Another impressive release on Aaron Turner's post Hydra Head label Sige, this one a three way live tag team between Turner's House Of Low Culture, Mamiffer and Japanese noise legend Merzbow.
Spread out over three sides (the fourth is an etching), this live show displays a surprising amount of restraint, considering the multitude of cooks in the kitchen, and considering one of those cooks is the iron chef Masami Akita.
The first side is all Mamiffer, aka Faith Coloccia, with gorgeous bit of dark, droney, cinematic chamber music, what sounds at first like solo piano, until you realize the piano is suspended in a field of glimmery soft focus buzz, atop deep rumbling swells, peppered with distant industrial creaks and groans, the piano occasionally giving way to long shimmering metallic tones, or thick dark blackened swirls, but always settling back in that haunting elegiac piano driven drift. Mamiffer's side finishes off with a final eruption of grinding blackened churn, a psychedelic soft noise squall, that while still laced with melody, is still seriously ferocious.
The second side finds House Of Low Culture teaming up with Merzbow, which on the face of it has the makings of something seriously noisy, but instead, the two created a lush expanse of hushed dronemusic, delicate and haunting, all ominous low tones, and warm washed out thrum, streaked occasionally with feedback, and shards of skree, the sound grows more and more dense, still lovely, but with a sort of blackened cast, dreamily funereal, with mysterious vocals drifting in the softly roiling sonic shadows. A brief crescendo leads directly into another stretch of dark shimmer, peppered with bit crashing gongs, and thick crumbling black buzz sells, it's not until the last minute or two, that things get downright Merzbowian.
The final (playable) side, features all three, a Mamiffer / HOLC / Merzbow collab, and is easily the noisiest of the bunch, a constantly shifting sprawl of undulating low end, blasts of hissy white noise, heaving slabs of crumble and crunch, corrosive and caustic for sure, but still textural and atmospheric, and strangely melodic. By HOLC / Mamiffer standards things definitely get pretty fiery and fierce, but by Merzbow standards, the sound is still relatively tranquil. A pretty fantastic chunk of spaced out abstract noise drone for sure.
LIMITED TO 330 COPIES, each one hand numbered, housed in super swank, black on black Aaron Turner designed matte jackets, with printed inner sleeves, pressed on clear vinyl, music on three sides, a cool etching on the fourth.
Back in print, back in stock!
Here's one for fans of the USA's most cult '80s era true/power/heavy/epic metal band (who are still around, as a matter of fact). We've lauded them before, as being a uber-eccentric low-budget take on Maiden and Manowar, with hints of '70s prog, precursor to the likes of The Lord Weird Slough Feg. But it's also one of their weirdest, a lot more than hints of that '70s prog here, so others than strictly Manilla Road and/or metal fans might wanna check out...
First issued by pre-Rockadrome imprint Monster Records back in 2002, this is actually much older than that - it's an unreleased album from 1981, originally titled "Dreams of Eschaton". The band, for some reason, didn't like the recordings at the time and shelved them, but bootleg tapes have circulated among the Manilla Road faithful for years. Eventually Monster Records persuaded Manilla Road mainman Mark "The Shark" Shelton that it was time to give the album a proper release at last. Boasting cover art from Jim Fitzpatrick (who a lot of art for Thin Lizzy - as well as being responsible for the famous Che Guevara portrait poster you see everywhere), Mark of the Beast is a worthy addition to the Road's official catalog, though not their heaviest - it's a doomy but kinda mellow and psychedelic and spaced out album of epic, sad melodicism and majesty. The vocals are doused in FX, the entire recording is echoey and rickety, a few songs (like "Black Lotus") totally rock out, while many others wend and wind in a laidback druggy daze.
Like all Manilla Road, this doesn't fit any generic metal template...some of this reminds us of Rush's early songs, and there's even a proto-Current 93 narration thing happening on one track too!
Love Is Real, the last record from warped lo-fi popsmith John Maus, is an all time aQ favorite, a dizzying trip into some alternate reality FM radio, where the Cure recorded on answering machines, OMD crafted pop hits on broken tape decks and malfunctioning 4 tracks, a cosmic beat laden dream pop drug trip that managed to be as catchy and irresistible as it was baffling and totally and insanely demented.
Needless to say, we were super excited to discover there was a new John Maus record, the strangely titled We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, a record that got even stranger when we discovered there was a song called "Cop Killer" on it. Naturally we assumed it was a cover of Body Count's infamous banned jam, so we played that track first, and besides being surprised that it was in fact an original, we also ended up being totally blown away by what might be the sweetest, most dreamily twisted John Maus track EVER.
A broody, almost torch songy ballad, all woozy synths, and big eighties drums, Maus delivering the bizarrely provocative lyrics in his best warm velvety croon: "Cop killer, cop killer, Let's kill the cops tonight, kiiiiiiill them, cop killer, kill every cop in sight", and then the delirious refrain "Against the law" repeated over and over in a tangled storm of intense pulsing synths. The sound lush and explosive, thick and softly blown out, a serious shot across Ariel Pink's bow, a definite challenge for the warped lysergic lo-fi pop crown, a challenge that's gonna be tough to answer. Especially considering that the rest of the record, is just as good, if not as immediately catchy. But catchy it is. "Matter Of Fact" sounds like Maus channeling Devo through his cracked eighties FM pop filter, with some equally baffling lyrics ("Pussy is not the matter of fact"), and some gorgeous hazy synth ambience. "Streetlight" is total eighties new wave pop with the delay and echo effects cranked, the vocals careening wildly through dubbed out clouds of delay, while underneath synths pulse and rhythms groove. "Quantum Leap" is haunting and gorgeously gloomy, Maus the consummate crooner, his deep dramatic vocals bobbing atop thick bouncy basslines, handclap percussion, and lots of swirling sonic murk. "...And The Rain" is another darkly dramatic dream pop doom synth dirge, all rainy late night ambience, and again cloaked in thick swirls of soft focus distortion and blurred echoey shimmer, every track seeming to constantly grow more and more washed out and effects drenched, constantly on the verge of total collapse, but somehow, the more tripped out and damaged they sound, the more pretty and poppy and dreamy they become, a fantastically fractured collection of twisted outsider gloom pop that really has no equal. About as close to a perfect pop record as Maus is liable to get, assuming you like your pop buried in buzz and all blurry and druggy and woozy and warped. Which we most definitely DO.
Brand new full length from this Brooklyn postpunk / noiserock quartet, who take the whole gloomy, gothicky dour eighties pop sound that is so popular with the kids these days, and twist it all up, supercharging it, dousing it in noise and transforming an overfamiliar sound into something super exciting and fresh, blown out and psychedelic, wild and chaotic, a collection of crashing, bombastic pop songs, tripped out droney instrumentals, and furious super saturated noiserock blowouts, that while in fact do occasionally hint at the aforementioned sound, seem to shed bits of that sound as the record progresses, and even moreso with every play, ultimately revealing the twisted, noisy, and wholly original sound at The Men's gloriously distorted core.
The opener starts with a misleadingly tranquil stretch of softly swirling psychedelic guitars, warbly ambience, and effects laced shimmer, it's over three minutes before the song proper kicks in, but when it does, holy shit, a blinding, head spinning kaleidoscopic blast of thick shoegazey guitars, super distorted drum pound, all tangled melodies and swirling harmonies, the main riff sounding strangely like Big Country, albeit more warped and woozy and noisy, and then the vocals swoop in and it's pure pop, all supercharged dreamy hazy multitracked vocals, everything wreathed in a crumbling almost Elephant Six style production, it's like a dirgey noiserock Neutral Milk Hotel record, melting in the sun, and blasted through some hood mounted loudspeakers as you do doughnuts in the middle of a busy intersection on a hundred degree summer afternoon, fantastically fuzzy and blissed out, but still crunchy and heavy and dreamily noisy.
The rest of the record follows suit, mixing in healthy heapings of pop soaked punkish pound, but even then the sounds are warm and in-the-red, and the sounds seem to ooze and warble, the riffs slippery and the songs laced with loads of subtle (and not so subtle) subtle harmonies. Much of the record is actually instrumental, which in the hands of most bands would bore big time, but these guys kitchen sink every song, often sounding like multiple Polvo's playing at once, thick and dense and gnarled and gloriously twisted, the songs constantly switching gears, whether it's feedback doused almost-sludge, wrapped in wild squiggly guitar leads, or dirgey near Brainbombs sounding cacophony, or even strummy psych pop blowouts that seem to explode into swirling squalls of free-psych shreddery, the sounds all merge into one glorious noise pop blur.
"Bataille" is the hit here, and it's obvious why, all of the above mentioned sonics, harnessed to a low slung chunk of Sonic Youth worthy post punk, all angular guitars, dense layered melodies, howled throat shredding vox, and dense propulsive drumming, the song rife with crazy hooks, droney-cyclical riffage but also some seriously killer gloomy new wave-isms. And while we love that track, our favorite (besides the opener), might just be "Shittin' With The Shah", a smoldering, sun baked, wide eyed bit of hazy psychedelia, all simple skeletal drumming, and chiming echo drenched guitars, woozy and dreamily druggy, a soft slow build to a final one minute blast of gloriously blown out in-the-red, sweetly melodic, but speaker shreddingly noisy shoegazekrautpopnoiserock swirl.
