One could be excused for thinking that a new cd from Acid Mothers Temple might be surplus to requirements... yet, while that's for each individual to determine, it must also be said that prolific as these Japanese psych purveyors are (and this isn't even the only new AMT we have, there's another that's a collaboration with Italian band Stearica), there's been nary a dud in their discography.
This one is probably a must for serious fans, since it's devoted to their longtime live staple, an extended track entitled "Pink Lady Lemonade". They've recorded it before, but this is intended as the definitive version. Presented here in four distinct parts, the total piece over 66 minutes long. It's quite a trip, with repetitive chiming guitar, freeform freakouts, sci-fi sound FX, and lots of droned-out whoosh... another endless hour and then some, trance-time well spent with the Acid Mothers!
Nice packaging/design, in a colorful digipack, the cover art oriented in sideways fashion.
Hell's Headbangers printed these up with two different covers, one for each of the two songs on it, so on some "Midnight Mass" is the the A side, with correspondingly blasphemous cover art, and on others "To Magic, Sex and Gore" is the A side, also adorned with appropriate artwork, that would never pass the Comics Code that's for sure.
Both songs are gonna be pure manna for fans of Acid Witch, whose brand of psychedelic stoner doom death metal we hope you all already know about and worship with cackling glee. If not, you should check this out and also Stoned, their recent full-length for Hell's Headbangers. Or be turned into a newt.
Translucent (blood) red vinyl with black splatter. Limited edition, natch. The cover you get will be random, btw.
This is a strange one for sure. A collaboration between Alva Noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, long running purveyor of Raster-Noton style click and bleep, and the legendary Blixa Bargeld, he of Einsturzende Neubauten and the Bad Seeds. And the first couple minutes won't dissuade you from that impression, a stretch of what sounds like layered screaming and sympathetic tones, a haunting, harrowing bit of dronemusic, that begins to glitch out, as Bargeld spoken vocals come in, now laid over a strange bit of high end staticky stutter, and a deep resonant rumble, before the sound shifts again, the screams returning, and Bargeld switching to moody croon, a burst of tripped out grind and crunch, some wistful piano, and a very balladic outro, sounds like the perfect intro to this collection of improvised abstraction and avant minimal soundscaping.
The second track sounds more like the Alva Noto we know and love, a clipped bit of minimal rhythm, wreathed in clouds of grit and static and hiss, and then the vocals come in, and it becomes much more musical, and moody, dramatic and intense, and as the record progresses, the sound definitely becomes less an unlikely collaboration, and more a meeting of like minded warped musical visionaries.
Bargeld is a chameleon, switching from strident bellow, to hushed whisper, to surprisingly melodic croon, and Nicolai is equally adept, alternately crafting austere minimal glitchscapes, swirling pop ambient shimmer and lush almost orchestral sounding avant pop. They even cover Harry Nilsson, and they manage to keep the spirit and mood of the original, while infusing it with all manner of thrum and hiss, crunch and skitter, and just as soon as we're in more familiarly pop territory, the record switches gears, and the two unfurl a droned out bit of cinematic drift, the layered vox creepy and ominous, the music a blur of hiss and crackle, stutter and drift. The rest of the record offers up more of the same, a sort of futuristic cabaret, glitched out balladry, minimal avant dronepop and skeletal industrial ambience, quite hard to succinctly describe, but the varied sounds here all manage to coalesce into a pretty fantastic bit of haunting avant minimal beauty, perfectly encapsulated in the string laden final track, all whispery vox, warm symphonic swells, rich mellifluous vocals, and tense dramatic minor key melodies, so gorgeous.
Latest from the uber prolific Aidan Baker, of mighty doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and as we've discovered in the past, Nadja is Baker's outlet for the heavier stuff, while working under his own name he tends to veer toward the minimal, ambient and drone side of the spectrum. So that's what we were sort of expecting from this, and while it definitely does lean more toward those sounds that the crush of Nadja, it's actually something else entirely, a solo acoustic record. That's right, just acoustic guitar and voice.
And Baker actually manages to pull it off. He doesn't lace his hushed abstract folk with heaving low end or thick drones, instead he weaves surprisingly lush expanses of minimal drift, and barely there strum, his voice an intimate croon, the sound dark, and doleful, melancholy and moody.
This dark hushes psychedelia stretches out over three songs and two sides, the pace glacial, the guitars buzzing and shimmering, whispery and abstract, there are occasional bits of overdubbing, but used judiciously, to create sweet vocal harmonies, or an unexpected melodic counterpoint. But no matter, the sounds always seem to shift back and settle into something barely there and dreamlike. But this is Baker after all, so on the second side he does manage to coax some buzz and drone and metallic shimmer from those steel strings, and those bits of metallic filigree simply add to the already rich, lush sound, and offer more texture, and another layer of sound to interact with the subtle strum and mumbled croon. Really nice.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Incredibly elaborate packaging too, a striking letter pressed inner sleeve, displayed through a die cut, origami style fold over outer sleeve. Wow.
Man, Matt Baldwin just seems to get better and better, taking his already wonderful celestial spaced out guitar playing and constantly pushing his sound further and further out. This super limited self released outing finds Baldwin positioning one short track inbetween two epic 15 minute sprawls which evoke the spirit of Robert Fripp playing a Terry Riley composition or Michael Rother and Steve Reich teaming up for some hypnotic psychedelic kraut guitar drift. Exploring cosmic guitar explorations similar to folks like Mark McGuire and Phil Manley, this is such a wonderful record of truly tripped out and densely dreamy solo guitar. We could go on and on about how much we love this, but considering these are the very last copies left of this cd-r we should probably just say act super fast as we only have ten of these left!
Ancestral Star is the latest batch of brooding, epic, twang flecked darkness from this local duo (now trio with the seemingly permanent addition of a drummer), their first for Thrill Jockey, and easily their most fully realized record yet, and while we were expecting it to maybe be their heaviest, based on the last few releases and the duo's individual solo recordings, it seems the band have dialed back the crunch, opting more for moodiness and atmosphere. The group's development from hushed psychedelic droners to brooding epic soundscapers has been a gradual and natural one, which is most likely what accounts for the seamless melding of whispery psychedelic ambience and lumbering doom-ed country drift.
The record opens up with a wild squall of superdistorted guitar buzz and howling feedback, a slowly unfurling melody, the notes crumbling and blown out, it had us expecting some serious crush right off the bat, but instead, the thick peals of smoldering psychdrone give way to some smokey Morricone-ish drift, haunting and abstract, the drums giving the sound a definite slowcore vibe, vocals hovering way off in the distance, more about adding texture than delivering lyrics.
After a brief twangscape, another spare skeletal bit of haunting countrydoomdrift, the band launch into the 10+ minute title track, a gauzy bit of slow building dronemusic, lushly layered, gradually expanding like a timelapse film of a supernova, a slowly blossoming burst of white hot buzz, expanding in every direction, a massive cloud of roiling distorted sound, that begins to fade almost immediately eventually becoming another stretch of hushed haunting ambience.
The rest of the record is rich with short sonic vignettes, a brief bit of echo drenched Appalachia, a heavily reverbed stretch of lush droney piano, a gorgeous bit of desert-y drift, all brooding twang and sitar like buzz, even some wheezing harmonium and choral like chants, these short form soundscapes separating the record's other two lengthy soundscapes, the first "Flatlands" begins all singing strings, and droned out vocals, lots of layers, and incredible overtones, the sounds constantly shifting, so dark and dramatic rife with some sort of melodic inner glow that infuses the rest of the sounds, the drone eventually fading out, leaving a bit of distorted twang, to gradually unravel to song's end. and then there's the closer, the nearly 7 minute "Light From The Mesa" another sprawling bit of dark dronemusic, washed out and whirring, the band's murky twang buried beneath the muted drift, everything wreathed in an ethereal haze, the drone finally dissipating leaving more spidery western twang, this time with percussion that sound like the clink of spurs on the wooden floor of the saloon, until those spidery guitars blossom into thick warm waves of chordal hum, backed up by soaring falsetto vocals, a gorgeous dirge to lead Barn Owl out of the valley, the record winding down as they disappear into the distance.
Yet another gorgeous collection of darkly epic doomfolk dronedrift dreaminess.
The cd version comes in a 4 panel mini lp style gatefold sleeve, the lp comes in a full color gatefold jacket and includes a download coupon as well.
Barn Owl, the local duo of Jon Porras (aka Elm) and Evan Caminiti (aka Higuma), have always tread a similar path to later era Earth, a sort of blackened twang, Morricone by way of the Melvins, slow motion soundscapes as evocative and slow burning as they are epic and heavy, dark and delicate. With the addition of a drummer, Barn Owl move even closer to their sonic brethren creating a gorgeous songsuite of Western tinged, slow motion psychedelia, dark, dolorous, warm and haunting, heavily reverbed, a sort of dark skeletal doom, rife with warm chordal clusters, gauzy clouds of muted feedback, and epic expanses of effected guitars that sound almost choral.
