Whoo-hoo! Here's a whole disc (or double lp) of music by a band from that great Those Shocking Shaking Days compilation of Indonesian '70s fuzz/funk/psych/prog we made Record Of The Week not long ago... one of the bands we liked so much we picked 'em for one of the sound samples accompanying our review of that comp. This best-of AKA collection is the first release on the Strawberry Rain label, formed by the very fellow who compiled Those Shocking Shaking Days, to reissue more vintage Indo-rock treasures. We're already salivating at the prospect; with this anthology Strawberry Rain is off to a pretty darn badass beginning. We imagine you'll agree, if you're into the international language of screaming vocals, acid rock guitar, swirling synth, and seriously funky grooves. Hard Beat is aptly titled.
According to the liner notes provided here, AKA started off in East Java, giving wild live performances playing material by such Western artists as James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad... and listening to this, we'd guess that some Deep Purple was probably part of their repertoire too. Eventually they started writing their own stuff, got signed to a label, and made eleven albums between 1971 and '77, selected songs from which are presented here - including the two tracks comped on TSSD, "Do What You Like" and "Shake Me", along with 12 others (13 on the cd, it's got a bonus track), all of 'em equally awesome, but varied between ants-in-the-pants JB's style funk (including their #1 in Australia hit, "Crazy Joe"), groovy psych-pop, and Purplish heavy rockers... several songs somehow managing to combine all of that, all at once, in fact!
For fans of sundry other purveyors of hairy funk freak rock from around the world, say like Los Dug Dug's, Speed Glue & Shinki, Modulo 1000, Black Merda, Bunalim, Ngozi Family, Juan De La Cruz, etc. Highly recommended; good grief this is good. Here's hoping Strawberry Rain do a Hard Beat volume two someday, though of course there's other bands from Those Shocking Shaking Days we'd like to hear more of too!
Compact disc packaged in gatefold mini-lp style sleeve, the double vinyl also in a gatefold, both limited editions.
Here's the much anticipated cd reissue of this way-too limited Alvarius B album which came and went on vinyl in a matter of days early in 2011. Alvarius B is the solo project of Alan Bishop, better known as one of the Sun City Girls - a project which dissolved after over twenty years following the death of drummer and fellow provocateur Charles Goucher. The Girls (a trio rounded out by Bishop's brother Richard) were specialists in frustratingly brilliant psychedelic-punk, damaged with free jazz, Southeast Asian pop, and fucked-up beat poetry. They were notorious for their designed lack of editorial constraints in situating brilliantly over-charged weirdo-pop melodic crescendos often hybridizing the likes of Ennio Morricone and Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son next to an uncomfortably misogynistic rant from Alan Bishop's slimy Bukowski parody as Uncle Jim. Even the most die-hard Sun City Girls fans who could stomach and perhaps grow to love their confrontational affronts will undeniably say that it's Torch Of The Mystics or 303,003 Crossdressers From The Rig Veda that are the masterpieces of borderless songwriting.
So with the Girls no more, where would Alan Bishop take his own work? The Sir Richard Bishop records have been uniformly brilliant in their fiery elliptical fingerpicking, exploding the Takoma handbook; and Alan has often given off the appearance of being a trickster figure, presenting himself as a minstrel with an immense emotional range only to pull back the mask to reveal a devilish, blackened heart intent on causing misery upon all who hear. With all of this as a preamble, we can say that Alan has followed where the Sun City Girls ended their career on Funeral Mariachi, with this gorgeous record in the form of Baroque Primitiva.
The album is rich with covers, although an Alan Bishop cover would certainly amount to a delirious transfiguration. The man has long been obsessed by Ennio Morricone, and this expertise has been applied to some of the best compendiums of Morricone's best work during the '60s and '70s. And 6 of the albums 12 songs are attributed to Morricone, or "Maestro Padre Supremo" as Bishop describes him in the liner notes. These songs enjoy the lilting yet complex melodies that Morricone had been so known for, with Bishop crooning all of the wordless oohs and ahhs that Morricone had originally penned for a female vocalist. Bishop has long been known for his ability to hit sharp falsettos in the Girls. Even though he does bend many of the notes towards atonality, he is quite reverential towards the Morricone text. In fact, the contrast between Morricone's ecstatic songs and the many cracks in Bishop's deliberately lo-fi production (think Sebadoh's four-track recordings with just multi-tracked voice, guitar and chord organ) serves to heighten the drama of these recordings. There are a couple of Bishop originals, "Humor Police" is very much a manic carnavalesque number and "Well Known Stranger" is a classic downer jam of strum and vocal mope that sounds like it could be a lost Neil Young tune, but done way better. The two other covers on the album are also quite noteworthy: the only song to emerge from his aborted album of John Barry covers in the form of "You Only Live Twice" and one hell of jubilant romp through the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."
