3 Leafs have slowly become not only one of our favorite psychedelic bands in San Francisco, but maybe even worldwide. We've dug everything they've released so far, but it was with their last release, Eat The Earth, that we really realized something really special was being created via their approach to improv based spaced out psych. With Titular Lines, we get further proof that this is a group truly invested in the essence of psychedelic music making. Too many of their counterparts seem very connected to one specific moment or era of psych rock, but what makes 3 Leafs stand above the crowd is how they really are true aficionados of such a wide spanning range of mind melting sounds.
The record starts off with a warm and woozy jam that sounds like some amazing lost outtake from a Miles Davis recording circa Live-Evil / Bitches Brew. As the record continues it shifts, twists and turns into hypnotic spells of sound that take us on a magical ride through a landscape of sonic wonder, rife with moments that recall Ennio Morricone, the Necks, Ash Ra Temple, Magma, Blues Control, Parson Sound, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Ariel Kalma, Eternal Tapestry, Sun Araw, the Organisation, White Hills, and others. We love how there is patience and an elegant pacing to the music of 3 Leafs. While others want to hit you over the head with just how 'psych' and 'weird' they are, 3 Leafs allow their tracks to slowly evolve with layer upon layer, allowing you to more deeply feel the evolved feeling of these sounds. This group definitely has the ability to sound shimmering and majestic as well as raw and haunting. So many other psych bands right now are getting all kinds of wide spread praise and acclaim, but we feel 3 Leafs deserves just as much attention as this is psych made with a deeper understanding and a long lasting impact.
The latest ultra limited and lovingly handmade release from SF one man label Time Released Sound. And actually, calling TRS merely a label does not at all do justice to the things he puts out. In some ways it's almost more art than music. Sure we're a record store, so we get these and think, wow, this amazing record has the most incredible packaging. But taking a step back, it's easy to imagine just the opposite, the man behind TRS is an artist, and each new 'piece' just so happens to be accompanied by a soundtrack. Either way, it's pretty impossible to resist, and pretty much every music nerd we know, has gone nuts for this stuff, and a little bit obsessed with the label, so much so that we have standing orders for ANYTHING Time Released Sound puts out (just ask, we can add you to the list).
This latest release/art object comes courtesy of a duo from the Northeast US who call themselves 5Turns25, and who specialize in a sort of electronic flecked ambient folk, reminding us a bit at times of aQ beloved Rameses III, the same sort of pastoral drift, skeletal acoustic guitars, thick undulating drones, swirls of washed out shimmer, a sort of droney drifty Appalachia at times, something much more hushed and intimate at others, the sound lush and expansive, as capable of blossoming into a rich majestic epic as floating lazy through soft clouds of whir and thrum. Some of the tracks have a sort of Avarus vibe, not so clattery or free, but a kind of foresty folk. The guitar here is the main instrument, weaving gorgeous lilting melodies, swirls of chordal hum, all over a constantly shifting bed of muted industrial sounds, hushed FX and blurred dreamlike ambience. The band records in an old barn, and the music is thus peppered with sonic evidence of their location, creaks and groans woven right into the music. Crystalline and glimmering and so lovely, which is of course reflected in the insanely elaborate and impossibly meticulously crafted packaging. Where to begin?
The cd-r itself has a full color face, and is housed in a fabric sleeve, there are two inserts, printed on thick textured paper, with strange stickers affixed in various places to interact with the printed images, with art, and liner notes, a discography, there's also a hand worked / collaged notebook page with original art, each one unique. Affixed to the notebook page are a pair of mismatched clock hands, everything housed in an oversized vellum sleeve, printed and stamped, this one featuring an elaborately cut front panel, with the images of clocks punched out of a smoked white sheet of plastic, held to the vellum sleeve by a hand printed Japanese style obi. Phew! So wonderful, sonically and visually, worth every penny!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, we have just 15, and that's all we'll be able to get!
Originally released on vinyl in 2005 on the Sun City Girls' Abduction label, Blood Operatives Of The Barium Sunset was at the time the first Alvarius B release in 7 years, a project of Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, accompanied by long time SCG accomplice Eyvind Kang as well as Randall Dunn, Tim Young and Andrew McGinnis.
Alvarius B is some sort of weirdo psychedelic cabaret folk music, somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and show tunes (?). The opener is a swampy bit of country folk, all slithery acoustic guitars, junk yard percussion, weird voices, Bishop's snarly vox, lots of buzz and tense atmospheric shimmer, and the lyrics, an over the top tale of miserable miscreants, while the second track is even more Tom Waits-ish, a piano ballad, haunting and melancholy, distorted and creepy, over a chorus of nighttime crickets, as if Bishop was set up on the porch of some old house on the edge of a black swamp. From there on, the sound slips into a strange lilting doom folk, Kang's viola, moaning over some atonal strum, and Bishop ranting like a madman. Deep chanted vocals draped over jagged acoustic guitar, a distant choir competes with some strange grunting, jaw harp, moody hushed vocals drift over a latticework of spidery steel string buzz, super dramatic and over the top, helps that that one is actually a cover, a piece by Italian horror soundtrack composer Fabio Frizzi, lyrics of course courtesy of Bishop. Which is what turns it into something much sicker and more hauntingly demented than even Frizzi could have ever imagined.
They also tackle a Morricone track, and a traditional, but it hardly matters, Bishop and company make the songs their own, transforming them into oozing, misanthropic swamp folk dirges, creepy, and funny, and fucked up, exactly what you'd expect from one of the Sun City Girls, an aural roadtrip through the hellish mind of a madman, a lost world of run down houses, bleak swampland, of destitution and despondency, but viewed through a serious cracked lens, that makes even the most dismal and brutal and miserable situations and characters seem endlessly fascinating and mysterious. Awesome stuff, essential for Sun City Girls obsessives of course, but maybe a bit TOO out there for the general population, which is precisely what makes this so awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
Back in print on vinyl, here's what we said about it back in 2004...
The mysteriously eccentric Animal Collective have returned bearing / baring their Sung Tongs. They continue along their quirky, meandering rough-hewn path, yet on this album they seem ever so slightly more focused and (dare we say?) accessible than on previous recorded endeavors. However, that's not to say that they're not plenty 'out there'. This 'Collective is definitely not for everybody. It just sounds as though they've set aside their eclectic genre palette (psych, jazz, prog, noise, etc) for the time being, keeping their sound for the most part within the mossy folk realm. Perhaps they've spent a stretch of time deep in the woods far from civilization? This does make for a much less haphazard, much less disarming listen than those of past A.C. releases. That said, odd details still punctuate the songs like cackling laughter, whooping vocalizations, textural ambient noises - hazily drifting in and out of lucidity. Furthermore, as if to not fully alienate those who dug their Here Comes the Indian and Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished / Danse Manatee releases, they end on a more characteristically strange note with the trippy track "Whaddit I Done".
Latest from this Swedish one man black metal band, and the fourth in a seemingly sonically connected tetralogy, beginning with the godlike Antikosmos from 2008, continuing with 2009's oddly named but nearly as good PPPPPPPPPPP (those really should be runes, not 'P's), and then last year's Sviga Lae, which we were never able to get a hold of, unfortunately. Helvitismyrkr, while perhaps not nearly as good as Antikosmos, definitely ranks up there with the other three, and the more we listen to this, the more it seeps into our soul, and the better it sounds.
On PPPPPPPPPPP, it seemed like the only big change from Antikosmos was that the sound was getting more polished, but the sound here is appropriately raw, still punky and thrashy, shot through with bits of classic metal, NWOBHM, and of course first wave classic Scandinavian style BM, with soaring frantic riffage, and epic arrangements, but like on the other Arckanum's, the sound shifts constantly, from doomy dirge to black blast to midtempo lope, with lots of strange breakdowns and stop/start arrangements, and guitar solos, yep, one of the few black metal bands that has leads, and they're pretty killer, occasionally just mirroring the melody, but often totally shredding.
The opening track here, "Helvitt", gives a pretty good taste of Arckanum circa 2011, with all of the above mentioned elements in full effect, and all woven into a buzzing, blasting, soaring, pounding chunk of blackness that manages to be surprisingly catchy to boot.
The classic /traditional metal elements play a big part here, and there seems to be a definite shift even further away from the grim black buzz of the early years, with much of this edging ever closer to 'rock' than 'metal', but it definitely suits the songs, more melodic, more memorable, with a handful of the songs slipping into slow almost ballady prettiness, still heavy, just moody and melodic, while others just creeping along ominously, like the nearly psychedelic closing track, but those moments seem to often be perfectly bookended by more furious frenzied sounds.
We're digging this a lot, and guessing it should definitely appeal to fans of the more rock sound of the recent Glorior Belli which we raved about a list or two back, while still remaining just black enough for the true grim hordes...
The two most recent records put out by ultra hip experimental electronic label Triangle, finds that label continuing to push well past the 'witch house' genre ghetto that birthed them. To be fair, the first few proper releases on Triangle, Holy Other, Clams Casino, and Balam Acab, were already a sort of POST witch house strain anyway, with some of the WH tropes retained, but with those groups upping the production big time, and ditching much of the lo-fi drag that defined the best witch house, and in the process, inventing a new electronica. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find the new record from SF electro weirdos Water Borders, a dizzying slab of Coil worshipping electronic what the fuck genius, and then there's this, the debut from Ayshay, which also incorporates a bit of Coil into the proceedings, but there seem to be no beats at all, at least initially, channeling some sort of Cocteau Twins ethereal drift, with some processed throat singing style vocals as a bass, the only beat a buried pulse, it's pretty compelling, and darkly haunting, and beautiful for sure. The second track offers up more of the same, channeling Grouper and stripping away all that low fidelity murk and instead creating a lush layered symphony of voices, subtly twisted and tweaked, another spectral vocal bliss out, and in fact, the third track is more of the same, it's like a three part vocal song suite that acts as a sort of introduction to the final 12 minute "Nguzunguzu Megamix", which is in fact the first track with beats, and while we may have been expecting some sort of skittery drag, or murky muted low end throb, it actually plays more like some lost Muslimgauze remix, all skittery Eastern percussion, multiple drums and rhythms all tangled up, some hand claps, some serious low end, all over those ethereal vox from the first few tracks, the sound constantly shifting, the beat growing more and more block rockin as the track progresses until it finally blossoms into some almost jungle near the end, the stutter and skitter (and some BIG bass booms), perfectly woven into that strange shimmery swirl of ghostly vox. And it's those last few minutes that are the sort of warped and weird, beat heavy mystery secret weapon that some cool DJ will unleash from his sonic arsenal at just the right time and just destroy the dancefloor. So good, getting tons of play here at AQ and appropriately just in time for the Halloween season...
