We've long been fans of Horseback (aka Jenks Miller), whose sound has gradually developed from blissed out dronescapery, to full on blasting post rock flecked black metal, to... well, to this (more on that in a second). We've also long been fans of pretty much anything Matthew Bower related, Total, Skullflower, Sunroof!, Hototogisu, and of course Voltigeurs. And while these two may not seem like the most obvious match up, their sounds are surprisingly complimentary.
Horseback offer up two tracks, of what we can only call black prog. Buzzing guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, and lots of ELP style organs, which transforms the sound into something way weirder, and frankly way cooler. The organs swirl and pulse and buzz over murky drum pound and those blackened shrieks, the black element sounds slowed down, like some bizarre mash up of Burzum at 16rpm and ELP at 33, the keyboards make the sound more psychedelic and spacey, and fuse perfectly into a gloriously twisted hybrid, one that is peppered with squalls of freaked out psychedelic noise, and culminates in a gorgeous Burzumic outro, all blown out drone riffage and buried anguished howls, mesmerizing and mysterious.
The second track is soaring and epic and a little blackened, but sounds more static, more like a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone, draped over blasting beats nearly lost in the churn and swirl, harsh vox here too, the overall sound extra distorted, glimmery and glistening and downtuned and crumbling, as if the signal is way too hot for the speakers, which makes it sound noisier for sure, but also mesmerizingly psychedelic.
Voltigeurs, which is Matthew Bower and cellist Samantha Davies, finds the duo doing what they do best, stirring up huge clouds of washed out white noise skree, a blindingly brilliant tangle of dense guitar freakage and whirling steel string buzz, a solar flare sprawl of amp melting, ear shredding psychedelic heaviness, that like other Voltigeurs recordings, offers very little to the casual listener, but beneath the barrage of howl and crunch and skree, lurk an ever shifting field of riffage and melody, buried song structures only visible occasionally, these glimpses coloring the cloud of noise that surrounds them, turning the whole thing into a surprisingly listenable blast of psychnoisebliss.
VERY VERY LIMITED! And an expensive import. We have about 10 copies, not sure we'll be able to get any more after that.
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.
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley curated the quizzically named series Center Of The Ass Run in the mid-'90s, packaging a handful of obscurant freeform experimentalists in pre-fab LP sleeves and a sticker annotating which Ass Run this might be. They looked purposefully lowbrow, but within always lurked stellar explorations of avant-noise, no-wave jazz excursions, and splattered electronics, with Id Battery's 1997 release Unique Ancient Tavern fitting nicely within this batch of releases. Id Battery was an early project for Brandon Labelle and long-time aQ-favorite Loren Chasse, who began this project well before anything Jewelled Antler. Much of this material harkens back to their earliest collaborations, when Chasse was found behind a drumkit and Labelle was on bass. While they soon moved beyond this guise into the more well-known explorations of sound through found objects, contact microphone probings, and rebroadcasting sounds in unconventional settings, the bass/drum Id Battery arrangements were more in keeping with garbled lo-fi murk that was coming out of New Zealand at the time (e.g. Dead C, Birchville Cat Motel, Doramaar, A Handful Of Dust) with falling-down-the-stairs drum clatter and atonal thwacking on the bass with plenty of choking atmospherics filling in the gaps. Chasse and Labelle spliced these grimy improvisational recordings with thrumming drones of equally lo-fi quality as various looping techniques amassing the sounds into deep bellows, pocked with skittering texture and corroded noises.
These are the last pieces of vinyl kicking around from the Center Of The Ass Run series, as a small stash was uncovered in a vault somewhere in Massachusetts. Don't expect these to be around for long!
Another fantastic collection of murky, sci-fi, new ageish, synth-wave, soft-noise dronescapes from this Belgian audio alchemist. Low fidelity mad scientist concoctions of muted mechanical crunch, woozy myopic shimmer, hazy soft focus whir, buried hypnogogic melodies, sonically similar to countrymen Dolphins Into The Future, as well as folks like High Wolf, Skaters, etc. Innercity, aka Hans Dens, takes all those elements and blends them into retro-futuristic miniature soundtracks, each track evoking some strange alternate universe, some long lost and buried civilization, decaying tape loops unwind crookedly, bunching up into warped soft squalls of blurred melody, cacophonous collisions of metallic crunch and layered thrum, bleed into each other, and are seemingly viewed through broken panes of frosted glass, everything gorgeously shadowy and indistinct, fractured rhythms stutter and stumble beneath clouds of Eastern melodies and effects drenched squiggles, occasionally locking into total Goblin/Carpenter sinister synthscaped ambience, or lurching machinelike robo-funk, the motorik pulses skittering over buried slowed down vocals all wreathed in a fuzzy haze, sometimes overtaken by heaving walls of crumbling shoegazey crunch, other times gradually blissing out into barely there swirls.
The lp comes with a cassette, featuring nearly an extra hour of music, parts 3 and 4 of Innercity's Future Life songsuite, one part washed out gauzy minimal drift, a darkly meditative sprawl of hushed shimmer, the other a futuristic bit of ultra lo-fi loopage, murky and blurred, which eventually gives a way to a fantastically lysergic bit of hypnotic electronic minimalism.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
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Interpol aren't groundbreaking or anything, but boy does this NYC quartet sound good. (They probably look good too, got the 'scrod' style DOWN.) The singer's voice has the arch desperation of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The music is dominated by intertwining guitars that're sometimes angular and choppy, sometimes pensively creating a lush blanket of minor key intensity. Very Factory Records, very Echo & the Bunnymen... but not annoyingly so, for a modern group. I like it! This is a three song, inexpensive teaser single in preparation for the full length to be released August 2002.
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We got a taste of Iron And Wine's new sound on the Walking Far From Home cd ep released a while back, the title track of which opens up the new full length as well, so we figured we oughta just revisit what we said about that track when we first heard it:
Still present are Sam Beam's gorgeous vocals, and the lush instrumentation, piano, guitar, but what is missing, is the low key almost lo-fi sound, and in its place, is a seriously lush production, not to mention a fleshed out band, complete with piano, keyboard, background vocals (which swoop and soar E.L.O. style!) and all sorts of buzzy basslines, and random dubbed out percussion. It's jarring at first, but it only takes a few seconds where you begin to wonder why Beam didn't try his hand at lush dubbed out orchestral pop before, cuz "Walking Far From Home" is totally fantastic. The sort of song that will finally get folks to listen to Iron And Wine, who might have found the old stuff too folky. We're definitely hearing some Animal Collective, and other forward thinking pop groops too, seems unlikely, but damn, we've listened to this song about 20 times. So great.
