1972, Argentina: hard rockin', heavy bloozin', proto-metal political protest band Piel de Pueblo ("Village Skin") record and release their one and only album, which we recently discovered via this reissue, being intrigued by its cover painting featuring a blood-dripping Earth whirling through space, orbiting a bummed-out Sun that's crying a single tear...
Piel de Pueblo make some prog moves here - there's electric violin on a couple of the tracks (reminding us of early UK heavies High Tide) - but mostly it's all about the wailing wah-wah guitar solos, and distorted fuzzed-out riffage (also reminding us of High Tide, for that matter).
"La Tierra En 998 Pedazos" is the psychedelic epic here, at 9 minutes plus (thus finding time for some gentle melodiousness amidst the riff-rock), but most of the other songs are right around 3 minutes or so, rockin' out for the duration. Fans of Mexico's Los Dug Dugs at their most "Loco" should investigate, likewise if you're into Piel de Pueblo's fellow countrymen Pappo's Blues...
Booklet includes Spanish-language lyrics, band photo, and a brief note about the history of the band in both Spanish and English.
One of our favorite instores in recent memory was a super special appearance by East Coast psych folk outfit Pigeons, who we already loved on record, but who proved to be even more entrancing in person, performing an amazing set for a small but utterly rapt audience. Their sound over the last few records has gradually grown more and more lush, more dreamy and druggy, and more shoegazey. We thought their last record Liasons was basically the culmination of this evolution, but then along comes They Sweethearstammers, which manages to up the ante on Liasons in pretty much every way. It's weirder, trippier, the strange sort of Portishead-y downtempo electronic elements even more twisted and strangely incorporated into the group's newly expanded sound, the vocals are more powerful, confident, often heavily effected, the bass is fuzzy and driving, adding a weird sort of gloomy pop vibe, from the very first track on They Sweethearstammers we knew we were in for something special. Sounding like some strange hybrid of lost seventies acid folk, some outsider British trip hop and Mazzy Star, all blurred into a gorgeously hazy drug drenched chunk of fuzzed out folky jangle pop. That buzzing bass driving everything, even mirroring the guitar melody here and there, acoustic guitars over jangly chorus laden electrics, everything layered and sun dappled, and of course some killer super distorted psych leads, all woven into a super catchy pop song. And that's just track one. It only gets weirder, and keeps getting better from there.
"Tout Nulle Part" is all gloomy and low slung, with some strange zither like buzz, some surfy twang, a little Morricone, a little Serge Gainsbourg, that driving fuzzy bass still holding everything down, the vocals lush and sensuous, the vibe dirgey and droney, but still strangely and hauntingly poppy, the song gradually coming apart as it goes, becoming more and more abstract, eventually dissipating in a cloud of electronics and detuned melodies. "Dead Echo" opens with some reverbed drumming, some super distorted vox, and what sounds like electric piano, or at least heavily effected guitar, the drums doing a sort of slo-mo 'funky drummer' shuffle, everything hazy and washed out and dreamily druggy, sounding a bit like a folkier, more tripped out Blonde Redhead. "Chances" is a strange one, big production, sassy glamorous vocals, some wah wah guitars, plenty of dubbed out production, what started out sounding super commercial, seems to grow more and more strange and lovely, eventually transforming into a cool murky bit of droney doom pop, before slipping right back into that opening groove. "Red Friend" is some lush perfect folk pop, very Beatles-esque, but even more lovely and lysergic. "Tournoi" reminds us of Ween, which is not a bad thing, it's the strange production, and the weird guitar sounds, maybe it sounds more like Mazzy Star with Dean and Gene Ween backing them up, either way, it's some gorgeously druggy psych pop for sure. "Lauren" starts off all tripped out experimental industrial, feedback, and rhythmic thumps, detuned twang and sci-fi shimmer, before slipping smoothly into some dark folk mesmer, while "The Welcome" is a lush murky sprawl of dirge dreaminess, a sort of muddy psych ballad, laced with strange acoustic guitar tangles, and lush layered drones, maybe the most deliriously mesmerizing track on the record, which leads right into closer "Cogville", which finishes things off with a brief bit of swirling tripped out horn laden dream pop chamber psych.
So great, not that we expected anything less, we just didn't expect something so far our and so far from where they started. So utterly and whole heartedly recommended.
As the witch house genre falls out of favor, bands that were part of the first wave (and second, and third�), seem to be reinventing themselves, often without changing their sound all that much, just rebranding it as something less flavor-of-the-month, but witch housers Pink Playground have definitely pushed past the strictures of witch house, and thankfully dragged much of what we loved about that stuff with them, and fashioned it into a sort of ethereal shoegaze dream pop, with skittery skeletal beats, angelic female vox, and lots of swirling synths, and billowy clouds of blurred melody, but they've also added some buzz and crunch, channeling classing noise pop shoegazers like Jesus And Mary Chain, as well as nineties outfits like the Swirlies, their jams delicately balanced between the sweet and dreamy, and the blown out and psychedelic. After a brief intro, that is definitely witch housey to these ears, the band launch into "Ten", that sounds like M83 if they were a bedroom dram pop band recording for Slumberland, the sound softly fuzzy and jangly, the sweet simple pop smothered in warm layers of buzz and thick tangles of melody, but as the track progresses the noise gets cranked up until the band are spitting out a serious din, bit even then, it's still impossibly sweet and poppy, which is pretty much how the whole rest of the record plays out, fuzzy, dreamy shoegaze noisepop, that should have fans of all things buzz and jangle, Slumberland and Spin Art, My Bloody Valentine and A Sunny Day In Glasgow, in buzzpop dream jangle heaven.
This song has been floating around for a couple years now, but it's so fucking cool to get it on wax along with an awesome remix as well. "Chase The Tear" may be the most uptempo and potentially dancefloor ready track we've ever heard from Portishead, without losing any of the sensuality and seduction that is always at the core of their songs.
The song was originally released as on online only benefit for Amnesty International (and proceeds from this 12" will be going to AI as well!)
It's one of the most exhilarating tracks the group has ever made, it's a total kraut-synth show stopper! The remix/cover version by Doldrums on the B side is fucking cool too.
NOTE for mailorder customers, if you're considering ordering this: Unfortunately this week's shipment from Matador/4AD/XL arrived today with one corner of every single piece of vinyl in the box slightly bent, argh. So, don't order this now if you're super anal about such things. We'll get replacements next week. Folks buying this in person in the shop, of course, can see for themselves if they mind the bent corner or not. Sorry!
Fans of the Japanese underground progcore "Zeuhl" two-piece Ruins have been waiting... and waiting... it's been a while since the last Ruins album. Probably 'cause mastermind (and drummer) Tatsuya Yoshida, busy with a million other projects, has apparently never found a suitable replacement for the other half of the duo, bassist number four Sasaki Hisashi having left after 2002's Tzomborgha. But now, he's decided, he doesn't need another bassist. He doesn't need anyone. That's right, he can simply (or rather, complexly) play all the parts his own self!!! Now, we'd not have thought it possible if we hadn't seen him perform solo before, octopoidally attacking drum kit, bass pedals, keyboard, headset microphone, guitar, etc. But he's a maniac, and he can do it. Sure, presumably this studio recording utilized overdubs (it must have) but we wouldn't be at all surprised if he's able to do pretty much the same thing live, Thrones style, somehow.
