**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT** **MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
You'll want to pay attention to this one, because this rare Mahmoud Ahmed, originally self-released in 1978, has never been reissued before in any form, cd or lp, and it's a KILLER! Recorded with The Ibex band forming funky circular rhythms of bass, guitars, horns, organ, and percussion around Ahmed's soulful and sultry vocals, the songs are upbeat yet heady, hypnotic and serpentine in a way that only Ethio-jazz can be. We've long been fans of Mahmoud Ahmed, waxing rapturously about his many contributions to the long-running Ethiopiques series and we've covered plenty of his back story in past reviews. But just when we thought his entire back catalog must have already been made available, turns out there are apparently new treasures to be found and this record is certainly worthy of that esteem. An awesome find that is truly magical and beguiling. Don't sleep on this one! Highest Recommendation!
Newest record from Damon McMahon, aka Amen Dunes. His first record, Dia, we made a Record Of The Week, describing it as sounding like some lost psychedelic gem from the Sixties, and the second Amen Dunes record, Murder Dull Mind, was more of the same, gloriously haunting, outsider bedroom psych, channeling the spirit of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, a mysterious otherworldly folk-pop artifact steeped in druggy atmosphere and loosed from traditional folk music tropes, resulting in haunting sonic ritualism that seemed to exist out of time.
This latest record is a logical extension of its two predecessors, and if anything, it seems to be the poppiest of the bunch. Right from the start, "Baba Yaga" had us expecting something WAY more far out, but instead, it's a gorgeous slab of soaring folk pop, all sun dappled and dreamy, with some surprisingly powerful vocals, all wound up in blurry shimmer, and what sounds like tangled strings or heavily effected harmonicas, either way, it might be the best proper 'song' McMahon has come up with yet. And much of the record follows suit, taking the early Pink Floydisms and mixing those up with some Byrds-y twang, some Grateful Dead jamminess, all blurred into a hazy chunk of lost Sixties folk pop. We can even hear some early Bee Gees, some Zombies, some truly gleefully twisted classic pop moments mixed in (check out "Not A Slave", which sounds like it could have been some alternate universe hit), which makes Through Donkey Jaw a surprisingly catchy record. And we have to say it definitely suits them (him?). Not sure if it was a conscious decision, or a natural progression, but this record is most definitely about songs first, that said, the sounds those songs are created with, are pretty impressive, a dead ringer for records of the era, but here and there some strange synth, or some odd bit of production will give it away as something more modern that it purports to be.
And there's still plenty of experimentalism going on, it's just more subtle, either whole non-song-tracks, or subtly woven in amidst the hooks and weirdly proper verse chorus verse arrangements. The vocals are woozy and laid back, wreathed in soft effects, but still much more of a driving force than on past records, the sound shifting easily from jangle pop to gloom folk, tripped out psychedelia to jammy psych rock without batting an eye, and managing to make it all hang together like a proper record.
The final track (a bonus track) is titled "Tomorrow Never Knows". Is it a cover of THAT song? It's actually hard to tell, but what we do know is that it's one of the most gloriously far out moments on the record, a dark brooding bit of rhythmic propulsive krautrock, laced with pounding piano, swirls of distorted guitar crunch, bleating horns, shards of feedback, wild tribal freakouts, after the otherwise song oriented psychedelic folk pop of the preceding thirteen tracks, it's a pretty unexpected, fantastic, and sonically unhinged finale.
First we've heard in a long while from this prolific home recordist, going on 20 years now, and while at one point we may have gotten a wee bit burnt out on AN, we have to say, this new single is definitely reminding us why we liked it so much in the first place.
The A side begins all lo-fi with a spidery melody unwinding over a bed of swirling electronics, laced with some raga like buzz, a little droney psychedelia, would have been perfectly happy to listen to just that for five minutes, but the side shifts dramatically, and the sound is transformed into a sort of cosmic synth swirl, the sort of sound that would be right at home on an Emeralds record, a sun dappled wall of blissy hazy soft focus buzz.
The flipside follows a similar pattern, this time opening with some slow synth creep, sounding a bit like a lost John Carpenter soundtrack, and then it too blossoms into another chunk of kosmische bliss out, this time, a high end raga drone that sounds like Sunroof! crossed with Muslimgauze, driven by a pulsing rhythm, everything wreathed in a blurred shimmer and tangled up with muted psychedelic leads, totally heady and hypnotic, and another one of those tracks that could have stretched out forEVER.
Gorgeous stuff, and again, we're reminded of just how much we may have been missing Ashtray Navigations. Not sure how limited these are, but we're guessing, probably pretty limited, so grab one before they're gone.
By now, long time readers of the aQ list know how much we dig Aidan Baker and all his various projects, and it seems that you all do too, based on how many of his records we sell. The sad thing is that so many of his most amazing records were released as super limited cd-r's, often so limited that we were never able to get any for the shop at all. Such was the case with 2007's Noise Of Silence. Originally released on Hyperblasted, the amazing Essence Music in Brazil has stepped into re-release it, and as with all their releases, they've pulled out all the stops. This is in fact a PRE-ORDER!! For the super deluxe, boxset version of Baker's reissued Noise Of Silence. We will have the regular single cd non-boxset version, but this right here, this is for the Baker obsessives, like us, like YOU, limited to 122 copies, almost entirely sold out from the label, Essence has graciously set aside about 20 boxes, the LAST 20, for aQ customers, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item).
So what's the big deal about Noise Of Silence. And this fancy box? Well, more on the packaging (and the bonus cd-r) further down, but Noise of Silence, is a doozy, a gorgeous, haunting, 50 minute abstract drone/drift, super cinematic, rife with dark chordal swells, layered shimmer, mysterious disembodied voices, a strange bit of processed sibilance, that could be the vocals processed, but instead becomes weird little shards of soft focus white noise peppering the hushed soundscape, almost like the sonic equivalent of white caps on a blackened sea. It doesn't take long for the track to blossom into something far from tranquil and drifty, the sound growing more agitated, the vibe more noisy, the atmosphere more dense, the voices more strident, a swirling cacophony, that manages to build to an almost white noise squall, but even them the edges are smoothed out, and the sound, while harsh and heavy, still manages to be darkly droney and weirdly hypnotic, the sounds grinding and crunching, the various tones splintering and crumbling, a heady blown out wildly looped collage that gradually settles into something much more mellow, the last 20 minutes a slowly decaying stretch of ambient dronemusic, the whispery shadows of that cacophony still present, hissing and swirling just below the surface, seriously and surprisingly haunting and demonic Baker, we can definitely imaging this as the score for some experimental foreign horror / art film. Gorgeous stuff for sure, but definitely on the dark side of Baker's sound, a side we don't get to her so much any more.
This new version of Noise Of Silence, is presented as a super deluxe, hand made and hand assembled box, painted in blacks and blues, nicely textured, with what appears to be branches or veins, inside the cd is housed in a gorgeous full color digipak, and held in place by black elastic bands, while right next to it, unfold black triangular flaps, and pull out the accordion like set of cards, each one hand painted like the outside of the box, all unique and surprisingly tactile, to reveal the bonus cd-r, a collection of early works and demos, many of which would in fact show up on later releases in altered forms, all culled from the period spanning 1991-1995, and an eclectic collection of early works, that tend toward the raw, the noisy, the aggressive, but still beautiful and lush and droney, some acoustic ballads, some droned out noisescapes, some hushed minimal acoustic drift as well as some darkly psychedelic and dreamy guitar ragas, incredible stuff for sure, and well worth a proper release on their own, but ONLY available as part of this super limited box.
As we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is for folks who want to nab one of these before they are gone for good.
It seems like ages since we last heard from East Coast acid psych combo Bipolaroid, but in fact it's been about 4 years, which seems to be about how long it takes these guys between records, but as always, it's well worth the wait.
The first two Bipolaroid records were big hits around here, both E(i)ther Or and Transparent Make Believe took early Pink Floyd as their starting point, but the band took that sound and stretched it way out, weaving woozy, tripped out, psychscapes, all whirring organs, fuzzy guitars, swirling strings, spaced out effects and laid back drawled vox that were at times a dead ringer for Syd Barrett. It was easy to get lost in those records, the sounds hooky and hazy and hypnotic, and even four years on, very little has changed, if anything, the band sound a bit heavier, the production more lush, the songs more propulsive and pounding, but also a bit more warped, almost like classic sounds dosed with some particularly virulent strain of LSD, the guitars a little tweaked and atonal, horns here and there, sounds drone and warble, pure psychedelia for sure, that minus the shiny new production, definitely sounds like it could be some unearthed sixties rarity.
The guitars are wild and wooly, buzzy and fuzzy, squiggly and distorted, slipping from riff to jangle, wild psychedelic lead to wrapped tangled atonal crunch, unfurling melodies wreathed in wah wah, draped over loping waltzes, and swaggery stomps, the vocals still a laid back drawl, settled just so in the mix, lots of acoustic guitars, and swirling keyboards, the vibe is jangly and psychedelic, but also a little dark, and a little bit wasted, the whole record a gloriously twisted sonic funhouse mirror, a wonderfully warped collection of dark twisted modern psychedelia, that should for sure hit the spot for old school psych obsessives, but might also appeal to folks into more modern psychedelic sounds...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
We'd heard how awesome the soundtrack to this film was for years, so we were so psyched to discover that Soundway was finally giving it a proper reissue. The film was directed by one of Nigeria's most respected directors, Ola Balogun, and was shot on location in Brazil. Balogun recruited the musical mastermind and fellow Nigerian, Remi Kabaka, to score and produce the soundtrack to the film. Kabaka has played with a wide range of folks including Ginger Baker, Hugh Masekela, Paul Simon, and Paul McCartney, and for the soundtrack rounded up some of Nigeria's finest players and crafted a collection of songs filled with such a unique and left-of-center Afro-jazz sound. There's something so raw and mysterious about these tracks evoking all manner of sweat and suspense. We're totally feeling this, late summer, slow burner for sure!
