We knew nothing about these guys when we first heard them, we were definitely intrigued by the band name, and the song title, "Tell Her I'm Dead", and then when the music started, thick, buzzing, almost synth sounding guitars (or maybe actual synths, hard to tell), with big booming drums, sound like some sort of metal / cold wave fusion, and when the song proper started, that only furthered that idea, the churning distorted bass line, soft focus synth swirl, churning propulsive rhythm, and super dramatic crooned vox, when all of a sudden, the song exploded into a burst of furious blasting, a sort of black metal cold wave, accompanied by some strange sci-fi squiggles, and as soon as it started, it was right back into that gorgeously miserablist mope rock. The second time that burst/blast surfaces, it's accompanied by hellish shrieks, and then explodes right into a crazy drum/synth jam, with the drums pounding wildly in a field of swirling new wave synths, a twisted hybrid that somehow is something we always wanted to hear, but never knew it. The song continues to confound, with creepy falsetto vocals, over a synth heavy doom creep, before finishing off in a squall of FX swirl and psych wave weirdness.
Holy shit, one song is all it took, and the rest of the tracks here are just as good. A little digging revealed that Pinkish Black is in fact a group with roots in an old aQ favorite, the late great Texas prog-psych outfit Yeti, and suddenly the sound of PB made a lot more sense. After Yeti, came The Great Tyrant, and it seems like every band these guys were in, endured all sorts of personal tragedy and loss of life, the sort of thing that would most definitely inspire the sort of gloom and doom Pinkish Black traffic in, and while based on Yeti, it's hard to see just what may have influenced the actual sound here, the last record from The Great Tyrant found them delving into similar territory, super gothy and dramatic, but not so fully realized, PB sounds like where The Great Tyrant might have eventually ended up, the whole record held together with that impossibly distorted buzz, be it synth or bass or guitar, it's a constant presence, whether churning malevolently, or droning blissfully, it's what gives the sound of PB its heft, it's grim black energy, and it's the drums that drive everything else, the playing dense and intricate, powerful and mathy, by turns metallic and brutal, deft and almost krautrocky, those two combined are the framework, over which all manner of soundtracky synth melodies drift and squiggle, and the vocals, a dark soporific croon one second, a washed out almost shoegazey reverbed bellow the next, the songs slipping from dense driving gloom rock to tripped out psych-goth space jams, often some dizzying mix of the two.
After Vaura's recent aQ Record Of The Week, we might not have been surprised to find this being released on Wierd Records, cuz for all its metallisms, and its punk/metal pedigree, this is essentially a super dark, super heavy new wave record, the synth melodies especially had us imagining what a Gary Numan record might have sounded like had he been making his first records 30 years later, and we definitely think they might have sounded something like this. Instead it's on the limited edition Handmade Birds label, run by the guy from Pyramids, who always bring us interesting stuff.
Haunting and heavy, brooding and brutal, imagine some sort of black metal / new wave hybrid, or perhaps a sort of noise rock / goth rock fusion, fans of all that Goblin / John Carpenter worship who might be into something much darker and heavier should check this out, but really, everyone who digs gloomy heaviness will dig this big time, and and if like us, the thought of a sort of metallic new wave gets you all riled up, then this just might be your new favorite record. It is ours!
First we've heard from this French instrumental math / post / noise rock combo, and holy shit, these guys push all our musical buttons, channeling the spirit of Polvo and Pitchblende, all droned out atonal guitars and wild mathy rhythms, mesmerizingly hypnotic metallic grooves and soaring layered sonic sprawls, the perfect post / math rock hybrid, fusing loping super melodic mesmer with gnarled dense near metal crush, but somehow managing the near impossible, making all of this weird mathiness insanely catchy, the sort of rare band that can conjure up swirling intricate landscapes of chugging and churning and soaring and droning, all manner of shimmer and crunch, pummel and pound, into something that you may find yourself humming hours later. Fans of outfits like Psychic Paramount, Dazzling Killmen, Laddio Bolocko, Phleg Camp, Don Caballero, Bastro, Breadwinner, Drive Like Jehu, Rodan and the like will flip. A new favorite band for sure!
What do you get when you cross one part Nadja and one part Bloody Panda? Well, pretty much what you might expect, a collection of sprawling epic doomic dirgescapes, that slip from spaced out and psychedelic to blackened and buzz drenched, blissed out and ethereal one second, suffocating and crushing the next, most often in the same song.
