Interpol aren't groundbreaking or anything, but boy does this NYC quartet sound good. (They probably look good too, got the 'scrod' style DOWN.) The singer's voice has the arch desperation of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The music is dominated by intertwining guitars that're sometimes angular and choppy, sometimes pensively creating a lush blanket of minor key intensity. Very Factory Records, very Echo & the Bunnymen... but not annoyingly so, for a modern group. I like it! This is a three song, inexpensive teaser single in preparation for the full length to be released August 2002.
- RealAudio clip: PDA
- RealAudio clip: NYC
Another new release from tUMULt laboratories, finds our coworker Andee's label dipping its toes into pop, and recoiling in horror, as it pulls its feet back covered in muck and crud. Iran take 'Indie rock' and bury it in fuzz and hiss, taking ultra catchy pop, and dragging it through the detritus of lo-fi noise rock, picking up an ungodly assortment of buzz and blur and scuzz. Imagine a Pavement record on Siltbreeze. Or Sebadoh, if Lou Barlow was a jaded fuck instead of a sappy romantic. Or old Smog covering Skullflower. Or Harry Pussy playing Built To Spill. A beautifully cacophonous mess. Iran play damaged folk music, bombarded on all sides by a wild assortment of squeals and shrieks, static and hiss, and speaker clogging grit. Huge and slowly shifting, dronescapes that evolve into perfect little pop songs and then explode into jagged shards of high end skree. Iran are psychedelic and textural and noisey and totally catchy, hardcore, hook-filled low fidelity un-pop noise. Pop. Plus fucking wicked 'tiger' cover art.
Well here we go, Iron Maiden album number 15, potential post-reunion disappointment #???... or maybe not. Crikey, we can't tell any more. In fact, before we comment on this album, the first thing we need to do is take back what we said about the Iron Maiden album before the Iron Maiden album before this one, Dance Of Death. Listened to it again (and again) the other day, and actually it's pretty decent, with a few great songs in fact ("Paschendale" mos def). Not at all the disappointment we claimed it was when it came out. Sorry about that guys. And while the cover still sucks, you can flip it over, the booklet's back cover photo looks better.
So, we're not even sure we trust ourselves to review this new one. Who knows what we'll think about it in a couple years? Maybe just let folks buy it (and they have been!) and decide for themselves. Though of course if you don't already have Killers, Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind, et. al. we actually won't LET you buy this, you need to get the original '80s classics first. But if you're a Maiden fan, then the question we'll ask is, have you heard all their Bruce-back-in-the-band reunion albums? We loved 2000's Brave New World, made it a Record Of The Week (really), then were mistakenly meh (until recently that is!) about 2003's Dance Of Death, and thought 2006's A Matter Of Life And Death was all right, but flawed, definitely over-long... The Final Frontier is flawed too, and longer even than AMOLAD, but not as glum and gloomy, much more bright and varied. And it's NOT the sci-fi concept album that it might appear at first glance, in fact the title track (which is joined to a surprisingly experimental, almost Hawkwindish space-metal intro entitled "Satellite 15") isn't about the outer space final frontier of Star Trek fame at all, instead it seems to be about dying, facing the final frontier of DEATH, and whatever may lie beyond. All right, a few further notes...
PROS: It's IRON MAIDEN, dude!! And even 21st century Iron Maiden, despite their unfettered tendency towards long-winded progginess (and sometimes cheesy poppiness) have that special X-factor (ahem, well...) that makes 'em sound like nobody else. Gosh, we can't be objective, really, since we're pre-programmed to respond to the soaring sound of Bruce's voice and the gallop of Steve's bass and the harmonized guitars of Dave and Adrian (um, and Janick?) and the battery of ol' Nicko... not to to mention the visage of Eddie on the cover (a much better cover this time than than the last couple, by the way, with Eddie starring as both Alien and Predator it would appear).
CONS: Well there's that aforementioned long-winded progginess etc. This album is 76 minutes for crying out loud, their longest yet! Featuring ten (long) songs, many of which once again display the "repeat the song title as the chorus waaaaaaay too many times" syndrome they've been suffering from for a while. And needless to say, they're never ever gonna write another "Hallowed Be Thy Name" or "Aces High", can't be done. Though they could probably come closer with a little more aggression, and editing...
Yet, at the same time, it's the (relatively) shorter rockers, like the single "El Dorado" early on in the album tend to be the weakest tracks here, but the uber melodic prog epics later on, in the second half of the record, like "Isle Of Avalon", "Starblind", and "When The Wild Wind Blows", are quite stirring and satisfying to our adjusted-for-expections 21st Century Iron Maiden desires... or again maybe it's that Pavlovian response of ours kicking in. Basically, we're enjoying this for what it is, cringing a bit at some parts, totally digging others, sometimes 'cause they sound like old Maiden, sometimes 'cause they don't (ferinstance the spacey, fusiony, jammy guitar parts in "Isle Of Avalon" and elsewhere). If you DO like reunion Maiden, like us, then all we can say is, this is a your-milage-may-vary situation. Right now, repeated spins of this are still eliciting guilty grins from the Maiden fans at AQ.
NB. we're stocking the regular compact disc edition, and the double picture disc vinyl... but not the special "mission edition" cd, which despite some bonus web-only content it allows you to access, doesn't seem worth the extra bucks.
It's no secret we have a deep love of so many of the sounds that come from the Finnish underground, and Islaja is one of the most golden treasures to come from that magical region. It's been over three years since we've heard new material from her, but with artists of this quality, whose songs are so meticulously constructed, we totally understand and appreciate that it takes a good deal of time to create a new album. And man oh man was the wait worth it, as Keraaminen is her most bold, up front, crisp and riveting work to date. Her earlier songs were very much buried in layers of rustic dirt, muddied and mysterious, but with her mystical sounding voice cutting through the fog. But now she has reached a place where she is confident and assured enough to strip away the excess layers while maintaining such gorgeous and evocative atmospheres, and her voice sounds as powerful, and alluring as ever. While previous outings have found her being compared to Bjork, that comparison maybe seems more apt here, as on this record she is able to use her voice as such a strong instrument conveying such striking and mesmerizing emotions. And for people who haven't heard Islaja before but love folks as haunting and varied as Zola Jesus, Fever Ray, Beth Gibbons, Jane Birkin, Brigitte Fontaine, Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, and Jarboe, we imagine you'll probably fall very much in love with the sounds on this record. We definitely have!
Recorded in locations all across the globe, in Helsinki, Berlin, Grand Popo, and Hong Kong, this is an album that transcends both geographical and musical borders. We've loved all her albums and this one has grabbed us from our initial listen and we've been listening to it multiple times a day since it arrived, and this will probably be a record that pops up on several of our year end favorite lists too!
There is little doubt that the band behind James Brown from the late sixties to the mid seventies was just about the tightest unit around. Of course, Brown's habit of fining his players for missing beats would keep any band in check. But the band wasn't dubbed The JB's until after a legendary moment where most of Brown's band, including key figures Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, up and quit on him. Brown, in a pinch, quickly grabbed a young Cincinnati-based backing band, The Pacemakers, which included a young Bootsy Collins before he joined Funkadelic. With a new band, a new decade and a new sound, Brown pretty much singlehandedly created funk music, and the recently defected Wesley, Parker, and Ellis quickly returned to the fold. The JB's went under many different names and line-ups, including Fred Wesley and the JB's, Maceo and The Macks, Fred Wesley and The New JB's. The Last Word, and The First Family, but the core personnel were more or less the same except for the Collins brothers who were only on the first JB's 1970 lp Food For Thought which contained the hits "Pass The Peas" and "Gimme Some More". All of their records up until 1974 are solid funk staples with hits "Doing It To Death", "Same Beat", and "If You Don't Get It Right The First Time, Back It Up and Try It Again, Party" that would be endlessly sampled in hip hop for decades to come. Good to have these on vinyl again! Funk essentials!
There is little doubt that the band behind James Brown from the late sixties to the mid seventies was just about the tightest unit around. Of course, Brown's habit of fining his players for missing beats would keep any band in check. But the band wasn't dubbed The JB's until after a legendary moment where most of Brown's band, including key figures Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, up and quit on him. Brown, in a pinch, quickly grabbed a young Cincinnati-based backing band, The Pacemakers, which included a young Bootsy Collins before he joined Funkadelic. With a new band, a new decade and a new sound, Brown pretty much singlehandedly created funk music, and the recently defected Wesley, Parker, and Ellis quickly returned to the fold. The JB's went under many different names and line-ups, including Fred Wesley and the JB's, Maceo and The Macks, Fred Wesley and The New JB's. The Last Word, and The First Family, but the core personnel were more or less the same except for the Collins brothers who were only on the first JB's 1970 lp Food For Thought which contained the hits "Pass The Peas" and "Gimme Some More". All of their records up until 1974 are solid funk staples with hits "Doing It To Death", "Same Beat", and "If You Don't Get It Right The First Time, Back It Up and Try It Again, Party" that would be endlessly sampled in hip hop for decades to come. Good to have these on vinyl again! Funk essentials!
You'd think it would be easy to write reviews of records you love, but it's not, not always anyway. This band, though, makes the task easier, 'cause maybe we can just say a few key words: JAPAN. DOOM. PSYCH. CRAZY. Uh... is that doing the trick? Tokyo trio King Goblin, who describe themselves as a "progressive space psychedelic death rock band", definitely have that "anything goes", totally WTF?! Japanese thing going for 'em, mixing up prog and punk and funk and metal and noise whatever else they want, you know what we mean if you have albums by bands like Boredoms, Melt Banana, Children Coup D'Etat, Space Streakings, Omoide Hatoba, Green Milk From The Planet Orange, and others of that ilk in your collection. Specifically, though, the Japanese bands that King Goblin most especially make us think of are CSSO, Solar Anus, and Sigh (circa Imaginary Sonicscape). Somehow melding gonzo grind and druggy doom, plodding heaviness and catchy grooves, the nine strange songs here bouncing from spaced out acid rock to lumbering funk, with rubbery bass, squiggly guitar, gruff guttural vocals, and, as it says here, "hand craps" (sorry if it's not PC to chuckle over that particular credit in the cd booklet!).
Imagine if retro-disco-doomsters Cathedral got even weirder than they already are now, turned Japanese, and went no wave... that might approximate the dizzying extreme entertainment offered up by King Goblin. Also, how can songs with titles like "Boiled Again (Born To Ride)" and "Motordead" not be entertaining?
This disc, their debut, actually dates from 2007, but we only discovered 'em recently, and got some copies directly from Japan as quick as we could. They're working on a new album, to be entitled Cryptozoology, but unfortunately the guitarist of King Goblin is currently suffering from some unspecified, serious illness, so that's delaying things. Hopefully he gets better soon!! However, a couple of the King Goblin guys are also in wicked sick grindcore band called AKBK, who have a brand new album out that smokes, so look out for us to list that, soon!
The King-Cat Comic series keeps chuggin' along... now on issue #71! John Porcellino's drawing style has remained steadfastly consistent. It might be defined by stark fine lines, but it still conveys a comforting warmth and sensitivity. In fact, the images - black ink on white paper figures which verge on the cute - regularly have us itchin' to turn the zine into a King-Cat coloring book! And the text follows suit with casual humble observations and low-key day-to-day commentaries. Always a welcome and welcoming read!
Killer 3 way vinyl split of extreme heaviness, starting off with SF's own Kowloon Walled City, who by now really have to be one of the best and one of the most criminally under-hyped heavy bands in the city, super brutal and intense, their sound dense and crushing and epic, equal parts modern metal and old school AmRep style noise rock, a hybrid few can pull off as well as these guys, yet outside of a select few, it seems these guys have yet to be discovered by the world at large, but with every record, it seems like they can't remain a secret much longer.
