Latest slab of epic, apocalyptic, psychedelic doom from A Storm Of Light, the project of Josh Graham, who also plays in Red Sparowes, Blood And Time, and of course the psychedelic doom sludge granddaddies of them all Neurosis. So it makes sense that Graham's project explores similar sonic territory, but where Neurosis is all downtuned crush and bellowed howl, ASOL is more spaced out, more Hawkwind, more melodic, more atmospheric. Even moreso than the last full length, As The Valley spends much of its time drifting, and smoldering, hovering and shimmering, but when the songs do lock in, and get heavy, it's still on the melodic psychedelic side of heavy, the vocals the driving force, way up in the mix, wreathed in echo and delay, giving the sound a bit of a Kyuss vibe, which is definitely not a bad thing, but when the band do crush, the sound MASSIVE, the guitars impossibly heavy, the production epic, but those stretches of extreme heaviness surprisingly brief with the tracks more often than not slipping back into the broodier moodier minimalism that much of the record explores, and those pronounced vocals, and the vocal heavy mix, definitely give this As The Valley a distinctly pop vibe, which probably screams sell out to some, but to us, just makes this less a doom metal record, or a post doom record, or whatever you want to call it, and transforms it into something tougher to pigeonhole, a sort of pop flecked metallic psych, or psychedelic doom pop. But let's to put too much of an emphasis on the pop element, cuz this stuff is still pretty goddamn heavy, it just happens to have hooks and melodies, and chooses not to bury them, and instead flaunts them, and often lets the melody, instead of the riff, drive the song. Which is actually pretty refreshing...
Latest jam from local improvised noiseniks Al Qaeda (featuring one of the guitarists from aQ SF black metal faves Sutekh Hexen), here expanded to a sprawling septet, recorded live on the radio in LA. Guitars, tape loops, oscillators, drums, percussion, metal, and trumpet, all woven into a strange sort of abstract avant free noise minimalism. Spidery free jazz tendrils underpin thick swaths of brooding low end, industrial percussion and room sound are blurred into backdrops for swirls of white noise hiss, streaks of feedback, and lurching loops. It's noisy, but more a soft cacophony, a slow build, the drums not about propulsion, at least not at first, eventually the cymbal sizzle and drum splatter coalesces into a sort of krautrock groove (although that other stuff does continue right on, there are multiple drummers after all), but once the drums lock in, the clouds of ever shifting noise and texture get the anchor they need, and you can almost hear it in all the players as they seem to lock in alongside the rhythm, playing more fierce, the sounds more jagged and caustic, but the whole thing sort of more structured. The sound shifts eventually, the drums becoming more motorik, while the sounds around the drums grow more abstract, like a field of electronic buzz, sheet of billowing low end, before eventually fading out.
The second piece starts out drum heavy right off the bat, and the track is a murky monster, the guitars not so much riffing and unfurling swaths of soft focus guitarnoise and little curlicues of melody, this one does get heavy, a churning slab of krautnoise that sounds like an updated version of Parson Sound or Faust. The next track set dials back the heavy, letting the trumpet drift in a field of skittery snare and abstract electronics, the drums eventually coming together, into something like abstract krautjazz, left to meander into the final number which is a hazy washed out expanse of layered tones, of distant melodies, of overlapping loops, a blurred droney drift, that thickens as the set progresses, darkening too, before the drums kick in hard, and the sound solidifies into a droned out blur, the trumpet playing a strangely mournful lament over the top, while the rest of the band churns and chugs their way through a final blackened free noise blow out.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES, each one machine numbered.
Record number two from these Irish heavies, who blend murky blasting black metal with slow build epic post rock, their songs sprawling epics that flit from frantic riffing to soaring churning majesty, guitars slipping easily from super distorted buzz to chiming jangle, and back again, the sounds alternatingly droney and trancelike, rhythmic and meandery. AoP at their finest when they lock into a single part and the whole band hammer away, building tension, a dense repetitive sonic throb, the sound of the instruments blurred into a single epic swell, growing more and more intense, until finally splintering apart and resuming its frenetic buzz and pound. The black metal here is definitely of the soaring, epic and transcendental variety, reminding us of Wolves In The Throne Room and other outfits of a similar sonic stripe, but AoP don't shy away from ditching the heaviness for long stretches, instead weaving lush minimal drifts, the guitars clean and warm, the drums muted and subtly rhythmic, and again those prettier, calmer moments balance the heavier blacker passages, the cool thing being when the melodies from the mellow parts find their ways into the heavy bits, transforming chugging black riffs into something strangely pretty, and way more atmospheric.
All of the songs here are intense and lengthy sonic journeys, and to be fully appreciated, require close listening, parts by themselves don't necessarily have the same impact on their own, you may experience a roiling bit of drum heavy churn, only to have a surprising melody overtake the menacing minor key vibe, other parts are all about the repetition, building into a trance inducing mesmer, a quick glance hardly registering, but letting yourself get lost in the sound makes all the difference. We saw these guys live, and for some reason it seemed a little bit boring, but then there are lots of distractions in a rock club, people talking drinking at the bar, all the sort of stuff that detracts from the sort of experience these guys strive to conjure, but strap on some headphones, close your eyes, and it's a whole different story...
Of all the lo-fi left-field pop records that have come out in the last few years, the debut by Art Museums really has stayed with us and remained so satisfying listen after listen. So were stoked to get two brand new tracks. We actually got to hear the A side several months ago when we first saw the awesome video, directed by former AQer Kerry McLaughlin. That song, "S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G." is a quick blast of C-86 inspired glory. The B side "Feel Like Dreams" is more of a warm burner somewhere between The Chills and Television Personalities. We've been flipping it over and over as both songs have already gotten deep under our skin. So good!
Man, are we ever so excited to get this title, Dorothy Ashby's third and most originally authorial album with Richard Evans, The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby. Based on the mystical poetry of the eleventh century Persian astronomer, Omar Khayyam, Ashby has created ten original compositions that feature an array of far eastern instrumentation and for the first time, her voice. Sung and recited, sometimes in bewitched multi-vocal incantations, the mystical vibe is heightened by electrified harp, distorted kalimba and koto but grounded in the driving percussive and bass grooves of Richard Evans' majestic production which evokes Egyptian, Middle Eastern and Pan-Asian sensibilities. The opener, "Myself When Young," has the cinematic power of a James Bond ballad. Her voice, commanding but never over-powering, becomes more intriguing and mysterious as the album progresses, immersing us deeply into the esoteric cosmos of her muse. A truly magical record and it can't be recommended enough!
After three years, Astral Social Club returns, the project of Neil Campbell, he formerly of Vibracathedral Orchestra. Originally ASC was a logical sonic offshoot of VCO, but along the way something happened, and ASC was transformed into some strange bit of alien electronica, and this brand new single continues in Campbell's warped dancefloor trajectory.
The A side is some serious cosmic psychedelic space techno or whatever you want to call it. The sound is hazy and shimmery and psychedelic, but it's all about the beats, and the glitches and squelches, arranged into a twisted bit of daft funk, fractured beats, super distorted Casios, buzzing synths, propulsive and frenetic, and growing gradually thicker and darker as the track progresses. The B side is like some twisted ASC house music, a pounding 4 on the floor beat, surrounded by buzzing drones, more glitched out electronics, percussive synths adding sympathetic rhythms, all wound up with tangled distorted melodies, peppered with high end hiss and more tangled tones, some seriously psychedelic space house. The perfect music for your next alien dance party...
SUPER LIMITED, the label doesn't say how many exactly, but there's a good chance that these are the only copies we'll be able to get since we had to pre-order these, and Trensmat only made as many as were ordered...
Aw, we needed some new sounds to swoon over and thankfully New Zealand's Bachelorette has a brand new album that's had us swaying and daydreaming since the moment it arrived. We were huge fans of her last album, My Electric Family, and also we got to see her open for El Perro Del Mar a year or so back, and that only furthered our appreciation of her wonderful musical magic. Her voice melts so perfectly above the warm and woozy instrumentation, a sound with such flowing ease and floral elegance. Songs that sound like modern day hymns or fables, both so intimate and inviting. We hear hints of Bjork's Vespertine mixed with Broadcast and Mirah. It's a record that makes us want to wear all white and frolic in a lush garden filled with bright red strawberries, shining yellow lemons, and the greenest grass that hugs the earth as far as the eye can see. How's that for swooning? Bachelorette has crafted another immaculate and smart pop record that will have us swooning for a long time to come.
Thanks to local noise rock heavies Kowloon Walled City for introducing us to these guys. And as we've mentioned before, when a kick ass heavy band, goes on and on about how kick ass and heavy ANOTHER band is, well, then you best pay attention. And boy are we glad we did. These NY doomlords, named for a massive seventies supertanker, are most definitely as heavy as their namesake, their sound a heaving, churning slow motion crawl, the riffs tarpit thick, the vocals caustic and wreathed in effects, the drums a lumbering pound, the band unfurling epic swaths of creeping slithering sludge, an oozing sonic blackness that reminds us of groups like Cough and Thou, who they seem to be compared to often. The band lace their sound with woozy, slightly detuned clean guitars, stretches of swirling ambient shimmer, and sometimes infusing their sound with a seriously epic post rock vibe, some of the songs building to surprisingly melodic crescendos, the opener deftly balancing some extreme ultradoom, and some unlikely hookiness. The rest of the record slips from lumbering death march doom, to pounding almost noise rock churn, to near static, Monarch/Moss/Bunkur like black sludge, fusing bits of Eyehategod like groove to total black hole doomdirge crush. Fucking killer. And WAY recommended for fans of the above mentioned groups as well as The Body, Atavist, Human Quena Orchestra, Fleshpress, Habsyl, Wicked King Wicker, Trees and other similarly sludgey heavies.
There's nothing that welcomes summer quite like a brand new Beastie Boys record. And damn, once again they bring the goods with cleverness and charisma, undeniable skills, and high energy that's going to make us blast this loud at pretty much every gathering we'll have this summer and beyond. So cool to see how after all these years the Beastie Boys have really kept on top of their game, there really is not a bad album in their discography, and they're also so smart about taking their time between albums to make sure nothing is rushed or half baked.
It's been almost seven years since their last full length, To The 5 Boroughs, came out. During that time MCA (Adam Yauch) was diagnosed with cancer which he has since overcome and you can hear that feeling of ecstatic triumph in the sounds of these new supercharged Beastie Boys SONGS. It's really got everything we love about them, their rad MC skills, their attention to detail and impeccable taste in samples, a bit of old school punk rockin', and it's for sure one of the most gritty and thick recordings in their catalog, recalling some of the sounds of Check Your Head. They understand how to use the studio as an extension of their sound so damn well. Try to think of any other hip-hop groups from the late '80s who are still around, yet alone still making such fucking cool sounds.
