A short sharp blast of buzzing grim blackness from Canada, from a horde known as Pestkreuz, whose sound is all classic buzz and blast, combining the sound of the early Norwegian greats with some of the more recent modern BM outfits. Think Funeral Mist and Katharsis via Satyricon and Immortal; while this may not be pantheon-worthy as any of those, it's definitely a pretty excellent chunk of orthodox black metal, one that should most certainly hit the spot for all of you who need a dose of furious, frenzied black buzz, there's even some passages that dip into the punkier side of BM, but for the most part, PK engage in the sort of corpse painted, Christ defiling, blast beating, tremolo picking, demonik vokill-ed heaviness, that we (and many of you) can't ever seem to get enough of.
It's hard to say what exactly a new Robert Pollard record means at this point. We'd imagine it means something dramatically different to different people. To fans, i.e. fanatics, who at this point most likely have thousands of Pollard penned songs in their collection, it simply means more songs. Which is not a bad thing at all. And if you're one of those people who makes arguments like "Do I really need everything by that band?" or "Do I really need another record by so-and-so?", well odds are, you're probably not a GBV fan, and heck, you're probably not an aQ list subscriber either. So for most folks, having 3 or 4 Guided By Voices records is probably enough Pollard to last them a lifetime. Which is perfectly fine on the one hand, but on the other, with a body of THOUSANDS of songs, limiting yourself to just a handful, you'll miss out on some amazing tracks. Spoken like a serious music nerd. But then this IS the aQ new arrivals list, and presumably, you too ARE a crazy music obsessive, and have more records than you can listen to, and tend to buy everything by the bands you love, and in that case, then we can happily tell you, that this is in fact another collection of killer songs from one of our favorite modern songwriters, and while it may be a 'solo' record, it sounds a lot like the most recent GBV records, which again is not a bad thing at all. The 'band' here is a duo, but they kick up a pretty good din, with a decent high fidelity production, and some crazy catchy songs, as well as the usual weird little experimental passages. And like all Pollard/GBV records, the sound is all over the place, jangly British invasion style jangle one second, murky super distorted dirgery the next, bombastic and anthemic one second, crunchy and fuzzy and power poppy the next. Full disclosure: we've loved pretty much every Guided By Voices record, and heck, most of Pollard's solo efforts as well, so even though our knee jerk response to a new record might be an exasperated sigh, once we throw it on, we find ourselves wanting to listen to little else.
First full length from this Fleet Foxes offshoot, and as we mentioned in our review of their recent Illusion ep, the sound really doesn't stray that far from the FF mothership, hushed delicate country folk dreaminess, all crystalline acoustic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, lilting melodies, the opening track is super stripped down and dreamy, but the second track is where the sound begins to blossom, becoming almost orchestral, layered and lush, and in doing so, definitely starts slipping firmly back into Fleet Foxes Territory. "Same Way", with its reverbed vox and sixties jangle, sounds a lot like the recently reviewed Father John Misty record, yet ANOTHER Fleet Foxes related project. And so it goes, the sound so lovely, and twang flecked, laced with lots of extra big band instrumentation, cascades of marimba and vibraphone, bits of percussion, strings, everything wreathed in echo and reverb, a total classic twang flecked pop vibe, a la Roy Orbison, or the Byrds. And like the preceding ep, some serious gems tucked away, like "Waiting For", which might be the catchiest of the bunch, or "Come Home" which sounds like some folks standard done sixties style, or "Holiday", that reminds us of New Lines, the same sort of Beach Boys beholden retro pop, the whole record brimming with dreamy old school pop, that while most definitely of interest to Fleet Foxes fans, should find much love with fans of Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, and all the rest of the current crop of retro poppers.
