Everybody knows 'Balls To The Wall', Accept's early 80's hit that almost made the 'You Shook Me All Night Long' leap from Headbangers Ball to FM radio, but their 1982 release 'Restless and Wild' (reissued here, digitally remastered and in a spiffy digipack) is the only truly essential Accept record. And essential it is. Equal parts catchy eighties hard rock and proto-thrash-metal and featuring the unique balls-in-a-vice/tracheotomy vocals of sort-of-dwarf Udo Dirkschneider, 'Restless and Wild' is easily one of my favorite metal records of the eighties, and it holds up surprisingly well, almost 20 years later.
Latest from this blackened noise drone doom duo, an offshoot of aQ faves Gnaw Their Tongues, which finds GTT mastermind Mories teamed up with a guy from a band called Mowlawner (awesome name!), for some very GTT-like audial pure pain punishment. Much like GTT, the sounds here are grim and harsh, lots of black buzz, and dense drones, sprawling fields of abject blacknoise and soundtrack like horror ambience, but unlike Gnaw Their Tongues, which tends toward the orchestral and symphonic, Aderlating seems more rough and raw, wild and loose, and according to the sticker on the front of the disc, also improvised, which makes sense listening to the opening track here, which sounds a bit like some demonic free jazz via Abruptum style black noise minimalism, the sound churning and roiling, bellowed demonic vox buried beneath an avalanche of downtuned heaviness and rumbling low end crunch, sounding almost like a blackened free jazz Wolf Eyes, the same sort of bleak blackened miserablism, but here driven by some chaotic loose drumming, the only thing really anchoring the otherwise billowing blackness.
But that's only really one side of this most recent incarnation of Aderlating, elsewhere the band unfurl thick coruscating sheets of crumbling dronemusic, or unleash stumbling chaotic blasts of low fidelity black metal, or epic expanses of cavernous droned out industrial noise, the sound most mesmerizing when it's somehow all of those combined, like on the 18+ minute "Engel Der Wrake", which at times sounds like a blackdrone version of Aussie jazz minimalists the Necks, fusing some mesmerizing, almost krautrock like motorik mesmer to near orchestral expanses of blackened musical majesty, with strange horns, sampled sounds, industrial clatter, it could be the soundtrack to some strange sci-fi art film perhaps, and is the most ambitious, but weirdly the most fully formed and listener friendly track of the bunch.
But just to make sure you know they're not getting soft, they finish with another blast of near jazzy blackness, on the surface, it's noisy and caustic and chaotic, but dig deeper, and like the lest of the record, it reveals itself as a dense, layered, rhythmic construct, that again fuses abstract black jazz to industrial noise, and creates something wholly original, that while obviously is essential for fans of Gnaw Their Tongues is also brutal and black enough for noise enthusiasts, while being plenty tripped out and psychedelic enough for adventurous metalheads and weirdo outsider music nerds as well.
Aero-Mic'd began as a solo concern for local San Francisco artist Wayne Smith, but has over the years evolved into a three piece synth trio for live shows with the additions of Cliff Hengst (Troll) and our own Scott Hewicker (The Alps). Specializing in long form kosmiche explorations that gently shift into woozy bowed drones with a mixture of field recordings and ambient atmospherics, 22:44 is mostly culled from a live 2010 performance at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, with subtle augmentations from other home recordings. Invited by the art and music publication entity Land and Sea to perform in the late great cathedral event series Episco Disco (where artists were invited to create installations and music events inside the hallowed space) , Aero-mic'd used the echoing acoustics and the substantial room ambiance to create a floating sound world of soft angelic otherworldliness. Layers of synth and computer-generated drones and loops, bass tones and field-recordings merge with sounds of sleigh bells, bowed guitar, kalimba, and murmurs and footsteps from the moving crowds. Limited to 50 copies. Play loud for full effect!
Latest in a series of killer vinyl-only reissues from the Secret Stash label, who indeed seem to have access to a secret stash of international groove obscurities. This rare record, originally released in 1975, was the sole album from Afro Funk, a band of West Africans based in London, England. Can you guess what this one sounds like from the band name? Yes you can! Afrobeat rhythms meet electric American funk. It's chock full of percolating percussion, chirping horns, wacka-wacka guitar, and chanted funk-shaman vocals. Also, some some JB's "Blow Your Head" style synth Moog-ery, notably prominent on side two's mesmerizing 8+ minute instrumental jam "Farewell To Ibusa". Overall, the lp's got a loose languid laidback vibe, yet the playing is tight and funky throughout. Reminds us a bit of Soundway's recent reissue by the Black Truth Rhythm Band, and also would fit in with the great stuff Academy Records/Voodoo Funk digs up, like Marijata. In fact, we now remember that their track "Afro Funk" appeared, appropriately, on the comp Afro Funk Explosion some years back, alongside the likes of Blo, Manu Dibango, and, yes, Black Truth Rhythm Band. Quite a groovy gem, well worthy of reissue. Comes with mp3 download card.
Watch out for more reviews of Secret Stash stuff as we catch up on their catalog...
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.
It's been a little while since we've heard from these Belgian weirdos. Their sound, an ever evolving black buzz sludge, having over the years seemingly drifted away from black buzz, to a more Gnaw Their Tongues style abject doom. But on this latest lp, the band explode from note one into a frenzy of wild, loose, spastic black metal buzzing - however, not sounding so much like a black metal band, but more like some weird noise rock / art rock combo doing their best black metal, which might have some folks crying 'poser', but as far as we're concerned it makes for something much more interesting. Just wait a few minutes for the songs to switch gears, the band grinding to a halt, then launching into an almost Shellac like bit of minimal math rock, albeit a bit more grimy and low fidelity. That opening track is 20+ minutes long, so the song goes through quite a few sonic permutations, adding some woozy droney shimmer, some chugging riffy churn, the sound almost more metallic krautrock at times, depressive black metal at others, eventually exploding into another stretch of stumbling flailing buzzing blackness, only to then add strange samples, squalls of psychedelic noise, and a final movement that's broody and slithery and seriously doomy.
The shorter middle tracks fall into more of a noise rock / dirge rock thing, grimey and downtuned, with the second of the two exploding into an almost D-beat pound, the sounds murky and muddy, flitting from loping crunch to punkish swagger, to noisy tangle, but constantly crusty and corrosive.
The final 13 minute jam, a sonic bookend to the epic opener, unfurls as a haunting hushed shimmer, blossoming into a sprawl of abject slo-mo ultra-doom, all tarpit riffs, and glacial drum damage, long tones and droned out melodies, super trancey and hypnotic and HEAVY, eventually splintering into more black blasts, the final blast getting seriously melodic and epic, making it sound like had the song not ended, it would have become some sort of Godspeed black metal blow out. Killer stuff as always. And yeah, SUPER limited.
Along with Oren Ambarchi's new Nazoranai trio with Keiji Haino and Stephen O'Malley (in which Ambarchi plays percussion), we thought we'd also list the Aussie experimentalist's recent 'solo' effort on Touch, which features a lot of help from his various talented friends. We were thrown off a bit by the opening track, "Salt", a sad slice of ambient-indie pop, featuring heartfelt singing from someone we at first assumed was Ambarchi (but is in fact Paul Duncan from the band Warm Ghosts) set amidst gentle, atmospheric backing crackle and melodic strings. Quite nice, really, readily reminding us of Ambarchi's Sun duo with Chris Townsend who made a couple records few years back. So we assumed the rest of the disc would play out in a similar song-oriented fashion, Ambarchi as indie troubadour, rather than experimental deep drone axeman, but nope, not exactly - the next cut, "Knots", at over 33 minutes, could be a whole different record all by itself, an abstract expanse with telegraphic tick tick tick percussion and smoothly buzzing electronic drones. Ambarchi contributes several guitar parts, in an (international, edited-together) ensemble that includes Eyvind Kang on viola and igil, along with others on sawing cello and foggy French horn, etc. This is for those into the more extreme end of Ambarchi's oeuvre, as it gets rather frightening before it's over, like the nightmarish, grinding psych rock equivalent of an electro-acoustic ECM improv, though other, milder parts resemble the glitchdrone work of NZ's Dean Roberts.
Following that intense opus, there's two further, somewhat shorter tracks remaining on the disc: the quiet and careful "Passage", with tremulous, wordless vocals from Jessika Kenney; and then, the disc's fourth and final track "Fractured Mirror", which gets into lovely, dual acoustic guitar mode� although somewhat shockingly it's a cover of a song written by Ace Frehley from KISS!!! Hmm, Ambarchi is even cooler than we thought.
A lovely, lovely disc, that touches upon several aspects of Ambarchi's career thus far while opening up other intriguing avenues of exploration (more KISS covers!).
From the same label that just reissued John Carpenter's Escape From New York soundtrack, comes this deluxe, 140 gram vinyl version of Michael Andrews' score for the 2001 film Donnie Darko, which finds the score remastered, and re-packaged with original artwork by Tom French, along with an A2 sized poster, also with French's artwork. Here's a slightly altered/updated version of our review of cd version, when we first listed it way back in 2002:
Easily one of, if not THE, best movies of 2001. Dark and beautiful and sad and haunting and creepy as fuck. A gorgeously surreal, sort-of-horror film, sort-of-coming-of-age-film, with tender awkward teen romance, family tragedy, alienated youth, and with some time travel and a giant demon-faced bunny thrown in for good measure. So delicate and tender, but genuinely frightening at the same time. And much of the mood is owed to the amazing score. A dark mix of rumbling drones and melancholy piano, wispy minor key song fragments, atonal musique concrete, and a totally soul stirring, heartbreaking, and eerie version of Tears For Fears' eighties classic "Mad World" (you know the one: "...the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I ever had..."). Much of the soundtrack proper (separate from the score) is made up of songs by Tears For Fears, Joy Division and Echo And The Bunnymen, Duran Duran and others, but the score itself is something much darker, and is the perfect balance to those eighties pop tunes, and the reworked "Mad World" is sort of the perfect mix of the two. Also includes an alternate mix of "Mad World" with skittery lo-fi drum machine that actually works pretty well, giving it a sort of Portishead vibe. Like the movie, WAY recommended.
