This is some seriously smoking vintage funk out of New Orleans from the early '70s. An 8-piece outfit, they were best known as the studio band for the Jewel / Paula Soul Power label, they backed up the likes of Fontella Bass, Little Johnny Taylor and Bobby Paterson. But even without a singer their music sounded exactly the way you want your funk to sound: raw, hot and gritty. While they never received the same acclaim as folks like The Meters or The J.B.'s this is still some top notch real-deal funk. The original vinyl of this release is pretty much impossible to find so this cd reissue is a welcome arrival for all soul and funk lovers.
While there is no shortage of rad girl group inspired garage pop coming out right now, Aias add some totally unique and spirited energy to the mix, definitely helping them stand out from the garage girl crowd: Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Slumber Party, etc. Singing in their native Catalan, these three women from Spain show that it's still possible to breathe fresh life into a sound that's been around the block, a sound that can always sound so damn good when done so totally right. And Aias do it so right. With a naive charming quality that sounds a little like Shonen Knife covering the Ramones and The Ronettes, with every single song perfectly hitting the spot. The recording is so warm and minimal in the best way, like our favorite early recordings that came out on K, this is such a smart pop record that understands that stripping away the fat leaves you with just the good stuff. A new favorite pop record for sure!
Swanlights might be the most giving, emotional and personal record yet from Antony & The Johnsons. Right from the get go, you've got "Everything Is New" which builds to a triumphant climax and captures the same kind of intensity that "I Hope There Is Someone" conjured, the opener to the 2005 release I Am Bird Now, which so strongly reeled us in to the world of Antony at the time. The follow up to that record, The Crying Light, was much more stark and insular, distant even, yet was still so haunting and intense. But with Swanlights it feels like Antony is coming to these songs from a much more personal and intimate point of view, and as always his voice and the song structures just totally make us melt and give us chills and the effects of these songs linger and linger...
Besides having a song called "I'm In Love" we get the exciting feeling that Antony may very well in fact be in love in a way we haven't heard from him before. There are several tracks with a much more wide eyed and under-the-influence, blood-rushing-love sound then on any of his past recordings. So while there is a more hopeful and uplifting tone to Swanlights, there are still lots of great somber and haunting moments, including a truly chilling duet with Bjork. Once again another stunning set of songs from Antony that we'll be listening to for a long time to come.
Another 'witch house' luminary gets their first proper (non cd-r or download) release in the form of this gorgeous 5 song ep. For those who have somehow missed out on the whole witch house thing, it's sort of hard to describe, a new self proclaimed genre that seems to mix electronic music with dark creepy samples, everything slowed down and murky and witchy, ethereal vocals, distorted production, there's already a serious backlash because of the ridiculous witch house hype, which is pretty funny, considering probably all but the very hippest folks have barely even heard any witch house.
We reviewed the debut 12" from oOoOO a few lists back (all the witch house bands tend to have names that borrow heavily from the zapf dingbats font and the special keys on your keyboard), a fantastically dreamy chunk of electronic ghostly minimal dream pop, we also made Salem's King Night our Record of the Week, with its bombastic shoegaze bliss meets chopped and screwed Southern style crunk, but Balam Acab definitely tends toward the former, the two part title track a fuzzy, almost dubsteppy bit of gently glitchy gauziness, angelic vocals, wreathed in reverb, drifting over swirling industrial loops and shimmering synths, the second part totally blissed out and otherworldly, the beats spare and skeletal, the vocals floating on clouds of whirling effects and blurred melody, while in between, basslines buzz ominously, beats careen in slow motion, voices loop and hover, melodies fragment and drift apart, the sound like some eighties MTV pop slowed way down and dipped in drugs and left in the afternoon sun to warm, fuzzy streaks of sound wrapped around stuttery glacial beats, "Big Boy" offering up a hook on par with "See Birds", while "Dream Out" sounds like a warped Kate Bush record playing at 16rpm, while kids play video games in the next room.
Awesome stuff. And we could care less really if the hipster intelligentsia has decided witch house is dead, cuz we're definitely dying to hear more...
Before, After is a collaboration between Mike Pollard (Pale Blue Sky, Treetops, the owner of Arbor Records), and Jon Borges (Pedestrian Deposit, Emaciator, the owner of Monorail Trespassing), the two working together bring to the table their mutual aesthetic appreciation for a world of post-noise dronescaping. In the cold oscillations of electrical hum and arcs of dual-tone ambience from all sorts of synths, pedals, and whatnot, it's easy to put these sounds in the orbit of Emeralds / Outer Space / Mist / etc.
Pollard and Borges affix a fluctuating halo of electricity to all of their subtle oscillations, and all of this voltage, wattage, and ampage is somewhat threatening, but presented at a relatively safe distance. Sort of like a live wire that's been dropped into a pool of water. The thrum and glow is seductive, but deadly to the touch. This isn't to say these tones are the stuff of death ambient engineers, more just to marvel at the amount of electricity that has been wrangled, harnessed, and turned inward to provide a radiance that's somewhat beautiful, as captured in emergent, ethereal fluctuations and accretive drones swarming into a series of Jeck / Basinski loops. Another exceptional tape from what has become the preeminent cassette label in the US.
For some of us, Belle And Sebastian are one of the only bands that have been a constant in our lives for the last fifteen years. So listening to them always takes on extra weight as we immediately are flooded with so many memories when we hear their delicate and exquisitely constructed bittersweet pop songs. Seeing them live just a couple weeks ago we were reminded just how many life defining and moment-capturing songs they've created over the years with an ease and breeze that so many have tried to emulate but always seem to come up short. During that live set we got to hear several of the songs that are on Write About Love for the first time and it made us very excited for the album.
Like all Belle And Sebastian albums, it's hard to write about this new one without spending tons of time with it as they really are a band who make records for the long haul. As all their records have left a mark on us even if at first we didn't think we were as in love with it as the one before.
Write About Love is a nice mixture of the slower side of the band as well as a few totally sugary and catchy songs that we have been humming non stop since we got this in. The record does make us miss Isobel Campbell, as a couple of the female led tracks just aren't as special as when they were being sung by her. But we know that so many of these songs will become totally ingrained in helping cue so many future memories of romance, friendships, lazy rainy days, and sun soaked adventures. (FYI, vinyl being repressed, probably back in stock next week.)
The mission has been terminated, once again. Without giving any reasons, Maurizio Bianchi has given up producing music. Of course, this is not the first time that Bianchi had ceased operations, as he famously disappeared from sight around 1984 after a frenzy of releases beginning around 1978. Those albums, in particular Symphony For A Genocide and The Plain Truth, as well as William Bennett's antics on two early MB records released on Come Organisation, secured his status as a heavy weight of Industrial Culture alongside Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, Ramleh, and Whitehouse; and the demonstrative cessation only served to buttress his mythology. But by the late '90s, Bianchi began recording once again, gradually returning to the frenzied pace he set during his earlier peak of activity. Unfortunately, the new work has not always been up to snuff, as he didn't seem to turn down any collaborative offer and didn't seem too interested in the finer points of editing his content. BUT, there have been some real gems amidst the chaff.
Hence, we announce Das Platinzeitalter. A quintessential Bianchi construction, this album meditates upon the minutiae of crumbling systems, returning to a common theme of Bianchi's classic period -- the cancerous body faced with a slow demise through ancillary pathogens. His sounds are blackened ambiences culled from stacked grey-smear loops and elongated ashen drones, some of which have been purported to originate from Jozef Van Wissem's lute recordings, although you'll be hard pressed to find anything lute-like in these shadowing sounds. Ominous. Grim. Foreboding. Oppressive. Neurotic. These are all apt descriptions to Bianchi's best work; and those all apply here, but with the strange twist that this ambience is somewhat contemplative, as if Bianchi's death-obsessed soundtrack is more of an enveloping invitation instead of a scream of horror.
This 2lp was originally released as a cd on Van Wissem's Incunabula a couple years back, and now appears on vinyl courtesy of Weird Forest in a modest edition of 500 copies.
When we listed a previous edition of this some years ago, it was back when our reviews were, um, a lot shorter. So all's we said then was that it was a proto-metal essential, from Japan's answer to Black Sabbath. And maybe that's enough, but since we dig this album so much, and it has at long last been reissued again, let's go for something a bit more expansive...
First off, Blues Creation's Demon & Eleven Children, their second and most classic album, dates from 1971. That's right, 1971!!! Of course it does. They'd started off in '69 with a record of all blues covers, but by '71 they'd heavied-up, and were ready with an album of originals, obviously influenced by the likes of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple's In Rock. And dig that cover art. If you're one of our many proto-metal lovin' customers, you NEED this.
Among early '70s Japanese heavy psych hard rock bands, THESE guys (next to, arguably, Flower Travellin' Band) were indeed the heaviest we've heard. And definitely the most Sabbathy (though FTB did cover Sabbath... and Flied Egg came close too, even putting albums out on Vertigo). But really, just listen to the opening track here, "Atomic Bombs Away". No question. Sounds like a song Sabbath wrote for their first album, but let Blues Creation have instead. Heck if you didn't know better, it really sounds like Iommi's playing the guitar riffs and solos, and Geezer's on the swinging, lumbering bass! Obviously, it's heavy, gotta be when it's called "Atomic Bombs Away" (we wonder if it was was weird for a Japanese band to title a song that, only about 25 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The song ain't actually about atomic bombs, actually, like most of the tracks on Demon & Eleven Children, it's about lovin' and leavin' (or being left). Which can be heavy stuff too. Sample lyrics from "Atomic Bombs Away": "First time I lay you in the rusty shack / Black night keep fallin' in your gypsy eyes / Keep on movin' till the end of time / Lord have mercy for my sin / Set me free from my destiny".
The next track is called "Mississippi Mountain Blues", complete with harmonica... but it's urgent and rollicking, and in any case about as conventionally blues rock as they ever get here. We call this proto-METAL for a reason. Just check out the rockin' riff-fest of an instrumental, entitled "Brane Baster" (aka "Brain Buster"), to see what we mean. It's not all about Sabbath emulation, either. They're proto-Priest in parts, too, or at least, they've got tight twin guitar action on here that'll impress the Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy fans. Definitely pretty badass for when and where they were from. Tracks like "Sorrow" do the slow and sad thing pretty well too. It's not all heavy - there's the gentle "One Summer Day", as lovely as its title suggests. But if you want heavy, '71 style, this album won't disappoint you at all, indeed, you'll be be freaking out. It concludes with the epic, and ripping, 9+ minute title track, and if you're not bowing down to Blues Creation by then, your name had better be, like, Ritchie Blackmore.
