Once again Japan's Acid Mothers Temple return (as they do it seems with almost the regularity of the sunrise/sunset), delivering another spaced out opus of psychedelic splurge, wowing us again with -both- the quantity, and quality, of their output.
And yet, Makoto Kawabata & Co. manage to surprise us with this one, at least when opening track "Chinese Flying Saucer" first kicks in. Check it out, AMT sound a heck of lot like early Led Zeppelin here, or more precisely, like Zep meets Hawkwind, as the 12 minute long track - bound to be a live favorite - rocks onwards up into Flying Saucer land.
That out of their system, the rest of the disc keeps the electronic Hawkwindy FX a-swirl, but mellows out away from the heavy rock riffage towards more of a hazy, shimmering, backporch-of-the-commune folky vibe. "Back Door Man Of Ghost Rails Inn" in fact reminds us a lot of those other Japanese hippies, Ghost, especially in the acid jabbering vocal dep't. The tracks "Chakra 24" (short) and "Shine On You Crazy Dynamite" (long) are similarly trippy and blissful.
But then, there's the album-closing cut "Electric Death Mantra" which pretty much describes itself with its title, except that title won't tell you that, by the end of the track, AMT work themselves into a very much Middle Eastern sounding frenzy, like they've been listening to a lot of vintage Turkish psych, a la Mogollar and Erkin Koray.
So, from its pastiche of Zep beginning to its dervish-like ending, and all the trippiness in-between, another fine addition to anyone's AMT collection.
It's been a while since we've heard from Anduin, the solo project of Jonathan Lee, he of late great longtime aQ faves Souvenir's Young America, whose distinctive harmonica flecked metallic post rock we we dug big time. But in Anduin, Lee focused more on the minutiae of sound, crafting lush, haunting soundscapes, that buzz and drift, smolder and shimmer. the sounds more along the lines of groups like Jasper TX or Machinefabriek, and with a distinctive cinematic flair, the sounds at once epic and majestic, while at the same time subtle and introspective.
Apparently this new record is the result of a burglary at Lee's house, which resulted in the loss of years and years worth of recordings (hence the title), and perhaps also the darkly spectral sound, infused with a deep melancholia, a spare, ghostly sonic landscape that manages to fuse field recordings, deep dronemusic, lumbering slowcore, downtempo electronica, and plenty of horns, into something soundtracky and sinister, brooding and ominous.
The record seems to spend most of its time rumbling and whirring through a sea of softly churning low end and dense layered whirs, but Lee has a delicate touch, whether it's introducing the aforementioned jazzy horns, or echo drenched flute flutter, the sounds of children playing, or a skeletal programed skitter, it transforms this dronemusic into something much more sprawling and engrossing, almost a sort of chamber music, a dark classical drone that slips easily from weirdly spaced out sci-fi shimmer, to bleak, bottomless pit mesmer, from almost new age drift to slowjazz creep, the songs all woven together into one epic songsuite, one that most definitely speaks to loss, and not just the loss of the stolen sounds, but a loss that's deeper and more personal. Powerful and haunting. Gorgeous stuff for sure.
Super swank packaging too, both the lp and the cd come housed in hand drawn, hand screened sleeves, with more hand drawn, handscreened prints inside!
Selected Ambient Works Volume II has been required listening since the album was originally released in 1994 right as the Aphex Twin was poised to capture the world's imagination with his mutant electronica, self-immolating techno, and acid laden drill 'n' bass. Here, the second chapter of Aphex's ambient works (sadly, no third volume followed this) is exactly what is claims to be, a brilliant collection of ambient works that re-engineered and re-interpreted Brian Eno's definition of ambient as a convoluted Phillip K. Dick cosmology of dreaming androids and quixotic sentient machines. This album stands at a crossroads of a number of musicological strains, with Aphex Twin's Richard D. James self-aware and self-conscious of the broader implications of making not just a collection of ambient music, but in making *this* collection of ambient music at *that* particular time. In the post-rave aftermath in the UK of the early '90s, chill-rooms were the zones for all sorts of lightweight collages of directionless new age musics and much of the 'ambient' music that was being produced around those chill-rooms was essentially amphorous techno that tempered the rhythm to a soft pulse and added a bird song here or there (e.g. The Orb, Future Sound Of London); but an ambient music that spoke to a community that was beginning to shape their digital / virtual selves was lacking.
Enter Richard D. James and the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume Two. The album follows the direction of Eno's Music For Airports with 24 vignettes that ascribe to a constant atmosphere of gilded tones and lugubrious rhythms, which are more often sequenced patterns and cybernetic echoes through mercurial pools of sound. Tracks glisten, lurch, dissolve, morph, materialize, crystallize, bloom, and collapse amidst a subtle latticework of beguiling electronic melody, something that the Aphex Twin has always had in spades. It was a brilliant record when it came out, and it's still brilliant today. This is especially true with the resurgance of new age wallpaper music, as this album outshines pretty much everything on the current landscape.
For nostalgia's sake, we'll reprise what we wrote nearly twenty years ago about this record: "James sonically replicated the post-slumber / pre-waking state when sunlight first strikes the dream riddled eye within the memory banks of his rewired samplers. A beautiful, synaesthetic and haunting post-techno ambient album that really must be heard!" How true. How true.
We were pretty surprised to discover that this new one sided 12" from Iowa doomlords Aseethe, whose Reverent Burden lp we raved about back in 2011, consisted of a single sidelong track based *entirely* on riffs from The Conjurer record by SF's own BARN OWL! Sounds pretty much custom made for aQ, a dirgey sludge/doom band covering/reinterpreting the music of a woozy twang flecked doom folk duo? And while we may have been expecting some crushing downtuned ultra-doom onslaught, Aseethe go the opposite route, offering up instead a reverent homage to Barn Owl, evoking a similarly haunting darkly psychedelic mood, with a smoldering glacial intro, all deep thrum and woozy shimmer, it's not really until a few minutes in that one of those riffs surfaces, and it definitely sounds like a Barn Owl riff, dusky and languid, a little twangy, drifting soporifically before the drums surface, a laid back lope, doomy, but not crushing, more a sort of slowcore dirge, with a spacious, cavernous production, streaked with feedback here and there, very much like a slightly doomier Barn Owl, with just a bit of extra buzz and rumble, and a thick blackened background drone that runs throughout, super haunting and hypnotic and very cool. Fans of Barn Owl will definitely dig, as will anyone into minimal, slow and low psychedelic heaviness.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, one sided lp with a silkscreened B side, housed in super swank hand screened sleeves, each one hand numbered.
WARNING: It seems like a sort of noisy pressing, with a bit of crackle on the few copies we checked out, so if you're super persnickety, or a super audiophile, maybe steer clear, but if you're like us, and a little crackle only makes it sound better, than grab one quick before they're gone...
Jeezus. Just when you thought that Aufgehoben couldn't get any noisier, the UK unit ups the ante with this terroristic slab of sonic annihilation, their sixth full-length and 3rd for Holy Mountain. Full of brutal feedback and blown out howl, crinkly glitch and sudden outbursts, this is loud miasmic 'music' that's maybe made with guitars and drums (2 kits worth) and electronics, but could just as easily be channeled direct from nightmare. There's broken rhythmic clank that garners them some This Heat and (early) Supersilent references, lashed to skree worthy of the Japanese heavyweights like Merzbow and Hijokaidan.
Aufgehoben have long been one of our favorite noise acts, 'cause there's always a discernible method to their madness, if you will, enough 'rock' structure for your ears to hang on to (for dear life) to make it, ahem, listenable. But boy do they push that envelope! This is one for fans of their previous works of course, also for fans of certain Skullflower, Kevin Drumm, Wolf Eyes, Voice Crack, Borbetomagus, Shit & Shine...
Really, recommended to all noiseniks! We wish it were on cd though, that's our preferred noise format. Who wants to get up and flip this when you're in its tender clutches?
One of THEE greatest punk rock records ever, from these legendary SF punks finally gets reissued, and reminds us just how good the Avengers really were (as if we had forgotten). As a band, they existed for a scant 2 years, and only released an ep before they broke up, their debut lp, this one right here, was only released in 1983, four years after the band disbanded, but displayed an incredible knack for writing amazing pop songs, and hinted at what could have been, had the Avengers survived to make another record.
But really it hardly matters, as this record, often referred to as The Pink Album, is so good, not only is it an incredible collection of impossibly catchy songs, but is there anything more punk than making a record this good and then hanging it up? Hell, hanging it up before the record even came out!! Juts give a listen to the first few sound samples and you'll be sold (if you haven't already worn out your old copy). "We Are The One" is a total punk pop anthem, with Penelope Houston's snarled/crooned vox and Greg Ingraham's killer guitar playing, the whole band killed, and the songs were untouchable. And if "We Are The One" isn't already enough, "Car Crash" will seal the deal, all super melodic bassline, and chugging churning riffs, dark and minor key, Houston's vocals all raspy and occasionally cracking, and the crazy catchy "wooooah oooh oooh" chorus that you'll find stuck in your head forEVER.
It's hard to know what else to say about this record. If like us you already had it, you might want to buy it again, for the bonus tracks certainly, or maybe just cuz there's some weird satisfaction in rebuying records you love (vinyl resurgence?), but if you've never heard this before, and dig poppy punk or punky pop this is gonna blow your mind.
The cd includes a big booklet with tons of photos as well as liner notes from Greil Marcus. The cd version also includes a whole extra disc of bonus material, which includes a bunch of rehearsal, studio and live tracks!
The Aidan Baker / Nadja musical onslaught shows no signs of letting up any time soon, but we're sure as heck not complaining. This week's Record of the Week is the blissy doom of Nadja's Touched, we also have the vinyl reissue of Bodycage, and then we've got this, Broken & Remade, a definite new direction for Baker, who for this disc, used 4 to 8 second samples of live recordings of analog instruments -- guitar, bass, flute, drums, violin, trumpet, and voice -- to construct these moody, almost jazzy soundscapes.
