The latest from Bay Area new-kraut-folk-age combo Alps, finds the band sounding more�high fidelity than ever, and more kraut than folk, which in both cases suits them big time.
For those new to Alps, a rundown of several members should help give you an idea of where their sound is coming from: our very own Scott Hewicker (Troll), Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp, formerly of Tussle) and Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Colophon, J.C. Ledesma). But Alps is definitely more than the sum of its parts, their sound is quite varied, expansive, even epic at times, but simultaneously, they manage to craft a sound simple and solid, based as much on rhythm and texture as on song and melody.
On past releases, Alps were a much more ramshackle concern, which at the time was definitely a big part of their sound, and thus set them firmly amongst the lo-fi cd-r drone folks scene, their sound a sort of ghostly Appalachia, mixed with longform drone music, muddy muted ambience, minimal soundscaping and plenty of lo-fi buzz and hiss much of the record mired in a corrosive murk, that only added to their dark dronelike vibe. The move to Type Records, coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with a sonic shift, where once was abstract and low fidelity, is now rhythmic, and propulsive, looped and repetitive, and most importantly, glistening and glimmering, the sound crystal clear, and this time the dreaminess doesn't come from poor recording, it comes from the compositions, and the arrangements, and a super nice sounding recording courtesy of Phil Manley of the Champs and Trans Am. The core members of Alps also have a keen interest in new age music. Not the Deep Breakfast sort of schlock that most seem to equate with the genre, but instead more the sort of inner space, dreamy drift of Tangerine Dream, Deuter, Steve Hillage and the like. And those sounds are all over III as well.
The opener is a gorgeous looped soundscape of repetitive guitar figures, and glistening chimes, almost like a dreamfolk Steve Reich, bits of Appalachia, big buzzing synths, strummed zithers, a gorgeous melancholy melody played out over the course of five and a half minutes. The second track finds the band getting their kraut on, channeling Neu! Or Agitation Free but through a much more washed out and weary space rock, like Hawkwind gone new age. Distant drifting vocals, all manner of layered buzz, distorted guitars buried in the mix, space-y FX, very tranquil and mesmerizing. The follow up "Cloud One" finds Alps revisiting their folk roots, taking strummed acoustic guitars, and simple piano, and draping them over a woozy melody and a super spare abstract rhythm. "Trem Fantasma" is a barely there whisper of spaced out dronemusic, Gloriously wreathed in musical mystery, drifting piano, fragmented guitars, some soft sixties 'ladada' vocals, another dreamy drifter that threatens to spirit the listener away to some sun dappled green grassed knoll. "Labyrinths" is another new age / krautrock meander, washed out and shimmery, the drums the only thing keeping the rest of the song from just floating away, playful melodies, that sound like Perry and Kingsley rendered in shades of grey. The next few tracks are more abstract, sounds swooping in and out, rhythms, if there are any, buried beneath soft layers of sound, everything hushed and minimal, until album closer, "Into The Breeze", which sounds just like the title would have you imagine, breezy, soft focus, the drums, simple and stripped down, shimmering steel string guitar, that ever present piano, the melody wistful, the production hazy and a little woozy, effects swirling in the background, the drums gradually becoming more and more tripped out, before fading out completely, leaving just the guitar and the piano to drift heavenward, through a field of soft shimmer and the glistening afterglow of the sounds that came before.
The more we listen to III, the more obvious the new age-isms become, which is not a bad thing at all, it wraps the proceedings, no matter how krautrocky or folky or droney, in a sweet swirl of moonlit dreaminess, turning each song into its own sort of otherworldly mesmer.
LIMITED TO ONLY 400 COPIES ON VINYL!!!!! (& the compact disc version is coming soon, but not out yet...)
And here's a Record Store Day release that we still have simply 'cause our shipment of these 7"s from Academy Records didn't arrive until a few days ago, AFTER Record Store Day. Billed as the funkiest Record Store Day release ever, and we don't doubt it, Academy's expert Afro-Funk bona fides being second to none. Working in conjunction with DJ/digger Frank "Voodoo Funk" Gossner, as they so often do, they've unearthed and reissued this early '70s West African gem, an ultra rare, ultra funky 45 of which only two original copies are known to exist today. Both A side "Onye Akpa" and "Oshi Onwu" on the flip offer up a head nodding, hip swinging stew of call-and-response chanting vox, chicka-chicka-chicka funk guitar, boom-boom-bap drumming, and psychedelic organ warble.
It's a remastered, official reish, limited edition of course, and "pressed extra loud for maximum impact".
While this is not new, we felt since we just listed Manuel Gottsching's essential early eighties proto-acid release E2-E4, we should revisit another essential release from the post-Ash Ra Tempel period that we never listed before. 1976's New Age of Earth was the inaugural release from Ashra, the next phase of Ash Ra Tempel which basically was Manuel Gottsching re-focusing his musical efforts from a group ambition to a solo experience, marked by more streamlined compositions involving more synthesizers and sequencers but not losing his signature cosmic guitar leads altogether. Letting go of the acid psych commune jams of Ash Ra Tempel's previous efforts, New Age of Earth enjoys a more meditative kosmiche sensibility with extended warm electronic sojourns with minimalist compositional tendencies. The opener "Sunrain" is a deliriously percolating track that sounds as if Steve Reich created a proto-Balearic slow disco jam for sunrise dancefloors in Ibiza. "Ocean of Tenderness" is a softly lilting and shifting piece marked by gentle waves of sound and floating guitar figures, while "Deep Distance" is a more contemplative and cinematic rumination on landscapes of sound. Which leads to the final piece "Nightdust", which at 21 minutes is the longest track, a gorgeously majestic build-up of cosmic sensations. Whirring pulsar synth effects over a serene new age foundation like the feel of illuminating stars over some alien planetary ocean, culminating in a searing sky-high guitar lead that propels us into the nebulous ether of oceanic space. In fact the whole album has this epic 'sci-fi beach' feel, reminiscent of that mysterious final scene from The Quiet Earth, where the last man on earth is on the beach and sees the giant planet Saturn looming in the distance. A classic cosmic krautrock release from Virgin Record's most exciting and exploratory period, New Age of Earth is essential for all fans of kraut-y space-rock and psychedelic cosmic bliss.
We first discovered Author & Punisher via a super limited dvd, cuz really, as good as the music is, and it is amazing, you sort of have to see the music being made to understand just how fucking nuts this stuff, and this guy really is. A&P is one man, Tristan Shone, who builds his own instruments, which in and of itself is nothing new, but we're not talking cobbled together rickety speakers and Amps For Christ style plywood soundmachines (although we love that stuff), we're talking gorgeous, precision machined instruments, that look like modern art, huge smooth steel drums, strange handles that slide along metal rails, bizarre triggers and stainless steel mouthpieces fitted with multiple microphones, Author & Punisher's setup looks like some post modern Rube Goldbergian sonic mousetrap, all glimmering metals and smooth expanses of perfectly fitted machines, the live performance as physical as any normal instrumentalist if not more so, Shone spinning the huge metal; drum creating thick swells of rib cage rattling low end, slamming the strange handles along the steel rails producing booming bursts of percussion, the strange Cylon like microphone producing an inhuman alien bellow. Even sans sound, the performance is riveting. Mesmerizing. We were lucky enough to host an Author & Punisher instore, and besides being incredible to see up close, the sounds produced shook the old wooden building that houses aQ so hard, that our upstairs neighbors came down in a panic, explaining that the whole hose was vibrating, and things were falling off shelves and tables.
Now imagine that sort of physical energy, converted into sound, but not just any sound, but totally mesmerizingly epic, crushing buzz drenched post industrial heaviness. A sound that falls somewhere between the industrial crush of Godflesh, and the blown out electronic buzz and glitch of Digital Hardcore, but all blurred into a sort of abject blackened industrial doom. All manner of low end pulsing and buzzing, rumbling and whirring, the beats skittery and stuttery one second, pounding and Teutonic the next, and then there's the bass generator, which we assume comes from that huge metal disc, cuz a sound that thick and intense should really come from a massive 300 pound hunk of spinning metal, that impossibly dense low end, weirdly woozy and almost liquid, the tones being adjusted on the fly, so much so that it sounds like the speed of the recording is being messed with, the sound warbly and woozy, warped and darkly damaged and druggy. While at the same time being heavy as fuck, and pretty much WAY more brutal that bands with real drummer and a phalanx of guitarists in front of rows of amps.
It's amazing how much of the physicality is captured on the record, more so here than on past recordings, the sound managing the delicate balance between blown out amp destroying crush, and tightly wound, barely controlled chaos. The songs slipping from lumbering doomic lurch, to swoonsome skittery abstract dronemusic, from noisy metallic pummel, thick, sinewy digidub, and from thick almost metalgaze drift, to super spare haunting minimal skitter.
Ursus Americanus is definitely the culmination of past recordings and live performances, managing the seemingly impossible task of creating something that stands on its own musically, but that captures a soundmaking method that you're unlikely to experience from anyone else. Totally incredible. And obviously, if you get the chance, see A&P live, and have your mind (and ears) blown.
Another fantastic release from Aussie reissue label Omni, this one from country legend Bobby Bare. It's a compilation of two seventies records, the first, Hard Time Hungrys, a record released in 1975, in the midst of the oil crisis, finds Bare teamed up with Shel Silverstein (who of course wrote the childhood classic, The Giving Tree), who wrote the lyrics for this darkly political record detailing the economic and social decline of the time, the sound classic country, Bare's vocals deep and soulful, the arrangements spare, but a bit lush, the standard instrumentation augmented by some keyboards and other studio polish, with the record balanced between old school classic country, and a more lush pop sound, that classic seventies country pop that was all over the radio at the time, the record rife with some really great songs (and a few hits), the lyrics cutting and incisive, but molded into some surprisingly melodies and some serious hooks.