This is very nicely packaged in the form of a 30 page hardback book, featuring various close-ups of the nude mandala artwork photographed by Kristen Anderson, to sweeten the deal. Already proving to be one of the best albums of 2011. So don't let the cd pass you by, if you didn't have the good fortune of getting hold of the vinyl already.
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!
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.
Most folks around here have been pretty obsessed with Crystal Stilts, since their self titled 2008 debut on Woodsist. But there's definitely a been holdout or two among us. Who, while appreciating that Crystal Stilts were a decent band, didn't necessarily understand what the fuss was all about. That all changes with In Love With Oblivion, and those folks are definitely gonna have to reassess their opinion on those older records too, cuz EVERYone here has gone totally nuts for this new record. Including the previous nonbelievers. Not sure what exactly it is, their sound hasn't changed so dramatically, but there's just something about this record that's totally magical. Dark and brooding, low slung slithery gloom pop, that while lumped in with the current crop of Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks outfits, to these ears are way more beholden to Aussie groups like the Celibate Rifles, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, the Saints, Radio Birdman, even the Hoodoo Gurus, maybe especially the Hoodoo Gurus. Which is weird, cuz these guys are from Brooklyn. But they have that twangy surf guitar, the Fuzztones style wheezing garage rock organ, everything hazy and reverby, and of course the vox, that's what really does it, deep and dramatic, commanding and intense but still melodic. Opener "Sycamore Tree" is a perfect example, a dead ringer for some lost Celibate Rifles jam, a minimal woozy groove, the percussion a propulsive shuffle, the guitars thick with twang and reverb, the bass dense and driving, and the vocals, the sort of singing that would go on to define noise rock outfits from down under like Lubricated Goat and Kingsnakeroost, eyes closed it feels like being in some dingy club in Australia in the early eighties, packed in like sardines, the sound deafening, the crowd rapt and sweaty, moving to the music, total zoner gloom pop post punk bliss.
Then there's the other side of the band, like on "Through The Floor" where they channel classic girl group sounds, but add their own twist, those deep crooned vox, the whirring organ, lots of sweet back up harmonies, and of course plenty of buzz and reverb. And so it goes, the band switching from shimmery sixties jangle, to dark brooding eighties post punk gloom pop, often melding the two. And while we love both sides of the band, it's the darker side that we find the most mesmerizing. Like on "Alien Rivers", a creepy crawl, all thick undulating organs, shuffling snares, spidery guitars, the vocals especially heavy with reverb and echo, the sound droned out and druggy, divinely hypnotic. And there's the woozy groovy stomp of "Prometheus At Large", classic rock and roll wrapped in murk and grit and grime, a sort of classic fifties style pop transformed into something much more sinister. Elsewhere there's plenty of jangle and shimmer, shuffle and buzz, "Flying Into The Sun" sounds like a lo-fi indie pop Interpol, "Precarious Stair" sounds like some fantastic union of Thee Oh Sees and the Vivian Girls, but with those crooned post punk vox, all the songs buzzy and hooky and heavy in their own way, slipping easily from indie pop to new wave to indie jangle but always infused with the Stilts' dark brood, and fuzzy wall of sound reverby shimmer, and all held together by some impossibly great and catchy songs, and of course those fantastic vocals.
Definite contender for record of the year, and a new unanimous aQ fave for sure!
What happens when a middle aged, extreme noise musician suddenly gets all voodoo "drum circle" on us? Cut Hands is what happens. Ethno-forgery, not exactly, ethno-freakery more like it!
Let's say this up front, so there's no confusion: this Cut Hands disc is bloody awesome, and nobody here at AQ (except maybe Jim) is all that big of a Whitehouse fan, either. We mention that 'cause Cut Hands is the new project by William Bennett, the perverse genius (?) behind infamous '80s industrial noise terrorists Whitehouse, who are up there with Merzbow in the noise that annoys pantheon. We appreciate the extremity of Whitehouse, sure, but unlike Merzbow, never really enjoyed listening to 'em all that much (maybe that's the point). As a result, we really weren't aware of the extent to which, in recent years, William Bennett had been getting into this so-called "Afro Noise" bag of his, with some of his more recent Whitehouse albums (like 2003's Bird Seed, which contained a track called "Cut Hands Has The Solution") incorporating the use, and probably abuse, of authentic ethnic Central African instruments.