Forget about the multimedia / iPad formats of this new album via which Bjork originally released Biophilia, all that app stuff just gets in the way, and clouds the fact that this is one of the most emotionally intense, dark, and rewarding albums Bjork has crafted yet. Biophilia continues display what a rare vision Bjork has, making her undisputedly one of the most imaginative and original musicians of our time. Filled with haunting organs, primitive electronics, majestic harps, delicate bells, and of course one of the most commanding and mystifying voices we've heard. It's a record that shares the intimacy of Vespertine, the dark intensity of Medulla, and the focus and power of Homogenic.
Much of Biophilia is filled with slower, brooding sounds. But the moments of ecstatic release that come on tracks like "Crystaline", "Mutual Core", and "Natura" are so perfectly paced, making us freak out and lose ourselves in the sound before returning to the heavy emotional essence of the rest of the record. When Bjork sings lines like 'craving miracles', you are reminded that she is one of the view artists who has the ability to truly create magic and miracles with her music. She continues to be steadfast in her vision and uncompromising approach to making music. These songs slowly crawl beneath your skin, recalling the best moments of records by Brigitte Fontaine and Robert Wyatt, yet so utterly modern, futuristic and timeless all at once. Brilliant!
Blue Daisy is the murkily downtempo project spearheaded by London producer Kwesi Darko, who's one to slide between any number of electronica's microgenres - dubstep, leftfield house, soulful croons, banging trax, and lots of nocturnal ambience. These may be the same strategies towards a hauntological electric dub that Demdike Stare had used to build their epic works, but Darko's wandering, disjointed beats gravitate back to a post-hip hop structuralism instead of the cryptic crate-digging of Demdike Stare. The resultant debut album from Blue Daisy (after a handful of killer 12"s and 10"s) looks through Burial back to the opiated Bristol sound of Tricky, Portishead, and Massive Attack. The female voice - compressed through layers of static and shitty microphones - is a constant theme throughout the album, certainly alluding to how Beth Gibbons sounded in Portishead. "Firewall" (featuring the occasional Blue Daisy vocalist Anneke Warburton) situates that static-saturated, angelic voice above a grizzled, snaking bassline and echo-pulse breakbeats. The album fractures through collages of media samples and blurred ambience, re-forming into the darkcore productions of "Shadow Assassins" and "Psyche Inquiry" which come across somewhere between RZA and Dalek, complete with gnarled psych-funk guitar riffs amidst the heavy beats. Out of these subterranean cuts, sparkling ambient synth lines morph into Kompakt-styled rolling minimal techno sourced from hypnotic bloop, monophunk beats, and disembodied female vocals again from Warburton, rounding out this mighty fine album.
Not sure what it is exactly, but some of us just sort of gave up on Will Oldham a while back, Oldham in his Bonnie Prince Billy guise just didn't seem to do it for us anymore, sure we dug those first few BPB records, but our hearts always belonged to the pre-BPB Oldham project, the late great Palace Brothers and post Palace Brothers, it was just never the same. But this new one from Oldham has us wondering if we haven't been missing out, cuz this collection of songs is some of the prettiest, most heartfelt music we've heard from him in ages. And his singing sounds better than ever, having ditched that warbly creaking about to crack croon, for something more polished, still rough and ragged and a little raspy, but much more controlled, and less seemingly purposefully fragile. And the songs on this new record too, simple and spare, but also lush and lovely, sounding more like classic country/folk covers than originals, which is a testament to their power. The band too, understated, but powerful, with the female background vocals perfectly balancing Oldham's voice, and making these songs sound almost like spirituals, not to mention the warm whirr of the pump organ, and some deftly placed distorted guitars.
Listening to this, we can't help but think of Neil Young, or Townes Van Zandt, or any number of classic singer/songwriters, the same sort of hushed energy, the songs timeless, the performances effortless, but so imbued with true passion, darkly dolorous, haunting and utterly honest and heartfelt, and so good, it has us doubters headed back into Oldham's catalog to see if there's more stuff like this we may have been missing. SO recommended.
It's been a pretty great month for electronica here at the store with brand new releases from our favorite artists on Kompakt. Last list we raved about new outings by The Field and Walls, and this time we get to gush about the third album by Gui Boratto. It took us a couple listens, but we now can say we deeply dig this record so much, as Boratto really strikes such vivid moods and sounds on each track. His debut album, Chromophobia has become a total classic in our books, ranking as one of our favorite electronica albums of the last decade. While we for sure liked his follow up, we would be lying now if we said it was as great as that debut. And while III might not erase the fact that Chromophobia is still our favorite, we got to say that we are getting way more into this than the last outing and remembering why we fell so hard for Boratto in the first place. And lots of that is due to a single song, "The Drill", which first showed up on the recent Total 12 comp and has to be the best thing we've heard from him. A heavy bassy low slung groove, all fuzzy and distorted, with a weird woozy synth melody and some cool handclap snares, the drums wreathed in effects, a little bit of backwards whhhhoooo, and then suddenly the bass gets even more distorted sounding crumbling and fuzzy and almost metallic, and then it does it AGAIN, getting more weirdly effected and distorted, only to slip right back into the more muted groove, and so it goes, that super catchy bassline synthgroove, constantly changing tone and timbre, the sound following suit, slipping from groovy and slithery, to super blown out and crackly, distorted and in-in-the-red, and right back to that moody sorts of housey skitter. Someone needs to make us an hour long mix of just this song, cuz we'd set out cd player on repeat and listen to nothing else.
But even beyond that track, the sounds Boratto creates have such bright colors and lush warmth, and at the same time he's also has really introduced a newfound tension into his songs, reminding us of the heyday of IDM, combining elements of folks like Plaid and Aphex Twin into something all his own!
Forget about the Pop Ambient series, and other modern dreamy music makers, when it comes to simply stunning, calming and beautiful sounds it just doesn't get better then Harold Budd. Now 75 years old, and showing no signs of losing his immaculate touch, In The Mist is quickly becoming one of our favorite Budd records ever. This is how we like his music the best, just Budd and a piano, so stripped down and minimal, yet able to conjure up such a majestic and otherworldly soundworld. Slowly drifting and gliding with an ease and emotional warmth that allows you to tune out the noise of the outside world and return to a place of peaceful surrender. What makes Budd's music so special is that in any other hands the sounds would just be pleasant but not much more, but Budd has this amazing knack for masterful phrasing that injects soft melancholy and real bliss into his compositions.
It makes such great sense that in so many ways Harold Budd is an artist's music maker. We know so many great visual artists who play Budd's music in their studio as it really does give you a clean slate to work from, erasing the clutter and annoyances of everyday life and softly guiding you into places that are filled with spirit and soul. Beyond beautiful!
Kevin Shields! There's a name that garners a lot of attention; and it's pretty obvious why Eva Aguila uses that moniker for her scalding noise ventures which she has broadcast up and down the West Coast. We're sure that a few must have stumbled into grimy warehouse noise shows expecting The Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine to be slumming it, instead to find a woman behind a table of pedals and some weird typewriter looking thing, all of which sizzle and shriek with a blaring electricity. So, if the ruse has ever drawn anybody in, were they pissed? Bemused? Hard to guess, but in addition to her activities as Kevin Shields, Aguila also records and performs in the duo Caldera Lakes with Brittany Gould. Here, they swing between deconstructed dream-time, avant-folk meanderings and full-on noise mode. Everything on this tape is swimming in a suitably lo-fi soup that could be the shittiness of this cassette (ostensibly a 'professional' duplication job) or the antique haze purposefully grafted onto the production. Detached folksongs strummed in monotone on guitar, with spluttered events, eerie tones, and haunted voices that drone-on creating a vibe that's not too far from those of Christina Carter or Grouper; but as these tracks proceed, convulsive noises ramp their activity from minor overloads on a four-track into concussion bomb explosions muffled through the constant gauze of tape hiss. Elsewhere, percussive scrabblings trickle through a multitude of delay pedals, forming stoned / hypnogogic patterns in keeping with some of the early experiments by Zoviet France (e.g. Eostre, Signal Gesture Threat, etc.). Static electricity cracks the ether around these phasing delays gradually building into another swelling cloud of ominous charged particles. Limited to 100 copies!
Got a handful of these three way split lps featuring some heavy rock outfits we hadn't heard before now, but are digging all three, pretty, umm� heavily. Four tracks from each, up first is Canyons who hail from Missouri, and who we had never heard before but who absolutely push all out mathmetalpunk buttons, reminding us a bit of local noise rockers Kowloon Walled City, but a bit more punky, their furious pound splintering into wild proggy mathiness as often as AmRep style head caving sonic swagger.
Tigon, who are from right here in the Bay Area, counter with their own brand of heaviness, much more murky and bass heavy, and way more wildly mathy, sounding almost like a super charged Nomeansno merged with a more lo-fi Unsane, furiously howled vox over the constantly shifting sonic churn below, occasionally slipping into something much more broody and stripped down, but those moments are balance by some seriously epic post rock infused metal majesty. The AmRep vibe is strong with these guys too. They also remind us a bit of Young Widows, which is most definitely not a bad thing.
And finally Foreign Theaters, who also hail from Missouri, round out the three way with their Melvins-y dirge rock, heavy hints of Black Flag, all woven into roiling brooding metallic punk, their songs much shorter, short sharp bursts of urgent heaviness, a noise drenched punk that occasionally slips into woozy slithery dirgery, but spends most of its time pounding and churning, the throat shredding vox wreathed in tangled droned out guitars that definitely make FT's punk more post punk and noise rock than punk proper, and we dig it!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, pressed on recycled black vinyl, and housed in a full color sleeve with a printed insert and a download coupon.
