One of two new Dark Entries titles this week is this bizarre French progressive synth obscurity from 1982, ADN'Ckrystall. Erick Moncollin, the man behind this one-man-band, recorded this in four days but it has as many ideas crammed into its six tracks as a candyland record store filled to the brim with Gong, Vangelis, Tim Blake and Bernard Szajner albums! Starting with the darkwave adrenaline pop of "Cocaina Vitamina", the lengthy mind-bending and genre-jumping tracks that follow employ spacey electronic synthesis, cavey dirges, occasional plodding new romantic vocals and a wonderful outsider sense of unbridled compositional experimentation. Every time we play this, we sell a copy. Weirdo French new wave prog is always welcome in our book and big thanks to Dark Entries for introducing this into our lives!
So happy to have this repressed and back in stock, after so many years - we originally reviewed this back on list #145! It's an all time dronological classic, so if you missed it way back when, here it is again:
It's a little hard to say who or what the Aeolian String Ensemble is, but a few references point toward the Nurse With Wound encampments, as Christoph Heemann takes some credit for this album (as both a contributor to the ensemble and as the cover artist), and David Kenny (longtime Nurse With Wound / Current 93 collaborator) produced and engineered the record, and United Dairies was originally scheduled to release it. Rumors persisted for quite a while that Steve Stapleton himself was behind these Aeolian Strings, only later to be refuted by Stapleton himself. Regardless of the Ensemble's participants, this album is a gem of post-industrial, British dronology.
Presumably the source material for the Aeolian String Ensemble is the aeolian harp, an antique instrument which gained popularity in the nineteenth century in English country gardens. The aeolian harp is fitted with a number of strings with different thicknesses but all tuned to the same key on top of a resonator box. Wind sets the strings in vibration in such a way that their harmonics are heard, rather than the fundamental note; thus creating an impressionistic chorus of droning sounds. From these harps and the subsequent post-production of judicious delay pedals and sustained reverb, the Ensemble coaxes some of the most beautifully immersive drones from these harps, on par with Andrew Chalk & Jonathan Coleclough's Sumac album, any of the Troum recordings, and the score to Tarkovsky's Stalker. A truly fantastic album that is fortunately back in print again!!
For some reason, this is the first thing we've reviewed from this ukelele fronted UK jangle pop combo, who sound right at home on Slumberland. This is the third single from their second album, and fans of Slumberland style dream pop and sixties girl group style twee pop jangle will fall in love for sure. Lilting and softly fuzzy, effervescent and wistfully washed out, both tracks here are sweet slab of simple summery pop, with shuffling rhythms, gorgeous vocals, subtle hooks and a classic nineties indie pop sound that we still never get tired of.
Pressed on orange vinyl!
Angel 'In Heavy Syrup were an all female Japanese psychedelic rock trio who flourished in the '90s, as you may know. We were always big fans, and a bunch of us here still consider ourselves lucky to have seen these girls live at the Kilowatt in SF, when they came over to play in the US one time in the mid '90s - an amazing show. The group released 4 albums, plus a "best of" compilation, but we had only ever reviewed their last one, IV, 'cause their other three albums proper pretty much predated our aQ list. And we thought they were all out of print, most of 'em having been released by the now sadly defunct Japanese label Alchemy. But, recently we discovered that one our suppliers still has copies - while they last - of the 1992 domestic US edition of Angel 'In Heavy Syrup's self-titled debut!!! Good news for any fan of the band who's been looking for it for years, but also good news for ANYONE who would enjoy some absolutely gorgeous, melodic and moody tripped out psych rock. It's a mix of dreamy balladry and all-out storms of distortodelic heaviness, breathy female vocals and swirling psych-guitar solos. The Angel 'In Heavy Syrup girls had their melancholic, timeless sound dialed in from the get-go, and there are two (uncredited) covers on here that help illuminate some of their vintage influences - the first a pretty one called "Why Don't You Take A Sight-Seeing Bus With Me?" written by Japanese folk chanteuse Morita Doji (familiar to fans of Angel 'In Heavy Syrup / Hijokaidan / Subvert Blaze side project Slap Happy Humphrey), the other being "Underground Railroad" by great US sixties garage psych act The Lollipop Shoppe (aka Fred Cole's band long before Dead Moon!).
This US version of Angel 'In Heavy Syrup's debut also comes with a lengthy bonus track not found on the original 1991 Japanese Alchemy edition, the nearly 12 minute epic "Crazy Blues", taken from Taste Of Wild West 3, an incredibly rare 1990 compilation that also featured the Boredoms, Omoide Hatoba, Solmania, Hijokaidan, Incapacitants, and UFO Or Die.
A highly recommended find, for sure! (Also - interesting to note how much more seemingly solid and sturdy both jewel cases and compact discs themselves were made 20 years ago, compared to nowadays.)
SKWEEE!!!! Fans of that special brand of mostly Scandinavian B-Boy retro '80s video game hip-hopped electro synth sound, check it out...
We've got like just 4 copies left of this, the latest vinyl offering from celebrated Skweee artist Randy Barracuda (he's been one of our faves ever since we heard his classic skweee jam "Rick James Is Dead" on the first Museum Of Future Sound comp back in 2007). Random Works Vol. II is, as the name sort of implies, his 2nd full-length album, following a self-titled record for Flogsta Danshall a few years ago. This one's got eight new tracks of Randy's skweee genius - super groovy, stuttery lo-fi funk full of fat synths. There's more tracks with vocals than we expected, kinda soulful like DamFunk... though lots here are the usual skweee style instrumentals.
LIMITED TO 101 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
We've long been fans of these Midwestern instrumental psychedelic drug obsessed doom dirge heavies, their Satan Worshipping Doom record was a huge seller around here, the first time around a couple years back, but we could barely keep the recent reissue of that record in stock either. The doom fans around here went to great lengths to track down every single one of their (mostly self released) cd-r's, and ever since we've done what we could to get enough to review/list, so the rest of you could revel in Bongripper's gloriously tranced out heavily psychedelic drugdoom epics.
Thankfully, it seems as if there's a Bongripper reissue campaign afoot, the aforementioned Satan Worshipping Doom a few weeks back (we're hoping Hate Ashbury and Hippie Killer will be reissued soon too!), and now the even more awesomely titled The Great Barrier Reefer, a sprawling, epic nearly eighty minute psych-doom tripout that most definitely gives Sleep's Jerusalem / Dopesmoker a run for its single-track-stoner-metal money. But unlike the more Sabbath beholden heaviness of Sleep, Bongripper ditch the vox, and spend a lot of time locked into tranced out repetition, just check out the first EIGHT minutes, which is spent drifting along, a muted, cyclical strum, mesmerizing and stripped down, beneath a subtly garbled, effected sample of a preacher, the result is seriously creepy, and it's easy to forget this is in fact a doom record, but eventually, the band kicks in, exploding into a droned out dirge, crumbling downtuned riffage, and blown out drum pound, the band lacing their metallic churn with spidery melodies, loads of texture, streaks of feedback, the guitars deviating from the main riff BIG time, splintering into weird angular fragments, or woozy looped strums, drifting over smears of distorted buzz and slithery basslines, the sound shifting from head caving pummel, to dark droney muted metal mesmer, to intricate tangled mathiness, and we're still only 25 minutes in!
The sound is in constant flux, at times it sounds nearly improvised, the band spiraling into weird stretches of near kosmische drift (albeit, still swaddled in crumbling buzz), or hazy almost classic rock sounding clean guitar dirgery, rife with slippery slide guitar melodies, channeling the Allman Brothers or maybe recent aQ faves Blackwolfgoat, weaving a sort of FX flecked droney riffscape, a little bit twangy, a little bit psychedelic, backwards guitars swooping in the background, beneath a cloud of echo drenched harmonics, fading out to near silence, before bursting into a massively heavy chug-fest, that over the course of the remaining 25 minutes lurches from grinding heaviness, to weirdly melodic poppiness, to tarpit sludge, before finishing off with a stretch of washed out feedback, and detuned slo-mo bass buzz.
Fuck yeah. Super psychedelic eye popping cover art too, much like the crazy cover of Satan Worshipping Doom, although this time featuring some sort of underwater sci-fi tentacled monsterscape!
It's easy to forget that Japanese psychedelic heavies Boris were in fact named for a song by the mighty Melvins, but with a quick listen to this, a vinyl reissue of their 1994 demo, that fact becomes blatantly obvious. Really minus the Japanese vocals (which are sort of a dead ringer for Buzz), this could be some lost Melvins demo. Sludgey distorted guitars, booming bombastic drums, the sound slipping from doomy slo-mo churn to more punkish pound (courtesy of Nagata, who played drums for Boris before the release of their debut Absolutego), the vocals a raspy garbled bellow, the choruses those weird sort of almost shouted sing along Melvins-y choruses. It's definitely a snapshot of a band in their early stages, before they had a chance to synthesize their influences into something all their own, but fans of that sort of slow sludgey heaviness, these guys kill it, and if you're after something Melvins-y, well, you won't find anything more Melvins-y than this slab of pure Melvins worship.
There are definitely some moments that do hint at the Boris to come, like the long stretch of feedback drenched droned out minimalism that takes up a good chunk of side two, seems like they already had a pretty good handle on crafting blissed out heavy dronescapes, but for the most part, the tracks here make up a seriously kick ass knuckle dragging chunk of ultra heavy drone-sludge noise rock, which is obviously essential for Boris fanatics, and hell, recommended to fans of the Melvins who miss that Melvins sound of old.
VERY LIMITED. We only got a handful, and odds are once these are sold out, we won't be able to get more.
Record number two from Christian Cosmos, just one of the latest projects from Dominick Fernow (Cold Cave, Prurient, Vatican Shadow, Vegas Martyrs, Ash Pool, etc.), who in CC is teamed up with Furisubi's Kris Lapke, and like on their first 12", which we flipped for, CC continue to mine a mutant industrial electro / techno, the sound gritty and grimey, and a little bit blackened, murky, woozy, the vibe subterranean and sinister, swaths of power electronics and swells of kosmische synthscapery underpin churning skeletal rhythms, and mutant house music, laced with haunting cinematic melodies. The sound on this latest 12" is even more dramatic than the first, sounding like the soundtrack to some obscure art film, moody and murky, brooding and ominous, but slipping as easily into something much more eighties sounding, like some stripped down minimal electro pop, as it does into dense, grinding industrial techno-noise, but it's all woven together by a haunting atmosphere, and blurred into a constantly shifting sonic whole, the tracks unfolding like some sonic travelogue of faded melancholy. We mentioned Philip Jeck in our review of the first record, and while this one doesn't feel so overtly looped and Jeck-like, it does ooze the same sort of atmosphere as many of Jeck's pieces, abject expanses of washed out melancholia, the mood dark and dolorous, the rhythms not so much driving, as trance inducing and mesmerizingly motorik. A gorgeous bit of gristly grey electronic mesmerism for sure.