"Crepuscular" begins all spidery guitars and distant atmospheric shimmer, but it's not long before that Nadja style metalgaze creep blots out the sun, resulting in a sort of washed out, grinding slo-mo dirge that really does sound quite Nadja like, which shouldn't be surprising as both members of Nadja show up here, resulting in something more like Nadja with an extra guitarist, which we're not complaining about AT ALL. It's a gorgeously thick and corrosive and fantastically heady avant metal drift, drum machine driven, give it a sort of Godflesh vibe, but way more blissed out, droney and trancey and totally hypnotic, the sort of dreamdirge heaviness that's so easy to get lost in. That heaviness does get dialed back for a brief spell midsong, during which the trio weave a lust shimmerscape of glistening effects and deem rumbling swells, only to work their way back to an even more blown out dirge.
The title track finds the core Scythling duo of Aidan Baker and Josh Rothernberger joined by vocalist Rebecca Fasanello and Michael Tambouro on hammered dulcimer, which had us expecting something darkly delicate, which the opening few minutes are, but Fasanello's vocals are a demonic shriek, that in places transforms into a witchy croon, and the dulcimer, we were expecting some sort of Botanist like percussive shimmer, but instead, they seem to just add to the general din, adding streaks of metallic shimmer, but for the most part, it's a gloriously slow moving cloud of blackened dirgery, the drums skittery and abstract, a droned out blurscape that manages to sound both grim and black, and spaced out and psychedelic simultaneously.
The final track "Gloaming" introduces another guest vocalist, as well as someone credited with "violet ray", the track starting out haunting and minimal, weird disembodied melodies over distant pianos, all smeared into a hazy abstract drift, a crumbling low end drone gradually surfacing underneath, underpinning what sound more like the Caretaker or Tim Hecker, eventually that low end splinters into a cloud of caustic crumbling heaviness, but the track remains a drifty amorphous crawl, moaning foghorn like melodies, shimmery guitar buzz and tinkling melodies eventually fight back the onslaught, the track unwinding to its end as some sort of blackened chamber music, the doomic creep wreathed in clouds of abstract metallic shimmer.
We first heard local singer songwriter Dylan Shearer on the In A Cloud sampler of local SF artists and were immediately smitten by his gorgeous old school retro sixties style pop, think Kinks, Zombies, early Bee Gees, Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, lush but spare instrumentation, dreamily strummed guitar, delicate piano, minimal drum skitter, instantly irresistible melodies, classic pop songsmithery, all driven by Shearer's distinctive dramatic croon, and all wreathed in a lush softly reverbed old school production.
Dreamy and melancholic, definitely a sound out of time, reminds us of aQ faves Cardinal, the New Lines, Still Corners, Bipolaroid and other aQ beloved retro poppers. But where those bands definitely veer toward the experimental, Shearer plays it pretty straight relying more on the songs themselves, which effortlessly transport the listener to a simpler time, Porchpuddles the perfect soundtrack to that bygone era of classic baroque dream pop.
Includes a download coupon of the whole record PLUS seven bonus tracks!!!
For those of you who have been FIENDING for some murky, gritty, booming and dark dubbed out techno, and seething, narcotic wareHOUSE similar to the dose we administered a couple months ago with the fantastic Porter Ricks reissue, Biokenetics, we got it for you RIGHT HERE! Shed, aka Rene Pawlowitz, offers up his third full length, The Killer, and man, while we're kinda bummed we're late to the party, it's SO great to finally arrive!
Rolling, mesmeric, corroded bursts of metallic klang tangle with dark and HEAVY synthscapes, rattling bass tones, and subtle trance inducing rhythmic shifts. Hazy clouds of filtered fuzz, and buzzing skree smokin out the disco tech!
"I Come By Night" is a nefarious and brooding techno stomper. The sounds of robot chatter and malfunctioning factory equipment crumbled up together and spread tautly over a tectonic rhythm grid, the sounds caustic and mysterious, buzzing and droning and teeming with dark energy. Like a WAY more brutal Actress, other worldly squeaks and blips ricocheting to and fro on top of some seriously gothic synthscapes. "Day After", "Phototype" and "Ride On" are more of a broken, fucked up and moody rendition of dubstep or UKG. The bass drum sound has us thinking of the gnarlier side of Chain Reaction, while the snares and hats swing rigidly on top (an oxymoron, we know, but we don't know how else to describe the confusional yet undeniably groovy sound Shed manages to achieve here). The synth vibes on these tracks are totally haunting. Heavy horror vibrations, and blissy blackened grittiness. Unintelligible vocal snippets looping over and over, creating an infectious syncopation.
There are also moments of dubby drifting ambiance that tie The Killer together quite nicely. The introduction, "STP3 The Killer", is a pulsating, Hecker meets Hallucinator vaporous trance dance, while "Gas Up" (Voigt reference?) is a soporific bliss out dreamscape! Bubbling angelic synth tones flow in and out of focus, obscured by a fog of tape hiss.