Needless to say, quite a surprise, even from a label we dearly love and who rarely disappoints. Most definitely a new noise pop / psych rock / post punk favorite, that we can't seem to stop listening to!
We had been hearing about this for ages, local pop heroes the Ovens had been RAVING, as had our very own Andrew, and about a million blogs, hailing these guys as the second coming. Of what you ask? Husker Du? Dinosaur Jr? The Wipers? All three is more like it, these guys offer up six songs in 21 minutes of buzzing, grungy, slightly sludgy ultra heavy indie pop, that takes that classic punk / pop sound, and adds some Torche-like heft, the guitar impossibly thick and crunchy and fuzzy, the songs hooky as hell, the vibe sorta washed out and woozy, a little druggy and laid back, the perfect mix of nineties guitar rock, eighties punk rock, and modern post punk heaviness, super emotive about-to-crack vox, and the solos, total J Mascis guitar tone, short and simple, just sort of mirroring the vocal melody, and then right back into it. Stripped down and simple, every jam a goddamn anthem, total windows down, stereo cranked, feeling young again, summer jam bliss, and fuck, if a band like the Ovens, who write catchy pop songs like it ain't nothing, lose their minds over a band, proclaiming them THE BEST EVER, well, then, you know you better figure out what the fuck is up, and what the fuck is up, is that this just might be your new favorite band.
In transit across the Pacific for months now, we had almost given up, but this grim little slab of droned out ritualistic slo-mo sludge finally showed up from Australia. Previously a tour only release from this aQ beloved female fronted French ultradoom horde (now featuring Robert Macmanus from Grey Daturas on drums), Sortilege is a single 11 minute track, and is of course everything we (and you) have come to love about Monarch, sprawling expanses of low end buzz, deep drones, minimal drum pound, blurred downtuned guitarage, but "Sortilege" is something a bit different, with the song never fully exploding into actual churn and crunch, instead, it seems to be Monarch's take on black ambience, and we have to say it most definitely suits them. The sound atmospheric and haunting, the rumbling buzz of the guitars a thick backdrop for all manner of wordless vocalizing, of warm washed out streaks of feedback, of buried melodies, and constantly shifting textures, not harsh or heavy, but still harrowing and haunting, the eleven minute running time is a bit frustrating, cuz this is the sort of jam you want to keep going and going and going. But otherwise, a seriously dense slab of hypnotic blackened drift, a sonic full moon ritual, corpsepainted and candelit, deep in the forest, in some underground cave, the sounds seeping from beneath the ground, and enveloping the listener like some grim black cloud. Awesome.
Really swank reflective black digipaks, with some super striking photos of frontwoman Emilie, multiple Emilie's in fact, face painted, dagger in hand, presiding over the ritual, whose soundtrack is captured on Sortilege.
Debut from the awesomely monikered Moon Knight, the work of James Brown III, a member of LA black metal horde Harassor, who sometimes also releases sick sonic blackness under the name Lord Foul. But as Moonknight, Brown creates that sort of crumbling blown out blissy blackness we can never seem to get enough of, equal parts buzzy and super distorted, hazy and washed out and shoegazey, clouds of caustic buzz and caveman pound seem soaked in soft swirls of melodic shimmer, sweetly melancholic melodies are looped dreamily beneath a churning wall of roiling riffage and guttural demonic growls, the label describes it as Alcest and Amesoeurs mixed with Ildjarn and Bone Awl, and that does pretty much nail it, a sound that is both thick and corrosive, hateful and hellishly menacing, but also woozy, dreamy, and downright pretty, meditatively melodic while simultaneously buzz drenched and brutally black, two great tastes that have really never sounded better together. Might just be one of our favorite new black metal releases, too bad it's LIMITED TO JUST 100 COPIES, each tape housed in gorgeous letterpressed #'d J-card, printed on sparkly reflective metallic silver paper.
While his outings this year have shown the gentler side of Thurston Moore's music making, those who love his noisy leanings need not fear. On this split with Talk Normal, the Sonic Youth guitarist shows he still loves to go as raw and in the red as possible. With three short blasts of guitar driven noise that hark back to his no-wave roots. So it makes sense that on the flipside are Talk Normal, who are very much influenced by that same early '80s damaged New York scene that Moore was a part of. Their song is a slow paced drugged out and dusty slab of fucked up glory. Nice to know Moore and his offspring still know how to keep things weird.
We first heard the oddly named Mudboy on Last Visible Dog's recent mammoth six-cd Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box. Curiousity thus piqued, we're pleased to now find a Mudboy full-length cd has now also just been released by LVD (actually, this is a reissue of a recording previously put out by an even smaller label). This Rhode Island feller's woozy music, performed with home-built electronics and modified vintage keyboards (a circuit-bent church organ we're told), would be the perfect soundtrack to a creepy, sleepy sort of imaginary movie... this cd's full of ominous drones and sinister synth but it's also soothingly repetitive and goshdarn lovely. Whooshing interludes bridge the spaced out explorations of minor-key organ melodies that permeate the disc, occasionally infiltrated by field recordings and broken rhythmic glitch. It's an atmosphere of menace that's strangely warm and inviting. If Bo Hansson's ghost made Halloween music, or down on his luck Eric Malmberg (keyboardist of Sagor & Swing) was hired to play a lullabies for a monster baby...they'd sound a bit like Mudboy, perhaps. And if "this is folk music", then Cluster and John Carpenter are folk music too, 'cause Mudboy seems to be inspired by both kraut-tronics and analog fright flick scores. And we're ready to snuggle up with that monster baby...
Completing our library of cult filmmaker Jon Moritsugu's flicks he's self-released on dvd (at least as of June 2011... we're sure there'll be more to come, since he's currently working on a new film!) is this early one from 1989. It was Moritsugu's first feature length freakout! Shot on 16mm, this trashy, kitschy, ultra lo-fi, truly underground film features a fictitious female rock trio, but its cast also includes a real pig's head. Super DIY, super strange, garish and fun! With music from Bongwater, Halo Of Flies, Vomit Launch, and Gov't Issue.
And while we're diggin' '80s movies about awesome punk rawk girl groups, definitely also check out Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. A film from 1981 which often gets mentioned in the same breath as this one by indie flick aficionados. Much to Cup's delight it also finally got released on dvd a couple years ago, and we've got it in stock now too!
We made the debut from the awesomely named Necro Deathmort our Record Of The Week way back in January of 2010. As we mentioned in that review it was pretty much a no brainer, the band name to begin with, the album title (The Beat Is Necrotonic), but then the sound, heaving walls of SUNOO))) like heaviness wedded to skittery beats, blackened drones wrapped around low slung rhythms, a sort of SUNNO)) meets Squarepusher electro-metal-blackened-dubstep, beat flecked slo-mo doom bliss wreathed in hazy spaciness, all drifty and mesmerizing, psychedelic, hypnotic and HEAVY.
If anything, this new one, record number two, even more evocatively titled Music Of Bleak Origin, is exactly what you would hope for as a follow up. In some ways, the gimmick of the first record was almost enough, sludgey metal guitars AND beats, granted, those two elements, not usually good bedfellows, were deftly woven into something special, heavy enough for the metalheads, but atmospheric and rhythmic enough for everyone else, but here, it's like that first record reimagined, and re-engineered, sonically, compositionally, it's heavier, more melodic, the songs are more catchy, more actual proper songs, the beats are bigger too, with much of the record REALLY sounding like a metal dubstep record, with the sound shifting easily from doomy skitter, to lurching electronics laced lumber, at its heaviest, definitely worthy of any self respecting metalhead's attention (adventurous metalheads we might qualify), but those heavy moments are not JUST heavy, their tangled up with squelchy synths, spaced out effects, keening vocals way down in the mix, almost like they decided to add space rock to their already eclectic palette, and when they're more concerned with beats, that heaviness, and doominess, and bleak origin, seeps into every beat, every twisted loop, or fuzzy buzzy synth.
The brief opener is the perfect intro, a stuttery beat, pelted with squelches, laid over thick undulating bass, all wrapped in thick layers of buzz and long streaks of high metallic skree, a perfect chunk of electro metallic dirgery. It's not until the second track that NdM really get to let loose, starting out with a super skeletal beat, draped with fragmented melodies, hushed muted effects, a sort of spacerock Portishead, but then the big guitars come crashing in, and then the sound becomes a churning psychedelic doom, lumbering, lurching, the thick crumbling guitars wrapped in swirling synths, the vocals heavy with effects, a sort of metalgaze spacedoom that RULES.
Which makes the next track even more of a surprise, "Temple Of Juno" is straight up dubstep, like it could have been yanked off some Hyperdub 12", until the music swings in, changing the vibe to low slung and again sorta doomy, but riff with woozy synths, wordless vocals, another dirgey bit of psychedelic electro doom, that builds and builds until again, the guitars are massive, roiling and churning, now strapped to buzzy dubsteppy synths, and so it goes swinging from dubbed out metallic lumber to spacey synthy drift and back again.