Although, we do remember when, in 1997, Bennett's label Susan Lawly put out an amazing compilation, now long out of print, called Extreme Music From Africa, that we totally loved. It featured a bunch of mysterious artists like Rorogwela, Vicious Teengirl, Electricity Featuring Fire Eater, and National Bird, that we'd never heard of before or since, doing tracks that somehow combined what sounded like genuine African tribal music with Whitehouse style noise... and was really quite listenable, too! We always half-suspected it might not have been on the up and up, that the bands weren't really from Africa, and were instead the work of Mr. Bennett and friends, and we'd still like it just as much anyway... Cut Hands certainly makes us further assume that might be the case, since our description of the sort of sounds found on Extreme Music From Africa would also describe this Cut Hands disc quite well: "Chanting and hand drums are buried in washes of hiss and white noise. Merzbow style blasts of crunchy feedback dissolve into tribal rhythms and explode again into shards of jagged buzz. Intense and aggressive and totally great."
In any event, Cut Hands is the next logical step in Bennett's "Afro Noise" obsession. While there is of course an electronic noise component to this, it almost takes a backseat to the rhythmic, almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion. Bennett has apparently amassed quite a large collection of Congolese and Ghanaian percussion instruments, and he puts 'em to use here, 13 varied tracks of primal, polyrhythmic, electro-acoustic pulsations. Djembes and doundouns played with jackhammer precision, mixed with washes and waves of hiss and drone. Some tracks attack with feedback, others are more quietly sinister and even shimmeringly atmospheric. There's one track with vocals, declaiming something in what sounds like an African language, amidst divebombing distortion and shuddering glitch, while the rest are purely instrumental. And all it is frighteningly trance-inducing. It's kind of insane, kind of incredible. We like, a lot.
It's not really all that much fun writing a review of this new Danava album. What's fun is listening to it, turned up loud... and maybe getting buzzed on a substance of choice whilst doing so. Whoo-hoo! Granted, that's the case with lots of albums, classics like say Deep Purple In Rock or Alice Cooper's Love It To Death. The kind that require, nay inspire, such behavior. Those, though, weren't just released, but this was, so all the more an occasion for drunken loud listening. They don't make 'em like this all that often anymore, so kudos to Kemado for bringing us the real deal (ironic, isn't it). Though its exactly what we've come to expect from Portland psych-prog-stoner rockers Danava, and are happy to hear once again.
Since the time we checked in with these boys, they've undergone some lineup changes. They now rock to the beat of a different drummer, for one thing. And the guy who only played synths is gone now... but in his stead, way better yet, they've added a 2nd guitarist for extra twin axe attackin', so that's a win. The bassist and the singin' lead guitarist are the same, and that's what really matters in this band, those dudes. They slay.
Needless (at this point) to say, this new album is a killer, replete from the very get-go with rollicking, riff-rockin' badassery. These new Danava jams are seriously being kicked, way out. And they're, y'know, real songs too, with real vocals and everythin', like it's back in 1973 or so and they've got something to prove, those twin guitars givin' with the glorious harmonies (think Thin Lizzy, on the song "I Am The Skull" here especially). They sound like old time Pentagram too, but galloping like they wuz in the Preakness. The Preakness of freakness. Danava are doin' it, here. They're gonna out rock, out prog, out psych, out retro-proto-metal all comers. Speedy and sinuous, no doubt a bit of stress on all the wrists and necks involved in the making of this music. And there's still the usual embellishments of spacey synthy FX sprinkled about, even with that one guy gone. It's all almost a bit overwhelming, which is why it's nice that the very last track, the instrumental "Dying Into The Light" winds things up on a calming, eerily pretty note. Whew...
And, it should be noted that they further pay tribute to their '70s forebears by covering a song, "The Last Goodbye", by obscure UK blooze bashers Slowbone, not that you'd think it wasn't one of their own.
So, yep, getting ripped and listening to these guys rip (rollercoaster style, like they do) is of course way better than writing or reading this review. The response should be obvious. We, or well at least one of us anyway, is gonna kick back and crank this right now. You, should buy a copy and do the same as soon as you can.
By the way, all that drink/drug stuff is meant metaphorically, for all we know the guys in Danava, and their intended listening audience, are super straight edge, not stoners, let alone beer drinkers and hell raisers - though we doubt it.
The first we heard from Dirty Beaches, aka Alex Zhang, was a recent split 7" with US Girls, which found Zhang doing a sort of super grimy lo-fi RnB, we also mentioned Johnny Cash, and that the sound like a murkier and less well produced How To Dress Well, which most definitely still applies on Badlands, but where on that single, we were feeling a sort of RnB vibe, here, it's more a classic rock and roll, as in the fifties, as in more specifically Elvis. Sounds weird, especially when you consider the sort of hype Dirty Beaches has been getting but, these tracks essentially sound like super low fidelity bedroom recorded Elvis jams, doused in murk and grit and grime, or draped over a looped loping churning chunk of crumbling low end.
