With a title like Black Wooden, we would have imagined that the latest installment in the limited edition Latitudes series, from Mount Eerie, aka Phil Elverum, would be sonically akin to his recent Wind's Poem record, which was a gorgeous hybrid of grim frosty buzzing black metal and dark droney folk, and while conceptually, Black Wooden is in fact related to Elverum's interest in black metal, as well as time spent in Norway, sonically, it has much more in common with the other, less black metal records in Mount Eerie's catalog. And while we were maybe a tad disappointed, once we got over it, we were treated to another fantastic collection of brooding, haunting, introspective, minimal folk, the title Black Wooden suddenly revealing itself to be almost literal, taking elements and perhaps themes of black metal music, and rendering them via wood, on mostly acoustic guitar. The sound hushed and harrowing, introspective but slightly ominous, reminding us immediately of Elverum's collaboration with Julie Doiron, from a few years back, Lost Wisdom, so perfectly dark, moody and melodic, the acoustic guitars, augmented by warm swells of spidery, desert-y twang, and thick swirling soft focus buzz, infusing a bit of that later era Earth-iness, minor key and mesmerizing, Elverum's voice fragile and intimate, sometimes switching to an about-to-crack falsetto, the whole sound just so urgent and personal and dark and emotionally frayed. It's hard to believe these songs were put together and quickly recorded on tour, in the hours before a gig, but they were, like all the Latitudes releases, created to let bands write and record quickly, although we'd imagine in many cases, it probably doesn't come together so cohesively or so powerfully.
We've dug pretty much everything we've heard from this Wisconsin husband and wife duo, the lp on Night People, the split with Wet Hair, those records found the group unfurling thick slabs of murky dronepop, twisted psychedelic dub, blurred hypnotic riff heavy space drone, psychedelic space boogie, all wound into a roiling sonic stew, seriously warped and druggy and occasionally blown out and noisy, but on this new record, they've ditched much of the heaviness, a lot of the noisiness, and toned down much of the murky psychedelia and instead crafted something much poppier and dreamier. The first track is a bit misleading with this in mind, as it's a lysergic bit of distorted dubbed out riffage, with some programmed beats, buried under chiming melodies and a heaving bass buzz, kaleidoscopic and hazy and with the potential to explode into something much heavier and noisier, but instead it gives way to "All The Sun That Shines" which sort of lives up to its title, a dubby reggae flecked bit of woozy skitter, programmed beats, swirling effects, loads of reverb and delay, and hazy ethereal female vox, some spidery Morricone-esque guitar twang, and an almost calypso groove are woven into the proceedings too, the result though is indeed hazy and sunshiney and gloriously washed out.
"Amazing And Wonderful" is up next, and while featuring a similarly murky Skaters-esque rhythm, it ditches the dubbiness, and sets a sort of abstract post punk into a much more dreampoppy realm, all tinkling chimes, descending melodies, multi tracked vox, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of swirling reverby whir. "Bird Of Paradise Dub Version" is another abstract swirl of druggy space pop, the 'dub version' aspect embodied by the delayed drums and the softly swirling clouds of blurred effects and heavy heavy echo. And so it goes, the rest of the record unwinds similarly, an ever shifting collection of murky, lo-fi programmed-beat driven dub pop, muddy, and murky and warbly, plenty of buzzing low end, shimmery effects, hushed dreamlike vox, a little bit of synthy new wave here and there, some stripped down low slung trip hop every once in a while, and even some fragmented off kilter synth pop strangeness, but overall, way less damaged then their past outings, and more akin to a group like Pigeons, that same sort of downtempo electronic pop, albeit with a much more murky, warped and experimental bent. Which as far as we're concerned translates into really really cool!
We don't know if there's anything like an official membership form or some sort of fucked-up ritual one has to endure before joining the inner circle of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, but this Swiss / German collective of malcontent noise makers and tape splicers might just increase their ranks through the diabolical collage work from Krube. Schimpfluch (whose members include Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, G*Park, Raionbashi, and Rudolf Eb.er) began in the early '90s as an aggressive / primitive hybrid between the Viennese Aktionism of Hermann Nitsch & Rudolf Schwartzkogler and the sharp collage techniques of the French musique concrete pioneers. Performance is often a critical component to the Schimpfluch aesthetic involving all sorts of transgressive theatrics, audience baiting tactics, and maybe a dead fish or two; but the recording output of Schimpfluch and associates has been exceptional throughout their history. Perhaps with all of those performative gestures hidden in the recording process, the resultant squeaks, bangs, grunts, and scrapes begin to disassociate from their origins and become all the more bizarre, more obscure, and more damaged.
This is definitely true for the work of Krube, the project of a German sound-artist by the name of Alexander Schneider. His techniques begin in snipping various sounds from who knows what. The label Hronir tells us its everyday objects, body openings, and non-definable machines; but by the time Schneider is done with his digital razor blade, what's a fart and what's a piston is not terribly discernible. These sound are quickly jettisoned in squadrons of battering sounds that collide with each other in clusters of events that splutter and bristle like a punk version of Pierre Henry's classic Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir.
Raionbashi's side long composition is comparatively sublime affair, more in keeping with the underappreciated G*Park sound of atonal ambience, creepy as hell field recordings, and generalized disturbances. Daniel Lowenbruck is Raionbashi, and a relatively recent addition to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, having run the exceptional Tochnit-Aleph label and the rumpsti pumsti shop in Berlin. His track begins with a bellowing piano chord which elongates into a desolate drone, marked with scurrying vermin like noises, backward scrapings, and indeterminate swells of grey noise. That same piano returns throughout the piece with an incremental build of anxious black energy seeping through every quiet gesture and gurgling rupture. Like the work of G*Park, the more you let yourself into the details of this piece, the more terrifying it becomes. Truly exceptional!
