We've been championing local San Francisco metal masters The Lord Weird Slough Feg for years and years now, so it's nice to see 'em getting more and more recognition. Indeed, they've become something of a cult heavy metal institution. Used to be, their releases were expensive imports from small European labels, then they got picked up by Profound Lore (who put out their eighth full-length, 2010's The Animal Spirits), and now they have just been signed to American metal mainstays Metal Blade. So, in advance of their upcoming new album for Metal Blade, the label has reissued three of Slough Feg's early hard to find albums (well, we usually had 'em, but other places not so much) as a package deal. Not exactly a "box set", though they do come in a slipcase. There's no bonus tracks or new art or anything, so if you already have 'em you don't need to buy 'em again. But if you're a Slough Feg fan who doesn't don't have 'em - or simply want a big dose of weird old school '70s/'80s styled metal done with eccentric aplomb - then you're in luck.
This set comprises the band's 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cds, originally put out via Italy's Dragonheart label. 1999's Twilight Of The Idols is the oldest, it came out back when we didn't write quite so much, ahem, about things on our site, so our review was short and to the point, and actually serves well as a description of Slough Feg in general. As we said then, they take their inspirations directly from the masters: Sabbath, Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Queen. Celtic folkisms collide with doom metal riffs, guitar leads run rampant over epic song structures, and the heroic vocals tell stories fantastic and weird... a metal masterpiece!
Nowadays, a metal band emulating Maiden and Lizzy isn't so strange, but in '99 Slough Feg were out on a limb... and let's face it they still are, even if fashions have caught up (or flashed back) to them. Twilight Of The Idols is a raw, early work, but definitely captures the essence of the band, and contains several of our favorite 'Feg tunes, including the epic (there's that word again) nearly 9 minute "Great Ice Wars", as well as perhaps one of the most obscure cover tunes ever chosen, "The Wizard's Vengeance", a track originally from an absurdly rare, 1979 private-press lp by a bizarre American progressive rock act called Legend.
Next up in the set is Down Among The Dead Men, from 2000. This is the one where guitarist John Cobbett of Hammers Of Misfortune et.al. joined the band. At the time, we said, we proclaimed it the "true heavy metal record of the year" and said, if you like some real, melodic heavy metal once and while (instead of the "brutality" and "evil" of that ol' black metal/death metal stuff we love too) the way they used to do it back in the '70s and '80s, with all the crazy fantasy lyrics and shredding dual lead guitar solos you can handle, then you need to hear these guys... This band is usually described as a mixture of Maiden, Lizzy, and Sabbath. That's true, they're all that, and not in just a wanna-be, "those are our influences" kinda way either - 'cause after listening to Down Among The Deadmen you could imagine Slough Feg getting in the wayback machine and sharing the stage with any of 'em at Castle Donnington and holding their own just fine! This is one of the only bands we know of where the musicians started as punk/rockers but realized that instrumental virtuosity and compositional craft characteristic of their childhood/teenage metal heroes WERE valuable and could be put to non-ironic, non-lame use. And were talented enough to do it. So, inspired by the past they are, but they're also their own weird thing, a cult act if there ever was one. With songs about Roger Corman movies ("Death Machine" is based on motorcycles-in-the-future David Carradine flick "Death Sport"), fantasy Celtic mythology (the "Heavy Metal Monk/Fergus Mac Roich/Cauldron Of Blood" tryptych) and the classic science fiction roleplaying game Traveller ("Traders & Gunboats"), with Mike's decidedly unordinary (but great) deepvoiced vocal majesty, and the plethora of amazing RIFFS, these guys rule!
For those who need an obscure indie/metal reference, it's kind of like The Champs meet Cirith Ungol or something; bizarre, epic, baroque, proud, a bit silly, masterful, very metal. So worthy of the delightful cover painting by Erol Otus of D&D fame (who also did the cover of Twilight Of The Idols).
Finally, batting third, there's 2003's Traveller, this time conjuring visions of cosmic adventure in a galaxy-spanning science-fictional Imperium of the sixth millennium AD, rather than the battlefields of the Celtic fantasy world which inspired those previous Slough Feg albums, though they've taken some of their trademark Celtic-tinged riffs with 'em into the future.
Yep, the 'Feg boys came up with a full-on sci-fi concept album here, each song contributing to a space opera story of far-future genetic warfare. It's convoluted and not just a little bit absurd (we'd expect nothing less from the Lord Weird) involving a megalomaniac mad scientist, dangerous alien spores, a hybrid race of sentient dogs known as Vargr (as pictured on the cover), asteroid miners, and a space pirate named Baltech Budapest who develops psionic powers after being turned into a dog-man! Huh? Well, all this is an excuse for Slough Feg to flex their collective metal muscles, showing off with dueling shredding guitar solos, majestic harmonies, dramatic vocals, shuddering doom riffs, and so forth. The European power metal legions traffic in such wares as well, but none with such flamboyant eccentricity and sheer insanity as the Slough Feg crew. Lost Horizon, Rhapsody, Blind Guardian, Hammerfall and the like might be more polished and synthesized, but for indomitable metal spirit and over-the-top anything-goes chutzpah you've got to hand it to San Francisco's Slough Feg, they'll take on all comers musically while upping the bizarreness quotient to impossible extremes. Raw, bombastic heaviness gives way to acoustic guitars, adrenalized thrash collides with show-tune catchiness, and the story of course is completely fucked. With their two Les Pauls going full bore, this is perhaps the last word in galloping, epic, multi-tracked guitar harmony metal... Their forbears like Iron Maiden, Queen, and Thin Lizzy should be proud (and a little confused).
