Usually when the description of a band is too good to be true, it actually is. We can't even count the times we've gotten descriptions of bands to check out that read like "Nirvana, with John Bonham behind the kit, playing ELP style prog epics, but in the style of Sabbath, all remixed by the Caretaker", okay, that actually does sound amazing, but our point exactly, that's not even remotely possible, and if it is, we promise to listen to nothing else forever! But in most cases, that hyperbolic and entirely inaccurate description ends up being essentially worthless, as not a single part of the description, applies to any element of the music. So when this long lost slab of classic California post punk was described to us as Chrome's Half Machine Lip Moves meets Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets, we were most definitely suspicious, and skeptical. And when we threw it on, we were even more confused, the record opening with a track called "Bach Variations", which is in fact Bach, but played in the midst of a wild thunderstorm, pelted with crashes of thunder, wreathed in the sound of rainfall, lots of tape hiss and sonic detritus, it's weird and not a little bit Caretaker-y, and then "Japanese Forest" comes in, and while we're no less confused, we're into this big time. No surprise that this had been making the blog rounds for ages. Apparently this was Null & Void's third record, and was rejected at the time for being too weird, which is tragic, cuz it's so good, but they were right, it IS weird, seriously warped and gloriously fucked up. "Japanese Forest", adds a distinctly Asian melody, to moaning slo-mo synth throbs, and a laconic laid back vocal, the result is haunting and beautiful and darkly poppy. But then as soon as "When I Fell Down" started up, that whole Chrome/Eno thing didn't seem so far fetched, we'd maybe throw in some Bowie as well. Glammy and swaggery, fractured and lo-fi, total warts and all recording, streaks of feedback, sudden stop/starts, all adding a distinctive whatthefuck factor to the proceedings.
"Einstein's Theory Of Relativity, No. 2" is another creepy industrial sci-fi glam ballad, that has a total Eno / Chrome / Bowie vibe, and is laced with awesomely weird bursts of white noise static, disrupting an otherwise sweet slab of garage glam swagger, which then slows down into a woozy washed out psychedelic echo drenched dirge, before big booming drums start things up again.
Check out "Our New Life", which might be the 'hit' here, way better produced, and with a killer pounding new wave / punk rock vibe, with swirling synths and fuzzed out bass, the song splintering into a weird sing-songy sort-of-chorus part way through, the buzzing synths mirroring the vox, before the whole thing explodes into a serious chunk of blown out Warm Jets style blissout, before a final bit of drum driven glam rock croon. So twisted, and so fucking great!
And it never lets up, the rest of the record flitting from classic glammy weirdo pop, to groovy, almost funky grooviness, to almost Suicide like drone-pop, to free form synth freakouts, to violin flecked classic rock super jams, rife with progged out organs, tangled psych guitars, and shredding leads, before finishing off with the three part songsuite "A Dream Wah!", which begins as a piano ballad, before splintering into some sort of avant glam-psych breakdown, before shifting into a garage rock shuffle, all soft focus jam band groove, which quickly devolves into a dark sprawl of ominous crooning, only to blossom into one more glamrock stomp, before fading into a weird collaged outro, sort of bookending the rainstorm outro, all tape hiss, and found sounds, murky melodies, and mysterious voices, disappearing into the background of hiss and hum.
Reissue of the year hands down!!! Absolutely essential and totally recommended!!!
Finally! Here it is, Andee's all time favorite Nurse With Wound record EVER, finally repressed after so many years of being out of print, and now coupled with another amazing (and tangentially related) album, Scrag! Both of these albums date back to the late '80s, with A Sucked Orange originally released on vinyl in 1989 (and later released on cd, although that version suffered from the dreaded bit-rot), and Scrag as a cassette in 1987 (later anthologized on the NWW boxset for Vinyl-On-Demand). There are three tracks which overlap the two album including both opening tracks - "Pleasant Banjo With Irritating Squeak" - which is pretty much exactly what it says it is, although that banjo does sound a lot like a ukulele playing a simple melody butting up against an irritatingly honking toy. It's all very much of the Sylvie-N-Babs ethos of jokester comedy for Nurse With Wound; and like most all of the tracks on A Sucked Orange, it lasts for just about a minute. Stapleton's wife and oft-collaborator Diana Rogerson then belts out shrill vocals wrapped in demonic pitch-shifting and wild-eyed production tricks on the next couple of tracks for A Sucked Orange sandwiching a shimmeringly beautiful ambient interlude, which is easily the most traditionally beautiful thing NWW has ever produced, one we wished existed elsewhere in album length form. The longest track is "I'm A Frayed Knot" with bowed atonal stings undulating over delay-rippled percussion, which are an obvious precursor to his fascination with Perez Prado and mambo rhythms. Stapleton delves into Reichian head-fuckery with the tape-delay / phase-shifting sample kaleidoscope of the two "Rockette Morton" tracks, before eventually making his way to the vaudevillian piano ditty "This Piano Can't Think" a return to that warped, skewed NWW musical humor, but then slipping back again into a gorgeous drone piece in "Crack Up" that's painfully short at one minute and fifty-one seconds, that stretched out to album length would have fans of the Caretaker and Tim Hecker and William Basinski wetting themselves (much like that beautiful interlude earlier on). An intentionally schizophrenic record of disparate cut-ups that somehow displays a strangely compelling and compellingly strange logic through all of the cyclical patterns of form and shape, undercut by detours and dead-ends. And really what should be a frustrating hodge podge mish mash reveals itself as something so much more, like staring at a series of colored dots, only to step back and have the whole beautiful image revealed.
As mentioned above, Scrag opens the same way as A Sucked Orange, before ushering in the pounding rhythm and scabrous metallic feebback of "Wisecrack" with Diana Rogerson belting out another skewered, tortured rant. It's actually one that she reprises on one of her Chrystal Belle Scrodd albums. Angular musique concrete collaged from blunt serialist phrases, jagged rhythms, non-sensical nursery rhymes, and discordant church organs comprise much of the rest of Scrag, making it a worthy companion to the demented, haunting, and down-right fucked-up and bafflingly beautiful A Sucked Orange. Get it now!
This just might be the perfect stocking stuffer this year for that music nerd in your life. A gorgeous collection of old school style trading cards, each one featuring as the title suggests, an obscure giant of the acoustic guitar, just check out the artists included: Peter Walker, Sandy Bull, James Blackshaw, Harry Taussig, Steffen Basho-Junghans, George Stavis, Robbie Basho, Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Davy Miller, Richard Crandell, Sean Smith, Peter Lang, William Eaton and more more more. In fact, it more than lives up to its title, as we didn't recognize a whole bunch of these obscure giants, and even some of the ones we did know, we weren't all that familiar with: Sam McGee, Lena Hughes, William Tyler, Nathan Salsburg, Daniel Bachman, Craig Ventresco, T. Damien, Richard Osborn, Scott Witte, Wilburn Burchette, Suni McGrath, and still so many others. The art by Seattle artist Shana Cleveland is gorgeous, and the cards are housed in a nice heavy printed box, and each card has an extensive and detailed history of each artist on the back of the card, along with various recordings and other info, so you can track down recordings by all of these folks. We only wish it had come with a cd featuring tracks by some or all of the artists on the cards, but as it is, it's pretty goddang great, and like we mentioned, the perfect size for that special someone's stocking!