And here they bring the noise (rock) big time, their first track a lurching stop/start mini-epic, the guitars corrosive and downtuned and THICK, driven by some seriously kick ass thumping drum damage, the vocals a frenzied (but still melodic) yowl, the arrangement strange and super dynamic, the whole thing hooky as hell, one of those tracks that had it come out in 1997 as a single it would probably be one of your most treasured 7"s. Their second track is totally different, reigning in that wanton bash and crush for something a bit more low slung and brooding, a weird sort of Neurosis / Killing Joke hybrid, super melodic, dark and moody, but with no shortage of extreme sonic crush.
We had never heard (or heard of) Ladder Devils before, but they're a pretty good match for KWC, they too have a sort of noise rock thing going on, their take a bit more punky and grungy, still hyper rhythmic and heavy as fuck, but way more loose, some awesomely howled vocals, thick syrupy low end, chugging guitars, hooky riffs, both tracks rule, even recorded evoking wild and sweaty live cub destroying chaos. Definitely psyched to hear more.
And finally Jersey metallic post rock sludgelords Fight Amp, who are only now making their first appearance on the aQ site, even though a few of us have been fans for a while. Fight Amp have a sound not all that far removed from folks like Baroness, Kylesa and the like, a sort of Southern sludge via slow brooding Neur-Isis style heaviness, and their two tracks here offer up a seriously heavy heaping helping of just that, churning and thick and epic, a little groovy, WAY downtuned, a little mathy and proggy too, giving it a sort of Voivod feel, albeit quite a bit more crusty and sludgey, but it's a pretty killer combo, and again, a pretty perfect match for both Ladder Devils and Kowloon Walled City...
Killer packaging too, a thick PVC style jacket, hand silkscreened, housing a printed folded sleeve, the back half of the sleeve cut away to reveal the clear vinyl and the printed images beneath it. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
A little while back, we listed issue #2 of one of our favorite comics, starring the big, hairy, doll making, lovestruck punk rock behemoth better known as Wuvable Oaf! But now for a very limited time, we got a handful of copies of the super limited special edition version of Wuvable Oaf #2. And we're the only store that's got em. So what's so exciting about the special edition you ask? More on that in a second, first a bit about the Oaf...
We've been champions of Luce's crazy creation since the moment we first laid eyes on Oaf and his equally hirsute cadre of pals and lovers and hangers on. Not to mention the kitties! For those new to the Oaf, in a city, suspiciously like San Francisco, lives the Wuvable Oaf, who spends his days making cool little stuffed dollies, filling them with his shaved body hair, living in a house full of kitties, and pining after Eiffel, the diminutive lead singer of the band Ejaculoid, who are constantly battling their arch rival band, Sphincterine, and that's just scratching the surface. There's lots of unrequited love, nightmarish dream monsters, wild punk rock gigs, nightmare dates, aggro-massage, jilted evil ex-boyfriend chefs, blind dates, bands with names like Muff 'N' Top Grrrlz and Wasp Women, a broKENCYDE shirt pops up during a show, so do the bad guys from Superman 2, as does our very own Andee! It's definitely a wild ride, the art is amazing, super detailed, over the top, there's so much hair everywhere, on the big beefy dudes, on the kitties, it's no wonder why it takes Luce ages to finish each issue, but it's well worth the wait, funny, and fun, and sexy and silly, now we're dying for issue 3, especially after the back page teaser, a big hairy, horned, devil tailed man-beast with the legend "Who is Gote Blud?". Well?? WHO IS IT??????????????
So okay, the special edition, what's so great about it? Well howsabout a custom glow in the dark cover, each one signed and hand numbered by the artist? Or what about a set of custom Ejaculoid picks, affixed to a special printed insert? Okay, well if that ain't enough, the special edition comes with a bonus 7" SINGLE, one sided, featuring Ejaculoid's synth punk grind jam "Fearce" on one side (and just so you know, the musical Ejaculoid is made up of members of Limp Wrist, Los Crudos and Needles!), the flipside featuring an awesomely gory etching, that goes along with the super gory eviscerated super model record cover, and it includes a torn ticket stub with info on where you can download a digital version of "Fearce"! All in a plastic bag sealed shut with a kitty sticker (of course). Only 200 in existence, and we're the only store, comic, record or otherwise that has 'em!
There is little doubt that the band behind James Brown from the late sixties to the mid seventies was just about the tightest unit around. Of course, Brown's habit of fining his players for missing beats would keep any band in check. But the band wasn't dubbed The JB's until after a legendary moment where most of Brown's band, including key figures Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, and Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, up and quit on him. Brown, in a pinch, quickly grabbed a young Cincinnati-based backing band, The Pacemakers, which included a young Bootsy Collins before he joined Funkadelic. With a new band, a new decade and a new sound, Brown pretty much singlehandedly created funk music, and the recently defected Wesley, Parker, and Ellis quickly returned to the fold. The JB's went under many different names and line-ups, including Fred Wesley and the JB's, Maceo and The Macks, Fred Wesley and The New JB's. The Last Word, and The First Family, but the core personnel were more or less the same except for the Collins brothers who were only on the first JB's 1970 lp Food For Thought which contained the hits "Pass The Peas" and "Gimme Some More". All of their records up until 1974 are solid funk staples with hits "Doing It To Death", "Same Beat", and "If You Don't Get It Right The First Time, Back It Up and Try It Again, Party" that would be endlessly sampled in hip hop for decades to come. Good to have these on vinyl again! Funk essentials!
Madlib's last Medicine Show compilation, High Jazz, was a collection of recordings by Lib's modern jazz outfits, doing their best to simulate classic jazz, and as we mentioned in that review, had we not known better, we definitely might have been fooled. But THIS is the one we've been waiting for. ADVANCED jazz, as in REAL jazz records from the past 40 years, funky, soulful, hard bop, free, big band, all stripes and flavors, woven into an insanely kick ass DJ mix, and separated into movements, titled appropriately enough: Miles, Ornette, Pharoah, Herbie, Mingus, Ra, Dolphy, Ranelin, Deodato and Coltrane. The cover art too has been jazz-ed up, the painting of Washington and crew crossing the Delaware, updated to include various jazz greats, even Herbie Hancock's Headhunter can be seen across the water in another boat. And that's the vibe of the whole record, a definite reverence for the music and the artists, but mixed playfully, all sorts of random snippets interspersed between killer jazz jams, interviews and recording of various jazz greats, hilarious impressions of Miles Davis, spoken word jazz poetry, a stretch of wacky drug conversations and what sounds like an anti marijuana PSA, blaxploitation trailers, commercials, a hilarious Herbie Hancock anti-drug PSA (specifically "skag and downers"!), and while those segues are pretty funny, they're just interludes between some of the most amazing jazz ever, c'mon, a DJ like Madlib with a handful of classic jazz lps? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it's gonna rule, and RULE it does, although some folks here found the snippets and samples a bit distracting, but taken as a whole, Advanced Jazz, is a dizzying trip back in time, not just music, but sounds, voices, vibe, it's like strapping on some sort of temporal time travel helmet, and having 40 years of jazz and jazz-related culture flash by in 70 minutes. So awesome. Maybe the best Medicine Show yet!
These days, something like this is a fairly strange occurrence, a (mostly) all drums solo record from a drummer. It wasn't rare at all back in the day for a jazz drummer to step out of his normal gig and go solo, but when was the last time you heard a solo drum record from the drummer of a modern indie rock band, and if somehow you DID, we'd guess it probably wasn't nearly as bad ass, and/or listenable as this, the debut from Man Forever, the Metal Machine Music style all drum freakout project of Kid Millions, the drummer for Oneida and White Hills among others.
A live performance of Lou Reed's Metal Machine music is precisely what inspired Millions to wonder if you could create the same sort of dense wall of sound, replete with strange harmonics and overtones, using just drums, and so Millions tuned his drums in a manner that would theoretically produce the most harmonic complexity and overtones, and went to town, recording himself over and over, layering track after track after track, one on top of the other into this flurry of octopoidal percussion, an endless percussive avalanche, chaotic and frenzied and FREE but somehow still a bit measured, and even composed at times. It does have the feel of free jazz, but it also feels like some sort of heavy noise rock experiment. The first side is a non stop fury of relentless drummage, imagine a hundred drummers all playing intensely and inventively, but not necessarily playing with each other, the sound is dizzying and far out, and in its own way psychedelic, but then as you listen, the notes and tones of the individual drums begin to interact, producing weird buzzed and rumbles and skrees, a symphony of buried overtones and strange harmonics, it suddenly ceased being just a drum solo, and becomes some gorgeous abstract composition for drums, layered and textured and lush, and in its own way weirdly mesmerizing. The only other sounds to be found are a bit of bass accompaniment, the bass itself thick and gnarled and corrosively buzzy, which at one point transforms the sound into something closer to warped grinding noise rock, almost like a more minimal avant Lightning Bolt, before finishing off with a brief squall of just buzzing distorted bass. Exhausting for sure, but also gloriously cathartic.
The flipside gets all dubby right of the bat, various beats wreathed in delay and reverb and echo and sent spinning off into the ether, the low end here is thick, the overtones and harmonics piling up until it's almost like rhythmic dronemusic, and when the bass does come in again, all thick and crunchy and buzzy, it transforms the sound once again into some sort of deep heaving drum driven dronedoom. So cool.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES! Housed in nice hand silkscreened covers.
After releasing dozens of tapes and tons of limited releases, Sean McCann delivers his gorgeous vinyl debut on local SF label, DNT. If Sean McCann is a new name to your list of weirdo dronesters, you better get hip quick, McCann is one of the most prolific ambient artists of recent years, and has delivered countless offerings of violin based, long-tone beauty on almost every home-spun tape label around. And even though "Chances Are Staying" is McCann's first attempt at vinyl glory, he's no newcomer to the soft-drifting world of string-based soundscaping.
What really draws us into McCann's music is his signature, ever-changing kaleidoscopic whirl, sounds and notes constantly shifting and swirling over crumbling layers of noise and grit, never a boring moment in an ocean of crashing color and melodic smear, so propelling yet immersive and entrancing. There's a refined quality to McCann's music that definitely reminds us of stuff on the Kompakt label, but that precision is offset by a weirdo playfulness that leaves each track unpredictable and completely fluid. It also reminds us of early Not Not Fun releases or maybe Ducktails. "Labyrinth" opens with a gauzy melodic passage, distant bells and chimes echo into a rhythmic lull, synthy washes and a deep low-end pulse guide you deeper into a gorgeous ambient headspace. Dry passages of violin stretch across the echoing beauty below, a buzzing drone builds into an epic flurry until suddenly the track is over and you're itching for more! "County Heirlooms" is another favorite, drum and bass set the rhythmic pulse as soaring strings and bellowing horns become tangled in a mess of field recordings, drones, and weirdo noise, so nice and quite unlike anything we've heard before. Somehow pleasant and very very strange all at once, like someone manipulating a Pharoah Sanders tape while a krautrock rhythm section rehearses next door.
So Rad! Super unique and super limited to 400 hand number copies, we got these straight from the label, pretty sure it'll be out of print in no time, so pick one up!
We love Mogwai. And we probably always will. Their Young Team record still ranks at the very tippy top of the slow burning, slow building, quiet loud quiet LOUD, post rock ouvre, and a million bands since, trying their damnedest to do the same thing, haven't dulled or diminished that love at all. In fact if anything, all it did was enforce how genius these guys really are. And while they're in the unenviable position of having a ridiculously iconic record that all subsequent records are inevitably compared to, when one can ignore that looming sonic spectre, then all of their records rule. Intense, and emotional, epic and majestic, heavy and melodic, soundtracky and cinematic. It really is remarkable listening to Mogwai and then hearing Pelican or Isis or any of the other bands who do something similar, and while Mogwai are maybe not BETTER, they are special, and unique, with a sound that impossibly manages to sound ONLY like them.
Special Moves is a documentary / live concert film, gorgeously shot, featuring selections from throughout their entire career, from big crashing bombastic epics, to brooding moody meanders, their live sound as lush and lovely as their records proper. All black and white, stark, high contrast live footage, interspersed with shots of random people on the streets, rain swept cities, crowd shots, sound checks, empty clubs, blurred lights, close ups of fingers and strings, all very impressionistic, and it all suits the music so perfectly. It includes some bonus live footage, which looks just as good as the movie.
