If you're a fan of Finland's Circle and/or their various offshoots (and if you're an aQuarius customer, chances you are!), then you know all about the NWOFHM (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal), the invented sub-genre self-classification that many of those bands embrace, as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of incorporating various heavy metal signifiers that they're fans of, into their sound and image. Although even at their most "NWOFHM", Circle, Pharaoh Overlord and the rest still usually come across more proggy and poppy and WTF? than actually metal in most cases. Very few of their records could be mistaken for "real" metal albums, in their entirety - maybe Steel Mammoth's Nuclear Rebirth lp?
But this new NWOFHM unit, a project of Circle mainman Jussi Lehthisalo and his pal Samae Koskinen (a live member of Finnish grind freaks Xysma), is definitely (in our authoritative opinion!) a real metal band. A weird one perhaps, when you read the lyrics and look at the artwork, but metal first and foremost. The iron gauntlet is thrown down right on the opening track, the pounding "Cult Of No Return" (you'll find a video for it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlLMCSZ_kk), which reminds us a bit of the the "black n' roll" approach of Norwegian kings Satyricon, circa such albums as Volcano and Now, Diabolical. Or at least, this sounds more like Satyricon than Circle, for sure. We're also reminded a bit of the Finnish melodic death metal band Sentenced, back on their long-forgotten NWOBHM (note the B, not an F) influenced Amok opus from '95. And this aggressive (yet also atmospheric) attack by the Akhamin Kirjasto duo continues, for ten varied tracks in total on Torches Ablaze. There's hella old school evil riffing a la Venom, some lashings of symphonic synths, and a dose of (melodic) death metal brutality in the form of the gruff (but intelligible) vokills from Samae, singing in English about such subjects as "Synthetic Death", "Knights Of Torment", and a "Bitch From Hell". Though, he changes up to a more clean style on the likes of "Sea Of Madness" and others, giving a whispery death-gasp on the speedy "Thousand Snakes", a track that could possibly have fit in on Circle's Katapult album. The Lovecraftian thrasher "Speed, Yog Sothoth" is another blazing ripper, albeit laced with unexpected weird noisy breakdowns, Jussi's avant-garde/experimental leanings coming to the fore without violating the essential metalness of this one.
Overall, Torches Ablaze is certainly something that Circle fans should check out, but is maybe more for actual metalheads. Since we're both, of course we're digging the results here, the weird atmosphere that arises from Arkhamin Kirjasto's unusual blend of chugging metal shred, majestic spacey psychedelic synthwork, and the harsh but catchy vox doused in reverb. As NWOFHM goes, if their tongues are in cheek here, they're well hidden. Hail!
What is it with bands not naming records? We're all for the 'self titled' record, but when they're ALL self titled, it gets a little confusing. By record number two or three at least start numbering 'em, fer chrissakes. Anyway, another rad reissue of a tape from this West Coast avant black metal horde, that was so limited on its initial release, we never managed to even see a single copy. Originally put out in a run of 150 copies on Psychic Violence, this is our, and quite possibly your, first exposure to this monumental chunk of progressive blackness, opening with a lumbery dirgey doom, that pounds and creeps, beneath anguished wails, before exploding into some of the most intense and emotional black metal we've heard, due in some part we would imagine to the structure and the melody, unlikely for most black metal, in fact, it almost sounds like post rock sped way up and blackened, soaring and hauntingly melodic, majestic and moody, these blasts are separated by still more emotional sonic stretches, midtempo sprawls of soaring guitar trills, and angular math rock riffs, all wreathed in black beneath grim howled vokills, before closing with a blast of frenzied riffage and a final movement of dirgey weirdly melodic doomic plod.
The B side starts off all shimmery synths and smoldering angular guitar melodies, before launching into another stretch of frantic blasting buzz, here alternating between furious blackness, blissed out reverbed psychedelia and churning mathy doom, the record epic and constantly shifting, but woven together into a single epic movement, the final part of which might be the best bit on the record, a slow build blackened post rock, that eventually explodes into a totally epic blowout of blackened Godspeed-style majesty.
LIMITED TO 777 COPIES, pressed on 160 gram red vinyl, housed in super swank matte black gatefold sleeves, printed on the front and back in red metallic foil.
How could we not be intrigued by this? Not only is this DIY, US black metal band on the same label that recently brought us the excellent Electric Wizard worshipping doom of Windhand, but they are named after a song on the first album (the one released on our own Andee's tUMULt label) by local prog metal masters Hammers Of Misfortune! And, they have had various folks online, including the BrooklynVegan blog, raving about 'em like crazy. (In fact, via BrooklynVegan, you can listen to a full-album stream of the record here: https://soundcloud.com/brooklynvegan/sets/bastard-sapling-dragged-from, so check it out, we think you'll be convinced.)
Although named after a Hammers song, Richmond, VA's Bastard Sapling (featuring members of Cannibis Corpse and Battlemaster) would seem to have more in common with another San Francisco tUMULt metal artist, the late great Weakling. Thus the classic '90s Norwegian likes of Immortal, Darkthrone, Mayhem, and Emperor have without a doubt been a steady part of Bastard Sapling's listening diet and serve as the influences for the frosty, frozen, grim, galloping epic black metal found here on these four long tracks (with titles like "Cold Winds Howled Across The Desolation"). Blasting and buzzing, the rasping croaking shrieking vokills stabbing like icicles in your ears amidst the blizzard-like onslaught of drum battery, guitar riffage, and keyboard atmosphere. What Bastard Sapling really have going for them, besides a lock on that classic sound, is a knack for bleakly melodic, miserablist majesty. Whether blazing away at speed or slowing down for a detour into post-rock-ish moodiness (like the intro to "Beyond The Void Of Life"), Bastard Sapling's songwriting gets a serious grip on the listener and doesn't let go. Full on quality black metal, with not just a Norwegian scene vibe, but maybe a Ukrainian one as well, and definite hints of Swedish greats Dissection as well. Good thing they named themselves after that Hammers so we'd check 'em out!
Limited to 500 copies, vinyl-only as far as we can tell (on "marbled obsidian black & cocaine white vinyl" to be precise!). Gatefold, with insert and patch!
Latest super limited cd-r release from the Debacle label, who in the past have supplied us with amazing jams from Cough Cool, Crystal Hell Pool, Expo 70, Kevin Gan Yuen & Demian Johnston, Megabats, The Slaves and more! That list of bands should definitely give you a rough idea of what to expect from Seattle one man band Black Hat whose Spectral Disorder is a gloriously psychedelic beatscape, all droned out tones and distorted percussion, the opener, unleashes an avalanche of tribal drumming, over a woozy drone, that gradually splinters into something much more gristly and staticky, the rhythm seeming to fade into the background, the drone driving the show, woozy, and constantly shifting in pitch, eventually, growing even noisier, the song transformed into a beat heavy chunk of avant industrial beat and buzz.
The second track is a bit more blissed out, softly swirling synths, wreathed in clouds of hum and hiss, laced with tinkling chimes and thick, fuzzed out Tim Hecker like atmospheres, the sound growing more and more sinister, darkening into a weirdly pulsing sprawl of minimal beatscapery, all muted tones and softly stuttering rhythms, which leads directly into "Callas", which also begins as a swirling psychedelic synth drift, and dispenses with the beats completely, unfurling a tangled web of super distorted thrum and softly pulsating overtones.
The title track is a glitched out barrage of sliced and diced beats and melodies, various sounds fragmented and layered, another murky blurry industrial soundscape, that sounds like it could have come of some old early Techno Animal record, or could even be the backing track to some obscure rapper on DHR, either way, it's good stuff, a warped production, that manages to be noisy, chaotic, but also weirdly groovy. which leads to the closer, a gorgeously dense sprawl of gristly ambience, driven by a slow metronomic pulse, and laced with shared of melody, the pulse, and those shards, soon coalesce into a groovy, lurching groove, a head nodding, stuttery lope, wreathed in sonic chaos and a bit of noisiness, that again sounds like the perfect backing track for someone like Sensational to rap over. Particular dig the lush, massive low end swell climax, and the resulting slow skitter fade out. Killer stuff.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Black Thread is a mysterious offshoot from the likewise mysterious Von Himmel, aQ faves who have graced us with some of the most amazing and least predictable psychedelic gems of the last few years. With so many of the bands we love, things are coming from a definite rock n' roll stance, but Von Himmel have always taken a more meditative approach based around pure sound and less obvious influences. Which brings us to this tape featuring two sidelong excursions of blown out blissful atmospheres, where the sound constantly builds and morphs over the length of each side. There is a certain hugeness overall while also sounding, in the best and most dramatic way imaginable, very fragile. Swells of washed out orchestral melodies are overtaken by noise and looped to gradually reshape the sounds into new forms. As we like to say, this is a good one to get lost in. Just zone out and let it overtake you. In the process you will note a strange and beautiful emotional resonance lacking in many other projects who attempt to play around with tape loops and effects pedals. No, this is composition, creation, and expression, maybe not with any clear narrative, but the result of patience, understanding, and pure dedication. The sounds of decay and rebirth featured here are strangely majestic and somewhat gloomy, but never depressing. Sonically, it fits perfectly within the Von Himmel family approach but will certainly appeal to fans of Leyland Kirby, William Basinski, Indignant Senility, Tim Hecker, and the like. Come to think of it, it sounds sort of like the new Buddha Machine. Highly recommended, and not surprisingly, quite limited!
Japanese psychedelic heavies Boris return, this time sharing a split with UK psychfolkie (and former frontman for Crippled Black Phoenix) Joe Volk. Apparently born of a chance meeting at a festival, it's a bit of a weird match up, but both sides are pretty cool.
Boris deliver a sidelong three part epic, which begins with a sprawling bit of field recording flecked, sample heavy shimmer, all softly swelling chords, and dense clouds of cymbal shimmer, dreamy and druggy and delightfully drifty, which leads directly into the second part, a glorious blast of bombastic metal pop heaviness, which weirdly enough is a dead ringer for late period Cave In, powerful soaring vocals, big bashing drums, droned out guitars, swirls of electronic squiggle, really it's not that far removed from recent Boris jams, but it's super polished and catchy, and hell it suits them! The final movement bookends the proper song second track with another stretch of swirling synths and murky woozy guitars, lots of shifting textures and buried vocals, everything blurred and bleary and abstract, a long form coda/outro that takes the classic slo-mo sludge of old Boris and recasts it as something much more serene and tranquil.
