We said it before, and we might as well say it again, these guys should really be WAY more popular than they are, everything we've heard from them has totally ruled, a few singles, two full lengths, one of which we made our Record Of The Week, and let's not forget their bad ass Hawkwind cover in the Sonic Attack 7" series (reissued on cd, one of THIS week's Records Of The Week!), so it should come as no surprise that full length number three is just as good, if not better than all the stuff that came before. Not as blown out and super rocking as Sun Broken, Lime is 4 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes, and is a bit more subdued than past efforts. That's not to say there isn't some seriously psychedelic ferocity on display here, it's just judiciously doled out, and set amidst some more minimal psychedelia. Although opener "Sunburnt Impedance Machine" might have you convinced otherwise, exploding right out of the gate with a killer fuzzed out Hawkwindy riff, chanted vocals, some soaring spidery leads, some killer staccato mathy breakdowns, huge squalls of spacepsych freakout, until finally at about the halfway mark, the track shifts gears and locks into a churning chugging krautrock groove, the instruments locked in tight, only the organ let loose, to whir and warble and buzz, laying thick undulating swaths of chordal buzz over everything, intense and hypnotic, and definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to Circle obsessives.
Which becomes even more obvious on the second track, the 13 minute "Serra", which is a dead ringer for our Finnish hypnorock pals, a sprawling motorik groove, you sort of almost keep expecting Mika Ratto to start singing over the top, but instead, synths swirl and shimmer, horns bleat and skronk, effects swoop and sway, organs get all proggy adding melodic counterpoint, but the main groove never wavers, mesmerizingly epic and relentless, 13 minutes is not nearly enough, could/should go on for hours...
"Radar King" returns Mugstar to the realm of the rocking, locked into another hypnokraut groove, this one minor key and mathy, before breaking down into some spaced out psychdrone drift, all clouds of cymbal shimmer, little melodic squiggles, swirling effects and hushed synths, barely there guitar jangle, eventually the build begins, pulsing, throbbing, growing louder, and more intense, the effects more frantic, the drums heavier, finally exploding in a climax of tangled guitar freakout, and splattery drum pound, all wreathed in dense spaced out FX.
Finally, the band finish off with a gorgeously hazy psychedelic dronedrift, that lays a woozy bassline, under a thick droning organ, the drums minimal, skeletal, like the tracks before, the organ takes control, adding all sorts of rhythmic texture to the proceedings, a total drugpsych tripout, all anchored to the seriously solid groove at its core.
Some seriously epic and proggy psychedelic spacekraut to the max, fans of Circle especially should dig these guys if they don't already, and like the last record, absolutely recommended for anyone even remotely into Salvatore, Magyar Posse, White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan and the rest of the current crop of modern psych rockers...
One of the more eccentric acts to emerge from the Belgian EMB scene in the late '80s, The Neon Judgement developed a stylized sound of electronics melded to an Americana swagger with patinas of country-fried twang working into leather-clad industrialisms. At times, Neon Judgement were brilliant in this approach, other times it was a contrived dud. Yet, this sound was one that was developed over time, as their earliest recordings took on the more of synth punk idioms that were held by contemporaries in Cabaret Voltaire, Absolute Body Control, Siglo XX, Suicide, and even bits of Gary Numan. This LP contains all the tracks from the two cassettes that Neon Judgement released in 1981-1982 (TV Treated and Suffering), and it makes perfect sense that the exceptional ears at Dark Entries would seek out the finest moments from Neon Judgement's beginnings. At this time, the band was considerably more raw, with jagged guitar riffs coupled to the overdriven synth chords and jabbing arppegiations. It sounds like Neon Judgement had been listening to that first Suicide record, and wanted to try to figure out how to reinterpret the zombified rockabilly through electronics as well, without resorting to a pure homage. The minimalist spiralling of Neon Judgement's electronics holds some of Suicide's simplicity, although Neon Judgement's rock sensibility is purely showcased through the guitar and not the songwriting, which is much more tuned (at least here) to the European approaches of coldwave detachment. A couple of the tracks (e.g. "Factory Walk" and "TV Treated") had made appearances on later albums with more polish on the production, but there's something better suited to the stilted gait and agitated guitar pluckings on "Factory Walk" that make these recordings more expressive. As with all Dark Entries titles, limited to 500 copies.
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.
This one is already sold out, we have the LAST 6 copies, limited to just 78 copies (that number will make sense in a sec), this is a 3" cd, affixed to an actual 100 year old, 5.5" mini 78 rpm record, with the cd-r and the record with matching labels, both housed in a black, holed record sleeve, wrapped with a series of printed cards, those cards wrapped in vellum, with a tag affixed to the cards by string, the black sleeve hand printed. All of that housed in a stamped and stickered envelope, each with an actual stamp, it's quite stunning. And the 78 rpm is definitely playable, just be very very careful, those old records are incredibly fragile, and brittle, which is another way the art ties in with the music, Newlyn's record a series of delicate miniatures, lush pianoscapes, wreathed in reverb, occasionally flecked with strange machine like sounds, tinkling melodies, swirling strings, cinematic and hauntingly dreamy, a sort of otherworldly chamber music, hushed and intimate, melancholy and oh so lovely.
Be warned, these do NOT travel well, if you buy one of these, they need to be packaged like crazy! Tons of packing, loads of protection from the postman, or the other items in your order. The label suggested we only sell these locally, but we figured some of our mailorder folks would probably dig, so be warned re: the packaging, and if the shellac record does crack, we can't replace it, although maybe the label would see fit to send you a new 78!
Nig Heist was punk rock band fronted by Black Flag roadie and SST employee Mugger, a joke band formed specifically to open for Black Flag, with the sole intention of pissing people off, and by all reports, mission accomplished. Big time. Infamous live shows, ridiculous costumes, super antagonistic audience baiting stage banter, stupid songs, over the top sexist and misogynistic lyrics, basically everything Mugger and company could think of to rankle the punk rockers. That crew, typically drawn from members of Black Flag and various bands who happened to be opening for Black Flag, over the years included: Bill Stevenson, Dez Cadena, Chuck Biscuits, Greg Ginn, D. Boon, Tom Trocolli, Spot, and maybe hardest to believe, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat/Fugazi.
The key to the group's 'sound' being that the members were called on to join Nig-Heist, and play whatever instrument they didn't actually normally play, which is part of why the songs sound a bit warped and warbly. Sonically, NH slip easily from jangly garage pop, sounding uncannily like the Leaving Trains, to Black Flag style gnarled punk rock, to skronky atonal jazz, to dirgey, downtuned heaviness, reminding us a bit of SST metalheads Saint Vitus, they also dabble in Misfits like sing along punk pop, and jokey cock rock that in places definitely sounds like aQ faves Bad News. Black Flagisms abound of course since the core of the band was in fact primarily members of Black Flag, but to dig this, you definitely have to be prepared for songs like "Hot Muff", "Tight Little Pussy", "Surfbroad", "Whore Pleaser" and the like. And yeah, it's silly and stupid and goofy, and the lyrics are cringeworthy (although they are of course meant to be), but fans of punk rock of that era, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fear and all that, will find it tough not to love this stuff, and knowing how how nuts the crowds must have gotten back in the day, not knowing these guys were taking the piss, only makes it that much better.
Now reissued on vinyl, also includes a bonus live cd from Henry Rollins' private collection (ahem) and features artwork by Raymond Pettibon (of course).
Full length number two from these California drugged out psychedelic dirge rockers, who now count a member of late great Monoshock among their membership, which makes sense, as these guys whip up a similarly murky moody protopunk psychrock sound, but where NP's debut was a more noisy garage-kraut sci-fi psych rock blowout, Late Night does seem to sonically fulfill its monicker, crafting a darker dirgier moodier minimalism, the songs sprawling dark brooders, all whirring organs, pulsing processed guitars, swirling FX and reverb drenched vocals, that slip from hushed croon to almost soulful falsetto, all set amidst streaks and swirls, smears and blurs, a druggy late night sonic comedown, the record occasionally exploding into some propulsive crunch, or distorted pound, but spending most of it's time oozing and creeping, electronic rhythms wound around fluttery effected melodies, some sci-fi synths remain, adding a haunting cinematic vibe to the proceedings, pop songs melting and oozing from the speakers, for a super obscure reference, think the organ driven dour pop of the Velvet Monkeys, the same sort of moody meandery moonlit minimalism, dirgey ballads crossed with slo-mo garage rock, indie rock jangle slowed way down and transformed into something more twangy and maudlin, reminding us of times of Aussie post punkers Naked On The Vague.
We loved the first NP record, but we're digging this one even more, a killer collection of murk pop gems, hooks everywhere, but wreathed in gauzy creep and wheezy shimmer, blurred shimmery buzz and hazy spaced out psychedelia. A new favorite for sure!
Another very affordable, but limited, 2-fer cassette from Thee Oh Sees, this time with both 2008's full band debut The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, and 2009's Help (an AQ Record Of The Week!). Limited to 250 copies, act fast!!!
Here's our massive original reviews of those two records...
Master's Bedroom: The Oh Sees have changed a lot since they were the OCS. Back then, Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer had his Coachwhips, a wild sweat soaked, garage stomp party, furious and frenzied, throbbing and in-the-red, so OCS was the outlet for Dwyer to explore the other sides of his multiple musical personality. The debut OCS record (released on tUMULt) was two discs, one of mostly solo acoustic guitar, a super intimate bedroom folk, all dusty and crackly, warm and super intimate, bits of damaged Casio, warbly old vinyl, damaged FX, lovingly crafted into some sort of heartfelt lo-fi sonic loveletter. The other disc was more noisy, super abstract, blown out blasts of free jazz weirdness, drones and rumbles, howling feedback, white noise, pink noise, and every color in between. OCS 2, 3 and 4 followed a similar pattern, a sort of lonely lo-fi homebrewed indie folk, off kilter and melancholy, wistful, damaged and dreamy.
But with the dissolution of the Coachwhips, came a name change for OCS, now The Ohsees, or sometimes The Oh Sees, a change in sound, and a transformation into a full band.
While not as freaked out and furious as the Coachwhips, the Oh Sees new record sounds more like the long lost CW's than any of Dwyer's records since. Garage-y jangle, shuffling drums, the vocals distorted, the songs simple and stripped down, but the big difference is that here Dwyer splits the vocals with bandmate Brigid Dawson, the result is truly endearing harmonies, with Dwyer often the wailing counterpoint to Dawson's sweet angelic croon. And songs that sometimes sound like alien versions of that classic Phil Spector girl group sound. But at its heart, the sound is still fuzzy and buzzy and skeletal, groovy and garage rocky, wouldn't be hard to imagine this disc on In The Red, or see these guys on tour with the Dirtbombs or the Country Teasers or the Husbands. (Bonus points for having a song about aQ pal and local artist extraordinaire Maria Forde!)
Help: Listening to Help, it's almost impossible to hear anything but mere traces of the chaotic noise rock path John Dwyer followed to make it to Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS, and Ohsees), but it's that noisy past, and penchant for musical shit stirring, that informs the jangly garage pop on Help, and transforms the band's jangle and shuffle and pound into near perfect buzzy fuzzy catchy retro pop, and makes it easily the best Oh Sees record yet. And a definite contended for (garage) pop record of the year.