And there's also a soundtrack disc, featuring all the tracks from the movie and then some, more of that epic Mogwai majesty, not necessarily all that different from the recorded versions, but heck, any excuse for more Mogwai is fine by us, and some of the tracks DO get reworked a bit, but if you've been hankering for some smoldering, swelling post rock quiet/loud epicness, this should hit the spot. Also includes a bonus download of 6 more live tracks!
We were first turned on to the Moonhearts when their vocalist/bassist Mikal Cronin teamed up with Ty Segall for a smoking collaboration on a 7" that sadly went out of print before we could even get it in the store. We remember when it came out, Ty Segall telling us how we had to look out for the band Mikal was in with this kid named Charlie, called Charlie & The Moonhearts, and that we just HAD to hear 'em. The band soon dropped the Charlie from their moniker and became The Moonhearts, and then we started to hear some of their songs on various compilations and 7"s and finally saw them live and were totally blown away. The debut full length is one of the most fuzzed out, on-fire slabs of wax to come out this year. For sure similar in sound and spirit to lots of Ty Segall's earliest recordings, an awesome combination of garage rock grit stripped of any fat and overflowing with full on punk conviction.
Start to finish this record absolutely kills, from all out blazing in the red rippers to some more stripped down raw psychedelic garage pop. "Deathstar Pt.2" might just be one of our favorite songs of the year, making us think of The Misfits doused with even more distortion and raw spirit. Just when we thought we might be burning out on fucked up and fried garage rock, Moonhearts come so correct on this LP, showing us that they are one of the best around at this sound and so deserve to be heard by anyone and everyone who digs that sound...
Latest from this experimental axeman, master dronologist and long time aQ fave, after a clutch of seriously epic and amazing releases that found Mullen dragging his guitar into mysterious musical realms, similar to the sonic otherworlds of fellow sound manipulators like Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz, William Basinski, Aidan Baker and the like.
In fact, much like the records that came before, one would be forgiven for assuming there were no guitars at all on the misleadingly playfully named Bongo Closet, instead, these extended pieces pulse and rumble and smolder, the manipulated and recontextualized guitars melded to old synths, only to blossom into haunting dreamscapes of murky buzz and rhythmic drift, the opener sounds a bit like some obscure krautdrone jam via Chain Reaction, a sort of heroin house dream drone, while the following track, melds chiming streaks of high end, and haunting backward swoops, to a glitched out almost tribal sounding rhythm, sonar pings demarcating a strange underwater sounding bit of twisted synth drift.
Not long after, the record returns to the dark droning, fuzz drenched melancholy of the opening track, fields of muted glitch and cascading sheets of electrical shimmer are draped over softly shifting glacial melodies, a haunting minimal moonlit blur creates a strangely ominous and foreboding variant of new age, which leads directly into a stretch of twang flecked ghost-dub, echoey melodies splinter and fragment, the various bits drifting over a sea of softly crumbling distortions and tinkling chimes.
The record winds down with a cloud of warm whirling psychedelia, a gauzy indistinct sprawl of layered soft skree, and whirring slow motion warble, all blurred and smoothed into a soporifically undulating dirgescape, a little bit post industrial crumble, a little bit late night bleary eared haze, until finally, the record finishes off with a sepia toned Jeckian dronescape of warped distorted melody, and crumbling atmosphere, a gorgeous bit of dreamlike drift, of hushed melancholy melody, nearly obscured by its thick patina of smoldering glitchy buzz, and a glowing halo of blown out, in-the-red, softly psychedelic thrum. So so nice. Fans of any of the above mentioned artists, who have yet to check out Mullen, don't wait a second longer.
The best part about one of our old favorite records getting reissued, especially one that predates the New Arrivals list, is that we finally get the chance to try and put into words exactly what it is that made the record so special to us. Neurosis' Enemy Of The Sun is particularly overdue for some gushing praise, to this day it remains one of our favorite records ever, and definitely our favorite Neurosis record. Although it should be noted, that Allan and Andee have spent much of today arguing about which is the better Neurosis record, this, 1993's Enemy Of The Sun or 1992's Souls At Zero, and while arguments could be made for plenty of other Neurosis records as well, we were at least able to agree that it most definitely boiled down to one of these two, but since Andee's the one writing this review, guess which one wins here!
Living in the Bay Area, Oakland's Neurosis were our heavy music heroes, crusty punks who embraced metal, transforming their early punk sound into something much more stately and epic and heavy, without losing touch with their punk ethics, their new sound as most folks by now know would go on to influence an insane number of the heavy bands of today. With no Neurosis there would be no Isis, no Pelican, and by extension of that, no metallic post rock bands at all, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. While Allan posits that Souls At Zero was the record where Neurosis made the shift from punk to metal (and chamber prog), Andee further posits that Enemy Of The Sun was the record where that new sound was perfected, the brooding slow builds, the mysterious samples, the Ozzy-like vox, the crushing doomy dirge-y pummel, the squalls of crushing heaviness, the sound so moody and atmospheric, yet so heavy and intense. Record opener "Lost" has to be one of the most perfect songs EVER, beginning with a haunting sample, simple high-hat rhythm, low-slung slow motion Joy Divisiony bassline, big bass kick and those Ozzy-ish vox, when the band kicks in, they sound almost industrial, like a Ministry track slowed down to a crawl, super dynamic, stop/start, big blasts of guitar crunch, and wailing harmonics, all underpinned by more samples, lurching and hypnotic, until finally the band explode into a churning downtuned blowout, only to slip right back into that start/stop harmonic driven drift, the song shifts a few more times, changing it up completely for the more punkish pounding outro, that also slips right back into chugging epic Neurosis style bombast.
As if that track weren't devastating enough, "Raze The Stray" is just as good, with its strange Middle Eastern sung intro, minor key piano, soaring strings, acoustic guitar, the haunting revery shattered by a dense grinding tribal blowout, roiling and fierce as fuck, howled and heavy, only to again slip right back into that tranquil ambient drift, now laced with bells, and woozy bass. This track too changes gears and directions, weirdly proggy, but somehow still cohesive, the second movement featuring a loping mathy midtempo groove, with a killer scraped guitar part and more chuggy chunky guitar crush.
We could go through the whole record, track by track, but you can probably figure out by now that they all rule, although it is worth mentioning the nearly half hour long closing track "Cleanse", a sprawling drum jam that definitely hints at future Neurosis side project Tribes Of Neurot, a hypnotic pounding Crash Worship style epic, laced with didgeridoo, and strange strangled vocalizations, those vocals wreathed in effects, and looped and sent spinning from speaker to speaker, the whole second half of the track a druggy damaged soundscape of hard panned, effects drenched, vocal trip-out. Woah. So fucking great, and even nearly two decades later, this still sounds better, and heavier, and more original than most of the stuff out there...
The new reissue features the same bonus tracks as the 1999 version, a demo and a live track, but this new one comes housed in a swank slipcover...
Just months after Oval's recent Oh 12", Markus Popp's first release in more than a decade, comes this, the similarly titled O, a sprawling, nearly sixty track, double disc, which continues on right where Oh left off. In fact, listening to O now, it sounds like most likely all of these tracks were recorded during the same session. They certainly have the same feel. A strange hybrid of past and present Oval, the cd skipping liquid glitchery of classic records like Diskont and Systemisch, and the new, more organic, 'real instrument' Oval. The main instrument sounds like a steel string guitar, sampled and chopped up and fed into the computer and spit out in strange gnarled glitchy shards. When we reviewed the 12", we mentioned that the new Oval sounded a bit like Michael Hedges or Derek Bailey all chopped up and computerized, which still holds true, but that's probably a bit reductionist. As Popp obviously has a keen ear and a deft hand at assembling digital errata into weirdly dreamy popmusik. The opening suite of songs perfectly encapsulates the new Oval sound, while setting the stage for the two discs to come. In "Panorama", over soft shimmery, warm and languid melodic swells, Popp flings flurries of grinding glitched melody, little spurts of melodic tangles, jagged and looped, their echoes and ripples allowed to ring out, as the first track progresses, the background shimmer seems to dissipate as the foreground glitchery becomes more and more clipped, the shimmer only returning briefly alongside the glitch, like a hazy shadow. "Ah!" is a loping bit of looped guitar tapping, while all around, soft steaks of gauzy electronics drift and swirl and swoop, and then in come real drums, another new addition, less present than on the 12", but here, evoking the same sort of post rock vibe, a little bit Tortoise, a little Stereolab, especially with its little swaths of melody and female vocal sounding "Ah"s. On the surface, it's a sweet bit of electronic post rock confection, but there's always so much going on, layer upon layer, little bits of glitch, little shards of melody, mysterious effects, but all perfectly placed. The result, some modern electro space pop, that sounds incredible. "Shhh" takes the same sort of approach but instead crafts the same elements into a hushed lullaby, the tones muted, the track laced with bits of keening metallic high end, drifting over a softly looped bit of mesmer. "Glossy" is another bit of electronic post rock, the big booming drums, shuffling beneath a cloud of constantly shifting notes and tones, clipped and skittery and stuttery, a scattershot spray of electronic sound draped over a minimal rhythmic backdrop.
And so it goes, for nearly 60 more songs, most 2 minutes or shorter, many clocking in closer to 30 seconds, all sounding like they were cut from the same sonic cloth, or maybe more accurately, they all sound like micro-movements of the much larger, sprawling epic whole, the electronic post rock symphony that is O, separated into tiny parts, miniature separate segments, every one its own little fragment of electronic avant pop, but all of those parts (maybe not so) loosely connected into Popp's grand masterwork, a whole that is perhaps easier to absorb broken down into its constituent parts, or perhaps not, maybe this is in fact a collection of mini-tracks, the sounds broken down into commercial length segments designed for the modern attention span, but who really knows the method to Popp's madness, all we really know is that O is deliriously delightful, mysterious and playful, and totally fantastic.
The vinyl includes extra tracks NOT on the cd (as well as a digital download of all the cd version tracks).
The strangely named Padang Food Tigers, are actually an offshoot of blissed out pastoral dream drone folk outfit Rameses III, and it sounds like it.
A short three track ep of sun dappled folky drift, sounding like three movements of a single piece, all hazy and hushed and delicate and lovely, the simple strummed melodies drift above field recordings of wind and water, wrapped in lush gauzy swells of soft focus whir, laced with tinkling chimes and distant bells, a slowly unfurling landscape of abstract folk drone meditative mesmer, eventually the instruments fade, leaving just the chimes and the sound of the world outside. Only to have the simple strumming reemerge over a brief stretch of crackle and pop, the sounds presumably of a warm fire in the hearth, this time there's piano as well, a delicate counterpoint to the crystalline guitar, which drifts lazily into the final track, the piano more pronounced, this time everything underpinned by the thick liquid buzz of a bowed cello, the deep resonant rumble wrapping warmly around melancholy pointilist piano, a sonic rendering of a lazy summer afternoon, the trees waving in the breeze, a stream burbling nearby, a glimmering world of tranquil bliss and washed out dreamlike folk drone ambience. So lovely. Sad it's so short.
Packaged in a stamped cardstock sleeve, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
The second of two long overdue reissues from this outsider avant pop techno technician, whose Black Noise record had us all in a tizzy, and any hope of that tizzy letting up went right out the window with the reissue of This Bliss, the -other- old title recently reissued, and now here we are with Diamond Daze, the second out of print PdP jam resurrected in the wake of Black Noise blowing up big time.
And like This Bliss, Diamond Daze doesn't deviate too far from what we loved about Black Noise, in fact all three records form this smooth, flowing continuum of blissed out minimal techno skitter, bleary late night pop ambient chill out, moody synthscapes, and throbbing, pulsing drone dance grooves. The weird thing is, if you threw some vocals on these tracks, you'd have a huge pop hit, Phoenix, Caribou, that sort of thing, but instead PdP takes these songs and strips them down, leaves them skeletal and abstract. Synths buzz ominously, beats skitter and shuffle, samples are looped and twisted, and stretched into streaks of washed out his, or lysergic shimmer, the result is not so much dance music or techno, but instead some sort of hypnotic trancelike electronica, a sound more conducive to blissing out, drifting off, than shaking it on the dancefloor.