If you're not listening to close it does just sound like some modern jazz band, crawling through a particularly blissy and smokey jam, the Necks for sure come to mind, as does Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore. The drums shuffle, the guitars buzz, the melodies are serpentine and dreamy, the obvious looping is kept to a minimum, at least in the beginning. Imagine the Bad Plus covering Oval or some Fennesz / Necks remix and you might get a rough idea. The second track, is a bit more glitchy and obviously sampled, but it doesn't take Baker long to build a killer groove, turning all of those little sonic fragments into some sort of Spring Heel Jack, Boards Of Canada dreamy almost IDM shuffle. Even at its smoothest and most straight ahead, Baker laces the proceedings with little bits of digital filigree, a kick drum sputtering repeatedly, a simple lick chopped and reassembled into a little burst of stuttery fuzz, a note here or a drum beat there flipped backwards, it all adds subtle bits of weirdness to the proceedings.
Later in the record things get decidedly more aggressive and freaked out, with thick slabs of distorted sound turned into stuttering fuzz drenched drones, chopped into staggered sonic pulses over drifting mariachi trumpet. Intense post rock workouts gradually become more and more dense until they are dizzying squalls of skittering drums and tangled guitar melodies. Pretty far out, but the songs never become unhinged, this is not any kind of Shitmat style mashup, this is a lot more subtle than that, some seriously deft composition, creating an immensely appealing alien post rock jazz, unlike anything we've heard before.
While Baker fans and Nadja obsessives will NEED this, folks into Boards Of Canada, Spring Heel Jack, Bohren, the Necks, the Bad Plus, and even stuff like Portishead and other late night groove merchants might really dig this as well.
Another super limited release from Mr. Aidan Baker, the first since, well, since the last list in fact, but as with that disc, Figures, this one too holds up just as well as any of his other numerous releases, and as usual the more we listen to it, the more we discover and dig about it. Unlike Figures, which was Baker in slowcore band mode, this is the slow languorous drone sound we originally fell in love with way back when. Orange finds Baker hooking up with another sonically like minded individual, Eric Quach, who records as Thisquietarmy. It seems both have a thing for the dark and drone-y, the lush and laid back, a world of expansive slowly shimmering deep ambience, as Orange demonstrates. Four tracks clocking in at 30 minutes, Orange is a darkly gorgeous drift in four movements, shifting lazily from dense rumbling reverberant low end explorations, to airy soft focus flutter, to lumbering slow motion whir, to subtly melodic epic cinematic ambience. It's hard to know what else to say about this stuff, other than it's gorgeous, dreamy, serene, haunting and so so so beautiful. As if there was anything else you needed to know.�
Packaged in an�orange, yellow, red and white sleeve and pressed on a cool matching silver/orange cd-r.�
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
A long-awaited reissue of Robbie Basho's debut, originally released on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1965. Basho was the third part of the Takoma triad which of course included Fahey and Leo Kottke. A big surprise that back then, Basho was the least popular of the three, as he has become a serious cult favorite of the genre since, and this first look into his unique take on Guitar Soli shows why.
Basho was the least interested in American forms of blues, classical and ragtime, and sought out instead Celtic and Oriental idioms which heavily influenced his music, giving his work a searching devotional quality. But he also wasn't afraid of performing with a brusque playing style as long as it captured an unfettered emotional intensity. This set definitely highlights his inventiveness as he uses the guitar body for a resonating percussive instrument and even accompanies himself on the flute on one song.
Housed in a Smithsonian Folkways style tip-on sleeve, with a simple hermetic drawing, Seal of The Blue Lotus has the feel of an arcane mystical object, one that imparts ancient wisdom to seekers of the craft. Basho's records didn't have cryptic liner notes or partake in humorous antiquated eccentricities, so their more serious reverential nature may have had something to do with his lower profile on the Takoma roster, but probably everything to do with why his records are so coveted now.
We're gonna do this review in 2 entirely separate parts:
FIRST, for folks already fans of this kickass Chicago-based old school metal squad (perhaps on account of our previous rave reviews), hell it's a new album from 'em, after four years a fine follow up to 2008's rulin' Freedom Metal - 'nuff said, you know you need it!
SECOND, if like a lot of folks, you're not familiar with the inexplicably underrated BOTD... well maybe you're into another band of shredders, from here in SF, The Saviours? They're pretty durn popular, and we love 'em too (their reviews on our site should attest to that), but we've always wondered why BOTD weren't at least as successful, 'cause, not to take anything away from The Saviours, BOTD are even better. Both bands play heavy, riffy '70s/'80s inspired, but sorta punked up metal, with tons o' twin guitar action - and with both bands, the vocals are the weak link. While the singing is superior in BOTD's case, let's say that their gravelly vocals still aren't the greatest, with more attitude than aptitude, but do get the job done. Besides, they sure do come up with catchy choruses, so that YOU can (and will) sing along, and see if you can do better! The backing vox whoah-oh-oh style stuff has become a BOTD hallmark all right, so they're doing the best with what they got.
But anyway, it's in the guitar dep't where these boys shine. And shine they do, here, there and everywhere. The guitarwork is jaunty and jubilant, with plenty of nods to what's gotta be one of their biggest influences, Thin Lizzy. Yep, as always, we're hearing a lotta Lizzy... NWOBHM too of course... and also some Led Zeppish funkiness on the track "Raw & Order". BOTD are the heirs to a lot of classic rock and metal moves that few bands today do as well as they do, or even do at all. Mention should also be made of the surprise horn section in the middle of "I Know What Is Right (In The Night)", nice!
The rough n' ready production job points up something else you should know about these guys - they're a great live band, go see 'em if you get the chance. Drunken air guitaring will be your fate... very likely too even if you just listen to this at home.
Recommended especially, as indicated, to fans of The Saviours and Thin Lizzy, also to fans of the likes of High Spirits, Gypsyhawk, Danava, and occasional partners-in-crime Slough Feg...
After six releases as Monument Of Urns, whose blackened doom has long been a favorite with aQ metalheads, the mysterious man behind Urns returns with a new project, Bird Of Omen, meticulously packaged like the Urns releases in gorgeous hand screened printed vellum oversized sleeves, which led us to believe that Bird Of Omen would be a sonic continuation of the black dirgery of Urns, when in fact, BoO is something else entirely.
In fact before we get into it, we'd say that ANYone into Barn Owl, Earth and that sort of Morricone influenced dronefolk desert twang, should definitely check out Bird Of Omen, cuz that's definitely what BoO is all about. Some of the blackness and doominess of Urns is definitely present, but it's much more subtle, more in the ambience, and the vibe, cuz the vibe is definitely brooding and haunting, whipping winds, howling wolves, all over a distant drone, a rumbling low end, and subtly spacey shimmer, over which a guitar unfurls twangy tendrils of minor key guitar, the sound slightly distorted and blown out, so the low notes go into the red, and add a bit of distortion, the background low end droning ominously, and drifting in and our like some mysterious black sonic swell. And in fact, the more we listen to this, the more we can imagine how easy it would be to transform this into a Monument Of Urns record, and which also made us realize that minus the distortion, Bird Of Omen is not that far removed from Urns, the same sort of dismal miserablism, the same sort of brooding trudge, a lumbering slo-mo slither, but where Urns doused that in distorted guitars, here, those sounds are spare and unadorned, maybe wrapped in a bit of echo and delay, and in some weird way, the sound manages to be just as doomy. And the closing track, which might be our favorite, sounds a bit like Barn Owl mixed with Skepticism. The twang dialed way back, letting the murky low end drive the song, a grim black creep, surrounded by field recordings, voices, the sound of rain, and a final coda that hints at the doom that lurks in the background as the sound swells into a squall of detuned buzz and swirling feedback, before finally fading out, truly haunting and harrowing. So great!
As mentioned above, gorgeous packaging, a printed vellum outer sleeve over a screen printed inner sleeve, the 3"cd-r affixed to the inside.
Originally self-released as a tour-only cd-r by the constantly wandering minstrel Sir Richard Bishop, former member of the always challenging Sun City Girls which disbanded after the death of drummer Charles Goucher. Both Richard and his brother Alan (also in the Sun City Girls) have an innate musicality that makes the songwriting process entirely second nature. As it seems so easy for both of them to spill forth song and (at least for Alan) verse, they've both fully immersed themselves in their own strategies to make music challenging and exciting at least for them. Where Bishop's brother Alan embodies the trickster persona from the Sun City Girls through his sneering Alvarius B persona and the scabrous Uncle Jim monologues, Richard takes up skill, craft, and technique culled from a lifetime of appropriating riffs from esoteric guitarists from the dusty corners of the world. In listening to the discoveries that Sublime Frequencies has made over the past decade or so (a label run in part by Alan Bishop), one can hear the influence from Saharan blues from Group Doueh, the Bakersfield country jigs from Buck Owen, the arabesque trills from Omar Khorshid, and the post-occidental folk-rock from Trinh Cong Son (surely, he'll be anthologized by Sublime Frequencies one of these days!). The further Richard Bishop has gotten from the SCG's gravitational pull, the prettier and more intricate his work has become. In listening to Intermezzo, we find ourselves hearing quite a lot of James Blackshaw or Alexander Turnquist in these exquisite acoustic and semi-acoustic guitar instrumentals. It's damn beautiful and at times heartbreakingly sad.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We all kinda flipped when we discovered Blackwolfgoat, and proceeded to gush about BWG's Dragonwizardsleeve record back on list #369, an album that definitely threw us for a loop, cuz with a name like Blackwolfgoat, and on a mostly stoner rock label, we were expecting some sort of crust metal or retro thrash or stoner doom, but instead, BWG, aka guitarist Darryl Shepard, offered up a gorgeous droned out, heavily layered solo guitar record, definitely heavy, at least in places, but more mesmerizing and cyclical, droney and psychedelic, slipping from SUNNO))) like dronesludge to almost krautrocky hypnodrift.