Most of us were introduced to Dwyer via his two piece noise rock costume rock combo Pink And Brown (after brief stints in some well known Providence outfits), but unlike most of the costumed joke bands at the time, P&B offered some serious songsmithery along with the unhinged live shows and audience baiting. A brief stint drumming for SF grindlords Burmese led directly into the band that brought Dwyer to worldwide attention, the Coachwhips. Arguably one of the best live bands around, the Coachwhips made up for what they lacked in actual songs with sweat and alcohol soaked performances, utter chaos, and sometimes literally, ultra destructive houseshows. Coachwhips shows were all about the energy, the vibe, jumping around, flailing wildly, getting wrecked and having a blast. Sometimes though, that energy was difficult to translate to home listening. Take away the sweaty throng and the deafening volume and, well why would you want to do that?
And so came the Oh Sees, originally called OCS, and a double cd release on Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, essentially a solo record, one disc of folky fluttery lo-fi twang flecked pop, another of corrosive textured noise experiments, which ended up being, for many of us, one of our favorite post Pink And Brown Dwyer documents. OCS transformed into The Oh Sees and became a real band, and seemed poised to follow in the sonic footsteps of the Coachwhips, stripped down garage rock, super lo-fi, lost of brittle high end, yelped distorted vocals, tribal drumming, but there was definitely something more, more refined, more catchy, more timeless sounding, something much more than garage rock, a sound that reminded us of sixties girl groups, of Phil Spector productions, raw and primal, but lush and expansive and catchy. But that catchy lush side of the Oh Sees remained hidden beneath squalls of tweeter abuse and fractured effects, a wall of fuzz and buzz more than an actual wall of sound. Until now.
Help finds the band making their first record for garage rock stalwarts In The Red, which is ironic as this is Thee Oh Sees' least typically garage rock record yet. Instead, the sound is total pop, plucked fresh from a time capsule buried in the sixties, the guitars jangle as much as crunch, lots of reverb, the vocals wreathed in a haze of delay, lots of female vox, the choruses are lush, the drums are still tribal, but much more measured, often quite spare, the arrangements though are anything but classic, sometimes getting super abstract, but never losing their catchiness, sometimes adding all sorts of extra distorted overload, but just as quickly slipping into something smooth and groovy. Minus the weird moments and the fucked up productions, some of these songs do really sound like they were just transported forward four decades.
"Meat Step Lively" starts off all Cramps-y, with a fuzzy grinding main riff, simple pounding rhythm, but adds some awesome female vocals and background 'ooooohs', some spidery lead guitars, and coolest of all breaks it down with about a minute to go into a swinging sixties smoke-y jazzy flute flecked groove. "The Turn Around" is a minute of blown out drum damage and fractured effects, but wrapped around a sing songy main riff, and some cool distorted and reverbed vox, in total Guided By Voices fashion, they truncate what could have been the jam of the record, and launch into "Can You See", which is all slithery and washed out, with angelic background vocals, shuffling drums, and a cool dreamy bridge, but the whole thing still manages to sound ominous and intense and weirdly sexy.
The record closes with "Peanut Butter Oven", which we first heard on the recent (and sadly now out of print) Awesome Vistas 12", and it's obvious why this was the single, it definitely is THE jam of the record, with it's simple stripped down jangle, workmanlike drum beat, and soaring minor key strings, and let's not forget the gorgeous harmony vocals draped over the singing strings and that irresistible main riff.
And so it goes, every track here is a gem, each one offers up something new, some twisted take on that classic sixties garage rock sound, but it's that sound revved up and filtered through Dwyer's gloriously cracked pop sensibilities, bathed in buzz and fuzz or stripped way down and left shimmery and crystalline, sometimes wrapped in HUGE hooks or allowed to simmer and slither, the catchiness subtle yet so irresistible, and unlike past efforts, even at its noisiest, the noise element seems more an organic part of the sound, and is often shaped into something barely recognizable as noisy.
We knew Dwyer and company had it in them, and now they've proven it, BIG TIME. Dying to see what they come up with next, if they could possibly one up this here disc, but hell, for now, Help has us way satisfied. And records like these are exactly why they invented that repeat button on your cd player. Folks with turntable will just have to get up and flip the record over and over and over, again and again and again.
WAY recommended.
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.
Another limited edition from Time Released Sound, this one from sound artist / dronescaper Fabio Orsi, whose Theft Of A Rose, is a sonic homage to Jean Cocteau's 1940 film Beauty And The Beast, and is a glorious piece of hushed and haunting minimal dronemusic, a lush, slow shifting expanse of warm swirling tones, lightly layered atmospheres, a luxurious slow build from a whispery drift, to a thick almost shoegazy shimmer, definitely reminiscent of Machinefabriek, mysterious overtones, pulsing buried rhythms, darkly dramatic and gorgeously ominous, so lovely, and well worth the price of admission alone, but the packaging is over the top!
Limited to just 100 copies, the cd is housed in a little black printed envelope, which along with an actual polaroid of a still from the film, and a lock of real hair tied with twine, is housed in a small plastic envelope, which in turn is placed in a vellum envelop, printed front and back, with a small tag affixed with twine, and inside the envelope are a handful of tiny sewn roses. So gorgeous!
Ovens just might be the most underappreciated best band in SF. Although that looks like it could maybe be about to change. The various members live in different cities now, and only really play about once a year, but at their most recent show, a few weeks back, HUNDREDS of people showed up, and went NUTS, there was a pit, and crowd surfing, in a tiny little hole in the wall club. Which might have you thinking these guys are some sort of heavy punk rock band, when in fact, they're a pop band. An amazing incredible pop band, whose songs routinely clock in at about the 30 second mark, and whose lyrics are mostly about getting drunk, getting high, getting fired or getting hurt. We joke that if their songs were longer and weren't all about drugs, they would be THEE most popular band in the land. And we believe it. Their sound like some impossible mix of Weezer, Guided By Voices, The Beatles, Thin Lizzy (who they covered at that show), Teenage Fanclub, old Bee Gees (who they also occasionally cover) and the Fucking Champs. Total hook filled pop, with killer dual guitar harmonies, shredding leads, amazing hooks, like the sort of hooks most bands would KILL for, but these guys toss out hooks like that in 20 second songs and simply move on to the NEXT killer hook. Hell, our own Andee loved Ovens so much he put out their debut full length (much more raving about these guys in that review elsewhere on the aQ site, and heck, if you don't have that yet, you should buy it NOW).
This latest blast of perfect pop is just that, perfect. Nine songs in 8 minutes, the longest song 1:59, the shortest :34, the band kicking out feedback drenched fuzzy power pop one second, lilting Beatles-esque ballad the next, a dreamy acoustic guitarscape leads right into a woozy chunk of nineties style indie rock, but with those guitar harmonies, that kill, and then it's right into another perfect chunk of miniature pop, in the amount of time it's taken to write this review, we've listened to the whole single 3 times in a row, and the thing is, now that the review's almost done, doesn't mean we have any intention of stopping.
Easily one of our favorite local bands, heck, local or not, these guys are incredible! And if you get a chance to see one of their rare (and usually brief, not to mention littered with eighties hardcore covers, although at that most recent show, they covered Leeway!!) performances, don't blow it, if there's any justice in the world, these guys will be HUGE, and the world will be humming along to their jams, 30 seconds at a time!!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
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 super limited art edition of this release sold out before we could manage to get any copies at all, but we did manage to get a handful of the slightly less limited (100 copies) digipak cd-r version, which is much cheaper, and still worth grabbing for the music inside, a gorgeous collection of field recording flecked folk, hazy and pastoral, spidery steel string guitars unfurl a dreamlike Appalachia over a bed of chirping birds, and mysterious bits of random percussion, a lovely bit of back porch dreaminess, which is how most of the record plays out, slippery slide guitar hovers over woozy bass and the sound of a gently burbling brook, long stretches of steel string buzz underpin simple, sweetly melancholic acoustic guitar, a crackling fire in the background, much of the music here is moody and muted, the guitar occasionally bursting into a fiery bit of psychedelia, but more often than not, darkly strummed, intertwining melodies creating lush landscapes of twang flecked drift.
Fans of Scott Tuma, Ilyas Ahmed, Chris Smith, James Blackshaw and other Appalachian soundscapers would do well to check this out.
It seems like every time there's a new Peste Noire record we make it Record Of The Week. Which only seems strange until you actually hear it. And hear how fucked up and totally bafflingly brilliant it is. With every record Peste Noire seem to move further and further away from the grim black metal that birthed them, but to be fair, no one in Peste Noire has spent much time playing what anyone might consider 'typical' black metal, especially mainman Famine, now rechristened La Sale Famine De Valfunde, who used to play in Alcest. Though we should note he took extreme umbrage when we suggested that Alcest / Ameseours mainman Neige had anything to do with the music of Peste Noire, which is also surprising considering that one member of Alcest and one member of Ameseours are also members of Peste Noire and we assume do contribute musically. But really, none of that matters as much as the very very strange sounds these folks create, and the fact that metalheads still dig it. In fact, we're constantly perplexed by certain bands that for no good reason remain beloved to even the truest grimmest metalheads. To be fair, Peste Noire, for all their twisted sonic proclivities, are still masterful black metallers, it's just that those blasts of brilliant black metal are often separated by strange accordion driven French folk music or some twisted bit of confusional psychedelia. Which brings us to L'Ordure A L'Etat Pur, the latest, and yes, perhaps greatest from these French misanthropes. And as always, it only takes the first track, a shot across the bow, to reveal their true intentions, as twisted and unlikely as they may be.
The sound of wind and rain, of crashing surf, distant foghorns, underpinning some reverbed clean guitar, riffs ringing out over these sounds of the sea, a second guitar adds some melody, and there seems to be a wolf howling, or a voice imitating a wolf, there are tolling bells too, and the beginning of what sounds like it could be a jig, or some sort of gypsy folk, maniacal rambling vocals surface, the guitars growing more distorted, the sound tense and dramatic and growing moreso, before no not launching into furious black buzz, but instead some sort of shuffling post rocky groove, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, wrapped around a chugging riff, and some simple propulsive drumming, not so much metal as rock, and then the sound does erupt into a kind of blackness, soaring and droney but before full blackness is achieved, it returns to that sort of sea shanty that opened the proceedings, and the howling wolf returns. Some double kick drumming ups the ante, and finally, the song lurches into more metal territory, but again, more sort of blackened rock, like Khold than Darkthrone, with some seriously catchy riffs, and then, HORNS, moaning ominously, adding some cool texture, and giving the song a sort of "Tusk" vibe, until the metal peels away completely, leaving just horns and acoustic guitar, a sort of oompa oompa polka, with a trombone playing the main melody. Oh yeah, and some accordion. We're in full on French street music territory now, and then the metal guitars swoop back in, as do the vokills, but now they're playing a killer metallized version of that polka, with some strange trilled vocal harmonies and some weird droned out guitars, which suddenly stop, leaving just the sounds of what sounds like sword fighting, and the song shifts gears again, bursting into an almost ska sounding punkish sprawl, only to moments later shift again into a gnarled bit of noise rock, and it's right back into the oompa oompa metalized ska, the vocals transforming into a sort of goregrind gurgle, the music stopping briefly to reveal the sounds of a barnyard, all chickens and roosters, then when the music kicks back in, the vocals simulate the sounds of chickens, Famine singing variations of "Ba-kaaaw", before finishing off in a killer mathy tangle of dynamic chug and pound.
And that's just the first song. And fear not, we won't go through every song here part by part, although we could, and reading this without listening would make this new Peste Noire sound like thee most bizarre record EVER, and heck, maybe it is, but impossibly, it also sort of works, in a dizzying, whatthefuck sort of way.
