Originally released as a super limited cd-r back in 2010, these early recordings from this Fell Voices side project finally gets a super deluxe vinyl reissue, much like the 2009 demo, also repressed and listed elsewhere on this week's list. But unlike I (2009), this is the very first time the second Sleepwalker demo has been available on vinyl. Like the other reissue, II (2010), pressed on heavy black 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 2010 demo (here renamed II) begins all gorgeously washed out and hazy blurred blackness that in some ways sounds more like Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker, the drums a buried metronomic pulse, the guitars a smeared swirl, a lumbering melancholic dirge that grows more and more jangly as the record progresses, only to finally switch to what sounds like a black blast, but it's hard to tell the sound is so gauzy and indistinct, regardless it's simple more dense swirling buzz drenched blackness. The second track begins with a long stretch of frantic buzz, and spoken word vocals, only to finally slip into a punkish blast, the guitars again blurring into strange amorphous shapes, all wrapped up with weirdly crooned vocals, the production muddy enough that the heavier it gets, the more abstract and spaced out it sounds, and finally, the last track is all acoustic, but not just folky interlude style acoustic, it's almost like acoustic black metal, the guitar strummed fiercely, frantically, eventually strange almost industrial percussion surfaces and the track begins to sound like some sort of militaristic industrial folk before finishing off in a cloud of steel string buzz.
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 image is all swirling liquids and abstract textures, all very striking, and on top of that there's a full color printed inner sleeve and a thick textured paper letter pressed Japanese style obi. Wow. Already sold out at the label, these are the only copies we'll be able to get!
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Sleepers, awake! Or rather, the opposite, as we herald the return of Yorkshire, England's Slomo, a "Highly Ritualised Somnambulant Glumbient Downer band" as they describe themselves - and we couldn't have come up with a better description ourselves ("Glumbient", that's great!). The duo of Chris McGrail (aka Holy McGrail, leader of another, eponymous heavy pagan drone psych unit) and Howard Marsden continue to live up to their band name with over 67 minutes of slow-motion doomdrone bliss on The Grain. Two tracks this time, unlike the one apiece that appeared on their previous albums The Creep (2005) and The Bog (2008), but of course both tracks here are loooong.
McGrail is credited with "strings & reeds", Marsden with "machinery"; what we're hearing is a lot of synths and some guitar, but it all of course takes a while to come into focus, the opening title track, duration 42:15, being just about thee ultimate definition of a "slow-build" piece! At the start, it's as if the sounds are emerging from nothingness, the primordial soup of (near) silence. Gradually, subtly, slowly, creepily, they build and build, a deep tone, a drone, another drone, at first purring, then softly growling... the rumble becoming rhythmic over time, echoing, echoing, echoing... When finally recognizable, McGrail's guitar manifests as a gentle subterranean wind-howl, or subaquatic whale-call. The gritty synth machine drones are equally cavernous, and the entire effect, especially after you've experienced the lengthy build up to full mind-altering force, is massively mesmeric, and indeed rather "Glumbient", we agree!
Then, track two, "Against The Grain", while shorter (only 25:17) somehow sounds even more stretched-out, the grain of the drones here even more, uh, "granular", with sudden clouds of creaking clicking, like field recordings of some strange bird or insect, drifting about the soundfield, backed by deeper dronier windier waves. It really is a bit like one of those environmental recordings from a pond, the faux-electronic sound of amplified water beetles, their buzz and glitch married to the guitar-leaning-on-amp whoosh of any one of our favorite dronescapers. Nice! Somehow spooky -and- soothing, simultaneously.
Definitely recommended to all old-school SUNNO)))-worshippers, if you can imagine SUNNO))), as we stated in a previous Slomo review, "perhaps sleeping and snoring and drifting in dream". Other good references would be old Earth (circa 2), Bohren, Black Boned Angel, Jonathan Coleclough, and Slomo's fellow rural UK, J. Cope-approved dronesters Urthona, with a slight dose of Coh or Ryoji Ikeda in the drone-mix.
These two have also been known to refer to themselves as playing "agricultural" doom, as they they're some sort of slowly spreading strain of fungal potato blight or something. But, here, maybe we can hear it - tall fields of wheat, waving and rustling in the autumn wind, those sounds slowed down and amplified, likewise with the chittering of insects living it up inside the grain silos - but still, they sound more like guitar 'n' synth wielding dronologists than they sound like that long-ago AQ fave cd, Insect Noise In Stored Foodstuffs...
Slomo's latest sure gives this week's other Record Of The Week honoree, Kompakt's new Pop Ambient comp, a run for its money as ideal going-to-sleep music - and none of the Pop Ambient tracks are this long, either, ever!!
Coming packaged in an attractive, slender digi-sleeve, it's been worth the four year wait (with Slomo, naturally not unexpected), for this new dose of the duo's somnolent dronedoom. Highly recommended.
We ranted and raved about the mighty Bastro a few lists back, and almost as if planned, both records by the band that would become Bastro get re-pressed not a few months later
We're talking about Squirrel Bait, post punk, pre math rock, a dense mix of massiveÔhooks, a twin guitar attack and raw vocals which manged to be not punk enough for the hardcore kids but too fast and fucked up for the indie rockers resulting in Squirrel Bait being, overlooked andÔTOTALLY UNDERRATED.
The pride of Louisville, Kentucky, these guys were LITERALLY just kids when they started this sonic bombast. A bit thrashy perhaps for power pop purists (boo!), these boys wrote the book on post-hardcore for sure. Good enough (or better than, depending on who you ask) to be as influential
SB's second and final release clocks in at under 30 minutes, but even more than their debut, Skag Heaven packs the future of indie rock and the blueprint for post rock right there in that half hour. This band explodes and offers up song after song dense with strange melodies and furious rocking, delicate arrangements and hooks galore. These guys accomplished more in this half hour than most bands do in their entire careers. They may have been POST hardcore, but the hardcore spirit meant you didn't need a 80 minute double album to say your piece, short and sharp, and pretty darn near perfect. Maybe more twin-guitar buzz this time around, more refined songwriting (without giving up the innovation OR the aggression),Ôsome of the best drumming EVER, and vocals that show real angst and depth without devolving into that indie sad boy whine. All this andÔstill not one member legally old enough to purchase alcohol!