So, here's the record. 23 tracks, about half of 'em brand new, utterly over the top compositions, the other half being "alone" versions of earlier Ruins tracks (including such old faves as "Grubandgo", "Cambodia", "Dharskrive", "Hyderomastgroningem", "Stonehenge", and "Sanctuary")... plus, as bonus tracks, two of the Ruins' now obligatory medleys - a "Prog Rock Medley" and "Hard Rock Medley", both gleefully ADD insane. Oh, and as another bonus, the surprisingly lovely & placid piano piece "Notturuno".
So, we're not sure if Ruins Alone is the way Ruins will be from now on, or if he's still just waiting for the right bass player to turn up, but for now anyway, if you want Ruins, this is it. And Yoshida (of course) pulls it off! Pretty freaking amazing. Y'know how Ruins already sounded like way more than just 2 people? Same goes here, dude's a one man multitude. While hyper-spastic as always (doing it all by himself sure doesn't slow him down!), Ruins Alone IS a wee bit different sounding than most previous Ruins, in that instead of heavy 5-string bass you get shredding, sizzling keyboards, and that's what makes the many tracks here that are renditions of past Ruins numbers especially interesting to hear for those familiar with the originals. The sound is still quite heavy and fuzzy but also uniquely synth-y, it's like some sort of crazy new wave, Nintendo version of the Ruins here, retro-futuristic in a remarkably "now" sounding way.
IF you're new to Ruins, you certainly could start with this, but we'd recommend checking out the proper duo recordings as well (Burning Stone, if you can find it!!). This as a taster, though, would help determine if you're crazy enough to become obsessed with this "band" or not. And longtime fans, YES you want this. More proof that Yoshida rules, even alone!Which we've known since his solo debut, Magaibutsu, back in 1991...
In a day an age when so many bands are getting huge due to hype from blogs, or one YouTube clip, The Sandwitches are a really refreshing reminder of how gratifying it feels to follow a band who are establishing themselves the old fashioned way. Playing shows around town and on the road, releasing tons of singles/ep's/collaborations, and refining their chops and songwriting prowess along the way. We've been huge fans of everything they've released so far and this brand new 7" keeps their perfect record alive.
"The Pearl" is an awesome campfire spell of a song, where Sandwitches take the influence of folks like The Roches and Fleetwood Mac and place them in a much more rustic and raw setting. The B side "Benny's Memory Palace" is a really cool slightly warped track that makes us think of Sinead O'connor on K records covering Billy Bragg. Once again these fine ladies hit the bullseye with yet another awesome slab of wax.
Even though we reviewed a lot of em, we had no idea Segall had been cranking out singles at such a crazy clip, nearly 20 tracks from 2007-2010, and that's not even counting the full lengths. And if you're a faithful reader of the aQ list, you probably already know we're a huge fan of Segall's fuzzed out jangle and crunchy garage rock stomp, and it's kind of great to have em all gathered up in one place, especially considering that we somehow missed a whole bunch of these.
Just check out the opening salvo, "Where We Go", 90 seconds of fuzzy, murky jangle and pound, all murky and fuzzy, with some weird percussion and some reverby sing along vox... then there's "It", which is also pretty far out, super lo-fi, and way dynamic, with a strange stop start arrangement, and a KILLER chorus. And then "Sweets" which is of a classic garage groover, but if those three songs don't knock your socks off, well, there must be something wrong with you.
We could go track by track, but pretty much everything here kills, some highlights include "Caesar", which, starts out all strummy and jangly, with some seriously fuzzy bass, the vocals a reverbed croon, shifting into a falsetto here and there, at one point getting all tangled up in effects in a twisted distorted psychedelic freakout. There's even a super rocking PIANO SOLO! But all that stuff is just icing, on what is a killer hook, and a crazy catchy jam. And the B side from that 7", "Bullet Proof Nothing", which is a Simply Saucer cover, is a little more grimy and buzzy than "Caesar", sounding almost like the Stooges "Search And Destroy" slowed down to a garagey dirge, but again, Segall wraps that jangle and crunch around a hook most bands would kill for. There's also Segall's cover of Thee Oh Sees' "Maria Stacks", a song which might just be Andee's favorite Oh Sees jam, not just cuz it's hooky and catchy, but it also immortalizes AQ pal and amazing artist/zine-maker Maria Forde. Ty finds a way to make the song a bit more lo-fi and fucked up sounding while still holding on to the great melody that makes the original stick like it does. We also dig "Cents", which still ranks as one of our favorite Segall jams ever, but there's also "Booksmarts", which we had never heard before, but is definitely now also in the running for best Segall jam, in fact, the more we listen to this, the more contenders there seem to be. Lots of the A sides from various singles did end up on the full lengths, but some of these versions are pretty dramatically different. Segall also does a pretty killer version of the Gories' "I Think I've Had It", with some chiming jangly guitars, lo-fi drum pound, and some crazily distorted vox.
In addition to the singles, there are also a handful of demo tracks, which are gloriously low fidelity, the yelped reverbed vox super reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees, which makes sense as Segall and Thee Oh Sees have shared numerous stages and records, and all except one have never popped up anywhere before, and even in their raw form, sound as good as anything else here.
Obviously if you dig Thee Oh Sees and Mikal Cronin and Bare Wires and the rest of that Bay Area garage rock crew, you probably already own most of Segall's records proper, and need this too (trust us), but if you somehow don't, this is as good a place to start as any!
NB. This is specially priced at $12.98 instead of the normal $13.98 for the next few weeks only!
Whatta ya know, it's a Christmas album from She & Him, the superstar duo of M. Ward, and actress Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous, 500 Days Of Summer, New Girl). If you've heard She & Him's previous outings then you know the idea of a record of Christmas songs is not so far fetched, as their trademark is making really sweet and cuddly indie pop. So now they've given us a sweet and cuddly indie pop version of holiday classics. Could be the perfect gift for that aunt, coworker, cousin, who has proven particularly hard to shop for...
Finally, we got enough of these to list, the darkly dreamy lp debut of Stefanie Franciotti's hazy and gauzy solo outfit, Sleep Over. A new light in the field of female-led synthesization, a la Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, Sleep Over is a stunning mix of Grouper's washed out and oceanic distortion, Cocteau Twins-ish pop romanticism and uncanny gothic dream soundtrack. We've been fans of Franciotti since her days as singer in aQ faves, Silver Pines, but in Sleep Over she has found her true calling as an experimental sound composer, synthesizing voice and sound in chillingly bright sonic environments and ambient textures. Gorgeous!
