We loved this record before we even heard a note. C'mon, the band's called Air Waves, the record is called Dungeon Dots, and the cover photo is a bearded man and his baby, both sporting chainmail made out of what appears to be beer can pull tabs. How could we not be smitten? And even though we loved it already, when we finally heard the music inside, it wasn't at all what we expected, yet we still loved it. In fact, we might love it even more for precisely that reason. With all the music coming out these days, that relies so heavily on atmosphere and ambience, echo and delay and reverb and lo-fidelity and buzz and drone, not to take way from that stuff, it's stuff we most definitely love, but enough of those things and much can be forgiven in the way of songwriting and performance. So we were sort of expecting another chunk of eighties beholden lo-fi lysergic garage pop, but instead, we were greeted by big jangly, strummy, sunshiney, melancholic warm, swirling pretty much perfect pop music. Softly crashing, dreamily bombastic, the basslines woozy and warm, the guitars chiming and lush and layered, and the vocals, well, let's just say we got so used to boys singing super high, and sounding female, that we were surprised to discover that Air Waves was in fact a one woman band, her vocals plaintive and emotional, the perfect balance for the jangle and strum, the shuffle and shimmer. The songs striking a similarly delicate balance between wistful and melancholy, sunshiney and dreampoppy.
Opener "Knock Out" sealed the deal within seconds, simple jangle guitars, some sorta twangy melodies drifting around that main riff, the bass warm and liquid, the drums crashing and loud, but not overwhelming, and the vocals, immediate and intimate, weary and emotive, all wound up into the sort of jangle pop we just can stop listening to. "Bisous" is another favorite, that starts out all brooding and melancholy, the vocals so bittersweet, over hazy minor key chords, a ballady dirge, drifting and droney, and subtly sad, but slow building too, eventually bursting into a super propulsive stretch of distorted fuzz pop, rocking and rollicking, but still retaining the pathos of the intro.
And so it goes. We could definitely go song by song, and sure there's reverb and delay and echo, but it's used way more judiciously here, cuz really the songs don't need 'em, but they are subtly colored by the various effects, the chords and arrangements, the melodies and the vocal lines powerful enough to carry even the most barebones sound, but thankfully, Dungeon Dots is anything but, it manages to be lush and lustrous and layered, but still simple and minimal and pretty and hooky and catchy. And sneaking in just hours before the end of the year, which will most likely require an adjustment to our year end top ten, since this definitely is one of our favorite pop records of 2010. Anyone who dug recent aQ faves like Jaill, No Joy, Avi Buffalo, or who loves stuff on Captured Tracks and Sacred Bones, or who digs classic modern pop like the Shins, Built To Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel and all that amazing nineties indie rock that still sounds so great, odds are you're gonna love this too!
Another warehouse find, a small handful of this killer split, 6 songs, in less than 15 minutes, you probably know what that means, GRIND! And killer grind to boot, two bands the grindheads around here love, but for whatever reason have never made it onto the aQ list. Which is a bummer, cuz both groups most definitely destroy.
Antigama, who are from Poland and would later find a home on metal behemoth Relapse, start things off with a blast, a whirlwind of frantic riffing, and avalanche of octopoidal drumming, and some seriously sick vokills, a furious slab of frenetic fast core, mathy and intricate, with a killer lumbering doomy breakdown midway through the track's 90 seconds.
"Gift" is more of a grinding chunk of hardcore, furious and blasting, still heavy and intense for sure, but it's Antigama's final track that makes this whole record worth owning, a super intricate ultra dynamic 2 minute workout, that flits from lightning speed blast, to stop start chug, to a stretch of twisted harmonics and strange percussion, before lurching into full on black hole crush, only to finish off with some impossibly proggy grind metal mathiness.
Antigama are teamed up here with some Americans, Southerners to be exact, hailing from Virginia, a veritable grind hotbed, they offer up their own unique brand of grind that sounds more like a grindcore Black Flag, with gnarled atonal riffage, midtempo rhythms, yowled vox, which eventually explode into some serious face melting grindage, continually slipping back and forth, and that's just the first track. The final track "Phantom" is a dizzying bass heavy doom grind mash up, that almost sounds like the Melvins or Man Is The Bastard gone grind, but before you get to that, you get DoF's own mini masterpiece, a twisted bit of full on grind prog called "Memoranda" complete with synths, faux strings, weird tribal drumming, strange percussion, chant like vocals, and a surprising amount of groove, sounding almost like Ruins side project Hundred Sights Of Koenji.
Forgot how good (and weird this was). Too bad we only have a tiny handful. Needless to say, well worth grabbing before it's gone.
At the beginning of December we made the latest aTelecine lp our Record Of The Week. A fantastic slab of twisted collaged industrial weirdness, blackened and warped and freaky and far out and weirdly beautiful. We sold tons, and were super psyched to discover that there was in fact a previous record, so we tried to order a bunch, but were only able to get a handful, so here it is, the debut lp from aTelecine, the avant industrial drone collage project of porn star Sasha Grey, and her band aTelecine, and like A Cassette Tape Culture, which we made our Record Of The Week, ...And Six Dark Hours Pass is just as dark and creepy and gorgeous and essential. Unfortunately, only a handful of folks will manage to get their hands on one of these. Anyone who loved the first one, is definitely gonna want this one too, layered samples, warped effects, disembodied voices, detuned guitars, dense rumbling drones, crumbling riffage, alien vocals, minimal murky percussion, hazy almost shoegazey drifts, hushed low end thrum, crackle and hiss and whir and hum and shimmer, stuttering looped rhythms, creepy gauzy driftscapes, all blurred and smeared and stretched and tangled into a psychedelic songsuite that melts before your very ears, the songs all oozing into one another, the melodies wrapping themselves around layered textures, the textures decaying and revealing hidden sonic treasures, those treasures blossoming into sounds way more sinister than expected and so it goes. Totally recommended. Even if you missed out on the first one, this stuff is so good. Regardless of the Sasha Grey hype/stigma, both of the aTelecine records are fantastic, grab one of these while you can. Sorry we couldn't get more...
One of our favorite albums of 2009 came from the New Zealand songstress, Bachelorette. Her record My Electric Family was on constant rotation winning us over so big with it's dreamy mix of smart songwriting and a creative mix of electronics and lush instrumentation. It wasn't until we reviewed that record that we learned there was actually more Bachelorette floating around out there. We had missed the boat on her earlier outings, 2005's The End Of Things and 2006's Isolation Loops never made it onto our radar, due in part to the fact that they didn't have much/any US distribution. Luckily Drag City has just reissued both those great records on vinyl so we have two new delicious and dreamy pop records to keep us warm with this winter.
Both albums flow with such a soft, seductive touch with that weightless energy and aura of light psychedelia that reminds us of early outings by Broadcast and Saint Etienne.
We love both of the albums so can't really recommend one over the other, they both are so great!
One of our favorite albums of 2009 came from the New Zealand songstress, Bachelorette. Her record My Electric Family was on constant rotation winning us over so big with it's dreamy mix of smart songwriting and a creative mix of electronics and lush instrumentation. It wasn't until we reviewed that record that we learned there was actually more Bachelorette floating around out there. We had missed the boat on her earlier outings, 2005's The End Of Things and 2006's Isolation Loops never made it onto our radar, due in part to the fact that they didn't have much/any US distribution. Luckily Drag City has just reissued both those great records on vinyl so we have two new delicious and dreamy pop records to keep us warm with this winter.
Both albums flow with such a soft, seductive touch with that weightless energy and aura of light psychedelia that reminds us of early outings by Broadcast and Saint Etienne.
We love both of the albums so can't really recommend one over the other, they both are so great!
The return of grim Russian black metal horde Blackdeath, the awesomely monickered brotherly duo of Abysslooker and Para Bellum, now joined by the much more simply named Maya, for this their most recent blast of glorious blackness. And glorious it is, and as fucked up and fantastically off kilter as past outings, the buzzing guitars in full effect, but the new drummer definitely pushing the sound into new and exciting directions. Intricate, and lush, but also raw and furious and weirdly prog, in fact, the vocals have always been super strange in Blackdeath, and this time around they're strange in a whole different way, loud, and dramatic, and crooned, way up in the mix, almost over the top, to the point that it almost sounds how we might imagine a black metal Circle might sound, the same sort of theatricality, proggy and operatic, a little bit like a black metal cabaret, and the music suits the new singing, not so frantic and frenzied as woozy and gnarled and twisted and atonal and abstract, the sound slipping from more traditional black buzz to this new tangled black squall, laced with organ, bits of warped ambience, surprisingly melodic leads, lumbering doomic plods rife with weird psychedelic spidery guitars, but still for the most part fuzzy and blackened and furious, blurred blasting, but the vibe completely altered by those incredible vocals. A little off putting for some most likely, but folks who like their black metal a bit bizarre, this batch of epic blasting black buzzery definitely fits the bill.
Full length number two from these Aussie psychgarage hypno-dirge dronerockers, equal parts Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, krautrock, garage pop and Japanese psych rock, all blurred and smeared into gloriously muddy and murky motorik garage psych minimalism.
Originally released in a ridiculously limited edition of 52 copies, Deja What? is a sprawling, drugged out hallucinatory drift, the bass and drums simple and stripped down but solid and motorik, the guitars on the other hand, unhinged and loose, wild wah wah squalls all over the places, organs whir and pulse, the male vocals are drenched in reverb and echo, the female vox a hazy gauzy echo, the sound super saturated and in-the-red, warbly and warped and woozy, every track a super hypnotic heart of the sun dronepsych workout, some drifting into serious pop territories, while others headed in a way more wasted and drugged out direction, with most meeting somewhere right in the middle. Needless to say, this is the sort of 'good shit' that should most definitely appeal to fans of Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo, Loop, Lumerians, Heads, White Noise Sound and all sorts of similarly stoned drugpop spacerock...
COMES WITH A DOWNLOAD CODE!