Like some bedroom noise rocker floor core purveyor was tagged to pack up some classic crooner. Zhang's vocals are total Elvis, maybe there's a bit of a Cramps vibe, but that's essentially a goth Elvis anyway. Some of the tracks take what sounds like a snippet of some fifties rock and roll, and then loops it into a weirdly hypnotic chunk of murky minimalism, over which Zhang snarls and croons, it doesn't seem like it should work, or even sound all that good, but it does, and these songs end up sounding like weirdly timeless classic rock and roll jams from some alternate dimension, or like the perfect soundtrack to the best movie David Lynch never made.
It'd normally be enough that Finders Keepers / B-Music decided to reissue a soundtrack, we'd assume it was awesome just 'cause they gave it their stamp of approval. That's true. But this one, though, well how could it NOT be good, with that title/concept?? Awesome music aside, heck we wanna see the movie. Werewolves On Wheels, for reals? As one of the radio adverts included here as a bonus track puts it: "Here comes the most eerie, the most chilling, the most terrifying motorcycle horror film ever made... Werewolves On Wheels - in color - is the most unusual bizarre film yet... Werewolves On Wheels is the ghoulish story of a wild motorcycle gang lost in the desert, mocking the supernatural... one by one they die... unnatural unbelievable deaths... they are afraid of nothing but they cannot fight what they cannot see and do not understand!" Sounds good, doesn't it? As lovers of another Satanic psychedelic '70s motorcycle horror film, Psychomania, we're sold. And like Psychomania, this has a way cool soundtrack. Which can also be filed alongside another biker B-Music release, Billy Green's Stone OST.
This 1971 low budget chiller thriller's "Main Theme" is 5+ minutes of percussive rhythms adorned with flashes of fuzz guitar, simple and effective, as hypnotic as it is haunting. Groovy! That's followed by the hippie country rock of "Mount Shasta Home", and there's another cool slice of country tonk later on with "One Foot In Heaven", but the majority of the soundtrack is devoted to more abstract, weirdly stumbling, atmospheric stuff, perhaps trying to evoke a tripped out Native American desert vibe, with ringing and rattling and what sounds like wrasslin'... there's sudden stabs of synth and the occasional line of campy movie dialog. Several of the tracks (the three spooky "Ritual" ones in particular) could be sinister krautrock jams, full of thumping hand drums, crackling fire, and synthesizer sounds. Other tracks are more groovadelic, yet creepy too, with propulsive rhythms, acid guitar licks, droning FX, and of course revving motorcycle engines and screams of terror.
For all we know, the movie, the directorial debut of Roger Corman/Russ Meyer associate Michel Levesque, isn't even so bad it's good. But the soundtrack, it's for sure fantastic! If The Byrds had teamed up with Goblin to do a soundtrack, maybe this is what the results would have sounded like!?! We're also reminded of Ry Cooder's Cyleib People - if they jammed with Sylvester Anfang, perhaps. The label suggests a Sandy Bull/Amon Duul team up, and we won't argue with that comparison either. Another winner - of course - from the Finders Keepers folks!!
While we've been treated to numerous divine sonic excursions from Mr. Leyland Kirby (aka The Caretaker) over the last couple years, since the release of the mind blowing and unanimous all time aQ fave Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was lp trilogy, which included the all-over-the-map Intrigue & Stuff series, and the old timey mixtape that was the Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, this latest mysterious missive, evocatively (or provocatively?) titled Eager To Tear Apart The Stars, most definitely seems to be the first record that sonically acts as a logical follow up, to that sprawling triptych, delving into the same sort of hauntological soundcaping, but with a distinctive shift in sound. Which becomes obvious from the first track, and continues throughout, the mood is somber, the vibe darkly cinematic, easily the most patient and painterly thing we've heard from Kirby,
ominous piano stabs wreathed in thick surface noise, a warm muted hissy buzz, hovering over softly soaring strings, a weightless chordal thrum, that seems hopeful and lit from within, but manages to still remain earthbound, as if tethered to some unseeable darkness. The first two tracks and the haunting closer, seem to be a suite of sorts, some lost soundtrack, driven by melancholy piano and wreathed in those sweetly sorrowful strings, initially the sounds buried in grit and crackle, but by the record's end, that noise seems to have abated, leaving the sound crystalline and prismatic, almost as if the receding noise reflects a sort of sonic hopefulness, a light at the end of a very long tunnel.
But between these cinematic bookends, lurk several tracks that rank among our favorite Kirby jams yet. "To Reject The World" is a sonic trifle, an intro of sorts, the piano from the opening movements carry over, this time over a thick rumbling swirl of blackened buzz, drifting on sinister swells, before giving way to "No Longer Distance Than Death", which sounds like it could have been lifted from Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was, a slow motion creep, everything hazy and blissed out, rumbling distortion and muted buzz smeared into bleary streaks of dreamlike sound, like an M83 track spinning at 6rpm on an old Victrola, so moving and haunting, and that's when The Caretaker pays a visit, his "They Are All Dead, There Are No Skip At All", another haunted ballroom slow dance, all murky strings, muddied chiming melodies, woozy strings, some sort of slow motion waltz, a dance of the damned captured on wax cylinder and played back in an alternate future, mysterious and utterly lovely.