The flipside introduces (many of) us to Joe Volk, who starts things off super spare, just acoustic guitar, the vibe is darkly dramatic and subtly psychedelic, the sound surprisingly lush, definitely reminiscent of classic seventies acid folk, fingerpicked steel string buzz, ghostly background harmonies, Volk's voice raspy and weathered, the whole first track a gradually slow build, culminating in the final few minutes of brooding buzz, moaning cellos and dense tribal drumming. The second track seems like more of an outro, sonically similar but even more stripped down, instrumental, a spare bit of skeletal, minimal folk, dark and dreamy. While we never got all that into Crippled Black Phoenix, this definitely has us hankering to hear more solo stuff from Volk.
Packaged in super striking full color sleeves, with printed full color insert with liner notes and lyrics. Weirdly expensive too for some reason, sorry...
As we mention in our review of the White+ album, one of this week's Records Of The Week, we've been digging all sorts of kick ass underground indie rock from China, one of our favorites being this one, the latest from a group called Boyz & Girl, named literally for the gender make up of the group, and whose sound falls somewhere between the the blown out shoegaze noise of My Bloody Valentine, the angular dissonance of Sonic Youth, and the quirky post punk poppiness of the Pixies. These guys (and gal) have obviously been raised on a steady diet of classic nineties indie rock and it shows, thick billows of distorted FX heavy guitars, laconic laid back vocals, driving rhythms, heavy and psychedelic, hooks buried throughout, wild tangles of guitars expand into droned out jangle, squalls of wild guitarnoise are harnessed into lush melodic drifts, we also hear hints of the Swirlies and Polvo, the group at their best when their dreamy pop gems are swathed in thick sheets of buzzing guitar, or driven by what sounds like junkyard percussion, "He Must Be" is our current fave, dreamy, poppy, but noisy as all get out, a cloud of constantly crumbling and swirling and howling guitarnoise over some perfect jangle, sweet sad boy vox, and loose propulsive drumming.
Amidst all this fuzzed out, noise drenched indie jangle, there's also plenty of experimental weirdness, "Cannot Touch" sounds like Blonde Redhead or Deerhoof, but deconstructed into something much more minimal and skeletal, "Cursed And Cursed Again" is a brief swirl of swooping backwards high end, "The Cold, The War", is a haunting reverb drenched brooder, dark and gloom poppy, but set on a bed of crunchy noise, muted and blurred into a lush and weirdly lovely backdrop. In fact most of the songs here have strange production, and cool weird guitar parts, equal parts jangle and crunch, buzz and spaced out swirl. Fans of that classic indie rock sound, who have been hankering for some noisy, shoegazey, jangle, will flip for this!
The return of these Pittsburgh heavies, the oddly named Br0wn Angel (yup, that's a zero), who deliver their swansong in the form of this epic and darkly melodic chunk of churning low-end heaviness, having recently called it a day. But what a note to go out on! And what a change from their self titled debut. That record (which is included here on the accompanying cd-r) was a sick and sinister chunk of superdistorted sludge, equal parts industrial pummel and droned out black crawl, with the band equally capable of kicking some seriously dense mathrock jams as they are churning, downtuned ultradoom. But the first track here, at least the first few minutes, displays a side of the band only hinted at on the first record. Starting with some mysterious field recordings, the band unfurl a thick sprawl of minor key buzz, and washed out melancholic heaviness, the title "You Can Find Heartbreak Anywhere" suits the sound perfectly, the vocals a weary croon, in a different context this would be some woozy dreamlike slowcore, but here, wreathed in thick, crumbling swaths of guitarnoise, squalls of feedback, and massive drum pound, it somehow makes it sound even that much more moody and malevolent. But then again, this is Br0wn Angel, so halfway through, the song splinters into a woozy start/stop, with squealing feedback, and harsh vokills, before again switching gears, and adding some chiming melodies to the proceedings, giving the sound a sort of ultra melodic Godflesh style industrial vibe, maybe Godflesh fused to Interpol, which sounds like a weird, but an AWESOME combo, especially the final salvo, where the vocals are belted out, and the song is transformed into something seriously dark and emotional.
The rest of the record is equally progressive and emotional and WEIRD, the second track is a dense slab of math metal chug and churn, a definite AmRep thing going on, but much more abject and downtuned, and like that first track, the band deftly incorporate all sorts of unlikely melody and still more clean vox. From there on out, it's a constant battle between light and dark, noise and melody, the sort of sonic tension that makes for compelling heaviness, "Days Of Vagrancy" taking those massive drums, and wreathing them in woozy, heavily effected guitars, and thick caustic bass buzz, the result more atmospheric than brutal, at times reminding us of eternal aQ faves Geronimo, that sort of almost motorik pound and mesmerizing bassline, surrounding by swirling clouds of noise and FX. "Did You Ever Need Me" is some seriously heartfelt indie rock / post rock in industrialblacknoise's clothing, stripped of the huge drums and buzzing guitars, it might pass for pure indie rock, but but instead, the sonic heft and underpinning darkness elevate Br0wn Angel's sound to something much more intense, and emotionally resonant. The last two tracks offer up more of BA's new twisted industrial / metal / gloom pop hybrid, seems like exactly the sort of thing fans of Pinkish Black and Wreck And Reference would dig big time.
Sad that this is the last we'll hear from these guys, but like we said, we couldn't have hoped for a better final missive. The lp includes a cd-r, that contains both the new record, AND the self titled debut, which we described thusly:
Br0wn Angel (yeah, that's Br0wn with a zero) hail from Pittsburgh, and offer up a heaving helping of blown out, super industrial metallic crunch, some strange hybrid of Godflesh, Author & Punisher, Big Black, and Jesu, but they add all sorts of unlikely stuff that makes this SO much more than just wannabe Streetcleaner. The opening track alone should have metaldrone obsessives in a trance, it's a blackened doomdrone raga, that finds these guys weaving a sprawling landscape of crumbling, superdistorted guitar crunch, a bit like SUNNO))) but way more melodic, infusing this blackened crawl with chiming melodies, strangely melodic seeing as they're set amidst barren fields of crumble and pound, the sound thick, gristly, but warm, and thick, and then the vocals come in, and they're quite unexpected, a monk-like chant, transforming the song into something way more ritualistic and spiritual, and we can tell you, if that first song had been stretched out to fill up both sides, we would have been pleased as punch, but instead, the band do get way more metallic and propulsive, the sound thickening into a sort of slowed down tarpit Austerity Program, thick guitars, lots of harmonics, streaks of feedback, starts and stops, ultra dynamic, sheets of guitar skree over black industrial creeps and proto industrial metal pummel, which again would have been just fine, but these guys continue to twist and tangle up their sound, occasionally launching into full on progged out math rock, but just as often slipping into some sort of super sludge death march, the interesting part is how those two sides bleed into that plodding, industrial core, creating a fucked up hybrid that is all their own.
Most fans of legendary (should we say infamous?) world music / punk / surf / WTF? subversives Sun City Girls probably know that a crucial one-third of the trio, SCG's drummer Charles Gocher, sadly met his demise due to cancer in 2007, thus bringing the band's 27-year long career to an end, with their final album being Funeral Mariachi released in 2010. But, their vast corpus of bizarre music lives on, as does the memory of Charles Gocher, at least if the two surviving ex-SCG's have anything to do with it. To that end, brothers Alan "Alvarius B" Bishop and "Sir" Richard Bishop have been touring under the name The Brothers Unconnected, performing an acoustic set of SCG tunes and screening a collection of Gocher's unusual video works. This double lp release documents the uncut entirety of such a show (minus the video portion of course), recorded live in Germany in 2011, with the Bishop bros. delving deep into the SCG catalog, going as far back to such albums as 1987's Horse Cock Phepner and 1990's Torch Of The Mystics to revisit an extensive selection of songs, all of 'em weird and wonderful (to varying extremes of both descriptors). Not only is this intended as a tribute to Gocher, and is something that any SCG devotee will enjoy, it could also serve as wide-ranging semi-introduction for noobs to the beauty, humor, and terror inherent in the SCG's utterly unique oeuvre!
Here's the full tracklisting: "Nyn De Gris Sang", "My Painted Tomb", "The Flower", "The Multiple Hallucinations Of An Assassin", "I Always Felt Sorry For The Monster", "The Brothers Unconnected", "Don't Fuck With The Squid", "Six Kids Of Mine", "Wild World Of Animals", "Academia Nuts", "Soi Cowboy", "Rookoobay", "I Deal A Stick", "Cruel And Thin", "Cooking With Satan", "Eyeball In A Quart Jar Of Snot", "Ali Baba", "Black Orchid", "Bitter Cold Countryside", "Dreamland (For Dinah)", "Horse Cock Phepner", and "Shining Path".
Handsome gatefold sleeve, with one lp on black vinyl, one lp on white vinyl, limited pressing!
There's probably not that much we need to say about this new Circle 7", other than to ask, are you familiar with the band JESTERS OF DESTINY?? 'Cause our Finnish friends Circle really really want you to know about that obscure '80s LA "alternative metal" band. They've already reissued the Jesters' 1986 album Fun At The Funeral on their own Ektro imprint some years ago, and former JoD vocalist/bassist Bruce Duff has appeared as a guest on several Circle-related releases (Circle's Earthworm ep and Hollywood full-length, and the Pharoah Overlord record Out Of Darkness). Plus another Circle side-project, Rakhim, put out a disc, Crimson Umbrella, named after a Jesters song. So yeah, the Circle guys really love Jesters Of Destiny.
Circle's fanboy obsession with Jesters Of Destiny continues with this limited 7" single, featuring cover versions of two Jesters Of Destiny tracks, "End Of Time" and "God Told Me To", both from the Fun At The Funeral album ("End Of Time" also being the Jesters' contribution to the Metal Massacre V comp alongside VoiVod, Overkill, Hellhammer, and Metal Church, among others!). They're great, uber-catchy songs, very representative of the "gleefully gloomy" blend of punk, psych, and metal that the Jesters made uniquely their own, and that helped inspire a certain Finnish band to come up with their own weird genre-hybridizing style (no, Circle don't actually sound much like JoD, but they share a lot of the same spirit, that's for sure).
So, if you've never heard JoD before, you'll get a good idea from this 7" of what they were all about - Circle do these songs pretty straight (no motorik krautrock detours or anything), hewing close to the original versions, and they also brought in ex-Jesters Bruce Duff and Ray Violet to sing and play on this recording. So it's almost more a Jesters 7" than a Circle one. While usually we like bands doing covers to reinterpret 'em in their OWN style (and we still would love to hear a 30+ minute Circle jam on the "Diggin' That Grave" riff, c'mon guys), the respectful way Circle did these songs here makes sense given their mission being to turn people on to the under appreciated greatness of the JESTERS OF DESTINY!