The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish was released back in 2005 by Jon Mueller's now defunct label Crouton, and it came packaged in slightly oversized cardboard box filled with dried flowers drenched in a silken perfume. While devoid of this smell-o-rama trickery, the much-needed reissue of Keith Berry's masterpiece of hallowed drone does come with an unreleased body of work as a bonus disc, which is just as good of The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish.
Here's what we had to say about the album way back when, and these words still ring true today: Berry defines his work through the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Sufi poetry, striving for an artform that could "unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that leads to enlightenment." In doing so, Berry begins The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish with a series of unremarkable sounds which fall somewhere in the hushed white noise territories, possibly including the sound of a gentle spring shower or the empty spaces on shortwave bands. He molds these hisses, crackles, and shadows into subtle repeating forms which do, in fact, lend themselves to any number of images, metaphors, and ideas. Given that he landed his debut album on Trente Oiseaux, Berry's work falls in the lowercase school of ephemeral electronics alongside Steve Roden and Bernhard Gunter, but there is an antiquated tactility to his albums which hint at the same temporal netherworld as heard in Philip Jeck's avant-turntable melodramas. These seductively restrained compositions for quiet flickerings, muffled rumbles, and whispered reverberations truly captured our imagination.
Not to be confused with a track on his Twenty Hertz album whereby he instructs the listener to veer left, Turn Right A Thousand Feet From Here is a far more nocturnal album than The Ear with its enveloping shadows, snowblinded mirages, and slow-motion tumbling of obfuscated noises into half-melodic passages. One would be forgiven for thinking these recordings to be a lost Thomas Koner record around the time of Kaamos or Daikan. Both discs are completely mesmerizing and come with our highest recommendation.
Oh man are we excited about this. A massive double lp collection of all the various eps and singles and cassettes and limited releases from one of our favorite modern groups. Fans of Blank Dogs, and we know lots of aQ list readers are, will definitely need this. We thought we were good about collecting all the BD stuff, but there's tons of stuff here we've never seen, as well as plenty we could never get enough of to review on the website.
This collection includes these titles: The First Two Weeks, The Doorbell Fire, Diana The Herald, The Fields, Waiting, In Here, Seconds, Yellow Mice Sleep, Two Months, Mirror Lights, Setting Fire To Your House, In A Web, Captured Tracks Vol. 1 and Leaves. Phew! Some of this stuff you may very well have, but we're guessing most of it you don't. A few of those we did review, In fact, we made The Fields our Record Of The Week we loved it so much, so for those not familiar with Blank Dogs, that review should serve as a pretty good introduction:
Everyone at aQ is super open minded when it comes to music, we all love all kinds of sounds, but each of us definitely has our favorite, our specialties, whether it be black metal, or indie rock or drone or post rock or power pop or whatever. So when a band shows up that has *everybody* freaking out, that's usually a sign that said group is something special, and in those cases we definitely try to mark the occasion by making that group's album our Record Of The Week.
Such is the case with Blank Dogs, or should we say Blank Dog singular as this is a one man operation, some cat named Mike Sniper who for the last few years has been practically gushing limited cd-r's and tapes and short run releases, most so limited that for most of us, this is our first real exposure to Sniper's gorgeous woozy lo-fi new wave, and new wave is really what this is, whereas a lot of the other Blank Dogs releases were super noisy and abrasive, this is hooky and catchy and jangly, total perfect gloom pop, albeit drenched in plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz. Equal parts The Cure and Joy Division, huge fuzzed out downer basslines, simple drum rhythms or programmed beats, all wreathed in thick swirls of murky effects, fuzzy clouds of bloop and bleep, synthesizers spewing squiggly melodies, or unfurling thick undulating ribbons of warm buzz, and then the vocals, deep and drowsy, weary and worn, a mournful croon, super emotional and darkly evocative, all of those parts stitched together into haphazard perfect pop gems. All gothy and gloomy, with irresistible hooks buried all over the place, the deep main croon balanced by weird processed almost falsettos, fucked up effects careening all over the place in the background, their sound sometimes like a sort of Interpol meets Magnetic Fields by way of Sebadoh, simple guitar jangle over woozy synths, and sweet sad boy vocals, elsewhere super rocking, with heavy guitars, and warm, almost heavy choruses, surrounded by plenty of lo-fi jangle and shimmer. Elsewhere wicked blown out buzzy bass lines, that would shame Interpol, Joy Division melodies strung between constellations of glistening effects, the vocals dripping with delay and reverb and distortion, and again, everything wrapped around wicked hooks. Moody new wave gloom crossed with weirdly ebullient downer doompop.
Need more? Here's our review of Seconds, also included here:
Picking right up where The Fields left off, all four tracks here are super immediate and lo-fi rockers with a damaged Joy Division feel and twisting, disjointed melodies that you can't help but get stick in your head. While the slick side of a dark romantic New York might be exemplified by Interpol, Blank Dogs represents the more seedy, fucked up and authentic underbelly of the Big Apple. While it's a tad less dark then past outings, these songs still kill. "Keeping All The Time" might just be our new favorite Blank Dogs song with its fuzzy synths, and live drums played by Ryan Naideau (Dustheads, Extremis).
Or still more, here's the review for Diana The Herald:
We aQuarians have been jonesin' for anything to do with Blank Dogs as of late, as they are one of those rare groups that EVERYONE at the store goes crazy for. The sound is murky, dark, more than a tad bit goth, and masterfully lo-fi, but at the end of the day, Blank Dogs are essentially a pop band, and a damn fine one at that. Since it took a while for them to enter our radar, we are getting to gleefully sift through an extensive catalog of eps and lps from the past few years while patiently waiting for the upcoming full length on In The Red.
This ep, released back in 2007, but newly available, is certainly worth the price of admission for the two songs which open each side of the record, but the others are quite impressive as well. "Leaving The Light On" and "Scenes From A New Town" are certainly among the most beautiful, melancholy, and just plain weird Blank Dogs songs to date. Things are kept moving with a steady drum machine beat as the overall melodies are shaped by single note guitars and bass lines that give the songs the feeling of some surf rock/goth hybrid with surprisingly anthemic choruses. Coupled with a recording fidelity that sounds like a crackling transmission from some parallel reality, creepy analog synthesizers galore, and Blank Dogs' spectral vocals, you'd be forgiven if you assumed these recordings might have been recorded at any point within the last thirty years. That said, there is nothing retro about Blank Dogs, nor would you call them (or more appropriately, "him" at this point) "ahead of their time". Instead, the music seems to exist simply OUT of time, which is probably why we have found Blank Dogs so very striking. A typically stellar release from this eccentric, hyper prolific pop machine.
But what about all the records we never reviewed? All pretty fantastic in fact, the older ones of course more raw and lo-fi, home brewed, but definitely displaying BD's rapidly developing pop chops, hooky and poppy but WAY tweaked and twisted, often sounding like a punk rock Joe Meek! We're pretty psyched cuz there's so much new stuff to discover and dig into, this collection the perfect balance of new sounds and old favorites, and for sure a perfect introduction for someone new to Blank Dogs. Way way way recommended.
Latest from these misanthropic French black metallers, loooong time aQ faves, this is the first in a planned trilogy, and finds the band sounding more intense, corrosive and chaotic than ever, with some of the most twisted, gnarled riffs we've heard from these guys, all woven into epic sprawls of discordant, dissonant, hyper technical, drone drenched industrial flecked blackness.
Of course, their sound exists in a sonic space similar to their black metal countrymen Deathspell Omega, particularly in their obtuse riffing and dense masses of sound, not to mention their post rock tendencies, but BaN continue to stretch the boundaries of their already ever shifting sound, and straight away, they erupt into a head spinning, ultra complex wall of bludgeoning black metal, the riffs seeming to detune as they're played, the melodies unraveling, the whole sound teetering on the edge of collapse, tense and so so dark, some avant black hole buzz for sure, the first few minutes exhausting in its relentlessness, until finally the song breaks down into a weirdly melodic and slightly mellower post rock tangle, all wavery buzz and woozy harmonies, some strangely psychedelic leads, the sound oozing and melting, only to splinter and collapse right back into another dizzying blast of tangled riffs and impossibly chaotic drumming, the guitars almost sounding like their being played with a slide, slippery and warbly. The vocals kept to a minimum, letting the warped music carry much of the weight, but this is Blut Aus Nord, so the band slip seamlessly into a bit of industrial drift, all hushed low end shimmer, haunting sine wave like melodies, and programmed rhythms, and hell, that's just the first song.
The rest of the record follows a similarly dark and twisted path, although the band do infuses their bouts of grinding black density and spaced out post rock infused drift with heavy stretches of minimalistic dirgery, as well as some surprisingly melodic, classic metal sounding parts, but of course, the next burst of gnarled black chaos is never far off, the record constantly shifting from epic and majestic, to haunting and atmospheric, to furious and frantic, to smoldering and melodic, to crushing and absolutely terrifying. Definitely as good as any of their past records, and a killer start to the new trilogy, the record closing with a surprisingly not black metal closer, a serious stretch of slow building post rock, sounding like a slightly more metallic Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky, tense and dramatic, moody and darkly mysterious.
Barn Owl are turning into a regular cottage industry, with a record just out, a new one on the way, and a seemingly never ending procession of solo records from both Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti. Not that were complaining. We love this stuff and can't get enough. And seems like most folks out there feel the same. Which brings us to this, one of two new 7"s on Irish label Trensmat (the other is from Astral Social Club and is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), the latest missive from Caminiti, and it's a good one, the A side is a thick billowing cloud of soft guitar noise, of swirling guitar whir, shot through with streaks of minor key melody, shards of buzz, the vibe is hazy and thick, and almost caustic in places, before giving way to a super serene bit of shimmery drift, all minimal thrum and slow motion melody, the whole track sounding like it could have come from the same sessions that produced Caminiti's most recent full length.
The flipside is another bit of hazy guitar sprawl, this one way more reminiscent of Caminiti's duo Barn Owl, with plenty of Earth-y twang, the sound deserty and desolate sounding, drifting and dusty, sun dapped and hauntingly cinematic, again finishing off with a more muted and minimal, darkly tranquil outro.
