Now, reissued on vinyl too!
This Brazilian band flourished circa 1965-1978, starting off as a Beatlesy dance pop group called The Bubbles, before changing their name to its Portuguese equivalent A Bolha in 1970 and going for a harder, more progressive rock sound, inspired in part by the bands they'd seen on a trip to England, at the Isle of Wight festival. They also spent some time as the as backing band for Tropicalia star Gal Costa. But history aside, what matters is the music, and even today A Bolha's lively grooves are pretty great!
This album, Um Passo A Frente, was recorded and released originally in 1973, and is rightly considered a Brazilian rock classic of the era. These tracks (7 from the album proper, plus fantastic 2 bonus cuts, which also appeared on the compact disc reissue we previously listed) range wildly across the spectrum of pop psych / hard rock / Tropicalia, incorporating laidback vibes, vocal harmonies (all songs sung in Portuguese), sudden prog rock changes (and song lengths, a couple up to 9 and 10 minutes), swirling organ, acid rock guitar soloing, honkytonk piano plinkery, frenetic percussion, countryish blues moods, bubblegum boogiewoogie, and even some free jazz squealing sax (such as during side two's epic "A Espera", which also has some really great freak out moments for all of us flute fanciers!). If we had to pick, our favorite track might be "Tempos Constantes", mixing fuzzy guitar riffage n' rippery with out-and-out uptempo sunshiney pop, but it's a tough call. And then there's the bonus cuts. If anything, those two tracks from A Bolha's debut 1971 single are heavier / druggier / jammier than the preceding cuts on this disc, the band apparently lightening up a bit for the album two years later. Worth it for those two alone, almost!
Definitely one for fans of South American psych all told, if you like the likes of later Os Mutantes, Los Dug Dugs, Bango, Embrujo, Som Imaginario, Color Humano, Miguel Cantilo, et. al. And in some weird way, we're even reminded a bit of recent Comets On Fire output!
(Oh, and unlike the slightly mixed-up cd reissue on Lion, this time around, the tracklisting appears to be correct regarding order and times.)
A few lists back, when we reviewed the (now already out of print!) 1996-1998 demos collection by this Pacific Northwest based cult, we mentioned we now realize we were quite foolish in not having paid sufficient attention to their career. Considering how much we ended up liking those early demos, seriously delving into the subsequent bulk of their discography seemed to be in order, though potentially a daunting task. Making things easier though, they've just come out with a new album, so let's focus on that. This latest from these difficult to describe grim blackened metal artists is via the Profound Lore label, who have established an admirable and eclectic track record lately of signing the best in the underground - their two other most recent releases were by extreme doomsters Salome and epic true metal rockers Slough Feg! Agalloch fit right in, in the sense of not fitting in, as they, like those bands, are nothing if not unique. Well, ok, Agalloch are nominally black metal, and "arty", and thus always draw Opeth comparisons, but that's just 'cause it's tough come up with something -really- accurate in that dep't. Another would be Wolves In The Throne Room. Or Ludicra, though they're supposedly so citified, and Agalloch are definitely of the forest.
Fans will know that Agalloch recently enlisted our pal Aesop from Ludicra on drums. One of Aesop's bandmates from that outfit told us that Agalloch sounds like Weezer doing black metal. Maybe that was meant as a criticism (of Agalloch, Weezer, and/or black metal) but for some of us it sounds like a recommendation!! And while we're not sure we really hear that anyway, we guess there is a "pop" side to Agalloch, at least, some occasional clean vocals crop up alongside the usual raspy style ones, and certainly plenty of melancholic melody factors into their exquisitely crafted, carefully orchestrated black metal onslaught, a warm and -gentle- onslaught some of the time we must say, one that even veers into post rock territory a bit, a la Explosions In The Sky or Godspeed or something like that gone black metal, maybe. And the whispery "To Drown" hints at Current 93, tremulous and atmospherically epic. So chamber rock, art rock, post rock, folk rock... Agalloch are perhaps all these things and sundry, in some small measure. But definitely black metal is the crux of this, with those vokills, and blasting beats, and the crunch and whine of the guitars much of the time... whilst Moog and piano, cello and glockenspiel, field recordings and vibraphone, even "petrified bone, glass & metal sheet percussion", all are also woven into the compositions here, making for a lulling sound easily associated with woods, smoke, antlers, mists - even without support from the artwork that suggests such things. Speaking of which, the tri-fold digipack this comes in is handsomely designed, with the band's logo subtly done in raised clear spot varnish on the front cover, likewise with the track listing on the back. Nice!
NB. for those into "six degrees of separation" games, a glance at the credits here will allow you connect Agalloch to krautrockers Faust in approximately one move! Amber Asylum also.
On sale, $2 off regular price (normally $13.98) for the next two weeks, through December 3rd!
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!
Demdike Stare fans listen up! There's a new dark mysterious stranger in town by the name of Anworth Kirk, and for fans of Demdike Stare's haunted dub sound paintings or that Broadcast and The Focus Group record we keep raving about, or any of the vintage horror soundtracks from Trunk Records, you will surely want to give this a listen. No, Anworth Kirk is not really a person, or a band, as far as we can tell, but it's the first release on the new archival imprint Pre-Cert Home Entertainment that will be devoted to releasing a series of limited vinyl missives of contemporary musical and non-musical strangeness. Most definitely associated with DJ Andy Votel and the B-Music crew as well as Demdike Stare themselves (in fact, we're pretty sure Anworth Kirk IS Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike, who run the Pre-Cert label), the music presented here is a mind-bending collage of haunting creaking loops, far away noises of babies crying and dogs barking, slow motion creeping synths, library music, and eldritch incantations culled from dusty corners of British horror. So haunting and beautiful! Limited to 500 copies, it is basically already out of print, so grab one of the few we have while you can!
Another warehouse find, dug up a little stash of this stunning 2004 debut from technical melodic death metallers Arsis, and holy shit is this stuff intense and fierce and complex and brutal and incredible.
Explosive grinding blasts of ultra tech blackened crush give way to impossibly melodic classic metal style leads, lumbering knuckle dragging death metal chug blossoms into In Flames Gothenberg style melodic blowouts, tons of killer harmonies, incredible drumming, super mathy and insanely convoluted, super atmospheric too, loads of melody, even during the heaviest, least melodic parts, some smidge of catchiness is lurking in there somewhere. The breakdowns are brutal, roiling and churning, peppered with squealing pick harmonics and wild solos, the vocals a howling rasp, and the songs, sprawling and mathy and majestic, and super proggy, tons of parts, all woven together into weirdly catchy melodic death metal epics, laced with all manner of hook and melody, a relentless onslaught of furious super catchy ultra heaviness, think In Flames, At The Gates, Dark Tranquility, Heartwork era Carcass, Dissection... Needless to say, this STILL totally rules, and sounds better 6 years on than about 90 percent of the heavy music out there...
A new short and sweet batch of dreamy breezy jangle pop from Beach Fossils, and like their self-titled debut, the sound here is warm and lush, sweet and swirly, laid back and jangly, the guitars liquid and prismatic, the vocals lazy and drawled, all wrapped around propulsive super melodic basslines and simple skeletal drum machines, and while the sound is somewhat familiar, seeing as Beach Fossils are swimming in a pretty crowded sonic pool these days, Beach Fossils manage to easily transcend, their sound somehow special and truly unique, the songs so catchy, so ethereal and magically melodic, boy / girl vocal harmonies drifting over softly surfy Beach Boys reverby guitars and tangled tendrils of melody, the production impossibly lush, the A side so perfectly poppy, but then the B side swooping in to maybe be our favorite of the two. So good, fans of all things reverby and jangly, blissy and poppy, will dig big time.
Don't be expecting the awesome droned out druggy gothy smeary shoegazey electro pop of The Big Pink's A Brief History Of Love debut we raved about a while back, cuz this is not in fact a new Big Pink record, instead, it's a killer mix tape those guys compiled, that is very reminiscent of the recent F*>k Dance, Let's Art comp, a killer collection of witch house, nu-gaze, glow-wave, weirdo electronica and all the other twisted microgenres we've been digging lately. And like all good comps, a handful of familiar faces, and a bunch of new bands that we are now dying to hear more from.
Witch house is definitely heavily represented, which is cool since, most of the witch house stuff has only been available on super limited cd-r's or as downloads, up first is GrillGrill (although typed properly the 'i's are little asci crosses), who unfurl a creepy stripped down slithery bit of slowcore electronic creep, with haunting atmospheres and weirdo sped up vox, Balam Acab's witch house anthem "See Birds" shows up, a fuzzy, almost dubsteppy bit of gently glitchy gauziness, with angelic vocals, wreathed in reverb, drifting over swirling industrial loops and shimmering synths, an old out of print Salem jam pops up too, a gloriously murky slow-mo shoegaze hip hop cough syrup doom pop crawl, there's also "Mumbai" by oOoOO, another witch house anthem, a slithery Portishead-y skittery downtempo drift with sped up vocal snippets, and super distorted synths.
There's also Gang Gang Dance, who do a spaced out psychedelic Kate Bush meets the Boredoms sort of ethereal jam, dubstepper Joker chops up soul vocals and creates a super witchy stuttery dubbed out groove, the Big Pink do show up, with a heavily remixed (by Gang Gang Dance) slab of fuzzy synths, looped samples and tribal rhythms, Actress unfurl some super minimal laid back murky psychedelic techno, the Xx get all moody and sultry and smokey and dreamy, and that's about it for the names we know.
