Man are we digging this new wave of Australian post punk / downer pop / psychedelia, having gone a bit nuts recently for Naked On The Vague and Total Control, Kitchen's Floor is having the same effect. We somehow slept on their debut, but this, our first exposure to these guys, didn't take long at all to win us over. Exactly the sort of shit we love. A modernized mix of classic old post punk indie rock. Think classic Aussie outfits like Feedtime and the Celibate Rifles, and give it a bit of a 2011 garage psych makeover. But only a little cuz lots of this sounds like it could actually be from back in the day. In fact, much of this harks back to the early days of Siltbreeze, like the second track "Graves", which sound like it could be some lost nineties SB 7", released right between a Guided By Voices and Strapping Fieldhands, and if you're a fan of either of those bands, then some of this is a dead ringer for what some weird hybrid of the two might sound like. The whole record is petty stellar, jangly, fuzzy, distorted, hooky, the vocals melodic but sort of world weary and occasionally yowly, lots of wheezing organ, the drumming is pretty awesome too, and hooks galore of course, one of those records that sounded pretty good at first, but after just one play, we found some of these songs lodged pretty firmly in our head, which of course required further and repeated listening.
Fans of Crystal Stilts, the Mantles, Naked On The Vague, Royal Baths, Pink Reason, and similarly dour, jangly, noisepop will be in heaven!
Includes a download coupon too.
If you haven't already decided to buy this just 'cause of the title (which is indeed indicative of what this is - field recordings of water beetles!!!), we suppose we should provide something of a review. Though, if you're like us, there's not much more you need to know besides that it's WATER BEETLES - and a release on the great German sound-art label Gruenrekorder...
The liner notes in the cd booklet here begin with a very apt quote from composer David Dunn: "All of the sound we hear is only a fraction of all the vibrating going on in our universe". And while it's probably good that we can't hear it all, all the time (boy that would be noisy) it's also cool once in a while to experience some of the sounds that we're usually missing out on. In this case, a sonic glimpse of another, secret world, what it would sound like if you lived in a marsh, and got your ears up close underwater next to some talkative, chit-chattering insects... which, interestingly, is a lot like some stuff in our experimental/drone section. Turns out the water beetles of Pollardstown Fen make mesmeric mad-scientist "music" that would fit in with the clicks and cuts on Raster-Noton! Abstract, ambient, but not exactly beatless - there's rhythmic pulses to the seeming electronic transmissions from these beetles. From track to track it's quite varied, these tracks teeming with all manner of bleepings and burblings, chirpings and cracklings... constantly changing, constantly fascinating, the noises these waterbugs make with their microscopic mating "cries" is AMAZING. Buzzing drones, sferic-like swoops, sawing sounds, gurgling grind, morphing and modulating in pitch... And it's not just them, there's other sounds found in their aquatic environment - did you know that photosynthesizing plants made sounds?
The ten tracks here, all recorded at locations within the Pollardstown Fen, an ancient alkaline marsh in County Kildare, Ireland, might somehow suggest mechanical sources, but are all indeed natural and organic (the liner notes take pains to specifically state that there's no electrical interference to be heard here, nor were any mechanical devices in operation upon the Fen at the time of these recordings). And yes, though we are quite happy to let our imaginations make the most of these recordings without any further information, for the curious the cd booklet does contain detailed notes, getting all technical and scientific about both the recordings and the insects in question, which should convince any skeptics suspicious about the actual origin of these sounds! Let's quote an example here, the description of track ten, just to give you the full flavor of the text, and also some idea of what you're in for, when you listen:
"This recording is a protracted performance given by a single waterbug (Water Scorpion) in heightened antagonistic stance. The hydrophone has been positioned about one inch from the insect. The insect stridulated in this way for approximately nine hours. In the background the communicative songs of the wider ecosystem can be heard. Towards the end of the recording an interesting oscillation technique takes place."
On that track, they only let that antagonistic waterbug go on for just about 13 minutes, but the whole disc itself is well over an hour and always interesting, and for us ultimately meditative.
If you liked another recent waterbug cd we listed (yes, we've had more than one!), Thomas Tilly's hydrophonic field recordings from a castle moat in France, this is maybe even more "immersive" and pleasantly evocative of its watery natural world... Recommended!
We talk all the time about not judging books by their covers, which for us often means bands by their band names, cuz really, the Flaming Lips, Bitchin Bajas, Bathtub Shitter (ok, that one's awesome), Cream Abdul Babar, Scrotum Poles, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, so many kick ass bands saddled with unfortunate monickers. NOT that we're lumping Bay Area duo The Lickets in with those outfits, but they do actually bring up another part of that whole book/cover, band/bandname situation, in that we never would have expected this sort of gloriously blissed out electronic psychedelic drift from a band called the Lickets. We were actually imagining this would be some sort of roots rock, or stripped down pop rock sort of thing, but this is anything but, The Lickets traffic in the sort of stuff aQ folks go nuts for: dreamy transcendental, glistening, textured kosmische psych folk drift of the highest order.
The tracks her merge billowy clouds of wispy chordal drift with constellations of subtle glitch, the edges worn away, the various sounds bleeding into one another, like the soundtrack to a time lapse film of two solar systems merging, hazy and spaced out, touching on the krautdrone of Expo 70, the gauzy melodic shimmer of Tim Hecker, the dreamlike drift of Pop Ambience, infused with little bits of classic krautrock. Acoustic guitars surface amidst swirling abstract pulsations, melodies melt and ooze, the tracks slowly expanding and evolving, occasionally slipping into something more overtly shoegazey, wrangling jangle guitars into vast smears of melodic blur, laced with tinkling chiming melodies, looped and layered into blustery soundscapes, while other tracks sound almost like old soundtracks to mysterious filmstrips about the emptiness of space, one track even shrugs off the hazy shimmer entirely, leaving just a sweetly lovely stretch of fluttery seventies style folk, replete with breathy vocals and wheezing accordion, before quickly returning to the bleary buzzy drift that defines the rest of the record. And as varied as the record is, the sounds are all held together by a lush, dreamlike melodic component that turns this set of songs into some sort of divine celestial songsuite. So good!
Another blast of nekro-black "morbid dead metal" filth from this aQ fave, the solo project of Andorkappen, the drummer of LA black metal trio Harassor. And like the previous tape on Universal Consciousness, this is some dark, sinister, hateful heaviness, the sound raw and primitive, filthy and crusty, the sound lo-fi, but still somehow weirdly lush and LOUD, buzzing guitars, pounding practice space drumming, and some seriously sick demonic croak vokills. The sound is all over the map, slipping from super brittle and tinny, to murky and muddy and sludgey, the songs too, dirgey ritualistic creeps, frantic lightning speed blasts, pounding punkish d-beat blowouts, the sounds not at all typical, with clean effects laden guitars and warped FX, wild tangled psychedelia, field recordings, all woven into this twisted black epic. 36 minutes, 20 brief blasts, plus a super creeped out almost 20th century sounding piano dirge outro, spare and abstract, percussive and darkly ominous. The whole track repeats on both sides. The label describes this as "primitive devotional caveman soul music" and who are we to argue.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in super deluxe, embossed, heavy textured metallic paper J-cards, each one hand numbered and sealed with a sticker, each copy marked with Mr. Lord Time's actual blood!
Latest from this hazy psychedelic dreampopper, and a bit of a left turn for sure, as these tracks are original instrumental compositions created as the score to a film, the music here borrowing heavily from classic Indonesian music, as well as incorporating some serious classic free jazz as well, the opening track alone should be enough to convince you that this is not a normal Lynch record. The gamelan rhythms, the moaning horns, the looped cyclical arrangements, the label mentions that all of these elements are woven into Lynch's bedroom psych, and there is in fact a little of that that finds its way into each of these tracks, the production is a bit fuzzy, there's one track with some cool wah wah effects, but the psych element definitely takes a backseat, letting the distinctive rhythms and melancholy melodies drive these songs, they are pretty fantastic, even removed from the visuals, some seriously cool and mysterious, Indonesian influenced free jazz gamelan psychedelia. Nice!
Comes with a download code.
The Universal Consciousness label returns with another batch of tapes, following the Moon Knight and Lord Time cassettes we reviewed a few lists back. There's another amazing Lord Time release, and this one the debut from this mysterious outsider ambient doom one man band (whose sole member also does time in Lightning Swords Of Death and Endless Blizzard). The label describes the sound as funereal and majestic and it most definitely is, the guitars soaring, epic and melodic, the drums minimal, super echoey, like this was recorded in some black cavern, the strange mix of off kilter percussion and the super mournful melodic guitars makes this sound almost psychedelic. Eventually the sound shifts into more classically doomy plod, but even then, the echoey drum pound is all dubbed out, and the guitars chug and churn, often unfurling long stretches of droney buzz, before slipping right back into those majestic melodies. The sound spends as much time drifting ominously as it does plodding and lumbering, those ambient stretches are hauntingly beautiful, not just your typical metal synth interludes, instead, it's a sort of blackened kosmische, lush and layered, infused with streaks of feedback, and grinding muted industrial thrum, all blurred into dark passages of sinister rumble and buzz, the sound of which seems to ooze into the doom proper, making the creep and crunch a bit more abstract and psychedelic, mysterious and otherworldly. This is the sort of rare 'doom', that could very well appeal to non metal folks into strange dark sounds and more abstract avant heaviness. And it may be a bit too out there for your typical metalhead, but if you like your doom twisted, tripped out and drone drenched, then this will definitely hit the spot.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in super deluxe, embossed, heavy textured metallic paper J-cards, each one hand numbered and sealed with a sticker.
The last time we heard from Tokyo underground psych-meisters Miminokoto, with their 2009 PSF release All About Mimi, they were calling themselves New Miminokoto. On account of how they'd replaced longtime lead singer/guitarist Masami Kawaguchi with Suzuki Junzo (ex-Overhang Party). Well, that's not news any more, so now they're back to calling themselves just plain Miminokoto. Suzuki Junzo is still capably fronting the group, wearing shades (we presume) and wranging his guitar through the usual distortodelic psych storms and melancholically poppy ramshackle jangle we expect from these exemplars of the hazy, heavy lidded, late-night "Tokyo Flashback" sound. Singing in Japanese, his voice is hushed and weary, the music often likewise, though they rev up for some of those feedback filled, Rallizes style blowouts we love at times too. On All About Mimi, the band covered a couple songs by the late Jutok Kaneko (Kousokuya), here they do another one, along with six others of their own, equally emotive and wrecked composition.