SUPER LIMITED, the label doesn't say how many exactly, but there's a good chance that these are the only copies we'll be able to get since we had to pre-order these, and the label only made as many as were ordered...
What do you get when you combine 4 hairy Japanese stoner dudes, an immense love of Black Sabbath, obsession with serial killers, and thee best heavy music festival that Europe has to offer? Church Of Misery Live At Roadburn 2009, of course!! Among our friends who regularly make the pilgrimage to Holland's annual Roadburn fest, the Japanese sludge merchants' several live performances there are legendary. Of course, the thing about Roadburn is they get bands to play who are great to begin with, and they tend to sound even better there... so for one to get singled out, gotta be amazing! Naturally, listening to this live album isn't the same as having been there. But it'll give you an idea, and any fan of CoM will be chuffed. 'Cause they did rip it up at Roadburn, and the recording is killer.
They do 8 songs, which tend to blend together here into one dope hazed, fuzzed out sludge fest, but actually represent two tracks from their most recent studio album Houses Of The Unholy, one from their 1998 debut ep Taste The Pain, one from 2001's Master of Brutality, three from 2004's The Second Coming, thus spanning their career quite nicely... and then they wind things up with their 11 minute long cover of "For Mad Man Only" [sic], a raving proto-metal classic from '71 by May Blitz also covered once upon a time by good ol' Fudge Tunnel, that's in fact how we first heard of May Blitz...
But anyway, yeah, CoM fans, get yourself to Roadburn next time they're playing, and in the meantime, jam out to this, sheer Sabbathoid stoner sludge, heeeaaavvvy and hairy and psychedelic, for sure! Also a good intro to this band for anyone uninitiated.
Latest chunk of gritty grimy scuzz punk from this Australian boy/girl duo, who on the surface seem like the Aussie answer to Royal Trux, but this here single is a bit of a surprise, the band ditch their sleazy glammy grit, and abrasive punky pound, instead offering up some sweetly moody, shoegazey drift, sounding a bit like M83 via Crystal Stilts, an eighties style ballad about taking drugs and having sex, but wreathed in a sweetly washed out softly psychedelic dream pop ballad, all hazy smoldering synths, minimal pulsing percussion, simple guitar strum, and some darkly gorgeous boy girl harmonies, almost like a more lo-fi Raveonettes.
We figured the flipside would get things back to normal, with some wild crunch and cacophony, but instead, it's another dreamy brooding ballad, all simple steel string strum, warm whirring organ and some mournful guitar harmonies, a dark minor key lament, the vocals slipping into Nick Cave territory, softened by the sweet female back up vox, the song dirgey and darkly doleful, gradually growing more and more hazy and washed out and softly psychedelic, and ultimately sounding like it could be some new band on Captured Tracks or Sacred Bones.
Some seriously striking (and a little disturbing) cover art too...
We reviewed the first four reissues from legendary punk rock outfit Crass over the last few lists, and now here's the 5th (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...
Yes Sir, I Will was Crass' last 'official' album, and was originally presented as a single album long track, spread out over both sides (making it the longest punk rock song ever!), and unlike the overt poppiness of Christ The Album, Yes Sir is dense and tense and tangled, rife as always with samples and sonic snippets, even a haunting piano ballad, the music was furious and vitriolic, dueling male/female vocals, over crunchy angular riffing, all wound around frenetic drumming, the production raw and brittle and a little lo-fi, the entire record mostly improvised, Crass version of 'jazz', much of the lyrics culled from a poem by drummer/vocalist Penny Rimbaud, an attack on prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her handling of the Falklands War, it's a pretty intense record, sonically and lyrically, and very ambitious, especially for a 'punk' band, but by now Crass were far from the typical punk band. The extra tracks here, a bonus disc entitled "Why Don't You Fuck Off", is a 2002 'jazz remix' imagining of the whole record, which is about as 'jazz' as the record proper, a slightly noisier and more chaotic take on the original, although there is some saxophone
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.
On the last New Arrivals list, we reviewed the first record in a TWELVE lp series from a group called Decimus, which was in fact, the solo project of Pat Murano, from No Neck Blues Band, K Salvatore and Malkuth. The series, a multi part epic, based on the teachings of Decimus Magus Ausonius, a Latin poet and rhetorician. We reviewed Decimus 5 last time, Decimus 1 was also just released, but this, Decimus 2, is apparently the FIRST part in the series, and as if that weren't confusing enough, it was also the only one of the first 3 installments so far (1,2 and 5) to be released on a different label, hence the hefty price, this one's an import. And how about a description from the label: "Decimus 2is the first chapter of the Decimus sodality. With reluctance, we are driven into the desert rent from the sweet succor of slavery Under Malkuth we feed the senses failing to satiate the insatiable For Shimon bar Yochai Synthetic meditations on the zodiac as envisioned by Decimus Magnus Ausonius." Um okay...
Like number 5, number 2 is another fantastic and totally tripped out exploration into some seriously tripped out and as yet undiscovered psychedelic realms of sound, some sort of otherworldly ritual, bird calls, croaking frogs, a series of mysterious field recordings, layered beneath tinkling chimes, and reverbed melodies, the music hushed and minimal, the tones layered into strange harmonies, down in the mix lurk crunches and crumbles, those sounds seeming to grow more murky and menacing, all of the various low end sounds, gradually transforming into deep rumbles and monster like gurgles, slowly transitioning into a warped stretch of looped mesmer, droney and druggy, layered voices and and constantly shifting pitches.
As the Decimus 2 progresses, processed guitars (?) churn and undulate, wreathed in swirling effects that sound almost like animal calls, perhaps they are animal calls processed to sound like effects, either way, the result is quite haunting, the track peppered with caustic industrial crunch, burbling electronics, the sound growing more and more fractured and far out, before finally ending, presumably, to be continued in the next installment.
Incredible stuff, anyone into No Neck, or any of the tripped out free psychedelic drone outfits should definitely check this out (and Decimus 5), odds are when all 12 are finally revealed, you might be kicking yourself for not grabbing them when you could.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES. In fancy recycled silkscreened jackets, with heavy red inner sleeves.
Originally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, was available via three separate slabs of vinyl, but was then gathered up and released together as a triple cd set entitled Tryptych, which we made our Record Of The Week. Now, the cds set has been split up again back into 3 lps, pressed up on vinyl once again, this time as a bundled triple lp set, for those who missed out on the vinyl versions the first time around...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps AND cds we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first lp, Forest Of Evil starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, before transforming into something darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine.
The second lp, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half of the record finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end. Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
Finally, the third lp, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Three individual lps, bound together by a Japanese style obi, with metallic print. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!
Anyone whose ever seen Cambodian pop combo Dengue Fever, knows that live is where they really shine. Their records are all fantastic, but somehow, those songs sound even better live, the vibe festive and celebratory, the band more loose, and the sound allowed to blossom, and in some cases explode.
For those new to Dengue Fever, these Americans (featuring members of the late great Dieselhed) were obsessed with Cambodian music, and over the years were able to emulate that sound perfectly, even to the point of crafting originals that sounded EXACTLY like lost Cambodian pop singles from the sixties. One thing was missing, and that was a vocalist. And that vocal spot would end up being filled by real Cambodian royalty, a princess in fact, the irresistible Chhom Nimol, whose gorgeous voice pretty much sealed the deal and Dengue Fever was born.
Cannibal Courtship is not a new record, but is in fact a live album, and as mentioned above, the sound, to these ears at least, is even better than their records proper, the guitars are fuzzier, the organs louder, the harmonies and arrangements still perfect, but just check out the title track, the verses smoldering and sexy, the chorus super loud, the guitars crashing, intense and epic. And then the band switch gears and go right into "Cement Slippers", an organ drenched surf rock jam, with English lyrics, and dueling boy/girl vocals, some wild horns, and yet more distorted guitars. Which gives way to "Uku" which is just classic sixties Cambodian pop that sounds like it was plucked right off a Sublime Frequencies compilation.
This was a Record Store Day release, and it was pretty limited, so we're not sure how long these will be along. Also includes a download coupon!
The return of grindlords Agoraphobic Nosebleed, here teamed up with fellow grinders Despise You, who offer up their first new material in a decade, although their sound has definitely not changed. Despise You traffic in furious, punishing hardcore heaviness, blurred buzzing riffs, wild thrashing drumming, dense super intricate arrangements, slipping from chug and churn to frantic blast, punk pound to mathy lurch, the songs short and sharp, cramming 18 songs into about 16 minutes, even tackling Fear's "I Don't Care About You", the boy/girl vocals (mostly boy) yelped and howled, the sound rough and raw, filthy and crusty, total fast core power violence style, definitely harkening back to the old school Pessimiser / Theologian / Slap A Ham sound of the nineties. Which we STILL love like crazy...
Agoraphobic Nosebleed counter with their own take on that sound, starting their half out with some downtuned doomed out sludge, the vocals a heavily effected guttural bellow, the sound grooving and slithery, a chugging churning almost Black Flag-ish bit of gnarled hardcore, it's not until the second song that the band explode in a frenzy of hypergrind, complete with dive bombing Slayer style leads, the sound thick and corrosive, the riffing insane and intense, super intricate and mathy, cramming tons of parts into super short blast of sonic fury, finishing off with another chunk of tangled doom flecked midtempo hardcore pound, that grinds and howls and creeps until it fades into a spaced out sprawl of psychedelic feedback and swirling distant drones. Killer.
We had never heard of Xander Duell before, but we were definitely intrigued by a record on Mexican Summer titled Experimental Tape No. 2 Vol. 1, but it's not necessarily what you might expect. Or what we were expecting. Based on the title, we had imagined some actual musique concrete tape experiments, all academic and avant, but then that didn't really jibe with Mexican Summer. And then you hear the first track, the ultra brief fifteen second lone "-", with its dramatic piano and crooned pop, and sampled strings, and the whole tape experiment makes more sense, and the second track just drives that home, acoustic guitar, lush multi tracked vocals, murky percussion, sounding a bit like the Frogs, although the label describes this record as a tribute of sorts to Scott Walker's Scott 1-4, which also makes sense. At its core, the music of Duell is a sort of old fashioned baroque pop, but in its presentation and execution, it's anything but old fashioned. Slathered in noise, warped production, slipping from piano ballad, to dark gloom pop, to a sort of new wave-y RnB, to shuffling groovy jangle, and pretty much every stop in between.
