We fully expected to dig this new Om record. After all, we've been fans of the band since their debut
hit back in 2004. Since then, Al Cisneros' ultra heavy bass vibrations and one of a kind stoned vocal delivery have remained pretty constant, and the main changes in the course of Om's history have revolved around two very distinct yet quite different drummers; while original skinsman Chris Hakius carried Om into territory that might well be viewed as the next step in the saga he and Cisneros developed in Sleep, current drummer Emil Amos (also of Grails and Holy Sons) brought a new, less overtly heavy approach that seemed to suit Om just as perfectly, and things have taken on a more meditative quality since his arrival. Still, some people like to joke that Om's variations on a theme have deviated little since Variations On A Theme. With that, we humbly admit that the greatness of Om's latest record, 9 years into their existence, has pretty much knocked us on our asses and led some of us to conclude that it is the best thing we've heard from them yet.
While there will be no mistaking who this is, there are in fact some of the biggest surprises on an Om record so far. Perhaps the most notable of these surprises come in the form of Robert AA Lowe, he of the 90 Day Men and Lichens, who has become a full fledged member of Om since the completion of Advaitic Songs. Indeed, Om sound more invigorated (but not *too* invigorated, for obvious reasons we would imagine) and more willing to venture into new mysterious realms. Along with additional contributions from Amber Asylum alum Jackie Perez Gratz (cello) and Lorraine Rath (flute), Advaitic Songs is by far the most diverse of Om's albums, bringing to mind everything from the Taj Mahal Travellers to Alice Coltrane to hints of early Pink Floyd and all manner of dubbed out atmospheres, while never abandoning the formula we've all come to love. In other words, shit DOES get heavy and rifftastic, but not before the introduction of female chanted vocals (which sound at times like a significantly less crazed/terrifying Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and yes, we mean that in a good way) and tamboura that open the album on the majestic "Addis". This track really absorbs you into the sound of the album and billows out steadily, with the vibe carrying on into "State Of Non Return" until the band abruptly shifts into one of the heaviest, most stoned out jams of Om's existence. And to return to the subject of drumming, kudos to Amos for his completely amazing work on this track. All we could do was bob our heads and let out a hearty "fuck yeah". Fuck yeah for sure. Interestingly, the track is monolithically heavy but still adheres to some sense of discipline and restraint. Quite simply, not many people could pull this off with these results. "Gethsemane" begins with a super heavy tamboura drone before some clean sounding Middle Eastern influenced bass and strings merge with a heavily focused drum pound with nice use of the ride. When Al's vocals come in, it sounds, well, how do we say this? Like a better version of Om. It's just so great, familiar but also exotic and surprising. "Sinai" begins as another heavy drone and makes brilliant use of distorted field recordings of some religious ceremony (sorry to be so non-specific) before ultra crisp drumming and bubbling bass create a foundation for the cello and tamboura to hover above. It's another great one to get lost in. "Haqq al-Yaqin" brings the album to its conclusion, with the memorable cello work giving the song a distinct feel and some typically awesome Cisneros vocal work. Instead of building to some predictable moment of catharsis where things get all heavy and everyone rocks out all "passionately", the song retains its focus and rides out with some beautiful acoustic guitar work before fading with some cool tabla rhythms. Wow.
At this point it's fair to say that Om are masters of their craft, and their desire to explore new worlds is made completely clear here. No one can touch them. We were going to make this a Record Of The Week, but our suppliers didn't have quite as many of the cds as we wanted in stock this week, so we had to demote it to Highlight status instead. Still, we encourage everyone to snap this one up.
Geiger-counter-ish clicks, reveberant chords, and swooping zwooping synth blips herald the atmospheric beginning to this new disc (a considerably expanded cd edition of the limited & long gone Blackest Rainbow vinyl version from last year) from Italy's Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, an aQ-fave combo ever since we heard their release on Japan's PSF imprint back in 2009. Those sort of eerie, uncertain sonics continue throughout this disc, forming the backdrop to the haunting, echo-effected vocal rites of Ramona Ponzini, singing Japanese poetry as per Painting Petals On Planet Ghost tradition (this time, the words come from the works of Takamura Kotaro). Also in the tradition of their other recordings, this is quite lovely and mysterious! Ponzini and her two cohorts (the brothers Opalio of experimentalists My Cat Is An Alien) have conjured another gently damaged and droning psychedelic soundscape of layered prayerful vox in a mad scientist's laboratory of strange secretive sounds. Just be sure to turn it off before you go to sleep, or the "hidden" bonus track at the very end of this lengthy disc will disturb your slumbers, featuring as it does some sudden, startling loud percussion, in the form of gongs being struck and bells being rung.
Sweet! The 1972 solo debut from the one and only Annette Peacock has at last been properly reissued on both cd and vinyl. This has been unavailable for years and definitely deserves to be heard. Last year, we found out that Peacock had just done her own reissue on cd, but they were only available in prohibitively expensive, autographed editions, though we were quite tempted to order 'em anyway. Glad we waited, for this more affordable and widely available reish comes in both digipak cd and lavish vinyl. We've sold quite a few of these already, so we guess some peeps were waiting for it too.
How to describe this? It's jazzy, bluesy, avant pop music, an inside-outside hybrid, with acid rock and electronic experimentation alongside the likes of a cover of Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender", rendered ultra moody and dramatic. Throughout, Peacock's vocals are expressive, edgy, extreme, and electronically effected (fed through a Moog synth, in fact), but also seductive and sensual. At her best here, she comes across like a free jazz version of Betty Davis (the funkstress ex-wife of Miles). It's also likely that fans of Yoko Ono will approve. Quite a debut, from a woman who had toured with Albert Ayler, hung out with Timothy Leary, and could count David Bowie and Diamanda Galas among her fans.
The epic title track ferinstance, starts off all skittery-skree freeform freaky, then, staying freaky, turns into a funked up torch song when the vocals come in. There's parts that sound like Sly & The Family Stone or Stevie Wonder grooves, other parts that sound like spaced-out Moog madness� all in the same song! That's the opening track, too, and sets the tone for the entire album, which is full of groovy bits, sad piano ballads, and spooky electronic soundscapes, in various combinations. Some of the synth stuff is played by her (then?) husband Paul Bley, with whom Annette had made a few improvised synths/vocals albums around about the same time. The album also features Brazilian percussionist Arto Moreira.
This reissue is remastered, and comes complete with brand new liner notes and previously unpublished photos. Here's hoping this means there's also a reissue of Peacock's 1978 masterpiece X-Dreams not far behind.