Longtime aQ fave, cinematic dubstepper Clubroot released the amazing III - MMXII record not too long ago, and folks who bought the vinyl version, missed out on two of our favorite tracks from that record, due to space limitations, which have now been released as a super limited 12" single, with a bonus track, only available previously on mixes, and not included on the cd version either. Folks who own the cd, skip down to read about the bonus track, as you've already got the other two.
Vinyl nerds, luxuriate in the A side, the lush, brooding "Summons", with its thick rumbling bass, skeletal beat, woozy swirling ambience, spaced out and darkly psychedelic, subtly sinister, with gorgeous hazy vocals drifting above the slow churning groove below, listening to this now, it's hard to imagine this was a track they left OFF the lp. Same with "My Kingdom", not nearly as dark, but more skittery and textured, with fluttery flute like melodies, Burial like slo-soul vocals, all wrapped around a killer stuttery groove, backed up by ominous strings, and swoonsome synth swells, super spacious and spare, haunting and very cinematic.
The bonus track is much house-ier, soft swirls of synth chords drift beneath a pulsing shuffling beat, more of those slo-mo soul vocals, and with a MEAN drop, the bass thick an corrosive, a rib cage rattling wobble that underpins the rest of the song, chopped up into a weird rumbling rhythmic counterpoint, and laced with bits of staticky glitch. The song darkening considerably from the beginning, and blossoming into something more drifty and ambient as the fluttery flutes return and the sounds gradually blisses out into an ethereal soft focus electro-dub shimmer.
Full length number two from these East Coast neo-folkies and like the previous record, it displays a sound that we don't immediately associate with Sacred Bones. Urgently strummed guitars, tribal drumming, horns, bellowed dramatic male vox, angelic female vocals, the vibe pagan and witchy, in our review of the other CoY we mention Comus, the Wicker Man soundtrack, and especially Death In June, this time around we might also add Circulus, and maybe even New Model Army, whose influence we hear throughout Love Will Prevail. The sound here is much more upbeat, the arrangements strident and almost rocking at times, definitely more melodic, the new wave element too is a bit more pronounced, but for every track like the opener "Man And Man's Ruin", which is downright poppy and displays shades of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, there's a track like "Garden Of Delights", that's much more brooding and downcast, in fact "Garden Of Delights" might be THEE jam here, the vox particularly vitriolic, the strummed guitar, pounding drums and bleating horns wreathed in a cloud of swirling psychedelic noise, it's pretty intense, and definitely super weird, almost has us wishing the whole record was like this, like some sort of acid folk power electronics. Then there's the final track which is SUPER poppy, trade in the super intense acoustic guitar strumming for some crunchy distortion and you'd have a sweet slab of noise pop, but instead, the horns swoop in, the vocals get all processed and twisted up, and suddenly that poppiness gets warped into something much darker and way more mysterious. Definitely an acquired taste, but one that we seem to have acquired a while ago. And we're guessing some of you may have too.
For many years now, Yannick Dauby, Hitoshi Kojo, and Michael Northam have collected environmental sounds with varying degrees of obfuscation and abstraction, often melding such sounds with sympathetic electro-acoustic noises, textures, scrabblings, and lots of heady drones. Northam's work is certainly the most well documented at least here at aQuarius (most recently through his ongoing collaboration with holy minimalist CC Hennix), although we have stocked much of Kojo's work in his various projects (e.g. Spiracle and Juppala Kaippo). The Frenchman Dauby (currently residing in Taiwan) is the purist amongst the three, prefering to contextualize untreated field recordings within his compositions, which is especially true for his most recent body of work. Kojo treks back and forth between tactile, growling harmonics and playfully dream-time minimalism, often sourced from his field recordings; and Northam's recently forays into psychedelic ragas morphed out of a conceptually rigorous and industrially grim sound design. Corgilon seems to have emerged from several recording sessions that convey the introspective mystery of a private ritual, with all three participants generating bright tones from various bells and pieces of scrap metal along with the organic crunch of stick, rock, and sand. The tactile sounds find themselves at the foreground at the beginning of the record, only to be slowly consumed in reverberant drones and golden ambience. If this sounds like something that might emerge out of any given Jewelled Antler offshoot, you're awfully close to the earthen mysticism found here. Limited to a mere 300 copies.
A while back we listed/reviewed a split 7" featuring local heavies Kowloon Walled City and Southern sludgelords Thou, part of a super limited, subscription only series, which we were only able to get cuz we got some direct from the bands. We had sort of give up tracking down any of the other installments in the series (twelve singles all told, featuring Coffinworm, Fistula, Fight Amp, Pyramido, Fungal Abyss, Great Falls, Ultraphallus, The Fucking Wrath, and a bunch more we had never heard of), but then in walk aQ pals Rabbits, who just so happened to have a stash of their single in the series, and we grabbed as many as they could spare.
They share the split with Dead Elephant, an Italian noise rock outfit whose sound is massive, a churning, downtuned mathy freakout, wild drumming, dizzying riffage, progged out heaviness, laced with feral vokills and some super rad guitar harmonies, the sound lush and layered, heavily textured, dense and brutal, but with a super stripped down minimal stretch in the middle, that sounds like Shellac at 16rpm, all distant guitar melodies, dirgey bass chug, and skeletal drumming, a slow build into a roiling, hypno-rock psychedelic noise rock coda. Phew.
Rabbits counter with something much more concise, sounding like a more metal Black Flag, throat shredding vox over slithery super distorted riffage, and wild chaotic drumming, a little bit sludgey, angular and atonal guitars draped over super distorted guitar buzz, devolving into a blown out almost industrial sounding outro.
Killer tracks from both bands. And like the KWC / Thou single, the cover art is super gorgeous, the packaging ultra deluxe, letter pressed and fantastically designed, and like that other one, SUPER LIMITED, very likely these are the only copies we'll see!
Finally, the long awaited full length from these eighties beholden jangle pop shoegazers, formerly known by the same name, but with a much more standard (and already taken apparently) spelling. This Brooklyn outfit features members of aQ faves the Beach Fossils and the Smith Westerns, and takes the sound of both of those previous groups, tangles it all up and douses it in thick swaths of reverb and lush layers of crystalline guitars, the vocals nearly buried in the mix, a hazy washed out croon, that more often than not is simply another lush layer to add to the already blurry, bleary dreamscape. Within this fuzzy dreampop soundworld, Diiv manage to conjure up some surprisingly disparate sounds, sweet twee indie pop one second, and loping, almost krautrock like mesmer the next (just check out "Air Conditioning"), but the sound remains consistent, like listening through ears full of cotton, everything deliriously and dreamily hazy, with various elements slipping surreptitiously to the fore, whether it's a twangy bit of guitar, a soaring bit of Big Country / U2 like melody, or some slithery Joy Divisiony bassline, the tracks rife with hooks, and perfect melody, the group nearly obscuring their deft pop songsmithery with their druggy production, but it makes for a potent combo, and on repeated listens, what at first sounded like another entry in the already crowded reverb heavy retro pop field, has blossomed into what is fast becoming a new pop favorite. WAY recommended.
We're always psyched on checking out black metal from places we don't normally associate with that sort of sound, whether it be Iceland or China, Iraq or India. There seems to be quite a metal underground happening in Israel too, with Arallu and Melechesh being some of the more well known outfits...
But there are plenty of other groups worth checking out, Salem for one (not to be confused with the witch house outfit), Geist (whose new record is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and now these guys, brought to us but kick ass Israeli label Total Rust. R.U.S.T. is the debut release from this Israeli horde, who traffic in a seriously catchy and kick ass strain of old school orthodox blackness, heavy on the blasting and buzzing obviously, but equally heavy on the melody, which makes Dim Aura's sound totally reminiscent of the first and second waves of Scandinavian black metal. Not inventing the metal wheel by any stretch, but playing classic BM with a passion and energy that takes what could be a tired rehash and transforms it into something fierce and epic, catchy as fuck, rife with galloping tempos, awesome shrieked vokills, wild dense drumming, some seriously ruling riffs, plenty of classic metal-isms and epic melodies too, all wound into the otherwise roiling blackness, plus lots of midtempo stretches where the band dial back the blackness a bit and get downright riffy and groovy (reminding us of Khold at times), but the songs never seem to stray too far from their furious black buzz core. Awesome.
Dinosaur Jr. continue to be one of the few reunited bands, whose new stuff, sounds pretty much as good as their classic stuff. That might be a bit of an overstatement, considering this is the band that was responsible for "Freak Scene", "Bulbs Of Passion", "Repulsion", "The Wagon", "Little Fury Things" and a bunch more, over great record after great record, but ever since they got back together, and released Beyond, it was like they never left. (We were totally prepared for the worst, but they just totally blew us away with that album.) And I Bet On Sky is just the latest great record from these guys, their third since reuniting, and just like Farm before it, which we also loved, all the things we love about the band are present and accounted for: crazy catchy songs, fuzzed out guitars, J Mascis's buzzing leads and whining plaintive vox. The first track on I Bet On Sky, is uncharacteristically jangly, with what sounds like a Mellotron offering up a string-like shimmery backdrop, then the vocals come in, and it's like some sort of minimal stripped down Dinosaur, there's even piano, plonking out a simple melody; gradually, Mascis' guitar swoops in, and unfurls wild soaring leads over the top, all the while, the song stays locked into that single loop/groove/riff/melody. It's a weird one, but impossibly catchy, and great opening track. Next, "Watch The Corners" is much more standard Dinosaur, chugging guitars, lilting melody, Mascis's Neil Young like croon, killer rhythm section, a super rad chorus, with weird harmonies, and super dynamic start/stop arrangement, and of course hooks galore. The rest of the record is pure Dinosaur Jr, which also means super varied, strummed acoustic guitars, under crunchy distorted riffage, all washed out hazily psychedelic, woozy, tangy almost slow-core, plenty of wah wah guitar, some serious rockers too, and some unlikely surprises (one aQ-er thought one of the tracks sounded like Steve Miller Band!), but for the most part, fans are gonna want this, and are likely gonna end up loving it. And while it might not be the very best place to start, it's still good enough that Dino newbies could find themselves hooked, with the added bonus of one of THEE most amazing back catalogs in indie rock to subsequently discover!