"Uberlord" is total blackened guitardrone, wall of crumbling buzz, but again, liberally does with swirls of static, fractured FX, and shinnery synths, the result way more spaced out and psychedelic that heavy, which gives way to "For Your Own Good", which starts out all murky and muted and heroin house-y, gradually getting more and more dubbed out, the beats building in intensity, more buried vocals, it's not until about halfway through that the beat splinters into a way more propulsive rhythm, still motorik but more muscly, all wreathed in a synth spacey haze, hypnotic and dreamily blissed out.
"Devastating Vector", unwinds a stuttery techno beat, and some glitchy synths, and lays them out over a dense layered sprawl of ominous low end rumble and buzz, which transforms into some undulating buzzed out bass, the song a sort of dubbed out techno flecked dirge, until it gets SERIOUSLY electro, the sound wrapped in zig zagging synth melodies, dizzying and almost housey, but still the beat and the low end churns along relentlessly, it is actually sort of funky, but in a way that manages to kick ass, not what you would expect from 'funkiness' in this context at all. And of course it's Necro Deathmort, so halfway through, the song explodes in a burst of static, only to come out the other side all thick and buzzy and sludge, the bass blown out and blackened, the beat a lumbering lurch, the whole thing oozy and melty like the whole thing is some huge black mass pouring from your speakers. "Blizzard" sounds like part two of "Devastating Vector", less funky and more plodding, the synths set on swirl, lots of crunch and distortion, moody and murky and woozily washed out, the song rife with subtle melody, the vibe sort of melancholy.
"The Heat Death Of Everything" starts out all big booming beat, and keening high end drones, sounding like Jesu or Nadja or something, and then the hammer falls, and by hammer, we mean massive, thick, sludgey downtuned riffage, about as metal as these guys get, a death march trudge, all howled distorted vocals, pounding drum pummel, squealing feedback, almost industrial / mechanical, but with a Moss / Bunkur sort of ultradoom vibe as well, the sound eventually begins to glow, with subtle color, and buried melody, eventually transforming into a swirl of washed out shimmer and gauzy droned out drift, only to lead straight into the final track, "Moon", a haunting hushed outro, all muted moaning melody, and echo drenched skeletal rhythms, like a doomdronedirge Portishead, total druggy, late night chill out minimal electro-doom slowcore drift.
Fucking awesome, AGAIN. Anyone who bought the first one is DEFINITELY gonna want this one too, and anyone who somehow missed out on these guys the first time around, here's another chance. Absolutely contender for fave record of the year, metal, electronic, otherwise or BOTH.
Super swank packaging, a massive, gorgeously illustrated fold out poster sleeve, housed in a stickered PVC plastic sleeve.
This one is going to be a major contender for drifty/dreamy/droney record of the year! We really have loved everything we've heard (and seen!) from Sarah Lipstate (she is a great filmmaker as well as a blissed out drone music maker). And each release of hers seems to soar just a little higher and reach new levels of daydream hazy washed out perfection. Desert Fires might just be our favorite outing yet from her, as it drifts and drips with a drugged out disposition that wanders through the outer realms yet flows so totally serenely. It reminds us a bit of the more spaced out and glacial outings by Kawabata Makoto, Steven R. Smith and Roy Montgomery. It's remarkable the way she's able to use her guitar to create such an ethereal and tripped out ambience, similar to the sound and feel that folks like Tim Hecker and Emeralds create in their soundscapes. It's a record that makes you want to close your eyes and just get lost in its soft focus and hypnotizing waves of sound forever. Utterly beautiful!
A grim, dank blast of fetid subterranean buzzing blackness from these Satanic Swedes, originally released in 2003, Draco Sit Mihi Dux was Ondskapt's debut, and found the band channeling a black frenzy similar to other Swedish groups like Watain, Ofermod and Funeral mist, mixing murky midtempo dirges with gnarled bursts of frenzied buzz and epic black metal majesty. The sound simultaneously raw and grim, dense and thick, a tranced out discordant dissonance, that while distinctly Swedish, seemed to owe much to the French as well (Deathspell, etc.), the tracks epic and serpentine, with the guitars slipping from doomy churn to atonal grind, the drums booming and echo drenched, mathy and complex, with some seriously dizzying stretches of wild double kick, the songs epic and ever shifting, moody and murky, the vocals tending toward guttural growls, only occasionally slipping into more hellish shrieks, or even more strangely, warped, clean crooned, almost operatic vox that give the proceedings a bit of an unhinged vibe. But for all the howling blackness and churning riffage, the atmosphere here is key, suffocating and fantastically tense, ritualistic and ominously grim, with much of the record devolving into thick sprawling expanses of droned out dirgery, laced liberally with blast and buzz, but even at its buzziest and blastiest, the sound still retains much of those slower parts' inherent bleak miserablism and dense sonic murk. Awesome.
Reissue comes in a swank digipak with a big booklet, all printed metallic gold on black.
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In the same spirit as listing My Bloody Valentine's 'Loveless' a few lists past, it occurred to us that like 'Loveless' there are probably some of you who don't own 'Blizzard Of Ozz.' Or perhaps some of you probably had it when you were 15, but haven't thought
"I would certainly never claim to be an expert on metal and my eyes fairly glaze over shortly after Andee and Allan begin one of their 'which album by _____ (random metal band) is the best' arguments. Having identified with punk rock in my formative years (though my appearance and actions made me look more like an effete and dorky new-waver at best), I was scared of the big hairy guys who I associated with metal in high school. But long before all that nonsense of cliques and fitting in, I used to ride around the suburbs on my BMX bike and listen to music regardless of its association to a particular fan demographic. With my walkman strapped on, "Blizzard of Ozz" was my soundtrack while I made my rounds checking the pay phones and newspaper machines for change. And I'm certain that I wasn't the only young suburbanite who wandered the streets plugged into Ozzy. As his first solo album away from Black Sabbath, the million-plus-selling "Blizzard of Ozz" demonstrated that Ozzy had a broader appeal than his earlier efforts with the group had. Over 20 years later, after people get over their ironic chuckling, this album still holds its ground. Those of you who've now lost or worn out your old cassettes and those of you who never gave the post-Sabbath Ozzy a chance should pick this 24-bit remastered and low priced classic up immediately!"
Also, if you were disappointed by the totally pointless / throwaway bonus tracks on the recent Judas Priest reissues (and let's be honest, 90% of bonus tracks on *all* reissues), you won't be here. The bonus track, 'You Lookin' At Me Lookin' At You,' is more kick ass-catchy metal and seems like it would have fit perfectly on the original album. A total timeless classic, for metalheads and non-metalheads alike.
James Pants last record, Seven Seals was a favorite for some of us here and while we thought he was going to venture into some far-off new territory with this follow-up full length, we were pleasantly surprised, though a bit perplexed, that he didn't. The songs still ride the gloomy new wave funk of Seven Seals, but it comes across as something you'd hear from the Captured Tracks label more than a Stones Throw release. The feel is less cosmically thematic and instead concentrates on truly well-crafted songs and catchy pop hooks among the murky lo-fi synth filtration. He has mentioned in interviews that he was inspired by Twin Peaks and '50s diner sounds, and there is definitely a creepy retro edge to even the most poppy songs, with elements of dubby ambiance and occasionally ethereal vocals provided by Lucrecia Dalt. But the more we listen to this, the more we're liking it even more than the last record. Its haunting pop-funk transmissions take time to weave their spell, but once transfixed, it's hard to pull away!
Ever wonder what a SUNNO))) record might sound like if instead of guitars and amps, it was just vocals? Well wonder no more. This new record on Ideologic Organ, a new label run by SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley, offers up an incredible collection of ritualistic Tibetan vocal music, from a Russian group called Phurpa, and is easily the darkest, heaviest, most intense and breathtaking record we've heard in ages.
Anyone who has heard Tuvan throat singers live, or experienced the chanted prayers of Tibetan monks, know the power of the human voice, the mysterious harmonies, and strange overtones, with Tuvan's adding an extra tone, each vocalist creating his own harmonies, or Tibetan monks creating specific overtones, much like the sounds captured here, but these voices while similar to classic Tibetan Buddhist rites, are actually unike any monastic chanting we've ever heard.
If you edited out the breaths, this could be some fucked up Lustmordian drone record, a thick near static wall of rumbling, reverberating sound, but the voices here are so organic, so pure and emotional, so much more intense and moving than any sort of synthesized sound, and with all five members singing, it creates this deep, lustrous, impossibly dark and downright scary, rib cage rattling harmony, a low end thrum that is so powerful, but not just sonically, these sounds connect on a much deeper level because of their pure humanity, no instruments, no effects, no amplification, this is some deep and primal soundmaking, similar sounds have been created and used for worship and mediation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, it's the first instrument, the human voice, here pushed to its limit, creating a sound few can conceive of, a sound conjured up from the lungs, the heart, the soul, devastatingly powerful, and impossibly massive. The pieces here augmented with traditional Tibetan instruments, but usually only to introduce a song, otherwise, it's a symphony of rumbling tones and deep vocal thrum, the sound darkly meditative, and mysteriously mesmerizing, occasionally building into a sound heavier than ANY metal record you've ever heard, and when the chants finally stop, it's like a vacuum, all the air sucked out of the room, the utter and inevitable silence that follows such deep devotional sound.
So utterly gorgeous, totally and breathtakingly mesmerizing, consider this a should have been Record Of The Week. Absolutely a new favorite, and again, just about the most amazing sounds we've ever heard...