Issue number 4 of this unique metal zine, or should we even call it a zine? It's more of a microzine, or a broadsheet, each short issue devoted to just one band and one band only. Written, edited, and published by John Mincemoyer, one half of the team behind the late great underground metal mag Oaken Throne, the idea behind Rape & Honey is to celebrate/investigate one crucial (and sometimes obscure) band, in DEPTH. Previously R&H has covered Weapon, Funeral Mist, and Razor Of Occam. Now for #4, they've turned their attentions to a particular AQ fave, up and coming sci-fi thrashers VEKTOR!!! Just read our rave reviews of Vektor's two (temporarily out of print, soon to be resurrected by Vektor's new label, Earache, we have on good authority) albums elsewhere on our site if you need to know why Mincemoyer might be so into this band. Or read this! Ideal either for Vektor fans who want to learn more about 'em, or for those who trust R&H to point 'em to cool bands they should check out (and trust US, you should check out Vektor).
So, you a lengthy interview with a very voluble David DiSanto, guitarist/vocalist of Vektor. Also there's a half-page acetate insert with Mincemoyer's review of Vektor's Outer Isolation album (why on acetate, we don't know, maybe for people who have an overhead projector). The interview is pretty thorough, informative, and (like Vektor) entertaining. It concludes with some interesting insight into what Vektor think about all the Voivod comparisons (unavoidable, considering their logo). And it's presented with a nice layout job by the guy from Gnaw Their Tongues, featuring lots of colorful vintage artwork from science fiction pulps, in keeping with Vektor's sci-fi obsession. 12 pages, packaged in a resealable plastic sleeve, accentuating the concept that R&H is for collectors, fans who value both music and the written word.
Japanese reissue label EM gives us another killer reissue from this unsung post punk / dub / reggae icon, this one a fantastic slice of classic late seventies / early eighties DIY weirdness/radness. Ostensibly a post punk record, but WAY heavy on the dub influence, the whole thing was recorded and assembled in a home studio, and overflows with all manner of abstract experimentation and twisted songcraft. From the first few seconds of "The Scream", we were smitten, with its weird processed drumming and handclaps, its weird industrial shimmer, and FX heavy vocals, the pulsating bassline, it's groovy and funky and fierce as fuck, and had us wishing it was way longer than 2 minutes. The second track is all woozy drum machine driven fuzzy sixties pop, sounding like Young Marble Giants or Black Tambourine, all reverbed jangle, hazy vox, and then the next song is some home brewed lo-fi reggae, with wheezing melodica melodies, groovy upstroke guitar strum, weird samples, and cool fractured vocal snippets, and what sounds like pinball percussion.
The whole record is all over the map, tending toward a dub/reggae for sure, but even within that 'sound', Ray mixes it up, processed horn blurts, FX drenched guitars, dueling girl boy vox, tripped out rhythms, and for every straight up reggae dub jam, there's some cool fuzzy pop jam, Ray's dreamy vocals wreathed in reverb and wrapped in angular guitars, surfing atop propulsive grooves, but it's the weirder jams here that get us the most excited, thankfully that's most of them. "Maybe It's Because I'm Not A Londoner", is a dubby creep, all tinkling chimes, skronking horns, woozy low slung basslines, droned out and darkly psychedelic, while "Rahmatullah", is a gorgeous slice of fluttering flute flecked spiritual jazz, with a slight dub bent, Ray's dreamy vocals draped over dense tribal drumming, and all tangled up with the ethereal flute melodies, and "Spring Thing-Hippy Dread" is some seriously dubbed out psychedelic abstract reggae, woozy and warped, and dreamily druggy, and in between all this weirdness, is some seriously catchy, and slightly fractured post punk dreampop, and the combination of the two is weirdly perfect.
Includes extensive liner notes in both Japanese and English and tons of rare photos.
Earlier this year, as we hope you recall, we made the "totally tripped out and hypnotic, stonery psych explorations" of Rhyton's self-titled debut for Thrill Jockey an aQ Record Of The Week� it was a limited edition lp, and even more limited cd, and neither version lasted long, flying out of here fast. Sorry if you missed it. Good news then, that at least the Brooklyn-based trio (featuring members of No Neck Blues Band and Psychic Ills) is back already with a new release, this one vinyl-only, and also limited - to just 619 copies, we're told.