"The Praetorian (Album Mix) is an evolving digital landscape, again reminding us of Tim Hecker circa "Harmony In Ultraviolet". Arpeggiated plink plonking glassinine sonic shards and delicately discordant mesmer floating up to the heavens! Beautiful!
The Killer is totally right up our alley, as far as techno goes. Massively heavy at points, dreamy and delicate at others. Blurry and narcotic, trance inducing dubbed out seismic GROOVE! If you dig all those Chain Reaction, Basic Channel and Gas vibes of yore, or are feeling that new experi-techno sound of Actress or that forlorn night music that is Burial, Shed's sound is definitely gonna hit you in the gut (in a pleasurable way)! RECOMMENDED FRESHNESS!
The Silver Jews of today are FAR removed from the Silver Jews of the early nineties. While these days the SJ's seem to have have more in common with folks like Bonnie Prince Billy and later period Smog, all dark folky downer indie pop, when we first discovered the Silver Jews, they were everything we wanted at the time, a totally loose, heartfelt, ramshackle, chaotic, noisy, home brewed indie pop band equal parts old Smog, early Sebadoh, and Pavement especially, Silver Jews were like Pavement Jr. Just check out "Secret Knowledge Of Backroads", their version of an obscure Pavement track that might even be better here, in all its about-to-fall-apart disarray.
Early Times collects the two earliest Silver Jews records, 1990's Dime Map Of The Reef 7" and 1993's The Arizona Record, which while sounding totally early nineties (how could they not?) also still sound impossibly great, back when songs mattered more than sound, and not everyone had some advanced home recording set up, so the recording process had to be as creative as the songwriting, resulting in some of the most idiosyncratic sounding music we've ever heard, and the sort of thing that threatens to be lost as 4-tracks are replaced with laptops. Enough old guy kvetching, this is just a fantastic collection of classic early indie rock, and buried beneath all the fuzz and buzz and tape hiss, and amidst all the weird dropouts and detuned guitars, and cardboard percussion, lurk some of thee greatest indie rock we've ever heard, these two records (and thus this collection) rank up there with Pavement's Slanted And Enchanted, and Westing (By Musket And Sextant), Smog's Sewn To The Sky, and Julius Caesar, Sebadoh's The Freed Weed, if you love any or all of those records and have somehow missed out on the Silver Jews (at least these first two records), you're in for surprise, and a new (old) favorite band!
If you still think of Ben Chasny's Six Organs Of Admittance as being primarily a folky, Fahey/Basho/Takoma style acoustic enterprise, then please note the blurb on the sticker on this new album's cover, where it says in time-honored rock n' roll tradition: "Play This Record Loudly". And you should, 'cause while it's not like Six Organs haven't rocked before (they have) but Chasny sure is getting his ya-yas out here, big time. As we said when we recently reviewed the non-album single, Parsons' Blues, that immediately preceded this full-length, this stuff sounds like "Six Organs Of Comets On Fire", and the lineup here backs up that assertion. That lineup features Ethan Miller, Ben Flashman, Utrillo Kushner, and Noel Von Harmonson, all from Comets, of whom Chasny himself has also been a member. Plus producer Tim Green contributes some guitar, too. Thus (?) it's the loud psychedelic freakout side of things (a la Comets) that dominates, on a majority of the cuts here, at least.
The album opens with an energetic, kickass quasi-instrumental (there's some voices but no words) called "Waswasa", and then on track two, "Close To The Sky", it really sounds like Chasny & Co. have slapped on their sunglasses-at-night and are channelling total Tokyo Flashback action, a la LSD-March, Up-Tight, High Rise, and goddamn godfathers Les Rallizes. Headnodding psych-noodling, all right! That's followed by the ritual ceremony of "They Called You Near", and for a while we're back to acid folk, not acid rock, territory. Track four, "Solar Ascent", is even mellower and lovelier, but the next one, "One Thousand Birds" rocks out quite a bit more, bringing back that psych skronk guitar over a steady rhythmic pulsebeat. And so it goes, this album both dreamy and driving, providing songs that focus on Ben's gentle hushed voice and melodies, along with distortodelic romps full of amped-up, Rallizes-esque throb that also ought to appeal to fans of Wooden Shjips and Crazy Horse.
If you liked what Chasny has conjured on other recent sets like Asleep On The Floodplain and Luminous Night, this is equally expansive and ambitious - but with a bit more Comets-y sonic violence n' volume overall.
