Been meaning to list this for a while now, the debut from a group we originally discovered due to the fact that it features members of longtime aQ faves, instrumental heavies Pelican. So we were expecting something similar, heaving atmospheric heaviness, slow burn post metal majesty, but instead, we discovered a sound much closer to the sludge pop of Torche - thick churning riffage, crushing drumming, clean soaring vox, hooks and harmonies galore, like a slightly less heavy Torche crossed with the post stoner rock heaviness of QOTSA, which for all the warped and weird shit we listen to, is actually a pretty badass combo to these ears. But actually, the more we listen, the more Aeges sounds like latter era Cave In, not the Radiohead period, but right after that, when they switched back to a heavier more metallic sound, but taking some of that stadium rock bombast back with them. Hooky as hell, with a sound that's massive and heavy, the guitar gnarled and buzzy, distorted and often thick, crumbling and corrosive, plus there are cool stretches of guitar riffing, where the sound is super processed and doused in effects, and those clean vox, slip occasionally into raspy glass gargling vokills, but almost always slips right back into something more melodic. We could go song by song for sure, but really if you dig super catchy, meldoic heaviness, and groups like Cave In, Torche, Queens Of The Stoneage, even Swervedriver and the heavier side of the shoegaze sound, this record will hit the spot big time. Aquarius pal Lauren came in the shop when we were playing this, and said it sounded like something that she would have listened to in the nineties, which is pretty spot on. Classic old school, heavy nineties style indie rock heaviness that is one of those sounds they just don't make like they used to, except in the rare cases, like this, when they DO!
Another outfit from the Pacific Northwest, trafficking in a sort of psychedelic doomy drift, who are friends of aQ faves Megaton Leviathan, which makes sense, the two groups occupying a similar space, but each most definitely carving out their own distinct sonic niche.
The first track here is a slowly swirling sprawl of pulled apart riffs and layered chordal crunch, crumbling distortion, and softly shimmering textures, starting out almost formless, but gradually coalescing into a churning slo-mo dirge, that manages to infuse its metallic creep with plenty of melodic jangle, the sounds chiming and keening, almost like a more riffy Sunroof!, it's not until nearly the end of the track before the drums kick in, and when they do, it's not so much propulsive or rhythmic as it is abstract and textural, the billowing clouds of psychedelic buzz wrapped around this skeletal doom drum dirge, the sound never really darkening, instead, remaining sort of blissed out, the guitars becoming more jagged and riffy, but the whole thing remaining pretty drifty.
The second track is where things get properly doomy, or as properly doomy as these guys get, the sound immediately exploding into a woozy, lumbering creep, replete with thick buzzing distortion, deep dramatic sung/spoken vox, and plenty of melody, tranced out and mesmeric, sounding a bit like OM with LOTS of guitars, a slow burn psych-doom epic, that slithers swaggers and gradually builds to soaring squalls of tangled psych guitar freakout, slipping from metallic dirge, to parts almost poppy and back again, hooks galore, but buried beneath the crumbling buzz, the song laced with occasional bursts of mathed out chaos, and often locking into tarpit hypno-rock grooves, the whole thing totally epic and majestic, but more psych than doom, more noise/post rock than metal, but with enough of doom AND metal to keep metalheads satisfied. That said, while these guys are self professed psychedelic doom gazers, we could easily imagine folks discovering this from a whole different angle, instead of psychedelic doom, something more like heavy, doomy psych. Maybe there's not much difference, but to our ears, this definitely falls further in the realm of heavy psych, the doominess just adding some serious heft.
Case in point, the 14 minute closer "An Unnatural Light", which takes a sort of Sabbathy almost stoner doom riff, and stretches it way out, repeating it over and over, the track totally tranced out, that riff, all clean guitar, swathed in clouds of cymbal shimmer, and squiggly swirls of psych guitar filigree. It's almost 5 minutes before the song really kicks in, and even then, the guitars remain clean, and almost jangly, a little bit angular, wreathed in FX, the bass sinewy and super melodic, the vocals slipping from deep monk-like chant, to full on wail. Then a few minutes later, the distortion swoops in, and finally, it begins to sound truly metallic, churning, heaving heaviness, but somehow, still sort of warped and tripped out. There's a long stretch where the guitar drops out, leaving mostly bass and drums, which reminds us a lot of Three Mile Pilot, dark and post rocky, from there on out, it's a slow build to an FX drenched, blown out psych guitar finale, all swirls of heavily flanged riffage and pounding dense drumming.
Way recommended for fans of Megaton Leviathan obviously, but really, anyone into heavy psych and psychedelic doom will flip for sure!
Predictably, there's been beaucoup hype about this new super group / Radiohead offshoot, featuring Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, longtime Radiohead producer/engineer Nigel Godrich, and oddest of the bunch none other than Flea, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We were definitely curious what it would sound like, and while we were maybe expecting something pretty far out and experimental, Amok actually hews surprisingly close to recent Radiohead records and Yorke's solo record The Eraser. Which really shouldn't be all that surprising considering the lineup, and really is not a bad thing. In some ways, we wouldn't have been at all surprised if this had simply been released as a Yorke solo record (which essentially it kind of is?). Every time we play this in the store, someone inevitably asks us if this is Radiohead, which should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect. The tracks here are not so much songs, like much of Yorke's (and Radiohead's) material, eschewing for the most part the standard 'pop' song structure, and instead letting atmospheres drift, and rhythms percolate, Yorke's voice often spectral and wordless, syllables stretched way out, transformed into woozy spidery melodies, the beats looped and layered and skittery, the bass thick and sinewy, pulsing and trancey and hypnotic, the whole thing peppered with strange little electronic filigree, the occasional buried horns, the vibe haunting and melancholic, and darkly, mysteriously groovy.
There's a definite late night vibe to most of the tracks, moody and chilled out, but then there's tracks like "Default", which is still moody, but super catchy, "Default" being the most Radiohead of the bunch, the first single, which makes sense, featuring a killer main melody that sounds like it was straight up lifted from some other Radiohead record, we just can't put our finger on which one, but you'll know it when you hear it.
So yeah, if you already love Radiohead, you'll love this, and if you dug Yorke's Eraser, you'll REALLY dig Atoms For Peace, and while we maybe weren't blown away at first, we find ourselves listening to this more and more all the time.
We'd been hearing about these guys for a while, lots of people we trust, kept telling us we'd love these guys, and just how crazy heavy and hooky they were, and you know what? They were right. Imagine the bastard son of the Melvins and Harvey Milk, ok? Now imagine that son got it on with the bastard son of Thin Lizzy and the Champs, and then the resulting bastard son got super into Deep Purple and ZZ top, and ended up hooking up with some hot metal chick into Motorhead and the MC5, and they had a baby, and all they played that baby was nineties AmRep 7"s until it grew up and was basically doomed by several generations of rock genetics to start a band, well, then this is probably the band he or she would start.
With any sort of band like this, there's a bit of tongue and cheek going on, not that it's a joke band, but bands like this are meant to be FUN, especially live, the sort of show you go to and end up getting home, beaten and bruised, sweat soaked and drunk as fuck, with about twenty years worth of classic riffs lodged in your head. And they've done a pretty good job of capturing that on vinyl, huge thick guitars, monster drumming, bellowed vox, that sound like that have to be coming from some massive bearded mountain man, the sound flitting easily from dense progged out math metal radness, to punked out metallic stomp, to swaggery classic rock crunch, harmonized leads, cowbell, all the ingredient of ROCK, deftly wielded by these barbarians. Opener "Brick Toothpick" starts out all Champs-y before stumbling into some Melvins style lumber, "Fake Tan" is all fist-pumping, head-banging stadium rock epic writ punk-as-fuck, "Bore" is all churning math metal swagger, with big hooks, big drums, and some awesomely ridiculous lyrics.
Elsewhere, the sound slips from super distorted Torche like sludge pop, to -almost- arena ready heavy rocking a la Mastodon or Queens Of The Stone Age, even some tripped out krautrockiness and swirling psychedelia here and here, but these guys don't get weird or musically high falutin', this is the sort of RAWK, that's about drinking and fucking and fighting, this is the sort of hard rocking good ol' boy soundtrack we all hear in our heads as we're making one glorious bad decision after another. Fucking AWESOME.
To be honest, we never paid this classic 1968 film that much attention because we always thought it was some treacley long-winded historical romance, but boy we're we wrong. It's actually more like a fucked-up dysfunctional family drama disguised in medieval garb, and it even takes place at Christmas! Plus the soundtrack is fantastic.
Starring Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn with young Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton in their first screen appearances, this is the story of King Henry II (O'Toole) having to deal with his indecisiveness of whom amongst his three unworthy sons shall inherit the throne. Complicating his decision is his imprisoned Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Hepburn), who once a year is released from her tower prison to celebrate Christmas with the family. She has her own ideas of which son should inherit the kingdom, and bitter rivalries, intrigue and underhanded political maneuvering ensue. The chemistry between O'Toole and Hepburn is as sharp and acidic as Liz and Dick In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, making their flirtatious hatred towards one another so engaging to watch. Originally a play, the movie is fleshed out cinematically with an atmospheric quality of pastoral England, and enhancing the vibe is this beautiful soundtrack by John Barry, mixing classic sixties film orchestration with ethereal psychfolk-tinged medieval plainsong in a haunting alluring score. The theme marking Eleanor's arrival is one of our favorite John Barry tracks ever, and this score is highly underrated and in our opinion amongst his best. And a nice price to boot!
We continue to dig ever deeper into the catalog of Russian composer / pianist Anton Batagov this week, with two different, and extremely different sounding titles. The other (elsewhere on this week's list) is one of the strangest recordings we've heard from Batagov so far, which finds him paired up with a musician called simply XMZ, for a gorgeous record of piano and electronic sounds/treatments, and this one, Passionate Desire To Be An Angel, which once again finds Batagov's pushing beyond the idea of standard classical music, and expanding that music's typical palette, to include not only cello, harp, vibraphone and samplers, but also guitars, and not delicately arranged 'classical' guitars, we're talking chugging distorted rock guitars, just check out the opener here "Can You Feel The Rhythm?", which pairs chugging rock riffage, with delicate flurries of piano, a strange combination to be sure, and a bit jarring at first, but after a few minutes, it somehow makes some strange sort of sense, but then it gets even weirder, with mournful trombone melodies, and finally, after a brief respite, the riff swoops back in, wreathed in pointillist piano, but now accompanied by some seriously belted out soulful female vox. Woah. We can definitely see classical nerds being a bit confused, but we're pretty into it, Batagov to at all afraid to mix his love of classical music, with rock, and an obvious joy in strange collaboration.
The rest of the record is not nearly as bizarre, but is, like all the other Batagov records we've reviewed, gorgeous, "Cunjunctio", a sweeping near 30 minute epic, that begins as a series of solo piano vignettes, which are soon joined by organ, and celesta, transforming the sound into what could be some seventies E.L.P. style prog epic, but instead of exploding into tangled rock bombast, the tones are drawn out into meditative drones, and lush layered textures, over which angelic female choral vocals soar, sounding almost liturgical, and it's at this point that we first realize how much of this record, sounds almost Christmas-y, the sort of fanfare you can imagine hearing at midnight mass, or as the soundtrack to some strange art film, all snowy vistas, and glimmery lights strung from houses, Batagov's love of Philip Glass evident here as well, with the busy organ chorale very reminiscent of Glass's score for Koyaanisqatsi.
"Opus Alchymicum" starts out with a very Vangelis feel, pizzicato strings, chiming melodies, all wrapped in swirls of reverbed piano melody, pulsing and propulsive, the song shifting from softly churning and rhythmic, to emotional and darkly hauntingly melodic and back again, those chugging guitars from the first track making a return appearance, and again the vibe is very wintery, and soundtracky, and really quite lovely.
The record finishes with "Umbra Solis", which begins all stately droned out mesmer, whirring organs, and long layered tones, minor key and wistfully minimal, before blossoming into another wintery chorale, swirling washes of organ chords, and harmonized operatic vocals, almost like the score to some time lapse film, of the end of winter, snow melting, falling from branches, buds and shoots pushing their way through the icy ground, the sun bathing everything in its hazy springtime glow. So good.
The accompanying booklet, includes all sorts of alchemical diagrams as well as various bits of text (including some quotes from Manly P. Hall), speaking to a deeper philosophical/alchemical/ideological subtext to these works, which only makes the sounds here that much more moving and powerful.
