Often touted as the "loudest band in New York," A Place To Bury Strangers has lived up to the billing with their Jesus & Mary Chain worship, played out through squalls of guitar noise, post-punk rhythmic propulsion, and the laconic vocal delivery of frontman Oliver Ackerman, who gives a spot-on impersonation of JAMC's Jim Reid. Over the course of their discography, they've experimented more and more with Ackerman's handmade effects pedals that give their incendiary guitar noise a pretty distinct crackle and buzz. But, on Worship, A Place To Bury Strangers seems to be parting ways with the band that's been the object of their own worship since the beginning. Well, at least a little bit! The Reid brothers presented their jet-black surf noise with a sneering fuck you, and their punk attitude was never too far away from canonical rock 'n' roll posturing; and A Place To Bury Strangers doesn't entirely embrace that JAMC too cool for school aura. They are expressionists at heart, and they want to connect with their audience through the dynamics of noise, even if that expression is accompanied with bleeding ears! The JAMC structural template may remain, but the guitar noise here is all the more explosive, twisted, darkly psychedelic, dynamic, and downright fucked-up. As a song, "You Are The One" isn't much to write home about with its Simon Gallup basslines and a semi-whispered narrative; but the guitars blast around the song in so many directions, rocketing through a constant barrage of distorted explosions, punctured by short, gated pauses at which the noise rapidly change directions due less to melody and more to a stomp on yet another pedal. "Mind Control" warps the underlying song through a heady tremolo pattern and flanging, tight delays that launch into a form-destroying crescendo at the end of the track. Amidst all the infernal noise, A Place To Bury Strangers exhibits a considerable amount of subtle, deftly rendered dynamics that would totally be lost in their conquest of the title "loudest band in New York." Maybe they're becoming a two-headed beast, with the studio work becoming more intricate, while the live side remains bloodthirsty for that sonic destruction.
Japanese psych overlords Acid Mothers Temple have made a LOT of albums, as you probably know. Experts that we are, we still can't claim intimate knowledge of 'em all. But, if someone asks us for a favorite AMT recommendation, this one is definitely does come to mind more often than not. It's one of the AMT essentials, in our book. So we're glad it's at long last been reissued, on vinyl, again! It was first issued as an lp on Eclipse long ago back in the year 2000, then went out of print, and was eventually put out on cd by Swordfish.
La Novia is a dark and droning take on the usual Acid Mothers Temple mix of hippie freak rock and experimental psych weirdness, with lots of faux-throat singing. Apparently this is based on traditional "Occitanian" folk music, which from the album graphics would appear to be a region of France. Hmm? (Later AMT projects have continued to make this particular, peculiar ethnic connection.) In any event, it's a heavy, forty-minute trip-out mixing everything from distorted guitar and spacey synth to violin and bouzouki. Plus another twenty haunting minutes, via the bonus tracks. Really great, heavy duty stuff. One of our all-time-favorite AMT discs - and that's saying something, since there are now so many, and most are so good. On La Novia, Makoto Kawabata and Co. (this album including erstwhile member Cotton Casino) certainly furthered their quest for ultimate psychedelic world domination!
This reish limited to 1000 copies, packaged in a thick gatefold jacket.
This is the first we've heard from Akatombo in more than three years. The last cd from this Scotsman living in Japan came in the form of Unconfirmed Reports, a record we sold tons of back in the day, and even after several years, False Positives seems to take up pretty much right where Unconfirmed Reports left of. A killer collection of programmed beats, layered samples, dark atmospheres, thick guitars, and droney-ambience, sounding at times like Muslimgauze, or like a more chill Necro Deathmort, or one of those bands who might have shared a compilation with Techno Animal or Sidewinder back in the day. The vibe is definitely on the isolationist tip, murky and claustrophobic, the beats are crunchy and caustic, more often lurching and lumbering than skittering or shuffling, and those beats are set amidst thick swells of grim sinister ambience, and blackened latenight atmospheres. And as we mentioned in our review of Unconfirmed Reports, that really is just the way we like it. A sort of dubbed out downtempo dance music that's not so much for dancing, but lurking, hanging out in the shadows, in empty clubs in empty cities, everything crumbling and decayed, a seriously dystopic soundtrack for some wasted scorched earth future.
The opening track is super misleading, a Kompakt style house music rife with samples, and dubbed out snares, it has us thinking that maybe things had in fact changed, but then the second song kicks in and we're back in the dark dank world that Akatombo seems to call home, sounding like a backing track for some Sensational B Side or a long lost Spectre jam, all low slung and dirgey, twangy Morricone guitars over a loping blackened groove, very cinematic, almost like Barry Adamson by way of Techno Animal, but then it just keeps getting darker, the beats more muted, the textures more blurred and dense, the vibe sinister and malevolent, murky pulses beneath thick swirls of tarpit thrum, clouds of blackbuzz driven by a machinelike industrial pound, stuttery rhythms wrapped around fragmented samples and the occasional stretch of almost big beat groove, which gives way to some blackened slithery downtuned dirgery, which in turn becomes a gauzy almost Tim Hecker like sprawl, before once again, splintering into another stretch of abject rhythmic miserablism, or tranced out blackhole propulsion.
Packaged in an oversized full color sleeve, inside are liner notes, as well as random newspaper clippings, and like Unconfirmed Reports, False Positives also includes a dvd-r with a handful of videos.
The return of these aQ beloved local psychedelic spacelords (and lady), whose sound has always bucked the prevailing modern psych/space convention of sound over song, rooting their sound in proper songs, catchy hooky SONGS, beholden to classic sixties jams and seventies classic rock, hints of Neil Young, the Allman Brothers, the Outlaws, collide with more modern/heavy influences like Monster Magnet and contemporaries like Wooden Shjips and Earthless (whose Isaiah Mitchell guests here), obviously, if you dig stuff like Carlton Melton and White Hills and Sleepy Sun and Moon Duo and The Heads and the Spyrals, odds are you probably already dig these guys too. But if not, they definitely come at their sound from a drastically different direction. On past records we compared them to Monster Magnet and Dinosaur Jr., and mentioned their penchant for Southern style rocking, but if anything, on Manzanita, Assemble seem to have shifted dramatically, fully embracing that Southern rock side, and combining it with a serious seventies classic rock vibe, and conjured up a killer set of songs that sound like they came from right back in the day. Albeit with a more modern production. Otherwise, this could be the band you saw opening for the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore, the same sort of extended jams, the band locked into heady grooves, the bass thick and fuzzy, the drums tight and propulsive, the guitars running the show, from the crunchy riffs to the extended heart-of-the-sun solos, all accompanied by whirring organs, fluttering flutes, laced with plenty of twang, the vocals laid back and croony, the songs subtly catchy, slow burning and smoldering, sometimes shuffling dreamily, other times pounding away in a psych rock frenzy, usually a mix of the two. And this time around the vocals definitely seem to be a focal point, maybe as much as the guitars, with most of the songs displaying some gorgeous lead vocals and even more incredible harmonies, the result a fantastic slab of retro spaced out psychedelic Southern rock that might just be our favorite Assemble record yet.
Of the four new Tapeworm tapes on this week's list, this might just be the weirdest. The label describes this recording very graphically, as a post coital nude woman draped over a piano, languidly brushing her hands on the keys, but in reality, it sounds more like many hands pounding wildly on a wooden box, contact mic'ed and submerged in water. Woozy and percussive, wreathed in a thick cloud of tape hiss, and a super lo-fi production, it's easier to imagine a strange assemblage of automatons, running on rubber bands and rusty springs, each set before a mysterious box, then wound and let loose, their flailing implements producing an erratic, but strangely mesmerizing tattoo of thumps and thwacks, ever one trailing a strange bit of FX drenched static behind it, sound at times like blunted, blurred, muted firecrackers, and at other like some primitive monochromatic drum circle.
The flipside is a whole 'nother thing altogether, but again about as far as you can get from the nude woman on the piano, instead, it's a slow building swell of crumbling caustic noise, that builds to thick billowing blackened clouds, before sprawling out into a darkly hypnotic expanse of blunted blacknoise shimmer, still wrapped in a gauzy layer of crunch and buzz, but the near melodic thrum beneath transforming it into something haunting and hypnotic, but still plenty noisy and distorted.
The liner notes also offer a special thanks to "a loud, short, fat, hairy-assed, umbrella-carrying American", which doesn't clear up any of the tape's mystery, at all.
Yet another reissue from the illustrious Southern California black metal collective known as the Black Twilight Circle, this one from the oddly monikered Axeman, whose lone 2010 demo was previously only available as a super limited cassette, but is now available again, as a slightly less limited lp.
As we mentioned in our reviews of some other recent Black Twilight reissues (Odz Manouk, Tuukaria), the Black Twilight Circle is modeled after the infamous French Black Legions, which included bands like Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes, with just a small handful of members, each playing in different groups in different arrangements. Volahn, the man behind Axeman, also performs under his own name, as well as in a number of other lesser known projects, and at one time played both in Bone Awl (live) and Ashdautus. In Axeman, though, Volahn mixes his old school crusty black thrash with classic eighties style metal, at least on the opener "Metnal", with its synth laden, spidery minor key opener, that sounds like some lost metal ballad, before kicking into full on rocking, rife with wild shredding leads, and chaotic drumming, we'd have ben happy if that was the total of Axeman's sound, but instead, the sound shifts to a more chugging dirgemetal, with raspy vokills, before finally exploding into some blasting thrashing metallic mayhem, raw, primitive, chaotic and loose, the shredding leads returning, and the sound shifting back to that classic metal sound that opened the track. "Kosmic Death" is a much black beast, frantic and frenzied, way more black metal, a murky lo-fi onslaught that is as filthy and buzzy as anything else we've heard from the Black Twilight bands, with some awesome King Diamond like falsetto wails. And finally, "Attestor of Doom And Birth" is a wild blast of old school black thrash, the sound so blown out and distorted, it often turns into a dense wall of droned out buzz, but when the buzz is dialed back a a bit, a tangle of buried melody is revealed, and soon the leads return, which definitely add something special, as most black metal seems to have dispensed with guitar solos entirely. Here it just gives the sound a classic speed/thrash metal vibe, which is a cool match with Axeman's more grim sinister murky leanings. The production is awesomely lo-fi too, with the tape hiss sometimes so loud it's like another instrument, which again, just adds to the atmosphere, and if you're like us, make it sounds even cooler.
Full color printed inner sleeves and nice thick black and red jackets.
