The latest in the ongoing series of limited Latitudes releases comes from psychedelic doom heavies A Storm Of Light, whose most recent full length, As The Valley Of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade, we just reviewed on last week's list. ASOL is the project of Josh Graham, who is a member of epic doom sludge legends Neurosis as well as Blood And Time and Red Sparowes.
And like that full length, this is another killer batch of epic psychedelic doom jams, the guitars chugging and churning, the melodies epic and soaring, the drums a colossal pound, the vocals effected and tripped out, the sound like a swirling druggy hybrid of Neurosis, Hawkwind and Godspeed, the tracks smoldering slow burners, which sometimes erupt into full on crushing metal blowouts, but just as often, remain murky and psychedelic and droney and dirgey.
"Tempest" starts out kinda weird, with some cool lo-fi backwards guitars, some creepy whispered vox, dark dolorous piano, a staticky field of what sounds like chirping crickets, before finally exploding into a lumbering, mathy post metal workout, and their version of Joy Division's "Day Of The Lords" sounds like it could have been an ASOL original, but the big surprise is the final track, a spacey psychedelic cover of Big Black's "Kitty Empire", which definitely adds a new twist to an already ruling jam.
A handful of guests pop up too, one of the Wolves from Wolves In The Throne Room, and the legendary Lydia Lunch, among others. Packaged as usual in that distinctive Latitudes packaging. the cd in a brown and white origami style sleeve, with a red metallic foil stamp on the front, and a full color insert inside with liner notes, the lp in a black and white sleeve, with the same insert. BOTH LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered!
This local metallic crust outfit's first record was released on venerable punk label Prank, who found, upon receiving the masters for this, Acephalix's second full length, that the band's sound had gotten, well, WAY TOO METAL. Which while bad news for the punks, was most definitely good news for the rest of us. Especially considering their sound on Aporia, was already pretty dang metal, and while at the time, we did concede that they were probably more of a punk band, we also cited groups like Anti Cimex, the Cro-Mags, Motorhead, Nausea, Celtic Frost, Sacrilege, all of whom blur that line, and while Acephalix may have been more punk back then, even if just barely, they definitely sound more metal now. And have found a new home on Southern Lord, who seem to have a newfound obsession with crust punk and metal.
So yeah, while this is more metal, it's still plenty punk, the tempos especially, not dirgey and doomy (although there are moments), or blazing and blasting, instead songs seem to gravitate toward that galloping punk rock rhythm, but wedded to sounds more distinctly metal, thick, downtuned riffage, and some very Maiden sounding guitar parts, not to mention some seriously shredding leads, everything crusty and murky and HEAVY. One distinctive holdover from the first record is the vocals, a terrifying bellow that occasionally slips into an equally terrifying shriek, and that sounds even more menacing and bad ass when coupled to the group's more overtly metallic pummel.
LIMITED TO 2000 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Whoo-hoo! Here's a whole disc (or double lp) of music by a band from that great Those Shocking Shaking Days compilation of Indonesian '70s fuzz/funk/psych/prog we made Record Of The Week not long ago... one of the bands we liked so much we picked 'em for one of the sound samples accompanying our review of that comp. This best-of AKA collection is the first release on the Strawberry Rain label, formed by the very fellow who compiled Those Shocking Shaking Days, to reissue more vintage Indo-rock treasures. We're already salivating at the prospect; with this anthology Strawberry Rain is off to a pretty darn badass beginning. We imagine you'll agree, if you're into the international language of screaming vocals, acid rock guitar, swirling synth, and seriously funky grooves. Hard Beat is aptly titled.
According to the liner notes provided here, AKA started off in East Java, giving wild live performances playing material by such Western artists as James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad... and listening to this, we'd guess that some Deep Purple was probably part of their repertoire too. Eventually they started writing their own stuff, got signed to a label, and made eleven albums between 1971 and '77, selected songs from which are presented here - including the two tracks comped on TSSD, "Do What You Like" and "Shake Me", along with 12 others (13 on the cd, it's got a bonus track), all of 'em equally awesome, but varied between ants-in-the-pants JB's style funk (including their #1 in Australia hit, "Crazy Joe"), groovy psych-pop, and Purplish heavy rockers... several songs somehow managing to combine all of that, all at once, in fact!
For fans of sundry other purveyors of hairy funk freak rock from around the world, say like Los Dug Dug's, Speed Glue & Shinki, Modulo 1000, Black Merda, Bunalim, Ngozi Family, Juan De La Cruz, etc. Highly recommended; good grief this is good. Here's hoping Strawberry Rain do a Hard Beat volume two someday, though of course there's other bands from Those Shocking Shaking Days we'd like to hear more of too!
Compact disc packaged in gatefold mini-lp style sleeve, the double vinyl also in a gatefold, both limited editions.
Antimatter is the work of Bay Area sound artist Xopher Davidson, whose intense, psychoacoustically challenging compositions earn noble comparisons to fellow Northern Californians like Scott Arford, R.H.Y. Yau, Michael Gendreau, and Joe Colley. Furthermore, Davidson has worked extensively with Zbigniew Karkowski, generating gnarled maelstroms of digital grit and volcanic noise on a handful of albums and live performances. Reset is Antimatter's first album in close to 6 years, after he released a couple of albums on the now defunct Asphodel label. It begins with a nasty low-end throb from phased oscillators, obsolete synthesizers, and integral-logic feedback systems, whose generative tension is heightened through metallic slashes and electrical bursts of white noise static. The vigor of Davidson's grim electronics dissolves on the curiously beautiful ambient construction "Sea Of Tranquility," whose vaporous atmospherics recall more of the mesmerism of Tim Hecker and Leyland Kirby emerging out of queasy sick tones and vibrational splutter. The next track "Sverdlovsk-45" was named for a Soviet secret city that enriched uranium throughout the Cold War, and it has all of the claustrophobic industrial metaphors one would expect through the belching hiss and churning centrifuge actions. The crumbling noises glow once again with a spectral beauty found on the aforementioned "Sea Of Tranquility" by the end of the record. Even so, this album is one for those keen on The Hafler Trio and John Duncan, especially since neither of those two have released anything in quite a while.
The return of French black metallers Aosoth, with what many are proclaiming to be black metal record of the year. And we have to say we're ready to agree. Obviously, as long time aQ list readers no doubt already know, we love French black metal, as probably do many of you. Deathspell, Blut Aus Nord, Diamatregon, Antaeus, Hell Militia, Otargos, Peste Noire, Spektr, S.V.E.S.T., Mutiilation, Wolok, and of course Aosoth belong to that elite group. This is record number three, originally a side project of Antaeus vocalist MkM, who seems to have maybe been downgraded here, as only the other two guys get their pix in the booklet, while MkM is credited with "audio propaganda", which we can only assume are vocals, and the vocals here are appropriately fierce and fucked up and awesome, and are no doubt still delivered by MkM.
But it's the music that's mindblowing, impossibly relentless, insanely heavy, gnarled and ultra complex, taking the sort of avant blackness of Deathspell, and rendering it in a form much more raw and low fidelity. The riffs are black tangles, the drums insane blasts of lightning fast pound, the atmosphere is super creepy and murky, the melodies soar, the arrangements epic and majestic, but the sound is just this side of lo-fi, the sound managing to be dense and heavy, without being slick and polished, instead, the sound is feral and RAW, and it's a strange combination, the raw lo-fi sound, and this seriously complex avant garde blackness, the tracks slipping from old school black buzz blast, to soaring epic majesty, to total mathed out confusional chaos, all super twisted and psychedelic, just take the extended breakdown on "II", which is a head spinning swirl of constant drum fill and swirling interlocking manic melody, a blurred cloud of frantic heaviness that is so tense and intense, that when it does finally switch, it seemingly takes a few seconds to readjust.
There are plenty of strange interludes, buzzing black ambience, haunting pianos, hazy stretches of guitardrone, hushed expanses of hushed shimmer, but this is the kind of record that is already inherently twisted, those non-metal extras only add to the atmosphere, in fact, in a way, it's those parts that offer a brief respite from the actual music's hellish black weirdness, the core sound a grinding, buzzing dense black tangle, occasionally slipping into something woozy and doomy, lumbering and creeping, a haunting bit of depressive darkness, but inevitably those parts explode into flurries of wildly chaotic drum damage and fucked up and fractured riffage. But for all this perceived weirdness, the sound is not 'weird', all of those strange elements are deftly woven into an incredible suite of grim black metallic mastery, creating a series of songs that manage to be heavy, haunting, brutal and black, fucked up and totally fucking incredible. Black metal record of the year? Could be...
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2nd album from these Pennsylvania epic trad doom metallers, featuring bellowing "Butch" Balich, ex-Penance. We dug the twin axe attack and majestic melodies of their first album, released by Shadow Kingdom, now they've moved on up to new label Cruz Del Sur, but their sound is still plenty cult and underground in the old school Shadow Kingdom style. If you want both heaviness and harmonies in yr metal, Argus has got the goods for you. They have some prog/technical tendencies, and are well versed in classic heavy metal mastery, with echoes of Iron Maiden amidst their modern day doom. Fans of Candlemass and Grand Magus (hey where's the domestic release of their latest??) and Slough Feg, too, also ought to enjoy, as we're reminded of all of 'em, as well.
For those who have been delving into the many minimal wave / synth punk reissues and anthologies that have been emerging in the recent years, the name Linear Movement should be familiar. They were a Belgian synth-pop outfit with a few art-disco-punk leanings, featuring Geert Coppens and Peter Bonne (Bonne would later found the EBM project A Split Second, but his earliest synth-wave work has stood the test of time much better than A Split Second). Unfortunately, much of this early work had only been released on small cassette runs, despite some exceptionally strong production values and some great song writing to boot. The aforementioned Linear Movement had an album slated for release in 1983, but the label dropped the album from their release schedule. It was rediscovered later by Minimal Wave who released that lost album 25 years later in 2008. While a few breathtaking gems of early OMD / Human League sequencing are found within, that album was admittedly an inconsistent listen.
However, Autumn's Synthesize fares much much better. This project operated on a parallel track, using all the same gear, but they come across as a slightly darker alter-ego of Linear Movement and with a bit more weird science thrown into the mix. Their catalog consists of four self-released cassettes and a single, with Synthesize being a best-of record in all the right ways. Tracks like "Night In June" have an uptempo, sing-songy melodicism amidst the squelchy analogue sequencing sort of like a more robotic incarnation of New Order, and then there's "Behind You" with its dark sequencing of vocoder driven proto-electronica, prescient of an Italo-disco / Model 500 sound, with a nod to Ruth as well.
Barn Owl are no stranger to the drone. In fact, this Bay Area duo's sound is all about the drone, a deep, brooding, moody, twangy Earth-ish cinematic devotional doomdriftDRONE that we can't get enough of. But on this recent collaboration, the band explore another side of the drone, one less dark, and one more in keeping with the traditions of modern minimal dronemusic, teaming up with The Infinite String Ensemble (consisting of a fellow named The Norman Conquest on acoustic guitar, vocals, and Moog; Theresa Wong on cello; and Ellen Fullman, on the long string instrument), Barn Owl ditching their smokey twang flecked shimmer, and instead laying down lush layers of complimentary long form drones and extended tones.
For those who are unfamiliar with Ellen Fullman, she created the 'Long Stringed Instrument', which is exactly what it sounds like, although the name does not and all prepare you for the power of actually seeing it and hearing it. Essentially, she stretches long strings across large resonant spaces, the strings sometimes 50 feet or longer, and the players proceed to scrape, and bow and vibrate the strings, creating incredible sounds. And how perfect for Barn Owl to join in and add their own drone two cents.