Refrigerator is woefully under represented on the aQ site, with 5 records listed (of the 20 or so full lengths, singles, eps and cassettes they've released in the last 20+ years) most without reviews, and the ones that do have a review only get a sentence or two. Which is strange, cuz we've always been fans, and we've always felt a definite kinship between Shrimper and aQuarius. Amps For Christ, Franklin Bruno, Nothing Painted Blue, Dump, Mountain Goats, Sebadoh, Wckr Spgt, Soul Junk, Bugskull, John Davis, Pork Queen, Simon Joyner, Good Horsey, Herman Dune, Woods and of course Shrimper flagship band Refrigerator.
And we always considered Refrigerator vocalist Allen Callaci one of the most underappreciated vocalists in the underground, his voice so soulful and emotive and passionate, on the verge of cracking, always sounding like it's about to slip into a falsetto, but instead, it's simply high and clear, pure and plaintive, and so perfectly matched to the group's gorgeous, melancholy downer lo-fi pop.
Dangerous is an odd first Refrigerator record to finally get the aQ love it deserves, as it's not a proper new full length, instead, it's a collection of demos, intended to be expanded into a proper electric full band record, but after a band member's injury and gradual recovery, by the time they went back to work on new music, the band were itching to work on new songs, but it was decided the demos were to good to just let slip through the cracks, so they became Dangerous, and even in stripped down demo form, this is some seriously gorgeous, moving, emotional music. Just check out the first track, "Be Positive", which just might be the sweetest, saddest, most heart wrenchingly lovely song we've heard in ages. Allen Callaci's vocals impossibly gorgeous, the melodies so perfect, the whole song only benefiting from the minimal instrumentation. And from there on out, it's just another classic, practically perfect Refrigerator record, lovely, soft souled song after darkly intimate song, all minimal strum, subtle percussion, more about the arrangements and melodies and those vocals, a gorgeous collection of lo-fi folk pop that few can pull off the way these guys can. We've been listening to this non stop, and that first song is definitely one of our favorite tracks of the year so far. With more joining that one the more we listen!
All the songs were recorded live too, with no overdubs (they were demos after all) which only adds to the immediate/intimate vibe. Also includes guest spots from Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno (who wrote one song, and sings on two), as well as a couple songs written by Refrigerator drummer Chris Jones. Includes a booklet with liner notes and lyrics too.
Hark! O Moon, Queen of Night on Earth... 'tis a new album from the inimitable Jonathan Richman! Sure, his legions of diehard fans have undoubtedly scooped this up already, but some of us are slower on the draw and some folks have somehow yet to discover Mr. Richman as he alternately feverishly and liltingly strums his guitar, and charmingly croons his intimate, yearnful song-stories. He's now in his fourth decade of music making, and he's showing no signs of stopping. He has so many records (both solo and with The Modern Lovers), we've lost count, but we're happy to add this to the stack. A definite pleasure for fans, old and new!
Now, here's one hell of a good collaboration! These are two incredible abstractionists of the song in their own right, both known for their protracted dronesmear pocked with eerie melodies and ghost-echo structures. Rosenqvist is the man behind the Jasper TX project with tons of incredible records of blackened murk, nocturnal ambience, and the tactile grit of antiquity, while Scott may be best known as the former drummer of Slowdive, although he's released a couple of stunning shoegaze instrumental records over the past couple of years. This album is ostensibly a soundtrack to a short film directed by Juriaan Booij. The film itself is just about 20 minutes long, but the soundtrack is nearly twice that in length. There seemed to have been a number of complications with production that caused innumerable delays for Booij, but this worked to the advantage of Rosenqvist (the original choice of Booij) as he was able to take his time with the concept that the filmmaker had presented to him and in turn consult his confidante Simon Scott about a possible collaboration. Without much of a deadline or even the indication that the film would be completed (in fact, it was and has screened at various film festivals around the globe), Rosenqvist and Scott composed an incredible album of luminous sound that glows through an endless bank of sonic fog.
A rasped buzz emerges from an oceanic current of tonal guitar swell as the intro to Conformists. A collage of cracked ether, electrical static, and crunched surface noises from what could be from old 78s amass into a small crescendo of noise that collapses just as gracefully as it emerges. Out of this, Scott and Rosenqvist follow up with gasping set of radiator drones which swirl around cavernous swells, all dark, metallic, and ominous. A more enveloping, less threatening drone develops next, with somber flickers of a melody buried somewhere in the mix only to succumb to another passage of prolonged shadow and desolation. It's all very haunting and very evocative.
The flipside takes up a beautiful set of twin guitar drones with subtle half-melodies barely flickering within their mutual undulations, gradually overtaken by a soft buzz of distant distortion and bass-heavy thrum, transitioning toward the glacial centerpiece of this side of the record, a track called "Monuments." Here, a slow electrical pulse repeats ad infinitum, almost like an old ringback tone on a telephone with nobody on the other end picking up, laden with glacial bursts oversaturated chiming guitar noise that flood the soundfield like high-beam headlights cutting through a wintery darkness. The album descends and fades away into another beautiful crushed velvet drone. Epic!
Skate clothing company Volcom is also a cool weird record label. Especially lately. Wildildlife, Best Coast, and now... legendary SST doomlords Saint Vitus??? Yep, they've got the reunited Vitus (with new drummer Henry Vasquez, RIP Armando Acosta), fronted by Wino, on 45rpm 7" colored wax doing two moldy oldies live, "Saint Vitus" and "Born Too Late", both classics of Sabbath styled doom metal. Recorded at the Palladium in Worcester Mass on October 17th, 2009, apparently the first time they'd played on the East Coast since 1993, when the band's original run was petering out. The A-side features some added vocals by their punk pal Dez Cadena (Black Flag, DC3, the Misfits)!
Lalo Schrifin's second most famous soundtrack after Mission Impossible (he also scored Dirty Harry, Cincinnati Kid and Cool Hand Luke among others) is this monster score for Enter The Dragon. The hit film is a perennial cult favorite that not only launched the Kung Fu Martial Arts Film craze in America but made its star Bruce Lee a legend due to his untimely death six months before the movie was released. But for avid readers of Wax Poetics, this score resonates amongst hip hop aficionados and sample heads alike for its thrilling combinations of jazz tension, funk breaks, wah guitars and far eastern musical motifs, not to mention Bruce Lee's battle cries peppered throughout. Hip hop and martial arts have often kept close quarters from Dolemite to the Wu Tang Klan, and this score just may be ground zero for the marriage of both those worlds.
