Latest from these sunshiney new age krautfolk drifters, a trio featuring our very own Scott Hewicker, along with Jefre Cantu (Tarentel, Root Strata) and Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp), The Alps' Easy Action is record number five if you're keeping track, although it's not in fact exactly a proper full length, instead, it's a bit of a collaged inbetweener, a gorgeous, surprisingly noisy at times, druggy and deliriously delightful hodgepodge assembled from various sources, old tapes from past sessions, unused takes from their last record Le Voyage, a handful of new recordings, as well as various other sounds, all meticulously assembled in the studio into a pretty fantastic record.
As mentioned above, the sound here is not nearly as laid back and soft focus as Le Voyage. That record definitely found the band in full on meandering mode, the guitars were jangly, the rhythms subtle and minimal, when there were rhythms, the noise was kept to a minimum, it was all about tone and timbre, ambience and atmosphere, the propulsion seemingly an afterthought, the band happy to let the songs drift lazily, but if a rhythm did surface, the band would just let that rhythm guide them, until it eventually wound down, leaving the band to drift ever onward. But here, the sound is actually a bit fierce, and a little dark. The opener starts with a cloud of swirling textures and hushed effects, muted melodies, and little flecks of buzz and glitch, but it's not long before a black cloud of grinding distortion and hissing electronics threaten to swallow up the other sounds, the song is transformed into a swirling bit of soft noise chaos, culminating in a strange stuttery glitched out finale. Wow. As if that weren't enough, the second track too delivers some powerful drumming, laid over some tangled steel string guitar, and some buzzing psychedelic guitar, a guitar that gets wilder and noisier as the track progresses before everything drops out leaving just the guitar unwinding a swirling cloud of FX heavy freakout.
And so it goes, "Pink Orange" is more of a interlude, a looped bit of processed guitar, but then "For Isabel" drifts in with its seventies folk guitar, but then suddenly glitches out, as some strange bits of studio buzz swoop in, the gorgeous looped guitar figure wreathed in a cloud of hiss and buzz, and rapidly expanding crunch, good stuff for sure, just surprisingly intense.
"Loves Of A Blonde" is a sprawling bit of abstract droney drift, some steel string buzz, some muted percussion, more crunchy distorted guitar noise, a sort of abstract raga, underpinned by dark piano chords, everything wreathed in gristly bits of static, eventually, all the noise fading out, leaving just some sitar like buzz and some echoey piano, the prettiest stretch on the record thus far. The title track dabbles in some dub, adding a little reggae inflection to a loping slo-mo krautrock groove, the guitars warm and shimmery, the bass sinewy and melodic, but even here, the band lay a thick bit of crunchy, lo-fi guitar fuzz over the otherwise tranquil proceedings, which we quite like, and definitely adds a needed edge to the otherwise placid drift underneath.
The rest of the record unwinds similarly, with the band taking the more serene and melodic elements and fusing them to strange studio misfires, and random, but fantastic bits of noisiness, tinkling looped melodies, that seems to fluctuate wildly within a field of hyperactive static, transforming a shimmery sleepy loop into a mysterious bit of crumbling crunch. They take a break on the hushed and crystal clear solo guitar outing "Reflections For Peter Green", only to slip right back into it with the nearly 10 minute "Instant Light" which was previously released on the super limited Root Strata cd-r A Path Through The Sun), a track that builds slowly, lush steel string strums drifting beneath whirling bits of distant ambience, definitely channeling the spirit of Le Voyage, but the band pile on some lush, effulgent guitar buzz, and some keening layered guitardrones, filling the sky with warm sonic streaks, while underneath the sound continues to drift along melodically, a practically perfect balance between the dreamy old and the more abrasive new, before finishing off with a brief 2 minute swirl of whirling, swirling, blurred and smeared, echo drenched new age shimmer. So good. And a bit of a sonic surprise. Which has us wondering if their next proper studio full length will find the band incorporating some of this new found, more 'difficult' audio experimentation. We sure hope so!
Super limited, and packaged in a super elaborate fold out psychedelic pyramid sleeve, designed by artist Tauba Auerbach, that is easily one of the coolest things we've seen.
Includes a download code as well.
Hey, blackened doom dudes and dudettes, we know you're busy spinning your new Yob album 24-7, but if you don't want to wear Atma out, here's something else you might like, from the folks (Seventh Rule) who last brought us Batillus.
Atriarch are an outfit from up in Portland, Oregon, and deal with the depression of living there (all the rain!) by making this bummer music, downer stuff for sure. And HEAVY. Though this is their debut, Atriarch aren't exactly newcomers to the underground sludge scene, their singer is from Trees, and also the bassist was in Graves At Sea. So they know what they're doing, and what they're doing is making some atmospherically arty, anguished ultra-doom!!!
There's four songs, adding up to 36 minutes (this is obviously intended for two sides of vinyl, which Seventh Rule has released in quite handsome form, though we also have cds in different, handmade packaging, self-released by the band). It's kinda like one looooong song though, and we mean that in a good way... a depressive, occasionally violent journey into the realms of grim gothic darkness, Atriarch employing harsh vokills (and some use of mournful "clean" vocals too), droning synth, somber slow-mo drum pummel, soft-loud dynamics, sad melodies, and of course crushing distorted guitars, to convey their dire emotional message of the foreverness of the end. Should appeal to anyone who might dig a bleaker, blacker metal version of Cough, Atavist, the aforementioned Yob, etc.
What more can we say at this point about these Baltimore blisspoppers that we haven't already? We've barely been able to keep this in stock since we first got it in, another gorgeous slab of hazy, shoegazey, washed out slowcore dream pop loveliness. Bittersweet melodies, lush layered textures, simple programmed beats, lots of buzz and drone and shimmer, all somehow woven into heady, softly psychedelic epics that smolder and drift dreamily, taking the same sort of retro dreaminess of M83, but casting it as something a bit more melancholy and downcast, the perfect soundtrack for rainy days, broken hearts, late night wanders through empty streets, missing you mix tapes, vocals drenched in echo and drifting astride soaring shimmering melodies, all underpinned by warm sonic swells, and everything wrapped up in lush swatch prismatic jangle and slow build sonic mesmer. In some ways, Beach House are like the overcast, cloudy and grey version of Best Coast's sunshiney pop bliss, some of the same sonic elements but again, in Beach House's world the light is more than balanced by the shadow, and for every moment of hopeful major key shimmer, there's a long stretch of wistful sonic heartbreak right around the corner.
And stick around for the hidden track tucked away at the end of the record, a dreamily dour reverb drenched downer pop gem laced with some gorgeous slippery slide guitars.
And peep the super swank cover art, a field of raised Braille-like GLOW IN THE DARK dots!
A few lists back we reviewed a one sided 7" square plexiglass lathe cut from Death Cheetah, aka local visual artist / musician Kevin Taylor, and it was a doozy, a twisted mix of electro-black metal, all pounding drums and blooping synths, we found ourselves listening it over and over like crazy. Apparently, that was just the first in what is looking to be a series of super limited, handmade lathe cut 7"s, the latest being this, the first we've heard from a group called Beheadings, which comes complete with super illegible black metal logo, in a hand screened, hand numbered sleeve. The group, includes Taylor of course, but also Tim Cohen, he of The Fresh & Onlys and Amocoma (whose record is out on Andee's tUMULt label), and while they're not quite as metal as the Death Cheetah, this record is a pretty fantastically twisted slab of experimental sound, all pulsing synths, weirdly programmed drums, woozy twang flecked riffage, lots of cool effects, everything dubbed out and droney, the sounds panned and constantly shifting from speaker to speaker, some wordless vocals wrapped in reverb and left to drip in the background, some cool blasts of zoner guitar buzz, and wild effects drenched squiggles, dizzying backwards swoops... And then toward the last few minutes, things begin to go nuts, the vocals effected in real time, swooping and swirling, speeding up and splintering into crumbling shards, a second vocal yelping wildly over the top, while the music grooves and pulses, before everything seems to collapse in a swirl of dubbed out chaos. So cool. We want these guys to make a whole album of this stuff.
But remember this is a lathe cut, so the above mentioned sounds are buried under a layer of crackle and hum, of buzz and rumble, adding a patina of hazy, gauzy washed out whir to the proceedings, that somehow makes it sound even cooler, all blurry and blissy and dreamily drugged out.
And as mentioned above, it's LIMITED TO JUST 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, in hand screened sleeves, we have about a dozen copies, but like that Death Cheetah lathe cut, these probably will go fast (though, we do have one or two of those Death Cheetahs left, if you're quick).
We've long been fans of these sun drenched West-Coast-Is-The-Best-Coast fuzz poppers, heck, we even had them play our 40th aQ birthday bash. Every record a glorious collection of washed out jangle and three chord Beach Boys via sixties girl group dream pop, all simple spidery melodies over urgent fuzzy crunch, BC instrumental mainman Bobb Bruno creating lush popscapes out of surprisingly simple instrumentation, and Bethany Cosentino delivering tales of boys and beaches, surf and sun, love and longing, in a voice that just gets better and better with every record. Much has been made about this latest, with Jon Brion on board as producer, and his magic touch has definitely transformed the group's sound. Where before, much of BC's sound was washed out and fuzz drenched and doused in echo, the sound here is crystalline and clear, the instrumentation lush, with all sorts of sonic subtleties throughout, and so now, it seems, BC is no longer a 'garage' band, and are instead a proper big studio, big venue, actual well produced, meticulously crafted REAL band, who play on Letterman and have their own clothing line, and who played here recently at the Fox Theater (!) instead of the tiny Cafe Du Nord where we had our party, but most importantly, who once again, have made a fantastic record of dreamy summery poppiness. Which we are digging big time.
When this came out as a vinyl-only release earlier this year, back in May, we made it our very rockin' Record Of The Week. Now, we're happy to report that the band also has done a limited run of pro-printed cd-rs, for those of you lacking in turntable technology!
Boyjazz? Boyjazz! The name should strike fear into the heart of all posers. Not because they weren't a joke band, cuz of course they were... but in spite of that, they kicked ass on most quote-unquote real metal/hard rock bands out there. Silly name, funny lyrics, tongue-in-cheek attitude and all, damn they rocked. Great songs, super showmanship, part wiseass LA hair metal parody, part party time garage glam rock ravers in their own right, the bombastic Boyjazz couldn't be denied. The musicians in Boyjazz were tight all right, virtuoso nerds in cock rock spandex disguise, but the band's not so secret weapon was charismatic frontman Adam "Sexmouth" Hobbs, who had few peers and less shame in the live arena - and acted as if arenas were indeed where they belonged!
Or maybe you're too young to remember their 2004 album In The City Tonight? Or their US tour opening for The Fucking Champs and Zombi? Well, you're in luck, they're baaaack... sort of... with, at long last, the posthumous release of their final all analog studio recording, tracked back in 2006 but shelved 'til now. Maybe the world is finally ready. We are!
It's clear from the title Unlimited Nights & Weekends that Boyjazz didn't get much more "serious" on their long lost sophomore outing, not that they needed to, or we expected 'em to. Though, they did do it with their five member full band lineup, not as duo-with-drum-machine like on In The City Tonight. So it's more what Boyjazz were like at their peak live, including the six string shred of geeky guitar hero Eric Murriguez, and the actual drumming of Aaron "Supertouch" Levin, with songs just as instantly catchy and kick ass as any on that earlier album. So many infectious riffs and great songs here, straight up. Tracks like "Woman Come To Man", "Woman In Love", "She's Got Gold", "Danger Danger", "Pocket Unicorn", heck ALL of 'em, are gonna be stuck in our heads for the foreseeable future, and that's just after a few spins, the almost-overly-enthusiastic backing vocal choruses generally sealing the deal. Turns out, a bunch actually were already stuck in our heads somewhere, as we immediately recognized several as longtime live faves from the band, so glad they got properly recorded for posterity! Like sleazy side 2 album-ender "Booze", usually their encore as we recall... Armed with these songs, Boyjazz could time travel back to the '80s and take on all comers on the Sunset Strip for sure, though some of the jokes in the lyrics might go over the heads of those in the audience.