Fans will probably agree that the grandiose Traveller is the Slough Feg album most similar to The Bastard by their sister band Hammers of Misfortune - both being continuous narratives (Traveller having but one vocalist to handle all the roles however). But while the Hammers' masterful metal operetta seemed all Dungeons & Dragons, this concept record is actually specifically based on - and named after - a once-popular science fiction role playing game called Traveller, D&D's spacefaring cousin. The cover design, and some of the lyrics, will make a lot more sense if you're familiar with that game!
So, there you have it, three old classics from Slough Feg, available together for a baaaargain price! You're not gonna find a bigger collection of catchy riffs, weird lyrical concepts, and flashy soloing all in one place!
Looking forward to what they have in store for us on their Metal Blade debut, being recorded now...
We've been getting so much cool weird Chinese music in recently. We made the tripped out Neu! meets Yellow Magic Orchestra of White+ our Record Of The Week, we reviewed the blissed out shoegaze pop of Boyz & Girl, our Chinese section is overflowing with stuff that we'll try to to get reviewed and posted on the site (even as we wait to get more of the aforementioned back in), but figured we'd start with this one, which we got on lp, and have a limited number of, and not super sure if we can get more and if we can, how long it'll take.
Didn't know much about these guys, other than the fact that they're apparently super popular in China, and have been honing a sound rooted in early industrial music, from the seventies and eighties, with nods to the Cure and Joy Division, a dark pulsing electronic minimalism, dark and psychedelic.
Check out the opener here, a softly pulsing synth, monotone vocals, swirling effects and slow shifting textures, dirgey and almost robotic, darkly hypnotic and dreamily tranced out, hearing this it's not hard to see why ex P.I.L. drummer Martin Atkins became obsessed with the group and insisted on producing their debut. The second track finds the sound splintering into something more jagged and new wavey, sounding a bit more like Joy Division by way of the Residents, or a much murkier, glooming goth pop Suicide, jagged melodies, blurts of noise, dense drones and throbbing programed pulses. Dramatic and noisy and woozily off kilter. The Residents vibe is huge throughout, a warped alien cabaret, kept in check by the low slung basslines, the programmed rhythms, murky and motorik, the layered loops, and the almost vaudevillian vocals.
Every track here is dark and woozy, rhythmic and minimal, some krautrocky and propulsive, others super abstract and avant, and still others gloomy and brooding, often the sound fusing the three, into some heady Chinese experimental electronic gloom pop weirdness, that we're digging more and more with every listen.
For fans of warped outsider pop, early electronic industrial, gloomy and gothy electro pop, and whatever surreal sonic stops might lurk in between.
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From the very first time we heard post punk / minimal wave / gloom pop one man band The Soft Moon (aka Luis Vasquez), we were totally smitten. The sound dark and menacing, distorted drum machines, buzzing low slung basslines, tangled melodies, all woven into a sort of lo-fi downer wave propulsion, that took the Cure, removed much of the overt poppiness, and instead recast it as some sort of home brewed post industrial goth wave, replete with breathy whispered vox, woozy minor key refrains and alien atmospheres, everything wreathed in a washed out eighties murk, noisy and rough around the edges, we couldn't get enough.
The Total Decay ep seemed to be an extension of the self titled debut, a perfect slab of similarly shadowy post punk nihilism, but if anything it was the bridge between that record and this one, where Vasquez' sound has blossomed into something even more perfect, a twisted dystopian future-wave, all thick, corrosive buzzing synths, and dubbed out machine funk, keening sine wave melodies, and woozy, echo drenched ambience. It's all about the sound. Really it always was, which is ironic since we often complain about bands getting the sound right, but not having the songs to back it up, but with The Soft Moon, while there are still songs lurking in the shadows, it's really all about the sound, and the sound is so impossibly perfect. All it takes is a few second of the opener, "It Ends", with it's dense blown out buzzing low end synth buzz, dubbed out hand clap rhythms, and frantic percussive skitter, not to mention the weirdly mournful keening melody over the top, it's like all the best parts of witch house, reimagined as some mutant strain of cold wave, we would have been perfectly happy if that sub two minute chunk of pulsing, buzzing witch-wave was stretched out to fill up the whole record, even if it just stayed locked in that witch loop. Sure it's an intro, but we've listened to it about 20 times in a row!
Thankfully, that alien electronic witch-wave oozes into the rest of the record, wrapping its inky tendrils around the more recognizable Soft Moon style of jagged rhythms, Factory style basslines, echo drenched guitar jangle, and hypno wave groove, cold and clinical, like the soundtrack to some alternate future, and as one grows accustomed to the sound, suddenly, as if by some slight of hand, the songs reveal themselves, a melody here, a vocal there, a hook hidden beneath a cascade of corrosive metallic crunch, a catchy chorus obscured by sheets of synth buzz and dubbed out robotic rhythms, repeated listens are definitely rewarded, the record acting almost as some sort of sonic portal, requiring a deep listening key, ultimately allowing the listener access to the inner workings of The Soft Moon's sentient musical machine.
Oh and stick around for the closer, a reverse bookend of that witch-wave opener, literally, as it's the opening track in reverse, which only makes it that much more psychedelic and fantastically fucked up.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We're such suckers for inventive / over the top packaging, and this super limited 'box set' from beloved local shoegazers Tied To The Branches pushes all our crazy packaging buttons, and it's not just the packaging here, this special release also collects EVERYTHING they've ever recorded, the two cd-r's we've reviewed and listed, but also a third record we never even got, as well as a bunch of demos AND a bunch of videos. All of these goodies are contained in a cool oversized pill shaped 8gb USB thumbdrive, and that drive comes housed in a classic orange pill bottle with white twist off lid, complete with TTTB prescription label, a TTTB button, and of course plenty of cotton. It's so cool! But sadly, CRAZY limited, as in only TEN copies were made, of which we got just EIGHT. So if you want one, best be quick, cuz these will be gone in a flash!
