Bay Area folks might remember Derek Monypeny from the ferociously explosive, improvisational trio Oaxacan. Their fiery brand of Eastern flecked, face-melting psych mastery was truly amazing to behold live. Sadly their time as a band was short-lived, but guitarist Derek Monypeny continues his journey into the desert cosmos with his debut lp of solo oud. Though he has also played guitar in Sir Richard Bishop's touring band, Mr. Monypeny decided to put the blaring fuzz and virtuosic six-string tendencies aside and opted for a more traditional approach here. These beautifully minimal pieces of eloquent, contemplative oud unfold like ancient narratives, evoking dramatic images of ghostly mirages, shimmering horizons and the desert sun sinking under pale dunes.
Side A unfolds with gorgeously sparse, delicate movements of slowly picked oud, each note rising up then dropping down like diamonds in the sand. We love the patient, reflective pace of the songs, each note carefully plucked and sent off like a gentle offering into the night. While side A reveals Monypeny employing the art of restraint and patience, side B finds Monypeny on the periphery of tradition, drenching the oud in hazy reverb and other effects that tastefully reiterate the instrument's Saharan roots. Reminiscent of Sandy Bull's oud outings, these final two pieces warble and melt in the hot sun, tremolo washes and smeared melody hover in the arid sky as the rhythmic haze and gentle noise lull you deeper into the cosmic badlands. So gorgeous and so perfect. Highly recommended for fans of anything related to Sublime Frequencies for sure. Limited to an edition of 250, don't be left in the Saharan dust!
Moon Duo return with their second proper full length, and if you needed any further proof of their masterful grasp of fuzzed out hypnotic grooves, well, look no further. It's almost as if Moon Duo set out to link every one of their records together as one gigantic pulsating trip into your mind, and Mazes takes you further in. Mazes. Hmm. Like the magic eye cover for their Catch As Catch Can single, the eyeball warping artwork seems to be a perfect visual accompaniment to the awesome brain-melting confusion of the music itself.
Kicking off with "Seer", the duo conjure the hazy underwater sound they've utilized before with a rhythm that walks the line between spaced out acid rock and minimal electro grooves with some of the clearest Moon Duo vocals to date. "Mazes" offers a slight departure from the usual murk, sounding poppy and jangly in the vein of other San Francisco popsmiths like the Fresh And Onlys or the Mantles. It rides out with a sort of pre-1965 surf rock feel that makes this a perfect jam for your next sun baked road trip. "Scars" shifts the mood into darker terrain like some fractured Suicide / Doors hybrid. The heavy vibrato keeps things percolating while the organ occasionally shifts into a spooky little interlude recalling Kraftwerk's "The Model". The song also strangely makes us think of Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild", an association which is taken to the next logical step with the aggressive "Fallout". The album concludes with "Goners", a midtempo jam that makes it feel like you are walking into the perfect fadeout to an album which will remain playing in your head nonstop for quite some time. Moon Duo have never let us down, and it doesn't seem that'll change anytime soon...
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.
We got a tiny handful of these a few weeks back, the brand new record from this French psych folk drone duo, and we were happy to get even those, considering how criminally limited NSB releases usually are. Those flew out of here and we figured they were just gone for good. But lo and behold, a batch somehow made it across the sea to one of our distributors and we snatched up all the copies we could, although that wasn't really all that many, so if you're an NSB fanatic, best act fast.
And if you're not a fanatic, well, then why the hell not. This duo conjures up some of the most fantastic otherworldly psychedelia we've ever heard. Long tracks that ooze and sprawl and drift, folk songs blurred and smeared into ambient outer space shimmer, drones undulate beneath clouds of slow swirling melody, effects whir and thrum, meditative and tranquil and dreamily druggy, the songs slipping from that sort of untethered psych drift to something much more earthbound, a woozy forest folk, tangled steel strings, minimal percussion, but still wreathed in the same sort of spaced out haze that seems like at any moment could blossom into full on heart of the sun ambient abstraction, and often does.
The one thing we can say about NSB, is that their records all sound like they were cut from the same sonic cloth, a glorious, fantastical, psychedelically colored cloth sure, but the sound remains quite similar, as if each record is less like a proper new album, and more like the next movement in some multi part epic, which is fine with us, this must be part 10 or 11 by now, but the sound remains so hypnotic and enthralling. The perfect blend of dark witchy psych folk, and deep shimmering dronemusic, of swirling psychedelic new age and ritualistic foresty primitivism, sun dappled and dew scented, all the sounds prismatic and crystalline, whether floating weightlessly in a field of hushed minimal thrum, or roiling darkly in a cloud of reveberating low end, Natural Snow Buildings are masters at creating this other world, conjuring up a soundtrack to takes us there with them and as always, the results are utterly breathtaking, and fantastically captivating.
ALREADY SOLD OUT AT THE LABEL!! These could very well be the last copies we get...
It's the return of the hard hitting British jazz duo with the really dumb name but the funkiest old school breaks augmented by organ, flutes and marimba. So how could we complain? Sounding like a revival of noirish jazz with occasional Latin tinges from the sixties and seventies, like the best of Creed Taylor's Verve label productions for Lalo Schifrin and Cal Tjader and a host of other cool cats, but with a futuristic twist of Moog-y delight. This new release doesn't change the formula so much from their last one as it expands upon it, including at the end of the the album proper, 18 or so additional "Biscuits" (sort of like J Dilla's "Donuts"), short sketches of organ and Moog squelches or drum breaks for you to sample and manipulate yourself. Cinematic and tightly knit, another score for the Now-Again label!
Plastic Palace Alice? Let's hear it for Scott Walker, first of all; but the mad genius of baroque pop has nothing in common with the long-form stupor and granular synthesis that these stalwarts of the avant-garde produced way back in 1991. At that time, O'Rourke was a recent graduate of music school with a head full of knowledge about vangarde composition, the whole Luc Ferrari back catalogue, and an standing invitation to perform / record within Chicago's preeminent postindustrial ensemble Illusion Of Safety; and Heemann was in the process of dissolving his seminal dada-montage project H.N.A.S. The two began a correspondence that led to him travelling to Germany where they jumped into a heady collaboration in Heemann's studio. Why none of these recordings have yet to see the light of day is anybody's guess, but here's what may be the first in a series of archival recordings produced by O'Rourke and Heemann.
A buzzsaw drone gradually introduces the first of three long-form pieces of stratified minimalism. As the piece grows and blossoms, an uneasy set of harmonic overtones dominates the stage, holding a firm grasp on the psychoacoustic properties that an epic Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock piece can achieve. The track collapses through a weird gurgling of electronics only to swell back again with a chorus of LaMonte Young inspired drone-vocalization rasped through electronics and / or coupled with sympathetic drones from a guitar, only to mutate into a spasmodic explosion of electronic granularity and sine-tone modulation. Really amazing stuff, for sure! The second track, picks up with what we'll assume to be O'Rourke's buzzing guitar drones giving way to a devilish montage of vocalized growling, suffocating gaspings for air, and other grim sound poetics that look forward simultaneously to the lupine babbling of Sudden Infant and the tortured incidental black-metal ambience of Spektr. The profound spookiness of the second track dissolves into the pools of shimmered tone and radiant beauty of the third, as something of a harbinger of where Heemann would direct the Mirror project with Andrew Chalk almost a decade later. So nice!
Again, we have to wonder why the hell did it take so long for these recordings to come out? They are simply too good to have been sitting dormant on some shelf!