That said, unlike the others, Diamond Daze features some seriously fuzzed out synth bass, that gives much of DD a way more fierce vibe, and while some of the beats do bang and boom, much of the record is more of a whisper than a howl, the darker more minimal tracks sounding like Kompakt meets Chain Reaction.
Another winner, a gorgeous fantastic, dark and haunting and mysterious collection of electronic mood music, and yet another nail in the coffin of any sort of techno hating we had hoped to ever engage in....
Finally! The wait is over. The final 4 releases in what is now a nearly complete reissue collection of all 9 demos from mysterious Swiss black metal horde Paysage D'Hiver. By now, most folks are probably more familiar with Swiss sci-fi black metallers Darkspace, whose mainman Tobias Mockl, aka Wroth, was the sole force behind the frosty, grim, wintry Burzumic blur that was Paysage D'Hiver. Calling himself Wintherr in Paysage, over the course of nearly a decade, Mockl crafted 9 full length demos, and two split releases, each one a stunning landscape of frostbitten buzz and buried blasting beats, of shrieked vokills, and haunting windswept interludes, of creepy footsteps and crunching ice, of lilting blackened folk and of totally epic black metal mastery.
Paysage trafficked primarily in sprawling wintery epics, up to 20 minutes in length, rife with trancelike riffage, and long stretches of haunting ambience, the sort of black trance-inducing monotone mesmer that we can't seem to get enough of, although occasionally, Mockl would unleash something totally different, a record of Tangerine Dream like kraut synth drone ambience, or in the middle of a squall of furious black blasting, a strange lurching lumbering clean guitar lope, or long stretches of almost orchestral soundtrack like drift, but always the atmosphere was grim and cold and grey, the production blurred and buzzy and murky and lo-fi, but not shitty 4-track lo-fi, instead, that low fidelity was a part of the sound, just adding to the miserable freezing chill of the proceedings, casting a patina of dour despondency, evoking the shadow of dead trees and their skeletal branches, of epic expanses, buried in snow, inhospitable, barren, forlorn, of loneliness and sorrow, emptiness and death. Easily some of the most intense, otherworldly, creative and evocative black metal ever made, and one of our all time favorites for sure...
Einsamkeit was the final release from Paysage D'Hiver, originally released on cassette in 2007, but the 'band' never officially 'broke up', so who knows, there could be a new Paysage some day, but for now, Einsamkeit was the band's last missive, three sprawling tracks, all right around 15 minutes, the first, a warm swirl of abstract krautdrone, deep murky pulses beneath shimmers of glimmering melody, all woven together by a strange barely there machine like whir, the track a sort of cinematic ambient drift, wheezing rumbles bleed into strange field recordings, almost industrial sounding clatter and creak underpin the barely there whisper of brushed percussion, and mysterious music box melodies, gorgeously creepy and abstract. As is the next track, another stretch of dreamlike ambience, but this time around it's hardly wintery, instead, the sound is warm and lush, almost sun dappled sounding even, warm wisps of melody, long languorous streaks of blurred chordal drift, it almost sounds like something that could be on Root Strata or Type, far removed from most black metal, even more black metal ambience. Drifty and hazy and gauzy and washed out and lovely.
Finally, the first epoch of Paysage D'Hiver draws to a close, beginning with the whirling winter wind, then some seriously filthy distorted guitar buzz, laid over ominous minor key synths, droney and buzzy and blissed out, only to dissipate nearly right away, leaving just a strange militaristic drum beat, and a deep rumbling thrum, and some glimmering ethereal synth shimmer, the squiggly bits of sci-fi melody, reminding us a bit of Oneohtrix or Innercity, that same sort of retro-futuristic vibe, but here the sound is rendered as something much more grim and foreboding. The guitar eventually returns, more filthy black buzz, and vocals surface for the first time, harsh and hellish, but way down in the mix, like another layer of hiss, suddenly the drums drop out, and for some reason the tension ratchets WAY up, and the buzzing guitar and mewling vokills drone on and on, riding an undulating low end swell, before dropping out completely, leaving nothing but the wind, and the blackness beyond. Totally amazing, and essential!
Like all the Paysage reissues, Einsamkeit comes in a gorgeous oversized A5 style digibook, with a cool super abstract starscape on the front, and inside a fold out booklet, with beautiful winter landscapes and minimal text. The whole thing sealed in a black envelope, the band name and album title printed in black ink, on the black background.
Finally! The wait is over. The final 4 releases in what is now a nearly complete reissue collection of all 9 demos from mysterious Swiss black metal horde Paysage D'Hiver. By now, most folks are probably more familiar with Swiss sci-fi black metallers Darkspace, whose mainman Tobias Mockl, aka Wroth, was the sole force behind the frosty, grim, wintry Burzumic blur that was Paysage D'Hiver. Calling himself Wintherr in Paysage, over the course of nearly a decade, Mockl crafted 9 full length demos, and two split releases, each one a stunning landscape of frostbitten buzz and buried blasting beats, of shrieked vokills, and haunting windswept interludes, of creepy footsteps and crunching ice, of lilting blackened folk and of totally epic black metal mastery.
Paysage trafficked primarily in sprawling wintery epics, up to 20 minutes in length, rife with trancelike riffage, and long stretches of haunting ambience, the sort of black trance-inducing monotone mesmer that we can't seem to get enough of, although occasionally, Mockl would unleash something totally different, a record of Tangerine Dream like kraut synth drone ambience, or in the middle of a squall of furious black blasting, a strange lurching lumbering clean guitar lope, or long stretches of almost orchestral soundtrack like drift, but always the atmosphere was grim and cold and grey, the production blurred and buzzy and murky and lo-fi, but not shitty 4-track lo-fi, instead, that low fidelity was a part of the sound, just adding to the miserable freezing chill of the proceedings, casting a patina of dour despondency, evoking the shadow of dead trees and their skeletal branches, of epic expanses, buried in snow, inhospitable, barren, forlorn, of loneliness and sorrow, emptiness and death. Easily some of the most intense, otherworldly, creative and evocative black metal ever made, and one of our all time favorites for sure...
Nacht was originally released on cassette in 2004, and features 4 looooong tracks, all between 12 and 18 minutes longs, and like most of the other Paysage records, the tracks are introduced, and separated by long stretches of wintery ambience, whipping winds, cracking branches, howling wolves, the opening track here introduces creepy deep organ drones, swirling synths, all super dramatic and atmospheric, perfectly woven into the howling winds, croaked demonic gurgles, a super haunting atmospheric black winter drift, that leads right into an extended stretch of mesmerizing black metal buzz, the riffing relentless, the drums machinelike and buried in the mix, the melodies epic and majestic, the vocals a sick alien gargle, the track shifting from blast, to doomic lumber, to buzzing black ambience and back again, underscored by barely there swaths of synth, before finally fading back out into the wintery ambience. The next track is more a sort of blackened buzzy drone, the riffs stretched into streaks of melody, layered into undulating sheets of frosty buzz, the vokills a constant creaking rasp, building in intensity, eventually becoming a super melodic dirgescape, all coruscating high end melodies and crumbling distorted low end, finally finishing off with just a single buzzing guitar, unfurling its riffage over the ever present winter wind. And finally, the record finishes with a gloriously epic chunk of freezing black buzz, relentless and intense, frantic riffing blasting beats, shrieked demonic howls and soaring synths, all gradually fading into the distance, as everything is swallowed up by the swirling snow and the bleak endless winter. Fucking incredible!
Like all the Paysage reissues, Nacht comes in a gorgeous oversized A5 style digibook, with a super creepy, ultra minimal cover image, where you can just see a corpsepainted face in the light of a burning torch, inside is a foldout booklet, with another creepy image and some lyrics, all sealed up in a black envelope, with the band name and album titled printed on the front, black ink, on black background.
Finally! The wait is over. The final 4 releases in what is now a nearly complete reissue collection of all 9 demos from mysterious Swiss black metal horde Paysage D'Hiver. By now, most folks are probably more familiar with Swiss sci-fi black metallers Darkspace, whose mainman Tobias Mockl, aka Wroth, was the sole force behind the frosty, grim, wintry Burzumic blur that was Paysage D'Hiver. Calling himself Wintherr in Paysage, over the course of nearly a decade, Mockl crafted 9 full length demos, and two split releases, each one a stunning landscape of frostbitten buzz and buried blasting beats, of shrieked vokills, and haunting windswept interludes, of creepy footsteps and crunching ice, of lilting blackened folk and of totally epic black metal mastery.
Paysage trafficked primarily in sprawling wintery epics, up to 20 minutes in length, rife with trancelike riffage, and long stretches of haunting ambience, the sort of black trance-inducing monotone mesmer that we can't seem to get enough of, although occasionally, Mockl would unleash something totally different, a record of Tangerine Dream like kraut synth drone ambience, or in the middle of a squall of furious black blasting, a strange lurching lumbering clean guitar lope, or long stretches of almost orchestral soundtrack like drift, but always the atmosphere was grim and cold and grey, the production blurred and buzzy and murky and lo-fi, but not shitty 4-track lo-fi, instead, that low fidelity was a part of the sound, just adding to the miserable freezing chill of the proceedings, casting a patina of dour despondency, evoking the shadow of dead trees and their skeletal branches, of epic expanses, buried in snow, inhospitable, barren, forlorn, of loneliness and sorrow, emptiness and death. Easily some of the most intense, otherworldly, creative and evocative black metal ever made, and one of our all time favorites for sure...
Steineiche was the very first Paysage D'Hiver demo, originally released in 1998, and over the course of four tracks, the shortest 11:34, the longest 24:27, pretty much every side of the Paysage sound is introduced, opening with a creepy intro, clean guitar, plucking out a mournful minor key melody, swirling winter winds, a croaking creaky vocal, like stumbling upon some reanimated skeleton in a cave on the side of a mountain, and having it begin to speak in some strange language, until finally, and quite abruptly, the track explodes in a frenzy of furious blasting, the guitars frantic, the buzzing woozy and warped, the vocals a continuous demonic shriek buried way down in the mix, almost an alien squeal, the whole track the musical equivalent to a raging snowstorm. Eventually, the track sputters to a halt, the drum machine skittering into a stretch of creepy drift, with more clean guitar, only to immediately burst into frenzied action again, listen closely and you'll here some super creepy deep voice intoning some mysterious passages WAY down in the mix, before taking off again, finally, the riffage grows weirdly angular, mirrored by strange choir like voices, the drums a half tempo pound, the vocals getting more and more garbled, before fading out with a tolling bell laced lumbering chug.
The second track is an odd one, even by Paysage standards, huge downtuned chugging riffs, a guitar that almost sounds like a banjo, more tolling church bell, total grim frostbitten doom, but with that guitar/banjo, it sounds almost like some strange doomfolk Appalachia, the track does occasionally grow more dense, swirling warped synths, gurgling vokills, the riffage super thick and distorted, the whole thing almost dronelike, and so it goes slipping back and forth between the strange folky doom chug, and the churning garbled black grind, only to finally finish off with some haunting campfire folk, all moaning sorrowful fiddle, all wrapped in reverb, draped over the distant howl of the whipping wind.
The longest track, is all ambient, lush synths over murky percussive pulses, a soundtrack like dronescape, laced with mysterious voices, fragments of minor key melody, deep rumbles, and distant shimmer, the tolling of bells, haunting operatic vocals, super atmospheric and cinematic, which leads directly into the final track, a seemingly super minimal drone / field recording, the whirring of winds, a distant low end pulse, a hushed bass rumble, it's not until about 6 minutes in, when what sounds like a radio broadcast of choir like voices, and they sound backwards too, tinny and mysterious, so creepy when paired with the rumbles and wind, and with the little bits of crackle, that give way to a murky washed out black metal buzz, wrapped wound those same voices, a strangely shoegazey sort of drift, that peters out quickly leaving just the wind, and tinkling chimes.