The result is pretty fantastic, but again, well removed from the Barn Owl most folks are used to. In fact it almost would have made more sense to bill this as an Infinite String Ensemble, with special guests Barn Owl. Either way, the players here create four loooooong tracks of shimmery sun dappled dronemusic, long streaks of metallic buzz, lush and layered, lots of shifting textures and subtle overtones, all wrapped in softly burnished reverb, space-y and kosmische and hypnotic and heady, like Taj Mahal Travelers jamming with Organum, the tracks slipping from hushed and minimal, glimmering and crystalline, to smoldering and softly cacophonous, from dreamy hazy drift, to ritualistic ur-drone. Gorgeous.
And obviously absolutely recommended for all the drone fanatics out there, which we're guessing is a whole lot of you.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Cover art by Root Strata's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
Battles are back with another spright, tight outburst of their (rather unique) rhythmically percolating math-pop post-rock. This time focussing on a kind of 8-bit steel drum tropical blow-out with less of the pitch-shifted vocals that figured greatly on Mirrors. Tyondai Braxton quit the band after that last album, but you wouldn't notice, and they make sure to make up for his absence with an impressive array of guests in any case, including Kompakt's Matias Aguayo, Eye from the Boredoms, and freakin' GARY NUMAN!
Gloss Drop sure is relentless and jaunty and technical and all, but we have to admit, maybe their schtick is starting to wear thin with us. We can't help but think of the Munchkins' Lollipop Guild song from the Wizard Of Oz every time we listen to Battles... Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, is it, though?
So if you're still digging on your old Battles records, you'll probably be into Gloss Drop too. Some previous Battles have won us over, for sure, and this one is doing so too, but we kinda wonder if they'll really win the war in the end...
Before you get too excited, Birchville Cat Motel, the long running project of Mr. Campbell Kneale, is still defunct, this is not in fact a new record, but instead, an album that was originally intended to come out as an lp, but for whatever reason was shelved, until now! So yeah, THAT you can be excited about, and should be, cuz this long lost sonic missive from BCM is one of the prettiest we've heard. One of three new blasts from Kneale's Don't Fuck With Magic label, the successor to his beloved Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, the others being a collab between Our Love Will Destroy The World (Kneale's post BCM project) and Finnish noisemakers Tomutonttu, and the first release from Tmpls (Kneale again), a furious face melting blast of super distorted New Zealand noise.
But this, what could be the last we hear from the late great Birchville Cat Motel, Came A Great Stallion Whose First Leap Sparked The Celestial Star, is dreamy and pretty and melodic, even by BCM standards, a slow, smoldering shimmerscape, all warm whirring thrum, swirling muted melodies, lush layered textures, it's like a Campbell Kneale Pop Ambient record, a glorious washed out landscape of blurred loops, of abstract ambience, plenty of buzz and rumble, but smeared into hazy streaks, all building to a gorgeously gauzy soft cacophony, before, wait for it the drums come in. Yup, a buried rhythm, motorik and krautrocky, a simple skeletal framework, chugging away beneath a sky full of sonic solar flares, and fiery sheets of super nova sound, which seem to slowly coalesce into slow motion melodies, wound up in a darkly dreamy bit of krautnoise bliss. The drums do eventually fade out, leaving a soft focus squall of intertwined electronic tones, looped effects, and warbly alien melodies, a shimmery hazy dreamdrift outro
Wow! So good. How this remained unreleased is definitely a mystery, and as much as we hate to proclaim a record so limited as such, this just might be one of our favorite Birchville recordings EVER.
CRAZY LIMITED! As in we have HALF the pressing, HALF of which we've already sold, so be quick, before these disappear.
Hmm. We're pretty big fans of Bernard Fevre's earlier Black Devil Disco Club releases, but this new one is a bit of a departure. Rather than continue to mine/emulate his archive of '70s-recorded Italo-disco cosmic synth stuff, which was a motherlode of instrumental atmospheric grooviness, here he's recruited an impressive (and unlikely!) array of guest vocalists, including Nancy Sinatra, Jon Spencer, and Afrika Bambaataa, along with members of Yacht and The Horrors, and Fevre's compositions backing them up are suddenly in a much more current-sounding synth-pop dance music style. We can see people really digging this, of course, but not because of the things that previously attracted us to the Black Devil Disco Club. Give us his spacey "library music" any day. Well, some of this still evokes the likes of Morodoer and Kraftwerk for sure, but that's overshadowed by all the guest stars. Check out the sound samples is our advice.
Doom metal bands aren't exactly uncommon these days - which is a good thing, as we can remember when there were only like five or six of them, really! - but we know that I Hate Records can be counted on to bring us the best. Also, this band, Italy's Black Oath, we already were familiar with due to an earlier, self-titled cdep that we never could get enough of to list (though we might still have a copy or two in stock if you ask). We liked that, and we like this. What's not to like? Ultra heavy, fuzzy guitar chords surge solemnly forth like black rays from some sub-Hell, weighty riffs churn and crunch, with mournful, melodic vocal lamentations rising up over it all. Black Oath incorporate additional church organ atmospherics as well, adding to the idea that doom metal monks are making this music (and also giving us a suggestion of '70s prog a la Jacula). The album is strong throughout, coming to an epic close with the eleven minute title track, that manages, within the confines of their monkish aesthetic, to really "rock out" at the end, while also bringing in rainstorm sounds and classical strings.
Most simply put, Black Oath manifest themselves like sludgier version of Candlemass, with plenty of Italy's occult metal tradition (Jacula, Death SS/Paul Chain, Black Hole, and AQ fave Tony Tears) prominent in the mix as well. This sombre, majestic album ought to find favor with fans of the aforementioned, also Griftegard, The Wounded Kings, Fall Of The Idols, Thunderstorm, and maybe Moss too, though this isn't so "ultra" doom as the latter. A delectable, despairing dose for all discerning doom hounds.
The return of grim Russian black metal horde Blackdeath, the awesomely monickered brotherly duo of Abysslooker and Para Bellum, now joined by the much more simply named Maya, for this their most recent blast of glorious blackness. And glorious it is, and as fucked up and fantastically off kilter as past outings, the buzzing guitars in full effect, but the new drummer definitely pushing the sound into new and exciting directions. Intricate, and lush, but also raw and furious and weirdly prog, in fact, the vocals have always been super strange in Blackdeath, and this time around they're strange in a whole different way, loud, and dramatic, and crooned, way up in the mix, almost over the top, to the point that it almost sounds how we might imagine a black metal Circle might sound, the same sort of theatricality, proggy and operatic, a little bit like a black metal cabaret, and the music suits the new singing, not so frantic and frenzied as woozy and gnarled and twisted and atonal and abstract, the sound slipping from more traditional black buzz to this new tangled black squall, laced with organ, bits of warped ambience, surprisingly melodic leads, lumbering doomic plods rife with weird psychedelic spidery guitars, but still for the most part fuzzy and blackened and furious, blurred blasting, but the vibe completely altered by those incredible vocals. A little off putting for some most likely, but folks who like their black metal a bit bizarre, this batch of epic blasting black buzzery definitely fits the bill.
On Funeral In An Empty Room, Michael Hensley locates his dark ambient project Blood Box somewhere between the spectral impressionism of Troum and the black voids of Lustmord. Of course, this is a very good place to be for all things grim, subterranean, and droning. Hensley is half of Yen Pox, whose death-head imagery and gaping drones inform where Blood Box might be coming from. It has to be said that none of Hensley's projects are terribly prolific, far from it when compared to pretty much every ambientdronenoise practitioner over the past decade. Yen Pox just released a 10" in 2010, some 10 years after their last release; and Blood Box's previous album on Eibon was released in 2004. While Hensley is a consumate composer of dark ambience, Funeral In An Empty Room is comparatively psychedelic when situated next to his earlier studies of depressive, claustrophobic reverberations that would give Brighter Death Now a run for his money. Yes, Hensley does ground many of his pieces on thrumming gasps of demonic drones and low-end vibration which are archetypal of dark ambience at large; but cosmic, dreamtime washes of synth and guitar blossom out of these shadowy sounds like 1970s renderings of what a black hole might look like with arms of radiant space dust getting sucked into an event horizon. As earthen and introspective as the title may seem, the album is a deep-space vortex of smears, swirls, and swells that still holds onto the desire for unease and dread.
When most people think of Bloodloss, they probably think of the Seattle based "supergroup" which included members of Lubricated Goat, Monkeywrench, and Mudhoney, Mark Arm of Mudhoney lending his oh so distinctive vocals, forever making Bloodloss a 'Mudhoney sideproject', but long before Mark Arm joined the band, Bloodloss were a Australia-based junk jazz / dirge blues juggernaut who totally destroyed. Scenemates with such Aussie post punk luminaries as Lubricated Goat, Scientists, King Snake Roost, Feedtime, the Scientists, Bloodloss fit right in, their sound swaggery and low slung, noisy and bluesy, punky and slithery, fitting perfectly right between King Snake Roost and Lubricated Goat, two of our favorite bands EVER. To be fair, their Seattle era sound was not all that removed from their classic early sound, the big change being their ditching of the jazz element which was a big part of their early sound.
Hell, their record is named after an Albert Ayler song, and they have a song about Archie Shepp, they've got sax on a handful of tracks, their songs are loose and wild, and while not necessarily 'free' (although a few tracks most definitely are), they definitely have the jazz spirit, a sound occasionally abstract and improvised, lots of jamming, killer freakouts alongside dense grooves and gnarled riffage, murky and low slung, the vocals seriously kick ass, deep and ominous one second, snarly and scowly the next, the guitars are dense and tripped out, wreathed in wah wah one second, all slippery slide the next, and the songs kill, catchy, noisy, heavy, wild and wooly, fans of all of the above mentioned bands, and that era of Australian post punk, who have yet to hear this stuff, holy shit are you in for a treat.
The first disc contains The Truth Is Marching In album from 1990, along with a handful of bonus tracks from their never released Hair Of The Future album from 1991, while the second disc contains highlights from their self-titled 1986 cassette, their 1987 lp Human Skin Suit and a bunch of unreleased tracks and rehearsals, and the older tracks feature vocalist Sharron Weatherill, who left before The Truth Is Marching In, and her distinctive vocals definitely give those older Bloodloss jams their own unique vibe, besides the fact that they're all noisier and way more lo-fi.
Super nice packaging with extensive liner notes and lots of photos. Memorandum continues to mine amazing gems from the Australian underground. Now we're just waiting for them to reissue all the old Lubricated Goat and King Snake Roost albums...
Eighties retro poppers Blouse make the leap to Sub Pop, but thankfully, their sound remains changed. In our review of their Captured Tracks 7", we mentioned they might be one of our favorite CT bands yet, and part of that seems to have to do with how genuine their music sounds. While much of the eighties influenced pop happening these days seems kitschy and tongue in cheek, Blouse's sound doesn't sound at all manufactured, and is presented as something pure and organic, as if they set out to make music, and it just ended up sounding like it was 30 years old, or like Blouse were in fact some lost eighties band somehow transported to the present day. Low slung, slightly gloomy basslines under jangly guitars, breathy female vocals, chiming melodies, hazy dreamy, hooky, 4AD meets the Cure meets Simple Minds, total classic eighties pop, the sort of sound that has you envisioning some eighties teen comedy, it's the perfect soundtrack for that feel good montage, where the boy and girl do all the things young lovers do.
The flipside offers up more of the same, starting out slightly more gloomy, but only a bit, minor key chords draped over a loping electronic rhythm, wreathed in the whirring synths, the vocals softly reverbed, and sweetly melancholy, with a big fuzzy dramatic chorus, some seriously perfect retro dream pop for sure. Can't wait for the full length.
