Latest from these French ultra doom sludgelords and sludgelady, a single song spread out over two lp sides, a sprawling, lugubrious, blackened slow motion tarpit crawl, and if it was even possible, Sabbat Noir sounds and feels even more abstract and spaced out than any of the other Monarchs, which is saying a lot. Sabbat Noir is also the band's first proper full length to feature their new drummer, Robert from the Grey Daturas, who makes himself right at home, his spare hard hitting style perfectly suited to Monarch's weirdly dreamy doomic drift.
The record/song begins with a dense cloud of rumbles and whirs, a slow motion sub-SUNN guitar crawl, wrapped in shimmery cymbal sizzle, an epic, smoldering, slow building low end creep. Thick, almost liquid guitars ooze beneath abstract drumming, the hits ages apart, long stretches of layered guitardrone, a nearly stalled doom, that hovers and floats more than crushes or pummels. The vocals exist way off in the distance, haunting and spectral, just another layer of slow shifting sound, which gives way here and there to hushed ambience, it's not so much a song as a sound, drifty and shimmery, and nearly ambient, it's not until near the end of the first side that things get a little mathy and metal, the riffs coalescing into black hole crunch, the drums pounding out an almost-rhythm. The side ends, and the song picks right back up on the flipside a la Lynyrd Skynyrd, more tarpit creep, streaked with feedback, the vocals moving gradually to the fore, their presence more intense, the riffs coalescing into a more traditional doom, mournful and melancholy, like Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride, but slowed waaaaaay down, the now shrieked vox drifting over this lumbering swoonsome dour doomic miserablism, a gorgeous, desolate, somber dronedoom, that slowly sheds the doom, eventually blissing back out into some more blackened guitardrone dreaminess.
The packaging is incredible, super glossy, metallic prismatic jackets, you have to see them to believe them, easily one of the coolest looking covers ever, the front cover the Monarch logo all shiny and metallic over what appears to be hair, but follow that hair to the other side of the sleeve where you'll find a sexy evil pic of Monarch's vocalist Emilie all corpsepainted and hoTT, the records are pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and of course LIMITED TO ONLY 400 COPIES!!!
Long awaited debut from Nashville doomlords Mourner (featuring members of long time aQ faves Loss), their first for the mighty Paradigms label (who also released this week's ROTW from Murmuure), and while we were all ready to haul out the extra 'o's (as in doooooooooooooooom), seeing as this is indeed a seriously epic and sludgey collection of extreme slow motion heaviness, multiple 'o's just don't quite do this stuff justice. Sure it's slow, and low, and sick and sinister, and blackened and brutal, but it's also weirdly pretty, and strangely melodic, surprisingly lush, just check out the list of instrumentation for your first clue: harmonium, Echoplex, noise, drones, tape loops, field recordings, all wound into the more typical guitar, and drums doom metal arsenal. The record starts out seriously doom-ed, a harsh cackling wicked witch vokill rasp, over murky rumbling bass, crushing spare drum pound, distant haunting shimmer and epic downtuned slowcore chordal crush, sounding almost like a prettier Khanate, the sound creeping and crawling, about as close as anyone has come to channeling slowcore legends Codeine though pure doom, but it doesn't take long for Mourner to distance themselves even further from the doom hordes, the vocals suddenly slipping into a super dramatic King Diamond like falsetto, giving the sound an even more melodic (and hauntingly dramatic vibe), and then the heaviness is peeled back entirely, leaving just some gorgeous skeletal clean guitar, draped over minimal super sparse drumming, the vocals a reverbed growl, the result is something doomy, but more just lovely and mysterious. The track slips back into heaviness, those KD vocals returning too, the song a woozy lumbering dirge that eventually fades out, leaving a bizarre slowed down voice, over a warm softly whirring choral outro.
The comes the 28 minute, two part "Still", a sprawling ambient doom epic, the band laying out a hazy, softdrone backdrop, over which, the guitars occasionally crash, vocals growl and mumble and gurgle and groan, the sounds occasionally coalescing into some sort of impossibly glacial doom death march, but just as often blissing out into something much more ethereal and washed out, clouds of cymbal sizzle, SUNNO)))-like riffscapery, plenty of tripped out effects-drenched drift, whispery clean guitar laced shimmer, some surprisingly pretty almost post rocky bits of melodic meander, hazy layered drones, with the second half being the more traditionally doomy, eventually locking into some seriously devastating lumber and pummel, still atmospheric, and subtly melodic, but heavy as fuck, until finally, the band slips back into something abstract and avant, a slowly unfurling soundscape of muted crunch and rumble, of hushed vocals, clean tendril like guitar lines, all manner of soft focus murk, peppered with the sounds of birds way off in the distance.
Most definitely recommended for the usual slow and low obsessives into Moss, Bunkur, Monarch, The Body, Khanate, Fleshpress, Celestiial, Nadja, Skepticism, Trees, Wicked King Wicker and the like, but Mourner is just weird and melodic enough to maybe reach beyond the doom metal loyal, and open up a whole new world of sound to folks who might not have dared in the past.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Packaged in a cool printed brown paper sleeve, with a printed 4 panel insert.
We said it before, and we might as well say it again, these guys should really be WAY more popular than they are, everything we've heard from them has totally ruled, a few singles, two full lengths, one of which we made our Record Of The Week, and let's not forget their bad ass Hawkwind cover in the Sonic Attack 7" series (reissued on cd, one of THIS week's Records Of The Week!), so it should come as no surprise that full length number three is just as good, if not better than all the stuff that came before. Not as blown out and super rocking as Sun Broken, Lime is 4 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes, and is a bit more subdued than past efforts. That's not to say there isn't some seriously psychedelic ferocity on display here, it's just judiciously doled out, and set amidst some more minimal psychedelia. Although opener "Sunburnt Impedance Machine" might have you convinced otherwise, exploding right out of the gate with a killer fuzzed out Hawkwindy riff, chanted vocals, some soaring spidery leads, some killer staccato mathy breakdowns, huge squalls of spacepsych freakout, until finally at about the halfway mark, the track shifts gears and locks into a churning chugging krautrock groove, the instruments locked in tight, only the organ let loose, to whir and warble and buzz, laying thick undulating swaths of chordal buzz over everything, intense and hypnotic, and definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to Circle obsessives.
Which becomes even more obvious on the second track, the 13 minute "Serra", which is a dead ringer for our Finnish hypnorock pals, a sprawling motorik groove, you sort of almost keep expecting Mika Ratto to start singing over the top, but instead, synths swirl and shimmer, horns bleat and skronk, effects swoop and sway, organs get all proggy adding melodic counterpoint, but the main groove never wavers, mesmerizingly epic and relentless, 13 minutes is not nearly enough, could/should go on for hours...
"Radar King" returns Mugstar to the realm of the rocking, locked into another hypnokraut groove, this one minor key and mathy, before breaking down into some spaced out psychdrone drift, all clouds of cymbal shimmer, little melodic squiggles, swirling effects and hushed synths, barely there guitar jangle, eventually the build begins, pulsing, throbbing, growing louder, and more intense, the effects more frantic, the drums heavier, finally exploding in a climax of tangled guitar freakout, and splattery drum pound, all wreathed in dense spaced out FX.
Finally, the band finish off with a gorgeously hazy psychedelic dronedrift, that lays a woozy bassline, under a thick droning organ, the drums minimal, skeletal, like the tracks before, the organ takes control, adding all sorts of rhythmic texture to the proceedings, a total drugpsych tripout, all anchored to the seriously solid groove at its core.
Some seriously epic and proggy psychedelic spacekraut to the max, fans of Circle especially should dig these guys if they don't already, and like the last record, absolutely recommended for anyone even remotely into Salvatore, Magyar Posse, White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan and the rest of the current crop of modern psych rockers...
