Killer collab between Aussie experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi and jack of all trades (although in this case those trades happen to be strings, synth and percussion) Jim O'Rourke, who have collaborated together in the past, always with other players though, so this is their first as a duo. And it's darkly lovely, a post minimal bit of synthscapery, liberally laced with mysterious percussion, and unlikely edits, all woven into a single track, separated into two movements/sides. The first of which begins with a bit of distorted crunch, which quickly gives way to a dreamy bit of chiming melody, and softly swirling synth, tinkling tones and washed out drift, still retaining some of the residual crunch, but in fragmented form, all over a deep shimmery thrum, peppered with muted heartbeat like pulses. As the piece progresses, gamelan like melodies surface, as do thick swaths of rumbling buzz, the sound a little bit glitchy, wreathed in warm swirls of soft focus feedback, all warm and drifty and dreamlike, lush swells washing over disembodied Appalachia, streaks of skree, strange bits of percussion, a softly swirling sea of overtones and sympathetic sounds, slipping from minimal abstraction to melodic dronemusic, all arranged with jagged edits that don't distract so much as add occasional texture. The second movement/side seems to add more tolling bells, more buzz and low end rumble, the sounds softly cacophonous, the tone more ominous and foreboding, but still hauntingly dreamy, and mysteriously lovely. Gorgeous stuff.
In case you missed it on our mystery themed in-between list last week, something we reviewed just for that, for the first time...
It's pretty much acknowledged that Bad Brains are one of the most influential American bands of the 20th century, having blown the minds of every young hardcore band in the D.C. and New York scenes and beyond. Their sound went way further than just "punk" or "rock", blending jazz, fusion, and reggae into something that defies simple classification. While most people might be familiar with the group from their godly self-titled debut and after, Black Dots collects early material recorded at the then fledgling Inner Ear Studios from a session in 1979. The studio at that point was in owner/engineer Don Zientara's basement, with band members situated inside while H.R. did his thing in the backyard. It's easy to imagine how cramped things were, but between song banter reveals a band in good spirits as they tear the living fuck out of their early material. Bad Brains in '79 weren't as fast, distorted, and manic as they would become, but the chemistry is still totally unbelievable, sounding both loose and ridiculously tight at the same time. And even with modest recording gear the band sounds HUGE. This looser style works particularly well for their reggae numbers, always a point of contention with many fans. These recordings almost sound like some hyper charged group from the 60s taking things into new worlds. Not many bands could sound this bad ass while also sounding like they are having the most fun ever - but I guess if you wrote songs like "Pay To Cum", "Regulator", "Banned In D.C.", "Attitude" and everything else here, you'd also be having the best time ever. Loads of personality with this band (check out H.R.'s hilarious kiss off of "Bye, Celeste" at the end of "Red Bone In The City", their reworking of "God Save The Queen"), it's completely easy to see why they were such a force to be reckoned with. They were just different. Better. And again, completely bad ass. There's almost no point in going on with this review, sure you'll have some people who prefer what Bad Brians became, but others will tell you that music kind of doesn't get any better than this, stripped to its bare form. Whatever the case, it all leads to the same recommendation: ESSENTIAL.
Super limited cassette of "retro futuristic dunestep" from aQ pal JD Short, aka Bassdblr, who made these tapes exclusive for aQuarius, limited to just 100 copies, and if you're not a sucker for experimental dubstep, and/or a sucker for DUNE themed electronica, there must be something really wrong with you. A bass player by trade, Short infuses his particular brand of dubbed out beat heavy stutter with REAL bass, so the sound is thick, and buzzy, a little proggy, and in its own way sort of heavy. The sound looped and hypnotic, cyclical and a bit tranced out. But then it's hard to pin down cuz the sound is all over the place.
Opener "Atrocity Arms The Future" is some seriously bass heavy dubstep electro prog ambience, sounding like a dubbed out soundtrack to some creepy eighties sci-fi epic, all looped beats, woozy distorted bass, and electronic pulses that give the sound a teensy bit of a Carpenter vibe. And that live bass also give it a sort of post rock feel too, but the beat is most definitely dubsteppy. "IX" is almost like Pinback crossed with Squarepusher scoring some zombie flick, all dark and tense and low slung and ominous, warm fluid basslines wrapped around a pulsing electronic rhythm, while "Long Live The Fighters" sounds like it could have come out on Not Not Fun, a fuzzy, percolating bit of retro electronica that is like a more progged out caffeinated version of the current crop of Goblin/Carpenter worship. "The Scattering" takes thick sludgey bass and wreathes it in fluttery flute like melodies, and crunchy electronic glitch for something swirly and almost psychedelic sounding, Bassdblr's dirgey basslines lending it some un-electronica sounding heft.
And so it goes, from stripped down, loping-bass-lined cinematic creep, to gristly, super distorted electro-buzz, from blissed out skittery / prismatic kosmische electronica, to old school VHS synth-funk, to grinding glitchy dirge dub stutter, to super melodic lilting electronic buzzpop, and from proggy, glitchy retro-futuristic electro ambience, to finally, a a last blast, a more distorted take on the opening dubsteppy jam, all anchored by Short's heavy cyclical dark-prog Dune-driven bass. Super rad stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Available only at aQ, includes a download coupon as well!!
This long time aQ favorite, finally back in stock!
Another solo outing from a member of the mighty Lungfish, and another disc of looped repetitive transcendental mesmer. First Daniel Higgs, then Asa Osborne's Zomes, and now Nathan Bell, how these guys ever put together an actual ROCK band we'll never know, we'll blame it on the drummer for now, at least until he comes out with some insane raga drone solo record, then we just give up.
It makes sense though as Lungfish songs weren't like normal songs, they were like minimal loops writ large, expanded into hypnotic epics, the band locked into an incredible groove, while Higgs does his thing over the top. But it becomes more and more apparent, that all the various members of Lungfish had a thing for minimalism, for drones, ragas, for repetition, and thus we have Nathan Bell's @2640. Recorded in a massive crumbling old cathedral, plugged into a blown out amplifier, these four tracks, while played on the banjo, don't sound country, or bluegrass, or even remotely twangy, in fact they don't really sound like they were played on a banjo. The notes have a sharp attack and a quick decay, but the massive space helps them stay afloat a bit longer than normal, Bell's arrangements and compositions offering nods to Reich and Riley, the pieces nearly static, a simple melody wound up within the endless repetition. So simple and gorgeous and absolutely mesmerizing. If you dug the Higgs solo records and the Zomes, you pretty much need this too.
Limited cd-r, in a hand screened fold over cardstock sleeve with a printed insert. And of course, as always LIMITED!
Ok, so they're called Blasted Canyons, the record is on John Dwyer's (Thee Oh Sees) Castle Face records, and has eye popping rainbow lazer psychedelic-smash cover art (courtesy Castle Face art dude William Keihn), one member of Blasted Canyons also does time in garage pop masters Bare Wires, so we were pretty much already sold, but then we threw it on, and well, we were definitely expecting some cool kick ass garage rock, but were totally unprepared for the tripped out psychedelic garage-prog synth-punk space-pop radness these guys and gal kick out.
The first track, awesomely titled "The Artist Formerly Known As Satan", should pretty much seal the deal, huge bombastic crashing distorted chords, almost metal sounding, but more like a fuzzy space rock dirge, swirling effects-drenched boy girl vocal harmonies that turn it it into some sort of twisted pop, pounding drums, druggy and dreamy, but heavy and fuzzy and catchy as hell, and when the track shifts gears, and they launch into some buzzy distorto garage pop crunch, with echo-y vocals, and woozy sweetly melodic background vox, not to mention some wicked melodic hooks, it's a total head banging hip swinging sonic bliss out, and then bam, it's right into that strangely epic and bombastic garage pop dirge which leads to one final buzzy blast. Might just be our jam of the year so far. Fuzzed out swaggery lowslung Stooges-y stomp fused to power pop jangle and lo-fi space-synth-prog, so good we can barely bring ourselves to listen to the rest of the record, but once we did...
The second track, "Blood On The Wall" is a synth driven chunk of angular garage-y new wave crunch, with a killer chorus, the howled distorto female vox and buzzing synth definitely reminding us of Black Bug, while "Consider Drowning" is a primo slab of surfy garage groove, with the vocals all deep and echoey reminding us of Crystal Stilts, but the chugging murky guitars, swirling spacey synth and pounding drums transforming it into something way more tripped out and primal. And so it goes, the whole record a wild ride through Oh Sees style sweat-soaked distorto-garage jangle pop, tripped out murkscapes of pulsing crumbling synths and pitch shifted vox, fuzzy classic post punk power pop laced with hazy oooh's and aaah's, noisy sci-fi-synth-wreathed punky pound, dirgey 4-tracked rhythmic experiments, wild, reverbed, feedback soaked girl group noise pop groove, twisted angular synth driven new wave, and finally finishing off with another bit of sonic weirdness, a perfect bookend for that opening blast of garage prog bombast, a swirling, dirgey, lysergic FX heavy synthswirl outro. So goddamn good. Record Of The Week for sure, but we're thinking maybe Record Of The Year too...!
Vinyl-only for now, here's hoping they'll also press up some cds soon as well...
Hot on the heels of last week's listing of the new double cd release on tUMULt from Bay Area hypersonic one man black metal band Mastery, comes something even stranger. Yet another mysterious one man black metal horde (and another double disc), rising from the fertile SFBM underground. The scene that gave us Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain, Pale Chalice, Sutekh Hexen, Dead As Dreams, Dispirit, Horn Of Dagoth, Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, Amocoma, Elk, Necrite, Palace Of Worms, and more, has now spawned the oddly monikered Botanist, an odd moniker only until you realize that all the songs here are about plants and flowers, and all of the artwork following suit, old faded images of strange and wondrous flora and fauna, but that's not nearly the strangest thing about Botanist. Nope, the strangest thing would be the fact that there are NO guitars, and there is NO bass, just drums, vocals, and HAMMERED DULCIMER. That's right, eerie and esoteric, buzzing and baffling, drum and dulcimer driven black eco-terrorist black metal. And as strange as that may sound, the SOUND is even stranger, the dulcimer a particularly haunting and strangely melodic instrument, the typical black metal riffs replaced by maniacal dulcimer melodies, repeated motifs, flurries of cyclical notes, the sound buzzy and brutal in it's own way, with an almost old-timey feel to the sound, the drums mathy and intricate, often sounding strangely like a demonic drumline, the vocals a hellish raspy croak, but it's the dulcimer that drives the sound of Botanist, a distinctive metallic buzz that's eerily creepy and darkly cinematic, with many of these tracks sounding like they could be some alternate soundtrack for a lost seventies giallo or some super surreal art film.