But almost all of the tracks here are pretty great: Love Distance, Active Child, Henry Moan, Sewn Leather, Yusuf B, Light Asylum, Horse Macgyver, No Bra, the sounds ranging from looped swirling collaged sampledlic easy listening, to shoegazey eighties style new wave electropop, to fuzzy distorto hip hop creep, to fractured anthemic rhythmic indie pop, to various shades of what to these ears sounds very witch house-y, and on and on.
Definitely anyone who dug that F*>k Dance comp will dig this too, but really, anyone with a voracious appetite for new sounds, who has been digging these latest strains of twisted electronica and warped electro pop, this is probably the mixtape you wished someone would make you!
Another batch of gloomy fuzz pop from one man Blank Dog Mike Sniper, and while the sound of Blank Dogs has varied quite a bit over the last handful of releases, from paisley punk pop to gloomy lo-fi garage pop to vintage sounding cold wave, but this latest somehow manages to fuse all those elements into what might be the catchiest poppiest BD record yet.
With woozy low slung basslines, shimmery space-y synths, super lo-fi Casio drum beats, reverby surf guitars wrapped around more angular riffy crunch, and the vocals, so nice, multi tracked and lush, swoonsome and dreamy, the songs peppered with all sorts of super catchy melodies, synth, guitar, vocal, "Goes By" might be our favorite Blank Dogs jam yet, total old school power pop via eighties cold wave via lo-fi 4 track bedroom rock via the current wave of fuzzy lysergic garage pop, fuzzy, effervescent and catchy as all get out!
Much of the rest of the record dials back the pop just a bit, and slips into something a bit more gloomy and new wave-y, the vocals languorous and weary, the synths and guitars buzzy and droney and minor key, wrapped around simple propulsive rhythms, and motorik synth pulses, but peppered throughout are moments of surprisingly poppy poppiness, "Northern Islands" for instance is total skeletal lo-fi dream pop, with super dramatic crooned vocals, and whispery guitar jangle and super stripped down rhythms, but even those bits of poppiness end up segueing into blown out Zombi/Majeure style synthscapes, or total eighties style electro pop, reminding us of the Fixx (who should totally get mentioned more often in reviews of the various new wave of new wave bands, just sayin') or Interpol style gloomwave...
It's all over the map for sure, but then Blank Dogs designed this map, so all the tracks manage to hang together perfectly, and have somehow coalesced into a pretty fantastic collection of twisted lo-fi new wave gloom pop, that we can't seem to stop listening to.
There's nothing on the gatefold cd sleeve to tell you much about who/what this is, besides the name Blue Water White Death (which for some reason makes us think of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, though as it turns out they're not at all similar). There's just illustrations of a few frightening looking fishies, and some quirky song titles like "This Is The Scrunchyface Of My Dreams", "Nerd Future" and "Rendering The Juggalos". Hmm. Well it's enough to have made us curious about this, anyway, and that curiosity was worth it! This proved to be a weird and lovely, very dark avant pop record, quite compelling, indeed the first time we played this one morning, the only customer in the store at the time ended up buying it. Later we found out that BWWD is a collaboration between two singer/songwriter types from bands we certainly had heard of, none other than Jamie Stewart of SF's Xiu Xiu (and Former Ghosts) and friend Jonathan Meiburg from Texan band Shearwater. Should have guessed.
Together as Blue Water White Death (named after a '70s nature doc about the undersea dangers off the coast of Australia, apparently) these two have created an album that's gorgeous, shivery, and just a bit eerie. The delicate, breathy vocals carry fragile melodies over sparse sedate arrangements with ghostly background echoes, drones, and choirs. Acoustic guitars glitter in the darkness. Sudden bass notes twang reverberantly, expectantly, out of the near-silence. It's intimate, moody, emotive, hushed, and ultimately dramatic, with much "somber beauty" as we've previously noted about Shearwater's folky rock. For fans of them, and Xiu Xiu too, of course. Also we're reminded of Richard Youngs, for sure. (So if your name happens to be Loren Chasse, you definitely want this.) But it's recommended to everyone, actually!
Found a little handful of these tucked away in the closet, way out of print, last copies ever of this chunk of heavy noisy weirdness...
A greatest hits of sorts from these Wisconsin noisemakers. After several outrageously limited self released albums, mostly given to friends over the course of 4 years, this psycho redneck power electronic duo have remained almost totally unheard until now.
You did see the words power electronics above, so you know this ain't gonna be no easy listening, in fact, this is some seriously difficult listening, but surprisingly enough not in a harsh noise sort of way, this isn't just a continuous wall of Merzbowian white noise, the sounds here are surprisingly listenable, warped and cracked and damaged and fucked up, but for the iron eared, surprisingly pleasant. Jagged shards of fractured synths, chopped into strange rhythms, radio broadcasts buried in effects, loops colliding and overlapping, dense clouds of detuned instruments, amp buzz and tape hiss, howled distorted vox, some almost songs, tons of melting tones, babies crying over throbbing low end rumbles, thick billowing sheets of pulsating distorted crunch, tangled melodies so dense and blurred they become one huge squirming amorphous lump, distorted percussion, damaged tape player rehearsal tapes, and whatever the hell else these guys could come up with, all pulled apart, and jammed back together into heaping piles of thick droning, fucked up free form percussive and FX laden noise.
Definitely cool stuff, and for folks averse to truly harsh noise, Bruce Carkiss might just be your entree into a filthy, grimy, crusty soundworld you only dreamed about.
This is a vinyl collection of Cindytalk's two previous cds on Editions Mego - The Crackle Of My Soul (2009) and Up Here In The Clouds (2010), spread over two pieces of vinyl and a 7".
It was hard to imagine what to expect with a 2009 full album from Cindytalk, especially from the digi-centric label Mego. On The Crackle Of My Soul, Cindytalk is just the work of Gordon Sharp; and it certainly sounds like a Mego record on par with the likes of Pita, Kevin Drumm, and BJ Nilsen, as shards of digital noise are looped and phased into building compositions that glow with a very intense high-end piercing. Not quite Whitehouse territory, it's actually far more glacial and icy in tone. Nevertheless, Sharp's electronics have a way of drilling into your skull. Voice and piano occasionally creep into the mix, but not to the extent that you would hear on any of the earlier records, even The Wind Is Strong. We have to admit that we didn't love this record as much as their '80s efforts Camoflage Heart and In This World, but it's sort of a different beast, and there's a lot of very strong electro-acoustic renderings to be found here.
As with The Crackle Of My Soul, Up Here In The Clouds is well suited to Editions Mego, a long time bastion of glitch-born abstraction, volatile noise, and electro-acoustic consternation. After those initial cycles of tidal lapping, Sharp introduces the first of many lush, elongated drones built upon tensely vibrating noises that are equal parts John Duncan sound dilation and Tim Hecker fuzzed digitalia. Elsewhere, his ring-modulations transform the source material into glassine textures that hang above faux-shepard tone constructions and blustery oscillations spun upon radio interference, almost like a digital recapitulation of Loren Chasse or Small Cruel Party. At times, there are glimpses shot into the past reconnecting with the overdriven-noise-turned-into-ambience that graced some of the 1986 Cindytalk album In This World, but for the most-part the digital modulation and transformation that Sharp elicits in 2010 is a newer model in pursuit of those same ideals of abjection becoming beautiful but through digital means.
Gorgeous new full length from Gordon Ashworth (aka little brother of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth), and like the previous Concern album, Truth And Distance (reissued on vinyl and reviewed elsewhere on this week's list!), Caesarian is another meticulously crafted series of looped and processed soundscapes, equal parts Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker and William Basinski, full of lush drones, crumbling decaying tapes, and hazy atmospherics, all assembled from a surprising array of acoustic instruments: piano, clarinet, banjo, sruti box, acoustic guitar, augmented with processed tapes and various reverbs, resulting in a sound that's both human and alien, organic and processed, beautiful and mysterious.
"Discrete Memorial" might be one of our favorite tracks yet from Ashworth, a strange loopscape of melancholy piano, mournful horns, all captured on a crumbling bit of tape, repeated into a mesmerizing refrain, but the various elements stuttering and glitching out, like some beautiful bit of sad pop, recorded on an old damaged tape, and played back on a malfunctioning tape player, gorgeously hypnotic, but similar to Basinski's recordings, much of the sound is derived from what surrounds the music, strange drop outs, bits of hiss, subtle squelches here and there, the tones and notes changing speed and pitch, it's all woven deftly into a warped and warbly, beautifully imperfect bit of looped droning melodic drift. The cool thing though is that by the end of the track, the sound has shed all of the imperfections, having grown gradually more lush and less lo-fi as the song progressed, eventually ending up a gorgeously swirling Lubomyr Melnyk like flurry of rich harmonics and warm melodies.
