Finally, the long awaited return of these mysterious French audio alchemists, whose sound is a strange amalgamation of black metal buzz, krautrock mesmer, and psychedelic ambience. And the aforementioned mystery lies not with the group itself, whose lineup features members of black metal outfit Diamatregon and psychedelic rockers Gunslingers, both big time aQ faves, but rather in their sound, and how a sound so minimal and spare, how seemingly reductive on the surface, manages to transcend, to exist as something wholly other, a band who at times can sound like other bands that came before, but only fleetingly, those sounds subsumed and reimagined, and spit back out in a shape that is distinctly Aluk Todolo.
This ritual is not a new recording, but in fact archival material recorded at the same time as their Descension record, and is a This single track, spread out over both sides of a 10", and begins with a loping dirgey rhythm, pounding through clouds of swirling cacophony, shards of jagged guitarnoise and layers of chordal shimmer, an electrified field that seems to crackle around the groups core pulse/groove, the surrounding noise, not so much just noisy as haunting and ominous and textural. A brief bit of super creepy, deep garbled vocals intone what must be some sort of warning, as the sound continues to drift, mesmerizing and hypnotic, dense but at the same time almost ethereal, seasawing between noisy and chaotic, washed out and woozy, until eventually the noise recedes, leaving just long streaks of hiss and glitch and static, all wreathed in a blurred melodic haze.
Finally an even slower, more spare rhythm begins, this one plodding along through a black haze, pelted by squalls of super distorted buzz, quick blasts of blown out crunch, those blasts themselves strangely melodic, as if they were spaced out notes to some other, mysterious melody, the sound eventually building to a much more rocking final blast, organ like whirs underpinning muddy riffage and still more explosive bits of grinding guitar crunch.
The flipside is much more relentless and abrasive, the dynamics ditched in lieu of something more textural, a wall of buzz and crumbling crunch, the drums an anchor, buried in the murk and mire, the noise surprisingly nuanced, textural one minute, caustic the next, blurred and melodic, but also hissy and harsh, creating all sorts of constantly shifting and evolving textures and overtones. A washed out spate of abrasive guitardrone fashioned into something almost riff-like, wrapped around that constant motorik beat, that krauty rhythm that definitely reminds us of German Oak, albeit way noisier and more blackened, the track pounds and drones and buzzes away before finally finishing off with a surprisingly woozy, buzzy, drifty dramatic outro. Wow.
As always, super striking packaging, pressed on heavy vinyl, and yeah, most likely very very limited.
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
Another fantastic batch of looped psychedelic mesmer from High Wolf, this one a sidelong sprawl, a 4 part epic of swirling electronics, Eastern melodies, warm whirling buzz, all wound around muted looped propulsive rhythms, a smoldering spaced out new age krautrock drift. Slipping drowsily from soft swirls of layered thrum, laced with tablas, to hazy, hiss-laden warbled melodies, almost sounding like Philip Jeck spinning Eighties 7"s on a phalanx of old beat up turntables. With wah wah guitar drifting in and out, the is sound psychedelic, and a little bit dubbed out, eventually blossoming into a glimmering starfield of blurred blissy sonic sparkles and blooping bleeping electronics, draped over an ever shifting backdrop of thrum and hum. The side finally culminates with a chorus of childlike voices drifting above a churning bit of psychedelic whirl, a gorgeously and hypnotically playfully choral outro.
The big surprise here though, might have to be Annapurna Illusion, who we had never heard before (and it seems is actually the same guy behind High Wolf weirdly enough), but whose sound is incredible, a wash of thick warm buzzy drones, layered loops and dense synth shimmer, all pulsing and undulating in a bleary eared expanse of alien FX and gauzy atmospherics. The sound is thick and mesmerizing and almost heavy, but stays just soft and washed out enough to keep from slipping into guitar dronedirgedrift territory, instead, hovering someplace much more abstract and psychedelic. The looped mesmer very reminiscent of a less cacophonous more mediative Our Love Will Destroy The World.
The buzz gives way to soft swirls of downtuned chords, and avalanches of descending tones, all over an hypnotic loping looped rhythm. The last stretch takes the above mentioned sounds, and adds some seriously synthy-sci-fi swirl to the mix, not to mention a surprisingly Sabbathy guitar riff, but all blurred into a dreamy druggy chunk of drowsy looped psychedelic dronemusic. Awesome.
Akarma does their mini-LP sleeve digipack reissue thing with this 1969 British psych gem -- "The definitive British psych album" says Nick Saloman of Bevis Frond, in fact -- and it's well worth checking out for fans of early Floyd, Cream, The Nice, and that T2 disc we reviewed a few lists back. Arzachel not only had a weird name, the band members had unlikely names (pseudonyms, actually) too. Meet guitarist Simeon Sasparella (aka Steve Hillage, later of Gong fame), drummer "Basil Dowling", faux-Kenyan bassist "Njerogi Gategaka", and organ player "Sam Lee-Uff", actually one Dave Stewart (not the Eurythmics guy) who is better known for being in progsters Egg later on.
The first half of this album features their poppier psych/garage numbers, including the lovely instrumental "Queen St. Gang", which seems to feature the "Hey Joe" bass line coupled with the melody from the theme to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly! The second half of the album indulges in extended heavy psych jams of the sort Arzachel specialized in playing at London's tripped out Middle Earth club. The acid blues of "Leg" sounds like an organ-led Cactus, while the howling, epic "Metempsychosis" is nearly seventeen minutes of primitive, pounding, distortion-filled psychedelia that could be mistaken for Amon Duul II. Good stuff! With their teenage enthusiasm and ambition, the Arzachel boys managed to wax a classic -- totally of their times in so many ways and yet unique and timeless as well. Doubtless Simeon, Basil, Njerogi, and Sam, with pseudonyms discarded, improved their musical skills in subsequent years, yet can anything from their later proggy careers really stand up to Arzachel?
Got the last copies ever of this killer split, direct from the bands, limited to just 100 copies, released to coincide with their just wrapped up Summer tour, and which teams up Ash Borer from Arcata with Fell Voices from Santa Cruz. A seriously brutal and kick ass Northern California USBM match up for sure. We've raved about Fell Voices before, but this is the first we've heard from Ash Borer, who sound pretty perfect alongside their sonically similarly brethren, offering up a 21 minute side long black metal epic, that slips smoothly from soaring, frenzied majestic black metal riffery, to woozy, loping, but still super distorted and raw, post rock flecked doom, to swirling black ambience, to lumbering spaced out psychedelic drift, lacing shimmery sheets of washed out guitar over plodding minor key melancholy, before building gradually back into a dense tribal crush, and then finally another bout of thrashing black buzz.
Fell Voices fill up their side of the tape, with another single sidelong jam, and much like last year's self-titled lp, unfurls a dark, brooding epic bit of blackness, beginning with a cloud of looped muted riffage, streaks of burnished feedback, slowly swelling and swaying, stretched out into some serious droniness, before some warped minor key guitar melodies, and buried in the mix blast beats surface, not turning the song into blasting blackness, instead just adding some strange texture to that deep black drone, the song wavery and woozy, until finally the band kicks in full bore, but even then, it's not typical black metal, it's super mathy, and intricate, lots of dynamics, all spaced out, guitar harmonics drifting over insanely dense drumming, and riffage so blurred and black, it almost just sounds like pulses of blacknoize. The song seems to coalesce into a driving blast of murky black thrum, bits of melody surfacing from the blurred black expanse, super tranced out and hypnotic and most importantly, especially in a genre like black metal, totally twisted and unlike almost any other BM we've heard.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Already out of print. Last copies EVER!
Not only have Barn Owl become one of our favorite musical projects right here in SF, but they are now serious contenders to the throne of best purveyors of deep hitting and soul satisfying drone anywhere in the world. While just about everything they've released up to this point has been way too limited and thus are now all sadly out of print, they finally have a release that while still limited will at least get to reach a lot more ears then anything they've put out so far. These are sounds that deserve to be heard by anyone with an appreciation for all things droney, stoney and drifty, done so totally right.
While drone-folk bands have become a somewhat common entity in the last couple years, it's actually rare when you hear one that you really feel true soul and spirited passion from. From Our Mouths A Perpetual Light finds Barn Owl striking a perfect balance between sparkling sonics and commanding doom. Imagine Sleep/OM running in the mud with sticks and stones and then meeting up with Windy & Carl, Bardo Pond and Tom Carter. The lp format suits the duo so well, as their songs are filled with deep and slowly swirling grooves. We just listened to one side over and over and over before we even moved on to the second side with which we then did the same. There is both patience and payoff in Barn Owl's sound. Music that makes you want to close your eyes because you know you are entranced by atrists that know so well what they are doing. While they pressed up way more lps than anything else they've released, it's all relative, meaning these LP's are not going to be around too long, in fact we weren't even able to get as many as we ordered. Highly recommended, but act fast!
This is not actually new, but this is the first time we've been able to get this, and the moment we heard it, we knew it was something we had to list! Recorded in 1999, and orginally released in 2002, The Wheel Of The Law compiles three epic pieces of gorgeous minimalism from Russian composer Anton Batagov. Three discs, three tracks composed for organ, glockenspiel, xylophone, piano and percussion, inspired by Buddhism and the Quest for Nirvana, and the practices involved: peace, meditation, deep thought, breathing, conciousness. Repetitive and melodic, lush and so so beautiful. Someone once referred to Batagov as sounding "like Reich on vodka", not sure we hear the vodka, or even any sounds distinctly and immediately recognizably Russian, but there is certainly plenty of Reich here, as well as Riley, and most definitely some Harold Budd, especially in the delicate, spare piano arrangements. The first disc, "Circle Of Time" is four long movements of warm rich swells of organ, flowing lazily beneath delicate cyclical chimes and abstract piano figures, very dramatic and hypnotic. The second disc, the 4 track Voidness cycle: "Appearances And Voidness", "Clarity And Voidness", "Bliss And Voidness", "Mind And Voidness", introduces the same delicate chimes found on the first disc, but this time over a repeating series of haunting moaning violin melodies. Minor key and mildly atonal, the melodies are spread out over a spare background of complex overtones, all drifting dreamily into space. The final disc: "Liberation Through Listening In The Between" is again a massive sprawl of lush static organ drones, wavering and subtly pulsing, with simple three and four note melodies played out over minutes instead of seconds, chiming and ringing, resonating above the organ's mesmerizing drone, the whole thing supported by a barely there framework of simple percussion, so subtle and simple that it's basically a single drum, muted and way down in the mix, offering a sort of pulse for the piece, a musical heartbeat, slowed down, as if in meditation or contemplation.
So completely an utterly breathtaking.
At this point, there is most definitely a Captured Tracks sound, and thankfully it's one we love, and can't seem to get enough of, but CT keep digging up these bands who sound like they could have been conjured up in some sort of Captured Tracks laboratory if such a thing existed (it doesn't?).
Blouse might be one of our favorite CT bands so far, their sound a gorgeously dark and moody, brooding and minimal eighties style gloom pop, but very stripped down and skeletal, the rhythm section tight and muted, the female vocals ethereal and drifty, with the occasional cool reverbed guitars, the A side featuring a sultry, breathy almost 4AD sounding chorus, very brief before the group slip right back into those low slung minimal verses, while the B side is a bit janglier, still plenty dark and moody, with a very Cure like mottled bassline, the vocals even breezier than on the flipside, the arrangement similarly spare, the songs both surprisingly hooky. One of those singles we find ourselves flipping back and forth and listening to over and over, which is always a good sign...