The tracks are mostly short sharp blasts of metallic buzz, the dulcimer alternatingly offering up dense overtone-rich clouds of frenzied tangled melody, but just as often, unfurling stretches of haunting atonal shimmer, occasionally spacing way out, and weaving sprawling dreadscapes of minor key tension and slow build terror, the sound of the dulcimer so strange, sometimes evoking old pianos in ghost town saloons, other times impossibly melodic, with the songs on the verge of pure poppiness, or as poppy as something as twisted and confusional like this can be. The sound of Botanist is definitely black metal, in form, in structure, in intent, in spirit, even to a degree in sound, but it's also something wholly other, the relation between the rhythms and the melodic component of the dulcimer's haunting buzz and chiming metallic tone hard to quantify, and obviously even harder to accurately describe, then there's the dulcimer's traditional station as a folky Appalachian instrument, it all adds to the crazy, confusional appeal of Botanist's warped sonic world, one that manages to be both heavy and buzzy and blackened, but also haunting and hypnotic and strangely soundtracky, a swirling, hazy, chaotic sound, densely melodic, relentlessly rhythmic, fantastically fucked up and bafflingly brilliant.
The discs are housed in super swank full color mini-lp gatefold style Stoughton jackets, with a thick booklet of lyrics, the jacket and booklet both printed to look like an antique botanist's field journal. ENTER THE VERDANT REALM!!
It may seem like we've been dragging this out, as ALL the first four '70s albums by pioneering Japanese heavy metal popsters Bow Wow were reissued at the same time over a year ago, but we've just been reviewing 'em one at a time every few months it seems. Well that avoids Bow Wow overkill, right? As it happens, a lot of folks already bought all four together from us after we listed the first, but we still figure we should get around to reviewing 'em all individually. 'Cause we totally dig Bow Wow. Ripping, energetic hard rock action, from a young Japanese band that brought together psychedelic proto-metal (with a big Hendrix influence), glammy bubblegum pop elements (The Sweet must have been another inspiration), and a burgeoning heaviness that matched what was starting to happen in England and America, to forge some fun, frenzied boogie-metal with its own quirky charm, that on Charge also definitely expanded into bombastic, balladic power pomp rock territory, as on album-ender "Behind The Mask".
Once again, this disc is supercharged with the guitar heroics of shredder Kyoji Yamamoto, who solos most impressively, wailing away on such tracks as "Must Say 'Adieu'" like he's the Japanese counterpart to Uli Jon Roth of the Scorpions (another big Hendrix fan, and probably himself an influence on Yamamoto too). Melody is another strong aspect here, they even offer up a gentle acoustic ballad in "Fallen Leaves". But don't worry about 'em wimping out, that track is in fact followed by a song simply titled "Heavy"! And it is, in a lumbering yet soaring kind of way.
Charge originally came out in 1977, it was Bow Wow's third album, following the self-titled debut from '76 and Signal Fire from earlier in '77 (both previously reviewed by us). Like the others reissued by Rock Candy, it's been remastered and comes packaged with new liner notes in the cd booklet. Next up: 1978's Super Live...
Now reissued on vinyl...
Eponymous debut and only ever release from this soul jazz outfit circa 1970, reissued now probably primarily because of the unmistakable presence of avant-jazz electric guitar legend Sonny Sharrock on six of the album's seven tracks. Definitely for Sharrock fans who've got a taste for some groove and soul (this ain't Last Exit!). Sharrock's spidery skronk sneaks out betwixt the sunshiney day horns and positive vibe vocals on this freely funky platter. But if the name Sonny Sharrock doesn't mean anything to you and you'd like to rectify that, we'd recommend checking out his 1991 classic Ask The Ages (sadly out of print at the moment), or perhaps his 1966 debut on Pharaoh Sanders' Tauhid album.
Long, long awaited vinyl reissue of this legendary 1973 lp, featuring American jazz trumpeter/composer Don Cherry and Polish avant garde composer Krzyztof Penderecki. Awesome mix of wild free jazz and 20th century classical, with wildly shrieking saxes and trumpets, bizarre chanted/sung vocals, both male and female, cool catchy almost bop-ish breakdowns, bizarre vocalisations, breathing and wheezing and whistles, recorded live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in Germany on October 17, 1971. 3 tracks, 2 by Cherry, one by Penderecki.
We especially dig the second track wherein the audience was instructed to clap the rhythms to a droning sitar/vocal piece (with the crowd failing miserably in the beginning and laughing, embarrassed). The final track is the legendary "Actions for Free Jazz Orchestra" written & conducted by Penderecki and including such European free music faves of ours as Peter Brotzmann, Han Bennik and a bunch of others. The sound is dark and sparse, with bursts of straight up jazz rhythms punctuating the sinister soundscapes, as well as plenty of improvised noodling, especially some truly inspired freakout drumming and some beautifully haunting trumpet parts, which all coalesce into a completely riveting 16 minute masterpiece of 20th century-avant-free-classical-jazz. Or something like that.
THREE, count 'em, three new releases from Utech Records on this week's list, all of them collaborations, this one here with a sonically Southwestern focus, teaming up New Mexican soundscaper William Fowler Collins with Arizona blackdronedirgedoom outfit Gog (both big AQ faves), for some sprawling, smoldering epic black expanses of slow building glacial dirgery and blurred blacknoisedrift. Three epic jams, separated by brief sonic explorations, the longform compositions find Collins and Gog conjuring up swirling black rituals, of hazy rumble and softly churning low end thrum, the sound growing subtly more crunchy and caustic, gradually transforming from hushed ominous shimmer to thick, heaving, roiling heaviness, crumbling avalanches of smeared soft noise, wreathed in strange high end shimmers and shot through with convulsing layers and buried melodies.
"Abandonment" is a creepy bit of subterranean murk, driven by a haunting heartbeat like pulse, the swirling surrounding sounds becoming more and more active, those sounds in turn wreathed in a staticky hiss, building to a swirling psychedelic squall of blurred feedback, keening high end and dense spirals of heavy hiss, before gradually fading back out to a whisper, all the whole, that strange pulse giving the black hissy drift some glacial propulsion. The final track, a massive nearly 18 minute stunner titled "Of Ash And Wind ", begins again, with some distant rumblings, some foghorn like melodies, some groaning and creaking, and deep dark rumbles, but unlike the other three tracks, this one is not a slow build, instead, the sounds ooze and drift and congeal into a creepy pitch black bit of cinematic stasis, definitely headphones required on this one, a softly churning stretch of slow motion shimmer, a deep blackened crawl, laced with strange bits of static and industrial crunch, but those sounds so minimal that minus headphones they just bleed into the surrounding blackness.
Gorgeous stuff. A heady bit of ultra minimal ritualistic black noise / dark ambience that will sound right at home alongside the rest of your ever expanding Utech collection...
Fantastic packaging as always, this time a super intense/beautiful cover image by photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg.
"Live reunion album" aren't three words (in sequence) that we normally get too excited about. But when the band is the legendary British pagan acid folk rock act Comus, who are responsible for having made one of our very favorite albums of ALL TIME (their 1971 debut on Dawn, First Utterance), one that Andee here in fact ranks as his absolute favorite record ever, well, that's another story.
With their cult following growing and growing over the years (with big fans like Opeth and Current 93 helping to keep their name out there), Comus finally reunited to play the Melloboat Festival in Sweden in 2008, and at the time we seriously considered buying plane tickets to fly over and attend. They've done some more gigging since, and Allan was in fact lucky enough to get to see 'em at last year's Roadburn festival. He can attest to them being pretty darn incredible, it's hard to imagine that their younger selves could have done much better of a job, though they might have looked the part of pixies and freaks a bit more - not everyone in the band still has long hair these days, though some of 'em do, and actually their female singer Bobbie Watson looked like she practically hadn't aged at all, still a bewitching blonde beauty, with a lovely lovely voice... and they really, really were enjoying themselves. As they obviously were at this historic Melloboat gig as well, and sounding fantastic especially considering it was the first time they'd played together in 34 years!!!
We've heard a bit of this recording already, the song "Diana" from their Melloboat performance appeared on a limited edition split 7" we listed a while back, and we noted that it sounded perhaps "even more woozy and carnivalesque and maniacal than they did back in the day". They definitely nailed it, maybe it's some pagan magic, 'cause remember, Comus is the ancient god of revelry, and he wasn't gonna let anybody on that boat down.
While it's not the same as having actually been there, of course, we figure some diehard Comus fans are gonna be curious to hear this. Especially since it includes, in addition to renditions of five of the seven songs from their debut, a cover of "Venus In Furs" by the Velvet Underground! A song we guess they also did back the '70s, the VU being an influence on them that we wouldn't have considered, but it totally fits, creepy and catchy, with sawing violin, sounding like something that they could have written themselves for inclusion on First Utterance.
The full tracklist: "Song To Comus", "Diana", "The Herald", "Drip Drip", "The Prisoner", "Venus In Furs", "Song To Comus (encore)". That's right, they did "Song To Comus" twice, but omitted two other songs from First Utterance, "The Bite" and "Bitten", oh well. At least they didn't do a bunch of stuff from their not-so-critically-acclaimed second album... You can decide for yourself if you want to hear this, or just stick with the mystical original, some folks (including some of us) may prefer to leave live Comus to the incomparable realm of our own imaginations, where they have long dwelt...
Released on a new imprint co-run by C93's David Tibet, this cd includes photos, lyrics and liner notes in the booklet.
As anyone with even a passing interest in the catalogue of Current 93 can attest, David Tibet's visionary poetry has always been a central facet to his work. The lyrics have gradually become more and more enmeshed into his deeper personal studies into the mythologies surrounding the Christian apocalypse, the various heresies involving Gnosticism and Patipatrianism, the texts of Crowley and other practitioners of the dark arts, and more recently, the ancient texts of Coptic Christians. The resulting imagery has become all the more convoluted beyond the pitting of Christ and Satan in existential conflict over the fate of the world. A brief bit of marketing states Honeysuckle Aeons to be "dreams of the crucifixion with Christ and two thieves ascending" and, we'll have to take Tibet at his word that all of his lyrical content is in someway revolving around this concept. Musically, Honeysuckle Aeons is a typically solemn affair, with the arrangements hedging towards the sparse end of the C93 spectrum (especially Soft Black Stars). The use of Theremin throughout the album is a novel one, interlocked with the delicate Satie-like notes on the piano from Baby Dee. We have to admit being much more partial to the heavier, darker, and / or more psychedelic incarnations of the C93 sound (e.g. Dogs Blood Rising, Thunder Perfect Mind, Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain, etc.), but here the Theremin-laced arrangements put all of the focus on Tibet's esoteric word (which is often "honeysuckle", he says that a lot here) and thought.
What happens when a middle aged, extreme noise musician suddenly gets all voodoo "drum circle" on us? Cut Hands is what happens. Ethno-forgery, not exactly, ethno-freakery more like it!
Let's say this up front, so there's no confusion: this Cut Hands disc is bloody awesome, and nobody here at AQ (except maybe Jim) is all that big of a Whitehouse fan, either. We mention that 'cause Cut Hands is the new project by William Bennett, the perverse genius (?) behind infamous '80s industrial noise terrorists Whitehouse, who are up there with Merzbow in the noise that annoys pantheon. We appreciate the extremity of Whitehouse, sure, but unlike Merzbow, never really enjoyed listening to 'em all that much (maybe that's the point). As a result, we really weren't aware of the extent to which, in recent years, William Bennett had been getting into this so-called "Afro Noise" bag of his, with some of his more recent Whitehouse albums (like 2003's Bird Seed, which contained a track called "Cut Hands Has The Solution") incorporating the use, and probably abuse, of authentic ethnic Central African instruments.