The double lp version is limited to 1000 hand numbered copies and includes a poster, the cd comes in a digipak with thick booklet.
Second issue of this fanzine done by notorious Nordic noisician Lasse Marhaug (Jazzkammer, etc.). Super nicely put together (it looks like a "real" magazine), but definitely a fanzine in its enthusiams... Marhaug and a few friends go one-on-one in in-depth interviews with such interesting contemporaries/colleagues as Incapacitants, Earth, FNS, Attila Csihar, Don Dietrich (of Borbetomagus), and more...
80 pages or so, squarebound, color cover, color interior (with lots of cool photos/graphics), on a nice matte paper stock, kinda like a double-size, Marhaug-curated edition of The Wire, but the content is ALL interviews (well, and ads). And the interviews are quite interesting. And go in some strange directions...
A new fave 'zine!
The entire musical aesthetic of the storied Flying Nun label can be traced back to the first two singles. On the exuberant and triumphantly cheerful side, you've got The Clean's "Tally Ho!" with its uptempo jangle and sloppily melodic power pop chords; but on the other side, there was the gloomy drone-rock of The Pin Group who actually released the very first Flying Nun single "Ambivalence" back in 1981. According to the liner notes by The Dead C's Bruce Russell, the late '70s and early '80s spawned quite a lot of bands in New Zealand trying to cop the Velvet Underground's gritty rock minimalism, including The Pin Group, a trio featuring Roy Montgomery (yes, THAT Roy Montgomery!), Ross Humphries (who later played in Bailter Space and The Terminals), and Peter Stapleton (who seemed to be the only guy in New Zealand with a drum kit, as he played with everybody). "Ambivalence" certainly had a black-leather minimalism filtered through the Velvets, but with strangled basslines and dour vocals from Montgomery, The Pin Group also shared more than a few passing glances at Joy Division. By the time The Pin Group got to their second single "Coat," (released later in 1981) the Velvets jangle had been engulfed in a black-hole of nervous gloom that hints at Montgomery's drone-rock impressionism from the early '90s onward. That single sported a clever Andy Warhol ripoff by replacing the Velvet Underground banana with a pop-art sequence of Kiwis, but the B side to that single, "Jim", situates the band at their bleakest, with a puritanically dark punk sermon that foreshadowed the emotionally draining dynamics of Slint by about a decade.
Ambivalence marks the second anthology of The Pin Group's short but hugely influential career which lasted less than 12 months. Everything from the first anthology (an eponymous cd released on Siltbreeze back in 1997) is reprised on the vinyl of Ambivalence, including the two covers - the smartly chosen "Hurricane Fighter Plane" and the unwise "Low Rider." Don't let the latter spoil the majesty of the rest of the album, which also features a bonus cd of a live show from July 1981 with a couple of tracks that had been unreleased elsewhere. Recommended? You bet your ass!
Tom Recchion has been making weird and wonderful sounds since the 1970s as one of the leading figures in the Los Angeles Free Music Society. In a constant rotation of projects and bands, he cranked out ear-damaging skree, zonked tape collages, anti-musical comedies, and all sorts of other illogical strategies for making fucked-up sound. Compared to pretty much everything he's done previously, Proscenium - his first record in nearly seven years - is downright sensible; and one that fits neatly alongside all of the other releases from Elevator Bath, a label which specializes in rarified dronemuzik and oblique ambience (e.g. Keith Berry, Matt Shoemaker, Rick Reed and even our own Jim Haynes). The album began as the musical accompaniment to Janie Geiser's play "Invisible Glass" itself an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, with Recchion attempting to craft a moody atmosphere that slowly creeps into the audience's unconsciousness. Strange melodies emerge through a shimmering hum at the onset of the record, sounding like an underwater version of Aphex Twins' Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Recchion smudges everything beyond recognition, although the thrumming of a piano does seem to peek from behind the veil of his aqueous mystery. Dense applications of reverb are common throughout, as is a strange echoing ripple that has a funhouse, helter-skelter vibe - probably the only commonality with anything from LAMFS! Whatever melodic phrases Recchion might have started out with have blurred into oceanic swells of nocturnal droning that by the end of side two morphs into an algae bloom of dread. The tracks on the seven inch are somewhat different from what's found on the lp, with a Dada-inspired splatter of haptic rhythms on one side; and a slow-crawling calliope slashed with sporadic gasps of noise on the other. While the seven inch follows Recchion anti-aesthetic through LAFMS, the ambient horror of the lp tracks are the true prize of the set. Think Basinski. Think Koner. Think Nurse With Wound. And, then you're getting close to where Recchion might be coming from.
The return of Redd Kross!!! Their first record in FIFTEEN YEARS!! The Redd Kross nerds at aQ have been in a tizzy since we first heard about an impending new album. And we're happy to report it's even better than we had hoped. And impossibly, it might just be their best since Third Eye, heck, maybe even since Neurotica! And yeah, we talk a lot about favorite bands, and are quite hyperbolic in our descriptions of records and groups we love, but Redd Kross definitely are one of our all time favorite bands EVER, no hyperbole there at all, some of us have been listening to Redd Kross for going on thirty years now. And Andee's very first band (with Jay Lesser) even played their first show with Redd Kross!! And every single RK record, from the early punk rock teenage jams, to their later, more polished, major label releases, has ruled, the boys in Redd Kross masters of pop songcraft, unfettered Beatles worship mixed with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic pop music, not to mention punk rock roots and a sound so distinctive that even wearing their influences boldly on their sleeves, Redd Kross jams could never be mistaken for anyone else.
We went and saw them play last year, the first tour with the original line up in ages, and it was rumored the band were raising money to release the next record themselves, and they played all the hits, new and old, and sounded as food as ever. And here we are a year or so later, and Merge stepped up and released what might just be contender for record of the year, and as mentioned above, might just be one of Redd Kross' best record period.
We weren't initially sold by the first single, the title track, which totally sounds like a Neurotica B side, which is not a bad thing at all, it just sounded a little like RK by the numbers, but then something happened and the more we listened to it, the better it got, a KILLER chorus and an even more killer pre-chorus/bridge, some wild wah guitar psychedelia, the sound heavy and fuzzy and crunchy, swaggery and the sort of sound younger bands would kill for. But once the second track started, we knew this was IT. "Stay Away From Downtown", is total Yellow Pills style power pop super charged and cranked up, with a main riff that is SO catchy, the vocals and main melody total Beatles worship, and then the chorus, holy shit, one listen and it was lodged permanently in our brains. Nothing we can say can compare to hearing it, check out the sample below and be SMITTEN. We ended up listening to that song fifty times at least before we could even bear to move on, and yet the rest of the record did not disappoint, and more than lived up to the promise of the first two tracks. "Uglier" is another track that sounds like it could have been plucked right off of Neurotica, and the chorus, another killer, crazy catchy, the song laced with some rad psychedelic freakouts.