'Tis totally over the top boogie rawk action, with wailing vox, clever lyrix, '70s glam riffrock stomp... Boyjazz has tongues firmly in cheek, yes, but they're nonetheless doing it right, asking no quarter and none given, willing to put up or shut up (they choose the former), their goofing and spoofing dangerously close to blowing doors on the real thing, like when they make Led Zeppelin their bitch on "Treat Steamin'" or send Judas Priest running hellbent for cover when they belt out "The Monsters Are Smarter". Even power pop new wave like The Knack gets the Boyjazz treatment via "Hot On The Phone".
It's not rocket science, or maybe it is... Part T-Rex, part Tenacious D, part Turbonego; a little White Stripes, a lotta Whitesnake, Boyjazz almost make even Van Halen seem stiff & serious, uptight with stagefright. To sum up, we've got one word for you: Wooooah-whoooah-whooooah-oh-yeah!
Super limited cd-r edition, in jewel case with full color art, professionally printed. They only only brought us a handful, though if we run out we might be able to get more from 'em in after the holidays.
Finally managed to get enough of these to list, the debut release from the oddly monikered Brennendes Gehirn, aka Matt Harries, who in his guise as BG, creates dense, stormy landscapes of sound, crumbling distorted atmospheres and murky buried melodies, squall of bristling chaotic blacknoise, and dark sprawls of haunting minimal drift. A mix of black ambience, post industrial, and electronic soundscaping, BG is the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of Tenhornedbeast, MZ412, Wolf Eyes, Wraiths, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Scorn and the like. Scorn seems like an odd one to include, but it's an occasional tendency toward a sort of beat driven sound that makes this truly unique, while the opening track follows a fairly standard slow build, from creeping drone-y dread to explosive roiling heaviness, the second track mixes it up, launching right into a blast of blaring howl and skree, but letting those sounds settle, and blur into each other, creating a sort of gauzy sonic patina beneath which melodies drift and unfurl, layers shift and transform, it's a drone, and a noisy one at that, but it's super active and constantly in motion, with the sort of momentum that this sort of sound usually lacks.
"Annihilation (Awakens New Life)" is where it starts to get REALLY good, a looped sample of some sort of zither, over a simple hand drum rhythm, all over a dense undulating sprawl of crumbling superdistorted blackness, then some female vocals come in, are doused with effects, and the track lurches into motion, a sort of Muslimgauze via Merzbow, tripped out and heavy, but darkly rhythmic, the noise is peeled away, the drums skitter and shuffle, and then the noise returns TENfold, a massive cascade of churning almost metallic sounding riffage (although it sounds like some strange sample), before drifting off in a haze of blur and buzz. Then there's "Elegie Fur Clemens Scheitz", which is a fantastically grimy slab of downtempo loop-age, like Portishead looped and spinning at 16 rpm, super druggy and totally mesmerizing, the beat and groove surrounded on all sides by heaving barrages of noise, might be the coolest track here.
But hang on for the epic 21 minute closer, that again sets a super abstract echo drenched beat down, in a wide open expanse of weird reverby emptiness, the beat never really gaining any sort of momentum, instead, the sounds seem to get more and more low fidelity, the track a slow smoldering ur-drone, constantly changing timbre, from murky and muddy, to bright and brittle, and finally to psychedelic cacophony. Interestingly enough, that 'beat' surfaces subtly throughout, as does a strange sampled voice (from Mullholland Drive), finishing off with some melancholic piano, and a surprising final burst of caustic noise.
Beautifully packaged in hand stamped cardstock digpak style sleeves, released on Ordo Pestilentia, the label run by Wraiths, and most likely very very limited.
We don't do this often, but sometimes, the easiest thing is just to link to a YouTube video. Especially 'cause it's what got us interested in tracking down this reissue in the first place! Made us kind of obsessed, actually. You'll see/hear why if you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgGK4qBTwpw&ob=av2n, and check out the psychedelic video version of this album's title track. (For those who just want a quick idea, take a look at the album cover operating room scene, that's in the vid, complete with people dressed up in disturbing animal masks, a Rolls Royce driving through the desert, naked ladies in the jungle, and, well, just watch it...)
So, Jean-Marc Cerrone was/is a French dance music producer and badass drummer (elsewhere on YouTube you can see him live in concert, kicking out the massive drum solos). The more disco-savvy among us here had heard of him, he's up there with Giorgio Moroder in the Euro-Disco pantheon. And Supernature, from 1977, his 3rd album, is the jam. A disco-PROG masterpiece. The title track starts things off, the one that crazy video's for, and dominates, being almost ten minutes long in its album version. An epic. No ordinary club fare here, on the surface maybe, but the disco diva vocals (lyrics by Lene Lovich!) are about some dystopian sci-fi scenario wherein twisted science is turning men into monstrous beasts (which explains - sort of - some of the video's surreal imagery), these mutants rising up against their masters. Hauntingly, she sings lines like "how can I explain, things are different today, darkness all around, and no one makes a sound..." Woah, downer disco. It's pretty dark, and weird, and the thump thump thump of the music gets that way too, with some fat synth bass riffing at about the six minute mark that brings this into imaginary Magma doing disco territory, almost. Cerrone sure puts his state of the art ARP Odyssey Mk III to good use here. The track ends with hint of 2001's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", that's how epic this is. The rest of the side maintains the mood, "Supernature" segueing seamlessly into Cerrone's solo spot "Sweet Drums", his insistent beats heavily effected and spaced out, and that's followed by the more blissfully eerie electronics of "In The Smoke", which could be from a Goblin soundtrack.
Side two (tracks 4-6 on this cd), is the brighter side... More typical fusion-funked Euro-Disco anthems, all three songs with "Love" in the title ("Give Me Love", "Love Is Here", "Love Is The Answer"), great stuff though, top-knotch! Lush, lively dancefloor fodder for sure.
So, recommended to fans of Zombi, Goblin, Moroder, and the recently departed Donna Summer. This import reish, in one of those rounded-corner "Super Jewel Boxes", comes with extensively detailed liner notes in the cd booklet, illustrated in full color.
This is super cool. Chips & Beer is a real 'zine, on newsprint for goodness sakes, 120 pages, chock full of more metal than thou madness, deeply nerdy, enthused about an aesthetic that most ordinary metal fans let alone regular folks don't 'get', but if you do, this is for you!!! Not sure how this rag got all the way to issue #3 without us knowing about it, it's totally up our alley, being all about the type of truely cult, truly METAL stuff we dig. Fortunately we got a clue and got it in, with this brand new ish hot off the presses. It's just the thing to be reading when cranking the great new Dawnbringer album (which we just got in, to be reviewed next list) loud, 'cause there's a big interview with 'Professor' Black in here. It's also good readin' to go with crankin' just about ANY old school (or new wave of old school) metal: thrash, death, doom, true, etc.
Along with the interview with Dawnbringer/High Spirits mastermind Chris Black, in this issue Chips & Beer also kicks back with Finland's Krypts and Swallowed, Australia's Cauldron Black Ram, and others... The historical side of things is also well-represented, one of the features being a lengthy piece on the epic '80s metal legends known as Cirith Ungol. And the issue's centerpiece is a massive "New Yawk Street Metal Special", a lovingly in depth look at NYC's (and Long Island's) contributions to the majesty of metal, including interviews with Twisted Sister's Jay Jay French, Manowar's Ross The Boss, the band Frigid Bitch, Dan Lilker of Anthrax/SOD/Nuclear Assault/etc.; also there's a run-down on all the KISS albums up through Music From The Elder (just like we did!), a piece about the movie Maniac, and more.
Plus, Chips & Beer's got all the other usual stuff you'd expect in any self-respecting 'zine: tons of uber opinionated album reviews (we don't always agree with 'em, but they're fun to read), a letters page, ads from underground labels, and even some comix! And C&B boasts an excellent stable of headbanging writers, including noted scribe Stewart Voegtlin, the editor in fact, whose fevered writing is always abstruse but amusing, a hesher beatnik academic hybrid. Recommended!
So, not only are we looking forward to issue #4, we've also gotta hunt down the back issues...
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...
Originally released as a deluxe 5lp boxset for this year's Record Store Day, this amazing collection, gathering up the first three albums from this seminal eighties indie pop outfit, is now also available as a triple cd set (and as individual lps, which we'll list/review soon), and reveals once again, to a whole new audience hopefully, what an amazing and influential band Cleaners From Venus really were.
Bandleader Martin Newell, who was bitter after some bad record label experiences with his previous band, became obsessed with doing everything himself (a real DIY band for sure), which meant recording records on a 4 track in his bedroom, dubbing the tapes himself, and releasing those tapes in super limited editions, of course distributed by Newell himself, which probably has a lot do with why these guys didn't get more attention than they did. But masterful pop music like this with such incredible songwriting was bound to work its way to the surface, and this stuff did manage to make its way into the ears of obsessive pop nerds, and quickly attained a cultlike status, and for good reason. Listening to this stuff now, it's easy to hear what a huge influence these guys had, and that their lo-fi pop was years ahead of groups like Ariel Pink, who would trawl the same sonic territory, albeit a bit more ironically. Jangly outsider pop, with strange homebrewed production weirdness, bizarre edits, twisted little intros and outros, brief snippets of conversations, sudden fade outs, that inexplicably fade right back in, the programmed drums, gorgeous vocal harmonies, hooks galore, definitely a product of the early '80s, with a different production and a less skewed take on pop, it's not hard to imagine this stuff on the radio or on MTV alongside groups like the Style Council or Human League or any of the other bands popular at the time, but Newell's Cleaners had it's own twisted take on the sound of the time, channeling Elvis Costello, XTC and the rest, but transforming that commercial pop sound into something much more personal and urgent, and without any restrictions, or any hopes of mainstream popularity, Newell never shied away from trying anything, no matter how weird it may have seemed, and the results definitely speak for themselves.
The first record, 1981's Blow Away Your Troubles, is the rawest of the bunch, and might still be our favorite, it's definitely the weirdest, with even this meticulously assembled reissue replete with those weird edits and damaged tape dropouts, all of which merely adds to the mood and mystery of the music. The second record, 1982's On Any Normal Monday, might be objectively the best record though, for a home recorded album, it sound incredible, still rife with all sorts of weirdness, whether that meant dubbed out snares, or strange spoken word segments, thick sinewy basslines or xylophone melodies, the sound is lush, and so fully realized, and the songs, catchy and meticulously crafted, in different circumstances, another instance where some of these songs definitely could have been hits.
The final record in the set, Midnight Cleaners, also from 1982, found the band's sound shifting once again, the vibe a bit more new wavey, the recording still polished, but but a bit more raw than On Any Normal Monday, still warped and weird, and reminding us a LOT of Guided By Voices, who seemed to fancy themselves a sort of imaginary Cleaners From Venus, a lost unsung genius pop band, GBV would after all manufacture a sort of faux Britishness that definitely approaches the Cleaners dreamy eighties pop sound, especially on Midnight Cleaners. Some of the songs here had us seriously thinking GBV might owe these guys some heartfelt thanks, if not actual royalties.
We had been subsisting for years on a worn out mix tape of Cleaners tracks, so it's thrilling to have all these songs in one place, many of which we're only hearing now for the first time, and we have been gleefully immersing ourselves in The Cleaners From Venus' twisted pop world, and we're hoping that the designation that this is in fact volume one, means that volume two is on the way...
