Newly Reissued on Vinyl!!!!!
The enigma of Gram Parsons remains ever elusive. Considered the Father of Country Rock by pioneering the concept of a rock band playing country music through his contributions with The Incredible Submarine Band, The Flying Burrito Bros, and The Byrds later output, namely Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But it's Parson's two solo records on Reprise, G.P. from 1972 and Grievous Angel from 1973 that cemented his legend and legacy... due to his untimely death from a morphine and tequila overdose near the Joshua Tree National Monument only weeks after the Grievous Angel sessions were completed. He was 27 years old. Previously only available as a two-fer cd, these absolutely essential solo albums have now been given room to breathe and stand up as two completely individual listening experiences. So utterly heartbreaking. The only happiness that comes from these sessions is the magical presence of EmmyLou Harris who was introduced to the world with these records and was an equal partner in their making, and without her, the legacy of these recordings would not shine as brightly.
Music nerds may get obsessed with records all the time, but they also get pretty into musical gadgets, as evidenced most recently by FM3's Buddha Machine, which we've sold about a billion of, and most folks we know own more than one. And heck, that's just a little plastic box that plays short little loops. We didn't think anything would be able to trump the coolness of the Buddha Machine, which appealed to music geeks and tech nerds in equal measure, but then along came 1-Bit Music from a composer named Tristan Perich. Not only was 1-Bit Music Perich's debut record, it wasn't a record at all, instead it was simultaneously a piece of sound art and a miniature sound producing gadget, a collection of tiny wires and chips and switches and a watch battery, all affixed to the inside of a plain old cd jewel case. The result, a super striking looking little gizmo, but one that produced some weird and amazing 1 bit sounds. But what exactly are 1 bit sounds?
Well, most folks are familiar with 8 bit sounds, all your favorite vintage arcade game music is 8 bit, and all the modern purveyor of Casio core or Nintendo core, they're using those crunchy lo-fi 8 bit sounds to make awesomely retro music. So one bit, is the smallest increment of memory and sound, and Perich composed his music using just 1 bit sounds, the result, beyond being small enough to fit on a tiny chip, and that chip along with some switches and wires in a jewel case, it also made for some alien sounds, like video game music, but as if imagined by the roster of Raster-Noton, a series of clicks and beeps and tangled squiggles of squelches and primitive melodies, almost like some ultra minimal toy techno or something. And while in headphones the sounds were intense and loud and raw, through speakers, they were INTENSE, super destructive and brutal, the sort of sounds, no matter how playful and simple, that DESTROY speakers. So awesome.
Sadly, Perich and his crew had trouble keeping up with demand, as each of the releases, were hand made, every wire and switch, glued into each jewel case one at a time. So eventually that 'record' was discontinued. But now, we have Perich's latest release, no longer simply 1-Bit Music, now, it's a 1-Bit Symphony! And it is in fact more complex, with the various tones and beeps and squelches woven into lush tapestries of sound, rhythmically complex, and harmonically lush, at times sounding almost like M83, sometimes like Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing on a primitive toy Casio keyboard, other times like some lost old school video game, the sounds panning wildly from speaker to speaker, the melodies tangled and intricate, the overall sound so hypnotic and mesmerizing, the compositions sprawling and epic, ranging from 5 minutes, to nearly ten minutes to infinite, the final track a gorgeously lush chunk of distorted fuzzed out minimal buzz, that manages to sound all moody and shoegazey, warm and woozy and crunchy, an endless loop, that we really could imagine listening to endlessly.
But like 1-Bit Music before it, the music is really only half the equation with 1-Bit Symphony, the packaging, which IS the record, is so striking, a gorgeously arranged series of wires and switches, a battery, a volume knob, a button to switch tracks, an on/off switch, a headphone jack, all affixed to a clear jewel case, with a simple stick on the front, and the booklet in the plastic sleeve on the outside of the jewel case, adding a spare white background to the visuals, but also including liner notes, not to mention an intense and fantastically confusional poster featuring what appears to be the composition presented as it was programmed, which also manages to be visually striking and a work of art in its own right.
This one is not so nearly limited as the last one, but probably safer to not risk it, cuz if you're at all into weird music, and weird music related thingies, you are definitely gonna want one of these, and you'll probably want to give one to all the music nerds in your life as well. And like the first Perich 1-Bit release, this one too, is no doubt destined to be the cool music gadget, and minimal lo-fi 1-bit glitch crunch shoegaze squelch symphony record of the year!
Dave Phillips doesn't give us a lot to go on here, but all of the clues point to this being the most fucked-up break-up record ever. Sure, there's plenty of emo bands and sensitive singer-songwriters who pine over their broken hearts with oh-so earnest lyrics and anthemic crescendos; but if you were to break the heart of a twisted Swiss aktionist with a penchant for violent noise outbursts, industrial-doomscaping, and slaughterhouse ambience, you get an album far more wracked with the depths of abject loneliness. Like we said, we can't be sure that this is a break-up record, but Phillips does state the album was recorded as a "therapeutic process during a period dominated by severe disturbances of loss, mental abysses and despair." And he does dedicate this album to Thala, who may have been his girlfriend at one time, but certainly had appeared in several rather disturbing performances with Phillips. Those performances involved a mattress wired up with numerous contact microphones and the two engaging in rather violent sex, with the noises of the groaning mattress tossed back at the audience through explosive amplification.
Of course, Phillips is a member of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss aktionists, alongside Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and G*Park. He was also the man responsible for that Dead Peni record released in 2008 on Blossoming Noise, and was the drummer for Fear Of God, which was like the Swiss equivalent to Napalm Death way back when. In all of those references, this album with all of its fragmented noises, nocturnal events, funereal dirges from an accordion, and fatalistic dronescaping falls more on the G*Park end of the spectrum, preferring mystery through abstraction rather than scatological expulsions of bloodcurdling skree. A few brief interludes of softened white noise dappled with various forest-dwelling field recordings opens the album, snapping to a halt with a 12 minute uncomfortable track that seems to recycle one of those sexually explicit performances. Phillips clips and cuts the moans of a woman rapt in sexual ecstasy, matching that with a male voice which has been pitch shifted way down to a demonic growl. Yes, this gets into the same problematic territory that you get with Brainbombs or Whitehouse, but given how Phillips treats the male protagonist in this exchange (and especially, if he is the man behind that voice), it's very clear that there is to be no sympathy for him. The despair to which this album speaks is of his own making. At the conclusion of this track, Phillips turns to his accordion which sways between two dour notes and a series of nocturnal recordings. Clusters of notes hammered at the very low end of the pianos keyboard are struck and extended into Lustmordian passages of bleak ambience, and there are further examples of Phillips' Aktionist pedigree with a scream session rhythmically locked to a series of meat-cleaving blows. There is nothing pretty about this album, and it is really quite a depressing opus when you come down to it. Break-up record or not, it's utterly powerful and absolutely not for the squeamish.
We really loved the Pearl Harbor record on Mexican Summer, which is sadly already out of print, there was something about it that stuck out from the onslaught of new lo-fi minded garage pop bands. With this new record, the band is transitioning into a new moniker (Puro Instinct) because of catching some grief from the '80s SF band Pearl Harbor, but luckily while the name is changing their sound is only evolving and getting more entrancing and seductive. We recently caught them opening for Ariel Pink and it was such a perfect hazy swaying daydream experience. And we have to say we have never seen a band with collectively such amazing flowing blonde hair!! Vidal Sasoon should really jump on board and sponsor them. But beyond their mesmerizing hair, their music actually feels very similar to that folicularly glowing and flowing sensation. These four new songs continue their smart take on mixing a 4AD sensibility with a washed out pop aesthetic. Like Beach House covering the Cocteau Twins, or Nite Jewel stepping away from the late night dance floor and entering an even more smoke filled blissed out world of moody mystery. Makes us want to sit in our bedrooms lit only by candles, as we lay so dazed, eyes closed, letting the sounds from the vinyl just seep into our skin and course through our veins.