On The Emerald Tablet, Rhyton offer up three more slowburning, instrumental psych jams (two of them quite long). Over steady percussive pulsations, side one's 19-minute opus "Obligation" slowly meanders, replete with echoing, effected whale call guitar distortion and improvised, sorta snake charmer melodies. Frazzled fuzz (from electric saz?) smolders amidst this laidback, krautrock inspired throbulation. Think Davis Redford meets Richard Bishop, something like that� There's a slight edge of jazzy skronk, too, moreso on side two's 13 and a half minute finale, with the esoteric-sounding title of "Trismegistus Sto Smaragda". That one's kinda like the first long track, meandery, but with more swing to it, and more chaotic sprawl. And in-between you get the spacey "Revert To Daze", six or so minutes that do sound quite dazed, but melodic and Middle Eastern-y too.
140 gram vinyl, jacket art by Arik "Moonhawk" Roper, includes mp3 download code.
Fucking hell. Where did this guy come from? And why the hell haven't we heard anything else that he's done? To answer the first question, Sexton hails from the quaint hamlet of Franklin, Tennessee and had travelled up the road to Nashville to collaborate in the (now defunct) outsider noise-junk collective Horsehair Everywhere - another project we've not heard, but by all accounts conveyed a psychedelic violence through stoned happenings for collaged film, scabrous dronemuzik, and stoned antics. Sounds a hell of lot like The Starving Weirdos to us; and Geoffrey Sexton seems to be taking a page out of the Brian Pyle playbook with his underappreciated acoustic-dronology project RV Paintings. Sexton's prepared guitar drones ooze with a subterranean murkiness, growling and undulating towards dramatically dense codas on each side of this tape. The scraping textures give the impression of Sexton rummaging around some crumbled farmhouse, generating resonant frequencies out of antebellum glass and earthen rumblings from piles of rounded bricks all sweating in the humid Southern summer heat. Think Parson Sound, Thuja, and yup RV Paintings and you're getting somewhere close to what Sexton is doing here on 197 Black Pendulums. Fucking great.
Silent Servant's dour techno emerges from the now defunct Sandwell District collective of techno-heds keen on bending the Detroit / Berlin axis to allow for the grim pathologies of Industrial culture and all of its post-punk offshoots to infiltrate the boom-boom-boom of a 909 drum kick. Sandwell's Karl O'Connor is certainly the most vocal, hardlined, and aggressive of the District's members through the brutalist techno that he's produced over the years. His DJ sets are notorious for dropping Whitehouse and other power electronic squalor amidst furiously hard breakbeats. Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) strikes a gloomier pose than O'Connor through the Sandwell District and carries this over into the ethereally witched-out Tropic Of Cancer. Silent Servant's Negative Fascination drops from Hospital Productions, whose ghastly noise aesthetic parted once before for Cold Cave's gritty synth pop, making room for head honcho Dominic Fernow to follow suit with his own adventures in rhythm (e.g. Vatican Shadows, Christian Cosmos). If one were to imagine what Dom would want out of a techno record on Hospital, Negative Fascination is exactly what comes to mind - Chain Reaction's dub-inflected heroin house, Clock DVA's cybernetic futurism, and the atmosphere from the mournful dirges of New Order's first album.
A fine grit coats the production of Negative Fascination, and it's something that electronic purists may find off-putting, but it suits the bleakness and dystopian overtures that Mendez injects into his production. Acid-like gurgles propel the minimalist techno thump of "The Invocation Of Lust" and "The Strange Attractor" both of which rise and fall through a complex sequence of churning rhythms and shifting drones. "Temptation & Desire" lifts a taut rhythmic stab straight from The Sisters Of Mercy circa Body Electric and mutates it into a punchy minimal wave number with appropriately coldly theatrical drones hovering in the distant. The finale "Utopian Disaster" is right out of the Sandwell playbook of modulated techno sequencing, Chain Reactive dubby rhythms, and stealth bomber vibes. A fucking great record. (FYI, turntable types: the vinyl version's first pressing sold out, but is being repressed right now, so back in soon.)