Believe it or not, it's been a while since we've been this excited about a black metal band, but this French horde sound like they could have been cooked up in a lab just for aQ. Heavy and fuzzed out, psychedelic and weird as fuck, melodic and sorrowful, abstract and all over the map, within the first minute you'll know exactly what we mean, starting out with this strange little snippet of exotica, that sounds a bit like that cursed idol theme from the Brady Bunch Hawaii movie, the intro becomes this warped soundtrack, all fluttery flutes and strange glitches, we would have been perfectly happy to have a whole record of that, but instead, Murmuure launch into some sort of twisted abstract avant black metal, that is pretty difficult to describe. The sound is echoey and blown out, the riffs aren't traditionally buzzy and black, they're more gnarled and warped and woozy, layered into heaving swells of blackened sound, and shot through with streaks of twisted melody, the drums totally chaotic, slipping from totally free, to stumbling dirge, the vocals are buried and barely there, there also seems to be all sorts of synth stuff happening, wheezing swatch of washed out chordal whir, as well as crunchy buzzing low end thrum. After a brief melodic interlude, the tape seems to crumble into a woozy circusy dronescape, all stuttering looped sounds, melancholy melodies, lots of hiss and crackle, and then those drums come in again, super loud, and weirdly produced, adding some structure to the whirling black cloud of twisted sound. Like some demented synth driven lo-fi black metal take on Godspeed but run through a whole bank of malfunctioning effects, not to mention the twisted mind(s) that conjured up these alien sounds.
Some of the tracks get downright shoegazey, all washed out and shimmery, the delicate melodies drifting through clouds of muted crunch, laced with an M83 style retro electronic haze, the drums driving this weird black pop into even further reaches of the know black metal universe, one moment it sounds like blackened Cocteau Twins, the next like some post rock band covering Abruptum as covered by Alcest, there are field recordings, long stretches of spaced out collaged soundscapes, but everything is woven together into a single multi movement gloriously blissed out, post black metal psychedelic drone drenched drift, and is just about the weirdest and coolest black metal record we've heard in FOREVER.
Here's one possible reason that this record sounds nothing like most black metal, according to the band:
"All the Murmuure material is based on a one hour guitar improvisation from November 2006. The selected parts were then further edited to fit a rhythmic structure, and merged with additional layers of sound. The percussions are a mixture of the original programmed drums, and some (extremely re-edited) additional live drumming. Vocals were recorded during a cathartic trance at a sacred place in the forest, with a mini-disc recorder. Being almost inaudible in the music, they're strictly conceived as a vocal sigil technique, a vehicle for intent."
Awesome. The sound is dizzying and confusional and so original, hell, if this were not a cassette, and not already out of print, this would be some serious Record Of The Week material for sure. But it is just a tape, and these are the LAST COPIES, saved just for us, and you, but fear not, we got a whole bunch, but considering how awesome, and awesomely fucked up this is, you still oughtta grab one of these quick, cuz without a doubt, this is our black metal record of the year!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE HAVE THE VERY LAST OF THESE TAPES!!!
It used to be a list wouldn't pass with something new from Aidan Baker or his doomdrone duo Nadja, we were beginning to worry since it had been a little while now, but as if to make up for it, we now present you with this sprawling double dvd featuring SIX HOURS of music from both Nadja and Baker solo, recorded live in 2003 and 2007, accompanied by experimental visuals by more than FIFTEEN filmmakers. All housed in a gorgeous book like digpak sleeve, and accompanied by an extensive set of liner notes, with details of the performances, and the various films and filmmakers.
This is most likely not for the uninitiated, for those of you new to Baker and Nadja, who are looking to dip your toes, 6 hours of live video might not be ideal, and there are no shortage of choices, have a look elsewhere on the aQ site, so many fantastic releases from both Nadja and Baker solo, but for fans, most of whom tend toward the obsessive, this double dvd set is a mindblower. The sounds of course are incredible, the Nadja disc slips from hushed dense drone music to barely there shimmer to full bore doomic shoegaze crush, the Baker disc is much more minimal and shimmery, dark drifting dronemusic, that occasionally erupts into something noisier, but spends more of it's time hovering and glimmering, the visuals designed to match, gauzy indistinct shapes and colors, cool black and white images of undersea life, blurred landscapes and softly psychedelic collages, while the Nadja films are more varied, weird shots of colored fire, tripped out psychedelic lights, grainy super 8 footage of mysterious signs and streets, blurred black and white, super saturated lysergic shapes, occasionally intercut with footage of the band on stage hunkered over their instruments in front of the films.
The label describes this disc as "the ultimate video aquarium for the acid-minded", and that's not far off, throw this up on your big screen TV, strap on some headphones, and TRIP OUT, or just toss this in your dvd player, sans TV, and you've got a brand new 6 hour album of blissed out drone-y psychedelic shoegaze heaviness. Can't argue with that.
Region free!
A record this short should probably get an equally short review, just don't want to sell Nails short, cuz for what their record lacks in length, it makes up for in sheer crushing ferocity. 10 tracks in 14 minutes, a relentless onslaught of classic Earache Records style grind from these SoCal crushers, downtuned guitars blasting beats, guttural vocals, screeching feedback, gnarled tangly leads, the occasional bit of lumbering doom, a frantic whirlwind of powerviolent brutality, a nearly non-stop blast of face melting Napalm Death style classic old school grind. Heavy as hell and definitely recommended for folks who like it fast and furious and filthy as fuck.
One of the more eccentric acts to emerge from the Belgian EMB scene in the late '80s, The Neon Judgement developed a stylized sound of electronics melded to an Americana swagger with patinas of country-fried twang working into leather-clad industrialisms. At times, Neon Judgement were brilliant in this approach, other times it was a contrived dud. Yet, this sound was one that was developed over time, as their earliest recordings took on the more of synth punk idioms that were held by contemporaries in Cabaret Voltaire, Absolute Body Control, Siglo XX, Suicide, and even bits of Gary Numan. This LP contains all the tracks from the two cassettes that Neon Judgement released in 1981-1982 (TV Treated and Suffering), and it makes perfect sense that the exceptional ears at Dark Entries would seek out the finest moments from Neon Judgement's beginnings. At this time, the band was considerably more raw, with jagged guitar riffs coupled to the overdriven synth chords and jabbing arppegiations. It sounds like Neon Judgement had been listening to that first Suicide record, and wanted to try to figure out how to reinterpret the zombified rockabilly through electronics as well, without resorting to a pure homage. The minimalist spiralling of Neon Judgement's electronics holds some of Suicide's simplicity, although Neon Judgement's rock sensibility is purely showcased through the guitar and not the songwriting, which is much more tuned (at least here) to the European approaches of coldwave detachment. A couple of the tracks (e.g. "Factory Walk" and "TV Treated") had made appearances on later albums with more polish on the production, but there's something better suited to the stilted gait and agitated guitar pluckings on "Factory Walk" that make these recordings more expressive. As with all Dark Entries titles, limited to 500 copies.
Record number two from this intercontinental pagan black metal horde, and like their first record a pretty impressive feat, considering the drums were recorded in California, the guitars and basses captured in Croatia, and the keyboards laid down in the Netherlands, but somehow, all of the elements came together to form this epic, sprawling, super complex, super frenzied collection of blackened grimnity, and indeed epic it is. As well as strangely melodic, the pagan element more pronounced this time around, and the keyboards higher in the mix, as well as some seemingly way more intricate, almost mathy arrangements, but other than that, the blown out heaviness and frosty blackness that defined the first record are in full effect. The first track makes that abundantly clear as it explodes with some Scandinavian style buzz, and a little pagan melody, a frantic soaring bit of black metal majesty, peppered with stuttery start stop breakdowns, but always slipping smoothly right back into more blasting insectoid buzz.
Throughout the record, the vocals are garbled and monstrous and harsh, the drums dense and pummeling, the keyboards ethereal and unobtrusive, but adding lots of atmosphere and subtle melody, the tracks are expansive and almost proggy, the riffing super tranced out and droney, in fact, lots of the parts seem to blur into a sort of droned out psychedelia, cyclical, repetitive and totally hypnotic. The vibe somehow manages to be raw and crusty as well, and a little punky, hooks and melodies woven deftly into parts that would otherwise be more like black blurs, the result is some surprising catchiness, alongside some super intense black brutality, and lots of unexpected and seriously -A- typical black metal elements: ultra twisted and convoluted drum parts, lush layered guitars, some gnarled off kilter riffage, warped keyboard melodies, all wound up with the more traditionally blackened elements into a constantly evolving, ever shifting, dizzying barrage of awesome twisted blackness.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES. Comes housed in a half sized dvd style clamshell case, with a metallic silver printed cover, and an insert with lyrics/liner notes.
[And don't miss the secret hidden track, a super cool, weridly poppy black metal jam that we were convinced had to be a cover...]
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Pesteg Dred was a very short-lived project, as the trio that revolved around Hall got together in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects. We've never heard of any of Hall's other projects; but if any were half as good as Pesteg Dred, they'd be worth the price of admission.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune); but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet. Death disco? You bet!
