This "live" drone recording is the debut solo cd from Berlin-based installation artist Thomas Ankersmit, who has previously collaborated/played with the likes of Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and Kevin Drumm. One single 39 minute track, this is some dense, abstract, trance-inducing drone indeed, and certainly sounds like more than a mere one-man operation. Ankersmit's drones are like multiple trains running on more or less parallel tracks, diverging and then joining together again, racing ever onwards towards a self-generated brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel.
There's some squeal and squiggle to these sounds, that arise from their origin within Ankersmit's saxophone - that's right, he plays the sax, so these are saxophone drones - but there's really only a few places where you can tell for sure the source is a sax, thanks to all the electronics and processing involved. In addition to alto sax, Ankersmit makes use of a computer, analog synth, and pre-recorded reel-to-reel tape. So his sax is set amidst much mysterious glitch and crackle, and takes on an ominously distorted, grinding quality that's quite unlike what you might expect to hear from a saxophone. Although it makes sense that he's also had some sort of association with the notoriously noisy sax and guitar outfit Borbetomagus, the music here isn't assaultive, and far from free jazz, no, it's simply, or perhaps not so simply, a gorgeous and varied dronework, one that passes through some quieter stretches of eerie subsonic hum and hiss, while ultimately massing towards the end into full-bodied solid drone purity, blissful and glorious. Pretty darn satisfying, we think our fellow drone-heads will agree. Looking forward to hearing more from Mr. Ankersmit as well. Recommended!
The editorial statement in this inaugural edition of As Loud As Possible claims to want "to solve a problem: to offer a contrast to the fumbling coverable of noise and experimental music found in most glossy music magazines... To them, all Merzbow records sounds more of less the same, and... they can hear no differentiation between a Merzbow, a John Wiese, a Macronympha, or a Sudden Infant." Editors Chris Sienko and Steve Underwood have collected 160 attractive pages of insightful, compelling, and sometimes incendiary thoughts in search of the mutable definition of Noise Culture. Probably the main attraction here is the duo's massive undertaking of delving into the history of the seminal Broken Flag label, investigating ALL of their releases, attempting to contact ALL of the artists involved. 40 pages later, and you'll be needing to track down the Vinyl On Demand box of the best that Broken Flag released! There's some great interviews with Rudolf Eb.Er of Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock / Schimpfluch infamy, No Fun bossman Carlos Giffoni, and Ides Recordings' Nicole Chambers. While there's tons of reviews in this issue of As Loud As Possible, Sienko and Underwood seek out direct communication with the artists involved to get their own take on Noise. A massive and highly commendable undertaking, for sure; one that makes for an exceptional read!
Intentional or otherwise, Asher Thal-Nir and Ubeboet (also known as Miguel Tolosa) have created a near perfect soundscape for winter. While Cell Memory is not nearly as isolated and grim as the classic Thomas Koner records that looked to Greenland for inspiration, the hushed noises and barren drones of Cell Memory capture a similarly cold environment. The album is split almost evenly between two near 20 minute tracks. "Alter" echoes a muted howl across a billowing mass of radio snow, nocturnal hallucinatory gestures, and soft focus noise, all of which has been muffled into a long-stare miasma of ghostly repetitions flickering against a fog-laden horizon line. While the mood of "Alter" has something akin to being awakened at 3am by a snowstorm, the second track "Nullus" is more of a subterranean, bunker recording, with flecks of static dropping on the cavernous subharmonic drones like seeped water from the ceiling into a massive concrete cistern. Electrical murmurings and accreted layers of smeared textures ebb and flow against the near constant background hum. Beautifully chilling impressionism that would fit very well next to Jonathan Colecough, Mirror, Murmer, Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden, and the aforementioned Thomas Koner.
As with all of the Wind Measures Recordings, Cell Memory comes in an elegant folio, letterpressed by WMR's Ben Owen. It's a professionally duplicated cd-r and is limited to 150 copies.
Most people probably know Sasha Grey for what she is most (in)famous for, and that would be for being a porn star. Even folks who don't know porn stars might still know Grey as an actress, who recently starred in Steven Soderbergh's film Girlfriend, and has been on HBO's Entourage, but few probably know her as a musician (although aQ customers might remember she sang on a Current 93 record!). And we're not talking cheesy club diva, a la Tracy Lords, crooning terribly over bad house music, no we're talking as a proper musician, one who apparently has been making music since she was a teenager (influenced by KMFDM and Throbbing Gristle), and whose current group aTelecine is some sort of blackened industrial avant drone sound collage thing, that would put most of the current crop of experimental musicians to shame. The label hypes Grey's music as being heavily indebted to groups like Nurse With Wound and Coil, and while we're tempted to think this is just the label trying to make the band seem 'cooler' and more authentic, it only takes a few minutes listening to aTelecine's new full length to realize, it's not all that unlikely. This stuff is dark, and corrosive, haunting and fierce, otherworldly and intense, a little bit industrial, a little ambient, a little witch house-y, a little black metal, doomy and new wavey and seriously dark, a dizzying churning cauldron of field recordings, samples, loops, electronics, distorted guitars, programmed beats, FX drenched vocals, throbbing basslines, plenty of glitch and clang and rumble and buzz.
If you're anything like us it'll just take a single song, the first one we heard (even though this is aTelecine's 3rd or 4th record), the super creepy, super intense "I Came, I Sat, I Departed", a lumbering blackened industrial creep, all downtuned chug, low slung slither, laced with some seriously fucked up and freaky hissed whispery vokills, the sound crunchy and glitchy, but super hypnotic. The song gets more and more chaotic, with anguished howls, more distortion, the song seeming to crumble before our ears into a hellish reverb drenched miasma. Terrifying and incredible.
The rest of the record stacks up pretty well too. "A Cassette Played" is all woozy low end and rumbling bass over snippets of crowd sound, a sort of collaged dark wavey drift, with some super minimal skittery Autechre style fractured beats, a sprawling expansive dronescape, laced with skitter, and ominous synth swells, strangely cinematic keyboards, the sound becoming almost John Carpenter-esque near the end, before slipping directly into "Chroeg Xen", which sounds like Steve Reich or Terry Riley as interpreted by the current crop of retro futurist sci fi new wavers. "Elijah's New Sun" is a fluttering field of hiss and static, of shortwave interference, buried synth pulses, strange processed vocals, and minimal synth melodies way off in the distance.
"It's All Write" is an avalanche of song fragments, woven into a woozy, series of melodic swells, streaks of buzz, bits of sampled voices, a minimal barely there beat, slowly unwinding like some out of focus sonic charnel house. "Kitchen Light" is a surprisingly lovely bloopy bleepy bit of spacey synthiness, while "Never Was A Dreamer (vox)" is a swirling synthy crawl, all whispered tangled voices, and layered shimmery drones. "She Is Beautiful" is another bit of sci fi synthery, which leads into the short closer "Some What Daft", a gorgeous creepy glitchscape, of muted melodies, fractured drones and alien squelches, all over a sort of krauty pulse, the sort of track that we would have loved to see go on way longer. Which is pretty much how we feel about almost every track here.
Sure, the fact that aTelecine is Sasha Grey's band is the hook, but it hardly matters really, besides bucking the convention of actresses turned terrible musician, or certainly porn star gone pointlessly mainstream, this stuff is incredible, dark and dense and extremely well crafted, occasionally playful and mysterious, but more often fucking chilling and intense, and definitely makes it plain for all to see, that if Grey ever did decide to give up her day job, as sad as that would be, at least we'd have more of this amazing music to look forward to.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Who hasn't been moved by the churning, blanketing, droning, tickling, swooning sounds of an organ? A staple in retro garage pop outfits, tiki lounges, churches and skating rinks, under capable fingers it can be one of the most expressive and versatile instruments around. Jared Blum (the man behind the Beaks Plinth moniker) shares the love, exhuming an assortment of wildly varied vintage records featuring said instrument. On Organo Saturado (inspired by Juan Torres' Organo Melodica Volume 11), he's Frankenstein'd them into something very very different from their origin. One step in the process was adjusting the RPM speed of many of the pieces waaay down to a snail's pace. It is as if the vinyl itself has been melted into some molasses or clay-like substance, but with some texturous grit embedded in the mounds, courtesy of the old record vinyl's inherent scritchy crackles. Sounds are stretched, smeared and layered almost beyond the point of recognition. What once might have been a sprightly ice skating accompaniment or a solemn chord sequence rattling the stained glass panes of a cathedral has been dragged into the murky dyspeptic depths of Beaks Plinth's lair. As always, otherworldly atmospheres are stirred up to wonderful effect, shuffling unpredictably between the haunting, the rubbery, and the strange.
"I never expected it to be, like, a big phenomenon." So sayeth Archie Bell about his 1968 mega-hit, "Tighten Up," a buoyant funk exercise that managed to accomplish the one thing that eluded James Brown: a #1 hit on the pop chart. "Tighten Up," the song, started out as a B-side but it found such favor with DJs that it caused Atlantic to move it to the A-side (backing it with "Tighten Up pt. 2") for a subsequent pressing. When the song pushed its way to the top position, Bell's label found themselves in the position of having to rush out a record for a group whose front man was currently stationed with the US Armed Forces in Germany. The result? A record that, despite the fact that Drell doesn't sing on a number of tracks, blends covers and originals into an appealing mix of upbeat funk, sweet soul ballads, and southern R&B. This is a breezy, uplifting collection of songs that sounds more like a well put together mix tape than it does like a cohesive record by a single band, and as far as we're concerned that's no knock against the Drells. In fact, this is a perfect record for kicking back on a lazy summer afternoon, so we highly recommend you pick it up and do just that!
After the amazing reissue of the 1969 Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg album, Light In The Attic gives us this reissue of Jane Birkin's proper solo debut from 1973, Di Doo Dah. Of course, Serge and his producer in crime, Jean-Claude Vannier make their presence felt, the latter especially in the arrangements that begin soft and low-key, but build with orchestral nuance and grace. Di Doo Dah has less of the mod-pop feel of the earlier record with Serge and is more lush and intimate, Birkin's non-native French singing is amazingly natural and fluid. Like Francoise Hardy's great La Question album we reviewed awhile back, Di Doo Dah is that perfect transitional record from youthful hipness to something more true and deeper lasting.