The vocals deep and dreamy one track, wavery and falsetto the next, and then a weird sped up and processed warble the next, making Duell sound almost like Ween, which is in no way a bad thing. In fact, Duell is sort of like a strange fractured mix of Scott Walker, The Frogs, Ween, and you could probably mix in some Ariel Pink, and Emitt Rhodes, and any of a number of idiosyncratic pop geniuses.
It's not an easy listen, some of the songs are dark and dolorous, moody and haunting, others are goofy and bizarre, still others are completely bizarre, and then others practically perfect pop. But the magic of Duell's experiments, is that rarely do they stick to just one of those. A perfect pop song, will have some bafflingly bizarre vox, some twisted avalanche of lo-fi clatter, will be shot through with a gorgeous timeless melody, or some lush vocal harmonies will be doused in effects and wrapped in a collage of twisted samples. But it works, and to these ears this is some seriously amazing stuff. It really makes us wonder what Duell could come up with in a real studio, but at the same time, why mess with what ain't broke, or in Duell's case is exactly as broke as it should be.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. Comes with a download coupon as well.
Ways Of Meaning is a beautifully serene ambient album from the classically trained composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. In sourcing much of his weightless tones, gossamer half-melodies, and immersive atmospherics from guitar and organ, Dunn develops a number of almost baroque flourishes throughout the haze and mist of his warm rich sounds that lean more to the sound of a medieval chorale pitched at quarter-speed than to the contemporary narcoleptic sounds of today's ambient practitioners. The looping interplay between the golden guitar tones on his "Canyon Meadow" begins to resemble an impressionist orchestration for French horns, albeit run through William Basinski's tape machinations that push all of the sounds in and out of focus. His charmingly titled "Movement For The Completely Fucked" is hardly the epithet that one might assume; rather, Dunn's placid composition for somber guitar mesmerism offers solace to whomever may be deemed completely fucked. Fans of Eno's Music For Airports, anything from Stars Of The Lid, and even some of the contemplative works of Arvo Part would be well served to check out this album. Vinyl only!
It took us a while to be won over. But once we were, we couldn't get enough. We've been anxiously awaiting this new Fleet Foxes for ages, and it's everything we hoped it would be. An utterly gorgeous collection of dark shimmery folk, of harmony-heavy country (indie) rock. Like their debut, Helplessness Blues is just simply beautiful and timeless twangy pop. All the stuff we loved about the first record remains, and if anything, the band have stretched out even further. The Beach Boys harmonies, the warm hushed, reverby production, the seventies Laurel Canyon vibe, but this time around, there are horns, the drums seem to play a bigger part, some of the tracks downright bombastic, the sound is way more varied, from hushed whispery drift to wild skronky free jazz freakouts, from strummy, hazy, psychedelic folk to lush, almost cabaret sounding pop.
And the vocals, as incredible as before, Robin Pecknold's croon crystalline and clear, and the harmonies impossibly rich and lush, the vocals bathed in echo and reverb, making every track sound like it was recorded in some dusty old dancehall, exactly as they should. And the songs, like most second records, not as immediately catchy as the first, but upon repeated listens, blossoming and revealing themselves as the perfect pop songs they truly are. The sound is still equal parts Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Simon And Garfunkel, and still those sounds are filtered though more modern influences like Animal Collective, as displayed by the record's lush layers and dense vocal arrangements, but Helplessness Blues is not just more of the same, the sound, the songs, the arrangements, everything this time around is somehow more, and better, and we can't seem to stop listening.
Yes, the Lopatin in this duo is in fact Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never fame - and Joel Ford was his partner in Games. For whatever reason, the duo have dropped the Games moniker, but they are still producing their earnestly reverential homage to '80s trashy electronic pop. This is the second of four singles, not sure what happened to the first one, as we never got that, but no matter as this one has all of the trappings of a Harold Faltermeyer production circa 1984 (you know "Axel F" from Beverly Hills Cop, or the score to Fletch). "Emergency Room" is all cocaine and legwarmers in its mid-tempo electro-funk groove built on sampled slap-basslines, vapid-but-catchy blorping melodies, vocoder vocals (augmented with modern day auto-tuning, mind you), and even an over the top LA rocker guitar solo thrown in for no real reason other than Harold Faltermeyer would have had an LA rocker at his disposal. The two B sides are from The Bug, who strips the song down to a slow motion crawl with lots of dubby atmospheres and little remaining but the vocals, and Gavin Russom, whose remix is a bubbly number that smoothes out many of the '80s references into a tumbling left-field techno number. Pressed as a picture disc with X-rays of spine and hands. Limited to 300 copies.
Forma are a Brooklyn synth-trio, fabricated from the same mold that gave us Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, and Stellar Om Source. Their Kraut-inspired electronics revolve around brightly rendered step sequencing, squelchy percolations, soft streaming melodies and quasi-ambient pads set upon drum machines. It's the rhythms that set Forma apart from many of their contemporaries, looking back to the Connie Plank productions in the early '80s (especially those Moebius & Beerbohm records) and without any indication that Forma has ever heard a techno or disco record, well maybe they've heard Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, but that would be the most recently forward-thinking production that Forma would be referencing. Everything else is firmly planted at the Kosmische center of Cluster and Harmonia. Released on the suitably retrogarde Spectrum Spools imprint curated by Emeralds' John Elliott and funded by Editions Mego.
Described by the label as "obscure, superstitious, cold, uninviting, archaic black metal", and really, who are we to argue. This two song blast of raw grim blackness is the solo project of the awesomely named Bestial Devotion, he of doomy, dramatic black metal weirdos Negative Plane. And really the sounds here are not all that far removed from the Plane, the black metal sounds at least, there seems to be a lot more weirdness lurking just below the surface.
After a creepy church organ intro, FP launch directly into some blurred murk, the guitars angular and atonal, the vox a hissed whisper, the drums buried, the sound heavy on the echo and reverb, giving everything a sort of psychedelic tripped out sound, the track grinding and churning until out of nowhere, some seriously twisted wild psychedelic leads swoop in, and lock into these almost looped sounding squalls, almost harmonies, it's hypnotic and heavy, and while WAY unexpected turns this into something so much more than metal. The flipside starts things off with some warbly clean guitar, sounding almost like a garage rock intro, before the track shifts into some haunting horror doom, lurching and lumbering, eventually building to a midtempo pound, with droned out riffage, creepy clean vox, almost chantlike, very occultic and ritualistic, laced with occasional dense black blasts, but for the most part, more atmospheric and psychedelic than black and blasting. The last few minutes the sound shifts into something way more dynamic and is assembled around some seriously doomy anguished wails, the sound roiling and witchy and grimly ominous, before finishing of with a weirdly melodic tangle of clean guitar.
Obviously Negative Plane fans NEED this. But anyone with even a passing interest in black psychedelia and obscure outsider black metal psych, would do well to check this out.
Housed in super heavy silkscreened black and white sleeves.
This ultra kvlt (and, we must admit, quite kvte!) all-girl Japanese band who play the blackened "metal of death" in a most dirgey and crusty stylee, inspired by (no duh) '80s death/doom pioneers Hellhammer, have returned after 4 years with a new album - titled with some finality The End, though let's hope it ain't. If you're an AQ customer with a pulse, at all into the doomy and dank, you're probably already a Gallhammer fan and are 'adding to cart' as we speak. If at all hesitant, the abysmal buzz and clank of going nowhere not so fast opener "The End" ought to convince you! With that title track out of the way, the Gallhammer gals (now the duo of bassist/vocalist Vivian Slaughter & drummer Risa Reaper, former guitarist Mika Penetrator having left after 2007's Ill Innocence) pick up the pace a bit on the next even more brutal number "Rubbish CG202" (one of several weird, partly numeric song titles on the album, btw), and vary between a flashing stroboscopic throb and molasses creepy crawl throughout this disc, the rhythms more a function of fluctuation in the overlaying distortion field than anything else. The vokills vary too, from rasping guttural anguish to some disturbing yelps (on "Aberration") and even almost actual singing (on "Sober").
The truth is, Gallhammer aren't really so much a metal band, as they are purveyors of nihilistic noise rock, having as much or more in common with the likes of Kevin Drumm, Wolf Eyes, Prurient, Sister Iodine, Aufgehoben No Process, Brainbombs, etc. as they do with the aforementioned Hellhammer, and other old school metal/punk artists whose T-shirts they're often seen wearing, like Amebix. The final cut, the ten+ minute "108=7/T-NA" is perhaps the weirdest, most WTF?, featuring some frightening saxophone textures, played by Ms. Slaughter... but don't worry, this is neither smooth nor jazz!! Just more grinding terror, the end of The End going to the utter extreme of experimental yet primitive doomdrone metal. Damn. We're falling in love with Gallhammer all over again.
Get out your candles, incense, tarot cards and fog machine, it's time for a brand new hypnotizing, psychedelic outing from Gang Gang Dance. So rad how this group continues to evolve and expand their sound, yet keep their original kaleidoscopic vision intact. Eye Contact picks up where Saint Dymphna left off, infusing a blast of downtown late night culture into a mind altering blend of sounds and styles. With some members of White Magic contributing this time out (Tim Koh, Doug Shaw), this recording really finds GGD melding all of their influences and varied sounds to full capacity. Sometimes dancey, sometimes with a warped '80s vibe, sometimes crafting a spell that haunts and seduces at the same time. And all of the time creating a world that Malcolm McLaren would have been drooling all over. It's become annoying to talk about music in terms of being postmodern, but GGD really are one of the best examples of a group who have excelled in bringing so many forms of music and influences altogether and not only deconstructing them but also honoring and celebrating them. This is the sound of NOW!
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL, ONCE AGAIN!!!
The roots of Gang of Four can be traced back to 1976, but from opposite ends of the globe. In their native England during that year, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash dropped the bomb that was punk whose shockwaves can still be felt to this day through music, literature, art, politics, fashion, etc. In China also in 1976, a renegade faction of communists staged a leadership coup after the death of Mao Zedong, holding out for 10 days and calling themselves the Gang of Four. Back in England a year later, a punk band began as four art students from Leeds appropriated not only the name but also the insistance upon bold ideological stances from those Maoist revolutionaries. After achieving considerable success with their debut Damaged Goods EP on the remarkably prescient Fast Productions (who also signed The Mekons early on as well), Gang of Four landed a deal with EMI which resulted in Entertainment. This album - like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the first three Wire albums - transformed punk with its ingenious marriage of intelligence, angst, politics, and aesthetics, and has not been improved upon since, despite the best efforts from a crowd of post-punk revivalists (i.e. The Rapture, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
Gang of Four were Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham; well at least for Entertainment and the two follow up records. Entertainment's politics have been at the center of most of the reviews you'll find praising this record, but those politics wouldn't have been heard had Gang of Four not been a fucking tight band, with Gill's rapid fire guitar arpeggios, Allen's agitated funk-punk basslines, and Burnham's explosive post-disco rhythms. Every thing that has been written about Gang of Four in the past is true, especially from those kind people at Pitchfork who sneered at the end of their review of Entertainment that "anyone who says it's played out is a douchebag." Truer words have not been spoken.