As you might have figured out over the last few lists, we're on a bit of a techno kick lately. There's so much far out, droning and expansive mind melting motorik music coming out at the moment that we're just chomping at the bit to share it with the world, and you, our dear aQ readers. This record by Detroit's Terrence Dixon might just take the cake though, as far as deep and dark discoveries go. Dixon, who is no doubt a venerated vet of the Detroit techno underworld, also releasing stellar jams under the moniker Population One, here he hits us with a brooding and beautiful slab of mesmeric and futuristic machine music, the sequel to an album from twelve years ago.
From The Far Future Pt. 2 is techno at its most tunnel dwelling. Hazed out sheets of analog texture fogging out the subterranean sprawl, demented synth sirens floating over hypnotic pulsations, detuned and moody sonic scraping, caustic dronings and bits of grimy sonic filigree oozing through the murk. "Dark City Of Hope (Main Mix)", is a narcotic entrancing drift. Buzzing textures rolling like waves over the beat, noisy but harmonically lush sheets of distortion and squelching blips and pops create an aphotic sonic miasma. The mood is melancholic and late night, imagine an Actress remix of Basinki played at 45 in a cavernous warehouse and we're getting close to the vibe. Totally engulfing.
"Horizon" is a bit more rough and tumble. A strong four on the floor giving rise to a moody and decimated loop, layers of percussion phased and out of balance, the whole thing groovy and stomping but possessing an almost seasick lilt, infectious and hypnotic hand-hewn soul. A darker and more industrialized turn is taken with "The Auto Factory", dystopian churning mechanics grind and scrape and meld into a trance inducing dream state. Underpinning the whole thing are minimal but booming bass intonations and nefarious droning buzzy synth drifts, all the while creeped out science fiction melodies shimmer ominously in the background, and the rhythm track starts to unravel in the most musical way. It's got this doomed and twisted desolation vibe captured by many a techno visionary, but somehow possesses this intuitive sense of form, allowing the jams to be caught in a beautiful sense of flux, both on and off the grid simultaneously.
From The Far Future Part 2 is a thoroughly captivating techno record, droning, hypnotically rhythmic, and densely textured. For fans of Actress, record of the weeker Silent Servant, and the analogue synth darkness of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's Drokk, this is an absolute MUST HAVE! Total vibey darkly future gazing techno bliss! RECOMMENDED!
Latest from these aQ beloved fuzz poppers, and with every record, they seem to move further and further away from the fuzzy, scrappy girl group worshipping garage pop stomp we initially fell in love with. And while we still dig those old records, this new one continues the group's progression toward something much more polished and refined. Vestiges of that original sound still abound, but here those elements are part of something more grand, a lushly produced jangle pop epic, that's soaring, majestic, the opener "Mine Tonight" begins all brooding and stripped down, but soon blossoms into a lush, full blown chorus that sounds almost M83-ish, the perfect balance to the bass driven minimal verses. The bass heavy, low slung minimalism drives much of End Of Daze, "I Got Nothing" is all bass and drums, the vocals drifting over shuffling drums and a woozy bassline, with a super hooky vocal melody, before crunchy guitars swoop in, and coalesce into some seriously perfect fuzz pop. The record continues to push past the jangle and crunch, like on "Trees And Flowers", a blissed out guitar drift cover of a Strawberry Switchblade tune, with some incredible vocals, even some synthy strings, suitably drifting into the retro eighties territory of M83, the sound here subtly gristy and staticky too, reverby and softly echo drenched.
The last two tracks split the difference, the first spacious and girl group-y, all hazy and washed out, with some strange production, adding a bit of texture and grit, and finally, "Season In Hell", which is the most eighties sounding of the bunch, reminding us of something we might hear on Sacred Bones or Captured Tracks, but they make it their own, and it suits them. Fans of the older, fuzzier jams might be a bit disappointed, but odds are you've been along for the ride anyway, and have dug DDG's progression from ramshackle garage pop combo to lush, retro jangle popsmiths, in which case you'll probably dig these new songs as much as we do.
Not really a live recording per se, but a focused session at the Manilla Beach compound where Brian Pyle lives and works in Northern California. Pyle is well known around these parts for his work in the DIY cosmic explorers The Starving Weirdos and psychedelic "nature jammers" RV Paintings, with his solo work being under the guise Ensemble Economique. 2012 has been a busy year for Pyle, even by his manic work ethic, thanks to a lengthy tour from the western end of the European continent all the way into the depths of Russia; and he also took a handful of excursions up and down the California coast bracketing that tour. When Pyle performed his set, which he mapped out for the European tour, it was already an impressive array of discordant Tim Heckerish blasts of semi-melodic fuzz, post-Goblin arrangements of ominously minor-key church organs, and a vibe pointing to late-nite habits of getting stoned and aimless trawling through the vacant spaces on cable television. By the time he got back from the tour, he had the set nailed down; and this recording is THEE document encapsulating all of the detours, epiphanies, and experiments Pyle made along the way. Pyle offers up seven or eight distinct movements within the seamlessly mixed session; and in those movements, electro-tribal rhythms and delirious synth tones gird the swelling arrangements for left-field ambience, punk raga-drones, crusty guitar blasts in prolapsed Morricone-styled melody, and brain-cracked vocalizations, with interludes from field recordings of fire, crickets, and whispering cyborg women. More great work from Brian Pyle. And yup, it's super limited.
Brand new single from the most recent record by Evans The Death, which we reviewed a little while back. The A side is obviously to be found on that record, so if you already have that, it's the bizarre B side that's the reason to pick this up. More on that in a sec. For everyone else, who may not yet have heard this noise pop combo, who are a bit heavier and crunchier than most outfits on Slumberland, low slung basslines, some serious distorted jangle, the A side here complete with a killer chorus and of course the super distinctive vocals, which you sort of have to hear. Definitely makes EtD a unique proposition. But yeah, check out the sample, and you might be as smitten as we were.
For folks who are already hip to EtD, the B side is a weird experiment, that sounds a bit like a sea shanty, super bass driven, but weirdly sing songy, with super bizarre vox, a strangled mewling for most of the track, but a second voice joins in and sounds a bit like a mumbling moaning pirate. Weird and pretty cool.
Super swank packaging with embossed / silver foil lettering.
Latest from this local electronic pop combo, who construct their songs mad scientist style, wrapping lilting melodies in strange looped mechanical melodies, weaving buzzing synths into fields of glitch and static, the production simultaneously low fidelity, lush and layered. Pulsing and pulsating darkly electronic one minute, playful lo-fi electro pop the next, usually the two wound into one, a dark folkiness underpinning the modern sci-fi sounds, the result a strange hybrid of folky pop (not that far removed from mainman Jon Bernson's previous outfit Ray's Vast Basement), and modern electronic pop, the record seeming to follow a trajectory that starts out fully electronic, and gradually becomes more song based, but the best moments are definitely where the line between the two remains blurred, like on "Dark_Light", which is a low slung slow groover, that has a sort of sci-fi soul vibe, a loping rhythm wreathed in slithery melodies, and cool boy/girl harmonies, or the old school new wave electro pop of "Tresspassing", which again infuses the sound with a more standard folkiness which makes for a curious combo.
Comes packaged in a full color J-card, and includes a link to a download of the full album as well.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
Flying Lotus is back and with every new release seems to bring something new to the table. This time around he doesn't spread himself as far out sonically as he did on Cosmogramma but instead reigns himself in to refine the details of his complex musical palette. This is definitely a late night record, full of lucid dreamy qualities, referencing obscure quiet storm RnB, celestial jazz, and narcoleptic funk, but with a soaring jewel-like exactitude. Cinematic in scope, we don't just listen, but become engrossed in his floating oceanic soundworld. Guest stints by Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, Thundercat and others add to the ponderous gauzy midnight feel. Recommended! Vinyl comes with download.
This latest from these prolific San Francisco indie popsters is perhaps a bit less garagey and fuzzy than some of their past works. Long Slow Dance is an apt title, for Tim, Shayde, Kyle and Wymond's brand of dreamy indie jangle here, soaring from softly crooned heartache to powerful euphoria. In fact, "Euphoria" is the name of one of the songs.
It's a record full of folky lushness that reminds us a bit of Fleet Foxes for sure. So fans of both bands ought to dig this. Each song is strummed and sung to moody, catchy pop perfection, destined to get stuck on 'repeat' if you give it a chance.
Another stellar outing from the F&O boys!
Here in America, the name Garfield makes us think of an assassinated 19th century President, and a cartoon cat - and not necessarily in that order. Some might also recall that Garfield is Henry Rollins' real last name. But fans of the tongue-in-cheek musical genre from Finland known as the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal", spawned by several Circle side-projects, should know another Garfield - Garfield Steel, the distinctive, drawling lead singer of NWOFHM standard bearers Steel Mammoth. And now here we have Garfield Steel's solo debut! Like his work in Steel Mammoth, this both is and isn't exactly metal; a (parodic?) sort-of-metal is part of it for sure but there's a lot more going on. Weird, synth-laden indie pop boogie would also describe it, a bit.
Several "synthesizerists" are listed in this album's credits, and boy do they synthesizerize. Also quite often the electronic drums and/or drum machines are locked in overdrive - the track "Memory Rhythm" gets almost Digital Hardcore with its noisy, speedy distortion/destruction. But this onslaught of eccentric electro-metal & lo-fi synth punk is very poppy too, head noddingly so, mellowing out at times as well. Along with all the electronics, Garfield Steel's hoarse melodic crooning is of course also a big part of the sound, delivering (just as he does in Steel Mammoth) some truly ridiculous lyrics to go with great, silly song titles such as "Nuclear Retard" and "Skullfist Emperor".
Fans of Steel Mammoth's over the top absurdity and catchy riffing and occasional detours into dreaminess will be right at home here, in other words, even if the sonic palette of GS's solo effort is a little bit different. And it becomes evident that the NWOFHM 'thing' is as much Garfield's doing, as it is Circle's...
Oh, and fyi, NWOFHM fans, Jussi from Circle also has a new, VERY metal band called Arkhamin Kirjasto. Their debut cd Torches Ablaze just came out on his Ektro label, we have just a few in stock right now...