It's hard to believe it's been two years since the last issue of Salt, but we're willing to be patient, after all it is possibly our favorite zine going, and as in our reviews of every issue of Salt, we really can't heap enough praise on this kick ass DIY zine, and as always, lament the fact that it somehow remains a zine, it seems like by now, Salt should be up there with Terrorizer and Rock A Rolla and Decibel. But you know what, fuck it, we love Salt just the way it is, virtually unchanged since issue #1, still black and white, a little oversized, same style layout, most of the illustrations done by Kevin, the guy who pretty much IS Salt, and the stuff he chooses to focus on, as always is weird and wonderful, varied and unlikely. Always something we're super into, always something else we've never even heard of, and even the stuff that seems like it would be of little interest, ends up being a fantastic read, always the sign of a great magazine.
This issue is especially exciting as it contains perhaps the first interview EVER with aQ fave and tUMULt recording artist, the mysterious Korean teenage black metaller Pyha, talking about life in Korea, black metal, mandatory conscription, protest music and more.
There's also a killer interview with Alicia from legendary crust doom outfit 13 (which also featured Liz Buckingham, now in Electric Wizard). There's a feature on doomdrone juggernaut Korperschwache, an extensive and WAY in depth review of the Some Bizarre Album, an extensive guide to getting drunk on cheap vodkas, a feature on indie poppers Grandaddy, and a guide to their best B-sides, a lengthy interview with comic artist Carla Speed McNeil, and an interview with the man behind new label The Great Pop Supplement (he also once upon a time ran both Enraptured and Earworm!). All that for five bucks! This time around there are no record reviews, and less pieces, but as Kevin explains in the intro, that's so the interviews and features could be longer and more extensive. Which they absolutely are.
What more do you need to know? You love music. You love reading about music. You love underground music, and underground zines, if you haven't been reading Salt, you've been missing out big time...
Hot on the heels of their awesome new 12" Duck Duck Goose, the ladies of The Sandwitches are wasting no time continuing their hot streak with these two brand new songs that continue to display what a cool range of sounds they're capable of conjuring. The A side "Makes Me Sick" is one of the most full on folk sounding songs we've heard from them yet filled with such a nice punch. Kind of like an updated version of a Karen Dalton track doused with a nice kick of piss & vinegar. The B side is the track we've been so obsessed with. "Idiot Savant" is so sparse and haunting, bringing us into a hypnotic world of sound filled with cobwebs and antique Oujia boards. With every step they take we keep falling for these ladies more and more. So good!
Years ago we fell in love with Gunter Schickert's Uberfalling, a 1980 late-krautrock guitarscape epic. The cd reissue of that is now sadly out of print, but we've recently been turned onto Schickert's first lp from 1974, Samtvogel, which at last has been reissued on vinyl courtesy of the Spanish Import label Wah Wah, who have also recently reissued Heldon, Vainica Doble, Inner Space and other international psych gems. Sure, they're a bit expensive, but everything we've heard from the label has been amazing, so they're pretty much worth it.
Especially this one, a three track epic of cavernous space guitar extrapolations and buried lysergic vocal incantations that sounds like an alternate soundtrack to Fantastic Planet. The first track, "Apricot Brandy" gently introduce us into Schickert's sound world, a spacy lyrical repetitive commune riff with murmured vocals and spindly multi-layered guitar percolations that gently float in an echo-y atmospheric chamber. The second track, "Kriegmaschinen, Fahrt Zur Holle" is nearly 17 minutes of space-echo, belltones and strange echo effects that slowly build into more intense repetitive and multi-layered motifs, sometimes urgent and cinematic, and other moments more billowy and sinuous, reminding us of Achim Reichel and Manuel Gottsching, and even obscure krautrock band Temple. The final twenty-one minute track, "Wald", brings the intensity to the fore, with a buzzing guitarscape that sounds like John Carpenter, but soon gives way to a more lilting spacey bubbling and exploratory improvisation before the intense riffs return and interject and subside in strange surges, finally dissipating in little clouds of helium. A beautiful piece of outsider kosmiche! Highly Recommended!
Steven Severin's Codex Astra odyssey continues with Hours Of Gold. The compositions were inspired by the words of Aleister Crowley. On the inside of this release is inscribed "Ordinary mortality is only for ordinary people." The all too fleeting 18-minute ep features two tracks of sumptuous dronescape. The first offers some light, glistening with an echoey underwater feel. The second stand in marked contrast as it closes in like a creeping, fog-drenched shadowy form. A lingering ghostly roar. Beautiful.
Part field recording, part free jazz improv. As the title indicates, solo sax in the subway, that's what this is. But definitely not your usual "busker" fare! Beautiful, but also definitely dog-whistle intense. Japanese saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi has been active since the '70s, and played in an early incarnation of Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha, we're told. He been living in New York City for at least a decade, collaborating with NNCK among others, and apparently likes to haunt the subway in Queens, with his sax, when he's in a pensive mood. The sax he blows here generates a thin, piercing, upper-register "whistling" sound, sometimes a subtle squeal, sometimes a haunting soul-cry, that we'd think would be lost in the clangor of the subway system. But, instead it sounds like he's playing in an abandoned area of the subway, it seems often almost totally silent, but for the saxophone. And except, now and then, for the sounds of a passing train. Clearly it's a lonely stop, late at night or very early in the morning... or maybe the sine-wave like tone of his saxophone has chased all the commuters away. When a train does "run though" the station where Shiraishi is playing, a whole 'nother dimension is added, the ambient, field recording character of this disc becomes apparent, that's definitely what makes this most interesting to us, as listeners. Rumbling, clanking, hissing, rhythmically choo-chooing in its subway way, first in the distance softly, then louder, then receding again to be replaced by the sax it didn't quite drown out... The loneliness of the delicately shrill saxophone soloing is accentuated as the train fades away, each a drone of its own, for moments in brief duet. More than the sum of its parts, we'd definitely rather hear Shiraishi in this subway setting than in a studio - and at the same time, it's NOT quite what you might have thought a subway platform saxophone recording would sound like. So, move over DJ Shadow, David Shire, and Charles Gayle... this is the new sound of the NYC subway system!
Did not see this one coming... but GODDAMN are we happy about it. Originally released by the band themselves in 1994 as, you guessed it, a companion cassette to the band's mighty Machine Cuisine 10", this little bastard has been out of print for years, attaining somewhat of a mythic status and fetching some pretty hefty prices the one or two times it ever ended up on eBay. Now, with 6FS operating once again, they saw it fit to reissue this cassette for the hungry masses in 2010, complete with a digital download card tucked inside.
A polarizing band if there ever was one, Six Finger Satellite was one of the few groups in the '90s to utilize synthesizers to their full potential, which they integrated into a traditional rock band setup for some heavy, hateful, and totally rocking results. While the Machine Cuisine ep itself found 6FS sans guitars, sounding a bit like a smart ass Kraftwerk meeting up with Chrome, the cassette rocks furiously, with the band's trademark demented vocals, machine like drumming and some razor sharp riffage. It's unfortunate that these guys never gained more than a cult following, but not really that surprising either. Listening to this stuff now, it's clear that they were not only completely out of step with much of the "indie rock" scene of the '90s, but also WAY ahead of their time. This may be a bold statement, but we imagine time will vindicate Six Finger Satellite and eventually find them mentioned along with all the other great, nihilistic drug bands like the Stooges and the Birthday Party. Highest recommendation imaginable, and we would imagine quite limited.