The rest of the record does offer more surprises, as well as some more traditional black metal, but even at its most buzzy and blasty, the sound will splinter into some strange super distorted can-can, guitars will suddenly unfurl wild squiggles of high end, the sound suddenly devolving into a sort of effects heavy progged out swirl that then transforms into a pounding almost industrial crunch, wreathed in more moaning horns, or a fight will seem to break out in the middle of the song, shattering glass, sirens, all while the song continues to chug and churn, the sound slipping easily from dark, gnarled crusty pound to woozy meandery clean guitar post rock and then to glistening soaring sonic majesty, only to have a chorus of weirdly chanted vocals surface and totally change the vibe to more of a stein hoisting sing along. The blasting buzz here tends less toward the grim blur of classic black metal and more toward a sort of goofy gallop, but one that suits the band more than the other ever would, and amidst all this weirdness, PN can whip out a stretch of impossible beauty or extreme blackened bliss, the sort of parts you want to go on forever, but in the ADD world of Peste Noire, those moments are fleeting, and will soon be subsumed by some new, stranger sound. Elements of power metal abound, but like all of the other musics bastardized here, it becomes just another twisted / fractured facet of Peste Noire's bizarre musical universe. All culminating in the beautifully mournful slow core doom of closer "La Condi Hu", a creeping lament, heavy and distorted, but darkly melodic and melancholy, laced with clean hushed vocal harmonies, but then you couldn't have expected that to be all, in swoop some sad sad strings, some chugging guitars, building to a minor key bit of blackened post metal, and unlike the rest of the record, nothing gets super weird, the band remain heavy, the music tense and dramatic and emotional, continuing to build, the sound intense and moving, laced with mysterious proggy sections, cool female vocal harmonies, dense intricate drumming, there's even a cool wild sort-of-drum solo, with the drums spitting our an avalanche of beats, beneath spoken female vox, which leads right into a super gorgeous stretch of minor key, slithery bass driven heaviness, that any band would kill for, but these guys leave for last, letting the sound wind down, and displaying without a doubt, that there is some sort of method to Peste Noire's extreme and utter musical madness.
Martin Hall appears to be the figure who defined the Danish New Wave scene, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that any of the projects he worked in found much traction outside of Denmark. Ballet Mecanique was one such project, And Then Again was another; of course, there were a couple of solo outings too. Both Pesteg Dred and SS-Say were very short-lived projects in the early '80s. Pesteg Dred was a trio that revolved around Hall in 1981 with electronics wrangler Per Hendrichsen and vocalist Inge Shannon. During one weekend, the three landed in a studio and banged out an album but didn't have the ability to pay the bill. So the tapes sat until Hall could negotiate something with the owners of the studio. A cassette of the material surfaced as a bonus with an art magazine in 1985, but otherwise, the recordings languished while all three members went onto other projects.
The dark storm of post-punk had certainly come to Denmark, with Hall admitting an early infatuation with Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (well, he did name one of his later projects And Then Again after an A Certain Ratio tune), but The Pop Group and The Ex must have made a big impact as well. The band is essentially a mutant rhythm section of rumbling, discordant funk basslines and unschooled percussive fills that showcase way more fury than skill, with a series of weirdly skittered electronics flushed between the rhythms with murky modular sweeps, distorted drones, and delay-rippled bloop. Inge's vocals are a cold monotone bellow that aren't too far from Bettina Koster of Malaria, making a perfect fit for the darkly, cacophonous agit-punk of Pesteg Dred. The lengthy "Light, More Light" is very much in the vein of the best A Certain Ratio, with breakneck post-disco rhythm, neck-strangling basslines, jittery guitars, and even some atonal blurts from a trumpet.
SS-Say released only one single in 1985, and that material rounds out the cd. Here, Hall is working again with Inge Shannon, for a more baroque, anthemic number wrought with Siouxsie-esque operatics and wah-wah guitar scratching above the catwalk disco rhythms. With its cocaine strung synths, "Care" is definitely the gem amongst the SS-Say tracks, which showcase much more polish as a Studio 54 / Batcave hybrid than Pesteg Dred, but with just as much post-punk bombast.
The Pesteg Dred material was reissued by Dark Entries on vinyl in 2010, and now it's available on cd for the first time with the SS-Say tracks that didn't appear on the lp reish.
Acid Mothers Temple alert!! Afrirampo alert too! Fans of either/both of those bastions of underground Japanese trippy hippy psych rock weirdness, listen up! This new Riot Season release is one of thee best Acid Mothers Temple related recordings we've heard in a while (and we've heard a lot). AMT's bearded guitar guru Kawabata Makoto teams up here with an old pal, drummer Pikacyu from the avant all-girl group Afrirampo, for a delightfully demented duo session, the two of 'em egging each other on to ever-more ecstatic extremes of cosmic chaos... Frazzled fuzz and reverbed wall of sound guitar from Kawabata accompanies multiple layers of echoing overdubbed vocalizations (chipmunk one minute, chanting monk the next) from Pikacyu, who also moves things along with energetic abandon on the drums.
The 13 tracks here vary from lovely drone-outs to noisy but poppy songs to short, sharp skronkfests - the 25 second "Oscar No Hope" being this disc's shortest and skronkiest, while the likes of "Back To Your House Over The Rainbow" and "Birth Star" are MUCH longer and more epic. The propulsive, rhythmic latter number being a good example of how this disc at its wild and playful best sounds a bit like Circle meets Melt Banana, or Yoko Ono jamming with Faust, or a nuttier, more psychedelic Deerhoof... yeah, far out! Some of the time Pikacyu-Makoto come across like a (two person) "tribe" a la ESP classic Cromagnon, and there's definitely a big krautrock influence at play (as always with Kawabata, right?).
Even if you're not a dedicated AMT fan, we'd say this is one worth checking out!
First pressing limited to 1000 copies in special gatefold sleeve packaging.
From the depths of the Impulse label's more "psychsploitaton" side of jazz comes this exotic East-meets-West rarity from 1968. And if you dug Gabor Szabo's Jazz Raga, any of the John Berberian electric oud albums, the Indo-jazz of Joe Harriott, or the even more authentically "Indo" Indo-jazz of T.K. Ramamoorthy recently reissued by EM, this will be right up your alley.
You might have second thoughts seeing the buttoned-down suit and tie wearing bass player Plummer seemingly taking the piss out of the sitar jazz craze of the mid-to-late Sixties, but this record's musical qualities far outweigh any trendy novelty or gimmicks. The opening track, "Journey to The East", is a groovy pop number with spoken singing (the only track with vocals) but the flute, tabla and sitar interplay is pretty far out. Things get further out on the sinewy free jazz of "Arc 294" and the quiet intensity of "Antares". Even covers like "The Look of Love" and The Byrds' "Lady Friend" have charms beyond what those songs normally have to offer. A cultish obscurity for years, it's awesome to see this one-off album reissued again!
Dominick Fernow who runs Hospital Productions, a record store AND label, has had to keep his main, mostly noise project, that would be Prurient, on the back burner for a while now, as he is now also a full fledged member of electro cold wave pop troupe Cold Cave, and what with touring and recording, it's seems like it's been quite a while since we've heard anything new. In the past, Prurient records could go one of two ways, blistering noise and caustic crunch, or dark thick brooding blackened dronemusic, often some mix of the two. But after all this Cold Caving, we weren't sure what to expect, but it definitely wasn't this. We did expect some of the CC sound to rub off on him, how could it not, but orthodox noise freeks will be very confused and disappointed, cuz this is essential a blackened synth heavy coldwave noise rock blowout, and it actually kind of rules! The liner notes instruct the listener to "Listen on headphones at night while driving through tunnels in Europe", and that is sort of what it sounds like, a few of the tracks like supercharged noise drenched versions of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", while others like meaner more brutal takes on Cold Cave. Fear not, there's still plenty of noise, and howling hateful vox, but those elements are doled out judiciously this time around, and its the juxtaposition between those harsher elements, and the more synthy/krautrocky/propulsive bits that make this so goddamn good.
Opener "Many Jewels Surround The Crown" begins with a wild distorted shriek, and a wall of distorted crumbling blackness, but then in swoop synths, swirling strings, it almost sounds like it could be the soundtrack for some Tron like film, all sleek and reflective, but a bit decayed and decrepit, a futuristic post apocalyptic soundscape, a voice intones beneath pulsing kosmische synths, barraged by blasts of distorted crunch, and thick swaths of blackened bass. This is quickly followed by some pounding electro-punk, the vocals a gruff bellow, over thick driving synths and blasting programmed drums, all laced with warm whirling melodies, total new wave for sure, but sounding like Majeure or Zombi remixed by Alec Empire.
The rest of the record plays out like some beautiful and bizarre soundtrack, slipping easily from sprawls of crunchy droned out noise, to lush, swirling string laden shimmer, to lumbering bass heavy synthbuzz thrum, to total Depeche Mode-is electro pop, but again, that pop flecked with shrieked almost black metal vocals, which totally changes the tenor, while other tracks drift along blissfully, layering distant muted throbs beneath ethereal streaks of washed out synth and sweetly melancholy melodies, and finally finishing off with the epic "Sugar Can Chapel", a sort of noise drenched M83 slow build shoegaze psychedelic synth blowout, that manages to be darkly atmospheric and blackly blissed out.
Easily the most accessible Prurient record yet, and anyone who wishes that new wave of retro synth stuff had a lot more blackened bit to it, well, this might just be what you were looking for.
NB we got this on vinyl too, but not as many as we'd hoped, we might still have just a couple so ask if you're interested...
From jaunty opener "Eye Bath" onward, this album is one that surprises and delights and offers so much interesting DIY recorded avant-drone *texture* along with its actually quite catchy indie-pop song-iness! We always knew we liked the music of New Zealander Stephan Neville, aka one-man-band Pumice (also a member of The Futurians), he's definitely been in there amongst all the cool, home-taped dronological sounds appearing on obscure cds, cd-rs, cassettes, lathe-cut vinyl and so forth from his entrancing island home that we've been geeking out about over the years. But all the releases tend to overwhelm. Not just Pumice's, but Birchville Cat Motel and Omit and Peter Wright and Antony Milton all the rest. We can't always devote our full attention. And actually, Pumice's previous album, Yeahnahvienna, released a year or so ago on Soft Abuse was a bit ho-hum we thought, we didn't even ever get around to reviewing it. A lot of it was too stripped down and acoustic, revealing too much of the vocals which aren't really Mr. Neville's strong suit. But we're glad we didn't miss this new album! It's different, dense, infectiously fuzzed, and really really good (one of those albums that gets all the AQers coming up to the counter to see what's playing when it's on). Actually our interest in Pumice was rekindled by the recent underground NZ comp on Xeric, Need For A Crossing. Neville, along with Pseudoarcana's Antony Milton, curated it, and it featured several cuts by Pumice and other projects of his, which were quite striking. So suddenly were were like, hmm, Pumice, hey let's be sure to check out this new disc Pebbles. And lo and behold, it's a winner.
