Release me now from my mortal flesh, where all my thoughts look towards death. This blackened void in which I gasp for breath, death release me NOW! Oh, what I mean is, this is the newest release from San Francisco's own twisted goth, mindfreakin art damaged, sorrowfully psychedelic Death Rockers, The New Thrill Parade! Whoa. Woe.
We have reviewed all their previous releases up until now, and luckily for us things just keep getting weirder and weirder and more and more demented in the New Thrill Parade commune. The sound is an angular misanthropic romp. Bass and drums churning out urgent, fractured rhythms, while the guitar cuts the throat of any soul with open ears, with piercing, discordant, mind-bending leads. Everything swirling, and seething madly, till the brain leaks out of the ears, and any thoughts you had before, about music, life, social relations, death, sex, are completely mutated and subverted. It's a jubilant sonic experience, but travels dark roads to come to it. This explanation of NTP's sound world is not unlike those of our past reviews (which you should check out), but Slumber In Colorland presents a marked development in both the bands sound and aesthetic. The intensely orchestrated, and inspired song craft fuckery of this latest venture show the band maturing and really finding their own unique mode of operation, giving this album a consistency not yet found in their previous works. It's like gothy deathrock darkness has finally met its blurry-brained, altered state, tripped out, color smeared polar blood brother! The songs range from depressive dark jazz sounding crooners, to completely fucked up rock fury, with mutilated melodies and disjointed noises. Heavily warped shit! Not so much genre defying, as it is genre defining!
While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version.
We reviewed David Newlyn's last release on TRS, and sold out in a heartbeat, and while we weren't able to get any copies of the super deluxe version of this new one, we got a handful of the standard version, but it's the sounds that count this time around, and they are divine, two lengthy tracks of haunting modern classical music, lush soaring strings and haunting melodies, melancholy swells and dreamlike drifts, the sounds gradually growing more abstract, the effects slowly dialed up, the sort of chamber music of the first few minutes soon pulled apart into something more abstract and spaced out, a whirling drifty ambience, all bleary shimmer and softly reverbed thrum, laced with glitches and subtle electronic interference, not to mention what sounds like banjo or mandolin at one point. So lovely.
The second track is even more pastoral, hazy and gauzy and washed out, long layered drones softly undulate over all manner of mysterious field recordings, delicate piano melodies, buried operatic vocals, foot steps, voices, children playing, all beneath a fog of long tranced out drones and looped string shimmer, finishing with a surprising bit of drum driven distorted noisiness!
Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!
Listen on: Deezer
Before we actually listened to this reissue, we didn't expect too much from these fairly obscure Swedish psychedelic underground rockers, having never heard them before, and knowing only that they were an earlier incarnation of another Swedish hippy rock
Listen on: Deezer
It's been a while (three years!) since we've heard from these instru-metallers, this being their first record since their Southern Lord debut What We All Come To Need, from back in 2009, a record which find them sounding less heavy, and more melodic, which seemed like a strange twist considering they were now on what many consider to be a proper metal label. But that shift continues here, with the opening track, which immediately moves even further from the Neur-Isis crush of old Pelican, and drapes vibe like melodies over shimmering low end buzz, peppering the proceedings with bits of static and a strange pulsing synth like rumble, it's pretty awesome actually, very cinematic and hauntingly melodic. But this is Pelican after all, who can, rock with the best of them, and do so on the second track, which explodes out of the gate with a seriously killer riff, that sounds somewhere between old school noise rock and super melodic classic rock, like Thin Lizzy via the Hellacopters with hints of some old Touch And Go band, the song sounding like it could burst into a proper full on rock song at any second, like the vocalist is gonna come bounding in, but instead, they draw it out, the guitars adding melody, the drums uncharacteristically flashy in places, but it works, might just be our favorite Pelican jam yet, capturing the mesmer of their old sound but sort of cranking it up. There's plenty of variation too, the middle section gets all darkly psychedelic and a little dubby, but before long they return to that riffy crunch and it kills. "Parasite Colony" is a bit more brooding and loping, a low slung bass driving a slithery main riff, building to some seriously muscly crunch, before the final track, "Taraxis", which seems to bookend the ep, similar in style to the opener, tangled almost Appalachian guitar, over thick swells of distorted buzz, squiggly feedbacky melodies, urgent strum, all over a simple stripped down looped rhythm, before blissing out into some moody deserty smolder, only to get seriously metal for the last few minutes, a churning sludgey pound, all super dirty sounding crumblingly distorted guitars, all wreathed in feedback, those acoustic guitars still strumming away beneath the din. Killer stuff, the band definitely pushing their sound in new and exciting directions, and making us hope we don't have to wait another 3 years for more!
Listen on: Deezer
Finland's Pharaoh Overlord return with this devastating double lp on Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia's vinyl-only Sige label. Whilst we have many favorite Finns, these guys (and their mothership Circle) are among our very favoritest. Yours too probably, so we imagine these are gonna fly out of here fast.
This Circle sideproject is certainly VERY "circular" here, full of repetitive minimalist vibrations to the max, utter stoner neo-kraut hypnosis for sure, with a heavy metallic undercurrent and some freaky cosmic jazziness to it too. Of the couple most recent previous PO efforts, Lunar Jetman aligns more closely with the space/noise rock of live lp Horn, rather than the "song-ier" classic metal of Out Of Darkness, harking back also to the dark stoner soundscapes of some of their earlier albums as well; but as always, it is its own entity.