These oddly monikered aQ faves return with a brand new full length, and return to the True Sheffield Black Psychedelia fold, aka their original label Frequency Thirteen, after a release on aQ beloved and now sadly defunct label Rusty Axe. And what a return! Like past records, Black Vomit's sound is one that's tough to pin down, an ever shifting tangle of blurred and blackened sound collage, blown out super rhythmic noise rock, field recording flecked spaced out psychedelia, they pretty much all apply at one point or another, and impossibly sometimes all at once. It takes a while for things to get rolling, a weird creeping noise drenched into, all strange samples and shimmery layered low end, all glitchy and warbly, then some Sunroof! style high end raga drone, then finally, a thick low slung bassline slithers into action, beneath a black cloud of growling croaked disembodied vox, and then finally, true to the track's title "Forbidden Dub", the various sounds peel off, leaving just a tripped out spaced out dub, everything wreathed in echo and reverb, the drums careening wildly through clouds of cymbal sizzle, more mysterious samples, moaning guitar melodies, it's like a way more grim and blackened version of Sun Araw almost, a bastardized dub, that is teetering on the edge of collapsing into full on doomy dirge.
Which is where things seem to be heading until the next track, "Riding Below A Sky Threatening Snow To The Very End Of An Empty World", explodes into what quickly reveals itself as some sort of fucked up dubstep jam, but Black Vomitized, so the sounds are all blurred and tangled, chaotic and abstract, a thick bass warble holding everything together, while beats stutter and stagger, and all of the other sounds blown out and in the red, before the record switches gears once again, laying down a bit of shimmery abstraction, before an avalanche of super distorted drums come crashing through a field of swirling electronics, the whole thing like an IDM Lightning Bolt. And so it goes, every song something entirely different, yet somehow linked to the song before it, and to the whole, a twisted songsuite of beats and buzz, of low end rumble and caustic crunch, slipping from synth heavy shoegaze blur, to tripped out reverb heavy space rock jangle, from creepy almost John Carpenter-ish soundscapery to bleary minimal low slung creep, and from distorted sun dappled dreambuzz ambience, to a final 20 minute slab of abstract synth-squelch, blur-bliss shimmer. So good.
SUPER DUPER LIMITED too, ONLY 40 COPIES!! we got 20 of those, which won't last long...
This Canadian doom-psych-prog-metal band's 2008 debut was a big fave 'round here, we likened their female-fronted n' flutey, Hammond organ driven occult heaviness to "Electric Wizard given a medieval, madrigal makeover" and compared 'em to a hypothetical Atomic Rooster + Jacula + Jex Thoth hybrid. So, stoked are we to announce the arrival of a brand new Blood Ceremony, still damp and crimson, and damn good! There's a few ways, we figure, a band like this could go: get darker and more extreme metal (a la Wooden Stake), or lighten up and develop more in their prog direction (we could imagine 'em sounding something like Curved Air in that case). Or, of course, they could provide more of the same, which would elicit no complaints from us. And that's what Blood Ceremony pretty much opted for, this album coming off like a continuation / perfection of their debut, nine more songs of vintage '70s sounding, witchy rockarolla. With plenty of rollicking Hammond organ and swinging retro riffery, they deliver the progged-out proto-metal goods like it's 1971 and they've just come from getting stoned with their groovy coven. Complete with a flute happy instrumental ("The Hermit"). And definitely, with a lot hinging on the dramatic, stagey, sometimes soft, sometimes soaring, vocals of Alia O'Brien.
Again, VERY much in the vein of Jex Thoth. O'Brien and Blood Ceremony are almost the Burning Saviours to Jex Thoth's Witchcraft, if you follow that doom-nerd analogy. Another would be Black Sabbath with a sex change, and Deep Purple or Uriah Heep's keyboards hired on... as Sabbath's actual keyboardy stuff, courtesy caped wonder Rick Wakeman on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath ferinstance, was a lot more "synthy" sounding than the classic Hammond vibe heard here, played in kick ass fashion by O'Brien by the way, a triple threat talent who's also the band's flautist, flaunting it indeed, what would they do without her?
Not that the guitarist, for one, doesn't get to shine as well, in the riff department, and dueling leads with the organ, like during the swirling, surging tour de force of the epic "Oliver Haddo" (the album's second longest song, not quite beating out the 10 minute plus closer, "Daughter Of The Sun", another extended, involved rite, all right).
This time, produced by Sanford Parker (Pelican, Yob, Zoroaster, Samothrace, The Gates Of Slumber, etc.), which perhaps accounts for some of the added thickness/heaviness we sense here, though the debut was heavy too. He also supplies some Moog.
This disc's too-dark cover photo of the band is about the only disappointment, whereas the cover painting for their first album, by fantasy artist George Barr, was something to look at. But for listening, this is indeed the answer to your prayers to the Great God Pan. So good, we simply can't get enough of this, and if you too are truly in the mood for some beauteous and bombastic, rockin' pagan prog heaviness, then it's time to begin Living With The Ancients!
A while back we reviewed the reissue of this British band's wonderfully twee and surreal first album, "We Are Ever So Clean", from the paisley days of 1967. But on this, that album's 1969 follow-up, they left the Sgt. Pepperisms behind for an even freakier, and heavier, direction. It's kinda like how The Pretty Things went from "S.F. Sorrow" to "Parachute", but weirder. The Mothers Of Invention might have been an influence, certainly the lead-off track "Peace Loving Man" is crazy enough. Heavy too, with gruff vocals and loud guitar riffs. Yep, compared to the ornate, orchestrated psych-pop of "We Are Ever So Clean" this whole album is waaaay more (acid) Rock, but still full of melodic hooks and 60s zaniness. Pretty cool. Unfortunately this was to be their last album, but their guitarist did go on to join Family (we mention for those into the rock family tree thing).
Record number two from this mysterious Bay Area black metal horde, a group whose sound is as heavy on the Louisville math rock is it is on the black buzz, and on record number two, they stretch out even further, exploring their math/post rock tendencies in ways that were only hinted at on the first record. And as one might expect, the mix of black buzz and meandering post rockisms sounds much more organic this time around, where as the first time the separation between the two sounds was more jarring. The production is much improved too.
Just take the opening track, "Volume Two Chapter One", with its darkly dynamic opening, all start stop minor key minimalism, a melancholy minor key melody played out over a series of chords, left to ring out, the drums crashing in time, the only hint of the blackness to come is a howled vocals way way off in the distance, it's two minutes before this crashing moodiness segues fairly smoothly into some frantic blackened blasting, the drums not your typical blastbeat, instead offering up all manner of unlikely fills, the result a little off kilter, and a good balance to the otherwise more traditional back buzz guitar and shrieked vox. And then with about 2 minutes to go, the buzz seems to dissipate leaving just a churning, chuggy chunk of palm muted math rock, that sounds more like Don Cab than Darkthrone, pounding out the final minute in a tangle of mathy rhythms.
The post rockisms are much more subtle in "Marie In A Cage", which plays more like your standard buzzing blackness, but there are those wild chaotic drums, not to mention a killer part midsong where the band switch into a brief bit of proggy mathiness that KILLS, but it's brief and soon the band are galloping along again, never fully shedding that mathiness, but instead incorporating it into the black buzz. "The Lampless Hours" is another track that starts out sounding like some lost mid nineties Touch And Go record (minus the flurries of double kick drum), before launching into a stretch of 'proper' black metal. "The Death Posture" is a churning doomy plod, peppered with burst of blasting black metal, and again here, the band are much more subtle with their deployment of post and math rock elements, which ultimately makes for some truly idiosyncratic black metal. And finally, the record finishes off with the 11+ minute "Why Am I So Lovely? Because My Master Washes Me.", which again sounds on the surface traditionally blackened and buzzy, but the post rock undercurrent seems to seep through every chance it gets, finally shouldering the blackness out of the way at about the midway point for a stretch of gnarled mathiness, that manages to not sound out of place, instead, it's drawn in shades of black, that make it that much easier for the band to slip back into the furious buzz that finishes off the record, until the last minute when the recording seems to go haywire, everything blown out and distorted finishing off in a wild squall of Merzbowian white noise.
Definitely less post rocky than its predecessor, but again, the trade off is that the post rock element doesn't sound as much like a gimmick, instead sounding more an actual intrinsic part of BdN's sound, and while black metal dabblers may not be so inclined this time around (although they should be), true grim metalheads might just find their horizons being expanded, whether they realize it or not.
For some reason, we've never reviewed any records by garage folk duo the Dutchess And The Duke, which means that to many folks Case Studies, aka Jesse Lortz, will be an unknown quantity, but sometimes that's the best way to experience a group or a record, especially when it's a new direction and/or a new sound for an established artist, it makes taking the music on its own merits a bit easier. So as you may have surmised, Jesse Lortz is in fact The Duke, one half of the aforementioned group, and fans of that band will definitely find some connections between that groups' songs and the music of Case Studies. But the music of Case Studies is much more stripped down and moody, the songs here apparently based on a year in the life of Lortz, and quite a year it must have been these songs painting lush miniatures of sorrow and loneliness, of bitterness and misery, but also of happiness and hope, or at least the promise of such.
Case Studies is at its core, country music, Lortz' deep croon, a dead ringer for country legend Townes Van Zandt, even his phrasing is eerily similar, the music is minimal but rich, the production spare but lush (produced by Greg Ashley), the songs mostly simple steel string strum, fingerpicked melodies and those deep moody vocals, but the voice and acoustic guitar are sometimes fleshed out with mournful strings, reverbed piano, sweet female harmonies, but for the most part, it's Lortz's voice that drives this record, that and his bittersweet (sometimes just bitter) lyrics and subtle way with melodies.
Dark and dreamy, hushed and melancholy. Opener "From The Blade Of My Love" is a heartbreaker, the melody, the vocals, the lyrics, the perfect start to a harrowing and ultrapersonal dark country missive, a song suite / melancholy missive that culminates in the droney slowcore twang of "California Ghost Story", a dark dreamy depressive creep, that drifts and shimmers, wreathed in the faded haze of forgotten love, and record closer, a surprisingly jaunty stretch of hushed minimal twang, replete with whistled melody, a glimmer of hope, as if finally, the clouds might part and the sun might shine down. Nice!