We've heard Sol before, the one-man Danish dooooooooooomster whose debut on Van we compared to both Skepticism and Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and recommended also to fans of such acts as Svarte Greiner and even Woven Hand, due to the "apocalyptic doomfolk" elements of Sol's sound. Now, we've got some new Sol, a collaboration on the always interesting Paradigms label with another Danish artist named Blodtru, and it's even more of a mashup of ultra doom, militaristic neo-folk, ambient, goth, and classical (the first track adapting music by 17th century English baroque composer Henry Purcell). Instrumentation ranges from accordion and glockenspiel to feedback and programming... Musically, it's both menacing and melodic, usually molasses-like and mesmeric. Across the six long tracks of this 77 minute disc, you'll encounter rumbling low-end bass, some sombre singing, shimmering cymbals, martial drum rolls, acoustic string pluck, and long lovely stretches of quietly wavering electronic drone. The occasional vocals sound somewhere between Antony of Antony & The Johnsons and Gregorian monk chant, or get scarier with a guttural black metal like rasp. Stunningly effective, super heavy when it's heavy, totally blissed out when it's blissed out, sometimes both at once, so atmospheric, and recommended! Could equally appeal to fans of Der Blutharsch and OM, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat and Aun. Limited to 500 copies.
Some awesomely sunshine-y jangle pop from right here in SF, Sonny & The Sunsets, fronted by local luminary Sonny Smith, who for his debut was joined by a who's who of local rockers, including Kelly Stoltz, John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, Shayde Sartin of the Fresh & Onlys, Flying Canyon and Kelly Stoltz's band and Tim Cohen (Fresh & Onlys, 3 Leafs, Amocoma!). The label compares S&TS to Jonathan Richman, Michael Hurley, Velvet Underground, the Holy Modal Rounders, which definitely all apply, but there's plenty of Beach Boys going on too.
From brooding moody lope, to shimmery doo wop flecked surf rock to stripped down classic power pop, to fifties style balladry, to twangy back porch folk the songs are simple and heartfelt, sometimes intimate and hushed, other times subtly silly, even a bit more rocking now and again, but always catchy, melodic and cool.
Not sure how this great UK band has manages to remain so far under the radar here in the States, as they create such bright and fully realized pop songs played with major chops and such immaculately crafted precision. They explore similar sonic landscape as folks like Stereolab, in the way they tap into the best of light psych-pop from years past while creating songs that have such a driving force and are filled with swirling melodies and kaleidoscope vision. Every element in their sound is so top notch. From the perfect soft and dreamy vocal delivery, to versatile instrumentation that is beholden to the best kind of sugary pop as it is to the power of krautrock like repetition and gliding psych excursions. Sounds sort of Saint Etienne and Broadcast coming together to make songs in the spirit of some awesome combination of the most catchy and poppy side of Can along with the carefree groovy '60s pastoral pop of The Free Design!!
All right, time to get yr underground proto-metal kicks! Remember the new album from San Francisco longhairs Dzjenghis Khan we highlighted last list?? Well THIS is exactly the sort of thing those retro-stoners were going for. Step up for an authentic '70s hard psych experience. Stonewall's rare, awesomely fuzz riffed record was recorded in '69, but not actually released until 1974, and even then without the band's knowledge, due to exploito-label shennanigans. Read the liner notes for more about that. (Actually, other sources claim this was recorded circa '71-'72, and then released in '76, we don't know what to believe, but either set of dates sounds plausible.)
Stonewall pump out stompin', rockin' boogie, durn heavy for '69 (or '71), fronted by an expressively raspy vocalist, gripped by the spirit of rock n' roll at its countercultural best. He also busts out the occasional harmonica wail. But it's generally guitars to the fore, and fuzzed-out. There's some Hendrix and Cream influences of course, maybe Led Zep too depending on when this really was recorded, and we're treated to some total organ jammin' blues rockin' on "Try & See It Through", while "Atlantis" hints at the slightly proggier riffage of Captain Beyond's debut....
Definitely for fans of Sir Lord Baltimore, Dust, Bang, Jerusalem, etc. Also if you remember a much more recent (but very retro) band from the '90s called The Want, who did a disc for Southern Lord, this sounds pretty much just like them. Which is cool 'cause we really digged The Want. Maybe they really digged Stonewall?
Oh, and yes, this IS the same Stonewall album that was previously reissued on cd some years back by the Italian label Akarma, with a different cover and title (Akarma called it Stoner, and the cover had a wall of Marshalls, with blood seeping from several of 'em.) Presumably this is the how the original lp really looked.
Jeez, guitarist Cameron Stallones has been on a roll lately with his solo endeavor Sun Araw. His third lp on the hugely prolific Not Not Fun label, Heavy Deeds picks up where the Phynx left off, more slow grooving jammers that fall somewhere between psych soul and pop-hop. Wailing delayed-out guitar, tons of wah and tons of soul, catchy vocal passages call out over and over as a leisurely turning lumber plods on with a hypnotic groove. Kinda like listening to a Suicide song on half speed while starring at the sun on a warm beach in Florida, whip out the hula shirts and Robitussin, it's going to be a trippy afternoon. All five tracks are so densely layered with all kinds of organ flutters, ripping solos, mumbling vocals its easy to get lost in Sun Araw's psychotic world of ultra catchy, mind melting blues. There's no doubt this kid has loads of talent, and is super productive, and we have to say we really dig Sun Araw's ability to balance pop sensibility with over the top psychedelic melt-down. There's enough here to get a song or two stuck in your head, without the music being at all straight forward or simple, pretty rad. Oh and by the way, the cd version comes with a killer bonus track titled "Hey Mandala"!
Man, it seems that's there's ALWAYS a new Sun Ra reissue or archival release. And that is, of course, a good thing. Though we can't always list every one of 'em. But this one definitely caught our attention, a 2-on-1 compact disc reissue of two rare Saturn label elpees, featuring material recorded live in concert in Detroit around New Year's Eve, 1980. Maybe it's the title (who wouldn't want to go Beyond The Purple Star Zone??), maybe it's the particularly unhinged and exuberant version of the classic funky Ra chant "Rocket Number Nine" that appears here, maybe it's all the wicked Sun Ra synth soloing (yeah, there's lots of spaced out Moog, also hard to resist!). Other than "Rocket", all the compositions are original to these two records, it appears. Great stuff, well recorded, with Ra's (Omniverse Jet-Set) Arkestra in fine form. That ensemble included such regulars as John Gilmore, Marshall Allen, June Tyson, Michael Ray, and many others. We were amused to note The Bell Brothers credited with, of course, "bells".
With wonderfully off-kilter keys, uncredited electric guitar, percussive skitter, moody melodic horns, AND massive wailing freak-outs, this is definitely for those into the more far-out, sci-fi, and downright noisy aspects of the Sun Ra sound as well as his sentimental side.
One of two new releases on the Imminent Frequencies tape label, the other from long time favorite Zomes, this one from the curiously named Sun Son Sun, who craft, gorgeous and ominous soundscapes of bass clarinet and manipulated tapes, creating a haunting low end drift, long moaning melodies suspended in a field of tape hiss and natural reverb, a cavernous free jazz slowed down to a near crawl, a subterranean sonic crawl, glacial tangled melodies, looped and recontextualized into blurred textural streaks and fragmented melodies, slipping from warm and washed out and melodic to rumbling distorted throb, often hovering somewhere right in between. Mysterious and otherworldly, equal parts abstract improvisation, dark ambience, and psychedelic dronemusic. Cool.
LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!
It's The Sword....in SPAAAAAAAAACE! Well, that is, the popular stoner doom quartet that so many "troo metallers" love to hate have released their third long-player, and this time trade their lyrical fixation on Norse mythology for more of a science fiction theme. Or cover art, anyway. And, really they don't sound too much different as a result. Still super heavy and riffy and kinda catchy despite the vocalist's limitations, and just as worthy of Guitar Hero inclusion as they ever were. What we are noticing, though, is maybe their Texas roots coming more to the fore, The Sword's typically Sleep-like sound now infused with some serious '70s boogie! The single "Tres Brujas", for instance, has a Southern Rock feel for sure, same with "Lawless Lands". Meanwhile, the cowbell-rockin' "Night City" and others like closer "(The Night The Sky Cried) Tears Of Fire" reveal The Sword's debt to another '70s influence: Thin Lizzy.