Lunar Jetman features six tracks, mostly quite long, sprawling over four album sides, for far more than an hour of slow burning, steady building, all-instrumental Overlord action. The album begins with the insistent gallop of the nearly 11 minute long "Rodent", which almost sounds like Maiden gone motorik! With extra spaceage shoegazey shwooshing and wooshing thrown in. It'll have you totally transfixed before it's even half over. The distortodelic kraut-iness continues amidst the metronymic percussive percolations of the even-lengthier track two, "Palmyra Cali"; then "Cardinal" is a much shorter, blissed out improv-sounding interlude.
That's followed by the 16+ minutes of "Black Horse", at long last a studio version of a composition earlier documented in briefer versions on both PO's 2004 live album The Battle Of The Axehammer, and then again on 2007's Live In Suomi. Here, it begins with much skitter and skree, before hammering into the happy heavy churning riffage we recognize. This one's definitely bound to be a fave of all the Wooden Shjips' fans out there.
Finally, Lunar Jetman delves deep into the dirge, with the two-part, nearly half-hour, massively moody "Cave Of Hair", a detailed, obsessively repetitive soundscape of ominous chuggery, building from quietly brooding near ambient creepy-crawl to metallic majesty...
Another awesome Overlord recording, in other words. And fyi, Lunar Jetman features Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler on keyboards, who has performed with PO previously, appearing on Live In Suomi - and who produced Circle's 2002 Klangbad release, Alotus. Not that PO nor Circle need Irmler to make 'em any krautrockier, they already had that covered!! But this IS plenty krautrocky.
Double lp fancy limited (530 copies) vinyl for now via Aaron Turner's Sige imprint; cd version expected also from Ektro, someday soon we hope...
Using visual artworks as a means of musical composition often sounds better in theory than in practice. Take the recent book and cd of Baudouin de Jaer's solo violin interpretations of the musical motifs in Adolf Wolfli's cosmological drawings where the audible results were less dazzling than the images would suggest. But not so in this latest experiment from conceptual composers Eve Polgar and Sandor Valy who turn the nonrepresentational paintings of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian into beautifully vibrant minimalist scores. Mondrian, who started out as a representational painter, became increasingly interested in a process of reduction from nature into essential forms that soon evolved away from any overt natural reference. Most famous for his painting of bold black lines on white grounds and geometric forms in primary colors, and their perhaps musically influenced titles (Broadway Boogie Woogie!), it's not hard to see a correlation of sound and vision in his work.
There is an interesting booklet that comes in the slipcase with this, detailing the process of how the pieces were composed to which paintings, where we also learned that this is not the first time the composers have worked in this manner. They previously worked out scores based on paintings by Breugel and there are cool pictures of how they designed scores based on how the orientation of the heads of peasants in Breugel's paintings followed a kind of musical order. Would like to see how that turned out musically, but getting back to the Mondrian Variations, the music starts out with repetitive solo piano figures that have a simple but idiosyncratic repetitive quality with sudden pauses that seem to follow a precise structure. With each composition, we're introduced to something new sonically through computer programs and samplers: an organ, pitched string modulations, then some minimal percussive rhythms until the pieces grow more epic in scope with choral like sounds, vocal counting of the odd tempos and blocks of interweaving rhythms. Of course, the musical corollary of this is Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the music feels somehow different as if Polgar and Valy were reaching the same place through a completely different approach. Regardless of the process, the music is engaging and a delight to listen to. An extraordinary release on Circle's Ektro label that comes highly recommended! Please note: these cds have cardboard slipcases that arrived in somewhat less than pristine condition due to shipping, so persnickety collector types be warned. And, like most Ektro titles, these aren't limited but might take a longer time to restock, once we're out, since they come all the way from Finland.
While the rest of the world has been reveling in the resurgence of the cassette tape, some folks have been taking it a step further, and going full VHS! Video Horror Show is a label who releases VHS tapes, which feature not only music, but also appropriately enough accompanying psychedelic visuals. Past releases have included the electro goth witch house of Masacara, and the droned out abstract psychedelic black metal of Suffer The Shards Of The Lost Cult Of Silence, which was in fact members of Woe and Absu, and now comes Psychic Teens, which weirdly enough might sonically fall right in between. Described by the band as "the time you saw your creepy metalhead brother at 80's night" which isn't really that far off. Imagine a sound that was equal parts dirgey psychedelic metal, and broody deep vocal-ed goth, and you'd have the Psychic Teens, and we have to say, it's a pretty bad ass sound. Especially if you're tired of all the wimpy twee eighties throwbacks, this is more like a metalized Sisters Of Mercy or Kommunity FK or Fields Of The Nephilim, with some thick squalls of blown out shoegaze psychedelia mixed in for good measure. The sound is dark and gloomy, a little poppy, a lot heavy, the guitars thick and crunchy, the vocals deep and dramatic and wreathed in echo, this is the sort of eighties throwback we can get behind for sure. And these three songs have definitely whetted our appetite big time!
The accompanying video is appropriately VHS looking, mostly live footage of the band, but super grainy and gristly, with plenty of old school interference, the pic flickering and flipping, as if it was being viewed on an old TV with a busted horizontal hold, a playback of an old videotape that had been in a box under the stairs for the last twenty years. Awesome.
Nicely packaged in a cool old school style VHS case, with printed grey on white covers, and recorded onto a white VHS tape, includes a download coupon as well!
LIMITED TO 75 COPIES!!