The compact disc version comes packaged in a nice cardboard miniature lp jacket, and we like how the "cd booklet" in fact consists of a folded up dot matrix printout (or rather, what looks like one).
The eccentric British sound artist Darren Tate delves back into the drone for this nocturnal album of slippery surfaces. His earliest recordings with Andrew Chalk in Ora and later on with Colin Potter as Monos explored the crepuscular regions of dronemuzik as dappled with sodden field recordings and occluded gestural noise. Yet his solo work of late eschews more and more of the drone quotient, emphasizing the erratic if subdued expressionist elements found in his blorping synths and anti-everything guitar fragments, all of which are bracketed by prolonged periods of quietude. The brilliant producer / engineer Colin Potter (the most sure handed colleague for Stapleton's recordings & performances through Nurse With Wound) amends and adds to recordings provided by Tate on No Longer Here, perhaps transforming the source material into the elegant, mercurial drones found within. A deep thrumming, low end frequency sprawls from end to end of this 45 minute epic, with eerie spectral tones ebbing between synthetic filigrees of cosmic electronics, hallowed reverberations, and watery elongations of sound. Beautiful stuff! The more times we hear this record, the more Tate's outsider strategies become more evident amidst the oceanic currents of drone, making this one of the best "solo" records we've heard from him in a very long time and another exemplary drone album from the whole Chalk / Coleclough / Potter / Tate axis. Not sure how limited this edition is; but probably won't be around for long!
Wish WE were going to Bloodstock... or any of the other crazy metal festivals they have across the pond in August. Well we can live vicariously through the pages of UK metal bible Terrorizer, who put Behemoth's Nergal on the cover as part of their festival preview. Also this ish: Watain, Nile, Eyehategod, Grand Magus, Gama Bomb, Deicide, Mayhem, Cradle Of Filth, Nachtmystium, Old Man Gloom, Dimmu Borgir, and plenty more metal faves, big and small, black and death, etc. etc.
Plus, it as usual you get a free "Fear Candy" sampler cd.
Are you ready to get down with the Go-Go? This exuberant, infectious, very dancable musical subgenre, a highly percussive, party-hardy species of funk, comes from the very specific geographic locale of Washington, DC and its environs, and never really took off anywhere else (though, DC's biggest Go-Go bands did tour in England and Europe with some success). Those include Experience Unlimited (aka E.U.) and Trouble Funk, both featured here on this fairly comprehensive Go-Go compilation, expertly put together by DJ/digger/producer/compiler Joey Negro (aka David Lee, he's a white guy, from the UK, one place outside of DC where Go-Go got a lot of love, for a while).
For those whose lives have yet to be enlived by exposure to Go-Go music, it's kinda like a primal, extreme version of funk, with proto-hiphop elements as well, characterized by the non-stop, syncopated Go-Go beat, implemented with a plethora of percussion, a lot of it rototoms and congas and cowbells (the next time someone yells "More cowbell!", play 'em some Go-Go, they'll love it!). Along with the percussion, there's gonna be fat synths and funky bass lines. Go-Go vocalists were often more like Jamaican toasters or MCs, their job to hype up the crowd, with repetitve call-and-response chants, not unlike old school rap� we were amused to hear the Davis Pinckney Project's "You Can Dance (If You Want To)", with lyrics apparently borrowed "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats! Though, some of the Go-Go tracks included here go for more soulful vox, as with C.J.'s Uptown Crew's "Satisfaction Guaranteed" and Expression's "Release Disco". With its roots in funk, other genres like jazz, RnB, hiphop, disco, and even punk, all got Go-Go-ified.
This comp is a suitably sprawling double disc collection of Go-Go essentials and obscurities. It's got 3 tracks from E.U., a couple from Go-Go pioneer Chuck Brown (and his Soul Searchers), also of course a track from Go-Go greats Trouble Funk (doing "Get Down With Your Get Down"). Other artists include Rare Essence, AM-FM, Donald Banks, Familiar Faces, Jackie Boy & Nature's Creation, Code Red, Jim Bennett & His Bumpin' Crew, Backlash, Little Benny & The Masters, and a few more� ok, there's no Junkyard Band or Mass Extinction, but we can't complain, as this does definitely include plenty of rarities that Joey Negro and pals spent a long time digging up. All in all, there's two dozen bumpin' tracks here all from Go-Go's heyday in the late '70s / early-to-mid '80s - with the exception of the final cut on disc two, by latter day Go-Go act Dr. Funk Skunk, which was recorded in 2004 and proves that Go-Go music is still going strong in the 21st century.