[note: The sound is a bit less lo-fi on the lp, these samples were made from the tape version]
There was a while, where every New Arrivals list had at least one release from Aidan Baker on it, whether solo or with Nadja, and heck, there were plenty of lists with two, three, sometimes even four AB releases. And even though they were all pretty great, it was hard to not get overwhelmed. Even beyond being able to AFFORD that many records, that's a lot of music to take it. So after a stretch of hearing very little from Mr. Baker, this new record of processed solo guitar comes as a nice surprise, and not just because we were actually hankering for more, which we of course were, but also because it's actually quite lovely, a dark and delicate collection of hushed, blurred ambience, that right off the bat reminded us a bit of Oval's Diskont 94, but where that record created a lush landscape of liquid shimmer from skipping cds and digital errata, Baker accomplishes something similar with just a guitar and some effects, transforming his guitar into a softnoise generator, in fact, this is the perfect music to lull you into a deep trance, it's not hard to imagine this as the perfect white noise machine for weirdo underground music nerds, the sounds a series of smeared swirls, at times sounding like some super minimal modern classical music slowed way down, and at others, an expanse of layered lush dronemusic, the first half of the record tends toward a super hushed soporific drift, but the guitar seems to become less obfuscated toward the end of the record, the songs becoming more like abstract Appalachia, but still looped and blurred into hypnotic stretches of woozy mesmer, culminating in the record closer, which pairs a warbly bit of guitar loopage with lush lustrous chordal swells, and some more distinct melodies, mournful and melancholy, all of which seem to bleed into each other, transforming the song into something impossibly lovely, yet still utterly hypnotic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Second collaboration from longtime aQ fave Matt Baldwin and his multi instrumentalist co-conspirator, and like Year Of The Dog before it, Dream Still is another mesmerizing blur of psychedelic layers and swirling looped ambience, think Fripp, Rother, Gottsching and of course Reich and Riley. But instead of en exercise in rigid minimalism, this is some seriously freaky far out psychedelia. Listening to opener "Notes On Entering The Tower", it's not hard to imagine this as some lost recording from the seventies, it's got a little Miles Davis going on, a little Herbie Hancock circa Sextant, Baldwin and Georis delivering a sort of washed out kosmische psych-funk groove that comes in waves, most of the track spent blissfully looping, trance-y and hypnotic, but then the drums slip in and sound builds to something more propulsive and druggy and mesmerizing. Total seventies style psych groove bliss out.
The two part "Dream Still" suite is a bit less druggy, and instead is delicate and dreamlike, the first part almost like classic Appalachia, but the fingerpicked steel string melodies, laced with hushed piano melodies, and wreathed in clouds of swirling sci-fi FX and warm spaced out synth shimmer, while the second part, pushes the sound back into a sort of psychedelic krautrock territory, another loopscape of pulsing synths and layered guitar, hushed and minimal and motorik, with just a hint of that groove from the first track.
Until finally, Baldwin and Georis finish things off with the sprawling 13+ minute "Boogie Corporation", which adds some primitive programmed rhythms to the mix, sounding like a groovier more seventies sounding Expo 70, the guitars layered and looped, not quite a 'boogie', but definitely with some groove going on, and very much in line with the opening track, warm washes of synth shimmer beneath almost-funky guitars, with melodies and textures piling up and constantly shifting, the sounds swirling and space-y, the keyboards dreamily tangled up with the spidery guitars, total trip out celestial psych kraut mesmer, that even at 13 minutes ends way too soon.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Housed in plain cardstock origami style fold over sleeves, with black and white paste on artwork and a photocopied insert.
It's hard to predict what songs will become hits, it's a magical mystical mysterious talent that few possess, and the ones who do wield that power like kings. But every once in a while, it's totally obvious, no secret talent needed, that jam you heard in the grocery store, in the background of a commercial, on the radio in the car, all it takes is a few seconds, and it's lodged in your head for good. The music, the vocals, the hook, the beat, the lyrics, when everything falls into place, few can resist. Which is also when songs and records get crazy hyped, and inevitably then incur some crazy backlash, which is precisely what happened to Azealia Banks and her song "212". A song we had been hearing about for months, but hadn't actually heard. Or hadn't realized we'd heard. Cuz we had just caught a second of some song on the radio that blew our minds, a weird, double-dutch-y Missy Elliott style stuttery hip-hop jam, all warped beats, skittery rhythms, and some of the craziest vocals, a sort of valley girl drawl, distorted and a little bit blown out, occasionally slipping into a weird dubbed out effects heavy loop, or a squelchy electro groove with an almost shouted hook, before lurching right back into it, with a cool little bloopy synth horn melody, and a lush soulful bridge, weird and warped, but CRAZY catchy. We did some digging and discovered that it was in fact the very same song we had been hearing about. So we looked it up on YouTube, watched the video, which only made us dig it more, AB a total cutie in a Mickey Mouse sweater, dancing with a nerdy pal, while spitting rhymes, and then we noticed just how nasty the lyrics were, easily the most occurrences of the word 'cunt' in a top 40 pop song, and then we wondered how the fuck they could have altered the song for radioplay, considering the 'chorus' is pretty much unbroadcastable. As is the verse really. But whatever. You've probably heard this already, and you probably already dig it too. Needless to say, this is WAY worth the $5 for that song alone, and we listened to that song about a hundred times before we even bothered listening to the rest. But the other three songs are pretty good too, the Missy Elliott influence even more prevalent, one a little bit of a techno vibe, one a little bit housey (with some dark bark beats, and a goofy slowed down vocal outro), and the title track sounding like Missy Elliott by way of Tribe Called Quest. Cool.
Finally! The first two kick ass eps from these Georgia heavies combined into one killer full length (we always thought they sounded like they belonged together on the same record). So for all you metalheads who missed out the first time around (these eps have been out of print for a while), you got yourself another chance, don't blow it.
Man, Baroness just totally destroys. Three massive tracks of Electric Wizard meets the Fucking Champs metal stoner sludge crush. Some of the catchiest riffs we've heard in a while, from strange melodic finger tapping, to soaring Iron Maiden-esque melodies, to groovy southern stoner rock to pummeling detuned sludge to thrashing punk rock with howling throat shredding vocals -- typically all in the same song! The first track on First has an awesome stomping stop start riff with an insidiously catchy little melody, which ends up sounding like Carcass meets the Jesus Lizard. The second track is all Sabbathy sludge / doom with occasional bursts of rapid fire blasting punk rock. But it's all about the third track. A super epic, proggy complex metallic post rock workout, tons of parts, all of them worthy of their own song, super dynamic and totally catchy with Champs-ish breakdowns and weird bursts of abstract ambience. So fucking great!
Baroness' Second, while still heavy and stonery and crushing, seems to be tempering their heaviness with some serious post / math rock, which is just fine with us, think maybe Isis / Pelican majestic sludge metal meets Rodan / June Of 44 style moody post rock. However Baroness' sound still leans way toward the metal side of that equation. Plus, their songs continue to be really weird, rife with strange meters, complex arrangements, lots of slippery guitar harmonies, weird psychedelic wah guitar, spacey electronic burbling, some stretched out slow motion sludge, some intricate riffing and some of the most insane drumming we've ever heard.
The reissue features the original eps' killer artwork, kinda like Pushead doing '60s Fillmore poster art, courtesy of Baroness guitarist, John Baizley, and comes in a digipak with cool embossed metallic lettering housed in a slip cover.
Not too long ago, Ideologic Organ pressed up one of Sir Richard Bishop's tour only cd-rs onto vinyl; and now we have an entirely different set of recordings also culled from a tour only cd-r, this time released by the German record shop Unrock, which hosted the former Sun City Girl during one of his many forays across Europe. Replete with acoustic and semi-acoustic instrumentals, The Unrock Tapes follows much of Bishop's solo career in swatting away stylistic distinctions between the sacred and the profane. Tracks like "Matadora" and "Almeria" leap around the sound of flamenco with a wild-eyed, yet cocksure aplomb through the rasping strum and manic fingerpicking. Bishop employs the same showmanship on the Americana numbers like "Boxcar Serenade", a Faheyesque ditty and "William Goat's Gruff" which gives a jitterbug backbone to his Delta blues reprisal. And of course, Bishop delves into the Omar Korshid fakebook on "Empty Quarter", as a dynamic, Arabic dervish blistering with frenzied solos, countered by the highly opiated raga of "Navaratri," pocked with acoustic scrabblings and blurred melodies. Of course, it's brilliant... it's Sir Richard Bishop! Limited to 500 copies though, we must warn.
Most long time readers of the aQ list are familiar with the stumbling weirdo surf guitar flecked outsider black metal of the German horde Varghkoghargasmal, whose peculiar brand of 'wooden metal' was a huge hit around here. So much so that our very own Andee released Varghkoghargasmal's Drowned In Lakes on his tUMULt label. Varghkoghargasmal mainman Avenger has more up his sonic sleeve, including not one, but two other projects on this week's list, one of which is this twisted blackened duo, appropriately monikered Black Priest Of Satan, which finds Avenger teamed up with the also awesomely named Molestor Kadotus, the two conjuring up a sound that's not all that far removed from Varghkoghargasmal actually. The drums are murky and stumbly, the guitars fuzzed out, the whole sound is loose, off kilter and home brewed, some seriously raw primitive satanic black doom, which is only further twisted by the crazed vocals, multiple vocal lines, some growled, others almost chanted, and still others soaring into shrieked falsettos, with voices overlapping, getting all tangled up, drenched in reverb and delay, giving the vokills, and the whole sound, a seriously dubbed out, almost psychedelic vibe. The music itself lurches from slo-mo black metal buzz, to sludgey Sabbathy doom, to lumbering chaotic thrash, always on the verge of collapse, and always wreathed in a seriously fucked up occultic ritualistic vibe, that makes this sound like some lost tape traded artifact from the late eighties or early nineties! Awesome.
Remastered and reissued: the third of BOC's debut trio of masterpieces, from '74. Features 5 bonus tracks -- 3 previously unreleased songs from the "Secret Treaties" sessions ("Boorman The Chauffer", "Mommy", and "Mes Dames Serat") as well as their
Along with full lyrics and photos (each band member posing with guitar in front of a triple stack of Marshall amps), this has liner notes by Lenny Kaye (as do the reissues of s/t and "Tyranny and Mutation" as well).