The mood is both warm and inviting, haunting and tense, emotional and intense. The various bits of steel string guitar are draped over dense swells of roiling downtuned drone, everything wreathed in streaks of high end shimmer, all blurred into a burnished black guitar blur, washed out and hazy, yet surprisingly lush and heavy. The second half of the record gets a bit more Appalachian, with delicate finger picked guitars drifting over deep layered drones, stately melodies unfurling like the black tendrils of smoke from a recently extinguished candle, or the fuzzy fog of late afternoon, painted deep blues and reds by the fading daylight. The record builds to a soaring finale, that revisits that choral sound, and infuses it with an hypnotic ur-drone vibe, like some glorious hybrid of Sunroof! and Arvo Part. Hypnotic and transcendent.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. We got the super limited fancy maroon vinyl mailorder version too. And as you might imagine, these won't be around for long...
There never seems to be any shortage of hype going around the music world. These days more than ever. And all too often those being hyped so much in the blogosphere world just never really deliver the goods to warrant all the hoopla. But every now and then a record comes along that totally does deserve all that attention, such is the case with this amazing album by James Blake. Immediately it reminds us of some amazing combination of several of our favorite records ever. Radiohead's Kid A, Burial's Untrue, Arthur Russell's Calling Out Of Context, and Antony & The Johnsons if they made a record produced by Massive Attack and Swarms.
Warm rushes of dubstep inspired backbeats meet gospel like vocal delivery, often auto-tuned but in such a moody and satisfying way. One of our customers who was going through a hard day when we had this playing in the store, came up to the counter and said "This is massaging my mind in ways I needed so badly." We can totally see where he was coming from. This is the kind of record made for melting, floating, and coming down softly.
It's pretty phenomenal that this record went from getting the suspicious side-eye when we first took it in on consignment, to becoming one of our favorite "WTF?" records of the year! When it first appeared, no one seemed to know where it came from (it had been brought in by Blunt himself, one day). And we weren't too sold on the cover, a generic photograph that looked like it was shot in the eighties, of this fellow Blunt, standing with a woman (a close friend of his, in a head to toe orange outfit that looks like it could have been prison garb, and who as it turns out, may no longer be alive) in front of a Mercedes parked in front of the mural on the side of the O'Farrell Theater on Polk street in San Francisco. Also, whenever there's a bunch of "ASCAP" logos plastered all over the front and back cover, our internal "uh-oh" meter goes way off.
So it just sat on our new arrivals shelf for a few weeks. But then a couple of folks (one of whom runs the Gloriette label, who have supplied us with some Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel records) started asking about it, because they had heard about this record, so we gave it a listen and were pretty surprised and rather blown away by what we were hearing. A lo-fi but breezy outsider funk, made with repetitive cheap-sounding keyboards loops and tones (the kind being currently exploited by Dam-Funk, Ariel Pink, and James Pants), strange metallic tropical guitar tones that sound more like steel drums and flute sounds than actual guitar, and sly, laid-back vocals and catchy, infectiously naive grooves that work their way into our heads and never let go. Everybody here ended up really really digging it.
We sold one copy immediately to someone in the store when playing it, and then when we tried to contact Blunt to get more copies, we discovered that somehow we'd neglected to get his contact info, d'oh! The cd had no contact information, and searches online only revealed that the title track, a raunchy but coded come-on to a sexy stranger, was included on a James Pants mix. This only piqued our interest further, as Blunt's skewed Caribbean inflected songs would obviously be simpatico with James Pants' more recent tropical themed output. We could also see folks into Ariel Pink and Dam-Funk getting WAY into this. So we thought maybe this record was a rare private press record from the eighties. It does seem to have a strange hard-to-pin-down-time-wise quality.
Thankfully, Blunt eventually came back in and we got more copies and found out that he had pressed vinyl copies too. He also told us that this record was recorded ten years ago in 2000, but that didn't diminish our new found love for this record's questionable mystery, as it still predates all of the artists mentioned above that it reminds us of, though we're pretty sure Blunt probably has never heard of any of them. It also has the left of center oddness of other outsider funk artists like Tonetta, or Wicked Witch, albeit way more toned down than either of those two. Not that it's completely off the wall weird, but it's one of those records that we went into with such hesitation and were pleasantly surprised that we then became totally enamored with its home-brewed charm.
The lp is 5 tracks, with extra shorter versions of the songs "Fly Guy" and "Gentle Persuasion" and comes housed in an old school white cut-out 12" sleeve. The cd version has two extra songs and instrumental versions of four of the tracks. Oh, and the vinyl has a gold star sticker that boldly proclaims "HIT!" We couldn't agree more!
If you thought the last few Blut Aus Nord records were weird, and freaked out, and fucked up, then this new disc is gonna have you either cowering in the corner with all the lights off and clutching some sort of talisman to ward off whatever the fuck kind of evil this record is emanating, or you'll be scratching your head wondering "What the fuck?" Or if you're anything like us, you'll be doing both, and loving it.
Any vestige of buzzing black metal has been shed and in its place a completely abstract, confusional world of muddy blackness. This music is so weird it's almost impossible to describe it in words. It's most definitely not black metal. It is certainly black, or at least some very very dark shade of gray, but it would be hard to definitively describe this as metal. Imagine all the super Slinty post rock parts from the most recent Deathspell Omega record, take all of those parts, play them all at once, some forward, some in reverse, run them all through banks of effects, and you'll have something like Mort. There are no blast beats, not mosquito-like riffing, in fact Mort hovers a lot closer to doom than to black metal.
But even doom wouldn't really begin to describe the loping lurching weirdness. Every track is a strange assemblage of damaged drum machines, dizzying circusy keyboards a dense oppressive swirl of guitars that sound like they are constantly being tuned and detuned. Super woozy and sea sick sounding. Completely and almost overwhelmingly chaotic. Like the songs are constantly threatening to fall apart at any moment. Which lends the proceedings a certain amount of tension and dramatic gravitas. Leads drift in and out, and sort of warble and wail, before breaking a part and sinking into the murk. The vocals are like another layer of low end rumble, a thick reverberating whir. Everything constantly shifting and blurring, pitches shifting up and down, swarms of creepy little FX appear and then fade away, long stretches of black ambience, punctuated by bursts of near industrial pummel. So weird. But it's mainly the riffs that make this record as fucked up as it is. They're not black metal riffs really, barely even metal riffs, some sort of gothy no-wave sounding deconstructed guitar torture. Sort of like if they had Greg Ginn come in and play a bunch of angular fucked up Black Flag riffs and then slowed them WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down and doused them in effects and randomly adjusted the tape speed, so the band and the various instruments seem to slowly shift in and out of phase, occasionally falling together in one huge blast of black fury, only to slowly drift to pieces again.
So weird and dark, and strangely mournful and melancholy. Some bastardized mix of Abruptum, M83 and Nortt. A baffling and brilliant, blissed out no-wave black doom ambient post rock masterpiece.
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We've been huge fans of Rhode Island two piece sludge doom duo The Body for years now, and have raved about every recording we could get our hands on, at one point even lamenting the fact that we were dying for a proper full length, and then BAM. Their self titled full length debut hit, and it DESTROYED. Then a few years later, and the band unleashed their epic, and seemingly universally acclaimed All The Waters Of The Earth Turned To Blood. A chunk of sludgy doom unlike anything we'd heard before, sure there was massive downtuned riffs, and bellowed and shrieked vox, pummeling drums, but there also happened to be a full choir, not to mention multiple drummers, strange electronics, programmed rhythms, strange samples, all wound into a bizarre and brilliant collection of avant heaviness, and finally it seemed the world caught on, and The Body began to get the love they so obviously deserved.
The bummer is, that while All The Waters IS incredible, so are all the weird and super limited cd-r's and singles that came before, so folks who discovered The Body via that record, were missing out on a whole world of heart stopping head caving sound, that is until now. This little collection, compiles pretty much everything the band has ever recorded minus their two full lengths (the older of which is sadly out of print), including split singles, tour cd-r's and even tacks on some unreleased stuff to boot.
Their 2008 tour cd-r might be one of our favorite recordings from these guys, and definitely displayed the band's dizzying mix of post rock, ultra doom, and sludge metal, as well as their penchant for mathy rhythms, lots of space, and seriously anguished vocals.The coolest part was that it was in the context of cover songs, and maybe not the sort of covers you'd expect from a sludge/doom outfit. Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and, wait for it, Sinead O'Connor. Yep. Hard to believe that last one works, but it does, and they don't just turn it into a pointless sludgefest, they have obvious affection for the original. But before we get to "Black Boys On Mopeds", let's run through the other covers first.
Crass's "Do They Owe Us A Living" is all buzzing low end, and tribal drumming. The vocals a processed feral bark, the whole thing lurching and lumbering and seriously harrowingly intense. Makes the original sound like a lullaby. The Danzig track is a loping low slung groove, with a fierce downtuned riff, and hysterical shrieking vocals, the band totally own it, and again, add untold heaviness and harshness to the original. Black Flag's "Police Story" is pulled apart and gutted, before exploding into a punk rock frenzy, who knew a sludge band could rock so hard? It's a muddy, murky free for all, not that far removed from the original other than the downtuned guitars and the insane vox.
And finally, "Black Boys On Mopeds", a gorgeous sprawling dirge, and wisely the band opted to get some help with the vocals, a gorgeous female voice, underpinned by howled shrieked back up vocals way off in the distance, the bulk of the song a single buzzing throbbing note stretched out into a thick undulating drone, the rhythm a metronome like clack buried in the mix, the end gets all trippy and dubbed out, but damn if this isn't creepier and prettier than the original.
