Kind of crazy to think that !!! have been around for almost fifteen years now. Seems like just yesterday that they were a brand new band aligned with a scene of like minded musicians who were rediscovering the intersection of dance music and punk. There was something so refreshing and fun about those early years of the band and while along the way there were definitely some musical missteps and a few duds there were always enough great moments to keep us at least a little bit excited for every new record. Strange Weather Isn't It? feels like a bit of a throwback to those years when they and The Rapture were being groomed to take over the world, but we do really dig how on songs like "The Most Certain Sure" sound like the band has been digging on what their Australian and Swedish counterparts like Cut Copy, Tough Alliance and Studio have been up to, cuz really it's been folks like that lately who have created an updated version of dance minded rock that works so well. We actually kind of wish the band would push it even further into full on pop territory, as we think that's where they could really excel and be a refreshing voice, but too often they return to their trademark if somewhat tired sound. Overall it's a record that while maybe not blowing us away, is for sure one of their more solid efforts.
Herein we find some early, early material by Portland's grim forest lurkers, the artistic, atmospheric black metal entity known as Agalloch. Eight songs taken from limited edition demo tapes circa 1996-1998, recorded before they got a record deal. Only a couple of the songs, meant for a 7", were later released on a limited cdep now also long gone. And listening to this, you can hear why they eventually got signed (and went on to develop the cult following they have today). These songs are both heavy and depressive, and metallically, melancholically melodic, coming off way more Iron Maiden-y than some black metal for sure, with extra folkiness that makes us think of early Abigor. And definitely fans of old Opeth should investigate this (you'll like the 11 and 13 minute long songs). Coming as no surprise to anyone whose heard their later material, Agalloch's demo archives incorporate rasping anguished vokills, jaunty folk-like melodies, trance-inducing battery, buzzing guitars, and calm, near-ambient interludes. One song is all acoustic strum and woodfires burning.
If you're already into this band, you'll want this. And it's also as good a starting point as any (considering these songs were THEIR starting point). Actually some of us here who hadn't really gotten into Agalloch before are finding this to be a bit of a treat, and realize we should pay more attention to what they've been up to lately, as well.
Ok, we know what you're thinking (maybe). Alice Cooper? Aquarius Record(s) Of The Week? Two of 'em?? If you're not familiar with these albums, you might be wondering... and while we know that many loyal AQ customers are of course extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of cool music, just as much or more so than any of us who work here, we also wouldn't be surprised if more than a few of you had never been exposed to these first two Alice Cooper albums before. Which is why we HAVE to list them and make them Records Of The Week!!�After being out of print for far too long, they've now been newly reissued on cd (in limited editions, see below for more about that), and we're excited to be able to tell you about 'em.
So, when most people think of Alice Cooper, what comes to mind? The big '70s shock rock act, up there with KISS, the guy who was the Marilyn Manson of the '70s, or maybe the regular on Hollywood Squares, or even the early '90s hairmetal Alice, of Wayne's World "we're not worthy" fame. Campy and kitschy and scholocky and alcoholic, with snakes and blood. All good things of course. But even if you are a fan of the Alice Cooper classics from the '70s, albums like Love It To Death, Killer and Billion Dollar Babies, the Alice Cooper Band's 1969 debut Pretties For You and its 1970 follow up Easy Action are often overlooked, and underrated. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label (and whatever you might think of Frank Zappa, he had a good track record for releasing freaky music by other folks, Captain Beefheart ferinstance!) this early Alice Cooper stuff is NOT the heavy metal hard rock you might be expecting. That was a direction AC went in really only after moving from LA to Detroit and hooking up with producer Bob Ezrin. There's hints of heaviness, of course, but this is waaay more psychedelic and poppy and proggy. And weird. If you think you know what to expect, think again. You're in for a bizarre treat indeed. (Some Alice Cooper fans might not agree, but we hope most open minded AQ customers will!)
The front cover of Pretties For You has a painting that make it look like a Robert Wyatt record. And on the back cover, the band, posing in a gallery of strange modern sculptures, show off a visual style that makes 'em look something like a cross between Blue Cheer and Roxy Music. Intrigued? Throw the album on, and you're confronted with the first of this album's many non-sequiturs, the orchestral fanfare of "Titanic Overture", which segues into the why-be-normal, twisty-turny psych piece "10 Minutes Before The Worm" (actually only 1 minute, 40 seconds long). They weren't trying to ease anybody into their "thing" it seems. Better yet is track three, "Swing Low Sweet Cheerio", the album's first true pop gem, and still plenty weird. And that's what this is, a pop album, full of great pop songs, super Beatlesy, hummable stuff. But it's Beatlesy in a tripped out Sgt. Peppers way. And wait a second, Pretties For You? The Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" might also have been an influence. There's a lot of quirky dynamics, theatrical art rock gestures, cryptic humor, wild psychedelic effects, screaming fuzz guitar, strange stops and starts... it can be off-putting at first, probably difficult listening for some, with as much in common with Amon Duul II or even Olivia Tremor Control as they do with Alice Cooper's later million-sellers. But, you like '60s garage psych right? Well early AC were really a Nuggetsy garage band (originally called The Earwigs, then The Spiders, and then The Nazz, finally settling on Alice Cooper following a legendary Ouija board session). Doing their thing on the Sunset Strip in LA, they gradually got nuttier and nuttier, more psychedelic and experimental. If AC hadn't gone on to such later success, we're certain this would be regarded by psych lovers as an obscure cult classic of late '60s freakdom, like 50 Foot Hose or West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band or something. Instead, it's the record that probably confuses average Alice Cooper fans, and isn't heard by anybody else, which we think is a shame...
Alice Cooper's swaggering second effort, Easy Action, is just a bit more straightforward, more of a "rock" album, proto-glam in fact, AC maybe trying to take on T-Rex? On it, with some wicked lyrics, Alice starts to develop his better known, "mentally ill" or "evil" sick humor persona, in a wittier way though than the cartoonishness that later took over in later years. His ever-so-slightly-raspy, steeped-in-decadence voice, of course, always had star power from the very beginning, but here he occasionally breaks out a snarl that never surfaced on Pretties, amidst more melodic crooning. And one of the tracks, the spasmodic tour de force "Still No Air", foreshadows Alice Cooper's later West Side Story obsession on School's Out.
And Easy Action proves to be still pretty darn trippy and weird, with plenty of progtastic twists, just like Pretties. Heck, "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye" is 7+ minutes of pretty much just sound FX laced freakishness. This album boasts several more glorious psychedelic pop gems like "Laughing At Me", the piano ballad "Beautiful Flyaway", and the very Beatlesy "Shoe Salesman", alongside the harder rockin' likes of "Return Of The Spiders"... Oooh so many good tunes. Compared to the debut, it's perhaps a more confident, slightly less confusional record, that set them up for major label success of their next album, another huge favorite of ours, Love It To Death, recorded with Ezrin after their relocation to Detroit - a move that made sense, considering they did have a lot in sonically common with The Amboy Dukes and even the MC5. You'll also hear parallels to very early Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie... And (moreso on Pretties) an American version of Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett era mind you...) or even a more obtuse The Doors...
While Alice Cooper (both the man and the band) made a lot of classic music in their career(s), no other Alice Cooper records were ever quite as arty and bizarre, with the unique one foot in the psychedelic sixties mix of throbbing manic energy and melancholic moodiness that's found on Pretties For You and Easy Action. Are we going out on limb by making 'em Records Of The Week? Nope, what could be more AQ?? These have been favorites here for a long time, but rarely available. And Jim and Allan bonded over these back when they both first started working here years ago. Also, we know the guys in Harvey Milk will have to be stoked to find that their new album got ROTW honors alongside these two!
And by the way, we insist on filing these under A, not C. It's the Alice Cooper Band dammit. Alice himself didn't go solo 'til Welcome To My Nightmare in 1975. The original act, featuring guitarists Glen Buxton and Mike Bruce, bassist Denis Dunaway, and drummer Neil Smith, alongside the former Vincent Furnier on vocals and snake handling, deserves their due! One of the great American rock bands.
One final note: these reissues on this new Rhino "Encore" imprint are based around the (dumb) idea of doing releases that are only available for a limited time. It's like the way Disney puts out DVDs. So, all the more reason for us to shout from the rooftops about these two albums -- in six months, according to the label, these reissues will be out of print, again!! Argh. So get 'em while you can, if you don't already have them in your collection!! And buy a copy for a friend!
It's always a little weird when a sound becomes cool, or hip, and suddenly the bandwagon is groaning under the weight of a million bands doing their very darnedest to cash in, to bask in even a little sliver of that reflected limelight. And with the advent of Facebook and MySpace the amount of time it takes now for a new sound to proliferate and make its way to every corner of the underground as essentially been whittled down from months, to weeks, to days, heck maybe even minutes. Such has been the case with the recent resurgence of interest in fuzzed out dream pop and eighties synth wave, cold wave, dark wave, all the various retro waves, besides the now hundred of new bands popping up every few weeks, it's even gotten to the point where Built To Spill recently re-recorded a bunch of their songs transforming their jangly indie pop into eighties new wave. But heck, at least it's a sound we dig, and amidst all the chaff, there is definitely some serious wheat, we focus a lot on those groups here, bands that obviously love that sound and aren't just aping it, in some cases, it's folks who remembered it the first time around, and were reminded how much they dug it, in other cases it may be a new discovery, but it ends up revelatory, and of course there are folks who take that sound and twist it all up, just another element and influence in a swirling sea of disparate elements and influences, which seems to be the case with Altar Eagle, the project of Digitalis head honcho Brad Rose and his partner Eden Hemming (who played together previously as psych folk duo Corsican Paintbrush), whose new lp under the guise Altar Eagle, is a heady swirling morass of murky dreampop, cold wave drift, eighties style shoegaze shimmer, and post industrial pop flecked fuzz, and is truly divine, but more importantly, manages to sound wholly original amidst a glut of bands attempting to create something similar.
Opener "Battlegrounds" with its bubbly propulsive beat, hazy vocal harmonies, and swirls of soft focus synth fuzz, definitely set the stage, for a sort of drugged out lazy afternoon fuzz pop drift, not all that far removed from Beach House, Mazzy Star, Cocteau Twins, Galaxie 500 and the like, but these two keep piling on the layers of buzz, letting the synths whirl and hum, the voices (and pretty much everything else) swaddled in reverb and echo, almost like some eighties classic slowed way down and doused in effects. "Honey" is similarly fuzzy and poppy, the boy/girl vocals pulled straight from some eighties C64 single, but settled amidst something much more modern, a stuttery rhythm and a tangle of warm liquid synths.