Haiy-AHHHHHHHH!!!!!
We've been dying for this. Shackleton's live set for Fabric, a collection of unreleased tracks, exclusives, and even a handful of older classics (reworked into wholly new and never heard before versions), all woven into a sprawling, claustrophobic avant dubstep soundscape, that manages to be groovy, and creepy, haunting and abstract, rhythmic and skeletal, super minimal and strangely funky, almost like some hauntological take on dubstep. Ritualistic, occultic, with plenty of looped, super minimal rhythms, strange disembodied voices, mysterious samples, reverb drenched soulful croons drifting through fields of hazy shimmer and dubbed out ambience, occasional cinematic strings, lurching lumbering low end, lots of haze and gauze and blurred atmospheres, all looped and layered and stretched out into ethereal streaks of spectral sound, but unlike a lot of dubstep, Shackleton is more about the beats, and the surrounding ambience is super subtle, sometimes so much so, that it sounds like the beats are just skittering through empty space, but it's all a deft arrangement of tension and release, it's precisely how Shackleton weaves this moody, intense, and darkly claustrophobic soundworld.
Oddly enough (or maybe not), much of the sound here reminds us of African Head Charge, the same sort of abstract spiritual dub vibe, but stripped WAY WAY down and spaced WAY WAY out. Druggy and psychedelic, as much as rhythmic and hypnotic. So great. Even though it's a comp / DJ mix, and not a proper album per se, it might just be the best Shackleton release yet!
Like all Fabric mixes, comes in a cool metal box, with a printed inner sleeve, and a heavy printed cardstock slipcover.
Not the Speed, not the Glue - it's just the Shinki, here. After reissuing the two classics of drugged out early '70s Japanese heavy psych by proto-metal power trio Speed, Glue and Shinki, makes sense that the Phoenix label would turn their attentions to the solo effort by that band's guitarist, Shinki Chen, originally released in 1972, also featuring Hiro Yanagida on keys, and George Yanagi from Flied Egg / Strawberry Path on bass and vocals. For those keeping score at home, this doesn't get nearly the love from Julian Cope's Japrocksampler as do Shinki's albums with Speed and Glue, but we still figure any Speed Glue & Shinki fan will certainly wanna check it out, 'cause it's pretty cool in our book. Truth is, as far as STONER rock goes, its hard to imagine music much more stoned than this comfortably numb slab of swirling, psychedelic blooze rawk. Just look at the album cover... crazy long hair, red eyes, puffing on a joint... that's this album, all right.
It starts off with a weird, semi-ambient opening track, "The Dark Sea Dream", five fairly abstract minutes of tinkling piano, barely-there percussion, distant voices (?), amp buzz and feedback drone which would fit right in on a current Miasmah label release, say. After that, the "regular" (though quite relaxed) rock n' roll kicks in, on melodic blues-based songs with such wonderful titles as "Freedom Of A Mad Paper Lantern", "Gloomy Reflections", and "Corpse". Shinki's guitar gently weeps, his riffage more slumbering than lumbering, the rhythms lazy and loping, everything often overwhelmed by blissed out layers of synth shimmer. And it's all quite enjoyable in fact, with a vibe sorta similar to the California dreamin' of Captain Beyond's Sufficiently Breathless (though without the jazziness of that album, which we just realized we've never reviewed!). And definitely of interest to fans of Too Much, Far Out, and of course SG&S.
In any case, Shinki and friends fuzz it up nicely here, and remarkably enough, on the album's last cut, the nearly 13 minute long "Farewell To Hypocrites", they suddenly start to display some energy, the drummer at last bestirring himself, making for a rousing finale to a record that otherwise often sorta sounds like heavy Hendrix on 'ludes. Nothing wrong with that, though, if you're in the mood! Hmm, maybe they recorded this last track first, who knows?
Limited, numbered, mini-LP sleeve styled gatefold packaging.
It's like the second coming of late great rhythmic post rockers Lungfish. This latest disc from Swedish hypno rockers Skull Defekts finds the group teaming up with modern musical shaman (and former Lungfish frontman) Daniel Higgs, for what is easily the groups most 'rock' record yet, which is no bad thing, and with the addition of Higgs, the band's sound is transformed into something that to these ears sounds remarkably like a modernized, supercharged Lungfish. Skull Defekts, like Lungfish before them, are obsessed with rhythm, and repetition, and their songs bear this out, often comprised of just one or two parts, repeated over and over, trance-like and mesmerizing, the band locking in tight, and getting all droned out and hypnotic and krautrocky, constantly shifting but minimally and subtly, so on the surface, it's total zoner psychedelic drone rock bliss, but closer listening reveals a constantly mutating underbelly innercore, and on Peer Amid, Higgs acquits himself nicely, taking an approach not that dissimilar to his Lungfish days, short shards of lyrics, more like mantras, repeated over and over, he's in full shamen mode, the band his high priests, the normal Skull Defekts fleshed WAY out, lush and layered, with tons of extra effects, electronics, percussion, the guitars super thick and distorted and heavy, the perfect bed for Higgs' inspired lyrical rants, the overall sound slipping from the noise rock/krautrock hybrid of the title track, to the almost Bleach era Nirvana sounding "No More Always", to the Eastern tinged midtempo dirgery of "Gospel Of The Skull", that is probably as perfect a realization of the Skull Defekts / Daniel Higgs hybrid as to be found here, the main riff sounding almost like something off Sun City Girls' Torch Of The Mystics, and Higgs' vocals all over the place, nearly operatic, super intense and over the top.