One of THEE most gorgeous cover designs we've seen from O'Malley yet, one that perfectly suits the music, a faded out image of a hand, holding some sort of mysterious ritualistic implement, an instrument perhaps, in front of a barely visible hooded figure, a truly haunting image, with Cyrillic characters printed over the top in a clear reflective spot varnish, the records housed in printed inner sleeves with stark black and white images of the cloaked members of the group, all seated on a stage, surrounded by their instruments, so completely visually breathtaking.
Ok, here's this list's special treat for all you proto-metal fans: a reissue of obscure, early '70s UK hard rockers Pluto! This digipack reissue isn't new, it came out a few years back but we missed it at the time - and in fact, as far as we know it's out of print (the whole Breathless label being now defunct), but we found a handful of these at one of our suppliers and grabbed 'em all. So, they won't be here for long, act fast if you want one.
Pluto's sole album was originally released in 1971 (yes, once again, 1971 completely blows our minds, good grief!) on Pye's progressive, "underground" Dawn label. But the type of progressive rock Pluto plays isn't, y'know, like Yes or Genesis, or Comus for that matter (whose First Utterance was also a '71 Dawn release). No flutes or tricky time signatures. They just play poppy, heavy rock and aren't afraid to boogie. This digipack reissue contains 13 tracks in all, 3 of 'em non-album bonus cuts from singles.
Bonus single track "I Really Want It" is possibly the star of the show, it's been comped several times, on Dawn anthologies and so forth, and for good reason, with suggestive lyrics that are well matched by the song's slow, stomping groove. But there's LOTS of good songs here, from cowbell knockin' fuzz rockers to some more melodic, ballady, even Beatlesy ones.
Recommended for folks into the likes of early Wishbone Ash, Orang-utan, Leaf Hound, Human Beast, Power Of Zeus, Three Man Army, Luv Machine, Bubble Puppy, and other vintage, semi-heavy obscurities.
We made Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss our Record Of The Week back in October of 2010, and for good reason, it was a fantastic collection of classic old school power pop, dreamy tripped out psychedelia and lo-fi bedroom 4 trackery, all woven into a blurred murky bliss out, a gorgeously confusional record that fused tape hiss and weird sonic dropouts to some of THEE catchiest classic rock sounding pop music EVER, all peppered with long stretches of hazy bongsmoke psych guitar trip outs. And while the records since have been great as well, they seemed to focus more on the heavy psych side of PH's sound, a blown out white noise psychedelia that had more in common with Fushitsusha or White Heaven or Liquorball, that the oddball power pop and home brewed bedroom folk that PSA referenced, but even then, PH couldn't seem to shrug off that keen pop sense entirely, which is what made those records so goddamn good as well.
But we're happy to report, on this new ep, PH have returned to that murky washed out classic pop that had us so smitten in the first place. Just give opener "Voices" a listen, all hazy humid guitar buzz, tangled psychedelia, muted and smeared into hazy swirls, the vocals lazy and laid back, a woozy drawl, the melodies impossibly lilting and catchy, a practically perfect slab of slo-mo psychedelic power pop dirgery, complete with lots of "ooooooh"s and plenty of wah wah'd guitar leads, same with track number two "The Hoodoo", a gorgeous heady collision of squiggly distorted guitar leads, warm washed out riffage, simple pounding rhythms, and those laid back vox, the vibe here a bit more Stooges-y but still distinctly classic poppy, especially with the crazy catchy chorus and more "oooooh" falsetto back up vocals.
And so it goes, the whole record unfurls in a hazy, blurry, druggy power pop haze, almost like an ACTUAL power pop record, only playing slightly too slowly, on a busted up old turntable, woozy and warped, the lo-fi murk and sonic warble only adding more warmth and druggy dreaminess to Purling Hiss's already blissed out power pop psychedelia, and sort of the perfect sonic addendum to their (his) beloved Public Service Announcement record!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Includes a download coupon!
No, it's not a typo, that's a Q and not a C, but this is in fact a new recording featuring Roedelius of Cluster fame, alongside new sonic sidekick Onnen Block. Block has served as musical assistant and audio engineer for the Berlin Philharmonic, and has collaborated with the likes of Zeitkratzer and Christina Kubisch. Together these two have created a record that is so ominous and engaging in its tones and texture. It continues to blow us away, how even well into his '70s, Roedelius continues to create such compelling, thoughtful and dynamic music. What's equally inspiring is his openness to collaboration, this time working with someone forty years his junior. (Hopefully Cluster partner Dieter Moebius is cool with the "Q").
The sounds of Fragen evoke a sense of slight unease, with a beauty laying just beneath the surface yet still cloaked in a mysterious darkness. It's easy to make work that makes a listener feel either happy or sad, but Roedelius has shown over the years a mastery that transcends the black and white and moves boldly into something so much more fluid and wholly satisfying. A stunning outing, and without a doubt one of the best electronic albums of the year!
Rainbow Ffolly? Sounds ffunny... maybe ffantastic! And it is, for what it is. For those who dig Sgt. Peppery British pop-psych from the '60s, what you've got here is a kaleidoscopic pop concoction whipped up in 1968 by some bright, Beatles-lovin' students who sent their demo in to Parlophone, hoping to score a record deal. The label ended up releasing their demo on vinyl just as it was, which is what we've got here, reissued on cd with a couple of bonus tracks. It's a bit like Yellow Submarine on a student budget, complete with bits of silly dialogue interspersed amidst the songs, but it has some fuzz bite to it as well. Definitely a colorful curiousity (and not just the cover) from a ffar-off but still ffabulous time, in the vein of the Beatles, Blossom Toes, Kaleidoscope, early Floyd...
When the fuck is Raionbashi going to release a proper album again? Daniel Lowenbruck (aka Raionbashi) has been releasing his work on various splits over the past couple of years following a 2006 lp on Hanson that nobody seems to have anymore. Even then, much of his output has been released in tiny editions, and this split on Senufo Edition is in an edition of 280 copies. Raionbashi operates within the transgressive art collective Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and G*Park, all of which mine the nether regions of the id for intensely claustrophobic collages of grim noise and post-Viennese Aktionism. For this split, Lowenbruck slumps into an occult almost doom-laden piece of ritualist gong strikes that certainly look back to Coil's How To Destroy Angels, but Lowenbruck slowly ramps up a smoldering, hypnotic squallor of discordant strings and uneasy field recordings with snippets of muffled vocals which seem in the midst of an unknown criminal act. Brilliantly creepy.
Daniela Fromberg & Stefan Roigk are multimedia artists hailing from Berlin, although little can be found regarding their intentions beyond their mutually crappy websites that only sport pretty pictures of their un-contextualized installations. Whatever these people are up to, it's a damn effective piece of acousmatic collage work, reflective in classic sound collage techniques found on Nurse With Wound's Homotopy To Marie, through the various bumps in the night and funhouse sound effects turned horrific and nightmarish. Arcane, oblique, haunting, and captivating. Fromberg & Roigk are an excellent foil to Raionbashi's dark ritual, and certainly should muster something else in the near future. Regardless, this is an excellent album of foreboding musique concrete.
For some reason, we've never actually reviewed any records by UK doom/sludge combo Ramesses, a band featuring two former Electric Wizards, but who will remain most infamous around these parts for one of THEE most disastrous, and thus inadvertently brilliant and amazing, performances we have ever witnessed. It was an Electric Wizard show in fact, when the Ramesses guys were still members (we later joked that it could have been THAT show that was the beginning of the end for that incarnation of EW), a complete drug addled sonic meltdown, with a drummer barely able to play, until it was time to stop (when EW's guitarist Jus Osborn stormed off the stage), at which point said drummer chose to continue playing, all on his own. Woozy and warped and constantly on the verge of collapse, at the time it was sort of appalling, but in retrospect, that sort of complete chaos and demented sonic mayhem seems pretty appealing, and while we may not have reviewed any of the Ramesses records, the metalheads around here (at least some of them) do dig these guys a lot. They're like a murkier, muddier, less catchy, less epic, more sludgey, dirge-y Electric Wizard, which totally makes sense. Cut from the same cloth as the 'Wizard, but with less emphasis on Sabbathy riffage, hooks and melodies, and of course those wailing refrains, and more on grim abject atmosphere and pure doom-ic energy, which these guys, and this new record, has in spades.
The music is a churning downtuned crusty filthy ultra doom, the rhythms drag and creep, the melodies moan hauntingly, the vocals ooze from gurgly growl to keening plaintive wail, the songs lumbering doom metal trudges, that are often so low and sludgey, the guitars sound like they're melting, the sound weirdly muddy and lo-fi, crumbling distortion, all wreathed in a blackly psychedelic haze, some of the tracks all droney and tranced out, cyclical and hypnotic, while others are almost punk, in their blackened doom ferocity. Barring occasional forays in spidery melody and clean guitar drift, the majority of Possessed By The Rise Of Majik find these guys trawling the dankest recesses of the doom-ed underworld, spinning sticky black webs of dark and druggy, bleak and blackened dooooooooooom. Fans of Electric Wizard should definitely give these guys a try, but anyone into filthy, plodding, psychedelic slow and low heaviness, this is the shit. From the same label that brought us the last Bong!