Here's a couple reviews of the two Tied To The Branches we've reviewed. First, the most recent ep Laser Eyes, TTTB's which might be our favorite from this SF shoegaze trio. 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.
Also included here is the first release we'd heard from these guys, the Light Of Day, It's OK record, which features some of the most captivating and inpactful, sludgy and dreamy pop that we could imagine. The sound is like this awesome combination of slowcore legends Low if they added languid synths and drum machines into their mix, while playing interpretations of demos by The Cure, The Chills, Codeine, and The Clean. The songs have a drifty and dirgy disposition that evoke in us such a satisfying daydreamy shoegaze state of mind.
While there has been no shortage of shoegaze inspired bands as of late, so many of them are tapping much more into the polished and glossy side of the genre, so it's so nice to hear a group channeling some of that sound from a much more primitive and DIY ethic. In ways the songs make us think of Slowdive's Pygmalion recorded in a dark and dusty garage. It's one of those records we could see being a 'pop' favorite of folks who usually are into really dark and even metallic sounds, and it could be the weird and sludgy exception for folks who usually are into cleaner and more peppy lo-fi pop. Such understated beauty and an undeniable integrity. So fucking good!
And as mentioned above, a third record, demos, unreleased tracks, videos and more more more!
Latest chunk of blackened cinematic industrial ambience from this Swedish one man band, whose sound continues to explore the darkest recesses of some hellish subterranean underworld, like the last tape of his we reviewed Deathward To The Womb, the sound here is equally uplifting (read: sarcasm), a creeping militaristic pound, over wheezing synth shimmer, wreathed in a mysterious crackle, in the distance what sounds like anguished voices blurred into smears of softly undulating texture, and over the top, a demonic voice, oozing malevolence, delivers some sort of arcane incantation, chilling and harrowing, the voice dripping with menace, the background sounds appropriately ominous, but strangely, for all it's grim intensity, it's also quite melodic, sans the voice, it could be a more dreamy bit of dark ambience, but the vocals manage to transform it into something downright chilling.
The rest of the tape is not so melodic, instead slipping into an ultra abject minimalism, that almost sounds like some hellish set of field recordings, all creaks and groans, distant thumps, faraway pulses, industrial clatter muter and blurred, as if heard through a wall, or from below ground, the sounds coalescing into deep dense swells, washing over the listeners like some fetid black tide, the sounds building to intense washed of black sound, peppered with garbled voices and buried barely there rhythms, and just as often slipping into near silence, a creeping hushed drift, that in it's minimalism, exudes just as much malevolence as the heaving swells of black noise.
Housed in a printed vellum tray card with several small inserts. And yeah, VERY VERY LIMITED.
Another batch of unabashed Goblin / John Carpenter worship from this aQ beloved synth wrangler, and really not sure what to say about Umberto that we haven't already, from song one here, you're immediately ushered into some creepy, lost world, of ominous spirits and glimmering starlit skies, of long lonely winding roads, old abandoned buildings, and mysteries lurking in the shadows. The sound evokes wandering down dimly lit roads, or late night car chases, pulsating rhythms, swirling synths, throbbing drum machines, chorale like textures, squiggly melodies, lush chordal swells, dark and ominous one second, soaring and dramatic the next, super cinematic and soundtracky, all Umberto needs is a time machine and he could definitely go head to head with Goblin back in the day. Moody retro cinematic synthscapery and tense, dark, electronic moodiness that never fails to evoke a glorious sense of sonic dread, and inevitably has us imagining some outlandish scenario, these sounds playing while we desperately try to elude a mystery killer, or escape from some haunted house. Fantastic!
Last list, you may recall, we had as one of our Records Of The Week, what was more precisely a Cassette Of The Week, a tape on the Black Horizons label by a band of sonic surrealists from Santiago, Chile known as Un Festin Sagital. In that rave review, we mentioned that Un Festin Sagital had a full-length upcoming on the Beta-Lactam Ring label - which made perfect sense, what with Beta-Lactam putting out such weirdness as Nurse With Wound reissues among other things. Well, what we hadn't realized, is that Un Festin Sagital ALREADY had a couple Beta-Lactam cd releases to their credit, that we'd somehow overlooked. So, naturally, we need to review those too. This one's their most recent, from actually just a few months ago - a sprawling double cd set, one studio, one live, packaged in nice gatefold mini-lp style sleeve.
And it's just as crazy and compelling as that tape that turned us on to 'em. We previously described UFS as a "occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra" and that's still a good, broad description of what this experimental musical collective is up to - namely WTF? weirdness with a dark, moody vibe to it.
The first disc's epic eight-part, 22+ minute opening track, "El Nino Ateo" should thoroughly infect you with Un Festin Sagital's lysergic musical sickness - or else cause the less stout of heart and eccentric of taste to flee in terror! It's like a sinister soundtrack, part symphonic 20th century classical, part distorted industrial churn, part krauty synth throb. There's eerie Magma-esque choral parts, mumbled incantations, screams, Satanic-sounding chant (shades of Igor Wakhevitch for sure); ominous haunting stretches of avant-classical murk replete with groans and drones and sudden, stabbing piano chords... Clearly "RIO" avant-prog chamber rock a la Art Zoyd is an inspiration, but Un Festin Sagital take it to absurd extremes. You could kind of imagine this is what modern-day aQ prog faves Guapo (who also have a fine new album reviewed this list) might sound like, if only they dwelled in some far off South American mountain village, wore animal masks, and chewed on hallucinogenic jungle plants all day.