The rest of the record offers still more inspired, next level, spiritual hypno noise rock, rhythmic mantra drone psychedelia, in the form of the creepy vocal driven drag of "The Silver Ring", with its brooding ambience chant-like vox and crashing distortion, and the tribal buzz drenched "In Majestic Drag" with its huge drums, crackling crumbling distortion, strange shimmering ambience, and still more crooned moaned vox, and "Fragrant Nimbus", with a main rhythmic groove that almost sounds like the Ex, Higgs, sing/speaking over the top, sparring with extra percussion, squalls of super intense psychedelic freekout, the vocals multi-tracked creating strange harmonies, and "What Knives, What Birds", another -almost- funky sounding jam, that wreathes the rhythms in distorted processed vocals, winding tangled distorted guitar melodies, and finally, "Join The True" with a killer bass heavy rhythm, circular and mesmerizing, Higgs, vocals an ominous spoken word, the vocals and instruments locked tight for a nearly unshifting 3 minutes, before exploding into a majestic bit of melodic crashing and soaring, again, reminding us a bit of Nirvana's Bleach, albeit filtered through both Lungfish AND Skull Defekts, the result a glorious slab of super rhythmic, catchy and melodic, heavy and trancelike hypnorock bliss!
Finally available on vinyl (again)!
Robyn Hitchcock formed The Soft Boys back in 1976. Pretty much from the get go, they were cranking out amazing song after amazing song, and the songwriting got even more awesome when guitarist Kimberley Rew joined the fold a year later. Their sophomore full length, the classic Underwater Moonlight (first released in June of 1980), boasts so many of them. The band fires up the punk engines with the anthemic "I Wanna Destroy You" and then gets your bubblegum snappin' with "Positive Vibrations" and then melts your heart with "Queen Of Eyes". All the while embedding their pop hooks permanently in your cranium... which is just fine with us! The band was sadly short-lived, burning brightly for just four years, and then going their separate ways shortly after this album (although they did reform briefly in 1994 and 2001). So, that perhaps makes this record even more cherished. The Soft Boys' sound? Well, Hitchcock himself said he wanted to cross The Beatles' Abbey Road with Captain Beefheart's Troutmask Replica. Ambitious guy, and he quite succeeded - these songs are filled with wryly clever absurdist lyrics, manic jump-up-and-down energy, lovely melodies, delicious vocal harmonies, art folk psychedelia, and slashing clangy post-punk guitars. Yes, all that and then some! The band has deeply influenced everyone from Yo La Tengo to Flaming Lips to Destroyer to Tall Dwarfs to REM to... well... EVERYONE. Those who've yet to encounter the brilliance of The Soft Boys should start with this, inarguably their definitive album, and then seek out their other smart and wonderful releases: 1979's Can of Bees, 1977's Give it to the Soft Boys ep, etc. Not to mention Hitchcock's subsequent solo outings as well as Rew's post-Soft Boys solo activities as well as in the deliriously catchy Katrina And The Waves.
As much as we dig pretty much all the Sonic Youth records, from Evol to Sister, Daydream Nation to Dirty, even Rather Ripped and Murray Street, we definitely find ourselves a little partial to the group's SYR releases, various records that for whatever reason the band opted to release themselves, the sound usually well removed from the indie noise pop of their proper records, and focusing on collaborations, live performances, odds and ends, and even soundtracks.
Simon Werner A Disparu is a collection of music SY recorded last year for the latest film by French director Fabrice Gobert. The group approached it like any musician scoring a film, watching the rushes and dailies, and crafting their songs and sounds into cues that fit the action on screen. But when it came time to release those recordings separate from the film, the band decided to return to the studio and rework the various cues into SY songs, creating altered versions and new compositions by taking those various cues and the numerous sonic fragments employed for the score, and weaving them together, layering them on top of each other, pulling them apart and reconfiguring them, essentially transforming the score into what is now less a soundtrack, and more an actual Sonic Youth record. And a pretty great one at that.
Performed by classic SY lineup: Thurston, Kim, Lee, and Steve (with longtime SY collaborator Jim O'Rourke on one track), from the first track it's immediately recognizable as Sonic Youth, dark and mesmerizingly droney, shuffling rhythms, percussive guitar scrape and crunch, that gives way to a woozy loping slightly gnarled groove, rife with spidery guitar melodies and swirling guitar ambience. "Alice Et Simon" is up next and is classic Sonic Youth, it's almost impossible to keep from constantly expecting Thurston's vocals to come in any second, but they never do, instead the band weave a lush bit of softly atonal jangle and crystalline chordal shimmer. And so it goes, a series of instrumental SY jams, all propulsive motorik drumming, low slung bass thrum, and a gorgeously cacophonic symphony of angular guitars, from warm melodies to grinding crunch, chiming chords over warped melodic squiggles, all wreathed in plenty of crackle and buzz and the occasional strange effects.
The final track finds the band joined by Jim O'Rourke for a sprawling 13 minute epic, droney and krauty, the sound shifting from shuffling jangle to super melodic slow build moodiness, to full bore psychedelic chaos to abstract ambient free noise exploration, culminating in a gorgeous droned out hypno-kraut outro.
So good! And makes us want to see the movie now too!
Originally released in 1998, and now available on vinyl again (and still available on cd), Good Morning Spider was record number 2 from the late Mark Linkous and band, following their debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. The interesting thing about GMS, is that it was a huge stylistic and sonic shift for the band, much more somber and introspective that its predecessor, in part, most assume, because just before the recording of GMS, Linkous overdosed in a London hotel room, collapsed and was clinically dead for several minutes, he also spent the next few months in a wheelchair after a surgery that threatened to keep him in that chair forever. But if that particular black cloud did indeed have a silver lining, it's the absolutely inspired, ultra personal, intimate and heart wrenching beauty that is Good Morning Spider. While the record still strikes a precarious balance between rambunctious rocking and more darkly balladic introspection, the scales seem to be tipping toward delicate crystalline beauty, dark, hushed, whispery, haunting and so lovely. But even the more rocking numbers are infused with some serious pathos, and of course plenty of melancholy and heartbreak.