While some reissue labels specialize in digging up the obscure '60s garage or '70s psych of collector's dreams, Shadow Kingdom's idea of a long lost gem is something like this, a pretty much unknown quasi-metal American rock act from the early '80s that went precisely nowhere with their strange brand of theatrical, "magickal", poppy, proggy hard rock / metal, despite a lot of spunk and even some talent too. This disc contains Cassle's 1983 ep plus a bunch of unreleased songs from the era filling it out to full-length cd status.
We say quasi-metal 'cause while they've got the medieval name of Cassle (i.e. Castle - it seems they liked to spell things differently, they were originally called Miraaj), and do indeed sport some fairly heavy, gritty guitars and fantasy/horror themes, they're really much more Rush than Maiden. And they've got keyboards. Yup, so '70s prog/pomp rock outfits like Rush, Styx, and Kansas were probably as big or bigger influences on 'em than the then-contemporary riffage of the NWOBHM. It's also a set of influences they share with another Shadow Kingdom band, Manilla Road.
But that's what gives this a lot of its charm, some kids from LA trying to do the pomp thing on a budget and without worrying much about being "cool". Well actually, they probably did think this was cool. And if you're like us, you might think it's cool too. How can you not love it when they actually sing "A dungeon, a dragon..." in one of their songs here, "Revenge (Cassle Walls)"?!
They're no Manilla Road but this is still pretty fun, it kinda reminds us of Sorcery's Stunt Rock soundtrack, and Legend US (From The Fjords), a bit. Cd booklet includes new liner notes, full lyrics, and color photos of the band back in the day.
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!!
Another killer chunk of outsider electronic music from Triangle, who has also given us amazing records by witch house outfits oOoOO and Balam Acab, and while Clams Casino, a twenty something hip hop producer from New Jersey who's done production for Lil B and Soulja Boy, is not technically witch house, it's easy to see why he ended up on triangle, cuz to our ears, many of the elements are the same, the sound woozy and warped, muddy and murky, washed out and ethereal, stuttering loops, disembodied voices wreathed in effects and layered into their own sort of rhythms, the sound a gorgeous creepy crawl, some seriously dreamy drag, everything blurry and indistinct, field recordings hover beneath smeared synths, and muted pulses, downtempo beats wrapped around sci-fi shimmer. Crumbling distortion envelops slooooowed down crooning, a sort of slo-mo soul laced with clanky percussion, and tinkling late night pianos, a little bit crunk, a little bit witch house, a swirling swoonsome sizurp vibe, that oozes into everything, the perfect wasted late night drift off zone out melting dancefloor alien chill out soundtrack for sure.
Definitely for fans of dark electronica, chopped and screwed hip hop, witch housers Salem, oOoOO, Balam Acab, and all the various strains of slo-mo soul and doped-up drag...
It's always a good day when we hear another new archival Phil Cohran and The Artistic Heritage Ensemble release. Not sure how much material is still out there to be released, but please keep it coming! Issued for the first time, this killer live recording from 1968 is one of his most intense, cosmic and out ensemble pieces to date, getting into some serious Sun Ra interstellar spiritual energy territory, as they delve into deep themes of the legacy of slavery, the atom bomb and the end of creation. Woah. The opener, "Motherless Child", sung by members of The Spencer Jackson Family, is slow and sorrowful, with just voice and a low rumbling of horns and drums that cascade around the singers instead of supporting them melodically, which leads into "The Creation of The Beast", an elephantine procession that revels in a sort of triumphant malevolence of marching brass and swirling leering horns. "The Window" is the most sedate of the five pieces, featuring a sparse but ominous frankophone riff that gradually interweaves with lilting horn motifs, while the longest and final track, "Armageddon" delves full throttle into the powers of the ensemble with battling and frenzied horns in a culminating fury of sound and vision that is as majestic as it is searing. Magnificent!
This all time aQ South American psych folk fave, available again, now on vinyl!!
A record we've listened to on so many roadtrips through windy terrain, sun soaked mountains, and pastoral horizons. The sole lp by this Chilean group, but what an absolute magical album they created. Much like his Tropicalia counterparts in Brazil like Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil, the music and lyrics of Antonio Smith, the mastermind of Congregacion, made him a big enemy of the military dictatorship of his country. Ultimately he was forced to flee from Chile. Much like Veloso and Gil, he never let that oppressive regime take away his vision of beauty.
This record is swathed in the natural sounds of birds and wind, with dreamy acoustic textures, flutes, guitars, strings and such gorgeous romantic harmonies. The sounds on Viene ease out with such a soft glow. We can just imagine the band levitating on mountaintops as they commune with the universe. It's a record we're sure many modern day dreamy music makers like Devendra Banhart, Beach House, Samara Lubelski, and Jose Gonzalez either already cite as a major influence or should listen to asap. Simply stunning!
It all comes around doesn't it? Through his Spectrum Spools imprint (which is manufactured by Editions Mego), John Elliott has presented work that digs into the underground of synth wrangles and electronic cosmologists with some true gems amidst his selection. A lot of these artists had been going back to older templates of experimental electronica and recrafting those sounds through new contexts and maybe a little bit of laptop trickery as well. Bee Mask certainly looks to the sharpened frequencies of Parmegiani and Schnitzler, and Temporal Maurader is a downright fictionalization of a 'lost' album of psychedelic electronica circa 1974. Container's revisionist history is in parallel with Zomby's question "Where Were You In 92?" Where Zomby would look to British hardcore techno the aesthetic for that year zero; Container pegged Detroit techno as object to reconstruct. Container is the work of Nashville's Ren Schofield, who leaps into the darkened acid techno of Richie Hawtin circa 1992 when he was recording as F.U.S.E. The insistent techno grooves march from drum sequencers that have a hand-crafted Dan Deacon type of sound. What ever he's using, it's not a 909; and the washes of toxic bubbling electronics that take their cues from 808 work-outs also have a kit-built irregularity to them. As most techno can give the impression of being so easy with so many digital sequencers that you can run from a smart phone, it's nice to hear something this angular and groovy.
The Date Palms debut lp on Root Strata, Of Psalms (now sadly out of print) was one of our standout favorite records from last year. A blissful combo of Eastern drone classicism and hypnotic psych fluidity. Now the core Oakland-based duo of Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons follow their debut up with this stunning, no doubt limited, vinyl-only release on Mexican Summer (which comes with a download card).
Composed of two side-loooooong tracks, the structure of Honey Devash is set up in the form of two ragas as their basic foundation but open wide enough to allow a number of key compositional elements to play through. The title track is the morning raga stirring softly at first with slowly energizing phase shifts and bowed violin drones setting up the mood before the heavy bass riff bursts forth into a forward moving momentum aided by percussive elements and all sorts of sonic layering: oscillating bloops, arc-ing violin loops and modal electric piano phrases. Slowly-burning upward toward a white hot light, the gorgeously smoldering momentum breaks off into a purifying hypnotic cosmic bliss punctuated by spacy violin figures before a long slow fade.
The second side track, "Honey Dune" is the evening raga and it cools down with a wide drifting expansiveness lke the end of a long desert heat just before twilight. The mood is less propulsive, more contemplative but beautifully rich with added instrumentation of bass clarinet, tampura and cascading piano motifs. Melodically pretty and explorative, the track gives ample room for each instrument to stretch out and play yet remain tethered to a unifying whole by the grounation vibes of Trevor Montgomery's basslines.
Like some heady hybrid of spiritual Eastern jazz and rockish psych extrapolation, fans of Bruce Palmer, Dadawah, L. Shankar, Brightblack Morning Light, and Spacemen 3 should definitely scoop this up.
This is the perfect soundtrack for hot desert nights, staring at the stars. Sooooooo gooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
We want to live in whatever world the music of Deepchord provides the soundtrack to. His murky, swirly minimal techno/dub evokes some sort of future noir, crumbling buildings, rainswept streets, everything lit by the haunting yellow glow of old streetlights, but it also has us imagining modern penthouses, all glass and chrome, overlooking the decrepit city, and the long lit tunnels of some futuristic transport system, not sure why, but Hash-Bar Loops, a record thematically focused on Amsterdam actually, instead has us imagining something like Raymond Chandler crossed with Tron. Which is most definitely a good thing.
We just can't resist the sounds of Deepchord, aka Rod Modell, who seems to have mastered this sound, whatever 'this' sound is. Future dub, ambient cinematic techno, pop ambient futurism, whatever it is, it's a strange hybrid, that to these ears at least, sounds like a mix of late night Detroit techno, Pole style digidub, blissed out pop ambience and that murky washed out heroin house we love so much.
Which pretty much describes Hash-Bar Loops, as does the opening three song suite, perfectly displaying what Modell is so good at, unfurling a hazy bit of warm whirling ambience, wreathed in a layer of static that could be the sound of wind whipping over the hills, rain falling on city streets, or just hissy static... And from there it's a slow build over the three tracks, opener "Spirits" is all ghostly and spectral, "Stars" is where rhtyhmic elements first surface, a muted skitter and pulse mostly obscured by the hiss and hum, all beneath a warm wash of blurred melody and smeared soft focus ambience, until finally, "Sofitel" finds the hiss receding completely, leaving just a skeletal techno groove, the soundtrack to some strange dinner party, on a rooftop in this futuristic city.
The record drifts deamily from beat to drift, from rhythm to ambience, the two sides of the sound constantly fusing and intertwining, the record's finest moments when the balance is just right, the beat buried beneath warm billows of dreamlike sound. And then finally the record ends the way it began, with a three song suite that leads the listener into a blissed out drift, "Crimson" shuffles and swings, surrounded on all sounds by a blurred thrum, on "Black Cavendish" that thrum takes over, and gradually transforms into what sounds like a symphony of crickets, over a murky muted pulse, until finally "Neon And Rain" slips into full on dubbed out shoegaze, a warm whirling shimmer, laced with jagged bits of echoey effects, perfectly evoking as the title suggests, the glow of neon on a dark, rainy night...