Ralf Wehowsky (aka RLW) has been shapeshifting sound since the early '80s, when he was in a dada / art-punk outfit called P.D., which later morphed into P16.D4, who earned quite a reputation throughout the '80s thanks to their aggressive adaptation of musique concrete techniques filtered through a DIY industrial-noise-punk lens, which landed them some highly influential albums on RRR and Selektion. P.D. emerged more from a 'band' context with their pieces shaped from sessions of synth, bass, drums, and noise and then cut up with cacophonic abandon. As P.D., the project could be seen as coming out of the same scene as Einsturzende Neubauten, Der Plan, and Die Todliche Doris, but by the time they morphed into P16.D4, they were an entirely different beast.
These recordings from RLW represent something of a transition period between P.D. and P16.D4 with some of this material getting thoroughly altered on the first P16.D4 album, recorded in late 1980 and early 1981. The album is split into two sessions, both offering fucked-up space-jazz workout with sporadic barked Germanic vocals and swells of feedback countering the post-Krautrock vibes, skittering drums, and noir basslines. One can think of something sort of like the Plastic People Of The Universe or the oddball Factory band Crawling Chaos or maybe even a super-loose Captain Beefheart filtered through a Kraut-punk exploration and expressionism. It's pretty hard to pin any of this down. Wehowsky didn't do much to these tapes in terms of his signature jagged cut-n-splice techniques aside from some seasick inducing tape reverse tricks, but it is very interesting to hear where RLW and crew would begin their sessions. This would certainly appeal to those keen on the more experimental avenues of the Berlin punk scene. Limited to 100 copies.
Relisting this in case you missed it on our mystery themed in-between list last week (we gave it a new, expanded write-up just for that).
"Japanese duo on John Zorn's domestic label." Good grief, is that ALL we wrote about this when we first listed it way back when (1995)?? Might as well say that the Beatles were "a British quartet on London-based label Parlophone". There's a lot more to the story.
First off, bass and drums two piece Ruins are/were probably our favorite crazy underground Japanese band, next to the Boredoms. Drummer/mastermind Tatsuya Yoshida is a musical genius, and if you've been paying attention to our site over the years you're read our raves about many, many of his various albums and projects, from Ruins to Koenjiyyakei to Korekyojinn to Zubi Zuva... etc., etc.
Hyderomastgroningem (that's a mouthful!) was the first Ruins disc to come out on Tzadik. It features bassist Ryuichi Masuda, who also played on their out of print classic Burning Stone (1992), and may in fact be the only Masuda-era Ruins disc still in print, as well as being the last one that he appeared on (Ruins has had several bassists over the years, all of them amazing, but Masuda was our fave).
There's 20 tracks here of the Ruins' complex, heavy, stripped down Magma-inspired prog madness, some continuing the catchiness of Burning Stone and earlier works, others getting more imrov-like and experimental and noisy... super distorted bass, faux-operatic (and nonsensical) vocals, Yoshida's usual octopoidal drumming, repetitive rhythmic bludgeon... it's all here, along with unique touches to this album, like a track where Masuda plays a radio, for instance.
Debut from this Seattle trio, and damn if this maybe doesn't sound like it should have come out on Slumberland. In fact, it almost sounds like it could have come out on Slumberland way back in the day. Or maybe Spinart. A dreamy collection of jangly, stripped down classic twee pop, that most definitely references Black Tambourine, Tiger Trap, The Softies, Velocity Girl, Aislers Set, and the rest, and sounds right at home amongst the new wave of sonically similar popkids: Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Best Coast, Brave Irene, Dum Dum Girls, Gold-Bears, Kids On A Crime Spree, Girls Names, Summer Cats and all the rest. Hazy reverby female vocals, sweet major key melodies, a little bit surfy, the rhythms simple and softly propulsive, total sixties girl group worship via K-records twee-pop, opener "Dreaming" is pretty irresistible, a perfect chunk of summery feel good dream pop, the rest of the record not far behind, washed out and hazy, shimmery and jangly, the vocals hushed and angelic, the guitars warm and crystalline, all wound up into some seriously soft focus, reverb soaked, summer sun, dream pop bliss.
Ever hear of Warren Ng? We hadn't either. At least until THREE separate DOUBLE cds showed up in the shop, two by his blissed out ambient guitardrone outfit Somnambulists, one by his old school post rock combo This Invitation. SIX DISCS, all of them pretty dang amazing, and pretty dang cheap too. We imagine if there's any justice in the world, Warren Ng won't remain unknown for much longer. And we're happy to do our part.
On the sprawling double disc At Daybreak The First Greyness To Emerge, Ng in his guise as Somnambulists, using just guitar, percussion and radio, crafts some deeply effecting, and darkly seductive, but most notably, not at all tranquil guitar ambience. Where other dronelords and soundscapers smooth everything out into shapeless shimmers, and washed out blurs, the music of Somnambulists is actually riffy, it's more like a solo guitar record, that an ambient drone record, sprawling epic tracks that are ever shifting expanses of riff and licks, of tangled melodies and woozy textures, the sounds chug and churn and jangle and swoop, backwards guitars wrap around chiming tones, warm muted pulses percolate beneath thick crumbling low end swells, at times verging on almost rocking, but more often slipping into something a bit more trancelike and softly psychedelic. Creeping skeletal minimalism gives way to jagged angular crunch, which in turn gives way to warped woozy swirls of mumbled melody, haunting and dreamy, soothing and spacey, Ng masterfully weaves lush sonic tapestries that manage the impossible task of actually sounding like someone playing the guitar (or guitars), while subtly effecting and transforming those guitar sounds, so that the whole is so much more than simply a 'guitar record'. Instead, it becomes some sort of psychedelic guitar minimalism. Ng's instrumental guitarscapery definitely sits comfortably along other guitarrorists like Roy Montgomery, Loren Mazzacan Connors, Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Rafael Toral etc.
Two discs, nearly two hours, all for $12, hard not to recommend buying both Somnambulists double discs (this and The Invisible Score, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), they're both incredible, and almost sound like two parts of the same sprawling avant guitar songsuite. So good!!
Ever hear of Warren Ng? We hadn't either. At least until THREE separate DOUBLE cds showed up in the shop, two by his blissed out ambient drone outfit Somnambulists, one by his old school post rock combo This Invitation. SIX DISCS, all of them pretty dang amazing, and pretty dang cheap too. We imagine if there's any justice in the world, Warren Ng won't remain unknown for much longer. And we're happy to do our part.
On the expansive sprawling two disc set The Invisible Score, Ng trades in the relatively spare instrumentation of his OTHER double disc Somnambulists album, At Daybreak The First Greyness To Emerge, and expands his arsenal to include Moog, Farfisa and bass along with percussion and guitar. The results are similarly stellar, a series of lush layered guitarscapes, a very particular type of guitar ambience, that's barely ambient at all, instead, Ng's guitar emits dreamlike tangles of melody, and lets them float atop keening looped high end shimmer, or lets unfurl a slow, smoldering sort of psychedelic drift, hauntingly melodic, alternately strummed and finger picked, gnarled riffs give way to spidery tendrils of sound, the sound hushed and minimal one second, heaving and distorted the next, occasional churning textured drones are peppered with simple crashing cymbals, gorgeous hushed drifts explode into abstract Godspeed style drumless-post rock that eventually splinters into shimmery cascades of metallic buzz and muted clatter and clang, the songs developing slowly, blossoming gradually, lush and dreamlike, emitting a warm sonic glow, that sometimes bathes the sound in its radiant light, and other times is swallowed up by dense waves of crumbling psychedelia. The Invisible Score is definitely experimental, but impossibly melodic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the other Somnambulists disc for sure.
Ng's instrumental guitarscapery definitely sits comfortably along other guitarrorists like Roy Montgomery, Loren Mazzacan Connors, Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Rafael Toral etc.
Two discs, nearly two hours, all for $12, hard not to recommend buying both Somnambulists double discs (this and At Daybreak The First Greyness To Emerge), they're both incredible, and really almost sound like two parts of the same sprawling avant guitar songsuite. So good!!
A few weeks ago, The New York Times had an article about San Francisco's burgeoning garage rock scene with a big focus on John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, Tim Cohen of The Fresh and Onlys, and Sonny Smith of Sonny and the Sunsets. Sonny Smith is more of the wild card of the three, zig zagging into country, rock-a-billy and early rock styles, but wherever he goes, the man can sure write a mean hook. Hit after Hit is another great selection of songs that wouldn't sound out of place in an early 1960's jukebox. With great girl group harmonies (provided by The Sandwitches) and lo-fi and catchy freakbeat rhythms, Sonny and The Sunsets, like their more queer counterparts, Hunx and His Punx and Shannon and The Clams, are mining those great old sounds for brand new ears.
Remember that special summer themed in-between list we sent out at the beginning of June? We ordered in copies of this album just to be on it (in lieu of a Van Halen record, since we'd never reviewed VH) and we even mentioned it in the list intro, but then somehow left it off the actual list, whoops!! But since we have it, and it's now officially summer, we figured we'd relist it on this list, definitely a recommended ol' fave from a band that may have flown under a lot of folks' radar. Here's what we wrote about this when we first listed it back in 2003...