And since then, we've probably listened to that song another fifty times at least. And it still sounds just as good, and just as exciting as it did the first time. And once you hear Beam and Co. playing this lush, Technicolor pop music, it makes the old stuff sound more like sketches of what was to come. Nothing will ever replace those records, they're gorgeous and practically perfect just the way they are, but it was definitely time for Beam to try something new. And this new direction is pretty fantastic, although it's bound to alienate plenty of long time I+W fans. The sound is way more slick, and thus more commercial, some of these tracks, it's not hard to imagine hearing them on a commercial, or in Starbucks, but maybe that speaks more to the times than to the particular sound, cuz really, the sound is not THAT far removed, it is the same voice, and the same songwriter after all, and the last few I+W records were moving in this direction anyway, it's the same songs, just cleaned up, and dressed in organs and chimes, and swirling harmonies, and keyboards and synthesizers, but it's still Beam's voice that defines the sound, whether it's the almost Beach Boys sounding harmonies of "Tree By The River", or the whispery croon on the weirdly funky "Monkeys Uptown", or the old school I+W vox laced over the dubbed out wah guitar driven psychedelia of "Rabbit Will Run", it still sounds distinctly like Iron And Wine and nobody else. And these experiments are still rooted in the timeless sound of Iron And Wine's old records, "Half Moon" stripped down, could have been off his debut, but here, with extra harmonies, the song sounds almost like Iron And Wine covering Fleetwood Mac, and "Godless Brother In Love" at its core sounds like classic Iron And Wine, but here it's piano instead of guitar that drives the song, not to mention strings and lush vocal harmonies, and thus musically it sounds more like Joanna Newsom or Antony or Rufus Wainwright, but it suits him, this all does (well most of it, there is one clunker, a WAY too funky groover with too much sax. No amount of tripped out synth or lovely vocalizing can tip those scales back). All in all, a wonderfully eclectic and exciting new chapter in the ever evolving sound of Iron And Wine, and one that we're digging quite a bit.
Well here we go, Iron Maiden album number 15, potential post-reunion disappointment #???... or maybe not. Crikey, we can't tell any more. In fact, before we comment on this album, the first thing we need to do is take back what we said about the Iron Maiden album before the Iron Maiden album before this one, Dance Of Death. Listened to it again (and again) the other day, and actually it's pretty decent, with a few great songs in fact ("Paschendale" mos def). Not at all the disappointment we claimed it was when it came out. Sorry about that guys. And while the cover still sucks, you can flip it over, the booklet's back cover photo looks better.
So, we're not even sure we trust ourselves to review this new one. Who knows what we'll think about it in a couple years? Maybe just let folks buy it (and they have been!) and decide for themselves. Though of course if you don't already have Killers, Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind, et. al. we actually won't LET you buy this, you need to get the original '80s classics first. But if you're a Maiden fan, then the question we'll ask is, have you heard all their Bruce-back-in-the-band reunion albums? We loved 2000's Brave New World, made it a Record Of The Week (really), then were mistakenly meh (until recently that is!) about 2003's Dance Of Death, and thought 2006's A Matter Of Life And Death was all right, but flawed, definitely over-long... The Final Frontier is flawed too, and longer even than AMOLAD, but not as glum and gloomy, much more bright and varied. And it's NOT the sci-fi concept album that it might appear at first glance, in fact the title track (which is joined to a surprisingly experimental, almost Hawkwindish space-metal intro entitled "Satellite 15") isn't about the outer space final frontier of Star Trek fame at all, instead it seems to be about dying, facing the final frontier of DEATH, and whatever may lie beyond. All right, a few further notes...
PROS: It's IRON MAIDEN, dude!! And even 21st century Iron Maiden, despite their unfettered tendency towards long-winded progginess (and sometimes cheesy poppiness) have that special X-factor (ahem, well...) that makes 'em sound like nobody else. Gosh, we can't be objective, really, since we're pre-programmed to respond to the soaring sound of Bruce's voice and the gallop of Steve's bass and the harmonized guitars of Dave and Adrian (um, and Janick?) and the battery of ol' Nicko... not to to mention the visage of Eddie on the cover (a much better cover this time than than the last couple, by the way, with Eddie starring as both Alien and Predator it would appear).
CONS: Well there's that aforementioned long-winded progginess etc. This album is 76 minutes for crying out loud, their longest yet! Featuring ten (long) songs, many of which once again display the "repeat the song title as the chorus waaaaaaay too many times" syndrome they've been suffering from for a while. And needless to say, they're never ever gonna write another "Hallowed Be Thy Name" or "Aces High", can't be done. Though they could probably come closer with a little more aggression, and editing...
Yet, at the same time, it's the (relatively) shorter rockers, like the single "El Dorado" early on in the album tend to be the weakest tracks here, but the uber melodic prog epics later on, in the second half of the record, like "Isle Of Avalon", "Starblind", and "When The Wild Wind Blows", are quite stirring and satisfying to our adjusted-for-expections 21st Century Iron Maiden desires... or again maybe it's that Pavlovian response of ours kicking in. Basically, we're enjoying this for what it is, cringing a bit at some parts, totally digging others, sometimes 'cause they sound like old Maiden, sometimes 'cause they don't (ferinstance the spacey, fusiony, jammy guitar parts in "Isle Of Avalon" and elsewhere). If you DO like reunion Maiden, like us, then all we can say is, this is a your-milage-may-vary situation. Right now, repeated spins of this are still eliciting guilty grins from the Maiden fans at AQ.
NB. we're stocking the regular compact disc edition, and the double picture disc vinyl... but not the special "mission edition" cd, which despite some bonus web-only content it allows you to access, doesn't seem worth the extra bucks.
A new batch of Awesome Vistas is always a cuse for celebration around here, so we're pretty thrilled to get not one, but TWO new AV jams, Flower Of Flesh And Blood, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this, the simple titled Is, which is the soundtrack music for an art exhibit by Chris Johanson, who also happens to be the Awesome Vistas head honcho.
For this project, Johanson gathered up a whole mess of kick ass guests, including Sam Coomes (Quasi), Tom Greenwood (Jackie O Motherfucker), Sara Lund (Unwound), Emil Amos (Grails), Tara Jane O'Neil, Nick Bindeman (Acre) and more, to create a gorgeous abstract drift of folky percussion, soft wheezing drones, and looped mesmer.
Two twenty minute side long tracks, the first begins with an awesome looped start stop figure, before expanding into something more free and folky and free jazzy, drums and flutes and acoustic guitars and cellos, eventually growing to a muted frenzy, like a free jazz / free folk / drum circle psych jam, think Avarus, No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Jackie O, but with a bit more of a chamber music vibe. Quite nice.
The second track is much more folky and hippy, definitely reminding us of the Finnish forest folk, with tribal rhythms, hand drums, shakers and random percussion, fluttery flutes, detuned guitars and chanted vocals, total psychedelic spaced out Wicker Man folk that slowly sprawls and then dissipates.
Gorgeous hand silkscreened sleeves with a photocopied insert, and yeah, probably limited too...
Ah, the glory that was NWOBHM! (Do we need to spell it out? The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a wondrous musical phenomenon of the late '70s/early '80s, yeah, you know.) A couple lists back, in our review of the killer Wolfbane disc released by Shadow Kingdom, we mentioned there were several other cool recent NWOBHM reissues we'd be listing soon, here's one of 'em, also on Shadow Kingdom, an archival collection of material by this fairly obscure Birmingham band (named for a historical incident from the Boer War) who never made proper full-length record but nonetheless did put out some cult classic tracks, including a contribution to the Metal for Muthas II compilation. For some reason, that one's not here, but you do get 14 tracks taken from various eps and demos, etc., among them the three songs from Jameson Raid's 1979 debut single, starting off with the triumphant "Seven Days Of Splendour" (a positive story about a UFO encounter, which, for those of you who were paying attention to our Roxxcalibur review a while back, was one of the songs covered by that NWOBHM tribute band on their highly enjoyable album). The other two are the punky "It's A Crime" (which reminds us of Crushed Butler!), and "Catcher In The Rye" (that's right, inspired by the J.D. Salinger novel). While this band boogied hard for sure, they also apparently liked to have their songs be -about- something, it's thinking man's NWOBHM in a way, quite melodic too, and a bit garagey, really more '70s hard rock proto-metal than anything '80s metallic, harking back to early UFO and Thin Lizzy. Good stuff, and all the tracks here share these charms, some of the songs with sad and weary vibe derived perhaps from Lizzy, others rockin' out like greasy AC/DC...