It's all pretty awesome, one big Go-Go party, so it's hard to pick highlights, but E.U.'s nearly ten minute "Somebody's Ringing That Doorbell (Express Yourself)" with its cameo vocal parodies of celebrities like Howard Cosell and Richard Pryor is definitely one of 'em. The more obscure Osiris's even longer jam "War (On The Bull Shit!) is another standout. Also we gotta mention the track "DC Groove", from white boy new wave punkers the Static Disruptors, an example of Go-Go's popularity in the harDCore scene (Minor Threat played shows with Trouble Funk!).
This labor of love includes extensive liner notes, with info on each Go-Go artist featured. From which we learned that there exists a Go-Go themed movie made in the '80s, a thriller called Good To Go starring Art Garfunkel, beleive it or not! Gotta track that down�
Holy cow! Matador Records has turned 21!! Hard to believe that it's been over 2 decades, and that what was once a tiny little indie label has turned into one of, if not THEE biggest independent labels in the world. But it's not all that surprising when you look at the records Matador has released, and the bands who call (or called) Matador home, just off the top of our heads: Pavement, Guided By Voices, Interpol, Yo La Tengo, Bardo Pond, Chavez, Belle And Sebastian, Matmos, Arab Strap, Cat Power, New Pornographers, Fucked Up, Sonic Youth, Ted Leo... We could go on, but you get the drift, in fact, if you're reading this, odds are you own a whole bunch of those records, and your house is probably overflowing with Matador jams.
So to celebrate the big TWO-ONE, Matador had a huge party in Las Vegas, with tons of awesome bands playing, and released this incredible 6cd box set (or 2lp, not so incredible, more on that at the end of the review, vinyl folks might as well skip the next bit as it only applies to the cd version). Six discs, a massive sprawling greatest hits collection, spanning the label's entire history, chronologically. The first disc is maybe the most exciting, as it features tons of the lesser known Matador outfits: Dust Devils, Toiling Midgets, Bailter Space, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Come, Bettie Serveert, Chain Gang, Circle X, H.P. Zinker as well as Unsane, Superchunk, Railroad Jerk (one of Andee's favorite bands EVER), Teenage Fanclub and more. The next few discs feature all of the bands mentioned in the first paragraph, as well as Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Pizzicato Five, 18th Dye, Guitar Wolf, San Francisco Seals, Helium, Boards Of Canada, Spoon, Pole, Mogwai, Cornelius, Dizzee Rascal, Dead Meadow, Mission Of Burma, Early Man, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Shearwater, Jennifer O'Connor, Stephen Malkmus, Lavender Diamond, Kurt Vile, Times New Viking, Jay Reatard, Harlem, Ted Leo, Magic Kids, Perfume Genius, Cold Cave and more more more! As if that weren't enough, there's a sixth disc featuring all unreleased recordings from Matador's 10th anniversary show back in 1999, live tracks from Pavement, Come, Bardo Pond, Cat Power and Mogwai!
Those all come in a super swank box, with an 80 page book, packed with liner notes, a history of the label, photos, emails and other goodies, and finally, 36 custom Matador poker chips (in keeping with their Las Vegas celebration, we presume).
Phew! Basically the raddest Matador mixtape EVER.
Vinyl folks are not so luck, the lp version is a more stripped down greatest hits double lp, featuring a handful of jams from Matador and Matador sublabel True Panther Sounds from Fucked Up, Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile, Yo La Tengo, Kurt Vile, Jay Reatard, Times New Viking, Ted Leo, Cold Cave, Girls, Interpol, Cat Power, Delorean and a few more. Still a pretty excellent mix/collection, but in this case, seems like probably the cd version is the way to go, $43 for 6 discs, poker chips and a swank box is not bad at all...
What a great comp! Rare but amazing examples of "Black music" (that's the European term) from the '70s, done with a heavy helping of at-the-time cutting edge electronics. Spaced out soul, in other words. Well, obviously it wasn't just cosmic krautrockers and spacey prog bands in the '70s messing around with the latest in synthesizers and other electronic music-making devices. Why wouldn't soul, funk, gospel, and RnB artists also make use of all that newfangled machinery? Of course they would, with folks like Herbie Hancock and Sun Ra leading the way. And they did. Especially those making music at home, without access to big studio budgets. That's the "Personal" part of the title, the songs here pretty much all being solo DIY home-brewed recordings, enabled by the technology... Which, along with the futuristic/sci-fi vibes that go along with the tech, give a lot of this a bit of an additional eccentric "outsider" feel, just check out the artist known as Starship Commander Woo Woo, for instance!
So, the compilers of this collection have dug deep, to find all these fantastic selections of what you could call "electronic soul", that in the mainstream we'd really only previously heard from Shuggie Otis... so if you can imagine Shuggie Otis really way out in spaaaace, you've got an idea of what's happening here.