Julian Cope ranked this as #17 in his Japrocksampler top 50, not bad. From a proto-metal point of view, though, it's top ten material, and we're not just talking Japan. Up there with Bang and Dust and Buffalo and Leaf Hound and all the rest.
Reissued in one of those wallet-digi packages, numbered.
Named for the mysterious Northern California glade where old white male dignitaries gather to perform strange and bizarre rituals, hold costumed orgies and who knows what else. Members include a who's who of world leaders, businessmen and various other wielders of power. These Greek black metallers wield their own brand of power, manifested in these blasts of frenzied avant black metal madness, furious gnarled riffage, colliding with incredibly dense and complex drumming, gorgeous epic and twisted melodies and gruff demonic vokills, the awesomely titled opener "Star Wimpled Dome" combines all of those elements into some seriously classic black metal, only to switch gears with "The Tree Ravens", more of a Buzumic lope, with some surprising vocals, deep bellows, super operatic croons, but those bits are nestled between bursts of furious blast, and pounding doomic trudge. Two more chunks of twisted epic black metal lead to the 11+ minute finale, a sprawling epic titled "When The North Winds Blow Fair", that like much of the record channels a bit of Deathspell through classic Norwegian style blackness, guitars here soar and howl, the track flitting from grinding black gnarl to frenzied insectoid buzz to lumbering midtempo crush, some incredibly catchy Khold-like riffing, some killer classic metal leads, more surprising almost operatic vocals, all wound around an awesomely intricate and convoluted arrangement.
Packaged in a super striking black and gold digipak, with some seriously bad ass bare-breasted goatgod / pagan ritual / mysterious monk cover art, not to mention a nicely printed booklet/lyric sheet.
Tape hiss, simple melodies, mechanical rhythms, dubby reverb... Nice! We're diggin' on the 16 tracks, 33 minutes�of blissful, bedroom-recorded Casio-dub instrumental music here, this cd-r being the second solo joint from Oakland's Adam Bugaj, a Pennsylvania transplant who played "lysergic barn rock" with underground psych acts Peacefeather and Clear Spots back in PA. Rather than rockin' out, though, this is lazy Sunday stoned music from the man, lo-fi DIY mesmerism, like a Jewelled Antler production of home-brewed Kompakt techno, shimmering with hiss and distortion. 'Tis spacey and mellow, sometimes subverted by sudden manual tape edits... Throw in a bit of Fahey folky guitar ramble here or there, and broken electronics that get accidentally cosmic and Cluster-like, with echoey keys, heartbeat drum machine pulses, minimal drones, fractured rhythms... Imagine, maybe, a more outsider version of Pantha Du Prince, recorded on, like, $15 worth of yard sale equipment and cheap cassette tapes. Yes it's pretty nice!
Greg Scharpen is an artist who's never without a project at hand. While the bulk of his artistic career has been spent in the sound design realm of East Bay theater and dance troupes, he also dons the Thomas Carnacki pseudonym to conduct various exercises in audio surrealism. Over the years, Scharpen has been a noted contributor to the irr.app.(ext.) live presentations and has even made appearances in the Nurse With Wound's rotating cast. These two figureheads of paratactic collage and bizarro-world atmospherics loom large in the audio vocabulary of Mr. Scharpen, and that of course is a very good thing! The Disappearance Of This Terrible Spool is just the second release by Carnacki / Scharpen, following the 2006 album Far Voyage From A Placid Island. Thus it begins with deep swells of thick reverberations that ascend towards a clatter of indeterminant gizmos, only to collapse into a maudlin half-melody of vibrato drone and lost-at-sea undulation. Think Nurse With Wound circa Shipwreck Radio, and you would not be all that far off. The somber tone of this first track continues through the second, due in part to the central role of a mournful violin performed by Gregory Hagan also of Common Eider, King Eider. The final two tracks embrace the disjointed, disembodied, discombobulated cut-n-paste collage techniques with spluttering electronics and truncated gaspings for air - again NWW, irr.app.(ext.) or HNAS comes to mind. A tad brief at 24 minutes, but not a minute is wasted within!
Boy, were we looking forward to this: A strange 1974 French sci-fi based concept album that claims comparisons to both Alain Goraguer (La Planete Sauvage) and Jean-Claude Vannier (L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, Melody Nelson), by some composer we had never heard of, Jacky Chalard, perhaps originally made under the assumed identity Gilbert Deflez (the booklet has the puzzling backstory). We were blown away by the opening number, "L'Agonie", almost fulfilling the promise of the B-Music folks' claims. But then almost all the following tracks are either spoken word, or strange radio plays in French (sort of in the same wacky spirit as Les Maledictus Sound), which we wouldn't mind normally, except the spoken stuff is on almost every track on the record, and after awhile, we want to just hear the backing music alone, because it IS so good! Occasionally, there is a French woman singing which is nice and there's a couple of Massiera-ish disco pop numbers, but overall, the narrative aspects becomes just a bit tedious. At least it's in French, though, that helps. We're sure this is a must have for some folks who dig the stranger realms of french prog-pop, but we can't recommend it as highly as La Planete Sauvage, Jean-Paul Massiera, or Jean-Claude Vannier.
Our favorite predictably unpredictable, hypnotically rockin' Finnish band, Circle, have made so many amazing albums (dozens of 'em!) that they're essentially an institution now, an integral part of our lives, an eternal manifestation of the creative energy of the universe. In other words, we can count on 'em to come up with something wonderful on a regular basis. They're kinda like Christmas, or your birthday, or something, except sometimes Circle gift us with more than one album per year. Sure, some Circle albums (like some Christmases) are better than others, of course, but we've yet to be disappointed. Though their last one, 2008's Hollywood, was a bit of an odd duck, what with featuring special guest Bruce "Jesters Of Destiny" Duff on vocals... This new one, however, we can recommend without any warnings about unexpected vocalists, though you do have to be into Mika's trademark faux-operatic excesses, which Circle fans should certainly be used to by now. And in fact, while he croons in his usual over-the-top manner some of the time, there are also songs here where the singing is much more "normal", making for some of Circle's most conventionally melodic pop moments ever, relatively speaking. Well, make that prog-pop. Rautatie is an EPIC effort from Circle indeed. Or maybe "effort" isn't the right word. 'Cause they make it seem effortless. So natural, the unique Circle sound just surging through 'em as soon as they enter the studio. In any case, it's epic, especially grand finale "Kaasukello", 8 minutes 18 seconds long, which builds from a sheen of shimmering rhythmic patterning in the style of Circle's possibly prettiest album, Miljard, into soaring waves of massive majestic choral prog triumph, causing all within earshot to raise their fists in the air, and look to the skies with a shared sense of exaltation. Wow. We kept putting that one on repeat, but the whole album is compelling, worthy of, like, infinite spins too.
And it's a varied experience, lots to grok... the opening, title track starts off with some heavy "NWOFHM" riffage, immediately making us think this is gonna be one of Circle's "metal-ly" efforts, perhaps like Katapult or Sunrise. But then that song suddenly switches to a repetitive (natch) '70s prog sounding section, adorned with weird wordless vocal outbursts from a (seizure-suffering?) Mika, before the guitars get kinda punk, and then return to the metal majesty with which it began... all that in under 5 minutes. And it's catchy, too. As is a lot of this, such as the rousing "Vaellus", sure to be a hit, that is if they'd play a 7:58 song on the radio, with lyrics in Finnish (or is it their own language "Meronian"?), some of 'em sung in a chipmunk-metal shriek. The synths are laid on thick on that one, and elsewhere, ferinstance on the equally epic "Kohtalon Sormi", from which we're getting a nice Ennio Morricone-ish vibe. Propulsive rhythms, incongruously placid piano parts, atmospheric interludes, and distorted guitar wailings are also all part of the proceedings on Rautatie. Especially those propulsive rhythms, of course.
It's definitely a proggy album, in more of an overt classic '70s prog style than some Circle albums have been, though of course they're ALL quite proggy and krautrocky. Plus those metal moments crop up more than once too, so those into Circle's heavier, leather and spikes side will get their fix as well. (However tongue in cheek that "NWOFHM" aspect of Circle is, it cannot be argued that they don't rock hard, and we know 'em to be true metal fans for sure.) And, as we said, it's practically pop at points too. And experimental. And... well, lots of things, as only Circle can do.
Furthermore, with a week's exposure to Rautatie so far, we feel it's been getting better and better with every listen, always the sign of a great album. Yay, go Circle! Heck, hyperbolically speaking, if they ever stop, it'll be like the end of the world...
Clinic are a band who hit the scene with such a refreshing splash of perfected art-rock a decade ago and while they haven't really released anything bad, it can be argued that they did make the same record several times and the freshness that we once felt had turned a bit stale. But with Bubblegum the band seems to have injected a bit of new life and explored a broader sound palette to add to their distinctive sound. And while we can't deny that these songs sound cool there's still something that seems to be missing, that keeps us from getting too excited.
If you hold the cover at just the right angle, a misanthropic and self-loathing text emerges from what might appear at first to be simply just another austere, all white package housing another austere album of micro-glitch minimalism. This well-executed design strategy (courtesy of Randy Yau) works to complement Joe Colley's subversive agenda, which even ends up undermining his own intentions. For all of the macho posturing of the text (e.g. "REMEMBER HOW WE DESTROYED THE THINGS THAT MADE US HAPPY AND HOW WE STILL DO? LETS DAMAGE EACH OTHER BEYOND REPAIR..." and so on) and the opening 8 second jolt of unneccessary noise, Colley's sound constructions speak of an inquisitive spirit. Throughout this record, Colley pokes and prods various sonic-making situations that often hold fascinating textural detailings. The most obvious example of this is found in his recordings of water being absorbed by modelling clay, which results in a dense chorus of tiny squeaks and squiggles. Colley almost allows himself to be seduced by these sounds; but just before he does, that misanthropic urge deep within his being instructs him to obliterate those curious textures though harsh digital noises, piercing arpeggiations, and noxious jump-cuts. This strategic hammering of sound certainly keeps the listener alert to what may be coming next; thus making the intricate detail work far more enjoyable... if "enjoyable" can in fact be a description attributed to Colley's solo output or his earlier work as Crawl Unit.
Another gorgeous outing of hushed acoustic sprawl and hauntingly grey ambience from San Francisco's Common Eider, King Eider. It's record number three from this mysteriously monikered band of outsiders, now expanded into a four-piece, still led by Rob Fisk, former member of both Badgerlore and Deerhoof.