Although, we do remember when, in 1997, Bennett's label Susan Lawly put out an amazing compilation, now long out of print, called Extreme Music From Africa, that we totally loved. It featured a bunch of mysterious artists like Rorogwela, Vicious Teengirl, Electricity Featuring Fire Eater, and National Bird, that we'd never heard of before or since, doing tracks that somehow combined what sounded like genuine African tribal music with Whitehouse style noise... and was really quite listenable, too! We always half-suspected it might not have been on the up and up, that the bands weren't really from Africa, and were instead the work of Mr. Bennett and friends, and we'd still like it just as much anyway... Cut Hands certainly makes us further assume that might be the case, since our description of the sort of sounds found on Extreme Music From Africa would also describe this Cut Hands disc quite well: "Chanting and hand drums are buried in washes of hiss and white noise. Merzbow style blasts of crunchy feedback dissolve into tribal rhythms and explode again into shards of jagged buzz. Intense and aggressive and totally great."
In any event, Cut Hands is the next logical step in Bennett's "Afro Noise" obsession. While there is of course an electronic noise component to this, it almost takes a backseat to the rhythmic, almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion. Bennett has apparently amassed quite a large collection of Congolese and Ghanaian percussion instruments, and he puts 'em to use here, 13 varied tracks of primal, polyrhythmic, electro-acoustic pulsations. Djembes and doundouns played with jackhammer precision, mixed with washes and waves of hiss and drone. Some tracks attack with feedback, others are more quietly sinister and even shimmeringly atmospheric. There's one track with vocals, declaiming something in what sounds like an African language, amidst divebombing distortion and shuddering glitch, while the rest are purely instrumental. And all it is frighteningly trance-inducing. It's kind of insane, kind of incredible. We like, a lot.
Deafheaven are a new band from right here in the Bay Area, who have been causing quite a stir lately in the metal underground, their soaring epic, super melodic black metal dividing the grim hordes right down the middle. Obviously, purists don't consider this to be black metal at all, which in some ways is fair, just listen to the opening 4 minutes of record opener "Violet", there's not a trace of blackness to be found, instead, you'll here Explosions In The Sky, Godspeed, Mogwai, majestic, bombastic, melodic, gorgeously lush and expansive. But then wait a few more seconds... and BAM, the band EXPLODE in a frenzy of buzzing and pounding blackend crush, rife with howled vokills, gnarled riffage, and there's no doubt that this is black metal, but not Immortal / Mayhem / Darkthrone black metal, no, it's more in line with the more melodic end of the BM spectrum, think Alcest, Fell Voices, Fauna, Wolves In The Throne Room, Deafheaven definitely have that Cascadian BM vibe going on too, but all of their blackness and buzz is most definitely tempered with heaping helpings of melody. Even at its most frenzied, Deafheaven essentially sound like Mogwai or EITS supercharged and metallized, it's still soaring and epic and majestic, just wrapped in thick swirling sheets of black metal buzz, and hell, it sounds pretty goddamn amazing.
The production is lush, the sound MASSIVE, the guitars thick and distorted, except when they're ringing out all clear and chiming, the arrangements are pretty expansive and epic too, blasting buzz giving way to droned out drift, which in turn gives way to another blast of furious melodic blackness.
Just four tracks, but they're all long, lots of parts, all moody and melodic, a dizzying hybrid of black metal, screamo and post rock, reminds us a little of a WAY more metal version of recent Record Of The Week-ers Pianos Become The Teeth, but where that band melded old school screamo to epic post rock, Deafheaven do the same with buzzing melodic black metal, the result, while perhaps not grim enough for some, is pretty tough to resist. And while we love how the songs shift from slow build brood to black blast, and back again, the real magic of Deafheaven is how they combine the two, taking churning buzzing blackness and laying some soaring coruscating shoegazey guitar chords over the top, or winding majestic, chiming, impossibly melancholic clean guitar melodies and lush textures into howling vokills and grinding black riffage, and while in battles between good and evil, we usually bet black, in this case, melody always seems to prevail, transforming what could have been just another chunk of blasting buzz into something gorgeous and transcendental.
Wow, what a change of direction for this long underrated electronic music maker. While past outings by Diskjokke were great examples of left-field beat driven techno, this outing finds Diskjokke exploring totally different territory. Commissioned by Norway's Oye's Festival, he packed his bags and headed to Indonesia to collaborate with Gamalan musicians and make not only the most ambitious record of his career, but his most satisfying and rewarding.
It would have been more expected and easy for Diskjokke to use the more rhythmic and percussive elements of Gamelan to make electro-dance-gamelan jams. But he didn't go the expected route, instead he flipped his entire music making past upside down, trading beats for drones and dance floors for bliss out sessions. There is a patience, subtly and warmth in these sounds that has made it one of our favorite languid explorations of the year. Such an awesome surprise!
In case you missed it on our mystery themed in-between list last week, something we reviewed just for that, for the first time...
Another one of our all time favorite bands who never made it on the aQ list, mostly due to the fact that all of the group's records, and in fact, their whole career (not counting the reunion), predated the modern incarnation of the New Arrivals List. We really wanted to include them on this week's list, for the obvious reason (obvious if you've sussed out the theme of this week's list, that is), but really we were basically itching for an excuse to gush like crazy over these indie pop legends.
Hailing from the same Canadian province that brought us other indie rock luminaries such as Sloan, Hardship Post, Jale, and lots of others, Eric's Trip were the very first Canadian band to sign to Sub Pop (who ended up popularizing the ensuing Nova Scotian pop rush, as it were), releasing just three full lengths before calling it a day. Love Tara, was their first, originally released in 1993, and is a glorious, ramshackle collection of perfect lo-fi fuzzy indie pop, like some delirious mix of the mopey sad boy 4-trackery of Sebadoh, the fuzzed out crunch of Dinosaur Jr, and of course the lush noisiness of the band who gave them their name, these guys and gal were absolute pop geniuses, even the most fragmented/abstract tracks here will get lodged in your head like crazy, and when they do let loose, they can definitely rock with the best of them. Hushed acoustic bedroom ballads, buzzy psychedelic indie rock blowouts, the production sweetly off kilter and home brewed, the bass lines fat and fuzzy, the guitars thick and gorgeously corrosive, the boy vocals, courtesy of Rick White and Chris Thompson (now of The Memories Attack, whose most recent record was released on Andee's tUMULt label), are earnest and heartfelt, that perfect plaintive sadboy croon, perfectly balanced by the sweet angelic voice of Julie Dorion, whose solo records we HAVE raved about on the aQ list, all in the service of some of THEE catchiest songs EVER. Alternatingly hushed and dreamy, heavy and hazy, even nearly two decades later, this record, and this band, put most other pop music to shame. So absolutely recommended, one of those rare records that we find ourselves listening to all the time, and have since we were in our twenties. Glad it's still in print. SO GREAT!!!
The wonderful flood of Japanese '70s psych rock reissues continues, something those folks who have yet to hear these previously hard-to-find gems (many "popularized" by megafan Julian Cope in his Japrocksampler book) can be quite glad of. The item under consideration here, a compact disc reissue of the final, 1977 release by hippie space travellers Far East Family Band, is another nifty one, though we'd probably recommend the other, earlier FEFB albums before this if you don't have those already. Fans looking to complete their collections, though, won't be disappointed - even though by this point keyboardist Kitaro had left the family / band (for eventual New Age stardom), on Tenkujin FEFB were still quite potent at making tripped out, synth-laden, New Age friendly psych. In other words still the kind of band where the same guy credited with operating a pile of synthesizers (Teisco 100F, Hillwood SY 1800, Combo, Basky, Rockyboard, Korg 700S, Mellotron, Yamaha, Solina String Ensemble) also plays the bamboo flute. And then there's all the guitars and other things as well that are part of their big wash of psychedelic sound.
The title track, with a driving, almost disco beat, and echoey, dubby FX, would fit in with a lot of late '70s kosmic krautrock, the Ashra, Michael Rother sort of stuff, heck it sound a bit like some bands today too, we're thinking Jonas Reinhardt and Maserati. Lots of burbling electronics and shimmering synth over propulsive percussion. FEFB's usual Pink Floydisms certainly come to the fore too, on the blissful, balladic likes of "Timeless Phase" and elsewhere... Make that blissful AND bombastic, the latter especially on the album-ending instrumental "Ascension".
Numbered, limited edition reissue in the usual Phoenix wallet sleeve.
Damn, the Numero Group does it again! At this point we don't need to go on about what an amazing and trusted label NG is. As their Eccentric Soul, Cult Cargo, and Wayfaring Stranger series continue to offer up so much amazing music that might otherwise have gone unheard.
Gathering dust in some garage for the last three decades due to the worst side of the music industry, this deep hitting, politically charged soul record finally gets to see the light of day. Father's Children were from the nations capitol, and took the influence of groups like the Stylistics, the Delfonics and the Dramatics and doused those sounds with fiery social consciousness and a slow burning psychedelic undertone. Like early Earth Wind & Fire, crossed with Curtis Mayfield's less funk and more full on deep soul moments. It's a record that really encompasses the most lasting and satisfying sides of '70s soul. The kind of record you can imagine inspiring folks like Erykah Badu, The Roots, Common, and Lauryn Hill.
As always packed with endless love and care featuring amazing photos and the story of the group's history.
Hey, all right! This British band is back, at long last, with their 2nd album, and once again sound like a blast from the past (the past circa 1972 or so) even though they're from this day and age. We're almost sorta surprised they're not from Sweden, usually it's Swedish bands like Witchcraft, Graveyard, Horisont, and Noctum who do the bellbottomed retro-rawkin' thing this damn well, but heck the bands Gentlemans Pistols most sound like - Sabbath and Zeppelin - were from England, so it's in their blood after all. We wuz big fans of their self-titled debut a few years back, and are damn happy to hear 'em kicking out the jams once more, this time with new axe slinger the one and only Bill Steer (Carcass, Napalm Death, Firebird) on board, GP's upping the ante on all others in the realm of '70s styled stoner rock with their wailing vox, crunchy fuzz guitar riffage, and hard to beat bouncy energy. They're delivering the goods here, is what we're sayin'. A dozen new songs, all catchy and heavy and authentically '70s proto-metal sounding, they could hold their own with Pentagram and Hard Stuff and Leaf Hound and Highway Robbery, etc.... and they've got a sweaty muscularity to 'em that makes 'em more of a powerful proposition than just some kind of imitation or approximation. They're real, and rockin'. A ripping good time. Another one of those bands, in our view, that should be HUGE, and would be if we ran the rock n' roll world! F'ing recommended.