Limited to 500 copies only, we only have a handful.
Chris Cohen might not be a household name for most folks, but if you live in SF you might remember him from when he played in the mighty Deerhoof, as well as Curtains, and the Natural Dreamers. He's also played with, White Magic, Cass McCombs, Danielson, Haunted Graffiti and a bunch of others. Overgrown Path is his first solo record under his own name, and is a gorgeous collection of psychedelic pop, not nearly as weird as we were maybe expecting, but really all the better for it. The instrumentation is lush and lovely, produced like a classic orchestral pop record, with some cool sonic twists, and Cohen's voices is warm and honeyed, deep and soulful, but slipping easily into a near falsetto, and the songs here, classic sounding and catchy, obviously indebted to classic pop outfits like the Zombies, Big Star, Beach Boys, Bee Gees, etc, but here given a little modern / avant tweak. Opener "Monad" is impossibly lovely, rich, piano chords, over softly swirling guitars, Beach Boys like drumming, blooping bass, then Cohen's dreamy vox, sunshiney guitar melodies, and the chorus/bridge, which finds the sound fracturing into something much more psychedelic, all swirling and woozy and subtly spacey, not to mention the warped droney outro. "Optimist High" is another chunk of near perfect pop, the sound warm and washed out, and dreamily prismatic, definitely reminding us of modern retro poppers like the New Lines and Zumpano, and here, on a track like this, the only thing giving this away as a modern recording, is the recording itself, otherwise it could be some lost Emitt Rhodes B side or something.
The whole record has a definite sixties/seventies singer/songwriter vibe, some tracks darkly groovy, others chiming and jangly, and still others brooding and melancholy, all of them lush and lovely and so absolutely dreamy. A new soft pop fave for sure!
We recently reviewed a batch of badass Buffalo reissues courtesy of Aztec Music, an Australian label that's been mining the rich ore of that country's rock n' roll history back in the '60s and '70s. Of the other Aztec releases we've checked out so far, the two albums by a band called Coloured Balls stand out as being crucial to connoisseurs of loud guitar rock. This one's their debut from 1973, and it reveals a high energy band revelling in the oldies rock n' roll of years past (witness their cover of "Whole Lotta Shakin'") while revving up the raw, anti-hippie energy that would explode in the UK circa '77... Yeah, while Buffalo were a proto-metal outfit, sort of the Aussie uncles of Monster Magnet, the Coloured Balls, while heavy, we'd have to describe as being more punk, or proto-punk. And there's a definite dose of boogie bar band bluesiness a la George Thorogood, or better yet, UK blues rock greats the Groundhogs, circa their progressive masterpiece Split. But with much more of a hooligan, kick-yer-head in edge, that's for sure. Some other early '70s acts with similar tendencies with which Coloured Balls could be aligned include the Pink Fairies, the MC5, Crushed Butler, and, not long after, AC/DC.
Apparently they had a lot of trouble with their "anti-social" image (sorta skinheadish "sharpie" haircuts, violence at their shows) but this music's got a lot more going for it than that. The recording simply sounds fantastic, powerful. Real rock n' roll guts and gusto, played by guys who knew what the heck they were doin' -- Coloured Balls were the brainchild of an already-veteran guitar hero named Lobby Loyde, who is all over this album (as well as a bunch of other Aztec reissues as well...).
And we gotta hand it to Aztec, they do a great job in the reissue dep't. This digitally remastered cd comes in a beautiful digipack, with a thick booklet full of pictures and liner notes, including a pro-Balls blurb from Pavement's Stephen Malkmus of all people. There's even also an essay explaining the "sharpie" subculture phenomenon of the times. Plus, the cd features a slew of bonus tracks: six songs from singles, plus a sixteen minute, freeform freakout of a live track from '73 entitled "G.O.D." aka "Guitar Over Dose"!
Limited stock on this Hooker Vision imprint, from the newly minted project Coyote Image Classic - which is the husband / wife pairing of Grant and Rachel Evans - the former better known as Nova Scotia Arms, and the latter as Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. Four tracks spread over two cassettes (one 21 minutes, the other 14) of mostly acoustically sourced songs on piano and guitar whose languid, late-night atmospheres really taps into the beautifully forest-dwelling spirits of the Jewelled Antler sound we championed back in the day, complete with self-destructing tape warbling that sounds like our crappy machine eating the tape, but such sounds are the residues from THEIR crappy tape machine. Within these sounds, it's easy to hear Roy Montgomery's downer tones amidst the cascades of delay on the B side of this set. As good as both of these two are using synths and electronics, they might be better with this set-up. Hopefully, this will be a project they'll continue and in greater quantities! Already sold out at the source. Last copies ever.
Originally released for this year's Record Store Day, this seminal slab of SF punk is now available to the world at large, the first in what will hopefully be an ongoing reissue campaign of all the singles from these legendary punks. This 7" was originally released in 1976, and while some younger folks might not remember Crime, they probably remember the A side, "Hot Wire My Heart", as it was covered by Sonic Youth, and listening to the original, it's easy to hear why SY were drawn to it, with its droned out melodies, killer hook, and noisy guitars (especially for the time), in fact, it actually kind of sounds a little Sonic Youthy in its original form, which is pretty remarkable. The flipside "Baby You're So Repulsive" is all swaggery knuckle dragging snarl, and like the A side is surprisingly noisy and is definitely prescient, knowingly or not, of what would follow. There's some strange stuttery lurches too, which make this just slightly damaged, and a fucking killer jam that sounds as good now as it did 35 years ago!!
Digitally remastered from the original master tapes, housed in an exact reproduction of the original sleeve, pressed on crazy tri-colored red, white and blue vinyl, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Three years or so on from their debut, here at last is more bombastic mostly instrumental prog from this hotshot young British outfit, in the grand tradition of great ye olde bands from their land of the seventies like Yes, King Crimson, Van Der Graaf, Genesis and even Comus (who weren't all instrumental of course, but sure excelled in that dep't as do Diagonal). A complex blend of powerful grooves and lovely moody bits, Diagonal deliver the prog rock goods for any fan of this style.
Diagonal, come to think of it, is a good name for a prog band - going off in their own direction, not aligned with either the X or the Y axis y'know, but still operating with straight-line precision. Well zig zagging a bit actually, when you think about it. But with precision, that's for sure. Lotsa moving parts (organ, heavy bass lines, horn-laced freakouts, etc.) but everything locking together TIGHT. Heck they should go play in Japan with one of Tatsuya Yoshida's bands like Koenjihyakkei, they'd for sure go down a storm (as they say in England when something goes over well).
Aside from some wordless ahh-ahh-ahh vocals on track 2, "These Yellow Sands", it's not until track 4 of 5, "Hulks", that we really notice Diagonal busting out any singing here, and it's melodic and gentle, again quite in the tradition of Yes and the like, with female backing vox. "Hulks" features some stirring sax as well, as it builds over the course of ten-plus-minutes into quite the majestic opus, and could have remained instrumental without really any lessening of impact, though the vocals are nice.
While, like so many fellow Rise Abovers, such as Astra, Diagonal are rather deliberately retro-minded and thus more circumscribed in approach than, say, Circle (who have a much more WTF? attitude to prog and everything else), nonetheless Diagonal's The Second Mechanism is an impressive exercise in prog-music-making that's quite exciting and vital.
We've never reviewed anything by Ethernet before, but now upon the release of ambient composer Tim Gray's third album under the moniker and second for the Kranky label, we wonder to ourselves why it took us so long. Opus 2 is cut from the same cloth as many ambient drone composers we've loved so much in the past: Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, Gas, White Rainbow, Boards of Canada, etc. In fact it reminds us some of BoC's polygonal musical forms, but pulled apart under layers of the kind of warm propulsive chill often explored in the Kompakt label's Ambient Pop series. Largely composed in a process of self-hypnotic improvisation, the resulting pieces are culled of overtly compositional elements, so instead we hear layers of polished down melodic forms and rhythmic pulsations under a brilliant haze of wondrous sonic drift. Beginning gently with waves of airy exploratory melodies that soon become overwhelmed by an embryonic vastness of sound that is both pastoral and bleak, the sun-dappled vibrancy soon mired in weathered earthy textures and slow windswept turbulence that gradually darken in gorgeous decay. Quite lovely!
This super limited tape was released by the new Room 40 cassette imprint A Guide To Saints. It's already out of print at the source, and we've only got a small amount so we won't dwell too much on this. Grant Evans, of course, is one of the proprietors of the incredible Hooker Vision label out of Georgia, and he's also responsible for the druggy, dreamy dronemuzik under the guises Nova Scotia Arms, Crippling, and Quiet Evenings (this being in collaboration with his wife Rachel aka Motion Sickness Of Time Travel). The A side sports contemplative synth lines with innervision pursuits that are buried through thick pedal effects of phase-shifted oscillations and low-pass distortion, giving a decidedly lo-fi spell of rural psychedelia. The B-side is a more gnarled affair with scabrous drones swarming with tight flanges and corrosive textures. The cosmic synths do reemerge through these thickets of noise, with Evans still conjuring the darker facets of Maeror Tri. Thirty-eight minutes in length. Too bad we couldn't get more.
The label calls this slab of heaviness from Fury, featuring Sonny Vincent of the Testors, "1972 NYC Proto Punk", but listening to the A side here, we're thinking this is more proto METAL than proto punk, plenty of raw guitar buzz and a kick ass main riff, pounding drums and some seriously muscly vox, the sound is heavy and hard, and pretty dang metal for the time, although there's definitely a serious blooze rock vibe too, oh and let's not forget the shredding leads. The flipside is definitely more on the proto punk tip, a bit more swaggery, groovy, still heavy for sure, with a definite Thin Lizzy vibe, due in no small part to the vocals. But damn, both jams here are killer, and way recommended for fans of both proto metal AND proto punk!!
Here's a cool new reissue from the Medical Records label, a collection of rare synth wave jams from DIY '80s musician Christof Glowalla, a young German who endeavored to create a moody swirl of haunting synthwave with just a single synth, a 4 track, and a super primitive drum machine. Eventually, he made it into a proper studio and recorded what would become a bit of synthpop coldwave history, with the track "Erde 80", a strange bit of cold synth pop, the rhythm track, sounding a bit Kraftwerky, motorik and pulsing, but overlaid with woozy dreamlike synth melodies, and most notably some intense Teutonic vocals, sounding like they were sung in a tunnel, all reverbed and metallic, only adding to the song's strange vibe. "Technik" is just as cool (and weird), the synths darker and buzzier, laced with laxer blast bleeps and FX squiggles, droney and tranced out, with yet still more twisted vocals, this time growled and distorted and transformed into something almost robotic sounding, until the chorus comes and they morph into a weird whiney croon, all over that dense somber buzz, the real surprise though, is the acoustic guitar that pops up midway through, giving the song a strange sun dappled folk vibe, only to slip right back into the dark synth buzz.