It's unfortunate that we've not reviewed any of the material from electro-acoustic composer Olivia Block. She had begun making music in Austin in the early '90s, having started a guttural shoegaze project called The Marble Index, but shelved that project upon meeting Michael Northam, John Grzinich, and Seth Nehil. Those three had begun their explorations with field recordings, electrical vibration, found object ruminations, volatile drone, and organized decay, and it was this sensibility that inspired Block to leap into piles of rubble armed with little more than a contact microphone. While all four of these artists emerged from a similar aesthetic, each has wandered down his or her own path, with Block taking more of a musique concrete approach, often bringing in various instrumentalists to provide a particular timbre to accompany her tape machinations, not unlike the early Jim O'Rourke compositions Tamper, Scend, and Disengage. One of those chamber musicians who Block had employed was Kyle Bruckmann. The two had met in Chicago in the late '90s, with Bruckmann contributing to almost all of Block's compositions since 1999. Bruckmann, now based in San Francisco, has quite the career in the realms of avant-jazz / new music / classical-experimentation / whatnot. Despite their decade long collaboration, Teem marks their first proper collaborative body of work.
At the beginning of the record, a scrabbling of small metallic objects builds upon a spiralling drone from Bruckmann's circular breathing through the oboe, followed by a series of descending, purposefully off-kilter melodic phrases from that same oboe. As painterly as this piece is, the second track uses Bruckmann's circular breathing for a far more atonal, bruitist attack through a head-throbbing elongated blurt, that recalls those Hermann Nitsch symphonic noise assaults or Penderecki's scabrous crescendos. Block's sensibility speaks more on this track through the oblique noise attack and transitions into passages of concrete noises from various pre-industrial machines struggling to get started. Glowing drones of feedback hang upon a muffling passage of woodwind errata, eventually building through jittery abrasions again reprising that Nitsch-like howl.
Another fantastic release that somehow slipped through the cracks, this one from Paul Bradley, who besides performing and recording in Monos, with Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, Ora, etc), has released an amazing amount of gorgeous releases on his own, pastandpresentcollide most definitely being one of them.
A lush, gorgeously hushed expanse of smooth muted minimal dronemusic, a sort of smeared new age shimmer, deep swells of stretched out melodies, a slow burning barely there bit of tonal thrum, an absolutely perfect late night drifting off soundtrack, resonant, reverberant, the tones overlapping, layered, bleeding into one another, the notes melting into one epic softly swirling organic whole, close listening reveals some mysterious ghostly voices, drifting way below the softly undulating dronescape, mesmerizing, soothing, tranquil, so so lovely.
Any one into deep minimal dronemusic will love this. Certainly essential for fans of Jonathan Coleclough, Ora Monos, Machinefabriek, Main, Darren Tate, and the like.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES when it first came out!! We have about 6 or 7, not sure if we'll be able to get more...
So many modern bands are looking back to the eighties, and even the seventies for inspiration, which quite frankly to those of us who grew up during those decades, seems a bit surprising, and shocking, all of the stuff that seemed cool then, was quickly deemed "what the fuck were we thinking" not too long after, from MTV synth pop to yacht rock to fringed leather jackets to creepers to rubber bracelets to... well you get the point, the kids today are reclaiming out teenage shame and doing their damndest to make it cool.
But what we're waiting for, and it can't be long off now, is the nineties revival, grunge, post rock, math rock, bands who look to Rodan, Pitchblende, Polvo, Bitch Magnet and all those bands for their inspiration. There are definitely a few bands digging into that era, but maybe it's that it just hasn't been long enough for the younger generation to discover that stuff, lots of those bands are still playing, or playing again, which is totally okay, we can wait, as long as SOMEONE is still making that kind of music. And making it well. Which brings us to Broughton's Rules, made up of members of Pittsburgh's legendary math rockers Don Caballero and not so legendary but still bad ass math rockers Blunderbuss (whose song "Broughton's Rules" is where these guys got their name).
The label's spiel is "recommended if you like: Russian Circles, Sonic Youth, Slint, Shellac, Battles Pelican and The Psychic Paramount", and we certainly can't argue with that, we might also throw in the above mentioned bands Rodan, Polvo, Pitchblende, along with Table, Breadwinner, Bastro, Butterglove, Hose.Got.Cable, Crain, June Of 44, The For Carnation, Shipping News, Turing Machine, Phleg Camp, well, you get the drift. Obviously we love this stuff, and are psyched when some band can totally pull it off, and since these guys have basically been pulling it off since back in the day, it should be no surprise that this RULES.
Dense and lush and intricate, moody and melodic, complex and convoluted, heavy and super rocking, mathy and meandering, brooding and moody, droney and blissed out, the songs are epic and sprawling, but manage to still be catchy, and this isn't all instrumental, there are vocals, which make this eminently more appealing to the rest of the maybe-not-so-instrumental-math-rock-obsessed world, and while there is plenty dense heaviness, and some intense mathiness, there are moments that are sunshiney and melodic and major key, a good balance, and a hell of a good record. One of our new faves for sure.
Now bring on the nineties math rock revival!
Found a small stash of these in the back room, long gone and long out of print, we have 6 or 7 up for grabs...
We've sung the praises of Burnt Hills before. Their epic basement jams are the stuff of legend, sprawling lysergic blowouts that shift from droney and krauty to full on Japanese style psych freakouts, multiple guitarists, sometimes as many as 4 or 5, even a xylophonist (although we have a hard time picking the xylo out of the din), the recordings all start out suddenly, and end the same way, as if someone reached over midjam to push record, and then the tape just runs out, and it's not til the next day, when some hungover dude shuffles down to the basement to collect the tape. Fucking awesome. And this live set from 2007 is no different, a nearly hour long jam, the drums all lo-fi and practice space, the air filled with wailing howling guitars, scrabbling leads, gnarled riffs, long buzzing feedback drenched drones, all stretched waaaaaay waaaaaay out, the band unfurling a glorious sprawl of lysergic, blown out, in-the-red drunk and druggy psychedelic space rock bliss. RAD!
This was LIMITED TO 99 COPIES when we first got it in, each one hand numbered. Again, this is WAY out of print, so these are most definitely the last copies we'll ever get!
We always wondered if East Coast metallic noise rockers Cave In were named after legendary slowcore outfit
Codeine's ultra heavy jam "Cave In", and now we know! More on that in a second.
This collection gathers up a handful of unreleased jams and rarities from these post/metal/prog heavies, who over the course of their now lengthy career, have probably managed to alienate every single one of their fans, except maybe us. Starting out as a crushing downtuned noise metal juggernaut, the band gradually morphed into epic bombastic Radiohead style arena rock, and then inexplicably back again, and these days seem to hover somewhere between the two. And while that may have confused lots of folks, we frankly love BOTH those sounds, the heavy and the poppy, and we're pretty into a mix of the two. So we were psyched for this, as it gathers up a handful of tracks, some as early as Until Your Heart Stops, some later on toward the Jupiter record, not to mention some seriously bad ass covers.
The first two tracks are classic Cave In, epic and proggy, metallic and complex, the liner notes even describe "Mr. Co-Dexterity" as being a song they never played live cuz it has more riffs than any other Cave In song. Hell yeah! Next up is their Bad Brains cover, and weirdly enough they chose to cover one of BB's straight up reggae songs, and as hard as it might be to believe, they totally own it, transforming it into something closer to a heavier Radiohead (which is basically later period Cave In anyway), before letting the song sprawl into a super tripped out and psychedelic workout, all tribal rhythms, twisted guitar weirdness, loads of effects and electronics everywhere, dirgey and droney and bad ass.
The flipside starts off with their cover of the Cure's "Plainsong", which is again turned into something more heavy and psychedelic, the melodies super effected and swirly, the vocals appropriately deep and dramatic, with big BIG drums. They also tackle Black Sabbath's "N.I.B.", but totally reinvent it, and the result sounds more like Pink Floyd than Sabbath, shimmery and spacey, the only recognizable bit is the bassline. There's one more original, an alternate demo version of one of the songs from Jupiter, solidly in their Radiohead period, big bombastic stadium pop, but still proggy and metallic, and finally, the band pay homage to their namesakes, the mighty Codeine, and they tackle Codeine's "Cave In", and while we might have expected them to metal it up (as mentioned before, we dream of a FULL ON doom metal version of "Cave In"), they instead do it all pretty and acoustic-y, gorgeously hi-fi, with thick rumbling bass, stripped down and almost dream poppy, definitely a nice version, and the liner notes explain that the band did indeed name themselves after that song, and sent a copy of their debut to Codeine, but never heard back!
Totally essential collection for fans of Cave In, any or all eras, super limited, pressed on white vinyl, in old school bootleg style jackets.
Akita. Menche. Blankenship. Dilloway. These are the men of noise with discographies the size of small town phone books, proving their might in the international noise community by the sheer audaciousness of their output. But then again, you might really only need a single testament to stake your claim as one of the greatest noise musicians. Chop Shop has chosen the latter tactic, with Oxide being that sole document, after a relatively tiny back catalogue of cassette only releases, a couple of cdrs, and two infamous 10"s. Both released through RRR, the first was the Steel Plate 2x10" that was literally bound to a steel plate; and the second was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party that was literally cut in half, making playback a dangerous proposition for the needle on your record player. Both of those releases have long been out of print; and despite the hushed respect that those 10"s demand, Chop Shop has kept a low profile. A very low profile. Hence, after a career that has spanned nearly two decades, Oxide is his first proper CD. And it's stunning.