So goddamn weird and amazing, and still more than a decade later, better than nearly any other black metal out there!
Like the other reissues, Steineiche comes packaged in a gorgeous oversized A5 style digibook, some mysterious gnarled shapes on the cover, with a fold out booklet revealing winter scenes and lyrics, the whole thing sealed in a black envelope, with the band name and record title printed in black ink, on the black background, subtle, and nearly impossible to read.
Finally! The wait is over. The final 4 releases in what is now a nearly complete reissue collection of all 9 demos from mysterious Swiss black metal horde Paysage D'Hiver. By now, most folks are probably more familiar with Swiss sci-fi black metallers Darkspace, whose mainman Tobias Mockl, aka Wroth, was the sole force behind the frosty, grim, wintry Burzumic blur that was Paysage D'Hiver. Calling himself Wintherr in Paysage, over the course of nearly a decade, Mockl crafted 9 full length demos, and two split releases, each one a stunning landscape of frostbitten buzz and buried blasting beats, of shrieked vokills, and haunting windswept interludes, of creepy footsteps and crunching ice, of lilting blackened folk and of totally epic black metal mastery.
Paysage trafficked primarily in sprawling wintery epics, up to 20 minutes in length, rife with trancelike riffage, and long stretches of haunting ambience, the sort of black trance-inducing monotone mesmer that we can't seem to get enough of, although occasionally, Mockl would unleash something totally different, a record of Tangerine Dream like kraut synth drone ambience, or in the middle of a squall of furious black blasting, a strange lurching lumbering clean guitar lope, or long stretches of almost orchestral soundtrack like drift, but always the atmosphere was grim and cold and grey, the production blurred and buzzy and murky and lo-fi, but not shitty 4-track lo-fi, instead, that low fidelity was a part of the sound, just adding to the miserable freezing chill of the proceedings, casting a patina of dour despondency, evoking the shadow of dead trees and their skeletal branches, of epic expanses, buried in snow, inhospitable, barren, forlorn, of loneliness and sorrow, emptiness and death. Easily some of the most intense, otherworldly, creative and evocative black metal ever made, and one of our all time favorites for sure...
Winterkalte was originally released in 2001, and begins with the sounds of screaming winds, and strange footsteps, and various random sounds, in fact it almost sounds like field recordings, or lost tapes from some doomed winter expedition, finally recovered after years and years, the sound buzzy and lo-fi, finally the guitars come in, sharp and harsh and brittle, the drums a machinelike skitter, exploding into a super raw and ultra intense blast of frosty blackness, the vocals so distorted and lo-fi they almost sound like white noise, the blasting is relentless, and trancelike, until finally some synths drift in, adding some super creepy texture and melodic counterpoint, and then with about 7 minutes left, the buzz and blast drop out, leaving just acoustic guitar, over the same whipping wind, and the lonely crunch of footsteps in snow, which trudge right into the next track, a very Burzumy plodding trudge, the guitars thick and buzzy, the vocals again blasts of near white noise, the melodies haunting and mournful, the vibe super intense and dramatic, the swirling synths in the background adding even more gravitas to the already abject winter miserablism of the doom drenched black dirge.
The next track is nearly nothing but wind and wintery ambience, all but for a brief bit of haunting choral music right near the beginning, ghostly harmonies drifting spectrally over the sounds of winter. And so the mysterious personage trudges onward through the wind and snow and the black night, the ambience laced with tinkling distant melodies, before once again the song kicks in, a loping woozy riff, a galloping beat, and those whitenoise vox, all wrapped in a whirring blanket of soft noise and blurred hiss, only letting up occasionally, allowing in the wind, delicate crystalline melodies, and the percussive crunch and boom of distant mysterious goings on, but always lurching back into the blast and buzz. And so it goes, one more track, a blurred monochromatic blast of frozen blackness, gives way to the final movement, still more blasting and buzzing, shrieking and blackened flailing, furious and frenzied, again leaving space for frozen winds, and melancholy acoustic guitars, before the final squall of wintery buzz, finally finishing with acoustic guitars and ethereal synths, fading into the cold black night.
Incredible, and as essential as all of the Paysage records. And like the other reissues, Winterkalte comes packaged in a gorgeous A5 style oversized digibook, the front adorned with a cool painting of some bleak winterscape, while inside, a fold out booklet, featuring lyrics. The whole thing sealed in a black envelope, the band name and album title printed on the outside, black on black!
Second of two new seven inches from the Olde English Spelling Bee label (the other by Ducktails, reviewed elsewhere on this list), two new tracks from husband and wife psych folk duo Pigeons, whose sound is like a modern take on that classic seventies Wickerman acid psych folk sound, but a bit more twisted, flecked with bits of electronics, effects, not to mention fairly unorthodox arrangements, which is no doubt aided by the involvement of various guests including some No Neck Blues Band-ers.
The A side starts out all softly psychedelic and folky, sweetly strummed acoustic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, subtle slippery lap steel, but then all of sudden in swoops some weirdly almost funky bass, along with swirls of effected melodies and distorted psychedelic guitar leads making it sound almost like some strange psych folk / Portishead / no wave hybrid, but all the disparate elements woven into something dark and lovely.
The B side begins with brittle, skeletal old school style drum machine, horns and tendrils of distorted guitar, an odd assortment, but again Pigeons are able to fuse those bits and bobbles into a gorgeously off kilter hazy seventies sounding bit of lo-fi folk pop, laced with angular guitars, buried vox, and other bits of sonic weirdness, managing to sound strange and mysterious but still lush and lovely.
A first listen to this elicited the following quote from Andee: "It's annoying enough that I definitely want one!" Need we say more? Well, what's so wonderfully "annoying" (and therefore AWESOME) about this you ask? PIVIXKI is a duo from Melbourne, Australia, that combines blasting grindcore (the drummer) with avant-garde modern chamber music (the keyboardist). It's just crazy enough to work. On half of the duo, virtuoso pianist Antony Pateras, comes from a classical/academic music background; in fact, he's the composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy Of Music, and we're not surprised to hear he has recorded for John Zorn's Tzadik label. The other half, drummer Max Kohane, plies his trade in the HC punk/grindcore scene, having played with a ton of bands, the one we know best being Agents Of Abhorrence, previously lauded by us for their technical grindcore frenzies! Thus the 11 instrumental tracks here are INSANE, maniacal typewriter-y piano plinking keeping pace with 1000mph octopoid drum battery. It's like Conlon Nancarrow's player piano music doing battle with a (human) drum machine. If Mick Barr played piano instead of guitar, Orthrelm might sound like this. A band it does remind us of, a lot, would be a stripped-down version of defunct Swiss art-grinders Alboth!, remember them?
Besides piano, Pateras plays the organ (including pipe organ) and analog synth as well, on occasion, lending a '70s prog aspect to the overt avant garde classical / grindcore collision. They also get some guests in on viola, vibraphone, and additional percussion in a couple places. So despite the impression we may have given already, there's a fair amount of variation here, PIVIXKI isn't ALL full on grind assault. The methods of their madness involve a number of techniques and textures. PIVIXKI make good use of minimalist repetition, free-improv ivory tickling, glitchy electronic manipulation ("Late Veins" ferinstance), dizzyingly dramatic crescendos, and even some downright pretty parts. One of our favorite pieces is the nervously moody "A Shrewed Manipulation Of The Facts", which (as other moments here do as well) reminds us of Carl Stalling cartoon music, David Shire suspense soundtracks, and/or a hybrid of Zombi and the Necks... Another artist we are reminded of at times is Tatsuya Yoshida from the Ruins, particularly the Ruins drummer's solo stuff where he's playing drums and keyboards simultaneously. (Some of the song titles also make us think of him as well.)
The handsome trifold cardboard packaging contains some interesting liner notes from Pateras, wherein among other things he discusses how he had to learn to adjust his playing/thinking to keep up with Kohane's drumming. You, in turn, may have to adjust your listening/thinking to keep up with this duo's music! Well worth the effort, though really, once you've taken the plunge (past a track or two), it's easy to enjoy. Especially if you like Xenakis, Radian, AND Discordance Axis. Recommended!
Not many musicians and composers are able to create music as beautiful and elegant as Max Richter. Whether it be his stunning albums, soundtracks or arrangements for folks like Vashti Bunyan, Richter has proven to be one of the most restrained and versatile composers of the last decade. Infra was a work originally created as a score for a Ballet called The Waste Land. These fragile, subdued miniatures create such a dislocated and gray musical mood. Allowing your mind to wander or stay frozen in a numbing disbelief. Our only complaint regarding some of his previous work was the incorporation of unneeded and heavy handed spoken word/voices which tended to ruin the flow of the music, but luckily on Infra he smartly keeps that out of the mix and allows the haunting, cloudy sounds he's created to speak for themselves. While this may have been made for a ballet we are finding it the perfect soundtrack to those foggy/cold days we've been having in July (oh San Francisco summer) and those early mornings you find yourself awake but bleary headed and needing a musical companion to your clouded vision and foggy mind. So nice!
Pretty provocative name huh? These problematically monikered nineties Bay Area improvised noise makers, in fact, boasted a pretty surprising and stellar pedigree, the duo included Kelvin Pittman now of Portland Bike Ensemble, and Kyp Malone, of fellow SF noiseniks Iran and now of... TV On The Radio!!? Huh? Yep, long before Malone was playing huge festivals and helping send Pitchfork into conniptions, and releasing solo records, and impressing the indie rock throngs with his impossible and impressive facial hair, he was in fact one half of Rocket Science, a raucous, blasting, psychedelic combo, who spit out a wild fusion of free jazz and free noise, and this was their only record, released on Vulgar Tango way back when, along with the debut Iran lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. The Vulgar Tango dude discovered a stash of records (both Iran and Rocket Science) that had been hidden away for close to a decade, and decided to let us have them!
So yeah, we always sort of wondered why in all the articles about TV On The Radio, they never ONCE mentioned Kyp's time in RSATNLF, although we can sort of guess. Which is too bad, cuz these guys ruled. Nothing at all like TV On The Radio of course, or Iran really (except for some of the noisiness), Rocket Science took guitars and bells and drums and some 'singing' and wound 'em all up into a super charged take on that SST jazz sound, filtered through a warped SF noiserock filter. Sometimes surprisingly melodic and tranquil, but more often than not, fierce and free and heavy and loud, skittery percussion, tangled grinding guitar gnarl, some serious psychedelic crunch, lots of feedback, all woozy and warped, chaotic and off kilter, brief squalls of splattery atonal skronk, give way to warbly drone psych squiggles, which gives way to drum-kit-down-the-stairs cacophony, which then gives way to some almost metal chug and thud, which always seems to blossom into a crumbling mass of swirling sound and amp damaging free-rock delirium. Gloriously ramshackle and seriously challenging, an extremely noisy and loud look back at one of our favorite unsung outfits that helped define the SF underground in the early 2000s...
Another disc of gorgeous smoldering dronemusic from long time fave RST, aka New Zealand dronelord Andrew Moon. The follow up to Tomorrow's Void, RST's Utech debut, a crushingly heavy and dark black hole of a record, The Sunset Limited, while in its own way still heavy and dark, dials back the intensity a bit, swapping downtuned thrum for shimmering murmur, metallic buzz for tranquil drift, allowing the ominous swirls and hushed low end creep, to swell and build into thick undulating landscapes of muted melodic glow and dense tectonic rumble, deep cavernous billows of blurred black sound and strangely melodic sprawls of warm gauzy ambience.