The lp version includes liner notes by director Richard Kelly and artist Tom French.
A brand new record from Arcata black metallers Ash Borer, and more importantly, their first album with a title! Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a review of the recent vinyl reissue of AB's debut 2009 demo, which we mistakenly listed last time as being the vinyl version of their 2011 full length (the confusion due mostly to both records being self titled and having nearly the same artwork).
On Cold Of Ages, the band continue to hone their sound, still delivering their black buzz missives in the form of lengthy sprawling epics, the shortest here clocking in at 11+ minutes, the longest 18 minutes. And as on previous records AB are masters of crafting majestic longform blackbuzz epics - "Descended Lamentations" opens the album with a long stretch of softly pulsing ominously minor key synths, over a barely there rhythmic churn, wreathed in clean guitar swirl, and a gauze of crumbling distant buzz, haunting and harrowing, the song proper doesn't kick in until three minutes in, but when it does, it's a furious thick, heavily layered blasting blur, rife with all manner of melody, and surrounded by a strangely shoegazey halo of soft focus production, that smoothes some of the edges and gives the sound more of a washed out vibe, which suits the music for sure. Dizzying and cyclical, woozy and psychedelic, halfway through the track shifts to a more midtempo pound, before blissing out completely, unfurling a sort of droned out abstract doomic dirge, which gradually builds back to the initial buzzing blackness.
"Phantoms" starts off all midtempo and minor key, a Buzumic riff swaddled in thick swirls of layered guitars and howled vox, everything again washed out and strangely sun dappled and glimmery, but like all these songs, the music is constantly shifting, here it flits to churning chug, to furious buzzing tangle, to soaring almost black metal Godspeed and finally to hushed delicate ambient dronescape. "Convict All Flesh" is the longest track here, and starts off with an ominous and stately riff, suspended in the ether, before it's joined by more guitars, creating a strangely psychedelic layered raga like ur-drone, which is soon dragged into motion by a creeping doomdirge rhythm, everything swaddled in distant synth swirl, slowly building to a seriously furious bout of black buzz, and throughout the rest of the track seasawing back and forth, although the best bit is the middle stretch where the group weds a furious blast beat to the doomy opening guitar creep, and an equally doomy chiming guitar melody, piling layer upon layer of buzz and crumble, creating a strange bit of black psychedelia that hover somewhere between furious blast and abstract drift, which could have (and maybe should have) gone on forever, but instead it eventually swallowed up but a billowing cloud of blackened static riffing, a haunting droned out coda.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Removed Forms", starting off all tripped out almost dubby guitar melodies, choral female vocals, drifting over a dark expanse of almost Barn Owl like sinister dusky twang, before exploding into a blur of brittle high end buzzing blast, mesmerizing and almost looped sounding, before splintering into a creeping Burzumic dirge, and building to a dense, mathy, layered final movement, the various elements peeling away, leaving, thick slabs of buzz drenched guitar to churn in a dark droned out finale.
We mistakenly listed this two weeks back as a repress of the 2011 full length by these Arcata black metallers, due in no small part to the fact that up until their brand new full length (Cold Of Ages, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), all of their releases were self titled, and often featured no artwork except for the band logo. So, to correct ourselves: this record is in fact, an lp reissue of the group's two song 2009 demo, originally released as an insanely limited cassette.
Two side long epics, each as heavy on the post rock and the black metal buzz, the A side starting off with a loping slow build minimal intro, before eventually exploding into a droned out blast, the lo-fi recording giving the sound a washed out almost shoegazey vibe, which would definitely remain a big part of their sound. Even the blasting buzzy parts super melodic, the song occasionally breaking down into long stretches of minimal drift, rife with spidery clean guitar melodies, the track working its way to a killer chugging old school classic metal sounding outro. The flipside begins with some soaring high end guitars, drifting over loping slo-mo riffage, and chiming harmonics. Like the A side, it soon splinters into a full on blown out black blast, laced with wild proggy drumming, and woozy sing songy melodies. The breakdown in the middle a chugging bit of midtempo churn, again beneath soaring melodies, slowly building back up to a final blast of melody infused black buzz. Still some of our favorite Ash Borer material, and definitely already displaying a fully formed sound, that would only become more full realized with every release.
Housed in a super swank letter pressed jacket, and yeah, very likely EXTREMELY LIMITED.
Killer compilation of pretty much everything ever recorded by these infamous LA punks, including a bunch of demos, alternate takes and rehearsals! The Bags were originally conceived after a failed audition for Venus And The Razorblades, Kim Fowley's next big thing after the Runaways. Named for the fact that the group would wear paper bags on their heads at early shows (Darby Crash of the Germs once infamously jumped on stage and tore off lead vocalist Alice Bag's bag!), the group would become infamous for wild shows, that would culminate in fights and damaged equipment, the group consequently getting banned from many of the popular clubs in Los Angeles. Sonically, while definitely punk, like lots of seventies punk rock their sound had a heavy Yellow Pills power pop vibe, the songs fuzzy and jangly, and crazy catchy, with cool, snarly, swaggery female vox, fuzzed out guitars, the songs laced with wild squiggly leads, and catchy like crazy. Listening to this now, it seems impossible that the Bags weren't more popular. Raw and emotional, passionate and rocking and hooky as hell, definitely another essential punk rock artifact, and one that anyone who's been digging that recent Avengers reissue should check out for sure!
Includes a massive insert with extensive liner notes by punk rock impresario Brendan Mullen and tons of photos!
Here, Dark Entries reissues the terminally obscure second album from the Slovenian minimal-wave quartet Borghesia. The band formed in 1982 during the death throes of the fractious Yugoslavian republic, operating in a liminal space between the art world and the underground punk scene, through their own club Disco FV. During these early years, the quartet produced video installations and performances alike, with the sound design being an instrumental, hard-edged variant on new wave sensibilities. By the mid '80s, the project stripped down to a duo and took up a sweaty DAF-inspired muscularity of industrial funk. But here on Clones (originally self-released as a cassette in 1984), we find Borghesia doing their best work. All instrumental trax of hypnotic, pulsing electronics with some very forward thinking 808 drum programming that foreshadowed the reductionist strategies of Detroit electro and techno, albeit within a context that favored the darker sounds of The Human League and Soft Cell. The A side features spry and punchy tracks with plenty of elliptical arpeggiations and ramped up BPMs, whereas the B side is more pastoral and slower, sporting an eerie, melodic homage to Cindy Sherman. Clones, indeed!
Killer double disc compendium collection pretty much everything recorded (two albums, a 12", and some bonus tracks) by this incredible indie rock band, an offshoot of the late great Silkworm, a group we were hugely obsessed with back in the day, and still love. Silkworm's sound was dark and mysterious, a twisted and bitter take on indie rock, that somehow managed to evoke an impossible hopefulness at the same time. Super melodic, 3 of the 4 members sang, each with a distinctive style and sound, which only helped make their music more interesting. Joel Phelps, perhaps our favorite voice of the bunch, left, and the band sadly seemed to flounder. Then tragically, their drummer was killed in an automobile accident, and Silkworm was over. The surviving members resurfaced as Bottomless Pit a year or two later, and something happened. Not sure if it was going through the death of Dahlquist, or the new members, but it was the best these guys had sounded since the Phelps days. And while it may be called Bottomless Pit, sonically it sounds as much like Silkworm as ever. Which in this case is a very good thing.
Hammer Of The Gods (from 2007) is a dark dark record. Moody and melancholy, introspective, but plenty rocking. The two Silkworms, Tim Midgett and Andy Cohen, still share vocals and songwriting duties, so in that way too, the sound is reminiscent of Silkworm. The drums are simple and solid, the guitars tightly wound, the vocals weary and warm, the second track "Dogtag" might be the best Silkworm song Silkworm never wrote. A muted chug holds the song down, never quite exploding into full on rocking, the tension building and building, the vocals managing to sound so worn and haggard, and yet so emotional The menacing groove of "Dead Man's Blues" sounds angry and bitter, with a jagged tangled chorus and a killer wall of gnarled guitar second half. "Human Out Of Me" is another brooding slow burner, all warbly falsetto vocals and simple cyclical melody. Hammer Of The Gods finishes up with "Sevens Sing", a real strange one, with haunting processed drums, shimmery talk box sounding guitars, space-y effects, all very spare and whispery, distant whirs and wheezing strings, the song never really getting loud or aggressive, just slithering along intensely, sounding like it might never end, a gorgeous, yet tripped out funereal indie rock sprawl.
The second Bottomless Pit album, 2010's Blood Under The Bridge, offers more of the same, dark and haunting stripped down indie rock. Someone here thought it sounded like Belle And Sebastian, but to our ears it sounds like a heavier My Dad Is Dead, the same sort of world weary, minor key, broken hearted indie rock. The first few tracks slither and creep, hushed and minimal and way moody, but then comes "Summerwind" which is surprisingly rocking, and sounds like it could have been yanked off one of the classic old Silkworm records, and the vibe and the energy stays relatively charged after that. "Late is another slow burning rocker, with some gorgeous vocal melodies, and some awesome psych guitar, "Dixon" alternately pounds and broods, with an almost surfy sounding main riff, but then "Kiss Them All" brings it back down again, a gorgeous low slung pretty indie pop drifter, that sounds as good as anything these guys have done.
The last three tracks on Blood Under The Bridge bounce back and forth between energetic crunch, spacey contemplative drift, and driving grooves, finishing off with the epic emotional catharsis of "38 Souls" that feels just like the old days. A (bitter)sweet dose of classic indie rock, the kind they don't really make anymore (except when it's made by the guys and gals who were making it the first time around anyway!)
