There's more to UK space/psych rock Trensmat than, well, space rock and psych rock. Sure their catalog reads like a primer on modern psychedelia - The Telescopes, Gnod, White Hills, Carlton Melton, Mugstar, Circle, Heavy Winged, that triple 7" Hawkwind tribute - but there have been plenty of outliers as well, the kosmische synth sprawl of Cloudland Canyon, the noisebliss of Our Love Will Destroy The World, the hypno-kraut grooves of Cave, and we could go on. But recently, the label seems to have been revealing another side, a more... electronic side. There was the twisted electronic weirdness of Tlaotlon, as well as the unexpected electronic turn on Gnod ultra minimal Presents... Dwellings & Druss, and now this, the first we've heard from The 15 Dead Minutes, who apparently have been a band for a decade plus, and who according to the label are infamous for some seriously intense live shows, but we're not talking rock shows obviously, we're talking sweaty underground danceclubs, strobelights and swirling smoke, this is some dense, rhythmic, druggy, post electro industrial throb, the band unfurling long sprawls of mesmerizing loops, and pulsing, pulsating rhythms, 303's, 909's, the sound raw and rough, dark and sinister, groovy and danceable sure, but all cast with a weird shadowy sonic underbelly, that infused the jams here with a definitely density and intensity.
Four tracks, each one essentially a single blast of rhythmic crunch, or dizzying electro skitter, or spaced out abstract stutter. The opener "The Runaway" is thick and caustic, corrosive and crunchy, the sounds distorted and blown out, the vibe soundtracky as much as dancey; the follow up "Children Of The 303" gets way spacier and more minimal, the beats crackly and crunchy, but more spare and skeletal, a muted bass throb, the whole thing laced with some old school acid squelch. The flipside starts out with another bumping electro blowout, the sounds WAY more aggressive than most dance music, making this the sort of fierce industrial electro-crush, that even space heads and psychlords can get into. Cuz it most definitely is psychedelic, weird wavery minor key rhythms, dubbed out beats, woozy textures, loads of FX, all tangled up into some seriously fierce writhing sprawls of alien dancefloor mesmer, culminating in the droned out minimal murk of closer "Internal Dialogue", which more than any of the tracks here reminds us of recent dark abstract electronica from folks like Silent Servant and Prurient.
The lp includes a download, that gets you the four album tracks proper, but also two bonus tracks, both of which are heady bass heavy slabs of noise drenched psychedelic electro. Already sold out at the label, these are the last copies we'll likely be able to get...
Holy shit, how had we not heard these guys before? Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius is the second album from these blackened UK death metal doomlords, and is an insanely chaotic onslaught of gargantuan proportions. Seriously, Abyssal are like a sonic sky full of bloody anvils raining down on you. Dense, relentless, punishing, pummeling, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, and whether it really is doom metal or death metal or even black metal. The vibe and sonic palette says death metal, all downtuned churn, and raspy demonic vokills, but the vibe is all doooooom, murky and woozy and washed out, the riffs are slippery and melty, and seems to be constantly oozing and dripping, the sounds bleeding into each other, little bits of melody and classical metalisms popping up throughout, but more often drowning in black swirls of buzz and rumble, hence the black metal element, cuz this really is seriously blackened, bleak and demonic, hateful and harrowing, the tracks epic and constantly shifting, dizzying in their complexity, but that complexity is not always obvious, as often the sounds are blurred and smeared into a furious swirling cloud of grim black sonic energy. Shades of Deathspell abound, Wold and Portal too, but Abyssal definitely take those influences and weave them into their own twisted blackdeathdoom, the sound almost psychedelic in places, with weird chords and strange sonic shifts that seem to approximate the record slowing down and speeding up, woozy and warped and totally druggy and dark, but crazy melodic as well, with some passages slipping into almost shoegaze territory, but all of that stuff reveals itself gradually, and is mostly to be glimpsed through Abyssal's wall of sound blackblur onslaught.
This is our favorite sort of metal, so dense and so heavy and so brutal, that it seems to totally transcend the bounds of those sorts of descriptor's, and instead becomes almost dreamlike, mesmerizing and hypnotic, utterly headbangable, but also, soothing and trance-like, lulling the listener into some strange state between submission and transcendence.
The latest addition to the ever expanding "Cascadian black metal" scene comes via Tacoma Washington's Alda (who apparently are not, as we had been hoping, named for Alan Alda). This is their 2009 debut, and delivers pretty much everything you'd want from a band like this or say, Wolves In the Throne Room, or Fauna, or Echtra, but give that sound their own twist. The record opens with a dark, haunting acoustic number, aching crooned vocals, spare finger picked guitars, the sound building to an urgent strum, the vocals too soaring dramatically, it's definitely effective in setting the mood, and leads directly into the slow, and distinctly melodic opening to the first proper metal track, "Fimbulwinter" - a plodding doomic death march, melancholic minor key guitar melodies, over simple plodding drums. We actually would have been perfectly happy had they kept it at this tempo, and unfurled a massive smoldering slo-mo blackened doom creep that filled up the whole rest of the record, but instead, they do eventually slip into some proper black riffing, and don't explode into a blast so much as a midtempo lope, an interesting choice for sure, giving the whole track a super laid back vibe, which is quickly scuttled when the guitar splinters into some super cool angular mathiness, and the harsh vokills swoop in. The song never fully explodes into blasting blackness, but in its own way, it sort of makes it less predictable and more interesting, the rest of the track rife with memorable melodies and shifting blackened textures.