In the year since its release the Soft Moon's debut full length has become a rare unanimous favorite here at aQuarius, and many other places too we would imagine. The songs were immediately gripping, but over time we came to the realization that the album is, dare we say, pretty dang perfect, and within the sea of similarly styled bands who would describe themselves as "dark" that record is one that will stand out as a classic. We often find ourselves wondering how something could be so goddamn amazing, managing to sound both familiar and unique to itself. Soft Moon mainman Luis Vasquez has taken things to the next logical step by assembling a full band to bring these songs to the live stage, and with the arrival of this brand new ep, Vasquez and company effortlessly show the world that there is more where that came from. The only issue we have here is Total Decay's short running time - but then it's an ep, so who are we to complain. Clocking in at under 15 minutes, we are already salivating for the next Soft Moon platter, but like the two singles that preceded the debut album, where we were given some months to digest the tunes and think about what might come next, Total Decay works in setting a mood while you hunger for what's around the corner. And yet, the ep also works well as a brief but wholly contained slab of music, beginning with "Repetition", where a murky post-punk bassline sets the flow over steady driving rhythms and frantically atmospheric synths that are as chillingly sexy as they are ominous. "Alive" would be a good place to start for someone who has never heard this band, displaying all the Joy Division / Wire / whatever influences they have merged into a sound that really belongs only to them at this point, with Vasquez's strange shouted whispers (or whispered shouts?) occasionally soaring into the disembodied falsetto that has become one of the band's trademarks. No doubt the standout here is the title track, which lurches forward midtempo with an industrial buzz and provides the perfect score to wandering alone through all the creepy abandoned parts of town. The heavily effected vocals feel like the voice of some sexless robo-narrator guiding you along and offering no guarantees that you won't get your ass kicked by whoever or whatever happens to be lurking around in the shadows as beautiful buried synths bring all kinds of strange melodies into the mix. The final track, "Visions", is a claustrophobic percussion workout with more creepy ambience that, again, has most of us desperately freaking out in advance for the next full length. Guess we'll just have to be patient, but until then Total Decay will be on constant repeat.
A 4 song stomp through Sonny Smith's various musical alter-egos and genre-hopping style. In collaboration with local SF gals The Sandwitches, Sonny composed these 4 songs for his 100 records projects last year where he wrote and recorded 100 songs under the guise of different bands and singers and asked local artists to design the covers. Each of the 4 artist covers for the songs are represented here in full color (including our very own Scott Hewicker, who painted the titular cover!), as well as a comic book and coupon for digital download. Embracing themes of drowning, death and redemption, these tracks showcase Smith's dark folk, blues and country sides, mythologizing a real-life near-death experience into a moral epic of salvation and grace.
Following close on the heels (hooves? no that's not right either, what do you call mammoth feets anyway?) of Steel Mammoth's Radiation Funeral lp from earlier this year, comes another vinyl-only slab of "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" madness from this Circle side project. On Nuclear Rebirth, as with their previous lp, Steel Mammoth are indeed a bona fide metal mutation, not merely a poppier Circle in old school leather 'n' spikes drag. "Punkmetal nightmare" is what they claim to conjure on this album, and they're quite accurate in that self-assessment! Nihilistic, nonsensical, noisy, "nuck-leeyr" thrashing and bashing is what you get here, along with more awesome comic bookish cover art featuring their horned and helmeted mascot, and the usual confusional album credits.
It's irradiated '80s speed trash-thrash action at its bizarre best, twelve trax with such OTT titles as "The Dark Behind The Dark", "Hate Medicine Lucifer", and "Undead Facts, Now". Wha? Well, one can debate if Steel Mammoth's non sequitur laden NWOFHM style is parody or not, but if you are banging your head (and we think you will be) then they've won the debate regardless.
However, we should point out that elsewhere on this very list, we've got the Alternative Tentacles reissue of Voivod's 1984 demo, and we respectfully submit that anyone buying Nuclear Rebirth should think about also purchasing To The Death 84 as well. We're pretty sure the Steel Mammoth guys would be super stoked to see both items in your cart...
Submissions was first described to us as "Bobb Bruno's Godflesh project", which while now having heard it is maybe not entirely accurate it was definitely enough to get us to order a bunch. And the truth of what it sounds like is in fact even better. For those who don't know, Bobb Bruno is probably best known at this point for playing guitar in fuzzy retro pop superstars Best Coast, but he was also responsible for the ultra heavy Goliath Bird Eater, and also played in nineties indie rock outfit Polar Goldie Cats, and we recently listed his first solo record Mellowdramas. Submissions is in fact a duo, Bruno, and his partner in industrial heaviness Paul Kneejie (The Pope, Bipolar Bear), and the two do conjure up some serious sonic Godflesh, with primitive programmed rhythms, churning murky riffage, and weird processed vox that sound more Buttholes Surfers processed garble than Godflesh bellow, which is most definitely not a bad thing. Besides the nineties industrial vibe, the songs also have a sort of gloomy goth feel to them too, like if you swapped in real drums and deep crooned vox, you'd have some sort of old school deathrock, but as it is, Godflesh, or Pitchshifter, are probably the closest comparisons. But unlike the relentless pound of the 'Flesh, Submissions do let the guitars fade out sometimes, leaving long stretches of droning guitars, they also add all sorts of strange electronics, and the slower tracks get downright atmospheric, thick swirls of low end rumble and moaning monk-like vox drifting above blurred dirges and robotic plods, with some of the more propulsive jams sounding downright gothrock. Closer "A Face" might be our favorite, a super atmospheric dirge, about as balladic as this stuff can get, the guitars dialed way back, the drums skeletal, all rumbling and droning and spaced out, no vocals this time, instead a strange sample drifting above the murky machinelike minimalism, doomy and bleakly atmospheric, reminiscent of nineties noise rock too, it's a lumbering, utterly mesmerizing doomic dirge that manages to be the most ominously heavy jam on the record.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Fewer things could bring more delight for us kraut and space prog heads than a 2cd anthology of Tangerine Dream rarities compiled by Edgar Froese, and for such an affordable price! Froese, the one mainstay of the band through 13 different lineups (the band including in their ranks at one time both Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze), has provided a compelling overview of the musical evolution of the band from their psychedelic roots to their later period as electronic film score stalwarts and everywhere in between.
The double disc set begins way back before TD, with their 1967 pre-incarnation 7" single as The Ones, a band more rooted in the sixties psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead than the spacey sounds they embraced later on. But the real highlight of this set is the inclusion of TD's rare first 7" single from 1971, "Ultima Thule", an epic two part space rock excursion that begins in stratospheric Hawkwind territory in part one, but in part two takes a Magma like instrumental prog trajectory, that prefigures the minimal electronic direction the band would take through records like Electronic Meditation, Zeit and Alpha Centauri. The rest of disc one explores these sci-fi themed gaseous realms of gorgeous brooding ambience.
Disc two covers the bands' later, mostly early eighties output, which saw the band more as composers of action film music with a definte increase in rhythms and sequencers, but still with a spacey electronic edge. While John Carpenter may get all the credit as progenitor of all the latter day eighties arpeggiated synth worshippers like Jonas Reinhardt, Majeure, James Ferraro, and Umberto, Tangerine Dream was equally influential in this regard. A lot of the later period Tangerine Dream output can be sometimes cheesy, but the careful curation of this compilation shows there were also plenty of gems as well. This may prove to rethink the general attitude that TD had completely lost the plot, when they started turning to film score commissions, and rhythmic dance music in the eighties and nineties.
With one or two exceptions, most of this music here, as far as we can tell, has not been released on any of their major records, but there is little information to tell if these tracks ever saw proper release at all. So this is a very worthy exploration for the newly curious as well as for seasoned fans. Highly Recommended!!!!
It would be a stretch, even for us habitual hyperbolists, to proclaim Tasmania as the next eccentric origin for unusual music to join the ranks of Finland, New Zealand, and Iceland. But there have been two cultural exports from Tasmania which have blown our collective minds: those being the black metal misanthrope Striborg and the elemental sound ecologist Tarab (aka Eamon Sprod). No, there is nothing really connecting the two other than the fact that they originated from the tiny Australian island; and even now, Sprod has migrated across the channel to Melbourne, but the case could be made that the compacted Tasmanian environments of bleached deserts, scraped coastlines, and tempestuous rain forests still tug at Sprod's heart. These landscapes which Sprod documents, agitates, and amplifies, sound as if they herald the end of the world, which may speak to a communal Tasmanian bleakness shared with Mr. Striborg. This allusion might be validated through the few interviews conducted with Sprod that highlight his nihilist traits; and maybe in that, there is some black metal oozing in Sprod's veins.