The sole proprietor of Chop Shop is New York based noise technician Scott Konzelmann, whose audio demolition revolves around speaker constructions forged out of hammered plate metal and disfigured commercial grade pipes, which focus particular frequencies and resonant overtones into swarming orchestras of rust, noise, drone, and static. Tape has long been Konzelmann's medium of choice for recording; and like William Basinski before him, Konzelmann endures the self-disintegration of the medium whilst transcribing the sounds of Oxide digitally. Where Basinski's vocabulary of decay is all romance and melancholy, Konzelmann's is muscular and urgently present. Oxide offers a metallurgist's din where compressed air strikes hard steel and machine vibrations generate noxious resonant frequencies in neighboring vents. Konzelmann composes the old school way, with a razor blade and pieces of tape, generating jump cut edits alongside the self-generated debris from the magnetic literally falling apart. These grey, dead-tech drones thus rupture and explode along the faultlines of those edits, and Oxide emerges as a forceful, dynamic album without resorting to purile shock tactics. This is a seriously great noise album for anybody with a passing interest in Broken Flag, Hansen Records, or early Hafler Trio.
Throbbing Gristle ceased to exist (for the first time) in 1981, shortly after the transgressive industrialists performed in San Francisco in May of that year. TG were deft in their manipulation of media, ominously stating that "The Mission is terminated," with the 'mission' referring to their numerous stark proclamations against society at large conjoined with their adventurous manglings of noise, rhythm, and atonality. But there's another rather self-evident historical fact: that TG's Genesis P-Orridge broke up with fellow bandmate & long-term partner Cosey Fanny Tutti. Shortly thereafter, Cosey and fellow TG member Chris Carter struck out on their own (with a romantic partnership not far behind), and later on in 1981, Chris & Cosey released their first solo project, the minimal wave / synthpunk masterpiece Heartbeat. In TG, Carter's propensity for beguiling electronic melodies and disco rhythms could be heard on such classic tracks as "United" and "Hot On The Heels Of Love." Both of these were signature tracks for Carter's aesthetic, which espoused an economic proto-techno approach to drum machine rhythms and heavily sequenced electro pulse melodies. Such has been the template for Chris & Cosey's sound since.
"Put Yourself In Los Angeles" opens the album with a dizzying percolation of flanged electronics which snaps into a militant march of Cosey's gnashed guitars locked against barked samples of a lunatic radio host and insistent rhythms. At least on this track, it's easy to hear the influence that Chris & Cosey would have on the likes of Front 242, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. Other tracks such as the metronomic spiralling of "Voodoo" and the downright pastoral birdsounds of "Moorby" looked back to the Krautrock electronic meanderings of Cluster. "Just Like You" is one of Chris & Cosey's finest tracks, oozing with paranoia and dread throughout the slashed noises and found dialogue haunting the minimalist techno-horror sequencing and sustained minor-key melodies. The title track completes the album brilliantly by looking forward to any number of Detroit-inspired techno trax with double timed rhythms emerging out of maudlin, if cybernetic melodies and electronic-pop propulsive sequencing that really does act as a bridge between the realm of Kraftwerk and the British new wave that was bubbling up around Chris & Cosey back in the day. An absolute classic!
The second record released in 1982 from former Throbbing Gristle alumni Chris Carter and Cosey Fanny Tutti still mines the coldwave and industrial electro aesthetics of their debut, Heartbeat (reviewed elsewhere on this list). But it may be their least regarded record due to its more removed soundtrack feel, exploring supposed realms of medieval chants and non-Western religious music, buried as they are under stuffy rhythms, slithery washes and ambient death-disco permutations. Apparently the band and label, Rough Trade had a dispute over the retail price of the record (our original copy says in printed type along the bottom edge "Please Note: Mid-Priced Record") and moved to various other labels shortly after, so it's hard to say if Trance got any real promotion at all. That's not to say Trance is not a worthy album, but its murky combination of earthy propulsive synthesis and detached ritualism make it less instantly accessible than their debut. Trance works best as a connected suite of songs, than individual tracks, a lot like Demdike Stare's twisted soundscapes, which share Chris & Cosey's fascination with an arcane British-ness. Especially the final two tracks, "Until" and "The Gates of Ancient Cities", which are two of our favorite C&C tracks ever, partially because they offer a shimmer of light from what preceded them and make a beautiful pastoral move towards grace.
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
Cuddle-core lives! Here's the newly remastered reissue of Cub's 1992 debut album Betti-Cola which comes with four bonus tracks. First things first, yes, the remastering did make a difference. This cd does sound a whole lot better than the original!
For those unfamiliar... Once upon a time, three Canadian college friends (including our own Cup, pre-I Am Sponbender and AQ!) with little or no previous band experience got together to have fun trying something new for themselves (yeah, you might think "big deal!", but back then things were different... the indie music scene was even more of a boys club for one thing!). Taking the spirit & ethics of DIY punk rock, but understanding the undeniable joy of '60s girl groups, Cub's basement rehearsal space was where the musical genre cuddlecore was born. Releasing a slew of 7" eps (the bulk of which comprise Betti-Cola) and touring extensively, the three gals were definitely kindred spirits with the scene happening just a few hours south at Olympia' WA's K Records (Beat Happening, Tiger Trap, Lois, etc). They even cover Beat Happening's "Cast A Shadow".
A decade and a half later, Betti-Cola's still burstin' with youthful exuberance and blithe spirit (and topping the college radio charts once again to boot!). The tunes are sweet, peppy, rough around the edges, and a bit unsteady at times just like, yes, a cub! On the surface it may seem a little silly or childlike, but looks can be deceiving. It takes guts to throw caution to the wind like they did. As a result, the trio inspired countless young girls and women to pick up guitars or drumsticks or... Heck, look no further than Ms Neko Case who drummed with the band for a spell!
With each album they grew in confidence, skill and composition (personally we favor their second and third albums Come Out Come Out and Box Of Hair), but this is where it all began. Their bright, playful pop is perfect matched with the cover art custom drawn for them by noneother than Dan DeCarlo of Archie Comics fame!
FYI: Come Out Come Out has also been remastered and reissued, and the band's third and final album Box Of Hair has also been rereleased with a bonus fan-pleasin' item.
Cub's newly remastered and reissued third and final album, Box of Hair, plays up the edgier and urgent side of their cuddle-core ethos. The distortion is upped, the song-writing more heartbroken, the lyrics more snarly in their delivery. Stiffer 'real world experience' influences are more pervasive here than on previous releases, and there's an overall feeling that the band is going for broke, and sensing an end coming, want to leave things with a bang. And that's definitely what Box of Hair is, a maturing sum up of priorities, showcasing their best song-writing and musical craft and taking it as far as it can go. One mesmerizing and charming highlight on the album, "Magic 8 Ball", captures all the Cub essentials - infectious pop hooks and clever, bittersweet lyrics. Box of Hair's not as carefree as their previous releases, but it's probably their most meaningful and resonant. Includes a bonus fan-pleasin' item -- a bright, embroidered patch of the band's sunshiney logo!
Note: If you can endure the seemingly endless chair creakiness ("it's not bed squeaks!" says Cup) at the album's end you'll be rewarded with a truly retarded punk rock finish.
FYI: Along with Box of Hair, Betti-Cola and Come Out Come Out, have also been rereleased with bonus tracks!
Come Out Come Out is Cub's masterpiece. Newly remastered with bonus tracks (a couple of them hidden), it is the culmination of all the DIY spirit of their debut but also shows the band honing their skills as musicians and songwriters into a tight set of upbeat tunes with a joyful edge - although Cub was often skillfully bittersweet. Self-proclaimed cuddle-core trio from Vancouver, BC, Lisa, Lisa and Robynn veered away from the battle cries of their more raucous riot grrrl contemporaries preferring to wave the 'home-crafted' flag with a more confident (and varied) direction. Obviously, legions of fanatic cubsters (likely whipped into a frenzy during thir sugar-pop-overload live shows) got the message. On this their second full length, wonder along to "Everything's Geometry", "New York City" (later covered by They Might Be Giants), and covers of the Go-Gos' "Vacation" and Yoko Ono's "I'm Your Angel"!
Originally released as a triple 7" colored vinyl fiesta with some wonderfully twisted cover art by Canadian artist Fiona Smyth, the extra bonus tracks here include a live version of "Cast A Shadow" featuring some Italian dude who jumped on stage to play harmonica, and a sweet phoned-in version of "My Chinchilla" on Canadian Radio, that really captures the band's energetic live spirit. Another key groop in a line of influential DIY femme trios from The Shaggs, Kleenex, and The Raincoats, to The Marine Girls, Shonen Knife and Le Tigre, it's time once again for Cub!!
FYI: Betti-Cola has also been remastered and reissued, and the band's third and final album Box Of Hair has also been rereleased with a bonus fan-pleasin' item.
When you hear the words Load Records, and then 'duo from Providence', you probably think of a certain sort of sound, blown out and super heavy, chaotic and noisy, the sort of sound that would be coming from a couple dudes rocking out wildly amidst a heaving sweat soaked crowd, and there could possibly be costumes involved, but odds are you wouldn't have thought of this - dark, brooding, moody, synthy coldwave, but that's precisely what you get with Daily Life, whose debut Necessary And Pathetic is indeed a Load anomaly, and we're digging it quite a bit!
Skeletal beats underpin crumbling distorted synths and lush chordal swells, the vocals deep and moody, weird processed whispery wraithlike vocals swirl around soaring melodramatic melodies, chiming guitars, strange glitchy crunches swoop from speaker to speaker, organs whir and warble, lovely female vocals offer melodic counterpoint, lots of metallic buzzing, deep bassy rumblings, all manner of keyboard and synth textures, electronic pulses, super dark and dreamy, surprisingly poppy and melodic, and all very lush and dense and really pretty great. For fans of Blessure Grave, Interpol, Cold Cave, Silk Flowers, and all that sort of stuff.