Record number three from this dubstep revolutionary, and another shift even further away from proper dubstep. Like the two preceeding records, Clubroot unfurls a lush landscape of ethereal drift and deep beat driven ambience, and while fans of the first two will find much to love here as well, there have been some subtle sonic shifts that are worth noting.
Not that the opener would give any indication, a lush expansive stretch of washed out dreamy cinematic synth shimmer, that remains beatless throughout, the sound grows gradually darker, until sampled voices surface, and this 'intro' leads directly into a track that sounds almost like Phoenix or Miike Snow, at least at first, a repetitive piano figure that in other hands would lead into some dream pop, but here, provides the melodic backbone for some seriously mesmerizing dubstep skitter, the beat thick and heavy, but still skeletal, while all around, fragmented melodies swirl, bits of vocal surface and fade away, "Summons" though is where the record comes into it's own, and displays a shift away from the lush ethereal atmospheres and toward something a bit more stripped down, the change is subtle, but it definitely works, sounding more like Burial here, a creeping tarpit drag, with some thick corrosive bass wobble, that's wreathed in effects which gives it a whole different effect, and the vocals here, hazy and and angelic, balanced by some sped up soul vocals that are transformed into woozy abstract melodies, it's the sort of jam that transcends 'dubstep' or any genre classifications, a gorgeous bit of electronica that we could listen to forever. But then "Lurking In The Shadows" lays down another killer groove, with more super distorted bass wobble, the whole track driven by a sped up looped vocal, and suddenly what we perceived as a less lush sound, or a more stripped down sound, is revealed as something more akin to economy of sound, it's not that things have been removed, but that everything is perfectly place, and there are no superfluous sonics, which becomes more evident as the record progresses, whether it's a loping dubbed out stutter, or a whirling sprawl of psychedelic ambience, a skittery almost hip hop groove, or Muslimgauze like Eastern tinged trip out. Ethereal and blissed out and dreamy one second, haunting and ominous and sonically sinister the next, check out the closer "Restraint", a gorgeous chunk of dubbed out rumbling bass heavy slo-mo soul, an be sure to stick around for the hidden track, which might be the darkest and heaviest of the bunch.
Yet again, another album of untouchable beat bliss innovation from maybe our favorite dubstep outfit out there...
Now on vinyl!
We love Philip Cohran, and while he doesn't get the same level of attention and widespread adoration as folks like Pharaoh Sanders, Rashan Roland Kirk, or Alice Coltrane, there is no doubt his music belongs in that special elite class of spiritual jazz geniuses, as his records are filled with such deep vibrations and such endless creativity.
In the past we have gushed over the reissues of his albums On The Beach and The Malcolm X Memorial, two records that truly transcend stiff and narrow definitions of genre, as we've seen many jazz-shy folks get swept away by those amazing sounds!
The Spanish Suite was never released before, so this is the first time most folks have gotten to hear it, a long form piece composed and created in the late '60s by Cohran and his collective of amazing Chicago musicians, many of whom have super impressive musical resumes, from Sun Ra to the great early incarnation of Earth Wind & Fire. The Spanish Suite demonstrates an effortless infusion of Latin elements into deep African grooves of forward thinking jazz, executed with total perfection. A little like Miles Davis' masterpiece Sketches Of Spain stretched out and taken to some outer dimension. Patience is a virtue with this piece as it starts out nice and somewhat traditional sounding for the first little while until it morphs into some contemplative and expansive spiritual jazz exploration, the sort of thing that Cohran has definitely mastered. Highly recommended!
The final release from Concern, aka Gordon Ashworth (brother of Owen, he the man behind Casiotone For The Painfully Alone), which uses as its main sound source a folk instrument called the box harp, or lap harp, and the record opens with a gorgeous Reichian figure played on the harp, which becomes the foundation of the whole record, an homage of sorts to the African kora and the a a similar stringed instrument from Madagascar. The creation of the record is almost as compelling as the sounds themselves, with Ashworth using super primitive looping techniques involving cassettes and speakers and microphones and delays, but even more exciting, using cavernous parking garages and a sort of crude echo/delay, like a modern day Taj Mahal Travellers. The results speak for themselves though.
Beginning with that rapid fire figure of notes played on the box harp, buzzing and percussive and darkly melodic, all over wheezing barely there chords, those opening harp notes soon disappear beneath a warm wash of lush layered shimmer, which we gradually realize is simply the same sounds, slowed down and blurred a bit, transforming them into something droney and dreamy, but the sound is constantly shifting, the opening flurry of notes surfacing now and again in different forms, all building to a lush dense dreamily blown out coda, all the while, the sounds constantly couched in a background of ambient sounds and field recordings, the crackle of fire, voices, footsteps, the clatter of dishes, the clinking of glasses, it all definitely adds a strange dimension to an already mysterious landscape of sound.
The B side continues right where the first side left off, the buzzing box harp notes now hazy and washed out and wreathed in a prismatic glimmer, lush, but super active, a roiling melodic swirl just under the surface, the sound mesmerizing and ever shifting, building gradually to a soft cacophony, before closing with a gorgeous sprawl of softly warbly mesmer, sounding like Philip Jeck spinning old recordings of box harps, everything dreamy and crackly and softly fading to black.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! In a super striking jacket, with teal foil metallic printing on black matte jackets.
Originally released on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, the Money Store is record number two from this weirdo outsider punk/noise/electro/hip hop trio from across the bay, whose debut, the twisted noise drenched Ex-Military was a huge hit around here, and The Money Store seems poised to follow suit. Although in some ways, this new record is a lot less weird, and a lot more polished, and while it's still fierce and fucked up, it's definitely not as outwardly angry, less a sonic brick in the face, and more like a carefully plotted and meticulously executed throat slitting, which we would imagine is a comparison these guys would dig.
As with Ex-Military, Zach Hill from Hella is one of the guys behind the production, and while there may be live drumming, it definitely sounds like he spent more time programming beats, the sound more electro than anything, and even moreso that Ex-Military, the sound much more fully realized, more lush and layered, opener "Get Got" has a loop and a beat that sounds like it could've gone in an entirely different direction, and been sort of weird pop radio hit, but with Stefan Burnett's twisted flow and frenetic delivery, it helps transform the songs' shoegazey electro-jitter into something more jittery and dizzying, like some malfunctioning double dutch jam. "The Fever" hews closer to the first record, the flow more of a belligerent bellow, the beat a stuttery skitter, but again, the production is super slick and makes the song a bit more palatable, without taking away from the ferocity, which is definitely a delicate line to toe.
The whole record is killer, every track here, all weirdo loops, twisted flow, sick beats, massive production, this is the sort of shit you imagine being blasted from a booming system in the car of THEE scariest dude in the hood, fucked up and fierce, but also groovy and funky, a little bit loopy and twisted, especially when they do the whole sped up soul sample thing, which here just makes things sound weirder then ever.
Lots of this record remind us of one of our favorite weirdo outsider hip hop records EVER, Too Bad But True, by Fever, released on DHR way back in 1998, the same sort of disregard for standard song structure, typical rapping, lots of distortion and murk, fractured beats, twisted loops, almost like both groups decided to reinvent the genre from the ground up, and just inadvertently touched on the various elements that DEFINE the genre in most cases, but here those bits and bobs just got all fucked up and came out the other side practically unrecognizable, and got all tangled up into an already head spinning, bafflingly brilliant sound. Hip hop record of the year? Quite possibly, but word is there's gonna be ANOTHER Death Grips later this year, so we might have to reserve judgment until then!
Holy shit! This is a frightfully good piece of dark minimalism on par with Roland Kayn, Eliane Radigue, and the late period works from The Hafler Trio.
Dimmer is the collaborative project between Bay Area experimentalist Thomas Dimuzio and LAFMS icon Joseph Hammer, who have toured together on a semi-regular basis up and down the West Coast for the past decade or so. The two previous Dimmer albums were collected and edited from the numerous live gigs, documenting the real-time electronic synthesis from Dimuzio coupled with Hammer's tape loop manipulations. As impressive as Dimmer has been live and on those edited live recordings, we were completely floored by Ascent - their first collaborative venture into the studio. Restricting their sources to vintage analogue gear, Dimuzio and Hammer generate swarms of harmonic drones that they in turn filter through the abstracting tools of choice. For Dimuzio, it's his gear-junkie arsenal of digital samplers and sequencers; for Hammer, it's the humble tape deck. On the first couple of tracks, Dimmer issues deep cosmic tones with strange / strangulated fibrillations from Hammer's tape tricks that elongate, expand, and collapse in accordance with a grand, if slightly sinister vision of miniaturized symphonies for the birth and death of the universe. Gasping drones billowing with toxic fumes stream rapidly out of blackened voids with Dimuzio and Hammer making prolonged descents into near-silence, before rocketing forward with another grandiose swell of ever darkening compaction of processed synth tones. Where the album begins in the shimmeringly majesty of a Klaus Schulze composition, it ends much closer to something monstrous and cavernous like Lustmord. This is easily the best we've heard from either of these two stalwarts of the California avant-garde! Limited to 300 copies.
It's been ages since we last heard from DMX Krew, it was probably on some comp way back in the day, or maybe one of their nineties Rephlex full lengths. We're happy to report very little has changed, as local label Voltaire offers up this ep of old school electrofunk/synthpop, all skittery beats, and vocodered vocals, fuzzy eighties synth stabs, total day-glo / neon beats for retro dancefloor revivalists, from the two takes on the title track, one blown out and frenetically funky, the other more laid back and groovy, to the "Rockit" style synthpop electro of "Surf Squad", and from the late night synth funk of "Turing Test", to the cheesy eighties VHS dance party robofunk jitter of "No More Bad Dreams". Although stick around for the final jam "Mind Bombs", which sounds like it's sourced from the same old school party rockers that M83 models his sound after, but where M83 gussies it up and modernizes it a bit, adding shoegaze blissout and some modern gloss, DMX Krew keeps it true and offers up a groovy funky slab of super hypnotic booty shaking electro pop, that sounds like it's playing underneath the credits of some lost eighties video jam like BMX Bandits or Gleaming The Cube, all dreamy female vox, blurts of low end synths and squelchy rhythms. Totally sweet!
This oddly named (can't the ducks and the geese just get along?) band hails from mainland China, and play an idiosyncratic blend of indiepop and mathrock and more... They've been around since 2009, doing an ep, an lp, and now this 7", which is the first thing we've heard by them. We're probably the only store in the States to have it, 'cause our friend Daniel, who used to run the pirate radio station here in SF where aQ's Allan and Alison did their 'Klaus To The Edge' progrock show, moved to Shanghai and opened a vinyl record store there, Uptown, which is also a label. So, this is one of Uptown's initial releases, and DFG are worth checking out to get a taster of what's happening in the Shanghai scene. They certainly seem ambitious. They even played at SXSW this year, and are getting big in China too, winning some awards at the Shanghai Grammies!
Part Tortoise, part Talking Heads... we don't know. On the anthemic A side, "His Story", it almost sounds like U2 is an influence. Grandiose stuff. The B side is equally catchy, but a bit quirkier. Definitely some '80s alt pop to their sound. And you wouldn't necessarily guess they were Chinese.
Pressed on nice white vinyl.
Most Slumberland releases tend toward the washed out and dreamily jangly, sort of ethereal and dream poppy, so when we threw this on, we were kind of thrown for a loop by the opening track "Bo Diddley", with its serious crunch and punkish pound, and were immediately smitten by the oddly named Evans The Death. Noisy pop, a little bit heavy and rocking, gloriously distorted and fuzzed out, that surprise though was immediately trumped once the vocalist opened her mouth, and let loose with one of the coolest, strangest, most distinctive voices we've heard in ages. A sonorous croon that soars and wails flitting into an impossible falsetto at the drop of a hat, and somehow, once you get settled into EtD's sound, it's impossible to imagine any other vocalist fitting in. The cool thing, is even sans the vocals, the music is pretty epic, flitting from churning Pixies-ish pound, to bleary eyed shoegaze trip out, to garage-y fuzz pop, to classic power pop crunch, the arrangements are a little mathy, the melodies epic and catchy like crazy, the sound lush and layered and loud, and then the vocals come in, and it's impossible to resist. Heck, they even have a song called "A Small Child Punched Me In The Face", which might just be the catchiest song with the weirdest title EVER. Quickly becoming a new pop fave, and "Bo Diddley", definite contender for pop jam of the year...
