Long overdue reissue of this psychedelic dub classic (originally released in 1986, their 4th record), from this long running UK collective, whose sound is an incredible mix of classic reggae and dub, live drumming, tape loops and samples. In a weird way, we're definitely reminded of the ethnic electronica of Muslimgauze, there's the same sort of rhythmic repetition, and for the time, an unprecedented melding of loops and samples and live instrumentation.
Led by percussionist Bonjo I, the group filled out with various players from Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound stable, AHC crafted sprawling dubscapes that fused a post punk aesthetic and a penchant for experimentation with classic dub basslines, and the ubiquitous melodica. But it's how these guys put these songs together, and the way they used samples and tape loops. Their usual MO is to lock into a dense bass heavy groove, and then working around that, adding live percussion, and lots of it, plus all manner of sampled percussion (sounding surprisingly industrial at times), not to mention buzzing guitars, breaking glass, dogs barking at different pitches to create strange melodies, lots of sampled chants, all of this giving these tracks a mysterious tribal/ritualistic vibe. One song is a dubby slow groove, wrapped around a sample of Albert Einstein, while others are caustic and surprisingly noisy, and still others are melodic and downright poppy, but always heavy on the bass, heavy on the percussion, and heavy on the woozy, dreamy, druggy atmosphere. Easily one of our favorite groups ever (some of us have been listening to these guys for close to 30 years), and this is certainly one of their best. The perfect late night chill out / drift off psych dub soundtrack!
Latest offering from long time collaborators Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Their work together really exemplifies the pinnacle and potential of true collaboration, each party bringing in a different aspect and aesthetic while simultaneously balancing each other and creating something neither would be able to achieve on their own.
While Sakamoto's work can be drenched in warmth and heavy emotion, Alva Noto is known for his ice cold precision and together they really are able to strike an awesome balance of sound that takes from each of their very different approaches to create a unique chilling warmth. With Sakamoto's impeccable piano playing, and Alva Noto's skilled hands processing and chopping us that playing, Summvs might just be their finest work together yet. The most sublime moment coming in their cover of Brian Eno's "By This River", which we really wouldn't want anyone else to touch, but these two are able to bring out its melancholy in such a breathtaking manner.
This is the rare album you want to play from start to finish, ideally in a clean and silent room where you can just drift and dream in its presence. So beautiful!
Must be something about summertime and the feeling of nostalgia and memories of our younger days that has had us going crazy over some of our favorite '90s indie rock records as of late. Recent lists prove this, as reissues of Sebadoh and Spoon classics received our record of the week honors. Truth be told Icky Mettle is just as qualified for that honor as well. There was a period during the '90s when we used to joke that if you looked up "indie rock" in the dictionary you would find a picture of Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle. But really, we sort of weren't joking. All you had to do was listen to it and you instantly understood the full glory of indie rock and how totally heavy and wild and kick ass and catchy indie rock could be. Guitars are crunchy and jagged, ringing loud and true, vocals soaring, melodies you can't EVER get out of your head, and a passionate urgency that makes your heart race and your soul shiver. It's pretty serendipitous that this record just got reissued as it's been playing around here quite a bit, Irwin rediscovered it earlier this summer, it's been rocking Andee's iPod quite a bit lately, and it gets played in the store NON-STOP!!
There is not a dud on this album... it's almost like Archers of Loaf made us the most perfect indie rock mix tape ever, except it's their entire album! The track "Web In Front" might just be THE GREATEST INDIE ROCK SONG EVER. If it's not, it's definitely top five. It jangles, it totally rocks, the vocasl are super intense but completely melodic, the arrangement is bizarre and the parts unlikely, but that only serves to make it that much more unique and unforgettable.
We can't count the times in the past that we've put songs from this record on mixes we've made for friends, crushes, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. It's got it all: the angst, the heartbreak, the longing, the anger, the catchy hooks, even the quintessential anthem about indie rockers. What a debut full length from a band a drift in a veritable sea of indie rock revolution, the next Seattle, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Helping to raise the bar for all their peers and proteges (Superchunk, Polvo, Pavement, etc.). This is not just some indie rock nostalgia trip, a longing for some unattainable indie rock heyday, this record has totally stood the test of time and still pretty much blows away any pop, rock or indie rock record you care to stack up against it. So utterly and completely and impossibly essential!!
First we've heard from this doom drone trio from Iowa, and it's definitely right up our alley. How could it not be when two members are credited with "drones", and one with "contact mics", in addition to the usual metallic instrumentation? Not your run of the mill doom/drone we're thinking� A smoldering blackened ambience starts things off, all haunting creaks and whirling winds, distant guitar buzz and abstract strum, the build ultimately culminates in some seriously pummeling and lumbering doomic plod, the crashes and churning riffage spaced way out, leaving plenty of room for long stretches of heavily layered guitar buzz and blurred expanses of low end shimmer. The vocals are deep and bellowed, and everything is subtly infused with a bit of melody, but those melodies seem to bleed into the blackness surrounding them, each track a haunting downtuned black doom creep.
The B side pushes the drone element even further, so dirgey and slow that the doom almost seems to transform into drone right before our ears. Occasionally interrupted by little blasts of extra riffage, and driven by some abstract drum pound, the song lumbers monstrously, eventually the drums taking up less space, the crashes happening less often, causing the second half of the B side to lean heavy on the drone and drift, lulling you into a druggy haze before exploding with another blast of blackened doomic churn.
The sort of stuff that will definitely appeal to fans of Monarch and Whitehorse and all that sort of slo-mo crush.
Super sweet packaging, thick heavy jackets, nice thick vinyl, each record with an old parchment, with the original writing, but also augmented with a more modern stone rubbing.
WARNING, the jackets got a little beat up in transit, so if you need absolute collector nerd perfection, you're out of luck...
Seems like the constant supply of Nadja / Aidan Baker releases has slowed down a bit. There was a time when a week wouldn't go by without a new releases from one or both. But if fewer releases means more like this new solo record, we're perfectly happy with the trade off.
As most Baker/Nadja fans know, Nadja records tend toward the bombastic and the metalgaze, seeing as that's what the duo is all about, but Baker's solo records are where he really gets to experiment. In the beginning it was mostly like a more minimal version of Nadja, the same sort of droned out drift, just with the volume and heft dialed way back. But then Baker began trying out new sounds, varied approaches, with different instrumentation, which brings us to Still Life, which just might be the prettiest, and maybe even best, solo record we've heard from Baker yet. Ostensibly his 'jazz' record, recorded using just piano, drums and upright bass, but this isn't like JAZZ jazz, this is like Necks jazz, droney and minimal, slow building and hypnotic, and Baker adds cool bits of weird production which only enhances the sound. Four loooong tracks, each one a dark miniature epic, the bass muted and minimal, the drums more like the skitter and sizzle of cymbals, while the piano plucks out the melancholic minor key melody, a repeated motif, that unfurls like a slowly mutating loop, it's not until about 9 minutes in that the rest of the drum kit comes into play, and even then it's just some barely there snare skitter, and the melody is wrapped in cool swooping effects, very subtle, but it makes the notes sound like they're swooping in. The first track leads directly into the second, almost as if they were two parts of a single song, this part though is even more spare, the chords on the piano, separated by long expanses of minimal drum shuffle and the slow decay of the bass. This track eventually builds a bit of momentum, the drums subtly more driving, the sound a woozy, mournful lope, definitely falling within the realms of 'doom jazz', Baker surprisingly adept on the kit, playing the rims, and unfurling busy little flurries, that manage to add texture without being distracting, and much like the first song, you never really want it to end.
Track three begins with a flurry of piano notes, all upper register, flecked with the occasional bass pulse, the piano getting more and more blurry, Baker subtly affecting the notes, blurring them, smearing them, transforming them into a sort of Lubomyr Melnyk style shimmer, all the while Baker underpins the proceedings with the wood-on-wood click and clatter of stick on drum shell, and at about 7 minutes in, the song shifts, and the low end swoops in, the drums coalesce into a proper rhythm, and the song becomes an ominous creep, all the while that initial flurry of piano plays on in the background, the vibe dark and drowsy and late night, the low end thrum and drums eventually fade out, leaving the song to end how it began with a swirling cloud of tinkling notes on the piano.
And finally, the record finishes off with another stretched out sprawl of hazy, droney hypno-jazz, again the piano offering melody and color, while the bass thrums and rumbles, and Baker keep simple time with stick on shell again, and so it goes, for nearly 14 minutes, an epic haunting minimal drone jazz drift equal parts the Necks, Bohren and Circle at their most murky and minimal. Gorgeous, haunting, beautiful stuff.
Fans of the Necks will definitely want this, as will anyone into dark, brooding minimalism and abstract doom jazz drift.
After falling so deeply in love with Matt Baldwin's recent cd-r release, Imaginary Psychology, earlier this year, we knew that this bay area guitar wizard had really come into his own, exploring exciting new terrain in reaching epic psychedelic bliss.
This new outing finds Baldwin collaborating with multi-instrumentalist Nico Georgis, as they create two long form pieces that explore a more textured and layered sort of kosmische drift. The first track, "Year Of The Dog", finds Baldwin employing guitar, guitar-synth, as well as loops and delay, while Georis contributes clavinet, Wurlitzer piano, percussion, a Prophet 600, and a MicroKorg to create a meditative movement that's like some pulsating dreamscape conjured up by Robert Fripp, Michael Rother, Ash Ra Tempel, Manuel Gottsching, and/or John Cale. It taps into a sound that folks like Mark McGuire/Emeralds, White Rainbow, Bitchin Bajas, and Arp have been exploring, but with a much more organic and warm approach.
