Right on! Reissued on vinyl... Gotta love the Pink Fairies. A seminal British freak-rock act, part of the scene alongside Hawkwind and Edgar Broughton Band and The Deviants and Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, their albums still hold up as kick ass psychedelic, proto-punk early '70s rock sets. A British Stooges they're not, but a sillier, even more anarchistic, hippified MC5 isn't too far off.
What A Bunch Of Sweeties was the Fairies second album, from 1972, still featuring founding guitarist Paul Rudolph but without original Fairy Twink, who split to Morocco after the first album. Fortunately, although Twink played drums, they already had a second drummer, Russell Hunter, in the band, so slimming down to a trio wasn't too difficult. They certainly kept their "deviant" sense of humor, even getting the guy who did the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix to pen lyrics to one song, "Pigs Of Uranus". Amidst the silliness, though, the Fairies might actually have managed more straight-up acid rock on this album than their debut, with one of its highlights being their nine-minute long, heavily distorted cover of surf classic "Walk Don't Run".
Like the MC5, the Pink Fairies obviously felt that the Revolution was Rock n' Roll and Rock n' Roll was Revolution, evident from the album's lead off good times rocker with the countercultural, political message of "Right On, Fight On" to the last track, their cover of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There". With their whiskey-soaked vocals, psychedelic excursions, pop hooks, and freak-flag attitude, the Fairies were too eclectic and scattered and messed up to have much of a "career" (you could never really imagine 'em ending up as a metal or punk or even Hawkwind style spacerock band). But their three albums, this one among 'em, bring back a vibe long-gone today, and so it's way cool to have this back in stock on vinyl.
We listed a reissue of this on cd a while back, that's long out of print, but we're happy to see it's now been done on vinyl...
When we first put this on, we were like, damn! Opening track "Living In The Ghetto" is some kick-ass, fuzz-filled, freak funk/rock from this all-black '70s act from Cleveland. And it was perhaps too much to ask for the whole of their eponymous 1970 album to keep up with the heavy acid rock like that track. No, soon Purple Image take a turn into some smooth and tender R&B territory, though weird synth interludes and psychedelic effects keep our interest, and there's definitely some more nuggets of tough fuzz rockin' to be found on here. The album ends with "Marching To A Different Drummer", a meandering fifteen minute mostly-instrumental garage psych R&B fusion jam, with shrill guitars, funky horns, phased drums, wild harmonica... Definitely cool, though they're no Funkadelic. Still, at least a couple of the cuts on here, particularly "Living In The Ghetto" would for sure make this worth it to any big fan of the much beloved Chains And Black Exhaust compilation from way back when!
The thing about Finnish black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, is that really, they are hardly even black metal. Hell, hardly metal at all. Instead, they always seemed to traffic in a mysterious low slung, sludgy abstract blackened rhythmic minimalism that reminded us of Circle and Aluk Todolo way more than Darkthrone or Beherit. And then there's RfR offshoot Will Over Matter, who take that same sort of abstract rhythmic weirdness and harness it to primitive electronics, and have created a sort of tripped out blackened power electronics. So of course we were super excited for a new Ride For Revenge, and were expecting another disc of twisted rhythmic churn, or something similar, but what we were not expecting was THIS. After a truly strange intro, which is essentially just a Speak & Spell toy emitting all those 8bit bleeps and bloops and wreathed in echo and delay, which had us imagining maybe RfR had moved toward Will Over Matter sonically, but then when the first song proper kicked in, we were blown away. Metal. And we mean METAL. Dirgey and sludgey and super distorted. Right out of the gate, the band erupt into some seriously corrosive blasts of full on blast beat-ed GRIND, in between which, the band churn and lumber, the guitars filthy and crumbling with blackened distortion, the vocals a glass gargling gurgle, the drums a simple dirgey pound, so we were prepared for the ban's return to full on primitive blackness, but then out of nowhere, in swoop all manner of weird warbly synths, and tolling bells, the whole song transformed into some sort of woozy avant buzz drenched doomic dirge, it's pretty ruling.
But then by track two, it's right back to the primitive bash and pound, the distortion even more blown out and in the red, the band sounding a bit like a blackened Brainbombs, which is not at all a bad thing, the songs peppered with ridiculous twisted drug addled guitar leads, super effected crooned gothic vox, some totally fucked up and freaked out Butthole Surfers style vocal garble, cool thick layered harmonies, that add a sort of warped majesty to some of the tracks, and at least one blast of weird bellowed, strident sermonizing beneath a cloud of in-the-red white noise skree.