This album has the word "synthesizer" emblazoned on its cover, in letters as big as either the artist name or the album title. And when you hear it, you will know why. This album is all about Pyrolator putting his several synthesizers through their paces. Inland was the debut lp from Germany's Kurt Dahlke aka Pyrolator (also a member of DAF and Der Plan), originally released in 1979 on his own Aka Tak label, and its synth-noise experimentation belongs both to the spacey electronic krautrock genre and to the (currently in revival) '80s minimal-wave scene. Think DIY Kraftwerk. It encompasses the abstract experimentation of someone like Asmus Tietchens, as well as other stuff that's much more melodic and Cluster-y. There's shortwave static, distant schlager transmissions, rhythmically buzzing glitchwerks, musique concrete tape edits, some blissed out white noise soundscapes... For folks who like difficult, mad scientist music, you've got squelchy distortion laced with whining, high end tones ("Inland 1"), and for the new wavers, there's trax with burbling sequenced beats, pulsing like something Zombi or Majeure might do today ("Minimal Tape 3/7.2"). Indeed, Inland is a veritable cornucopia of such ear candy for those of us enamored with the minimal coldwave synth sorta thing, the more experimental side of which, especially. You could file this with your Axxess album (that recent Record Of The Week) though a lot of this is scarier than that - Inland apparently intended as cutting edge "protest music" (those were radical days in West Germany, the Red Army Faction running rampant). But its claustrophobic character is abstract enough for us to enjoy today without any explicit political aspects made plain. Another good reference, perhaps, being Bernard Szajner.
The compact disc version of this reissue comes with 6 worthwhile bonus tracks. Oh, and Bureau B has another early but much poppier Pyrolator reissue we'll try to get to soon...
Listen on: Deezer
Been eagerly awaiting this!! The 2nd coming of this strange band and their rather outsider-y epic true metal. The hermetic duo of JH Halberd and Czar, have indeed built upon their realm, expanded their empire, brought forth further examples of their special sound, one that's triumphant (heck they even use trumpet!) and weird and raw and curiously poppy. Realmbuilder, while certainly under the sway of such cult '80s fantasy metal acts as Manilla Road, Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol (along with sharing the same literary inspirations like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith), aspire to actualize a unique vision of their own. And for us, their stirring striving is quite effective, as well as eccentric!
The album begins with an anthem to a mythic highwayman, wherein the basic building blocks of Realmbuilder's sound are made apparent: catchy old school heavy metal riffing, accompanying somewhat amateurish but expressive clean vocals that are far from the usual sort of polished power metal wail (and become quite glorious when both band members harmonize together). The oddity of the vocals will be the most make or break thing regarding your reaction to this band; we love 'em. And the choruses are quickly skull-lodged, with lyrics that usually contain commands: "Yield or perish!" "Swing your pick axe!" "Pull the wagon!"...
Another significant Realmbuilder trait: psychedelic soloing (courtesy session guitarist Brian Koenig) that adds to the emotional impact of these songs rather than being mere shred.
Realmbuilder's compositions tend to be filled with an energetic choppiness, but just as often possess a more solemn, droned out vibe... as, especially, on the album's spacey, dreamy final epic, with the suitably lengthy title "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods". It's a strange sort of pop indeed.
Again, probably to be appreciated by fans of the likes of early Manilla Road, Max Planck, the long forgotten but utterly genius Coven, and the lordliest weirdest of Slough Feg. Also you could certainly consider this to be the even more DIY cousin of Dawnbringer, whose new one is reviewed elsewhere this list.
Oh, and once again, we love the Crystal Logic of the cover painting, by Czar...
Listen on: Deezer
Record number two from these witchy Atlanta heavies, part of, whether they like it or not, the new female fronted heavy rock movement, that includes loads of aQ faves like The Devil's Blood, Loon, Jex Thoth, Blood Ceremony, Castle, Christian Mistress, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Cauchemar, and, well you get the drift. And as much as we love all those bands, and we do, Royal Thunder definitely stand out, for one thing, being not nearly as metal as most of those outfits, instead trafficking in something much more hard rocking, their sound riffy and heavy as fuck, but with a vibe that feels more Southern/classic/stoner rock than metal or doom. And as we mentioned in our review of the last Royal Thunder record, there seems to be a serious eighties metal vibe going on as well. A thumbnail this band plus this band description might be Lynyrd Skynrd plus Neurosis, although we tend to lean toward something more along the lines of Janis Joplin fronting Baroness. Cuz their sound definitely owes much to their Southern countrymen and women (Baroness, Kylesa, etc.), but also because vocalist Miny Parsonz has one of those voices that KILLS, throaty and sultry, witchy and powerful as fuck, the sort of voice that in a different generation might have made her a genuine big time mainstream rockstar. She can croon seductively, of wail like nobody's business, and the music is the perfect match, melodic and dynamic, riffy and groovy, heavy but also plenty psychedelic, and of course catchy like crazy, cuz these songs are less about headbanging or flailing wildly in a pit, and more about drinking beer in the parking lot and driving through town in your beat up old Trans Am, top down, parking behind the Winn Dixie, hanging out, getting stoned and blasting these jams at full volume. They have that sort of classic timeless heavy rock sound that is definitely rare, not just in this new breed of female fronted metal outfits, but in music in general.
For some reason our favorite track from the first record, gets a reworking here, the band slowing it down even further, adding some mournful fiddle (or maybe it's cello), the song much more polished and even more perfect than the original, the main groove, just that much more slithery and swaggery, Parsonz vocals fierce, everything louder and more distorted and heavier and just all around more intense. But really, all the songs here kill, and some of us are tempted to proclaim Royal Thunder top of the witchy heavy rock heap at this point, and we're thinking some of you just might agree.