The rest of the record is equally moving, and sonically breathtaking, from the warm whirling swells and metallic buzz of "Mending", to the fractured murky folk drift and eventual psychedelic drone effulgence of "From Warmth And From Violence", to the glitchy almost Oval sounding shimmer of "Leaving Gold", and finally, the sprawling 34 minute "Immersed In Envy, Porous With Forgetfulness", which manages to somehow bring all of those various sounds together, insectoid buzz, hazy abstracted minimal shimmer, mysterious field recordings, washed out whirring organs, sunshiney dronepop drift, blurred hiss drenched ambience, all woven into a lovely, slow shifting expanse of lush minimal beauty.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
This awesome 2009 cd release, now available on vinyl!! Here's what we said about it before:
One of several new releases on the always kick ass Digitalis label, this one from a one man band called Concern, that one man being Gordon Ashworth, little brother of Owen Ashworth of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, as well as a member of the late great Peyote Calamity, a weird heavy outfit, who sadly never released a proper record, but neither of those bands necessarily hint at the sounds to be found here. Utilizing a vast collection of instruments and noise making devices, zither, lap harp, mbira, banjo, piano, clarinet, trombone, accordion, acoustic guitar and alto horn, Ashworth blurs all those various instruments into long streaks of hazy drone-y dreaminess. Three tracks, all long, all gorgeously lush and textured, strangely melodic and propulsive for a sound that tends toward a more static drift.
Opener "Truth And Distance" bristles with energy, a glowing warm shimmer, the edges growing ever sharper as the songs sprawls outward, from a hushed whisper to a mighty heart of the sun ur-drone, the sound raw and organic, the core a deep unwavering drone, but the sound is like a stream, carrying all manner of glitch and hum, stray bits of disembodied guitar, melodic fragments, eventually transforming into a strange abstract Appalachia, a soft swirling tangle of upper register buzz and and skittery processed tones, definitely some of the most divine drones we've heard.
The first track is well over half the total length of the record, but the second two tracks, while shorter, are just as beautiful and epic. "Young Birth" builds from hushed whir to almost symphonic sounding majesty, a warped otherworldly new age, all tranquil and blissed out, the various tones overlapping and intertwining before fading out in a soft flurry of crackle and hum. While the final track, "Heartsink", begins all raw and fuzzy and almost heavy with a Tim Hecker sort of vibe, only to shift gears, and allow the sound of the various instruments to become distinct and identifiable. Which in no way means the sound is any less dreamlike, soft shimmers of heavily reverbed piano drift weightlessly in an expanse of soft muted melodies, the overtones creating distant drone-y swells, the result a lovely abstract sort of classical chamber dronemusic, so so so nice.
Essential listening for the drone inclined, and any one into Tim Hecker, Aidan Baker, Fennesz, Belong and the like might just have a new favorite record.
At first this heavy duty doom matchup seems like maybe it wouldn't work, sure both bands are technically doom, but both seem to exist on different ends of the doom-ic spectrum, with Cough spitting out a sludgier, more raw and crusty sort of Eyehategod meets Electric Wizard feedback drenched slow-mo crush, while The Wounded Kings traffic in something closer to true doom, more melodic, less sludgey, but surprisingly enough it works, both bands offering up some of their best material, a side long epic from each, Cough infusing some serious melody and some of that classic Sabbath sound into their lurching and lumbering pummel, while the Wounded Kings get a little bit sludgey themselves.
Hot on the heels of their amazing Ritual Abuse full length, reviewed here recently, Cough come up with a nearly 20 minute dirge that almost sounds like it could have been recorded during the same sessions (and maybe was?). Beginning with a slow spaced out bit of funereal doom, lots of space, even a tolling bell, the band soon launch into some caustic filthy blacksludge brutality, downtuned and malevolent, with some seriously sick vokills, all wrapped around a killer, main chugging riff, it's not until nearly half way through that the band decide to get all melodic, with some effects drenched vox, WAY up in the mix, all spacey and trippy, laced over that main riff, that seems to start swinging just a bit more, then there's some awesome psychedelic wah wah guitar leads, and we're in seriously classic true doom territory for sure, before eventually slipping back into the lugubrious sludge of the song's first half, and then finally an awesome layered feedback outro.
The Wounded Kings counter with a smoldering slow building intro, all whirring organs, downtuned chordal crush, eventually launching into a keyboard laced melodic lumber, a sound that could go either way, into shrieking blackness, or soaring epicness, some tangled swaths of wah wah guitar give us our first clue, before slipping right back into some more downtuned chug, but then finally, the vocals swoop in, and the sound is transformed into some epic Sabbathy true doom, the vocals growing more and more melodic as the track progresses, the guitars too, but before the song can explode, the track slips into a super minimal organ driven bit of psych prog, which rules, but only lasts for a minute or two before the song proper bursts back into action a fusion of the downtuned doom and that psychedelic prog, finishing off with an epic and dramatic climax before fading out, leaving a shadowy bit of tinkling piano.
Straight out of Stockton, California (the birth place of Pavement btw), via the always reliable Captured Tracks comes this latest blast of jangly new wave flecked reverb drenched indie pop from Craft Spells, whose sound, while not owing that much to the slacker pop of Pavement, does fit perfectly with the recent explosion of new wave eighties influenced retro garage pop. Craft Spells situates themselves somewhere right between Ariel Pink, Greatest Hits and Blank Dogs. Shimmery washed out glistening guitars, over softly propulsive drum machine rhythms, deep moody vocals, lots of layered background oooooh's and aaaaah's, the whole thing wrapped up in a gauzy hazy swirl. The B-side throws in some handclaps, whirring organs, changes things up a bit with a more minor key vibe, and some falsetto vocals, the result sounding almost like a warped Style Council 45 playing at 33.
Woozy and washed out, jangly and new wavey, catchy and druggy, some twisted pop that will hit the spot for fans of the usual suspects: Gary War, Julian Lynch, Solar Bears, Night Control, Beach Fossils, Hanoi Janes, Dignan Porch, Minks, Soft Moon, Wild Nothing, etc...
So cool! And cold wavey. A wonderfully produced piece of vinyl to replace those crappy downloads which have been bouncing around the internet for the past five or six years. Dark Day was the project spearheaded by R.L. Crutchfield, who first worked with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori in the earliest incarnation of the seminal No Wave band DNA in the mid '70s. By 1979, Crutchfield was striking out on his own as Dark Day; and at first, this band was an intentional reversal of roles within the trad-rock band with two women playing guitars and drums and a man behind the keyboards. The ladies for that incarnation were Nancy Arlen of Mars and Nina Canal of Ut; and they managed a few gigs and one hell of a great single - "Hands In The Dark" - which appeared many years later on a Soul Jazz No Wave compilation and has been covered spectacularly by the Chromatics. Canal and Arlen weren't terribly interested in continuing in the project, leaving Crutchfield to find likeminded folks with whom to work. The second (and last) Dark Day record was recorded in 1982, with Crutchfield going into the studio with a bunch of cheap electronics and toy synthesizers with Bill Sack to flesh out the accompaniments on similar instruments. Their interlocking arpeggiations are punctuated with blooping electronics that are equal parts Trio and Kraftwerk with an underlying dread to the spiralling songs that detoured from Kraftwerk's utopian vision of man-machine hybrids and down a paranoid vision of man being at the mercy of his machines, no matter how innocent their intent. Dark Day's songs are insistent and catchy despite their utterly simple structures. "Metal Benders" and "Danger / Dance" are probably the closest thing to being 'hits' on the album as weird / anti-romantic variations of Young Marble Giants with whip crack rhythms and spectral pre-X-Files electronic whistling melodies. Coming out of the NYC No Wave scene helped craft Dark Day into a something other than neo-Romantic post-punk outfit with electronics. This was a wholly unique band, who never got the attention that many of their contemporaries. Kudos to Dark Entries once again on a splendid reissue!
Phil Anselmo (Pantera, Down, Viking Crown, & now Arson Anthem) is on the cover of this issue, looking mean and tough in his tats and Poison Idea t-shirt. Also in this ish: Kylesa, Salome, Father Befouled, Winterfylleth, The Crown, Crowbar, Intronaut, Death Angel, Chris "Masters Of Reality" Goss, Forbidden, and more, of course the usual wiseass columns, reviews, and whatnot, that make this glossy metal mag a must read for all up-to-the-minute metallers. Oh, and this issue also includes a well-deserved Decibel Hall Of Fame album induction: Venom's Welcome To Hell! Pretty cool reading the sidebar featuring Tom G. Warrior's reminiscences about when he first bought his copy and how it made him feel!
A miasma is defined as a heavy, vaporous emanation or atmosphere, also used to describe a corrupting influence (thank you, dictionary dot com!). So obviously, Chicagoan Kevin Drumm has been hanging around miscreants Peter Rehberg and Masami Akita and has decided to drop a nasty, pungent aural fart on all of us. Normally, guitarist Drumm crafts near inaudible soundscapes which leave much to be imagined. But "Sheer Hellish Miasma", his first recording for the stalwart experimental electronic jetset label Mego, is just FUCKING LOUD!!!! As to be expected from Mego, there's an abundance of clicks and whirrs, digital chirps and skitters, but I repeat, it is FUCKING LOUD!!!! (!) This'll probably be up for Prix Ars Electronica against Whitehouse. Or not. Who knows what those Ars Electronica people are thinking? The closing "Cloudy", in contrast, builds a simplistic, yet wonderful shimmering drone that ends the disc quite gorgeously. Well done. A necessity for all you pure noise freaks out there. Epic and apocalyptic, much like the work of Zbigniew Karkowski, Boyd Rice as NON, the overdriven sonic capacities of Whitehouse or the more hellish punishments of Merzbow (it's a bit like "Hard Lovin' Man" in its trance-inducing aspects).