The label that put this disc out calls their style "decadent death doom" and while that might be a bit misleading to those of you who think you already know what "death doom" sounds like ('cause this definitely ain't metal, though it may be decadent), that description definitely captures the downer vibe. For sure they've got the blues, though this also isn't "blues" as commonly known, either. What it is, is a sad and gorgeous session of shimmering amp bliss, burbling bass, slow shuffling drums, aching vocals, creaky chords, and minor key melody.
Fans of prior Miminokoto output (new and old) as well as other Tokyo flashbackers like LSD-March, Up-Tight, Suishou No Fune, Kawaguchi New Rock Syndicate, Overhang Party etc. etc. should definitely dig!!
Maria Minerva is the latest shining star in the Not Not Fun hypnogogic pantheon, chanelling the dreamy slow disco of Nite Jewel through the breezy post-punk tropical sounds of Brenda Ray and Translucence-era Poly Styrene. It's often been a hallmark of recent artists to use the cheesier sounds of vintage synths and drum machines to get in touch with some ironic nostalgia for the recent past, and Minerva is doing her best to ward us off with some intentionally terrible cover art and font choices. But luckily the music wins us over with its warm exuberance and its blithe but mind-warping embrace. Reverb-soaked and dreamy with a slow motion submerged romanticism that is near impossible to disentangle from its gleaming charms.
The return of aQ beloved UK space rockers Mugstar, who have teamed up with another fave of ours, East Coast noise rockers Oneida, and neither side disappoints. Mugstar offer up another killer chunk of spaced out psychedelia that would have been right at home on Lime or Sun Broken, opening up with a fuzzy organ drone, which quickly gives way to a badass Hawkwindy groove, all motorik mesmer and fuzzed out space rock pound. The organ giving the proceedings a serious prog vibe, the track chugs away until about halfway through when it collapse into a super rad mathy tangle of drum / guitar freakout, all repetitive and almost looped sounding, with FX swirling all over the place, before finally resolving in a blissed out stretch of murky psychedelic shimmer, only to eventually emerge as a stripped down, more krautrocky groove, with soaring dramatic vocals way down in the mix, pounding away all druggy and dreamy and laid back.
Oneida counter with what could be their coolest / weirdest jam yet, what appears to be their twisted take on space rock, exploding immediately into a wildly chaotic freakout guitar/drum squall, the band taking their sweet time to lock into a proper groove, and in fact, they almost manage not to at all, super loose and free, the drums intricate and mathy and almost the star of the show, pounding away beneath some freaked out guitar skree, until about halfway in, when in swoops some chiming guitar, draped over thick bass buzz, even more progged out and wildly trippy, until finally, they reel it all in, and finish off with a very Wooden Shjips sounding outro, but even then, way more tripped out and space-y. Killer stuff from both bands, and some of THEE coolest packaging we've seen, eye popping pink sleeve, with lots of white and brown 'o's and 'm's!
My Cat Is An Alien, the Italian duo of brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, who recently graced the cover of UK new music mag the Wire, are crazy prolific, releasing an amazing number of cd-r's and limited vinyl releases over the years, and in addition, the duo definitely have a thing for collaboration, their discography rife with splits, the From The Earth To The Spheres series, which found the band partnering up with lots of aQ faves: Thuja, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Christian Marclay, among others, then there's this series, the first four of which we have here, originally released as super limited lps, each one housed with an actual original painting done by one of the brothers, but later re-released on cd, and finding the band once again sharing space with some pretty cool outfits: Text Of Light, Steve Roden, Keiji Haino and Mats Gustafsson. These are not however collaborations, instead, each artist took one side of the original lp, with MCIAA doing their thing on the other, the results pretty fantastic.
This one probably doesn't need much of a description at all, as fans of Japanese psych legend / guitar god Keiji Haino tend to be on the obsessive side, and c'mon, how can you resist and exclusive 21 minute track, with the very Haino-esque title: "Whither Goes It? / That Which Canst Not But Be Described / As My Prayer / Nowhere Held In Common / Lunatic, Unknowable". The answer is, you probably can't. Especially if you dig Haino at his most freaky, cuz this track, or series of tracks, finds Haino in full on Merzbow mode, unleashing a furious tripped out torrent of wild blown out sonic tangles, squalls of heavily processed psych weirdness, hard to say whether it's actually guitar, but if it is, Haino has twisted it into something else entirely, the sound super heavy and textured, rife with all manner of fragmented melodies, twisted effects, and crumbling weirdness, at least for the first 12 or 13 minutes, at which point, those sound all disappear, leaving just pounding drums, and Haino, howling maniacally, a strange psychedelic drum vocal dirge, that is soon surrounded by still more clouds of wild psychnoise and twisted effects, the strange FX wreathed drum plod dirge, pounding resolutely to the end of the track, with Haino down there somewhere ranting like some crazed shamen.
The My Cat Is An Alien track is downright tame by comparison, and when played in succession with the first two volumes in the series, and taking note of the similar song titles, reveals itself as a single massive multipart track spread out over these 4 discs, the track here starting off delicately, before quickly exploding into a woozy ambient haze, a thick fog of buzz and shimmer, beneath which chimes tinkle, vocals croon, percussion pounds, again with MCIAA seeming to look to Haino's side for inspiration, a strange shamanistic ritual, the high vocals blurring into the high end drones, creating a strangely hypnotic stretch of soaring Sunroof!-like ur-drone.
WE ONLY HAVE SEVEN COPIES OF THIS, and the label is now defunct, which means, we can not get more of these EVER!
MPEG Stream: MY CAT IS AN ALIEN "Everything Crashes Like Cosmic Debris" [/audio/cd3mciaaeve.m3u]
My Cat Is An Alien, the Italian duo of brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, who recently graced the cover of UK new music mag the Wire, are crazy prolific, releasing an amazing number of cd-r's and limited vinyl releases over the years, and in addition, the duo definitely have a thing for collaboration, their discography rife with splits, the From The Earth To The Spheres series, which found the band partnering up with lots of aQ faves: Thuja, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Christian Marclay, among others, then there's this series, the first four of which we have here, originally released as super limited lps, each one housed with an actual original painting done by one of the brothers, but later re-released on cd, and finding the band once again sharing space with some pretty cool outfits: Text Of Light, Steve Roden, Keiji Haino and Mats Gustafsson. These are not however collaborations, instead, each artist took one side of the original lp, with MCIAA doing their thing on the other, the results pretty fantastic.
On volume four, My Cat Is An Alien continue their multi-part Cosmic Debris epic, unfurling another stretch of hazy vocal driven drift, bits of guitar twang submerged in a sea of looped shimmer, of minimal percussion, of high almost falsetto vocalizations, the sound ethereal and dreamlike, a cloud of twisted effects gradually surfacing and overtaking the sound, until finally, the track becomes a swirling cacophony of clatter and buzz and howl and skree, a dizzying chunk of blown out psychedelia for sure.
MCIAA teamed up with jazz legend Mats Gustafsson, whose track here, is gorgeously restrained, starting off with a hushed low end pulse, which is soon joined by more melodic pulsations, a blurred patchwork of electronic signals, low and high, a fantastically austere sprawl of Raster-Noton like rhythmic minimalism, which waits until the last 5 or 6 minutes to let loose, adding what could be processed horns, but could just as likely be a bank of home brewed effects, the original pulsing electronics now buried beneath a wildly psychedelic barrage of feedback and buzz, rumble and skree. So cool.
WE HAVE ONLY SEVEN COPIES OF THIS, and the label is now defunct, which means, we can not get more of these EVER!
Never managed to get any of these when it first came out, a split picture disc lp with Italian psych folk duo My Cat Is An Alien, and the oddly named Pestrepeller, a duo featuring none other than legendary artist Savage Pencil. The MCIAA side find the brothers Opalio at their noisiest, kicking up a serious din unlike anything we've heard from them, getting downright Merzbowian at times, sheets of high end lots of clatter and clank, there are occasional bits of tranquility amidst the chaos, with looped liquid effects and tangled up faux field recordings, processed vox, and all manner of warped shimmer, but those moments quickly blossom into another gout of blown out psychedelia.
Pestrepeller take the opposite tack, reeling in their noise rock tendencies and unleashing a sidelong sprawl of rumbling drones, blurred guitar dirges, and softly psychedelic ambience. Opening with some thick SUNNO)))-like downtuned churn, wreathed in streaks of feedback, the sound quickly shits and transforms into an industrial thrum, rife with pulsing low end, lush swells of muted crunch and keening fragmented melodies, lots of hum and hiss, haunting and mysterious, an epic soundscape that manages to be musical on its own, but definitely has a distinctly cinematic vibe as well.
Comes in a heavy PVC sleeve sealed with a full color printed sticker. The picture disc features original full color MCIAA art on one side, Savage Pencil on the other. AND WE ONLY HAVE FOUR COPIES OF THIS, the label folded, these are the last copies we'll ever be able to get! If you order it, wouldn't hurt to list an alternate...
My Cat Is An Alien, the Italian duo of brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, who recently graced the cover of UK new music mag the Wire, are crazy prolific, releasing an amazing number of cd-r's and limited vinyl releases over the years, and in addition, the duo definitely have a thing for collaboration, their discography rife with splits, the From The Earth To The Spheres series, which found the band partnering up with lots of aQ faves: Thuja, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Christian Marclay, among others, then there's this series, the first four of which we have here, originally released as super limited lps, each one housed with an actual original painting done by one of the brothers, but later re-released on cd, and finding the band once again sharing space with some pretty cool outfits: Text Of Light, Steve Roden, Keiji Haino and Mats Gustafsson. These are not however collaborations, instead, each artist took one side of the original lp, with MCIAA doing their thing on the other, the results pretty fantastic.
On volume two, My Cat Is An Alien seem to be composing with their 'collaborator' in mind, their sound definitely reminiscent of Steve Roden's minimal field recording / found sound / soundscaping in mind, at least initially, although MCIAA's take is much more raw and primitive, lots of creaks, and random room noise, mysterious about-to-crack vocalizing, the tinkling chiming of what sounds like a tiny xylophone, brief fragmented bits of melody, eventually blossoming into a swirling morass of groaning guitars, warm sweeps of melodic shimmer, plenty of murky industrial buzz, layered and droney, and again slipping into that sort of abstract trip out we can't get enough of, like Avarus meets No Neck Blues Band�
Steve Roden offers up two tracks, both as always hushed and lovely, the first a lengthy bit of minimal dronemusic, peppered with percussive thumps, and wreathed in short wave broadcasts, while the main drone, ebbs and flows, funereal and stately, a dark smoldering drift, that is gorgeously minimal and meditative. While the second, shorter track, finds Roden essentially playing guitar, a lovely bit of folky minimalism, the notes glistening, warm and lustrous, multiple melodies intertwined, unfurling gradually and dreamily, eventually joined by the buzz of a recorded voice, as if recorded on an old microcassette recorded, which soon pulls the guitar itself into that otherworld, the sound transformed into something tinny and barely there, as if it were some intercepted broadcast, delicate and mysterious.