This reissue tacks on another record, the following year's The Winner And Other Losers, which ended up being a much more popular record, due in no small part to the inclusion of Bare's version of "Dropkick Me, Jesus" which was a HUGE hit, and still ranks up there as one of THEE best (and funniest) spirituals ever. But the whole record is overflowing with great songs, a few co-written by Silverstein again, including "The Winner" which comes accompanied by a laugh track(!). There's lots of could/should/would have been classics, and definitely finds Bare at his best. And like all Omni reissues, meticulously researched, and fantastically remastered, with a huge booklet full of liner notes and rare photos!
On the last list, we reviewed the latest cd-r from LA metal masters Behold! The Monolith, and as we mentioned in that review, we had already had this self-titled debut of theirs for a while, and had been digging it big time, before we got the new one. And since the new one was such a hit, we figured we oughta go back and list the one that started it all. Our thumbnail description from that other review still definitely applies, we reference Sleep and Mastodon, Electric Wizard and Venom, Motorhead, epic metal mastery and big arena riffing, doomy stonery sludge and classic thrash, this record if anything is a bit more raw that the follow up. Opener "Battlestagg" the first we'd ever heard from these guys, so still in some way it's the defining song, with its churning metallic crunch, the raspy vokills, the massive drum pummel, not to mention the middle stretch where the distorted bass takes on the melody all on its own before the band kick back in. That's right, amidst all this metal pound, the band kick out some serious melody, and hooks galore, in fact, that sensibility, combined with the thick guitar tone, definitely reminded us of sludge poppers Torche too, albeit not nearly as poppy, and WAY more thrashing and metallic.
"Battle For Balls Deep" is one of the two epics here, starting out with some misleadingly funky drumming, and some guitar scratch to match, the band soon explode into some dizzying mathiness and progged out heaviness that should have most weirdo metalheads in heaven, before the band launch right back into some serious Sabbathy dirgery, the track is all over the map, even slipping into some weirdly twangy country drift midway through, complete with some gorgeous sun dappled lapsteel, slowly building to what almost could be some sort of Mogwai / Godspeed slowbuild epic, before lumbering right back into some churning downtuned crunch, but managing to still retains some of that soaring melody and subtle poppiness, before finishing off with a wild psychedelic guitar freakout over a grinding churning metallic crush. The record finishes off with another epic, a 12 minute, three parter that starts out all post rocky, and deceivingly jangly, this record deviating from the group's metal core much more than the follow up, this song offering up long stretches of hooky sludge pop, of crunchy stoner metal pound, of woozy post rock lope, even some weirdly psychedelic wah wah guitar driven classical infused moodiness midway through, but with all that weirdness, they manage to sound heavy as fuck, the metal parts massive, and the whole sprawling dizzying multipart epic somehow falling together perfectly.
Needless to say, if you bought the more recent record, you're gonna want this one too. And this might actually be an even better place to start, the sort of metal record that just might drag nonmetalheads over to the dark side, and alternately, the sort of heaviness that just might convince metalheads, that there's more to music than metal.
Like the other record, totally bad ass fantasy cover art, this time some sort of axe wielding antler-ed gorilla riding a demon deer through a wall of hellfire. Fuck yeah!
Latest in a long line of dopesmoke driven, Sabbath worshipping, downtuned stoner sludge heavies, these guys hail from Poland, and take their drug rock cues from all the usual suspects: Sleep (of course), Eyehategod, Electric Wizard, etc. It's all instrumental, so it's all about the riffs, and the riffs here are pretty goddamn great, dense, blackened, skull caving, slabs of thick, ugly, crumbling, distorted buzz and crunch, riding atop some of the sickest bass rumble around, the drums a Neanderthal pound driving the lurching dopesick creep, the slithery stoner swing and lumbering doomic plod laced with spidery melodies, and brief blasts of psychedelic wah wah guitars and woozy FX, the tempos are occasionally cranked up to a serious stonery groove, the band sounding like some lost Meteor City band, but Belzebong seem to always eventually slip back into a more woozy, warped, glacial tarpit trudge. The lack of vocals is made up for with some strange tripped out samples, and the tracks sprawl and ooze and stretch way out, to the point that they definitely seem less HEAVY, and more sort of tripped out and wasted... Definitely not reinventing the bong, but hell, folks who love their shit hard and heavy, low slung, blown out and burnt, this will definitely hit the spot.
Debut single from this brand new duo, featuring Eric Copeland of long running noiseniks Black Dice and Jimi Hey, formerly of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, and we have to say, the sound definitely falls somewhere closer to Hey's old outfit, two slab of tweaked, warped, carnivalesque outsider pop, rife with sped up vocals, woozy harmonies, backwards guitar swoops, bizarre production. The A side sounds a bit tropical and summery, very Ariel Pink / John Maus for sure, everything warped and liquid sounding, bloopy melodies, the record almost sounding like it's physically melting, or like a classic pop 45 spinning on a malfunctioning turntable, the RPM's constantly changing, dreamily queasy, sunshiney and washed out, but with a thick buzzy second half that gets weirdly heavy and distorted.
The B side offers up more of the same, another drowsy druggy chunk of outsider jangle pop, more strangely harmonized vox, tangled up wah wah guitars, and a super crazy catchy melody, that the rest of the song and all of the sounds seem deadset on subverting. Cool strange stuff. Definitely recommended for fans of lysergic outsider pop and warped weirdo summery jangle, which we're guessing is probably a whole lot of you!
A special Record Store day release from the oddly named Bitchin Bajas, a side project of aQ fave psychkraut hypnorock combo Cave, and another one of those records that people seemed to be particularly keen to get their hands on, so we did our best to get a bunch extra for mailorder folks who couldn't be at aQ on RSD. Only three songs, but clocking in at a whopping 38 minutes, and another gorgeous chunk of tripped out psychedelic kosmische synthscapery, the first track, all 17+ minutes of it, finds the BB duo unfurling a dizzying tripped out soundscape of pulsing pulsating synth blurts that careen from speaker to speaker, hypnotic and almost maddening, but before it gets to be too much, the sound shifts gears, and blossoms into a gorgeous bit of Carpenter/Goblin like cinematic synthscaping, cascading melodies, all draped over a deep low end pulse, ominous, but at the same time prismatic and energetic, before once again switching back to a more swirling spaced out bit of heavily panned sonic mesmer, which is soon joined by some abstract percussion, the sound expanding in slow motion, like some sort of time lapse footage of a supernova, before returning to that soundtracky synthscape, and before finally splintering into something much more abstract, the whole second half of the track a sort of spaced out softly psychedelic
landscape of looped repetitive Reich/Riley like pulsations, that ebb and flow, fade out to a hushed whisper, then expand to a corrosive crunch, and back again, so heady and hypnotic. The comparatively shorter "Bajas Ragas" weds Muslimgauze like rhythms to a buzzing synth drone, before adding a groovy low slung bassline, woozy and warm, a mesmerizing bit of murky minimalism, before the synths come in, and unfurl snakecharmer like melodies over the top, the sound growing gradually more propulsive, the synths getting more distorted, the rhythms more driving, the bass buzzier, before one by one the various elements begin to fade out, leaving just a hazy stretch of synth buzz and chordal shimmer. The final track, "Jelly", is the most somber of the bunch, beginning as a warm, hushed drone, which is soon joined by more drones, more layers, what sounds like a horn of some kind, the vibe subtly jazzy, and darkly cosmic, soon the low end rises up from below and adds some bass heavy heft to the the proceedings, eventually, the horns grow wilder and wilder, culminating in a dark droned out psychedelic jazz raga that ends way too soon.
Included with the lp is a dvd featuring films that accompany all three songs, by none other than Olivia Wyatt, who was responsible for that awesome Staring Into The Sun release on Sublime Frequencies. Here, Wyatt matches BB's psychedelic sounds with her own quite psychedelic visuals, bursts of sun dappled prismatic glimmers, sparkling water born shimmer, strange abstract shapes and slow morphing colors, and finally some super grainy black and white footage of night time rituals and mysterious dances, perfectly capturing the spirit and the energy of the sounds they accompany.
The record comes housed in a super glossy, brightly colored, slightly oversized jacket, and includes a small printed insert. And again, this was a Record Store Day release, so supplies are limited, and we may not be able to restock once these sell out.
So, can you really call a song "Pinball Wizard", if it's not actually "Pinball Wizard"??? We guess you can, if you're Black Dice. They don't give a damn. Or maybe it IS a version of "Pinball Wizard", but so fucked up Black Dice style as to be unrecognizable. Whatever it is, it's the opening track on this new platter from Brooklyn weirdos Black Dice, the entire nine tracks of which represent another damaged dose of what we've previously referred to as their usual "sampled and collagey, beat driven electro-noise" shenanigans. Piled with broken beats, looped noises, distorted vocal blurts, farting synths, etc., their lysergic grooves sound kinda like a really woozy drugged out Pop Will Eat Itself making an album for the Boredoms' Super Roots series or something. All kinds of chaotic craziness, but weirdly catchy though!
Got just a little handful of these special Record Store Day singles from Thrill Jockey country string band the Black Twig Pickers, two songs of old school Appalachia and back porch bluegrass hoedowns, the A side a rollicking, foot stomping barn burner, all sawed fiddles and intense fingerpicking, replete with hoots and hollers, the B side though a much darker affair, a haunting dirge-like lament, a dark folk ballad all minor key, melancholy and brooding, with sorrowful vox and wailing mouth harp. Gorgeous stuff as always.
Super limited too, so once these are gone, they are most likely gone for good. Includes a download coupon as well!
Second volume in Captured Tracks series of Wake tribute 7"s, released in honor of Record Store Day, and of course late great UK post punk outfit the Wake. This year, it's another two aQ faves tackling their favorite jams by the Wake, first up is Blouse, who already sounded a bit like The Wake to begin with, so if you're unfamiliar with the original, it sounds very much like it could be a proper Blouse track, gloomy and woozy, ethereal vox drifting over murky basslines and skeletal rhythms, spidery guitar melodies, lots of jangle and haze and shimmer, all floating on warm minor key synth swells. Craft Spells' cover is a bit more upbeat, a serious Style Council vibe, frenetic guitar jangle, shimmering synths, an almost disco drumbeat, wreathed in chiming melodies, crooned dramatic vocals, a fantastically washed out slab of fuzzy shoegazey new wave gloom pop.