So we were super excited to discover there was a new album - only to discover it was a cd-r, and had been limited to just 100 copies, waah. We basically gave up on ever getting copies for the store, when lo and behold, Mr. Blackwolfgoat himself got in touch and offered us his last copies! So of course we said hell yeah, and now submit to you, Dronolith, another disc of churning repetition, and cosmic looped mesmer that should most definitely appeal to all you aQ headz into drone/metal/psych/kraut, but be warned, we have about 10 copies and then that's it!
The first track starts things off with a gorgeously murky stoner rock riff, that instead of launching into a song proper, just repeats, trancelike, while Shepard layers spidery melodies, and psychedelic streaks over the top, the track drifting closer and closer to heart of the sun spacerock. The next track is all clean guitar, and sounds a little like a sketch for a Circle song, but gradually blossoms into a hazy sprawl of sun dappled psychedelia. There are some moments of extreme distortion, and creeping slo-mo riff sludge, but those moments are brief, with Shepard instead focusing on motorik krautdrone, woozy, gauzy cosmic buzz, and dreamy druggy atmospheric drift. Even the title track which had is imagining Sleep in their prime, begins all shimmery and swirly, but does fulfill the promise of the title by exploding into full on amp melting supersludge, oozing tarpit riffage that splinters into a full on blacknoise blowout.
Fucking AWESOME. Such a shame that it's so limited (ONLY 100 COPIES!). But it is, so grab one quick. They come in nice printed full color jackets, and each copy is hand numbered.
Here we have the newest piece of hypnotized dream-hop, back alley drug murk, neuro-mantic soul collage from Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland, formerly (?) known as Hype Williams! And while the sound here is a little more "put together" than some of their previous works, its still filled to the brim with that fucked up what-the-fuck sonic cough syrup sound we have all grown to love! Still hazy as hell smoked out buzz and hiss, mixed with draggy beats and screwed up samples, droney and dark synth drifts, Inga's vocals dubbed out to the max, haunted and peaking in the red on those louder syllables. The songs here are a woozy sprawl, but all mostly under four minutes, making the whole thing really feel like an album "proper". The jams maybe a little more focused than before, and maybe a little more pop-tones in the vocals, but that otherworldly element in their music is anything if not more pronounced. It's just so nice to not be able to put your finger on something, and that is exactly what Hype Williams does for us here. Hype Williams' music is all about reference points on system crashing overload. A combination of sounds and textures resulting from many a late night/early morning YouTube wormhole, filtered through narcotic smoke machine fog, resulting in a sound that is totally confounding, but equally seductive.
Track 2 is a dark and sexy crawl through the moonlight, drum machine toms ping ponging from left to right, while a minimal synth outlines the progression. Honestly kind of reminding us of a gloomier, more damaged Enya (such a good thing!), but with Inga's voice being a little more breathy and spaced out. There are many hidden layers in such seemingly stark music. There is a lot of sonic space in the sounds at the forefront, but at about the 1:10 mark of track 2, a haunting little synth wash creeps in, WAY down in the mix, almost perfectly blending with the omnipresent tape hiss buzz. This sort of subtle sonic fuckery is a trade mark of Hype Williams, and Black Is Beautiful seems to exercise it to the point of perfection. Its understated psychedelic drifting, the sound lulling the listener into a sort of fugue state. Track 5 has very strange, euro-infomercial "world" vibes. A snappy little pop song buried in hiss, a gem that sounds like it would fit right in on one of those Sublime Frequency radio comps. Lo-fi dreamy, and catchy as hell. But it's tracks 9 & 10 that really have us reeling. The centerpiece to the album, and the longest songs here, we are treated to EVERYTHING that make Dean and Inga's sound so damn interesting. Track nine starts with a screwed up down-pitched voice (Dean?) talking about reaching the promised land with some homegrown, and then the phrase "Never Look Back" is repeated over and over and over again, kosmiche-y synth drones start to appear and build as the repetition of the phrase goes on and on. Really tranced out, stony subliminal message type of vibe. Than suddenly a song erupts! With Dean rapping the verse in his Houston via Hackney cough syrup drawl, and Inga singing an ear-wormy chorus. This is a pop song, albeit delivered through thick layers of opium smoke and TV glow haze. Hype Williams at their most accessible but still, WTF? Also AMAZING use of samples: "When white people tell other white people" etc. etc. LOL. Track 10 is a draggy slow jam, gothic sort of thing. An aphotic dub jam, slow and low with layers of synths gurgling and bubbling up. The beat just going forever while all sorts of disassociated noises creep in and out of frame, filled with feedback and tripped out dubwise vocal intonations. A jammy hypnotic drugged out creepy crawler of a tune! The rest of the record follows suit, an ecstatic tapestry of blurred vision, lo-fi yet space agey subliminal beats music!
Black Is Beautiful sees the duo growing musically without losing sight of their unique aesthetic. A sound track for the over-saturated information age. It seems like it has meaning and message, but whatever that is, is not plainly seen, instead buried under layers of obscure reference and abstract signifiers. And the music itself (our main concern, admittedly) is as fucked up and hypnotic as ever! So, fully recommended!
Rhode Island avant doom duo The Body just swung through town, with their pals in Braveyoung in tow, the two groups touring as a single unit, the increased firepower of this newly formed two headed beast harnessing some serious black energy. And for those who were unable to witness said energy in the flesh, comes this, an audial document of the collaboration, and while we'd never heard Braveyoung before, the resulting sonic onslaught speaks to the two groups' compatibility, the result a sprawling blackened soft cacophony, a series of surprisingly melodic and impossibly lush blackened doomscapes replete with a choir (the very same choir from The Body's epic All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood), and an unlikely cover of a song by sixties voodoo groovers Exuma!!
The opening track explodes with black gouts of crumbling low end, murky blurred riffage, and churning black hole crush, but as the song unfolds, all manner of melodic subtleties blossom, what sounds like soaring strings, muted tangled melodies, moaning low end rumbles, the buzz and crunch peeling way right at the end revealing the swirl of melodies that lurked underneath all along.
The factually titled "Song Two" seems to be the centerpiece, a massive epic clocking in at 15+ minutes, a brooding slow build, long droning tones over a bed of hiss and crackle, the sound quickly growing more melodic, laced with deep throaty cello, tinkling chimes, and lush female vocal harmonies, the sound downright liturgical, hints of Godspeed and other brooding post rockers, eventually the drums kick in, the guitars begin to buzz, and the song is transformed into a fantastic dirge, peppered with long stretches of crumbling low end, keening guitar tones, more ethereal voices, finally building to a massive coda, the drums cranked WAY up in the mix, the guitars too, the sound so in-the-red, you can almost hear all the meters peaking, everything wreathed in clouds of feedback, until finally disappearing in a haze of crumbling buzz.
The title track is the prettiest of the bunch, the two groups laying down a thick fog of blackdrone and hiss drenched rumble, muted streaks of feedback, all blurred into one heaving undulating stretch of corrosive low end, while over the top, Christmas carol like melodies drift and shimmer, the crystalline tones hovering weightless above the black sonic chasm below.
And then finally, the band finish off with their Exuma cover, trading the over-the-top swamp shaman vocals of the original with some gorgeous folky female vox, transforming the sound into a weird sort of dirgey atmospheric doom folk, the sound woozy and warm, washed out and dreamy, the main vox backed up by the lush harmonies of the choir, while The Body and Brave Young, wrap everything in a thick coruscating black haze, a blackened background that more than anything, adds a bit of dreamily sinister texture to the proceedings.
Fantastic stuff, and well worth experiencing live too if you get the chance...
We've raved about these damaged metal weirdos in the past, from their band name (with its constantly shifting spelling), to the always garish and usually puerile cover art, from the amazing song titles (always "Something OF Something Else") to the amazing warped take on classic metal, and that's not even mentioning the twisted lyrics and ridiculous vox.
As we mentioned before in a past review, we first discovered these guys on a split with faux handicapped metal outcasts Faxed Head, which makes perfect sense, these guys seem like Faxed Head's more earnest, equally drug addled little brothers, and their half of that 7" consisted of nothing but metal song intros, repeated over and over and over. Twisted but genius. The lps are not so high concept, in fact if anything, they're extremely LOW concept.
This lp is not a new one, in fact, it's a reissue of an early record, but even back then, all the Breathilizor parts were in place. Album name: "For The Ultimate Pain Of Medusa's Love a.k.a. Evil Grotokhan VI". Check. Cover art: a drawing by the infamous Mike Diana (of Boiled Angel infamy) of a snake headed, Old Crow drinking, satellite crashing (?), limb severing monster lady. Check. Song titles: "Baby Of Witch", "Graveyard Of Night", "Nuclear Of Power", "Sombrero Of Doom", "Dracula Of Hell", and of course "Something Of Something Pt. IV". Check. The music: total classic metal riffing, with harmonized lead guitars, occasional bursts of blasting thrash, but usually more sort of eighties style riffery, and the vocals, ridiculous and over the top, sorta raspy and metally but also goofy and almost cartoonish, ridiculous over the top lyrics, shit, what's not to love. Total classic weirdo whatthefuck outsider metal radness!
Includes a printed insert with all the LYRICS!!!
While we wait for the impending full length from local droned out cinematic psychedelic heavies Burial Tree, we've got this two song 'cassingle' teaser to hold us over, and to give us a taste of what's coming. This nice priced tape features one song from the upcoming album, and a live in the studio version of a song from the first album. The new track is a beast, an effects drenched psychedelic space rock blow out, heavy and blissed out, an extended trance-y psych jam that should have fans of the current crop of space-psych warriors wondering why they hadn't heard Burial Tree before. The reworked older track is a more brooding and laid back affair, lo-fi and blissed out, a twang flecked post rock that builds to a churning metallic dirge, before getting all spaced out and slipping tight back into that post rock lope and eventually finishing off with some abstract ambient drift. Can't wait for the new record!