"Juan Carlos" is the other massive track here, an improv psych-jam, that features Juan Carlos Morales Tablada on congas and percussion. It starts with a slow build that immediately entrances as its sounds are both so connected to the earth, yet do such an amazing job of taking you to another dimension. In some ways the vibe makes us think of another one of our favorite cd-r releases from this year, Eat The Earth, by fellow San Francisco psych improv masters 3 Leafs.
Hand numbered and limited to 50 copies, this one is a no brainer. Don't miss out!
Another successful pairing of the older guard and the new wave, one of the latest in the RVNG label Frkwys series puts together experimental vocalist, Julianna Barwick (whose recent aQ instore was beautifully dreamy), and avant percussionist and seventies no wave music scene vet, Ikue Mori (DNA, John Zorn, Death Praxis). Recorded live during a residency at White Columns in New York last year, the two sides are the results of two different performance collaborations. The first side was made while Barwick and Mori were separated from each other in cubicles in the gallery, improvising together through aural suggestion. The second side was made with the artists working face to face. Both sides employ Mori's signature warbling crystalline electronics and sampled percussion triggers with Barwick's swelling gossamer and reverbed vocals in prolonged forays of electro-acoustic atmospherics and ambient abstraction, but each side has a different feel. The collaborative dynamics caused by closeness and distance move from a hushed majestic expansiveness to a more engrossed focused energy that demands your attention. Quite lovely!
Here stands the monumental anthology, culled from the numerous cassettes and cd-rs that Chris Madak has released over the past decade or so, under the moniker Bee Mask. Like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Madak is single-minded in his retrogarde aesthetic for synthesized compositions based on a vintage 1970s' cosmology. But where many of the '70s synth revivalists have coyingly adopted a full-fledged new age aesthetic through effervescent prettiness and soft-focus ambient swirl, Bee Mask offers up his own dysptopic take on psychedelic electronics through a crucible of cracked circuits, tape splutter, infernal field recordings, and a hell of a lot of sustained synth drones oscillating into crescendos of dissonant thumming. The zoner tracks on Elegy For Beach Friday (and there are a number of them) never sit in the background seeking a sublimated hypnosis, rather Madak zooms in on the placid pools of sound to unveil intense percolations and swarming vibrations. There's a scientific rigor to his pieces that finds Bee Mask orbiting around the dense, alienating electronics from Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed, and Bernard Parmigiani. But, Madak is also one to tease with the subtle swelling melodies that harken to the more emotive works from Omit and Emeralds. If his work shares anything with the retro electronic tapestries that are the forgotten soundtracks for a summer sunset, Madak would rather blind the audience with the intensity of the sun, complete with blisters on the skin and technological mishaps from sunspots. Brilliant!
An awesome recording of Japanese and Chinese sound artists - some of whom you should know and some of whom you probably don't - gathering inside a massive oil container and mustering all sorts of acoustic noises in response to the huge amount of natural reverb within that space. Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M are the two big names from Japan, and Yan Jun is the most well known of the Chinese artists, although he's accompanied by a half-dozen other artists as well. While this might seem like a pretty large assortment of people making a racket inside the giant oil drum, the recording is suitably restrained with many of the bangs, scrapes, and prolonged vocalizations thoughtfully responding to the industrial reverb. It would be very easy to confuse some of these episodes with one of the fictional subterranean realms of Lustmord or Thomas Koner, but here all of that expansive isolationist reverb is in fact recorded live. Cracks of wood upon the thick metal walls give way to a coordinated chorale of sustained vocal bellowing that's not too far from ritualized chants of the Tibetan or Gregorian variety, with small eruptions, clatterings, and rustlings of various objects presumably found within. When the activities diminish and some chiming metals are struck, the length of the echo seems to last close to 15 seconds before finally decaying to nothing, allowing resonance from outside to intrude. It's very clear that all of those within the space know a thing or two about improvisation, knowing that shutting the hell up is just as important as making the right sound. But it's the space itself - the Big Can - that is the real massive presence throughout the recording.
Overt rhythms had seemingly disappeared from Biosphere's work over the past decade, as he had been building his lush ambient electronica from orchestral loops and samples. Dropesonde may have broken into an electronic jazz shuffle for a moment or two, but all of his signature ambient-techno structures seemed to be something of the distant past (especially from his 1994 album Patasknik). That is until the 2011 release of N-Plants, which is the first album from Biosphere to feature the drum machine with any regularity since maybe Cirque in 2000. Gier Jenssen hasn't lost his touch, that's for sure, as a clean, mechanical breakbeat punches through the slow-as-molasses basslines and heavenly ambient swooshes on "Shika-1." Blooping melodies march alongside the clockwork rhythms of "Joyo" and "Ikata-1," and "Genkai-1" could be some missing Boards Of Canada track from Music Has The Right To Children with its off-kilter sub-melody locked in step with a warmly cybernetic tumble of algorithmic notes and a gliding hip-hop breakbeat.
This is all well and good as simply a great Biosphere record, but Jenssen actually finished this album in early 2011 as a study on the architectural designs of the Japanese nuclear power plants built during the reconstruction period in the middle of the 20th century. On completion of N-Plants, he saw this as a soundtrack to those plants, their relationship to the turbulent landscape, and the potential damage caused by radiation contamination if something were to happen. Little did Jenssen know that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant would succumb to the damage from an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. While his precognition is downright spooky, the album is not. It's quite lovely and lilting even in its mechanical design.
Latest from the oddly monikered Bitchin Bajas, the solo synth project of Cooper Crain from psychedelic hypnorockers and big time aQ faves Cave, who when not contributing to Cave's rhythmic bombast, spends his time crafting drifting synth/organ soundscapes a la Tangerine Dream, Harmonia, etc., and his two tracks here, a single epic split into two movements, finds Crain doing just that, long lush tones, pulsing and percolating, drifty and near static at first, but soon the sounds begin to blossom, melodies spinning into the ether, intertwining, some serious cosmic bliss out for sure. The second movement ditches the dreamy drift for something more rhythmic and propulsive, crafting synths into a glimmery, glistening pulsing futuristic sci-fi soundscape, all frantic melodies, over lush layers, very soundtracky and cinematic.
Bitchin Bajas are teamed up with another oddly named outfit, Faceplant, which is in fact Aaron Coynes, the man behind Rahdunes, and aQ faves Peaking Lights, but Faceplant has little in common with either of those groups, instead Coynes crafts pulsing soundtracky synthscapes, bloopy groovy synthy psychedelia, that like the BB stuff, definitely sounds very soundtracky, sorta dubby, with driving beats suspended amides the pulsating synths. Coynes describes the sound as "solo modular hessian noise trance", but to us it sounds more like a mutant strain of that whole John Carpenter / Goblin worship thing, although one of the tracks almost sounds more like some alien futuristic lounge music, all spacey FX, groovy minimal rhythms, and playful melodies. Either way, we're digging it a lot.
Housed in a weird multi colored sort-of-pickle jacket, with a photocopied poster/insert. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!
In our review of the recent archival release from Seattle/Aussie garage rockers Bloodloss, we went on a bit about the later years of Bloodloss, after their move to the states, when Mudhoney's Mark Arm took over on vocals, and then we realized we had never reviewed any of those Arm-fronted Bloodloss records, and then whaddayaknow, in drops this, the long lost final recordings from Bloodloss, in their final incarnation, still featuring members of Aussie noise rock legends Lubricated Goat, but firmly Americanized at this point with Arm up at the mic. Recorded way back in 1996 (we didn't realize they had broken up so long ago) and only unearthed and mixed last year, this is a healthy dose of swampy, punked up garage rock, still laced with some of the jazzisms (plenty of sax) that so defined the early years of Bloodloss, but for the most part, this sounds more like a grungier, scuzzier, swampier Monkeywrench / Mudhoney, although on opening track, someone else takes the mic, and delivers his lines in a Beefheart/Waits like raspy growl, but when the second track kicks in, we're off, propulsive tribal drumming, throbbing bassline, distorted buzz and crunch guitars, and that distinctive Arm wail, and from there on out, the record sort of flits back and forth, between slithery swaggery Beefheartian swamprock and post grunge Stooges-y stomp, with some wild drumming, gnarled guitaring, and plenty of twisted arrangements tangled up in both.
Sorta forgot how much we dug these guys, both pre and post Arm, but holy shit is this kicking our asses, and inspiring us to revisit all those Arm led Bloodloss records!
Includes a digital download of the album too!
Our favorite Teutonic twilight doomjazz combo, the awesome Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, is back with a new, 35+ minute ep, once again released via mega fan Mike Patton's Ipecac label (as have been their past few domestic outings). It's classic Bohren we know and love, more of their usual slow, sad, sparse jazz, that's "heavy" and noirish and minimalistic. But this ep also introduces a WTF? factor we weren't expecting. Of the three (long) songs here, one's a cover. And it goes a long way to establishing their metal cred, more than the Immortal and Emperor t-shirts they sometime wear (with suits) on stage. No, rather than cover a black metal song, as you might expect, they instead proved that they're real old school metal fans by doing "Catch My Heart" by '80s German heavy metal band Warlock, you know, the outfit fronted by blonde metal siren Doro Pesch before she went solo.
It's a nice, melodic song, and Bohren successfully adapt it to their own style, extending it to over 13 slowly trickling minutes, and making it all the more emotive and moody. And... they got Mike Patton to sing it. Which is where your mileage may start to vary, depending on how much of a Mike Patton fan you are. Patton doesn't get too over the top or anything, he sticks to a deep voiced, torch-song croon that's only a little bit weird, reminding us a bit of the singer for Urfaust in fact. But, we kinda think they should have done it as an instrumental (which is of course Bohren's usual mode), and also that way the weirdness of doing a Warlock cover woulda been a bit more subtle. Or, if they had to have somebody sing it, maybe they should have just gotten Doro herself!!