The whole record is a marvel, gorgeously and idiosyncratically produced, lots of crackle, and buzz, and processed vocals, effected instrumentation, strings, lush twang flecked indie rock one second, dreamy about-to-collapse balladry the next, fragmented perfect pop the next. The record begins with the brief blast of "Pig", is a serious chunk of incendiary crunch, but so rife with impossibly hooky melodies, and some super dramatic layered vocals, not to mention plenty of twisted sounds and atmosphere. And then it's all dialed WAY down, "Painbirds" is a lilting bit of sweetly sorrowful shuffling slowcore, "Saint Mary" is a hushed bit of slo-mo Appalachian pop, Linkous' fragile vox drifting over a simple strum, but it is so much more than the sum of its parts. "Sick Of Goodbyes" is another more rocking track, but that rocking squall is brief, as the record shifts back into slow sorrowful drift.
One of our favorite tracks has to be "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", which begins as a whirling FX flecked bit of organ warble, mysterious voices, ethereal and dreamlike, a brief intro to what sounds like bad radio reception, the song "Happy Man" struggling to be heard through the static and hiss, even cutting out completely at points, until finally kicking in, and it's such a perfect pop song, with an incredible hook, and some super intense vocals, and killer guitar playing, and then once again, the record slips back into darkness, and for the remainder of the record, slips seamlessly between angstful distorted jangly crunch and shimmery drifty introspection. So good.
Anyone who loves stuff like Vic Chestnut, Lambchop, Neutral Milk Hotel, Palace/Will Oldham/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Songs:Ohia and the like, who somehow missed out on Good Morning Spider, here's another chance...
Includes a digital download card!
It's always pretty amazing when reissue labels continue to set high standards with rediscovered music. Especially when you think the well has surely gone dry, that they must have to heap loads of praise and hyperbole on a record that no one has heard of to get folks to buy it, only to have it not be as good as one hoped. That's what we were expecting going in to this 1969 private press Jim Sullivan record, when the label was describing it as a cross between Fred Neil and David Axelrod, two of our favorite musicians. While the description is somewhat apt, we couldn't help in our excitement over what we were hearing to come up with better comparisons like the Memphis swamp-folk of Tim Rose, the string-driven downer folk-blues of Tim Hardin or the lysergic folk-pop of Hoyt Axton (especially his debut, My Griffin is Gone). Needless to say, we are loving this record!
U.F.O. is a unique hybrid of Southern-fried world-weary folk with classic top-notch LA studio production sheen. Backed by the legendary Wrecking Crew, Sullivan's earthy but wide-eyed existentialism is cradled in stunning atmospheric orchestral arrangements that give deeper scope to the song's melancholic luster. Why this wasn't a major studio release at the time is a mystery because it sure sounds like one. But mysteries seem to have dogged Jim Sullivan throughout his life, as he strangely disappeared in 1975 in the New Mexico desert. His belongings abandoned, his motel room untouched.
Light in the Attic has done an incredible job of piecing together Sullivan's backstory and disappearance, but with no definitive resolution except for the legacy of one of the best lost folk records we've heard in a long while. Highly recommended!
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
From the same folks who brought us the Carlton Melton "Handling Snakes" single, here's a 7" by the band Sweet Apple, featuring several members of doom rockers Witch (namely drummer J. Mascis, better known for his gig as guitarist in a band called Dinosaur Jr., and namesake bassist Dave Sweetapple, who insists that the rest of the band thought it would be funny to call themselves Sweet Apple). The other two guys in Sweet Apple are also from Cobra Verde. So its a semi-super group we guess.
We missed reviewing their full-length on Tee Pee, which apparently features both of the tracks found here, and to be honest this isn't entirely convincing us to go back and give it another listen, though maybe we should. At least check this out if you're interested in some authentic, anthemic, kick ass, good ol' fashioned rock n' roll. Definitely a bit "bar band" sounding, so grab a beer, and go with it
Limited to 500 copies, with a nice cover by poster artist Alan Forbes!
Hot damn! The amazing girl group inspired sounds just keep on coming, and Tennis are serving them up in such an irresistible fashion. We knew very little about this Colorado husband/wife outfit before Cape Dory came our way, but once it hit our ears we jumped aboard their timeless yet fresh approach to bringing rich harmony and hooks into driving, melodic songs that are so so catchy. Alaina Moore's vocals are truly the driving force that makes Tennis rise to the top of the recent wave of like-minded bands, her voice is beyond warm, seductive and engaging. If you've been swept up by groups like Best Coast, Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, Aias, and Girls At Dawn, we promise you'll find Tennis to be your next fix. We are so addicted, and have a feeling we are going to be playing Tennis all year long!
PS. we were tempted to go even more overboard with the tennis cliches, but we still say this is one ace of a record!
On the cover for some reason, Turisas. And inside this new issue of our favorite glossy metal mag from the UK, there's also Agalloch, Baroness, Impaled Nazarene, Kverlertak, Orange Goblin, and plenty more. Plus tons news and reviews of course. And the usual ads for insane European metal festivals we wish were could be at. And then there's the bonus cd sampler stuck to the cover. Metal, metal, metal!
We went nuts for the last 7" by Total Control, a side project of Aussie garage rockers Eddy Current Suppression Ring (who we just can't seem to get into), that record was a total ear shredding blast of classic old school synth punk a la the Screamers, Nervous Gender etc. This follow up, while still in the same electronic ballpark is somehow stylistically a huge shift, all the punk has been stripped away, leaving 2 tracks of minimal, robotic, old school electro, stripped down and spare, the beats programmed and clipped, the synths woozy and fuzzy, with some Radiophonic Workshop sounding melodies, occasional deep ominous crooning way down in the mix, bits of jangle guitar, some FX drenched vocalizing, but all wound around super sparse and skeletal beats and arrangements, resulting in some strange super hypnotic alien krautrocky robo-funk. Awesome stuff. Definitely time for a Total Control full length!!