Like we said, Pumice makes lo-fi indie rock, the Dead C and the Velvet U are both likely influences, also all the rich history of NZ indie awesomeness from labels like Xpressway and Flying Nun, artists like The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, and Alastair Galbraith. The music here is damaged, reverbed, distorted, as much about sound as song. Regarding Pebbles, Pumice claims Moondog and Simply Saucer as inspirations -- while we might not have thought of those disparate outsider references, they're not so outlandish when we think about it. And although Neville has a reputation for gloominess, the sheer pop umph buried beneath the lo-fi grit and noise of these tracks can't be denied, and tends to balance the depressive effects of the doleful droniness also much in evidence. Yeah, there's moments of rollickin' destroyed rock as well as an experimental folkiness that Richard Youngs fans will dig... and again if you like ye olde Xpressway style NZ indie stuff this is gonna be a blast. Another reminder for us here at AQ that we need to make a New Zealand section in the store again, like we used to back in the day!
After a long string of now out of print 7" singles, cassettes, 12" eps, and a name change from what was Pure Ecstasy, The Austin, TX trio Pure X finally deliver their debut full length, aptly titled Pleasure. In previous reviews we recommended all the hip boutique labels such as Woodsist, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, Mexican Summer that were signing all the real good lo-fi murk-pop bands to sign these guys quick. But true to their nature, the band stayed loyal and stuck with the local Austin labels Light Lodge and Acephale who released their previous singles as well as releases by connected bands in their circle, Silver Pines, Sleep Over and Survive. That was a smart move, because instead of feeling pressure to polish their songs with better recording equipment or add more complicated arrangements, the band was really able to stretch out their already established dreamy and hazy pop sound. Pleasure does see some of the songs from their 7"s, such as "Dream Over", "Voices", and "Easy", re-recorded, but not necessarily all that different, perhaps with a new layer of hazy feedback and slo-mo guitar fuzz, as these songs were all recorded live with no overdubs. A bold move for sure, but Pure X has long nailed their economic sound into something so wonderfully self-sufficient and unique. And besides those 7"s are so far out of print, that most folks are lucky to get any versions of these songs at all. Imagine Friends-era Beach Boys way slowed down to a molasses pace with crashing lo-fi waves of shoe-gaze guitar strums, buttery rhythms and space walking basslines with sleepy but impassioned vocals. Pleasure is a beautifully dirty dream-pop heaven! Highly Recommended! Vinyl to follow next month, fyi.
From the same label that gave us records from Alkerdeel, Aidan Baker, Bongripper, Expo 70, Caina, Gorgontongue and Persistence In Mourning, comes this, the debut ep from UK sludgelords Pus, whose sound is a lurching, lumbering downtuned heaviness, that owes as much to Electric Wizard as it does Moss. The guitars are thick and oozy and blackened, downtuned and tarpit groovy, the drums simple and solid, the vocals a reverb drenched bellow that sounds a bit like Mike Williams from Eyehategod crossed with Justin Broadrick circa the good ol' Godflesh days, each song mostly a single riff, pounded at relentlessly, laced with occasional gouts of wah drenched psychedelic leads, the songs once in a while oozing into something more blackened and dirgey, or something more propulsive and downright rocking, but for the most part, it's a relentlessly tranced out black dirge, doomy and psychedelic, mesmerizing and hypnotic, culminating in the extra noisy title track, which substitutes the bellowing vox for a weird droned out monk like chant, the guitars a big muddier and murkier, the result something weirdly dreamy and trippy.
Definitely recommended for fans of all things slow and low, doomy and sludgey. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Got us a kick ass split here, bringing together a band we had yet to hear (and can barely pronounce), Pyrifleyethon, and aQ faves Ophidian Forest (counting the man behind tUMULt's Botanist as a member!).
First up is Pyrifleyethon, hailing from Greece. We're told pretty much everything we need to know within the intro "Ignipotence", where guitar fuzz takes on the sound of a portal opening up into hell before launching into full on blasts of black metal fury with "Powers of The Second Sphere". Our favorite track from this horde is "Underneath", where the band expertly utilizes melancholy melodies with croaking troll vokills and machine gun riffery with all kinds of queasy runs up the fretboard. The final song, the perfectly named "Hades Landscape" begins with a spooky guitar melody and rides it for a good 5 minutes as a midtempo dirge before shifting gears and launching into full on black metal insanity.
Pretty bad ass stuff from Pyrifleyethon, but Ophidian Forest have no difficulty in staking out their own crazy identity on this split. OF's previous albums, which we gobbled up like crazy, gave us a roadmap for where things *might* go, but goddamn if this band hasn't upped the ante for totally confusional, totally fucked black metal mayhem. Given the band's international makeup and method of creating albums via file swapping, we wonder how these three manage to produce stuff this bizarre while still sounding completely together and musical. No doubt the most immediate reaction is to the keyboards, which almost sound like a jazzy organ at times. In terms of how they are worked into the mix, think maybe of Beherit's Drawing Down The Moon. The songs have a strange sepia-tone quality to them, and it sounds like they could be the soundtrack to some lost Jan Svankmeyer film. On "Never Wish To Sleep", the keyboards buzz about nefariously like a poison fog while the vocals sound like something creeping out of an underground bunker. The song is weird and hallucinatory with a cool end of the world vibe that we can definitely get behind. "The Tower" makes great use of the aforementioned "jazzy" keyboards, thrown in with guttural riffs and uber metal drumming. The song is almost proggy at times, like something Van Der Graf Generator might have made if they were a three strangers from disparate parts of the globe instead of a bunch of old English nutters. Ending with "Paladin Of The Blackest Heart", OF conjures elements of industrial sci-fi craziness and even hints of folk (we think anyway) while still sounding like... well, only themselves. Quite a feat, and highly recommended!
Much of avant composer Eliane Radigue's work dating back to 1967 has yet to be heard, as she would construct her long form minimalism through feedback (for the earliest compositions) and synthesizers (particularly the Arp and occasionally Moog and Buchla) to be played back on a reel of tape with durations often lasting longer than an hour. After an installation or a performance, she would box up the results and work on something new. It wasn't until the advent of cds that technology allowed for her work to made commercially available, as she was unwilling to allow these pieces to be sliced into 20 minute excerpts for vinyl playback.
In 1974, she presented 4 nights of her work in New York - three nights at Phill Niblock's loft (where the man is STILL hosting shows!) and one at the Kitchen. A handwritten invitation to these gigs is included in the liner notes, mentioning various pieces that are now appearing on cd releases some 30 years later. Transamorem - Transmortem was one of these pieces, now part of the reissue series spearheaded by Manu Holterbach and reissued by Important. This 67 minute monolith undulates slowly through a series of "waves in tune" (as she calls them) from her Arp. The strategy is very simple, but the choices Radigue makes are perfect. Her tones are primal and earthen, grounded in plenty of low-end that gives the impression that whatever notion of the eternal she is seeking to describe, it's located physically in the here and now. This is a beautiful piece of minimalism, certainly ranking with her chilling Trilogy Of Death and Adnos.
Newly Reissued on Vinyl!
Hot stuff! The liner notes for this soundtrack suggest that the movie, which paired the ultra sexy Marianne Faithfull with the equally irresistible Alain Delon, fell "somewhere between fetish and fantasy" and we'd venture to say that this soundtrack does too. Sooo perfectly '60s - bringing together the grand orchestra and the rock band! There's the expressive horns that frolic, chuckle, taunt and weep... the glorious strings and woodwinds that sweep you around a dancefloor or along an open road... oh and let's not forget the funky noodly electric guitars and keyboards. Now, punctuated the proceedings with some thunderous timpani drums, some enchanting Cleo Laine and Mireille Mathieu vocals and yes, some ambient sounds from the film itself like the roar of a motorcycle! Super sexy and stylin'. If you dig hip '60s flicks, this soundtrack and the movie is totally for you.
The return of our favorite Finnish black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, who really are barely even black metal, and actually hardly metal, but they are definitely weird, and this latest sidelong jam definitely does nothing to convince us otherwise. Beginning the ridiculous (and best ever!) title: "Ridiculed By Ladies Of The Moon", the song begins with a long stretch of warbly synth drone, laced with feedback, slowly undulating, while in the background sounds clank and clatter, sounding either like someone building a robot or someone making dinner, this goes on for a while until BLAM, the drums kick in, the synthy/electronic buzz is joined by HEAVY buzzy bass, and the track is transformed into a stumbling bass heavy dirge, the drums super distorted, which is especially noticeable on the bizarre fills, then the vocals, and awesome alien croak, sick and sinister and totally fucking nuts, the song pounds away, the sound gradually becoming a sort of dirgey space goth doom, dramatic and demented, and then there's the last stretch a wild final few minutes, the drums gone haywire, totally chaotic, the buzz intensified, wreathed in squiggles of white noise, and the sonorous clang of metal on metal, either some distant bells, or more likely, the pots and pans from the above mentioned kitchen being hurled about, a twisted and baffling finish to another incredible warped chunk of sonic weirdness from these guys.
Which is a lot to live up to for Undor, who decide to not try to outweird RfR, but instead, offer up a sort of sonic analogue, a stretched out midtempo jam, that sounds like just drums and guitar, the guitar riffing away, but occasionally spiraling into some weird bit of atonal squiggle, or slippery abstract melody, or a brief bit of shred, but always returning to the stumbling, lumbering, lurching main rhythm/riff. The vibe is a bit mournful, at times it sounds a bit like Hypothermia crossed with Varghkoghargasmal, the vocals pushing it over the top, a wild hysterical shriek, that in some weird way balances the slightly more measured tone of the rest of the track. But only slightly.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
We don't care what the rest of the world says, we still love Witch House, or drag, or grave rave, or cave rave, or whatever you want to call it, we still can't seem to get enough of it, the murky slithery soundscapes of slo-mo rhythms, tarpit soul, slowed down vocals, everything wreathed in a cough syrupy haze, it's the perfect late night music, like a bastardized drug addled Portishead, which sounds amazing right? We've been particularly partial to the recent spate of groups crafting a sort of abstract soul, a minimal, washed out, woozy RnB that takes the tropes of the original sound and stretches 'em waaaay out and slows them waaaaay dooooown, the result being a blissed out sonic comedown, all lumbering shuffling beats, woozy washed out melodic swells, vocals alternatingly chopped and screwed or left to drift angelically amidst hazy clouds of druggy drift. Think How To Dress Well, Crypt Thing, D'eon, Holy Other, Dirty Beaches, Hype Williams and the like.
We had never heard Shlohmo before, and actually first discovered him via a recent local show featuring Water Borders, oOoOO, White Ring and other sonically similar soundscapers (think Witch House if you want, it's okay). Shlohmo definitely traffics in a similar sound. fans of any of the above mentioned bands, will no doubt dig Shlohmo as well, his sound leaning more toward the swirling slow motion melodicisim of Balam Acab or Clams Casino, the sound all slow strummed chords, wreathed in effects and layered beneath blurred vocals, occasionally deep and dramatic, but more often, a fluttery Prince like falsetto, spidery melodies, creepy rickety rhythms, slow motion stutters and woozy warble, those distinctly witch house-y female vox all layered into a sort of chordal thrum, the sounds here hovering mainly in some ethereal sun dappled Technicolor dreamworld, but once in a while the sounds gain momentum, and become darker, the sounds more caustic and crunchy, but even then, the vibe is more shoegazey and dreamily druggy, with the sound eventually slipping back into something much more drifty and ephemeral.
Gorgeous stuff. WAY recommend for fans of prettier dreamier drag (Balam Acab, Clams Casino, etc.)�
Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold sleeve, includes a download code as well.