"Dracula's Daughter" is classic Redd Kross balladry, all Partridge family style power pop jangle, and at times melodically reminding us of Thelonious Monster's "Sammy Hagar Weekend", while "Meet Frankenstein" is a perfect slab of fifties style retro pop, which had us thinking Redd Kross would have been an even better choice to supply the music for the fictional band in the movie That Thing You Do (instead of Fountains Of Wayne).
The rest of the record unwinds like a classic Redd Kross record, every song crazy catchy, jangly and fuzzy, funny clever lyrics, killer harmonies, hooks galore, borrowing liberally from all the classic pop bands that came before, but making those sounds all their own, and stick around for closer "Hazel Eyes", whose main riff is a dead ringer for another classic RK jam "Follow The Leader", from 1997's Show World, but here unwinds as a droned out psychedelic jangle pop dirge, laced with weird effects, and a woozy groove, and finishes the record in fine fashion, weird, heavy, trippy and crazy catchy. It's been nearly impossible to work on the list cuz this record is ALL WE WANT TO LISTEN TO. And we're already gearing up to see Redd Kross play here next week, we're in a sort of Redd Kross mania, which makes sense cuz this record is SO GOOD. Record Of The Week hands down, and yeah, quite possibly Record OF THE YEAR!
Anyone who's been digging Ty Segall, King Tuff, Purling Hiss and other like minded noise poppers, who has yet to discover the joys of Redd Kross, now is the time to discover your new favorite band!!
Solo record number two from Stereolab frontwoman Laetitia Sadier, and like The Trip before it, Silencio finds Sadier's solo sound not that far removed from that of the Stereolab mothership, if anything, she trades in some of the cosmic krautrock worship for something a bit more sixties and French sounding, a dash of Tropicalia, plenty of shimmery guitar jangle, lush orchestrations, the vibe for the most part lush and languorous, all warm and woozy and washed out, with swoonsome strings, and simple shuffling rhythms, dramatic vocal harmonies harkening back to a different time, her voice so lovely, heavily accented, perfect for conjuring up a lost era, subtly psychedelic, all vibes and warm whirling organs, the record rife with subtle space age effects, and peppered with bursts of more rocking jangle, that sound like a mix of some lost Teen Beat band and aQ faves The New Lines, in fact, fans of the New Lines will find much to love here, as will anyone into classic lush timeless pop.
A two song teaser for the upcoming Six Organs album features a strangely familiar lineup, a quick glance at the names on the back of the sleeve has us convinced this is in fact a Six Organs Of Comets On Fire 7", and it sounds like it too, this five man band kick out two instrumental psych jams, the A side is distorted and dirgey and blown out, seriously psychedelic, but weirdly minimal too, with a haunting apocalyptic folk undercurrent, the vibe tranced out and cyclical, a sort of churning hypnorock workout that is a gloriously mesmerizing chunk of psychedelic heaviness.
As is the B side, a bit more spaced out, abstract and drifty, but the guitars are still gnarled and buzzy, the drums loose and free, the sound a freeform psych drift blowout that explodes in the second half with some seriously killer guitar shred. Wowee. Can't wait for the full length!
Last year, when we listed the Paradigms cd of Grey Angel by The Slaves, we lamented that the band had already ceased to exist. They had only produced two full albums (the aforementioned Grey Angel and the currently out of print Ocean On Ocean, which will get reissued on 2lp in early fall 2012) and a mini-cassette, all of which were thoroughly brilliant amalgams of ethereal shoegaze and doom-tinged heaviness, akin to Lovesliescrushing genetically re-engineered to sound like Barn Owl. Fortunately, the declaration of the defunct-ness of The Slaves was indeed premature, as the Portland duo of Barbara Kinzle and Birch Cooper have returned and released this epic lp Spirits Of The Sun for Digitalis! The hiatus (which, seemed to be the result of the, um, romantic disentanglement betwixt the two) didn't change The Slaves' sound all that much, with elegantly fuzzed out synth melodies girding the liturgical, somber heaviness suspended upon the slow-motion crawl of the songs. Both Kinzle and Cooper intertwine wordless vocals around the fundamental tunes, which emote with the best of sound poems from Grouper but also align with plainsong chants from forgotten cathedrals. On top of all of this, they thoroughly smother everything in a beautifully luminescent blur of dream-pop / shoegazed noise. The album's opener "III" explodes with a dense accretion of guitar noise that pops in stark relief against the languid vocal chorales. "River" and "The Field" melt together with "III" to form the first side of the album with its oceanic heaviness of synth and guitar dronescaping. "Born Into Light" is a side long majestic epic that blossoms with much more blistering guitar noise searing through the melodic synth backbone, all of which deflates back to a nocturne of vocal incantations. Totally beautiful and totally recommended!
After years of underground mixtapes, this is the proper debut from oddly monikered Miami MC / producer Spaceghostpurrp, a seriously sweet slab of sinister darkness, a collection of hip hop slow jams, but slow jams that ooze and creep, all slithery and sick, blackened and ominous, the music a screw-ed low slung swagger, the beats a skeletal crunked out skitter, the sound all mysterious loops and swirls of grim shimmer, Purrp's cough syrup drawl the perfect match for the music's woozy drag. There's a bit of a horrorcore vibe throughout, think a more laid back Gravediggaz, which gives the whole record a seriously nightmarish vibe. One of the meanest, darkest, creepiest hip hop records in recent memory, and one that offers the rest of the world a glimpse of the grim dark underbelly of sunny Miami.
The second archival release from obscure sound-art resurrectionists Dead-Cert (a label connected to Finders Keepers and Demdike Stare). The first was Suzanne Ciani's terrifyingly clinical Voice of Packaged Souls. This time around it's a revival of a 1982 souvenir recording from a sculptural installation project with Swiss electronic jazz musician Bruno Spoerri and Material Design theorist and artist Betha Sarasin, as they utilize stainless steel sculptures for an array of acoustical sound investigations, how cool is that? You may remember Bruno Spoerri from the eccentric Finders Keepers collection, Gluckskugel, of off-the-wall musique concrete compositions, zany musical inventions and rejected TV themes, here he strikes a slightly more serious tone as he melds jazz organ and reeds with electronic drones and modular synthesis, as Sarasin employs tape manipulations and computerized sounds. But while we were expecting this to be cold "furniture music", there is also room for the playfully melodic, rhythmic and the sublime as well. Beginning with layered recorded voices that create a syncopated rhythm of which computer and organ sounds are built upon into a strange formalist jazz motif, each piece explores a strange new sonic territory. Later industrial oscillations are revved up into a keening pitch before imploding noisily. Some pieces have a library sound-relief quality that reminds us of Egisto Macchi's wondrous planetary explorations on I Futuribli. Other pieces remind us of Moondog's idiosyncratic rhythmic jazz extrapolations. A gem of a recording for any fan of unusual avant-garde sensibilities. Limited to 700 copies!