The Red & The Black! BOC's 2nd album, from 1973, now remastered and all that. Includes 4 bonus tracks: three live tracks from bootlegs, and a studio outtake version of live fave "Buck's Boogie". "The Black Side" (LP side one) rocks hard with aggro classics
BOC (that's Blue Oyster Cult, not Boards of Canada!) has always been mistakenly regarded as some sort of heavy metal band -- and while they originated and/or embraced much of the imagery associated with HM (umlauts, leather pants, long hair, occult symbols)
Contains the hard rockin' hits "Transmaniacon MC", "Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll" along with several other somewhat more obscure but equally brilliant tunes full of the surreal, psychedelic lyrics and guitar work of which these guys were geniuses.
And this reissue also includes four bonus tracks, taken from the band's rejected 1969 demos under the name Soft White Underbelly. These are released here for the first time (well, outside of the recent mail-order only Rhino Handmade release of the Stalk-Forrest Group's entire unreleased album demos, which contains 3 of these cuts). A few of the SWU/SFG tracks were later reworked into BOC tunes, like the bizarre "I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep" found on this album. Recommended!
Another WTF? release from this very much non-blues weirdo duo. As usual, but more so than ever, we're not quite sure what to make of it. Opener "Love's A Rondo" really threw us for a loop. A meandering rock groove jam lead by jaunty jazzy piano, ivories being tickled here in the vein of Vince Guaraldi of Peanuts fame, or even Bill Evans. The sprightly piano then mixes it up with distorted but mellow psych guitar wail. It's like Schroeder from Peanuts jamming with Wooden Shjips or something. Kinda confusional but we like it, an assessment that applies to the whole album. There's a soundtracky vibe to the heavier throb of track two, "Iron Pigs", which features happy but slightly dissonant sounding synth-horns and a steady drum machine thwack-thwack amongst other noises. As the album progresses, all these elements - piano, drum machine, guitar, electronics - woozily weave in and out, kind of mellow, kind of strange, kind of pretty, kind of queasy... It's tough to tell if it's "good" or not, but, well, we guess it IS, in that we like to listen to it, in fact it gets played in the shop quite a bit, and we're talking about it, even... Valley Tangents makes an impression as being not quite like anything else. They've successfully captured a true 'outsider' vibe here. It's like Blues Control decided to make a record today that, had it come out in the '70s, would for sure have wound up on the infamous Nurse With Wound 'list'. Or imagine Vince Vince Guaraldi making a krautrock record, with Brian Eno's help perhaps, one that's both pleasant -and- weird.
If you liked Blues Controls' recent collab with Laraaji, or their previous Local Flavor lp, well, you just might like this too. Or maybe not. We doubt BC are bothered much, they're just gonna keep doing their 'thing', whatever it is!
Full length number three from this mysterious SF black metal horde (who are rumored to share a drummer with SF true metal legends Slough Feg), and their grim blackened buzz meets nineties style post rock hybrid seems to still be in full effect, but this time around they've managed to more seamlessly integrate the two sides of their sonic personality. Where on past records, the schism between clean guitar post rock lope and blasting blackened buzz was pretty distinct, the transitions more abrupt, here, the band seem much more comfortable switching from sound to sound, the best moments being when the blackness bleeds over into the post rock, and vice versa, and that change is all over III, the band unfurling epic blasts of buzzing blackened post rock epicness, and infusing their grim buzz with rhythmic mesmer, and strange haunting spoken word, it definitely makes for a more fully formed and full realized sound.
And on past records, it also took the group a while for the black metal element to assert itself, the group spending much of their time in post rock / math rock territory, but here, the opening track explodes immediately into some frenzied mathy blackened buzz, the sound immediately displaying the above mentioned hybridization, sure there's frenzied riffing and blasting beats, but the sound is soaring and melodic, and the drumming is not just a blast beat, it's wild and insanely chaotic, some of the most amazing drumming we've heard in a while, and that too is all over the record. But all that said, the band still do love to bring it down, and sprawl out into moody minimalism, just check out the gorgeous "Cells", with its spare slowcore guitar, and martial snare, all beneath more spoken word, the melodies chiming, the Slint comparisons more than apt in cases like this, but these guys do it so well, and the band are never that far off from exploding into some frenzied and mathy blackness, those parts making this probably the most black metal sounding of any of the BDN records. But having said that, the heaviness is shot through with loads of melody, and reminds us more of stuff like Fell Voices and Sleepwalker and Deafheaven and Cold Body Radiation and the like, soaring, melodic, buzzy post black metal, that manages to be catchy and sort of pretty but still buzzy and brutal and heavy. And pretty goddamn great.
We should also mention the lyrics, which are amazing, not at all lyric-like, more like short flash fiction, just check out the lyrics to "The Arborist":
"You have disregarded the advice of your friends and entered an accord with the Arborist. He brings you to his special garden at the center of which is a circle of trees. Next to each tree is a sort of well that is meant to receive a person. You will be placed in one of these holes with only your head above the earth. For several weeks you will engage in intense mediation on your novel existence. However, you will eventually grow anxious and restless. Others will come and take their places in the holes near you. You will find it easy to befriend them, but as the months pass you will begin to bicker and experience jealousy. At length, the affinity you feel for your tree becomes something which you cannot express and you will form a union which excludes all others. Soon after, young roots will find you and brush against your most tender places."
Wow. So nuts. We were convinced there was no way that was what he was actually singing, and when we listened close we couldn't discern enough from the raspy vokills, but then suddenly the song shifted, and the vocals changed to a cleaner, spoken word style, and lo and behold, those were in fact the actual lyrics. And all the tracks are like that. Genius!
The return of Botanist, the SF eco-terrorist black metal one man band, whose curious weapons of war are pretty much just drums, voice, and hammered dulcimer! Sound strange, and it most certainly is, and black metal fans have definitely been divided, too weird, and no nearly metal enough for some, perfectly twisted and mesmerizingly oddball for others. We, like many of you, definitely fall into the latter camp, our own Andee having released Botanist's double disc debut, a sprawling collection of short sharp bursts of brittle steel string buzz and furious blasts, but as you may have gleaned from the title of Botanist's third record, some things have changed this time around. Most notably, the tempos are slowed way down, the tonal palette too is much more varied, the sound surprisingly lush, and describing some of the sounds here as simply doom, would definitely be selling short the twisted innovation and warped songcraft on display here.
Just check out the record opener "Quoth Azalea, The Demon (Rhododendoom II)", a swampy, dirgey, slithery creep, that reminds us more of groups like Woven Hand or Der Blutharsch, where the dulcimer manages to sound almost like a piano at times, and the melody is so wistful and melancholy, if it weren't for the raspy vokills, this could be some dark apocalyptic folk ballad. And so goes the rest of the record, unfurling darkly and dramatically, from loping doomy dirge, to creepy slo-mo deathmarch, to strangely propulsive almost post rock, much of this record sounding like something, that sans vox, could be on Temporary Residence, brooding, slow building, majestic and epic, all shot through with a healthy helping of drone, the steel string buzz creating mesmerizing layers of subtly shifting overtones, and woozily tangled melodies. Some of the tracks have a distinctly cabaret vibe as well, but even then, the sound tends to return to something more stately, trudging through thick fields of chiming notes and shimmering buzz, the vocals often buried, but sometimes a demonic croak, and strangely enough, the vocals tend to be at their most demonic, when the music is at its most lovely, which makes for a potent, and fantastically confusional combination.
Fans of the first record will definitely not be disappointed, but folks into brooding slow build post rock, and dark drone driven doom folk, should give a listen as well.
As a bonus, also included is a second disc, called Allies, which finds friends of the Botanist creating their own tracks using drum tracks from the Doom In Bloom sessions. The sounds and songs vary sonically quite a bit, there's strange staticky hushed ambient drift, crushing sludgey slo-mo doom, blown out, soaring hazy mid tempo black metal buzz (courtesy of the Botanist's other band, Ophidian Forest), some corrosive noise too, but there's a clutch of tracks that might surprise folks, the witchy, doomy female vocal driven Bestiary and the pop flecked almost Opeth-y melodic metal of Lotus Thief, but probably our favorite reworking comes from Arborist, whose version starts off as a sort of lumbering, lo-fi bit of screamo-y slo-mo creep, which explodes into a super psychedelic blast of woozy heaviness, the riffs and melodies slipping and sliding and seeming to melt before your very ears. Definitely hope the Arborist and the Botanist do more together in the future (which seems likely, as the Arborist actually records all the Botanist records)...
And if three records is still not enough Botanist for you (it's not for us!), fear not! There are already at least three, if not more, full lengths on deck. We can't wait!
Rituals is the second full-length from these aQ pals, local atmospheric psychedelic heavies Burial Tree, whose last album, Outer Dark, was a big hit around here, and thankfully, Rituals takes up right where Outer Dark left off, in fact if anything, it's a more fully realized disc, a killer concoction equal parts blackened atmospheric ambience, Neurosis like metallic heft, and psychedelic space rock heaviness! It opens with a sprawling expanse of sinister drones, and string laden low end smolder, building to an almost Nitsch like cacophony, shot through with subtle FX, the perfect lead in to "Black Magick Trance", which might be our favorite BT track yet, a driving thunderous psych jam, that's mathy, and proggy and seriously spaced out, and has the group more aligned with outfits like White Hills or the Heads, the same sort of endless shoegazing heart-of-the-sun Hawkwind style zoner jams, the band locked tight into a serious groove, over which the guitars writhe wildly, the song switching gears constantly, a churning math metal workout one second, a killer super dynamic, mathy stuttery start/stop, that leads into a dirgey breakdown, the whole thing laced with strings, and all sorts of swirling effects, the perfect final jam / closing number (which it was when BT played their first ever show recently).
The other three tracks here, while not nearly as bombastic, still offer up everything we've come to dig about these guys, a loping twang flecked Morricone-ish post rock, rife with swoonsome strings, and finished off with a super rocking near metallic outro, a warm washed out atmospheric organ driven dirge that blossoms into a classic almost doom metal heaviness, wreathed in shredding guitars and driven by some serious drum pound and some almost ELO like cello chug, and finally, a gorgeous, malevolent blackdrone combo, cavernous and caustic, a slow shift from soft shimmer to grim buzz, from drifting mesmer to grinding abject blackness. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Nice packaging too with multiple color cardstock inserts.