It's always weird to discover a local band via a label in another city, or even another country, but it happens all the time. Not sure if it speaks to a lack of venues in SF, or less importance placed on bands playing tons of shows before putting out a record, or just us not going to enough shows, but we keep discovering records by bands we didn't even know existed, even though they're from right here. Which was the case with Castle, whose new record was just released on aQ beloved German label Van Records, who in the past have brought us incredible music from Ruins Of Beverast, Sol, Nagelfar, The Devil's Blood, Griftegard, Verdunkeln, Funeral Procession, Kermania and more.
Castle might have the most in common with their labelmates The Devil's Blood, being a female fronted heavy rock band, and with the seeming popularity of 'witchy' metal bands, it seems only a matter of time before fans of Loon, Blood Ceremony, Jex Thoth, Cauchemar, The Devil's Blood, Christian Mistress, Purple Rhinestone Eagle and all the others finally discover these guys (and gal) and freak the fuck out, cuz Castle might just be one of our favorites, they have an incredible sound, heavy and psychedelic, drawing on classic heavy metal, a little modern black metal, classic psych, and vocalist Elizabeth Blackwell has a killer voice, raw and rough around the edges, but powerful and emotional, a little bit gritty, a hint of a rasp, the same sort of vibe we used to get from Doro (vocalist for Warlock), intense and powerful, without resorting to shrieking or howling, somehow the perfect match for the music, riffy and psychedelic, and in fact, they have a little Sunset Strip swagger, some of what we love about eighties metal finds its way in, as does some cool mathy post rockiness, opener "Descent Of Man" might be the heavy psych jam of the year, with a killer main riff, a wicked hook, groovy and heavy and tranced out, took a while before we could even get to the rest of the record, but once we did, pretty much all the tracks hit just as hard. So great!!
Record number two from this metal supergroup, and like the first one, besides being heavy and hooky and epic, once again reminds us how much we wish more metal bands had actual real singers, capable of actually and really singing, and then of course there are the shredding leads, which are sorely lacking in most metal these days as well. The sounds here are pretty classic metal, but with a hint of modern power metal a la Blind Guardian and Lost Horizon, which makes sense when you check out the band members' pedigrees: Tim "Ripper" Owens" (Judas Priest, Iced Earth, Yngwie Malmsteen), Richard Christy (Death, Iced Earth), Steve DiGiorgio (Death, Autopsy, Control Denied, Testament, Obituary), Jason Suecof (Capharnaum, Crotchduster).
Most metal folks probably know Richard Christy as a radio personality on Howard Stern's show, but he's still a killer drummer, and all these guys shred, and this record is just a primo slab of classic heavy metal. It's not blackened, or FX drenched, or warped or twisted, but it is technical, a little proggy, heavy as fuck, thrashy, and hooky as hell, and if you're a fan of the classics, Maiden, Dio, Priest, etc., and have been lamenting the state of modern metal, this record is a total timewarp to the days of classic heavy metal, and like the first one, we find ourselves listening to very little else.
Although Alice Coltrane released few recordings back when she was performing regularly in the '60s and '70s, several welcome reissues have come to light in recent years. This is the first time on cd for Transfigurations, a live performance from 1976 at
Up until now, SF garage popper Mikal Cronin seemed to exist mostly as sideman, his name usually following an ampersand, which in turn seemed to typically be preceded by the name Ty Segall. Thus most of our experiences with Cronin had been the duo of Segall & Cronin, and everything we had heard we dug, a LOT, but it was hard to tell what exactly Cronin was bringing to the table, versus Segall, but listening to this now, seems the answer is EVERYTHING! And as much as we love Ty Segall, we're thinking that maybe much of that garage pop magic was coming from the other side of the ampersand, cuz WOW is this record totally great. Anyone at all into the SF garage pop scene, Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, etc., will go absolutely nuts for this. And if this record doesn't immediately catapult Cronin into the spotlight, then there's something very very wrong with the world.
It's a perfect blend of sunshiney jangle, garagey fuzz, paisley pop and noisy psychedelia. And for all the warped fuzz and reverbed drenched lo-fi crunch of his peers, it seems Cronin has much more of a pure pop heart. That pure pop is however gloriously corrupted by little bits of wild flute flecked freakouts, strange horns, noise rock jams, and whatever else struck Cronin's fancy it seems, yet whatever sonic weirdness Cronin adds to the mix, it never sound gratuitous, it always sounds like an organic part of the song and the sound, and without fail, the song is crazy catchy, and the sound is fantastically lush and psychedelic and utterly ruling.
The first track manages to sum it up pretty perfectly. Starting with some dreamy Beach Boys a cappella harmonies, then some big distorted guitar crunch, pounding drums, before slipping right into some dreamy almost folky jangle, acoustic guitar strum, fuzzy bass, sweet vocal harmonies and HOOKS FOR DAYS, like the best song the Fresh & Onlys never wrote, but a little bit more twisted and a little bit more Byrds / paisley pop, but with plenty of crunch and fuzz, a little bit proggy in its arrangement, and then out of nowhere, with about a minute left, the song explodes into a double time pounding psych rock blow out, complete with jagged guitar crunch and a wild flute freakout (courtesy of John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, who knew he played flute?). We've probably listened to that song 50 times since we got this in.
But once we dug deeper, we realized that pretty much every song here is an absolute gem, "Apathy" with its start/stop acoustic strum, wild feedback, and total classic pop hooks (reminding us melodically of The Olivia Tremor Control actually), "Green And Blue", with its thick crunch droned out guitar buzz, dirgey drumming, thick blown out wall of sound and wild tangle of psychguitar freakout, "Get Along", which is another acoustic guitar driven chunk of practically perfect dreampop, rife with sweet harmony vox and some cool tripped out backwards psych guitar melodies, "Slow Down", a lo-fi, organ driven ballad, all stretched out drones and fuzzy reverbed vox, "Gone", another crunchy, riff heavy rocker, that should have Thee Oh Sees fans frothing at the mouth. And so it goes, the perfect mix of modern garage pop and classic indie jangle, and some of THEE best songs EVER. This week's list is chock full of contenders for pop record of the year, but if any of the other ones are gonna come out on top, this is gonna be the one to beat.
Oh, if you're wondering if it's vinyl-only, no it's not. But we're just listing the vinyl format this week, 'cause for some weird reason, the cd version we originally received turned out to be a cd-r. However, the label has fixed that and pressed some actual, real cds, we're just waiting for them to show up. They're on the way, should be here sometime next week, so if you're a cd person, or just prefer the cheaper format, let us know and we'll put your name down for one. We'll also of course list it on our next list.
Second release on Handmade Birds from this post (sort of) black metal outfit, formerly called Frail, when they were black metal only in as much as they had shrieked vokills, musically, their sound was much more in line with the Cure or Depeche Mode, dark depressive almost new wave, and wait a second� that's basically true of Crooked Necks as well, after a whole record of Joy Division covers (the recently reviewed Something Must Break 12"), this brand new full length doesn't sound all that far removed, dark shimmery bass lines, lots of chiming melodies and gloom pop guitar jangle, crooned vocals, a little reverby shimmer, softly propulsive rhythms, Crooked Necks are one of those rare bands that all metalheads seem to like, even though they're not even remotely metal. It's that weird heavy metal rule that states all metalheads must like the Cure and Depeche Mode, but just applied to a more modern band, which does make sense cuz again, take those shrieked vocals away, and this record could have come out on Sacred Bones or Captured Tracks or Wierd. But hey, that's fine with us, we're merely questioning why these guys are classified as metal, black or otherwise, maybe they're not so much anymore, regardless, we love this stuff, dreamy blissed out gloom pop, the weird thing is we'd almost even like it more sans the harsh vox, then it would just be pure crystalline jangle pop, a little gloomy, a little gothy, but pretty much total pop. The vocals definitely give it an edge, and there is some cool, slightly weirder stuff going on as well, some strange production, backwards swoops an swirls, but for the most part this is just a great new wave downer pop record, that yeah, if you're an adventurous metalhead, you just might dig, and if you're a popkid, and don't mind a bit of black screech, this could definitely be a new fave.
Sometimes a picture is in fact worth 1000 words, just check out the cover photo on this most recent Omni Recording Corporation reissue, featuring a tall lanky man, brown pants and a black long sleeved turtleneck, sitting on a guitar case on the side of the highway, his hair slicked back, a cowboy hat clutched in his hands, one eye covered by a black eye patch. The title? The Long And Lonesome Road. Of course it is. And a quick scan of the back cover finds the words "drug and alcohol addictions" pop out, as do many of the song titles: "Bury The Bottle With Me", "A Tombstone Every Mile", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out", "Loser's Cocktail", "Goin' Down That Road Feeling Bad", well, by now, like us, you're pretty taken with this, the latest in a long line of unearthed country gems, and we've yet to even hear a note.
We weren't all that familiar with Dick Curless, although according to the liner notes, he had a whole mess of top 40 hits over the years, the note also inform us that the eyepatch is no affectation, and while it was gouged out in a bar fight or shot out by a jealous lover, it was the result of actual health problems. Anyway, the opening track is classic country, Curless's deep voice pretty stunning, the lyrics very very strange, barrelhouse piano, groovy background vocals, it's pretty good stuff, but the next track, "Wrinkled, Crinkled, Wadded Dollar Bill" is where we first get an earful of Curless' impossible and super dramatic low low baritone, sounding, at first blush at least, like Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony The Tiger and the singer of the Haunted Mansion song from Disneyland. And while he's a capable singer in multiple registers, it's that deeeeeeeep voice that makes this especially great. There are some track we knew, some classic trucker jams (the aforementioned "A Tombstone Every Mile" being an old fave), some honky tonk hits, a very Johnny Cash vibe a lot of the time, but beyond those few tracks, most of this was new to us, and like all Omni reissues, there's lots of amazing stuff to discover, and fans of any of the other Omni collections (Henson Cargill, Tommy Cash, Grandpa Jones, Stonewall Jackson, Dee Mullins, Hank Snow, Billy Edd Wheeler, Larry Jon Wilson), will probably dig this one too!
And like all Omni releases, there's a massive booklet with killer liner note and lots of photos.