"You Lost Your Neon Haze" might be the 'hit' if bands like this actually had hits, with its looped mesmerizing rhythm, gnarled electronic backdrop, and buried in the murk vocals, a gorgeous chunk of smoldering slowcore, barely audible through the washed out dreamlike haze. Although a few tracks later, there's "Monsters", a total gloom pop anthem, like Cold Cave's "Life Magazine", that sounds ripe for someone to snap up and toss in a hip commercial. Swirling synths, a propulsive beat, a killer hook (still buried under layers of fuzz and buzz) a crazy catchy chorus, with some awesome ooohs and ahhs background vox.
And so it goes, the rest of the record unfurling like some sort of drugged out hazy sonic fever dream, eighties pop transported to the nineties, leaving a twisted spray of swirling shimmering gloomy new wave doom pop contrails in its wake, warm and woozy and daydreamy, and easily one of the best things we've heard in this new wave craze of retro synth wave dream pop. WAY recommended.
Always time to rejoice around here when we're graced by new music from Antony. This ep has three brand new songs as well as two covers (Dylan, Lennon). It opens up with, what for Antony is an almost upbeat and rocking song that doesn't come off as immediately devastating as most Antony record openers, but instead demonstrates the rage of textures and dynamics that Antony is capable of creating. The next two songs slip back into Antony's more slow and swoonsome sound. And then the record closes with covers of Bob Dylan's "Pressing On", a cool choice for a cover as it came from Dylan's 1980 born again record Save. And Antony latches on to the melancholy gospel themes of survival in such a beautiful way. The record closes with a cover of "Imagine" where Antony is joined by Kevin Barker and William Basinski. That might be our least favorite of the songs from this ep but luckily we love the other tracks so much that it almost doesn't matter.
Always time to rejoice around here when we're graced by new music from Antony. This ep has three brand new songs as well as two covers (Dylan, Lennon). It opens up with, what for Antony is an almost upbeat and rocking song that doesn't come off as immediately devastating as most Antony record openers, but instead demonstrates the rage of textures and dynamics that Antony is capable of creating. The next two songs slip back into Antony's more slow and swoonsome sound. And then the record closes with covers of Bob Dylan's "Pressing On", a cool choice for a cover as it came from Dylan's 1980 born again record Save. And Antony latches on to the melancholy gospel themes of survival in such a beautiful way. The record closes with a cover of "Imagine" where Antony is joined by Kevin Barker and William Basinski. That might be our least favorite of the songs from this ep but luckily we love the other tracks so much that it almost doesn't matter.
Got the last copies ever of this killer split, direct from the bands, limited to just 100 copies, released to coincide with their just wrapped up Summer tour, and which teams up Ash Borer from Arcata with Fell Voices from Santa Cruz. A seriously brutal and kick ass Northern California USBM match up for sure. We've raved about Fell Voices before, but this is the first we've heard from Ash Borer, who sound pretty perfect alongside their sonically similarly brethren, offering up a 21 minute side long black metal epic, that slips smoothly from soaring, frenzied majestic black metal riffery, to woozy, loping, but still super distorted and raw, post rock flecked doom, to swirling black ambience, to lumbering spaced out psychedelic drift, lacing shimmery sheets of washed out guitar over plodding minor key melancholy, before building gradually back into a dense tribal crush, and then finally another bout of thrashing black buzz.
Fell Voices fill up their side of the tape, with another single sidelong jam, and much like last year's self-titled lp, unfurls a dark, brooding epic bit of blackness, beginning with a cloud of looped muted riffage, streaks of burnished feedback, slowly swelling and swaying, stretched out into some serious droniness, before some warped minor key guitar melodies, and buried in the mix blast beats surface, not turning the song into blasting blackness, instead just adding some strange texture to that deep black drone, the song wavery and woozy, until finally the band kicks in full bore, but even then, it's not typical black metal, it's super mathy, and intricate, lots of dynamics, all spaced out, guitar harmonics drifting over insanely dense drumming, and riffage so blurred and black, it almost just sounds like pulses of blacknoize. The song seems to coalesce into a driving blast of murky black thrum, bits of melody surfacing from the blurred black expanse, super tranced out and hypnotic and most importantly, especially in a genre like black metal, totally twisted and unlike almost any other BM we've heard.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Already out of print. Last copies EVER!
Utech brings us the third album from these Japanese earhole destroyers, two years after Aural Fit II which came out on the PSF label (and was one of the most brutal and intense recordings ever on PSF, and that's saying A LOT). They haven't changed much. You want noise rock? Dense, distorted psychedelic clangor? A truly powerful power trio? Well this band's music is positively apocalyptic. Makes the likes of Skullflower and Wolf Eyes sound almost tame. The feedback and distortion is a physical force, the sound of a universe imploding. Listening to each track, it's hard not to imagine Aural Fit's amps and other gear (and the band members themselves too) beginning to vibrate, levitating off the ground, and then flying violently through the air, all around the room, participating in a "wire-fu" version of a mosh-pit, crashing and bashing together, drums colliding with speaker cabinets, effects pedals pelting off of cymbals, the tangle of guitar cables and power cords writhing in space like some sort of noodly monster...
Though, somehow, somehow, the 5 individual pieces on this 40 minute disc are structured "songs", even with (distressed) vocals buried somewhere in the blown-out din. A couple of the tracks, like "Embedded Command" parts 1 and 2, are more spaciously rumbling, a mesmeric smear of textural rattle and roll. Others, like "Revelation 1" or epic opener "Overexposure", traffic more in lumbering bludgeon, all pounding drums and in-the-red riffage. If we said Aural Fit sounds like Fushitsusha in gladiatorial combat, atop a trash heap, with a "motorpsycho" Merzbow, would you dig it?? All lovers of anything excessively "distorto-delic" should.
Comes in a slim, oversized, mostly black sleeve typical of Utech's usual fine packaging and graphics, with liner notes by liner notes by Alan Cummings.
Wow, this one's a real surprise, because as much as we're fans of jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers' early to mid-seventies rare groove and jazz albums, his later output that we knew of, pretty much fell into cheesy disco and RnB. So when Universal Sounds re-issued this album from 1983 that we had never heard of, we were a bit wary but also highly intrigued. Released on his own independent label Uno Melodic while he was between major-label tenures with Polydor and Columbia, Lots of Love clearly shows Ayers independence as he freely explores many styles of post-disco dance music from the Afro-beat inspired "Black Family", the electro-funk of "Fast Money", and the minimal house of "Chicago", while "D.C. City" hearkens back to the simmering rare groove classics he recorded with Sylvia Striplin and Ethel Beatty. He also gets in a couple of grooving instrumentals with the vibes, showing that he never lost his chops. His best record since 1976's Everybody Loves The Sunshine!
Recommended!
With past releases including Acid Mother's Temple and Yahowha 13, we can always count on Prophase to deliver a lysergic dose of psychedelic awesomeness. Gypsy Woman is their latest offering of psych-folk bliss, a free-flowing cosmic epic from Oakland's tarot warrior Janina Angel Bath. With the help of some friends and a wide array of world instruments, including bansari, tamboura and flute, Ms. Bath gently crafts an otherworldly escape into ethno-drone solace. While Gypsy Women is heavily decorated with exotic instrumentation and dizzying effects, the majority of the album revolves around Ms. Bath's vocal work. "Mystic Lady", a favorite track of ours, probably because it features Kazem Zia Ebrahimi on electric sarod, unfolds like a hazy desert dreamscape. Somber gestures from the sarode weave in and out of Bath's vocal croons, swells of reverb fade into the distant horizon as the many layers fall into place like a leaf onto water, so mysterious and elegant.
Oslo meets the Bay Area in this cross-continental collaboration, first brought to our attention by bay area drummer extraordinaire Jacob Heule, who also tears it up in both Basshaters and Ettrick, two bands particularly known for their explosive live shows and improvisational finesse. The Bay / Oslo Mirror Trio chronicles an exceptionally fierce meeting of 3 Norwegian improvisers (Guro Skumsnes Moe, Havard Skaset, and Kyrre Laastad) and 3 Bay Area improvisers (Jacob Heule, Ava Mendoza and Tony Dryer). Don't be fooled by the "trio" tag, really this is a 6 person collaboration that covers all kinds of sonic territory. The disc opens with low electronic rumbles, metallic drones and shimmering percussion that chime and corrode into demonic clatter and wailing distortion. The instrumentation becomes less mysterious as the album unfolds, spastic drum fills flutter beneath walls of guitar feedback and head-splitting noise, sizzling electronics burn holes in amps and glimpses of double bass peer through the mix. While we definitely love the moments of chaotic bombastic whirl, we can also hear the group's careful attention to space and detail as moments of quiet restraint offer shelter from the storm. So nice! An impressive showcase of modern improv, we can't get enough!
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It's finally here, the debut from Cali sunshine retro poppers Best Coast, and as much as all the internet hype might make you want to think otherwise, it's just as good as they all say. The seven inches we've heard definitely already had us hankering for a full length, and as much as we dug those singles, the band has benefited big time from some serious production upgrade, the sound on Crazy For you finally realizes their potential. All the comparisons to Spector's wall of sound and sixties girl groups, now totally make even more sense, the sound here is totally timeless, fuzzy and reverby, like a treasure trove of rare sixties 7"s, but at the same time lush and lustrous and subtly modern, the guitars warm and liquid, and the vocals, wow, Bethany Cosentino manages to channel every torch singer and chanteuse that she was ever inspired by, her voice rich and smokey and passionate, every line sung with such conviction, the songs melancholic and wistful, a heartbroken longing infusing the sad songs, a pure unfettered joy, and enthusiasm for all the little things, sunshine, love, friendship, oozing from the happy ones, the drums simple and propulsive, the background vocals soft focus clouds of oooohs and aaaahs, Bobb Bruno's understated guitar parts sealing the deal, mirroring the vocal melodies but occasionally spiralling off into soft psychedelic swirls, and the songs, the songs are so good, catchy and fun, and dreamy and heartfelt, and like the sound, totally timeless, opener "Boyfriend" is an instant classic, the melody utterly beguiling, the perfect encapsulation of what Best Coast do so well, right down to Bruno's minimal leads, which perfectly compliment Cosentino's harmonies, the soaring chorus, and the simple propulsive rhythm that drives the song. "The title track is another practically perfect summer pop gem, more jangly and driving, like a sixties girl group jam as interpreted by vintage Unrest, more oooh and ahhhs, and plenty more hooks. The whole record is overflowing with perfect pop, with summery vibes, everything you could possibly want from a feel good pop record. And while they last, we have the version that tacks on the bonus track "When I'm With You", the closest thing the band has to a 'hit', a woozy, soporific intro, quickly exploding into a gloriously infectious pound, the main melody so awesome, and the chorus, a stone cold killer, the harmonies, the arrangement, the fuzzy guitars, the drums, everything. Perfect. Yeah okay, we totally love this record. Like crazy, and we're pretty sure you will too.