A long overdue reissue of these two rare records from this long running Scottish pop band, C86 from 1989 and Star Wars from 1991, both loooong out of print. This is actually the first time we've reviewed anything by BMX Bandits, even though most of the pop fans around here love them, their sound very reminiscent of the naive pop of the Pastels and the Vaselines, especially the Vaselines, which makes sense as the Vaselines' Frances McKee was a member of the Bandits, as was Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and the Faith Healers, Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines and Eugenius, Francis MacDonald of Eugenius and Teenage Fanclub, David Scott of the Pearlfishers, Sushil K. Dade of the Soup Dragons and Telstar Ponies, Sean Dickson of the Soup Dragons and loads more.
The BMX Bandits specialized in super heartfelt, dreamy, occasionally goofy, sweet and fey, jangly indie pop. Their first single was declared "the worst record ever made" by British magazine Sounds, while their next was a single of the week in pretty much every publication, and at the time was voted one of the top pop tracks of the year. Anyone who digs the sound of the Vaselines and Teenage Fanclub will definitely dig BMX Bandits, in some ways, they're like the perfect mix of the two.
C86 was the band's first record, and is a perfect slab of naive pop, the sound surprisingly lush, the vocals being the most polarizing aspect, an often off key croon, that is what definitely reminds us of the Pastels, the same sort of earnest sad boy croon, but here set amidst big guitar jangle, female background vox going 'la la la la', powerful drumming, not to mention some strange and silly bits, like the weird gypsy breakdown on the title track, all fiddle and flutes, or the programmed beats and Ween like vocals on "Disco Girl 2" (one of our favorite tracks here).
Star Wars, from a few years later, is a bit more polished, a little more rocking, and with a bigger production, sounding like Teenage Fanclub fused with Belle & Sebastian, again, big fuzzy, jangly guitars, lots of acoustic strum, and those distinctive vocals, the sound on Star Wars much more nineties college rock sounding, but with that fey Scottish pop vibe that kept these songs from sounding like anyone else besides the BMX Bandits. Star Wars also peppers its songs with strings here and there, mandolin once in a while, slipping from lush bombastic pop, to personal bedroom strum and croon, a record overflowing with some of our favorite pop songs ever.
The return of Bong! We may have had the amazing Live At Roadburn disc to tide us over, but what we were really hankering for was a brand new full length from these UK psychedelic space doom heavies, and we're not and here it is. Beyond Ancient Space is three loooooong tracks, titled "Onward To Perdondaris", "Across The Timestream" and "In The Shadow Of The Towers" respectively, and described on the cd sleeve as 'unsere kosmischen musik', and after a creepy deeply intoned, reverbed spoken word intro, delivered over a glimmery spacescape of twinkle and shimmer, we are suddenly sucked into the strange world of Bong, as massive guitars come cascading down, a plodding ultra heavy doomic lumber, the drums spare and loose, the churning rumble and thrum laced with some sitar like buzz, which is no doubt the Shahi Baaja, an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys, that figures prominently in Bong's sound.
"Onward To Perdondaris" is a sinister creeping crawl, a nearly 25 minute, tranced out buzzing space doom mediation, the guitars not so much riffing as unfurling sheets of rumbling low end, a sprawling layered expanse of thick blackened thrum, a spaced out dirge, the buzzing Shahi Baaja transforming the sound into something exotic and alien, the vocals too, a monk like chant, long low tones, all very mesmerizing and meditative but still heavy and buzzy and droney, like Hawkwind covering SUNNO))), or Ravi Shankar jamming with Earth, or maybe some blurred confusional mix of the two.
"Across The Timestream" is another 25 minute epic, beginning with a crumbling, rumbling bit of corroded guitar buzz, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in that the drums surface, and even then, they're barely there, a skeletal rhythm underpinning the group's smoldering blackdrone, finally, the Shahi Baaja begins to buzz, and the track locks into a mesmerizing, motorik space psych dirge that will carry us through the whole 25 minutes, this is not headbanging music, this is blissed out drug drone music, a zoner cough syrup space rock soundtrack to some serious innerspace exploration, the track does build gradually, growing more intense, but subtly and slowly, they're called Bong for a reason, it's 25 minutes, but it could be 2500, or 2.5, time does not exist, once you're lost in these sounds, time becomes liquid, it's the perfect sonic tranceout, drifting off, alternate plane, next level, ur-drone ur-dirge bliss out.
Finally, there's the nearly 30 minute final movement, "In The Shadow Of The Towers", which begins with a SUNNO))) like riff, all foghorn moan and blurred slo-mo melody, the drums way more up front here, a slow, meandery lope, pounding away, the rumbling guitar a lush backdrop, the cymbal sizzle spilling over, a slow burning space rock dirge, blurred and bleary, hypnotic and lysergic, druggily monochromatic, it's not until about 20 minutes in that things get seriously intense, the drums wild and chaotic, the sound blown out and in the red, a sonic squall climax, that quickly gives way to a smoldering blackened slow fade outro.
Like all the Bongs that have come before, a heady chunk of krautrocky psychedelic dirge-y doom recommended for fans of SUNNO))), Gnod, The Heads, White Hills, Grails, Sylvester Anfang, Electric Wizard, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Monster Magnet, Black Sabbath, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and their slow and low doom dirge alchemist brethren
And it's not just us, our customer Glenn was so blown away by the new Bong he felt compelled to send HIS review which is way more succinct than ours:
"Album of the year so far. Absolutely fucking amazing. Imagine if Hawkwind had taken downers rather than acid and you played their albums at 16rpm. A total kosmische trip into another dimension."
Fuck yeah! Bong on!
Ah, BORIS! The band that everybody loves (or if they don't love 'em, they probably love to hate 'em...). The Melvins-worshipping Japanese "heavy rock" band that started off in the '90s as an import-only cult fave, and eventually got picked up over here by Southern Lord. The next thing you know, they turned into an unstoppable juggernaut of super limited edition releases and unlikely collaborations, and got BIG. For a while, they were definitely a band that could do no wrong, combining that Melvins-y sludge, and equally Melvins-y weirdness, with their own, innate Japanese "WTF?" aesthetic... In addition they boast the presence of a female singer/guitar player, Wata, who is both cute and talented. And making themselves even more potent proposition, they also recruited noted psychedelic guitar whiz Michio Kurihara (Ghost, White Heaven, Stars) more or less permanently into their ranks.
Yet, in recent years, Boris has also been courting a backlash, the way we see it, as anything hyped to the skies usually does. Those aforementioned ridiculously limited editions have something to do with it... and what can come off as a too ironic attitude to everything... and when we've seen 'em live, well, memo to drummer Atsuo: the gong is cool, but the headset microphone maybe isn't so much.
So, we've been Boris fans for a long long time, and still are, but we'll confess to wondering if it could be said that Boris finally (?) "jumped the shark" with last year's BXI ep, wherein they, oddly enough, teamed up with rock star Ian Astbury of The Cult (who is presumably still "big in Japan"). That disc was probably the first Boris release in history that didn't merit highlight status on our list... but hey, nobody's perfect.
But now, as if rising to the challenge, and/or making said challenge all the harder for themselves, Boris are back with not one but TWO* new albums for new US label Sargent House.
There's Attention Please, which undoubtedly will get a lot of attention, and not just 'cause of the glamor shot of Wata on the cover. She also sings on all the tracks, to this is definitely one for all you Wata fanciers out there! The other one is called Heavy Rocks, not to be confused with the earlier Boris album, that's also titled Heavy Rocks. Huh, what's with that, Boris? Why give two totally different albums the same name? Obviously to invite comparison (and for the record, while we're definitely digging this new purple 2011 one, if we had to choose between 'em, we'd pick the original, orange 2002 Heavy Rocks). Naming an album Heavy Rocks in the first place is a bold move, having two of 'em is just silly. Or ironic. Or something. Brilliant, perhaps. Oh, and this Heavy Rocks features another guest appearance from Ian Astbury, doing backing vocals on the track "Riot Sugar". There's other guests on the album as well: Aaron Turner (Isis, Mamiffer) and Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer), and regular Boris collaborator Kurihara. Heavy friends for Heavy Rocks!
First up, let's talk about Attention Please. Of the two albums, possibly more interesting to us as it's really quite a departure for Boris, plus we've always found Wata to be their most appealing singer anyway. Her delicate vocals are accompanied by some of the band's softest, most mellow material yet. There's acoustic guitars, and electronica elements, and it's all really quite nice. At times dramatic, dancey, dreamy, and/or rockin', one thing it's not is sludgey. Not that it doesn't get loud and noisy at times - shoegazing explosion of "Spoon" could probably have gone on the accompanying Heavy Rocks just as easily. But for the most part, if you didn't know it was Boris, well you wouldn't know it was Boris! The nervously rhythmic "Tokyo Wonder Land", with its stabbing psychedelic guitar sizzle, and glitchy tic-tic-tics of drums and electronics, is the highlight here for us, but we're pretty into the whole disc. Utterly captivating. Wata and Boris sound like they're channelling every dreamy girl fronted band from the nineties and beyond: My Bloody Valentine, Blonde Redhead, Adult, Amp,Noriko Tujiko, and even Grouper, and it works. Hopefully we'll hear more from this incarnation of Boris in the future, with Wata on the mic... we suspect we will! We think open minded Boris fans will indeed like this album - and it just might make 'em a lot of new fans too, who didn't have any idea Boris could or would sound like this.
Then, to Heavy Rocks (2011)... Drop the needle on track one, and you're greeted by a mean, heavy chugging riff, and it almost seems like, hey, they've gone full-on metal here, but that track, "Riot Sugar", becomes more of a howling psych stoner rock song, with hushed vocals. Off to a good start. The next track isn't nearly as heavy, it begins with some jangle, then a tangle of guitar soloing from Kurihara in his Quicksilver/Cippolina mode, there's also more of those hushed vox, and a general loud/soft songwriting dynamic, this track having echoes of both Nirvana and Can! Kinda sounds like something Kurihara's band Stars would do. Track three "GALAXIANS" is a more energetic, uptempo attack, lots of whoops and hollering going on, with thrashing drums, noisy guitar and electronic FX...
And so it goes, the album a mix of race-with-the-devil rockers and much moodier, shoegazey stuff. "Missing Pieces" is an example of the latter, a slow build from quiet ambience to almost Merzbowian jet-engine noise. The two final tracks are well worthy of mention, the penultimate, nearly 13 minute "Aileron" (greatly expanded, and of course heavied up, from the brief acoustic guitar version of the same track found on Attention Please), is another of the shoegazier pieces, super heavy, lumbering and lovely, reminding us a lot of Codeine, then after that there's "Czechoslovakia", at the very end of the album, a brief instrumental thrash metal number with electronic embellishments, sounds like something Circle would do in their NWOFHM mode, pretty killer, but of course we have to assume Boris sorta meant it as a joke, oh well, in any case it unfortunately fades out at 1:35, just as it's really gettin' good... if another five or ten minutes of this song as we imagine it actually existed, and were included here, that would definitely make Heavy Rocks even radder. Who knows, though, maybe it will continue on a forthcoming album entitled, Heavier Rocks?? (Our idea, but Boris you're welcome to it, sounds like something you'd do - well actually probably what Boris would do is release ANOTHER album also called Heavy Rocks.)
Anyway, to wrap up, these two new discs from Boris are both pretty darn good & satisfying overall. And both emblematic of the band's dabbling in an almost alt-pop, quasi-commercial (on their own terms, though!) direction, while staying HEAVY as they wanna be.
*There's actually a 3rd new Boris full-length as well, out in Japan only, the cleverly (?) titled New Album, which includes some of the same songs found on these two domestic US releases, though we'd imagine they're different recordings/versions, Boris being who they are (confusing!).