The first we heard from Dirty Beaches, aka Alex Zhang, was a recent split 7" with US Girls, which found Zhang doing a sort of super grimy lo-fi RnB, we also mentioned Johnny Cash, and that the sound like a murkier and less well produced How To Dress Well, which most definitely still applies on Badlands, but where on that single, we were feeling a sort of RnB vibe, here, it's more a classic rock and roll, as in the fifties, as in more specifically Elvis. Sounds weird, especially when you consider the sort of hype Dirty Beaches has been getting but, these tracks essentially sound like super low fidelity bedroom recorded Elvis jams, doused in murk and grit and grime, or draped over a looped loping churning chunk of crumbling low end.
Like some bedroom noise rocker floor core purveyor was tagged to pack up some classic crooner. Zhang's vocals are total Elvis, maybe there's a bit of a Cramps vibe, but that's essentially a goth Elvis anyway. Some of the tracks take what sounds like a snippet of some fifties rock and roll, and then loops it into a weirdly hypnotic chunk of murky minimalism, over which Zhang snarls and croons, it doesn't seem like it should work, or even sound all that good, but it does, and these songs end up sounding like weirdly timeless classic rock and roll jams from some alternate dimension, or like the perfect soundtrack to the best movie David Lynch never made.
Jeff "Monoman" Conolly has gotta be one of rock 'n' roll's awesomest unsung legends. First off, he fronted DMZ, Boston's garage punk answer to the likes of the Stooges and the New York Dolls, in the mid-'70s. Then, out of the ashes of DMZ, he formed Lyres, who traded in some (just some) of DMZ's scuzzed out heaviness for retro Vox organ driven power poppiness in the style of the best '60s Nuggets outfits. There's a new cd that brings both bands together, half the disc DMZ demos from '76, the other half Lyres live in '82. It's also available as two separate vinyl releases, this one's the DMZ half, featuring 12 tracks recorded as demos at a Cambridge radio station in 1976. They rip it up here, doing a ton of rad covers, among 'em "Til The End Of The Day" by the Kinks, "Teenage Head" by the Flamin' Groovies, "Search and Destroy" by the Stooges, "Heart Of Stone" by the Stones, and "Someone's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight" by Fleetwood Mac (also memorably covered by the Rezillos). Definitely the sound of a band reveling in their influences, gettin' ready to kick out their own jams, as well as some other covers, on their one and only studio album, which was released in '78 by Sire. (Note: there's no song overlap between this and that.)
Jeff "Monoman" Conolly has gotta be one of rock 'n' roll's awesomest unsung legends. First off, he fronted DMZ, Boston's garage punk answer to the likes of the Stooges and the New York Dolls, in the mid-'70s. Then, out of the ashes of DMZ, he formed Lyres, who traded in some (just some) of DMZ's scuzzed out heaviness for retro Vox organ driven power poppiness in the style of the best '60s Nuggets outfits. This disc brings both bands together. The DMZ half features 12 tracks recorded as demos at a Cambridge radio station in 1976. They rip it up here, doing a ton of rad covers, among 'em "Til The End Of The Day" by the Kinks, "Teenage Head" by the Flamin' Groovies, "Search and Destroy" by the Stooges, "Heart Of Stone" by the Stones, and "Someone's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight" by Fleetwood Mac (also memorably covered by the Rezillos). Definitely the sound of a band reveling in their influences, gettin' ready to kick out their own jams, as well as some other covers, on their one and only studio album, which was released in '78 by Sire. (Note: there's no song overlap between this and that.)
Then, on the second half of the disc, there's 15 more tracks from Lyres, recorded live in '82, with a line up featuring 4/5s of DMZ, at an Italian restaurant that doubled as a punk rock venue by night, back in the day. There's lotsa killer covers here as well (The Wailers, The Sonics, The Young Rascals, Kenny and the Kasuals...) and they do a DMZ tune too - but the main attraction might be the raw, raucous versions of Lyres own songs, Conolly compositions that shoulda been big hits, like early single sides "Help You Ann" (Andee's favorite Lyres song EVER) and "I Really Want You Right Now". Considering that reissues of Lyres studio albums are not easy to come by these days (why oh why are they out of print?), the release of this live recording, which makes up for in sheer energy what it might lack in high fidelity, is quite a boon both to fans and folks who, upon hearing it, will immediately become fans!
Basically a double dose of straight up rock 'n' roll radness. Also available as two separate vinyl lps, DMZ on one, Lyres on the other.
Hurrah! William Duke has hand-delivered his latest album to our doorstep. You might recall our recent better-late-than-never review of his 2007 full length The Ghost That Would Not Be. Well, we're getting properly up to date now with this, his follow-up to that wonderful debut, and y'know what? It's just as delightful. Carrying on in similar fashion, The Sunrise and the Night is a pop lover's dream. Such a perfect soundtrack to these late summer eves... or really any time you're feeling in a particularly wistful, reflective mood. His songwriting has a luster that echoes the finely crafted west coast rock pop of the '70s. On the surface it initially seems all breezy and honey sweet, but there's a subtle darker melancholic core. The whole album is lovely and downright swoonsome, but standout track "The Canyon" is its crowning jewel, a solid yearning yank on your heartstrings. Duke sings with an earnest, drowsy delivery which fits nicely against the instrumental backdrop, a glistening balance of acoustic guitar and synths that brings to mind Sparklehorse or Grandaddy. Interspersed with the vocal numbers are a handful of plush instrumentals. Recommended!
One of two new blasts of "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia" from one of our favorite labels, UK weirdo sound stronghold Frequency 13, the True Sheffield Black Psychedelia descriptor covering a whole lot of sonic territory, from groups as varied as Black Vomit (whose new record is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Ice Bound Majesty, Rape Rack, Skultroll, not to mention these guys right here, Dukkha, whose latest, the awesomely titled Grim Disco, is a single, 70 minute sprawl, that merges Butthole Surfers like atonal guitar melodies, with thick swaths of churning low-end, and looped propulsive programmed rhythms, into something heavy, hypnotic and WAY tripped out.
A dirgey, murky, krauty groove, submerged in a sea of chug and buzz and crunch, wound up with all manner of spidery melodies, the 'riff's a sort of blurred black metal, tangled up with something much dirgier and noise rockier, the sound slipping from caustic distorted buzz to weirdly tranced out cyclical churn, but that's only the first 6 or so minutes, the rhythmic pound and chug fading out into a cloud of glitched out digital shimmer, a bit like Oval, hazy and hypnotic, before splintering into something much more ominous, a whirling cinematic stretch of buzzing epic synthscapery, all soaring low end buzz and haunting majestic melody, thick and lush and layered, seriously dark and creepy, before it too fades out, this time into a field of glitch and glimmer, which gives way to some Melvins-y detuned dirge-y pound, the guitars gradually growing more and more chaotic, streaks of feedback, shards of fragmented riffage, moaning melodies, jagged atonal crunch, swirling low end murk, all wound around some tribal rhythmic pound, a doomy, downtuned final sludgey, weirdly groovy coda.
Killer stuff, as always. CRAZY LIMITED too, ONLY 40 COPIES!! we got 20 of those, which are bound to go fast...
We were first introduced to the mysterious Estonian outfit Edasi by aQ pal, weirdo black metal / noisescaper Cloak Of Displacement. And he did not steer us wrong. Edasi's, goofily titled Freddy Krueger Death Chant was a pretty incredible collection of distorted ambient ritualism. The sort of stuff that appealed to metalheads as much as dronelords. This week we got two new releases from Edasi, both STUPIDLY limited. A cassette, of which we got EIGHT copies, reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this here cd-r, limited to just THIRTY copies, of which we got 20, and then that's it.
And we would recommend grabbing both of these, or at the very least this one, a gorgeous assemblage of super distorted blown out ambience, mournful melodies drifting beneath thick crumbling sheets of superdistorted crunch, it's noisemusic, but here it's surprisingly listenable, a melancholy lament wreathed in squelch and static, the opening track sounds almost like a lo-fi take on that sort of gauzy Hecker / Jeck washed out minimalism.
The sprawling second track is more percussive, and even more lo-fi, the tape hiss in some places as loud as the music itself. A swirling field of buzz and clatter of muted chordal pulses and decayed melodies, a strange bit of rhythmic blur, noisy and a bit blackened, it sounds at times like it might launch into some actual black metal, but instead, much of the noise abates, leaving a strange stumbly rhythm and layers of Eastern sitar like buzz, before collapsing into a final cloud of mysterious percussive detritus and warm whirling static.
The next track fuses a sort of primitive electronica to a woozy warbly bassline, and some spidery guitar melodies, which makes it sound almost like some twisted take on James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, a loping pop rock, wreathed in careening percussive effects, undulating sheets of pink noise, and all manner of crunch and buzz and hiss, but like the other tracks, it too seems to devolve as it goes, eventually the drums transformed into wildly sputtering machinebeats, wrestling with atonal synth buzz creating a dizzying synthscape gone haywire.
The record closes with a brief bit of distorted drone, a warm liquid low end drifting darkly though caustic clouds of staticky hiss and brittle buzz.
LIMITED TO 30 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. Once these are gone, they are gone for good...
We first heard from Estonian ritualistic black metal soundscapers Edasi, from our pal, the weirdo behind black metal outfit Cloak Of Displacement. Edasi's Freddy Krueger Death Chant was a big hit around here, so we were psyched to get TWO new releases from this mysterious outfit: a cd-r, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this, a super limited tape. And we mean crazy limited, as in TEN copies. Total. We got EIGHT of those, odds are these will be gone in a flash, so we won't get into too much detail. Needless to say, if you loved Freddy Krueger Death Chant, you're probably gonna dig this too. Another mysterious sonic ritual, that is less black metal and more abstract forest folk or Wolf Eyes like industrial ambience, a lo-fi sprawl of super distorted sound, streaks of feedback, echo drenched percussion, blurred vocals, all wreathed in murk and mire, swirling effects, thick slabs of buzzing rumbling low end, abstract rhythms, everything smeared into haunting dubbed out blackened ambience, that manages to be fierce and freaky, but also strangely blissed out and listenable. Like a pipe fight in a huge cistern recorded on a tape player with dying batteries, a sort of ephemeral industrial doom drift. Great stuff. And again...
LIMITED TO TEN COPIES. THAT'S IT!! Each one in a hand painted black stickered cassette case, sealed in a stickered plastic bag, the tapes themselves hand painted and hand numbered.