We ranted and raved about the mighty Bastro a few lists back, and almost as if planned, both records by the band that would become Bastro get re-pressed not a few months later
We're talking about Squirrel Bait, post punk, pre math rock, a dense mix of massive hooks, a twin guitar attack and raw vocals which manged to be not punk enough for the hardcore kids but too fast and fucked up for the indie rockers resulting in Squirrel Bait being, overlooked andÔTOTALLY UNDERRATED.
The pride of Louisville, Kentucky, these guys were LITERALLY just kids when they started this sonic bombast. A bit thrashy perhaps for power pop purists (boo!), these boys wrote the book on post-hardcore for sure. Good enough (or better than, depending on who you ask) to be as influential as Husker Du or the Replacements, but more genuine in their attack as they were young bucks making an unholy racket well beyond their years. Squirrel Bait's debut is a wild and loud messy mix of pop and punk, but this ain't no 'pop punk', this is just a furious blast of mathy, heavy, catchy, hooky, thrashy, sloppy rock and roll. Later folks would call this post-hardcore, post punk, stuff like that, but the truth is, Squirrel Bait were making music that while similar to other groups at the time, was taking chances, and making sounds and writing songs like no one had heard before. It's still fiery and furious and in your face, but amidst all that youthful exuberance, were the bits and pieces that would define a whole generation of post rockers. It's no coincidence that members of Squirrel Bait would go on to play in Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and The For Carnation.
Even to this day, this record sizzles and crackles and sounds as original and innovative as the day it was released!
We've long been fans of dubstep DJ/producer Starkey, in part because even when dubstep was his bag, he was constantly pushing the boundaries of that sound, preferring terms like 'street bass' or 'bass music' to the flavor of the month 'dubstep', and introducing all sort of other flavors into his dubstep. Orbits finds Starkey delivering the latest installment in his 'street bass' series and easily the best, a forward thinking collection of modern electronica, still heavy on the dubstep, but all of those classic dubsteppisms are recontextualized here into a whole new sound. The opener "Renegade Starship" sounds like Starkey trying to mash up DJ Shadow and Daft Punk, which somehow sounds amazing, darkly dramatic, soaring sweeping synths, and stuttering beats, a woozy atmospheric first half, and tangled, beat heavy, second half, with a cool, haunting droned out synth denouement.
But "Command" is the single here, and it's obvious why, moody and atmospheric, with sped up and stuttered soul vox, all wound up into a killer alien hook, and when the drop comes, BAM, an avalanche of synth buzz, that gives way to some skeletal 808 skitter, then big block rocking beat, wound around some seriously slithery synth, this is the sort of shit that some pop star should be singing over on the radio, listening to this now, we're imagining it can't be long before some mainstream big names catch on and start hitting up Starkey to produce their tracks. Orbits plays like the perfect transition records, still fucked up and experimental, and underground, but so close to breakthrough mainstream pop hit material, which is what makes Orbits so good, best of both worlds. And yet for every booming bass hook heavy hit, there's a jam like "Magnet", all murky vocodered celestial electro ballad, creepy and dreamy and haunting, with a surprising final big beat climax, or "Distant Star", which starts out all kosmische and psychedelic, before exploding into full on Deadmau5 / Daft Punk territory. And in-between, more stone cold killers, like the weird stuttery synth crunch of "And Then God Built To Cosmos" or the super minimal old school squelch heavy "Lzr", or even the lush atmospheric synth swirl of "Crashing Sphere".
Easily our favorite Starkey record so far, and the more we listen it it, the more it seems inevitable that some big names will pop up with some crazy new jams with some twisted Starkey productions in the near future. Bieber? Beyonce? Britney? Ke$ha? Nicki Minaj? Taylor Swift? We can only hope...
Not really sure how we managed to not ever review this, the third record from dreamdrift duo Stars Of The Lid, especially considering they're a long time aQ fave, and rank up there for some of us as one of our favorite groups ever. But this gorgeous chunk of haunting spectral guitar drone ambience, originally released way back in 1997, has just been reissued on vinyl, which makes this the perfect time to right that wrong.
For those who are new to Stars Of The Lid, in the early days of the list, anything that was lush and brooding, ambient and beautifully atmospheric, Stars Of The Lid was the comparison we would most often make, the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie, channeled the spirit of Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki through two guitars and a four-track, contemporaries of groups like Labradford and Jessamine, but way more minimal, the duo approached their songs like classical compositions, modern minimal epics, sweeping movements, in places lush and majestic, but in others, hushed and meditative. While the group would later go on to incorporate piano and strings, their early records were mostly created with treated guitars, deftly arranged and lushly layered, the Ballasted Orchestra being the perfect example. Longform compositions that unfurl like somnambulant ragas, starlit reveries, the sounds pulsing and drifting, subtle overtones ringing out like ripples in a pond, at times sounding like a super stripped down Spacemen 3, that sort of druggy pulsing buzz that defined that group's sound, but here slowed to a crawl, and spread way out.
A few of the tracks here gain some forward momentum, "Fucked Up (3:57 AM)" definitely has some dark twang and swoonsome drift, brooding and haunting, softly pulsing, a hypnotic slo-mo trance, all lush guitar thrum, and buried minor key melody, not to mention some heaving low end rumble off int he distance. And then there's the two part "Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30", which is indeed a hearfelt tribute to the show, and it's not hard to imagined these sprawling swirls of burnished chordal hum as the backdrop to that classic surreal program, and even on their own, free of any visuals, the sounds evoke all sorts of dark drama, especially part two, which adds some field recordings, and more haunting twang. The final track might be the loveliest of the bunch, a lush landscape of dark dreamy swells, of softly swirling swoonsome melodies, of smeared soft focus shimmers, all blurred into a hazy expanse of sweet sound, drifting off into the endless night.
Such a fantastic album, from an incredible group. Most definitely a precursor to bands like Barn Owl, newer Earth, Fear Falls Burning, FNS, RV Paintings, Slaves, and many of the current crop of dark sonic soundscapers, and yet as good as many of those groups are, few have come close to eclipsing Stars Of The Lid.
The reissue vinyl finds one of the tracks that was edited for the original cd release restored to its proper length, as well as the bonus track, "24 Inch Cymbal", from the original lp release!