We all have guilty pleasures, stuff we LOVE to listen to more than anything, but stuff that maybe doesn't get bragged about as much as that grim black metal or obscure indie rock band, we've tried to be pretty open about our guilty pleasures (heck we even made a No Doubt singles comp our Record Of The Week once upon a time), with the hopes that people will realize there ARE NO guilty pleasures, or at least, there's nothing to be guilty about, especially when it comes to some music you love, if it moves you, or you just enjoy listening to it, that's good enough. However, we've discovered a new sort of guilty pleasure, maybe a guilty displeasure, the sort of stuff music nerds harass each other about endlessly, in this case, that displeasure entails not stuff you DO like, but the stuff you DON'T. Bands that by all rights you should love, but for whatever reason you just don't. My (Andee) well known dislike of Can gets lots of mileage around aQ, and for the longest time, I also harbored a general dislike of late great Midwestern punks Husker Du. It took much hassling and many different mixtapes foisted on me, but eventually I came to my senses and decided that I did indeed dig Husker Du.
But Sugar always seemed to pose the same problem. Bob Mould's post Husker Du band seemed right up my alley, sort of THEE ultimate noise pop band. Not sure if it was one of those knee jerk responses to the band that everyone likes, but I always just assumed Sugar wouldn't be my cup of tea, and thus, barring a few glancing listens here and there, managed to make it this far without ever hearing them.
Which brings us to these two reissues, which compiles all three of the group's releases on two double discs, and here's where the silver lining of missing out on something everyone else already knew about. Getting to discover and dig things for the very first time. And digging these Sugar reissues I most certainly am! It's a sort of musical discovery that happens less and less in this era of music everywhere and iTunes and downloads, and the fact that it's a group from an era of music when I was discovering new bands and sounds left and right, and it's a sound I loved and STILL love only makes it that much better. So that's another thing hopefully folks can learn from us putting our weird music nerderies out there for the world to see, you should always be open to having your mind changed, cuz the worse thing that happens is you suddenly have more music to love.
So yeah, you're all right, Sugar are pretty great, and while they still sound distinctly nineties, these records have weathered well for sure. Big crunchy guitars, crazy catchy choruses, a sound that's really not that far removed from Husker Du's Warehouse record, pretty much every song on Copper Blue, Sugar's 1992 debut, is a heavy hook filled killer, we could go song by song, but odds are most of you already know all about Sugar, the album tracks here fleshed out with a handful of B sides (available as a download with the lp version), as well as the following year's Beaster EP, which is really more of the same, although to these ears, it alternatingly sounds more shoegazy and/or more punk rock, but it fits pretty much perfectly alongside Copper Blue for sure. The cd version also includes a DVD featuring a live show from 1992.
I still don't like Can though.
We all have guilty pleasures, stuff we LOVE to listen to more than anything, but stuff that maybe doesn't get bragged about as much as that grim black metal or obscure indie rock band, we've tried to be pretty open about our guilty pleasures (heck we even made a No Doubt singles comp our Record Of The Week once upon a time), with the hopes that people will realize there ARE NO guilty pleasures, or at least, there's nothing to be guilty about, especially when it comes to some music you love, if it moves you, or you just enjoy listening to it, that's good enough. However, we've discovered a new sort of guilty pleasure, maybe a guilty displeasure, the sort of stuff music nerds harass each other about endlessly, in this case, that displeasure entails not stuff you DO like, but the stuff you DON'T. Bands that by all rights you should love, but for whatever reason you just don't. My (Andee) well known dislike of Can gets lots of mileage around aQ, and for the longest time, I also harbored a general dislike of late great Midwestern punks Husker Du. It took much hassling and many different mixtapes foisted on me, but eventually I came to my senses and decided that I did indeed dig Husker Du.
But Sugar always seemed to pose the same problem. Bob Mould's post Husker Du band seemed right up my alley, sort of THEE ultimate noise pop band. Not sure if it was one of those knee jerk responses to the band that everyone likes, but I always just assumed Sugar wouldn't be my cup of tea, and thus, barring a few glancing listens here and there, managed to make it this far without ever hearing them.
Which brings us to these two reissues, which compiles all three of the group's releases on two double discs, and here's where the silver lining of missing out on something everyone else already knew about. Getting to discover and dig things for the very first time. And digging these Sugar reissues I most certainly am! It's a sort of musical discovery that happens less and less in this era of music everywhere and iTunes and downloads, and the fact that it's a group from an era of music when I was discovering new bands and sounds left and right, and it's a sound I loved and STILL love only makes it that much better. So that's another thing hopefully folks can learn from us putting our weird music nerderies out there for the world to see, you should always be open to having your mind changed, cuz the worse thing that happens is you suddenly have more music to love.
So yeah, you're all right, Sugar are pretty great, and while they still sound distinctly nineties, these records have weathered well for sure. Big crunchy guitars, crazy catchy choruses, a sound that's really not that far removed from Husker Du's Warehouse record.
1994's File Under Easy Listening was the band's swansong, and it too is a monster of kick ass noise pop record, hooks galore, some killer drumming, and a seriously hefty production that makes File sound even better than Copper Blue, but most importantly, some amazing songs, File is beefed up with a bunch of B sides and a whole live show (Available as a download in the lp version), both sets contain tons of photos and extensive liner notes, and yeah, I know I'm twenty years late, but this is getting some serious non-stop play. So for those of you who somehow missed out on Sugar, like some (one?) of us, absolutely and retroactively recommended.
I still don't like Can though.
