We've been waiting for this one for a while now. The infamous, and much talked about "mushroom record" from this SF improv psychedelic space rock collective. So called, because the entire thing was conceived, created, performed AND recorded while the entire band was under the influence of magic mushrooms.
Close to 40 minutes (edited down from much more than that, although it's unclear whether it was also edited in the same state), of gorgeous, tripped out, abstract psychedelia, sprawling swirls of kosmische drift, all blurred guitars, krautrock like pulses, streaks of druggy FX, throbbing propulsive bass, equal parts total spaced out ambience, and head nodding hypnotic motorik churn, the opening track "Fahren Bei Tag", starts off with nearly 5 minutes of hazy atmospheric exploration, before the drums finally kick in, and it's another minute or two before the band lock into a serious cosmic kraut groove, but when they do, it's exultant, the pulsing bass and stripped down drumming, surrounded by gorgeous peals of fragmented melody, thick corrosive swells of undulating high end, grinding chunks of feedback drenched chordal buzz, all winding down after about 13 minutes, leading directly into a bit of super melodic Neu! worship, with some washed out swirl and shimmer and a playful meditative main melody, this time the vibe much more new age-y and drifty, sun dappled and dreamy, the warm processed guitars conjuring up a lush layered bed of rapid pulses, over which synths whir and warble, and that main melody drifts on and on.
The title track, clocking in at 13+ minutes, is definitely the record's centerpiece, a dark brooding epic, haunting and otherworldly. The rhythm skeletal and spare, the wheezing keyboards hovering amidst rubbery basslines and glitch electronics, the vibe very gothic and gloomy, but shot through with bits of melody and light, it's a slow build, but not in the traditional sense, it doesn't get louder or heavier so much as subtly more intense, totally hypnotic and mesmerizing, the core sounds soon joined by bird calls and other field recordings, strange burbling liquids (bongs perhaps?), swooping streaks of electronics and processed effects, it sounds like it could have gone on for another 13 minutes (and probably did).
The final track, is another organ driven droner, dark and dense and deep, the drums more free and skittery, everything muted and washed out, the organs doing most of the melodic heavy lifting, and much of the textural as well, the bass thick and ropy, anchoring the whole thing, keeping it from drifting off into the stratosphere. Warm and whirring, dreamily druggy and so so good.
We tend to love everything 3 Leafs does, but this might just be their best. Although we can't vouch for how it sounds when listened to on mushrooms as well. Guess we'll leave that up to some of you out there.
Featuring members of the Fresh & Onlys, Tussle, Horn Of Dagoth, Amocoma, Citay and a bunch more. And most definitely recommended for fans of Expo 70, White Hills, the Heads, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, Sleepy Sun, Burnt Hills, Gnod and other practitioners of modern kraut / space / psych. And it's probably pretty dang limited too...
With this, their fourth album, these previous AQ Record Of The Week honorees, the oddly named Italian group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, have again given us a precious glimpse into their sonic dreamworld, and we say YAY to that. Kinda wish we could stay there forever, this music has such an engaging embrace, part abstract soundscape, part gentle melodiousness, part drone, part indie-pop, definitely not too far removed from some Jewelled Antler output, with a little This Heat or Village Of Savoonga mixed in. Our idea of blissful "oblivion" indeed, these mysterious and experimental lullabies of hum, hiss, buzz.
Various instruments, field recordings, electronics, turntables, percussion, the human voice, all are utilized to create the four tracks on this tightly crafted 39 minute disc. The very first piece, the longest at 17 minutes, introduces all the ingredients... gentle vinyl crackles, looping along with shimmering swells of strings and synth. Occasional hits of a snare. Hints of piano melody, amidst equally restrained electronic glitch. Environmental noises, tape manipulations. Bringing this somehow into an avant pop orbit, there's layers of vague vocals, or even simply sometimes just the breathy suggestion of vocals, that in this sonic setting recall to us Richard Youngs and Robert Wyatt, with their ghostly fragility.
Definitely a wonderful reminder of why we've always loved this band so much, highly recommended!
Brand new record from these Italian post/avant black metallers, and their first record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is kind of crazy, considering most of the aQ metalheads have been big fans ever since their debut in 1999. And since that debut, the band has continued to stretch the boundaries of their particular brand of black metal, culminating in this, the single song, ten movement electro black metal concept record that is Psychogrotesque.
Beginning with a bit of creaking industrial ambiance, the record soon launches into a twisted tangled bit of gnarled blackness, blasting beats, chugging riffs, and a swirl of squiggly lead guitars, not to mention little flurries of electronic crunch and glitch, all backed up by choral like voices, and some almost ravey synths, that weirdness is balanced by the croaking lead vocals, and the sinister, minor key melodies, the track swings from churning buzzing blackness, to melodic soaring majesty, to off kilter mathiness and back again. The second movement explodes with some frenzied black metal buzz, but it's swaddled in more synths, the electronic element making it sound alien and futuristic, before shrugging off the synths and delving into some frosty true grim blackness.
And the record just gets weirder and weirder from there on out. The synths competing with the riffs, the arrangements almost orchestral, but instead of woodwinds and brass and strings, it's whirling buzzing keyboards and programmed beats, the vokills are constantly transformed, occasionally becoming a deep dramatic croon, most noticeably in the sixth movement, when those vocals are paired with some Gerry Rafferty style way-out-of-place saxophone, and sure, there's plenty of straight ahead blackness, but there are also jams that sound like black metal Daft Punk, or some bizarre hybrid of the two, and then there's the epic final track that is impossibly epic and twisted, the black metal component furious and frenzied, the over the top electronic bits cranked all the way up, so tense and intense and heavy and twisted and totally bizarre, and be sure to stick around for the hidden final track/coda, strange sampled vocals, over hazy electronic shimmer, the sound gristly and gauzy and darkly mysterious, making us wish they would have kept it going well past its far too brief two minutes.
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Latest from long time aQ fave one man ultra doom outfit, Amort, here expanded to a quartet, with extra members handling gong, keys, saxophone and extra guitar. Here teamed up with crusty black metal punks Ives.
Amort offer up a single 14 minute track, the begins with haunting female vocals, over deep reverberating piano, and rumbling low end drones, very ritualistic and choral, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in, that the song splinters into what sounds like some sort of abstract free jazz doom, the gong rippling out thick metallic waves of sound, the sax skronking and squeaking, all wrapped in thick whorls of rumble and thrum, a monstrous ominous slo-mo creep, until finally, the song proper kicks in after about 5 minutes, an impossibly glacial chunk of slow motion doom sludge, drumless, and surprisingly melodic, the melodies nearly pop, but the guitars oozing and blackened, the vocals a demonic gurgle, a strange combination for sure, this filthy downtuned evil sound, but the song itself almost happy, like some pop song slowed waaaaaaaay down and then filtered through Corrupted and Nortt and Bunkur, the prettiest, most melodic slab of ultradoom you'll ever hear. It does build, and get louder and louder, there are spidery guitar leads, and more piano, but the sound never gets any less melodic.
Ives are pretty much on the other end of the sonic spectrum entirely, spitting out blasting, thrashing crusty blackness, minor key riffing, furious pounding drumming, harsh vokills, sonically quite akin to the punkier Darkthrone sound, or classic Discharge, but for every bit of D-beat pound, the band unleash a blast of face melting black metal buzz, the sound lo-fi, but still heavy and frantic and frenzied, brutal and blasting, galloping and churning, crusty but plenty grim and black. Killer stuff from both bands, the Ives stuff is from an old cassette, so a little curious to hear more recent stuff, and Amort, well, we can never get enough of their/his gloriously abject slow motion piano pounding dismal doom...
Here's a new one from this Italian one man black metal band, the awesomely (and confusionally) titled Death Grows Into Sperm, with it's equally confusional cover, featuring some sort of demonic sperm/skull hybrid.
For a self described practitioner of "harsh impudent black metal", much of DGIS is surprisingly melodic and lush, especially the opening two part epic (and the closing two parter, but more on that in a second), the intro is all clean guitars, and swirling swells and proggy synths, when the track proper kicks in, the guitars soar majestically, the tempo more doomy and midtempo than black and thrashing, still heavy on the melody, until about 4 minutes in, when some frantic riffing surfaces, and the sound explodes into some seriously bleak and blasting blackness. But even, then the sound is infused with melody, a subtle poppiness, that manages to make the fury and force stick in your head.
The sound shifts quite a bit too, from Nordic style classic black metal, to more traditional eighties style heavy metal riffing, those elements woven together by serpentine guitar leads, and those aforementioned melodies. The middle chunk of the record is much more traditionally grim and black, buzzy and blasting, still rife with bits of melody and unlikely arrangements, until the final two part closing songsuite, which mirrors the opening, creating a super lush and intricate blackened prog epic, lots of spidery clean guitars, droned out buzz, some black blasts for sure, but way heavier on the melody and the atmosphere, especially the second part, which spends the majority of its 8 minutes blurring and swirling and drifting like some Tim Hecker-ish bit of gauzy atmospheric ambience, interrupted briefly by a bit of super melodic heavy riffing, but otherwise left to whir and chime and float and finally fade out.
Grim, black, majestic, epic and melodic, and way recommended for folks who dig that sort of thing. Which we're guessing is a whole lot of you.
This one shouldn't need much of a description. The debut full length from this new group featuring Kevin Morby from psychedelic stoner folk garage poppers Woods, and Cassie Ramone from girl garage group the Vivian Girls, and it sounds just like you'd expect/imagine/hope. A perfect mix of the two. Fuzzy, jangly, ramshackle boy/girl lo-fi garage rock / indie pop, big crunchy guitars, simple pounding drumming, droned out repetitive melodies, and some seriously killer hooks. A little bit Velvets, a little Ramones/Misfits (in that sort of hooky poppy punkness), some stonery psychedelia, lots of bouncy and poppy pep, plenty of echo and reverb, the songs slipping from wild and punky and loose and loud, to more dark and layered and less raucous, to hazy and sun dappled and folky. And of course the dueling boy/girl vox and the occasional harmonies which result only seal the deal.
Fans of both Woods and Vivian Girls will of course dig, but so will anyone into Thee Oh Sees, The Dum Dum Girls, Royal Baths, the Mantles, Brilliant Colors, Male Bonding, Parting Gifts, Home Blitz, the Vaselines, Vermillion Sands, Grass Widow and the rest of the current crop of garage-y jangle poppers...
Okay drug rock freeks, space rock explorers, doomlords, sludge demons, prog obsessives, metal maniacs, stoner dudes, noise nerds, and basically most of the other folks who read this here aQ list, Bad Acid is the magazine for you. And calling Bad Acid a magazine is a bit of a misnomer. It's more of a multimedia spacemetaldoomprogsludgenoise experience. You think we're exaggerating? A seventy minute dvd, an ELEVEN HOUR mp3 audio disc, a nearly two hour long label sampler, AND a 60 page booklet/magazine packed with liner notes, articles and interviews.
Packed with SO many aQ favorites, but just as many new bands we'd never heard, a bunch who could very well turn into new favorites. We've barely scratched the surface, since if we spent 14 hours on each review, the list would be, oh, about 5 items long. But from what we've heard / seen / watched so far, this latest issue of Bad Acid is pretty essential.
The dvd first, a series of music videos, film excerpts and slide shows, we were mostly excited about the scenes from an Antonius Rex movie, Antonius Rex being the dude from JACULA!! Tripped out and satanic and appropriately what-the-fuck. Some killer live footage of doom mongers Ogre, a killer art gallery slide show from the Malleus artist collective, featuring an awesome soundtrack from Morkobot, a Northwinds video, and then some more obscure stuff, Manatees tour video, Wicked Minds video, King Suffy Generator video, Lento live footage and tons more. All woven together by some super creepy animated menus.