Listen on: Deezer
The history behind this particular Conrad Schnitzler track is a little vague. Supposedly, Zug is also known as the "Red Cassette" which the German electronic pioneer self-released in 1973 (some say 1974). M=Minimal reissued one of the two 20 minute cuts from that tape as Zug, and fleshing out the rest of the vinyl with two remixes - one from glitched-dub expert Pole and another from Borngraber & Struver. Both of those remixes are reprised on this cd, but Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer are the artists who get the marquee treatment by having their names affixed to the title. A little strange, yes, but don't let the lack of parity dissuade you from this fine remix collection of one of the most influential electronic artists of the post-Krautrok era. Schnitzler's history has been well mapped here at aQuarius, so we'll merely mention his inspired involvement in Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Villalobos & Loderbauer recently wowed us with their abstract recontextualization of ECM chamber jazz. On the first remix here they adopt more of a motorik / minimalist techno vibe that fits with the taut rhythms that Schniztler embedded into that old tape; and the second spins Schnitzler's dystopian synth drones into a clattering decentered piece more reminiscent of the New Zealand outsider Omit (who really would make for a stellar artist for M=Minimal to reissue!). Pole's remix shifts the rhythm to the offbeat, plenty of percolating metallic tones and ghostly filigrees of digital debris; but the clear winner of all of these remixes is from the previously unknown duo of Borngraber & Struver, who snap the darkest, nastiest swells of Schnitzler's synth patches onto a techno-noir grid that reconnects the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno all over again through the mid-tempo 909 thump and locomotive samples. As good as the other three remixes are, Borngraber & Struver tap a vein most in keeping with Schnitzler's grim futurism. Totally worth the price of admission just for that one track!
Sort of seemed inevitable that these guys would get together, two local lo-fi garage pop masters, both of whom have gotten much love from aQ, and both of whom have surprisingly similar styles, collaborating on a set of songs, that ultimately manage to sound like they could have been proper records from either. No distinct separation between tracks, no huge stylistic shifts, instead, a meeting of the minds that manages to be both impossibly hooky and fuzzy and catchy, but also as weird and twisted as anything either of them have done on their own. Lots of kick ass axework, wild psychedelic leads and dense squalls of tangled freakout, over all manner of jangle and crunch, the vocals doused in reverb and appropriately washed out and yelpy, the drums simple and spare, the songs slipping easily from druggy psychedelic jangle pop to crunchy noisy garage punk raveups, to full on skiffle-y sixties psych-pop to twisted echo drenched garage rock dirges and some head spinningly experimental garage rock space jams, like "Scissor People", which might be THEE jam here, beginning with a little bit of birdsong, before launching into some jangly crunch, another blast of garage-y poppiness, until things go totally crazy about halfway through, the song suddenly a patchwork of alternate takes and different productions, as if multiple versions of the song were playing simultaneously, and someone began to flip between the various channels, the sounds dramatically different, even the tempos, and then coming out of it into a sort of motorik psych-kraut groove, wreathed in killer leads, and thick swaths of guitarnoise, it's the sort of jam most bands would have stretched out for ages, but these guys cram into a succinct 3:31.
We have to admit, that on first listen, mostly heard in the shop in little chunks, didn't fully sell us, but once we strapped on some headphones, this collab definitely revealed itself as being something sort of next level, and blossomed into a pretty fantastic(al) psychedelic garage pop trip out that we've had on pretty heavy rotation ever since.
Listen on: Deezer
Jussi Lethisalo can never be accused of not following his weird and warped muse. Whether it's in his band Circle, who while remaining rooted to a particular sound, have offered up pretty much every iteration / permutation of that sound imaginable, or in any of his many other groups, whether it be Pharaoh Overlord, Doktor Kettu, Steel Mammoth, Ektroverde, Grumbling Fur, Lehitsalofamily (a group he formed with his parents!), Split Cranium, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, we could go on, but you get the drift. And Jussi's Ektro label is no different, while mainly focused on releasing records by any/all of the above mentioned bands, Ektro also released records by legendary Finnish punks Death Trip, weirdo Finnish experimentalist Keuhkot, legendary krautrockers Faust, '80s LA metallers Jesters Of Destiny, '70s Finnish prog rockers Haikara, Argentinean stoner rock outfit Los Natas, weirdo Japanese metal outfit Quest For Blood, Finnish heavy metallers Solitaire, legendary hard rocking muscleman Thor and now the oddly named Shaved Women, a noise rock / dirge punk outfit from St. Louis, who definitely channel classic pig fuck heaviness though Black Flag punk and AmRep noise rock. The bass is thick and corrosive, the caveman riffing is caustic and blown out, the drumming loose limbed and chaotic, the vocals a throat shredding bark, feedback everywhere, the band wild and unhinged, the sound shifting from downtuned dirgery to frantic punk pound, the label namedrop Jesus Lizard and Drunks With Guns, the latter seeming much more applicable, but definitely the sort of noisy filth that would appeal to fans (like us!) of Violent Students, Twin Stumps, Drunkdriver, Rusted Shut. Eight songs in seventeen minutes, chaotic hardcore infused punksludge that KILLS. Also included are five bonus live tracks, that make the band sound even more gloriously blown out and noise drenched.
Like pretty much everyone else, when we first heard Sigur Ros, we were totally smitten, utterly captivated by the dark delicate haunting soundworld these Icelanders conjured up. But for whatever reason, over the years, many of us stopped paying attention. Not because the band stopped making records, or making great records, they just seemed to fade from our everyday listening. Part of it might have to do with the whole mainstream factor. As crappy as it is, that sort of thing does tend to afflict music nerds/obsessives, and as Sigur Ros got more and more popular, as their songs started popping up constantly on C.S.I. and a million other programs, some of us went looking for new, less overexposed sounds. And often, as is the case with Sigur Ros, much amazing music was missed out on. Listening to this latest feels like the first time we hear Sigur Ros all over again. From the very first song, we're whisked away to some hazy dreamy otherworld, the delicate falsetto vox, the lush layered musical majesty, the haunting heartfelt melancholic melodies, it all sounds as good as it ever did. We had heard much about how this new one was the group's most minimal to date, and while we haven't heard enough of the last few records to know for sure, we're finding this record to be surprisingly dynamic and dramatic, with huge tonal shifts, moments of barely there crystalline shimmer, but also moments of crushing epic bombast. The opener is the perfect introduction, all blurred and shimmery, jangly and chiming, softly fuzzy and wistfully dream poppy. But it's the second track we find ourselves returning to over and over, a dark delicate sprawl of soft swells and haunting strings, buried electronics, and woozy ethereal vox, all wreathed in a thick patina of record crackle, sounding a bit like Sigur Ros produced by Tim Hecker, laced with some strange melodies, and all held together in an abstract but somehow totally compelling arrangement. Cinematic throughout, but shifting smoothly from hushed drift to layered shoegaze shimmer to spare chamber music minimalism, all the while warm and crackly and dreamlike.