Dark Entries scores yet again with a really great re-discovery on Pested Dred.
After a couple of fantastic full lengths, and a handful of equally impressive singles, comes the latest long player of washed out psychfolk from this East Coast duo, whose sound, as on past records, continues to slip between moody broody Portisheady lope, and fuzz drenched hazy dreamfolk, often meshing the two, adding murky drum machine pulses to swirling ethereal steel string drift.
On Liasons, Pigeons sound even more deliriously druggy and dreamy, the downtempo trip-hop elements now relegated to the occasional electronic rhythm, instead their sound moves further into much murkier sonic waters, more soft focus and fuzzy, infusing their already gauzy sound with swaths of Galaxie 500 like slowcore shimmer and blurred Bongwater-esque Shimmy Disc fug. In fact, for those of you who remember Bongwater's gorgeous cover of Roky Erickson's "You Don't Love Me Yet", much of Pigeons' Liasons plays out like variations of that lilting lo-fi, drugfolk avant pop sound, spindly steel string guitars, whirring organs, occasional bits of programmed rhythm, loads of delay and reverb, and of course those angelic echo drenched vocals.
Liasons is definitely the group's slowest and prettiest and most introspective record yet, a dark languorous drift, almost all of the way through, although the band do throw in a Serge Gainsbourg cover, and finish off with a track that's way more abstract and druggy, psychedelic and OUT, with woozy billows of soft guitar, stretched across an expanse of hum and whir, while the vocals soar and trill and keen, evoking some dark surreal late night otherworld. So nice. Psych folk(s) will dig for sure, but anyone into that Best Coast / Dum Dum Girls sound, looking for something darker and dreamier and druggier, might get into this as well...
We managed to get a very small handful of this very limited, Not Not Fun, Bored Fortress series split, between Psychic Reality and Sex Worker (Daniel from Mi Ami). And what a nice slab of damaged and entrancing sounds it is. Sex Worker's side is a Blondie cover transported to an underworld within an underworld of sound that is both decaying and roaming in another orbit, which had us imagining Cupid Car Club remixed by Excepter, Replikants (that awesome Justin Trosper side project) or Black Dice.
Psychic Reality continues to really come into their/her own as this track finds her bringing moments of beauty and sweetness into an overall fucked up and disorientating sound. Fresh off her split with LA Vampires, this finds her sound lurking somewhere between early Gang Gang Dance and a much more primitive version of what's been radiating out of the witch house scene as of late.
We would gush even more but like we said we only have a handful of these and once they're gone they are GONE for good. So you know what to do....
For every one who has been digging Zombi and Majeure, and the various other soundmakers mining eighties sci-fi VHS tapes to create retro futuristic synthgroove funk jams for smokey chrome and neon danceclubs, the sort of sounds you might have heard cyborgs shaking their mechanical thangs to in Logan's Run or Blade Runner, well, then prepare yourself for the oddly monickered Publicist, aka Sebastian Thomson, drummer for electronic post rockers Trans Am, whose latest, Keep It Off The Record, is a killer assemblage of fuzzy sci-fi synths, vocodered vocals, live drums and programmed beats, all woven into some seriously propulsive robotic cyber synthfunk grooviness.
"Hand To Mouth" is the party jam of the year, assuming that year is 1985, super hooky, and fuzzy, and groovy, the synths fuzzy and buzzy, the vocals totally alien and psychedelic, and the live drums/drum machine combo super intense and propulsive and yeah, funky. Some crazy catchy retro futurefunk for sure. "Miscalculation" is no slouch either, another disco flecked, dizzying synth funk workout, that sounds like the soundtrack to a chase scene (through a futuristic club of course) on Buck Rogers, laced with huge spaced out swath of cosmic synth shimmer, draped over that relentlessly percolating futurefunk pulse.
"Schnell Und Sauber" is the most krautrock of the bunch, a driving Kraftwerkian Autobahn worthy krautsynth workout, with driving rhythms and lush layered synths that throb and pulse, the real drums here in full effect.
The flipside starts out with the title track, total eighties electro pop, sort of Zapp via Daft Punk via Zombi if that makes any sense, groovy and funky, but also slightly ominous and cinematic, and still infused with that sort of krautrock core. And finally, the record finishes off with the epic "Self Similar", a soaring pulsing synthdrone workout, that is a total Goblin sci-fi dancefloor destroyer, another one of those jams that sounds like the music behind the credits of some lost Euro sc-fi B move VHS, moody and slightly minor key, the synths swirling and pulsing, propulsive and motorik, the sound groovy, but equally haunting and hypnotic.
List 357's Record Of The Week, Public Service Announcement, by Purling Hiss, was a huge hit around here, an awesomely hooky lo-fi collection of home recorded GBV style 4 track pop, mixed with slow, shimmery lysergic psychedelia, but apparently, that record was a bit of an anomaly, as all of PH's other recorded material seems to be super heavy and freaked out psych rock a la White Heaven or Burnt Hills or Acid Mothers Temple or Comets On Fire. Sure the pop element is still present, but it's buried under glorious squalls of psychguitar and pounding drum damage.
The tracks here are long too, so once the vocals fade and the song proper disappears, the songs keep on going, stretched out super extended heart of the sun psychedelic space rock excursionism, incendiary sprawls of white hot guitar freakout.
But, as mentioned above, the songs do still retain some of that poppiness, albeit in seriously small doses, but the presence however slight of that pop, manages to imbue the rest of each song with a subtle pop element, that keeps things from devolving into full on wankery. "Woo hoo" vocals abound, but they're wrapped in hazy streaks of buzz and howl, there are hooks too, they surface here and there, and occasionally, one of the shredding distorto guitars will start playing one of those perfect pop melodies, before letting it splinter and explode back into a psychedelic frenzy.
The B side is weirdly tracked, with several super short blasts of blown out psych heaviness, but right in the middle is an awesome, extended space-psych jam, the guitars explosive and white hot, but underpinned by super melodic looping, walking basslines, which sort of remind us of Redd Kross at their most psychedelic, but again, that little bit of melody, grounds the rest of the song, and transforms a sidelong blast of shreddery, into something weirdly poppy and melodic and listenable, and fucking AWESOME!
Maybe a bit too fierce and fiery for folks who were mainly into the pretty pop side of that first Purling Hiss record, but anyone into the above mentioned bands, or at all into freaked out psychedelia, then this is most definitely the shit.
Fantastic split from aQ faves Rene Hell, and until now unknown to us Three Legged Race, both 'groups' paying homage to early electronic music, experimental tape music and science fiction outsider bedroom private press weirdness.
Rene Hell offers up a 4 part series of zoner synthscapes, lush layers of buzzing rumbling electronics, buried, barely there vox, haunting and cinematic, with distinctly pop music melodies, but here suspended in charged fields of squelch and whir and buzz. As the songsuite progresses, the sound shifts to something more new agey and washed out, total Tangerine Dream style kosmische bliss out, swirly and hypnotic, space-y and sun dappled, total trance-y synth age drift, which again changes tone and drifts into something a bit more ominous like the opening track, more cinematic creep, slow, low tones, mysterious and atmospheric, subtly rhythmic, soft swells over buried pulses, finally moving into the closing track, which manages to fuse those two sides of RH's sound, the fluttery super nova synthkraut bliss and the brooding minimal electronic flutter, darkly dramatic, rife with dense chordal swells, swirling black ambient atmophere and more of those muted murky voices.
The flipside is similarly dark and mysterious and electronic, courtesy of Three Legged Race, aka Robert Beatty, who starts his side off with an unexpected chunk of woozy, lo-fi Scott Tuma like loner folk guitar haze, all murky and spidery, underpinned by a soft field of hauzy crackly thrum, glistening melodies drifting in the ether, hushed and lovely, until... in swoop some super twisted processed robotic vox, heavily effected and distorted and crunchy, totally at odds with the rest of the song, but it somehow sort of works.
After a brief swath of Radiophonic Workshop style electronic percolations, raw outer space shimmer, sixties sci-fi sound effects and hauntological bleep and bloop, the record blossoms into a sprawling stretch of glitched out primitive analog electronics, sounding a bit like Bruce Haack, but way more fractured and distorted and processed, a malfunctioning starfield of sound that manages to be weirdly melodic and subtly rhythmic, the background growing louder and murkier and more ominous as the track progresses. So good. Both sides are incredible. Way recommended for fans of the burgeoning new wave of spaced out sci-fi synth drone, especially folks who might be on the hunt for something darker and weirder and slightly more cracked.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!!