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label is home to all sorts of warped electronic music, from Southern hip hop, to lo-fy synth pop, to total summer jam radio pop, to woozy witch house to THIS, a glorious blast of super distorted blown out, boomin' system, big beat bumping Miami Bass music, but constructed entirely from samples of Middle Eastern music!! It's so nuts, but so amazing, Middle Eastern folk music, Bollywood loops, chants and prayers and all sorts of unlikely sounds wedded to booty shaking beats, nasty rapping, female call and response vox, it's like 2 Live Crew if they did a record for Sublime Frequencies, total what the fuck GENIUS. This is most definitely what we'll be blasting next time we're driving down the coast with the top down and the bass BOOMIN'!!
What's better than a new record from SF psychedelic space rockers Carlton Melton? Howabout a new record from SF psychedelic space rockers Carlton Melton with John McBain from Monster Magnet?! That's right, McBain, from the original space lord motherfuckers teams up with our beloved local psychlords for three long tracks of improvised spaced out psychedelia, recorded as always in a geodesic dome, where the band go to get lost, and conjure up the sonic spirit smoke that somehow becomes Carlton Melton. Hours of drug addled jamming and sonic experimentation bottled up and distilled into these sprawling smoldering slow burn epics.
The A side here is a sidelong blowout called "Adrift", and the band spend the first few minutes just sort of, well, adrift, a simple motorik drumbeat, spidery tendrils of electric guitar, some sitar-like buzz, all wreathed in a swirling cloud of synth shimmer, it's the sort of hazy zoned out psych-drone mesmer that we can't get enough of, and we like to think the original was closer to 3 or 4 hours long, this being just the best 20 minutes, a totally tranced out hypnorock groove, that's druggy and dreamy, a slo-mo swagger that sounds like Hawkwind on tranquilizers, there doesn't even need to be any sort of build or explosive blown out climax, cuz once you're lost in these sounds, you're a willing celestial traveller, drifting on CM's beams of sonic light, headed for the heart of some black sun. But the band do crank it up, the guitars growing wilder near the end, and louder, but never letting totally loose, instead just slipping right back into the same mesmeric groove, and playing us out to the very end.
The title track on the flipside ditches the drums completely for a heady sprawl of psychedelic ambience, multiple guitars, synths and manipulated tapes, are let loose in a sun dappled spray of softly tangled melodies and smoldering buzz, abstract riffage and swoonsome swells of FX drenched thrum unwind into slithering sonic tendrils and lush layered psychdrone shimmer, which gives way to the closer, which has McBain credited with "Dome Treatment", and is the densest and heaviest of the bunch, the riffs muddy and murky, a churning almost Stooges-y vibe, the drums weirdly chaotic and splattery, the track never locking into a groove, instead seeming to remain unhinged to any specific rhythm, the sounds super twisted, the production all over the map, with the drums sometimes leaping to the front of the mix, bit just as often disappearing beneath an avalanche of crumbling scrabbling guitarnoise, the strange skittering making us imagine Aussie jazzdrone outfit the Necks trying their hand at space rock, which we imagine would not be a bad thing at all. Loose, wild, chaotic, and borderline unhinged, everything doused in distortion, and woozy warped effects, a dizzying, disembodied dose of fucked up space psych drug-DOME bliss!!
Housed in super striking psychedelic jackets, with thick printed inner sleeves, and pressed on milky clear vinyl!
Vanity Records don't get much stranger or funkier than this one. We thought it odd that Trunk Records would put this out since it was originally recorded in 1980 in Anaheim, CA, far from Trunk's usual English oddity realm. But we're glad somebody finally released this, as we've been hearing about it for years, namely the unlikely stellar post-disco jam title track,"It's Broken". We say unlikely, because looking at the cover and pictures of Bob Chance singing and recording, it kind of reminds us of our '70s dad having a mid-life crisis moment and living his dream of being a real rock and roll musician, or something like that. And there are moments on this record that TOTALLY sound like that, like the opening blues rocker, "Brown Skinned Girl", but then things get even weirder. What starts out as an anachronistic take on sixties blues-folk pop a la Tim Rose and Tim Hardin, becomes a ten-minute funky slow disco excursion that fans of Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone will most definitely dig. Its long form hypnotic breaks and peaks are executed quite flawlessly. But then what to make of the stalker ode, "The Van Man", which not only makes light of mobile date-rape units, and the creeps who ride in them, but also sounds remarkably like some obscure Bollywood pop production. "I See Her" is a candy coated kaleidescopic folk-ballad, while "Colors" is more of a Herb Alpert cruise ship show tune reminding us of that Michael Farneti album, Good Morning Kisses. The final track, "Jungle-Talk" is a psychedelic instrumental Nino Nardini like Library groover full of exotic bird calls, congos and sultry temperatures. Quite the oddity, and yet totally infectious!
Throughout the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the coastal mountains are dotted with countless bunkers which were built during World War II in anticipation of the Japanese invasion that never came. Nearly 70 years later, these bunkers have been weathered by wind, fog, rain, and of course the sodden folks who tromp through the Headlands on a daily basis. These concrete structures with small portals facing the Pacific all have amazing reverberant qualities; and it shouldn't be a surprise that the more frequented bunkers and passageways inevitably echo with the sound of children dying to hear their own voices tossed back to them. The Headlands have been a favored destinations for Loren Chasse, who has sought many of the lesser known and lesser travelled environs for field recordings and jam sessions that would eventually work their way into all things Jewelled Antler (Thuja, Franciscan Hobbies, The Blithe Sons, Of, Ov, etc.). In his recordings, Chasse extracts a profound mystery and grand sense of wonder from that echo, the bunker's grit, the soft recurrence of surf bleeding through those walls, and the distant bleat of a foghorn.
Back in 2005, Chasse took his fellow globetrotting wanderer Michael Northam to the Battery Townsley where the two set up long string wires and various handheld instruments to begin a series of recordings which took a few years to complete after Northam left California. The two did manage to meet up once again in Estonia, there exploring the Soviet industrial ruins that pock the Estonian landscape with similar intentions. Out of the bramble of overgrown weeds, rebar, concrete, dirt, rock, wind, and water, Chasse and Northam straddle those psychedelic leanings of Jewelled Antler and the more studied aspects of minimalism.
The Otolith begins with an acoustic clamor, as if billions of iron filings were brushing against each other under the direction of a couple of hefty magnets, before shifting into a harmonium blur of sustained tones hinting at a melody well beneath these clouds of tousled energy. Softer drones and Aeolian fragments flutter forth out of bowed strings and gently tapped gongs amidst a golden hue of opiated atmospherics. Scrabblings across the surfaces of leaves, rocks, mud, and metal fuse with field recordings of wind and water, as a continuing demonstration of Chasse's alchemy with naturalist sound to bring forth stately ragas and dreamtime psychedelic lullabies. Chasse and Northam work amazingly well together, having produced this thoroughly amazing album. Think Popul Vuh, Parson Sound, Pandit Pran Nath, Harry Bertoia, and Erc La Casa. Totally beautiful and mesmerizing.
This unlikely freak-funk treasure from Chubby Checker has at long last been properly reissued, fully legit we're now told for the first time. You might recall it under the self-explanatory title Chubby Checker Goes Psychedelic, which is what it was called when we first listed an earlier edition some years back. Here's what we said about it then, which still applies:
When you think deep, soulful, psychedelic tinged rock the first name that probably does NOT come to mind is Chubby Checker. But guess what, he did in fact brew up a totally potent batch of funky psych rock burners that somehow slipped completely under the radar.
Apparently Chubby was living in Holland in 1971 when he hooked up with some eccentric and unknown hippie rockers who all seemed to be smoking some seriously good stuff and together they recorded this batch of seriously scorching tracks! Forget everything you know about Chubby Checker. This is not "The Twist", or the golden-oldies or a novelty comeback with the Fat Boys in the '80s. This is an impassioned psychedelic rock killer with deep grooves and a super emotional and intense vocal delivery from Chubby. Every time we play this in the store someone thinks it's some rare Hendrix track or an unreleased Arthur Lee gem or some amazing group like Black Merda finally being resurrected. In fact just about all of these songs could have appeared on any of the recent spate of psych reissue comps that we have fallen so in love with (Nuggets, Cherrystones), and actually we were given our first sneak peak into this secret world of Chubby Checker a few years back on the great collection Mr. Toytown Presents Vol. 2: Nightmares at Toby's Shop. We never thought we'd finally hear the whole disc, heck, we didn't even think there -was- a whole disc. Turns out there was, first presented to us as Chubby Checker Goes Psychedelic though it was originally released back in the day on some budget labels variously under the titles New Revelation and Chequered.
There are some seriously mind blowing songs here. Songs that aren't just cool cause it's neat and weird and interesting that they are actually being sung by Chubby Checker, but songs that stand on their own two feet and grab your and shake you and sound so damn good! What's also so cool about this recording is that 9 of the 11 songs were actually written by Chubby, so it's not like some hip producer just grabbed a bunch of great songs and slapped Chubby's name and voice on them. He shows such an amazing range, from scorching stingers ("Love Tunnel") to druggy cookers ("Stoned In The Bathroom", yeah!) to darkly solemn tales ("He Died"). What an absolute surprise of a record! We haven't been able to stop playing it since it arrived to AQ. We're completely addicted! And we think you will be too.
Includes liner notes explaining a bit more about how the heck this happened, and the cd has a bonus track!
A beautifully extensive live piece of long form minimalism from one of its most beguiling practitioners, Catherine Christer Hennix (remember The Electric Harpsichord?). Recorded at The Grimm Museum in Berlin in 2011, "Blues Dhikr Al-Salam (Blues Al Maqam)" is a 49 minute piece for voice, brass, computer and live electronics performed by Hennix and the newly formed electronic ensemble, Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, which includes aQ favorite dronologist Michael Northam on "time-mirage delay" and as the sound engineer. Originally commissioned for La Monte Young's 70th Birthday in 2005 as an 'infinitary' computer sound/animation environment, this is the first live recording of this piece. Modulating raga drones shift in an array of harmonic frequencies aided by layers of deep plaintive horns and processed vocals. There is a deep Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that flows throughout all of Hennix's work and in which she details in rather high-minded language inside this package, which would be difficult to paraphrase here, but the writing's closing line may sum up this piece nicely: "One of the Thousand sounds of Om."