This is bizarre in every sense of the word. Naturestrip is a label that has dedicated itself to propagating all sorts of composition through field recording, with sound artists like Tarab and Loren Chasse crafting impeccable scores directly from the earth, and rural psychedelic practitioners like Leighton Craig and Eugene Carchesio crafting skeletal song against an environmental backdrop. Australian filmmaker and sound artist Joel Stern has taken his field recording tactics into an unusual place of thickly collaged signifiers with hints of song, rummagings for texture, and straight recordings from out the in the field. It sort of comes across as a ramshackle radio play, as if some genius lunatic outfit like the Starving Weirdos were given permission to fuck around in the INA-GRM studios. Stern offers up some improv clamor in the woods with sticks, twigs, and bird chorus playing equal part in the noise with squeaking horns, concertina strum and squabbling noises. He's also found scraping upon styrofoam, and steel springs for an unnerving background of skincrawling textures that counterpoint tension-loaded pops of long wire manipulation and the occasional heavenly ring of chimed bells. Feral dogs bark and howl in the rain while Stern overlays a simple melody line from a thumb piano coaxed into harmony with a distant chanting of unknown origin. He's at his best when an unsettled musicality seeps through the field recordings; and perhaps he saves his best for last, with the plaintive strum across the guitar and harmonica set against a distant wailing of children becoming a tragic end to this Fellini-esque album. Remarkable to say the least.
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 this collaboration between SF black metal / blacknoise outfit Sutekh Hexen, and long time Nurse With Wound collaborator Andrew Liles.
There would be a time when Liles remixing a black metal band would seem crazy, but the fact is that at this point, SH are really only tangentially black metal, as they spend much of their time weaving dense dronescapes, or sculpting bursts of feral ear splitting noise into tense and intense walls of blown out sound, granted, there's still plenty of blast and buzz, but it's often obfuscated and recontextualized. Each side of this tape seems to offer up both the original track, and then Liles' reworking. On the A side, SH unfurl a dense blurred rumble, peppered with muted bombastic thuds, and subterranean pulses, buried voices, and a tranced out sprawl of undulating layers, blacks and greys, haunting and harrowing, a sound that's bleak and abject, the perfect launching point for Liles, who takes that track and stretches it from a little under 6 minutes, to almost 18, making the focal point a haunting, reverbed piano, drifting in soft billowing clouds of what we take to be the original track, letting the occasional drum blat leap out, or spidery tendrils of industrial buzz, gnarled tangles of voices speaking in tongues, and then suddenly, at about 10 minutes in, the song is transformed into what sounds like a sort of industrial rock? Chugging metallic guitars, big drums, all over that churning Sutekh brood, there's even some psychedelic guitar leads, unclear if somehow those sounds were buried in the original track, or if Liles just went nuts and essentially turned SH, at least briefly, into a weird industrial metal band, but then suddenly, it all fades away, leaving the track to slither ominously to the end, trailing a cloud of buzzing detritus in its wake. Wow.
The flipside finds SH exploding right out of the gate with a blurred blast of black buzz, murky and swirling and dizzyingly dense, before settling into another long sprawl of black ambient drift, much more haunting, abstract and serene. And again Liles takes SH's 5 minutes and more than doubles it, the whole thing, a brooding blackened driftscape, the tones oozing and rife with what sounds like some sort of demonic chorale, a blurred black raga, laced with sheets of harsh noise, jagged shards of processed vocal hiss, building to an impossibly dense and noisy, speaker destroying crescendo, that sounds like multiple Herman Nitsch compositions playing at once, atonal, droned out, and weirdly mesmerizing, underpinned by what sounds like organ or calliope, the vibe very cinematic, the sound collapses into a cacophony of smashing bottles, before beginning the slow build again, this time to a blown out, smeary drone, seemingly constructed from the blast and buzz of the original, but here recast as something more Tim Hecker like, massive crumbling distorted swells, and granular sheets of sound rife with melodic murk, gradually collapsing into a strange stuttering digital freakout, and one final burst of smashing glass.
Super sweet packaging, printed silver-on-smoky-clear tapes, reflective silver on swirly green and black J-cards.
This ain't that new of a release - it came out in 2011 - but we hadn't yet reviewed it, and when we got some copies back in the other day, wondered, why the heck not? Haven't been able to stop listening to it lately, it's so dang electrifying and infectious. What we have here is a killer collection some of the best tracks recorded by one Takeshi Terauchi, who in the mid-'60s was known as Japan's "King Of The Electric Guitar". In fact, he may still be.
We all know what instrumental surf music guitar sounds like, give it a Japanese twist and you have "Eleki" (what they called electric guitar music). The "Tsugaru" of the subtitle refers to traditional Japanese folk songs, which were also adapted to the '60s rock n' roll invasion. Badass guitarist Terauchi was a pioneer of the Eleki craze, building his own gear, playing to crowds of screaming young girls with his bands The Blue Jeans and The Bunnys. So just imagine a Japanese version of Link Wray and/or Dick Dale, all exciting, exotic surf twang and groovy fuzz. There's some achingly romantic, folk based melodic moments, and we like that, but the best parts are when Terauchi is ripping it up on his fretboard to surfy, psychedelic excess!
FYI, they fit 25 tracks on the cd, and 14 on the vinyl.
Laser Eyes is the third ep release from Bay Area shoegaze trio, Tied To The Branches and is fast becoming our favorite one. Members, Brad DerManouelian, (who runs the new label, Sleep Genius, which also just released the last Chasms 12" we sold a ton of recently), soundscape artist and aQ fave Marc Manning, and Justin Wasterlain, really rev up the distortion and reverb here, hearkening back to bands like Loop, Flying Saucer Attack and the Jesus and Mary Chain, but with their own skillful knack for writing strong memorable songs with driving tempos. Ghostly vocals and fluid bass lines pierce through the thick and luscious wall of sound the trio create to form a speedball of heavy somnolence, invoking a world of nightmarish sleepwalking hallucination. Amazingly, this was engineered by Don Pyle of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet fame (you know, the creators of the Kids In The Hall theme!), and listening closely there is a hint of twangy surf-rock buried under all the topcoat layers of distortion and reverb, but TTTB are no revivalists. Rather, they are carving their own homegrown niche within a larger heavy shoegaze-psych framework. While this ep will be available to the general public as a digital only release, the band has given aQuarius an exclusive but limited physical cd-r version just for our customers, so act fast on this one. It's so good!
We're pretty picky when it comes to garage rock/punk, it's really got to be raw, impassioned and at least a little fucked to truly catch our full attention. Traditional Fools blast out the kind of reckless garage rock jams we can totally get behind. Should be no surprise as one of the members of the band is Ty Segall whose solo debut last year was one of our favorite records of the year! Traditional Fools are a bit more on the traditional side of punk/garage rock, but still way blown out, lo-fi and way fun. They cover Red Kross and Billy Childish which gives you a pretty good idea where they're coming from, and this full length really is full of drunken garage rock delights that could have been at home on Crypt or Rip-Off Records back in the hey day of classic garage. Fun and irreverent and totally raw and rocked out.