While we totally dug Matthew Dear's debut from several years ago, we just haven't gotten into his last few outings as much as we wanted to, but with Black City, he shows us why we fell for him in the first place. He merges elements of house, electro funk, and dark pop into such a compelling and unique sound, one as influenced by folks like Herbert and Swayzek as it is Gary Numan, early Nine Inch Nails and mid-era Cabaret Voltaire. While there has been no shortage of white guys doing their best Prince imitations in recent years, we love how Matthew Dear takes elements of Prince's sound yet totally injects his own voice and style in it, adding darker beats, sleeker rhythms and more hypnotic melodies, all without having to resort to a really forced high pitched vocal delivery, which so many others do and just comes off as beyond corny. Kind of like if Junior Boys started listening to lots more dirty techno or how that last James Pants record tapped into the same kind of unique hybrid of electronic left-field pop. Undeniably groovy and funky and so very good.
What can we write about France's mysterious Deathspell Omega that we haven't already? Pretty much the gold standard of forward thinking avant black metal, every record better than the last, more twisted, more complex, and weirdly enough less obviously black metal.
Paracletus is the final part of the group's epic trilogy, which began with Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, and continued with Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum; like those records, Paracletus is an epic sonic undertaking, present in smaller doses are the requisite black metal buzzing and blasting, but even more than the first two records, which were already reaching beyond the tired tropes of traditional black metal, Paracletus barely seems black metal at all. It's definitely heavy, and seriously intense, complex, but even the blasting blackness is infused with mysterious melody, and impossible textures. Listening to this, we not only find ourselves wondering how people can make music like this, but how they can even conceive of it?
The opening sub two minute 'intro' is all gnarled melodies, twisted atonal mathiness, convoluted and avant and abstract and somehow totally catchy, the blackest part is the vocals, still delivered in a gruff demonic bellow, but other than that, the sound is in a realm all its own. And when you expect the record proper to kick in, the band do explode in a frenzy of blasting fury, but the riffs sound weirdly clean, and are peppered with all sorts of little bits of filigree and little sonic curlicues, not to mention more of those super tangled and gnarled Greg Ginn-ish guitar parts that band is known for, the song a twisted sonic puzzle, a million parts seamlessly woven into an impossibly cohesive whole which is indeed heavy, and black, but has so much cool weird shit going on, strange melodic breakdowns, laid over frantic blast beats, haunting ascending and descending melodies, atonal and angular, and it never lets up, how a band can play this fast, and this intricate, and definitely boggles the mind. And the whole record is like that, the sound both heavy and harsh, but simultaneously clean and melodic, it seems impossible, and sounds weird to describe, but there is something definitely unique going on here, the tone, the arrangements, the SOUND, it's not brittle or buzzy or grim or kvlt or any of that, it's LUSH, and expansive and epic and majestic, but still fierce and dark and intense, there's bass all over the place too, definitely an anomaly for black metal, adding some serious heft, not to mention melodic counterpoint, clean vocals, intense spoken word, doomy stretches that sound more like Codeine than Mutiilation. Not to totally downplay how heavy and TRUE this is, there is no doubt that this is black metal, it's just so above and beyond everything else, so unique and unlike all the other groups out there. We LOVE black metal, but 99 percent of the time we'd fail a blind name that tune or even name that band sort of comparison, cuz so much BM sounds so similar, but we could pick out DSP in a matter of seconds.
For their sound, but also for all the strange stuff they mix into their BM, like the lurching low slung breakdown on "Phosphene", with it's buzzy gothy fuzzbass, and tortured wails, not to mention the woozy main riff and the strange scrapes and slides, or the glimmering prettiness that is "Epiklesis II", which sounds almost like Mogwai or something, growing more and more epic, it even sounds like there are horns or an orchestra, so totally epic and unexpected, or howabout the insane mathiness of "Devouring Famine", along with the twisted dizzying breakdowns and the warped sounding guitars, or finally the whole of "Apokatastasis Panton", which is an incredible slab of black pop, the drums super complex, the arrangement sprawling and serpentine, but the guitars, soaring and melodic, again building and building to a sort of psychedelic blackened Godspeed style climax.
So incredible, the sort of thing that doesn't just feel like the culmination of the record, but of all three records, of the trilogy as a whole, an explosive and emotional and ultimately cathartic release, the sort of thing you don't get from much music, let alone black metal. Easily our new favorite black metal record, and without a doubt, black metal record of the year. TOTALLY ESSENTIAL.
Finally part three in Demdike Stare's strange and wonderful hauntological black dub triptych, a logical continuation of both Forest Of Evil and Liberation Through Hearing, a sprawling twisted landscape of sound, from lurching stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep to looped and processed African folk music (??) to swirling glitched out electronics, to throbbing pulsing deeeeeep dronemusic, to reverb drenched post-rock-via-Chain-Reaction skitter to... well wherever these cracked sonic alchemists decide to dream up.
The record opens with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangling those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift.
And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
So gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and spine tinglingly stunning.
Rumor is all three lps are getting reissued as a cd box sometime next year, but the vinyl tends to disappear pretty quick, so act fast...
As we've no doubt mentioned before, there was a time, when aQuarius was one of the few places you could get NZ underground music, and in particular, Flying Nun records, and the Flying Nun sound sort of defined aQ, we were the source for so many amazing discs by bands like Tall Dwarfs, The Chills, The Bats, Bailter Space, The Dead C, The Renderers, The Terminals, The Gordons, Able Tasmans, Straightjacket Fits, The Clean, The Verlaines and so many more. All of them so different, but somehow all tied together by this distinctly NZ sound.
While over the years we continued to dig that NZ sound, but Flying Nun seemed to cease functioning, or at the very least began to focus more on New Zealand and less on getting those records overseas. Not sure what, but something happened recently, some new distribution deal we presume, maybe new management, but Flying Nun is still a going concern, and all the old classics are available again, legendary records by those abovementioned bands, available to a whole new generation who just might have discovered their new favorite label.
Along with all those classics, seems FN is also actively releasing records by a new wave of NZ underground rock, groups like The Mint Chicks, Ghost Club, Garageland, Grayson Gilmour (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and these guys, Die! Die! Die! We actually saw D!D!D! play in SF years ago, but that ramshackle somewhat underwhelming performance hardly prepared us for this killer collection of frantic shoegazey punky power/noise pop.
Apparently, the band have indeed and perhaps purposely transformed from a more angular noisy unit into this, a heavy, hooky, shoegazey pop band, capable of creating jangly indie rock one, dense brooding downer pop and frenetic caffeinated noise pop, more often some twisted hybrid of the three, we hear a LOT of Built To Spill, especially on tracks like "Daze", with its droney crunchy guitars and very Martsch-like croon (which the more we listen seems to pop up quite a bit), but we also hear bits of Maximo Park, My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Wire, the sound alternatingly noisy and punky, tightly wound and almost new wave-y. There's a definite nineties inde rock vibe, with some crazy catchy songs, and a super lush, driving bass heavy sound that perfectly balances the big crunchy angular guitars. The more we listen to this, the more these songs grow on us, quickly becoming a new pop fave...
The Not Not Fun label's Bored Fortress subscription split 7" series has been going on for a few years now, and is always killer, featuring a who's who of hip underground weirdo rock combos, not to mention some seriously fantastic packaging, and for whatever reason, this year, a handful of the previously subscription only singles have been made available to non subscribers, but not for long, as these babies are crazy limited.
Ducktails offer up another slab of wistful, summery lo-fi jangle and strum, all minimal drum machine and hazy melody, which shifts gear midway through and becomes something a wee bit darker than we're used to from DT, a slightly minor key lope, all distorted beats, fuzzy bass, laid beneath more spidery guitar jangle fuzz.
Rangers counter with some total lo-fi eighties retro pop, Simple Minds guitars drifting over bloopy basslines, tinkling chiming melodies, everything wreathed in a hazy dubbed-too-many-times-VHS-tape murkiness, the song gradually growing sweeter and more poppy, until it almost sounds like the music behind the credits of some lost eighties sitcom. A weirdly good match for the Ducktails jam.
Also, we have another Bored Fortress title, besides the ones we're listing now, the Infinite Body / No Age split 7", VERY few copies of that one, not enough to list, just ask if you want one and IF we still have some left, it could be yours!
The duo known as Games presented themselves as chillwave mutants on the Everything Is Working 7" which came and went a couple months back, but this long EP / short LP (depending on how you wanna look at these six tracks) proves that Games is an entity existing between a number of dichotomies: Now vs. Then, East vs. West, ironically uncool (thus making it cool) vs. unfashionably gauche, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise then that half of Games is the sci-fi trickster Daniel Lopatin, who's better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. There's plenty of the Lopatin infatuation with polygon melodies, allusions to Russian technocracy, and dreamtime slippages into the forgotten futures of the past; but Lopatin's partner, Joel Ford, brings a mash-up aesthetic of Italo-Disco sensuality, mid-'80s Fairlight sampling mimesis, and plenty of trashy Euro-pop tropes. Unlike Lopatin's Oneohtrix project which seeks to capture a sound which never existed in the '80s but is an extract of a bleary selective memory from all of the data that's been left behind, Games is far more concise in what it's referencing - the mid-'80s synthpop / tropes of bands like Animotion and Ministry. No, we don't mean the "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod" era of Ministry, but the period that Mr. Jourgensen seems to want to forget: the swooning romanticism of With Sympathy and the cross-pollinated electronica album Twitch. The track "Strawberry Sky" is a Top 10 single that should have been released in 1986, with a magnificently catchy vocal chorus delivered by Laurel Chartow atop faux-flute synth pads, darkly washed electronic arpeggiations, thumped drum machines, and a coked-up production sensibility. The auto-tuned vocal utterances that drive "Shadows In Bloom" compliment an acid flashback of an arrangement seemingly lifted from one of Bel Biv Devoe's skittered grooves. Couple that with all of the new wave synths, and it's a downright awesome track! The Gatekeeper Remix of "Strawberry Sky" steps up the Ministry / Twitch references with more of a cybernetic flare to the punchy EBM rhythms and American Anglophilia. Recommended.
What do you get when you mix two parts Barn Owl and two parts Eternal Tapestry? Pretty much just what you'd expect, which is this here lp, 4 looooong tracks from a group called Garden Sound (not to be confused with, uh, Soundgarden), which is in fact equal parts Barn Owl and Eternal Tapestry and offer up a sound that balances right between the brooding twang flecked post rock drift of the former, and the blown out psychedelia of the latter.