We've always been impressed with the ghostly decay that seems to be so effortlessly flowing through CEKE's sound, a perfect balance of organic drone and instrumental songwriting, all bundled together into a seamless journey into the coldest, deepest woods. We must say that Worn immediately appears more melancholic and somber than past CEKE releases, whether it's the doom laden vocal drawls of Grouper on "Ennui" or George Chen's heaaaaavy buzzing guitar riff on "All They Will Find Is Blood", we're totally blown away!
Swells of gorgeously shimmering vocal melodies weave in and out of the rumbling distorted guitars like some shoegazing doom opera, an ocean of distortion buzzing under a glowing sky, so serene and moving. What we really love about Worn is while there are defiantly heavy moments of sheer epicness, there are also moments of precise composition and gently guided ambience. "The Rabbits Will Come Again" unfolds with gracefully bowed notes ringing out into the moonlit sky, while distant bells and shimmering feedback melt into the mournful piano. Vocal sighs and whispers set the mood for a deep forest seance, super chilling and super amazing. In addition to the special appearance made by Miss Grouper, don't miss out on Tom Carter's whirlwind cameo on "Earth Liver"! And don't forget, this one is limited to 300 copies, complete with lp covers that fold out into full size posters, lovely packaging for this ice cold, psychedelic epic!
We do love our lo-fi New Zealand indie rock, and South Auckland's Coolies apparently realize that we like it best really lo-fi... and noisy... 'cause that's what they deliver! We're not surprised we dig 'em so much, 'cause their current drummer happens to be Stefan Neville, of AQ-fave NZ noise-popsters Pumice (and The Futurians, etc.), and he also recorded, mixed and edited the material on Master. Otherwise consisting of girls (Tina and Sjionel), who started the band as teens, Coolies have been around since the late '90s, releasing a 7" back in 2000, and a 10-song tape recorded on a ghetto blaster... but this is their first full-length cd, comprising music made over the past four or so years since Stefan joined the band. Raucous, energetic, poppy, punky, "annoying" (their word), "brilliant" (also theirs, but we tend to agree), the ten tracks on Master, most of 'em short sharp shocks, should appeal to NZ noise nerds, as well as peeps into today's burgeoning garage punk girl-groop soundz like Vivian Girls, Brilliant Colors, Grass Widow... the DIYness of this also brings to mind those Messthetics comps of '80s UK cassette culture. Oh and we're also reminded of Kleenex/Liliput. In short, the Coolies are cool. If you're in the mood for some raw, angular, urgently rhythmic "pop" songs that is! From the same label that brought us recent the Record Of The Week by Fabulous Diamonds, another Down Under fave...
('Tis also on vinyl, we're out at the moment, but should get some soon...)
Dom Fernow (Ash Pool, Vegas Martyrs, Prurient, Cold Cave) of Hospital Productions insisted that this record from mysterious USBM outfit Curved Blade was totally aQ worthy, and boy was he right. A stumbling damaged chunk of plodding, lumbering outsider death-obsessed doom flecked black metal grimnity.
The guitars are warbly and warped, the drums are loose and chaotic, the keyboards add a twisted droned out vibe, the vocals are barely vocals, more an inhuman moan, the tracks plod along, always seemingly on the verge of total collapse, constantly shifting tempos, giving the record a seriously twisted seasick feel, and when the band do attempt to blast, or even just up the tempo, they sound like they're struggling desperately to keep it together, only making it sound that much more primitive and raw and fucked up.
It's super short, one track split over two sides, but it's everything you could want in some mysterious weirdo black metal record, it's twisted and damaged, repetitive and droney, murky and atmospheric, buzz drenched and grim, and totally and brilliantly bizarre.
As we mentioned in our review of the teaser ep that preceded this full length, unless you are seriously disconnected, you no doubt have seen or heard Die Antwoord (which means THE ANSWER), who are one of the most baffling, brilliant, raddest, silliest, goofiest, most exciting rap trios we've heard in ages. South African rednecks, one a tall gangly track suit wearing rapper called Ninja, covered in homemade tattoos and prone to performing in just boxers and sneakers, his 'hypeman', an ultra cute diminutive helium voiced elfin pixie called Yo-Landi, and finally DJ Hi-Tek, whose inclusion in the group was based on the fact that he "owned a PC computer" and made "next level" beats. And the best part about DJ Hi-Tek, a chubby baby faced dude, is that if you see them now, DJ Hi-Tek is inexplicably a tall skinny good looking guy, which is the first clue that everything is maybe not on the up and up.
When we first saw one of their videos, besides being totally blown away, and immediately crushed out on Yo-Landi, all we could think was "please be real, please be real" cuz, c'mon, it seemed way too weird and awesomely fucked up to be genuine. Some research revealed that Ninja and Yo-Landi are long time partners, who supposedly have a kid together, but more importantly, have been performing for years, in various permutations, different groups, on TV shows, art collectives, there are some amazing videos you can dig up if you know what to look for, but the bottom line was sadly, that Die Antwoord was all an elaborate prank, but which somehow really actually just made them that much cooler.
There was only two ways it could go after all, it was impossibly real, or it was the most perfectly executed art project / prank ever. And to be honest, either way, we were gonna be totally into it. But really, none of it would work if the music didn't rule, they are a band after all, and $O$ seals the deal, regardless of who they are, and where they come from, these jams slay, "Enter The Ninja" is the video that launched their career, having been viewed about a gazillion times, and with bands like this, the videos are so good, and so over the top, and they're such characters, that sometimes none of that translates to the music, but that definitely is NOT the case here, and the "Enter The Ninja" song sans visuals still slays, and yet it's not even the best jam here.
And actually, to pick the best jam would be a tough one, so much good stuff here, there's the Diplo produced "Evil Boy", which also has a head spinning over the top video, but the song itself is all over the place, featuring a young South African guest rapper and Ninja and Yo-Landi on fire, rapping about penises and underpants and whatever other weirdness they can whip up, and besides Yo-Landi's chorus refrain, her closing rap is KILLER, sexy and sinister, all delivered in her strange squeaky chirp.
There's also "Rich B***h", an awesomely stripped down synth driven groover, woozy and low slung, "Beat Boy", most notable for the 'swinging Dark Side Of The Moon boxers' video, but which features an awesomely twisted off kilter production, some robotic electro shimmer, and another killer Yo-Landi chorus, or the heavy synth raver "Wat Kyk Jy?" with a crazy anthemic chorus and cool brooding minimal verses, fuck, they're all so good. The closer, is some sort of wheezing accordion driven chunk of sea shanty cabaret, which leads into a few minutes of silence, which hides a secret bonus track that's killer and sounds like Zombi, all super sci-fi Carpenter / Goblin synth disco.
Believe the hype. Overdose on the videos, and play this record to death.
BTW: Allan and Andee saw them play an instore at another record store in SF, and they DESTROYED, whipping a crowd of hundreds into a near riot-ready frenzy, A + A included!!
Eccentric outsider doom metal from the '80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words "doom" or "metal" make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn't like any metal you've ever heard, really. More like spaced out '60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song's called "Heavy Vibrations", man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects... That's where the "outsider" tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It's so DIY that the cds have his phone number on 'em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double cd anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an '80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it's hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.
Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that's a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we're guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other "metal" albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.
Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you'd almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr's for real, something we'd vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother's bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the '80s, two from the '00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and "heaviest". A Record Of The Week, easy.
There's 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There's nothing that's NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track "Animals") are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock/metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of "Chocolate Mescalyne", a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.
And then there's the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it's not "normal" doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. "Ghost Lover", for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs' "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", and Duane's vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy "Evil Lures" too... Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks "to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments". We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin' like that. It's pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above...
The Italian horror artwork that graces Psychical is something of a red herring, as Brian Pyle guides his Ensemble Economique into the orbit of Conny Plank and Moebius in his use of electronics rather than one of Goblin or Zombi. Pyle is an artist who should need no introduction as one of principals in the Starving Weirdos as well as RV Paintings, with records on pretty much every cool label under the sun (Root Strata, Blackest Rainbow, Weird Forest, Olde English Spelling Bee, Digitalis, and now Not Not Fun). While the debut Ensemble Economique record was very much dialed into what Pyle was conjuring in RV Paintings through a superb stoner-zoner-drone vibe of gorgeous guitar shimmer and suspended harmonic intonations, his solo EE recordings have been carving out a separate identity other than the Starving Weirdos or RV Paintings. Beginning with the Standing Still, Facing Forward LP released earlier in 2010, Pyle's Ensemble Economique has been mining references from '70s and '80s progressive electronics, mostly looking back to those seminal Germans. Certainly, Holger Czukay, Plank, and Moebius come to mind; hell, even Cranioclast and Stockhausen wouldn't be that much of a stretch.
Psychical is wholly dark-trip cast upon waves of two note synth melodies that bounce back and forth against a backdrop of hand percussion and heavily looped drone-shadow. Snippets of dubbed voice and radio transmission crackle ooze a fourth-world, rhythmicist eeriness somewhere between Muslimgauze and that Zero Set record from Moebius and Plank, furthered along by bloodshot guitar snarls. Tom Carter makes a guest appearance on one of the track, bringing a rather incendiary prolonged solo to Pyle's raga-drone rhythms. All in all, another great record from Brian Pyle!
Originally released on cassette, this chunk of psychedelic atmospheric synth-fi futurism has been gussied up, the original tracks, remixed and/or re-recorded with more parts, more music, subtle alterations here and there, not so subtle changes as well, but since we missed out on the cassette completely, it hardly matters, and according to the label, this is indeed the definitive version.
So who the heck is Dylan Ettinger? We have no idea, but what we do know, is that New Age Outlaws is a fantastic collection of synth driven sc-fi new age/wave atmospherics. Fans of Majeure, Zombi, Umberto and similarly minded retro futurists will definitely dig.
Just check out the sprawling nearly 12 minute opener, "City Lights, City Streets", that ends up sounding like Expo 70 covering Zombi, droned out and mesmerizing, thick layered synths, slowly unfurling melodies, a simple robotic rhythm, bits of psychedelic wah guitar, thick swells of rumbling crumbling low end, a slow burning epic, that only really shifts gears _ of the way through, when some of the low end drops out leaving the high end to shimmer and soar and glisten, infused with some swirling minor key melodies, only to build to a Sunroof!-like climax, with synth melodies that sound weirdly like sun baked steel drums, everything hazy and washed out and gorgeously blissy.
The rest of the record explores similarly spacey and psychedelic territory, the sound raw and buzzy, "Rico's Pawn Shop" loops a strange stuttery bit of melody, beneath warm whirring chords, and some rubbery synth bass, that man loop never letting up, while the various other synths tangle and intertwine. "Gordon's Theme" is more mellow, more muted and minimal, but again, anchored to a simple synth loop that entrances while the various surrounding sounds paint in the rest of the picture, adding warm lustrous ambience, deep layered textures, a gorgeous hazy sonic drift.