This is Monk's second Blind Blake collection, and like the first, it showcases some of the most impressive and mysterious blues guitar work ever. Like many of the original bluesmen, Arthur Blake's personal story is a mystery. His music is his legacy, and though categorized by many today as blues, these songs cover a wide range of styles and show a serious command of the guitar that has led to much speculation about Blake's formative years. Indeed, his reputation as king of the ragtime guitarists may be the result of some jazz training and time spent in ensemble groups. His polished East Coast style went over quite well with audiences during his active years from 1926 to 1933. Despite this success, Blake's death under mysterious circumstances blurred things even further. Luckily he left behind a strong legacy that has led to scores of imitators and an assured status in the history of recorded music. For this one, Monk ventures beyond their usual graphic design, completely aping the artwork from a Yazoo Blind Blake collection instead. Still, looks pretty nice. The music, of course, speaks for itself.
After a half decade, The Books deliver their fourth full length and follow-up to Lost And Safe! Anticipation and expectations were high, and we wish we could report that our socks were knocked off, but we'll have to settle for our socks to be warmly comfy. The Way Out is definitely way more vibrant and lively than its comparatively moody predecessor. The lead-off track relies heavily on the quirkiness of vintage self-help hypnosis tape voiceovers to engage the listener, but remove those samples and you're left with a simply pleasant clitter-clatter toybox pop-tronic instrumental which would be very at home on the German Morr Music label alongside the likes of Lalipuna and Styrofoam. Moving onwards, in keeping with their unpredictable multi-genre gadabout nature, The Books then inject a welcome bit of funky juiciness and more random novelty into the proceedings, but it too seems to rely a lot on modern sound manipulation software to tweak the listeners' ears. Earlier in the decade, there weren't a whole lot of artists making this kind of music, and thus the group's patchworked quirkiness was somewhat distinct and engaging, but these days everyone and their dog has or at least knows about those programs and is making similarly spirited recordings. Simply, the mystique has faded a little, and it takes a bit more these days for folks to truly get beyond the "whoa, listen to these crazy, loopy, chopped up and processed sounds!" We don't mean to be too hard on The Books specifically, it's just an inescapable fact of modern music making. That said, if you dig that sound, and want more, this will most likely still hit the spot.
It's finally here! An audio / video document of the amazing 77 Boa Drum performance that took place in Brooklyn on July 7th, 2007. Originally filmed for a full length theatrical and dvd release, those plans were scrapped for some reason, so this right here is the only document of that fantastic and now legendary performance.
Available only as a very pricey import, 77 Boa Drum contains 2cds, a full recording of the performance split into two halves, a dvd, featuring 20 minutes of video from the event, all housed in a massive and gorgeously designed green and gold hardcover book, packed with tons of photos, including a couple of our very own Andee, who was one of the 77, diagrams of the drum layout, various text and other imagery. It's really pretty fantastic, totally deluxe and elaborate. And beyond object as art, listening to the recordings, the sound is massive and powerful and beautiful, more than just a spectacle, it was a sprawling chunk or rhythmic organic sound, equally composed and improvised, the power of that many drummers, each contributing his or her own style, combined with the Boredoms three drummer attack, and Eye's homemade multi necked guitar and spaced out electronics. If you missed it, you might want to think about picking one of these up (cheaper than the plane ticket woulda been, right?). And even if you were there, that almost makes this even more essential, an amazing, over the top, keepsake of one of the most amazing performances we've ever seen or been a part of, and the very first Boa Drum.
Needless to say, this is crazy limited, and we only have a few of these. When we run out, we'll hopefully be able to get more, but there's certainly no guarantee. So if you really want one, act fast.
We were hugely obsessed with Silkworm back in the day. Their sound was dark and mysterious, a twisted and bitter take on indie rock, that somehow managed to evoke an impossible hopefulness at the same time. Super melodic, 3 of the 4 members sang, each with a distinctive style and sound, which only helped make their music more interesting. Joel Phelps, perhaps our favorite voice of the bunch, left, and the band sadly seemed to flounder. Then tragically, their drummer was killed in an automobile accident, and Silkworm was over.
Tim Midgett and Andy Cohen, the core of the original Silkworm lineup, reunited and returned with Bottomless Pit, which to our ears sounded like a return to the classic Silkworm sound, still dark, and depressive, brooding and melancholy, but the songs were so good, tense and dramatic and crazy catchy, with the spirit and feel of classic nineties indie rock, but dragged into the now. That first record was on seriously heavy rotation around here, spacey and spare, warm and lush, totally fantastic and a surprising return to form.
And now we have Blood Under The Bridge, which offers more of the same, dark and haunting stripped down indie rock. Someone here thought it sounded like Belle And Sebastian, but to our ears it sounds like a heavier My Dad Is Dead, the same sort of world weary, minor key, broken hearted indie rock. The first few tracks slither and creep, hushed and minimal and way moody, but then comes "Summerwind" that is surprisingly rocking, and sounds like it could have been yanked off one of the classic old Silkworm records, and the vibe and the energy stays relatively charged after that. "Late is another slow burning rocker, with some gorgeous vocal melodies, and some awesome psych guitar, "Dixon" alternately pounds and broods, with an almost surfy sounding main riff, but then "Kiss Them All" brings it back down again, a gorgeous low slung pretty indie pop drifter, that sounds as good as anything these guys have done.
The last three tracks bounce back and forth between energetic crunch, spacey contemplative drift, and driving grooves, finishing off with the epic emotional catharsis of "38 Souls" that feels just like the old days.
Along with the Versus record reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, a sweet dose of classic indie rock, the kind they don't really make anymore (except when it's made by the guys and gals who were making it the first time around anyway!)...
Good grief, we've never listed this??? Every once in a while we realize when such an oversight has occurred. Thankfully, we've got this new vinyl reissue to review. This album, originally released in 1971 (that's right!), the debut from Swiss krautrockers (I think you can call 'em that) Brainticket, is simpy one of the freakiest, LSD-trip inspired slabs of groovy mu-sick ever. Up there with Funkadelic's Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, even.
The first two tracks on side one, "Black Sand" and "Places Of Light", ease you into it, being laidback groovers laced with stabs of distortion... then the true "trip" begins, the utterly over the top, three-part "Brainticket", that starts on side one and spreads over all of side two, dense and propulsive and repetitive, with orgasmic female vocals and all kinds of intense psychedelic throb. It's the perfect soundtrack to goin' completely mad. In addition to wah-wah guitar, organ, flute, tabla, and sci-fi electronics, there's layers of musique concrete "samples", tapes of rainfall, clanging bells, clattering trains, cheering crowds, all sorts of chaotic noise panic...
Quite a overdose of LSD-enthusiasm, that even today still seems more likely to scare folks off from trying drugs than encourage 'em to do so. But then, who needs to actually drop acid when you can just listen to this? Fans of the likes of A.R. & Machines, Amon Duul II, Siloah, Tangerine Dream's Electronic Meditation, and other cosmic trips (as well as hippie kitsch) this is another one you need to get turned on to if you haven't already. Oh, and as a footnote, the drummer went on to play in proto-metallers Toad.
An old fave, maybe a bit more expensive than it needs to be, though to be fair this package does come with a cd version of the album as well, which is a nice touch. 180 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve, which is nice too.
There's never a question as to if a Budos Band release will sound good or not, they are one of THEE tightest and most masterful players of Afro-soul-funk around. And while their first two outings were totally great records, they have stepped up their game big time for number three. It's one thing to be talented musicians, it's another to create songs that have a really strong mood and presence, and that's exactly what Budos Band have done on III. It's a bit darker, wider in scope and just straight up ON FIRE! They've figured out how to take their inspiration from the music of Fela Kuti, James Brown, Sun Ra, Funkadelic, as well as hints of psychedelia from Turkey, Latin America and Africa, and bring it all together in such an infectious and surprisingly original sound. If you ever get a chance to see them live, go for it, cuz they always kill, and this new album is our favorite from them yet!
When we first heard about this, we had to check the calendar to make sure the release date wasn't April 1st. But no, this is real, the latest collaborative project undertaken by everyone's favorite Japanese psychedelic heavy rockers, Boris, wherein they team up with, yes, Ian Astbury of The Cult!! Seems like something out of an episode of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, does it not? Well believe it. BXI is Boris + Ian (or times Ian?), and the disc's blatant/redundant title makes the concept plain.
So... what do we think? Well what do YOU think? Basically, a lot depends on A) what you think of Ian's singing, which may or may not depend on how big of a Cult fan you are or once were, and B) how much of a hardcore devoted Boris fanboy (or girl) you are. If you like everything Boris and/or Ian Astbury, then this is for you. Otherwise, maybe check out the sound samples before reflexively "adding to cart" just 'cause it's a Boris (related) release.
This 20 minute, 4 track ep includes 3 songs newly written by the BXI unit, plus a version of The Cult's "Rain", from their 1985 album Love, sung by Boris guitarist Wata. The fairly dynamic first track, "Teeth And Claws", finds Astbury wailing about how "animals will save us... yeah, yeah they will, yeah they will, yes they will" over some sub-grunge, big-beat, quasi-heavy quasi-psych that wouldn't sound out of place on most modern rock stations. The next song, "We Are Witches", is much "tougher" and more metallic, with chunky distorted guitar chug. After that, comes "Rain", which is the best cut here in our opinion. Wata's gentle, dreamy vocals are a nice change from Astbury's overwrought rock dude yowl, and guest guitarist Michio Kurihara's stinging acid rock leads are glorious. Though, if they'd chosen to cover "Love Removal Machine" we'd have been into it too... The finale, "Magickal Child" is slow and majestic, with Astbury being dramatic but not ridiculous. Still, it's the closest Boris has ever come to U2 territory, that's all. Kurihara also plays guitar on this track too, again a plus. It's kinda funny he's on this disc with Astbury, in a six-degrees of separation way, since Kurihara was a member of Tokyo retro psych act White Heaven, who sounded a lot like The Doors, whose frontman Jim Morrison was of course famously portrayed by Val Kilmer in a movie, wait no that's not it, it's that The surviving Doors recently toured with Ian "The Lizard King II" Astbury as their singer, didn't they?