Egads. What's that rumbling, lumbering sound? The Gates Of Slumber, of course. The Midwestern true doom stalwarts return with their 2nd slipcased album for Rise Above/Metal Blade, at least their fourth full-length release overall. If you like your metal HEAVY then you know these guys already. Traditionalists at heart, they don't mess much with their basic modus operandi, once more this is barbaric thud that Conan himself would enjoy blasting on his stereo, if they had such technology in the ancient Hyborian Age...
Snail's pace opening track "Bastards Born" is VERY Vitus-y, the influence of '80s Sabbath disciples Saint Vitus always having been a big part of TGOS's sound, but here really taken to an extreme of emulation, it could easily be a track left off of final (for now) Vitus masterpiece Die Healing. Except that the vocals by TGOS guitarist Karl Karl Simon aren't quite so godly as those of Scott Reagers. He's a bit more "wretched" sounding (natch, this album is titled The Wretch after all) and comes closer to sounding like the other significant Vitus vocalist, Wino.
Heck we're preaching to the choir here, making references to Die Healing and Reagers and Wino... if those names mean anything to you, you probably already know if you're interested in TGOS's latest or not. In any case, we can't imagine that TGOS weren't thinking of this as their "Die Healing" song when they were writing it.
As an statement of purpose, "Bastards Born" says: "Sludge". And sludge they do, as the rest of the album oozes forth. But some tracks ooze faster. Track two "The Scourge Of Drunkenness" is one such relatively uptempo rocker... Later on "Coven Of Cain" conjures up the high spirits of the NWOBHM, while conversely "Castle Of The Devil", another mid-album number, takes things in a relaxed, almost artily atmospheric direction, a nice breather amidst the more crushing cuts.
TGOS's true doom devotion to sheer lamentation and misery is utterly fulfilled by the end of the album, with the epic - and even more epic - tracks "The Wretch" (8:18) and "Iron And Fire" (12:14) both slo-mo, sorrowfully emo trudges to leave you suicidally spent, when all's said and doomed.
Pretty darn good, though you kinda have to be in that "doomed" mood. So if we admitted that, right at the moment, we'd rather be listening to those reissues by Alaskan '80s metal band Pandemonium that we made Record(s) Of The Week, we don't think the TGOS guys would be at all offended. After all, they're nothing if not worshipful of their heavy metal forebears themselves, the cd booklets to most previous releases usually featuring Karl Simon's analysis/admissions of each song's musical inspirations (whereas here, his liner notes are all about how this time, they got more "personal" rather than "fantastic" in terms of lyrics and mood, hence titles like "The Scourge Of Drunkenness", presumably).
Another blast of twisted black metal weirdness from Finland, from long time aQ faves, one man BM weirdo Dead Reptile Shrine, and fellow one man black metal outfit Goatmoon, who just happen to be finally making their aQ list debut.
And as you might have surmised, 'weird Finnish black metal', could very well mean that this is not at all like the black metal you're used to, and in this case you'd be right. Goatmoon, who in the past have shared a split with another aQ fave, the truly insane/brilliant Ride For Revenge (in fact, Mr. Goatmoon is a member of the RfR live band), offers up the nearly 25 minute title track, which is barely black metal at all, instead, the first 4 minutes is all acoustic guitar, draped over swirling winds, sounding a little like a Nordic Six Organs or something, that is until the guitars fade out, leaving just the wind, then some tribal drums, howling wolves, and then what sounds like some alien gypsy ritual, buzzing guitars that sound very Eastern, the percussion bells and shakers, the only real black element is the howled demonic vox, otherwise it sounds more like Amps For Christ, that is until that fades out, leaving just piano, a mournful lament drifting over that same whipping wind, then that distorted gypsy folk sounding buzz returns, this time with crooned clean vocals added to the mix, before everything fades out, leaving just a soft swirling expanse of melancholy synths, a meditative dronescape, haunting and dreamlike, drifting darkly though the ever blowing wind. So amazing, twisted and far out. Finland!
Which brings us to Dead Reptile Shrine, who like Goatmoon, confound and confuse, here offering up a thick swirl of hazy psychedelia, minimal percussion beneath a cloud of tangled looped buzz, a weird disembodied distorted voice buried in the mix, the sound tense, never quite offering release, instead, a continual crescendo, epic and majestic and gorgeously haunting, before giving way to the stripped down minimal stumble folk of the next track, reverbed notes drift over electronic buzz, the vocals a caveman grumble, before a second vocal swoops in strident and powerful, the track flecked with steel string guitars, atonal melodies, monstrous whispers, a creepy chunk of haunting black folk mesmer.
And so it goes, the sound definitely seems to exist in some warped abstract folk continuum, stumbling looped rhythms, distant fluttery flutes, detuned finger picking and fractured folk strum, eventually subsumed by some almost blackened buzz, and ridden by echo drenched sung/spoken vokills, the next track is about as close to proper black metal as DRS get, but as you might imagine that's not very close, with a black metal riff slowed way down and gradually unraveling, while various bits of percussion or shaken and rattled, and strange chant like croons swirl all around, until finally, DRS finish things off in a cloud of keening almost Skullflower like guitar, peppered with tiny bits of percussive glitch, thick low end rumbles, and a strange voice that almost sounds like he's speaking while breathing in, warped and weird, and pretty amazing in fact, a haunting, confusing bit of black ambient ritualism, and pretty much what we would expect (if one could really expect anything) from Dead Reptile Shrine.
Of course, unadventurous black metallers should steer clear, but everyone else, whether you dig anything weird and Finnish, or love blackened outsider folk, or twisted deconstructed folk flecked black metal or like us want ANYTHING from either of these bands, this comes HIGHly recommended.
Slumberland are certainly making up for lost time. This iconic pop label seemed to disappear for a while there a few years back, but since they reemerged, a month hasn't gone by without a new record by some new band (or an old favorite), and if it was any other label, we might be wondering "where the heck do they find these bands" but this is Slumberland, whose track record for discovering bands is pretty much totally untouchable. SO thus we have Gold-Bears, the latest new band on Slumberland, and we're digging it big time. Big jangly, distortion drenched noise pop, the label mentions Boyracer (one of our all time favorite pop bands who for some reason have never made it onto the aQ list) and the Wedding Present, both of which definitely fit, as do some of the other Slumberland bands like Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Summer Cats, but hell, there are bits of Neutral Milk Hotel and other Elephant Six bands going on here and there. Gold-Bears' pop is rife with angelic female background vox, lots of 'la la la's and 'ooooooh's, horns and unlikely instrumentation, strange production, the sound slipping from murky punky and lo-fi, to big bombastic to jangly and shimmery, the record oozing hooks, none so much as the opener, a summer jam if there ever was one, plus it's called "Record Store", noisy, jangly, catchy as heck, super dynamic, crazy melodic, a total mixtape track for sure. And like all great records, Are You Falling In Love? is full of those sorts of tracks, the whole thing immediately catchy, but the sort of record where every song has the potential to be your favorite, and if you listen enough, they eventually all will be. So good.
Killer three way split of grim depressive blackness from the same label that brought us the new Pyha (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and while we were familiar with French outfit Grimlair, we had never heard of the other two. And while Grimlair have not made it onto the aQ list until now, the black metalheads around here have dug them for a while, their, woozy, mournful, melancholic buzz drenched miserablism, the guitars crunchy and softly corrosive, the vocals and anguished wail, the drums simple and buried in the mix, but the melodies, so dreamy and haunting and emotional, think Xasthur and Alcest and Amesoeurs, but way more raw and stripped down, a single riff spread out into a whole song, the melody winding through the churning murky riffage, not so much heavy as atmospheric, a gauzy, blackened sonic dreamworld, the last track a cool, reverby, almost classical clean guitar piece, love this guy. If you're at all into the sad and sorrowful side of the grim black spectrum, this will totally hit the spot.
The guy from Grimlair apparently also plays in Klar, who not surprisingly traffic in a similar sound, but Klar's sound is a bit more lush and full, the same sort of melancholic melodic grimnesss, but with a dour almost post punk undercurrent, the guitars reverby and echoey, with some cool, almost psychedelic sounding leads, the vocals more up front, and a bit more tortured sounding, with occasional bursts of almost blasting blackness, but for the most part, Klar creeps and crawls, crafting ominous and haunting slo motion metallic atmospheres, peppered with stretches of almost post rock sounding clean guitar jangle, and one long stretch of solo guitar that's super meditative and hypnotic.
Finally, there's Unending Hatred, a depressive duo from Mexico, who have their own take on miserable blackness, a full, heavy sound that definitely reminds us a little of Lifelover, but much more raw and grim, the guitars woozy and washed out, everything wreathed in thick buzz, the melodies sad and sorrowful, minor key and mournful, and the vocals, twisted mewls and wild falsetto shrieks, very alien and animalistic, adding a seriously demented vibe to the droned out depressive blackness, definitely want to hear more from these guys.
Three variations on grim black miserablism, all of them pretty great...
Woah. What the heck is this? Pretty badass, as reissues of '70s sci-fi inflected proto-metal glam rock we've never heard of before goes!! Now, we're not sure why these guys were called Hillary Blaze, there's no girl nor guy named Hillary (or Blaze) in the band, but maybe it's an Alice Cooper kind of move, they must have been big AC fans for sure. They started off as a '60s psych pop act called The Paper Garden, but by the mid-'70s, after a name change and some lineup changes too, were MUCH more metallic (though still spaced-out enough for this to get a positive mention in the Acid Archives book). So, yeah, all you proto-metal lovin' folks, you'll want to pick this one up and crank it loud, another excellent obscurity rescued by the reliable Rockadrome/Vintage label, whose Cain and Poobah reissues could kinda be seen as foreshadowing this one...