This new collection also includes the 2008 Congress EP which we were never able to get, as well as three previously unreleased and unheard (by us at least, and probably you) tracks, all of which, sound as good as anything on the records proper.
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label is home to all sorts of warped electronic music, from Southern hip hop, to lo-fy synth pop, to total summer jam radio pop, to woozy witch house to THIS, a glorious blast of super distorted blown out, boomin' system, big beat bumping Miami Bass music, but constructed entirely from samples of Middle Eastern music!! It's so nuts, but so amazing, Middle Eastern folk music, Bollywood loops, chants and prayers and all sorts of unlikely sounds wedded to booty shaking beats, nasty rapping, female call and response vox, it's like 2 Live Crew if they did a record for Sublime Frequencies, total what the fuck GENIUS. This is most definitely what we'll be blasting next time we're driving down the coast with the top down and the bass BOOMIN'!!
Imagine the fuzziest and loudest side of My Bloody Valentine, the haziest, most washed out and dreamy side of Bardo Pond, and the white noise of Flying Saucer Attack coming together and you start to get an idea of the amazing terrain that San Francisco's Chasms wander so perfectly on their debut offering.
We've been smitten with these two ladies from the first time we saw them perform, at what may have been their first or second show ever opening for Royal Baths. Every time we've seen them since then they only get better and better, and this cassette finds them in seriously fine form. Raw and primitive drum machines back their shredding and trance inducing guitars, and then the vocals, which are captured perfectly in the mix, bring it all together for a listening experience that makes us sway and nod and close our eyes as we get lost in the clouds of their foggy sonic daydreams.
The cassette is brimming with such a perfect full and alive sound, we can't help but think of everything from Bowery Electric to Nadja to Grouper.
We could go on and on about how much we love this duo, but we have the FINAL 6 COPIES of the tape left and once they're gone it's out of print, so chances are by the time you finish reading this review this cassette will already have disappeared into the ether.
Record number two from this NYC abstract electronic alchemist, who as we mentioned in our review of his debut, Gray Panic, counts Porter Ricks, Skullflower, Techno Animal, Portal, Main, Pan American, Scanner AND Bark Psychosis as influences. And while lists of influences are generally impossibly hyperbolic, somehow Gray Panic actually did manage to live up to the promise of the groups that informed its sound. So when City Surgical got in touch with a new album, describing it as even murkier an druggier than the first, we were pretty much already sold.
And once again, we were not at all disappointed, after a brief opening of blurred shimmery and gauzy ambience, the sound coalesces into a sort of mumbled skitter, all muted throb and skeletal pulse, with the promise of some sort of impending big beat, but instead, the tension is gradually ratcheted up, the sounds swirling and ethereal, it's not really until part three of the opening four part 17+ minute title track song suite, that any sort of actual beat coalesces, and even then, it's a murky bit digital dub wreathed in gnarled static never fully coalescing, instead seeming to fade in and out like bad radio reception, giving the sound a lost ghost like quality, tending more toward Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, with the beats existing more as some strange sonic artifact, the woozy pulsing synthiness which also surfaces in part three seeming to channel a little Goblin / John Carpenter too, before devolving into a deep murky pulse. Part four is like an ultra minimal reinterpretation of Chain Reaction style heroin house, peppered with strange bits of glitch and squelch, more ethereal and ambient than rhythmic, the various submerged rhythms more adding texture than propulsion.
The final two, non title track numbers, continue in a similarly woozy, washed out, dreamily druggy direction, draping chiming metallic melodies over rhythmic backwards swoops and a sea of thick gristly sonic swirl, a haunting robotic lullaby, that morphs into the gorgeous final track, a thick sprawl of gristled low end, roiling beneath some dark dubbed out rhythms, stuttering chopped and looped pulsations, and multiple layers of hazy and gauze and shimmer, the sound a constant dreamlike swirl that coalesces into a Raster-Noton like stretch of gorgeous electronic late night minimalism, that once again has us wondering why City Surgical is not a way bigger deal. So great!
Packaged in striking hand screened three color origami like sleeves, with color printed cardstock inserts. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Pre-order for this aQ exclusive, an incredible cd / dvd / book / patch set from these long time aQ faves, chronicling the group's quest to build a cabin in Alaska. Both the cd and the dvd are meant to be played simultaneously, a la Zaireeka, the sounds on both, a gorgeous vocal / organ chorale, fusing into something lush and layered and divine. The book features tons of breathtaking full color photos, and is accompanied by a sewn patch featuring the band's sigil. And it's only available right here, and it's EXTREMELY limited, only 250 copies, so order yours today!! We won't charge you now, this is just to reserve yourself a copy. It will be in around the end of the month, at which point we'll charge you, and send it off (with whatever else you might have on hold)! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
We've been HUGE fans of Mira Cook since her first cassette, which we sold tons of when we first carried it about three years ago. Since then she put out her first full length which only made our love of her intimate, unique and honest music, grow stronger. We've been anticipating this release for a while now, and Broken Bones might just be her finest moment yet.
In so many ways Cook is a shining example of the true meaning of DIY. She teaches herself how to play different instruments, expands and experiments with the possibilities of her voice, and puts out her own records filled with songs that she writes, arranges and performs all by herself. That work ethic pays off and you can feel it in the sincerity and warmth in this new set of songs. While they still maintain the same immediacy and charm as her earlier work there is a deeper emotional impact as well as more space and breadth in these songs which truly work their way under our skin and into our subconsciousness. While folks like Tune-Yards and Dirty Projectors have become huge, there is something so much more organic, satisfying and subtle in Cook's songs that make us wish that SHE was the the one on the cover of so many magazines.
Cook has really mastered the use of repetition as means to create a trance inducing aura in her songs, and then her beautiful and mesmerizing voice and poignant lyrics just seal the deal. Stunning!
Newly reissued on vinyl, our very favorite record from New Zealand noise rock legends the Dead C. This is IT. One of THEE most perfect slabs of abstract free rock ever set to tape. Yes, noise rockers, this is where it all started. Originally released way back in 1992, about five years into their recorded career. Long out of print and finally available again (on vinyl, cd still sadly out of print). We're of the mind that the Dead C never made a bad record, but of their entire recorded output, Harsh 70s Reality continues to be our all time favorite. Most of the vestiges of pop that showed up in their past records, the legacy of their NZ pop heritage, were jettisoned or at least transformed into something much harder, and much weirder. The pop remained, but drastically altered, more often twisted and tangled, buried or burned, a soft glowing core barely visible through the Dead C's abstruse ambient noise. Truly hard to describe, there are guitars and drums, but Harsh 70s Reality never really rocks, it does however manage to be heavy and psychedelic and dense and droney all at once. Blissful, tranquil, harsh, jagged, dreamy, dark, atonal, an impossible collision of sounds and emotions. This may be noise rock, but it's not precisely noisy, nor rock. By this point, the Dead C were channeling Cale and Conrad and Maclise and the Taj Mahal Travellers as much as any rock or noise outfits.
This is immediately evident on the opening track, the 22 minute "Driver U.F.O.", a massive dirgescape of angular guitar, clanging and keening, a sound that hinted at the noise to come, their future trajectory, headed for sonic worlds even further out. A world first visited here, of strange little abstract chordal figures, not riffs per se, just strange smears of sound repeated over and over, totally mesmerizing, but completely alien, sheets of guitar noise, big slabs of metal percussive clang, creepy wheedly little melodies, lots of drone and drawn out streaks of feedback. Sounds almost like the first musicians ever, musical cavemen, suddenly stumbling upon a stage full of amps and drums, and curiously exploring, discovering all the strange ways the different instruments can be poked and prodded and struck to create an abstract and gorgeous primitive din. This is divine dronemusic. A clattery atonal dronescape. If you took this first track, stuck it on a crappy cd-r, made up some crazy name, Black Tomb Resurrect or something, added some xeroxed cover art, and sent out a handful to the Wire and Eclipse and Volcanic Tongue, made sure it was limited to 100 copies, you would have indie hipsters shitting themselves to get their hands on one, buying copies on eBay for $100. It's that prescient. Either that or the current breed of noisemakers are not hiding their Dead C obsession AT ALL.
The shorter tracks here do actually 'rock'. Sort of. As much as a jagged smear of super distorted crumble and crunch can 'rock'. "Sky" sounds like the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" covered by Reynols, a stumbling rock drum beat beneath a white noise riff, all crumbly distortion and blown out fuzz, and some strange sort of crooned vocals drifting in and out. "Suffer Bomb Damage" is a haunting keyboard drone, all off key lo-fi Casio wheeze and reverb spring percussion, very reminiscent of NZ legends Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos. "Love" sounds like the Velvet Underground fronted by Jandek, covering the MC5, lurching fuzzy garage stomp with damaged guitar and weary, drawled vocals. "Constellation" is some long lost Velvet Monkeys joint, an East Village folkfuzz jam, throbbing and saturated in dense distortion and wrapped in thick sheets of druggy droney guitar swirl, all wrapped haphazardly around a cracked pop hook. The record ends on a truly strange note, a sort of fuzzy folk drift, warm acoustic guitars are picked and strummed, a mournful lament, crowd sounds and occasional bursts of distorted fuzz, as well as a brief stretch of wailed anguished vocals and a few splatters of snare drum, but for the majority of the nearly ten minutes of "Hope", we drift lazily through a murky world of soft muted guitars and sad, mumbled vocals. So lovely. A most perfect noisefolk elegy. It's hard to understand how the hell this record ended up here, drifting dreamlike and swathed in murky folk, especially after the 20+ minutes of face melting freaked out abstraction of "Driver U.F.O." Or the blown-out deconstructed noiserock in between. But that's exactly what makes the Dead C so special. This is exactly where it had to end up. Where you were meant to emerge. It seems like an impossibly confusional journey, an improvised exploration. And it is. But taken as a whole, Harsh 70s Reality is exactly as it was meant to be. Perfect. Perfectly imperfect. A world of noise that slips from sound to sound, taking many forms, many guises, a world where letting fuzzy folk guitars and soft vocals wash over you is not all that different than letting a wall of crumbling guitar grind and feedback freakout collapse and bury you alive. Two different sides of the same glorious noise.