Really, not bad as long as you don't hate Astbury. But also, not what we were hoping for (well, had we ever envisioned this collaboration in the first place). Boris definitely seems to be meeting Astbury much more than halfway here, this coming off more like Astbury with Boris as a backing band (or Boris paying tribute to him for some reason) than Boris doing some weird and heavy Boris thing and then making it weirder by having the guy from The Cult sing on it. Oh well, we'll admit we're Boris (and/or Cult) fans enough to pick this up just for "Rain" alone, and then can enjoy the other tracks to varying degrees, or not...
NB. vinyl coming soon (within a couple weeks).
Caboladies specialize in ecstatic electrical jams that have been making the rounds of the various psychedelic-post-noise-zonked tape and cd-r labels (Arbor, Gneiss, Peasant Magik, Digitalis, etc.). And at one time, these two Kentucky ex-pats (now living in Chicago) shared a tape release with Oneohtrix Point Never. They've always been a bit loopier and more shambolic than Oneohtrix, elevating their work to the druggiest plateau of spiralling bloop and eyes-dilated sparkle that you might expect from an Astral Social Club reworking of J.D. Emmanuel. Many of those tape and cd-r releases had disappeared from physical distribution, although some less than stunning sounding mp3s are making their way around the blogosphere. So, it's really great to hear Caboladies on wax, which is certainly the best medium for these celestial crystallizations blossoming from piles of analogue gear. Taken separately, each piece of electronic gear is dialed to a twitchy spasmodic set of bleeps and swoops, that would be ungainly had Caboladies not playfully situated five, six, eight, ten complementary sets of tones that smear together into an ambient shimmer that's anything but static. These irregular vibrations and delirious patterns are alive with psychedelic energy, that you could almost see fitting into some freak-folk nature jam session... but then again, everything needs to be plugged rather heavily into the grid. Great stuff!
Country music pioneers the Carter Family really need no introduction at this point (check our review for the previous collection on Monk, I'm Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes...). With their encyclopedic knowledge of old American and British folk songs, the Carters helped to bring this music into the recording age where they stood as a link between old and new. As the world was rapidly changing around them, groups like the Carter Family were essential in documenting American traditions which were rapidly fading. This collection, containing songs recorded in 1929, finds the group at the height of their commercial and artistic powers with some amazing renditions of many old time classics, such as "Motherless Children", "Wabash Cannonball", and the title track among others. All in all, another essential compilation of some of the most timeless music ever recorded.
From the state that gave us President George W. Bush's presidency and our first taste of anthrax panic, comes sludgemetal masters Cavity and their new album for Hydra Head. Just like their past efforts, the sweet smell of Sabbath is strong, mixed with the
FINALLY back in stock!
As soon as we spied the cover art of this self-released cd from this obscure French doom (natch) trio, we knew it was gonna either be really awesome... or really terrible. We were hoping for awesome, though, some kind of magical dirtbag psychedelic metal anarchy that could live up the crude cartoonish line drawing of a skeleton biker riding through an apocalyptic landscape, with the band's tattooed skull logo floating in the air above him... As you can guess 'cause we then ordered a bunch and are highlighting it on our list, we think it was pretty rad indeed! Though, surely not for everyone. You gotta appreciate wasted heaviness, psychomaniacal alcoholic sludge... Named after Saint Vitus' most obscure, underrated release, it should be no surprise that C.O.D. sound a heck of a lot like Saint Vitus. But even more primitive and unpolished! They're a band that's being damn redundant when they title one of the four tracks here, "We Are Bestial And Raw". Other titles indicative of their mindset: "Hell's On Wheels", "Hangover" (a track which starts with a cheap clock radio alarm going off, a clever contrast to the tolling church bells most doom bands would use), and "Rusty World" (when he sings it, it sounds like "Fucking World", though - in fact every other word sung on this disc sounds like fuck or fucking, even when it's not). Speaking of the singing, the vocals are definitely strange, like there's something wrong with the guy (nothing to do with being French). But we like 'em. Everything here goes towards creating a messed up but hypnotic effect, the psychedelic distortion, the crude riffs, the crashing cymbals, the weird vocals, the demo production quality, the extended song lengths (it's 4 songs, as we said, but 32 minutes). In addition to those into Saint Vitus style doom (like Blood Farmers too) this might well appeal to fans of such acts as Brainbombs, The Heads, and Julian Cope's Brain Donor...
The only thing cooler than this, would be to have it on cassette... which it once was, but they only made 250 of those, and probably not many more of these!
Up Here In The Clouds, you'll hear the ocean. Or at least, those are the first sounds that Cindytalk issues forth on his second album of digitally shorn impressionism for Editions Mego. For both of the Mego discs, Cindytalk has been a solo project for Gordon Sharp; but the earlier incarnations that date back to 1982 were post-punk ensembles erupting with a violent beauty through slabs of guitar noise, dirge-paced rhythmic backbeats, and Sharp's angelic vocals. After the band's 1994 album Wappinschaw, Cindytalk as a project became all but dormant, until Sharp began working digitally a couple years back, and it seems that Sharp has been energized through this process, producing these two records over the course of a year, with rumors that he'll be cobbling another band together to work under the Cindytalk banner.
As with the 2009 The Crackle Of My Soul, Up Here In The Clouds is well suited to Editions Mego, a long time bastion of glitch-born abstraction, volatile noise, and electro-acoustic consternation. After those initial cycles of tidal lapping, Sharp introduces the first of many lush, elongated drones built upon tensely vibrating noises that are equal parts John Duncan sound dilation and Tim Hecker fuzzed digitalia. Elsewhere, his ring-modulations transform the source material into glassine textures that hang above faux-shepard tone constructions and blustery oscillations spun upon radio interference, almost like a digital recapitulation of Loren Chasse or Small Cruel Party. At times, there are glimpses shot into the past reconnecting with the overdriven-noise-turned-into-ambience that graced some of the 1986 Cindytalk album In This World, but for the most-part the digital modulation and transformation that Sharp elicits in 2010 is a newer model in pursuit of those same ideals of abjection becoming beautiful but through digital means.
It's tough to argue with a band whose influences include Porter Ricks, Pan American, Skullflower, Techno Animal, Portal, Scanner, Main, and Bark Psychosis, and even tougher when somehow, against all odds, the band actually manages to sort of sound like a bastard mix of all of those.
Such is the case with NYC one man avant abstract electronica outfit City Surgical, whose sound is not so much electronica as it is created electronically, if that makes any sense, sure there's buzz and skitter and glitch, but the way those elements are assembled makes the sounds on Gray Panic sound more organic, more mysterious. Right from the get go, "Our Blood Will Roar In The Pipes" is a strange bit of pulsing ambience, but the pulses are thick rumbles and muted roars, wreathed in strange muffled skree, and in between there's lots of space, filled with some barely audible hiss and fuzz, like some lost transmissions, barely making it through the ether, very haunting and creepy, and with a definite nineties Pathological vibe. "Pi Needle" offers up something similar, a strange electronic buzzscape, the rhythms skeletal skitters, that slowly build to something more substantial, while the bass whirs and throbs, and smeared melodies expand and contract all around. "Low In Silhouette, Irregular In Shape", begins as a stuttery bit of low slung skitter, but then the track skids to a halt, and shifts gears, expelling think swaths of industrial creak and warm melodic buzz, a lurching start stop, that is soon joined again by a muted rhythm, and a woozy bassline, only to get more and more distorted and abstract as the track progresses.
And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted collection of post industrial electronica, of skeletal abstract bass music, of muted blackened ambience, Kompakt style minimal pulses wind around haunting late night drift and darkly groovy basslines, dubbed out minimal crunch splinters into fragments that are left to float through hazy fields of FX and ghostly melody, creaking, crumbling haunted house ambience is wrapped around little flurries of electronic glitch and tangled melody, while thick streaks of warm liquid buzz hover over moaning sheets of feedback and delicate rhythmic frameworks, super distorted hiss drenched buzz swirls around dizzying flurries of rapidfire skitter, and finally, the record unwinds in a tangled blowout of throbbing bass heavy grooves and seriously corrosive blasts of crumbling psychedelic soft noise...
Killer stuff.
Cloudland Canyon always seemed like some impossible classic krautrock / noise rock hybrid, their records equal parts German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, My Bloody Valentine and the Dead C, a washed out sonic world of gritty hypnotic haze, of lumbering psychedelic grooves, of twisted FX drenched drift and looped druggy ambience, as likely to explode into a super rocking fuzzed out dronejam as they were to emit thick billowing clouds of swirling blurred psychdrone shimmer, but always, at the core of their sound was pop. Little hooks buried in the murk and the mire, catchiness subtly woven into the fabric of every bit of spaced out crush or raga-like skree, the thread that held their sound together was spun from melody and harmony, no matter how much those elemental forces were obscured.
Recently CC shared a split with Citay, both bands paying homage to fuzzy dream poppers Galaxie 500, CC's version was especially fantastic, drugged out and hypnotic, somehow transforming the original into what could have been a proper Cloudland Canyon jam, and in the process, revealing, more explicitly than ever, the warm glowing pop heart, that beat inside the buzzing, lysergic krautrock chest of Cloudland Canyon. Which it seems, lead to this, Fin Eaves, a fully realized exploration of pop music, filtered through CC's gloriously cracked kraut/drone/noise filter, the result, one of the fuzziest, most washed out, dreamiest noise pop / dream pop records in recent memory.
Every track a swirling morass of druggy effects, of muted melodies, of buried reverbed vox, of subverted jangle, muddy grooves, subtle hooks, a soft focus collision between My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Filmstars and Galaxie 500, a three way pileup where the various elements simply sink into one another, blurring and smearing into fantastically new shapes, a little bit of looped hypnotic Spacemen 3 style drug rock here, a little super distorted minimal Jesus and Mary Chain stomp there, slipping seamlessly from gauzy soft pop shuffle, to dense crumbling popnoise damage, to hushed loping slowcore haze, to soaring prismatic space psych bliss, each and every track is dense and spacious and layered, the various sounds constantly shifting, transforming, pealing melodies sloughing off only to reveal even more subtle melodies beneath, streaks of electronic glitch and clouds of warm whirling hiss drift amidst deep thrummed bass, and simple motorik rhythms, gorgeously out of focus vocal harmonies, and all manner of texture and timbre, a rare record as much about song as sound, strip away the sound, and you'd have a surprisingly perfect pop record, take away the songs, and you'd still have some fantastically abstract sonic earcandy, but combine the two, and you have this, an utterly gorgeous disc of otherworldly noise drenched lysergic dream pop. Fans of Teenage Filmstars, Beach House, Jesus & Mary Chain, Flaming Lips, Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Candy Claws, Mercury Rev, School Of The Seven Bells, and other psychedelic dream poppers, this is your new favorite record.