We've loved pretty much everything these guys have put out, their sound a super catchy jangly indie rock, that at times is a dead ringer for The Strokes, but for whatever reason, we like these guys a whole lot more. The songs are more rough and ragged, and while maybe not MORE catchy, definitely catchy in a different way. And this record, from the very first listen, has pretty much set itself up to be on heavy rotation for the foreseeable future. The opener "Saratoga" is a jittery propulsive blowout, all bubbly bass, frenetic drumming, with some killer catchy riffing, and languid laid back vocals, the second track finds the band in Strokes mode again, slowing things down a bit, even adding some horns, while "They Say" sounds like it could be the single, with a propulsive almost new wave-y beat, some big crunchy guitars, and a vocal line that will stick in your head for days!
And so it goes, "Tallboy" adds some whirring organ, the sound almost classic rock, while "Bobby Brown", is dangerously funky, the band flirting with eighties pop, sounding suddenly like they should be on Captured Tracks, but then in swoops "Chinatown" another barnburner, that we imagine will inspire jittery indie rock bounce and hair swirling headbanging in equal measure. And stick around for the sprawling "Captain Ace" which sounds very nineties, in a good way, mixing in lots of tripped out effects, lots of layers and texture, more horns, strange sci-fi effects, all stretched out into a glorious slab of psychedelic indie pop space out.
LIMITED TO 2000 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.
The last time we heard from Mike Haley, it was in the guise of Wether on Monorail Trespassing, offering up a headsplitting noise cassette of powerdrone synths and sawtooth aggression. Here, recording under the moniker Spectrum Tickets for Hooker Vision, Haley dials those electronics into a glimmering pop ambient type of ethereal drift that certainly does muster favorable parallels to Hooker Visionary Rachel Evans' solo project Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. The stabbing John Carpenter arpeggiations are central to his science fiction electronica built out of swooshing fundamental drones with Radiophonic / Oneohtrix melodic flourishes, peppered with burbling electronics and strange fuzzing static. There's just enough paranoid android in Haley's electronics to keep things interesting, making this tape recommended for anybody whose enchanted by the like of Rene Hell, Oneohtrix Point Never, and much of the oddities found on NNA Tapes. As with all Hooker Vision titles, this one is super limited.
Cameron Stallones is back from his pilgrimage to Jamaica, where he made that FRKWYS album with The Congos, and now offers up a new Sun Araw album on his own Sun Ark imprint, full of damaged grooves and new twisted strain of avant dub weirdness, fragmented and spaced out, stumbling and super loose, the guitars spidery and echoey, the rhythms skittery and a bit abstract, the vocals doused in effects and WAY up in the mix, the whole thing sounds like it's melting, gradually decaying, peppered with blasts of fuzzy synth, swaths of swirly organ, percussion that sounds like clinking bottles, shuffling processed glitches. The tracks stutter and hiccup, never locking into a groove, so much as drifting and slipping from sound to sound, a series of swells, often fading out to near silence, before slipping back into it, some folks here thought it sounded kinda like Blues Control making a reggae album, while someone builds furniture next door (!), but some of us definitely got a serious Fastest vibe, total fractured outsider whatthefuck weirdo reggae action that will definitely have lots of folks scratching their heads and wondering what the hell is happening here. Although plenty of other folks will flip for Stallones' new, more damaged incarnation. Listen to the sound samples, and you'll know pretty much right away, which side you'll find yourself on.
Meandering and gloriously unfocused, The Inner Treaty definitely lacks some of the catchiness and groove of past Sun Araw releases, but for what it lacks in those areas, it makes up for in confusional weirdness, lacing its sundappled WTF dub with James Ferraro weirdo-wave retro VHS wooziness, and Ariel Pink / John Maus style avant drama-pop, and tangles it all up into something totally bizarre, something in fact that is so fucked up, it's like a musical car crash, we don't necessarily WANT to keep listening really, but somehow can't seem to stop ourselves. Very reservedly recommended, and even then, only for folks who like their music a bit baffling. Which come to think of it, is probably a whole lot of you.