A co-release by two great San Francisco labels Make A Mess (home to Nodzz, Brilliant Colors) and Wizard Mountain who put out Ty Segall's first cassette. Comes on nice white vinyl and for so cheap. It's a no brainer!
For some reason, we've never properly reviewed a Utarm record on the aQ list before, even though the aQ metalheads here are longtime fans. We did review their split with Servile Sect offshoot Sadness Saturn, and dug their half quite a bit. And we gave a brief mention to their 2009 full length Minus The Divine, but now is the time to give this weirdo Norwegian black doom experimental one man band his aQ due, and it's pretty good timing too, as this might just be his most warped and what the fuck outing to date, which makes it even more fitting that he found their way on to the Handmade Birds label, his twisted take on doom-ed BM a perfect fit, alongside outfits like Circle Of Ouroborus, Pyramids, Crooked Necks, Sutekh Hexen, Pinkish Black, Theologian, not to say Utarm sounds like any of those groups, he most certainly doesn't but like those outfits, Utarm most definitely forges his own twisted, idiosyncratic sonic path.
Only five tracks, but most are loooooong, the opener begins with a smoldering expanse of keening, music box melodies, over sheets of super distorted high end tones, feedback, anguished vocal mewlings, woozy and druggy, more twisted electro-ambience, and droned out avant psychedelia, it's not until six minutes in before there's any trace of actual metal, black or otherwise, and when it does erupt out of the warped sonic swirl, it's not the buzzing blackness you might expect, instead, it's a sort of epic, heaving, Gnaw Their Tongues style bombastic majesty, pounding, slo-mo drum crush, keening soaring metallic guitar buzz, howled wailed vocals, the melodies unfurling mournfully, a sort of ur-drone doom, almost like Sunroof! if they were from Norway and sported a black metal pedigree, we kept expecting it to burst into something buzzier or blacker, but instead, it continued to ratchet up the tension, total heart of the sun, black doom, ur-drone bliss out.
The following track laces weird samples into swoonsome symphonic swells, and tortured, near operatic vokills, the vibe dense and dramatic, almost like some sort of satanic cabaret. The music warped and warbly, the tempo shifting constantly, as if someone was physically altering the speed, the result a woozy, creepy sprawl of dramatic black ambience that unwinds like some blackened, noise drenched murder ballad. That is before it crumbles into near silence, only to explode a weird black tangle, buzzing guitars, wild shrieking vokills, the whole thing wreathed in static, and glitch, and malfunctioning FX, but somehow retaining that twisted cabaret vibe.
From there on out, it doesn't get any less weird, or any more traditionally black metal, instead, each of the three remaining songs, unfolds like some cursed garden of poisonous black flowers, heaving swells of epic chordal buzz, doused in sheets of crumbling distortion, but within this blacknoise, all sorts of swirling minor key melodies, layer upon layer, heavily textured, and strangely moving, "Black Light Aeon Apocryphia" almost sounds like Tim Hecker or Nadja, that same sort of warm melodic doomdrone swell, blown out and gorgeously gristly, while "The Headen Of Men And A Left Hand Dagger", the shortest of the bunch, still clocking in at a whopping 6:42, is a dense squirming tangle of layered guitar buzz, a tranced out electrified dronescape, brilliant arcs of whiteheat guitargrowl are channeled into a single sure of super heated Skullflower like guitarnoise, underneath which all manner of other sounds roil and churn. Tranced out and totally hypnotic. And finally, the record ends with the 10+ minute "Above Death", which is another sprawling field of high end howl, a sky full of burnished, black energy, streaks and contrails bleeding into a blinding white light, a grinding onslaught of industrial white noise, filtered through a fractured avant black metal filter, emerging on the other side some sort of damaged avant power electronics, the sort of thing that would make Utarm right at home on a label like Cold Spring, or the perfect group to tour with Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend or Theologian.
Fierce and fucked up and dementedly brilliant, but black metalheads tread lightly, this could definitely be the gateway to much scarier, much noisier stuff...
Second volume in this amazing series of compilations, which gathers up all manner of music from discarded memory cards from cellphones, these memory cards and cellphones collected from throughout Northern Mali since 2010, even more relevant now that extremists in Mali have banned music on cellphones. A sad state of affairs for the people of Mali, who, like everyone else in the world, use cellphones for everything - including, collecting, trading, and listening to music.
Like the first volume, the music here offers a glimpse of some of the weird and wonderful music that doesn't often make it on to world music compilations, even comps on Sublime Frequencies and the like. Like the first one, maybe even moreso, the focus here is on the home produced DIY jams, heavy on the autotuned vocals, a modern hybrid of traditional African music, and modern pop. The opening track is the perfect example, sans vocals, and drums, it's a beautiful bit of deserty blues, all intricate melodies and warm steel string buzz, but then add the skittery lo-fi drum programming, and the woozy autotuned vocals, and you've got a strange bit of 'futuristic' Afro-pop. Even the songs that sound more traditional, like the second track, still display subtle elements that give the sounds a unique twist, in this case, more of that programmed Casio style drum machine, which gives the dreamy high life a strange propulsion.
There's an uncredited track here, that's a sort of reggae groove, which sounds like it's sung by a child, is laced with some crunchy guitar and groovy synths, not to mention the occasional bleat of a goat! After that the comp continues to swing wildly from the groovy desert blues of Hasso Akotey, to the moody percussive club music of Lakal Kaney, replete with rapping, to the handclap driven, fuzz guitar, horn flecked high energy of DJ Mopao, even the recently deceased Koudede shows up, with a gorgeous track of that warm languid, hypnotic guitar grooves. There's more autotuned pop in the form of Pheno S.'s laid back Afro-soul funkiness, although our two favorites might be Iba One's horn driven Afro-hop banger, which weaves majestic synth horns around skittery beats and strident anthemic vox, a huge American hip hop influence for sure, but filtered through classic African pop, and the crazy closer from Cheba Wassila, another high energy groover, that has a serious Bollywood vibe, soaring autotuned vox, and wild rhythms, lots of horns, squiggle synths, even some killer fiddle solos (also seemingly run through the auto-tune for good measure!).