It's really kinda hard to know what to say about Obits, when we first HEARD ABOUT the band, we were basically already primed to be blown away, c'mon, this was the new band fronted by Rick Froberg, he of late great math rock/post punk masters Drive Like Jehu, not to mention the mighty and mighty missed Hot Snakes. Froberg's guitar playing and super distinctive wail (rivaled only perhaps by his labelmate Mark Arm of Mudhoney) are indie rock underground treasures, and wherever they end up, you can bet, we'll be there front and center, digging the sounds. And we are digging this new Obits big time, it's not a huge departure from their Sub Pop debut I Blame You, which already was a bit of a shift from the looser, more rocking Snakes... Obits offered up the same sort of garagey rock, but maybe it's that the band was no longer youngsters, in fact most were married with kids and thus, the sound was way more mature, in a good way, the songwriting concise and tightly wound, and if anything, they continue to shift in that direction on Moody, Standard And Poor, the sound still low slung and swaggery, stomping and propulsive, but even more broody and dark, the sound much more stripped down, a serious Wipers vibe to these ears, that same sort of classic songsmithery, wreathed in more modern post Stoogesy stomp. And the songs here are fantastic, they suit a more minimal approach, it's like a modern punk rock take on classic rock, harkening back to a time when bands were as concerned with songs as they were with songs, and thus, these are the kind of songs that will remain lodged in your head. The sort of record, that sounds pretty great on first listen, but by listen 10, and then 20, and beyond, well, then it gets harder and harder to imagine listening to anything else. Easily one of our new favorite records. So good. (PS comes out Tuesday, so you won't find it in the store 'til then, but you can certainly order it now.)
One of THREE new Utech releases this week (plus the vinyl of the latest Locrian!), and the first we've heard from this Spanish duo, but hopefully not the last, as these guys push all our heavy spacey droney buttons. A series of long form, atmospheric space outs, draping thick pulsating guitar grit over swirling electronics, fusing Morricone-ish twang to spiraling streaks of synth shimmer, creating a sort of hazy, droney space folk, or maybe a folk flecked bit of space drone, either way, this stuff is divine, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
The opening two tracks seem to function as one single two part epic, crafted from a Tim Hecker like cascade of warm whirring chordal blur, beneath soft spacey pulsations, some twangy guitars, a bit of thick Earthy buzz, all blurred and smeared into a thick, organic, undulating dronescape, the fuzz and buzz gradually receding, leaving a sky full of crystalline guitar shimmer, that seems to pick up grit and whir as it goes, eventually it fades out completely, leaving just a lush shadowy cloud of muted crunch and swirling ambience, only to erupt into some distorted guitar crunch, laced with strangely rhythmic streaks of hiss and glitch, before finally fading out into something much more tranquil.
The rest of the record offers up variations on this twangy spacey droney sound, often resulting in something that sounds like a Tim Hecker / Barn Owl jam, ethereal and ephemeral one minute, all spidery melodies and slow shifting glimmer, pulsing and electronic the next, strange flurries of stuttering melody wrapped around gentle steel string strum, and hushed chordal background blur. There are moments when the sound transforms into something much more soundtracky and spacey, "Red Forest" for example sounds like it could be an alternate score for Logan's Run, a haunting retro-futuristic creep, all swirling minor key synths, loping basslines, and pulsing electronics, quite ominous and haunting, but which gives way to the warped squelch of "Threshold" all murky and muddy, but again, haunting and futuristic sounding, like another lost sci fi synth score, the whole record wrapping up with the hazy drone psych of "Jatavena" warm whirling buzz, murky distorted rumblings, strange bits of noisy background detritus, the tone of the track gradually shifting and getting more and more ominous, before again seeming to shrug off the sonic clouds, closing with a warm whirring bit of softly melodic droned out drift.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Packaged in super sweet Utech style mini sleeves, black ink on heavy brown paper.
Brand new full length of hushed minimal pastoral psychedelia from the duo of Spencer Grady and Steven Lewis, who also do time in aQ fave Rameses III, and like we mentioned in the review of the cd ep we listed a while back, the sound of Padang Food Tigers is like a more minimal version of the sound of their main group, the songs lush layered expanses of hushed folky drift, laced with field recordings, the sound of rainfall seems to run throughout, as if the listener was eavesdropping on some intimate back porch rainy day jam.
Most of the songs here feature just a couple instruments, usually guitar, banjo, lapsteel, piano, even harmonica, the song a gradual unfurling of some lazy woozy melody, the sound rich with room sound, a lush natural reverb, a dream like echo, the opener introduces the record with the sound of rain, over which a haunting piano plays a funereal lament, accompanied by banjo, the two playing out a skeletal harmony, often making it difficult to tell which is which, the perfect intro to such an introspective record.
Much of the record is like some sort of abstract, Appalachia, subtle strum, slippery slide, all spread way out, letting notes flutter and fade, spinning surprisingly lush streaks of warm whirring buzz, the tracks with banjo sound like slow motion bluegrass, other tracks introduce more natural sounds, rushing rivers, chirping crickets, and suddenly the jam seems to have moved creekside, the notes bouncing off the porch and joining the sounds of the woods and water, a few of the tracks build and become epic and emotional, like the soaring majesty of "Right Up Rosster", a lush swirl of strummed high end steel strings and warm piano chords, the sound almost liturgical, but so dreamy and divine.
And the record finishes with a bit of music box like melody, woven into some spare late night folk, all warm and lit by flickering firelight, a darkly dreamy finish to a darkly dreamy record. So nice.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, already sold out at the label!
We've always appreciated the music of the Papercuts, but we still felt like they were capable of more. Not all the elements had come together, something seemed to be missing, something kept it their sounds from achieving greatness. Always lovely and lilting and dreamily folky, but with Fading Parade, they have finally made the record they always seemed capable of creating. Perhaps it was getting signed to Sub Pop, but the Papercuts have elevated their song writing and delivery into an entirely different league. The recording of the album is so perfect in capturing a warmth and seduction in their songs that we had never felt before. Jason Quever's vocals are some of the most smooth and dreamy male vocals we've heard in such a long time.
Not to keep pressing the Sub Pop connection but we can hear sonic and song comparisons to two of the labels best releases of the last decade, Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins and Teen Dream by Beach House. From their touring with Beach House this past year, we can tell that the Papercuts were able to really learn how to incorporate such rich and hypnotizing atmospheres into their songs. We also hear a touch of the elegance of The Clientele. This is an album that's both hazy and woozy, while also being catchy and emotional and immediate. We always love when a band we've been on the fence about, makes that huge leap and delivers a record that makes us all hardcore believers!
We've long known that the veteran San Francisco acoustic group Pickpocket Ensemble never fail to deliver the goods, and their sixth cd reaffirms this. Those of you outside the Bay Area might already be familiar with them and this album from their airplay on NPR. It's sure to please old fans as well as attract plenty of new ones. Always rich in mood and atmosphere, they deftly meld inspirations and instrumentation from around the globe. Some are fleeting like single threads in their lustrous tapestry, while others (such as the Appalachian folk and Balkan gypsy influences) appear more solidly, forming artfully arranged patches of the PPE musical quilt. Along the mesmerizing way, they visit and revisit the twist and turns of jazz, flamenco, tango and chamber music. Equally at home in a sunny sidewalk cafe or a vivacious cabaret, Memory is a dark and sultry album that captures the flair and charm of a bygone era.
Latest batch of swirly swooshy, psychedelic sci-fi synth new age drift from Pulse Emitter, aka Daryl Groetsch, and since we've raved on and on about PE over the course of close to 15 releases (and those are just the ones we were able to get enough of to list) we most definitely risk repeating ourselves, which is probably okay, as this is another perfect installment in Groetsch's ever expanding catalogue of otherworldly synthscapes.
This one is crazy limited too, we only have about 15 copies, and it's already out of print so odds are these will be gone in a flash, fans, you already know what you're instore for, and probably want to grab one of these quick. Newbies, prepare to be transported to some strange futureworld, but one as envisioned by our 1980 selves, rocket cars, and space probes, cities in orbit around dying planets, whole worlds buried beneath the ruined surface. We can't help but envision Logan's Run, especially on the first track here, a percolating arpeggiating synthscape laced with laser beam effects and deep buzzing ominous basslines, super soundtracky, and evocative of some low budget sci-fi future.
The second track is a bit more sun dappled and new agey, but is cut from the same cloth, so in some ways it almost sounds like the love scene from that imaginary future, but it too is laced with weird swooping low end buzz, and strange streaks of blooping and bleeping FX, which transform the tranquility of the main synth lines into something a bit more dramatic.
After a short-ish, music box like synth ballad, thick swells beneath tinkling melodies, comes the 10+ minute closer, a sprawling expanse of sci-fi space kraut synth drone bliss, super spare and abstract, dreamy and woozy and mediative, hazy and hypnotic, and the perfect soundtrack to drifting off, and floating weightless into space. So good.
