Every crate digger worth their salt has come upon the Asian record dilemma. Records (often Chinese) that look so awesome and full of promise with their mysterious photography, strange graphics and humorous English misspellings, only to be underwhelmed by the most boring, pedestrian and oft-times sickly sweet music contained within. But what's a cratedigger to do when they are actually IN Asia and have to wade through stacks upon stacks of such records knowing they can only bring home a tiny batch? That's the dilemma the French-Vietnamese producer Onra found himself in on a trip to Vietnam where scouring through various flea markets, he picked up a stack of promising but highly worn records. Like the best of recent instrumental hip-hop records by J Dilla, Madlib (especially his Beat Konducta Indian series), and Oh No processed through the radio collage filters of Sublime Frequencies, Onra was able to mine pure gold from the scratchy sounds he collected abroad. Bits of operatic theater, odd sixties easy-listening covers, traditional flute and string ensembles, love songs and obscure soundtracks chopped into loops and grooves with all the rough crackle and sheen kept in tact. Soooo Awesome!!!!
Recorded live in 2011 (in a yoga studio and a synagogue), the latest from these Virginian dronelords, once again prove these guys are still the modern masters of the raga. Seven extended tracks of exquisite modern minimal drone music, lush, layered tones, constantly shifting textures, and ever shifting overtones, multiple instruments deftly woven into one single organic whole, all recorded live, on acoustic instruments, with no overdubs, this is pure sound, Pelt masterfully weaving this pure sound into expansive/expressive sprawls of mesmerizing, meditative minimalism, the sound varying greatly from track to track, whether it's the near atonal din of opener "Of Jack's Darbari", or the downright folky "Wings Of Dirt", they both revolve around the drone, as do all the tracks here, the thread that binds all these sounds together. And the fact that the various instruments can be busy on their own, unfurling flurries of notes, that on their own, would have a completely different vibe than as part of the whole, where all of that business, simple adds texture, and propulsion, tonal color and depth, and these songs are deep, the sort that require deep listening to truly appreciate the sort of spiritual sonic tradition these guys are a part of. LaMonte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Henry Flynt, Charlemagne Palestine, Catherine Christer Hennix, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Pelt's incredible body of work most definitely fits among those masters, and this live document demonstrate that Pelt can still channel that cosmic energy and form it into gorgeous, transcendental sound. In almost any form. The band really do explore every facet of the raga/drone here. Deep sonorous tones crafted from scraped bells and bowed metal, become a hushed metallic shimmer, rife with subtle movement and endless tonal variation, huge clouds of blurred shimmer are formed from piano notes drifting atop abstract percussion, and lush room reverb, wheezing chords are layered and layered, wreathed in keening streaks of high end, fiddles and harmoniums woven into a lustrous prismatic soft focus skree, dark bell tones hover over muted rhythms, wrapped in woozy metallic shimmer, and a mournful fiddle emits an aching, scraping tone, while below, thick slabs of metal rumble and whir. So incredible.
Packaged in a super striking, gorgeously psychedelic, full color, heavy gatefold jacket. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Joe Pernice, formerly of the Scud Mountain Boys, and Big Tobacco, and now the Pernice Brothers is turning out to be one of the most important singer songwriters of our time. It sounds like hyperbole, but Joe Pernice has managed to find a sound all his own,
Book Burner is the first record in 5 years from these grindcore gods. Their last full length was 2007's Phantom Limb, and as we mentioned in that review, as much as we dig these guys, we sort of dig PD frontman Scott Hull's -other- grind band even more, the twisted, warped, drum machine driven Agoraphobic Nosebleed, perhaps in part due to the fact that the music is not at all restrained by the limits of human drumming, which means that a lot of AnB stuff is ridiculously, and inhumanly fast, not to mention dizzyingly convoluted. But let's not sell PD drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) short, he comes about as close as any other human we can think of to insane hyperspeed drum damage, and the rest of the band follow suit, unfurling some seriously shredding, grinding heaviness, that in the world of grind really has no equal. We bitched about the more punky parts of the last record, and for the most part, that stuff has been jettisoned, in favor of lots of crushing slow and midtempo parts, that KILL, as well as crazy chunks of wild progged out math metal, which sound sooooo good, especially when paired up with bursts of lightning speed grinding blasts, the switch to churning chugging riffage only makes it sound that much heavier. And if anything, the sound of Pig Destroyer has continued to inch ever closer to that of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, more dense and complex, more furiously frenzied and fucked up. It's still somehow surprising the sort of hype this record's been getting, these guys popping up on the covers of all the metal mags, and no doubt filling up year end lists, but we have to say, as skeptical as we were, the more we listen to this, the more we're digging it, repeated listens yield a deeper appreciation of how fucking epic and relentlessly masterful this stuff really is, strap on some headphones and get lost in the wild squalls of grind, and the classic metal flecked churn and chug, a furious face melting modern grind metal powerhouse that jams 19 songs into 32 minutes, and sets the grind bar pretty goddamn high. As always, creepy artwork, demented lyrics, and a clutch of sick guest vocal spots from occasional PD/AnB vocalist (and full time Salome frontwoman) Kat Katz.