Imagine James Ferraro trying his hand at this sort of Carpenter/Goblin style synth wave, primitive loops, strange hypnogogic melodies, not sleek and polished, more home brewed, which is precisely what makes New Age Outlaws so unique, so strange and so good.
LIMITED TO 490 COPIES!!
A frenetic 7 song ep that finds Flying Lotus building more nervous kinetic rhythms and lurching arcade game textures than on past releases (though we got some hint of it on the first half of his last full length Cosmogramma) This reminds us a bit of a Zomby's One Foot Ahead of the Other, but on a more wonky tip than Zomby's 8-bit rave-ups. We're not sure if this is just a moment to release some pent-up anxious energy or a sneak peek into a possible full blown assault on their next outing. Got to give them credit for their exploration and experimentation, but we find ourselves missing the majestic downtempo moments from past releases.
We heard about this single back at the On Land festival, where Daniel Lopatin awed the packed house with his polygon planes of synth as Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin brought a handful of the Games single, which was being rumored to be his hip-hop excursion. Well, now that we've gotten a hold of this; it's not quite hip-hop, and not even the abstracted witch-house / chillwave variant of screwed hip-hop from the likes of Salem and oOoOO. Lopatin and his Games partner Joel Ford apply loops of muffled robot-speak vocals, dopey-eyed slow-jam rhythms, and Lopatin's trademarked '80s computer as utopian object iconography. The Ariel Pink-ish false starts through the sampled guitar jangle, and the Max Headroom skipped disc jitter make this unmistakably Lopatin (especially from those hard to find KGB Man tapes) and strangely believable as a wintery mixtape staple for beleaguered COBOL programmers and the robots who love them.
We missed out on Glasser's debut ep which came out last year and quickly went out of print. But everyone we knew who heard it kept telling us we had to check out Glasser, and with the release of her first full length we can now officially proclaim ourselves bigtime fans, as this is proving to be one of the most satisfying, colorful, swirling and flowing pop records of the year. Glasser reminds us a lot of a more sparkling, bright and rhythmic version of Zola Jesus or Islaja. There is a tinge of darkness in her string tones and electronics but there is also so much life and moving energy in her songs which gives the record such an amazing fluidity. Instead of just mimicking Kate Bush, Bjork and Laurie Anderson, she instead takes cues from different elements of their brilliance in helping to create a sound that is both hypnotic and inviting. While she may soon be tagged under the new 'it' genre of 'witch-house' there is something much more singular and organic happening in these songs that can't be written off as any sort of passing fad. This is a record that we think will definitely stand the test of time.
Remix albums are tricky affairs. Often times there are only one or two truly notable tracks, or there are too many disparate remixers that cramp the flow of the listening experience from beginning to end. While this reworking of Gonjasufi's amazing debut, A Sufi and A Killer, doesn't trump the original (really, what remix album has ever done that?), this is surprisingly one of the best remix albums we have heard in a long while. Why that is, is rather curious because it's not that there is just one or two really drop-dead standout tracks, or they're trying to make it more friendly for the dance floor. Rather it's because all the remixes work together in an interesting way that make the overall flow a really nice listen. It offers a ghostly alternate universe to the sound-world Flying Lotus, Mainframe and Gaslamp Killer brought to Gonjasufi's debut.
Beginning with Mark Pritchard's (Harmonia 313, Afrika Hi-tech) spookier take on "Ancestors", Bibio's low-key groove on "Candylane" and Dam Mantle's dub-hop reworking of "Ageing", the unusual choice of Broadcast & The Focus Group to remix "DedND" with a chopped up collage of middle eastern strings harps, flutes and sampled vocal snippets adds to the otherworldly proceedings by removing it from the original almost entirely. Jeremiah Jae and Shlomo add a smeary dreamy dubstep twist to "Kobwebz" and "Change" , while Bear in Heaven, have the most minimal electro rework with "Love Of Reign". Another unusual choice of Oneohtrix Point Never to remix the Tom Waits-ish "She's Gone" results in a chopped and screwed rework pitching Gonjasufi's vocals up and down over a syrupy layer of noise. The last remix by Dem Hunger Bowel Blood of "SuzieQ" is the darkest and strangest taking the punkish quality of the original and smearing it slowly across a bleak queasy landscape. The restraint from upping the tempos too much from the originals was a smart choice, as the sound of Gonjasufi works best on the more stoned, slowed and ambient level. There's just enough variety not to get too stuck in a similar sound, while at the same time complimenting each other really well. We wish more remix records were this consistent!
We had never heard of these guys, which kinda makes sense seeing as up until now they've flown pretty far under the radar, having released a bunch of cd-r's and only one proper 7", but hell they're called the Guinea Worms, the record is brilliantly titled "Sorcererers Of Madness (4rd Year In A Row!), and yeah, you read that right, SORCERERERS, multiple 'er's, and 4RD, not 4th, plus they came highly recommended by a loyal longtime customer, who besides being a great guy with impeccable taste, also used to play in a certain band of spacelord motherfuckers, which makes any recommendation of his even more worthy of serious consideration. Plus c'mon, they're from Ohio and their first record is a massive 22 song double lp!! Did we mention they totally rule too???
But what do they sound like you're probably wondering by now? Well, sort of like a drunken and damaged, drugged out and demented, super noisy, stumbling, chaotic, metallic, garage rock combo, with awesomely ridiculous lyrics, delivered in a super distorted howl, over blown out fuzz drenched Stooges style riffery, pounding brickbat drumming and some wild psychedelic flourishes, but that's only part of their sound. These fuckers are seriously far out, goofy, ridiculous, and as likely to bust out with some heavy crunch and chug as some silly fuzzed out sing along, or some twisted drugged out blues dirge, the lyrics are totally and brilliantly dumb, reminding us just a bit of Breathilizor, but the sounds here are all over the map, every song totally different, "Drunk In Yr Uggs" is a "Hey Mickey" style call and response, but with a killer woozy bluesy main riff, and some awesome female vocal harmonies on the chorus, "Accidental Space Tourist" is all low slung drunken garage blues, "Lounge Waltz" is angular and twisted, as it lurches and lumbers, "Kick In The Door" is a fuzz drenched garage rockified country hoedown, "Come Here Baby" is a thick slab of psychedelic dirgery, "Afternoon Party" is total Hawkwind worship, but way more damaged and dumb, "Never Giving Up" is a killer slithery jam that gradually erupts into something much heavier and darker, the vocals definitely reminiscent of Nomeansno, but the music much more like some bastard mix of Liquorball and Warlock Pinchers (minus the hip hop), or Bunny Brains crossed with Brainbombs as reimagined by fellow Ohioans Guided By Voices? Tough to describe for sure, but then the coolest weirdest things usually are.
You definitely need to have a pretty high tolerance for goofball dumbshittery, cuz there's lots of that, all over the place, and yeah, normally that stuff might drive us nuts, but it just suits these guys, they're funny as fuck, and can thankfully back up their goofy puerile sense of humor with some serious chops. Our favorite jams are the fuzzy distorted psychedelic numbers, which do make up a pretty good chunk of the tracks here, but somehow, if you took those tracks on their own, it wouldn't be the same, the dumb songs would be more dumb, and the killer songs would be way less killer, but together, it's pretty goddamn perfect. Absolutely recommended. Especially if you dig stuff like Liquorball, Breathilizor, Bunny Brains, Faxed Head, Half Japanese, Happy Flowers and other purveyors of ridiculous and brilliant whatthefuck weirdness.
We're pretty sure we've got the last few copies they had a the label, so when they're gone, they're gone.
Does that name sound familiar to you? It should. After all, "Hallo Gallo" was the opening track on Neu!'s legendary debut album. So who would have the gall to name their band after a Neu! track (besides Negativland we mean), well, Hallo Gallo 2010 just so happens to be the new band of Neu!'s Michael Rother, who is joined by Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley (whose Vampire Blues label released this) and Aaron Mullen from Tall Firs, for some modern day krautrocking, Neu! style, and somehow it does manage to channel the classic sound and spirit of the original with something more dense and psychedelic. Motorik and rhythmic (of course), "Blinkgurtel" is gorgeous and hazy and washed out and mesmerizing, Shelley's simple solid drumming perfectly locked in with Mullen's warm fluid basslines, and Rothers's incendiary guitars, thick thrumming riffs, soaring psychedelic melodies, all gently phased and flanged into something gorgeously trippy and otherworldly, getting downright rocking near the end.
"Drone Schlager" is much more muted and restrained, a simple pulse like groove, with little rhythmic flurries here and there, the bass a deep throb, the guitars, cyclical and looped, strange production has the guitars dropping out and swooping into the foreground, totally stripped down and utterly mesmerizing, another one of those tracks that could go on forever, but instead, winds down after 5 minutes, pretty much ensuring you'll have to play it again. So good, and not just past laurels good, this is as dark and mesmerizing and hypnotic as anything out today. Circle fans especially will probably go nuts for this.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, housed in hand screened covers, comes with a download card too!
By now, most aQ metalheads know all about our undying love for oddly monickered Happy Days, and most likely feel the same. But for those who might be confused by a metal band called Happy Days, let's examine this, their latest, a split with Dutch outfit Eindig. The record is called The First Step Towards Suicide, there's a photo of an oven on the cover. The Happy Days tracks have names like "Clinging Onto A Chance Of Happiness" and A Bleak Future That Awaits Us" and "Too Sick To Speak", the booklet is full of blurred photos of people hunched over, seemingly in misery, so yeah, the name Happy Days is meant ironically, cuz these sounds are the soundtrack for the unhappiest days you can imagine.
Happy Days offer up a new batch of abject audial depression, beginning with a mournful jangly guitar accompanied by an appropriately dark and hopeless sample, before launching into some buzzing midtempo depressive black metal, melodic and melancholy, after a burst of furious buzz, the record settles into a loping melodic gloom and doom, gorgeously sorrowful guitar melodies draped over pounding drums, raspy vokills and churning riffage. More dark and atmospheric than blasting and buzzing, but there's still plenty of that lurking within these tracks. Some killer riffs, some awesome hooks, buried amidst all the miserable buzz. But every time the second guitar line comes in, with some totally heartbreaking melody, it's then that Happy Days reveals itself as more than just some grim black horde. This is the best sounding Happy Days record yet, the music exuding that same dark pathos, but perfectly suited to the duo's slightly more polished black melancholic buzz.