WE ONLY HAVE SEVEN COPIES OF THIS, and the label is now defunct, which means, we can not get more of these EVER!
My Cat Is An Alien, the Italian duo of brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, who recently graced the cover of UK new music mag the Wire, are crazy prolific, releasing an amazing number of cd-r's and limited vinyl releases over the years, and in addition, the duo definitely have a thing for collaboration, their discography rife with splits, the From The Earth To The Spheres series, which found the band partnering up with lots of aQ faves: Thuja, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Christian Marclay, among others, then there's this series, the first four of which we have here, originally released as super limited lps, each one housed with an actual original painting done by one of the brothers, but later re-released on cd, and finding the band once again sharing space with some pretty cool outfits: Text Of Light, Steve Roden, Keiji Haino and Mats Gustafsson. These are not however collaborations, instead, each artist took one side of the original lp, with MCIAA doing their thing on the other, the results pretty fantastic.
MCIAA offer up a sprawling bit of abstract primitivism, sounding like Avarus or Anaksimandros, lots of rhythmic clatter, instrumental haze, swirling heavily effected vocals, looped and sent spinning into a tripped out bit of foresty free folk weirdness, their are squalls of spacey FX, birdcall like trills, almost like some strange field recording, but the group layer and blur those sounds and build them into a strange Sunroof!-y sort of high end crystalline ur-drone, still shot through with murky muted melodies and tribal clatter.
On this installment, NYC outfit Text Of Light, featuring Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Alan Licht and others, counter with their own bit of clattery drift, theirs a bit more dense and abstract jazzy, like a supercharged, noisier Necks, the percussion wild and frantic, underneath heaving layers of buzz and thrum, and the occasional wailed vocal buried in the mix, the sound seeming to mellow out as the track progresses, dialing back the noise, replacing it with clouds of blurred feedback, and the occasional clatter of junkyard percussion, the sound very soundtracky, which makes sense, as if memory serves, this group was formed to do just that, accompany films with a new improvised score. Cool stuff. Sadly, WE ONLY HAVE SEVEN COPIES OF THIS, and the label is now defunct, which means, we can not get more of these EVER!
With the new Myrmyr album we'll be briefer than we would like to be because it's incredibly good, but super limited. We have 10 copies and only 250 have been made, so we're not sure we can get more, so act fast! The stunning vinyl debut of these two former Mills College music grads, Marielle Jakobsons (Date Palms, Darwinsbitch) and Agnes Szelag, was recorded during a snowstorm on Shasta Mountain. We were smitten with their first release, The Amber Sea, and here on Fire Star, they have honed down their focus of post-classical orchestrations into a more finely textured array of nuance and mood. It's hard to tell who is doing what. It sometimes sounds like there are a dozen players performing, or it could be a lavish manipulation of tape loops and electronics, but the effect is quite beautiful. Starting out with plucked strings and bell tones that eventually melt feverishly into intense drones that smolder and swell revealing hidden passages of lush orchestrations that slip seamlessly in and out of the aural field. Four tracks of gorgeous mesmerizing beauty. Don't Hesitate!
We've long been fans of this grim kvlt Colorado horde, whose uniquely twisted sound seems to merge classic Norwegian style black metal, with the gnarled, warped blackness of bands like Deathspell Omega, their hybrid a furious, frenzied, impossibly complex and totally maniacal black metal that while reminiscent of other bands, is most definitely a pure and extremely virulent strain of blackness few bands can ever hope to attain. We often joke that even the black metal savvy among us have trouble telling one band from another, but there's no mistaking Nightbringer, their sound strangely distinctive, tonally, compositionally, this latest record, their third, delves even deeper into the warped world of post blackness that their Deathspell brethren are constantly exploring, for every burst of blast beat driven fury, there's a stretch of twisted super melodic mathiness, for every chunk of churning doomic plod, there's some progged out moment of soaring majesty, the songs slip and slither, transform and constantly shift shapes, the riffs besides being gnarled are strangely slippery, sounding almost at times like they're being played with a slide, and lending a warped psychedelic vibe to much of the proceedings, with much of the black filth tempered by moments of surprising loveliness, or bits of classic metal that find their way into an otherwise furiously fractured squall of black hole buzz.
But like the records before, there's something going on well beyond the playing, or the production, an ineffable something that infuses the music here with something special, a mood, and ambience, evocative and mysterious, pretty much every black metal band is grim and brutal, dark and blackened and EVIL, but Nightbringer seem unconcerned with all of that, instead crafting this incredible black metal worlds, where the mood is built into the sound, into the order of notes, the choice of tone and timbre, it seems like it must be unconscious, but whatever it is, and however these guys do it, it's what makes THIS the real transcendental black metal!!
What really needs to be said about Nirvana's Nevermind at this point that hasn't already? For people our age, it might just be thee most iconic record of our lives. Bleach might be better, more raw and urgent, but Nevermind is probably the coolest punkest record to get as popular as it did. If you want to read a gushing heartfelt appreciation of Nirvana, check out the review of the With The Lights Out box elsewhere on the aQ list. Needless to say, this band, this record, and Kurt Kobain himself, meant a lot to us. And while we played this record to death back in the day, it's been just about long enough, that we can listen to this with fresh ears, and holy shit, it still sounds so good. It may be poppy and hooky, but it's also heavy, and noisy, and in its own way raw and angry, even "Smells Like Teen Spirit", had you not been forced to hear it a million times, just imagine hearing it for the first time again, even now it would be mind blowing. And as much as that song does rule, the record is full of better songs. "In Bloom" for sure, with one of THEE greatest choruses ever. "Drain You" might be even better, so catchy, so heavy, with impossibly melodic drumming, one of the few songs where the verse is essentially the chorus, an anthemic sing along VERSE. And don't forget "On A Plain", another one of those verse as chorus classics. On the heavier side there's "Breed", fuzzy and feral, minus the more polished production, it sounds like it could have been plucked straight off of Bleach. Same with "Territorial Pissings". But besides all the rockers, there are the brooders, the dark creepy plaintive ballads, that still are amazing, so utterly haunting and moving and gorgeous. Obviously we're probably preaching to the choir (as pretty much everyone in the world loves this record, and if you say you don't you're either lying, or don't like music), so this 20th anniversary reissue (has it really been two decades?) is really only for megafans, most everybody has Nevermind already, but there's lots here for the obsessives, the first disc is augmented by all the singles' B-sides, with some killer classics (including their Wipers cover which is amazing), as well as a whole mess of rad live recordings. But the second disc is probably what most people are after, the first few tracks are early demo sessions for Nevermind recorded with Butch Vig at Smart Studios, and features lots of Nirvana classics, but in a rougher and a much more raw and lo-fi form (including their Velvet Underground cover). The second batch of tracks might be our favorites, a handful of boombox demos, which sound appropriately super blown out and shitty, the sound rife with drop outs, and every time the band kicks on the distortion the sound peaks, but for crazy fans, hearing those songs like that, it's pretty fucking cool, and there's the rarity "Old Age" which was in the boxset, but otherwise seldom heard. And finally, a couple BBC sessions, a super rocking version of "Drain You" and a gorgeous, haunting and surprisingly heavy version of "Something In The Way". Apparently there's gonna be an even more deluxe version, 4cd and a DVD, which will include all this stuff as well as the real Nevermind holy grail, the un-remixed version of the record that was rejected and sent to Andy Wallace to be gussied up. But odds are for most folks, this is more than enough.
Nice packaging with lots of cool pix, including the original photo of the baby with a handwritten note that reads "if anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it". Not much in the way of liner notes, but it hardly matters. One of the greatest rock records ever, from one of the greatest bands ever.
Hot on the heels of the recent reissue of early material from Bay Area doom/sludge combo Noothgrush, comes this killer live record, collecting two live-on-the-radio performances, one from 1996 on KZSU Stanford, the other from 1999 on KFJC in Los Altos Hills, and both are just what you'd expect, heaving, downtuned heaviness, churning riffage, cavewoman drum pound, glass gargling vokills, all wound into a lurching lumbering doom juggernaut, the older stuff much more beholden to classic doom, featuring the band as a foursome with Matt Harvey (Exhumed) on second guitar, winding some mournful melodies into the groups dirgey plod. The sound is great, dense and crushing, the guitars massive and heavy, they even take on a Celtic Frost song and totally make it their own.
The KFJC recording (introduced by aQ pal and longtime KFJC DJ Number 6), finds the band stripped back down to a trio, but the sound is just as epic, and in fact, it's a super strange recording, echoey and reverby, the drums SUPER loud, which makes everything, especially the drums, sound super dubbed out, with some of the slo-mo snare rolls sounding purposefully dubby, but all it does really is add a psychedelic vibe to the proceedings, the band unfurling another sick set of sonic tarpit misery, gloriously miserable and darkly depressive, the sort of stuff that should be heaven (or hell?) for fans of Corrupted, Whitehorse, Monarch, Eyehategod, Monument Of Urns, Khanate, Fleshpress, Bongzilla and the rest the slow and low doomlords...
Groovy, baby! Are you a filmmaker making a movie about sex kittens on the moon? A crime drama with rocket ships and ray guns? A documentary about swinging space aliens building the pyramids? Or just daydreaming about such subjects? Well, have we (and Omni) got the totally fab, pre-fab soundtrack for you!! Swank futuric funky jazz loungey freakbeat electronic grooves perfect for any kitschy exploito-flick you could imagine, pounded out by a band led by composer Peter Thomas, whom perhaps you know already as the man responsible for scoring Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol), a classic German '60s sci-fi TV show. His "in-kraut" stylings on many, many other soundtracks have earned him a cult following.