A special Record Store Day 2012 release, already sold out and out of print, we have a bunch, but once these are gone, they are gone for good!
Reissued on vinyl for Record Store Day, this was the final record from these aQ beloved math metal crushers. This new version comes pressed at 45rpm on nice thick vinyl and housed in a heavy full color jacket, an almost exact reproduction of the original, here's our brief review from way back in 2002:
Final missive from these aQ faves, the mighty Botch. A wicked math-metal machine spitting out super heavy but surprisingly melodic and complex metalcore. As good if not better than Coalesce and Converge but criminally underappreciated. Maybe that's why they're calling it quits. Must be tough making music this amazing and not being HUGE. Every song is an epic, with earth shaking bass rumble, keening high-end guitar melodies, lots of chugging riffs, stop/start rhythms, pounding drums and one of the fiercest roars around. WAY RECOMMENDED!
The cover of this Branko record, featuring a stylish long haired bell bottomed hippy posing in the middle of a street, with sunglasses and a cigarette, had us imagining that it must be some archival psych rock record from the sixties, and that the guy on the cover must be Branko. But in fact, Branko is a band from Sweden, and not from the sixties, but from NOW, although they sound very much like they're from the sixties, their sound a heavily reverbed surf rock, groovy garage pop, a la Link Wray or the Troggs, or the Ventures, but their sound is definitely modern, the guitars are impossibly fuzzy and blown out, all the instruments in fact are crazy distorted, it sounds like the whole record is crumbling as it comes cascading from the speakers, and the deeper you get into the 7" the more sort of punk it sounds, some serious surf punk for sure, laced with wild bouts of chaotic percussion, weird sci-fi samples, random voices speaking in strange languages, draped over the bands hypnotic grooves, with lots of the tracks sounding like revved up theme songs from lost sixties spy programs, or the ultimate soundtrack for the most bad assed chase scenes EVER. So great. Includes a download card too which includes an extra NINE track not on the 7"!!
In pretty much every review of every Burnt Hills record, we mention that it simply sounds like someone decided to push record on the tape machine mid jam, and then the group just played and played until the tape ran out. Which is what it really sounds like. Set the needle to the groove, and suddenly the listener is thrust into an already-in-progress mega-psych-jam, multiple guitarists, multiple drummers, and one thing that few other space/psych rock outfits can boast, a xylophone player (!!). The sound is a wild, loose, unhinged, drug addled free for all, that against all odds, constantly coalesces into proper grooves, or thick chordal swells, the sound shifting from what sounds like premeditated composition, to full of mind melting freakout, which is pretty much what makes this psych rock collective so endlessly listenable. Their weekly jams, that often feature a traveling musician just passing through, the sound lo-fi, but loud and lively, it's all captured in a suburban basement after all. The thing is with this record, not only does it sound, like the others, as if this was just a random sampling of an even bigger jam, but suddenly, we get the impression, that the jam never stops, that there's some sort of endless jam, with rotating players, around the clock psychedelia, the collective shifting out members and rotating constantly, and every once in a while, someone remembers to press record, and someone else, maybe on a run for more weed, or beer, or LSD, makes a quick stop, presses up some lps, and sends em off, before returning to that smoke filled, sound filled basement.
Live At The Elevens though does bear some distinctive elements, it starts off much more stripped down and rhythmic, the drums driving the show, still tripped out and psychedelic, but way more rhythmic, pounding drums beneath clouds of processed guitars, mesmerizing and hypnotic, some heavy krautpsych for sure, laced with squiggles of melody, before the sound begins to grow more and more dense, and then more chaotic, the multiple guitarists unloading a blissed out cacophony of buzz and howl and crunch, the xylophone unfurling those distinctive chiming melodies, buried beneath the cascade of psychedelic swells. The flipside finds everyone stretching way out, the sound getting way more washed out and almost ambient, blissed out and dreamlike, the sounds all blurred and smeared into thick swaths of buzz and thrum, sheets of caustic distorted crush, softened into billowing chordal swirls, heavy and tranced out. Killer!
Packed like past Burnt Hills records, full color art pasted on to a plain black lp sleeve, LIMITED TO 99 COPIES, each one hand numbered on the lp label. We usually only get one shot at these, so we're guessing once the batch we got sells out, it's probably gone for good. You know what that means.
Last list, we highlighted A Little Bit Of Big Bonanza, the newest full-length from this Norwegian improvising unit on Rune Grammofon. The takeaway: "...a great 'jazz' album for people who love amped-up, tangled-up rock."
Fans will be interested in this vinyl-only 12", intended as a companion to that new album, recorded at the same sessions. It consists of cover versions of some of their faves. Bushman's Revenge has previously covered Motorhead and Sonny Sharrock, among others, and the covers presented here are equally diverse. Jazz, alt-rock, metal, they know no boundaries. They cover The Pixies ("Monkey Gone To Heaven"), The Police ("No Time This Time"), Black Sabbath ("War Pigs"), Sun Ra ("We Travel The Spaceways"), and even themselves ("Bushman Rock", a song left off their earlier Jitterbug album). As you might expect, these compositions are all respectfully rearranged, and deranged, when given the Bushman's Revenge treatment.
Comes with mp3 download.
aQ Hits is a new collection from beloved SF psychedelic space rock minimalists Carlton Melton, and is our second annual official aQuarius recOrds Record Store Day release. Last year's was a live disc called Black Valleys, a document of a killer aQuarius instore by NY psych rockers White Hills, and that one sold out in a flash. This year's looks to do the same - if you like White Hills, you like Carlton Melton, right?!
It's a super limited (just 300 copies) compact disc, collecting a handful of rare, and now out of print vinyl tracks, from various singles and split lps from the last couple years, including one super extended version.
Let's run through the various tracks... "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]", is, as you can probably tell from the title, the aforementioned alternate cut, which takes "Bottle Of Heat", originally released on the 2011 Agitated Records 12" comp I'm So Convoluted!, and offers up the unedited full-sprawl recording, stretching out to more than 19 minutes, thick smoldering clouds of soft focus psychedelia, drifting and blissed out, free form and abstract, a meandering epic of lush chordal swell and shimmery FX drenched swirl, all over a shuffling hypnotic and motorik kraut-psych beat. "Handling Snakes" is the A side from the group's Valley King 7" single, and is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips, but in the hands of Carlton Melton, somehow even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums.
The next two tracks are from Carlton Melton's split 12" with Empty Shapes, originally released on Mid-To-Late Records in 2010: "Call and Response" is an epic (and originally nearly side-loooong) blowout, beginning with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. While "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory, total heart-of-the-sun zoner blissout.
And finally, the last two tracks are from CM's split 12" with Qumran Orphics, also originally released on Mid-To-Late Records, that one in the beginning of 2011. "March Of The Cicadas" is a glorious ten minute slab of psychedelic heaviness, that sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. And things finish off with "Murder Ridge", a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay, a gorgeous hazy stretch of blurred lysergic drift, the perfect final movement, psych-drone comedown.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the artwork is printed on metallic silver cardstock, everything housed in a slim dvd style case, only available here!
Most of the record nerds and music obsessives we know (ourselves included of course), have shelves loaded with books full of album covers, total record porn. And we can't get enough, from old classic jazz lps to lost punk rock 7"s, crazy heavy metal jackets to arty experimental sleeve design, album artwork is as much a part of our musical love as the music itself, and thus pretty much everyone here wanted one of these, a collection of 7" single sleeves from the eighties, all presented in a gorgeous hardcover book, featuring lots of your favorites: Duran Duran, Adam Ant, the Romantics, Bow Wow Wow, the B-52's, ABC, Grace Jones, Gary Numan, Pat Benatar, The Cure, XTC and those are just the ones shown on the cover. There are loads of obscure singles, and even more obscure bands, beautifully laid out, a single sleeve per page, with the original designers/artists listed, and a paragraph about each, often telling some cool story behind the creation of the cover or the genesis of the artwork. Folks our age, who grew up in the eighties, will flip for this total nostalgia trip, but even folks around here to young to remember that decade have been pretty into this book as well. These are sealed, but we did get a glimpse inside one on Record Store Day, when one of our customers opened his copy, and it looked amazing. And while they last, we have the special Record Store Day version, which was LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, each one signed, numbered and dated by the author!!
Perhaps most widely known as one of the bigger stars of New Age music's MOR commercial peak in the mid-eighties (think Mannheim Steamroller's Fresh Aire series and Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast), most folks don't necessarily consider the Private Music label's pop new age princess Suzanne Ciani as being a second generation electronic music pioneer or a highly inventive classically trained synthesist. But this fantastic new anthology of early works from Ciani's archive on B-Music/Finders Keepers is aimed at changing that perception.
Fact is, Ciani has had a hand in many of the innovations in electronic music from the late sixties to the early eighties, in what has been a largely male-dominated field. A classically trained pianist, she met Don Buchla through a mutual artist friend and mastered the Buchla Synthesizer (pictured on the cover) and soon began seeking out projects for art galleries, experimental films and pop music (Meco's Star Wars theme for example), before moving to New York and becoming a valuable asset in the experimental underground and commercial advertising fields. She supplied the sounds for Xenon's pinball machines as well as doing sound effects work for films The Stepford Wives and The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Her company Ciani Musica became a testing ground for many of electronic and computerized music's new developments where she built up an incredible portfolio of recording experiments that make up the bulk of this collection.