The following track offers up some of the aforementioned serious sonic heft, it may start out delicate and fragile, but a la Godspeed, it's a smoldering slow build to a super distorted but still gloriously melodic prismatic big drum pound blowout. Those moments pop up here and there, but the rest of the record does tend toward the delicate drift, with some swirly pop moments, plenty of celestial shimmer, loads of ethereal ambience, all woven into a sound we hadn't really realized we'd been missing.
Listen on: Deezer
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
One of two new ULTRA limited releases from Mr. Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof! etc.), this one from his long running Skullflower project, which has gone through many permutations over the years, from pummeling thud rock, to full on face melting noise, to tripped out tranced out psychedelia. In recent years, Bower has become increasingly interested in black metal, and SF records have definitely offered up glimpses of this black buzz obsession, maybe none more so than this two track ep, which starts out with "Black Helicopters", an intro of sorts, a stuttering loopscape of static pulsations and swirls of hiss and whir, super mesmerizing, heavily textured and atmospheric, with a subtly pulsing rhythmic component. Gradually, the sounds begin to glitch out, the sound blurring into a hazy sprawl of heady thrum, before slipping into the second track, the 10+ minute "Sky Burial", which finds Bower unfurling some thick swaths of blackened riffage, smeared into the buzzing washed out background, the effect not so much 'black metal', as a sort of super thick, darkly psychedelic blackened drone, sounding like Tim Hecker armed with nothing but a handful of black metal riffs and an arsenal of pedals. Super tripped out and dizzyingly hypnotic, the frantic frenzied riffing is almost more implied, as the edges blur and everything oozes into one epic undulating mass of blackdrone blurbuzz. The sound does gradually build, but never explodes fully, instead just seeming to grow more and more dense, while within this black squall, lurk all manner of haunting minimal barely-there melodies, and buried not-quite rhythms.
EXTREMELY LIMITED! As in 25 or 30 total made EVER, we have about just 7 remaining out of the batch we started with, and unless we can convince Bower to whip up more, these are the last copies we'll ever see. So act fast, list alternates, you know the drill. Housed in cool handpainted minisleeves with pasted on liner notes.
"Play At Maximum Volume" it says here, right on the face of the cd. Well, OF COURSE! Duh. Stoneburner, from PDX, are another sludgier-than-thou (and maybe than Thou) metal band, whose debut full-length is brought to us by the same label, Seventh Rule, recently responsible for the newest, aQ Record Of The Week awarded Author & Punisher album, as well as cool discs from the likes of Atriarch, Batillus, Wizard Rifle, Indian and other heavy hitters. Furthermore, one of Stoneburner's guitarists used to wield his axe in the late, great Buried At Sea.
So, it comes as no surprise that Stoneburner, in the nasty doomed-out tradition of such bands as Buried At Sea, Graves At Sea too, Eyehategod, YOB, and yes their hometown pals & labelmates Atriarch, are loaded for bear with fuzz-storted heavy riff-chuggery and throat-ripped vile vokills, along with some suddenly quiet, postrockish detours into acoustic-atmospheric moments that serve to make the prevalent heavy and wretched sounding parts all the more heavy and wretched by contrast (and earn Stoneburner some extra points for musical nuance and sophistication). Six songs here, including an unlisted bonus soundscape-y one (that the CDDB tells us is called "Thank You For Listening").
The misanthropically doom/sludge lovin' amongst us will indeed be playing this at the recommended volume. But we doubt the neighbors will be thankful for listening.
Oh, and we like how the "band pics" in the digipak are all (only) of the individual band members pedals - drum pedals for the drummer, many and various effects pedals for the others.
Listen on: Deezer
The name of this 'group' might not be familiar to you, it wasn't to us, even though this is Suum Cuique's second album. SC is in fact Miles Whittaker, whose name you also might not recognize, but he is in fact one half of aQ faves, the hauntological electronic duo Demdike Stare, but Suum Cuique, while sharing some sonic similarities with Demdike, is very much its own beast, with Whittaker recording straight from the mixing board, using only analog equipment and almost no edits or overdubs. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell, but it does lend the sounds of Suum Cuique a sort of raw urgency and an old school primitivism that is definitely missing from Demdike records.
The record begins with a wild squall of spacey synths before slipping into a long sprawl of skittery primitive drum machine driven space kraut, wreathed in metallic shimmers. The record gradually drifts towards a more reverbed soft noise collage, peppered with rhythmic pulsations, the sounds oozing into blackened drones, abstract percussive workouts, and finally, finishing up the A side with a looped sounding stretch of hypnotic murk, al buried sine tones and rumbling crumbling whirs, sounding quite a bit like Philip Jeck.
The flipside is equally all over the map, starting off with a churning doomy electronic dirge, that gradually dissipates into an ominous ambience before transforming into some hazy hauntological dronescapery, only to splinter into a serious blast of super distorted blown out Our Love Will Destroy The World style rhythmic noisiness, all looped and layered, gnarled and tangled, only to finally fade out in a cloud of cosmic FX shimmer.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!