Latest sprawling collection of next level avant guitar shreddery from Mr. Mick Barr, he of black metal horde Krallice, spazzed out angular mathcore duo Crom-Tech, his sometime drum machine driven solo project Octis, and of course our beloved Ocrilim, another solo vehicle for multi tracked solo guitar, and whose sound is positioned somewhere between maddeningly repetitive Reichian/Riley-ian experimental guitarscapery, and black metal riffery sans everything but the guitar, which ultimately amounts to almost the same thing, soaring, epic, frenzied, tangled guitar insanity. And as much as we love all of Barr's various projects, we find ourselves returning to Ocrilim the most, and while, as we've mentioned in other reviews, most folks find much of Barr's output difficult, bordering on unlistenable, Ocrilim is fantastically mesmerizing, hypnotically rhythmic, lushly textured, intensely frantic, but somehow weirdly listenable, so much so that we find ourselves constantly pushing repeat, even though the majority of these songs are 20-30 minutes long. It's so easy to get lost in Barr's dense dizzying guitarscapes, and the tracks here function both as background music, a swirling psychedelic blur, that bleeds into a buzzing backdrop to whatever you're doing, and as rich fodder for active listening, an impossible intricate collection of modern maximalism composition, one that pushes the listener's limits in terms of sonic endurance, but also in an understanding of the music's varied complexities. The fact that a frantic sprawl of rapid fire notes can blossom into a soaring swirl of black metal style buzz and vice versa only makes it that much cooler, and perhaps even demonstrates the innate avant elements in black metal. A sequel of sorts to the first Annwn release, which came out on Hydra Head, these tracks were recorded back in 2007, and have not been released until now.
Barr put this out on his own label, and of course the cover features Barr's distinctive sci-fi line-drawing art, and as you might imagine, there aren't too many of these, it's LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
New on local label the Flenser, two of SF's best one man black metal bands join forces, Palace of Worms offer up nearly a whole new record, while Mastery (whose insane double disc demo collection was released recently on tUMULt) kicks down an 8 plus minute sprawl of blackened metal insanity.
PoW launch straight into it, starting things off with some surprisingly classic metal riffery, loads of melody, lots of texture, and a cool woozy breakdown, before the second track blackens considerably, erupting right out of the gate with gouts of black buzz and blasting beats, but even here, the sound soon grows blurry and doomy and weirdly psychedelic, PoW's sound seeming to drift between the two, classic black riffery, and tripped out doominess, culminating in the super chuggy black psych dirgery of closer "Temple Of Failure" which weds churning riffage and black buzz, to swoonsome chordal swells, so fucking cool!
Mastery counters with something much more gnarled and frantically gnarled, "Egregorian Synapse" is a warped slab of lighting speed sci-fi blackness, that slips easily from dense blast-buzz to twisted tangles of melodies, the sound never letting up for the whole 8+ minutes, but constantly flitting between different arrangements and sounds, like some warped ADD black metal mutation, the rhythms too, blasting furiously one second, stuttering chaotically the next, the guitars wild warped squalls, the riffs slippery, slithery, warbly and blackly psychedelic, the track fading out mid frenzy, leaving us to imagine that this is only a fragment of the endless epic from which it was so clearly culled.
Orilla Oscura is the latest solo record from Jon Porras, former aQ-er, and one half of dronedoom duo Barn Owl. It's Porras' second release this year (along with Black Mesa), but this one takes Porras's signature sound, all smoldering twang flecked drift, and haunting droned out mesmer, and applies it to something much more high concept, and the results are pretty fantastic.
Using old tapes as the basis of Orilla Obscura, Porras slowed down and manipulated the source tapes, adding effects and various textures, and then approached the compositions as if the guitar was a tool with which to explore these ghostly sounds, the haunting mysteries revealed by these old tapes, do in fact make the perfect background for Porras' haunting sonic ruminations, so much so that in many places it's difficult to tell what's guitar and what's tape, the various sounds bleeding into one another, long passages of somnambulant drift, give way to some soaring, almost shredding (at least the barn Owl / Porras version of shredding) distorted guitar blissout, lush distorted layers of guitar aimed heavenward, quickly drifting back to earth and settling into another sprawl of slo-mo soft psych drift. The tapes seem to provide texture as much as anything, adding plenty of hiss and hum, giving the sound a rough around the edges feel, and a mysterious warmth. Divine and dreamy, and beautifully ghostly.
To be fair, the sounds here are not hugely removed from Porras' other solo work, or as Elm, or even his work with Barn Owl, but it is a stunningly subtle progression, as he continues to push the boundaries of his own explorative guitar ambience, continuing to delve deeper into the dark and dusty corners of abstract psychedelia, and with each record further refining the sonic essence of shadow and light, rendered here in lush, sweeping epics of spectral guitardrone and heaving swells of warm chordal shimmer. So nice.
Housed in a super heavy full color gatefold jacket. Includes a download coupon as well!
This duo of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, aka Raime, have conjured up this strange and mysterious slab of dark brooding black energy, equal parts minimal electronica, bleak black ambience, abstract techno and avant sound design. Right off the bat, we were reminded of last week's Record Of The Week, Roly Porter's Aftertime, as well as the grim, sinister electronic soundscapes of Ben Frost, not to mention recent techno favorites from Shed, Terence Dixon and Stefan Goldmann. In fact, in some ways, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line is like a bizarre hybrid of all of those. Casting doomic plod as stripped down electronic skitter, reminding us of Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore, creating heaving slabs of rumbling crumbling blackened heaviness, that sound like Wolf Eyes score for an orchestra, transforming mutant strains of dub and jungle into creeping expanses of sinister stutter, and stretching dubstep bass warble into droned out layers, and wrapping them around haunting sprawls of cinematic menace.
The record almost plays out like a soundtrack or score, the various pieces blurring into one another, the most disparate, still sonically linked, from the opening rumbles, like some blackened hellish noise-drone, drifting beneath distant keening melodies, laced with shards of grinding glitch, all underpinned by ominous minor key melodies, gradually dissipating, leaving a sprawl of looped skitter, beneath a cloud of ominous chordal thrum the vibe dark and doomy, subtly rhythmic, a little bit dubby, the drumming splintering into near industrial crunch, with the background sounds never ceasing their woozy drift. That drift transforming into the aforementioned Bohren-like creep, minimal and cinematic, which over the course of the next two tracks, begins to slip back into something much more techno, almost jungle sounding, but somehow remains restrained, the rhythmic heft more implied, a muted pulse and stutter behinds warm swirls of melody and dark fragments of caustic crunch.
From there on out, the sound unfurls and expands, slipping from Arvo Part like choral majesty, to harrowing tense rhythm flecked drone, to lush orchestral, industrial shimmer, the various pulses and crashes, groans and clatters, gorgeously rendered, the sound design lush and lovely, while also being harsh and weirdly alien, but all blurred and woven into Raime's haunting moody mesmer.
Here's a super obscure blast of long lost Southern garage punk caveman drug rock blooz stomp from a short lived band, who existed for a brief stretch way back in the late nineties, featuring members that would go on to play in aQ beloved weirdo avant black metal outfit the Mausoleums. But don't be expecting any tripped out black buzz or pop flecked post BM trippiness, this sound of Sexual Confusion was something else entirely, primal, and raw, primitive and fucking fierce, this dense squall of swampy, swaggery punk rock energy was written and recorded when the band members were just 17, and was originally released as a cd-r, limited to just 30 copies and sold at one of the few shows the band actually played, including several at Christian coffee houses, where they would wait 'til right before they played to announce the name of their band, and according to the scant info about these guys we could dig up, one of those shows was the Tampa Bay Oi! fest, where the skinheads were most definitely not amused.