Fat, buzzing synths. The mechanical tick-tock of primitive drum machines. Spacey FX galore. Mega multitracked masterpieces. Yeah, it'd all be novelty, if these songs weren't good. But, they ARE good. Obscure but definitely grade-A stuff in our book. The sci-fi sounds (which make a lot of this seem simultaneously '70s retro but also very up-to-date electronica-ish) are put to use by artists who come across like mutant Stevie Wonders and Sly Stones. There's 17 tracks here, from names we doubt you've ever heard of before: Jeff Phelps, Guitar Red, Johnnie Walker, U.S. Aries, The Makers, Cotillion, Spontaneous Overthrow, Jerry Green, Johnson, Key & Cleary, The New Year, T. Dyson & Company, Steve Elliot, Deborah Washington, and the aforementioned Starship Commander Woo Woo. Kinda hard to pick faves, some are simply groovy, some super bizarre, many both at once...
The only omission we can think of, is that even though this gets into the '80s, there's nothing from Wicked Witch on here (see our review of EM's reissue of that if you aren't familiar). But what's here is plenty weird & wonderful, from the twangy zipzap of bluesman Guitar Red's "Disco From A Space Show" to the heavily echo-effected "My Bleeding Wound" by The New Year...
Nicely presented, the cd in deluxe hardbound booklike slipcased packaging, complete with liner notes including thumbnail images of each original release. And the vinyl version is a 180 gram double lp, also nicely packaged.
Originally released as part of a cd / dvd / book combo, this incredible musical document, compiled by photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt on a recent trip to Ethiopia, is now available sans dvd and book, as a super deluxe (and yeah, of course very limited) double lp!
Staring Into The Sun was planned to coincide with a music festival - which the government abruptly cancelled for fear of the musicians being exploited. So instead, Wyatt travelled into the bush, to compile a sonic/visual travelogue of the music and musicians, the people and places of the various tribes of Ethiopia, and it's of course breathtaking. The music, which is obviously the focus here, is heady and hypnotic, joyous and emotional, the sounds varying dramatically from tribe to tribe, but music being ubiquitous, weddings, ceremonies, rituals, drawing water from the well, on television, in living rooms, very rhythmic, mostly vocal driven, but with lots of hand clapping, wildly bowed stringed instruments, vocals chanted, shouted, call and response, super mesmerizing, many of the tribes utilize whistles and panpipes, and the music they make is incredible, otherworldly and impossibly lush, sounding like some modern 20th century classical composition in many cases, while actual bands do rock out occasionally, and get surprisingly soulful and funky. A compilation like this must have been so impossible to put together, how on earth to whittle down what must have been days of recordings to just an hour? But the tracks chosen are amazing, and make us want to hear so much more.
Even minus the visuals, so incredible, and easily some of our favorite Sublime Frequencies sounds so far for sure.
Housed in a super deluxe, ultra heavy full color gatefold sleeve, featuring reproductions of some of Wyatt's striking Polaroid photos...
BACK IN PRINT, this former Record (or Records, or Book, or whatever it is) of the Week!!!
Holy cow!!! A freaking flexidisc BOOK. And if that wasn't already cool enough, just check out the lineup: Thee Oh Sees, Bare Wires, The Fresh & Onlys, Blasted Canyons, Ty Segall And Mikal Cronin. Almost entirely unreleased and exclusive tracks. And did we mention the flexidisc book?
Yeah, a big book, it sort of feels like one of those baby books kids can take in the bath, thick heavy pages, still softcover, but hefty, and the design is incredible, full color, super retro, all the band pages some old product reimagined using the name of the band, presented on thick glossy pages, over which lays the band's flexidisc, printed in cool metallic inks, and see through, so you can see the picture in the book through the record. And just an aside for folks who don't actually know what a flexidisc is, it's a sheet of plastic, into which record grooves are cut, and back in the day, that's how magazines gave away songs, by including flexidiscs (Mad Magazine used to include flexidiscs all the time!), but anyway, five flexidiscs, all housed in this cool spiral wire bound book! And if this wasn't already worth it as just a cool musical object, this musical object just so happens to have ten tracks from five of our favorite bands!