Not to be confused with the German Geist, whose record we reviewed here a few years back, this Geist is from Israel, and this record, their full length debut, is a furious, tortured, sickening blast of hateful buzz drenched brutality, in fact the sheer blown out, super distorted buzziness ranks up there with groups like Wrath Of The Weak, who at one point we proclaimed as "THEE buzziest black metal band around". The guitar tone here is prickly and crunchy and wreathed in hiss, insectoid and gristly, the sort of guitar sound we can't ever get enough of, that swirling black buzz wrapped around buried blasting beats, harsh howling vox, and some soaring epic melodies, the band blasting along at light speed, only to slip into a woozy seasick dirge, the buzz seeming to ooze and expand, wrapping its inky tendrils around the warbly minor key melodies and the super creepy echoey ambience. And hell, that's just the first song.
Apparently these tracks were recorded live, and left mostly unaltered, to capture the raw fury and unrelenting abject misery of their sound, and it definitely worked. A cascade of in-the-red heaviness, that definitely headphones to truly appreciate it, impossibly lush buzzscapes, doomy swirling almost psychedelic dirges, all manner of haunting spectral sounds, voices, chordal swells, all woven into the bands super distorted blackbuzz crush. And sans those headphones, via just speakers, the sound borders on the Merzbow-ian, each song a swirling squall of face melting heaviness and hellish soul shearing buzz. But it's not all noisemetal punishment, these guys infuse their hellish howl with some gorgeous atmospherics, and some twisted downright catchiness, soaring and majestic one second, haunting and melancholic the next, not to mention some cool proggy almost Voivod-y angularity, and some dense washes of smeary shimmer. At times the sound does veer into something more lurching and lumbering, like the punishing death march of the final track, but the majority of Der Ungeist is spent blasting and buzzing through thick clouds of dense, black hole buzz. So awesome.
Volume five in the long running Black Tar Prophecies series, finds cinematic post rockers Grails teaming up with their self proclaimed favorite band, Finland's hypno-rock Circle offshoot Pharaoh Overlord! Grails start things off with some dark, brooding, Morricone-esque soundscaping, all atmospheric and a little bit gothic, swoonsome chordal swells beneath lush layered shimmer, a definite Godspeed vibe, but Godspeed via Barn Owl. The following track adds some twang to the proceedings (someone here thought it sounded a little like the intro to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive"), wreathing the deserty drift in FX drenched swirls of buzz, all driven by some woozy somnambulant riffage. There's definitely a bit of an eighties vibe going on to, with much of this sounding like soundtrack music from some strange thriller on late night cable, the sound at times slipping into surprising soft prog grooviness, but eventually settling into a shadowy sprawl of twangy post rock dreamdrift thrum.
Pharaoh Overlord, a long running side project of aQ faves Circle (and really at this point, PO are just as much aQ faves as Circle, if not moreso), fill their side with two epic jams. The first is all chuggy, and riffy, and Circle-like right out of the gate, in fact, it sounds essentially like Circle, stripped down, minimal and motorik, churning hypnotic riffery solid simple rhythms, but as the track progresses, the surrounding atmosphere thickens, adding all sorts of psychedelic filigree, adding layer upon layer of shimmery swirl, eventually blissing out into some seriously abstract kosmische drift. The second track gets even more spaced out and minimal, unfurling a gorgeous sprawl of dense drones, thick and woozy, a blurred downtuned raga of sorts, sounding like the Taj Mahal Travellers via Wolf Eyes, rumbling, shimmering low end thurm, underpinned by muted percussive pulses, barely audible through the blackened sonic swirl, everything blurred into a hazy, slow motion expanse of softly psychedelic, almost SUNNO)))-like tectonic reverberations.
LIMITED TO JUST 1500 COPIES! Each one hand numbered. We took every copy our distributor had, and they weren't sure when/if they would be getting more, so when we run out, while we're hoping we can eventually get more, this could be it, so best snag one now just in case... as they say, buy now or cry later...
The Grass Widow gals are fast becoming one of the best bands in San Francisco. Their tight, three-part vocal harmonies layered on top of angular guitar-driven melodies cannot be beat. It's like Dig Me out era Sleater-Kinney mixed with a healthy dose of the Mamas and the Papas. Internal Logic is the first full-length released on Grass Widow's own HLR label. Over the course of a few eps, 7"s and a full-length, they've really honed their sound into something all their own, however. There isn't a power trio out there right now who can do what Grass Widow does. They really use all of the various layers at their disposal to the fullest advantage possible, mixing up Raven's sometimes jagged guitar lines with Lillian's drums that sometimes play straight surf-rock beats and sometimes bounce around all over the kit. Hannah's mid-range bass tones never dip too low in frequency, sounding for the most part straight off an early Joy Division record. It's all about the interplay, one vocal harmony leading into another, slightly more discordant one. These ladies have been playing together for a while now and it's quite evident in the way each instrument compliments the other, skillfully showing technical prowess without one ever dominating the overall sound. The entire record clocks in at a little under half an hour, a short and sweet slab of vinyl that really could have been two or three songs longer, especially since two of the songs ("Milo Minute" and "Disappearing Industries") on the A side were previously released on 7"s. We're not complaining by any means, though, because this record is great from start to finish. Grass Widow is one of those bands, no matter how many records they release, you just want more! If for some reason you have been living under a rock and have never heard of Grass Widow, fans of The Shop Assistants, Erase Errata, Thee Oh Sees, The Mallard, The Soft Moon, you need this!
Listen on: Deezer
Epic heavy metal fans know that it's been fairly frequent occurrence of late that we've gotten new a reissue of an old '80s album by US underground metal eccentrics Manilla Road, and also once in a while, a brand new release from that still active (and still epic) cult unit. But this is a bit more unexpected - the debut from a Manilla Road SIDE PROJECT, called Hellwell, featuring MR main man Mark "The Shark" Shelton. The Hellwell name we thought was kind of faux-scary goofy, until we learned that the other driving force behind the band was a personage in fact named Ernest Cunningham Hellwell, who plays organ and synths. Also on board, Bryan "Hellroadie" Patrick, sharing some of the vocals with lead guitarist Shelton much as has been the case on Manilla Road albums of recent vintage. And really, name aside, this is basically another new Manilla Road album, and a good one. MR fans will feel right at home with it, it's hardly a big departure. Except, imagine Manilla Road with ornate Deep Purple style keyboards, loads of 'em (courtesy of the eponymous E.C.), AND an extra emphasis on the more "extreme" side of the MR equation - lots of fuzz, some guttural death metally vox and the like - whilst keeping it quite epick and eldritch indeed. Think Poe and Lovecraft. 'Cause lyrically, these songs are rooted in good old pulp literature. It's tale-telling of the horror story variety, in the grand tradition of Mercyful Fate/King Diamond and of course Manilla Road themselves, among others� Music to listen to after dark, in other words, especially if you can get yourself in the mindset of someone in the '40s listening to a creepy radio play or something, as delivered by a band part '70s prog, part '80s heavy metal, part gothic doom, part modern extreme metal� It's a cool mix, again one that most MR fans will dig 'cause that's basically what MR is all about anyway. You know how Slough Feg has gotten their share of Manilla Road comparisons? Well, perhaps Hellwell could likewise be compared to Hammers Of Misfortune.
The return of our favorite horror obsessed Finnish deathmetal doomlords, whose latest is another epic collection of sludgey blackened doom, filthy crusty riffage, echo drenched demonic cookie monster vokills, all woven into plodding psychedelic heaviness, with a classic, epic doom vibe, that definitely reminds us of the mighty Cathedral. And when we say death metal we're not talking the 'Tion's (as in Suffocation, Incantation, etc.), we're talking death OBSESSED metal, a death metal that's slowed way down to a doomy crawl, a creepy, downtuned chugging churn that sounds like classic death metal spinning at 16rpm, and few do it better (to our ears at least) than Hooded Menace, and while these guys are totally capable of thrashing and rocking out, they do spend the majority of their time stumbling zombie like, through fields of murky riffage and neanderthal drum pound. This is not knuckle dragging caveman doom though, these guys craft some serious SONGS, and lace these songs with killer melodies, mournful leads, just check out the end of the title track, total epic and emotional, but these guys are Finnish, and are called Hooded Menace, so a few seconds later, there's a cheesy clip from some old horror movie, before stumbling into the next stretch of grim death doom heaviness.
The production is massive, the sound crushing, there are melodies galore, there's even some Sabbathy swing to some of these tracks, and a definite psychedelic vibe, and the band do an awesome job of not just using movie samples as intros, like on "Evoken Vulgarity", a doomy chugfest that has a breakdown partway through, where the band slows down to a crawl, a swaggery slithery dirge, wrapped around a seriously creepy sample, which leads right into a killer psychedelic blowout, with some seriously shredding lead guitar. And then there's the outro, which could be a proper horror movie soundtrack, lacing harmonized guitars over another mysterious sample. The whole record finds the band deftly weaving horror movie ambience, and moody mood music into their hellish hookydeathdoomcrush, and the results are pretty fantastic.
(Note, it's also on cd of course, we're just low on 'em right now, but we should have more next week...)
We had never even heard of this long running UK doom/death horde, who have apparently been plugging away for going on 12 years now, even though this is just their second proper full length, but kudos to Profound Lore, who definitely seem like the perfect home for Indesinence's classic British doom, a sound that seems to be channeling of course the early versions of Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, as well as other doom heavyweights like diSEMBOWELMENT, the sound lurching malevolently from churning, stumbling tarpit doom, to that strange strain of midtempo death metal, that ultimately has much more in common sonically with doom metal, but it's a sound we love, blasting double kicks, frenzied riffing, all somehow reigned into a loping, chugging, downtuned lumber. Indesinence often slip into full on funeral doom creep, letting loose soaring minor key melodies, all buried beneath a shroud of abject blackened ambience, but eventually seem to always return to that death/doom gallop. The sound is laced with clean guitar melodies, the vocals both shrieking and gurgling monstrously, the tracks drifting between mournfully melodic and blackened and brutal, at their best obviously when fusing the two.
Packaged in a super swank oversized hardcover book style digipak.