"El Nino Ateo" ranges from sheer mesmerism to utter mayhem and back again, as does the rest of this disc, the other three tracks dabbling in gentle acoustic folk ritual, exploding with spastic prog nuttery, and experimenting with atmospheric neo-classical soundscapery. And then there's the second disc, entitled La Muerte Solar, which was recorded live, but you wouldn't know that but for the occasional outburst of applause from the audience - which in UFS's strange sound-world, could easily be mistaken for just another intentional, sampled element of their collage-like compositions. Their 12+ minute rendition of "El Nino Ateo" here is a true tour de force, and the whole disc is easily the equal to the set's studio half.
At their heaviest, they kind of remind us of Orthodox or Blizaro, at their spazziest of Uz Jsme Doma or The Ex, and at their weirdest of NWW or even Reynols (whose Alan Courtis has in fact guested on one of Un Festin Sagital's other albums). Throw in some Circle at their most "operatic", and one of Tatsuya Yoshida's improv groups, roll all that into a ball and smoke it, and you've got some idea of how freaky this shit is! Not every single moment here "works" but overall, yeah, it sure does.
Finally, after nearly a decade, this long running Norwegian black metal horde release their very FIRST proper full length album, after a ton of demos and splits and eps and live records, and like those other releases, Ordo Servorum Satanae is a furious blast of primitive buzzing blackness, the production warped and woozy, the mix equally twisted, the vokills an inhuman croak, that builds to a demonic howl, WAY up in the mix, so much so that when the vocals are roaring, the music seems to blur into a low level background churn, but somehow it only seems to make the sound that much more fierce and fucked up.
After a 2 minute intro, of gurgling voices and moaning low end thrum (bookended by an outro of whipping winds, rainfall and distant drones), the record is really only 4 tracks, clocking in at about 26 minutes, but even such a brief blast of blackness it surprisingly potent. The tracks are twisted epics, fusing loping classic metal gallop, to roiling grim blasts, lacing that black buzz with some angular atonal leads, and some cool layered stretches that elevate the sound to something massive and dense, but then just as quickly the sound will devolve into a sprawl of punkish pound, primitive and stripped down, those croaked demonic vox ever present, there's even what sounds like some cowbell buried in there occasionally. And there's some cool weird shit going on throughout, the crumbling distortion wreathed plod of the last few minutes of "Sin", weirdly psychedelic and atmospheric, or a tranced out stretch of "Inverted", which transforms into a weirdly propulsive lope, before exploding into a frenzied black blast.
And while the sound is most definitely twisted, the production warped, and the various songs laced with all manner of experimental audio, at its core, the sound of Unholy Crucifix is raw, and primitive, and grim and is the perfect culmination of all the recordings that came before.
These two long out of print early nineties gems back in stock, but who knows for how long. As far as we know, these in fact remain out of print, but one of the band members bequeathed us a tiny handful, so we figured some of you more adventurous folks out there, might appreciate an earful of these SF avant slo-mo country weirdos, who over these two records (and a few more after), created a warped, dark, idiosyncratic drummerless country music, that drifts and creeps, moodily and murkily, the music, hushed and spidery, mostly just guitar and viola (provided by Brian Hageman of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282), the vocals super melodramatic and definitely an acquired taste, backed by Margaret Murray's more hushed, almost whispered croon, the songs loose and ramshackle, drowsy and druggy, but ultimately strangely lovely.
The second record is even weirder, noiser, the guitars buzzing more wildly, Murray's vocals more present, sometimes a wild caterwaul, other times locked into dreamy harmonies with USS main man David Tholfsen, the music, slipping easily from hushed moody brood, to angular Jandekian blooze, both of these records, had they been instrumental, would sound that far removed from the stoner country sprawl of aQ faves Souled American, but the vocals definitely transform this into an even wilder strain of outsider lo-fi country, one that sounds just as good today as when we first heard theses records two decades ago.
Fans of Songs:Ohia, Palace Brothers, and other country outliers should easily fall under U.S. Saucer's dark hypnotic spell.
These two long out of print early nineties gems back in stock, but who knows for how long. As far as we know, these in fact remain out of print, but one of the band members bequeathed us a tiny handful, so we figured some of you more adventurous folks out there, might appreciate an earful of these SF avant slo-mo country weirdos, who over these two records (and a few more after), created a warped, dark, idiosyncratic drummerless country music, that drifts and creeps, moodily and murkily, the music, hushed and spidery, mostly just guitar and viola (provided by Brian Hageman of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282), the vocals super melodramatic and definitely an acquired taste, backed by Margaret Murray's more hushed, almost whispered croon, the songs loose and ramshackle, drowsy and druggy, but ultimately strangely lovely.
The second record is even weirder, noiser, the guitars buzzing more wildly, Murray's vocals more present, sometimes a wild caterwaul, other times locked into dreamy harmonies with USS main man David Tholfsen, the music, slipping easily from hushed moody brood, to angular Jandekian blooze, both of these records, had they been instrumental, would sound that far removed from the stoner country sprawl of aQ faves Souled American, but the vocals definitely transform this into an even wilder strain of outsider lo-fi country, one that sounds just as good today as when we first heard theses records two decades ago.