Even though this is record number FIVE from Reuber (aka Timo Reuber), who is also a member of electronic duo Klangwart, Ring is the very first thing we've heard from him, and it immediately became one of our new favorite records, a dizzying assemblage of loops and samples and textures and effects woven into a series of super varied soundscapes, from hypnotic kosmische krautdrone, to hazy murky pulsing techno flecked electronica, to super frantic spaced out new wave, to murky electronic drone dirge psych rock to woozy minimal sci-fi techno, all of it rhythmic and hypnotic, lush and layered.
Self described as Reuber's "motorbike album", Ring finds Reuber trying to evoke a 'Reuber Principle' using a selection of sounds designed to sound different during each performance, depending on the venue, the audience and of course Reuber himself. All but one of the tracks are created using just two synthesizers, experimenting with rhythm and texture, creating constantly shifting collages of sound, all 'Ring' variations, the first "Ring Ring", the most blissed out of the bunch, a minimal electronic pulse, a slowly shifting melody, a deep buzzing vocal that sounds like Tuvan throat singing, a haunting bit of cinematic kosmische drift that ends way too soon. The upside being that it leads directly into the 17 minute "Ring", which takes the sound of the first track and explodes it into something much more celestial and cosmic, a supernova of sound, all blurred and washed out, hazy and shimmery, underneath which various bits of percussion pulse and pound, a buried rhythm that gradually moves to the fore, and the song transforms into a gorgeously hypnotic tribal psychedelic workout that sounds almost like modern day Boredoms. This tribal churn is laced with strange melodic bits, twisted effects, a roiling swirl of sound, that soon returns to the washed out cosmic shimmer of the song's beginning, only to again explode into some heaving crumbling rhythmic crush, and then slip right back into a hazy dreamlike outro.
"Ringer" offers up a swirl of looped repetitive synth, mesmerizing and cyclical, cinematic and sci-fi, gradually growing more and more distorted and intense, until some of the sounds coalesce into beats, and the track becomes a supercharged synth heavy sci-fi blowout that wouldn't sound out of place on a Zombi record, although with a bit more of a techno twist. "Ring Frei" counters the previous track with some low slung synthbass, some skittery skeletal rhythms, streaks of feedback and squealing electronic glitchery, and most importantly some seriously fat fuzzy, murky melodies, a crunchy, buzzy muddy krautjam, propulsive and motorik, almost like some far out Kraftwerk / Suicide / Electronicat hybrid. And finally "Ringfest" finishes things off with some Kompakt style throb and pulse, starting out sleek and late night and minimal, before blossoming into something buzzier and more twisted, with shards of rave-y synth, more of those buzzing throat singing style vox and some squiggly spacey Theremin like melodies. Wow. We really can't stop listening to this, so mesmerizing and psychedelic and hypnotic and tripped out and most definitely a new unanimous aQ fave!
If you're anything like us, you've always been fascinated by aliens and outerspace and all that science (fiction?) stuff, X-Files, In Search Of, Star Trek, Cosmos, art, TV, movies, magazines, with every move forward, every discovery, every shuttle launch, every planned mission to Mars, the world comes on step close to becoming what humans once only dreamed of, and wrote about.
One of those epochal science moments, happened in 1977, when we launched a gold record into space, encoded on it were all the various things that make humans human, music, and math, voices, and languages, recordings of heartbeats, whatever scientists could think of that might help an alien species that discovered the record be able to understand and maybe communicate back (assuming they had turntables!).
Similarly, we've always been a bit obsessed with SETI, the Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project, a group who monitors the sky for communications from space, and perhaps from alien beings. In all the time SETI has been active, they have not received a single confirmed alien transmission. Which brings us to the similarly named SETI-X, Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence in Exile program, who supposedly received transmissions, that were believed to REMIXES (!) of those records we sent into space. SETI-X meticulously reconstructed these very sound files here from the various transmissions, bits and fragments, snippets and shards of sound. Scientists were of course skeptical, so SETI-X set out to contact the micronation of Sealand, who were well known for supporting controversial and radical science, might step in to help, but a typo when searching in Google resulted in them contacting Seeland Records, Negativland's record label, and they were of course more than willing... now wait a minute...
So yeah, this incredible 'scientific document' is in fact absolutely and certainly alien remixes, NOT some elaborate and brilliantly conceived and executed musical art hoax from a band who exists to fool the foolish. The sounds begin with a twisted greeting, which then explodes in a grinding squall of distortion only to unveil a warped bit of classical music, and the greeting we originally sent skyward, and from there on out, Scrambles Of Earth is a dizzying assemblage of collaged sound, beats and rhythms, strange loops, disembodied voices, textures and drones and truncated melodies, twisted bits of pop, slowed down classical music, voice in many languages, snippets of various musics, usually wrapped around weird voices and glitched out electronics, lots of hiss and buzz, lush swells, super blown out corrosive crunch, gorgeous hypnotic bits of kosmische electronics, all manner of mysterious production, squalls of competing sounds sweeping back and forth through the stereo field, bits of jazz, blues, calypso, and so many voices, surprisingly, it's a really great listen, flowing like some twisted sonic travelogue, as if this is how the aliens see us, based on how we represented ourselves. Cool and strange. Oh, and absolutely real.
Includes extensive liner notes, with a history of the Seti-X program, a description of each track, lots of photos and diagrams, oh and did we mention that this was released on Negativland's label Seeland, but is not Negativland, but in fact actual alien remixes? Good.
Big and brightly colored, every issue of UK music magazine Shindig! is good readin', if you're into the old school sounds they celebrate, mostly '60s and '70s rock, folk, pop, prog, garage... This issue's got the pre-fab four, The Monkees, on the cover, with a story about their cult movie Head (as Shindig! terms it, their "celluloid suicide note"). Then there's also stuff about Aussie legends The Easybeats, The Iveys (pre-Badfinger band, y'know), Todd Rundgren, Free Design, proto-metallers Banchee, Kaleidoscope (UK not USA), Jim Sullivan, and plenty more, including a ton of reviews, ads for stuff to salivate over, oh and an appreciation of the cover to The Poppy Family's 1969 single "Which Way You Goin', Billy?".
We had thought that Sistol was more or less a one-off project for Sasu Ripatti, the Finnish electronic producer better known as Vladislav Delay. The pioneering label Phthalo released an eponymous album back in 1999 as one of the first properly replicated discs after a slew of hand-duplicated cd-r releases. But for whatever reason, Sistol has resurfaced with this reissue of that 1999 album, buttressed by a second disc of remixes. Where Vladislav Delay's work has been a rather painterly smear of granular abstractions dotted upon a loose definition of the Chain Reaction rhythmic sensibility, Sistol has all of its sprockets engineered for a finely tuned precision. It's a very skeletal techno sound here, with a 909 kick drum pulse driving every track without much use for snares or hi-hats. Within this monophunk pulsation, Ripatti scatters small patterns of wooden electrical clacks and pings that again eschew most everything that could be construed as a melody. The insistence of the rhythm and the accretion of the pixel points settles into some curiously infectious grooves, although we'd be hard pressed to find this working on a dancefloor given how incredibly minimal this stuff is. The more austere moments of Thomas Brinkmann definitely come to mind as do the Wolfgang Voigt productions as Studio One, recorded about the same time as these cuts.
The bonus disc of remixes features John Tejada, Mike Huckaby, DMX Krew, Sutekh, Alva Noto, and like-minded techno types fleshing out Sistol's hyperminimal tracks with smooth Detroit / Berlin syncopations and darkened cybernetics. Given how minimal Sistol's work was, adding anything else completely changes the complexion of the original. Nevertheless, there are some mighty fine techno cuts to be found here. The noted exception to the techno offerings can be found in the remix from Ike Yard (yes, the recently reformed bleak No New York band with zombified leanings towards Cabaret Voltaire sounding very much like an updated version of themselves).
Yet another hat thrown into the eighties retro futuristic sci-fi Carpenter / Goblin new/cold/synth wave faux soundtrack ring, this one comes from a duo called Soft Metals, who definitely draw from the same sonic well as many of their contemporaries, but have a sound that's varied (and catchy) enough, to make them pretty interesting.