Includes a download coupon as well.
Uh, yeah that's Chuck Billy from veteran Bay Area thrashers Testament on the cover, in a headdress. Haven't heard their new album yet but our customer Monte says its good.
Also in this issue of America's best/smartest/funniest glossy metal mag: Ghost, Gojira, The Darkness (!!!), Evoken, Wolf, Candlemass, Marty Friedman (y'know, ex-Megadeth), Grand Magus, Samothrace, and Isis enters the 'Decibel Hall Of Fame' for their Oceanic album...plus of course more!
We still don't understand why more Mountain Goats fans don't buy this magazine from us, just for John Darnielle's back page column... maybe you all subscribe???
This is the self titled debut from Texas black metal horde Depths, which starts off more like a noise tape, a thick swath of billowing blackness, crumbling, grinding blacknoise, pulsing and swirling rhythmically, a pretty fierce intro, which leads directly into some cavernous blackened riffing, ultra lo-fi, sounding as if it was recorded at the bottom of a black pit, the guitars a muddy swirl, the drums a layer of hiss over the top, the vocals a reverb drenched bellow, the sounds so blurred and indistinct, the black metal buzz is more like a swirling sea of roiling buzz and blurred white noise. Eventually, the band slow things down, and the song seems to coalesce, into a loping almost post rock, but those vocals, a harsh hellish bellow that must melt faces live, but here keeps the proceedings from veering too far from the black path, the group displaying a surprisingly keen melodic sense, in the slower parts, while everything is utterly obliterated when the group explode into blasting blackness. This is definitely KVLT, sounding like some lost nineties rehearsal tape, which is not a bad thing at all, but is definitely more for the true grim hordes. Would definitely dig hearing what these guys could come up with in a real studio, assuming this isn't exactly what they were shooting for in the first place - raw, primitive lo-fi blackness.
Search back into the Aquarius archives, and you'll come across reviews of records that we loved with just a phrase or a sentence, giving a few choice references and adjectives. Oh, how the times have changed. Way back when, we summed up Der Plan's classic weirdo kraut new wave record with the following pithy statement: "A head on collision between the Residents and Conny Plank." Still very true to this day, although an expansion of that description is most definitely in order. Der Plan hailed from Dusseldorf, and Geri Reig was their first record, emerging in 1980 as a particularly bizarre version of the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) sound. It seemed that every single German punk and NDW band would twist and mutate some sickly sweet ballad into something monstrous and perverse. Even Neubauten did a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'Aime" on their first record; but polkas, waltzes, and cabaret numbers seemed to the prime target for the venom, bile, and ill-thoughts of the youth from back in the day, and Der Plan had authored a good number of these cheeky tunes, with atonal blooping electronics, plinkety-plonk melodies, and disjointed scratchy vocalizations. As a result, the Residents are still an apt reference for most of Geri Reig, although perhaps the equally bizarre, although less known Die Todliche Doris should also be referenced as well. For all of Der Plan's weird disposition, they would also craft a percolatingly brilliant minimal wave track here and there, as heard in the man-machine sequencing on "Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimentale" and the future-shock arpeggiations of "Adrenalin Lasst Das Blut Kochen." A classic record from the NDW period, now available once again thanks to the fine folks at Medical Records!
Album number two by Der Plan came out originally in 1981, and it follows the art-pop quirkiness of the band's Geri Reig album with a slightly more conventional approach to their Neue Deutsche Welle songs. Just slightly, though. For the most part, the overt references to the vernacular of Germanic pop music (waltzes, polka, cabaret, etc.) are dropped for more of a primitive electro sound, with plenty of clipped rhythms, flanging electronic sequences, mutant funk anti-grooviness, and occasional vocoder-treated vocals. Der Plan takes delight in rendering each and every sound in a deliberate staccato choppiness, with electronic and vocal melodies often in naked opposition to each other, while the rhythms are loose skeletons that hardly anybody could dance to. The album features 17 tracks, and many more ideas running through all of those cuts, mucking up the streamlined new wave surfaces within disjointed, Residents inspired asynchronicity, and there's even a couple of early plunderphonic experiments popping up, such as "Kleine Schlager Revue" which mashes up saccharine German pop ditties with a smutty sex-recording lifted from some porno flexi-disc, and the grimmer "Wat's Dat?" snipping bits of commercials and breathy exhortations and melding them onto teletype synth modulations. Like Geri Reig, Normalette Surprise is back in print on vinyl... but probably not for long, as Medical Records only released 550 of these!
Finally, the long awaited full length from these eighties beholden jangle pop shoegazers, formerly known by the same name, but with a much more standard (and already taken apparently) spelling. This Brooklyn outfit features members of aQ faves the Beach Fossils and the Smith Westerns, and takes the sound of both of those previous groups, tangles it all up and douses it in thick swaths of reverb and lush layers of crystalline guitars, the vocals nearly buried in the mix, a hazy washed out croon, that more often than not is simply another lush layer to add to the already blurry, bleary dreamscape. Within this fuzzy dreampop soundworld, Diiv manage to conjure up some surprisingly disparate sounds, sweet twee indie pop one second, and loping, almost krautrock like mesmer the next (just check out "Air Conditioning"), but the sound remains consistent, like listening through ears full of cotton, everything deliriously and dreamily hazy, with various elements slipping surreptitiously to the fore, whether it's a twangy bit of guitar, a soaring bit of Big Country / U2 like melody, or some slithery Joy Divisiony bassline, the tracks rife with hooks, and perfect melody, the group nearly obscuring their deft pop songsmithery with their druggy production, but it makes for a potent combo, and on repeated listens, what at first sounded like another entry in the already crowded reverb heavy retro pop field, has blossomed into what is fast becoming a new pop favorite. WAY recommended.
Full length number five from these Jersey doomlords, who continue to trudge through blackened landscape of downtuned dirgery and funereal creep, everything wreathed in shadow, rendered in shades of black and grey, but the opening track on Atra Mors definitely reminds us why we dig these guys so much, opening with a sky full of swirling winds, which are soon joined by choral voices and spare tribal drumming, the guitars creep in, those choral voices blurring into a shimmery ethereal haze, the vibe almost shoegazey, the vocals join in, a thick reverbed bellow, the drums too, an echo drenched pound, the vibe still washed out and gauzy, it's not until nearly 5 minutes in, that the track slips into a weird lurching slo-mo chug, laced with haunting chiming melodies, swirling synths, the sound still weirdly drifty and atmospheric, until finally, the track explodes into something much more metal, reminding us of the death metal / doom metal hybrid of diSEMBOWELMENT, wedding relentless double kicks and wild qualls of guitar shred to thick tarpit creep and surprisingly mathy arrangements, all blurred into an epic slab of heaving progged out ultra doom, that KILLS.
And so it goes, the rest of the record engaging in similarly tripped out deep doom exploration, flitting from pounding almost death metal dirgery, to creepy cinematic piano driven chamber music, from swirly blackdoom psychedelia to FX heavy mathmetal churn, and from haunting twang flecked string laden shimmer to classic true doom crush.
The return of Fastest! Longtime readers of the list are by now no doubt familiar with this weirdo outsider one man band, whose sound seems to meld eighties video game music, midi synth guitar metal, almost hip hop style grooves, growled/crooned sort of metal vocals, into a twisted head spinning concoction that either has people freaking out and wanting every single release, or freaking out and wanting it to stop. Odds are this most recent record will be no less divisive. It's funny to see regular aQ customers come in and FREAK OUT that there's a new Fastest, a way more visceral reaction that lots of other more high profile (and yeah, less ridiculous) releases. But that should tell you something. Odds are, everyone out there who bought most/all of the other Fastest cd-r's, are gonna want this one too cuz it's another twisted whatthefuck batch of homebrewed midi-metal weirdness, just check out the opening track "Fantasy II", with its chugging churning almost metallic riffing, the weirdly catchy atonal main melody, the whispered/crooned vox, the stumbling stuttery programmed drums, the track displaying some surprising malevolence, slipping easily from Legend Of Zelda style cloying 8-bit synth swoon, to weird electronic guitar chug crunch, and then stripped down bass driven dirgery before a strange syncopated breakdown. It's genius, and ridiculous, and impossible to stop listening too, and if you're like us, you can never have enough Fastest.
The rest of the record is more of the same, churning dark synth heavy, drum machine driven musical drama, wild blast of Bollywood drumming, all tangled up with woozy synth melodies, thick rumbling distortion and weird blown out production, there's definitely an eighties vibe, but also an alien video game vibe too, heck there's even a seriously warped 'dance' number this time around too! This is the sort of thing people like James Ferraro are trying to conjure up, but this is the real deal, the genius inner workings of a truly and fantastically warped musical mind, and a sound that is truly unique, and unlike anything you've heard. EVER. Join us in our ridiculous fascination / obsession with the fucked up musical world of Fastest!
This is in fact record number EIGHT, counting the awesomely titled greatest hits collection Magicmancy, if you need any/all of the other ones just ask, a few are reviewed on the aQ site, including Theme, which was a Record Of The Week. So if you're up for some seriously whatthefuck sounds, it really doesn't get much more damaged and awesomely demented than this.