One of two releases on this week's list from Russian composer / pianist Anton Batagov, this one the first in a series of collaborations Batagov produced with a musician called XMZ, who according to the liner notes, contributed 'sounds' the the project, and what sounds they are. We shouldn't need to go into too much detail about how much we love Batagov, his piano playing fluid and lyrical, expressive and emotional, every record we've heard has been stunning, and while this one is no different, it definitely casts Batagov's playing in a whole different light, with XMZ leaving the piano alone for the most part, but creating a lush, and layered, super varied landscape around Batagov's piano, the opening track alone perfectly demonstrates this strange partnership. Batagov unfurls lovely, haunting melodies, which at first are underpinned by strange percussion, and slow shifting textures, but quickly those textures build to soft swirls of chordal color, and underneath, rhythms begin to surface, skittery and barely there at first, but soon, those too become more driving, and eventually almost bombastic, the surrounding ambience too, becomes darkly dramatic, majestic swells of post rock like shimmer, the final minute, pounding, dramatic and so epic!
The second track is much more atmospheric, near ambient, and very cinematic, with XMZ doing most of the heavy lifting in the beginning, Batagov left to unfurl stately chords, and little melodic flourishes. Eventually, the background noise coalesces into another rhythm, and Batagov's piano becomes more forceful, the whole track gaining momentum, becoming a sort of dreamy, soundtracky krautrock flecked new age. The rest of the record unwinds similarly, from moody, darkly dramatic soundtrack like refrains, and strange crackling background textures, disembodied voices, moody rumbling drones, shuffling beats, lush clouds of chordal piano shimmer, sometimes sounding a bit like DJ Shadow, a sample heavy sprawl of beat driven classical piano, but elsewhere, it's a dramatic, dreamy melancholic ambience, and finally, a brooding, lovely, slo-mo sonic elegy, XMZ letting Batagov finish things off, adding very little, just some subtle sonic colorations, and some deep background thrum. As always, fantastic stuff, this one especially sounding like something you might hear on Type or Miasmah or Time Released Sound. Needless to say, absolutely recommended.
Strange and introspective Italian prog-rock ballads from the one and only Franco Battiato. Based on themes of creation and rebirth, this first release from 1972 in his eccentric experimental mode is more song-oriented than later synth-prog efforts Sulle Corde Di Aries or Clic, but no less exceptional. A student of Stockhausen with a singing-style reminiscent of Pugh Rogefeldt or Tom Ze, Battiato combines the synthy arpeggios of Tangerine Dream with musique concrete-like manipulations of found recordings and ecstatic bursts of orchestrated pop. Awesome! New reissue includes liner notes from Jim O'Rourke.
If the true measure of a record, is the impression/perception of the 'first listen', this new record from jangle poppers Beach Fossils might be the most popular record in the store right now. Cuz every time we play it in the store, and we do mean EVERY time, someone buys a copy. Whether they knew the band or not! BF's infectious hook heavy wistful jangle is in full effect on Clash The Truth, but unlike past records, the sound here is definitely a bit darker, which most certainly suits them. Quickly scanning back over our reviews of past BF records, it's all "breezy", "sunny", "lazy, dazed & glazed", and all of those definitely still apply, but one comparison seems even more apt, which is where we compare their sound to Pavement covering The Smiths. Here, the songs are wistful and melancholy, all cloudy skied and fading afternoon light, when the songs rock, they almost sound new wavey, or even post rocky, like the soaring majesty of "Carless", keening soaring swirls of melody and frenetic drumming, all driven by Joy Division like basslines, and when they don't rock, they're wistful gems like "Sleep Apnea", all shuffling drums, chiming acoustic guitars, little flurries of effects heavy melody, and reverbed sad boy vox.
Some songs unfurl dreamily, in the shadow of mournful strings, others are propulsive and a little bit garage-y, and others are straight up retro pop jangle, and still others are crunchy and fuzzy and almost shoegazey, a few even have a distinctly Interpol vibe (check out "Caustic Cross"), and a bunch definitely remind us of Unrest and that old Teenbeat sound, which is most definitely a very good thing. But without fail, all of the tracks here are lush and lovely, lilting and hook heavy, catchy and dreamy, and again pretty goddamn irresistible.
We said it about Nirvana a while back, and we'll say it about the Beatles, people who say they hate the Beatles are LYING. And if they're not lying, well, then we just feel sorry for them. We're perfectly willing to admit to Beatles oversaturation, and fair enough if you've heard enough Beatles on classic rock radio, that you never want to hear any again, but that's so unfair to a band's legacy, especially a band who wrote so many amazing songs. Take Led Zeppelin, imagine NEVER having heard them, and then getting your ears on "Stairway To Heaven" or "Immigrant Song" or "No Quarter" or "When The Levee Breaks". Your mind would be BLOWN, and you'd suddenly realize how much every metal band you ever loved owed to Zeppelin. We remember playing Neu! for a friend whose favorite band was Stereolab, she had never heard Neu! but the second the first song started, her whole idea of Stereolab changed, and in fact, if we remember correctly, she said something like "Stereolab is a total Neu! ripoff!!"...
So imagine, for a second, being super into pop music, and never having heard the Beatles, needless to say, you would be overwhelmed by their sheer genius, their utter mastery of pop music, and how much they defined the template for almost all pop to come. No band since has such a distinct and immediately recognizable sound, or such an expansive and hit filled catalog. And yeah, is this reissue campaign number 5, 6, 10? So odds are most of you have all the Beatles records, or at least the ones you like, and probably, you've had your fill of old record nerds getting all misty eyed for the Nth time, and talking about remastered sound quality and stereo versus mono.
But, we thought as long as these records are available again, nicely repackaged, and indeed sounding better than ever, we'd make the case for one of our favorites, a commonly dismissed, overlooked, and surprisingly depressive Beatles gem. Beatles For Sale came out in 1964 (we think), and was met with much confusion. Sure there were hits, "Eight Days A Week" was massive, "I'll Follow The Sun" has always been a favorite. But then there was record opener "No Reply", which begins as a total classic sounding, but is broken up by some seriously caustic (and almost heavy) parts, with voice on the verge of cracking, guitars distorted, and the hook, one of the Beatles' best. But our heart belongs to the second track "I'm A Loser", another total classic sounding Beatles jam, with incredible harmonies, and dark lyrics that are at odds with the song's lush sound and groovy feel, acoustic guitars, walking basslines, all sorts of melodic filigree, it's been 20 years or more since we first heard it, and not only are we still not tired of it (maybe partly cuz it NEVER gets played on the radio) but it still ranks up there with our all time favorite pop songs.
The one strange thing about Beatles For Sale, is the mix of dark brooding lush pop, and stomping rock and roll numbers. We had sort of forgotten about the more rocking tracks, cuz to be honest, when we made a tape of this way back when, and later put it on our iPod, we actually left those tracks off, not cuz they're BAD, just because they're not what made us fall in love with this record in the first place. Strip away those rockers, and this is a gorgeous, introspective, hook filled, dark and subtly depressive pop gem.
Fancy new digipak packaging, new liner notes, rare photos, a mini documentary about For Sale, and yeah, it's remastered and sounds AWESOME!
PS we've got a bunch of the other newly reissued remastered digipacked Beatles discs in stock too, love 'em too, just happened to get extra excited to write about this one!
Second full length from these epic metal masters from LA. Their debut cd-r was a big hit with the metalheads around here (and we do have copies in stock), but for some reason never got around to reviewing them til now. But album number two is just as good. Fusing soaring epic true metal majesty with the lumbering bongsmoked doom of Sleep and Electric Wizard with the massive big arena riffing of Mastodon and the furious alcohol fueled metal of Motorhead and Venom. In fact, anyone who, like us, has been flipping out over the most recent record from Denver metalheads Speedwolf, might as well just add this to their cart right now, cuz this definitely pushes all the same buttons. Massive riffing, furious drumming, whiskey ravaged vokills, the songs heavy as fuck, catchy like crazy, this is the sort of classic headbanging shit they just don't seem to make anymore. Slipping easily from monstrous downtuned black doom crush, to NWOBHM style classic metal shreddery, to punked out metal pound, to Sabbathy stoner rock grooves, all somehow woven into a singular sound, one that we can NOT get enough of. For all the grim buzz and twisted damaged weirdness or filthy slo-mo sludge we obsess over, sometimes, when it comes to metal, real, true METAL is all you need.
Just check out the sprawling 3 part nearly 14 minute epic "Cast On The Black / Lamentor / Guided By The Southern Cross", that begins all melodic doom, with harmonized guitar melodies, and a churning downtuned trudge, before slipping into some clean guitar drift, a haunting bit of spaced out dirgery, that leads into a blast of metallic crunch, which unfolds as a super melodic doom, all clean guitar melodies wedded to woozy loping buzz and fierce shrieked vox, the vibe almost eighties metal, especially when the heaviness is dialed back, and it's all drums and clean guitar, soaring synths, it gets downright proggy and so epic, before slipping right back into some heaving classic doom heaviness, rife with some killer leads, and an old school style fade out. Fuck Yeah!
Just check out the samples, you'll be sold in no time!
Killer futuristic robot bird dragon warrior cover art too.
Another unearthed Americana rarity from Tompkins Square, this one from the guitarist Don Bikoff, whose Celestial Explosion was originally released in 1968 on the super obscure Keyboard Records, which apparently featured some reference in the liner notes to John Fahey, who subsequently sent Bikoff a handwritten letter, that simply stated "I am not now, not have I ever been in search of someone named 'Blind Joe Death'." Those original liner notes are reproduced here as well, and really listening to this, there's no way to NOT make the comparison to Fahey, and Robbie Basho, and all the rest. But Bikoff definitely has his own sound, one that's more raw and aggressive, his strain of American Primitivism, involves aggressive, rapid finger picking, lots of overtones, the sound swirling and cosmic, with plenty of reverb, his playing quite percussive as well, even the gentle more laid back numbers here sound intense, as if he's really plucking and strumming those steel strings for all he's worth. Opener "Rindler's Metamorphosis" is a stunner, maybe the most psychedelic of the bunch, lots of bent stings and dark chords, strange melodies, the vibe haunting and otherworldly, it's easy to see why the record was named Celestial Explosion.
There's some excellent slide work too, "Earth (Revisited)" is all slippery, heavily reverbed steel string buzz, with some deft melodic flurries, not to mention lots of buzz and super percussive pizzicato plucking, and of course the title track is fantastically hypnotic and again darkly psychedelic, laced with glimmering chimes, a sort of abstract Americana that seems to be drifting heavenward, the stars their destination.
Nice packaging, reproducing the look of the original lp, original liner notes and other track info inside, new liner notes from Tompkins Square head honcho, Josh Rosenthal.
Bjork is one of those rare artists that has somehow managed to juggle underground /independent credibility, with mainstream success. Obviously she's one of the most popular performers in the world, and you'll hear her music in movies and commercials, on the radio and at Starbucks, she performs at huge events and is constantly on the red carpet. Yet somehow she remains surprisingly subversive, her music quite strange, especially by popular music standards, she's got a brilliantly twisted aesthetic, and she loves collaborating, and doesn't hesitate to hook up with the most unlikely of musical bedfellows. Let's not forget that our pals in Matmos, as well as Jay Lesser, have been long time collaborators, and historically, her remixes have been AMAZING, and her choice or remixers impeccable, in fact we still remember discovering the Alec Empire remix of "Yoga", which at the time was one of the coolest things we've heard.
Since those days, Bjork's popularity has hardly waned, but neither has her experimental streak, which brings us to this new remix record, and for aQ folks, a quick look at the list of remixer shouldbe all it takes considering there are two mixes by Omar Souleyman and two by Death Grips!! Holy crap, and all four are as good as you'd hope. The rest of the remixers include Hudson Mohawke, Matthew Herbert, Current Value, The Slips, These New Puritans and more.
The two Souleyman tracks are about as close as we're gonna get to an Omar / Bjork dream duet, and really, it sounds like they just took Bjork's vocals and wove them into a Souleyman jam, but it works, a crazy dabke blowout, with Bjork's dreamy vox drifting amidst all of Souleyman's whoops and passionate crooning, and those pulsing exotic rhythms. The two Death Grips mixes are dark and sinister, beat heavy, a little hip hoppy, but also sorta glitched out, these sound much more like DG worked their sound into the originals, but again, it's a great match, and darkens Bjork's sound considerably. The second mix is a dense collaged plunderphonic freakout, that churns and roils, stutters and skitters around the swoonsome main melody, and Bjork's soaring vox. There's also some serious ribcage rattling dubstep style bass wabble, that swoops in, super dramatically.