Once more, it's time for Church. The Sabbath Assembly has reconvened to sing the songs of the idiosyncratic '70s hippie religious organization (some might say, "cult") known as the Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Not your everyday hymns here, folks! These are songs of praise to both Christ AND Satan. If you've heard Sabbath Assembly's 2010 debut Restored To One, which we highly recommended, you sort of know what to expect. Arcane Jesus/Satan Freak music reinterpreted by a psychedelic rock outfit helmed by David Nuss of the No Neck Blues Band. The results: lovely, atmospheric, sing-song catchy, sometimes soulful; slightly sinister, yet strangely uplifting (as it was meant to be).
Ye Are Gods is mostly gentle and folky, sometimes jazzy and trippy, and kinda Comus-y, with sudden dramatic eruptions and majestic excursions. We wouldn't call it at all metal, yet at certain times, this reminds us a bit of SF's own operatic prog-power metallers Hammers Of Misfortune - perhaps not surprising since one of Nuss's other bands is the very much Hammers-influenced Under Satan's Sun. And, aha, in fact, none other than former Hammers (and Wolves In The Throne Room) vocalist Jamie Myers turns out to be Sabbath Assembly's lead singer on this recording, having taken over the mic from their previous frontwoman/high priestess, Jex Thoth. While some might miss Jex, Myers' delicate, dulcet tones admirably fill the void. The full on gospel pop sound of "Exit" was a surprise, but she pulls it off!
Also new on board this time, Genesis P-Orridge. Her presence brings a Current 93 element to the proceedings, Genesis doing the David Tibet thing, providing portentous spoken sermonizing, credited in the role of "Sacrifist". Ye Are Gods also features performances by Imaad Wassif, Eyvind Kang, Kevin Rutmanis (ex-Cows/Melvins), and quite a few others eager to embrace the Process message (or at least, who find it intriguing?).
The deluxe digi-book cd packaging is quite handsome, and contains lyrics, original sheet music, Biblical quotations, and various other related texts. The similarly-fancy vinyl version also includes this material, in a lp-sized booklet. Nice. While most of us here aren't regular church-goers, you can believe we'll be spinning this a lot, and twice on Sundays...
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!
We've gone on at great length in past reviews of records by Gnaw Their Tongues and sister band Aderlating, about the sound of those groups being bombastic and strangely soundtracky, each trafficking in a strain of symphonic industrial cinematic blackened doom, the usual downtuned sludge crawl and murky black miasmas of like minded noisemakers, instead wrapped around soaring majestic arrangements, lush melodies, as well as strange bursts of brass, and sprawling atmospheric sonic vistas.
As Seirom, the same man behind both of those outfits, draws back the blackened curtain, revealing the lush sonic wonderland that lies beyond, a soaring, shimmering expanse of blurred soft focus ambience, lush layered drones, processed vocals, smeared into shoegaze streaks of spectral psychedelia, all it will take is the first 5 minutes of the first track to convince you, the sound falling somewhere between the gauzy ambience of Tim Hecker, the lush soundtracky drifts of Stars Of The Lid, the Pop Ambient haze of Gas, but listen close, buried beneath the washed out swirls, some black metal blast beats remain, but they're so indistinct, as to be less rhythmic, and more textural, adding a strange pulsing thrum, which oozes into the rest of the surrounding sounds, moaning melancholic strings, gristly soft focus textures, vocal fragments, all floating on a woozy wash of ethereal ambience. Another one of those cases, where had that one track spread out over both discs, we would have been perfectly happy.
And while some of the record does get heavy, the various strands of prismatic melody, turning black, and blossoming into thick heaving walls of downtuned blurred churn, a la SUNNO))) or Nadja, but way more blissed out and ephemeral, even those tracks finds that heaviness being pulled apart, the blackness fading to more of a dreamlike grey, that grey shimmer revealing all manner of voices and fragmented melodies just below the surface, at its most abstract, it's like the Caretaker, a symphony of slowed down orchestral drifts, and gloriously blissed out dream pop melted down into something much more freeform and amorphous.
The title track adds martial drumming, and the sound becomes a sort of majestic industrial M83, which is just as good as it sounds, while "As Hills" laces its dirgey drift with deep dramatic vocals, elsewhere almost black metal buzz, finds guitars soaring skyward and transformed into something much more epic and dreamlike, and when the blast beats do return, this time much higher in the mix, impossibly they don't make the music sound any more metal, but instead, adds a spectral propulsion to the shoegazy bliss, the sound churning and driving the ether, like black metal stripped down and run through some sort of 4AD/M83 filter.
There's a lot to take in, two discs, ninety minutes, too much to really adequately describe here, and yet it's still not enough, a gloriously immersive sonic experience, that manages to take fulfill all the non-metallic promise of Gnaw Their Tongues, the tracks here fully embodying some otherworldly alchemical inverse, an alternate dimension Gnaw Their Tongues, where a blackened burnished beauty is reflected back from the abyss.