Anyway, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second full album as Tarab, yet in his small discography of manipulated field recordings and agitated objects, he's proven himself a masterful sound artist, on par with all time Aquarius favorites Chris Watson, Toshiya Tsunoda, Matt Shoemaker, and Loren Chasse. But even in comparison to those esteemed artists, Tarab's work is considerably darker, as you might imagine with that end of the world reference posited earlier. Field recordings are central to the Tarab sound, augmented by the complementary sounds of Sprod tossing leaves, rust, dirt, and shattered glass, all of which get mulched into seamless compositions swollen with expansive low end drones and electrocuted vibrations. As on his first album Surfacedrift, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away navigates barren landscapes between the industrial wasteland and the wilderness of the outback, with jolts of shattered glass and heavy rains breaking up the tactile sounds and sympathetic frequencies that make this album so incredible. Very highly recommended!
The cover for Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a marvelous piece of subversive design. The four members of Throbbing Gristle look quite dapper, Genesis dolled up in a tailored white suit jacket, Cosey smiling happily in her pert miniskirt, and Chris & Sleazy both wearing rather conservative sweaters, but they had situated themselves on the cliffs of Beachy Head (a notorious suicide spot on the south coast of England) with a rented Range Rover in the distance and in a variation of this scene, a nude male body lies at their feet in the grass, presumably dead. This design (executed by Sleazy through his day job at Hipgnosis Design) was a sneering act of contempt for British society that failed to see the horrors and injustice which boiled just under the surfaces of congeniality and civility.
Both Second Annual Report and D.o.A. were ostensibly compilations of recontextualized material both from the studio and extracts from live recordings, but 20 Jazz Funk Greats - the third proper album from Throbbing Gristle - feels like a conceived album from beginning to end, even with all of its dead-ends and contradictions. The album opens with the title track, where a slow-motion drum machine and synthesized bass tones strut with a mechanical swagger with Cosey's discordant cornet blurts in the distance and predatorily whispered vocal extracts of what could be some smooth jazz DJ trying to set the mood - with that mood being a sickening, menacing threat. Such is also the case, with the lugubrious "Tanith" whose atonal rolling basslines churn against strange electronic blorp and tinkling chimes, which leads into "Convincing People" - whose metronomic synth sequencing became the signature for nearly every 'industrial' band that claimed TG as an influence. The detuned and distorted guitar from Cosey smears the mechanical edges while Genesis wailed through the lyrical repetitiveness which articulated to the effect that if you say it enough, people will start believing you. A hammer might help too. The minimalist club hit "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is one of the most memorable TG songs, and for very good reason as TG offered a much-imitated disco frugality through their insistent drum machine, squiggling sequencing, and Cosey's whispered vocals. Immediately following this is a nightmarish narration of the aftermath of a night of partying too much in "Persuasion", as disembodied female yelps of sexualized horror sporadically punctuate a slithering Genesis donning the role of a low-rent pornographer. "What A Day" is another 'industrial' template with a corrosive loop of cybernetic thumps forming the only backdrop to Genesis barking as loud as he can in a diabolical take on a footballer's chant. The finale "Six Six Sixties" finds Cosey's monochord guitar awfully prescient of Sonic Youth and Bailter Space in the drone intensity through distortion and rhythm, with Genesis reciting a suitably bleak monologue above, rounding out what is arguably the best of the Throbbing Gristle albums.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions apparently appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material, although we've not cross referenced these facts yet). The two versions of "Discipline" (which were released as a 12" on Fetish Records in 1981) suitably conclude this disc, as that was the track that TG also performed at the end of their sets, with the heavy drum machines whipping the crowd into a frenzy and Genesis barking hysterically for some order. Such were the wonderful contradictions of Throbbing Gristle. About as a high a recommendation as we can give.
Neither the third nor the final album from Throbbing Gristle, D.o.A. marked the decided progression of a band that earlier produced the cauldron of sinister noise found on Second Annual Report and would lead to the subversive disco of "Hot On The Heels Of Love" on 20 Jazz Funk Greats. TG frames this album almost entirely upon the William S. Burroughs strategy of the cut-up, with found sounds being the inspiration for, counterpoint, or inclusion in the musical program. For both Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, the chance operation of overlapping seemingly unconnected elements offered the possibility of hidden, unconscious meanings in those 'texts' which could be pushed further through aesthetic means. What P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle found in their aleatory combinations was a foreboding, societal malevolence, to which their sounds could be read as both response and antagonist.
The sounds which introduce the first track - "I.B.M" - might have been familiar to anyone with an early '70s era computer that used tapes for data storage, especially if that data-cassette found its way into an audio tape player. The blurting, flanged lurches of electronic noises speak a de-humanized language of the machine, one which TG augments with their own synthesized noise and atonal fragments as a seance attempting to make contact with the ghosts that may or may not live in those machines. The most infamous appropriated text found on D.o.A. is "Hamburger Lady" - a thoroughly creepy piece based on a letter written to the band about a woman who was suffering under the extreme pain from half of her skin being burnt off of her body. TG grinds a low-frequency VCO pulse upon a very slow throb, whilst an unsettled melody blurts through a fence of tremolo patterns, with P-Orridge reciting the text of that letter in the distance. Sickening doesn't even begin to describe how effective this track is even three decades after the fact. The track "Dead on Arrival" parallels what Conrad Schnitzler was producing at the same time on his darkened electronic album Ballet Statique with its mid-tempo drum machine, unsettled percolations, and angular jabs of dissonance. But the bulk of D.o.A. is filled with found-sound excepts including the self-evident found tape of "Death Threats" and the recording of mumbling children on "Hometime."
The cd version of this remastered reissue contains a bonus disc, mostly of live material ending with a single. Here, the live tracks cover much of what's found on the Live Volume 2 compilation, and the single in question is "Five Knuckle Shuffle / We Have You (Little Girls)", the former of which reprises the mechanical sequencing from "Dead on Arrival" with much vicious bass and guitar noise slashing throughout, and the latter being a screaming exorcism of vocals and electronics that must have planted the seed in William Bennett to make a whole career out of screaming at his audience above a painful squalor of noise.
A five knuckle shuffle on my throbbing gristle! Yup, it's a crass reference to masturbation uttered by one of the associates of Coum Transmissions, the mid-'70s, British transgressive performance art ensemble whose happenings involved extreme rituals of sex, vomit, and blood, causing quiet a stir in the press, art world, and beyond. By 1976, the principle members of Coum - Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter, and Peter Christopherson - rechristened themselves Throbbing Gristle, as a musical outfit creating a confounding, bleak electronic parallel to the trajectory of punk. Over the next four years, TG released a handful of albums and toured constantly, always attuned to a coy semantic juxtaposition of gruesome, pornographic, or morbid imagery next to that which was cheeky and absurdly comical. Monte Cazazza's catch phrase "industrial music for industrial people" spoke not only the mechanical, de-humanizing mirror that TG was holding up to western culture, but also to the band's downright British industriousness. As such, the band's in-house label, Industrial Records, addressed all of this and more.