This was another mystery submission, originally presented to us described (maybe not so) simply as "post-post-digital bubblegum black/death metal". And while the first track had us thinking that description was WAY off, a gnarled chunk of churning frantic machinelike riffing and programmed blasting, croaked vocal rumbles, the guitars super distorted and crumbling, a pretty fierce little chunk of programmed black buzz. But then BAM, in comes the second track, and it makes way more sense, bubblegum for sure, minus the harsh vokills, it sounds like some sort of electro pop, or a less damaged Fastest even, the major key melody, the bouncy jaunty rhythm, almost video game music at moments, but those vocals, and the weird echoey reverby production transform it into, well, into post-post-digital bubblegum black/death metal.
And if you needed even further proof of this record's PPDBGBDM sound, skip all the way to the last track, a totally ruling, and bafflingly brilliant, cover of Del Shannon's "Runaway", totally transformed into a buzzy, dirgey epic, and when the weird guitar/synth finally plays that immediately recognizable back ground vocal "Wah Wah Wah Wah Wonder" melody, you sort of want to laugh and bang your head at the same time, and then when the track locks into the super frenzied version of the original song's bridge, it's about the coolest heaviest thing ever, oh and the end of the chorus is transformed into a cool descending depressive riff that totally changes the feel of the whole song.
And in between the opening salvo, and the Del Shannon cover, are a whole mess of twisted, bedroom brewed black metal weirdness, from dirgey heaviness that sounds like a horror movie soundtrack, to programmed loping rhythms that sound like some machine post rock, which slips into some seriously grinding blackness, or from goofy blackened fuzz pop that almost sounds like a black metal Dickies to fuzzy, washed out almost blissy 8-bit sounding new wave drift. It's pretty nuts, and any metalheads who bough the Fastest record, even though it's resolutely NOT metal, will LOVE this, and anyone into twisted weirdo outsider black metal, or post-post-digital bubblegum black/death metal, well, this is for YOU.
Another list, another batch of mysterious cassette sounds from Root Strata, check out the Father tape elsewhere on this week's list, which arrived alongside this, a clinically titled new release from a group/person called Driphouse, who like Father, we know next to nothing about, other than Root 91 is created from piano, harpsichord and synths, all woven into strangely cosmic sonic experiments, that range from swirling, electronic synthdrones that sounds almost like some crazy soundtrack to an alternate universe's planetarium show, to bizarre robotic electro, cobbled together from short bursts of static, bits of glitch and squelch, all wrapped around plink plonk piano melodies. There's also bleepy Radiophonic Workshop style analog electronic bloopscapes, minimal cinematic synthwave rife with shades of John Carpenter, but deconstructed into something much more abstract, super intense blasts of fuzzy shoegaze new age shimmer, this too peppered with starburst effects and sci-fi squiggles, haunting almost soundtracky sprawls of glitchy synth drones and processed minor key melodies, and some seriously creepy sing songy electro wrapped harpsichord, draped over softly swirling string like shimmer, and sounding a bit like the soundtrack to the unsung Halloween III. Cool, strange stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Housed in a super striking, embossed/debossed J-card, the cassette also strikingly printed white on white.
Latest from this Cascadian black metal outfit, the solo project of, as the band name suggests, Echtra, who is one half of aQ faves Fauna, whose sound is definitely reminiscent of their sonic and geographical brethren in Wolves In The Throne Room. But unlike Wolves, or even Fauna, the music of Echtra is a much more personal and intimate affair, minimal and hushed much of the time, with haunting ambience and dark dreamy folk woven into what is actually more a sort of blissed out doom, than black metal buzz, spidery tendrils of distorted melody wrap themselves around delicately plucked steel strings, all draped over a downtuned dirge, the drums distant and way down in the mix, the vibe washed out and hazy, even at its most distorted and aggressive, the sound is still woozy and dreamlike and a bit shoegazey, the deep growled vokills also buried in the mix, adding more layers to the already thick layered sound. Fans of Megaton Leviathan should definitely check this out, as it's got the same sort of druggy psychedelic vibe. Occasionally the sound grows dissonant, or the drums erupt into some furious double kick, but even then, it's more ominous and sinister than heavy, the sound almost like a blackened folk.
The second track starts out even dreamier, the same Appalachian style steel string guitar, but here wreathed in clouds of gauzy shimmer, the whole thing a gloriously sun dappled prismatic blur, fuzzed out dream folk, that does eventually explode into some blasting buzzing blackness around the nine minute mark, but even then the metal is smeared and muted, the acoustic guitar supplying the melody, again transforming the black buzz into a strange sort of frenetic blackened folkmusic, which gives way to some spare fluttery folk drift, before finishing off with a brief bit of downtuned dirgery.
Someone pointed out recently that all the Echtra songs are 23 minutes long, on ALL of their records, which is in fact the case here too, not sure if there's some sort of significance, but for these 46 minutes, it's easy to get lost in Echtra's gorgeous folk flecked blackened mystery.
Super swank packaging too, metallic gold ink on a heavy textured black cardstock digipak style jacket, both the inner and outer panels embossed too.
All right! We've been waiting for this, at long last a new album of mathy mania from our favorite Manitoban instru-metal nerds, who rip it up like an unholy hybrid of The Fucking Champs and Gorguts.
So, we threw this on as soon as we got it in earlier this week, and as we were listening to it in the store, a dizzying display of complicated instrumental triple-guitar metal pyrotechnics, completely ridiculous stuff, Andee remarked to Matt that THIS must be what it sounds like inside Allan's head all the time. To which Allan says, "I wish!"... And Allan's wish is Electro Quarterstaff's command. All he (or anyone) has to do is strap on some headphones and hit "play", and your brain can start doing somersaults and backflips to the tricky tunes of these tech-metal masters!
Yes, it's a fun ride. Somehow the Electro Quarterstaff boys make their music crazy technical and also utterly rock out at the same time. In fact, on some of the tracks here, we declare EQ may have invented the hitherto unknown subgenre of "technical boogie"!!
The Willowtip label is of course known for uber-technical death grind, bands like Arsis, Capharnaum, Gorod, Necrophagist... serious, brutal stuff, though they do have their "humorous" side (remember, uh, Crotchduster?). Electro Quarterstaff certainly have a quizzical sense of humor, witness song titles like "Waltz Of The Swedish Meatballs" and "Unholy Gravy" (though others are less overtly absurd, to be sure). But that's not why we like 'em so much. Any band can come up with silly song titles, but NOT just any band can play like this, nosiree. Grin-inducing MUSICALLY 'cause it's so damn complex, yet catchy too. Reminds us a bit of An Albatross, but not so spastic and noisy, way more METAL, their hectic shred conversant with classical-sounding melody. In fact, first track "The Wolf Shall Inherit The Moon" is a disarmingly beautiful semi-acoustic piece, setting any unsuspecting listeners up for a shock when frantic next track "McNutty" erupts into their ear-space.
Once again, they've named this after a famous Canadian (Gretzky was their debut). And once again, this cd is graced with really awesome artwork. This 2nd album was worth the five year wait, but we hope EQ don't go back into lengthy hibernation right away... what would be really rad would be to see 'em play live, how 'bout a West Coast tour, guys? We'd be in the front row for that, along with any fans of Scale The Summit, Suzikiton, Pegataur, The Champs, Gorguts, etc.
Young fans of John Fahey who may have thought it all began with Blind Joe Death and the Takoma label will be in hidden treasure heaven with this incredible 5cd box set of Fahey's earliest recorded output for Joe Bussard's Fonotone label, the very last 78 rpm record label. Seasoned fans who may have long tired of seeking out these rarer than rare "cut-on-demand" releases can breathe a sigh of relief that these recordings made between 1958-1965 have been lovingly archived with a big beautiful 88 page book filled with liner notes, extensive histories, anecdotes, indexes, track-by-track commentary, photographs, and production information by Fahey follower Glenn Jones, who has worked for years on this project with a host of contributors. Here are 115 tracks, most of which are on cd for the first time.
It's hard to quantify how many of the originals were made, because Fonotone was a cut on demand mailorder label, meaning someone would have to order the title and the records would be hand cut (not pressed like they are today) from the master tape. Since each one was cut in real time, there were often slight discrepancies in the speed of the record, making each one a unique individual object. While Bussard claims he sold a lot of Fahey's records during his 14 year label lifespan, Jones was never sure if that meant 50 copies or one hundred or more, but given the scarcity of them in the collector resale market, Jones surmises that they might not have been more than 5 complete sets made. So there is a lot of gold to be discovered here. While some of the tracks are early recordings of Fahey Takoma-era classics like "Transcendental Waterfall" and "In Christ, There Is No East or West", there are a myriad of recordings attributed to Blind Thomas, one of Fahey's lost bluesman alter-egos, but unlike his more well-known alter-ego Blind Joe Death, Blind Thomas sang in a gruff world-weary manner, which we'll leave it up to the listener to decide if that is a good or bad thing. Our favorites are a few lovely collaborative tracks with flautist Nancy Maclean and folksinger Fran Vandiver, as well as a long beautiful instrumental track played with Indian instruments ("Western Medley").
But there is so much to pore over and obsess about here that any review we can write can hardly contain our enthusiasm and amazement over such a huge and immersive labor of love. Another score for Dust-To-Digital!!!
(Who, by the way, also just brought out an amazing 4cd boxed collection of vintage African 78s called Opika Pende that we have in stock too, and will endeavor to review on our next list...)
Album number three from one of our favorite forces to emerge in the world of electronica over the last several years. Their (his?) Kompakt debut, Here We Go Sublime, still stands as one of our favorite records of the last five years and this new one is making us think we probably have lots of great records from The Field to look forward to for a long time to come. The Field's hypnotic take on minimal techno has the ability to win over folks who might not usually find themselves listening to techno records, while at the same time putting those who do occupy that word into a perpetual state of bliss.
Looping State Of Mind finds The Field taking their trademark approach to repetition and harnessing it deftly to reach ecstatic levels of energy, yet also demonstrating a knack for evoking much needed breeziness into their sound. We can't wait for some serious late night drive-time with this blasting as we cruise over bridges and under freeway ramps, only paying attention to the road ahead and the blinking lights of the city that surrounds us. So damn good!