Ah, BORIS! The band that everybody loves (or if they don't love 'em, they probably love to hate 'em...). The Melvins-worshipping Japanese "heavy rock" band that started off in the '90s as an import-only cult fave, and eventually got picked up over here by Southern Lord. The next thing you know, they turned into an unstoppable juggernaut of super limited edition releases and unlikely collaborations, and got BIG. For a while, they were definitely a band that could do no wrong, combining that Melvins-y sludge, and equally Melvins-y weirdness, with their own, innate Japanese "WTF?" aesthetic... In addition they boast the presence of a female singer/guitar player, Wata, who is both cute and talented. And making themselves even more potent proposition, they also recruited noted psychedelic guitar whiz Michio Kurihara (Ghost, White Heaven, Stars) more or less permanently into their ranks.
Yet, in recent years, Boris has also been courting a backlash, the way we see it, as anything hyped to the skies usually does. Those aforementioned ridiculously limited editions have something to do with it... and what can come off as a too ironic attitude to everything... and when we've seen 'em live, well, memo to drummer Atsuo: the gong is cool, but the headset microphone maybe isn't so much.
So, we've been Boris fans for a long long time, and still are, but we'll confess to wondering if it could be said that Boris finally (?) "jumped the shark" with last year's BXI ep, wherein they, oddly enough, teamed up with rock star Ian Astbury of The Cult (who is presumably still "big in Japan"). That disc was probably the first Boris release in history that didn't merit highlight status on our list... but hey, nobody's perfect.
But now, as if rising to the challenge, and/or making said challenge all the harder for themselves, Boris are back with not one but TWO* new albums for new US label Sargent House.
There's Attention Please, which undoubtedly will get a lot of attention, and not just 'cause of the glamor shot of Wata on the cover. She also sings on all the tracks, to this is definitely one for all you Wata fanciers out there! The other one is called Heavy Rocks, not to be confused with the earlier Boris album, that's also titled Heavy Rocks. Huh, what's with that, Boris? Why give two totally different albums the same name? Obviously to invite comparison (and for the record, while we're definitely digging this new purple 2011 one, if we had to choose between 'em, we'd pick the original, orange 2002 Heavy Rocks). Naming an album Heavy Rocks in the first place is a bold move, having two of 'em is just silly. Or ironic. Or something. Brilliant, perhaps. Oh, and this Heavy Rocks features another guest appearance from Ian Astbury, doing backing vocals on the track "Riot Sugar". There's other guests on the album as well: Aaron Turner (Isis, Mamiffer) and Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer), and regular Boris collaborator Kurihara. Heavy friends for Heavy Rocks!
First up, let's talk about Attention Please. Of the two albums, possibly more interesting to us as it's really quite a departure for Boris, plus we've always found Wata to be their most appealing singer anyway. Her delicate vocals are accompanied by some of the band's softest, most mellow material yet. There's acoustic guitars, and electronica elements, and it's all really quite nice. At times dramatic, dancey, dreamy, and/or rockin', one thing it's not is sludgey. Not that it doesn't get loud and noisy at times - shoegazing explosion of "Spoon" could probably have gone on the accompanying Heavy Rocks just as easily. But for the most part, if you didn't know it was Boris, well you wouldn't know it was Boris! The nervously rhythmic "Tokyo Wonder Land", with its stabbing psychedelic guitar sizzle, and glitchy tic-tic-tics of drums and electronics, is the highlight here for us, but we're pretty into the whole disc. Utterly captivating. Wata and Boris sound like they're channelling every dreamy girl fronted band from the nineties and beyond: My Bloody Valentine, Blonde Redhead, Adult, Amp,Noriko Tujiko, and even Grouper, and it works. Hopefully we'll hear more from this incarnation of Boris in the future, with Wata on the mic... we suspect we will! We think open minded Boris fans will indeed like this album - and it just might make 'em a lot of new fans too, who didn't have any idea Boris could or would sound like this.
Then, to Heavy Rocks (2011)... Drop the needle on track one, and you're greeted by a mean, heavy chugging riff, and it almost seems like, hey, they've gone full-on metal here, but that track, "Riot Sugar", becomes more of a howling psych stoner rock song, with hushed vocals. Off to a good start. The next track isn't nearly as heavy, it begins with some jangle, then a tangle of guitar soloing from Kurihara in his Quicksilver/Cippolina mode, there's also more of those hushed vox, and a general loud/soft songwriting dynamic, this track having echoes of both Nirvana and Can! Kinda sounds like something Kurihara's band Stars would do. Track three "GALAXIANS" is a more energetic, uptempo attack, lots of whoops and hollering going on, with thrashing drums, noisy guitar and electronic FX...
And so it goes, the album a mix of race-with-the-devil rockers and much moodier, shoegazey stuff. "Missing Pieces" is an example of the latter, a slow build from quiet ambience to almost Merzbowian jet-engine noise. The two final tracks are well worthy of mention, the penultimate, nearly 13 minute "Aileron" (greatly expanded, and of course heavied up, from the brief acoustic guitar version of the same track found on Attention Please), is another of the shoegazier pieces, super heavy, lumbering and lovely, reminding us a lot of Codeine, then after that there's "Czechoslovakia", at the very end of the album, a brief instrumental thrash metal number with electronic embellishments, sounds like something Circle would do in their NWOFHM mode, pretty killer, but of course we have to assume Boris sorta meant it as a joke, oh well, in any case it unfortunately fades out at 1:35, just as it's really gettin' good... if another five or ten minutes of this song as we imagine it actually existed, and were included here, that would definitely make Heavy Rocks even radder. Who knows, though, maybe it will continue on a forthcoming album entitled, Heavier Rocks?? (Our idea, but Boris you're welcome to it, sounds like something you'd do - well actually probably what Boris would do is release ANOTHER album also called Heavy Rocks.)
Anyway, to wrap up, these two new discs from Boris are both pretty darn good & satisfying overall. And both emblematic of the band's dabbling in an almost alt-pop, quasi-commercial (on their own terms, though!) direction, while staying HEAVY as they wanna be.
*There's actually a 3rd new Boris full-length as well, out in Japan only, the cleverly (?) titled New Album, which includes some of the same songs found on these two domestic US releases, though we'd imagine they're different recordings/versions, Boris being who they are (confusing!).
We've never listed this ambient, avante-garde masterpiece before and when we realized it was Harold Budd's 75th birthday last week, we figured it was the perfect time to honor the man, and the amazing dreamy sounds he has given us over the years.
While best known to some for his collaborations with Brian Eno, and Cocteau Twins, there is also the deep well to explore of his vast solo catalog. But for many, Pavilion Of Dreams originally released in 1978, ranks as one of his best, a perfect melding of 20th century composition and warm, weightless shimmery ambience, creating pieces fragile and prismatic, as if they were suspended in glistening, glimmering bubbles.
While piano is at the center of Pavilion Of Dreams, there is some of the most sensual and dreamy sax we've ever heard, played by Marion Brown, a wildly under-appreciated free jazz artist who played with everyone from John Coltrane to Anthony Braxton, as well as an extensive catalog of his own recordings that deserve to be explored.
The album opens with the 18 minute "Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim", a track that feels like a passage from one of Alice Coltrane's most majestic tracks taken to a new age inside a mystical castle looking over the ocean. Then there's the mezzo-soprano classical vocals of Lynda Richardson are featured in the second and third tracks of the album. Don't let them scare you away. Even if you are not usually a fan of opera or classical vocals, Budd uses them in such drifting and compelling ways. They would have been perfect for a chilling scene in a Stanley Kubrick film. The album closes with "Juno", one of the most perfect ambient daydreams of all time. We realized we've said the word 'dreamy' a ton of times in this review, and well the album is called Pavilion of Dreams, and even though the term dreamy is so often overused, this is a record that really does take you to another state of consciousness. We hear the influence of this recording on so many of our favorite artists like William Basinski, Circle (on Miljard), Colleen, Seefeel, Johan Johansson, Sigur Ros, The Knife, The Durutti Column, Michael Harrison, Koss, Klimek and more... Absolutely essential!
We're not sure how these guys (and gal) do it, but somehow, SF's own sludge/dirge/grind/noise mavens Burmese, make record after record, everyone a mind blowing slab of ultra heaviness and absolute head caving pummel, on all sorts of cool labels, tUMULt, Rock Is Hell, Enterruption, Planaria, Load, Not Not Fun, Heart & Crossbone, New Scream Industry, Crucial Blast and now UgExplode, yet they somehow remain for the most part totally under the radar. They've definitely had some bad luck, but this is crazy. If you've ever seen Burmese play, in any of their permutations, they utterly destroy. Their worst shows are better than most band's best shows. In fact, their worst shows might just be their best shows. Two basses, manned by two Mikes, each with a stack of amps piled to the ceiling, two drummers too, at least on this record, spewing out wild octopoidal tangles of beats and rhythms, no guitar, they sure as fuck don't need one of those, and then to top it off Tissue, their diminutive female lead vocalist, who dresses in skirts and sweaters, but then turns into a beast on the mic, with some impossibly throat shredding vokills, the band so impossibly tight, especially considering how insane their songs are slipping from ultra intricate mathy grindprog, to spaced out nearly abstract free noise whatthefuck.
We say this about every record, but this just might be their best yet. And c'mon, that's how it should be with all bands, every record should be better than the last, and considering how goddamn good their first record was about 10 records back, well then guess how good Lun Yurn is. Yep. Exactly.
They're pretty hard to describe actually. Heavy, for sure. Metal, sort of. Punk, absolutely. Noisy. Grindy. But also mathy, proggy, droney, noisy, chaotic. Their songs generally flail from blasting D-beat pound, to doomy lurching plod, to grinding noise drenched blast, to weird super dynamic stop/start breakdown, and back again, the two basses unleashing thick gouts of power violence style riffery, the multiple drummers (one of which is Weasel Walter on this record) anchoring the impossibly chaotic crush, somehow all of these disparate elements, and all of this intense caustic sound, is deftly assembled into the sort of grinding metallic noisepunk jams that actually stick in your head. It's true. Not sure, how, or why, but we never get tired of this band or these songs, or seeing them lay waste live. It'd be pointless to go song by song, listen to the sound samples, if you're not totally bowing before the altar of Burmese, well then there just might be something wrong with you.
Stick around to the very end cuz there's an extra track, a whopping 45 minute jam, that one track 50 percent longer than the whole rest of the record, and it's an impossibly relentless, insanely chaotic, non stop frantic, frenzied, frenetic, blown out grindpsych blowout. Fuck.
Woah. Only previously available in the form of expensive Japanese imports, this is the first time we've been able to stock and list this amazing album, and we've wanted to for a long time. It's one that anyone into weird heavy '70s psych / prog, particularly of the Japanese variety, should add to their collections posthaste. Seriously. You perhaps have heard of J.A. Caesar (variously, J.A. Seazer, J.A. Ceaser), a Tokyo based playwright and composer, responsible for many wild, psychedelic theatrical productions that we can only imagine were utterly mindblowing to witness, judging by their soundtracks. This disc, reissuing a 1973 record, contains the highlights of his dramatic score for a 5-hour play called Kokkyou Junreika, here about 54 minutes of music. And it's an intense 54 minutes, this album being the best, and heaviest, J.A. Caesar release we've heard, with ceremonial-sounding Buddhist chant and fuzzed out guitars and doomy organ and heavy riffs and moody female vocals out the wazoo. Wow. Magical Power Mako meets Magma would be one good (if potentially puzzling) description. Or perhaps imagine Flower Travellin' Band participating in a freaked out rock opera / ritual, with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance. For krautrockier comparisons, Amon Duul II and Necronomicon are obvious ones, and should suffice as an excellent recommendation. Another would be that this album was highly rated by Julian Cope in his Japrocksampler book (ranking at number 5 of his top 50). This reissue says it's remastered, and is limited and numbered to boot, packaged in a gatefold sleeve.