Once again, Kirby continues to explore the hauntological sonic underworld, and gives us just a glimpse of the musical mysteries that reside there.
Without a doubt one of the most creative and pleasurable groups making electronic tinged dance pop these days. What sets Little Dragon so far ahead of the crowd is that they are such innovative music makers as well as having the amazing talents of lead singer Yukimi Nagano, who really does have one of the most soulful and seductive voices around. Ritual Union is one of the most perfect electro pop albums of the year. The songs and sounds on the record let you go deep into you body. But it's not just a surface high that makes you shake it for a moment, but instead something you feel dig into you deeper and actually grab a hold of your spirit and soul. Like some of the best work that Herbert & Dani Siciliano made together, or if Prince in his prime teamed up with Lykke Li to make a record smart enough to want to spend intimate time with, yet fun enough to want to blast so loud when your friends are around. Colors, shapes and melody all swirling together into something so intoxicating, and so totally good for you. This is becoming our absolute summer jam!
Marissa Nadler's latest (and Kickstarter funded, on her own label) self-titled collection of dreamy folk-pop might be her best yet. Her voice is light and clear, carrying the listener through the narratives and characters she creates. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar provides the ubiquitous background around which pedal steel, vibes, a few synths and washy percussion float. Her vocals seems almost effortless in their breathy melancholic beauty. As on Little Hells, Nadler utilizes a full band for much of the record, though a lot of what the band does is minimal, allowing the layered vocals to drive the songs. When the band does really kick in, however, it's fucking magical, as on "Baby I Will Leave You In the Morning" and "Puppet Master". Nadler, who has been previously much compared to Cat Power and Mazzy Star, deserves the compliments those comparisons bring, but should not be seen as derivative or secondary to those artists. Yes, there's a healthy dose of Americana (the pedal steel, the banjo) and yes the vocals are drenched in reveb (though not to disguise any lack of talent), but there's no mistaking that Marissa Nadler's got IT, whatever that singular quality is that marks truly exceptional performers. A je ne sais quoi that trancends comparison.
After the wonderful opener "In Your Lair, Bear" which hints at the fullness of the instrumentation to come later in the record, Nadler gives us the minimal "Alabaster Queen". The hard-edged coldness created by the stately vocal narrative contrasts nicely with the slow-strummed warmth of the acoustic guitar and bell-like Rhodes piano. "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" might be the song that sounds the most like Mazzy Star in one of their less drug-hazed moments. "Mr. John Lee Revisited" takes a step back and feels more akin to Nadler's earlier work. "Wedding" stands out in that it features no guitar at all, just synths, percussion and vocals that build and build and build. "Little King" serves as a nice comedown after "Wedding"'s drama, a return to fingerpicked guitar minimalism alongside a banjo that glides in and out of the vocal melody.
These are songs that make you stop and listen, whatever else is going on in your life. Songs where you can just close your eyes and drift away to wherever the music takes you. Highly recommended.
For some reason, it has been frustratingly difficult to restock last year's outing by Noveller, Desert Fires, which is such a shame as it was truly one of the years best drifting and dreamy albums. Here's hoping that her new record, this one right here, Glacial Wave, will not suffer the same distribution problems, as she has again crafted another exquisite collection of some of the most substantial blissed out sounds you are liable to hear all year long.
It's been so nice to witness the evolution of Noveller's music, from her much noisier, harsh and slightly unfocused beginnings to the much more serene, spaced out and majestic tones and songs she's creating now. But we think that background in the noise scene has helped her create such a strong core and depth to these beautifully ethereal soundscapes. There is something both so mournful and harrowing about the sounds on Glacial Glow. Much like Grouper and Windy & Carl, Noveller has this amazing ability to create utterly haunting and mesmerizing moods in her music. We've been playing this as we go to sleep, as we wake up and actually at all hours in between as there's no better sounds for when we are feeling dazed and glazed. Highly recommended!
Ever wonder what a SUNNO))) record might sound like if instead of guitars and amps, it was just vocals? Well wonder no more. This new record on Ideologic Organ, a new label run by SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley, offers up an incredible collection of ritualistic Tibetan vocal music, from a Russian group called Phurpa, and is easily the darkest, heaviest, most intense and breathtaking record we've heard in ages.