The sound of this Bay Area blackmetal / blacknoise duo-turned-trio continues to evolve, and in surprising directions on this, their latest in a flurry of extremely limited releases over the last year. Beginning life as purveyors of dense speaker shredding noise, informed by, but not necessarily sounding much like, black metal, it seemed more a case of black metal riffs buried beneath sheets of white noise and crumbling industrial detritus, and blast beats recorded on a crappy cassette tape and played back through a Walkman, and again, buried beneath a punishing wall of sound. But with every record, the sounds seem more composed, perhaps less antagonizingly harsh, with more time spent creating atmospheres and ambience, than actually buzzing and blasting, which again is the case on Larvae. The opening track, begins with 3+ minutes of shimmery ominous ambience, laced with strange insectoid clicks, the guitars, when they do surface, unfurl soft strummed streaks of chordal whir, beneath which lush swells undulate drowsily, it's at about the 4 minute mark, that the song splinters, and explodes in a dense blurred barrage of furious murky black buzz, that while heavy, is also soft focus enough that it nearly has more in common with Tim Hecker or folks like that, until the group crank up the sound once again, and it becomes full on black metal, that lasts less than a minute, and the band return to the haunting drift that opened the record, before one final time, blasting through the last two minutes, the guitars a black blur, the vocals a fierce monstrous bellow, the drums, if there are any, buried in the mix, a heaving wash of noise drenched heaviness, that manages to be massive, but still weirdly textural.
The relatively brief second track applies the group's corrosive crunch and black atmospheres to something much more dirgey and dismal, a churning industrial tinged creep, the sounds blown out and in-the-red, a tangle of black noise / white noise and industrial crush somehow sculpted into a lumbering black doom, peppered with squalls of blaring FX drenched ear shredding skree, but also underpinned by all manner of layered drones and disembodied voices.
The final track, clocks in at a whopping 15 minutes, and again, finds the band easing into it, unfurling a hushed bit of blackened dronescaping, again flecked with strange clicks and skitterings, the guitars drift in, this time sounding like some sort of Appalachia, draped over streaks of muted crumbling crunch, the song sprawling out into an epic chunk of black folk drift, tangled voices, swirls of hiss and thrum, all wreathing the steel string buzz of the acoustic guitar, until at about the ten minute mark, everything is swallowed up by an avalanche of frenzied black buzz and frantic riffing, so dense and tangled that again, sans headphones the riffs all bleed into one thick roiling cloud of sound, eventually coalescing into an almost classic metal sounding chug, a murky hypnotic dirge that churns malevolently to the record's end.
Both the cd and the lp come in super swank, and gorgeously designed packaging, the artwork abstract in all blacks and greys, with the text printed in clear spot varnish ink, designed by Sutekh Hexen member Kevin Gan Yuen and Dwid Hellion from hardcore legends Integrity. The cd is limited to 500 copies, the lp is already sold out and out of print, so these are the last vinyl copies we'll be able to get...
Last list we highlighted two somewhat unusual "surf music" reissues, by Farm and Peter Martin & Finch, both brought to us by our favorite Japanese reissue label, EM Records, as part of their Summer 2007 "EM Under Water Series"! Those were quite cool, and now we've got the remaining three discs in the series, all of 'em (like those first two) soundtracks to several now-legendary surfing movies from back in the sixties/seventies. With the exception of Farm (from the USA) all the bands in EM's series are Australian, and in all cases the movies they were doing soundtracks for were Australian productions and/or featured Australian surfers. And as before, this isn't your typical SoCal Jan & Dean, Beach Boys style surf music... it's *psychedelic* surf music. Well 2 out of 3 of these anyway (the Tim Gaze Band album being more of a yacht rock outing).