Also included in this collection is Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss, another killer cd-r of that immediately recognizable Body style abstract sludge doom. Think a more skeletal Khanate, with dubbed out drums, but replace Alan Dubin's vocals with a even more hysterical shriek bordering on Bathtub Shitter territory. Weird but so fucking cool and creepy. Massive sheets of blacktar guitars, sometimes a grinding trudge through a viscous cloud of noxious grime, at others, a slow motion stumble through stark post rock territory, one track features a doom dub breakdown, where the snare sort of careens lazily in a wide open space before eventually being stomped flat by a wall of anvil guitars, another track is peppered with creepy soundbites, adding to the paranoid creepiness. And they tackle another cover, "Here Come The Tears" by Judas Priest, and turn it into a blown out white noise drenched dirge, crumbling and crushing.
These guys love their covers, as is evidenced by their Cop Killer / Dead Cops single also included here, a double dose of dead cops. The Body dump their sludgy doom all over "Cop Killer" by Body Count and "Dead Cops" by M.D.C.! The originals are barely recognizable, the original riffs, transformed into cesspools of filthy sludge. Again, comparisons to Khanate and Moss and are apt, but they definitely twist these jams all up into their very own blackened shapes.
As if that weren't enough, the collection is filled out with their track from a split 7" with Get Killed, and another unreleased track from 2004, as well as their very first demo, originally released as a super limited cassette on Armageddon, which displays the band, even in the early stages, capable of unleashing thick torrents of shrieking, lurching, avant doom, the sound a dizzying mix of slo-mo mathiness, low slung sludge, and blackened post rock, all blurred into epic swaths of black hole heaviness and skull caving crush, without losing their sense of melody or mood. Awesome.
Super striking visuals/packaging as always, spare and austere, with the liner notes printed on a cool white on black mini poster insert.
Surprised this one didn't happen sooner. Hell, if it hadn't, we probably would have suggested it. Providence, Rhode Island's two piece doom sludge wrecking crew The Body, and Aussie slow and low heavies Whitehorse. A seemingly perfect match, but the weird thing is, they both offer up something out of the ordinary here.
The Body start things off with what could be their most metal jam yet, sounding like some grim black metal slowed way down, there are even some almost-blasts, the vocals shrieked and maniacal, the song collapsing part way through into a super thick doomed out sprawl, laced with bursts of blown out buzz, the vocals hovering over a thick undulating almost ambient layer of downtuned guitar buzz and dense tribal drum pound, that every once in a while sounds like Lightning Bolt slowed to a crawl.
Whitehorse counter with a booming, echoe-y chunk of churning doom-ed noise rock, about as groovy as these guys get, and we're talking Eyehategod style groove, which is to say, barely a groove at all, occasional blasts of thick low end creep up from below, shrieking feedback and squalls of glitched out noise pepper some surprisingly black metal riffing, the vocals here veering fro, shrieked to cookie monster grunted, a massive, lumbering, lurching sonic slab of doom sludge crush.
SUPER LIMITED. In fact, already mostly out of print. We got some of the last copies direct from Whitehorse before they headed back to Australia. Packaged in super swank screen printed jackets.
It wasn't so long ago, that UK heavies Bong were just an amusingly-named band that counted one of our customers as a member. It took a while, but eventually we got 'em to send us some records (you can imagine, a band named Bong isn't the most businesslike and efficient bunch, nice folks though they are). And their brand of stoned, psychedelic, Eastern-tinged doomdrone improv proved to be right up our alley, and appropriate to their moniker.
Now, a couple years later, we've sold many, many Bong lps, cds, and cd-rs - and one of us here even got to see 'em live, last year. That'd be Allan, when he went to the amazing Roadburn festival in Holland (sadly, he missed out on going again this year, darn it). Of course, being a fan, he was excited about seeing Bong in person. And even though they're not the sort of band to move around much on stage, they weren't boring. In fact, they were TERRIFIC. Allan was also told afterwards that their performance was recorded, and would be released on Roadburn's Burning World label. Beyond that, strangely enough, Allan doesn't remember much else specific about the show (there may have been a contact high involved from their music that affected his memory faculties) but now at long last here's Bong's Live At Roadburn 2010 release to remind him! And for the rest of us to enjoy as well, and not have to be so jealous that we didn't go to Roadburn too.
After some enthused hails from the crowd, the first of two loooooong tracks ("Onwards To Perdonaris", 33:24) starts up, or seeps in, eerie and airy and understated, quite lovely really, not at all heavy, but nicely hypnotic...until a few minutes in when one may be rudely startled (depending on how high you have your volume set) by some deep voiced declamations, dunno what the fellow is on about, but that's ok, 'cause it serves to alert you that right about NOW the band is really gonna get LOUD, everything stepping up a big notch, to accommodate a constant drone backing, yeah now it's heavy, but still keeping the hypnotic lovely thing going too, slow rhythmic pulsations punctuated by an exotic zing of the strings (that's the "Shahi Baaja", an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys that one of the Bong-sters plays), once in a while joined again by more near-throat singing... It's rolling, rumbling, atmospheric, Eastern, with something of the quality of a cult ceremony or religious rite, in part due to the those occasional low monkish vocals. At times, "Onwards..." drifts back down into lulling stretches of spacey warbling electronic FX, and hippy-kraut hand drumming, coming across like a sinister Siloah or doomy Amon Duul. Or imagine the Master Musicians Of Bukkake making an ambient album for Miasmah, maybe.
The equally epic second track, "Wizards Of Krull" (previously recorded for the first side of their self-titled lp debut in 2009), continues in this vein, with more powerful percussion, though. It's 24 minutes of ritualistically pounding drums and crashing cymbals, low drone from bass and voice both, gobs of distortion and spooky psychedelic effects, those Shahi Baaja note clusters chiming in with regularity. "Wizards..." gets (slowly) more and more intense as it goes, really ramping up towards the end with rhythmic urgency. Damn this is good!
Bong bring it, all right, quite recommended, definitely for fans of Om, SUNNO))), Grails, Sylvester Anfang... and of course Bong. And bongs! Most if not all Bong releases thus far have been live, and this one is much less of a lo-fi recording than some of those, making for an essential document of Bong's unique trance-inducing potency.
If you recall, we highlighted this Japanese Seventies (proto-)metal band's second album, Signal Fire, sometime last fall, and promised more to come. Well it took a while, but here's a review of another remastered, reissue by Bow Wow! This time we're highlighting the band's self-titled debut, from 1976. We'd mentioned that shredding lead guitarist Kyoji Yamamoto was a big Jimi Hendrix fan, and you can hear that here, they even pay Jimi explicit tribute on the nearly ten minute "James In My Casket", part heavy riffing psych-out, part power ballad, and certainly one of this album's standout tracks, sounding almost like something that Far East Family Band or Far Out might have done, earlier in the '70s. Or Deep Purple, definitely. Early Scorpions are likely another inspiration.
There's also a song here called "Foxy Lady", which is NOT the Jimi Hendrix composition, oddly enough! That's one that displays the poppier, almost bubblegum side to the teenaged Bow Wow's initial sound (they weren't really metal yet, more of a rock n' roll rave up meets proto-metal, pop rockin' proposition). But even a lightweight boogie number like that is redeemed by Yamamoto's guitar prowess, and elsewhere they take the boogie to ultra energetic, metallized extremes, with speedy scorchers like "Hearts On Fire" and "Volume On".
Fun stuff, influenced by, besides Hendrix, we'd assume The Sweet! You want wailing vocals and even more wailing guitar? You got it! Yamamoto was on his way to becoming a Japanese Eddie Van Halen, or maybe Eddie was the American Yamamoto...
This has been given the typically enthusiastic Rock Candy reissue treatment (they've even added a rising sun motif to their logo on the spine), with extensive liner notes in the illustrated cd booklet - though we'd take issue with the writer's contention that Bow Wow was innovative, he doesn't give enough credit (any) to the likes of Flower Travellin' Band and Blues Creation as previous Japanese hard rock groups also on par with their Western contemporaries. But then again, maybe those bands never opened for Aerosmith like Bow Wow did.
And for the moment, we also have copies Signal Fire back in stock, as well as the yet to be reviewed Charge and Super Live, those being the other entertaining '70s Bow Wow albums reissued by Rock Candy... who we're hoping will get their hands on some of Bow Wow's '80s output as well.
Revelation: Sick Again is the legendary long lost unreleased final album from North Carolinian stoner sludge sickos Buzzov*en, and while recorded over a decade ago, it languished unreleased due to various legal difficulties, which were just the latest, for a band who essentially existed in a world of difficulties and dysfunction, be it jail, drugs, violent shows, band breakups, cancelled tours, but of course all of that stuff found its way into the groups nihilistic, heavy as fuck, drug addled sound. Recorded during a period of "exhaustion, drug-induced confusion and frustration" (although how that differs from other Buzzov*en records we're not entirely sure), Revelation: Sick Again is everything we've come to love about Buzzov*en: woozy, slithery Sabbathy riffage, sheets of feedback, big pounding drums, Kirk Fisher's whiskey soaked glass gargling yowl, songs that slip from blasting and frenetic, to wasted and druggy, long stretches of droned out blackened lumber dropped between bursts of low slung sonic swagger, and filthy crusty metallic crunch, the tracks peppered with strange samples and lots of grit and grime, the sound a gnarled melding of Black Flag's My War and classic Sabbath, sludgey, groovy, heavy, wasted and warped and so goddamn good.