Packaged with a thick cd booklet stuffed with lyrics, liner notes (including reminiscences from original band members), vintage photos, etc.
Nobody here except for Andee (who was already a fan!) had ever heard of this band before Circle mainman Jussi Lehtisalo told us he was reissuing their 1986 debut LP on his label Ektro. He also said, "Jesters will blow up the whole world!!!" Those familiar with
Duff: "Diggin' back through my life circa 15 years ago has been an emotionally unnerving experience. The music, the jams, the changing line-ups, the convoluted recording contracts, the hallucinations, the revelations, the girls, the divorce, poverty, doom, despair, joy, the extremely loud amplifiers�But that's my business. I will tell you it all began when my friend Ray Violet invited my roommate (drummer and multi-instrumentalist Doktor Stixx) and me (the bass player) to be the rhythm section on a songwriting demo he was organizing along with his buddy Bill Irwin. Ray offered to 'pay' us by allowing us each one song of our choosing produced to our individual satisfaction. I picked a metallic, psychedelic, existentialist war yelp I'd bashed out called 'End of Time.' During the sessions, which culminated on Halloween, 1984 (talk about Doom!), Ray played me the unforgettable riff to a song about a mosh pit dance in which the participants beheaded each other with shovels -- 'Diggin' That Grave.' Together, we finished the tune, and when all of the songs were completed, it was clear that 'Grave' and 'Time' stood alone and apart from the rest. We decided to form a band."
Duff goes on to recount the whole sordid saga of the band and its successes and failures, ins and outs (of the band members -- who included past present and future members of such acts as 45 Grave, The Mentors, and Poison!). Highlights for them included signing to Metal Blade imprint Dimension, after "End of Time" appeared on "Metal Massacre V", and playing shows with the likes of Janes Addiction, Flaming Lips, and the Dickies. Lowlights include, well, uh, signing to Metal Blade imprint Dimension, plus all the stuff you'd expect to befall an '80s LA metal band that didn't "make it".
What's really funny (and not discussed) is how their saga ends with this reissue 15 years later on a strange Finnish art-rock label! From Metal Blade to Ektro!
This disc contains their entire "Fun at the Funeral" debut (seeing release on cd for the first time), plus eight bonus tracks consisting of punkier material recorded for their never-released third album (including "Diggin' That Grave '87", a more Talking Heads-ish take on their impossibly catchy signature tune), a home demo, and a live version of Black Sabbath's "Electric Funeral" (can't get away from graves and funerals with these guys!). Their studio cover of that song appeared on their second, all-covers album "In A Nostalgic Mood", the material from which both Duff and Jussi decided was unfit for reissue -- too bad, we want to hear it! Anyway, their live "EF", Duff says, "shows the kind of heavy metal Ornette Coleman spazz attack the band was capable of live." Dunno about that, but it's a fine way to end the disc nonetheless, summing up the fucked up "gleeful gloom" rock that Jesters of Destiny created.
To wind up, thanks Jussi for reissuing this masterpiece of heavy psychedelic pop metal weirdness! Now it's not just Andee here who's a fan. For my part (Allan speaking) I could listen to "Diggin' That Grave" on auto repeat a hundred times and not get tired of it, it's that great a song. To get that and the rest of the album too, plus all the bonus tracks -- well it's a happy day here at Aquarius!
Finally reissued, the very first release from Justin Broadrick's post Godflesh combo Jesu, the two track Heart Ache was a Record Of The Week way back in 2005, and this updated version tacks on the previously unreleased Dethroned ep, which Broadrick started way back in 2004, but only finished recently, the perfect accompaniment to Heart Ache for sure.
Most readers of the aQ list are now well familiar with Justin Broadrick's (Godflesh, Final, etc.) bliss metal behemoth, Jesu, but when Heart Ache first hit, we were blown away, totally knocked for a loop, all the heft and grit and pummel of Godflesh, but blurred into gorgeously washed out shoe-gazey swells, a new sound that was, and still is all we wanted to hear. And still remains, to this day, quite possibly our favorite Jesu recording yet. Which is most definitely saying something considering how much we love pretty much everything Jesu has put out.
But right before Heart Ache was released, we had all pretty much given up on Godflesh. It seemed like maybe that band had run its course. The sounds were there, but it sounded like Broadrick had his mind elsewhere. Gone was the glorious industrial pummel of Streetcleaner and gone too was the dubbed out machine metal of Slavestate, and in their place, more-of-the-same riffs, shouted atonal vocals, and songs that played out more like assembled parts than actual SONGS. So while our age-old and undying love of early Godflesh had us super excited to hear this Jesu everyone was talking about, we were prepared for it to not live up to the hype. Which was precisely why we were so blown away when we finally heard it. Everything we loved about Godflesh was there, plus a new found love of melody, swoonsome clean vocals, expanded instrumentation (piano!) and extended slow building tracks of brooding intensity and smoldering instrumental ferocity, all smeared into dreamy industrial bliss drone epics!
Unlike the following full length, on which Jesu was a full band with a live drummer, on Heart Ache, Jesu was just Broadrick, a guitar, a piano, and of course a drum machine. Ahhh, the drum machine. How it warms our Streetcleaner worshipping hearts. Clangy and clattery, brittle guitars soar over crumbling distorted rumbles, all machinelike and clinical but imbued with a weirdly organic lushness. Drifting clouds of ghostly feedback, sonic vapor trails of haunting minor key swells, all slip and shift into vast stretches of shimmering cinematic ambience, with slowly pealing guitar tones and synthesized chant-like vocals, gorgeously melancholy almost Goblin-esque in its creepy beauty. Everything held together by smooth, clean, barely affected vocals, all dreary and weary, repeating simple mantra-like lyrics, distant and otherworldly. The whole thing sheds its industrial armor as it moves forward, showing more skin, becoming more vulnerable, becoming less and less rigid, and more and more soft and indistinct. Pretty, dreamy, blissed out and sweetly sorrowful, with Broadrick's endlessly repeated, haunting refrain drifting and fading, like a mirage that may have never been there at all. And that's just the first track.
The second track is just as surprising as the first, starting off with spare solo piano, joined eventually by simple, finger-picked guitar, eventually drifting into a simple low end piano chord, repeated over and over and over, floating in the inky blackness, until the song lurches into a sludgy crawl, with huge murky downtuned riffs (think Fudge Tunnel's "Hate Song" at 16rpm), but then Broadrick confounds again with heavily delayed, clean vocals, singing in a strangely hypnotic counterpoint to the main riff. Dizzying and quite lovely. It's a constant tug of war between the black hole tar pit dirge and the almost hopeful sounding vocals. Like the first song, track two devolves into a whole 'nother beast, as it slows down and blisses out, with lilting melodies creeping into the sludge and making what was only moments before a metallic behemoth crushing all in its wake, into a creepy rickety, buzzy back porch crawl, spare and skeletal, with distorted piano, buzzing fret noise and lots of ambient reverb that's gradually smoothed out into a fuzzy smear of static, beneath a simple low end piano figure, chiming and ringing out into nothingness. One of those rare records that manages to be heavy yet pretty, beautiful but scary, sweet and sorrowful, darkly doomy and gloriously luminous!