This is only the second full length (we know of) from UK space rock psych drone collective Gnod, besides the recent cd-r/cassette The Crystal Pagoda we listed a while back. Most everything else we know about these guys comes from the various split and collaborative releases that came before. And that was all we really need to know, their list of collaborators reads like WE selected 'em: Bong, White Hills, Robedoor, that should be enough to give you an idea of where Gnod are coming from. But they definitely have their own twisted take on spaced out psychedelia, as is further evidenced here, on this two track lp. The first, a 20 minute epic titled "Tony's First Communion" opens with what sounds like a collision of zithers (band name?), which quickly gives way to a woozy low slung bass pulse, wreathed in distant chantlike vocals, and then in come the drums, and some swirling buzz, some croaking frogs (?), space-y FX, and the band are locked into a gorgeous head nodding hypno krautspace dirge, motorik and mesmerizing, the beat and the bassline stay solid, an anchor holding down all the chaos that surrounds them, lush tangled layers, buzz and fuzz and swirl and shimmer, creepy processed vocals, dubbed out effects, until a sudden break where the drums drop out, and howled vocals wrapped in distorted guitars swoop in, and remain as the groove restarts, adding to the tripped out weirdness. And so it goes, for 20 minutes, that main motorik spacekraut groove plodding relentlessly though a sky full of squeals and streaks, shards and squiggles, voices and instruments, samples and field recordings, all hurled heavenward and left to spin weightless in Gnod's orbit, adding all manner of twisted texture and melodic color to the already druggy and dreamy and supremely tranced out proceedings.
The shorter flipside, only 13 minutes, titled "Vatican" begins with big super distorted drums, that quickly drop out, leaving just swirling drones and muted electronics, reverbed voice transmissions and lush organ shimmer, until the drums drop again, big and blown out, reminding us a bit of a less manic Shit And Shine or Butthole Surfers, a tribal pound wreathed in glitch and hiss, a slo-mo spacerock dubstep, again the group locking tight into a groove, and letting it run out, while pelting it from all sides with thick jags of blackened buzz, or bleary streaks of Technicolor melody, twisted effects, shards of hiss and whir and hum, the voices even more reverbed and tripped out, but about halfway through, the song shifts to half time, and the sound becomes distinctly doomy, a space rock effects drenched dirge, the beat a caveman pound, the various sounds growing more and more intense, building to a gloriously glitched out, lumbering blown out space psych squall, the beat a lurching half time creep, the song plodding darkly until it finally crumbles and grinds to a halt.
So awesome. Fans of The Heads, White Hills, Shit And Shine, Bong, Carlton Melton, Robedoor, Teeth Of The Sea and all things rhythmic and psychedelic, krautrocky and spaced out, the line forms HERE.
Slumberland are certainly making up for lost time. This iconic pop label seemed to disappear for a while there a few years back, but since they reemerged, a month hasn't gone by without a new record by some new band (or an old favorite), and if it was any other label, we might be wondering "where the heck do they find these bands" but this is Slumberland, whose track record for discovering bands is pretty much totally untouchable. SO thus we have Gold-Bears, the latest new band on Slumberland, and we're digging it big time. Big jangly, distortion drenched noise pop, the label mentions Boyracer (one of our all time favorite pop bands who for some reason have never made it onto the aQ list) and the Wedding Present, both of which definitely fit, as do some of the other Slumberland bands like Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Summer Cats, but hell, there are bits of Neutral Milk Hotel and other Elephant Six bands going on here and there. Gold-Bears' pop is rife with angelic female background vox, lots of 'la la la's and 'ooooooh's, horns and unlikely instrumentation, strange production, the sound slipping from murky punky and lo-fi, to big bombastic to jangly and shimmery, the record oozing hooks, none so much as the opener, a summer jam if there ever was one, plus it's called "Record Store", noisy, jangly, catchy as heck, super dynamic, crazy melodic, a total mixtape track for sure. And like all great records, Are You Falling In Love? is full of those sorts of tracks, the whole thing immediately catchy, but the sort of record where every song has the potential to be your favorite, and if you listen enough, they eventually all will be. So good.
Oh Googoosh! We were pretty thrilled when this came in as we've been anticipating a collection of her recordings ever since many of us first heard her mind blowing track "Talagh" on that great Pomegranates compilation of Persian pop, psych, and funk from the '60s and '70s. Luckily, Iranian singer Googoosh was no one hit wonder, as this collection shows that pretty much every song she made during this era (1970-'75) is totally awe-inspiring. Like the perfect cross between the explosive psychedelia of Selda and the introspective folk of Pari Zangeneh. Her voice reels you in and the music's alluring and dynamic swirling melodies leave you in the throes of serious sonic pleasure.
Much like Turkey's Selda, Googoosh's music had such a brave and fiery political stance to it as well. Sadly much of her music was banned by the Iranian government by the end of the 1970s, and many of her records were literally burned and destroyed. Luckily, from what copies did remain, Andy Votel worked his Finders Keepers magic and has compiled an amazing collection of one of the greatest voices to come out of Iran (and anywhere else for that matter)!
It's been a while since anything from The Hafler Trio has come through our doors. So long in fact, we probably need to revisit the complex history into the Trio's work. There was never a time when The Hafler Trio was an actual trio, although the group's founders Andrew McKenzie and Chris Watson (then of Cabaret Voltaire fame and now the world's preeminent field recordist) had constructed the identity of a third member Dr. Edward Moolenbeek back in the early '80s. This Moolenbeek character was supposedly interested in the physical and psychological effects of sound upon the human populace, with an emphasis on presenting sound as an obfuscated means of communication through his research to the point of gnostic cryptography. Throughout the career of the Hafler Trio, a steady stream of interlocking and heavily encrypted set of allusions and allegories were conjured and manifested, but then all but disappeared from the public realm. Now, McKenzie (the sole pilot of the project for many years now) is offering his music solely as individual commissions to collectors who can pay a premium for his work.
Fortunately, Korm Plastics had reissued a good chunk of his back catalogue including the Hafler Trio's brilliant sound collage experiments Kill The King and Mastery Of Money. The Name Of Someone stands as the last in Korm Plastics reissue series, collecting three records that had been very difficult to find --Brainsong (1986, originally an lp on Touch), Kuklos (1988, also released through Touch), and (Antarctica) Brahma (1996, which was the accompaniment to a book whose contents are suitably elusive). We'll not belabor the conceptual agendas to each of these works, but the sounds are wholly compelling and well worth investigating. Brainsong is an oblique collage that begins with an overlapping of water field recordings sloshing against undulating drones, that are consumed within a caustic synth pattern that is sterile and bleak. Through a series of jump-cut edits, additions, and subtractions (a technique which is a signature of The Hafler Trio's work in the '80s), McKenzie offers a slow descent of tonebent drones seemingly built from the sustained wails of a female choir rendered as disjointed ghosts of a Cornelius Cardew piece of minimalism. Antarctica finds Hafler Trio in his long form compositional style of the late '90s and early '00s, structured from heavily layered filters and alien frequencies shot from other dimensions and / or other parts of the universe. One could think of Thomas Koner as someone operating in a similar field of desolate sound design and impeccable production techniques. Kuklos was also a soundtrack to a film about the graphic designer Neville Brody, and is a smear of thick grey drones and ghostly residues. It's hardly an 'ambient' record, but Kuklos is far less of the shapeshifting collage work that McKenzie had been producing around that time. All of his work comes highly recommended, even as it can be a difficult to get into... perhaps because it can be difficult to get into.
Unfortunately, McKenzie does not allow anyone to post sound samples of his work, so you'll have to take our word on it: this is brilliant.
We never really got that into Handsome Furs before, a husband and wife duo, who are now on record number three, we did review a record of theirs WAY back, and described them as sounding like Bright Eyes meets U2, which is definitely difficult to understand in the light of this new one. We almost didn't even give it a chance, considering our disinterest in past HF outings, but holy shit are we glad we did. This new one is all dark and electronic and gloomy, a sort of gothic synth wave or something, just check out "Damage", the perfect mix of retro eighties synth sounds, and new sort of post punk gloom, swaggery and low slung, tense and dramatic and minor key, the sort of thing that a band like Interpol would kill for, although here it sounds like Interpol crossed with some lost eighties VHS soundtrack.
And while that's THEE jam here, and well worth the price of admission on its own, there's plenty to love here, the loping new wave swagger of "Memories Of The Future", with it's pulsing synths and Depeche Mode like melodies, "Bury Me Standing" is a total eighties throwback, classic MTV style electro synth pop, but the vocals, a dead ringer for Woven Hand's David Eugene Edwards, gives the song (and all the songs here) an extra gravitas that most synth pop is missing. "Cheap Music" is the punkest of the bunch, with it's buzzing guitar, and propulsive big beat, and the record closes with the 7 minute "No Feelings" which is the perfect hybrid of eighties synth pop, and noisy post punk gloom, thick squalls of corrosive guitars dotting an otherwise new wavey groove. We'd dig even deeper, but we just can't seem to stop listening to "Damage"...
Some of the coolest packaging we've seen in a while, a full color gatefold digipak, with naked lady posing beneath an overpass on the front, while inside, lots of pix of young Asian men at some sort of water park, the booklet wrapped in see through printed front and back covers, so the artwork is superimposed over the images underneath, and the actual cd sleeve too, made from printed color plastic. Nice.
Not a new record, but a vinyl reissue of the long out of print cassette demo debut from LA black metal trio Harassor, and actually, the first proper full length we've heard from these guys, having only ever reviewed their split 7" with SF horde Moon Dark. But for those of you who remember Harassor's side of that split, this full length is more of the same, if anything more twisted and fucked up and weirdly raw. Plenty of d-beat style raw black metal pound, the guitars filthy and crusty, the vocals an effects drenched bellow one minute, an alien garble the next, the drums a wild chaotic pummel all but buried in the noise drenched mix, the sound primitive and blown out, lo-fi, but still caustic and noisy and heavy, the songs tending toward the punkish, but slipping easily into furious buzzing blast or lumbering doomic lurch.
Two of the tracks here are modern re-recordings of tracks from the original demo, and thus, sound way more polished, but polish in black metal is really relative, so while the guitars are thicker, the drums more powerful, the vocals are still a demonic croak, and overall, the re-recorded sounds are just as buzzy and frenzied and crusty as the originals.
There's also a new song, "Killed By Inanity", which unfurls thick crumbling superdistorted riffage, pounding midtempo drum pummel, the vocals a caustic glass gargling growl, careening from tangled gnarled blast, punky gallop, to full on blown out almost noise rock, which definitely hints at the groups non-black metal roots, and perhaps points to the band's new material continuing to push the boundaries of the raw, primitive blackness they so clearly are masters of. Definitely recommended for fans of Bone Awl, Maleveillance, Akitsa, Ildjarn, and similarly grim practitioners of the primitive black arts...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, pressed on 140 gram vinyl, comes with a sticker.
Now available on vinyl...
Reissue of a rare 1972 album. (All right, we're listening, tell us more...) Free jazz improv. (Ok, we're interested, except for Jim who's not into jazz.) Funky grooves. (Still sounds good... except you've lost Andee, he doesn't dig the funk.) BAGPIPES! (Whoa?! Really? Maybe Andee and Jim are back in the fold. Bagpipes?)
Yep, bagpipes. And a lot of groovy, jazzy funk laid down by organ, bass and drums. And, at one point, there's a baby crying. Ok, this IS still way too jazzy fusiony funky for Andee or Jim, but Allan's digging it. Just imagine a Scottish highlander trying to fit in with a jivey '70s urban nightclub jazz scene. It works. Rufus ain't blowin' the bagpipes continuously (he also grooves on electric soprano sax), but there are certainly way more BPs than you'd normally hear on a jazz/funk album! Understandable, then, the "legendary" status of this record.