Of the now thirteen (!) volumes of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, we've only ever made two of them Records Of The Week, at about three year intervals, which is a bit surprising considering how much we've dug them all, and the fact that the term itself, Pop Ambient, has become a frequent bit of aQ review shorthand we use all the time to describe the numerous variations of blissed out shimmer and dreamy washed out drift we can't seem to get enough of. And as with each past installment, this latest is another stunning collection of experimental ambient music, lush atmospheric electronica stripped of beats, the backgrounds pushed to the fore, abstract and hauntingly atmospheric, the lineup featuring a handful of familiar names, but some new faces as well. And another reason for making this latest Pop Ambient collection a ROTW, is that there seems to be a growing darkness in the sounds of these comps, a grim musical undercurrent that infuses these tracks with a brooding quality that most ambient music lacks, the artists pushing well past a sound that initially was simply a beatless Kompakt style techno, toward something that over the years morphed into fully fleshed out modern minimalism, expansive sprawls of cinematic soundscapery and gorgeous snippets of avant chamber music, but all retaining that sort of Pop Ambient haze, a soft focus murk that makes the music sound like it's being transmitted from some other world, or some other time.
Leandro Fresco starts things off with a gauzy bit of hushed shimmer, laced with what sound like alien field recordings, and pocked with haunting little sonar like pings, and wreathed in soft chordal swells. The vibe is very much like the soundtrack to some slow panning shot across a fog shrouded landscape, lit by the moon, and a sky full of flickering stars. Kompakt mainstay Michael Mayer follows up with a dark thrumming sprawl (remixed by another Kompakt regular Wolfgang Voigt), wedding a deep rumbling low end to a woozy looped susurrus, whispery and wispy, but shot through with a strangely sinister drone element, that lurks in the background, but gives the track some serious sonic malevolence. Jens-Uwe Beyer dials back the darkness, and unfurls a bit of slowly blossoming soft focus glimmer, the sound reminding us of Machinefabriek or Jasper TX, a slo-mo, melodic drift, all softly shifting overtones, and undulating layers, gauzy and darkly dreamlike. Triola delivers a strangely circus-like track, that conjures up images of a brightly lit carousel, viewed through a thick fog, a very Something Wicked This Way Comes vibe that is deftly molded into something much more playful and pretty.
Marsen Jules returns to the dark side, with a lush, layered landscape of long tones, of minimal percussion, and blurred melody, woven into a tense, slow building brood, before the sound bursts into a dense, percussive, almost doomlike lumber, almost like a fuzzy, soft focus, dreamdrift SUNNO))), crashing percussive bursts of swirling sound, surrounded by streaks of bleary hum and thrum, a darkly churning, hauntingly cinematic epic that is WAY to short. Mikkel Metal keeps it dark, introducing his track with a distorted churning rumble, laced with swirly psychedelic backwards swoops, and a clipped hissing pulse, the noise sculpted into majestic swells, the vibe blackened and industrial, building to a thick, caustic, but still woozy and washed out, climax of dense black swirl. Anton Kubikov brings things back into the light, but a grey, dying sun sort of light, wrapping reverbed piano in thick swaths of gauzey swirl and crumbling textures, sounding a bit like a lost Caretaker track, weathered and worn, melancholic and otherworldly. Wolfgang Voigt returns, this time with his own track, which plays like a collage of orchestras tuning up, simultaneously symphonic and cacophonous, a dizzying collage of tangled loops, of fuzzy textures, murky ambience, warbly melodies, flutes surface at one point, as do strings, not to mention some epic orchestral swells, but they all seem to be sinking into a gorgeous, whirring black sonic morass. Leandro Fresco lightens things up with his second track, sounding more traditionally Pop Ambient, all hazy, lush textures, slowly shifting, glimmering melodies, and softly pulsing overtones, again super cinematic, dreamily epic, gorgeously melodic, a sun dappled dreamdronedrift that definitely plays like the sonic denouement, the musical light at the end of this hauntingly dark tunnel. Which is followed up by the finale, another field recording flecked stretch of swirling electronics, and dark droning swells, adding shadow to the previous track's light, and then surprising us all but coalescing into an actual pop song, all strummed acoustic guitar, and echo drenched dreamy sad boy vox, all wreathed in softly swirling clouds of woozy thrum, and all manner of forest sounds and bird calls, pastoral but again, just slightly sinister. So good.
By now, we're used to the idea of rock n' roll in its sixties heyday as a GLOBAL phenomenon, kids everywhere, East and West, North and South, rockin' to that crazy beat. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of quite a few internationally-digging DJs and collectors, the past few years have been especially fruitful ones for reissues of far-flung rock artifacts on labels like Sublime Frequencies, Now-Again, and Soundway.
We've heard groovy groups from Turkey, Cambodia, Ghana, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and seemingly every place else. Certainly there's been a few releases that have delved into the scene in Malaysia and Singapore, but this fabulous new collection on Sublime Frequencies is THEE one to get if you want to learn about the great electric beat music being made by and for teenagers in that part of the world, circa 1964-1970.
Despite the conservative nature of Malaysian society, the rock n' roll revolution took root among its youth too. This Pop Yeh Yeh comp proves it! (The term "Pop Yeh Yeh", by the way, referring to rock music sung in Malay, was apparently derived from the "yeah yeah yeah" chorus of The Beatles' song "She Loves You", though it may have been another British band, Cliff Richard and The Shadows, that was the bigger influence on the nascent Malay rock scene.) While the kids there didn't get as wild in the streets as they may have elsewhere, with drugs and sex and all of that, they were still happy to let their hair down (if only just a bit) to make some sweet rock n' roll records. There's 26 such tracks are collected here, full of catchy melodies, fuzzy guitars, warbling organs... There's energetic dance numbers, and lovely ballads both. Some have the twang of surf music, others the sultry singers and lush arrangements of Hindi movie soundtracks, which were another big influence on Pop Yeh Yeh, besides Western pop rock and traditional Malay folk music forms.
This compilation is an obvious labor of love, years in the making, and can't be faulted for any lack of thoroughness. The physical product and depth of research set the bar pretty high for future collections of this type! It's a big package all right, colorful and informative. The tri-fold digipack contains not one but TWO thick booklets, they're both needed to contain all the extensive liner notes (book 1, a general essay on the history of rock n' roll in Malaysia and Singapore, plus lyrics to the songs on the cd; book 2, detailed write-ups on each and every track on the disc) plus tons of vintage photos of the sharp-dressed young men and women who made this delightful music, which despite all the interestin' reading, is still the main draw here after all! Another winner from Sublime Frequencies, guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Scattered Melodies is the first 78rpm compilation from aQ beloved world music label Sublime Frequencies (there's a second one, released simultaneously, focusing on Burmese music, which we'll review on the next list). It was curated by long time SF contributor Robert Millis, a member of aQ faves the Climax Golden Twins, and curator of many of our favorite world music compilations.