The latest tripped out DJ mix from DJ Female Convict Scorpion aka Josh Pollack from local psychedelic space rockers 3 Leafs, and like the three before it, on Wizards (named for the genius Ralph Bakshi movie, and featuring a drawing of the movie poster done by a young Josh way back when), Pollack once again displays not just a knack for digging up insanely obscure jams, but for weaving disparate sounds together into utterly unrecognizable but totally mesmerizing sonic tableaus. Just check out the opener, "5 Terrorists", which drapes some strange buzzing percussive Asian stringed instrument, some fluttering flute, and some echo drenched vocals, over some spaced out progged out jamming, pretty impossible to tell which parts Pollack mixed, and how much of the song was already the song, which again is the magic of these DJFCS mixes, and when that first track gradually switches gears, and disappears in a field of ominous buzz, and seems to transform into a drum heavy krautprog groove, it KILLS.
And so it goes, low slung slithery funk, strange movie samples, spaced out psychedelia, stuttery old school hip hop, DJ Shadow like moodiness, primitive (but effective turntable manipulation, again hard to say which is part of the music and which is Pollack), strange crooning, weird psych folk, draped over thick sinister chordal swell, shimmery dreamlike ambience drifting into fierce driving fuzzfunk, all manner of backward swoops and swirls, moaning strings, disembodied voices, glistening strings, some of the combinations more moving and intense than the originals, lots of a capellas wedded to unlikely instrumental accompaniment, everything wreathed in echo and reverb and loads of warm record crackle, and just some downright bad ass jams and grooves, not to mention the easy listening Sabbath that finishes things off. Essential listening. And most definitely the DJ you want at your wedding, assuming your goal is to alienate or downright freak out 90 percent of the guests. But that other ten percent, including us (we're invited, right?), will be in whatthefuck weirdo music HEAVEN!
While not a proper new Fennesz 'album' per se, Aun is in fact a soundtrack to a new film by Austrian director Edgar Honetschlager, incorporating a few collaborative pieces previously released on the album Cendre, which found Christian Fennesz teamed up with pianist Ryuchi Sakamoto. Surprisingly, those tracks, already pretty cinematic, fit perfectly amidst Fennesz' original music for Honetschlager's film. And while we've yet to see the film, the music on its own is lovely, and hauntingly contemplative, especially the tracks with Sakamoto, the pointillist piano lending the music a certain gravitas, moody and melancholy. While the rest of the tracks find Fennesz weaving lush tapestries of deep glowing drones and warm whirring ambience, opening track "Kae" is dense and thick, a lush gauzy melodic stasis rife with buried melodies, the sort of sound that evokes those time lapse nature films, plants breaking through the soil, blossoming, then withering and dying. Poignant and moving, quite a feat for a track that barely cracks two minutes. Later on the soundtrack, Fennesz returns to the guitar, letting gentle strums and delicately picked notes become gently obliterated by clouds of digital errata, transforming the sound into a glitchy dreamfolk drift, those bits of glitchguitar ambience surrounded by thick slabs of deep dense digital dronemusic, tracks like "Euclides" imbuing what would otherwise be an ethereal shimmer, with an almost black hole density, while other tracks display a knack for melding airy ambience with gristled laptop buzz, the results sometimes spare and ghostly, other times bleak and blackened, but always haunting and lovely. In some ways, the sounds are almost too perfect as a soundtrack, the sort of abstract minimal ambience that seems to underpin most movies these days, but close listening reveals that this is more than rote ambience, instead, each track here is a dense multilayered mini-symphony, that even sans visuals, offers much to discover on repeated listens, and seems to blossom before the listener's ears, the sound rich with the promise of endless sonic discovery.
This Japanese psychrock reish, now available on vinyl!
Yes that's right, it's Flied not Fried Egg. Uh, 'cause they're Japanese. Think about it. Hey, it's their joke. Anyway, this one's for all you '70s heaviness lovin' proto-metal fans who may have missed it before. Good Bye was Flied Egg's second of two albums (both '72, and both on the famed Vertigo label, best known as the home of Black Sabbath). The first one, with the marvelous title of Dr. Siegel's Fried Egg Shooting Machine, is as you might guess is some pretty wild acid psych. Good Bye, however, is the heavier of the two, and we can simply say it's a no-brainer for Blue Cheer fans. Basically, this album is distinctly split between two sides, the first half recorded live, possibly at their farewell concert, we'd guess from the title. This in-concert portion is the heaviest, it's all bad ass fuzzed out blooze rawk swagger that makes us think Blue Cheer, Blue Cheer, Blue Cheer! (Also Grand Funk, Cactus, and Mountain.) Hear 'em rile up a cheering crowd with these party-pleasers: "Leave Me Woman", "Rolling Down The Broadway" (a stompin' composition that appears in a studio version on their debut), BB King's "Rock Me Baby", and the twelve-minute-plus "Five More Pennies", which includes a drum solo in addition to all the acid guitar excess. Following all that, the studio half of the album gets a bit more proggy and wigged out (ending with a multi-part piece entitled "521 Seconds Schizophrenic Symphony", wow!) while also containing a couple of mellower melodic numbers, namely the sad and gentle "Out To Sea" and finale "Goodbye My Friends". FYI, not a favorite of Julian "Japrocksampler" Cope, but WE like it. Members of Flied Egg also did time in some other hard rockin' underground Japanese psych acts whose reissues we've previously reviewed, including Strawberry Path, Brush!?, and Food Brain... if you dig those, or the likes of Flower Travellin' Band, Blues Creation, Speed Glue & Shinki, or Too Much, then Flied Egg is for you too.
Some of us at aQ have been going through a little bit of a Japanese crust phase, listening to lots of Lip Cream, Gloom, Confuse, GISM and of course Gauze, when what should show up but this lp reissue of both of Gauze's first two records, their 1984 debut 12" ep Fuckheads, and the 1986 follow up Equalizing Distort. Both brimming with furious chaotic metallic crust punk fury, grinding buzzing guitars, strange flanged riffage, all sorts of sound effects, seriously fucked up almost experimental production, wild tribal drumming, yelped vox, thick super distorted bass, weird squiggly atonal leads, all wound into churning, pounding blasts of frantic hardcore mayhem, with shouted almost sing along choruses ("THRASH THRASH THRASH") and some downright poppiness popping up here and there. But for the most part, this is some fierce as fuck frenzied Japanese hardcore crust punk genius, that sounds just as good now as it did nearly three decades ago!!
Includes a two sided 12" x 12" insert, photos on one side, a lyric sheer, in both English and Japanese on the other.
We've been trying to review/list the recent full length from Daughn Gibson for a while now, but our suppliers are constantly out, which is not surprising, cuz the rest of the world must be as smitten as we are by Gibson's weird electro-country, traveling a similar sonic path as Dirty Beaches, but where DB reinvents Elvis style rockabilly electronically, Gibson does the same with country ballads, looping voices and soul snippets and creating dark haunting electronic country soul ballads, driven by Gibson's deep cowboy vocals. The weirdest part is that he was actually the drummer for heavy rockers Pearl And Brass, which makes electro-country side even more of a surprise. But until we can get copies of the full length, this new 7" will have to tide you over, the A side draping Daughn's deep snarly vox over swirling looped strings, and subtly sampled soul snippets, all infused with a dark country twang, it's not until the end that the song really reveals itself as a strange electronic studio concoction, with layered looped background vocals coming to the fore. The B side is a dark sultry country ballad, again super subtly looped and sampled, only close listening reveals the strangely disparate elements, otherwise it plays like some long lost honky tonky jukebox ballad. Nice!
Brand new song from aQ beloved Irish garage poppers Girls Names, teamed up on this split with new to us Weird Dreams. Girls Names unfurls some fuzzy eighties beholden twee pop, laced with new wave synths, and driven by deep, breathy, dramatic vocals. A soaring chorus laced with weird slightly industrial percussion and a woozy psychedelic shimmer, transforms the song into something way weirder (and cooler) that your run of the mill retro pop.
Weird Dreams look back with their sound too, but in their case, back to the sixties for a smokey, sultry torch song style pop ballad, slithery basslines, crooned vox, everything fuzzy and late night ballady, spidery melodies weaving a darkly psychedelic spell, fans of the New Lines and Still Corners will definitely dig.
Pressed on clear purple vinyl!!
More from the Flying Nun archives and we couldn't be happier. This particular artifact comes courtesy of David and Hamish Kilgour, who formed the Great Unwashed right after the break up of legendary pop group the Clean, this record recorded in 1983, and fans of the Clean will of course hear much of that group in the Great Unwashed. In fact, folks who have flipped out over the recent Flying Nun collections Tally Ho and Time To Go, most likely dug the killer GU tracks included on both (both included here). The vibe of the Great Unwashed is a sort of woozy home brewed effects laced psychedelic jangle pop, heavy on the Syd Barrett vibe, the music loose and ramshackle, lush and layered and jangly one second, more woozy and minor key the next, the vox a sort of mumbled croon, occasionally slipping into a haunting falsetto, the music drifting easily into some haunting Pink Floyd like psych pop just as easily as something more distinctly classic NZ indie pop sounding. And like much of the NZ pop of the time, while on the surface everything may seem jangly and super poppy, there's a dark undercurrent of droniness and subtle minor key malevolence, whether it's simply a sort of Velvets style droned out hypno-strum or some dark almost Birthday Party-ish twang draped over the otherwise dreamy jangle, or even the occasional bit of tripped out psychedelic effects, or in places a bit of gloomy dirgery (moments definitely remind us of fellow Kiwis the Pin Group).
Another essential Flying Nun / NZ indie rock classic, finally available again. Pressed on thick vinyl, and housed in an old school Stoughton tip on style sleeve. Sadly, no download coupon though.