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Oooh, we love 1968's Notorious Byrd Brothers. Well, most Byrds albums are pretty great, but this one's a reall beaut. Pedal steel and Moog synth co-exist exquisitely, along with 12-string guitar jangle and lovely vocal harmonies, there's songs about drugs and hippies and Vietnam, it's got "Space Odyssey" and other sci-fi mystical stuff while of course they're kinda country too. This reissue includes plenty of liner notes, and six bonus tracks, including "Moog Raga", which is exactly what you think it is, and rad.
These high concept instrumentalists are most definitely not the first group to explore the subtleties of single chords; twentieth century classical music is rife with extended chord performances, and more recently San Diego rock minimalists Physics based their entire career on performing a C chord - it's just that Chord the group are the first to present their single chord process so overtly. They're called Chord to begin with, and each track is titled the specific chord that is being played/explored. And sure, there's some seriously academic stuff going on, the liner notes of their records reveal a deep understanding of music theory, but it's all in the application of the theory, after all we didn't pick this record up to LEARN anything!! Regardless, for whatever academic underpinnings are present, the music of Chord is in fact quite lovely, dark billowing swirls of deep drones and lush chordal whir, this particular chord was already explored on the group's Flora record, but here the group revisit it, and offer two sidelong explorations/reinterpretations/improvisations. The first, subtitled "Stasis", is not in fact as static as the title might lead one to believe. It's a slowly unfurling sprawl of layered low end drones, of subtly shifting overtones, lush textures, rumbling buzz, deep swirling shimmer, super hypnotic for sure, with the sound slowly building to a heavy buzzing SUNNO))) like dirge, but with headphones this wall of crumbling super distorted sound is revealed to be rife with ever shifting sonic colorations, the titular chord being pulled apart, making the inner workings audible, a blackened buzz transformed into a dense swirl of prismatic tonal thrum writ epic and majestic and surprisingly heavy.
The flipside, subtitled "Kinesis", doesn't seem to offer up as much movement as the subtitle suggests, although we're now beginning to understand the subtleties of Chord's process, the kinesis here due mostly to the introduction of drums (courtesy of US Maple's Pat Sampson!), the guitars offering up a looped Reich like backdrop to some heavy drum pound, blustery and bombastic, with moments that shift toward more abstract and jazzy, the drums and guitars seemingly at odds, occasionally coming together in stretches of Necks like minimal groove, but more often than not, sparring wildly, before finally blossoming into a heavy blown out blissy psychedelic raga like outro, all soaring sunburnt guitar buzz and loping tripped out rhythmic pummel. Nice.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Comes packaged in a silkscreened fold over sleeve, and includes TWO download coupons, one for the record proper, and another for a 2010 live set at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.
Anthem collects two sets of long out-of-print 3" inch singles from Joe Colley's earlier days, right after he shed the Crawl Unit moniker in the early oughts. There's the titular track which was originally released on C.I.P, which came out in 2001 and which we had been able to stock back in the day through Mr. Colley himself. The flipside contains all of the material from the uncomfortably packaged triple-business-card cd-r entitled Triptych For Paranoia Calibration, released through the terminally underground California noise label Banned Productions. The first side, subtitled "Static For Empty Life", lifts itself out of deep rumblings with streaming, cold gray ribbons of electrical fizzings that subtly phase across the stereo field. These physically active drones build up to a sublime chorus of electrical field hummings, that deflate into silence before throbbing mechanical stabs of low-bit-rate noise drive to the end of the piece. Where moments of "Anthem" are relatively placid and almost pretty (for a Joe Colley track, that's saying something!), "Triptych" is a torturous affair of brutalist squiggles, damaged circuit-bending techniques, mistreated electronics, and dead-line tones, all of which get caught in out of phase tape loops. Brilliantly toxic work, as always. Limited to just 200 copies.
Death rock and surf rock don't really seem like the best mix, but somehow, that seems to be what Crocodiles's M.O. is, and in the past it seemed to be mostly visual, the band constantly clad in black leather and shades, like some sort of modern day surf pop Lords Of The New Church, and while the music may have had hints of that death rock sound, it was subtle enough that they ended up falling with groups like Wavves, Best Coast, Dum Dum Girls and all the rest, and sounded right at home. We thought maybe that death rock thing would play a bigger part on this new record, based on the very gothy album title, and the even gothier songs: "Electric Death Song", "Hung Up On A Flower", "Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9)". Of course those titles are tempered by ones like "My Surfing Lucifer", which seems to be the perfect mix of surf and death rock. But as much as we wanted all this death rock stuff to come to pass, Endless Flowers takes up pretty much right where Sleep Forever left off, and once we pushed play, we couldn't have cared less, cuz these guys sound as good as ever, and this new batch of songs are killer. Big crunchy fuzzed out guitars, crooned vox, hooks galore, if anything the sound is even more polished than before, the songs more well crafted, which is a little surprising since this new one is on French Kiss. This is the sort of record that usually heralds the move to a major, the one where all the punks yell sell out. But really, no matter hoe much more polished this new one is, Sleep Forever wasn't exactly lo-fi. Some of the druggier Spacemen 3 and Jesus And Mary Chain elements that were a big part of Sleep Forever have definitely been dialed back a bit, in favor of a more jangly pop sound. That said, there are some moments, like on "Hung Up On A Flower" that's plenty dirgey and druggy, and even features a cool super weird trip out in the second half, all detuned guitars and weird foreign female voices, and all sorts of warped production, and the stripped down closer, which also has a sort of woozy softly psychedelic vibe, but elsewhere it's all fuzzy jangly pop and really we couldn't be happier. Definitely a new pop fave for sure.
Listen on: Deezer
Ah-ha! The first D.A.F. record! And boy, was it quite a surprise to hear this one. D.A.F. began in 1978 as a post-krautrock outfit from Dusseldorf, with Robert Gorl, Kurt "Pyrolator" Dahlke, Wolfgang Spelmans, Michael Kemner, and Gabi Delgado originally calling themselves You; but with another German band snatching up the name and releasing the mighty fine album Electric Day in the same year, they decided upon Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft as the new name. A couple of band members were not all too pleased with Gabi Delgado's vocals and lyrics, and he was promptly sacked after their first attempt in the studio. Delgado returned to the band a year later when a few of his detractors left, and he became the iconic frontman for the stripped down D.A.F. with Robert Gorl. That incarnation of D.A.F. spawned an aggressive synth-punk sound that dominated the more abrasive side of new wave throughout the '80s; but this instrumental, motorik album is an entirely different beast. While electronics do make some interesting punctuations to the D.A.F. sound, they were fundamentally a damaged art-rock band with a rhythm section well versed in the classic Can, Neu!, and early Kraftwerk records from earlier in the decade, but they also exploded with slashing guitars, pummelling basslines, and an aggressive angularity that responded to the American contemporaries like DNA and Pere Ubu. Could this influence from American degenerate art-rock be an explanation for the name of the band? In any case, threads of this first D.A.F. record certainly look forward to the likes of Sonic Youth and Circle. The album is a collection of 22 untitled extracts from what seemed to be an exhausting recording session of constantly accelerating rhythmic marches with jagged-toothed guitar riffs that get pretty heavy and churning at times (even reminding us of instru-metallers Gore!), with plenty of interludes of amplifier feedback and spark-plug noise bursts. Part krautrock, part no-wave and new-wave, all rad. Not what we would have expected from their first album, but this is totally an excellent record!
Most aQ customers don't need to know anything other than the fact that there's a new Deathspell Omega to send them scrambling for the buy button (or running down to the shop, if they're local folks). One of those rare bands, whose reputation rightfully precedes them. Every record a stunning sonic masterpiece, and seemingly with every record the band continue to not only hone their unique sound, but to push themselves further and further away from black metal, at least the strictures and tropes that seem to keep so many bands from making truly innovative music. And DSO is most definitely innovative, maybe THEE most innovative black metal band out there, and Drought finds them pushing their sound even further out, while not at all abandoning the gnarled blackness that has defined their sound up until now.
The opening track might be the boldest thing they've done, a spare bit of haunting atmospheric doom creep, with lots of space, chords ringing out, notes decaying gradually, sounding like Low crossed with Skepticism or a heavier blackened Barn Owl, the track a sprawl of minor key twang and distant black buzz, that builds to a loping post rocky chug and churn, that had us thinking DSO might have abandoned the black buzz entirely, but that the second songs erupts in a frenzy of pounding blackness, rife with melody, but impossibly noisy and gnarled, the drums insanely complex, the arrangement dizzying, DSO one of those few bands that have even the most musically savvy scratching their hands wondering not only how the hell do they play this, but how do they come up with it in the first place. Heavy, and heady, melodic, proggy, intricate, intense, somehow catchy to boot, the band deftly flitting from melodic lope to impossibly dense black blast and back again.
The Slint influence is still heavy here, but the band don't dial back the heaviness for those post rockier parts, which gives this new ep a twisted ferocity, that barely lets up, instead of switching to clean guitar and spare arrangement, they douse those post/math moments in black buzz, and transform them into something else entirely.
There are some super melodic moments for sure, the final track especially manages to turn a post rock style groove into a dense black sprawl of distortion drenched heaviness, with strange tripped out stretches of just drums and chanted monklike vocals, but bookended by heavy parts that are SO heavy, and yet so hauntingly melodic. In just a little over twenty minutes, DSO manage to accomplish more than most bands do in a lifetime, creating something at once so perfectly embodying the spirit of true back metal, but at the same time forging their own ultra distinctive sonic path, one that continues to lead them further and further afield, into sonic realms where most other bands fear to tread.
Fellow doom junkies, you'll agree: what could be better than a 3-way sludge split?? Especially when the three bands are all from Finland, 'cause you know we love Finland. Only one of the three bands here, the mighty Frogskin, had we previously heard, but it turns out, ALL of 'em are awesome, and very well-matched, stylistically. In fact, to tell the truth, at first it's hard to tell when one band leaves off and another begins. Demonic Death Judge (great name!), Semtex, and Frogskin each in turn dish out tremendously heavy, lumbering, loping riffage, with a liberal application of feedback, and rasping ugly vokills. Their sludge has a Sabbath-derived swing to it, for sure, and features plenty of psychedelic guitar shred soloing, especially from DDJ. So these three represent the warped Finnish branch of a doomed-out, drugged-up family that includes both Eyehategod and Electric Wizard in its lineage.