Originally released in 1977 on "30th Century Fox Records", this, the sole album from Hillary Blaze, is a dramatic, high energy entertainment attack, full of sizzling sci-fi synths (and plenty of distorto geetar too), quite theatrical in the vocal dep't, indeed full on freaky overall, their glammy '70s sounds influenced not only by AC and Ziggy Stardust, but also The Sweet, most definitely! A real Rocky Horror Show of early heavy metal histrionics, before heavy metal was codified into more a conventional/conformist direction in the '80s, commercially and otherwise (and '80s "glam metal" has NOTHING to do with what we're talking about here with regard to Hillary Blaze).
No, these guys have more in common with such eccentrics as Zolar X and White Boy And The Average Rat Band, really. Heck maybe Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack could be another contemporary comparison. And today, maybe Danava??
Cool stuff, thanks once again to the folks at Rockadrome for bringing this to our attention, we're lovin' it... not sure why they made a new cover, though (the original mushroom cloud one can be seen thumbnail sized on the back, however).
What apparently began as a lark has absolutely snowballed... and with what is quite possibly the (unintentional) best timing ever! Indeed it seems the planets have aligned in the most fortuitous fashion for devoted Brian Eno fan Doug Hilsinger (presently in SF band Waycross, and formerly in Bomb and Gifthorse) and his bandmate Caroleen Beatty. Initially planning to record covers of just two of the songs from TTM(BS) for their own enjoyment, they got caught up in the inspired swing of things and progressed right on through the rest. Hilsinger has emphasized that this was not intended to be some grand transformation nor interpretation of Eno's original. This is simply their celebration of a great album, with the hopes of drawing attention back to the original. And it certainly does just that, but it also bears the mark of an immensely talented duo in their own right. If you dig this, be sure to check out Waycross too. Now, we're probably going to catch some flack for this, but we'll dare to say that he improves on a few of the originals. C'mon all of you Eno fanatics who're screaming "Impossible!", it's not all that hard to fathom. Consider the following: back when Eno recorded the album, these songs were fresh and new to him. They tingle with the electricity of experimentation and spontaneity, but there are moments that are perhaps not fully realized. On the other hand, Hilsinger has lived and loved these songs for thirty years! He knows them like the back of his hand. With the exception of the lead vocals which were the domain of Beatty, Hilsinger played and produced all that you hear. With a full command of each instrument and the aforementioned inside'n'out knowledge of the songs, his performance and the recordings are breathtaking. The interplay between the instruments captures the subtle dynamics of a kickass full band playing together live. You'd never know it was laid down track by track, piece by piece. Heck, the prerequisite organizational skills alone are daunting. Completing this loving, enthusiastic tribute in the best possible way, Beatty's languid voice winds its way around the slinking arrangements, delivering Eno's words in a most seductive, heavily lidded fashion. Highlights include a great carnivalesque rendition of "Back In Judy's Jungle" transitioning it into a pint-raising singalong, as well as their slowed-to-half-time, intoxicating version of the originally near-punk, Wire-ish, propulsive "Third Uncle". The winding chorused guitars and textural wheeze are rich and effective while the vocals add to the air of subtle unease. Splendid!
So back to the magical tale of good timing... The pair completed the work right around November 2003 which just happened to coincide with a special lecture that Brian Eno was giving here in SF. Of course Hilsinger was in attendance, and personally delivered a copy into Eno's hands. The very next day he received an enthusiastic phone call from Eno giving it his mighty stamp of approval. He even wrote the liner notes! To boot, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the album, and four titles from Eno's back catalogue are at long last receiving their much needed reissue. We've got 'em as well as Hilsinger's Gifthorse and Waycross cds.
One of two new Handmade Birds titles this week, the other, an amazing triple 10" boxset from Finnish folky weirdos Key reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this one, a long overdue reissue of this long out of print rarity from long time aQ faves His Name Is Alive. There was a time when HNIA were THEE aQ band, their Stars On E.S.P. record still ranks as one of our all time favorites (but gets short shrift on the aQ site, as it came out in the early days of the list), a sort of mad scientist, Beach Boys influenced outsider 4AD flecked dream pop, laced with strange noises, and fantastic atmospheres, gorgeous vocals, and some of the most amazing hooks EVER. The band eventually transformed into something else entirely, not as much to our liking, but back then, they were unbeatable.
This record right here, is from back then, 1993 to be exact, and was originally released on Perdition Plastics as a 'fake' bootleg, a compilation of tracks from various cassettes, consisting of demos, outtakes, and alternate versions, as well as unreleased tracks and a handful of sonic experiments, all woven into a twisted chunk of weirdo pop. Out of print for years, recently remastered and now available again as a limited edition double lp on Handmade Birds, and wow, does this have us drifting back, these sounds so reminiscent of that other time, but sounding so fresh and relevant to NOW.
Guitars buzz, drums shuffle, harmonics chime and drift, female vox all lush and dreamy drift over the top, while way off in the background other vocals swirl and shimmer, choruses crash, acoustic guitars strum, strange bits of percussion shuffle and clatter, harmonies hover and fade, tape speed shifts, speeds up and slows down, it's definitely not the absolute weirdest HNIA, but these wistful indie pop drifters are definitely laced with strange production, mysterious sounds, are sometimes chopped up and rearranged into strange arrangements, the vibe is definitely hazy and shoegazey, washed out and dream poppy, the guitars occasionally getting a little buzzy and crunchy, and the sound sometimes crumbles into strange collages, or bursts of crumbling distorted noise, but at its core, this is a fantastic pop record, just twisted and fractured enough to make it something more.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES! Already sold out at the label, these are the LAST copies we'll ever be able to get! Housed in super deluxe full color gatefold jackets.
We were really happy to see that Type has added Ezekiel Honig to their great roster, as he's someone whose been making fractured, fragile sounds over the last several years with such great results. His latest shows how masterful he is at crafting dreamy and drifty soundscapes with such a subtle touch. In many ways it's the subtlety of his work that really allows the listener to slowly get lost in the haze and sway of the tracks on Folding In On Itself. Like the most delicate moments on records by Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, Philip Jeck, William Basinski and Fennesz, and with the dream world atmosphere found on recordings by Colleen, Mum, and Koss... This has been our early morning and go to bed soundtrack, as it's just so perfect in slowly transporting you to a softer, dreamier dimension. Understated, shimmering beauty.
It's been a long time since we've heard from Hoor-Paar-Kraat, aka Anthony Mangicapra, whose records have definitely been big time faves around here, each one a series of delicately crafted dronescapes and ambient atmospheres, of abstract Dada-ist sound, modern minimal acoustics and of course strangely twisted sonic rituals. This is not in fact a new record, instead it's a compilation, collecting various ultra limited and long out of print releases, as well as at least one unreleased track.
Previously released on Small Doses, Peasant Magick and his own Goat Eater Arts label, these three volumes of what is essentially now The Eureka Tapes, find Mangicapra and crew digging deep into sounds both haunting and horrifying, mysterious and minimal, haunting expanses of keening high end shimmer, tinkling chimes, strange voices, deep tectonic rumbles, piercing tones, churning industrial crunch, strange field recordings wedded to barely there rhythms and disembodied riffage, twisted tape experiments, rumbling guitardrone, warped audio collages, all blurring and bleeding into one another creating a fantastically fantastical world of sound. The closest comparison would maybe be irr. app. (ext.), who has a similarly Dadaist aesthetic, or maybe Nurse With Wound, although Mangicapra definitely takes his own route, deftly weaving difficult listening into lush hypnotic soundscapes, and turning dreamlike expanses of sound into something a bit more nightmarish. These two discs are a pretty great sampling of Mangicapra's activities over the last few years. And it will be interesting to hear the sounds he conjures up from here on out, now that he has finally left Eureka behind.
We initially reviewed the first disc of this 2cd set way back in 2007 and proclaimed it "absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc", and lest we forget, Relapse has printed that right on the front of this reissue, which takes that record, and bundles it with a super limited cassette release from 2010 called Forbidden Planet, available on cd for the very first time, originally a tape that was so limited we never actually got ANY copies at all. So this reissue seemed destined to be a Record Of The Week, that classic Horseback debut available again, and what essentially amounts to a whole new full length that most folks never got their hands on either. Here's what we had to say about Impale Golden Horn when we first heard it way back in 2007:
Drone records are a dime a dozen. Not that we don't love drone records, we do. In fact, often we're way too easy on the purveyors of drone, since the very essence of that sound, is so simple, and yet so completely satisfying to listen to. A guitar against the amp, a handful of keys on a keyboard held down, a loop cycled over and over and over, almost any sound smeared into a near static drift, we could listen to that stuff forever, and often do. But it's the rare drone record that uses the drone as just the jumping off point, as a foundation upon which to build a fragile and ephemeral structure of minimal melody and movement, instead of the beginning AND end. Stars Of The Lid are a good example, as is William Basinski, Tim Hecker and a handful of others.
Horseback too. We were sent this disc out of the blue and immediately fell in love. Only later to discover that this was the work of a faithful AQ mailorder customer by the name of Jenks Miller! Small world. Horseback is most definitely a drone record, but manages to incorporate plenty of not specifically drone-like sounds. At once massive and dense, dark and distorted, but also ephemeral and airy, soaring and dreamlike. The root of the sound is a guitar, or guitars, allowed to reverberate and ring out, unfurling billowing clouds of distorted buzz and whir, that settles on the speaker like a thick blanket of snow, glistening and blinding, but at the same time warm and enveloping. The guitars pulse and swell, melodies drifting in and out, streaks of feedback, all wound up into a huge softly roiling glowing orb of sound.
It's almost unfair to call this a drone record, as it's so lush, and rich, and full of motion, sprawling out like some sort of sonic sunrise, the sounds gradually changing color, everything shifting and shimmering and transforming subtly as the record progresses. So much more than just a simple 'drone' record. In fact, it's easy to hear Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, that sort of spaced out doped up drift, all smeared into Horseback's haunting sun dappled world of slow burning sound.