The second disc included with the long anticipated Heart Ache reissue is an ep called Dethroned, recorded just after the Heart Ache sessions, but only completed recently, and while there are obvious references to those early days of Jesu, the fact that the songs were completed recently is evident in the songs' distinctly shoegazey vibe, the poppiness, the songcraft, these 4 tracks hover right in between the two eras of Jesu, the washed out almost M83 dreamy blissed out modern Jesu, and the chugging, industrial, post Godflesh chug and pound, and the result is actually pretty fantastic, super heavy, subtly poppy, kick ass riffage, that slips from almost groovy to crushing and downtuned, the vocals are super effected, almost vocodered sounding (autotuned?), which gives the songs a weirdly almost new wave vibe.
"Dethroned" almost sounds like nineties noise rock, a little grunge, a little pop, but woven into a sort of post industrial shoegaze framework, the vocals and melodies are all super heavy on the effects, the rhythm is almost groovy, definitely demonstrating in a single song the evolution of Jesu, which gives way to "Annul", the most Godflesh-y of the bunch, with its churning chuggy main riff, and machinelike drum pound, a little Godflesh, a little Helmet (!), but again, still with some of that blossoming shoegazey poppiness that would later inform almost everything Jesu.
"Aureated Skin" is total ballady bliss, all big chiming guitars, and blurred shimmery distortion, not to mention some lush keyboard swells and some seriously poppy melodies, while "I Can Only Disappoint You", is super stripped down, and almost sounds like Three Mile Pilot or something, the drums super spare, the guitars brittle and metallic, but the song is laced with cool backwards guitars, and hazy atmospheres, it almost sounds like some strange hybrid of Godflesh and the Cure, which is most definitely very very cool.
Yay, we mean uh oh, we mean yay, heck it's a new ep from the controversial ('round here anyway) psychedelic doom chanteuse Jex Thoth and her band of the same name. Controversial? Well, let's just say her trademark theatrical vocal stylings are a subjective, love 'em or hate 'em proposition, though we all pretty much agree the band's heavy, hazy music is awesome. And among the AQ staff, Allan at least has finally succumbed entirely (it was inevitable) and now proudly declares himself a true Jex Thoth fan, which means he was quite happy to see 'em play last week at the Roadburn Festival in Holland. In live performance, Jex's apparent thespian background proved quite effective, she had excellent stage presence not to mention witchy sex appeal, cape-draped and with candles burning. They played to a packed house and it was quite obvious they had lots of fans in the audience!
We also know Jex has plenty of fans out there among the AQ faithful, and they'll be pleased with Witness, comprised of three new recordings, suitably dramatic and lugubrious, clocking in at just over 15 minutes total: "Raven Nor The Spirit", "Slow Rewind", and "Mr. Rainbow", the latter a cover of a song by '70s European art rockers Slapp Happy (a good choice, if you didn't know better you'd think it was a Jex Thoth original). Bearing a dedication to the late Jack Rose, and again graced with cover art by Reverend Bizarre's Sami "Albert Witchfinder" Hynninen, this ep is a fine continuation of the eccentric underground doom-prog sounds heard on Jex Thoth's 2008 self-titled full-length, although apparently there's been another lineup change in the band since that release (for one thing, Silas Paine, aka Jewelled Antler's Glenn Donaldson, is no longer playing guitar). However, they still sound like a bit like Curved Air taking downers with Electric Wizard (or something), totally vintage, bass heavy '70s psych sounds with prominent Hammond organ action, both bombastic and atmospheric, over which Jex's cleanly-sung, clearly enunciated vocals soar. Probably if you're at all interested in this ep, you've already got the earlier full-length, and if you liked that, you'll like this, need we say much more? Uh, how 'bout for fans of Jacula, Blood Ceremony, The Devil's Blood, and Witchcraft (capital 'W' and otherwise)?
A reissue of the 2004 album Virdulegu Forsetar from Iceland's post-classical composer Johann Johannsson. Since the release of this album, Johannsson has jumped from Touch to 4AD, with international acclaim following right along. Virdulegu Forsetar is an hour long piece written for 11 brass players (trumpets, horns, tuba), percussion (Glockenspiel and bells), electronics, organs and piano. Virdulegu is all brooding, slow building, minor key, cinematic epic. Warm and lush, rich with harmonic overtones, and melodically very grandiose. The sounds here are very visual and definitely bring to mind vast expanses of land or space, whether it's the sun slowly rising over the desert, the moon peeking from behind a planet, a slowly spiralling galaxy, and even the Olympics. Huh? Yep, the Olympics. The melodies and instrumentation are quite similar to the fanfares used during the opening ceremonies, or over montages of past Olympiads, lovely nonetheless. And of course much darker and dronier than any of the music actually used for the Olympics. Each epic fanfare / flourish dissipates into a rumbling subterranean drone, where it hovers and slowly shifts until another fanfare surfaces in it's place, shines briefly, only to quickly sink back into the inky darkness.
The Miasmah label has been on fire lately! Without a doubt they have become one of the most consistently dependable labels releasing layered, dark, haunting, droned out mysterious sounds. This time around the label has gone back to the '90s to unearth some amazing sounds that somehow never managed to get a proper widespread release. It makes sense that this Norwegian band's moniker means 'abyss'. The music makes the listener feel like they are floating around the charred remains of a civilization that has been doomed, yet there is still something so paralyzing and beautiful about the void and desolation.
It's so impressive that this was recorded between 1996-1998, a decade before the outburst of so many drone based recordings that we have constantly freaked out over. With a sound that is so haunted, nuanced, layered, and so perfectly executed, taking in the more ambient and creepy side of black metal and doom drone luminaries like Burzum, SUNNO))) and Paysage D'Hiver, the soundscape imagination of Philip Jeck, and the minimalist intensity of Tony Conrad and Deathprod.
Like the soundtrack to a horror movie that isn't as much about shock and awe as it is about casting a very real spell that shimmers with isolation and a beautiful kind of despair. As with most things on Miasmah, so very recommended.
We had never heard of Kark before, but boy is this a serious slab of free sonic exploration! Kark are a revolving ensemble of over 50 musicians, and it sounds like it. Featuring various Louisville luminaries who also do time in Sapat, Valley of Ashes, Virgin Eye Blood Brothers, Son of Earth, Taiwan Death and others, The Hermit begins with some barely there glitch and crumble, a mumbled murky soundscape, which just sets the listener up to be knocked the fuck out when the group explodes into a furious blast of some sort of demonic big band jazz, a dizzying angular atonal jazz dirge, like Sun Ra possessed by the spirit of Merzbow, splattery drums and bleating horns, a cacophonous percussive chaos, free jazz gone haywire, but always, at least tenuously, linked to some shadow of traditional jazz. Some tracks seriously swing, albeit in a seriously unhinged manner, others sound like free jazz filtered through Masonna, like an orchestra being hurled down a thousand flights of stairs. Pretty amazing, probably too much for run of the mill jazz-niks, but the for the jazz-noise inclined this just might be pure heaven.
Packaged in a full color sleeve with a full color, and of course information-less, insert.
First release from these Brooklyn psychedelic looped pop alchemists, featuring former aQ-er Frank, who is featured in all his badassness, along with the rest of the Keepaway crew, on the back cover, a goofy shot featuring much posturing, some gold medallions, and what appears to be some silver shiny panties on one of the pantsless band members, but don't be distracted by the visual silliness, cuz there's some seriously heady, sonic trippiness inside.