The rest of the tracks vary from shimmery prismatic electro-pop (Hudson Mohawke), to seeping almost orchestral dreamdrone shimmer (Matthew Herbert), there's some slo-mo dubstep creep, that explodes into a blurred barrage of big beat pummel (Current Value), and some super abstract skeletal stutter-step electro (16 Bit) and so much more.
It's all pretty great, but SO worth it just for the Souleyman and Death Grips tracks, and both bands tackle Bjork's "Thunderbolt", and it's super cool to hear what each band brings to the same song!
Is it really the end for Black Boned Angel, the aQ beloved guitar/drum doomdronedirge duo? It sadly seems to be, as The End is apparently not just the title for this elaborately presented three part song suite, but does in fact supposedly represent the final musical missive from Campbell Kneale and James Kirk, aka BBA. And not a bad way to go. A three song epic, the shortest 16 minutes, the longest more than 24, and right away, the duo launch into it, with a sick, metallic howl, a crushing doom-ed lumber, all demonic vokills, and crumbling super distorted riffage, all wrapped around simple monstrous drum plod, and while that sort of intro usually signals some straight up droned out black doom sludge, quickly the sound reveals a surprising amount of melody and texture, the creep and crawl, and abject ultra doom miserablism, tempered by an inner light, and some super crazy catchy guitarwork, that gives the sound an epic, majestic, chiming dreaminess, and when the rhythm kicks in proper, it's a strange sort of wistful doom-sludge slowcore; but just as quickly as the sound coalesces, it seems to decay right before our ears and shift back into amorphous black buzz. And the song seems to push and pull between these two sides, the loping mournful melancholia, and the howling black hole heaviness, eventually, reaching a gorgeous sort of equilibrium, which is weirdly coupled with some seriously warped guitar, a sky full of tangled distorted melodic moan, not buzz, but a sort of haunting keening, unlike almost any other guitar sound we've hear, its ultimate effect giving the sound a seriously woozy, psychedelic vibe, although the last few minutes finds the drums ditched and the two guitars wound tight into a thick cloud of billowing guitarnoise and grinding black crunch.
The second movement begins like some demonic Arvo Part piece, all layered choral vocals and ominous drones, heady and haunting, it's not until nearly 5 minutes in, that the doom drops, and when it does, it's a tarpit chug, but again, it's laced with some unlikely beauty, at first sounding like a more blown out Blackwolfgoat, but soon, it turns into something utterly lovely and almost dreamy, of course still doused in crumbling black buzz, but beneath all the distortion and doomic swirl, is something lilting and melancholic, strip away all the heaviness, and we'd be talking total heartbreak ballad, but when fused to the groups monstrous lumber, it somehow only becomes that much more intense and darkly emotional, there's a definite Nadja vibe, but this is way dreamier and way more overtly melodic than ANYthing we've heard from them, it's like some crazy catchy song fragmented, looped and slowed down and stretched out into a gorgeous blackdoom dreampop dirge, eventually blissing out into a droned out drift of soft crumble, swirling effects, and delicate piano.
Finally, BBA finish things off (and by things, we mean the record AND the band), with another epic majestic dirgescape, this one too laced with melody, and unlikely texture, soaring and weirdly poppy, the melodic component here a strange wavery vocal like melody, that sounds somewhere between a warped theremin, and a vibrato heavy opera singer, that quavering 'voice' woven into the groups melancholy plod, and like the track before, the drums drop out, and most of the buzz, leaving a gorgeous haze of crumbling distortion, blurred riffage, and that ghostly melody, a haunting threnody, and a darly dream epitaph for one of our favorite bands. Who will be greatly missed.
Super elaborate packaging, all assembled and numbered by hand, an origami style inner jacket, with a full colored oversized insert, several envelopes/sleeves, all housed in a thick 7" sized vellum outer sleeve, through which the silver printed inner sleeve can be viewed. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
- MPEG stream: II
- MPEG stream: III
The return of Matthew Bower's latest project, Black Sun Roof - post Skullflower, post Sunroof!, post Total. We've yet to pin down exactly what it is that BSR was sonically designed to do, other than kick up a fantastically psychedelic skree, which this new double disc most definitely does, and if anything, of all of Bower's recent releases, and even the last few Black Sun Roof records, this one is definitely the most varied, and most musical. Harkening back to that very first cd-r. There's still some of Bower's recent black metal obsession lurking around in the shadows, and of course elements of all those previous projects are still definitely present, but on these two records, Bower and his musical partner Samantha Davies, have cooked up some ultra fried, zoner psych of the highest order.
It's varied enough, that if any record deserved a track by track breakdown it's this one, but that's a whole lot of tracks, so let's just pick some highlights.
The opener definitely sets the stage, with some murky processed vocals, buried under heaving slabs of crumbling sound, distorted buzz, and squealing feedback, and then, slowly surface, some skittery drum machine, the guitars blossom into a weird grinding tangle of distorted melodies, as the drum machine unfurls a lockstep groove, the whole thing strangely loping and mesmeric, the main 'riff' sounding almost like burst of shorted out static, or black buzz chopped into weird grooves, the second half of the two part opener is more of the same, just cranking everything to 11, the vibe sort of folky, reminding us like a way more bleak and black take on recent Record Of The Weeker Dan Friel, or even Dan Higgs. A tranced out noise-dirge mantra that we could listen to forever.
And while a casual glancing listen to most any of these tracks might reveal nothing but bursts of noise, headphones help get lost in Bower's impossibly dense soundscapes, from grinding, looped locomotive buzz, soft noise drifts, to melting black metal slo-mo dirges, to dense, feedback drenched Sunroof! style ur-drone raga blow outs, all keening shards of jagged noise and heart of the sun howl, to downright post industrial prettiness, all woozy and warped, buried melodies, and slow shifting textures, haunting and seriously cinematic.
The second disc starts off as if to begin blasting black metal style, but instead, the insectoid riffing seems to ooze into a black swirling cloud, while the blast beat slows to a skittery dubbed out crawl, and over the top, a dark ominous cloud of low end bleat drifts in and out, might be our favorite track of the bunch! But then the rest of the second disc makes that an even tougher pick. From weird glitchy, swirls of dub-noise drift, croaking frog squelch and blurred blackbuzz shimmer, to glistening blasted shoegaze noise pop blurred into a near white noise blowout, to a murky industrial creep fused with some spaced out new wave, sounding a bit like Skullflower covering Soft Moon, to the final two part closer, a churning, droned out gloom-punk noise dirge, that's more hypnotic and trance-y than noisy, and again driven by roiling rhythms, before finishing off with a two minute blast of paint peeling skree, which close listening reveals to have a hidden hear of warm melody and lush texture. Fuck yeah.
So moody. So atmospheric. So weird. So awesome. The fourth full album from this band we've previously described in an all-encompassing if imprecise way as "doom metal / postrock / black metal / doomfolk / black ambient alchemists" is another gorgeous and grim glimpse into their ceremonial soundworld, a realm that's dirgey, ambient, dreamlike, doubtless haunted by ancestral pagan spirits. Blood Of The Black Owl is one of the several projects of Chet W. Scott, who runs the Glass Throat label - some others being Cycle Of The Raven Talons (formerly Ruhr Hunter), The Elemental Chrysalis, and Cedar Spirits (reviewed this list too). All his music is pretty intense, and idiosyncratic, so it's hard to pick a favorite, but definitely we've always been big into Blood Of The Black Owl, and this new album takes this project to yet another level.
The disc begins with the croaking droning vocals of what sounds like a half-dead shaman, accompanied by the shaka-shaka sounds of hand percussion, witchy drones, and spooky nighttime noises, what could be horns, or hoot owls. Although the feeling is evident that Scott's intent is something deeply mystical, more secularly speaking, these twilight sounds could be the soundtrack to a cult 'giallo' horror movie, for sure, set out in the woods somewhere, ritual murder afoot, Native American relics factoring into the plot somehow. The next track continues the vibe, with mumbling invocations and a repetitively ringing bell, which reminds us for a second of Anton Batagov's Music For The 35 Buddhas. And so this disc goes, getting heavier and more sinister as it spins, always slow and spare and soundtracky. Part slowcore, part black metal (the rasped vokills, the fuzz guitar that comes as a shock when it bursts out, like on track four, "Sundrojan"), Light The Fires! is a mostly "mellow" but still devastatingly nightmarish trip conjured by chanting vox, plodding tick-tock percussion, eerie field recordings. Lovely melodic moments coexist with crushing doomic textures. Imagine Aluk Todolo teamed up with the Jewelled Antler collective, recording an album for the Neurot label, documenting a spirit quest they never came back from� Truly fantastic & recommended!
Comes in the oversized unique 6"x6" six panel gatefold Glass Throat style cd packaging. (Double vinyl version apparently upcoming too.)
Look out, here's the latest onslaught from the long running free improv unit Borbetomagus! It should tell you something that we found it difficult to review this 'cause we basically can't play it in the store without running the risk of driving out any customers present. That's not to say, though, that we don't have customers who would enjoy experiencing this mayhem in the comfort of their own homes.
The Borbetomagus trio (Donald Miller, electric guitar; Don Dietrich & Jim Sauter, saxophones) have been at it since the mid-to-late '70s, with their first album being released in 1980. This one, their 21st album if we're counting correctly, documents the final show of their 30th anniversary European tour, in Montreuil, France - hence the title - and proves that in 30 years, they haven't at all mellowed out! Play this loud at your own risk, a blanketing wall of sound consisting of distortion, noise, feedback, all in constant flux like writhing snakes of skree. One track, slightly over 46 minutes. A pleasant experience, once you've eased into it, like taking a hot bath.
By the way, we noticed that the database iTunes uses to identify cds seems to think that this one is called "Meditation For Heath And Healing" by some other, presumably new agey, artist. NOT.
Also, when we were (briefly) playing this in the store today, one AQ staffer came in and remarked, with irony: "What is this jubilant sound?" - meant in jest, but there IS a jubilant aspect to the noise of Borbetomagus. 30 more years!!!
The latest from (now) local label Moon Glyph, comes from Minneapolis trio Brute Heart, who were commissioned by Walker Art Center to perform a new score for the legendary German expressionist film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. Their usual arrangement of bass, drums, viola and keyboard, expanded here to include analog synth and cello, which makes for something spectacularly spectral and spacey, the new score begins with a shuffling minimal pop, that slowly blossoms into something much more ethereal and ambient, swirling voices and shimmering synths, all wedded to a slither bass pulse and a hypnotic rhythm of kick drum and brushed snare, all wreathed in soft billows of space-y FX. That pretty much sets the scene as it were, BH weaving lush, smoldering soundscapes, haunting and moody, delicate keyboard melodies swathed in swoonsome strings, many of the tracks with a sort of chamber jazz feel, appropriately old timey, but others sounding surprisingly modern, futuristic even, giving the music and mood of the film a nice tweak.
Some of the tracks here sound almost like weird hybrids of Stereolab and Portishead, a sort of downtempo shuffle here, a creepy crawly shuffle there. Swoonsome ballads, unwind languorously alongside ominous buzzing spaced out dronescapes, replete with ghostly female vox and dreamlike strings, while other tracks get downright noise, and a little chaotic, shuffling dark jazziness wreathed in clouds of crackle, and field of glitch and glimmer, all blurring into a woozy soft focus psychedelia. And still others have a classic baroque pop vibe, think the New Lines or even a more minimal abstract Beach Boys. Even (especially?) removed from the images, Brute Heart's score is a dark gem, one that we've been listening to like crazy, and which has us really wanting to see the film with the groups gorgeous new accompaniment.
Third in this new 7" series of dancehall bangers from Kevin Martin aka The Bug, the A side of this one is a twisted mix of loping big beats and woozy tangled synths, sounding like some alien sound system, Warrior Queen toasting over the top, the end result like some playground double dutch jam, but cranked WAY up, and when the low end drops, it's some serious chest caving buzz and rumble punishment.
The flipside pulls from the same sonic palette, more squelchy sci-fi synths, this time though, the bass is slithery and fuzzed out, the vocals, all call and response, sing songy and swaggery and a little bit snarly too, courtesy of Miss Red, perfectly complimenting Martin's fierce digi-raga damage, which begins sort of dubbed out, but by the track's end has transformed into some dense digital skitter.