Normally we would spread out multiple releases by the same band over several lists and several weeks, but since these are so limited and folks are always so excited about new Expo 70 stuff, we figured fuck it, let's just do it, THREE new Expo 70 releases, all different formats, and surprisingly different sound.
This tape is limited to 70 copies. We got exactly HALF, it's already sold out at the label, so these are THE last copies anywhere. And it's awesome. Less heavy than some of the other Expo's, Awakening, features some super stripped down drumming (or drum machine, hard to tell), locked into an endless groove, pulsing over a swirling spacescape of smeared riffs and fragmented melodies, it sounds a bit like Goblin, very soundtracky and otherworldly, space-y and mysterious, and not at all cheesy, more sort of classic new age / krautrock, think Klaus Schultze, scoring some super abstract French sci-fi flick from the sixties, and you'll sort of get the vibe.
Like all Expo 70 stuff, dark and dreamy, warm and warbly, drone-y and hypnotic, but the addition of drums really adds a new dimension, and the soundscapes swirling around the groove seem to be endlessly shifting and transforming. Awesome stuff as always. Total blissed out new age spacey krautiness, as only Expo 70 can do it. WAY recommended. And it's also recommended that if you want one of these you don't dawdle, as we mentioned before, this is LIMITED TO ONLY 70 COPIES! AND WE GOT HALF!! Already sold out and out of print, so you get one shot at these. Nicely packaged in a hand colored psychedelic fold out sleeve.
Brand new batch of twisted noise pop malfunction from Steve Peffer, the mastermind behind fucked up noisemakers Homostupids. Fans of the 'Stupids stumbling lo-fi Neanderthal crush will find much to love here, but Factorymen takes the demented buzz and crunch of Homostupids, and fashions it into something a bit poppier, and weirdly enough, more electronic, creating some sort of knuckle dragging buzz drenched electro-pop, that takes the warped pop of folks like Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, and adds some Stooges-y swagger and some dirge rock guitar buzz, not to mention the whole thing sounds like it was recorded on a cassette that's been sitting the dashboard of a car for the last decade, all hiss and warble and plenty of Faxed Head like sonic drop outs, but all that only adds to the deliriously demented sound.
Tape speeds shift, the fidelity slips from muffled and murky to brittle and blown out, the songs are all over the map from garage-y pound to blurred hypnotic thump, to total eighties style FM radio cheese, to blurred blissy strangely sunshiney Breakfast Club pop, to rhythmic Butthole Surfers like mesmer, to downtuned synth laced space doom dirge, al woven into a druggy and lo-fi, synthy, outsider, electronic, psychedelic warped pop that almost sounds like a drug addled Stephin Merritt record on Not Not Fun or Olde English Spelling Bee, but with just enough crunch to keep the sound at least tangentially noise rocky. Bizarre and sorta brilliant, should most definitely appeal to fans of James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, Rusted Shut, Rangers, Pink Noise and other similarly twisted pop deconstructionists.
Includes a download of the whole record, as well as the previous Factorymen record, 25 tracks in all! The first FM record another batch of even more murky minimalist drug pop...
Perhaps you're familiar with Zeitkratzer, the classically trained mavericks from Germany who have taken it upon themselves to produce orchestral arrangements of notorious pieces from scabrous noise musicians, notably Whitehouse, John Duncan, Keiji Haino, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. The ensemble has also ventured into arrangements of austere electronica (e.g. Carsten Nicolai and Terre Thaemlitz) and revisiting the classic avant-garde pieces from Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and Xenakis. Zeitkratzer's mastermind is the pianist Reinhold Friedl, who embraces the prepared model for the piano that Cage and company presented more than a half-century ago. In the liner notes here, Friedl offers plenty of examples of techniques developed to produce sound from various objects manipulating the strings inside the piano - e-bows, fishing line, violin bows, rubber balls, and small motors. Through his own exploration of the prepared piano, he really attempts to create a vast orchestra of sounds which can be automated and / or perpepuated through extended passages. Side A is a very dynamic piece with all sorts of sonic activity erupting from within Friedl's piano, described by the man himself as his "full orchestra" with "low vibrations, bottleneck techniques, piping backgrounds, and scratching." It is an intense exploration of dissonant crashes, razor slashed glissandos, and agitated acoustic noise. Side two begins with a rasping acoustic drone slowly building and mutating through multiple strings driven by e-bows and springs. The unholy racket that follows is a variation on the first side with scraped metal and bellowing more in keeping with a Z'ev action of junkyard gamelan follows the drone stasis. All of these demonic howls and squeals answer a whole lot of questions as to how Zeitkratzer was able to render their orchestrations of Metal Machine Music and the Whitehouse pieces in particular! Oh yeah, the album was cut at 45rpm, so you know we played this at 33, where it sounds all the blacker. Thanks, Hronir!
FYI we can also get this on cd, not in stock at the moment though.
By now we probably don't need to tell you know nuts we are for Finland. For whatever reason, the music that comes from Finland pretty much always blows our mind. And when it comes to black metal, hell, it's tough to think of a region the produces more bafflingly brilliant blackness. Aanal Beehemoth, Ride For Revenge, Will Over Matter, W.A.I.L., Jumalhamara, Circle Of Ouroborus, Horna, Dead Reptile Shrine, Beherit... Well, you can add Funerary Bell to that list, their debut full length, The Coven, another twisted black missive from Finland, and like many of their Finnish black metal brethren, classifying these guys as black metal, is a bit of a stretch, sure they blast and buzz with the best of them, but they spend just as much time, creeping, jangling, whispering, strumming, they're sorta tough to pin down.
Check out opener "Vision Of The Undead (World)", which is all clean guitar strum, whispered almost melodic vox, simple loping drums, and when the metal does kick in, it's more like classic old school eighties metal, chugging riffs, almost stadium rock sounding, minus the WAY up in the mix blasts of double kick, the song lurching from doomy (yet still melodic) plod to seasick sort-of waltz, back to that double kick laced power metal riffery. Right near the end the band do explode into a brief bit of blackened blasting, but then it's right back into melodic lope. And did we mention the bass, an instrument most often missing from most black metal, but here it's busy, offering up bloopy melodies and add a whole other dimension.
"Detachment" starts out similarly, all melodic and post rocky, then in swoops some Maiden-ish riffing, the vocals a growly grunt, and then there's that double kick again, at least twice as loud as the rest of the drum kit, adding some serious low end oomph.
And so it goes. Folks looking for grim buzz and frenzied blackened blast will be left wanting, but if you like your black metal to flit from crusty d-beat pound to synth laden swirly stumble, from melodic classic metal (via twisted Finnish blackness) to woozy harmonized guitar doom, and from almost indie jangle to melancholia Katatonia-esque melodic blackness, then this might just be your cup of demented druggy blackened Finnish tea!!
Another awesome find from the diggers at Finders Keepers / B-Music! This '70s Spanish (Catalan) band, as their name implies, plays freaky fusion jazz/rock, kinda like a (more) wacked out Return To Forever! It's psychedelically groovy stuff, high on classical gasses, that at times even reminds us a bit of Bollywood, and much else besides (a goofier Goblin, anyone? Le Orme? Wolfgang Dauner?). Fusioon is for sure fun.
Ferinstance, the buzzy, bouncy synth and Spanish-languge chant of the quirky, rhythmic "Farsa Del Buen Vivir" is utterly delightful, deservedly drawing comparisons to old kid-friendly funk fave Stark Reality.
The dozen selections here, drawn from Fusioon's singles and lps for the Belter Progressiva label in the early/mid '70s, are percussively propulsive, sometimes soundtrack-suspenseful, and always packed with surprises, including symphonic-sounding bits and electronic blitzes...
And as always, the Finders Keepers folks fit this cd out with a booklet full of colorful photos, graphics, and extensive, expert liner notes (by Cherrystones and Andy Votel) delving into the details of Fusioon's career, and in general schooling us about the psych/jazz scene in Franco's Spain.
It's been almost two years since we last heard from these Sacramento fuzz poppers, and we're happy to report that very little has changed. The last record, Monster Head Room, arrived right at the beginning of summer '09, and we reveled in its Beach Boys harmonies, surf rock jangle, and psychedelic garage hooks, but we also pointed out their tendency for experimentation, and their occasional hints of gothic brood. But this time around it's all pop all the time, their sound even more sunshiney and summery, we're hearing way more of groups like the Drums and Soft Pack that the usual garage rock fuzz poppers we compared them to before.
As we've seen pointed out in other reviews, the sound definitely touches on classic NZ Flying Nun pop, and that classic nineties shoegaze slowcore, but where past records felt ramshackle and a little home brewed, this time around, they sound like a real band, with real songs, poised for something bigger than just playing the local dive every Friday night. And while some folks will find that disappointing, we can't help but love the new songs, and the new more polished sound, we actually hear a lot of Fresh & Onlys, that same sort of classic pop songsmithery, songs like "California Cousins" are total sunshine summer beach jams, right down to the chiming melodies and VERY Beach Boys arrangements, while tracks like "Faster" are snarly and swaggery, with fuzzed out guitars and pounding drums, with a nod to the Ganglians of old, but most of the songs here fall somewhere right in between. Which as far as we're concerned is perfect. Hooky, and fuzzy, dreamy and jangly, poppy and pretty dang perfect, maybe their best yet, and quickly becoming our new favorite summer record, even in these waning days of the season.
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
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Brand new release from local soundscaper / noisemaker Holly Herndon, a tape designed specifically for where most tapes get listened too. Yep, the car! This recent resurgence in tape releases has had most of us scrambling to find tape players, going to the Goodwill looking for tapedecks, buying Walkman's (Walkmen?) at Radio Shack, but one place tapes still seem to be ubiquitous, is of course in CARS. Not new cars, it's all cd players now, soon to be MP3 player docks exclusively we imagine, or who knows, maybe you'll be able to sync up your car stereo to your iTunes, but for now, those of you with a tape player in your car, or anyone with a tape player period, should check out Herndon's Car, which was created with the automobile driver, weird sound enthusiast in mind, starting with experiments using sine wave sweeps of popular car models, not to mention random samplings of FM radio (do we hear "Owner Of A Lonely Heart"?).