This exuberant disc consists of prime Peter Thomas stuff, material recorded in 1970, released as an obscure library music lp in 1975, and never before released on cd, until now! Remastered, from the original master tapes, and expanded with 4 rare bonus tracks, this features 16 tracks in total, most about 2-3 minutes in length, each categorized variously as either "Beat", "Electric Beat", "Strong Beat", "Rock Beat", or "Fast Beat", for what it's worth. They've ALL got bombastic beats, along with brassy horns, sizzling synths, fluttering flutes, and occasional wordless vocals... Any TV commercial or film project that was wild enough to made use of this library music would sound pretty hip, considering that the players in the Orchestra Peter Thomas included close associates and/or members of krautrockers Amon Duul II and Brainticket... Oh, and on lead guitar, Vampyros Lesbos co-composer Siggi Schwab!
Definitely another awesome Omni find. Packaged with informative, photo-illustrated liner notes, where you can read about PT's one of a kind "Tho-Wi-Phon" synthesizer, among other interesting things.
Originally released in 2007, the oddly named Find Electronica sees Italian soundscaper / audio alchemist Orsi, conjuring up some hushed delicate beauty, that sort of hazy, otherworldly fuzzy drift we can't seem to get enough of. Warm slowly whirling melodies blurred into long lazy drones, the layers constantly shifting, gorgeous overtones surfacing here and there, melodies buried and revealing glimpses now and again through the hushed lush shimmer of these tracks. The opening track is total Pop Ambient bliss out, anyone who digs that beatless shimmer, that washed out glistening thrum of groups like Gas and Klimek will be in heaven, Heck even the second track which finds Orsi looping an acoustic guitar into a bit of Appalachian mesmer, takes that guitar and wreathes it in a gorgeous gauze of muted electronics and muted psychedelia, the sort of late night sky-full-of-stars dreaminess that could go on forever, before slipping into a strange bit of post rockiness that quickly transforms into a sort of electronic music box bleepscape.
The record closes with the darkest of the three, a murky, low end rumble, shot through with glistening textures and subtle melodies, the sound ominous, but still warm and weirdly welcoming, gradually thickening, becoming something akin to a much more minimal Nadja, heavy, but woozy and warbly and completely mesmerizing. So fantastic. One of the coolest things we've heard from Orsi, which makes it all the more sad, that WE ONLY HAVE FIVE COPIES OF THIS!! Sadly the label is no more, which means we can never get more, which means these are the very last copies we'll ever see...
We love, love, loved the cd that Japan's PSF label released by Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, 2009's Haru No Omi, a disc of hushed hazy psychedelic semi-acoustic drones backing delicate female vocals, themselves often gently looped and layered. Although on PSF, and despite those vocals being in fluent Japanese, PPOPG is the work of Italy's Ramona Ponzini, joined by the ever-industrious Opalio brothers from My Cat Is An Alien, and is probably our favorite thing the Oplaio's have been involved with.
Now, we knew of an earlier Painting Petals album on Time-Lag, the vinyl long out of print, but had somehow missed out on this one, a 2008 release from the A Silent Place label. Well, as you may have noticed elsewhere on this week's list, we just managed to acquire an assorted quantity of A Silent Place "product", at a "nice price" too, including (yay!) a handful of these lovely discs. It's totally along the lines of the PSF release, being another album of gorgeous, near-ambient driftworks, apparently recorded in "mystic locations" in the Italian Alps, with Ponzini's dreamy vocals once again set amidst melodious shimmering drone, and tinkling bells... there's both wind chimes, and what sounds like field recordings of actual wind, along with guitars, glockenspiel, antique accordion, mini-keyboard, and harmonica. Utterly entrancing and relaxing.
So, if you liked the more recent Haru No Omi as much as we did, you should act fast and try to grab one of these. We won't be able to get more, and only have a few...
Perhaps best known as the arranger of a forty-five year old masterpiece that's famous for having never been released (the Beach Boys' Smile), Van Dyke Parks may be finally getting his due. Of course we've been huge fans of the eccentric wonderland of his 1968 solo debut Song Cycle, which got a beautiful sampling nod from Madlib on his Beat Konducta series (check out the "Left On Silverlake" sound clip from our review of the Beat Konducta Vol 1 & 2 to see what we mean). And his orchestral arrangements on Joanna Newsom's 2006 release Ys were some of his most inspired work we had heard in a long while.
Yet he has remained an elusive cult figure, a master of subtlety and nuance in his craft that has championed the sounds of American folk ingenuity from earlier eras in dizzyingly bright kaleidoscopic arrangements that can be a bit of an acquired taste for those unfamiliar with them. Channeling industrious American composers, such as Charles Ives, and Scott Joplin, the bygone popular song structures of Tin Pan Alley, Honky Tonk and Ragtime and eccentric instrumentation of zithers, mandolins and singing saws, Parks arrangements don't just capture an old-fashioned sound but the feel of a forgotten age that adds a patinaed sheen of passing time to his work. His music and arrangements could easily be a score for any number of Richard Brautigan novels.
Parks himself curated and released this first volume of his arrangements on his own Bananastan imprint, and in typical Parks fashion, it's a varied and eccentric affair. Featuring songs by Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, Little Feat, Lowell George, Ry Cooder, Sal Valentino, Dino Martin, The Mojo Men, and a few songs by Parks as well, including the first track, an adaptation of Donovan's "Colours" called "Donovan's Colours" credited to George Washington Brown (a pseudonym of Parks) from the Song Cycle album. While most of the tracks enjoyably engage us, there are a few rabbitholes such as the calypso-inflected Bonnie Raitt track that may have you reaching for the skip ahead button. But wiggly twists and turns have always been a feature and ultimately a joy of the Van Dyke Parks experience persuading us to unexpected places we might not venture on our own.
We won't go on to much about this one, of all the Small Voices / A Silent Place releases we managed to get our hands on (and are listing on this week's list), this is the one we have the fewest copies of. Which is a huge shame cuz, as much as we dug all the other PCS records we've reviewed in the past, this one is a killer. Not sure how we missed this one anyway the first time around, but beyond the usual spaced out psychedelia, and heady heaviness, the sound on Painted Shadows is way more low slung, murky and krautrocky, and to be fair, it's been a while since we listened to Plastic Crimewave, but this record has us thinking we definitely have to go revisit those other ones, as this one pushes all our druggy dreamy psych rock buttons, pulsing motorik rhythms, cyclical guitars, mumbled weary buried in the mix vox, lots of sitar like buzz, layered sounds all blurred and smeared into gauzy washes of dreamy drug rock, fans of Moon Duo will flip for the opening track, that sounds like it could definitely have been a precursor to MD's looped mesmer. The following track almost sounds like indie rock, still murky and fuzzy and druggy, but a bit more propulsive, with busy drumming and yowled vocals, all over some killer fuzz guitar and some serious drum pound.
And so it goes, a handful of tracks that should have most fans of modern psych wondering why the heck these guys aren't as hyped as Wooden Shjips and White Hills, just check out the closer, the 20+ minute title track, a slow build of tripped out psychedelia, cyclical krautrock like groove, and space rock pound, swirls of FX and wild swaths of buzzing guitar (not to mention what sounds like violin!), all wound into a serious heart-of-the-sun blowout.
Super awesome, but again, sadly, WE ONLY HAVE THREE COPIES, and since the label folded, these are indeed the last three copies we'll ever have. Alternate choices, please.
We know a LOT of you are familiar with the band Jerusalem, one of thee ultimate holy grails of '70s proto-metal, thankfully reissued by Vintage/Rockadrome a couple years ago. We made it our Record Of The Week at the time, and still sell 'em steadily, every week!! And this list, you'll also find the vinyl version of that reissue, repressed. One of the heaviest, doomiest proto-metal finds ever, coming closer to the gods Black Sabbath than most, but with their own primitive, almost punk charm!
Jerusalem only put out that one rare lp, but that's not the end to the story. Rumor had it that there was a second album in the can, never released. Well, as we mentioned in our Record Of The Week write-up, the actual fact was that when Jerusalem broke up, sometime in 1972, 3/5ths of the ex-members immediately formed another band, Pussy, and what we've got here is Pussy's entire recorded output, finally seeing the light of day!!
Not to be confused with another British band called Pussy, a psych pop outfit from the '60s (what's with these young men liking Pussy as a band name so much? Cat fanciers, huh?), this Pussy were a power trio, consisting of Jerusalem's rhythm section plus their lead guitarist. Apparently, the lead singer and 2nd guitarist from Jerusalem had wanted to go in a more progressive/polished direction, which lead to the split, and resulted in the formation of Pussy, by those who wanted to keep things rather more raw and rockin'. However, Pussy do sound somewhat different from Jerusalem, and not just 'cause bassist Paul Dean took over on vocals (on the other hand, he was also always the main songwriter in both bands).
While their songs are full of throbbing rhythms and crunching distorted guitar riffs, Pussy don't come across quite so doomy and dark as did their previous incarnation. There's a bit more of a poppy "glam" thing going on here, Pussy sounding something like a heavier T.Rex at times! Banging a gong, getting it on, boogying down, complete with handclaps and cowbell. Slade and The Sweet could be other influences/comparisons, which means this has something in common with the proto-metal treat we listed last time, by Incredible Hog... Some songs remind us of Stray ("I Keep Remembering You"), others of early UFO ("Moonshine"), and one ("Pig Mansion") even hints at a proto-metal version of early Brian Eno. There's even a number on here that Andee thought sounded like something from the first Duran Duran album, though we're not sure if anyone else thinks so. These rollicking tracks are all energetic and fuzzed out, with lots of bouncy, rubbery riffing. Definitely a good time, and thus getting played in heavy rotation here at the store ever since it showed up!
There's a total of 16 tracks on this cd, including both sides of their only previously released record, a 7" single from 1972, the great "Feline Woman" (inspired by Sabbath's version of "Evil Woman"?) backed with "Ska-Child" (definitely NOT a ska number, though it does feature groovy hard rockin' horns!). Then there's four more songs from demo sessions circa '73, plus the ten tracks, with a new guitarist, from what was meant to be their full-length album, all produced (as was Jerusalem) by Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, who also sings some backup. So cool that this long lost gem is finally available! The 20 page cd booklet includes lyrics, photos, and detailed liner notes about the Pussy story...