Delving into this disc, though, we do discover that the sci-fi (or rather, science fantasy) deal is for real: this is in fact a full-on concept album, with a cryptic nerdy narrative running though such heavy tracks as "Acheron/Unearthing The Orb", "The Chronomancer I: Hubris", and "The Chronomancer II: Nemesis". Hmm, we almost suspect that their brief two weeks of touring two years ago with San Francisco's Slough Feg somehow rubbed off on 'em. There's even Space Pirates in the story!
So, If you like The Sword (and we do, even if sometimes we get a bit bored if we hear too many of their songs in a row) and don't mind 'em doing something just a bit different, you'll likely like Warp Riders; to possibly damn with faint praise it's their least boring album yet!! No, seriously, we're digging it. Not as doomy as they once were, but more hard rockin' is what we're sayin'.
And if you don't like The Sword (or don't think you do), c'mon and give this one a chance anyway, as they're definitely trying out some new (old) stuff here and doing it well. And maybe the haters can give 'em a break now, as they're 3 albums in, and that counts as paying some dues, right?
Once a collaborator many years ago with Andrew Chalk in a project called Ora, Darren Tate has been steadily self-releasing his own diversions of drone, field recording, and eccentric sound-design at quite a brisk pace. Late Afternoon is already the fourth album he's released in 2010, and we might have actually missed one or two. We're pretty sure that the Keijo he's dedicated this album to is the freaked-out Finnish psychedelic minstrel with boatloads of albums on PseudoArcana, Digitalis, Last Visible Dog, etc. Unlike many of the recent Tate records, which had been heavy on the weirdo-synth tip, this one finds Tate adopting the beloved Jewelled Antler strategy of recording out in the wilderness, allowing all of the incidental sounds - manmade, natural, and otherwise - to tread upon whatever musical notes might be generated. Tate doesn't let on to where this recording was made, but it's got something of a natural concrete reverb, it's near an airfield, and it's infested with pigeons. Tate's minor intrusions include a set of chimes which tinkled gently in the thickened reverberations, an acoustic guitar which Tate strums occasionally in brightly ringing chords that again cascade in that reverb, and there's one big cough about 18 minutes into the disc, which Tate purposefully leaves in the mix. Forest folk minimalism meets field recordings! Limited to about 100 copies, of which we have only a handful.
Bold move, Terrorizer, putting spandex-clad Swedish retro metallers Enforcer on the cover! We fully approve, just surprised is all. Inside, this ish, you'll also find the likes of Enslaved, Yob, Yakuza, Starkweather, Grave, Cannibis Corpse, and others. Plus the usual reviews, news, free cover-mounted cd sampler, etc. And a feature on top "40 Riffs Of Sickness" of all time!
Full length number three from these Louisiana heavies, and it just might be their weirdest, most experimentally sprawling and prettiest release yet. It seems like we're in the age of post doom, or avant doom, with bands moving well beyond the sounds that have so far defined them. We recently featured The Body's latest record as our Record Of The Week, which at its core was a sludge/doom record, but incorporated a choir, multiple drummers, drum machines, strange editing and collages, horns, all adding to the whole, but never taking away from the band's sound, or the ultimate heft and heaviness of the music. A delicate balance for sure, one that Thou seem poised to strike as well, with Summit. But it's not like they weren't a weird band anyway, they definitely had their own take on the ubiquitous post metal / sludge metal thing, even transforming a classic Nirvana jam into their own gnarled and twisted chunk of downtuned crunch. The changes here though are not as dramatic as those undertaken by the Body, the band offer up some blackened blastbeats right at the beginning of the record, there's piano, viola, trombone, other horns, female vocals, but most of those are all contained in a single track, an interlude of sorts, a hazy bit of slow building jazzy warble and drift, wreathed in clouds of cymbal shimmer and peppered with muted percussion, a brief respite amidst the otherwise thunderous proceedings. Some of those elements do show up elsewhere, but they're super subtle, and easily overwhelmed by the surrounding heaviness.
No, the main change seems to be a shift toward melody, where as before the band veered most frequently into serious abject crust-sludge Eyehategod territory, here, they tend more toward the post metal / metallic post rock end of the spectrum, unfurling majestic slow building Isis / Pelican style epics, still dipping occasionally into some filthy dirgery, but mostly crafting gorgeously soaring downtuned almost symphonic sounding heaviness, sounding at times almost like a black metal Explosions In The Sky, and other times slowing things down, dialing back the chug and crush, and resembling some sort of extra heavy sludgy slowcore outfit. But it suits them for sure. Summit definitely plays out as the perfect mix of pretty heaviness and fierce brutality, with just a smidge of experimental weirdness thrown in for good measure.
Another fantastic record from a group who pretty much only make fantastic records, some seriously epic sludge and surprisingly listenable ultra heaviness, fans of all those post metal combos like Rosetta, Baroness, the Body, Grails, The Ocean, Angel Eyes, Tides, Souvenir's Young America, Mouth Of The Architect, Irepress, Indian, Conifer, who have yet to discover Thou, this is the record for you....
Whoa. Just when we warmed ourselves to the idea that this would NEVER happen... it happened. The return of Twilight, described out of necessity as a "black metal supergroup", a bad description for something so awesome, but more or less to the point. The core lineup of Blake Judd (Nachtmystium), N. Imperial (Krieg), and Wrest (Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice) soldiered on without past contributors Hildolf (Draugar) and Malefic (Xasthur), and made themselves even more super with the additions, on this recording at least, of Sanford Parker (Minsk/Buried At Sea), Aaron Turner (Isis, etc.), Robert Lowe (Lichens, 90 Day Men, and now OM apparently), and Stavros Giannopoulos, who is new to us but whose presence is at the very least justified by the his awesome name. And yes, we realized how many bands we had to list in parentheses, but if anything, that should accommodate you to the awesome pedigree on display here, letting you know that there is no way in hell it could be anything except completely awesome.
Monument To Time End is not only great, but full of unexpected turns throughout. Unlike its self-titled predecessor, which was pretty much as black as black metal can get (opening song "Woe Is The Contagion" being one of the most terrifying things EVER), there is a surprising amount of diversity here. For example, would you have ever expected this horde to whip out an emo-ish breakdown with disco beats? Probably not, and the good news is that it doesn't suck at all, it just confounds in the best way imaginable and makes you love this band even more. And while the other album was created by swapping tapes through the mail with the fidelity being pretty much what you would expect from such, Monument is a work of well thought out, amazingly produced ART. This no doubt has much to do with Parker's presence and the use of his Volume Studios, not to mention the amount of time that has passed since the first album. Best of all, none of these upgrades in any way represent a more subdued or cuddly Twilight; on the contrary, this shit sounds even more dangerous, unstoppable, and out to kill. But enough rambling, let's talk songs here.
Doomy opener "The Cryptic Ascension" sounds a bit like a more evil Pelican, and Turner's signature is in full effect for the aforementioned emo-ish breakdown replete with disco beats. Imperial's vocals, however, definitely help bring things to another darkened realm. And while we really don't need to say this, we will: FUCK is Wrest an amazing drummer, and his bell heavy work on the ride cymbal helps carry this song to its amazing fadeout before everything is overtaken by Parker's spaced out synth buzz. The word "epic" is thrown around all the time in metal these days, to the point where it seems to have lost its meaning, but here Twilight completely own the term. Really no other word will do; this shit is EPIC. "Fall Behind Eternity" is up next, sounding a lot like Leviathan's creepy ambient moments with more spacey synth until the brutality kicks in with a dizzying blast. On "8,000 Years", things manage to be both soaring and pummeling, and the combined talents of these guys gives birth to some of the most adventurous and impressive metal we have heard in, well, forever. "The Catastrophe Exhibition" opens up with some ominous acoustic strumming and weird ambience with effected martial drums before venturing into unknown terrain where the band sounds a bit like an evil Don Cab being broadcast out of a portal to Hell. The album closes with "Negative Signal Omega", another awesome surprise that begins as a crumbling drone experiment and ends with a choraled vocal chant that is stunningly beautiful. Did you ever think we would use words like "stunningly beautiful" to describe this band when they first came out? Neither did we.