And again, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Already sold out at the label so these are indeed the last copies we'll be able to get...
As these young ladies from Los Angeles settle into their new moniker (they first hit the scene known as Pearl Harbor) they continue to evolve their hazy take on breezy and washed out shoegaze pop. There is something about the overall sound on Headbangers In Ecstacy that induces in us such a swirling and cloudy state. With songs that seem to exist in worlds that bring to mind The Swirlies, The Feelies, Chapterhouse, Lush, and Blondie. Or what it might sound like if Ariel Pink got to produce a record for Julee Cruise. It's dream-pop that's detached enough to let your mind take it wherever you want. This is the perfect album for those days when you can't tell whether you are happy or sad but you know that you just want to keep floating somewhere in-between.
Spirited debut album from this local French folk chanteuse and multi-instrumentalist. Helene Renaut teamed up with Papercuts' Jason Quever and members of Skygreen Leopards to bring us this sunny and wistful record that is perfect for the fresh beginnings of Spring. Renaut's songbird voice and dulcet harmonies with spare chamber arrangements of guitar, violin, glockenspiel and a brass ensemble remind us of singers we have loved from the past, the airy British folk of June Tabor, the folk-pop eccentrics of The Roches and Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the beautiful fragility of Connie Converse, Ruthann Friedman and Kath Bloom, all with a sense of French pastoralism from her native Brittany. Limited to 250 copies, each one hand-numbered. Quite lovely, indeed!
We may have missed out on legendary punk rock outfits Gorilla Biscuits, CIV and Youth Of Today (even though one of us is indeed straight edge), but holy shit did we love Quicksand, the connection being frontman Walter Schreifels, who played in all four, but for many of us, Quicksand was our introduction to Schreifels, and what an introduction, totally epic heaviness, huge riffs, killer songs, the band a crack team of crushers, Schreifels' voice so distinctive, raspy but emotional and intense.
After the dissolution of Quicksand, Schreifels went on to start various projects, one called Walking Concert, and this one, the long running Rival Schools, but unlike the heavy post punk crush of Quicksand, most of Schreifels's post Quicksand output was way more pop, a sound he was surprisingly well suited to (which was definitely hinted at in Quicksand), the first Rival Schools record, United By Fate, still kills, so we were super excited to find out about a brand new record, the first RS record in a decade, and very little has changed since United By Fate, big crunchy powerful pop songs, like a stripped down Quicksand in a way, another one of those bands that if there were any justice, these guys would be playing stadiums, and Letterman, the sound is aggressive, and heavy, but also jangly and hooky and way melodic, the vocals as distinctive as ever. Might be a bit too wimpy for punks and metalheads, but heavy pop fiends should definitely check this out (and United By Fate).
Here's a 2003 release that we've never stocked before, from one of our favorite sound artists. Steve Roden built this album originally as the sound design for an installation back in 2000, with all of the sounds sourced from three musical instruments found in a Chinatown giftshop, including a toy wooden flute, an aluminum wind chime, and a paper accordion. Where so many musicians would take these instruments and render their sounds cute, cheeky, or ironic, Roden has always been an artist with a profound sensitivity for his source material; and he deftly extracts harmonically rich and emotionally resonant hues and tones from all of those instruments. The first piece, sourced from the wooden flute, elegantly weaves sustained wisping tones out of a deep, almost sinewave-sounding thrum of down-pitched low-end rumbling. The looping hypnosis of this track harkens to the pre-digital smears of flutes that Zoviet France created on such albums as Shouting At The Ground or Shadow Thief Of The Sun - in other words, haunting, sublime, and gorgeous. The second track is adopted from the aluminum wind chimes, collects an aggregate of variably pitched sounds of those chimes, with deep resonance, metallic textural scrapes, and chittery clicks coming into the mix. The pacing of this track is quintessentially Roden, deliberate and hypnotic, becoming all the more engrossing the further one engages with the track. The final composition is for the paper accordion, whose spare notes evolve into a beautiful elegy of lilting tones that overlap and loop with each other, upon sets of miniature abrasions and a thick set of low-drones, which must have been designed to simulate those on the first track. Like much of Roden's work, this is a lovely piece of introspective minimalism, slowly germinating into a beautiful ambience.
Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Girls At Dawn, and on and on. So many of our favorite lo-fi garage pop bands of the last few years share one common bond, a deep love and appreciation for Phil Spector's production and the girl groups that he helped bring to life. When it comes to his production and THAT sound he perfected, it just doesn't get more classic than with The Ronettes. The 'Wall of Sound', the drenched reverb, the hypnotic warmth, the catchy melodies, the heartache and yearning.
Makes it extra heartbreaking and bittersweet to revisit these songs knowing all we do now about the troubling relationship that Phil Spector and Ronnie Spector had and of course the ongoing black cloud that haunts Spector's life. But no one can ever take away the amazing and revolutionary sounds he helped create with The Ronettes. These recordings really did help shape the landscape of so much of the best pop music that would follow over the next quarter century. From The Beach Boys to The Ramones, all of the greats have been influenced by the sounds of The Ronettes.
Huh, we haven't really ever reviewed any Sabbat before... except for one crazy out of print triple 6" vinyl release, a long time ago. That's despite the fact that all the troo cvlt metalheads here at AQ have lots of Sabbat in their collections. We're talking about the Japanese Sabbat here, by the way, not the thrash '80s British one - though these guys are thrashy and '80s sounding too, and also totally black metal. Heck they did that triple six inch, after all! Can't get much more Satanic than that.
So, about time we reviewed something else by them. They've got a massive discography spanning the years, from way back in 1985 'til now, many full-length albums but also a bewildering array of eps and splits, with an unlikely preponderance of their releases being super limited edition LIVE recordings. Sometimes as many as nine in one year. Weird. Who do they think they are, Pearl Jam?
Anyway, at long last, this is a new studio recording, and while it's not presented in as quite a "cult" format as that aforementioned 3x6", it's still a fetish object of sorts, the packaging fiendishly glimmering and glittering, with the art and logo in metallic red ink on a white background. And even though it's a domestic US release, they've included a Japanese-style obi strip, nice. A band that gets this lavish attention, either definitely deserves it, or made a pact with the Devil, in this case, probably both!
So, for those who have yet to come to the Sabbat, let's explain what you're in for: total raw black metal mayhem, a la Venom and early Slayer, played with infectious enthusiasm by Japanese maniacs so old school and true that they make Darkthrone look like posers. With some NWOBHM elements (this band's Cronos, bassist/vocalist Gezol, is also a member of Metalucifer, after all) they display real heavy metal musical chops even amidst the thrashing, noisy chaos that these songs deliver with such high speed and seeming insanity.
That insanity partially manifests this time via a focus on witches, there's no less than four songs here that factor "witch" into the title: "Witchflight", "Witch Hammers", "Witch's Torches", and the instrumental "Witch's Weed"! Don't ask why, or witch. Stereotypically Japanese with such obsessiveness, Sabbat are as over the top as ever on this new album.
While our other favorite Japanese black metal band, Sigh, took off in weird avant-garde directions from their Venom-worshipping beginnings, Sabbat stay true to the source, earning a special place in the pantheon of all-time underground black metal greats. Sabbatrinity is further testament to that.
Hard to not dig a band described as "deep space power violence", which is fine, cuz we dig the shit out of this. The debut full length from this two piece from Seattle, who like many heavy duos before them, make a sound much bigger than their lineup would suggest. And yeah, that whole deep space power violence thing actually seems pretty accurate, the band flitting from churning chugging heaviness, rife with gnarled riffage and bellowed vox, to spaced out synth driven minimalism, even stretching out into weird woozy ambience, and they're at their best when they cram all of that stuff together, like on "The Shocking Discovery", with its tribal drumming, and squelchy synthy electronics, it's spaced out and psychedelic, until the riff comes in, then it gets heavy fast, before slipping back into something WAY more hushed: minimal drumming, a loping two note bass melody, all wrapped in feedback, until some howled vox starts bringing it all back in, getting more and more anguished, the drums getting busier, then some seriously thick bass buzz bursts in, and the song explodes like a progged out power violence Ruins, the song slipping effortlessly from part to part, tempo to tempo, hence the progginess.