The Second Annual Report was actually the first release for Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records in 1976, with the deliberately confusing title and catalogue number (IR 0002) alluding to then non-existent First Annual Report (which was recorded in 1975, although shelved by the band at the time and released as semi-official and un-official bootlegs from the '80s onward). The album is a collection of live recordings, showing the variations on two tracks - "Slug Bait" and "Maggot Death." The former is an unsettled, murky, barely formed set of lumbering tones with grim guitar drones and spluttering electronics, with Genesis caterwauling as he has done for close to four decades now. Sampled interviews with a child molester and a murderer dot the charred soundscape from the recording made in Brighton, marking a common application of appropriated 'true crime' objects which litter so much of the Industrial Culture which came after TG. "Maggot Death" is just as amorphous as "Slug Bait" with a morass of monochromatic bass-distortion and blurting electronics. The side-long "After Cease To Exist" rounded out the B-side of the original LP, and was a suitably disfigured soundscape of scraping violin, atonal guitar bursts, and dark electronic excursions. While each of these tracks is rudimentary in form and function, they lay the foundation for what would come next in TG's career.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions do appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material), as well as the deliciously counterpointing single "United / Zyklon B Zombie." Aside from the perky Kraftwerkian percolation of "United", the second disc is overloaded with cacophonic dive-bomb squalls of noise with slashed vibrations of electronics, madman barked vocals, flanging guitar distortion, and decentered Burroughs-inspired collages of spoken texts, fitting with the cruel delirium of what's found on The Second Annual Report proper. Difficult listening for sure, but after all, "Entertainment Through Pain" was Throbbing Gristle's motto!
We've definitely mentioned it before, but it's worth reiterating, as much as we love all strains of twisted blackness, of damaged and demented whatthefuck black metal, of warped outsider grim stumble and blur, the weirder and the more baffling the better, we still love and treasure TROO GRIM BLACKNESS done in the old style - Burzum, and Emperor, and Immortal, and Mayhem, and Satyricon, the Norwegian elite, and while there are tons of black metal bands these days, few capture the same sort of black energy, the same sort of grim chaos, the furious buzzing blackness, none of this 4 track lo-fi whine and buzz piddle, we're talking massive squalls of black buzz that sound like a black plague swallowing you whole, drums like the thundering hooves of the four horsemen, vokills straight from the pits of hell, all blurred into a soul shearing black fury, no experiments, no ambience, no twisted gnarled whatever, just grim black buzz. Which brings us to Norway's Throne Of Katarsis, who for 9 years have kept the black flame burning, and even now on full length number three show no sign of letting up, or fo changing their formula, which we essentially outlined above. This is classic Norwegian black metal, modern maybe, but as far as we're concerned these guys could have released this back in 1994 and been included in that ultimate black metal pantheon, where they so obviously belong. Hell, they're in our pantheon for sure, every new record another batch of grim black bliss. They do offer up a bit of clean singing, but it's more of a Viking croon, and it somehow suits the sound, whether ToK are frantically buzzing and blasting, or unfurling lumbering doomic slabs of trudging black crush. These guys rule, this record rules, and if you're after some modern true Norwegian black metal (and why wouldn't you be?!), you could NOT do better than this.
Inarguably an all-time classic of sixties psych. Peru's Traffic Sound might not be the most famous band from the era, but those in the know, know. At long last we have a cd reissue of their second album, Virgin, a masterpiece recorded in 1969. It's brought to us by the Repsychled label from their homeland, responsible also for that Tarkus reish we raved over a not long ago. And it's about time. Maybe you saw our review last year of the Traffic Sound compilation Yellow Sea Years? It included only one track from this album (the hit single in Peru "Meshkalina") for reasons we can't fathom, except that you'd want the whole thing anyway, and here it is! Psychedelic pop/prog perfection, featuring both dreamy melodies and some freaked out, flutey jazz/krautrock sounding passages, including a dose of backwards weirdness and several tracks of acoustic beauty. They were contemporaneous with better-known American and British acts such as the Beatles, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and Love, and influenced by the likes of them no doubt. But on Virgin, Traffic Sound make the case for their own spaced-out, groovy, early-prog creativity. And in fact this was the first album by a Peruvian rock band to feature all-original compositions. As albums of the era from Latin America go, this is one of the essentials, particularily if you've been digging, say, Mexico's La Revolucion De Emiliano Zapata, or any of those awesome psych titles from Brazil that we've seen lately...
Repsychled has some interesting packaging notions, this is in a sort of under-sized cardboard digi-folder thing. It seems like each title we get from them is in some different, non-standard sleeve. In any case, for this official reissue they've gone to the master tapes and done a careful remastering job, and the cd booklet is packed with vintage photos and suchlike.
Trash Talk are PUNK ROCK. And we mean punk rock like some howling feral mix of Fucked Up / Converge / Coalesce, that sort of churning almost metallic punk, the guitars MASSIVE and so heavy, the drums pummeling, and TT have killer dueling vox, one a frenzied almost shriek, the other a more melodic bellow, bit together they make the sound super distinctive. And did we mention CRAZY hooky, this is the sort of punk rock no one really makes anymore, the songs clocking in at around 90 seconds, the sort of stuff that would whip up a pit in seconds, but totally sing-along-able, the sound is epic, the production is kind of weird, but crazy LOUD, and the songs are all over the place, sort of proggy actually, some parts just popping up for a few seconds, others grinding away, the sound occasionally metal, sometimes total D-beat, but again, always impossibly hooky, relentless riffing, feedback everywhere, there's a reason folks are flipping out over these guys, we sort of are too, and odds are even though this single is on the short side, you'll find yourself spinning it over and over and over.
Packaged in super thick nice black and white sleeves, with a printed fold out poster / lyric sheet!
Troum's second installment in their "Tjukurrpa" trilogy is self-evidently subtitled "Drones" (and makes us ask, the first one wasn't?). Since their days in the prolific isolationist ensemble Maeror Tri, the two members of Troum continue to masterfully
We LOVED the previous Umberto album, From The Grave, and are stoked that he/they/it have finally returned with another full length packed with oodles of Goblin-y goodness, just in time for Halloween!!
But the sound of the Expo 70-associated Umberto is not strictly that scary, at least not all the time, in fact, like Goblin and other '80s Italian fright-film soundtrackers, most of the scary stuff here is really just an *underlying* un-ease, a sinister suspenseful undercurrent over which more "groovy" stuff gets down. And way more groovy this one most definitely is, some serious haunted dancefloor action, or horror movie disco, or whatever you want to call it, but Umberto has for sure upped the funk/groove quotient, lacing the usual cocktail of thick, tense, pulsing synth throb, minimal motorik rhythms and heavy ominous drones with plenty of funky basslines, crunchy modulated keyboard buzz, soaring synths, chanted voices and propulsive grooves... Here and there, the sound gets all stripped down leaving just gurgly, crumbly distorted low end peppered with spaced out booming rhythms, or creepy ambient atmospheres, but the songs tend to slip quickly back into haunted shuffly rhythms, woozy horror movie atmospherics, ominous strings laced funky grooves and dark descending bass blarp.
The second side begins with one of those tracks that sounds like the music that always introduces us to the main character in all those seventies thrillers, the little girl playing with her dollies, the old woman in the garden, the sound is tranquil but subtly sinister, here it's a music box like melody, plinking dreamily beneath haunting strings, and soft swirls of creepy voice like synth, total horror movie soundtrack shivers for sure.
After that it's back to wah guitars, chiming bells, groovy Italo funk haunted dancefloor grooviness, but this time with some cool washed out M83 style female vocal textures, a shoegazey gauze over that propulsive Goblin-y groove.