Listen on: Deezer
While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version.
Taskerlands is a duo consisting of Michael Tanner, aka Plinth, who was responsible for that incredible Collected Machine Music disc all created from the sounds of vintage music boxes, and David Colohan from psych folk outfit United Bible Studies. Tanner and Colohan each strap on a guitar, run it through some pedals, and out comes some gloriously dreamy pastoral psychedelic folk, lush and sun dappled, the notes and chords wreathed in reverb and echo and allowed to drift weightless over darkly delicate piano, and the sweet melodies from a bass clarinet fluttering just below the surface. Two twenty-one minute tracks, each one a softly smoldering sonic rumination, slipping from dense tangles of abstract Appalachia to brooding low end swirl, flickering melodic drift to dark distorted droned out minor key dirges, from haunting hypnotic thrum, to washed out hazy psychedelic shimmer. Lovely, lovely stuff.
Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!
Somehow, we never wrote up a review of this before, although it was probably the first document of anything by this longtime AQ fave Swedish psych rock band that we ever stocked. (Guess it took us a while to really get into 'em.) So, cool this disc has at last been repressed, for us to finally list, especially since their several other live albums are all out of print.
If you're new to Trad Gras Och Stenar (Trees, Grass and Stones) you should read some of our other reviews of records by them and the other bands they morphed out of, like for instance their earliest incarnation as Parson Sound! In short, the whole TGOS/Parson Sound/Harvester/International Harvester thing was Sweden's answer to krautrock: droned out, rhythmic hippie hypnorock, representing radical politics and alternative lifestyles, in an almost proto-punk, or primitive prog style. Seriously, if they were German they'd be up there with Amon Duul I&II, Faust, Can, etc. And fans of Hawkwind also oughta check 'em out.
This live recording is an instant timewarp back to the pothaze atmosphere of the famous underground Gardet Festival in 1970, sorta the Swedish Woodstock, giving the listener a dose of TGOS's magic, live and raw. While there's other albums maybe we'd suggest for first timers, since this is a tad lo-fi, this WILL demonstrate their mesmeric majesty pretty darn well. Like we said, it's raw, and it rocks in its druggy dreamy hella distorted way. Oh, and it was recorded (on Nagra tape recorder, with one mic) by their fan, none other than Joakim Skogsberg, himself responsible for the amazing Jola Rota album.
Six songs here, almost an hour of music, including their oh-so-woozy cover of the Dylan by way of Hendrix classic "All Along The Watchtower" along with a wild nine-minute rave up on the Stones' "Satisfaction", and of course several lengthy, and equally wild, jamming originals, like the rollicking (and bluesy/folky) "In Kommer Gosta".
Must have been amazing to have been there that summer day. You can tell the audience is enjoying it. Rad it was recorded (thanks Mr. Skogsberg!).
The cd booklet is full of liner notes and vintage photos from the festival. And, by the way, this is also available in a relatively recent double vinyl pressing that we think we'll be getting some more of in soon, too.
Listen on: Deezer
We sorta flipped for these new wave electro gloom pop weirdos when we heard their first single, which sadly, we were never able to get enough of to list (although the A side is included here!). We did review the follow up 12", which found the band cranking up the dancier side of their sound, which seems to be the direction they've continued to move in with this, their debut, but, and this is important, this is not just some sort of retro Breakfast Club soundtrack worshipping MTV style eighties electro pop, these guys are fucking WEIRD. Fusing a sort of draggy dancy witch house sound, to classic eighties new wave tropes, adding plenty of cold wave chill not to mention a sort of M83 bombastic electro pop shoegaze vibe. Sound like a mess, and it sort of is, but a glorious, impossibly irresistible mess.
Just check out the opener here, the oddly named "Shoom", and you'll be sold, a creepy industrial intro gives way to some pulsing eighties synths, and then when the vocals come in, total WTF, a mush mouthed super affected creepy old man mumble, the sound stripped down, creepy and haunting, and then when the beat kicks in, the vocals remain weird, just differently weird, a sort of maniacal whine, over some super propulsive krauty gloom, and then after a long instrumental stretch, where all the sounds seem to be melting and slipping out of tune, a super hooky melody swoops in and it sounds like some weird witch housey M83, and then female vocals come in, adding even more of a pop element, until those creepy male vox return and the song finishes up with a cool gothic electro dirge before disappearing into a cloud of electronics. So good! Another one of those cases where we listened to the first song at least ten times before we dug any deeper.
But if that first one does it for you, the rest will hit the spot as well. Even when the sound is more traditionally new wave, those vocals add a twisted vibe to the proceedings, and the production is super tripped out, with fat slabs of bass buzz, big stuttery beats, some almost dubstep sounding bits, not to mention long stretches of brooding minimalism, that in places sound like they were cribbed from an Interpol B side, while others touch on Kraftwerk like robotic krautrock and woozy gloomy house music (?). The track from the aforementioned 12" is included here, as is the A side from that 7" we never got to list!
Definitely a new weirdo goth pop gloom wave favorite for sure!
If you go way back in the aQuarius list archive, you'll find us raving about Turing Machine years and years ago, and while that was before our reviews got to be so long, it didn't take a huge review to explain that they were one of our favorite instrumental post rock bands. We compared them to Polvo and Drive Like Jehu, Pitchblende, Shellac, Unwound, their sound was mathy and propulsive, driving and complex, a modern day kraut / prog combo that made it all seem effortless, from darkly hypnotic minimal grooves, to wildly dense almost metallic heaviness. Much of their magic was the incredible drumming of Jerry Fuchs, who tragically passed away a few years ago.