If Googoosh and Shirley Collins were somehow melded together into one incredible singer, you would have Shusha. Shusha was a Persian singer from the early seventies most famous for her debut album, Persian Love Songs and Mystical Chants from 1971. But her love of music extended beyond her native Iran towards the British folk of Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny and the American protest music of Dylan and Joan Baez. That is what inspired her on these two 1974 recordings, Shusha and This Is The Day. Reissued together for a very affordable price, these two albums of chamber folk-rock divide time between English-sung originals, covers and reworkings of traditional British songs and poems. No native songs here, the only inkling that we're given that Shusha is not English born is her woozy phrasing on some of the American covers such as Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" and the Elvis Presley social ballad, "In The Ghetto". But her singing really becomes transcendent on the British traditional material, where her range is allowed to soar around the song structures rather than being confined by them. This is an incredible discovery of two rare recordings by this amazing singer. Fans of Bridget St. John, Vashti Bunyan, and Joan Baez take note!
While there is no shortage of vintage kraut worship going on these days, Germany's Kreidler are one of the groups who have been doing their country's rich '70s underground music scene proud, since they formed in the late '90s. In fact their last outing, Tank, might even be our favorite record from them yet. So when we found out that Kreidler's drummer Thomas Klein had a new solo project, we were super curious and excited.
And we're happy to report that Klein has delivered the goods, as this record is filled with a hypnotic and suspenseful tone which takes us to a dark underworld filled with tribal beats, dubbed out repetition, and kraut like precision and intensity. There is no doubt that Klein's playing comes out of the direct lineage to the krautrock forefathers that so influenced the sound of Kreidler, and his drumming in particular. We think of Jaki Liebezeit (Can), Mani Neumeier (Guru Guru), and Klaus Dinger (Neu). But we could also see this record really appealing to everyone who has been going crazy for all the great John Carpenter/Goblin worship that's been coming out lately like Zombi, Majeure, Umberto, and Jonas Reinhardt. One of those records that gets people asking what is playing whenever we have it blasted on the stereo in the store. So good!
We're not sure how a live Omar Souleyman record differs from any of his other records, which were all essentially recorded live, but these shows are distinctive for one reason in particular, they all took place in the West, in front of audiences outside of the Middle East, who most likely had never seen anything like it. And we were lucky enough to see Souleyman perform here in San Francisco, and we were blown away. The sound was incredible, that tangled Eastern psychedelic sound that is already so propulsive and rhythmic and mesmerizing, but cranked through a MASSIVE sound system, and suddenly, it was as if that was how it was supposed to sound all along. And to see a whole sweaty throng of SF hipsters, from punks to metalheads, losing their shit, and dancing wildly to these weird and wonderful sounds, it was pretty inspiring. We couldn't help but wonder how Souleyman felt, performing in these big dance clubs, maybe it just seemed strange to us, cuz really we can't imagine any crowd, no matter how big or small resisting these incredible grooves. So here are a handful of live performances, from America, Australia, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the UK and Denmark, all of the tracks here finding Souleyman in fine form, the music lively and wildly chaotic, psychedelic and groovy.
One thing this live record does gives us the chance to focus on is Souleyman's keyboardist / percussionist, Rizan Sa'id, who when we saw Souleyman, almost stole the show. Sure Souleyman was the master of ceremonies, pacing the stage, clapping and singing, hyping the crowd, but then off to the side was Sa'id, going totally nuts on the keyboard, providing ALL of the music, a veritable one man band, playing wild melodies, looping rhythms, triggering big rib cage rattling beats, but the best part was his keyboard had little drum pads, and all of those flurries of Middle Eastern percussion, those are actually being played live, his hands a blur over the keyboard, unfurling wild rhythmic tangles. We literally could not take our eyes off him. On these tracks, those two are joined by an electric saz player, who adds another glorious layer of psychedelic buzz, and as you might imagine, this is incredible, and fantastic and totally and utterly transcendent. Fans will want this for sure, and it's definitely a perfect introduction to Souleyman's spiritual sonic magic, and by all means, if you get the chance to see this stuff live, you won't be sorry!!
For all the deserved attention and press the whole Los Angeles musical underground has been receiving in the last couple years, we still think that Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, is perhaps the most unique musical visionary to come out of that scene. Beyond being so prolific, the quality of his proper records just gets increasingly better and better. On Patrol was one of our favorite albums of 2010, and with Ancient Romans, Sun Araw continues to move forward from that dubbed out blueprint and expand on what has become one of the most singular sounds of any new band of the last decade.
The moment the album starts, you immediately understand that you are at the beginning of a ceremony, some sort of stange sonic ritual, which requires the listener to open up to completely, wholly trusting in these sounds to carry you away. With dirty, hypnotic organs for the opening tones, setting the stage for the textured and layered dubbed out trip that will unfold over the next 80 minutes. More then almost any band we can think of, Sun Araw is a master of creating a unified vibe. The tracks on Ancient Romans just melt in and out of each other, you lose track of what song is playing, and instead just get lost deep in the fuzzed out grooves, and tripped out meditations. It's hard to explain when music feels this spiritual, it's just something you feel and trust. And with Sun Araw we get that feeling so intensely. It places you in some dusty, archaic temple that we could imagine was transported directly from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. Once inside the temple, you forget about the trivial details of the everyday, and instead leave your body and find yourself somewhere mystical, magical and totally transcendent. This is going to be a contender for record of the year!
We didn't know too much about Surachai, or his record Plague Diagram, but from the way it was described to us, as a one man electronic / metal outfit, whose sound was equal parts black metal, doom metal, powernoise and avant garde, we were sorta convinced it would be right up our alley (and yours), and now that we're finally hearing this stuff, we're pretty sure we were right.
The metal sounds remind us of the more mechanical / industrial groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter, the sound churning and chugging, the rhythms, precise and clinical, hard to tell if it's a real drummer or a machine, but it hardly matter, this is some serious heavy, downtuned crush, and even in the first track, there are hints that this is more than just a metal record. Little stutters here and there, chirps and glitches and squelches, subtle at first, before eventually, the metal dissipates, leaving a weird bit of black ambience, all bleating horns, looped low end, hazy shifting drones, fluttering backwards effects, gradually growing more and more abstract and tripped out, before giving way to the second track, which opens with a flurry of soft chaos, machine like rhythms erupt as do buzzing riffs, those bleating horns seeming to still be present, underpinning the relentless chug, the vocals harsh and howled, the arrangement mathy and precise, and then again, out of nowhere, the song splinters, and is barraged by strange electronics, mysterious sound effects, before slipping into another expanse of ambient drift, all muted distorted glitch, heaving low end melodies, all strangely cinematic.
The rest of the record plays out similarly, a churning and chugging electronic flecked metal gradually decays eventually leaving some sort of glitched out sonic shadow, a tangle of dense pulses and layered shimmer, of staticky squelches and grinding blackened melodies, the final few minutes of the record maybe our favorite, a strange sort of slowed down demonic IDM, all chirps and hisses and whirring, that gives way to an almost Aphex Twin sort of melodic drift, albeit just a bit twisted and slightly atonal, sounding a bit like a demonic Christmas Carol, before gradually being overtaken by another squall of black buzz.
Includes lots of strange guests: Richie Devine, Nordvargr, Otto Von Schirach and others, and is pretty nicely packaged, pressed on 180 gram clear vinyl, housed in a thick PVC plastic sleeve, with a printed insert and a sticker. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES.
Finally, the debut full length from this Bay Area black metal / blacknoise duo, who in recent months have garnered a whole lot of hype, based on a flurry of killer (albeit insanely limited) releases, and a recent West Coast tour, which found the duo playing outside of the Bay Area for the first time ever. And while we've raved about everything we could get our hands on from these guys, this is definitely the band's finest moment, albeit, weirdly their least noisy. But noisiness is all relative. Cuz this is still plenty noisy, it's just compared to some of their previous releases, and their blistering liver performances, this stuff is far removed from that black metal Merzbow sonic attack that defined their early days.
Here, the noise takes a backseat to the black metal, which is actually a good thing, the riffing, and prerecorded blast beats, weaving a woozy washed out buzzscape, which on their own, would make the sound a sort of soft focus Wold, all washed out and blackly buzzy, but over this blackened foundation, the duo add heapings of noise, the vocals, processed to oblivion, sound like gouts of white hot buzz, more guitars, extra layers of blackness, it's as if the black metal core is at the center of a swirling cloud of jagged, caustic blacknoise, the two seeming to function independently for the most part, but the band create dramatic dynamics with the twisted mix, which finds, various elements dropping out, only to erupt and explode back into action moments later, or the black metal riffing getting fused to the blacknoise creating a harsh wall of sound, which just as quickly separates leaving the blast and buzz to pound furiously, shadowed by streaks of hiss and hum, the sounds dramatically stereo panned too for further twisted effect.
The stretches of ambience are darkly effective, as are the weirdly mournful clean guitar parts, the band obviously capable of creating mood and mystery, and when the buzz kicks in, none of that mood or mystery is lost, instead, it's absorbed into the frenzied black chaos which transforms the sound into something more than noise, more than black metal, it's a darkly epic, strangely textured assemblage of buzz and blast, howl and pound, the sound a living black entity, sonic chaos given form, this is the real transcendental black metal, all should be worshipping before the altar of the priests of Sutekh Hexen.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!!
We recently listed the amazing Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them quadruple lp box set on Three Lobed, which contained exclusive sidelong tracks from Sun City Girls, Sonic Youth, Comets On Fire, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry and more (we still have a handful of copies left! but only a few�), apparently folks who preordered copies direct from the label, got a little something special in their box. THIS. A brand new ep from Pete Swanson, who was one half of the late great noise/drone duo Yellow Swans, but who since then has been carving out a pretty decent niche for himself as a solo artist.
This latest disc is just about the prettiest thing we've heard from Swanson, a hazy, washed out bit of what sounds like solo guitar, or more specifically, sounds like it COULD be solo guitar, what it actually sounds like is warm lush layers of chordal shimmer, dreamy tangles of lilting melody, everything warm and sun dappled, distorted but not harsh, more sort of thick and smoldering and lush, the sound does get noisy, but again, it's the sort of dreamy noisiness we dig, a thick swirling cloud of psychedelic shimmer, all soaring guitars and whirling FX, in fact some of Swanson's playing here reminds us of legendary NZ guitarist Roy Montgomery - the same sort of hazy, brittle tone, a similarly constructed soundscape of blurred riffs and smeared melody, softly propulsive and dreamily druggy.
The final track might be our favorite, a gorgeous assemblage of keening high end tones, all woven into a darkly melodic bit of abstract, majestic drift, mournful, melancholy, but strangely and hauntingly epic, WAY too short at 9:29, would have been happy to have that track stretch out to fill up the rest of the cd. So nice.
Pretty sure this is limited to, we got a bunch direct from Swanson himself, but since most of these ended up on those boxsets, not sure how many more we'll be able to get when we run out...
For a very very brief moment in the nineties, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments were the next big thing, or if not that specifically, they were definitely super hyped, signed to a big cool label, and poised for some sort of success, which not surprisingly, never really came. And hearing these guys, it's really no surprise, this is not the sort of music made for anything but the pure love of making a racket. And the fact that within that racket lurked some of the most awesome songs ever, well, that was just a bonus. If you've yet to hear TJSA's all time classic "Negative Guest List", a song about something we all wish really existed ("Even if I pay I can't get in..."), you need to remedy that right quick. And hell if you're anything like us, that will no doubt lead you to a burning desire to own EVERYTHING these guys ever did, which is difficult seeing as almost all of it is out of print.