Dutch depressive metallers Eindig are a subtly different beast, their sound thicker and more full, a bit more poppy too, their opening track, strangely melodic and 'happy' sounding, a sunshiney melody strapped to some pounding beats and some howling vox, balanced we'd imagine by some seriously bleak lyrics (can't tell for sure, as they're not in English), but the song slips from super melodic jangle to more grim minor key miserablism. Which seems to be their M.O., their music a strange mix of melody and aggression, but with a sound that shifts dramatically, from that sunshiney opener, to a more anguished and dejected traditional depressive black metal, to a downright lovely bit of big drum / clean guitar post rocky drift, the vox WAY down in the mix, super spare and skeletal and really quite pretty, to the final 9 minute epic that is similarly melodic, no distorted guitars, just drums and clean jangle, this time though the vocals a ghastly and tortured presence, jarring over the comparatively lovely melodic drift underneath, and some super intense, yet still undistorted crescendos. Incredible stuff from both bands.
The long awaited second album (it's been FIVE years since their debut) from this French black metal super group, featuring members of Mutiilation, Vorkreist, Antaeus, Merrimack, Malicious Secrets, Vagezaryavtre Secrets Of The Moon, we could go on, but odds are most metalheads were already dying for this, and if not, just that list of bands should have most folks reaching for the buy button. Much like the first record, Last Station On The Road To Death, is dark and grimy, grim and filthy, harrowing and heavy, a seriously scary collection of hellish black art, beginning with a short stretch of swirling black ambience, accompanied by a sample about drug addiction and the fate of addicts (which is most likely a not so subtle fuck you to the Black Legions, since Hell Militia mainman Meyhnach was purportedly kicked out for becoming a drug addict), the record lumbers into a stumbling bit of doomy filth, before exploding into frenzied blasting blackness, and over the next 45 minutes HM's sound delves into all sorts of varied directions, many of them not all the black metal, which is what makes this record so cool and weird. It spends most of its time trudging along gloomily, dark and depressive, the melodies minor key and dismal, the mood abject and melancholy, more often a sort of plodding doom than black metal, but loads of sonic surprises lurk all over the place, plenty of which will no doubt not please the true grim hordes, the strange stuttering glitched out guitars on "Unshakable Faith", the slow motion Deathspell-isms of "The Ultimate Deception", the almost industrial lumber of "Fili Diaboli", the weirdly poppy sing along punk rock feel of "Shoot Knife Strangle Beat & Crucify", the mathy, stop start riffage of "The Pig That Became A God", and the bizarre barroom cabaret of the title track, the gruff vocals delivered more like Nick Cave or the Young Gods or even the Pogues, laced over long droned out chords, but peppered with cool jagged gnarled mathy blackness, it's definitely a super weird record, but it all works, and the weird bits are definitely balanced by a true grim blackness that seems to infuse everything here. The various elements woven into a blood soaked black stained sonic tapestry, filthy and crusty, heavy and twisted, grim and black.
Comes in a cool hardcover book like digipack, and like the first record, gorgeously laid out with tons of super creepy imagery.
Ultra limited, sprawling triple cassette collection of murky, mechanical hypnogogic loopscapes, from Belgian soundscaper and synth minimalist Innercity aka Hans Dens. While on his previous cd-r for Ruralfaune, he crafted a sound more in keeping with the current movement of blissed out synthkraut dronemusic makers, on Arupa Travels, Dens' sound falls more in line with the other Innercity releases we've heard. Gloriously tripped out lo-fi blisscapes, rife with decaying loops, streaks of blurred noise, buried rhythms, strange sped up voices, crumbling low end drones, field recordings, Jeck like skipping-record landscapes of dusty crackle and muted melody, ethereal expanses of gorgeous hazy ambience and heaving slabs of rhythmic crunch, lush swells of soft noise, peppered with mechanical creaks and layered whirs, a bleary eyed soft focus drift, rendered in chunks of low fidelity hum, mysterious bits of soundtracky post rock meander, gauzy clouds of sci-fi synth, haunting stretches of ominous cinematic shimmer, and deep dense slabs of otherworldly psychedelic minimalist drift. So fantastic.
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 30 copies, we have about a dozen left. Comes in a cool oversized plastic clamshell case (like they use for language tapes), with a printed fold out insert.
Yay, we mean uh oh, we mean yay, heck it's a new ep from the controversial ('round here anyway) psychedelic doom chanteuse Jex Thoth and her band of the same name. Controversial? Well, let's just say her trademark theatrical vocal stylings are a subjective, love 'em or hate 'em proposition, though we all pretty much agree the band's heavy, hazy music is awesome. And among the AQ staff, Allan at least has finally succumbed entirely (it was inevitable) and now proudly declares himself a true Jex Thoth fan, which means he was quite happy to see 'em play last week at the Roadburn Festival in Holland. In live performance, Jex's apparent thespian background proved quite effective, she had excellent stage presence not to mention witchy sex appeal, cape-draped and with candles burning. They played to a packed house and it was quite obvious they had lots of fans in the audience!
We also know Jex has plenty of fans out there among the AQ faithful, and they'll be pleased with Witness, comprised of three new recordings, suitably dramatic and lugubrious, clocking in at just over 15 minutes total: "Raven Nor The Spirit", "Slow Rewind", and "Mr. Rainbow", the latter a cover of a song by '70s European art rockers Slapp Happy (a good choice, if you didn't know better you'd think it was a Jex Thoth original). Bearing a dedication to the late Jack Rose, and again graced with cover art by Reverend Bizarre's Sami "Albert Witchfinder" Hynninen, this ep is a fine continuation of the eccentric underground doom-prog sounds heard on Jex Thoth's 2008 self-titled full-length, although apparently there's been another lineup change in the band since that release (for one thing, Silas Paine, aka Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson, is no longer playing guitar). However, they still sound like a bit like Curved Air taking downers with Electric Wizard (or something), totally vintage, bass heavy '70s psych sounds with prominent Hammond organ action, both bombastic and atmospheric, over which Jex's cleanly-sung, clearly enunciated vocals soar. Probably if you're at all interested in this ep, you've already got the earlier full-length, and if you liked that, you'll like this, need we say much more? Uh, how 'bout for fans of Jacula, Blood Ceremony, The Devil's Blood, and Witchcraft (capital 'W' and otherwise)?
More and more every day we miss that brief period in the nineties when rock music was heavy, and noisy, and LOUD. Not necessarily metal, although to some ears it probably sounded like metal. It was more about BIG riffs, lumbering tempos, huge pounding drums, throat shredding vox. Think: Unsane, Halo Of Flies, Today Is The Day, Tad, Killdozer, Tar, Helmet, Lubricated Goat, Karp, Unwound, we could go on and on, but you understand what we're talking about.
There are very few modern bands who can channel the same sort of sonic energy without being retro, and typically, the heavier they are, the more they get lumped in with some metal subsect. But goddamn if there doesn't seem to be a bit of a modern noise rock scene brewing, bands popping up here and there, pushing all those noise rock buttons, and totally hitting the spot.
Which brings us to local boys Kowloon Walled City, whose recent Turk Street ep knocked us on our asses with it's noise rock / doom sludge hybrid. Weirdly enough, with this here debut full length, Gambling On The Richter Scale, the band somehow sound WAY heavier, but at the same time way less metal. Tapping into the rich noise rock history, and creating a disc that's both intense and punishing, melodic and heavy, and yeah, still a bit metallic here and there..
Opener "Annandale" is a churning hook filled noise rock jam, with big guitars, some killer melodies, harsh vox, wild dense drumming, some awesomely soaring high guitar parts, as well as the occasional burst of super melodic almost indie rock, before lurching back into the chug and crush. The sound definitely veers closer to a band like Torche or Floor than Neurosis or Eyehategod.
The second track though totally reminds us of the Unsane, with its roiling distorted bass, looped churning riffage, and weirdly mathy arrangement, some cool dynamics and some stop / starts that definitely had us in math rock heaven. But even here, the band inject some clean guitars, and some downright pretty melody before getting all aggro again.
It's a pretty relentless record, but thankfully KWC mix it up, changing up tempos, letting the drums breath here and there, giving riffs space to ring out and decay once in a while, stretching out into spaced out slowmo ambient drifts, pulling tracks apart into almost groovy sounding doomy dirges, slipping in plenty of subtle pop, heavy hooks galore. The title track is a monster, beginning with some clean guitar strum, minor key and tense, before lurching into a fierce chugging plod, with some Maideny guitar harmonies, plenty of palm muted guitar throb, an impossibly heavy downtuned chorus, and subtle melody mixed in throughout.
The record finishes off with the 6+ minute "More Like The Shit Factory", a sprawling slowjam, the guitars droning out in long streaks, peppered with bursts of downtuned crunch, the drums never really kicking in, the guitars all intertwined and layered, beating against each other, a cloud of swirling overtones, while the vocals howl, the drums sporadically pound, eventually everything dropping out entirely, leaving just a blown out psychedelic dual guitar drone, which crumbles and gradually fades out over the last minute, although. we'd have been perfectly happy had they let those guitars drone endlessly and fill up the rest of the record. Next time maybe.
So yeah, if you're in the market for some heavy, catchy as fuck, NOISE ROCK, okay, maybe call it metal, then Gambling On The Richter Scale is IT, and by the sounds of this record, they probably destroy live. On that same label that that brought us Catalyst, another bad ass noise rock band well worth checking out.
Packaged in full color gloss varnished jackets, pressed on colored vinyl (either clear, or black/silver haze), comes with a cd version of the record (it's an actual cd not a cd-r) housed in a separate hand screened sleeve. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
There's actually a third entity who makes an appearance on this collaborative record, certainly at the behest of Steven Stapleton. That would be Eberhard Kranemann (aka Fritz Muller) who had been an early member of both Neu! and Kraftwerk way back when, but had taken much more of a damaged freeform experimental approach during the next three decades. Nurse With Wound is represented by the longstanding coupling of Stapleton and Colin Potter, spinning a psychotropic cloud of disfigured tones and mangled rhythms. Larsen is the Italian occultish-leaning post-rock outfit with quite an interesting history behind them of Autechre covers and an odd and hardly believable story of once working with Michael Gira. That said, it's hard to really qualify this as a collaborative album, since the tracks at the front-end of the record really sound like Nurse With Wound and those in the latter half like Larsen.