First up is DDJ, with three tracks, each over 7 minutes long, their dirty stoner grooves betraying a love of classic '70s psych and metal. They also aren't afraid of some shining melody in their songs, like on one of this album's highlights, "Beneath The Monument", which also makes good use of disturbing samples, layered and looped. Epic, glorious stuff, which is not what we'd usually say about sludge. Then comes the pot-lovin' Semtex, who boast the best and/or cutest logo. Their four tracks are more overtly drug-oriented, the band a bit like the Finnish answer to Bongzilla, delivering lotsa lazy, bluesy, doped out doominess. And then Frogskin wrap things up, their three contributions to this sludgey split taking it into an even filthier, nastier, crustier direction. It's been doomy all along, but now it's time to run and hide, kiddies.
Wow, what a wicked, wasted 3-way! Better than most single-band discs of this ilk we've ever heard. If it's any recommendation - and it is - we've been listening to this A LOT since we got it in. And are also hoping that a Vol. 2 is indeed on the way, as well as new full-lengths by all 3 of these great bands�
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In Allan and Andee's quest to keep everyone up on some of the choice metal they may have missed out on (Kix anyone?), we bring you Fastway. Featuring guitarist Fast Eddie Clark from Motorhead and the Robert Plant like wail of David King (who later found success in the popular Pogues-ish band Flogging Molly, believe it or not!), Fastway struck a perfect balance between '80s hard rock/ pop and heavy '70s Sabbathy dirge. Some might remember their 'big' hit, "Say What You Will". Catchy and groovy and heavy! Also, the song "We Become One" contains the best riff, EVER, Andee insists. Allan, of course, scoffs - well, he loves the riff, but scoffs at Andee's hyperbole. Both agree, though, that this album rules!
Of all the hundreds of super limited Record Store Day releases this year, the double lp superstar collaboration from the Flaming Lips and their 'Fwends' was probably THEE most anticipated one of all, and as might have been expected, those sold out in a heartbeat. But now it's available again, this time as a less limited cd, with different cover art. And yeah, as the title suggests, this is indeed a collection of collaborations, but VERY unlikely ones, with all sorts of other musicians, very few of which we would imagine would normally end up in the same orbit as the Lips. But much has changed over the last couple decades, the band that was once a sloppy chaotic drug rock mess and who toured with bands like the Butthole Surfers, has become one of the biggest bands in the world, and thus, one might not be as surprised to see the list of collaborators: Ke$ha, Biz Markie, Bon Iver, Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, Prefuse 73, Tame Impala, My Morning Jacket, Nick Cave, Lightning Bolt, Yoko Ono, Neon Indian, Erykah Badu, New Fumes, Chris Martin of Coldplay. Weird, huh?
And as much as we want to hate on the modern version of the Lips, and doubt their relevance as a band, all it takes is an earful of their warped psychedelic pop, and we realize that maybe not so much has changed after all. Cuz goddamn if we're not sort of loving this record. The sounds are all over the map, but pretty much always sound like the Flaming Lips, from weird noise drenched electro-pop to drum machine driven psychedelia, from lush orchestral almost choral sounding dreamfolk to rad tripped out electronic skitter and squelch, from fuzzed out falsetto vocal-ed psychedelic dreaminess to super distorted doomy dirgey fuzzy noisepop and even some warm swirly synth heavy new wave.
We had already heard their Lightning Bolt collab, and it's pretty much THEE jam here, heavy and heady, noisy and weird as fuck, the perfect mix of the two bands' sounds, dreamy and woozy one second, wild and drum heavy and chaotic the next, but then the Yoko Ono track is pretty rad too, trippy and abstract, tribal, with plenty of fuzz and buzz and crunch, weird effects, Ono mostly shouting "Do It" over the droned out psychedelic dirgery beneath, and Erykah Badu's Flaming Lips-ed version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" becomes creepy and doomy and super haunting, and heck, even the Chris Martin track is pretty gorgeous too, elegiac, a haunting softly psychedelic ballad that sounds more like the Lips than Coldplay, but manages again to fuse the best of both bands. Needless to say, this is definitely recommended. For new fans and even skeptical old fans like us.
"Funky Junction are an exciting new group that has the pulse of today". All lovers of '70s classic rock & proto-metal, pay attention. This one's a bit of a curiosity, all right, but one that we'd been *very* curious about� Finally reissued, this obscure footnote to rock history: an album of Irish legends-to-be THIN LIZZY playing a bunch of DEEP PURPLE covers! Originally released on lp in 1973 by a budget label called Stereo Gold Award, this was what you'd call an 'exploitation' album, where a producer would get together a group of studio session musicians to try and capitalize on the success of a currently popular band, by putting out their own versions of said band's hits. In this case, it was none other than the young, not yet famous Thin Lizzy trio, who were recruited to record these Deep Purple tunes under a rather goofy pseudonym, 'round about the same time they made their Shades Of A Blue Orphanage album. But since Lizzy's husky-voiced frontman, bassist Phil Lynott, couldn't be expected to wail like Ian Gillan, they brought in the singer from another Dublin band, Elmer Fudd (that's the name of the band, not the singer!) who does a quite capable Gillian impression. Elmer Fudd's keyboardist also appears here, taking on the Jon Lord role. But for our purposes, the treat is getting to hear original Thin Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell and drummer Brian Downey rip it up in the roles of, respectively, Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice.
They romp through these burly Deep Purple hits: "Fireball", "Black Night", "Strange Kind Of Woman", "Hush" (itself a Joe South cover DP did), and "Speed King". But there's also a handful of originals on here too, mostly instrumental psych jams full of wild soloing - in fact, "Dan" is primarily a Hendrixian guitar solo. Good stuff. They were probably all improvised in the studio, though one's based on "The House Of The Rising Sun".
For fans of Deep Purple & Thin Lizzy, obviously, and also those into the likes of Hell Preachers, Inc., The Purple Fox, and other such exploito-artifacts. Pretty neat. Of course, we'd have liked to hear what Phil would have sounded like singing these songs, but it's understandable why he didn't. If only they knew then what we know now.
Funny, they really don't make exploitation albums like this anymore - or, well, maybe today's equivalent are all those string quartet covers albums, like the String Quartet Tribute To Radiohead, The String Quartet Tribute to Bjork, The String Quartet Tribute To Slayer, The String Quartet Tribute To Tool, and A Baroque Tribute To Rush (and by the way, some of those are kinda cool!).
Now, if only someone would reissue the German-language covers of The Sweet that the Scorpions once did�
Yowza! At last, after 3 years, it's here, another huge, totally hand-lettered, profusely comix-illustrated, utterly enthused fanzine for all you psych rock and acid folk freeks!! You can see right away why it takes so long between issues. This ish, editor Plastic Crimewave and a host of like minded contributors bring us the dope on every cool thing they can think of... the Lollipop Shoppe, The Daily Flash, White Witch, The Moody Blues, John Berberian, John DuCann (RIP), Curtis Knight, Status Quo, Kak, and tons more. There's stuff on "Psychedelic Canada", on Texas acid punk (Red Crayola, The Golden Dawn...), country funk, and lotsa prog too (East Of Eden, Egg...).
And along with PCW & the GZD crew's ravings on such subjects, there's also interviews, including chats with Arthur Brown, Rodriguez, Black Widow, Mark Fry, and the Poppy Family, wow. In non-musical (but equally psychedelic) coverage, they examine a lot of freaky '60s comic book artwork too, from Mad Magazine to Marvel...
It all adds up to 112 action-packed pages that will keep you entertained for a long time. Plus, this comes with the usual thick sheaf of way-cool TRADING CARDS (Damaged Guitar Gods set #5, Astral Folk Goddesses set #3!), AND a free cd sampler of "unearthed expansive sounds 1968 - present", many unreleased garage rock obscurities, 23 tracks total, including a live jam from Japan's Mainliner!
Gold Panda's Lucky Shiner had to be one of our favorite electronic records of 2010, a looped and layered gem that played like a more lo-fi version of The Field, and had everyone here a little obsessed. After two years, we get our first taste of some new GP in the form of this limited two track 7", and A side "Mountain" immediately reminds us of why we love Gold Panda so much, a woozy shimmery backdrop, beneath a sort of world music groove, all wreathed in crackle, and laced with Morricone-esque guitar twang, the whole thing has a super Eastern, almost raga like vibe, swooping backwards melodies, some scattered handclaps, until the beat blossoms into something much more booming, and stuttery, a little footwork going on, and the song is transformed into a skittery heady slab of psychedelic electro pop!
The B side, "Financial District", sounds like it could have been plucked right off of Lucky Shiner, with its warbly droning melodies and layered woozy atmosphere, and then the beat drops, all handclaps and tightly wound skitter, laced with some old school 808's, the track a groovy sun-dappled prismatic sonic shuffle, with a gorgeous psychedelic second half, all fractured electronics and soaring high end melodies. So good. Can't wait for the new full length!
WOW! Hyperdub kills it again (see Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland's new jam Black Is Beautiful, reviewed last list)! Quarantine is the debut full length from Laurel Halo, whose previous ep releases are among some of our favorite in modern experimental electronic pop music, and here on her first full length, she presents us with a work that is both explorative and deeply emotive. The tunes here are more on the King Felix ep side of things, in that they are most definitely "songs" (as opposed to her more experimental techno leanings on the Hour Logic ep, and the music she makes under the somewhat confusing King Felix moniker). Beautiful intertwining multi-tracked vocal melodies floating on top of layers and layers of gorgeous cosmic synth drones, muted rumbling drum machines, and amorphous atmospherics ricocheting from one ear to the other, but all beautifully placed in the mix, giving it a subtle sort of hypnotic quality. "Airsick", the first jam, is an underwater, gurgling and bubbling beauty. Plenty of space for her voice to be the focus, but underneath a woozy piano sample rubs up against some projector reel like hiss rhythms, while dreamy synths play the progression with ease. All the lines are blurred and the music seems to effortlessly expand and contract.