One of two new releases from local art-label Time Released Sound, the other, the second release from mysterious modern classical soundscaper Strie is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this, the latest release from a South Korean soundscaper/dronescaper who calls himself Fescal, and this single 50 minute tracks is a beauty, all tinkling melodies and gauzy staticky haze, warm softly billowing drones, and distant smoldering atmospheres, the production gives it the feel of some antiquated recording recently unearthed, the music too is timeless in its own way, the sound shifting dramatically throughout, from hushed black ambient thrum, to warm almost chamber music, and from washed out soft focus psychedelic drift, to barely there blurred atmospheric shimmer, and all the indistinct stops in between. Fans of Machinefabriek and Jasper TX, of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck, this is definitely for you.
Like with all TRL releases, the packaging is fantastic and extravagant, LIMITED TO JUST 100 COPIES, the cd is housed in a hand worked black digipak, housed in a see-through anti-static bag, stickered on the front, with a pressed metal tag affixed to the bag with wire, inside there's a screw topped pyrex test tube containing metal and glass shavings, and inside the digipak are all manner of litmus strips, found artifacts, chemical notations as well as liner notes.
ALREADY SOLD OUT AT THE LABEL AND OUT OF PRINT. We have 5 or 6 copies, and then these are gone for good!
Mango Sunrise is the latest release from these Minneapolis electronic psychedelic kraut-inspired-rockers, and the first release of theirs we've gotten in sufficient numbers to review/list, and we're guessing lots of you will dig these guys as much as we do, cuz FP's sound is definitely the sort of thing we can't seem to get enough of, heady and hypnotic, sun dappled and mesmeric, reminding us quite a bit of another aQ fave, the Cave offshoot Bitchin Bajas. Like BB, Food Pyramid, approach their psych jams with a kind of wide eyed innocence that seems to come through in the sounds. The pulsating synths, the cascading melodies, the lush landscapes, it's the sort of kraut influenced mesmer that also reminds us of another long time aQ fave, Stereolab, the same sort of dreamy repetition, so easy to get lost and carried away, but Food Pyramid seem to position themselves more alongside folks like Tangerine Dream, but this is not straight up krautrock worship at all, these guys definitely have their own thing going on, just check out "Orange Alert", which sounds like some bastard offshoot of witch house, that is minus the tripped out psychedelic guitar and the SAX, sounds weird, but somehow it works. Then there's "Oh Mercy", which is a serious slab of cheesy eighties style synthfunk, touching on the whole Goblin/Carpenter axis, but way more concerned with booty shaking than mood making, and there's the strange sampled vocal too. The rest of the record unwinds in a similarly unpredictable manner, from dubbed out weirdly psychedelic almost reggae, to blissed out ur-drone psychnoise, and from Muslimgauze like Eastern tinged synth soaked groove, to blown out super distorted synthbuzz electro skitter, and then there's the closer, a sprawling field of in-the-red kosmische ur-drone swirl and shimmer, that is totally dreamy and blissful and the sort of track we find ourselves playing over and over and over.
A couple years ago, San Francisco minimal-wave / shoegaze outfit Foreign Cinema handed us a 4 song ep - Non-Synchronous Sound - which quickly became a staff favorite around here, with its wintery atmospherics wrapped around sublime songs that reminded us of The Cure (circa Faith / Seventeen Seconds), Slowdive, and Crystal Stilts. With just four songs, we did keep on wondering (sometimes aloud to the band when they dropped off more and more copies of Non-Synchronous Sound), when a full album would come out. While we're totally stoked that the band has finished a full album, we're still somewhat scratching our heads why Foreign Cinema hasn't caught the attention of somebody like Sacred Bones, Captured Tracks, or hell 4AD for that matter. Yeah, they really are that good!
Anyway as for Monochromatic, the spatiousness and spectral songs which we loved so much on Non-Synchronous Sounds continue here. The songs all have a complexity that along with those earlier references seem to meld the artful tumble of Wire with the post-rock dynamics of Bark Psychosis. Rolling basslines that slide out of noir-tinged melodies into a low-slung, darkened dub countering the synth and drum machines, all given a good old Martin Hannett style production. The spindly guitars of Dave Han leap out of the songs with a simple, graceful sadness to match his distantly mixed, minor key vocals. For all of the referecnes to darkened atmospheric pop, Foreign Cinema conjure a sound that is pretty much all their own. We'll be ballyhooing this one as much as we did the earlier ep, until they sell out of the 300 copies they pressed up for the lp, which also comes with a cd-r of the entire album.
The final installment in the recent batch of tapes from Land Of Decay, this one a three way collaboration between Terence Hanuum, he being one half of aQ faves Locrian, and two other groups we had never heard before, The Fortieth Day and Shee Retina Stimulants, and like the rest of the tapes in this batch (Number None, Ithi, Andre Foisy, Wraiths) this is another slab of grim, low end minimal blackness, a sort of post industrial thrum, all looped layers and blurred rumble and crunch, but LIKE those others, this is way more than just noise, the sound here is lush and haunting, the loops add a subtle rhythmic element, much of the time spent creeping and drifting and woozily shimmering, but the proceedings pocked with bursts of static, blasts of tangled psychedelic noise, the framework provided by sonar like beeps, and softly stuttering clipped loops that become actual rhythms, occasionally sounding like some murky sprawl of heroin house, while at other times like some sort of abstract doom pulse, a heady plunderphonic songsuite of blacknoise, post industrial drift, and blissed out psychedelic minimalism, that manages to be surprisingly hypnotic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Hail, the return of Japanese psych shaman Keiji Haino's legendary psychedelic free rock unit, Fushitsusha!
We'll dispense with doing a lengthy background essay, as pretty much anyone who would purchase a $29 import cd by Fushitsusha already knows all about the band; in fact we probably know exactly who you are. Not that we don't want to spread the gospel of Fushitsusha far and wide, it's just that there's some more affordable introductions that could be made. But, even our fellow fanclub members probably want to know if this gets the thumbs up from us. Well, of course it does! But some further attempt at description might help.
For a couple reasons, we were quite surprised (and pleased!) when this appeared. We had thought that Haino was done forever with Fushitsusha, actually. There hadn't been a new Fushitsusha release for over ten years (and on the last one, he didn't even play guitar), and it seemed that his 'blues band' Seijaku, and also his trio recordings with Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi, were what was gonna have to fill the void. Those were great, but nothing knows the 'void' like the true Fushitsusha... Also never thought we'd see a Fushitsusha release with a cover that wasn't mostly black, or at least, purple - but this handsome digipack is a rather lovely blueish green, with metallic silver details, and silver inside and on the obi. Does this shocking new color scheme herald other big changes in the Fushitsusha 'formula' too? Well, let's see...
First off, we noted that this cd consists of seven tracks, in just 35 minutes. Good grief, on a lot of other Fushitsusha albums, a single song could last 35 minutes or more, and maybe even continue over onto a second disc! But here, the longest track is a relatively brief 7:04, with most of 'em clocking in at closer to 3 or 4 minutes. But, radio-friendly singles they ain't! Instead, they're intense, concentrated doses of Haino & Co.'s unique reinventions of rock n' roll's most primal urges, rock that's been deconstructed/destructed...
The first track, features very prominent bass, played by Mitsuru Nasuno (also of Seijaku, Korekyojinn, Altered States, Ground Zero, Sanhedolin/Sanhedrin, etc.). This repeating, slightly mutating bass riff loops as endlessly as possible for the song's 3:35 duration, accompanied by the stumbling, staggering drummage of longtime Fushitsusha percussionist Ikuro Takahashi (also of LSD March, Kousokuya, and many other projects). Haino isn't playing guitar at all, just singing, in his trademark throat-torn shriek. What? No guitar? Again? But don't worry, it's just a fakeout, he doesn't keep us waiting long, starting with track two, his sweet stabbing sheets of sound come crashing down, Haino's guitar & amp in full effect. Nasuno's bass burble continues, very upfront, but Haino's gorgeously noisy guitar wrangling takes crucial center stage. And the Fushitsusha (blackest of black) magic happens. About halfway into this track, this listener's pulse rate went way up... And so it goes, some songs taking sharp turns you'll need your sealegs for, the disc's relatively short running time crammed with stormy spazzed out improvs, bloodshivering blowouts, and some almost no wavey numbers, again not destined for the hit parade, except on another plane where the likes of the Dead C and Starfuckers and Last Exit are regular Grammy winners.
'Nuff said? No doubt.
Gothdammit might just be the best album title EVER. The latest from Seattle goth/gloom/doom weirdos Grave Babies, find them in fine form, opening up with the succinctly titled "Fuck Off", which begins as a long sprawl of washed out almost new agey synth drift, but when the drums finally kick in, they throw another curveball, the song blossoming into some seriously hooky eighties pop, that sounds a bit like a more warped and distorted version of "I Melt With You", it's not hard to imagine this as the theme to some John Hughes VHS knockoff, in fact, the record is super raw and lo-fi and makes it sound almost like it was recorded straight off an old TV while said imaginary movie was playing. And that eighties poppiness continues throughout, with "Morning Heir" sounding like some lost Cure B-side, the vocals a dead ringer for Robert Smith, and the song's inherent Cure-iness, gets a little bit supercharged and turned into a blast of shoegaze gloompop that is crazy catchy and pretty gothdamn irresistible. The rest of the track titles may point to something much more noisy and grim: "Nightmare", "Bloodstains", "Wasting", but the rest of the record is crammed with more hook heavy eighties style gloomy new wave pop, that sounds like it came straight off some alternate universe high school mixtape. Which is most definitely a very very good thing. How we love these guys more and more with every release! Includes a download code as well!
Philip Jeck. Janek Schaeffer. Otomo Yoshihide. Thomas Brinkman. Saule. These have been some of the recent crop of avant-turntablists whose praises we've sung in the recent past; yet the use of the turntable with experimental music is nothing as novel as the current infatuation would indicate. Turntablism could be traced back to John Cage's Imaginary Landscape (1939), but perhaps a better historical jumping off point for those artists' delirious collage work would be with the early work of Christian Marclay and Non, who both reconfigured the noise and disembodied cultural reference from skipping records in the late '70s. It was that environment of Industrial culture that spawned Gum -- the Australian avant-turntablist duo which began quite literally with a skipping Brian Eno record. While Gum's Andrew Curtis and Philip Samartzis shared a common interest in Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Whitehouse, their work centered upon the volatility of surface noise from cheap turntables that they rescued from thrift stores and junk shops. At the same time, Gum balanced their destructive pursuit of tumultuous noise and electrically charged static with a clinical disembodiment. Even when disco-grooves from the Bee-Gees or porno climaxes get mangled in their Frankensteinian aggregates of loops and layers, it's hardly funky or sexy... rather a wonderfully disturbing mess. Having only a couple of singles on RRR and Korm Plastics as well as two self-released LPs, Gum had remained a secret history within the prolific oeuvre of Australian sound art; and now, thanks to this Vinyl Anthology compendium which features the bulk of their recorded works, the ecstatic expressionism of Gum can now be rediscovered for what it really is: precocious genius.