Citing Black Flag, the Godz, the Germs, the Fugs, Teengenerate, the Stooges, 13th Floor Elevators and the like as influences, we also hear shades of Green River, the Lyres, Wipers, Aussie outfits like the Scientists, Feedtime, King Snake Roost, pretty heady stuff for a bunch of deep South teens, but these guys pulled it off big time, laying down a pretty convincing sprawl of filthy, furious, sweat soaked, bloody lipped, thud rock, all swaggery, heavily flanged guitars, murky caveman drum pound, whiny snarled vox, slipping easily from organ driven old school garage rock creep to stripped down, lo-fi dirge pop to full on punk rock, fist in the face, fuck you up and get high, skull caving pound. The tracks laced with wild psychedelic synth squiggles, churning swampy bass buzz harsh howled vocals, their debt to classic sixties garage rock jangle on display big time, but all fused to some serious furious punk rock energy, and further warped by the occasional stretch of druggy acoustic blues, tweaked and twisted tangles of angular, atonal psychedelia, brutal bursts of near hardcore pummel, super rad backwards guitar, spaced out sitar raga style buzz, and long droned out layers of undulating high end shimmer, but ultimately all of that weirdness is only window dressing for a pretty serious set of songs, that still sound pretty fucking bad ass more than a decade later.
In addition to the original 'album', this limited reissue tacks on a handful of demos, which in most cases we would expect to just be shittier versions of the proper songs, but here, the tracks sound possibly even better in demo form, super raw, even more lo-fi and blown out, wasted and murky, the sort of filthy drugged, out, busted up sonic filth these guys were made to wallow in.
Remains Unchanged is a sort of alternate history of UK minimalist outsider rock weirdos The Shadow Ring, gathering up 20 never before heard tracks, spanning a decade, culled from recording sessions for pretty much every Shadow Ring record, from 1993's City Lights to 2003's I'm Some Songs, with stops at Lindus, Lighthouse, Hold Onto I.D., Wax-Work Echoes and more in-between. The first record starts off with the late great John Peel, opining on The Shadow Ring, explaining that he doesn't really love them that much, but for some reason, can't stop listening to them, which definitely gets to the heart of the 'Ring's mysterious music, although most of the folks we know, do in fact LOVE pretty much everything about these guys. And those fans will NEED this for sure, and even though it's essentially a collection of unreleased outtakes, it's not a bad intro to the group either.
The first record starts off with a long stretch of detuned acoustic guitar and sporadic percussion, Graham Lambkin doing his weird spoken word croon thing, but then all of a sudden, the song devolves into something else entirely, the music drifting abstractly along, while Lambkin talks about seafood, and some friend whose a vegetarian, a weird bit of casual conversation, that somehow sound perfect in the context of the song.
And so it goes, the first record is mostly acoustic, super lo-fi, lots of primitive weirdness, barely there rhythms, occasional bursts of super distorted drumming, the sound super abstract and dirgey, billows of angular guitar shimmer, towards the end there's some wobbly synth squelch and primitive electronics, that hint at the new direction of the group.
Which is fully explored on the second lp, covering the later years, unfurling woozy electronic melodies over dreamy slowed down samples, pitch shifted vox, abstract droned out drifts, minimal rhythmic noise accompanied by strange intoned vocals, sounding a bit like a more spare Will Over Matter, finishing off with a long stretch of warbly dreaminess that might be the prettiest thing we've heard from these guys.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, housed in a heavy full color gatefold, and includes a massive poster, with an awesome early shot of the 'Ring performing / recording in what looks like somebody's apartment.
An obscure little band called The Rolling Stones is featured on the cover of this new issue of the UK retro-minded mag Shindig! Of course, we're talking the Stones circa 1967, at their most psychedelic, not today's inexplicably still at it old age pensioners.
There's lots more of course in this big colorful magazine: Family, Ray Stinnett, Gary Farr, Ian Hunter, the Crusher label, Kevin Coyne's Siren, their 2012 writer's poll (Best New Album: Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovell), and plenty else besides, including the usual load of reviews.
Another excellent installment in the ongoing series of classic horror score vinyl reissues from UK label Death Waltz. So far we've seen some of our favorite soundtracks get the deluxe reissue treatment: Escape From New York, Halloween II, Halloween III, Zombi 2, Prince Of Darkness, heavy on the John Carpenter for sure, even some soundtracks we hadn't heard of before like Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue. And now we have Let The Right One In, easily one of the best modern vampire movies, and notable in the Death Waltz catalog for being the first modern score (with more apparently on the way), and even beyond that, it's a strange fit sonically as well, as Johan Soderqvist's score is much more of a traditional, lush symphonic big budget Hollywood movie score, but it's still a good one, and for folks who've seen the film, the cues here will immediately evoke some iconic images from the film. But even if you haven't seen the movie, the music here is quite beautiful, and stirring, soaring swoonsome strings, minor key melodies, darkly emotional, haunting and melancholic, long passages of brooding and mesmerizing minimalism, with tracks like "The Slaughter" and "Hiding The Body", as the titles and the corresponding scenes in the film might suggest, unfurling as much darker, atonal affairs, adding dissonance, and creating tense / intense dronescapes, laced with subtle percussion, clouds of cymbal shimmer, moaning brass, delicate crystalline pianos, all set amidst softly roiling billows of low end thrum, sounding more like something you might here on Type or Miasmah. And like some of our other favorite scores, there are recurring melodic motifs, and Soderqvist deftly creates the sort of gorgeous haunting melodic themes that get lodged in your head, and become forever linked with the mood and emotions of the film.
There are a few tracks that border on the maudlin, it is after all a big time symphonic score, and to be fair those moments make perfect sense in the context of the film, but the majority of the score is a much darker, and more ominously brooding affair, which does make it in the end, a pretty excellent match over all for the Death Waltz series.
And like the rest of the Death Waltz lps, the record comes housed in that super distinctive black and blue bordered Death Waltz sleeve, with a new original painting, depicting the main character, sitting alone, in the snow, on the jungle gym in front of a dilapitated apartment complex, beneath a black sky. Includes a printed inner sleeve, liner notes by both Soderqvist and cover artist Candice Tripp, as well as a large A2 sized poster of the cover art.
Out of nowhere comes this grimy slab of murky, sci-fi, synth kraut, cold wave, psych dub weirdness, that sounds a bit like former aQ ROTW-ers Fabulous Diamonds gone cold wave, or a way more blissed out and krautrocky Soft Moon, it's like some mutant strain of futuristic Euro disco, heavily dubbed, and then reimagined as the soundtrack for some dystopian post apocalyptic future age. A woozy, blurred landscape of pulsating squelches, arpeggiated melodies, lo-fi rhythms, lush space age synth swells, and hazy, washed out vox, dripping in echo and reverb and delay, gauzy and ethereal and almost dreampoppy one second, super dubbed out and near psychedelic the next.
The songs here less verse-chorus-verse, that a single looped melody over a near static groove, locked into endless cylical sprawls, super tranced out and utterly mesmerizing.