Question Mark are indeed obscure... but when you hear 'em it'll be no mystery why we think they're awesome! And, despite some similar garagey allegiances, they're not to be confused with Detroit's ? & The Mysterians from the '60s. This Question Mark is a band from Africa, circa 1974. That's right, yet another one to add to the grand stash of international psych reissue riches being industriously dug up by labels like Shadoks, Soundway, and Now-Again. Yep, we've all been lucky lately, getting reissues of '70s groovy garage fuzz groove monsters from Zambia's "Zam Rock" scene (Rikki Ililonga, Witch, Amanaz, Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Ngozi Family), also from Nigeria (Blo, Ofege, Tirogo) and Ghana too (The Psychedelic Aliens)... Now here's Question Mark, a Nigerian band who recorded this, their sole album, in Kenya. And they totally fit right in with those mentioned. Really, all we should need to say is that, if you like the same label's earlier reissues of Witch and Tirogo and the rest, you'll want Question Mark.
Fuzz guitar, pulsating organ, driving beats, it's irresistible stuff, with that definite African "feel" to the rhythms, though the pleasant vocals are all in English (most of the lyrics are about girls: "Oh My Girl", "Hey Hey Girl", "Mary Anne") and clearly Question Mark's music is indebted to Western influences, especially the softer songs like the sunshiney "Oh My Girl" sounding like they could be off an American Nuggets comp. But don't worry, they never get too "ordinary", there's also plenty of off-kilter psychedelic jamming and warbling organ, indeed they they follow that melodic number with the manic "Freaking Out", which by the way is the song here we realized we'd heard before, maybe you have too, it appeared on Soundway's compilation Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz. And they really couldn't have selected anything more appropriate for a comp of that title! Well, unless they'd picked some of the other tracks from this album...
First time reissued on cd, complete with fat cd booklet packed with informative liner notes - there's an extensive interview about the history of the band with lead vocalist/organist Frank Izuorah and percussionist Uzo Agulefo, both of whom now reside in Texas (one's a family therapist, the other a Professor of Economics), who also offer their commentary on each of the disc's 8 tracks. Wherein we learn that the title track was their attempt at copying Ofege's style...
First vinyl release from this mysterious Belgian free music collective. Recorded in various locations, abandoned churches, old factories and the like, R.O.T. unfurl dark and murky soundscapes, clouds of electric skitter and rumbling outer space interference. L'Ecurei is a dark ambient trawl through some creepy, dimly lit soundworld of campfired crackle and feeding back guitars, transmitted through a thick haze of abstract murmur, clattering percussion, haunting whirs and random bits of rumble and low end hum. Sounds like a very stoned Starfuckers jamming at the bottom of an emptied swimming pool, or like an alien army of sentient music making machines left to hum and rattle and drone until their batteries slowly run out. Really cool.
The Way Things Go is a very impressive electro-static drone anthology documenting a bunch of barely released material from the Texas gear junkie Rick Reed. This is a man who's been tinkering with vintage synths, shortwave radio, and sinewave generators for well over 25 years, woak from the classic progressive electronic sound of the likes of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, through the nihilism of the post-industrialists (e.g. MB, Arcane Device, John Duncan, etc.), and into post-noise constructs of liquid psychedelia from Emeralds and all of their satellite projects. In so many ways, this could have found a nice home on John Elliott's Spectrum Spools imprint, but Reed stays with the ever impressive Elevator Bath.
There is some overlap between this collection and the self-published Celestial Mudpie album that Reed issued a couple years back. In particular, there's Reed's very evocative and chilling soundtrack to the Ken Jacobs film Capitalism: Child Labor that is an intense piece of tonal vibration, slipping from Andromeda Strain styled pulses upon rotating layers of a atonal hums, arching drones, and nervous lines of analogue static. Another high profile soundtrack is "Hidden Voices Pt 1." which was composed for the Hermann Nitsch gallery exhibit "The Orgies Mysetries Theater" in Houston back in 2005. This track contains the bloodcurdling atonality that Nitsch composes for his own aktions, but Reed twists the stratified dissonance with deep space blorp, shards of Birchville-esque distortion, and shortwave SSB detunings. The whole album follows suit with muffed static cracklings amidst radioactive clouds of analogue fired tone float, sulking at times into a melancholy atmosphere but always immensely complex. Very highly recommended stuff, and yes this does come with a download card. Nice.
It's been a while since we last heard from Rivulets, aka Nathan Amundson, whose sound is a delicate acoustic guitar driven slowcore folk, haunting, hushed and intimate, and whose career has seemed always tangentially connected to slowcore pioneers Low, due in no small part to Low's Alan Sparhawk having long championed Rivulets, taking them on tour, playing on their records, and even releasing one of their albums. For whatever reason we pretty much forgot about Rivulets entirely, even though they tour tirelessly and this is in fact full length number four, and when we discovered there was a new record, this one, for whatever reason, our first impulse was that we didn't really care, and weren't all that into the band. But within the first 90 seconds, we remembered exactly what we loved about Rivulets, so much emotion conveyed with so little, the arrangements spare and sparse, Amundson's vocals gorgeous and warm and intimate, and the opening song here, the aforementioned 90 seconds (or so) is darkly delicate, and sweetly melancholy, just vocals and guitar, until about a minute in, when the song gets just a little bit more lush, then shortly after, some of the dreamiest vocal harmonies ever, only the hardest of hearts could not be smitten. We were most taken by the second track though, "No Talking", which starts off all spidery guitar, barely there percussion, clouds of cymbal shimmer, Amundson's vocals, slipping into a lovely falsetto, a gorgeous bit of folky balladic creep, the sort of thing that could have gone on forever, but then it begins to ramp up, electric guitar, the drums hitting a little bit harder, eventually building to a full on psychedelic blow out, the guitars all tangled up in a wild sonic swirl, the cymbals emitting sheets of metallic shimmer, before fading out, leaving just that muted percussion, and that melancholy guitar melody. Might be one of our favorite new songs so far this year. And to be honest the record is full of 'em. A gorgeous collection of hushed softly psychedelic slow core folk, with some surprising dynamics, and some awesomely explosive moments. A new favorite for sure. Definitely recommended for fans of Palace, Songs: Ohia, Iron And Wine, Herman Dune, Mt Egypt, and the rest.
With this one track from 1986, Arthur Russell clearly set his sights for the future of dance music and pretty much became the godfather of chillwave, balearic house and other modern day pop forms dedicated to all that's the sun-kissed, blissful and breezy. This newly remastered version features three dubs of the song (Gulf Stream, Puppy Surf, and Coastal, the last one mixed by the legendary Walter Gibbons!) and a previously unreleased track called "Make 1.2 (Gem Spa Dub)", that has a more funk oriented vibe, but still as left-field as can be. There have been rumors that Arthur Russell had made 96 separate mixes of "Let's Go Swimming", and the versions here don't sound exactly like previously released versions on other compilations like Strut's Disco Not Disco 2 or Soul Jazz's The World of Arthur Russell, which felt more orientated to the dancefloor and could have been stripped down mixes by Gibbons and others. The Gulf Stream Dub may be the truest of the three mixes here to Russell's original vision of the song, a submerged percolating paean to the return to innocence of summertimes past. But the three mixes here are like one extended jam of the song going into a more balearic house mode on the Puppy Surf Dub then into Gibbons' more economic and percussive but mind-bending and body shaking Coastal Dub. Essential!
For some strange reason, we've never reviewed or listed any records by Arkansas sludge/doom outfit Rwake, which is crazy, cuz the heavy music obsessives around aQ have loved these guys for ages, this is after all their FIFTH full length! And like many of their metallic brethren, their sound has changed quite a bit in the last decade plus, but unlike many of those same bands, these guys didn't just decide to add some 'post' to their metal cuz everyone else was doing it, even way back when, Rwake were augmenting their metallic crush with weird samples and lots of sonic experimentation, and musically, they made no secret of their love of prog and bluegrass and classic metal, elements of those genres finding their way into most of the group's records, including this new one, which sonically is a logical continuation of their Relapse debut, 2007's Voices Of Omens, and in those 4 years, if anything, the band have crafted what has to be one of the most ambitious and progressive post metal records we've heard.
The record opens with what sounds like some sort of homage to Comus, all witchy acid folk, dreamy female vocals and fluttery flutes over sinister steel string guitar, swooping backwards effects and swirling low end drones, which leads right into the record's first epic, the nearly 12 minute long "It Was Beautiful But Now It's Sour", which opens all Neur-Isis-y, doomy and dirgey, but topped with some classic metal leads, and some bizarre vocals, which took us a while to realize they were actually backwards, flipping forward suddenly, the band locking into some classic metal riffage, before exploding into a pounding epic post metal blow out, the vocals anguished and howled but still melodic, seemingly having ditched the dueling high / low vocals from past records for the most part, which makes a big difference in the musicality of the sound. Suddenly the heavy churning guitars are joined by some cool sitar like buzz, giving the song an Eastern vibe, before lurching into a wild mathy bit of progged out heaviness, only to slip right back into it, eventually working their way to a meandering bit of acid fried psychedelia fused with a more melodic classic doom, which slips back and forth between that churning crush, and woozy minor key, tribal drum heavy psych metal. And that's just the first song, there are 3 more long ones, the shortest 8:45, the longest 16:07, the sound so heavy and psychedelic and completely catchy, the sort of metal that is rarely this hooky and anthemic, classic metal bits all tangled up with modern post metal weirdness, some serious poppiness tempering some unbelievable heaviness. Metal record of the year contender for sure. And we're guessing anyone into epic post metal heaviness (a la Minsk, Conifer, Isis, Tides, Pelican, Mouth Of the Architect, Rosetta, Indian, Angel Eyes, etc.) will agree.
Oakland's more metal than thou (but still sorta punk) Saviours are back to the attack with this new album, their fourth, another wicked rager like 2009's Accelerated Living, once more produced by Trans Am's Phil Manley, and again on the Kemado label. Hesher, hipster, whatever, this is METAL and your soon to be bangin' head will be proof of that. So, poseur patrol, but down your pitchforks (and Pitchfork readers, time to switch to stronger stuff than PBR).
This time 'round, rather than ripping right into it, Saviours actually start things off slow and low, in something of a stoner/sludge mode, with the lumbering, 7+ minute "The Eye Obscene". Electric Wizard fans might want to break out their bongs for this one. But, while the album surely stays sludgey, the sonics thick, pretty soon Saviours are chuggin' along more aggro, metallic, thrashed out avenues, eventually channelling the classic likes of Judas Priest and Motorhead with the souped up rocka rolla of "Crete'n" and "God's End" ferinstance.