The first song sounds almost like Barn Owl solo, a dark dronescape, all desert and twangy, moody EARTH-y shimmer, spidery melodies, almost like one of those slow building epics, but instead of building it just sort of drifts and hovers, there's some minimal percussion, and some extra psychedelic swirl that hints at E-Tap's involvement, but it's not until the second song, that the partnership equals out, with a massive, thunderous superdistorted doomdronedirge, big crashing drums, blurred guitars smeared into black streaks, buried barely there vocals, peppered with occasional squalls of full on psychedelic freakout.
The flipside starts out like the A side, a smoldering minimal raga, buzzing guitars, simple tribal rhythms, hazy and dreamy and definitely mesmerizing. And like the A side, the second track finds the two groups going all out, but this time, it's something way more spare and abstract, still heavy, and doomy, but the drum crashes are spread way out, less a rhythm, than a sort of textural punctuation, the guitars peal and rumble and buzz, streaks of feedback everywhere, a plodding, spaced out stretch of minimal dronedoom drift.
SUPER LIMITED!! We have less than 20 copies, and once those are gone, then this will be gone for good...
Just in time for the chill in weather we are feeling right now, it's a new set of ultra warm and cozy tunes from the always dependable Howe Gelb. His latest Giant Sand outing is so hitting the spot on these wintry days, with songs perfect for sitting by the fire, drinking some bourbon, and swapping stories with close friends. The album sinks in right away with the kind of intimacy and southwest charm that Gelb is so masterful at evoking. Blurry Blue Mountain covers so much of the terrain that Giant Sand have explored in their long wonderful career. From the subtle and seductive to the all out twang filled rockers. Fans of Smog, Johnny Cash, and Townes Van Zandt will find so much to love here, and if for some reason Giant Sand has slipped under your radar over the years this is a great time to jump into their wonderful world of warm honest sound.
One of two new releases on the reinvigorated Flying Nun label, recently reactivated (apparently repurchased by the label's founder) who besides repressing many of the label's classics, is also signing new bands, the shoegazy punky pop trio Die! Die! Die!, whose latest record is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and Grayson Gilmour, whose fifth full length is fast becoming a big hit around these parts. A lush collection of soaring layered orchestral pop, dreamy melodies, fantastic arrangements, shades of long time aQ faves like Zumpano, Cardinal, High Llamas, as well as Beach Boys, XTC, Sufjan Stevens. Grayson is a classically trained pianist, plays most of the instruments himself, has a crystal clear voice, and has a knack for sweeping majesty and epic pop bombast.
"Loose Change" is an instant classic, woozy piano melodies, smoldering big builds, those gorgeous vocals, a killer hook, the production lush and rife with odd filigree (xylophone, cello), and a seriously soaring emotional coda. It was tough for us to make it past that song, we found ourselves listening to it over and over and over, but once we did, the whole record is just as good, perfect pop assembled from flurries of piano, bell like melodies, tinkling chimes, layered vocal harmonies, intricate drumming, soaring strings, Reich like repetition, gorgeous lush production (especially considering much of this was recorded in bedrooms and "Mum's house"), the songs slipping easily from hushed moody ballad to crashing epic heartfelt pop. Fantastic!
We were psyched by the debut ep of Girls At Dawn released on Captured Tracks nearly a year ago and are thus now doubly psyched to finally see their full length debut. Surely, unless you've been hiding under a rock, you must have noticed that there's a huge girl group revival thing going on, a lot of it spurred on by the great Captured Tracks label: Grass Widow, Wet Dog, and Aias to name but a few. But Girls At Dawn have carved out their own special niche. Where bands like the Dum Dum Girls mine the sixties Phil Spector / Shangri-las / Ronnettes sound and groups like Wet Dog and Grass Widow channel late seventies post-punk bands The Slits and The Raincoats, The Girls At Dawn have been exploring the eighties/sixties paisley underground sound of bands like The Pandoras, Strawberry Switchblade and The Bangles, as well as one of our favorite bands from back in the day, Fuzzbox. Girls At Dawn manage to apply a coat of strawberry-scented psych gloss to their lo-fi DIY ethos with punchy short songs (the longest track is 2:36) and sweet pop charm.
The Not Not Fun label's Bored Fortress subscription split 7" series has been going on for a few years now, and is always killer, featuring a who's who of hip underground weirdo rock combos, not to mention some seriously fantastic packaging, and for whatever reason, this year, a handful of the previously subscription only singles have been made available to non subscribers, but not for long, as these babies are crazy limited.
UK dronedrugspace rockers Gnod unfurl a sprawling bit of effects heavy minimal space psych crawl, all super reverbed vocals, swirling echoey guitars, ultra minimal almost dubby drumming, the guitars a distorted murky muddy squall of tangled melody, drifting over the dirgey creep-like black clouds.
Robedoor lay down some grungy riffage, some big boomy drumming, and lock into some seriously drum heavy dirgery, with strange alien vocals, super saturated guitars, a crazy blown out sound, all barely obscuring some gloriously epic psychpop within, a psychpop that seems to emit glorious rays of sonic shimmer constantly on the verge of bursting from within the fantastically grimey, swirling murky muddy production.
Also, we have another Bored Fortress title, besides the ones we're listing now, the Infinite Body / No Age split 7", VERY few copies of that one, not enough to list, just ask if you want one and IF we still have some left, it could be yours!
The return of these blackened psychedelic doomdrift dronelords, with their second record for Utech, and what appears to be the second Heavy Fierce Brightness record, the first being a limited lp only release from a while back, the soundtrack to an art installation (we still have a last few copies, act fast!), this one a new proper full length cd, this HFB further described as Spells Of The Sun, three new tracks, nearly 50 minutes of rumbling low end mystery and abstract avant blackness.
The ritual begins with the 8 minute sort of introduction "Spells Of Shadow", a smoldering sprawl of metallic buzz, and muted industrial throb, all manner of grinding metallic crunch, and swirling spaced out effects, the sound corrosive and distorted, but still hypnotic and soothing, a thick undulating black drone, the various layers surprisingly active, spinning off sparks and constantly changing tone and timbre, all the while underpinned by a hazy high end shimmer. Blackened dreamy dronemusic of the highest order.
"The Opening" unfurls yet another expanse of lush layered blackness, hazy and washed out and gorgeously mesmerizing, but before you know it, the song shifts gears and the band kicks in, pounding drums, distorted guitars, a sort of doomy lope, hypnotic and propulsive, wrapped around streaks of high end skree and feedback, then the vokills come in, SUPER distorted, the whole thing splintering into a blown out black squall, the main lumbering riff and rhythm still in place, but all around it, blackened clouds of crunch and chug and whir and buzz swirl and shimmer, a strangely pretty bit of motorik blackness. The metal fades out leaving traces of melody, stretched out into hazy smears of softly kaleidoscopic sound, some hushed minimal droney drift, only to explode once again into some dense doomy pound.
Finally, the 21 minute title track finishes things off, a sprawling layered dronescape, that shifts slowly from glassy almost new age-y minimalism, from soaring howling psychedelic squall to crumbling distorted doomdronedirgedrift, from keening high end ur-drone, to wild storms of swirling feedback and finally to murky minimal shimmer. As always, gorgeous stuff.
Packaged in cool oversized black and white four panel poster sleeve with artwork by Locrian's Terence Hannum.
Latest from Northwestern weirdo electronic label Fukdup, who most famously gave us the awesome grungecore 7" that featured Shitmat covering Nirvana and came packaged in a real flannel shirt! This new one is from Seattle based Graz, who describes his sound as "rapid-fire-amen-infused-mashcore federally certified to crush any party" or as a "glitched out high-speed rave rendition of radio's yesteryear", both pretty much nail it. The beats are all jungly, but not all hyperspeed drum and bass, more often sort of midtempo groovy and funky, and the samples, well, they're all radio hits, past and present Busta Rhymes, Avril Lavigne, Toni Basil, the Archies, Yello and tons more. Those samples sped up, chopped up, layered, twisted up, turned inside out, flipped backwards, slowed down, and strapped to wild unhinged off-kilter beats, rambunctious and chaotic and fun as fuck. Track pulse and throb and pound and bang, housey one second, jungly the next, dipping toes into happy hardcore, dancehall, ragga, rave, drum and bass, and whatever twisted hybrid of all of the above Graz can whip up.
Fun and funky, goofy and pretty much the perfect fractured and freaky and fucked up dance party record.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, packaged with candy bones in the cd spine, and a button!
A peripatetic and a workaholic, Kevin Greenspon is constantly touring around California and hocking a small library of post-noise / blistered ambient cassettes & cd-rs that he's been producing over the past couple of years. Having performed alongside the likes of Pedestrian Deposit and Infinite Body, his smoldering, sorta-shoegazing dronescapes make a lot of sense. The A-side of this tape begins with a creeping two-note guitar melody, accompanying a muffled crackle and occasional interruptions of short noise transmissions. Out of the compressed noise and overdriven distortion pedals, a summery lullaby emerges from the tape murk and grime that blossoms through harmonic clouds of organ/synth drones and guitar smear. Yeah, comparisons to Infinite Body's prickly noise-pop hybrids are definitely apt. The B-side continues with these same ideas, as serene washes of distorted noise allude to something sinister just seething below all of the shimmer, twinkle, and glisten. 25 minutes in duration, and another great tape released through Monorail Trespassing!
We originally thought these Southern sludgelords were just adding a letter to their name to make it cooler, you know, like Mutiilation with two 'i's, or Wooden Shjips with a 'j', or Celestiial also with two 'i's, but it seems that perhaps they are named after a certain High Frequency Active Aural Research Program, a program seemingly designed to explore radio communication via the ionosphere, but it reads more like some sort of weaponized sound to us. And hell, if weaponized sound is what you're after, look no further than these New Orleans heavies, who we had previously heard sharing a split with fellow Southern crushers Thou, and you know any band with the sonic balls to throw down with a group like Thou, well, needless to say, prepare to have your ass handed to you.