Latest solo record from Barn Owl and Higuma member Evan Caminiti, and one of the first releases on Handmade Birds, a new label launched by R. Loren of Pyramids, White Moth and Sailors With Wax Wings. When California Falls Into The Sea finds Caminiti ditching the billowing brooding drones of recent Barn Owl records, and the humid dronedrift twang of past solo efforts, and instead, stripping his sound way down, crafting something much more intimate and contemplative, abstract and atmospheric, as rife with space and drift as notes and chords, the tone is still dark, and the sound lush, and there is a bit of abstract twang, bit these tracks are more like smoldering folk flecked ragas, smoldering swells of crumbling melody, spare serene stretches of hushed shimmer, hazy sprawls of hushed melancholia, spidery guitars underpinned by distant swells, streaks of fragmented melody, all wreathed in delicate echo, swaddled in spacey reverb, the sound soft, and soft focus, crystalline and fragile, but infused with a dark energy, a subtle power, that transforms muted minimal thrum into a sort of blackened blues. The various sounds shot through with serpentine tendrils, the chords drifting apart, into blurred and smeared expanses of dark moonlit sound.
A fantastic collection of introspective electric guitar meditations, each a hushed and haunting, otherworldly and tranquil, meditative and mesmerizing blackened spectral emanation. And every one spectacularly lovely.
There's no shortage of psychedelic space rock in SF these days: recent Record Of The Weekers Lumerians, the Spyrals (who have a new tape reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun, and these guys, Carlton Melton, not a person, but a quartet, who conjure up epic stretches of spaced out psychedelia, and who, unlike many of their contemporaries, seem to be less concerned with the pulse, and the rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of effects drenched psychedelic ambience, drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, which seems to exist more as a pulse, than a beat proper, everything murky and muddy and washed out, at once lo-fi, but impossibly dense and heavy, the band seeming to drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies, their sound loose and free and abstract and ephemeral, the whole first side here is a single track, the title track, and it's a fantastically entrancing space drone epic, a sound the drifts and buzzes and flutters and swirls, the sound emerging in swells, building into squalls of warm whirling chaos only to slip back into something more druggy and dreamy and meditative, it's not until the final couple minutes that the song finally explodes, and even then it doesn't really get heavier, the rhythm doesn't get any more intense, instead, it just sounds like the whole band crank it up a notch, the swirling clouds of effects and guitars suddenly become more volatile, and more chaotic, the melodies gradually swallowed up by slashes of distorted guitar crunch and crumbling walls of distortion, the sound gets more dense, and more thick, and the whole time the main groove, now buried beneath the roiling surface, continues on unwavering, the only thing keeping the track from drifting into the heavens and toward the heart of the sun.
The flipside is more of the glorious same, barring a brief bit of solo guitar, an interlude that is bookended by two more heaving walls of krautpsych swirl, the band unfurling droned out minimal hypnorock mini epics, that howl and thrum, buzz and shimmer, songs that obviously could have been stretched way out and turned this into a double lp.
As always, fantastic stuff. Fans of the SF psych/space/drone/kraut rock contingent that aren't already into CM, get with it! And obviously, anyone into White Hills, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Cave, The Heads, Heavy Winged, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and the like, these guys will definitely hit the spot.
Originally released in a run of just 100 copies, Black Swallow & Other Songs is yet another gorgeous bit of minimal abstract ambient folk experimentation from this prolific musician. We've reviewed several of his releases under the name A Broken Consort, as well as his fantastic Landings record on Type, but that's only the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg consisting of multiple releases, all amazing, meticulously composed, recorded and packaged, each a musical love letter to his wife who passed away in 2004, thus each recording, besides being sonically compelling, carries serious emotional weight, emotion and energy that seeps into the sounds, only making them sound that much more personal and intense.
Black Swallow & Other Songs is a songsuite of dark wistful dronefolk, all spidery tendrils of melancholy melody and the droning buzz of violins and other bowed instruments. Long stretches of muted buzz underpin spaced out slow motion ragas, the vibe darkly contemplative, the arrangements spacious and spare. Lush garlands of dark hues piano are draped over haunting metallic shimmer, female voices surface here and there. The guitars are introspective and plaintive, mediations on loss and loneliness, miniature soundtracks to lives and loves gone but not forgotten. The sound evokes grey skies, wide expanses of rolling hills, skeletal branches on trees having shed all their leaves, a wintery twilight, lit by flickering firelight, these sounds, warm and hopeful, holding off the chill and the ever encroaching darkness. So so lovely.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!!
Oh how we hate spoken word. Bad poetry, dramatic readings, in all but a very very very very few rare cases, spoken word = BAD. But then this is not your average spoken word record. In fact it's not even strictly a spoken word record. It's a modern minimal electronic record, made with voices instead of electronics. Closer to someone like Jaap Blonk, that is if someone recorded Blonk's bizarre poetry and then chopped it all up and reassembled it into complex rhythms.
Sound poet Anne James Chaton has been collecting receipts and train tickets, newspaper headlines, and various other seemingly mundane bits of text, specifically related to rare media related occasions, in the case of these recordings, specifically Barack Obama becoming president, and the death of the 'king of pop' Michael Jackson.
Much like those sound exercises where a phrase is repeated until it becomes a jumble of nonsense syllables, these pieces are paced on short spoken pieces, which are recorded, cut up, and reassembled into human beatbox style hyper rhythmic arrangements. The result is strangely hypnotic, not just the words, but the percussive elements of recorded speech are transformed into lurching, stuttery, skittering beats, the jumble of rhythmic vocals peppered with brief snippets of the original phrase, creating weirdly meditative trancelike expanses of rhythmic speech, or speech based techno, or whatever you want to call it.
Baffling and brilliant, this stuff would sound so amazing mixed randomly into a DJ set, but it's also some serious headphone bliss, it's so easy to get totally lost, letting the words and sounds, the sibilance and phrasing, the pulse and throb of these textual rhythms transport you to some strange world where sound and speech, music and words, blur into something wholly other.
Also included are shorter loops, presumably so you can assemble your own rhythmic word workout....
It's been a while since we've heard from one man, lo-fi, outsider, doomdrone, blacknoise weirdo Cloak Of Displacement, and fans of any of the other CoD cd-r's we've raved about in the past know just what to expect, which is to NOT know what the fuck to expect. This time around, it's three tracks, all dramatically different, the first hint being the instruments listed on the sleeve: guitar, knife, drums, vocals, and POWER SAW. Hell yeah.
And the first track, the epic 21 minute "Torture Beckons Me" definitely follows through on the implied promise of sonic whatthefuck. A spaced out abstract ultra doom crawl. But instead of heaving avalanches of blown out downtuned riffage, and massive pummeling beats, the reality is way more bizarre and baffling, tons of space, occasional swells of muted guitar buzz, some SUPER abstract drum thump and plonk, and some seriously SICK vokills, super skeletal and minimal and in its own way sort of hypnotic. Like a way less harsh, way more spaced out blackened Khanate maybe? The riffs pulled so far apart they're more like occasional squalls of thrum, the track nearly free of momentum or propulsion, more an ooze or drift, the vibe ritualistic and primitive and totally fucking strange.
The second song picks up the pace, but if anything gets even WEIRDER, with some muted rhythmic riffing, lots of seriously stumbling drumming, and twisted freaked out hysterical vox that make the dude from Lifelover sound like Neil Diamond. The song weaves and wobbles drunkenly, reminding us a bit of Varghkoghargasmal or a more brain damaged Hypothermia. And finally, the saw make an appearance, the brief closing track / outro, that plays like the bloop bleep of ambient Burzum, but the whole thing is wrapped in the harsh buzz of the power saw, which is presumably being used, at least judging from the song title, in the "Disposing Of The Body".
NOW ALSO ON VINYL, YAY!!
We at first balked at getting this 1993 recording by the great Sun Ra disciple Phil Cohran, because (and this just may be our own particular bias) more often than not we find that great and vital jazz artists from the sixties and seventies rarely stay quite as vital as time goes on. Or perhaps it's not the artist, but the technology of instruments and recording production as well as the aging and general mellowing of the culture that seem to give the music a less fresh vibe in our minds. But we were surprisingly blown away by African Skies, a live performance at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago as a memorial tribute to Cohran's former mentor and friend who had just passed away.
Ranking up there with the best of Cohran's recordings, African Skies is a beautiful cosmic jazz masterpiece utilizing mostly acoustic instruments such as harps, flutes, upright bass, francophone, bowed piccolo bass, and trumpet with some occasional ensemble and solo vocals. Looking at the back cover, this performance looks amazing too, with performers in traditional African garb playing these amazing large harps under a surrounding backdrop of projected galaxies. The pieces are minimally arranged with hypnotic rhythms and blithe flourishes. Occasionally a plaintive trumpet makes its presence known, or a woman vocalises soulfully, but it's really all about the fluidity of the sonic undertow that is vibrantly repetitive, and elusively graceful. Cohran doesn't try to mimic Sun Ra, but to emphasize the strongest qualities that he took away from the master: Beauty, Majesty and Reverence. Highest Recommendation!