This sort of natural, organic confidence is a strand that continues throughout Quarantine, the sounds totally spaced out, yet reigned in in a way that ultimately ends up bolstering the quality of the song. The third number "Thaw" starts with a deep and dark square wave drone with looped atonal strings and pitch bent bells eventually giving way to an absolutely BEAUTIFUL broken and bouncy arpeggiated progression. Slowly, new sounds are subliminally introduced, delay drenched and 'verbed to the max skree, and oscillating chirps swelling underneath the sheen of the song. All the while the vocal melodies, double tracked and harmonized the whole time, remain very much exposed above the mix, with very little effects, giving the lyrics and delivery a vulnerable feeling, which is an extremely interesting effect when paired with such far-out sonic experimentation. "Carcass" which is undeniably the darkest and weirdest tune of the bunch (and possibly our fave) is an industrial tinged, hypno-trance bubbling acidic roller. A pitch black, syncopated bass synth line unfurls, the filters opening and closing slowly, as the deep and cold synth squelch and atonal high pitch textures swirl and morph. Layers of synth and samples coalesce into an altogether punchdrunk outta body high, and than suddenly the vocals enter. The vocals on "Carcass" are astounding! Pitch shifted and bent all out of shape, her voice sounding like it's being transmitted from some wayward space station, the feedback of the faulty connection providing dark space overtones to an already harrowing vocal melody. GORGEOUS! And a little scary and overwhelming. We could go on and on, as all the tracks here are excellent, but why spoil all the fun of discovery!
Quarantine is fast becoming a favorite around here, and with good reason. Laurel Halo's music is extremely blissful, but not in a "shoegazey" sort of way, or really in any sort of way that you can pinpoint a super specific reference. Those references are of course there, but she blurs the lines with a deft hand. It's a new type of bliss. Futuristic bliss! A very bold, beautiful, inventive, and wholly singular record. Very, very impressive debut. Can't wait to hear what's next!
Van Der Graaf Generator, if you've been paying attention, are one of our very favorite '70s progressive rock bands. Forget '70s, they're STILL good, when they get together, as they do now and then. And their talented frontman, he of bombastic voice indeed, Peter Hammill, has kept up an equally impressive solo career over the years - this latest is, like, his forty-somethingth solo album (!!!). No, we haven't heard all or even most of the others, but are happy to have become acquainted with Consequences.
He's propelled his lean and lanky self into the 21st century, more distinguished (with white hair) but in no way diminished, still wrestling poetically (and proggily) with the big everyday/everybody issues: relationships, identity, miscommunication, self-consciousness, doubt, fear...
It's moving, dark stuff, this intimate internal cabaret of Hammill's. 'Tis definitely about the lyrics, and the delivery... but also the suitably uneasy music, sparse and moody, with angular hooks and hushed textures. There's plenty of pensive piano, some rattling tambourine, a ticktocking drum machine on "New Pen-pal", and dissonant distorted guitar adding danger to the climax of "Scissors". Hammill's vocals carry the day, though, of course quite dramatic and dynamic, ofttimes overdubbed with himself for a backing chorus effect, that can be haunting, or powerful.
Ok, if you've never heard Hammill or Van Der Graaf before, this might seem pretty odd at first, but we'd recommend it to anyone who wants to check out some intelligent & compelling not-so-pop music from a one of a kind singer-songwriter.
No doubt about it, this total gem and often overlooked left field outing by Herbie Hancock, recorded in 1972, is one of those records that belongs in the COSMIC HALL OF FAME! Lightyears ahead of its time, it's a record that mixed electronics, synthesizers, Afro-funk, prog, spiritual jazz, free-bop and more, as it charted territories that had rarely been explored at that point, and that still sound so otherworldly and divine all these years later.
Sextant is a record that undoubtedly has had a major influence on so many of our favorite music makers of today, like Matmos, Four Tet, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Flying Lotus, Etienne Jaumet, Gavin Russom, Robert A. A. Lowe, Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance etc. In fact when we were blasting this in the store the other day, one of us who hadn't heard this before (gasp!) came up front asking if this was a new Oneohtrix Point Never! It's that spaced out, mystifying and alien-sound-channeling.
Tapping into the atmospheres and stratospheres that Miles Davis drifted through on Bitches Brew but taking it even further out, Sextant is truly one of the most tripped out and transcendent recordings of all time. Three long tracks (about 40 minutes all together) of pure psychedelic mind melting "fusion" innovation. You could definitely imagine this was Magma, Goblin or even (especially) Sun Ra. Somehow it's managed to remain below the radar of so many music lovers, we're always so excited to see people freak out when they hear this for the first time. And for some reason its now priced crazy cheap (it's not new after all, we just realized we had never listed it!), so if you don't own it, this is a an absolute MUST own and hell, you might as well get a couple to give to friends that you want to blow away with these far our cosmic sounds!
The latest from this Dutch one man shoegaze black metal band, whose A City In Mono record was a big hit around here, with it's fuzzed out dream poppiness and weirdly looped sounding construction. Well if anything, on Calm Down, You Weren't Set On Fire it's gotten even harder to refer to Hypomanie as a black metal band, no matter how much you qualify it, any black buzz here is wreathed in prismatic swaths of sun dappled shimmer, the soaring guitars are processed to the point that they almost sound like horns and the programmed drums aren't driving as much as they are textural. Utterly blissed out and airy, fuzzy and dreamily soft focus, even when the sound is in fact blasting, the blast seems to be floating heavenward, in a cloud of blurred chordal thrum and majestic bleary eyed shimmer. But the band spend relatively little time bliss-blasting, instead unfurling long expanses of jangly shimmer, and post rocky dream poppy lope. And on tracks like "Alissa Loves Perfume", while the band do rock, all driving and intense, with the guitars super distorted to the point that they seem to crumble, it doesn't make it sound heavy at all, just fantastically produced and poppy, making us think of a more home brewed M83, which is not a bad thing at all, in fact, we've been listening to this like crazy. It's just that for all intents and purposes, Hypomanie are not a metal band, they are instead a heavy shoegaze dream pop band, and a really good one, the songs here super catchy, and almost soundtracky at times, the sort of jams you can imagine would be on the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, if he was making Sixteen Candles in 2012. Fans of M83, Phoenix, Craft Spells, Beach House, and yeah okay, Alcest, Amesoeurs, Les Discrets and the like.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
The last thing we would have expected from UK tape label The Tapeworm, who pretty much traffic in the unexpected, was a hip hop record, but if they were gonna release a hip hop record, it makes sense that it would be weirdo UK MC Infinite Lives, whose Bush Meat full-length we reviewed way back in 2004, and flipped over, describing him as "equal parts Ol' Dirty Bastard, De La Soul, Outkast and Ali G." And if anything this live set is even weirder. A super spacey abstract set of dubbed out, free-from electro hop, all woozy synth stabs, footwork like beats, warped loops, and more singing than rapping, Infinite's vocals a soulful croon, drenched in reverb, and all tangled up with dubby shimmer and stuttery melodies, eventually, the rapping comes in, and it's appropriately jagged and twisted and rapidfire, with the music switching gears and following along, the various beats and loops splintering into a head spinning barrage of jumbled collaged chaos before slipping right back into that twisted dubby soul, sounding more like something we might hear from Hype Williams, a fractured future funk, laced with some dubstep bass wobble, smooth synthy shimmer, relentless programmed beats, and some killer next level flow, but always returning to Infinite's whatthefuck echo drenched soul dub hip-pop. Cool.
We had been hearing about this record for ages, mostly that it was the best thing Justin Broadrick had done since Godflesh! Which would be discounting everything he'd done as Jesu, much of which we hold near and dear, so while we're actually inclined to agree with the above sentiment, it might be more accurate to say that, besides Jesu, which is an entirely different beast, we haven't dug a Broadrick project this much since the days of classic Godflesh. Which makes sense really. The first hint was the name, Broadrick having resurrected a name he used back in the Techno Animal days, and in fact, JK Flesh reminds us a lot more of Techno Animal than Godflesh. The jams here all remind us of the kind of weirdo experimental electronic stuff Broadrick was doing on the side, when he was still doing Godflesh. The sort of jams that you'd hear on some obscure comp alongside Alec Empire, or Porter Ricks or Spectre or Scorn, if you remember those Macro Dub Infection comps from back in the day (if not, you should track them down, they are incredible!) or remember any of the more obscure Broadrick alter-egos, Curse Of The Golden Vampire, the Sidewinder, Techno Animal of course, especially the opening track on Posthuman, which lays down a spare lurching beat over buzzing droned out guitars, and features some super intense heavily effected vokills that sound unlike anything else we've heard from Broadrick. And instead of being heavy, it's more a sort of brooding malevolence, a hypnotic lumber that borders on some sort of industrial demonic dub. And had the whole record sounded like that, we would have been just fine. But the other thing we'd been hearing about JK Flesh, is that it was like Godflesh, but with dubstep beats, which may have had some folks crying foul, it actually sounded pretty goddamn good to us, and we're happy to report that it does in fact sound about as good as we imagined it would.
The same sonic template as the opening track for the most part, but with distinctly dubstep beats, and the thing is, it totally works, the dubstep element really becomes secondary, as Broadrick unfurls some of his fiercest and heaviest guitar work in ages, his vocals a thick, hellish bellow, far removed from the shouty vocals that marred the last few Godflesh records, this is some sick, fierce, and yeah, slightly groovy heaviness. But think how radical the drum machine driven Godflesh was back in the day, playing alongside all these crusty grind bands and straight up metal bands, that actually translates pretty well to the now, with JK Flesh, melding that sort of crusty chugging heaviness to a more modern beat. The first few tracks really don't even really get dubsteppy at all, instead, seeming to ease the listener into this brave new world, two massive slabs of massive downtuned machine-doom heaviness that kills. It's not until "Devoured" that things get crazy, when the beat is actually skittery, sounding a bit like Clubroot remixing Godflesh, which is obviously not a bad thing AT ALL. The title track too, is all manic skitter, wreathed in an impossibly thick gristly patina of crumbling super distorted buzz, and it's a crazy killer mix. The sort of thing that just might have metalheads tempted to poke their heads out onto the dancefloor, but should most definitely have the dancefloor heaving, with what is essentially some of THEE heaviest dubstep EVER. "Earthmover" introduces some of that blown out bass wobble, but it's mostly lost amidst all the churning metallic riffery and squalls of effects. The record finishes with another weird one, a good bookend for that opener, a sort of abject creeping doom dirge, driven by a skittery beat, but not so overtly dubsteppy, instead, a pounding lumbering lurch, with some seriously sick vokills, and while there is a kind of drop, it turns into something much more washed out and psychedelic, with clean vocals, and thick washed out guitars, the result sort of dreamy and druggy, and a little bit like a darker noisier heavier Jesu.
For those of you, like us, who always found yourselves way more into Broadrick's extracurricular sonic activities, this is a no brainer, it pushes all our Techno Animal buttons big time, but it definitely is the closest thing we've heard to Godflesh in a while, but still different enough to be fresh and exciting. Needless to say, this totally rules, and is WAY WAY WAY recommended (& anyone who digs Necro Deathmort, in particular, should check this out).