We say a lot of things about all the metal coming in these doors, but Twilight have set the bar pretty high with this album. Monument To Time End will without question end up on many year end best ofs, and with good reason. The greatest success here is the fact that everybody's dirty, blackened fingerprints are all over this project, but the end result is something totally of its own creation. Not many guys could pull this kind of thing off without seeming at least a little bit self-indulgent. Twilight have surprised us all by putting out one of the best metal records in recent memory. Until we fully understand what the fuck happened in Chicago, where the album was recorded, we're just going to be blasting it nonstop. While words may fail to convey just how amazing this is, we give it our highest seal of approval and have no doubt you too will agree...
Analog Africa does it again! The hardest working Afro-beat reissue label brings us another amazing comp of psych-tinged, long-lost Afro-beat, this time from Ghana and Togo recorded between 1972-1979. Raw, sultry, and totally ass-shaking, pretty much all of the tracks have never been released outside the region. Funky Latin rhythms, organ-driven psych, and cosmic soulful percussive trance-outs by 11 bands. Comes with amazing 44 page booklet with pictures and histories. Wow, deluxe package, incredible music. We can go on, but do we really need to? Analog Africa hasn't let us down yet. 100 percent Solid! Trust.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Been Here All My Days, the latest in Mississippi's incredible series of compilations, another blues comp, but in the hands of the curators at Mississippi, this is anything BUT just another blues comp.
We sometimes joke, that running a record store, and doing our weekly New Arrivals list is a lot like making mixtapes for a living, digging up cool sounds, and compiling them and then sharing them. We like to think we're pretty dang good at it by now, but the guys at Mississippi, they actually DO make mixtapes for a living, the only difference is that they dig through blues archives and old 78's, and then press their mixtape onto vinyl, much to our delight, and the delight of pretty much everyone we know. Which makes sense considering how great these mixes/compilations are. The perfect mix of long time favorites and total unknowns, of classic tracks and utter obscurities, but beyond that, Mississippi comps flow, one song into the next, whole sides, in some ways, after a few listens, it's hard to imagine these tracks came from other records, they sound so organic and perfect nestled there on that slab of wax.
As we mentioned above, Been Here All My Days is a compilation of old timey blues, and features a whole bunch of names you'll no doubt find familiar: Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson, Furry Lewis, Jesse Mae Hemphill, but a bunch you probably don't, Green Paschal, Precious Bryant, John Lee Ziegler...
All culled from an incredible collection of field recordings compiled by George Mitchell, a fan and field recordist, who travelled throughout the rural South, just like the Lomax's and a bevy of others, meeting folks, buying records, recording musicians on their porches, in their parlors, and as is stated in the liner notes. for Mitchell, it was all about the love of the music, not an expert in any way, his recordings are rough and raw, made on inferior equipment sure, but infused with warmth and life and vitality, due in no small part to the fact that Mitchell was a regular guy, and ended up befriending folks as much as chronicling their lives and sounds.
The basic sound here will no doubt be familiar to blues fans, but as always, it's the nuances and the characters that make the music here special, especially some of the lesser knowns, who totally impress and like with all great mix tapes, whose songs will have you hankering for and hunting down more more more.
The one thing we've noticed with the recent spate of Mississippi releases, is that finally they've seemed to abandon their mysterious barebones approach. Older releases had little in the way of liner notes, just a track listing and nothing else, but on Been Here All My Days, there are multiple inserts, a huge essay on George Martin, his life and history, as well as pages of notes on each of the tracks, and the artists, featuring notes from both the compilers and Mitchell himself. Fantastic stuff. And as always, WAY recommended!
This actually came out a few months ago, but the majority of the pressing was defective, so we've been waiting for the repressed vinyl to show up, and now it finally has!!
There's been no shortage of amazing blues reissues recently, especially on vinyl (and especially via the Monk label), Blind Blake, Dock Boggs, Ishman Bracey, Sleepy John Estes, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Furry Lewis, Blind Wille McTell, Charley Patton, Charlie Poole, but weirdly, we never really paid much attention to these classic blues cd / calendar combos, even though at least one of us has had one hanging in our house for the last couple years, they're actually really cool. The cd is an amazing collection of classic blues, featuring some of the above mentioned artists, classic tracks from Charley Patton, Ma Rainey, Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi Sheiks and others, including a handful of ultra rarities (remastered from the only surviving copies) from Tommy Johnson, Furry Lewis, Jaybird Coleman and Charley Patton! And even cooler is the calendar, which features original artwork for each of the 12 tracks, early advertisements, record sleeves, old flyers, as well as quotes and liner notes related to each record and its artwork, and the calendar is of course marked with various blues related dates, births and deaths of all the greats, in fact, even if for some reason you didn't want to use it as a calendar, it's pretty fun just to read through and check out all the illustrations, it's almost like having a proper lp sized set of liner notes for the cd! And we should mention one of our new (old) favorite song titles: "Will The Coffin Be Your Santa Claus"!
Holy moly! A handsome, hefty vinyl box set here from Crammed, and crammed it is with vinyl "Congotronics" treats, street jammin' bands from the Kinshasa scene. Here's what's in it exactly: AQ faves Konono No.1's Congotronics lp, the Congotronics 2/Buzz'n'Rumble From The Urb'n'Jungle compilation, Kasai All Stars' In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic lp, Staff Benda Bilili's Tres Tres Fort lp, and Konono No.1's latest, Assume Crash Position on double vinyl (none of which we've seen available on wax separately yet except for Congotronics 1), plus a bonus 7" with exclusive tracks from Kansai Allstars, one of which is a collaboration with Akron/Family, believe it or not!! There's also a 12"x12" booklet of photos, and last but not least a special Congotronics 2Gb USB drive, containing nine video clips, as well as mp3s of all the tracks on all five of the albums in the box set! Wow. And all the lps are 180 gram vinyl.
You can search elsewhere on our site for Konono if you want to learn more about the "Congotronics" sound and why they're such faves of ours, but we figure this box set is for folks who are already fans! We only have 1 in stock at the moment (of sending out this list), but if you want one, we'll get more next week when this one sells, so go ahead and order away!!
Horse Meat Disco have proven to be not only some of the best dance / disco DJ's on the planet but also such awesome ambassadors of preserving and celebrating the spirit and soul of classic disco for a whole new generation. Their compilation and mix from last year was one of our favorite collections of dance jams we'd heard in ages and with this second volume they continue to show that there is an endless vault of rare disco gems to be excavated and revisited, and we're so stoked they are putting their love and appreciation of that time, and sound, and making these awesome compilations.
This time out it's a collection of tracks by so many folks that have slipped under even the most disco loving of the AQ staff's radar as well as a few people we know and love (Stephanie Mills, Madleen Kane, Scherrie Payne). But damn what a rad schooling in so many unsung heroes of disco past as we've been moving with big wide smiles on our face to tracks by folks like First Love, Bravo, Electra, Nightfall, etc. If luck had been a little different for some of those artist's their names and songs would be as well known as folks like Gloria Gaynor, Thelma Houston, Gwen Guthrie, Donna Summer, Evelyn "Champagne" King, Labelle, Anita Ward, etc. Horse Meat Disco understands that true disco spirit is so much about the pure emotional energy that was bringing people together on dance floors in total bliss and unity, and it translates in the awesome parties they throw in the UK and with these compilations they have put together. Everytime we play this in the store it's awesome to see how everyone shopping immediately starts tapping their feet and getting in such a good mood. This is impossible music to feel dour while listening to, and as much as we love bleak and brooding sounds around here, we also know that it's important to also have the good stuff to go to when you want to get in a fun, physical dance state of mind, and when you do, it don't get much better then this. So awesome!