The songs are all super varied, sometimes blossoming into some weird sort of bass driven spaced out psychedelia, but just as often some sort of lumbering downtuned doom, or electronic synthy drift, or super intricate post punk power prog, the various power violence elements holding all the disparate elements together, those vocals, the murky grinding low end, but the cool thing, is, when they're at their heaviest, there's still some weird spacey shit going on, and when they're getting all psychedelic and spaced out, there some serious heaviness happening simultaneously.
Some seriously rad twisted heaviness, way recommended for anyone into, well, anyone into twisted heaviness. Which we're imagining is a whole lot of you...
These fine ladies from San Francisco have been quite busy ever since we first fell for them so hard, a couple years back, with their debut full length How To Make Ambient Sadcake. Since then they have been playing out like crazy and releasing 7"s and 12"s at a dizzying pace. We love how they have taken advantage of the different formats to play with and display different sides of their sound. With their new full length outing, Mrs. Jones' Cookies, they've released their most satisfying and coherent recording yet. We've loved everything they've put out so far, but all those releases felt way more about the individual songs, while this one really feels like they've mastered the ability to create an overall mood and feeling with a set of songs that flow so well with each other.
Mrs. Jones' Cookies is what it might sound like if Neko Case or Jolie Holland did way stripped down, haunting covers of The Roches, Fleetwood Mac, The Incredible String Band, and Karen Dalton. The Sandwitches greatest strength is that while you can tell they have such a rich and strong understanding of music's past they never sound like some nostalgic act, as there is such an immediate and fresh perspective that they deliver in all of their songs. So good!
We loved the last Scale The Summit record, a soaring shredding, super epic, majestically scenic chunk of instrumental metal, jubilant, sweeping, kinda prog, but totally mesmerizing in its scale and cinematic vibe. Like we mentioned in the review of that record, it was almost like a metal soundtrack to one of those nature films, the sweeping shots of the coastline from a helicopter, or maybe the music playing while the credits roll, and the main characters drive off into the distance, the shot growing wider and wider, until the car becomes barely a speck on a fantastically panoramic vista. As we also mentioned, the only downside, and it's a downside that didn't really seem like a downside at all to us, is something that probably dogs lots of epic instrumental prog metal bands, the fact that no matter how rocking, or how shredding or how epic things get, it's hard not to think of Joe Satriani's Surfing With The Alien. Lots of folks out there probably don't even remember that record, but when that record came out we LOVED it. Now it's considered supremely cheesy, but at the time it was totally epic shredding genius.
Which we suppose makes Scale The Summit the modern Surfing With The Alien, which is fine with us. And this record is more of the same. Maybe even better than the last one. It's heavy, the riffs are awesome, the arrangements are intricate and complex, the vibe is totally epic, like a shreddy prog metal Godspeed, but the band slip deftly from that sort of slow build chug, to super intricate stop/start progged out workouts, and then right back into something emotional and cinematic and sweeping. There's some fretless bass, and some woozy almost jazzy bits that definitely drift awfully close to cheese, but those parts are few and far between, and in the context of the whole, they offer a brief respite from much of the rest of the record's Champs meets Satriani progshred crunch.
Check out the sound samples, it'll probably take you all of 30 seconds to figure out if this is your cup of tea, but trust us, if you find that it is you might find it hard not to blast this in your convertible as you speed down the highway along the coast, driving off into the sunset...
Israeli band Churchill's, reviewed a few lists back, aren't the only vintage '60s act from the Middle East to get a reissue recently. We also just got this, from the somewhat more obscure Sea-Ders (aka The Cedars) of Beirut, Lebanon, who sound a bit like a Middle Eastern Monkees or something! There's 8 tracks here, apparently everything they ever recorded, all from singles circa 1966-'68. It's jangling and energetic, exotic East-meets-West psych pop beat action, a la lot of the Turkish stuff of the era we like so much, complete with ripping bouzouki, saz, and/or oud alongside electric guitar, and in fact a couple of their popular songs here were covered by Turkish artists, comped on that Turkish Delights collection we used to have. Any fan of Middle Eastern psych (or psych with Middle Eastern motifs) a la 3 Hur-el or The Devil's Anvil, should enjoy this.
Liner notes provided by both Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things magazine (which featured an interview with one of the former Sea-ders in issue #26), and also Lenny Helsing of Shingdig! magazine as well.
A 2005 release that somehow slipped through the cracks here, Colin Andrew Sheffield's First Thus is a magnificent, spectral drone album. Sheffield's day job is in the book industry, where the title of the book would hold some meaning in speaking of a first edition of a book that had been previously available but in a slightly different form. Sheffield applies this sensibility to his own appropriation of "other commercially available recordings." Of course, what those recording might be aren't made known through the radical disfiguration and obfuscation that Sheffield applies to these sounds. One can think back to Aphex Twin, and a remix he was commissioned to create for a band he despised, so he sped up an entire Jesus Jones track to a microsecond burst and used that bit of digital abrasion as an ancillary hi-hat in his polyrhythmic electronica. Whatever Sheffield may have thought of the original recordings has become irrelevant in the perpetually cascading streams of digital vibration and hypnotic ambience. Time-stretching is an obvious weapon within Sheffield's arsenal, but he's so heavily layered all of the cross-phasing patterns that massive washes of op-art inspired pulsations ripple through the protracted echoes and cavernous reverberations. His aerosolized sonic mist takes on a similarly ghostly patina found in the Leyland Kirby recordings and the frigid digital shimmer of the darker contributions to the Pop Ambient series. Pressed in a batch of only 330 copies, of which there can't be very many left in circulation.
We all loved the blurred washed out buzz of weirdo black metallers Velvet Cacoon. Even the non metalheads around here. And when they called it quits, thus was born Clair Cassis, which was like an even more fuzzy, dreamy, and poppy version of Velvet Cacoon. But if you ever wished even Clair Cassis was more dreamy, more shoegazey and WAY more lush and poppy, well then Sleeping Peonies are for you.
Most folks missed out completely on their debut, Rose Curl, Sea Swirl, we only managed to get a tiny handful for the store, but we loved what we heard, and wanted to make sure that the next SP record would get reviewed and listed. And so here it is. Like the debut, this is a lush, smeared, soft focus buzzscape that's as much eighties 4AD shimmer as it is black metal buzz, if not more. Sure there are blast beats, and howled vokills, but they drift in thick clouds of warm whirling haze, and lustrous chordal thrum, and most of the more blackened blasts end up fading into sweet sonic swirls, notes are doused in reverb and left to drift in the ether, the sound seesawing between murky buzz and spacious glimmery drift. There's also lots of cool weird production, thick corrosive low end rumbles underpinning anguished wails, piano like melodies hovering over deep softly roiling shimmer, bursts of heaviness that are so high in the mix, they causes strange ripple effects as the sound threatens to overwhelm all the other sounds around it, yet even at its heaviest, it's so ethereal and ephemeral, the sound so washed out and woozy, that the black buzz is often rendered more as a sort of blurred doomgaze ambience. Within that ambience, swaths of dreampunk drift rife with lilting melodies blossom into heaving Nadja-worthy swells of crumbling distorted rumble, or collapse into gauzy fuzz drenched slo-mo dream doom. There's also a definite cold/new wave vibe, that reminds us of a way more lo-fi, ramshackle, blackened Soror Dolorosa, who themselves are indebted to eighties gloom pop anyway...
Gorgeous stuff, total blissed out dreampop blackmetal weirdness that should absolutely hit the spot for anyone into Velvet Cacoon, Clair Cassis, Alcest, Amesoeurs, Les Discrets and other purveyors of dreamy buzzy blackness...
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!! House in a nice thick black envelope, with a hand bound 16 page booklet filled with lyrics, and a poster!