Then there's the cd-r, featuring 11 hours of mp3's from Moss, Danava, White Hills, Barbara, Hey Colossus, Orange Sunshine, Capricorns, Khlyst, Acid King, Heresi, Raw Radar War, Fire Witch, Taint, Orange Goblin, Shinjuku Thief, Litmus and those are just the bands we know and already dig. 57 bands total, 102 tracks, tons of new bands to check out and discover. Also included is a label sampler focusing on the Bone Structure cd-r label, whose releases run the gamut from raw black metal, to buzzing industrial noise, to black ambient to grinding industrial weirdness. We actually have some BS stuff on the way, to be reviewed on the list soon, but this is a killer way to check out tons of stuff on the label.
And then there's the actual magazine component, with notes on each of the bands on the cd-r, a feature on each of the bands on the dvd, tons of info about Bone Structure and the bands on the label, as well as interviews with Fire Witch, Taint, Orange Goblin, and probably most exciting of all Alan Dubin, formerly of Khanate, talking about his new band Gnaw, which features folks from Burning Witch, Thorr's Hammer, Atavist, Enos Slaughter and Ike Yard(!). Man, we can't wait to hear that.
All of the above packaged in a standard dvd style case, with killer cover art from the Malleus Rock Art Lab. A bit pricey due to the weak dollar and the expensive overseas shipping, but pretty well worth it.
Yet another incredible collection of far out sights and sounds from the folks at Bad Acid. Everything from sludge to doom to psych to stoner rock to noise to weird jazz to fractured electronics to post rock and pretty much every stop in between. Rumor is that Bad Acid might be shifting to a monthly release schedule, which is certainly fine with us, but considering how much stuff is jammed into each Tab, we have no idea how these guys will be able to pull it off. But here's hoping, cuz not only is every issue loaded with tons of mp3s and videos and live performances from bands we already love, but also included are tons of bands we'd never even heard of before, many of which end up being be big time favorites.
This time around, the audio compilation includes tracks from Gnod, Harvey Milk, Oxbow, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Moss, 5ive, Berkowitz Lake & Dahmer, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Zu, Btong, Skull Defekts, Burmese, Cadaver Eyes, Pendo, L'Otracina, Enablers, Outrageous Cherry, Millions, Kenji Siratori, A Fashionable Disease, and that's just the bands we know, there are FORTY FIVE other bands!!! The dvd features Bay Area stoner stalwarts Acid King, as well as a whole mess of mostly new to us bands, offering up promo videos, live sets as well as animation and other visual weirdness. There's also a label sampler included on the disc, and then there's still the printed magazine! A thick dvd sized booklet, overflowing with interviews and articles and features and reviews, with most of the bands featured on the dvd as well all the notes for the artists included on the dvd (both the audio and video portion). Easily one of the most amazing resources for tripped out weird underground and independent music, and for discovering new bands, or even for actually finally hearing bands you'd always wondered about, it's a big ol' earful, and an eyeful, so best to set aside some serious listening / reading time, and just dive in. After all, since they might be bumping up their schedule, you might only have the next 30 days to make it through all this Bad Acid before you have Tab 9 to contend with...
We have been DYING for this. The Black Bug I Don't Like You 7" was probably our favorite single of the last however many years, we've played it to death, over and over, just waiting for a full length to materialize, hoping and praying it would be even half as good as the 7", but maybe steeling ourselves for disappointment. But thankfully that steeling was totally unnecessary, as the full length more than lives up to the impossible expectations set by that two song salvo.
This Swedish new wave garage punk 3 piece are a furious feral synth driven monster, their sound equal parts cold wave gloom, riot grrl yowl, in-the-red punk rock, and ultra raw blown out garage pop, but even that's a bit reductive, there's something magical about what these three conjure up, both in sound and song, with just synth, bass, vocals and programmed drums. Their sound is all over the map, from howling pounding furious crunch, to warped woozy synthy drone, to dour pulsing minimal cold wave, to super anthemic almost emo garage rock, and every variation in between. The recording is raw and lo-fi, the drums, the synths, the bass, the vocals, in various stages of blown out distorted crumble, the drums are clipped and weirdly processed, pushed as loud as they can go, the synth too, fuzzy, buzzy, wreathed in a sort of decaying haze, the vocals of frontwoman Lily are wild and unhinged and super emotional, sometimes a playful yelp, sometimes a cold croon, other times a full on hysterical shriek.
But it's not just the sound, the songs are incredible, short sharp bursts of new wave gloom pop. "Fell In Love With" is like a lo-fi riot grrl Soft Cell, with stuttery drums, insanely distorted synth and blown out bass, and Lily's vocals so intense and snarly, a depressive descending melody that is totally irresistible. "Inside Out", one of the few songs with male vocals, courtesy of Lily's partner Ruslav, a brooding propulsive chunk of synth doom, Joy Division via Cold Cave, like a more raw and lo-fi Sixx or Soror Dolorosa. "The Wave" is like an ultra raw lo-fi Aavikko a sort of woozy alien krautrock, "Beating Your Heart Out" is the buzz synth breakup song you blast in headphones to soothe your black and broken heart, a cathartic buzz drenched dirge, "I've Got Eyes" sounds like it could have been on Captured Tracks or Sacred Bones, that sort of modern retro synth wave weirdness that anyone into Blessure Grave or Blank Dogs should lose their shit over, "Make Her" is like some lost riot grrl anthem, run through a bank of busted effects pedals and broadcast through a wall of blown speakers, warped and warbly and crumbling before your ears, but somehow, still heavy and hooky and fucking incredible.
This whole record is visceral and immediate, emotional and bombastic, a bloody screaming sonic gem, equal parts heart and hooks, groove and grind, blast and buzz, an insanely catchy chunk of ultra blown out, bloodied and bruised, gloom-wave noise-pop genius. Record Of The Week, fuck that. Record Of The Year!!!!
OK, they're called BONGRIPPER. The record is called Satan Worshipping Doom. The song titles, and there are four of them, are as follows: "Hail", "Satan", "Worship", "Doom". Both the front and back covers are adorned with eye popping Bosch-ian paintings of weird goat headed demons and naked ladies, and flames and birds, and strange plants, and lots of wrong heads on wrong bodies, and flames, and demons, and well, you get the drift.
So one guess as to what this sounds like.
Epic, monstrous, big riff slo-mo satanic sludge doom heaviness from these Midwestern miscreants. We've been fans for a while, having dug their first few hippie hating outings, Hippie Killer, and Hate Ashbury (which featured killer cover art of a big set of hedge clippers about to snip the fingers off a hand making the peace sign), but this is the first one we could get in enough numbers to review / list. Which is a shame, cuz these guys rule. But at least now, with Satan Worshipping Doom, the rest of the world can finally revel in the epic downtuned riffage and filthy crusty pummel of these doomlords. And the best part? NO VOCALS. Yep, all instrumental, so if you hate the sort of hysterical shrieking, or can't stand the howling bellow, or are annoyed by the cookie monster gurgle, well, you're in luck, cuz this is ALL RIFFS, and nothing but, sludgey, doomy, Sabbathy, a little bit of swing, a little stonery, lurching, and lumbering, staggering and stumbling, pounding and pummeling. But the band do mix it up, adding some cool minimal leads, that almost sound more like vocals than guitars, what sounds like synths here and there, even some electronics, the sound and songs super dynamic, slipping from all out assault, to swoonsome droned out dirge, to Sabbathy Swing, to full bore glacial crush, to epic ultra doom trudge, but somehow, even sans vocals, these guys manage to keep it interesting, the songs catchy as hell, heavy and hateful, doomy and moody and sometimes a little melodic, but always fucking crushing and heavy as hell.
You shouldn't even need a list, but just in case, this is totally essential for anyone who digs The Body, Cough, Thou, Electric Wizard, Bong, Sleep, Bongzilla, Cavity, Church Of Misery, Om, Dopethrone, Eternal Elysium, Los Natas, Reverend Bizarre, Ufomammut, and all that sort of stonery, Sabbathy, doomy, sludgey, riffy heaviness...
San Francisco boasts a great history of kick ass party bands who have the ability to get a warehouse full of sweaty folks lost in pulsating sounds. From Tussle, Numbers, Dynasty Handbag, The Vanishing, Harold Ray Live In Concert, Jonas Reinhardt (in their live incarnation) - SF bands have proven you can be fun and smart at the same time. Boyz IV Men follow in this great tradition as the torch carriers for sweaty dance floor jams done so totally right. Armed with analog synths and a minimal drumkit, they blast out electro jams that feel like a less precious Ratatat or a more DIY minded Justice or Simian Mobile Disco. We love how they maintain a raw and gritty sound in the midst of their all out body moving bangers. So damn good!
The lp comes with a coupon for a digital download of the album.
While Exotika is the fourth and final volume of Chris & Cosey's reissue campaign, this is not the fourth record in their discography. That designation goes to the 1985 album Techno Primitiv, and while there might be some reason for this chronological anomaly, here we have the 1987 album Exotica. At this point in the history of Chris & Cosey, the two had been collecting a considerable amount of gear, expanding upon the voltage control Gristlising machines Chris built for Throbbing Gristle and working with a much more complex MIDI set-up alongside a bunch of Roland drum machines, bass sequencers, and the like (There's a long interview with Chris Carter geeking out over all the gear, for those who may want to know what he was using out of the box). All of this was certainly at the cutting edge of technology in 1987, but you get the sense that Chris & Cosey might have had too many ideas for the technology to handle. The punchy rhythms which drove a good number of their earlier records (and some of the TG tracks as well) move on Exotica at a downtempo electro pace, as if the speed of each tune needed to be slow enough for all of the MIDI gear to catch up to without crapping out. Regardless, Chris & Cosey work well with this slinky, disjointed electro pacing that's always punctuated with a whipcrack of the snare for a seductive, dominatrix vibe. "Dancing On Your Grave" is a particularly choice track, noted more for Cosey's uncharacteristic operatic style of singing which meant bellowing the lyrics instead of whispering them as a sultry spell. "BeatBeatBeat" finds Cosey purposefully clipping her words to match the stream of movie dialogue snippets, moans, screams, and howls that decorate all of the percolating electronics and minimal wave surface tension. The production on Exotica is particularly clean, even as they've polished up all of these early recordings for this vinyl remastering. Here, the duo are more in line with the British avant-pop constructions of He Said, Art Of Noise, and some of the more disjointed moments of New Order.
Album number three from the electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey is Songs Of Love & Lust, which originally came out on Rough Trade back in 1984. It was on this album that the signature sounds of Chris & Cosey really developed as something other than what they managed to produce in Throbbing Gristle. It may not be a surprise that this was also around the same time that the other former TG members began to really flourish in their own projects with Psychic TV's masterful Dreams Less Sweet and the epic Scatology record by Coil. Here, on Songs Of Love & Lust, Chris & Cosey were polishing their electro / minimal wave surfaces with hypnotic cascades of arpeggiating synths, plucky drum machinations, and outright majestic swells of electronic wash. A handful of these tracks clearly became anthemic floorfillers that inspired acid house in Chicago, EBM in Belgium, and the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno. "Walking Through Heaven" is one such track with its soaring sustained electronics counterpointing all of the scintillatingly brilliant sequencing. Chris Carter had long been a non-ironic fan of Abba, and yes, he was responsible for the cold-sex disco TG classic "Hot On The Heels Of Love" which essentially eviscerated the Abba structures of baroque disco down to a skeletal rhythm with an uncomfortably breathy sensuality thanks to Cosey's vocals. And the ghosts of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "United" (another stellar Carter engineered TG song) emerge within this album (e.g. "Love Cuts," "Chiron" and "Driving Blind"), although they are wholly detacted from the grand guignol commentaries of TG. Rather, Chris & Cosey spoke more of a cybernetic sensuality, embracing the technologies around them as a means of expressing, well songs of love and lust. This album has held up remarkably well, and is required listening for anybody who's been gobbling up anything on Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, Anna Logue, or Vinyl-on-Demand.