Which is precisely what'll happen, about 10 seconds into this, Haarp's debut, a crusty, filthy, pummeling slab of epic downtuned NOLA style crush. It's pretty impossible to not think of Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of stuff, and seeing as these boys were drinking the same water, it makes sense that The Filth definitely has the feel of EHG worship, but like Thou, they definitely have their own take on this sludge/doom/dirge thing, most notably the vocals, a fierce, monstrous bellow, WAY up in the mix, that sounds more death metal than sludge metal, sort of Chris Barnes crossed with Phil Anselmo (this was released on Anselmo's Housecore label after all), a voice that perfectly suits Haarp's slow-mo swagger and caveman pummel.
Slow, groovy, heavy as fuck, but with some surprising bits mixed in here and there, surprising super melodic stretches, psychedelic guitar leads, some classic metal harmonies, but for the most part this is an epic skull caving rib cage rattling avalanche of black hole slo-mo sound, absolutely required listening for doomlords into the usual slow and low suspects: Eyehategod, Cough, Thou, The Body, Buzzov-en, etc...
Two discs full to overflowing with fifty immaculate French-pop nuggets by one of our favorite chanteuses of all time, and at a really reasonable price to boot, this one is an absolute no brainer!
Compiling songs Hardy recorded during her years on the Vogue label in France in the 1960s this really shows why there is so much to love and adore about Hardy. The first disc begins with many of her most ye-ye and infectious tunes that you just can't help but feel so classy and sassy while listening to. And as the collection plays on, you see what a nice range of sound Hardy had developed, which would lead her to create her masterpiece, La Question at the onset of the '70s. Taking the influence of what folks like Phil Spector were doing with girl groups in terms of lush, warm and hypnotic production, but with such a singular and undeniably sexy voice that just stands miles ahead of the pack. From songs that make you want to get on a dance floor with a glass of champagne in your hands, to songs that are so perfect for rainy Sunday nights when all you have is time to pass, this is pretty much as perfect a collection of songs as you can get. In fact it was this very collection that made the biggest Hardy fanatics at AQ first fall in love with her, so we're so happy this is finally available for us to list. One of those records we feel safe in recommending to just about anyone who loves music!
Yet another blast of blown out psychedelic guitar rock from this East Coast space-psych trio, who in the past have given us extended slabs of doomy heaviness, of kraut flecked psychedelic grooves, of motorik in the red hypnorock, and often some mix of the three, but the opening few minutes of Sunspotted had us thinking the band had abandoned all that, as it's a furious, super rocking, ultra propulsive almost mathy post rock blow out, the drums frantic and frenetic, the guitars chiming and distorted the bass thick and heavy and DENSE, the band flinging themselves headlong into what has to be the most rocking blast of freaked out crunch and soar that we've ever heard from these guys, the sound is epic, lush, so heavy, definitely a step up from past muddier murkier outings, and it suits them, that first blast goes on for ages, and we didn't really want it to ever end. But about 4 minutes in, the song seems to collapse, leaving a wreckage of drum skitter, and atonal guitar strum, not to mention sheets of feedback, the band settle down into a weirdo bit of spare drift, the guitars atonal and angular, the drums splattery and abstract, with weird bursts of electronic crunch, only to finally settle into a weird woozy lumber, the guitars rubbery and all twisted up, the drums a caveman plod, everything still wreathed in sheets of buzz and feedback, the doom eventually dissipating, leaving a sky full of tangled high end guitar skree, peppered with chiming guitar chords, and spare drum crashes, growing more and more abstract, before fading out completely.
Holy shit! So free and loose and wild, but still so tight and composed sounding, easily the coolest stuff we've heard from these guys, and hell, we're only halfway through.
The second track is even longer (clocking in at close to 25 minutes), and begins with less of a bang, but it doesn't take these guys long to get things going, with some crumbling distortion, some throbbing downtuned riffage, some churning low end crush, a whirling, swirling dronescape of roiling dirge-y guitar rumble, which after close to 10 minutes gives way to some squealing feedback drenched dirgery, the band pounding, and lumbering, a weird sort of spaced out Sunroof!-y almost doom, that grows gradually more blissed out and hypnotic, while remaining super abstract and drifty, the band slip into a strange meandery lope, the guitars shimmery and layered and washed out and sort of dreamy, the drums laid back and loose, the sound hazy and hypnotic, never coalescing into anything rocking, instead, playing out like more of a decompressing wind down from the first track, gorgeously minimal, and understated, textural and surprisingly lovely.
Brand new record of looped lysergic psychedelia from this mysterious French one man band, his second for Not Not Fun, and maybe his 10th or something overall, but the first we've reviewed here, and it definitely seems like it's got aQ written all over it. Long loopscapes of rhythmic repetition, of swirling spaced out raga like ur-drones, of heart-of-the-sun blissed out soft noise, of swirling abstract free form drift, we hear plenty of likeminded noisemakers in High Wolf's sound, Birchville Cat Motel / Our Love Will Destroy The World, Avarus, Yellow Swans, Black Dice, Natural Snow Buildings, Raccoo-oo-oon, Starving Weirdos, Skaters, Sun Araw, even some Muslimgauze, and odds are anyone who digs most of those are gonna love High Wolf too.
"Meeting Of The Three Seas" offers up a softly warped, dreamily looped main rhythm, a motorik pulse amidst swirling clouds of chordal whir, of clipped voices, of deep drones, of tangled melodic fragments, gradually building in density and intensity, soon there are what sound like horns, blurred into swooping swirls of sound, a softly cacophonous climax, which quickly settles back into a warm woozy cloud of echo and delay. "Diego" follows the same pattern, a looped rhythm, that as it moves forward, gathers all manner of sonic detritus, bits of echo, strange voices, coos and aaahhh's, fragments of guitar, bleats of horns, soon squiggly synth melodies creep in, giving the track a sort of retro sci-fi vibe, before once again blossoming into a head spinning cloud of soft noise psychedelia. "Cloudhead" takes the same formula, but adds a whole bunch of haze, creating a super blissed out shoegazey dirgedronescape. "Solar System Is My God" might be our favorite track, it's the one that evokes Muslimgauze comparisons, with its tabla like rhythms, handclaps, warm swaths of muted buzz, chordal swirl and Eastern melody, this tracks climax, less intense, and more glimmering and glistening, sun dappled and celebratory.
The record finishes off with the nearly 13 minute "Fire In My Bones", which changes up the pattern, beginning with a thick blast of hazy soft focus sound, buried vocals, and pulsing shimmer, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in, that the rhythm kicks in, and this time the background sound echoes the rhythm, a mesmerizing trancelike ripple, underpinning keening buzz drenched high end melodies, a distinctly tripped out raga vibe for sure, then a brief stretch of hushed minimal echo, laced with disembodied wah wah guitar, before slipping right back into the eyes-to-the-sky ritualistic sonic blissout that started the track. Awesome stuff. Total sonic manna for the drone-loop-psych-bliss crowd...
The Not Not Fun label's Bored Fortress subscription split 7" series has been going on for a few years now, and is always killer, featuring a who's who of hip underground weirdo rock combos, not to mention some seriously fantastic packaging, and for whatever reason, this year, a handful of the previously subscription only singles have been made available to non subscribers, but not for long, as these babies are crazy limited.
High Wolf do more of that tripped out psychedelic loopage we love so much, and that few seem to be able to pull off quite so fantastically, this one a little bit more rhythmic and spacey than usual, a simple motorik pulse, beneath billowy clouds of processed guitars and sweetly melodic blurred loops, which eventually build to a full on pounding, lo-fi, psychedelic squall freakout. Awesome.
Never heard of the weirdly named Savage Young Taterbug, but as their name might suggest, their sound is equally weird, a twisted drift of super lo-fi Casio style organ wheeze, abstract tinkling chimes, disembodied melodies, super distorted echo drenched vox, crumbling crunchy guitars and all manner of percussive plink and plonk, like a poppier, way slower Avarus, that same sort of abstract psychedelic campfire jam, which is surprisingly transformed for the last little bit into a super lethargic 16rpm blues crawl, still wrapped in buzz and fuzz and whir. Definitely psyched to hear more, uh, Savage Young Taterbug!
Also, we have another Bored Fortress title, besides the ones we're listing now, the Infinite Body / No Age split 7", VERY few copies of that one, not enough to list, just ask if you want one and IF we still have some left, it could be yours!
This just might be the coolest, weirdest sort-of-soul record EVER. It took us a while to check this out though, because once again, we found ourselves being overly resistant to popular consensus, our first impulse when super hyped records are concerned, is to assume that for whatever reason, people have been fooled into digging something due to above mentioned extreme hype, hell we've definitely fallen for that before. Or at the very least, we sometimes think, whatever record it is, it's probably not nearly as good as people are making it out to be. Cuz really, how super original and interesting and fucked up and far out could something be and still manage to appeal to folks not normally into things fucked up and far out? Apparently plenty. And that said, we LOVE to proven wrong, and boy should we have checked this out sooner. This is a gloriously mysterious and murky collection of druggy, psychedelic, slow-mo soul, long expanses of crackly drones, and what sounds like R&B 45's spinning at 16rpm, wheezing synths, reverbed shimmer, deep sinister basslines, hazy ambience, crumbling distortion, stuttery loops, stripped down skeletal beats, and some gorgeously washed out soulful vox. All wrapped in thick swaths of gauzy hum and shimmer, blurred and smeared and washed out, totally ghostlike and spectral, but still so goddamn soulful.