The album opens with a Kranemann penned song of guitar scribbling very much on par with the NWW classic Chance Meeting On An Operating Table with an almost 23 Skidoo / Hula groove of electronic-bhangra with all of the distant screams and weirdo sounds you would expect from a wacked NWW tune. A more introspective, but kaleidoscopically dark ambient track follows. Again, this is a signature NWW production, harkening to A Sadness Of Things or Thunder Perfect Mind. As the tables turn towards Larsen's end of the spectrum, elliptical basslines, melodic bells, and propulsive drums move to the foreground, proceeding toward their trademarked layered builds and soaring crescendos.
In January 2009, the Bay Area sound-artist and composer Cheryl Leonard embarked on a residency program at the Palmer Station in Antarctica. There, she took every opportunity to venture out into the summer's perpetual daylight to make as many field recordings as possible and to collect an array of penguin bones (with the permission of the Palmer Station, of course) to use in her rather elegant, beguiling compositions. In the past, Leonard had used a variety of branches, rocks, and other natural elements in these beautifully textured compositions whereby she would bow and clink those objects into masses of textures that came across somewhere between the work of Loren Chasse, Jeph Jerman, and Small Cruel Party. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that she actually released a split 7" with SMC's Key Ransome some 15 years ago.
While Chattermarks is a collection of pure field recordings, the use of those abraded sounds within a composed swarm points to what she was listening for in Antarctica. In hearing Leonard talk about her Antarctic adventure, she is quick to describe the brutality of the wind and the intensity of the cold, all of which wreaked havoc upon her binaural mics and hydraphones. Many of her recordings feature the noises of Antarctic animal life: adelie penguins, elephant seals, skuas, and gulls. The slumbering snore from a couple of the elephant seals is particularly striking as are their bellowing barks and guttural thrumbings. But the sounds of ice are probably the most intriguing recordings on Chattermarks, from the huge rumbles of a glacier that crumbles into the ocean with smaller tinklings of ice racing down an embankment to the searing hiss of millions of shards of ice clattering together next to a disintegrating wall of packed snow. The only document of the Antarctic wind was captured in a haunting recording of wind whipping around an antenna punctuated by the booms of a glacier splitting in two somewhere in the distance. An obvious treat for anyone keen on Douglas Quin's polar recordings, but Leonard has an excellent flair for subtle drama that's also heard in those impeccable Chris Watson field recordings. Highly recommended!
Fuzzed-out, jangly garage-pop dreaminess from SF's Lilac, new project from guitarist of local favorites Bridez. Heavy hitting distorted guitars strummed under dual male/female vocals, distant organ haze fluttering about, amp melting leads sailing over bratty lyrics and pure punk rock attitude, all thrown together into a super catchy, blurred-out rock and roll bonanza.
This has a lot going for it. First off, they're called Lords Of Falconry, which is kinda cool. Lordly, even. And this, their debut full-length, comes to us via the also quite lordly Holy Mountain label, who have a pretty stellar track record as far as we're concerned. In fact, Holy Mountain probably has had a higher number of AQ Records Of The Week per capita than almost any other label. Furthermore, our discerning pal JW who runs Holy Mountain tells us that THIS is precisely the sort of thing he's always wanted to release on his label. So far, so good. Our appetites are whetted. And then, there's the music. ULTRA fuzzed, freaked out, high energy, heavy psychedelic guitar jams, to put it plainly. Can't complain about that, no siree. But (you knew there had to be a but), we do have one minor caveat for you potential emptors... it concerns the vocals. If this was all-instrumental, there'd be no hemming and hawing. But, some of the vocal stylings struck some of us as, well, a little bit goofy. Self-consciously "rawk" or something. You may not mind a bit, and we actually don't much either.
Anyway, it's hard to be picky about the vocals when Lords Of Falconry's guitars are blasting jet-engine like, turning the air into cottage cheese they way they used to do back in Blue Cheer's daze, the wild FX and throbbing distortion turning yr head inside out so your brain is being caressed and cudgeled by these riffs and rhythms without any help from your ears.
Recommended to folks who get off on bands like Julian Cope's Braindonor, DMBQ, Midnite Snake, The Heads, Hawkwind, High Rise, and other fuzz-laden, pedal-stomping, heavy-duty psychedelic throwbacks. And by the way, though Holy Mountain didn't tell us this, we're pretty sure that one of these Lords Of Falconry is in fact none other than guitarist Steven Wray Lobdell of Davis Redford Triad, Sufi Mind Game, and Faust fame! If true (it is), that explains a lot about this. The other dude in the band we believe to be one Sammy Adams, formerly the drummer for Fireballs Of Freedom. Talk about a power duo. So, despite a slight case of what we might call the Scissorfight syndrome, this gets a solid recommendation from us!
Here's the second release from Andrew Chalk's Marsfield project, even though these recordings date back to 2002 well before the 2010 release of The Towering Sky. At that time, Chalk was still engaged with the sublime Mirror collaboration with Christoph Heemann, producing a vast collection of impressionist drones that certainly set a gold standard for anyone looking to dive into the dronemuzik category. Enter Brendan Walls, an Australian ambient practitioner who also moonlights in the slugfuck-noise outfit the Menstruation Sisters (although there's nothing of the Sisters' scattered noise that enters any of the Marsfield recordings). Walls had released a few albums through Heemann's labels of vaporized hum and oceanic tonefloat, including a 2004 collaboration with Mr. Chalk on Three Poplars. Whatever the relationship of the collaboration between Chalk and Walls might have been, Three Sunsets Over Marsfield has the fingerprints of Andrew Chalk all over it: smeared texture into elongated drone and shimmering resonant tones coalescing into thrumming hypnosis. What is unique to Three Sunsets in relation to the Chalk catalogue, is that there is a peculiar backstory about a retired British soldier who had been able to receive and amplify radio transmissions through a metal plate in his skull. It's easy to imagine that Chalk and Walls set out to create a sublime piece of music, best suited for playback within the skull of an old soldier, sick of listening into whatever the BBC might be broadcasting. Chalk and Walls compact and compress numerous layers of psychedelically-bent guitar drones into a gorgeous, mid-frequency stream of flutter, shimmer, and mirage, not unlike what Chalk would later reprise on Shadows From The Album Skies. To say that this album is mesmerizing is undoubtedly an understatement!
Andrew Chalk vinyl is a rare commodity indeed, and Three Sunsets Over Marsfield is no exception, being printed in an edition of 300 copies in an extraordinary package of embossed metallic paper with an obi sporting the title in Japanese.
Imagine some twisted blown out psychedelic hybrid of Vibracathedral Orchestra and Fushitsusha, and you'd probably come up with something very much like this latest lp from a Scottish power trio called Moon Unit. Five sprawling space/psych jams, that slip from dark and droney to explosive and in-the-red and everywhere in between.
The record begins with some washed out shimmery free form krautfolk drift, psychedelic and kosmische, like Vibracathedral or Avarus or Sylvester Anfang, gauzy clouds of softly tangled melody drift and swirl over spare percussion, fuzzy tendrils of guitar woven into lush landscapes of blurred beauty, but it's a smoldering slow build to something much more intense and aggressive, subtly explosive crescendos surface throughout, guitars growing ever more frenzied and distorted, the drums slip from skitter to pound, long keening tones are laid over choppy seas of rhythmic churn, until finally, the band unleash full on space psych blowouts, crumbling and explosive and fierce and fiery and so intense.
The sound is not so easily classified though, this is not just a psychedelic Godspeed, the sound veers wildly from face melting almost metallic fury, to full on Japanese style white heavenly noise, to distorted krautrock grooves, the drums chaotic on second, locked tight the next, everything wreathed in some sort of incandescent shimmer, that somehow makes the heaviest noisiest bits beautiful, and makes the beautiful bits mysterious and otherworldly.
The record closes with a murky effects heavy free psych workout, disembodied melodies collide with rhythmic shards, swirling swooping effects and crumbling riffage, glimmery and shimmery but still damaged and dark and distorted and totally intense. So good.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Ever wonder what it would sound like if Yoko Ono joined doomdrone duo Nadja? No? Well, we're guessing it would sound a little like this collaboration between Canadian doomgaze two piece Nadja and Italian chaotic weirdo avant punk duo OvO. The overall sound here seems to fall more toward the Nadja end of the sonic spectrum, but OvO definitely add their own twisted vibe, the result something dark, and creepy, and abstract, and occasionally very heavy and very fucked up and awesome. Separated into four movements and based on some strange concept about killing a wasp in a cup of coffee, the record begins with some loping heavy slowcore, big drums, lush clean guitar chords, and all sorts of swirling weirdness, detuned melodies, harmonics, strange FX, long stretches of ambience, buried guttural vocals, streaks of feedback, it's not until nearly the end when OvO vocalist Stefania lets loose, with her childlike Ono-ish trill, operatic and creepy as hell, sometimes slipping into a monstrous gurgle, but just as often wailing like a banshee, while the music churns underneath. Can't help but be reminded of Bloody Panda too, the same sort of weird vocal / heaviness hybrid.
The second and third movements are shorter, and continue on in the same vein as the opener, with loping post rock rhythms, swirling blackened ambience, haunting chiming melodies, thick guitar thrum, more FX, Stefania's vocals never quite getting to the maniacal shriek stage, instead, slipping from hushed whisper, to almost black metal rasp, to cookie monster gurgle, the vibe almost Goblin-ish, heavy and dark, but cinematic and really creepy, the third movement the heaviest so far, a lurching doom, trudging grimly beneath wild drumming, and even wilder vocals, until finally, the 13 minute denouement, the final movement, which begins like some horror movie soundtrack, all fragmented melancholy melody, and deep heaving low end, droney and so ominous, gradually building to a strange industrial style drone-plod, which eventually explodes into something primal and tribal, pounding drums, those trilled super dramatic vox, an intense cathartic climax, which eases back into that ominous drift, this time with the vocals in full effect, the result, dark, bizarre, intense and fantastically out there!
Latest blast of black filth from right here in SF, from one man band Palace of Worms, aka Balan, who also does time in Elk, and in Weakling worshipping outfit Dead As Dreams. The first PoW record was a huge hit around aQ land, a killer mix of grim black buzz, and avant post rock weirdness, everything we had read about this new record talked about how all the post rock and other stuff had been ditched in favor of a sound more raw and old school, but to these ears, this is anything but, the weirdness that made The Forgotten so good, still pretty much in full effect.
The opening intro eases us back into PoW's black underworld, a sprawling smoldering melodic drift, all serpentine guitars, minimal tribal drum pound, buried vokills, which leads directly into a lumbering chunk of midtempo dirgery, laced with some serious melody, and finally some raw blasting blackness, and the rest of the tape seems like a push and pull between those two influence, the melody and intricacy, the raw blast and primitive buzz, but it's that constant tension that gives Lifting The Veil its energy, even when songs are in full on blast mode, the sound is still weirdly textured and melodic, check out the first half of "No Exit", appropriately grim and frantic, but the chords are lush, and there seems to be all sorts of melodic shading going on, not taking away from the grimnity of the sound, just adding texture and depth.