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records of the year! When it first appeared, no one seemed to know where it came from (it had been brought in by Blunt himself, one day). And we weren't too sold on the cover, a generic photograph that looked like it was shot in the eighties, of this fellow Blunt, standing with a woman (a close friend of his, in a head to toe orange outfit that looks like it could have been prison garb, and who as it turns out, may no longer be alive) in front of a Mercedes parked in front of the mural on the side of the O'Farrell Theater on Polk street in San Francisco. Also, whenever there's a bunch of "ASCAP" logos plastered all over the front and back cover, our internal "uh-oh" meter goes way off.
So it just sat on our new arrivals shelf for a few weeks. But then a couple of folks (one of whom runs the Gloriette label, who have supplied us with some Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel records) started asking about it, because they had heard about this record, so we gave it a listen and were pretty surprised and rather blown away by what we were hearing. A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laid-back vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. Everybody here ended up really really digging it.
We sold one copy immediately to someone in the store when playing it, and then when we tried to contact Blunt to get more copies, we discovered that somehow we'd neglected to get his contact info, d'oh! The cd had no contact information, and searches online only revealed that the title track, a raunchy but coded come-on to a sexy stranger, was included on a James Pants mix. This only piqued our interest further, as Blunt's skewed Caribbean inflected songs would obviously be simpatico with James Pants' more recent tropical themed output. We could also see folks into Ariel Pink and Dam-Funk getting WAY into this. So we thought maybe this record was a rare private press record from the eighties. It does seem to have a strange hard-to-pin-down-time-wise quality.
Thankfully, Blunt eventually came back in and we got more copies and found out that he had pressed vinyl copies too. He also told us that this record was recorded ten years ago in 2000, but that didn't diminish our new found love for this record's questionable mystery, as it still predates all of the artists mentioned above that it reminds us of, though we're pretty sure Blunt probably has never heard of any of them. It also has the left of center oddness of other outsider funk artists like Tonetta, or Wicked Witch, albeit way more toned down than either of those two. Not that it's completely off the wall weird, but it's one of those records that we went into with such hesitation and were pleasantly surprised that we then became totally enamored with its home-brewed charm.
The lp is 5 tracks, with extra shorter versions of the songs "Fly Guy" and "Gentle Persuasion" and comes housed in an old school white cut-out 12" sleeve. The cd version has two extra songs and instrumental versions of four of the tracks. Oh, and the vinyl has a gold star sticker that boldly proclaims "HIT!" We couldn't agree more!
This is indeed a weird one, even from the already extra weird Shadow Ring camp. Call Back The Giants is the solo project of SR keyboardist Tim Goss, and on this, the debut lp from Goss and his CBTG, he weaves an ever shifting landscape of warped keyboard drones, twisted new age drift, fractured late night ambience, creepy processed vocals, and blissed out psychedelia.
Gloomy and otherworldly, some sort of soundtrack for another world, another time, another dimension, low tones wheeze and creep and slither, blossoming into Technicolor expanses of hazy, gauzy ambience, rife with fragmented melodies, slowed down voices, swirling FX and heart-of-the-sun kosmische solar shimmer.
The title track takes the retro futuristic sci-fi synthscapes of Zombi and Majeure and pulls them apart until they sound like a melting VHS tape of some seventies British science program, and of course, that's not counting the bizarre male and female vocals, both drawled and druggy, and distorted, mostly blotting out the sounds beneath them.
The rest of the record unfurls similarly, slipping from woozy, Dr. Who style synthscapery, all warbly and woozy, to hazy, almost shoegazy glitched out rainbowy shimmer, to murky underwater electronica, laced with sing songy synth pulses, to ominous electronic flecked faux string lofi MIDI sounding dirges, to 8 bit style primitive keyboard majesty, all of those various shades of fantastical whatthefuck, made even more twisted by the various vocals, mush mouthed mumble one second, deep moody croon the next, almost falsetto sounding warble the next, and eventually to that very recognizable Shadow Ring style spoken word.
Weird record for sure, but Shadow Ring fans will be in heaven, and folks who like tripped our electronic dronemusic and otherworldly new age avant ambience, or hell, just plain far out (but still mysterious and melodic) weirdness, then this is definitely worth checking out!
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!
Another blast of crusty, druggy, swaggery, slithery blues groove garage sleaze from this Australian duo. A sort of garagey noise pop dipped in glitter and blow and blasted through busted Marshall stacks. The sound on these two jams is a lot heavier than their Siltbreeze full length (which we loved), in-the-red and deliriously glammy, the guitars crunchy and corrosive, the drums pounding and relentless, a bed of musical nails for the wailing bad ass vox draped over the top, all wound into a serious back alley blues explosion.
The B side cranks up the glam element even more, sounding like T-Rex/Gary Glitter via the New York Dolls or Hanoi Rocks, but filtered through that distinctly Aussie Lubricated Goat / King Snake Roost noise/blues rock continuum, replete with big stadium style hand clappy hooks and soaring sing along choruses, all wrapped in a tattered cloak of filthy buzz. Awesome. And killer almost DHR looking collaged cover art too...
Our in-house mycologist (how many record stores can claim one of those?) identified the cover star of this album as an Amanita muscaria, a very colorful and toxic mushroom found throughout the globe. While deaths are uncommon to this particular mushroom, it's also known for its psychoactive properties whose chemical compounds are not actually processed by the human body. So, after consuming one of these mushrooms, you can drink your pee and trip for days. Well, that's what Nick the resident mycologist tells us.
The cosmic trip from Colored Mushroom & The Medicine Rocks comes by way of Cleveland, starring the seemingly ubiquitous John Elliott (Emeralds, Mist, Imaginary Softwoods, Outer Space, etc.) with three other dudes who got together Christmas time of 2009 jamming out a bunch of tapes. This hyper limited LP is a best-of collection from those tapes, whose linear structures of percolating synths, post-Suicide drum machinations, and shimmered tone resembles much of the zoned out work from early Emeralds crossed with the glistening properties of those Mist LPs. Given that this album was released right before Emeralds embarked on a huge US tour opening for Caribou, most of these lps had been sold out on the road. It remains to be seen if we'll be getting any more copies from this pressing which counted less than 500 copies...
Another slab of awesome eighties style electro new wave digital funk dreaminess, from a mysterious Canadian, released by the label that brought us Games and White Car. Layered synths, pulsing minimal beats, all drifting beneath reverbed soulful vox, a bit like a more electro/new wave How To Dress Well (a recent AQ Record Of The Week), the music leaning more toward the Goblin/Carpenter/Zombi axis, sort of futuristic retro sci-fi soundtracky, slipping from droning electronic psychedelia, to pounding big beat to almost '80s MTV style electronic pop, the vocals drawing it all together, and weirdly enough, reminding us quite a bit of Peter Gabriel, as if someone took those old classic Gabriel records, and time machined them into the body and soul of some modern music maker, who created the same music, but filtered through a slightly cracked, modern avant electronic music lens, the result a psychedelic electronic retro pop, equal parts new wave, old soul, eighties pop, synth wave and dream pop. Nice!
Okay, odds are most aQ list readers aren't gonna be interested in this. But in the spirit of aQuarius, and the sort of open mindedness we try to engender here, hopefully a few folks will give this a chance, cuz it's actually pretty great. The math sounds bizarre and it most definitely is, take two parts Fallout Boy, two parts Anthrax, and one part Every Time I Die (literally, it's members of those bands!), and this is what you get, a bombastic blast of super heavy, ultra melodic, catchy as hell classic eighties style hard rocking heaviness. Big riffs, wild leads, pounding drummage, some super epic clean vocals, classic metal guitar harmonies, all wound into super hooky heavy jams that kick tons of ass.
"We've Got A Situation Here" is THEE one here, a pretty much perfect pop song rendered in shades of chug and crunch and wail and blast and pound. The guitars crunchy and heavy, the vocals throaty and what you might expect from the dude from ETID, but with a chorus most bands would kill for, not to mention some seriously heavy breakdowns, one in particular that seriously swings and sounds almost like Pantera or Down. And the rest of the songs are pretty much just as good, born from a shared love of Thin Lizzy, it's got that kind of classic rock vibe, some songs sounding a little like Kiss, others more like Queens Of The Stoneage or Foo Fighters, but the Damned Things, definitely temper their poppiness with some serious heaviness, and some killer songs. Scoff if you must, but some of us (mostly Andee) have been listening to this like crazy!
This Portland-based band's debut album, The Sellsword, was a bit of a hit around here last year, in part 'cause their twin guitar harmony metal sounded a heck of a lot like that of AQ-faves The Fucking Champs. Unlike The Champs, though, they aren't all-instrumental, they've got a singer belting it out in classic high-pitched fashion over their galloping riffage, sweet!
The full-length was limited to 500 copies, and is now out of print, but the band are back with a 5-song follow-up, also limited to 500 numbered copies. This new DarkBlack is definitely less "epic power metal", more NWOBHM-ish rock n' roll, but still undeniably Champsy in parts (the chuggery of "Golden Idol" ferinstance) though perhaps not quite so Champsy as before. Not that they've backed off on the guitars, nosiree, you want hot guitar-on-guitar action, you got it here. Shreddin' solos and soaring harmonies galore, definitely their raison d'etre, outshining the decent-but-unexceptional vocals, a ragged whine at times that lacks the power to truly compete with the axes. Yep, it's the guitars that butter the bread in this band.
Anyone into authentic old school metal revivalism oughtta get a kick out of DarkBlack's garagey '70s sounding sincerity and impressive chops, and these five songs come at a bargain price as well. All of 'em deliver the goods, from the catchy opener "Doom Herald" through to the speedy closer "Broken Oath", with the hectic energetic title track standing out as one of our faves, full of twisty changes and triumphant lead work. At ep-length, it's easy to spin this again and again and discerning headbangers should do so forthwith.