For folks more into the dark cold wave buzzy synth side of this new wave sound, the opener might throw you for a loop, with it's synth disco vibe and way up in the mix soulful vocals, an overtly eighties montage soundtrack styled jam, but for folks into Italians Do It better and all that sort of Italo disco dancefloor stuff, it will definitely hit the spot. A little bit cheesy, but seemingly purposefully so, primitive drum machines, fuzzy synths, echo drenched female vox, it's total old school electro pop, which surprisingly leads into something much darker, a robotic Kraftwerk like groove, sinister and sci-fi, motorik and hypnotic, with moments that definitely remind us of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit". From there on out the record veers into some total old school electro pop cold wave, very Teutonic, with detached aloof almost spoken vocals, everything wrapped in swirled effects. The next track might be the biggest surprise, like Reich or Riley rendered in analog cold wave synth form, looped and cyclical, sounding a little like 8 bit video game music, mesmerizing and repetitive and so wonderfully hypnotic. Finally the record finishes off the way it started, with another blast of full on swoonsome and dramatic eighties electro pop...
Stellar Om Source is a one woman sci-fi space-synth, cosmic (or kosmische?) sonic starship piloted by Christelle Gualdi, a fusion of droned out minimal krautrock, raw private press naive electronic experimentation, Carpenter/Goblin influenced retro soundtrack synthscapes, and percolating analog atmospherics, all woven into lush landscapes of low-grade futuristic synthdrone kraut drift mystery.
Culled from three long out of print cd-r's: Ocean Woman, Alliance and Crusader, Trilogy Select gathers up a handpicked greatest hits, and assembles them into something resembling a proper album, a woozy, amorphous drift through dark starlit skies, through vast crumbling futuristic cities, evoking the landscapes of low budget late night science fiction B movies, blocky shapes and neon colors split into jagged sine waves and square waves, kinda like Tron meets Logan's Run scored by John Carpenter as performed by Oneohtrix Point Never (who collaborates on one of the tracks here!). Totally mesmerizing and spaced out, the tracks slip from hushed droney blur to cascades of Riley like repetition, soft cacophonies of layered synth swirl, to sun blasted upper register ur-drone bliss, hazy ethereal new age shimmer, to muted textural thrum, always infused with some sort of dark pathos, and dramatic tension, all very cinematic and atmospheric, hypnotic and totally mesmerizing.
Absolutely essential psychedelic space synth drone music for anyone into Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, Dylan Ettinger, Caboladies, Pulse Emitter, Innercity and other like minded sonic cosmonauts...
Comes with a download coupon as well!
Howard Stelzer is the man behind Intransitive Recordings, one of the finest experimental-noise-drone-fucked labels of the past decade or so. He's quite an exceptional mangler of sound in his own right, thanks to piles of barely working tape decks and thoroughly gunked up cassettes, promoting a distressed aesthetic of murky tape noise, garbling hiss, gray thrummings of compressed rumble, sea-sickened whirlings, and start-stop mechanics. Stelzer's collaborator here is David Payne, a Canadian noise-junk thrillseeker who might be known to some for his releases in / as Fossils. Admittedly, we're not all that familiar with Payne or Fossils, but Stelzer's broken collage approach is definitely present.
Small Cruel Party like textures amass out of the ever present fog of tape hiss, which Stelzer and Payne push to steam-vent intensity amidst churning, lumbering emanations that crawl out of calcified hums, decayed tones, and wind-sheer microphone obliteration. The tapes are not without their recognizable forms (although for the most part, these mud-crust recordings stay purposefully abstract), as twitterings of a bird and the rasp of car horns puncture the low-tech musique concrete approach from these gritty tape machinations. Grizzly crunches that sound like bones getting snapped in half, to which we have to hope is not the result of Stelzer and Payne setting contact mics on their fingers whilst shattering their own digits. Swelter finds itself somewhere between the first Dry Lungs international noise compilation, Merzbow's really early noise-junk offerings, and Maurizio Bianchi's Sacher-Pelz turntablist warbling. Limited to 200 copies and not long for this world!
There are some bigtime Stereolab fans in the aQ crew, so needless to say many of us were way bummed when we heard the band had announced they were taking an indefinite hiatus. Especially since their last album, Chemical Chords, was one of the most infectious and satisfying of their wonderful career. Well, luckily, before going on this hiatus (we're hoping it's really just a brief hiatus), they realized that there was too much great material recorded at the time of Chemical Chords, to not let some of those songs have their moment in the sun. Not Music, though, stands on its own as a totally swirling, seducing and engaging proper album from one of the most unique pop groops of the last quarter century.
Much like Chemical Chords, the record really starts to sink in after a few listens and then every song becomes a stand out single to our ears, and once again we find ourselves totally overtaken and completely smitten with a new set of Stereolab songs. The two remixes included are total stunners too, courtesy of Atlas Sound, and Emperor Machine. Don't stay away too long Stereolab, the world of music is a much brighter, smarter and more exciting place with you around!
After five long years, Sufjan Stevens returns with The Age Of Adz, an album packed with gloriously fuzzy, buzzy orchestrated pop originals. Swirling, sweeping, candy-colored instrumentations grounded by Stevens' sensitive dulcet vocals, the overall sound leaning a bit more towards his trippier, electrified side (often likened to Flaming Lips) than his folksy acoustic side (often akin to Iron & Wine). According to Asthmatic Kitty, the title is a reference to "the Apocalyptic art of Royal Robertson (1930 �1997), a black Louisiana-based sign-maker (and self-proclaimed prophet) who suffered from schizophrenia."
The record finds Sufjan at his most varied and ambitious. Mixing elements of electronica (there's even vocoder on a few tracks!) with the orchestral and tender pop that he has always had a way with. Seems like Sufjan's been listening to lots of Flaming Lips and maybe Black Moth Super Rainbow lately as this is much more epic and electronic in scope then any of his previous records, oh and he's not singing about a particular state anymore.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
OK all you underground obscuro black metal freaks and obsolete format obsessives and fucked up video nasty collectors and super limited release weirdos, gather round this awesome audio/sonic artifact, you are definitely gonna want one of these. And you better act fast, cuz it's limited to 50 copies, and is already out of print, and we have the LAST 12 COPIES! Why should you care? Well for one, it's a brand new 30 minute improvised track of blasting droned out psychedelic black metal mesmer from some mysterious horde called Suffer the Shards Of The Lost Cult Of Silence, which features members of aQ black metal faves Woe and Absu, AND it's the soundtrack to a twisted nightmarish video collage, an eye popping video mashup of all manner of demented scenes from horror movies, sci-fi flicks, giallos, and who knows what else, a dizzying head spinning barrage of twisted imagery, the perfect accompaniment to STSOTLCOS's sprawling blown out black buzz, "inspired by the endless depths of infinite darkness", the sound lurching from noise drenched chaotic black pound to spaced out murky creep, to gnarled atonal doomic pound to blazing Norwegian style epic majesty, the whole thing lo-fi and wreathed in a cavernous gauze of blurred and blackened production, raw and grim and spooky and fucking awesome.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, in white clamshell VHS cases with two color hand screened inserts, recorded onto purple VHS tapes, and comes with a download code (just for the music) as well!
A reissue of record number two from Sun Araw, aka Magic Lanterns guitarist Cameron Stallone, and much like the other SA releases, Beach Head is a fuzzy, druggy, washed out, effects heavy psychedelic krautdrone new age blow out. Four extended tracks of smoldering minimal drift, soft cacophonies of bells and chimes wrapped in streaks of feedback and swirls of spaced out FX, undulating tendrils of sitar buzz, warped calliope melodies, and muted almost folky twang, everything sun dappled and Technicolor ear candy.
"Thoughts Are Bells" is indeed a bell heavy intro, a slow building, dronescape of percussive swirl, smoothed out angular guitars, and a slow motion avalanche of effects and buried melodies. "Horse Steppin'" is all laid back tropicalia via Ariel Pink, and broadcast through loud speakers hung from palm trees on some deserted tropical island. Flirting with Ducktails style lo-fi tropical garage pop, but transforming it into a reverb drenched bit of slow dreampop, that almost sounds like Animal Collective being spun manually at about 10rpm, the guitars glisten, the drums are muted and barely there, the vocals are soaked in echo and delay, everything laid back and stretched out and washed out, hazy and lazy and bleary and deliriously dreamlike.