San Francisco based visual artist and composer, Ishan Clemenco, in conjunction with a show at NOMA Gallery has released this special edition 10" on dandelion-yellow color vinyl. Consisting of two pieces, the first, "Afterlight (for Henning Christiansen)" is a 7-minute fragment of a longer work for found pianos. Taken from recordings of pianos found in old churches, music rooms and theatres and atmospherically clustered in soft-focus overlapping arrangements, the cloudlike acoustical effects of layered random pianos creates a gentle building upon of harmonic overtones in an almost raga-like structure that is really quite beautiful.
The B-side, "Untitled (Typewriter), is dedicated to Samuel Beckett and is like the title implies, a work based on the rhythms made on an Hermes "baby" typewriter. Recorded during a residency at The Headlands Center For The Arts, the rhythms of the the taps, spaces and returns (ding!) of the old analog typewriter, based on karnatic musical structures bounce against the former military bunker walls in beautiful reverberations. So nice! Limited to 50 copies, this is a bit on the expensive side, but it is basically a limited edition artwork and they won't be around long. Beautifully packaged with an essay by artist Dean Smith.
COH, aka Ivan Pavlov, has been a long time favorite, taking that click and beep and buzz we love so much, that austere clipped electronic minimalism, and somehow infusing it with melody, and emotion, and while we love Pavlov's contemporaries, that might just be what makes the music of COH sound so special to us. And as if we weren't already excited about a new COH record anyway, IIron is Pavlov's 'metal record', a continuation of 2000's Iron, which was ostensibly his rock record (thus the title IIron should be read as Iron with the Roman numeral two replacing the 'I', as in part two), and much like other COH records, his take on minimal electronica bears little resemblance to his peers, especially here, taking acoustic guitars, chugging metal guitars, skittery electro rhythms, synth new wave, droned out low end crush and nineties style electronic industrial, and tangling it all up into some weird electro-avant-metal hybrid, that varies wildly from track to track, but manages to weave them all together into a somewhat cohesive whole.
Besides the usual minimal buzz and click programming and electronic beat crafting, Pavlov incorporates both recent guitar recordings as well as various guitar recordings made back in the eighties during Soviet era Russia, when even listening to metal music, let alone crating it, was expressly forbidden, Which also adds to the tension and emotional resonance of these tracks, which vary from propulsive and electro, to blackened and sludgey, to chuggy and noisy. The opener "Red Square" begins with a bit of delicate fingerpicked steel string guitar, wreathed in record crackle, which is soon overtaken by some pulsing industrial pulse and pound, a little Skinny Puppy, a little Ministry, but a bit more skeletal and cinematic, the crunchy distorted guitar, chopped up and spaced out into a weird sort of rock riff chug, all wrapped around a seriously creepy bit of soundtracky ambience, and a tangle of melodies that sounds almost like a electro-metal version of gypsy folk.
"War End War" is where the record first gets truly metal, after some deep barely audible subsonic rumbles, the low end roils and churns, a Tim Hecker-ish bit of blurred bassy melody, all hazy and indistinct, which builds and builds until a lurching lumbering doom-ic riffscape stumbles from the murk, wreathed in swirls of glitched out electronics and strange spacey FX, the sound crusty, and crunchy, distorted and crumbling, all wound around a big thick metallic riff just chugging away, the sound gradually smoothing out, until the song has returned to the murky muddy thrum that started things off, this time laced with a simple guitar melodies, and distant little curlicues of effects, all beneath a patina of crumbling gauze, before that riff returns, only this time to get all glitched up like a super scratchy skipping record, and then to get fused with some pulsing trancey electronica, the result a buzzy, metallic bit of doomy abstract industrial electronica.
The metal element is not so pronounced on some of the other tracks, or at least not obviously so, "Soii Noir" is a super minimal bit of pulsing electro, spare and spacious, sounding almost like a game of Pong, until another crunchy, lo-fi distorted riff enters the picture, but like before, it's all twisted up and distorted, wreathed in crackle and crumbling buzz, and molded into something distinctly UNmetal, but still heavy and riffy, where as "Slowup (Quadrate Fur Jah)" begins like some old demo tape of garage band riffery, only to become something much more playful and pulsing, like Neu! if they had drafted a metal guitarist to join, the same sort of sun dappled krautrocky drift, albeit with that one extra six stringed element.
"Fist Of Glory" distorts the guitars even further, turning a buzzy lo-fi riff into a layered bit of glitched out textural ambience, cutting out, skittering and skipping, clipped and looped, like some decaying reel to reel of plunderphonic metal, dizzying and abstract, but in its own way strangely rhythmic and hypnotic.
"All Lights Are Fire" is super spare and skeletal, the guitars muted and muddy, the electronics glitchy and squiggly, the sound somewhere between the electro dub of Pole and the krautrock of Can or Neu!, motorik, meditative, hypnotic, but as the track progresses, the guitars grow more buzzy and insistent, the production more noisy and distorted, the arrangement more chaotic.
Finally, IIron finishes off with "Satsugaii", which starts out all minimal murk, spare electronic pulses, and deep low end thrum, before some seriously Shellac-y noise rock guitars come in, which are mirrored by some pulsing synths, creating a weird bit of metallic electro-noise-rock, or something, whatever it is, it's like the perfect middle ground between old school krautrock, modern Carpenter / Goblin style cinematic electro-wave, nineties industrial and noise rock, especially with the addition of wild squalls of psychedelic guitar tangle, all over thick pounding pusling electronics and crunchy clipped riffage, heavy and heady, eventually slipping right back into that opening bit of minimal electronica, and finishing off with some hushed steel string guitar, and one final blast of psychguitar skree.
Awesome stuff for sure. And quite possibly one of our favorite COH records yet, which we should have assumed, considering the record bears the irrefutable legend: "HAIL TO WORLD PEACE AND DEATH TO FALSE METAL!"
Swank gatefold sleeve for the double vinyl, the cd version in a nice digipack, with art and design by Stephen O'Malley.
There's been quite a few Shirley Collins reissues lately, and they're all pretty great if you've got a soft spot for this British singer's sweet voice and the trad folk she celebrates. We should get 'em all reviewed one of these days, but we thought that we absolutely had to provide a little write-up for this one, originally released on LP in 1964. Amidst the many wonderful Collins discs, this one is just a little bit different and special because it finds her collaborating with pioneering jazz/folk guitarist Davy Graham. It was some record company's notion of getting folk vet Collins and up-and-coming guitarist Graham (a fellow turned on to both Thelonious Monk and Indian raga) to make a "folk-swinging" record, but one that worked out well, even if they were somewhat of an odd couple -- Collins a responsible young mother with two children, the younger Graham a decidely bohemian character with vices that extended beyond merely smoking pot. But despite their differing lifestyles, Collins and Graham's Folk Roots, New Routes is quite a wonderful one-off work, blending old fashioned folk and modern jazz and strains of non-Western music into arrangements both innovative and lovely.
The last album from Australia's Cut Copy, In Ghost Color, is without a doubt one of our most listened to pop records of the last several years. It proved to have such amazing legs and grew on us so much so that even when we look back at the initial review we wrote, we would change it to speak more to what a perfect offering of uplifting, ecstatic pop it truly is. Zonoscope keeps our full on love for Cut Copy going super strong, as this album further proves these guys as some of the most skilled and talented folks around at crafting infectious and memorable pop that sticks in your head and seeps into your skin like crazy!
They take the blueprints of the Hacienda sound (Happy Mondays, New Order, etc.) and flesh it out with such a crisp and focused delivery that definitely taps into what folks like M83 have been moving towards in recent years. With nods to OMD, Erasure, Tears For Fears, Pet Shop Boys, even Men At Work on "Take Me Over" and of course New Order, CC have found a way to merge the romantic and dance minded side of '80s pop music glory into a sound that is so totally modern and refreshing. You can also tell they have a HUGE appreciation for the dynamic epic/huge pop sound that folks like ELO, Queen, and Cheap Trick were carving out in the '70s and have figured out how to inject a modern sensibility into that classic pop prowess.
Listening to Cut Copy is like being shot up with a rush of adrenaline and endless energy. All you want to do is jump and dance and run and accomplish all the things you have your heart set on. Not many folks are able to truly inspire that reaction with their music. Zonoscope is proving to be the greatest pop record so far in 2011 and we have a feeling at the end of the year we will still be saying the same thing.
THEE most epic, grandiose, operatic, regal, majestic, bombastic, portentous power / doom metal this side of Sweden's mighty Candlemass, quite possibly comes from the island of Puerto Rico, in the form of this band, called Dantesco. We haven't listed anything by them before, but we've actually been fans of 'em for a while (well, Allan and Andee anyway, as this particular style of metal isn't admittedly to everyone's taste). So we were excited to get this new disc, their third proper album, not surprisingly released seven years after the band's inception, which comes to us via the excellent Stormspell label, who specialize in anything obscure and '80s (or that sounds that way) in the metal realm. See also Immaculate, reviewed this list, and also recent releases by Noctum and DarkBlack.
The big deal with Dantesco is pretty much their singer, Erico La Bestia, who possesses a powerful and versatile voice, capable of deep somber recitations, as well as fists-clenched screaming in his upper range (which is up there!). We'd guess he's a tenor, not quite sure, but he sure sounds operatic, and regardless of whether he's singing in English or Spanish (on this album, 2 of the 8 tracks are in Spanish) we find both his voice and vocal stylings quite compelling. The man was clearly BORN to sing in a band like this, lucky for the other dudes in Dantesco. If such a thing as epic doom metal didn't exist, they'd have had to invent it for him.
Not that the rest of the band are chopped liver. The crunching, lead weight riffage provides a solid base for La Bestia's histrionics, and certainly the spiraling, intricate soloing of the guitarists also grabs our attention. It's all part of the vast and elaborate architecture, the castle walls and cathedral spires, conjured by Dantesco's music, which ultimately conveys much emotion and a great deal of gravitas. And is of course very very metal. To underscore that point, the disc ends with a slaying Savatage cover, "The Dungeons Are Calling", and it's evident that Erico relishes doing that sudden "aaaaah!!" thing that was Savatage singer Jon Oliva's trademark. Also of course this is for fans of the aforementioned Candlemass, as well as the likes of Solitude Aeternus, Doomsword, Mercyful Fate, Powers Court, Warlord, Cirith Ungol, etc.
As with other Stormspell releases, this is a limited, numbered edition. FYI they've also just put out a self-titled Dantesco disc, consisting of the band's demos from seven years ago.
What can we write about France's mysterious Deathspell Omega that we haven't already? Pretty much the gold standard of forward thinking avant black metal, every record better than the last, more twisted, more complex, and weirdly enough less obviously black metal.