What a total gem! An amazing unearthed, ultra obscure album from way back in 1986. Hailing from Rochester, NY, Eleven Pond crafted super infectious dark pop with wonderful synth moments and song writing that has really held up over the years. Some of the production, and much of the overall sound reminds us a bit of Seventeen Seconds era Cure, where basslines lead the tracks and the guitars and synths add such a nice mood and texture. We're also reminded a lot of another obscure mid '80s band, For Against, who had the same ability to take Factory/4AD elements and influences and meld them so nicely with classic eighties American college rock, they kind of sounded like this amazing hybrid of Joy Division and R.E.M.
With new romantic vocals that totally tap into vintage Depeche Mode and New Order territory, we also hear echoes of other lesser known yet great bands of this era like Soul Merchants and Jet Black Factory. With so many new bands lately referencing that era and looking to similarly vintage sounds for inspiration, it's so refreshing to hear an actual relic from that period, too bad it sadly somehow slipped through the cracks, but now we can finally enjoy this set of songs, so worthy of much wider appreciation.
Limited to a pressing of 500, each copy has been silk screened and contains two Eleven Pond postcards as well as a sticker from Dark Entries, the label who mark this as their first release and who we have a pretty good feeling we're going to be hearing a lot more from in the future. Grab one while you can, as this is highly recommended!
In their brief career beginning in 2006, the Ohio based trio Emeralds has associated themselves with the grit and rust-stained noise that has erupted in the mid-western underground, often sharing the stage with Aaron Dilloway, C Spencer Yeh, and Hive Mind. Their two major releases have come by way of Dilloway's Hanson Records and No Fun Productions, which typically rank as releasing some of the most aggressive and brutal pieces of noise of the contemporary era. While live performances have reportedly embraced the noise community's full-force fury of maximum volume, Emeralds instead favors a sound that harkens back to the era of Cluster, Manuel Gottsching, Fripp & Eno, and Klaus Schulze.
Last year's Solar Bridge was a spectacular lazer blast of cosmic droning and inner-space meditation; but with that album clocking in less than 30 minutes, we were left wanting more. Fortunately, more is what Emeralds bring on What Happened. Collected from their seemingly non-stop sessions of improvisations for guitar, Moog, and Korg plus ample effects boxes, these 5 tracks spiral and snake around the same deep-space psychedelia found on Solar Bridge, pushing their sound beyond the two extended crescendos which populated that album. Monochord guitars pulse hypnotically against the overlapping tapestries of the sawtooth hum and modulating tones from the analogue synths. Throughout What Happened, Emeralds shift in mood from alien percolations of '60s sci-fi sound design to graceful swells of tonefloat majesty to purely physical vibrations which rip through the nervous system and strike numbly at the bone. There is beauty to be found here, but also a sublime unease that haunts these recordings. Yup, this one comes highly recommended!
As true a return to classic form as could be expected by this pioneer of ambient music, the one and only Brian Eno. Eno's later records are always met with a bit of trepidation as he seems more often to collaborate or explore musical realms that are perhaps more interesting to him than his listeners. But we were excited and curious to learn that Warp would be releasing this new record, and the label's pretty strict quality control ensures that it doesn't disappoint, but it's not altogether revelatory either, as much of a nice listen it truly is.
We've heard Small Craft on A Milk Sea as being billed as a series of filmless soundtracks, but we've also learned that the albums genesis was from the rejected recordings for the film, The Lovely Bones. The cinematic quality of the tracks especially the opener, "Emerald and Lime" is highly evident and harkens back to classic Eno records, Music for Films or Thursday Afternoon, with their billowly atmosphere and far-away piano tones. Later tracks evolve with more urgent dynamics as distorted guitars, percussion and processed electronics up the rhythms and textures significantly from the earlier tracks, and remind us of Eno's fourth world strategies heard on Another Green World and on his collaborations with Jon Hassel. The last third of the album calms back down with more placid ambient moods and ethereal washes and layers.
This is definitely a record to spend some time with as it doesn't quite reveal itself completely after two or even three listens. It's the best Eno record in years, which might not mean that much, but it's not for the easily dismissive. Like the best Eno records, it graciously rewards the patient.
They've done the FEFB's 2nd album Nipponjin, and 3rd album Parallel World, not to mention the sole record from pre-FEFB incarnation Far Out, so it's about time Phoenix also reissued the 1975 debut from these Japanese '70s space rock masters, led by the lost-worlds-obsessed Fumio Miyashita. In the Julian Cope Japrocksampler pantheon, this one ranks 41 out of 50, not quite as high as some of those others, but still in the thick of it. This debut demonstrates that even before Klaus Schulze took them under his wing as producer, they were doing just fine at making quite "kosmische" psych-synth symphonies all on their own. If you have any of the other FEFB related stuff you know what to expect!
Moogs and Mellotrons galore, in a more krautrock-than-thou Japanese heavy hippy blissout, melodic and meditative and massive, with much ritualistic-sounding vocal drama. Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues were other major Western influences, but the FAR EAST Family Band never let you forget that's where they're from. Some of the tracks here were afterwards radically re-mixed/re-recorded for Nipponjin (originally a Germany-only release, produced by Schulze) but not all of 'em.
The compact disc version comes in one of those cardboard "wallet" style digipacks, this one is especially cool though due to the die cutting of the front and back covers, through which you can see the clouds-and-sunset photos on the cd booklet, a nice touch! The vinyl version has the die cut covers too, presumably replicating the design of the original lp.
Supposedly, past members of long time aQ faves Deerhoof call Fat Worm Of Error home these days, and while you'll be hard pressed to hear any of the sweet poppiness or twisted hookiness that makes Deerhoof so near and dear, you will find magnified and even more twisted versions of everything else, the most damaged and demented parts of the noisier more abstract Deerhoof, here writ large, in huge swaths of confusional whatthefuck lurch and stumble, looped stutter and glitched out ambience, deconstructed antipop and damaged avant noiserock, with most of the rock removed. Each track is a slow building, sprawling sonic ooze, of gnarled strangled atonal guitars, bizarre vocals that swing wildly from murky mumbles to frenzied yelps, stumbling chaotic percussion, squiggly electronics, and clouds of malfunctioning electronics, streaks of skittery drum machine bleep and bloop, buried samples, loads of hiss and hum and whir and rumble and skree, held together by long stretches of mysterious ambience, flecked with chimes and bells, little rhythmic clicks, truncated barely there melodies, warm whirling layered textures, the tracks do occasionally coalesce into almost songs, and when they do, it sort of sounds like a field recording of OOIOO, OvO and Rubber O Cement engaged in some serious sonic warfare, but more often, the record just sort of swirls and drifts and lumbers, occasionally jaggedly, but just as often weirdly soothingly, sounding like Avarus or No Neck Blues Band bad-tripping though some Sid And Marty Kroft style psychedelic noise forest. Weird!
SWANK DOUBLE VINYL REISSUE FOR THESE KRAUTROCK LEGENDS!
This compiles the posthumous Faust odds-n-ends LPs Munic & Elsewhere and The Last LP. But of course, Faust is all about odds-n-ends. That's kinda their whole aesthetic. Not the first Faust record to buy, but definitely worthy of purchase.
Experimental electronica (particularly the glitch techno and collage work on the Mille Plateaux label) is getting dangerously close to self parody, with the definitions of very specific electronic music forming ever increasing legions of devoted followers
Fennesz' third album -- the aptly titled "Endless Summer" -- picks up where his ep of Rolling Stones / Beach Boys covers left off with a digital dispersion of "fun in the sun" rock mythologies. While there are no obviously discernable pop culture references, Fennesz builds a sound that really is quite summery from odd duets between disintegrating acoustic guitar strums and the coalescence of digital errata. Thus, this album has the feeling of the classic Beach Boys sound, but very little of that structure. These are NOT Beach Boys covers; but if he said they were, we'd have no basis to call him a liar. Regardless, Fennesz's "Endless Summer" is just fucking great.
BACK IN PRINT!!!
Most folks will probably be grabbing this for the F+O's tracks, but we're pretty blown away by Dan Melchior, and his awesomely super distorted garage pop, like Elvis Costello, all jammed up and slathered in crumbling hiss and grit, the vocals delivered in a thick English accent, the drums blown out, effcts all over the place, everything buried beneath a patina of blurred buzz, but the songs themselves, total classic power pop, Costello, Nick Lowe, that sort of thing, opener "Daylight Robbery" is a definite contender for pop jam of the year, with a main hook / melody that will stick with you like crazy. And yeah, we know he's been making record for years, but somehow this is one of the first times we've heard him. We're definitely gonna do some digging into Melchior's back catalog. You probabaly will too after hearing this...
The Fresh & Onlys hold their own just fine thank you, with frantically strummed acoustic guitars, skiffly drums, reverbed vox, and two of their best songs yet, both channeling a sound similar to Melchior's, but with a bit more of an American nineties indie rock vibe, lo-fi, but weirdly lush, killer choruses, the sound warm and washed out, some cool sixties girl group back up vocals, the second track definitely getting all Spector-ish and reminding us quite a bit of Thee Oh Sees. Good stuff. And probably limited too...
PREORDER! PREORDER! PREORDER! PREORDER!