We really weren't sure what to expect from the oddly monikered Guardian Alien, knowing that two of the members also played in black metal outfit Liturgy, but that this was drummer Greg Fox's project, Fox also apparently recording as GDFX, whose tripped out experimental electronic tape on Ormolycka we reviewed a while back. We were even further confused when we got a look at the record cover, a weird painting of a Rasta alien in a tracksuit, in a field full of animals and campfires, and a sky full of deer with books in their mouths and exploding suns, and of course the tracksuited alien is holding a copy of the record, whose cover depicts the same alien holding a copy of the record and so on and on and on ad infinitum. The title too, "See The World Give To A One Love Entity" has a definite Rastafari bent, so we were definitely feeling some serious trepidation as we pushed play, which at first unfurled what sounded like field recordings, birds and insects, and then footsteps, maybe the footsteps of that alien on the record cover, then a brief bit of Eastern style drone, before BLAM, the song explodes in what we can only describe as Liturgy by way of Sunroof!, which you have to hear to believe.
It's a furious raga-blast, the drums relentless a splattery chaos of wild octopoidal drumming, the guitars following suit, sounding like a transcendental Mick Barr, it's frenzied and tangled but infused with a serious does of droned out tranciness, and then as the song lets up briefly, we were expecting that whole bit to just be the intro, but then the furious raga-blast starts up again, this time even more intense and explosive, and this time with vocals, a strange chanting buried in the mix, very ritualistic and meditative, and even though the band is pounding away frantically, the whole thing manages to be totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, and after three minutes, although it feels like much more, the sound settles down into something much more stripped down and meditative, the drums no less busy, but instead, weaving a dense percussive backdrop over which woozy guitars waver and buzz, the vocals become more distinct, the melodies stretched out into gorgeously buzzy ragas, we're reminded of Astral Social Club at time the same sort of noise-raga thing, but here blissed out, the sound like some wild ritualistic drum circle wedded to some serious free jazz raga exploration, the vocals doused in effects, sounding truly alien, in keeping with the cover and the concept, the sound swirly and tripped out and super psychedelic, until eventually the drums drift off, leaving just a sky full of layered undulating guitars, a blur of shifting overtones and wild sonic squalls, before the drums come back in, a dense mathy, driving percussive groove, wreathed in swirling effects, the song shifting constantly, arranged like an epic black metal song in some ways, it's dynamicism in no way taking away from the tracks overall mesmer, and it is a single track, nearly 40 minutes of blast beat driven raga ur-drone psychedelia, dipping into ultra minimal drones and chant like vocalization here and there, chiming Tibetan bowls elsewhere, the field recordings that opened the record returning occasionally, a gorgeous droned out slow build to a final movement, a gloriously cosmic free jazz psychedelic drum heavy raga drone blowout, that builds to a sort of Boadrum like rhythmic frenzy before finally fading out in a cloud of deep bell like tones and slow fading shimmer. Wow.
Almost before we even heard this, we knew it had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. A double dose of Finnish sonic insanity in the form of this insanely limited one sided 12", which finds Finnish one-man psychedelic noise project Haare, aka Ilkka Vekka, creating his new record, a single sprawling twenty minute soundscape, from various sounds, much of which is sourced from the 2004 album Forest by fellow Finns and all-time AQ faves, Circle!
Here Haare transforms what was already an atmospheric, sort of acoustic sinister spookiness, into something even more abstract, an arcane sonic ritual, all deep resonant rumbles, keening distant tones, rumbling thrums, haunting chimes, murky melodies, clouds of blurred metallic shimmer drifting over softly undulating sprawls of moody murk, a swirling smear of all manner of gauzy melodies, and ever-shifting texture. The sound barely obscuring creepy monstrous low end rumbles, that sound like some sort of demonic crooning. The upper register tones, sounding a bit like bowed metals, muted and muddied into sonorous tones, but that metallic buzz gradually breaking free from the murk and the mire, intensifying like some swarm of metal insects, way off in the distance, a sort of blurry buzz that billows ominously around the softly roiling ambience at the track's core. The sound obviously moving in a noisier direction, but finding a sort of swirling almost serene stasis just on this side of that ambience/noise barrier, the sounds gristly and crackling with energy, infused with a haunting dark mystery, that seems to imbue all the buzz and crunch with something much more soft focus and abstract, which somehow gradually attains a strange sort of next level dreamlike ambience, all the sounds blurring into a bleary bit of washed out thrum, a thick layered wall of super active sound, but with all the edges worn away, resulting in a slow pulsing stream of warm whir and dense warm dreamnoise, which reaches a sort of bliss out near-raga equillibrium in the last few minutes, and definitely has the listener in a total trance, and had us really wishing there was a second side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered!!
We didn't really expect to ever see this record again, but lo and behold here it is: The Hafler Trio's brilliant lp-only production If Take, Then Take from 2005. The album was recorded and released during a notorious flurry of Hafler Trio activity about a decade ago, when he cranked out some 20 albums in a 4 year period. Pretty much all of those albums (and most everything that Andrew McKenzie has produced as the Hafler Trio and beyond) are highly recommended; and mostly are out of print. Here's what we had to say about the album way back when:
Is there much more to say about The Hafler Trio that hasn't been said already by us or anyone else for that matter? Perhaps. Yet another month and another Hafler Trio album arrives, stretching our feeble efforts to describe the audio / visual / contexual productions of Mr. Andrew M. McKenzie, the sole member of the Hafler Trio with assistance from other like-minded techgnostics on occasion. For the month of September 2005, the Hafler Trio album in question is If Take, Then Take which marks the first full length LP that McKenzie has engineered in over a decade - this, of course in the wake of numerous multi-cd sets and 10"s galore. In describing this record, the C.I.P. label offered an exceptional introduction for If Take, Then Take: "Unanswered questions, unasked-for responses, stimulus and response exercises conducted and presented for the benefit of a select few. Hafler Trio has always asked more of the listener than many sound artists do, with questions and ideas that provoke and, like an open invitation, await response from those who are willing to tackle, often at length, the ideas presented. The audio cleanses the aural palette and refurbishes it nicely. The ideas in the booklet are available to those who wish additional illuminations, provocations, questions, and - when the light is right - answers, may add greater tricks to their own personal repertoire of knowledge. Please note: in this instance, knowledge may be considered fact, fiction, or entirely up for debate."
As to the musical program found within, McKenzie offers another breathtaking variation on the theme of hidden ambience, disrupted silences, and rich timbral minimalism. Limited to 400 copies and signed by Andrew McKenzie and includes a fancy trapezoidal booklet of text and art. And as always, he prefers for us to not offer any sound samples.
Fans of infamous noise rock combo Harry Pussy might not be so familiar with this strange release, which came out in 1998, right after the band broke up, on which a one second feral yelp from vocalist/drummer Adris Hoyos is transformed by guitarist Bill Orcutt into an hour long drone. Sorta makes sense that it would end up on Editions Mego, partially due to the fact that Orcutt has seemingly been embraced by the minimal / electronic / avant music scene, but also the fact that even though this was recorded way back in the nineties, barring its source material, the resulting sounds are definitely some sort of abstract minimal electronic drone music, which definitely sounds right at home on the label, and except for that initial yelp, the four sides of this double lp set offer up a strange bit of extended buzz and whir, and within a few minutes, the source is irrelevant, and all we're left with is long layered stretches of undulating tones, of mysterious overtones, and slow shifting textures. It's mesmerizing and trancelike, long stretches of Niblockian minimalism, but made somehow more potent by their punk rock sound source. Certainly a strange 'final release' for Harry Pussy, but one that seems now in retrospect to have foreshadowed Orcutt's unlikely sonic trajectory. Ultimately, Harry Pussy fan or not, this is a cool ultra minimal drone record, that will no doubt most likely hold way more appeal for fans of Editions Mego's austere minimalism, than fans of Harry Pussy's brutally beautiful caterwaul.
Packaged in a super swank, heavy gatefold sleeve.
Light in The Attic continues their awesome Lee Hazlewood archival series with this rarest of rare releases, a 1975 soundtrack to the last (and least known) of the many films for Swedish television Hazlewood made with longtime collaborator Torbjorn Axelman. Half surrealist anecdote and half documentary, A Room Safe for Tigers is a bizarre self-portrait of the artist as he embarks on a new life in a new land. Filmed on the island of Gotland, Hazlewood shoots various scenes with the local townsfolk, running a marathon, trying to convince Swedish children to take sides against Nixon, and seeking protective spells from a witch. The centerpiece of the soundtrack, the song "Soul's Island", reads like a pastoral response to the Nancy & Lee classic, "Some Velvet Morning" with its epic orchestral sweeps and never-ending fade out. There are a couple of revisitations from the back catalog, namely "The Nights", a spoken-sung epic about Native American genealogy and genocide and an early Shackletons' cover, "Little Boy Blue". But the bulk of the release is material never released before including instrumentals, some country-funk numbers and a strange duet with Axelman as he recites all of Hazlewood's lines in Swedish. As seen with the last archival release, The LHI Years, Hazlewood's less heard '70s Swedish output was just as vital and essential as the famed sixties material he was best known for. Kudos to Light in The Attic for continuing to make the work of this eccentric American voice more widely available.
Armed with just three drums, three cymbals, and three strings, this ramshackle noise pop continue to kick ass, every record another unlikely collection of perfect power pop. We first discovered these guys via a split with Best Coast, their side of the split, the impossibly catchy "Bummer" was equal parts Weezer, Further and the Ovens, and their genius fuzz pop full length We Are The Champions only sealed the deal, mixing classic power pop, cheesy cock rock, prog and metal, into a totally irresistible confection, and like aQ faves the Ovens, we constantly imagine that were they slightly more conventional, they'd be HUGE, but then they'd be way less cool, and as it is, it's their warped, goofy sense of humor, and tendency to mar perfect pop songs with blasts of progged out noise, or their love of handclaps, or their audience baiting, which we observed recently when they opened for Best Coast and tortured the audience with a serious MBV worthy blast of shrieking feedback white noise to finish off their set.