Dark and grim, haunting and harrowing, but also strangely lovely, a series of gorgeously luminescent soundfields, each track a sonic alien topography, slow shifting shapes, layers unfurling and overlapping, intertwining, bleeding into one another, the notes and chords fluid, the various melodies stretched into blurred fragments, pulses and throbs coalesce from muted loops, a thick patina of fuzz and grit, swirls above the various sounds like some mysterious fog. Here and there, distorted tangles of guitar are unfurled and allowed to hover, suspended in tranquil expanses of muted buzz, a sort of glacial Appalachia, viewed in stop motion, each sonic exhalation a single frame, woven into a warped, woozy wash of slow moving sound. Elsewhere, the sound devolves into a sinister black ambience, evoking all manner of existential dread, tense and mysterious, long tones and softly swirling overtones, and near the end of the disc, the sound settles into a warm burnished buzz, a gorgeous dreamscape of chordal smolder and hazy late evening drift, a gorgeous melancholy finale, letting the listener drift off into the ether, with the last light of day. So great.
Super cool car-jumpin sunset cover art too!
Latest from this mysterious 'alien black metal' duo whose sound definitely leans way more toward the alien than the black metal. We went pretty nuts for their Stratospheric Passenger record, a dizzying assemblage of psychedelic drones and outerspace black buzz, of dark drone metal and abstract otherworldly ambience. That record still ranks up there as one of our favorite slabs of outsider black metal weirdness, and then recently we got to see them play on THE BUS here in town, transforming an old city bus, parked under a highway overpass, into some sort of smoke filled, ear drum destroying, trance inducing sonic starship.
So here's their latest batch of strange sounds, confusingly packaged in an eye popping almost cartoonish, full color geometric cover, sealed shut with a similarly printed little band-aid style sticker. But inside, it's the same twisted blackened psychedelia we were hoping for. Spidery minor key guitars, field recordings, raspy metallic drones, harsh vokills way off in the distance. Simultaneously meditative and hypnotic, harsh and caustic, abstract and blackened, a sort of post rock black metal drift, warped and washed out and weirdly not all that black metal at all. But that's just the first track. From there on out it's a series of strange soundscapes, analog electronics, treated textural drones, creaks and thrums and moans, wreathed in strange FX and smeared into abstract sounds and shapes, everything bleary and blurry and indistinct, haunting and ghostlike, snippets of samples(?) surfacing occasionally amidst the layered drifts of chordal thrum and soft black buzz. Slow motion melodies unfurl over clouds of shortwave static, ethereal billows of muted shimmer, and delicately swirling textures, malfunctioning machinery, and all sorts of other slowly decaying sonic ephemera, suspended in some sort of rusted out, gauzy dreamworld, bleak and beautiful, creepy and claustrophobic.
LIMITED TO 80 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered.
"Psych, garage, prog, powerpop, soul, folk..." are this retro-minded magazine's into. This ish, features The Birds (no, not the Byrds) on the cover. Y'know, Ron Wood's band before he was in the Stones. Also: Swedish psych poppers Tages, John Sebastian, The Remains, The Purple Hearts, and plenty more. Including a free 21 track download thingee.
Another little chunk of fractured noise pop from local popkid Sic Alps aka Mike Donovan. This is not super new, but odds are most folks never got their hands on it, as the label (Donovan, actually) sort of stopped making them for a while. So after a bit of nudging and cajoling, Fool's Mag is finally available again... for the first time, sort of. An ep length collection of that fuzzy washed out pop we've grown to love, and that only Sic Alps seems to kick out. Folks who dig stuff like Iran and Oh Sees, who haven't heard Sic Alps should really give it a chance, as they traffic in the same sort of hook filled noise drenched poppiness.
Short and sharp, warm muted distorted guitars, simple Pavement-y drumming, whiney sad boy vox, that occasionally slip into a strained falsetto, awesome buzzy sort-of-leads, lush harmonies, all buried in hiss and murk, the sound WAY lo-fi, but somehow the pop still shines through, hooks galore, melodies that will stick in your head like crazy, some of the best Sic Alps songs so far.
Not sure how long we'll have these, we did get a bunch, but you never know...
This is so absolutely brilliant and bonkers, that when we first heard it, we thought it must be fake, some modern day Rephlex artist putting everyone on, taking the piss, with a "raga-techno" album supposedly from the early '80s. But, no joke, this is the real thing! In 1982, Charanjit Singh, a famous Bollywood composer (he was featured on Sublime Frequencies amazing Bollywood Steel Guitar compilation), had a plan to translate ancient traditional Indian classical ragas to the synthesizer. Using the very synths that would later define Acid House (Rolands TB-303 and TR-808!), Singh unwittingly created a proto-acid masterpiece, before the techno genre ever existed. Since only a hundred or less copies were made originally, this release was mostly a rumor since its creation. We vaguely remember Drew Daniel from Matmos talking about it on Pitchfork, a couple of years back, saying someone should reissue it, but we weren't ready for how incredible and ahead of its time it sounds. Imagine if Kraftwerk (or even Oneohtrix Point Never) started composing music for a Bollywood Rave. Or imagine a more raga-inspired take on another proto-acid classic, Manuel Gottsching's epic E2-E4. While the "disco" rhythms are fast and frenetic and don't really vary that much between tracks (they're not really disco beats per se, but more akin to acid's trancey bounce), the synth flourishes and squelches of the raga over the top are soaring and floaty, making the tracks deliriously hypnotic. Capturing acid house's lysergic transcendence but with an outsider's economy that refuses to date it specifically to the era. While we only have the double lp, there will be a cd release sometime in the next month or so. But don't sleep on the vinyl too long as it's highly limited, and we guarantee there is not another release quite like this one in your collection. Highest Recommendation!
We're huge fans of Santa Cruz black metallers Fell Voices, their sprawling epic blackness immediately held us in its thrall, flitting from total classic Scandinavian style blackness, to raw punky pounding filth, to meandering post metal drift, to furious Cascadian style epicness, all blurred into massive totally transcendental, side long black metal jams. But ever since we first reviewed the Fell Voices lp, we had a handful of customers emailing us insisting that we had to check out Sleepwalker, a side project of the drummer of Fell Voices. We managed to get in touch with him, and now we finally got a handful of the two Sleepwalker demos, one from last year, and a brand new one from 2010, most folks will probably want one of each, they're pretty crazy cheap after all, and they're amazing, but sadly, they're the very last copies we'll be able to get, we only have about 10 of each, so grab one before they're gone...
Sleepwalker is similarly epic, but more washed out and murky than Fell Voices, occasionally more midtempo and depressive. The 2010 demo begins all gorgeously washed out and hazy blurred blackness that in some ways sounds more like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, the drums a buried metronomic pulse, the guitars a smeared swirl, a lumbering melancholic dirge that grows more and more jangly as the record porgresses, only to finally switch to what sounds like a black blast, but it's hard to tell the sound is so gauzy and indistinct, regardless it's simple more dense swirling buzz drenched blackness. The second track begins with a long stretch of frantic buzz, and spoken word vocals, only to finally slip into a punkish blast, the guitars again blurring into strange amorphous shapes, all wrapped up with weirdly crooned vocals, the production muddy enough that the heavier it gets, the more abstract and spaced out it sounds, and finally, the last track is all acoustic, but not just folky interlude style acoustic, it's almost like acoustic black metal, the guitar strummed fiercely, frantically, eventually strange almost industrial percussion surfaces and the track begins to sound like some sort of militaristic industrial folk before finishing off in a cloud of stel string buzz.
The 2009 demo, is more post rock influenced, spare simple drumming, deep rumbling bass, spidery guitar melodies, repetitive and motorik, eventually the sound cranks up but doesn't get metal so much as it gets rocking, pounding away for a while before exploding into something more expansive and epic, sounding a bit like Godspeed, noise rock and black metal all woven together, surprisingly melodic and catchy, a little bit jangly too, although it does seem to get darker and blacker as it goes. The second track is much like the opening track on the 2010 demo, murky and washed out, blurred and a bit shoegazey, even the shrieks and blasts and buzz and smoothed out into something way more hypnotic and dreamlike, before the final track finishes off in a blaze of blown out, blissed out blackened post rock buzz, epic and majestic, hypnotic and repetitive, the vocals buried yowls, the drums way down in the mix, all riding on the soaring sheets of black-psych-metal-gaze guitars. Awesome.
Both demos come in oversized white envelopes, each with a different pasted on front image, each with a small printed inserts, and unfortunately they're both out of print so these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
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We're huge fans of Santa Cruz black metallers Fell Voices, their sprawling epic blackness immediately held us in its thrall, flitting from total classic Scandinavian style blackness, to raw punky pounding filth, to meandering post metal drift, to furious Cascadian style epicness, all blurred into massive totally transcendental, side long black metal jams. But ever since we first reviewed the Fell Voices lp, we had a handful of customers emailing us insisting that we had to check out Sleepwalker, a side project of the drummer of Fell Voices. We managed to get in touch with him, and now we finally got a handful of the two Sleepwalker demos, one from last year, and a brand new one from 2010, most folks will probably want one of each, they're pretty crazy cheap after all, and they're amazing, but sadly, they're the very last copies we'll be able to get, we only have about 10 of each, so grab one before they're gone...
Sleepwalker is similarly epic, but more washed out and murky than Fell Voices, occasionally more midtempo and depressive. The 2010 demo begins all gorgeously washed out and hazy blurred blackness that in some ways sounds more like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, the drums a buried metronomic pulse, the guitars a smeared swirl, a lumbering melancholic dirge that grows more and more jangly as the record porgresses, only to finally switch to what sounds like a black blast, but it's hard to tell the sound is so gauzy and indistinct, regardless it's simple more dense swirling buzz drenched blackness. The second track begins with a long stretch of frantic buzz, and spoken word vocals, only to finally slip into a punkish blast, the guitars again blurring into strange amorphous shapes, all wrapped up with weirdly crooned vocals, the production muddy enough that the heavier it gets, the more abstract and spaced out it sounds, and finally, the last track is all acoustic, but not just folky interlude style acoustic, it's almost like acoustic black metal, the guitar strummed fiercely, frantically, eventually strange almost industrial percussion surfaces and the track begins to sound like some sort of militaristic industrial folk before finishing off in a cloud of stel string buzz.
The 2009 demo, is more post rock influenced, spare simple drumming, deep rumbling bass, spidery guitar melodies, repetitive and motorik, eventually the sound cranks up but doesn't get metal so much as it gets rocking, pounding away for a while before exploding into something more expansive and epic, sounding a bit like Godspeed, noise rock and black metal all woven together, surprisingly melodic and catchy, a little bit jangly too, although it does seem to get darker and blacker as it goes. The second track is much like the opening track on the 2010 demo, murky and washed out, blurred and a bit shoegazey, even the shrieks and blasts and buzz and smoothed out into something way more hypnotic and dreamlike, before the final track finishes off in a blaze of blown out, blissed out blackened post rock buzz, epic and majestic, hypnotic and repetitive, the vocals buried yowls, the drums way down in the mix, all riding on the soaring sheets of black-psych-metal-gaze guitars. Awesome.
Both demos come in oversized white envelopes, each with a different pasted on front image, each with a small printed inserts, and unfortunately they're both out of print so these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
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While there is no shortage of rad new music coming out of San Francisco, there is something about the sounds of Soft Moon that excite and dazzle us so much that it's safe to say they very well may be our favorite new Bay Area band in quite a while. They came out of nowhere, releasing their incredible debut 7" before even playing a show, and then kicking off their live incarnation with unforgettable performances, including their first ever show where they played with Blank Dogs. Seeing them live after falling so hard for that first slab of wax was just further proof that this was a band we would be loving for a long time to come. This new 7" continues to show the intensity and spot on vision that makes their entrancing psychedelia so damn addicting and satisfying. Both these songs have something so menacing, driving and assured about them. You can't just name a single specific band or era that they are tapping into, and while they do have this really cool dirgey early '80s dark wave disposition there is also something so sensual and singular to their sound. Without a doubt a total contender for our favorite 7" of the year and we are so psyched for their full length to drop in the near future!
On the cover, Soundgarden! Inside: Of Montreal, Interpol, Superchunk, Jenny Lewis, Phil Collins (!), Local Natives, Taylor Momsen, The Black Keys, Sleigh Bells, High Places plus loads of reviews and all sorts of other musical ephemera...