Aside from the presence of Patton's vocals, though, "Catch My Heart" sounds very much like a typical Bohren piece. As do the other two songs here, quietly droning, glacially paced, utterly gorgeous, no vocals. "Zombies Never Die (Blues)" is all drifting near-ambient synth, adorned with some smokey sax which tends to give this the vibe of the soundtrack to an '80s Jonathan Demme film, wistfully perfect for a late night street corner scene between two young lovers. The final, title track, is the longest, over 14 minutes, wonderfully atmospheric, shimmering textures from the trap kit, limpid notes arising from the keys, no sax. Nice.
But, the Warlock song isn't the only thing that's really weird about this ep. Another truly WTF? element to this release is the cover art, as discerning music fans will recognize it as some sort of tribute to the album Fun At The Funeral by the band Jesters Of Destiny (you know, the late '80s LA alt-metal act beloved by our Finnish friends Circle, they reissued that album on their Ektro label!). Same logo/typeface, almost identical (but different) artwork. No explanation. We're really curious what the deal is with that, 'cause it's such an obscure thing to reference and has nothing to do with anything else about this release, if they'd have done a Jesters cover on the ep rather than a Warlock one, it would make more sense. Instead, it's a total non-sequitur that almost nobody will even "get".
And thus, Bohren are somehow even cooler now than we already thought they were!!!
We've been smitten with these local ladies ever since their first couple 7"s released a few years back. We predicted back then that they should/would end up on Slumberland, and we're happy that our prediction came true, as they really are a band that represents the best aspects of Slumberland's awesome legacy and reemergence as one of the best labels around to trust for indie-pop done right. On Again And Again, Brilliant Colors have created their most free flowing set of songs, each one capable of being a pull-away single, but each track leading right into another with such carefree ease. The kind of album you want blasting in your car as you take to the coast to soak up some sun and dip your feet into the sea. It's got a kind of driving breeze to it that makes for such infectious repeated listening. Still channeling the influence of greats gone by like The Shop Assistants, Heavenly, Velocity Girl and Black Tambourine, as well as groups like Tsunami, Veronica Lake, and Butterglory, but continuing to flex their own vision, and undeniable integrity.
There is such a cool DIY spirit to so much of what Brilliant Colors do. Their handmade flyers, the all-ages shows they play in super unique places, in fact the record release party for this album is going to be held in a tiny hair saloon just a few blocks from our shop. Even though their sound isn't "punk" you can tell that they've got a punk ethos, and that classic post-punk bands really helped influence their sound. If they lived in D.C. rather than SF, they no doubt would be on Dischord. We've been blasting this on repeat ever since it arrived in the store, as its become a major contender for our favorite summer album of the year!
Three new tapes this week from aQ beloved tape label The Tapeworm (out of four new releases, we'll list #4 next time, it's a doozy!), running the gamut from solo piano to opera to bedroom recorded tape experiments to this. A wild skronked out blast of Norwegian free jazz from his drum/sax duo, described by the label as "harsh free jazz" which this most certainly is, the drumming relentless and intricate and wildly chaotic, the sax bleating and squealing and spitting out insane atonal melodic runs, the two instruments sparring constantly, like dueling solos, the method to their madness surfacing here and there, but for the most part a head spinning barrage of sound, that will probably hit the spot for folks into the wildest free jazz, think Borbetomagus meets the Jooklo Duo and you'll be in the ball park.
Dizzyingly intense and wildly relentless, file under the Borbetomagus coined descriptor: 'snuff jazz'.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES.
Latest full length from this long running experimental black metal one man band, masterminded by Andrew Curtis-Brignell, who has been doing Caina since he was a teenager, and who for this new record is joined by a pretty elite group of guests, Imperial from Krieg, Rennie Resmini from hardcore legends Starkweather, and Chris Ross from Blood Revolt / Revenge / Axis of Advance.
Like on past records, the sound of Caina is a tough one to pin down, fusing total shoegaze pop, to indie pop jangle, crushing downtuned doom to soaring epic post rock slow build, gloomy gothy drift to churning mathy almost-prog, and pretty much anything else Curtis-Brignell can think of. The opening track here is the perfect example, exploding right out of the gate with a chugging almost punky D-beat pound, with wildly bellowed vox, but laced with shimmery melodies, the vocals heavily effected, and insanely high in the mix, swinging wildly from speaker to speaker, eventually the song slipping to what sounds almost more like Mogwai, that sort of brooding, smoldering crescendo, building to an explosive climax, before fading into a bit of shimmery drift, hushed and softly psychedelic, a smeared expanse of woozy low end and hazy guitar glimmer, which leads directly into a burst of old school raw black metal blast, guttural vox, stumbling blast beat, murky frenzied riffing, but this is Caina after all, so it doesn't take long for the sound to splinter into something weirdly mathy and dynamic, and then transform into a dreamy melodic drift, hovering beneath some sick vokills, and again building slowly to something much more fierce and frantic.
It would probably be a bit confusing to go track by track and try to describe every part of every song, needless to say, it's wildy varied, but never to the point of losing cohesion, it's an epic sonic patchwork, woven deftly into some super idiosyncratic avant black metal, infusing the usual blast and buzz and pound, with field recordings, swirling synths, strange samples, blissed out kosmische drift, tribal drum driven math rock, all manner of strange vocals, the sound constantly shifting from black metal blast, to depressive dirge, melodic jangle to drifty drone and back again.
It's probably too all over the map for the true grim hordes, but most aQ metalheads will find this stuff easy to get lost in, a wild sonic journey through some twisted epic black metal otherworld.
Included with the album proper is a bonus disc, featuring reinterpretations of four older tracks, remastered versions of the originals and a Nico cover, both the old and new version of the older songs definitely light on the metal, more jangly and atmospheric, darkly psychedelic, with the biggest surprise might be the re-done version of "To Pluck The Night Up By Its Skin", which is retitled "To Funk The Night Up By Its Shit" and is exactly what the title warns us it might be, a groovy, almost disco-y reworking, but insanely enough, it's actually pretty awesome, and ends up sounding like a slightly darker dirgier version of that whole Eurodisco Carpenter / Goblin worship that is so popular these days.
Sweet packaging too, full color six panel digipack with booklet packed with liner notes, lyrics and photos.
Commissioned for a special event at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, this 'soundtrack' of sorts offers up a gorgeous collection of new age ambience and blissed out soft focus kosmische drift, five tracks, 55 minutes, each piece a hazy bit of looped guitar shimmer, equal parts ambient krautdrone and warm whirling dreamscapery. Cantu-Ledesma, a member of late great post rockers Tarentel, as well as one of the folks behind the Root Strata label, now has a handful of solo records under his belt, running the gamut from deep dark dronemusic to blown out shoegaze guitadrone, but this is most definitely his most hushed and intimate, delicate and crystalline. A series of slow soft focus smears of prismatic glimmer, hushed arrangements of softly tangled guitar harmonies and slow shifting textures, glorious slow motion cascades of echo drenched melody and hazy indistinct chordal swells, like watching a time lapse film of the universe being born, a slowly developing landscape of colors and shapes, all seeming to float weightlessly in a wide open expanse of star flecked emptiness, the swirling contrails of the drifting notes blurring and oozing into one another, transforming the sky into softly swirling clouds of washed out sound, an endless expanse of ebb and flow, the sound wrapping up everything in their warm ethereal embrace. So lovely.
Real cds too, not cd-r's, housed in simple handmade sleeves, and of course, LIMITED!!
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Now on vinyl, the second, sort of self titled ep (aka CCII), from post Velvet Cacoon outfit Clair Cassis,
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, and housed in ultra thick, case wrapped gatefold jackets, on clear vinyl while they last, here's what we had to say about the cd version when we first reviewed it back in 2010:
The final(?) twisted blackbuzz missive from outsider black metal weirdos Clair Cassis, whose -other- posthumous record we made our Record Of The Week a few lists back. Clair Cassis, for those who don't already know, was the short lived post Velvet Cacoon outfit, made up of essentially the same members, but whose sound was a poppier, prettier, and in some ways an even weirder version of what they had been doing in Velvet Cacoon. Whereas VC offered up sprawling expanses of droned out black buzz (originally purported to be played not on guitars, but on a diesel powered harp) and deep black ambience, CC take those same elements and craft them into more concise chunks of gloomy almost poppy black metal, with Joy Divisiony bass lines, chiming Cocteau Twins like guitars, lots of unlikely hooks, all woven into sheets of black buzz, galloping blast beats, and some seriously freaky croaked Gollum-like vokills.
This ep and the one before it barely crack 50 minutes combined, so this is essentially side 2 of CC's 15 track swansong. And like the first installment, this stuff is twisted, warped and bafflingly brilliant. The gothy post punk vibes even more pronounced here, the bass thick and sinewy, the guitars even more melodic, and the sound dangerously closer to blackened pop than poppy black metal, and it definitely suits them.
The record explodes right out of the gate a buzzing black blast, but even within those first few seconds, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on, the low end is thick and layered and lush, the melodies mournful and melancholy, almost like a blacker buzzier Lifelover. The first two tracks flit from melodic buzz to midtempo dirgey gloom, it's not until the third track "Praline Civet", that the band let loose and stop trying to disguise their sound as black metal, it soars and pulses, it's a glorious blackened gloom pop, surprisingly epic and emotional, for a band of legendary cynics and charlatans. "Bronzed Ash" might be the prettiest song here, a moody midtempo lope, that has strange drumming, lots of clean chiming guitars, lush washed out atmospheres, super blissy and shoegazey, and it ends way too soon after about 90 seconds. The final track too is super cool, and strange and not at all typically black metal, with trippy processed harmonized guitar melodies, over a churning swirl of muddy riffage and motorik drum pound, super psychedelic and dreamily noisy, and poppy and really sort of noise poppy.