If we had to pick a single song that was THE ONE here, it would probably be "Someone Chasing Someone Through A House" which sounds exactly LIKE THAT, pulsing throbbing synths, electronic squelches, deep ominous drones, dark swells, foreboding and creepy and tense and SCARY!
The album ends with an upbeat track entitled "Everything Is Going To Be Ok", all sun-coming-up, yay we survived the zombie onslaught good cheer & cheesiness. The sort of music that plays over the closing credits, or even better, over the final shot which lulls you into a sense of false security, before a decaying hand bursts through the ground, or a beast explodes from the water and drag our heroine out of the boar, some sort of shock to let you know that evil won't stay buried... which of course usually leads to a sequel, and we are definitely looking forward to the next installment of groovy Gobliny sonic scares from Umberto!
Analog Africa strikes gold once again! Just when we thought we might need a little break from '70s African psych/funk reissues, we're reminded again just how much amazing music was recorded without seeing wide release, sounds that so deserves to be heard and blasted loud and proud! This time out Analog Africa put their crate digging skills to work on the raw beginnings of the Burkina Faso sounds recorded between 1974-1979. With its geographical roots running through the Sahel, these sounds incorporate Afro-funk, Islamic rhythms, and Malian guitar sounds. It might sound cliche, but there is really no other way to describe the songs on this collection without using words like smoking, blazing, raw, and on fire. Not a record you want to listen to softly, these are songs you want to blast as even the slow burners on here cut right to the core. We had never heard any of these sixteen tracks before, and with the awesome 44 page booklet that accompanies this release we now get to not only listen but learn about amazing music we had very little knowledge of beforehand. Isn't that what being a music lover is all about, so damn rewarding!
Weird, murky drone and darkly introspective goth-ambient sounds from the Austin indie-electronic underground. Brain Club is a series of mixes compiled by Jesse Jenkins (Silver Pines, Pure X/Ecstasy, Thousand Foot Whale Claw) and Kyle Dixon (Survive, Heathen Earth) of unreleased tracks by Austin-based groups (at least for this inaugural edition), most of whom we've never heard of before, but after checking this out we're really excited to know more about them.
The first side is more ambient with tracks mixing into each other beautifully. After a brief clip of a found spoken word recording by the mysterious "The Artist", Daniel Hipolito's Smokey Emery, the one project here we've reviewed in the past, appears with a short outdoor ambient industrial recording made with multiple tape machines that sound like far away drones recorded in a sewage tunnel which segues into VC Childkraft's soft focus "Magnetik Rose", a ghostly pitch-shifted piece of electronic clusters that sounds like a wind-soaked lullaby. Thousand Foot Whale Claw's shoegaze ambience of "Lost In Those Dunes", brings in a slow-motion crest of gorgeous guitar feedback culminating in the final track of side 1, Heathen Earth's witch-house instrumental of bleak hollow synths, echo-y drums and incidental crashing noises.
Side 2 has three more composed electronic tracks, the first a live track by Bodytronix which sounds like a Dam-Funk instrumental without beats. "Reverie" by Jake Schrock is probably our favorite track and it's also the longest. Sounding like a ballad composed by Roedelius, Vangelis, and OMD, it's pretty melancholic synth composition hits that sweet spot of uncanny eighties nostalgia without trying too hard. The final track by Phantastes called "Flight of Stares" is like last call at the Bat Cave, a murky instrumental goth dance anthem that channels Soft Cell or Alien Sex Fiend filtered through some druggy hazy processing. So good! We can't wait for more volumes if they're as good as this one!
Limited to 300 copies, these won't be around too long, so grab them fast. Comes as a pinkish-grey unlabeled transparent smoke colored vinyl in a hand-printed cardstock half-sleeve wrapped in an oversize ziplock plastic storage bag.
Jean-Claude Vannier is best known for his amazing work as an arranger and producer for some of French pop's greatest stars like Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin, Francoise Hardy, and Brigitte Fontaine. We also got a taste of his singular, warped and mind melting musical vision when Finders Keepers unearthed his fucked up masterpiece from 1972, L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches.
Now they've dug deep into his vaults for this short but sweet (under half an hour) collection of rare, unreleased archival recordings from 1968-1973, that demonstrate what a master of mood and sound Vannier is. With tracks that range from tribal and trance inducing ("L'ours Paresseux 1969") to the perfect soundtrack for an absurdist cartoon ("Claquez Klaxons") to a chant filled show stopper that sounds like an Ella Jenkins record doused in acid ("Le Ballet Des Accouchesuses"). You can imagine how folks in the Stones Throw crew, or the late J Dilla, would be drooling over the chance to sample so many of these tracks. Vannier's music is like an amazing crossbreed of David Axelrod, Raymond Scott, and Joe Meek, but with such a pronounced French sensibility.
Kurt Vile's most recent full length has been reissued as a deluxe double version, the second disc a brand new ep (also available on its own as a vinyl 12") featuring tracks recorded during the same sessions, including a Bruce Springsteen cover! Read more about the ep at the end of the review, but first let's reiterate what we've said before about the record proper...
Kurt Vile can seemingly do no wrong. The momentum of the last few years has only strengthened the Kurt Vile-ness displayed on Smoke Ring For My Halo, full length #2 for Matador after the not-so-surprising success of his asskicking Childish Prodigy album. Kurt's increased stature was enough to bring in hotshot producer John Agnello, who ups the fidelity a bit while retaining the DIY approach and style that brought Kurt to everybody's attention in the first place. Yep, the results are pretty stellar, further solidifying this dude's standing in the rank of current American songwriters. He somehow manages to sound both contemporary AND classic. The guy is for real, and this is by far the best thing he has released... so far, anyway.
Smoke Ring For My Halo is the kind of album that gets better with each listen. It's production is laid back but totally pro, and the cast of supporting musicians includes Meg Baird from Espers, Mike Polizze of Purling Hiss / Birds Of Maya fame, and of course, KV's band the Violators. The camaraderie of this Philly crew totally shines through, and boy does it sound fucking GOOD. A skillful use of noise and other bits of experimentation are worked effortlessly into these impeccably crafted songs, the result of someone who can turn any simple melody into a bad ass classic.
The album begins perfectly with "Baby's Arms", a beautiful heartfelt number with a nice dose of melancholy that immediately announces its author's total confidence in his abilities. Next up is "Jesus Fever", riding out with an easy rocking groove that should explain why Matador snapped KV up. You can see how Kurt just oozes out music when you read the lyrics to songs like "On Tour", which one would imagine are a direct reflection of what it means to be Kurt Vile. Many - wait, scratch that - ALL of these songs are presented as hazy and coolly detached from reality, like "Society Is My Friend" with its lonely western vibe carried forward with shimmering 12 string guitar and spacey mellotron, and the solo fingerpicked number "Peeping Tomboy". The record closes with "Ghost Town", which is dramatic in a Midwestern sunset kind of way. YEAH! In a music world filled with more imitators than originators, Kurt Vile occupies a unique place and his identity is unmistakable. That is why he, and this record, completely rule.