Stacian hails from Milwaukee, but could just as well be have been transmitting these sounds via tachyon beams from some mysterious planet, in an alternate universe, and from a wholly other timeline, it definitely fits sonically alongside outfits like the above mentioned Fabulous Diamonds, and it has a distinctly Carpenter / Goblin vibe, not to mention that whole modern retro Brooklyn cold wave thing, but Stacian adds a heaping dose of murky minimalism, with some of the tracks ditching the vocals completely, and oozing into a sort of zoned out space-kraut dirgey, while other tracks blossom into impossibly catchy near poppiness. Songs like "Almos Telos Tenoste", almost sound like something Joe Meek might have whipped up his mad scientist kitchen/recording studio/laboratory, while tracks like "Formida" anchor near weightless synth simmer, to a lurching robo-kraut rhythm, while vocals swirl and spin over the top, Stacian's throaty croon dubbed to high heaven and sent careening into the ether.
And the whole record in fact splits the difference between the two, pulsing, pounding, percolating, motorik and mesmerizing, a sort of warped electro synth-pop run through a bank of malfunctioning electronics, and played back by a cyborg backing band. It's not hard to imagine Stacian, dressed in a strange metallic gown, hovering above an elevated dais, in front of the cosmos, spinning darkly behind her in the distance, while all around her, shadowy machine-like shapes churn and grind, gears spinning, lights blinking, a primitive futuristic symphony, unfurling wasted zoner kraut-pop gems and loosing them into space, left to glimmer and glisten in a sky full of dying stars.
The cd version tacks on FIVE bonus tracks, which while retaining the same sort of cosmic kraut-murk energy, are way more lo-fi, and much more propulsive, the sound brittle and tinny, the synths buzzing over skittery robotic grooves, a brief songsuite of melancholic kraut-synth space pop, that while sonically not as lush and fully realized as the record proper, might just contain the catchiest jams of all, check out the closer "Micro-Trauma", which will get lodged in your mechanical brain after one listen, and gloriously gum up the works. WAY recommended.
aQ-beloved, all-instrumental metal/jazz/punk/prog power trio Stinking Lizaveta just won't quit. Thank God. Year in and year out, they make genius records, tour tirelessly (playing to perhaps not excessively large but always extremely enthusiastic audiences - naturally, since they're one of thee BEST live bands you're ever gonna see!), and just keep getting better and better. They have a well-deserved cult following (folks you know who you are, of course you don't need to read this review, just know there's a new SL album and come get it!!) that should be getting bigger with every record and tour. This album, their lucky seventh, is especially representative of the band's dedication and will. 'Cause earlier this year, Stinking Lizaveta's badass drummer Cheshire Augusta was struck by a hit and run driver while riding her bicycle in the band's hometown of Philadelphia. Fortunately, she survived the accident but had to endure surgery and painful therapy. But did that stop her from completing this album, and going out on tour a few months later? No sir!
If you're not yet familiar with the magic of Stinking Lizaveta, what this telepathic trio can do with abundant energy, incredible chops, and endless creativity, well please pick this up and listen (also, go see 'em perform if you get the chance 'cuz as all who've seen 'em will acknowledge, no matter how good they are on album, live is even better). Along with drummer Cheshire, the brothers Yanni and Alexi Papadopoulos (on guitar and upright electric bass, respectively) bow to no one in terms of majestic math-metal musicianship, crafting tracks that somehow meld together classic rock bombast, atmospheric post rock vibes, and jazzier, noirish moodiness. Plenty of heaviness, but also so much feeling and emotion and lighter moments of great beauty. And of course, no singing, none needed! While every member of this tight unit are virtuoso players, special mention must be made of Yanni's sheer sinuous psychedelic guitar heroics and his ripping riffs galore. He's a master, of "we're not worthy" caliber. There's something downright spiritual about his tremulous, ecstatic playing - and the music of Stinking Liz in general.
Ok, that's (almost) enough superlatives. Let's just say that Stinking Lizaveta's eighteen years and counting career of kicking ass in their utterly unique fashion are fully embodied here. Heck this has a bunch of our favorite Stinking Liz jams on it yet. As always, we know their fans will want this, but we really want to induct more new folks into the Stinking Liz fanbase. So let's say, did you dig the latest Six Organs Of Admittance? Well try this out too, it takes certain instrumental elements of that to whole 'nother level. Or, how 'bout a cross between Golden Void and The Fucking Champs? Sound good? Here it is, but better! Then mix in both Black Sabbath and Dave Brubeck (RIP). Yup, if you can imagine, it's in here.
And once again, this boasts a powerful production job from Sanford Parker (the switch they made on their previous opus Sacrifice And Bliss, from longtime engineer Steve Albini to Sanford P was, as it turned out, a pretty good one). Though we said the live SL experience can't be really captured in a recording, this comes damn close, especially if you play it LOUD! Includes 2 cd-only bonus tracks.
Tape number two from this local one man band, who as we mentioned in our review of his first tape, has an awesomely skewed take on black metal, as is evidenced again here, on the haunting delictae opening, a lilting melody that is repeated over and over, creating a trancelike mood, before the buzzing guitars swoop in, but again, in keeping with the warped blackness, the guitars here are muted and washed out and weirdly quiet, a hazy buzzy blur, undulating and pulsating, beneath bellowed vokills, the drums, if there are any, absolutely buried beneath a blackened haze, which is how the whole tape plays out, a blurry sprawl of droned out buzzscapes, the drums occasionally making an appearance, but revealing themselves as more of a distant buried pulse, the vocals too, here and there leap to the top of the mix, a wild monstrous demonic croak, the music still blurred in the background, the result is somewhere between a super raw, ultra lo-fi rehearsal tape, and some sort of avant experimental blackness, either way, we dig it a LOT, and we're imaging most of you into weirdo black metal will find this tranced out black metal minimalism right up your alley.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered!
Besides having one of the best band names EVER, Aussie punks Taco Leg also kick out some serious, and seriously twisted jams. Twelve tracks in less that twenty minutes, of raw, low-fi, post punk garage rock radness, simple riffing, stumbling rudimentary drumming, and tranced out monochromatic vocals, catchy as fuck, but constantly on the verge of collapse. The label jokes that this is the record where they finally figured out how to play their instruments, tongue partially in cheek we imagine, but it definitely sounds like that's precisely what happened, in fact, some might argue, maybe the next record is where that actually happens, but it's that ragged what the fuck looseness that gives these stripped down jams a weird sort of urgency.
Check out the plodding, riffy churn of "I Can't Decide", that almost sounds like a garage punk version of the Shadow Ring, in fact, the more we listen to this, the whole record sort of sounds like the Shadow Ring, maybe crossed with the Fall, via some super obscure underground Aussie punk rock outfit from the seventies. But back to "I Can't Decide", holy shit, some of THEE most loose and fucked up drumming ever, totally twisted, but fucking perfect. We're reminded of black metal sorta-surf weirdos Varghokoghargasmal too, the same sort of inspired stumble and shambolic genius. It's almost like a punk rock Shaggs, or something. So fucking great!
A fantastic archival slice of early nineties Lousiville post rock / post punk, from this amazing, but virtually unknown outfit, who over the course of their brief existence, created a body of work easily on par with their Lousiville brethren, not falling that far outside of the sonic world inhabited by the likes of Slint, Rodan and the rest. But for whatever reason, these guys slipped through the cracks, with virtually none of their music seeing widespread release, and what little did make it out into the world, didn't make it much further than the merch booth at local shows. So this long overdue compendium is a godsend for fans of that era, and another supreme sonic feather in TRL's reissue cap (Bitch Magnet, Moss Icon).