Elsewhere piano drifts amidst the dense guitar swells, and rhythms are provided by pulsing guitars and various sounds beating against one another. Vocals hover way below the surface, barely audible, but adding another layer of lilting mystery, near the end, the guitars peel back gradually revealing a blurry expanse of swirling cymbals and splattery free jazz percussion, all spread out into a buzzy sizzling swirl, over which the final haunting piano notes drift and fade. So gorgeous. Absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc
Then there's Forbidden Planet. By now, the one thing we've learned about Horseback is that their sound seems to change dramatically with every record, gorgeous hazy drones on one release, buzzing blasting black metal on the next, so it's really impossible to predict what the next record will sound like. Which makes pairing two Horseback records together an interesting challenge. Forbidden Planet opens up with what might be the perfect balance of the two, buzzing layered guitars, wound into a heavy slice of dark metallic drone, but laced with hellishly growled black metal vokills, as if that weren't far out enough, there's also shards of glitchy electronics, a weird industrial component, which just adds a whole other vibe. Cuz minus those strange sounds, it begins to sound like black metal loosed from any rhythms and slowed way down, and thus transformed into a sort of buzzing black dronemusic, which does seems to be the theme of the whole record, blackened riffing pulled apart and stretched into sprawling expanses of majestic buzz, laced with weird vox, rumbling basslines, and streaks of feedback. In some ways it reminds us of Mick Barr's Ocrilim, which did something similar, taking just the riffs, that distinctly epic and majestic minor key black metal style riffery, and repeating, looping, layering, and transforming it into something much more abstract and minimal. Which is definitely what's going on here. But Horseback sounds more organic, the sounds more raw, bleeding into each other, the distinction between notes and riffs gradually blurring, until these tracks are transformed into something much more woozy and psychedelic, heavy and heady. Thankfully, the vocals are way down in the mix, so while their presence does indeed further the black metal vibe, they gradually blend into the background, becoming just another layer of sound, woven into Horseback's thick undulating blackened buzzscape. And it's not until the final track, a brief 3 minute outro, that the buzz and howl are peeled back, leaving a gorgeously hazy bit of soft focus shimmer to finish things off. Quite gorgeous, and in its own way, a pretty perfect companion to Impale Golden Horn. Needless to say, absolutely recommended...
If any album on this week's list is gonna put a smile on your face and spring in your step, this is the one! First off, we love Bollywood stuff to begin with, and then that this was curated by the Finders Keepers / B-Music folks, you know it's gonna be good... And indeed the stuff they've dug up for this compilation is so fantastic, fun, energetic, absurd, over the top, and catchy, yeah it's Bollywood at its best. Well, except that actually to be precise it's KOLLYWOOD not Bollywood, 'cause this is is all music from films produced by the Tamil-language film industry, based not in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) but in the South Indian city of Chenai (formerly Madras), in a neighborhood called Kodambakkam, thus "Kollywood" (and remember, there's also Pakistan's Lollywood too, based in Lahore, and Nollywood in Nigeria...).
In any case, there's 16 tracks here, each more groovy and insane than the last. Furthermore, they're all the work of composer Ilaiyaraaja (meaning, Prince), aka The Maestro, a very creative and hard working fellow indeed, responsible for the scores to over 900 films in his long career!!! Thanks to Finder Keepers, who've selected these gems, sourced from rare 45 rpm singles and such, we're now big fans. Reminds us A LOT of one of our very favorite Bollywood and/or Kollywood collections ever, an all time AQ fave disc in any genre in fact: the long out of print Vijaya Anand "Dance Raja Dance" cd on Luaka Bop from years ago, another amazing batch of songs from South Indian musical cinema.
Solla Solla, like Dance Raja Dance, Dance, is simply irresistible. A lively, genre defying mash up of Eastern and Western, kitschy pop and chaotic exotica, psychedelic sometimes intentionally, sometimes otherwise, full of sudden surprises and sweeping melodies, crazy rhythms, wild vocal outbursts, funky fat synths, big bands doing disco beats... Wow!!
These songs, presumably for whirling, ADD action sequences / dance numbers, often feature quasi-orgasmic murmurs and squeals from the female lead vocalists, giggles and screams as well. Along with plenty of lovely singing, too, of course. And from the men, lots of "Huuh!!" and "Hey!!". Quite bombastic, and ecstatic, and definitely dance-floor DJ fodder for when you really want the party to get goin'. Absolutely delightful!!!
Again, all music composed, produced, and arranged by Ilaiyaraaja. Various veteran "playback singers" like S.P. Balasubrahmanyam and T.M. Soundararajan appear on here. The liner notes by Doug Shipton go into depth about Ilaiyaraaja's career, and plenty of photos/graphics are provided.
FYI, we also have (or can get) this on import vinyl, in two volumes, $24.00 each. Vol.1 contains a bonus track.
It's a while since we've heard from these Chicago heavies, almost three years in fact, but 4 full lengths and 8 years in, and these guys still sound as good as ever. Massive downtuned droned out doom, shrieked vox over post rock and math rock flecked doom, a sound that distinctly their own, definitely positions them alongside Isis, Neurosis, Mastodon, Conifer, Tides and the rest of the many Neur-Isis bands, but they also have a serious sludge thing happening, reminding us of groups like Khanate, Melvins, Buried At Sea, Eyehategod, their stonery sludge and epic bombastic post-doom seemingly more polished and melodic this time around, the songs mini epics, slow building sprawls of cyclical repetition, tension and releases, often blossoming into full on poppiness, but just as often collapsing into gouts of curdled black tar trudge and plod. The sound laced with strange electronics and effects, the vocals often heavily effected, give them a sort of tripped out psychedelic vibe.
Opener "No Grace" seems to meld AmRep style noise rock to epic Godspeed style majesty, all wound around murky downtuned riffage, and peppered with some surprising bits of melody, while "The Fate Before Fate" almost sounds like a more screamo style Neurosis, crumbling avalanches of grinding riffage offset by soaring tangles of high end melody and the vocals super distorted and intense. The title track slows it WAY down, a creeping blackened crawl, the guitars undulating strangely, the drums mathy, but slowed way down, and those vox, managing to transcend mere shriek and actually sound like 'singing' even though they're harsh and hellish.
After a brief bit of noise drenched low slung slithery detuned blues, the record finished off with the epic 9 minute "Banality" a heaving, hauntingly atmospheric bit of lurching lumbering heaviness, a strange mix of tranced out droniness, and extreme intensity, culminating in a weird stretch of warped metallic psychedelia, the chords and riffs seeming to bleed and ooze and melt, the vocals even more blown out, wrapped in effects, and over the top all manner of strange shimmer, and warbly psych guitar filigree, the sound getting more and more noisy and intense before blinking out in a brief blast of staticky hiss.
Way way recommended.
This was a warehouse find, managed to dig up 4 or 5 copies, been hiding away for 5 or 6 years now, which is a shame cuz this is some pretty bad ass black metal. Split records are always funny when both bands share members, but even more funny when both bands are one man bands, and that one man is the same guy. Thus we have this split from way back in 2004, featuring Inimical and Sect, both the work of J. Del Russi, who hails from New Jersey, and MIGHT be more recognizable under his other name, Xathagorra Mlandroth, which is what he used in another one man band, long time aQ faves, ultra funereal doomlord(s) Catacombs.
But before the blackened slo-mo tarpit crawl of Catacombs, Russi/Mlandroth was trafficking in some serious old school raw and grim black metal, all frantic riffing, furious drumming, and some sick raspy vokills, the sound murky and lo-fi, the arrangements repetitive and trancelike, very hypnotic and mesmerizing, in fact almost weirdly looped sounding, which only adds to the mesmerizing vibe.
Where Inimical was more murky and washed out, the sound of Sect was more brittle and buzzy, the sound blown out and buzz drenched and thickly atmospheric, but similar to Inimical, the sound is cyclical and repetitive and trancelike and again weirdly looped, few parts repeated over and over, almost mantra like, although Sect did mix it up, with some weirdly industrial rhythms, abstract droned out ambience, and some weird spacey song structures, often ditching the blackness entirely for something way more abstract and tripped out. Cool stuff for sure. And in Sect maybe hints of what was to come in Catacombs.
Got very few of these, not sure if it's even still available, but we're guessing not, so grab one of these quick before they're gone.
Here's one of those albums that we KNEW we'd make Record Of The Week - IF ever it was reissued. And now it has been! Here's a fully legit reish of this cult '70s hard rock rarity, a record by one of those bands who seem simultaneously to be both testosterone-tanked young men and wizened ol' wise wizards. Yeah, a Record Of The Week easy, on account of it not only being an old fave of some of us here, but something that immediately caught on with the AQ staffers who hadn't heard it before, this reissue getting played in the store quite steadily (and loudly!) since it arrived. Let's listen in, as Jerusalem's vocalist belts it out, in an emotive yowl a bit like Robert Plant but with Ozzy Osbourne's paranoid feelings: "Hey girl, will you never learn? Who d'you think you're fooling with your lyin' and your cryin'? You'll only be happy the day you see me dyin'!" But then, in more of a normal speaking voice, we get the casual aside: "Oh yeah, that's the way it happens sometimes. Ha."
Right on, brilliant. That's from "Frustration", the first of nine fantastic tracks on the one and only album by this English band, recorded in 1971, released in '72 on Deram/Decca, produced by Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. Why Jerusalem didn't get big is a mystery, though the liner notes give some clues as to why they disbanded. Heck they're even fairly unknown (or a well-kept secret) among connoisseurs of '70s heavy psych and hard rock, with this being its first ever official, non-bootleg reissue on compact disc. Now, there's lots of great obscure heavy rock rarities from the early '70s. We've raved about reissues of many of them (Dust, Leaf Hound, Toad, Bang, T2, etc.). But as far as unheralded proto-metal goes, this belongs pretty much at the top of that longhaired, bellbottomed heap, as essential as any of 'em anyway. Pentagram, Bedemon, Blues Creation, Budgie, Night Sun, you name it.
Allan here first heard Jerusalem a few years back when a friend who shares his taste for proto-metal passed along a cd-r copy of this otherwise unavailable album (thanks, Glenn!). Killer stuff indeed, damn it was good. One of the heaviest things from the era he'd ever heard, Jerusalem took it to an extreme that most of their peers didn't approach. With elements of both biggies Sabbath and Zeppelin, but more frenzied and frantic on one hand, more plodding and suicidal on the other.
Crashing, fuzzed out guitars. Energetic hectic riffage. Doomy, thudding blues. Wicked stinging, sliding soloing. Punkish attitude (competitive with contemporaries Crushed Butler). The vocals often hoarse, on the verge of screaming, or gone over that edge. Yeah, pretty heavy for '72! This is rough, raw, proto headbanging mania mixed with mystical, melodic proggy interludes, of course we love it. Plus it's got a genuine dark, occult, despairing vibe, with poetic lyrics about madness, murder and death... And you can't get much more "downer rock genocidal" sounding than the truly, uh, primitive bludgeon what might be the heaviest track here, "Primitive Man".