We've long been fans of burly bearded post doom crushers The Body, their sound like the classic two man pummel of godheadSilo expanded into something even more majestic and sprawling, black hole heavy, infusing their ultra doom glacial sludge with plenty of post and rock mathisms, the cinematic tension of groups like Godspeed, and heck, they even cover songs by folks like Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and Sinead O'Connor! For a two piece, these guys pretty much transcend and obliterate any sort of limitations that lineup would pose to most mere musical mortals, but that said, plenty of two pieces have seen fit to expand, say to a trio or a quartet, maybe just to record, get a few guests, or even permanently, ditching the duo which sometimes gets focused on more than the music. But few bands (dare we say, practically none) expand further than that, say from 2 members to THIRTY TWO! But that's exactly what The Body has done for All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood, their second proper full length in ages, one that marks ten years as a band, and more importantly, marks a serious sonic shift. No longer are they scrappy DIY punk rock noisemakers, setting their sites above and beyond, these guys have gone for it, meticulously crafting an album of extreme heaviness, of sonic mystery, haunting, and epic, metal for sure, even going so far as to include an actual 13 member choir, and not just for little random bits here and there, nearly seven minutes of the ten minute opening track, is just choir, lilting and angelic, lovely and otherworldly, only making the sudden shift from ethereal vocal harmony to crushing downtuned ultra doom all the more jarring. But the coolest part, is that the parts aren't clearly delineated. The choir continues on into the heaviness, so the howling churning crush, is peppered with gorgeous hymn like vocals, creating some sort of strangely liturgical sounding swirly sludge. And it's not just the vocals, there's saxophone, samples, piano, plenty of noise. And that pretty much sets the template for the whole record.
Besides the Assembly Of Light Choir, who are featured on almost every song here, the record also features Robert Lowe of Lichens offering up some additional vocals, not to mention the other 15 or 16 guests who contribute, beyond the core Body duo of drums, guitar, samples and vocals, a pretty crazy array of soundmakers, more vocals, saxophone, sousaphone, guitar, piano, keyboards, Moog, baritone saxophone and more drums. LOTS more drums. In fact, on the final track, "Lathspell I Name You" drummer Lee Buford is joined by EIGHT extra drummers!!! More on that in a moment.
The second track "A Curse" begins with a loping post rock beat, swirling synths, a melancholy melody, soaring chiming guitars, very moody and slow burning, before the band explodes into full doom, the sound shifts too, the crystalline clearness, becomes big and booming, the sound blown out, but more sort of warm and muted than in the red, the drums massive and pounding, while the guitars swirl in little chordal clouds, and the anguished vocals howl and wail, which gives way to "Empty Hearth", which sounds like some abstract experimental Swans style track, looped sample of what sounds like speaking in tongues, lurching mechanical crunch, glitched out electronics, shrieking vox, the whole song occasionally stuttering to a halt, as if the song was being remixed or was gloriously malfunctioning, there's also some awesome guttural throat singing, laced underneath the start stop, sample skitter, and super distorted bass buzz.
"Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss" starts with tarpit riffery and blurred hiss, strangely atmospheric, the drums skeletal but subtly mathy, the choir adding their gorgeous harmonies, an epic spiritual doom, tolling bells, everything dropping out, leaving just the booming drums, the shrieked vox, those bells, until a thick layer of low end washes over everything, and the track unwinds as some classic funereal doom.
"Song Of Sarin The Brave" begins all blown out and tangled up, sheets of feedback, huge heaving bursts of titanic metallic crunch, mysterious voices, finally the band launches into the song proper, and things get really weird, the drums stripped way down, the whole track slathered in strange murky blur and melting effects, while underneath, a strange sampled voice drifts, through clouds of other voices and mysterious sounds, totally creepy, and beautiful, and so mesmerizing, it goes on forever, and could have gone on way longer, but instead finishes off in a minute long blaze of shrieking black doom sludge crush.
"Ruiner" is another smoldering slow starter, haunting, downtuned minor key riffs ring out, doomic drums pound out a barely there rhythm, again, all underpinned by a strange staticky cloud of hiss and gauzy atmospheric hum, the track starting out super spare, but gradually growing more and more dense, more and more doomy, gathering momentum, not rhythmically so much as sonically, the progression laced subtly with strings and horns, little streaks of psychedelic guitars, until finally exploding into a lumbering dirge, the instruments blackened and crumbling, less riffy than a throbbing organic black buzz, pounding and pummeling before blinking out abruptly.
Which leads us to the final track, the 14 minute, multiple drummer-ed side long "Lathspell I Name You", a heaving, expansive ultra doom epic, a churning looped riff and some busy drumming start the track off, not doomy at all really, more noise rock or post rock, with some gorgeous folky melodies woven in, the choir offering up their lovely harmonies, but in this context, they sound less angelic and slightly demonic, locked into their own looped pattern mirroring, the motorik metal loop underneath, which gives way to a weirdly records, noise drum blowout, voices and instruments hissing and buzzing while a cacophony of drums pound and crash, mesmerizing and hypnotic, before the glacial chug resurfaces, along with the choir, and the band lock into a seriously slow motion, abrasive cathartic doom sludge crawl, the sound growing more and more blown out until every drum hit pegs the needles and distorts everything, making the sound that much more caustic and emotional and intense.
The roots of The Body's sound may be in doom or sludge, or even simply metal, but All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood has taken that sound so far beyond, transforming sludge and doom into something way more transcendent, way more difficult to immediately categorize, it's melodic, and poppy, and mathy, and drone-y, and electronic, and experimental, epic and majestic and mysterious, while somehow still remaining brutal, and pummeling and heavy as fuck. Fans of the usual suspects will probably dig this big time, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, Monarch, Nihill, Otesanek (in fact the liner notes read: "All Praise To Otesanek And Man Is The Bastard"), Eyehategod, Habsyll, Fleshpress, but be prepared to look beyond the realms of traditional doom, or of conventional heaviness, because The Body are anything but traditional or conventional, and All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood just might be the coolest, weirdest, most original doom record EVER.
Incredible packaging too, heavy vinyl (3 sided, the 4th side is blank), thick, gatefold sleeve, with some chillingly striking artwork, a printed 12" x 12" insert silver reflective ink printed on black cardstock, liner notes and lineup on one side, lyrics on the other...
We're not sure how these guys (and gal) do it, but somehow, SF's own sludge/dirge/grind/noise mavens Burmese, make record after record, everyone a mind blowing slab of ultra heaviness and absolute head caving pummel, on all sorts of cool labels, tUMULt, Rock Is Hell, Enterruption, Planaria, Load, Not Not Fun, Heart & Crossbone, New Scream Industry, Crucial Blast and now UgExplode, yet they somehow remain for the most part totally under the radar. They've definitely had some bad luck, but this is crazy. If you've ever seen Burmese play, in any of their permutations, they utterly destroy. Their worst shows are better than most band's best shows. In fact, their worst shows might just be their best shows. Two basses, manned by two Mikes, each with a stack of amps piled to the ceiling, two drummers too, at least on this record, spewing out wild octopoidal tangles of beats and rhythms, no guitar, they sure as fuck don't need one of those, and then to top it off Tissue, their diminutive female lead vocalist, who dresses in skirts and sweaters, but then turns into a beast on the mic, with some impossibly throat shredding vokills, the band so impossibly tight, especially considering how insane their songs are slipping from ultra intricate mathy grindprog, to spaced out nearly abstract free noise whatthefuck.
We say this about every record, but this just might be their best yet. And c'mon, that's how it should be with all bands, every record should be better than the last, and considering how goddamn good their first record was about 10 records back, well then guess how good Lun Yurn is. Yep. Exactly.
They're pretty hard to describe actually. Heavy, for sure. Metal, sort of. Punk, absolutely. Noisy. Grindy. But also mathy, proggy, droney, noisy, chaotic. Their songs generally flail from blasting D-beat pound, to doomy lurching plod, to grinding noise drenched blast, to weird super dynamic stop/start breakdown, and back again, the two basses unleashing thick gouts of power violence style riffery, the multiple drummers (one of which is Weasel Walter on this record) anchoring the impossibly chaotic crush, somehow all of these disparate elements, and all of this intense caustic sound, is deftly assembled into the sort of grinding metallic noisepunk jams that actually stick in your head. It's true. Not sure, how, or why, but we never get tired of this band or these songs, or seeing them lay waste live. It'd be pointless to go song by song, listen to the sound samples, if you're not totally bowing before the altar of Burmese, well then there just might be something wrong with you.
Stick around to the very end cuz there's an extra track, a whopping 45 minute jam, that one track 50 percent longer than the whole rest of the record, and it's an impossibly relentless, insanely chaotic, non stop frantic, frenzied, frenetic, blown out grindpsych blowout. Fuck.
Who would have thought? A new Burzum record, after his release from16 years in prison. Has it really been 16 years? And who would have thought the new Burzum would actually be really really great?! Certainly not us, especially after the last two stinkers, the made-in-jail, all-synth Daudi Baldrs and Hildskjalf. And the last one of those was more than 11 years ago! And let's not forget Varg's prison conversion, becoming a neo fascist, a Nazi, spouting white pride rhetoric, hell, this record was even originally titled "The White God", not to mention that he's in fact a convicted murderer and an arsonist. But it's always been like that with Burzum, and much of black metal, but in Burzum's case in particular, we try to not confuse/conflate the man with the music, and to be fair, for some that's not possible, no one could fault a person for not wanting to support a musician who espouses reprehensible views, and one way is by not listening to their music, and not buying their records. But as we've posited before, your record collection would begin to get pretty sparse, once you eliminated records made by assholes, and by people whose politics you disagreed with, but again, it's perfectly fair to do just that.
But for those of you who can in fact separate the music from the musician, then Belus is a pretty serious and solid return to form. Not so much Filosefem as Det Som Engang Var and Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. The same guitar tone, the same epic riffage, the same raspy vokills, for someone who was not allowed a guitar for the last decade plus, it's pretty amazing that in the space of less than a year, he somehow managed to come up with this. Granted some of these tracks are older, but for the most part this is a brand new record, could be that it was formulated over the past decade, the result of all that pent up emotion, this fierce and furious chunk of black buzz, weirdly melodic in places, very trancelike all the way through, with lots of spoken word mixed into the frantic riffing and blasting beats... The record is at its strongest when it's the most Burzumic, blown out buzz, frenzied riffing over loping midtempo rhythms, the riffing surprisingly layered and complex, check out "Morgenroede" with the relentless main riff shifting from fast picking, to dizzyingly looped arpeggiation, making the whole song swoon and warble, before lurching back into a buzz drenched lumber. The closing track, "Belus' Tilbakeomst (Konklusjon)" is pretty incredible as well, super intense and droney and atmospheric, the riffing almost static, building all sorts of tension, layer upon layer, various notes and overtones ringing out, the playing frantic and frenzied, but with very little forward momentum, almost like some weird sort of black raga drone, rendered in black buzz. There's lots of that sort of unlikely innovation going on here, every time we play this in the store, people come to the counter to find out what the heck it is, and then they can't believe it's Burzum. Or, rather, they might very well have thought it was Burzum, but can't believe it's the NEW Burzum.