If you deliriously dug into the recent Soft Boys Underwater Moonlight vinyl reissue, and are seeking more... Well, look no further than that album's older brother, the band's 1979 debut full length which has also been reissued on lp by the fine folks at Yep Roc. Robyn Hitchcock's obtusely peculiar lyrics rally with Kimberley Rew's guitars - at once, somehow both jangly and angular. Granted A Can Of Bees is not quite as bountiful with immediately charming hooks as Underwater Moonlight, but there's still plenty of top notch infectious goodness on it from Hitchcock, Rew and co. Unquestionably though, the band dishes out far more delicious piss'n'vinegar than normally expected from bands inhabiting the neo-psych folk pop arena. Still great thirty two years later!
The Spacemen 3 vinyl reissue campaign continues, with the Glass Records eps now getting their due. Considering the amount of repetition in this band's catalog, many may be asking themselves whether or not they need another record with the same songs on it, and it may come down to just how obsessed you are... wait, scratch that, OF COURSE YOU NEED IT! It's awesome to have these eps available to us again individually (having been previously compiled together on cd via Taang! Records, and who knows, probably by someone else as well) because it lets you really get into the drugged out mindset of the band. Listening to these as they were intended, you can get a better idea of how Spacemen 3 established themes within their music. Rather than release mere 7" singles, they instead developed and reinterpreted certain songs on the 12" format. Which makes sense, as the band was certainly in no rush to adhere to 3 minute pop songs if they weren't up to it. In fact, calling these "eps" is a little misleading, as the boys stretch things out to album lengths.
Take Me To The Other Side was the companion ep to the band's mighty - nay, GODLY - Perfect Prescription lp. In other words, this ep represents the band at the height of their unified powers, and the title song itself (taking up side 1 at 45 rpm; side 2 goes at 33) is no doubt one of their strongest pieces. Kicking off the second side is "Soul 1", a slow burning soul-inspired (duh) number with blaring, sleepy horns given the Spacemen 3 treatment, followed by "That's Just Fine", which has appeared tacked onto various editions of the Perfect Prescription. No matter how you weigh it, it's awesome having the bulk of the Spacemen 3 discography available as these handsome vinyl reissues. Playing this stuff alongside so much of what we carry, it's obvious that this band has seeped into underground consciousness like the legends they were always destined to become. But you know what? There's only one Spacemen 3.
Attention fans of '70s heavy hippie rock!! Another primo proto-metal reissue from the fine folks at Rise Above Relics, who brought us the fantastic Bang boxset we listed not long ago. 'Tis a band/album well deserving of the deluxe treatment given here, especially welcome since only other Steel Mill reissue we've seen in the past was somewhat shoddy looking. THIS, though, is really nice, packaged with an elaborate illustrated 32 page booklet, in a slipcover adorned with new art (while the original, quite effective, surreal cover painting remains preserved within). They've renamed it too, the original lp from 1971 (there it is again, brothers and sisters, Nineteen Seventy Freaking One!!) was called Green Eyed God, this gets a new title of Jewels Of The Forest (Green Eyed God Plus) on account of all the bonus tracks included, and the remastering job, and other improvements.
So, with a name like Steel Mill, you'd expect this British band to be industrial-strength HEAVY, maybe even coming close to Black Sabbath territory. Well they do... and they don't... heavy, yeah, but opting for artier, more progressive atmospheres a lot of the time. Opener "Blood Runs Deep" is a good example, combining big, loping, rather urgent guitar riffage with passages of much mellower, jazz-inflected psychedelia via languid saxophone. Give that one a listen, and if you're like us, you'll know you want this right away. That "jazz" element, represented by what sometimes seems like pagan riot of horns, gives Steel Mill a vibe of mystic, exotic grooviness, putting 'em rite in there with underground tribes like Comus and Cromagnon. Some of these songs sound like rock rituals, like "Treadmill", with its fuzz and (literal) grunt.
Ultimately, they're an excellent, eccentric "heavy progressive" outfit, a la early King Crimson (you can be sure they loved "21st Century Schizoid Man"), Gnidrolog, Gravy Train, Tucky Buzzard, Wild Turkey, Sweet Slag, Steamhammer, East Of Eden, Murphy Blend, Amon Duul II, Culpeper's Orchard, Blackwater Park, Necromandus, etc.
Their acid rock guitar solos and lumbering riffs lean towards the Sabbath, but there's also gentle ballads ("Turn The Page Over") and fluttering flute (featured on the moody "Black Jewel Of The Forest", and elsewhere). Not that, as we've pointed out before, Sabbath themselves didn't indulge in some of their own flute flutter now and then! Steel Mill balance the light and heavy with aplomb, often in the same song. Darkly dreamlike and outre, yes, but also heavy enough for any proto-metal head. If someone were crazy enough to try and compile a collection of 1971's heaviest riffs, they'd definitely have to give Steel Mill some attention. (Er, although technically, some might quibble, as while this was recorded in '71 and the "Green Eyed God" released as a single then, the lp itself was apparently not released until 1972, and then just in Germany, with a UK release only appearing in '75.)
The original album is great all by itself, but we're also digging the bonus tracks. There's 9 of 'em, including songs from a 1972 single, as well as five unreleased studio demos of garagey popsike recorded in 1970. And, one last song - a new one, recorded by a reunited Steel Mill in 2010, "A Forgotten Future, A Future Past". And you know what, it's pretty good! Better than you might expect, actually, fitting in remarkably well. Nice how a lovingly done reissue like this can give an long lost band a new lease on life.
Ultra limited (only 100 copies) cassette release from this lesser known solo project of Garek Druss, who plays in PDX dronedoomsludge combo Tecumseh, and also records as Dull Knife (who split a cd-r a while back with aQ faves and weirdo outsider heavies Inh Halentropy). And it's some hazy, heady, gorgeous stuff. A lush layered landscape of grimy, gristly, crumbling, softly distorted dronemusic, at once warm and melodic, caustic and corrosive. Waves of feedback crash over churning buzz, all blurred and blearily blown out, but within this noisy swirl and squall, is a lovely and serene core, a deep meditative sonic swell, that infuses the noisiness with an impossible loveliness, the whole thing seems washed out and sun dappled, any of the jagged edges are smoothed out, and as the sound builds, in volume, and intensity, the sound remains rooted in melody, and drifts dreamily dragging a contrail of crunch and hiss and swirling overtones in its wake.
The first movement (side) is a much more incendiary affair, building to an almost deafening (but still dreamy) Sunroof-style ur-drone roar, a blazed sprawl of zoner drift and spaced out shimmer, but the second half (side) dials it back a bit, the sound more cavernous and echo drenched, the melodies less abstract, and woven into something almost propulsive, wheezing chordal blur over undulating deep swirling swells, a captivating bit of grey ambience, the sound rich with overtones, and buried melodies, hypnotic and woozy and in its own way strangely tranquil, a gauzy droned out minimalistic drift, total dreamdoomdrone bliss for sure...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, nice thick printed cardstock sleeves, and cool transparent cassettes...
This legendary document of nineties New Zealand noise/drone rock, originally released on Bruce Russell's (Dead C) Corpus Hermeticum label has finally been rescued and reissued by the fine folks at Utech, and it's strange that a 15 year old record sounds so right at home amongst the rest of the Utech catalog, but it does, which either speaks to the curatorial genius of Utech, or the extreme sonic vision of the guys in Surface Of The Earth. Most likely both!
Fans of this era of New Zealand underground rock are no doubt familiar with these guys, in fact, lots of folks out there probably already own this, but for those who don't, this is some glorious, Dead C style drone-noise soundscapery, thick billowing expanses of humid guitar drone, lots of clatter and crunch, static and hiss, voices, amp buzz and various sonic detritus that most bands would do everything in their power to get rid of, but for Surface Of The Earth and other NZ bands at the time, the lo-fi-ness was as much a part of the sound as the sound itself. No pretenses, no bullshit, this was music for music's sake, organic, personal, and intimate, this was sonic creation, and everything involved in that creation was worth including on tape. Modern slo-mo drifters like Earth and Barn Owl and the like owe these guys a huge sonic debt whether they realize it or not.