Some deep and heady devotional vibes from this unlikely dream collaboration of Sun Araw, M Geddes Gendras and reggae legends The Congos for the latest installment of the RVNG label's FRKWYS series. Reminding us of a more churning and lysergic exploration of Dadawah's long form Nyabinghi jams, Icon Give Thank as this disc in the series is titled, turns the standard dub-reggae expectations on their heads and instead offers a strange brew of soft swells, smoky psych drift and oceanic dub interludes, punctuated by the honeyed falsetto vocals of elder statesmen Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson from Congos. This release has garnered the most divisive stance of the FRKWYS series among us at aQ so far, with some of us considering it one of the better collaborations and for others a squandered opportunity smacking of colonialism. Granted, the sound design relies heavily on the Sun Araw side of the coin, but his approach is hardly "the white boy playing reggae" criticisms this release has occasionally garnered. The sound, for one, hovers hazily in the air like swirling smoke while the grounding bass is pushed back way in the mix instead of anchoring it rhythmically. Each member of the collaboration has come together on the premise of praise and invocation of thanks, making this project a more spiritual concern than just a good-times-get-high-let's-jam together record. By the end of it, we're in a completely different headspace altogether, in reverent clouds of the Divine.
And along with the cd, you get an hour-long dvd disc, called Icon Eye, a travelogue/documentary all about the collaboration process.
After the reissues of Talk Talk's final masterpiece, Laughing Stock and the band's reclusive frontman Mark Hollis's sole solo record, we get these two amazing Talk Talk Records reissued from the Parlophone label, third album The Colour Of Spring from 1986 and fourth album Spirit Of Eden from 1988. Unfortunately both are Dutch imports and pretty pricey, but they both come with dvds containing a high audio transfer of the original album masters and an exclusive bonus track. So true fans and audiophiles should really dig these!
Colour Of Spring marks the exact dividing line between the early Talk Talk bold Euro-pop style of It's My Life and the later subdued improvisational spaciousness of Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock. It's My Life (and ultimately this album as well) were such a commercial success that it gave the band a lot of capital with their label to begin pushing boundaries musically, so Colour Of Spring is really a concept-album song-cycle about the nature of romantic relationships where the band really begin exploring with unconventional song structures and complex hypnotic arrangements. They even use a children's choir. That album also afforded the band the opportunity to work with multiple musicians instead of synthesizer programming for the first time, making this record their last big commercial hit and the last time the band ever toured. The bonus track on the dvd is "It's Getting Late in The Evening", an outtake from the album sessions.
Spirit Of Eden, on par with Laughing Stock as one of the best and essential Talk Talk records is a magnificently realized studio album that proves what a band can do when everything they ever needed resource-wise is handed to them by their record label. Although it would eventually lead to severed ties and burnt bridges when the band finished the record and told the label that due to how the record was recorded (with several improvised parts complexly and fastidiously interwoven together in post-production), a tour supporting the record would be impossible. Fans at the time didn't know what to make of the new direction, which saw the band moving away from preconceived composition and pop sensibilities into a subdued improvisational unit borrowing more heavily from jazz and the avant-garde. It's as if the band went from being romantic Euro-poppers a la ABC to a more elegant, jazzier version of Slint. But the album presages the advent of post-rock and nineties indie rock, so it and its follow-up Laughing Stock which took the new direction out to it's farthest possibilities have long been heralded with cult-like status by legions of new fans. The bonus dvd comes with an outtake from the original sessions, "John Cope". Pricey, but recommended!
After the reissues of Talk Talk's final masterpiece, Laughing Stock and the band's reclusive frontman Mark Hollis's sole solo record, we get these two amazing Talk Talk Records reissued from the Parlophone label, third album The Colour Of Spring from 1986 and fourth album Spirit Of Eden from 1988. Unfortunately both are Dutch imports and pretty pricey, but they both come with dvds containing a high audio transfer of the original album masters and an exclusive bonus track. So true fans and audiophiles should really dig these!
Colour Of Spring marks the exact dividing line between the early Talk Talk bold Euro-pop style of It's My Life and the later subdued improvisational spaciousness of Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock. It's My Life (and ultimately this album as well) were such a commercial success that it gave the band a lot of capital with their label to begin pushing boundaries musically, so Colour Of Spring is really a concept-album song-cycle about the nature of romantic relationships where the band really begin exploring with unconventional song structures and complex hypnotic arrangements. They even use a children's choir. That album also afforded the band the opportunity to work with multiple musicians instead of synthesizer programming for the first time, making this record their last big commercial hit and the last time the band ever toured. The bonus track on the dvd is "It's Getting Late in The Evening", an outtake from the album sessions.
Spirit Of Eden, on par with Laughing Stock as one of the best and essential Talk Talk records is a magnificently realized studio album that proves what a band can do when everything they ever needed resource-wise is handed to them by their record label. Although it would eventually lead to severed ties and burnt bridges when the band finished the record and told the label that due to how the record was recorded (with several improvised parts complexly and fastidiously interwoven together in post-production), a tour supporting the record would be impossible. Fans at the time didn't know what to make of the new direction, which saw the band moving away from preconceived composition and pop sensibilities into a subdued improvisational unit borrowing more heavily from jazz and the avant-garde. It's as if the band went from being romantic Euro-poppers a la ABC to a more elegant, jazzier version of Slint. But the album presages the advent of post-rock and nineties indie rock, so it and its follow-up Laughing Stock which took the new direction out to it's farthest possibilities have long been heralded with cult-like status by legions of new fans. The bonus dvd comes with an outtake from the original sessions, "John Cope". Pricey, but recommended!
Quite the student of the obscure & forgotten histories of synth punk and industrial culture, Ravi Binning's Thought Broadcast firmly embraces the primitive technology and the vacated zeitgeist from 1979-1983. For Binning, the musical universe may have ceased to exist after SPK's major label dalliance on the unforgivably bad "Metal Dance," but he still carves out plenty of room to operate alongside The Units, Factrix, and Club Moral. As we heard last on the super limited Phaserprone 7" released earlier in 2012, Binning has at his disposal a collection of primitive monosynths and drum machines, possibly of vintage origin, possibly reverse engineered through modern technology, possibly new circuits designed to sound old. No matter what the means of production might be, his sound is decidedly primitive, with the simplest of minor-chord melodies, the most zombified of arpeggiations, and the tinniest of mechanical rhythms filtered from Conrad Schnitzler through TG and MB, all of it swamped with tape hiss and scabrous noise errors. How could Binning not record this on the shittiest of 4-tracks? Highly compressed, garbled vocals bark in distant monotone at erratic intervals, with crude tape-delay manipulation further obfuscating whatever apocalyptic, anti-social, damaged epithets Binning may be uttering. It's brilliant in its bleakness and its re-animatation of that peculiar hollowed-out industrial sound.