Paracletus is the final part of the group's epic trilogy, which began with Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, and continued with Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum; like those records, Paracletus is an epic sonic undertaking, present in smaller doses are the requisite black metal buzzing and blasting, but even more than the first two records, which were already reaching beyond the tired tropes of traditional black metal, Paracletus barely seems black metal at all. It's definitely heavy, and seriously intense, complex, but even the blasting blackness is infused with mysterious melody, and impossible textures. Listening to this, we not only find ourselves wondering how people can make music like this, but how they can even conceive of it?
The opening sub two minute 'intro' is all gnarled melodies, twisted atonal mathiness, convoluted and avant and abstract and somehow totally catchy, the blackest part is the vocals, still delivered in a gruff demonic bellow, but other than that, the sound is in a realm all its own. And when you expect the record proper to kick in, the band do explode in a frenzy of blasting fury, but the riffs sound weirdly clean, and are peppered with all sorts of little bits of filigree and little sonic curlicues, not to mention more of those super tangled and gnarled Greg Ginn-ish guitar parts that band is known for, the song a twisted sonic puzzle, a million parts seamlessly woven into an impossibly cohesive whole which is indeed heavy, and black, but has so much cool weird shit going on, strange melodic breakdowns, laid over frantic blast beats, haunting ascending and descending melodies, atonal and angular, and it never lets up, how a band can play this fast, and this intricate, and definitely boggles the mind. And the whole record is like that, the sound both heavy and harsh, but simultaneously clean and melodic, it seems impossible, and sounds weird to describe, but there is something definitely unique going on here, the tone, the arrangements, the SOUND, it's not brittle or buzzy or grim or kvlt or any of that, it's LUSH, and expansive and epic and majestic, but still fierce and dark and intense, there's bass all over the place too, definitely an anomaly for black metal, adding some serious heft, not to mention melodic counterpoint, clean vocals, intense spoken word, doomy stretches that sound more like Codeine than Mutiilation. Not to totally downplay how heavy and TRUE this is, there is no doubt that this is black metal, it's just so above and beyond everything else, so unique and unlike all the other groups out there. We LOVE black metal, but 99 percent of the time we'd fail a blind name that tune or even name that band sort of comparison, cuz so much BM sounds so similar, but we could pick out DSP in a matter of seconds.
For their sound, but also for all the strange stuff they mix into their BM, like the lurching low slung breakdown on "Phosphene", with it's buzzy gothy fuzzbass, and tortured wails, not to mention the woozy main riff and the strange scrapes and slides, or the glimmering prettiness that is "Epiklesis II", which sounds almost like Mogwai or something, growing more and more epic, it even sounds like there are horns or an orchestra, so totally epic and unexpected, or howabout the insane mathiness of "Devouring Famine", along with the twisted dizzying breakdowns and the warped sounding guitars, or finally the whole of "Apokatastasis Panton", which is an incredible slab of black pop, the drums super complex, the arrangement sprawling and serpentine, but the guitars, soaring and melodic, again building and building to a sort of psychedelic blackened Godspeed style climax.
So incredible, the sort of thing that doesn't just feel like the culmination of the record, but of all three records, of the trilogy as a whole, an explosive and emotional and ultimately cathartic release, the sort of thing you don't get from much music, let alone black metal. Easily our new favorite black metal record, and without a doubt, black metal record of the year. TOTALLY ESSENTIAL.
How do you make a record that is your most unique, ambitious and weird, but also your most accessible at the same time? How, after ten albums are you still able to create an album that sounds so damn refreshing, creative and full of new ideas? There aren't really answers to these questions, except for the fact that you are Deerhoof. How after all these years they've maintained their artistic creativity, yet been able to explore new avenues, techniques and approaches along the way, still boggles themind. With their first non Kill Rock Stars full length in almost a decade, Deerhoof make Polyvinyl proud with one of the most far reaching, exciting and enjoyable albums we've heard in ages.
Further pushing their love of sounds and music from across the globe, Vs. Evil finds Deerhoof taking those sounds and with them exploring an awesome psychedelic spy soundtrack vibe, as well as a twisted take on sparkling teenage pop music, all of which displays a band at their most sensual, surprising and innovative.
Deerhoof most deserve all the love and adoration they seem to be receiving, and we are hoping this is the record that will push them to that next level, alongside folks like The Flaming Lips, Radiohead, etc., as we can't think of a more creative or exciting band that has paid their dues and stayed true to their mission of all out creativity and sonic excellence!
Full length number three from 'hypnogogic pop' outfit Ducktails, aka Matthew Mondanile, whose day job is playing guitar in lo-fi pop combo Real Estate, and whose records as Ducktails tended more toward the murky and druggy and hazy, a tropical infused low fidelity avant pop warble, but on Arcade Dynamics, Mondanile has definitely jettisoned much of the murk and moved his side project a bit more toward the more traditional pop of the Real Estate mothership. That said, it's all relative, things in Mondanile's world of Ducktails is still warped and woozy and warbly and dreamily druggy, but this time around, the guitars are more jangly, and chiming, the sound is more sunshiney and sun dappled, and most noticeably, there are way more vocals, less meandering experimentation, and more proper songsmithery, and it definitely suits him.
The record begins with a more traditionally Ducktailed mini jam, instrumental and a little bit tropical, a simple beat under effected jangle and swirling melody, but as soon as the second track starts up, it's easy to hear something has changed, the song a bit more brooding, still rife with gorgeous hooks and melodies, but the sound is more measured and hypnotic, the vocals hazy and reverby, but not at all to the point of distraction. "Sprinter" is a total eighties throwback, with gorgeous tangles of guitar harmony and muted thumping percussion, and while "The Razor's Edge" does find Mondanile dipping back into the more experimental side of Ducktails, it's actually pretty great, a brooding minor key almost sci-fi sounding bit of glitchy twang and motorik throb. "Killin' The Vibe" is a hazy bit of sunshiney psychedelia wrapped around a stripped down electronic pulse, and rife with hand claps and gorgeous multitracked vocals, while "Art Vandelay" might be the highlight of the record, reminding us of recent Record Of The Week Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss, the same sort of lo-fi retro classic pop sound, with a big chorus (big for Ducktails at least), flanged steel string strum, and another skeletal programmed beat, all wound into an impossibly perfect chunk of hook-heavy lo-fi jangle pop.
And like some of the other Ducktails records, it seems Mondanile likes to finish off with lengthy experiments, and III is no different, a sprawling 10 minute stretch of minimal reverbed guitarscapery, warm and shimmery, hypnotic and mesmerizing, laced with strange percussion and mysterious field recordings, a beautiful and chilled out finish to what is most definitely our favorite Ducktails yet!
The vinyl version comes with a free download, which includes a bonus track NOT on the cd, an alternate version of "Killin' The Vibe" featuring Panda Bear from Animal Collective!
PS vinyl coming February 1st!
The underground's been buzzing about this band, they're the latest and one of the greatest doing the extreme death metallized ultradooooom thing, a style harking back to the days of Incantation in the '90s. Much like the Vasaeleth release on Profound Lore we recommended last year, Encoffination have turned the slo-mo brutality of death/doom into something almost artistically ritualistic, murky, morbid, and mesmeric, convincingly conveying blasphemous atmosphere. Bathed in funereal fuzz, Encoffination's riffs and rhythms are both akin to death knell bell tollings, the vokills guttural exhalations of fetid crypt breath, the guitars thick and foul and almost gaseous as well, this music mostly slow, sullen, a plodding funeral procession indeed, everything working towards a totality of insalubrious effect. Which, oddly enough, embraces a certain sort of sickly beauty. Their attention to detail extends to the b&w graphics in the cd booklet, elegant and old fashioned looking.
All in all an impressive debut from this depressive duo, the band consisting of Ghoat (Father Befouled, Festered, Hills Of Sefiroth, Vomitchapel, etc.) on vocals, guitar and bass, and Elektrokutioner (Decrepitaph, Scaremaker, Festered, Tombstones, and myriad others, including Wooden Stake, also reviewed this list) on drums. Your rotting corpse couldn't be in better hands... We're not kidding, turns out that Ghoat in fact is studying for a mortuary sciences degree and currently works as an assistant funeral director!
Latest chunk of buzzing, swirling, atmospheric doomdronedreamdrift from this long time aQ fave, a single 21 minute track, derived from an old folk song, and it sounds like it. Warm billows of washed out warm whirling buzz, a landscape of languorous melodies stretched way out into softly undulating layers of blurred sound, reverberating steel strings transformed into clouds of pixelated thrum, all woven into a haunting sprawl, a sea of abstract melodic swells. The various sounds all wrapped in streaks of gauze and haze, a gloriously indistinct bit of drift that definitely reminds us of folks like Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek and the like. A new sonic world conjured up from a jumble of decaying elements, borrowed from the old, a slowly unfurling exploration of this new dreamworld, rendered in bleary eyed sheets of hushed, darkly ominous hum and deep rumbling shimmer. Long stretches of minimal thrum, bookending squalls of more metallic intensity, but eventually all smeared into a single continuous stretch of burnished ambient mesmer.
Minimal artwork, housed in a mini 3" case, and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED...
It's weird how everyone is so into goth now, maybe it's part and parcel of the whole eighties resurgence, but Goths were once the outcasts, at least when we were in high school, wearing all black, listening to Sisters Of Mercy and the Mission UK and the Cure and Depeche Mode, and clomping around in Doc Martins, lots of skulls and leather jackets, sitting in their own little group at lunch, getting picked on by jocks, who knows that might still be true, but in underground music, and even these days in mainstream culture, the Goths rule, from Hot Topic to Twilight, Zola Jesus to Cold Cave, Blessure Grave to cold wave, and for those of us who dug it back in the day, we're definitely into this new wave of gothic rock, taking all the stuff we dug about it the first time around, and sort of revamping it and modernizing it. Like all the musical movements of late, the word spreads like wildfire and suddenly there are way too many bands playing whatever super hyped sound is the flavor of the day/week/month, and most of them not playing it very well. The same could be said of this new goth wave, the cream definitely floating to the top, Cold Cave, Blessure Grave, Zola Jesus, and now UK Goths Esben And The Witch, named for a Danish fairy tale, which told the story of Esben and his 11 brothers, and their (mis)adventures, EATW conjure up a gorgeously expansive and explosive sound, lush and shoegazey, the guitars chiming and shimmery, the drums heavy and tribal, the vocals reminiscent of Zola Jesus, all woven into huge swirls of gothic psychedelia.
The record opens with "Argyria", which begins, all broody and jangly, minimal and hushed, shimmery and drifty and warm and woozy, before building and building and finally exploding into a massive and surprisingly heavy squall of dense, shoegazey wailing, the vocals howled and buried in the mix, before winding down into a skeletal bit of pulsing electronic gothy drift, haunting and otherworldly and gorgeously creepy.
"Marching Song" is the band's big hit, with it's crunchy main riff, and tribal drum pound, the song gets slow and low for the verses, with the vocals delivered in a deep witchy croon, over a Joy Divisiony bassline, and wreathed in swirling spectral vocal harmonies before launching into more epic, majestic choruses, and a killer percussion heavy outro.
"Light Streams" is all hazy and washed out, druggy and dreamy, the ethereal female vocals, backed up by strange processed demonic male background vox, before becoming engulfed in echo and reverb and spinning out of control into a pounding blown out swirl of gothpsych haze, grounded by a gorgeous repeated high end guitar figure. "Hexagons IV" weds dirgey gothy shoegaze to murky electronic pulses, as does "Chorea", but like the rest of the record, they eventually spiral into full on buzzy, fuzzy blissed out blown out shimmer. "Eumenides" is an experimental dronescape that's equal parts druggy drift and chaotic crunch, an extended bit of swirling lysergic ambience, that give way to the gorgeously brooding closer, "Swans", the vocals VERY Zola Jesus here, but much more expressive and acrobatic, laced over some deserty guitar twang, some deep rumbling drones, and clouds of abstract percussion, the sound eventually transforming into a hazy, end-of-the-world choral drift, dense and dramatic, dark and dolorous, winding down slowly, the harmonies and spidery guitars seeming to melt into each other before fading away completely.