And oh yeah, dude's playing AMERICAN FLAG bagpipes in the picture on the front cover.
What the hell? We thought these had long disappeared, but a handful of the super limited edition 2cd version of Sever / Severed were just discovered. These will most likely be the final copies we'll see of this... As for the record, here's what we had to say about it when we first reviewed it:
Much like his art, the music of Jim Haynes is based on, and is a continual exploration of the act of decay, an imagining of natural (and un-natural) processes rendered into sound, a world of crumbling landscapes and of microscopic worlds collapsing. While he has yet to figure out a way to actually record the process of metal rusting, Haynes has managed to create a soundworld that sounds precisely how he, and perhaps we, might imagine it.
The process of decay, and erosion, found on and in Sever, is some sort of sprawling sonic time lapse, each track as much about the sounds as the sources, as much about the arrangements as the process of listening, as much about texture as timbre, as much about the tiny details, and the expansive whole, the opening track for instance, is all clatter and crunch, chiming and tinkling, to these ears it sounds like wandering through a ruined world, a dead planet, the sun drying every living thing to husks, these sounds are the dried carapaces, hung from rotted fence posts, rubbing against one another in what little breeze is left under a harsh midday sun. The sound of footsteps, the crunch and scrape of a despondent trudge, a death march, but all of this is carefully blurred and smeared, the obvious references are blunted, so the sound evokes all of the above, yet as if it were a dream, the edges a bit fuzzy, the sounds slightly gauzy, the colors hazy, the sound almost underwater sounding at times, a feverdream in sound.
The rest of the tracks explore a different world altogether. A world of darkness and blight, of grim emptiness and eternal blackness, three variations on the darkness beyond, varying shades of grey and black, ominous, haunting, threatening, abject, deep and so very dark. Almost as if the listener from the first track, stumbled into the cool darkness of a cave, sheltered through the sun, only to find his or herself wandering through an endless labyrinth of tunnels and caverns, the sound massive and bottomless, but simultaneously hushed and intimate, the blackness rife with buried melodies, with warm whirring textures, the haunting clang and clatter of bells? Some sort of metal on metal. Crunch and crackle adds grit to Haynes' subterranean drift, the sound growing ever more ominous, the low end shimmer transformed into a grinding hiss, a black hum, wreathed in clouds of effervescent static, beneath it all, an unlikely pulse, a barely audible throb, a machinelike anti-groove buried beneath, a slow swirling noxious obsidian haze.
The final track explodes with what sounds like the grind of stone against stone, whirring processed textures, that slowly shift and are pulled apart into strands of greyed melody, a whirring, gritty expanse of softly intertwined layers, that seem to extend forever, the various bits of grit and grime worn away as the track progresses, the sounds getting smoother as they grow darker, as if the sounds are dragging the listener further down into the dark, the light from above fading, becoming a warm orange glow, then a smudge of red, before any and all color is swallowed up, leaving just the echoes to ring out before they too disappear.
The bonus disc features recordings previously thought to originate from a sound installation, but which is in fact the reworked source material of his performance opening for Nurse With Wound back in 2009.
Totally recommended!
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Although we've never technically reviewed anything from post-noise rock combo Helms Alee, we have actually listed one of their records before, the review was just not written by any of us. Nope, in fact, Helms Alee's Night Terror was reviewed by Mr. Justin Foley of The Austerity Program, who while perhaps not THEE most objective reviewer, considering his band is in fact labelmates with Helms Alee, was definitely of the same mind as us that Night Terror was in fact, a killer record. It definitely helped that we were all pretty nuts for pre-Helms Alee outfit Harkonen. And while we can't hope to match Foley's unique way with words, we figured that on the occasion of the new Helms Alee record, Weatherhead, the time had come for us to weigh in ourselves.
As Mr. Foley mentioned, there are still plenty of residual Harkonen-isms In Helms Alee, but HA are definitely their own band, a much more melodic beast for sure, the first track immediately brings to mind Torche and Big Business and even Cave In, that sort of sludge pop drum heavy melodic crunch, and that opener "Elbow Grease" is a doozy, not even two minutes but packed with plenty of buzz, wild tribal drumming, woozy tangled guitar harmonies, and cool multitracked vocals, which leads right into "8/16", which begins again, all super melodic, but quickly shifts gears into something seriously bombastic and aggro, howled vox and downtuned guitars, a lurching lumbering crush, but still shot through with tons of melody, and the first appearance of female vocals, which definitely change the vibe, and that song is all over the map, frantic and mathy, tripped out and psychedelic, chugging and churning, and that sort of plays out over the whole record, which for the most part is WAY more varied and melodic than the already admittedly melodic and varied Night Terror, lots of acoustic guitars, shimmering harmonies, and meandering slowcore, hazy angelic vocals, low slung bass creep, pure jangle pop, tripped out almost looped sounding riffage, seriously unhinged bellowed boy vocals, total classic rock sounding crunch but wrapped in super crumbly distortion, and rife with cool boy/girl harmonies, all that peppered with brief blasts of serious heaviness, like on the closing title track, which explodes with a super intense mathy workout, then gets all warped and punky, before getting dirgey and doomy, only to finally blossom into something totally melodic and hooky. Definitely all over the map, but the various bits and pieces do manage to all come together into a seriously kick ass and crazy catchy chunk of post everything heaviness.
***Finnish Supergroup Alert! ***
Lau Nau, Islaja, and Kuupuu all together in one band - it's like the dreamiest aQ daydream come true! All three of these ladies have been responsible for some of the most mystical and beautiful recordings of the last few years, all of which have become permanent favorites with everyone here. Lau Nau, and Islaja's recent recordings have shown them moving toward a more direct approach in their songwriting, but this project really lets all of these ladies dig deep into their textured, experimental roots.
It's a bit like listening to a seance happening miles away. Distant and subtle rumblings, murmurs, and gently conjured spells. One of those records that you can't identify what instruments/electronics are being used, with many of the sound sources seeming to be drawn from nature. They use their voices as another haunting instrument that glides in and out of these four long tracks. It has us thinking of the Jeweled Antler crew performing an Arvo Part piece, or Grouper and Hala Strana collaborating on the soundtrack to a pagan solstice ceremony. Completely breathtaking!
This was a nice surprise, just showed up in the mail one day, and knocked our fucking socks off. These Richmond Virginia noisemakers kick out the face melting, head spinning jams, equal parts gnarled Voivod-ish math metal and grunge infused Amrep style noise rock, the guitars chug and howl and churn, the drums pound, the vocals are all over the place. From howled feral shriek, to punk yelp, to weirdly melodic croon, all wound up into killer, sprawling, epic SONGS. Catchy, tangly, dense, and so heavy.
From pounding midtempo dirges, all Jesus Lizard swagger and lurching Ved Buens Ende lope, to chugging nineties style post rock math metal, the Voivod-ness on tracks like "Lunatic Sun" are undeniable, but they're all tangled up with more modern noise rock like Young Widows or Daughters, a sound at once familiar and retro, but forward looking and utterly headbangable.
"Black Skeleton" opens with a flurry of tangled riffage and chaotic drumming, before locking into a stuttery groove, the vocals wound around the constantly shifting arrangement, and somehow, while all this weirdness and complexity is going on, it manages to be CRAZY catchy and super rocking.
"Godheads Full Of Candy", the 8+ minute centerpiece of the record, unfurls a weird, lumbering, almost Godflesh sounding industrial dirge, with some cool gnarled chug, flurries of double kick, clouds of tripped out processed guitar, eventually launching into some twisted, super mathy angularity, and for the rest of the track, flitting back and forth between the two, with some surprisingly melodic vocals, and yet another bunch of weirdly irresistible hooks.
The second half of the record, sounds weirdly way poppier than the first, to these ears, which is in no way a bad thing, hints of Bleach era Nirvana for sure, especially on record closer "Vivisection", as well as OLD Queens Of The Stoneage, but all twisted up with plenty of the aforementioned noise and math, the result a killer collection of convoluted pop flecked mathy and metallic, noise rock bliss, that we find ourselves unable to stop listening to...
It's tough to argue with this one. Two recent aQ Record Of The Week-ers, Chicago blackened doom-drone-metal trio Locrian, teamed up with one man psychedelic-black-drone outfit Horseback, for two tracks of brooding, smoldering, blackened psychedelia, the perfect fusion of the two sounds into something darkly mysterious and hauntingly beautiful.
The shorter opening track, "The Gift", definitely sounds like it could be either band, and most definitely sounds like a hybrid of the two, hazy blurred ambience, haunting melodies, deep rumbling shimmer, a sort of gauzy post industrial black ambient drift, streaks of high end hovering over soft slow whirls and strange bits of clatter, laced with what sounds like someone playing the inside of a piano, buzzing metallic strums way down in the mix, beneath heaving groaning slabs of low end, billowing clouds of washed out thrum, distant drums, some harsh vokills, a slow build, with everything fading out EXCEPT the drums, which just get louder and more powerful, leading directly into the nearly 14 minute "Our Epitaph" which sounds fantastically like neither. At least on the surface. After a brief flurry of tolling bells, the song unwinds like a gloomy pop song, all fuzzy low end synth buzz, shuffling minimal drumming, all wreathed in swirling streaks of dreamlike haze, and wrapped around a darkly hypnotic main melody, and then there are the vocals, a softly distorted croon, wreathed in reverb, the result is pretty fantastic, sounding almost like an Interpol B-side or some lost live Joy Division track, spinning at 16rpm, but way more abstract and washed out and blackly psychedelic. Over the course of the track, the surrounding sounds grow more and more intense, an ever expanding squall of swirling high end and blurred and smeared melodic tangles, but that rhythm, and that relentless dirge stay locked solid, totally mesmerizing, a gorgeously trancelike chunk of noise-drenched blackened krautpsych that while obviously essential for Utech obsessives, and lovers of all things dark and droney, heavy and haunting, it's also just melodic enough to maybe lure some dabblers over to the dark sonic side for good�
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Features super striking artwork from longtime collaborator artist Denis Forkas Kostromitin, who also did the etching on the B-side, and on the printed insert.
On the same label that released the recent live White Hills tape as well as a post Brainbombs No Balls jam we were never able to get, comes this brand new 7" from these San Francisco psychedelic stompers, thick with blown out guitars, classic rock riffage, wild octopoidal drumming, Stooges-y stomp and wild manic almost Jello-like vocals, the sound a glorious tangle of sixties style psych, eighties punk rock, hairy fuzzy proto-metal and seriously shredding guitar mastery, the lyrics and unhinged vox remind us of some lost proto-punk classic, but then it's all set amidst some BIG riffs and killer melodic leads, which sound way more heavy seventies. Either way, killer stuff, and we're definitely hankering for a full length. Features some super scary green-goo'd space teeth cover art.
The husband and wife duo Jeff & Jane Hudson started out in art-punk outfit The Rentals (not to be a confused with the Weezer side-project of the same name from the '90s). There were a couple of Rentals singles, one of which landed on Beggars Banquet in 1979, before the band broke-up. The Hudsons relocated to New York from Boston, and shifted towards synths, drum machines, and electronics in their collaborative project. Their first ep - World Trade - was released in 1981 through the seminal No Wave Lust/Unlust label alongside Mars, Dark Day, Martin Rev, Lydia Lunch, Z'ev, etc., and the Hudsons had made the rounds of all the punk spaces at the time, opening for Suicide on at least one occasion. Flesh was their second album, one that they recorded at home and released themselves in 1982. There is an insularity to this album that asks something of a chicken and an egg question. Was their self-financing the result of an expressive solipsism, or vice versa?