Thirty seconds into the first track, "Automatic Pilot" and fans of that brooding, tense, strain of nineties style minor key math/post/noise rock will be wondering how the fuck they missed these guys. Spidery melodies, woozy angular guitars, loping rhythms, lush, and moody, darkly textured and super dynamic, the vocals a hushed crooned, nestled in dark shadowy sprawls of minimal strum and barely there drum skitter, bookended by dense mathy tangles of low slung bassline and jagged guitar crunch, and let's not forget the Slint-like spoken word, or the wild squalls of super distorted psychedelic guitar, or even the final shift into a killer off kilter mathy breakdown, set to plaintive sad boy emo vox. So good!
And it stays that good throughout, every song a haunting slow build soundscape of blurry chordal shifts, and muted rhythmic mesmer, super hooky, keening melodic sort-of choruses and long stretches of tense angular thrum, wild frenzied near metallic freakouts, and darkly lilting slow core mumble.
Some tracks like "Douglass Boulevard" get fully rocking right out of the gate, with soaring buzzing guitars, throbbing bass and wild intricate drumming, but inevitably slip into another chunk of woozy slo-mo post rock creep, before gradually working its way back up to another math/noise/post punk blow out. "Kelly" is a wild churning, chugging, grinding, metallic mathy workout that should definitely please fans of Don Cab and some of the heavier outfits along the post rock spectrum. The band unfurl awesome stretches of cyclical hypno-rock mesmer, locking into tranced out grooves that could/should never end. They also have an emo streak a mile wide, the wailing about-to-crack vox, the soaring majestic melodic epic-ness. At some points the resemblance to the post/math rock big boys is downright uncanny, which makes it even more curious why they weren't more popular, but these guys definitely infuse their own subtle twists and tweaks into the sound, and it's a sound some of us can't ever get enough of, and wish that more modern bands were still able to pull off. So goddamn great, even all these years later. Here's a list of bands, and if it reads at all like your collection you definitely need this: Slint, Rodan, Polvo, Bitch Magnet, Don Caballero, Drive Like Jehu, Giant's Chair, A Minor Forest, Sweep The Leg Johnny, Breadwinner, June Of 44, The For Carnation, Honor Role, Shipping News, Butterglove, Crain...
Metal magazine madness! Terrorizer is the other glossy metal monthly we always turn to, this time with Dani Filth from Cradle of Filth looking kinda goofy (of course) on the cover. Also: 20 years of Darkthrone, Napalm Death, Grave, Sonne Adam, Dragged Into Sunlight, Anaal Nathrakh, Nuclear War Now! (label festival preview), Swans, God Seed, and more. Includes the usual "Fear Candy" cd sampler stuck to the front as well.
For many folks, Kiwi (post) punk outfit Toy Love was their introduction to Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate, but for us, we were already in love with the twisted home brewed bedroom pop of the Tall Dwarfs, aka Knox and Bathgate, before we learned that there was something that came before. And for some reason, we were expecting some sort of proto-Tall Dwarfs, and in a way, that is what Toy Love were, albeit sonically a whole different kettle of snotty punk rock fish. The clever lyrics, and strange turns of phrase, the inventive arrangements, and rollicking rocking looseness, not to mention the hilarious between song banter, all had their genesis in Toy Love, but for all that would follow, Toy Love were indeed a punk band, described by the label as New Zealand's answer to Wire, which is really not that far off the mark. And while there is a double cd collection which captures virtually everything the band ever recorded (we can order it for you, just ask, you should! It's awesome!), live, the band were something else altogether. Hearing this now, it's hard to imagine a band this good, with songs this great, would hang it up, especially after only a couple years (they only existed for two years, 1979-1980). This live set was one of their final shows, and displays the band in fine form, the sound loud and pristine, the songs KILL, the band tight as fuck, wiry and angular, but at the same time loose and wild, the onstage back and forth between the bandmates the sort of thing that makes the whole audience feel like they're just hanging at the rehearsal space drinking beers watching their buddies' band practice. This is one of those live records that most definitely captured a special moment in time, and a special band at their prime.
And the songs, holy shit, how has the Toy Love catalog not been plundered by a million punk bands looking for covers infinitely better than their originals, in fact the opening salvo here is pretty much untouchable, "Fifteen", is all buzzing bassline, wild octopoidal drumming, jagged shards of guitar, swaggery, snarly vox, and a hook to kill for. "Unscrewed Up" is more of the same, slowing it down a bit and adding some slither, the guitars spidery and droney, the drums still the driving force, the vocals a raspy yowl, and another killer chorus, the vibe dark and a little Wipers-y, which leads right into "Amputee Song" which is pure pop dressed up in punk clothing, crazy catchy, super melodic, very reminscent of -that- NZ pop sound, but way more punk. And so it goes, for the whole of this epic set, relentless, and relentlessly great! The set rife with slow, dark brooders, and crazy catchy punky pop songs, but leaning mostly toward wild, gleefully chaotic pop flecked post punky crunch. An essential NZ underground music artifact for sure!
Includes a mini-foldout poster, with extensive liner notes and rare photos.
The new, five years in the making Witchcraft album is indeed awesome (and we finally just got the vinyl version in, which you'll find elsewhere on this week's list). But OLD Witchcraft, we still love too of course. So how 'bout some new old Witchcraft, sort of, in the form of the long awaited full-length debut from Troubled Horse, a band whose membership includes 3/4ths of the original Witchcraft lineup?! Rocking out with catchy riffs and vintage '70s sounds, these guys are everything we'd hope for from a band with such a pedigree. Comparisons to early Witchcraft are easy, but Troubled Horse get way more bluesy than Witchcraft ever has done, and add some swirling organ to the mix. The singer's style can be also more gruff and rough than that of Witchcraft's Magnus (though with his Swedish accent there's certain similarities too). But the basics are the same, Troubled Horse maybe stronger even in their overt Pentagram worship. The Pentagram is palpable here, indeed some of these tracks, like "Sleep In Your Head", "Shirleen" and especially "Don't Lie" (notable also for its Lovecraftian recitation halfway through) might as well BE new Pentagram songs. They certainly would be if the wizened one, Bobby Liebling, were on the mic. Other '70s era influences are evident too, of course, with tracks like "All Your Fears" coming closer to something a bit country-ish that the Rolling Stones woulda done in a sinister mood. Meanwhile, the twin guitar leads and harmonies of the swinging "Another Mans Name" bring to mind very early Wishbone Ash hard rockers like "Lady Whiskey". And the psych/garage rock side of this (as displayed straight out of the gate on stomping opener "Tainted Water") should appeal big time to fans of Troubled Horse's countrymen Dungen, to cite a more modern (but still retro) comparison. Furthermore, this is definitely for fans of bands like Witchcraft (natch), Horisont, Danava, Graveyard, Gypsyhawk, and Spiders (with whom they also share a member - keep an eye out, hopefully we'll have that band's new album in soon too). Packaged in a slipcased jewel case.