Northern Californian media artist John Davis is a bit of a renaissance man. Film, photography, and sound design all come together through looping systems that pile old means of construction on top of new ones, with all sorts of erasures and additive marks along the way. The results throughout all of his media can be strikingly beautiful, if idiosyncratic in the way the old becomes new and vice versa. Such has been evident on his musical output for Root Strata, Students Of Decay, and Digitalis; and it's certainly true for his cassette on Peasant Magik. The tape begins with a drone-field of pastoral impressionism that fits very nicely within the overarching aesthetic of Root Strata as something of a reclamation of rural psychedelia (a phrase coined by Flying Saucer Attack to describe their first album), yet Davis intervenes through small phrases of electronic plinks and strange field recordings buried behind the Chalk-ish guitar drones. He then moves onto a piece driven by ring modulated tone and motorized clatter that harkens to early electronic music experiments merged with the scrabblings Keith Rowe would sometimes offer by disrupting guitar pick-ups with other magnetics and motors. Elsewhere, Davis fuses a no-fi layering of mashed textures on par with any of the Richard Youngs albums of grit and shimmer crossed with the Jasper TX / Machinefabriek means of song deconstruction. Needless to say, there's a lot going on in each of the tracks that Davis provides, but it's not an overload that he's seeking rather a curiosity to explore as many possibilities while maintaining a hushed restraint. Limited to 100 copies.
Years ago when we listed the compact disc reissue of this Krautrock classic, the home-recorded 1971 debut from eccentric electronics specialist (and soon to be New Age pioneer) Georg Deuter, we called it quite brilliant, a hallucinatory affair of studio experiments, tape effects, and guitar explorations, that we recommended for fans of both early Kraftwerk, and most of the Kranky contingent. Still do, now that it's back on (unfortunately expensive) vinyl. Certainly, it's THEE Deuter album to get (though we also like some others he has done). If you dig the back cover photo of a barefoot, mustachioed Deuter (wearing those round John Lennon style shades), crouched in front of some reel-to-reel tape gear, playing the bongos, you'll probably also dig the sounds on this album, from the Eastern drone of "Krishna Eating Fish And Chips" to the underwater ambience of "Atlantis"! This record is not not nearly as blissed-out as Deuter's later output, with many sequences that attack with jarring yet hypnotic intensity, reminding us a lot of another kraut fave, A.R. & Machines.
Okay, true grim metalheads, scoff all you like, but we can NOT stop listening to this. Not because it's a great black metal record (although it sort of is), in fact, this is barely black metal at all really. There was a time where Dimmu Borgir were Norwegian black metal royalty, but they committed the ultimate offense, which was to become popular, as in mainstream popular. And instead of fighting that popularity, they embraced it, and in the process became even MORE popular. In fact, the new record, at least special versions of it, are only available in your local mall via Hot Topic! And if there's anything less kvlt, we'd be hard pressed to think of it. But. And this is a very big but, for what DB has shed in true black metal cred, and classic black metal sound, they've made up for by transforming into something totally other and else. Sure there's still some blasting beats, some buzzing riffage, sick vokills, but where DB used to employ orchestras and orchestral filigree for bombast, and sheer epicness, that orchestral side of DB seems to have lapped their BM side, and now they sound like a black metal score to the most amazing pirate/adventure/action movie that could never live up to such an epic over the top soundtrack. Which means this is fucking FUN, and ridiculously bombastic, and now the guitars take a back seat to the strings, and you know what? It suits them.
Check out "Born Treacherous", which sounds remarkably like their Norwegian brethren Khold, sort of groovy and grungy, but then the strings come in, and the flutes, the horns, the percussion, but before the can launch into it, the explode into some serious black metal, but even then, that buzz and blast is wrapped in strings and soaring dramatic swells, and there are plenty of stops and starts so the strings can soar dramatically. This is power metal writ WAY over the top, super intricate and proggy and pretty brilliantly orchestrated, but it's not until about halfway through that the brilliance is driven home, by a dizzying breakdown, a super dynamic stop/start interlude, with creaking ship's riggings, chantlike vocals, sampled spoken word, grunting pigs, choirs, even Tuvan throat singing, and then it comes together, descending pizzicato strings, dense swirling swells, launching directly into another almost trad sounding burst of black metal, but again soon the orchestra takes over. It's overwhelming and exhausting and totally thrilling. If we were designing a video game, this record would be the soundtrack, it's so evocative and over the top and you can't help but feel like you should be battling or swashbuckling or something.
And beyond the music, DB always had the craziest outfits, the biggest spikes, the most ridiculous costumes, and for this new record they've totally outdone themselves, ditching black entirely, now clothed entirely in white leather, all dusted with what seems to be powder, strange rams horn helmets, long white leather dusters. Check out the video for "Gateways" on YouTube (it's also included as a bonus here, the special 'cross' digipak version of Abrahadabra, which we'll have til they run out), it's easy to see why these guys are so popular, in fact, it makes us wonder why they're not ever MORE popular. Fuck the boring jeans and sneakers shoegazers, if we pay $20, we want flames, and bigger than life characters, and ridiculous drama, and that's pretty much what you get with Dimmu Borgir, especially on Abrahadabra. AWESOME!
This one pretty much floored us when we first put it on. Track one, "Tourniquet", begins quietly, with a droning sound swelling up slowly, so we didn't expect the shocking outburst of sick fuzz that then erupts, the rest of the song alternating between distorted, disjointed riffs and gentler melodic parts. Its unhinged freakiness immediately made us think of Michael Yonkers' similarly crazed Microminiature Love album, a total genius AQ fave. So what the heck is this? The mysterious trio of Damin Eih, A.L.K. and Brother Clark (from Minneapolis, just like Yonkers) made this wonderfully twisted psychedelic rock record in 1973, privately releasing it into almost total obscurity and eventual psych-rock collector dreams. But thank the reissue gods, it's been deservedly rescued from oblivion and boy howdy is it ever something that we're happy to hear and we think you'll be happy about it too.
The eleven tracks feature fragile vocal melodies, delicate 12-string strum, weird trippy lyrics (telling you to "take off your eyes, lie down in your head" or chanting "world is ridiculous" over and over), and a few further doses of that aforementioned totally sick fuzz guitar (which doesn't really return in full force until the final track). Most of the album is fairly spaced out, the many mellower songs all delightfully druggy, dreamy, drifty... there's really some quite lovely stuff on here, in keeping with the trio's obvious interest in Eastern mysticism and inner mind trips. Furthermore, for an apparently underground DIY production, it's actually rather ambitious and accomplished, with effective vocal harmonies, electronic embellishments, ethnic instruments, and other interesting orchestration. Stuff like the Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" sounds like an influence... as does that song's obvious inspiration too.
Along with Yonkers, another AQ fave we could compare this to would be the Alice Cooper Band's psychedelic debut Pretties For You... but more surreal and subversive. Alice, even in his later shock-rock showman guise, would have shied away from lyrics like "rape and kill your parents or the blacks, and if you're one of those you can rape and kill the others back", a line found here in the deviant blues rocker "Return Naked" that ends this album with tour-de-force of really warped hippie-punk attitude and ultra-distorted, rubbery megafuzz riffage (the idea behind the song, we think, being about how the war is over in Vietnam, so now what?).
Never Mind is an album that's also possessed of the same lost and lysgeric vibe we got from another early '70s private press rarity reissued a while back, Stone Harbour's Emerges. And '80s psych savant Bobb Trimble could be another good comparison in parts ("Thundermice" in particular). Oh, and if you're gonna get the Dwarr reissue we made record of the week, this would make a good companion purchase, though despite some heavy moments it's not in any way metal, it still seems to share some of the same outsider DNA, this is possibly what Dwarr would have sounded like in '73 instead of '86...
Sadly, this digipack contains no liner notes to speak of, just recording credits, too bad 'cause we're sure there's quite a story behind and beyond this album, from what we've been able to glean from other sources about main member Damin Eih vanishing to India not long after this was originally released.
Some will be curious about this simply on account of how it's an Editions Mego release, by Mark Fell who is one half of snd, the UK glitch-house duo that used to record for Mille Plateaux. For us, it was more that the bright orange digipak cover with shiny metallic silver artwork caught our eye, and then we read the text on the back that includes such sentences as "Using 32 operator frequency modulation synthesis configured in 16 pairs of operator and modulator, panned at equal positions around the circumference of a circle using high order ambisonics." And: "With 2, 4, and 8 channel rectangular waveshapes with variable pulse width subject to frequency modulation from synchronised sine functions with variable phase offsets." Intriguing, no?
What it it all boils down to is minimal techno electronics: clinical, precise, and purely rhythmic. Only the relatively blissed-out final track, "Death Of A Loved One", brings in much melodic coloration at all. Otherwise, Fell's music sounds a bit like a malfunctioning Geiger counter (especially the five track opening sequence "The Occultation of 3C 273"), with some pieces (the seven part "Vortex Studies") shuffling in buzzing, fizzing, distorted textures as well, and others (the "Acids In The Style Of Rian Treanor" series) incorporating sizzling synth squiggle. It's all very mesmeric (to some, maybe maddening to others), often energetically urgent, a dense, complex, pitter patter patterning of clicks, claps, and kicks, ratcheting up and down, constructed with conceptual, architectural logic... Definitely for fans of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Senking, Mika Vanio, and Kazunao Nagata (Zero Gravity).
Fell also has another new, simultaneously released cd out on Raster-Noton, we'll have to get that one reviewed soon too!
A crushing double dose of extreme low end downtuned heaviness from these two UK heavyweights, up first, long time aQ faves Hey Colossus, who tackle an unlikely cover, Andre Williams' "Jailbait", and transform it into some seriously creepy crawly doom blues. A monstrous chugging plod underneath distorted mush mouthed rambling vocalizing, sounding much like a sludgier Oxbow, or maybe the Melvins covering King Snake Roost. As the track progresses, the vocals get more and more garbled, and the background chugs grow more and more intense, transforming from churning riffage into a blurred sheet of black buzz, undulating beneath the relentless pound and chug. AWESOME.
Field Boss, formerly known as Tractor (as they're credited on the 7" label) kick right back with some of their own low slung creep, all thick ropy bass, coruscating sheets of feedback, a sound that's equal parts old school AmRep crush and industrial pound, the song title "Headache" maybe referencing legendary noise rockers Big Black, which would make sense, cuz there's definitely that sort of vibe about this. The track slowly unfolds into keening slo-mo super distorted guitar leads that tangle and become more and more atonal, draped in layers over the churning sonic sludge, until finally, the song explodes into a final tangle of grinding blasting punkish crush, pelted with swirling clouds of hissing distorted static. So good.