Once again it's the glorious, galloping guitars that rule the record (though that drummer of theirs deserves a hand too), the quasi-melodic vocals however hopelessly hollerin' away without nearly as much effort put in, it would seem. But the guitars, damn they're whipping out the shredding solos and sweet harmonies aplenty. If you dug Accelerated Living as much as we did, you'll be into Death's Procession too, it's cut from the same (denim) cloth but with extra doom-trudge heaviosity added in. Fans of High On Fire, The Sword, Early Man, and Bible Of The Devil, this is for you (though, as much as we like Saviours, we don't understand why Bible Of The Devil aren't at least as popular!).
FYI, the vinyl version came and went, hopefully we'll get more soon...
You'd think by now, that we'd all be sick of reverby garage rock, the whole retro girl group thing that seems to be the M.O. of every new band that pops up these days, but beyond the onslaught of sound alike bands, it's a sound that's tough NOT to love, and when done right, and creatively, it still pushes all our buttons and we can't get enough of it. But more and more these days, the bands that do in fact do it right, are few and far between. Which brings us to Shimmering Stars, a Canadian reverb heavy Spector worshipping dream pop group whose debut, this right here, takes that sixties sound, and melds it to a more fifties sound, reflected by the band's sonic obsession with the Everly Brothers and Del Shannon, and that makes all the difference. Besides the classic, sound all distorted and reverby, dreamy and jangly, the band have come up with some crazy catchy songs, that besides sounding fantastic, also actually sound like they could actually be from the fifties. If someone told you these were all covers, it wouldn't be tough to believe. Granted, the sound here is way more fuzzy and distorted, but the songs are just so perfect, classic and catchy, simple but dreamily melodic. The opening three song salvo here should have you smitten in no time. But the whole record is bursting with could have been classics, in some alternate universe fifties, these guys would have been the biggest band in the land. And be sure to stick around for the closer "Walk Away", a dreamy dirgey chunk of shimmery reverb heavy garage rock pound that while still channeling the fifties should have fans of Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin and all the rest freaking out big time. Another new pop favorite, which we'll most likely be jamming nonstop along with the new Veronica Falls and the new Big Troubles. SO GOOD!
As much as we try to not judge records by their covers, sometimes you just have to, especially when the record is called Slumberwood, and features some strange blurred painting of a cartoon-ish dragon, in what looks like some sort of psychedelic forest, the name scrawled in fuzzy golden letters that look like they're made of light. And the record is called Yawling Night Songs, and it sort of looks like that cartoon dragon just may be 'Yawling'. Plus there's a sticker that compares Slumberland to Werner Herzog, Coil, Nurse With Wound, Big Star and This Heat. That's some serious praise, but the more we listen to this, the more we're convinced that maybe it's not all hype. From the first track we were smitten, a noisy, swirling chunk of slow building psychedelia, mysterious voices, wild distorted guitars, simple krautlike percussion, swells of cymbal shimmer, thick rib cage rattling bass thrum, feedback everywhere, we would have been just fine if the rest of the record had sounded exactly the same. Instead, the sound shifts constantly, the second track is all weird echoey voices, strangled melodies, all floating in clouds of reverb, until the song kicks in proper, and the drums pound and the guitars grind and snarl, creating a sort of unhinged, speaking in tongues, dark forest kraut folk, while the track after sets hushed crystalline steel string guitars over distant wheezing shimmer, and flecks of electronic glitch and squelch, barely audible, more like some sort of sonic fireflies drifting in this sun dappled glade of a song. And so it goes, weirdly bluesy one second (complete with harmonica), meandering post rock the next, rustic almost roots rock psychedelia one second, murky hazy pulsing druggy dronemusic the next, before finishing off with what kind of sounds like some sort of looped, cyclical indie rock jangle.
Too bad we have so few of these, cuz folks around here have gone a little crazy for this. Sadly, WE ONLY HAVE SIX COPIES, the label no longer exists, which means we can NOT get any more of these, so grab one before they are gone...
Latest from this Danish doomlord, whose last record, Let There Be A Massacre, was a huge hit around here, sure we hauled out the extra o's, it was supremely dooooooooooomy after all, but not sludgey funereal ultradoom, it was more a classic doom, with soaring and majestic melodies, proper songs, not just huge slabs of black rumble (not that we don't love that too). This new one though, actually starts off with some super minimal dronemusic, all layered tones and undulating swells of low end, atmospheric and ambient, it's not until about 5 minutes in, when something other than low end surfaces, but instead of a blast of doomy crush, it's an accordion / harmonium, emitting yet more drones, but these melodic and melancholy, drifting atop that sea of roiling blackness, and then when the church organ comes in, it's epic and intense, the sound so powerful and haunting, the whole first side of the tape, this gorgeous bit of blackened almost folky ambience.
But then flip it over, and that's where the doom comes in, a massive, crushing, lumbering slab of howled anguished depressive doom, the vocals a throat shredding yowl, over the downtuned churn of the guitar, and the Teutonic pound of the drums, all underpinned by atmospheric synths, the sound does shift into something more melodic, all spidery melodies and almost post rocky arrangement, before slipping right back into more abject doom. The track continually drifts between the two, before finally bleeding into the final track, which begins all wheezing organ drone and simple drum plod, hypnotic and weirdly krautrocky (reminding us actually of that Tony Conrad and Faust collaboration, so much so we sort of wished it kept doing that for the entirety of the song), until the guitars and vocals kick in, but instead of getting super doomy, the guitar is weirdly twangy, the vibe almost like a doomy Morricone, the shrieked vox the only concession to true doom, otherwise it would sound like some weird sort of Scenic / Barn Owl hybrid. Weird and quite cool.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! Packaged in a gorgeously printed textured paper J-card, the tape held shut by a printed Japanese style obi.
Yes the cover art is pretty terrible! And yes this seems like a last contractual commitment to Geffen, but you can't deny what's in the grooves on this double vinyl. Some of the best Sonic Youth tracks of all time as chosen by some of their most famous fans. Folks like Gus Van Sant, Beck, Chloe Sevigny, Radiohead, The Flaming Lips, Dave Eggers, Mike Watt, Mike D, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and more select the Sonic Youth track that speaks to them the most. So we get an awesome collection of their songs like "Bull In The Heather", "Tom Violence", "Expressway To Yr Skull", "Rain On Tin", "Shadow Of A Doubt", "100%" and more.
So yes all that is a fancy way of saying this is a best of Sonic Youth record of sorts. And full disclosure this was originally released by Starbucks on cd a few years back. hence the cover. But if you ignore all that, you get two slabs of wax full of amazing songs by one of the best bands of all time.
Yet another Wolf Eyes offshoot/side project, and it's another good one, and another unexpected sonic detour, this one ditching all of the harsh noise, and much of the industrial crunch of the WE mothership in exchange for a sort of creepy, bass driven minimal psychedelia, a tripped out psychedelic blues maybe? It's actually quite hard to describe, an obvious comparison would be Jandek, but filtered through a more cracked Midwestern noise rock filter, albeit with much of the noise and most of the rock removed. It's all about the blooping basslines, the bleating horns, fluttering woodwinds, the streaks of hiss and whir, the weird bits of blurred noisiness that add color to these super skeletal sketchy dirges, the vocals a lazy drawled moan, it's almost like Spacemen 3 if they took WAY too many drugs (if that were possible), and were forced to stumble through a set of abstract psychedelic blues, the same sort of druggy mesmer, and hypnotic haziness. The band do gain some momentum on a few of the tracks, but it's still a druggy stumble, with instruments all lurching in fits and starts, the rhythms more a sort of looped repeated stutter buried in a cloud of swirled grey thrum, and when the band do lock in tight, there are some serious stretches of dark droned out hypno-dirgery that manage to be truly haunting and mysteriously abstract, imagine some impossible collaboration between Wolf Eyes, No Neck Blues Band and Jandek, and you wouldn't even be close.
Strange and surreal, wonderfully dour, hauntingly lovely and occasionally chaotic, an unlikely new favorite for sure.
When we first heard London retro murk poppers Still Corners, it was on a split single with another retro pop combo called The New Lines, and we were so smitten by The New Lines song, that it even had us wondering why it was Still Corners who got signed to Sub Pop and not The New Lines. Well, if there was any doubt about whether Still Corners should be on Sub Pop, it was wiped away within seconds of putting on their debut full length. Like Portishead crossed with Ennio Morricone crossed with Stereolab crossed with The Caretaker, the sound is so washed out and careworn, organs warble and wheeze, the drums minimal and skeletal, the guitars chiming and jangly, the production muted and muddy, all supporting the breathy angelic vocals of singer Tessa Murray, whose childlike croon is ethereal and spectral, the result is some sort of out-of-time faded memory dream pop. Opener "Cuckoo" is a perfect example, about as dreamy and divine as pop music gets. Fans of the various Girls bands (Dum Dum, Vivian, etc.), who want something dreamier and darker and more late night sounding, this might be the ticket. "Circulars" definitely displays the bands Stereolab side, propulsive and a little bit krautrocky sounding, but as if broadcast from underwater, or through an old radio hooked up to the sixties. The distinctive organ sound and the washed out production is what really defines Still Corners' sound, there aren't even any proper vocals on "Circulars", instead just some buried oooh's and aaah's, woven into the softly undulating fabric of the song's gauzy shimmer. Elsewhere the band look to Mazzy Star for sure, even the Cocteau Twins, but their sound is firmly rooted in sixties girl group pop, but not in the way the current crop of garage rockers channel that sound, no Still Corners have made that sound their own, it's not just echo and reverb, the sound is thick, and organic, the vocals dreamlike and crystalline, the songs subtly hooky, as much about the sound as the song, and vice versa.
Our favorite track would have to be "I Wrote In Blood", which almost sounds like a female Chris Isaak, channeled through some sort of Southern gothic PJ Harvey, the guitars fuzzy and distorted, but still minimal and spare, chiming melodies draped over the chugging swampy blues that seams to be blurred and smeared into a sort of ethereal slither, and when the drums do finally kick in, it's immediately all soundtracky, haunting and mysterious and so darkly evocative. And just as we pick that as our favorite, another one begins vying for the honor, until we finally give in and proclaim the whole record as our favorite. Easily one of the prettiest, darkest, most mysteriously lovely retro pop, dream psych records we've heard in ages, and absolutely destined to top our year end list. At least until that New Lines full length comes out...