So good. And might as well be considered another Record Of The Week, the second half of their FIRST Record Of The Week (their FIRST s/t record that we did in fact make ROTW), a moody, blissy, shoegazey collection of psychedelic, droney, buzzy tripped out blacknoisepop.
Record number three from this drug driven blurwave blackgaze Velvet Cacoon offshoot. Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt already familiar with that Northwestern horde, whose exploits, sonic and otherwise, included a ridiculous band backstory (eco-terrorists?), made up instrumentation (diesel harp?) some purportedly plagiarized sounds (a whole record supposedly stolen and redone as VC), not to mention a whole mess of angry, bitter and confused black metallers in their wake. And while we bought into it all, when the truth was revealed, that VC was in fact, just a guy and a gal, taking lots of drugs and making some blissed out black buzz, we actually thought it was funny. The for some strange reason, VC mainman Josh decided to disband Velvet Cacoon, and immediately created Clair Cassis, a band that was quite sonically similar, the same sort of washed out buzz, droney black mesmer, the biggest difference being that CC trafficked in WAY shorter songs, and those songs were WAY heavy on the bass (infamous for it's absence in almost all black metal) and traded in much of the drone and drift for something distinctly more poppy. And we were, and are, pretty into it. Dense thick whirling hazy black metal, formed into dark almost new wavy chunks of blackbuzzpop, sure still black and buzzy on the outside, but strap on some headphones, and the basslines become sinewy and serpentine, the melodies and buried hooks reveal themselves, step back and its a glorious blackened blur.
After two self titled eps, comes this, Luxury Absolute, another short (ish) collection of CC's unique brand of black and buzzy, midtempo dronegaze doompop, the sound here though even more tripped out and psychedelic than on past releases, with the bass MASSIVE, even moreso than usual, with the sound so blown out and in the red, that the sound continually peaks, and clips, the sounds distorting and crumbling, adding a strange sort of bleary, blurry decay vibe to the already woozy minor key proceedings. Just check out opener "Antique Sea Smoke", a warped lumbering almost dirger, with the guitar melodies swirling amidst grey clouds of whir and thrum, the bass thick, and driving, the drums distorting like crazy, all of that overblown sound pushing CC even further into shoegaze territory.
The rest of the record follows suit, barring a few creepy stretches of haunting rumbling black ambience, the rest of Luxury Absolute unfolds as a series of brief dreamlike black blurs, melancholic and mesmerizing, the drums a lurching programmed pound, the vokills a demonic croak, but the guitars, so warm and whirling, thick and layered, the doom vibe is huge here too, partially because of the tendency toward dirgery, but also cuz the sound is so thick and viscous, imagine diSEMBOWELMENT or Skepticism trying their hand and shoegaze cold wave, and you might be getting close. Either way, this is some awesome stuff. Occasionally frustrating, cuz the songs are so short (longest 3:31, shortest 1:51, 19 minutes total), and we would love to hear these jams stretched out into tranced out dronepop blackbuzz drifts, but the brevity seems to reinforce than in their own twisted and fucked up way, these really are just pop songs, albeit, buzzy, and sludgey, and dirgey and BLACK. Might be our favorite CC yet. Hope it's not their last.
Packaged in a super swank DVD sized digipak. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
BACK IN STOCK!!
Yet another twisted blackbuzz missive from outsider black metal weirdos Clair Cassis, whose -other- posthumous record we made our Record Of The Week a few lists back. Clair Cassis, for those who don't already know, was the short lived post Velvet Cacoon outfit, made up of essentially the same members, but whose sound was a poppier, prettier, and in some ways an even weirder version of what they had been doing in Velvet Cacoon. Whereas VC offered up sprawling expanses of droned out black buzz (originally purported to be played not on guitars, but on a diesel powered harp) and deep black ambience, CC take those same elements and craft them into more concise chunks of gloomy almost poppy black metal, with Joy Divisiony bass lines, chiming Cocteau Twins like guitars, lots of unlikely hooks, all woven into sheets of black buzz, galloping blast beats, and some seriously freaky croaked Gollum-like vokills.
This ep and the one before it barely crack 50 minutes combined, so this is essentially side 2 of CC's 15 track swansong. And like the first installment, this stuff is twisted, warped and bafflingly brilliant. The gothy post punk vibes even more pronounced here, the bass thick and sinewy, the guitars even more melodic, and the sound dangerously closer to blackened pop than poppy black metal, and it definitely suits them.
The record explodes right out of the gate a buzzing black blast, but even within those first few seconds, it's easy to hear that there's way more going on, the low end is thick and layered and lush, the melodies mournful and melancholy, almost like a blacker buzzier Lifelover. The first two tracks flit from melodic buzz to midtempo dirgey gloom, it's not until the third track "Praline Civet", that the band let loose and stop trying to disguise their sound as black metal, it soars and pulses, it's a glorious blackened gloom pop, surprisingly epic and emotional, for a band of legendary cynics and charlatans. "Bronzed Ash" might be the prettiest song here, a moody midtempo lope, that has strange drumming, lots of clean chiming guitars, lush washed out atmospheres, super blissy and shoegazey, and it ends way too soon after about 90 seconds. The final track too is super cool, and strange and not at all typically black metal, with trippy processed harmonized guitar melodies, over a churning swirl of muddy riffage and motorik drum pound, super psychedelic and dreamily noisy, and poppy and really sort of noise poppy.
So good. And might as well be considered another Record Of The Week, the second half of their FIRST Record Of The Week, a moody, blissy, shoegazey collection of psychedelic, droney, buzzy tripped out blacknoisepop.
BACK IN STOCK!!
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
The Concretes have been blissing out indie pop fans for well over a decade but their steadily growing spiked big time over the past year. The Swedish dreamboats were drawn further into the limelight by former Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman's appearance on the omnipresent Peter Bjorn And John single "Young Folks". Yes, you heard correctly. Former! The PBJ guest vocalist who charmed everyone and brought attention to the Concretes has jumped ship in favor of a solo career. But fret not, despite the album's title, this is by no means a 'man overboard!' emergency. Although you're not going to be hearing Ms. Bergsman's sweet and distinctly quirky voice on any of these dozen songs, you will be hearing the just as sweet and distinctly quirky voice of Lisa Milberg. Her performance makes for not such a drastic transition after all. Slightly off kilter and bittersweet. Yes, if you like Peter Bjorn And John's Writer's Block, what are you waiting for? The soft serve dream whip sounds of Hey Trouble are like a more girlie counterpart.
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Super rad ultra crazed blast of old school Portland punk from this short lived outfit. So short lived in fact that this two song single from 1979 is all they ever managed. The sound is feral and punk as fuck, but also weirdly new wave and a little electronic, equal parts Devo and the Units, the title track a pounding blast of sinister electro punk, driven by a maniacal organ pulse, thick fuzzy low end, and some maniacal vox, peppered with some awesome angular guitar, and a super tripped out staccato second half that is about as close to a deranged sing-along as we can imagine, totally killer, and irresistible, we've listened to it like ten times in a row, a dirgey swaggery jitter-punk classic. The B side is less bizarre, a more standard (but only slightly) chugging punk rock blast of political indignation, furious fist in the face, fuck the man radness. So recommended.
Cub's newly remastered and reissued third and final album, Box of Hair, plays up the edgier and urgent side of their cuddle-core ethos. The distortion is upped, the song-writing more heartbroken, the lyrics more snarly in their delivery. Stiffer 'real world experience' influences are more pervasive here than on previous releases, and there's an overall feeling that the band is going for broke, and sensing an end coming, want to leave things with a bang. And that's definitely what Box of Hair is, a maturing sum up of priorities, showcasing their best song-writing and musical craft and taking it as far as it can go. One mesmerizing and charming highlight on the album, "Magic 8 Ball", captures all the Cub essentials - infectious pop hooks and clever, bittersweet lyrics. Box of Hair's not as carefree as their previous releases, but it's probably their most meaningful and resonant. Includes a bonus fan-pleasin' item -- a bright, embroidered patch of the band's sunshiney logo!
Note: If you can endure the seemingly endless chair creakiness ("it's not bed squeaks!" says Cup) at the album's end you'll be rewarded with a truly retarded punk rock finish.
FYI: Along with Box of Hair, Betti-Cola and Come Out Come Out, have also been rereleased with bonus tracks!
Come Out Come Out is Cub's masterpiece. Newly remastered with bonus tracks (a couple of them hidden), it is the culmination of all the DIY spirit of their debut but also shows the band honing their skills as musicians and songwriters into a tight set of upbeat tunes with a joyful edge - although Cub was often skillfully bittersweet. Self-proclaimed cuddle-core trio from Vancouver, BC, Lisa, Lisa and Robynn veered away from the battle cries of their more raucous riot grrrl contemporaries preferring to wave the 'home-crafted' flag with a more confident (and varied) direction. Obviously, legions of fanatic cubsters (likely whipped into a frenzy during thir sugar-pop-overload live shows) got the message. On this their second full length, wonder along to "Everything's Geometry", "New York City" (later covered by They Might Be Giants), and covers of the Go-Gos' "Vacation" and Yoko Ono's "I'm Your Angel"!