This has been out for a while, but we hadn't been able to track down copies until now. It's been a while since we've heard from Shackleton, and we were sort of amazed to realize that this was the first proper album from Shackleton we'd ever reviewed, there was a Fabric mix, there was a collaboration with Pinch, a collection of ep's, a split with Mordant Music and Vindicatrix, and those awesome Skull Disco comps, but this is the first record proper. Even though technically it's not a proper album per se, apparently the whole first disc here was in fact a series of ep's, recorded using, yep you guessed it, some sort of Italian drawbar organ (whatever that is), and this the tracks seemed to all belong together, and they definitely do, the sound seems less dark, and more playful than on past Shackleton recordings we've heard, gone is much of the dubsteppiness, the droniness, the darkness, and in its place, a much more vibrant and multi hued soundworld. A dizzying concoction of stuttery beats, of swirling melodies, strange voices, fragmented samples, blurred collages spinning across the stereo field, slipping easily from synthy, krauty mesmer, to almost Eastern sounding Muslimgauze style beatscapes, from crackle drenched minimal house music, to dubbed out abstract low end minimalism, and from swirly almost soundtracky ambience, to skittery Kompakt style techno. The vibe is super varied, every song constantly mutating and shifting, some serious avant techno ear candy for sure, but it definitely makes it a tough one to describe, however, as far as listening, it's endlessly mesmerizing, every track here deeeeep and lushly layered, multiple beats, weird loops, lots of samples, mysterious voices, all deftly chopped up and reconfigured into some serious hypno-techno mesmer.
The second disc was originally intended to be a bonus 12", but there ended up being too much music to fit on a single 12", and thus became its own record, and as the title suggests, was written to be more spacious and abstract, which it is, but really it's all relative. This is no pop ambience, it's Shackleton's warped take on 'quiet' music, which is really not that quiet at all, full of sputtering rhythms, ping pong beats, buzzing synth thrum, thick swaths of rumble and hum, and spare skeletal rhythms. The opener is seriously dark and sinister, more like the dubsteppier Shackleton of old, but a bit more droned out, but really, that's as dark, and as quiet as it gets. Part two adds female vocals, woozy melodic percussion, bigger beats, warbly samples, sheets of glitchy squelch, fluttery flutes, there's a definite kitchen sink thing going on, but Shackleton can pull it off, and while this is not strictly ambient, or even really quiet, it is pretty abstract, and impressionistic, lots of tranced out loopage, mesmerizing melodies, plenty of texture, the tracks lengthy explorations of some warped sonic otherworld, pairing maddeningly repetitive melodies, with ominous spoken word, African chants, bloopy bleepy effects, all of those elements constantly blurring and looping, drifting in and out of phase, it's like a modern chill out dancefloor plunderphonia, and it's pretty goddamn psychedelic, and seriously, mind meltingly addictive.
New issue of this UK magazine, kinda like a slicker Ugly Things, devoted to the all the fantastic psych/folk/garage/etc. music of yesteryear - and also to stuff from the here and now that tries to live up to the glories of the past.
On the cover, harmony pop greats The Free Design. Also: Bill Fay, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Ian Hunter, Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, Lee Hazlewood, the Guerssen label, and the Swedish retro-rock scene. And more. A big colorful read, that will get you spinning some old records!
Latest 12" jam from local label Voltaire, and the first we've heard from local trio Shock, their song "Heaven", starts out all noisy and synthy, driven by a dark house-y pulse, which sort of had us expecting something all Carpenter/Goblin-y, but then the vocals come in, and the song is transformed into a gorgeous slab of retro electro pop shimmer, all groovy low slung bass line, reverby guitar jangle, ominous synth pulse, dubbed out handclaps, skittery beat, and some seriously divine, sultry vox, all wreathed in a gorgeously lush production, that had us thinking M83 for sure, a fantastic blast of fuzzed out shoegaze electronic house-pop.
The remixes are pretty bad ass too, probably most exciting for aQ-ers, is Steve Moore from Zombi's mix, which transforms it into a glistening cascade of percolating synth melodies, the house music pulse left intact, but the vocals blurred and smeared into long stretches of breathy looped drones. So good!
The other remixes are less dramatic, Beatbroker, as his name would suggest, goes heavier on the beat, while letting all the other sounds blur into something more ethereal and washed out, while Hatchback go the other direction entirely, and take the song in a much more eighties pop direction, more fuzzy retro-pop, all hazy and almost Beach House-y at times.
Volume II in Smokey Emery's series of live performance edits expand from the first volume into 9 pieces taken from performances over the last couple of years around Austin, Texas and Colorado. Adding to the industrial foggy ambience of Smokey Emery's sound proper is the fact that these recordings were made on low-fi tape recorders, cell phones and digital cameras, further murking up the cloudy din. Listening at low volumes might be akin to listening to your refrigerator hum, but turned up a bit, there are distilled blooms of haunted sounds, muffled dialogue and far off buried music. We had this playing loudly one morning in the store, the day after the election in fact, when we had a sudden cold snap after days of warm dazzling sunshine and the store took on this sudden charge of a soft industrial autumn haze that was chilling and melancholic, but also blithely peaceful. We guess we'll be looking forward to winter after all! Limited!