Tully were apparently a pretty successful sixties rock act in their native Australia, despite playing total "head" music, not anything you could boogie to. They were popular enough to do a TV show, and even played with the Sydney Orchestra! They came from the same "alternative surf" scene as Tamam Shud, and were just as musically progressive, having the freedom to develop their material while touring as the backing band for an Australian production of "Hair", getting into poncho-garbed spirituality and electronic experiments (being the first band Down Under to possess a Moog). Somewhere along the way they merged membership with acid folk outfit Extradition, before recording their very freeform second album, this one, the 1971 soundtrack to Sea Of Joy, a surf movie directed by Paul Witzig (same guy who shot Evolution, for which Tamam Shud did the soundtrack).
Angelic female vocals, gentle organ grooves, hippie folk blissfulness, mellow instrumental textures -- it's truly glorious, lovely stuff. Quite exploratory too, with a freeform, organic feel. Tully's Sea Of Joy can be sunshiney (quite literally, on songs like "I Feel The Sun" and "Brother Sun") one moment, almost spooky the next (on such sinisterly electronics-laden tracks as "Follow Me" and "Down To The Sea"). And their interest in Eastern Indian mysticism comes through on the raga-like "Syndrone", for instance. EM says this moody, mesmeric album is the one in the series that's been selling best for them, and we're not surprised.
Question: what's better than one new album by Italian space-doom masters UFOmammut? Answer: another one!! Oro: Opus Primum came out a few months back, and now here's the 2nd installment that we've been waiting for, Oro: Opus Alter. Another five HEAVY tracks (making for a ten-part sonic ritual over the two discs) from thee incredibly potent musical aspect of the Malleus psychedelic art collective, UFOmammut. Once again, it sounds kind of like a (more!) drugged out and synth-ed up Electric Wizard, riding a rocket with Hawkwind at the controls, far into outer space. There's some of the screaming, extreme elements of UFOmammut's heavy pals Neurosis in the mix, too. It's a punishing, yet trance-inducing sci-fi ceremony of pounding drums, thundering bass, gobs of distortion and sizzling synth. Gee, we have basically run out of science-fictional superlatives to describe two-time previous aQ Record Of The Weekers UFOmammut; you don't need to hear 'em from us anyway 'cause if you got the first part you already want this - and if you don't already have it, please go look up our review of that, and all other UFOmammut output for that matter, to read us rave about 'em further.
So, if like us, you've been in your basement ever since Opus Primum came out, awaiting the next visitation from these space dwellers, perhaps obsessively building a scale model replica of Devil's Tower a la Richard Dreyfus in CEOT3K, now you can take a well deserved break, and kick back with this blasting from your stereo!
This awesomely titled compilation covers a very specific strain of metal, as in 'heavy metal from Northwest Arkansas'. Aha. Well, we were definitely intrigued. Not that we can think of any metal bands from NW Arkansas off the top of our heads (Rwake?), but we're always down for some obscure metal, and while we're often wary of comps that feature no bands we've heard of, we decided to give this one a go, and were pretty psyched we did.
Up first is Vore, who kick up some serious death metal brutality, equal parts chugging riffage, pounding pummel, churning breakdowns and mathy stop start dynamics, the song laced with some seriously shredding leads, not to mention some surprising melody, the whole thing pretty dang catchy for a DM jam. Deadeye Jack do a sort of grimy, crusty stonery sludge thing, the recording raw and rough, but it suits their sound, muddy and murky, the vocal buried in the mix, but with a pretty serious main riff. Lightbulb Detective Agency have a terrible band name, but their song has a great title ("HP Hovercraft"), the sound sort of mathy and proggy, definitely very modern, dramatic crooned vox over complex mathmetal chug and churn, reminds us of all those Norwegian black metal bands who decided to get all proggy and poppy (Borknagar, Dodheimsgard). Definitely not bad though.