The metalheads around aQ, it seems, will always have a soft spot for stoner rock. There's just something about it that always does the trick, the Sabbathy grooves, the thick Kyuss-y sunbaked guitars, the wailing vox, that combination of heaviness and groove is pretty irresistible, but like any genre, there are way more mediocre groups than killer outfits, and in a genre that to some degree is derivative by its very nature, that makes it even harder for a band to sound original, or to at least cop from other bands and in some way make that sound their own. And as avid readers of the aQ list no doubt know by now, we have a serious thing for Freedom Hawk, whose self titled record was a runaway hit around here, one of Andee's favorite records of that year, and even though Allan tried to fight it for some reason, eventually he relented too and admitted he dug 'em too. We then had to track down their other record, the equally kick ass Sunlight - and now, after playing those to death, comes their brand new record Holding On, which as you might imagine, and as we desperately hoped, everything we loved about those other two records are present in full effect: massive riffing, wild shredding leads, killer grooves, pounding drums, epic jams, and those wailing Ozzy like vocals, sounding more like classic Ozzy than Ozzy himself has for years, and the songs, heavy, psychedelic, groovy, spaced out, slipping easily from smoldering dirges to galloping blasts of metallic heaviness, and ruling equally at both. Just check out the samples, and be prepared to dig them so much, that if you haven't already, you'll probably end up needing the other two records as well.
For all the avant weirdness and grim black heaviness we dig around aQ, we somehow find ourselves constantly returning to this lately. In fact, the second this week's list is finished and sent off, and there's no reviewing left to be done (at least for another couple days), odds are this is probably the record we're gonna throw on, which says a whole lot. Hooky and heavy, with actual songs that will get lodged in your head like crazy, the sort of hard rocking heaviness you wanna blast at ear splitting volume with the top down, and the sun dipping below the horizon, as you blast down the interstate.
Stoner record of the year without a doubt. But it might even make it out of the stoner rock ghetto and onto some top tens proper, you never know...
This is the debut from a one man black metal band from Germany with the odd moniker Fyrnask, and some of the coolest, weirdest most striking cover art we've seen in ages. In fact we were pretty much sold based on the artwork alone. A gorgeously drawn man, who on first glance seems to have a huge golden beard, but on closer inspection, those torrents of tangled hair are emerging from his eyes, and flip it over, and a similar explosion of 'hair' seems to be emerging from a body, like tentacles emerging from the face, and wrapping the body in their creepy golden embrace. We figured with artwork that weird and distinctive, the music would probably have to be too. And considering this is the same label that released the Echtra record (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) as well as those killer Spectral Lore records from a while back.
And the sounds inside do not let us down, the opening intro is a gorgeous buzzing droned out opener, all clean steel string guitar and warm shards of effulgent shimmer, an almost post rock feel to the slow build, when the second track does finally kick in, it's dense and gnarled and furiously blackened, the riffing a black blur, cyclical and hypnotic, total tranced out heaviness, which occasionally blossoms into soaring melodic majesty, before slipping right back into that relentless buzz. And within that song, the sound shifts constantly, with clean choir like vocals, a loping midtempo stretch before some spare fluttery almost folk, and a final blast of frenzied black riffing.
And so it goes, darkly ominous super cinematic drones give way to dirgey black doom, which in turn explodes into roiling black buzz, all the various parts hot through with subtle (and not so subtle) melody, some stretches sound almost choral, others swirly and psychedelic, still others creepy and otherworldly, the best parts of the record where the metal and non metal parts bleed into one another, like on the nearly 11 minute title track, which finds the metal slowed down to a dirge like crawl, while those choir like vocals surface beneath the swirling buzz, the result darkly dramatic and strangely lovely.
Seymour Glass's Glands Of External Secretion comes from the weirdo surreal art-punk primordial goo that birthed the likes of the Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Porest / Monopause, irr.app.(ext.), and Caroliner. The Glands loiter in the funhouse of culture, picking and choosing the most bizarre bits to appropriate into strange, nauseous collages and splattered songwriting, and as one could gather from the project's name, scatology is never far away. Reverse Atheism could hardly be called a treatise on anything, despite the multitude of religious, atheistic, and existential themes, as Glass hurls everything at his disposal against the wall with a hard splat and an oozing trail down to the floor. Everything gets treated with the same disregard and clownish pie-tossing attitude. Such was commonplace when Glass published the seminal magazine Bananafish, complete with nonsensical reviews that talked more about rhinoceros foot bacteria (for example) than the merits of some mediocre indie band.
Here on Reverse Atheism, there are reinterpretations of biblical tracts, old gospel hymns, and cult-spawn texts (from Elizabeth Clare Prophet and L. Ron Hubbard, no less) alongside punk-era tirades against God and religion - the latter include mutant covers of XTC's "Dear God," God's Gifts "No God," and The Birthday Party's "Mutiny In Heaven." Glass has long worked with the far more sensible singer-songwriter Barbara Manning, bringing her beautifully languid voice into the warbling, asynchronous, fucked-up loops of various plonks and deconstructed song. He's also employed help from Bruce Russell (Dead C), Alastair Galbraith, and Scott Simmons (Eat Skull) amongst lots of other guests and vagrants. In the calliope of tongue-in-cheek references, Glass uniformly slices apart everything - transcendence, salvation, the end of the world, conspiracy theories, mind control, Darwinism, and any pretty much everything in between. The result is more of a mess of entrails than anything cohesive; of course, that's the way Seymour Glass views the world. A compelling and convoluted album for sure.
It's always exciting to get something new on Sublime Frequencies, and in this case even MORE exciting, the third in the Guitars From Agadez series, and the second from the mighty Group Inerane, leading lights of the Tureg Guitar Revolution, and in this case, revolution might be an apt description. For with the joy of new music from Group Inerane also comes sadness, as the guitarist of the group, has been shot and killed in the ongoing rebellion battles, and Inerane mainman Bibi Ahmed barely escaped with his life from the very same battle.
Hard to imagine a group like this continuing to play music, and tour and perform, in the face of such constant dangers, but for Group Inerane, Group Bombino, and other Tureg Guitar groups, this music is their rebellion, their statement, how they speak out against the senseless loss of life and oppression, and it's that emotion and energy that seeps into every not, every chord, every vocal. Extremely powerful and intense, which is also what imbues the music of Group Inerane with an ineffable magic, that had us utterly entranced at first listen, and this record follows suit.
To replace their fallen comrade, they recruited Koudede, aka Absoulahi Maman, a legendary Tureg Guitarist in his own right, the resulting chemistry is indeed potent, the sound not much changed, but the energy and interactions of course subtly different.
For those new to Group Inerane and Tureg Guitar music in general, just check out the cover, a guitar player in a super fancy satiny robe, holding his guitar up over and behind his head as he presumably SHREDS! Inside, blurred photos of the band rocking out, and that's precisely what Group Inerane traffics in, high energy desert blues, psychedelic and cyclical, hypnotic and in its own way HEAVY.
The sound is warm and sun dappled, celebratory and effusive, plenty of twang and buzz and jangle, simple motorik drumming, intensely emotional and powerful vocals, with lots of whooping and cheering and call and response, emblematic of the hope and joy in the face of the grim realities all around them. The guitar playing is of course incredible, super buzzy and mesmerizing, cool little melodic tangles, locked in tight with vocal counterpoint, or a skittery rhythm, the sound manages to be both loose and free, but also tight and locked in, the recording here is live in a room, so the sound is raw and immediate and intimate, the vocals wreathed in natural reverb, the guitars ringing out, fleck of traditional folks music woven int the groups psychedelic hypnotic desert blues, and while every track is gorgeous, and mesmerizing, like all great guitar bands, it's when they let loose, stretching out the end of a song space rock style, and let the guitars howl and sing and get all tangled up in each other, jams that could, and should go on forever, and these guys definitely have that in them, and when it happens, it's like some glorious Tinariwen / Hawkwind collision.
As always, so so good, and like much of the music we hear from Sublime Frequencies, it's so much more than just the music, we lose sight of that sometimes, but these sounds, and songs, these are people's lives, and hopes, and dreams, and it's their way to be strong and never give in. And listening to this, beyond the sheer joy and exuberance of the music, it's humbling to share in those emotions, and in this music.
Gorgeous deluxe full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and plenty of liner notes. EXTREMELY LIMITED, and vinyl only (for now)...
Along with Laughing Stock, the final Talk Talk album from 1991, Ba Da Bing has also reissued on vinyl this breathless 1998 solo album from Talk Talk frontman, Mark Hollis. While most folks thought that Laughing Stock was perhaps the ultimate understatement from a band that went from bright Euro-pop sensations to clandestine and worried experimental minimalists, Mark Hollis' solo album (and perhaps final statement?) has taken that tendency even further. Severely recorded at hushed volumes, the songs were born out of months of improvisation with jazz and chamber orchestra musicians and then excruciatingly labored over and crafted into discreet compositions. Every lyric coming from Hollis's milky voice feels almost too painful to rise above a murmur, but exudes a powerful complexity that is not freely offered. This is a very tender and moving record that begs for close listening. Like Laughing Stock, it continues to amaze upon repeated listens to those who have the disposition to absorb its bracing spareness. It's not a light album by any means, but its emotional weight is secretive and uncompromising, begging us to focus on the subtle beauty of the rich muted atmospherics that barely cover deeper wounds. A rainy day record if there ever was one!
We were lucky enough to get a sneak peak at these new Neurot Recordings signees at the Bay Area premiere for the new Blood, Sweat + Vinyl documentary, all about independent record labels, focused on three of our favorites, Neurot, Hyrda Head and Constellation. To commemorate / celebrate, the screening was turned into a show, featuring one band representing each label, Evangelista for Constellation, Oxbow for Hydra Head and this trio Ides Of Gemini for Neurot. Since they didn't have a record out yet, we weren't sure what to expect, other than that metal scribe J Bennett played guitar, and when they took the stage, the shaved headed bushy bearded Bennet sat in a chair, hunched over his guitar, accompanied by two willowy women, both with long dark hair, both wearing what appeared to be white wedding gowns. The effect was striking, even more so when the fog machine came on and wreathed the band in smoke, and the sound was appropriately haunting and witchy, not so much metal as gloomy and ethereal, the drums simple and propulsive, the guitars washed out and warm, and the vocals, lush and layered, hazy and hypnotic, with lush swirling harmonies. The resulting sound reminded us of slowcore indie gloom outfit Warpaint, albeit a bit heavier, the sound being a bit more ritualistic, and the guitar occasionally (and quite suddenly) launching into full on black metal buzz, but instead of the rest of the music following suit, the brief buzzing blast soon dissipated leaving the song to return to its woozy mesmer. This is the kind of dark heaviness (or heavy darkness), that evokes Mazzy Star as much as The Devil's Blood or Blood Ceremony, if not moreso, the tracks here don't blast or pound or thrash, these or haunting funereal ruminations, witchy and otherworldly, hazy fuzz drenched dirges, a gauzy sort of ethereal doom, that is more mesmerizing than it is heavy, a blackened siren song that is utterly hypnotic, especially the last track, the main melody/hook stayed stuck in out head long after that show, and hearing these tracks again, that one especially, has us dying for a proper full length.