Another killer, baffling brilliant chunk of bizarre blackened death metal from Australia courtesy of Profound Lore, and as we've mentioned before, we're especially picky when it comes to death metal, so for us the more twisted and complex, damaged and demented the better, which is probably why we're digging this Stargazer record so much, probably helps to put it in perspective knowing that Stargazer just so happens to feature several ex-members of twisted costumed Aussie death metal weirdos Portal. Granted this is not nearly as noisy or twisted, but it does share a similarly off kilter approach to death metal.
The first track along manages to neatly summarize the Stargazer sound in less than 6 minutes, a flurry of frantic riffing, a burst of murky blasting chug, some tangled convoluted stop/start dynamics, howled vox, squalls of dizzying confusional death metal freakout, some wild squiggly leads, little bits of NWOBHM melody, some cool stuttery chugs, and wild frenzied drumming, weird bits of doomy half time plod, weird stretches of really loud rubbery bass, like crazy rapid bass solo style basslines, a cool classic metal breakdown that quickly gets all weird and twisted and tangly, laced with some surprising melody, and finally a weirdly industrial sounding finale, all low slung bass throb, peppered with wild bursts of drum/guitar dervish, that grinds to a halt, only to spit out one more surprise blast right before the finish. Holy shit. How can you not love this stuff?
The rest of the record follows suit, a super complex, but still melodic onslaught of furious grinding metal, of muddy murky blurred heaviness, pounding mathy proggy drumming, tangled warped melodies, very Eastern sounding at times, bits of classic metal, and of course bass, lots of bass, way up in the mix, woozy and busy, and adding a distinctly off kilter and atypical edge to the groups already twisted death metal sound...
Seriously kick ass stuff, we can't get enough, and we find ourselves listening to this over and over like crazy non stop, definite new metal favorite for sure...
By now, pretty much everyone knows who Kevin Shields is. He of shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine. Who over the course of the last 20 years or so have released all of THREE records. But what about Ed Ball. A musical contemporary of Shields. A man Shields described as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist", going on to say "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Ball, over the last 20 years, has released close to 40 records, a whole mess of amazing discs with UK mod popsters The Times, a handful under his own name, and a bunch with power poppers the Boo Radleys, among others. But what Ball is most famous for, at least around these parts, is releasing three of the most perfect, and perfectly fractured genius shoegaze blisspop records EVER, as Teenage Filmstars: Star, Rocket Charms and Buy our Record Support Our Sickness. Each a kaleidoscopic blurred and blown out avant pop fantasia of sound, mixing in gorgeous melodies, with all manner of found sounds, backwards loops, ethereal vocals, studio fuckery, with very little regard for form or function, for the rules of pop. Instead, seemingly feeling their way through a totally tactile world of sound, everything bristly or buzzy or fuzzy, smeared or blurred, wah guitars wrapped around roaring motorcycles, Spectorish wall of guitars spread over, skittery almost Stone Roses-y rhythms. The most obvious reference is My Bloody Valentine. And at the risk of receiving an avalanche of hate mail, Teenage Filmstars are better. They may not have invented the sound, and they definitely didn't perfect it, instead, they fucked it all up, twisted it and chopped it and doused it in FX, and flipped it backwards, and let it sprawl and spin out of control, wrapped tightly into perfect pop gems one second, then let loose in unhinged squalls of sonic whatthefuck meltdowns the next. Each of the three records growing continually more abrasive, more intense, heavier, more backwards, more fractured and freaked out, and somehow only getting better and better and better.
Star is the first proper release from Teenage Filmstars, and was released a year or two after MBV's epochal Loveless. Opener "Kiss Me" is TOTALLY cribbed from Loveless, but it sounds like it was recorded on a busted 4-track, the rhythm track supplied by a fluttery backwards loop, the guitars super distorted but also brittle, woozy and wavery, all wrapped round the main hook, a guitar / vocal harmony that is just incredible, soaring and wistful but sort of super rocking, the whole thing dripping in effects, Loveless filtered through DIY bedroom pop, and then filtered through the twisted musical mind of visionary sonic alchemist Ball. The track crumbles near the end, the guitars disappear, motorcycles zoom by, the drums all distorted, snippets of classical piano, the twitter of birds, disembodied voices, one intoning "this just might be the finest composition I ever wrote", which it might have been, if it weren't for the follow up "Loving", which follows a similar template as "Kiss Me", with the main hook, a hushed wordless vocals crooning along to a slithery guitar line, all over a looped tribal rhythm, and tripped out wah guitar all over the place. If this was just a single, "Kiss Me" / "Loving", A side B side, it would be hands down one of the greatest singles ever! But we've barely just begun. And it only gets weirder and weirder.
"Inner Space" predates the fuzzy gauzy drift of Fennesz and Jeck and Tim Hecker by 20 years, unfurling sweeping vistas of sound, intertwined with buried melancholy vocals, muted rhythmic skitter, and deep whirring strings. "Apple" is all sixties strum and whirling effects laden swoosh, simple pop stretched out and blurred and distorted into something slightly alien, a warm dreamlike missive from beyond the stars. "Flashes" is a strange sort of electronic calypso, with a subtle techno throb beneath divine female vocals, propulsive krauty drums, and of course loads of FX. "Kaleidoscope" returns to the more MBV style rocking of the openers, and does indeed sound like a shoegazing fuzzrock kaleidoscope, a swirling dizzying space pop jam, the sounds slipping from speaker to speaker, the drums relentless and hypnotic, the vocals buried, but the main guitar melody soaring over the wavery sonic swirl beneath.
Then comes a three song suite of tripped out avant weirdness, drifting fuzzy almost melodies, strange intercepted radio broadcasts, a super deconstructed version of "Kiss Me", looped and flipped backwards and transformed into something else entirely, deep whirling drones, weird voices, samples, deep black ambience, shot though with streaks of glimmering buzz, the sounds of engines, choir like vocals, damaged effects laden rhythmscapes, flange and chorus and delay and reverb all wrapped around little sonic events, laced into a delicate framework of tripped out sound. Until the closer, "Moon", a gorgeous explosion of distorted pop effulgence, thick warbly organs, epic melodies, the guitar so distorted they almost sound like white noise, almost proggy keyboards, the whole thing fracturing into a brief falling apart coda of drum freakout, and skipping lurching guitars. Holy Shit.
So maybe it's not that Teenage Filmstars are -better- than My Bloody Valentine. Just weirder, more fucked up, more spaced out, more fractured, more challenging, more out there, less like ANYTHING you've ever heard, more... oh fuck it, okay... BETTER!!! Bring on the hate mail!!
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, all good enough to have been on the record proper, but with way more of the backwards production that would come to define their sound on future records, blissed out fuzzy shoegazey power pop, but crumbling and often in reverse, and thus fantastic. Also included lengthy liner notes, as confusing and obfuscated as the music itself.
The other two Filmstars discs are getting reissued soon, and will definitely also be Records Of The Week, so immerse yourself in Star while you can, cuz it only gets better and weirder from here on out...
NOW ON VINYL!
Love her or hate her, Lydia Lunch will make an impression on you. Given her venomous poems, constant invectives, and perpetual bad attitude, it's pretty obvious that Lydia wants you to hate her. While she's not an artist without her charms, she'll probably hate you for loving her. She began a career of transgression and teeth-gnashing in the mid-'70s when she was a runaway teenager slumming around the crappiest parts of NYC and pissing off more people than not. Yet, she managed to sequester enough people to support her in Teenage Jesus and The Jerks - one of the seminal bands who defined No Wave. They were also one of the four bands who appeared on the highly influential No New York compilation, alongside James Chance & The Contortionists, Mars, and DNA. Teenage Jesus only lasted for three years, probably due to the fact that no one could tolerate the musical dictator that was Lydia Lunch. But the music itself probably did a fair share of damage upon the participants as Teenage Jesus produced hyper-abrasive, hyper-condensed songs through militant rhythmic stomps, screechingly atonal slide guitars, and Lydia's sharply barked vocals. James Chance was in fact one of the early members of the band, offering his blood-splattering sax as a suitable duet for Lydia's caterwauling.
While Teenage Jesus never managed a full album (well, they barely managed to clock in a 20 minute live set!), there have been a number of collections of Teenage Jesus tracks. This compilation, Shut Up And Bleed, pretty much has all of the tracks from the band that were recorded to tape. It should be noted that the cd version of the same name contained tracks from Beirut Slump, another early Lydia Lunch project; but none of those cuts appear on this Cherry Red vinyl reish.
Whoo-hoo! Congats to the UK's mightiest metal periodical upon reaching their 200th issue. To celebrate, there's (part one of) a feature on the "200 essential albums" as picked by a bunch of your favorite bands... Also this ish, cover stars Sepultura look back at their past. And also: Limbonic Art, Winterfylleth, Misery Index, Blind Guardian, Mael Mordha, Danzig, Horseback, Castevet, Doro, and plenty more... Plus the usual ton o' reviews, news, ads for awesome European metal festivals you probably won't be going to, and a free cover-mounted cd sampler.
Wow, total sleeper hit of the year! This came out a few months ago and we almost missed it, but damn are we happy we we got our hands on this as Twin Sister have made one of the most woozy and deliciously bittersweet pop records of the year. A sound rife with swirling melodies, lush warm instrumentation and dreamy vocals that sound like a feather just drifting along on a soft breeze. Like a much more subdued and swoony Stereolab, or if Saint Etienne covered Beach House and Taken By Trees. There is such a warm and intoxicating sensation infusing all of these songs. We also hear this really cool hint of a Seefeel influence in the way their songs swirl and float so easily. One of those record so perfect for mornings or early afternoons with the windows half open and the breeze from outside mixing with the breeze from these songs creating such a perfect state of sound. Be ready to melt, this is gorgeous!
Latest comp of genius dubstep and bass heavy grooves, and it's SO goddamn good, it's been hard to listen to anything else since we got this in. Avid readers of the aQ list no doubt know by now, how much we love dubstep, especially the harder, darker, bassier strains, which is precisely what you get here, two discs of some of the heaviest buzzing low end bass heavy jams of the last few years, the thread that connects them is not just a label, but a UK studio as well, where all these tracks were produced, before being released on various labels, and on various 12"s between 2004 and 2009.
Folks already way into dubstep will probably see the artists included and be sold: Vex'd, Joker, Skream, 2562, Pinch, Loefah, Cyrus and a bunch more, but anyone who's been digging the recent series of Soul Jazz dubstep collections, or like us, is always on the lookout for some seriously dense and heavy buzzy dubstep bliss, well then, this is definitely gonna hit the spot.
Both discs start off with killer jams from Vex'd, whose Cloud Seed record was our Record Of The Week a while back, and of course, these tracks rule just as hard, thick fuzzy bass, distorted synthy squelch, distorted toasting style vocals, lurching stuttery beats, the perfect way to kick off both discs for sure. Drop the needle anywhere though (yeah, we know, or the LASER or whatever), and you're bound to land on some seriously deliriously kick ass buzz and stutter, warble and crunch, Joker & Ginz's skwee-like "Purple City", Pinch & P Duddy's lumbering super blown out bass skitter anthem "War Dub", Circuit Breaker's super hypnotic low end pounding repeto-groove "Phonque", Joker's cinematic epic "Stuck In The System", with its moody string like melodies, and insanely thick bass warble and cool synth pulses, Cyrus's warbly Eastern tinged "Indian Stomp", October's super spare, dubbed out minimal "Euro Dance Hit" which is anything but, Loefah's clattery dubdronescape "System", not to mention a whole bunch of minimal Pole style digidub jams on disc 2.
Absolute bass bliss, and divine dubstep dreaminess, although not so much dreamy as dark, but still, WAY WAY recommended. Definitely one of our new favorite electronica comps, dubstep or otherwise...
Now available on vinyl!
Horse Meat Disco have proven to be not only some of the best dance / disco DJ's on the planet but also such awesome ambassadors of preserving and celebrating the spirit and soul of classic disco for a whole new generation. Their compilation and mix from last year was one of our favorite collections of dance jams we'd heard in ages and with this second volume they continue to show that there is an endless vault of rare disco gems to be excavated and revisited, and we're so stoked they are putting their love and appreciation of that time, and sound, and making these awesome compilations.