After two killer singles, finally the full length from Stockton's Craft Spells, another batch of eighties worshipping new wave indie pop, and actually since all the songs from those singles, if you dug those, you'll definitely have a good idea of what you're getting into. Besides embodying that whole Captured Tracks / Sacred Bones sound, a little gloomy, a little gothy, a little new wave, Craft Spells are serious popsmiths, who probably didn't actually grow up in the eighties, although these songs sure sound like it. Not as warped and lysergic as many of their new wave gloom pop brethren, who often have us feeling like those groups must be taking the piss, "how crazy were the eighties?!" Instead, these songs are just really GOOD, hooky, jangly, bubbly chunks of classic new wave electro pop. We described one of their singles as sounding a little like a warped Style Council 45 playing at 33, and while that might be overstating the 'weirdness', Style Council is not a bad reference point at all, neither is Simple Minds, or Thompson Twins, or Culture Club, or The Smiths, or Icicle Works, or The Cure, or Echo And The Bunnymen, we could go on, but those are the bands, and the sound, that Craft Spells seem to have captured so perfectly. Barring the more modern production, and some subtle strangeness, many of these songs could be actual long lost eighties jams, the minor key guitar jangle, the mopey sad boy vox, the bloopy synth melodies, the mood and the vibe and the hooks.
And while it's definitely NOT super weird, it's just strange enough that it will probably still hit the spot for fans of Greatest Hits, Gary War, Julian Lynch, Solar Bears, Night Control, Beach Fossils, Hanoi Janes, Dignan Porch, Minks, Soft Moon, Wild Nothing and all the rest. A new retro new wave jangle pop favorite for sure!
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
One of the flagship groups on the Philles Records label run by Phil Spector in the Sixties, The Crystals stand as one of the greatest girl groups of all time. When Spector and The Crystals joined forces, the results encompassed some of the strongest and most moving selections of Spector's production career. There is a reason so many, diverse bands have covered these songs, including Grizzly Bear and Hole. "He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)" stands as one of the most chilling pop songs of all time. Even the one of the most subversive of artistic minds, Kenneth Anger, knew the power of their pop prowess and included "He's A Rebel" on the soundtrack to his legendary short film Scorpio Rising.
It's been so awesome to get to highlight these reissued Phil Spector recordings (The Ronettes, etc.) over the last few lists, as this is hands down some of the best pop music ever made. And such perfect timing for this release as we hear The Crystals' influence on so many of today's 'it' bands like Hunx & His Punx and Dum Dum Girls. It's that rare kind of recording that both your mom, and the most experimental minded music loving obsessive will love so much, as there's no denying the greatness of The Crystals!
Features 18 remastered tracks, including one previously unreleased cut.
R.L. Crutchfield is best known as one of the pioneers of no-wave in his band DNA as well as a forefather of cold-wave with his first few outings as Dark Day. What lots of people don't know is that Crutchfield has continued to make and release records under the radar without pause for the better part of three decades. His newer recordings, including Strange Clockwork, find him working in an almost miniature style. Short tracks that have a music box fragility but also incorporate sort of renaissance fair elements, all transformed into sonic stop motion experiments. Primitive sounding drum machine beats under electronics heavily influenced by baroque classical music. In many ways reminiscent of some of the more recent work of another electronic music pioneer, Wendy Carlos.
Anyone whose ever seen Cambodian pop combo Dengue Fever, knows that live is where they really shine. Their records are all fantastic, but somehow, those songs sound even better live, the vibe festive and celebratory, the band more loose, and the sound allowed to blossom, and in some cases explode.
For those new to Dengue Fever, these Americans (featuring members of the late great Dieselhed) were obsessed with Cambodian music, and over the years were able to emulate that sound perfectly, even to the point of crafting originals that sounded EXACTLY like lost Cambodian pop singles from the sixties. One thing was missing, and that was a vocalist. And that vocal spot would end up being filled by real Cambodian royalty, a princess in fact, the irresistible Chhom Nimol, whose gorgeous voice pretty much sealed the deal and Dengue Fever was born.
Cannibal Courtship is not a new record, but is in fact a live album, and as mentioned above, the sound, to these ears at least, is even better than their records proper, the guitars are fuzzier, the organs louder, the harmonies and arrangements still perfect, but just check out the title track, the verses smoldering and sexy, the chorus super loud, the guitars crashing, intense and epic. And then the band switch gears and go right into "Cement Slippers", an organ drenched surf rock jam, with English lyrics, and dueling boy/girl vocals, some wild horns, and yet more distorted guitars. Which gives way to "Uku" which is just classic sixties Cambodian pop that sounds like it was plucked right off a Sublime Frequencies compilation.
This was a Record Store Day release, and it was pretty limited, so we're not sure how long these will be along. Also includes a download coupon!
The first we heard from Dirty Beaches, aka Alex Zhang, was a recent split 7" with US Girls, which found Zhang doing a sort of super grimy lo-fi RnB, we also mentioned Johnny Cash, and that the sound like a murkier and less well produced How To Dress Well, which most definitely still applies on Badlands, but where on that single, we were feeling a sort of RnB vibe, here, it's more a classic rock and roll, as in the fifties, as in more specifically Elvis. Sounds weird, especially when you consider the sort of hype Dirty Beaches has been getting but, these tracks essentially sound like super low fidelity bedroom recorded Elvis jams, doused in murk and grit and grime, or draped over a looped loping churning chunk of crumbling low end.
Like some bedroom noise rocker floor core purveyor was tagged to pack up some classic crooner. Zhang's vocals are total Elvis, maybe there's a bit of a Cramps vibe, but that's essentially a goth Elvis anyway. Some of the tracks take what sounds like a snippet of some fifties rock and roll, and then loops it into a weirdly hypnotic chunk of murky minimalism, over which Zhang snarls and croons, it doesn't seem like it should work, or even sound all that good, but it does, and these songs end up sounding like weirdly timeless classic rock and roll jams from some alternate dimension, or like the perfect soundtrack to the best movie David Lynch never made.
Along with a new Cloak Of Displacement cd-r, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, the maniac behind CoD has also dug up this weird bit of looped, hypnotic psychedelic blackness, all the way from Estonia! Edasi weaves a high concept, 74 minute sprawl of haunting, noise drenched drift. The label describes it as sounding like a bar fight between Silvester Anfang and Havohej, and we have to say that's not really all that far off. In the beginning, it does sound like some ritualistic bit of forest folk ambience, distorted steel string buzz, muted electronics, simple percussion, processed demonic vox, it's tripped out and tweaked, the blackness more implied, the whole thing rife with a seriously ominous vibe, but musically, this could just as likely be some strange lo-fi free noise collective from Finland, or some bedroom doom folk one man band from the midwest.
It's a smoldering, creeping expanse of skittery ambience, of chiming melodies, streaks of feedback, the whole thing tethered to a strange propulsive glitch and crunch, managing to be weirdly tranced out and tranquil, yet, fucked up and seriously demented at the same time. Way too far removed from 'proper' black metal to appeal to the typical metalheads, but fans of Cloak Of Displacement, as well as the weirder fringes of black metal, a la Circle Of Ouroborus, Dead Reptile Shrine, Stalaggh, and the like, as well as anyone into warped outsider sounds, will definitely dig this a LOT.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, comes with a printed insert detailing the genesis of this particular chunk of sonic weirdness, as well as a miniature reproduction of the bizarre painting that spawned these sound.
Another batch of tapes from Root Strata, this one from someone named Ekin Fil, who hails from Istanbul, and creates dark, lush landscapes of sound. Lo-fi and super intimate, the songs and sounds are super varied, from woozy looped synths to hazy, clattery, smeary shoegaze, like some hybrid of Grouper and Sunroof!, from dark strummy reverb soaked dreamfolk to hazy, washed out minimal abstract pop, from deep blurred ambient shimmer to haunting folky otherworldly drift.
The sounds all seem to blur and bleed and ooze into each other, the guitars liquid, the reverb and delay transforming everything into a gauzy indistinct smear of sound, all held together by the hushed echo drenched vocals, spectral and ethereal, laced over the warm swirling murk underneath. A foresty folk, slightly gothic, a little shoegazey, shades of Zola Jesus and Grouper, of groups like Zomes and the Slaves, a haunting ephemeral ritualistic minimalism, that manages to be lush and expansive, but simultaneously, dark and intimate. So totally lovely.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
Released for Record Store Day this year, we were able to get a few extra copies to offer to folks unable to make it down. Two new tracks from the Entrance Band, both covers, one by the Troggs, the other by Love, and both sound pretty perfect for The Entrance Band. In fact if you didn't know the originals, it would be easy to mistake them for EB's own material.
The Troggs' "I Want You" is all dirgey and fuzzy an garagey, with some low slung murky riffage, the vibe slithery and sexy, the music almost sounds slowed down, a little warped and woozy, the vocals wrapped in reverb and draped over the top. The end of the song offers up a cool squall of effects drenched tripped out psychedelic leads.