Some essential heaviness for sure, and gorgeously packaged in a super swank silk screened black on metallic silver, cardstock 6 panel fold out sleeve, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
We're always amazed that so much awesome and little known music from the sixties and seventies continues to be resurrected, and remain very worthy of its cult status. Case in point, this anachronistic synth-heavy psych gem from 1977 by the George-Edwards Group. While punk, disco, glam, bland FM radio, and heavy metal ruled the musical zeitgeist of the era, two multi-instrumentalist friends with a love of synthesizers, home-taping and melancholic spacey folk-pop made a mini-masterpiece in their Detroit, Michigan basement. Briefly mentioned in the Acid Archives book, it doesn't feel so much a late hippie-psych artifact, as it does a sublime and moody soft-rock epic that would have been huge on '70s AM radio in a parallel universe of our fantasies. Where instead of Bread, Chicago, and Seals & Croft, being played ad nauseum, music by Dreamies, Shuggie Otis, Fresh Maggots, Roger Rodier, Emmanuelle Parrenin, Collie Ryan, Biff Rose, Big Star, Scott Walker, Warlus, and of course, the George-Edwards Group would have scored our parallel universe childhood. Yet even that said though, 38:38 is much stranger than we can describe. Often the tracks with their multilayered Arp, Moog, and Mellotron drones and harmonies often sung in falsetto, sound like the less musically-damaged touchstones of what Ariel Pink recorded on his Doldrums album. And though the synthesizers are most prevalent, especially in sci-fi themed instrumental tracks like "Solar Flare" and "Magnetic Variation", other instrumentation like xylophones, autoharps, bells, piano and acoustic guitar play a big part in the compositions. One of our favorite tracks is "Floating Away", a druggy ballad with just acoustic guitar and what is purported to be recordings of ocean sounds, but sound like huge sheets of metal crashing in the background. Even the longest track, the instrumental "Hypertrain" is a kraut-y fuzzed electric guitar raga over drums that reminds a bit of Circle and Cave, while the second to the last track called "Some Fun" features maniacal laughter over a repetitive groove that adds an element of bad trip creepiness to the proceedings. One of the headiest records from the seventies we've heard in a while; those into druggy cyber-space folk-pop weirdness will be very satisfied with this. Solid!
Vinyl only, not sure if there's plans for a cd reissue too.
We hadn't heard from Aussie industrial crushers Halo in ages, so this lp was definitely a pleasant surprise, a long overdue reissue of an out of print cd-r. Halo released two of our favorite records, both on Relapse, both punishing and epic, downtuned and fierce as fuck, but also atmospheric and haunting, their sound somewhere between Swans, Godflesh, early Earth, Neurosis, Eyehategod, diSEMBOWELMENT, Gore, Cop Shoot Cop and Whitehouse, thick low slung bass buzz, pounding pummeling drum crush, as well as various electronics and tape loops, the duo whipping up a sound that sounded like it came from a much bigger beast.
Degree Point Of Zero Implosion was originally released way back in 2000, and finds the band sounding super raw, but with a sound already fully formed, a sort of abstract doom sludge drone industrial, the drums pounding out simple monstrous earth shaking plods, the buzzing strings not so much producing riffs, as seismic waves, thick swells of rumble and thrum, the sound shifting from spaced out minimal drift to full on corrosive howling crush, the sound fleshed out by all manner of electronics and samples, of textures and loops, the songs brooding and slow building, super ambient and atmospheric, creepy and ominous and sinister, the vocals usually buried way down in the mix, but sometimes howling over the band's lumbering din. Often clean, but just as often a guttural, heavily effected death metal style bellow, the songs wrapped in coruscating crumbling guitar drones, moaning, keening fractured melodies, sheets of hiss and howl, or super distorted, impossibly downtuned ultradoom chug. This shit is so dense and brutal and powerful and heavy and epic, anyone into the current crop of slow and low heavies (Khanate, Moss, Bunkur, Monarch, Habsyll, Atavist, The Body, Otesanek, Human Quena Orchestra, Salome, Orthodox, Nihill, etc.) who hasn't checked out Halo, you have been missing out BIG TIME.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Who doesn't love Harry Pussy? Actually probably a lot of folks, but don't count us among them. One of the finest noise rock bands ever, with a strange flair for infusing their racket with something special, not melody necessarily, or musicality, something more ineffable, and something much more abrasive and harsh. But heck, female fronted noise rock was a rarity back then (and still is sadly), and Adris Hoyos, was a whirling dervish of damaged drumming and freaked out vocalizations, and their sound was totally unique, a stumbling super distorted acid fried feedback drenched blow out, and this here disc captures the band at their best, live and out of control, on their last tour, live in Texas in 1998.
The music is amazing of course. Fucking heavy as shit, a maelstrom of drum chaos and super distorted guitars, the recording SO in the red, but the best part is probably Adris' crowd baiting, so much shit talking, calling the crowd a bunch of assholes who dress like jocks, but in the same breath trying to pimp shirts and records, usually met with a chorus of "FUCK YOU"s, before launching back into an explosion of fucked up glorious pounding noise rock.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, but beautifully packaged in a full color sleeve, with a cool printed insert.
When we were making our top tens for 2010, Allan realized that one of the discs he loved and listened to the most this year was something we hadn't even reviewed yet - and actually came out in 2009. Finally, we just got it in, though, direct from the band. It's this, High Spirits' self-titled debut, which consists mostly of material from two demo cd-rs, but they're the sort of demos with songs that some bands with a career's worth of proper albums could never better. So, some background on the Chicago-based High Spirits... Maybe you recall, in our review of Profound Lore's recent release by Dawnbringer a few lists back, we mentioned that the mastermind behind that outfit, Chris "Professor" Black, was also in a NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) worshipping band called High Spirits. What with the critical acclaim that Dawnbringer has received, we expect some folks will be interested in this too - especially since as far as we're concerned, High Spirits is even better. Rather than trying to synthesize a variety of metal methodologies the way Dawnbringer does, High Spirits does one thing and does it so well... catchy, classic, honest to gosh pop songs in retro-metal guise, sounding so authentically NWOBHM that it's uncanny. Seriously, if someone told us that lead-off track "Torture" was a long lost single recorded by a band from London or Liverpool in 1980, we'd believe it.
Dunno how he does it, the Professor surely is talented a talented fella, with this, like Dawnbringer, being a one-man operation (though he's got accomplices for live performances, including two dudes from like minded retro metallers Zuul). The lo-fi demo budget production only adds to the atmosphere of awesomeness, as far as we're concerned. High Spirits simply rules, with warm, wonderfully FUZZED guitars, relentless riffing, tasteful solos, and Professor Black's slightly strained, ever so vulnerable, melodic vocals... and let's give it up for his lyrics, not something that we usually notice on most metal albums... they're pretty well-written for what they are, rock n' roll boy meets (or loses) girl cliche. Lyrics about loving and dreaming and yearning and running away, coming across as quite heartfelt, done with subtle cleverness. One line that stood out was: "Everything is what it seems / Just like in your dreams". Another we liked: "You left me crying on the day you said goodbye / But we both know you were so good at telling lies".
Memorable, melancholic, majestic, rockin'... Oooh. So good, can't wait for a new full-length. But even if this was all they ever did (and they have put out a 7" since), High Spirits should get some recognition, for conjuring such a classic sound - and songs - in this day and age. It's indeed about the songs, and the spirit - which is high indeed. Of all the new school of old school metal bands we've come across, High Spirits is one of the most worthy, please don't miss this. Heck, if NWOBHM means nothing to you but a jumble of letters, give this a shot, even folks into the current crop of indie garage pop with fuzzy guitars might just have a new favorite metal band!!
Available in either compact disc or vinyl formats, the cd in a digipack, the lp in a gatefold sleeve, both with minimal, black text on plain white graphic design that's simple but striking, lets the music speak for itself, and contributes to the super old school and underground vibe too.
San Francisco's Raub Roy (aka Horaflora) met Ryan Martin (aka Secret Boyfriend), during an ambitious Horaflora tour in 2008, whereby he biked from Georgia to Maine, playing his unique brand of acoustic noise along the way with just what he could carry and what he could scrape together at each show. Martin hosted one of these shows in his hometown of Carrboro, NC; being impressed by the performance, he offered Roy a split release on his own Hot Releases imprint. While it would have been cool to have a document from the Horaflora bike tour, this is a damn fine split release of nocturnal murk linking the two projects. The Horaflora side is actually a recording of a live radio broadcast at KALX in Berkeley, with Roy being accompanied by Andrea Williams. One of Roy's best tricks - expanded balloons expelling their innards across drum heads and metal surfaces - is on display here; and it's great to hear the variety of these blustery elongated textures in an audio environment when it has been such a great visual aspect to his live performances. Amidst these sounds, Roy and Williams interweave acoustic noise-junk textures from found metal, tin cans, and hypercompressed recordings from hand-held tape decks, spluttering towards a dense climax of floor rattling low end and aerated acoustic noise.
The Secret Boyfriend side opens with a meandering set of Roy Montgomery styled noise-drone guitar melodies collapsing into a murky spectral-decay wash of no-fi shoegazing. Fuzzy piano tones begin to emerge as graceful calliope like melodies, still hung with enough grit and cobwebs to make these sound haunted. All of this comes to an end with a menacing burst of noise grafted upon a cheap synth melody that tone bends from the depths of cavernous cistern, but the noise begets a couple of darkened mope-folk tunes of just acoustic guitar and voice buried in echoplex.
300 copies and that's it for this great split!
We've long been fans of Horseback (aka Jenks Miller), whose sound has gradually developed from blissed out dronescapery, to full on blasting post rock flecked black metal, to... well, to this (more on that in a second). We've also long been fans of pretty much anything Matthew Bower related, Total, Skullflower, Sunroof!, Hototogisu, and of course Voltigeurs. And while these two may not seem like the most obvious match up, their sounds are surprisingly complimentary.