By the way, one of the tracks here was later covered by druggy doomsters Solar Anus, you can hear it on their tUMULt double disc, Skull Alcoholic...
Record number two from Leyland Kirby's Caretaker project, whose last record, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases, was a unanimous aQ fave, and was of course one of Wire magazine's top 10 albums of 2008, and was, and still is, one of our best sellers, and it looks like this one is likely to follow suit.
A sonic meditation on memory and loss, The Caretaker, takes old jazz records, various effects, and what sounds like a battery of old beat up Victrolas, and weaves Philip Jeck like soundscapes, but unlike Jeck, the source sounds here are not obfuscated, in fact, in some respects, The Caretaker records are almost like spectral spiritual otherworldly mix tapes, especially on this new one, which sounds like old 78s left to play in a big old auditorium, the room's reverb lovingly wreathing the music in a gauzy old timey haze, the surface noise, hiss and crackle and pop, somehow accentuated by the cavernous space. Better yet, replace the auditorium with an old abandoned mansion. Imagine the great room, animal heads on the walls, old oil paintings, a massive fireplace, charred black, old decaying rugs, all the furniture covered in white cloths, looking like ghosts, cobwebs in all the corners, the floor beneath a layer of dust, and in the corner, an old record player, lit up, its turntable spinning slowly, some old dusty record, to a room full of spirits, a sonic requiem for a time that once was, the music seeming to reflect the ever fading memories, and that's what these songs sound like, some sort of haunted house jazz, old timey seance blues, mournful melodies played on an old piano, muted trumpet, swoonsome strings, shuffling drums, a slow motion big band performing live in the ether, a spectral band playing lament after lament, dedicating it to their lost loves, and loves lost.
An Empty Bliss Beyond This World plays like some archival collection of lost 78's, but where the records' provenance is unknown, timeless music that could have come from anytime, and anywhere, the imperfections and inconsistencies as much a part of the sound as the music itself, all of that hiss and crackle a warm wreath of time-transformed-into-sound detritus, the passing of time mad physical, a sonic memorial to the past. So utterly gorgeous.
Vinyl only for now, cd version to follow in a few weeks.
Enter Forced Nostalgia - a label mining the post-punk underground of dark electronics. Judging from this release and their upcoming programming for "a wayward selection of often unreleased, mostly unheard and overlooked material from tape music to industrial, from bossa-pop to proto-techno, and from drone to out and out analogue experimentation," Forced Nostalgia looks to be something wholly different from Vinyl-On-Demand, Minimal Wave, and Dark Entries. The bands here are two terminally obscure Italian industrial outfits who made these recordings in the early '80s with a clear aesthetic framework set forward by the Industrial Records model of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire. Cicciolina Holocaust's woozy cornet buried in the mix of murky rhythms and electronic arpeggiations certainly draw their inspiration from the early productions of Chris & Cosey (think Heartbeat and the collaborative single with John Duncan) and of course there's plenty of TG to be heard in the mix. There are a couple of exceptional minimal wave numbers with clockwork nocturnal techno modulations and super creepy windswept dronings, all of which have been expertly remastered and sound really amazing on this piece of vinyl. Sermonizer harkens from the same realm of spooky electronics, with weirdly plucked guitars working through tape-delay splutter which is more Illitch than TG. Cold radio detunings, dark meanderings of synth warble, and highly sexualized moans and groans flush out Sermonizer's contribution to the split. All of these tracks seem to have come from private cassettes handed out back in the day. This is an amazing find and whets our appetite for what else Forced Nostalgia will be offering in the years to come.
Another week, another killer batch of weirdo releases from one of our new favorite labels, Debacle. So far, of the practically millions (okay maybe 30 or 40) of Debacle releases, we've reviewed records by Expo 70, Demian Johnston & Mink Stole, Megabats and The Slaves. This time around, elsewhere on the list we have another Demian Johnston jam, this time teamed up with 1/2 of local black metal / black noize merchants Sutekh Hexen, and this, the first we've heard from the awesomely named Cough Cool, who specialize in a sort of druggy dreamy droney bedroom pop, but the sort of pop heavy on the mantra like repetition, the woozy atmosphere, and the downercore dreamdrone bliss.
Originally released as a super limited cassette on Sweat Lodge Guru, Cough Cool unfurl a blurred appropriately cough syrupy skeletal electro pop, clipped electronic beats, draped over warbly expanses of shimmer and whir, the guitars dripping with reverb, the vocals a heavily effected whispery croon, everything muddy and murky and washed out, some gloriously lysergic slowcore. But the sound shifts constantly, where the opening track is murky and muffled, the follow up is a bit more crisp, a little more jangly, everything still wreathed in effect, and the programmed rhythm still skeletal, but here the guitars crunch a bit, the vocals a little more moody, the sound like classic indie pop slowed way dooown and run through a bank of effects with dying batteries.
And so it goes, CC spinning lush landscapes of looped jangle guitar, hazy expanses of blissy dream pop, twisted lo-fi eighties style electro-pop, each track not so much a song, as a single riff, or single part, repeated, transformed into an oddly trancelike version of whatever influences CC are choosing to subvert, cyclical and hypnotic, we're reminded here and there of a way more minimal Ariel Pink, while in other places the sounds drifts into seriously Pop Ambient territory, and still elsewhere, it sounds like the muddiest murkiest lost Sentridoh tape, but all of these sounds manage to be woven seamlessly into a single dreamy druggy whole. Our favorite track might be the heavy doomy dream pop dirgery of "Sucker", thick syrupy guitars creep and ooze over a simple loping beat, the vocals spinning a whispery Higgs style mantra, it almost sounds like a darker dirgier Zomes, which is most definitely a good thing.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Latest blast of psychedelic avant doom from this Floridian boy/girl duo, apparently often referred to as the doom metal White Stripes, based we assume entirely on the boy guitarist / girl drummer lineup, cuz sonically this is miles away from the Stripes' bluesy stomp. Instead, these two whip up a swirling, noisy, progged out, psychedelic sort of doom, which really is only classified as doom, because of the downtuned chugging, and slow-ish tempos. But the songs here are not slo-mo sludgefests, or funereal drags, these songs are furious tangles of wild guitar freakouts, of twisted effects drenched melody, of howled vitriolic vokills, of crashing chaotic drummage, and yeah, there are certainly stretches of plodding doomic crush, but even there things are not strictly doomy, the guitars sound warped and woozy, effects everywhere, the ambience seeming to melt in some sort of lysergic haze, the duo transformed into a lurching, lumbering doom-ed deity, sonically smiting all who stand in their way.
The guitars constantly flit from crunchy distorted metallic buzz, to effects drenched warble, to slippery spidery squiggle, the drums following suit, the arrangements and structures seeming to continuously mutate, flecked in various places with chanted chorale like vocals, pulsing new wave synths, thick low end rumbles, even programmed drums, "To Hide Is To Die" sounds almost like a metal version of the current John Carpenter / Goblin worship, and has us sort of hankering for a whole record of metalwave retro-giallo-doom. But the next track slips right back into the duo's gnarled prog-psych-doom, before finally finishing things off with a super strange chunk of piano driven ultra distorted dirge, haunting, and cinematic, everything blown out and warped, harsh vox draped over the top, a pounding, minor key miserablist abstract doom lament, the perfect finish to a fucking killer record, that's fast becoming one of our new faves...
Features guest spots by all sorts of underground metal luminaries including Mike Scheidt from YOB, Blake Judd from Nachtmystium, Nate Hall from U.S. Christmas, and Parker Sanford from Minsk, who also recorded the record.
The band name starts with the prefix DIS, which is your first hint that you best prepare yourself for some serious D-beat pummel. Featuring at least one member of UK black doom heavies Ghast, Disfortune offer up seven songs in a little over eight minutes, with at least two songs clocking in at less than 20 seconds, this is some seriously brootal, furious frantic grinding metallic crust, weirdly lo-fi too, the guitars buzzy and murky but way down in the mix on most of the tracks, crushing and blown out on the super short ones, the sound driven by the d-beat pound of the drums, and the raspy vokills, and of course there are plenty of samples, the sound metallic and crusty, and much beholden to Discharge (of course), Digust, Disfear, Disrupt, and all the other DIS bands, as well as Anti Cimex and Doom and well you get the drift. A short sharp blast of metallic punk heaviness, for fans of all of the above mentioned bands, as well as more recent d-beat practitioners like Acephalix, Bone Awl, Malveillance, etc...
In recent years, Chicago's Kevin Drumm has unleashed an impressive cacophony through a handful of recordings of gnarled distortion and tempestuous noise. Having collaborated with the black-clad noisemonger Prurient and the power electronic technician Lasse Marhaug, having released an album for Hanson Records, and having composed a kick-ass disc called Sheer Hellish Miasma should be enough to let you know what the man is capable of. But listen closely to each of those albums, you'll find hints of glinted melody and a subtle beauty just below the surface of the chainsaw buzz. Here on Imperial Distortion, Drumm focuses entirely upon the contemplative and introspective gestures in the form of the huge longform drones similarly embraced by Eliane Radigue, Andrew Chalk, BJ Nilsen, etc. Gone are the attack, the aggression, and the noise; but the dark, the doom, and the hellishness are what remains in these icy drones. His strategy is pure hypnosis through slippery layers of elongated electronic drones and bell-tone like resonance. On first listening to disc one, the subterranean gong clatter soaked in reverberation could easily tear themselves apart into digital chaos, but Drumm molds the gritty klank into an ominous dronedirge. This softening of potentially destructive sounds becomes Drumm's modus operandi throughout the first disc, with each modulation toward excess pregnant with malcontent energy reigned in for a severely dark moodscaping. On disc two, Drumm sets up soft transmissions from controlled feedback undulate with a slow moving rhythmic pulse, which gradually doubles upon itself into a topographical drone with the all of the same-but-different patterns of wind swept sand. Here, Drumm most recalls the unnerving minimalism through refined feedback manipulation that Nurse With Wound concocted on Soliloquy For Lilith. By the end of the record, the shadow and disease which could be read into some of the tracks on the first disc dissolve into a shimmering ambience that's just damn pretty.
Let it be known, Imperial Distortion will be one of the best drone records of 2008.
Live performances by Andrew Chalk are incredibly rare. The man just doesn't seem to like to travel; but earlier in 2011, Chalk ventured to Paris for a collaborative concert with Timo Van Luijk, a likeminded Belgian composer crafting similarly spectral drones and impressionist soundscapes. While we were not so lucky to have been in Paris for that show, the collaboration between the two must have been fruitful, as they recorded this set of lilting instrumentals, hushed psychedelic ragas, and softened minimalism under the moniker Elodie. Echos Pastoraux seems to lean more towards Chalk's sound, especially after his recent push towards quietly rendered improvisations blossoming from his signature dronemuzik on Ghost Of Nakhodka and Violin By Night. Gentle plucks on a koto or an acoustic guitar meander through field recordings of birds and rain, giving way to more harmonic pieces of interwoven melody that sounds like french horn (or maybe an oboe, or maybe an analogue synth, or maybe a harmonium, or maybe some combination) whose overtones shimmer and flutter into quietly hypnotic clouds of soft buzz and thrum. Any number of these tracks could have been extracted from a private ritual performed by Chalk and Van Luijk; and while such could be said for any of the Jewelled Antler releases or any of the ancillary projects of Kemialliset Ystavat, Elodie's quiet drones, acoustic impression, smoke, shadow, and maudlin atmospheres are hardly anywhere near the 'freak folk' camp. This is much closer to what Akio Suzuki has done, although there are plenty of flourishes in the production that gives evidence of the hands of Andrew Chalk being at work. As a result, it's still spellbinding, like pretty much everything that Chalk has ever touched. Just 400 copies!