The flipside starts off with Hymns, who are definitely the fiercest of the bunch so far, frenzied and furious metallic grind, mathy and relentless, shredding axe action and insanely frantic drumming, a wild chaotic grindmetal tangle that kills! Ogham offer up a brief blast of instrumental math metal, that might be our favorite of the bunch, a million parts and tempos crammed into two minutes, equal parts the Champs, Scale The Summit, Loincloth, Don Caballero, the song twisting and turning relentlessly before seeming to just stumble to a halt, definitely want to hear more from these guys. And finally some true metal / true doom to finish things off, from the questionably named Dragon Sunday, whose sound is epic and very Pentagram / St. Vitus sounding, soaring majestic guitars, dramatic vocals, classic metal harmonies, chugging riffage, total true metal radness that all you 'true metal'-heads should flip for.
Includes a download code too!
While the last few Voltigeurs records found the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Hototogisu, Sunroof!, etc.) and Samantha Davies (Skullflower) in a distinctly black metal direction, this new lp see the BM pushed way into the background, the sound here much more of a guitarnoise record, albeit with some black buzz lurking below the surface.
Four extended tracks, the opener titled "Morning Raga", but that title is a bit misleading, as the sound is less raga, and more a dense cloud of caustic grinding guitars, buried synths and unrecognizable piano, woven into billowing swirls of crumbling caustic distortion, shot through with shards of rib cage rattling low end and underpinned by a roiling sea of tangled melodic squiggles, barely audible over the din above. The second track reimagines the same sound as a more murky buzzy industrial framework, weirdly and subtly rhythmic, again buried beneath and avalanche of grinding, crumbling heaviness, but again, this is not simply a wall of guitars (and synths), within this noisy onslaught lurks all manner of weird droned out buzz and strange spidery melodies, all of which seem to ooze from Voltigeurs' blacknoise murk.
The flipside begins with a heaving landscape of metallic buzz, and an undulating low end rumble, all smoothed out into something more droney, and downright hypnotic, strangely cinematic in its own way, still noisy and abrasive, but haunting and harrowing, laced with keening minor key melodies, and infused with mysterious electronics (or something that sounds like electronics). The final track dials back the noise a bit, and sculpts what's left into a minimal sprawl of crumbling static, this time, there seems to be some black metal buzz churning away underneath, but so low in the mix as to be just another layer of buzzing thrum, the sound here reverby and cavernous, the aforementioned black metal elements distant and abstract, all swirling behind a gristly wall of grinding high end hiss, and weirdly glitchy hum, again transforming abstract guitarnoise/synthnoise into a mesmerizing slab of droned out mesmer.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!
Whoa! Scott Walker has certainly never been about meeting audience expectations, but we never expected hime to go in a direction this extreme, a lyrical and musical excursion so far out it's a little disconcerting. The Drift, his first release in 11 years has got to be some of the darkest and intensely uneasy soul-baring music we have heard lately, which is saying a lot for us. Visceral and highly visual, Walker seems to be channeling the decadent symbolist literature of Rimbaud, Verlaine or J.K. Huysmans as well as the surrealist existentialism of T. S. Eliot or Georges Bataille, as he takes us on a poisoned delirious absinthe-induced journey through the seasons of hell. Walker's voice recalls a strange mutation of Antony's (from Antony and the Johnsons) operatic theatrics and Jandek's sorrowful moans as it plays against orchestral arrangements that sound like Arvo Part, Morricone and Penderecki caught in a purgatorial bar-room brawl. Punctuated by deep resonant strings, concrete blocks pounding on wood, sounds of donkeys braying, and snippets of shortwave radio, Walker's arrangements vary from oppressive ambience to brutal stabs of orchestrated noise, as they cover a wide gamut of themes, characters and moods, from the reproachful condemnation of power to the painful humanity of love. The saving moment comes at the end with A Lover Loves, a spare but melodic ballad of voice and acoustic guitar that is the albums only peek back to the Scott Walker of old (in particular, Scott 4), and it kills!