Horseback offer up two tracks, of what we can only call black prog. Buzzing guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, and lots of ELP style organs, which transforms the sound into something way weirder, and frankly way cooler. The organs swirl and pulse and buzz over murky drum pound and those blackened shrieks, the black element sounds slowed down, like some bizarre mash up of Burzum at 16rpm and ELP at 33, the keyboards make the sound more psychedelic and spacey, and fuse perfectly into a gloriously twisted hybrid, one that is peppered with squalls of freaked out psychedelic noise, and culminates in a gorgeous Burzumic outro, all blown out drone riffage and buried anguished howls, mesmerizing and mysterious.
The second track is soaring and epic and a little blackened, but sounds more static, more like a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone, draped over blasting beats nearly lost in the churn and swirl, harsh vox here too, the overall sound extra distorted, glimmery and glistening and downtuned and crumbling, as if the signal is way too hot for the speakers, which makes it sound noisier for sure, but also mesmerizingly psychedelic.
Voltigeurs, which is Matthew Bower and cellist Samantha Davies, finds the duo doing what they do best, stirring up huge clouds of washed out white noise skree, a blindingly brilliant tangle of dense guitar freakage and whirling steel string buzz, a solar flare sprawl of amp melting, ear shredding psychedelic heaviness, that like other Voltigeurs recordings, offers very little to the casual listener, but beneath the barrage of howl and crunch and skree, lurk an ever shifting field of riffage and melody, buried song structures only visible occasionally, these glimpses coloring the cloud of noise that surrounds them, turning the whole thing into a surprisingly listenable blast of psychnoisebliss.
VERY VERY LIMITED! And an expensive import. We have about 10 copies, not sure we'll be able to get any more after that.
Yet another one man band cooking up glorious batches of home brewed hazy garage-y dream pop, this one going by the curious name of Jameses, aka Adam Perry (yep, not James), and for a sound that is done to death on a daily basis, this guy manages to make us dig it all over again. A soft focus fuzz wrapped around super textured and ever shifting cascading sheets of pulsing, swirling heavily effected guitars, all wrapped around layered, overlapping melodies, anchored to some rumbling cloomy basslines, and peppered with yelped reverby vox. A little cold wave-y especially on the A side, while the B side gets even more washed out and druggy, a sort of fun house mirror / circus midway psych pop, rife with all manner of warped effects and seriously twisted production, all while managing to remain fantastically poppy and catchy.
A few years back, we became particularly obsessed with a Finnish (sort of) black metal group called Jumalhamara. Now, we know, aQ becoming obsessed with a band from Finland is hardly big news, but this was something else.
As mentioned in our old review, a friend warned us off these guys, saying they were barely black metal and were way too wussy and jangly, but everything he said just made us want to hear it more. Besides, they were from Finland, they were called Jumalhamara AND they had a song called, "Discover The Pigtail", which ended up being as good as the title might lead you to believe. Probably better to just revisit what we said about that track last time:
"Discover The Pigtail" begins with glistening harmonics, which are soon joined by some strange off kilter drumming, tangled riffing and howled vocals, and those harmonics never go away, so even as the band slithers and sprawls, spewing out a sort of buzzy blackness, the glistening shimmer totally shines through, diluting the heaviness, turning what might be something raw and heavy into something way more bizarre and trippy, at times it almost sounds like two records playing simultaneously, they drift in an out of sync, all very dizzying and gloriously tweaked."
And listening to it again recently, we realized there were horns, and all sorts of other weirdness going on. Unfortunately, that record was only a 3 song ep, so it definitely left us wanting more.
Here we are 3 years later, and the band finally deliver their first proper full length in close to 14 years of existence. And how does it stack up? Well on first listen, it doesn't sound nearly as weird, in fact it sounds way heavier, and more black metal, but it doesn't take long, in fact within a few minutes of the opening track's 10+ minutes, the song reveals itself as way more than black metal, subtly at first, the riffs atonal and sort of off kilter, that feeling of two records playing at once returns, everything a little warped and twisted, and then suddenly the song fracture, and the band gets super intense and aggro, the song lurching and starting and stopping, before launching right back into it. Buzzing blackly on the surface, but all around the main riff, other guitars are moaning and pealing, and adding that weird second melody / other record vibe. And then it just gets weirder and weirder, gnarled vocals, operatic female singing, the guitars getting more and more angular, the sound blurring and smearing and becoming more dronelike. Twisted for sure, but definitely some of the most original and warped black metal we've heard in ages.
And don't worry (or maybe do!), it gets WAY weirder, and way less black. As the record unfurls, spidery blues guitars drift underneath groaned deep dramatic vocals, before being blasted by some crumbling crushing doom, only to blossom into some propulsive industrial flecked noise rock, laced with what again sound like horns.
After that it's a sonic tug of war between a sort of swampy gothicky almost Woven Hand sort of vibe, and noise drenched back metal weirdness, doomy slithery guitars wrap around martial snares, splintering into shrieked noisy blackened chaos, only to settle down into some moody meandery reverb drenched slowcore blues, big buzzy guitars and almost Harvey Milk like crooning.
The title track is a frenzied blast of black metal riffing howled vox, and some dense intricate mathy drumming, epic and majestic but never truly slipping into 'black metal' until the last minute, a frantic blast that leads directly into the album closer, a sprawling bit of epic weirdness, a relentless pounding cymbal crash keeps the tempo, guitars howl and grind and buzz, strange melodies tinkle and drift off, like someone playing bottles, the vocals alternatingly shrieked maniacally and bellowed defiantly, a frenzied stretch of blown out psychedelic noisedrone chaos, with super intense dramatic vocals that follow the guitars and the crashing cymbals to their final termination point.
Somehow these guys have managed to make a record that's crazy fucked up and twisted, but with a sonic dementia that's just subtle enough, that some unsuspecting true grim warriors might just get suckered into listening to this chunk of blackened what the fuck genius.
Gorgeous packaging too, matte finish digipak, with super striking artwork, and a booklet filled with lyrics, and weirdly old timey imagery.
Newly reissued, now as a 2-on-1 with another, later album, we've previously listed a cd of Kirikyogen, organist/pianist Kuni Kawachi's 1970 recording with hard rockin' Japanese psych geniuses Flower Travellin' Band (which barely preceded those AQ faves debut on their own, Anywhere, also 1970). Kawachi came from sixties Group Sounds band The Happenings Four, and made a great decision in teaming up with the nascent FTB (who had started off as Yuya Uchida and the Flowers, another GS act) for Kirikyogen, especially since Flowers/FTB had recently recruited Joe Yamanaka, the inimitable vocalist whose trademark wail did much to make Flower Travellin' Band band stand out from the pack later on. With Joe on the mic, and guitarist Hideki Ishima coming into his own, Kirikyogen is very much Flower Travellin' Band, the prequel! Meanwhile, Kawachi's Hammond organ grumblings add a nice touch to the tracks here, which he also wrote, for the most part. In addition to Kawachi's organ, singer Joe plays his harmonica more than he did on later recordings, giving these recordings a bluesier sound. While we're not going to tell you this is anything near as great as FTB's Satori or even Made In Japan, it's got some great heavy psychedelic jams (like the title track, and "Works Composed Mainly By Human") that are certainly as good as anything they did for their first album. If anything, they are a lot closer to what ended up on Satori, albeit a great deal more primordial and lacking the taughtness of their later works. It should also be noted that Kirikyogen is about 1/2 heavy Hendrix-y grooves, 1/2 more acoustic-y (but lovely), not as heavy melodic material.
Also to be noted, as alluded to above, this cd reissue also includes Kawachi's 1972 follow-up Love Suki Daikirai, which is appears as the first 14 tracks here for some reason rather than being presented in chronological fashion. Love Suki Daikirai doesn't feature any FTB folks (and is thus automatically less rockin'), but does have Kimio Mizutani on guitars, whose solo album A Path Through Haze was also recently reissued by Bamboo and reviewed by us (and which happened to feature, yes, Kuni Kawachi on keyboards!). Much more gentle and meandering than its predecessor, this later album certainly has its beautiful and/or freaky moments, but Kirikyogen, #25 in Julian Copes "Japrocksampler" Top 50, is still the primary reason to pick this up.
Trunk Records comes through again with still more wonderful unheard sonic mysteries from the seemingly more prolific than anyone thought Basil Kirchin. So far we've been treated to various soundtracks, lots of library music, sonic sketches, so here's another piece of the Kirchin puzzle, an unreleased score for an infamous 1965 British exploitation film concerning death, birth, beatniks and wife swapping, and judging from the booklet, quite a bit of nudity, not to mention reenactments of the Jack The Ripper murders, sweaty men in saunas, topless ladies, and apparently "the infamous chicken scene". Hmmm... Guess we'll just have to let the music to the talking, and oh it does, swinging sixties jazz, laced with haunting Theremins, marimba melodies, moody smokey ballads, hazy, warbly ambience, the sounds groovy, funky, fuzzy, jazzy, creepy, bits of whirring organ drone butted up against soaring strings, mysterious ominous low end thrum blossoming into almost Joe Meek-ish sounding processed/looped ambience, long drawn out high end shimmer, Eastern sounding buzz and drone and drift that definitely sounds ahead of its time, so incredible, hard to believe this stuff has been hidden away until now.
And if that weren't enough, included as a bonus is the soundtrack to the film The Freelance, a 1971 gangland thriller starring Ian McShane, featuring a funky very seventies sounding score, heavy on the jazz, the free jazz especially, with some surprisingly abstract out there freakouts, that have us dying to see the sights that go with these sounds!
As with most Trunk releases, lots of pix, and plenty of interesting/informative/humorous liner notes.
Another fantastic split, on a list jam packed with killer splits, this one featuring recent aQ Record Of The Week honorees Locrian, whose The Crystal World double disc was a big hit around here, and Century Plants, a duo we dig who are WAY under represented on the aQ site, with only a single cd-r having ever been reviewed.