Longtime aQ fave Amon Tobin, whose records are brilliant dark tangles of dense electronica, dizzying, driving beats, swirling atmospheres, unrecognizable samples recontextualized into wholly new shapes and sounds, and often, especially on his early records, a distinctly Brazilian vibe, returns with a new album, under a new moniker, and in this new incarnation as Two Fingers, Tobin seems to have moved away from the brooding Ben Frost-like cinematic menace of his last record Isam, in favor of something much more mainstream, and much more dubsteppy. In fact, a lot of the tracks here wouldn't sound that out of place in a DJ set alongside jams by Deadmau5, Blackburner or Skrillex. But while this is definitely made for the dancefloor, it's well removed from all the knuckle dragging bro-step out there, it's still Tobin after all, working some delirious dancefloor alchemy with BIG beats, that are ribcage rattling crunches one minute, intricate technoid skitters the next, everything wreathed in heaping helpings of dubstep style low end bass wobble/warble, electro synth squelch, dense gouts of buzz and thick sheets of undulating rumble, clouds of psychedelic FX and spaced out sci-fi bleeps and bloops. Lots going on for sure, a whole different effect in headphones as through the sound system at a club, but Tobin's knack for crafting impossibly catchy grooves, and mutating them into some warped alien electro/techno hybrid, is fully intact. And for every blast of grinding beat heavy crunch, there's another sprawl of loping electronic grooviness, usually those two oozing into one twisted new whole.
And while they last, we have the deluxe version of the cd, which includes a second disc, on which the sound slips even further into the commercial/pop realm, with vocals, even rapping, the resulting jams will definitely have you wondering why this shit is not all over the radio.
Oh heck yeah! It's time for a new issue of one of our favorite periodicals, Mike Stax's venerable 'zine Ugly Things. Issue #34 is once again a hefty (184 pages!) collection of tiny type and b&w pictures devoted to, as they say, "wild sounds from past dimensions". This issue's expert enthusiasms, as always, extend to '60s garage groups and '70s psych artifacts and all kinds of coolness. Some stuff, about bands you've never ever heard of before. Other pieces, perhaps pertaining to old faves. All super in-depth and fascinating either way. We're really keen to read the article about French freeks the Rob Jo Star Band, and also the one about heavy Dutch proggers Cargo� We did already read the amazing installment of Cyril Jordan (Flamin' Groovies) regular "San Francisco Beat" column, a full nine pages (with illos by Human Being Lawnmower's Avi Spivak), that make Beatlemania and the British Invasion sound pretty fresh and exciting for those of us who weren't there then by describing the powerful effect that the arrival of the Beatles & Co. had personally on Jordan himself.
Some of the other artists written about in #34 include: The Others, The Bees, The Blue Aces, The Velvet Illusions, The Byrds, The Viletones, Jenny & The Rascals, The Haunted, Spike-Drivers, Virgil Caine, and more.
Plus, there's pages and pages (and pages!) of reviews. Plenty of ads for cool reissues and stuff too. Yup, tons and tons of info here to absorb, and as of writing this review we're only part way through this issue ourselves, taking notes as we go (seriously). As always, recommended; if your attention span can handle it, your reading will be rewarding!
This double cd set hits the shelves just in the Saint Nick of time for the Christmakuh holiday season. Thanks to the Idelsohn Society, a wonderful nonprofit dedicated to preserving and illuminating Jewish history through music (they also put out the Songs For The Jewish-American Jet Set comp), Jewish people can make peace with their love of Christmas music and their desire to tinsel a tree. And why shouldn't they? Set to the tune of Jingle Bells, "The Problem" by Ray Brenner and Berry E. Blitzer lays out the holiday conundrum with campy humor: "Jingle bells, jingle bells, it's tragic but it's true / There's joyous fun for everyone, but what's a Jew to do?" (Oy!) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, it seems. As demonstrated on Disc 2: Merry Christmas, many of the most popular Yuletide songs have been performed by representatives of The Chosen People. Mitch Miller's rendition of "White Christmas", with its all-male chorus and big band swing, easily rivals Bing Crosby's. Mel Torme's beautifully melancholic "The Christmas Song" stands among the best of Christmas tunes and can get even the most devoted Israelite roasting chestnuts on an open fire. Then dreamy Eddie Fisher romantically croons "Christmas Eve in My Hometown" backed by a chorus of angels, Bob Dylan's nasal delivery of "Little Drummer Boy" manages to stir, and the Ramones "Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)" conjures the all-too-common dysfunctional family Christmas that Gentiles have become so accustomed to. As the set's accompanying booklet explains, the production of Christmas music outpaced music for celebrating the Festival of Lights by 10,000 to 1. That's not too surprising, since Hanukkah is a minor Judaic holiday and only rose to prominence in Jewish American culture due to its proximity to Christ's birthday celebration, a national holiday in the US since 1870. As a result, what we have in way of musically commemorating those eight days of candle-lighting on the Happy Hanukkah disc, are not exactly Billboard-charters, but they are just as worthy a listen. Woody Guthrie's "Hanukkah Dance" has a doe-see-doe old-timey feel for dance-y party times. Klezmer ditties include "Hanukkah Tree" by the Klezmatics and "Klezzified" by Klezmar Conservator Band. "The Latke Song" by Debbie Friedman (the so-called Jewish Joan Baez) cleverly tells the story of Hanukkah celebration from the perspective of the latke itself and reminds young listeners that it's important to feed the hungry. Ella Jenkins "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" is the real deal while "Dreidel" by Don McLean (possibly this release's only non-Jewish contributor) is just, perhaps, an ill-chosen metaphor for his own '70s mid-life crisis. The most stirring piece on the Hanukkah disc is a barely preserved version of "Yevonim," sung by the Russian-immigrant sensation, Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. Greil Marcus writes in an essay contained in the set's booklet : "...the sound is distant, the surviving cylinder worn and scratchy. All that adds to the sensation that something precious is being passed on." That's a lot for one little tune to express and worth the inclusion in your holiday music collection alone!
The latest installment in Tompkins Square's round-up of modern guitar soli practitioners is as beautiful as ever, this time focussing on the newest breed of the craft. Familiar and unfamiliar names abound, but we're sure folks will get as excited as we were at the inclusion of two longtime San Francisco acolytes, Danny Paul Grody formerly of Tarentel, who brings a lush and lovely kosmiche vibe to "Lookout Point", and Bill Orcutt, delivering a healthy dose of dissonance and experimentation with his track "John Fahey Commemorative Beer Can", a title the great master would surely love. The overall feel of this set seems to oscillate nicely between the two poles of the traditional and experimental with tracks also by Steve Gunn, Jordan Fuller, Nick Shallice, Will Stratton, Daniel Bachman, Eric Carbonara, Tom Lecky, Alexander Turnquist, Cam Deas, and Yair Yona. Gorgeous!
FYI, the whole five volume Imaginational Anthem series is also now available in as six cd box set, the sixth disc being a bonus live recording by William Tyler called Elvis Was A Capricorn. Price, $37.
This is the third in a series of super limited lps, each offering a fantastic, albeit brief overview of the Japanese underground music scene, separated by decade. Starting with the seventies, which featured Les Rallizes Denudes, JA Caesar, Kuni Kawachi & His Group, The Apryl Fool, Sadistic Mika Band, Stomu Yamash'ta's Red Buddha Theatre, Akiko Yano, Toshiaki Tsushima, Harry Hosono & The Yellow Magic Band, Osamu Kitajima, Karuna Khyal and a bunch more. Then there was the eighties volume, which included Phew, Riuchi Sakamoto, Tako, Daisuck & Prostitute, Gunjogacrayon, Lizard and load of groups we had never heard of. And now we arrive at the nineties, and this time around, a lot of the groups are familiar, Phew and Riuchi Sakamoto make return appearances, which makes sense, as they were both just as active in the nineties as the eighties, there's also Ghost, Fushitsusha, The Gegogerigegege, E*Trance, Demi Semi Quaver, Takako Minekawa, Idiot O'Clock and Jun Miyake. Weirdly enough, a lot of these tracks almost sound more eighties than the actual eighties installment did!