"Illbient" aQ-fave producer Spectre brings us (literally, he brought these in himself, on a visit to SF) another album of dark, bass-heavy, mostly instrumental hip hop, smoke-hazed & paranoid; this latest one, his ninth, being a vinyl-only release on his own label WordSound. The True & Living begins positively yet ominously, with "inspirational" spoken word samples taken from the movies Waking Life and The Matrix, eventually joined by echoing maniacal laughter that segues into track two, the aptly titled "Impending Doom", which is a dizzying collage of end-is-nigh soundbites, of all varieties (some scarily plausible, others not as much) over loops of strident strings and horns, layered with beats and scratches. That sets the mood for the whole record, an apocalyptic, suspenseful hip hop soundscape. For example, the track "Destroyer", which is built around someone (a concerned citizen-scientist? demented doomsayer?) explaining one "nightmare scenario" in particular. One quote from that panicked fella sums it up, and made us chuckle: "We're about to have a solar system come though the middle of OUR solar system; this can't be good." Of course, we won't we laughing if/when that guy is proven right. Again, this inconvenient information is suitably set to music sourced from the climax of some old sci-fi thriller or something.
All that apocalyptic shit sets the stage for the title track, on which Wu Tang's Killah Priest drops science in grandiose, mystical fashion. We're primed to believe his hype after all that we've been through on the record already. The album's other rapper cameo comes on the track "Triumph", featuring the unique flow of frequent Spectre associate, and another aQ fave, Sensational. So those are a few of the highlights, but we're digging the whole damned doomed and dubbed-out thing. Oh, and regardless of whether the world is ending soon or not, this record IS limited - to just 250 copies!
Yet another new-to-us sonic mystery from local tape label Black Horizons, this from the oddly monikered Spettro Family, who we know next to nothing about, but whose sound is definitely hitting the spot, a hauntingly ritualistic soundtrack like ambience, that brings to mind classic eighties thrillers, the Carpenter influence is huge, minimal drum machine, swirling analog synths, ominous ambience, clattery tribal percussion, disembodied melodies, swirling primitive FX, plodding and sinister, Goblin is obviously another huge influence, it's nearly impossible to not imagine some grainy VHS trailer while listening to this stuff. Cheesy horns that surface here and there only add to the retro sonic veracity. Chillingly perfect melodies pop up again and again, the sort of musical mantras that get lodged in your head and seem like they MUST have come from some classic horror movie. Way recommended for fans of Umberto, Zombi and all the rest�
Gorgeously packaged, red tapes, gold labels, black on black J-card, all housed in a red case. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Luxury Problems is another stunning progression in the already brilliant catalogue of Andy Stott. The game is fully upped on this one, the dark hues even more melancholic, the fogged hiss and forlorn night drones ever present buried beneath sheets of crumbling percussion and is associated ether-rag induced slo-mo ghost house lamentations. It's a haunted sound for sure, as were his previous two mini albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together, but it seems the bleak vaporous vibes of this Manchester artist are now fully realized. The addition of Allison Skidmore's beautifully woebegone vocals on most of the tracks provides just enough emotional power to really push Stott's vision forward.
Kicking off with "Numb", beautifully dark chords swell underneath Skidmore's plaintive and gorgeous utterances, sounding like that Julee Cruise/Burial collaboration we've all been dreaming of, recorded on a cassette deck and blasted LOUD from some reverberating corner of an abandoned bus station. Sorrowful and droning, the 4-on-the-floor way slowed down, everything blurred out and disintegrated. "Sleepless" is a standout as well, starting with a hissing Zoviet France like syncopated drone, with dubbed out reverb drenched percussion and off-kilter loopy sheets of unraveling hiss, the rhythm track slowly starting to creep in about halfway through. Hitting those drugged out R&B vibes we've been digging so much, a pitched down vocal loop intermingles with the drums, creating a hypnotically swinging, yet dirge like dirt-house stomper. Everything blasted out and fuzzy, the beat goes on, never peaking but developing into a blissed out trance state, time stretched windchimes cascading from left to right as the cut up vocal samples surface from some deep subterranean sonic cavern. Exquisite. "Hatch The Plan" has a field recorded mechanics vibe, starting and ending with what sounds like a rusted squeaking conveyer belt drenched in 'verb, a totally heavy and corroded sub baseline appears. This is one of the more minimal moments of the record. Essentially a bass line, a kick drum, and some percussion, and plenty of space for Skidmore's vocals, which are multilayered to brilliant effect. Elegiac vocal passages double and triple up over this blackened percussive skitter, subtle elements of noisy details peak through the mix, building towards a break in the drums, the angelic chorus of the vocals given full reign in the mix, haunting and sonorous, before the conveyer belt sound reappears and pitches up and up til being left alone, untreated, to cap off the jam. Drugged out and woozy, layers of dirt and skree undulating, altogether creepy, yet still, somehow sublime.
The vibe of the record remains totally consistent throughout, but what's truly great is how Stott finds understated ways to insert some funk into the proceedings. Stott, after all, has some dance floor cred, gained through his garagey bassy alter ego Andrea (also worth checking out is Millie & Andrea, Stott's collab with Miles Whittaker of Demdike Stare), but this is an Andy Stott record proper, so any dance floor tendencies are going to be handled with a handful of bleak dust. The title cut offers the best example of a clever infusion of dance floor tropes. A flickering breakbeat rolls along, slow and low slug swing, stark vocal harmonies commingle with a downtuned & groovy bass guitar line. Suddenly a 'verbed out to the max disco-y conga loop shows up, WAY high in the mix, giving the whole thing a very handmade, mid nineties NYC hip hop by way of Bristol vibe. Cut up and funky, yet with all the forlorn noise dappled feeling emblematic of Stott's sound.