Originally released as a triple 7" colored vinyl fiesta with some wonderfully twisted cover art by Canadian artist Fiona Smyth, the extra bonus tracks here include a live version of "Cast A Shadow" featuring some Italian dude who jumped on stage to play harmonica, and a sweet phoned-in version of "My Chinchilla" on Canadian Radio, that really captures the band's energetic live spirit. Another key groop in a line of influential DIY femme trios from The Shaggs, Kleenex, and The Raincoats, to The Marine Girls, Shonen Knife and Le Tigre, it's time once again for Cub!!
FYI: Betti-Cola has also been remastered and reissued, and the band's third and final album Box Of Hair has also been rereleased with a bonus fan-pleasin' item.
Repressed and back in stock!!
Our original review: It is incredible that this prog damaged pop group from San Francisco, which thrives on simplicity, can continually create complexly playful and riddling compositions while maintaining a bashful earnestness that totally offsets any and all chances that their musical prowess and ingenuity will falter into the category of 'wank'. Through Deerhoof's ten year existence, there have been numerous changes in personnel and instrumentation, but even through these variables there is a solidarity and consistency in the songwriting that is uniquely Deerhoof. While not as wildly cacophonous and volatile as 1997's The Man The King The Girl, there has been a return of sorts here (as on last year's Apple O') to a certain looseness that had been held back on the lushly crafted Reveille. Milk Man, their sixth long player, maintains the taut rock sound perfected on Apple O' whilst introducing more sonically diverse elements to the everyday Deerhoof palette (most notably: crackling electronics, horns and/or woodwinds - is that a flute or a pocket trumpet on 'Milking'? - synthesizers and organs, and what sounds like to these ears, a Happy Apple*?) John Deiterich and Chris Cohen's awkwardly perfect harmonizations weave into Greg Saunier's John-French-by-way-of-Keith-Moon drum blasts, emblazoned with Satomi Matsuzaki's mesmerizing vocal ornaments on rockers like the opening title track, 'That Big Orange Sun Run Over Speed Light' and 'Milking'. The lovely 'Desaparecere' is an electronically backed number that evokes the Brazilian work of Joao and Astrud Gilberto (though the lyrics are in Spanish rather than Portuguese...). The previously released single 'C', is reprised here in all its hand-clapping and falsetto glory. As beautiful and bewildering as past releases, what I think shines through most on Milk Man is its cohesive solidarity as a single album.
*for those who are curious (like Allan, who had to ask), a Happy Apple was a children's toy made by Fisher Price in the seventies. It's basically a six inch tall plastic apple with a happy face that, when shaken, makes a pretty polyphonic "chiming bells" sound. Kinda like windchimes, but muted since the elements which makes the sounds are encased in plastic. If you crack one open, you'll see that it's a simple circular design of four or five metal rods of varying length, with a pendulum-like ball in the center that hammers at them when agitated. I have a few of 'em at home, I always pick them up at flea markets. No two sound exactly alike! Anyway, there are occasional chiming sounds on this new Deerhoof record that I suspect are in fact from a Happy Apple, but I could be wrong...
The latest in Deerhoof's new 7" series where they invite up and coming artists to use one of their instrumental tracks as a backing track for their own vocals and lyrics, while the B side allows Deerhoof to remix one of their guests' tracks. This time out it's a group called Woom who get to create their own special something inside the magical landscape of Deerhoof's imagination. Woom, who are on the great Ba Da Bing label, have a very stripped down, and quirky approach to pop, sitting somewhere between Young Marble Giants and Tune-Yards. We think its really cool of Deerhoof to lend their name and presence to help lesser known bands get a wider audience, but in all reality this is much more a Woom 7" than it is a Deerhoof one.
All previous 7"s in this Deerhoof series have already gone out of print, so best to act fast if you want this one. Pressed on clear vinyl and includes a digital download.
Latest chunk of grim blacknoise from Ohio duo Demonologists, comes in the form of this super limited split cd-r, with the mysterious Deathstench. We first heard from Demonologists on a cassette from Waves Of Decay, and we described that record as sounding like ten different black metal records all being played at once and then remixed by a Japanoise DJ. Which should tell you all you need to know, brutal, harsh, intense, black buzz brutality. On their half of this split, Demonologists start off each track with some black ambient drift or some creepy cinematic dronemusic, only to eventually explode into full on blacknoise, an avalanche of speaker shredding, ear piercing Merzbow/Masonna style fury, only in this case, buried in there somewhere are buzzing riffs and shrieked vokills, and if you can brave the first few minutes, the songs tend to open up, peeling back some of the noise, revealing all the murky weirdness inside and underneath, whether that's wild squalls of fractured effects, surprising shards of jagged melody, or just stretches of black metal buzz. Headphones seem the way to go, this is the sort of all out aural assault that in a room with regular speakers, just sounds like a vacuum cleaner symphony, but strap on those cans, and you're plunged into a blacknoise abyss, a skull caving collision between Incapacitants and Wrath Of The Weak, a whirling black buzz dervish of unparalleled proportions. Metalheads tread carefully, one must have iron ears as well as a black soul to truly survive this sonic onslaught!
Deathstench start their side off with a creepy sample and some sick, gurgling low end buzz, a churning black expanse of downtuned heaviness and murky oozing creep, the sound super distorted and on the verge of crumbling to pieces, textural and heavily layered, black and black but surprisingly listenable. Which is how these guys roll, balancing the relentless blown out pummel of Demonologists, Deathstench are a bit more subtle with their bleak, grim, abject soundscaping, creating looped landscapes of industrial whir, and buzzy black drones, of machine like rhythms buried in the sonic murk and mire, wreathed in haunting drifting melodies, and swirling black ambience, finally finishing things off with a 15+ minute horrorscape, beginning with some hushed ultra minimal shimmer, but quickly blossoming into something much more evocative and sinister, distant demonic vokills, disembodied voices, churning black low end, lots of spaced out drift, super cinematic and downright scary.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! With full color glossy artwork!
Another bafflingly brilliant batch of tapes from UK tape label The Tapeworm, and while we often find ourselves at a bit of a loss to describe whatever sonic oddity they've unearthed or discovered or dug up or conjured from the ether, not sure we've ever encountered one like this before. With very little info to go on, what we can surmise from the description we read, is that this might be some sort of home-recorded ritual, perpetrated by a teenager (Andrew Lagowski?), with his parents in the other room, taking leave from whatever rock band he was playing in at the time, to create, well, THIS, a strange bit of sinister collaged ambience, wild squiggles of feedback, what sounds like running water, manipulated tapes, stumbling percussion, what almost sounds like field recordings, owl calls or something like owl calls, detuned guitar melodies, shards and fragments of sound, all blurred and smeared and tangled into a sci-fi lo-fi soundscape, jumbled, textural and weirdly rhythmic, a definite kitchen sink approach, or maybe toolshed approach would be more accurate, a strange selection of noise making devices including various effects and fuzzboxes, a reel to reel tape player not to mention a drill and a space (perhaps wielded by the artist's brother), and while there is a sense of randomness and chaos, much of this is quite listenable, and for sure is beholden to (whether intentional or not) Nurse With Wound, Hafler Trio, and other unconventional sonic experimentalists. Two distinctly different mixes/versions, edited and reworked earlier this year. Pretty excellent stuff.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! With cover art by Savage Pencil.
New four song 12"s from these tropical lysergic fuzz poppers, featuring the title track, a reworked number from the last record, but this new version features none other than Panda Bear from Animal Collective, as well as a few other guests. How different is it? Well, not really all that different, the main change being some soaring Beach Boys-ish background vox, that add a bit of sunshiney shimmer to the proceedings, and we have to say, the song is in fact probably the better for it.
There's also a live version of the same song, this time performed live, with yet another set of guests, the Spectrals this time, and at first blush, it sounds almost the same, until you realize Ducktails here is augmented by a real band, and most importantly a real drummer, whose beats definitely give the song some heft, and transform it from woozy bedroom dream pop to proper indie rock crunch.
In between these two versions of "Killin The Vibe" are two new jams: "Sit Around With Ya" is a lazy slightly dubbed out bit of strummed dronefolk, the vocals laid back and weary, the song gradually growing more lush, as a second guitar swoops in and adds some dreamy jangle, while "Couch Surfer" revisits the murky 4-track lysergic Tropicalia of early Ducktails, all woozy warped loops, and the sounds of crashing waves, all wrapped around a bloopy bassline, eventually joined by some extra percussion, some shakers, the song muted and droney and mesmerizingly cyclical, until finally, with about 90 seconds left, the song blossoms into a rad psychedelic jam, all wild psych guitars, lots of swirling "ooooh"s and "aaaah"s, a perfectly hazy, dreamy, drugged out coda, and just enough to tide us over until the next full length, presumably coming soon...?
Brand new disc of narcotic psychedelic somnambulant guitar drift from Elm, aka Jon Porras, one half of similarly sonically inclined duo Barn Owl, and also one of your faithful aQuarians. Whereas past missives from Elm were brooding and minimal, they crept and crawled and oozed and sprawled, Nemcatacoa immediately sounds more epic, more song based instead of sound based, channeling both the slow burn guitar drone of groups like SUNNO))) and Vulture Club and Fear Falls Burning, as well as the epic post rock build of groups like Godspeed. The sound is much closer to live Barn Owl, humid and hazy and HEAVY, distortion wreathing all of the melodies, there's even some drums, buried way down in the mix, offering up a skeletal framework for Porras' blackened guitarscapes.
It's not all heavy and dense though, some of the tracks are breathlessly lovely, spacious and spare, the notes drifting weightlessly, strung together by hazy contrails of reverb and soft focus feedback, hushed and reverent and meditative. But often those quiet moments splinter into heaving swells of crumbling distortion, or arcing streaks of burnished black melody. The sound is humid and heady, a constantly shifting dronescape, that goes from barely there folk flutter to blurred buzz drenched haze and back again. So awesome. Definitely has us excited for the forthcoming Barn Owl lp as well...