Unlike the black and buzz of The Crystal World, Locrian explores a sound world more hushed and minimal, more cinematic and soundtracky, two long tracks, that flow into one another, the first beginning with streaks of shimmering buzz, over deep ominous drifts, tinkling melodies way off in the distance, soon overcome by thick swaths of swirling thrum and whir, gorgeous shards of keening high end, bits of electronics and feedback, the sounds thickening as the track progresses, sounding more like a lost John Carpenter soundtrack that some avant/post black metal thing, haunting and atmospheric and mysterious. Which leads directly into the second track, pulsing, throbbing, muted melodies, a brooding tense slow build, strangely pretty, but still dark and ominous, plenty of murky buzz and roiling blackness beneath the surface, the track never exploding into something strictly heavy, instead, drifting darkly and dreamily as a suite of mysterious cinematic dronemusic.
Century Plants dial it down even further, an ultraminimal strum and drift, whispering riffage over a cavernous low end hum, tendrils of minor key melody intertwine with smears of moaning low end, soft swoops of backwards guitars, and super subtle effects, the sound gradually becoming more insistent, the guitars subtly buzzier and blacker. The second track begins similarly, a soft hushed shimmer, but quickly blossoms into something much more sinister, a thick slab of churning black SUNNO)))-ed buzz, a glacial low end drift, that heaves and roils, but is deftly smoothed into something more tranquil and otherworldly, than heavy and harrowing.
Fantastic stuff from both bands. Definitely needing to hear more Century Plants, and of course can never get enough of Locrian.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, housed in a beautiful silkscreened blue metallic ink on matte black sleeve, with heavy printed insert.
Killer tag team from two of Chicago's finest, Locrian and Harpoon. We've long been fans of Locrian's grim dark drift, infusing their ritualistic black ambience with plenty of black metal, but here, they go full on black, spitting out a slab of dirgey, muted, murky, howled hate. After a rumbling intro, the track explodes into a swirling cloud of frenzied riffing, loping demonic pound, and shrieked anguished vokills, with the drummer from Velnias driving them in their dirgey blackened plod, grim and atmospheric and surprisingly metal. We dig. Ambient drone fanciers might be a bit... overpowered, but everyone else will definitely dig.
The flipside comes from Harpoon, who we've yet to list, which is a bummer as it features ex members of LONG time aQ faves (and tUMULt recording artists!) 7000 Dying Rats. But Harpoon is not comedy grind, no this is some serious metallic brutality, slipping from frenzied blackened thrash, to pounding downtuned doom, throat shredding vox, crushing riffage, all wound around some complex arrangements and of course some seriously brutal drum damage.
A pretty heavy seven inches for sure. And in some seriously sweet packaging. Letter pressed black on black gatefold sleeve on super thick nice cardstock, green and black swirled vinyl, a full color two sided printed insert, and a download card.
Mako is truly one of the most masterful musical minds behind some of the best psychedelic sounds that came out of Japan in the '70s, a relatively unsung hero of that scene. While his project Magical Power Mako certainly produced other records that are noisier, weirder, more abstract and fucked up, there is no doubt that the 1975 album Super Record is his absolute tour de force! An album that left many of us stunned upon our first encounter with it. It's one of those records that exemplifies what you really want in a psychedelic record, filled with a wide range of textures and mystical sounds from across the globe that take you on a journey and make you forget where you are.
Super Record melts into an unforgettable washed out pastoral setting as it glides and floats through different terrain of dripping colors and hallucinatory smoke. Like the best psychedelic albums of this era, Super Record is an absolute start to finish experience, with different interludes laced with lute, harmonica, melodica, charged fuzzed out guitar all in a ceremonial tone which creates a mood and vibe that would be at home in a film by Jodorowsky or Antonioni.
Think of some mind melting combination of Ash Ra Temple, Bo Hansson, early '70s Pink Floyd, Jean-Claude Vannier, and a dash of The Incredible String Band and you start to get a picture of the kind of musical magic that is happening on Super Record. We also get the feeling that some of our favorite modern day psych music makers like The Alps, Blues Control, and Dungen have all been influenced by the brilliance of this album as well. Super and magical!
After a year or two of track stealing cameos, on records by Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and loads of others, Nicki Minaj finally unleashes her long awaited full length, and people for the most part seem to be bummed out. Mostly because it seems she decided to go pop instead of straight hip hop. But it would definitely be a mistake to write off Pink Friday, cuz there's some seriously twisted kick ass shit here.
For those who need a history lesson, or who have been living under a rock, pretty much every hip hop jam of the last 24 months, if it was worth hearing had Minaj spitting some twisted rhymes on it. Probably most notably on the recent Kanye West record, where her cameo on "Monster" dusted even Jay-Z. She's a mini bombshell, pneumatic figure, robotic composure, and a voice that slips from sweet croon, to deep bellow, slipping in and out of accents, making sound effects, woofing like a dog, growling like a dragon, spitting expletives like a longshoreman, but what a way with rhymes, and for the most part, that's on display here big time, the bummer is that there's also plenty of pop fluff. But like we said, it's still worth it. And as far as pop stuff goes, it's pretty decent. And hell, we'd much rather see Minaj all over the radio than Katy Perry.
By now you've probably heard the Buggles sampling "Check It Out" (the video is a kick, and if you're not crushed out on Minaj after that, there's something wrong with you), with it's "oh oh" refrain, and Wil.I.Am, and yeah, we sort of dig it, but even here, Minaj's rap is twisted and fucked up and WAY weird, rhythmically off kilter, the rhymes unlikely and funny as fuck. And on "Blazin", with its classic '80s sampling loop, Kanye returns Minaj's "Monster" favor and delivers a pretty excellent guest spot of his own.
But the two best jams are tucked away right at the beginning, after the pop opening, "Roman's Revenge" is spare and stark and fierce and fucked up, the music minimal, and Minaj is on fire, mean and nasty and funny, and she's teamed up with Eminem who spits out his own serious nastiness over a weirdly creepy children's choir backdrop. A whole record of this sort of sick hip hop genius would have made Minaj a legend for sure, and all the haters would be bowing down, but a track like that would never make it on the radio. Neither would the next one "Did It On 'Em", a woozy, synth driven syzurp slither, with its "Did it on 'em, shitt'd on em" refrain, and some gleefully nasty lyrical madness, including "if I had a dick, I would pull it out and piss on 'em", all over a stripped down lo fi beat, and a hazy wheezing buzz.
But sadly, those two tracks are really the only vestiges of the mixtape Minaj everyone wanted more of. That Minaj does pop up here and there throughout the rest of the record, but only occasionally and briefly. So if you have a low tolerance for radio pop, then Pink Friday might be tough going, and you'd probably be better off tracking down those infamous mixtapes, but if you don't mind a little pop, you could definitely do worse, and you get the occasional blast of bafflingly brilliant Minaj, which to us, seems well worth it.
It's been well over a decade since our ears have been assaulted by a -new- recording from intense Swiss industrial-jazz juggernaut 16-17, though thankfully in recent years there's been a couple crucial reissues via the Savage Land label, including one, of 1994's Gyatso, that we made a Record Of The Week not too long ago, in 2008.
While 16-17 are long gone, now it's almost as if some of their extreme spirit has been reincarnated in the form of this new band, MIR, whose debut compact disc on Savage Land is in fact produced by 16-17 mastermind Alex Buess. MIR, it turns out, is the project of one-time 16-17 drummer Daniel Buess (who is apparently NOT related to Alex, oddly enough) in a trio with two others. Daniel is credited with drums, metal percussions, and electronics, while the other members of MIR play guitar, bass, organ, and synth, lots of synth. Heavily effected electronics and punishing percussive strikes are definitely the two key elements of MIR's all-instrumental "experimental rock music" sound. They traffic in droning noise, isolationist improv, sludge and skree filled soundscapery, and no wavish punk, MIR synthesizing something both avant garde and physically primal.
Among the seven tracks on this not-quite-half-hour album, the most 16-17 sounding one here is probably "Animal Instinct", with the swingin' jackboot precision of its big rhythmic boom-thwap, floor-scraping distorted bass, and dense layers of abstract electronic groan and drone (however there's no sax attack though, which is one way that MIR differs from 16-17). To mention a few other songs, there's also the skittery grooves of "Jimbo", the sinister shimmering drones of "Organ Donor", the uptempo energetic guitar throttling of "Hit", and the sudden attacks and echoed decay of the darkly atmospheric "Terminal Reverb", which sounds like it's part Starfuckers, part Spectre.
Also we could also compare MIR to a mix of Supersilent and Shit & Shine, perhaps... along with, of course, 16-17. Very cool, and best played LOUD, if you dare.
Just in! 2nd pressing, now on red instead of green vinyl! If you've still got the holiday spirit, and haven't grabbed one yet, now's your chance before they're gone again...
Along with the recently reissued 12" of holiday faves by Wooden Shjips, WS mainman Ripley Johnson gets similarly festive with his WS offshoot spacekraut combo Moon Duo, which finds Johnson and his partner Sanae Yamada tackling one Christmas classic, and another obscure winter themed cover.
Up first is "Silver Bells, which we had heard described as "Silver Bells meets Silver Machine", but barring the swirls of reverb and the echo-ey vox, the band play it pretty straight, offering up one of the poppiest bounciest jams we've heard from these two. The perfect hazy blur of wasted Christmas cheer for sure.
The flipside finds the band tackling a fairly obscure Rolling Stones track, titled appropriately enough, "Winter", from the Stones' Goats Head Soup record, no one here remembers what the original sounds like exactly (the label describes it accurately as a 'deep cut'), but in the Moon Duo's hands it just becomes another gorgeously washed out smear of spidery glistening guitars, whirling gauzy keyboards, and tripped out reverbed vocal mumbles, all drifting in a wastedly warbly haze, that reminds us way more of the Velvets than the Stones.
A little spacey, a little krautrocky, a little dream poppy, a little Christmasy, but as always, droning and druggy and divine...
For some reason, the name Mountain Man had us imagining some sort of big guy bearded heaviness, a la Tad, big crushing riffs, pounding drums, bellowed vox, but this Mountain Man is actually three ladies, and the sound, is anything but burly and heavy, instead it's lovely and heartfelt, a gorgeous dreamlike Appalachia, a sunshiney country folk. The instrumentation is super minimal, usually just acoustic guitar, cuz it's all about the vocals, which are incredible, lush and lustrous, and emotional, the harmonies incredible, powerful and devotional, evoking classic old time country, Sacred Harp music, the Carter Family, the recordings of Alan Lomax, if it wasn't for the incredible and crystalline production, these songs could be from anywhere, and anytime, the sound most definitely timeless, less a basement show in 2010, and more a rickety porch in rural Alabama in 1950. But somehow equally both.