Scattered Melodies is a rough translation of the Korean word 'Sanjo', which was in fact a form of improvisation in the late 1800s, as performed on the Kayagum, a cousin to the Japanese koto, with a similar sound and range, the notes plucked one at a time, decaying quite quickly, giving the melodies here a very pizzicato feel, but with overtones that ring out, making the sound buzz hypnotically, a little bit like a sitar. The notes are often scraped and thumped and snapped, the melodies angular, the playing percussive and physical. There's a definite connection to early American rural music, at least sonically, the same sort of aching, mournful quality, and of course it's all wreathed in that warm 78rpm record crackle. Some of the faster passages sound sort of slippery, like they could have been played with a slide. The tempo constantly shifts, the Kayagum accompanied by a simple hand drum called a changgo, not so much supplying rhythms, but instead accents, often mirroring the Kayagum, occasionally locking in with the Kayagum's melody, the building rhythm adding tension and pathos, but just as often, spread way out, a simple thump or pound every few measures, giving the sound a loose, skeletal framework. There's also the occasional vocal, just a shout or yelp in the background. Raw and visceral, emotional and mysterious, Millis explains in the liner notes, that it's Korean Kayagum Sanjo was the music that made him obsessed with 78rpm records, and listening to these tracks, it's easy to see why.
Packaged in a nice old school tip-on style sleeve, with a printed, full color insert, featuring liner notes from Millis.
Another fantastic collection of old timey music from local label Tompkins Square, this one chronicling the life cycle of rural America, in the twenties and thirties, split up over three disc, the first, songs of labor, "John Henry, The Steel Drivin' Man", "The Farmer Is The Man Who Feeds Them All", "When The Roses Bloom Again For The Bootlegger", the second songs of leisure, "Work Don't Bother Me", "The Beer Party", "Corn Shucking Party In Georgia", "Home Brew Rag", an finally, the ultimate reckoning in the form of songs of prayer and worship, "Climbing The Golden Stairs", "I'm S-A-V-E-D", "The Gambler's Dying Words", "When The Moon Drips Away Into The Blood" (!).
Almost as fantastic as the music is the provenance of the records themselves, most of which belonged to a single hillbilly 78 collector named Don Whale, from Louisville Kentucky, who died leaving a hoarder's haul worth of trash and junk and receipts and everything else you'd expect to find, but in addition to the usual detritus of life, was an INCREDIBLE collection of rare 78's most of which had been tossed in the dumpster, and were rescued mere hours before being hauled away to the dump and destroyed!
Most of the tracks here are previously un-reissued, and while a few of the names will be familiar to old timey / blues / bluegrass aficionados, many won't, and the songs themselves are gorgeous, the aforementioned "When The Moon Drips Away Into The Blood", is a surprising jaunty jam, considering the title, while the two part "Flat Wheel Train Blues", is beautifully melodic, with some fantastically melancholic fiddle, intricate finger picking, sans the sung/spoken vocals, it's a stunning slab of dreamy Appalachia, the song replete with simulated trains sounds which only make it that much more evocative. "The Beer Party" begins with a playful conversation/intro before the song launches into a stomping fiddle driven hoedown, "The Preacher Got Drunk And Laid Down His Bible" almost sounds like proto Mountain Goats, urgently strummed guitar, and keening rapid fire vox, and "Beyond The Starry Plane" is a wistful lament, wreathed in tons of hiss and crackle, which only makes it seem that much more ethereal and ephemeral. We could probably go though the whole collection song by song, but you get the drift, all of this stuff is amazing, and as with all Tompkins Square releases, beautifully packaged, here each of the three discs is housed in its own full color sleeve, there's a huge perfect bound booklet, with liner notes and essays, rare photos and more, all housed in a nice heavy box, with full color paste on artwork.
Oooh. Nice one, this. If you dig psychedelic dronemusic, heavy on the guitar, that is, 'cause it's the 2nd album on the ever-reliable Utech label from this droney duo from China, one half of which is none other than freeform electric guitarist & sculptor-of-feedback Li Jianhong, whose solo album on Japanese psych label PSF, Classic Of the Mountains And Seas, we made a Record Of The Week a few years back. The other half of the band is laptopper Vavabond, and together they create a dark and disturbing, yet sometimes somewhat soothing symphony of cosmic sci-fi space drone (VagusNerve are kind of big into UFOs and flying saucers), full of strange sounds. Layers of Jianhong's whale call guitar and swarms of other unidentifiable electronic drones (from keening high end to bassy lows) are ofttimes joined by weird wordless vocals, druggy mumbles, the guttural moans of some human creature. This devolved baby-babble is however buried beneath the burbling electronic FX and quasi-melodic guitar wail. What sound like distant air raid sirens rise and fall, as abstract alien transmissions from across the galaxy shower down over the three loooong tracks here, "The Memory Of Light", "The Exiled Life", and "Go Back To The Sirius" - as in, this is sirius tripping balls music!! To be played LOUD, if you dare. These aren't airy ambient drones. It's all quite dense and physical and maybe even frightening, with Jianhong's amp burning blackest on that third track, at times coming close to Keiji Haino in an echoing realm of insane video game zips and zaps.
Recommended drones for sure, a no-brainer if you trust us, or Utech, or are already a VagusNerve and/or Li Jianhong fan. Comes in a nice Utech-designed fold-up sleeve, with cool art appropriate to the dark spacey sounds on the disc.