We're super excited to be one of the few stores to be selling preorders for this lp series from Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, who, starting in January of 2011, will be releasing an lp every two months, each one focusing on and created from a single instrument, the first (from which the sound sample below is taken) will focus on the piano. There will be six lps in the series, but subscribers will also get, along with the last album in the series, two bonus full-length albums featuring Matt and special guests. Subscribers will also get an old-style tip-on LP box with a hand mounted photo in which to house their lps. SUPER limited to just 700 copies worldwide. And, Solos not be available digitally, or on compact disc in it's complete form. Some of the lps might be available individually, but heck, $40 for 8 lps and a super fancy box, tough to beat. So Fiery Furnaces fans, line up here, and grab one of these before they're gone.
You'll be charged for the whole series, and will be notified as each lp is released and arrives at aQ. You'll still have to pay shipping for each individual lp, that's not included in the $40, but of course if you're a regular mailorder customer, we can just toss it in your current order. Otherwise we'll ship them out as they arrive...
Fourth (?) in Fucked Up's ongoing series of Chinese Zodiac eps, this one featuring two loooooong songs, which find the punk band that even non punks seem to love, moving even further from their punk rock roots on these two extended, repetitive hypno-kraut post rock jams. And while folks were crowing about this being FU's 'krautrock' record, it's not quite that, although it is pretty rocking and repetitive, the title track notable also for some guest vocals from Mod Goth chanteuse Zola Jesus, but more on that in a second.
"Year Of The Ox" finds the band locking into a pretty serious chunk of hypnotic rock, after a gorgeous cello intro, the drums and riffs locked tight, with the howled vocals following right along, for almost six minutes straight, with only brief variances, until about 7 minutes in, when the strings return, and the song turns into some weirdly lush indie pop, dramatic and melodic, and then finally the song switches gears completely into a heavy swirling bit of psychedelic drift, with big guitars and swirls of cymbal sizzle, lots of soaring strings, all pretty epic and majestic. When the track finally resumes its rocking, Zola Jesus swoops in her deep dramatic vox the perfect foil for Pink Eyes' gruff howl, the two sparring over a frenetic crunch before fading out and leaving just the strings again.
The flipside, "Solomon's Song" is equally kick ass and not all that punk (and not a bad thing), beginning with just horns, then some dark crunchy riffage, before the band launch into another propulsive groove, droney, and hypnotic, and again sort of post rocky, the verses super tense and tight, but with some cool mathy breakdowns and some serious poppiness, the gruff vocals sounding more melodic by the second, not to mention a killer minimal second half, that's a stripped down stretch of drums and bass, distant horns, and some spidery bits of guitars, gradually unfurling and winding down until just the horns are left. Now we can't wait for the next 8 eps (year of the tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster and dog!)!!
Full length number three from this turntable / baritone guitar duo, whose last two records have been huge favorites around here, and this one looks to follow suit.
With a sound that's equal parts doomy abstract drift, and gauzy atmospheric ambience, washed out textures of hum and hiss and crackle and whir wrapped around lush melodic figures and effects heavy psychedelic shimmer, these two craft gorgeous mini epics, slow building soundscapes that brood and drift and soar, haunting and hushed, layered and lush.
This latest installment opens with a lustrous bit of guitar loopage, locked into a web of soft spun delay, repetitive and mesmerizing, the turntable nothing but crackle at first, but gradually growing into something much more substantial, adding texture, little shards of melody, the sound getting more and more hazy, and blurred, and softly noisy, the guitar receding behind undulating sheets of swirling static, eventually the various sounds smearing into a single shimmering sound. That track flows directly into the next, another slow drift, this one driven by a simple percussive crash, surrounded by soft swirls of recorded sound, and washed out streaks of dreamlike guitar blur, this track growing more and more hushed and minimal, before segueing directly into another gorgeous field of electronically charged crackle, warm whirling melodies surfacing in lush gauzy billows, eventually parting to reveal a simple, moody riff, the melody gently driving the sound, the turntable wrapping ethereal swaths of buzz around the riff, and introducing some disembodied percussion.
The rest of the record unfurls in some sonic dreamstate, the guitars and turntables hard to distinguish from one another, each offering up snippets of melody, percussive thumps, gauzy shimmer, and easily slipping into a supporting role when one or the other takes charge. The middle portion of the record plays out like a single epic multipart piece, all the tracks bleeding into one another, ambient and atmospheric, rhythms surfacing and then dissipating, melodies doing the same, all about texture and mood, the various layers shifting and drifting creating all manner of subtle tonal color.
The final two tracks are the culmination of the record's overall slow build sonic arc, with "Get Out Of The Obese Crowd" unveiling a lazy buzzy guitar figure, wreathed in hushed hazy wheezes, that build to dense static charges, the sound growing more brittle and electronic, the buzzes swirling and whirling, a dizzying glitchscape, that leads into the ominously fuzzy final 6+ minutes that make up "Precious Persecution Complex", a sort of WAY more minimal SUNNO))), a glacial low end creep, that slowly gives way to a staticky sun dappled drift, and then slips right back into the smoldering caustic crunch that transforms the song into a minimal moody chunk of Nadja style doomdriftdrone, but one writ in shades of grey and streaks of static, a thick charged stretch of dense crackling sonic energy, threatening to explode, but that unrealized threat simply becomes a lush hazy tension, that infuses the track with a strange otherworldly pathos, and thus creating a powerful and hauntingly lovely coda, to an already hauntingly lovely record.
After a handful of super limited tracks, including a now out of print 7", this here is the first record from these guys we've managed to get for the store, and it's a doozy. Gauntlet Hair are a duo from Colorado, who specialize in distorted jangly bombastic pop, falling somewhere between Animal Collective and The Big Pink, stirring in some programmed beats, some moody noisepop jangle into their hypnotic, soaring druggy psych pop crunch.
This new single will most likely have folks finally freaking out over these guys, not only is it on the uber hip Mexican Summer label, but it totally rules, definitely owing a huge debt to Animal Collective, with tribal rhythms, jagged bits of guitar crunch, and dramatic reverbed vox, but here, that stuff is augmented by handclaps, programmed beats, epic Big Country like guitar jangle, super distorted drums, effects drenched vocals that swing wildly from speaker to speaker, a thick gorgeously gauzy production, not to mention hooks galore, the chorus super catchy, as are the verses, the song a slow build to a super distorted blown out psychedelic noise pop climax. Definitely a new fave, and these two jams have us hankering big time for the forthcoming full length.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
For all the hype and publicity that has surrounded Girls, its easy to lose sight that why so many, including us have fallen so hard for these guys (Girls?), is that they write such earnest, endearing and moving songs that have a kind of pure emotional honesty that just doesn't come along in music that often.
We first heard a couple of these songs over a year ago when Girls performed very stripped down versions for the first time on Irwin's radio show Sleeves On Hearts on KUSF. And what makes Christopher Owens such an amazing songwriter is that his songs can be delivered totally bare bones or fleshed out with full production and both ways they still hit to the core. These new songs introduce a delightful twang and bittersweet elegance to the already wide scope of sonic terrain that Girls cover within their songs. Tracks like "Oh So Protective One" and "Broken Dreams Club" have a melancholic southwest charm that makes us think of some of our favorite Giant Sand records, or if Calexico teamed up with Elvis Costello in his prime. With beautiful horn arrangements, and a very talented cast of players, including one of our favorite and most unsung talents of San Francisco, Ara Anderson backing them up, this record finds Girls growing in such exciting ways.
There is still the exuberance and wide eyed wonder that made listening to their debut such a thrilling experience, but there is a depth and truth inside each of these songs that is just further proof that Girls are no of-the-moment fad, but instead a wildly talented band who will make beautiful and moving music for a long time to come! (And although this is an "ep", it's actually about 30 minutes long, longer than some Captured Tracks "full-lengths", haha.)
Oh wow, this is one of those amazing split 7"s that makes you stop listening to the piles of records you've been meaning to get to, as once you put this one all you wanna do is listen to each side over and over again. This is the first we've heard of Girls Names, who apparently will have their debut full length out early next year and if "I Lose" is any indication it's gonna be a record that'll demand some serious attention. We haven't been quite this smitten with the sounds of a new rock band since we first got floored by Crystal Stilts a few years back. In fact they have a very similar sound to Crystal Stilts, nice warm reverb rushing through their hollow and haunting garage rock.
We were already big fans of San Francisco's Brilliant Colors so it comes as no surprise that their song on the split is another gem of early '80s inspired post-punk/dream-pop garage bliss. Even though we have so much other stuff to listen to right now, we just can't stop flippin' this and playin' it nonstop!
All it took was about 30 seconds, and we knew this was probably gonna become out favorite new electronica record, heck, maybe just our favorite new record period. The best way we can think to describe Gold Panda is like a more lo-fi DIY version of The Field, if that makes any sense. Where The Field take samples, and loops and layers them, rendering them almost unrecognizable, and creating lush house-y soundscapes, Gold Panda does something quite similar, but without the goal of disguising the source or the samples, a vocal loop is chopped up and processed and woven into a stuttering melody, over a simple looped beat, and warm whirling melodies, that looped sample makes the whole thing sound so playful, and at least on the opener, "You", whose sample is the word 'you' chopped and looped, that melody ends up sounding strangely Indian, like some electro raga, although over the course of the track, the tone and timbre and pitch changes, so it slips from Oval like shimmer, to skittery faux Indian raga, to loping super melodic playful trip hop.