You might do an audio doubletake on first listen, within the first few seconds of "Yellow Wings" you'll immediately notice these guys bear an uncanny resemblance to fellow Brooklyn avant poppers Animal Collective, which is undeniable so we might as well just throw that out right here, these guys sound a lot like Animal Collective, but we love Animal Collective so we're already digging 'the sound', before we even begin to get into what it is that makes Keepaway their own (sort of) unique beast. The aforementioned "Yellow Wings" is probably the most Animal Collective-y track here, with its chiming guitars, chopped and looped samples, programmed percussion mixed with live drumming, the woozy vocals, which also remind us of Modest Mouse, but Keepaway add their own little twist with some gloomy almost new wavey eighties style riffs, just below the surface, it's a great pop jam for sure, and AC fans will eat this up, as will fans of other groups in the new wave of new wave, like The Drums, Surfer Blood and the like.
The rest of the record gets a little more spaced out, and only a little less Animal Collective-y, "Family Of The Son" begins all minimal and skittery, but once the warm guitars and wavery vocals come in, joined by some martial snares, and a hazy swath of warm shimmer, we're back in that sort of washed out hypno tribal psych groove otherworld Animal Collective, if not invented, at least REinvented. "I think About You All The Time" wraps woozy synths around skeletal rhythms, and some super sweet melodic vocals and handclaps, a retro electro love song that gets more trippy and druggy as it goes.
The last two tracks are just as fuzzy and sunshine-y and psychedelic and shimmery, stirring in some lush Beach Boys style harmonies, some spidery post rock guitars, a little old school indie jangle, some electronic glitch, thick fuzzy synths and of course loads of reverb and delay and other effects. Cool cool cool.
We're beginning come to terms with the fact that Ms. Keffer is pretty much our new noise rock crush (although hard to remember who our old one was... Matthew Bower?), not only is she foxy, she kicks up a seriously corrosive din that puts most of the other noisemakers, men AND women, to shame. This three track 12" is some seriously old school corrosive and caustic noise, fitting perfectly alongside groups like Robedoor (who she shared a split with recently), the Yellow Swans, and similarly minded noisemakers, but only at their fiercest and most brutal, cuz this 12" is fierce AND brutal. Seriously lo-fi, dense clouds of processed guitars, damaged FX, misfiring synths, who knows what all is in there, a pulverizing wall of damaged FX drenched sound that eventually attains a sort of Total / Sunroof! droned out bliss, albeit much harsher. ANd as with only the deftest of noisemakers, Keffer manages to make this blast of brutality downright listenable, but probably only to those with ears of steel (or collections packed with Masonna, Merzbow, Hijokaidan and the like...)!
Hot on the heels of KTL number two, comes, you guessed it, number three, this one however is a brief two tracks, carved into a gorgeous one sided lp, with the other side featuring a super striking etching than none other than Savage Pencil.�
Like 2, 3 also features music the duo of Stephen O'Malley (SUNNO))), Khanate, etc.) and Peter Rehberg (Pita) composed and recorded for�the theatre piece Kindertotenlieder by Gisele Vienne and Dennis Cooper, which goes a long way to explaining why, 3, even more than 2 maybe, sounds so dramatic and even cinematic at moments.�
The first of the two tracks here is quite brief, an introduction almost, effects and glitched electronics swirl over a deep black whorl of muted guitar buzz and warm organ whir, a pulsing, vibrating, shimmering backdrop that hovers and flutters beneath streaks of electronics and smeared feedback, and groaning industrial creaks and grinds.�
The second track is the main attraction here, and takes up most of the side, based around an incredibly intense super low speaker rattling rumble, a sort of blurred and abstract low rider bass, almost more felt than heard, that throbs and sets bones rattling in your skin, a bottomless black morass, a sonic tar pit which all manner of strange and subtle sounds seem to be struggling against, desperately trying to keep from being sucked under. Scrabbling, atonal Derek Bailey like guitar scratch and scrape, haunting plink plonk melodies, tiny high end trills, sparkling slivers of feedback, subtle electronic shadings, all drifting on that ominous and constantly shifting extreme low end black sonic sea. A truly haunting, gorgeous chunk of deep deep deep black ambience...
Packaged in ultra thick jackets, the vinyl housed in a black printed inner sleeve, sealed with a sticker.�
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.
Record number two from this Cave side project, and while the name Lazer Crystal certainly evokes thoughts of pretty much every Myspace band in the land, since those two words have been used in various combinations over and over and over, these guys in fact have most definitely forged their own unique sound, and have been doing so for a while now. Fans of Cave's tribal spaced out drone-y krautrock, should be prepared for something entirely different. This is most definitely dance music, but seeing as it's the work of Cave men (and by extension, members of Warhammer 48k), you can expect something a bit more twisted and home brewed than your typical dancefloor fodder.
Right out of the gate, it sounds like (Daft) punk rock kids doing their own lo-fi sort of Justice dance rock, all stuttery synths, woozy spaced out melodramatic melodies, thick swaths of warm buzz, and some gothy dramatic crooning a la Human League or Depeche Mode. Propulsive and hypnotic, but also groovy, fun, funky and a wee bit goofy.
The second track takes that goofiness a little further, twisting the sounds of the opening track into bleeping blooping malfunctioning glitchery, swirling effects, still more buzzy synths, letting the track get way more abstract and space-y and almost ambient at times.
The flipside starts off with what sounds like some Nintendo 64 8-bit video game music, but fused into some primitive electro jam, still a distinct krautrocky undercurrent, and those croony Human League vocals all tangled up with the warm buzz, giving it an almost M83 vibe. The last track might be our favorite, definitely the darkest and the buzziest, ominous and sinister, but just a bit, still groovy and funky, and those vocals still crooning oddly throughout.
Incredible packaging, we talk about things being 'handmade' all the time, but these sleeves are WAY handmade, all done by different artists, some are collages, others are painted, some are 3-D and very tactile, some are eye poppingly colorful, everyone totally different. Includes a full color insert as well. And as you might imagine, SUPER LIMITED, TO ONLY 300 COPIES.
Originally released on cd back in 2001, An Un World was Andrew Liles' first album proper after a string of cdr releases. It has recently received the deluxe limited edition vinyl treatment - clear vinyl, only 300 pressed! The double record also features two tracks which did not appear on the previous cd incarnation. Liles, perhaps best known as a member of Nurse With Wound for the past many years, has been a prolific solo artist and multi-instrumentalist for well over two decades. His music falls under the expansive umbrella of experimental soundscaping, incorporating a myriad of processed found sounds and electronics. He ventures through the peaks and valleys of Surrealism, Dada, dark ambient and post-industrial, with a morbid black humor snaking its way throughout. These densely detailed early compositions conjure grim unravellings and profound despair. Seriously, the album envelops the listener in atmospheres that are bleaker than bleak. Not for the faint of heart! But so good...
If you're anything like us, all it will take is three simple words to convince you that you need this: FLUTE. FINLAND. NINETEEN SEVENTY ONE. Okay, so that last one's not really a single word, but yes, this fantastic chunk of Finnish Flute heavy jazz folk was indeed released in that musically mindblowing year, and is pretty much everything you could hope for from a seventies Finnish flautist, it's groovy, jazzy, folky, a little bit rocking and a lot bit pretty goddamn weird. Just take the opening track, after some field recordings of seagulls and lapping waves on the shore, Loiri whistles along to some simply strummed acoustic guitar, and suddenly you realize it's essentially a jazzed up cover of Blind Faith's "Can't Find My Way Home", hand drums and flutes swing in, some deep wordless "la la" vocalizing and then it's back to the waves and birds. Definitely an odd way to start a record, but these guys are Finnish after all.