As always, SUPER LIMITED, packaged in a cool arigato style screen printed cardstock sleeve, with wolves and trees and an animal skull, all printed in metallic silver ink. Nice!
The Austrian avant-guitarist offers four tracks of beautiful guitarscapes tricked out through his signature glitched-n-blurred processing. Hardly cold for a slab of digitalia, the opening track "Liminal" is one of Fennesz' more structured numbers, built from a simple chord progression on his acoustic guitar, that then stomps on a Mogwai-ish distortion box for at least one burst of incendiary soft-loud-soft dynamics. All of the sounds prickle, squish, and splutter amidst a swarming sea of digitized pixels that reassemble themselves as echoes and ghosts of Fennesz' original guitar playing. "July" darkens the hue quite a bit with a warbling bass that looks back to the post-rock explorations of Rothko or Labradford. "Shift" is one of Fennesz' finer drone-centric moments that builds a hallowed melody out of a cavernous wash of sun bleached tones, and the title track is a collaborative effort with Steven Hess on drums, resulting in a slowcore tune fleshed with all of Fennesz' digital ephemera.
FYI, there is a compact disc scheduled for release in September 2011, for those not so keen on the vinyl format. Oh yeah, this has been cut at 45rpm, so you know that we'll be playing this at 33 as well!
The sixth Gainsbourg album, originally released by Philips in 1964. A return to Alain Goraguer�s orchestration and the wonderful sounds produced on his second LP. Extremely lively and playful, this record definitely lives up to its title, as drums and percussion are the driving force behind the music here. Taking the Mambo influence of No2 and bringing forth other worldly
One of two new releases on Oakland label Sanity Muffin, the other, a fantastic collection of sonic strangeness from Dutch blackened drone/dirge ambient outfit Torture Corpse, and this, some droned out blackened heaviness from Galena, the one man band of the guy behind the SM label, and it's definitely the sort of sound that pushes all our buttons. Shouldn't take more than a minute or so before you're sucked in, after some swirling ambience, a strange rifflike high end drone loops and loops, and then suddenly everything explodes in a frenzy of what can only be described as electronic black buzz, a churning bit of melody looped beneath sheets of hiss and buzz and thrum, with what sounds like a super distorted blast beat laid over the top, the result is fantastically psychedelic and hypnotic, even as the blast beat fades, and much of the buzz, the ensuing high ends shimmer and thick layered crunch continues to invoke the same sort of grim vibe, except here, Galena lays some lilting warped melodies over the top, so it almost sounds like a Philip Jeck installation gone haywire, a wild tangle of woozy synths over a thick swirl of Our Love Will Destroy The World like skree.
And that's just the first track. The rest of the tape plays out similarly though, taking riffy black metal buzz and transforming it into something much more washed out and psychedelic, the various elements seeming to ooze and bleed and melt before our ears, sometimes building to crushing cacophonies, other times smoothed out into a sort of almost Pop Ambient prismatic mesmer. A murky, drifty bit of ambient buzz and blurred blackened swirl, that definitely has us wanting to hear more.
Nice packaging, too, a thick cardstock J-card , with a xeroxed hand stamped insert.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
From the man behind two of our favorite labels, the now defunct Starlight Temple Society, and post STS label Khrysanthoney, comes this hefty metal tome. We're discovering GOTG on issue 5, perhaps the final issue, for now at least, we're a little late to the party, not sure how we missed the first four, cuz this definitely has tons of awesome stuff in it, and seems like anyone who has been digging Oaken Throne (R.I.P.), Rape & Honey, The Convivial Hermit, Forgotten Path, not to mention the recently compiled / reissued Slayer mag as well as all the other recent (and not so recent) kick ass underground metal mags, would definitely dig this too.
Nicely laid out, the whole thing printed white on black paper (very metal), with lots of pix, and band logos, and drawings, a handful of record reviews, with reviews often separated into different categories, with different reviews for production, music and vocals, and he even reviews a bunch of his own releases. But the crux of the mag is interviews, this time around with Destruktor, Black Witchery, Nyogthaeblisz, Yosuke from Nuclear War Now!, Forgotten Woods / Joyless, Velvet Cacoon, Jon from Full Moon Productions, Nightbringer, Perversor, Ignivomous, Dead Congregation, Deiphago, John Mincemoyer, who is 1/2 of the team that produced all time aQ beloved metal zine Oaken Throne, Black Majesty, Ares Kingdom, Crimson Moon, Goatlord, Maledicere, Profanatica, Roba El-Khaliyeh, Wolfhetan, the Ajna Offensive, and finally an interview with black metal illustrator Kramer (who also plays in Grand Belial's Key and runs the musically cool but otherwise highly problematic Satanic Skinhead Propaganda label), plus probably most strangely of all, an interview with, and a bit of brutal erotica / S&M fiction from, the writer Maija, whose story is accompanied by some high school binder style pencil drawings of a woman being tied up and hung from hooks. Well the magazine IS called Gallery Of The Grotesque, after all.
For the most part, essential metal reading for sure. And it has us definitely hoping for an issue six...
Comes with a cd sampler of releases on the Hell's Headbangers label...
Killer 4 way split of extreme outsider heaviness, most folks will probably grab this for the two new Gnaw Their Tongues tracks, but will probably end up digging the other three bands nearly as much.
But since GTT might be the reason most folks are here, let's talk about those tracks first. No huge departures, just more of that same, grim, apocalyptic, industrial, cinematic doom. "Crawl" is just that, a harrowing sonic crawl, with blown out distorted drums, heaving downtuned guitars, moaning miserable melodies, hysterical shrieks, shimmering strings, dense drones, a freaked out apocalyptic soundtrack to the death of mankind. "Paleness" is more of the same, but more metal, the main riff a blurred bit of undulating buzz, the vocals insane, the drums and industrial plod, long stretches of creepy ambience, the final half of the song a dense, thick, layered bit of blackened slow motion dronemusic, that is as weirdly hypnotic as it is hellish. Definitely worth it for fans, to get those two tracks, but there's much more metallic misery to be had.
The Arm And Sword Of A Bastard God (killer name!) are a Southern California doomkult, and traffic in plodding blackened doom, minimal and murky, big guitars, pounding drums, and some sick slowed down death metal style vocals. Halo Of The Sun contribute their own bit of UK style doom-ed blackness, a frantic bit of black metal laced with wild squiggly guitar harmonies, harsh vox, a definite Cradle Of Filth vibe, weirdly melodic, but way more lo-fi and underground, the track breaks down into a lurching doomy trudge, there are even some weird processed clean vocals, but it's soon back into the dense black grind and churn. Cool stuff for sure. Definitely be into hearing more from these guys.
And last up, from LA come The Slaughtered Lamb, who also do the black doom thing, their sound way more akin to Gnaw Their Tongues, super distorted, almost industrial, the guitars crumbling and nearly formless, the vocals dripping in effects, a filthy abject sonic crawl through broken glass and bloody entrails, leading to the 26 minute closer, an sprawling bit of epic and dismal black ambience, from hushed shimmer, to distorted thrum, to black buzz creep and back again.
All four bands impress, so buy it for the Gnaw Their Tongues, but stick around for the Slaughtered Lamb!
We barely need to write anything for this one really. Everyone we know, has wanted one of these without even hearing it. Hell, Andee even ordered one from overseas without hearing a note. They're called Harpsicorpse, which would probably be the best band name ever, even if this wasn't solo harpsichord. But it IS. SOLO HARPSICHORD. Solo ELECTRIC harpsichord, played by a guy who when he's not crafting solo electric harpsichord music, is creating crazed breakcore using samples of classical music (and yeah, that stuff rules too, will try to get copies in to review!).
So yeah, Andee got a copy of this played it on his radio show, played it for everyone he knew, and we all became a bit obsessed, and so we ordered a bunch for the store, and when they finally showed up, it was like music nerd Christmas! So what is it exactly beyond the above mentioned obvious stuff, that had us all flipping out? Well, the harpsichord is an amazing instrument, and this electronic version not only offers a weirdly buzzy distorted version of the actual sounds, it also makes the player able to unfurl impossible super fast flurries of notes, the result is somewhere between a creepy soundtrack for exploring some old abandoned house in the middle of a lightning storm, complete with levitating candelabras, cobwebs, creaking doors and wailing spirits, the music from some demented post battle feast/orgy with all the knights, in your crumbling castle in the time of King Arthur, or an 8 bit Nintendo soundtrack for some alternate universe version of Castlevania. However it strikes you, it's awesome, bizarre, beautiful, demented, baffling, but absolutely one of the most amazing things we've heard. When things really get going it almost sounds like someone took a chunk of Venetian Snares style drill and bass, and replaced all the beats with harpsichord sounds, while at it's most creepy and ambient, it couldn't be more scary, a total horror movie soundtrack, late night drive in movie freakfest bliss out. And the tracks that feature a lot of low end, those are the notes that don't really sound like a real harpsichord at all, and instead sound like some sort of ominous buzz/drone weirdness, which again, only adds to the WTF factor.
But to be fair, beyond all the weirdness (of which there is plenty), this is definitely some cool, beautiful, haunting stuff, and odds are if you're like us, and EVERYbody we've played this for, all it's gonna take is one listen, and you will be as crazy obsessed as we are!