There's really no useful information to be found about Roe Enney. She authors a thoroughly cracked strain of bedroom electronica, one that could have been produced around 1983 in some depressed region of the world. We could say Vladivostok for someplace fitting of the sounds but in truth she hails from Phoenix, Arizona. That's pretty much all that we know about her and this tape she produced for the newly invigorated Phaserprone label, who has never shied away from grimy electronics, queasy rhythmic oppression, and fucked-up histrionics. Enney's stoned, witchy vocals would certainly draw parallels to Liz Harris and Amanda Brown, although Enney is far more of a deconstructionist, stripping away her already emaciated structures through a Spartan use of vintage Linn drum machine, synth, guitar, voice, and a fair amount of tape decay with all of these typically keeping their own orbits independent of everything else. The resultant warbling constructions are stunted, ghetto-dub mutations where voice and synth murkily blur into cough-syrup overdosed crawlings whose sewer seduction atmospheres are splattered with her puncturing drum machine programming that rarely acts as time keeper to these personal, dystopian visions. She's channelling the more idiosyncratic elements of Dome, Throbbing Gristle, Tara Cross, and The Storm Bugs, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to situate this near the early Zola Jesus singles or LA Vampires. Limited tape-only production in a run of 100 copies. Don't expect these to last long.
Originally purveyors of grim depressive blackness, their sound abject and hateful and suicidal, this Italian horde has gradually been moving toward a sound more melodic, and by extension more accessible, and on Under Saturn Retrograde, they seem to have moved about as far away from that early blackness as possible before becoming an altogether different band.
Folks who don't dig melody or poppiness in black metal, will have no doubt given up on these guys a long time ago, but for the rest of us, this stuff is pretty great, the sound is thick, and heavy, a little bit gothic, seriously poppy, think Khold, Katatonia, Lifelover, Alcest, the band occasionally dipping into some buzzing blackness, but for the most part, crafting hooky blackened epics, the vocals still harsh and hellish, the riffs still gnarled and minor key, but all wound into sprawling depressive buzz drenched black pop jams, which lope along for the most part, but do occasionally explode into furious blasts or stutter through weirdly dynamic mathy arrangements.
The title track is split into two movements, the first about as grim as it gets here, epic and intense, blasting and black, but then the second part is all acoustic guitar, martial snare, and a final burst over super melodic guitar harmonies, soaring and majestic. "You Can't Kill Who's Already Dead" sounds like the perfect fusing of Lifelover and Katatonia, while "Spectres Over Venice", is a killer pop flecked bit of churning blackened heaviness, before finishing off with some pure heavy pop, all super epic chords, tangled guitar harmonies and soaring clean vocals, a weird finish, to a record that while poppy is still pretty black metal, but not nearly as weird as FT's fairly straight forward, slightly blackened version of the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog", which sounds pretty great actually, the guitars a little bit more blackened and minor key, the vokills appropriately harsh, some wild frenzied drumming, but otherwise pretty true to the original.
We dig this a LOT, but can definitely understand how old fans would be disappointed, but anyone into the above mentioned bands, should definitely check this out.
Wonderful! This is album number three from this fine Swedish trio, and they continue to grow and delight. Perhaps in keeping with the changing seasons, the tranquil frosted shimmer of their previous recordings has given way to subtly more active and warmer tones. Still very softly pastel hued with shadowy underpinnings, the aptly titled Flora stirs visions of springtime nature - of tender young leaves and limbs pressing up through the recently thawed earth, of tiny blossoms bursting open, all seeking the sun. Their trademark dewy-eyed murmured vocals and ghostly atmospheric washes are contrasted nicely by the occasionally more robust rhythmic elements (as on "Rites Of Spring" and the gently stormy "The North Greatern"), resplendent strings, and chiming percussion (definitely check out "The Shape and Colour of Things Gone Blind"). This music sighs enchantingly and you will blissfully sigh right along with it! We could go on and on. Recommended... particularly if you dig the likes of Sigur Ros, Jose Gonzales, The Notwist, Lali Puna, and Mum.
Ooooh, and if you find yourself craving more... we still have a handful of their limited edition Origami 7" in stock. Get it while you still can!
Oh damn! This brand new 7" from Grass Widow finds these ladies really hitting their stride. Released on their brand new imprint HLR, it features a great new jam called "Milo Minute" which further shows how they excel at crafting pop songs that incorporate post-punk, '60s girl groups and '90s riot grrl elements with such satisfying results. The B-side has two awesome covers, "Time Keeps Time" by Neo Boys, and "Mannequin" by Wire. They do those in a style that makes us think of a slightly heavier Aislers Set. Which is of course AWESOME!
One of our favorite 7"s of the year so far!
For a lot of young Swedes, it's apparently still 1973... what with bellbottomed bands like Witchcraft, Horisont, Noctum, Dead Man, and Graveyard, eh? Here's the latest from the latter, their second full-length, and yeah as the title suggests - and as everyone who heard their self-titled, stonery debut would expect - it's heavy '70 style blues rock, all right, rollin' and tumblin' with amped up urgency and authentic analog-recorded old school mojo.
As always, Graveyard remind us a bit of aforementioned fellow countrymen Witchcraft, with whom they share roots in the late '90s band Norrsken (when oh when will there be a reissue of that awesome band's obscure output we wonder?!). For that matter, both bands also share members with another outfit, Spiders, that we've reviewed some singles by recently. But Graveyard do their psychedelic blues thing their own way, with less of Witchcraft's admitted Pentagram influence for one thing. Instead, we're (again) hearing echoes of good ol' Monster Magnet. Maybe even Thee Hypnotics. And of course the '70s bands, that inspired those bands...
Graveyard's vocalist has a nice raspy edge to his voice when he wants, like when wailing away on opener "Ain't Fit To Live Here", one example of the many galloping rockers to be found on this disc... which also has its moody slow moments, take the lovely, lumbering 2nd track "No Good, Mr. Holden" with its backwards effects, for instance. Or the wide-open spaces, spaghetti western whistling atmospherics of "Longing", which sounds like a nod to Ennio Morricone, or maybe to Bjorn Olsson. Fans of another very '70s sounding Swedish band (and AQ-fave), Elope, should feel right at home with this more mellow side of Hisingen Blues.
Furthermore, while the amount of cowbell and whoo-whoo backing vocals found here could come across as cliched in lesser hands, Graveyard sound like they really mean it, these tracks possessing real emotional resonance alongside their retro radness.
From experience, we know they're a great live band, but this is the sort of record that would make you very much suspect that, anyway. Will we get to hear 'em kick out these jams in person sometime soon? Sure hope so!
Probably best known for scoring such television classics as Space: 1999, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, and loads more, Barry Gray also had a career in advertising, applying his same quirky compositional style to whatever product needed his special attention be it tobacco, milk, banks, gin, spaghetti, washing powder, ice cream, shampoo, tea, you name it. And Gray's sound was pretty crazy, classic and classical one second, symphonic the next, poppy the next, but also experimental and far out, tape loops, electronics, effects, reverb, echo, a little Joe Meek, a little BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a dizzying barrage of sounds and themes, different jumbled genres, goofy, fun, silly, brilliant, and CRAZY catchy. Anyone into industrial music (as in commercial and advertising music) will go nuts for this stuff. Imagine a commercial for a washing machine with a soundtrack that sounds like it could be for Plan 9 From Outerspace, or a supermarket commercial that sounds like some sort of experimental electronica, or what sounds like a Perrey & Kingsley Moog workout, which is in fact an ad for something (or someone) called Poor Pablo, then imagine those interspersed with all manner of playful sonic silliness, super catchy miniature pop songs, insanely catchy jingles, many with Gray often taking up the mic and singing his little ditties himself. So good!
Another fantastic, and fantastically far out, collection from Trunk Records. Includes a massive booklet with tons of liner notes, including notes about Grey, his music, and most interestingly, blurbs on all the various products advertised in the various commercials!
Most folks are probably more familiar with Mathew Kvohst McNerney as a member of avant post black metallers Code, or Dodheimsgard offshoot DHG, but in Hexvessel, MKMcN explores a different sonic path altogether, a sort of ritualist psychedelic folk, that has more in common with groups like Woven Hand and Comus and other modern freak folkers than any of the bands in his more metal pedigree.
The coolest part about Hexvessel is McNerney's distinctive vocals. For us, the best part of Code were McNerney's clean vocals, especially set amidst churning black buzz, or Interpol like metallized gloom, so to hear those same vocals draped over sun dappled acoustic guitars and fluttering flutes, is pretty spectacular, and reveals that in many ways, his talents were wasted screeching and shrieking over black buzz.
The tracks are dark and haunting, minimal and dreamily druggy, hazy and washed out, warm and woozy and psychedelic, conjuring that seventies acid folk vibe, buzzing metallic drones swirling around lush finger picked steel string Appalachia, the vocals crooned one second ominously whispered the next, the core sound of the group augmented by a fantastic array of musical instruments including mandolin, banjo, bandoneon, upright bass, gongs, harmonium, dulcimer, zither, psaltery, bells and more, the songs alternately ominous and sinister, hushed and dreamlike, sometimes set amidst the sound of a summer glade, all bird calls and whispering wind, other times wreathed in strange occultic ambience, the lyrics mysterious and cryptic, the delivery, passionate and urgent, a gorgeously timeless collection of old timey ballads, haunting laments, foresty folk dirges, and various other permutations of Hexvessel's mystical dark folke.
Most definitely for fans of all strains of folk: psychedelic, apocalyptic, doom, freak and otherwise, as well as fellow folk brethren like Woven Hand, Comus, Sixteen Horsepower, Burial Hex, Espers, Six Organs Of Admittance, Timesbold, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, etc.
Super striking packaging, all metallic gold ink on full color matte finish, inside an equally striking booklet filled with haunting images, lyrics, liner notes and original artwork by Albert Witchfinder of Reverend Bizarre.
The last we heard from mysterious post industrial deadtech alchemist HSDOM was on a split cd-r from way back in 2009, which he shared with likeminded noisemaker SYNB aka Mat Brinkman of Load Records infamy, but on that split, with each artist reworking the sounds of the other, it was difficult to tell whose sounds were who, and to be honest at the time, it didn't matter, as both batches of reworked sound were incredible. So this limited cassette is actually our first true glimpse of what this Brooklyn by way of Berlin soundscaper is capable of, and much like that out of print split, it's a creepy, industrial, soundworld, of disembodied reverbed voices, churning, chugging, whirling rhythms, twisted swirling fractured effects, loads of hiss and static, rumble and crunch, the sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, slipping from rhythmic pulse to white noise blast, a barrage of looped lysergic mesmer, the garbled voices transformed into rhythms of their own, while the various electronics offer up their own confusional counter rhythms, blurred sea of blackened squiggles, hazy ambient sound turned into minimal thrumscapes, bleary streaks of gristly shimmer, peppered with common every day sonic detritus, all transformed via old microphones, mouldering magnetic tape, and damaged effects into some sort of crumbling futuristic transmission, sent from the cold grey past.