"Up The Box" though, at least rhythmically speaking, may be the greatest departure on the record. It starts as a grinding and mesmerizing caustic drum drone. Again with some serious Zoviet France vibes, reminding us a little of our favorite Demdike Stare moments, the otherworldly percussive grime looping on and on, swirling hissing textures building until suddenly the whole thing turns into a screwed and chopped breakbeat work out! Although dirty and decimated as hell, just a breakbeat and a handful of effects go toward creating this stark rhythmic roller. Finally, "Leaving" caps Luxury Problems with more of Skidmore's beautifully funerary vocal intonations, multilayered and of course with a healthy dose of cavelike reverb, a gloomy gothy synth bass line combined with all the gauzy heavenly texture in these final moments has our collective hearts about to break. SO FUCKING GOOD!
Luxury Problems is definitely Stott's best work to date, which obviously means this is totally essential. The sonic palette here is definitely consistent with all the various releases under his own name, but the addition of the voice adds an incredible layer of emotional depth. Inhabiting a deep and dark nighttime universe, ghostly and mourning, disintegrating and dreary, the perfect soundtrack to those moments of lonely reflection. So utterly recommended! Beautiful Modern Love sleeve design too. (FYI, the vinyl version we had for a moment, but it's now being repressed, we'll list it when we can!)
Longtime aQ pal Chris Johanson (rad artist and Awesome Vistas label head) dropped by the store the other day with just a handful of this special edition release by his current band Sun Foot. As part of an ongoing series called Old News, where the label commissioned bands to make records based on current issues in the news (or rather, not in the news enough!) that are important to them, Sun Foot use their installment to highlight breakdowns in the justice system that inevitably send innocent people to death and for juveniles to be increasingly tried as adults, using the recent execution of Troy Davis as its central focus. Sun Foot, who also count among its members Brian Mumford from the tweaked Americana project, Dragging An Ox Through Water, bring a bluesy shambling dirge of grief and resilience through four tracks that are as ramshackle as they are urgent. Comes with three printed inserts of news clippings and information about the project. These are limited to 300 of which we have 5 and probably cannot get more so act fast if you want one.
We've been meaning to review something from these Texan psychedelic space-kraut heavies for ages now, this one is as good a place to start as any, their latest, a super limited cd-r that finds Sungod traveling the astral plane, and offering up a pretty fair (and extremely varied) sampling of what these guys are capable of, their sound all over the map, but all held together by an underlying kosmische drift, the opener, is a hushed brooding slow build, that wreaths subtle low end shimmer, in clouds of swirling space-aged blips and bloops, total planetarium show trip out, until part way through, when the drums come in, transforming the sound into something much more dense and driving, but still plenty abstract. The second track is a lush expanse of harmonium like drones, pulsing beneath swirling FX and acoustic guitar Appalachia, haunting and meditative, before slipping into the next track, a swirling retro synth groove that would sit petty perfectly alongside the current crop of retro futuristic synth wranglers. Krautrocky and cosmic!
The sound shifts dramatically after that, a sort of slow slithery acoustic blues, all slippery slide, laced with piano, and peppered with empty tin can percussion, which gives way to a heady slab of pulsating spaced out synthscapery, all droney, and Necks-like with skittery free jazz drumming, and delicate piano, under clouds of swirling synths, and from there on out, all bets are off, the band slipping easily from super distorted fuzzy kraut flecked garagerock groove, to super abstract collaged ambience, to blown out blissed out freeform noise, to heavy Hawkwind style spacerock freakout, to hazy, druggy musique concrete, to heavy cosmic synthdrone mesmer.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in a dvd style case, with a full color printed insert.
Now with an expanded lineup, and several tours under their collective belts, this Bay Area black metal / noise outfit offer up their latest missive, their sound continuing to evolve, their mix of blurred noise drenched black buzz and haunting atmospheric ambience skewing toward the former big time.
The opening track introduces Sutekh Hexen at their noisiest, the initial stretch of washed out buzzing blackness giving way to pure face melting black noise, unrelenting and devastating. Which is a bit of foreshadowing, as this might be the group's noisiest record as a whole, at least since their earliest recordings, which is surprising as the last few records found the band growing more and more melodic.
The rest of the side unwinds in blasts of corrosive noise, this time underpinned by low drones and chant like vox, adding some melody and color, however subtle, to the proceedings, everything burred into a Tim Hecker-ish haze. Side one closes with a blast of extremely harsh black metal, the buzz and any semblance of riffage, nearly buried beneath an avalanche of grinding psychedelic noise.
The B side lets Sutekh Hexen flex those soundscaping muscles, at least briefly, opening with a stretch of droned out thrum, a soft black swirl, drifting ominously, only to disappear in a squall of torrential blackness, a wild roiling black hole of sound, that eventually dissipates, allowing the harsh vokills to slip to the fore, then the buried rhythms, but again, it all bleeds into an extended sprawl of black metal murk, woozy and blown out, blurry and dense, trailing off into a cloud of grim black energy.
Latest issue of this kick ass UK heavy music mag. On the cover Electric Wizard ("Boobs, Blood & Badass Riffs!"). Inside Isis, Pig Destroyer, Neurosis, Converge, Anaal Nathrakh, Hexvessel, My Dying Bride, Cauldron and loads more. Including an 'Ask David Vincent from Morbid Angel' advice column! And Terrorizer's version of The Wire's Invisible Jukebox, this month with Max Cavalera of Soulfly, and of course the usual collection of record reviews, live show reports and more.