It's too bad for Burzum, and for this record, that Belus will forever be saddled with so much non musical baggage, though it's his own damn fault, cuz once you dig through all the shit, get past all the politics, all the rumors and racist rhetoric, past all the expectations and the various scenesters and tastemakers, past the fact that he's really just a total fuckhead, if you can forget just for a second what led up to the creation of this record, Belus could very well end up being one of the best black metal records of the year.
NB. There IS vinyl, or rather WAS, but the first pressing is sold out, and the copies we got are long gone, but eventually they'll do another pressing.
There was a time where all you had to do was add umlauts to every vowel (heck how about a few consonants too?) to make your band name more evil. More mysterious. For glam rockers it simply meant changing s's to z's, BOYZ, TOYZ, NOYZE... oh and changing i's to y's, and double o's always helped... Bad Noose. But recently, there have been several examples of grim black and doom metal bands adding an extra 'i' for no apparent reason. When it was just French black metallers Mutiilation, we thought, okay, they're just French and little bit strange, or maybe it was a typo but they thought it was cool. We can dig that. But now with Minnesotan funereal doom lords Celestiial jumping on the double 'i' bandwagon, we're beginning to think something is going on. Something sinister. Er... siiniister we mean.
Anyway, we'll just have to keep our eyes peeled for more of the evil double 'i' but in the meantime, Celestiial has more than just the 2 i's going for them. They also have a gaggle of o's. that's right. Celestiial are definitely one of those bands who have earned the multiple o'd doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. They're in the tradition of bands like Skepticism, Thergothon, Disembowelment, Evoken, Winter and more modern practitioners of the ultradoom like Catacombs, Esoteric and the like, but Celestiial are no ordinary doom band, sure their songs are lengthy and glacial, guitars are nothing but black smears in a starless sky, the plodding drums are dropped reverently amidst a bleak and barren sonic landscape. Vocals growl and gurgle and float weightless like some dark wind. Celestiial's doom is even more spacey and blissed out than any of their influences. The guitars are thick and dense and tuned impossibly low, but they sound soft, like someone shaking out a huge black blanket and letting it settle over you, blocking out all light. The programmed drums are so dense with reverb, and the cymbals seem to sizzle endlessly, the percussion just turns into a wash of hiss and whir, that adds a strange fuzzy glow to the already murky and blissy sound. The other thing you can't help but notice, is the sound of nature, everywhere, in every song, crickets, wind blowing through the trees, frogs, whippoorwills, thunder, rain falling on leaves. You know how Skepticism sounds like it was recorded in a forest? This is like that too but it's not metaphorical, it really has forest sounds. It's almost like their is some black doom funeral procession, trudging through the forest, lit only by torchlight, the creatures of the night, gathered just outside the circle of fire. So intense and strangely serene, especially for a 'doom metal' record.
And the thing is it's not just for effect. Celestiial are from Minnesota and are quite possibly the first reflective, isolationist, naturist doom band ever. From the band's website: "Celestiial was created to mirror mysticism in nature. Its heart lies not in its medium but in its dreams. It is a reflection of astral light shown upon the earth--sinking into its soil--waiting and dreaming. It wishes to be the pulse of woodlands and water. Nothing more? Understand that funeral doom isn't always slow for the sake of being slow. It is slower than the beat of the human heart. Its pulse is dead. The pulse of CELESTIIAL aims at being completely parallel to continual motion in everything of this earth. From the seasonal changes to representations of myth."
Woah. But if you really listen, Celestiial's slow motion doom does sound perfectly at home amidst the sounds of nature. Like some living breathing shadowy doomic creature living among the insects and wild birds, lurking in tree tops and curled up upon soft piles of wet leaves. It's almost like a doom metal version of recent record of the week Osmose, by Ariel Kalma, but instead of synths and rainforests, it's doom and dark forests. And as if to further tie the music to the land, and the peoples of the land, Celestiial incorporate an unlikely selection of traditional instruments into their slow motion dirges, such as Celtic harp and Native American flutes.
All of that, strange instrumentation, nature sounds, the two i's, combine to make this wonderfully weird, hauntingly mysterious and quite possibly one of the dreamiest and most blissed out doom records ever!
When we first heard Chancha Via Circuito's debut a few years back, it was one of the those magical moments when a record by an unknown artist seemed to stop time and everything around us as we became completely emerged in their dubbed out, Latin American cumbia-inspired sounds.
With the follow up, Chancha Via Circuito prove that record number one was no fluke, as this album melts and sizzles with its own seductive flair. Sonically it's like some awesome mix of Twilight Circus Dub Sound System, Fauna, Kit Clayton, Massive Attack, Prince Far I, and Rainbow Arabia.
Mixing elements of cumbia, minimal techno, dub, and adding strains of traditional folk from the sprawling roads they've traveled near their home outside Buenos Aires, which has taken them across the border to Bolivia and beyond. Like one of our other favorite modern South American psychedelic music makers Las Malas Amistades, Chancha Via Circuito have this amazing ability to incorporate their surroundings and heritage and bring it into the future without compromising its integrity.
Four new songs - well actually four OLD songs, but new to us and probably new to you too - from the mighty Christian Mistress, whose debut on the 20 Buck Spin label was a very popular, very metal Record Of The Week here last year. Now illustrator/metalhead Dennis Dread's new label Unseen Forces has, for their very first release, reissued CM's original 2009 4-song demo tape on 12", 45rpm vinyl, in a limited edition of 350 copies, already sold out at the label. And we got just a tiny handful. The songs: "Poison Path", "Never Let Go", "Anoxic Living", "Black Out". All good examples of what makes these female-fronted, NWOBHM-infuenced retro-metal rippers so damn great.
Remixed, remastered for vinyl, with new cover art by vocalist Christine Davis, handscreened, with lyrics sheet.
We've been so focused on the Paysage D'Hiver reissues lately, that we've barely had time to dig into the other releases on Cold Dimensions and Kunsthall, but there are at least two that we definitely need to highlight, the latest Trist, which we'll review soon, and this one right here. Melancholie2, from German one man band Coldworld, quite possibly, one of the best depressive black metal records we've ever heard. Although defining Melancholie2 as a depressive BM record might be a bit reductive. It will make more sense, read on...
A dizzying mix of lilting melancholia, furious blackened blasts, epic morose arrangements, awesome drumming (a definite shortcoming in most bands), kick ass and ridiculously catchy riffing, and most importantly, incredibly evocative atmosphere and ambience, even when a song is buzzing along frantically, beneath the surface there is always some sort of drifting crystalline melody, or whirring drone, or chant like vocal line, it sounds a bit confusing, but the mix is magical.
The sound on Melancholie2 is so dynamic, so majestic and heavy, no lo-fi boom box recording here, the guitars are massive, thick and crunchy and buzzy, the vocals raw and primal, the keyboards and synths lush and shimmery, the drums somehow perfectly audible amidst all the buzz. And as with most black metal records, buzz is a key component, and here that buzz is all encompassing, warm and expansive, coating everything in its warm embrace.
The slower tracks are definitely Burzumic, the lumbering riff, the plodding rhythm, underpinned by a gorgeous keyboard melody, the midtempo tracks are like a less weird Lifelover, the music hooky, and weirdly poppy, but still grim and black, slipping from melodic lilt to intense speaker shredding blowout, rare that a band, or man as the case may be is equally adept and crafting doomy dismal blackness AND intense blasting black metal. The ambient tracks are surprisingly effective, moving and lovely, most black metal bands use cheesy synth sounds, but here, those parts sound like antique music boxes, or the soundtrack to a soft snowfall in some forgotten forest, dark, and haunting, but definitely beautiful and breathtaking, only moreso when they lead directly into another intense burst of blackness.
Some of the tracks are dangerously poppy, but the band manages to pull it off, channelling the sweeping sound of Katatonia, but adds some truly bizarre, almost robotic sounding vocals, which definitely sounds goofy, but in fact, the effect is anything but. It's more some sort of abstract alien doom, that is truly creepy and otherworldly. A few of the tracks are gorgeous sprawls of washed out sorrowful doom, but at least one shifts part way through into a strange pounding bit of minor key midtempo black metal, before slipping back into that depressive plod.
It's really hard to do this music justice. It's at once so familiar, embodying so much of what we already love about this sort of music, at the same time, it manages to sound unlike anything we've heard before, every song manages to be both heavy and wistful, depressive, but weirdly rocking, as a whole it's an incredible, expansive song suite, culminating in the final track, a skittery glitched out ambient landscape, bits of static and hiss drift between simpler percussion, and a shuffling rhythm, moody minimal guitar, slightly twangy, all draped over a swoonsome bit of minor key drone, with a crunchy metallic middle, before slipping back into more skittery melancholic drift. So goddamn good.
Quite possibly one of our new favorite records, black metal or otherwise!
We reviewed the first three reissues from legendary punk rock outfit Crass a few lists back, and now here's the 4th (of 6) in the series Anarcho-punk legends Crass are finally getting the deluxe reissue campaign they always deserved, but probably never really wanted anyway. Having spent the seventies and eighties kicking against the pricks, these DIY iconoclasts pretty much lived and breathed punk rock like few others since, making music, putting on gigs, setting up squats, coordinating political actions, starting a label, creating art, making films, advocating animal rights, environmentalism, feminism, direct action, anarchism, pacifism, criticizing various subcultures, encouraging dialogues, and encouraging participation and protest, and obviously, and perhaps most pertinent to this here review, making some of the most awesome punk records EVER.
These records sound impossibly and incredibly fresh, intense and dramatic and emotional, heavy and hooky, jagged and jittery, their ideals clearly on display, backed up by musical muscle, pop smarts, and some super original and innovative sounds and songs. The crazy thing, revisiting these records again, is how much they've influenced modern underground music, there are at least a handful of bands, who now with these records fresh in our ears, sound almost criminally beholden to Crass: Arctic Monkeys, The Fall, Louis XIV, Art Brut... the list goes on.
Legendary for a reason, all the Crass records should be required listening for punks and metalheads and hell, anyone into underground sounds, and are totally worth revisiting, we had sort of forgotten how goddamn great all three of these records are, and even if you still own beat up original copies, there's enough extra stuff, music and artwork wise, that they're totally worth picking up again...
Christ The Album, Crass's 4th full length, might be the group's most famous (or infamous), again not shying away from controversy, right down to the record's title, and of course the lyrical content, sonically, Christ found the band sounding as full and lush and well produced as ever. The sound was still frantic, and frenzied, blasting and thrashing and relentless, but surprisingly polished, and the band at their least 'punk', the tracks rife with killer hooks, and plenty of pop, but the record itself remained difficult, and as concerned with the message as the music, loads of samples, all the tracks beginning with a little filmstrip style beep, followed by snippets of newscasts and interviews and various other politically charged recordings before the songs kicked in.
And nowhere was this poppier sound more evident than on "Beg Your Pardon" which sounds almost like their own version of "Train In Vain" (the song infamously left off the sleeve of the Clash's London Calling, supposedly because it was WAY too poppy, although officially it was because the track was added at the last minute), which is funny, considering Crass' outspoken disdain for The Clash, but "Beg Your Pardon" is impossibly hooky, with jangly guitars, irresistible melodies, and at times does sound quite a bit like the Clash. There's also the brooding, super rhythmic "Birth Control Rock 'n' Roll", with its frantic drumming and harmony vox, and the soaring, epic, drone-y and almost proggy "Reality Whitewash", and we could go on and on...