Good, great, amazing, none of those are really useful superlatives in the case of The Drift, although it is all of those things and then some, as it definitely will not appeal to everyone, especially fans of Walker's first four solo records from the late sixties. But viewed as a work of art, with all the genuine brilliance and pretension that that may entail, this is extraordinary and astonishing uneasy listening!
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...
On The XX's sophmore effort, Coexist, the UK trio has stripped down their sound even more then on there debut, giving the tracks more less-is-more focus then genre-jumping experimentation. Still sexy and elegant, they ride the line between Beach House's parlor pop and Little Dragon's minimalist dance music. Yet it ultimately leaves us wanting a bit more to sink our teeth into than its genial offering of what can only be described as posh romanticism for the luxury car set. Though if you are looking for a wistful night drive soundtrack, this may just hit the spot.
FYI, the 'Deluxe' lp edition features a die cut gatefold sleeve on heavy card with 24 page booklet on rainbow mirri board. 180 gram vinyl with mp3 coupon. Or, there's regular compact disc and lp options too, the latter with mp3s too.
On The XX's sophmore effort, Coexist, the UK trio has stripped down their sound even more then on there debut, giving the tracks more less-is-more focus then genre-jumping experimentation. Still sexy and elegant, they ride the line between Beach House's parlor pop and Little Dragon's minimalist dance music. Yet it ultimately leaves us wanting a bit more to sink our teeth into than its genial offering of what can only be described as posh romanticism for the luxury car set. Though if you are looking for a wistful night drive soundtrack, this may just hit the spot.
FYI, the 'Deluxe' lp edition features a die cut gatefold sleeve on heavy card with 24 page booklet on rainbow mirri board. 180 gram vinyl with mp3 coupon. Or, there's regular compact disc and lp options too, the latter with mp3s too.
Indie rock fans have been waiting since 2009's Popular Songs for new music from Hoboken's finest. Well, good news - Yo La Tengo are in the midst recording a new album now, due out in 2013!
And, Matador has just released this teaser 12", featuring an apparently totally different, alternate version of a nice new song, entitled "Stupid Things", that will also appear on said upcoming album. The A side also features an exclusive remix by none other than Eye Yamantaka from Japan's mighty Boredoms! For that alone we know lots of folks are gonna want this, Boredoms and YLT fans both. Then, on the flip, there's another version of the song, its original extended instrumental recording, with indeed plenty of guitar improv from Ira.
The 12", which comes with a free download coupon, is limited to just 1500 numbered copies, and we won't have it for long...
Originally released as an ultra limited cassette, and then available on cd as half a split with Canadian blackened doom noise outfit Ghast, and now finally available on vinyl for the first time...
Yoga is a pretty unlikely name for a black metal band. But then Yoga are a pretty unlikely sounding black metal band. So much so that we're not even sure they really are black metal. Or metal at all. But they are. Sort of.
The sound of Yoga takes the lo-fi practice space recordings of grimmest of the BM outfits, and combines it with the murky muddy noise drenched blur of bands like Wold. But then take it even further rendering their sound so muted and lo fidelity that even when they're blasting furiously, it still sounds like a busted music box or an old black metal 78. And then there's the fact that Yoga spend a good amount of their time not blasting blackly, but instead, crafting synth heavy Goblin style film music, all throbbing bass and buzzing synths, creepy minor key melodies and tons of haunting ambience. Those songs too are wreathed in a foggy night-on-the-moors sort of murk, which ties those songs closely to the more blackened ones.
The strange combination of grim and Goblin, the tripped out fucked up recording quality, the damaged arrangements, the looped hypnotic vibe, turn Yoga into something totally out there, most likely way too abstract and psychedelic and deliriously lo-fi to appeal to folks looking for grim buzzing blackness, but for the rest of you, if you can try to imagine some impossible mix of Philip Jeck, Wold, Goblin, the Skaters and some of the super weird EEE unblack bands, all produced by John Maus and Ariel Pink, then you're gonna flip out over this stuff for sure...