Modern goth has rarely sounded so good. Definitely recommended for fans of any of the abovementioned gothics, but also, anyone into moody, shoegazey, dreamy, dramatic darkness.
Yet another band trafficking in creepy electronic Carpenter / Goblin / Zombi style Euro-horror retro futuristic soundtrackery, and like those others, Gatekeeper definitely have their own spin on it, with a sound way more danceable, and with loads more samples, adding to the whole cinematic vibe, the opening track alone pretty much sums it up, the revving of a motorcycle engine, pulsing electronics, symphonic stabs, samples of a terrorized woman, from some seventies horror flick most likely, the sound a driving propulsive fusion of old school techno, and electronic krautrock, laced with cheesy electronic drums, swirling spaced out effects, fuzzy bass, and buzzing synths, deep creepy vox add to the drama and tension, it's pretty impossible not to envision some futuristic chase scene or some occultic ritual gone wrong and the resulting pursuit through the forest. Total techno electro-kraut futurist kosmische sci-fi new wave.
The rest of the tracks follow suit, with big pulsing slabs of buzzing synth, fuzzy eighties basslines, programmed drums, new agey ambience, loads of samples, strange voices and sound effects, but unlike the others, the sound of Gatekeeper seems to be more dramatic, more intense, with the songs often building to seriously epic and freaked out climaxes, but just as often locking into mesmerizing minimal electro grooves, but always slightly ominous, haunting, otherworldly and seriously dramatic and cinematic. Think Majeure, Innercity, Oneohtrix, Nightsatan, Umberto but somehow more over the top. Which of course means WAY recommended.
Another killer warehouse find, dug up a little handful of these, probably the last copies we'll ever see...
Yet more tripped out psychedelic noisescaping from this Wolf Eyes offshoot, featuring John Olson and crew, who offer up a gorgeously creepy, harrowing abject free jazz dronescape, that pairs skronk with rumble, shimmer with crunch, the result a haunting sprawl of cinematic dronemusick that sounds like the score for some lost Euro thriller. Moaning clouds of metallic thrum, plenty of clang and thump, creaks and scrapes, but muted and minimal, sinewave tones drift way off in the distance, squalls of gnarled electronics, weird fragmented melodies, sorrowful, bursts of percussive freakout, bits of skronk, tangled rubbery basslines, tinkling chimes, fluttery woodwinds, whirring wheezing buzz, deep resonant gongs, all woven and blurred into a surprisingly subdued jazzdronescape, cinematic and hushed, the sound of flickering firelight, of cloud choked skies and dim dank abandoned buildings. A sound that manages to be super spare and abstract, but really tight, improvised for sure, but these sounds mesh perfectly into something that sounds almost composed, a brooding sonic desolate gloom, a sort of doom jazz, or some sort of post industrial free jazz dronemusic, whatever it is we're digging it big time.
Beautiful cover art to boot!
This one definitely doesn't need much of a review, it's a super limited tour single from Liz Harris, aka Grouper, it features two brand new and EXCLUSIVE tracks, it's lovely and ethereal and spacey and dreamy (of course), it's already sold out and out of print, and we got less than 10 copies, and will NOT ever be able to get more. Odds are you don't need much of a description, fans will definitely want this, even with the steep price tag, but rest assured, it's another fantastic collection of hazy guitar swirl, lush atmospheric shimmer, disembodied reverbed vocal coo, shoegazey sonic swirl, a little bit of extra buzz and distortion all but obscuring the fragile vox on the second, track, but for the most part it's all gauzy and ethereal and ephemeral and abstract and hauntingly gorgeous, and for Grouper obsessives, most likely essential. Too bad we got so few...
Housed in nice thick covers with super striking black and white artwork, includes a Xeroxed insert with a download code too.
Latest disc from Mr. Jeremy Barnes, formerly of legendary indie rockers Neutral Milk Hotel, and a staple of various other Elephant 6 bands, but for the last nearly nine years, the mastermind behind A Hawk And A Hacksaw, his solo project turned proper band, which performs music in the style of American folk music and Eastern European, Turkish and Balkan folk music. Now expanded to an EIGHT(!) piece, not counting various guest musicians, the expanded instrumentation of accordion, bass drum, cymbal, violin, viola, bouzouki, trumpet, flugelhorn, tuba, euphonium, dumbek, riq, guitar, cello, dobro, clarinet, and saxophone, has made the group's sound even more rich and expansive and expressive, from gypsy folk, to wild flamenco, to super intricate and lush klezmer music, Romanian folk music, Mariachi... Barnes and company are voracious, and deftly master whatever music they try their hand at, all woven into an incredibly festive, almost psychedelic, world music brew, which slips from frenetic and energetic and irresistibly danceable, to moody and mournful, to woozy and weary, to propulsive and playful. We had sort of forgotten how great this stuff was, but we can't seem to stop listening to this new one. A new favorite for sure.
Gorgeously packaged in a textured papers, screen printed, origiami style sleeve.
Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced artists on the aQ website. Whenever we need to describe something fuzzy and gauzy and washed out and blurred and bleary, smeared and shimmery, woozy and mesmerizingly dreamlike, we tend to always look to Hecker, whose gorgeous crumbling otherworldly soundscapes manages to transcend their constituent parts. When listening to Tim Hecker, it's practically impossible to hear samples, or instruments, or anything really, other than the amazing organic soundworld that Hecker has created, the constituent parts rendered wholly unrecognizable, instead, they are layers, or colors, or pieces of the new whole, a sound that's transformative and transcendent, evocative as always of other times, and other places, lost worlds, lost loves and forgotten memories, conjuring up many of the same emotions as folks like Leyland Kirby and Indignant Senility. But whereas those folks' sounds are distinctly old fashioned, the sound of Hecker's music is timeless. It does of course have elements of a forgotten past, in its crumbling decayed sound quality, and washed out ethereal ambience, but it also manages to be melodic, and active, and alive it its own way. It has energy, and vitality, as if some bit of glowing modern sound, was left in a corner to collect dust, and fade a bit, before being rediscovered, brushed off, only to find it's glow, while not diminished, has definitely been altered by the passage of time. Like the most magical of musics, Hecker's is hard to describe, and even harder to imagine how it was created, even if we know the instrumentation, whatever arcane sonic alchemy Hecker employs makes even that knowledge useless in trying to understand how his music works. But then, like magic, not knowing how it works is part of the joy of experiencing these sounds, it's as if they were created from the elements, conjured up from the spirit world, beamed in from another dimension, it's not knowing, or understanding, but feeling, and experiencing, and enjoying, letting the music work its magic, and transport you to whatever imaginary other world they were intended to invoke.
With every Hecker record, we seem to proclaim, 'best one yet!' and it looks like we'll have to again with Ravedeath, 1972, recorded in a church in Iceland, and with a pipe organ as its main instrument, augmented by synthesizer, piano, microphone and feedback, this is the richest and most lush Hecker record yet, not just atmospheric, but emotional and infused with a definite pathos, even moreso, than on past records.
The record opens with a super corrosive bit of blurred ambience, the sound decaying and crumbling, the melodies pulsing and undulating just below the surface, a gorgeous balance between warm melodic drift, and caustic psychedelic haze, but woven together, they create something impossibly gorgeous.
From there on out, the sound and the songs sprawl and shimmer, epic expanses of warm whirring melodies, of lush layered ever shifting textures, the organ, while not always distinctly organ like, does lend the sound a certain choral gravitas, that makes all the sounds here darkly cinematic, the score for some lost art film, all deep shadows and strange shapes, of empty streets and abandoned cities, it's almost like the sound of Super 8 film if that film had 'a sound', all the lens flares, and warm distorted flutter, the fuzzy out of focus over saturated colors, all translated into sound, a sound that slips deftly from murky and moody and muted to blown out and sun blasted, from under water woozy melodic thrum, to super crunchy distorted buzz, to music box like tinkle to epic almost liturgical majesty, the whole record, so perfectly and uniquely Tim Hecker, again the reason we refer to him so often, when describing the often futile attempts of others trying to evoke sounds this powerful and moving, fuzzy, gauzy, washed out, blurred, bleary, smeared, shimmery, woozy, mesmerizing, dreamlike, crumbling, otherworldly, and so utterly and breathtakingly gorgeous.
We dug up an old review we wrote for another Hecker record, where we managed to describe Hecker's sound about as perfectly as we'll probably ever be able to, and reading it over again now, it applies to Ravedeath as much as any of Hecker's other records:
"Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique Victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be the music of Tim Hecker."
Easily his best yet, and one of our new favorite records, and for sure, a contender for record of the year, even just a little over a month in...
Last list we reviewed an amazing art book, featuring a selection of made up and imagined 7" sleeves from Boredoms leader Yamantaka Eye, from the awesome Soundscreen Design publishing house. This time around, we have another book in the same series, this one from Daniel Higgs, who most folks might know as the frontman for Baltimore hypnorockers Lungfish, or for any of is amazing solo records, or for his guest spot on the new record from Swedish outfit Skull Defekts (one of this week's Records Of The Week), but in addition to all his musical endeavors, Higgs is also an incredible artists, paintings, drawings collages, much of his artwork adorns the various records he's made, but he was also a legendary tattoo artist, until giving it up a few years back, and his artwork, both tattoos and otherwise are super distinct, while being incredibly varied. This book is a small sampling of Higgs work from the last decade, and it features gorgeous reproductions of various paintings, drawings and collages, many of which will be immediately recognizable to fans of his artwork (or even his music, what with the various aforementioned album covers).
The cover features a typical Higgs piece, that is equal parts, drawing, diagram, diary page, with strange words, mysterious drawings, not to mention some credits for the book mixed in, while the back cover features a super striking ballpoint pen self portrait on a rich colored background.
Inside it's all over the place, from simple shapes, lots of words, and designs incorporating letters, references to God and Satan and the Bible, simple sketches, gorgeous full color paintings, striking drawings, strange shapes, all very psychedelic and abstract, culminating in a piece of lined paper on the final page, just a list of words, from vulva to cosmos, fountain to aether, temporal to blossom, headdress to phallus, aura to flux, crag to spider, cistern to torpedo, throng to crater, sphinx to echo, luminous to spectral and on and on and on. So simple, but so strangely mysterious and alluring and impossible to decipher, like all of Higgs' work. What mysterious messages lurk in the shapes and the colors and the arrangements of words, part of the magic. Needless to say, fantastic stuff. And like the Eye book, comes packaged in a 10" style record sleeve.
Latest blast of downtuned, crusty, sludge-soaked ultra doom from these Kentucky killers, released on the always kick ass Israeli label Total Rust. Somehow we missed out listing the first Highgate record, which we're kicking ourselves for now, cuz this new one is a pretty brutal and twisted slab slow and low heaviness.
Three tracks (and one brief sampled intro), a little over 40 minutes of extreme, hateful, filthy slow motion, grim, grinding ultramegadoom. A lumbering, lurching, stumbling slo-mo sludgefest, creeping and crawling and slithering sickly, the guitars thick and tarpit black, the drums a Neanderthal pound, and the vocals, howled, growled and bellowy, but weirdly metallic and effected, as if they were sung through a length of pipe, making them sound sick and alien and awesomely fucked up.