Pressed on bright yellow wax, housed in a super swank metallic silver and yellow sleeve, and if past 7"s in this series are any indication, these aren't gonna be around for long...
Culture of Pink is the second full length from Cankun, aka Vincent Caylet. He's a studio mad scientist who has whipped up a warm, woozy, otherworldly post punk sound here, that plays as if it really could be some lost eighties lp beamed here directly from another decade, a sound that on the surface wouldn't be out of place on Captured Tracks or Sacred Bones. It definitely seems to be channeling another era, the guitar chime and soar and swoon, most definitely reminding us of the Durutti Column, but here filtered through an aesthetic much closer to say someone like James Ferraro, and the percolating rhythms a cascade of tangled drum machines, that almost sounds like a more lo-fi home brewed Soft Moon, but as the tracks play, they seem to unravel, just a bit, seeming to reveal the strange sonic machinations lurking beneath. The opener "Agave Sticks" is all low slung bass groove, chiming distorted guitar buzz, wreathed in sheet of chordal thrum, and driven by buzzing rock riffs in the background, the rhythms cranked up so it almost sounds like machines creating this alien post punk, and near the end of the song, those rhythms are pushed to the fore, and grow more erratic and chaotic, and soon they're grinding along through billowing clouds of guitar shimmer, at once, tripped out and off kilter, but also dreamy and weirdly tranquil.
It definitely sets the stage perfectly for the rest of the record, which unfurls as a collection of woozy, rhythmic, almost new wave soundscapes, of overlapping loops, sampled horn blurts, swirls of reverbed synths, sounds chopped up and reassembled into weirdly rhythmic stutters, many of the songs building to almost tropical blowouts, like multiple Martin Denny records spinning simultaneously with someone like Philip Jeck at the controls, while others lay down skeletal robotic drum machines, and wrap them in spidery minor key melodies, and deep sinewy bass slither. There's even vocals here and there, doused in echo and reverb, deep and dramatic, buried way down in the mix, giving those tracks even more of a gloom pop electro goth feel. But there's also plenty of lush ambience, long stretches of collaged sound, droned and whirs, breakbeats, twangy guitars, on tracks like "Acinom" or "Save My Day" it almost sounds like Dirty Beaches by way of DJ Shadow, while others get fully dubbed out, upstroke guitars, faux horns, even almost toasting-like vox, but even there, the sounds are warped and woozy, low fidelity and fantastically and dreamily murky, reminding us of an even more tweaked and drugged out Sun Araw maybe. And so it goes for the record of the record, a hazy, drowsy sprawl of tripped out, darky dubby, rhythmically off kilter, melancholic, new wave flecked, FX heavy psychedelic tropical dream-murk weirdness that we are digging BIG TIME.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Nick Cave's partner in crime for the past decade has been the wild-eyed beardo Warren Ellis, contributing battered violin and scrappy guitar in an attempt to replace Bad Seed / Birthday Party mainstay Mick Harvey as well as the perennial malcontent Blixa Bargeld, both of whom left the Bad Seeds in the late '00s. While Cave & Ellis were responsible for the testosterone garage rock of the aptly named Grinderman, their collaborative efforts have also found them scoring beautifully maudlin yet rustic soundtracks for film. In many ways, the soundtracks that Cave & Ellis scored for The Road and The Proposition laid out a template of sorts, foreshadowing the arrangements that would end up on Push The Sky Away. Yup, this is still a mellower Bad Seeds record, but it proves to be more consistent than some of the highly acclaimed earlier records. Tender Prey is a monster of a Nick Cave record, but it is dotted with duds. The lyrics behind all of Nick Cave's cautionary tales and murder ballads demand attention, perhaps more than we can really do justice to here; but we can say that the ballyhooed song "Higgs Boson Blues" with its strange pop culture references isn't nearly as corny as the press has made it out to be. The opening number "We No Who U R" features a smart cyclical chorus that's long been a staple in the Nick Cave songbook; and the skeletal track "We Real Cool" is the only one that seeks a bit of menace through a throbbing monochord bassline that back in the day would have girded a stabbing Bargeld / Harvey guitar duet but which now swims beneath a sky full of maudlin strings and plaintive pianos.
Wish we had the vinyl too but it's already being repressed, you gotta wait a few weeks...
Two new releases from the Glass Throat label on this week's list, elsewhere, the latest from longtime aQ faves Blood Of The Black Owl, and this one the first release from Cedar Spirits, a trio featuring the husband and wife team who run Glass Throat, Chet Scott (who is also BOTBO) and Rachel Boaz-Scott. The music is dark and reflective, laced with the very sounds of nature that seem to influence everything on the label. In fact the record opens with four minutes of field recordings, just the sound of a rushing river, water flowing over rocks, wind through the trees above, and when the music does come in, it's just the reverberant ringing of struck bowls, the tones ringing out and fading into the sounds of rushing water, although eventually the tones begin to sustain, creating a crystalline dronescape, laced with tinkling chimes, hushed and minimal and quite lovely.
It's the perfect introduction to Cedar Spirit's nature folk, the record unwinding lazily, subtle steel guitar strum, chant-like vocals, all over the sounds of chirping birds, and a crackling fire, the sounds fading out leaving just those nature sounds, which are soon joined by some sort of horn, the result primitive and ritualistic, the music here simply the trio sonically communing with their surroundings. Fluttering flutes drift in, some minimal percussion, tranced out and darkly mesmerizing, it is the sound of these three performing sonic nature rituals, borrowing from seventies British folk, classic Americana, Native American folk songs, adding a bit of subtly metallic leanings to the proceedings, not so much in the form of actual metal, but more in the forms of deep dark drones, and ominous ambience, but those shadowy moments are in fact rare here, instead, the mood is mostly one of sunlight and spring, of rebirth and return to whence we came, some of the tracks here are downright jubilant, while others are tranquil and dreamily wistful, but even the songs themselves and their cyclical structures, seem to represent the spirit of the group, living in harmony with the surrounding world, creating something beautiful that works in harmony with the land and all who call it home, and letting that creation find its place in nature however brief, only to fade, and disappear, leaving everything as it was.
Packaged in a super swank oversized, six panel deluxe screenprinted digipak style sleeve.
When we first listed this way, way back in 2004, our review started with the words "Circle. Vinyl. Limited." And we really didn't have to say too much more. Though we did, a bit, of course. All of which we'll repeat here in a sec, and add a lot to, 'cause Circle's label Ektro has FINALLY gone and reissued this, the band's uh, maybe 14th or 15th or so album (how do you even count, since it's a double?), released the same year as Forest and the live lp Empire. Awesome to finally have it on cd, 'cause it was so limited and has been gone so long, we almost forgot about it. But it's a good one. AND there's bonus tracks!
It's one half live (Golem), one half studio (Vesiliirto). Of course, we like 'em both. Golem's got titles in English (such as "Salamander Sword", "At War With Mercy", "Forbidden Steel Patriot", "True Incubus From Beyond" and "Destination Thunder"!!!) that are all very metal-sounding, though in actuality these tracks are quite far from metal, even Circle's own weird brand of metal. Having been recorded live, it was (and possibly remains!) the most free-form, ambient, fucked up, droned-out, abstract Circle document we had yet heard, unique in their catalog though hinted at by parts of their previous album Guillotine, and Circle side-project Doktor Kettu. Rife with jazzy piano plinking (shades of Circle's mellow masterpiece Miljard from a couple years later), demented echoing operatics out of Mika Ratto's mouth, damaged druggy harmonica blowin', throbbing fuzz, and FX laden percussive skitterscapes, it's a wild woozy sound world, suitable for some serious, dedicated late night listening, with the lovely final track, "Forbidden Steel Patriot" a sweet lullaby to send you off to sleep as the audience (forgot about them) softly applauds at the end.
Whereas, the second disc in this set, Vesiliirto, with all-Finnish titles, is much more in Circle's tradition of tight, rhythmic, repetitive rock riffage. Though it's got a loose, live feel to it too, even though it's the studio session. There's definitely a ramshackle, rustic vibe on opener "Korahteleva Haapa", like Circle are channelling some of the old bluesmen on the Fat Possum label or something, also getting crazy with skronky guitars threatening to overwhelm the "Circular" order of things. Monstrous mumbles segue into the second cut, a light groovy number adorned with blurts of spacey FX, warbling organ and echoed vox. And so it goes, Vesiliirto sharing much of Golem's far out freeform aspects, fitting in too with the hippie blues bad drugs feel of Forest, but also bringing in a lot of what we'd have to call spaced out sci-fi funk, influenced perhaps by Sun Ra and psychedelic '70s era Miles Davis?
That organ comes to the fore later on the exotic, carnivalesque freakout of "Haulikko Ja Kivaari", which also seems to feature UFOs hovering overhead, everything locked down though by the drummer's ticking motorik pulse that picks up over the course of the track's eleven minutes... Dang that's a good one, reason enough for any Circle fan to be happy this was reissued.
Not to mention that for this cd version, they've added one track to the Golem disc, while Vesiliirto boasts two bonus tracks, for a total of 34 minutes of Circle that you've never heard before, even if you already have this on vinyl - so true obsessives just might need to get it again.
So, if you're a fan of this cult metal band (most of whom could be also described as rabid), then the news that a cd has been released containing rare early demo versions of the songs from Confessor's 1991 Earache debut Condemned, demo tracks that actually sound heavier than the recordings that ended up on the album, and is accompanied by a bonus dvd disc of live footage, is all we really need to tell you, to get you to hit the "add to cart" button with excessive force. But maybe even folks who aren't (yet) Confessor fanatics should check this out. 'Cause we know a lot of you like technical / progressive / math metal, and also a lot of you like traditional epic Sabbath-styled DOOM, and for that matter a lot of you like plain ol' weirdness, and that's what Confessor's unique sound was all about, and they were unique, at the Venn diagram intersection of prog metal and doom metal, characterized by riffs inspired by Sabbath and, especially, Trouble, chaotically crazy, complex stop-start song structures and time changes out of the mathrock playbook, the INSANE drumming skillz of sticksman Steve Shelton (now in Loincloth), and high pitched vocals wailing disconsolately o'er it all, which might be the weirdest component of the whole Confessor calculation.
If that sounds good, we'd of course recommend getting the Condemned album itself, it's a classic - BUT it's out of print, and also the band thinks the guitar tone is better on these demos anyway.
There's eleven songs on the cd, including all the tracks from band's three demo cassettes circa 1988-1990, plus two cuts from comps and two live tracks from the era. The cd is also enhanced with live video of the band from a show '92. Then there's the limited dvd disc, which includes tons more archival live footage of the band over the years, including video from an outdoor performance at a waterpark that the guys from The Fucking Champs always loved to talk about. Yeah, Confessor, perfect for a sunny day of fun at the waterpark, people must have been into that.
The cd booklet boasts liner notes by Jeff Wagner, who wrote THE book on prog-metal (Mean Deviation: Four Decades Of Progressive Heavy Metal, published by Bazillion Points), plus lots of old photos, gig flyers and demo tape graphics.
So it's definitely a deluxe deal, for Confessor's rabid fans and maybe some new ones too.
Active for most of the nineties, this experimental/ambient/industrial outfit called it quits back in 2000, only to regroup and reform in 2012, and essentially take up right where they left of. While we weren't all that familiar with the group's earlier material, this new incarnation still sounds very beholden to the nineties, creating sprawling landscapes of haunting ambience, twisted, paranoiac, sample heavy landscapes of keening tones and deep rumbling drones, mysterious horn blurts, orchestral stabs, blasts of percussive chaos, deep foghorn like moans, and some seriously intense vocals, delivered as a sort of screed, deeply and ominously intoned, all over a sprawl of softly undulating shimmer, of high end glitchiness, of distant chants and chorales. The sound shifts continuously, from glimmering psychedelia, to softly roiling synth heavy churn, to squelchy cinematic synthscapes, all peppered with industrial clatter and groaning metallic thrum, that voice resurfacing throughout, as if this was a soundtrack to some harrowing ritual.
But then on tracks like "Tripoli Calling", the group take fragments of female vocals, shards of percussion, and slow swirls of deep blackened buzz, and weave them into something that sounds more like Muslimgauze, martial snares underpin, clouds of cymbal shimmer, and lush soft focus swells of chordal shimmer, quite tranquil and dreamy, but almost as if it's just setting you up for the next track, which is all corrosive drones and distant sirens, soft noise melded into a heaving wall of dense, tense sound, only to dramatically shift gears, acoustic guitar strum, chanted crooned vox, and political samples, which sans those samples would sound like some sort of droned out acid folk, but instead, is a weirdly chaotic bit of post industrial sonic rhetoric.