Wow, we were surprised and pleased to see the release of a new The(e) Speaking Canaries album! It's been quite a while since 1995's Songs For The Terrestrially Challenged, but they've still got it, in fact, this may be even better than we remembered 'em being. The Speaking Canaries, for those for whom 1995 is a blur, are a band from Pittsburgh featuring the talents of Don Caballero drummer Damon Che. Che plays drums on half the album, but the whole disc showcases his just-as-impressive ability with the electric guitar. His nimble, Eddie Van Halen styled guitar licks are distorted, yet cleanly chiming n' gorgeous. Yep, we said Eddie Van Halen. If you've never heard The Speaking Canaries before you're in for a surprise - Van Halen is an obvious, huge influence. And Damon even lets off some some jubilant David Lee Roth yelps. But, don't get the wrong idea, this is a melodic indie-pop record, not any sort of retro '80s hair metal throwback. The songs are somewhat complex and mathy (as you'd expect from a Don Cabber) but have pop hooks a la Foo Fighters. And these days, after after Trans Am and The Fucking Champs and so forth, the idea of heavy metal guitar heroes in an indie-rock context isn't so novel. It's just good music. Damon and company kick ass on this record, from the three-minute track one (with the excellent title "I Wear Glasses in the Most Brutal Sport Ever Invented") to the disc's hidden bonus track finale. Very recommended!
Wow, exciting times at our shop. Even several of the Starfuckers' biggest fans here at AQ had never heard THIS before, this crucial Italian band's debut lp originally released in 1990. As promised in our Record Of The Week review of the Starfuckers' Ordine '91-'96 collection just a few lists ago, the Holy Mountain label (who know their secret history of rock and roll all right!) has now done a reissue of this early Starfuckers platter, a dark slab of Stooges worship containing a dirty dozen tracks so trance inducingly raw n' powerful we can only imagine the entire band were stripped shirtless, bare torsos smeared with peanut butter, Iggy Stooge style, whilst recording this. The blurry black and white cover photo suggests as much, though the peanut butter is not visible...
If, at our recommendation, you picked up the Ordine cd (which is out of stock at the moment - we have more copies coming from Italy soon, never fear) then you have already heard a handful of early Starfuckers rockers from before they went totally gonzoid experimental. The six songs from the band's 1991 Brodo Di Cagne Strategico mini-lp included on Ordine demonstrated that despite their ultimately unique, counter-intuitive, almost "anti-rock" sound for which we consider the band geniuses, they surely had their roots in "actual" rock and roll, very much Stooges influenced (hence the "Funhausen" tag that Holy Mountain head honcho JW likes to apply to 'em). If you liked the Brodo Di Cagne Strategico stuff, then Metallic Diseases is for you. And anyway, how can it not be great with that title?
Relentless punked out noiserock riff repetition that's fuzz laden, feedback filled, with drawling English language vox all sneered and snotty, and song titles like "Dead Metal City Blues", "Western Man", "Cold White Cancer", and "U.S.A.". Godly garagey stuff for sure, loud and pounding. There's maybe a jangling, poppier side to some of it ("Shake Off" in particular), and that's a real cool time too, but what you've got mainly here is a down on the street death trip, Starfuckers on a search and destroy mission to be your dog... this left hand path eventually leads them to the inclusion of some Funhouse style saxophone squawk, skronk, squall on the penultimate track "Flower Lover", and thence to the seven and a half minute final cut, "Grado Zero", the only song sung in Italian, and heavily laced with wiggy electronic FX, which of the trax here most strongly foreshadows the Starfuckers' later experimental direction, it could have appeared on Sinistri alongside "Ordine Pubblico" for sure.
So, it's as if the Starfuckers guys got together in 1990, and decided, ok, sure, we'll make rock and roll, yeah, let's channel the Stooges, 'cause we want to START at the END, and then push past those limits. So, once they had manifested themselves as the apotheosis of "rock" at its punkest and rockest, on Metallic Diseases and Brodo Di Cagne Strategico, they then moved on to the next phase of their career to utterly DECONSTRUCT "rock" on the Sinistri album and beyond... Why they did this, how they decided these things, what happened? We don't know, we can only wonder.
But, while cool and interesting and all, that doesn't even matter. Let's put it this way, if Metallic Diseases was the only record that the Starfuckers ever did, its reissue would/should still be hailed as the discovery of a long lost gem of timeless Stoogified psychedelic ugly-noise-punk-rawk that belongs up there with the output/outbursts of such acts as Union Carbide Productions, The Heads, Spacemen 3, High Rise, Brainbombs, and (more recently) Vincent Black Shadow. That it was only the beginning of the Starfuckers' sonic explorations, a program of experimental rock n' roll reinvention that took them somewhere that no other band has ever gone, makes it even more special...
Totally recommended, as if you couldn't tell. Sadly for those of us who happen to prefer cds, this reissue is vinyl-only, although it does include a download code for mp3's.
Starter were a Swiss synth-pop outfit, founded by the fashion designer Francis Foss with Jet Harbour and Grauzone's Claudine Chirac. They released one album back in 1981 of super minimal arrangements for synths, drum machine, and Foss' androgynous vocal stylings that would alternate between a rockabilly croon and a theatrically cabaret snarl. His voice is not all that dissimilar to Bettina Koster of Malaria with its Teutonic biting delivery; and musically, the band takes after Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, and the Neue Deutsche Welle sound in an electronic pastiche of poppy rock action, with a new wave twist of course. The album's opener "Lunapark" is a pretty simple rock-chord progression marched out on synths, video game sound effects, and Foss' amphetamine-laced pogo-pop vocals. "Is This Love" is a colder affair with sci-fi synth percolations. "Baby" is almost a Roy Orbison torchsong, with Foss crooning above the simple synth lullaby. This track has got to be a tongue-n-cheek parody in the style of Nina Hagen, given how overwrought Foss delivers the vocals and how toy-like and simple the synths are. This lp comes with an extra track "Victim" produced in 1985 when Starter reformed with just Foss and synth programmer Gary Grey, working in more of an Italo-Disco vein by way of Yello's "Bostich." As with all of the Dark Entries reissues, the production quality through the mastering and the artwork reproduction is top notch!
The Starving Weirdos (and their handful of off-shoots) have made the rounds of pretty much all the cool labels around the world... Olde English Spelling Bee, Blackest Rainbow, Root Strata, Not Not Fun, Helen Scarsdale, Weird Forest, Amish, etc. Now, they return to Bo Weavil, a label mostly known for their outsider folk recordings, although the Weirdos certainly fit nicely next to the hillbilly ragas of Henry Flynt, who's got a couple of his scratchy pieces of minimalism on Bo Weavil as well. Out of the foggy constructions from primitive horns blurting prolonged atonal blasts and creeping VHS-horror melodies, the Weirdos kick out a rolling, mid-tempo breakbeat to gird their psychedelic minefields and delay-crusted clatter. It almost sounds like a witch-house track, but rendered with an apocalyptic ritualism that would have fit right into a Psychic TV jam circa Unclean or Dreams Less Sweet. A similarly creepy atmosphere is cast on "Flowing Without Rest, Forever Onward" through the intertwining loops of slasher noise, cracks of thunder, squalls of feedback, more horror-score minor key melodies, and tumbling drum fills. If Godzilla were ever to wreak havoc on the Eureka Bay in Humboldt county, the Weirdos have already mustered the perfect soundtrack. A blinding transcendence of squalid hums and suspended atonal mutterings emerges from the junkyard Tuvan throatsong of "Contemplation Of The Setting Sun," before descending into a far more mysterious rattling of chains, bellowing horns, and synthetic notes clashing at the bottom of some murky catacomb. This dark trip is limited to 350 copies, all housed in silkscreened covers.
A few weeks ago, we listed Yma Sumac's last commercial effort, the incredibly awesome and strange lounge-rock hybrid from 1971, Miracles. So we thought this week we should balance that with her first major label release, the stunning proto-exotica of Voice of The Xtabay from 1950. Recorded with Les Baxter a full two years before his Ritual of The Savage album (which is widely considered to be the cornerstone release of the lounge exotica trend with many tiki bars and hula dance lessons to follow in its wake), Voice of the Xtabay still has an air of being somewhat authentic sounding, namely due to the otherworldly quality of Sumac's four and a half octave vocal range and her incredibly striking beauty that made it easily believable that she was actually descended from a true Inca princess (whether that was true or not has always been debated throughout her life and career and still persists after her death). A lush Technicolor fantasy of erupting volcanoes, chanting virgin maidens and jungle animal sounds, gorgeously orchestrated, Voice of The Xtabay is truly a unique record. The cd also features all the tracks from her Inca Taqui record from 1953 with her husband Moises Vivanco taking over the composer duties. Transcendent!
We got in a limited number (five) of an exclusive Tamaryn tour t-shirt from their recent voyages with the Raveonettes! Featuring an outtake image from the cover shoot of The Waves, the shirt is screened on white cotton and won't be around for very long. Due to the limited nature of the shirt, it's ONLY available in size MEDIUM and we will NEVER have any more than we currently do, sorry petite and large people! Don't miss out, medium folks.
Morbid Angel are on the cover, no apologies from them. Inside, also, Ulver, Autopsy, Fucked Up, Hell, Amorphis, Portrait, Brutal Truth, 40 Watt Sun, Enforcer, and (among other things) a "Crust Special" featuring Amebix, Gallhammer and Trap Them. Plus the usual reviews, news, and ads for crazy European festivals we'd love to attend. Stuck to the cover, a cd sampler w/ trax by Arch Enemy, Gallhammer, Dark Castle, In Solitude, Black Crucifixion, Portrait, and others...