The rest of the record doesn't deviate too much from those first two tracks, "Beams" manages to fuse the two, the sort of raga drift of the first with the slowcore blurpop of the second, into a Spacemen 3 style druggy drone, replete with woozy basslines, ethereal guitar atmospherics, and all the other various elements, vocals, drums, buried in a glorious sonic murk, while "Bridal Filly", takes the same combination, but stretches it WAY out into something even still more indistinct, an almost Tim Hecker-ish landscape of blurred grit, and pixelated melody, softly pulsing melodies, weightless wordless vox, muted percussion, swaths of thick buzz, eventually coalescing around another lumbering bassline, into some total stoner zoner psych drone spacerock drift. Awesome.
Yet another backroom discovery, found a stash of this mysterious missive from someone calling themselves Swagger Jack, some sort of hillbilly drunken pirate, armed with a busted up old acoustic guitar, a jaw harp, a harmonica, maybe some busted up old keyboards, but very little else. A little digging is all it takes to discover that Swagger Jack is in fact long time aQ fave / pal Antony Milton, head honcho of killer cd-r label PseudoArcana as well as a member of various awesome groops (The Stumps, AM, The Nether Dawn, Mrtyu, Glory Fckn Sun, etc.), but as Swagger Jack, Milton is in full on hillbilly/folk/bluegrass mode, laying down simple lilting chunks of slo-mo Appalachia, lo-fi and hazy, druggy and minimal, simple steel string buzz augmented by jaw harp twang, harmonica wheeze, some minimal percussion, and a ramshackle backing of creaking, groaning whir and shimmer. The whole record sounds as if it was recorded on a rickety old porch, or in a forest clearing, like a more songy Avarus, or Tower Recordings with a backwoods hillbilly twist, some Velvet Underground druggy drift stripped down and recast as some sort of Fahey-esque dronefolk, bits of classic NZ soundmakers like Roy Montgomery, The Clean, Alastair Galbraith, and the like, woven into rickety backwoods twang flecked drone laced zoner country ballads. Pretty incredible stuff for sure, listening to this now, we're sort of surprised more folks didn't go crazy for this, and surprised that we somehow missed listing this completely, but better late than never, gorgeous stuff, and way recommended.
BACK IN STOCK!!!
Blackest Rainbow has been pretty damn consistent in their survey of the pharmacologically tainted realm of dronemusik, releasing great albums from Aidan Baker, Barn Owl, Elm, Tom Carter, Jazzfinger, more recently that Bong / Quttinirpaaq split, and certainly this incredible split between Taiga Remains and RV Paintings. The former is the work of Alex Cobb, who also runs the equally great label Students Of Decay; and the latter is a side project of the Starving Weirdos. Both sides of the LP dwell heavily upon reverb saturation grafted onto acoustic dronings from various sources - probably guitar, certainly some bells, maybe a long-stringed instrument. Such is a typical strategy for RV Paintings, but is somewhat novel for Taiga Remains, whose driftscape sensibility tends more towards the smooth surface arcing for tone and harmony. If Blackest Rainbow hadn't etched the names of each artist into the surface of the wax, you'd have a 50 percent chance of guessing who was doing each side. Perhaps Cobb was deliberately trying to coax more of a RV Paintings sound from his gear and vice versa. The major difference in these two sides only becomes apparent when RV Paintings begins to gently tap across sheet metal, gongs, and a drum kit a la Eddie Prevost from AMM. The drone is still the central feature, and the percussive serves to levitate and propel the drone forward. Really great stuff to be found here, and limited to a mere 400 copies.
We had never actually heard much from NYC power electronics / black ambient / dark industrial / synthdrone outfit Navicon Torture Technologies, but we were definitely intrigued by this latest installment of blackened sound from NTT mainman Leech, under the name Theologian. Even before hearing it. It's on Crucial Blast, and if anyone knows their way around grim, bleak, black heaviness, it's CB. Then there's the gorgeous oversized cover, a long haired figure holding her head, underneath a strange sigil and surrounded by a decahedron and a field of pure black, and then the record title, The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face, and the accompanying song titles: "In Times Of Need, We All Go Against Our Natures", "The Fragility Of The Male Ego", "Bearing Bitter Fruit", and the packaging folding out to reveal more mysterious shapes and strange shadowy nudes, a pretty compelling chunk of art, even before we get to the sounds within.
And if anything, the sounds inside more than live up to that promise, the opening track "Zero" begins the proceedings, and we expectantly wait for some serious harsh noise, or some grim black ambience, and while there is a little of both, it's molded into something much more, well, lovely for lack of a better word, 5 minutes of crumbling black beauty, gorgeous plaintive melodies buried in a thick morass of buzz and blur and swirling hiss and whir, like a way more ominous and blackened Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, gorgeous, and gorgeously harrowing.
"In Times Of Need, We All Go Against Our Natures" is 24 minutes long, the majority of which is spent drifting through some nightmarish landscape of hushed minimal rumbles and post industrial grit, again, far more 'pretty' than we might have expected, a smoldering chunk of subterranean blackness, a roiling murky surface than offers brief glimpses of melodies and voices below, unsettling but gloriously grim, and in case we find the proceedings too soothing, the last few minutes find those sounds expanding and exploding into thick crumbling swells of blown out synths and fractured black electronics, underpinning some seriously anguished super distorted vokills.
The record continues in a similar fashion, creating blackened shades of beauty out of elements harsh and hateful, abject and bleak, the sound almost shoegazey at times, hints of Nadja for sure abound, but a Nadja stripped to its essence, the tracks creep, and crawl, and drift, thrumming and pulsing softly, wreathed in sheets of grit and grime, but always glowing from within, the melodies like buried black secrets. Occasionally, like on "The Fragility Of The Male Ego", the sound becomes super blown out and corrosive, an ultradistorted blacknoise, that for all it's corrosive clamor, remains somehow, if not lovely, at least haunting and mysterious, while other tracks, like "It's All Gone", take unlikely elements, and again, weave them into something strangely beautiful, but still undeniably pitch black.
Dark and mysterious and troublingly lovely, some seriously intense power electronics flecked black ambience, most definitely recommended for fans of Lustmord, MZ412, Nordvargr, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Wicked King Wicker, Locrian, Wraiths, Wolf Eyes, etc...
Incredible packaging, 6 panel dvd sized digipak, black and spare on the outside, full color on the inside.
Sweet! A deluxe double cd reish of one of our faves by Irish greats Thin Lizzy, who are one of those influential bands that posthumously just seems to be getting more and more popular, heck they're probably bigger now than they ever were before, in the States anyway. More influential on the current rock/metal community too. Vagabonds Of The Western World, from 1973, belongs to the earliest era of the band when Eric Bell was their guitarist. Note we said guitarist, singular. That's right, the twin guitar harmonies thing that Lizzy is famous for came later, originally they were a power trio with only one guy on guitar. But he's awesome, and the first three Lizzy albums (of which this is the 3rd) are definitely cool, though different (often a bit mellower, folkier, psychier) than the more famous later stuff with the Gorham / Robertson duo. Vagabonds is pretty rockin', though, heck it even includes the song "The Rocker" among other classics like "Gonna Creep Up On You", "Little Girl In Bloom", and the storytelling epic "The Hero And The Madman", which is one of this sometimes odd album's weirdest, quasi-prog entries. Plus of course, most crucially, the talents of Thin Lizzy's charismatic singer/bassist/songwriter, and resident tragic genius, Phil Lynott, are fully in effect here, his distinctive voice always a delight...
In addition to the digitally remastered original album, you get ten bonus tracks (including a radio promo edit of early hit "Whiskey In The Jar", and one called "Cruising In The Lizzymobile"!) on the first disc in the set, while the second disc features 13 cuts from various BBC radio sessions, for John Peel and others. In addition to songs from Vagabonds, you'll hear renditions of other Lizzy gems from the era like "Suicide" (different from the later album version done with the double guitar lineup) and "Black Boys On The Corner". The double digi cd package includes liner notes and vintage photos too. Deluxe indeed, and deserving of the treatment.
Brand new remix ep (featuring a clutch of new jams as well) from Tobacco, the weirdo psychedelic synth electro hip hop side project of long time aQ faves Black Moth Super Rainbow, on which a handful of past Tobacco jams get reworked and revved up, and handed over to some of the world's weirdest and most warped MC's: Anti-Pop Consortium, Doseone, Rob Sonic, not to mention some rappers we've never heard of: Serengeti, Height, Icicle Frog, Zackey Force Funk.