The original "Erde 80" single is joined on this 10" reissue by three tracks recorded a year later, all of which were rejected by record companies at the time, and only one that was ever released. "Smog In Der Stadt" is starts out as a grim sprawl of atmospheric buzz and creepy processed vox, before blossoming into another acoustic guitar laced bit of synth pop, the vibe still dark, but way catchier, and much more well produced, the song featuring a haunting vocal drone in the background, not to mention some super strange falsetto background vocals, and some crunchy guitar, even some leads, a weird sort of hard rocking new wave, in fact the last minute sounds way more proto-punk than synth wave! "Der Bosse" is a darkly psychedelic synth ballad, with super dramatic vocals, droned out synth tones, kosmische pulsations, and some spidery, twangy guitars, again displaying Glowalla's new direction, and it becomes more obvious why folks wanting another "Erde 80" might have been thrown off, but we're digging it big time. Finally, "Science Fiction" is a groovy sprawl of bleepy bloop sci-fi- synth pop, which at least for the few minutes sounds more like the "Erde 80" 7", but as the track progresses, the acoustic guitars drift in, and the sound once again seems to move more toward a slightly more mainstream electro pop, eighties new wave sound, which again, sounds pretty goddamn great to us!!
Housed in as super thick, full color jacket, pressed on heavy mustard colored vinyl. LIMITED TO 600 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
We weren't sure what to expect from this mysterious outfit, but it definitely wasn't this! We got this from FRKSE, who's most recent releases was a Record Of The Week not too long back, and the fact that the group was called Goat's Gloom, and came via FRKSE, we were really expecting some sort of dark churning experimental abstraction, rhythmic, industrial, sorta home-brewed, which is precisely what we got, at least at first, muddy, and moody, a sort of grinding industrial crunch and clatter, noisy and lo-fi, definitely our sort of thing, and then all of a sudden, there's RAPPING. Woah. We were sort of thrown for a loop, but it didn't take us long to get right back into. The weird combination of rapid white boy flow over lurching stumbling junkyard beats and blown out industrial ambience is actually pretty goddamn great. Sounding a bit like some warped and woozy cross between DHR hip hoppers Fever and aQ faves Death Grips, via Bay Area hip hop label Anticon, if that makes any sense. And it sort of doesn't, but that's definitely what makes this so cool. As the record progresses too, it just gets noisier and more chaotic, lots of drones and low end rumble, sheets of buzz and all sorts of fucked up rhythmic weirdness. Fans of all the weirdo Ormolycka tapes we've been reviewing lately, this is definitely right up your alley. LIMITED TO 125 COPIES!!
The return of Gog, and yet another monolithic slab of avant heaviness, this time based on, according to the label at least, the death of the American dream, with much of the sounds coming from Gog mainman Mike Bjella's family blacksmith shop, hence the title. And sonically, it is a gorgeous dark and depressive epic, the opening track a strange bit of atmospheric ambience, constructed from a weird brittle blast beat, beneath a crumbling all of distorted low end, buried melancholic melodies, and what sounds like the clank and clatter of metal on metal, the sound eventually builds into something much more melodic, that opening buzzy brittleness, overlaid by a dreamy washed out guitar, all blurred and shimmery, eventually the buzz and blast dissipating completely, leaving just spidery guitars over the sound of churning machinery, plaintive piano, before finally exploding into a wall of Tim Hecker like buzz. The rest of the tracks aren't all so lovely, instead they often veer toward blackened industrial crunch, and smeared blacknoise, often with deep vocals drifting over the top, but just as often left to churn and squeal and howl and rumble.
"God Says To Love You In Chains", though, IS as lovely as the opener, at least in the beginning, another melodic noise hybrid, delicate buzz, echo drenched anguished wails, pointillist piano, all beneath a crumbling cascade of blown out distortion, and mysterious percussion, building to a caustic and chaotic frenzy, the strange percussion giving the track a tribal fee, all the while wheezing swirling synths or organs drift beneath, adding a strange bit of atonal drone to the proceedings. "A Promised Eternity Fulfilled With Cancer" too is a dark beauty, haunting piano wreathed in a cloud of static and hiss, crunch and crumble, a more abject take on Tim Hecker / The Caretaker, or perhaps a more blissful lovely take on Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, either way, the sampled sound of machinery, or what sounds like it, drives the track, grinding away beneath the piano, and the psychedelic haze. After a track of what sounds like pure processed field recordings, those sounds murky and muffled, gradually more and more processed, into sheets of noise and haunting rhythmic pulsations, the record finishes with a lovely bit of melodically sculpted noise, "I Draw My Strength From You", is a brooding drift, rife with thick blurred swaths of low end, and the distinctive sounds of hammer on metal, a gorgeous bit of collaged ambience, the sounds gradually growing more and more corrosive and distorted, crackling and in-the-red, a coda of blown out buzz, which quickly settles back into a long slow sprawl of grey noise and lush, textured ambience.
Packaged in a super striking black on black embossed jacket, includes a download coupon, and is LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
Grale is one of the many projects encircling Bruce Anderson and Dale Sophiea, both of whom are best known for their work in the seminal Bay Area art-punk project MX-80, with another Sophiea (this being Nicolas) contributing alongside those two elder statesmen, as well as Gregory Hagan (from Common Eider, King Eider and the Thomas Carnacki ensemble). The recent productions from Bruce Anderson have evolved through a somber palette of doleful guitar plucks treated with plenty of effects to blur and shapeshift his rich guitar tones. With the extra hands lurking behind the curtains to conjure soft drones, textural abrasions, electro-acoustic hocus-pocus, and tape loop machinations, Anderson steers his contributions towards devolved, formless blurs and echo to complement the ectoplasmic emations of darkened sound. Yet, when the supporting cast mounts rhythmic pulses (as is done towards end of the second suite through a spry Necks like drum-kit march), Anderson's guitar mimics the twin guitar swarm of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore on the instrumental Sonic Youth suites from Anagrama and Slaapkaamers. Released on Thomas Carnacki's Alethiometer Records.
As if three full lengths last year wasn't enough, everyone's favorite indie rock overachievers start off the new year with this brief blast of warped lo-fi pop gems, and a sound that finds the band seeming to move even further towards the classic GBV of old, and by that we mean warped, fractured, home brewed, experimental pop that really has no right being as catchy as it is, but even the most abstract track here manages to lodge itself permanently in your skull. From the boom box recorded acoustic ballad "It Travels Through Thin Hair", to the weird multi tracked monk-like background vocal on the buzzing brooder "Pictures Of The Man", replete with angular guitar and handclaps (!), from the dreamy string and vocal trifle that is "Amanda Grey" (that sounds a LOT like old Bee Gees), to the pounding piano and drum driven "Standing In A Puddle Of Flesh", with it's super dramatic vocals, and very loose structure, and from the lush, psychedelic swoon of "Copy Zero", to the bombastic fuzz drenched title track, every number here is as catchy as anything else Bob Pollard and company have produced in the last twenty years, and while a six song, ten minute ep might be mostly for fans, it also makes a pretty great introduction to one of the best, and weirdest, indie rock outfits of our generation.
It's finally here!! Holly Herndon's mini-opus Movement is a striking electronica debut that addresses the intimate relationship that entwined humanity with technology. Conceptually, this San Francisco electonic music alchemist has honed her craft through her studies in the masters program at Mills College and through her current PhD work at Stanford; but she's also got a handful of years absorbing minimalist techno from Berlin's finest dancefloors. The album pretty much splits the difference between the humanist splendor of Kraftwerk's Man-Machine and the technological horror of any given Cronenberg / Ballard amalgam of science fiction. She's quick to assert that none of her sounds are dystopian, even as the human voice is strangled and hacked apart into bite-sized components which she shuffles in and out of slippery, shifting digital sequences. The slow crawl of "Terminal" opens the album with clinical pulses pitched to half-speed and pricked with sharp lazer emanations of probing sound. "Fade" harkens back to her Berlin club days with a tautly engineered burst of angular techno with Herndon's voice reversed and modulated into anthemic chords smacked between Chris & Cosey and The Knife. This is an awesomely fluid track but is somewhat at odds with the uncomfortable cybernetic gaspings of "Breathe" that follow. It's clear that Herndon intends for the album to offer release through the rhythmic aspects of "Fade" and the title track later on in the album, and build in tension through the polymorphous digital abstractions that dot the rest of the album. Movement makes for a bold album that's certainly for fans of Matmos and AGF.
Bombastic '70s progressive rock proto-metal from Italy! I Teoremi were a quartet who really kicked out the jams hard, specializing in muscular, complex stuff that, amazingly enough, at its most extreme reminds us of the prog-punk of much more recent bands like Stinking Lizaveta, Breadwinner, and Ruins! Seriously. For 1971 (when this, their only album, was released), they're one of the heaviest and most spazz-tastic we've heard. Sure, you have to enjoy some grandiose vocals in the typical dramatic Italian prog style, but mostly this is about their instrumental ass-kicking. With its herky-jerky riffing and spiralling guitar patterns, "Il Dialogo d'un Pazzo" could be a song off of one of the first two albums by Greg Ginn's Gone for gosh shakes! Now, we should mention that there's actually a somewhat more recent reissue of this on Arkarma, in one of their mini-lp style digipaks, that's got a bonus track...but we won't be getting any of those 'til we get rid of the two copies of this older jewel case version we happen to have. So we're selling 'em cheap, come n' get 'em! Everyone (well, two people) into early '70s hard prog and metal need to hear this.