Totally stunning, and not at all what we were expecting from the kick ass Underwater Peoples label, who in the past have brought us records by Ducktails, Julian Lynch, Real Estate and others...
Pressed on swirled marbled turquoise/blue vinyl!
Brendan Murray, we salute you! You get the reason why there should be a cassette resurrgence - the 90 minute tape! So many noise / drone / floorcore tapes have been released in recent years as 8, 12, 15, 20 minute running times, and it's totally baffling. If you're gonna put out a cassette, let's have the full 90-minute experience as was the norm for any self-respecting mixtape in the '80s and '90s.
So, yes the Boston-based minimalist has cranked out a stunning, slow-crawl tape of suspended tone, that was originally commisioned as some sort of installation thing at Weird Records. The A-side is a brain-drain smear of brass instruments turned into a brash atonal undulation that sounds more like a symphony of junkyard car-horns rather than french horns or trumpets (the more likely culprits). As a result, Murray's piece becomes this glacial recapitulation of a Hermann Nitsch style sonic violence, whose speed is crushingly slow but impossible to avoid. There are also similarities to Murray's highly acclaimed Commonwealth album and its long-stare contest of inevitable decline. If you sit and listen for anything to change there's nothing noticable in the perpetual shimmer and consummate drone; but get up leave the room for a couple of minutes and something will be different - a slight variation in timbre, a repeating form either added or subtracted, a lumbering rhythm oozing from the depths, etc. The B side is not an exact replica of the first, promoting more compositional leaps and starts. In reality these shifts are quite subtle, but given the anesthetizing affect of the A side, any transition is gonna appear like a huge mountain range on a flat surface. Put this up there with LaMonte Young and Charlemange Palestine. Limited to 150 copies of professionally dupped cassettes.
Another unlikely match up, one that sounds a lot less unlikely once you hear it. Wet Hair, formerly known as Raccoo-oo-oon, and Aussie gloomy noise rockers Naked On The Vague, both mixing it up a little for this split (released on Wet Hair's Night People label), expanding their sounds, and dipping toes into new sonic territory.
Wet Hair start their side out with some Tangerine Dream style synths, which drift dronily throughout all the tracks, before giving way to a loping bit of psychedelic drift, equal parts minimal psych rock and keyboard heavy krautrock. Layered synths, softly reverbed distorted vocals, spacey FX, all over a simple post rock-ish real drumming, mesmerizing and hypnotic and reminding us a bit of a more blissed out synth heavy Wooden Shjips. The other tracks follow a similar pattern, but gradually grow more abstract and chaotic, tangles of keyboard melodies, spidery guitars, wheezing chordal drifts, tripped out deep dramatic vocals, swirls and whirls and sixties style sci-fi electronics, everything warped and warbly and fantastically spaced out and bizarre.
Naked On The Vague don't necessarily veer too far from their minimal gloom/drone noisepop, but the sound drifts a bit more toward the psychedelic drift of the Wet Hair tracks, a sort of Velvets vibe for sure, blurry muted guitars, simple programmed beats, bleating trumpet like melodies, swaths of hazy keyboards, boy girl vocal harmonies buried in the murk and the mire, a minimal psychedelic krautdrone drift, super reverbed, the electronics and various background sounds growing more and more frenzied, more atonal, before eventually mutating into a brooding electronic laced doomfolk flecked bit of slowly decaying psychedelic dronemusic.
Pressed on clear vinyl, housed with a nice thick printed insert, silkscreened, purple on yellow, all housed in a thick PVC sleeve, and of course, quite limited...
From the same label that brought us the most recent Clair Cassis ep, and the Velvet Cacoon Dextronaut reissue, comes this, the gorgeous hazy, shoegazey depressive black drone pop debut from Pakistani one man band Necktarium, whose sound is just barely black metal, sure, there's plenty of buzz, and some hellish vokills, but those elements are buried in billowy layers of gauzey fuzz, and washed out shimmer, woozy melancholy melodies, and tinkling pianos, all cloaked in blurry Burzumic thrum, the tempos lazy and laid back and a little waltzy, the sound lush and warm and rife with clean spidery guitars, whirling chordal swells and lovely field recordings. Burbling brooks and bird calls drift beneath a haze of translucent glimmer, soon buried beneath an avalanche of blasting blackness, but that blackness is burnished and glows with a strange warmth, wrapped in tendrils of swoonsome melody, everything indistinct and otherworldly, even at its fiercest, Dreamblur manages to be both, dreamy and blurry, like an even more washed out and druggy Velvet Cacoon, Necktarium paints gorgeous landscapes of abstract sonic drift, black metal rendered in shades of blues and greys, moon lit and obscured by flickering shadows, the sound shifting from murky muddy churn, to hushed chiming ambience, from melancholy lullaby to creeping, lumbering sorrowful blackdoomdrift, from gorgeous crystalline atmospheric minimalism, to lo-fi in-the-red blackblur bliss.
Totally fantastic, and absolutely recommended for anyone into dreamy depressive blackness, washed out shoegazey buzz and dreamy droney blurred and bleary blissiness, and tragically LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!!!!
Woah. Witchcraft fans, listen up!! There's gotta be something supernatural in the water over there in Sweden, 'cause they've somehow conjured up ANOTHER band that channels the swinging riffage and occultic vibe of early '70s Sabbath (and Pentagram) so perfectly, a la Witchcraft. We had thought that Burning Saviours (RIP) were Witchcraft's closest doppelgangers, but these young guys do a damn good job of it too. Other bands in this vein include Graveyard, Horisont, Troubled Horse (well they're mostly all Witchcraft members, that one), and Dead Man... now add Noctum to that list and put 'em at the top! Not what we were expecting, with its cover art and logo, this looks a bit more like black metal, but these Swedes are definitely practicing an earlier form of witchcraft for this seance of theirs... Quite a nice surprise, if something that sounds so familiar can be called a surprise.
Probably if the singer didn't have that particular Swedish-accented lilt to his voice (all songs but one, "Den Onda Trollpackan", are sung in English), and did more of an overt Ozzy, we'd be calling 'em Sabbath clones (first 3 albums!) rather than Witchcraft ones, but the combination of Pentagram/Sabbath stylings and the emotive, melodic, sincere-sounding vocals definitely spell Witchcraft. (Though "Lucifer's Way" also reminds us of a song by heavy progressive krautrockers Dies Irae!).
We thought of trying to review this without playing up the Witchcraft-iness of it, but really, if you like Witchcraft (and who doesn't?) you'll find this a pleasure - and if you aren't yet into Witchcraft, you should probably start with one of their own albums anyway. Though this would do in a pinch! Sabbath fans, too, queue up. Noctum possess a very Iommi-ish guitar tone for sure. Goes great with their undeniably catchy, and heavy, riffs. Throw in crashing cymbals, bellbottomed lope, and urgent-sounding songwriting infused with portents of doom, and you've got something that's more authentically 1971 proto-metal than most things from 1971!
LIMITED to 500 numbered copies.
The return of the Brooklyn based boy-girl, bass and drums duo Orphan, with another slab of thick fuzzed out riffing and thunderous drum damage, here matched up with the until now unknown to us Dope Body who somehow sound like an impossible hybrid of Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Man Is The Bastard, and Konono No.1! More on those guys in a sec. First up, ORPHAN.
Like on past records, these two bash and pound, the bass blown out and distorted the riffs massive and fuzzy, the drums pounding and crashing, with a sound that lurks somewhere between Bleach era Nirvana and Unsane, a sort of pop flecked low end noise rock, that KILLS. And everything we love about Orphan is in full effect here, AND they do a cover, that suddenly reveals another band we would never have thought to compare them to but makes perfect sense, UNWOUND! They definitely have that same sort of nineties noise rock sound, and they prove it by making Unwound's "Dragnalus" their very own, a bit sludgier and downtuned than the original, but with all the same energy. Which is exactly what infuses the other songs here, the sound is proggy, mathy, sludgey, metallic, heavy, noisy, poppy, bombastic, sweaty and frantic and seriously fun. But also a bit dark and menacing at the same time.
The real discovery for us here, though, is Dope Body, who we know very little about, but the first track sounds like a noise rock Konono No.1, which pretty much sealed the deal in seconds, chiming guitar harmonics, wild tribal drumming, yelped vox, crunchy and distorted and rhythmic and fucking awesome, quickly becoming something more like a Deerhoof meets Melt Banana sort of thing, which again, is perfectly fine with us! The sound is super varied and weird as all get out and all over the map, super mathy and bizarre, like Man Is The Bastard one second, howled vox and fuzz bass and Neanderthal pound, frantic and frenzied Lightning Bolt the next, freaked out math prog held down by some super chaotic drumming, and then still later, a sort of home brewed industrial, fractured and fucked up, twisted and cracked, the sound flitting between those various sounds, often mashing 2 or more into a whole new weirdo sound. But whatever it is, we LOVE it.
Gorgeously packaged of course. Thick silkscreened jacket, each one hand numbered, and limited to 500 copies, with a nice, printed heavy paper insert as well.
We had never heard of Outer Limits Recordings until we reviewed that LA Vampires record, which featured someone called Matrix Metal, apparently a member of OLR, or maybe he IS Outer Limits Recordings, but we liked that collaboration enough to be curious so we were psyched to check out these two new singles, which actually ended up sounding a lot different than we expected. The sounds on that collab were all electronic and future funky and twisted lo-fi beatsmithery, so that's sort of what we were imagining, but instead, OLR traffic in low fidelity outsider psychedelic lysergic garage pop, fitting comfortably alongside Ariel Pink, Gary War, Blank Dogs and the like.