Jun Miyake starts things off with cool tribal drumming, chant like vocals, programed electronics, sounding a bit like a Japanese Muslimgauze, albeit with a Native American techno vibe (!). Phew do their warped funky weirdness, mewled vox, jazzy horns, layered drones and lots of space-y FX. Sakamoto does his thing as well, sounding a bit like traditional Japanese music modernized and electrified, a little bit electro, a distinctly new wave vibe with some woozy crooned vocals. Japanoise weirdos Gergogerigegege (that translates as 'vomit, diarrhea, ha, ha, ha') offer up an all acapella track, spoken female vocals, accompanied by the moans and groans of the band's masturbator (they do indeed have a band member who wears a diaper and jacks off!), as he does his thing! The Ghost track is a gorgeous chunk of hazy, chanted, free-form psychedelic murk, ritualistic and haunting, while Idiot O'Clock finish off the A side with some full on new wave, which as mentioned above, sound way more '80s than '90s.
Japanese heavy psychlords Fushitsusha start off the B side with a surprisingly hushed and restrained slow jam, super spare drumming, barely there guitar strum, brief flurries of gnarled fretboard scrabble, all as a softly psychedelic backdrop for Keiji Haino's anguished wail. E*Trance are up next, whose track is a glorious chunk of loping weirdo psych rock, full of atonal melodies, twisted choruses of laughing voices, weird sporadic percussion, swooping heavily effected guitars, and what sounds like some traditional Japanese instruments, not to mention some seriously rad fuzzed out psych/shred leads. Takako Minekawa delivers a short blast of squelchy minimal synthy new wave, a little Kraftwerky, and another track that doesn't necessarily sound distinctly nineties. And finally, Demi Semi Quaver wrap it up with a lengthy, sprawling psychedelic jam of weirdo spaced out Japanese prog, female vox, abstract drumming, shuffling rhythms, wheezing accordions (?), lots of space, the instruments drifting in wide open expanses, sort of like the warped more progged out version of a Japanese jam band!
All of these comps are super limited, they go out of print quickly, and even before then, we often have trouble restocking once we sell out, so grab one quick before they're gone.
Finally, this long long long out of print recording from these aQ space psych faves, originally released as a super limited tour only cd-r, is available again, repressed on vinyl, via the kind folks at Immune. Here's what we had to say about these jams when we first reviewed the cd-r version WAY back in 2007:
The return of White Hills, and their East Coast Hawkwind worshipping Stooges stomp FX blowouts. Every album so far has kicked our asses, each one exploring a different side of WH's spaced out psychedelic sound. From the swirling cosmic krautprog of No Game To Play, to the more straight ahead space rock of Glitter Glamour Atrocity to the collaboration with Bay Area noisemakers White Pee, a half hour blast of ambient spacenoize. Where does Abstractions And Mutations fall? It falls smack dab in between all of those, but it falls HARD and HEAVY. Easily one of THEE fiercest outings yet from Dave W. and his bearded and robed wizards of druggy sonic overload. Beginning with a seriously metallic riff, and some super effected vocals, the band pounds relentlessly, adding tons of melody and a wicked hook, and then a brief space-y shuffle, before the song explodes into three minutes of amp frying psychguitar destruction.
The 15 minute "Left Behind" begins by drifting through some Tangerine Dreamed outer space void, peppered with fluttering drum fills, abstract shards of guitar, and clouds of shimmering FX, before again, exploding into a relentless acid jam, the drums splattering and sputtering, pounding and thrashing, the guitars wailing and howling, everything wrapped in a dense haze of buzz and effects. The rest of the record strikes a balance between the two, the blissed out laid back haze, and the face melting psychedelic freakout, culminating in the super tripped out final track, a sort of disembodied Doors-y jam, slow and spare, vocals drifting, guitars burning in soft swells, the percussion doused in reverb, the pace seriously stoned, before the chaos rains down from above, an intense drum guitar duel, the reverb and delay joining in for good measure, a swirling head spinning blow out.
Includes a download coupon as well!!
A while back we reviewed a super limited tape of ultra obscure early nineties proto-trip-hop from a woman named Leslie Winer, who recorded much of her music under the mysterious symbol/moniker ©, and who was in fact a former model, a pal of William Burroughs and Jean-Michael Basquiat, not to mention a sometime guest vocalist on records by groups like Bomb The Bass. Apparently Winer ditched modeling, and soon dropped off the map, but not before making a record called Witch, considered to be an essential early chunk of skittery, hazy, woozy, trip hop style electronica, well before there really WAS trip hop. The record featured Jah Wobble among others, and was/is a gorgeous chunk of druggy, dubbed out minimal electronic murk that most obviously referenced Tricky, Massive Attack, even Portishead, but predated all of them (with much of Witch having been recorded in the eighties).
On this new cd collection, on the newly launched Wormhole imprint (and offshoot of the kick ass Tapeworm label that put out the Winer tape we first heard), that tape is expanded to include even more mysterious sounds from Winer's mostly unheard back catalogue, a sprawling selection of tracks recorded throughout the eighties and nineties, including several collaborations with Vincent Gallo which appear here for the first time. Long sprawling horn flecked dubscapes, rife with barebones rhythms, tripped out FX, warm muted chordal swirls, plenty of downtempo weirdness and creepy crawly late night shimmer. A dark skeletal avant dub, softly roiling morass of blurred sonics that underpin Winer's strange vocals, hushed and whispered, a sort of slow motion toasting, spoken one second, crooned seductively the next, occasionally multitracked into dreamy harmonies, but just as often slipping into something far more sinister. The tracks expanding into billowing clouds of thrum and whir, anchored by loping rubbery basslines, and wreathed in slowed down samples, fragments of reggae guitar, disembodied horns, all woozy and warbly, everything wrapped in a gauzy haze of record crackle, tape hiss, smeared psychedelic ambience.
Here and there the drums are cranked up into something more block rocking, but even then Winer transforms it into something more murky and surreal, the bass gets super distorted and fuzzed out (some dubstep foreshadowing for sure), everything wrapped around effected acoustic guitars, sampled, layered, recontextualized vox, Winer's vocals slipping easily into lower registers, and sounding a lot like Tricky, due in no small part to the rhythmic murk they're wrapped in, and throughout, strange little flurries of percussive filigree, all of these swirling abstract elements woven into a mesmerizing sprawl of shuffling tripped out, psychedelic downtempo moody muddy groove, that should definitely appeal to fans of witch house, as well as the warped fringes of modern downtempo electronica (Burial, Holy Other, Balam Acab, James Blake, How To Dress Well, etc.).
Super swank packaging to boot, an oversized A5 glossy cardstock insert, liner notes on one side, art on the other, as well as a fold out poster, everything printed in metallic silver ink, and all in a thick PVC sleeve.
