Another big, colorful, glossy, action-packed issue of this UK music mag, devoted to cool sounds from past dimensions (wait, that's Ugly Things motto, well they cover about the same sort of stuff). '60s pop psych, '70 acid folk, garage rock, freaky prog heaviness, all sorts of things we love. Plus they give some coverage to modern day bands with the same spirit and sound.
This time around, it's a US Psych Special, with features on The Strawberry Alarm Clock, Clear Light, The Fallen Angels, Crystal Syphon, and more, including a handy guide to "50 US Psych Albums You Need To Hear".
Plus plenty more, including stuff on Bill Fay, the Alive Naturalsound label, and power pop greats The Shoes! And reviews, reviews, reviews...
Lots to read, lots to oogle, lots to make you go digging around for reissues!
We just got a mere handful of copies of this, a super limited 10" vinyl single that XL put out for the Icelandic group's long awaited US tour supporting their recent & quite excellent Valtari full-length. This has a song from Valtari, "Varud", on the A side, but then the B side is an exclusive, unreleased non-album track, "Logn". We could tell you more about what it sounds like, but we might as well just let the few of you who manage to snag a copy listen for themselves. What we will tell you, is that both songs play from the inside out, so remember that when you put it on your turntable!
We'd been wanting to review this for ages, but the first pressing disappeared in a heartbeat. Which makes sense considering that this is the SECOND kick ass offshoot of Philly psych rock outfit Birds Of Maya - the first being the awesome Purling Hiss, whose Public Service Announcement record we made Record Of The Week back in 2010.
The weird thing is, for whatever reason, we were never that nuts for Birds Of Maya, but Purling Hiss totally blew us away, and Spacin' is doing the same, which has us thinking maybe it's time to revisit Birds. But for now, we can just revel in Spacin's debut, the awesomely titled Deep Thuds, and if you're already a fan of Purling Hiss, we have to say, you might as well stop reading right now and add this baby to your cart, cuz it's most definitely cut from the same sonic cloth, equal parts power pop, classic rock, Stooges-y swagger, hooky and fuzzy, hand claps, all tripped out and psychedelic.
The opener "Empty Mind" is a total classic old school garage punk jam. The Stooges vibe is HUGE, the drawled vox, and the T-Rex guitars, the woozy hooky chorus, the spidery psychedelic leads, the sound lo-fi but still rocking and fantastically fuzzed out. But then the second song "Some Future (Burger)", ditches songcraft entirely, instead weaving a lush landscape of murky mesmer, all heavily effected guitar drones, and looped melodies, total low fidelity kosmische trip out, which once again reminds us of Purling Hiss, and the way PH flits from pop to psych out and back again.
"Wrong Street" is total Yellow Pills style psychedelic power pop, the sound super distorted, but hooks galore, and more wild psych shreddery. "Chest Of Steel" is another lo-fi pop gem, which leads directly into the warped experimental "Oh Man", that is a weird melding of fuzzy psych groove, minimal krautrock, and hippie rock trip out, but it's awesome, totally hypnotic and spaced out and trance-y, the production giving it a sort of Ariel Pink / John Maus vibe.
There's one more short sharp pop jam before the final number "Ego-Go", which might be our favorite, a sprawling psychedelic groover, plenty poppy, but still droney and murky and minimal, sort of a power pop Velvets maybe, driven by some fierce guitaring, some rad psychedelic leads, and laced with plenty of thrum and jangle, with another warped production, that gives it the vibe of some lost live jam captured surreptitiously in some shitty dive bar, and dug out of some old dusty box 30 years later.
Probably our new favorite lo-fi psychedelic spaced out power pop / garage punk record, fuzzy, jangly, hooky as hell and one of those records we can't seem to stop listening to! And absolutely WAY recommended for everybody who bought any/all of the Purling Hiss records!!
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
We've got the limited 2cd combo which comes with a bonus dvd of live material from the last tour, during which Swans worked through variations of tracks that made their way on to this album, including "Avatar," "The Apostate", and "The Seer", with two gems from Children Of God and a few from My Father Will Guide Me...