The second to last track lays out some grim black buzz, and laces it with some long stretches of blues guitar flecked low end pulsations, haunting and strange, a disembodied sort of industrial noise blues, or something, seems like a weird mix, but it's cool, and definitely works. There's also some strange gristly static, and what sounds like heavy breathing sculpted into spidery tendrils, all of which leads to the epic closer, that creepy voice back again, this time over a hazy drift of slow-mo synths, and disembodied melodies, rusty and groaning in the background, the whole thing looped and hypnotic, the track unwinding as a slow shifting collage, noisy and staticky one second, dreamy and lilting the next, that voice drifting to the surface throughout, before a tangle of overlapping voices returns us to that Jeck like opening loopscape, which becomes a creepy, woozy, dirgey stretch of down tempo wooziness.
While they last, we have the limited deluxe version, which comes in a fancy oversized full color slipcase which houses a slide out panel that holds both the cd and a booklet.
No idea who this Cool Person is; but he / she / it / them hail from Gainsville, Florida and landed this outsider chunk of electronica on Hooker Vision. At its most sensible, the Cool Person ethos follows more of a rhythmless, atonal, and organic sounds similar to Matmos and Mouse On Mars, all done on a very lo-fi scale, with squelching tones and ring-modulated arpeggiations sent along divergent paths; but at other times, echoplex delay patterns crosshatch into swarms of gritty feedback or swarming Reichian drones that cut against abstracted polygons of golden tones with hints of those Frankenstein tape constructions from any given Joseph Hammer project circa 1983. A strange one, but a very intriguing tape from this anonymous project. Released in a tiny batch of just 50 copies, all of which are sold out at the source, so these are the last few copies...
Originally released on tape a while back, this primo slab of Orange County garage-psych has been recently reissued by our pals at Permanent, and we're so grateful it has, since that tape disappeared before we could grab one, and listening to this now, we can't imagine folks into the current crop of fuzzed out psych won't flip for this SoCal crew, who whip up a heady brew combining Spacemen 3 like druggy mesmer blown out swaggery Oh Sees style distorto garage stomp.
Fierce and feral, raw and urgent, just check out "Neon Kids", all dirgey and Stooges-y, the guitar fuzzy and drenched in effects, the vocals a marble mouthed yowl, the whole mix WAY in the red, or "Dorothy", a furious blast of chaotic surf-punk fuzz pop chaos, but which spends its last couple minutes all droney, unfurling a buzzing sitar-like main riff, trancey and super hypnotic. There's also a definitely Wooden Shjips / Moon Duo vibe, and we hear plenty of Ty Segall's glammy garage in Cosmonauts' druggy dronerock, but they manage to take all those influences and craft something, that to a certain degree is all their own. Tracks like "Yer So Rad" slow things way down, into super head nodding lysergic dirgery, which balances the other more frenetic jams, but those jams, especially tracks like "T.V. California" display a pretty serious knack for classic pop songsmithery, they just tend to take whatever pop they whip up, and douse it in distortion, and send it careening, sweaty, bruised and bloodied, into the fray.
Sorta surprised these guys aren't on Castle Face, which already pretty much probably tells you all you need to know. Fans of the usual garage psych suspects, will dig big time!
Norway's number one "hiking metal punks", the Darkthrone duo of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are back with another album (their 16th!) that melds the grim frozen Nordic black metal of the '90s (typified by their own corpsepainted classics from the era like A Blaze In the Northern Sky and Under A Funeral Moon) with '80s NWOBHM, punk, crust, and speed metal, as they have been doing for the past six or seven years.
We'd heard before we got this that the new Darkthrone was heavily influenced by Agent Steel, and while Fenriz does pull of some amazing high pitched shrieks in the style of John Cyriis from that cult '80s speed metal outfit, we suspect that people were saying that 'cause a copy of Agent Steel's Skeptics Apocalypse lp is prominently displayed behind Fenriz in his picture on this album's back cover. What also should have been in that picture is a copy of Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales, 'cause plenty of this has that brand of '80s underground doomic deathliness to it too. Mercyful Fate and Venom, the '80s originators of black metal, are also clear inspirations. A good example of what that means, is the album's truly epic final track, the 13 minute 49 second "Leave No Cross Unturned", written/sung by Fenriz, which opens with an impressive balls-in-a-vice scream, the song speeding along with rapid riffage ornamented by soaring swooping vox. But then, whomp, it slows for a sluggish doomed out break, chugging thenceforth under a Hellhammered, Frosty vibe. Eventually the velocity ramps up again as do Fenriz's operatic affectations, and then back again into the doomy depths, the song a tour de force display of what Darkthrone dig in metal, as well as serving as a representation of the entire album in microcosm, it's got it all. A headbanging masterpiece right there.
That could be the only song here and we'd still be into this, but wait, there's more. Six tracks total, three by Nocturno Culto (the guitarist) and three by Fenriz (the drummer). Fenriz sings his compositions with an extreme/eccentric mix of falsetto wails and guttural deathgrunts, while on his tracks Nocturno employs a capable (if less WTF?) black metal rasp. They alternate songs throughout the album, beginning with Nocturno's gnarly snarly punked out black metal opener "Dead Early", followed by the more-likely-to-get-you-staring-at-your-stereo "Valkyrie" of Fenriz, some very epic wailing metal, fast but glorious, like a weird mix of Bathory and Manilla Road, maybe. Nocturno is back on the mic with track three, the dense churning rocking riff-fest of "Lesser Men". Fenriz responds with the rollicking "The Ones You Left Behind", sorta like "Valkyrie" but with some Motorhead added in? It's hard to describe actually, and that's what's cool about Darkthrone these days, while these guys wear their influences on their sleeves (and can do so with impunity 'cause they themselves were once so influential), the stuff they come up with here is still original, somehow channelling their obvious inspirations into weird hybrids never before attempted or envisioned.
Then to the album's penultimate track, Nocturno's own pounding epic, the 8:37 "Come Warfare, The Entire Doom", which is indeed doomy, but cranks at speed too, and almost would be this album's more metal than thou piece de resistance if we didn't know that the massive "Leave No Cross Unturned" was coming up next. But it sure comes close.
All we can say is, if you love metal, you gotta love Darkthrone. Long may they reign. As long as they're around, metal will never die.
The cd comes packaged in a hardcover digibook, 20 pages, necessary 'cause of course the ever talkative Fenriz takes up a lot of space with his notes on each song, etc. One of his songs ("Leave No Cross Unturned", natch) even has its OWN lengthy "thanks list", separate from the two page thanks list Fenriz himself has. Nocturno Culto, aka Ted, more taciturn, limits himself to just one page for his thanks list and doesn't deign to analyze his songs, unlike Fenriz, who practically writes reviews for 'em, listing precise inspirations for each section of each of his compositions. Also, in recent Darkthrone tradition, Fenriz provides a list of recommended new bands he likes, in his role as tastemaker for a new generation of metallers. So folks who download this, illegally or otherwise, are missing out on a lot!
All hail! At last, a follow up to the critically-acclaimed (and by us as well) 2010 album Nucleus, from this idiosyncratic lone genius metal cult. Yes it's the return of Dawnbringer, masterminded by guitarist/drummer/vocalist Chris "Professor" Black, he of also, amongst others, AQ faves High Spirits. Interestingly, Dawnbringer started off years ago as the one-man band of *somebody else*, but early on, Chris Black joined on drums, and then the other guy subsequently quit, making Dawnbringer into Black's own one-man band! (Though he does get help from friends.)
For those who've heard Nucleus, you know that Dawnbringer plays truly classic metal, but with an experimental edge, informed by black and death and other styles, though those elements have been toned down in recent years. Dawnbringer's latest comes quite close to the sound of the NWOBHM-ish High Spirits, with some of the power/proggishness of another band the Professor plays drums in, Pharaoh.
Dawnbringer must be lauded for their real, honest-to-god heavy metal songwriting, unafraid to be a bit 'pop' - track five even gets a little power-ballady, we love it! Other trademarks include the powerful drumming, TONS of gorgeously shredding guitarwork, various quirky details, and, crucially, the whiskey-weary, Lemmy-phlegmy, soulful vocal stylings of Black - the earnestness of which go a long way toward making the weirder aspects of this seem worth taking seriously, 'cause yes, the album title kinda sounds like the name of a D&D module, and indeed it's fantastical. The sticker on the shrinkwrap says that this album is "the story of a naive assassin, his bizarre journey, and its tragic end". But beyond that, for a 'concept album', very little is revealed. The disc is broken up into nine completely untitled tracks, there's no 'story' provided in the cd booklet, and only a few lines of lyrics are printed. You just gotta listen. And, whether you follow the plot or not, you'll enjoy the masterful metal music, full of killer riffage, galloping rhythms, and impassioned vocals...
Dawnbringer here can certainly be compared to their former Profound Lore labelmates, Slough Feg and Hammers Of Misfortune (the latter especially due to the pounding '70s prog Hammond organ you'll hear on track VI, in particular). Also of course, such bands as diverse as Iron Maiden, Blue Oyster Cult, Bathory, Manowar... In sum, this album is an artistic, ambitious attempt at 'Epic Metal', and it's a huge triumph. Definitely in competition for best heavy metal offering of 2012!
- MPEG stream: I
- MPEG stream: II
- MPEG stream: VI
Listen on: Deezer
Longtime readers of the aQ list no doubt remember Aussie heavies, Fire Witch, who released a barrage of often way too limited released before calling it a day. Well since then FW drummer Jem has resurfaced with Dead, a two piece, just drums and bass, and a sound that while maybe still a bit beholden to his old group, definitely has honed a pretty unique sound, one that definitely transcends the limitations of the bass and drums duo. The opening few minutes delivers a strange bit of percussion driven ambience, all cymbal shimmer and tinkling chimes, subtly rhythmic, abstract and space-y, laced with little curlicues of FX, before the bass comes in, and comes in hard, super distorted, grinding, chugging, then the drums, totally off kilter, and seemingly at odds with the bass riff, dizzyingly mathy, then the vocals, a distorted monstrous bellow, the band channeling a little bit of that classic AmRep noise rock sound, but though something much more minimal. Eventually, the song explodes into something more melodic and metallic, the vocals cleaner, a sort of dramatic howl, the drums wild and chaotic, the bass spitting out thick distorted chords and dense textures, the song constantly shifting gears, erupting into full on frenzied metallic math rock, and then switching to some serious metallic pummel and back again. The first song along is intense and energetic, relentless and dense, and brutal and intricate, and it's the sort of song that makes you exhausted just listening to. Hard to imagine just two guys kicking up this sort of racket, but holy shit, Dead are a fierce sonic beast.
The rest of the record follows suit, straddling the line between minimal metal crush and punked out mathy freakout, "Couldn't Keep His Mouth Shut" finds dead sounding like a dead ringer for the Melvins, while "Up!" is all bass driven noise rock sludge, "Murder Hollow" is some darkly atmospheric doomic churn, which leads into the progged out "Bed Bugs" which had us thinking Nomeansno! Stick around for the 11 minute closer "Lego Men", which lets the band unwind a slowburn punk-sludge epic, that again, harkens back to classic Melvins, which is no bad thing at all.
Super swank packaging, an elaborate gatefold inner sleeve, full color printed, in a plain white jacket, so the gatefold is partially visible through the hole, full color sticker on the jacket, label stickers inside and a download code as well.
Imperial Distortion was the album that opened a lot of people's ears to multi-dimensional sound tactician Kevin Drumm; yet the artist himself had admitted some self-doubt in regards to that 2008 release. He did eventually recognize the subtle power of Imperial Distortion's isolationist pall; and the relative popularity of Imperial Distortion led him to follow up that album with Imperial Horizon, another masterful album of bleak, shapeless dronescaping. With Tannenbaum, Drumm returns once again to the ambient strategies of those two previous albums. And while Hospital Productions situates the album within the realm of 'malign electronics,' Drumm's timbral choices are golden, warm, and nocturnally rich; and there's not much of a threat to be heard within the near two hours of glacially paced dronemuzik. The hour long "Nightside" is perfect dreamtime music, with not-quite static drone subtly undulating toward a chord change that slowly creeps into the realm of perception some 32 minutes in, only to ebb back towards a glistening shimmer of lush ambience. Much more akin to an Andrew Chalk album than anything close to what Prurient might have to say.