After this, the band would release just one more record (the sprawling single song/album Yes Sir, I Will) so Christ definitely stands as the final testament to Crass's sonic journey from the raw punk of The Feeding Of The 5000, to the polished pop flecked punk found here.
Like the original vinyl reissue, the original disc is augmented by a second disc, a collection of demos and studio outtakes, called Well Forked - But Not Dead, and like the other reissues, there's a massive booklet including liner notes and lyrics, as well as a fold out poster, all housed in a super swank slipcover, which fits together with all the other reissues, the various covers combining to form a single image. Cool.
As anyone with even a passing interest in the catalogue of Current 93 can attest, David Tibet's visionary poetry has always been a central facet to his work. The lyrics have gradually become more and more enmeshed into his deeper personal studies into the mythologies surrounding the Christian apocalypse, the various heresies involving Gnosticism and Patipatrianism, the texts of Crowley and other practitioners of the dark arts, and more recently, the ancient texts of Coptic Christians. The resulting imagery has become all the more convoluted beyond the pitting of Christ and Satan in existential conflict over the fate of the world. A brief bit of marketing states Honeysuckle Aeons to be "dreams of the crucifixion with Christ and two thieves ascending" and, we'll have to take Tibet at his word that all of his lyrical content is in someway revolving around this concept. Musically, Honeysuckle Aeons is a typically solemn affair, with the arrangements hedging towards the sparse end of the C93 spectrum (especially Soft Black Stars). The use of Theremin throughout the album is a novel one, interlocked with the delicate Satie-like notes on the piano from Baby Dee. We have to admit being much more partial to the heavier, darker, and / or more psychedelic incarnations of the C93 sound (e.g. Dogs Blood Rising, Thunder Perfect Mind, Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain, etc.), but here the Theremin-laced arrangements put all of the focus on Tibet's esoteric word (which is often "honeysuckle", he says that a lot here) and thought.
Deafheaven are a new band from right here in the Bay Area, who have been causing quite a stir lately in the metal underground, their soaring epic, super melodic black metal dividing the grim hordes right down the middle. Obviously, purists don't consider this to be black metal at all, which in some ways is fair, just listen to the opening 4 minutes of record opener "Violet", there's not a trace of blackness to be found, instead, you'll here Explosions In The Sky, Godspeed, Mogwai, majestic, bombastic, melodic, gorgeously lush and expansive. But then wait a few more seconds... and BAM, the band EXPLODE in a frenzy of buzzing and pounding blackend crush, rife with howled vokills, gnarled riffage, and there's no doubt that this is black metal, but not Immortal / Mayhem / Darkthrone black metal, no, it's more in line with the more melodic end of the BM spectrum, think Alcest, Fell Voices, Fauna, Wolves In The Throne Room, Deafheaven definitely have that Cascadian BM vibe going on too, but all of their blackness and buzz is most definitely tempered with heaping helpings of melody. Even at its most frenzied, Deafheaven essentially sound like Mogwai or EITS supercharged and metallized, it's still soaring and epic and majestic, just wrapped in thick swirling sheets of black metal buzz, and hell, it sounds pretty goddamn amazing.
The production is lush, the sound MASSIVE, the guitars thick and distorted, except when they're ringing out all clear and chiming, the arrangements are pretty expansive and epic too, blasting buzz giving way to droned out drift, which in turn gives way to another blast of furious melodic blackness.
Just four tracks, but they're all long, lots of parts, all moody and melodic, a dizzying hybrid of black metal, screamo and post rock, reminds us a little of a WAY more metal version of recent Record Of The Week-ers Pianos Become The Teeth, but where that band melded old school screamo to epic post rock, Deafheaven do the same with buzzing melodic black metal, the result, while perhaps not grim enough for some, is pretty tough to resist. And while we love how the songs shift from slow build brood to black blast, and back again, the real magic of Deafheaven is how they combine the two, taking churning buzzing blackness and laying some soaring coruscating shoegazey guitar chords over the top, or winding majestic, chiming, impossibly melancholic clean guitar melodies and lush textures into howling vokills and grinding black riffage, and while in battles between good and evil, we usually bet black, in this case, melody always seems to prevail, transforming what could have been just another chunk of blasting buzz into something gorgeous and transcendental.
Reading is funda-METAL with Decibel magazine. Sorry. But it is a good read, if you're into metal. This month's issue bears a striking photo of Ghost's frontman on the cover, and those rockin' Swedish Satanists are profiled inside. Others this ish: Gorguts, Electro Quarterstaff (hey, glad to hear they're working on new stuff!), Altar Of Plagues, Scale The Summit, Vintersorg, In Solitude, Anaal Nathrakh, Mastodon, Eric Rutan of Hate Eternal, Killing Joke (Hall of Fame article on their self-titled debut), and more... including a look inside the upcoming Slayer Mag book (can't wait!) and tons of reviews, news, columns, etc.
Gotta tell you, we should be selling a lot more of these (and Terrorizer) than we do. At least as many as we sell of The Wire. C'mon...
A heady slab of tripped out psychedelic sonic spirituality from this new project of Pat Murano, who also counts himself a member of NY free jazz / drone rock / avant hippy collective No Neck Blues Band, weirdo black metal horde Malkuth and cosmic outsider explorationists K-Salvatore. Murano continues on his own peculiar and bafflingly brilliant path, with the debut release from his solo project Decimus, the first in a high concept, 12 part (as in 12 lp) series of records based on the medieval zodiac of Decimus Magus Ausonius, a Latin poet and rhetorician.
Two side long meditations, the first begins with soft shimmering clouds of tinkling melodies, and ethereal ambience, over some haunting processed mantra like looped vox, hazy and druggy, wreathed in keening high end and lilting barely there melodies, and muted bits of abstract percussion. Eventually, FX drenched sitar like buzz surfaces, adding a whole other dimension to the trancelike drift, that buzz pulsing and stuttering percussive and slightly corrosive, the sounds growing ever more spacey and swirly, a warped dreamlike buzz that gradually decays and crumbles, the effects growing more and more chaotic, before finishing off with a brief super intense white hot sonic squall.
The second side is another slow burning musical mantra, loping, warm woozy buzz over a bed of softly roiling hiss and soft focus whir, sounding almost like Zomes or Daniel Higgs or Amps For Christ, cyclical, repetitive and mesmerizing. The dreamy drift is soon joined by a crunchy corrosive rhythm, which lurches and lumbers before transforming into a weird skeletal beat, the sound almost Middle Eastern, the low end super distorted, a deep rib cage rattling thrum, all the sounds again gradually growing more and more blurred and distorted, some freaky creepy robotic vocals only adding to the confusional cacophony, but still that initial loop/groove remains, a solid rhythmic anchor, keeping the track trancelike, while all around sounds swirl and swoop, flecks of fragmented melodies surface and are quickly swallowed up, before everything dissolves into a cloud of staticky hiss.
We already can't wait for the next 11 volumes! (we actually have the next one, Decimus 1 in stock, just ask if you want one of those too!)
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Housed in hand painted and hand stenciled covers.
It's been a few weeks since the madness and fun of Record Store Day, but actually there were a few intended-for-Record-Store-Day releases that were delayed, and are only now, luckily, falling into our laps.
Here's one, a shredding 7" from local heroes The Dodos that just arrived and whoo boy we're happy that it has, as these are two of the most rocking and raw tracks from these guys that we've ever heard. Both tracks are previously unreleased and show how great these guys are at crafting impassioned and driving songs, so focused and so ecstatic. What's extra cool about these songs is they are a bit less produced and shiny than their albums, showing that this is indeed a band that sounds just as good raw and rugged as lush and orchestrated. Makes us so excited to see these guys play and experience all this frenetic sonic energy live. Grab one of these while they last! LIMITED NUMBERED EDITION!
The further Earth evolves, the harder it is to believe they were once THEE progenitors of the doomdronedirgesludge sound that's so prevalent these days. They began life as a sludgey, druggy, slo-mo avant riff behemoth, no one could have imagined they would have turned into this, a dusty, twangy, deserty, moody minimal slowcore combo, with a sound that has essentially evolved into a score to some stark, spare, imaginary black and white independent film, more soundtrack, imagined or not, than proper rock band, let alone, METAL band, which is how they have been traditionally categorized. But Angels Of Darkness, like the last few Earth records before it, is most definitely not metal, not even heavy really, at least in the traditional sense, this one even in the NON traditional senses, instead, it's again dark and brooding, evocative and emotional, cinematic and soundtracky, the core sound has again been expanded to include strings, which only adds to the whole moody minimal soundtrack vibe. But hell, it still suits them, we now have enough other bands doing the whole slow and low dirge and drone thing, and if anything, Angels Of Darkness might be Earth's most full realized stab and capturing their 'new' sound. No pretenses, no strings attaching them to the old Earth, very few allusions, sonic or otherwise, to the ghost of doom past, they're even more secure on the new path they set out on years ago, and it shows, each of the long tracks here unwinds gradually, a slow, swirling smoldering bit of twang flecked slowcore, a little bit droney, the guitars spidery and crystalline, the bass and drums super minimal, the cello doing much of the heavy lifting this time around, its deep throaty buzz, the perfect compliment to the band's sun baked shimmer, and bleak drowsy moodiness. Not a huge shift in sound, but then nobody wanted that, we just wanted more, more slithery, sun dappled darkness, more summery shadowy twang, and that's what Angels Of Darkness is, more just a honing and perfecting of a sound that's already pretty perfect, and exactly what you'd want to be playing in the background as you wandered down the dusty street of some old ghost town, and a perfect fit alongside the rest of your 'Ghost Town' mix alongside Scenic, Tulsa Drone, Barn Owl, Calexico, Sixteen Horsepower, and the rest.
Originally released on Touch as a cd, now available on vinyl via the always kick ass Digitalis...
Kiri No Oto was the first album that Lawrence English released for the venerable Touch Music label (now, as mentioned above on Digitalis). This after a number of releases via his own Room 40 imprint, which bridged environmental recordings and somber electronics with sublime results; but there's been little to indicate that he would generate something as stellar as Kiri No Oto. The Japanese title loosely translates as 'the sound of fog' or 'the sound of mist.' Both are applicable to the extended blur that this Australian sound-artist generates, with its miasma of soft-focus distortion arching into long-form compositions of minimalism. The album doesn't exactly erupt, as the sounds are more soothing in their softened textures; but English cuts into one of his grey-mass drones with little fanfare. English slowly glides his 'sound of fog' down to a muffled static, then brings up tectonic rumblings and kicks the overdrive in on his distortion box (or more likely, some patch on ye olde laptop) for one of those digital distorto-drones that Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz have been sculpting over the past few years. And yes, we'll throw in an obligatory My Bloody Valentine reference, well because there are plenty of parts here which have the blissed out wash of the ambient interludes on Loveless.
The art, as on the Touch cd version, matches the depth, mystery, serenity, and subtle darkness of this very impressive album.
Ultra limited cassette from Ensemble Economique, aka Brian Pyle, 1/2 of Humboldt avant abstractionists Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings. We've long loved the SW's sprawling rhythmic dronescapery, and on his own, Pyle explores similar sonic territory, but Pyle's approach sans partners seems to be more dense and dark, caustic and abrasive, the rhythmic element balancing the atmospheric elements, like here on the title track, which spreads out over all of the first side. A thick, swirling low end thrum oozes and undulates, it's a hazy blurred rumble, over which Pyle layers heaving shards of crunch, thick throbs, deep bell-like tones, rhythmic machine gun stutters, all of which pile up and overlap, creating a soft cacophony of clatter and crunch, chug and churn, a strangely haunting, and sorta noisy, almost industrial creepscape, that sounds like some weird hybrid of Wolf Eyes, Philip Jeck and Umberto performed by some strange robotic minimalist chamber ensemble. A swirling, heady, and darkly psychedelic barrage of loops and rhythms, layers and textures, mesmerizing and intense.