Ever hear of Warren Ng? We hadn't either. At least until THREE separate DOUBLE cds showed up in the shop, two by his blissed out ambient guitardrone outfit Somnambulists, one by his old school post rock combo This Invitation. SIX DISCS, all of them pretty dang amazing, and pretty dang cheap too. We imagine if there's any justice in the world, Warren Ng won't remain unknown for much longer. And we're happy to do our part.
This Invitation is the duo of Ng and Casey Farnum, and Sunless / Ellipses, Lapses, And Collapses is their second full length. Unlike the gorgeous guitarscapery of Ng's Somnambulists releases (both reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), This Invitation is more of a proper band, and pretty much from the get-go, triggered our warm fuzzies for "old" post-rock instrumentals from the likes of David Pajo, Tarentel, Tristeza, Village Of Savoonga.
Hushed vocals waft above loosely layered cyclical guitar lines and droney soundscapes, everything is hazy and washed out, warm and woozy and so dreamy, some of the tracks gradually unfurl sun dappled sprawls of soft focus psych folk drift, while others are softly propulsive jangle rock meanders, spidery melodies curl around sweetly layered chordal thrum, there's a definite dreamy/druggy Galaxie 500 vibe happening to, with much of Ng's distinctive guitar playing in Somnambulists still present, but blurred into something much more gauzy and hushed. Sprawling fields of soft smolder and swirling skitter seem to stretch out forever, melancholy and moody, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and even though this is more properly arranged as a 'rock' record, it's still so abstract and swoonsomely slowcore-y, that much of the record plays out like another of Ng's gorgeous guitarscapes, just in this case, they're fashioned into shapes a bit more song-like, but only just a bit.
Pastoral, soothing and wistful and so good.
In the reviews of Ng's Somnambulists double discs, we suggest buying both, since they're pretty cheap for doubles, and are both incredible, but the more we listen to this, we feel like we should now suggest buying all three! Six discs, nearly six hours, all for $36, hard not to recommend buying all three, they're all incredible, and do actually sound like they belong together, a hazy drone-psych post-rock, guitarscape songsuite.
Perhaps this could be seen as a response to all of the haunted ballroom and sunken ship metaphors that The Caretaker has been producing through his reverb-soaked appropriations of old '78s, as Ocean Drama creaks and crawls with tactile, crusty sounds that give this album a waterlogged mustiness. In fact The Tobacconists' Scott Foust collected numerous recordings from a boat, which Foust and fellow Tobacconist Frans De Waard manipulated into a poetic excursion of overlapping creaks, groaning tension put upon the wooden hull, gentile lapping of the water upon the underbelly of the boat, and various clatterings of unknown origin. Upon this stream of activity, the two build a slow-moving melodic excursion, which could have originated from a particular vibration from that ship's guy-wire to the mast, or then again it could be from a guitar (as the sound does have a lovely resonant vibrato about it that isn't too far from a low-slung Morricone guitar swagger). As the guitar / tension-wire melody dissolves after about 25 minutes, the various creaks and groans move to the foreground above a glassine drone which fragments into a series of precious synth-tone melodies, only to sink into the depths of the ocean below.
Both Scott Foust and Frans De Waard have been around forever, with too many projects to even begin to list (even for us!); but the two will be releasing an album as The Tobacconists through Hanson sometime in the future. The material on Ocean Drama is pretty damn amazing, and stands as some of the best work that either has done throughout their career.
The latest criminally limited release from this Natural Snow Buildings offshoot, the work of one half of the NSB duo, Mehdi Amaziane, he of the impossibly high and surprisingly feminine voice, which is in full effect here, soaring and lovely, sounding like some lost seventies folk songstress, while the music underneath definitely touches on classic folk and Appalachia, but quickly moves beyond, culminating in the 25 minute folkdrone epic that takes up all of side two, but more on that in a second.
The first half is a collection of shorter songs, beginning with a smoldering prismatic buzz, a layered raga like drone, slow building and subtly epic, which gives way to something much more stripped down, tinkling folk melodies and Amaziane's sweetly crooned vocals. The sound so dreamy and sun dappled and washed out. The record switches gears and suddenly our ears are treated to thick swaths of soft noise drift, swirling voices, a little bit noisy, but it gradually grows more and more orchestral and melodic, before settling down into some tranquil new age shimmer, eventually slipping into delicate Appalachian dreamfolk, crystalline guitar figures, and that voice again, so dreamy and divine.
Then the flipside, and the aforementioned epic 25 minute sidelong dreamdrone, a constantly shifting dronescape rife with swirls of warm whirring buzz, shimmery streaks of fuzzed out melody, soft focus chordal smears, layers and overtones, woozy and softly psychedelic, flecked with fragments of steel string guitar, disembodied voices, a gloriously dense and ultra lovely ur-drone that sounds like a folkier, prettier, more delicate Birchville Cat Motel, droney and dreamy and divine.
Pressed on incredibly heavy vinyl, in a tip on style sleeve so thick, it's almost impossible to get the vinyl out, LIMITED TO 979 COPIES this time around, we got a whole bunch, but 979 is still apparently not nearly enough as once our copies go, this record will most likely be sold out at the label...
Another fantastic collection of far out seventies South East Asian grooves, from rock to garage to surf music, once again HEAVILY influenced by American and European music of the time, although this time we do in fact mean HEAVILY, as this collection features various hard rocking jams from Asia, recorded in the seventies, all songs and sounds that lean toward the heavy, the psychedelic, the metallic even, with lots of fuzzy guitars, pounding drums, distorted horns, throbbing basslines, not to mention some wholesale borrowing from popular rock songs of the time, all given a distinctly Asian sonic makeover, mixing traditional folk vocals with thick super distorted guitar crunch, or wrapping wild psychedelic guitar freakouts around funky grooves and more traditional sounding vox.
This strange hybrid is probably best exemplified by the killer opener, Sroeng Santi's "Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng", which essentially swipes that oh so iconic riff from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man", without doing much to it at all, but then mixes it with a dark slithery low slung verse, all broody and fuzzy and a little bit sinister, with those totally irresistible Thai vocals, which as we've mentioned before, most of us heard for the first time via the Butthole Surfers' track "Kuntz", in fact, "Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng" sorta sounds like an "Iron Man" / "Kuntz" mash up, and it RULES.
Then there's Jalwal, Annie & Geerasak's "Klug Tum La", which is essentially a Thai version of Chicago's "25 or 6 To 4", that immediately recognizable riff, SERIOUSLY fuzzy and crunchy, and then the horns, fantastically atonal and harsh, adding a strange vibe, as do the sweet crooned female vox, which occasionally slip into a powerful witchy howl, there's also a seriously fierce, super distorted psychedelic guitar solo.
Another one of our favorites is Teungjai Bunpraruksa's "Kanong Krung" which is just crazy and over the top and so good, pounding and fuzzy and groovy, with wild horns, twangy guitars, frantic drumming, a fat fuzzy main riff, super strange girl gang vocals, all distorted and often erupting into wails and screams, a total free for all party anthem for sure.
A lot of the tracks here are not necessarily super heavy, but they all share a certain something, whether it's a bit of fuzzy guitar, or some wild chaotic drumming, or some psychedelic guitar leads, and the sounds do vary dramatically, with many on first listen sounding like they could have come from any of the other recent Thai and Asian comps from Sublime Frequencies or Subliminal Sounds, whether it's twang flecked Morricone-esque moodiness, or Ventures like surfiness, or groovy fuzzy exotica, but spend a little time with each song, and no matter how traditional they sound at first, before you know it, some fuzzy riff or tangle of psychedelic guitar, or burst of skronking horns, or flurry of tribal drums will surface, and the song is transformed into something else. And we do mean SOMETHING ELSE!
Includes a booklet with photos, and liner notes, with more details about the history of the music, as well as the artists and the songs.
Kris Needs strikes again! If you've been keeping up for the past few months, you may have noticed the amazing Needs-curated Dirty Water compilations highlighting the (sometimes unlikely) inspirations for punk rock, including skronky free jazz, mid-'60s RnB mayhem, and glam, just to name a few. Needs steps up again with this impressive comp focusing on the evolution of the incredibly fertile, multicultural New York music world during the middle of the 20th century, which without question plays a major role in the city's undying allure. The years of focus here span from roughly 1945-59, and Needs, an Englishman who fell in love with NYC in the 1960s before finally landing there in 1983, is probably one of the most detail oriented compilers around. He knows how to tell a story with his compilations, rather than just putting together a bunch of songs. Like many, Needs associates NYC with its famous subway system and chose Duke Ellington's jaunty "Take The A Train" to get things started on disc 1. Other artists include legends like Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger's Almanac Singers, Harry Belafonte, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis with Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, and John Cage, demonstrating the diverse array of styles and personalities that, not surprisingly, found themselves in the world's ultimate cultural hub.