And the whole record is like that, the construction of the tracks is obvious, the glitch and static and crackle and pop of the source records, are all part of the sound, the samples assembled to create rhythms, to fashion melodies, draped over whirring skeletal beats, woven into Philip Jeck like cracklescapes, gamelan like melodies are layered into a lush tangle of melodies and placed atop a sea of hiss and a spare stripped down beat, soft melodic swells are truncated and left to rise and fall, creating a woozy rhythm, the whole thing wrapped in playful chimes and clipped minimal beats, every track is playful and lovely and dreamy in its own way, not so dependent on the beat, as much as the arrangement of samples, which is inevitably perfect, and conjures up the perfect mood and atmosphere.
There are some definitely oddballs, the two minutes of folky acoustic guitar on "Parents", that manages to be quite pretty and sweet on its own, and fit with the rest of the more sample heavy tracks pretty perfectly, there's also the buzzy sitar laced "India Lately", which does chop up Indian ragas, sitars and tablas, and weaves those parts into a gorgeously shoegazy stretch of pop ambience, and finally, the record finishes off by revisiting "You", this time with strings and chimes, and a less manic arrangement, instead opting for something much more subdued and dreamlike.
So great! All this amazing electronica coming out lately, we can't get enough, but this one just might take the cake!
Another weird and wonderful release from the mysterious Tapeworm label. "What's so weird and wonderful and mysterious about someone remixing Fennesz?" you might be wondering? Well on Remiksz, Stefan Goldmann makes use of Fennesz' previous Tapeworm release, the collection of samples appropriately titled Szampler, which gathered up various source material used to create some of our favorite Fennesz records and then wove those raw samples into a surprisingly cohesive whole. With Remiksz, things get pretty meta, with Goldmann removing Fennesz' original samples, one by one, replacing them with samples of his own, recorded and created over the last decade, in the same sequence, eventually resulting in this, Remiksz, a sort-of remix record, which contains absolutely NO music by Fennesz. Instead, Goldmann has composed a record using Fennesz' Szampler as a template, or a framework: the track durations are all the same, all the arrangements, it's just the sounds that are utterly and completely different. We guess one could argue that it therefore does incorporate MUSIC (in the sense of organization/structure) "written" by Fennesz, but just not his SOUNDS.
So Fennesz fans at first might be a bit puzzled, or disappointed, which definitely seems fair, but give it a chance, Goldmann has a fantastic arsenal of sounds and samples, many of them quite reminiscent of Fennesz himself, and like Szampler, Remiksz ends up being a deliriously varied barrage of tripped out psychedelic soundscapery, tendrils of buzzing guitar, dense staticky rumbles, orchestral bursts, little bits of melody, long shimmery drones, swirls of crackly haze, and blown out gauze, delicately drifting harmonics, dark ominous piano, cinematic strings, fields of celestial glitch and burnt black squelch, skittery fragmented rhythms, buried samples, cricket-like clicks, lots of reverb and washed out echo, warped and warbly tape experiments, primitive synths, a blurred and ever shifting short attention span sprawl of fractured lush loveliness and glitched out sampledelic sputter. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
The break out single from Cee-Lo Green's latest solo record, "Fuck You" has got to be hands down the song of the year. Its tone of jilted empowerment speaks to so much more than just a scorned lover, that we're sure we'll be seeing some very politically pointed parody covers in the coming months. Lady Killer sees the Gnarls Barkley frontman step away from the Dangermouse production and gives us a killer tour of classic souled out funk, electro, and RnB that for the most part stays highly energized and grooving with only a couple of detours into schmaltz. But his amazing voice carries through it all and as always is the reason to listen.
Full length number three from this amazing outfit, whose debut, Guitar Music From The Western Sahara, we made our Record Of The Week back in 2008, and whose second record, Treeg Salaam, we probably should have, both of those albums brimming with, as we mentioned in past reviews: "dizzying blasts of lo-fi electric guitar driven rhythmic African folk, clattery homemade percussion, jubilant vocalizing, repetitive and melodic and hypnotic, and super rocking."
This latest lp offers up a different side of the band's sound, songs that adhere to the roots of Saharoui music, the roots of Group Doueh's sound, played mostly on traditional Moorish instruments: the tinidit (a three string lute), the ardin (a kora-like harp), the tbal (a clay drum) and the kass (tea glasses), but this is Group Doueh after all so those traditional instruments are augmented by synths and GUITARS!
The opening track is sooooo gorgeous and sets the tone of the record, darkly rhythmic, lush and layered, sweet tangles of intricate melody, the arrangements emotional and propulsive and jubilant, laced with subtle drones and flurries of rapid fire notes, minimal but still so rich and dense and deep. Not all of the record is so tied to the past, after all the Group Doueh sound we know and love was born of this music, and is not really that far removed, so many of the other songs drift into more familiar territory, although the arrangements and instrumentation remain subtly closer to traditional Saharoui music, but again, since our exposure to that music has mostly been via Group Doueh records... well, you get the picture. Every song here is a fantastic celebration of sound, from sublime desert blues buzz to soaring vocal driven high life, to droned out psychedelia to super stripped down vocal/rhythm jams, and those vocals, again so incredible, so emotional and passionate, the perfect match for the music underneath which exudes the same sort of passion. The final track on side one slips back into a sound more minimal, a sprawl of hypnotic buzz and skitter, totally trancelike and hypnotic before exploding into a noisy psychedelic blowout, perfectly bookending the tracks in between.
The offers up still more fantastic desert blues folk bliss, singing strings, propulsive rhythms, vocal harmonies, some wild serious steel string wrangling guitar action of course, peppered with bits of that more minimal rhythmic traditional music, but all woven into the lush living colorful fabric of GD's gorgeous timeless sound.
As with all Sublime Frequencies vinyl releases, EXTREMELY LIMITED, this will most likely be sold out and out of print in the next week or two, pressed as always on thick vinyl and housed in a super swank, heavy full color gatefold sleeve. ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Okay, let's get it out of the way right up front. Yeah, we know, Gruntruck is a terrible name for a band, and yeah they do have a song called "Crucifunkin'" which is unfortunately, as the title might lead you to believe, a little bit funky. But be that as it may, these guys slayed, early nineties Seattle grunge, always underappreciated, but so heavy, and hooky, and groovy, channeling the same sort of sound as Skin Yard and Soundgarden, big downtuned riffage, wild scrabbly leads, and vocalist Ben McMillan's killer yowled vox. Need proof, just check out the sound sample for "Inside Yours", a track that we would definitely put near the top of our list of best grunge jams ever, with its woozy, druggy, slow build intro, and lurching lumbering, stop / start arrangement, slinky and sludgey, with some killer weirdly effected guitars, reminding us of Green River, the same sort of junkie blues grunge metal groove. And while that 's definitely our favorite jam here, there are plenty that are just as good.
Gruntruck played constantly with grunge legends like Screaming Trees, Alice In Chains (supposedly they opened for AiC more than any other band), not to mention touring with Pantera, and featured at least one of The Accused as a member, but for whatever reason, they sort of slipped through the cracks. Which makes no sense listening to this now. This double disc collection gathers up the group's two full lengths, 1990's Inside Yours and 1992's Push, with two bonus tracks. Inside Yours is the grungier of the two, definitely sounding like it could easily have ended up on Sub Pop, although it's maybe a tad more metal, with a sound that was definitely dangerously close to fellow grungers Skin Yard, while Push was a bit more commercial, probably reflecting all those shows with Alice In Chains, their sound definitely moving in that direction. Record label bullshit hastened the end of the original lineup, and while the band soldiered on, releasing another ep in 1996, and reuniting in 2000, it's these two records that should have made them as big as their grunge brethren. Super rocking, grunge-y hook filled heaviness that should most definitely hit the spot for fans of Skin Yard, Tad, Green River, Soundgarden, The Fluid, Afghan Whigs, Swallow, Love Battery, Nirvana, etc., who somehow missed out on these guys the first time around.
Packaged in a super fancy six panel double digipak, with two booklets, lyrics and liner notes.
Wow, this lost Swedish eastern-tinged psych-folk gem from 1970 gets a deluxe reissue. Handgjort means "handmade" and all of the original copies of the record were individually made by the band members. The reissue is on the expensive side, even for the Silence label, but that's because the label worked with the band members to make an exclusive replica of the original record with, again, unique individually handpainted covers! It also features a 32 page book about the band complete with all the reproductions of the original covers and other interesting photos of the band, as well as bonus tracks from live performances from the festival at Gardet in 1970 and 1971. Imagine a more moody Incredible String Band with less singing and more sitars and tablas!
This cd is limited to 600 copies. Also, there is an exclusive double lp version on Psykofon that is even more expensive (in the $70 range) that features 25 minutes of live material not on the cd. We probably won't get those for the store, but if anyone is interested, we can special order it for you.
All right. Yet another great homage to the transcendent, cosmological sounds of mid-'70s progressive electronics by way of John Elliott, better known as one of the synth dudes in Emeralds. The number of Elliott's solo / side projects is pretty staggering, with Imaginary Softwoods being the eighth that we're aware of, outside of Emeralds. Given the vast back catalogue from the Elliott / Emeralds axis, it shouldn't come as surprise that this 2lp set has gone through several permutations as well. First on cassette (three of 'em!). Then on vinyl. A cd-r came and went. Now, this remastered set appears once again on vinyl. There is a reason for all of the various editions of this album: it's a damn good record!