The cd is LIMITED TO 333 COPIES, packged in gorgeous metallic blue/silver sleeves, multiple printed panels, super swank, the tape is LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the J-cards on the same sort of metallic paper, and includes a sticker!
We flipped over this French/Italian fuzz/garage/noise pop combo after an aQ pal insisted we'd dig em. And dig em we did. So much so that we proclaimed "Odyssey Of Love" the opening track of their first record our jam of the year, and here it is months and months later an we find ourselves still blasting that jam regularly, along with the rest of the record.
And then out of nowhere came a brand new full length of J.C. Satan's peculiar brand of psychedelic noise pop, and if anything, this latest record cranks up the noise considerably, at least over the first few tracks, so the pop, while still most certainly present, is often buried beneath crumbling walls of guitar crunch, or strange sing song vox, or wild squalls of psychedelic freakout. Thick crunchy riffs, wild chaotic drumming, lots of jangle and soaring melody, the first half of the record fierce and frantic, the sort of thing that would have the crowd sweaty bouncing wildly, the sort of band that would be a perfect match for our own Oh Sees.
But as the record progresses, the noise seems to abate bit, revealing the jangle pop underneath, with the sound slipping from old school Modest Mouse to quirky Blonde Redhead, but their own twisted and slightly noisy take on both. Check out "Crystal Snake" with its weird slow build almost Sun City Girls sounding melodies all woven into some seriously heavy fuzzy garage rock crunch, or "Close To Me", all slithery jangle rock ballad, replete with crashing noisy chorus, or "Abandon" which takes the Beach Boys' dreamy surf pop and makes it even more dreamy, all hazy and druggy, or "In The Light", that sounds downright Beatles-esque, albeit a bit more warbly and lysergic.
The heavy buzzy noisy garage rock perfectly balanced by the more washed out and woozy dream pop, and yet another record from these guys (and gals) we can't seem to get enough of.
Here it is, the long awaited new album from blissed out shoegaze eighties retro pop master M83, aka Anthony Gonzalez, whose gorgeous records have long been HUGE faves around here, so we were pretty excited about this new one, even though we had already heard one track with just a wee bit too much saxophone, but once we started playing it in the store, we knew we'd probably end up digging it a lot, although the most mentioned comparisons we could come up with were bands like Thompson Twins, Peter Gabriel, and Men At Work!! So yeah, the eighties thing is in full effect, and the opening intro, with Zola Jesus, is a primo slice of M83 blissout for sure, all soaring synths, and swirling melodies, Zola Jesus' voice a perfect match for Gonzalez' Peter Gabriel like croon, and the lush eighties slow dance psychedelia he seems able to so effortlessly conjure up.
"Midnight City" is the aforementioned song, and listening to it now, the sax is not too bad, tucked away at the end and buried in the mix, and the opening is thick and distorted and crunchy, with thick Justice / Daft Punk like synths, over a strange, but crazy hooky chirping melody, the song slipping from hazy synthy slow jam verse to distorto synth pop blowout chorus, and yeah, there's a sax solo at the end, but all our favorite eighties jams had sax solos, so why shouldn't these? And while that track was an obvious choice for a single, cuz it sounds the most like classic M83, the rest of the record definitely leans more toward the Thompson Twins / Duran Duran / Howard Jones eighties radio pop side of the spectrum, which when done right, still sounds so good, and c'mon, this is M83, so for every bit of total retro pop, is a blast of superdistorted in-the-red almost witch housey synth buzz or hazy ethereal droned out shimmerscape.
We really can't imagine anyone who LOVED M83 before to hate this, but you really have to dig the sound of the eighties, and we mean the REAL sound, not the ironic lysergic reinterpretation of the eighties, we mean tracks that sound like you might have danced to them at your eighth grade prom, or blasted it in your mom's car on the way to the mall. That all said, Gonzalez has a knack for pop songs, and he kills it here, hooks galore, the sound soaring and epic and shoegazey one second, cheesy and synthy the next, but always crazy catchy, every single track sounding like the inspiring, rabble-rousing score to the ultimate final montage in some classic eighties movie about the outsider finally getting the girl or winning the big game. We could all use a little bit of that sort of inspirational dream pop in our lives anyway, right?
Second solo record from Preston Nunez, whose 'day job' is playing in cosmic synth drone outfit Scantily Clad, whose three cd-r's were all big hits around here. A little while back Nunez sent us some copies of the debut record from his new group Guisher, which while bearing virtually no relation to Scantily Clad, still totally hit the spot, a head spinning bit of slice and dice audio collage weirdness, rhythmic and groovy and noisy and all over the sonic map. So we weren't entirely sure what to expect from this new project, Mafouka, which definitely has more in common with Guisher than with Scantily Clad, but where Guisher was a relentless sonic barrage, Mafouka sounds more measure and composed, at least a bit, it's still a bit of a barrage, 14 songs in a little under 20 minute, short bursts of hypnotic soundscaping. The opening track is all woozy and warped, a rhythms created from what sounds like a needle scratching across the surface of a record, not to mention some slowed down beats, looped female vocals, shimmery synths, it's like a super raw, primitive home brewed Portishead almost, that sort of washed out, late night vibe, then the next three tracks, all clocking in at well under a minute each, offer up brief snippets of sound, from a layered and looped but of easy listening, to some dialogue heavy, drum addled ambience, to a killer chunk of super distorted dirgey doom, again laced with bizarre samples, until finally another song that breaks the 2 minute mark, a synthy distorted creeper, the sound panning from speaker to speaker, laced with chopped up bits of drumming, layered voices, warm swirling melodic shimmer, which leads directly into another twisted, surprisingly melodic loopscape, from which unfurls the rest of the record, a sprawling selection of primitive sampledelia, equal parts Art Of Noise and Negativland, but all woven into something much more moodily musical, a glorious bit of home brewed 4-track alchemy that in some way plays out like a bedroom indie pop Endtroducing, albeit a bit more freaked out and fractured.
More super extravagant home mad packaging, this time, colored jewel cases with the art printed onto clear stickers which are affixed to the front, no tray, the 3" disc affixed to the inside of the trayless jewel case, over some photocopied artwork pasted into the bottom, which is also visible through the back of the jewel case, which has yet another clear sticker affixed to it. LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!
Yet another full length from the crazy prolific Tim Cohen, mastermind of SF jangle poppers The Fresh & Onlys as well as the man behind weird one man black metal band Amocoma (released on Andee's tUMULt label), who was STILL not busy enough so started a 'solo' project, which was in fact a band called Tim Cohen's Magic Trick, but for this new album, a couple things have changed, now it's a proper band, right down to the name, and instead of perfect little 2 and 3 minute pop nuggets, this record is four long songs, the sounds shifting and sprawling, Cohen and company stretching out a bit, keeping much of the pop intact, but weaving it into much more expansive and experimental frameworks. This permutation of Magic Trick includes members of Thee Oh Sees, the Sandwitches and Citay, and Cohen and his cohorts unfurl some gorgeously lush folk, all glimmering melodies, hushed vox, strummed acoustic guitars, ethereal harmonies, the sound beholden to classic sixties psych pop for sure, but reimagined and filtered through Cohen's twisted pop lens, the opener jangly and dreamy, a seriously epic pop song, almost prog pop, and then about 10 minutes in the song shifts dramatically, and is transformed into a buzzing drone-y raga, hazy and psychedelic and darkly dreamy. And from there on out, the record continues on in a similar fashion, not shying away from abrupt shifts, or melding disparate sounds, "Daylight Moon" takes a strummy shuffle, and adds all sorts of progginess, some cool start stop arrangements, some jazzy psychedelic freakouts, but all wound around a delicate pop core.
"Clyde" starts out all hushed and strummy, rife with woodwinds, lush vocal harmonies, infused with a dreamy droniness, the song subtly propulsive but growing less so as the song progresses, evolving into a sort of shimmery drift, before the strangely jaunty almost cabaret sounding coda. And finally, "High Heat" begins with some Fahey style American primitive guitar, draped over a buzzing thrum, before slipping into a reverbed skeletal folk, the sound blossoming into something much more lush, almost like some sort of chamber pop, and then again, the song shifts into a dark drum heavy psych folk, almost dirgey, but still impossibly poppy, and laced with vocal ooh's and aah's and swoonsome soaring strings, Cohen and his crew managing what in most hands would be impossible, creating catchy, perfect pop that just so happens to be in the form of 10+ minute long epics. Almost makes us hope he never goes back to the 3 minute pop song...
Let There Be Drums! Whoo, cool to have this old fave reissued on vinyl! Especially with previous anthologies on Strut and Mr. Bongo now out of print, original lps of course also being hard to come by...
What the heck was the Incredible Bongo Band, you might ask, and what was so Incredible about it? Well, just listen to the soundclips of "Apache" and "Last Bongo In Belgium", we bet you'll recognize 'em. The Incredible Bongo Band are one of those almost anonymous groups who in fact contributed quite a bit to hiphop and dance culture, with many of their breaks being sampled literally HUNDREDS of times. In fact, it can be argued that IBB cut the "original breakbeats"! Kinda funny to realize that they were in fact Hollywood-based studio session players, led by producer Michael Viner (responsible for several Sammy Davis, Jr. hits), who came together to record chase music for the Ray Milland/Rosey Grier horror flick "The Thing With Two Heads" - and ended up putting out records now revered the world over by the hiphop/DJ community. Their debut "Bongo Rock" 7" sold over two million copies in 1972; that is, apparently after they pulled the cover that showed how white they were and replaced it with a closeup of racially unidentifiable hands playing bongos. During the course of their career, supposedly such big names as John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, and Glen Campbell all dropped by to play a little.