Listen on: Deezer
Novaya Zemlya is a grand statement. But then again, Thomas Koner doesn't operate in any scale other than monumental. All of his albums (barring the somewhat lackluster La Barca from 2003) speak through the gasping drones of a bleak existentialism. For Koner, the human condition is mirrored in the environment around us, especially those rugged, barren locales at the poles, with his isolationist smears of grey sounds alluding to water, ice, permafrost, wind, radiation, and vast empty spaces above the Arctic Circle. The environmental site for this album is a suitably inhospitable Russian archipelago jutting far out into the Arctic Ocean toward the North Pole. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet Union used Novaya Zemlya as a nuclear test site, dropping the Tsar Bomba in 1961 on the landmass, which was permanently scarred by the largest atomic detonation in the history of the world. The thin layer of nuclear fallout which has buried itself in the frozen tundra of Novaya Zemlya commingles with radioactive isotopes from poorly managed storage facilities, sunken reactors, and scuttled submarines.
Koner describes this landscape through its hazardous potential, which is so much worse than the current situation. With global warming, the methane gas spewed from a melted permafrost will lift all of that radioactive material into the atmosphere and send that along the prevailing winds across western Russian over Scandinavia and into continental Europe. Perhaps, a greater catastrophe than Chernobyl. In speaking to that potential, Koner manifests pockets of near silence throughout the album with his signature tectonic rumblings and stealth-bomber frequencies gliding beyond the event horizon into the realm of the audible. Darkened crumblings of earthen material pocks the beginning of the first in a trilogy of tracks, sounding almost like slabs of ice thunderously collapsing into the sea. Drones swell and collapse into pools of resonant emptiness, broken on the second track by a disembodied shortwave radio transmission of garbled voices. The album returns to those cold, contemplative sounds until the end of the album draws near, when Koner introduces a few elegant, melodic plucks from what might be a harp. For all of the foreboding that looms throughout, the end is almost hopeful that humanity might just sort out this global warming puzzle. But then again, we might not; and then, we're fucked.
An easy contender for 2012's album of the year.
The Swedish composer Mats Lindstrom is the studio director for the storied EMS studios in Stockholm, whose mission for the advancement of electro-acoustic music and sound art began way back in 1964. BJ Nilsen, Kevin Drumm, Brian Lustmord, and Stephen O'Malley all passed through the studios in their respective careers, alongside a plethora of more composerly types who we're not all that familiar with. While the connection was never made all that clear, it was probably during O'Malley's residency at EMS when he first met Lindstrom and became familiar with his work, which is now anthologized for the first time on O'Malley's imprint Ideologic Organ. Lindstrom's aesthetic harkens back to the classic era of musique concrete and post-serialist electronic composition from the '60s (e.g. Pierre Schaefer, Xenakis, Nordheim, etc.), playing with the metaphors of his sounds much more than the semantic detachment that usually embodies such acousmatic practices. Take for example the title track, which must refer to the Russian fighter jet, as the track was commissioned for an aviation museum in St. Petersburg and races forward and backward with jet engine roars, possibly simulated, possibly recorded, all of which is surgically cut with mechanical clank and industrial hum. The two IBM tracks clatter away with the anachronistic sounds of typewriters, rigorously collaged with bizzaro scrapes, gratings, and atonal tactile events more in keeping with the irr. app. (ext.) / Nurse With Wound realm of sonic fuckery. The finale is a demonic tape-piece of continuously ascending violin notes that could practically be a brilliant reworking of the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T soundtrack in the style of Penderecki. Excellent stuff!
Melvins LITE? What? That makes no sense. We want our Melvins HEAVY.
Well don't worry, 'cause the godlike Melvins, despite their many many years and many many albums, never ever disappoint (unless perhaps deliberately, as with 'difficult' stuff like Prick and Colossus Of Destiny). So of course Freak Puke is heavy. 'Tis their usual (unusual) blend of rockin' heaviness and utter weirdness. They're just calling themselves Melvins Lite on this record because it's a trio this time, with Buzz Osbourne and Dale Crover joined by bassist extraordinare Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, etc.), rather than being the four-piece unit that has constituted the Melvins as of late. However, their dual-drummer lineup, with Buzz and Dale and the two dudes from Big Business, is just on hiatus. Apparently Buzz and Dale thought it would be interesting to pull a temporary lineup switcheroo and record with their old pal Trevor, who plays a stand-up bass and thus brings in some 20th century avant-garde string-scrabble elements to the lurching, lumbering mix, particularly on track 2, "Inner Ear Rupture". Elsewhere, ingredients include gloom-doom atmospheres, mathrock dynamics, druggy grunge, AND uptempo noise pop catchiness, as you'd expect from these guys. Plus all the UNexpected stuff you'd also expect. With Trevor's upright bass getting in its licks all right.
Opener "Mr. Rip Off" has an oddly spaced out, loose '60s/'70s Floydian psych feel (in a way), with dreamy droney vox and distorted guitar. That vibe recurs, among plenty of 'Melvinsy' twists and turns throughout the disc. Oh, and they do a cover of "Let Me Roll It" by Paul McCartney and Wings!
For fans of any of these folks (possibly including Paul McCartney), Freak Puke by 'Melvins Lite' is an interesting detour / change of pace that's not so different, really.
Psychedelic pioneers in their home country, The Mops (great name!) were one of the originators of the Japanese GS (Group Sounds) scene. They were among the first in Japan to experiment with psychedelic studio effects like flanging and phasing, as well as with
Temporary Residence does it again, after the recent Record Of The Week reissue of the complete works from nineties math rock gods Bitch Magnet, comes yet another amazing archival release, this one digging back even a little further, from the same sonic pool that so obviously informs TRL's taste in contemporary sounds - it's the complete recorded works of the late great Moss Icon, who in the mid/late eighties were crafting a super unique strain of post punk / hardcore / math rock / emo / gloom pop, that while definitely sonically tied to other groups in the underground at the time, drew from super disparate influences, and created a sound most definitely all their own, a sound that would eventually influence a whole slew of bands to follow.
Imagine a mix of eighties hardcore and nineties post rock, a dizzying hybrid of the the Wipers, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Slint, Fugazi, Joy Division, all thick slithery low slung bass lines, jagged slashes of angular guitar, chiming chords and churning riffage, spidery melodies, the songs super intricate, and often nearly prog in their arrangements, super dynamic with soaring swell of near metallic heft, and long stretches of brooding mesmer, over which the usually howled vox slip into more of a spoken word, sometimes delivered in a haunting deadpan intonation, other times a fervent rant, the sound super tranced out, the band locking into long stretches of hypnotic almost looped riffing, driven by darkly propulsive rhythms, a sprawling moody psychedelia that's the perfect backdrop for vocalist Jonathan Vance's socio-political sonic shamanism. There are moments of surprising poppiness throughout, but usually tucked away amidst long stretches of droned out mesmer, fierce blasts of emotionally wounded heaviness and a relentless barrage of driving melodic crush and controlled sonic chaos. One of the great unsung bands from that era, and an incredible collection of sonically and emotionally powerful music that deserves to be (re)discovered.
PS: Guitarist Tonie Joy would go on to play in Born Against, the Great Unraveling, Universal Order Of Armageddon, The Convocation Of and others, and ALL of those bands were definitely a product of the sounds and songs here.
Rachel Evans brings her humid, oozing synth explorations to Spectrum Spools, which has become quite the launching pad for a wide array of outsider electronics as curated through the judicious ear of Emeralds' John Elliott. The name of Evans' project is lifted from William S. Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine; and with her decentering, liminal drift of half-formed / half-dissolved constructions, she finds herself peering between the kudzu-encrusted fields of her native Lagrange, Georgia and the imagined soundscapes of a primordial Gondwanaland (time-travel for her seems to go backwards in time, not forwards). After close to a couple dozen releases (mostly in the micro-edition format), she's either gotten the doseage right on the Dramamine, or she's acclimated to the queasy side effects of jumping between time and space, as this eponymous record isn't nearly as woozy and narcotized as her previous work. "The Dream" starts out quite dark, with backward-masked slashes that parallel the thickets of razored noise from Current 93's early collage work; but she quickly escapes from these bad vibes into a lengthy daydream of shimmering ambience laced with bright, effervescent sequences and some rather Vangelis-like triumphant synth stabs. "The Center" spins around a latticework of crystalline sequences that blur into massive, oceanic pools of rippling sound, with her voice looped and smeared into an ethereal bliss. "Summer Of The Cat's Eye" is a mellow impressionist piece of synth jamminess akin to Tangerine Dream's wanderings across the keyboard. "One Perfect Moment" is very reverential of John Elliott's work in Emeralds and all of his solo projects, with a sequenced glissando streaming beneath the slow unfurling of bittersweet tonal chords and Evans' pleading vocal delivery. Easily, the most arresting track she's recorded to date, rounding out another fantastic album from Evans' Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.
Final pressing!! It's taken a long while to get enough of these in stock to list, as they've flown out the door since we started stocking it back in June, and then our distributors kept being sold out of it. Makes a lot of sense that folks have been freaking out over this, as the sounds on Science Of The Sea are some of the most blissed out sounds we've ever heard.
Originally recorded in 1982 (there is debate over that, we will get to that later) by an oceanographer in Germany while living on a houseboat. The sounds on the album undoubtedly talk to the sounds and feeling of the sea. You not only feel like your floating but often that you are underwater yourself. With soft waves glowing in their ripple, as such warm shimmering sounds come gliding out of the grooves of this record. Imagine the right kind of new age bliss injected into the most pastoral & ethereal side of kosmiche glory and you begin to get a picture of what kind of beautiful sounds are found on this album.
While some doubt has been risen as to whether this really is a reissue of some obscure private press from 1982, or in fact the work of a modern artists, perhaps even Brad Rose, the man behind Digitalis. But who knows, and in the end who really cares, as its the music that matters, and the music on this album is beyond gorgeous!
In looking at his discography alone, Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) might not seem to be such a prolific artist; although he's certainly dedicated his entire existence to the pursuit of the field recording, its use in composition, and avant-garde sound practices in general. Each week, McGinley produces the ever enlightening Framework radio series dedicated to those very topics, starting out of Resonance FM in London with syndication now reaching several dozen adventurous radio stations across the globe. He's also active in curating a quarterly series of small cd-r editions of sound ecology, phonography, and field recording based sound art; and he also is an active participant in the Estonian avant-garde, as he's currently planted himself in the university city of Tartu. What Are The Roots That Clutch is his first full album in nearly seven years. Has it really been that long? That said, McGinley did work on a brilliant collaborative project with John Grzinich and Yannick Dauby, and he released a 3"cd-r for Taalem, both of which came out earlier this year in 2012. McGinley quips that he put the recordings aside to this record for well over a year, which may account in part for the delay; but ultimately, all of the recordings from Murmer are timeless. What Are The Roots That Clutch is no exception.