Fans of Songs:Ohia, Palace Brothers, and other country outliers should easily fall under U.S. Saucer's dark hypnotic spell.
We made the last Group Flex flexi-disc book thing Record Of The Week back in 2011, and for good reason, visually and design wise it was about the coolest thing we'd ever seen, a cool little book, where each page was a fricking record, and you just put the whole book down on the turntable and let it spin! Besides how goddamn cool it was as an object, it also featured exclusive tracks from some of our favorite outfits: Thee Oh Sees, Blasted Canyons, Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin.
So a few months back we got word from Oh Sees mainman / Castleface head honcho John Dwyer that there was another installment of Group Flex brewing, and it was gonna be even better than the first. And true to his word, when it showed up, we were sorta blown away. This time around, the book is entirely transparent, with crazy, surreal, psychedelic artwork on the various pages, so when the book is closed, the multiple pages, and strange shapes and creatures, form a sort of 3D visual, little Strawberry men with guns, weird demons holding maces, a creepy scribbly purple mountain, tree-cats, bloody brick walls, snake headed skull doctors all woven into a dizzying tableau that sort of reflects the warped music within. Once again, plenty of faves: Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, The Mallard, Sic Alps, White Fence, Mikal Cronin, The Fresh & Onlys, Kelly Stoltz, Blasted Canyons, as well as a few surprises: Burnt Ones, Warm Soda, Running. And like the first installment, anyone into ANY of these groups is basically gonna need this. Warm Soda might be the biggest surprise of the bunch, their track "Lost For Words" definitely has us hankering for more, a super catchy lo-fi power pop, that sounds like some strange mix of Guided By Voices and the Shoes. Thee Oh Sees deliver a cool broody, fuzzed out garage pop dirge, spare and swaggery. Ty Segall's "Fucked Up Motherfucker" is a super distorted blast of howl and pound laced with plenty of horns and sax bleat, while Mikal Cronin's "King" is all druggy, droned out organ, and drifting acoustic guitar strum, washed out and gloriously woozy.
The Mallard are all lo-fi jangle and crunch, while Running prove themselves to be another new band to look out for, one that most definitely fits in with the rest of the Castle Face crew, sounding like The Oh Sees' snotty little siblings. The Fresh & Onlys drift through some laid back, softly psychedelic classic pop, Kelly Stoltz's "Double Exposure" sounds like some lost slab of seventies/eighties new wave power pop, and White Fence gets even further out, super spaced out, tripped out, space pop weirdness, lots of FX and crumbling distortion, echo drenched vox, and warped production, and somehow in there, some crazy catchy melodies.
Former Record Of The Weekers Blasted Canyons kick out the jams on a short sharp burst of warm, blown out fuzz drenched jangle pop, before Sic Alps do the same, infusing the same sort of garage-y pound, with some expansive psychedelic classic pop-isms, before Burnt Ones finish things off with a super trippy chunk of processed guitar chug and swirling psych pop, crazy catchy, and like Warm Soda, has us wanting more more more!
As you might imagine, CRAZY LIMITED! The whole thing comes in a thick, screen printed PVC sleeve, also clear, adding to the 3D-ness, includes a download code for all the tracks, as well as instructions for playing and care of your Son Of Flex flexi-disc book. Each one unique, everyone slightly different. So cool. And so absolutely recommended.
Fourth volume in World Arbiter's Traditional Japanese Music Series, this one focusing on the music of the shamisen, a three stringed Japanese style lute, an instrument that was integral to the development of Japanese music in the 17th century. There's much to be learned about the history of the instrument, and the various genres it helped bring about, and about this era in Japan, a particularly turbulent time, as well as the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, an organization formed to encourage cultural exchange between Japan and other countries, as well as helping preserve Japanese culture.
The sound though is what's really fantastic here, the sound of the shamisen no doubt familiar to anyone acquainted with traditional Japanese music, the notes plucked dreamily, the sound very much like a banjo, the melodies relaxed and slowly unfurling, moody and melancholic, here accompanied by fantastic and emotional vocal performances, these old recordings wreathed in a lush layer of crackle and hum, the overall effect not that far removed from listening to old timey American music, or early rural blues, even the mood of the music tends toward the lament, mournful and dreamy, some also accompanied by percussion, or fluttering flute, a few even sung by children.
Fantastic stuff, emotional, and intense, a sound both personal and intimate, but also inherently imbued with the tensions of the time, of life in the village and beyond, fans of Sublime Frequencies and other 'hip' world music labels, would do well to explore the World Arbiter label, whose releases are rife with musical riches.
This awesomely titled compilation covers a very specific strain of metal, as in 'heavy metal from Northwest Arkansas'. Aha. Well, we were definitely intrigued. Not that we can think of any metal bands from NW Arkansas off the top of our heads (Rwake?), but we're always down for some obscure metal, and while we're often wary of comps that feature no bands we've heard of, we decided to give this one a go, and were pretty psyched we did.
Up first is Vore, who kick up some serious death metal brutality, equal parts chugging riffage, pounding pummel, churning breakdowns and mathy stop start dynamics, the song laced with some seriously shredding leads, not to mention some surprising melody, the whole thing pretty dang catchy for a DM jam. Deadeye Jack do a sort of grimy, crusty stonery sludge thing, the recording raw and rough, but it suits their sound, muddy and murky, the vocal buried in the mix, but with a pretty serious main riff. Lightbulb Detective Agency have a terrible band name, but their song has a great title ("HP Hovercraft"), the sound sort of mathy and proggy, definitely very modern, dramatic crooned vox over complex mathmetal chug and churn, reminds us of all those Norwegian black metal bands who decided to get all proggy and poppy (Borknagar, Dodheimsgard). Definitely not bad though.