Alongside advertising spots for Atari, ITT, Almay, and Coca-Cola, are longer compositions of electronic grandeur that point to her later new age music career, but are also steeped in electronic music's recent past. Percolating oscillations, robotic breathing, percussive mechancial rhythms, and long-form and layered computerized tones are assembled into warm and engaging pieces that aptly put Ciani in the same league as Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman and even the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This is an exciting anthology that sheds light on an overlooked period of electronic music innovation and one of its most vital players. Recommended!
Everybody knows that we at aQuarius are HUGE fans of the Finnish space/prog/hypnorock band Circle, right? We have raved about 'em for years, even had 'em play our 35th Anniversary Party back in 2000. So, naturally we get lots of folks, just starting out with their own Circle obsession, who ask us, which Circle album is The One To Get? 'Cause there's at least, like, over thirty albums in Circle's vast discography, thus far (though not all are still in print), and they're all pretty great. Well, among the longterm Circle fans here at aQ, the answer to that difficult question is, when it comes down to it, if we have to chose: Zopalki, Circle's second album, originally released back in 1996 by the Bad Vugum label. For a lot of us, it's arguably Circle's best ever record, among many great ones. And, significantly, it's also the one that we first heard, that first caused us to totally freak out about Circle, and led us to become such ardent fans, ever after. So, yeah, Zopalki! But, for years and years, it's unfortunately been one of those out of print titles. Kind of a holy grail for latter day Circle initiates. Until now - because we just got the brand new remastered, reissued version on Circle's own Ektro label in the mail. And thus, an automatic Record Of The Week!
Like we said, this is The One that, so many years ago, turned us on to Circle's unique brand of rhythmic psychedelic hypnosis. It's heavy, it's atmospheric, it's tight, it's sprawling, it's incredible. The staccato Helmet-like riffage of their debut Meronia is still in effect, but even proggier experimentation is afoot, with a darker, murkier, neo-krautrock, chamber rock vibe pervading the proceedings. There's choppy guitars, dubby drumbeats, sinister string arrangements, and eerie Gregorian chant style vox (yes, this was many Circle lineups ago, long before current operatic weirdo Mikka Ratto joined the band, but the vocals are still quite unusual).
Originally released on vinyl also, as a double lp (the new liner notes in this edition amusingly explain the "negotiation" with their record label that resulted in this being a double), it's got a dozen tracks stretching over 72 minutes. They range from explosive & percussively propelled to the dolefully droned out (often accomplishing both feats in the same epic composition). "Bonoroid" is among the most blissful, "Sector" the most psychotically hectic, "Argont" perhaps the most grindingly heavy, but heck we just picked a favorite Circle album, don't make us pick a favorite song too!
Our only complaint about this reissue, is we wish they'd have included the bonus track found only on the long-gone vinyl version... for a moment we thought this reissue had the bonus track, but it's just that for some accidental reason the tracklist here says the final song is "Contact" (which was that bonus track) when it's actually "Gregorium Vaernd Valerii", which closed the original cd. Whoops.
Regardless, we're SO glad to have this back. It's remastered (louder!), and the redesigned, expanded cd booklet now contains Zopalki-era photos of the band, as well as brand new retrospective liner notes from former guitarist Teemu Elo, from which we learn that "Zopalki" means "matchsticks" in Polish (though we don't learn why that was chosen for the title, or why the title was in Polish). More importantly, we learn a lot about the young band's struggle to make the record. It's worth noting that he says, "Zopalki caught most of us in the process of widening our horizons more than any other Circle album". It widened OUR horizons too...
We sold a ton of the last Clarinette release, which not only came as a double cd-r, but also in a crazy limited cassette run, with each cassette housed in actual Walkman tape player, and then that tape player wrapped in a warped and melted colored vinyl 7", each and every one hand sanded and silkscreened. And the music inside was definitely worth all that extra effort. So now we have yet another double album (no over the top tape edition for this one sadly), from Mr. Dan Vallor, aka Clarinette, this one according to the liner notes, dedicated to sixties Dutch art collective Nul, who in turn were influenced by the German Zero Movement, based on, again according to the liner notes "Working with a mono- or di-chromatic palette" and embracing "repetition and reproduction, seeking to validate reality by isolating its parts and displaying them without form, context or subjective judgment".
Thankfully, you don't actually need a degree in art history to dig into Clarinette's gorgeous minimal soundworld, fans of the now out of print The Clarinette Anti-Cassette Act Of 2012 will definitely want to grab one of these before they're gone, and anyone into spaced out minimal abstraction, and lush layered dronescapery will find much to love here, long tones, lush landscapes of subtly shifting overtones, dark and soporific, thick and heavy in a slow motion black whole drift sort of way, funereal and elegiac in places, blurred and blackened in others, and almost blissed out and kosmische in still others. The final track on the first disc unfurls a sprawl of low end that given the proper stereo might just set off car alarms several blocks away, a dense pulsing thrum that even in headphones is so deep and thick it almost makes you dizzy.
The second disc offers up more epic longform dronescapes, and listening to them here, it's easy to understand why some early Clarinette records ended up on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, definitely a Birchville vibe going on, a sort of smeared softly psychedelic blissed out raga, that on one track can explode in a prismatic burst of high end Sunroof!-like skree, while on another, gradually blossom like a time-lapse filmstrip of a dying star.
Gorgeous hypnotic stuff. And again, ULTRA limited. Only 105 copies, each one hand numbered, and housed in striking hand painted green sleeves.
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We loved the last record from these Cleveland fuzz poppers, likening their sound to groups like Yuck, Telekinesis, the Disciplines, all bands they shared space with on the aQ list, sharing also a combination of perfect pop jangle, fuzzy shoegaze, and woozy new wave, with a tendency toward bouncy frenetic almost punky pop
But something seems to have happened to these guys since that last record, cuz Attack On Memory is a much darker affair, in fact opener "No Future/No Past" is a dense minor key brooder, all pounding tribal drums, and spidery guitars, the singing raspy and a bit anguished, underpinned with strange deep almost chantlike background vocals, as well as droned out rumbles and layered buzz, and as the song progresses, the vocals get more and more blown out, becoming a near shriek, and pushing the sound into an almost emo/screamo direction, which totally suits them. It's definitely the darkest creepiest jam here, but that darkness and creepiness does seem to settle over all the proceedings, even the second track, which is much more intense and rocking, still oozes menace, sounding like a meaner more intense Strokes, there's plenty of jangle and hooks, but it's all wreathed in droned out guitars, and it is a nearly nine minute song, so the band are constantly stretching out into full on freaked out heavy psych blowouts, that we just don't remember from past record. In fact, we'd go so far as to say these guys sound pretty fucking fierce, and downright heavy, a sort of psychedelic post punk jangle pop, that while bears some things in common with other groups we dig, definitely puts it all together in a way that we've rarely heard, and it's a potent combination for sure. As the record unfurls, the group definitely slip into the sounds that defined their old record, and it still sounds as good as ever, but it's those tinges of darkness, and the more guitar heavy sound, that really make this into something else entirely. WAY recommended for sure!
We had never heard of French garage rock / trash pop duo Crash Normal before, but holy shit are we loving this stuff. Inhabiting the same sonic space as other groups like Thee Oh Sees, Sic Alps, the Mayyors, Ty Segall and all those cats, but Crash Normal take that fuzzed out garage pop sound we love so much, and go fucking nuts, dousing it in distortion, piling on echo and reverb, their garage pop veering dangerously close to noise rock and we're loving it. Two guitarists. Drums AND drum machine, although it's hard to tell which usually, these guys run their shit through a wall of fuzz pedals, and what comes out the other side is pure blown out garage pop BLISS. Big booming, echo drenched poppiness that chugs and pounds and churns and crashes, the vocals a reverbed yelp/croon, the drums a primitive plod buried beneath CN's wall of sound, the jams flit from loose ramshackle chaos to chugging super distorted pound, the production is what makes it, totally blown out, needles pegged at all times, every single sound so in-the-red it starts to sound utterly psychedelic, there are whirring organs, the vocals occasionally get doused in delay and become dubbed out and disappear into clouds of blurred effects, some of the tracks are twang flecked, others are swaggery Stooges-y stomps, others are surfy, and others are gloomy and somehow lo-fi while still managing to be speaker-destroyingly LOUD, and every song is catchy as hell, like stick in your head pop gem catchy, so much so that we find ourselves not wanting to listen to much else. Needless to say, fans of all of the above mentioned outfits, and really any of the current crop of garage rock combos, this shit will flip your lid.
It's been seven years since we last heard from Down Under trio the Dirty Three, who back in the day, were definitely an huge aQ fave and consistent big seller. The first couple D3 records will definitely rank in the aQ pantheon of all time classics. But to be honest we had sort of forgotten about these guys - it's been seven years since their last album. In fact we didn't even realize they were still a band, but all it took was a few minutes of opening track "Furnace Skies" to remind us of what we'd been missing. The band laying down a gorgeous droned out, almost jazzy skitterscape, mournful violin, buzzing organ, spidery skeletal melodies, all over a bed of dense super busy drumming, we had always remembered the drumming in the Dirty Three being super simple and stripped down, but here it drives the track, positioning the song as something we'd expect to hear from fellow Aussies the Necks, heady and psychedelic, circular and cyclical, another one of those jams that we find ourselves listening to over and over before finally making it to the rest of the record. And while the rest of the record isn't nearly so dense and dark and rhythmic, it is quite haunting, and beautiful and cinematic, and the busy drumming which surfaces throughout really makes the sound something special. The rest of the record does in many places hew closer to the Dirty Three of old, which is no bad thing at all, but it's the darker, denser, heavier, busier jams that we're digging the most, the record offering the perfect balance between hushed and lovely, dark and dense, with some of the best tracks merging the two. Really great! (Vinyl version exists as well, unfortunately we ran out before the list, hopefully we'll have more for next time.)