After a handful of killer 12"s comes the debut full length from Vessel, aka 22 year old producer Sebastian Gainsborough, who sounds right at home on Tri Angle, especially after the recent release of the new record from Holy Other. But where the Holy Other record found HO taking a stab at mainstream radio pop (and failing spectacularly), creating a warped chunk of radio-proof, avant, slo-mo soul pop weirdness, Vessel uses a similar sonic palette, but to create something much more tranquil, spaced out and psychedelic. The dub vibe is huge, at times the sound reminding us of a more reverby, dub heavy Burial. "Stillborn Dub" delivers a breathy, fragmented vocal line, over a spacious sprawl of blurry sonic haze, of skeletal rhythms, of murky bass pulsations, all held together by that distinctive upstroke melody. But then "Images Of Bodies" ditches all that dubbiness for some super minimal sci-fi house music, peppered with all sorts of weird FX, some fuzzy bass warble, the sound somehow equal parts techno and some mutant strain of futuristic electro, but whatever it is, it works. Woozy and warped, total tripped out late night avant techno mesmer. The sound continues to shift throughout, making Vessel a tough one to pin down, some tracks fusing hazy Pop Ambient shimmer to dramatic Portishead like downtempo moodiness, others taking murky minimalism and burying hip hop beats and breathy processed vox, still others channeling classic nineties IDM into something bloopy and playful, but always with a certain sinister undercurrent. And throughout the record, the oddest sounds will pop up, instantly changing the feel of the song, a groovy throbbing synth here, a warped house music pulse there, hazy eighties keyboards, wild tangles of electronic melody, distorted buzz, bursts of glitch and squelch, the sound occasionally dense and propulsive, driving and hypnotic, but more often then not, much darker hued, more laid back and darkly druggy, and be sure to stick around for the brief 2+ minute closer, which might be our favorite jam here, a dubbed out hazy distorted shimmery creep, that sounds like Vessel remixed by the Caretaker!
Ever wake up from a late night out on the town with that hazy, fucked up feeling in the head? Of course you have, so imagine that feeling translated into a an album of super damaged, super woozy garage filth. Kurt Vile and his boys the Violators bring us the Hunchback EP, an unholy combination of mid '70s Stones and a more gritty Spacemen 3. And even though the first couple tracks don't veer to far from the new wave of lo-fi garage rock, as the album plays through it dips into more cosmic and spacey realms of dreamy guitar. Makes us think of nighttime alleyways, smokey barroom depression, a drugged-out fried-out bad trip kinda vibe, all nicely put together with catchy riffs and tough guy in a leather jacket at-all-times kind of vocals. Dingy parking lot car show rock n' roll, with a fitting black and white photo of Vile on the cover in some empty lot in Philly (looking quite damaged himself). It's a perfect match for any fan of Thee Oh Sees, Wavves, or Wooden Shjips. Oh and make sure you play this sucker loud, definitely something you'd hear blasting from the rager next door. Recommended.
There are perhaps too many literary and historical allusions in Scott Walker's latest viscerally infernal libretto to map out any specific meaning for our dear readers, but the brute force of the complexly sophisticated and yet still bombastic arrangements is enough to both highly recommend to our listeners with difficult and extreme tastes, and to warn others who may not be able to stomach such arch utter weirdness. We weren't sure Walker could venture further into such out-there territory than 2006's The Drift, but the man continually surprises. The sound design is incredibly, even crazier: plucked strings like cawing birds, farting theremins, coffin nail drumming, the heavy guitars that wind in serpentine fashion like venomous snakes around Walker's operatic croon, the sharpening of blades, the detuned horns, the carnival rhythms that appear and recede seemingly out of nowhere. But through the strange and corpulent madness of music comes moments of sublime tenderness that momentarily hearken back to Walker's early solo records, a wistful nod to "Plastic Palace People" on "Corps Du Blah" for example, keeps this from being an exercise in extreme sonic indulgence like say "Lou-Tallica" was. We have rarely heard a more insane record, but whether that is complimentary or not remains entirely in the hands, and the ears, of the listener.
Two and half hours of a continuous, unedited recording from Chris Watson, the field recordist who should need no introduction! The Sukau rainforest is found in Borneo along the Kinabatangan River and is a dense primary forest with little access to the forest floor with the exception of a decaying boardwalk that meandered from the lodge where Watson was staying deep into the heart of the rainforest. One morning in October 2011, Watson followed this path several kilometers to the furthest point and lashed his microphones to a tree in order to record the growing dawn chorus of the birds, monkeys, and insects as their activities increased with the rising sun. At the beginning of the recording, Watson gives a brief description of the environment around him before he quietly retreats and lets the forest do the talking. He is quick to point out that the watery sounds are not of rain but of the huge amounts of moisture captured on the vegetation, tumbling down on the forest floor. As daylight approaches, the frequency of the cicadas and buzzing insects seems to increase ever so slightly and the bird calls tend to become more vibrant if a bit more spread apart. It's so easy to get lost in these beautifully rendered sounds of the forest; and Chris Watson's trademark of quality is stamped all over this recording.
If you might be balking at the price of a dvd-r, the Framework Seasonal discs are only available to the donors supporting the Framework Radio series and Resonance FM. Patrick McGingly - the producer of Framework - made one exception in allowing aQuarius to be the only shop carrying these discs. So, yes they are expensive, but they are certainly going toward a worthy cause and Chris Watson's recording is well worth the price of admission!
Recently, through several friends of aQ, we've been introduced to a bunch of really cool indie rock from China, Boyz & Girl (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Pairs, Snapline, Mr. Graceless, Carsick Cars, Duck Fight Goose, but the one that really grabbed us the most was this one right here, the oddly monikered White+, which is in fact not really indie rock at all, but is in fact an experimental offshoot of the Chinese indie rock group Carsick Cars. This duo describe themselves as being a "hardware electronica band", although the friend who turned us on to these guys, described them as sounding like Neu! crossed with Yellow Magic Orchestra, which thankfully is pretty dang accurate. Utilizing a set up of customized keyboards, pedals, samplers, loops and live drums (and the occasional bit of spare ethereal vocals), White+ lay down some droned out, super mesmerizing, darkly motorik krautrock influenced electronic hypnorock, that sounds like a weird hybrid of Circle, the Boredoms and Fabulous Diamonds, or something like that, just check out the opening track here. A cascade of skittering programmed beats, looped and layered, chopped and collaged voices, live tribal drums, swirling electronics, dizzying FX, the sounds warped and constantly shifting speed, the vocals processed into strange streaks of psychedelic melody, the various other loops slipping from crunchy chug, to spaced out shimmer, the whole track churning and propulsive and utterly hypnotic. The second track is where the Neu! first pops up and shines through big time, the band locked into a serious psych-kraut groove, a sound that positions these guys squarely in the current movement of kraut-psych space rock revisionists, but their sound is definitely more electronic, and much more beholden to classic krautrock, albeit here wreathed in psychedelic effects and layered with warm washes of keyboard melody, not to mention clouds of swirling FX.