There are a couple tracks that strip away some of the crumble and buzz, and harken back to the more purely rhythmic RfR of old, but those moments are brief, the band quickly slipping back into their woozy sea sick doom-sludge churn, but even then, pretty much every stretch of seemingly pure raw blackened doomic primitivism, is in fact seriously fucked up, whether that fucked upness is in your face, or buried way below the surface, it's there, and it keeps Under The Eye firmly rooted in whatever fucked Finnish tradition RfR oozes from...
Record number two from this now defunct, vocal/synth psychedelic shoegaze duo, recorded back in 2009, and released not long after their Debacle cd-r, Ocean On Ocean. And like that record, on Grey Angel the Slaves again masterfully conjure up some sort of cosmic otherworld, a sound so expansive and epic, its hard to believe they're just a duo, layers of smoldering synths, swirling clouds of blurred effects, and the vocals, ethereal an angelic, like a deconstructed Slowdive, or My Bloody Valentine, slowed way down, and smeared into alien torch songs, the music roiling and full of motion, the lush raga like tones draped over a swirl of fractured melodies and vocal fragments, a darkly dour, melancholic rhythmless drift, all buzz and fuzz and rumble and whir, bleeding into one organic sonic swoon. On the tracks that hew closer to traditional songcraft, the melodies coalesce into something that almost sounds like some lost eighties synthwave creep, but the Slaves add wild squalls of psychedelic guitars, and reverb drenched vocal acrobatics, all of those disparate elements again woven into something impossibly lovely and dreamily mesmerizing.
A collection of melted pop songs, of deconstructed shoegaze, which occasionally, like on the cold wave poppy "Visions", definitely sounds like it could be some unearthed eighties synth pop gem, but of course spinning at the wrong speed, and not to mention the weirdly processed male vox, almost robotic, a weirdly (im)perfect foil for the gorgeous powerful soaring female vox. But of course, it doesn't take long for the band to slip back into something more abstract and tripped out, looping snipped vox over thick synth swells, all again as a backdrop to those gorgeous vocals.
"Ancestors" almost sounds like witch house, with all the rhythms stripped away, and the sounds super saturated, sonically coloring way outside the lines, haunting and dreamily ominous, the track growing more and more noisy and chaotic as it goes, culminating in the sweetly brooding slo-mo shoegaze dreamwave of the closer "Angel", which sounds like the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from Sleep Over or Still Corners, a totally gorgeous hazy, hushed dreamsynth ballad, that sounds a little bit like Zola Jesus on 4AD...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Austin based artist Daniel Hipolito has been recording as Smokey Emery for over a decade making small runs of self-released cd-rs of drone-based tape and field recordings. His musical aesthetic of manipulating industrial sounding drones made with vintage tape recorders into warm shimmering layered compositions that evoke the feel of memories of a fading past, rainy days and old photographs, the mystical feel of night and unspoken, perhaps terrifying secrets, have made him one of the more interesting figures to come out of Austin's growing experimental music scene. For this special but extremely limited 3" release (only 12 copies made!) on local Austin label Kendra Steiner Editions, there are two new pieces. The title track is like a Brian Eno recording for the Twin Peaks Soundtrack, giving off a dark foreboding yet alluring ambience. The second track, "Nightly" creates a chilly peacefulness of a dark meadow before sunrise, perhaps a restful solitude after a night of violence. Limited to 12 copies, we have 6, of those, and -might- be able to get a few more, but odds are once these are gone, they're gone for good!
Sutcliffe Jugend is the long-standing power electronics outfit of Kevin Tomkins and Mark Taylor, which Tomkins founded in 1982 with the release of a massive 10-cassette box-set of transgressive noise dedicated to / inspired by various serial killers and psychopathic malcontents, appropriately released by Come Productions. Tomkins shelved the project for much of the '80s whilst he sharpened his knives for electronic power-violence by joining William Bennett in Whitehouse; but in the '90s, Tomkins re-ignited Sutcliffe Jugend with the help of Mark Taylor, who's also collaborated with Tomkins in the abject-rock outfit Bodychoke. With Extreme Prejudice is the first Sutcliffe Jugend album in nearly three years, although both Taylor and Tomkins report a considerable amount of new material on their website, including an absurdly large 17 disc boxset documenting Tomkins' autoharp compositions(!).