For the second edition of their Local Customs series, The Numero Group dig deep into the heart of Beaumont, Texas and uncover a regional archive of dusty, sunscorched sounds from Lowland Studios. Operating from the late sixties to the early seventies and barely surviving even in the best of times, the studio recorded a wide range of local flavor from a tight knit scene of bands for small independent labels. The 22 tracks here fall into primarily three groups: Heavy southern-fried boogie rock, Crosby Stills and Nash-ish folk, and nascent Yacht Rock, even though we're sure no one here had a yacht to rock out on. While some tracks on here aren't necessarily our cup of tea, it's hard not to get caught up in the music when the Numero Group has done such an amazing job of documenting the history of this scene, with thorough liner notes, a family tree of players and bands and lots of cool photos. A really fancy package.
We like the boogie stuff best, especially the bands Boot Hill and D.O.A. (and they look awesome too!). But then there's the final song by Donald Thomas called "Black Night Is Calling Me Home" with its too-high-in-the-mix vocalised guitar riff, a real hoot! Some of us here gonna get this just for that. We're sure anyone into classic rock from 1970-77 featuring dudes with long hair and mustaches singing about their ladies (think Molly Hatchet, Little Feat, Audience, CSN, BTO, Ten Wheel Drive, etc.) will probably find lots to like here. Though all we could think about while listening to this is: MORE COWBELL!!!!!
People have been clamoring for this long in the works compilation from UK label Blackest Rainbow, mostly for the two looooooong exclusive tracks from SF space kraut combo Moon Duo and French psychedelic dronefolk duo Natural Snow Buildings, and those tracks do rule, and are well worth the price of admission on their own, but there's way more going on, both sonically and visually. Eight exclusive tracks on the lp, including a handful of bands we had never even heard of, as well as a printed full color zine, featuring original artwork from 8 different artists, presumably with each artist's piece representing one of the tracks.
Let's start with the vinyl, and with Moon Duo, who offer up another fantastic, sprawling synth heavy psychedelic space groove blowout, looped, motorik and mesmerizing, the guitar and keyboard locked into pulsing fuzzed out melodies, the guitars buzzy and crunchy, the synths thick and spacey, heavily reverbed vox floating over the top, the whole thing laced with awesome super melodic, warped and woozy psychedelic leads. Murky, dreamy, druggy, a whole lot of Spacemen 3, a whole lot of krautrock, nods to fellow astral travelers like White Hills and the Heads, and like Moon Duo related outfit Wooden Shjips, a little Doors as well, albeit WAY more tripped out and abstract.
The other main attraction comes courtesy of Natural Snow Buildings, who offer up a gorgeous soundscape of luminescent layered guitars and sprawling epic slow motion melodies, the vibe dreamily dark and majestic, a little brooding and ominous, a smoldering slow build, that eventually settles and slips back into a more tranquil drift, an almost new agey haze, laced with soaring wordless vocals, steel string guitars and deep lush astral shimmer.
Beyond that, there's Akron/Family's warm soft sun dappled psychedelia, crystalline acoustic guitars, clouds of processed melodic drift, sweetly dramatic and lush, WAND's seventies style West Coast country folk pop, acoustic guitars, piano, simple percussion, and heartfelt vocals, Joanne Robertson and Matthew Ashworth's hushed doomfolk dronescape, all blurred buzz and spidery melodies, Married In Berdichev's dreamy washed out psychfolk, gauzy streaks of fractured melody, layered loops and jangly percussion, underpinning more dramatic vocals and finishing with a squall of soft noise, Seadog's poppy folky soft psychedelia, rife with lush strings and muted drones, sounding spacey and almost Pink Floyd-ish, and finally, The See See, who sound like they time traveled from the late sixties / early seventies, their sound total pitch perfect classic California country pop, the Eagles, the Byrds, Fleetwood Mac, gorgeous harmonies, and incredible arrangements.
The accompanying booklet/zine, is about DVD sized and includes all sorts of artwork, from a bunch of cool artists, most notably, long time fave Pete Fowler, the art ranges from super abstract and colorful, to stylized rock poster designs, to simple and cartoony, to druggy and seriously tripped out.
Pressed on nice heavy vinyl. Both the jacket and booklet printed on heavy stock. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
Yay, skweee!
The vinyl 7" single may be the preferred format for the damaged DIY Scandinavian electro funk music called skweee that we love so much here at AQ, or at least, we've certainly seen a lot of 7" skweee releases come through here recently. But actually, when we're listening to skweee, we don't want to stop (to get up and flip the record, y'know). So a compact disc mix is much more OUR preferred skweee format. And that's what we have here. In the tradition of other skweee cd comps like The Museum Of Future Sound (vols. 1 & 2) and Skweee Tooth, comes The Internalization Of Massy, a mix on the Helsinki label Massy, put together by skweee artist Spartan Lover. He's on here, along with some others we know (the great Randy Barracuda among 'em, with an effervescent cut called "Sex People") and many more we don't. 14 tracks, 12 artists, 49 minutes. Glitchin' and poppin', slippin' and slidin', there's a wide range of skweee happenin' here. To mention just some of it specifically, well... The mellow woozy zink-zonk of "Bjhbj Nkknkn Kl" by Coco Bryce is quite pleasant and vaguely suggestive of some sort of mechanical accordion music. Boston's Stickem drops some haunted bass on "Hoi Poloi". Compiler Spartan Lover contributes an edit of "Silk Smooth Skin" that's got a nice layer of distortion on it, a real fuzzy sheen. Motem's track "Unexact" has some quasi rap vocals, generally a rarity in the mostly instrumental world of skweee. Hybakusha turns in a nicely disjointed groove called "The Number Of The Glitch". Whereas both Mother North and Beatbully go a more shimmery disco-friendly route, we could almost imagine their tracks coming from Italians Do It Better, or on one of those Milky Disco comps. Much darker and creepier is Jyrkka Pajulasskso's "Twisted Bar Game". And even more messed up (but still groovy) is the flutter-stutter and frog-like croak of V.C.'s "Jello On Springs", which appears to be a Mesak remix. And that's not all. So, if you like skweee, or think you might like skweee, this disc is quite recommended.
We've noticed that most skweee releases tend towards minimal art/packaging, and this is no exception, the disc coming in a cardboard sleeve with a simple but nice graphic of waves... and a shark fin?
Latest in the ongoing series of Kompakt's Total compilations of minimal techno, a series that runs concurrently with their other, more blissed out series under the Pop Ambient banner. And like we seem to always mention in these reviews, we definitely lean toward the pop ambient side of the sonic spectrum, although it seems that the chasm between the two sounds grows ever smaller. Not sure if that's indeed the case, or our tastes have just gradually mutated, but it hardly matters, we now find ourselves just as excited for a new Total collection as a new Pop Ambient one. And this one especially is totally hitting the spot, maybe the weirdest of the bunch so far. Right off the bat, DJ Koze, offers up a twisted bit of electronic cabaret, with some clipped synth warble, and what sounds like muttered vocal garbling of some Tom Waits / Louis Armstrong hybrid, gurgles and grumbles, before a pulsing modulated bass pulse comes in, then some crooning, can't imagine that this would go over well on the dancefloor, but it's pretty wacked out and weird and wonderful. And while the rest of the music here is maybe not SO far out, it is all pretty wonderfully weird, especially by techno standards. New music from The Field (a whirling swirl of kosmische synths and warbly low end buzz, hazy and dreamy and krautrocky), Wolfgang Voigt (a super minimal clipped beatscape, all murky and mysterious, but laced with some strange hazy jazziness), Matias Aguayo (a fantastically festive looped party jam, anchored to a solid 4 on the floor, but wrapped in creepy haunted house synths and funky basslines), Superpitcher (an awesomely "I'm Too Sexy" chunk of techno pop), Justus Kohncke (total eighties style electro pop) and on and on. Other new jams from recent aQ faves Walls, Jurgen Paape, Jorg Burger, Thomas Fehlmann, Michael Mayer, Gui Boratto, Jonas Bering and more more more. So great, and yeah, recommended even for those of you, like us, who claim to not be so into techno or electronic music. This is exactly the sort of record that will change your mind.