How can a country with a population as small as Australia produce so much heaviness?? Grey Daturas, Whitehorse, Fire Witch and now Dad They Broke Me, who just might be the heaviest of the bunch. Seriously blown out, black-hole-heavy doom dirge sludge, lurching, lumbering, pummeling, pounding, guitars thick and corrosive and black as pitch, tuned WAY down, the drums a crashing, rib cage rattling battery, the vocals, bile spewing demonic shrieks and guttural monstrous bellows, the songs dense and intricate, mathy and metal, proggy and convoluted, lots of stuttery start stop, bursts of feedback, churning chugging riffage, long stretches of rumbling buzz, think Eyehategod, Unsane, Khanate, Corrupted, Zeni Geva and the like, a glorious AmRep style noise rock / extreme doom / Southern sludge hybrid, but way more filthy and crusty and droned out and hypnotically brutal and bleak, with occasional bursts of murky muddy grind, and total tranced out downtuned dirgery, easily one of the meanest, heaviest discs in recent memory, and most definitely a new favorite amongst the aQ heavies.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, housed in a folded cardstock sleeve, with a sticker cover front and back, a printed insert, each one hand numbered.
Proving that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal's bounty is seemingly limitless, Shadow Kingdom does it again with another killer NWOBHM find. Actually, we'd read about this band on the internet a while back and wanted to hear 'em ever since, finally here's a reissue of their only album, complete with bonus disc of demo rarities! We've barely listened to that disc, though, interesting as it is, 'cause we just keep spinning the actual album. That's one sign of a good record, another is that after only listening to it a couple of times, we felt like we already knew the songs, there's a lot of individuality here.
Deep Switch (named after a bass-boosting option on an amp one of them owned) and their Nine Inches Of God album, originally released in 1986, are hardly typical NWOBHM fare though. You might have guessed that from the cover art, a psychedelic cartoonish painting of a tripped-out, half-naked, lysergically melting nun (done by the guitarist's dad!) No, they're weird ones, these Deep Switch boys, lead by one "Reverend Nice"; irreverent, intelligent, idiosyncratic (just look at their colorful facepaint and top hats!). Combining a bit of a punk attitude with heavy metal chops, Deep Switch are sex-obsessed and anti-religious, making commentary on society and politics in songs that range from total prog epics to ahead-of-their time alt-metal (and one pretty ballad).
Lead-off track "Pigfeeder!" really threw us for a loop when we first heard it. NWOBHM... with rapping?? Well a little bit of rapping, but it doesn't sound like any "rap-metal" we've ever heard before. Not even sure if that was their intention. Weird but it works, in a Blondie "Rapture" man from Mars, eating cars kind of way, but it's actually saying something, while taking the piss at the same time. Ultimately "Pigfeeder!" is THEE super-catchy, uber-rhythmic song that Deep Switch shall be remembered for when the Big Book of Heavy Metal is written at the end of days. At the very least, in our book, it's up there with "Diggin' That Grave" by Jesters Of Destiny. But there's lots else on this album we dig too, other songs where the widdly guitars and falsetto vocals are put in more typically metal context, reminding us of Mercyful Fate and LA's Warlord at times. Another fave of ours would be the history lesson of "Time Machine", a poppy, proggy gem with lines advising a certain Harold not to "go down to Hastings".
So if you can deal with a little British humor in your old school metal (the killer guitars, catchy riffage, and vocal harmonies should certainly help), you should flip (for) the Deep Switch. And again, Shadow Kingdom do the reissue thing right, there's that whole other disc featuring earlier, different demos of several of the album tracks, plus some previously unreleased material, including a parody of their own "Pigfeeder!" in the form of a Christmas song called "The Festive Zone". And then there's the thick booklet, full of crazy photos, lyrics, and copious liner notes from Reverend Nice himself. Informative, and amusing - we loved the part where he talks about a pub gig at which their bass player Johnny Blade, unable to decipher the set list, comes over to ask what song they're doing next... when told, his response was "It couldn't be - I just played that one!". Classic. As is this album, in its way. Very much recommended.
This absolute classic is finally back in print!
Predating the inclusion of chance operations into modern composition by almost fifty years, these compositions by Marcel Duchamp (written in 1913) were recorded in 1976 by the S.E.M. Ensemble of New York.
Duchamp was a household word in art circles, and music seemed the least important of his various interests, yet he managed to create a small, but highly innovative body of work. Included here are two interpretations of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even". One utilizes a chance system in which notes are represented by numbers written on balls which are selected as they pass through a funnel into the open cars of a toy train. The other is based on a a random selection of numbers, transcribed into notes and performed by player piano.
That's all well and good, but what does it sound like? Pretty amazing actually. This disc is worth buying for the first track alone, a gorgeous 25 minute piece, spacious and elegant, a dreamy sleepy swirl of chimes and their shimmering overtones. Absolutely gorgeous.
Yet another glorious little blast of warped and woozy jangle pop from Ducktails, the A side offers up a brief instrumental intro, all shuffling tempos and reverby melodies, before leading right into some pretty perfect old school style indie pop, softly swirly with echoey sad boy vox over a simpler stripped down beat, crystalline guitars, all wrapped in a gauze of lo-fi 4-track fuzz, with some serious hooks and a super catchy chorus, sounding a bit like a less fucked up, way more jangly Ariel Pink. The flipside is sonically similar, but just a bit darker, the tempo and arrangement a bit more convoluted, with flanged guitars, a weirdly lurching off kilter beat, but still plenty of acoustic guitar strum, indie jangle and sweetly sad minor key melodies.
One of two amazing new records released by recently discovered (by us at least) Pest Productions, a record label in China specializing in mysterious outsider black metal of all stripes, from black depressive black buzz, to blown out shimmery shoegaze black metal drift. The other, reviewed elsewhere on this list is a bizarre bit of depressive blackness by a Chinese one man band called Heartless, this though comes all the way from Iceland, another one man band, but this one not so depressive as dark and moody. Beginning with a haunting and very cinematic bit of piano driven ambience, the record soon lumbers into the 10+ minute "Mirthless", a buzz drenched bit of midtempo blackness, the distortion super crunchy and thick, the main bit of riffage, laced with shimmery bits of crystalline melody, the vocals a harsh hellish shriek, the riffing occasionally stuttering into spurts of clipped chug, before slipping right back into the woozy buzz. Over the course of the track, the song veers from melancholy folky shuffle, complete with strange sound effects and clean minor key guitar melodies, to churning doomy plod, to creepy chanted vocal ambience. "Rotten And Diminished" begins with some stately strings, moaning cellos, orchestral percussion, and even after the black metal kicks in, the strings remain, underpinning the blast and buzz with some epic pomp, a strange black metal classical hybrid, with the track again constantly switching gears, one of the coolest parts is when one guitar unfurls a staccato chug, the other a sheet of distant high end shimmer, over which the vokills, gurgle and grumble, before the track finishes off with acoustic guitar, reverbed piano, and some creepy monstrous backwards growls.
The rest of the record continues in a similar vein, taking the melodic blackness of groups like Lifelover, Shining, Forgotten Tomb and the like, and twisting it up a bit, adding plenty of strange interludes, folky and drifty, classical and cinematic, but it's the songs themselves, the unique riffing, the melodies and arrangements, that make this stuff stand out. In fact, that guitars constantly do weird little things that are a bit hard to explain, but mid riff, they'll modulate, or transform into a little melodic trill before slipping right back into the riff, or slow down into a sort of slowcore drift, or suddenly sound double tracked, super dense and extra loud, and the way those odd guitarings are woven into blasts of black buzz, and washed out stretches of doomic plod and creepy expanses of blackened ambience, is exactly why Dysthymia's The Shivering Opus sounds so awesome. And why we can't recommend it enough...
Brian Pyle is a musician with far too many ideas bouncing in his head to let them lie still. He's best known as one of the Starving Weirdos, specializing in druggy and junked avant-drone work, which we have championed for years. But he's also produced equally impressive sonic opiates through the nature-jam project RV Paintings and his solo outing Ensemble Economique. There are obvious similarities in all of the Pyle projects, found in the foggy psychedelia oozing from the sodden landscape of his native Humboldt County and into the billowing passages of guitar drones that perch between overcast industrialism and stoned wanderlust. Standing Still, Facing Forward leans a bit more toward the early experiments of krautrock electronics, especially in comparison to Holger Czukay's oft forgotten masterpiece Canaxis.
The album opens with a set of somber strings overlapping and colliding into a filmic melancholy, transitioning into an Andromeda Strain type of sonic paranoia with electronic twinklings dispersed upon a ghostly drone smear. The noir horns that repeat throughout "Angkor Wat, In The Mist" harken to a slow-motion John Barry at his peak and certainly the facet of Morricone's work for Italian slasher films. Pyle furthers the tension of those allusions with a sustained rasp from a Tambura and a weird chirping from what sound like electric birds. The finale of minor-key synth tones grafted to a harmonica transmitting extended tones through waves of echo and reverb. Mysterious, haunting, and recommended as with pretty much everything that Mr. Pyle touches.
Faust's third album (or fourth if you count the Tony Conrad & Faust "Outside the Dream Syndicate" album), originally released in 1973, is now available for the first time on cd with the original artwork (excepting the box set) instead of the horrible cover
This is pretty much an aQ dream team, guitarist / lap top technician / abstract dronehaze alchemist Christian Fennesz, teamed up with Tony Buck, drummer for outsider minimal jazz legends the Necks, and David Daniell, guitarist for the late great slowcore combo San Augustin, all gathered up for a night of abstract improv noise making.
The session begins with a slow building minimal post rock meander, and over the course of about 8 minutes, the sound grows from spidery and shimmery, a sort of washed out melodic drift, all sun dappled and gauzy, to full on ferocious free form psychedelic freakout, an explosive squall of woozy guitar chords underpinning wild clouds of octopoidal drum damage, Buck letting loose, no Necks-like restraint here, the climax of the track like a free jazz Godspeed / White Heaven hybrid, while weirdly, beneath the skree and crunch, the guitars still moan mournfully, giving the jam, even at its noisiest a strange sort of instrumental pathos.
The second number begins with a shimmer of cymbals, some swirling looped guitar, flurries of muted percussion, a heaving hazy whirl of abstract drone, which about halfway through seems to suddenly expand into a slow motion supernova of smoldering sound, building to a blast of Nadja-like shoegaze dronedoomdrift, before fading back into a reverbed echo of the chaos that came before.