"The Scroll Of Kimiris" is similarly crafted, on the surface, a frenzied blackened buzz, but the guitars soar, the melodies epic, the sound weirdly spacious and spare. "Wounded Pride" also begins all mathy and melodic, a doomy trudge, a lurching arrangement that ends up sounding noise rocky and majestic, before eventually crumbling into buzz and blast, but it's "Hellish Journey" that's the record's focal point, easily the heaviest, most sonically dense track, and its longest at nearly 10 minutes, the melodic aspect is downplayed a bit, but still surfaces all over the place, especially in the dreamy clean voiced outro, but those parts are well balanced by the sheer black force of the surrounding sonics.
Packaged with super nice, printed, heavy-stock fold-out full color inserts, and of course, SUPER LIMITED!
Pedestrian Deposit have relentlessly toured the United States for as long as we can remember; if your hometown has some shithole warehouse space or a couple of dudes who host noise shows in their house, chances are that PD have been there. Given their constant touring in a car with a tape player, it makes perfect sense that the cassette would be the preferred media for PD; in fact, PD's Jon Borges has released a shitload of noise and drone tapes over the years through his Monorail Trespassing imprint. East Fork North Fork did in fact come out as a cassette earlier in 2010, only to disappear before anybody really got to get a hold of it; but the tape has been usurped by the cd for the reissue of this pretty fucking awesome record, with two new unreleased tracks as a nice bonus.
The days of Pedestrian Deposit abusing soundsystems with deleterious feedback and earscraping noise are pretty much gone. Nowadays, Borges is working with his partner Shannon Kennedy in constructed a frightening, haunting set of recordings for cello and electronics, thick with echoing drones and ghostly shadows that creep out of the woodwork. The amount of empty space on East Fork North Fork is notable, with Borges and Kennedy layering backish abrasions of rusted objects on contact microphones, distant pluckings of cello looped into seasick passages, heartbeat thumps coupled with subterranean scrapings, and hauntological half-melodies pushing to the foreground. Everything appears tuned as to announce the possibility of a huge surge of punishing noise, much like the atmosphere that Michael Gira built on Children Of God; and Pedestrian Deposit does allow for one such explosion on the album. But for the most part, it's the post-noise threat of audio holocaust that gives East Fork North Fork its sense of drama.
This is easily the best thing that Borges has released either through Pedestrian Deposit or through his solo Emaciator project.
San Francisco's Eric Haney is the man behind the powerdrone project Phantom Pains, which has been popping up in a few gritty warehouses around the Bay Area with a few cassettes under his belt as well. Obelisk is the first tape we've been able to check out, but it's definitely piqued our interested for more. The fuzzy droneshot of guitar/synth/pedals/whatever comes across at first like unkempt variations of the electroid-psychedelic smears of Grasslung or Pulse Emitter; but Phantom Pains stratifies such toneshift with a good chunk of muffled distortion and puretone feedback suspended above a deep and distant roar of jet-engine noise. Despite all of fuzz, hiss, and crunch, Obelisk is quite placid, glacial in movements in and out of the these chunks of activity that slide past each other like stealthy icebergs at midnight. Elsewhere, bell tones coagulate around tape noise into a glistening track not all that far from Peter Wright's guitar drones accelerating through the layers of murk, ash, and grit only to be engulfed by a gasping drone of flanging reverb and Maeror Tri industrialized shadow.
Monorail Trespassing continues to release amazing cassettes of unknown and obscure acts from the US underground of floorcore noise and gnarled drone, and this one from Phantom Pains is certainly one of their best.
Latest batch of woozy, dreamlike downtempo psychedelic folk from this husband and wife duo, and like their previous efforts, they subtly hybridize Portishead style trip hop with seventies style acid folk, the results are sublime, spidery guitars, hand claps (!), thick almost synthy sounding low end, skeletal rhythms and angelic reverbed vocals. The tracks drift and hover and shimmer, but occasionally are peppered with bits of psych rock fuzz and crunch, that sounds like it could have been lifted from the Latin American installment of those Love, Peace & Poetry comps, but the fuzz is fleeting, slipping quickly back into more dreamy drift.
The B side is even more melodic and melancholy, ditching the handclaps and more overtly programmed drums, introducing subtle wah guitars, and adding even more haze to the mix, the vocals positively dripping with space-y echo, both tracks here, haunting and lovely, and way recommended.
A brand new, sprawling collection of celestial darkness and buzzing black ambient drift from this black metal / black ambient master. As we've mentioned in the past, more often than not, PV will dedicate a whole record to either side of his sonic personality, sometimes it's a disc of swirling and dense blackened black metal buzz, other times it's gorgeously bleak and minimal ambient dronemusic, but in both cases, the man behind Procer Veneficus is able to conjure up gorgeously sinister sounds and nightmarish atmospheres, be they buzz or drift, blast or shimmer.
How The Heather Moonlit Shivers, is, as the legend on the back of the record makes clear, "Dedicated to Her", and judging from the black sonic mystery within, the 'Her' in question either broke his heart, or is the object of a seriously grim obsession, or both. Extended stretches of layered black drift, Philip Jeck style crackly loopscapes, muted subterranean pulses, thick swaths of distorted crumble, processed ghostly vox, swirling soft focus effects, minor key steel string folk dirges, keening streaks of fragmented melody underpinning slowed down voices, haunting reverb drenched avant Appalachia gives way to abject post industrial black ambience, which gives way to dense clouds of low end bellow, laced with melancholic finger picked acoustic guitars.
Elsewhere thick walls of guitarbuzz dirge lumber and throb, but are infused with subtle bits of melody, transformed from brute force crush into something moody and soothing and beautiful, while spidery guitars wrap their tendrils around long stretches of layered voices and alien harmonies, while here and there, fragments of voice, or a bit of guitar, will be doused in reverb and echo and delay and sent spinning into the aether, creating a dizzying looped out dronescape.
The record closes with a 10+ minute interpretation of an Amber Asylum song, complete with strings, the strings along with languid steel string guitars, and swirling ambient background shimmer create a sort of droney, depressive otherworldly chamber music. There's also an Espers cover (a cover of a cover oddly enough), which is equally beautiful, but a bit more tripped out, a sort of druggy heavily effected space folk, but both covers fit perfectly amidst the equally evocative and hauntingly beautiful PV originals.
Folks who ONLY like the black metal side of Procer Veneficus, may be disappointed, but anyone into mysterious dark soundscapes, cinematic blackened drone music, and creepy sinister black folk, will be immediately and inexorably ensorcelled.
Packaged in a super swank and thick matte finish gatefold jacket, pressed on thick red vinyl, LIMITED TO 406 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
WOW, did this record pretty much immediately blow us away! We had never actually heard these guys (this guy actually, he also plays in Birds Of Maya), but had always thought Purling Hiss was a pretty awesome name, so not expecting too much, we threw this on and then BAM, we were sold, smitten, obsessed even, finding ourselves playing this to death, getting these songs stuck in our heads, and not just the songs proper, but even the weird little recording anomalies and random bits of musical glitchery. For a record that sounds, and is maybe meant to sound, so lo-fi and tossed off and just sort of half assed, a druggy murky muddy home brewed pop record, it's impossibly catchy and well crafted and AMAZING.
A heady mix of classic pop songsmithery, blown out psychedelic drift, abstract tape experiment fuckery and fragmented bedroom 4 track alchemy, Public Service Announcement plays at times like some classic rock record that's been dubbed a million times and then played back in your crappy car stereo, the one with only one speaker and no bass knob, and at other times like some inspired Guided By Voices mini pop epic, and occasionally like some super baked, basement psych jam blowout, wasted and lazy and drifty and divine.
The record opens with "Run From The City", which within 5 seconds establishes itself as some impossible instant classic, with a totally killer guitar lick that IS the song's hook, the track sounding like some lost punky pop gem from the seventies or eighties that somehow got left off of every compilation since, the verses crunchy and muddy and melodic, those guitar leads just sealing the deal. In fact, we could barely get to the rest of the record cuz we just wanted to keep playing the first track.
"Porch Dude/Slight Return" offers up our first glimpse of Purling Hiss as wasted and stoned psych jam drifters, shuffling drums, swirling flanged guitars, everything hazy and wreathed in pot smoke, little spidery leads surfacing here and there, bit otherwise a blurred and bleary drift, the slight return of the title being the revisited melody from the album opener.
And then there's "Don't Even Try It", the other song we can't seem to keep from just playing on repeat, with it's folky guitar and vocal intro, the tape speed constantly shifting, the sound warped and warbly, like someone with their finger on the record as it spins, and then the chorus comes in, with it's "woo ooo ooo" refrain, and the song suddenly reveals itself as some pretty perfect pop. Lo-fi yet lush, vocal harmonies, guitar melodies, a hook to die for, all hazy and sun dappled and catchy as all get out.
After a brief (but AWESOME) minute long Van Halen loop, that manages to be totally twisted yet totally catchy, the record slips right back into fuzzy lo-fi pop, more oooh's and aaah's, summery steel string strum, dreamy harmonies, and sweet pop hooks, before unfurling some serious psychedelia in the form of "Gypsy", a sprawling droned out chunk of druggy spaciness, and at that point if you're not already under the record's spell, you bliss out and drift off and let the record carry you wherever it will, whether it be to "Zor" a thick buzzing, swirling, yet still dreamily melodic bit of dark drone, or to "Beautiful Earth Creature" which is another perfect chunk of jangly pop, replete with those warped speed fluctuations that end up becoming irrevocably part of the song, or to the heady spacepsychjam freakout of "Malice In Wonderland" or to the twisted Ariel Pink-ish warbly fuzzy FM radio pop of album close "1976".
Warped and wonderful and definitely one of our new favorite records.
Not one, but TWO brand new records, brand new BANDS in fact, from the man behind avant black metal weirdos Pyramids, Sailors With Wax Wings and White Moth, both heavy and weird in their own way, and both featuring incredible ensemble casts, not so much guests and collaborators. In some ways it does both of these records/groups a bit of a disservice to lump them together, as most reviewers (including this one) do, but it's sort of unavoidable, for as different as these two records may sound, there are quite a few similarities conceptually and even sonically.