While the autoharp is listed as an instrument in the liner-notes for WEP, Tomkins and Taylor demolish any and all of the instrument's sonorous qualities in the crucible of noise, distortion, and unpure thought. But lest you think Sutcliffe Jugend unfurls a static harsh wall of noise for 70 minutes, With Extreme Prejudice emerges as a varied and dynamic album always scraping and scratching at the depths of human cruelty. "Carnage" blorps and bleeps with atonal electronics that might lend one to think of a David Tudor exploration, if it weren't for all of the guttural howls and splattered screams. Tomkins and Taylor must have been listening in on William Bennett's Cut Hands project in relation to "Empathiser" although the Frankensteinian rhythms seem pilfered more from Justice than from African drums. Still, a frenzied maelstrom of ill-will and bad-vibes abound. "Lucky" is one of those power electronics tracks that presents a disgusting narrative from a sadistic anti-hero who's paid for an hour with a junky prostitute after torching his workplace. Needless to say, it's not a happy bit of fiction. "Fuckrage" pretty much says it all in the title, and the final cut "Fall Of Utopia" takes a dark ambient loop to a punishing noise crescendo that's equal to the heights that Controlled Bleeding and Prurient have reached in the past.
After watching this movie starring Charles Bronson and Lee Remick, you'll never think of Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping By Woods on A Snowy Evening" in the same way. Putting a new twist on a plot device borrowed from the Manchurian Candidate, Telefon (1977) is a unique take on the Cold War spy thriller. Donald Pleasance, playing a mad Russian spy, recites the last stanza of Frost's poem ("The woods are lovely, dark and deep / But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.") via telephone as a hypnotic trigger to wake up long dormant sleeper agents embedded in the US to commit violent suicidal sabotage. Charles Bronson is the KGB agent sent to intercept him before all the Telefon agents are activated, sparking the next World War, and Remick is the double agent who loves him but is ordered to betray him once the mission is complete. Don Siegel (Charley Varrick, Dirty Harry, The Beguiled) directs this with enough sharp hard-boiled pulpiness to make it a great b-movie thriller, as we used to see it get played a lot on independent television in the seventies (Those were the days!). Its far-fetched plot, spoofed in the Naked Gun movies, was believable enough for aQ-staffer Scott to fear telephonic hypnosis for a brief time when he was very young.
Lalo Schifrin's brooding score makes great use of the cimbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer used in a lot of Eastern European folk music, and other harp and string based instruments as a means to convey a pensive uncanny dread. Matching the harboring terror lurking beneath seemingly normal American citizens, the music at first exudes a dreamy facade that quickly becomes tense and hair-raising. Since this is one of the first American movies to have a KGB agent protagonist, the music also borrows from Eastern European musical idioms for the more sensitive character based plot lines.
Added onto this release is Leonard Rosenbaum's score for Hide In Plain Sight, the 1980 directorial debut of James Caan. Caan also stars in this film about a man searching to reunite with his kids after his ex-wife and new husband enter a witness protection program. Rosenbaum's score is typical of most Hollywood thrillers of the time, but it is short with only a few cues and a couple of longer pieces that probably wouldn't warrant its own release. Like with all Film Score Monthly releases, the booklet is chock full of information about both film's history and cultural context and the score's particular cinematic power in exemplifying each scene. Hypnotic!
Long lost legendary slab of classic British industrial music, originally released in 1986 on the amazing Broken Flag label. The most noteworthy thing about Toll, besides it being a killer record, is the fact that it just so happens to feature a pre-Stereolab Tim Gane (!) as well as Paul Lemos from Controlled Bleeding. But Stereolab fans won't necessarily dig this, Toll is grim stuff. Cold and harsh, lots of metallic percussion, looped rhythms, skipping records, bits of shortwave radio, disembodied voices, plenty of metal on metal clang, thick distorted drones, all held together by huge lurching basslines, that give the whole thing a definite depressive miserablist vibe, like a seriously industrial Joy Division.
At their most musical, like on the loping mantra like "Broken Frame", they do sound quite a bit like the darkest of Factory bands, with simple plodding percussion, and hypnotic low end throbs, all beneath a dramatically crooned vocal line. Imagine any of the current crop of new wave revivalists, Interpol for example, slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaay down and wrapped in plenty of rumble and clang, and you'll get an idea of the sound of Toll.
But that's only one element of their sound, the other being much more abstract, epic, wide open expanses of industrial crunch and shimmering drone, mournful melodies drifting in and out of machinelike rhythms, and crumbling landscapes of sound, wheezing hisses and keening feedback, jagged shards of buzzing electronics, all sorts of strange vocals, dripping with reverb and delay, grinding whirs and thick moaning low end, very dark and dreary and very prescient of the whole modern Wolf Eyes and friends noise scene.