This album, recorded prior to Fuch's death, is the first Turing Machine release since their Zwei record in 2004, that long hiatus in no small part due to Fuchs' extracurricular drumming activity, which included a whole bunch of dance outfits, !!!, the Juan Maclean, LCD Soundsystem, even Massive Attack, and all that dance music drumming definitely had a huge effect on Turing Machine, who were no longer just a nineties style math/post rock outfit, but instead had become something much more. Fear not though, there's plenty of awesomely motorik post rock jamming, it's just that a lot of the time, there are also pulsing synths, or electronics. But just check out album opener, "Yeah, C'mon", which starts out like some strangely percolating new wave jam, the drums almost disco-y, the driving synths, but as the guitars come in, and coalesce into riffs, the song begins to take on rock form, until finally, exploding into some seriously fierce and driving post rock, wrapped in wild guitar squiggles and all sorts of random electronics, and the drumming, fucking KICK ASS.
"Lazy Afternoon Of The Jaguar" is equal parts laid back dance groove and motorik krautfunk, the guitars looped in woozy psychedelic swirls around the super tight bass/drums foundation. "Slave To The Algorithm" is total electro kraut-funk, Fuchs doing his best robo-beat accompanied by all manner of pulsing synths and weirdly processed guitars. The title track sounds like "Legs" by ZZ Top, stripped down and given a cosmic psychedelic space rock makeover, the synths again in full effect, but the drums locked tight, and the guitars loose and spidery and wildly psychedelic. "If It's Gone (It's On)" adds vocals to the mix, and lays down a serious slab of crunchy, fuzzy, guitar driven post-punk electro-funk, and record closer "Bovina 2/23/08" finds the band in full on heart of the sun mode, effortlessly channeling the sort of FX drenched space rock psychedelic freakout that should most definitely endear them to fans of White Hills, the Heads and the like.
Listen on: Deezer
First we've heard from this oddly monikered duo, just bass and drums, who traffic in a sort of sludge/doom dirgery, the bass super distorted and blown out, sounding in places more like a guitar than a bass, but unfurling thick slabs of buzzing low end, while the drums deliver a plodding caveman accompaniment. The vocals might be the strangest of all, a sort of sung/spoken demonic growl, which give Tuurd a much more abstract experimental vibe. It really does sound like a Neanderthal version of OM. The groove is dark and stonery, thick and sludgey, but when it slows down, and gets a little mathy and dynamic, stripped down while the vocals gurgle malevolently, it's transformed into something else entirely. Which is also what happens on the second track, at least in the first half, the band ditching the sludge for some dense mathy noise prog, the bass and drums in a wild tussle, which finally gives way to a more slithery downtuned groove.
It's hard to really nail these guys down, the label mentions all sorts of other duos, from Lightning Bolt to the Ruins, as well as other bands that occupy a similar sonic space, Sleep, Abruptum, Killdozer, Slug (someone needs to reissue all the Slug records!), Black Sabbath and a bunch of others. But to our ears, Tuurd sound like slowed down power violence, like Man Is The Bastard covered by Corrupted, or some rare Slap A Ham 7" spinning at 5 or 6 rpm, but that's only one side of the Tuurd, the band totally capable of whipping out some seriously dense downtuned progginess, the combination of the two is what makes this stuff so good. Murky and muddy, dirgey and doomy, crusty and filthy, heavy as fuck obviously, proggy and mathy and not without a sense of humor (check out "Eating Ice Cream With Satan"). Definitely recommended for fans of any and all of the above mentioned bands, and anyone who like their music sloooooow and loooooow.
Super striking cover art, the album titled drawn in dirt on the front, the band name smeared in mud (please let it be mud!) on the back. Pressed on brown vinyl (of course) and includes a digital download.
This all-time AQ favorite is finally available on vinyl!
From the label that brought us Dungen, Parson Sound and Abner Jay comes a crazy collection of Thai Go-Go. We're still reeling from the double whammy of the two volume Cambodian Rocks releases and the excellent Cambodian Cassette Archives and now this. Though to be fair to the latter, this release might not necessarily cater to all the same fans. The music here is more likely to appeal to fans of obscure 60's pop and garage than say, fans of off kilter pop influenced Thai music. In fact, much of what's on this disc would be difficult to place within any particular country, let alone region of the world through listening alone. Apparently the musicians here were first and foremost concerned with reproducing an accurate replica (there are many overt copies included here) of popular American music of the day. This was, after all, during the Vietnam war and plenty of American servicemen were stationed in Thailand and American music was being broadcast far and wide for their benefit. That said, there are still plenty of great rocking vocal and instrumental tracks here and a few nutty renditions of classics. Of note is The Son Of P.M.'s version of the "James Bond Theme", which gets a little spicing up with Thai drums and The Cat's "Meow" or Louise Kennedy's "Poo Yai Lee", either of which would have been an excellent addition to the Ultra Chicks compilations. There's also a version of Hank Williams' "Kaw Liga" with augmented Native American drumming and a super upbeat bridge, and Johnny Guitar's "Klongyao", probably the best representation of Thai-Western pop hybrid on the collection. Definitely stick this one out to the end when you pick it up though, as it seems heavily weighted with the best tracks in the second half.