The first side opens with a cold void atmosphere of filter sweep tones and metallic sawtooth vibrato, reminiscent of Elliott's recordings as Outer Space with more of slant toward the languorous, flanging drones that come by way of Maeror Tri or Cranioclast, minus the post-industrial framework. Elliott settles into a series of tone cluster of rounded synth notes whose cycling phrases have an elegant restraint and somber mood, as if Morton Feldman were to score a isolationist sci-fi soundtrack. Side two offers more of the liquid abstraction that became an Emeralds' signature on What Happened, sprawling through gentle oscillation and bittersweet half-melodies. A church-organ like set of rainy-day impressionism settles onto the third side, before Elliott reprises the cold flanging isolationism and Feldman-like tone clusters noted on the first side. The album drifts into a minor-key oblivion that descends over the course of the three final tracks on the fourth side of the album, tumbling into maudlin suspended tones and drones. So so nice!
Ah, Kompakt! The current kingdom of electronic music has produced another exceptional album from one of its citizens. There's not much to be said about Jatoma, as this Danish trio seems to be flaunting an air of mystery through a half-hearted attempt at anonymity. Regardless of their backstory, Jatoma are impressive magicians when it comes to their eccentric techno productions that recall the best of Four Tet, Matthew Herbert, and even Matmos from time to time.
With an opening sequence of sparkling digitalia on "Little Houseboat" that teases at a precious melodic phrase in the same way that Oval captured our imaginations with his impeccable Diskont 94 album, Jatoma is clearly onto something quite special. This becomes obvious when they push through a jumble of electronic squiggles and clockwork clicks into the soft whump of a techno pulse and accompanying bass groove that fleshes out just the first number on the very impressive debut. References to Animal Collective have been offered in comparison to Jatoma, but their sound relies less on lithium-addled bubblegum electronica and more on a chimerical synthesis of Pop Ambient dreaminess and the tech-house dramatics of build-and-release. It's no wonder that Kompakt signed them! "Durian" and "Bou" are both curious anthems with their auto-tuned, chill-wave melodies and warbled acid motifs fused onto thumped deep-house rhythms and hi-hat swing. While there are distinct tracks which stand on their own as the singles amongst the album, Jatoma take the time to subvert the iPod listening experience with very short interludes, codas, and intros of transitional squelches and tuned melodies that bridge the moods and atmospheres of Jatoma's varied tracks. Yup, it's an album that works best when listening from beginning to end!
Like many of the recent Kompakt releases, the vinyl comes the cd of the same material found within.
The sound of science! This is not the fictionalized abstraction of synthesized tone and pulse that come across as sci-fi dramas in the works of folks like Oneohtrix Point Never or Klaus Schulze, instead field recordist Ernst Karel has ventured into the various laboratories at Harvard to capture the environmental sounds found within! To astrophysicists, chemists, and cognitive science researchers these are the quotidian noises of work; but beyond the walls of any given science institution, these clanks, hums, hisses, and groans can take on any number of allusions. Such a strategy is not uncommon, as John Duncan had the opportunity to capture the sounds of the Stanford Linear Accelerator for his potent powerdrone masterpiece The Crackling, and Francisco Lopez brought focused sensibility to his Machines. Karel's approach to his source material seems to be one of cautious awe and political neutrality. On the first track on Heard Laboratories, Karel captures the metronomic clicks from an organometallic chemistry process that results in atomic layer deposition. There is a rather clinical definition of what this process is, but no explanation as to what this could be used for or why. The various clicks emerge from a growing vortex of precision tuned motors and pressurized hiss, broken on one occasion by an incoming telephone call. Elsewhere, the sounds of sterlizers and centrifuges take on a particularly ominous set of rasped bursts of noise that bear a bone-chilling resemblance to a dental drill. Marathon Man, perhaps? The tiny bird-like squeaks from the tamarins being used for cognitive research infiltrates Karel's sound field, bracketed by massive vibrations from cooling systems used to protect much of the equipment. The clinical hiss of a canister of liquid nitrogen resonates with the cycling pulse of a lazer that it was intended to cool takes on an almost musical quality of chorale-like minimalism touched with slow crawling rhythmic swells. Karel offers a pretty amazing set of field recordings here, certainly recommended for anyone interested in the aforementioned John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, M. Behrens, Tarab, Eric La Casa, etc.
From the same label that brought us the old school electro synth lo-fi party jams of the oddly monickered Oxykitten, comes this, the latest from PDX via SF audio alchemist Garth Klippert, who while living in SF and working as a cab driver, spent his free time creating dreamy abstract melodic soundscapes, cobbled together from field recordings, twangy guitars, electric pianos, assorted homemade instruments and toys, as well as all manner of junk (plastic guns, saw blades, pot lids, shoes, etc). These disparate elements are smeared and blurred into warm, fluid, layered sonic drifts, from woozy piano driven sunshiney kraut shimmer, to twang flecked Negativland-esque vocal collages, to slow burning skeletal blues wrapped around mysterious voices and fields of click and chitter, to windswept expanses of almost Eastern sounding sort-of-ragas, rife with sped up voices, croaking frogs, muted murky looped and lo-fi rhythms, everything very hazy, a little haunting, cinematic and subtly psychedelic. Cool stuff for sure.
Pressed on bright yellow tapes, housed in full color sleeves, LIMITED to 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and comes with a digital download.
Kylesa are another one of those bands we've always dug, but for whatever reason, have never reviewed ANY of their records. So time to remedy that omission right now, with this, their 5th full length, since 2001, when the band was born out of the dissolution of Savannah sludge metal outfit Damad, and like Damad, Kylesa trafficked in a similarly sludgey Southern sound, epic crushing downtuned riffs, howled vox and dense tribal drumming. Heavily influenced by Neurosis, Kylesa kicked out jams that were doomy and low slung, swampy and thick, crushing riffage giving way to stretches of rhythmic mesmer, only to explode into another head caving burst of metallic crush.
Over the years though, Kylesa's sound has changed dramatically, like their Southern sonic compatriots Baroness, their music started out super heavy and sludgey, almost punk, feral and fierce and crusty and brutal, and gradually developed into something much more psychedelic, melodic, and at times downright poppy.
On A Spiral Shadow, the songs concern themselves with texture and arrangement as much as pummel, moreso in many cases, the dual drummers adding an awesome and densely rhythmic element, with the band sometimes breaking down into total Crash Worship drum jams (and live, the stage is littered with drums, so the guitarists can join in), the guitars too, for as much as they grind and churn and chug, they also soar and chime, melodies and harmonies woven into intricate psychscapes, the songs slipping easily from hooky metallic psych pop to fierce doomy plod and back again, howled male vocals switch off with more melodic female vox, it's easy to see why this seems to be Kylesa's 'breakout' record. It's still heavy, and complex, and metal, but also hooky and melodic and sort of tripped out and psychedelic. Makes sense that folks into Mastodon and newer Baroness are all over this stuff. And rightfully so.
If we had to pick a favorite track it would probably be "Don't Look Back" which is so dangerously poppy, it almost sounds out of place, like it might belong on a Torche record, or like it must be some nineties indie rock cover, but for all it's extreme hookiness, and incredibly catchy guitar harmonies, the sound is still thick and lush, with some seriously crunchy verses, and some pummeling drumming, holy shit, it's just so goddamn catchy, this song totally KILLS.
The thing is though, the more we listen to this record, the less this track really stands out, and the more the rest of the songs seem to start sounding nearly as catchy, even at it's heaviest, A spiral Shadow is infused with melody and texture, the arrangements hypnotic and trancelike, soaring epic crescendos and stretched out hypnodronerock all tangled up with gnarled downtuned pound and fierce churning pummel, and for every bit of metallic chug there's some mysterious melodic warmth or poppy psychedelic shimmer woven in. Awesome.
The space-age sounds of Lazer Sword make us here at aQuarius recOrds feel like we are living in the kind of future where everyone has mohawks and wears plastic dresses and there is no light but flashing neon-colored spotlights. But, hey, we've been waiting for this record for what seems like years now, so we ARE living in the future, albeit one (slightly) less Blade Runner-esque. You'd never know that, though from the cover of Lazer Sword's self-titled debut, which looks like something out of Tron, or maybe Voltron (!). Former aQ employee Antaeus Roy and collaborator Bryant Rutledge have given us a record filled with beats and synths that don't so much throwback to as reinvent the '80s by chopping the hell out of them and reassembling the parts. On the surface somewhat akin to Flying Lotus or Zomby (the one with the "y", not the proggier one with the "i"), Lazer Sword's sampling is a bit more frenetic, though, and leans toward hip-hop rather than dub.
After opening the record with three mostly instrumental tracks, Lazer Sword brings in a bit of help from Turf Talk on "I'm Gone." The strange rhythm samples provide a perfect background for the catchy pitch-shifted hook: "Pass me that control / I'm in a fucking zone / I'm on my spaceship / I'm outta here I'm gone!" Just when you think the track is going to stay hot the whole way through, Lazer Sword takes it down a notch and drops the drums, leaving you floating in space for a minute and a half. The four or so tracks where Lazer Sword bring in outside guests (including Myka 9) to do vocals stand out, but not as much as you'd think because of the way LS incorporates sampled vocals into the layers of sound. This is a record that definitely requires either a dancefloor, a blunt, or quite possibly both.