In addition to the entire Christ Knows LP, the cd includes 3 bonus tracks, two that sound like they could be lost Wire jams, all blown out and relentlessly throbbing, with wild squalls of feedback and buzzing guitars over bouncy bass lines and simple propulsive rhythms, while the other is an epic drone-y crawl, thick with layered voices, pulsing bass lines, muted percussive thumps and shuffles and tangled guitar scribbles, all swirled into a dense cloud of slow shifting sound. So awesome.
Fans of old school industrial (Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Nurse With Wound), classic post punk / new wave (Wire, Joy Division, the recently reviewed Arkansaw Man, etc) as well as mode modern outfits like Skullflower, Wolf Eyes, Dead C and the like, will seriously dig!
Two new slabs of TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA!!! Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a new cd-r from Astral Womb, but this right here is record number two from Torture Gnosis, a duo whose first record seemed to slip right by us, for which we are now definitely kicking ourselves, cuz this stuff is seriously ruling.
Fans of the Frequency Thirteen label, the home of 'True Sheffield Black Psychedelia', and the various TSBP bands we've gushed over in the past: Black Vomit, Dukkha, Rape Rack, Ice Bound Majesty and Skultroll, should probably just stop right here and add this to your cart, but for everybody else, imagine a sort of twisted more lo-fi and sci-fi Expo 70, the same sort of psychedelic bliss out, long expanses of cosmic shimmer, but not rendered in the typical tropes of 'kosmische' music, instead, these are weirdo lo-fi metallers crafting a gorgeous fractured songsuite of intergalactic ambience. Their first record was a much noisier beast, with many of the tracks leaning way more toward a dizzying chaotic confluence of black metal, free jazz, and industrial clatter, but even then, the band would pepper these blasts of blacknoise and tangled metaljazz skree with hushed expanses of druggy drift and mesmerizing shimmer, and for II, it seems the band have jettisoned the blackness, ditched the rhythms, and instead opted for something much more tripped out and tranquil, soft focus swirls drifting weightless through clouds of effects, raga like drones layered into lush swells, all the tones stretched way out, meditative and dreamlike. But fear not, there's still plenty of darkness, with a handful of tracks playing out like soundtracks to some low budget VHS Alien knock-off, and we mean that in a good way, creepy ominous cinematic sprawls laced with weird sounds, is that some creature chewing human bones, or the footsteps of some mysterious figure trudging though some alien graveyard, or a mad scientist in a cave assembling some infernal machine, the synths rumble and thrum, occasionally blossoming into something that sounds more like the music from a seventies planetarium show. Killer stuff. And definitely recommended for all you into the current crop of psychedelic space synth and retro-futuristic Carpenter / Goblin worship who might be up for something a bit more fucked up.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!!
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Found a couple of these killer comps stashed in the closet. Figured there would probably be one or two noiseniks out there would flip for this. Just have a look at the groups/folks involved: Oren Ambarchi, Thurston Moore, Noxagt, Lass Marhaug, Volcano The Bear, Neil Campbell, Dylan Nyoukis, and a whole bunch more. House in a cool oversized cover. Pretty sure this is long out of print so these are definitely the last copies ever. And on sale to boot!
We're super picky when it comes to noise, and noise rock, okay so maybe we're just really picky, but like techno, it takes something special to really win us over. We were a little wary at first of this comp, which collects a bunch of music and bands "From Providence And Olneyville Rhode Island". Sure there are tons of those bands who totally rule, but there are also a whole bunch of one off costume rock joke bands. Thankfully this comp is pretty fucking solid all the way through, splitting the difference between aggro noise rock, and weird damaged metal, and pretty much every stop in between. All the usual suspects are here, Landed, Necronomitron, Mindflayer, Prurient, Drop Dead, Lightning Bolt, White Mice, Kites.... But there are also plenty of noisy newbies, Knights Of Timbre, Em Dath Rir, Football Rabbit, Suffering Bastard, Bloodthrone, Knifestorm, Smashed Femur Dance Party, Patootie Lobe and more...
Standout tracks include the technical metal mayhem of Necronomitron, the Lightning Bolt-ish psychdamaged drum/synth freakout of Mindflayer, the cartoon cutup buzz and glitch of Knights Of Timbre, the 20 second hyperspeed blast of female voiced brutality from Bloodthrone, The electro sludge of Football Rabbit, the damaged turntable manipulation of Mahi Mahi and so much more.
Never thought we'd say it, but pretty much every single track on this noise comp kicked our ass, and at least a few had us wanting to hear LOTS more!