This time out it's a collection of tracks by so many folks that have slipped under even the most disco loving of the AQ staff's radar as well as a few people we know and love (Stephanie Mills, Madleen Kane, Scherrie Payne). But damn what a rad schooling in so many unsung heroes of disco past as we've been moving with big wide smiles on our face to tracks by folks like First Love, Bravo, Electra, Nightfall, etc. If luck had been a little different for some of those artist's their names and songs would be as well known as folks like Gloria Gaynor, Thelma Houston, Gwen Guthrie, Donna Summer, Evelyn "Champagne" King, Labelle, Anita Ward, etc. Horse Meat Disco understands that true disco spirit is so much about the pure emotional energy that was bringing people together on dance floors in total bliss and unity, and it translates in the awesome parties they throw in the UK and with these compilations they have put together. Everytime we play this in the store it's awesome to see how everyone shopping immediately starts tapping their feet and getting in such a good mood. This is impossible music to feel dour while listening to, and as much as we love bleak and brooding sounds around here, we also know that it's important to also have the good stuff to go to when you want to get in a fun, physical dance state of mind, and when you do, it don't get much better then this. So awesome!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Okay Mississippi Records obsessives, get ready to blow your tops. Besides the amazing Been Here All My Days comp reviewed on the last list (grab one if you haven't yet, it's fantastic!), there are five, count 'em FIVE other new Mississippi titles this time around: I'll Meet You On That Other Shore, I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die, I'll Be So Glad When The Sun Goes Down, Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long and Wave The Ocean, Wave The Sea, all culled from a legendary set of Alan Lomax field recordings, collected during his "Southern Journey, a trip he took through the American South, between the years 1959 and 1960, accompanied by British folk singer Shirley Collins, during which he made the first ever stereo recordings of American Traditional music in the field, capturing in stereo for the first time, music from Southern prison farms, the traditional gospel choral folksong of the Sacred Harp, the Southern Fife And Drum Corps, the debut recordings of blues legend Fred McDowell, not to mention an incredibly varied selection of musics from blues to bluegrass to country to gospel, captured on porches, at dairy farms, in churches, at picnics, state fairs, in prisons, in living rooms and in bars, many of the musicians, many of the folks Lomax had recorded before, and was visiting again, years later, while many were new discoveries.
According to the extensive liner notes, Lomax upon returning to the US, after a decade long recording trip in Europe and the UK, was hailed as a hero, responsible for the revival of interest in American folk music, but was quite disappointed by all the young people playing the folk music and traditional American music he helped discover, record and expose to this new audience, an audience that seemed to believe not only were they preserving the music, but also in some strange way "improving" on the originals, which horrified Lomax and spurred him to make the trip that would be later known as his "Southern Journey", not only to capture stereo recordings of all this amazing, still thriving American music, but to also prove those young folks wrong.
The results speak for themselves, 5 lps of gorgeous, unique, heartfelt American music, instrumental and vocal, celebratory and sorrowful, ballads and bluegrass hoedowns, gospel spirituals and military marches, call and response prison songs and back porch blues, and so much more. This is classic, timeless music, sounds imbued with the sweat and blood, the lives and deaths, the loves and losses of the American people, past and present, moving and emotional, and totally fantastic...
As for which one of the five to buy, it's a tough call, they're all fantastic, and the music is varied on each, they're not divided by theme or style, instead, it's more like a sprawling 5 part compilation, each as good as the next, so yeah, obviously if you can, you should buy all 5, but if that's too much, heck, just pick one, maybe with a title that appeals to you, and dig in. Odds are you'll be back for more.
Packed in super heavy jackets, with printed liner notes on the back, each volume containing a big booklet, with photos and more notes on each of the different tracks and all of the various performers.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Okay Mississippi Records obsessives, get ready to blow your tops. Besides the amazing Been Here All My Days comp reviewed on the last list (grab one if you haven't yet, it's fantastic!), there are five, count 'em FIVE other new Mississippi titles this time around: I'll Meet You On That Other Shore, I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die, I'll Be So Glad When The Sun Goes Down, Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long and Wave The Ocean, Wave The Sea, all culled from a legendary set of Alan Lomax field recordings, collected during his "Southern Journey, a trip he took through the American South, between the years 1959 and 1960, accompanied by British folk singer Shirley Collins, during which he made the first ever stereo recordings of American Traditional music in the field, capturing in stereo for the first time, music from Southern prison farms, the traditional gospel choral folksong of the Sacred Harp, the Southern Fife And Drum Corps, the debut recordings of blues legend Fred McDowell, not to mention an incredibly varied selection of musics from blues to bluegrass to country to gospel, captured on porches, at dairy farms, in churches, at picnics, state fairs, in prisons, in living rooms and in bars, many of the musicians, many of the folks Lomax had recorded before, and was visiting again, years later, while many were new discoveries.
According to the extensive liner notes, Lomax upon returning to the US, after a decade long recording trip in Europe and the UK, was hailed as a hero, responsible for the revival of interest in American folk music, but was quite disappointed by all the young people playing the folk music and traditional American music he helped discover, record and expose to this new audience, an audience that seemed to believe not only were they preserving the music, but also in some strange way "improving" on the originals, which horrified Lomax and spurred him to make the trip that would be later known as his "Southern Journey", not only to capture stereo recordings of all this amazing, still thriving American music, but to also prove those young folks wrong.
The results speak for themselves, 5 lps of gorgeous, unique, heartfelt American music, instrumental and vocal, celebratory and sorrowful, ballads and bluegrass hoedowns, gospel spirituals and military marches, call and response prison songs and back porch blues, and so much more. This is classic, timeless music, sounds imbued with the sweat and blood, the lives and deaths, the loves and losses of the American people, past and present, moving and emotional, and totally fantastic...
As for which one of the five to buy, it's a tough call, they're all fantastic, and the music is varied on each, they're not divided by theme or style, instead, it's more like a sprawling 5 part compilation, each as good as the next, so yeah, obviously if you can, you should buy all 5, but if that's too much, heck, just pick one, maybe with a title that appeals to you, and dig in. Odds are you'll be back for more.
Packed in super heavy jackets, with printed liner notes on the back, each volume containing a big booklet, with photos and more notes on each of the different tracks and all of the various performers.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Okay Mississippi Records obsessives, get ready to blow your tops. Besides the amazing Been Here All My Days comp reviewed on the last list (grab one if you haven't yet, it's fantastic!), there are five, count 'em FIVE other new Mississippi titles this time around: I'll Meet You On That Other Shore, I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die, I'll Be So Glad When The Sun Goes Down, Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long and Wave The Ocean, Wave The Sea, all culled from a legendary set of Alan Lomax field recordings, collected during his "Southern Journey, a trip he took through the American South, between the years 1959 and 1960, accompanied by British folk singer Shirley Collins, during which he made the first ever stereo recordings of American Traditional music in the field, capturing in stereo for the first time, music from Southern prison farms, the traditional gospel choral folksong of the Sacred Harp, the Southern Fife And Drum Corps, the debut recordings of blues legend Fred McDowell, not to mention an incredibly varied selection of musics from blues to bluegrass to country to gospel, captured on porches, at dairy farms, in churches, at picnics, state fairs, in prisons, in living rooms and in bars, many of the musicians, many of the folks Lomax had recorded before, and was visiting again, years later, while many were new discoveries.
According to the extensive liner notes, Lomax upon returning to the US, after a decade long recording trip in Europe and the UK, was hailed as a hero, responsible for the revival of interest in American folk music, but was quite disappointed by all the young people playing the folk music and traditional American music he helped discover, record and expose to this new audience, an audience that seemed to believe not only were they preserving the music, but also in some strange way "improving" on the originals, which horrified Lomax and spurred him to make the trip that would be later known as his "Southern Journey", not only to capture stereo recordings of all this amazing, still thriving American music, but to also prove those young folks wrong.
The results speak for themselves, 5 lps of gorgeous, unique, heartfelt American music, instrumental and vocal, celebratory and sorrowful, ballads and bluegrass hoedowns, gospel spirituals and military marches, call and response prison songs and back porch blues, and so much more. This is classic, timeless music, sounds imbued with the sweat and blood, the lives and deaths, the loves and losses of the American people, past and present, moving and emotional, and totally fantastic...
As for which one of the five to buy, it's a tough call, they're all fantastic, and the music is varied on each, they're not divided by theme or style, instead, it's more like a sprawling 5 part compilation, each as good as the next, so yeah, obviously if you can, you should buy all 5, but if that's too much, heck, just pick one, maybe with a title that appeals to you, and dig in. Odds are you'll be back for more.
Packed in super heavy jackets, with printed liner notes on the back, each volume containing a big booklet, with photos and more notes on each of the different tracks and all of the various performers.
Rarely has something showed up in the store that so many of us have wanted so badly, so instantly. An incredible TEN DISC boxset, accompanied by a huge book, tracing the history of Bollywood music, from its beginnings in the 1930s, to the present. All its influences represented, from classical to rock and jazz, new age, disco, hip hop, featuring so many legendary Bollywood vocalists including Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Hemant Kumar, Geeta Dutt, Sonu Niigaam, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohd. Rafi and tons more. 168 tracks total! We haven't actually opened one up yet, but odds are we're all gonna end up buying one, $99 for ten discs and a book, hard to beat, and judging from the tracklisting and the artists included, it's bound to be incredible, just figured we would get it up on the list/site sooner rather than later, and give aQ listers first crack at scoring one of these amazing collections!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Okay Mississippi Records obsessives, get ready to blow your tops. Besides the amazing Been Here All My Days comp reviewed on the last list (grab one if you haven't yet, it's fantastic!), there are five, count 'em FIVE other new Mississippi titles this time around: I'll Meet You On That Other Shore, I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die, I'll Be So Glad When The Sun Goes Down, Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long and Wave The Ocean, Wave The Sea, all culled from a legendary set of Alan Lomax field recordings, collected during his "Southern Journey, a trip he took through the American South, between the years 1959 and 1960, accompanied by British folk singer Shirley Collins, during which he made the first ever stereo recordings of American Traditional music in the field, capturing in stereo for the first time, music from Southern prison farms, the traditional gospel choral folksong of the Sacred Harp, the Southern Fife And Drum Corps, the debut recordings of blues legend Fred McDowell, not to mention an incredibly varied selection of musics from blues to bluegrass to country to gospel, captured on porches, at dairy farms, in churches, at picnics, state fairs, in prisons, in living rooms and in bars, many of the musicians, many of the folks Lomax had recorded before, and was visiting again, years later, while many were new discoveries.
According to the extensive liner notes, Lomax upon returning to the US, after a decade long recording trip in Europe and the UK, was hailed as a hero, responsible for the revival of interest in American folk music, but was quite disappointed by all the young people playing the folk music and traditional American music he helped discover, record and expose to this new audience, an audience that seemed to believe not only were they preserving the music, but also in some strange way "improving" on the originals, which horrified Lomax and spurred him to make the trip that would be later known as his "Southern Journey", not only to capture stereo recordings of all this amazing, still thriving American music, but to also prove those young folks wrong.
The results speak for themselves, 5 lps of gorgeous, unique, heartfelt American music, instrumental and vocal, celebratory and sorrowful, ballads and bluegrass hoedowns, gospel spirituals and military marches, call and response prison songs and back porch blues, and so much more. This is classic, timeless music, sounds imbued with the sweat and blood, the lives and deaths, the loves and losses of the American people, past and present, moving and emotional, and totally fantastic...
As for which one of the five to buy, it's a tough call, they're all fantastic, and the music is varied on each, they're not divided by theme or style, instead, it's more like a sprawling 5 part compilation, each as good as the next, so yeah, obviously if you can, you should buy all 5, but if that's too much, heck, just pick one, maybe with a title that appeals to you, and dig in. Odds are you'll be back for more.
Packed in super heavy jackets, with printed liner notes on the back, each volume containing a big booklet, with photos and more notes on each of the different tracks and all of the various performers.