Regardless, Flesh is a record that didn't have many contemporaries in New York, although if they hailed from San Francisco, the Residents, Snakefinger, and the Psyclones would have all been kindred spirits. Jane and Jeff wrote darkly carnivalesque, post-punk numbers through early Roland synths and drum machines, accompanying bass, guitar, vocals, and a lot of warbling effects. Their flanging, weird sound grafted onto the chicken scratch guitars certainly looks forward to what Blank Dogs would do some 30 years later. So it's no surprise that Blank Dogs' label Captured Tracks would be one of the two two labels releasing this reissue, which comes with a ton of bonus material, including the aforementioned World Trade ep, the "No Club" single, and the punchy art-punk dance number "Special World," originally released as a single in 1983 before the Hudsons transitions from music to video art. Great stuff!
Remember the "blurry noise-rock-space-garage distorto rock off kilter groove damaged glam trash blooz" of the weirdly named Timmy's Organism that we listed a while back? A twisted slab of schizophrenic warped what-the-fuck from Michigan, the product of a very disturbed musical mind, one belonging to a fella named Timmy Vulgar (who fronted the Clone Defects once upon a time). Well Timmy is back, this time with a band in tow, that would be Human Eye, and they take the twisted sound of Timmy's Organism, and rev it up, giving it the full band treatment, creating a riff heavy chunk of psychedelic spaced out drug drenched outsider noise rock, that manages to be riffy, hooky, heavy, and occasionally totally and completely fractured and fucked.
Take the awesomely titled "Brain Zip (Kickin' Back In The Electric Chair)", which begins all synth laden garage rock space buzz stomp, with snarly swaggery vox, and some of THEE most distorted guitars ever, totally blown out, and all twisted up, the various sounds somehow restrained and molded into some seriously tripped out post Stooges / pre Hawkwind space garage weirdness, until the guitar solo comes in, WAY up in the mix, and SUPER distorted, a wild melodic squiggle that relegates the rest of the song to a hushed background buzz. "Impregnate The Martian Queen Pt 2" is a glammy stomp, with Butthole Surfers style processed vox, not to mention a weird watery splash sound that seems to wreathe all of the sounds, there are even bongos and some acoustic guitars, like Ziggy Stardust on a SERIOUSLY bad (or good?) trip. "Junkyard Heart" somehow channels both Van Halen AND Monster Magnet, through a short sharp blast of drum heavy uber distorted effects drenched garage dirge crush. And so it goes, song after song of twisted fractured fucked up confusional new wave / space rock / glam garage / psych punk weirdness that we're digging more and more with every listen.
With all the great music they've put out it's easy to forget that Hunx & His Punx had still not put out a proper full length until now. With Too Young To Be In Love, Hunx shows he's not just good only for singles but that he can keep the momentum up and fun flowing for a whole full length record. His love of girl groups shines so bright in these songs as you can hear how the sounds of The Crystals, The Shangri Las, and The Ronettes are given such respect as they are channeled through a gay punk's point of view. With great back-up vocals from some fine ladies including Shannon from Shannon & The Clams, this is a record that gives you all the hand claps, high energy, and tales of heartbreak that you want in a great pop record. "The Curse Of Being Young" might just be Hunx's finest song yet as it for sure will be a contender for favorite pop song of the year, and luckily everything else on the album stands near that level of pop excellence.
It's been a good long while since we've heard from the Frequency Thirteen label, home to a sound and style of music we became pretty obsessed with and they call TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA. There was Black Vomit, Dukkha, Rape Rack, Skultroll, that amazing Audio Apogee double cd-r compilation featuring a whole mess of TSBP bands, including the above, and then of course there were these guys, Ice Bound Majesty, who at the time we described as surreal free folk black metal ambient experimentalism / epic melodic blackened folk flecked post rock, but then ultimately decided that they were pretty impossible to describe. But now we get another chance with this latest batch of twisted avant heaviness and weirdo blackened psychedelia, which starts out all skittery electro almost, a synth melody draped over a house-y plus and what sounds like animal sounds, only to immediately be obliterated by a wall of SUPER distorted crumbling black buzz, crashing drums and harsh vokills, a sort of blackdrone drift, that also quickly give way to a bit of glitch, and then a long stretch of dreamy, hushed ambient shimmer, all softly layered undulating chordal thrum and delicate acoustic guitars. The second track begins just as baffling, with some sort of sampled Irish folk song, again immediately crumbling in a haze of in-the-red metalgaze buzz, and pounding blown out beats, a sort of electro metallic dirge, that sounds a bit like a more lo-fi version of Necro Deathmort, but it's here where the post rock vibe comes in, the sounds may be harsh and metallic, but the melodies and the arrangements are total Godspeed style slow build drama, loping and hypnotic, although this is IBM, so the song does lurch from that dreamy lope to crumbing blackened metallic dirge and back again, sprawling into a nearly 11 minute second half, where the sound drifts and whirs and shimmers, flecked with sheets of distorted low end, keening feedback, looped feedback, muted skeletal beats, again, sonically in line with the electronic metal hybrid that Necro Deathmort specialize in, but IBM are much more twisted and raw.
The rest of the record is equally schizophrenic, lumbering doomy glitch flecked pound gives way, to swirling druggy, tripped out ambience, which in turn blossoms into a weird sort of electronic krautrock, wreathed in blackened buzz and strange distant voices, before slipping into what might be our favorite track, with looped female vocals, haunting minor key piano melodies, thick doomdronedirge guitars, a super blown out beat heavy second half sprawl, that gradually fractures and begins to stutter, a digital freak out that sounds like malfunctioning cd players, before finishing off with a thick corrosive avalanche of skittery distorto doom.
After a brief bit of haunting industrial ambience, the record finishes with the 12+ minute "Thevirgocluster/Acollapsedstar", which right out of the gate sounds like some Jesu / Nadja hybrid, all big booming distorted beats, blurred crumbling melodies, and sprawling tarpit riffs, all muted and muddied, washed out and woozy, peppered with wide open spaces, the heaviness peeled back to let the drums skitter and shuffle through fields of hushed shimmer, before heaviness swoops back in, finishing off with a wild tangle of collaged vocal samples, and a final hidden track of blurred, softly blackened shimmer. So good.
And here's hoping this heralds the return of the label, and all the warped outfits that sail with her. As always crazy limited, so grab one while you can. And word is there's a new Black Vomit on deck too, so prepare thyself...
Yay!! Now in stock, in quantity, on nice fancy import vinyl, in two parts. And each of the lps contains a bonus track not found on the compact disc version! Here's what we said about the cd:
If any album on this week's list is gonna put a smile on your face and spring in your step, this is the one! First off, we love Bollywood stuff to begin with, and then that this was curated by the Finders Keepers / B-Music folks, you know it's gonna be good... And indeed the stuff they've dug up for this compilation is so fantastic, fun, energetic, absurd, over the top, and catchy, yeah it's Bollywood at its best. Well, except that actually to be precise it's KOLLYWOOD not Bollywood, 'cause this is is all music from films produced by the Tamil-language film industry, based not in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) but in the South Indian city of Chenai (formerly Madras), in a neighborhood called Kodambakkam, thus "Kollywood" (and remember, there's also Pakistan's Lollywood too, based in Lahore, and Nollywood in Nigeria...).
In any case, there's 16 tracks here [18 on the vinyl, spread over the 2 lps], each more groovy and insane than the last. Furthermore, they're all the work of composer Ilaiyaraaja (meaning, Prince), aka The Maestro, a very creative and hard working fellow indeed, responsible for the scores to over 900 films in his long career!!! Thanks to Finder Keepers, who've selected these gems, sourced from rare 45 rpm singles and such, we're now big fans. Reminds us A LOT of one of our very favorite Bollywood and/or Kollywood collections ever, an all time AQ fave disc in any genre in fact: the long out of print Vijaya Anand "Dance Raja Dance" cd on Luaka Bop from years ago, another amazing batch of songs from South Indian musical cinema.
Solla Solla, like Dance Raja Dance, Dance, is simply irresistible. A lively, genre defying mash up of Eastern and Western, kitschy pop and chaotic exotica, psychedelic sometimes intentionally, sometimes otherwise, full of sudden surprises and sweeping melodies, crazy rhythms, wild vocal outbursts, funky fat synths, big bands doing disco beats... Wow!!
These songs, presumably for whirling, ADD action sequences / dance numbers, often feature quasi-orgasmic murmurs and squeals from the female lead vocalists, giggles and screams as well. Along with plenty of lovely singing, too, of course. And from the men, lots of "Huuh!!" and "Hey!!". Quite bombastic, and ecstatic, and definitely dance-floor DJ fodder for when you really want the party to get goin'. Absolutely delightful!!!
Again, all music composed, produced, and arranged by Ilaiyaraaja. Various veteran "playback singers" like S.P. Balasubrahmanyam and T.M. Soundararajan appear on here. The liner notes by Doug Shipton go into depth about Ilaiyaraaja's career, and plenty of photos/graphics are provided.
Yay!! Now in stock, in quantity, on nice fancy import vinyl, in two parts. And each of the lps contains a bonus track not found on the compact disc version! Here's what we said about the cd:
If any album on this week's list is gonna put a smile on your face and spring in your step, this is the one! First off, we love Bollywood stuff to begin with, and then that this was curated by the Finders Keepers / B-Music folks, you know it's gonna be good... And indeed the stuff they've dug up for this compilation is so fantastic, fun, energetic, absurd, over the top, and catchy, yeah it's Bollywood at its best. Well, except that actually to be precise it's KOLLYWOOD not Bollywood, 'cause this is is all music from films produced by the Tamil-language film industry, based not in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) but in the South Indian city of Chenai (formerly Madras), in a neighborhood called Kodambakkam, thus "Kollywood" (and remember, there's also Pakistan's Lollywood too, based in Lahore, and Nollywood in Nigeria...).
In any case, there's 16 tracks here [18 on the vinyl, spread over the 2 lps], each more groovy and insane than the last. Furthermore, they're all the work of composer Ilaiyaraaja (meaning, Prince), aka The Maestro, a very creative and hard working fellow indeed, responsible for the scores to over 900 films in his long career!!! Thanks to Finder Keepers, who've selected these gems, sourced from rare 45 rpm singles and such, we're now big fans. Reminds us A LOT of one of our very favorite Bollywood and/or Kollywood collections ever, an all time AQ fave disc in any genre in fact: the long out of print Vijaya Anand "Dance Raja Dance" cd on Luaka Bop from years ago, another amazing batch of songs from South Indian musical cinema.
Solla Solla, like Dance Raja Dance, Dance, is simply irresistible. A lively, genre defying mash up of Eastern and Western, kitschy pop and chaotic exotica, psychedelic sometimes intentionally, sometimes otherwise, full of sudden surprises and sweeping melodies, crazy rhythms, wild vocal outbursts, funky fat synths, big bands doing disco beats... Wow!!