The flipside starts off with Hymns, who are definitely the fiercest of the bunch so far, frenzied and furious metallic grind, mathy and relentless, shredding axe action and insanely frantic drumming, a wild chaotic grindmetal tangle that kills! Ogham offer up a brief blast of instrumental math metal, that might be our favorite of the bunch, a million parts and tempos crammed into two minutes, equal parts the Champs, Scale The Summit, Loincloth, Don Caballero, the song twisting and turning relentlessly before seeming to just stumble to a halt, definitely want to hear more from these guys. And finally some true metal / true doom to finish things off, from the questionably named Dragon Sunday, whose sound is epic and very Pentagram / St. Vitus sounding, soaring majestic guitars, dramatic vocals, classic metal harmonies, chugging riffage, total true metal radness that all you 'true metal'-heads should flip for.
Includes a download code too!
Out of all the American folk musical forms, Sacred Harp singing is arguably the most strangely beautiful. With songs dating back to as early as 1840 and rooted in Northern European 'shape note' singing traditions, Sacred Harp singing is a white gospel musical form developed in the rural south as a means of social gathering and group worship. It was not designed to be performative nor were there really any formal touring groups (though early recordings have been miscredited to "The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers", they were more like rotating singing societies with designated song leaders centered around local church congregations and communities). For these 1959 recordings at the 56th Annual United Sacred Harp Convention in Fyffe, Alabama, singers were farmers, laymen, townsfolk and children who gathered every summer for all day singing functions, and it never mattered if they had good singing voices. The whole group is divided into four harmonic parts in a square formation with a group song leader situated at the hollow center of the square. Song leaders call out the hymn number and sing the tonic note of their section and each group follows suit with their section. Each participant is allowed to add their own embellishments to their designated section and all four parts sing off each other creating a cascading vocal round with astonishing peaks and valleys of harmony. Since each part is singing different lines simultaneously, it's hard to understand the actual words being sung, but the fervent energy brought out by so may singers is incredible to experience, reminding us of what could be the audio equivalent of the beautiful sight of large flocks of starlings flying in complexly shifting formations. This was the second of three times Alan Lomax had tried to capture the strange beauty of Sacred Harp singing, and the first time using stereo equipment. Nice vinyl on Mississippi with liner notes from Alan Lomax's three recording sessions. Incredibly beautiful!
Brothers Wolfgang and Reinholdt Voigt have dabbled in collaboration before, with a 12" here and there over the lengthy careers that both have had as pioneers of German techno. Wolfgang's arboreal atmosphere that swept through the four epic Gas records still rank at the very top of the electronic music that we've ever heard, but Reinholdt is no slouch. He's got a very particular style that emphasizes on-the-one synths stabs which cycle through his hypnotic monophunk excursions. And for the first two tracks on their collaboration, it seems the brothers are alternating in aesthetic conceit, with Wolfgang gliding smoothly into the silken techno of "Intro Konig" while Reinholdt snaps his taut rhythms in place for "Der Erste Zug," but for the rest of the album they prove to be much more unpredictable as on the oom-pa rhythmic sample and playful chords of "Der Keil NRW" and the robotic Mambo groove of "Tja Mama, Sandra Masichbeger." The album's finale "Der Letzte Zug" is about as far from techno as the Voigt brother could get, with a 26-minute mantra of a hypnotic buzz extracted from just a couple of chords on a zither or a hammered dulcimer. It's way more in line with a Yoshi Wada or Henry Flynt piece than these proponents of the Kompakt techno sound, but it's nevertheless a very cool track.
Within the last few years, the frequency of Von Himmel and related releases has picked up significantly, and thus, here we are with the band's long in the works follow up to their mighty Space Communion lp. Things have gotten even more insular with this two song monster, offering yet another glimpse into the band's strange and unique soundworld.
"Rock N Roll Animal", aka all of Side 1, comes across like some weird, warped Alice Coltrane number beamed in from another dimension, all woozy and queasy sounding. Stuttering drums merge with glorious cascades of jagged riffing to form a beautiful, strangely cohesive mess. We've mentioned legendary Texas psych pioneers the Red Krayola before when talking about Von Himmel, and the similarities are still evident in their expansive collage-like jams. Jams that manage to be hypnotic and quite lovely at times but also noisy as hell. Things are definitely chaotic, but it's a chaos with purpose, recalling previous VH releases but with what appears to be a new sense of direction, or at least forward momentum. Ramshackle bursts of melodic noise that sound a bit like an orchestra pit warming up, or fucking around, create a suspended dream state before switching gears at the midway point with some majestic cymbal washes and drones. Zoned out bits of German Oak style proto-industrial ambience appear, before things end in a swirling mass of pulsing noise that would make the Taj Mahal Travellers proud.
Side 2, "Traum Esel", begins with a sinister drone intro, heavy and sort of evil sounding, a bit like Harmonia at their most ominous. It's more meditative and subdued than the A side, maybe a little more "focused" than the freewheeling feel of the first track/side. As the song continues, things get seriously krauty with immersive, washed out melodies and sparse bits of looped percussion before ending in clouds of billowing GAS-styled bliss.
Another winner that somehow manages to top their previous release, pushing in new directions, but dragging much of what we loved about that record with them, this lp also marks the inaugural vinyl release for the band's Donkey Disc label. Grab it now!