The second site starts out with some pulsing cold wave synths, slightly off, occasionally seeming to falter, or stumble, a haunting hypnotic malfunctioning machine groove, still underpinned with strange whispered voices, bits of distorted electronics, the synth tones gradually changing tone and timbre, clipped and brittle one second, warm and fluid the next, everything gauzy and hazy and washed out, the vibe growing more tense and claustrophobic, a minimal cinematic loopscape that evokes dread and darkness, gradually fading out to something much more shadowy and abstract, a looped bit of synthy soundtracky murk, that locks into a motorik groove, while all around, more strange voices, brittle sine wave tones, creaking glitched out electronics, mysterious low end croaks, all seems to float and shimmer like some dying sonic particle field. Haunting, otherworldly, dreamily disturbing, quite abjectly fantastic.
And of course, SUPER LIMITED!! Very likely the last copies we'll be able to get. Beautifully packaged in deluxe letterpressed, hand stamped J-cards, pro duplicated...
Up until now, we knew Hyetal as a Bristol based dubstepper, with killer jams on all sorts of labels from Punch Drunk to Planet Mu, his sound a soulful, tripped out variant of classic dubstep, but who here, on Broadcast, has ditched the whole dubplate / 12" single / dancefloor driven approach and crafted a record proper, one that plays out like some strange Eighties giallo soundtrack, equal parts Goblin, John Carpenter, witch housers Salem, and nineties IDM, not to mention some serious soul. Opener "Ritual" is the grimmest of the bunch, and the most witch house-y, total blackened synth heavy drag, the sounds distorted and crumbly, the beat a soporific creep, lots of buzz, and swirl, and some total Carpenter like soundtracky melodies, all minor key and haunting as hell. "Diamond Islands" continues the vibe, with a skittery abstract beat, some woozy, sinister synths, some big eighties drums, breathy vocals suspended over the swirling electronic backdrop, the vibe low slung and retro, but also weirdly abstract and futuristic.
"Phoenix" takes some swaggery dubstep, stirs in some 8 bit eighties video game sounds, and some cheesy soundtracky synths, into some total VHS dubstep new age soundtrack soul, while "Beach Scene" conjures up the exact opposite, some grimy chase through the gritty streets of some post apocalyptic wasteland. And weirdly enough, "The Chase" doesn't really evoke a chase, but is darkly tense, a pulsing new wave synthscape, that leads directly into "Searchlight", which takes Boards Of Canada style warm and washed out IDM, mixes in some weird eighties synths and some blooping bleeping video game music, not to mention some fragmented soul vox, for a dizzying bit of haunting skittery electro wave.
"Dimepiece" is all minimal and stripped down, with distant melodies, a churning propulsive melody, but with some awesome swaths of dubstep bas wobble, underpinning echo drenched disembodied female vox.
The record continues on, straddling the line between abstract dubstep, vintage Carpenter soundtrack, old school IDM, and dark minimal electro soul, finally finishing off with the haunting and gorgeously brooding "Black Black Black", a sort of post Portishead chunk of downtempo slither, sexy female vocals crooned over a Burial style slo-mo dubstep beat, all wound up with pulsing synths, and deep thick swells of haunting ambience, and draped with some chiming, lilting eighties pop melodies, only to fade out into nearly two minutes of crashing surf. So nice.
Note: the double 12" vinyl version only includes 5 of the 10 tracks found on the compact disc format.
Last time we highlighted the 2nd album from Mercyful Fate/King Diamond (and Satan) lovin' Swedish true metallers, Portrait. Now this week we've got another sophomore album from ANOTHER Swedish heavy metal act on Metal Blade that's ALSO heavily influenced by Mercyful Fate, and they're pretty rad too!
This is the first time we've listed anything by In Solitude, though they were on Earache's Heavy Metal Killers comp that we recommended some time back - they appeared there alongside, yes, Portrait, as well as Cauldron, Ram, and a bunch of other cool bands we like from the "New Wave Of Old School Metal".
This new In Solitude, their first disc for Metal Blade, is a triumphant affair of twin guitar riffage, and soaring vocals, both quite melodic AND powerful. Never quite getting as ridiculously falsetto as ol' King Diamond, In Solitude's singer does however traffic in similar melodies and lyrical themes, wailing about demons, devils and darkness. Musically, In Solitude boast dynamic songwriting with a variety of sounds and speeds, structures incorporating moody acoustic guitars, and plenty of Maidenesque gallop... By the time epic, 13+ minute finale "On Burning Paths" rolls around, your arms will be tired from hoisting those "invisible oranges" in reaction to this music.
Perhaps they're not quite so gnarly / ancient / evil sounding as Portrait, though you certainly can imagine 'em dwelling in some bat-infested castle somewhere, surrounded by pentagrams and black candles for sure (and empty beer cans and old Mercyful Fate lps). In Solitude definitely captures that '80s metal "Mr. Crowley" vibe of occult-induced danger and despair. In terms of pop/rock elements, they come slightly closer to that other Satanic Swedish sensation, Ghost, and the singer also sports subtle, spooky facepaint that's a bit Ghost-like too. Horns up!
Originally intended to be released for Record Store Day, this split lp features long time aQ faves Iron And Wine, teamed up with new aQ faves the Low Anthem, both performing live (from a recent tour they did together). The four Iron And Wine tracks are expanded to a whole 100 minute set with the download coupon, and is heavy on the newer stuff, with a whole band, fairly rocking, big drums, horns, synths, if you dig the new sound, the new songs sound great live, as do the old ones. Not for newbies so much as for already-fans. The flipside finds the Low Anthem doing their dark brooding folk thing, taming a rowdy crowd, their sound, lush and dreamlike, haunting and meditative, lush vocal harmonies, all melancholy and sweetly moody, nearly 30 minutes of folky softly psychedelic drift.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Supposedly only available and indie stores, it's apparently already out of print, we have just 5 copies left, and then that's it! Comes in a full color jacket, with a swank letter pressed 2 color silk screened insert, and includes a download coupon, with the Low Anthem tracks and the WHOLE Iron And Wine set.
We haven't heard anything from this oddly named Memphis duo, not since their Cooper-from-Cave-produced split lp way back in 2006, which at the time we described as sounding like a "gloriously ramshackle mess" and a "stumbling, distorted whomp of detuned hillbilly indie twang", most of which still holds true, it's a little ramshackle, a little bit messy, and packs a serious detuned whomp (or perhaps wallop), but even so, it's a much more fully realized chunk of modern twang flecked indie Americana, or maybe call it countrified punk rock, or maybe just a sweet collection of home brewed indie twang, jangly guitars that erupt into gouts of super distorted crunch, songs loping and lilting before launching into blowouts more fiery and fierce. The jangle and croon laced with sinewy streaks of distorted guitar melody, the drums bashing and crashing, effects sending sounds swooshing and wooshing, the vocals a plaintive countrified about to crack croon, the sound slipping easily from indie twang stomp, to woozy folky jangle, dreamy twangy, drowsy ballads that sound like lo-fi re-envisionings of classic Uncle Tupelo, but way more tripped out and effects drenched, that lead right into full bore psych-twang freakouts. Pretty cool.
One of two new releases this week from the always awesome Debacle Records (Expo 70, The Slaves, Megabats and about a million more), the other is some gorgeously druggy and dreamy downercore bedroom pop from Cough Cool, this one is a cool collaboration from Demian Johnston, whose team up with Mink Stole we raved about a few lists back, and who was once a member of late great kick ass postpunk metalcore heavies Kiss It goodbye. But on the solo stuff we've heard so far, Johnston tends toward dark and blackened drones, which makes this collaboration all the more apt, with Johnston joined by Kevin Gan Yuen, one half of local black metal noise merchants Sutekh Hexen.
And thus you can imagine the sort of sinister sounds these two conjure up. Deep devilish rumblings, strange bits of percussion and creepy sonic detritus, a roiling black sea of blurred tarpit riffage, laced with chiming harmonics, haunting barely there melodies, the sound dense and heavily layered, slipping from meditative thrum to churning gnarled crush and back again, shifting from Wolf Eyes-ish black industrial creep, to thick pulsating SUNNO))) like black hold doom, to swirling, almost pretty blackbliss ambience. The two occasionally dip their deep rumblings in something more caustic and corrosive, adding a patina of crumbling hiss, and gristly static, but just as often, smearing those sounds into another layer of undulating buzz and blur, the twisted chugging slo-mo near-static riffage at one point wreathed in the sound or falling rain, creating a weirdly atmospheric stretch of ambience that evokes some sort of unholy black storm, before splintering into one final blast of grinding low end crunch.
Sweet stuff, WAY recommended for fans of grim black slow low heaviness, and creepy, sinister, blackhole buzz, which we're guessing probably includes a whole lot of you...
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!
Another new release from Slumberland, who have been cranking out release after release since they resurfaced after a bit of a break, thankfully all these new Slumberland jams kill, and this latest one is no different. Featuring a bunch of folks from psych pop combo From Bubblegum To Sky (who are pretty dang great, even though we've never managed to review anything, yet!), this is a modern homage to Phil Spector and the old Brill Building songsmiths, and yeah, we know, everyone and their mother have a reverby garage rock band that is trying to do that whole Phil Spector wall of sound thing, and there are plenty of Something-Girls or Girls-Something bands, Dum Dum, Vivian, At Dawn and the rest, who are doing it quite well thank you.
But fuck it, there's always room for another fuzzy, dreamy retro sixties style pop band, especially if the songs are great, and the sound is warm and wonderful, and Kids On A Crime Spree nail it on both counts, using old equipment and vintage recording techniques to capture that classic sound, these guys pull it off songwise too, with warm crunchy softly fuzzy guitars, plenty of jangle, hooks galore, and an awesome second guitar, all warm and woozy, clean and clear, playing the melody over the top of the fuzzy jangle, we LOVE that. Just check out "I Don't Want To Call You Baby, Baby", shades of the Raveonettes for sure, the same sort of washed out dreaminess, but there's just something about KOACS that make these songs sound special. "Trumpets Of Death" has those super echoey vocals, but adds some fat fuzzy bass, and a bizarre chorus that seems to have nothing to do with the titular trumpets of death.
All the songs here are awesome, warm and fuzzy, sunshiney and handclappy, hazey and dreamily druggy, softly psychedelic, mixing the classic pop sound that they're paying tribute to, but adding little subtle modern sonic bits that help make this stuff sound special, with some tracks erupting into crunchy fuzzy almost punky blasters, while others getting all warped and blurred and laid back, finally finishing with the piano pounding fuzz bass buzzing "Jean-Paul Sartre 2", which adds a glistening super melodic chorus to the otherwise fuzzed out feedback drenched verses, as well as a cool dynamic stop/start post chorus bridge, and some soaring, super melodic vocals, a strangely tweaked and twisted take on classic popsmithery, that definitely has us hoping that the next record will head more in that direction.
Pretty much every metalhead in SF went to see Carcass at the Grand Ballroom the other night (in fact, we were joking that a well placed incendiary device could have wiped out the entire scene in one fell swoop). And yeah, of course Carcass destroyed, but the very same night, all the way across town, a band called Kowloon Walled City were faced with the daunting task of laying waste to a room not exactly full of the few metalheads who for whatever reason were not at the Carcass show.
And listening to this, the debut release from this SF foursome, we'd be hard pressed to say that the folks at Carcass, ourselves included, didn't miss out on something serious. Thankfully, unlike Carcass, KWC are a going concern, so we'll get another chance, but until then, get a load of this five song ep, of fierce, furious, crushing heaviness. Think Unsane, old Helmet, the Melvins, Buzzov-en, Neurosis of course, this is some seriously heavy shit. The guitars massive and downtuned, a relentless sea of roiling chug and churn, the drums dense and pounding, the vocals a throat shredding howl. The AmRep vibe is all over these songs, the sound incredibly thick and corrosive, the rhythms alternatingly pounding and lurching, most often settling into a lumbering almost-groove, the melodies buried amidst the crunch and rumble, sometimes surfacing as the band slips into something more dynamic, letting the guitars moan and keen, the drums getting all spacious, sheets of Eyehategod style feedback, a weirdly doomy sort of abstract sludge, before slipping back into a furious grinding metallic crush. Pretty fucking excellent, and definitely has us looking forward to finally seeing what we missed that fateful night.