The new tracks kill, the old tracks sound new, a dizzying, over the top, twisted avant hip hop blowout, synths buzz and twist and get all tangled up, the beats skitter and stutter, guitars crunch and shimmer, samples are chopped up and looped and layered, sounds buzz and crunch and whir, a swirling ever shifting backdrop for some seriously out there flows.
"TV All Greasy" buzzes and warbles while Anti-Pop go nuts over the top, the vocals riding on the undulating synths, "The Injury" sounds like an eighties educational film soundtrack wedded to crunchy fuzzguitar, the beats primitive, Doseone's whiny flow perfectly balancing Tobacco's shimmery vocodered croon, "Lick The Witch" is classic old school hip hop slathered in synth buzz and swirling effects, and Rob Sonic's bad ass versery, "2 Thick Scoops" is a dirgey almost metallic bit of shoegaze doompop hip hop freakiness, with some slithery flow and some woozy synth filigree, and so it goes, the rest of the record playing out in similarly blown out, synth heavy fuzz guitar drenched stumbly outsider hiphop radness.
Makes us think how cool it would be if all the boring radio rappers who shell out thousands of dollars for boring beats, got Tobacco to whip up some of his weirdness instead. We can't help but imagine Jay-Z or Eminem spitting rhymes over some of this stuff. If only!
Features some disturbing Tobacco style basketball headed milky cereal garish colored eye popping artwork on a 12" picture disc!
The title says it all. This is a compilation of jumpin' and jivin' treats from the early years of rock n' roll, circa 1955-1965 or thereabouts, and the one thing they all have in common (besides rockin') are NONSENSE LYRICS... thus amongst the 24 tracks here you'll find such wonderful gibberish statements as "Tutti Frutti", "Woojamacooja", "Chop Chop Boom", "Bom Bom Lulu", "Yodee Yakee", "(You Got) The Gamma Goochee", "She Goes Oonka Chicka", "Shtiggy Boom", "From The Top Of Your Guggle (To The Bottom Of Your Zooch)" and more, including of course "Great Googley Moo". Some of this strange lingo represents onomatopoeic sound effects. Others, teen slang that was hip at the time. Or, just plain ol' silliness. And some, no doubt, are euphemistic stand ins for other words, often risque if you read between the lines.
Wow, what a great comp! Fun, fun stuff, this is rock and roll at its purest, it don't have to make sense, it just has to rock, and roll, and make those crazy kids dance!! And, we're pretty sure both Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss would approve.
The artists, most of 'em fairly obscure, nowadays anyway, include Little Richard (naturally), Screamin' Jay Hawkins, The Spaniels (with the title track), The Kingsmen, The Tammys, The Premiers, The Astro-Jets, LaVern Baker, Gene & Eunice, Shirley Ellis, The Rivingtons, The Five Blobs, and many others. The thick, colorful, heavily illustrated cd booklet (24 pages) features super detailed notes on each song and artist, along with vintage photos and record label graphics. Really nicely done. Turns out this is actually a sequel to a previous Ace comp along the same lines, called Great Googa Mooga, so we'll have to get that one in soon too...
So this is officially the third installment in the I Love Techno series we've reviewed, and in the first two, we had to qualify that we didn't actually love techno, but for some reason these comps pushed all our buttons and maybe we did in fact love techno. But this latest installment is so fucked up and fuzzy, tripped out and psychedelic and rife with big bass and blown out synth and even some punk and metal, not to mention weirdo video game sounds, all we can think is either we DO really LOVE techno, and this is more of the same, or this record is really fucking tripped out and damaged and genius and typical technerds will be way bummed out on this, while the rest of us just discovered the raddest electronic comp of the year.
We're leaning toward the latter, or at least some combination of the two. Needless to say, this is not at all what we imagine most people think of when they think 'techno'. The first track alone, "Paradise Poltergeist" by some guy called Tai and techno legend Steve Aoki, is all over the place, twisted and totally geniusly whatthefuck, beginning with some dizzying 8 bit melodies, muted drums, and buzzy looped vocals, which give way to what sounds like time stretched Tuvan throat singing, modulated into a weird croaking frog melody, over a pulsing 4 on the floor beat, and some strange metallic crunches, not to mention some punky vox, some big banging drums, some ravey flourishes, fat buzzy synths, the song so hypnotic and psychedelic, we were sort of expecting the rest of the record to pale, but if anything, it just gets better and better.
Twisted looped horns get wound into crackly fields of thick synth buzz, and machine gun squelches, sounds change speed and pitch, every track sounding like it's being broadcast through a funhouse mirror, the beats stuttery and skittery, lots of woozy squiggly melodies, weird voices, pitched way down or sped up like crazy, wild ragga toasting over more woozy lo-fi grinding synth buzz, we were constantly waiting for it to let up, or for some bum track to surface, but it never does, relentless and continually getting buzzier and weirder, the sounds unexpected and twisted and super surprising, culminating in the sped up Refused sampling "New Noise", which takes that new punk anthem and adds thick swaths of synth, bigger beats, but essentially leaves the original song intact, it's easy to imagine how bad ass that sounds in the midst of a techno set.
Totally ruling, and yeah, based on this comp, not sure there's anything we actually like more than techno.
Another week, another forward thinking electronic music off shoot, another new genre. It's sort of always been like that. Acid house begets jungle begets drum and bass, begets drill and bass, begets UK garage or dark step or about a million other variations, which beget dubstep and grime, which then leads to this stuff, dubbed UK Funky, which was supposedly born out of the aggression and intensity inherent in grime and dubstep, moving back toward house music, a little lighter, with that 4 on the floor beat, and still lots and lots and lots of BASS.
As always, Soul Jazz leaps right in to document this new scene and do a bang up job. Right off the bat, you'll notice a handful of familiar names, Kode9, Roska, Shystie, Grievous Angel, that's cuz Funky is not that far removed from dubstep, it's almost the same sound pallet, just with that dubstep lurch and swing replaced by a more steady driving beat, but around that beat, synths still bloop and bleep and bloop and buzz, the bass rumbles and warbles, and like jungle, Funky has a bit of a ragga vibe, so there's a definite dancehall feel, with some killer toasting on some tracks.
This comp is pretty solid all the way through, and ANYone who's been digging the various Soul Jazz dubstep comps, will definitely dig this too.
MJ Cole's "Volcano Riddim" takes super dramatic soundtrack strings and wraps them around a killer main groove and a very dubsteppy beat, Altered Natives' "Rass Out" is a cool murky muted minimal shuffle with live drums, moody minor key melodies, and some swooping swirling synths. Warrior Queen contributes to Sunship's "Almighty Father" creating a super funky grimy dubfunk workout, Zumen's "Rolexx" features some incredible tongue twisting flow from the awesomely named Leafnuts, Lil Silva lays down a skittery beat underneath bleating synths and woozy funk bass, super stripped down, but seriously bad ass, DVA gets super bassy and buzzy with his "Natty" that sounds like a skipping jungle record slowed down and swathed in synths. We could go on, but why bother, this stuff all rules, and for dubstep obsessive and grime freaks, this is just another collection of bass heavy dancefloor destroyers that should get your toes tapping and rib cage rattling.
Like all Soul Jazz comps, includes a big booklet with lots of liner notes, info about UK Funky, the history of UK dancemusic and more. The cd comes housed in a cool extra wide half sized dvd style case, the lp split over two pricey but super swank double lps...
Another week, another forward thinking electronic music off shoot, another new genre. It's sort of always been like that. Acid house begets jungle begets drum and bass, begets drill and bass, begets UK garage or dark step or about a million other variations, which beget dubstep and grime, which then leads to this stuff, dubbed UK Funky, which was supposedly born out of the aggression and intensity inherent in grime and dubstep, moving back toward house music, a little lighter, with that 4 on the floor beat, and still lots and lots and lots of BASS.
As always, Soul Jazz leaps right in to document this new scene and do a bang up job. Right off the bat, you'll notice a handful of familiar names, Kode9, Roska, Shystie, Grievous Angel, that's cuz Funky is not that far removed from dubstep, it's almost the same sound pallet, just with that dubstep lurch and swing replaced by a more steady driving beat, but around that beat, synths still bloop and bleep and bloop and buzz, the bass rumbles and warbles, and like jungle, Funky has a bit of a ragga vibe, so there's a definite dancehall feel, with some killer toasting on some tracks.
This comp is pretty solid all the way through, and ANYone who's been digging the various Soul Jazz dubstep comps, will definitely dig this too.