The rest of the record is not so obviously strange (or is it?), the second track is some groovy flute driven folk, the flute playing is stellar, woozy stand up bass, intricate hand drumming and more steel string strum, there's some bluesy psychedelic guitar leads, and then there's a drum solo, accompanied by humming (or is that kazoo), and then it's right back into it, Loiri often singing and vocalizing through the flute (a la Roland Kirk), which makes it even more far out.
The record shifts gears constantly, the next track begins playful sing songy lullaby, suddenly transforming into some sort of gypsy folk music the next, what sounds like a drunken tavern sing along, and then it's right back to the lullaby like fluttery flute of the opening, and then a strange old field recording of a carnival or circus. All a single track. The next track is more straight ahead jazz, some incredible flute playing and amazing drumming, the next track too, sounding almost Latin Jazz, but then along comes "Mummon Kaappikello" a groovy bit of big band jazz, backing up some sped up chipmunk vocals, turning the otherwise trade jazz into something totally warped, and then it's right back into it, some seriously swinging seventies jazz funk, and still more kick ass flute.
The final three tracks are more folky jazzy grooviness, some serious strum heavy drum driven rhythmic jazz, gives way to some jazzy cabaret, with deep crooned dramatic vocals, and finally finishing off with a brief bit of folky flute and acoustic guitar that returns to the opening bit of Blind Faith. Wow. Awesome, and bizarre and amazing and easily one of the coolest things Porter has dug up. And again: FINLAND. FLUTE. 1971.
Eye popping pop art cover with a big foldout poster, both depicting Loiri in aviator's helmet and goggles, with a painted on bright yellow and red bullseye shirt and little angle's wings!
Last year's Ugly Side Of Love, the debut from UK sampledelic duo Malachai, was a surprise hit around here, we loved it from the second we first heard it, we just didn't realize HOW much. We ended up playing it to death, and it ranked as one of our favorites of the year, so much so that we found ourselves lamenting the fact that we didn't make it a Record Of The Week. Which it no doubt should have been, a dizzying assemblage of samples and proper instruments, woven into what sounded like some some lost seventies retro rock, proto metal, fuzzy, groovy, heavy psych jam, and barring some little bits of obviously electronic filigree, it totally could have been.
So we were super psyched to discover a new record, and while on first listen, it doesn't sound -quite- as catchy as their debut, the more we listen, the better it gets, and we're pretty sure we'll find ourselves obsessed and kicking ourselves all over again. But whatever, just don't sleep on this, so fuzzy, and heavy and groovy and goddamn good. And strange. Simultaneously warm and familiar, but also like nothing you've heard, from the super cinematic opener "Monster", a string heavy bit of dramatic ambience, with big skittery beats, and a gorgeous soaring orchestral outro, which leads directly into a heavy shuffling drum beat, laced with some hazy guitar buzz, some swirling atmospheric shimmer, and then some reverby vox, the sound again some impossible hybrid of then and now, past and present, sixties psych wrapped around looped beats, and wreathed in shimmery effects.
"Mid Antarctica (Wearin' Sandals)" is super heavy proto metal buzz, the riffs epic, the organs whirring, the bass thick, the beats big, a sort of hip hoppy groove underpinning some serious psych fuzz, occasionally breaking down into ethereal drift, but always lumbering right back into some thick churning heaviness. "Rainbows" is all hazy and reverby and echoey, with gorgeous boy girl vox, the strums muted and washed out, everything wreathed in a patina of soft focus shimmer, and so it goes, the record shifting and transforming, from hushed balladic drift, to shuffling sunshiney hippie folk, to buzzy druggy groove, to piano driven super dramatic creep, to what might be our other favorite track, "Monster" which sounds like DJ Shadow, if he were raised on sixties psych as well as hip hop, epic and bombastic, moody and broody and so good. And it just keeps getting better. The sort of 'psychedelic sixties Entroducing' vibe becomes more pronounced as the record progresses, finishing off with the twangy, woozy buzz drenched strum and shuffle of the closer "Hybernation", pepper with some unlikely boomin' system low rider bass, and yeah, we're kicking ourselves now for not making this Record Of The Week, so just figure this is an UNofficial ROTW, which means this is about as recommended as it gets...
Maleficia is the work of Bay Area noise artist Andy Way (French Radio, NF Orchest) and avant-vocalist Ilysea Simpson. Their debut cd-r begins with an evocative wordless vocalization from Simpson conjuring the likes of Christina Carter and Jarboe in decontextualizing Southern hymns away from their spiritual intent and toward the raw emotional expression of just voice. After about five or six minutes of a capella delivery, Simpson's duet with Way begins as he gradually unleashes a torrent of tactile noise, all bathed in reverb, which somewhat mutes the sharpness of the distortion, static, and turbulant noise. As her voice becomes more processed and takes on more shrill characterists alongside Way's caustic noise, Maleficia begin to resemble the volatile noise and voice couplings of Fe-Mail to remarkable results. Stitched paper artwork completes this limited edition production of which we only have a handful.
What might you expect from a band made up of one part Everlovely Lightningheart and one part These Arms Are Snakes? What if we told you some of the guys in Isis, Helms Alee and a few of the other These Arms Are Snakes fellas helped out? You still probably wouldn't imagine the sound of Mamiffer, which does share some elements with those bands, but is definitely its own unique entity.
Martial snares, grinding drones, melancholy piano, a strange sort of murky chamber ensemble, like a fucked up malevolent Rachels, that slips smoothly into some jazzy almost post rock. Moody and moving and dramatic and pretty dang cool. And that's just the first track. The rest of the tracks are all over the place, but held together by the everpresent piano, from glitchy buzzing dronemusic that swells to an incendiary Jesu / Nadja-like roar, piano laced folky slowcore, all moaning cellos, and cinematic piano, again underpinned by fuzzy buzzing drones, Godspeed style slow burn epics, Necks like slow jazz shimmer wrapped around a glowing black rumble, wrapped in a hazy shimmer, Fahey-esque Appalachian guitar strum that gradually slips into something much more distorted and heavy, laced with ethereal female vocals, and a distant whirring hiss, all woven into one epic and moving cinematic songsuite.
While this might not hit the spot for most Isis / These Arms Are Snakes / Helms Alee fans, it will almost for sure please fans of all things moody dramatic post rock, Rachels, Godspeed, Explosions, Mono, Magyar Posse and the like...
A brand new black hole slab of metallic tar from Marzuraan, part of the NWOSMDGS, aka the New Wave of Slow Motion Doom Grind Sludge!!! Taking their sonic influences from the holy trinity of Boris, SUNNO))) and Earth (specifically Earth 2) and taking their name (presumably) from pre-Khanate outfit OLD, the UK's Marzuraan deliver their own brand of doom drone. With a raw, very live sounding production, Solid Wood deviates a bit from the recent spate of sludge releases, as Solid Wood infuses its slow motion apocalyptic dirges with mournful melancholy melodies, warm washes of guitar, and a darn near post rock shuffle. A lot of Solid Wood sounds like a heavy metal Codeine, or a seriously beefed up and tuned down Low. Sure it's crushing and heavy as fuck, but it's also dreamy and blissy as it lopes lazily through a haze of thick guitar and dense sonic reverberations. Occasionally the crush outweighs all else. but more often than not, this is one of the dreamiest prettiest pummellings we've received in a long long time.