Similar to the soul infused dubstep of Burial, HTDW create these gorgeous little chunks of soulful slow motion drift, those heavily effected and distorted falsetto vox hovering over warped and warbly bits of muted melody, female vox offer up plenty of oooh's and aaaah's, the voices choral and angelic, seeming to fade into a softly roiling swirl muted blackness in the background, swaths of mumbled low end throb and pulse and undulate dreamily, there are bits of piano, haunting and elegiac, the arrangements are delicate, the sound impossibly lush, alien and otherworldly, but so darkly familiar and emotional and intimate, the sound equal parts Antony And the Johnsons, Pop Ambience, the warped warble of witch house, the twisted popsmithery of folks like Ariel Pink, the deep stuttery soulfulness of Burial and other likeminded dubsteppers and of course classic old time soul, all melted down into a thick sonic morass, that oozes and flows, a glacial, sun dappled, moonlit, lysergic soulful psychedelic murk, that while indeed muted and muddy and blurry and bleary, still manages to glow, and pulse, emitting rays of sonic light, this is not miserable music, for all its ghostly abstraction and mysterious darkness, the music of How To Dress Well is gorgeous, and romantic, and full of life, and energy, and emotion.
Huun Huur Tu are probably the most famous musical export from Tuva, known to most for their unique style of throat singing, in which the singer sings multiple notes: a drone, and then whistle like overtones, enabling the singer to create harmonies and multiple melodies, it's quite fantastic, and unlike almost anything you've ever heard. We've often fantasized about a black metal band finding a throat singer for a vocalist. We've actually seen John Gossard (Weakling, Asunder, Dispirit) at a Huun Huur Tu performance, trying to figure out exactly how they do it.
But the music of Huun Huur Tu is much more than just throat singing. Formed in the early nineties, the group performs and preserves traditional Tuvan folk music, singing in the traditional style, but also performing on traditional instruments, hand drums called Tungurs, a long necked Tuvan lute, called a Doshpuluur, a bowed two string instrument called an Igil, and perhaps as distinctive as the vocals, the Khomus, which is a Tuvan Jew's Harp. The sound they create is incredible. The above mentioned performance had 500+ people absolutely enraptured. Four guys in traditional Tuvan garb, boots and headdresses and furs, with those gorgeous instruments, the band wove a sonic spell that was impossible to resist. A sound that was surprisingly loud and powerful as well.
Ancestor's Call is their latest collection, and reflects the various facets of the group's sound and of the Tuvan folk music they pay homage to, from gorgeous solo vocal ballads, to galloping grooves (the galloping rhythm meant indeed to be horselike), the vocals a deep raspy almost Popeye sounding croon, easily slipping into throat singing, that whistling tone soaring impossibly over that deep buzz, some of the vocal harmonies are incredible, 4 impossibly deep voices woven into a lush harmony that rivals ANY drone music you've ever heard, rich and thick and dense and layered and when they begin to add those throat singing overtones, it's totally mesmerizing. The band do incorporate more traditional Western instruments (flutes, acoustic guitars), but they're deftly woven those into the group's sound, and they only serve to add to the gorgeous textures, especially on "Odugen Taiga" which sounds like Tuvan new age, or some Tuvan group making a record for Root Strata, but that's quickly followed by the gorgeous monk like chanting vocals of "Prayer", and it's then, more than ever, that you can feel the true power of their voices. So haunting and intense and emotional.
Of all the group's records, this one seems more stately, and restrained, darker and more melancholy, heavier on the ballads, the focus on the voices, not just the throat singing, but the vocal and instrumental interplay, the more rollicking numbers taking a back seat to the darkly dreamy moodiness of Huun Huur Tu's incredible sound and the fantastic musical legacy of Tuva. Nice slipcover packaging as well.
Originally reissued on the amazing Tiliqua label, in much fancier packaging and with a correspondingly higher price tag, this sexy gem is available once again, now $6 cheaper, and with slightly more minimal (but no less R rated) packaging...
Some of you are probably hip to the Pinky Violence films of early seventies Japan, especially with a handful or recently reissued dvd's, an eye popping, mind blowing combination of not so subtle eroticism, extreme ultraviolence and over the top ACTION! The twist, being that the brutalizers tended to be bad ass Japanese women, cat fighting, beating the crap out of men, always seeming to be clad in boots and with their shirts 'accidentally' torn open to reveal their breasts. Which miraculously never kept them from kicking still more ass! What's not to love?
Sort of in concert with the movies, a whole genre of erotic music was spawned, Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular music, sexed up as it were with chanteuse like crooning, but most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion. And at the time, 1971 (THAT seemingly perfect musical year!) this was indeed pretty dang racy and risque.
The sound is a blend of soft core soundtrack music, groove jazz, playful exotica, a little Spaghetti Western, with Herb Alpert horns, fluttering jazz flutes, Spanish guitars, smokey sax, hip shaking rhythms, marimbas and xylophones, very moody and dreamy sometimes, wild and playful at others, but always with Reiko's sexy croon, and of course her very convincing sounds of passion, including an unexpected bout of spanking at one point (!) accompanied by the proper breathless exhalations of pain/pleasure.
Wow! Wild and fun and sexy, but so so strange. Highly recommended for sure.
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If you have never heard of Rikki Ililonga or his influential band, Musi-O-Tunya, you are not alone. As it goes in the rediscovery of important music especially outside North America, the true innovators of a sound and a scene are often the last to be rediscovered, and Rikki Ililonga is a case in point. Followers of the aQ list have no doubt been aware of the recent spate of "ZamRock" reissues, most lately, from Witch, and Tirogo, and farther back, gems from Ngozi Family, Chrissy Zebby Tembo, The Peace, and Amanaz, that really have shown the influence of Jimi Hendrix and heavy psych on this part of Southern Africa. Well, Rikki Ililonga through his band Musi-O-Tunya and subsequent solo records were there from the beginning, releasing the very first pop and rock records after Zambia gained its independence, thus pioneering the birth of "ZamRock".
The Now-Again label has done an incredible job of compiling two discs of recordings from the years 1973 through 1976, one disc devoted to Musi-O-Tunya, and the second disc to Ililonga's solo recordings. The first disc traces the band's roots from its Afro-beat beginnings with bass and horn funk rhythms to more lo-fi fuzzy garage rock singles band then to a heavier psych powerhouse singing full on in English. The centerpiece single being the title track, "Dark Sunrise", should get any heavy seventies I-rock head salivating. The second disc compiling Ililonga's first two solo records is a more varied affair as he goes through many seventies styles and tropes. There's still plenty of heavy psych with searing guitar leads, but there's also some Thin Lizzyish power rock, baroque rock balladry, heavy sexy blues and even some rhythmic Afro-pop.
The cds are housed in a 32 page full color hardback book compiling photos and interviews, liner notes and ephemera, and the triple lp vinyl version is even fancier, a massive boxset containing 12 page booklet, and individual, exact reproductions of Ililonga's original 3 albums (thus tracklist of the vinyl format is somewhat different than the way the cds are organized, as described above). Whooo yeah!
A "Black Friday Record Store Day" 3 song teaser for the new Iron And Wine full length due early next year, and our first glimpse of I&W's new sound. Still present are Sam Beam's gorgeous vocals, and the lush instrumentation, piano, guitar, but what is missing, is the low key almost lo-fi sound, and in its place, is a seriously lush production, not to mention a fleshed out band, complete with piano, keyboard, background vocals (which swoop and soar E.L.O. style!) and all sorts of buzzy basslines, and random dubbed out percussion. It's jarring at first, but it only takes a few seconds where you begin to wonder why Beam didn't try his hand at lush dubbed out orchestral pop before, cuz "Walking Far From Home" is totally fantastic. The sort of song that will finally get folks to listen to Iron And Wine, who might have found the old stuff too folky. We're definitely hearing some Animal Collective, and other forward thinking pop groops, seems unlikely, but damn, we've listened to this song about 20 times. So great.
And the two exclusive non-album tracks are equally kick ass. "Summer In Savannah" is all jazzy and krautrocky, you can almost imagine the song rearranged for OLD Iron And Wine, lazy and softly strummed, but here, the basslines buzz, the guitars are alternately jangly and jagged, there's an almost funky vibe, playful xylophone like melodies, more lush background vocals, swooping backwards effects. Again so unexpected. And then there's "Biting Your Tail", which might be the most surprising of the bunch. A weird bit of minimal electro pop, all clipped skittery beats, buzzing basslines, squelchy electronics, all laid beneath lush vocals, steel drum like melodies, and some glistening psychedelically shimmery crescendos, and a distinctly rhythmic post rock vibe running throughout.
Wow. We never would have guessed, but we're definitely digging this big time, and are dying to hear the full length...
Finally reissued, the very first release from Justin Broadrick's post Godflesh combo Jesu, the two track Heart Ache was a Record Of The Week way back in 2005, and this updated version tacks on the previously unreleased Dethroned ep, which Broadrick started way back in 2004, but only finished recently, the perfect accompaniment to Heart Ache for sure.
Most readers of the aQ list are now well familiar with Justin Broadrick's (Godflesh, Final, etc.) bliss metal behemoth, Jesu, but when Heart Ache first hit, we were blown away, totally knocked for a loop, all the heft and grit and pummel of Godflesh, but blurred into gorgeously washed out shoe-gazey swells, a new sound that was, and still is all we wanted to hear. And still remains, to this day, quite possibly our favorite Jesu recording yet. Which is most definitely saying something considering how much we love pretty much everything Jesu has put out.
But right before Heart Ache was released, we had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. It seemed like maybe that band had run its course. The sounds were there, but it sounded like Broadrick had his mind elsewhere. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, more-of-the-same riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and songs that played out more like assembled parts than actual SONGS. So while our age-old and undying love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were prepared for it to not live up to the hype. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded instrumentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the following full length, on which Jesu was a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu was just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifting and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broadrick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
The second disc included with the long anticipated Heart Ache reissue is an ep called Dethroned, recorded just after the Heart Ache sessions, but only completed recently, and while there are obvious references to those early days of Jesu, the fact that the songs were completed recently is evident in the songs' distinctly shoegazey vibe, the poppiness, the songcraft, these 4 tracks hover right in between the two eras of Jesu, the washed out almost M83 dreamy blissed out modern Jesu, and the chugging, industrial, post Godflesh chug and pound, and the result is actually pretty fantastic, super heavy, subtly poppy, kick ass riffage, that slips from almost groovy to crushing and downtuned, the vocals are super effected, almost vocodered sounding (autotuned?), which gives the songs a weirdly almost new wave vibe.