These sprawling smoldering dronescapes are epic and majestic yet still strangely minimal, tones laid out like thick sheets of black fog, the sound alternatingly warm and liquid, lush and layered, or dark and crumbly, distorted and detuned, this stuff takes the whole guitar-against-the-amp thing to another level, not so much playing the guitars as coaxing the sound out, in fact in many ways, the player seems to be removed from the equation. Unlike with most bands, where the physicality of the playing is inexorably linked to the sounds produced, Surface Of The Earth, seem to toil behind the scenes, they are musical alchemists, more concerned with producing these magical mysterious sounds than 'rocking', it's hard not to imagine these guys set up in some huge dimly lit space, not all robed like SUNNO))), no dry ice, no colored lights, just these shadowy figures, hunched over their instruments, lit only by the little red light on their amplifiers, ghostly figures creating these ghostly sounds, surprisingly physical sounds that have weight, and heft, modern NZ guitardroners like RST are obviously channeling the spirit of SOTE, worshipping at the altar these guys constructed 15+ years ago, and left as a monument to these very sounds. Multiple guitars pealing in a dark room, creating black clouds of sound, warm and whirling, dense and hypnotic, peppered now and again with some synths, or some walkie talkies, or some other random noisemaker, but those moments are subtle, and are as likely to slip by unnoticed, it's really all about the guitars, and 'the sound', the energy and emotion, the power of these sounds, listening to this stuff again, it definitely puts the current crop of guitardrone wannabes in perspective. Like anything, it's easy to do, but to do well, there has to be some magic involved, and this stuff is truly magical. Dark, ritualistic, dreamlike drone magic. Awesome.
Incredible packaging, a thick fold out heavy black paper jacket, embossed with the record's original artwork, inside a printed black and white insert. Limited to 500 copies.
We knew after their breathtaking collaboration with Bill Wells last year that Tape were really reaching a zenith in their career. With a back catalog rich with so many beautiful records, it's so nice to see them continue to reveal subtle shifts in their sound and sonic scope. Revelations flows with such melancholic grace. Instrumental songs that are filled with rich tones and warm melody, taking you to some perfect place, evoking that feeling of staring out the window on a long drive, late at night when there is nothing left to say to the person in the seat beside you.
Other bands that have tried to create a sound like this end up falling so short, coming off as nothing more then post rock band with more moody intentions, but lacking the means or depth to make something really substantial. Tape exist on a totally different level, absolute masters of their craft. Nothing ever feels forced or contrived in their songs. There is an integrity in their compositions that allows you to sway back and forth and get lost in swirls of musical memory and long lost images of other times and places... An utterly gorgeous record.
Somehow we never carried the debut by Toro Y Moi, which fit crazy comfortably next to releases by Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Nite Jewel as one of the most promising offerings in the 'chill-wave/glo-core' movement that seemed to blossom a couple years ago. With his anticipated follow up to that debut, he's shown there is much more to them to just being a part of a potentially passing trend, as this album proves with glorious cascading pop sounds that come swirling and dripping from all of his songs. Imagine if the Sea & Cake let their hair down and loosened up big time, that's the vibe of this record, the sounds rushing and swirling with a tropical breeze that just feels so damn good. Instead of trying so hard to be weird or lo-fi like so many of his peers, Toro Y Moi has shown he's way more interested in creating a broad sonic landscape that invites you in with open arms and leads you ever deeper and deeper, going wherever the sounds may twist and turn. So delightful.
Trap Them are another band that seems to have slipped through the cracks for whatever, maybe it's inevitable with SO many bands and SO many records, but these guys are seriously kick ass, and definitely deserve some aQ love.
These New Hampshire heavies are a glorious grimy mix of grindcore, crust punk, death metal and dirgey Swans like crush, all woven into a blown out, in-the-red, sledgehammer to the skull. Folks constantly compare these guys to Entombed, Cursed, Converge (whose Kurt Ballou recorded this, and it sounds MASSIVE, impossibly heavy, maybe the heaviest record since that Dragged Into Sunlight we reviewed a few lists back), all of which make perfect sense, the sound here is vicious, punishing, brutal, relentless, a definite D-beat vibe going on, the guitars dense and gnarled, the drums pounding, the vocals a glass gargling howl, the songs slipping easily from frantic punkish blast, to twisted proggy weirdness, to doomy plod and back again, makes us actually think of a supercharged Tragedy or His Hero Is Gone, that sort of metallic punk but cranked way up, with a sound SO heavy and distorted, all the sounds seem a hair's breadth away from clipping, which helps make this stuff sound so fucking fierce. One of our new favorite metal records for sure...
Features some of our favorite Justin Bartlett art yet, not to mention a big booklet filled with solid black pages (!), the jewel case housed in a fancy slipcover, also adorned with some serious Bartlett visual sickness...
From the same label that brought us the killer 7"/cd from Spanish electro punk outfit Der Ventilator (reviewed elsewhere on this list), comes this killer split, featuring long time fave US Girls, and new super hyped combo (or one man band, we're not sure), Dirty Beaches.
US Girls, aka Megan Remy offers up another fantastic batch of lo-fi psychedelic greywave, all murky and muddy, haunting and ritualistic, a strange drum driven vocal chant starts things off, her voice witchy and warped, all wreathed in a cloud of whirring low end, before the sound blossoms into a weird electronic groove, all minimal programmed percussion, beneath a soft haze of distortion and tangled psychedelic guitars, before launching into the final and longest track, a sort of creepy underwater goth dub workout, that sounds a bit like a more minimal avant lo-fi Zola Jesus, a looped sonar rhythm, Remy's vocals chant like and mesmerizing, eventually the beat and vox are swallowed up by a cloud of electronic squiggles and warped spaced out FX. Dirty Beaches is similarly murky and echoey, but instead of witchy electronic minimalism, he/they offer up a moody croon over a super minimal bit of rhythmic crunch, and some barely audible melody, the sound a woozy, warped bit of washed out drift, the rhythm more like a distant chugging train, a hushed pulse, there seems to be some super minimal guitar too, an almost Johnny Cash bit of low slung strum, but it too is wreathed in murk and transformed into just another warped undulating throb, the whole thing dark and dreamily dubby.
Super sweet packaging, full color cover in a thick plastic sleeve sealed with a sticker, pressed on green vinyl with a download coupon too.
NOW ON VINYL, spread out over two separate double lps...
Blame it on the Bossa Nova! What Americans experienced of Brazil's biggest cultural export in the sixties (think Astrud Gilberto's "Girl From Ipanema" and Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66) was actually a watered down version of a vital cultural renaissance of luxury and prosperity in a country transforming itself from its agrarian roots to a new industrial power on the world's stage. Soul Jazz has released this terrific new compilation to highlight the origins of this tremendous and far-reaching cultural shift, with many of the genre's original innovators: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Elis Regina, Jorge Ben, Gilberto Gil, Nara Leao, Wanda Sa, Maria Bethannia, Milton Nascimento as well as plenty of others we had never heard before. With its cool vocals, complex but economic melodic structures and sophisticated jazz motifs, Bossa Nova represented a huge shift away from traditional music to a new modern jet-setting sound. What's neat about this compilation is that even though the names may be familiar, many of the tracks are not the typical hits you may have heard before, reflecting the urgent embrace and hopeful optimism of a country stretching into its new identity. Sadly it wouldn't last. By the time, American's were fully seduced by Bossa Nova's warm wave of tropical sophistication in the mid-sixties, Brazil experienced a military takeover and many of the musicians (namely Jobim and Mendes) were forced to flee to the US. They were able to have successful careers (perhaps even more successful than when they were in Brazil) but Bossa Nova in America became something symbolically different, an almost Imperial embrace of laid-back Latin coolness while completely overlooking the political unrest that displaced it. Thankfully another musical and cultural revolution, Tropicalia, was gearing up to take its place. Still, whatever association you might have with Bossa Nova, this compilation is full of surprises and well worth the listen. So freaking good!
NOW ON VINYL, spread out over two separate double lps...