This month there's the usual free Fear Candy cd, with new tracks from Cradle Of Filth, Anaal Nathrakh, Pig Destroyer, Sylosis, Graveyard, Cauldron, and a bunch more. But also a second free cd, called 'The Thunder From Down Under', a collection of tracks from a bunch of underground Aussie metal bands, most of which we've never heard of! Awesome.
One of our favorite analog electronic prog-hippie jazz-psych records from the magic year of 1971 has finally been given the reissue treatment, and it's a doozy! TONTO stands for "The Original New Timbral Orchestra", the first, and still the largest, multitimbral polyphonic analog synthesizer in the world. Created by Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff, the duo's first outing with their new creation was originally released on jazz flautist, Herbie Mann's Atlantic Records sub-label, Embryo.
The album was so influential that Stevie Wonder collaborated with the duo on several of his most essential recordings of the seventies including Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale. It was also the instrument featured on screen and used by Paul Williams character in Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise! The machine later became a key player in lots of eighties RnB, seemingly miles away from the soundscapery on this first record.
While Zero-Time acted largely as a showcase for what the TONTO could do, it's still a pretty killer record of synthetic cinematic prog groove, subterranean alien library funk and spacey folk electronic ambience. Over six tracks, there are several varying moods from sexy (there's a song called "Jetsex" after all), to blissfully solemn. The opener "Cybernaut" sounds like a movie theme for a sci-fi crime thriller, all foreboding and mysterious, while our favorite track is the floating space raga, "Riversong" which has strange treated vocal modulations that are completely sublime. Recommended!
Latest from weirdo psychedelic sludge pop duo Tweak Bird, whose self titled debut was a HUGE hit around here, and at the time, we compared them to Torche, since they definitely specialized in a similarly hook heavy poppy sludge, and really very little has changed this time around. The record opens with a maddeningly looped vocal, over pulsing synths, collaged melodic fragments and weird voices, panned heavily swooping from speaker to speaker, before the band finally launch into a song proper, which displays much of the stuff we loved about the other record, but here displaying much more of a poppy vibe, still heavy, but not nearly as sludgey, the vocals slipping into near Geddy Lee territory, but the song, CRAZY catchy, a little proggy too, a pretty much perfect blast of short sharp proggy psych pop heaviness that reminds us how much we missed these guys. The follow up is more of the same, buzzing guitars, keening vocals, pounding drums, hooks galore, totally anthemic, the kind of jams that you'll find stuck in your head for days, and we're imagining would whip a pit into a serious prog pop frenzy, assuming there are prog-pop-pits, and if there aren't there sure as shit should be.
The record is short, seven songs, sixteen minutes, but odds are you'll find yourself playing this over and over and over. A new favorite for sure. Heavy pop nerds pay heed!
The last U.S. Girls record, U.S. Girls On Kraak, found Meghan Remy, who IS U.S. Girls, pushing her sound ever/even further from the gnarled low fidelity roots that seemingly defined it, claiming that those lo-fi records were that way based entirely out of necessity. And as we mentioned in that review, she said that if she could, she would make a super glossy commercial pop record. And while it may have been her intention, U.S. Girls On Kraak was most definitely not that record - Gem however IS.
We were actually pretty shocked when we put this one. The record opens with some warped music box melodies, wreathed in weird industrial scrapes, the sound panned woozily from speaker to speaker, so we were thinking that maybe all that talk about glossy pop was a put on, that she had reverted to her early experimental floorcore sound, and were just beginning to luxuriate in those woozy soft noise, when the sound suddenly transforms into something MUCH poppier, and MUCH more polished, simple stately drumming, wheezing organ, and Remy's vocals way up front, soaring dramatically, the vibe very sixties girl group, positioning this new version of U.S. Girls alongside some other Girls, namely Dum Dum Girls, and Best Coast, and while it's not nearly THAT poppy, it definitely sounds like that's what Remy is shooting for. More minimal, and a bit more droney and psychedelic, but ultimately a dreamy organ driven sixties style fuzzy pop, and heck, it definitely suits her. The next track adds some skittery programmed drums, which gives it a bit of a cold wave vibe, but still poppy and almost torch songy, her voice sounding a bit like Zola Jesus, there are horns (or what sounds like horns), some serious girl group vocals, it's weird, and surprising, but cool. Track three might be the straight up poppiest of the bunch, and listening to that, it's hard to conceive of the fracture fucked up sounds on past U.S. Girls records.
"He Who" though might be one of our favorites, harkening back to the more experimental USG recordings, brittle machinelike rhythms, haunting pianos, lots of echo and reverb, cinematic and creepy, darkly dramatic and psychedelic, we could easily listen to a whole record of just that. The rest of the record unfurls similarly (to the poppier opening salvo), and then something weird happens, with Remy seeming to try her hand at different sounds, echo drenched garage pop on "I Don't Understand That Man", or most surprising of all, some big guitar Gary Glitter style classic glam rock on "Slim Baby", or the groovy almost calypso sounding "Down In The Boondocks", and it all sounds pretty great. There's one more short experimental track, all stuttering programmed beats and looped and layered vocal samples, murky and muted, but those moments are few and far in between. The new sound is definitely well removed from the U.S. Girls sound of old, but for fans of Dun Dum Girls, Best Coast, and other sort of sixties girl group jangle pop, this will very likely hit the spot! And who knows, might get some pop kids to check out the way more warped early records too!