Vile's latest ep of gorgeous downer folk / classic rock psychedelia, So Outta Reach, is included as the bonus disc here, and as mentioned above, features a handful of tracks recorded during the same sessions that produced Smoke Ring For My Halo, so it should come as no surprise that these tracks sound exactly how you might expect, as if that record were just six songs longer (which in this cd version it essentially is), and listening to these tracks now, all of them pretty great, it's hard to figure out just why they didn't make the cut at the time. Opener "The Creature" is so good, we might like it more than anything on the record proper, all dark fingerpicked guitar over shimmery drones, simpler shakers and pounded kick drum rhythm, Vile's vocals laid back and weary, the song dark and melancholy and so catchy, the bridge especially, a gorgeous tangle of fuzzy folk, which leads right back into the droned out psychedelic folk drift. The rest of the record follows suit, mixing Vile's underground leaning with a sound much more mainstream, big guitars, classic rock arrangements, in some ways this reminds us a little of a fuzzier more psychedelic take on the latest Arcade Fire, which makes sense as both Arcade Fire and Vile have an unabashed love of Bruce Springsteen, which Vile indulges here with his own version of Springsteen's "Downbound Train", which is pretty true to the original, just a bit more fuzz guitar, and Vile's distinctive slacker vox, and of course the wild psychedelic freakout at the finish, but if you can imagine Springsteen via Vile, you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on here, and odds are if you dug Smoke Ring, you're gonna want this too. Even if it means buying Smoke Ring all over again...
This latest ep from downer folk / classic rock troubadour Kurt Vile, features a handful of tracks recorded during the same sessions that produced Vile's most recent full length Smoke Ring For My Halo, so it should come as no surprise that these tracks sound exactly how you might expect, as if that record were just six songs longer (which in the cd version it essentially is, since it was included on a new version of Smoke Ring), and listening to these tracks now, all of them pretty great, it's hard to figure out just why they didn't make the cut at the time. Opener "The Creature" is so good, we might like it more than anything on the record proper, all dark fingerpicked guitar over shimmery drones, simpler shakers and pounded kick drum rhythm, Vile's vocals laid back and weary, the song dark and melancholy and so catchy, the bridge especially, a gorgeous tangle of fuzzy folk, which leads right back into the droned out psychedelic folk drift. The rest of the record follows suit, mixing Vile's underground leaning with a sound much more mainstream, big guitars, classic rock arrangements, in some ways this reminds us a little of a fuzzier more psychedelic take on the latest Arcade Fire, which makes sense as both Arcade Fire and Vile have an unabashed love of Bruce Springsteen, which Vile indulges here with his own version of Springsteen's "Downbound Train", which is pretty true to the original, just a bit more fuzz guitar, and Vile's distinctive slacker vox, and of course the wild psychedelic freakout at the finish, but if you can imagine Springsteen via Vile, you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on here, and odds are if you dug Smoke Ring, you're gonna want this too.
So Outta Reach is available on its own as a 12" single, but if you want the cd version, you'll have to buy the new double disc version of Smoke Ring, which includes the ep as the second disc.
NOTE for mailorder customers, if you're considering ordering this: Unfortunately this week's shipment from Matador/4AD/XL arrived today with one corner of every single piece of vinyl in the box slightly bent, argh. So, don't order this now if you're super anal about such things. We'll get replacements next week. Folks buying this in person in the shop, of course, can see for themselves if they mind the bent corner or not. Sorry!
We're still obsessing over Villalobos and Loderbauer's recent double disc of super electronic minimalism, all sourced from various ECM recordings (a recent Record Of The Week), we play it constantly like crazy, we weren't sure what to expect from this new 12", but it features two new tracks from the duo, this time incorporating the music of an African group called Tshetsha Boys, and for the first few minutes, we really didn't hear anything, just some super cool, sleek, ultra minimal and skeletal techno, pulsing and hypnotic, but as the track progressed, little melodies seemed to surface, snippets of voices, bits of percussion, looped, and truncated, and blurred a bit, a little effects, a bit dubbed out, but the song began to sound subtly African, the melodies lilting and slowly adding warmth to the otherwise cool electronic shuffle.
The flipside is a whole different story, BIG beats, very housey, at first we weren't hearing any of the Tshetsha Boys, until we realized the main melody was in fact the borrowed element, Villalobos and Loderbauer deftly weaving that looped cyclical element into that pulsing pounding big beat.
Cool stuff.
The far out French-Canadian sci-fi metal institution Voivod, legendary geniuses at both raw punkish thrash and advanced psychedelic prog, recently brought us an excellent live album, Warriors Of Ice, their first recording without the presence of late, great guitarist Denis "Piggy" D'Amour - although of course he'd had a hand in writing the songs, all old Voivod classics. It gave us reason to look forward to their future (studio) endeavors with Piggy's replacement, Daniel "Chewy" Mongrain.
Looking in the other direction, though, we've got this blast from the ancient past, featuring their original lineup of Piggy, Snake, Blacky, and Away. Alternative Tentacles, as if to celebrate the continuing legacy of Voivod, have just done an official reissue, on cd and vinyl, of one of the band's earliest demo tapes. As the title indicates, the year was 1984. Dystopian thrash was the primal order of the day. Light years from the technical and melodic extremes that they would eventually achieve - yet of course utterly "extreme" in its own right, and definitely already imbued with Voivod's trademark strangeness.
This release consists of 15 tracks, including such destined-to-be-well-known headbangers as "Voivod", "War And Pain", "Blower", "Suck Your Bone", "Nuclear War", and "Iron Gang", amongst others you'll recognize from Voivod's first few albums. Plus, they do a couple of cool covers that indicate Voivod aligned themselves with the "black metal" bands of their day: "Evil" by Mercyful Fate, and "Buried Alive" and "Bursting Out" by Venom! Also, worth the price of admission for any Voivod fanatic, there's the otherwise unreleased (except on other demos) track "Condemned To The Gallows", very cool and very Voivod, dunno why they never recorded it for any of their albums proper.
Sonically, the production is actually not that bad, it really sounds pretty darn good for a DIY demo done so many years ago!! No complaints there. Nor with the material, needless to say, it's killer stuff, as anyone into early 'Vod would expect - though you may be at bit surprised at Snake's harsh vocal style here, much sicker and screechier than what you may be used to, interesting indeed.
We can only hope that Alt Tentacles will follow up this historically significant release with a reissue of the Voivod's debut demo, the one that preceded this, 1983's Anachronism tape, which consisted mostly of covers by the likes of Judas Priest, Motorhead, Budgie, and various NWOBHM acts... we'd love to hear that too!
We reviewed a super limited tape a while back by Ben Wildenhaus, former guitarist from Northwestern garage rockers Federation X, and an occasional collaborator with members of the Reeks And The Wrecks, and as we mentioned in the review of that tape, Wildenhaus has since transformed into a bit of an avant guitarist, now living on the east coast, and managing the Instrumental Quaalude blog, on which he weekly posts new recordings, always instrumental, always under 5 minutes. That tape, Great Melodies From Around, has now been reissued both on cd (and yeah, a real cd, not a cd-r), and vinyl, with a download coupon, and while there is new artwork and the curious addition of 'Von' to Wildenhaus' name, Great Melodies From Around is presented in these new formats, sonically identical to it's early cassette tape iteration...
Great Melodies From Around seems, in fact, to be an extension of Wildenhaus' Instrumental Quaalude blog, as it is a moody and sonically surreal collection of similarly dark, gorgeously instrumental excursions, assembled from lush layered drones, Appalachian style steel string guitars, woozy twangy slide guitar, strange murky percussion, bits of vocals (NOT singing) employed as more texture, wheezing organ, sinewaves, minimal drumming, subtle electronics, bits of glitch and hiss, amp buzz, a little noise here and there, the occasional sample... The sound is smokey and dark and ominous, dreamy and hauntingly lovely, a distinctly Lynchian soundtrack vibe for sure, late night, lights low, everything dusty, and dark, and lonely, and lit by the streetlights outside, hazy, gauzy, fuzzy, and totally and fantastically lovely.