We already know that any Sublime Frequencies release is gonna be desirable - and not just 'cause it's undoubtedly limited in edition, especially the vinyl variety. But this one's really rad. A 45rpm 7" single from modern day Turkish psych band Hayvanlar Alemi, whose SF full length Guarana Superpower had us likening 'em to a surfy Sun City Girls steeped in the Anadolu pop playbook of the late '60s/early '70s, in other words they're the descendants of the likes of Mogollar, 3 Hur-el, Baris Manco, and Sublime Frequencies labelmate Erkin Koray, mixed with many other psychedelic influences.
The B side here is a cool unreleased improv jam, live in the studio in their hometown of Ankara. But it's the A side that makes this a double whammy for international groovy music lovers - it's a heavily rocked up, killer cover of the classic song by Ethio-jazz legend Mulatu Astatke! Even if you don't know it by name, chances are you'll recognize it when you hear it.
Now we'd like to hear Hayvanlar Alemi do an entire Ethiopiques album...
A fantastic compilation of Hazlewood tracks from his late-sixties/early seventies output when the country-pop production genius found himself in Stockholm and recorded some of his most weirdly romantic and beautifully bummed out records. Most of the tracks come from 1969's Cowboy and The Lady (with Ann Margaret), 1970's Cowboy in Sweden (with Nina Lizell and Suzi Jane Hokum) and the most awesomely embittered break-up record ever, Requiem for an Almost Lady from 1971. But fans familiar with those albums might not have everything here, including rare B sides and an unreleased track, "I Just Learned How To Run". The burnt out surrealist western influence came about largely from his collaborations with Swedish filmmaker Torbjorn Axelman who Hazlewood worked with throughout the seventies. Yet these albums were sometimes a bit much on their own, having a flair equally for epic wanderlust as they did for cornball humor. But by taking the best tracks from these albums, it really puts a spotlight on Hazlewood's druggy pop genius, and shows that his best years weren't behind him with Nancy Sinatra and his amazing output for Reprise. Anyone that dug those Water reissues a while back (The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood and Lee Hazlewoodism: It's Cause And Cure) should pick this up too. A compilation that we couldn't heap more praise upon if we tried.
FYI, there was a vinyl version of this that came out on Record Store Day; of course, it's long gone, but we do hear that they plan to repress it sometime...
For some people, J Mascis' distinctive vocal whine was a make or break element in their appreciation of Dinosaur Jr. But Mascis had more to offer than his peculiar and to us, quite endearing vocal style. He's also a serious shredder, as fans of Dinosaur Jr. no doubt appreciate. Yes, Masics is a master axeman, which brings us to Heavy Blanket. An all instrumental heavy psychedelic blooze trio, with Mascis on guitar. And while these songs are fairly sonically dissimilar to Dinosaur Jr, they do offer Mascis the opportunity to let loose, and he does, six songs, 37 minutes of full on heavy psych jams, no vocals, the rhythm section tight and not flashy, but a little shredding in their own right, locked tight into dense hypnotic grooves, which seem to be made with the express intent of letting Mascis go nuts. Fans of the endless shredding of Earthless will find much to love here, i.e. more endless shredding. And yeah, you really have to be into the sort of heart of the sun, blown out, druggy psych blowouts to get into Heavy Blanket, but then that probably describes a whole lot of you.
And, fans of all that psychedelic space rock like White Hills, The Heads, Mugstar and all the rest, who just want to dispense with all the 'songs' and 'songwriting' and 'arrangements', and just get right to the endless shredding, then this is for you too, with much of this falling squarely in that sort of Hawkwindy psych-rock, droned out druggy psychedelic jam freakout zone, loping, and hypnotic, and the sort of jams, that while not technically or literally endless, sure as shit could be.
Absolute space-psych-shred bliss. Thus obviously WAY recommended. (Vinyl version expected in June.)
Listen on: Deezer
The return of everybody's favorite imaginary rock couple, Henry & Glenn, as in Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig, and more tales of the forbidden love that dare not speak it's name. Yep, just like the first issue, Henry & Glenn imagines a better world, where the forbidden gay love these two don't actually share (or do they?) is real, and they live together in a house with a partially finished sacrificial altar in the front yard, their next door neighbors the Satan worshipping duo Hall & Oates, and we are given a glimpse into H&G's daily lives, where we observe Henry as the responsible one, the one who does the housework and pays the bills, and worries what the city thinks about the above mentioned unfinished altar in the yard, while Glenn is the dreamer, the one always full of crazy ideas, oblivious to poor Henry and his desire for more. It's all pretty irreverent, and pretty gosh dang hilarious. And this time around, original artists Igloo Tornado (which includes aQ pal Tom Neely) bring in some guests, most notably, Ed Luce, who longtime readers of the aQ list will no doubt know as the man behind the awesome Wuvable Oaf comic, who here imagines H&G in couples therapy, which of course includes guest cameos from Kerry King of Slayer, Ian Mackaye of Fugazi and of course a demon kitty.
Neel does a cool back cover color comic, which features a striking likeness J Bennett of Decibel (and Ides Of Gemini), who bums out Glenn by showing him the original H&G - which is apparently (maybe) a true story? Benjamin Marra pit our couple against Leta Fjord and Hall And Oates get in on the demonic action. And the opening comic is mostly just a hilarious build up for a distinctly Danzig punchline, and of course there's more more more.
One of our favorite comics for sure, and as always, leaves us wanting to know what could happen next in the lives of our heroes, Henry & Glenn...
Finally! This long in the works vinyl version of a long out of print comp gathering up pretty much everything ever recorded by late great SF punks Hickey, is available again, thanks to the folks at 1-2-3-4 Go! In fact, even if you have the cd version, this swanky vinyl version has NINE extra songs, as well as some super extravagant packaging (more on that in a second).
For those of you who were around back in the nineties, you no doubt experienced Hickey once or twice (or EVERY time), their live shows wild and loose and ramshackle, frontman Matty Luv (who passed away in 2002), the funniest fucking guy ever, whose onstage banter was brilliant and baffling, drummer Aesop, who would go on to drum for Ludicra, Agalloch and others, an animal behind the kit, never averse to leaping over the kit and into the fray if some sort of confrontation required it, the band generally wasted and fucked up and brilliantly on the verge of collapse, and the songs, punky and a little bit metallic, noisy and hooky and heavy and catchy as fuck, the lyrics hilarious, just check out some of the song titles: "Make Sure There Aren't Any Squares At My Funeral", "Hickey Is About Long Hair And Getting High", "Everything I Know About Sex I Learned From KISS", they even recorded a tribute to El Farolito, thee late night Mission burrito joint, then and now. The recording surprisingly hi-fi all things considered, and sounding better than ever here. Some of the songs pure pop perfection, others feral blasts of punk fury, most of the jams here somewhere right in between, and yeah, the quality definitely varies a bit, seeing as most of these tracks came from different sessions, from comps and singles, but the energy is through the roof, and is a glorious tribute to this awesome band, who really could have/should have been a WAY bigger deal, and it definitely speaks to a vibrant time in SF's music history, when the Mission was a fucking hotbed for weirdo punks and killer DIY rock bands, and pretty much any night of the week you could end up at some wild house party or some crazed club show or just hanging out on a corner drinking beer eating burritos and shooting the shit.
RIP MATTY LUV!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold sleeve, adorned with all the various record covers and a bunch of flyers and an old tour diary, inside is a massive booklet jammed with still more old photos and flyers, original record covers, some liner notes, there's even a Hickey patch, and a download coupon.
Longtime SF locals probably remember The Court And Spark, on of our favorite local bands back in the day, their debut album released originally on Andee's tUMULt label, they played shows with Souled American when they were in town way back when, the band slogged away, making amazing record after amazing record, only to have the sort of success they so richly deserved escape them again and again. And thus like bands often do, they called it a day, with the core of the Court And Spark, M.C. Taylor and Scott Hirsch, continuing on as Hiss Golden Messenger, a group that traded in the traditional country influences of their previous outfit for some stranger influences, the Grateful Dead, seventies FM radio, classic rock, and of course that classic Laurel Canyon country pop, all woven into a sound, that while reminiscent of the Court And Spark was something all together smoother, and while we dug this new group, it wasn't really until this new one that we really GOT it. Not entirely sure what it is about Poor Moon, but everything seems to have fallen perfectly into place. Those same influences loom large, but there definitely seems to be a return to a more classic country vibe, the opener sounds like it could have been plucked straight off a Court And Spark record, the only difference some whirring organ, some horns, but Taylor's voice sounds as great as ever, and the song is crazy catchy, rife with swoonsome strings, it's definitely a stunner. "Call Him Daylight" is another winner, a swaggery twang flecked groove, laced with slithery melodies, and even some handclaps, but goddamn if we can't stop listening to it. The rest of the record unfurls similarly, the sound slipping from slide guitar laced country rock, to brooding country folk ballads, campfire bluegrass back porch hoedowns, super warm, melodic country tinged classic rock groovers, all of the tracks here fantastic, not a bum note in the bunch, the sound too, lush and expansive and so gorgeous, mandolin, clavinet, electric piano, violin, viola, fiddle, saxophone, banjo, Rhodes piano, all woven into probably the coolest country rock record we've heard in forever.
Housed in a swank oversized old school tip on mini lp style gatefold sleeve.
It's always difficult to know exactly what to expect from Horseback, the one man black metal / drone / psych project of Jenks Miller, every record is different, and every record over the course of the album shifts constantly, yet we're always pretty blown away. And this new one, just like the last few, confuses from the get-go. Opening with a mathy sort of post rock groove, all clean guitar jangle, churning distorted bassline, and warbly organ, and then the vocals, a weirdly distorted black metal rasp, which is only really weird paired with post rock. But it sounds killer, the record sounds massive, the drums crushing, the instruments lush and layered, the vocals the only thing pointing to anything other than post rock. Minus those, it sounds more like Skull Defekts or maybe Lungfish or even Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. But that was just the first track, which as we've learned is hardly an indicator of what's to come. But here it sort of is, as the second track is another lumbering post rock groove, all big drums and spidery guitar melodies, and again driven by some serious distorted bass heft. Replace those vokills with say Dan Higgs, and this WOULD be a dead ringer for an as yet unreleased Skull Defekts record. A strange twist for sure, but it suits him, as so any seemingly disparate sounds do.
And so it goes, we were steeled for the eventual crush, the track that would suddenly splinter into some brooding black dirgery, or some furious blasting blackness, but nope, this is the sound of the new Horseback, a twisted slightly blackened post rock, and we dig it. The rest of the record is peppered with a handful of tracks that slip back into a more blissed out drone sound, at one point blossoming into a glorious Sunroof!-like ur-drone rife with strange shortwave interference and dreamy drifty melodies, while another track drags those raspy vokills in and rapes them over some ethereal shimmer, making for even stranger bedfellows. The post rock jams get even stranger, when Miller switches to clean vocals, and it couldn't be further removed from the Horseback(s) of old, and then there's the gorgeously blissed out final track, a 12 minute raga, that laces stuttery melodies and processed vox over a simple pulsing krautrock like beat, all wreathed in a haze of synth shimmer and guitar buzz, sounding a bit like Stereolab crossed with Amps For Christ, which if you couldn't tell by that description, might make it our favorite track of the bunch.