The flipside finds EB tackling Love's "A House Is Not A Motel", and unfurls some cool warbly psych guitar, under which surfaces some thick bass thrum, the drums skittery, the vocals wreathed in echo and delay, a little bit quavery, the whole thing washed out and hazy, and really, not all that far removed from the original, in a good way.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, hand numbered, in beautiful silk screened covers, like we said this was a Record Store Day release and we only have a handful, so not sure how long these will be around...
Dylan Ettinger's New Age Outlaws lp was a big hit around here, a sprawling collection of retro futuristic psychedelic synthwave that we described as Expo 70 covering Zombi. On this follow up single, some of that stuff is still present, but Ettinger has definitely taken his sound in a new direction. The core sound is still a murky sort of retro cold wave, but it's the execution, and the constituent parts, primitive programmed beats, swirling soaring synths, and most notably, ethereal echo drenched vox that slip from falsetto to more dramatic croon and back again, there's even some melodica, which helps create the weirdly dubbed out vibe, the tangles of melody disappearing in a sea of deem thrum and blissed out beats, sounding a bit like Gary Numan at 16rpm.
The flipside begins with a stripped down rhythm, pulsing and throbbing within clouds of bleep and bloop, of buzz and glitch, a downtempo cold wave, muddy and smeary, the vocals buried this time around, reminding us of Tricky teaming up with some modern synth outfit, the results are dreamily druggy...
What really needs to be said about Fear? One of the greatest punk bands ever. Have you ever seen the Decline of Western Civilization? Fear definitely stole the show with their fierce and frenzied audience baiting set. And then there's the time they played on Saturday Night Live at the behest of none other than John Belushi, where they were introduced by Donald Pleasance, and eventually caused over $20,000 in damage. But all that rabble rousing would be nothing but bullshit posturing if they didn't have the music to back it up. And Fear's The Record, released in 1982, said it all, a pretty much perfect punk rock record all the way through, fierce and fucked up, weirdly proggy, frantic and frenzied, politicized and irreverent, vocalist Lee Ving's over the top growled vocals leading the charge.
"Let's Have A War" is a punk rock anthem if there ever was one, with its "there's so many of us" repeated bridge and its woozy tribal verse that almost sounds like the Butthole Surfers. Then there's the goofy and tasteless "Beef Bologna", with its crooned bluesy intro, the song itself a minute of pounding punk anthem. "Camarillo" is an unsung classic, as powerful as any of the tracks on The Record, with some weird angular guitaring, some very metal riffage, not to mention some seriously Jello-like vocals. But it has to be "I Don't Care About You" that steals the show, heavy and hooky and punk as fuck with a chorus that kills, and c'mon "I Don't Care About You FUCK YOU!!" Doesn't get more punk than that, does it?
The rest of the record is overflowing with classics, the ridiculous but impossibly catchy (and very Dead Kennedys sounding) "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones", which of course is rife with actual saxophones, and the lyrics are hilarious. "We Destroy The Family" is fierce and furious and peppered with weird metal percussion, "I Love Livin' In The City" is somehow WAY poppier than it has any right to be
Fear were one of those rare punk bands that infused their punk with plenty of pop hooks, and had serious song writing chops, all without losing any of their punkness, yet somehow making their music eminently more listenable, and making them way more accessible to folks outside the punk scene, think the Dickies, Bad Religion, The Descendents
Available on vinyl again, but whatever format, this is an essential document of West Coast punk rock, and one of our favorite punk rock records EVER.
As we may have mentioned before, with every Gnaw Their Tongues release, we find ourselves once again struggling to describe the blackened filth and abject cinematic doom contained within. Fans already know what they're in store for, and will most likely want more, need more even. The music of Gnaw Their Tongues is the sort of grim black sound that inspires some strange unquenchable hunger for more. A mysterious desire to fall ever deeper into the abyss, to explore GTT's hellish sonic underworld, each record a dizzying assemblage of crushing industrial dirge, of glacial black metal buzz, of clattery, chaotic blacknoize, of weirdly operatic choral music, all woven into some sort of pitch black musical ritual.
L'Arrivee De La Terne Mort Triomphante is merely the latest miserable missive from the black soul who sits on a black throne, made from charred bones, as he gnaws tongues, drinks blood, and as a choir of demons serenades him with these sick sick sounds, but in some ways, L'Arrivee does differ from past releases, in that more than most, it allows the classical element room to breathe. GTT was always some sort of demented Arvo Part / Abruptum hybrid, mixing strings and choirs into the swirling black miasma of crush and thud and buzz and howl, and on L'Arrivee, the orchestral / cinematic side for maybe the first time, does battle with the blackened heavy side, the result a surprisingly dynamic, darkly cinematic chunk of dramatic over the top blackness. One can almost envision this as some sort of crazy Hermann Nitsch style opera, flames and blood, and carcasses, everything dripping with black ichor, lit from below, the shadows like living black beasts, the sound the perfect reflection of those images, booming timpani, moaning sorrowful strings, symphonic swells, operatic voices, mournful pianos, a sort of epic bombastic chamber music, the heaviness and buzz and black occasionally pulled back, allowing the pianos and strings time to unfurl, before quickly being swallowed up again.
The sound here too seems a bit more lush, more produced, cleaner, but without losing any of the filth. We might go so far as to say this is the most accessible GTT release to date, but then it's all relative, this is still some seriously crusty, devastatingly brutal, menacing and mean black doom misery, but deftly woven into something more melodic, more emotionally charged, where past GTT records were simply hateful and hellish, pummeling and punishing, L'Arrivee De La Terne Mort Triomphante is something more, an epic, intense journey, the soundtrack element can't be understated, this totally plays out like the score to some insane, and insanely harrowing epic, a tale of death, and lost souls, and the end of humanity, and total annihilation, but as with all great epics, there continues to be hope, a glowing ember, that sits at the middle of it all, waiting to be discovered, and to perhaps eventually triumph, or perhaps to perish and disappear into utter and unending blackness. Quite possibly the most epic black doom cinematic symphonic noise metal opera EVER.
Gold Panda's Lucky Shiner was one of our favorite electronic records from last year, so we were super psyched to discover this special Record Store Day remix 12", with four super distinctive and very different versions of one of the tracks from Lucky Shiner, by some pretty cool remixers. Star Slinger is up first, and douses the original in super thick buzzing dubsteppy bass, and thickens up the beats, everything distorted and intense and blurred and fantastically prismatic. Baths takes the opposite approach and stretch the original into something much more minimal and blissy, hushed and muted, lots of backwards smears, tinkling melodies, warm and warbled, a sort of housey almost pop ambient vibe, deep soft pulses, and haunting pianos, so so lovely. AQ faves, drone steppers Forest Swords totally reinvent the track as a glitched out sprawl of folky abstract minimalism, drifty and dreamy and so otherworldly. Halls takes the track EVEN further, and transforms it into a hazy, gauzy, softly glimmering stretch of abstract ambience. And finally, the original is tacked on the end in all its playful looped and sampled glory.
SUPER LIMITED. This was a Record Store Day release, so stock is limited, and odds are once these are gone that'll be it.
Record number two from Jon Chang's post Discordance Axis outfit Gridlink. Unlike his OTHER post DA combo Hayaino Daisuki, which was like a super charged hyperspeed power metal grindcore combo, Gridlink is more aligned with the avantgrind of Discordance Axis. A dense million parts a minute flurry of hyperblasts, hellish howls, and impossibly gnarled riffage. And like Amber Gray before it, Orphan is a dizzying micro-epic, 12 songs in 12 minutes, almost a minute longer than Amber Gray, and somehow more focused and even more intense than its predecessor.
A twelve minute full length might seem laughable to some, but not sure most folks could handle more than 12 minutes of this stuff, and we doubt Gridlink could keep up this sort of intensity for much longer, either. Each track is a furious, frantic, frenetic, frenzied blast of grinding proggy metallic mayhem, the guitars liquid and serpentine, slipping from chug to noodle to maniacal hammer-on's, spewing a million notes a second, offering up rhythmic heft and tangled melody. The drums are right there with the guitars, impossibly rapidfire bursts of machinegun beats, endlessly relentless fills, the tempo changing every few second, blasting and pounding, a confusional bafflingly brilliant sonic battle, a non stop guitar / drum duel, the musical version of the Tasmanian Devil, a roiling, churning black cloud of sound, laying waste to all in its path.
But for all the grind and shred, pound and pummel, blasting and thrashing, the songs here are rife with hooks, killer melodies, and kick ass riffs, all surprisingly catchy, and dangerously hummable for a 12 minute, 200 part, million bpm, grindmetal blowout...
Featuring members of Discordance Axis, Mortalized, Human Remains, Kill the Client, Burnt by the Sun, Hayaino Daisuki, and more, might just be one of our favorite metal (grind or otherwise) records of the year so far...
The limited lp version is pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and features BOTH Gridlink albums (Orphan and Amber Gray), at 45 rpm, one album on each side, it's housed in a swank full color gatefold and includes a coupon for mp3 downloads of all the tracks AND karaoke versions of the songs so you can sing along at home! The vinyl is limited to 500 copies. The cd version includes the downloadable karaoke versions of the songs...
Yet another one of the ultra limited Record Store Day releases, we got enough of this one to review for all the faraway folks who couldn't be here on the day. A killer split, one side longtime aQ fave Ilyas Ahmed, teamed up with Steve Gunn on the other.