Exquisitely packaged (as wilth all things Kult Ov Nihilow) in a strange gatefold half-sleeve, with a striking silver ink on cardstock printed insert and a full color poster.
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.
We've been getting tons of requests for this, and after many attempts at contacting the band, we've finally got copies of their full length vinyl debut!! Maus Haus is a local San Francisco experimental pop six piece group, whose analogue synth-driven sounds lend themselves to comparisons to bands like Hot Chip, Stereolab, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Aavikko and Grizzly Bear. They're sure garnering a popular following with floor-filling live club gigs and word-of-mouth buzz!! But Maus Haus also mine a more off-kilter chamber pop sound that often forays into adventurous noirish British jazz territory that set the group apart from their perhaps better known contemporaries and influences. Whipsmart lyrics, soulful harmonies and tightly shifting musical arrangements (pensive harpsichords, far-off flutes and hypnotic saxophone hooks weave throughout) aptly display the group's fine-tuned musicianship and makes this local band definitely one to watch! Each LP comes with a mp3 download card for those who are vinyl-impaired! Very Recommended!
Ms Maya (pronounced May-ah) is a dear friend of Edison Woods' Julia Frodahl, and the two artists definitely are of kindred spirit albeit the former is a bit more heady, mystical and dusky than the latter. On the front cover she may bear a strikingly waifish resemblance to actress Mia Farrow, but her vocal delivery is strongly reminiscent of Kendra Smith, Rose McDowell and perhaps Carla Bozulich, particularly when she's singing the lower octave layers of her multi-tracked vocals. Y is comprised of four ethereal numbers steeped in shadowy somber atmospheres. String and piano tendrils wind gracely around her voice. Utterly captivating. The music may be slow creeping, but you should act fast because this release is limited to 500!
This long in the works split finally sees the light of day. Two aQ faves together on one super limited lp. MGR, the solo project of Mike Gallagher from the mighty Isis, and Xela, the project of John Twells, who also runs the kick ass Type label.
We've yet to get around to reviewing the new MGR full length, but this track is definitely whetting our appetite. Simple finger picked guitar over, shimmering streaks of sound, layers of glimmering gossamer whir, loping and laid back, eventually some BIG guitar comes in, huge crashing chords, allowed to ring out and slowly fade away, the notes pulsing and beating against each other, building to an epic coda, all majestic and intense, like a stripped down Isis, the original guitar slipping into the ether, the huge chords crashing further and further apart, eventually stopping all together, leaving murky blurs of guitar cacophony, smoothed into dense swells, still intense and almost heavy, but more blurred and washed out, the notes and chords and harmonics swirling in a roiling sonic sea.
The Xela track begins with a squall of feedback and squiggly distorted electronics, harsh and jagged, eventually drums surface, the electronics are reigned in a bit, angelic voices drift in, everything bathed in some ethereal shimmer, the drums stumble and skitter, cymbals crash and sizzle, the electronics flit and flutter like clouds of lightning bugs, the sound gradually grows heavier and more dense, a low end gathering beneath the surface, the sound is almost like some free noise Arvo Part, haunting and choral, but those electronics continue to squelch and glitch, the drums skittering chaotically, the vocals wreathed in effects that turn them into shadowy blurs, the track becoming blurrier by the minute, more tranquil, the vocals smeared into glistening chords, the whole track like the soundtrack to staring into a dying sun. Really amazing, and unlike anything we've heard from Xela before.
SUPER LIMITED! ONLY 350 COPIES!!! All hand screened with some seriously creepy cover art. We only got 30 copies, and will not be able to get more!
Milanese's Extend record from back in 2006 instantly became an all time aQ favorite. A total headspinning mix of old school jungle, hip hop, ragga, grime and who knows what else. A massive block rocking, dancefloor destroying, speaker shaking dancemusic freakout. We still throw that one on all the time. Then came Adapt, which was remixes, and took Extend and twisted it up and freaked it out evern MORE. And now we have Lockout, which seems like a proper new full length, although it's jam packed with remixes and guests and multiple versions, but right out of the gate, we're totally sold. Big phat buzz synth basslines, swooping space FX, and some super tweaked helium vocals, until part way through when everything shifts, the beats flip backwards, the tempo drops to half time, and a new vocalist joins the fray, his lazy flow perfectly matching the woozy buzzy lope. The second track is more of the same, a sort of supercharged junly techno, with a dash of dubstep, and some tongu twisting rapping over the top, the whole thing peppered with weird distorted tracheaotomy croaks and warped computer vox. And it just gets weirder and weirder and better and better.
Skittery hiccupping beats wrapped around creepy looped little girl voices, huge chopped jagged shards of low end, warped stumbling big beats, some twisted Tracy Morgan like flows, clipped sirens, clouds of squelch and glitch, a bunch of awesome samples and fractured melodies, a definite Sensational / Dr. Octagon vibe all over the place, as well as a gritty sheen of buzzy grime, a couple tracks dip their toes into diva / radio hip-pop, but even those jams are plenty tweaked.
Another winner for sure, and another record from Milanese that manages to go way beyond dubstep or grime or techno or hip hop or whatever other label you can come up with that barely begins to cover whatever the fuck is going on here. Awesome.
More exceptional recordings broadcast from the house of Emeralds! Mist is the collaboration between Emeralds' John Elliott and Sam Goldberg, both employing a bunch of synthesizers for this sci-fi extravaganza. Like Emeralds (and all of the other John Elliott productions for that matter), Glowing Net locates itself at the tail end of the post-krautrock explorations of progressive electronics from the early '80s that quickly devolved into new age drivel and tepid incidental music. Much of that devolution of kosmische music into garbage came at the hands of too many portentous concepts and over-reaching metaphysical agendas, and while Elliott and Goldberg are tapping into a poetry of galactic expansiveness through their electronics, they never lose sight of the simple elegance of an arpeggiated melody, open-ended allusions, or a bittersweet reflectiveness that comes from the benefit of hindsight. The album opens with a plaintive aquatic percolation that slides into a tighter, focused lazerbeam of sequences on "Sky High" that at once speaks to fellow hypnotist Oneohtrix Point Never and the soaring work of J.D. Emmanuel. "Mist Stream" acquires something similar to Wolfgang Voigt's highly innovative ambient swoosh on the Gas album Pop, soaring above a low-ratcheted arpeggiation. Very impressive stuff, that could easily be extended into a 20 minute zoner jam, but Mist has condensed this down to an economic four minute track. While this album is cut at 45 rpm, we've resisted our normal urge to spin these at 33, since Mist got everything just right at this speed. No need to fuck with genius!
Everyone loves the '80s right? Well, no, but that doesn't mean that we can't take the good stuff that the '80s created and turn it around and make it better. That's what Monozid (from Leipzig, Germany) does time and time again on their debut full-length. There's a few post-punk bits, an early Sonic Youth noise-guitar element, and a lot of Three Imaginary Boys/Seventeen Seconds era Cure, but all of it topped with a 21st century sensibility. Monozid is not re-hashing old tricks worn out twenty years ago; they're using what came before to make great modern pop music. Some songs are instrumentals, the remaining are either sung in German or English. With song titles like "Du Bist Mein Mann, Sabrina" ("You are my man, Sabrina") we wish we could speak more than infant-German to understand just what they're singing about! Recommended.