Folks outside of the Bay Area may not be privy to the burgeoning black metal scene known as the Black Twilight Circle, a small insular group of musicians all playing in multiple bands, all on different instruments and in different arrangements, a scene modeled after the legendary French Les Legions Noires, which featured Mutiilation, Belketre, Aakon Keetrah, Torgeist, Vlad Tepes and others. In the case of the Black Twilight Circle, the bands include Blue Hummingbird On The Left (the only one we've reviewed on the aQ list until now), Volahn, Ashdautas, Axeman, Arizmenda, Kalathonn, Kuxan Suum and others, but Dolorvotre is the first group to get a proper cd release, and on the ruling Ajna label to boot, previously released on tape, several times in fact, this is the first full length from the duo Dolorvotre, and is raw and lo-fi, primitive in part, but also surprisingly progressive and experimental, the band offering up simple slabs of black blast alongside haunting doomy creeps, their songs laced with surprising melodies, weird little guitar filigree, the vocals often doused in strange effects, the tempos shifting constantly, the two piece managing to sound surprisingly lush and full, even with the primitive recordings, the vibe crusty and almost D-beatish at times, those elements though woven deftly into something much more grand, with headphones, much of what sounds raw and primitive reveals itself as way more layered and complex, the record peppered with haunting folky interludes, acoustic guitars draped over chanted vox and swirling synths, the haunting moodiness of those interludes bleeding over into the songs proper, and imbuing the record with a strange black energy that definitely transforms it into something much intense and unique.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
As promised last list, when we reviewed Rob's Make It Fast, Make It Slow, here's the other killer African '70s reissue that the folks at the Soundway label just blessed us with, the 1973 Projection One album from Ghana's Edzayawa band, their sole release. Once again, this proves that the international groove scene of yesteryear just won't quit. Deep digging labels like Soundway are getting nowhere near to the bottom of the barrel, if albums like this are any indication. Edzaywa is top flight stuff, funky and kinda freaky, with tight percussive grooves in complex patterns arranged into what amount to mostly-instrumental, dark & intense "Afro-prog" workouts. There's often someone jamming away on the organ, also outbursts of some slightly surfy guitar twang, occasional emphatic vocals (usually in an African dialect), and even an interlude or two of crazy whistling flute (?). But it's the staggering rhythms, ticking away steadily, speeding up, slowing down, sometimes with echoing, almost dubbed out production, that will keep you in thrall. Hot stuff. Finding just one awesome obscure album like this would be an accomplishment for most reissue labels, for Soundway it apparently ain't no thing.
By the way, there's a vinyl version too, but it's currently on backorder....
This is the first we're hearing from Electric Jellyfish, although mainman Michael Beach is responsible for a killer tape we reviewed a while back. We tried to catch EJ at South By Southwest, they played WFMU's showcase, sadly, we were at the aQ show across town, but word was they killed it. Which is not hard to imagine listening to this two track teaser, clanging crashing guitars, pounding tribal drumming, howled feral vox, thick sinewy basslines, swaggery and slithery, punky and low slung, very reminiscent of some of our favorite Aussie bands like Lubricated Goat, Kingsnakeroost, the Scientists, etc. A similar sort of swampy junkyard blooz, a little loose, a bit druggy, with the bass on the second track driving a sort of Birthday Party-ish dirge. Good stuff for sure. Super short, only two songs, six minutes, but will definitely leave you hankering for more.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already sold out and out of print, so these are the very last copies.
We only have a very few of this Record Store Day release but wanted at least a few mailorder folks to get a shot at it. We weren't really sure what to expect, actually we sort of were, we just weren't sure whether it would work or not, and whether we would dig it. But like last year's Electronic Anthology Project, which focused on the songs of Built To Spill (BTS's Brett Nelson is the man behind EAP apparently), which we somehow missed completely, the EAP reimagines the fuzzed out indie rock jangle of our youth as eighties synth pop anthems, and weirdly enough, making it seem possible that ANY of these songs would have fit right in that decade, and could easily have ended up on the iconic Breakfast Club soundtrack, or in any of John Hughes' movies, Dinosaur's J Mascis has the perfect vocals, all cracked and weary and whiny, the original melodies just a bit melancholy, and the new arrangements/productions are spot on, channeling the cheesiest eighties electro pop and synth pop, all skittery drum machines, hand claps, and chiming synths, pulsing and pulsating, fuzzy faux basslines, and somehow, weirdly enough, these Dinosaur Jr classics work really well, which is either a testament to the originals, to the new versions, or both. Some of the folks at aQ were driven crazy by repeat plays on Record Store Day, but some of us, couldn't get enough. And again, totally sold out and out of print. We have just a little handful, and then these are gone for good.
You might be asking yourself just who Esther Chlorine is, and this project is definitely shrouded in mystery. One thing that will no doubt pique your interest is a connection to recent ROTW honorees Von Himmel, whose Space Communion lp we sold TONS of. Esther Chlorine follows a decidedly less band oriented path and looms with a disembodied ambience that sounds like something you might hear in a Jan Svankmeyer film. Strange pulsations and scraping piano string type sounds give the project the vibe of an abstract classical sound collage. Like Von Himmel, one can detect a spirit of ESP styled free jazz dissonance, but the two sidelong pieces also move back and forth with a quasi industrial feel. A strange slowed down voice percolates in a percussive manner giving the impression of someone being trapped within a spiraling tunnel of sound. And like Space Communion, we are reminded of the amazing Sun Ra disc Space Probe, which found him experimenting with the then new Moog synth. Esther Chlorine's MO exists outside of any real timeline, sounding like it could have been recorded at any point within the last century. It is this awesome sense of detachment that gives the project a sound and feel unique to itself. Coming to us from the equally mysterious Donkey Disk imprint, this is highly recommended!
We've been totally obsessed with EM's recent reissue of Istikhbars & Improvisations by Algerian pianist Mustapha Skandrani, and before we even had a chance to begin wearing that one out, along comes yet another magnificent gem, this one from Thai violinist Thonghuad Faited, the Thai violin in question a two stringed sor, a mainstay of Isan music (which you may have heard on the Sublime Frequencies compilation ISAN: Folk and Pop Music of Northeast Thailand); Faited being perhaps the instrument's greatest proponent, and one of the few sor players to have made the transition from background musician to revered solo artist.
Diew Sor Isan is the first proper anthology from Faited, gathering up many of his finest performances from various recordings, many of which are available here for the first time outside of Thailand, Faited's sound part of the 'Molam' tradition, again, sampled on another couple of Sublime Frequencies comps, Molam: Thai Country Groove From Isan volumes 1 and 2, Molam is the dominant musical tradition in rural Thailand and is focused around the exotic meditative melodies of the sor, and a style of playing that in some ways is definitely reminiscent of Celtic music as well as bluegrass, but ultimately it remains so distinctive, and utterly unique, the music collected here lush and emotional, dreamily melodic and groovy, from aching solo sor pieces, to lush full band grooves, sensual and soulful, to haunting percussion driven folk, to much more modern sounding Thai funk, from fuzzy garage-y grooves, to gorgeous vocal / sor interplay, some of the tracks super distinctive, the melodies especially the vocals, will be instantly recognizable to folks who remember the Butthole Surfers' purloined-Thai-music-sampling jam "Kuntz", Faited's sor so versatile, whether unfurling smooth, clean sinewy melodies, or sawing way wildly, the Thai folk version of 'shredding', it's no wonder he's a star, ALL the tracks here mesmerizing, every time we put this one, we end up just pushing repeat and listening to it over and over and over again. So fantastic.
The cd is housed in a full color gatefold cardboard sleeve, the lp in a nice full color jacket, both with a fold out full color insert with photos, and liner notes in both English and Japanese.
Killer disc of droned out buzz drenched post punk dirge pop from this French outfit, their sound a Velvets inspired druggy synth/organ heavy haze, fans of Moon Duo will flip for these guys, the same sort of kraut-drone mesmer, but Feeling Of Love, with what we can only assume is a live drummer, sound a lot looser, and a lot more rocking, getting downright garage-rocky in places, but they often lace that rock with some dreamy angelic background vox and infuse everything with some seriously prismatic poppiness, which is pretty irresistible. The band sound as good rocking out jubilantly, as they do churning away in a dour sonic trance, both of which they do in equal measure, and it's a pretty fantastic combo, but the band also display a fairly expansive sonic palette, occasionally unfurling long stretches of hazy rhythms, wreathed in squealing feedback, and wrapped in smokey tendrils of psychedelic guitar, or bursting into twee pop ditties at the drop of a hat, somehow even managing to mix the two once in a while, like on "La Bas C'est Naturel", which sounds like some lo-fi drug psych rock via K Records, but then before long, they slip right back into their droney swaggery hypno-rock, but one that seems to have limitless permutations, whether it's the druggy Fuzztones via Spacemen 3 trance out of "666 Blank Girls", or the Railroad Jerk like junkyard bluesiness of "Empty Trash Bag", or the frenetic caffeinated drum heavy, yelpy vocal-ed jangle and crunch of "I Am Right, You Are Wrong" (which has a surprisingly KILLER chorus)...
Fans of other Kill Shaman releases, by the likes of Night Control, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Pink Noise, etc, will dig this big time, as will everybody who loved the records by aQ faves J.C. Satan, or heck really anybody into hooky, druggy, droney, garagey, psychedelic garage pop radness.
Got just 3 or 4 of these, a special vinyl reissue for Record Store Day, of probably our favorite record (originally released in 1993) from this long time aQ beloved old timey country combo, their first for Thrill Jockey, a way influential record in the early early days of the No Depression movement, the group is fronted by Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean, and here as on all their records, their gorgeous voices perfectly harmonize over acoustic guitar and mandolin on a handful of originals and few kick ass covers (Nick Lowe, Woody Guthrie and more). It's been years since we listened to this, but hearing it again, we're loving this like crazy! Remastered for vinyl, and housed in a thick, old style tip-on jacket.