Not sure how we first stumbled across Submerged, but all it took was one listen and we became kind of obsessed. A dizzying mix of ethnic dubstep, old school drum and bass, classic industrial and experimental electronica, the sounds here are heavy and hypnotic, sounding a lot like stuff we were crazy about back in the nineties, but a bit supercharged and updated for the new millennium. The opener "Space Arabs" is a perfect example, a lumbering chunk of big beat dubstep, with thick undulating bass warble, but wreathed in all sorts of Eastern melodies, and fragments of classic Middle Eastern folk music, it sounds a bit like Muslimgauze if he had been raised on jungle and dubstep. The second track features Scorn and Dr. Israel (other guests on the record include Justin Broadrick of Godflesh/Jesu and Ted Parsons from the Swans/Prong, among others), and starts off with some thick buzzing bass, wrapped in clouds of hissy static, it's noisy and distorted and crumbly, when the drums kick in, it sounds almost dancehall-y, but fused to a more dubstep beat, with those staticky clouds returning throughout, adding all sorts of grit and grime to the stuttery beat and Dr. Israel's distorted flow.
Fans of the recent dubstep and dancehall collections, who lean toward dancefloor sounds that are dark and dangerous, this will definitely hit the spot, the sort of dance music, that is less about getting bodies moving, and more about evoking dread, or creating sonic mystery, building moods ominous and sinister. Then there are the jungle jams, where the beats get cranked way up, and it's like classic jungle but way more distorted and blackened, "Transport" takes a pounding two-step beat, adds some weird gnarled percussive melodies, and a layer of grinding static, while "No One", adds chugging metal guitar and howled vokills to wild spastic drill and bass, reminding us of aQ faves like Drumcorps and Aaron Spectre.
"Death Sentence" is another killer, a loping skull caving beat, clipped and distorted, over a noisy backdrop, and wrapped in some seriously cinematic ambience, the sound shifting constantly from dark and thick and layered to spare and skeletal to twisted and noise drenched. "Rorschach" too, with its strange melody constructed from processed vocals, and looped stutter beat, and wild swirling percussion, not to mention more thick bass, and one of those drops that would kill on the dancefloor if any DJ had the balls to spin something this heavy, and then finally there's "Dead", the 8+ minute closer, that starts out all blissed out and ambient, before transforming into a wildly tangled drum and bass squall, buried beneath a gauze of hazy shoegaze drift and buzzing metallic churn, the drums and production shifting constantly, a dizzyingly, insanely programmed psychedelic dubbed out junglenoise blowout. Totally ruling, some of the darkest heaviest electronica we've heard.
As much as we love discovering new genres, it's almost more exciting to watch those new genres develop, transform, and spawn new and infinitely varied subgenres. It used to be that the evolution of scenes and sounds took months, maybe years, as bands toured and records made it to new listeners, but with the advent of the web, Facebook, MySpace and the like, it can now take weeks, hell, even days. And it seems like electronic music, more than most genres gets constantly and consistently mutated into new forms. At any given time there seems to be some sort of '-step', pick any word, and there's some microgenre, dronestep, drugstep, slugstep, doomstep, and of course the billions of variations on techno, jungle, downtempo, IDM...
The most recent IT genre is dubstep, even the new Britney Spears single features a killer blast of synth heavy dubstep, and of course dubstep as been evolving constantly, and while we tend to like our dubstep dark and heavy, with booming beats and massive ribcage rattling bass, we found ourselves mesmerized by a guy called Clubroot, and strangely blissed out, atmospheric take on dubstep, stretching out the sounds into hazy droney shimmerscapes, stripping the beats way down, and weaving lush landscapes of dubby skitter and swoonsome drift. Two albums and a couple 12"s (a new one reviewed elsewhere on this list!) and we still couldn't get enough.
And then along comes UK trio Swarms, who follow a similar path, taking dubstep somewhere else entirely, melding a minimal dubby shuffle to the abstract avant electro soul of How To Dress Well and Burial, weaving soulful vocals into clouds of softly swirling effects, pointilist piano, subtle guitar jangle, shimmering synths, taking elements of shoegaze and post rock, slow build dramatics and hazy atmospherics, layering them into washed out, dreamy and druggy expanses of sultry, laid back R&B flecked dubstep drift. Swarms augment the usual studio assemblies with plenty of organic instrumentation: guitar, violin and piano, and the vocals, these guys don't just slap on some soulful crooning, no they transform vocals into another instrument, sometimes speeding them up into little hooks hip hop style, other times they wreath the vocals in echo and delay and reverb, and pull them out into ghostly streaks, the male vocals are sometimes slowed down, and become a sort of chopped and screwed warble, but the vocals are just one part of the whole, and what a lush, expansive, multi layered kaleidoscopic whole it is. Totally mesmerizing, hypnotic, trancelike, sun dappled and dreamy one second, haunting and ominous and otherworldly the next, the songs woven into an epic sonic travelogue, a mysterious songsuite, a hazy glimpse of a musical otherworld, a transmission from the ether, a blurred impressionistic projection of dubstep from an alternate dimension. Incredible.
If you read our in-between list last Friday, the one where where highlighted some of our favorite things on the Holy Mountain label, you may remember us mentioning this new, soon-to-be-reviewed Holy Mountain release, the debut album from Swiftumz. As promised, here it is, and it's awesome. But, those of you you familiar with Holy Mountain's usual output might be expecting something deeply psychedelic, acid folky, or even experimentally abrasive... so Swiftumz might throw you for a loop, 'cause instead it's quite poppy. Hum-along, stick in your head, lalala-ishly poppy, wow! But it's lo-fi bedroom indie pop, of course, kinda on the Ariel Pink or Art Museums tip, delirious and distorted enough to find favor with the Holy Mountain mystics. REALLY distorted on opener "Don't Cha Want Me Back?" in fact.
It's the work of a local fella, super nice guy and man about town, Chris McVicker. Who until now, we hadn't realized was such a hidden pop talent. Perhaps we should have known, apparently he wrote a hit single for Hunx & His Punx, but we tend to think of him as the guy who hangs out with Oakland heavies Pigs and brings us their records (and one of the Pigs guys plays on this, as does Myles Cooper and some other folks). So, surprised were we that this was such a catchy affair, inspired by the '80s British stuff from the C86 scene, but also reminding us of all kinds of other good ol' underground indie faves like Dinosaur Jr and The Supreme Dicks. There's plenty of strummy guitar jangle, shimmering FX, tick tockin' drum machine beats, and gentle vox to lift these tracks to the top of the pops in your heart. Really good stuff, it was tough to pick which songs we liked best out of the bunch to make sound samples of, 'cause they're all so good. Some mellow and dreamy, others uptempo energetic, all hooky and hazy and full of heartache.
By the way, that cute name, Swiftumz, is that McVicker's secret nickname or something? Sounds kind of like a term of endearment - or perhaps the opposite. "Good one, Swiftumz!" one could say, sarcastically. But we will say it sincerely, this IS a good one, Swiftumz, we're impressed!! Enthusiastically recommended. And by the way, the phone number that's on the sticker on the front cover, below where it says "call me", that IS McVicker's phone number! And he really doesn't mind if you call him.
Though unfortunately vinyl-only, this does include a mp3 download code.
Warning: this review contains movie spoilers!!!
An ancient vhs copy of this 1968 movie starring Burt Lancaster clothed only in a little black Speedo swimsuit (the whole time!) made its rounds around here back in the late '90s, and it's a total understatement to declare that everyone who watched it had their minds blown, melted, fried, and otherwise levelled by the viewing experience. Beyond the shock of seeing Lancaster in a Speedo (often in, ahem, profile we will add!), The Swimmer is a pretty darn bleak tale - one man's nightmarish unravelling presented in a unique, slightly perverse and boggling way. Over the past two decades, its cult classic notoriety has mushroomed to the point where there's been talk of a remake starring Alec Baldwin. Absolutely unnecessary, in our opinion! Anyhoo, as Andee pointed out recently, oftentimes when reviewing a film soundtrack, we inevitably end up gushing or going on at length about the movie itself. Kinda hard not to do, expecially with a flick like this one. So, we're doing our best to restrain ourselves (we'll just say that if you haven't seen it yet, please do so... immediately!). The Marvin Hamlisch composed music on the soundtrack is pleasant on its own, an instrumental blend of easy-listening '60s jazz pop and orchestral melodramatics. It's very much unlike modern-day movie soundtracks riddled with well-known popular hits, that lazily push the buttons of viewers' personal nostalgic and kitschy associations with those familiar tunes. It may mostly seem to lean towards the innocuous, however when combined with the film's visuals, it does what a soundtrack should do. That is, for the most part, it provides an unintrusive complimentary sonic backdrop, and occasionally making its presence felt more prominently, subtly influencing the viewer's perceptions. While it's not really something we'd listen to on its own on a regular basis, it definitely does serve as an effective memory triggering device for fans of the movie, stirring visions of Burt Lancaster in a Speedo running with a galloping white horse, Burt Lancaster in a Speedo wooing a nubile blonde, Burt Lancaster in a Speedo fighting to reclaim his hotdog cart, Burt Lancaster in a Speedo...
Another obscure reissue from Dark Entries! How obscure might you ask? Well, System Liliputt was a one-man band of the Norwegian Geir Vassang, who released only one cassette in 1984 in an edition of 150 copies. There were some blogs which got a hold of crappy rips of the cassette in recent years; but for the most part, this is a project that nobody has really heard. The Norwegian new wave tunes that Vassang produced oscillated between motorik, disco arrangements and standard verse-chorus pop arrangements on his polyphonic synths, drum machines, guitar, and an occasional bass. Some of the sequencing that Vassang gets has a hollowed plasticity heard in some of the tracks by Cabaret Voltaire or Casssandra Complex with a brittle jangliness to his guitar playing cribbed from The Cure's Seventeen Seconds. The pop-song side of Vassang's production can be quite fragile in its construction, which lend itself to the subjects of loneliness and death through these bittersweet tunes alternately sung in English and Norwegian.
We mentioned The Cure earlier, and we got to say this really does hit the magic mark of our favorite era of The Cure. So many of the songs on here are leaving a lasting impression with us, especially "Gatelangs" which should be put on every mix tape this winter. One of those records so perfect for the onslaught of rain we've had the last few days. You just want to sit locked in your bedroom while flipping this over and over and sulking in such great sounding misery!
T.A.C. have been at it since 1981, operating on the rhythmic side of the industrial culture, finding home for their work on Insane Music, Ant-Zen, Tesco, Minus Habens, Discordia, etc. This Italian project seemed to have undergone a number of personnel upheavals over the decades with Simon Balestrazzi being the only founding member still active in the project. Splintered was recorded back in 2003 as something of a witchy / gothy take on click'n'cuts electronica. Crisp rhythms and ultra-minimal arrangements for synth, horns, and guitar are laced with the caterwauling female vocals of Monica Serra, all of which predate what The Knife were up to a couple years later and are somewhat prescient of the whole witch house thing, if T.A.C. would have dunked everything in a massive pool of reverb and delay like Mater Suspiria Vision.