The flipside is another permutation of Pyle's abstract beat laden drones, another thick swirling morass of sitar-like buzz and sci-fi synth squelch, this time the beats buried, little flurries of stutter and shuffle, squalls of glitchy tangle, more coloring the proceedings than driving them. The last track is a tense soundtracky stretch of layered buzz, haunting melody, a sprawl of pulsing high end over deep ominous rumbles, like the music from the scariest moment in some lost Italian giallo, stretched out into minutes instead of seconds, all tension, no release, brooding and intense, haunting and mesmerizing, fantastic stuff.
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES! We only have a handful direct from Mr. Pyle himself when he was in town, and it's very likely that these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
It's hard to know what to say about these guys. Every record of theirs is great, moody, emotional, lush and layered, smoldering one second, explosive the next, and while instrumental post rock bands may be a dime a dozen, few can match the depth and emotion of EITS (or Mogwai, or Godspeed for that matter). It says something that even though there are a million bands doing something similar, it only takes a few seconds to recognize Explosions. Not sure if it's the sound, the arrangements, the production, or all of those, but they have a sound that is so distinctly their own, all they have to do is play, and we're whisked away.
The opening track here is actually quite a weird one by EITS standards, beginning with some strange samples, a looped rhythm, before the drums come in, some stately piano, and some soaring high end guitar, within seconds the vibe is stirring and intense, a chiming reverbed melody drifts in, and we're gone, this is the sound of warm Summer days, of walking through the woods with friends, it's the musical version of Super8 films of small towns, and late nights, the sound so evocative and expressive, shimmering chords all hazy and washed out, the rhythm oddly loping, everything fading out leaving just fingerpicked acoustic guitar, a weird hiccuping rhythm, distant whirs, some softly tangled melodies, and then when the song picks up again, it's crystalline and sun dappled and so gorgeous, the sound growing more and more lush and layered, not necessarily loud or bombastic, before finally fading out.
The rest of the record plays out exactly how you might expect/hope, warm languid chords drift over hazy dreamy expanses of blissy ambience, big drums pound over lush soaring chords and woozy melodies, post rockisms abound, those sort of loping rhythms, and that distinctive guitar/drum interplay, but EITS add all sorts of subtle (and not so subtle) colorations, little bits of electronic flutter, lush liquid horn like melodies, thick chordal swells, tribal tom fills, layer after layer of guitars crating strangely haunting harmonies, a few bursts of almost explosive heaviness, the final track maybe our favorite of the bunch, with weirdly processed voices, blurred into an atmospheric haze, the drums subtle and skittery, the guitars almost jazzy, soft piano chords, very softly psychedelic, sort of droned out and dreamy, and the track does have a few crescendos, crunchy and heavy and soaring, but those moments are brief, with most of the track spent drifting and brooding. A gorgeous sonic denouement, hushed and haunting, and so so good.
Some of the most amazing packaging EVER. Both the cd and the lp sleeves fold out into a little house, the artwork on the outside of the house, all wood and stone, ivy, a chimney, the wooden door, a mailbox full of letters, some old bikes leaned against the house, inside a fireplace, some old frames leaning against the wall, hardwood floors, an old telephone, with the receiver off the hook, the window and the door open revealing storm clouds and a tornado in the distance. Even the underneath is printed with the framing under the floor of the house. And there's a poster of the land the house sits on, right down to the empty foundation and the surrounding land on one side, the dirt and roots on the other. WOW.
Reunion records can be a huge let down. Sure it's fun to see a band get together and play all their old hits, but the minute you hear those famous last words "Here's a new song we've been working on", most of us tune out. So when those new songs they've been working on get maid into an actual album, we're definitely wary.
But c'mon, it's the Feelies, who as we admitted to in another review, we actually missed out on back in the day, but when we did finally hear the amazing Crazy Rhythms record, and the almost as amazing The Good Earth, we were definitely kicking ourselves. And ever since those records got reissued recently, we have been playing them nonstop. And we were pretty excited to hear this new record. It has been THIRTY ONE years since Crazy Rhythms, and TWENTY since their last full length, but the second this got put on in the store we knew just what it was. The sound is definitely classic Feelies, not as jittery and percussion heavy as Crazy Rhythms, but then neither were any of the other records. The vibe is maybe a bit more mellow and laid back, the guitar playing not as strange and layered as on some of the old records, and the vocals more sung/spoken a la Lou Reed, but we're digging it, a LOT. The sound is warm and familiar, shimmery and jangly, that classic eighties/nineties college/indie rock sound we love so much, and like classic Feelies records, Here Before is a grower, the sound as we mentioned is great, but on repeated listens, the songs begin to seep in, the hooks gradually revealing themselves, and suddenly any of these songs could get stuck in your head.
If you're new to the Feelies, we'd probably recommend Crazy Rhythms or The Good Earth first, although this is really not all that bad a place to start and of course if you're already a fan, you won't be disappointed.
Yet another new record from SF's own Fresh & Onlys, and another fantastic batch of moody, melancholy jangle pop, and while it's hard to know what else to say about these guys, what with them seeming to release a new record practically every month, the minute we get an earful of the latest record, all we wanna do is forget all that and get lost in the new set of songs, mainman Tim Cohen's reservoir of classic pop songs still seemingly bottomless. And with every record, we find ourselves proclaiming some song their best yet, or a new favorite, and hare to say it but we're about to do it again. The title track here is practically perfect, Cohen's deep reverby croon, laid atop a low slung post punk bassline, wrapped in chiming guitars, the production lush and polished, but still quirky, with huge swaths of sound dropping out to let a little guitar lick float all on its own, before the band launch right back in, bit and bombastic. Catchy and hook, broody and darkly dreamy.
The rest of the ep is just as good, the songs ranging from twangy organ driving strum (sounding a bit like Calexico actually), to hazy, melodic sixties dream pop shuffle, and from moody lilting garage-y jangle pop, to moody, murky, dark doleful dirge, the last song "Poison WIne" definitely one of our new F&O favorites, bombastic, lush and buzzy, the refrain a haunting descending minor key melody, the bass thick and fuzzy, the guitars crunchy, the vox weary and washed out, one of their darkest yet, and yeah, we know, but still, maybe one of their best. As always, recommended!
Gabby La La is known in the Bay Area and beyond for her very imaginative and playful musical mind. She has played alongside folks like Les Claypool, who actually released her previous solo outing. I Know You Know I Know finds Gabby making all her beats and electronics with a Nintendo DS Lite as well as playing sitar, Theremin, ukulele and singing in her childlike voice. In fact the record sounds like it could be an awesome soundtrack for some new super cool psychedelic cartoon for kids...
We first heard these Irish garage rockers on a split with SF outfit Brilliant Colors, their sound reminding us of big time aQ faves Crystal Stilts, their brand of jangly garage rock similarly haunting, and listening to their full length, we definitely still hear shades of CS, we're imagining it has much to do with the vocals, a deep reverbed croon, that even here reminds us of groups like Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders and the Scientists, but the difference is that the Crystal Stilts' SOUND was also similarly gloomy and dour, a sort of garagey jangle pop via brooding post punk, but Girls Names traffic in something much more jangly and poppy, melodic and a little twee, their sound more in line with groups like Black Tambourine, the Pastels, the Shop Assistants, Creation Records and that classic C86 pop sound. And yeah, the deep male vocals do change the feel, in some cases making Girls Names sound like a bit like Felt, and again, sometimes positioning them closer to Crystal Stilts. And while a few of the tracks here do find the band exploring darker sonic territory, with brooding reverby guitars and gloomy minor key melancholia, for the most part, they focus more on dreamy pop jangle, a hazy, super melodic, catchy and sixties garage style pop, but that, when wedded to the deep crooned vocals, the occasional gloomy overtones and some subtly haunting moodiness, make Girls Names something special for sure.
Moogs. Magma. Need we say more? All right, we will. This reissued 1980 album is both very Moog-y and very Magmoid. Mostly instrumental, it was the work of classically trained French pianist Jean-Philippe Goude, who was also interested in jazz, rock, and minimalism, and who had played keyboards with the Magma offshoot band Weidorje in the late '70s. So though this is a solo album, he got a lot of help from various heavy friends... usual suspects from the French prog-synth-rock underground, including members of Magma and Heldon (Klaus Blasquiz, Bernard Paganotti, Patrick Gauthier, Richard Pinhas, Francois Auger, and many more, what a lineup!). Thus this fits in snuggly with the Magma-inspired, jazz meets prog "Zeuhl" movement, especially tracks like opener "Les Saturnales" (with Blasquiz on vocals) or the exciting quadruple-guitar heaviness of "Dies Irae". But this is a varied album, and despite all the guests, two tracks feature no one but Goude alone, including the quite strange and effective soundscape piece "Coma". He also does a piano/synth duet with Heldon's Pinhas on the original album's final track "Cantiliene", which has that sort of Romantic, classical vibe we associate with Cluster's Roedelius. We say original album's final track, 'cause this cd reish closes with a bonus cut, the relaxed, loping, rather happy-sounding "Trio Des Mini-Moogs". Another track we should mention is the fantastic "Machine", wherein the melancholic strings of a chamber music quartet are overtaken by bleeping, burbling mad scientist synth and chugging mechanical beats.
The entire album is a delight, being both experimental and avant-garde, AND mesmerically melodic. Like we said, interestingly varied, but always with an aura of refinement, elegance and careful composition. It makes sense that Goude would go on to make a career out of library music and soundtracks for film and television. Indeed, if we understand the liner notes correctly, several of the tracks here were rearranged from pieces Goude had previously written for a pair of privately pressed lps, commissioned for the use of the French national gymnastics federation (???).
You'll find those extensive liner notes, vintage photos, etc. in the cd booklet. Lion has done their usual thorough labor-of-love job here, although this could have used one more round of proofreading, as we noticed a few insignificant typographic errors. The only potentially confusing one, being that the tracklist on the back cover has the songs numbered 1-12, omitting 5 though, as actually there's only 11 tracks... whoops. But other than that minor glitch, this is nicely done, with the original album's retro-futuristic graphics carefully reproduced. Love the neon-looking script for the text!!
Definitely glad they reissued this, having never heard it before, many of us here at AQ are digging it, even the not so Magma obsessed. And while perhaps "warmer" than some French coldwave, fans of that sort of thing should check this out, it certainly has something in common (including personnel) with Bernard Szajner's stuff, for instance.
Latest reissue from the Omni Recording Corporation, and as with most of the Omni releases, it's an odd one. But what's so odd about Grandpa Jones? A kindly older gentleman, dressed like and old time prospector, playing banjo, yodeling occasionally, playing classic old timey bluegrass, lush vocal harmonies, plenty of twang and strum, the music itself is not especially strange, just some classic country and bluegrass. Well, it's all in the way Jones BECAME a "grandpa" - before he was even 20 years old! And no, he didn't somehow sire a child at an impossibly young age who then sired a child at an equally impossibly young age. He apparently was grumpy during early morning recording sessions, which earned him the nickname Grandpa, and at some point he decided to BECOME Grandpa Jones, which entailed, an old hat, some silver hair dye, a big fake mustache, and some old clothes, and voila! Grandpa Jones was born, and would then go one to record and perform for decades, until presumably, he could do away with the fake mustache and dyed grey hair, and no one would be the wiser. Although apparently he DID perform at the Grand Ole Opry, as a real grandpa, dressed up as a fake grandpa!