For those unfamiliar with Pyramids, we've been pretty smitten with these guys ever since we first heard their double disc debut on Hydra Head, a dizzying sonic concoction that infused black metal blasts with washed out shoegaze glimmer, swirling dreamy ambience, blurred slowcore drift, actually it might be more accurate to describe Pyramids as some sort of blissed out shoegaze slowcore outfit that flecked their dreamy sound with bits of black metal buzz, but either way, the sound these guys cooked up was heady and psychedelic and pushed our buttons BIG TIME. Everything we could want in a weird heavy band seemed to be all smeared into this gorgeously indistinct entity called Pyramids. And the interesting thing about that debut, is that it already sort of foreshadowed the genesis of these two new projects, by including a discs of remixes/reworkings featuring Swans drummer Ted Parsons, Toby Driver of Kay Dot, Colin Marston of Behold the Arctopus, James Plotkin of OLD and Khanate, Justin Broadrick of Jesu / Godflesh and French industrial black metal crushers Blut Aus Nord. And the recent 5 cassette box seemed to be another sign pointing at Pyramids' mainman R Loren's restlessness, and need to keep creating and collaborating, featuring hours and hours of interpretations and reimaginings. Which brings us to Loren's latest projects, a simultaneous release of two different record, by two different groups, each sonically disparate, yet inexorably linked, Sailors With Wax Wings, whose sound is like a more abstracted shoegazey Pyramids, and White Moth, whose sound has been described by Loren as "digital hardcore", but also infuses its drill and bass and industrial crunch with plenty of Pyramidal blissed out black metalisms (including vocals from John Gossard of Weakling and Asunder!).
Sailors With Wax Wings, is the one that will most immediately appeal to fans of Pyramids, or fans of blissy avant black metal and experimental heaviness, and as mentioned above, White Moth is Loren with a pretty incredible collection of collaborators, which we might as well just list: Ted Parsons (Swans, Prong), Colin Marston (Krallice, Behold�The Arctopus), Aidan Baker (Nadja), Simon Scott (Slowdive), Dominick Fernow (Ash Pool, Vegas Martyrs, Prurient, Cold Cave), cellist Hildur Gudnadottir Vern Rumsey of Unwound (!), Aaron Stainthorpe (My Dying Bride), Jonas Renkse (Katatonia) Marissa Nadler, James Blackshaw, and the cover art should look familiar too, courtesy of David Tibet (Current 93). Phew! If there was ever the potential for too-many-cooks, but somehow, Loren and crew pull it off, crafting a slow burning world of soaring dreamlike buzz, thick black shimmer, epic explosive energy and brooding mystery, right away, with "Soft Gardens Near The Sun, Keep Your Distant Beauty", we're transported to some otherworld, where sound is light, and gorgeous chords come cascading from on high like some sonic waterfall, thick swaths of sound whirling and swirling, peppered with delicate piano melodies and powerful drumming, shoegazey for sure, but also intense and urgent and emotional, which is spotlighted even more on the second track "There Came A Drooping Maid With Violets", with the introduction of sorrowful crooned clean male / female vocals, buried in the mix, nestled amidst warm glimmering guitars and lumbering drum plod, like a more crystalline and dreamily doomy Nadja or a softer more spare My Bloody Valentine. Which is the sound that seeps into all the other tracks, like a continuous song suite, a single multi part epic, slipping smoothly from barely there hushed drift, to blackened sheets of soaring high end, to minimal whispery creep, to bleary pop ambient shimmer, to hazy, utterly lush sweet fuzz flecked dream pop, a song like "There Was One Who Sought A New Road" should have fans of groups like Beach House in a tizzy, with its delicate gauzy atmosphere and warm languid melodies. In fact, the more we listen, the more the black metal elements seem to recede, sure there's buzzing and fast picking, and maybe even some blasting beats, but here. those elements are reimagined as parts of some otherworldly abstract blurscape, wreathed in whir and crackle and buried under billows of layered drones, soft swaths of angelic drift, everything rendered in slow motion, slightly out of focus, a lush atmospheric expanse of blackened slowcore dreampop bliss. So gorgeous!
Before we get into our usual wordy meandering, hyperbolic gushing and tangential ruminating, we oughta come right out and say it first thing, this record is fucking incredible. One of the coolest weirdest records we've heard in ages. Twisted and blown out, weirdly melodic and groovy, dense and washed out and otherworldly and fucking bizarre, equal parts blissed out hypnogogic shoegazey drift, lurching, chopped and screwed style Southern crunk, majestic choral dreaminess, blurred beat heavy collaged electronica, and sample heavy blown out synthbuzz epicness. In some alternate universe alien world, THIS is the music that comes blasting out of booming systems in tricked out lowriders, some sort of glorious, blindingly blissy club music that fuses stuttery stumbly beats, to crumbling distorted low end, and thick swaths of synths so blown out the whole record sounds like it might collapse, mix in soaring operatic vocal samples, low slung bass buzz, jittery drum skitter, and mush mouthed slowed down 'rapping', smear and blur it all into one glorious, warped and warbly cough syrup fever dream epic, and that's basically Salem's King Night.
By now, most folks have at lest heard of 'witch house' a new 'genre' that Salem seem to represent, willingly or not, it's hard to say, but alongside other groups like oOoOO, witch house has received the sort of blog hype (and mainstream press) that immediately turns us off, and made us want to hate it, but so far, everything we've heard, we've dug, big time, but nothing has kicked out ass as much as this Salem record. It's so weird, and twisted and bizarre, it's sort of hard to believe that THIS is the record people are talking about, it makes sense that we'd love it, and that it would be an aQuarius Record Of The Week, but the New York Times? John Q. Public? Fuck it, like we always say, we'd way rather here stuff like this on the radio anyway. But regardless of the hype, or the backlash, or any of the nonmusical stuff, it all boils down to how ingenious and utterly OUT THERE this is. Just check out the title track, some weird garbled voices, some skittery drum machine, some ravey synths, choral voices, and then BAM, the song explodes, the bass a throbbing slab of rumbling crunch, the drum machine weirdly awkward, but the perfect compliment to the tangled melodies, and those soaring distorted operatic voices, the track a total epic, building and building, like the score for some insane alien sci-fi slow motion dancefloor martial arts battle, you can almost visualize fishtanks exploding into galaxies of exploding glass shards, while bodies fly threw the clouds of glistening sparkle, everything seemingly floating weightless. So good. We could listen to this track FOREVER (and pretty much have since we got it). But then comes "Asia" with its fat stuttery beat, and girlish vocals buried beneath a miasma of crumbling distorted crunch, and woozy synth melodies and confusional drum programming, sounding a bit like some over the top M83 jam gone haywire, or maybe some lost Cocteau Twins B-side remixed by Alec Empire and Black Moth Super Rainbow, everything fuzzy and washed out and gauzy, murky and dark, but still suffused with a weird sort of sunshininess. "Frost" is more of the same, even prettier and blissier, taking Sigur Ros and dipping it in a vat of gristly distortion and Carpenter sci-fi synths, and then stretching it out into a billowing sheet of diaphanous dream pop.
It's not until "Sick" that we get a glimpse of Salem's other side, their chopped and screwed, sippin' sizurp, alien slow motion shoegaze hip hop side, the music remains essentially the same, maybe not quite as dense, still swirls of female vocals, a strange otherworldly chorale, but over the top of this sonic cotton candy , a 'rapper' delivers his mutated pitch shifted flow, mouthful of marbles, finger on the record slowing it do a crawl, creating a weirdly dreamy draggy druggy hip hop / dream pop hybrid. And the rest of the record seems to drift lazily between those two sounds, "Release Da Boar" finds Salem offering up another cloud of dopesmoke dreaminess, fuzz drenched dirge pop bliss, which gives way to "Trapdoor", another slow motion, DJ Screw style cough syrup remix, laid over a warm warped and warbly bit of lysergic ambience and buzzing rave synth swirl. "Hound" is like the title track redux, so thick and crumblingly distorted, but so blown out and beautiful, "Tair" is a gloriously weird spaced out, handclapped chunk of shoegaze rap, and "Killer" sounds like Joy Division or Interpol run through a million distortion pedals, and set to a Casio keyboard drum machine beat, only to shrug off some of the crunch and warble, leaving a gorgeous stretch of plaintive low slung doom pop, that hints at the poppiness that lurks beneath the surface on King Night, only to finish the record in a squall of synth buzz, mumbled vox and drum machine chaos.
Wow. What else can we say. This sounded so good in the store, and even better in headphones, but it wasn't until we got in the car, and cranked this as loud as it would go, that it finally sunk in, and suddenly, we were bouncing up and down in a tricked out lowrider on some alien planet in some alternate universe, our booming system BOOMING, getting totally lost in these twisted and gorgeously damaged sounds. WAY WAY recommended.
If the archetypal Raster-Noton style of pixel-point rhythms and clinical data-streams represent "Ping", then Senking's far more sensual approach here to the click-n-groove would indeed be "Pong". It's the deeper, weightier side of the equation, but undeniably linked to that equation. The Cologne based sound engineer Jens Massel is more interested in a thickened low-end with rumbling basslines more indebted to a slowmotion techstep cruise or more of a Demdike Stare / Ghost Box electro-haunt than the post-techno shuffle ingrained in most every Raster-Noton artist's DNA. The Raster sounds of sonar blip echo, small rhythmic points, and slashing post-acid squelches do surface as the skeletal grid of rhythm guiding the throbbing bassbin rattle, yet Massel is not averse to coupling these sounds with moody, almost noirish melodic phrases for piano, Rhodes organ, and even some vibraphone. Pong is quite an evocative downtempo record that effectively comes across as something like a Pole / Bohren & Der Club Of Gore collaboration!
The second disc is a CD-ROM with a re-engineered version of the old-school Atari game Pong as a 3-D game, that looks and feels a lot like another old-school Atari video game Tempest. We haven't played around that much with it, but at least it looks really cool!
Wow! Awesome Vistas brings us another stunner with the debut musical release from Sacramento-based artist Christine Shields. Shields, known in the Bay Area for her portraits and ghostly paintings of child spirits, trees and landscapes that evoke a lost Victorian past, has been making and performing music with various groups for awhile, but this is the first time we've heard a full recording and we must say we're quite blown away! Reminding us a bit of Opal or White Magic, Shields and her group have created an amazing record of hauntingly atmospheric chamber folk. Organic vocal harmonies, intricate guitar work, melodica, piano, percussion and bells, evoke a world of beauty and loss, shipwrecks and spirits, dark and light, that is gentle and melancholic but not at all fragile. The songwriting and production are breathtaking and creates the pitch-perfect mood to draw us in and never lets us go. With gorgeous hand-screened covers. Highest Recommendation!