Apparently MF Doom, now just Doom, was on tour in Europe, and got stranded, with visa problems, eventually finding his way back to the UK, where he was born, but hadn't lived for years, and being stuck decided to do what he does, and make a record, first hooking up with Jneiro Jarel, who produced all the tracks here and is the JJ in JJ Doom, and sorted out some surprising guests, Damon Albarn of Blur/Gorillaz and Beth Gibbons of Portishead. While much attention has been paid to the unlikely guests, and a fair bit of flak has been hurled at the record for being somewhat lackluster, we have to say we're pretty into it. The record opens with a strange psychedelic collage, all warped samples, pinball/gamelan melodies, field recordings, eventually wound around a stuttery handclap beat, before "Guv'nor" lurches into action, a woozy tangle of melted loops and a barrage of unlikely samples, musical and otherwise. "Banished" is a murky sprawl of soundtracky kung fu groove, "Bite The Thong" is all big beat hook heavy groove, Albarn's contribution a barely noticeable refrain, same with "GMO", Gibbons offering up a very Portishead-y style chorus, but hardly the most exciting part of the song, a dizzying assemblage of strummed acoustic guitars, and weird sound effects, streaks of electronics and dramatic strings. "Rhymin' Slang" is a killer slab of pulsating synthy stutter, the whole record is pretty fucking great, and to these ears the production, while dramatically different than Doom's past collabs with Madvillain and Danger Mouse, is really fucking cool and far out, Jarel definitely has his own twisted thing going on, and it suits Doom's weird flow for sure, a mush mouthed stream of consciousness that's as brilliant / baffling as ever. Been listening to this like crazy, and doesn't seem like we'll stop anytime soon.
This is the first we've heard from Minneapolis sci-fi garage combo Leisure Birds, whose second lp comes courtesy of the Moon Glyph label, newly relocated to the Bay Area, and the sound Of Leisure Birds sounds custom made for us (and you we're guessing), blissed out psychedelic kosmische synthscapery mixed with trancey minimal spaced out garage rock drift, sort of Spacemen 3 doing something a bit more kraut-agey. Just have a listen to the opening track, all electronic shimmer, and slow brooding synth swell, which is soon joined by buzzing sitar like guitars, and a muted rhythmic drum pulse, the vocals come in and they're all lazy and hazy and washed out, it's like Moon Duo on tranquilizers, woozy and druggy and so divine, and then out of nowhere, about 5+ minutes in, the song bursts into something WAY more propulsive, driving bassline, pounding drums, distorted guitars, never quite exploding into full on rocking out, but seriously driving and psychedelic. The rest of the record follows suit, bloopy synths and swirling electronics drift in clouds, wrapped around motorik beats, and slithery basslines, locked into hypno-rock trance outs, peppered with lush swirls of majestic chordal shimmer, but more often drifting along soporifically, druggy and drowsy, late night space rock minimalism for gradual come downs, or all night trip outs. There are moments that get pretty rocking, but even then, the sound stays pretty washed out and gauzey, and more often than note seems to gradually transform into another gorgeous stretch of blissed out space rock drift. Most definitely for fans of Moon Duo, Spyrals, Spacemen 3, Radar Eyes, Date Palms, and all things psychedelic, spacey and kosmische...
Includes a bonus 7" with a two song epilogue to the record, and also includes a download code (only for the album proper, not the 7"). Super striking futuristic cover art too.
One of the rare contemporary bands to be released on the ever exceptional Dark Entries label, typically known for reissues of classic and / or obscure minimal wave and post-punk electronics from the late '70s to mid '80s. But this is an album that's firmly grafted to the aesthetic that Dark Entries has honed through their fine curatorial ear; so much so that if we were told that Linea Aspera were some rare Sheffield band from 1981 featuring an undiscovered Anne Clark on vocals, we wouldn't be surprised one bit. The sequenced electronics, drum machines, and minimalist melodies are ice cold in their production thanks to the engineering prowess of Ryan Ambridge, who taps into the darker synth wrangling of Chris & Cosey, Psyche, Soft Cell, Human League, and even the Eurythmics in an experimental mood. That Eurythmics reference is furthered along by the full-throated vocals of Allison Lewis, whose poetics of despair and sexual miserablism are couched in the industrialist appropriation of neuroscience and various medical pathologies. There's a considerable amount of dark tension between the cold electronics and Lewis' vocals that really makes this record quite special and worthy of being included in the hallowed Dark Entries pantheon. To be completely honest, this is really what Xeno & Oaklander *want* to sound like if either of those Anglophiles could really rise above their well crafted electronic starkness. Kudos, once again to Dark Entries for introducing us to another great minimal wave find!
One of two new reissues from legendary garage rockers the Lyres, founded in the late seventies by Jeff Conolly, after the break up of the seminal punk rock outfit DMZ, and before he would go on to found the Monomen. And while sonically, the Lyres were only one of many bands doing that sort of organ-heavy sixties inspired garage rock, they were most definitely one of the groups doing it BEST, combining classic sixties Beatles-y pop, classic Yellow Pills style power pop, garage rock crunch and swaggery RnB style stomp, into something fierce and catchy, super rocking, jangly and groovy, slithery and snarly, elsewhere on this week's list you'll also find the Lyres 1984 debut On Fyre, but this one here is their 1985 follow up, Lyres Lyres, which has all the energy and catchiness of their debut, but is way more well produced, and is much heavier on the covers, most of them super obscure, so much so that we never even knew they were covers until recently. This record also features a different lineup than their debut, and finds Conolly's voice even more powerful, dramatic and soulful this time around.
Right off the bat, the band start off with the groovy soulful stomp of "Not Looking Back" with a blatant "Live For Today" organ riff that the band make their own, and transform into some serious garage soul swagger. They group quickly switch gears for the brooding ballad "She Pays The Rent", with Conolly singing his heart out, over effects laden guitar, simple stripped down drums and swirling organ, groovy and darkly soulful. Then the band tackle the oft covered "You'll Never Do It Baby" (maybe most famously by the Pretty Things), which is a crunchy, swaggery garage rock blowout that totally sounds like a Lyres original. "I Love Her Still, I Always Will" revolves around a "House Of The Rising Sun" riff, and blossoms into a cool swirling groove, all shimmery guitars and funky drumming,
And so it goes, the rest of the record a pretty even split between covers and originals, the sound fantastic throughout, the power poppiness of "No Reasons To Complain", the woozy waltzy druggy dreaminess of "The Only Thing", the churning distorted guitar driven swagger of "How Do You Know?, and the band's "You Won't Be Sad Anymore" a total power pop garage rock gem, all jangle guitar and whirring organ, and vocals that transform the lyrics into near gibberish, sounding a lot like a slowed down garage rock Dickies! The reissue also tags on four bonus tracks, which are as good as anything on the record proper.
So great, and a whole lot different than the group's debut, so much so, that lots of fans were freaked out, not understanding what happened to the raw feral garage rock energy of On Fyre, but listening to both back to back, they sound pretty perfect together, definitely different, but weirdly complimentary, it makes sense that they were reissued together, and while lots of folks will prefer one over the other, we're pretty sure if you're anything like us (and would you be reading this if you weren't?) odds are you're probably gonna want both!
If you've never heard the Lyres before, just listen to the sound sample below for "Help You Ann", we'll wait...
Odds are, if you're anything like us, that song is all it'll take to convince you how goddamn great the Lyres were. And are! Especially with the current crop of garage rock combos, it's easy to forget, that bands were doing something similar, and in some cases, WAY BETTER, more than 25 years ago. Case in point the Lyres (another case in point, the Fuzztones, who we'll no doubt gush over once there's a fancy new reissue), a garage rock outfit founded in Boston in the late seventies by Jeff "Monoman" Conolly, after the break up of the seminal punk rock outfit DMZ, and before he would go on to found the Monomen. And while sonically, the Lyres were only one of many bands doing that sort of organ-heavy sixties garage rock, they were most definitely one of the groups doing it BEST, combining classic sixties Beatles-y pop, classic Yellow Pills style power pop, garage rock crunch and swaggery RnB style stomp, into something fierce and catchy, super rocking, jangly and groovy, slithery and snarly.
On Fyre, the Lyres 1984 debut, is one of THEE sweetest slabs of garage rock EVER, there's "Help You Ann", which is obviously a stone cold classic, but opener "Don't Give It Up Now" is nearly as good, full of swirling organ, wild drumming, killer jangle guitar, Jeff Conolly's snarly soulful vocals. It's super energetic, intense, the sort of sweat soaked garage rock energy groups like Thee Oh Sees traffic in, but three decades earlier. But the sound isn't all fuzzed out jangle and pound, tracks like "I Confess" display the group's poppier side, lilting and jangly and catchy as all get out, hearing this stuff now, it's hard to believe more folks aren't totally obsessed with these guys. Then there's the "You Really Got Me" riff of "I'm Tellin' You Girl", the vocals super raspy and soulfully feral, that main hook splintering into a weird almost proggy stuttery breakdown, weird and so cool. They also do a killer version of the Kinks' "Tired Of Waiting", their version a bit more loose and ramshackle, but the song suits them, and totally sounds like it could have been a Lyres original.
This reissue tacks on a handful of tracks that were recorded at the same time but were left off the album proper (although they were included on an older reissue), and they're all pretty much just as good as the album tracks, the bluesy groove of "Never Met A Girl Like You", the propulsive punkiness of "Busy Body", and more more more (yep, three more!).
The whole record is brimming with garage rock classics, that sound as fresh today as they did nearly thirty years ago, and hopefully this reissue will turn a whole new generation of garage rockers on to one of the bands that made it possible for all the bands they love to even exist in the first place!
Every installment in Luaka Bop's World Psychedelia series has been an across the board aQ favorite. From Os Mutantes, Shuggie Otis, the great African psych compilation, Love's A Real Thing, and now we have this great introduction to the post-Tropicalia funk of the great Tim Maia.
But the music is just one part of the story, the man's life is filled with interesting twists and turns including multiple marriages, prison sentences and an avid role in a UFO-obsessed religious cult, all of which have been the subject of a best-selling biography, tv show and hit musical in Brazil. How could we not love this?!
Combining a unique twist on Brazilian popular music along with copious American soul influences have made Maia's seventies recordings long sought after and excepting a couple of pricey imports, we have never been able to find any substantial release of his early musical output. After a decade of legal wrangling and coinciding with what would have been Maia's seventieth birthday (he died in 1998 of a heart attack while performing onstage), it's great to see this 15 track compilation realized and we're loving it more with each listen.
Mixing the Latino funk of Mexican-American groups like Malo and El Chicano, the cool urban sophistication of Steely Dan (yes, we went there, and we're not apologizing!) and the soulful vocals of Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil. Maia's music has a fervent infectious energy that is totally engaging and sexy. He's often been compared to Barry White in the fact his music celebrates love over politics, but really Maia's music made the joyous acceptance of love and life a political statement and has long endeared him to legions of fans worldwide.
The cd is housed in a mini-hardbound cd-sized book, the lp in a deluxe full color gatefold, both with extensive notes and details of his extraordinary life. And this compilation comes of course, highly recommended!