The vinyl is limited to 300 copies, and is pressed on cool swirled red and black vinyl. The cd-r is limited to 100 copies, packaged in super nice, silkscreened cardstock style sleeves with a printed insert, each one hand numbered.
If you're like us, you probably never heard of these Boston bashers, a short lived ultra heavy combo from Boston, with just a handful of releases, all collected here, and a sound that makes us wish we had, and one that most definitely puts most other heavy bands to shame, equal parts gnarled Black Flag dirge, mathy sci-fi Voivod-isms, and churning downtuned Swans like pummel, every track here a grim, dense slab of sonic crush, the guitars massive and thick, the riffs fucking fierce, the drums devastating, the band alternatingly locking into hypnorock grooves, or super intricate, churning mathiness, loads of buzz and feedback, total math rock / post rock / noise rock / post punk bliss.
The label describes these guys thusly: "Imagine massive slabs of discordance at earsplitting volume and a terrifyingly intense, tattooed madman working out his personal demons while wearing a too-small Sonic the Hedgehog tee shirt", which sounds pretty amazing (and had us thinking of Oxbow for some reason), and La Gritona, even minus the apparently terrifying live experience, sound pretty goddamn terrifying on record too, with plenty of Jesus Lizard-y swagger, Helmet like metallic chug, and that vocalist, mostly singing in a monstrous bellow, but seemingly constantly slipping into a crazy hysterical shriek, but not like a metal shriek, more like an inhuman high pitched squeal, weirdly haunting, and definitely disturbing, but perfectly suited to LG's pigfuck heaviness. And while they do slow it down every once in a while, those slow songs almost sound even more intense, offering up a sort of mutant blues Birthday Party style onslaught.
Every single track here rules, from tangled atonal metallic dirgery, to doomed out lurching math sludge, old school noise rock crunch to psychedelic fuzzed out harmonic drenched post punk, a sound that at the time was obviously a decade or so to early, but that to these ears would have the current crop of sludge worshippers going nuts, and if Harvey Milk can finally get the love and adoration they so deserved, a full decade late, then why the hell not these guys. And as long as we're mentioning it, Harvey Milk fanatics would do well to check these guys out too. Just sayin'...
Massive double disc, 40 track collection gathering up EVERYTHING these guys ever recorded, which includes loads of unreleased and live tracks, as well as the Steve Albini engineered full length Arrasa Con Todo, which just might be one of the most perfect slabs of skull splitting downtuned heaviness we've ever heard.
Despond marks the very first proper full length from these Nashville funereal doomlords (whose frontman also plays in doom outfit Mourner, whose most recent record came out on Paradigms a short while back), after a whole mess of splits and demos, and if ever there was a record that captured the true spirit of depressive ultradoom, it's Despond. Epic musical miserablism, the sound HUGE, the production massive, but the sound is only part of it, the mood, the atmosphere. Song after song, with titles like "Open Veins To A Curtain Closed" and "Silent And Completely Overcome" and "Cut Up, Depressed And Alone", peppered with haunting bits of spoken word, recorded as if the speaker were sitting alone in their room, in the dark, contemplating the end. It's seriously grim and powerful stuff, and the gorgeously varied music reflects that, by exploring different shades of dark, this is not all churning, roiling black sludge, it's way more nuanced than that, just check out the opener "Open Veins To A Curtain Closed", which begins with just gristly gurgly vocals over big plodding drums, the effect truly harrowing, before the guitars come crashing in, and briefly, the track is a plodding sprawl of broken souled doooooom, but then the downtuned dirge peels away, leaving just spidery clean guitars, shuffling drums, woozy wandering super melodic basslines, strangely psychedelic, much of the song is spent in this haunting ethereal drift, before finally, the song slips back into churning chugging, guttural voiced black heaviness, loping and melancholy, but peppered with brief blasts of grinding metallic crush, only to finally unwind with a lumbering stretch of surprisingly melodic, but still crushingly mournful dirgery. And that's just the first song. The rest of the record plays out similarly, the melodic component a real surprise, with the band seemingly more beholden to classic doom like My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, than the ultra doom sludge that followed, with much of the music on Despond sounding downright poppy, still dark, and dreary, and depressive, but the melodies are surprisingly catchy, a timeless melancholy woven into a more modern funeral doom framework, but it makes for a much more satisfying listen.
That said, the band do get seriously slo-mo sludgey, like on "Shallow Pulse", where they wed some more melodic guitar lines to some tarpit black ooze riffage, the vocals gurgling over the top, the drums pounding out a Neanderthal plod, or on "Silent And Completely Alone", which begins all clean vocaled, which might have you scratching your head, until the song slips right back into the roiling black abyss, and back into a blurred black doomsludge drift, but with the addition of those clean vocals, adds a whole other element to the song, and the sound, and while perhaps taking away from the pure grimnity for some, to us, it only makes the music that much more emotional, and makes that song quite possibly our favorite.
There are also some mysterious interludes, gorgeous ambient experimentation, thick Tim Hecker like crumbling doomscapes, creepy reverbed piano drive drifts, even a gorgeous, mostly clean choral sounding guitar/organ/chanted vox closer, but those only add to the overall vibe, the doomed soul, black hearted, and yeah, despondent atmosphere, the whole record a fantastically tense push and pull between collapsing black hole ultra doom and a more melodic classic dreary miserablism.
The return of the Mausoleums! Well, not so much a return, it's not like the man behind the Mausoleums went missing, for the last several years, he's actually been working alongside us right here at aQ, but for whatever reason, the Mausoleums as a musical entity had remained silent, which was definitely a shame. After two obsessively loved cd-r's, we had been hankering for more.
Those cds, sadly both out of print (any labels tuned in that might want to reissue those on cd or vinyl, really SHOULD!), were a confusional mix of super distorted buzzing blackness, crunchy blissed out shoegazey pop, jangly post rock, and whatever other sonic weirdness Mr. Mausoleums felt like mixing in. On Just A Certainty, the first new Mausoleums record in 3+ years, much has changed, it's a much more cohesive record for sure, but all of the above sounds are glaringly absent, no jangly indie pop, no buzzing blackness, no dreamy shoegaze, instead, The Mausoleums have crafted a gorgeous disc, of lo-fi, murky mesmer, that manages to fuse fuzzy folk with mantric hypnorock, looped ritualism with druggy psychedelic space rock, buzzing dronemusic with abstract lysergic drift.
The opening track "Destination III" is a bit of Appalachian style folk, but wreathed in a prickly swirl of crunchy static, the recording so muted and muddy, the notes bleed into each other, the folky fingerpicking transformed into a fuzzy chordal swirl, dripping with reverb and delay. "Negation" is another bit of folky strum and stomp, but even more muted and washed out and indistinct, the vocals and guitars tangled up under layers of hiss and hum and whir and thrum, there seem to be drums too, but so buried they become a muted pulse, all woven into a weirdly rollicking chunk of murky dronefolk. "Swimmin In A Sea Of Sand" displays the other side of the Mausoleums new sound, one that fuses the drugged out hypnotic repetition of groups like Spacemen 3 and Wooden Shjips, with the alien trancelike audio ritualism of Zomes, a looped buzzy guitarscape that could go one forever.
"Doomed/Where You Go" continues that same sort of lysergic dronerock, with the drums almost punching through the murk and mire, but remaining more of a distant throb, while the muted buzz is laced with spidery melodies and hushed whispery vox, a tripped out buzzy bit of hypno psych rock for sure. "Gypsy Moth" might be our fave, a hazy, gauzy layered landscape of pulsing organs, dreamlike loops and all manner of overtones, it may be just an interlude, but it will have you completely entranced.
The last three tracks are longer, and allow The Mausoleums to stretch things out, and get way spacier and psychedelic, "Psychic Overthrow" is like a space rock jam reduced to it's core elements, a churning sea of pulsing, reverb drenched riffs, roiling endlessly, bleeding into each other, creating one epic and organic psychscape, while "Opposite Shores" sounds like some old school psychedelic garage rock, but recorded underwater, all the sounds washed out and blurry, the drums propulsive, but still buried beneath layer upon layer of fuzz, this jam the poppiest of the bunch, with some cool Eastern sounding buzzing guitar leads wound into the shimmery swirl, and finally, "H774119" offers up a Mausoleums style stab at new wave, programmed drums, buzzing synths, hypnotic and krautrocky, sounding a bit like a super raw, and WAY more fucked up Stereolab, dark, dreamy, druggy, and WAY psychedelic.
A rad to return to form, even though it's a decidedly different form, but it's one we like a a lot, maybe even better. Recommended for fans of Zomes, Wooden Shjips, Spacemen 3, Amps For Christ, Suicide, Stereolab and other masters of murky cosmic mesmer...
CASSETTE ONLY, AND OF COURSE CRAZY LIMITED!!!!
A reissue of a private cassette Maurizio Bianchi made in 1981, whose ghastly noises would become the foundation for Endometrio, one of Bianchi's undisputed masterpieces of grim powerdrone electronics. Endometrio was a self-released LP from 1982 that formed a diptych with Carcinosi, which explored Bianchi's self-described 'bionic' music, and which metaphorically described the encroachment of technology within the human body as a form of self-annihilation by way of cancer. The heavy drones of thick vibration seemed to be a magnification of cancerous cells growing within bone tissue. Yeah, Bianchi's work is fucking bleak.
Oitr Emo-Dne features many of those spectral vibrations, slumping drones, and frigid noises that would later form the monolithic wall of sound Bianchi would deliver on Endometrio; but this tape is far more composed than most of Bianchi's proper albums, which pretty much begin and end with rough edits and hardly anything as subtle as fade-out. Instead of a relentless torrent of sound, Bianchi allows his sounds to ebb and flow with various cracklings (possibly left over from his early turntable experiments as Sacher-Pelz), sounding very prescient of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith and especially the NWW track "No Longer His Dominant" with its arrangement for swelling low-end feedback. This tape is pretty limited itself, with just 216 copies of this edition, although the tape and the inserts are professional grade. An exceptional artifact of early '80s noise culture!
We were just raving recently about Thurston Moore's beautiful solo acoustic guitar meditations record released on VDSQ a little while back, and now he follows it up with an album some of his most intimate and inviting songs yet. Demolished Thoughts demonstrates a side of Moore's songwriting that is often blurred in the layers and velocity of his long running group Sonic Youth, but loosed from that noise and bombast, these songs are revealed as perhaps some of the dreamiest you will hear all year. If you are like us, and ever daydreamed about what an entire record filled with songs that sound like the first six minutes of "The Diamond Sea" would sound like, then this is one of those amazing moments when a wish gets granted, and exceeds that far fetched fantasy.
With Samra Lubelski adding violin, Moore playing his acoustic with sensual perfection, and songs sprinkled with harp by Mary Lattimore, its an album that perfectly captures the drifting and pastoral side of Moore's musical vision, which has also been a more subtle part of his signature sound. Beck was at the helm of the production for this record, and we have to say we think we might be liking him more these days in that role than on his own records (check out Charlotte Gainsbourg's IRM, for more proof). In fact there are some elements of Demolished Thoughts, that echo Beck's downer masterpiece "Sea Change." What's so remarkable about this album is that alongside its elegance, Moore maintains his voice and vision to the core. Highly recommended!