Anyone who has heard Tuvan throat singers live, or experienced the chanted prayers of Tibetan monks, know the power of the human voice, the mysterious harmonies, and strange overtones, with Tuvan's adding an extra tone, each vocalist creating his own harmonies, or Tibetan monks creating specific overtones, much like the sounds captured here, but these voices while similar to classic Tibetan Buddhist rites, are actually unike any monastic chanting we've ever heard.
If you edited out the breaths, this could be some fucked up Lustmordian drone record, a thick near static wall of rumbling, reverberating sound, but the voices here are so organic, so pure and emotional, so much more intense and moving than any sort of synthesized sound, and with all five members singing, it creates this deep, lustrous, impossibly dark and downright scary, rib cage rattling harmony, a low end thrum that is so powerful, but not just sonically, these sounds connect on a much deeper level because of their pure humanity, no instruments, no effects, no amplification, this is some deep and primal soundmaking, similar sounds have been created and used for worship and mediation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, it's the first instrument, the human voice, here pushed to its limit, creating a sound few can conceive of, a sound conjured up from the lungs, the heart, the soul, devastatingly powerful, and impossibly massive. The pieces here augmented with traditional Tibetan instruments, but usually only to introduce a song, otherwise, it's a symphony of rumbling tones and deep vocal thrum, the sound darkly meditative, and mysteriously mesmerizing, occasionally building into a sound heavier than ANY metal record you've ever heard, and when the chants finally stop, it's like a vacuum, all the air sucked out of the room, the utter and inevitable silence that follows such deep devotional sound.
So utterly gorgeous, totally and breathtakingly mesmerizing, consider this a should have been Record Of The Week. Absolutely a new favorite, and again, just about the most amazing sounds we've ever heard...
One of THEE most gorgeous cover designs we've seen from O'Malley yet, one that perfectly suits the music, a faded out image of a hand, holding some sort of mysterious ritualistic implement, an instrument perhaps, in front of a barely visible hooded figure, a truly haunting image, with Cyrillic characters printed over the top in a clear reflective spot varnish, the records housed in printed inner sleeves with stark black and white images of the cloaked members of the group, all seated on a stage, surrounded by their instruments, so completely visually breathtaking.
After a tiny handful of way too limited cd-r releases, and an endless series of devastating live aktions (including a show stealing opening slot at our 2009 South By Southwest showcase), comes the long awaited full length from this SF boy-girl-boy doom-crush psych-sludge power trio, a sprawling five, track, 40 minute epic, that will definitely hit the spot for all of you hard and heavies that like it slow and low, and dig the likes of the Melvins, Harvey Milk, Boris and other slo-mo dirge merchants. But Prizehog infuse their low end assault with all manner of druggy psychedelia, warped doom pop and blurred blissed out slow-core, conjuring up a sound that pounds and pummels, drift and shimmers, grinds and churns, slipping effortlessly from bombastic Melvinsy howl and chug, to a super hooky heaviness, that reminds us of the warped Buttholes beholden noisepop of Prizehog pals Wildildlife, from a sort of bluesy, blissed out tarpit ZZ Top swing and swagger, to a dark and dolorous black hole heavy slowcore a la Codeine or True Widow, often all wound up into a single song.
Thought Nest begins with "Swayback", opening with a little bit of harmonica flecked blues fakeout, that quickly transforms into some seriously downtuned heavy doompsychblues churn, lurching and mathy and metallic, but laced with some subtle groove, the vocals a sort of worldless croon, the song pounding away before slipping into a woozy, washed ouy lysergic haze, a blurred starfield of chiming guitars and whirling layered melodies, before returning to a more swaggery, slithery lumbering crunch, only to finally blossom into a skull caving, knuckle dragging bit of slo-mo dirgery, all bellowed howls and keening high end tones, wrapped around a pummeling, drum heavy dirge-metal doom-pop workout, grinding its way through clouds of tripped out FX, and finishing off like it began with a bit of harmonica-y blissed out blues, before one final blast of churn and chug.
"Dunner" is up next, unfurling a stretch of tripped out shimmer, draped over garbled soft focus white noise, all hovering beneath clouds of cymbal sizzle, spidery guitar melodies, a druggy bit of drift, before a flurry of monstrous drumming drags with it a glorious psychedelic metallic cacophony, wild squalls of tangled guitars over intense double kick drumming, only to slip right back into something way more abstract, moody and murky, a sort of blackened slo-mo ballad, some simmering slowcore shimmer, bleary and blurred, almost like a more metallic, more drugged out True Widow, the sound dense, and layered, alternatingly smeared and shimmery, soaring and pop flecked, crusty and crunchy...
The oddly titled "Aykranoid" explodes with a chugging almost Eighties style metal riffing wrapped around some pounding black hole drum pummel, wild swooping and swirling effects, and some seriously twisted vox, the aforementioned vocal bellow, but here even MORE bellowy, drenched in effects and way up in the mix, spitting out mush mouthed stream of consciousness vokills, that add a weird psychedelic avant pop vibe to the otherwise more metallic backdrop, before again shifting into a slow slithery crawl, the sound epic and majestic, but still muddy and murky, warped and woozy.