The second disc is comparatively more dynamic, although that's only due to the incorporation of near-silent passages at the beginning of the aptly named "Winter Ice" which adheres to an arcing composition that glides up to an elegant, melancholy plateau of fluttered electronic drone, hinting at something which may be a melody buried somewhere inside. "Taurean" follows the Phil Niblock approach to minimalism, "no melody, no rhythm, no bullshit" with its gilded set of tones that gracefully bends within a small axis of subtle variations. Another mighty fine, mighty beautiful album from Kevin Drumm.
There are those certain records for all of us that just change things when they enter your world. For a few of us here, this 1981 album by Durutti Column is one of those records. An album that showed that music could be sparse and majestic at the same time. D.I.Y., yet and grandiose in how it evokes emotion, memory, longing and desire. The work of Vini Reilly, Durutti Column emerged out of Factory Records yet their sound was something completely of its own world. Merging impeccable guitar playing with subtle drum machines, soft vocals and a golden warmth that makes this one of those albums that makes you melt everytime you put it on.
Pastoral and blissful, LC is filled with both perfect restraint and full on flowing beauty. You can hear how traces of the more blissed out side of Krautrock influenced him, merging that with the stripped down emotional quality of British folk and placing it into a very modern moment. While not an obscure band by any measure, we are still blown away though by how many people who would love Durutti Column have never heard them. And with the reissue of their first two lp's we hope that so many of those folks finally do. We could go on and on listing folks whose music we love and who have undoubtedly been influenced by Durutti Column, and this record in particular: Felt, Fuqugi, Danny Paul Grody, Colleen, James Blackshaw, Ducktails, Fennesz, Manuel, A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine, and on and on. One of our favorite records of all time, so if you didn't have this before, now's the time!
We've got two great vinyl reissues of the first two lps from Manchester's Durutti Column this week. Despite the title, The Return of The Durutti Column was their debut release from 1980, originally on Factory Records. While the title is tongue in cheek (as was the original album cover, covered in sandpaper so that it would scrape and scuff any record filed next to it), it was truly a return, as by the time they were set to record, the original five piece group enlisted by Factory label boss Tony Wilson had dissolved into sole member, guitarist Vini Reilly. In less capable hands, this might of been devastating, but Vini Reilly, a true alchemist of the electric guitar, could more than hold his own. Working with Martin Hannet, who provided the atmospheric production and synth washes, and a couple of session players, The Return of... is a tour-de-force of warm pastoral instrumentals, soft textures and intricate jazz-like compositional dynamics.
Durutti Column didn't have the typical Factory Records sound associated with bands like A Certain Ratio or Joy Division. In fact, Reilly's interweaving filigree guitar lines and bright chiming tones sounded more like a group that would be on Crepuscule or even 4AD. "Sketch for Summer" is one of the most beautiful openers ever and completely sets the tone for the rest of the album. Sweeping and expansive, yet also introspective and labyrinthian, Reilly conjures beautifully spiraling melodies that glide and wander, sometimes letting themselves get lost in the exploration but never get aimless or muddled. Highly Recommended!
Are those purple icicles on the cover? We're not sure exactly, but it looks cool and psychedelic and eldritch� perfect for this latest, vinyl-only release from these stoner sludge heavies. We loved their MeteorCity cd from two years ago, Dead Roots Stirring, a disc of desert-y doom that was both crushingly heavy and mesmerically melodic. Now on it's second pressing, this newer two-tracker (one song to a side, 22 minutes total) follows on from that album with yet more lumbering riffage and fuzzed out psych glory. The track on the second side, "Release", in particular is a thing of epic, grungy beauty. Like we said, second pressing, no doubt just as limited as the first was.
Endless Boogie continue to do what they do best, endlessly boogie-ing, on this their third album for No Quarter. If you've heard their other two records (we hope), if you're a fan of their other two (we are), then you have a not-so-rough idea of what the heck the haps are here, and oughta dig Long Island big time. Boasting a scary/spooky cover painting that looks more like it's meant for a black metal album, Long Island is all asprawl - over four vinyl sides or one literally jam-packed (nearly 80 minutes long) compact disc side - with EB's trademark by now Stones meets Beefheart meets ZZ Top meets Wooden Shjips style of old school sixties record collectin' bluesy choogle 'til ya droogle extreme jammage damage. For those of you not familiar with these NYC (by way of the fabled crossroads, perhaps) jammers, please do go read our reviews of Focus Level and Full House Head - in fact we were just reading 'em over ourselves the other day and thinkin', hey wow good job on those reviews, we should relist those records just so folks will scope them again. But anyway, they'll give you a decent idea what's Long Island is all about, too. But, if you want a review of this IN this review, here's the rundown�
Vocalist "Top Dollar" (his vox a potential dealbreaker for some, as we've previously noted, depending on whether you believe or care if his maniacal gritty drawl is authentic or parodic or not) does his old blues coot holler over the guitar blurt and rhythmic churn of these eight tracks, none of 'em short, all (except "Taking Out the Trash") with fairly cryptic/esoteric titles. They range from moody numbers wherein Endless Boogie "bring it down" and Top Dollar reigns it in, to put forth a semi-spoken Nick Cave-y sorta vibe, to power rockin' bangers aswirl with plentiful 'lectric geetar psych soloing, a preponderance of the tracks leaning to the latter cantankerous category, or at least in the murky middle ground of mesmeric instrumental groovin', so get ready for the rumble.
Just imagine a world in which there's only one kind of music: the blues. As the basis for ALL other types of music. (Ok, maybe this is almost true, but take the idea to an extreme). So there's no rock, just blues rock. No electronica, only, uh, blues electronica. No black metal, only blues black metal. No reggaeton, only blues reggaeton. And no tranced out throbbing krautrock except, well, ENDLESS BOOGIE. Makes sense they'd be on the same label what's put out records by Circle, Pharoah Overlord, and The Psychic Paramount.
Vinyl version is a gatefold, with download, fyi.
Another fine cassette of home-droned electronics from Hooker Vision founder Grant Evans (aka Nova Scotian Arms, Crippling, and half of Quiet Evenings). What sounds like guitar, synth, and maybe even a bit of piano seems to get into the loops that Evans cycles with the same languid pacing that William Basinski presents via his own tape loop miasma. An underbelly of smoldering grit and amplifier distortion haunts the distant regions of some of the loops as if they were bleed-through artifacts from a previous noise construction that refused to be erased from the tape and points to a latent psychic violence that runs counter to the dreamy, lulling drones which receive a minimal amount of information as to their origin from Evans "soft sounds from 1/4" tape." Super limited pressing of 50 copies, and it's already sold out at the source, these are the last copies.
This marks the second reissue of these recordings from Andrew Chalk's early noise-junk project Ferial Confine. The Full Use Of Nothing was originally a cassette self-released back in 1985 and was most likely one of the recordings that piqued the interest of Broken Flag to eventually release some of Chalk's more gnarled constructions. While the Ferial Confine records are definitely noise albums, there is a thread which ties these into the drone-centric work for which he's best known, in the gradual evolution of the compositions that shift from one set of demolished sounds into another. The process seems to find Chalk beginning with metal-bashed percussion recorded at very slow speeds on a 4-track then bounced to a different track at very high speeds with swarming synth / reverb saturated dronescraping draped beneath the volatile squeaking and dissonant klanking aktionism. One can hear some of the early Merzbow and / or Yeast Culture noise-junk recordings and most certainly the frenzied clamour of The New Blockaders (who had in fact worked with Chalk around this same time period), but it's that phasing, slippery drone miasma suspended as a backdrop to all of the tactile noise that gives this a very Andrew Chalk feel. Even working with noise, Andrew Chalk proved himself much better than many of his contemporaries! The cd reissue of The Full Use Of Nothing is the first in a triology of Ferial Confine recordings which will include the Broken Flag cassette Meiosis (1985) and a second pressing of the First, Second, And Third Drop (1986, unreleased until a cd version came out in 2008).
The last Lee Gamble record, Diversions 1994-1996 was a strange sort of ANTI-jungle, jungle record, having been constructed from just the NON jungle parts of old jungle mixtapes recorded off the radio. Only a brief bit of beat driven murk toward the end even hinted at the genesis of that record. This latest Gamble missive, was described to us as Gamble finally getting to make a proper beat record, one that's maybe not jungle, but wherein all those sublimated beats apparently finally show up. Which to a degree is true. We were sort of picturing some old school jungle drum and bass style throwback, but instead, those lost beats are only part of the occasion, with Gamble focused more on creating dense collaged landscapes of hazy pulses, sculpted static and murky sublimated rhythms. This still sounds like Gamble sort of deftly stepping AROUND the beats, the rhythms that do show up, end up being woozy fragmented loops, or strange 'heroin house' style throb, all wreathed in lots of hiss and crackle and static, with much of the record foregoing beats entirely, focusing instead on textures and ambience, some of it quite lovely, a little bit woozy and washed out, minimal psychedelic drifts, but the beats are definitely an integral part of the equation this time around, just not for the usual reason.
Squelchy 8 bit crunch is sculpted into murky, hiccuping anti-grooves, which morph into woozy, blurred and looped sprawls of 4-on-the-floor pulses and cascading synth melodies. There are some swoonsome moments of Kompakt like skitter, all hazy, gauzy, murky dreaminess, the beats buried beneath pixelated swirls of grainy tape hiss, but there's also some full on beat driven alien funk, mutated beats, warped melodies, pitch shifted percussion. The sound throughout is gristly and lo-fi, which is only magnified during the record's housiest moments, where all that hiss and static gets whipped up into clouds of hazy druggy shimmer, which is perfectly balanced by long stretches of ghostly murmur, softly dubbed out thrum, and druggy nocturnal drift.
Like all PAN releases, super exquisite packaging, a heavy full color jacket housed in a thick silkscreened plastic PVC sleeve.
This is a long overdue reissue of the classic 1997 debut (and really, only proper full length) from this legendary NZ noise pop outfit, who remain a functioning unit to this day, but who over the last 15+ years have recorded precious little material and who most folks have probably heard of, but not actually hard.
Their sound is tough to pin down, sometimes lo-fi and dreamy, almost lullaby like, but at others, noisy and abrasive, the band deftly combining lilting loveliness with walls of crumbling sound, or atonal folk with minimal drones. Eyes Rind As If Beggars starts off with "Love Comes Slowly Now" which is a sweet little slab of bedroom folk, all simple percussion, hushed acoustic guitars, softly crooned vox, but as if to balance the sonic scales, "Nothing Going Down" begins sort of melodically, before splintering into a cloud of wild tangled guitar drones, the original recording is damaged too, so the speed fluctuates giving it a seriously twisted psychedelic vibe, the guitars spitting out drones and raga like buzz, sounding almost like bagpipes at one point, a chaotic sprawl of NZ noise that could be some lost Dead C jam really, but then they slip right back into "Carousel" a slow burn Velvets style ballad, druggy and woozy, laced with moaning fiddle, and detuned guitar warble.
That detuned warble is present throughout, it's what drives "Sweet Pea", which starts out quite druggy and dreamy, before getting noisier and noisier, before finally settling into a warped unfunky groove. "Rosicrucinn Lovers" returns to the band to noise drenched shoegaze territory, a heady, heavy stretch of blissed out guitarnoise, draped over simple caveman drumming, and warbly vox, the whole thing wreathed in wild distorted psych-shred guitar. Which bleeds right over into "Marshall Sign", sounding like some modern psych rock band going apeshit, but with some weird sort of gravitas that keeps it from sounding wanky, and instead makes it droney and trancey and mesmerizing. The rest of the record proper offers up variation of the previous songs, strummed psych folk drones, chaotic, stumbling free-form noise rock, minimal garage pop, angular Sonic Youth like dirge-rock, classic lo-fi NZ noise, fuzzy psychedelic jangle, and dense, swirling shoegaze dreampop, all of those sounds blurred and smeared into constantly shifting variations, the overall vibe, one of fantastically inventive, yet somehow still sort of naive, home brewed free form psychedelic noise pop, that really sounds like it could be some contemporary combo, which certainly speaks to both The Garbage & The Flowers sonic prescience, as well as the heavy influence they had (perhaps unknowingly) on the current crop of noiseniks.
The reissue tacks on a bonus disc/lp, featuring a ton of singles, compilation tracks, demos, rehearsals, alternate versions and previously unreleased rarities, all of which sound as good as the record proper. Includes a big booklet of liner notes and rare photos.