The field recordings that McGinley collects hedge towards disturbances in any given sound ecology, as found in the abrasive textures from a busted exhaust vent comingling with the Aeolian harmonics from the sustained gusts streaming down from the North Sea. McGinley does include two relatively unaltered field recordings (probably some minor filtering, but that's all) within the thoroughly abstracted and droned out compositions. One of these features a very eerie fundamental harmonic drone, obviously being activated by the wind and coupled with a glistening rattle and an unfurled flapping. The three elements here make for a surprisingly musical, if totally alien sounding piece that's akin to the Alan Lamb wire recordings. The album's 17 minute centerpiece is a slow building blur of industrial resonance and densely layered aquatic filigree that melts into chunks of clattering ice (it could be wood or glass... but ice is just so much more poetic to consider given the context); but the album's finale is where McGinley really gives us something to sink our teeth into. A comparatively harsh stutter of electrical abrasion builds up to a crescendo through water-tank rumblings and fire and / or water textures. At the peak, McGinley snaps to a downright psychedelic raga of back-masked belltones, harmonium drones, and percussive clatter that all comes together in a minimalist chorale on par with anything that Angus Maclise mustered in his dervishes and mantras.
As great as McGinley's last record was, What Are The Roots That Clutch might be even better. Handsomely packaged in letterpress artwork whose ochre-yellow hue matches the color of an Estonian farm house he's quite fond of. Limited to 400 copies.
The latest project from SUNNO)))'s Stephen O'Malley comes in the form of this explosive psychedelic drum/guitar duo, recorded live in 2010, and while we hadn't heard of Noble before this, we had definitely HEARD him, as he's a member of Aethenor, along with O'Malley, and is a UK improviser of some repute, as well as apparently having played on no fewer than NINE(!) releases on the Bo Weavil label.
St Francis Duo definitely serves as a fantastic (re)introduction to Noble, at least to Noble as mainman, right out of the gate, we're barraged with an onslaught of tribal toms, and thick clouds of cymbal sizzle, a sound that even sans O'Malley, sounds like it would be HUGE and dense and powerful. But O'Malley just adds to the chaos, ditching the slow and low droneguitar of SUNNO))) in favor of some full on Keiji Haino-esque psych-noise fury, the first couple minutes a veritable avalanche of guitar buzz octopoidal drum sputter, before settling into something much more restrained and rhythmic, Noble still impossibly busy, laying a framework of jazzy skitter which O'Malley unfurls warm swells of dark twang and muted thrum, the rest of the track more a showcase for Noble, with O'Malley painting a blackened blurred backdrop for a relentless fury of cascading rhythms and fragmented grooves, furious fills and a track long drum solo. But somehow it all manages to be super mesmerizing.
The other three tracks (each a sidelong epic) tend toward a similar sound, blissed out and brooding, with Noble doing most of the heavy lifting, whether it's hypnotic grooves, or abstract jazzy stutter, or dizzying blowouts of wild drum damage, O'Malley though the perfect foil, his guitar rumbling ominously one second, grinding and shredding wildly the next, spitting out jagged shards of atonal melody before slipping into some almost straight ahead riffage, before splintering and devolving into another tangled woozy melodic meltdown.
There are a few moments, where the two lock tight and approach something akin to a Necks like mesmer, and other times where they sound like a facemelting noiserock band, or some classic freeform Japanese psych combo, but in-between, the two seem to build epic psychedelic improv constructs, only so they can tear them down again, reveling in both parts of the process, and managing to make both the ascent and descent, equally compelling.
For fans of heavy free psych, chaotic drum heavy free jazz and abstract improvised noiserock.
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One of two records on this week's list from a man called Avenger, who is probably most familiar to longtime readers of the aQ list as the mastermind behind stumbling surf-guitar flecked outsider black metal weirdos Varghkoghargasmal, whose 'wooden metal' is a twisted mash up of surf guitars, woozy warbly organs, black metal atmosphere and motorik almost krautrock rhythms, and whose only proper full length, Drowned In Lakes, was released on our own Andee's tUMULt label.
But Avenger is an old school black metal thrasher at heart, as is evidenced by these two other projects, the creepy blackened doom of Black Priest Of Satan, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this, a collection of early demos from Nocturnal, Avengers's old school thrash outfit that is pretty much everything a thrashing maniac could ask for, buzzing brittle riffs, galloping riffs, harsh demonic vokills, with the occasional falsetto scream, the songs impossibly catchy, the riffs killer, frantic and frenetic, raw and loose and sloppy and chaotic, all of which only adds to the feel and the vibe and the mood. Not hard to imagine that this is some killer cassette from the mid eighties. Shades of Destruction, Bathory, Nifelheim, Abigail and the like.
The Thrash With The Devil ep from 2002 which starts things off is the more polished of the two, the band sounding heavy and thrashy and a little bit modern, still classic thrash for sure, and easily putting to shame the majority of thrash revivalists out there. Both with song AND sound, but it's the Rites Of The Black Mass demo from 2001 that is the gem, here, super raw and twisted, the drums weirdly produced and buried in the mix, the guitars brittle and jagged, the vocals a strange raspy bellow, also down in the mix, and blurred into what sounds more like a series of droned out demonic exhalations, the riffs super tranced out, the sound murky and muddy and seriously grim and evil, so good!Essential underground black thrash, classic sounding enough for the true metal obsessives, but just warped enough for the rest of us.
Oh yeah, best part of the liner notes: "The guitar solo part in 'Welcome To Your Death' should be viewed as an expression of total fear and despair of a victim which looks into the merciless face of its killer!"
Demo 1 is the debut release from a New Orleans one man band called Phantom Feel, who traffics in a sort of black metal, but a strain far removed from the grim buzz and black blast of most BM, instead, the vibe is much more woozy and washed out, the opening intro is all lush, smeary swaths draped over skeletal skitter and programmed pulses. The track blossoms into mournful almost shoegazingly melodic sweeps, shimmering dreamily over murky muted riffage, and clouds of soft focus hiss, the sound tied together by spidery minor key guitar melodies keening way off in the background, and cool crooned vocals. The vibe is almost cold wavey, a little gothy, much more like a blackened M83 actually. The second track definitely gets a bit more grim, the buzz more to the fore, the sound a bit more bleak and melancholy, the vocals more tortured, but even then, the sound continues to be more pretty and psychedelic than black and malefic.
But flip the tape over, and the sound slips right back into PF's woozy warbly soundscapery, this time strange processed sampled voices, buried beneath a creeping almost Portishead-y style dirge, warm and liquid, lots of thrum and buzz, all blurred and bleary, the black metal riffage here smeared into hazy distant streaks, while in the foreground the haunting sonic haze roils and churns. Gorgeous stuff for sure. And really only barely black metal. In fact, much of this is WAY too weird for meat-and-potatoes metalheads. Much likelier that if you're into strange dark drone music, psychedelic ambience, creepy slowcore, abstract blackened electronica and other twisted sonic strains, then this is for you.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES. Each one hand numbered, and each copy with a hand painted/stamped sigil on the front.
One of four new releases this week on the always impressive The Tapeworm label, this one from pianist Andrew Poppy, who offers up a handful of lovely piano sonatas on the A side, stately and subtly cinematic, a mix of modern classical and baroque elegance, mesmerizing and not so minimal, every track in constant motion, lush cascades of notes over hypnotic almost looped and near rhythmic arrangements, haunting and cyclical, a little Satie, a little Reich, dark and brooding, but with flourishes of sun dappled melodicism.
But it's the flipside that most folks will probably find the most exciting, a 'dub' version of the pieces on the A side, entitled "Infernal Dub Furniture", which casts all the melodies and arrangement in a new, soft focus, woozy, dreamily druggy light. The sounds smeared into an almost Caretaker like blur in some places, a dizzying barrage of careening fragmented melodies in others.
Repetitive and less 'dubby', than just sort of fucked up and tripped out, but definitely dubby in the sense that it adds lots of texture and rhythm, even a little groove that wasn't present in the standard sonatas, a gloriously lysergic sprawl of dizzying collaged sounds, whirling washed out piano shimmer, and gristly melodic buzz. Some seriously droned out abstract drone-dub piano-noise bliss for sure.
Finland's much lauded (by us and others) Fonal label has been best known for the Finnish forest folk, experimental indie likes of Kemialliset Ystavat, Islaja, Kiila, and Paavoharju, among others... but recently they've branched out beyond their country's borders to release (reviewed last list) the new agey electronic improv drift of Dolphins Into The Future, and also this, by another band not from Finland, the 1st full-length (or 2nd if you count a super limited cd-r) by a blown out blooze rock duo from Deutschland who call themselves Pretty Lightning, though it's more likely thunder you'll think of when you hear 'em, not lightning.
As you might have guessed from the phrase "blown out blooze rock" this isn't your typical Fonal release. Well, it's plenty psychedelic and druggy, though, so that fits right in with a lot of the weird rituals recorded by Fonal's roster. But Pretty Lightning's rolling and tumblin', shambolic stoner stomp sounds a lot more traditionally '60s & '70s rock-based than the usual brand of Fonal freakery. Loud n' distorted fuzz guitars, drawling vox, lots of reverb, swampy slide, lumbering rhythms, splashing cymbals... we're thinking this will go over really well with fans of Dead Meadow!! Reminded of them right away. Also in some regards Wooden Shijips, Moon Duo, Comets On Fire, even Witch... You could also maybe imagine an uber lo-fi, Teutonic Black Keys? Or a basement-dwelling, krautrock-damaged Mount Carmel? Pretty Lightning bring in some ceremonial-sounding communal kraut vibes all right, with rattling percussion and chanted vocals on tracks like "Brother Gold Miner". There's spaced out pretty parts too, sunbaked backporch bliss, but it's all raw and droney for sure, and rife with big catchy riffs and melodic hooks, hot damn we're digging this. Funny it takes a Finnish label to bring us this modern day garagey krautrock that sounds like it's somehow also coming straight outta the Mississippi Delta.