Buck then creates a drum drone using just a snare roll and some cymbal sizzle, while Daniell and Fennesz add their own shadowy minimalism, the washed out ambience the most Fennesz sounding of the bunch, as if all of the sounds created were winding their way through his guitar, then his laptop and out through the speakers, the cymbals getting more and more busy, sounding like rainfall, another sonic climax, but this one a more subdued subtle bit of cymbal driven swell, starkly dramatic and so lovely. Finally, the trio finish these off with another bit of softly chaotic clatter, the scattered bits of percussion and jagged shards of guitars, slowly coalescing into something rhythmic and driving, building to a gloriously effulgent climax, a blinding spray of prismatic sound, a high end ur-drone, that fades gradually again, allowing the set to settle to the ground, in a soft fog of hiss and sizzle, rumble and whir. Fucking fantastic.
The bad news is, the vinyl version of this is somehow already out of print, so we only have 4 or 5 copies, and that's IT. But, we WILL have the cd version next week, got some of those coming from the label (everyone else is out!), so if you want that, just ask...
Finally available again, now on a proper cd, the first two long out of print cd-rs, I Spit Lies and Critter / Kirtta, from Aussie heavies Fire Witch, a bad ass guitarless, two bass and drums killing machine from down under, who weave delicate soundscapes of low end drift and simple pounding rhythms, peppered with blasts of skull crushing heaviness, free noise splatter, and gorgeous shimmering ambience. They're sort of aligned with bands like Whitehorse and the Grey Daturas, but somehow, what these guys do is way different.
I Spit Lies is two looooong tracks, "I Spit" and "Lies". The former is a slow burning gradual build, with bass feedback draped over a throbbing low end pulse and a simple shuffling rhythm, with occasional lapses into sludgy doom, before resuming the lugubrious groove. Right in the middle there's an extended stretch of delicate drifting low end swirl, that eventually gives way to some seriously hooky propulsive post rock crunch.
The latter is equally mathy, almost groovy, another simple rhythm underpinning soaring bass melodies all held together by the pulsing bass #2. Eventually, things gradually break apart, into epic expanses of space, with just the occasional chord or drum hit. It's doomy, but more in the way Low or other slowcore bands are doomy. A gorgeously abstract ultra minimal deconstructed slow motion math rock, that by the end of the song has turned into a grinding heavy, almost metal groove. Fucking awesome!
Critter / Kritta is two tracks, two versions of the same song. The first is an instrumental epic, a cross between Pelican and Khanate, just the right balance of head caving sludge and minor key post rock, slow building, lots of dynamics, expansive and grand, a massive grooving post sludge psychrock blow out. The second, lengthier track sonically resembles the first, but immediately strikes out on its own, WAY free-er tangent. The drums are way more spread out, the rhythms are much more abstract, the feel is much more plodding and glacial, guitars don't riff so much as they slither and scrape and squeak, a creepy soundscape of strange guitar sounds and a massive layer of low end rumble, letting the drums sit right up front where they belong, alternating between slow motion crush and complex tribalism, the drums offer up a densely woven world of pound and pummel, a tangled web of strangely shifting rhythms, over a blown out psychedelic swirl. Killer!
Usually we lament the fact that bands choose to jettison the guitar, there are so many bass and drums duos out there, many of which would sound so much better with a guitarist, but one of the bassists in Fire Witch swings his bass like an axe and it makes all the difference in the world!
Housed in a super swank, hand screened origami style cardstock sleeve, with a printed insert, LIMITED to 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered of course...
Wow, well, we thought we'd heard every weird-ass variation on black metal possible... but we had never heard black metal with autotuned vocals before, until now. That's right, autotune, the computer program used and abused by all of today's worst pop stars (and many amusing YouTube videos). In this black metal context, it's pretty funny, and clever, if you're not too "troo" to get into this obscure Norwegian duo's blend of blasting grimnity and (artificially enhanced) soaring melody... And autotune's not the only unusual feature of Formloff's "black metal", other factors that make this disc surreal and subversive include an obvious affinity for both '70s prog (including lots of groovy-proggy organ), and the latest in emo-pop electronica. And more. They have a kitchen sink approach that really works, maybe because it combines the sudden mood/genre swings with plenty of melody. So, there's techno beats on here, alongside hysterical screaming vokills, buzzsaw guitars, spacey electronic textures, symphonic metal, and even a chorus of dogs barking on the track "Gregor Samsa I Las Vegas"... yet it's catchy too.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds a bit silly on paper, and we don't mind silly, but actually it seems like Formloff -aren't- just joking around, or at least that's the feeling we get, though all the singing, autotuned or otherwise (there's all kinds of gruff growling and funny voices as well) is in Norwegian, so we can't judge from the lyrics what the heck is really going on. Maybe a good thing. We imagine they're pretty bizarre though.
This is the Norwegian duo Formloff's debut (and thus far, only) full-length, from 2006, recorded when the band members were still in their teens. Apparently the label that put this out folded not long afterwards, so this release never really was properly distributed. We recently acquired some copies from a friend of the band who thought we might like it... and we do! Pretty amazing stuff, actually, musically and conceptually, and if you're into genre-splicing, mashed-up weirdness a la Mr. Bungle, as well as the Nordic black metal of Darkthrone and Enslaved, you should definitely check out Formloff! To further elaborate on the "for-fans-of" thing, we should mention Sigh's Gallow's Gallery, also Arcturus, Shining, various bands on Garm of Ulver's Jester label, latter-day Master's Hammer, and Pan-thy-monium if you remember them. Not surprisingly, the cd booklet graphics aren't your usual black metal style either, referencing generic 1950s conformist Leave It To Beaver domesticity instead of the usual corpse paint and burning churches. Huh. Well we're enjoying this, and certainly curious about what's next from Formloff, as we're told they've got a new album in the works as well...
Alrighty all you good people who swooned to this Norwegian duo's debut (released in late 2008) which we just recently reviewed, let's keep the love flowin', shall we? Yes, we shall because we've got more of Fredrik's glorious sounds in stock now. We are getting ourselves all properly caught up with this, their sophomore full length... and such a fine album it is!
With their softly shadowed faery folk choral passages, gentle clattering percussion and sighing brass, Fredrik's intricately patchworked and multi-layered songs conjure visions of moonlit meadows and enchanted forests. We imagine them to be sort of the aural counterpart to the mesmerizing and darkly fanciful animated filmworks of the Brothers Quay. When they bring in more electronic instrumentation as on the song "Ava" they draw closer in line to the heartfelt dream pop of Postal Service or The Notwist. And on particular standout numbers such as "Milo", Fredrik Hultin's hushed dewy-eyed vocals are quite reminiscent of Kings Of Convenience's Erlend Oye and Notwist's Markus Acher. You know, that charming murmur that sounds like it has a sweetheart secret to tell only you! But that said, the overall lasting impression of Trilogi is far more otherworldly. Glistening, lovely and artfully crafted... yes, we recommend it! (By the way, we should forewarn you that the songs that make up this album were originally released on three very very limited edition cdeps titled Holm, Ava and Ner - hence the title - but they were gone in a wink of an eye. So chances are you missed them like we did, but happily you can get them compiled on one disc now!)
The title of Richard Garet's exemplary piece of lowercase tonefloat and crackle refers specifically to what Jacques Derrida saw as a profound difference between the future that has been mapped out and a future that is unpredictable and can shatter the continuity of the present. L'avenir is defined in French as the latter of the two, with Garet describing this through oblique shifts of electronic drones suspended quietly upon a backdrop of hushed activity and near silence. The album opens with a slight crackling that sounds like a ill-tempered radio transmitting from somewhere outside, whose particulate pocks of activity quietly burst in the distance. From these, radioluminescent tones grow and collapse within a flickering glow of a haunted melody, just barely announcing itself through the overlapping of rarefied frequencies. After a noticeable crack from a short and sharp tactile event -- somewhere between a hammer, a creak, a sigh, and a jolt - Garet fleshes out the sinusoidal drones with what could be field recordings or maybe some low-voltage electronics, which elicit the nocturnal stillness of hidden motors creating their own chorus of phase-shifting hum. Some 30 minutes into the 49 minute piece, the relative placid mood which Garet has carefully crafted shifts towards a something comparatively menacing before everything dissolves into a quiet mass of radioactive snow.
Garet's methods are reductive in nature, stripping away everything that isn't essential; but there's also a subtle, but certainly noticeable flair for the dramatic that comes across L'avenir. Through his signals and gestures, Garet is easily on par with the finest work of Richard Chartier, Steve Roden, Keith Berry, and Bernard Gunter. L'avenir comes to us by way of Winds Measure Recordings, who has housed these professionally duplicated cd-r's in a very elegant oversized, and letterpressed folio. Limited to just 150 copies, and very recommended!
Long overdue and much deserved collection documenting the work of one of the most influential DJs, remixers and game changers in New York's dance scene of the '70s and '80s. Gibbons was working mixing magic with two turntables back in the mid '70s as well as being one of the first artists to make reel-to-reel edits of tracks as he extended the breaks for ecstatic dancefloor delight. In many ways he was one of the first people responsible for remixes, edits and extended tracks, which would become staples of dance 12"s for years to come. It also helped that Gibbons had such great taste, working on mixes for such amazing artists as Arthur Russell, Bettye Lavette, Gladys Knight, Stetsasonic, Double Exposure, etc. He had this incredible ability to keep the essence of their tracks alive yet completely transform them into something even more primitive and physical. It's no wonder folks like Arthur Russell and the Salsoul label would only trust Gibbons with their remixes. Gibbons could always take what was just an average song on its own and make in into absolute magic (see "Sun Sun Sun")!
He brought a street grit to the disco floor, and his mixes remain as some of our favorite dance floor burners of all time. It's eerie what a striking resemblance his photo on the cover of this collection bears to another great pioneer of dance music, Patrick Cowley, and sadly like so many of the talented artists of this era, Gibbon's life ended all too soon due to AIDS related illness in 1994. His legacy, spirit, and sound live on, captured so lovingly on this Strut collection, making it an absolute must have!
As we may have mentioned before, with every Gnaw Their Tongues release, we find ourselves once again struggling to describe the blackened filth and abject cinematic doom contained within. Fans already know what they're in store for, and will most likely want more, need more even. The music of Gnaw Their Tongues is the sort of grim black sound that inspires some strange unquenchable hunger for more. A mysterious desire to fall ever deeper into the abyss, to explore GTT's hellish sonic underworld, each record a dizzying assemblage of crushing industrial dirge, of glacial black metal buzz, of clattery, chaotic blacknoize, of weirdly operatic choral music, all woven into some sort of pitch black musical ritual.