The band's main bongo player Jim Gordon (who co-wrote "Layla") later went cuckoo and killed his mom, but despite that tragic association, the IBB's music is super fun, and more than a little kitschy, good not only for DJ sampling purposes but also enjoyable groovy listening on its own. The 8 tracks on this reish of their 1973 full-length include both funky originals, and equally bongo-riffic cover versions, like the aforementioned surf classic "Apache", also Iron Butterfly's heavy psych epic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", believe it or not (lotsa room for a bongo workout in that one). And who can forget "Duelling Bongos"?
The former core trio of post rock combo Tarentel (Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Danny Paul Grody and Trevor Montgomery) have been on a roll lately, releasing tons of solo, side projects and collaborative efforts! Danny and Trevor are both in The Drift and synth duo Believer, which both have new releases out or coming soon. Danny has got a new solo album on Students of Decay that'll be here shortly. Trevor has been on the last two Date Palms records and released the Isidore Ducasse lp with Jefre, and Jefre has released recently a solo album on Type and a record with his other outfit, The Alps on Mexican Summer. Hardest working local musicians? Maybe so now that the three of them have reunited together in this new outfit, Moholy-Nagy (rhymes with mirage, hence the title of the album, Like Mirage). Named after the Bauhaus artist and professor whose photogram experiments and industrial design aesthetic have made him known as one of the fathers of Light Art, the band have made a gorgeous record of light-searching cosmic excursions utilizing synths, piano, pastoral guitar and drum machine. Dreamy and drifting but also focused and grounded, Like Mirage hones the strongest sensibilities of each member into something truly collaborative. And though cosmically charged music has been the modus operandi of all three members through most of their side and solo projects and labels, Like Mirage manages to sound completely distinctive from their other projects which is a strong indicator of the masterful musicianship each one brings to the table. Beautiful stuff!
Dunno how we missed it when the Sundazed label put out this sweet reissue last year, but better late than never to list the early '70s heavy psych awesomeness of Morly Grey - any psychedelic rock freaks out there who didn't know about it should be super stoked!
This Youngstown, Ohio band's sole, privately pressed lp came out in 1972 and has long been considered a desirable underground artifact of hippiness and heaviness, the sort of thing that actually lives up to the collectors' hype, with original copies being relatively rare and expensive (and bootlegs prevalent). It's a blend of fuzzy acid rock guitars, mellow West Coast-y folkiness, and proggy ambition (the trippy title track, which incorporates an instrumental arrangement of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", takes up a whole album side, at over 17 minutes in length). Plus a healthy dose of flowers and beads bedecked pop that harks back to the '60s sounds of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Jefferson Airplane, all acts no doubt influential upon the Morly Grey guys, even as they display nascent headbanging riff rock inclinations as well. So while a song like "Who Can I Say You Are" may mostly be all delicate and melodic (with vocals worthy of Bobb Trimble), it also kicks in with the heaviness at times too. That song, by the way, you may have heard already on that great Forge Your Own Chains: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges compilation that came out a couple years ago.
Elsewhere, there's parts that remind us of krautrockers Agitation Free, and spacerockers Hawkwind... while lead-off cut "Peace Officer" could almost be early Blue Oyster Cult at their most psychedelic and proto-metallic.
We remember a long time ago, this was available as a compact disc reissue via Italy's Akarma label, but this nicely digipacked Sundazed reish is much superior, being totally legit and more than complete, as it includes a bunch of rare (and excellent) bonus tracks, totalling an additional 28+ minutes of music! There's also enlightening liner notes, based on interviews with surviving band members, by Doug Sheppard of Ugly Things magazine.
aQ pal Phil Franklin turned us on to this mysterious Danish crew MX (believed to have something to do with the two main members obsession with BMX bikes, but that's another story we won't get into), and we were quite surprised and taken by what an amazing and flat out bizarre record this is! This is an anthology of recordings from the past ten years, and we're wondering why we haven't heard of these guys before, but we're so glad we know about them now! Our Danish language skills are lacking, so we can't really tell exactly what is going on or how many players are involved, so of course it leaves the music open to speculation. It sounds like it could be a whole bunch of people, or the careful tape manipulation of just a couple. But the sounds are dirty and lo-fi, recorded on four track and feature mostly short rhythmic compositions of acoustic string instruments (banjo, guitar, and violin), with distorted wheezing accordions, fuzzy pulsating synths, clattering percussion and cultic chanting. Occasionally strange tape manipulated vocals that sound like old folkway recordings of pygmys or some far-off South Asian tribe will appear, along with brain-melting primitive electronics effects. It reminds us a lot of the "ethnological forgery" of groups like Harappian Night Recordings and Sun City Girls, the hippie shamanism of Daniel Higgs and Ur-Dog, as well as the collective free-folk ingenuity of Kemialliset Ystavat. But for all the strangeness and noise, the songs seem more composed than improvised, full of beautiful otherworldly melodies and a stunning sense of DIY psychedelic exotica.
LPs are hand silkscreened on repurposed thrift store record covers. We only have about 8 of these and while we're trying to get more, it might be awhile until we see a restock, so act fast!
This one hardly needs much of a description. SF garage pop darlings Thee Oh Sees teamed up with Aussie gloom poppers Total Control, 4 songs each, all pretty dang great! Thee Oh Sees side is appropriately rambunctious and chaotic, wild and noisy and jangly with plenty of surfy twang, dollops of reverb, John Dwyer's almost cartoonish high pitched echo drenched yelp, super melodic and catchy, and with Thee Oh Sees, you have to know that there's much more going on than what's just on the surface, sure it's sweaty and wild and invokes much shaking and bouncing, but the band are tight as fuck and weave intricate layers and strange harmonies, and the songs are surprisingly complex, slipping from frenzied avalanche of noisy sound to almost fifties sounding reverby shuffles, but just check out the last few minutes of the final track, "Blood In Your Ear", with its swirling falsetto vox and soaring melodies all suspended amidst lush swirls and shimmers, pretty goddamn divine.
Total Control counter with their own brand of gloomy garage pop, another clutch of songs that ranks up their with their best, dirgey, droney, minor key, haunting and moody, peppered with blasts of full on distorto punk garage crunch, culminating in their last track, a gorgeous minimal low slung slither of layered guitar drones, rumbling bassline, laid back weary vox, a darkly depressive broody ballad that explodes in the second half into tense angular soft cacophony, that ends way too soon.
Cool cover art. Includes a download card too.
While not as instantly memorable or chock full of timeless pop classics as their debut, Dusk At Cubist Castle, the Olivia Tremor Control's second and final record, originally released in 1999, has now been reissued by the fine folks at Chunklet as a super deluxe double lp with LOADS of extra bonus (mp3) material, and listening to this record again more than a decade after its release, we're quickly realizing that being only "almost as good" as Dusk, still means it's about a million times better than most other records.
Olivia Tremor Control were one of many bands who were a part of the Elephant Six collective, which also included Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples In Stereo and a whole bunch of others. Elephant Six bands were notable for two things, a sonic nod to the sixties and classic psychedelia, all wound up in a sound that was equal part modern indie jangle and old school tripped out psych, and a penchant for experimentation, and of all the E6 bands, the Olivia Tremor Control seemed to have an experimental streak a mile wide, peppering even their perfect-est poppiest numbers with all manner of freakout and strange instrumentation. And while the band focused more on the 'pop' on their classic debut Dusk, relegating the trippy weirdness mostly to intros and brief interludes, we had previously mentioned (in our original review way back when) that on Black Foliage, the "ambient" weirdness came closer to overindulgence, but again, with fresh ears, and a little time since our last listen, that overindulgence doesn't really sound all that overindulgent anymore, in fact, it positions Black Foliage, as rife with Beach Boys vocal harmonies, Sgt. Pepper's baroque excess, and mid-'70s Eno-esque surreal pop as it's predecessor, as way better than we remember it, that weirdness almost making it a more interesting, and certainly more tripped out, record, a seriously crafty concoction of psychedelia - the Olivias able to create near perfect pop songs and then dose 'em with lysergic clusters of experimental tinkering. A sound that still sounds impossibly fresh today.
Needless to say, if you have a thing for jangly psychedelic pop, like Dusk, this too will be right up your alley, and if you're already a fan, you might want to grab one of these quick before they're gone, cuz they've been remastered and include TONS of extra stuff via mp3 download. The records come housed in an eye popping, full color, heavy duty Stoughton sleeve, with a printed insert, and a download coupon, which not only includes downloads of the record itself, but also OVER AN HOUR of bonus material, including a track that was left off the original record due to time considerations, a handful of B-sides, some unreleased audio experiments, unreleased live sessions, a Velvet Underground cover from a VU tribute released in 2000, a live set on NPR, an unreleased track with special guest Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum and more! Wow!
Be warned though, we have a bunch of these, but our suppliers are sold out, so these may be the last copies we're able to get.
Huzzah! This absolutely wonderful album is now, at long last, back in print. If you've already got one, well, let this be a reminder to go listen to it again if you haven't in a while, it's still as lovely and poppy and psychedelic and well-crafted as it was when first released in 1996 and became an instant AQ favorite. If you don't have it, and especially if you haven't heard it, be thankful that it's available again!! The OTC's masterpiece, Music From The Unrealized Film Script Dusk At Cubist Castle (to give it its full title), is just about as perfect a slice of home recorded, neo-psychedelic pop as you can find. Beach Boys inspired harmonies. Lysergic Sgt. Pepperisms galore. Great, glorious songs. Unlike some of their other, experimental or ambient efforts, here the Olivias didn't obscure their songwriting smarts with unnecessary weirdness. Sure there's surreal interludes (and surreal lyrics) but the pop remains paramount. Next to the output of Neutral Milk Hotel (with which really few things can compare), certainly a classic in the Elephant 6 discography.
We haven't heard from Canadian outfit Picastro in ages, in fact, we sort of assumed they might be no more. In past reviews we described their music as having a "somber heaviness" which makes them a pretty good match for doomgaze duo Nadja, and indeed the two groups team up for this lp collaboration, and from the sound of it, the A side seems to be more of a Picastro record, with Nadja guesting, and the B side a Nadja record with help from Picastro. But both sides are pretty great.