Hypnotic Nights is their major label debut, and thankfully nothing has changed, but then, why should anything changed, they were already poppy enough to con Warner Brothers into believing they might be the next Weezer, and there's plenty of jams here that make it seem less like a con. Just check out "Sixpack", which is about a million times better than the last five Weezer singles, and if there was any justice in the world, these guys would be all over the radio and wherever videos play now that MTV doesn't really exist (YouTube?). Anyway, this shit is loose and wild, ramshackle, heavy at times, a little proggy too, but mostly a noisy and fuzzy and poppy and crazy catchy, and seriously if you miss the days of Weezer's Blue album, this might be the band to fill that Weezer shaped hole in your heart. Now someone just has to make an Ovens / JTB tour happen and we can die happy!
Supreme metal triumph. The last good (in fact, great) Judas Priest album, also happened to be their last with 'Metal God' Rob Halford at the mic. Originally released in 1990, "Painkiller" at the time seemed like the big Priest comeback, after a string of
Not only does our pal Jason run the weirdo tape label Ormolycka label, responsible for a whole mess of awesome releases including jams from Lil Ugly Mane, Death Grips, Burqa Boyz, Pictureplane, M Ax Noi Mach and tons more, he also puts together amazing shows at the Sutro Baths, that happen in THE CAVE!!! Which is even more remarkable considering he lives in New York City! The 5th annual Oromolycka Cave show just happened this last weekend, and it was awesome, tons of folks showed up, there was free BBQ and the bands KILLED. It ended up being a wild hip hop cave show, with even M Ax Noi Mach doing some rapping, but it was Lil Ugly Mane that stole the show, the whole crowd singing along to every single line.
Here we have yet another rad/weird Ormolycka release, this one from Milwaukee rapper and energy drink entrepreneur (we kid you not) Juiceboxx, whose sound is like a whinier goofier version of Lil Ugly Mane, sped up soul samples, skittery beats, the vibe a little bit crunk, very Southern in places, all sorts of twisted samples, squelchy synths, and lots of that weird sports horn sound, EVERYwhere. Total party rap that's pretty fun, pretty silly, but definitely self aware and clever, hints of Eminem, Beastie Boys (all the usual white boy rapper touchstones), but Juiceboxx definitely has that outsider Ormolycka hip hop thing going on which makes this well worth checking out, and odds are you'll be blasting this big time, for what remains of Summer.
Comes in a cool old school double cassette case, with two different J card / covers for each album, one a Springsteen homage/pisstake (!!). And yeah, SUPER limited!
This two-fer is a strange sort of reissue, ostensibly a re-release of Locrian's 2011, previously vinyl-only The Clearing album on cd for the first time, but also including a whole disc of unreleased material called The Final Epoch. More on that disc in a second. First up, The Clearing, here's our review from when we listed the lp version last year:
The Clearing is the latest from the Chicago duo of Andre Foisy and Terence Hanuum, now seemingly permanently expanded to a trio with Steven Hess on drums, and like past records, these guys effortlessly conjure up another series of haunting dronescapes and blackened ambience, opening with a creeping sprawl of funereal piano, wreathed by all manner of distant industrial clatter and metallic buzz, before finally transforming into a proper song, complete with clean vocals, loping drums, laid atop a wild squall of feedback and squealing guitars, all blurred into an undulating stretch of softly caustic mesmer, the result a sort of noise drenched slowcore, dramatic and intense, a little bit doomy, before finishing off with a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone.
"Augury In An Evaporating Tower" starts off all power electronics buzz, the sounds layered and shifting like some sort of deconstructed riff, which could have gone on forever as far as we're concerned, but instead the band slip into some serious buzzing and blasting blackness, the transition is fantastically abstract and creepy, but once they're in it, it's about as black metal as we've heard these guys, the black buzz rife with al manner of tangled melodies, the sound strangely muted and woozy, eventually giving way to a buzzing psychedelic second half, that sounds a bit like a more fracture blackened Barn Owl, moody and melancholy, before slipping right into "Corprolite", which begins with a gorgeous bit of decaying sound, a little Tim Hecker, a little Philip Jeck, warbly and crumbling, which is soon joined by some acoustic guitars, and some tribal drumming, until other guitars surface, adding heft and turning it into something resembling a Swans jam, albeit still minimal, instrumental, and wreathed in crumbling crackle.
The 17 minute title track finishes things off with a slow build epic, starting with some John Carpenter like pulses, overlaid by some heavier synth buzz, some spidery guitars, and lots of other layers gradually creeping into the picture, while way off in the background, vocals howl, drums pound, electronics hum and whir, the sound staying pretty abstract the whole time, but eventually building to a sort of wall of black buzz, before fading out in a squall of sine waves, throbbing synths, fractured electronics, and looped industrial noise. Seriously killer stuff. We're often skeptical when bands release so much stuff, but these guys never fail to deliver.
So as mentioned above, included here with The Clearing is also The Final Epoch, a collection of previously released material, from various cassettes and things, on labels like Small Doses, Deathsmile, Tape Drift and Black Horizons. Five long songs that while not a proper record, definitely play out as one, and are a pretty good foil for the Clearing. The opening track is a gorgeous bit of droned out tension, all deem billowy rumbles, warm swells of melodic feedback, almost like a darker more intense and metallic Expo 70, the shrieked vox buried in the mix pushing it from meditative kosmische into abject blackened industrial, but without making it any less blissed out and mesmerizing. From there on out the disc drifts into Our Love Will Destroy The World like chaotic swirl and skree, building lush landscapes from heavily reverbed guitars and keening high end shimmer, dubbed out and droney, lush and layered, slipping into hushed minimalism here and there, but more often flitting from churning black thrum to dense tangled melodic mesmer, many of the songs laced with cool little looped guitar figures that remind us of Durutti Column, those elements woven into Locrian's blackened soundscapes makes for something tripped out and weirdly transcendental.
The final two tracks find the sound starting out as an abstract bit of spaced out subtly twangy atmospheric riffage, hints of Earth and Barn Owl, but that dark dreamy drift is soon subsumed by more thick viscous washes of crumbling blackness, before finishing things off with a gorgeous gristly noisy droned out closer, that sounds like the Dead C but more spare and spacey, lots of buzz, and crackle, tangled atonal feedback, rumbles and thrums, a churning droned out muted riffscape, that eventually blossoms into a soaring, keening noise drenched celestial ur-drone. So good.
Both discs housed in printed inner sleeves, those sleeves in a super fancy old school tip-on full color mini lp style gatefold jackets.
Unsound is album number 4 in the 'second career' of Boston's muscular art-punk quartet Mission Of Burma, whose first batch of albums and singles from 1979-1983 still stand as some of the greatest and most influential recordings of the American punk movement. Always an adventurous proposition, Mission Of Burma democratically allotted the vocal duties to the three traditional musicians - Clint Conley, Roger Miller, and Peter Prescott - with the original fourth member being the enigmatic Martin Swope, handling tape manipulations and engineering duties. When the band reunited in 2002, Swope declined to participate; and the trio recruited Shellac's Bob Weston to wrangle with tape and sound design for the band. The Weston / Swope factor in Mission Of Burma was something of a secret weapon in how the band shapes their sound. It's not uncommon to hear an asynchronous tape loop grabbing a swarm of feedback here or a propulsive rhythm there that would crash against the anthemic punk melodies. Weston's contributions here (perhaps more than ever before) stand out in the mix, with his bellowing trumpet getting warbled and mangled amongst his tape manipulations; but Unsound thrives on the strangled basslines, angular / spitfire guitars, and start-stop rhythms that have been at the heart of the Mission Of Burma sound. While the band has yet to author another 'hit' like "Academy Fight Song" or "That's When I Reach For My Revolver," they've still got plenty of twists and detours to offer on the art-punk formula. Well worth checking out, especially if you dug the more adventurous moments of Mission of Burma's early career.
We made the debut lp from Moon Pool & Dead Band our Record Of The Week a while back, a sort of techno offshoot of industrial noise outfit Wolf Eyes, although as we made clear in our review of that record, there wasn't a real techno element, instead the sound was more of a synth heavy psychedelic trip out, a sound that definitely made the fact that the record was on space/psych rock label Agitated, make a little bit more sense. Druggy, synthy, krautrocky, kosmische, needless to say we were super excited for this follow up 12", and like the lp, we were immediately thrown for a bit of a loop. This one isn't really techno either, not exactly, it's more, well, sort of disco, a bizarre strain of alien funk space disco really. Sounds weird and it is, especially considering it's Wolf Eyes guys, but the move to Not Not Fun definitely makes more sense.
The side long "Human Fly", starts things off with a weirdo alien dancefloor groove, all low fidelity squelch and primitive drum machine, churning rhythms under thick low end buzz and rumble, and some weird house-y stutter, it's an extended mesmerizing minimal spacedisco groove that plays like an old school extended disco 12", albeit one that's a bit more muddy and murky and lo-fi and woozily warped.
The B side opens with "The Jagged Orbit", which is heavy on the eighties disco, but again, a sort of warped psychedelic variant, the vibe murky and totally soundtracky, laced with glitchy FX, lots of hum and buzz and squelch, minimal and motorik and seriously mesmerizing. Which leads right into "Cyber Rebels", a final does of alien funk, a looped and loping groove equal parts vintage dancefloor disco and warped woozy electro. Not at all what we were expecting, but cool nonetheless. Folks who loved the first Moon Pool might be in for a bit of a surprise!