So stoked that this awesome album by the Chromatics is available on vinyl now and with a whole side filled with unreleased tracks.
Ooooh Ahhhhh! This one has been sizzling in our ears pretty much on endless repeat since it showed up at the store. Chromatics have undergone a pretty radical change from their early herky-jerky no-wave inspired beginnings, as showcased on the amazing and scene defining After Dark comp that we recently listed, and are still so in love with. Chromatics now have a sound that is much more sensual, subdued and spaced out. And we have to say we are loving this new direction. I definitely suits them so much more naturally than their noisier punky past.
With a sound much more rooted in early drugged out disco and '80s Euro-pop, Night Drive is sparse and melancholic enough to reel in folks whose taste usually falls on the darker end of the spectrum yet with songs so damn sexy and enticing that those of us with dance and pop leanings are seduced by their sound as well. With Ruth Radalet's vocals sounding like they are being delivered in a dark room filled with fog and smoke, there is such an intoxicating late night vibe that Chromatics tap into which feels so vacant and so sexy in the best possible way. They take on the daunting task of covering Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" and manage to make it their own, no small feat as that is a song with such deep meaning for so many of us. So damn good!
One listen to this and you can see why the likes of Andy Votel and Demdike Stare would rush to release this radiophonic electronic gem on a newly created subsidiary label, Dead-Cert, (a subsidiary of an already subsidiary label Pre-Cert which released lps by Slant Azymuth, Apple Head, and Anworth Kirk). Dead-Cert's mission statement, we've been told, is to reissue albums that virtually no one has heard before and this by all means is one of the rarest of that ilk. Recorded in 1970 for an art installation by Harold Paris in Brussels, there were only 50 copies of Voices of Packaged Souls made, and were given away at the opening. Unlike the material on the recent Suzanne Ciani archive reissue, Lixiviations, Voices of Packaged Souls is 13 experimental sound pieces made on the modular Buchla synthesizer, each one introduced by a male narrator in both English and French, with mystically ominous titles: "First Voice: Sound of Hair Bleeding" "Eight Voice: Sound of Bones Growing", "Seventh Voice: Sound of an Eye Tearing", "Fourth Voice: Sound of Wetness", "Tenth Voice: Sound of A Lighted Window", that suggest a clinical litany of library sounds and actions, similar to the remote feel of a Demdike Stare recording. But what separates this from just a standard bloop-bleep electronic record is the impeccable sound design, with high relief-textural dynamics that jump around the audio spectrum, sometimes sounding right against your ear and other times receding away from you. Would have been neat to see this sound / sculptural installation in person.
Beautifully spooky! And beautifully packaged, too.
Great Bringer Of Night was the 2009 demo from these Midwestern blackened doomlords, and has now been remastered by James Plotkin, had a couple extra tracks tacked on (alternate versions of tracks from their Profound Lore release), and been made available again, this time on vinyl, via local label Flenser. Folks who dug Coffinworm's When All Became None cd on Profound Lore, will most likely dig this as well. On Great Bringer Of Night, like on When All Became None, Coffinworm offer up a dense churning black sludge, crusty and corrosive, the guitars thick and caustic, the drums pummeling, the vocals a glass gargling howl, the songs lumbering and lurching, abject and miserable, slowing to a tarpit crawl and times, while at others surprisingly cranking up the tempo and getting downright melodic, like on "Start Saving For Your Funeral", which sounds like Lifelover with a doom metal makeover, the song slipping from chugging full-on rocking, to gnarled downtuned churn and back again. Then there's "The Inner Caligula" that fuses slow-mo sludge to something almost punk sounding, like an ultra doom version of a metalcore breakdown. There's even some full on thrashing on "Spitting In Infinity's Asshole", some blast beats too, but for the most part, Coffinworm spend their time chugging and churning, dirging blackly through a hellish sonic wasteland, equal parts Eyehategod, Unearthly Trance, early Cavity, a crusty, filthy, sludge-y, blackened doom dirge that's LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
OMG!, as they say. It doesn't happen very often, but once in a lucky while, one of us here at AQ will suddenly find out about some impending reissue and just about jump up and down exclaiming, "AT LAST!!!" We're talking about holy grails, like Bruce Haack's The Electric Lucifer, and Moolah, and Joakim Skogsberg, and Pandemonium... All of which we made Records Of The Week, by the way. So, last week we had another such exciting moment, when it was revealed that THIS album had just been reissued on cd, for the first time ever (barring bootlegs).
Not to be confused with a host of other Covens out there, this Coven was a uniquely doomy, gothic metal band from Detroit, who released but one record, 1987's Worship New Gods. No, we've never ever even seen an original lp copy - this band is pretty obscure. You might find a track of theirs on a DJ mix by Darkthrone's Fenriz, but that's about it. To give credit where credit is due, we first heard of Coven thanks to the great metal collector nerd website The Corroseum [www.thecorroseum.com], who had reviewed and raved about Worship New Gods with enough enthusiasm to get us to, ahem, track down for ourselves personally one of those bootleg copies previously mentioned. That was several years ago, but now, though, thanks to Shadow Kingdom, we've got a legit version we can happily share with all of you.
The Corroseum review said of Coven that "they sound like no other metal band that ever existed", yet went on to explain how in FEEL Coven could conjure comparisons to the likes of Cirith Ungol, Celtic Frost, Bathory, and even Bauhaus (more on that angle in a minute). We may as well quote the conclusion of their write-up: "Some dark, cloudy, angst-ridden days you cannot listen to anything else but Coven." Quite a recommendation, we had to hear 'em! And when we did, we fell in love. To the extent, that, like the Pandemonium, this became something for Allan & Andee here to daydream about trying to properly reissue ourselves. Fortunately, Shadow Kingdom were a little more proactive about that than we were, and here it is.
Pagan-proud true martial metal, '80s steel that those into the epick, eccentric likes of Manilla Road and Max Planck ought to bow down to. But that's hybridized with even heavier, doomier fare, a la Black Sabbath and Candlemass (triumphantly lumbering opening track "The Riddle Of Steel" definitely shares some DNA with Sabbath's "Electric Funeral"). That's the metal side of it. But there's more: Coven also convey a strong post-punk, '80s gothic death-rock vibe, at the same time. Think Bauhaus, The Mission, Christian Death, and 45 Grave... And, thus, like The Corroseum said, they don't sound like any other -metal- band, exactly. There's just something so haunting and magical about 'em.
What really puts these songs of blood and fire over the top are the stirring, echoing vocals, they sometimes struggle and strain, but that only enhances their emotive appeal. And, again, goes a long way to making this band indeed not sound like any other, their music massive and murky and melodic, swirling and psychedelic. Their battlecries from a bygone age are doomy and druggy (well, if Vikings did drugs) and oh so atmospheric.
Reissued with a 16 page cd booklet full of lyrics and vintage photos in both b&w and color. No liner notes, though, but in some ways that adds to the mystique, in fact, maybe they should have left out some of the photos, too...
SO glad this has been made available. Until now, all we could do, was reference 'em in our reviews of the underground epic metallers Realmbuilder, and hope that somebody somewhere would know what we were talking about. Now's your chance to find out. Don't miss it. 'Cause Coven's record is definitely some under the radar weird genius, a truly lost gem of metal, and more...
After recently making two recent offerings on the Medical Records label into Records Of The Week (Axxess and Lou Champagne System), we figured we oughta review a couple other kick ass Medical releases that somehow slipped under our radar. There's the Guyer's Connection, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, a collection of lost tracks from a Swiss teenage synth / electro-pop duo, and this one here, another oddly named outfit, called Dalek I, short for Dalek I Love You, a UK duo, whose equally oddly named debut, Compass Kumpass, was originally released in 1980, and is available again on vinyl for the first time in thirty years!
If you need a quick thumbnail of Dalek I's sound, it might be easiest to list the bands that members of Dalek I would go on to play in, most notably, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and the Teardrop Explodes.
Dalek I offer up a glorious world of classic new wave and gloomy moody electro pop, dramatic and a little bit gothy, with post punk flourishes here and there, hand clap rhythms, skittery programmed beats, warm fuzzy synths, indie pop guitar jangle some of the tracks here sounding like total classic old school eighties electro pop, like the opener "The World", which sounds like Tears For Fears or Icicle Works, while others do get darker, and more haunting, like the brooding, droney "A Suicide", but for every sonic shadow, there's something bouncy and playful and super melodic, just check out "The Kiss" which is the impossibly peppy track that comes right after "A Suicide". They even do a cool (and pretty far out) cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", with a woozy echo drenched abstract intro, that leads into a super taut angular almost Devo-esque sounding version that we find ourselves playing over and over.
For the most part, this stuff steers well clear of the whole Carpenter / Goblin side of the synth spectrum, in favor of something much poppier, a lot more twee, but at the same time, way catchier. If you dig OMD, Tears For Fears, Icicle Works, Talk Talk and other eighties indie poppers / electro-poppers, definitely give Dalek I a listen...
Pressed on 180 gram hot pink vinyl, housed in super eighties looking new wave jackets, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered, and also includes a flexi-disc single, featuring two B-sides!
This record has been floating around for a while now, in various permutations, tapes, downloads, and now finally an lp, and a cassette again, maybe in anticipation of Death Grips' Epic label debut which is slated to drop later this month. And if you've yet to hear Death Grips, you might be a little surprised that they got snapped up by a major, cuz this is some fierce, grim, mean sounding shit. This Sacramento crew specializes in a twisted hybrid of hip hop and experimental electronics, the sound a dizzying assemblage of buzzing metal guitars, skittery programmed beats, bizarre samples, fractured glitched out buzz, twisted loops, seriously raw and lo-fi, but at the same time urgent and intense and fucking far out and super original.