Picastro's 'side' is a series of shorter tracks, a woozy sort of post rock, detuned twang, male and female vocals, plenty of weird distortion, there's a Tom Waits sort of junkyard vibe to a lot of the sounds here, which also reminds us of the late great Reeks And The Wrecks (whose lost first lp is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list). The sound shifts from creeping slowcore to a sort of jazzy drift, all shimmering strings and muted percussion, all wreathed in a folky ambience, the whole thing like some abstract dirgey drone folk slowcore, and the sort of thing that reminds us of Codeine and post Phleg Camp weirdo country combo the Reveries.
The flipside is a single sidelong track, which should be the first hint that Nadja are in the driver's seat. The second would of course be the thick swirling buzz, rife with acoustic guitar (Picastro?), the sound muted and washed out, before blossoming into full on distorted shoegazey dirge, blown out, heavy and hazy, but still melodic and darkly pretty, the two groups a perfect match, conjuring up a sweet bit of dreamy sorta folky doom bliss!
Includes a download coupon!
Death metal weirdos Portal return with another blast of incomprehensible sonic destruction, an avant garde, sepia tinged nightmare that perfectly indicates how appropriate a name like "Portal" is for a group like this. It's like stepping into another world - in this case, Australia, home to all kinds of unprecedented and bizarre metal groups like dISEMBOWELMENT, Halo, and Nekrasov. Simply put, Portal are fucking weird. Not only that, they are intense, and while no one will mistake this for anything other than scary as hell metal, the insane song structures and bizarre instrumentation - harsh and totally unique riffing, cyclonic drumming, and super guttural death growls (the only sort of "normal" thing about the group, but in this context they still sound pretty much unlike anything else) - are something different altogether. It's like whoever is playing guitar decided, after completely mastering his craft, to throw out all knowledge of standard guitar chords and build the band's sound off of hithero unknown chords that are sour, sludgey, and just completely fucking out there. One wonders just how the hell the band remembers where they are going, but somehow they get there like only they can. The overall sound on Swarth, and pretty much all of Portal's releases, is like a buzzing insect caught in a torrential downpour on the moon, or in some parallel dimension... or something. If you haven't figured it out yet, it's pretty hard to pin this stuff down, which is certainly a quality we appreciate in a genre plagued with formulaic ripoffs. So take comfort in the fact that there is hardly anything you could have ever anticipated in a metal group and go from there. It might just change the way you look at things - ESPECIALLY death metal!
On the last Psychic Ills full length, these spaced out dronerock drifters has changed their sound pretty substantially, ditching much of their Spacemen 3 worshipping drugginess and spaced out rocking for something that we had heard folks calling "doomtronica", which we have to say, we found pretty appealing, but on this latest one, they seem to have mellowed out a bit and returned to the shadows, unfurling song after song of smoldering slo-mo shimmer, all muted guitar strum, hushed vox, whirring organs, super spare percussion (what sounds like bongos), and coolest of all, what sounds like a reverb drenched jaw harp (!), which plays the solo on opener "Midnight Moon". And while "Mind Daze" picks up the pace a bit, it's really only just a bit, a hazy softly propulsive shuffle, all woozy and laid back, sort of stonery and later night feeling, but with some thick, buzzing distorted guitar woven in, adding a thick patina of scorched psychedelia to the proceedings.
And so it goes, the record was definitely perfectly titled, cuz this does sound like a Hazed Dream, and the song titles: "Sungaze", "Incense Head", "Mind Daze", "Dream Repetition" definitely further hints at what's in store for the listener, a dark brooding fuzzy spaced out psychedelia, that sounds like Wooden Shjips after downing a mess of downers, and speaking of "Dream Repetition", it's only two minutes, but what a gorgeous chunk of layered psychedelic guitar drone, churning and undulating SUNN-like rumble wrapped around gauzy organ shimmer and some strange processed barely-there rhythms. So good. A practically perfect collection of dreamy druggy late night bliss out come down jamz for sure...
As Radiohead have evolved into a band much more connected to electronica than guitar rock, we knew it was just a matter of time until they released a remix album. And their latest album King Of The Limbs, really was the Radiohead record most ripe for remix, so after several 12" releases featuring many of these remixes, they've finally put together a great two disc collection of those tracks, all songs from King Of Limbs, remixed by folks like Caribou, Four Tet, Actress, Jamie XX, SBTRKT, and lots more. While there should have been no doubt, we were relieved to find this wasn't about making cheesy dance remixes of Radiohead songs, but instead they all honor and respect the mood of the album from which these tracks come and create nuanced remixes much more suited for dark rainy nights than brightly lit dancefloors.
Moody and moving, just the way we like our Radiohead.
As many of the various lysergic pop weirdos and lo-fi audio alchemists move toward poppier and less fucked up sonic climes, it's nice to know we can count on Rangers, aka Joe Knight, to keep the warped alternate dimension FM radio druggy eighties retro pop whathefuck fire burning bright, this latest record another collection of glammy lo-fi pop that in some other world would/could/should have been all over classic rock radio in the future. The opener, in different hands, could very well have been a dreamy bit of blissy pop, if say Big Troubles in their current incarnation had a god, we can picture it all shimmery and crystalline, but here, it's raw, and fuzzy, murky and lo-fi, the sounds careening from speaker to speaker, the effects in-the-red, the sound crumbling and distorted, swaths of swirly synth drifting alongside the buried reverby croon, but all the noise and damaged 4-track malfunctioning can't disguises that Knight definitely knows his way around a pop song. But just so you don't get too comfortable, he follows it up with the 13 minute long ADD short attention span "Zeke's Dream", which does start out all James Ferraro style drug pop weirdness, but then it keeps getting weirder, swirling distorted vocals, the guitars getting crunchier, and then it's almost like someone switched the channel on the radio, the song transforming into more of a slow jam, this one peppered with strange sci-fi streaks, and blown out echoey vox, and then it happens again, and becomes a gloomy dirgey ballad, that sounds like it's melting inside the speakers, or Knight has 6 different people gradually detuning each string on his guitar, and then it happens again, the song becomes a John Carpenter synthscape, that morphs into a bit of krautrock style kosmische musik, but there are voices and electronic squiggles everywhere, but it's not over yet, some police sirens signal the shift to the final movement (?), a warped lounge-y bit of fuzzy groove, that ends in a gorgeous bit of psychedelic tangle. And we're only two songs into the record. But that gives you an idea of what's to come, more twisted druggy pop, more warped home brewed psychedelia, and whatever it is that is born of merging the two.
Most definitely recommended for fans of James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, John Maus, and all the other similarly warped lysergic pop alchemists out there...
As much as we love distorto noise rock, and heavy crunchy blown out garage rock, and swirling FX heavy lysergic pop, we also love dreamy, shimmery, jangly sunshiney pop, sans noise and effects and experimentation, just perfect major chord, breezy vocals, simple jangle, washed out summery dream pop. And while on past records, Real Estate did show hints of the current crop of reverb drenched pop combos, a little psychedelia, a pinch of lo-fi warble, on this most recent record, they've cut the cord completely, and instead, created something that requires we haul out adjectives like sparkling, and glimmering, and glistening. We mentioned in a past review, that these guys were barely even underground, in the sonic sense, sure the sound is a teensy bit lo-fi, and rough hewn, and for however perfect pop this is, no one will mistake this for FM radio Rolling Stone magazine pop, but it's about as close as a little DIY band can get. We're reminded a lot of the late great Field Mice, the same sort of hushed whispery crystalline pop that just seems to float weightless, the sounds lush and lilting and so lovely. There's definitely some urgency here and there some subtle crunch, cuz really this is not all that far removed from past Real Estate records, but it is definitely continuing the group's move away from home brewed and lo-fi toward something much more pretty and polished, and we like it!
We've been fans of New Zealand's The Renderers for years and years, since back in their Flying Nun and Ajax days in the '90s; more recently, they played one of the SXSW showcases we cosponsored with WFMU, and -almost- did an instore performance here just last week, which poor scheduling unfortunately nixed... but perhaps you saw 'em at the The Hemlock that night, or on another date of their current US tour in support of this fine new release of theirs on the Ba Da Bing label, A Rocket Into Nothing.
With eerie winds howling from their guitar amps, and moody urgency to their rhythms (that's Pumice's Stefan Neville on drums, this time 'round), The Renderers once again strike that special NZ balance of downer-pop indie-rock and noisy, darkly psychedelic effects-laden abstraction they do so well. The married, guitar-wielding duo of Maryrose and Brian Crook share vocal duties as usual, trading off song to song across the record (we must confess, we tend to prefer Maryrose's more melodic, dreamier singing to Brian's rougher, occasionally outsider-y stylings). Sometimes weary, sometimes rocking, it's all quite hypnotic and haunting, this album vaguely rustic, yet with a shoegazing spacerockiness to it worthy of its "Rocket" title...
The only real complaint we can make is a minor one, regarding the packaging, in that the graphic design seems a little careless, and the proofreading a little lax; for instance, what's up with all the excess commas littering the credits in the cd booklet?
We really didn't know what to expect from these guys (this guy), just what we read on various music blogs. This was one of those records that was getting hyped to high heaven, which definitely has us wanting to not like it. But damn if if this isn't some seriously gorgeous darkened psychedelic IDM. Yeah, it's dance music, but not the sort of music you'd hear on any proper dancefloor, this is the sort of mysterious electronica that is made to be the soundtracks for mysterious late night drives, strange encounters, dimly lit dives at the top of stainless steel skyscrapers, the sort of dark skitter that leaks from the headphones of darkened figures as they move through the shadows, the sounds at once lush and lovely, but raw and lo-fi, the low end buzzy and glitchy, the beats stuttery and gristly, the sound slipping from almost droned out mesmer, to near ambient shimmer and back again, never fully erupting into full on beat heavy crunch, but there is plenty of crunch nonetheless, the beats sounding like decaying tapes of chirping crickets one second, some sort of rumbling engine the next, while those beats are surrounded by swirls of sci-fi FX flutter and creaking post industrial thrum, the sound blurry and bleary and fantastically tripped out, the sort of electronica they don't really make anymore, and actually come to think of it, never really did.
Fans of the various mutant strains of electronic music would do well to check this out, but even the beat-phobic and dancefloor averse might find much to love in RxRy's twisted electronic underworld.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!
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