Which brings us to this, a pricey little gem of a 7", featuring two rare TJSA demos, which means the usual lo-fi basement-scuzz broken 4 track, old microphone recording quality that already helped defined their sound, seems positively high fidelity compare to this, but that sort of makes these jams sound even better. From 1995, two zoner garage punk scuzz pop gems, all woozy and druggy and swaggery and in their own way catchy as fuck, that should definitely show the current crop of garage rock noise poppers a thing or two about how it's really done.
With all the Cold Wave and Minimal Synth reissues from the late seventies and early eighties coming back into fashion, we knew it wouldn't be long before we'd see some goth, industrial and deathrock bands from that period being re-issued as well. Tones On Tail weren't all that obscure, coming out of the ashes of Bauhaus who disbanded in 1983, but they were very short-lived, only lasting about a year before Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins reunited with Bauhaus bandmate, David J to become Love and Rockets in 1984. However, Tones On Tail produced an exceptional amount of material over one lp and numerous eps and singles. While best remembered for their club hit, "Go!", their output covered a range of gothic styles from gloomy pop to dark jazz, but always with an ear towards strong songwriting and evocative atmospherics. And we always liked them a bit more than Bauhaus anyway!
Weird Pop is a new double vinyl collection that covers most of the same ground as the older 2cd collection, Everything, with a few previously unreleased alternate versions of songs like the full original version of "Performance", the studio version of "Heartbreak Hotel", the single edit of "Go!" and the extended version of "Twist". But unless you want these tracks on vinyl, or you are a completist collector, you might not need this if you already have the Everything collection (which is also available to order from our website) as that features more tracks (24 tracks vs. 19 tracks on the vinyl). Nonetheless, it's always great to see one of our favorite bands get some more much-deserved attention!
Labels like Minimal Wave and Dark Entries had been chomping at the bit trying to reissue this long sought after slab of weird 'n' wonderful minimal synth pop circa 1981. But it's the German label, Anna Logue who get the prize, putting out Transparent Illusion's album at a time when its sounds are more relevant then ever.
A one man band, Roy Young used his synths and off kilter voice to create music that reminds us of a slightly drunk Gary Numan joining forces with R.L. Crutchfield during the early years of Dark Day. We also hear the blueprints of the sound that would make Mute one of the most successful labels of the '80s. But what makes Transparent Illusion so fucking cool is just how DIY it sounds and feels. This definitely also foreshadows the current wave of weirdo pop peddlers like John Maus, Genevieve Jacuzzi, and Gary War. Dark primitive synths injected with infectious melody and a sinister disposition that feels totally punk in spirit. Weird and fucking cool!
When Thomas Ankersmit performed in San Francisco a few years back while opening for Phill Niblock at 23five's Activating The Medium festival, he stood behind a Serge Modular Synth housed in a modified suitcase. At a rapid-fire pace, he tugged at the nest of patch cables before him, plucking just the right one that he would then move to a different input. Despite this frenzy of activity, Ankersmit mustered an intense, blossoming swarm of electrical noise, thrum, and buzz. We had known of his long-standing collaborations with Phill Niblock, as the stalwart minimalist had employed Ankersmit's circular breathing techniques on the saxophone for a number of performances and compositions; but this electronic side of Ankersmit certainly piqued our interest.
This collaborative album with Valerio Tricoli (of 3/4hadbeeneliminated) finds Ankersmit in this electronic framework. Ankersmit and Tricoli have been making the rounds of the European festival circuit, making this album the refinement of their live presentations - working with that aforementioned modular synth, laptop trickery, overdubbed sax-driven minimalism, and some rather obtuse field recordings as well. Compositionally, Tricoli and Ankersmit adopt the decentering approach to structure that the Hafler Trio mustered on his most complex collage works, although Tricoli and Ankersmit give the impression that their jaggly spliced electronics could have been generated in a live setting. Eerie passages of dissonant tones crackle with electromagnetic static and puretone chirpings of vibrating signals, shifting from insectoid chorales to spluttering polyphonic bloop circa 1965. When the sax comes out, Ankersmit molds longform, harmonic drones into metallic planes of shifting timbres and tonal dissonance, much more in keeping with his work with Niblock than anything normally sourced from a sax. But especially when it comes to the electronics, there is a sophistication to all Tricoli and Ankersmit's arsenal of noises that's miles beyond so many of today's retrogarde synthesists, and Forma II is all the better for it! One of the best electro-acoustic records to come along in quite some time.
Wonders never cease. About four or five years ago, the Secretly Canadian label did a big favor to obscure music lovers everywhere and brought out deluxe, at long last legit reissues of the two rare private press albums that obscure DIY psych pop genius Bobb Trimble released in the early '80s. We love those two so much, we made both reissues Records Of The Week. Trimble's Iron Curtain Innocence (1980) and Harvest Of Dreams (1982) are timeless, cult artifacts, of which we said: "...you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you...", and favorably compared to everyone from Lennon/McCartney to Pink Floyd to Roy Harper to Marc Bolan to Richard Youngs to Ariel Pink.
Well, we had no idea that those two albums weren't the entirely of Trimble's discography. But now, happily we learn that there was a THIRD even rarer Trimble lp, and it's just been reissued as well!!! And it too is a doozy.
Turns out that a year or two after Harvest Of Dreams was released into an uncaring world, the 20-something Trimble teamed up with a local Worcester, Massachusetts gang of teenagers (some of whom we think had been in the even younger group, The Kidds, who are heard on some songs on a song or two on Harvest Of Dreams) called The Crippled Dog Band, named after the three-legged dog seen on the cover of this album, presumably. Who doesn't love a three-legged dog? Together, they played shows - and, better yet, for us today - made an album, this one, in '84, which captures the outsider psych-pop brilliance of Trimble's songwriting in exuberant collision/collusion with youthful rock n' roll energy.
Yeah, compared to Trimble's two "solo" albums, this could be considered to be more rockin', more "punk", more band-like. And more '80s as well, if only 'cause of the sci-fi video arcade game sounds that appear here on the intro and outro tracks! The songs, while typically Trimble-poppy (and graced with his delicate, high and whispy vox) are also often loud and raucous and awash in feedback and FX. At times we're kinda reminded of The Dickies.
Most are in the 2-3 minute range, though they do a version of one of our favorite Trimble songs, "Armour Of The Shroud", that stretches out for over six minutes, as per the epic original that appeared on Harvest Of Dreams. They also do "Galilean Boy", a demo of which appeared as a bonus track on SC's reissue of HoD. The other "cover" here is a reinterpretation of The Beatles' "All Together Now", which Trimble and The Crippled Dog Band really make their own, converting it into a theme song of sorts, near the beginning of the album: "Singin' the Crippled Dog anthem / ruff ruff / ruff ruff!"
There's something so wonderfully charming about that, eh? And the teenage spark of Trimble's cohorts here is infectious, the band tearing it up, gritty garagey psych stomp style across much of this disc. Ferinstance, there's the distortodelic Eastern vibe of "Camel Song", and "Angel Eyes" is another that offers up some pretty heavy-duty, driving psych gunk for your earholes. And those are only a few of the punked up Pepperisms to be found on this delightful disc. Some songs are darker ("Undercovers Man"), others, pure fun ("Poker Game Of Life").
Apparently, the story goes, The Crippled Dog Band came to an end shortly after this was recorded, for whatever reason, and with no hope of selling 'em, almost all of original pressing of 500 lps was unceremoniously disposed of by Bobb in a dumpster! Good grief. Thankfully, the actual recordings weren't lost, and this reissue has finally arrived to allow The Crippled Dog Band to be heard again - it's certainly getting a lot of play here at AQ! Recommended, ruff ruff!!
This one is for all the folks who bought the Botanist 2cd on tUMULt, who have been hankering for another record of botany themed black metal. This one comes from the oddly monikered Turdus Merula (which is the taxonomic term for a kind of bird, the Common Blackbird), who are a Swedish one WOMAN black metal band, a rarity in black metal for sure, and what makes it even more rare is that this record is all about hallucinogenic and poisonous plants, which makes sense as the title, Herbarium, is of course, a collection of dried plants and flowers, and sonically, well, that's where the comparisons to Botanist end, although the opening track all old timey piano, wreathed in echo and washed out, is to these ears, quite evocative of some old botanist in his greenhouse, but that image soon fades about 2 minutes in when the guitars swoop in, a mournful downtuned buzz, depressive and dark, we were prepared for some plodding miserablism, when all of sudden, POW, the song explodes in a frenzy of super blown out in-the-red chug and churn and pound, the sound so heavy and loud and thick, the vocals a raspy wail buried beneath the furious sonic assault, the sound is pretty incredible, really powerful and thick, there's definitely a Burzum vibe, but TM's sound is so much more dense, and almost noisy, the riffing shifts occasionally to something more melancholy, but quickly returns to the black buzz crush.
The Burzum (and Xasthur to a degree) comparisons become a bit more noticeable as the record progresses, the second track is a pounding midtempo buzzscape, all minor key, with lush layered guitars, and moaning distant melodies, the guitar drenched in cool effects, that sound a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now" but only in the way they pulse, creating a weird rhythmic effect, and as the record progresses, in some weird way it gets prettier and less heavy, with the second to last track, an epic nearly 14 minute sprawl sounding more like a sort of blackened buzz pop, with a bit of jangle and melody mixed into the swirly buzz, and that's not to mention the cool cinematic chamber music interlude about halfway through. The track before too is a droned out bit of mostly solo guitar, that only picks up drums about 4 minutes in, and continues on as a sort of moody downer pop dirge until finally the vocals surface, and the track becomes much more blackened, although without ever completely ditching the moodiness that came before. And after a final brief bit of blast and buzz, the record finishes off with another stretch of creepy, cinematic echo drenched, darkly distorted piano, a perfect finish, to a killer chunk of atmospheric depressive blackness that we've been digging way more than we expected to...
For fans of Janis Joplin and/or Flower Travellin' Band... a reissue of the 1968 album from this Japanese Sixties psychedelic act, who later morphed into Seventies hard rockers and massive AQ faves Flower Travellin Band. This early incarnation of the FTB had a mostly different lineup, including female vocalist Remi Aso who does her best Janis (and Grace Slick), singing in either a delicate waver or a screeching wail, wow. And The Flowers back her up like Big Brother, total pros. There's also a male singer, Chiba Hiroshi, who belts it out on such songs as "Hey Joe". Yup there's lots of then-contemporary covers on here, including stuff by Hendrix, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin. So you've gotta be into the classic rock - with a Japanese twist. Apparently Uchida had just returned from a trip to England, hanging out there with John Lennon, and this record was his first attempt to take the Japanese "Group Sounds" scene into a new, more psychedelic acid rock direction to emulate the hipness happenin' in London and San Francisco at the time. The band got attention for that - and for their naked album cover photo, the band loitering about in an idyllic meadow someplace, in the buff, though any band members (ahem) who happen to be facing toward the camera also happen to be reading newspapers or magazines for some reason... Of course, Uchida pulled this stunt again with the first FTB album that came out a few years later, with the naked band on the cover riding choppers down the highway.
Besides the cover, the first thing anyone would notice about this album is the charming intro skit, at the beginning of track one, wherein a guy tells a giggling girl about this great new band from Tokyo, "these six guys and this chick", who "do some really fantastic Big Brother And The Holding Company stuff". And he's not kidding, as the rest of the record proceeds to prove. And let's face it, these are great songs, you might not want to hear the versions played on your local classic rock radio station ever again but the Summer Of Love seems a lot cooler when we're tuning in via Tokyo.