These songs, presumably for whirling, ADD action sequences / dance numbers, often feature quasi-orgasmic murmurs and squeals from the female lead vocalists, giggles and screams as well. Along with plenty of lovely singing, too, of course. And from the men, lots of "Huuh!!" and "Hey!!". Quite bombastic, and ecstatic, and definitely dance-floor DJ fodder for when you really want the party to get goin'. Absolutely delightful!!!
Again, all music composed, produced, and arranged by Ilaiyaraaja. Various veteran "playback singers" like S.P. Balasubrahmanyam and T.M. Soundararajan appear on here. The liner notes by Doug Shipton go into depth about Ilaiyaraaja's career, and plenty of photos/graphics are provided.
One of three new releases on Utech this list, all collaborations of sorts, this one, the oddly named Ithi, is a duo from NY called Ithi, made up of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. You might remember Convey from his Utech release Vacant Integument, which was a fantastic collection of hazy blown out psychedelia, thick shimmery guitarscapes AND processed harmonicas!
Not sure if there are any harmonicas employed in Ithi, but if there are, they must have run them through a million pedals, cuz right out of the gate, Ithi is a seriously noisy beast, a churning blackened maelstrom of tangled melodies, of thick slabs of buzz and rumble and hiss and skree, woven into some strangely rhythmic shapes, although those rhythms are almost completely subsumed by thick corrosive clouds of NOISE, although that noisy beginning is a bit misleading, cuz before long, the noise seems to fade a bit, and suddenly there's some pulsing electronics, some deep garbled crooning, the sound transformed into some strange sort of gloomy gothic electronic black noise. Or something. But once the vocals come in, everything changes, and the record blossoms into some sort of noisedrenched demonic electro-pop. Heavy on the noise.
The rest of the record is similarly twisted and off kilter, a dizzying, constantly shifting hybrid of black noise and post industrial crunch, or blurred ambient shimmer and depressive doom pop, or of austere synthwave and abstract electronic drift.
"Go Forth And Die" might be the 'hit' here, with its hazy buzz, murky low end melody, stumbly industrial rhythm, and creepy deep dramatic croon, like some lost eighties new wave jam reimagined by Wolf Eyes and Einsturzende Neubauten. But the sound is anything but static, slipping quickly into a super echoey bit of feedback laced murk, very soundtracky with lots of recorded-in-a-bunker reverb, then into a pulsing bit of glitched out thrum, before slipping into a strangely melodic bit of layered ambient dronemusic, that sounds more like Andrew Chalk or William Basinski (albeit much noisier), until finally, the record finishes off with the nineteen minute "From Caveman To Starflight", which begins a low slung and slithery, deep pulsing tones, muted rhythms, a little bit dubby, everything wreathed in some hazy space out buzz, there are even some blasts of super crunchy fuzzy synthbass buzz, making this almost sound in places like some sort of alien industrial dubstep, but the rhythms splinter, and seem to careen in all directions, the various buzzes and rumbles grow more and more intense, before finally exploding into a Technicolor psychedelic squall of glitched out grind and swirling streaks of crunchy electronics and tangled melodies, a heaving, but weirdly hypnotic blast of impossibly mesmerizing soft noise, that gradually grows more and more soft before fading out completely.
Super swank embossed jackets, with artwork and layout by Kevin Gan Yuen from SF blackmetal noise merchants Sutekh Hexen.
The first we heard from this fuzz pop duo was on a split 7" with Best Coast, and as much as we love BC, it was the oddly monikered Jeff The Brotherhood that knocked our socks off, due in part to low expectations based on the goofy name, but mostly based on their impeccable popsmithery. We described their sound as reminding us of "classic Weezer or old school noise poppers Further, also SF pop geniuses Ovens, super distorted guitars, weary stoned boy vocals, sweet harmonies, killer hooks, crazy catchy, with some tripped out spacey squiggly FX".
Thankfully, nothing has changed on JtB's debut full length, included is the aforementioned jam ("Bummer"), the track that had us smitten in the first place, but there's a whole mess of jams equally as fun and fuzzy and hooky, alternating between pure power pop janglefests, casio laced fuzz punk blowouts, stomping fuzzy dirges and hazy psychedelic sixties dream pop ballads, with the band infusing their standard instrumentation with plenty of swirling effects, old school indie rock guitar leads, strange falsetto vox, sitar like buzz, lo-fi practice space drums, and a 4 track production that manages to sound DIY but still totally rocking and fuzzed out. Fans of the above bands will LOVE these guys, as well as folks into classic nineties indie rock like Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr and all the rest, as well as modern retro poppers like Best Coast. Easily one of our new favorite pop records!
Tehran, Iran isn't the first place you'd think to find a heavy '70s power trio playing loud distorted blooze rawk, but if you were there in 1972 and looked in the right garage, you'd have found these guys rocking out, the Jokers. They recorded this album on a reel-to-reel tape machine, with two mics, in that garage, but it was never released - until now. Lotsa fuzz and wah where the guitars are concerned, and raucous vocals. Influenced by English and American blues rockers like Cream and Mountain and Hendrix and Grand Funk, we'd hazard a guess. And, especially on "Southern Blues", seemingly also inspired by '50s rock n' roll cats like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent.
Only 4 songs here, but it's still over a half hour long, 'cause the fourth song is really a wailin' three-part suite that would have taken up a whole side of vinyl. All in all, awesomely unrestrained and uncouth, though maybe a bit too bluesy for some. You probably would never guess that these Jokers were from Iran, it's not like they incorporate any Persian music in their sound, but this definitely sounds real raw and underground in its blues-blasting abandon. Packaged in mini-LP style sleeves, numbered limited edition of 1000. (There's also a limited vinyl reissue we can get, from the same label, but it's waaaay more expensive, we can order it for you though if you like...)
Classical inspired daydream electronic ambience crafted with an immaculate touch. Marsen Jules should be familiar to anyone who loves the blissed out sounds found on Kompakt's yearly Pop Ambient series, as he's had tracks featured on four of those collections. Nostalgia is rife with solemn undertones, making it the perfect soundtrack for broken hearts and tearful moments, surrendering to the intensity of the moment. It's music that would perfectly suit some 16mm gauzy Kodachrome film panning through the sky, city, and glimpses of old friends, lovers and faded memories. A record that makes us think of our favorite outings by Sylvain Chauveau, Gas, Biosphere, and Klimek.
Completely gorgeous.
Ok, so AQ customers are likely well aware of the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" movement popularized by Circle and cohorts, an alleged genre that's usually more krautrock than metal anyway, but is certainly Finnish. Well, drop the heavy metal part and you've got Finnish New Wave, eh? And that's what new Smalltown Supersound act K-X-P are up to. Synth-laden '80s inspired "New Wave" from Finland, played on drums, bass, and keys (no guitar), with plenty of that motorik krautrock groove Circle and Co. are known for as well. One of their two, rotating drummers (they switch off on this recording) is in fact Tomi from Circle and Aavikko so that certainly makes sense.
Consisting largely of instrumental grooves, these eight tracks are heavy on the electronics, and driving hypnotic rhythms, with some vocals here and there, that at times remind us of Adam & The Ants, or what we think we remember Adam Ant sounding like, though the vocals in "Pockets" are weirdly effected in a way that makes 'em sound almost like Mika Ratto from Circle, singing over Gary Numan-like throbbing synth pop. K-X-P doesn't lack variety, "Mehu Moments" actually reminds us of a krauty version of that Charanjit Singh Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat reissue, it's got that "exotic" vibe with synth squiggle freaking out over steady pulsations, and "18 Hours (Of Love)" has a bit of a glammy Gary Glitter shuffle-time Fred Bigot feel to it, with the singer chanting anthemically over rhythmically spaced electronic distortion-detonations. Elsewhere, K-X-P offer up moodier, dubbier excursions. And yeah, with our love of Finland, and Circle, and krautrock, and coldwave, and noise, and disco, and dub, this pushes plenty of buttons. So this disc has been getting a lot of instore play here at AQ, as word passes from one staffer to another...
We'd happily recommend this to you if you enjoy some/most/any/all of the following: Jonas Reinhardt, Aavikko, Neu!, Suicide, Circle, Cold Cave, Salvatore, Bronze, even Rah Bras.
Don't let the inappropriate band name fool you. We had visions of dorky noise rock, or maybe fuzzy garage pop goofs, when in fact, King Dude is something much more haunting and enthralling, initially lumped in with the whole witch house scene, due in part to releases on witch house labels like Disaro and Clan Destine, the sound of King Dude, aka TJ Cowgill, who also does time in Book Of Black Earth, is more a dark brooding, neo-folk, think Death In June, Blood Axis, Cult Of Youth, Sol Invictus, urgently strummed guitars, deep dramatic sung/spoken vocals, the vibe haunting and otherworldly, minor key and melancholy, occasionally strident and majestic, but more often moody and mournful, the lyrics full of blood and sky, earth and fire, death and the beyond, a ritualistic doom folk, channeling the seventies British acid folk of groups like Comus and Incredible String Band through the more modern industrial folk sound of the above mentioned groups. Female vocals add dreamy harmonies here and there, but for the most part, this is dark stripped down twang flecked doom/neo folk that should also appeal to fans of Woven Hand, Sixteen Horsepower, Hexvessel, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Der Blutharsch and the like.
This record collects the out of print My Beloved Ghost ep, the out of print Black Triangle 7", and tacks on one unreleased bonus track.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
For those who remember the escapades of Jewelled Antler, the various tunnels and concrete bunkers of Battery Townsley provided a musty ambience of crumbled mortar and mold spores to any number of that collective's psychedelic ragas. But the Battery's intended use was to house a couple of huge artillery cannons dug into the top of one of the higher peaks just to the north of San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Bridge, all in preparation for a Japanese invasion during World War 2. As this never came to pass, the vast network of bunkers throughout the Marin Headlands landed in the domain of the National Park Service, who had done a major renovation job on Battery Townsley, by resealing the massive steel doors and cleaning out decades worth of detritus - both manmade and natural. Those Jewelled Antler excursions had occurred well before the National Park Service's renovation, and the bulk of Battery Townsley remains under the watchful eye of the staff, who open it up weekly for docent led tours.
Many of the bunkers throughout the Headlands have attracted sound artists from across the globe, given the massive sustained reverb and interesting acoustics of the various bunkers. But nearly all of these recorded sessions needed to be held surreptitiously, given that the Park Service doesn't want to have to rescue somebody with a microphone who plummeted into a cistern in the heart of a mountain. But in 2010, the curators of the Soundwave Festival approached the Park Service about setting up a concert in Battery Townsley, and were pleasantly surprised that the Park Service was very keen on such a presentation. There, of course, were some challenges to overcome - the most daunting of which was the lack of electricity. But the Festival gathered a pretty kick-ass assemblage of artists making amazing sounds without having to plug into the grid, including Danny Paul Grody, Hora Flora, Jacob Felix Heule, Jim Haynes, and Gregg Kowalsky. Of course, Kowalsky went into the thick reverberant space with his arsenal of tape decks, which he's employed for his ever-changing Tape Chants performances.