The latest from this mysterious dronemusic duo comes courtesy of Oakland label Merz Tapes, and finds Steven Hess (Locrian, Haptic) and Reto Mader (RM74) once again, crafting haunting, cinematic black ambience that sounds like the score for some bleak futuristic dystopian sci-fi noir, or some Satanic strain of twentieth century classical music. Dense roiling rumbles, a tense ominous swirl-scape, peppered with the clang and clatter of abstract percussion, the swells gradually growing more and more intense, until deep resonant pulses surface throughout, a strange heartbeat like throb buried beneath this softly caustic sonic tide, woozy and washed out. A hazy Jeck like arrangement of ebb and flow. Heaving undulations that blur texture and timbre, and create a sound that's extremely physical, emanating a strange sort of dark energy. Soon those black swells are joined by soaring string like sweeps, minor key and melancholy, bringing to mind a more dense and driving Disintegration Loops, haunting cyclical melodies that seem the hover just beneath the roiling swells, the whole thing meant to be a sonic addendum to the awesome Fog Tapes lp on Hinterzimmer.
Soon the swells recede, leaving just a whirring organ thrum, suspended in a field of tinkling chimes and glimmering metallic shimmer, peppered with bits of glitch and hum, malfunctioning electronics, lending an air of some strange ghost in the machine. Until the drums proper come lumbering in, the sound again transforming, this time into some sort of slo-mo abstract minimal doom, the drums a mutant dirge, while all around, the organ warbles, the tinkling chimes, bursts of cymbal crash, streaks off feedback, clanging metal, detuned string plucks, all seem to morph into some sort of alien machine music, the various clangs and clatters gradually coalescing into a heavily reverbed, deliberately plonked piano melody, pounded out on some old broken piano, adding to the feel of decay, the sound lurching and woozy, everything wreathed in soft billows of chordal thrum, and all gradually sinking into a blackened crumbling sonic morass. Intense, but also intensely beautiful.
The flipside is a bit more buzzy and blackened. A thick sprawl of undulating thrum churns over keening melodies drifting in the murk, fragmented voices swirl and shimmer, a sort of chopped and screwed shoegaze doom crawl, the builds and builds to something much noisier, a gristly squall of soaring tones and tangled flurries of riff like distorto-crumble, all over a haze of synth like whorls, the rhythms driving and propulsive, yet somehow simultaneously bleary and blurry and washed out, after a frenzied coda, the sound settles into a placed, near tranquil outro, a gloriously mesmerizing Caretaker-ish stretch of soft focus, cinematic haze.
Beautifully packaged in a swank multiple paneled J-card, and yeah, most likely VERY VERY LIMITED.
Who knew? Back in the sixties, not all the folk singers were left-wing pinko peaceniks. Apparently, there were a few "counter-counter-culture" folkies strumming and singing, in much the same style as the more popular likes of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, but with a reactionary, not revolutionary, agenda. Singing songs of patriotism and anti-Communism, three folk troubadours for the "Silent Majority" - Janet Greene, Tony Dolan, and Vera Vanderlaan - appear here, on tracks from releases circa 1965-'68, that now sound quite quaint and corny, and maybe did back then too. Leave it to The Omni Recording Corporation to come up with a collection like this! It's both amusing (in a kind of Stephen Colbert kitsch sort of way), and of nostalgic, historical interest. Which brings up a point - it helps if you know stuff like what the S.D.S. was, and who Alger Hiss was, to fully appreciate these songs. Though everybody will get the jokes about hippies and hygiene! Many of the songs here are passionate and heartfelt ("Cry The Beloved Country", "Remember Bloody Budapest"); others are humorous, both intentionally and otherwise. Tony Dolan's "Abolish, Abolish!", which is actually in support of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, is quite Tom Lehrer-esqe in its tone of sarcastic, ironic humor ("Now it calls the Reds destructive, they're not that at all, they're actually very constructive, take a look at the Berlin Wall"). His "Join The S.D.S." is like that too, with one line being "They're the soiled young men, who fight for liberty / they know all the four-letter words, except S-O-A-P". Har har har.
Definitely an amusing novelty, and perhaps a great gift for some older person who might actually appreciate the sentiments expressed (like, your cranky grandpa who voted for Barry Goldwater?). However, we're not sure how many times WE'RE gonna want to hear a song like, say, Vanderlaan's "Modern Paul Revere", a paean to then-governor Ronald Reagan!! Still, lots of chuckles the first few times through, and of course it's packaged with typical Omni care, including fascinating & detailed liner notes, plus vintage graphics from the original releases by these obscure, conservative folkies. Anyone into the politics and culture of the era, should find this cd both interesting and entertaining.