Technically this is a split release between At Jennie Richie and irr. app. (ext.) with each project contributing a 16-minute, side-long track to this limited cassette on Black Horizons; but it's also a strange collaborative project as well. M.S. Waldron - the mad scientist behind irr. app. (ext.) - has worked within At Jennie Richie in the past and may have contributed to the murky, post-DADA smeared noise here; and for the irr. app. (ext.) track, Waldron has recycled elements of At Jennie Richie's track from this tape into his own composition of swirling drones and psychic miasma. Got it? Nothing is ever easy for that Waldron fellow! At Jennie Richie's track is mysterious through and through with gray blasts of sound ebbing from silence only to blink out of existence in seconds. These are ghostly sounds, or rather these noises are treated in a ghostly way akin to the acoustic materialization that Francisco Lopez would offer forth about a decade ago. The motorized rumblings that massage themselves into a eerie cosmic purr open the second side and could be generated by no one except for irr. app. (ext.). Out of this introduction, Waldron sets up weirdly flanging, filtered tones that undulate above watery field recordings and nocturnal bumps in the night, concluding with a strange set of angular synth beacon pulses and gasped utterances. Packaged very handsomely as always by Black Horizons with a full color printing on metallic paper for both o-cards that nestle together with the cassette inside. There's only 66 copies of this one!
Record number two from this heavy rock super group, featuring Aaron Turner from Isis, House Of Low Culture, Hydra Head, etc., James Plotkin of Khanate, O.L.D., Phantom Smasher and Tim Wyskida also of Khanate, and like the first record, Black Curtain too is a spare, haunting affair, all atmospheric and lovely, drifting and ghostly, psychedelic and abstract, but where that record hinted at a slowcore side to the group, this new one full embraces that part of the band, the vocals way up in the mix, sounding like an actual pop band at time, pop in the sense that it's not so explicitly experimental, like much of these three guys' output. Granted this is still experimental, but it's a sort of experimental pop, the guitars unfurl lush layered streaks, the drums are minimal, and restrained, it never gets really heavy, instead the vibe is super space and shimmery and surreal, the guitars crunch and howl and feedback, moan and squeal, but those elements are deftly sculpted into something downright lovely. And while opener "Broken Ground" is pretty open, and free, lots of space, lots of long notes and slow decay, by the end, it sounds more like Talk Talk or Cave In, and the next track, "Silent Temple", pushes that sound even further, definitely reminding us of a slightly heavier Codeine or Seam, but the vocals, it's uncanny how much they remind us of Cave In, which is not a bad thing at all, just surprising.
There's still plenty of tension, in fact every song here remains an exercise in patience, push and pull, slow release, gradual ratcheting up and down, the band's at their best when they harness that tension to something impossibly melodic. "Red Bough" sounds like some strange otherworldly Peter Hammill ballad, brooding and majestic, epic and expansive, and yeah, downright pretty. It's definitely possible that heavy music fans will be bummed out on this, which would be a shame, cuz while it's not traditionally heavy, it is dense and dark, and emotionally heavy, even sonically in places, but that heaviness is wielded not as a hammer, but as something much more delicate, but no less dense and devastating. The final track does get downright heavy, the guitar is fierce, downtuned and distorted, the drums pounding, but even here, the vocals soar and melodies abound, a gorgeous fusion of melody and emotion, dark energy and sonic heft. A gorgeous surprise, and a new favorite for sure.
Full length number two from these SF heavies, and while they haven't sacrificed any of their Teutonic crush, or noise rock heft, they do display a surprisingly melodic side on Container Ships, a soft white sonic underbelly that was hinted at on their recent split 7" with Thou, on which they covered a Low track, and it feels like much of the sensibilities that not only drove that choice, but determined what they did with it as well, are all over Container Ships. And while nothing here is quite as darkly delicate, the band do definitely dial back the heaviness, letting the sounds linger, letting clean guitars spread out and set the mood, and when the hammer does fall, the sound this time around is much more crisp and lush, even when the guitars are downtuned, churning and chugging, they ring out, the sounds reverberant and rich. The debt to the Unsane and Helmet no longer so obvious, at least not all the time. On the opener, which might be the prettiest song here, the band offer up their own sort of slowcore minimal math rock / noise rock sprawl, subtly nuanced, and super melodic, another big change on display here is frontman Scott Evans' vocals, which have transformed from a gruff bark, to a serious croon, still rough around the edges, but way more emotive and the perfect match for the band's ever developing sound.
But fear not, get an earful of the second track, "50's Dad", which is all loping, chugging noise rock crush, Evan's vocals higher than on past record, which definitely changes the vibe throughout, and makes even the heaviest tracks here, less of a knuckledragging vibe, and more of an emo edge, which again totally suits them, especially when the band lock into a weird loping groove, and Evans sings himself ragged, his voice rough and raw and impassioned. Not to mention the burst of tangled psychedelic guitar leads that are wrapped around the middle of the track.
The guys have been busting their asses for years now, and we always sort of wondered why they weren't huge, but goddamn if this record doesn't change all that nothing will.
The whole record is a sort of push and pull between the muscled mathy noise rock of the early records, and this desire to make beautiful music, even if it's dark, mean, ugly, hard and heavy beautiful music, which this most certainly is, and it's that balance that makes this record, and these guys so good. The title track here is a dirgey doomy drag, the chords ringing out, the vocals carrying all the melodic weight, and transforming a dirgey chugfest into something epic and intense, the song revealing a grasp and mastery of dynamics that was most definitely underutilized on past records, but gets a serious workout here.
"Cornerstone" is about as poppy as these guys get, and again, they not only mange to pull it off, they also make it this hook heavy noise-pop fit seamlessly into the way heavier rest of the record, not to mention demonstrating another element the band have in their arsenal but obviously choose to employ very judiciously. The record finishes off with the 9 minute epic "You Don't Have Cancer", which again reveals their slowcore proclivities, and demonstrates their ability to subsume that sound into their own, the resulting hybrid another sprawling, gut wrenchingly emotional, crushingly heavy, surprisingly melodic epic, that would, and does, put most other heavy bands to shame.
Another weird and wonderful release from Moniker records, who have recently supplied us with not one, but two aQ Records Of The Week, the weirdo warped electronic downer pop of Jealousy, and the recent sci-fi synth outing from Stacian. Somehow, even though this sounds nothing like either of those, it fits alongside them pretty perfectly. We know next to nothing about Kraus, other than they're from New Zealand, and that this is a fantastically confusional collection of low fidelity, retro-futuristic sci-fi-scapes, slipping easily from murky, stumbling, analog synth dirgery, to woozy outsider space folk, and whatever fucked up stops lay in between.
The opener sounds like Amps For Christ, if he was obsessed with the sixties vision of outer space and the future, it's raw, and garage-y, primitive and spaced out, it's the musical equivalent to some cheesy Z-move epic with aliens and monsters, heavy on the reverb, and some ridiculous drum programming, something like the Shaggs crossed with Joe Meek. Whatever it is, it's awesome. And it only gets weirder. The second track, takes harp like guitar strum, dreamy and woozy, and wreathed in in a warped squiggle of insectoid buzz from some primitive analog synth, a dizzying abstract psych folk space ballad maybe? Who knows? We just know we LOVE it.
From there on out, it's like some wild ride through the cosmos, or at least through the cosmos as envisioned by a teenaged mad scientist who built a lifesize replica of the cosmos out of paper mache, and dressed his pets up like aliens, and offered the neighborhood kids tours of this 'other world'. THIS is the soundtrack, grinding buzzing melodies, over woozy warbly basslines, swirling malfunctioning electronics, warped swells, lazer blast blurts, totally inept drum stumble, the occasional burst of seriously fierce, super distorted fuzz guitar, plenty of percolating electronics and random percussion, detuned guitars, scrapes and hum, hiss and whir. Some tracks sound like drug addled, brain damaged surf rock, or caveman garage stomp, but with a twisted futuristic bent, while other tracks are straight up kitchen sink, weirdo mad scientist electronic experiments, all seemingly recording on a busted old tape deck, giving the proceedings a very Faxed Head like productions, constant warble and pitch shifts, drop outs, bleep and blurts. Some tracks coalesce into practically being real songs, but before they can become proper songs, it's as if something malfunctioned, machine failure, or brainmelt, either way, it seems the song implodes, and splinters, and is gloriously transformed into a fantastically demented slab of warped musical whatthefuck radness.
Another shoulda / coulda been Record Of The Week! You know what that means...
A while back we reviewed a killer compilation from this legendary Finnish composer / inventor / early electronic music pioneer. This new release on Jussi from Circle's Ektro Records offshoot Full Contact, features many of those same tracks on vinyl for the first time, along with a bunch of others that weren't on the cd version. Here's what we had to say about that collection:
This is an awesome document of early computer music from Finnish inventor/composer Erkki Kurenniemi, who is featured on the Arktinen Hysteria: Suomi-Avantgarden Esipuutarhureita compilation, a past aQ Record of the Week, that collection a brief sonic overview of Finnish experimental/electronic/avant garde in the sixties. Kurenniemi's track on the comp is a sort of precursor to Pan Sonic, stiff robotic dance music made from blips and bleeps. This collection of his work from 1963-1973 shows multiple sides of Kurenniemi, the silly, playful side, like the comp track (which also appears here) and then a much darker, noisier side. Having spent time as an artist, a photographer, and a musician, Kurennemi was always an enthusiastic amateur, with most of his works remaining in a raw and unfinished state. Which in no way detracts from the power of these amazing pieces. In fact like lots of home-recorded/primitively recorded music, the quality of the recording is a huge part of the overall sound. A combination of computers, synthesizers and home made automated sound making devices, resulted in a broad range of sound, from grainy rough walls of sound to boinky primitive rhythm tracks to thick rumbling tones and ear piercing sine waves to dorky spastic freak outs to twinkly spacescapes. Really cool stuff.
Really cool indeed. This comp definitely expands on the earlier cd version, in part by introducing the music in the context of Kurenniemi's 'rules', the first of which was "A work has to be completed in a single day." The second was: "Consecutive sounds must be chosen so that they are totally inconsistent or surprising and have no rational relationship with each other." And most interesting, the third rule stated simply: "...?" Not sure exactly what that means, but perhaps we're not meant to know, or perhaps it means nothing. What we do know is the music of Kurenniemi is fascinating and beautiful, difficult and perplexing, sometimes it's like mad video game music gone haywire, at other times it's darkly delicate and downright haunting, much of this created on machines he built and invented, electro-acoustic experiments give way to tape collages which in turn give way to primitive early synthesizer compositions which in turn give way to pure electronic sounds. Gorgeous mysterious stuff, and absolutely recommended for fans of early electronic and computer music pioneers like Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel, F.C. Judd, Daphne Oram, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as imaginary pioneers like Ursula Bogner!!
Incredible deluxe packaging, super thick full color heavy duty gatefold jacket with extensive liner notes, pictures and detailed notes on each song.