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
Another eye popping collection of crazy obscure record covers that had all the record nerds at aQ freaking out big time, and we're guessing a lot of you will feel the same. Even if for some reason you don't love seventies glam, or proto punk, or bubblegum pop, this incredible 384 page hardcover book of seventies Euro picture sleeves doesn't require any listening at all, it's just total over the top music nerd record sleeve porn, although we can't imagine seeing some of these records and not being immediately driven to track them down, even if just to hear what sort of musical madness could inspire such over the top colorful visuals. When we first picked this big book up and started flipping though the pages randomly, we first opened up to a stunning shot of the ridiculous German glam rocker (and former crime reporter) Ramma Damma, posed in a glamorous black light up (!) jumpsuit, complete with battery equipped utility belt, and covered head to toe in Christmas ornaments and glitter and garland. Flipped through a few more pages and happened upon a CRAZY 7" cover from a band called Children Of The Morning, the song, oh just a little ditty called "Ku Klux Man" (!), the cover adorned with shadowy hooded figures superimposed over a burning cross. WTF?!! Flipped though a bit more and stumbled upon the band Hector, in their striped shirts and patched overalls and platform boots, looking like the even more flamboyant older brothers of the Bay City Rollers. And it only keeps getting better. And crazier!
There's lots of familiar groups: Angel, Slade, T-Rex, New York Dolls, The Sweet, The Osmonds (and the insane and awesome cover of their "Crazy Horses" 7"), Suzi Quatro, Bay City Rollers, Sparks, Tiger B. Smith, etc.; but a ton of super obscure outfits as well, some of our favorite names being Lieutenant Pigeon, Capt. Skid Marks, Bubblerock Is Here To Stay, Stud Leather, Hobnail, Shake A Tail Suzy, Bilbo Baggins, Rock Co. Co., Pantherman, Lemmings, Roobarb and of course Muff, but again, there are so so so many more. And it's not just the names that are ridiculous, the collection of covers is a parade of constant whatthefuck eye candy, lots of guys with big hair in poofy poses with INCREDIBLE outfits, some nudity of course, bizarre song titles, insane outfits, ridiculous (but totally rad) graphic design, it really is endlessly engrossing.
Besides all the amazing record covers and band shots (as well as a super cool page of just label logos), there are also interviews with Iron Virgin, Hector, The Jook, The Hammersmith Gorillas, Ramma Damma, Brett Smiley and Milk N' Cookies. The book is separated by year(s), and in some cases thematically, in one instance a series of record covers featuring bands on motorcycles, in another, just records about streaking. So cool, and ridiculous, and fun. Totally recommended for all you music nerds and obscure record obsessives and graphic design geeks. And goddamn if we don't now have about a hundred more bands we're DYING to hear...
Well, it's about fucking time! During the past two and half decades, this uncompromising Italian sound artist released only two solo records and a handful of noteworthy collaborations, all of which had earned him a reputation for incredible compositions nestled within an intellectual framework dealing with semiotics, esoteric languages, psychogeography, cosmology, and plenty of other topics that are way above the heads of 99% of everybody else. For all of Toniutti's high-falutin' ideas, his sound design isn't nearly as obtuse as you might think. There is an expressionism to Toniutti's work that you might also find in Xenakis' electronic works or Chris Watson's high quality field recordings, although Toniutti's idiosyncrasies make it difficult to draw apt comparisons. So with the release of Qwalsamtimutkw?italuc'ik, Toniutti has finally issued something new. Almost 19 years after the last proper full length album, and 11 years since the last major collaborative project. There have been entire careers that have risen and then fallen during that span of time, and Giancarlo quietly toiled away with his research into dying languages and an occasional flurry of recording which only now has been resolved. The title itself translates from Nuxalk, an indigenous Canadian language, if you must know.
As for music, Toniutti built an instrument which he calls a 'rattle-harp' out of a large piece of found metal, several long thin pieces of wire, and some bones. The sounds that emanate from this instrument are haunted drones and rattles which create an unsettled ground of activity that is anything but static. Sure, the surfaces of these shadowy subharmonic thumbs and oceanic tone bursts could fall into the darkened ambient catageory that we love so much; but as Toniutti slips the layers against each other, unnerving ruptures in frequency provide a woozy feel to these occluded drones. Even at low volumes, these tectonic rumblings can be very potent.
At the time of this writing, Toniutti has announced a slew of archival recordings including his bleak electronic album La Mutazione which Broken Flag released back in 1985, as well as a 3lp set for Vinyl On Demand; and yes, there might even be another new record. So, Giancarlo Toniutti does not appear to be the Kevin Shields of noise culture, rather just a highly exceptional composer with a pretty sizeable time gap in his discography.