While we've definitely dug the last few records from Canadian blackened neo-folk duo Menace Ruine, we were initially a bit confused by their shift from grim, psychedelic, experimental black metal, to their newly minted neo-folk incarnation, and while much of the mood and musical ambience remained, some of us still longed for the group's previous incarnation. But over the course of the next two records, we grew to dig their witchy, mystical sound, one that shared seemingly everything but sound with the black metal that birthed them, sinister and haunting, abject and ritualistic, it's no surprise that they continue to be embraced by the BM scene, even though they had essentially ceased playing black metal long ago. But on Alight In Ashes, their blackened strain of neo-folk has definitely drifted even closer to the great black abyss, the sound already grim, but here even more cloaked in shadow, the soaring dramatic vocal incantations, the perfect foil for the roiling blurred riffage and muted power electronics that churn underneath. In fact, the music sounds like slow motion black metal, blurred into sinister swells of smeared riffage and buried rhythms, it makes for a fantastic combo, when coupled with the vocals, which we've seen compared to Nico, but we still hear Jex Thoth or Blood Ceremony or Christian Mistress, and in places, the vocals sound remarkably like a female Mike Scalzi from Slough Feg. The vibe throughout, much like the record before it, continues to be haunting and harrowing, very much like these are in fact mysterious rituals, and arcane incantations, the music often building to dense, near psychedelic crescendos, or slipping into hushed mesmer, the opening track might be the most black metal thing we've heard from Menace Ruine since they shed their black buzz, a sprawling, dynamic expanse of murky metallic churn and smeared shadowy psychedelic shimmer. Elsewhere, the sound shifts to something much more medieval, that ancient music simulated by electronic buzz and minimal percussion, or the music groans and heaves, like a symphony of moaning strings, even sans vocals, the music here would be some fascinating collection of blackened electronic ragas, but with the vocals, the sound is transformed into some sort of divine doom-ed blackened medieval folk, and we find ourselves no longer missing the black buzz one bit.
We had never even heard of Canadian noise rockers Metz, until this record just showed up, but holy shit is it kicking our asses. Heavy and hooky, weirdly groovy, a bit mathy, a psychedelic grinding, churning, pounding blast of drum heavy crunch, the vocals all but buried in the mix, but still an integral part of the sound. The coolest thing about the record though might have to be the production. Instead of being super blown out, or ultra heavy, the sound is weirdly abstract, murky and muddy one second, blisteringly loud the next, certain parts smoothed out into tranced out hypno-rock, others exploding into prismatic noise pop freakouts. And yet somehow every track here manages to be impossibly catchy. We've read comparisons to Jesus Lizard, which might be the most apt, but while Metz are no doubt influenced by JL, their sound is much murkier, much more minimal, with many of the songs collapsing into weird drum-centric breakdowns, a pounding rhythm surrounded by swirls of effects, or some sinewy drum and bass lope, or something similarly abstract and stripped down, only to explode right back into another bout of melody infused near metallic churn. The label talks about how these guys have one of the loudest drummers ever, and while it's usually pretty impossible to capture that sort of thing on record, the drums here are definitely a HUGE part of the sound. They always are in a trio, but the drums here pretty much define the sound, driving, powerful, not overly bombastic, but recorded in such a way that they crush, that aforementioned weird production applied heavily to the drums, causing them to be muted thumps one second, rib cage rattling booms the next, the guitar and bass treated similarly, thick, gristly buzz on some tracks, detuned murky twang on others.
The single "Wet Blanket" is the band at their most classic noise rock, sounding very much like a band you might have seen play with Jesus Lizard or Don Cabellero, and anyone who digs those kinds of outfits should definitely check these guys out too, but even at their catchiest, like on "Wet Blanket", they still seem to slip into that sort of almost krautrock like mesmer, churning looped cyclical hypno-rock sprawls that transform song into sound, reminding us of other similarly inclined combos like Psychic Paramount or recent aQ Record Of The Week-ers Aluk Todolo, but with Metz, those moments, as tranced out as they may be, invariably lead back to something more rocking and melodic.
Easily our noise rock record of the year. Folks who dug the last album from The Men, another aQ ROTW, but who might be after something a bit more fierce and feral, this might just be your new favorite record.
(FYI, there's vinyl too, but our copies got munched in transit, @#$%!, should have more early next week...)
Record number three from aQ beloved modern minimalist psych-kraut combo Moon Duo, initially an offshoot of psych rockers Wooden Shjips, but over the last few years, it seems the 'Duo have been way more active than the mothershjip. This latest record from the Shjips' Ripley Johnson and his partner, Sanae Yamada, taking up right where the last one, Mazes, left off, the duo weaving lush, hypnotic, jams, expanding their sound with every record, Circle being the most polished, and certainly the most poppy. They still worship at the altar of Spacemen 3, you can't really play this sort of music and not, but the sound this time around is definitely less dark, more sun dappled and dreamy, and the pop element is huge, with some of the songs sounding downright noisepoppy, even the more tranced out krauty jams, find the duo adding multiple melodies, layering their guitars and synths, and most excitingly, singing together much more, the boy/girl harmonies downright dreamy. While the opener "Sleepwalker" is about as close to classic Moon Duo as Circles gets, it sort of feels like they're easing us into it, cuz "I Can See" is propulsive and driving, a little bit bouncy, but Yamada and Johnson sing the chorus together, before Johnson lets loose with some wild gouts of psych guitar. The sound is still plenty sinister, and darkly hued, but that is NOT the case on the title track, which is fuzzy and super poppy the intertwined vocals and the killer chorus, not to mention a super melodic lead, it's a sunshinier side of Moon Duo, one that we sort of like. "I Been Gone" is almost new wavey, a percolating melody over a driving groove, and another pretty excellent chorus.
Our only complaint with past Moon Duo records really, and a minor one at that, was that their songs were less songs, so much as just cool parts, the band would play the part, a killer psychedelic krautrocky groove, until they stopped, this was even more evident live, where they would push play on the drum machine, then start the song, then eventually stop, the programmed rhythm continuing on unwavering, until they pushed stop. Here, the songs sound much more crafted, and composed, as if they were meant to be the length they are, a certain number of verses and choruses, and then end, and somehow they manage that without losing that sense of endless jamminess, which was part of the joy of Moon Duo's sound. And for all the took of new sounds and more poppiness, fear not, there's still plenty of tranced out psychedelic brood, and looped hypno rock mesmer. "Sparks" is classic Moon Duo, as is the epic loping closer "Rolling Out", with its Spacemen 3 riff and monster groove, but then out of nowhere comes the weird, pulsing, effects drenched stomp of "Free Action", with its stuttering guitars and woozy descending almost glammy sounding chorus.
So good, just enough of the classic old sound, balanced with a whole lot of the new, is making this a big fave around here for sure!
This is not new, wasn't just reissued, but was just discovered. And sometimes the process of discovery with music, or movies or whatever, can be just as interesting and strange as the music itself. And sometimes that process enables you to discover music you might not give a second listen to otherwise, and lets you be more objective, lets you disregard your normal musical biases. Thus... we've never been that big into Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young. And yeah, before you email all in a tizzy, we've already gotten plenty of suggestions for CSN+Y records we NEED to hear, but for the most part we were just never really big fans. Consequently, we tended to ignore the various members' solo records (not counting Mr, Young of course) as well.
We recently (re)discovered Terry Reid via the soundtrack to Rob Zombie's killer 'killer' flick The Devil's Rejects, which is already sort of a random way of getting turned on to an artist we had at least known about for ages. But there was something special about those specific tracks Zombie chose for the soundtrack. Further exploration of Terry Reid's various releases, revealed that those three tracks were all from the same album, Seed Of Memory, and while we love pretty much all the Terry Reid records, Seed Of Memory is by far our favorite. The dreamiest, the catchiest, the most country (and somewhat frustratingly, the most difficult to get). So what was it exactly that made that record so special. Well, and here's where it connects, it was produced by Graham Nash, who also played and contributed various parts and pieces. So, recently an aQ customer suggested we check out Songs For Beginners, which they told us was Nash's best solo record, and while we haven't heard enough of Nash's releases to say for sure, we can at least say we really really like it! A LOT!
To begin with Songs For Beginners was originally released in the mystical magical year of 1971, a year when pretty much every great record was released (at least according to Allan) from Black Sabbath to Flower Travellin Band to Van Der Graaf Generator to Comus and on and on. While Nash's record is obviously not as weird or heavy or psychedelic as any of those, it's still pretty fucking awesome. Sunny, sweet, singer songwriter soft rock dream pop. With a streak of dark melancholy moodiness. Think Billy Joel, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Bread, America, Donovan and even more esoteric folk folks like Bill Fay, Terry Reid, Fred Neil and the like.
Each track is a gorgeously simple folky pop gem, with harmony vocals, lilting melodies, gentle piano, lush strings, soaring lap steel, a little bit of twang, a little bit of swoonsome sweetness, all dreamily draped over minor key Beatlesque pop or soft shimmery folkpop ballads, While the sound is immediately recognizable, that ubiquitous seventies FM radio soft rock from our childhoods, it's just weird enough, and the songs are just so goddamn good, that it totally transcends the seventies schlock that surrounded it. And by now we've all been blessed with a healthy diet of modern psychedelic folk, bizarre Finnish forest folk, neo-Appalachia, folky droney pop weirdness, plenty of Six Organs and Current 93's and Vetivers and Banharts and Newsoms and Feathers and Wooden Wands that we can look back with wide eyes at the sort of folky pop that was the seed for the dense folky foliage we love rolling around in these days...
If there was ever a band to masterfully manipulate the whole 'insanely limited release' thing, it's French duo Natural Snow Buildings, whose early releases were so limited, it's a wonder anyone even got to hear them, case in point, 2008's Night Coercion Into The Company Of Witches, which was released as a triple cd-r in a run of just TWENTY TWO copies!! Over the last few years, many of those old NSB records have been getting reissued in much more reasonable editions, and while that sort of hype can often backfire, especially when way more people have heard OF your band, than actually heard it, every NSB release we get simple confirms what a remarkable duo they actually are, and what a shame it is that it's taken this long for more people to actually hear them.
It wouldn't be an NSB review without the 'limited release' rant, but now that we've got that out of the way, we can luxuriate in this fantastic collection of lush layered folkdrone psychedelia and ritualistic psychedelia soundscapery. Coercion is in fact the group's first proper domestic release, and thus might be the first many folks hear, and we have to say, you couldn't ask for a better introduction. Three discs, nearly three hours, six tracks, the shortest clocking in at 17:59, the longest at 57:47, which is exactly how NSB are meant to be experienced, their tracks epic, sprawling, lush and organic freeform explorations, guitars and percussion, woodwinds, bells and chimes, lovely vocals, all woven into something mesmerizingly transcendent.