On this super limited recording, Kowalsky presents a live recording of his performance in the bunker and a studio reinterpretation using the same material. The source tapes have the radiant glow of a church organ, beaming with luminous hues as the slippery tones bend in and out of dissonant ripples and downright heavy drones. While the studio recording is gorgeous, it's all the more impressive to hear this material as broadcast within a bunker thick reverberation, as the tones begin to growl and the tape deck speakers' crackle being pushed to their limits, giving the whole collage of swirl and drone a heaviness never heard in any of Kowalsky's previous recordings. It's more of a Surface Of The Earth recording of corroded amplifiers and slumped guitars, but it's all tape decks. Totally fucking great!
Unfortunately, this LP is limited to 250 copies of which we got the very last batch from the label.
Record number two from the mysterious Kreng, aka abstract soundscaper / sonic surrealist Pepijn Caudron, and even more than the first, Grimoire evokes some impossibly haunted otherworld, inhabiting a world not that far removed from the land of lost memories that the Caretaker calls home. But that land is wistful and melancholy, whereas the world of Grimoire is abjectly terrifying, not merely haunting or ominous, this is the soundtrack to something or someplace truly frightening, a blackened ambience of disembodied voices, of creaking clattery percussion, hushed shimmer, deep blackhole swells of rumbling low end, swooping backwards melodies, echo drenched throat singing, tinkling chimes, wheezing drifts of chordal thrum, plink plonk piano, moaning strings, but all of those elements hushed and subdued, a whispery slice of soundtracky minimalism. Bits of glitch and crackle wreath a lumbering rhythmic thud, mournful melodies drift through fields of bleary blur, barely-there beats surface and fragment, horns bleat way off in the distance, thick impossibly low bass tones reverberate like pulsing black clouds, each track is like some spectral soundscape, equal part swoonsome classical music, grim black ambience, and minimal abstraction, the various tracks bleeding into one another, slipping from jazzy clatter, to symphonic bombast, to dark rumbling, to lurching looped rhythmic skitter, but always seeming to settle into a near static bit of black drift, this songsuite a lost soundtrack to some dark depressive mystery, a lost noir, a characterless black and white epic, these are the sounds of empty streets, of derelict houses, of dark defeating the light, of a world cast in permanent darkness, impossibly beautiful, but a beauty blackened by loss and decay, a descent into madness, a physical descent into the crumbling hidden world that lurks just beneath ours, a gorgeous sonic representation of what awaits us beyond the dark, on the other side, in the next world, the world of shadows.
Super intense, and harrowingly gorgeous. Most definitely for fans of The Caretaker, as well as other haunting Miasmah releases like Elegi, FNS, Jacaszek, Gultskra Artikler and all the various purveyors of dark minimal drift, haunting cinematic dronemusic and spectral black ambience.
Holy shit! SIX POUNDS OF METAL. There are certain things, that as metalheads, one feels might just be utterly essential, something every self respecting metaller NEEDS to own, and this friends is one of those things, the long in the works hardcover book compendium of every single issue of long running (25 years!) Norwegian metal magazine Slayer. You might remember not long ago we reviewed the ultra deluxe hardcover version of the final issue of Slayer Magazine, which went out of print in a flash, that's included here too, but more on that in a second.
Bazillion Points, who also released the equally amazing and almost overwhelming Touch And Go zine compendium, not to mention Hellbent For Cooking,The Heavy Metal Cookbook, Tom Gabriel Fischer's Only Death Is Real Hellhammer / Celtic Frost book, and Daniel Ekeroth's Swedish Death Metal book, phew, has really outdone themselves with this Metalion book. It really does weigh SIX POUNDS, and is gorgeous, super striking front and back cover, printed in foil stamped red metallics. Inside you'll find EVERY PAGE of every single one of the zine's twenty issues, but that's not all, it's also, as the title suggests, a diary/memoir of sorts, kept by Slayer Mag mastermind Jon Kristiansen, all about the magazines, the story behind each issue, as well as his life in metal. It also includes the pre-Slayer zine Live Wire, of course tons of rare photos, and like that out of print Slayer Magazine issue XX. While the outside is super swank, the inside is total classic cut and paste old school zine style, lots of drawings and cartoons, different typefaces, photos, no efforts made to smooth the edges, to hide the bits of tape or the staples that might have show up in the photocopies, total DIY, kvlt metal zine, just fancied up and presented in book style. And over the course of 20 issues and 25 years, the magazine featured pretty much every metal (and metal beloved) band that mattered: Watain, Morbid, Whiplash, Bathory, Sadus, Kreator, Master's Hammer, Sadistik Exekution, Funeral Mist, Nifelheim, Destroyer 666, SUNNO))), Grotesque, Savage Thrust, Medieval, Invidious Deathrash, Obscurity, Nocturnal Graves, Pagan Altar, Strid, Mayhem, Emperor, Slayer, Nihilist, Celtic Frost, Cathedral, Entombed, Morbid, Napalm Death, Metallica, Opeth, Cradle of Filth,�Sadus, Satyricon, Enslaved, Pentagram, Jarboe, Immortal, Possessed, Overkill, Ulver, Dark Angel and more more more.
Also included are multiple forwards from publisher Ian Christie, SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley, Fenriz of Darkthrone, Tomas Lindberg from Grotesque, Chris Reifert from Death/Autopsy, and Erik Danielsson from Watain.
We've barely cracked the book and we're already totally captivated and will no doubt get sucked further in. Kristiansen is a great writer, his interviews are funny and cool, the bands really open up, and it's really interesting to read interviews with all these bands from the last two decades, and Kirstiansen's life story is pretty amazing, he's self deprecating, includes lots of embarrassing photos of himself as a child and a teen and at every stage of his metal evolution, and the way he tells his story is a pretty great read on its own, and the magazines are way more enjoyable now, with Kristiansen offering context and history and all the drama and various tales behind the assembly of each issue. Needless to say, this is metalhead nirvana, and even if you never read it, it'll look amazing on your coffee table, but odds are you won't be able to resist, and like us you'll get sucked in, and lost in 25 years of METAL.
Be warned, mailorder folks, this book is MASSIVE, and HEAVY, and we don't mean heavy like metal, we mean heavy like SIX POUNDS, so this book will be shipped by weight, not by the usual per-item flat rate price, but it's SO worth it...
So interesting to see what new directions people take when faced with similar turning points. Out of the ashes of Pocahaunted, Bethany Cosentino embraced her love of pop and girl group garage glory, forming Best Coast. On the other hand, her former bandmate Amanda Brown went the other way, riffing off the layers of fractured/damaged sounds that Pocahaunted were creating into something more dubbed out and beat orientated. What's so cool is they both created such great music while taking utterly different paths.
LA Vampires seem to thrive on collaboration. Her record with Zola Jesus last year was a narcotic dubbed out slow burner and she also collaborated with Matrix Metals and shared a slice of vinyl with Psychic Reality. Ital is the new left-field dance project by former San Francisco resident Daniel McCormick (Mi Ami, Sex Worker). We were super excited when we heard McCormick was working on a new project focusing on weirdo electronic dance tracks. We knew he had such a great ear for the underworld of damaged dance sounds and damn does this collaboration between him and LA Vampires kill! Dubbed out, tripped out, swirling with infectious yet hazy melody and sensual rhythm. It's a 12" that merges the steaminess and sexiness of Throbbing Gristle's "Hot On The Heels Of Love" with the Chromatics "I Want Your Love." We've been playing this nonstop!
A brief blast of grim nekro blackness from this offshoot of LA's black metal mavens Harassor, Lord Time offers up 4 tracks of punked out, super raw heaviness, with a sound that alternates between weirdly melodic bursts of frenzied black blast and churning murky d-beat crush, the vocals a bizarre alien croak, the drums buried in the mix, but the guitars, gloriously blown out and buzz drenched, managing to sound thick and heavy even with some seriously lo-fi production, the songs twisted and tangled into convoluted arrangements, lurching from frantic demonic fury to pulverizing punkish pound and back again, often fading out into tripped out psychedelic ambience or blackly droned out drift before lurching right back into it again. And while it may be on the short side, the whole program repeats on the flipside, but with significantly different mixes and arrangements, the B side sounding distinctly more distorted and lo-fi, but at the same time laced with seemingly more stretches of psychedelic black ambience�
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each tape smeared with actual blood, and housed in gorgeous letterpressed #'d J-cards (also smeared with blood!), printed on sparkly reflective gold paper.
Portable mp3 players and iTunes and all the digital music out there has definitely changed the way we listen to music. Many folks barely listen to whole albums anymore, instead making playlists, or setting their devices on shuffle, and while in some ways, that's a bummer, that the traditional concept of THE ALBUM, seems to be slowly fading from the collective consciousness, in other ways, it's actually gotten lots of folks to listen to music they've had forever, but had maybe forgotten all about, and shuffle is the best thing to happen to deep cuts EVER. How often does some track start playing, and you're forced to check and see who it is, and it ends up being some band you love, some record you love, but it's a track hidden away mid record. And the other thing we've noticed is how much you end up listening to records that are in your iTunes RIGHT AFTER one of your favorite records, there's that record you always listen to, which inevitably leads right into whatever comes next alphabetically, and bam, that next record is suddenly a new favorite too. Something similar happened at work, where one of the computers had an iTunes full of music, and there were certain records we listen to all the time, and like above, one of those records would play right into the next, and EVERY time, we would have to check and see what it was, and every time, it was a band called Magdalena Solis, so we checked the store, and the website, and we had never carried it. A mystery of sorts. Quickly solved when we discovered that it was sent to us by two awesome aQ customers, Wouter and Terje, thinking we'd like it, and boy did we, we LOVED it in fact, so much so that we tracked down the band, and then the label, and finally got actual copies for ourselves, and for YOU. And trust us, it was well worth the wait.
The sound of Magdalena Solis hovers somewhere between psychedelic space rock and kosmische krautdrone, which means it's pretty much EXACTLY what we love, hazy, washed out drifts of dense distorted wah wah guitars, swirling FX, Eastern melodies, hushed angelic female vox, minimal drums, most of the tracks, pulsing and drifting and shimmering, and when there are drums, it's more sort of a blissed out, percussion laced spacedronedrift, take "Seven Boys And Seven Girls" the drums a simple motorik pulse, the main melody looped and cyclical, the whole thing wrapped in effects-heavy swirls of distorted synth and psych guitar buzz, the sound building to a seriously blown out cacophony, only to settle right back down again, leading into the comparatively contemplative "Cities Crumbling Planets Growing", a sitar soaked stretched of billowy low end, and distant sci-fi squiggle, barely there guitars slowly build into something, thick and fierce and spaced out and dreamily distorted.
The whole record is a series of smoldering slow build space drone epics, heavily layered landscapes of swirling synths, wheezing organs, skittery percussion, lush warm sonic swells, all wreathed in thick swaths of serious psych guitar, the sound constantly shifting from tranquil and dreamlike, to blown out and druggy/droney and way tripped out, heady and hypnotic and easily some of the best kaleidoscopic kosmische space/drone/psych we've heard. Most definitely recommended for fans of White Hills, Grails, the Alps, Expo 70, Gnod, Carlton Melton, Bong, Lumerians, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and other droney, druggy psychedelic drifters...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, comes with a download code.