Tripped out sci-fi groove-rockers from Austin, Thousand Foot Whale Claw make their vinyl debut, and it's even better than we hoped it would be! We sold through a bunch of their Holodeck tape, Lost In Those Dunes, which was typical of their tape releases, two long sides of heady space rock drift, explosive cosmic psych expansiveness and ambient nuance. But for their vinyl debut, they really take their sound to the next level in the rhythm section, adding more bass and drum groove into tracks that enter an almost psych-rave territory, as if Spacemen 3 and Fuck Buttons gave birth to a baby in the bleak vacuum of space. Like local hypno-rockers, Lumerians, TFWC take advantage of an arsenal of psychedelic styles that propel the momentum, but keep the energy fresh, exciting and interestingly unpredictable. A tremendous debut that comes highly recommended! Fans of Cave, Moon Duo, Carlton Melton, White Manna, and Wooden Shjips take note!
Holy shit! Skullflower / Matthew Bower / Broken Flag / early industrial music nerds rejoice! A long overdue reissue of the debut release from Matthew Bower of Skullflower's solo project Total, originally released on cassette way back in 1986 on the Broken Flag label, and now available on cd for the first time EVER. And it's a monster. Amongst fans of this kind of stuff (which we most certainly are, and we imagine many of you are too), this ranks up there as holy grail sort of stuff, and many folks' favorite Bower recordings ever. And it's easy to see why. Even after all this time, the stuff on Hard + Low, still sounds totally fresh, and way ahead of its time. With new bands today conjuring up similarly mysterious murk, with no idea that Bower was doing the same thing, and doing it better more than two decades early.
Sonically, this is a tough one to pin down, the record begins with a live track, which is essentially a squall of blown out white noise guitar skree, through which can barely be discerned the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy In The UK", but soon even that disappears beneath a barrage of feedback and industrial clatter, it's the sort of noisiness that would have the listener battening down the hatches preparing for the onslaught that must no doubt be coming. But instead, the rest of the record, while still plenty pummeling and brutal, shows a surprising amount of restraint, whether it's the weird pulsating dirge folk noisescape of "Transfigured Night", which transforms skronking horns into bagpipe like bellows, all over corrosive drones and strange detuned guitar strum, sounding not unlike an industrial free jazz version of Amps For Christ, or "Charnel House Revisited", which is a woozy Philip Jeck like turntablescape, all warped loops and crackly records spinning over a strange stuttery beat. Or there's "You'll Get Yours Yet", which sounds like some lost cold wave gem, the guitars stretched out into droning buzz, laced with plenty of strange sonic streaks and tangled melodies, over which a darkly dramatic vocal bellows and growls, a sort of ominous drumless doom and gloom drone-noise creep.
The record's centerpiece is the nearly 14 minute "The Sound Of Music", which is essentially solo piano, super lo-fi, and with tons of echo and reverb, wreathed in subtle swaths of haunting buzz, the whole track rife with weird bits of static and tape hiss, and more detuned guitar buzz. Surprisingly lovely, but at the same time, still slightly sinister. There's a studio version of the opening live track too, which is GORGEOUS, driven by what sounds like organs, but must be processed guitars, tranced out and droney, drifting on a bed of static and hiss and gristly buzz, all manner of strange industrial filigree in the background, but weirdly tranquil, and dreamily mesmerizing, easily one of the prettiest 'noise' jams EVER. And finally, the record finishes off with "Terminator", another tripped out psychedelic samplescape, all looped and cyclical, an early industrial Jeck, unfurling a softly noisy, layered loops, and wrapping them in warm swirls of blunted noise and blurred gauzy thrum. Wow. Absolutely essential.
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The title Grote Mandrenke comes from an archaic Saxon dialect, meaning 'the great drowning of men' and refers to a historic storm that struck Europe in January 1362. This Atlantic storm raked across the British Isles and Northern Europe, killing over 25,000 people and creating such a deluge across the coastline of Holland as to aid in the formation of the Zuiderzee, a large inland sea which later became crucial for the political and economic fortunes of the Dutch Empire by the 17th Century. The aQ-endorsed drone-duo Troum takes up this subject with the same allegorical grandeur as Goya or Gericault or Turner might apply to such a subject through their historical paintings. It's all fury and bluster in the huge blasts of droned dissonance leading towards majestic overtures and ethereal gaspings in describing this event of meteorological violence.
In recent years, Troum's shadowy expressionism has developed greater and greater degrees of musical clarity with their pieces aligning closer to the drone-metal dirges of Nadja or Barn Owl. That holds true for the highly dramatic Grote Mandrenke. Emotionally saturated melodies tumble from a buzzsaw take on shoegazed guitars and lurching drum machine rhythms, shifting from one mighty orchestration of processed guitars into another. The mood of Troum's melodies is mostly somber although the sheer beauty of many of their phrases and slippages can considerably brighten the overall atmosphere of this album. One can easily see these torrents of darkened guitars as the manifest force of that 14th century storm, with the beautiful swaths of melody as the Pyrrhic visions of those who may have survived the storm but have a countryside of corpses, debris, and brokeness to sift through. A potent album to say the least.
This killer two band tag team of weirdo whatthefuck outsider Finnish black metal, previously only available on (out of print) vinyl, NOW ON CD!! Here's what we had to say about this split when we first reviewed the 12":
The return of our favorite Finnish black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, who really are barely even black metal, and actually hardly metal, but they are definitely weird, and this latest epic jam definitely does nothing to convince us otherwise. Beginning the ridiculous (and best ever!) title: "Ridiculed By Ladies Of The Moon", the song begins with a long stretch of warbly synth drone, laced with feedback, slowly undulating, while in the background sounds clank and clatter, sounding either like someone building a robot or someone making dinner, this goes on for a while until BLAM, the drums kick in, the synthy/electronic buzz is joined by HEAVY buzzy bass, and the track is transformed into a stumbling bass heavy dirge, the drums super distorted, which is especially noticeable on the bizarre fills, then the vocals, and awesome alien croak, sick and sinister and totally fucking nuts, the song pounds away, the sound gradually becoming a sort of dirgey space goth doom, dramatic and demented, and then there's the last stretch a wild final few minutes, the drums gone haywire, totally chaotic, the buzz intensified, wreathed in squiggles of white noise, and the sonorous clang of metal on metal, either some distant bells, or more likely, the pots and pans from the above mentioned kitchen being hurled about, a twisted and baffling finish to another incredible warped chunk of sonic weirdness from these guys.