Pretty darn metal when it comes down to it, forget the "proto". In their own way though, Jerusalem sounding halfway betwixt '60s garage rock and '80s New Wave Of British Heavy Metal... which on balance puts them a bit ahead of their time. In fact, since what's old is new again, this actually sounds like if could have been made now, not because it sounds modern (it doesn't) but because it's so line with certain stonery retro-stylings popular today, particularly in Sweden. In other words, if you like Witchcraft, you'll love Jerusalem!! We always thought that of all the obscure '70s bands that are their forebears, Witchcraft sound most like Jerusalem (well, next to Pentagram). Remember what we said in all caps about Witchcraft's debut? "PERHAPS THEE BEST '70s INSPIRED DOOM ALBUM EVER!" Well the same would go for this, except that it's the real deal, which makes it even better.
Anyway, to return to our story, after Allan got that cd-r dub, he knew he had to find a proper cd. There HAD to be one, this was too good not to have been reissued, right? But, after looking and looking, no luck. Then, one day, Allan came to work at Aquarius and lo and behold what did he hear, but Jerusalem blaring from the store stereo! No, it wasn't this reissue. This was still a few years ago. Turns out, Andee had found a used copy of a bootleg cd someplace, and had bought it simply 'cause he thought the cover looked cool (he's like that), without knowing anything about the band. Life is so unfair, thought Allan. But he was able to eventually guilt Andee into giving him the cd for a birthday present (thanks, Andee! You can have that one back now). Later on, we discovered a Japanese reissue that may or may not have been a boot but in any event was way too expensive and hard to get, nothing we could easily stock and sell for a reasonable price. But NOW, we happily are able to share Jerusalem with you thanks to this nicely done reissue on the Rockadrome label's Vintage imprint! Yeah!
In addition to the nine songs from the original LP, this cd comes with five bonus tracks, including non-album single "Kamakazi Moth". The thick booklet is filled with lengthy liner notes, complete lyrics, vintage photos, all that good stuff you want in a reissue. Once more, yeah!
It might seem strange, that a band whose mastermind spent most of his career bashing our epic swaths of crushing Teutonic industrial pound, abrasive and caustic guitardrone and gnarled hyperkinetic grind, would find himself on a label run by none other than Mark Kozelek from the Red House Painters, but it only seems strange if you haven't been paying attention to Jesu the last decade plus.
Justin Broadrick, better know to some as the man behind the legendary Godflesh, as well as having played in Napalm Death, Head Of David, and Fall Of Because among others, has spent the last few years playing as Jesu, a surprisingly melodic, and shoegazily dreamy outfit that has moved well beyond the programmed head cave churn of Godflesh and well into something more along the lines of the hazy dream pop of M83. With ever record it seems Broadrick has been perfecting his own particular brand of pop music, still beholden to all the various groups he played in before, but the elements from those various endeavors have in Jesu been transformed and deftly woven into a whole new sound, a hushed slow build, post rock slowcore, with just a bit of the recently coined metal gaze, the bombastic choruses, the lush, crumblingly distorted avalanches of thick guitar swirl, but always underneath, a sweetly melancholic pop. Never more so than on Ascension, which has to be Broadrick's prettiest, and lest heavy record to date.
Opener "Fools" begins all acoustic guitars, simpler percussion, woozy bass, sounding like Codeine, or appropriately enough Red House Painters, the vocals hushed and softly crooned, the melody minor key, the song soon erupts into crashing big guitars, but it's not chugging and churning so much as chiming and soaring, the sound epic and majestic, the thick guitarbuzz washed out and almost ethereal, the guitar does slip into some cool processed chug, but instead of making it sound metal, it just adds another layer of warm muted buzz. The song drifts on and on, wistful and melancholy and dreamy and shoegazey, an updated version of the softly psychedelic nineties indie pop that we grew up listening to.
And so it goes, the rest of the record equally melodic, poppy, washed out and shoegazey, some of the songs sounding like reimagined Godflesh jams, the guitars softened, the melodies stretched out into soft spiraling swirls, often blurred into something slightly darker, but this is definitely Broadrick's finest moment, at least from a pop standpoint, the songs gorgeously catchy, beautifully arranged, the instrumentation lush and thick and layered, some of the best hooks we've heard buried beneath the warm whirl of Jesu's slowcore shoegaze buzz.
Sometimes you have to go straight to the source to get it really right. And no doubt, for the sounds of Jonas Reinhardt, that motherland (er, fatherland?) is Germany, as their kosmische sound has no doubt been shaped heavily by so many of the groups that came out of the Krautrock scene of the seventies and eighties. Spending some time in Berlin and recording this new record there seems to have really helped take JR's sounds to the next level. Music For The Tactile Dome, their vinyl only debut for Not Not Fun, is the most successful outing yet by JR, demonstrating different facets of their sound while still keeping a focused eye on the unknown cosmic sky. It also has some of the darkest elements that we've heard from these guys so far and those sounds really suit them so well. Analog synth overdrive orbiting a pulsating planet with mysterious and surprising twists and turns along the way. Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze would be proud!
Yet another strange release on the increasingly difficult to pin down Handmade Birds label, run by R. Loren of Pyramids, White Moth and Sailors with Wax Wings. In a matter of months, Handmade Birds has more releases than most labels have over the course of years! But hell, we're not complaining. So far we've had Blut Aus Nord's Mort, Celestiial's Desolate North, Evan Caminiti's When California Falls Into The Sea, His Name Is Alive's King Of Sweet (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and about a million more on the way (Der Blutharsch, Human Quena Orchestra, The Rita, Crooked Necks, Swamp Horse, Servile Sect and more!!), but this one, this is odd even by Handmade Birds admittedly far out criteria. This is a triple 10" boxset reissue of three long out of print demo tapes from Finnish black folk weirdos Key, a duo consisting of Kaarna from drone outfit Somnivore and Rauta from outsider black metal horde Circle Of Ouroborus, and all the mentions of 'black' above could be a little misleading, as this is far from black, and not at all metal. It's more in keeping with the later Circle Of Ouroborus recordings, a sort of fractured folk, a jangly, gloomy folk pop, all clean guitars, and haunting atmospheres, the vocals plaintive and hushed one second, deep and dramatically crooned the next, the sound slipping easily from psychedelic folk, to haunting almost new wave, to creepy doomy ballads, to reverby proto punk, but all gloomy and moody and fantastically strange, sounding a lot at moments like some lost nineties New Zealand outfit, maybe a bit like the Moles, or some obscure band on Flying Nun or Xpressway, the melodies are lilting, the basslines gloomy and a little gothic, the songs minimal, but strangely catchy, and definitely haunting and otherworldly, fans of Finnish stuff like CoO and Dead Reptile Shrine will definitely dig, as will anyone into fractured freak folk, and outsider gloom pop.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, housed in a silver foil printed box, each of the three 10"s pressed on colored vinyl (white with black splatter, milky clear, ultra clear), each record in its own printed sleeve.
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 makes perfect sense that Bureau B has released this new album by Kreidler, if you were to hear this without having any idea who it was, and you were told it was a long lost early '80s electronic proto-techno exploration by Moebius and members of Neu!, you would have no reason NOT to believe it. These are dark, motorik, trance inducing sounds at their best. More than any of their modern day German peers, Kreidler really have been the ones to build on what their krautrock forefathers and mothers (don't forget Deutsche Wertabreit!) laid down the blueprints for. Mixing their instrumentation and electronics with organic ease, the album flows start to finish with a late night K-hole seedy sensation. Kind of like Villalabos remixing Jonas Reinhardt, Arp, or White Rainbow.
You can hear echoes of Cluster deep in these tracks as you can tell Kreidler have gained much inspiration from albums of theirs like Zukerzeit and especially the Moebius/Beerbohm outing Double Cut. We could also see folks who have been digging lots of the John Carpenter/Goblin inspired sounds by folks like Zombi, Umberto, Xander Harris, Black Devil Disco Club, and The Oscillation getting way into Tank. The live drumming really helps fuel the record and the undercurrents of such a dark and sinister soundworld have drawn us so deep into this recording. This is shaping up to be our favorite Kreidler outing yet!
Here comes another one from the vaults displaying Phil Spector's production glory. But before we go giving Spector all the credit, there is no doubt that Darlene Love is one of the greatest singers of all time! Just ask folks like Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Gene Autry, The Beach Boys, and Aretha Franklin who all employed her at one point for her vocal prowess. A founding member of The Blossoms, she would then meet Phil Spector in 1962. He was so in love with her voice that he even released some songs he recorded with her under The Crystals moniker, since he owned the name, even though none of the actual members of The Crystals were on the record. This collection brings remastered versions of seventeen of her classic tracks together on one disc, many of which could only be found on different compilations until now. Spector's wall of sound production only adds to the overall glory and power of Love's voice. Pop perfection!
Latest full length from one of our favorite purveyors of warped and warbly lo-fi lysergic garage pop, which had us a bit confused, as the first track starts off with some smoldering sexy sax, over some woozy almost funky sounding bass, sure there are some strange sounds swirling around, but we were definitely wary, until the song proper kicked in and we were back in more familiar territory, laid back acoustic guitar strum, warm whirling atmosphere, and some sweetly crooned, softly reverbed vox, the only remnant from that intro, the loping bassline, there's harmonica too, it's a strange jam, all laid back and wistfully woozy, but it's definitely not that far removed from past Lynch outings.
The second track is pretty laid back too, super slowed down, the guitars warbly and spidery, the vocals a lovely falsetto, a dark, woozy dreampop ballad for sure, but we're getting the idea, that maybe this is a different kind of record for Lynch, which is definitely confirmed by the next track, after a big crashing open chord, the songs lips into something much more mellow, minimal muted percussion, reverbed piano, a sort of smokey lo-fi ballad, rife with some extra percussion, little bits of oddness here and there, but for the most part, still more mellow gold.
It's not until "Canopy", 4 songs in, that the sound is cranked up a little, with distorted drums, slithery bass, a blown out production, but even here, it's far from raucous, in fact, the sax returns, adding some smoky smolder to the proceedings, somehow managing to avoid sounding cheesy.
In fact the sax is all over the second half of the record, as well as what sounds like some other horns, lots of acoustic guitar jangle, some psychedelic buzz swirled in, but again, all washed out, dreamy, laid back and mellow. If the other Lynch records were to get the party started (already a mellow party by most standards), then Terra is to bring it down, as the last guests trickle out, the fire begins to flicker, the sky begins to glow with the impending dawn, this is the sort of long night, bleary, dreamy drugpop that sets the mood. Or at least it's the soundtrack to those last few minutes before you drift off. Nice.