Brand new split from these two experimental outfits, each taking a side, Mamiffer starting things off with a gorgeous bit of plaintive piano, drifting beneath fields of reverberant buzz, lush and layered, the sound soon expands and blossoms into a thick wall of sound, heaving and crumbling, a roiling sonic miasma that soon dissipates, leaving a landscape of looped backwards melodies, which swirl softly and sound almost new agey, driftfully dreamy. The second Mamiffer track opens up all textural and super minimal, but like the first one, it too bursts into something noisier, in this case MUCH noisier, as in full on white noise Merzbowian howling skree, it too eventually drifts off, leaving a weird stretch of grinding industrial rumble, beneath soaring echo drenched vox, which somehow manages the feat of being both noisy and lovely.
Weirdo post black metal avant soundscapers Pyramids, counter with their own bit of sonic abstraction, laying down a field of shimmering ambience, moaning horns buried in the mix, roiling looped programmed rhythms, it ends up sounding like some sort of noisy abstract electronic prog, with some seriously fucked up and freaky processed vox, all staticky and demonic. The drums are often blasting, but the production is such, that instead of sounding heavy, it sounds sort of hypnotic and trancey. The second half of Pyramids' side long track is a weird hazy psychedelic drift, backwards vox set atop a lush swirling backdrop of prismatic shimmer, creepy and cinematic, slowly building to a haunting ambient doom creep.
Housed in super nice heavy jackets, pressed on different colored vinyl, and includes a newsprint insert/poster with liner notes/lyrics.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
YESS!!! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Those are direct quotes from Allan the day he discovered, totally out of the blue, that this album had been reissued on cd by the Japanese label EM Records (same folks who put out the Symphony of the Birds reish reviewed elsewhere this list). Kerry and Andee were both in the office that day and can attest that Allan just about jumped out of his skin, his voice positively yelping with excitement. And now we're ALL going ohmigod, ohmigod too since the box from Japan that Allan ordered arrived and Moolah is among us.
Ok, so what the heck is Moolah?? Well we're talking a super-obscure psychedelic/experimental Holy Grail album here. Allan only knew about it 'cause he'd heard some of it on a cd-r burn that our pal Loren Chasse had gotten from Jan Anderzen of Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat. Totally weird, damaged, krautrocky cosmic psych with electronic drones, haunting classical piano, and fucked up rhythms! According to Anderzen, it was an ultra rare LP from the '70s by a band called Moolah, entitled Woe Ye Demons Possessed. Wow. Allan found it hard to believe that was really true, and that it wasn't just something recorded by some genius Finnish forest freak friend of Anderzen's directly for the cd-r. But some diligent research revealed that the mysterious Moolah was indeed a band from New York who released an album on what was probably their own label, Druidstone (!), in 1974. But it was still pretty much unknown and almost utterly unobtainable. It didn't seem to have ever been reissued. And even our most '70s knowledgable psych-rock reissue supplier in Sweden hadn't heard of it at all. But we never lost hope. And now, thanks to the extremely strange and cool Japanese label EM Records, here at last we present to you Moolah on cd! We're still left in the dark about a lot of the details of this mysterious record's history (EM's sales info is mostly in Japanese) but from the album cover notes reproduced in the cd package we can tell you that the men behind Moolah were a duo named Walter Burns and Maurice Roberson, who recorded this, "their paranormal concertwork ...a cosmic rock relaxation creation" at a "secret studio in New York's Greenwich Village". There's also some amazing pagan poetry on the sleeve, here's a few lines: "Licking BLOOD Drinking TEARS Sacrificing LOVE on the Altar of Tomorrow Eating FRUITS of Stolen Vineyards With Withered Young Mouthes That Sing The OLD SONGS WHICH WERE FORBID".
And the music is as amazing as what Allan remembered. Dreamy, beautiful ambience -and- disturbingly chaotic, claustrophobic sounds. Shimmery, murky, distorted, primitive... is it even rock music? For the day, about as far out as you could get. Indeed, ahead of its time. Such tracks as "Crystal Waters", "Terror Is Real" and "The Hatd Hit" are lo-fi jams full of dubby echo effects, indistinct voices intoning New Age ideas, crazy backwards percussion, and insectoid squiggles of electronics. And we think we heard a purring cat in there too. The question is: did the Moolah duo simply inhabit their own, messed-up, mystical little world (which seems likely, judging by those sleeve notes of theirs), or had these guys heard records by early Kraftwerk, Amon Duul, Kluster, and Neu!? We wonder. But either way, the krautrock scene's freakiest had nothing on Moolah. File with such rare, eccentric, outsider psych artifacts as the Cromagnon's Orgasm, Yahowha 13's Penetration, and Comus' First Utterance. What a find. If you like weird, lost, lovely, maybe a bit frightening music THIS IS FOR YOU.
Recently we reviewed a soundtrack from psychedelic space rockers Mugstar, for a film called Ad Marginem, and we remarked that the band's sound was appropriately moody and brooding, appropriate for the film certainly, and thus weren't too surprised that in this context, the band's usual progged out bombast was tamped down a bit. And while we assumed that this shift toward brooding moodiness was perhaps a one off for the film, their most recent record displays something sonically similar, perhaps displaying an overall new direction for the band, but on Axis the band manage to bridge the gap, infusing their sonic brooding with a bit of their earlier bombast (Lime, Sun Broken), but only a bit.
Opener "Black Fountain" (originally on a split with SF spacepsych combo Carlton Melton) is a churning sprawl of mesmering hypnorock, dirgey and murky, the drums dense and busy and driving, driving the whole song, a relentless tribal pound that pulses beneath the chug and churn of the bass and guitar, building tension, but never totally exploding, instead slipping back into another stretched of brooding minimal mesmer. The second track "Hollow Ox" opens with a very This Heat sounding electronic melody, before bursting into some serious progginess, but again, the band seem to stretch out and let the sounds drift and drone, the keyboards heavy here, hence the progginess, but the sound remains locked in an almost looped sounding expanse of seventies progginess by way of Circle's relentless repetition. We're not knocking it at all, in fact we quite like it, and find ourselves listening to these tracks constantly, getting lost in their hypnotic heaviness. "Tangerina" also channels Circle, but adds more warmth, and more organic proggy swirl, even building an almost epic post rock coda part way through.
The sort-of title track "Axis Modulator" is the band at their heaviest, chuggy and mathy and proggy, the riffs churning, the drums relentless and driving, the sound washed out by thick swaths of droney keyboard thurm, building to a seriously rocking sprawl of krautrocky space-psych, that definitely harkens back to previous Mugstar records. "Upturnsidedown" returns the band to that new brooding murk, before finishing off with the almost Stereolab-ish "Vehicles Of Spain", which weds playful psychedelic keyboard melodies to dense drumming, and heavy clouds of woozy washed out psychedelia.
While at first blush, Axis most definitely seems like a departure, much broodier and moodier, darker and a bit less rocking, on repeated listens it reveals itself as the perfect follow up to their last full length Lime, and the more we listen, the more we can't seem to get enough.
Really, at this point, what else is there to say about long running epic doom/sludge outfit Neurosis that we (or someone else) hasn't already? Their sound, ever evolving, remains a template for a million bands that have and will continue to follow in their gargantuan footsteps. The arrival of each new record is an event unto itself. Their performances, increasingly rare, rival Godspeed and Phish and the Grateful Dead in terms of obsessive and slavish fan worship, with fans driving hours, even flying to see them perform. And anyone (including us) will tell you it's well worth it, their performances visceral and emotional, punishing and epic. And they continue to masterfully craft their own brand of brooding, majestic heaviness, even now, nearly THIRTY years in.
This latest full length finds them once again returning to Electrical Audio in Chicago, with Steve Albini manning the mixing board, having been recording them since 1999's Times Of Grace, and while we all have our favorite Neurosis records (Andee's is Enemy Of The Sun, Allan's is Souls At Zero), they've yet to make a bad record. And while they continue to crush and pummel, they have also mellowed with age, or maybe more accurately, gotten more comfortable expanding the group' sonic palette, and it definitely suits them, this new record might be the most varied, and in some ways the least heavy yet.
The opener almost sounds like Neurosis channeling Lungfish, the same sort of looped trancelike mesmer, with the vocals delivered in a staccato sung/spoken bark, the vibe a little bit groovy too, a strange opener for sure, but about halfway through it slips into huge heaving riffery, and yet instead of sounding crushingly heavy, it's more sort of washed out and psychedelic, the heaving riffs, laced with woozy melodies, and weary clean vox.
We can't help but think Steve Von Till's and Scott Kelly's forays into folky singer songwriter territory and their obsession with the late great Townes Van Zandt, hasn't informed the sound of Neurosis, with "At The Well" starting off with some spare guitar shimmer, and Von Till's raspy croon, and even when the hammer falls, it isn't the same sort of Neurosis pummel we would have expected, it remains mournful and melodic, and a little bit twangy, and it might just be our imagination, but we hear slivers of slide guitar drifting in the background, which gives the song even more of a melancholic vibe. "Bleeding The Pigs" too starts off a bit croony, but quickly evolves into something more fierce and feral only to lock into a long stretch of droned out psychedelia, that reimagined with different instrumentation could easily have turned into some brooding dark folk. And even in the heavy parts, that folkiness subtly surfaces again and again.
And as the record plays out, you begin to realize that in some ways, this is in fact a way different sounding group, with the churning, gnarled super distorted heaviness, relegated to a supporting role, the second half of "Casting Of The Ages", the final few minutes of "Bleeding The Pigs", sounding especially like old Neurosis with weird samples, tribal drumming, and anguished bellowed vox, but really, most of the rest of the record seems to be more contemplative, with strings surfacing here and there, acoustic guitars, long stretches of post rocky minimalism, brooding expanses of hushed drift, and then when the riffs come in, the pounding drums, they seem to be infused with a sort of mournful energy, and seem to be recorded in such a way, that the sound is more psychedelic, more lush and enveloping, a hammer wrapped in velvet, the band unfurling some of their moodiest, and most majestic material yet, which we imagine, live, could still translate into something utterly brutal and punishing, but here, exists as something much more measured and mature, a darkly melodic, occasionally metallic, moody musical fugue that is as much brooding heavy post rock and roiling psychedelic heaviness as it is doom dirge crush, and more often than not, much more so.
While they last, we have the limited version in slightly oversized gatefold digi-packaging, after which we'll have the slipcased jewelcase edition.
We loved the last Night Marchers record, See You In Magic. It perfectly pushed all of those Rocket From The Crypt buttons, which had remain sadly unpushed for years, while at the same time soothing the hurt we were experience due to the recent dissolution of the Hot Snakes, 3/4 of which made up the bulk of the Night Marchers including of course Mr. John Reis himself, he formerly of Rocket, and of course the late great Drive Like Jehu.