Thick swaths of pulsing sound, streaks of static, layered low end swells, the sound of engine rumbles merged with crackling white noise creating hazy fields of static, which occasionally give way to some flipping through the dial, only to slip right back into heaving sheets of soft focus hiss and whir, throbbing and pulsing subtly within clouds of crunchy static, slipping into softly roiling sprawls of low end hum, which in turn pulse rhythmically, the sounds hypnotic and minimal, like some fractured automobile sourced heroin house. Electric windows are rolled down, their sounds processed and looped into weridly mesmerizing mechanical dronescapes, sounding not unlike The User's ink jet printer symphonies.
Killer stuff, and on headphones it sounds amazing, we can only imagine how it sounds cranked in the car.
LIMITD TO 102 COPIES!!
Latest batch of noise rock pummel from these UK crushers, although the first few minutes had us thinking we might have stuck the wrong disc in the player, a cool droned out slithery expanse of dense layered shimmer, of mysterious ritualistic buzz, tribal percussion, disembodied vocals, all hazy and druggy and mesmerizing, but fear not, apparently that was just the intro, as track two comes stumbling in like some downtuned AmRep avalanche, all Melvins-y stomp and swagger, with knuckle dragging drum pound, bellowed processed vox, all beneath squalls of feedback and grinding FX, and let's not forget the guitars, there are after all THREE guitar players (four if you count the bass guitar, and we DO), a thick wall of crumbling blackened slo-mo tarpit riffage, churning and roiling, some sort of sonic mad scientist channeling the Butthole Surfers and Shit And Shine, and sort of like in the movie The Fly the two are fused in some horrible laboratory mishap, but in this case, the result is fantastic, a gloriously sludgy dirgey pound, heady and hypnotic, a looped sounding chunk of metallic mesmer, which is pretty much what these guys specialize in. The rest of the record offers up variations of that theme, "The Drang" slows things down to a swampy crawl, letting synths shimmer and feedback squall beneath a sea of swirling buzz and bellowing howls, while the title track blurs everything into a stretched out sprawl of FX drenched space rock bliss out, that gradually becomes more and more metallic, more and more pounding and propulsive as the track progresses, the last half sounding a bit like the Melvins covering Hawkwind, which is no way a bad thing at all.
"Almeria, Spain" is an epic bit of post-sludge, sounding all majestic and mighty, a bit like Harvey Milk at their most melodic and bombastic, while "Warmer The Belter" gets all sensitive, acoustic guitars, some shuffling drums, dreamy melodies, and the vocals a deep dreamy croon, the whole thing underpinned by a symphony of demonic sounding effects and sinister drones, which finally gives way to the final jam, "I Am Bunga Bunga", which far from the crushing closer we were expecting pairs weird garbled vox with shimmery shuffling almost krautrock sounding thrum, which really only briefly explodes, offering up a final glimpse of these guys' crush and pummel proclivities, before slipping right back into a final minute or two of swirling effects wreathed ambience.
As always incredible stuff, and a pretty awesome document of how these guys drag their noise rock kicking and not always screaming, far beyond the boundaries that define most of their similarly sonically inclined brethren...
Hot damn, we're in high spirits indeed to be gettin' this new full-length from High Spirits, whose self-titled demos disc we raved about last year, and proved to be a bit of a sleeper hit here at AQ. We've been waiting for their "debut" album proper ever since, and now here it is, High Spirits offering up nine new, completely classic-sounding songs that you could mistake for NWOBHM gems circa '79.
The mastermind behind High Spirits is multi-instrumentalist Chris "Professor" Black, best known for his critically acclaimed one-man-band Dawnbringer on Profound Lore. High Spirits is another one man band, although Chris has recruited a color-coordinated lineup for live performances. Here, however, he handles all the vocals, guitars, drums, songwriting, etc., heck he even self-released the cd. And even moreso than with Dawnbringer, which grew out of a black/death metal basis to incorporate more melody and traditional speed metal shred, with High Spirits he's utterly indulging his love of good ol' fashioned, and downright poppy, metal. And damn is he good at it. Gorgeous guitarwork, catchy tuneage... What's more, these songs rise above being merely ear candy for retro-metal nostalgics (though ear candy it is!), because of his distinctive, dare we say delicate, high voice (often harmonized with himself) and heartfelt, non-ironic lyrics. The melancholic tinge to his singing, juxtaposed with the hot rockin', headbanging riffage, gives this a very special, unique vibe. Compared to a lot of other current "New Wave Of Old School Metal" bands we like (Cauldron, Enforcer, Zuul, Twisted Tower Dire...) there's something about High Spirits' sound and songwriting approach that comes across as particularly honest and uncontrived, whether the songs be about love, or partying. Somehow even the sorta cheesy, "nighttime in the big city" stuff a la the album cover/title track, comes off as innocent and sincere. Listening to High Spirits is like listening to a good friend (or an inner voice) giving you a psychological pep talk, backed by powerful, warmly fuzzed guitars. If we're making comparisons, we'd say this probably comes closest to last year's highly praised debut from Christian Mistress, no foolin'.
Color us quite impressed, anyway, with the good Professor's memorable-metal-making abilities! F'n recommended, yeah!!
So as soon as we dove into the extensive liner notes of this seriously awesome reissue of New Zealand's heaviest (and only??) psych band Human Instinct, we realized that despite their failed commercial success, these dudes were really way ahead of their time. After relocating to the UK in the late sixties and undergoing a handful of line-up changes, Human Instinct hit the local bar circuit with an original formula of heavy ripping psych played at blistering, amp melting volumes. Inspired by Hendrix and other dudes pushing the limits of the newly evolved electric guitar, Human Instinct developed a sound that was completely unique and possibly influential on the heavy bands that followed. While we wouldn't exactly call this stuff proto-metal, more like heavy psych, it definitely was a major step in reaching the heavy blackened riffage that bands like Sabbath and Pentagram would later perfect. That said, the album definitely has songs worth listening to over and over and over, buuuuuut there are a few tracks ya might just want to skip over. Oh and did we mention these dudes were known for having a lead singer who ALSO plays drums standing up!!?? Yes its true, Maurice Greer not only has a wicked sweet voice, but his drumming style is truly unique!!
Track number one kicks things off with an awesome version of Dennis Wilson's "Black Sally". Definitely a track you can headbang to, it's easy to hear how their slow grooving heaviness could one day become the essence of doom. Needless to say, these guys were way ahead of their time, I mean according to the liner notes, they starting playing together in '58!! Crazy! "The Jugg-A-Jugg Song", our second favorite track on Stoned Guitar, starts off with a wall of psychedelic fury, blaring, amp frying guitar, rampant drum chaos, destroying eardrums and anything else that stands in the way! So good!! "Midnight Sun" follows with stoney (obviously), repetitive riffs layered with atmospheric fuzz solos that seem to launch into the sky, really kraut-like and hypnotic, not unlike Parson Sound or Wooden Shjips, sorta.
So this is basically the complete package, four bonus tracks, killer liner notes with photos and basically the entire history of this underappreciated heavy psych gem! Stoned Guitar is fried out, in-the-red type blues perfection for fans of the recently reviewed Jerusalem, Bedemon, or even Flower Travelin' Band. We even hear some similarities to new psychedelic jammers Magic Lantern or Eternal Tapestry too. Take our advice and don't miss out on this super influential piece of psych glory!! And maybe Rockadrome/Vintage will follow up with reissues of the other two Human Instinct albums, we used to have all three as imports but they've been AWOL lately.
Every now and then we like to spring some crazy '70s Italian prog on y'all just to see who can take it. We're not just talking Goblin (though we love Goblin), or any of the more "mainstream" Italian prog acts of the period (PFM, Le Orme, Banco), who were cool but didn't go far beyond the Yes/Genesis/King Crimson template. We're talking weirder stuff like Museo Rosenbach, New Trolls, Osage Tribe, I Teoremi, and Area. We hope to soon have some copies of the cds by an amazing band called Osanna (possibly Allan and Andee's all time favorite prog band!!) but while we wait for those, we did manage to bring in a few of this, the 2nd album by another fave Italian group of ours called Il Balletto Di Bronzo. Sure, their nutzoid sci-fi keyboard attack will bring to mind ELP, but you'll also think of Magma (and their descendants Shub-Niggurath and Koenjihyakkei as well). Complex, powerful, heavy, precise yet darkly psychedelic, Ys (from 1972) is one of those timeless pieces of rock n' roll art that's definitely very '70s yet not entirely dated: you could imagine a Laddio Bollocko or Tarantula Hawk kicking out these jams, that is, except for the occasional operatic vocal chorus. This album's five long songs (plus a bonus track), with their acid guitar action, haunting female vocals, droning keyboards, martial drumming, baroque/classical motifs, and weird changes, are just about as good as over-the-top Italian prog can get, and that's pretty damn good. That is, if you are willing to get into it like we are. A top ten prog album (if Aquarius had a prog top ten, and please don't ask us for one, we'll be arguing for weeks).
Super limited new lp from the duo, Isidore Ducasse, which is Jefre Cantu-Ledesma (Root Strata, Tarentel, etc.) and his ex-Tarentel partner Trevor Montgomery. Named for the 19th century French poet better known by his pen name Comte de Lautreamont, this unit was originally formed to create the soundtrack for a Western, and while the film never materialized, the eventual soundtrack, this record right here, works just fine on its own, being darkly evocative and well able to conjure up visions of some lost West in the minds of the listeners.