"Dethroned" almost sounds like nineties noise rock, a little grunge, a little pop, but woven into a sort of post industrial shoegaze framework, the vocals and melodies are all super heavy on the effects, the rhythm is almost groovy, definitely demonstrating in a single song the evolution of Jesu, which gives way to "Annul", the most Godflesh-y of the bunch, with its churning chuggy main riff, and machinelike drum pound, a little Godflesh, a little Helmet (!), but again, still with some of that blossoming shoegazey poppiness that would later inform almost everything Jesu.
"Aureated Skin" is total ballady bliss, all big chiming guitars, and blurred shimmery distortion, not to mention some lush keyboard swells and some seriously poppy melodies, while "I Can Only Disappoint You", is super stripped down, and almost sounds like Three Mile Pilot or something, the drums super spare, the guitars brittle and metallic, but the song is laced with cool backwards guitars, and hazy atmospheres, it almost sounds like some strange hybrid of Godflesh and the Cure, which is most definitely very very cool.
It's hearing records like this that kind of make listening to any new rock n' roll, as lo-fi and garage-y as it may seem, just sound like total fluff. Today's rockers can't compare to the blasts of impassioned fire and raw righteous shouts of belief that come pouring with soul out of the body of Atlanta's Rev. Johnny L. Jones. For years he has been broadcasting his songs and sermons on WYZE in Atlanta, and Dust-To-Digital, who definitely have a knack for this sort of thing, knew that these were sounds that deserved a much wider audience. Because no matter what religious stripe you're are, or even those of us who don't believe in that higher being at all, you can't deny that this is music with 100 percent absolute conviction and raw power. This is total gospel rock n' roll, with the kind of early blues grit and hip shaking fuel that the best kind of soul music contains. Over this two disc collection there are over two dozen smoking songs as well as clips of sermons, guest soloists and some awesome short commercial clips that the Reverend delivers with the same kind of zealous urgency and single minded purpose.
We can think of so many of our favorite frontmen, like John Reis (Rocket From The Crypt), John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees), and Ian Svenious (The Make Up) who for sure would be sitting front and center, taking notes during any of Jones' services. We can't emphasize enough just how damn good this music is! And as always Dust-To-Digital does it right with handsome packaging and liner notes from the Reverend himself. We believe!
Latest blast of blown out, super fierce and fiery free jazz pummel from this Italian duo, whose last tour cd-r was a huge hit around here, and whose surprisingly hushed and minimal instore was pretty fantastic. But for those of you who lucked out and snagged one of those cd-r's or saw the duo perform live when they were in SF, you know what you're in for, two sides, two tracks brimming with nonstop, relentless, frantic, frenetic, explosive super rhythmic, wildly tangled and super psychedelic next level free jazz freakout. The drums never let up, laying down a super textured avalanche of rhythmic shuffle and skitter and pound, a non stop drum solo, that manages to be totally free, yet somehow strangely rhythmic, but it's the sax and clarinet, wielded by Virginia Genta, that drives these jams, the sounds she gets out of her horns are inhuman, alien, free jazz may skronk and squeal, but this stuff SHRIEKS and GRINDS and is just a face peeling onslaught of strangled notes, atonal melodies and wild high end squiggles. There are bits of extra percussion, some vocals, even a little blast of harmonica (?), but this is definitely hardcore free jazz that will send anyone with any sort of aversion to skronk and squeal and shriek running for the hills. The rest of us can just revel in Jooklo Duo's divine jazz chaos.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Long time readers of the aQ list no doubt remember Tetuzi Akiyama's Don't Forget To Boogie record, ostensibly, as the title suggests, a boogie rock record, but in reality, a twisted droned out hypnotic psychedelic minimal psych record, with the boogie elements stripped down to a single riff, then drenched in distortion and repeated over and over and over, creating super mesmerizing fields of layered repetition a la Reich or Riley, it quickly became a bigtime aQ favorite.
This debut lp from one man 'boogie' outfit King Blood, approaches boogie rock in a similarly oblique fashion, taking those boogie riffs and fucking them up big time. Not quite as minimal as Akiyama's opus, Eyewash Silver adds drums, and what sounds like multiple layers of guitars, not to mention WAY more distortion, a gloriously blown out chunk of experimental abstract minimal boogienoise weirdness.
Opener "Black Money" is probably the most traditionally song-y, a loping lumbering midtempo groove, a main riff locked tight and looped over a similarly tight barely there rhythm, but then all around it, guitars howl and grind, churn and crunch, loads of distortion and tangled melodies, swirling clouds of corrosive sound wrapped around that fantastically incessant groove, gradually growing more and more explosive, before the noise guitars nearly swallow up the boogie riff completely.
"End Of A Primitive" sounds like a Stooges sample dipped in distortion and left outside to crumble and decay before being brought back in and recorded onto some 20 year old 2" tape that had been stored in a wet basement. Another groovy riff, multiple guitar lines, the song gradually shifting, but so gradually, it's easy to get totally mesmerized. "Grimhaven" and "Grimhaven (A Return)" are all twang flecked dirge, like an echo drenched Earth, via the desert rock of Scenic, but again way more minimal, a single riff, a single part, looped and locked and totally hypnotic, while much of the melody is supplied by the bassline which is fluid and woozy, drifting beneath the song's core hypnodirge.
"Poison In Jest" is the killer here, super short at 2+ minutes, but an insanely super distorted chunk of garage dirge minimalism, Stooges riff and about ten tons of crumbling super blown out distortion.
The other songs follow a similar path, taking simple riffs and stretching them way out, adding layer after layer of thrum and howl and fuzz and buzz, occasionally letting the sounds slip into full of in-the-red freakout, but just as often, keeping them just this side of total chaos, the result, a gloriously hypnotic bit of riffy mesmer.
SUPER LIMITED, ONLY 100 COPIES, we got 12 or 13, and those are all we'll ever get. Way recommended for folks into droney, dirgey, hypnotic heaviness, which should most definitely be most of you!
You'd think it would be easy to write reviews of records you love, but it's not, not always anyway. This band, though, makes the task easier, 'cause maybe we can just say a few key words: JAPAN. DOOM. PSYCH. CRAZY. Uh... is that doing the trick? Tokyo trio King Goblin, who describe themselves as a "progressive space psychedelic death rock band", definitely have that "anything goes", totally WTF?! Japanese thing going for 'em, mixing up prog and punk and funk and metal and noise whatever else they want, you know what we mean if you have albums by bands like Boredoms, Melt Banana, Children Coup D'Etat, Space Streakings, Omoide Hatoba, Green Milk From The Planet Orange, and others of that ilk in your collection. Specifically, though, the Japanese bands that King Goblin most especially make us think of are CSSO, Solar Anus, and Sigh (circa Imaginary Sonicscape). Somehow melding gonzo grind and druggy doom, plodding heaviness and catchy grooves, the nine strange songs here bouncing from spaced out acid rock to lumbering funk, with rubbery bass, squiggly guitar, gruff guttural vocals, and, as it says here, "hand craps" (sorry if it's not PC to chuckle over that particular credit in the cd booklet!).
Imagine if retro-disco-doomsters Cathedral got even weirder than they already are now, turned Japanese, and went no wave... that might approximate the dizzying extreme entertainment offered up by King Goblin. Also, how can songs with titles like "Boiled Again (Born To Ride)" and "Motordead" not be entertaining?
This disc, their debut, actually dates from 2007, but we only discovered 'em recently, and got some copies directly from Japan as quick as we could. They're working on a new album, to be entitled Cryptozoology, but unfortunately the guitarist of King Goblin is currently suffering from some unspecified, serious illness, so that's delaying things. Hopefully he gets better soon!! However, a couple of the King Goblin guys are also in wicked sick grindcore band called AKBK, who have a brand new album out that smokes, so look out for us to list that, soon!
It's been ages and ages since we last heard from Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. All three of the previous KTAOABC records: An Interlude To The Outermost, If the Sky Falls, We Shall Catch Larks and The Nebulous Dreams, were all huge hits around here. KTAOABC, aka Stef Heeren is a Belgian musician, who also builds his own instruments, and past records have all played out like some impossible mix of Comus, Woven Hand, Swans and Current 93. A brooding, dark apocalyptic folk, that has definitely evolved over the years, always spare and haunting, but also always mysterious and ominous, slightly sinister, and a little witchy. Heeren employed quite a varied sonic palette as well, the core vocals and acoustic guitar augmented by piano, bells, strings, and on the last record, even drums, transforming the more drifty vibe of past records into something more rocking and propulsive.
But on Hewers Of Wood, Heeren seems to pull back a bit, there are still drums, but the songs seem more subdued, hauntingly minimal, back to the creepy dirgey folk of Kiss The Anus records of old. In fact, more than ever, KTAOABC is sounding like Woven Hand / Sixteen Horsepower, a similar knack for melody, the same sort of strident vocalizing, at times his voice a dead ringer for David Eugene Edwards, the swampy bluesy folk, it's a sound we love, and Heeren is a master, and these songs are super intense and emotional, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and so catchy and gorgeously creepy.
The first three songs are practically perfect, the slo-mo Comus-y waltz of the title track, the buzz flecked urgency of "All Your Ghosts Are Worried", and "Argonaut And Magneto" which could easily mistaken for a Woven Hand song (if it wasn't for that Belgian accent), so much so that it almost sounds like a cover, but also means it's gorgeous and powerful intensely moving.
The whole record oozes with a sense of foreboding, as if each song was some sort of cautionary tale, stories of lives lost, loves lost, forgotten memories and other, better times, and this sense of loss and regret, as well as some hope for redemption and forgiveness, that all seems to seep into every note, every lyric, helping transform this swampy bluegrassy folk music into something more, acid tinged, subtly psychedelic, emotionally powerful, sonically revelatory, dark meaningful music. Gorgeous!