Numbered, limited cd edition in the usual Phoenix manner.
Number eight in this ongoing series, where various dubstep DJs and producers, put together sets of their favorite 12"s, creating killer mixes featuring the cream of the dubstep crop. The last few volumes seemed to be moving in a weird direction, toward a more mainstream strain of 'bass' music, but this one is back to business, featuring Distance, who for his mix is focusing on the classics, the jams that are the cornerstone of his DJ sets, which of course means a whole bunch of his own tracks, all of which kill, but also classic jams from Skream, Cyrus, Benga, and loads more.
We're long past the point where we're trying to win over new converts to dubstep. If that This Is Dubstep 2011 didn't convince you, then hell, we're not sure what will. But if that comp was the best dubstep comp EVER, which we so boldly proclaimed in the review, then this one would have to be in the running to place. At least. It's definitely not as weird, or all over the map, but what it is, is dark, and hard and heavy, this is some seriously sinister dubstep, the tone ominous and sinister, the bass thick and fat and distorted, the beats heavy and hard, the soulful vox kept to a minimum, a continuous mix of low slung bass heavy dancefloor destroying dubstep with some of the HEAVIEST bass ever, that huge speaker rattling warble that threatens to blow your woofers, it's everywhere, pulsing and throbbing beneath all manner of skitter and shuffle, with some of the drops absolutely devastating, you can understand how mental crowds must go when some of these get spun in the club.
If you're a fan of this strain of dubstep, the hard and heavy and dark, then this is exactly what you're after...
Any pop lover knows that when it comes to suave and sassy pop perfection, you can't beat France in the '60s and early '70s. With this collection the focus is put on the Parisian pop-psych scene, and what's really refreshing about this compilation is that it's not just filled with the usual suspects. So many names we weren't familiar with giving us such irresistible gems, and enough fuzz and weird elements on lots of the tracks to keep things interesting and not just saccharine sweet. Infusing elements of West Coast pop, the mod scene, and funked out burners, these are sounds that are just pretty impossible not to get swept up by. Filled with decadence and charm from folks like Cristal, Elisa, Les Hamsters (best name ever?!), Les Rover, Pax Quartet, and tons more.
No need to stress about what to throw on the next time you have people over for a little party, as all you will have to do is blast this, and watch as feet start tapping, and drinks start spilling, and everyone starts smiling!
We are suckers for dancehall. Always have been. It's one of those sounds/musics (like black metal buzz, or THE DRONE), that we just can't ever seem to get enough of. That distinctive dancehall rhythmic stutter, so hypnotic and mesmerizing, it's irresistible, and then there's the wild toasting, all woven into this strange skeletal rhythmic party music, that manages to be fun and funky but also weirdly dark and heavy, especially on the first disc here, compiled by Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, who seems to have collected the weirdest dancehall jams around, even the opening track, a classic dancehall number, from way back in 1999, is pretty strange, the beat big and heavy, the vocals chopped up, some super cinematic strings, the toasting way off in the distance, buried way down in the mix, a dub seemingly gone haywire, which when you think about it could describe dancehall in general. Or at least the kind we love. And the first disc here is overflowing with it. Thick buzzing synth over low slung skitter, super effects heavy 8 bit stutter, weirdly produced so the sound slips from blown out and brittle, to murky and muddy, the sound laced with all manner of strange sound effects and WAY dubbed out drums, there's gypsy folk fiddles fused to clipped electronics and slithery basslines, or steel drum driven sunshiney party grooves underpinned by some seriously ominous low end, big skipping synth shuffles beneath snap and clam rhythms, and some swirling drugged out effects heavy vox, and so it goes, the first disc playing out like some twisted big beat experiment, that ranks up there with our favorite dubstep comps for speaker punishing beats, and fuzzy funky grooves, this one maybe the most twisted and far out yet, finishing off with a Bug track of course, Martin offering his own take on dancehall, this one a thumping chunk of bass heavy murk, that almost sounds like super charged double dutch, with some glitch electronics and echoey vocals, the sound slipping from gristly and crunchy, to hazy and washed out.
The second disc, ostensibly slightly more 'traditional', with more obvious nods to the dub and reggae that birthed dancehall, ends up being almost as wonderfully far out as the first, compiled by Soul Jazz head honcho Stuart Baker, disc two manages to shine a light on a different side of dancehall, but one that's just as twisted. Right off the bat, the opener sounds like a squelchy warbly dancehall-ed version of some classic hip hop jam, while the follow up is like some sort of dancehall / dubstep soundtrack to a futuristic sci-fi police chase movie, all fat bass warble and wah guitars, pulsing synth and BIG beats. The rest of the second disc plays out just as strangely as the first few tracks, slipping often into sounds more classically dub or dancehall, but even then, the beats get all twisted up, the loops warped, these tracks obviously chosen as the stranger examples of what was going on in dancehall, even King Tubby contributes some cool lo-fi Casio-driven dancehall weirdness, and near the end of the disc, the sound seems to gradually be slipping back toward a more traditional dub sound, but again, the far out aspects that define the tracks on the first disc, and to a lesser extant the first half of the second disc, remain present, just employed more subtly.
We make proclamations like this all the time, but this is quickly becoming our favorite dancehall comp, definitely the strangest, and most far out. WAY recommended of course. Even if you've yet to be won over by dancehall, if there was ever a record to do it, it would probably be this one. Besides the fact, that the whole thing is presented as an over the top concept collection, the music here apparently some sort of sound shield, to protect Kingston, Jamaica, where a crazy battle is set to take place, between the Alien Sound Lord Abductors, who are trying to recapture humanoid souls, and the Digital Defenders! And you can read all about it in the included comic book! So rad!
Also available, as so many of these Soul Jazz comps are, spread out over two separate vinyl volumes.
Vinyl part one, here's the review we wrote of the complete 2cd edition:
We are suckers for dancehall. Always have been. It's one of those sounds/musics (like black metal buzz, or THE DRONE), that we just can't ever seem to get enough of. That distinctive dancehall rhythmic stutter, so hypnotic and mesmerizing, it's irresistible, and then there's the wild toasting, all woven into this strange skeletal rhythmic party music, that manages to be fun and funky but also weirdly dark and heavy, especially on the first disc here, compiled by Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, who seems to have collected the weirdest dancehall jams around, even the opening track, a classic dancehall number, from way back in 1999, is pretty strange, the beat big and heavy, the vocals chopped up, some super cinematic strings, the toasting way off in the distance, buried way down in the mix, a dub seemingly gone haywire, which when you think about it could describe dancehall in general. Or at least the kind we love. And the first disc here is overflowing with it. Thick buzzing synth over low slung skitter, super effects heavy 8bit stutter, weirdly produced so the sound slips from blown out and brittle, to murky and muddy, the sound laced with all manner of strange sound effects and WAY dubbed out drums, there's gypsy folk fiddles fused to clipped electronics and slithery basslines, or steel drum driven sunshiney party grooves underpinned by some seriously ominous low end, big skipping synth shuffles beneath snap and clam rhythms, and some swirling drugged out effects heavy vox, and so it goes, the first disc playing out like some twisted big beat experiment, that ranks up there with our favorite dubstep comps for speaker punishing beats, and fuzzy funky grooves, this one maybe the most twisted and far out yet, finishing off with a Bug track of course, Martin offering his own take on dancehall, this one a thumping chunk of bass heavy murk, that almost sounds like super charegd double dutch, with some glitch electronics and echoey vocals, the sound slipping from gristly and crunchy, to hazy and washed out.
The second disc, ostensibly slightly more 'traditional', with more obvious nods to the dub and reggae that birthed dancehall, ends up being almost as wonderfully far out as the first, compiled by Soul Jazz head honcho Stuart Baker, disc two manages to shine a light on a different side of dancehall, but one that's just as twisted. Right off the bat, the opener sounds like a squelchy warbly dancehall-ed version of some classic hip hop jam, while the follow up is like some sort of dancehall / dubstep soundtrack to a futuristic sci fi police chase movie, all fat bass warble and wah guitars, pulsing synth and BIG beats. The rest of the second disc plays out just as strangely as the first few tracks, slipping often into sounds more classically dub or dancehall, but even then, the beats get all twisted up, the loops warped, these tracks obviously chosen as the stranger examples of what was going on in dancehall, even King Tubby contributes some cool lo-fi casio-driven dancehall weirdness, and near the end of the disc, the sound seems to gradually be slipping back toward a more traditional dub sound, but again, the far out aspects that define the tracks on the first disc, and to a lesser extant the first half of the second disc, remain present, just employed more subtlely.
We make proclamations like this all the time, but this is quickly becoming our favorite dancehall comp, definitely the strangest, and most far out. WAY recommended of course. Even if you've yet to be won over by dancehall, if there was ever a record to do it, it would probably be this one. Besides the fact, that the whole thing is presented as an over the top concept collection, the music here apparently some sort of sound shield, to protect Kingston, Jamaica, where a crazy battle is set to take place, between the Alien Sound Lord Abductors, who are trying to recapture humanoid souls, and the Digital Defenders! And you can read all about it in the included comic book! So rad!
Vinyl part two, here's the review we wrote of the complete 2cd edition:
We are suckers for dancehall. Always have been. It's one of those sounds/musics (like black metal buzz, or THE DRONE), that we just can't ever seem to get enough of. That distinctive dancehall rhythmic stutter, so hypnotic and mesmerizing, it's irresistible, and then there's the wild toasting, all woven into this strange skeletal rhythmic party music, that manages to be fun and funky but also weirdly dark and heavy, especially on the first disc here, compiled by Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, who seems to have collected the weirdest dancehall jams around, even the opening track, a classic dancehall number, from way back in 1999, is pretty strange, the beat big and heavy, the vocals chopped up, some super cinematic strings, the toasting way off in the distance, buried way down in the mix, a dub seemingly gone haywire, which when you think about it could describe dancehall in general. Or at least the kind we love. And the first disc here is overflowing with it. Thick buzzing synth over low slung skitter, super effects heavy 8bit stutter, weirdly produced so the sound slips from blown out and brittle, to murky and muddy, the sound laced with all manner of strange sound effects and WAY dubbed out drums, there's gypsy folk fiddles fused to clipped electronics and slithery basslines, or steel drum driven sunshiney party grooves underpinned by some seriously ominous low end, big skipping synth shuffles beneath snap and clam rhythms, and some swirling drugged out effects heavy vox, and so it goes, the first disc playing out like some twisted big beat experiment, that ranks up there with our favorite dubstep comps for speaker punishing beats, and fuzzy funky grooves, this one maybe the most twisted and far out yet, finishing off with a Bug track of course, Martin offering his own take on dancehall, this one a thumping chunk of bass heavy murk, that almost sounds like super charegd double dutch, with some glitch electronics and echoey vocals, the sound slipping from gristly and crunchy, to hazy and washed out.
The second disc, ostensibly slightly more 'traditional', with more obvious nods to the dub and reggae that birthed dancehall, ends up being almost as wonderfully far out as the first, compiled by Soul Jazz head honcho Stuart Baker, disc two manages to shine a light on a different side of dancehall, but one that's just as twisted. Right off the bat, the opener sounds like a squelchy warbly dancehall-ed version of some classic hip hop jam, while the follow up is like some sort of dancehall / dubstep soundtrack to a futuristic sci fi police chase movie, all fat bass warble and wah guitars, pulsing synth and BIG beats. The rest of the second disc plays out just as strangely as the first few tracks, slipping often into sounds more classically dub or dancehall, but even then, the beats get all twisted up, the loops warped, these tracks obviously chosen as the stranger examples of what was going on in dancehall, even King Tubby contributes some cool lo-fi casio-driven dancehall weirdness, and near the end of the disc, the sound seems to gradually be slipping back toward a more traditional dub sound, but again, the far out aspects that define the tracks on the first disc, and to a lesser extant the first half of the second disc, remain present, just employed more subtlely.