There's definitely a sonic link, intentional or otherwise, to the Finnish forest folk we hold so dear, fans of groups like Avarus, Anaksimandros, Uton, Kemialliset Ystavat and the rest, will definitely discover kindred sonic spirits here, the foresty campfire vibe looms large, but NSB aren't afraid to take that muted minimalism, and let it blossom into something massive, gloriously lush and layered ur-drone tranceouts of the highest order, taking elements of Flying Saucer Attack, Astral Social Club and classic kosmische krautrock, and tangling it all together into something sublime and divine. While some tracks, like the record opener, "Kadja Bosou", are rhythmic and trancey, others, like the title track, are much noisier affairs, dense squalls of chaotic sound, reminiscent of Birchville Cat Motel or Our Love Will Destroy The World, but often foregoing the rhythmic component for something freer and more abstract, keening high end melodies, shards of heavily effected guitar howl, over a softly roiling backdrop of shimmer and thrum, the sound slipping easily from drifting loose and free to something more directed, tethered to a simple pulse, or some minimal percussion, but even then, the rhythms seem less an anchor, as a pulse, a loose demarcation, guiding the wild psychedelic swirls overhead.
Theirs is definitely a sound that's difficult to describe, especially on a record as vast and varied as Coercion, but somehow, each epic track, as different sonically as some of them are, manage to all sound like NSB, whether it's crumbing and noisy and atonal, or lush and layered and lovely, or driving and hypnotic and strangely propulsive, NSB imbue their sound with some ineffable sonic thread that runs not just through these songs, but through all of their songs.
This record (or perhaps more accurately, THESE recordS are) is an epic journey, one that requires patience, and perhaps headphones, to really get the full effect, the thought of a single three hour session might seem daunting, but these are the sorts of songs that suck you in, that are so easy to get lost in, truly psychedelic, and at times it's difficult not to fall into some sort of trance listening to this stuff, it's gorgeously zoned out, darkly melodic at times, almost purely textural at others, but always utterly mesmerizing, and some of the most unique and moving modern music you're likely to hear.
Depending on where you stand with Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth's avant explorations, this is either a dream come true or a nightmare collaboration. It sounds exactly like what you would imagine. Extended vocal freakouts, chiming detuned arpeggiations, blithe detached whispered murmurs, ritualistic vocalized koans, distorted feedback squalls and even some right wing slamming poetry in the round. But besides that last part, it rarely comes off as indulgent as we feared, and the fact that it was recorded in a day, gives the pieces an urgency and vitality that would have been lost had it been more composed. Yokokimthurston definitely would have made a great installment in the group's SYR experimental series, and as a part of that series might have felt more substantial, and been granted more of a musical gravitas. As it stands in most music press this record is being treated more as Yoko acting as some therapeutic arbitration for Kim and Thurston to work out their post-marriage musical relationship. Please! As if the three of them didn't have anything better to do. Disregard the hype (or lack of) and check it out, it's definitely pretty great!
Ignore the embarrassing cover art and the too twee band name if you can, but definitely dig into Glaswegian trio Paws's unabashedly nineties style indie rock debut. A perfect hybrid of the all too obvious influences, mostly Superchunk, but a little Dinosaur Jr. too, heck if this record came out twenty years ago, heck, they might be indie rock elder statesmen themselves now, but these kids were barely even born then, but somehow they amassed a pretty kick ass record collection, one we would imagine included the aforementioned Dinosaur and Superchunk, Archers Of Loaf too, but we hear a lot of lesser knowns (which could just be us), but heck, if you're an old guy or gal like us, and remember loving Small (or Small 23), Further, Loomis, Throneberry, Clumsy, Tripping Daisy and all the myriad other fuzzy, jangly, indie rock bands that were the soundtracks to all our crushes and breakups and roadtrips, then Paws will push all your buttons. And these guys aren't doing anything new, in fact they're doing just the opposite, essentially channeling everything we loved about nineties indie/college rock, fuzzy guitars, soaring choruses, whiny sad boy vocals, lyrics mostly about girls and breakups and teenage things, but these guys do it so well, hooks galore, crazy catchy songs, strident and super rocking, with plenty of jangle too, it's a lot like the sound of modern retro indie rock outfits like Silversun Pickups (themselves dead ringers for Smashing Pumpkins), but played by kids, and it sounds like it, youthful and ramshackle, totally fun, the sort of sound that makes you almost unable to resist embracing your inner indie rocker, it'll take all your will power to not flail about, air guitaring and singing along. Maybe the best nineties style indie rock record, since, well, since the nineties!
Some years back, in 2006, the Japanese label EM - one of the most eccentric reissue specialists in the world, and just about our favorite - introduced us to the works of a mysterious, long lost '70s cosmic jazz ensemble called Pyramids (not to be confused with the post-rock/black metal act of the same name). They reissued The Pyramids' 1976 record Birth/Speed/Merging on cd, then a double-cd anthology of music by Pyramids bandleader, saxophonist Idris Ackamoor, including more Pyramids material, some of it previously unreleased. We were pretty taken with Ackamoor & Pyramids, calling 'em "amazing, and revolutionary and so brilliantly far out", and comparing 'em to such current underground ensembles as the No Neck Blues Band and Avarus, among others. Birth/Speed/Merging we said was an "amazing slice of majestic tribal funk free jazz" that made references to both Egypt and Jamaica, and the same goes for their other records too.
Then, a little later, the Ikef label reissued all three of The Pyramids' rare albums on vinyl - the ones which we just got back in stock, and relisted a few weeks ago, you may recall. We relisted 'em because none other than Idris Ackamoor himself happens to live here in SF, in our neighborhood in fact, and he brought copies by! As always, we were happy to see him, and happier still when he told us the news that Pyramids had recently reunited with several of the original members, and had recorded a new album, their first in the 35 years since Birth/Speed/Merging - that's this, now out on the German label Disko B. Recorded at Faust Studio - that's right, the studio run by Hans Joachim Irmler of krautrockers Faust, in Scheer, Germany - it maintains and expands the Pyramids' spiritual, ethnic, cosmic, funky '70s jazz vibe perfectly. Otherworldly (so aptly titled) still holds echoes of their contemporaries the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Sun Ra's Arkestra, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, etc. It's Afro-centric, with some further Far Eastern inflections... Universal sounds, universal consciousness. Both free and freaky but also totally soulful and gentle and groovy too. Definitely worthy of The Pyramids' now much less obscure legacy. The ancient/modern, multicultural connection Pyramids make is quite evident, resonating on tracks "Reincarnation" (which relates the royal drummers of Mali to kids dancing in the streets of New Orleans) and of course "Ancient Funk!". Tracks that find mantric group chant and masterful hand percussion alongside lovely whistling reeds and echoing electronics, both electric and acoustic bass parts intertwined, and plenty of other "otherworldly" sounds.
Now we're really looking forward to seeing 'em live, as Idris told us they'd be playing shows soon, here in San Francisco as well as over in Europe (where they got their start, in France back in '72). In fact, he just dropped off some flyers, The Pyramids are playing 3 nights, November 1st-3rd, at the Buriel Clay Theater on Fulton!
Compact disc version packaged in a nice gatefold sleeve with large fold out insert of lyrics and color photos. The vinyl is similarly presented.
The second tape this year from one man guitarscaper The Rainbow Body, aka Matt Kattman, who was also responsible for another aQ fave, the crushing blackened doomdrone of Utsuro Bune. But as we mentioned in our review of the last Rainbow Body tape, Kattman has decided to delve into something much more atmospheric and kosmische, using just his guitar and a handful of effects, creating, lush billowing landscapes of hazy, washed out guitar ambience, and slow shifting layers of longform guitardrone bliss out. An eight part songsuite, with each part bleeding organically into the next, the sound here is alternatingly sun dappled and dreamy, droned out and sinister, the sound at times reminding us of a more spaced out new age-y Roy Montgomery, lush languorous chords, drifting weightless in sprawling expanses of layered shimmer, loops tangled into dreamlike swirls of soft focus melody. Cosmic and celestial, wreathed in reverb and echo, notes and chords caught in swirling clouds of muted buzz and raga like thrum, darkly meditative, and divinely mesmerizing, anyone into psychedelic drone music, kosmische new age drift and minimal guitarscapery will want to get lost in the Rainbow Body's woozy, washed out prismatic soundworld.
Packaged in a full color J-card and includes a download coupon as well.
You may not necessarily know who Emil Richards is, but you've most definitely heard him play. The list of his musical accomplishments, is nearly Zelig like, seeming to appear everywhere and on pretty much every great recording, and having played with a who's who of performers, jazz, rock, underground, mainstream, even a small sampling of his music resume will have you wondering why he isn't a household name. He played with Charles Mingus, Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle, Doris Day, Judy Garland, he performed frequently with Harry Partch, he plays the bongos that open Lalo Schifrin's theme to Mission Impossible, he's the guy snapping his fingers on the theme music from the Addams Family, he played tuned bowls and gongs on Jerry Goldsmith's iconic soundtrack to 1968's Planet Of The Apes. He later played with Frank Zappa, George Harrison (he even traveled to India with Harrison) as well as Blondie, and hundreds of other pop artists, and played on soundtracks like Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Shaft, Chinatown, Dirty Harry, and again, HUNDREDS more.
But for weird music obsessives, he's no doubt best known for his record New Sound Element: Stones, originally released in 1967, which was a collection of 12 songs, each named for a month, and its specific birthstone, and which is infamous for the fact that it was in fact the first commercial recording to feature the Moog Synthesizer. But beyond that, it's a crazy record, some sort of twisted electronic jazz sci-fi exotica, the main instruments being ring modulated mallet instruments (marimba, xylophone, etc.) and synth, trippy and woozy, playful and silly, but at times, seriously twisted and darkly psychedelic. We're reminded of course of Perrey And Kingsley, after all for many of us, that was our first real exposure to early Moog pop, but Richards' compositions are a lot less goofy, less melodic too, more rhythmic, with the best tracks layering wild jazz drumming, over heavily effected marimba or xylophone, the sound locked into propulsive grooves, while the tones and overtones are constantly altered to created woozy warbly melodies, that's not to say this stuff isn't on the playful side, it most definitely is, the darker passages more than balanced by goofy, super melodic workouts, but the sound seems to always slip back into something a wee bit darker, whether it's the droney, swirly shuffle of "Emerald (May)", or the driving drum heavy psychedelic trip out of "Bloodstone (March)", the wild Moog swaddled xylophone shredding of "Moonstone (June)", or the fuzzy twisted jazzfunk of "Ruby (July)".