Richard Garet is on quite a roll with his latest two albums! Earlier in 2012, he presented us with the eerily beautiful album Areal (which we made a Record Of The Week!), and now there's the discordant blurs of Silver. Garet's work centers on the errata from deconstructed and cracked consumer electronics. In dismantling radios and speakers, Garet unleashes a Pandora's box of noise, static, chaos, and dissonances that he then meticulously sifts, culls, and abstracts to arrive at atonal frequencies, electro-magnetic cracklings, or attenuated broadcasts from the other side of the world which happened to be caught in his network of wires, photocells, and electronics. Though this process, Garet renders those ill-tempered noises as hollowed-out drones and vacant ambiences populated with desolate scrabbling textures. His is a deep and haunted sound, akin to the work of John Duncan, Mika Vainio, and Joe Colley; but where those three use noise as a metaphoric tool of psychic and psychological aggression, Garet prefers to sublimate his noise as if they were ghosts communing through an electromagnetic seance.
Silver glides through 4 movements, the first of which was originally part of 23five's radio broadcast series for their annual Activating The Medium festival from 2011. Here, the smoldering grit of dead-space static hovers amidst cathode ray tube drones and well-timed razor edit compositional techniques that look back to John Duncan's masterpiece River Of Flames. Garet's other three pieces follows suit with passages of intense sinewave purity that slowly dissolve into nebulae of smeared buzz and hiss, thoroughly obliterated from whatever source material he may have been using. Fantastic work that parallels those aforementioned artists as well as the more abstract work from Tim Hecker and William Basinski. Limited to 300 copies.
You'd probably never guess listening to this, the debut from a mysterious trio called Gauchiste, that one of the guys here plays guitar in Loincloth, whose recent Iron Balls Of Steel record for Southern Lord was a huge hit around here, but even with that sort of metal pedigree, one that does in fact extend to all three members, you won't find any churning math rock metal mayhem here, or even pounding downtuned chug, instead, this trio specializes in a haunting hybrid of minimal electronics, abstract soundscapery, and droned out avant metal, that more resembles some strange soundtrack than a metal record proper, the whole thing meticulously assembled mostly via computer, using the various sounds in different ways to produce all manner of timbres and textures, evoking a gorgeous hauntological dread, that is seldom found in more traditional metal.
The opener is a noxious cloud of blurred guitar buzz, skittery cymbal shimmer, and buried double kick drumming, that initially sound more like some strange chittering insect, it's definitely metal, but a sort of smeared abstract offshoot, with those drums fading out gradually, eventually leaving dense slabs of heaving chordal thrum and post industrial shimmer. The follow up track starts out like it's gonna ooze into some sort of dense doomic creep, but instead blissed out into a billowy cloud of ethereal ambience, washed out drones, and buried processed vox, while elsewhere on the record, deep rumbles pour forth like some sort of downtuned sonic avalanche, the occasional metal vokills, are appropriately growly and gruff, but they're suspended in a sort of blackbuzz stasis, with the most metal moments more reminiscent of a group like SUNNO))), or even more appropriately, like some obscure Cold Meat black ambient outfit.
Guitars seem to be the main instrument, but they're rarely left in their distinctly guitar-like form, instead, deftly transformed into what sounds like whirring organs, or smeared blackened hum, over which the group lace skittery glitches and machinelike rhythms, rarely propulsive, or even strictly that rhythmic, more another textural element, to add to the already bleak atmosphere that infuses pretty much every moment.
The last two tracks probably best sum up the group's sound, slipping from glimmering dreaminess, almost orchestral at moments, to blurred blackened ambience, and finally to super dense drone, a harsh, haunting, abject sprawl of super cinematic malevolence, that should most definitely appeal to metalheads and dronelords alike.
The packaging is stunning, the lp in a deluxe, heavy paper, weirdly cut multi-panel jacket, the cd-r (why a cd-r and not a real cd we do not know), in a cool hinged metallic case, with a plastic front panel, the disc visible through the plastic.
Latest from this French one man depressive black metal band, whose name means 'greyish', which is actually not a bad description of Grisatre's washed out minor key buzz and blast, definitely a sort of 'grey metal', very melodic and melancholic, reminding us of Happy Days and Hypothermia, being yet another group whose shrieked vokills are mostly what keeps the sound firmly entrenched in the black metal world. And yeah, the guitars buzz, the drums blast, the recording is murky and lo-fi, but even at full blast, the guitars chime and ring out mournfully, and the songs evolve continuously (the three tracks here are all between 13-16 minutes long), so the sound slips into woozy midtempo melancholia as often, if not MORE often, than it explodes into blasting black buzz. Three long stretches of loping buzz soaked mesmer, peppered with bursts of more overt blackness, but also creepy shimmery drones, there even seems to be some warm swirls of softly psychedelic synthesizer in the mix, and amidst everything, there are some truly divine moments of melodic bliss, gorgeous bits of pop songsmithery buried in the murk, as well as twisted bits of production, that turn what could have been something more more generic, into something a little bit more far out and weirdly warped. It's also one of the rare BM records where you can actually hear the bass, and not JUST hear it, as it's a sinewy melodic driving force in the sound, giving much of this a gloomy post punk vibe as well. We're digging this big time, and we're guessing if you like buzzy melancholia and hauntingly melodic 'grey' metal (and really why wouldn't you?), then you will too.
Finally both extremely limited and way out of print lps, that came and went in a flash last year, have been reissued together on a not-as-limited double cd set via Kranky!
We've gushed and gushed about Grouper so much in the past, and we're going to do it once again because these albums are utterly gorgeous! While 2008's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill found Liz Harris, aka Grouper, starting to really embrace the idea of songs, we love how these cds, Alien Observer and Dream Loss (framed together by the personally symbolic pictographic title, "A I A") blur that focus once again. While one leans towards songs and structure, and the other towards more abstraction, they are pretty much equal companion pieces that mirror each other, and share similar tendencies that defy a defined experience (especially since it seems we discovered by the track listing that the cd labels are switched, making it even harder to pin down which one is which, but it's really no matter!). They're much more about mood, soft focus, hazy dreams, and ethereal exploration. Harris' voice a murmur built up through tape and Dictaphone loops like soft whispering leaves swirling in and out, and every sound and tone, whether it be acoustic guitar strums, far-off distorted delayed electronics, piano, bell tones or static, she uses and manipulates them with such a mastered ease. There's a hushed reverence to this suite that demands rapturous attention to Harris' cathedral like sound world, as if we were in some universal congregation listening to an angelic choir singing from the deepest remote space. We've been listening to these records late at night and early in the morning and whenever we need to come down from the craziness of the world around us. And smehow whenever we listen to them, everything else just fades away and for a little while all that matters is the soft narcotic rush we feel as the music plays.
The Omni Recording Corporation has been killing it lately in a string of essential vinyl reissue collaborations with the Australian Roundtable label, focusing on rare library, lounge and private press exotica. We recently listed the Orchestra Peter Thomas Orion 2000 lp of tripped out sci-fi grooves, and this week we have two extremely fine examples of Italian library music from composer Egisto Macchi and his more well known group that included Ennio Morricone, Gruppo D'Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
While we have always respected and revered this Italian improv collective, much of their recorded output has been on the difficult listening side of things. Skronky free jazz , metallic bangs and tings, tape noise and pounding prepared piano. Sometimes abstract, dissonant and sparse, though equally majestic, heavy and remarkable, it hasn't always been easy to get behind...until now! Finally, a lost recording from 1971 for the Gemelli Library that was never released, Niente is a mind-scorching set of avant-psych groove. While there are still qualities of their defining sound present, this set is marked most notably by a strong rhythm section that is not afraid to jam out. Reminding us of favorite records from Faust and Can, this is the GDNC at their most kraut. Both funky and proggy, we think that moden day-psych fans of bands like Wooden Shjips, 3 Leafs, Carlton Melton and The Heads should look into the weird sound world of this release and get their minds blown!
Limited to 500 copies and nearly out of print, we were lucky to get the copies we have, so don't snooze on this one!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This was one of this year's Record Store Day releases that everyone seemed to be after, OUR customers certainly, so we did our very best to get as many as we possibly could, so all you out there who don't have a local record store to call your own, would not miss out on this kick as slab of blown out, amp melting, psychedelic space rock freakout. And we do in fact still have a bunch, but it was limited to 500 copies, and is totally sold out, and these are the very last copies we'll see. EVER.
Most folks who fancy themselves fans of space rock / psych rock, and love stuff like the White Hills and Wooden Shjips and all the rest, probably already dig the Heads, and have most likely already tossed this in their cart and moved on, but if somehow you've missed out on these UK space psych heavies, now's as good a time as any to remedy that situation. This collection of live radio performances capture the band in their element, playing some of our faves, but giving those jams new life, or stretching them way out, or just cranking them up even further. A few of these tracks were available on the bonus disc that came with the 2cd reissue of the group's Relaxing With The Heads record, but most of these have yet to be released, and they're all on vinyl for the first time. And while we love Heads studio albums, live these guys let loose, the drums pounding away, all but buried beneath an avalanche of wild swirling acid drenched psych-guitar blowouts, thick crunchy riffage wild squalls of wah wah, like some unholy union of the Stooges, Hawkwind and Spacemen 3, tranced out zoner drug rug heaviness that KILLS. Thick buzzy basslines driving everything from within, but this is not all heart-of-the-sun psychedelic freakouts, the band slip into low slung slithers, dirgey and dark, loping and krautrocky, still laced with squalls of psychnoise, but adding an element of hypno-rock mesmer. Not sure what else to say. Check out our other Heads reviews elsewhere on the aQ site for more ranting and raving, needless to say, this collection is killer, from the speaker destroying full on freakouts, to the droney darkly psychedelic dirges, we can't get enough of this stuff, and pretty much nobody does it better than The Heads.
Fans of White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Great Society Mind Destroyers, Lumerians, Telescopes, White Noise Sound, Spyrals, Burnt Hills, Sleepy Sun, and all the rest of the current crop of space psych outfits, this is absolutely ESSENTIAL.
Packaged in old school bootleg lp style, with photocopied paste on artwork affixed to a plain white sleeve, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, already OUT OF PRINT, these are the very last copies we'll have, so grab one while you can!!