Listen on: Deezer
Been meaning to list this for a while now, we knew we'd get to it "Sooner Or Later" (as one of the best tracks here is titled) and there was no rush since it's been so long already since the music found here was originally made. San Francisco '70s folk rockers and hash smokers Hot Knives put out a couple of 45s back in the day, but this, their complete full-length album, remained unreleased for like 35 years. As the extensive liner notes in the thick, fully illustrated cd booklet puts it: "Caught in between eras, the Hot Knives were a little too late for the '60s hippie trip and little bit too hippie for the crash 'n' burn punk-rock scene that followed..." But, thankfully, at long last their record has been rescued and released, and it's quite nice indeed, a treat for anyone into the likes of Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds and Moby Grape (whose "Hey Grandma" Hot Knives cover here). Also fans of the Flaming Groovies may be interested, as ex-Groovies Tim Lynch and Danny Mihm were members of the Hot Knives, on guitar and drums, respectively, plus Groovies Cyril Jordan and Ron Loney were credited with production, or at least hanging out in the studio, for some of these songs. But the core of the band were lead vocalists Mike and Debbie Houpt, a brother-sister duo whose lovely harmonies hark back to the influence of Peter, Paul & Mary in their youth. But don't think this is all flowery '60s folkiness, the Hot Knives definitely rock out upon occasion. While definitely not new wave punk rockers, they could do the raucous garage thing all right, witness their killer cover of the Knickerbockers "Lies"...
And while we've mentioned a few covers, it's the originals that make this truly worthwhile. Great classic-sounding songs like "I Hear The Wind Blow" deserve to be heard. How was that one not a hit? In the cd booklet, there's a clipping from a vintage issue of the fanzine Bomp!, wondering the same thing, editor Greg Shaw saying the Hot Knives "are the best thing happening in San Francisco these days". Also reproduced in the cd booklet, we noticed a print ad for one of the Hot Knives singles that says it's available at Aquarius Records, and also Rather Ripped in Berkeley, "two of the finest independent record stores in the Bay Area". (The ad also features 7"s by Crime, Bryan Ferry, and The Nerves, among others.)
So, super nice to have this, and so nicely presented, definitely a good example of the seemingly endless supply of lost gems out there still awaiting (re)discovery.
Some of the power metal nerds around aQ (okay, just one) had anxiously been awaiting this release, partially based on the ridiculous big budget video for the first single that had been making the YouTube rounds, but also, cuz of how much vitriol had been directed at the band based entirely on their lead vocalist, a busty blonde former stripper (we assume?), who dresses in crazy revealing outfits and smears herself with warpaint and blood, and well, if you're not with us already, thinking, hell, that sounds like an awesome metal band frontwoman, well, then you're probably not gonna dig this regardless of what we say. One could make the argument that one might perhaps rather watch a beautiful busty blonde up there on stage instead of a hairy shirtless dude, and one has, repeatedly, but most of the metalheads we know just weren't having it.
But you know what? Fuck it, this shit rips, and whatever problem you have with vocalist Jill Janus' image, and her fake boobs, she's a total babe, and cuts a seriously impressive figure up there all draped in furs and covered in blood, and more importantly she's got a killer voice, equally capable of singing melodically, and shrieking demonically, and at times chirping maniacally, apparently she was a trained opera singer and has something like a 4 octave range, and it definitely sounds like it. And then there's the band, shit, crazy tight, super heavy, furious riffing, crushing drumming, with wild shredding solos, killer classic harmonized leads, the songs intricate and progged out, mathy and power metally, but also sort of speed/thrash metal with hints of classic NWOBHM, which might all be less surprising when you realize that one of the guys in Huntress used to play Skeltonwitch.
Just check out the video for Eight Of Swords: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SKELDVRJDY&ob=av3e
If that doesn't sell you, we're not sure if anything will...
At the risk of repeating ourselves, there's a visual component to this witchy blackened trio, that is certainly worth mentioning again, and seems to tie directly into the strange occultic vibe of the music. Imagine two willowy women, both beautiful and with long black hair, each wearing what seems to be an old white wedding dress, one at the mic, the other behind the kit, while the guitar player, quite willowy himself, sits in a chair hunched over his guitars, the trio remaining mostly motionless, but evoking a strange sort of vibe, like some ancient ritual, enacted for hundreds of years in different permutations, this one being in the form of a musical trio, the medium now a sort of blackened dirgery. Not so much metal as slightly metallic, and as we mentioned in our review of Ides Of Gemini's debut, we found they seemed to have much more in common with Warpaint or Mazzy Star. But the opening of the first track definitely throws down a black metal gauntlet, unfurling a frenzied buzzing black metal riff, underneath which, the drums pound tribally, yet instead of exploding into some furious blast, the sound shifts into a sort of funereal march, all simple stumbling drums, doomy riffage, and then the vocals, mesmerizing and ethereal, but still powerful, the harmonies haunting, the sound blossoming like some blackened liturgical incantation, the overall effect quite mesmerizing.
The whole record's a series of ritualistic sonic spells, driven mostly by the vocals, but constantly underpinned by simple blackened droned out riffing and driven by the spare martial drumming.
All four of the tracks from the demo are re-recorded and presented here again, including our favorite, the utterly spellbinding "Resurrectionists", which is essentially a gorgeous slab of indie pop slowcore, with a killer main riff/melody, and an insanely catchy refrain/chorus, the sort of song that you'll find yourself returning to again and again, the new version (of this and the other three demo tracks) so much heavier, and so much more lush, wreathed in warm swaths of reverb and echo, as if these sonic rituals were being performed on a crumbling altar in some old stone cathedral, the listener hunched in an alcove, hidden by shadows, letting Ides Of Gemini's mournful musical lamentations wash over them...
The Maestro strikes again! You should already know prolific South Indian film score composer Maestro Ilaiyaraaja and his "Electronic Pop Sound" from a couple Finders Keepers compilations we've highlighted: his own Solla Solla, and also the one featuring singer K.S. Chithra, with music by the Maestro. If you thought those two discs were over the top and irresistible, just get a load of this new one! (And even if you missed those, well, you probably have an idea of what we're talking about, if you've been exposed to any Bollywood/Kollywood/Lollywood craziness, as represented by other recent collections like Bollywood Bloodbath and Life Is Dance.)
Compared to those other Ilaiyaraaja's, this is similar, but with perhaps even more "video-game-iness" in the goofily orchestrated mix. It's VERY '80s electro synth sounding, and groovy too, as the subtitle promises. There's a big kitsch/cheese factor no doubt, but that's a big part of this genre's charms, really! Plus, this shit's tight, every element - electronic beats and sweet vocals and synthesized string sections and ethnic instruments and startling sound FX - in its place, everything and everybody dancing to the tunes of the Maestro. Hott stuff. 16 tracks, 65 minutes, you'll be grinning gleefully the whole time.
And you gotta love the cover, right? Icing on the cake of this swank trifold digipak, which includes a 30 page booklet with info on each of the films from which music was taken.
Brand new record from these aQ beloved lo-fi garage rock noise poppers and right off the bat they're in full-on confuse mode. Instead of a wild rollicking blast of crunchy guitars and pounding drums, we're treated to a woozy bit of druggy minimal drum machine driven folk, all steel string strum and Casio skitter, laced with tinkling melodies, it's actually pretty cool, definitely a dramatic shift. But there's more going on that meets the ear. Soon the song devolves into a repetitive groove, the drum machine rhythm now sort of fucked up and skipping and glitching out, with a single strum every measure, over which the vocalist sings a number, starting with one, then two, and he keeps counting, and we honestly had no idea when he would stop, but he does, at 44 for some reason, and then says "Ladies and gentlemen, the band", at which point the band proper kicks in, playing a properly garage rocking version of the song, and suddenly it's all perfect. and that weird whatthefuck intro only makes us love these guys all the more.
From there on out, the band kick down another clutch of twisted garage rock weirdness and warped jangle pop noisiness, but barring a few seriously far out jams, the band are surprisingly polished, as are the songs, fuzzy and hooky and jangly, slipping occasionally into strummy folkiness, or soaring epic shoegaziness, but always returning to some crunchy catchy pop, that for all it's outwards normality, is still quite twisted, whether it's bizarre arrangements, strange effects, maddeningly repeated parts, new wave-y angularity, all deftly woven into a seriously addictive slab of outsider garage pop that while crunchy and fuzzy and jangly enough to appeal to the whole Thee Oh Sees / Bare Wires / Blasted Canyons crowd, might just be a little too weird and warped for heavy rotation with casual listeners, but because of that, seems to transcend the classification of simple 'garage pop', and becomes something much more fucked up and weirdly arty, which makes this a new fast fave.
Listen on: Deezer
Eyewash Silver, the debut from one man knuckle dragging minimal psych avant boogie one man band King Blood, was a massive hit around here, every track seemed to be a Reich / Riley style deconstruction of psychedelic boogie, a thick corrosive riff, dipped in distortion, then repeated trancelike over and over, inducing a seriously psychedelic state in the listener, we haven't been that blown away by a mysterious debut in ages. So we were super psyched for this follow up, and were expecting another does of blown out caveman riffing, but instead, something strange seems to have happened, at least judging from the opening title track, sure the sound is still insanely in-the-red, the low notes crumbling and seeming to tumble from the speaker in corrosive gouts, but the vibe is much more laid back, the sound much more melodic, a serious fuzzy psychedelic groove, multiple melodies, intertwined guitar lines, there's still really just one part, repeated over and over, but it's downright catchy, and near the last minute or so the low end drops out, leaving just the drums and some soaring guitars for a strange sort of majestic psych coda.
So we were expecting the second track to drag us back into the murk, and while it too is all thick and slithery, the low end a seriously dense buzz, it too is pretty goddamn melodic, the low end locking into a groove, while other guitar lines soar and wail over the top, and like the opener, it's blissed out and hypnotic, and yet weirdly melodic and catchy. "Wheels Across The Night" does touch on some of the Stooges vibe that was present on much of Eyewash Silver, all swaggery super distorted stomp, but then "I'll Take What's Mine" strips things way down, practically acoustic, lilting and balladic, sounding a bit like some lost Les Rallizes Denudes recording (which we're sure was the intention), buried crooned vocals, shards of feedback, spidery melancholic melodies, it's a cool side of King Blood we hadn't seen before, but we definitely want more. "Here Comes A Candle" is a brief bit of super melodic boogie, which leads into the closer, the 8+ minute "Silent Dust", which is the most abstract of the bunch, and ends up sounding like Six Organs Of Admittance or Ghost, albeit run through a daisy chain of malfunctioning distortion pedals and blasted out of a cabinet equipped with shredded speakers, and as good as that sounds, the actual jam is even better, blown out, dusky and deserty, lazy and druggy and dreamy, and yet still plenty distorted and heavy and seriously psychedelic.
Beautifully packaged in a heavy screen printed cardstock jacket, already sold out at the label, so these may be the last copies we're able to get!
The return of King Tuff! Kyle Thomas's glam pop acid psych outfit, who we hadn't really heard a peep from since a cd-r way back in 2006. But Thomas has definitely been busy, playing in acid folk combo Feathers, stoner metal heavies Witch (with J. Mascis), not to mention being responsible for one of our favorite weirdo pop records of the last few years, the self-titled debut from the oddly named Happy Birthday, a record of total lo-fi nineties style power pop bliss out, check the review eleswhere on the aQ site, you won't be sorry. And of all of those, this new King Tuff probably lands closest to Happy Birthday, which suits us just fine. Just check out the record opener, which sounds like seventies power pop via Marc Bolan glamrock, all big chords, handclaps, woozy tangled guitar melodies, hazy sunshiney boy vox, shuffling drums, all wreathed in a summery sort of gauzy production. This is definitely windows down, top down, speaker pumping summertime crusing glam pop radness, and it's no coincidence the title of that track is "Anthem".
"Alone & Stoned" is another one that's perfectly titled, a weirdly produced chunk of jangle pop, that sounds a bit like Ariel Pink via Jeff The Brotherhood, all Wezzer-y big pop crunch, wed to murky bass slither, whiny vox, plenty of jangle and chordal shimmer, another track that's pretty dang summery. Which leads right into "Keep On Movin'", another glam pop anthem, big acoustic guiat strum, hand clap rhythms, loping bass groove, more whiny vocals, and a big flanger heavy chorus.