White Ring are another witch house outfit who manage to gain a serious amount of notoriety, with very few proper releases, relying more on YouTube videos and limited cd-r's, as well as downloads and filesharing, but of the many groups of that ilk, they were definitely one of our favorites, so it's not that big a surprise that they would end up on Handmade Birds, even less so once you get an earful of their amazing cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey My My", which transforms the original into a hazy ethereal bliss out, that is until the drop, when the drums come in, and the buzzing synths, very reminiscent of Salem obviously, but it's a sound we're still not tired of, Southern crunk style hip hop skitter, over fuzzed out low end, everything wreathed in a dense cloud of dreampop haze, the vocals an almost wordless croon, which soar skyward along with the synths/beats, only to bliss out once again in between. We've listened to that track so many times it was ages before we even made it to the flipside, but it's a good one too, much more downtempo and dark, woozy and wondrously warped, the track building to epic soaring Salem like crescendos, reminding us of the blissed out shoegaze of M83, but then retuning to the murky skitter that is so much a hallmark of witch house / drag. Fans of Salem, and all the other witch house we've reviewed are probably gonna want this, and everyone into shoegaze and dream pop, who have yet to check out anything like this, White Ring might just be your gateway... Sorry if we run out though; couldn't get very many of this limited release.
Progression is the latest chunk of abject nihilistic ultra doom sludge from these Aussie heavies, the first full length since their sprawling double cd on 20 Buck Spin, and it continues on right where that one left off. Lurching lumbering downtuned slo-mo riffage, dueling vocals: grunted monstrous growls versus maniacal shrieks, fat fuzzed out bass buzz and massive pounding drum pummel, but unlike many of their doom/sludge contemporaries, Whitehorse actually have some groove, and some serious forward momentum, with maybe more in common with Eyehategod and Khanate than say Monarch or Bunkur, this isn't all near-ambient black doom drift, no these guys grind and pound, this is most definitely metal, just really really slow, it's propulsive, but a sort of tarpit propulsion, the sound super dynamic, lacing their metallic crunch with plenty of stop/starts, long stretches of squealing feedback, strange industrial clatter, the songs shifting from slow slung bass driven crawls, to loping glacial doom, to almost swinging metallic crush.
Opener "Mechanical Disintegration" channels the spirit of Winter and diSEMBOWELMENT into some sort of slow motion death metal, peppered with some surprisingly melodic filigree, these strange but super hooky guitar melodies draped over the main churning riffage, makes it sound like some classic metal playing at 2 rpm.
The title track slows it done even further, adding lots of scrape and clatter to the death march trudgery, a pounding minimalism that shifts gears part way through when the band launch into a serious groove (at least for them), verging on almost headbangable, really lurching and lumbering, some Sabbathy swing slowed down into something more serpentine and slithery. The rest of the record veers from funereal crawl, to grinding metallic pound and back again, the songs laced with strange mechanical hiss, white noise hum and weird glitches, all wrapped around that super low throb and thrum, culminating in the epic 9+ minute closer, which pounds away relentlessly before finishing off in a squall of feedback skree, twisted black noise and super distorted buzz.
On the cover of this issue of this adventurous music lovers must read mag, krautrock guitar/electronics explorer Manuel Gottsching (of Ashra), with the story of his classic album E2-E4.
Inside, also: A primer on Turkish psych! aQ fave Grouper! Techno mavens Sandwell District! Composer Roger Reynols! Jukin' duo Spinn & Rashad doing, naturally the "Invisible Jukebox"! And plenty, plenty more. Including all the vast plethora of reviews as usual.
Originally released as a super limited cassette in 2004, Badb is one of the first releases from Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, and if you thought the other records were noisy and demented before, this one will blow your mind (and probably your speakers too). After a quick opening intro of whipping winter wind, that ends abruptly as if someone just leaned over and pushed stop on the tape player, the record launches into the title track, the first song in what is apparently a songsuite based on a the myth of a mysterious war goddess, and is an crumbling onslaught of superdistorted buzz and while there may be drums, if there are, they're buried WAY down in the mix, the vocals however are right up front, a wild demonic shriek over the churning roiling blackness below. And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted maelstrom of sound, a sonic blizzard of black buzz and harsh vokills, the guitars less riffy and buzzy as they are practically a Merzbowian wall of blown out white noise, that white noise seeming to be in constant flux, occasionally coalescing into an almost riffy churn, before splintering again into a blast of face melting buzz. The recording is super lo-fi too, which gives even the harshest passages a strange washed out and muted vibe, the coolest parts when the sounds seem to blur into one another and become a strange sort of pulsing alien rhythm.
"Final Offering" might be our favorite, a murky monster of a track, with the most discernible riffing, and a cool murky swirl that envelops everything in its path, and when the vocals back off, the music becomes a weird audial illusion, like those paintings that reveal hidden shapes if you stare at them long enough, the wild tangle of buzz seems to unravel before your ears, the various melodic fragments and interwoven textures shifting and transforming, eventually seemingly melting into a blurry viscous pool of buzz and drone, that eventually fades to black, finishing the record the way it started, with another stretch of frosty winter winds. Awesome. And EXTREMELY noisy, fans of Wold know what to expect, and folks into other noise metal outfits like Nekrosov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Alkerdeel, Hallow and the like will definitely dig, but be warned this is less about THE RIFF and more about blown out blackness...
Bow down doom hounds, the third full-length opus of spaced out sludge trudge from these British heavies is here! In most respects, exactly as expected, slow and low and psychedelic. But, they've changed up one (big) thing. Get this: in our review of their previous disc, The Shadow Over Atlantis, we suggested that the many fans of their labelmates Jex Thoth might dig the The Wounded Kings too, due to similar sonics and aligned atmospherics. Well, now that's even more the case, as on this album suddenly the Kings have a female singer, a la Jex Thoth! Not sure why they made this move (the popularity of Jex Thoth, The Devil's Blood, Blood Ceremony, et. al. in the "New Wave Of Female Fronted Occult Metal" trend couldn't possibly be the reason, could it?) but it was a good one, really. Not that we didn't like their original singer (former bassist George Birch, now out of the band) but we're really digging new singer Sharie Neyland's haunting, yet commanding, presence on this platter. Also, it makes perfect sense, considering that The Wounded Kings already had the spooky-proggy organ sound of Italian horror movie scores as a big influence upon their sound. Female vox fit in quite well with that vibe, and, as those other aforementioned bands also have demonstrated, sound good in conjunction with dirgey, lumbering, Sabbath-derived riffage.
And they're not just "female vox" anyway, there's an eccentric personality here. With her wavery, witchy, fairly low for a female voice, Neyland sounds something like a weird hybrid of Jex Thoth and Manilla Road's Mark "The Shark" Shelton... really! Now that's cult. Take that voice and let it range o'er epic effected hypnotic heaviness along the lines of early Cathedral or Electric Wizard (with a dash of Blizaro), and you've got In The Chapel Of The Black Hand.
So. Not just another Wounded Kings album (though that would have been fine too) but one that stands apart, if not above. Phantasmagorically recommended.