Ahmed offers up some warm sun dappled Appalachia, lush strummed 12 string guitars, all minor key and melancholic, accompanied by wispy reverbed vox, plaintive and intimate, the sound hazy and hypnotic. Near the end, buzzing streaks of electric guitar swoop in, hushed swells and layered harmonies, turning the folkiness into something more moody and softly psychedelic.
Gunn counters with his own take on Appalachia, a stripped down bluesy vamp, a little bit bluegrass, a bit folky, warm overtones, lots of layered buzz, Gunn's vocals deeper and more gruff, swaddled in reverb and delay, the various spidery melodies seem to grow more tangled as the song progresses, a gorgeous chunk of bluesy psych folk for sure.
LIMITED TO 800 COPIES, only 200 on clear, which are the ones we have. Housed in a super swank jacket with original artwork by Ahmed.
Sound artist Joseph Hammer was a member of the legendary/infamous LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society), and on I Love You, Please Love Me Too, he takes everyday sounds, and creates something far from everyday. It's a gloriously head spinning Plunderphonic style collage of loops and snippets and samples, old dusty records, snatches of radio broadcasts, tapes of old performances, all layered and mashed into a swirling sonic stew, repeated motifs melt into warped and warbly murk, pianos tinkle, vocals swoop and soar, different languages, jazzy horns, chugging metal guitars, skittery programmed drums, jangle and crunch and grind and swoon. RnB gives way to nu-metal, yacht rock gives way to new age, but chopped and sliced and diced and recontextualized so each element is just a part of the bigger, constantly mutating whole. The A side seems more jumbled, a relentless onslaught of stuttering sound, a swirling flurry of tangled melodies and ever shifting voices and instruments, flurries of shards and fragments in constant motion, while somehow, the second side seems more serene, the sounds blurred and smeared into something slightly more linear, the pitch and speed still constantly changing, a warped woozy sprawl of psychedelic, ADD plunderphonic pop.
LIMITED TO 330 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and like all releases on Pan, the vinyl is 140 gram, and is housed in a thick jacket, which itself is presented in a super elaborate and psychedelic two colored PVC plastic sleeve, with eye popping tripped out geometric designs.
Not the long suffering, crushed out sidekick of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, this Xander Harris is yet another addition to the new movement of John Carpenter worshipping retro eighties sci-fi soundtrackery, also practiced by folks like Umberto, Zombi, Majeure, Blizaro, Dylan Ettinger, Gatekeeper, Roll The Dice, Twins, and plenty of others. And while it's getting to be pretty crowded, for now, we can't seem to get enough, so we're pretty psyched on this Not Not Fun release, and for all of its similarities to those other artists, there is definitely something special about Urban Gothic.
It might be that it eschews the whole horror disco vibe, ditching the dancefloor almost completely, and weaving a series of imaginary soundtracks, that sound like they could actually be from some long lost straight to video Argento giallo, channeling Goblin and Carpenter, but in a way, that the results are truly haunting and ominous, and very very soundtracky. Many of the elements may be the same, but XH excels at assembling them into compelling, realistic scores for imaginary horror movies. Halloween-like repeating motifs, lots of swirling atmospheric synth shimmer, minimal programmed percussion, haunting chant like vox, pulsing menacing melodies, all woven into cinematic mini epics that are truly harrowing and spine tingling.
And that content is hinted at by the equally evocative song titles: "I Want More Than Just Blood", "Fucking Eat Your Face", "When The Hammer Starts To Swing", "Tanned Skin Dress", "Hatchet In The Teeth", "Splatter In The Mouth" and more
So yeah, maybe this sound isn't the most original these days, but Xander Harris' take is definitely one of the more exciting variations we've heard. Which has us picturing Umberto and Zombi and Blizarro, all creeping though an old decrepit mansion, trying desperately to survive until sunup, running from various shadows and hidden monstrosities, all to the strains of Xander Harris...
Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Grave Is A Grim Horse, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like A Grave Is A Grim Horse, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNN))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combos�
The debut album from Chicago's Implodes is a quintessential Kranky release. It's a darkly beautiful production of pop narcotic smeared in layers of shoegaze distortion, monochromatic psychedelia, and slumping atmospherics, harkening back to Kranky's early releases from Bowery Electric, Amp, and maybe even the first Labradford record. That said, Implodes does fit nicely in with the current Kranky roster of Belong and Tim Hecker as well, and moreso Disappears, as Implodes is a conventional rock quartet crafting their tuneful sludge balanced with radioluminosity through pedals and amps. Throughout the album's humid, smoldering fuzz and droned distortion, Black Earth perpetuates the creeping violence and midwestern depression, spoken through the album's cover art, a creepy photograph of a woman's silhouette brandishing a knife in a rather hostile pose. The suitably downer melodies and androgynously murmured vocals flicker amidst the muffled guitar haze like the best of all shoegaze acts, but unlike most who reference My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, or Ride, Implodes is more attuned to Flying Saucer Attack, Bailter Space, or even the desolate drone-rock of Higuma. Tracks like "Screech Owl" and "Experiential Report" slowly burn from downer acoustic strumming into the plodding rhythms and intertwining male / female vocal mumblings buried beneath the narcoleptic atmospheres of muffed guitar haze. But if there was to be a 'hit' on the album it would be "Meadowlands" with its disco-ping synth notes that must be a reference to Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" instead of anything remotely hedonistic. Out of all this fuzz and distortion, sad melodies and muffled androgynous vocals sing of woe and heartache with a psychic conviction that doesn't need anything explicit like lyrics. The music is perfect in delivering this bleak mood all on its own.
It's a while since we've heard from these Chicago heavies, almost three years in fact, but 4 full lengths and 8 years in, and these guys still sound as good as ever. Massive downtuned droned out doom, shrieked vox over post rock and math rock flecked doom, a sound that distinctly their own, definitely positions them alongside Isis, Neurosis, Mastodon, Conifer, Tides and the rest of the many Neur-Isis bands, but they also have a serious sludge thing happening, reminding us of groups like Khanate, Melvins, Buried At Sea, Eyehategod, their stonery sludge and epic bombastic post-doom seemingly more polished and melodic this time around, the songs mini epics, slow building sprawls of cyclical repetition, tension and releases, often blossoming into full on poppiness, but just as often collapsing into gouts of curdled black tar trudge and plod. The sound laced with strange electronics and effects, the vocals often heavily effected, give them a sort of tripped out psychedelic vibe.
Opener "No Grace" seems to meld AmRep style noise rock to epic Godspeed style majesty, all wound around murky downtuned riffage, and peppered with some surprising bits of melody, while "The Fate Before Fate" almost sounds like a more screamo style Neurosis, crumbling avalanches of grinding riffage offset by soaring tangles of high end melody and the vocals super distorted and intense. The title track slows it WAY down, a creeping blackened crawl, the guitars undulating strangely, the drums mathy, but slowed way down, and those vox, managing to transcend mere shriek and actually sound like 'singing' even though they're harsh and hellish.
After a brief bit of noise drenched low slung slithery detuned blues, the record finished off with the epic 9 minute "Banality" a heaving, hauntingly atmospheric bit of lurching lumbering heaviness, a strange mix of tranced out droniness, and extreme intensity, culminating in a weird stretch of warped metallic psychedelia, the chords and riffs seeming to bleed and ooze and melt, the vocals even more blown out, wrapped in effects, and over the top all manner of strange shimmer, and warbly psych guitar filigree, the sound getting more and more noisy and intense before blinking out in a brief blast of staticky hiss.
Way way recommended.
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
Oh man, that just made us think of something insane, what if Daniel Higgs teamed up with Inquisition someday, a la one of our other Records Of The Week this list, by The Skull Defekts?! That would be awesome.
Domo arigato! Now here's a nice import vinyl reissue of this essential late '60s Japanese psychedelic rock record, the genius debut by 'Group Sounds-gone-gloomy' band the Jacks. Along with underground cult heroes Les Rallizes Denudes, The Jacks were another early, influential home-grown Japanese psych band, just ask Keiji Haino, whose outfit Fushitsusha covered the Jacks' classic "Marianne" on the second Tokyo Flashback volume.
With stinging Quicksilver psych guitar leads and melancholy vocals, the Jacks' legendary Vacant World, from 1968, is a truly gorgeous album of delicacy, darkness, and murk, that words like 'timeless' and 'dramatic' well describe. Its sparse, sad beauty makes it one of AQ overlord Allan's favorite '60s psych artifacts ever (although fellow AQ overlord Andee isn't as into it, but then, he doesn't really like Can or the Velvet Underground, either). Unlike other noted Japanese 'GS' bands like The Mops or The Challengers, these guys were not mainly, merely doing covers of the rock hits of the day from San Francisco and London, no. While Western garage and blues and psychedelic rock certainly shaped their sound, the Jacks seem uniquely Japanese, uniquely Jacks as well.
Though there's fuzz guitar on here, it's much more about atmosphere, moodiness, melody. The lyrics too, were apparently somewhat subversive, not that we'd know for sure. Totally recommended, especially to those of you into the more gentle and balladic side of more current Japanese psych acts like Ghost, LSD-march, Up-Tight, Nagisa Ni Te, etc.