And so it goes, the record sort of dreamy and druggy, summery and shimmery, glammy and groovy, from the softl focus synthy shimmer of "Unusual World", rife with tinkling melodies and a sort of sixties girl group vibe, to "Bad Thing", which weds classic rock stomp to seventies power pop swagger, heavy with hooks galore and some ruling kick ass guitar action, or from the dirgey blooz jangle of "Stranger", all raw and primitive and fuzz drenched, to the almost Redd Kross sounding bubblegum ballad "Stupid Superstar". And actually Redd Kross might not be such a bad comparison, these guys have the same sort of knack for pop songsmithery, as well as a thing for rock eras past, glam, power pop, post punk, but where Redd Kross have morphed into a proper rock band, King Tuff still sounds fantastically home brewed, more ramshackle and wild, the pop way off kilter, the hooks balanced by plenty of random sonic weirdness, but somehow all crafted into a sweet little slab of twisted glampop, that's fast becoming a new fave.
We already dug Brooklyn weirdo cold wave minimalists Led Er Est, but their most recent record The Diver totally knocked our socks off. And hot on the heels of that record comes this, a super limited, gorgeously packaged one sided 10" ep with three more songs, all of which sound like they could have been plucked right off The Diver. Dark and minimal, haunting and rhythmic, the record opens with a skittery skeletal bit of droned out synth pop, that sounds like a sketch, or an unfinished rough draft at first, but soon reveals itself as a wholly formed bit of dark pop minimalism, subtly tripped out, utterly hypnotic, a little bit druggy and woozy, subtly sinister, a fantastic chunk of new/cold wave mesmer. After a brief interlude, a strange collage of spoken word and field recorded voices, the record concludes with a second track, another gorgeous sprawl of cold clinical minimal cold wave, this time much more soundtracky, a synthscape laced with softly psychedelic guitars, deep chordal swells, rumbling buzz, a total psych-synth drone pop head trip that is sinister and ominous and so so good!
The packaging is incredible, the B side of the record features a silkscreened image, visible through the inner sleeve, which is also silkscreened, both bundled with the cover, a thick printed purple cardstock insert.
Solo record number two from aQ pal Jussi Lehtisalo, frontman of Finnish hypnorockers Circle, Ektro / Full Contact label head honcho, and member of too many outfits to count, a few of which would include Ektroverde, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, Doktor Kettu, Pharaoh Overlord, Rakhim, Grumbling Fur, Krypt Axeripper, Motorspandex, Split Cranium, Steel Mammoth...
Sadly, we haven't yet managed to get Jussi's first solo lp, by all accounts a surprisingly beautiful and subdued album, but we did manage to get a bunch of these, the tape version at least (there's a vinyl version as well, which we hope to have soon too), which is also beautiful, but about as far from subdued as you can get. Both side long tracks are dense and layered, and constantly shifting. In some ways taking all the disparate sounds of Jussi's other bands, and somehow mashing them all together, into something surprisingly cohesive.
The A side, "Caterpillars", starts off sounding like some sort of abstract deserty ambient experimental doom, with churning guitars, spurts of metallic crunch, clattery bicycle spoke like percussion, woozy Morricone-esque twang and spidery minor key melodies, peppered with occasional twisted little synth trills, all beneath some monstrous growled vokills, before the song transforms into something more woozy and jazzy, a little late night bluesy, with crooned distorted vox, and thick low end rib cage rattling thrum, only to then launch into some seriously twisted buzz drenched rock pound, which initially sounds like it might explode into full on black metal, but instead, the pounding and buzzing is joined by more twisted xylophone like synth melodies, booming sub bass throbs and cool blasts of rad classic metal style harmonized leads, before once again slipping back into a spacey sort of moody, woozy slowcore, driven by frenetic high hat cymbal stutter, and trippy dubbed out snare drums, still more crooned vox, the sound dreamy and washed out, laced with strange swoonsome faux horns and glistening spaced out FX before finally returning to that strange xylophone driven metallic stomp.
The flipside is equally schizophrenic, "Here March The Cranes" begins all grinding gnarled guitars in a cloud of cymbal sizzle, which is then joined by some Circle like hypnorock bass, the guitars coalescing into little soaring squalls of majestic fast picking, multiple guitars interwoven, those guitars growing more intense, unfurling wild psychedelic leads, everything getting noisier and noisier, until finally switching gears and mellowing out, into a twisted post rock sprawl, all ethereal guitar shimmer, wild jazzy drummy, and spaced out bass blurts. Soon those growled vox come back in, and the sound turns into some strange sinister epic prog rock, swirling synthy strings, a slow build, more and more intense and tense, before splintering into a stretch of cool droned out noise rock churn, that sound gradually growing more and more spacey and serene, dreamy melodies, more of those faux horns, all manner of strange percussion and swirling FX, as the noise recedes, the sound becomes a hazy, lilting bit of psychedelic dreamdrone raga like drift. Fantastic! Easily one of the coolest weirdest things we've heard from Jussi, which is saying a lot considering his whole career has basically been nothing BUT a series of cool weird releases!! WAY recommended. And limited, limited TO JUST 100 COPIES!!! The cassette comes sealed in a stickered little bag, inside a cool cd sized box, artwork affixed to the inside and outside, and sealed shut with another sticker.
Killer new record on the resurgent Belgian electronic imprint R&S, here we have the latest from Matt Cutler, better known as Lone. "Galaxy Garden" Is a hyper-colored blast of glistening funky as hell UK two-steppin bass muzik! Some real frenetic, overly radiated glow in the dark, brain-melting recontextualized 'ardkore, ravebrained madness!!! Kinda like the sugar addicted, hyper active step brother of Burial (the one you chain up in the basement for fear that he might dance a hole into the kitchen floor).
Cutler's jams have always been very unique, and always super colorful and tripped out ("Coreshine Voodoo" is the quintessential example that comes to mind, released on the "Echolocations" ep in 2011 on R&S), but with "Galaxy Garden" the vision is complete. The songs are all meticulously layered affairs. Pristine synth sounds meld with shuffle steppin riddims, all dreamy and hypnotic, reverberated into the ether and catchy as hell. One of the elements that separates Cutler's music from other bass music makers is his intensely rhythmic and incredibly ear-wormy melodies. As heard throughout "Galaxy Garden", the melodic phrases extend and develop over the rhythmic tumult, floating above and carrying the sound further into a heavenly futuristic zone. Take for instance, the 4th cut "Lying In The Reeds", starting with a warmly analogue synthetic hypno-arpeggio outlining the progression, multilayered melodies weave into the song's fabric, building layer upon layer of blissed out texture and hooky melodies till about 1:40 in the drums drop out and a MOST beautifully enveloping pad swaddles your earholes and swirls about your mind, rippling sonic teardrops ping ponging from left to right, then the beat and bass kick back in just in time to bring you back to the groove. A space-bound jam for certain. Another standout track is "Crystal Caverns 1991", which also happens to be the lead single. Running at a frantic 140 bpm pace, this cut is an absolute brain melter! A torrent of hand percussion, aquatic synth squelch and psychotic RAVE stabs come together in a 5 minute flurry of future FUNK! All held together by Cutler's incredible melodic knack, and propelled by seriously HEAVY bass. This is the kinda music we imagine hearing piped through the subway system of some utopian city of the future! The perfect soundtrack for bullet train commuting. Or like a way more far out and bass heavy soundtrack to F-Zero, you remember? For SNES! A wondrous, glowing sound to cruise with through the twists and turns of some gleaming digital autobahn! �
The rest of "Galaxy Garden" follows suit. All the sounds melting and dripping and incredibly melodic, and the bass and drums heavy and propulsive. Lone's jams are like Oneohtrix Point Never on dancefloor steroids, or James Ferraro if it was more about function and less about concept (not that we really mind concept)... this is just beautiful, comic underworld SYNTH MAGIC! Trancey, warm and enveloping, fiercely rhythmic, and about as far out as any modern day New Ager so-and-so can claim to be. Lone just happens to aim his psychedelic, utopian-glow transcendence at the dance floor... and we love him for it! Double LP version includes a cd of the album! RECOMMENDED!!!!�
Shiny Tiny Stars is another collection of archival, unreleased material from the deconstructed bliss-pop duo Lovesliescrushing. A couple years back, Projekt released a beautifully packaged 2cd entitled Girl Echo Suns Veils (it came housed in a silkscreened wooden box!), with half of the material culled from the demos that predated their first album and the other half being newly constructed pieces. The recordings here were created from 1991-97, obviously a very prolific period for the duo of Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra; which also begs the question, will we ever again see any new recordings? It probably matters not, as any Lovesliescrushing material is welcome around these parts!
The Lovesliescrushing sound blossomed from a classic shoegaze template, but stuck to a decidedly lo-fi approach, layering and overdubbing soft noise, reverb, more soft noise, more reverb, all on a 4-track instead of something more akin to Kevin Shields' meticulous productions for Loveless. With the limitations of just 4 tracks, Lovesliescrushing swept the legs out from underneath the shoegaze 'song' - removing the bass and drums entirely, leaving the vocals and guitars suspended vertiginously in mid-air. More so than anywhere else in Lovesliescrushing's back catalog, they sound a hell of lot like Grouper with the vocals creating the fundamental melody which cycle woozily through blurred motifs while the guitars dreamily drift in oceans of reflective echo and drone. Beautiful stuff, for sure; and like all Handmade Birds titles, it's painfully limited, this time to 300 copies.
Apparently the impetus for creating this multiple drummer-ed outfit, was to create something akin to Metal Machine Music for drums, which makes sense when you realize the man behind Man Forever is Kid Millions, drummer for NY experimental rockers Oneida, and one of the drum leaders in the huge many drummer-ed Boredoms performances that happened a few years back.
What started out as something more like a mini-Boadrum situation, became something much more subtle and simple, with whole kits ditched in favor of single drums, with the drummers playing single stroke rolls, and amidst this flurry of rhythms, allowing all manner of patterns to emerge, similar in the way that dronemusic often involves various overtones from the various sounds interacting, in Man Forever, the dense drumming, stops sounding like drumming after a while, and becomes more textural, and actually becomes a sort of drone, the shifting rhythmic subtleties adding all sorts of color to the sound. But this is not just music for drum nerds (although if you are one, you WANT this), the group add guitar and bass, but much like the drums, those instruments seem less concerned with 'riffing' and more with adding still more texture to the proceedings, rumbles and drones and thrum and hum and moaning low end, barely there melodies, when the whole group is finally in full effect, like halfway through "Surface Patterns" it sounds a bit like the Boredoms jamming out with Phill Niblock, or SUNNO))) backed by a drumcorps, heady and hypnotic, the repetition and rhythmic mesmer evoking Reich and Riley.
The second track, "Ur Eternity", is another dense drumscape, a smoldering rhythmic slowbuild, that manages to be hypnotic enough sans any other instruments, but when the rest of the band join in, with strange staticky drones, and clipped looped fragmented melodies, the result is something surprisingly psychedelic, still hypnotic and minimal, but also droney and a little bit soundtracky, dense and textural, the drums sounding less like drums and more like the pounding of feet, or the churning of some machine, and until the rest of the track less about driving the music, and more about spreading out beneath it, adding a haunting heft that is more felt than heard. So good!