The second of two new tapes from Black Horizons this week, this one a split with another rad local tape label Merz Tapes, a kick ass cassette reissue of a long out of print 10" originally released on the now defunct Release The Bats label, a soul searingly menacing, ultra grim black industrial ritual from this Swedish outfit, all slow motion churning blackness, creeping bleak ambience, and demonic processed vox. This demonik invokation was inspired by the late '40s Babalon Working conducted by rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons (along with none other than L. Ron Hubbard!!), a series of magic ceremonies designed to conjure up the physical manifestation of the divine feminine archetype. Needless to say, this is some haunting, atmospheric, gorgeously pitch black stuff. Deep rumblings, ominous scrapings, all blurred into a heaving, roiling expanse of sonic malevolence, and all underpinning some intense vocalizations, a harrowing speaking in tongues, wreathed in effects, heavily processed, drifting from bestial gurgle to anguished almost black metal shriek, but smeared into something way less focused, and more impressionistic, the whole thing simultaneously tranced out and mesmerizing, chilling and downright disturbing.
Like all Black Horizons tapes, fantastically and elaborately packaged, this time the J-card, transformed into a deluxe mini-booklet, aping the package of the original 10" screen printed on thick cardstock and printed in metallic silver ink. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!
Whatever this final question is that Paul Bradley and Colin Potter are asking, it is fucking deep. The stalwart British drone artists Bradley & Potter (the latter of whom is also known as being a long-standing member of Nurse With Wound) have collaborated a number of times in the past; and here they present their latest work under the new moniker Un. Not to be confused with the pre-Double Leopards / pre-Fursaxa audio narcotic, this Un brings Potter almost full circle to his early '80s explorations of cosmically tinged synth music, which was marvelously anthologized on his 4cd set Ancient History. An ominous, sawtooth drone sets the stage for an analogue synth take on dark ambient tension, with plenty of ghastly cascades recalling a chilling John Carpenter horror sound design that's been getting quite the workover as of late. But when the arpeggiations begin to come into focus, Bradley and Potter deflate the claustrophobic drones that opened the record, spilling forth an emotive smear of glistening synths and buried melodies orchestrated out the same infatuation with Klaus Schulze, Cluster, and Manuel Gottsching that spawned Emeralds, Outer Space, etc. By the end of the longform drifting, the Final Question becomes beautiful, maudlin, and rapturous. Quite a trip Bradley and Potter have engineered!
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT****MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
Coming off as something of a companion piece (at least in our eyes) to their recent gospel compilation Last Time Around, Mississippi offers up this cool six song 10" to keep things spinning. The artists were all unknown to us, but Mississippi rarely lets us down, and the songs here offer up some dynamite vocal performances with some surprisingly scrappy instrumentation to back things up. All these intense tracks were culled from rare 7" singles originally released three or four decades ago, by the following: Missionary Mamie Sample, The Skylifters, The Missionaries, The Sensational Six, The Willenette Gospel Singers, and Rev. R. Henderson. If you dig your gospel gritty and on the more loose and ramshackle side, you'd definitely dig this big time. And obviously, anyone who bought the Last Time Around, will likely want this one too...
**MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT****MISSISSIPPI RECORDS ALERT**
One of three brand new Mississippi titles we're listing this week, this one a lovely collection of Western Sahelian guitar music brought to us also in part by Sahel Sounds who also released the incredible Saharan Cellphones compilation and the Ali Ag Amoumine record. Laila Je T'aime is comprised of various field recordings mostly of solo guitarists and singers, but also some larger groups in different areas of the region such as Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. The intimate recording technique not only captures the beautifully soulful vocals and circularly lyrical fingerpicking style, but also the outdoor ambiance of desert life. It really feels like you're present at the moment these songs are being performed. What's also surprising is that while many of the songs recorded seem to have a timeless traditional quality as if meant to be handed down from previous generations, the very last song will be very familiar to western ears. It took us a second to realize what it was, thinking it was just a coincidentally similar melody, but then the vocals kick in with what turns out to be a really lovely rendition of "Message In a Bottle" by The Police! Gorgeous stuff!
Comes with a newsprint booklet insert, with color photos and extensive liner notes about artists, and the journey that resulted these recordings.