Thee Oh Sees get all abstract and post punky on "Burning Spear", channeling Wire through their reverby garage crunch, before slipping into the shimmy shake of "What You Need (The Porch Boogie Thing)" complete with falsetto vox. The Fresh & Onlys offer up two short sharp tracks of vintage retro jangle pop, all reverby and echoey and hooky as hell, laced with girl group backup vox and warm whirring organ. Bare Wires kick out the jams on two total retro classics, sounding more and more like they were actually transported here from the sixties, total Who worshipping jangley mod-pop radness. Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin try their hand at some Bowie covers, transforming "Fame" into an echo drenched dirge, and "Suffragette City" into a supercharged garagepunk blowout. Recent Record Of The Week-ers Blasted Canyons contribute two songs from their Record Of The Week (this was actually meant to come out first), but if you needed a teaser/taster, these two songs should convince you, fuzzy blown out, synth heavy garage pop space punk bliss, dueling boy/girl vocals, thick buzzing synths, wild crashing drums, big riffs, sixties girl group shimmy via modern garage rock crunch, and of course hooks galore. The mysterious bonus track which was available with the first pressing, and was cut right into the back of the book, is sadly no longer included, but it IS included in the digital download!
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAYING YOUR GROUP FLEX: Do not tear out the flexidiscs, just fold the book back, with the record you want to play on top, then set the whole book on your turntable, when it's time to play the next record, simply turn the page, and put the book right back on the turntable. And repeat.
And look out for Group Flex volume 2, which we hear is upcoming!!
There has been no shortage of obscure '80s synth-wave reissues in the last several years. Most of them super cool, and while they all have an awesome sound and aesthetic, it's becoming more rare for them to be records that you actually want to listen to over and over and over. That said, this awesome reissue of the 1984 and 1985 eps by this Spanish band, Vocoder, has been hitting the spot big time, with not only a cool sound and style but actual fun and infectious songs that we've been blasting super loud on neverending repeat.
Vocoder have a seriously hi-NRG sensibility balanced by robotic dance grooves and a sassy / peppy vibe that makes these jams pretty irresistible. Maybe what Ruth or Gina X would sound like, brightened and tweaked by the hands of Patrick Cowley. The sounds of Vocoder offer this wonderful glimpse into the crossroads of a colder, still Kraftwerkian aesthetic merged with the Europop dance music craze that would be emerging several years later. But somehow Vocoder are way more fun and catchy then so many of the colder synth wave bands of their time and so much more rewarding and challenging than the more polished Europop that would dominate the airwaves after Vocoder had called it a day. While playing this in the store while we write this review, three different customers came running up to the counter asking what it was, and all three of them were shopping in different areas/genres of the store, always foolproof evidence that a record is seriously fucking cool!
It takes a lot for a doom metal record to knock us on our asses. Sure it's a sound we love, so even the most pedestrian doom pushes our buttons, and we tend to find it sonically pleasing, but as a genre, doom more than most metal subgenres has a tendency to become boring and ponderous. It's sort of unavoidable, it's slow and dreary and depressive, and so it takes some sort of spark to turn that sort of dreary sonic depression into something you want to listen to. So what is it exactly about this record, the debut from these Richmond doomlords (which weirdly features members of Alabama Thunderpussy) that has us losing our shit? In fact we'd been chomping at the bit to get this reviewed on the list, but our distributors continued to be out of it.
So here it is, finally, presented for your approval, and we can safely say that since we first discovered this record, we've listened to little else. It's slow, heavy, Sabbathy, hell it even starts out with the whole rain and thunder and whipping wind thing (which in fact pops up throughout the record!), but it's also seriously droney and tripped out, in fact listening to it now, it definitely reminds us of Electric Wizard a LOT, the same mix of classic churning doom, and witchy psychedelia, the vocals are doused in effects and soar majestically beneath heaving walls of blackened doomic crumble, the songs are peppered with squalls of wild wah guitar, the drumming is monstrous, the riffs KILL, and the songs are catchy as fuck. The band lock into these super tranced out almost mantra like workouts, that remind us of EW's "Supercoven", the sort of drug drenched heaviness that inspires a woozy lethargic swaying hypnotic headbanging, a sort of trancey worshipful reverence that only the truly exalted doom outfits command.
We're also reminded weirdly of Acid Bath, the band have a serious knack for apocalyptic psychedelic pop, but here rendered in shades of dirge and doom, just check out "Heap Wolves" which sounds like a doom band covering something off Paegan Terrorism Tactics. Heavy and psychedelic, doomy and droney, Windhand have most definitely made THEE psych doom record of the year, and a serious contender come year end top ten lists, metal OR otherwise!
FYI there's also a cd version, but our supplier wuz out, hopefully we'll have 'em soon...
Profound Lore brings us the second album in two years from female fronted PDX doom posse Witch Mountain. And for the second time, their weighty Sabbathy stoner sludge is taken to another level by the soaring singing of Uta Plotkin, who can really belt it out, damn!