Definitely mining territory similar to groups like Earth and Barn Owl, the vibe is dusty and windswept, desolate and dreamlike, opening with chiming melodies, delicate and hushed, over soft swells of tape hiss and amp buzz, the record slowly unfolding as a series of hazy, shimmery drones, all moonlit and washed out, peppered with languorous twang, streaks of warm fuzz and deep low end thrum. Stretched out atmospheres that drift from lush layered buzz, to soaring string like majesty, swoonsome melodies surfacing amidst slow swirling clouds of soft focus distortion. There are moments where the record veers into way more abstract territory, with the duo capable of conjuring up some sweet cosmic dronemusic or more minimal abstract drift, and those moments definitely have their place, and do evoke some fantastic and mysterious tableaus that no doubt play out in whatever imaginary western these sounds now accompany, and there is enough of those sounds that this will no doubt hit the spot for those into drone/drift minimalism, but the core of the record remains a dark twang flecked drift, a dreamy, otherworldly ambience, a slo-mo avant country drift, that will no doubt appeal to fans of Barn Owl, Earth, Scenic, Morricone and the like. So nice.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Before there was Joanna Newsom, there was Carol Kleyn, a young hippie spirit with an ethereal songbird voice who wrote rapturous paeans to love and nature on her harp. So it makes sense then that Newsom's label, Drag City, would reissue this lovely private press recording from 1976. Studying at the University of Santa Barbara, Kleyn befriended Bobby Brown (the instrument builder who recorded the amazing old aQ fave The Enlightening Beam of Axonda) and she assisted him with his constructions and live performances. He gifted her the harp, and she began to learn to play and write her own songs, eventually opening for Gregg Allman. Instead of waiting to get a record deal, she decided to make a record on her own and released it on her own label. She recorded two other lps soon after, before devoting herself full time to her family.
Love has Made Me Stronger divides its compositions between harp and electric piano. Her tone is bright and the songs exude a sunny yet eccentric warm energy. Similar to the beautiful Collie Ryan and Connie Converse reissues we listed a while back, Carol Kleyn's debut is a much-needed positive ray of sunshine in these dark days.
Uh, c'mon, how could this NOT be awesome? Sublime Frequencies never fails us, first off. AND we're already fans of vintage Turkish psych in general, guitarist/vocalist Erkin Koray in particular. So this release, with its excellent eyeballs-shooting-purple-rays-from-space-or-whatever cover painting, was eagerly anticipated at AQ. And yeah it's awesome. As the subtitle says, this consists of singles and rarities circa 1970-'77 from this Middle Eastern psych rock master, founder of "the first underground group of the Orient", a living legend whose career stretches back to the '50s. Rarities? Well, compiler Mark Gergis notes in the liners: "This collection features tracks not found on the many unauthorized Erkin compilations and LP reissues that have emerged in the west over the years." And indeed these eleven tracks were provided to Sublime Frequencies by Koray himself, sourced from his personal vinyl collection! So, listen up, 'cause this is the stuff Erkin wants us to hear, and well, if you're any sort of Turkish psych fan like us, you NEED to hear it. Tracks like "Kendim Ettim Kendim Buldum" and "Hadi Hadi Ordan" are going to make you very happy. Swirling and shimmering, twanging surfy electric saz (or is that oud?), melodic deep droning vocals, bellydancing folk motifs, stirring orchestration, and YES some wild blasts of psychrockguitar distortion, it's the exotic East (lots of East) meets West sort of thing we just love! While some of this is wonderfully moody, a lot of it rocks, all right, ferinstance just crank up "Krallar" (a '75 single from whence that striking cover image comes) with its especially dramatic vocals to match its uptempo urgency.
Digipack cd release for now, with a vinyl version due out in a couple of weeks as well. Is it too much to hope that Sublime Frequencies will get Erkin to undertake a Western tour like labelmate Omar Souleyman, one of these days...?
Wow. We can't get over this incredibly cosmic, tripped-out debut cassette from KWJAZ. SF mastermind Peter Berends decides that space is the place and sets his sights for uncharted musical territory. Falling somewhere between outsider instrumental pop and dubbed-out psychedelic ethno-jazz, Berends leads a colorful excursion into the astral unknown. The two, side-long tracks unfold like some otherworldly mix-tape, deep basslines giving way to sizzling warbling drones, cut-up bits of rhythmic clatter ooze and materialize into slow grooving monuments to the stars. Chopped up samples and distorted swells melt into a lo-fi woozy web. Hazy, primitive beats (picture a slowed down Ethiopiques loop) rock and sway as horns, electric piano and weirdo samples add to the celestial crunk. And keep in mind, though KWJAZ is weird, far-out and strange, this humble cassette is overflowing with musicianship and close attention to layering and detail.
What makes all the tripped-out, genre defying weirdness so satisfying is Berends's ability to form these diverse elements into a propulsive, evocative musical journey through time and genre. Moments of cool jazz tranquility unexpectedly morph into trip-hop fantasy ballads, long-tone new age bliss suddenly shifts into West African romps, and somehow all these tangents seem impossibly and seamlessly linked. We can't recommend this one enough!
Limited to an edition of 121, fans of Hype Williams, Rangers or Ducktails will not want to miss out on this lysergic masterpiece!
Three out of print cd-r's from this outsider blackened doom duo, A Million Dead Beneath The Ice, Life Is Meaningless & Goes On Forever and Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected, all available again, now repackaged and offered together as a single triple cd-r boxset, with all new art, additional inserts, and two buttons, released on Crucial Blast sublabel Crucial Blaze. Here's what we had to say about each of the records when we first reviewed them individually:
A Million Dead Beneath The Ice:
From its humble beginnings as a genre, black metal has changed dramatically, transformed into something style and sound based rather than belief based. And where black metal was once strictly the province of the grim and kvlt, and yes, the actual metalheads, it's�now gained a certain cache, a definite hip factor, where any band, metal or not, is likely to feature one member with his or her own solo black metal project. We're not complaining, not in the least, it's these fresh injections into black metal's sonic gene pool that�keep it interesting, that produce more and more strange and wonderful variations, a great many perpetrated by folks new to metal completely, who were lured to the darkside by black metal specifically, its mystery and unique sound, the sonic possibilities offered by�its murky symphony of buzz and blast, rumble and shriek, sounds easily twisted into all manner of shapes.�
We got this particular cd-r in the mail a few weeks ago, and as we've mentioned before we do get quite a few. Our first impression was that it would most likely be some sort of minimal drone record, very stark white packaging, hand made, the band is called Light,�with song titles like "When The Green Midwestern Sky Comes Crashing Down", and "When The Flood Waters Come Rushing In", the packaging unfolds to reveal nothing but the song titles, rendered in a flowery script, but on the disc, there was what appears to be a�smear of actual blood (which we later discovered was in fact menstrual blood!). The first clue as to what sort of mysterious darkness lurked inside...�
Once we threw it on, we knew this was something else entirely, there is plenty of drone indeed, but the drone is only one element of Light's mysterious lugubrious buzz drenched blackened crawl. Almost like a more lo-fi Skepticism, Light trudge along at tarpit�tempos, the guitars not so much riffing as unfurling thick swirls of soft fuzz, the vocals howled and wailed, but way off in the distance, the drums strangely un-drumlike, more like pots and pans, a clattery, skeletal percussion, the whole thing held together by the�warm dramatic keyboards, that sound like the Haunted Mansion soundtrack played at 16rpm, all smeared and blurred together into something only barely black metal, only barely doom, a thick lurching slow motion black doomdrone, evocative and cinematic, at once�epic and sprawling, lo-fi and ultra personal. Creepy and haunting, but strangely melodic and beautiful. Think Trollmann, Abruptum, Celestiial, Catacombs, Monument of Urns and again Skepticism, but filtered through the cracked lo-fi filter of underground cd-r�dronemusic. If one was unfamiliar with black metal, one might be reminded of Lustmord, or some other sort of deathambient, but with the confusional addition of actual riffs, and those hellish vox, and the strange primitive percussion, the end result a sort of�metallicized slowcore, or a washed out ultradoom, or a blurred bleary black metal, however you describe it, Light have crafted some truly original, gorgeously bleak, warm and almost dreamy, slow motion buzzing black beauty.
Life Is Meaningless & Goes On Forever:
Earlier this year, we reviewed a super limited avant outsider blackened doom record called A Million Dead Beneath The Ice, by a duo called Light. Which was anything but light, in fact, it was one of the darkest and most harrowing discs we'd heard in a long time, a�slow motion drone drenched funereal crawl, with a lush almost orchestrated feel that definitely reminded us of Skepticism. And if anything, record number two, the awesomely titled Life Is Meaningless & Goes On Forever is even more! More black, more doomy, more�droney, more beautiful, more harsh and more bizarre.�
One hour long track, which begins with a slowly cycling piano figure, draped over a wash of reverbed tones, distant rumbles, the sound gorgeous, slightly atonal, ominous and sinister, and then there are the vocals, a nearly impossible to describe high pitched�shriek, that almost sounds like someone screaming as they breathe in, a twisted strangled howl, totally at odds with the music underneath, reminding us a bit of Tomb Of..., who also paired up piano and black metal vokills, but Light seems borne more of a free noise�aesthetic. Minus the vocals, the sound on Life Is Meaningless, is a sort of abstract slowcore crawl, a little post rocky, a little doomy, a bit of black ambient drift, but the vocals are just SOOOO creepy, it definitely pushes it into a whole other realm. And suddenly what�could have been something darkly pretty, becomes something fucked up and grimly gorgeous.�
Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected:
Third and final release from this depressive black doom duo, and it's a fitting epitaph to a short but brilliant streak. Three super limited cd-r's, less than 200 all told, each one overflowing with blackened misery and gorgeous harrowing sonic blackness, the first, titled�A Million Dead Beneath The Ice, gave way to the second, titled Life Is Meaningless & Goes On Forever, which brings us to Worse Than Anyone Would Have Expected, which should give you a decent impression of the overall vibe and tone of Light's distinctly UN-light�sound.�
Three looooooong tracks, thick caustic layers of buzzing low end drone, sparsely strummed acoustic guitar, shrieked vocals way down in the mix, funereal, glacial, miserable, not even plodding as there seems to be no drums, or if they are there, they're practically�inaudible. The melodies are lilting and melancholic, there's some piano, the rumbling buzzing backdrop seems to coalesce into some sort of melody, the whole thing lurching in slow motion, grim, and dense, and miserably and mournfully lovely. Totally hypnotic .
The second track offers up more of the same, another lovely black expanse of pointillist piano, harrowing screams, and slow swells of black buzz, before finally segueing into the epic closing track, a formula similar to the first two, but somehow even slower, more�abject, more ambient, so slow and spaced out and minimal, that it nearly ceases being metal or doom and is transformed into some sort of black ambient slowcore, a haunting doomic creep, that to these ears is as pretty as it is grim and harsh.�
This reissue is also limited, only 200 copies, each one hand numbered!