You should have seen some of us jumping with joy (literally!) when we finally got this in stock a few weeks back. And we wanted to list it immediately but it's take us until now to get enough copies! Gina X Performance were a totally ahead of their time electro-pop outfit outta Germany who formed at the end of the 1970's. Nice Mover was their first and best album. Essentially the collaboration between Zeus B. Held, a musician and producer who was getting way bored with the stale world of rock at the time and was seeking to create some cold, dark and sexy electronic based music, and his perfect partner in crime Gina Kikoine, who had a background in art-history and was leaning heavily toward the avant-garde. Together they sounded like Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk hooking up with Grace Jones in the middle of the night at a dark seedy club in Berlin. Such the perfect late night record for those nights that you are feelin' a lil' dirty, a lil' sassy and lot up to no good.
When Pam in mailorder heard this for the first time she thought it sounded like the best kind of "slutty dracula-music!" or the soundtrack to early '80s cult-favorite Liquid Sky. Gina X were the prototype of riot grrl and electroclash. Musically it's that gettin' you so hot by being so cold, with Gina singing queer-positive lyrics about gender bending. there's even a song dedicated to Quentin Crisp. You can't help but hear Gina X Performance in the sounds that would come almost 25 years after from the likes of Tracy & The Plastics, Chicks On Speed, Goldfrapp, Adult, Solex, and Ladytron. Also if you loved that great So Young But So Cold comp as much as we do then this is pretty essential listening as well! Those of us who DJ know that sometimes all you have to do is put on "Nice Mover" or "No G.D.M." and immediately all the wild and sexy dancers will hit the dancefloor all flushed and feverish!
Originally released as two separate, ultra limited vinyl volumes, this sprawling psychedelic opus has finally been combined onto epic psychedelic songsuite, all on one shiny aluminum disc - which gives us a chance to make it our Record Of The Week, which was impossible before.
Unlike Gnod's more experimental electronic Presents... Dwellings & Druss lp, which we reviewed recently, Chaudelande finds the band in full on kosmiche space-psych mode, the sort of thing fans of outfits like Carlton Melton, White Hills, The Heads, 3 Leafs and the like, will flip for, assuming those folks aren't already heavily into Gnod. Which many probably are, as we've raved about these UK psychedelic space rockers on past lists, and who we first discovered via a split with NY space rockers White Hills. Gnod would later go on to share a split with another aQ fave, Bong, as well as releasing a clutch of their own records, which as you might assume, had all the space/psych rock fans around here flipping their lids. Chaudelande, originally released in 2012 and split into two separate 12"s, is another heady concoction of heavy psych rock bliss, swaggery space rock crunch and shimmery lysergic sonic drift, the first three tracks, originally volume 1, are sprawling epics, the shortest a little over eight minutes, the longest originally taking up a whole side at 17+. Where on past records, Gnod did a lit of drifting and spaced out shimmering, the opening track here wastes no time, well, okay, a little time spent spaced out and ethereal, before exploding into some full on space rock stomp, equal parts Hawkwind, the Stooges, heck, even a little Monster Magnet, the drums are massive, pounding away, the guitars thick, and crumbling with distortion, swaggery and spacey and seriously psychedelic, everything wreathed in swirls of effects and swaths of blurred buzz, the vocals a reverbed yelp, the bass thick and slithery, the whole thing on the edge of slipping into full on freakout. Sort of mirroring the sonic shift White Hills displayed on their most recent record. The second track dials it back a bit, drifting into a more Moon Duo-ish territory, that sort of mesmerizingly cyclical propulsive space-kraut, but Gnod mix it up by adding some thick grinding bass buzz, and clouds of constantly shifting FX, not to mention layer upon layer of swirling guitar murk and celestial shimmer, and while it does go through several permutations, at its heart, it's a seriously heady slab of blissed out zoner psych.
But then the third track displays a whole different side of Gnod's sound, opening up with some fluttery folk, wreathed in field recordings of bird calls, and all manner of voices, as if it were some hippy commune fireside jam. The sound darkens considerably, a low slung bass line driving some skeletal rhythmic shuffle, the sound hazy and fuzzy and droned out, but peppered with bursts of incendiary guitar noise, wild squalls of psychedelic freakout, wheezing organs, eventually exploding into a pounding noise jam second half, that finds the sound cranked, all the pedals pushed to their limited, the whole thing held together by a raga like buzz, heady and heavy and gloriously noisily spaced out.
The second half of the cd, originally volume 2, begins very tranquilly, with some bells and chimes, a fluttering flute, bird song, and folky chanted vocals, all driven by a simple plodding rhythm, very old timey and ritualistic sounding, but then a few minutes in, the song gradually splinters into a murky, pounding punkish churn, that sounds almost industrial, like a space rockier version of Crash Worship, tribal drumming beneath chugging crumblingly distorted riffage, wrapped in keening synth drones, and pocked with yelped reverby vox, the vibe is very Circle-like, a sort of Neanderthal space-psych hypno-rock, that does eventually transform into something that sounds almost like death rock, or some sort of goth-psych, that shuffling almost disco-y rhythm, deep crooned vocals, slithery basslines, but all nearly obscured by sheets of wah wah-ed guitar noise, pretty goddamn weird, but also one of our favorite Gnod jams yet! The follow up track Entrance, is a similarly minded sprawl of psychedelic hypno-rock. churning, pulsing, pounding, the drumming much busier, but still seriously motorik, the sound growing gradually more intense and heavy and blown out, a sort of space-punk sprawl, and the sort of mesmerizingly tranced out psychedelic space jams that end way too soon, even after 10+ minutes.
And like the first volume, the second volume (and the collected compact disc version of Chaudelande)
ends with an epic, previously sidelong mega-jam, this one the awesomely titled "Genocider", which begins with a full on "Hey Mickey" style drum beat, which is quickly buried under an avalanche of crumbling riffage and howled echo drenched megaphone vox, the song a mesmerizing space garage stomp, with the guitars growing ever more unhinged, spraying wild tangles of psych-freakout over everything, but then something strange happens, the guitars begin to recede, and the drums begin to become a bit dubby, the timbre shifting, the low end dissipating, with beats careening back and forth, the sound breaking down into a twisted brittle psych dub drum jam, before exploding right back into another stretch of roiling space stomp heaviness, that pounds on relentlessly, until crashing to a halt in a final squall of blown out noise-psych crunch. So awesome.
We first heard Golden Void, via their debut single on local label Valley King, and were immediately blown away, so much so that we could pretty much only muster up a bunch of wild gushing to explain how much we loved it. It went like this:
"Golden Void's sound is SO kick ass and SO hits the spot, totally heavy, hooky, groovy stoner rock, big riffs, lots of organ, soaring vocals, and yeah, of course some seriously shredding leads, totally catchy, a modern take on some mix of all your teenage faves, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Skynrd, just totally rocking, laced with plenty of psychedelic swirl, and a distinctly laid back classic rock vibe. Also reminds us a LOT of aQ stoner rock faces Freedom Hawk, the A side of this here single, might be THEE rocking jam of the summer. And we're thinking that when these guys come out with a full length, we might just have us a new favorite record..."
Well, we pretty much called it, cuz these guys DO have a new record, and it most absolutely IS our new favorite, in fact, we got a copy a while back, even though it only just came out, and it has to be one of THEE most played records in the store, by pretty much everyone here, and almost every time we played it, customers in the store had to find out what it was, and more often than not, ordered themselves a copy.
So yeah, Golden Void is the new band from Earthless' Isaiah Mitchell, along with Camilla Saufley-Mitchell (his wife?) from Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, as well as few other locals, and they have come up with easily the best retro rock, heavy psych record of the year. In addition to the above mentioned outfits, we hear plenty of Captain Beyond, Ozzy era Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, even Witchcraft, the sound is heavy and hooky, the songs good enough to actually BE classic rock tunes, not just sounding like them, had this record come out in 1976, we'd be hearing this shit on classic rock radio non stop. Sun baked and blown out, more mellow than metallic, very California-esque in its vibe, a totally classic, vintage seventies sound, right down to the recording, and again, the songs. We can't tell you how many bands have the sound nailed but not the songs, but every track here is perfect, and impossibly catchy, the sort of songs you'll have stuck in your head forEVER.
"Art Of Invading" starts things off, organ driven proto metal psychedelic radness, wild drumming, the vocals bathed in reverb, the sound stone-y and heavy, super dynamic, and it is Mitchell's band after all, so plenty of super melodic, wildly shredding leads. "Virtue" cranks things up a notch, and weirdly reminds us of the sort of sound that aQ faves Malachai were conjuring up in the studio, super heavy, riffy, laid back vox, and hooks galore, and the drumming, holy shit, crazy busy, but perfect for the song, which leads directly into "Jetsun Dolma", the slow groover of the record, the psychedelic ballad, that has a bit of an Allman Brothers vibe, laced with woozy swirls of washed out organ, and killer wah guitar.
It's at this point that the record gets REALLY good. Even better than the first half. "Badlands" might be our most played song on the record, with its churning organ heavy groove, crazy catchy chorus, and killer proggy breakdown midsong. Then come the two tracks from the Valley King single, which along with "Badlands", are absolutely the perfect retro psych heavy rock one-two-three punch. "Shady Grove" is the band at their poppiest, and sort of Southern rockiest, such a goddamn great song, and the main melody, especially when Mitchell solos off of it, untouchable. And then there's "The Curve", which might be even poppier, but is also heavier, some of us hear Kiss like crazy, but a smarter, heavier, more psychedelic version of Kiss, more killer guitar harmonies, and probably the catchiest leads on the whole record. There's also the bluesy breakdown midsong, which is so seventies, Mitchell lacing it with all sorts of subtle guitar shreddery, and then the slow build back to the main riff, pretty much impossible to resist headbanging or air guitaring or BOTH.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Atlantis", which might be the most psychedelic of the bunch, with its slithery main melody, and washed out vocals, the whole thing hazy and tripped out, but still heavy and groovy, slipping from the dense drum heavy verses, to the soaring swoonsome chorus, the two separated by a super cool angular guitar break. The second half of the track adds extra guitar shred, and a bit of sonic heft, before the music drops out, leaving just the vocals to fade out in a druggy haze.
Holy shit. Even after maybe a hundred listens, we're still not tired of this. Anyone into any of the above mentioned outfits, as well as obviously Earthless, Assemble Head, Comets On Fire, etc. will definitely lose their shit over these guys, as will most folks into heavy, hooky retro rock heavy psych radness, which we're guessing is probably a whole lot of YOU.
Gothdammit, we love the Grave Babies! Their sound the perfect mix of noisy, super distorted jangle punk and garage-y gloom pop, every record better than the last. And as much as we loved their recent Gothdammit lp, this new one finds them taking that same sound, all blown out shoegaze crunch, and gloomy miserablist dream pop, and making it even better. Somehow noisier and more off kilter, but impossibly, even more catchy. The opening one two punch is tough to beat. "Over And Underground" sounds like the Wavves with a gothic makeover, and a ridiculously anthemic vibe, the vocals gloomy but belted out dramatically, hooks galore, but all wreathed in distorted murk and crumbling fuzz, Grave Babies at their poppiest for sure, the sort of thing you wouldn't be surprised hearing on Castle Face, in fact, it sorta sounds like the Fresh And Onlys, albeit, noisier and grimier and gloomier. The second track is even better, "Skulls" is a twisted, noise drenched downer pop dirge, with some seriously twisted guitar sounds, the whole thing ultra lo-fi and weirdly and psychedelically washed out, skittery drum machines, and more woozy cold wave-y vocals, and again, catchy as all get out!
And while we can't say it only gets better, it most definitely stays goddamn great, GB weaving a dark sonic spell that's equal parts eighties new wave, shimmery shoegaze pop, and angular distorto death rock, from the dreamy wistful fuzzed out balladic "Slaughter", to the Jesus And Mary Chain via Blank dogs jangle crunch of "Count Cuts", replete with some seriously dreamy harmony vox, to the warped Chrome-gone-garage-pop of "Breeding", with some super over the top emotional vox, not to mention more crumbling guitar crunch. With a different production, and some of the gloominess toned down, this would be some perfect jangly pop music, but as it is, it's a fantastic, and fantastically warped chunk of noisy shoegaze gloom pop, that we can't get enough of!