L'Arrivee De La Terne Mort Triomphante is merely the latest miserable missive from the black soul who sits on a black throne, made from charred bones, as he gnaws tongues, drinks blood, and as a choir of demons serenades him with these sick sick sounds, but in some ways, L'Arrivee does differ from past releases, in that more than most, it allows the classical element room to breathe. GTT was always some sort of demented Arvo Part / Abruptum hybrid, mixing strings and choirs into the swirling black miasma of crush and thud and buzz and howl, and on L'Arrivee, the orchestral / cinematic side for maybe the first time, does battle with the blackened heavy side, the result a surprisingly dynamic, darkly cinematic chunk of dramatic over the top blackness. One can almost envision this as some sort of crazy Hermann Nitsch style opera, flames and blood, and carcasses, everything dripping with black ichor, lit from below, the shadows like living black beasts, the sound the perfect reflection of those images, booming timpani, moaning sorrowful strings, symphonic swells, operatic voices, mournful pianos, a sort of epic bombastic chamber music, the heaviness and buzz and black occasionally pulled back, allowing the pianos and strings time to unfurl, before quickly being swallowed up again.
The sound here too seems a bit more lush, more produced, cleaner, but without losing any of the filth. We might go so far as to say this is the most accessible GTT release to date, but then it's all relative, this is still some seriously crusty, devastatingly brutal, menacing and mean black doom misery, but deftly woven into something more melodic, more emotionally charged, where past GTT records were simply hateful and hellish, pummeling and punishing, L'Arrivee De La Terne Mort Triomphante is something more, an epic, intense journey, the soundtrack element can't be understated, this totally plays out like the score to some insane, and insanely harrowing epic, a tale of death, and lost souls, and the end of humanity, and total annihilation, but as with all great epics, there continues to be hope, a glowing ember, that sits at the middle of it all, waiting to be discovered, and to perhaps eventually triumph, or perhaps to perish and disappear into utter and unending blackness. Quite possibly the most epic black doom cinematic symphonic noise metal opera EVER.
The latest release from one of our favorite modern masters of drone and drift and doom and dirge, the oddly monikered Gog, who in Heavy Fierce Brightness, has composed two nearly 20 minute epic soundtracks for an art installation of the same name.
But regardless of the inspiration or ultimate application of the sounds contained within, Heavy Fierce Brightness is simply a continuation of Gog's endless sprawling exploration of some grim black space, a hellish otherworld, captured alchemically and represented sonically, a harrowing, harsh, blackly abject landscape of minimal low end thrum, and corrosive grinding glacial crunch, two slabs of slowly decaying melted metal filth, allowed to ooze blackly into great sonic tarpits of sound, audial black holes, their blinding black glow dulling all the colors around their slowly collapsing centers.
"Dragged By A Black Cat" begins as a hushed creep, a low thrumming drift, peppered with strange bits of scrape and clatter, the low end billowing up in great gauzy clouds, so low the speakers struggle to keep up. A haunting cinematic ambience, like the score for a descent into some great yawning abyss. Eventually streaks of feedback, and sheets of buzz are laid atop the throbbing low end, wreathed in electronic crackle, in gouts of tremorous glitch, building into a crumbling wall of cascading buzz and grinding crunch, the chaos and clamor gradually settling into a long bit of processed drift, a slow swirly sea of near static tones and subtle harmonic shifts, a Niblockian expanse of soft sumptuous swells and lush layered thrum.
"Heavy Fierce Brightness", begins much like the first side, some hushed minimal rumble, some ominous drone, but quickly the sound grows tense, a wash of smoldering buzz quickly enveloping the softly chiming minimal shimmer beneath, but that underlying melodic swirl, remains throughout, while the more corrosive sounds above, roil and churn like some storm swept sonic sea, the various layers coalescing into something strangely shoegazey, a warped undulating dronescape of looped and layered tones, of crunch and shimmer and buzz and whir, keening distant melodies, and lush rumbling whirs, all blurred into a slow shifting panorama of blown out black bliss, a muted harshness, that somehow still manages to soothe and entrance. The final stretch a series of mesmerizing slow burning swells, dark and deep, truly heavy dronemusic, a sound that is anything but minimal, a constant slow motion barrage of downtuned guitar crunch, squealing electronics, deep metallic reverberations, whirling layered tones, strangely textured thrum, gauzy ambience, all woven into a caustic and creeping doomdronedirgedrift crawl.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Housed in a gorgeous embossed jacket, with original artwork by Colin Stinson (and featuring images of the HFB installation).
There was a time when just about anything on Kill Rock Stars was guaranteed to be totally fucking great. Oh that special era of the '90s and the early '00s, when KRS were putting out records by folks like Unwound, Sleater Kinney, Elliott Smith, Erase Errata, Biking Kill, Quixotic, The Gossip, etc. By being one the most visible outlets for rad female and queer artists it was a label that really tapped into the best and most soulful parts of punk rock's past. All the bands had their own sound and unique vision, running the gamut from intimate folk to angular post-punk and anthemic physical minded and super smart art-punk. Sadly over the last several years the label has scaled back quite a bit and not everything they release is as special as it once was. But Grass Widow really do sound right at home and tap into that golden era of the label with a sound and spirit that really represents the essence of what made so many of us so inspired by the Kill Rock Stars vision to begin with.
Grass Widow is one of those rare bands that you could tell had something super special about them from the get go. Our local college radio station KUSF got a handmade cd-r release from them before they had an official release out and it immediately became a big hit at the station. And then they released a 12" and lp on Make A Mess and Captured Tracks that we all went crazy for, and now with their debut for Kill Rock Stars they have put out their most fully realized set of songs yet. Past Time wastes no time jumping right into the punchy harmonies and vocal melodies that drive the record from start to finish. Carrying a Raincoats torch with such ease and undeniable conviction. We're also reminded of a slightly more twee version of Sleater Kinney. As well as their peers like Wet Dog, Effie Briest, and Brilliant Colors they are part of a new wave of post-punk bands with a spirit and sound that is so goddamn good right now. And while we love all the aforementioned bands, we might just be most in love with Grass Widow. For sure the best release to come out on Kill Rock Stars in a long time. So great!
If you're like us, you can never get enough Bruce Haack. Pretty much everything he touched was amazing, as well as way ahead of its time from a technical standpoint. Haack's genius, however, is that at the core of his strange electronic music is real emotional depth.
The most obvious comparison for Bruce Haack's sound would be Kraftwerk, and surely both parties were taking electronic music into unprecedented new territories. It's a bit of a lazy comparison though, as Haack's pioneering work actually predated Kraftwerk as most people know them, and it overlooks how unique Haack's approach to songwriting was. Haack is most famous for the Electric Lucifer album, definitely his strongest and most conceptually realized statement, but he also made children's music, as well as some more, shall we say "adult-themed" compositions. There was even an Electric Lucifer Book 2 and a number of perfect pop singles. Farad (the name of the homemade vocoder he used extensively, named in honor of famed British scientist Michael Farraday but also sounding a bit like "far out") collects prime cuts from 1970 to 1982, showing an artist who remained true to his initial vision while continuing to break boundaries. Haack was a man who wanted to share his songs with the world, as evidenced by a quote in this album, and accordingly, his music is very fun to listen to. Songs like "Rita" are really beyond any sort of reference point, just weird and beautiful and insanely poppy gems that even today sound beyond anything else. Other numbers like "Man Kind" from the Haackula album are spacey sci-fi romps filled with all kinds of great analog atmosphere and evocative vocoded lyrics that flow like bizarre little nursery rhymes. Then you get some racier stuff from the 80s like "Snow Job" and "Program Me", the latter of which resurrects a song from the Electric Lucifer and re-envisions it in a colder, more robotic way for some great results. Haack even proves with 1982's "Party Machine" that he was fully ready to embrace the progression of electronic dance music while still sounding unlike anyone else. It's crazy to listen to the more playful material alongside the epic storytelling of the Electric Lucifer tracks, as you realize Haack grasped so many types of music with a wide range of emotions, and merged this with bold electronic innovation. As a compilation, Stones Throw have done a great job here, making this the obvious place to start for anyone unfamiliar with Haack's work while also being a great collection of some of his strongest songs. Awesome.
While Health were once a crazy amalgamation of fractured rhythms, crashing guitars, glitched out electronics, freaky noise and retro futuristic new wave, the band always had a thing for dance music, and their weirdo noise always definitely leaned in that direction, hell this is their SECOND record called Disco, and like the first it's a collection of remixes, mostly by groups we've never heard of, but who all do amazing things to Health's already pretty amazing music. So this is NOT a new record, although there is one new song, "USA Boys", which is a slow burning synth driven groove, big beats, hazy washed out vocal harmonies, a melancholy main melody, not dance music so much as some sort of dark electronic pop, reminding us a bit of M83, all hazy and shoegazey, definitely has us hankering for more new Health. The rest of the record, though, is all remixes, only two by bands we're familiar with, Tobacco, and Crystal Castles, whom Health seem to have a connection with, as this is at least the second Crystal Castles / Health remix, and they even shared a split.
The Crystal Castles mix is a murky dreamlike drift, a soft focus sonic fog, that gradually grows more manic and abstract, wild drumming, twisted bits of electronics, voices reverbed and washed out, it manages to be propulsive and new wave, but also weary and otherwordly at the same time, has us kind of wishing the two bands would just permanently join forces! The Tobacco remix is all motorik beats and synthesizer squelch, groovy and very Ed Banger sounding, the synths thick and fuzz and blown out, wrapped around serpentine basslines and some eighties style melodies, the vocals here too are doused in reverb and rendered ghostlike, the result, like the CC mix, is simultaneously groovy and dreamlike. The rest of the mixes are pretty much just as cool, transforming the originals into all shades of twisted electronic disco pop, lots of synths, all manner of beats, from soft skitter, to pounding crunch, there's some total Kompakt style house-y pulse, some new wave shoegaze throb and shimmer, some almost OMD / Erasure style dance pop, even one track where the beats are ditched completely for something much more atmospheric and mesmerizing, long synth tones, deep swells, soft focus vox, a sort of new wave dream ballad, so good.
And if that weren't enough, there's a whole extra collection of mp3 mixes, basically an extra entire album's worth, as good as the album proper (not sure why they didn't just make it a double cd), with mixes from Nite Jewel, Clipd Beaks, and another whole gaggle of unknown (to us) remixers who work their magic.
We recently discovered Pest Productions, a record label in China specializing in mysterious outsider black metal of all stripes, from black depressive black buzz, to blown out shimmery shoegaze black metal drift. Heartless are also from China, and whip up some seriously gorgeous and utterly despondent blackness, just check out the opening track here, after some minimal skeletal clean guitar strum, the song explodes in a thick washed out buzz drenched blur of mournful doom drenched black buzz trudgery, the melodies sad and bittersweet, the drums mechanical and spare, the vibe haunting and grim, dreamy and depressive, hypnotic and hellishly dreamy, the sort of sound we could listen to forever, a little bit Lifelover, with simple soaring melodies over the top, deliriously dreary. But that's just the opener.