MJ Cole's "Volcano Riddim" takes super dramatic soundtrack strings and wraps them around a killer main groove and a very dubsteppy beat, Altered Natives' "Rass Out" is a cool murky muted minimal shuffle with live drums, moody minor key melodies, and some swooping swirling synths. Warrior Queen contributes to Sunship's "Almighty Father" creating a super funky grimy dubfunk workout, Zumen's "Rolexx" features some incredible tongue twisting flow from the awesomely named Leafnuts, Lil Silva lays down a skittery beat underneath bleating synths and woozy funk bass, super stripped down, but seriously bad ass, DVA gets super bassy and buzzy with his "Natty" that sounds like a skipping jungle record slowed down and swathed in synths. We could go on, but why bother, this stuff all rules, and for dubstep obsessive and grime freaks, this is just another collection of bass heavy dancefloor destroyers that should get your toes tapping and rib cage rattling.
Like all Soul Jazz comps, includes a big booklet with lots of liner notes, info about UK Funky, the history of UK dancemusic and more. The cd comes housed in a cool extra wide half sized dvd style case, the lp split over two pricey but super swank double lps...
Another week, another forward thinking electronic music off shoot, another new genre. It's sort of always been like that. Acid house begets jungle begets drum and bass, begets drill and bass, begets UK garage or dark step or about a million other variations, which beget dubstep and grime, which then leads to this stuff, dubbed UK Funky, which was supposedly born out of the aggression and intensity inherent in grime and dubstep, moving back toward house music, a little lighter, with that 4 on the floor beat, and still lots and lots and lots of BASS.
As always, Soul Jazz leaps right in to document this new scene and do a bang up job. Right off the bat, you'll notice a handful of familiar names, Kode9, Roska, Shystie, Grievous Angel, that's cuz Funky is not that far removed from dubstep, it's almost the same sound pallet, just with that dubstep lurch and swing replaced by a more steady driving beat, but around that beat, synths still bloop and bleep and bloop and buzz, the bass rumbles and warbles, and like jungle, Funky has a bit of a ragga vibe, so there's a definite dancehall feel, with some killer toasting on some tracks.
This comp is pretty solid all the way through, and ANYone who's been digging the various Soul Jazz dubstep comps, will definitely dig this too.
MJ Cole's "Volcano Riddim" takes super dramatic soundtrack strings and wraps them around a killer main groove and a very dubsteppy beat, Altered Natives' "Rass Out" is a cool murky muted minimal shuffle with live drums, moody minor key melodies, and some swooping swirling synths. Warrior Queen contributes to Sunship's "Almighty Father" creating a super funky grimy dubfunk workout, Zumen's "Rolexx" features some incredible tongue twisting flow from the awesomely named Leafnuts, Lil Silva lays down a skittery beat underneath bleating synths and woozy funk bass, super stripped down, but seriously bad ass, DVA gets super bassy and buzzy with his "Natty" that sounds like a skipping jungle record slowed down and swathed in synths. We could go on, but why bother, this stuff all rules, and for dubstep obsessive and grime freaks, this is just another collection of bass heavy dancefloor destroyers that should get your toes tapping and rib cage rattling.
Like all Soul Jazz comps, includes a big booklet with lots of liner notes, info about UK Funky, the history of UK dancemusic and more. The cd comes housed in a cool extra wide half sized dvd style case, the lp split over two pricey but super swank double lps...
Weed Diamond is an upstart, lo-fi outfit from Denver, which has grown out of the cracked bedroom project of songwriter Tim Perry into a full band that's just as wonderfully sloppy in the delivery of some pretty awesome melodic jangle. The Sweater Kids recordings originally appeared as a cassette in 2009, but the origins of the Carry On ep is not all that clear. It could be that Perry had some new material with his full band in tow when Bridgetown asked to reissue that cassette as a cd-r. In any case, the differences between Weed Diamond, the one-dude-holed-up-in-apartment, and Weed Diamond, the four-piece ensemble, are pretty minor, as everything has been recorded on a shitty 4-track with any given channel totally overblown and given ample doses of the cheapest reverb one can find. Weed Diamond revel in their untidy trimmings and primitive hiss; but on pretty much every track, there's an effortless, utterly catchy vocal melody that rises out of the noise-pop chaos. If this brings to mind The Oh Sees or Wavves, you're definitely on the right track with the mischievousness of those two projects occasionally begetting the wistful, downer paisley pop underbelly of Deerhunter or Beach Fossils. Really fantastic stuff that speaks well for the future of Weed Diamond!
Twisted eighties style new wave electro industrial electronic pop from this duo, a dizzying mix of old school synth pop and industrial crunch, with a teeny bit of Chicago house swirled in. And some straight up eighties MTV style pop. But it's not the parts, it's what they do with them, and what these guys do is pretty bizarre and fantastic.
Imagine Oingo Boingo but way more minimal and druggy and psychedelic, or a way more industrial version of The Fixx, think old Ministry, Foetus, Coil, Severed Heads, even Portion Control, it's poppy, but dark, warped and electronic, new wavey but also a little witch housey here and there.
Woozy melodies are wrapped around stuttery beats, deep super dramatic vox drift over angular off kilter synths, strange sound effects swirl in the background, while the beats skitter and pound, keyboards buzz and pulse, all somehow molded into some retro dancefloor destroying electronic industrial pop weirdness, that manages to totally hit the spot, referencing all of those bands we grew up with, but also twisting that sounds into something fresh and new and gloriously tweaked and tripped out.
Pressed on super thick white vinyl, and probably pretty limited too...
Hot on the heels of their great debut full length that we've been playing to death, comes this new ep brimming with songs that are adding fuel to our Wild Nothing addiction fire. The title of the ep, Golden Haze, accurately sums up the sound here as well as the mood and vibe we find ourselves drifting off into when listening to these perfect '80s inspired dream-pop gems, that manage to keep a sharp focus while still allowing for plenty of shoegazing drift. They tap into so many of our favorite bands like Ride, Slowdive, and Swervedriver and just the right amount of sounds borrowed from groups like The Cure and New Order. And while so many other bands may share very similar influences, we've been taken with how Wild Nothing have been able to bring those influences together and create songs that already have a distinctive imprint and don't just come off as a lesson in nostalgia. Their songs make us want to be a passenger in a car with the windows down, wind rushing by with our destination unknown. So great!
We don't see a whole lot of music from Singapore come through here, the most recent was the dark psychedelic folk of the Observatory, and then all the way on the other end of the spectrum are these guys, Wormrot, also from Singapore, but whose sound is a furious blasting downtuned metallic grindcore that SLAYS. Think Insect Warfare, Nasum, that sort of hyperspeed fury. Released last year, on a tiny indie label in Singapore, it didn't take long before heavy music freaks caught on, many declaring Wormrot's Abuse THEE grind record of last year. Which caught the ear of one of the original grind labels Earache, who swooped in and reissued Abuse with a whole bonus disc of demos (34 tracks!).
So here it is, and holy shit does this smoke. We try really hard to convert people to the way of the grind. No reason folks who love black metal and death metal and all sorts of heaviness shouldn't also be into grind, it's fast and furious and technical and super intense, brutal as fuck, more political, more sonically raw, and feral, we've raved about Discordance Axis, Brutal Truth, AKBK, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Gridlink, Nasum, Pig Destroyer, Unholy Grave and loads more, and Wormrot fit pretty perfectly amidst such esteemed grind royalty. Their sound fast and frantic, the drums insanely intense and technical, the guitars gnarled and frantic, the dueling vox, guttural grunt and inhuman shriek, wrapped around frenetic super convoluted complex blasts of metallic fury, that blaze at lightning speed one second, churn and chug the next, flipping from tempo to tempo, lots of super dynamic start stops, killer riffs, little chunks of classic metal laced into insectoid buzzing and blasting pummel, 23 songs in less than 22 minutes, but about a million parts and a billion riffs, putting most bands 10 minute epics to shame in less than a minute. And if that wasn't bad ass enough, these guys even do a Yeah Yeah Yeah's cover, and DESTROY IT. Easily one of our favorite grind records of the last few years, and we urge anyone who has been grindshy, to check this shit out, hard to imagine you won't be converted.
And while they last, the cd version (not the lp, sorry) of Abuse includes a second disc, Extra Abuse, 34 demo tracks, alternate versions of some of the songs proper, but a mess of otherwise unreleased stuff too.