On record number two, very little has changed, but then very little needed to. The songs are just as driving and catchy, the vibe maybe even more RFTC-like this time around, slithery and swaggery, lots of crunch and stomp, howl and slither. It took a while for us to make it past the opener, "Tropical Depression", which we found ourselves listening to over and over and over, the perfect mix of Jehu, Hot Snakes and Rockets, and while initially, the rest of the record doesn't quite reach such great heights, repeated listens seem to prove otherwise, as every song here reveals itself as a dark, twisted, gem, and within the framework of the sound these guys have mastered, they mix it up big time, frantic shuffles (complete with harmonica), pounding groovers, loping poppers, stonery blooz jams, catchy call and response jangle (with horns!), after listening to this whole record a bunch of times, gets harder and harder to pick a favorite, needless to say fans of RFTC, Hot Snakes and even Jehu (and definitely all three), will dig this big time.
This latest batch of tapes from local label Merz Tapes finds the label expanding and rebranding, now known as Merzbild, and no longer limiting themselves to cassettes. It is however this most recent batch of cassettes we're here to discuss. In this case, it's the first release (and apparently part on of a trilogy!) from Ogham, a duo made up of Kevin Gan Yuen of Sutekh Hexen, and Thomas Martin Ekelund of Trepaneringsritualen. The project is named for an early medieval alphabet, which according to the label is "known for obscuring runic inscription", and the sounds here reveal themselves to be equally obscure and obfuscated. Two sidelong sprawls, crumbling expanses of black ambience spread out over a landscape of murky and clatter, all blurred into heaving subterranean transmissions, greyed out and pocked with moaning metals and reverberating overtones, dripping water and a constant ambient thrum gives the whole thing a sort of post apocalyptic field recording vibe, the soundtrack to a lone figure, trudging through a desolate wasteland, ominous and cinematic, shot through with subtle streaks of melody, and wreathed in crackle and static that ebbs and flows, all seeming to drift in a bleary haze of abstract shimmer and soft clouds of gentle black noise.
The flipside is a much darker dronier affair, as if that same lone figure has chose to wander deeper beneath the ruins of a lost city, the hum of some mysterious machine at the center of the planet, revving up for some seismic event, the hum blossoming into a rib cage rattling drone, layered and corrosive, a black blur that threatens to swallow up the surrounding sounds, but which is soon joined by some unlikely percussion, a slow-mo cascade of tinkling delicate melodies, which are soon lost as that low end rumble explodes into a huge squall of swirling murk, a blown out blur that is surprisingly textured and nuanced, hiding chantlike vocals and strange muted melodies beneath the roiling, churning blackdrone surface, simultaneously crushing, and weirdly hypnotic.
Super sweet packaging, printed silver-on-black tapes, reflective silver and black J-card.
The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Like a lot of you, we flipped for Chinoiseries, a killer collection of sample heavy jams from French-Vietnamese producer Onra, the sources for which were all culled from old records scored while crate digging in Asia, the result was a dizzying barrage of beat driven almost Bollywood craziness, folk music, opera, classical, pop, chopped and looped and wrapped around funky beats, transformed into crazy catchy crackly grooves. We were psyched to discover there was more Onra out there, although this is not so much an album proper as it is a sort of beats and breaks record, and it's not new material, it's archival (check the date as title), but even so, all the breaks here KILL! The song titles are pretty self explanatory: "Porn", "Hit The Bong", "Dirty Loop", "Disco", and as you might imagine, those tracks do in fact sound like the title suggest, but not exactly. Onra definitely has a knack for twisting up sounds and making them weird and warped. Vocals are clipped and layered, collaged and recontextualized, lots of wah guitar, breathy exhalations, plenty of sci-fi synths, bloopy bleepy electro-funk, electronic squelch wrapped around passionate porno moans, bubbling bong sounds over woozy grooves, blasts of disco skitter, much of the record definitely falling into a sort of psychedelic / fuzzed out, almost Blaxploitation sort of vibe/sound, with a bunch of the tracks getting all RZA like, one in particular with fuzzy flutes, squiggly effects and a gaggle of giggling girls. So cool!
Initially we were mostly intrigued by this new ep from Italian punx Thee Oops, cuz the six year old daughter of a friend of ours, has a band called the Oops, where she and her same aged friend, each sit at a drum kit, and try to hit all the drums without hitting the cymbals, and every time they do, they both shout "OOPS!"
This record is by no means as cute as that, but then what really could be? Instead, these guys have tacked on an extra E and delivered 10 short sharp blasts of furious, catchy as fuck punk rock, nothing twisted or weird or experimental, just three chords, pounding drums, yowled vox, and hooks galore. Like all the best punk rock, these songs are essentially pop songs, super charged, revved up and let loose. Opener "1994" has been stuck in our head for weeks, even after only a handful of listens, and the more we listen to this (ten songs in a little over 12 minutes, so it's a lot!), the more it's true of pretty much every song here. Wild little squalls of lead guitar, crazy catchy choruses, some kick ass riffs, the songs flitting from anthemic singalongs to crunchy almost metallic punk to J-Church / Jawbreaker style pop punk to fuzzy midtempo UK punk rock to Toy Dolls style hyper pop. They even do a Beastie Boys cover (as in old punk rock BB!!). So great!
Vinyl folks, fyi, this will be coming out as a double 7" sometime soon.
People's Temple are another group whose debut record seemed to slip right past us, but record number two from these Michigan sixties style psychedelic garage poppers is definitely pretty great, groovy and swaggery, fuzzy and jangly, their sound definitely transplanted from the past, it's actually not that difficult to imagine this is some lost sixties artifact recently dug up and reissued, the sound stripped down and raw, super jammy, with plenty of spidery leads, some serious blooze jams, a few with harmonica even, lots of echo and reverb, the guitars slipping easily from urgent crunch to shimmery jangle, the vocals a snarly drawl, almost Scott Walker-y at times, but with some cool dreamy two part harmonies, the songs slipping from low slung brood, to soaring baroque pop, to fuzzed out dirge, to soaring FX heavy trip outs, to crunchy stripped down garage rock groovers, a serious grower, the sound instantly digable, but with every play, the songs seem to get catchier and catchier, and it's easier and easier to get lost in the People's Temple's sixties sonic time warp.
Latest blast of blown out heavy psych guitar grime from this oddly named Ohio outfit, and like the records before it, this is some gloriously filthy in the red noise rock crush, equal parts Stooges-y sludge, droned out heart-of-the-sun Hawkwind heaviness, and slithery leather pants-ed, bong smoke-y swagger, a bass driven dirgery that erupts into wild squalls of wah guitar blowout and feedback fried freakout. For fans of the current crop of psych/space rock, these guys are like a dirtier, scarier, grimier, noisier version of all those other bands, which some might argue also makes them BETTER. And while they sound right at home on Hozac, it's easy to understand why they sometimes also call Siltbreeze home, that aesthetic is definitely all over 1982, a continuous barrage of crumbling in-the-red riffage, avalanches of chaotic drum damage, wild shredding leads, buried feral vox, a million tangled melodies woven into walls of blown out psych, and buried underneath all that there seems to be a whole mess of hooks, and heck, maybe even some 'choruses', but instead of hunting for them, it's way better to just crank this as loud as you can, and let PA's psychedelic skree wash over you, wallow in their wild wooly psychedelic noise rock, and eventually, all of that other stuff will seep into your pores, like some glorious sonic poison.
Primitive proto-metal reissue alert here, folks! Reaction were a heavy, hairy power trio bashing out boogie-blooze-based hard rock. Technically, Reaction could be considered a krautrock group, we suppose, since they did hail from Germany and this rare record originally came out back in 1972. But it's nothing cosmic nor proggy that's for sure. No flutes, no synths, no motorik beats. Instead it's just loud and lumbering and riffy and mean (well with a bit of poppiness at times, those lumbering riffs being fairly catchy after all).
Yer basic, raw, fuzz filled rockin' good times, the nine tracks here taking the likes of Cream and Cactus to the next (lower) level, more wasted, more fuzz, more cowbell! (There's plenty of the latter on the awesomely titled "The Funeral March Of A Marionette".)
Some of the obscure and not-so-sophisticated heavy psych acts of era we'd compare 'em to include Moses, Blues Addicts, Road, Toad, and Speed Glue & Shinki, plus fellow "krautrockers" like Tiger B. Smith, Blackwater Park, and Hairy Chapter (their first album Eyes anyway). Like we said, in the vein of Cream and Cactus, moreso than Can or Kraftwerk! Nothin' wrong with that though, when you wanna rock.
The first few seconds of Lost Language, a blast of fuzzy crumbling distortion will have you expecting the latest slab of monster sludge, or a blast of pummeling downtuned brutality. And the bands pedigree might have you expecting something similar, guitarist Larry Dolan produced the debut full length from metallic post rockers Tides and drummer Mikey Lemieux used to bash the skin for metalcore heavyweights Drowningman. But what you get instead is some killer, super propulsive, slightly mathy, but very moody, instrumental rock, that harkens back to bands like Pell Mell. There's all sorts of definite reference points, Pell Mell is the most obvious, a simultaneously laid back and caffeinated burst of super energetic mathy groove. But can hear lots of nineties indie rock, plenty of SST, a bit of Tortoise, some Minutemen for sure. Surf rock guitars are wound tight beneath thick splashy swirls of open high-hat and frenetic almost funky drumming, the bass is sometimes slithery and dark, sometimes rubbery and almost dub like. Some tracks stretch into languid epics, others fly by, a manic expulsion of chaotic energy. Once in a while they sound a little like a less Joy Division obsessed Interpol, but again with that nineties instrumental rock vibe. The final track is the show stopper, a near half an hour epic, that almost sounds like the band took the first seven tracks and rearranged, reshaped, and reimagined them into one lengthy jam, keening angular riffs, wildly chaotic drumming, a hypnotic neverending epic, with cool backwards guitars, some My Bloody Valentine swoosh, the whole thing constantly shifting from full blown overdrive, to laid back lope, and back again, until the whole thing fades to a haunting soundscape of minimal guitar drone. Finally, a simple tribal rhythm emerges, and the track unwinds, a slowly decelerating coda, all muted rhythmic rumble and barely there melody. So cool.