Got just a tiny handful of this special Record Store Day release left, a teaser of sorts for a brand new full length (already in stock, and hopefully being reviewed on the next list), from this post Court And Spark combo, who have taken the druggy dusky twang of their previous outfit and wedded it to swirly seventies Laurel Canyon style songsmithery and stretched out Grateful Dead like jams, M.C. Taylor's voice warm and welcoming as always, the band laying down a lush landscape of twang flecked folk pop on the A side, which on the flipside is stretched out into some woozy, drowsy twang flecked dub, dark and dreamily tripped out!
Housed in a plain white sleeve, and extremely limited. These are the last remaining copies.
While, sure, there were indeed heaps of exciting Record Store Day releases to freak out about this past weekend, but as you can tell from perusing this week's list, there are of course lots of other recently released things to get excited about as well. Like this - especially if you dig goddamn good ol' rock n' roll music. It's the new album from Swedish retro-proto-metallers Horisont, released Stateside by Rise Above licensees Metal Blade. It just came out this week, on Tuesday, and if we weren't so busy, we woulda been happy to spend Tuesday night with this cd and a six pack of an appropriate bubbly beverage as our only entertainment. As you might have already surmised from the title, this is Horisont's second album. We raved about their debut Tva Sidor Av Horisonten a few years back (the first word of our review was "Wow"), and Allan here was lucky enough to see 'em play at Roadburn in 2010 (they slayed!), so yeah we've been eagerly anticipating this new album, and it's a doozy, definitely for fans of Witchcraft, Graveyard, Burning Saviours, Gentleman's Pistols, Danava, and others who keep the spirit of '70s style heavy rockin' alive today. Meaning, also for fans of Sabbath, Judas Priest circa "Sad Wings", Uli-era Scorpions, UFO, Nazareth, Swedish gods November, Leaf Hound, and all the other (proto-)metal granddaddies that the Horisont boys are doubtless making very proud.
There's ten new, timeless sounding, tracks here, rollickin' with boogie rock action borne of both youthful exuberance and love of those classic influences. Horisont kick out the jams big time, veering from bluesy, bellbottomed lope to sheer speedy early-metal gallop, these songs replete with soaring vox and soaring melodies, lots of tasty guitar harmonies and catchy riffs. You've got your hard rockers, a few moodier, psychier moments, more hard rockers, and then wow when it seems that it can't get any better, the disc ends with a hell of a bang, Horisont creating their proggiest metallic construct yet with the stuttering, stunning "Thunderflight", a NWOBHM-ish triumph that fans of such diverse acts as La Otracina, Pharaoh Overlord and even Slough Feg will want to hear in heavy rotation. Along with the rest of the disc. Damn. We know that Swedes seemingly have access to a Rock n' Roll Way Back Machine, and Horisont have put it to good use here, again.
Another Record Store Day release, that we managed to snag a few extra copies of for our mailorder folks to get a crack at, a super limited live bootleg style lp from these LA psychedelic hard rockers, who as some of you might remember, we only really heard for the first time a few months back via a 7" on Agitated, and were promptly blown the fuck away. Before that, we had only really know the Icarus Line as that punk band who during a show at a Hard Rock Cafe, ended up smashing a display case, and pulling down one of Stevie Ray Vaughn's guitars, with the intention of plugging it in and rocking out, only to be tackled by security. Pretty bad ass for sure. But it wasn't until we heard that single, that we realized that there was more to these guys than wild onstage antics. But wild onstage performance are definitely a huge part of what makes these guys so good, and this lp captures them in fine form. The sound fuzzy and heavy and psychedelic, the drums booming, fuzzed out bass, and wild tangles of lead guitar, not to mention seriously crunchy chugging riffage, the band flitting from swaggery Stoogesy stomp to druggy dirge, in fact the band seems to spend a lot of time in 'brought down' mode, you know where the singer instructs the band to "bring it down", and the guitars disappear, and it's just a slithery bass and drums backdrop, while the singer does some wild testifying, before the band explode back into another blast of super rocking crush, whether it be loose chaotic psychedelic freakouts or churning downtuned creep, these guys kill, and this record does a pretty good job of capturing that killer live energy.
Packaged like the Heads Record Store Day lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, a plain white sleeve, with photocopied artwork pasted on. Super limited, this was in fact a special Record Store Day release, it's already sold out at the label and out of print, we do have a handful of copies, but these are the last ones we'll see.
This sexy sultry silly slab of seventies Japanese exotica, now on vinyl!
Some of you are probably hip to the Pinky Violence films of early seventies Japan, especially with a handful of recently reissued dvd's, an eye popping, mind blowing combination of not so subtle eroticism, extreme ultraviolence and over the top ACTION! The twist, being that the brutalizers tended to be bad ass Japanese women, cat fighting, beating the crap out of men, always seeming to be clad in boots and with their shirts 'accidentally' torn open to reveal their breasts. Which miraculously never kept them from kicking still more ass! What's not to love?
Sort of in concert with the movies, a whole genre of erotic music was spawned, Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular music, sexed up as it were with chanteuse like crooning, but most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion. And at the time, 1971 (THAT seemingly perfect musical year!) this was indeed pretty dang racy and risque.
The sound is a blend of soft core soundtrack music, groove jazz, playful exotica, a little Spaghetti Western, with Herb Alpert horns, fluttering jazz flutes, Spanish guitars, smokey sax, hip shaking rhythms, marimbas and xylophones, very moody and dreamy sometimes, wild and playful at others, but always with Reiko's sexy croon, and of course her very convincing sounds of passion, including an unexpected bout of spanking at one point (!) accompanied by the proper breathless exhalations of pain/pleasure.
Wow! Wild and fun and sexy, but so so strange. Highly recommended for sure.
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The much anticipated debut from this new dooooooooooom outfit, featuring 2/4 of late great legendary doom/death metallers diSEMBOWELMENT, and we have to say fans of that group's legacy will not be disappointed, the same mix of spaced out reverb drenched loping doom, and pounding, lurching death metal churn, a sound that definitely doesn't fall to far from the withered and gnarled sonic tree. The opening few minutes lull the listener into a false sense of trippy bliss, before the track explodes into a murky, muddy blast of old school blackened guttural death metal, mathy and intricate, but also primitive and raw, a sound that's echoey and downtuned, that sounds in its own way timeless, although it most definitely sounds like it could have come straight from the same era as diSEMBOWELMENT. The track slipping into a creeping chugging dirge, wreathed in squiggly metallic leads, before exploding again in an avalanche of crumbling distortion and almost a sort of caveman Voivod sort of crush. And then without warning, the song slips into a cool sort of swirling tribal drum driven riff heavy midtempo psych metal space out, that could easily have come from some young metal bucks, the song finishing off with a long stretch of cavernous hushed ambient drift.
The other two songs follow suit, with "The Menin Road" unfurling like some demonic death march, definitely earning some extra o's in their doom, a glacial tarpit creep, but laced with some cool shimmery distant guitar melodies, about as close to a ballad as these guys get, before winding it up with "Shadows Of The Flame", which returns to the sound of the opening track, a dizzying mix of true doom sludge and frenzied blackened death metal gnarl, even some more psychedelic metal drift, flecked with soaring melodies, haunting atmospheres and some seriously killer riffing, and all with a seriously crushing production, that makes everything here sound massive and majestic, heavy and so epic.
We're huge fans of the Dais label, from the haunting industrial psychedelia of aTelecine, to the bloodletting gothpunk of Bestial Mouths, from the primitive American black metal of Lord Foul, to the experimental vocal rituals of Ghedalia Tazartes, and from the gothic neofolk of King Dude to the punishing noise rock of Twin Stumps, so we were expecting something similarly brutal / twisted / pummeling / heavy / fucked up from the strangely named Italian Horn. But what we definitely weren't expecting was Guided By Voices style lo-fi pop, but that's precisely what Italian Horn are all about, and really the cover art collage by none other than Robert Pollard should have been our first clue, but for whatever we were expecting, we have to say we're not at all disappointed, the Guided By Voices influence is indeed HUGE, but Italian Horn, definitely has a knack for short sharp blasts of woozy, softly psychedelic pop, opener "Bells Of Spring" unfurls warbly guitars, plenty of ooooh's and aaaah's, drapes them over a buried skeletal rhythm, and then croons over the top through and old distortion box, the result is wreathed in fuzz and hum and echo and delay, and let loose, where it hovers and drifts dreamily, a warm, sun dappled bit of fractured pop magic. Which is pretty much how the rest of the record unfolds, from the murky indie pop of "Comfortable Planes", with its caffeinated rhythm, and droned out distorted guitars, buried vox and keening melodies, or "Cambridge Factory", which melds a very Pollard-esque vocal line to some fuzz guitar and simple stumbling drumming, and then again wraps the whole thing in a dreamy druggy haze. However, besides having the best title of the bunch, "Witchcraft Recharge Center" might be our favorite song, with its weirdly distorted urgently strummed acoustic guitars, its buzzing squelchy streaks of sound, its keening vocal, and the weirdly super catchy bridge/chorus, all again buried beneath layer upon layer of grit and grime, which in no way disguises the pop dreaminess underneath.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.
While Kellarissa's 2008 solo debut Flamingo tempered solemn chamber pop elements with a '60s girl group style sweetness, the Vancouver artist's latest album, the vinyl only Moon Of Neptune allows the shadows to fully envelop each song. Drawing inspiration from themes of outer space, ancient Egypt, and her own Scandinavian roots, it is a far more heady work than any of her other projects (P:ano, Gigi, and The Choir Practice). The opening track immediately brings to mind the darkwave synth pop of the '80s. "Passages" commences with cycling icy staccato synth melodies from her trusty Yamaha and basic programmed drums, and those sounds taken on their own can make it easy to instantly dismiss this as retro fluff, but you are urged to listen further because where the song (and the album... and her music in general) truly soars is when she sings. Some have called her voice ethereal, and while it certainly has its heavenly tones, it is far from delicate. Its range is more substantial and has more gut than that adjective allows. It's a gorgeous outpouring from her heart and soul that once doubled and tripled via her looping effects pedal is truly a force unto itself. In this way, she stands apart from many of her heavily processed reverb'n'loop laden indie contemporaries, she doesn't hide behind or let her voice be buried in the clouds of effects. Darkly bewitching, hypnotic and haunting. If you've dug the like-minded aQ fave Mira Cook and her Signs cd-r, or simply have a penchant for a truly enchanting female voice, this is for you!