First new music from these Scottish indie pop legends in 20 years, and it sounds like they never left. Well, almost. Some of us got to see the reactivated Vaselines play at the Sub Pop 20th anniversary celebration in Seattle, and they sounded incredible, the core two piece of Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee augmented by members of Belle And Sebastian, a lineup that lent some serious heft to their sound, that heft is well represented here on this 2 song teaser for their upcoming full length, only their second proper album in 2+ decades, and the first new music since 1990's full length Dum Dum.
And right out of the gate, "Sex With An X" sounds like it could have been beamed here straight from the early nineties, sure a little more full and lush, not nearly as ramshackle, but still playful and coy, jangly and simple, the lyrics mantra like, sweet boy / girl harmonies, a killer main melody, a little crunch, hand claps, summery pop perfection for sure. The flipside, "Roaster" though, which is exclusive to this single, is maybe even better (reason enough to buy this, since the A side will be on the full length), darker, and fuzzier, a little grungy and low slung, minor key, still laced with sweet harmonies, but much more reminiscent of Kelly's post Vaselines band Eugenius, Vaselines style jangly indie pop infused with a some spaced out shoegazey crunch. Both songs are really good, but we're so digging the B side, it kind of has us hoping for more of the same on the full length. We'll just have to wait and see...
Includes a download code as well.
What can we say, we just love Venetian Snares, pretty much everything he does, whether it's twisted tangled electro, lush symphonic string laden electronic soundscapes or super complex drill and bass, Aaron Funk, the man who is Venetian Snares, just has the magic touch. His drum programming is INSANE, head spinningly dense, frantic and frenzied, the samples ridiculous and WAY over the top, but woven seamlessly into the tumbling explosion of beats and buzzing basslines, the songs managing to be super catchy, even though they're so explosively frenetic. My So Called Life is the sound of VS we like the best, a wild, wickedly fun and funny, super fucked up and freaky, relentless and dancefloor destroying collection of jungle/rave/drill & bass mashups, laced with dancehall style toasting, or choruses created from awkwardly stitched together samples, but those are just filigree for the main attraction, the speaker shredding, ear drum blasting avalanche of wildly twisted beats, as if someone took a handful of the most intense jungle beats, tossed em in a blender, poured the resulting mix into bazooka, and fired it directly into your earhole. So fucking great! Compact disc version due out in 2 weeks, vinyl is here now!
What more do you really need to know? Goat, frontman for legendary Bay Area black metal horde Von, teamed up with Wrest of Leviathan, recorded by John Gossard of Weakling, Asunder and Dispirit. That's some serious black metal firepower for sure. Von Goat is not merely the sum of its constituent parts though, nor is it simply some sort of Von rehash, no, this is something completely different, and plenty twisted.
A murky muddy raw primitive blackness, shot through with all sorts of woozy guitar damage, rumbling growling gurgling vokills, pounding blasting drumming, all wound into lurching lumbering outsider black brutality. Just take album opener "The Gathering", which on the surface sounds like some old school blasting black metal, but it's weirdly melodic, not obviously so, and then there's this constant extra guitar laying these warped keening high end sort-of-leads over the top, that make everything sound detuned, or like the instruments are slowly melting in the hellish heat, the effect is odd, but it's that oddness that makes this stuff so compelling and fucking genius.
"Poison Bottle" is a fantastic dizzying dirge, a murky slow motion death metal churn, all tightly wound riffage, lurching start/stop tempos, more guttural bellows, convoluted and mathy, the whole track oozing blackness, a chugging black creep with brief streaks of minor key melody, and occasional bursts of grinding crunch. "Thru Your Skull" is another muddy blur of deconstructed black riffage, pounding jackhammer beats and monstrous demonic grunts, not to mention another head spinning squall of detuned lead guitar that ends up sounding seriously psychedelic. As does the whole record. This stuff is so dark and twisted and out there, some sort of seriously damaged psychedelic blackness, that should definitely appeal to both the true grim hordes, and folks who like their black metal as fucked up and far our as possible.
As for us, we might just have us another contender for black metal record of the year...
Here's the thing with Swedish black metaller Watain. Such a big deal is made out of their EVILness, their Satanism, their philosophy, their filthy, smelly live shows, rife with rotting animal heads and lots and lots of blood, all that stuff, there's really no way the music could live up to the hype, especially considering these guys, for as heavy and blasting and black they are, they are writing super melodic black metal, that is way too listenable and catchy really to be doused in blood and adorned with pentagrams and upsidedown crosses. If you had only seen pictures of the band, and heard about them, read interviews, you would undoubtedly expect something WAY noisier and WAY more brutal, insanely filthy and lo-fi and, well, frankly, more evil. There's been a huge backlash with this record, which seems weird to us, cuz it's not that far removed from Sworn To The Dark or Casus Luciferi, if anything it's the logical progression from those records, the sound is incredible, killer production, the guitars chaotic and crushing, everything sounds massive, the songs are a bit more complex and proggy, more parts, lots of weird tangly bits and strange time signatures, but the things is, these songs have a definite pop core, that no amount of buzz and blast can disguise. Which no doubt bugs the fuck out of the orthodox true grim kult hordes, but hell, for us, we're loving it, it's almost like these guys are taking up where Dissection's Storm Of The Light's Bane left off, total old school metal melodies mixed in with classic Scandinavian blackness, the songs epic and majestic and heavy, but hooky as fuck, crazy melodic, and WAY catchier than black metal was probably ever meant to be. What more do you need to know? If you can ignore the grim posturing and just dig into the music, this is definitely some seriously awesome shit, plus, as if to further distance themselves from the troo and grim traditionalists, they do a killer cover of "Chains Of Death" by Italian horror metallers Death SS!!!
While they last, we have the super deluxe digipaks, that are fucking amazing, all designed to look like an old woodcut, but with a diecut front panel with the third panel visible through the hole...
Oh yeah! We've been eagerly awaiting this ever since we heard Buried By Time And Dust was putting it out. A deluxe box set containing 180g vinyl reissues of this cult NWOBHM band's original two full-length albums, 1982's Death Penalty (featuring classics like "Free Country" and "No Stayer") and 1983's Friends Of Hell (equally cool, with such songs as "Love On Smack" and the under-rated "Music"). Part Sabbathy doom, part psychedelic punk, and part party metal. Initially best known for their risque album covers, featuring topless witches/wenches in tableaus that combined "historical reenactment" with Page Three Girl cheesecake, WfG's lasting legacy has more to do with their Sabbathy sound, they being one of the first (and few) bands in the '80s to so overtly worship Ozzy, Tony and Co., and establish the "doom metal" genre, along with Saint Vitus, Trouble, Pentagram, and Candlemass.
With this collector's set, you get not just the two lps, and nice box to keep 'em in, but also a huge 20 page booklet featuring unpublished outtakes from those infamous album cover photo sessions, plus full lyrics, liner notes from guitarist Phil Cope, newspaper clippings, and more previously unseen photos (live and promo shots), making this quite a treat for all true WfG fans.
Here's what AQ's Jim Haynes (not our usual metal reviewer!) had to say about these two albums when we first listed compact disc reissues some years ago...