Pressed on red vinyl, identical to its original issue, we're told.
A fantastic split lp released for Record Store Day, on one side Mr. Glenn Jones, formerly of modern krautrockers Cul De Sac, now an undisputed master of the Appalachian guitar, on the other side, a bluegrass hoedown teamup, bluesman Charlie Parr and country string band the Black Twig Pickers.
Fans of Jack Rose (who Jones dedicated this record to), James Blackshaw, Marisa Nadler, Ilyas Ahmed, Tom Carter and the like who haven't heard Glenn Jones, now's the time to remedy that for sure. Lush tangles of intricate steel string picking, gorgeous melodies, plenty of buzz and slippery slide, rich overtones, from moody dark drift to effusive folk flecked twang, every track here is a gem, Jones a modern master of the Appalachian guitar.
The flipside finds Parr shacking up with The Black Twig Pickers for a serious hootenanny, a back porch, sun-going-down, campfire country folk bluegrass jam session, fiddles, banjos, steel string guitars, all whipping up a wild rollicking country workout, from dark haunting twang to old timey blues, from rollicking hoedown to mournful lament...
LIMITED Record Store Day release, so these may not be around for long. Housed in a super heavy full color jacket, includes a download coupon, and multiple inserts, including some recipes from Charlie Parr.
We completely flipped for Sven Kacirek's The Kenya Sessions, a record where Kacirek, a producer, drummer and percussionist, traveled to Kenya to record local musicians, in their homes and on the street, and then took those recordings and wove in his own. The result was a fantastic electronic / world music hybrid, so seamlessly executed it was often difficult to tell which was which.
The Palmin Sessions are from a few years earlier, but seems to employ the same method, with Kacirek playing real acoustic instruments, vibraphone, kalimba, drums, glockenspiel, as well as brushes, books, paper, film, doors and other unlikely sound making devices. And like The Kenya Sessions, these tracks are incredible, the fusing of real drums, and programmed electronics, all woven into songs lush and organic, sometimes dreamy and laid back, other times intense and super propulsive.
Opener "Heinrich & Helene" is the perfect example, with its warm, soft focus vibraphone melodies, all wreathed in little streaks of electronics, glitches, bloops and bleeps, all very subtle, total bliss out drift off minimal electronica, but then the drums begin to surface, gradually overtaking the hushed shimmer, the playing getting more and more busy, until they erupt in a fantastic squall of wild drummage, still surrounded by electronic blurs and smears, only to blink out, and revert to the opening hushed drift. Awesome.
And the rest of the record is just as good. Some tracks are a bit jazzy, others are almost house-y, still others sound like Kompakt style pop ambience, there are horns, tinkling chimes, occasional vocals, all the tracks based on rhythms, and Kacirek's playing in particular, while the production transforms all the sounds into washed out, dreamlike, ethereal skitterscapes, and warm, woozy, soft focus drifts of electronic shimmer.
One of two new tapes from Root Strata, this one comes from Arrow Kleeman, who we know very little about other than the fact that he's a visual artist and musician/composer, on Phase Reps And Builds, he pretty much does exactly what the title suggests, repeating electronic phrases, looped rhythms, and layering them into lush, gorgeously mesmerizing sci-fi synthscapes. Percolating rhythms, overlapping melodies, the sound simultaneously futuristic and retro, definitely tapping into the whole Blade Runner / John Carpenter / Logan's Run vibe that folks like Majeure and Zombi and Umberto have been exploring lately. But where those folks seem to be pushing the eighties soundtrack / Euro dancefloor, Kleeman's explorations are more minimal, more academic. Not to say they're lacking in emotion, they're just darker, and more contemplative, the sounds cyclical, mesmerizingly repetitious, each track and experimental loopscape, trancelike and tranquil, infusing its rhythmic and electronic elements with the compositional approach of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, creating a sort of modern minimalism / sci-fi retro-futuristic space synth hybrid.
Needless to say, recommended for fans of Lichens, Grasslung, Oneohtrix Point Never, Pulse Emitter, Le Revelateur, etc.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!
What's there to say about Low that hasn't been said before. Without a doubt one of the most inspiring, emotionally riveting and chill inducing bands of our generation. Their ability to capture mournful emotion and conjure up deep mystery in their songs has often been imitated but one rarely gets to that same satisfying bittersweet state of sound that they do. While the first half of their career found them as leaders of the slowcore movement, in recent years they haven't been afraid to play with their sound and speed things up a bit, and even rock out from time to time. But no matter how they allow new sounds and styles to enter their fold, they always sound like Low, and that is a very good thing indeed. C'mon introduces an almost twang like sensibility on several of the songs. But ultimately it's still about the way they can transform a four minute song into a meditation on sadness, longing, and despair. Like all of their records, C'mon takes a few listens to really start seeping in, but damn once it did we realized we have yet another great Low album that we'll be listening to for years to come.
Even if it didn't say Kawabata Makoto on the cover, or if you didn't know that Kawabata is the guitar player in Japan's Acid Mothers Temple, you might guess that this was somehow Acid Mothers Temple related, just from the cover graphics. Naked hippy chick in yoga pose, check. Flying saucer, check. Comic book style voice balloon, check. (She's saying, "AHAAAAAAA... UMMMMMM", which could be alternate, onomatopoeic titles for this disc's two tracks, actually.)
And knowing that, you have an idea what this is all about. It's one of Kawabata's most blissed out, droned out efforts. Actually, it's hard to imagine something as physical as a guitar being involved in its making. Kawabata seems to be playing some more ethereal instrument, a simple shimmering cloud of cosmic sound that already existed at the dawn of days, long before anything as mundane as a guitar was ever invented. The transcendent, translucent 46 minute "She Came From The Shining Sea", followed by the shorter (17 minute) and even quieter "Kiss On The Dream Planet", seem more like mental projections, delicate dream drones direct from Kawabata's inner space practice space. It's certainly difficult to believe that he's actually, you know, touching anything to make this music. In reality, these two tracks were recorded at the actual Acid Mothers Temple (Kawabata's flat in Tokyo, we assume, or better yet a commune filled with those naked hippy chicks) in January and March of 2006... Kick back, close your eyes, and enjoy.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
Super groovy, raw Afro-funk-fuzz album reissued! The label has applied a lot of hyperbole to this release ("toughest and most sought-after African funk record of them all") but since that label is Academy/Voodoo Funk, responsible for such killer reissues as Ofege and The Psychedelic Aliens, we're inclined to believe 'em... and our ears, which tell us that this IS pretty darn awesome and gritty. Recorded in 1976, and originally released on Ghana's Gapophone Records, This Is Marijata features 4 tracks recorded live in the studio, which must have been a sweaty, sweaty place. The core trio of Kofi "Electric" Addison (drums), Bob Fischian (organ), and Nat Osmanu (guitar), plus additional "hand picked" musicians, play a sort of totally tweaked and frantic take on your basic James Brown/JB's style jams, with horny horns and hoarse, crazed screams. That's three of the tracks, anyway, with one other ("I Walk Alone") being more of a soulful ballad, but a badass one.
Vinyl already sold out at the label. Compact disc issue forthcoming, as is a reissue of Marijata's other album, Pat Thomas Introduces Marijata.
Props to Thrill Jockey. Not only did they come up with a batch of Record Store Day releases this year that were all truly worthy (unlike some other RSD stuff that seems more about collectability than good music), they also made sure that they'd last a bit beyond Record Store Day itself, being limited but not soooooo super limited that they're already on eBay. So, you'll find a bunch of 'em on this list, like the Oval/Liturgy 12", and this, the vinyl-only debut lp from the guitar duo of Mitchell and Manley.
If you're familiar with Isaiah Mitchell's playing in his band Earthless, you kinda know what to expect... endless, tripped out, set the controls for the heart of the sun electric guitar soloing... Meanwhile, Phil Manley is no slouch on the axe himself, as he's demonstrated in Trans Am, The Fucking Champs, Oneida, Jonas Reinhardt, etc. Plus, if you've heard his recent solo album Life Coach, you know he's totally tuned in to '70s kosmiche krautrock electronics. In this context, Isaiah is perhaps more about fingers on frets, and Phil about feets on pedals, but the division of labor isn't all that clear-cut.
And if you were here on Sunday for their instore (their first ever live performance together!), you got a taste of what the two of them are capable of (and, probably already bought this lp). However, that instore was, despite everyone's best intentions (sorry, neighbors!) a bit louder and "face melting" than how Mitchell and Manley come off on record, which Phil had told us was kind of "new-agey". And Norcal Values does mellow it out a bit, on two side-long cuts, "San Francisco Values" (we're proud of them, dammit, and just love Nancy Pelosi!) and "Sausalito Values" (adding a little Marin to the mix).
Basically, this is just what we expected (and wanted)... something that combines the never-ending jamming aspect of Earthless, with the more blissed out vibe of much of Phil's solo album. Shred vs. shimmer, here. Improvised live, with no overdubs. Guitar solos, like it says on the cover.
Although this was released on 4/16, for Record Store Day, it could just have easily come out on 4/20... what we're sayin' is that this is stoner music. Not sure how long these will be around, they are limited to 1000, so better hurry and grab one now - you can mellow out and relax (and light one up) AFTER you've scored a copy. Comes with digital download, btw.