Attention hard rockers and proto-metal freaks! Finally, the self titled debut and only release from Canada's Warpig gets the deluxe reissue treatment, thanks to those rockers at Relapse. After numerous shoddy bootlegs, this is the first time this record has ever been officially available on cd, and the first time it's been available at all since the original record was released in 1970. Very much in the same vein as the recent Relapse Pentagram reissues, this is some serious stuff, heavy and psychedelic, groovy and dark, Warpig were a heavy rock outfit very much in the spirit of Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, Blue Oyster Cult...
Heavy heavy riffs, thick fuzzy organ, kick ass drumming, and wild wailing vocals, lengthy extended riffing, organs atop guitars, slithery snake-like leads, throbbing sludgy bass lines, and catchy-as-fuck songs...
Every track is a killer: the wild proggy Jethro Tull-ish groove of the opener "Flaggit", the "In A Gadda Da Vida" meets Black Sabbath jam "Tough Nuts", they even had a song called "Melody With Balls" fer chrissakes!! One of the best (and strangest) tracks is the lengthy instrumental epic "Advance In A Minor", a dense moody, almost classical sounding metallic prog workout, with loping minor key stretches of muted low end guitar strum and simple piano chords, strung between killer bursts of mathy prog, staccato and dynamic, the whole track eventually twisting itself into some slow burning hard rocking blow out, propulsive and relentless. Later on in the record is another lengthy jam, the strangely titled "U.X.I.B.", rife with wild wailing leads, a groovy main riff, fuzzed out organ, and long stretches of blissed out space rock drift, with the vocals not joining in until nearly halfway through. Unlike a lot of supposedly heavy "proto-metal" records, where one or two of the tracks rock super hard and the all the rest are just bad twelve bar blues bar rock, every track here kicks ass, heavy and proggy and groovy and spacey and pretty dang metal for 1970. Quite recommended! Includes all new artwork, rare photos and brand new liner notes...
Sometimes we just have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're not dreaming, and that Japan's EM Records and all the crazy stuff they somehow find and reissue is actually real! Seriously, it's hard to believe, EM dig up such obscure things that are just so AQ-perfect, so darn weird. We have whole sub-genres of stuff in stock here at the store all because of EM - steel pan funk, psychedelic surf soundtracks, singing saw music! And quite a few one-off items that pretty much represent new genres in and off themselves. Like this one, which EM almost too tamely describes as "Obscure evil psycho machine-funk from '80s Washington D.C. Psychedelic madness!".
From the moment Wicked Witch showed up in the mail, we were ensorcelled. Heck, this pretty much had us with the cover, featuring a Vice magazine Dos and/or Don'ts worthy photo of a mysterious, ridiculously bad ass lookin' African American fellow wearing shiny black leather and spikes, sporting a knife in a scabbard attached to one of his boots. He's got his hands on his hips, his eyeballs are colored in red, and we sure wouldn't want to mess with his rad dudeness. But even that strange, sinister image couldn't have prepared us for what this actually sounds like... Which is, to us, ARIEL PINK PLAYING FUNK!! It's that damaged, that lysergic, a one-man outsider take on the druggiest moments from early '70s Miles Davis and especially Funkadelic, like "Wars Of Armageddon" off of Maggot Brain ferinstance.
The first track of this anthology, "Fancy Dancer", a 7" single from 1985, drops the listener right in at the deep end, a dense miasmic phantasmagoria of percolating off-kilter grooves, funky vampings, and creepy, low-end synth buzzings and growlings, further made freakier towards the end of its 5 1/2 minutes with a dose of wild psychedelic electric guitar soloing. Damn. Don't even know if funk is the right word for this. How about "glunk"? 'Cause it's got such a melty, gooey viscosity to it. The credits tell us this appeared on a 7" single from 1985, with all instruments and vocals by Richard Simms (he's the cover star, he's Wicked Witch, and he's apparently quite a character!). Next, track two, "Erratic Behaviour", is maybe even more murky and chaotic, a mixture of echoing, babbling voices and tick-tocking drum machine, set loose amidst swirling electronics. It comes from another 7" single, circa '83, as does the similar track three, "X Rated", which adds some "sensual" guest female sex-freak vocal exhibitionism over the lashing beats, bass throbs, and general dementia. But it's at least as spooky as it is sexy...
Then, track four, "Vera's Back", suddenly shifts things into another realm, delving into Wicked Witch pre-history. Written and produced by Simms, this track was originally released in on a 12" in 1978 by a band he was in (on bass and vocals) called Paradiagm [sic]. It's twelve minute workout of shredding jazzfunk fusion, with over the top chops, a la Return To Forever, with violin and echoing vocals and proggy changes galore. It's a lot "cleaner", less distorted and drugged out than Wicked Witch's later bizarre cauldron bubblings, but still pretty crazy, some of it like Goblin on speed!
The next three tracks bring us back to the more unusual funk (or glunk?) stylings of Rick Simms solo in the '80s, with two takes (one instrumental, one vocal, though both have vocals, the latter just more n' nuttier of 'em) of a track called "Electric War", from a 1984 Wicked Witch 12", and then, for a finale, the disc comes full circle with a previously unreleased, extreme remix of "Fancy Dancer" done in '86. Again, weird, dense, DIY outsider grooviness. Yep, CHAOS: 1978-86 is aptly titled. And we're still astonished, dunno how EM does it. Who digs deeper? You couldn't make this stuff up, we know, but we're still pinching ourselves. Maybe Wax Poetics will do a feature on Wicked Witch one of these days... we can only imagine what became of Simms, perhaps institutionalized in some asylum for the Funkily Insane. In the meantime, you can pour over the photos included herein.