Which is a lot to live up to for Undor, who decide to not try to outweird RfR, but instead, offer up a sort of sonic analogue, a stretched out midtempo jam, that sounds like just drums and guitar, the guitar riffing away, but occasionally spiraling into some weird bit of atonal squiggle, or slippery abstract melody, or a brief bit of shred, but always returning to the stumbling, lumbering, lurching main rhythm/riff. The vibe is a bit mournful, at times it sounds a bit like Hypothermia crossed with Varghkoghargasmal, the vocals pushing it over the top, a wild hysterical shriek, that in some weird way balances the slightly more measured tone of the rest of the track. But only slightly.
We made the first Air Texture compilation our Record Of The Week, back in November of 2011, a fantastic, and fantastically blissed out collection of ambient soundscapery from some of our favorite audio alchemists, running the gamut from dreamy Pop Ambience to abstract ethereal drone music, from modern classical minimalism to hushed softly psychedelic shimmer, and the many many variations in between. This is the second volume in what now appears to be an ongoing series, and once again features a lineup that reads as if it was curated by someone at aQ, as well as featuring a number of artists who contributed to the first compilation. Most folks will probably just need a list of the folks involved: Brian McBride of Stars Of The Lid, Loscil, Pan American, Mitchell Akiyama, Bvdub, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Simon Scott, Lawrence English, Marcus Fjellstrom, Rafael Anton Irisarri and loads more. And like the best compilations, it doesn't feel like a compilation, it plays like an album proper, or perhaps the perfect mix tape for late night chill out / drift off.
Brian McBride starts things off with a track that does not sound that far removed from recent Stars Of The Lid, huge sweeping swells of lush chordal shimmer and swoonsome strings, orchestral and symphonic and achingly majestic, dappled with pointilist piano and soft focus swirls, that blossom into radiant expanses of prismatic gauzy drift. Marcus Fischer weaves muted rhythms into a swirling sea of guitar twang and distant melodies, the sound washed out and rainswept, Loscil unfurls billows of blurred electronics, darkly dynamic, sounding like a slightly more sinister Oval, while Chris Herbert lays out a super minimal sprawl of softly staticky hiss and ephemeral thrum.
We could go track by track, but the great thing is how all the songs share attributes that weave all of these disparate pieces together, while each track remaining wholly unique, the listener is carried along by this constantly subtly shifting collection of sounds, lost utterly within each, the songs bleeding into one another, offering a bit of sonic familiarity, before revealing something unique to that track, a constant voyage of sonic discovery, which rewards close listening, but is equally effective as background ambience. Music that conforms to its surroundings like some strange sonic fog, hovering and drifting weightlessly in the distance, becoming something else entirely as we draw closer, and lose ourselves within.
Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. And most definitely the perfect soundtrack for late nights, lost afternoons, rainy days, deep black nights, and drifting into oblivion.
Killer collab between Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, JK Flesh, etc.) and Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Hototogisu, Sunroof!, etc.) along with Samantha Davis who plays with Bower in Voltigeurs, who team up for some seriously old school blackened industrial noise dirge bliss. aQ pal Matt described it as sounding like Skullflower's Birthdeath / Form Destroyer / IIIrd Gatekeeper records "but maybe just a little prettier", which is definitely not that far off the mark. Four long tracks, thick clouds of caustic guitar swirl, blurred riff-noise, and churning chordal thrum, shot through with buried melodies, streaks of feedback, all anchored by a primitive plodding drum machine rhythm. That's the first track at least, best listened to through headphones, which like a lot of recent Bower projects, reveals a whole other world of sonic subtleties beneath the roiling surface, and here it's dreamily keening melodies, some woozy downtuned chugs, and some dense layered noisiness that ends up sounding more trancelike and hypnotic that harsh or brutal.
"Ourobous" is more of the same, only with the treble dialed way back, and the low end cranked as high as it'll go, a murky muddy dirge, with a more forceful, double kick driven beat, the dueling guitars sparring in jagged tangles over a swirl of blackened buzz and crunch, until the drums drop out, and the song is transformed into a weirdly mesmerizing ur-drone, one guitar rumbling and whirring while the other unfurls almost black metal sounding riffs, that soar skyward like some black metalized Sunroof! "Naga" pushes the robotic rhythm to the fore, letting the guitars (and this time a very audible bass) grind away, plenty of skree and howl, the bass providing some serious heft, the rhythm section seriously pulverizing, wreathed in a cloud of wild psychedelic guitar freakout.
"The Exit Door Leads In" is the longest of the bunch, at 12+ minutes, and is the perfect mix of Godflesh industrial dirge, and Skullflower blackened skree, with all sorts of riffs and melodies and rhythms seeming to gradually come into focus only to dissipate back into the endless psych-noise squall. This final track also seems to have a driving melodic component, that makes it feel the most songlike, sort of gloomy and haunting, like if you stripped away all the guitar noise, you'd be left with some sort of gloomy gothic almost cold wave sounding dirge, but add the guitars, and the noise, and it becomes a dense, darkly driving noise rock space-psych jam that could go on forever and ever, and is the sort of thing that might even appeal to super adventurous fans of outfits like White Hills, The Heads, Carlton Melton and other psychedelic space rockers.
Needless to say, fans of Skullflower, Godflesh and and various like minded, Broken Flag beholden, industrial psychedelic noise outfits, will dig this A LOT!! Limited to 500 copies.
One of two new singles on this week's list from UK label Trensmat, one by UK psychedelic spacekraut collective Gnod, and this one, from twisted soundscapers Whirling Hall Of Knives, and as always, already sold out at the label, and thus the copies we got are most likely the only ones we'll ever see.
We actually first discovered Whirling Hall Of Knives via a split 7" on Trensmat, with Tlaotlon, and even then, we were pretty into WHOK's looped and layered slow building psychedelia, which is still present here, but wrapped around some pounding hypnotic drumming, the sound a thick, almost corrosive buzz, churning and roiling and being pulled along in the wake of the aforementioned drum pound, a sort of droned out blackened krautmetal that is some of the raddest stuff we've heard, falling somewhere between the recent JK Flesh record and Necro Deathmort, but somehow more metal, or noise rock, whatever it is, it sounds like a real band, not a guy and his laptop, and it sounds like the kind of thing that would DESTROY live, a sort of heavy heavy drum driven ur-drone that we could imagine coming from the Shit And Shine camp. The flipside strips away the drums, and adds all sorts of extra melody and textures, creating something that while still plenty buzzy, is more space and almost Eastern sounding, heady and hypnotic and seriously blissed out. So good!
Pressed on milky swirled blue grey vinyl, and includes a link to downloads of both tracks as well as a bonus track NOT on the 7" (that's easily as good as either of the proper 7" tracks, dense and blackened, droney and HEAVY)!