We first discovered Scott Tuma when he was playing guitar for stoned Chicago slowcore country cosmonauts Souled American, his distinctive sound helping to shape SA's totally idiosyncratic music. And after Tuma parted ways with Souled American, he seemed to mark the event by jettisoning traditional songs completely, instead crafting a series of gorgeously gauzy country dronescapes, like an organic folk version of Tim Hecker, his lush landscapes, blurred and gauzy, washed out smears of impressionistic country music, evoking lost loves and bygone eras, his music utterly timeless and totally unlike anything we'd heard.
So every new Tuma releases is definitely worth celebrating, and Peeper is no different. A five song suite that captures everything we love about Tuma's music. The opener is a barely there stretch of gauzy sun dappled shimmer, which gives way to a stretch of slow motion Appalachia, the notes left to float weightless in wide open stretches of warm whirring ambience, a creaky, glacial bit of old timey drift, like a broadcast from some other time, playing through a busted old radio on a rickety old porch, the sunlight glimmering through the branches of the trees, the summer fading ever so slowly. Like on past records, Tuma is joined by members of Zelienople, and as the record progresses, the trio begin to unfurl fuzzy stretches of soft noise, of industrial creak, and layered grey drones, peppered with bits of percussion, clatter and whir, growing noisier and more propulsive, more like some murky psychedelic outfit, a haunting melody laced noise drenched creep, that's both caustic and lovely, eventually dissipating and leaving more hazy hushed dreaminess, what sounds like harmonium, piano, lazy and warm and languid and so sweetly beautiful.
The flipside of the tape, as far as we can tell, features a reinterpretation of Tuma's music, or maybe Tuma's sounds are sampled, or perhaps it's simply an homage, but the oddly named Brothers Pus (aka Johnny Kember & James Provencher), weave a thick sea of layered bass rumbles, of keening distant high end streaks, of tolling bells, a dark industrial dronescape, infused with bits of melody, that gradually fades out and gives way to something more folky, the industrial whir dialed back, while guitars pluck out melancholy melodies over the top, a dark droning country drift, that had we not known better, would have assumed it was Tuma himself.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already sold out, we have less than 20 copies and that's IT.
Originally a side project of aQ beloved grunge combo the Afghan Whigs, and formed during some downtime because of a label dispute in the late nineties, The Twilight Singers, became Whigs frontman Greg Dulli's main musical vehicle after the Whigs breakup in 2001. And over the course of six full lengths, Dulli has continued to craft his dark thoughts and melancholy miserablism into haunting soulful grooves and vitriolic soul flecked indie rock. We had originally described the Twilight Singers as "Like Arab Strap if they were raised on blue eyed soul and had a little more outward pointing vitriol then self-loathing misery", and that still seems to hold true. This latest record, like ...Plays Blackberry Belle, our other favorite TS record, is a logical continuation of the sound of the Afghan Whigs circa Gentlemen. The music lush, and dark, and introspective, but still occasionally rocking and distorted and intense, and yeah, soulful. The finest moments are definitely the collaborations, specifically "Be Invited", where Dulli is joined by Mark Lanegan, whose whiskey soaked drawl is the perfect match for Dulli's emotive croon, especially when underpinned by super dramatic swoonsome strings and lush cinematic ambience. Had us sort of wishing the two had done the whole record together, but even sans Lanegan, the rest of the record is pretty dang great. Another killer (and surprising) collaboration is when Dulli is joined by Ani DiFranco, whose voice too is a gorgeous match for Dulli's, reminding us of Marcy Mays' (of Scrawl) lead vocal turn on the Whigs' "My Curse", and somehow again, subtly in this case, shining a light on Dulli's oft troubled dealings with the opposite sex, painfully and explicitly laid bare in most of his songs (a la Arab Strap).
Listening to this now, it wouldn't be hard to imagine this was a proper Afghan Whigs record, maybe the one that should have/could have come out right between Gentlemen and Black Love. Which is high praise indeed, as far as we're concerned. Needless to say, if you're already a Dulli fan, and/or dig and miss the Afghan Whigs, this will totally hit the spot. And if you're someone into dark, dramatic, emotionally charged, epic cathartic indie rock, and has yet to discover Greg Dulli and the Afghan Whigs, well, you're in for a serious surprise...
Here's the the vinyl debut from this eerie experimental drone duo, their second album after a cd on Utech. Last list, you may recall, we had a record by Cleared, featuring Stephen Hess of Haptic, On, and Locrian. He's 1/2 of Ural Umbo as well. The other half is Reto Mader, best known to AQ customers for his excellent Utech release as RM74. Together, these two utilize a variety of instruments and electronics (bass, organ, synth, kalimba, tapes, bowed cymbals, percussion, chimes, etc.) to conjure up (or rather, carefully construct) a powerful selection of detailed, dense "nebulous post doom" soundscapes, both amorphous and atmospheric, thick and physical. Yet their heavy drones, however ominous, are soft around the edges, and seem to be lit by a glow from within. 'Tis often more dreamlike than nightmarish, although with an active imagination the listener could find themselves growing frightened, as one wonders not so much about the music itself, than about the darkened spaces beyond it.
Aptly titled Fog Tapes, and not just because it was recorded to analog tape, this record conjures layers of blurry, obscured images in the mind's eye. Nothing fully ever comes into focus, these half-developed images superimposed and fading from one curious scene to the next. At times it sounds like the vibrations that might still lingering in the air in the aftermath of an occult ritual, by an assembly of robed monks conducting arcane, abstract rites. Or maybe it's the sounds of the rites themselves, isolated, slowed down, ghostly, heard through a gauzy veil, dimmed and distant. Ural Umbo's gentle echoes, crackling distortion, swelling drones, mysterious clattering, indistinct voices, and other manifestations, can be quietly creepy, or massively grinding, but at the same time seem mystically serene if you give yourself over to it - possibly psychologically disturbing otherwise. At its heaviest, on tracks like "The Mediums Feed", this should appeal to fans of SUNNO))) and Aun, but also bears comparison to some stuff by Steven R. Smith, and many of the haunting soundscapey things specialized in by labels like Miasmah, and Utech - in fact, this puts us in mind of the "black metal Taj Mahal Travellers" comment we made regarding Utech's Tetragrammaton release.