Blame it on the Bossa Nova! What Americans experienced of Brazil's biggest cultural export in the sixties (think Astrud Gilberto's "Girl From Ipanema" and Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66) was actually a watered down version of a vital cultural renaissance of luxury and prosperity in a country transforming itself from its agrarian roots to a new industrial power on the world's stage. Soul Jazz has released this terrific new compilation to highlight the origins of this tremendous and far-reaching cultural shift, with many of the genre's original innovators: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Elis Regina, Jorge Ben, Gilberto Gil, Nara Leao, Wanda Sa, Maria Bethannia, Milton Nascimento as well as plenty of others we had never heard before. With its cool vocals, complex but economic melodic structures and sophisticated jazz motifs, Bossa Nova represented a huge shift away from traditional music to a new modern jet-setting sound. What's neat about this compilation is that even though the names may be familiar, many of the tracks are not the typical hits you may have heard before, reflecting the urgent embrace and hopeful optimism of a country stretching into its new identity. Sadly it wouldn't last. By the time, American's were fully seduced by Bossa Nova's warm wave of tropical sophistication in the mid-sixties, Brazil experienced a military takeover and many of the musicians (namely Jobim and Mendes) were forced to flee to the US. They were able to have successful careers (perhaps even more successful than when they were in Brazil) but Bossa Nova in America became something symbolically different, an almost Imperial embrace of laid-back Latin coolness while completely overlooking the political unrest that displaced it. Thankfully another musical and cultural revolution, Tropicalia, was gearing up to take its place. Still, whatever association you might have with Bossa Nova, this compilation is full of surprises and well worth the listen. So freaking good!
We're pretty damn excited by Sun City Girls 33.3 percenter Alan Bishop's new Sublime Frequencies label. "Dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers" Sublime Frequencies is slipping on the shoes apparently discarded by such pioneering labels as Smithsonian Folkways, Nonesuch Explorer, et al. Unlike previous explorers in such unheard music, Sublime Frequencies is not restricted by academic or commercial purposes. The latter probably deserves a bit more explanation; for where much of the post-Explorer purveyors of "world music" shamelessly produce an endless slough of slick garbage that sounds like the crap you can hear on any U.S. top 40 radio station merely sung in another language (Christ, if I had a wooden nickel for every fuckin' starry eyed NPR music review extoling the uniqueness of some generic world music outfit that combines electronic music with traditional folk, yadda, yadda, yadda the world's forests would be clear cut by now) the recordings you'll hear presented by Sublime Frequencies come from the cracks in the pavement of the culture makers. Through field recordings (many made by Bishop himself in his travels), radio and shortwave broadcasts some of the most fucking great music and audio you've never heard has been culled together. Balls to fidelity, none of the artists here would be allowed within 10 miles of a Putamayo AR executive, this is the punk rock of field recordings!
Assembled from cassettes acquired by Alan Bishop through trade or purchase in 1989 while traveling through Sumatra, "Folk And Pop Sounds" contains some of the most obscure recordings of the three initial CD releases from Subliminal Frequencies. Located on the furthest Western edge of the Indonesian archipelago, Sumatra is big (as big as California) and widely unexplored in the audio realm in comparison with its neighboring islands to the East, Java and Bali. The disc begins with the Haba Haba Group in which a male singer is accompanied by flute, two alternating gongs and percussion and secondly by an unknown Sumatran Dangdut (crazy overdriven pop with a heavy Indian film music influence). The most immediately noticeable difference in these recordings from Sumatra to Bali & Java is the overt Arabic influence on the music. The Dangdut track even sounds similar to the music on a Somalian CD, "Jamiila" which we used to sell here years ago before it went out of print. As if to admonish us against generalizations, another later Dangdut track, with runaway farfisa organ, pleasant arppegiating electric guitar and female vocals sounds not dis-similar to the "keroncong" music of The Steps CD from Java released on Warn Defever's Time Stereo label. While the disc may begin innocently enough, the sequencing of the tracks seduces the listener into the strange world of Sumatran music. The very Arabic sounding Indang Pariaman which features a female singer who's melody line interweaves beautifully with end blown wooden flute and some more incredibly nutty buzzing electric keyboard (one can only imagine that the sound is intended to imitate a double reed instrument of old) is moved along by jovial electric bass and casio-rhythm. The combination of acoustic and archaic electric instruments is shamelessly wonderful. Later an orchestra of sorts, complete with violin, electric organ, bass, drums, female voice leads us down a fragrant path that's oddly reminiscent of a Sun City Girls track. Speaking of which, though this one technically isn't, there are a couple of tracks on here which indeed are songs covered by the Girls, can you figure out which ones? Along with the songs proper included here, there are some great excerpts from dramas. The first instance begins with sweet flute and what's supposed to be a rooster crowing, but emulated by what sounds like an old air raid siren played through a broken megaphone. A melodramatic dialogue ensues between a terribly afflicted female and a stoic male voice. needless to say, this one comes highly recommended!
Killer new collection jam packed with aQ faves, a vinyl only primer on the San Francisco underground. Most folks won't need to know much more than this:
EXCLUSIVE TRACKS FROM THEE OH SEES, TY SEGALL, THE FRESH & ONLYS, SONNY 7 THE SUNSETS, KELLY STOLTZ, TIM COHEN, THE SANDWITCHES...
But there's way more, there's also Hannah And Raven of Grass Widow, the Trainwreck Riders, the Exray's, Paula Frazier (of Tarnation), Dylan Shearer, Jacques Butters, and Donovan Quinn + The 13th Month (he of the Skygreen Leopards), a pretty stellar collection, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Sonny & The Sunsets' offer up some warm summery jangle, the Fresh & Only's get all new wave with a song that sounds at first like Devo's version of "Working In A Coalmine", before getting all twangy and reverby, Thee Oh Sees track is a twisted garbled-vocal sixties shuffle, a twisted murky Monster Mash groove, Tim Cohen offers up a bit of classic Beatles-esque pop, haunting and stripped down, the Ty Segall track is a snotty noisy garage rock dirge that RULES, and we could go on.
Needless to say, fans of any or all of the above outfits are gonna want this, and it just might introduce you to some other local combos that could very well become new favorites...
This is one of those records that is either one of THEE most amazing and bizarre collections of random and far out archival sounds and recordings, or it's one of the most meticulously assembled sonic hoaxes EVER. And as it usually is with records like this, it almost doesn't matter. If it IS real, well then WOW. How some of these recordings exist, and have never been heard, hard to fathom. If it's all fake, then WOW again. Gorgeously presented, the liner notes detailed and super informative, complete with archival photos, and all presented in a jacket that looks like one of those classic collections of library music. BUT. This was compiled by weirdo outsider musician Felix Kubin (whose career retrospective compilation cd we raved about recently), which makes us think this is just the kind of thing he would think up, and actually create. Plus, some of these recordings are so impossibly bizarre, and some of the sounds are so weird, and often don't sound at all like what they purport to be.
So let's dig in. A recording of a demonstration record, demonstrating a mechanical automatic speech apparatus, lots of talking in German, then the actual demos, a weird mechanical series of tones, meant to be vowel sounds, the first step in a machine that will emulate human voice. Next is a lost recording of a Finnish telephone exchange from 1938, that sounds more like some strangely musical bit of dronemusic, all reverby and woozy and washed out, haunting and soundscapey. Up next is some music from a Norwegian Whaling Festival, in 1948, a surprisingly high fidelity blast of what could be Avarus, a cacophony of crowd sounds, voices, clanging metal, all nearly drowning out the skronk of various horns. Then there's a recording from a fraudulent attempt to raise money for a new '16 track tape' (twice as good as the 8 track that was so popular at the time, 1967), a recording of what we presume to be the factory where they make the tapes, all industrial whirs, voices, clanks and rumbles, the tape having remained unheard due to the fact that it was an obsolete format.
Up next, a supposedly early piece by David Tudor, possibly his first, a stretch of near silence punctuated by bits of crunch and glitch, weird warped tape sounds, it could be Tudor, hard to say. Then comes a hydrophone recording of a project to record plankton, capturing the plant's electronic impulses and converting them into sound, this recording however is from the cockpit of a submarine, so everything is murky and muddy, voices and underwater warble, quite an awesome recording, genuine or not. The side ends with what might be the most bizarre track of them all, a recording of a man performing with barnyard animals in the UK, a part of variety shows that were apparently quite popular at the time, the man beats a drum, his rumbling voice soon joined in by mooing cows, oinking pigs, meowing cats and clattery horse hooves percussion.