As promised last list, here's the second of the two volumes of collected wah-wah overload and heavy fuzz freakout from this legendary underground UK hard psych power trio, circa 1969-1972, who were doomy and proto-metallic, but also fairly melodic and bluesy and sixties-sounding (they do a version of Jimi's "Voodoo Chile" here, which fits right in).
There's seven more archival Wicked Lady selections here to delight deaf bikers everywhere, ranging from excellently titled opener "I'm A Freak" to the album-ending 22 minute epic "Ship Of Ghosts", each full of heavy fuzzed out chugging guitar to the max.
Imagine a rather darker, more evil sounding Blue Cheer and you'd be close. The nearly 10 minute "Passion" sounds a heck of a lot like something by early Pentagram (or Bedemon), you could almost imagine it's Bobby Liebling singing it. Also there are some lines in the lyrics that go: "Tell me you love me / And I won't throw your grandma on the fire", how nice!
The cd booklet includes lyrics, and liner notes (the same notes as found in vol. 1, The Axeman Cometh, though). And for your information, Guerssen has released this on vinyl as well, though we're still waiting for our copies to arrive.
This is another one of those cases, where we were sort of obsessed before we even heard a note of music. They're called Wizard Rifle, which is simultaneously the raddest and stupidest band name ever, they claim to play 'scrap metal', they have songs with titles like "Tears Won't Soften Steel" and "Leathery Gentlemen", they even have a song named for legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, and then there's the band photo, which has one guy dressed like and old timey dandy in a rocking chair holding a rifle, while the other guy is wearing zebra print spandex, is wearing hand made wings, is painted all over and is brandishing a scythe, that band photo could have gone either way actually, but when combined with all the other stuff, we had a feeling...
And holy shit, sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover, and these Portland scrap metallers totally destroy, taking their cues from groups like Karp, that sort of relentlessly pounding metallic churn, and Lightning Bolt, that sort of frenzied hyper prog bombast, in fact, in some ways, that's the perfect equation to describe these guys, Karp plus Lightning Bolt. BUT, and this is critical, they take those two sounds, and totally make them their own, they're definitely as frantic and mathed out as Lightning Bolt, and maniacally metallic as Karp, but they've created something even more poppy and proggy, and totally wild and fucking over the top fun. One of those rare bands that sound like they just might be one of the funnest bands to see EVER. We'd happily base that on the first track along, the 6+ minute hyper-pop-prog-metal workout that is "Tears Won't Soften Steel", which begins with a little flurry of hazy guitar, which is then joined by some furious drum pound, all wreathed ins swirling bleeps and bloops, the guitar offering up shards of angular riffage, soaring and squiggly, before finally launching into some seriously Karp-ed out krunch, but here wedded to some crooned Torche-like pop song vox, a weird combination that kills, the Karp-ness at times is uncanny, but then the band will explode into crazy mathiness, or some weird sing along start-stops, or some doomy metallic chug and churn, and then some awesome harmonized guitars that make this sound like the heaviest pop record of all time, the sort of part that sends you diving for the rewind button the second it finishes, thankfully, the band hammer away at that part, soaring and melodic and so catchy, before the final super rocking sing along finish.
And while the opener might be our favorite, the rest of the record is fast catching up, "Frazetta" has the coolest heaviest opening, before locking into some swirling dizzying pop infused metallic mayhem, there are samples too, and the band seem to flit from part to part at the drop of a dime, so tight, so heavy, and yeah, so totally fun. From there on out, the band dip their toes into some brooding minimal shimmer, only to see it splinter into a slithery sludge pop groove, with some haunting harmonized vocals, while elsewhere they take frantic frenzied blasts of metal and pepper them with progged out breakdowns, and wrap them in surprisingly poppy vox, and finally, they finish things off with "Leathery Gentlemen" which in some ways sounds basically like a culmination of everything that came before, grinding metallic crush, blasting sludge pop bliss, soaring harmonized vox, wild dueling guitars, mathed out progginess, and a surprise bit of swirling psychedelic backwards guitar flecked drift, only to explode into a blastbeat driven stretch of soaring metal majesty, that might be the most furious part of the whole record, only to devolve in the last minute into a warped woozy, increasingly dizzying noise pop freakout.
A brand new solo incarnation from San Francisco based multi-instrumentalist Trevor Montgomery (Lazarus, Tarentel, The Drift), Young Moon evokes the romantic and wistful jangle pop of early eighties groups such as Durutti Column, The Lilac Time and Autumn Fair. Far from the downer croon of Lazarus, Montgomery employs a hazy autumnal shimmer of synths and guitars with vocal treatments pushed back in the mix in songs that explore love's gains as well as losses. At times Montgomery's vocals evoke early Springsteen with some obscure C86 band backing him, but this album is more than a culmination of influences and moods. It's a genuinely heartfelt and sincere approach to music making with some of Montgomery's best songwriting to date. A beautiful record to wake up to as our warm summers make way for the chill of the fall.
So far we've made both full lengths from Asa Osborne's Zomes project Records Of The Week, and for good reason, each one a gorgeous assemblage of lo-fi keyboard mediations, and haunting rhythmic ragas, hiss drenched melodies unfurling over murky beats, everything blurred and bleary and meditatively blissed out. Many recent converts to Zomes might not realize that Osborne was previously the guitarist in late great Baltimore hypnorock combo Lungfish, which also of course featured mystical musical shaman Daniel Higgs, who also gets a lot of love on the aQ list.
Between those two ROTW full lengths, Osborne released a cassette called Improvisations 1 + 2, which as the title suggested, found Osborne improvising on some similar sonic themes, that tape fitting perfectly between those proper albums. Variations takes up where that tape left off, with a series of short form tranced out synth mediations, rhythmless this time, so the feel is much more abstract and free, more celestial and yeah, even more kosmische. It's hard not to draw a parallel, at least melodically, to another aQ fave, Amps For Christ, Zomes' sound treading similarly warped electronic ground, with some tracks revealing playful melodies, as if reinterpretations of some old folks standard, played here on some primitive analog synth, and recorded onto old dusty tapes, while others blossom and unfold like some long lost new age prog artifact, captured surreptitiously on a handheld tape player, the strange low fidelity production and soft swirls of tape hiss adding all manner of texture and grit to the proceedings, so even at its most washed out and serene, the sound is rough and raw, the tones gristly and crunchy, everything gloriously warm and buzzy.
Not much else needs to be said really, Zomes fans will want this for sure, but really anyone into tripped out lo-fi kosmische explorations and hushed minimal synthscapery should grab one of these, and will most likely find themselves falling under Zomes' sonic spell.
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