The vocals are fierce and furious, not so much just rapped as bellowed, and howled, which suits the heavy sounds in the background. While much of the drumming is programmed, the drummer in Death Grips is none other than Hella's Zach Hill, but don't be expecting much of that furious Lightning Bolt style frantic drumming, this is after all a hip hop record, so most of the beats are spare and stretched out, as much about their tone and timbre as the rhythms themselves. Opener "Beware" is about as close to perfect as the troublesome hybridization of hip hop and metal has ever gotten, with big chiming distorted chords, an epic almost rock song arrangement, skittery rhythms, and DG mainman Stefan Burnett laying down a fierce flow over the top. "Guillotine" sounds more like a super charged Sensational jam, the beat spare and skittery, the main loop a thick buzzing low end synth, the track laced with little flurries of sci-fi FX, and weird random blasts of psychedelic sound, not to mention a having chain clatter crunch and some motorcycle rev thrum, and the rapping, twisted and deliriously off kilter. "Spread Eagle Cross The Block" is a dizzying assemblage of looped pop song, big sing along verses, stuttery handclap beats, while "Lord Of The Game" is a head spinning shuffle with the main loop made from sliced and diced vocals, there's also Beastie Boys horn bleats, and a Crazy World Of Arthur Brown sample, all tangled up into a crazy rapid fire blast of rhythmic crush. The rest of the record is just as twisted and all over the map, and while we could go song by song and describe each one in turn, it should be obvious by now if this is your cup of seriously spiked tea or not, we'd be surprised if it wasn't, this is the sort of hip hop record that sounds like it was made for aQ, fucked up and funky, heavy and tripped out, groovy and super twisted. For a genre that seems to do less boundary pushing than it should, this is the sort of hip hop record that shakes shit up big time, and suddenly it's not such a surprise that this is getting the big underground buzz AND major label attention it so strangely deserves. Quite possibly our hip hop record of the year, and yeah it came out last year, but it's our favorite this year so far too!
Full length number two from this Norwegian duo who traffic in, as their name suggests, some seriously fierce old school eighties style thrash. Think Kreator, Sodom, Bathory and the like, their sound a blitzkrieg of frenzied riffing, shredding leads and blasting beats, the sound super distorted and blown out, the vocals a raspy growl with a penchant for Slayer style almost falsetto screams at the end of lines, sometimes just a weird voice cracking squeak, other times a full on maniacal shriek. Some of our favorite moments though are where they slow it down and get downright doomy, like the opening of "Emperor Of Sin", complete with tolling bell, or on the distorted organ and chugging dirge intro to "Lead Us Into Hell", but in both cases, it's not long before they explode into another blast of galloping thrash.
Obviously stuff like this doesn't need a huge review, or in depth analysis. Do you favor denim vests, preferably with patches and spikes? How about bullet belts? Do you like your metal raw and violent, furious and frantic? Blasting beats and hyperspeed riffing? Do you dig classic speed/thrash/black metal? Yes to any of those and odds are Deathhammer will be your jam...
Another party hardy block rocking big beat Baltimore underground warehouse sweaty noise dude good time to be had here from Dope Body, now signed to Drag City, which we heartily approve of 'cause their previous label, Hoss, never even managed to get it together to supply us with cds of last year's Nupping album to list. We did however give a big thumbs up the the lp version of Nupping, and this new album is equally enjoyable!
Once again, Dope Body bash out a wild melange of quasi funk-punk, noise-damaged weirdness. But this time, Dope Body has cleaned up their act a little bit, gotten more nuanced, and added a bigger dose of pure POPPINESS to the proceedings. Don't worry, Natural History is still chock full of crunching distorted grooves, rubbery bass, vocal bro bellow, and all of Dope Body's other catchy/confusional hallmarks. But, ferinstance, track two, "Road Dog", which begins with a chicka-chicka-chicka rhythmic guitar part that reminds us of aQ faves Cave, eventually blossoms into full-on crooned, new wave garage pop hit single from some alternate universe. Hot damn. And there's plenty more such hits on offer as the rest of the album spins. Chunky, catchy, heavy, mathy, dumb, fun, dancey, brutish, melodic, Dope Body deliver in ways that not too many other indie acts these days dare, channelling fave '90s influences (and sometimes guilty pleasures) like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rocket From The Crypt, Cop Shoot Cop, and a host of AmRep noisemongers.
Great music to play at your next house party, but (as we alluded to in our review of Nupping), don't be surprised if some of your furniture gets broken...
One of a whole bunch of releases on our pal Jason's Oromolycka label on the list this week, everything from Middle Eastern booty bass, to Southern hip hop, minimal synth pop to witchy electro, and then there's this, a tape from a Brooklyn outfit called DubKnowDub, whose sound is a thick, noise drenched blown out downtempo avant dub, sort of. The beats are there, and they are definitely dubbed out, but they're buried beneath a roiling sea of super distorted loops, of layered drones, fractured samples, all blurred and smeared into woozy streaks of soft noise shimmer, and crunchy buzz, the noisiness peeling back now and again to reveal a loping groove underneath, the beats crumbling and chaotic, the sound constantly shifting from noisy and groovy, to lumbering and dense, to spaced out and skittery, it's the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from Kevin Martin's The Bug, or on one of those old Pathological comps, a twisted industrial dub, or warped minimal avant hip hop, but doused in some serious noise. Sweet shit for sure...
First we've heard from these Chicago glam-prog punks, but we're pretty into it. Angular lo-fi riffs wreathed in thick swooshes of flanger drenched guitars, wild rhythmic flurries, avalanche like drum fills, the vibe VERY glammy, with some cool glimmering breakdowns, but plenty of glampop crunch and garage fuzz shimmer, reminding us a whole lot of a lo-fi Alice Cooper band.
The B side is even more glittery and glammy, with some super progged out drumming, lots of heavily flanged guitars here too, and a weird very seventies sounding mix, the track slipping into psychedelic space prog territory with some jammed out guitars and some strange percussion (even bongos!!). Tripped out, psychedelic and heavy, and LIMITED TO 475 COPIES!!
Latest (vinyl-only) blast of psychedelic heaviness from these Portland space rockers, and much like the last record, the awesome Beyond The Fourth Door, Dawn In 2 Dimensions finds the band stretching way out, unfurling hazy, druggy, psych-drone epics, with pounding caveman drums anchoring clouds of white hot guitar squall, and horns too, the band don't even bother with the slow build or an intro or anything, they just launch right into "Wholeodrome" and start jamming, and we're immediately struck by how much fans of bands like White Hills and Carlton Melton and the Heads and all those outfits, should be flipping out over these guys as well, it's some fantastically heady stuff, heart of the sun sort of lysergic heaviness, rife with chanted vocals, lush layered riffing, and those tangled guitar melodies, a laid back psychedelic shredding drifting atop the groups churning spaciness. The opener is the perfect introduction, and surprisingly short at 4:33 considering it could have easily stretched out and filled up the whole side, and we're guessing live it probably does get even more blown/stretched out.
And while the label touts this as the band trying to capture the energy of their "blistering live shows", there's still plenty of super laid back stoned out psych, in fact "Bread Of Dreams" spends most of its nearly seven minutes in a dirgey effects heavy haze, only exploding into some fierce heaviness near the end, only to transform into a bit of pastoral acoustic folk, wrapped in some weirdly tweaked (and heavily panned) birdsong. "Marrow Of The Wand" offers up something similar, a bit more krautrocky and propulsive maybe, but still super laid back, and almost Grateful Dead sounding (albeit a much more spaced out and druggy version), that again does devolve into a wild psych squall freakout right at the very end.
It's the B side that really seems to display the band at their rawest and heaviest, a sidelong 3 part epic, that spends a good chunk brooding ominously, slowly building, all spidery melodies and stripped down rhythmic shuffle, before slipping into some Stooges-y swagger, some buzz drenched heavy rock crunch, the middle portion being downright headbangable, before the final kraut-psych stretch, that finds the band locking into a woozy mesmeric groove, that again, could probably go on forever, pounding through a cloud of swirling psychguitar, before finally stumbling to a halt.
Heavy psych heads and psychedelic space rockers should really already be hip to these guys, but if for some reason that's not the case, get his now, and clear a space on your shelf next to Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo, White Hills, Carlton Melton, etc...
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs.
Scheintot was the only studio album from Factrix, originally released on Adolescent Records in 1981. Its dark lysergic murk and obsessive decomposition crawls through scabrous guitars, clanking metal, distorted electronics, shadow-cast vocals and atmospheric doom, certainly paralleling the death-factory churn of TG's Second Annual Report and SPK's Leichenshrei. It must be stated that all of the tracks here (including the cd's two bonus tracks!) were present on the aforementioned Artifact 2cd; but with that long out of print, this becomes a recommended purchase!
About ten years ago, we championed the San Francisco industrial prodigies Factrix via their Artifact 2cd anthology released on Storm, in fact, we made it a Record Of The Week. That went out of print quickly; so we are now quite grateful to Superior Viaduct for at last reissuing two of this band's seminal recordings! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 30+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Research Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and - Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on transgressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records, even as Factrix teamed up with fellow San Franciscan provocateur Monte Cazazza for this Spartan yet very caustic live recording. California Babylon was originally released by Subterranean Records back in 1982. There are songs lurking throughout the scalding guitar noise, announced through repetitive, lurching basslines that sound like Flipper tunes played at super slow-motion. Growling slabs of toxic noise, grim electronic murk, tape collages (including some rather diabolical rants from somebody who sounds a lot like Jim Jones), and plenty of guttural No Wave deconstruction spew out from underneath those bass throbs, with Monte Cazazza occasionally spitting his own transgressive venom with his unmistakable, devilish lisp. There's even an appearance from Z'ev on a couple tracks clanking on found metal objects!