Imagine a drum/percussion driven sixties jazz record, re-engineered by some Moog mad scientist, and you'll get an idea of what Richards concocted on Stones, which has been floating around as a bootleg for years, but this is the first official reissue. And Stones is only the beginning. While it's most definitely the reason to pick this up, Omni has also tacked on a bunch of bonus tracks, first, a handful of songs from New Time Element, also originally released in 1967, which features a selection of pop and jazz standards, presented with odd time signatures and unique percussion, the original liner notes even give the listener breakdowns of the various rhythms of each song. It's not super far out, but a fun listen, and a nice chunk of sixties jazz. The final batch of extra tracks come from Richards' 1968 release Journey To Bliss, which is probably closest to Stones in sound, dialing back the electronic element, and heavy on the rhythms, lots of marimba, xylophone and percussion, some drum solos, a bit of fuzzy jazz funk, a heady psychedelic jazz excursion for sure, fans of the recent Spiritual Jazz collections will definitely dig, the album culminating in the final 18 minute six part epic "Journey To Bliss", which features a yogi like recitation, directions for meditation and inner peace, over Eastern raga style buzz, playful percussion, and more of Richards' wild psychedelic jazz.
Like all Omni reissues, gorgeous presented, with loads of pictures and extensive liner notes!
This new vinyl (+cd) release from the consistently winning experimental label Utech comes from an artist we weren't previously familiar with, by the name of Frank Rosaly. We think he's based in Chicago, but aren't even sure about that. And it's a little hard to describe his music, as documented here, but we'll try, 'cause as soon as we heard this record, we could tell it was right up our alley. There's two long tracks here, about 15 minutes per side, apparently created/composed using a highly conceptual process, yet the results are much more than of academic interest, they're quite compelling and original, we think any adventurous listener will agree. Utech somewhat drily describes the genesis of Centering And Displacement thusly: "A body of improvised source material was collected, segmented and organized by a simple chance operation. These segments were then orchestrated into a sound program and arranged by order of the strict composed form. At times, the score also regulated post-recorded effects to manipulate the original material. As the material was edited, it was divided into six separate channels (three stereo tracks). Each pair of channels was transferred to a cd and each was played on three cd players simultaneously, creating a simple six-channel sound installation� the dense six-channel score was revised and reduced to two channels (one stereo track), which is now the final, preferred version."
Ok, but what does it sound like? How about a gamelan (or a recording of one) that's been all crumpled up, then unfolded and stretched out? Or, less fancifully, like a one-man electro-acoustic improv session on drums, percussion, and electronics (which IS what this is), subjected to the operations described above, in such a way as to strike a balance between abrasive, abstract textures and more hypnotic, if unusual and damaged, quasi-rhythmic soundscapes. Like we said, right up our alley!
It begins, on side one, with a low thunderous rumbling, like a magnified burst of record crackle. And such startling, ominous blown-out barrages of distortion continue intermittently throughout this first track, sounding like the breath of an expiring monster, sighing heavily amidst tinkling percussive jumble and crash, with pauses for silence� these tumbling spasms then steady and flow into what sound like masses of clattering chimes, a soundscape above which a recurring three-note motif (on synth? vibraphone?) is heard. That, in fact, reminded us of the incredible soundtrack to the 1971 movie Klute, sinister and suspenseful. There's electronics that sound like bird-twitter here too, and it's all very atmospheric, far from a mere experimental compositional exercise.
The second side/track continues with that atmospheric vibe, being a twilight soundscape of distant airplane engine drones, with more up-front textural scraping and bell ringing tones, that eventually coalesces into a softly thrumming humming pulse, over which a very gentle clitter-clatter of percussion drifts. Quite lovely and mesmeric, it is. The clank and rattle builds towards the end, as does the pulsation, becoming more insistent and dramatic, but still relatively mild as such things could be imagined, before a sudden whistling finale.
Inspired (we're merely guessing) equally by '60s/'70s out-there free improv (stuff on FMP, BYG) and also Industrial music's infamous "pipe-fighting" techniques, Rosaly's music has moments that may remind you of No Neck Blues Band, of Will Over Matter, of Supersilent, of Pierre-Yves Mace, of Aufgehoben, and other disparate and unusual and sometimes counter-intuitive but fascinating music-and-noise-makers. This is really pretty great. And, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Note, the lp comes packaged with a compact disc version of the album as well, which is always a nice touch (much preferable to a mere download card, we think).
Available on vinyl again! Here's our review of this Norwegian BM masterpiece from when we reviewed the cd version year and years ago:
One of the best, most influential, most perfectly grim and black, most brutal, and most importantly one of our -favorite- black metal records EVER! Easily the band's finest moment. When anyone asks us to recommend the most essential black metal releases EVER, this record vies for the top spot along with Burzum's Filosefem, Emperor's In The Nightside Eclipse, Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, Darkthrone's Transylvanian Hunger and Immortal's Blizzard Beasts. Pretty seriously daunting company for sure, but depending on our mood, a lot of the time Nemesis Divina easily bumps the others out of the top spot. From the all time classic "Mother North", quite possibly THE catchiest black metal songs ever, to the barely audible sscccching! of a sword being unsheathed about 3 minutes into the first song, to the fucking awesome band photos, this record is tough to beat. Any of the above mentioned records would be perfect introductions into the grim world of black metal, but somehow, Nemesis Divina seems like the perfect secret weapon, the record that even a non-metalhead would hear and be forced to bow down to the dark lord. So fucking great!
Record number two from this Seattle bliss out twee pop combo, and much like their debut, it's another killer collection of fuzzy guitars, simple stripped down drumming, shoegazey ethereal vox, and some seriously catchy songs. As we mentioned in our review of Go With Me, anyone into Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, or really any of the girl groups on Slumberland, Seapony will definitely hit the spot. Wistful, dreamily melancholy dream pop, but this time around, the band have roughed up the production a little, adding some grit and gristle, the guitars a little bit warbly and subtly woozy, the result makes for something just a bit more psychedelic. Just check out the opening track "Outside", which on the surface is pure jangly bliss, but listen close, and you'll hear distorted crumbling distortion, and the vocals somehow soft focus and hushed, but still in-the-red. "Tell Me So" is more smoothed out, but even there, the vocals are weirdly recorded, the drums seem to ping pong from speaker to speaker, all wound up in lush billows of warm strum and shimmery melody. The rest of the record unfolds similarly, the songs slipping easily from sixties girl group shuffle, to groovy garage rock pound, to dreamy shoegaze pop, to nineties retro indie rock, but all within the context of the group's dreamy soft focus dream pop sound.
When we reviewed the teaser 7" released a few weeks back to whet appetites for this, Ty Segall's new full length, we described the jam "The Hill" thusly: "a killer slab of glammy, proggy, garage pop, that might just be the best thing we've heard from Segall yet. A cool female vocal intro explodes into some seriously fuzzed out glam rock garage stomp, no lo-fi production here, it sounds incredible, massive and lush, and totally heavy, the boy/girl harmonies on the chorus KILL, the vibe swaggery and seriously glammed out, with some blasts of wild psychedelic shredding." And while that single and that sound is not really all that far removed with Segall's sound in general, the glamminess is cranked big time here, as is the hookiness. Just check out album opener "Thank God For Sinners", the perfect mash up of classic Beatles style melody and swaggery, slithery T-Rex fuzzed out groove. Which leads right into "You're The Doctor", adding some seriously driving psychedelic garage rock stomp, a wild blast of heady heavy psych rock that will have Oh Sees freeks losing their shit.
But as with every Segall record, the sound veers all over the place, slipping easily from sound to sound, vibe to vibe, and speaking of vibes, The Beatles vibe is huge throughout, but is deftly applied to Segall's already hook heavy sound, "Inside Your Heart" adds some brooding minor key melody as well as a killer catchy main guitar part, not to mention a wild squall of psychedelic freakout and a woozy, warped drag of an ending that makes it sound like the tape is slowly melting. "Would You Be My Love" is a dead ringer for classic Redd Kross, a supercharged sixties pop, while "Ghost" is a fuzz drenched, but still darkly melodic, almost metallic dirge, rife with gorgeous vocal harmonies, and a wicked main hook.
And so it goes. The rest of the record brimming with classic fuzzy pop and psychedelic garage gems, groovy and jangly one second, blown out and chaotic the next, but every track here stone cold killer. And while we do feel kinda foolish, going on and on about each successive Segall record as being the best yet, and our new favorite (and even making this one Record Of The Week only a few lists after Segall's Slaughterhouse record received the same honors), that's exactly what happens every time. And Segall really does just keep getting better and better, not just the songs, but the arrangements, the production, the vocals, everything. Have a look at past reviews on the aQ site, and you'll see just how much we love past records of his, which should tell you something when we once again, proclaim this the best one yet!
Small Cruel Party turns up again, just a few weeks after the release of the impeccable 3cd anthology An Accident In Substance released by Harbinger Sound. As we mentioned in the review of that set, Small Cruel Party was the obscurant sound-art project for then Seattle-based Key Ransome, who applied the grandeur of minimalism to the sodden detritus of his surroundings, creating a brilliant amalgamation of texture, noise, drone, atmosphere, tension, bombast, industrial euphoria, and mystical threat. Three Simple Eyes Of The Insect Ancestor was an early cassette by Small Cruel Party, released by Apraxia in 1992 in a package smeared with wax and oversized sticks that would have surely fallen off merely by looking at it sideways. In a rare piece of text accompanying these recordings (found on the Kaon website, and not the cd), Ransome describes a considerable difference in the sound quality between the original cassette and remastered cd, the latter of which negated the former's overblown mulched sound from faulty replication providing 'clarity' for the murky sounds found within. Ransome admits a lack of memory when it comes to the recording of the first track "Crowd Of Small Things" - but the dank atmosphere that hangs on a mysteriously motorized droning erratically hums amidst a slow arcing crescendo of ever-increasing tactile crunches. If anything, it's an existentially bleak soundtrack to an environmental disaster, with the damp forests of the Pacific NW suffocating under the slow ooze of a bunker oil spill. The second track "Tank Ecstasy Between Floors" features recordings make with the members of Yeast Culture in the reverberant stairwell of the Seattle Public Library. Those huge thumps and klangs from the SCP/YC industrial pipe fights are set against a shimmering stream of aquatic field recordings processed with a dreamy delay & reverb combination. In the final mix, Ransome balances the menace of those heavy-handed, thunderous booms in the stairwell with the rapturously hypnotic calm of the watery recordings. A classic Small Cruel Party strategy that's as brilliant as ever.