The story behind Grandpa Jones may be pretty far out, but the persona was in part tied to his love of old timey music, and suited his sound, playing classic bluegrass ballads, gorgeous steel string strum, intricate banjo, shuffling percussion, slippery slide, timeless tales of heartbreak and misery, farms and trains, the Wild West, Jones' vocals a warm and weathered croon, that could also yodel with the best of them.
This reissue collects two of Jones' classic albums, and tacks on various singles and B sides, and like all Omni releases, includes a massive booklet with meticulously researched liner notes and loads of photos.
For a lot of young Swedes, it's apparently still 1973... what with bellbottomed bands like Witchcraft, Horisont, Noctum, Dead Man, and Graveyard, eh? Here's the latest from the latter, their second full-length, and yeah as the title suggests - and as everyone who heard their self-titled, stonery debut would expect - it's heavy '70 style blues rock, all right, rollin' and tumblin' with amped up urgency and authentic analog-recorded old school mojo.
As always, Graveyard remind us a bit of aforementioned fellow countrymen Witchcraft, with whom they share roots in the late '90s band Norrsken (when oh when will there be a reissue of that awesome band's obscure output we wonder?!). For that matter, both bands also share members with another outfit, Spiders, that we've reviewed some singles by recently. But Graveyard do their psychedelic blues thing their own way, with less of Witchcraft's admitted Pentagram influence for one thing. Instead, we're (again) hearing echoes of good ol' Monster Magnet. Maybe even Thee Hypnotics. And of course the '70s bands, that inspired those bands...
Graveyard's vocalist has a nice raspy edge to his voice when he wants, like when wailing away on opener "Ain't Fit To Live Here", one example of the many galloping rockers to be found on this disc... which also has its moody slow moments, take the lovely, lumbering 2nd track "No Good, Mr. Holden" with its backwards effects, for instance. Or the wide-open spaces, spaghetti western whistling atmospherics of "Longing", which sounds like a nod to Ennio Morricone, or maybe to Bjorn Olsson. Fans of another very '70s sounding Swedish band (and AQ-fave), Elope, should feel right at home with this more mellow side of Hisingen Blues.
Furthermore, while the amount of cowbell and whoo-whoo backing vocals found here could come across as cliched in lesser hands, Graveyard sound like they really mean it, these tracks possessing real emotional resonance alongside their retro radness.
From experience, we know they're a great live band, but this is the sort of record that would make you very much suspect that, anyway. Will we get to hear 'em kick out these jams in person sometime soon? Sure hope so!
Yet another record from this incredible Saharan outfit, number four if you're keeping track, their first was an aQ Record Of The Week, and the other two might as well have been, wild guitar driven African folk, rhythmic and percussive, all very hypnotic and mesmerizing, trancelike for sure, with some incredible vocalizing, soulful and emotional, all wound into some of the most jubilant, energetic, emotional and original music we've ever heard.
Our first impulse this time around was to say that this was simply more of the same, but in fact, the sound has definitely changed, due in no small part to what seems to be an expanded lineup, as the elder Doueh has enlisted his next oldest sons, on synth and drum kit, and it's really the drums that are the big difference. The first track is immediately more propulsive, the production better than ever, the low end thick, the vocals way up in the mix, the drums so hypnotic, and of course the guitars, impossible tangles of super intricate melody, gnarled riffs, all woven into a sound that's surprisingly super rocking.
And actually 'super rocking' might just be the best way to describe the whole record. The aforementioned drums are powerful and ever present, and the guitars remain impossibly wild, wooly and wonderful, drenched in effects, wah and flanger, or some approximation, making the notes and riffs twist into fantastic new shapes, the keyboards adding all sorts of texture, and the newly added trio of female backup singers adds even more oomph, the choruses and call and response vocal harmonies so rich and lush.
There are a couple tracks that stand out, where the band set aside their new rocking-ness, and instead unfurl gorgeous hazily psychedelic expanses of guitar buzz, sounding more like a sitar, the melodies all tangled and interwoven, while the drums offer a deep resonant pulse, and the vocals wail passionately way down in the mix, cuz here it's about the crazy intricate dense guitar playing, which is incredible, so hypnotic and utterly mesmerizing.
The record finishes off with a lengthy jam that is definitely another of our favorites, sounding a bit more laid back than the rest of the record, less buzzy, and more warm and washed out, the guitars unfurling gorgeous little flurries of notes, the rhythms and main riff locked tight so that it almost sounds looped, and at times like the record must be skipping, those moments eventually blossoming into synth laden, softly droney stretches of strummy folk and sun dappled Afro-pop bliss, dreamy and so divine. Like all the records before, utterly fantastic, and totally recommended. We can only imagine how great it must be to see Group Doueh live, but thankfully, we won't need to imagine much longer, as this record coincides with their first US tour!!
We weren't sure what to expect from a Scantily Clad side project, but it certainly wasn't this! But we like it. In fact we sort of LOVE it. Unlike the cosmic synth drone of Scantily Clad, Guisher specializes in a dizzying, short attention span collection of home brewed lo-fi cut and paste, slice and dice, collaged, sample heavy, hyper rhythmic loopscapes. Sped up soul samples, snippets of songs off the radio, are slathered in crumbling distortion, then assembled into strange stuttery beatscapes, waves of white noise swallow up the proceedings, only to spit out fragmented shards of pop on the other side.
The sound is awesomely raw and primitive, like some caveman Art Of Noise at times, but the structures and rhythms are often surprisingly complex, and downright groovy at times, while pulverizingly noisy at others. The sound is pretty fantastic, slipping from DJ Shadow like moody skitter to weird world music collage to barely there short wave static in the same track, only to weave some sort of analog assembled electronica on the next track, all lumbering rhythm surrounded by flurries of tangled melodies, and weird swooping backwards effects. And so it goes, a head spinning kitchen sink concoction, a blast of crunchy electric guitars, shards of yacht rock, blasts of static and slowed down voices one second, warm and warbly, shuffling sort-of-electronic woozy rhythmic groovescape the next. So great! And apparently all recorded while on prescription drugs, which definitely might explain everything...
SUPER SUPER LIMITED. ONLY 55 COPIES, partially because the packaging is so deluxe, an oversized photocopied booklet with tons of fold out pages, secret panels, a little multi paneled triangular booklet in the middle, and a foldout poster, all in a plastic bag, each one individually sewed shut with multi-colored thread.
We've said it before. A bunch of times. In lots of reviews, but we'll say it again. There's just something about FRENCH black metal. Not sure what it is exactly, some of it sounds similar, but plenty of it definitely does not, but somehow, there's some ineffable -thing- that makes French black metal, special, hell, maybe BETTER than most black metal. Just off the top of our heads here's a list of French black metal bands (one that we've probably enumerated in other reviews before, but again, it bears repeating): Deathspell Omega, Katharsis, Mutiilation, Antaeus, Blut Aus Nord, Diamatregon, Peste Noire, Vlad Tepes, Aosoth, Hell Militia, Alcest, Otargos, Arrival Of Satan, S.V.E.S.T., Wolok
So yeah, we love French black metal, and one band we've dug for ages, but never reviewed on the list is this one, Haemoth, who released a couple full lengths back in 2003-2004, but this is a collection of all the band's demos, from 2001-2004, and they KILL. The sound appropriately raw and black, the guitars super distorted and blown out, the vocals sick and processed, and the songs oozing all sorts of crazy atmospheres, the opening track, with headphones on, there's all this weird low end thrum, and strange buried melodies, all swirling and pulsing beneath the buzz and pound, even without headphones it makes the song sound creepy and dense and really really cool. It might be some sort of bass or synth or processed guitar, cuz it's on the next track too, which has some seriously thick crumbling distortion, all laced with lots of drone and weird murk, the sound SO in-the-red, and so crazy heavy, check out the first couple sound samples, you'll be sold.
The older demos are more brittle and lo-fi, but still ooze menacing alien atmosphere, and are bizarrely arranged, and slip from crusty creepy plod to blurred and buzzy blast, the drums murky pulses in the thick swirls of guitarbuzz and howled vokills. There are plenty of drones and ambient breakdowns and lots of weird experimentalism scattered throughout, enough to satisfy folks into the more twisted shit, but raw and grim and black enough for the true / old school black hordes.
Xander Harris's recent Urban Gothic lp ranked among our favorites of the new wave of cinematic sci-fi Euro disco Carpenter/Goblin worshipping soundtracky electronica, precisely because Harris seemed to ditch much of the whole dance/disco vibe in favor of something much more creepy and cinematic. But on this 12"s, those very elements are shined and polished and put on display, this side of Harris' sound positioning him even more appropriately alongside folks like Umberto and Zombi. "I Want More Than Just Blood", maybe the danciest track on Urban Gothic, gets stretched out to almost 11 minutes, creepy vocodered vox over pulsing eighties synths, the sound still hypnotic and minimal, but the groove, and the beat, jacked up a bit, lush melodic swells, swirling effects, almost a sort of euro disco space prog, especially with the epic noodly synth jams sprinkled throughout.
The B side is more of the same, the first track another stretch of Euro synth sci-fi space groove, whooshing and hazy and softly psychedelic, rife with plenty of lazer like sound effects all lashed to that relentless Eighties kraut-wave pulse, while the second track is even more spare and skeletal, a cinematic groove that might be the cheesiest of the bunch, but in a good way, the Eighties Carpenter/Goblin worship in full effect.
Comes in a super cool, full color disco 12" style sleeve, this one of course adorned with imagery much more sinister and sexy than most disco 12"s though...
Yay, 180 gram vinyl reissues of two canonical Britfolk elpees, all right! For those who need some brushing up on their acid-folk history, England's Incredible String Band were a late sixties/early seventies outfit who blended folk rock, psychedelia, and Eastern ethnic musics. Very sixties, very hippy - they played at Woodstock, in fact. With their folky male and female vocals and expertise with a plethora of exotic stringed instruments, a shorthand description might be that ISB was kinda like Fairport Convention with sitars, and crazy costumes. Perhaps less truly traditional than Fairport, they made a bigger splash with the LSD crowd of The UFO Club where they played often with the likes of early Pink Floyd, Tomorrow, and Procol Harum. Their music encompassed British folk, Indian ragas, Dylan, blues, country, hoedowns, etc. - an eclectic stew indeed. Sometimes ISB can come off as a little *too* varied: you might be digging some Eastern drone track and find an abrupt switch to, say, music-hall country a bit jarring. But that just means there's plenty of different things on these albums to like.
While originally in 1968 these albums were issued together as a 2lp set, for reissue 4 Men With Beards have elected to do 'em as two individually available records... but you should get 'em both. Again the ISB mix their Celtic and Appalachian folkie roots with "world" influences, and although this is quite mellow and gentle, they also brought in some electric amplification at this point. With female vocals n' whistles n' fiddles n' sitar etc. this is quite pretty stuff, great summer morning sitting in a sunny meadow music. Both records are ISB fan favorites, with gorgeous four-part vocal harmonies, whimsical but sometimes dark moods, and of course lots of Incredible String-ed instrument playing.