This is about as doomy and dismal as it gets, no swing, no Sabbathy groove, a little bit of clean guitar shimmer, a sort of minimal outro in the second song, but other than that, Shrines To The Warhead is all death march trudgery, lead foot dirgery and blackened and filthy hellish crush and pummel. The sort of sick shit that should be sonic sweetness for folks into Eyehategod, Khanate, Bunker, Moss, Corrupted, Otesanek, Habsyll, Moloch, Monarch, Salome, Trees, Whitehorse and the like.
With a name like Hour Of 13, you know this is a doom metal band. "Trad" doom, in fact, the most Black Sabbathy kind, sludgy and old school, with a dark and occult vibe, compete with a vocalist who sounds a little something like Ozzy. He's Phil Swanson, who also sings in Seamount (reviewed here previously) and Briton Rites (whom we hope to review too), amongst others. The main guy in this outfit, though, is Chad Davis, who wrote and recorded all the music. He's also a member of country-flecked space rockers US Christmas (and used to play drums for death metallers Father Befouled) among many other band connections.
After an interestingly atmospheric and melodic opening track, laden with synths, they get into harder and heavier headbanging fare, from stuff that evokes early '80s Ozzy to, slowing down, the chunky majesty of Trouble. Mostly, though, Hour Of 13's thick tones remind us of The Obsessed, and that whole "Maryland doom scene sound" (though they're from NC); they're also a bit like Lord Vicar, with the sadness and "Ozziness" factor in Swanson's voice being similar to Lord Vicar's singer Chritus.
Way more sinister than stoner, this is though, keep that in mind. Hour Of 13 definitely venture into the dark side, psychologically, singing of demons that aren't entirely mythological. What might be the fastest song here, is also the longest, an almost 9 minute epic entitled "The Crawlspace", Swanson taking on the role, with perhaps unseemly relish, as perpetrator of an abduction/rape/murder scenario, and demonstrating that doom doesn't have to feature the anguished "vokills" of extra-o'd ultradooooom to be disturbing.
We'd wanted to list this a while ago, but never could get enough, and then couldn't get any at all, but now that's all be solved 'cause this has just been reissued (and remastered) by good ol' Earache, having previously been an Eyes Like Snow/Northern Silence release last year. Glad to finally get it, to give it a recommendation for all you doom lovers out there.
Illusion Of Safety records have been slow coming in recent years, but IOS mastermind Dan Burke has been hinting at a whole slew of new material forthcoming. All of which should be very good news for all who have followed his work over the years. Since 1983, Burke has been producing an occasionally volatile, often sublime, and almost always exceptional body of work that prominently figures into the history of industrial culture and the ensuing explorations of noise, dronemuzik, and electro-acoustic collages from the mid-'80s onward. There had long been a sense of violence and transgression in the Illusion Of Safety catalogue, yet the overt displays of psychological horrors that appeared on such albums as Historical have gradually sublimated into the more inquisitive and arguably more compelling albums such as In Opposition To Our Acceleration and here on Bridges Intact.
A room recording of piano, feedback, guitar, and electronics opens the album, as Burke presents a collaborative piece with one of the long-time contributors to Illusion Of Safety, in Thymme Jones (who fronts the idiosyncratic art-rock combo Cheer Accident). At first the piano and the guitar spiral atonal clusters around the droning feedback tones, but after a transition through a series of clattering objects, the piano swarms into a dynamic blur of Terry Riley / Charlemagne Palestine inspired minimalism. Very impressive! Electricified buzzes and tremolo flutterings scatter around another set of bleary guitar drones whose tendrils of shimmered tone and vaporous ephemerality lead to a haunted, levitating quality to the piece, as if everything were hovering around the participants in a seance. This isn't a haunting on the demonic scale, but something more sublime and peculiar. Burke shifts more towards an intense stream of mechanoid pulses, electrical whirls, pierced tones, rarified static, and heavily amplified microsonic vibrations. Here, IOS has more of the research & development experimentation that you would get from the likes of Joe Colley or John Duncan. As Burke ducks and weaves through his tangles of crossed wires, tactile crunches, and short-circuited electronics, the breadth of his ability to produce such an extraordinary variety of electro-acoustic expressionism becomes very evident.
It should also be noted that the Russian label Waystyx has produced some elaborate packaging with two fold-out panels with numerous die-cuts that give the folio the appearance of an old steel truss bridge. Limited and numbered to 324 copies.
Immaculate? Kind of a strange, and not so tough-sounding, name for a metal band, though not nearly as dubious as some others we've run across (such as Hackneyed, Custard, Argyle, and even Chinchilla, believe 'em or not). Immaculate are from Sweden, so English is not their first language, obviously, but they definitely speak the language of THRASH. And that's why we're listing this. Retro-thrash bands are a dime a dozen these days, and we feel pretty "meh" about most of 'em, but as soon as we gave this a spin, we realized Immaculate were different, and worthy. For one thing, they're got an incredible high-pitched vocalist, and they're clearly inspired by over the top American '80s greats Agent Steel and the even more progressive Fates Warning. So this is "speed metal" as much as it is "thrash", if you know or care about the difference. And, especially on this album's tour de force title track, an 8 minute, 43 second epic, they pull out all the stops, with plenty of chops - it's is like a mix of Iron Maiden with technical thrash metal insanity. All eight tracks are complex compositions of mile-a-minute metal, rife with rapid-twitch riffage, startling shrieks, and some surprisingly melodic moments.
Oh, and they also came up with the song title "Thrashark"! Maybe shoulda used that for the band name... or maybe not.
Impressive stuff, they even do a cover of "The Apparition" by Fates Warning, and it fits right in. Along with sci-fi techies Vektor, whom we should review soon, a big exception to our usual retro-thrash "meh" reaction. This is the real deal, and thus recommended, ragers!!
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
Oh man, that just made us think of something insane, what if Daniel Higgs teamed up with Inquisition someday, a la one of our other Records Of The Week this list, by The Skull Defekts?! That would be awesome.
Another killer compilation from Omni, this once an overview of Stonewall Jackson, a name most folks probably aren't familiar with, even though between 1958 and 1971 he had THIRTY FIVE top 40 country hits, and was the first member of the Grand Ol Opry to become a member sans recording contract. And these days, Jackson is more famous for suing the Opry in 2007, a $20 million age discrimination suit, claiming the Opry told him he was "too old and too country" for the 'new' Opry.
Back in the day, Jackson was an unsung country music hero, hit after hit, amazing record after amazing record, yet he somehow still managed to remain under the radar of most country music fans. We first heard him on Omni's awesome Troubled Troubadours collection with the twisted track "Push The Panic Button", and while nothing included here is quite as far out, most of the songs are just as good, "I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water" is crazy catchy, twangy and heartfelt, "Drinking And Driving" is a classic country lament, with gorgeous lap steel and some deep crooned vocals, and it's about, well, drinking and driving, "While The Daises Grow Free" is a tragic tale of coal miners slaving away underground, while, well you know. The arrangements are lush, lots of harmonica and slide and both male and female background vocals, simple rhythms, fantastic guitar playing, and of course Jacksons's soulful croon, sweet and smooth. Like all Omni collections, we end up finding ourselves listening to this over and over, and it gets played in the store like crazy.
And also like all Omni collections, extensive liner notes, tons of photos, and many of these tracks available on cd for the first time ever.
Now on swank ass double vinyl!
We were a little hesitant to check this out at first, even though we've loved all the tracks we've heard on various comps, because for some reason it was described as dark dubstep with "spoken word vocals". Spoken word? Ugh. Thankfully, one person's spoken word is another's woozy warbly mumbly crooning, 'spoken word' not in the crappy poetry slam sense, but as in brooding smoldering, slow motion toasting, totally reminiscent of classic Tricky, especially Nearly God, the music too, all hazy, and druggy and somnambulant, the beats, cough syrupy, gorgeous late night, rain soaked, glacial tarpit slow jam ballads. Totally dubbed out and minimal, the production hazy and gauzy and softly psychedelic. There's a new Massive Attack out this week too, and it's not bad, but listening to this, all we can think is this is how we wish Massive Attack sounded now.
Every track is a bleary eyed, druggy drift through warped, slow melting downtempo dubscapes, the rhythms, clipped and skittery, horns moaning in the background, wheezing keyboards, clouds of record crackle, the vocals, both male and female, wreathed in reverb and echo, draped over the slowly undulating grooves, sultry and sexy, so darkly languorous, murky and mysterious, the beats thick and dense and heavy, all wrapped in a laid back and lysergic, grimly psychedelic atmosphere, which makes sense considering the man behind the King Midas Sound is none other than Kevin Martin, aka The Bug!
WAY RECOMMENDED!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Finally on vinyl, the complete recorded works by these seminal punks. This vinyl version contains all of the music from the 2cd on Kill Rock Stars, but Mississippi has gone ALL OUT, cramming that same music into a massive QUADRUPLE lp set, each lp in its own heavy sleeve, all housed in a super striking and seriously hefty box! Here's what we had to say about this when we first listed the cd version a while back:
Well all right! Lots of folks have been waiting a loooong time for this collection!! Kleenex were a Swiss punk band who released one record in 1978 before being forced to change their name to LiLiPUT, the moniker they used for the next four years until they disbanded in 1983. For the five years of their existence, Kleenex / LiLiPUT amassed an astonishingly cohesive (considering they went through three vocalists) body of work that was championed by everyone from John Peel to Rough Trade Records, who were their label for a while. Since their demise, the legend of LiLiPUT has only grown larger and larger. At one point a brief 1993 cd reissue of their work was reportedly going on eBay for over $300! The riot grrl scene, among other punk movements, has been inspired by and today rightfully acknowledges and champions the influence of Kleenex/LiLiPUT (heads up, fans of Le Tigre, this will kick your ass and you'll thank them and ask for more). Somehow it seems appropriate that stalwart indie-punk label Kill Rock Stars first got this stuff to a lot of the kids today!
But what do they sound like? Well, no fan of the Slits, Raincoats, or X-Ray Spex should be without this for a moment longer. Yeah, it's got that much unbelievable energy, choppy melodies, and three-chord majesty... and the band was similarly female fronted (one guy was only briefly a member). The two constants in the band - the two people who were present throughout all the incarnations of Kleenex/LiLiPUT - were guitarist Marlene Marder and bassist Klaudia Schiff, so there's driving, relentless, yet thoughtful basslines, coupled with slash 'n burn, jumpy guitar terrorism that at times recalls the band's contemporaries in the scene, like Gang of Four, Joy Division, and Wire. The vocalists ferociously crowed and cackled mostly in sing-song English, making for funny and evocative lyrics. Violin and skronkin' saxophone were occasionally used as embellishment to their already full, solid sound. Every song is unique, approachable... every song is good. And boy do Kleenex/LiLiPUT sound as good now as they did then!!
Man, do we at ever AQ love that Japanese '70s group the Taj Mahal Travellers! Masters of organic drone, utilising bowed cymbals, violins, loudspeakers, tape loops and all sorts of unique source material. And we've been blessed of late with the reissue of lots
Omni may be primarily a country reissue label, but every once in a while they'll come up with something distinctly NOT country and more often from way out of left field. Most recently it was the amazing Russkie Wig-Out compilation of demented surf, electro and exotica from Russia, and now comes this, a career retrospective of German outsider sci-fi electro pop visionary Felix Kubin, whose career has been an ongoing series of twisted sonic experiments, from lo-fi mad scientist sonic tinkering, to freaked out chaotic noise, to hypnotic krautrock grooves to super catchy sci-fi pop to twangy almost soundtracky Morricone-esque soundscapes and beyond.