WARNING: These lps seem to have had a long difficult journey across the ocean all the way from Europe, and the sleeves are a bit worn after such an arduous trip. So there are some dented corners, and while for the most part it's not really that dramatic at all, if you require your records to be in pristine, ultra mint, record collector nerd condition, then you just might have to pass on this, which would be a bummer, cuz it's AMAZING�
Oh the '90s! We can't get enough of that decade these days. With the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind upon us, and reissues of our favorite albums by folks like Archers Of Loaf, Sebadoh, and Pavement, we're remembering just how damn special and earnest so much of the music we love from that decade was. Heatmiser were one of those bands who actually didn't catch on with folks that much when they first hit the scene in 1993, but thanks to its members' other musical output, folks did finally start paying attention to them. Those members being Elliott Smith and Sam Coomes (Quasi), as well as Neil Gust (No.2). But let's be honest, it's really all about Elliott Smith. Heatmiser allowed folks to get to hear his amazing voice, and guitar playing in a much more rocking venue. And a lot of these songs, sounded like his solo songs just supercharged and punked up. And it was so good to hear Smith let loose, rock out and have fun.
Mic City Sons is our favorite of Heatmiser's three albums, while their previous two albums each had some really good songs, this was the album where they seemed to really hit their stride and the songs and the players just meshed so well. Even if you take away the big names in the band, this stands as one of the best indie rock albums of the '90s! As you can tell, we're so stoked it's just been reissued on vinyl!
Here's great disc that we got clued into thanks to heavy druid dude Julian Cope's Head Heritage website (and label, that put this out). The UK's Holy McGrail (perhaps a silly name, but the guy behind this project is named Chris McGrail) is definitely one for any AQ customer who digs heaviness, droneiness, and krautrockiness. That's a lot of you, eh? Well then, how 'bout three looong tracks ("Lady Holle" running to 23:45, "'Quake Appeal" at 28:51, and "Ur-cow" just 19:59) of pagan drone rock, one with buried-by-bass Amon Duul meets th' Stooges drumming and the rest totally beat-less cosmic guitar and synth-scapes, guest-starring the likes of Doggen (Brain Donor), Julian Cope himself and SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley?? From the freaking lovely purple cracked earth mountain cover art to the dense drones within, this is utterly right-on. Turn it up and let it rumble. Damn beautiful. If you like SUNNO))), Growing, Earth, etc. you should check this out. Now we're looking forward to Holy McGrail's upcoming plunderphonic tribute to Iggy & the Stooges, something called the Raw Power Suite! And soon (next list) we'll be reviewing a cd-r entitled "The Creep" by Slowmo, an aptly named Earth-like duo also featuring McGrail.
Yet another fantastic disc of murky mysterious electronica from the Tri Angle label, after records from oOoOO, Balam Acab and How To Dress Well, Holy Other falls right into place, another group straddling the line between witch house, slo-mo soul, dubbed out minimalism, and just murky otherworldly spaced out psychedelic hip hop. And while Holy Other has his own distinctive take on the sounds, it will probably only take you a matter of seconds to feel the sound's warm embrace, and make the connections to other groups mining similar territory. The tempos creep and drag, the vocals, when there are any, are chopped up and processed, looped to make hauntingly layered rhythms, or placed judiciously to help create a sort of spectral soul. Skeletal grooves drift over spare rhythmic skitter, low end whirs and rumbles, beats surface and submerge, the hooks, as unlikely as they are, seem to be built from those fragmented vocals, and when a certain phrase, delivered by a clipped voice is sent bouncing from speaker to speaker, creating ghostly harmonies, it's pretty incredible, and then when those are woven into lush dreamlike arrangements, total electro dreamdrift bliss out. "Touch" might be THEE jam here, its definitely the most Burial beholden, but the vocal hook, and the arrangement, the lush dark groove, it's so darkly dreamy and mysteriously soulful, and the thick buzzing low end just makes it that much more haunting and gorgeously ominous. Tri Angle are pretty much untouchable when it comes to this shit, they're four for four at this point, we can hardly wait to see what's up next. So if you're in the market for hazy, gauzy, washed out, dreamy and druggy, then Holy Other is probably right up your alley.
Latest new band from Captured Tracks, not sure what the name is all about, or the cover photo of little kids playing basketball, cuz if there really is some sort of sports theme, we're not hearing it, what we are hearing is a pretty fantastic slab of gloomy angular new wave-y artpunk that doesn't sound all that far removed from groups like The Editors, the Killers, Maximo Park and the like. Thick driving Joy Division like basslines beneath chiming jangly guitars, everything reverby and shimmery, but still dark and moody, with deep dramatic vocals, the B side ups the murky gothy vibe, and sounds a bit more like the Cure or Fields Of The Nephilim, even a little Interpol-ish, lots more electronics, pulsing synths, more programmed sounding beats, with some really strange cool parts that seem to swoop and swerve and get all swoonsome, there are plenty of hooks tucked in there too. For sure will appeal to the usual CT crowd, but they do seem a bit more mainstream, or at least less reverby and lo-fi and retro, the sort of band that could probably make the leap from Captured Tracks to the more mainstream musical world their above mentioned sonic compatriots inhabit.
Another blast of post-apocalyptic cold-wave inspired dark goth-pop from Horrid Red. Comprised of members of Teenage Panzerkorps, including the ever prolific and talented Glenn Donaldson (Art Museums, Skygreen Leopards, Jewelled Antler, etc.) as well as a rotating cast of band members including some AQ alumni.
"Silent Party" is perhaps the most infectious song Horrid Red have crafted yet. Sounding like some lost gem of gloomy dark wave pop that one might hear on some awesome reissue by Dark Entries. But just as we played that song over and over several times and finally allowed ourselves to hear the next track "The Horror & The Cruelty" we had to seriously rethink if this track now takes the cake for their best blast of sneering motorik Fad Gaget inspired darkness.
The two tracks on the B side "Marble Staircase" and "Parts I & II" are less immediate but showcase their ability to create a downer atmosphere with such success.
At a time when we've been getting lots of 7"s with just one killer song, we appreciate that there are four totally strong tracks on this 7" making it well worth the price.
The vinyl of Fin De Siecle came out in 1995 through the Korm Plastics label, who only pressed up 250 copies as something for the band to take on tour in Europe. In many ways, this was a parallel album to the sublime drone constructions that Illusion Of Safety produced on the unheralded masterpiece Of & The, whose foggy netherworld of found sounds crossed with haunted ambience was prescient of the albums that Mirror, Kevin Drumm, and The Caretaker would produce many years later. Illusion Of Safety had been operational for about a decade when this record originally came out, first building very ominous post-industrial constructions laced with toxic noise and unsettling media samples; but by the early '90s, IOS became far more sophisticated through subtle uses of musique concrete and psychoacoustic strategies. Records like Probe and Cancer are indicative of this approach leading to the more introspective and contemplative albums of the mid '90s, including Fin De Siecle.
The liner notes from revolving door Illusion Of Safety member Kurt Griesch mentions being unhappy with the outcome of the LP, as much of the material needed to be edited and revised to fit on vinyl. In revisiting the material, Illusion Of Safety chose to leave what was found on the LP intact and bracket those tracks with two newer pieces (one about three minutes long, the other over twenty-five) serving as a re-imagined framework. The first cut builds a screeching collage of metal-upon-metal and compacted rumblings ramping quickly to a corroded crescendo that snaps to a loud amplification of a runout groove on a piece of vinyl. This brief interlude of acoustic noises stand in stark contrast to the rest of album, which glides weightlessly in and out of the dreamy glassine drone of pre-waking ambience, stretching out the cybernetic dreamtime heard only in brief sketches on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. As an ambient record, Fin De Siecle does have its moments of dislocation and upheaval with a growling snarl of impulsive thrumming at the end of "Part One" and some gritty field recordings of an industrial wasteland devoid of any human emerging in "Part Three." Even on their prettiest and most graceful album, Illusion Of Safety find a way to make their proceedings unsettling.
Recommended to us by an aQ pal (thanks Hank!) as most likely being 'right up our alley', we were pretty excited to check out this French / Italian outfit, heck, they're called JC Satan, and the record cover is a pretty intense and bizarre painting of a masked man covered in blood and sores, surrounded by two topless demon women, one wearing a pentagram, the other with 666 carved on her belly, the trio standing between two big pillars of smoke, but the drawing is not 'metal scary', more cartoonish, which should have been our first hint that this 'Satan band was not at all metal, and instead, trafficked in something else entirely. That something else in this case is some fantastic fuzz poppy garage rock, a sound much more in like with Thee Oh Sees and the Fresh And Onlys and the like than anything remotely heavy or evil.
In fact the opening track "Odyssey Of Love" might be out new favorite garage pop jam, all big chiming reverby guitars, pounding echoey drums, Beach Boys-ish vox, sweet female background vocals, dreamy and hooky and washed out and hazy and a little bit druggy. But wait, the second track "Prehistoric Love" is just as good, more laid back and low slung, with some impossibly distorted guitars, that blown out, peaking production making everything that much more murky and muddy, but with a soaring chorus, kick ass drumming, and some rad howled female screams, this is some dark buzzy fuzzy garage rock bliss for sure.
"Your Place" gets all spaced out an minimal, like some lost lo-fi NZ drone pop gem, a smoldering garage rock ballad, all spidery melodies, and woozy, weary boy/girl harmonies, "Itaca" is also laid back and dreamily druggy, sounding like Mazzy Star via Dum Dum Girls, "The Day" gets things going again, with some Lyres like riffage, some knuckle dragging drum pound, and more of that meter pegging production, while "You Are Good" is another warped dirgey blast of sixties style reverb heavy garage-y groove, and so it goes, a dark and mysterious collection of deliriously druggy fuzzed out garage rock from this Euro crew, the sort of thing that should have the current crop of fuzz pop garage rockers anxiously checking their rearview mirrors...