We're always mentioning ISB in reviews of other folk-psych albums past and present, from Forest and Trees to P.G. Six and Tower Recordings, so it's nice to have some of their essentials here on vinyl...definitely if you're into that British folk-psych vibe you need to investigate this band if you haven't already!
Yay, 180 gram vinyl reissues of two canonical Britfolk elpees, all right! For those who need some brushing up on their acid-folk history, England's Incredible String Band were a late sixties/early seventies outfit who blended folk rock, psychedelia, and Eastern ethnic musics. Very sixties, very hippy - they played at Woodstock, in fact. With their folky male and female vocals and expertise with a plethora of exotic stringed instruments, a shorthand description might be that ISB was kinda like Fairport Convention with sitars, and crazy costumes. Perhaps less truly traditional than Fairport, they made a bigger splash with the LSD crowd of The UFO Club where they played often with the likes of early Pink Floyd, Tomorrow, and Procol Harum. Their music encompassed British folk, Indian ragas, Dylan, blues, country, hoedowns, etc. - an eclectic stew indeed. Sometimes ISB can come off as a little *too* varied: you might be digging some Eastern drone track and find an abrupt switch to, say, music-hall country a bit jarring. But that just means there's plenty of different things on these albums to like.
While originally in 1968 these albums were issued together as a 2lp set, for reissue 4 Men With Beards have elected to do 'em as two individually available records... but you should get 'em both. Again the ISB mix their Celtic and Appalachian folkie roots with "world" influences, and although this is quite mellow and gentle, they also brought in some electric amplification at this point. With female vocals n' whistles n' fiddles n' sitar etc. this is quite pretty stuff, great summer morning sitting in a sunny meadow music. Both records are ISB fan favorites, with gorgeous four-part vocal harmonies, whimsical but sometimes dark moods, and of course lots of Incredible String-ed instrument playing.
We're always mentioning ISB in reviews of other folk-psych albums past and present, from Forest and Trees to P.G. Six and Tower Recordings, so it's nice to have some of their essentials here on vinyl...definitely if you're into that British folk-psych vibe you need to investigate this band if you haven't already!
SKWEEE!! DJ Jon AD (who runs the LoDubs and losonofono labels as well as the kick ass Anthem Records store in Portland) claims responsibility for the "first skweee mixed cassette in the known universe". Yep, that's probably correct. Kudos to him, and as skweee connoisseurs ourselves, we can tell you it's a damn fine mix, dense with percolating glitch and electronic future-funk freakiness from some of the best in the biz.
And you're reading this and wondering what the heck this "skweee" is of which we speak, well first off this tape will school you, and secondly, just do a quick search on our site and you'll find reviews of previous skweee comps like Skweee Cruise and Skweee Tooth that should explain it.
Jon wanted to demonstrate that skweee can rock a (dance) party, and definitely succeeds. We like how he mixes in a few ringers - non-skweee, or perhaps we should say pre-skweee (?) tracks by the likes of Boogie Down Productions and the Beastie Boys, to give the listener a sense of skweee's hiphop, b-boy roots. The tape is also crammed, of course, with the work of such Scandinavian skweee luminaries as Limonious, Daniel Savio, Spartan Lover, Mangrove, Uday, Rigas Den Andre, V.C., Randy Barracuda, Slow Hand Motem, Beem, and Joxaren. The new wave of American skweee is represented too, with Portland's Lazercrotch leading off side A...
Over the whole tape, there's nearly 30 individual skweee cuts seamlessly mixed together, in quite a dense and frenzied fashion. Each side of this C-60 cassette was recorded in a single take, with two turntables, mixer, and effects ('cause skweee can always use MORE video game zipps and zapps).
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Comes with download code, so you don't actually need a tape deck...
First cd issue of what is reportedly a highly sought after record of UK psychedelic rock. The singer's got a nice Skip Spence strain in his voice, and there's a lot of sitar on top of the more traditional instrumentation, and the winsome harmonies are
Strange that we, of all people, didn't realize this before - the Jason Kahn who has been producing extraordinary minimalist compositions and beautifully subtle sound installations in recent years is the same Jason Kahn who had stints as the drummer for mid-'80s, SST bands Trotsky Icepick, The Leaving Trains (one of Andee's all time faves!), and Universal Congress Of. Believe it! Around 1990, Kahn moved to Europe, dropping out of the US art-punk / post-hardcore scene and effortlessly transitioning into the avant-garde improv community in Zurich. He soon began experimenting with feedback systems resonating within the architecture of his drum kit, discovering a vocabulary of noises that have become the building blocks for his current body of work. A man of numerous collaborations (Gunter Muller, Ralph Steinbruchel, Asher, Steve Roden, Kevin Drumm, Jon Mueller, Toshimaru Nakamura, etc.), solo Jason Kahn records don't happen ever so often; and this one on 23five is exquisite!
On Vanishing Point, Kahn's techniques shift a little bit from the feedback bouncing around the innards of his drum kit to a series of colored noises generated from his custom built, patch-bay synth. The album reveals itself as a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned softened noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative.
For those familiar with the 23five catalogue, this fits snugly next to those awesome records on 23five from Jean-Francois Laporte and Tim Catlin; and for those who are not, the calm surfaces of Kevin Drumm, the crackled surface noise of Loren Chasse's Hedge Of Nerves, the spectral reflections from Alan Lamb's wire recordings, and even the placid side of Taiga Remains could be jumping off points into this excellent album.
Leyland Kirby's sprawling Sadly The Future Is No Longer What It Was collection, which compiled the vinyl double lps When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die, When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart, and Memories Live Longer Than Dreams, sounded exactly how those titles would lead you to believe: wistful, melancholy, a blurred sonic approximation of fading memories and tarnished dreams, of lost loves and long lonely nights, the sounds so achingly beautiful, a bleary collage of loops and field recordings and layered ambience, lush drones, and fragmented melodies, it easily became a unanimous favorite, and a record we couldn't keep in stock. We had a similar response to the Caretaker, an alter ego of Kirby's, who as the Caretaker explored a similarly obfuscated, antique filmstrip sound, but culled from slowed down jazz records, ancient chunks of vinyl reimagined, rendered in blurred and smeared streaks, and evoking a similarly emotional response. Thus we, and lots of you, became OBSESSED, needing to own everything Leyland Kirby or the Caretaker released, and always hankering for more.
So now, after a protracted silence, Leyland Kirby returns, with yet another series, this one entitled Intrigue & Stuff, spread out over 4 separate lps, this being volume 1, and this time, with a whole different sound. And we mean WAY different. Gone is all the scratchy ambience, the warped and warbly loops, the haunting minor key pianos, the mysterious moody textures, the blurred bleary beauty, and in its place is a strange chunk of warped electronica. Yep. Just have a listener to opener "Video 2000", which plays like a super distorted, slightly fractured Boards Of Canada, or like some techno record slowed waaay down, and run through a handful of effects pedals with dying batteries, the sound are super distorted, buzzy and fuzzy, the beat drags, gloriously, the rhythm loping, the melodies sun dappled and glimmering, a sort of blown out lo-fi downtempo avant IDM, which leads directly into the bloopy bleepy moody drift of "Re-Record Not Fade Away" with majestic synth shimmer laid beneath a blooping alien melody. "Neon-Lit Atoms" is up next, and again, is super distorted, the beats crumbling and crunchy, even the synth sounds seem to crumble, the sound a bit like some strange DJ Screw jam, but here wreathed in swirling sci-fi synths, lush and Eighties sounding, but when wedded to the weird crunch and crumble, it becomes something else entirely, eventually blossoming into something that definitely borrows from the whole Carpenter / Goblin soundtrack sound, but then twists it all up into something fractured and fantastically fucked up.
"Live For The Future, Long For The Past" was apparently used for a BBC documentary, which is a little surprising, because, while it is stately and elegant, majestic and moody, it's also dark, and droney, super distorted, and creepy as hell, the grinding distorted buzz that seems to wreath all the sounds make the vibe downright apocalyptic, the synths slightly new wave-y, but here stretched into long tense tones, and buried in thick layers of distorted sonic rubble, like the theme music for some futuristic sporting event, recorded and stored on some way too fragile media, only to be dug up hundreds of years later and played back in all it's decayed and nearly destroyed glory, seeming to slowly fall apart as it plays. "Low Entropy" sounds like an interlude of sorts, a descending plink plonk piano melody coupled with a blown out ultra distorted counter melody, the two in a woozy, tangled otherworldly harmony, which finally leads into the final track, "Ruined Visions", which is perhaps a reinterpretation of a John Denver song, but regardless, is a fantastically abject chunk of slo-mo, cough syrup synth, dreamdrone drag, the sounds seeming to melt and ooze and crumble and fracture, the melodies wavery and woozy, the main melody so mournful and melancholic, but all the sounds slightly off kilter, a little bit witch house-y, its a gloriously warped and druggy electro-ballad, a chopped and screwed synthscape, stretched into streaks and warbles, and winding down like a battery of synths being played on some old, slowly dying Victrola.
Ultra minimal packaging, plain black big-hole disco style 12" sleeve, and of course, very very limited.
It's been YEARS, exactly FIVE in fact, since the last Kode 9 and Spaceape record, Memories Of The Future, which at the time was one of the darkest dubstep records we had heard yet, it was like a more grim, less soulful Burial, with Spaceape's growled slo-mo toasting adding a whole 'nother level of darkness. Slithery and sinister and haunting, it was exactly what we wanted from dubstep.
But much has changed in the last 5 years, so we were curious what this new record would sound like. We wouldn't have been disappointed at all if it was the same thing all over again. But while many of the elements are still present, much has changed here too. Most distinctly, the record is not nearly as dark. Beyond that, the dubsteppiness is not nearly so pronounced, and the sound and sounds are surprisingly varied, slipping from electro to house to dub, but still all wound together by Kode 9's distinctive production and of course Spaceape's vocals, which sound more sung this time around, less growled.
Opening track "Black Smoke" uses some Burial like dubstep as a stepping off point, but then adds all sorts of rhythmic skitter, not to mention swirling synths, and some soaring percolating 'choruses'. It's strange, but definitely cool. "Promises" is all backwards loops, and muted thrum, but then some shimmery synth sneaks in, and the beat, more like a pulse, with a looped vocal carrying the main melody, sounding a bit like How To Dress Well, with Spaceape toasting over the top. "Am I" sounds like it could have been an M.I.A. jam, but here, it's more stripped down and skeletal, but with some ominous synths, and clipped handclappy beats, and here Spaceape actually sings. "Love Is The Drug" is almost house-y, like some weird dark Kompakt jam, and so it goes. From slow motion soul, to clipped RnB skitter, minimal slice and dice dancehall, to hazy dubbed out electro, warped and woozy droned out synthscapes, to jittery reggae flecked techno, washed out electronic dreamdrift, to crackling cinematic synth heavy buzz ballad. Cool stuff for sure. Dubstep purists might be bummed out, but anyone whose been digging How To Dress Well, Dirty Beaches, Hype Williams and other left field electronica will dig this big time.