Weird name. Weird band. Cool band! First thing to note: this is from the same folks who brought us Ufomammut's Lucifer Songs. In fact, Supernatural Cat is Ufomammut's label. And yes, as we were hoping, MoRkObOt are another HEAVY, spaced-out band of freaky Italians. But while Ufomammut sound like Electric Wizard playing Hawkwind songs, these guys exhibit a more precise -and- alien sounding technique in their all-instrumental compositions, which are definitely very heavy and DISTORTED a la Ufomammut. It's as if Ufomammut built a spaceship, took off from Earth, went up into outer space, and found these guys already there, orbiting some far off galaxy in a blinking robot vessel!!
The MoRkObOt trio -- Lin on bass and synth, Lan on bass, and Len on drums -- obviously have a lot of the same influences as Ufomammut, including the aforementioned Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, and Godflesh... with the latter influence maybe more prominent here, though this isn't all darkly depressive, instead it's sometimes almost energetically happy, like these guys have been popping pills they bought in a shady spaceport cantina. Some tracks are all about repetitive rhythmic pummel... or jaunty, twisting riffery... others feature passages of ominous synthy ambient drone and disturbing sound FX... it's all very psychedelic and sci-fi sounding, like a band jamming around the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By the time you've experienced the last track, the 23+ minute "Poldon", you're waaaay out in space, maybe never to return... We pretty sure that this will appeal to fans of Titan and Zombi and Circle, and of course the other bands mentioned above!
Another thing to note: these REALLY swank and elaborate, hand-printed, hand-assembled packages (for the cd and the 10" both, they're equally cool lookin', and come in various random colors) are LIMITED. The cd contains a 500 numbered copies of the cd, 500 numbered copies of the vinyl (which, by the way, contains a much shorter version of "Poldon" than the cd does). Both formats feature a wire-bound booklet featuring cool artwork for each track, Voivod-style! Ufomammut's "Malleus Art Lab" is responsible for all the far out art, design, and execution.
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.
Killer collection of demos and outtakes from arguably THEE only grunge band that mattered (Nirvana who?), sure we love Tad and Soundgarden and all the rest, but Mudhoney are one of the few bands who always ruled and somehow STILL rule, swaggery and heavy, and punky and bad ass with some of the catchiest songs EVER.
Head On The Curb goes way back, to when original bassist Matt Lukin was still in the band, a bunch of tracks that would mostly go on to make up Piece Of Cake, although a few jams here went on to be B sides, or never went on at all, which is enough to make this worthwhile. Besides the fact, that this is Mudhoney at their fiercest and heaviest, the sound varies, but for the most part, this is super distorted, ultra heavy, raw and urgent, caustic and chaotic, that Mudhoney sound you know and love, just a bit less polished, the guitars muddy and murky, everything fuzzy and blown our, Mark Arm's yowl in fine form, there's an acoustic jam, a super obscure cover, but for the most part this is prime vintage Mudhoney.
Absolutely essential for fans, newbies might want to try Superfuzz Bigmuff first, but then again, what the hell, if these jams, in all their raw unpolished glory, don't convince you of Mudhoney's rulingness, then hell, nothing will.
Pressed on super thick vinyl, and housed in heavy old school black and white jackets.
The moody, obscurantist ensemble Multer had its origins in the industrial / field recording outfit ABGS, who in turn had some connections to Cranioclast. Of course, these are references that mine the post-industrial currents of German experimental music; those dour atmospheres persist in the current Multer guise, but with an ear for what the likes of Village Of Savoonga had been up to (remember how great that band was?), in addition to all things Drone Records. The first of the three tracks on this 10" interweaves drone guitar chords into a two note melody that oscillates plaintively above of a set of electrical pulses. The whole ambience of the track is thoroughly evocative in its gloom that elegantly sits upon the lattice work of skittering rhythms and that simple turgid melody. The second cut wraps fuzzed out stabs of guitar noise above angular march of drum machines and electronics. Much closer to the Morr Records sound than what's ever appeared from Multer in the past. And the finale returns to the guitar drone, but blown out through distortion, all shoegazing and maudlin in its slice of noise that sheds all of its layering to reveal the melody hidden with. Really nice work found here; but limited stock!
Here's the first piece of vinyl from one of our favorite drone artists - Brendan Murray. Here, he's working with his Boston neighbors Perispirit, whose earlier recordings seem to lean much more toward the power-noise end of the soundscraping underworld, but actually ends up being a worthy compliment.
Brendan Murray offers an interesting twist upon his electrical orchestrations of uneasy minimalism for his contribution to this split. Here, Murray is working with the voice of Noell Dorsey as the only source material. Not all that sure of the background of Ms. Dorsey, aside from a few avant-improv performances in various spots in Boston; and Murray repurposes her voice within a churning insectoid drone which elegantly descends into a soft hum whose calm is disrupted through signal ruptures of Dorsey's cackling. These witchy vocalizations have all of the bloodcurdling empathy of Diamanda Galas, but Murray is more interested in dissembling that voice into a swarm of disquieting drone.
The Perispirit half of the record begins with a lurching splatter of air-compressed noise, broken up with tiny jittery silences and heavily gated signal processing, only to snap into a shadowy, lonesome ambient passage of lilting guitar tones, which gradually acquire a leaden sheen of heavy, downtuned distortion before cutting back to a rupture of those aerated noises from the first moments of the record. Another razor edit back to silence, and Perispirit makes another ramp of guitar-sourced dronescaping through atonal loops and layers of sound, whose density has the rapturous quality of those Chatham / Branca guitar armies, but coupled with some low-impact noisemongering below. Limited to 250 copies, pressed on off-white vinyl, and certainly recommended!
Mute Socialite are a new aural maelstrom featuring Bay Area avant music vets Moe! Staiano, Ava Mendoza, Alec Karim and Shayna Dunkleman. Don't even attempt to define this new group's sound by the words in their moniker. They are anything but mute, and we wouldn't consider theirs to be the most social of musics. It's like a sonic blow to the solar plexus that then proceeds to march on odd time signatures upon your fallen form. The dozen pieces deliver plenty of mighty post-punk churn, no wave spasm and math rock count-that-shit! At once fiercely precise and wildly chaotic. Blistering.
The first we'd heard from Australia's My Disco was on their split 7" with Young Widows, their track a killer slab of dour post punk noise rock, all lope and chug and minor key guitars, which is how Little Joy starts out, all clanging riffage, low slung bass, simple propulsive drumming, mantra like vocals, a bit like a dronier spacier Interpol maybe, their sound repetitive and cyclical, peppered with jagged shards of caustic guitar crunch. But it's on the second track, "Young", where the band's unique sound really gets to blossom, after another opening blast of minor key post rock, with cascading This Heat like guitars, and pounding motorik drumming, the band eventually slip into something way more rhythmic and sinewy and mesmerizing, sounding almost like a punk rock Necks, the band unfurling an epic sprawl of minimal hypnorock, the instrumentation super restrained, more about the rhythm, and the timbre, then the melody, the sound at once heavy, rhythmic and hypnotic, reminding us of a way more abstract Circle, locked tight, peppering the looped groove with little flurries of extra drumming, super subtle bits of melodic filigree, but for the most part holding the listener in thrall with their trancelike mastery of tension and NO release. Which is how the whole record plays out, a push and pull between more traditional sounding post punk jangle and clang, and totally mesmeringly minimal droned out repetition, either on their own would certainly be pleasing enough, but the two combined, create something much more that the sum of it's parts, the rare sort of record that should appeal as much to math rockers as post punkers, or to krautrockers as much as pop kids. So good.
(Not just on vinyl, cds coming back in soon...)