FYI, the above review describes the programming of the cd version, EM's lp of this has a slightly different running order and in fact some different tracks! The vinyl edition omits the "Fancy Dancer" remix and the "Electric War" vocal version. But, its "Erratic Behaviour" and "X Rated" are both remixes different from what's on the cd. And, there's a whole 'nother previously unreleased cut on the lp, "Under Your Spell", eight and half minutes long, from 1986! So we can't tell you which format to choose. Either one, or both, are highly recommended!
Record number two from these East coast dream poppers, and like their self titled debut, it's another lush and luxurious collection of soft focus jangle, ethereal Mazzy Star like vox and wistful minor key melodies, all woven into dark billows on washed out melody and ephemeral grey skied drift. Like their cover of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game", this whole record evokes that same sort of brooding, haunting, swoonsome minimal shimmer, although this time around, the production is definitely more polished, giving these songs some heft, sonic and emotional, letting the sound blossom into mini jangle pop epics, adding all sorts of extra instrumentation, lush layers, and letting some of the songs get downright rocking. Where the first record had a definite nineties vibe, the Mazzy Star comparison is pretty much unavoidable, this new one also dips into the eighties, with tracks like "Dyed In The Wool" channeling the Motels or Scandal, through a more modern psychedelic garage pop filter, and the results are pretty divine.
Like the first record, repeated listens reveal more and more songs as being stone cold pop classics, and again, that new production, makes these songs more fuzzy and crunchy, giving them a dreamy dark power, but the band are just as adept sans studio magic, check out the stripped down "Thick As Thieves" a near acoustic brooder, that reminds us of Chelsea Wolfe's recent acoustic record, here multi tracked vocals are draped over downtuned guitar plucks and wheezing accordion, steel string strum and a shimmery prismatic drone, the whole thing a dreamy, druggy, psychedelic sea shanty, and maybe our favorite track here. But keep listening, and like all great records, more favorites reveal themselves. "Ballad Of The Golden Hour" is all shimmery fuzz pop bliss, while "Devil Knows" has a "Crimson & Clover" feel, all crunchy guitar and driving drums, but then a soaring swirly chorus reels it back into Widowspeak's more psych pop sound. "Sore Eyes" sounds like some classic rock should have been, Fleetwood Mac via Dum Dum Girls maybe, and the rest of the record unwinds in a similar fashion, equal parts classic dream pop and modern psychedelic garage rock, finishing off with another gorgeous brooding psych folk gem, the smoldering "Storm King", which like "Thick As Thieves", is currently vying for our top spot, on a record that's FULL of top spot contenders. SO great. Sweet packaging too, the cd comes in a standard jewel case housed in a die-cut slipcover, the lp in a deluxe full color gatefold jacket, and a download of course! We're listing the lp only for now though 'cause the cd is on backorder, boo hoo.
The Wire is all over the musical map with this issue. On the cover, Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. Inside, Lonnie Holley, Ergo Phizmiz (with a "Rabelaisan techno opera" in the works), Little Annie doing the "Invisible Jukebox" feature, a scence report from Honduras, and a primer on '80s American hardcore punk!! Plus the usual reviews, news, etc. As always, recommended reading!
Wreck And Reference's Black Cassette record was a big hit around here, a blackened gloomy, electronic flecked sludge, that managed to infuse it's outsider metal with plenty of goth pop weirdness, haunting slowcore creep and industrial post rock churn, so much so that an argument could be made for whether it was in fact a metal record at all. And really it hardly matters to us. In fact, it was precisely, all the non metal elements that really made it so distinctive and cool. And if anything, the duo's new record No Youth moves even further from a sound that could be considered 'metal'. The opening track is the perfect example, the only bit of actual metal, a brief bout of blackened screeched vokills, but other than that, it's all creaking industrial crunch, processed FX heavy loops, psychedelic ambience, muted guitar strum, clean vocal croon, distorted buzz stretched out into pulsing drones, tribal, almost jazzy drumming and then a wild chaotic squall of noise rock freakout. Bam. That's it. And it's great! The second track too, a creepy gauzey slowcore drift, al crumbling muted thrum, and muted feedback, again some metal elements surface, this time a blast beat, but it just so happens, the blast beat is blasting away beneath a creepy crawly droned out melody, and darkly dramatic crooned vocals, the song winding down into a slow fade, before launching into another non-metal jam. A loping post/math rock lope, all snarly, gothic vox, and processed background, the final few minutes slipping into a near metallic churn, but again, it's more dark and woozy and gothic and hauntingly heavy. Okay, now that we've established that W&R are NOT a metal band, at least by any traditional definition, we can simply enjoy their wonderfully warped, super progressive, experimental avant heaviness, and wonderful and avant it is. We're most reminded of Pinkish Black, a recent aQ Record Of The Week, whose sound also took metal as their launching point, and then stopped concerning themselves with anything other than making heavy, tripped out, amazing music.
And Wreck And Reference have definitely blossomed into something special, a band that we imagine must be pretty divisive, even though they're dark and heavy, and near metallic at times, they have a pop streak a mile wide, and a similar gloomy gothy streak, not to mention a thing for electronics, and programming, and transforming perfectly serviceable riffs into stuttering progged out blurs, and they obviously like real singing, and they like that singing to be dramatic and intense and melodic most of the time, and the thing is, when the band to indulge in some pure metallic crush, they do it so convincingly, it's easy to think they were a metal band who got weird, instead of the other way around, which is how they sound to us. Even better than the Black Cassette, which we dug big time, and everyone who bought that Pinkish Black record, even though this doesn't sound at all like it, seems like something most of you could very well end up digging A LOT.