Most definitely recommended for fans of Thee Oh Sees, Blasted Canyons, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, Davila 666, etc...
We've been sitting on a handful of these, the most recent release by Weakling worshippers Jabaladav, a ridiculously limited edition of just 50 copies, with the intention of eventually getting a bunch more to list and review. Well, we were informed recently by the man himself that The Cold Warmth was out of print, and thus we have the last handful of copies. And while there is a new full length on the horizon, this is most likely your last chance to get your grubby mitts on a copy of this, a collection of tracks recorded at the same time as Atta Vinter, but that were left off the final version. So Jabladav fans, if you dig AV, this is almost like a part two, all the usual Jabladav-isms are present, gnarled black blasts, mathy rhythms, killer riffing, the songs soaring and majestic one second, murky and dirge-y the next, the arrangements complex and almost proggy, with the sound switching from grim black, to grinding distorted churn, from strange processed vox flecked clean guitar moodiness to hazy, minor key almost post rock ambience, it's all good stuff, heavy and twisted, dark and tripped out. Apparently, according to the liner notes, Atta Vinter was meant to be 'to the point' and not at all epic, which is why these tracks were left off, but now with Atta Vinter AND The Cold Warmth in your clutches, the potential for grim black epicness is endless.
As with all Jabladav releases, the packaging is pretty deluxe, housed in a dvd case, with a cool color cover, signed by the band, there's a xeroxed insert, also signed by the band and numbered, as well as a smaller color insert, which is numbered, as is the disc. And again, this is out of print, and these are THEE last copies we will ever be able to get.
Another list and another batch of classic reissues from the always great Omni label (check elsewhere on this list our review of Hank Snow's Songs Of Tragedy!). Norma Jean was one of country music's early female stars, having gotten her start in 1950 at the tender age of 12 and later moving into good but tumultuous company with Porter Wagoner on his legendary TV show. To quote the liners, "Norma Jean is quite possibly the most misremembered and under appreciated of all country western singers," but this 30 song compilation featuring choice cuts from 1964-1973 should be enough to remind listeners of her considerable talents. Possessing a confident, crystal clear voice and covering all the usual time tested country topics (spurned love, drinking, and more spurned love) Norma Jean's reputation may have been somewhat eclipsed by Wagoner's next big discovery - Dolly Parton - but she had quite a prolific career before leaving the industry and venturing into darker, more alcoholic waters in the 1970s and then embracing Christianity. The material here is top shelf Nashville fare and one of our new favorites from Omni's ever expanding catalog.
We first were made aware of this great New York dance floor pop group, with their mind blowing single "Prisoner Of Love", which features Antony on vocals and is one of the best modern disco burners we've heard in ages. We immediately were reminded of the game-changing Hercules & Love Affair album that Antony guested on a few years ago, and then we realized that Jessica 6 is a group led by Nomi Ruiz, one of the vocalists in Hercules & Love Affair. In fact all three core members of Jessica 6 worked on that great Hercules & Love Affair record. So it should come as no surprise that See The Light, is filled with a similar sound, yet a little more pop, and the jams here come out so damn charged. Kind of like if you took records by Cristina, Vanity 6, Culture Club, Hot Chip, and Madonna and made the ultimate dance floor mix. It's actually really refreshing to hear a great vocal filled dance record that hits the spot so right on.
Not sure what it is exactly, but just recently there seems to be a sudden onslaught of classic old school hip hop reissues, mind you we're not complaining, but it is a strange selection of 'classics' (Whodini, Sparky D, Kool Moe Dee, Unique & Dashan). One of our favorite of the bunch though is this, originally released in 1990, record number four from old school hardcore MC Just-Ice, one of the first hardcore rap MC's (whose hyphenated name always made us think of metal band Vio-lence), who has a pretty bad ass delivery, very reminiscent of Big Daddy Kane actually, and really seems like he must have been an influence for the character Charlie Murphy plays in CB4 (still some of the best hip hop parody ever, alongside Fear Of A Black Hat). And while Just-Ice definitely cut an imposing figure, buff and tattooed, with a gold grill and some serious attitude, much of this record's success is due to the music, which of course is provided by legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash, whose sound is absolute classic hip hop, minimal scratching, layered soul loops, snippets of horns, killer grooves, creepy ominous basslines, simple shuffling beats, a super distinctive sound that pretty much defined hip hop of that era, but few did it better that Grandmaster Flash, and when combined with Just-Ice's badass flow, it's pretty tough to beat.
We usually start reviews of records released on Mississippi Records with a blaring announcement that looks a little like this:
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Cuz we know there are plenty of folks out there, that like us, are crazy obsessed with that label, and will buy ANYthing and EVERYthing they release. And we imagine those folks will no doubt buy this one as well, but for the folks who might not be quite so Mississippi obsessed, or who might have gotten in the habit of seeing that announcement and skipping on by, we didn't want anyone to miss out on this one, because this record just might be the one to suck you in and MAKE you that obsessed. Sure it's yet another incredible unearthed gem from the crazy music obsessives who run the impeccable Mississippi Records label, and as we hinted at above, pretty much everything they release is worth checking out, and yeah, they're all special in their own way, there's a bunch of others on this very list, but this one, this one is something else altogether, a collection of 78s from legendary Indian classical vocalist Khansahib Abdul Karim Khan, dense, lush, emotional and spiritual ragas, haunting and mystical and completely gorgeous. A huge influence of legendary minimalist composer La Monte Young, in fact the liner notes offer up a quote from Young that basically says it all: "When I first heard the recordings of Abdul Karim Khan I thought that perhaps it would be best if I gave up singing, got a cabin up in the mountains, stocked it with a record player and recordings of Abdul Karim Khan, and just listened for the rest of my life."
We can definitely understand his feelings, this is the sort of music, so powerful and so passionate, that it definitely puts most 'singers' to shame. The instrumentation is very traditional classical Indian, but it's the vocals that drive these songs, the instruments way down in the mix, Khan's gorgeous vocals soaring and dramatic, haunting and moving and utterly breathtaking. We've seen descriptions of these recordings as being "not easy listening, but ultimately very rewarding", and while we definitely agree with the second half of the statement, these sounds while complex and totally unlike most of the other music you've heard, are not at all difficult to listen to, just the opposite, after just a few seconds, you'll be whisked away, totally transported, as the sounds surround you, and seep into your spirit and soul. The music here so utterly transcendent, so lush, warm and welcoming, yet at the same time, so strange and wondrous, Khan's voice sounding like its bathed in divine light.
Khansahib Abdul Karim Khan truly was a sonic shaman for the ages, delivering these divine musical messages to us, his willing supplicants. Incredible.
Packaged in super thick full color old school tip-on jackets, with a big booklet packed with liner notes and photos.
As we mentioned in the review of volume one of Leyland Kirby's new four part series Intrigue & Stuff, his work has become a bit of an obsession for us around, here, and from what we can gather, many of you out there. His sprawling Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was collection was and is definitely a unanimous aQ favorite. And don't even get us started on The Caretaker, his hauntological mixtapes of crackly old jazz records, mysterious, haunting and otherwordly sonic studies on memory and loss. So it's not surprising that the first volume of this new series threw us for a bit of a loop. But hell, if there's anybody you SHOULD expect the unexpected from, it's Kirby. Thus we grew to love Intrigue & Stuff volume 1, which was in fact a collection of twisted murky electronics, fractured reimagined IDM, crumbling synth shimmer, not to mention some grinding distorted buzz and some dreamy droned out electro warble, and just from the above descriptions, you begin to realize that maybe it wasn't so sonically out of character after all.
But then what to expect from the second volume? Surely not more of the same we imagined. And in fact, it's definitely not, it's more of a return to the sound we imagine most folks were hoping for with volume one, sonic decay, warped slo-mo samples, crumbling distortion, everything woozy and warped. This time, separated into just three tracks, the shortest a little over 4 minutes, the longest nearly 20, Kirby slips back into his hauntological guise, with the opening track, the provocatively titled "Eventually, It Eats Your Lungs", unfurling as a super distorted slo-mo soulful creep, a deep crooned vocal suspended in fields of churning staticky buzz, of blurred chordal shimmer, the sounds all wreathed in effects, and crumbling from the speakers, it's almost like a Caretaker remix of some Burial track, the same sort of creepy murky soul, the vibe is so mysterious and hauntingly sinister, laced with super cinematic cues, it's WAY too short at 12 minutes, this is the sort of thing we could listen to FOREVER, and found ourselves wishing Kirby had stretched that track into a whole record.
The relatively brief "Speeded Up Slow Motion" sort of sounds exactly like the title implies, a dizzying spatial shimmer, with pulses of distorted ambience, careening back and forth between the left and right stereo fields, while in the background, new agey melodies tinkle and chime, and as amazing as this one sounds, we definitely could not handle a whole record of this. But in fact, it seems to be a bit of a palate cleanser, preparing our ears for the epic sprawl of the final track, "Complex Expedition", which begins with a long slow drift, wreathed in a haze of hushed static, driven by subtle muted low end pulsations, and rife with bits of abstract dub, sounding a little like some super ambient abstract version of Pole, every sound wrapped in echo and sent drifting into the ether, it's not until about 5 minutes in, that the main melody surfaces, a playful darkly distorted bit of carnivalesque bleep and bloop, that quickly turns sinister, and minor key, and we're in definite Goblin territory, the track slips back into the initial ultra minimal drift, and the sound slowly and dreamily slips back and forth, that second melody returning, but each time more greyed out and grim, until finally the process seems to reverse itself, and the track seems to emerge from darkness, luxuriating in the light, only to moments later disappear into darkness for good.
Fantastic, of course, and already we're hankering for volume three...