Disc 2 (at least on the 2cd; the vinyl has a different track order, and fewer tracks, 25 vs. the 32 on the compact disc format) hints at things to come in the 1960s, with folk and blues giants like Josh White, Dave Van Ronk, and Sonny Terry sitting alongside Thelonious Monk, Big Maybelle, Raymond Scott, and Allen Ginsberg (reading Howl).
This compilation is clearly a labor of obsessive love and incredibly hard work. In the cd's uber-detailed, book-like liners (72 pages!), Needs notes how this represents one of the most difficult projects he has ever undertaken, and guess what? IT'S ONLY VOLUME 1!
This is the third, in a series of lp collaborations gathered under the heading Required Wreckers (the second being the recently reviewed Ensemble Economiques record Standing Still, Facing Forward), a collaboration between Ben Vida, whose recent Root Strata tape was big hit around here, and longtime aQ fave/pal, Keith Fullerton Whitman, formerly known as Hrvatski.
Two side long tracks, one new work from each artist, both experimenting with digital / analog hybrid compositions, Vida starts things off with a flurry of squelchy electronics, a tangle of fragmented melodies, and buzzing tones, the sound flits all over the place from warm whirring shimmer, to glitchy electro crunch, from whirling stereo panned pulses, to fractured sci-fi spacesynth warble, from blooping bleeping lab conjured electronic minimalism, from layered sinewave soundscapes, to playful Radiophonic Workshop style electronic primitivism.
Whitman counters with his own high concept piece, one using live recordings, multiple speakers and inputs, room noise and crowd sound, all woven into a constantly twisting and transforming soundscape, that pairs dolphin call like electronic clicks with skittery lo-fi glitchery, ping pong like percussion with super distorted stuttery electro-chaos, almost jubilant sounding high end music box like melodies that seem to fade into more percussive skitter, with hazy, and buzzy garbled almost shortwave sounding transmissions, with thick swaths of keening tones that buzz and undulate while beneath other sounds pulse and percolate. Heady, trippy, strange stuff for sure. Both sides in fact, a bit more academic / avant compared to much of the electronic/synth music we hear, but definitely gorgeous stuff, and essential listening for fans of abstract electronic experimentation.
Gorgeously packaged in nice thick sleeves, with a letterpressed mini obi attached with colored elastic string, includes a 16 page art booklet insert as well.
It's been a while since we've heard from mysterious one man band Voltaic Omen, who we first discovered via a barrage of unlabeled emails packed with mp3's, and who, once tracked down, was more than happy to send us each new release as it was spawned, usually JUST for us, and in numbers that make most other limited releases seem bountiful. Well that definitely hasn't changed with this one, an email showed up saying "just sent you a box of the new tape, 23 copies, it's fucked, in fact it's called "You're Fucked". Needless to say we were pretty thrilled, especially considering the fact that when someone whose music is ALREADY totally fucked, proclaims a record to be 'totally fucked', well, it's gotta be good. And seriously fucked. which You're Fucked most definitely is. Another barrage of tripped out low fidelity buzz, wreathed in epic melodic swirl and druggy spaced out atmosphere, the songs lurching from epic majestic drum machine driven pound, to blurred flurries of tangled black buzz and garbled grunted gurgles, from almost punkish chunks of d-beat pound to dirgey psychedelic industrial dirgery, with all sorts of sonic weirdness, gloomy spidery melodies, hissy whispered vox, machinelike clatter, clouds of swirling black crunch, clean almost folky psych guitar, and dig even deeper, and it's easy to see VO has definitely progressed, with some of these tracks bordering on epic black prog, the drum programming (or maybe real drumming, hard to tell now), way more weirdly mathy, the arrangements too constantly shifting and transforming, and if that wasn't already rad enough, two covers this time around, Melvins and Nirvana. Hell yeah.
LIMITED TO 23 COPIES!!!! Might be the only copies we can ever get so act fast...
More good readin'. And lookin'. At pictures. It's another thick (112 page) issue of this soul, funk, jazz, hiphop, anything groovy goes magazine, packed with vintage color and b&w photos and album art to make collectors drool. This issue: pieces on Earth Wind & Fire, Ramsey Lewis, Bobby Womack, Lamont Dozier, Solomon Burke, Billy Ocean, Dennis Coffey, and more.
Latest blast of classic/black/death metal from this Canadian-by-way-of-Bangladesh metal horde, and as much as we loved their debut, Drakonian Paradigms, From The Devil's Tomb is even better. Heavier, better riffs, better production, more epic and intense and intricate songwriting, and most importantly, at least to us, WAY weirder. Not as in twisted damaged weird, just way more creative and strange, riffs, arrangements, the whole thing. The first song along should make things perfectly clear, after some strange tinkling chimes and swirling backwards FX, the guitars come in, filthy and distorted, and then the song proper kicks in, and the guitars are huge, a lurching, lumbering doomy plod, laced with some strange little super distorted high end squalls, until finally, the frantic black riffing swoops in, and the band explode into a blast of murky, muddy, downtuned death metal churn, that SLAYS. The song plays out, flitting back and forth between classic metal riffage, complete with squiggly leads, doomy crush, and blackened blast. The second song is just as gloriously twisted, with a super dynamic mathy start/stop opening, that leads into a woozy post rocky drift, with gorgeous harmonized guitars, the sound moody and minor key, before again spitting out more DM fury. And that's basically what makes Weapon so interesting is how they infuse their blackened blasting and DM grind with classic melody, old school riffage, wah guitars, leads, Eastern melodies, sitar, organ, whatever the fuck they feel like tossing in, it all somehow works, and serves the greater good, that good being pure evil, evil attained via furious fucked up blackened heaviness. Probably our favorite track though would have to be the final jam, "Towards The Uncreated", which mixes some galloping blackness, with some surprisingly melodic midtempo post rockisms, not to mention some super emotional, melancholic leads, creating a strangely moody metallic bit of doom flecked mystery, bookended of course by blasts of gnarled black crush.
Recommended for anyone who digs Absu, Bathory, Melechesh, Mayhem, Morbid Angel and the like, or any sort of blackened death metal / deathlike black metal.
Brand new blast of shoegazey fuzz pop jangle from this SF outfit, the A side just a slightly abbreviated 'radio' edit of the track "End Times" from their Sports full length, and while we're happy to hear that song again and again and again, for fans it's the B-side that's the big attraction here, which finds Sports' opening jam, the 6+ minute "Coma Summer", a blast of summery jangley shoegaze pop bliss, here transformed into something much murkier and gloomier, the sounds washed out and echo drenched, lots of softly swirling effects, the drums almost krautrock sounding in their motorik simplicity, while the vocals seem to have been transformed into streaks of high end sound, blurred into the whirling washed out background, the sound distorted and lo-fi, sounding more like something you might find on an Ariel Pink / John Maus record, that same sort of alien FM radio broadcast, via fucked up 4 track, and while it definitely sounds NOTHING like anything else on Sports, as a brief blast of warped lysergic weirdo krautpop, it's pretty goddamn great.
Comes with a download coupon as well.
During a time of creative restlessness and an ornery disregard for his audience and label alike, Neil Young throughout the eighties tried out several genre exercises with very mixed results. Though looking back on them now, records like the electronic rock album Trans (1982) and his rockabilly mini-record, Everybody's Rockin' (1983) have developed their own peculiar charm, even if David Geffen didn't think so back then (he tried to sue Young for making deliberately uncommercial records). The third of these records, Old Ways (1985), was a straight up country record that fared worse than the previous two. But while the contract dispute was raging on, Young was out on a year long tour with a band of country session greats including Spooner Oldham, Hargus Robbins, Rufus Thibodeaux and Ben Keith called The International Harvesters. While the resulting album was not one of Young's best, this new Archives series release (Vol. 9 for those who are counting!) showcases what a great live band they were, and it shines a brighter light on this grey period of Young's career. While a few tracks were featured on the Old Ways album, he also reworks earlier songs such as "Are You Ready For The Country", and "Motor City" and Southern Pacific" from the critically maligned hard rock album Re*Ac*Tor from 1981, giving them more a honky tonk stomp and chug feel. There's even a reworking of Buggalo Springfield's "Flying On The Ground is Wrong". But for Neil Young enthusiasts, the real reason to pick this up maybe the inclusion of 5 never before released tracks that are all first rate! All in all, a kick-ass and rollicking live set that is worthy of this great archival series.
We'd be stocking the vinyl of this too, but for some reason ol' Neil or his management/record company thinks folks should pay $55 for it! Good grief.
This is some seriously blissed out cosmic exploration. No doubt named after the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, ground zero in late '60s Berlin for the burgeoning experimental art/music scene that would blossom into the sounds of Krautrock. All these years later the amazing sounds of many who emerged out of the Zodiac Free Arts Lab, like Ash Ra Temple, Popul Vuh, Cluster, and Harmonia have had such a huge influence on a new generation eager to get lost in that cosmic trance.
Zodiac Free Arts Club, who hail from Berlin themselves, nails that sound and vibe spot on. In fact every single time we've played this in the store someone has asked what Brain Records reissue we were playing. Using analog synths with warm perfection, one can close their eyes and think they're listening to wonderful outtakes from Harmonia's Deluxe sessions. Reaching the same level of excellence in capturing this sound as folks like Arp, Jonas Reinhart and Majeure, this is some authentic modern day kraut-tronica indeed. The kosmische glow is alive and well in 2011!