This document of raw and primitive American black metal has been resurrected and reissued on vinyl by the Dais label. An unlikely choice, considering the rest of the Dais catalog, but in its own way, this collection of outsider blackness is a pretty good fit. This Kentucky one man band recorded only two cassette demos, between 1993 and 1994, only one of which was ever released. Originally thought to be a joke, the liner notes in this new edition state explicitly that "the hatred radiating from these recordings is real!", and while the man behind these sounds was known as Roach back in the day, he now goes by the name James Brown III, and is a member of LA black metallers Harassor (and is responsible for the awesome Moon Knight tape we reviewed a while back)!
Eleven blasts of blasting, pounding blackness, primitive and raw, fierce and feral, the guitars buzz maniacally, the drums super lo-fi, boomy and rehearsal space sounding, the vokills so awesome, a sick demonic croak, all woven into short sharp bursts of true black metal grimnity, the songs slipping from mid-tempo plod to furious blast and back again, the sound fantastically lo-fi, blown out, murky and muddy, buzzy and black.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, incredible packaging, black matte finish sleeves, with red metallic foil stamped artwork, the lp is one sided, with a cool satanic etching on the B side, inside is a huge 12"x12" booklet with lyrics, photos, and two interviews with Lord Foul from way back in 1994.
Jeff "Monoman" Conolly has gotta be one of rock 'n' roll's awesomest unsung legends. First off, he fronted DMZ, Boston's garage punk answer to the likes of the Stooges and the New York Dolls, in the mid-'70s. Then, out of the ashes of DMZ, he formed Lyres, who traded in some (just some) of DMZ's scuzzed out heaviness for retro Vox organ driven power poppiness in the style of the best '60s Nuggets outfits. There's a new cd that brings both bands together, half the disc DMZ demos from '76, the other half Lyres live in '82. It's also available as two separate vinyl releases, this one's the Lyres half, with a line up featuring 4/5s of DMZ, live at an Italian restaurant that doubled as a punk rock venue by night, back in the day. As with the DMZ set, there's lotsa killer covers among these 15 tracks (The Wailers, The Sonics, The Young Rascals, Kenny and the Kasuals...) and they do a DMZ tune too - but the main attraction might be the raw, raucous versions of Lyres own songs, Conolly compositions that shoulda been big hits, like early single sides "Help You Ann" (Andee's favorite Lyres song EVER) and "I Really Want You Right Now". Considering that reissues of Lyres studio albums are not easy to come by these days (why oh why are they out of print?), the release of this live recording, which makes up for in sheer energy what it might lack in high fidelity, is quite a boon both to fans and folks who, upon hearing it, will immediately become fans!
"What is indie rock?" Perhaps one day that question will win a contestant on Jeopardy a ton of money. And chances are the answer would be, a style and approach to music perfected and exemplified by Stephen Malkmus and his '90s band Pavement. Yes the words 'indie-rock' and 'Malkmus' pretty much go hand in hand, and we've got to say that all these years later the old Pavement records are still sounding so great, and his solo releases have been not half bad either.
This time out, Malkmus teams up with Beck, who was called on to produce Mirror Traffic. After working with Thurston Moore on his latest, Demolished Thoughts, this time around Beck got the opportunity to work with another one of his heroes. We wonder if Matador has Beck on their payroll now, but damn we've been pretty impressed with Beck, the producer. Though, this record is still very much the sound and vision of Stephen Malkmus. While there's no doubt both Beck and Malkmus, have strong, confident egos, we would never expect Malkmus to let go of control of his patented sound. The album is for sure the most peppy and poppy post-Pavement outing yet. While some of his more recent albums have found him striving for a bombastic psych approach, Mirror Traffic finds Malkmus remembering hooks, clever word play and catchy melodies better then almost any other songwriter around. We can imagine this record was a lot of fun to make, as he seems to have let go of any grandiose musical pretension, and got to the core of what he does best. In fact the last few songs on here, had us thinking we were hearing some rad unreleased Pavement tracks. Indie rock is still alive and well in 2011!
We're really so excited to finally welcome local label Time Released Sound to the aQuarius family. We've yet to list anything, in part because their releases are so limited, but also, because they sell out so quickly. Every single release, every single copy is an incredible work of art. Each one hand crafted, individually assembled, numbered and hand stamped, letter pressed and printed, the packaging thematically linked to the sound within, with photographs, or old records, strange little knick knacks, clock hands, piano keys, they're really incredible, an absolute labor of love, with most of the limited versions taking hours to assemble, and the fact that Time Released Sound is just one man, makes it all the more impressive. So from here on out, we'll get a limited number of each release, they're quite limited already usually around 70-100 copies. And odds are we won't be able to get more than 10-15, but trust us, they're worth it, sonically beautifully, and visually stunning. There will be regular non-art editions of some of the releases, much less limited, and thus less expensive, but if you're after one of the limited editions, you'll want to act fast.
The art edition of this one sold out to quick for us to get copies, but it's the first Time Released Sound release to get an actual proper cd release, which is a good thing too, cuz this stuff is way to gorgeous to be only heard by a handful of folks. A hazy droney drift, equal parts haunting ambience, mysterious field recordings, and abstract synth shimmer, these soundscapes are lush smoldering expanses of hypnotic sound, dreamily layered loops, judiciously applied effects, all woven into totally mesmerizing drones and sweetly melodic cinematic miniatures, from the soundtracky synth shimmer of "Below Sea Level" to the hazy, ethereal ambience of "Floating Sculptures", Maps And Diagrams, creates an otherworld of sound, a world of water, dominated by the sea, the sounds of water seep into many of the tracks here, a distant drizzle, the sound of a far away shore, but the music itself is evocative and lovely, simple melodies draped over lush landscapes, as much about texture and tone, mood and meaning as notes and chords, these blurred abstract drifts seem to hover ghostlike, before taking shape, only to fade into the ether once again. Dreamy and darkly divine, WAY recommended for all the aQ-ers into lush, mysterious ambience, and dreamily melodic dronemusic, fans of Jasper TX, Machinefabriek and other crafters of soundworlds hushed and haunting.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
Another discovery via aQ pal / black metal weirdo Cloak Of Displacement, this one a super obscure collection of dark ambient sound collage from the mysterious Estonian soundscaper known as Mavra (who is in fact Veiko Rebane, live vocalist for CoD), all created from audio samples from films, old records and a delay pedal. A very primitive sort of Philip Jeck in a way, the sounds barely recognizable, instead transformed into woozy looped rhythmscapes, or layered into shimmery drones, the vibe is propulsive and a litrle bit krauty, but definitely very primitive and ritualistic, lo-fi and home brewed.
Some of the tracks are downright pretty, and sound a bit like Boards Of Canada, albeit a slightly more abrasive, more evil version, the melodies a bit off kilter, a little atonal, the tracks laced with shards of crunch and glitch, all drifting atop warm sinister swells of chordal thrum, the second track here in different hands could have been a sweet bit of dreamy IDM, but instead is a bit more raw and moody. Elsewhere the sound shifts into almost soundtrack territory, heaving bits of organ swirl underpin tense high end tones, and cascading avalanches of primitive electronics, but all masterfully woven into a strangely mesmerizing sort of lo-fi electronic ambience.
The final three tracks offer up variations on the electronica versus black ambience versus droney drift, the sound flitting between the three, noisy and chaotic one second, swirly and sci-fi the next, and finally, dark and dolorous, haunting and hypnotic, which is how the record unwinds in its final moments. So good.
LIMITED TO 20 COPIES!! That's it. We got 15 and once they are gone we won't be able to get more!
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Oh the glory days. Remember when all our favorite bands were still sort of our own little secret that the larger mainstream world both didn't know about and could care less about. That's how it was almost two decades ago when The Magnetic Fields first hit the scene. Before getting the attention of NPR and culture vultures far and wide with the release of 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt was one of the most unsung songwriters of our generation. Whether it was with The Magnetic Fields or when he recorded under the monikers of The 6ths, Future Bible Heroes, or the Gothic Archies, he carved out a space as one of the most unique and versatile songwriters we had heard in ages.
Obscurities draws from this magical era. Taking rare and unreleased tracks dating back to his days on Merge in the mid-late '90s. And we have to admit, this record is really reminding us why we fell so hard in love with his songs in the first place. The poignant and wicked smart lyrics, the deadpan delivery, the range of song forms from lo-fi C86 inspired blasts to more delicate and introspective twee. And we must mention that this contains one of our favorite songs of all time. "I Don't Believe You" by The Magnetic Fields, and it's not the version that came out on their Nonesuch debut, I, but instead the version from the long out of print Merge 7", that a few of us here have probably played over and over more then any other song in the world. well worth the price of admission for that practically perfect chunk of lo-fi pop bliss!
While we still dig what Merritt has been doing in recent years, in fact we made the 2008 Magnetic Fields album Distortion a Record Of The Week, we have to admit this is the era that will always be most near and dear to our hearts and ears. Absolutely essential!
Whoa! Thurston sure knows how to keep himself occupied and totally balanced, if not bipolar. After releasing two of his prettiest and acoustic based solo records, the song based Demolished, and the self explanatory Solo Acoustic Vol. 5 - 12 String Meditations For Jack Rose, he goes the exact opposite route and releases one of his most fucked up and noisy solo guitar records ever. Suicide Notes For Acoustic Guitar, is in fact a cd-r filled with relentless blasts of electric guitar way in the red and filled with an urgency that never takes a breath. In fact it's got the same kind of crazy intensity and bleeding guitar sounds that can be found on records from folks like Mainliner, High Rise, Keiji Haino, Wolf Eyes, Skullflower etc. But within all this psychedelic noise you can still totally hear his patented approach to guitar playing lurking there all the time right beneath the crushing pace and voltage that blasts out of these tracks from start to finish. Who else in their early '50s can thrash and destroy with this much energy and passion on one record, while getting so dreamy and beautiful on another. The man is a legend for a reason! And while we found the title confusing, we now realize its true meaning, that these are the sorts of sounds that would drive an acoustic guitar to end it all!