WE ONLY HAVE 4 OR 5 COPIES OF THIS, it's out of print, the label folded, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
The acronym T.A.C. stands for Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata, which for all of us Anglophones equates to a CAT-Scan, and this Italian post-industrial / dark-pop project has been producing work since the early '80s with quite a number of limited releases mostly on Italian labels. Small Voices was one of those Italian labels, who had specialized in a lot of obscure Italian post-industrial and experimental music; thus serving T.A.C. quite well. Here, T.A.C. is revolving around the founding member Simon Balestrazzi and vocalist Monica Serra. There's a minimalist sound design to their nocturnal electronics, which almost harken to Morricone's restrained atmospherics on his horror soundtracks with lugubrious basslines, radio-fuzz guitar, and skeletal Coil-esque electronic bloop to go with Serra's languid combination of Annie Anxiety and Beth Gibbons at their most somber.
WE ONLY HAVE 4 OR 5 COPIES OF THIS, it's out of print, the label folded, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get...
Of the three T.A.C. album we managed to get in, Waiting For The Twilight is the earliest, recorded in 2002 and taking many of its cues from the '90s period of Coil, with skittering glitch based electronica gliding over downtempo breakbeats. All sorts of darkly baroque flares lay upon T.A.C.'s skeletal framework with ritualized hand percussion, occluded Spanish guitar excursions, and plenty of loping basslines that all set a dark-eyed atmosphere much on par with fellow Italian avant-rock occulists Larsen, further shaped by the evocative vocalist Monica Serra.
WE ONLY HAVE 4 OR 5 COPIES OF THIS, it's out of print, the label folded, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get... so as with all the Small Voices / A Silent Place stuff we're listing this week, probably a good idea to list alternates when ordering.
We had never heard this Portland duo before, until their new record showed up at aQ. Obviously the band name was intriguing, and when we threw it on, we were pretty blown away, a haunting sort of electronic flecked rhythmic post rock, or blackened ambient electronica, hard to know exactly how to describe them, one thing we definitely would not have guessed is that they were a drums / viola duo!! The drummer is also the programmer, who we imagine is the one who fills out the sound with all manner of buzz and crunch, but the viola adds some dreamy drama to the proceedings, drifting over percolating rhythms, and wreathed in wild swirls of space-y effects. The opening track "Slumber Verses" sounds like the music from some soundtrack, remixed and revamped, the melancholy melodies are blurred and buzzy, the sounds are streaked with feedback, and hazy droned out chordal shimmer, the heartbeat like pulse, blossoms into a distorted drum beat about halfway through, while the guitars explode into a blissed out sky full of shoegaze high end. It's a pretty dreamy mix, darkly rhythmic, but also noisy and fuzzy and seriously psychedelic. The second track though, the title track, is the first song we heard and the one that really won us over, with a skeletal skittery beat, and a sky full of crumbling distortion and buzzing melody, some electronic bleep and little bits of glitch, washes of hiss and hum, while the viola offers up dreamy melodies, the drums getting super distorted at one point, a totally psychedelic freakout, the electronics freaking out to match, and then when the viola comes back in, so dramatic. Every track here sounds like it could be the music from that super intense movie in some quirky indie film, without the music being quirky itself, which is rare indeed.
Oh did we mention how the title track tumbles though some in-the-red backwards drum damage before slipping right back into a sixties Stereolab like groove? The songs are super varied, but manage to all work together, dreamy and hushed and droney one second, wildly propulsive and blown out the next, fuzzy and poppy one moment, hazy and dreamy and washed out the next. So good! Released on the dude from Modest Mouse's new label.
This is the second lp from UK psychedelic instrumental space rockers Teeth Of The Sea, their third record over all, and another twisted batch of heavy twisted psych, it makes sense that it would be on Rocket, home to other aQ fave space rock heavies like The Heads and Gnod, and these guys traffic in a similar sound, but one that is most definitely all their own, just check out opener "The Ambassador", one of THEE heaviest, trippiest slabs of space psych we've ever heard, thick low slung bassline, weird burbling electronics, tripped out processed vox, all hazy and buzzy and gristly, it sounds like a spaced out dirge rock Butthole Surfers almost, the guitars thick and distorted, the song a lugubrious crawl, until a second guitar swoops in, playing a slithery stoner riff, and the horns, the HORNS, bleating out a dark funereal drone, those freaky voices making everything way more druggy and demented, the drums come pounding in, it's not until about halfway through, that the guitars unwind wild peals of psychedelic leads, the drums grow more tribal, and yet, it never full explodes into conventional space rock, this is something else entirely, the song blisses out part way through, weird sci-fi squelches and more horns drifting in an expanse of distant guitar shimmer, and muted rhythms, everything gradually fading out leaving just tabla like drumming, subtle organs and swirls of electronic bloops and bleeps, and hell if that's not the way to start a record...
And the rest of the record, defies convention still by never quite settling down into anything even resembling proper space rock or psych rock, even compared to their last record we reviewed, this is as about far out as it gets. The next track is all drum machine, weird industrial electronics, processed voices, swirling synths, almost like some heavier take on Goblin / Carpenter soundtrack stuff. The title is all horn flecked slow burn drift, a gradual build to a more post rock crunch, building to a sort of Godspeed climax, but one that's all super high end guitar tangles draped over the otherwise seemingly sedate sonic background, dramatic and tense and surprisingly cinematic. The rest of the record continues to take the concept of psychedelic space rock and twist it all up, from pulsing kosmische synths, to almost cheesy, eighties sounding soundtrack music, like a more metal Beverly Hills Cop or Miami Vice (!), to murky hazy washed out ambience, all muted processed guitars and blurred gauzy melodies, to a weird final track that's a hazy shoegazey soundscape of minimal drumming, chiming guitars, and lots and lots of horns, again very haunting and cinematic, and really quite gorgeous.
Weird these guys seems to still lurk so beneath the radar, might be cuz they're just to far out and freaky for the psych/space rock crowd, which is a shame really, cuz this is some of the coolest stuff we've heard in ages.
After many years of romping through almost every possible musical style imaginable and composing tons of music for movies, TV and kids' albums, Join Us find the two Johns bringing the focus back to what they've always done best... that is, writing clever, witty, quirky, hook-laden pop songs with a sweet dorky charm. Really, this is their most solidly classic college pop rock (circa '90s) album in eons. So, if you're an old They Might Be Giants fan with a nostalgic hankering for their earlier sounds (y'know, the ones with the maddeningly catchy jingles!), you'll probably find a bunch of peppy tunes here to tickle your fancy (heck, who are we kidding? All of you true old school TMBG devotees don't need us to tell you that. You already secured your copies of this album the day it was released, right?). One thing we came to realize though while listing to this album was that their use (overuse? abuse?) of their magical hook-writing pen over the past decade for non-TMBG projects has resulted in virtually every song here sounding slightly familiar, quite slick and somewhat calculated... like some gleaming TV sitcom theme. A bit unsettling. To be honest, Join Us just had us digging out and dusting off our beloved Flood and Lincoln albums to hear the real deal, and we recommend you do too!
Finally here! We have been waitin' for this reissue to arrive for eons (well, at least Cup has!), and it's so well worth the wait. This is the original soundtrack to George Lucas' 1971 feature length debut THX-1138, a chilling, near-future dystopic cult fave shot right here in SF. Although Lucas decided to handle this film's restoration for the dvd release in much the same unfortunate way that he did for Star Wars - namely, by adding numerous quite significant (often intrusive and questionably necessary) CGI 'enhancements' and revisions - Lalo Schifrin's soundtrack has aged quite gracefully, and this release even includes some numbers he composed for the film that did not make the final cut. We love Schifrin's work, and this is no exception. It is considerably different from his many other sountracks (Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Enter The Dragon), but then again this film is considerably different. Imaginative, haunting and incredibly effective, his score perfectly complements Walter Murch's innovative ahead-of-the-curve sound design (it would be great to have a cd of that!), and together they play a vital role in each scene and in the film's overall impact. Starkly contrasted with the film's predominantly icily sterile visuals, it's an ever-shifting aural kaleidoscope of grand symphonic strings, menacing drones, blats of brass, imposing choral assemblies, bursts of Latin jazz, early synthesizers and electronic explorations, solitary woodwinds, percussive African rhythms, and avant garde sound collage... topped with a deliriously giddy "Be Happy" sing-song jingle cherry on top. Richly atmospheric, melodious and dissonant, and deceptively unsettling. Highly recommended... and not just for film score buffs! Limited pressing of 3000, but it has been out for a while, so get it while you can!
Lost Tapes, then Found Tapes, and now Hidden Tapes. As good as many of the reissues that Minimal Wave has released, it's their compilations that really shine. Here, those obscurant new wave / post punk obsessives offer a great collection of urgent synth blorp from all over the world and all dating from the early '80s. Very few of these tracks had much in the way of distribution or fanfare whatsoever, and that makes the discovery all the better. There's only a couple of the acts that we had any familiarity with, and we're probably not alone in that assessment. The opening number by SS-Say is one of the tracks we had heard, being featured on the cd reissue of the Pesteg Dreg album, as both bands were led by the Danish synth-mastermind Martin Hall. "Care" is a megawatt anthem of oversaturated synth lines and Euro-pop danceability that lusts after the New Order production of Blue Monday with more cocaine and dark theatricality tossed in for good measure. Every thing else on the compilation is considerably more understated in terms of production quality (and following the branding of 'minimal wave' all the more), with high caliber tracks offered on the Normal / Human League anxious bleep from the Yugoslavian project Oskarova Fobija and the insistent synth-chanting of Danton's Voice. The British duo Robert Lawrence and Mark Phillips take up a friendlier version of early SPK / Nocturnal Emissions monophunk sequencing with transistor radio vocals and speed-simulating circuitry. Things turn toward the ultra-minimal side with the bittersweet melodicism of The Fast Set and Reserve's proto-Italo disco number, sporting an icy vocal detachment that would make Johnny Jewel jealous. The cd features two bonus tracks not on the vinyl including Gary Allen's weird science sequencing and goofy lyricism that looks to Devo and Oingo Boingo. Another tip of the hat goes to Minimal Wave for this one!