We make proclamations like this all the time, but this is quickly becoming our favorite dancehall comp, definitely the strangest, and most far out. WAY recommended of course. Even if you've yet to be won over by dancehall, if there was ever a record to do it, it would probably be this one. Besides the fact, that the whole thing is presented as an over the top concept collection, the music here apparently some sort of sound shield, to protect Kingston, Jamaica, where a crazy battle is set to take place, between the Alien Sound Lord Abductors, who are trying to recapture humanoid souls, and the Digital Defenders! And you can read all about it in the included comic book! So rad!
French import, a vinyl-only comp of some excellent Japanese psych stuff from the Seventies!! We weren't able to get very many, it's now out of print, and we've got like 3 copies left, first come first served!
13 tracks, circa 1969-1978, including cuts by Les Rallizes Denudes, JA Caesar, Kuni Kawachi & His Group, The Apryl Fool, Sadistic Mika Band, Stomu Yamash'ta's Red Buddha Theatre, Akiko Yano, Toshiaki Tsushima, Harry Hosono & The Yellow Magic Band, Osamu Kitajima, Karuna Khyal, and more... Some we'd heard before (the ones that have seen full album reissues in recent years) but others we'd never even heard OF, and are utterly new finds for us. There's a very "Japanese" vibe indeed to these particular psych acts, and an arty one too. Cool!
There's a sequel too, Ongaku 80: Alternative Waves From Japan, that we sold out of already, but that one we're told we might see more of again in a few weeks...
Out of all of Motown's small subsidiary labels, Mowest may have been the most stylistically diverse. Created as an outlet for Motown's West Coast based artists, its brief existence between 1971-1973 before Motown set up shop in Los Angeles full time, covered a fertile period of music-making that was freed from pre-defined genre constraints. Where else could the soulful exuberance of the Commodores, the slow proto-disco groove of Odyssey and The Sisters Love, the late-period vocal pop of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and the stoner hippie vibes of Lodi commingle together? As usual, Light In The Attic does a stellar job of highlighting the amazing aspects of this brief label, re-introducing to the world some of its lesser known artists such as The Nu Page, Suzee Ikeda, and G.C. Cameron, while showing the early career promise of Syreeta and Thelma Houston. This is a side of Motown at its most adventurous yet relaxed, letting the sunny soulful vibes wash over us like warm ocean waves. Super Recommended!
We only recently discovered Oakland label Sanity Muffin, but their first two releases kicked our asses, blackened Dutch doom/dirge/drone outfit Torture Corpse, and the project of the guy behind the SM label, Galena, a gorgeous collection of droned out blackened buzz. So here's a nice priced chance to check out some of the other stuff on Sanity Muffin. Not only do you get new and exclusive tracks from both Torture Corpse and Galena, you also get a hole mess of strange and wonderful sounds from a whole bunch of bands we'd never heard of. In fact, the only group we knew was hip hopper Odd Nosdam, but his track here is a whole different thing, a creeping, lumbering chunk of hazy, droney drift, swirly and abstract, crunchy and softly noisy, had us wishing all his records sounded like this!
The rest of the comp is all over the place, from thick distorted buzzing drones to blackened rumbling creep, to gorgeous and epic field recording flecked collaged post rock ambience to spacey psychedelic skitter, nearly 90 minutes, pretty much not a bad one in the bunch, and will for sure have you looking for more from a lot of these folks.
Super swank full color fold out covers, with photocopied inserts and a Sanity Muffing guitar pick!
One of two new 7"s from the Trensmat label, this one from big time aQ faves, space rockers White Hills, who offer up two tracks of ambient drift, the A side, a swirly bit of abstract shimmer, a softly pulsing two note melody, subtly mesmerizing, surrounded on all sides by strange melodies, little bits of glitch, headphone listening reveals much going on in the background, a slow shifting sprawl of mysterious sounds, that seem to surface and fade, constantly changing shapes, while that pulse remains constant, the sort of jam that sounds like it must have been cut from a much bigger sonic cloth, it's the sort of sound that would be so easy to get lost it.
As is the B side, a more dirgey bit of ambience, thick churning guitars, roiling away in a cloud of hazy whir and deep rumble, loads of echo and delay and reverb, softly swirling, a gauzy and washed out expanse of slo-mo buzz and thrum, that seems to almost become riffs, before those riffs melt into the sounds around them, a gorgeously entrancing stretch of cyclical mesmer, in the form of downtuned spaced out crush.
ALREADY SOLD OUT AND OUT OF PRINT AT THE LABEL. We got a whole bunch, but odds are they won't be around for long, so don't dawdle, or risk being disappointed...
While we have been digging lots of weird and lo-fi pop that's come out in the last few years, there's been a shortage of the kind of dreamy and focused pure pop records that make us wanna swoon for days on end. Luckily that has changed with the debut full length from New York's Widowspeak. We were already pretty much sold when we first heard their 7" earlier in the summer, which featured one track from this record and a Chris Isaak cover(!), but we had no idea that this was going to be a band who would be responsible for maybe one of the best pop albums of the year, this their self-titled debut. From the opening moments of the records lead off track, "Puritan" to the album's closer, "Ghost Boy", it's a record we'll be listening to repeatedly for a long time to come.
Widowspeak take elements of Cat Power, Beach House, and Mazzy Star, but somehow put them together in a way that countless other bands, all of whom take those same points of inspiration, never seem able to reach. Waves of warmth, and an economical approach to songwriting come together to create songs that make us just want to sway and linger as we stare into the eyes of someone we love, sounds that conjur up the memory of the one that we wish was still by our side.
We also love how as bittersweet and love soaked the songs can be, there are still these awesome and surprising moments that totally rock out and show sound both urgent and passionate, again in a way that many others treading similar terrain are never able to quite capture either.
This is that rare record rife with musical moments that both give us goosebumps as well as inspiring much shimmying and shaking. We might just have ourselves a new favorite band!
Another issue of one of any weird music fan's must-reads... this time, Italian freeks My Cat Is An Alien get the cover spot. Also this ish: Prurient, Andy Stott, Jana Winderen, an "Invisible Jukebox" session with John Carpenter collaborator, soundtrack composer Alan Howarth, and more, including an article on Fela Kuti's London years, and an interesting piece by Not Not Fun's Amanda Brown about how filesharing etc. is destroying the DIY underground. Plus the usual reviews and news and suchlike. ----* ----* Compilations : ----*
We'd been hearing about this for a while, the first collection from legendary Iranian psychedelic rocker Kourosh Yaghmaei, who spent much of his career literally forbidden from performing or recording. We initially thought we had never heard anything from Yaghmaei, until we realized that he was responsible for one of our favorite tracks, on one of THEE best compilations ever, Forge Your Own Chains, his "Hajme El Khali", a sultry, brooding ballad, all spidery melody, whirring organ, chiming guitar, and powerful emotional vocals, the song moving and intense and so darkly passionate. He also showed up on the great B-Music Pomegranates compilation, that track open the proceedings here, a gorgeous chunk of piano driven melancholy, dusted with psychedelic effects, but it's all about the vocals, gorgeous and intense, and the cool little guitar filagree, wild little tangles, or slowly unwinding melodies, and a little Ventures-y surfy twang (The Ventures were apparently Yaghmaei's favorite group), and so it goes, this is quickly becoming a new favorite, which is saying something, since there is really no shortage of killer lost psychedelic classics.
But there's something about these songs. The vocals obviously, but Yaghmaei's guitar playing is so distinctive, his love of the Ventures and that era of American rock evident, but the classic folk music of his Middle Eastern upbringing finding their way into his sound, the recordings raw and intimate, surprisingly lush, with some of the tracks reminding us of classic Bee Gees, all warm whirling orchestral pop, while others, are fuzz drenched rockers, all wah wah guitars and sultry sinister swagger, while still others are dreamy ballads, heartfelt and sweetly melancholy, but no matter the sound, every once in a while, Yaghmaei cranks it up and unfurls some FIERCE psychedelic guitar leads, Hendrixy and distorted and awesome, and similarly, the organ will emit gouts of crunchy buzz, often offsetting what is otherwise some dreamy jangle. There are definitely hints of Bollywood, and other Middle Eastern musics you've perhaps heard before, but Yaghmaei's sound is definitely all his own, and should for sure appeal to fans of Ethiopiques, Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers and the like.
Pretty much all the songs here are incredible, and then there's the story of Yaghmaei's life which is equally incredible, told in the liner notes in his own words, which according to the compilers is a symbolic gesture to the many years of silence he suffered, unable to speak out, perform or record. So great.
The double cd version comes in a cool hardcover book style packaging.
Ok, lately it seems like we're ALWAYS saying stuff reminds us of the suspenseful soundtrack synth music of film director John Carpenter - who, along with collaborator Alan Howarth, is known for composing the propulsive, sinister scores for his own movies. Music that's become a big influence on a lot of our favorite artists today. How many recent releases have we tagged with a Carpenter comparison? Umberto, D.A., Gatekeeper, Zombi, Xander Harris, Majeure, Roll The Dice, Steve Moore, Twins, Dylan Ettinger, Blizaro, Jonas Reinhart, Hyetal, Arrow Kleeman, Lazer Crystal, Maserati, Nightsatan, and more... Of course many of those are overt imitations of the master. Goblin is the other influence we usually cite for a lot of these too, but the future-disco, fright flick, sci-fi SYNTH sound is more about Carpenter.
So, this release makes perfect sense, the obvious next step in the current wave of Carpenter worship. Zombie Zombie is a French synth duo, 1/2 of which is in fact former AQ Record Of The Week honoree Etienne Jaumet (for his album Night Music), and they have decided to pay tribute to John Carpenter in the most direct way possible: a disc of all Carpenter covers! This 5 track, 28 minute mini-album includes their takes on the main themes from JC classics Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape From LA, and The Thing. Hmm, the latter of which was actually composed by Ennio Morricone, right? Though that's cool too. You also get ZZ's version of the music from the bank robbery scene in Escape From New York.
When we learned Jaumet was part of this, we knew ZZ would know their stuff and do JC right, and they sure do. All the skittery machine beats and eerie melodies, urgent shuffling chase-scene rhythms and ominous thick bass heavy synth burble, moody atmospheric drone and creepy tick-tock-ery of the JC originals is lovingly recreated via ZZ's not-far-removed but definitely updated, dancefloor/DJ friendly versions, which come across as somewhat heavier and a bit more tweaked than actual soundtrack recordings, also more "band-like" and less soundtrack slick. We haven't heard ZZ's other album, but we bet these sound like their own songs, y'know. Basically, if you like John Carpenter, or any of the stuff we're always mentioning JC in conjunction with, you will dig this! The only thing that would have made this better is if they'd made it a longer disc and also included cues from The Fog, They Live, and a few other of our JC faves. But these themes are pretty much the best of the best. And we'd LOVE to see 'em play this stuff live, which we hear they're doing. Come to think of it, we'd love to see Carpenter himself perform live, we wonder if he's ever even considered the idea, he'd probably be surprised at how many people would come out to see that, don't you think?