Hot on the heels of the first volume, Subliminal Sounds has released this second collection of Thai garage beat pop go-go madness. And we have to say it's better than the first. Much better (and cheaper too). Like the first volume the tracks here are all distinct replicas of popular music from the Occident of the late sixties. Some notable covers include the King's "All Shook Up", Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus" and The Beatles' "Lady Madonna". What makes this collection stand out for us though is both the inclusion of a wider range of severely demented production aesthetics and a great deal more songs that, vocally, sound more Thai. The album starts off with a bang to Viparat Piengsuwan's "YoK YoK" with chipper plosive vocals that could only come from Thailand. So cute it'll make you barf. Not skipping a beat we're led into Surapon's "Ding Dong", which sounds like a seriously fucked up deconstruction of the "Surfing Bird". A little later Waipot Petsuwan's "Mia Chaa" throws a monkey wrench into our expectations with a dreamy ellyptical vocal line -- that sounds reminiscent of Mo Lam -- over an otherwise standard garage beat tune, instantly transforming it into a classic. Then, of course, there's some demented production like excessive reverb in the oddest places and a strange Thai version of the Chipmonks that'll have you spitting your lunch out your nose. Highly recommended!
It's beginning to appear as though Subliminal Sounds' well of amazing undiscovered Thai Beat music might be bottomless! We were a bit surprised when they managed to pull off a second excellent collection of Thai bubblegum psych tunes from yesteryear, but now a *third*?? "Is it just as good", you ask? Well, heck yeah, it is! It doesn't seem as though they culled the best for the first, or even the second, collection. This third volume may in fact be the best -- though it's hard to choose. This one has about the same ratio of purely weird and inimitably Thai "pop" to off-kilter covers of your favorites from the golden era of rock (including "Hang On Sloopy" and another Elvis number "Heartbreak Hotel"), but add into that mix a great deal of seventies funk & disco and even some Santana-esque rock, all with a Thai twist and lots of fun. But the real gems on this collection are two tracks -- "Thai Boxing" and "Siamese Boxing" -- by Jiraphand Ong-Ard which nearly bookend the anthology and completely fill their own void of strange rock. Both tracks pay homage to Muay Thai boxing and raam muay -- the traditional music that accompanies boxing events. The music of raam muay features a Thai reed instrument that sounds like a kazoo run through a Marshall amp. Both the tracks use this music as an odd bridge mixed in to them -- almost arbitrarily -- in such a way that they sound bi-polar. In addition to all the cool music on this collection is album's cover, which looks as though it were taken from a 70's Thai B-grade horror film. A "scary" looking dude in blue slacks, red sweater, and dracula fangs is lightly held back (or is he dancing with?) two sexy Thai girls wearing matching green skirts and white knee high boots. WOW! is our reaction to that, and the whole disc as well!
Last year we raved about the Insane Technical Sci-Fi Thrash Metal Mastery of this group's 2nd album, Outer Isolation. And, having subsequently seen 'em play n' slay live, we're even more convinced that Arizona's Vektor are one of thee very best metal bands currently going. Live, their music was complex yet ragin', these guys effortlessly, amazingly technical, but ready to party at the same time. Plus one of the guitarists has a tattoo on his arm that sez, 'Sci-fi or die', how cool is that?
Sadly, though, the record label Vektor was signed to, Heavy Artillery, has just folded. And so for the time being, the Outer Isolation cd is out of print, with its planned release on vinyl also in limbo. WTF? But, since Vektor has gotta be a hot property, we imagine they'll soon be signed to another label... However, for the time being, we can't get their newer album. But, we DID manage to grab a last few copies of this, their 2009 debut, for those that missed it. We didn't actually review it when it came out before, either, though we should have.
Utter next-level mind-boggling shred, that's heavy and hectic, and impossibly catchy too, like a brilliant mix of Voivod, Coroner, Destruction, and Megadeth. With their chugging rollercoaster riffs, exquisite neo-classical melodies, and outer space atmospherics, plus the vocalist's uncanny ability to switch from guttural tones to an inhuman shriek (they say in space, no one can hear you scream, but you'll hear this guy, and your dog will hear him better!), Vektor are one of the few 'retro-80s-thrash-revival' acts that we consider to be actually equal or superior to the best bands back then.
Basically, If you liked Outer Isolation, you'll like this too, in fact, how come you don't have it already?? And if you haven't yet heard any Vektor, well, check this out! But be quick, we only got like 5 copies, and then they're gone...
Listen on: Deezer
In our review of the first Violens records, we spent a lot of time talking about how weird it was to listen to their music, in particular because in their previous incarnation, they were such a different sounding outfit, but since then we've actually gone back and re-listened to that old stuff, and can definitely see the connection, and the path from there to here doesn't seem nearly so unlikely. That group, Lansing-Dreiden, was definitely weirder, and while even back then they definitely had an eighties new wave MTV style pop thing going on, they mixed it with all sorts of more modern conventions, but it seems like maybe we've been basing that whole idea of Violens being so dramatically different on a single song, our favorite L-D song, which melded eighties MTV pop and crushing death metal, which to be fair, WAS pretty goddamn awesome. If anything, Violens are more of a real band, less of an experimental collective, so while that meant shedding some of the cool weirdness, it definitely meant these guys got a lot better, tighter, more polished, their songs gorgeous and lush and catchy, jangly and so melodic, where other bands of a similar stripe seem to be aping the eighties doing their best to sound like they actually were from the eighties, Violens seem to take a much more mature approach, obviously influenced by those bands and that sound, but instead of crafting some sort of homage, they simply make their own music, which definitely stands on it's own as modern jangle pop, but if you're old enough to remember the eighties, and all those bands, then that somehow makes it even better, the best of both worlds, fantastic new songs that are fresh and modern, but that are inherently infused with a bit of nostalgia.
And really Slumberland is the perfect home for this new record, the band actually moving away from the overt eighties new waviness into a sound that's much more classic pop, fuzzy and jangly, dreamy and divine, sounding weirdly a little more nineties this time around, and very much like a band that would have been on Slumberland back in the day as well!