Hot damn, we're in high spirits indeed to be gettin' this new full-length from High Spirits, whose self-titled demos disc we raved about last year, and proved to be a bit of a sleeper hit here at AQ. We've been waiting for their "debut" album proper ever since, and now here it is, High Spirits offering up nine new, completely classic-sounding songs that you could mistake for NWOBHM gems circa '79.
The mastermind behind High Spirits is multi-instrumentalist Chris "Professor" Black, best known for his critically acclaimed one-man-band Dawnbringer on Profound Lore. High Spirits is another one man band, although Chris has recruited a color-coordinated lineup for live performances. Here, however, he handles all the vocals, guitars, drums, songwriting, etc., heck he even self-released the cd. And even moreso than with Dawnbringer, which grew out of a black/death metal basis to incorporate more melody and traditional speed metal shred, with High Spirits he's utterly indulging his love of good ol' fashioned, and downright poppy, metal. And damn is he good at it. Gorgeous guitarwork, catchy tuneage... What's more, these songs rise above being merely ear candy for retro-metal nostalgics (though ear candy it is!), because of his distinctive, dare we say delicate, high voice (often harmonized with himself) and heartfelt, non-ironic lyrics. The melancholic tinge to his singing, juxtaposed with the hot rockin', headbanging riffage, gives this a very special, unique vibe. Compared to a lot of other current "New Wave Of Old School Metal" bands we like (Cauldron, Enforcer, Zuul, Twisted Tower Dire...) there's something about High Spirits' sound and songwriting approach that comes across as particularly honest and uncontrived, whether the songs be about love, or partying. Somehow even the sorta cheesy, "nighttime in the big city" stuff a la the album cover/title track, comes off as innocent and sincere. Listening to High Spirits is like listening to a good friend (or an inner voice) giving you a psychological pep talk, backed by powerful, warmly fuzzed guitars. If we're making comparisons, we'd say this probably comes closest to last year's highly praised debut from Christian Mistress, no foolin'.
Color us quite impressed, anyway, with the good Professor's memorable-metal-making abilities! F'n recommended, yeah!!
History hasn't always been kind to bluegrass and folk musicians of yore who weren't so lucky to get recording contracts or be discovered by travelling musicologists. Case in point the story of Lena Hughes, a Missouri born fiddler, banjoist and guitarist who specialized in parlor music, a folk form that consisted of renditions of hymns, sentimental songs, 19th century airs and finger-picked tunes of fiddle songs, often played in specialized tunings. She was born in 1904 and died in 1998, and during her long life she only cut one record, which came out on a private press in the sixties. But, she was well-known on the Ozark mountains music circuit that she toured extensively throughout her career. Her finger picking style is magical, often employing an ethereal open tuning technique, on songs that have the sweet sadness of days gone by. Recently remastered, this Tompkins Square rediscovery is truly a joy to behold. Highly recommended!
A while back we made the Shin Joong Hyun anthology Beautiful Rivers And Mountains put out by the Light In The Attic label a Record Of The Week, and it was deservedly very popular. So hopefully you already know all about this legendary Korean rock n' roller, but if you don't, you could go read that lengthy review for a lot more information. He certainly has had an interesting life and career, with lots of ups and some serious downs; he began playing rock music back in the '50s for the G.I.'s on American military bases, saw a lot of success in the '60s writing hits for an assortment of singers, by the '70s his rebellious rock n' roll attitude landed him on the conservative South Korean government's shitlist, he wound up getting busted for pot and was tortured in an insane asylum and blacklisted, but eventually things changed for the better and his work resumed, though not the same as before, and he still makes music to this day.
What we have here is a 1974 album, the debut from a three-piece unit Shin formed called the Yup Juns ('brass coins'). None of the songs here appear on that Light In The Attic compilation except for one, there in an alternate recording that was used on a film soundtrack. But if you liked what we described in that review as the guitarist's signature style of being "moody and soulful, but with a fuzzy, distorted grooviness" then this album is full of that - awesome Korean '70s poppy psych action that's VERY GROOVY indeed, with an exotic, Asiatic flair. Halfway through the album, the track "I Love You" seems to channel some traditional Buddhist chant, with bells and percussion in lieu of Shin's guitar, a placid interlude amidst the other songs which look to get heads bopping and hips swivelling out on the dancefloor.
The compact disc version of this comes in a miniature-lp-style sleeve, and includes a thick 20 page booklet with extensive liner notes, lyrics and photos, which are also included with the 180 gram vinyl version. And it's an official release, in cooperation with Shin Joong Hyun himself. Nicely done, so happy to have this.
This week we happen to be listing another reissue from 1974 by another international psych guitar great, Erkin Koray. What Erkin Koray is to Turkey, we suppose you could say Shin Joong Hyun is to South Korea. We recommend getting both albums, while they draw from totally different cultures and traditions (well, except for rock n' roll), they're both great and it'd be tough to decide between the two...
Everybody here flipped for the debut release from these Danish jangle punks, 2011's New Brigade, a seriously kick ass record that we described thusly: a broody buzzy collection of darkly gothicky post punk that is equal parts frenetic crunch and low slung swagger, of murky moody jangle and tense tribal pound, the vocals buried in the mix and doused in echo, the guitars swinging from reverbed chime to gnarled atonal riffage, the drums wild and loose, the songs often veering from lumbering dirge to chaotic blast and back again, loads of strange sounds, twisted production, a sound that's garagey and low fidelity, but still thick and dense, and the songs, slow blossoming gems, that seem to get catchier with every listen.
And all of that most definitely still applies, but the first thing we thought when we threw this on, and the opener "Ecstasy" kicked off, was, wow, these guys sound super drunk. And they really sort of do, at first, and somehow, even the instruments sound drunk, that track, and the whole record really, unfurls as a gloriously woozy blowout, all melting guitars, stumbling lurching rhythms, drawled slurred vocals, the production murky and muddy, the band launching into brief blasts of punky crunch, but quickly swinging right back into that opening murky lumbering dirginess. And the thing is, it all sounds SO GOOD, and somehow, that fuckedupness, combined with an obvious knack for pop songsmithery, makes it sound just as catchy as that first record. Check out "In Haze" which seems to channel the spirit of Husker Du through something way murkier, with a crazy catchy chorus, that keeps stumbling to a halt part way through, the melody just sort of petering out, before lurching right back into it, it sounds too fucked up and off kilter to be on purpose, but it obviously it is, the weird woozy tempo shift a huge part of what makes it so catchy. And then the follow up, "Morals", displays the other side of Iceage, their secret pop side, here sounding like a more punk Guided By Voices, and that GBV vibe pops up throughout, dramatic and hook heavy, but still fuzzy and murky and punky. We also hear some Arctic Monkeys buried in the mix here and there weirdly enough, almost as if someone were to clean this up, and washed off some of the murk, there just might be come crunchy pop hiding out in there somewhere, which is in fact probably the case. There's also a bit of the Fall, the singer's mumble mouthed vocals draped over churning angular guitars and loose woozy rhythm section.
On the surface, it's all post punky swagger, yowled vox, wild drumming, fuzzed out riffs, thick buzzing bass, and lots of these track are just that, seriously fierce blasts of churning punk rock energy, but the more you listen, the more these songs become much more than that, from the jangliest, to the fiercest and most frantic, they all begin to blossom into the sort of effortless poppiness that once woven into the aforementioned janglepunk crunch, is pretty much totally untouchable. A new store fave for sure!!
Jasper TX, how we will miss you! An Index Of Failure marks the final installment for Jasper TX, although the man behind this dream-time drone-rock project will be continuing to record under his own name, that being Dag Rosenqvist... and hopefully, he'll be retaining the same moodscaping and slippery alternation between post-rock ambience (e.g. Stars Of The Lid, Labradford, Barn Owl, and perhaps a rhythmless Mogwai) and the electro-acoustic soundsculpting of a Tim Hecker or a Jonathan Coleclough. That said, the title is apt, given this is a collection of tracks that were originally commissioned for various compilations or were collaborations that never quite got off the ground with Rosenqvist completing the original material by himself. The sad chords on the first track sound like they could have come from a Rhodes organ that leads into a beautifully shimmering wash of guitar drone, and that resonant, echo-laden radiance continues on the second track, about which Rosenqvist quips that it was just recorded with voice and guitar, although the expansive blur and wash speaks to a much larger, if hushed orchestra of instruments quietly layering timbre on top of timbre. Piano and tape experiments get reworked through Rosenqvist's tricks and techniques, culminating in what is undoubtedly one of his finest moments - the grandiose, oceanic crescendo of desolate guitar chords, slow marching rhythms, and densely washed out blur of post-Nadja distortion on "Days Above The Tide." So beautiful!
Handmade Birds printed up a few more of these than they normally do, with an edition of 500, all on winter grey-sky vinyl.
Even though it's the outtake and b-sides album (which often mostly exists as an excuse for an artist to get out of a contract by tossing together some unrelated castoffs), Barbed Wire Kisses showcases the most volatile and most dynamic facets of the Jesus & Mary Chain, when they would unleash all of their hurricane fury of distortion and amplifier destruction on one b-side, and for another, they'd cut a beautiful acoustic rendering of one of their tunes from Psychocandy, still clad in jet-black reverb. Sure Psychocandy is a non-stop thrill ride; but the introspective moments of Barbed Wire Kisses make the screamed noise loosely adhering to a dum-dum '60s punk anthem all the more visceral. The surf references which greased Psychocandy are even more pronounced in these tracks, from the lead track "Kill Surf City" to the cover of the Beach Boys' mega-hit "Surfin' USA", completely laden with gloom and grit, compounded by the fact that the Brothers Reid probably never saw any sunlight. The more sedate tracks are found in "Don't Ever Change", which sounds so much like an outtake from Darklands, because it WAS an outtake from Darklands; and then there's the acoustic version of "Taste Of Cindy" which we alluded to earlier and may be the highlight of the album with a prettiness rarely associated with JAMC and sounding sorta similar to those Dave Pajo covers of the Misfits. It should be noted that this reissue reproduces the tracklisting from the original vinyl pressing, and does not include the 4 bonus tracks found on the cd version. If you never picked this up back in the day, now's your chance to grab a CLASSIC.
A match made in heaven (or maybe hell), one of our favorite noise makers / soundscapers, Mr. Dan Vallor, aka Clarinette, or in this case, Klarinette with a K, tries his hand at 'metal', the end result sounding less like metal proper, and more like some twisted, super distorted, ultra heavy, hypno rock, avant noise rock dirgery, which of course means we're digging it big time. We weren't sure what to expect when Vallor told of us this impending metalocalypse, but it definitely wasn't this. We were expecting something more dronedoomdirge-y, sort of noise style drones, but delivered with some extra heft. But instead, The Path Of Sisyphus reveals itself as something much more subtle, rhythmic and hypnotic, a simple skeletal drum beat (programmed perhaps?) locks into a stripped down krautrock like groove, and seems to set the controls on autopilot, while the surrounding sounds explode in wild gouts of crumbling distortion, keening moaning swaths of blown out buzz, murky tangled melodies, undulating swells of layered guitar fuzz, that pulsing propulsive beat, keeping this from being straight up abstract noise, and helping transform it into something that sounds not all that far removed from a past Record Of The Week by Torlesse Super Group, which features another longtime aQ fave Roy Montgomery. That TSG record was a fantastic assemblage of murky ambience, and minimal rhythms, tranced out and super hypnotic, and the vibe is similar here, but with a hefty helping of Dead C style guitarnoise over the top, as well as some super catchy melodies buried in the murk, all deftly woven into billowing clouds of soft focus psych guitar and bleary distorted tangles of blissed out noise, and all anchored to that beat, that persistent rhythm, which somehow holds it all together.
Those guitars, and it sounds like there's lots of 'em, as in swarms and swarms of em, are what this is all about, and they swoop wildly from angry buzzing barrage to keening Sunroof! like skree, to grinding metallic churn, to weird Butthole Surfers like distorto melody dirge, in fact, at some points, this sounds like it could be some lost live BH recording, that simple tribal rhythm, and the super distorted melody infused guitar freakouts over the top, all wreathed in a sort of fuzzy haze.
Fantastic stuff! And while maybe not strictly metal enough for metalheads, it's still plenty heavy, not to mention psychedelic, dark and rhythmic, tranced out and utterly hypnotic, which means, of course, absolutely recommended! And it's dedicate to our very own Andee!!
LIMITED TO 60 COPIES!! Of which we have almost half, but it's very likely these will be go pretty quick, and once they're gone, that's it. Each one hand numbered.