We love getting to hear new sounds when they seem to appear from out of nowhere. Such is the case with this, the debut release from Mantle Sound Core, the project of continental drifter Mark Shvartsman, a onetime SF resident now making his home in Santa Cruz when he's not trekking across the states with, quite literally, an ARSENAL or machines. Having recently witnessed Mantle Sound Core in action in one of the most unlikely of venues - a mansion in San Francisco's uber elegant Twin Peaks neighborhood with an unbelievable window view of the the city at night - we can safely say we have NEVER seen anything like it before. Watching Shvartsman and his setup - numerous synths, drum machines galore, multiple mixers, maybe about 30 cassette players, and a killer lightshow - brought to mind many of electronic music's great visionaries, including everyone from Klaus Schulze to Aphex Twin to Boards of Canada. At the same time, MSC will no doubt appeal to fans of recent electro maestros like Umberto, Zombi, Etienne Jaumet, and stuff making the rounds on Honest Jon's. Unlike many of these artists, however, MSC doesn't exist within any sort of network that will lead to instant recognition from a certain fanbase. Instead, Shvartsman appears to be on an entirely different path altogether. He even went as far as to make a film in Death Valley with a handful of collaborators, which he then created a live soundtrack for. With this in mind, one can easily detect the cinematic nature of the music. The recordings here are a compilation of live performance from MSC's West Coast Spring tour and previous ambient studio recordings. The colossal journey that is this tape begins with a vaguely Italian horror styled intro with creeping industrial ambience lurking above majestic synth swells. Throughout there are strong melodies that help to set this apart from being an exercise in mere droniness. At times the feeling is somewhat ominous, but always wondrous and beautiful. Buried rhythms churn below the synthed out glory, with distant vocals occasionally coming in to add yet another dimension. There are also some extended workouts of Jeck-ian ambience that are dreamy and a perfect comedown for the more harrowing moments. Elsewhere krauty percolations keep things moving forward before hushed atmospheres take things into the sunset. Wow.
As is often the case, these tapes are limited - as in, like, 25 copies, so act now before it's too late. We feel this is just the beginning for Shvartsman and his wholly unique vision, and we can't wait to see what the future holds.
We're a bit crazy about Wolfgang Voigt around here, especially in his guise as Gas, whose small body of work perfectly embodies what we now have come to know as Pop Ambient, the four Gas records ranking as most aQ-ers FAVORITE electronic records ever, records which also managed to make almost every one we know, whether they liked 'techno' or not, OBSESSIVE about techno music, albeit a very specific, very un-techno sounding variant. And in fact the Kompakt label, which Voigt runs, has pretty much redefined minimal techno, and like Gas, helped convince techno haters, that they didn't in fact hate techno, they just hadn't heard the right techno.
Mohn is a new duo consisting of Voigt, and his long time collaborator Jorg Burger (The Modernist), who have recorded together in the past as Burger/Ink and Burger/Voigt, but where those records were more beat driven, and yeah, more techno, this Mohn record is something else altogether, a swirling heady mix of cinematic drones, of soundtracky ambience and haunting beat driven atmospheres, the beats here less dancefloor driven and more part of the duo's sonic palette, as they strive to conjure up some other futuristic soundworld that to our ears sounds like a mix of the dystopian future worlds of Blade Runner and Escape From New York, with the more clinical alternate futures of Logan's Run and Gattica, the record's opener setting the scene with a dense sprawling drone, woven together from deep pulsations, and crumbling distorted buzz, a blurred chordal shimmer smeared into a hazy ambience, that is at once darkly mysterious and hauntingly ominous,. The track is flecked with strange swooping electronics, and hushed barely there beats, slowly building to something majestic and sinister and downright menacing.
The vibe switches dramatically though as the second track introduces strange looped and layered almost operatic vocal snippets, over a skittery skeletal shuffle, and woozy blooping melodies, the first half nearly ambient, the second a twisted bit of super abstract ping ponging digidub, that again, is less about propulsion and groove that texture and timbre, and like that first track, it's evocative of some otherworld and similarly strangely cinematic. "Ambientot" begins as a sort of electronic slowcore, creeping and slithering, the main 'groove' wreathed in lush swirls of faux strings and swoonsome synths, that to these ears make this sound like it could be "Love Theme from Mohn", a hauntingly romantic shuffling drift, rife with strange melodies and mesmerizing (often backwards) effects. "Saturn" finds the duo drifting into Carpenter / Goblin territory, a sort of pulsing eighties VHS synthscape, which the duo quickly and deftly transform into something much more mysterious, deep doomy pulses, swirling swaths of fluttery effects, softly shimmery synths, the whole thing gradually transforming, sounding in fact a bit like an electronic/synth take on the brooding slowbuild jazz of the Necks.
The rest of the record continues to paint a sonic picture of this imaginary future, taking much more recognizable minimal electro-dub, and wreathing it in a woozy shuffling rhythm, and a thick fog of smeared synth and blurred FX, or unfurling lush gaseous expanses of hiss and hum, billowing dreamily over muted melodies, and ever shifting textures, wedding crackly buzz to Tangerine Dream like synthscapery, and wrapping it in a prismatic haze of softly roiling electronic percussion and sublimated effects. "Mohn" strangely enough might be the most 'techno' of the bunch, but even here, the sound is smeared into an almost aqueous dronescape, the beats seeming to hang weightless, drifting to and fro, as if driven by some strange tidal influence, all the while the background blossoming like a time lapse filmstrip, growing ever so much more washed out and ethereal, before finally finishing off with a dreamy, but strangely convoluted chunk of Pop Ambience, the sounds all hushed and hazy, dreamy and drifty, but the arrangement, stuttery and glitchy, the lurching stop/starts, giving the amorphous soundscape a strange sort of non-rhythm, which makes it all the more compelling, and strangely mesmerizing.
So gorgeous. Absolutely recommended for fans of all the Pop Ambient collections, as well as the Gas records, but really, anyone into dark electronic soundscapes and mysterious cinematic minimalism will easily fall under Mohn's spell.
We sorta flipped for these local shoegazers when we first heard their Figurine ep a while back, and had been anxiously waiting for a full length ever since, and now that it's here, we're happy to report that it more than fulfills the promise of those first four songs, the hazy drug rock of that debut even more lush and lustrous this time around, the production cranked way up, the guitars thick and layered and lustrous, the vocals reverbed and echo drenched, Moonbell's 4AD shimmer wreathed in a gauzey otherworldly blur, still obviously beholden to nineties shoegazers like Ride, Swervedriver, Medicine and of course the godfathers of slow-mo drug rock Spacemen 3, but taking the sound and adding their own twist, the ethereal female vocals and the buzzing guitars a heady mix, and when wedded to a lumbering skeletal beat, the sound becomes a blissed out psychedelic slowcore dreampop, while on other tracks, the group up the tempo and crank the FX and send pinwheels of smeared melody and chiming guitars into the ether.
Our favorites definitely tend to be the slower jams, the group locked into mesmerizing hypnorock grooves, pulsing and pulsating through billowing clouds of wild guitar tangle beneath thick crumbling chordal swells, minor key and melancholic, the sounds swirling drowsily in epic expanses of glimmering sonic bliss, culminating in the chiming shimmerpop of closer "White Light", which infuses the group's sound with long streaks of thick layerd buzz and shards of crumbling distortion, all underpinned by a soft almost lullaby like melody. Gorgeous stuff.
Includes a download coupon (and there may also be a cd version we'll be able to get too).
Looking back on reviews of other Necks records, we find ourselves either struggling to describe the Necks' unique sound, or gushing uncontrollably about how goddamn great they are. More often than not, some mix of the two. And we realized that wasn't likely to change here, with the latest record from these Australian modern jazz minimalists, who do indeed have a sound that's difficult to describe, but that is precisely why they are one of our favorite bands EVER. Jazz or otherwise. And they are most definitely jazz, drums, upright bass and piano, and many jazz music tropes are present in their music, it's just that their music takes the idea of jazz, and stretches it way out, and turns it into something much more about tension (and no release), about timbre and mood... Their songs are generally 20-60 minutes long, most of their records are in fact a single track, and they slowly build a gorgeous lush jazzscape that on the surface appears jazzy, a quick glancing listen and an unsuspecting listener might think, "oh, nice, jazzy", but had they bothered to keep listening, that wasn't just a part in a song they were hearing, it WAS the song, and the Necks masterfully take that part and nurture it, from a hushed whispery skitter, occasionally to an all out roar, but just as often, just a much more dense and intense hushed whispery skitter. The three players impossibly and organically linked, sounding less like a band, and more like pure sound. Like we said, it's hard to explain. In some ways, their music sounds like it could be the result of some sort of audio manipulation, as if some audio alchemist took jazz samples and stretched and layered them into these droned out hypnotic jazz ragas, which in itself is a testament to these guys' skill.
On Mindset, the Necks offer up two 21+ minute tracks, the first might be their darkest yet, starting out immediately with some deep low end thrum, some minimal drum skitter, the band immediately locked into a dark almost dirgey groove, and when the piano comes in, it's noisy and surprisingly atonal, the pedals depressed, the tones all bleeding into each other in a thick swirling angular sonic cloud, while the bass and drums remain locked tight. The bass gradually grows more active, and more melodic, as does the piano, the sound impossibly lush and dense, sounding like a way heavier Lubomyr Melnyk, swirling flurries of notes over layered drones, the drums subtly propulsive, it almost sounds like a jazz Godspeed You Black Emperor, so epic and majestic, and darkly moving. Eventually the drums too begin to be more active, and deviate from the groove, the sound building to a cathartic climax, before jettisoning much of the jazz, and turning into a dark droned out abstract psychedelic dirge, with what sounds like effects everywhere, although we're pretty sure they don't use much in the way of effects, there even seems to be what sounds like a guitar, offering up fuzzy squalls of high end buzz, the second half doesn't sound like jazz at all, more like some heavy droney psychedelic post rock outfit. So good. One of our favorite Necks jams for sure. And definitely a good gateway for those aQ-ers who tend toward the jazz-phobic.
The second track is a lot more subdued, starting out super abstract and spacious, tinkling melodies, mysterious sound effects, minimal percussion, spacey little glitches, streaks of high end skree, it's not until 5 or 6 minutes in when the song really starts to coalesce, the bass bowed, unfurling lush slow-mo melodies, and then finally, the drums drift in, another motorik shuffle, the sound remaining ethereal and washed out, glimmery and shimmery, very cinematic too, the drums crazy busy, but still holding things down, the track growing more and more frantic, and frenzied, while on the surface, the piano remains languid and tranquil, while beneath it, the rest of the band grows more and more agitated, the sound so dark and tense, and growing ever darker, hints of funkiness are blurred into something more abstract, the groove nearly swallowed up by the bands swirling sonic churn. Maybe THIS one is one of our favorite Necks jams ever. Hell, who needs to pick? Another Necks record that will no doubt rank as one of our forever faves, and again, Mindset definitely seems like the kind of record that could very well convince some folks out there of what we already know, that the Necks are one of thee best bands out there!
Record number two from these creepy synthpop postpunks, and as much as we dug their last one, Immer Etwas, this one is giving their debut a run for its money. From the super haunted house-y psychedelic synth intro, all monklike chants and squiggly melodies over minor key synth pulsations, the sort of thing that could have been stretched out for another 3 or 4 minutes (heck 15 or 20!), but before you know it, the song proper kicks in, murky basement beats, crunchy guitars, angular melodies, yelped reverbed vox, all wreathed in plenty of synth buzz and echo drenched effects. Weirdly enough, the first thing we thought was that it sort of sounded like a way more lo-fi punk version of eighties big haired electroglam weirdos Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which is not a bad thing at all. The second track though changes gears dramatically, unfurling a sort of reverby drum machine driven psych-blooz dirge, all sinister swagger and twisted dark creep, sounding like some lost jam from some obscure eighties Aussie outfit. The rest of the record continues on in an appropriately unpredictable manner, flitting from garagey fuzz-rock pound, to gothy electro-punk weirdness, and from woozy psychedelic synth heavy gloom pop, to ultra lo-fi bedroom brewed almost glam sounding punk pop crunch. There's also shades of eighties new wave, stoner rock grooves, outsider industrial pound, and shuffling fifties style pop songsmithery, somehow all tangled up in NF's already tangled and twisted soundworld.