The first in a new series of vinyl only releases from Touch, this is an amazing document of Javanese and Balinese sounds, originally released as a cassette in 1983. A seamless collage of sounds edited into a dizzying sonic travelogue by Touch head honcho Jon Wozencroft, along with BJ Nilsen of Hazard, this collection is essential for fans of Sublime Frequencies and Mississippi Records. Heavy on the gamelan, obviously, the record flits from clanging metallic percussion, to buzzing burbling jaw harp, from super intense vocals, featuring some deeply moving, almost liturgical sounding call and response, in the background of many of these recordings, you can hear children laughing and playing, bustling markets, cars driving by, shouting and various voices, the music in the foreground is wild and chaotic one second, dark and contemplative the next, slowly bleating horns, unfurl a playful melody, before the sound eventually slips into something more modern, still gamelan driven, but in the form of some wistful Indonesian balladry, before finally finishing off in a blaze of super distorted almost free jazz sounding near psychedelic gamelan freakout, the sounds super saturated, and buzzing and crumbling around the lilting melodies, and hypnotic rhythms. Fantastic!
Housed in an orange-stickered plain white sleeve, and most likely fairly limited.
The Walking Corpses are yet another Teenage Panzerkorps side-project, this time the core sonix axis of snarled Teutonic vocals from Bunker Wolf with the detoured punk of Boy True (aka Jason Honea), is augmented by two other characters in the form of Ratbag and John Murphy (who may or may not be the same person who has freelanced in SPK, Current 93, Death In June, Whitehouse, Dumb & The Ugly, etc.). It's a scabrous noise affair with a tenuous hold on what may pass for a song, with piano notes dragged for miles through fields of tape hiss and distortion and sped up into a 90 second track, snapping to another 'song' whose sole arrangement is a tortured drum machine, and then there's Bunker Wolf - a monumental presence in Teenage Panzerkorps, who reprises that role here in The Walking Corpses. But on one track, Honea takes on the vocal duties with lush languid harmonies like those he brought to The Knit Separates and even back to his punk days in Social Unrest. It's a super quick 10 minute set from The Walking Corpses, but it's pretty wonderfully fucked up.
The usual wide variety of interestin' music is covered in the pages of this month's Wire... Folkstress Josephine Foster, minimal techno maven Robert Hood, grime producer Terror Danja (vs. the 'Invisible Jukebox'), Penny Rimbaud & Gee Vaucher of Crass, and more, including a cassette-centric Montreal scene report, and Steve Beresford on the late Lol Coxhill. Plus, reviews, adverts, charts, columns, etc.
For all the things that are truly great about working in a record store, on of the only real bummers is that sometimes it's kinda hard to be surprised by new music, in most cases, we know when a record is coming long before it's out, and often we get to hear albums before they're released, so some of the musical excitement we grew up with is gone, and we sometimes really miss that thrill of making a special trip to the record store only to discover some record you didn't even know about. So when it does happen, we freak out big time. Similarly, being the music nerd obsessives we are (and most of you are too), we're constantly on the hunt for new sounds, and for new favorites, and the one thing we DO still experience, is stumbling upon a record, and being blown away by the crazy cover art, or the weird name, or both, only to find that the music inside more than lives up to that unspoken promise, which is precisely what happened with the oddly monickered Yamantaka // Sonic Titan (and yeah, that double back slash is part of the name), not a split between two bands, but a duo, who the label describe as being a "pan-Asian cultural collective" based in Canada, whose two person lineup is expanded to eight members for this record, and whose eclectic lineup includes a traditional Mohawk singer, and the sound, WOW, not just a pleasant surprise, but a total revelation. The label describe YT // ST as being "for fans of Boredoms, Flower Travellin' Band, Taj Mahal Travellers, Deep Purple, J-Pop and Chinese Opera", and whenever you read such an over the top impossibly rad comparison, you sort of feel obligated to call hyperbole/bullshit, but the weird thing, as impossible as it seems, we might have come up with something similar, although we would add something about math rock / post rock / noise rock, and would definitely include Blonde Redhead, the vocals are occasionally a dead ringer for Kazu Makino, albeit much more washed out and druggy, and there's definitely some of the hyper Magmoid prog of Hundred Sights Of Koenji / Koenjihyakkei going on, but not so hyper, a little more toned down and stretched out into woozy rhythmic mesmer. As with all great records, this stuff is actually really difficult to describe, although odds are by now, some of you are already flipping out over the above comparisons.