Limited pressing of 500. So don't dawdle!
Here's a nice digipack reissue of something that's reputed to be one of the best ever psych albums from south of the border, right up there with Los Dug Dugs (who'd be our personal pick). And oh yeah, it's from 1971! If you've got the "Love, Peace and Poetry: Mexican Psychedelic Music" comp then you've already heard some La Revolucion De Emiliano Zapata, though their track on that comes from their second album, Hoy, not this their debut.
First off, there's plenty of stinging acid rock guitar awesomeness here, big time FUZZ action. But there's also mellower, more melodic side to them as well. Basically they cover all the bases of badass rockin' and rollin' California sixties psych influenced garage freakdom here. And they sing in English, whereas on Hoy they switched, mainly, to Spanish, which was a radical move as the conservative Mexican government/society of the '70s apparently would tolerate a lot of things sung in English but not in Spanish. Considering that two of the song titles here are "Nasty Sex" and "Shit City" maybe that's understandable...
Hopefully Dynamic will be reissuing Hoy as well someday, it's also a good one!
This is a gorgeous and confusional archival release from Graham Lambkin, leader of weirdo outsider 'rock' combo Shadow Ring, this recording, from 2004, features just voice, tapes and piano, and is a curious landscape of spoken word, distant swirls of tape hiss, and haunting funereal piano, not to mention all manner of creaks and buzzes, cobbled together from what sounds like some strange spoken word diary, recorded on a hand held tape player, various fragments strung together, peppered with the 'kthunk' of the buttons on the tape player being depressed, the track shifting haphazardly from some strange description of random goings on, weird bits of random tape sounds, pulsing non-rhythms, static and rumbles, quacking ducks, bits of orchestra, snippets from programs, other voices, always returning to that creepy echo drenched piano, while Lambkin/Shadow Ring newbies might be a bit put off by the sounds here, fans of either or both will definitely feel right at home, a strangely intimate glimpse inside strange and twisted musical mind, one that unfurls soundscapes like this as an entreaty to the brave to wander in and get lost. Very cool, and very bizarre.
But that's really only half of Millows, the other is a strange, dizzying photographic project, that according to the liner notes, is a "series of 450 photographic combinations documenting a solitary drunken non-event", which in reality appears to be a series of combined photos / photo collages, of Lambkin in what appears to be a festive mood, laughing, and smiling, drinking, and conversing, but knowing that said photos were culled from a solitary event, makes the project a bit creepy, and the way the photos have been manipulated, often multiple faces layered into one, colors bleeding, strange projections, textures and overexposures, some like ordinary snapshots, others like wild impressionistic splashes of colors and shapes, and all presented one after the other, nine to a page, almost make it seem like someone took a short bit of filmstrip and laid it out one frame at a time, offering a visual analogue to the strange sounds on the accompanying cd.
All presented in a super striking full color hard cover book, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered, with the cd affixed to the inside back cover.
Uh, wow! And WTF!? That's what we thought as soon as we got a good look at these, the other day when Tyler from Ajna dropped 'em off at the store. Is this for real? This late 2011 release from the Ajna affiliated, vinyl-only cult metal reissue label Unseen Forces seems tailor made to be of immense aQuarius interest. First off, we, and many of you, are pretty into the whole Father Yod / Ya Ho Wa 13 / Source Family communal '70s psych rock thing. Pretty much everybody here at aQ owns one of those Japanese 13cd God & Hair box sets of Ya Ho Wa recordings, and we just this week hosted an instore event promoting the Source Family documentary currently screening in the SF Film Festival.
Also, several of us at aQ (and again, many of you) are keen on obscure '80s old school metal, the more outrageous and over the top, the better.
And somehow, unbelievably but awesomely, THE LAW brings those two obsessions together!!
You see, the guys in The Law were members of Source Family, followers of Father Yod. Bassist Peter Tobin and singer/lead guitarist Troy Duke at least, had played and recorded with Ya Ho Wa 13. But by the early '80s, they were transitioning from being long haired hippies to being long haired heshers! Gotta change with the times, man. Having formed a garage (more like barn, cuz they lived on a cattle ranch) band, The Law (= Love And Wisdom), in 1979, they decided to make the big step of moving from Hawaii (where the Source Family had been based since the late '70s, and Father Yod had sadly perished in his fatal hang gliding accident) back to LA, now a hotbed of heavy metal activity in the year of 1983! But they brought their interest in esoteric, psychedelic spirituality along with them, into the realm of the heavier-than-thou, glammed-up, Decline Of Western Civilization Part II, Sunset Strip scene, where they rubbed shoulders with the likes of Motley Crue. Theirs was sleazy hard rock with a mystic message, though, all right!!
Though that unusual backstory (and the picture of the band on the back of the lp, all done up in macho tight leather and studded belts) would probably have been enough to convince us to buy this, it was listening to the songs on this lp that made us decide, heck, all that AND they totally rule, in the hot rockin' department? Ok, Record Of The Week time.
These ten songs include hit single in an alternate universe "Chill The Wine", theme song "Here Comes The Law", and several with either "Baby" or "Love" in their titles, like the dirgey (mostly) ballad "Baby I'm A Mystery", the lyrics to which include the advice: "Sweet child of the fire, the only way to go is higher, higher, higher...". These songs feature plodding riffage, wailing psych guitar solos, commanding vox, low budget sound FX, and (we're just guessing here) an exploding drummer a la Spinal Tap.
Unseen Forces' ringleader Dennis Dread sez this slab of "vintage volcanic rock" is for fans of "The Rods, Oz, Blue Cheer, and Buffalo"... sure! And we'd say Dwarr, Cirth Ungol, and Iron Butterfly, too! There's paradoxically party-hardy outsidery-ness to this, The Law bringing in '60s influences (they do "Wild Thing"), astral influences, whatever, so that while it's not quite Ya Ho Wa 13 in spandex, it's sure not your usual corporate Sunset Strip LA '80s hair metal.
The power trio's sole, independently released, lp came out in 1983, and failed to become a commercial success despite (or because of) its eccentric charms, but it did eventually become a collectable rarity. This reissue probably will too!
Remastered and reissued with the cooperation of The Law's original members, also with help from Source Family historian Isis Aquarian. Pressed on 180 gram vinyl and lovingly packaged. Includes liner notes and lyrics insert. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! And the label is almost out of 'em, so these may well be the last copies we'll be able to procure. But we still had to make it Record Of The Week, nonetheless. How could we not? None escape The Law!!
Skweee alert!!! Skweee alert!!! The uncomfortably named Lazercrotch is the nom de skweee of Poisonous Gases head honcho John Calvin Murphy, whose Portland-based label is the USA's number one purveyor of the originally Scandinavian DIY lo-fi glitchfunk electronic music called skweee, something which we hope you know plenty about already from all our enthused reviews of such skweee artists as Limonous, Daniel Savio, Pavan, Markis Sage, Eero Johannes, and others... As we put it in our review of Lazercrotch's 2009 debut 7" (which we loved): Skweee is an "infectious and sometimes silly electronic music subgenre, an 8-bit obsessed video gamey sort of instrumental hiphop/electro music". This new self-titled Lazercrotch full-length fits that description perfectly, and will give anyone still wondering what exactly skweee is, a crash course in skweee badassery!
The six tracks on this vinyl-only platter are all packed with ominous growling bass crunch and blippy jittery beats, together forming freaky, but seriously funky grooves. As is perhaps alluded to by the cover art, Lazercrotch's skweee gets exotically Eastern-tinged on such cuts as "Tikka Masala" and "Radio Gaza" (love the repeating eerie high end squeeks in that one, over the echoey, ponging beat). A lot of this is atmospheric and relaxed-sounding in a way, also dark and distorted, but always headnodding and sometimes more than that, as with the shake it up rhythms of such tracks as "Mike Tyson" and the shuffling "Tony LaRussa"...
Highly recommended to skweee aficionados new and old. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Comes with download code.
Latest from these French post black metal shoegazers, who seem forever doomed to live in the shadow of their countrymen Alcest and Amesoeurs, which makes sense, cuz most folks might in fact have a little trouble telling them apart. It's a shame though, because removed from the whole 'post black metal' equation (like really, all three of these band should be at this point), Les Discrets are masterful practitioners of fuzzed out, distortion drenched shoegaze dreampop heaviness. While they have essentially given up any pretense of being a black metal band of any stripe, their are some hints of blackness here, mostly in the occasional atonal riffage, and the brief stretch of guitar buzz and blast beat, but if anything, they definitely have more in common with the soaring dramatic metallic gloom pop of Katatonia, or the shoegaze blissiness of 4AD and Creation. There's plenty of buzz and pound, big soaring guitars, epic riffage, but even at their heaviest, Les Discrets are still a pop band, which is really what makes this stuff so great, every song here, gorgeously melancholic, epic and hook filled, maybe not necessarily in the classic verse chorus verse sense, but their knack for unforgettable melodies, for lush enveloping textures, for hypnorock mesmer, are unmatched, and yeah, we'll say it, even by their more famous countrymen. And when they slow it down, LD are capable of great beauty, of hushed crystalline mystery that sounds even more dramatic in the midst of a sprawling progged out black pop shoegaze epic. And all that said, of the three flagship post BM shoegaze combos, at this point we'd have to say LD might be out favorites. It could be simply because this is new, and these songs are fresh, but we're thinking it's much more than that.