Death Penalty is one of the lost metal albums from the early '80s, falling victim to its own indecisiveness, not that such is a bad thing. Never really staying "true" either to the glam metal of Hanoi Rocks, Fastway, and Motley Crue or to the shocking horror shows of Ozzy and Iron Maiden, Witchfinder General alternated between both worlds, with the first half of Death Penalty being rowdy party numbers about drinking beer and dropping acid. These songs followed standard blues based rock, but as Witchfinder General was pretty amped up on the aforementioned substances, they were quite a bit more distorted and quick tempoed. By the time Witchfinder General gets to their anthemic "Witchfinder General," this album takes an impressive turn down the dark path of mythologically laden proto-doom metal, loaded with super-heavy (for 1982) Sabbathy grooves and aggro lyrics mostly about killing witches. They also throw in some grave robbing, just to prove how evil they are. A confused classic... Witchfinder General's second album Friends Of Hell picks up right where Death Penalty left off, with an album split evenly between the party rock elements from the New Wave of British Metal back in 1983 and their undeniable influence from Sabbath. Just as bipolar (between comical and evil) as the first album, and just as great. One of Jim's (!) favorite metal bands, and that goes for most of the rest of us here at AQ too.
Not that probably if you're in the market for this, you need US to tell you that Witchfinder General is great. Though, we were shocked, shocked, to find out not long ago that one of our good friends and customers, who shall remain unnamed, had not only never heard any Witchfinder General but had never heard OF them, despite being a huge fan of Sabbath specifically and stoner, doom, black and other metal music in general! We were like WTF? How can you not know WfG??! What are you, -not- high?
A stark half-toned reproduction of two idealized proletariat workers graces the cover of Work / Death's debut full length album. This along with the stencil text of the album's title gives the impression of this being somewhere not too far from the anarcho-punk of Crass or the sadistic noise of Con-Dom or Grey Wolves. In fact, Work / Death's fizzing synth-drones are far from these grim signifiers. At one time, this Rhode Island one-man band might have abused his audience with sheer hellish miasma. But even though he still uses the self deprecating slogan "garbage in, garbage out" to describe his working process, Tender Comrades is nothing at all of a noise record, creating mesmerizing assemblages of layered static, soft blurry orchestrations of electronics, and sustained drones which come together much closer to the likes of Tim Hecker or Lawrence English than anything previously mentioned.
The album opens with a wispy swirl of aerosolized hiss situated above a Charlemagne Palestine style church organ drone, slipping into an Oneohtrix Point Never melody on the synth presets for horns by the end of this uncannily gorgeous piece. The second track may be more in keeping with Work / Death's earlier compacted noise, with motorized clickings and dampened alarm bells perched upon a carcinogenic hum of MB style sonic rumbling and electro-acoustic brutalism. But the gauzy approach returns on the third through a quiet set of guitar strummings behind another engulfing mass of thickened grey/white noises, with all of the sharp edges burnished off, like a shoegazed approach to noise construction, matching the mood of the plaintive guitar strums. By the album's finale, Work / Death offers something of a post-noise homage to Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon or Jonathan Coleclough's Period, with small clusters of piano hanging on a smoldering backdrop of rasping Brendan Murray-like minimalism. Very nicely done and a quite a nice surprise.
Of all the new bands coming out of Austin, TX, we think Woven Bones just might be our favorite. Their dark & punky garage rock just comes flowing out with such pure conviction. We're stoked to see that Hardly Art took notice of the great music the band has been making and added them to their roster. This new 7" finds the band at their most catchy, without losing any of their dark chops. So driving and full of gusto, and there is something so timeless and true about these songs. It's cool how Woven Bones can make as much sense next to todays lo-fi garage rock peddlers like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Fresh & Onlys, yet they have much more of a primitive post-punk driving vibe a la the Wipers. If you loved the last full length as much as we did, then for sure you need to grab this, and if you haven't had your moment with Woven Bones yet this is a great way to jump into the fold.
We never know what to expect from Richard Youngs, after years and years and tons of releases, a sound that runs the gamut from wild free form ur-drone skree, to tangled guitar / Casio crunch, to dreamy deconstructed shimmer, to hushed folky ambience, to electronics laced layered vocal soundscaping, even to Youngs just reading train tickets, not to mention about a million collaborations, many of them noisy and seriously out there, a proper pop record is maybe the last thing we might have expected. Which is good, cuz this is anything but a proper pop record. But it IS a pop record. And we're talking POP record. All of Youngs' music has had melodic and pop elements, but this is the first time he's totally gone for it, crafting a set of truly pop songs, albeit, filtered through his distinctly cracked sonic sensibility.
On a dare from a friend, Youngs created this pop song suite, which was then released as a super limited micro cd-r edition on said friend's label, but now, finally, Beyond The Valley Of The Ultrahits in unveiled to the public at large, which will no doubt appeal to a whole new audience, and will most likely also alienate older fans who might not be so open to such unabashed melodiousness, but we're loving it. Really when you get right down to it though, the hype around this record has been a bit overblown, it's not like Youngs hasn't spent a good deal of his career crafting proper songs, crooning and playing piano or acoustic guitar, playing some sort of folk or prog, but always it was a sound that seemed to constantly flirt with the boundaries of pop music, so to long time fans, this record might not seem all that far out, but at the same time, it's just so catchy, reminding us more of groups like the Moles or the Chills or even the Smiths, a sort of heartfelt twee pop, the vocals absolutely the focal point, the music muted and merely background for Youngs' crooning popsmithery. The rhythms skitter, while guitars and organs whir and swirl creating streaks of sound, a hushed minimal backdrop for this retro almost new wave sounding pop, sequenced synths, processed rhythms, but it's the melodies and the vocals that define the music, "Like A Sailor" totally sounds like something you might have heard on MTV in the eighties, a sound that would fit pretty comfortably alongside songs by Talk Talk, Ultravox, Echo And The Bunnymen and the like.
But it's Youngs, so it's not nearly that simple, a swirling pop song will be laced with some grinding buzzing crunch, but also some super catchy, almost cheesy lead guitar, then the whole song will be wrapped in a gauzy otherworldly haze, other songs get almost funky, the bass becoming more pronounced, reminding us a lot of The Style Council, all soulful and shimmery, but then the record will shift gears again, and Youngs will pair vocals with some electronic rhythms, multitracking his voice, strange harmonies and falsettos battling with the strange swooping rhythm underneath, and then it's right back into something more straight ahead and poppily new wave. Here and there, Youngs melds minimal folk to this new pop sound, or infuses some tracks with John Carpenter like synths, and that sort of eighties action movie credits vibe that's so popular with the hypnogogic pop crowd, but when wedded to crazy catchy off kilter pop, Youngs creates something entirely new, or perhaps not strictly 'new', but a sound that's original but with enough of a retro new wave vibe, that everyone into the cold wave / synth wave revival, who are up for a poppier take on that sound, might end up as obsessed with this record as we are.
Includes a download code.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The last time we heard from Zomes, aka Asa Osborne, he of the mighty Lungfish, and later, the stripped down but equally mighty Pupils, we couldn't get enough, declaring his self titled debut on Holy Mountain our Record Of The Week, a stunning collection of fragmented loop music, single melodic figures, repeated and layered into trancelike shortform miniature ragas, as shamanistic as his long time partner Daniel Higgs, but taking a much more subdued and kosmische path.
On this way too limited cassette, Osborne continues on his sonic path, but expanding his sound, or rather the scope of his sound, the source is still minimal, warm layered synths, but here, those layers are stretched into slowly undulating sidelong swells, like Riley or Reich, Osborne, unfurls lush melodies, lately them drift and shimmer, melodies surfacing and then fading out, before a new set of melodies take their place, dreamlike and softly psychedelic, sun dappled and gorgeously gauzy, this is total krautdrone new age bliss, utterly lovely and serene and tranquil and divine. Both tracks here are transcendent and transport the listener to some hazy otherworld, everything blurred and muted and washed out and soft focus. Imagine a way prettier and more minimal Expo 70, and you'll get an idea of what sort of spaced out cosmic drift these 2 improvisations offer. So totally lovely.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Already out of print, these are the only copies we'll be able to get... ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