The record opens with a brief bit of ritualistic ambience, the sound of rainfall and distant thunder, reverbed vocal harmonies, like the chanting of some astral female monks, all swirly and druggy and ethereal, which leads directly into "Queens", which unfurls in a haze of strange looped voices and whirring Deep Purple like organs, the vocals come in, and the sound is transformed into a sort of psychedelic indie rock, the melodies though reminiscent o seventies British acid folk, the rainfall present throughout, haunting and liturgical, epic and mysterious, and then the drums kick in, super distorted, in-the-red, the guitars coalesce into some serious riffage, splintering off into psychedelic swirls, the sound blown out, but dreamily so, until the blown out indie rock haze devolves into some seriously heavy, churning mathy pound and crunch, the vox processed into dizzying loops, blurred into the organs and the swirling psychedelia. So good. Imagine a way heavier, mathier, tripped out psychedelic Blonde Redhead and you might be close. But it only gets better/weirder from there.
After a brief bit of ethereal haze, that sounds like a grittier spaced out lo-fi take on Kate Bush / Cocteau twins, those British folk melodies here rendered in thick corrosive streaks of warm woozy guitar buzz, underpinned by powerful drumming, the sound coalescing into a brooding ballad, heavy and dark and broodingly beautiful.
But then comes "Reverse Crystal // Murder Of A Spider", which feels like the record's centerpiece, beginning with a grinding, crumbling bit of blurred orchestral swell, wreathed in clouds of decayed FX and fractured muted rhythms, the song explodes in a twisted mathy progged out frenzy, like the Ruins meets Nomeansno, only to immediately blossom into a super distorted heavy post rock lope, and then the soaring crystalline vocals come in, and the song is transformed into a bass heavy math prog groove than manages to be impossibly catchy at the same time, with what sound like wordless vocals unfurling a gorgeous and irresistible melody over some serious organ drive prog that sounds almost carnivalesque at times. After a brief tangle of abstract noise and processed tape, the song shifts into its second movement, a muted, rhythmic, almost krautrocky groove, that sounds like This Heat by way of Tortoise, and as the song progresses, the drums distort, the sound gets darker and heavier, the vocals surface adding a swirling spectral layer to the churning rhythmic low end below, before gradually getting more and more abstract and then finally fading out. YT // ST manage in one song what most bands can barely pull off on a whole record.
"Hoshi Neko" starts off sounding almost like some alien Christmas carol, a music box melody over a hushed tinny rhythm, all blurred with FX, and then in come the big distorted drums, and the band locks into a dark sinister groove, that almost sounds like a heavy creepy Stereolab, the vocals here are dramatic, transforming the song into what sounds like some classic sixties girl group songs reimagined as some sort of rhythmic post rock churn. "A Star Over Pureland" is the other long song on the record, and in some ways is competing with "Reverse Crystal // Murder Of A Spider" for sonic centerpiece privileges, and definitely makes a good case, although it's less fully formed songwise, instead it's a killer mathprog workout, the drumming particular, intricate and intense, while the guitars grind and crunch and howl, occasionally splintering into full on psychedelic squalls, there's definitely some sort of White Heaven / Fushitsusha classic Japanese psych going on here, but filtered through groups like Aluk Todolo and the Psychic Paramount, the track constantly morphing, locking into a very Ruins-y groove about midway through replete with strange effected vocal barks, wild Yoko Ono like warbly wails, and some thick buzzing bass, only to return to that strangely hypnotic lurching and stuttering groove and riding it out until the end.
Finally, the record closes with the awesomely and evocatively titled "Crystal Fortress Over The Sea Of Trees", which opens ominously like some sort of John Carpenter cinematic creepfest, but instead launches into some serious mathy post rock, only to have that Carpenter-y synth return, to help the song transition into something more swirling and surreal, but it only briefly, as the drums crash right back down, and the song returns to that opening post-math-psych-prog groove, the sound noisy, with all manner of guitar shards and fragmented melodies and bits of keyboard and strange voices swirling all around it, the song building to a strangely choral sounding drum and vocal coda, before devolving into burst of bass buzz and drum pound before clipping out abruptly, leaving a long stretch of near silence, a barely there distant blur of tinny vocals and ghostlike shimmer.
Definite contender for record of the year, it's available on both cd and lp, the vinyl limited to 500 copies...