"1865" is a bit more introspective, a slowly materializing smoldering bit of chordal guitardrone buzz, spread out into a gauzy hypnotic hypno-dirge, the beats spread way out, each chord allowed to ring out, and fade into something softer and more shadowy and nebulous, a contorted bit of dark dirge droniness, the sound shifting from crash and crunch, to muted thrum, all very trancelike and ritualistic, especially when the ghostly washed out vocals drift in, the sound transforming into a sort of crumbling, super distorted dream pop, again sounding more like a bastardized True Widow or Codeine, although here the sound grows ever more caustic and corrosive, but never without losing that moody pop vibe, just getting louder, and more dense, eventually locking into a more metallic bit of contorted churn, only to bliss out a bit, before a final stretch of lurching, pounding pop flecked pummel.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Ramsong", which begins in a cloud of grinding guitar noise, and swirls of chaotic buzz, a wild bit of droned out static psych, out of which emerges yet another gorgeous bit of low slung slowcore shimmer, dreamy and druggy and drifty, before exploding in a blast of seriously cruching metallic riffery, the drums a wild octopoidal pound, the vocals that weird Tom Waits / Buzz Osborne bellow, the sound nearly schizophrenic, flitting from pretty drift, to damaged dirge, rife with cool little gnarled guitar licks, streaks of feedback, layers of buried melody, a stuttering sprawl of strangely melodic heaviness, an expansive epic chugscape, that seems to grow more poppy as the song unwinds, and weirdly enough getting darker and more dense, while simultaneously seeming to space out, drifting into something more psychedelic abstract. The song finally begins to dissipate, the various elements loosed from structured song and allowed to float weightless, a darkly delirious night sky of loosely tangled melodies, of overlapping spectral voices, of washed out guitar buzz and deep low end rumbles, soft focus effects and dreamy druggy blissed out ambience.
Fucking SO RULING, gorgeous stuff for sure, crushing, hypnotic, heavy and heady, poppy and spacey, the sort of thing that should appeal to folks who dig the dooooom, or the druggy psychedelia, or the dirgey slowcore, or the warped pop, or the sludgey metal, and just might be your favorite new record if you dig ALL of those. Which we absolutely DO!!
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
Sure, this is the solo album on which Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio picks up the guitar, but the sounds that he wrangles from that instrument are not all that dissimilar from those he crafted on the final Pan Sonic album Gravitoni, and especially on the first half of their 4cd opus Kesto. There's long been a swagger to the low-slung electronic rhythm and noise that brought Pan Sonic closer to an electro-punk rockabilly sound by simulating a snarling guitar with accelerating riffs of synthesized distortion that had more in common with the growl of a motorcycle than the squelch of an 808. So, when Vainio switches out his tone generators for a guitar, he's still got all the tools to distort, corrode, and disintegrate the sounds of six strings with considerable aplomb. The drum machines, the spatialized approach to editing, the white hot shards of electricity, the swarming noise, and Vainio's ability to control all of his cacophonic sounds are all present on Life (...It Eats You Up). "Mining" is an exemplary track displaying Vainio's ability to work a brutalist noise-guitar riff into his jittery industrial groove, sounding something like a downtuned Big Black or loosened-up Godflesh. Many will comment on Vainio's cover of The Stooges "Open Up And Bleed" which strikes a glam rock strut with drum track and smolderingly dissonant guitar riffs. It must be said that Vainio's cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" on Oleva was a better choice; but this one is pretty damn good too. The rock-n-roll mimesis of these tracks disintegrates over the remainder of the album, where splinters of guitar noise pop through walls of electrified drone, ominous hums, and demolished doom-laden ambience which aren't too far from the realms of KTL or Black Boned Angel. Pretty fucking great.