Even after nearly three decades of recording, Kubin remains unknown to all but a select few of far-out music obsessives, which is perhaps the way it will remain, cuz this stuff is indeed pretty dang far out. But for all its weirdness and willful obscurity, it's also catchy, and crazy, and fun, and in places funny, the sort of thing, that if it were some 20 year old kid and it was a limited lp on Not Not Fun, or some self released cd-r folks would be losing their shit. So go ahead, freak out, this stuff is well deserving of that sort of worship, and it's long long overdue!
From the opening jam "Phonebashing", all skittery, electro new wave, warped and lo-fi, like some mash up of Kraftwerk and the Radiophonic Workshop and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", to a killer WAY twisted version of "Lightning Strikes", originally written and performed by Lou Christie, but later covered by Klaus Nomi, which makes sense, since Kubin is a lot like Nomi in many ways, and musically sounds like Sparks crossed with The Residents, but more glitched out and electronic. Then there's "Schnitzler", which does in fact feature krautrock legend Conrad Schnitzler, a loopy, woozy bit of electro skitter, the refrain being simply "Schnitzler" and then "Conrad Schnitzler". The title track is a creepy bit of haunted house electronica, all creepy ambience, and super lo-fi programmed drum skitter, processed vox, and some cheesy, eighties drama soundtrack music woven in, again, twisted, but weirdly genius, and again, if this were some new hip underground band, blogs would be singing its praises.
The collection covers pretty much all of Kubin's far out sounds, from manic, stuttery, carnivalesque Devo style video game synth buzz freakouts, to swoonsome soundtracky slow jams, to lush cabaret pop, all deep dramatic vox and pizzicato strings, to manic Love Boat style soundtracks all chopped up and electrified and freaked out, to super lo-fi 8 bit electro crunch, to faux big band almost Lawrence Welk sounding easy listening, to shuffling warped jazzy weirdness, to full on Legend Of Zelda style Nintendo core, to moody groovy electro slow jams, and pretty much every warped and gloriously twisted sonic stop in between.
So good! Anyone into the current crop of lo-fi, electronic fractured pop experimentalists, this is will blow you away, and puts lots of that stuff to shame!
Features an extensive full color booklet, with liner notes, but the liner notes are quite cryptic, but very interesting, and fantastically written, appropriately mysterious for the music they accompany.
After a fantastic single, the full length finally arrives from this Vivian Girls side project, and like the 7" (whose A side "Never Come Around" is present here too) this definitely sounds a lot like the Vivian Girls mothership, the sound is washed out, gauzy, softly reverby, that Phil Spector-ish production, the opening track is fantastic, ethereal and dreamy, guitars shimmering and jangling, lush vocal harmonies, all hazy and otherworldly, with crunchy guitars here and there, but for the most part, just gorgeously fuzzy soft focus drift, with some unexpected psychedelic guitar crunch and swirl near the end. Which is quickly followed by the single, all lush jangly guitars, simple stripped down drumming, and reverbed vocals, and even more of that Spector wall of sound, but as we mentioned in the review of the 7", La Sera takes the VG sound and adds some strange (and lovely) synth melodies, and the vocals of Katy Goodman aka La Sera are much more clean and pure, her voice more ethereal and angelic, which perfectly suits the sound, the overall feel like some mix of primitive K Records girl pop, nineties Slumberland shoegaze, and of course that classic sixties girl group song. There's nothing ramshackle or garage-y really about La Sera, instead it's much more polished, WAY more lush, hazy, shimmery, a lovely fuzzy, soft focus dreampop, that will no doubt appeal to fans of all the 'Girls (Vivian, Dum Dum and At Dawn) but also fans of the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, and the sonically similar groups that came before like the Lilys, Velocity Girl, My Bloody Valentine, Heavenly, Pastels, etc.
Yet another addition to the ever expanding ambient dreamgaze electro-wave songstress scene, which is a genre we just made up, but one that does sort of actually exist, if not in name, certainly in sound, modern musicians channeling the spirit of early 4AD, eighties and nineties dance music, Kate Bush, Siouxsie, and similarly shoegazey/gothic electronic pop, into something swirling and ethereal and space-y and groovy and rhythmic and well, like a more MODERN gothic shoegazey electro pop. Ladies like Zola Jesus, Tamaryn, Glasser, and the like, now joined by Laurel Halo, a one woman newwavedreamgaze band from NYC by way of Michigan, Halo channels an abstract, danceable and slightly witchy mutant form of electronica, a little bit of the outsider home brewed R&B of How To Dress Well, a little of the witch house sound of her pals Balam Acab, a little synthy new wave drift a la another of her pals Oneohtrix Point Never, but all filtered through the Cocteau Twins, and Kate Bush, and classic decades-ago MTV, and transformed into a delicate, crystalline, but still seriously propulsive and groovy bit of drifty, floaty, washed out echo drenched eighties style electronic pop, but with plenty of that modern futuristic retro sheen, that has the club kids all in a tizzy.
These guys sent us an lp a long while back, and somehow we totally slept on it. Not sure why, a 12" x 12" image of a cloudy sky, the sun glinting in the background, and the words "PURE TRANSCENDENTAL BLACK METAL" writ large in big black records across the front, and inside, just what the cover promised some seriously buzzing blazing blackness. It's not surprising these guys found there way to 20 Buck Spin, a pretty good fit for sure for this NY horde.
Unlike the blissed out blackened ethereal transcendentalism of the lp, back when Liturgy was a one man bedroom black metal band, Renihilation finds Liturgy expanded to a 4 piece, and the sound is much more raw and organic, still blown out and pretty blissy, goddamn soaring and epic in fact, but it sounds more like a proper rock band, although the drumming is still inhumanly fast, and the band lock into these cool, weird, and very un-black metal sounding high end trills, that only make the sound that much more mysterious and mystical. The band claim some unlikely non-metal influences, but as you get into Renihilation, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on here than Ulver or Darkthrone worship, the band slipping into lurching, almost mathy breakdowns, incredible dynamics, that almost sounds like Harvey Milk at 78rpm, the sort of stop start, sway and lumber, that only works if the band is tight as fuck.
These songs are not super long either, but they feel majestic, and sprawling, and never ending, in a good way, the guitars are frantic, the drumming relentless, the guitars seem to exist only in the upper registers, like wild psychedelic leads transformed into some sort of blackened tremolo picking, so instead of black metal, these jams almost sound like modern classical compositions, like Arvo Part composing for black metal band, when a song ends, you feel exhausted, and drained, like at the end of a long journey, but before you can even catch your breath, the band explode into action once again. And before you know it, they're locked into another high end blast of extreme tension, no let up, no slipping into acoustic interludes, it's almost like the musical version holding your breath, soaring as high and for as long as (in)humanly possible, so when the band does pause briefly, it knocks you on your ass, of when they switch gears and get all spacious and dynamic, it nearly blows your mind.
When we first got this, we only listened to it a couple times, and thought it was pretty cool, but on repeated listens it is proving itself to be truly transcendental, and unlike almost all of the other black metal out there, and is quickly becoming a contender for black metal record of the year.
Not to be confused with the Master Musicians, these LORDS Of Bukkake are Spanish, and specialize in a particularly twisted, sick, sludgey, electronic flecked ultradoom. The label describes their sound as Iron Monkey meets the Swans meets Godflesh meets Esoteric meets Eyehategod, and while something like that may be too good to actually exist, this definitely comes close. The first few minutes set the stage with a squall of wild glitched out electronics, swirling squiggles of damaged effects, mewled maniacal vox, before quickly slipping into a low slung almost twangy groove,a ll super busy drumming, and spidery reverbed guitars, not to mention more swirls of weird effects, dubby reverb and whatnot, and the drums are so bizarre super chaotic and all over the place, soon some chiming guitars come in, but it still sounds more tripped out and abstract and psychedelic than specifically doomy. It's not until about 4 minutes in, when out come the big guns, and by big guns we of course mean, crushing downtuned, super distorted riffage, and then the vocals, holy shit. Like Burning Witch but even MORE fucked up and freaked out, raspy and alien and sick, like some cartoon supervillain, perfectly matched to the sort of twisted psych doom these guys lay down.
The second track is another sprawl of slo-mo doom trudgery, all downtuned glacial guitaring and octopoidal caveman drumming, this time peppered with stretches of droned out layered high end, but again, it's those vocals, seriously freaky and haunting and EVIL.
The last two tracks continue on in much the same way, lacing the sick black doom with squalls of effects, of warped wah wah drenched psych guitars, swirling spaced out atmospheres, the final track especially, starts out all total hazy psych rock before the guitars drop out completely, leaving just the drums and some insect like buzzing electronics, suddenly sounding like Geronimo or Bastard Noise, before finally launching back into some doom, this time though, the tempo is cranked up and it's almost groovy, a little stonery, a LOT Sabbathy, but corrupted by those awesomely damaged vokills, and then finally the song collapses into yet another sun baked stretch of shredding washed out psychedelia, the only thing keeping it from total druggy psych rock bliss out, those vox, turning it instead into something wholly other.
Twisted, sick, heavy, slow and low, psychedelic and totally gloriously fucked. It's almost like someone whipped this up just for the aQ weirdos out there, a seriously WAY recommended batch of what-the-fuck avant psychedelic outsider doom sludge radness!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!
A handful of new installments in the ongoing Latitudes series, where bands are given a session in the Southern Studios to whip up some improvised on the spot sounds, and release them into the world. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find new Latitudes releases from Gowns, Gang Gang Dance and Nadja, then there's this one, from aQ faves the Master Musicians Of Bukkake, featuring the usual lineup, made up of various members of other bands you might have heard of: Earth, Sun City Girls, Burning Witch and more...
MMOB aren't so much a band, making music, as they are a collection of sonic sorcerers, conjuring up gorgeous and mysterious songscapes, drawing on all manner of world musics, Morricone-esque soundtracks, free jazz, drone, doom, Appalachia, and whatever else they've picked up on their travels, somehow all of that is woven into lush organic expanses of fantastically enthralling, super cinematic sound, that drifts from meditative Eastern tinged raga to buzz drenched Hawkwind style space rock.
Two tracks, 31 minutes, the first, is a fantastically abstract bit of raga-drift, the steel strings buzz and shimmer, sitar like melodies draped over warm whirring chordal thrum, slide guitars offer up slippery melodies, all softly tangled into gorgeous sun dapped dreamlike free-raga-drone music, the drums relentless, non stop rhythms adding less rhythmic heft, and more percussive texture, flurries of notes, clouds of cymbal shimmer, until about halfway through, when the various elements seems to coalesce into a bit of Eastern tinged slo-mo Appalachia, now with chanted monklike vocals, the drums more rhythmic, gradually locking into a hazy, deserty sprawl of twang flecked raga doom folk drift.
Which couldn't be more different than the second track, which immediately launches into some super motorik, cyclical krautrock, synthy swells swooping from speaker to speaker, the vocals down in the mix, but oh so Hawkwindy, repetitive and sing songy, and the song follows a distinctly space rock trajectory, locking into some druggy memser, and then slowly building and building, getting louder and louder, the main groove remaining virtually unchanged, but all around it, wild squalls of FX, streaks of glitched out synths, the guitars a bit crunchier and distorted, to cut through the swirling clouds of blur and buzz and skree and squelch, just the sort of thing for anyone into White Hills, The Heads, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Monster Magnet, Colour Haze, the Telescopes and of course Spacemen 3, Loop and Hawkwind!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, the covers the immediately recognizable brown and white origami style Latitudes sleeves, this one with super swank copper foil printing, and a full color insert inside.