The second side doesn't get any less far out, beginning with what is meant to be a recording of a Pygmy hunting ritual, recorded in 1934 in Africa, and again, it sounds almost like some modern lysergic forest folk weirdness, super distorted, lots of percussion, wailed voices, super dense and chaotic, definitely raw and primitive sounding, but definitely suspect. Then comes another demonstration recording, this one from Oskar Sala, who created the soundscapes for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, here he demonstrates the Volkstrautonium for the infamous Joseph Goebbels of the Third Reich. Then there's an early early 'remix', created in 1965 from wax cylinder recordings of Persian foot soldiers in 1921. Next up, a found reel to reel tape, that came with a player, and was discovered to contain what is purportedly a recording of a Situationist project to construct a non authoritarian kindergarten "aimed to engender a spirit of subversion in children", and is essentially a recording of a man and a child, interrupted by various strange sounds. Then comes an unknown tape recording "presented here as a curiosity", a twisted blast of mysterious voices and garbled analog electronics, a technical experiment perhaps, we'll never know. And finally, an untitled player piano composition by Hans Henny Jahnn, a "playwright, novelist, organ builder, music publisher and polymath", and his masterpiece was apparently about a man who tried to notate the grain of birchwood into musical notation, and it seems Jahnn tried to do the same in real life, using birchwood grain as a blueprint for musical notation. Wow.
Incredible. And incredibly strange. A fantastic, and fantastical listen for sure. Everything here so bizarre and baffling, and in most cases almost TOO bizarre and baffling. But like we said, it hardly matters, regardless of their provenance, this is an amazing document of some truly wondrous sounds, recordings that if not genuine, are at least genuinely freaky and fascinating. And, unfortunately, we have but a handful.
So, what exactly is a "brutal orchestra"? That's what this Japanese band describes themselves as, and their brand of loud, dynamic, droning chamber prog with violins and piano vying with wordless vocals (and bass, and drums, and turntables, and electronics, and etc.) in an constantly swelling, cinematic onslaught is certainly orchestral, and kinda brutal (volume, noise, density) but also beautiful. So, OK, brutal orchestra it is. And making 'em even a bit more brutal than they might otherwise be, they've got special guest Merzbow bringing some additional noise n' distortion to the proceedings. Among other guests is, on vocals, Jarboe of the Swans (shades of her collab with Justin Broadrick a while back, as there's a Jesu-ishness to this, somewhat). Also apparently drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins fame appears here, and a few Boredoms related folks contribute too. So, some high powered personnel present, and put to use!
There's two loooong tracks on this album, one with Jarboe, the other with Merzbow, "Sea" (24:43) and "Land" (24:36), titled after things both of which unhappily have proven cruel and threatening to the beleaguered populace of Japan in recent days. Their elemental power is portended here, in the build-build-build ups of these ominous, abstract, slowly unfolding compositions, making this release fit in well with the doomdirge side of Important's avant roster, for sure.
May or may not be representative of Vampillia's usual sound, we've seen some YouTube videos that portray them as much more of a surreal, circus-y affair, a facepainted freakshow vibe of artrock absurdity. There's hints of that here, but the entirety of this has more of a coherent, atmospheric impact, almost like a Miasmah label release multiplied in intensity and amplification.
It's been a while since we've been excited about a post metal doomgaze post Neur-Isis outfit... It was a sound that, we, and lots of other folks got pretty obsessed with, mixing the mathy sprawl of post rock with the doomy heft of sludgey metal, but like most exciting new discoveries these days, it didn't take long for us to be inundated with boring clones, and pointless pound and meander. There were definitely exceptions, bands who took that sound and made it all their own, Pelican, Snowblood, Cloaca, Conifer, Rosetta, and you can Boston heavies VYGR to that list. Formerly called Voyager, a shift in sound and membership resulted in the moniker change, and while we have no idea what they sounded like before, we love how they sound now. This epic post metal writ surprisingly melodic, the only holdover to the forefathers is the bellowed vocals, without those, this would be more like a metalized Explosions In The Sky, the same sort of slow build brooding majesty, but this is definitely metal, massive downtuned riffage, big pummeling drums, flurries of double kick, but for every bit of doomy crunch, the band get all synthy and proggy, spacing way out, getting super melodic and poppy, wedding double kick to spacey synths and woozy major key melodies, or taking those same melodies and dropping them right into the middle of some serious metallic churn.
"Galactic Garbage" is a highlight, with its almost stonery groove, its cool minimal droned out space rock middle, and a killer chugging second half. So is "The Hidden", textured and dynamic and melodic, the synths way up in the mix, adding a sort of sci-fi prog element to the loping post rock doomisms, not to mention one of the best little chunks of guitar harmony EVER, we wish the song was 10 minutes longer just so that part would never end.
And it's those guitar parts, the harmonies and leads, that definitely elevate this stuff, adding a distinct melodic and almost poppy component that works surprisingly well amongst the chug and pound.
Unfortunately for these guys, the specter of Isis and Neurosis and all the post metal that came before will loom large, but it's still an awesome sound, and this is a killer record, and if you're like us, and love THAT sound, then this stuff will for sure hit the spot.
Type artist Richard Skelton on the cover. Also on the cover (attached to it with gummy stuff) is another installment of The Wire's "Wire Tapper" sampler series, a cd with 20 tracks by lots of weird electronic and/or noisy folks. Inside this issue, you'll find Funkystepz, Peter Evans, Olivia Block, Charlie Nothing, Jenny Hval, and a piece on the legendary Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music center, among other things, including all the usual reviews. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
Now, our appetites fully whetted by their debut out of print cd-r ep, their more recent split cd with Blizaro, and their 7" single reviewed last list, here at last is the first full-length from the ultra-cult (cultra?) Wooden Stake, one of the only boy-girl doom-death duos around, and in any case our fave, as the most "extreme metal" example of the female-fronted occult rock mini-phenomenon happenin' now, a la Jex Thoth, Blood Ceremony, The Devil's Blood, etc.
We've described 'em as playing "slomo sludge", that's "part Black Sabbath, part Jex Thoth, part Obituary" and that's still just about right. Yeah, imagine Jex Thoth occasionally channelling her inner Cookie Monster, that'd be Wooden Stake's Vanessa Nocera. She's the wicked, witchy woman on vocals and bass, while Wayne "Elektrokutioner" Sarantopoulos (also of Decrepitaph, Encoffination, Father Befouled, etc.) handles the guitar and drums, and would slay you in a staring contest, no doubt, to judge from his picture here.
Their music is scary stuff, too, and also wonderfully underground, old-school, and horror-kitschy. The album opens with "Cadaverum Caecorum Liber", yet another of metal's tributes to the Blind Dead movies, from '70s Spain. Nocera first intones the lyrics in spoken rather than sung style, double tracked, over a quietly gloomy guitar backing, lulling and almost lovely, before busting out some raspier vokills (and she'll have you know, by the way, that no effects were used on her voice anywhere on this album). The next track, "Salem, 1692", showcases her more melodic siren song style of singing, that's where the Jex Thoth comparisons come in (and we're also thinking Bliss Blood, a bit). But her throat-shredding deathlier vocals are also employed for contrast. Musically, the gloominess of course continues, lo-fi rumbling riff repetition that's a doomic delight, grinding down down down into the ground. And so it goes, the many moods of Wooden Stake (gloomy, gloomier, gloomiest) highlighted by the multitracking of Nocera's varied vocal personas - she's a one-woman coven, indeed.
All nine of the Dungeon Prayers and Tombyard Serenades found here hit the spot for us, this album never lacking for eldritch atmosphere, whether conveyed by quiet creepiness or loud riffiness. Ferinstance, behold the instrumental interlude "Cemetery Closes At Sundown", a gentle somber solo, leading into the lumbering lurch-out of "Skullcoven", a composition combining bashing brutality with sloppy psychedelic Sabbathry. Which would describe a lot of this record, really. Electric Wizard fans, here's a witchier witchcult for you!
Well, hopefully we've already convinced you in previous reviews to worship Wooden Stake, and like us, you were just waiting for this to come out. But if you haven't yet been initiated, appropriate attention to this album under certain conditions (by the light of the full moon, in a graveyard) ought to do the trick...of course, that's right where it puts you, anyway.