The bonus tracks on California Babylon are pretty amazing, we have to say; and all of these were in fact featured on that aforementioned Artifact compilation. On these tracks, the trio was certainly honing their songwriting craft, but they had not eschewed the noise, the murk, nor the bad vibes. "Silver River" is an awesome slab of downer, drone-rock orchestration that could very easily be mistaken for some New Zealand / Expressway gem by Gate or Alastair Galbraith, where "No Trees" reprises Factrix' searing guitar noise with staccato punk vocals and deconstructed post-punk basslines.
The accompanying dvd (which comes only with the cd edition, not the vinyl) features "Night Of The Succubus", the video that was shot at the same California Babylon live recordings. Like Scheintot, California Babylon is an essential document of San Francisco's industrial culture!
We first heard this Philly garage psych combo via their debut lp on Siltbreeze, which was a killer, and Siltbreeze was definitely the perfect match, as is Hozac, the label that put out this brand new 7", the A side of which begins with a woozy, druggy sprawl of dirgey psychedelia, the feel very eighties Aussie, until the track explodes into a frenzy of guitar crunch and drum bombast, spaced out and heavy, a little bit Sonic Youthy for sure, a pounding garage psych freakout that we can't get enough of!
The B side starts out with some lo-fi noise pop garage punk swagger, crooned vox over an almost Gary Glitterish groove, a little glammy, with a killer main hook, before the final track an echo drenched super noisy garage rock pound, all sweat drenched, bloody nosed, fat lipped blow out. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 475 COPIES!!
Yet another Fleet Foxes offshoot whose sound doesn't fall that far from the FF tree. And we're not complaining. It took us a while to decide that we did indeed love the Fleet Foxes, but once we did, we couldn't get enough, which makes this proliferation of sort-of-sound-alikes good news for folks like us who love THAT sound and want more. But like the Poor Moon record we reviewed recently, Father John Misty, the work of former FF drummer Joshua Tillman, who seems to effortlessly capture the same sort of timeless sounding folk pop as the FF mothership. But where Fleet Foxes tended more toward traditional folk sounds, Father John Misty is definitely on the pop side of the spectrum, the arrangements lush and expansive, strings and percussion, piano and all manner of studio filigree, the songs rife with rich layered drones, lush old fashioned production, and Tillman's voice is fantastic, spending much of its time in the upper registers, sounding not unlike Roy Orbison at times, the music appropriately orchestral, and then there are the lyrics, which pop out once in a while, especially when Tillman is singing something about punching himself in the face, or something about Jesus Christ, but delivered in that gorgeous velvety croon, over some lush dreamy twang flecked pop, it's hard not to love. Lots of dreamy ooooh's and aaaah's, cool crunchy guitars, big bombastic drumming (just check out "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings", which might be our favorite track), wheezing organs, groovy electric pianos, programmed beats here and there, slippery slide guitar, the songs all over the map, stripped down folk, fuzzy almost indie pop, dark country, lush chamber pop, sixties psychedelic rock, and more often than not, some mix of them all.
Super cool eye popping psychedelic cover art too!
Listen on: Deezer
We try to get everything we can on our pal Jason's Ormolycka label, we usually only manage to get enough to put a few in the store, so while some lucky local tape nerds have managed to snag some of these, our long distance tape obsessives have been left in the cold until now. Of the many releases on Ormolycka, we've only really ever managed to list a few. There was the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), this week we have a big handful of Ormolycka tapes, enough to finally review on the list, one of which is this, the first we've heard from a mysterious outfit called GDFX, who we know nothing about, other than this tape is a sweet slab of low end synth buzz, stuttery fractured beats, looped layered drones all woven into a sort of tranced out new age big beat lo-fi synth pop, that slips from creepy minimal thrum to tripped out skitter to 8-bit video game groove, easily on of our favorite jams on Ormolycka.
The last Glitterbug record showed up in the midst of some sort of electronica renaissance, with fantastic new records from Pantha Du Prince, Actress, Klimek, T++ (sad we haven't heard anything else from them/him) and a bunch more, so Glitterbug, the work of a German DJ/producer fit perfectly with all of those, the sound lush and layered, softly psychedelic, cosmic with a definitely Pop Ambient vibe. We played that record to death. This record looks to follow suit, but unlike that first one, which was more a full self contained sound world, woven from both studio work and live recordings, this record, Cancerboy, is a much more personal collection, focusing on Glitterbug's struggle with cancer as a boy (hence the title). The record even starts off with what sounds like the ambient sound of a hospital room, the wheezing and beeping of machines, the voices of doctors and nurses, which gives way to the opening track "To Guess", which takes some of those sounds and weaves them into a dark, droney stretch of moody electronic melancholia, a hushed rhythmic shuffle, warm shimmery drones, little flecks of glitchery here and there, a super simple kick drum pulse, tinkling chimes, and ethereal melodies, quite haunting and cinematic, and an appropriately somber opening for a record with such a dark focus. But the darkness is not all encompassing, the record slips into more sort of Kompakt style minimal techno on "Abyss", a grid of pulse and click, wreathed in dark melodic swirls and brooding low end thrum, but as the song progresses, the melodies percolate wildly, the song grows more distorted and the vibe more frantic.
"Undertow" brings it back down, another Kompakt style shuffle, a woozy moody robotic groove, laced with a spidery minor key melody, the beats and loops in constant flux, sometimes sleek and clinical, other times noisy and rough around the edges, the vibe definitely cool and late night, but seemingly always underpinned by a melancholia that infuses the whole record. Much of the record could very well pass for some modern minimal techno, not knowing the background or the source of the title, but the record is rife with tracks that are a bit more moody and brooding, tracks that peel back the skitter and stutter to reveal the darkness underneath, like on "From Here On", that loops a strange echo drenched hand clap beat, and then drapes it with thick washes of low end rumble and waves of metallic buzz, as well as some delicate chiming melodies, or on "Dragged Along", which is a hushed sprawl of super spare dubbed out ambience, that skitters amidst vast swirls of barely there sonic shimmer, only coalescing into a proper beat near the end, and even then, wreathed in wistful melodies, or on "Outside My Window", which is a lush collage of tangled beats and murky swirling melodies and blurred psychedelic textures, that seem to gradually bleed into one another.
One of six records which were originally part of a multi part release from local label Time Released Sound, whose releases are initially presented as deluxe hand crafted art editions, which we carry when we can, but in the case of this series, dubbed the 'chocolate box' series, which found each record pressed onto 3" cd-r's and packaged in a mini chocolate box, every box hand assembled, and every one different, the set had a seriously hefty price tag, and sold out super quick anyway, so while we weren't able to get our hands on the deluxe versions, thankfully the records were also available as proper cds in more modest packaging. We already reviewed the first two installments on the last New Arrivals List, Taskerlands and David Newlyn, and this week, we have the other four.
One of which is this one, from Rezo Glonti, a Georgian sound artist (as in the republic of Georgia, not GEORGIA), whose sound is a lush and lovely hybrid of warm washed out swells and mysterious electronic glitchery. Hazy dreamlike shimmers wreathed in swirls of static give way to hushed delicate ambient folk peppered with lush textures, buried field recordings surface and fade away, the vibe is almost choral, the sounds stately and serene, the strange clouds of electronics transforming a muted minimalism into something much more abstract and mysterious, as if they were lost broadcasts, being intercepted from some alternate universe or being sent forward from the past. The gauzy patina that surrounds most of these songs give them the feel of an antiquated unearthed recording, we hear shades of TIm Hecker and Philip Jeck, the same sort of soft focus staticky shimmer and woozy warbled melodies, all smeared into a bleary bit of electronic ambient drift, that is quite entrancing and mesmerizing.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
After recently making two recent offerings on the Medical Records label into Records Of The Week (Axxess and Lou Champagne System), we figured we oughta review a couple other kick ass Medical releases that somehow slipped under our radar. One of those is a collection of lost tracks from a Swiss teenage synth / electro-pop duo, with the unlikely name Guyer's Connection, whose Portrait lp originally released in 1983 is a synth nerd holy grail.
The tracks here were recorded around the same time as Portrait, but were only rediscovered in 2005, and include a mix of unreleased tracks and reworked versions of older songs. And the sound definitely seems right at home amongst the current crop of synth retro-revivalists, in fact, if these guys weren't so obscure, you'd swear some of the synth kids today owed much of their sound to these two. But unlike much of the brooding Carpenter / Goblin worship these days, a lot of the music here is fun and playful, even kind of goofy, it is after all a couple of teenagers with 2 synths, a drum machine and a 4 track, just check out opener Discoqueen II" with its woozy vocodered vox, bloopy bleepy percolating synths and skittery drum machines, or the krautrocky "Laugh About" which sounds a little like Kraftwerk gone haywire, with some bizarre sampled voices, and a deep dramatic main vocal.
There's also a strange cover of a German children's song, with lyrics by Kurt Weill, which sounds like the guy who plays organ in the mall, all cheesy easy listening organ and shuffling rhythm underneath weird sing songy vocals and twisted music box melodies.
And while all that playful goofiness is occasionally balanced by tracks like "Flow", a dark, brooding, slightly sinister, slab of soundtracky synth creep, the record seems to spend most of it's time pulsating through autobahn like expanses of sleeky synthy futurism, and groovy electro-synth, pop weirdness, the songs super varied, and featuring a surprising array of vocalists, and vocal styles, which gives the record a distinctly twisted outsider vibe. Killer stuff, and definitely recommended for the legions of aforementioned retro synth revivalists out there.
Pressed on 180 gram green vinyl, housed in super striking silver on green jackets, and LIMITED TO 600 COPIES, each on hand numbered. Sold out at the label, so these are the last copies we'll be able to get.