Here it is, the always-eagerly-awaited year end "Rewind" issue of The Wire, looking back at the past year, in this case 2012. Besides the massive 2012 Rewind section, pages 30-59, it's got all the usual regular features: reviews & columns & charts, etc.
The "Invisible Jukebox" test this time is undertaken by Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry. The "Global Ear" scene report covers Christchurch, NZ in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. Charles Hayward of This Heat handles the "Epiphanies" essay on the back page. And there's more.
Meanwhile, in that 2012 Rewind section, you'll find The Wire's writers' picks for the Releases Of The Year (#1 going to Laurel Halo's Quarantine). Various trends also get spotted and analyzed and argued about ("the decline of the group", "the rise of the private press") by The Wire's scribes. These writers (and also a bunch of the artists) further share their personal reflections on the year that was. As usual, very very interesting/informative as a recap of the state of "new" music in 2012 and a potential argument starter all right.
Back on list 126, I (Allan) wrote about my belated discovery of the greatness that is Wishbone Ash's self-titled 1970 debut. Well, now it's about time to follow that up with a rave review of another Wishbone Ash record, this being the newly remastered and expanded edition of their third album, 1972's "Argus". Giving this a few listens, I've come to the conclusion that while their first album is certainly somewhat more of a "heavy rock" outing (think Cream meets Thin Lizzy), "Argus" is equally great, and is actually destined to be one of my ALL TIME favorite albums! Seriously, I'm becoming kinda obsessed with listening to this, with its absolutely gorgeous, gentle melodies and its extended instrumental workouts. Some internet investigation reveals that I'm not alone -- this record is in fact considered by many fans to be Wishbone Ash's absolute masterpiece. They just got everything right on this release, from the evocative cover photo of an ancient sentry to the achingly beautiful, stirring music. I can't get enough of the three-part vocal harmonies, the dual guitar leads, or the melancholic power of the riffs. Favorite tracks include the beautiful British folk of "Leaf And Stream", the anthemic "Warrior", and the shoulda-been-a-pop-hit "Sometime World". The whole album has a timeless vibe. Maybe you could call their style "rural progressive" rock? It's melodic, mystical and complex in ways that make it sound simple.
In addition to being remastered, this new 30th anniversary edition includes three bonus tracks: the entire "Live From Memphis" promo-only EP. These live-on-the-radio versions of "Phoenix" (from their debut) and "Jail Bait" and "The Pilgrim" (from their second album, "Pilgrimage") add another half-hour to the disc, being even more jammed-out and epic than the original studio cuts! So even if you already have the old cd of "Argus", you should consider replacing it with this disc, these bonus tracks are worth it! The loud-soft dynamics and interlocking instrumental loveliness of the live "Pilgrim" are positively 'post-rock', but better of course.
Truly 'classic' rock that needs to be rediscovered. My advice for this week: pick up that new Champs album, and order a copy of this as well. You'll be set for a while then!
This is one of those classic rock '70s bands that I (Allan) had always heard of (their claim to fame was pioneering the twin guitar harmony thing, inspiring Thin Lizzy and later Iron Maiden) but had never heard... Nobody was like, "Dude! Wishbone Ash! You
Yay, at long last (five years!) the return of our/your/everyone's favorite Swedish retro-proto-metallers, Witchcraft! With this, their fourth album, they've moved on from their previous label Rise Above to a new home on bigger label Nuclear Blast. They've also altered their lineup quite a bit, though of course mainman Magnus Pelander remains at the mic (though he's not playing guitar anymore, for some reason, concentrating solely on vocals). Going through changes� without changing -too- much, as far as us listeners are concerned, thankfully. Even with a new drummer and two new guitarists, this still sounds of a piece with the Witchcraft of olde, certainly in part due to the distinctive, emotive, melodic vocal stylings of Pelander. We just love his voice, and he puts on a great performance here. He's got flair, the whole band does.
Musically, Legend is maybe a bit more modern and slickly produced than previous Witchcraft outings, and certainly they didn't get rawer or heavier, no. The direction they took was onwards and upwards. But the influence of such vintage greats as Black Sabbath and Pentagram hasn't exactly waned, though nowadays we'd be more likely to describe Witchcraft as being their own psychedelic, doomy, melodic, proggy, heavy rock thing. Good meaningful music, well played, with lots of both light and shade - lumbering riffs, lovely vox, great guitarwork� Now, someone here thought that this new Witchcraft showed signs of being "success rock", whatever that means, and someone else here (Andee) thought some of it sounded a bit like Queens Of The Stone Age (meant, he assured us, as a compliment!), and yeah sure this is perhaps geared to appeal to a bigger audience than the record collecting '70s downer rock nerds that Witchcraft themselves once were (and heck, still are - after all, the likes of "Dystopia" here sounding like something off of one of Sabbath's final few Ozzy-era albums like Never Say Die). But, whatever. At the risk of sounding snobby, very few bands who get big are really all that great, but Pelander and Witchcraft definitely deserve all their success, so we won't hold it against 'em. Longtime Witchcraft fans, you have nothing to worry about, listen to "It's Not Because Of You" ferinstance and tell us that it doesn't sound like it coulda been on The Alchemist or Firewood. Once again, we're happily enscorcelled by this Witchcraft - and hope it won't be another five years between albums, again!
Domestic vinyl version coming out later in October, fyi.
Come the Thaw is the brand new 2nd album from San Francisco's female fronted gothic downer doom trio Worm Ouroboros, which now features Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, Ludicra, Hickey) on drums, as well as bassist/guitarist/cover artist Lorraine Rath (The Gault, Amber Asylum) and guitarist/vocalist Jessica Way (World Eater). We really liked WO's self-titled 2010 debut, also on cult metal label Profound Lore, and are finding that this new one is just as dreamy and depressive, pretty and portentous as before, another slow-moving slab of their "4AD doom" stylings, with ethereal female vocals once again gently hovering over sparse, serene, sorta post-rock soundscapes. The metal factor is actually LESS evident than on their debut; while a few parts do get momentarily heavy with the guitars, it's mostly rather restrained in that regard, or at least seems to be, Worm Ouroboros channelling the likes of Dead Can Dance even more than before. Which is, really, quite nice. And somber, and hushed, and blissful...
Not long ago we listed a cool picture disc vinyl compilation that the Unseen Forces label put out, called Grave Command, featuring the likes of Orchid, Danava, Occultation, Deceased, Ghoul, Ride For Revenge and others from the realms of heavy metallic weirdness. Standing out amongst all those mostly evil & occult modern day acts was a band called XINR, actually a Christian metal act from the '80s, from up in Portland. Their killer track "All Hallow's Eve" was taken from this lp, consisting of demos recorded circa 1984, that Unseen Forces has now released on vinyl for the first time (there IS also a cd version on Stormspell that we can get too by the way). Devout Christans but also devout metalheads, XINR (pronounced ex-sinner, get it?) were obviously heavily influenced by Judas Priest and Accept, and come of sounding a lot like Cirith Ungol, with over the top screechy vocals and heavy, catchy riffs. A bit doomy, and pretty darn (excuse me!) rockin'!! Satan doesn't have all the best tunes it turns out. Sadly, the band's career was tragically ended (before it had barely started) by a motorcycle accident that took the lives of their singer and guitarist. However, their headbanging legacy lives on! If you like rippin' old school metal and don't mind if it's Bible believing as long as it's badass, then this is fer you! Limited white vinyl, includes lyrics and liners.