I Need My TV features two tracks that sound like they could have come straight from the eighties, the first, the title track, is all electronic drums, super processed electric guitars, crooning multitracked vocals, super sugary power pop hooks, all wrapped into a song that either sounds genuinely vintage, or like some Ween style perfect pastiche, a little bit cheesy, but super super catchy. The flipside features a cover of some band we've never heard of (if it's really a cover at all), and is another blast of electronic pop that sounds like it could have been plucked right off the radio circa 1983, a little soulful, a little funky, a little electro, cheesy eighties pop, that manages to be crazy catchy, and still sound like the current strain of retro lo-fi garage pop. There's even a whistling solo!
Julie offers up another couple eighties style electro pop gems, the title track, if it weren't so lo-fi, sounds like it could be M83, all after school, Breakfast Club style epic, and actually the more we listen to it, it sort of sounds like unsung UK power poppers Silver Sun, albeit slowed down and a bit warped.
The B side again revisits the same sound, bouncy new wavey pop, with jangly guitars, soaring vocals, sounding like whoever Outer Limits Recordings is or are, they must do nothing but watch old VHS tapes of eighties MTV, which they then translate into their own music, incorporating all the glitches and strange audio drop outs that come with that outdated technology. We're not complaining, AT ALL. We love this stuff, and these two singles have been on heavy rotation. Now we need to get our hands on an OLR full length...
We had never heard of Outer Limits Recordings until we reviewed that LA Vampires record, which featured someone called Matrix Metal, apparently a member of OLR, or maybe he IS Outer Limits Recordings, but we liked that collaboration enough to be curious so we were psyched to check out these two new singles, which actually ended up sounding a lot different than we expected. The sounds on that collab were all electronic and future funky and twisted lo-fi beatsmithery, so that's sort of what we were imagining, but instead, OLR traffic in low fidelity outsider psychedelic lysergic garage pop, fitting comfortably alongside Ariel Pink, Gary War, Blank Dogs and the like.
I Need My TV features two tracks that sound like they could have come straight from the eighties, the first, the title track, is all electronic drums, super processed electric guitars, crooning multitracked vocals, super sugary power pop hooks, all wrapped into a song that either sounds genuinely vintage, or like some Ween style perfect pastiche, a little bit cheesy, but super super catchy. The flipside features a cover of some band we've never heard of (if it's really a cover at all), and is another blast of electronic pop that sounds like it could have been plucked right off the radio circa 1983, a little soulful, a little funky, a little electro, cheesy eighties pop, that manages to be crazy catchy, and still sound like the current strain of retro lo-fi garage pop. There's even a whistling solo!
Julie offers up another couple eighties style electro pop gems, the title track, if it weren't so lo-fi, sounds like it could be M83, all after school, Breakfast Club style epic, and actually the more we listen to it, it sort of sounds like unsung UK power poppers Silver Sun, albeit slowed down and a bit warped.
The B side again revisits the same sound, bouncy new wavey pop, with jangly guitars, soaring vocals, sounding like whoever Outer Limits Recordings is or are, they must do nothing but watch old VHS tapes of eighties MTV, which they then translate into their own music, incorporating all the glitches and strange audio drop outs that come with that outdated technology. We're not complaining, AT ALL. We love this stuff, and these two singles have been on heavy rotation. Now we need to get our hands on an OLR full length...
Adam Pacione's blissed ambience has quietly enthralled us over many years now; and he continues his relationship with the exceptional Elevator Bath label, who has issued this wondrous album through an ongoing series of picture discs that previously included work by Rick Reed, our own Jim Haynes, and Dale Lloyd (reviewed elsewhere on this list). Pacione claims a bunch of sources for Dobranoc, including guitar, field recordings, analogue synth, Moog filters, and shortwave radio. He seems intent on extracting particular, harmonious colors from each of those materials and working them into a monochromatic blur of softened dronescaping and hushed ambience. The faintest of half-melodies work through Pacione's stately compositions; and it's easy to become lost in these extended moments on Dobranoc. Throughout, Pacione streams a series of delicate textures that could be snow coming through the radio, or it could be a light shower of rain that settles behind much of Pacione's sustained tonal flutterings. No matter the source, the slight abrasions of these sounds act as a ghostly counterpoint to the purity that Pacione gets out of his drones. The resulting wanderings through his radiant soundfields have much of the sense of mystery that Zoviet France managed on Shadow Thief Of The Sun or that emerged from the more minimal explorations of Stars Of The Lid. The picture disc features two blurred macro-lens images sporting oversaturated colors abstracted through the lens; and these are suitable visuals to accompany Pacione's ethereal work. Limited to 268 copies.
More deep new age drones from this New Zealand artist, this time focussed on the universal canopy of the sky. Akash in Sanskrit means sky or ether and all that it embraces, but it's also the name of India's medium-range, surface-to-air missile defense system. That duality of meaning informs these long-form drone compositions exploring the realm of atmospheres that encompass all life as well as embodying a complete and total emptiness. What we like most about Parson's work is the natural quality of sound he gets from pure synthesis, evoking a heavy weightlessness that is meditative and peaceful with just enough edge to create a slightly unsettling feeling. Fans of Klaus Schulze, Ashra and Tangerine Dream should definitely check this out.
We got a little taste of Peaking Lights on their split with Wet Hair, as part of the Not Not Fun Bored Fortress 7" series, and we loved their murky bass heavy drone pop and were definitely hankering for more. And here it is, in the shape of a one sided clear vinyl silkscreened 12", three new tracks of murky spaced out hypnotic riffage, sprawled out over a single side, these three tracks ooze and drift, a sort of disembodied abstract psychedelic space boogie, crumbling rock riffage draped over a morass of echo and reverb and crumbling distortion, the vocals high and keening and wrapped in reverb. The sound shifts a bit and becomes more rhythmic and hypnotic, swirly and softly buzzing, blissed out and droney, laced with shamen like vocalizing over tangled muddied riffing and some skeletal robotic percussion. The final track is the prettiest of the bunch, an epic slab of blown out hypno-drone psych buzz, another machine like rhythm, tinkling pianos, wheezing chords, all held together by undulating layers of fuzz, and all blurred into a fantastically hazy ritual of washed out dreamdronedrift.
The lp is pressed on clear vinyl, one side is silkscreened, the lp is packaged with a heavy paper insert, also silkscreened, green on green, all housed in a thick PVC plastic sleeve. And of course, limited...
Phantom Payn Days was the mid-to-late '90s solo project of Juergen Gleue, who some of you might know as one half of Germany's mysterious electro punks 39 Clocks. Musically Phantom Payn Days shares a similar approach, with results that are perhaps a little more upbeat and less nihilistic, at least in the sound department. While the Clocks displayed an appropriately stripped down approach, things are even more so here, which of course makes sense, as it's just one guy who was already part of an expertly minimal project in the first place. Despite the demo like recording quality here - which is actually just as good and more effective than a lot of stuff that comes out today - Gleue's songwriting talents and his grasp of melody are what make things stand out. Dreamy keyboards, sparse percussion, and highly melodic droney guitars accompany Gleue's detached, accented vocals, which will be immediately recognizable to anyone who's heard 39 Clocks. The lack of information here adds to the weird, timeless quality and you certainly won't think "90s" when you hear this. Scuzzy but surprisingly melodic, hazy and ethereal, Phantom Payn Days is another winner from this dude we know next to nothing about.
We made Reuber's Ring a Record Of The Week a little while back, the latest solo record from Timo Reuber, who is one half of the electronic duo Klangwart. Ring was fantastic, super varied, slipping from kosmische dronemusic to pulsing psychedelic techno to spacey new wave. We loved it so much, that many of us got a little obsessed, and decided to dig deeper and check out some of Reuber's other releases. Thus we have this, Reuber's second solo release, from 2001, the title translating to "Stay Cool", the bulk of which is made up of the two part title track, each part about 22 minutes. The first part, definitely in keeping with the album title, is an extended electronic dronescape, shimmery and crystalline, lush yet delicate, warm tones drifting from speaker to speaker, bathed in a hazy glow, meditative and dreamlike, new agey and a little bit krautrocky, soft flurries of notes dissipate into gauzy streaks, bits of electronic glitch and spacey effects surface here and there, like the score for some educational film about interplanetary travel. The sounds eventually coalesce into an almost rhythm, pulsing warmly, wreathed in strange atonal melodies, before quickly blissing out again, and spreading out into a barely there cloud of glistening, tinkling blur.
The second part of the title track is pretty much the opposite, a pulsing metallic buzz like rhythm, skeletal and mechanical, skitters and shuffles, the sounds growing more and more thick and buzzy, distorted and intense, eventually becoming almost Merzbowian, thick and corrosive, yet still somehow warm and melodic, a wildly buzzing chunk of hypnotic spaced out rhythm, the timbre constantly shifting too, from dense and layered, to brittle and tinny, finally to fully blown out and in-the-red. All the while managing to sound kosmische and psychedelic, under that coating of crunch and thrum and buzz and glitch.
Finally, the record finishes off with another bit of 'cool'ness, a relatively brief (7+ minutes), of hazy high end shimmer, a warm whirling drift of subtle overtones, slow shifting layers, of blurred melodies and glowing near static thrum, a perfect bit of tranquil mesmer to finish with.
Fantastic stuff, anyone who dug Ring will like this too, and anyone into kosmische drift, and spacey new age kraut drone, who is not averse to a little bit of crunch and buzz, this will definitely hit the spot.
Nice 180 gram Rhino vinyl reish of this 1978 poppy punky new wavey classic from Glaswegian rockers the Rezillos, which includes such energetic "hits" (in an alternate, much cooler universe, at any rate) as "Flying Saucer Attack", "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures", "Bad Guy Reaction", "Top Of The Pops", and their hard hitting cover of early Fleetwood Mac garage stomper "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight". Though the Rezillos were one of Scotland's first Pistols-era punk bands, they liked their '60s stuff, doing some other '60s covers besides the Mac, also suitably punked up. Faye Fife's vocals provide some melodic balance to the more sneering-sounding, tougher male ones. Not that she doesn't sound tuff too. Super good tunes, good times, yeah!!
Don't just take it from us, J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. has been quoted as saying that Can't Stand The Rezillos is the best album Sire ever put out. And that's saying a lot, since in just '78 alone Sire released albums by the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, and the Flamin' Groovies, among many others...