Opener "The Ballad Of Lanky Rae" is a bit of a curveball, a bluesy backwoods tall tale about a seven foot woman, who as a little girl preferred to play with guns instead of dolls, and eventually leaves town (after stealing a car and shooting a man down) to find her gun-totin', whisky drinking demon daddy, deep at the center of the earth. It's good fun, some swampy stoner rawk all right, and Plotkin sure puts it across. But, the other tracks on this album are quite a bit more "serious" sounding than that, with atmospheres more desolate, or emotions more real. The riffs are massive and mighty, the quiet parts moody and melodic, and Plotkin proves that her vocal range can convincingly venture into scary growls as well as piercing howls. The guitars get to let loose too, and these aren't short songs. Ferinstance, "Aurelia", the longest, clocks in at almost 12 minutes, its epic post-rock loud-soft dynamics mixed with more of that high lonesome sound, Plotkin singing sadly and sweetly amidst plodding heavy parts that utterly crush. The album's closer is another long one, a 9:22 doom-blues that creeps along quietly for some time before its cathartic fists-clenched conclusion. Earth fronted by Alannah Myles might be a good/weird comparision! Furthermore, there's moments on this album that make us think of both Hammers Of Misfortune and Black Label Society, at the same time. Which is also weird. But awesome.
Basically, if you liked Witch Mountain's South Of Salem, you'll like this. And it's very much recommened to fans of the current crop of female fronted heavy rock acts, especially Royal Thunder, Loon, and The Devil's Blood.
Another fantastic slab of sunshiney lo-fi twang-flecked indie pop from these aQ faves, the A side maybe the catchiest most perfectly poppy jam we've heard from Woods yet, driven by reverbed harmonica and dreamy falsetto vox, the whole song is fantastic, but it's got one of those choruses that will stick in your head forEVER. The B side though is about far removed from crazy catchy pop as you can get, all mellow and minimal, dubbed out and dreamy, with barely there ethereal vocals and stripped down ultra skeletal drumming, everything layered and blurred in a soft psychedelia, playing out almost like a dub style 'version' of the A side. Can't wait for the full length!
Brand new disc of solo works from these two one man bands, both of whom traffic in sounds much harsher and heavier in their 'day jobs'. Ventoux is Graham from aQ faves Souvenir's Young America and Forensics, and Years is Ryan from Darkest Hour and City Of Caterpillar, both of whom seem to share a similar sonic focus here, away from the heaviness of their proper bands, both delve deeply into some sonic netherworld where the churning blackened buzz of Locrian intersects with the psychedelic bliss out of Expo 70, and the barren dusky deserty twang of Barn Owl blurs into the cavernous creep of Lustmord.
Years is up first, and deftly unfurls a shimmery electronic buzz that drifts atop billowy clouds of rib cage rattling low end, the insectoid melodies the perfect foil for the suffocating black hole bass beneath, the two delicately intertwined, creating something at once dense and black, ethereal and amorphous. The high end peels away, leaving just that deep Niblockian thrum, before being buried beneath a cascade of almost symphonic sounding high end, a woozy washed out synth heavy swirl that fades out again, leaving just that massive almost physical sounding low end, before finishing off with a haunting minor key bit of cinematic synthscapery, that's both dark and dramatic, and definitely hints at the sound of Umberto and Zombi and all the rest, but still tethered to that intense black hole bass.
Ventoux is immediately a much darker proposition, launching immediately into a churning, Locrian like black ambience, thick and undulating, softly gristly, laced with shards of melody, and wreathed in ever shifting textures, and like Years, allowing all sort of warm whirl and dreamlike shimmer to creep into the proceedings, so that by the end of the opening tracks nearly ten minutes, the sound has lightened considerably, and has drifted into a sort of sun dappled Nadja style metalgaze drift, a lush blur of softly roiling riffage. The second track grows considerably darker, playing out like some ancient sonic ritual, the sounds massive and glacial, this track too, gradually begins to build, but here instead of blissing out, the noise is cranked up, and not just Merzbow style noise, no instead it's a weird grinding choral sort of swirl, a blackened choir, twisted and tangled into a gloriously chaotic psychedelic ur-drone, which leads directly into the final 'movement', perhaps the noisiest and heaviest of the bunch. A groaning, creaking, caustic landscape of crumbling low end, thick processed burts of strangely melodic noise and dubbed out industrial clang and clatter, all wreathed in a black sonic gauze, but also infused with a strange bit of buried melody, that keeps the sound weirdly warm, and strangely soothing, the sort of sinister blackdrone music that transforms punishing blacknoise into mesmerizing tranced out black ambience.