The former lead guitarist for Loop has been on quite a journey of sonic deconstruction over the years, beginning in the mid-'80s through the drone-rock hypnosis of black sun psychedelia via Loop which dissolved into the equally hypnotic, but incrementally decentered project Main; and now recording under his given name, Hampson has ventured into the hallowed GRM studios in Paris. It is definitely the aesthetic of Michel Chion, Bernard Parmegiani, and Pierre Schaefer that guides this album, and not those of The Stooges or 13th Floor Elevators. We have heard rumors that Hampson intends to resurrect Main (possibly with Stefan Mathieu in tow); but until then, we'll be very content with the acousmatic abstractions of Repercussions. The title track bristles with thorough abstractions of percussive objects - piano, drums, gamelan, metal grates are all cited; and the rhythmic potential of those objects is reflected, refracted, smeared, and cracked into luminous frequencies and churning vibrations that are very similar in scope to the electronic cosmology that Parmegiani forged through his seminal records in the '70s. The second track continues down this line with deep space transmissions of sound that was in fact commissioned for a piece by the Planetarium in Poitiers, France. Yeah, it is the sound of solar flares, pulsars, nebula, red giants, and black holes, with all of the complexities of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and string theory intertwined in the dense network of overlapping tones, drones, crackles, and negations. The third piece was originally released on the split 10" with Cindytalk, a glacial piano piece that draws inspiration from those beautiful and haunting piano / ambient pieces from Cindytalk. It's the closest to a structured song that Hampson has done in nearly 20 years, and it's fantastic way to end this album.
Editions Mego presents this in both a stereo format on a regular cd, and as a 5.1 surround experience on dvd. The cd sounds pretty fucking stellar, and we can only imagine the 5.1 version will sound even better.
Attention Finnish music freaks, yet another weird and wonderful discovery from our favorite far away sonic Mecca. Colossal is the debut full length (released in 2008) from this Finnish stoner sludge combo, whose sound is gloriously thick and viscous, blown out and blisteringly heavy, a mix of Kyuss-y desert buzz, churning aggro AmRep-y noise rock, Eyehategod slo-mo Sabbathy dooooom and crumbling Torche style distorto pop, all tangled up into a super (subtly) hooky and heavy psychedelic brew. Plenty of stonery swing for sure, so fans of recent aQ faves like Black Pyramid, Orchid, Obrero, Freedom Hawk and all things Meteor City should definitely check this out, but ONLY if they're ready for something WAY more fucked up, sludgey and super distorted, with lots of the songs smoothly segueing from grinding, howling tarpit heaviness to groovy near poppiness, sometimes laced with wild psychedelic leads, wah wah guitars, other times, just utterly filthy and distorted and blackened, the drums bombastic, the arrangements mathy and super dynamic, with the occasional stretch of woozy stripped down slither, and sprawling expanses of detuned ultradoom crawl, but generally spending most of its time in either super sludgey stoner mode, or wildly pounding noise rock mode, usually some unholy union of the two. The magic to the record really is the recording though, which is impossibly heavy, ridiculously blown out, the sound super saturated and in the red, it sounds like the tape is frying or the speakers are melting, the guitars so distorted they become heaving swells of crumbling buzz, anchored by the drums and transformed into some seriously fierce riffage, the sort of tranced out riffiness that turns this into something just as spaced out and psychedelic as White Hills or Carlton Melton or any of those outfits (just check out the tranced out closer "Death") albeit WAY WAY heavier. Definitely recommended if for folks who dig the EXTREMELY slow and low, Sleep, Bunkur, Conan, Monarch, the Body, Otesanek, Slomatics and the like, but these guys definitely have their own twisted take on that sound, one that has us already tracking down their newer one, which will hopefully show up on a future list...
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.
We just got done raving about the brand new record from weirdo garage-pop punks The Intelligence, when what should show up, but ANOTHER new record, well, not actually new, but new to us! Originally released in 2009, on the French label Born Bad, and only showing up here for the first time in the last few days, but we're not complaining, in fact it's like some sort of garage punk Christmas. And like Everybody's Got It Easy But Me, Crepuscule With Pacman is another killer chunk of whatthefuck garage pop that manages to be catchy and jangly and fuzzy, and yet totally bafflingly bizarre. Crepuscule is much more raw and low fidelity, but it definitely suits them, the songs super stripped down, and repetitive, a but minimal, a little murky, but still impossibly catchy. the more we listen to these guys, the more we're surprised so many people dig em, cuz they are definitely difficult. The songs here run the gamut from frenetic angular almost new wave, to Velvets-y dronedirge, from crunchy atonal post punk noise rock to stripped down classic sixties style jangle pop, but really, whatever these guys are doing, they're just a little bit off, a little bit twisted, making the tracks here sound like some sort of alternate universe garage pop band, whose very existence and interruption of the space time continuum, cause their music to warp and warble, but every time we begin to think that (and yes, we think that a lot), they'll slip into some totally perfect pop, or unveil a ridiculously masterful hook. Mixing synths and surf rock, twisted guitars, and warped outsider pop into something that we can't get enough of, and should definitely appeal to fans of groups like Thee Oh Sees, Bare Wires, Ty Segall, White Fence and all the rest, who like their garage pop on the seriously skewed side of the sonic spectrum.
We made Jaill's That's How We Burn our Record Of The Week back in 2010, and here it is more almost two years later, and literally the only thing that is keeping us from STILL listening to that record constantly, is a NEW Jaill record the third full length since 2009 from this psych pop outfit from Milwaukee, and while ANY record that is the follow up to one as obsessively and slavishly listened to as That's How We Burn is already set up to be a disappointment, all it took was a few listens to Traps to convince us that while this might not be our favorite Jaill record, it's our second favorite, and that alone puts it miles ahead of pretty much all of the other indie pop records out there. The secret weapon on That's How We Burn was "Thank Us Later" (which to this day, remains the most played tune in Andee's iTunes), which definitely ranks up there as one of our favorite pop jams ever. On Traps, that honor this time around ends up being a tie between album opener "Waste A Lot Of Things", and the record's final track "Stone Froze Mascot". "Waste A Lot Of Things" is a perfect slab of jangly indie pop, beholden to much of what came before, but so distinctive it could only be Jaill, a little surfy, a little indie rock, but the melodies, the vocals, the strange arrangements, the lush production, the impossible hooks and killer chorus. We'd been listening to that track nonstop, and it wasn't the first time we listened to the whole record all the way through, that we finally discovered "Stone Froze Mascot", which sounds like a weirdly new wavey dub version of a track from the first record, fuzzy synth low slung bassline, up-stroke guitar, hazy la la la background vocals, weird FX, the vocals dubbed out too in places, the whole thing so impossibly catchy, and yet still so weird.
And it's not just those bookends, with every listen, we discover a new favorite. "Everyone's A Bitch" is a current fave, all big guitar jangle, and chiming classic pop chorus, although "I'm Home" is another doozy, all off kilter and woozy but crazy catchy, and "Perfect Ten" a sort of stripped down sleeper hit, hell, we're on the verge of just going through the whole record song by song. New favorite pop record hands down, and the only record that's managed to bump the first Jaill or the recent Mrs Magician record, which is saying a LOT. Anyone who loved That's How We Burn, needs this, and anyone after some crazy catchy off-the-beaten-path slightly off kilter indie rock, you could not do better than this. Already secured a spot on some of our year end top ten lists, and it's only June!
Glass Canyons marks the first time, Bay area-based experimental musician Marielle V. Jakobsons (Date Palms, Myrmyr, darwinsbitch) has recorded under her own name, and it's a delicate balance between her more classical and experimental tendencies. Overriding melodies take a back seat to texture, rhythm and spatialization, the feeling of hiking through a varied terrain of wild topographies: glacial drift, windy deserts and oceanic turbulence. Bowed vibrational strings sometime sway in lyrical folk filigrees, but only make apparitional appearances throughout before disintegrating in a sea of modulating tones and an undercurrent of bell-tone piano figures. Darker uncertain moods sometimes cloud over before blissful lighter notes burst forth like dappled sunlight. It's an album that has the uncanny ability of feeling free-form and carefully constructed at the same time, and so in tune with a sensitive nature that makes it seem like we're roaming through a strange new world. Lovely!
Kandodo? If the name sounds familiar it's maybe 'cuz you've got the Wooden Shjips remix 12" wherein Kandodo was one of the participants. Aha, that's right, Kandodo is the solo project from guitarist Simon Price of UK fuzz psych mongers The Heads! And, following that Shjips remix, here's his first full-length under that moniker (the name of a supermarket in Malawai, where Simon grew up), released also through Thrill Jockey.
So, this should be of extreme interest to the legion of Heads fans out there. Even though, this -isn't- one of those solo projects that sounds just like the person's main band. Kandodo, a spacey guitar n' effects based, all-instrumental manifestation of chilled out cosmic krautronics, is a different, more blissful beast indeed, one that's rather more in the mode of deep, late night and early morning listening, for prayerful headphone inner/outer mind explorations.
Still, this is the sort of thing that we'd expect any fan of The Heads to enjoy as well. Also fans of Zomes, Expo 70, Barn Owl, Bjorn Olsson, Urthona... and there's also just a hint of Dr. Who theme music whoosh to this too. It's epic and echoing; both gentle and ominous, rhythmic and serene... Mellow and memorably melodic (each track, individually) even though composed, in the main, of hypnotic waves of droning distorted guitar, seeming simple and stark. Also some keys, tambourine, and lo-fi field recordings are woven into these "fuzzy lullabies" as Simon calls them.
While in OUR universe Simon is a rock star, if he ever needs to pick up some extra work, this release proves he could / should easily get commissioned to do soundtracks to BBC documentaries about, like, ancient science and cosmology. We're envisioning this music accompanying images of pyramids and henges and starry night skies quite effectively. Furthermore, certain tracks here could give the likes of Umberto some competition in the imaginary giallo suspense film soundtrack department, too.
About our only complaint is that this disc eventually comes to an end (after nine tracks) rather than being somehow limitless in duration, infinite and eternal the way it seems it should be.
Quite highly recommended, in fact, we came pretty close to making this a Record Of The Week, probably should have, as we think it's a must have for many of our customers...