For those who missed out on the super limited demo cassette from this SF lo-fi noise pop / post punk outfit, four of the tracks from that tape, have been re-recorded with a full band for this 7", and sound even better now. As we mentioned in our review of the now out of print tape, VC were born from late great punk pop weirdos the Sopors, who basically went mostly unheard outside of their little scene (which also included tUMULt pop heroes the Ovens!). And while Violent Change, at the time of that tape, was essentially a solo record by Sopors mainman Matt Bleyle, has since then, become a proper band, and now also includes Tony from the Ovens. And all of the above mentions of the Ovens is not for nothing, cuz Violent Change definitely has the same sort of pop vibe as the Ovens, but where the Ovens take the Beatles and Weezer and the Champs, Violent Change are a much more twisted and lo-fi proposition, an obvious comparison is definitely Guided By Voices, in fact, we'd imagine fans of GBV would flip for these guys, who kick out perfect pop jams at the drop of a hat, but don't shy away from getting more punky, or twisting a perfectly good pop song into a gloomy chunk of deeply crooned post punk dirgery. That said, the bulk of this four song 7" is some of THEE catchiest lo-fi pop you're bound to hear EVER, with excursions into blasting punk rock, noisy freakouts, and a moment or two here and there that position VC as a dead ringer for the Ovens, but the whole thing is way more fuzzy, and ramshackle and gloriously lo-fi, and punky and catchy and is definitely convincing us that Violent Change might be our (and possibly your) new favorite local band!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, includes a download coupon as well.
Full length number two (or three, counting the recent Carrion lp) from this Skullflower offshoot, which finds SF mainman Matthew Bower once again joined by his partner in recent Skullflower outings Samantha Davies, and once again, the two deliver some sort of warped ritualistic black noise experimentation, even further removed from past Voltigeurs outings, no distinctly black metal buzz, or perhaps not gone, but buried and blurred into almost unrecognizable shapes, and much of the 'guitarnoise' seems to have been reshaped into pure noise. The opener here is like the Caretaker via Merzbow, a long stretch of blunted white noise, cascading sheets of gristle and hiss over murky melodies, and what sounds like a metal band playing down the hall, all record surreptitiously and recorded onto a wax cylinder. The level is low, the sounds weirdly hushed, and not overly harshed, but cranked, one can catch glimpses of what must be going on within Voltigeurs' psychedelic sonic squall.
The second track is much heavier, and the guitar returns to the fore, but instead of riffing, just emits noxious clouds of buzz and grinding low end, at least in the beginning, but part way through, the tone changes dramatically, and the sound shifts, and morphs into some seriously dense black buzz, occasionally coalescing into strange sonic shapes, a shadowy impressionistic avant black metal ambience, doused in blacknoise buzz.
The rest of the record follows a similar path, soaring frenzied fast picked melodies, are laid beneath, a crackly chaotic cloud of crumbling blackness, which on the surface sounds like pure noise, but reveals itself as strangely soothing and hypnotic, blissed out buzz drifts through pockets of blistering freenoise shimmer, underpinned by heaving weirdly melancholy melodies, full on psychedelic guitarnoise blowouts unfurl ever shifting layers, the guitars tangled and serpentine, and finally, a blast of black metal buzz, blurred into an ambient noisescape, that again, mirrors the Caretaker, if the DJ in his old time ballroom was spinning old scratchy Darkthrone 45s and limited Merzbow lathecuts. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Long overdue collection from this UK black metal horde, gathering up a bunch of various way-too-limited demos, as well as a handful of unreleased tracks, the sound raw and seriously lo-fi, melding lurching doomed creeps to punkish almost D-beat pound and the occasional bout of furious black buzz.
But part of what we like about these guys (this guy?), is how stripped down and Spartan the sound can be, the drums are simple and workmanlike, the guitars buzz, but not blackly, more almost sort of jangly, check out the first track here, which begins as a haunting darkly melodic dirge, clean guitar melodies draped over murky buzz and doomy drum plod, before exploding into something much faster, but which in some weird way, sounds almost punk, or even noise poppy, minus the productions, and the demonic croaked vokills, this could easily be some weird indie rock outfit, but with the vox, and the swirling low fidelity buzz, it ends up being more melodic BM. And it's that mix that sort of defines the sound, and actually is a hallmark of much of the black metal we like, that stripped off the overt black metal tropes, could be some weird murky doom pop or some experimental noise rock. The second track here is a gloriously minimal murk rock blowout, that even with the vocals, still sounds more like some metallic cold wave oddity than pure black metal.
The second demo here (starting at track 8), dials up the muddy, murky, dirge, and takes all that poppiness and buries it, at least on the first track, a lumbering monstrous black doom trudge that kills, and that sonic filth spills over into the rest of the tracks, the sound way more black and grim, but again, close listening, it's easy to hear the melody and more traditional songcraft that lurks beneath the surface, whether intentional or not. The two previously unreleased tracks are the blackest of the bunch, with the second of the two boasting some super sick vokills, and a soaring majestic arrangement that manages to be both dirgey and doomy, epic and intense. The final track is from some comp and is definitely the weirdest one here, with big booming drums, super distorted guitar buzz, belched harsh vox, the whole thing confusional and stumbly and gloriously chaotic.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
On the cover this month: the reclusive Scott Walker, who gives a rare interview to discuss his forthcoming new album! Also: dubstepper Pinch (being tested by the 'Invisible Jukebox'), remembrances of the late saxophonist David Ware, a Mexico City scene report, and much more, including the usual tons of reviews of new music. Oh, and also a Part II to last issue's interview with improv great Peter Brotzmann...