The second track explodes in a frenzy of blast beats and insectoid buzzing, the drums buried in the mix, minus one REALLY LOUD cymbal, and that's just the first clue, that stuff is about to get really WEIRD. The second clue? The insanely hysterical falseto shrieked vocals, that are WAY up in the mix, reminding us right off the bat of the Judson Fountain radio plays, and his crazy old woman voice. It's that twisted and over the top. So much so, that we think all but the most obsessive weirdo black metallers will most likely be quite put off, cuz it is totally ridiculous, we have to admit, the first time we heard it, we were totally thrown for a loop, we definitely cracked up. But then something happened, and the more we listened to it, the more we dug it, and the more its sheer craziness made some sort of WTF sense.
The record sprawls in all sorts of different sonic directions, from churning midtempo buzz drenched chug to reverby doom pop, to warped trudging blackened slowcore, to skeletal black folk drift, to full on furious black buzz, the production changing just as much as the sound, the kick drums sometimes lost in the murk, other times a thick throbbing pulse, the guitars muted and murky one minute, sharp and jagged the next, but all that sound is just a backdrop for the insane maniacal vocals, equal parts Mr. Doctor from Devil Doll, the inhuman black shrieks of Silencer, and of course the aforementioned Judson Fountain old woman voice, it's pretty demented, totally fucking wacked, but so unique, and so weirdly intense, and the music is so dark and heavy and melodic, it all melds into something totally twisted, and for those with a taste for the TRULY bizarre, something absolutely essential.
Brand new record of looped lysergic psychedelia from this mysterious French one man band, his second for Not Not Fun, and maybe his 10th or something overall, but the first we've reviewed here, and it definitely seems like it's got aQ written all over it. Long loopscapes of rhythmic repetition, of swirling spaced out raga like ur-drones, of heart-of-the-sun blissed out soft noise, of swirling abstract free form drift, we hear plenty of likeminded noisemakers in High Wolf's sound, Birchville Cat Motel / Our Love Will Destroy The World, Avarus, Yellow Swans, Black Dice, Natural Snow Buildings, Raccoo-oo-oon, Starving Weirdos, Skaters, Sun Araw, even some Muslimgauze, and odds are anyone who digs most of those are gonna love High Wolf too.
"Meeting Of The Three Seas" offers up a softly warped, dreamily looped main rhythm, a motorik pulse amidst swirling clouds of chordal whir, of clipped voices, of deep drones, of tangled melodic fragments, gradually building in density and intensity, soon there are what sound like horns, blurred into swooping swirls of sound, a softly cacophonous climax, which quickly settles back into a warm woozy cloud of echo and delay. "Diego" follows the same pattern, a looped rhythm, that as it moves forward, gathers all manner of sonic detritus, bits of echo, strange voices, coos and aaahhh's, fragments of guitar, bleats of horns, soon squiggly synth melodies creep in, giving the track a sort of retro sci-fi vibe, before once again blossoming into a head spinning cloud of soft noise psychedelia. "Cloudhead" takes the same formula, but adds a whole bunch of haze, creating a super blissed out shoegazey dirgedronescape. "Solar System Is My God" might be our favorite track, it's the one that evokes Muslimgauze comparisons, with its tabla like rhythms, handclaps, warm swaths of muted buzz, chordal swirl and Eastern melody, this tracks climax, less intense, and more glimmering and glistening, sun dappled and celebratory.
The record finishes off with the nearly 13 minute "Fire In My Bones", which changes up the pattern, beginning with a thick blast of hazy soft focus sound, buried vocals, and pulsing shimmer, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in, that the rhythm kicks in, and this time the background sound echoes the rhythm, a mesmerizing trancelike ripple, underpinning keening buzz drenched high end melodies, a distinctly tripped out raga vibe for sure, then a brief stretch of hushed minimal echo, laced with disembodied wah wah guitar, before slipping right back into the eyes-to-the-sky ritualistic sonic blissout that started the track. Awesome stuff. Total sonic manna for the drone-loop-psych-bliss crowd...
This double disc from The Hototogisu, the occasional project of Sunroof!/Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower (Hototogisu is in fact Bower teamed up with Marcia Bassett from Double Leopards), isn't exactly new, as it was originally released as a super limited cd-r back in 2002 on Matthew Bower's Rural Electrification Program, then reissued as an insanely extravagant and expensive triple lp on DeStijl in 2004, both of which went out of print in a heartbeat.
We always lamented the fact, that this record remained out of print, considering it's most definitely one of Hototogisu's finest moments, thankfully Important Records has now (finally) reissued it as a double cd! So if you missed it before, get it now!
Unlike many of the other Hototogisu records, which can drift into areas more abrasive and chaotic, still droney and lovely in most cases, but often the drones are assembled from noise and skree and blurred crunch, but 'Floating Japanese Oof!' plays out like one massive 140 minute dronescape (regardless of how it's tracked, or on what format it's released on). This is pure, transcendent, heart-of-the-sun, bliss out, drone music the way it was meant to be experienced, in massive mind expanding chunks. Shimmery clouds of ambient high end guitar drone and squiggly brain tickling twinkles, hushed glacial space folk blur with pulsing low end, and distant clatter. Shimmery and abstract, hypnotic and hushed, lysergic and transcendent. Gorgeous, otherworldly and totally essential.
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Part three in the Human Quena Orchestra's ever evolving sonic mission to create what could possibly be the darkest, and most intense post industrial metallic blacknoise EVER. Not like there's a lot of competition, and having worked our way now through all three records, even if there were any other outfits foolhardy to have a go at HQO, they'd most likely be dispatched in short order. As anyone who's heard either Means Without Ends or The Politics Of The Irredeemable can attest to. Easily, two of the bleakest, most abject and miserable collections of hellish hymns and burntblack dronescapes ever committed to tape. HQO's modus operandi is a combination of caustic black buzz, of pounding machine like percussion and howling anguished shrieked vokills, all wound tight into throbbing, churning, nightmarish chunks of jagged black filth, and crusty musical misanthropy. Think the usual suspects, Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter, Skepticism, Esoteric, even Swans, and then tune it further down, slow it further down, pile on layer after layer of suffocating buzz, of oozing soul crushing low-end, and let it fester, and rot, and crumble and decay, and you'll begin to get close to the strange and sick soundworld of HQO.
A Natural History Of Failure finds HQO mastermind Ryan Unks, joined by a handful of likeminded volunteers, each adding their own secret ingredients to Unks' noxious brew, and weirdly enough, if anything, more players has not resulted in more sound, or more accurately, the sound itself does seem MORE, more dense, heavier, thicker, more filthy and fraught with emotional peril, but the songs, the structures, somehow seem even more minimal. The opening track is more a thick, pulsing drone, a dense layered funereal creep, the sounds burnt and blown out, a single riff slowed down to near static, and left to churn and chug in slow motion, while more and more buzz and thrum and hiss is piled on top, a sound so heavy and so dense, it seems constantly on the verge of collapse. The second track two is more drone than crush or pummel, beginning as a hushed distant throb, an impossibly deep low end that drifts beneath ethereal streaks of grey melody, processed voices, and textured whirs, the sound builds to a furious roil, only to settle back down into what sounds like a symphony of warped SUNNO))) records, being played simultaneously with the needle stuck in the runoff grooves. And so it continues, a warped tarpit drift, vocals only show up in track three, and even then, so low in the mix, they just sound like jagged shards of static, nearly suffocated by the heaving rumbles above.
The whole first half of the record is constant low end punishment, but part 5 is where it changes, a processed voice, stretched into a perpetual moan, a looped bit of human bred sonic texture, over a lumbering bit bit of low-end, soon subsumed by a dense cloud of corrosive hiss, of swirling white noise, which leads directly into the most minimal track on the record, a hushed minimal pulse, warm and languid, but still subtly menacing, laced with high end shimmer, and blurred tinkling melodies, leading you gently into a truly ominous and monstrous plod, a robotic pound, trudging along a series of deep buzzing swells, being slowly torn apart by some sort of static driven industrial grey noise demon, the sound rendered and recontextualized into a slowly stuttery field of deep whirs and jagged shards of crumbling static, before finally finishing off with a brief bit of muted beauty, again, the sound impossibly thick and heavy, but blurred into something almost shoegazey, but still grim and gorgeously hopeless.
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Folks who flipped over the recent copies of Techno Animal's Ghosts we dug up and listed a while back, are probably gonna flip over this too, a long lost remix ep from the group Ice, that like Techno Animal, featured both Kevin Martin of The Bug and Justin Broadrick of Godflesh, Jesu and lots and lots of other stuff. There was plenty of overlap between Techno Animal and Ice, both being sort of avant industrial hip hop /dub groups, the big difference was that Ice included sax (played here by both Martin and 16-17's Alex Buess!!), which gave it a sort of free jazz vibe, although that was balanced by Ice's overall lurching, lumbering industrial crunch.
On Code:Quarantine, two tracks from Ice's Under The Skin record get reworked, as does one from that awesome long out of print Isolationism compilations. "Juggernaut Kiss (Deaf, Dumb Blind)" is all nineties industrial thump and skitter, the beats dubbed WAY out, all tangled up in squiggles of distorted guitars, swinging wildly from speaker to speaker, thick low slung bass rumbles and thrums, sax squeals and skronks, the vocals are spoken or mumbled, the whole thing is a constant barrage of dizzying beats, twisted production, and staggering deconstructed beats, like some sort of Godflesh / 16-17 mash up, pulled apart and reassembled as something much more spaced out and skeletal. "The Dredger (Titanic)" is mostly beatless, long stretches of moaning horn and reverbed string buzz, loads of echo and delay, plenty of reverb, streaks of feedback, when the beats to come in, they're pretty abstract, shuffly and skittery, more about texture that rhythm, building to a skronky psychedelic freakout, before locking back into a more stripped down groove, as it slithers through billowing clouds of twisted FX and whirling fragmented melody.
Finally, "Implosion (Flying Machine)" gets WAY dubbed out, thick syrupy basslines under horns and vox and drums, that get slathered in effects and sent spinning, a looped tripped out cracked looking glass bit of free jazz industrial dubbiness, with some seriously killer long stretches of stripped down minimal skitter that makes up almost the whole second half of the song, various beats all space echo-ed and Lee Perry-ed, the motorik rhythm pounding and shuffling its way through occasional fields of crumbling distortion, insectoid buzz, and swirling psychedelic chaos.
WAY OUT OF PRINT. We got a small handful of these direct from the label, who discovered a small stash, so odds are these will be gone before you know it, so buy one now cheap, or pay way too much later for it on eBay...