A quite excellent 8 tracks, 44 minutes! Swiss import, limited edition. Nice silver-printed sleeve, with fold-out poster enclosed.
How long has it been? Seven years? Well it's about time we had a new studio album from these old, old AQ faves. Hopefully they're old faves of yours too, but if not, we're very happy to introduce 'em to you, and this new album will do the job very very well! Hailing from the Czech Republic, this legendary band of radical arty rockers, whose name means "Now I Get It" and is pronounced ooje-May-Dome-uh, or Oozh Smeh Dough-Ma, depending on whom you ask, got their start back in the '80s Prague punk scene, and soon became the PROG punks to reckon with as well; we've described their musical approach as being a sort of "heavy and hyperkinetic ... horn-blasted punk/prog hoedown that mingles the folk melodies of Eastern Europe with the underground/avantgarde of the Rock In Opposition scene" and that's certainly still displayed with fervor on Caves, a spelunking themed album of majestic melodies and energetic pop in their trademark eccentric style.
The current UZD quartet, lead by vocalist Miroslav Wanek (and including as always non-musical member Martin Velisek, credited with "brushes, paints" for his distinctive art and design work) is augmented by several guests on accordion, trombone, violin, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and vocals. That's in addition to their usual guitar, piano, trumpet, drums, and bass. So it's no wonder that this ensemble can be such a powerful musical force, driven by their unique vision.
After a brief intro, "Cave", consisting of dripping water and spoken poetry (in Czech, as are all the songs, though English translations are provided in the cd booklet), the band launches into the album's first song proper, the brassy, bombastic "Droplet", which has a bit of a Hawaii Five-O gone Eastern European vibe. That's followed by the more somber "Abyss", and then 8 more varied, vibrant numbers, some tracks like punked-up Carl Stalling cartoon music, some getting almost metal in the guitar dep't., others slowing down for gorgeous, mournfully melodic parts... They also get into some quite complex, convoluted rockin' that kinda sounds like Japanese zeuhl heavyweights Hundred Sights Of Koenji with more horns! Fans of uber-insane prog should be pleased, as well as anyone who likes their pop music to sound both dramatic and deeply meaningful (even when you don't know the language). We'd further guess that fans of sundry such current indie acts as Deerhoof, Hidden Cameras, and USAisamonster (RIP) could be potential UZD converts, for various reasons, check 'em out.
A new Pop Ambient collection is always exciting news around here, perhaps our favorite single ongoing series of electronic music compilations EVER. And goddamn if we don't reference the Pop Ambient sound in about half our reviews. But it's inevitable really, after all the sound we've come to know as Pop Ambient is just so gorgeous and glorious, washed out and hazy and gauzey and dreamlike. It's techno without the beats, it's new age without the schmaltz, it's dark deep listening, but it's also ethereal and ephemeral and the sort of sound that ends up being the soundtrack to so much of our lives, so soothing and mesmerizing and hypnotic, dreamlike sounds that entrance, and lull and transport us to some other place, thus, a new batch of Pop Ambient jams is some soothing sonic balm for our weary musical souls...
The biggest surprise this time around might be opening with a track by ANBB, the collaborative duo of Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld of Einsturzende Neubaten, whose music, even here, is barely Pop Ambient, the sound is muted and buzzy, electronic and abstract, a slow building drone, that's more ominous than dreamy, very soundtracky and dramatic, with deep electronic pulses, and then right near the end, vocals come in, and the song is transformed into some strange bit of haunting electro cabaret. But that's about as weird as it gets, the rest of the record slips back into the swirling shimmering electronic dreamscapes we've come to love, pianos unleash flurries of notes that drift beneath soft swells of muted buzz and skittery barely there rhythms, warm whirring chordal streaks are layered and stretched out into beautiful sun dappled blurscapes, full on daydreamy fuzz pop like a druggier driftier M83 meanders and drifts like some after school special playing in slow motion, the standout track might be "30.6.1881", by Crato, who we'd never heard before, whose take on Pop Ambience is on the dark side, mixing a little heroin house underwater pulse to the otherwise whirring ethereal blur, fantastically warped and blurred and in places surprisingly noisy. But other than that and the opener, the rest of the record finds the Pop Ambient stable at their most blissed out, their most woozy and soft focus, featuring some of the usual culprits: Thomas Fehlmann, Jurgen Paape, Mikkel Metal, Wolfgang Voigt, Triola, as well as some fresh faces: Bhutan Tiger Rescue, Crato, Bvdub, Barnt and more.
As always, absolutely, utterly and wholeheartedly recommended, total bliss out dreaminess for sure, and if you're just discovering the world of Pop Ambience, prepare to become totally obsessed, and with a desire to track down the first TEN volumes as well...
Looks like, at least until folks run out of appropriate puns, we can count on more and more collections of skweee being released, thank god. We love the skeeee! It's a marvelous micro-genre that wouldn't exist without the '80s, video games, hip-hop, and the internet. Damaged, DIY retro-electro futurefunk that's spread from Scandinavia to a bevy of eccentric enthusiasts elsewhere across the globe, as this double lp Skweee Cruise proves. Released on the Poisonous Gases label from up in Portland, Oregon, who have previously brought us 7"s by such artists as skweee pro Daniel Savio and up-and-comer Lazercrotch.
We hope you're already as much into skweee as we are (a lot!). In which case, you will definitely want this exskweeellent comp. But it's not just for skweee obsessives like us, it'd be a good intro to skweee as well. From itchy, glitchy popping and locking grooves to moody synthscapes for sipping on gin and juice to some Middle Eastern exotica flavored cuts (a skweee sub-specialty), taking this cruise will help you get your "skweee-legs", that's for sure!
The eighteen new tracks spread across the four sides of this compilation include contributions from vets like Limonious, Daniel Savio, Joxaren, and Randy Barracuda (here under another moniker, The Golden Retrievers!). Plus there's plenty of funky folks fresh to us, including the first example of Japanese skweee of which we've heard (Shitaraba). The full line-up also includes: Coco Bryce, Easy & The Center Of The Universe, Razorsnatch, Boss Kite, Simple, Ben Butler & Mousepad, MO, Slow Hand Motem, mir, Michael Bruce, Wankers United, Hybakusha, and V.C. & Luc B.