For all the Witch House music out there, it seems like very little of it actually gets released. Instead it's shared, and downloaded, offered on Soundcloud and various other sites, occasionally released as super limited cd-r's, but proper releases are few and far between.
As far as we know this may very well be the first proper release (definitely the first and only vinyl, there's been a cd-r and a cassette) from the mysterious collective called Mater Suspiria Vision, purveyors of witch house, or perhaps ghost drone, haunted disco trance, or even drag, depending on who you ask. The sound of witch house, for the uninitiated, is a twisted hybrid of classic goth, nineties techno, DJ Screw style slowed down sounds (hence the term drag), and all manner of spooky creepy atmospheres, horror movies, giallo soundtracks, all woven into a witchy bit of electronic psychedelic creepiness. And the various monikers tend to be heavy on the strange symbols that you get by pressing option or control on your keyboards, you know, little black triangles, tiny crosses, all those sorts of zapf dingbats style icons. Anyway, Salem is probably the most high profile witch house combo out there, but of all the other outfits we've heard, Mater Suspiria Vision is probably the only other group that comes close to conjuring up the same sort of mystery, coupled with the same sort of sonic heft.
No idea if MSV is a group or a person, it seems to be some sort of collective, or where they're located, all of their various pages list their home as Kabul, which seems suspect. In addition to music, they also create incredible tripped our psychedelic videos, that perfectly capture the same twisted vibe as their music. And they somehow manage to release a continuous stream of sights and sounds, new ones seemingly every day, which is why it's even more remarkable that this is one of only a tiny handful of actual MSV releases.
Regardless, it's a doozy, if you dug the Salem, and the oOoOO and the Balam Acab and maybe that Big Pink Tapes comp, then you are definitely gonna want this. And if you've yet to take the witch house plunge, but dig stuff like Leyland Kirby and Demdike Stare, odds are this is gonna be right up your alley.
A two parter titled provocatively "Exorcism Of The Hippies", it's all fat fuzzed out woozy warbly bass, thick low end swells, strange stuttery handclap rhythms, swooping spaced out effects, creepy dubbed out slo-mo atmospherics, strange voices, vocal snippets and samples, all blurred and smeared, a hazy, gauzy lysergic psychedelic trip out, the soundtrack to some strange foreign horror film from the seventies, coupled to some primitive old school techno 12", both spinning at 16rpm, the whole thing doused in cough syrup and left in the sun, cursed by a witch, buried in a graveyard, only to be dug up, melted down and mixed with liquid thorazine and a handful of horse tranquilizers and then pressed into this here 7". SO GOOD!
Packaged in super swank full color covers, and LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!
Record number two from these twisted avant Canadian death metallers, whose sound has less in common with Morbid Angel or Deicide and WAY more in common with the warped and twisted metal of groups like Portal, WOLD, Impetuous Ritual, Cremation and Gorguts. Years in the works and meticulously assembled, Parasignosis is a dizzying, ultra prog outsider death metal blow out, rife with impossibly obtuse arrangements, super demented time stretched vocals that sound like a blurred droned out gurgle, the guitars don't buzz and chug as much as they ooze and swirl and soar, the sound muddy and murky and blurry and chaotic, a churning, roiling morass of downtuned guitars, of chaotic intricate drumming, of those fucked up vokills, as well as strange samples, buried whispers, the normal blast and pound and pummel, infused with super druggy psychedelia, with the tracks constantly slowing down and spacing out, the guitars unwinding into loose tangles of psychedelic leads, and unfurling layered, textured spidery melodies, the riffs themselves gnarled and twisted, the band locking into long stretches of hypnometal, sounding almost looped as they pound out mesmerizingly cyclical blasts of grinding blackened crush, or alternatingly letting the guitars spiral skyward unleashing frenzies of super dense melodic psychedelia, draped over the furious pounding blasts below, the whole thing an undulating ever shifting super complex and convoluted deathmetalscape, as likely to pummel relentlessly, as slip into some heavily effected blackened drift or trip out into some sort of death metal space rock psychedelic hybrid, finishing off the record with an extended ambient outro, all abstract guitars, strange twisted organs, buried industrial crunch, all smeared into a hazy sprawl of blackened otherworldly deathlike drift. AWESOME.
We all love Mogwai. Ever since their 1997 debut Young Team, which still pretty much is the standard for brooding, slow building quiet/loud/quiet/loud post rock, and sure, none of their records since have been as good as Young Team, but the thing is, they've all been pretty damn good, some of them GREAT. Many of them deceivingly good, only to gradually blossom into greatness on repeated listens, which we're beginning to think is the case with this, their latest, and easily their best titled. In fact, we might posit that the new Mogwai has one of the best titles of any record, ever!
C'mon. It's called: Hardcore Will Never Die. But You Will. Kind of surprised some other band (a hardcore band?) hadn't thought of that already, but then somehow it seems more fitting on a band, that's not really at all hardcore. And Mogwai have always had a knack for song titles, which comes in handy when you're essentially an instrumental band, and song titles are thus removed from any sort of lyrical constraints or parameters.
Needless to say, fans of Mogwai are gonna dig this too, unless you absolutely hated the last few, in which case, give the sound samples a go, and see what you think. But was far as we're concerned, this is another winner, from a group, who essentially created a genre, and even with a legion of imitators, have virtually no equal.
The cool thing is that Mogwai no longer feel wedded to the whole slow build quiet/loud thing, sure they indulge once in a while, and yeah, they still do it better than most, and if you see them live, these guys can get as loud as ANY band, but here, they're more about creating gorgeous chunks of indie rock. And on Hardcore, the sound is as varied as ever. Opener "White Noise" is gorgeous, thick with whirring keyboards, and some strange guitar crunch, laced over their meandery post rock, super melodic and sun dappled and really, great. Winding down after only 5 minutes, we really wish it would have gone on for twice as long at least.
"Mexican Grand Prix" is a big surprise, sounding more Like Neu! than Mogwai, with a clipped electronic pulse, electronic drums, warm wheezing organs, and vocals! Whispery and a little distorted, there are some computer voices too, and the drums get all stuttery, it sort of sounds like a darker, heavier Stereolab, but still manages to sound like Mogwai.
Much of the rest of the record is just super hooky, fantastically melodic, crunch guitar driven post rock, sounding like Mogwai for sure, but minus the super stripped down verses and explosive choruses, then there are tracks like "Letters To The Metro" which are all hazy and dreamy, with gorgeous slide guitars, simple stripped down drumming, and prominent piano.
"How To Be A Werewolf" might be the first track to really slip back into the old Mogwai template, but even then, it still sounds great, and original, the guitars are weirdly distorted, wrapped in effects, all draped over some strange bit of distant percussion, while the rest of the track offers up spidery melodies, simple propulsive drumming, and yeah, an eventual guitar heavy coda. "Too Raging To Cheers" does the same, starting off with some minimal piano, letting guitars surface, and grow gradually more distorted, same with the drums, there are even some strings, it's very moody and melancholy, and does explode into a very epic majestic Godspeed like climax.
Finally, the record closes with the awesomely titled "You're Lionel Richie", which is definitely an extended and abstracted version of the Mogwai formula, the sound minimal and shuffling, dark and brooding, eventually slipping into near silence, just some little tendrils of barely there guitar, only to come back in all distorted and buzzy, loping, and midtempo, eventually blossoming into something that sounds almost orchestral, soaring and wailing and seriously sonically transcendent, proving effortlessly, that Mogwai don't NEED to sound like the Mogwai of old, but can whenever they want to, and when they do, it will still totally and completely KILL.
While they last, we have the deluxe double disc version of the cd, which includes a 23 minute bonus track called "Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)", and don't fret vinyl folks, the lp includes a download card which ALSO includes that bonus track, even though it's not on the lp.
We all love Mogwai. Ever since their 1997 debut Young Team, which still pretty much is the standard for brooding, slow building quiet/loud/quiet/loud post rock, and sure, none of their records since have been as good as Young Team, but the thing is, they've all been pretty damn good, some of them GREAT. Many of them deceivingly good, only to gradually blossom into greatness on repeated listens, which we're beginning to think is the case with this, their latest, and easily their best titled. In fact, we might posit that the new Mogwai has one of the best titles of any record, ever!
C'mon. It's called: Hardcore Will Never Die. But You Will. Kind of surprised some other band (a hardcore band?) hadn't thought of that already, but then somehow it seems more fitting on a band, that's not really at all hardcore. And Mogwai have always had a knack for song titles, which comes in handy when you're essentially an instrumental band, and song titles are thus removed from any sort of lyrical constraints or parameters.
Needless to say, fans of Mogwai are gonna dig this too, unless you absolutely hated the last few, in which case, give the sound samples a go, and see what you think. But was far as we're concerned, this is another winner, from a group, who essentially created a genre, and even with a legion of imitators, have virtually no equal.
The cool thing is that Mogwai no longer feel wedded to the whole slow build quiet/loud thing, sure they indulge once in a while, and yeah, they still do it better than most, and if you see them live, these guys can get as loud as ANY band, but here, they're more about creating gorgeous chunks of indie rock. And on Hardcore, the sound is as varied as ever. Opener "White Noise" is gorgeous, thick with whirring keyboards, and some strange guitar crunch, laced over their meandery post rock, super melodic and sun dappled and really, great. Winding down after only 5 minutes, we really wish it would have gone on for twice as long at least.
"Mexican Grand Prix" is a big surprise, sounding more Like Neu! than Mogwai, with a clipped electronic pulse, electronic drums, warm wheezing organs, and vocals! Whispery and a little distorted, there are some computer voices too, and the drums get all stuttery, it sort of sounds like a darker, heavier Stereolab, but still manages to sound like Mogwai.
Much of the rest of the record is just super hooky, fantastically melodic, crunch guitar driven post rock, sounding like Mogwai for sure, but minus the super stripped down verses and explosive choruses, then there are tracks like "Letters To The Metro" which are all hazy and dreamy, with gorgeous slide guitars, simple stripped down drumming, and prominent piano.
"How To Be A Werewolf" might be the first track to really slip back into the old Mogwai template, but even then, it still sounds great, and original, the guitars are weirdly distorted, wrapped in effects, all draped over some strange bit of distant percussion, while the rest of the track offers up spidery melodies, simple propulsive drumming, and yeah, an eventual guitar heavy coda. "Too Raging To Cheers" does the same, starting off with some minimal piano, letting guitars surface, and grow gradually more distorted, same with the drums, there are even some strings, it's very moody and melancholy, and does explode into a very epic majestic Godspeed like climax.
Finally, the record closes with the awesomely titled "You're Lionel Richie", which is definitely an extended and abstracted version of the Mogwai formula, the sound minimal and shuffling, dark and brooding, eventually slipping into near silence, just some little tendrils of barely there guitar, only to come back in all distorted and buzzy, loping, and midtempo, eventually blossoming into something that sounds almost orchestral, soaring and wailing and seriously sonically transcendent, proving effortlessly, that Mogwai don't NEED to sound like the Mogwai of old, but can whenever they want to, and when they do, it will still totally and completely KILL.
While they last, we have the deluxe double disc version of the cd, which includes a 23 minute bonus track called "Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)", and don't fret vinyl folks, the lp includes a download card which ALSO includes that bonus track, even though it's not on the lp.