And here's where we'd usually say something like "and that's how it goes from there on out", but these guys aren't so simple to peg. The next track takes seriously driving drums, and adds some electronic bagpipe sounding synths, the result some twisted Amps For Christ / Maserati hybrid, with brief bursts of twisted FX heavy warpage, where the sound slips into near Aphex Twin territory.
From there on out, all bets are off, bloopy and bleepy, skittery and playful one moment, all lilting melodies, and hazy dreamlike kraut-age shimmer, brooding buzz drifting atop wild dense drum damage the next, all supporting soaring echo drenched vocals, the vibe ritualistic and trance-like, definitely a sound that fits perfectly alongside modern day Boredoms. The live drums are really what make the band, even the most ethereal sprawl of soft focus electronic ambience, takes on a whole new vibe when anchored by some pounding rhythms, and the mix of programmed beats and real drums makes for a heady rhythmic concoction, with the surrounding sounds just as compelling, equal parts melodic pulsation, kosmische cascade, and tripped out sonic swirl, some tracks sounding like a full on, heavy as hell hypnorock band, others like ultra abstract avant kraut experiments, the vocals transforming some of the tracks into near popsongs, but more often than not, the vocals splinter and are transformed into something more textural or rhythmic, the song following suit, taking that pop element and wedding it to something much more abstract and psychedelic.
A unanimous new aQ favorite, and literally every time we play this in the store, we sell a copy! We have a whole bunch, but when we sell out, we'll have to get more from China, so might take a couple weeks. Needless to say, grab one NOW! Super deluxe packaging too, sweet design, massive booklet, obi, etc.
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Long in the works, this last ever Throbbing Gristle project, which was to be a fully realized cover album of the legendary Nico record from 1970, has had more than its fair share of controversy and drama within the confines of the remaining members of the group (Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson). Not only by the death of key member and project leader Christopherson, but also the decision of Chris and Cosey to continue the project on their own as a tribute to "Sleazy" sparking a widely publicized twitter feud with former Throbbing Gristle member Genesis P-Orridge. Already the name X-TG was christened due to P-Orridge's unwillingness to continue to tour with the reenergized Throbbing Gristle in late 2010, and the remaining members continued on, under the new moniker, with a desire to mold new sounds in the studio. The Desertshore album was in fact instigated several years before, back in 2006 for an art installation, but the results were unsatisfactory and thus re-recorded two years later. With Sleazy's death occurring before the project was finished, it became a tribute with vocals given to an array of familiar guests. What seemed at first like a dream project, has since been altered so far away from its original intentions, that while on one hand it's great to see a long involved project finally realized, we can't help but wonder what could have been.
The problem being that with so many guest vocals, it's impossible to be immersed into a singular sound world that the original Desertshore demands, as the changes among vocalists create an unwanted distraction. The sound that X-TG created for themselves is beautifully exquisite, and on some tracks, especially the Antony led, "Janitor of Lunacy", the total effect is mesmerizing. But between the bravado of Marc Almond, the tepidness of Sasha Gray, and the wildly fluctuating moods of other guests including Blixa Bargeld and Argentine cinema provocateur, Gaspar Noe, it's difficult to feel satisfied overall. The biggest question for us is why didn't Cosey just sing the whole thing? Her vocal contributions are among the best of the lot and might have led to the project having some much needed continuity. Perhaps perfect closure was too much of an unattainable goal in the post-TG world for us to expect.
Unlike the other declarations of finality, disc two in this double disc set is in fact The Final Report for the remnants of Throbbing Gristle. The sketches of The Final Report were mapped out during studio sessions from 2009 through 2010 up until Sleazy's death, with Chris and Cosey completing the album themselves. In many ways, it's a considerable improvement upon the Third Mind Movements by Throbbing Gristle from 2009, with flickering, mirage-like electronic tones and deconstructed samples sliding in and out of focus around the orbit of the lumbering rhythms. While the technology and the ability to use it has improved, the band continue to build from primitive pulses and scaffolding that are plastered with uneasy sounds, subliminal vocalizations, and mutant electronica -- all very much in keeping with the Industrial agenda of 1978, but with current technology. "E.H.S." sounds very much like what Throbbing Gristle revamped today would sound like, with unsettled vocalizations lurking at the perimeter of perception and Cosey's atonal guitar bursting through the cybernetic, lurching rhythm in chunky blocks of bent sound. "What He Said" is a noirish piece of futurist electronica with a heart-beat pulse gradually building in intensity with elongated coronet tones and skittered echoings of caustic noise bouncing throughout. The Final Report is pretty much a unified album, which is a strange thing to say about a Throbbing Gristle record, which in the past were known to be distinctly disjointed and multi-faceted. Here, the vision is consistent with a morose soot covering both man and machine alike. Let's hope the next Chris & Cosey record picks up where this one leaves off!
We're actually glad Yo La Tengo isn't more prolific and makes us wait a few years before each release. This way we eagerly anticipate each new album and fully savor it once it's finally here. There's always a give and take of expectation too, we know inside and out what YLT's basic sonic template will be, but there's always a loose thematic exploration or vague organizing principle behind each release that gets changed up each time. The last two, Popular Songs, and I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, were largely kitchen sink affairs in terms of style and duration, mixing cool genre pop experiments of Motown soul and country with long excursions into indie psych rock. Fade by contrast is their most compact and concise full length in over a decade with just 10 songs in about 45 minutes (the deluxe vinyl comes with a bonus 7" with two covers of a Todd Rundgren song and a Times New Viking song, as well as a download coupon that also includes a bonus new 11 minute track, the ambient instrumental "Oriole"). But the brevity of length on the album proper brings greater focus to the nuanced details of each song. Produced by John McEntire of Tortoise in a wonderful collaboration we are surprised hasn't happened long before now. This may be the band's best sounding record yet.
Whether it's their overall best record is always debatable, but every YLT record satisfies us on some level like a dear old friend, and all of us of course have our own favorites. Fade hearkens back to the softer pastoral sensitivity of 2003's Summer Sun without so much of that album's cosmic free jazz flourishes. Instead, each track on Fade is a tightly composed slice of indie pop economy with attentive detail to arrangement and production: The warm warble of the organ, the brilliant reverbed guitar tones, the subtle chamber orchestration of horns and strings that are peppered about, but used with restraint, and of course the sublime vocal harmonies. Definitely a great morning record to get your day started. Not a game changer by any means, but in the band's 30 year history, who's really expecting one at this point. At least they remain firmly on top of their game, and that's all that matters.