Thee latest blast of confusional sonic chaos from this sort-of black metal supergroup, featuring avant outsider axeman Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.) and bass shredder Colin Marsten (Behold The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, etc.) is Krallice album number three, the follow up to the awesomely titled Dimensional Bleedthrough, and it's pretty much another opus of epic, soaring and majestic, yet convoluted and confusional black metal as only these guys can play it. There are moments, where you might, MIGHT think this could be some other black metal band, but those moments pass, and before long, when the band lock into their blazing blasting fury. As with the other records, the real surprise is how melodic Krallice can be, judging from the pedigree, one might be forgiven for assuming this would be incredibly difficult, and it is, in some ways, but it's also weirdly catchy, a pretty good mix of classic black metalisms, and the player's obtuse and obviously idiosyncratic take on the genre. The sound this time around actually seems a lot cleaner, and arrangements a bit more straight ahead, and the melodies much more pronounced, and it definitely suits them, but just when we begin to think that, the song we're listening to will fracture into some impossible tangle, or some super tripped out sort-of guitar lead, before slipping right back into more soaring buzzing melodic black metal. Which is just fine with us. Be sure to check out the epic 15 minute closer "Forgiveness In Rot", which is maybe the most melodic thing they've done, with some impossible hooks, and some subtle poppiness, all woven into the buzzing and blasting, almost like Krallice channeling Alcest AND some sort of epic post rock!
Every time we come across a new Les Rallizes Denudes reissue, not only are we absolutely thrilled, cuz we're sort of WAY obsessed, as are many of you we're discovering, we just can't get enough of these Japanese underground legends' crazed guitar-heavy freaked out, in-the-red psychedelia, but we also begin to marvel that there even IS another Rallizes release. After all, these guys only ever had ONE single proper release, and spent very little time in the studio, so pretty much every other record is a collection of live performances, some recorded straight through, others collaged into 'proper' records, but hell, we're not complaining, these guys sound like they were made for tearing it up live. And the varying sound quality, only adds to the whole freaked out-ness, the sound crumbling, or the levels peaking and the whole band seeming to disappear in a cloud of muted buzz, before emerging and exploding into another frantic bout of wild tangled leads, or some chugging proto-metal psychedelic blues.
Great White Wonder was originally released in 2006 on the Univive label, and now it's now been reissued with a whole extra disc, the now 4cd set compiling, yep, a handful of live shows from 1974 to 1980, with lots of the same song performed at each, but in true Les Rallizes fashion, you'd never know, in fact sometimes we think the titles were just a formality, the same song will be 9 minutes on performance, 5 the next, 6 the next, super loose and high end and chaotic one performance, dark and muddy and riffy the next, murky and heavily reverbed and way more rocking the next, but that's kind of what's so magical about these guys, and what keeps most of us complaining about the inevitable overlap, cuz it all sounds so good, and it always sounds different, the arrangement, the sound quality, the tone and timbre, and listening to these 4 discs, if you edited out the breaks and between song spaces, it's easy to imagine this would flow pretty excellently as a nearly four hour super jam. And it is pretty divine, these guys are the undisputed masters, slipping from brooding, and soulful crooned balladic blues, the guitar leads super emotional and soaring and epic, to wild and loose and chaotic, the guitars impossibly frantic and furious and freaked out, the sound easily shifting between the two, a moody crooned verse will explode into freaked out psychedelic frenzy, an endless heart-of-the-sun jam will slip smoothly into a loping bit of midtempo brood. And with Les Rallizes, it's totally about the jam, sure there are songs, and there is singing, but most songs eventually (d)evolve into something much more transcendent, total epic majestic psych rock nirvana.
Fans of all things PSF, modern Japanese Psychedelia, and newer psych rock like the Heads and White Hills, odds are you're already as obsessed with these guys as we are. If you're not, well, give the sound samples a listen and try and see if you can resist...
Four cds housed in cardboard wallet style sleeves, all housed in a nice printed box, with extensive and detailed liner notes. And FYI, an eventual (and expensive) vinyl version is on the horizon as well.
What is it about this band that inspires such controversy? Sure, any band of short haired hipsters that decides to play black metal is bound to get some heat from the true grim hordes, but with Liturgy it's off the charts. Could be frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's diatribes on the intellectual roots of his band and music, maybe that combined with his pretty boy looks and his valley girl like diction - but hey it's all about the music, and as far as we're concerned Liturgy have definitely taken black metal and twisted it all up and made it their own. Sure we love the true grim classics, corpsepaint and raw primitive buzz, blasting necro metal, we do, and we maybe always will, but we gave up long ago on the whole 'troo' thing. If being true means only listening to one kind of music, and even then, only made by a certain approved sect of musicians, who would want that. It's a discussion that could go on for ages, and does on pretty much every metal messageboard on the web, but if you're reading this, odds are you're like us, you like cool, weird, GOOD music, and you don't care if someone thinks the music you love is 'true' or 'pure' or whatever, and odds are you don't just like black metal.
Which we think is probably a prerequisite for liking Liturgy. Because while this is most definitely black metal, all of HHH's intellectual posturing, just might not be posturing after all, cuz this stuff is WEIRD. FUCKED UP. SUPER COMPLEX. Minimal, but somehow totally maximal too. The black metal tropes are present and accounted for, super fast picking, soaring minor key melodies, insectoid buzz, frantic blast beats, howled vox, but, the arrangements, the song structure, even the sound, is far removed from Burzum and Immortal and Satyricon and Mayhem and all the rest. In the past, we've described Liturgy as sounding like a black metal Arvo Part, and that definitely still applies, it's as if these guys filter their BM through Part and Feldman and some sort of modern minimalism. The songs are rife with drones, and intricate harmonies, the rhythms complicated and convoluted, the buzz often wound up into soaring sheets of high end frenzy, the drums locked tight with the guitars, the songs often, a series of short phrases repeated over and over, very minimal and mesmerizing.
Opener "High Gold" is the perfect example, with it's soaring majestic black metallisms, arranged into seemingly brief blasts, lush high end swells, a sort of psychedelic ur-drone rendered in blasts and buzz. "True Will" is slightly more traditionally black metal, but even here, the band lock into these impossibly dense drones, where all the instruments lock onto a single high note and hold it, and keep holding it, creating so much tension, before splintering back into something more traditionally buzzy, but only slightly. The sound is ALL high end, all upper register, brittle and soaring. There did seem to be one other element in play, but on we couldn't put our finger on until
"Generation" which finds the band loosing a serious math rock onslaught, super technical, totally repetitive, the guitars churning, locking tight into these gnarled bits of crunch and chug, the drums mathy and meticulous, it's like these guys took 2 or 3 of their favorite riffs from Don Caballero songs and composed a super heavy, super minimal, almost looped sounding in places, math rock epic. It's so good. And you can hear the other element that finds it's way into the more black metal jams on the record, AND you can also observe the band's unique compositional strategy more easily in the math rock context, so when the next track begins, it's a killer mix of blasting soaring blackness, and gnarled mathiness, AND of course modern minimalism.
So yeah, the true grim corpsepainted hordes should definitely avoid this, they wouldn't enjoy it, or even get it, anyway, but for everyone else, this is some epic, majestic, and yeah, transcendental, math infused minimal black metal majesty of the highest order.
Here's another addition to always dreamy sounding and delightfully packaged Dynamophone Parcel series (psst, we still have one final copy in stock of the now out of print Science Teacher edition... please let us know if you're interested in it or any of the others!).
Filia Melusine is a lovely spoken word piece read by Ms Phyllida Law. Her tender voice floats atop a soundscape of Evan Sornstein's soft drones and Jacob Phelps' delicate piano and guitar. The words can be traced back to a 15th century tale. Achingly intimate and deeply romantic, 'tis a magical bedtime story of personal quest and loss. The limited edition cd-r comes in a sweet little 3" box along with an added little treasure.
Yet another mantric missive from these musical missionaries and cosmic sonic seers, a collective of sorts, its membership drawn from several somewhat similarly likeminded groups, including Earth, Sun City Girls, and Burning Witch among others. And as with past installments in the ongoing Totem series, here the Master Musicians weave lush, slow building soundscapes, drawing on all manner of musics, Eastern ragas, Western space rock, minimal dronemusic, experimental ambience, freaky forest folk and who knows what all else, woven deftly into dark, brooding, expansive epics.
Totem Three begins ominously with chiming bells, a deep rumbling synth drone, tinkling chimes, a darkly meditative drift, deep vocals, horns and other low tones, are all layered on top of that initial drone, the sound swept up by slow shimmering swells, laced with strange spacey effects, just below the surface, an intro of sorts, leading directly into the much more traditionally song-y "In The Twilight Of The Kali Yuga", those shimmering swells from the first track carrying over, but in the place of the drone, strummed steel string guitars, fluttering flutes, sitar like buzz, Eastern hand drums, and the quickly song coalesces into a surprisingly jaunty bit of Middle Eastern sounding folk, rife with hazy vox, and tabla, as well as other percussion. Before the record returns to the drone of the opener. But again, that rumbling buzzing synth is overlaid with some sort of woodwind, balancing the ominous vibe of the drone, thick downtuned guitar chords are unfurled, as are bells, and chantlike vox, the result a strange sort of Eastern style folky dirge, SUNNO))) like guitars beneath a meditative raga.
The record splits the rest of its time between a buzzy, Middle Eastern style folk, lush with fiddles and handclaps, and group vocals, albeit with a bit more buzz and strange sonic filigree than actual traditional music, soaring string laden almost soundtracky ambience, moody and dramatic, and haunting minimal dronemusic, replete with moaning horns, creepy incantations, glitched out electronics, finally finishing off with a seriously left field bit of cinematic weirdness, that basically sounds like the soundtrack to some eighties straight to video Indian movie, all cheesy eighties synths, groovy Euro disco rhythms, and of course some bloopy bass and some shredding guitar solos, the sort of thing that would definitely appeal to folks into Zombi and Umberto and the like. Compared to Totems One and Two, Three seems to lean a bit more towards the atmospheric, away from the heavy.
As always weird and wonderful, with appropriately eye popping psychedelic cover art courtesy of Seldon Hunt.
The Bay Area dreamy pop duo of Jaime Borschuk and P.F. Dumanis are back with their third full length. While the first two were delivered to our ears on cd, this one comes spinning on wonderful limited edition vinyl. Only 250 were pressed, so act fast! All These Days starts rolling in gentle fashion with "Fleeting", a lullaby tempo'd number that brings to mind the drowsy blanketing embrace of Yo La Tengo or Low. Wistful verging on downright melancholic. Then they get the toe tappin' and guitar strummin' on the considerably more upbeat second tune "Can i Love You Yet?" It's definitely more like what we recall from their previous releases. However, the bright burst of springy sunshine swiftly give way to the autumnal feel of the opening track, as the pair brings things back down again for the next tune. They stick to this slower, somber pace for the rest of the nine songs. While we certainly dig The Matinees' peppier side, on this album they prove to be just as engaging treading the more shadowier paths of pop.
Here comes a great new San Francisco band making some melt worthy washed out pop. Right at home on Underwater Peoples who have also released records we love by folks like Ducktails, Julian Lynch, Air Waves, and Pill Wonder. They for sure have the kodachrome soaked old cassette recording C86 happening, but there is something nice and subtle about their delivery that sounds so refreshing and earnest. We love how much of a daydream haze these songs put us in, synth pop that is less about beating you over the head with the sounds of synthesizers and more about casting a spell of timeless daydreams and melancholy memories. If you've been digging folks like The Art Museums, Puro Instinct, Memory Tapes, and Holy Shit then for sure you should jump all over this Melted Toys debut. It's some of the best dreamy and druggy, hazy and seductive pop that we've heard in a long time!