We've long been fans of death metallers Nile, their insane super technical avant metallic constructions, and of course their ridiculous (but kind of awesome) obsession with Egyptology, every record we go through the same process, we don't really care that much, just another Nile record, and we're already kind of burnt out on the last one, but then we throw it on, and BAM, our minds are re-blown, and we becomes obsessed once again, and listen to it like crazy, and marvel and how these guys whip up this impossibly complex metal, and incorporate yet more arcane Egyptian mythology into their sound to boot. And whattayaknow? It happened again. After sort of sleeping on this when it came out, we're now nuts for it, we've been listening to it constantly, even poring over the lyrics, and the various explanations for the lyrical inspirations, with the band's commentaries extensive and self deprecating and pretty fun to read, but really it's the music, which once again is dizzyingly complex, head spinningly intricate, the drumming furious and frantic, the riffing dense and frenzied, the arrangements super progged out, with wild squiggly tangled fully psychedelic death metal leads, much of the playing downright inhuman, total mathed out technical death metal bliss, that few other bands can touch. Like we've mentioned in past reviews, while this is most definitely death metal, the sound and the production aren't necessarily traditionally heavy, which is another thing that gives Nile a weirdly avant vibe, the sound more like some super dense, complex, tangled experimental math metal, the production making all of the various sounds crystal clear, every kick drum beat in every furious blast beat, every note in every lead, but to make it that clear and crisp, much of the buzz and distortion has to be dialed back, so the result is this strangely mesmerizing, droned out, hypnotic tangle of death metal tropes, and weird experimental textural sound, that definitely helps Nile transcend the strictures, both sonic and compositional, of traditional death metal.
One of THREE new Utech releases this week (plus the vinyl of the latest Locrian!), and the first we've heard from this Spanish duo, but hopefully not the last, as these guys push all our heavy spacey droney buttons. A series of long form, atmospheric space outs, draping thick pulsating guitar grit over swirling electronics, fusing Morricone-ish twang to spiraling streaks of synth shimmer, creating a sort of hazy, droney space folk, or maybe a folk flecked bit of space drone, either way, this stuff is divine, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
The opening two tracks seem to function as one single two part epic, crafted from a Tim Hecker like cascade of warm whirring chordal blur, beneath soft spacey pulsations, some twangy guitars, a bit of thick Earthy buzz, all blurred and smeared into a thick, organic, undulating dronescape, the fuzz and buzz gradually receding, leaving a sky full of crystalline guitar shimmer, that seems to pick up grit and whir as it goes, eventually it fades out completely, leaving just a lush shadowy cloud of muted crunch and swirling ambience, only to erupt into some distorted guitar crunch, laced with strangely rhythmic streaks of hiss and glitch, before finally fading out into something much more tranquil.
The rest of the record offers up variations on this twangy spacey droney sound, often resulting in something that sounds like a Tim Hecker / Barn Owl jam, ethereal and ephemeral one minute, all spidery melodies and slow shifting glimmer, pulsing and electronic the next, strange flurries of stuttering melody wrapped around gentle steel string strum, and hushed chordal background blur. There are moments when the sound transforms into something much more soundtracky and spacey, "Red Forest" for example sounds like it could be an alternate score for Logan's Run, a haunting retro-futuristic creep, all swirling minor key synths, loping basslines, and pulsing electronics, quite ominous and haunting, but which gives way to the warped squelch of "Threshold" all murky and muddy, but again, haunting and futuristic sounding, like another lost sci fi synth score, the whole record wrapping up with the hazy drone psych of "Jatavena" warm whirling buzz, murky distorted rumblings, strange bits of noisy background detritus, the tone of the track gradually shifting and getting more and more ominous, before again seeming to shrug off the sonic clouds, closing with a warm whirring bit of softly melodic droned out drift.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Packaged in super sweet Utech style mini sleeves, black ink on heavy brown paper.
The first proper cd (non cd-r) release from Campbell Kneale's post Birchville Cat Motel project Our Love Will Destroy The World, after a whole mess of lps, 7"s and cd-r's, comes in the form of this sprawling two disc collection on Handmade Birds, and it's precisely the sort of format that best suits Kneale's longform compositions, with any one of these tracks capable of being stretched out into a whole record proper, but instead, Thousands Raised To The Sixth, is more like a sampler, as if every one of these tracks was an edit, culled from a much longer piece, with the tracks lurching into action, as if someone just happened to push record on the machine capturing a bit of whatever perpetual sound making machine Kneale had cooked up, and set running. Like past OLWDTW records, the sounds here find Kneale melding the noisy freeform bliss out ur-drone of his Birchville project, with something decidedly more rhythmic. Not necessarily rhythmic in the standard sense, but more using rhythms to create layers and textures, whether it's the tabla like splatter on "Calculate Unknown Angels", skittering beneath a sky full of groaning buzz and grinding clouds of thrum and whir, or the almost tribal sounding looped drums on "Early Scrawl Like Fuck Academy", that sounds like old school hip hop via African folk, all wreathed in a cloud of glitchy static, and wound around an almost funky looped bassline, and if you stick around, the song eventually transforms into a sort of blissed out krautgaze new age, all propulsive skitter and soaring ur-drone shimmer.
"Lime Glacier" is a heady slab of looped and layered almost industrial sounding machinemusic, that manages to make a robotic insect symphony into a dreamlike swirl, while "Forgotten Stormbringer" seems to merge time stretched black metal creep and soaring super distorted shoegaze drift into something simultaneously heavy and psychedelic, a birdsong wreathed sprawl of muted crunch and gristly bliss. "Blindness Black Battalion" pairs martial drumming buried way in the mix with swirling clouds of insectoid buzz, and squelchy electronic skitter, "Ice Reptile Swastikas" slices and dices sounds and samples and piles them atop one another into some sort of super drugged out, weirdly mesmerizing slab of fluttering almost orchestral sounding freeform dreamnoise, and "Cloud Water Assembly mixes dreamlike dolorous piano with thick swaths of heavily flanged and phased white noise, as well as a strange deep voice, and some chittering percussion into what might be the most stately and hauntingly lovely track of the bunch.
And that's only a sampling. Odds are if you're already a fan, of OLWDTW or Birchville, you're gonna dig/want this big time. And if somehow, you've been reading the aQ list all this time and managed to avoid Kneale and his glorious din, well, you are in for a treat.
Third mysterious sonic missive from this Northwestern lo-fi synthscaper, and like the two tapes that came before, it's another wild and wooly mad scientist concoction of stuttery beats, creepy soundtracky synths, woozy loops, and all manner of warped effects. At first we dug this stuff just cuz it was kinda far out and fun, but with every record the sounds get better, the arrangements more fully fleshed out, and with Octagonal Wax, we're really beginning to wonder how this guys has remained such a secret. Just check out the opener, "50 Times Higher Than Any Normal Man", with its weird little blurts of synth squelch, woozy haunted house ambience, bloopy bleepy 8-bit video game melodies, all wrapped on a creepy cinematic Goblin-y gauze, playful but also infused with a strange sinister streak, which is precisely what makes this stuff so good. The last Oxykitten played out more like a summer party record, but this one is ominous and a little bit wintery, the opener a herald of strange dark times to come, leading directly into "Drowning Inside", which weds a thick buzzing synth to swoonsome melancholic strings, some weird wah wah melodies and a lumbering staticky beat. But it too has a strangely melancholy cast, with some almost choral like sounds that give this the vibe of some heartbreaking montage, and weirdly enough, sort of sounds like a WAY better produced Fastest.
From there on out, the sounds continues on in much the same fashion, definitely slipping into much more sun dappled sonic climes, but almost always drifting back toward something more woozy and moody, with a lot of the tracks touching on Carpenter / Goblin retro-synth soundtrack territory, making Oxykitten definitely ripe for discovery by fans of Umberto, Zombi, Majeure and all that stuff. That said, this is much definitely way more home brewed and DIY, which also in many ways makes it more appealing, strangely idiosyncratic, a dizzying melange of retro soundtracks, modern beatscaping, and outsider synth oddities. Another weirdo winner from Oxykitten!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Includes digital download coupon!
In the past, we've listed a couple, now out of print limited vinyl reissues of stuff by this lost-in-time, doom-laden New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band, so we know some of you are already fans. And anyone into either Witchcraft or Witchfinder General, who hasn't yet heard Pagan Altar, should really check them out! They could be considered one of the NWOBHM's best kept secrets, seeing as how the songs they recorded back in the '80s weren't even released until many, many years later. Nowadays they're finally getting some attention, playing festivals like Roadburn, where Allan was lucky enough to see 'em, in 2010, and having more of their music finally see the light of day (or the full moon, as might be more appropriate).
While many of the releases in this band's somewhat curious discography, like 2004's Lords Of Hypocrisy and 2006's Mythical & Magical, consist of songs written (but not recorded) over 20 years earlier, what we have here REALLY goes back, way back, to the band's beginnings - these five songs are the earliest known Pagan Altar recordings to exist, actual demo tracks dating from 1978: "Highway Cavalier", "The Time Lord", "Judgement Of The Dead", "The Black Mass", and "Reincarnation". Some of course were redone on later releases. But they sound pretty darn good in their original demo form, tape hiss included. Total heavy riffing, epick rocking, infused with pagan Britfolk vibes� kinda like Sabbath meets Roky Erickson (on account of frontman Terry Jones's reedy Roky-like voice) meets the NWOBHM, all under the influence of Dr. Who; in other words, the Pagan Altar we know and love. Classic mystic misty majestic metal.
Pagan Altar, next to Manilla Road, are probably the top favorite band of the cult metal fetishists who run the Shadow Kingdom label, so we know they were thrilled to put this out on remastered cd (I Hate Records did a 12" vinyl version back in '04). We're stoked about it as well. AND they're gonna be doing domestic cd reissues of Pagan Altar's Judgement Of The Dead and Lords Of Hypocrisy albums soon, too!
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label puts out some of the coolest weirdest shit, all of it super limited, most so much so that we rarely get enough to list, in the past we've had the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), and now this week we have a whole bunch of releases, finally in amounts enough to list, one of which is this tape, from Denver witch house / electro pop outfit Pictureplane, whose sound drags the woozy lo-fi drag of witch house into total bumpin' electro pop territory, big beats, fuzzed out synths, sexy vox, skittery rhythms, warped loops, soulful and synthy, funky and poppy, super summer jams for late night dancefloor bliss outs.