From the mysterious black cover and gothic font, we initially thought that this was some new vinyl release by Amort or Striborg or any number of black metal hordes we see day in and day out. But no, this is in fact quite an awesome surprise, a beautiful early-seventies drum-centric spiritual jazz record by the unknown to us, David Lee Jr., and it's really quite killer! Right up there with the likes of Steve Reid, Rashied Ali, Roland P. Young or Khan Jamal!
Hailing from New Orleans and moving to New York where Lee played in Roy Ayer's Ubiquity for a few years, Evolution was recorded in 1974 and is Lee's only solo record originally released on his own Supernal records imprint (not to be confused with the black metal Supernal!). Centered around martial rhythms and syncopation with a left-field avant jazz sensibility and even some blazing psych rock and soul flourishes, the disc is 14 short tracks with the title track centerpiece being a 7 minute extended drum solo. There are even a couple of short vocal tracks, one of which should just be skipped over at the very end called "I Want Our Love To Always Last" (even the Soul Jazz site won't let you sample it). But other than that one misstep, this is a highly recommended album for fans of vintage beat-heavy seventies jazz from the likes of P. E. Hewitt, Lee Miller, or any of the cool cats we mentioned above!
Two enigmatic projects share this 20-minute cassette, which provides little more than the names of the two bands and their respective track titles. There is an enticing inscription inside the j-card which reads "dusseldorf lunar sand continuum." Yup, sci-fi soundtracks and kraut-inspired electronics are in the cosmological order for both Lithium Dreams and Starla Dust. The former transmits a linear stream of tremolo augmented soft noise with ambient swoops and half-melodic blurs. Eventually, small tone pulsations and percolating lazer-ping synths open up Lithium Dreams to sounding like those early Oneohtrix Point Never cassettes or some of John Elliot's non-Emeralds output, as if it were the soundtrack to some long lost scientific / industrial film about satellites. Starla Dust keeps to the oblique sci-fi sound with low-end oscillations dappled with metallic half-formed drones, malleable ambient wash, and squiggling electronics. The vibe here is not all that far from Coil's Music To Listen To In The Dark in all of the deep space hypnosis and synth miasma. Another fine cassette from Monorail Trespassing!
Everyone should know by now that we're HUGE fans of the legendary Baltimore group Lungfish, not to mention their side projects - Zomes, Pupils, and of course all the solo releases from the band's one of a kind singer Daniel Higgs. Even though they're not technically broken up and hold the title of being the longest running Dischord band ever, we haven't heard so much as a note since 2005's Feral Hymns. And no, this isn't a new Lungfish album, but since Dischord has been going through their catalog and remastering their albums to meet today's standards, we figured "why not?" If there's anything the ol' aQ website could use, it's more Lungfish. It's interesting charting this band's career, as they've always channelled a cyclical sound that hasn't really changed too much except that its become more psychedelic and... shamanistic?... over the years. The one constant is that Lungfish have sounded only like Lungfish. Pass And Stow dates back from 1994, at a point where their punk roots were more prominent and they were definitely flirting with a sound that owed a debt to other great Dischord bands like Rites Of Spring, Ignition, Soul Side, and so on. Still, Lungfish stood out. Higgs could never be mistaken for anyone else and Osborne has got to be one of the most underrated guitar players ever. Serving as the perfect anchor are drummer Mitchell Feldstein and, on this release, bassist Jon Chriest. The no-nonsense Lungfish rhythm section may in fact be the band's secret weapon, because their restraint and super solid ability to push things forward are what make this band so uniquely HEAVY. Like, monolithically heavy, in a way other bands simply couldn't understand. Listening to this band now makes it even clearer how unique they were (and are), especially considering other sounds coming out in 1994. Damn we love this band.
Sprawling double disc of self described 'other planetary field drone' from this mysterious Aussie duo featuring members of doomsludge heavies Whitehorse, avant noisemakers Bone Sheriff, and grey metallers Krystoffkrvstoffiston, one disc of collected tracks (hence the title), the other disc a 'collaborative' collage put together by Malakat, and made up entirely of an unreleased collaboration between the now defunct Grey Daturas and the also now defunct Yellow Swans, but more on that in a second.
The collected tracks disc, gathers up various jams from the last few years, all of them hushed and minimal and mysterious, strange dronescapes of abstract ambience and microscopic events, field recordings and performances, long stretches of creak and whir and thrum and rumble, laced with mysterious voices, fragments of melodies, a sound somewhere between the free forest clatter of Avarus, the ritualistic black abstraction of Abruptum and the free sonic exploration of A Handful Of Dust.
Long streaks of feedback, overloaded mics, monstrous howls, low end crumble, whirring layers of glitch and hum, washed out hazy shimmer laid over murky sonar mumbles and muted clatter and clank, doomy crumbling rhythms pulled apart into sprawling industrial blurs, all smeared into creepy hushed black ambient drifts, and groaning, creaking, whispery abstract free noise minimalism.
The second disc, finds Malakat assembling somewhat similar sounds, but using only a recording of the Yellow Swans and Grey Daturas from 2006 as source material, and according to the liner notes: "pots, pipes, a clay skull and a wooden tube". And it sort of sounds like it. Sort of. Ultra minimal, abstract and ambient, stretches of what sound like alien field recordings give way huge heaving swells of crumbling buzz, squalls of roiling blacknoize splinter into full on drum freakouts and blurred drone jams, deep cavernous rumbles explode into jagged shards of hissing static and beastly vocal mewling, gorgeous blown out swells of chordal whir dissipate into chiming metal-buzz minimalism, these lengthy bursts of sonic energy, which actually don't sound all that messed with, more like they're just straight up recordings of GD and YS rocking out,, but those blowouts are all separated by short interludes of barely there shimmer and hazy muted drift. Killer stuff. On bad ass Australian label Sweatlung, and most likely crazy limited...
We've raved about instrumental post rockers Maserati in the past, and they just keep getting better and better, while oddly enough, they seem to gradually be moving away from their early sound, which was pretty much straight ahead nineties style post rock, which we love, toward something much more synthy and krautrocky, more groovy and almost dancey, which we also love. It probably has to do with the fact that drummer Jerry Fuchs (who tragically passed away last year) also played drums for !!! (Chik Chik Chik), so it was maybe inevitable that some of that funkiness might creep into his other group, since it's Fuchs' beats that pretty much drive this Maserati, propulsive and intricate, mathy and tight, but also super fluid. The guitars follow suit, looped and effected, cascading and chiming, all of that underpinned by some serious eighties style synths, pulsing like some supercharged John Carpenter soundtrack, and that's what makes Maserati sound so good, the collision of heavy crunchy guitars, propulsive motorik krautrock, and that sort of new age/wave-y synth. That's also why Maserati sound more like Zombi or Majeure these days, albeit a way more rocking, way heavier version. And hell, who could argue with a way heavier Zombi? Not us, that's for sure.
But really, to be fair, this new record is not all that far removed from past records, as far back as their Inventions For The New Season record, we were already describing some of their music as sounding like a "coke-fuelled Circle/Tortoise/Zombi jam" or as the perfect soundtrack for "an episode of Miami Vice, like for a scene (filmed from a helicopter) of an exciting power-boat chase across a deep blue, beautiful, sunshiney sea." And that vibe is still present, only now, it's for an episode of some futuristic sci-fi noir program, and instead of a speedboat chase, it's a hovership chase, between Bladerunner like buildings, culminating in a wild shootout in some sort of futuristic space disco. Which sounds pretty dang good to us.
Recommended for fans of Majeure, Zombi, Solar Bears, and other modern spacekraut sci-fi synth explorers, but also post/math/hypno rockers like Circle, Salvatore, Parlour, K-X-P, Magyar Posse, Cave, Russian Circles, etc.
Good grief, but Melechesh certainly makes it tough for other 'extreme' metal bands to compete. If it wasn't enough that they're masters of razor sharp, ripping blackened deathly thrashy metal, they've also got the Middle Eastern thing going for 'em. Not just lyrically (they're into Mesopotamian mythology) but musically as well this has Middle Eastern motifs, heck there's even some bouzouki on here, and you know how much we like Middle Eastern influenced rock music, all that '60 Turkish psych stuff, well this is the modern metal equivalent! Plus these guys are a lot "closer to the source" than, say, those Egyptology obsessives in Nile, who are Americans. Melechesh are Palestinian Arabs, originally from Israel, and this album was recorded at a studio in Istanbul.
It's been four years since their last album, the amazing Emissaries, and they haven't changed much, except to get even better if possible. These songs are, as always, both crushing and catchy, as well as mystically, "magickally" atmospheric... mesmerizingly so, via the heaving heaviness of such tracks as "The Magickan And The Drones" (the magick wins out), full of sinuous, serious, seasawing riffage that leaves us utterly hypnotized. Elsewhere, the blazing fast battery does the same trick. Yet another AQ-approved aspect of Melechesh is how fist-pumpingly metal they manage to be, showing that their Middle Eastern sound might also have something to do with Iron Maiden's "Powerslave"!
Definitely for fans of Absu (whose Proscriptor was in fact a Melechesh member for a while), with whom they share some similarities of sound and vision; also of course the aforementioned Nile (though those guys are much more death metal) and Morbid Angel (who also are inspired by ancient Sumer). For another concocted comparison, imagine Dissection with a Middle Eastern makeover, maybe.
Highly recommended, this pushes a lot of buttons for us, definitely gonna be a major contender for 2010 top tens. Like we said, when you're listening to this, it's hard to see what else could compete. Comes packaged in a digipak, with suitably esoterically evocative artwork.