Gatefold vinyl, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES ONLY!!!
Another fantastic collection of far out seventies South East Asian grooves, from rock to garage to surf music, once again HEAVILY influenced by American and European music of the time, although this time we do in fact mean HEAVILY, as this collection features various hard rocking jams from Asia, recorded in the seventies, all songs and sounds that lean toward the heavy, the psychedelic, the metallic even, with lots of fuzzy guitars, pounding drums, distorted horns, throbbing basslines, not to mention some wholesale borrowing from popular rock songs of the time, all given a distinctly Asian sonic makeover, mixing traditional folk vocals with thick super distorted guitar crunch, or wrapping wild psychedelic guitar freakouts around funky grooves and more traditional sounding vox.
This strange hybrid is probably best exemplified by the killer opener, Sroeng Santi's "Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng", which essentially swipes that oh so iconic riff from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man", without doing much to it at all, but then mixes it with a dark slithery low slung verse, all broody and fuzzy and a little bit sinister, with those totally irresistible Thai vocals, which as we've mentioned before, most of us heard for the first time via the Butthole Surfers' track "Kuntz", in fact, "Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng" sorta sounds like an "Iron Man" / "Kuntz" mash up, and it RULES.
Then there's Jalwal, Annie & Geerasak's "Klug Tum La", which is essentially a Thai version of Chicago's "25 or 6 To 4", that immediately recognizable riff, SERIOUSLY fuzzy and crunchy, and then the horns, fantastically atonal and harsh, adding a strange vibe, as do the sweet crooned female vox, which occasionally slip into a powerful witchy howl, there's also a seriously fierce, super distorted psychedelic guitar solo.
Another one of our favorites is Teungjai Bunpraruksa's "Kanong Krung" which is just crazy and over the top and so good, pounding and fuzzy and groovy, with wild horns, twangy guitars, frantic drumming, a fat fuzzy main riff, super strange girl gang vocals, all distorted and often erupting into wails and screams, a total free for all party anthem for sure.
A lot of the tracks here are not necessarily super heavy, but they all share a certain something, whether it's a bit of fuzzy guitar, or some wild chaotic drumming, or some psychedelic guitar leads, and the sounds do vary dramatically, with many on first listen sounding like they could have come from any of the other recent Thai and Asian comps from Sublime Frequencies or Subliminal Sounds, whether it's twang flecked Morricone-esque moodiness, or Ventures like surfiness, or groovy fuzzy exotica, but spend a little time with each song, and no matter how traditional they sound at first, before you know it, some fuzzy riff or tangle of psychedelic guitar, or burst of skronking horns, or flurry of tribal drums will surface, and the song is transformed into something else. And we do mean SOMETHING ELSE!
Includes a booklet with photos, and liner notes, with more details about the history of the music, as well as the artists and the songs.
If you're anything like us, you can't get enough of the woozy, '60s laden sounds of White Fence. And if his latest release on Woodsist isn't enough to quench your thirst for psych-pop jangle, feast your eyes (and ears) on this hot new 7" featuring a stellar, unheard, unreleased song. Released by our friends After Life (rad clothing shop across the street from aQ), this slab of washed out psychedelic pop is exactly in line with past WF releases. Blaring fuzz guitar, catchy hooks and diluted melodies, all melted and warped into a unique brand of 'white light, white heat' drug-rock.
"The Pool" is completely new to us, a relaxed, slow burning trip into a blurred summer afternoon. Reminds us of Texas trippers Pure Ecstasy. Distant tambourine, chiming guitar and layers of tape hiss drift together into a wash of melodic goodness. Our favorite thing about WF is beneath all these layers of grit and haze are well crafted songs that only leave us wanting more. Don't miss out on this gritty pop gem!
Another month, another Wire, at least that's something good about the passage of time.
This issue, Detroit techno DJ Theo Parrish on the cover. Also, an interview with composer David Beford, a report on a bunch of interesting sounding bands from Cambridge UK we've never heard of, the scene in Burkina Faso, an epiphany about Fugazi's Red Medicine, a session of the Invisible Jukebox with French composer Michel Chion, tales from an academic black metal symposium, and more, including all the many many reviews that we expect in each issue of The Wire.
So it's beginning to seem like it's a happening new quasi genre of sorts, this "doomy, black magic metal band with witchy sounding female frontperson" thing. There's Jex Thoth, and The Devil's Blood, and Blood Ceremony... and now Wooden Stake, an extremely doomy duo who've seen more horror movies than you have, featuring Vanessa Nocera on vocals and bass, with Wayne "Elektrokutioner" Sarantopoulos handling the guitars, keyboards, and drums.
Like the other abovementioned bands, Wooden Stake is Sabbathy and '70s, with lumbering riffs and an occult vibe, though the difference is that they come from more of a death metal background, and are thus a lot darker and creepier. Electrokutioner is in a bunch of other doomed-out death metal bands we like, among 'em Decrepitaph, Scaremaker, and Encoffination, the latter of which is also highlighted this list; Vanessa is also in Scaremaker, and just joined Skeletal Spectre. So the guitars are not just thick but EVIL, the plodding drumming has a caveman wallop, and Vanessa's spooky siren song singing style sometimes switches to guttural growls. Imagine Jex Thoth wearing an Incantation t-shirt. Very underground sounding for sure, underground as in "from the grave". So underground in fact that we didn't even think we'd ever get to list this, their debut 5-track ep, as it was limited to a mere 100 copies, and sold out before we could get any. But fortunately Hexamorphosis Productions (a sub label of old school death metal purveyors Razorback by the way) decided to have another handful of these pro-printed cdr-s pressed up, so now we have them, for the moment, at least.
If you miss out, though (and also if you don't), be aware there's a less limited, upcoming full length to look forward too, and also a split release they'll soon be doing with recent AQ Record Of The Weekers BLIZARO!