The name might not seem immediately familiar to you, but avid readers of the aQ list might remember Vantzou from her membership in aQ faves The Dead Texan, a Stars Of The Lid offshoot fronted by the Adam Wiltzie half of SOTL, and whose self titled (and now sadly out of print) full length on Kranky from a few years back, was a huge favorite around here. Vantzou provided the stunning visuals on the accompanying dvd, and also provided vocals, but here demonstrates quite a Stars Of The Lid like flair for dramatic cinematic soundscapery. The tracks here dark and dreamily brooding, all lush strings draped over distant mysterious drones, subtle smears of echo and reverb add just the right amount of mystery, layered swirls of sound billow around hazy washed out melodies, slow glacial swells of sound which give way to more traditional chamber music, only to quickly slip back into warm whirls of hauntingly majestic drift, notes and tones left to float and gently decay, sinking gradually through layers of reverberent shimmer, blurred and gently smeared into something that sounds more more akin to Indignant Senility or The Caretaker, and at times, like on record closer "Joggers", indeed like an even darker and more abstract Stars Of The Lid.
Oh, yes. Industrial music. Blake Edwards - the man behind Vertonen, not to be confused with, uh, the other Blake Edwards - ventured hither and yon throughout the great state of Illinois cataloguing the noises, rhythms, and drones from the state's wealth of industrial-strength machines, capturing half-ton presses, diesel engines, hydraulic presses, air filtration systems, hay balers, drill presses, iron works fabrication facilities, desalination facilities, etc; and he's worked these grinding rhythms, incendiary hisses, and atonal klank into a very effective set of pulse-oriented collages that harken to a classic, early '80s definition of Industrial Music, post-Throbbing Gristle. The likes of Vivenza, Esplendor Geometrico, and even Test Dept. looked to the sounds of the industrial workplace for musical inspiration, contextualizing their field recordings with a claustrophobia that alluded to a grim monotony within an increasingly dehumanized social order. Such is the framework for Vertonen's La Coeur Mecanique, recorded a few decades later with a more clinical mindset in the approach to the sounds, alternating between a rhythmic bash on one track followed by a monolithic gray wash of noise on the next. For the former strategy, Vertonen's locomotive, mechanical churnings lock into incessant patterns of hammered iron and steel, with blossoms and swarms of hum, hiss, and klang amassing in the distance. And on the latter, the compacted layers of steam ventilation and compressed air become the ashen bellowings from the belly of an ill-tempered foundry. Without the rhythmic patterns of the former, these latter works are bleak parallels to those industrially-sourced recordings by Francisco Lopez. Limited to 160 professionally duplicated cd-rs, we might add.
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Never heard of these guys, apparently they're from the US and are another band that sound like they should be on Siltbreeze, or maybe on AmRep circa 1995, they have that Aussie swampy noise rock blues vibe (a la Lubricated Goat or King Snake Roost), which is even further driven home by the A side, which is a Cramps cover, and after a squall of guitar squiggle, they erupt into a churning swampy groove, all detuned riffage and yelped vox, pounding caveman drums, some seriously rad wah wah guitars, the whole thing loose and heavy and noisy and very live sounding.
The B side is more of the same, churning, chuggy primitive sludge punk dirgery, loads of feedback, sung/spoken vox, tangled melodies, some killer riffing, all leading up to a crashing chaotic outro. The sort of jam we would expect to discover via Brian Turner's radio show on WFMU, which of course means this rules!
Super limited cassette tape from aQ beloved NY psychedelic space rockers White Hills, two side long slowburn psych-kraut groovers, part of a series that offers up a sort of rough draft of some of the 'process' that went into the creation of their most recent full length H-p1, and as you might imagine, everything you (and we!) love about White Hills is present and in full effect, the skeletal motorik drumming, the low slung slithery basslines, the effects drenched guitars, the psychedelic swirls, explosive crescendos, the brooding grooves, weird samples, wah wah guitar freakouts, the sound murky and muddy and washed, out, super lo-fi, but it totally suits them, making this sound like some unearthed seventies psychedelic rarity. The A side is the murkier of the two, raw psychedelic minimalism, that splinters near the end into some weird found sound, and then a chaotic coda. While the B side is much more expansive, still pretty lo-fi, but more guitars going on, chiming and soaring, with swirling melodies, the bass especially thick and super distorted, and a long stretched out super blissy second half, which finds everything dialed way back, the band drifting druggily and dreamily, through a thick expanse of hum and hiss and thrum, finally finishing off with some tripped out backwards guitarscaping. Nice.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, already sold out so these are the last copies we'll be able to get.