We've long been fans of minimal techno maven Ricardo Villalobos, his records spare and skeletal, rhythmic and repetitive, the sort of electronic music we find utterly mesmerizing and totally irresistible. In addition to that, Villalobos does not shy away from strange sonic experiments, and is thus no stranger to odd samples, considering he made a whole record out of sounds borrowed from French prog legends Magma, so this new record really shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, nor should we have been surprised by just HOW great it turned out, but it was, and we were, which should speak to just how incredible this strange sonic experiment truly is. Villalobos teamed up with Max Loderbauer and created this sprawling double disc which is essentially a minimal techno mash up of modern classical and European jazz, with all the sounds culled from various releases on the legendary ECM label, which include, most excitingly for us, Arvo Part, but also loads of ECM stalwarts like Bennie Maupin, Paul Giger, John Abercrombie, Christian Wallumrod, Alexander Knaifel, Miroslav Vitous, Louis Sclavis, Wolfert Brederode, Enrico Rava, Stefano Bollani and Paul Motian. Never heard of any/most of those, it hardly matters, as the duo of Villalobos and Loderbauer stretch out the sounds of the originals into spare rhythmic minimalism, looping and layering, adding subtle bits of rumble and crunch, deep pulses and abstract shimmer, fields of glitch and muted crunch, but to our ears, it sounds like very little was added to the mix, and much of the magic came from deftly manipulating the originals. The techno element is really negligible here, the sound is much more abstract avant jazz, or hushed minimal drift, in fact, the sound is so unique it's quite difficult to really describe simply. The sound actually reminds us quite a bit of Aussie free jazz minimalists The Necks, the same sort of subtle shifting sonic palette and the gradual evolution of sound. Opener "Reblop" is a hushed super spare bit of solo piano, wreathed in clouds of occasional cymbal shimmer, and some melodic harp, the notes on the piano wreathed in reverb, the cymbal shimmer strangely distorted, the wide open spaces peppered with soft synthy streaks and bloopy squelches, which often mirror the melody, it's really strangely pretty, but also subtly alien. "Recat" is about as close as things here get to techno, which is not that close, but the original brushed snare rhythm is looped into a clipped minimal electronic flecked skitter, that rhythm delicately processed and gradually transformed while all around it pianos and strings unfurl melodies that become gnarled and softly distorted into new shapes, the result a sort of warped lo-fi kraut-jazz. "Resvete" is super spare and spaced out, cymbal shimmer and angelic female vocals, Villalobos and Loderbauer's contributions so subtle, that barring a few glitchy bits, it's difficult to tell how different this version is than the original, quite we're guessing, but it's so deftly transformed, that it's not hard to imagine this as just some strange slab of experimental European jazz. And the tracks that sample Arvo Part, manage to make magical music even moreso, taking Part's lush liturgical drift and making it even more washed out and ethereal, mysterious and dreamlike.
One of our favorite tracks is "Reannounce", which is very tribal, almost African sounding, hypnotic rhythms, and processed chant like vocals, underpinned by some throat singing like buzz, and some wild almost free sounding percussion, "Recurrence" too with its lazy drumming, and slo-mo late night smokey slowed down jazz feel, the whir of the trumpet buzz turned into a muted drone, the sound almost like the music is melting. "Rebird" finds the duo building what sounds like an imagined field recording, underscored by delicate, slightly warped piano, and a barely there rhythm, while "Retikhiy" sounds like some sort of alien world music, or some reimagined forest folk transformed into looped electronic minimalism. We could really go track by track, every song here is mysterious and magical, the rare sort of record that transcends it's genre, it's hard imagine anyone into adventurous music not loving this. It's jazz, it's classical, it's electronic, it's plunderphonics, but it's also none of those, the sound truly more than its constituent parts. The extensive liner notes go into great detail about the creation of this collection of songs, explaining that the duo did not have access to the original tracks, so had to use the records themselves, and thus chose tracks where rhythms and instruments were isolated in the composition, in addition, gaps and pauses and record noise, as well as the natural room sound were also sound sources, with much of this improvised live, with the intention of "combining the functionality of reduced electronic structures with the living textures of ECM productions", with the most important thing being "to harmonize these two worlds, without them aspiring to mutually deactivate each other, to keep both - the organic and the electronic - in balance." So great, definite contender for record of the year, jazz, electronic, classical or otherwise!
As we enter fall on our way to winter, we anxiously await some new records from some amazingly strong female forces of musical nature, records that will most certainly be by our side as the cold begins to overtake us. With both Bjork and Kate Bush releasing new albums in the upcoming weeks, it's so fitting Zola Jesus join that elite pantheon, as she's proven to be one of the newer generation's most singular and stunning artists. Taking ideas from goth, industrial and post-punk as launching points, yet making music that transcends any one genre, scene, or aesthetic. After two amazing ep's, including former aQ record of the week, Stridulum, Zola Jesus returns with her first full length in a few years. It's filled with an intensity and sense of purpose that makes so many other releases we dig just seem sort of frivolous and forgettable. Zola Jesus hits you in the gut with her music. There's no fluff, no excess fat, she gets right in there and twists, turns and reaches deep inside, extracting sounds and songs that grab you by the throat as they seduce and scare you at the same time.�
Conatus is like a continuous sonic pulsation, a field of sound waves that soothe and envelop, penetrating to the core of your soul and forcing you to look deep into the sound's clear vision of intensity, where it then has this magical ability to make you feel that you can finally face ghosts that have been haunting you and conquer the night no matter how cold and alone you may be. Simply stunning.