After the breakup of the much-loved floor-core noise duo, Yellow Swans, Pete Swanson has carved quite a solo career for himself, but we haven't heard as much from fellow YS member Gabriel Saloman. As it turns out, Saloman has been rather busy himself over the past few years in Vancouver working on various solo projects of his own under the monikers of GMS and Sade Sade and with collaborative projects Diadem and Chambers. Most of his projects have taken on a conceptual form of social resistance like his Music for Prisons project, which employed field recordings of protests for imprisoned Tamil refugees with original music to be broadcast at extreme volume outside of prison walls as a form of political protest against authoritarian-imposed incarceration.
But Adhere, his vinyl debut for the Miasmah label, is the first time we're getting a full sense of the range of Saloman's sonic vision, and it is uniquely compelling and powerful. Composed in collaboration with a contemporary dance group, Adhere reads as a modern classical composition in seven parts with intense builds and pregnant silences, centered around reverberated piano, bowed strings, ambient guitar, percussive woodblocks and martial drumming into a captivating and beautiful soundscape. Sometimes the intensity is restrained by minimal piano stabs in a big empty room, in the third part, we hear some gorgeous Robin Guthrie-ish guitar washes, still later some dramatic yet solemn percussion. The entire composition toggling back and forth between quietly pensive dynamics and voluminous crescendos that give a sonic drama to an obviously visual accompaniment. Perfect for the Miasmah label which has always had a strong focus on marrying works of experimental classical forms with dark penetrating ambience.
Holy crap, this long circulated bootleg, originally released in the early eighties as a crazy limited unofficial cassette, has now been remastered and reissued as a super deluxe double lp. Capturing a classic period in the early years of these Aussie post punks, four sides of swaggery, snarly, swampy garage punk action, the sound delivered in varying degrees of fidelity, it was bootleg after all, but all the tracks here rule, loose and ramshackle, sloppy and wild, unhinged and fuzzed out and catchy as hell, a bunch of cool covers too, Alex Chilton, Chuck Berry, the Troggs, some rarities but also some Scientists classics. All recorded between the late seventies and early eighties, and sounding way better than any of the versions you might have dug up on some blog.
Pressed on 150 gram vinyl, housed in a thick full color gatefold sleeve (with printed innersleeves), featuring lots of rare photos, and extensive liner notes from various Scientists, all telling wild tales of back in the day!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
Ok. Go to YouTube and watch this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8nTGTCSGj30&mode=related&search=
Now, buy this album.
What, you need more???
Ok, but don't think we won't try that ploy again.
So, if'n you don't know, 1972's Lonesome Crow was the first ever album from Germany's Scorpions, a band later to become worldwide heavy metal hitmakers. Here, though, their not-so-humble beginnings are in the realm of heavy, hippie, progressive KRAUTROCK. Of course. In fact, this Conny Plank produced debut was the first ever release in the legendary Brain label 1000-series, catalog number Brain 1001 (and thus it's now getting a nice digipack cd reissue via the Revisited label, along with classic krautrock albums by Klaus Schulze, Eroc, Novalis, and others). It's fully psychedelic heaviness, seriously Sabbathy in spots, featuring the glorious fly-you-to-the-rainbow vocal stylings of a then-bearded and not-yet-balding Klaus Meine and, on virtuoso lead guitar, Michael Schenker, the 16 year old brother of rhythm guitarist Rudy! Young Schenker would soon split the Scorps for what at the time were greener pastures in England's UFO, but since his replacement was the godly Uli Jon Roth, the Scorpions saw no slacking in the dep't. of axe mastery. Still, this first album is definitely sits on its own lonely throne amongst all the amazing early Scorpions records (up thru the last one with Uli, 1977's Taken By Force, you can't really go wrong!).
So fans of the psychedelic proto-metal and krautrock too should check this out...no, it's not like they sound like Can or Faust... but it's not too far off from some Amon Duul II, Lucifer's Friend, Nektar, or even Necronomicon. The title track clocks in at over 13 murky, majestic minutes (that's prog!). And the riffs, well the riffs definitely are Hendrix-Cream-Sabbath influenced, on the road to true metal, sorta an earlier parallel to the evolution of another great '70s metal act, Judas Priest, whose first album was also on the druggy, psychedelic side.
One of our favorite tracks from recent Record Of The Week, Twins, from local garage pop kingpin Ty Segall, and listening to this track, we forgot to mention how much the main riff sounds like classic Nirvana! Which is most definitely a good thing, but Segall transforms it into something even poppier. In our review of Twins, we describe it as being a dead ringer for classic Redd Kross, which is also sorta true, a supercharged sort of sixties pop. The flipside, exclusive to this single is another slab of sixties pop, but much more stripped down and acoustic, some dreamy hippy psych pop, all dreamy harmony vocals, steel string strum, and even some whistling at the end. Not hard to imagine this song distorted and supercharged, and fitting perfectly on Twins, but in it's acoustic form, it's pretty much the perfect B side, and well worth the price of the 7"!
No doubt about it, Ty Segall is really one of our favorite garage rockers around. We're lucky enough to get to see him play all the time and the incredible sweat and energy of his live shows manages to seep its way into his recordings as pretty much every slab of wax he's released has delivered way raw fucked up garage rock at its absolute best!
Teamed up with his pal Mikal Cronin, the two take things to even more of a blasted and fractured state of garage mayhem with Reverse Shark Attack, tons of moments that remind us of the amazing thrashing garage pop scorch of the great Japanese band Acid Eater or some dream universe where Syd Barrett got to jam out Brainbombs covers. In fact they do an amazing cover of the Barrett era Pink Floyd gem "Take Up The Stethoscope And Walk" - it was so rad when we played this in the store for the first time and an enthusiastic customer screamed out "Who is doing some serious fucking justice to the spirit of Syd Barrett right now!?" and we totally understand where that impassioned and immediate reaction comes from! Segall continues to tap into the kind of music making that truly grabs a hold of your body to give you a totally enthralling pure and raw physical experience. We had heard an awesome 7" these two did together earlier in the year that sadly we weren't able to get our hands on, and it seems that Cronin really encourages Segall to go more into the outer limits of sound than on his own and we have to say we really love it! And we pretty much love any and all of what Ty does whether it's the amazing pop hooks he's capable of creating in his great songs on his proper solo albums or when he totally just goes way free and enters a total garage freak-out state that goes way beyond fuzz, like the tracks on Reverse Shark Attack. So rad!
Agents Of Power (subtitled: "including Elric: The Dragon Prince (A Tale Of Tragic Destiny In 12 Parts") is the third album from these ultra-epic, triumphant true metal warriors, who often write lines like "I have slain man and elf before" - but don't take themselves TOO seriously however, since their band is named, after all, for the villain from the He-Man cartoons (or are they?). Skelator are an American act, from up in Seattle, but have a definite European power metal feel a la Hammerfall (and remind us also of aQ faves Sacred Steel). However, their biggest influence is probably Judas Priest, with Skelator's vocalist, excuse us, "Larynx of Doom", Jason Conde-Houston, definitely possessing some screaming-to-the-stratosphere, Rob Halford style pipes! Furthermore, what's cool is that the Priest influence extends not just to their "castle metal" epics - they've also made Priest's motorcycle ridin' rocka-rolla part of their sound too. So while the whole entire second half of this album (and then some) is an elaborate, theatrical multi-part song suite dedicated to Michael Moorcock's swords & sorcery anti-hero Elric (which by itself would be rad and impressive), the first batch of tracks here are lustful, stand-alone denim & leather rockers, with the reckless "Rhythm Of The Chain" (first lines: "I'm walkin' down the street / rocking to the power of the thunder beat") being a ridiculous standout and live fave. We know that 'cause we saw 'em a month or two ago here in San Francisco at, of all places, hipster haven The Hemlock Tavern. They were on a bill with SF's Slough Feg - turns out those bands are buds, and it was particularly cool when Skelator's singer got on stage during Slough Feg's set to duet on a cover of "Green Manalishi"! Of course. After that, we were like, gotta review some Skelator! It's the first album of theirs that we've listed, though the true metalheads here at aQ have been throwing the horns to 'em for a while now. This new album could be their best yet.
For fans of, well, METAL, but, specifically, Judas Priest, not to mention fellow Pacific Northwesterners 3 Inches Of Blood, too.
Originally released as a super limited cd-r back in 2009, and more recently as an insanely limited lp, these first recordings from this Fell Voices side project get a second vinyl pressing, again on heavy white vinyl, mastered at 45rpm, and BEAUTIFULLY packaged.
Here's what we had to say about this Sleepwalker record when we first reviewed the cd-r:
We're huge fans of Santa Cruz black metallers Fell Voices, their sprawling epic blackness immediately held us in its thrall, flitting from total classic Scandinavian style blackness, to raw punky pounding filth, to meandering post metal drift, to furious Cascadian style epicness, all blurred into massive totally transcendental, side long black metal jams. But ever since we first reviewed the Fell Voices lp, we had a handful of customers emailing us insisting that we had to check out Sleepwalker, a side project of the drummer of Fell Voices. We managed to get in touch with him, and now we finally got a handful of the two Sleepwalker demos, one from last year, and a brand new one from 2010, most folks will probably want one of each, they're pretty crazy cheap after all, and they're amazing, but sadly, they're the very last copies we'll be able to get, we only have about 10 of each, so grab one before they're gone...
Sleepwalker is similarly epic, but more washed out and murky than Fell Voices, occasionally more midtempo and depressive. The 2009 demo, like the follow up, is seriously post rock influenced, spare simple drumming, deep rumbling bass, spidery guitar melodies, repetitive and motorik, eventually the sound cranks up but doesn't get metal so much as it gets rocking, pounding away for a while before exploding into something more expansive and epic, sounding a bit like Godspeed, noise rock and black metal all woven together, surprisingly melodic and catchy, a little bit jangly too, although it does seem to get darker and blacker as it goes. The second track is gorgeously murky and washed out, blurred and a bit shoegazey, even the shrieks and blasts and buzz are smoothed out into something way more hypnotic and dreamlike, before the final track finishes off in a blaze of blown out, blissed out blackened post rock buzz, epic and majestic, hypnotic and repetitive, the vocals buried yowls, the drums way down in the mix, all riding on the soaring sheets of black-psych-metal-gaze guitars. Awesome.
As for the packaging, Vedavu have pulled out all the stops. The vinyl is housed in a full color inner sleeve, which in turn is housed in a full color jacket, all the images super bright and abstract, not really black metal looking at all, the cover looks like pouring milk or some mysterious white honeycomb, all very striking, and on top of that there's a thick textured paper letter pressed Japanese style obi, black on black. Wow. Already sold out at the label, these are the only copies we'll be able to get!
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