But fear not, the following track finds the band in full black/buzz/blast mode, furious and frantic, at least for the first minute or so, the song soon shifts into something much more mathy and midtempo, before they lurch right back into it again. And so it goes, there's some cello that pops up here, giving the sound some moodiness, and the acoustic guitars return, giving the proceedings a bit of a neo-folk feel, and leading directly into the next track which finds the band again unfurling some midtempo melodic blackness.
It definitely seems obvious that Alda are more comfortable at a generally more midtempo clip, and it certainly suits them, the heavier slower parts get almost Neurosis-y, and the blasting parts add some definite dynamics, the vibe throughout moody and melancholy, and in its own way darkly psychedelic. While these guys might not be as epic and intense as WITTR, it also doesn't seem like that's what they're going for, their sound much slower and moodier, less majestic and more personal, and the neo-folk elements too are super distinctive, the cello is a nice touch as well. For fans of that 'Cascadian' sound, these guys definitely do it well. And there's a second Alda record too, released more recently, so curious to see how Alda have pushed their sound in the two years since they recorded this one. Regardless, we're digging this one a lot!
There was a zine produced by power electronic antagonist Mark Solotroff, back in the mid-'90s, called Rape Of The Angels. In one issue, he wrote rather poignantly about two new projects which then were mostly unknown - Brainbombs and Bodychoke, describing them as two sides of the same abject-rock coin with one side aligned with the bacchanalia of the Stooges and the other the melancholy of Joy Division. At the time, Solotroff's principal outlet for his power electronics was Intrinsic Action, which was shameless in appropriating Whitehouse's ultra-violent posturing and searing noise. But since, Solotroff has ventured into a whole host of projects with various aesthetic differences, but all of which maintain an axis of grime, sleaze, transgression, and violence. Anatomy Of Habit is Solotroff's first venture into an outright 'rock' context, after the punishing electronics of Bloodyminded and the bleak coldwave of A Vague Disquiet; and here, it all comes back around to Brainbombs and Bodychoke (although more Bodychoke than Brainbombs) with Anatomy Of Habit. Formed around Solotroff, drummer Dylan Posa (Brise-Glase, Cheer Accident), Greg Ratjczak (Winters In Osaka), Kenny Rasmusen, and Blake Edwards (Vertonen), the band is a steamroller of huge Swans / Neurosis riffs chugging out of crawling rhythms, and lots of bad vibes. Both sides of the wax are sprawling numbers that hypnotically build out of interlocking guitar and bass that steadily builds towards a distorted, crushing climax with dextrous turns toward powerdrone sludge. Solotroff, with his years of barking like William Bennett, has turned into quite a deft vocalist with his baritone in perpetual motion amidst the roiling noise-rock, coming across more like a cross between Jaz Coleman and Michael Gira. Well worth checking out.
The gloomier the day the more perfect to listen to this album from Belgian abstractionist Felicia Atkinson, who also records under the moniker Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. Her work often draws parallels to the likes of Natural Snow Buildings or Motion Sickness Of Time Travel in terms of the narcoleptic atmosphere that drifts through song and drone alike - one that's perfect for late winter fog or cold damp mornings of early spring; but Atkinson's work is probably even darker, more somber, and drearier than from either of those other artists. She deftly moves from song-based arrangements for guitar, voice, to lots of effects and broad ambient gestures of elongated fragments, loops, and pastoral passages. Visions / Voices showcases these multi-faceted aesthetics from Atkinson, collecting tracks from the various micro-edition cassettes and cd-rs she's produced over the years, none of which have made their way through aQuarius we should add.
The first cut on the album "This Impermanent Gold" is a sodden avant-folk number sporting a Jandekian open-chord, atonal strum on an acoustic guitar with bleakly windswept clouds hovering behind the gasping, non-verbal vocalizations. She counters this track with a rapturously billowing drone piece that has all of the compositional trappings of one of Tim Hecker's ambient excursions, through the rich tapestries of interwoven drones and darkly radiant hypnosis. "All Roads Are Circular" is an aptly named track of once brightly strummed guitars burnished down to a dull iron finish and set into loosely organized loops and off-set shoegazing patterns. Twinkling synths form constellations of downer melodies on "The Owls" bringing her closest to the Motion Sickness Of Time Travel sound of murkily cosmic introspection. But when she gets to "Franny," things get downright spooky with a rasping antique piano slowly creaking a low-register dirge whose ominous, suffocating vibe comes to the surface through a violent smolder of deep rumbling tectonic drones and corroded amplifier distortion, definitely giving Chelsea Wolfe a run for her money when it comes to ghastliness.
Easily some of the best material we've heard to date from Atkinson under either her name or Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier! And is there a download card? Yes!
The latest in the long running Latitudes series comes from long time aQ fave Aidan Baker, who is one of the few artists to make more than one Latitudes appearance (the last time was the album Sky Burial, with his doomgaze duo Nadja). For the oddly named Glass Crocodile Medicine, Baker hauled in his UK tour mates the Plurals, and they lay down two sprawling slow burn epics, the first a 20+ minute haze of long tones and muted shimmer. It's a lot like some of the other recent, jazzier Baker solo records, but with the jazziness mostly removed, leaving just lush billowing shadows of sound, loose softly swirling tangles of bleary chordal thrum draped over tinkling melodies hovering just below the surface. The song spends it's first 7 or 8 minutes slowly fading in, but once it gets its footing, it unfolds dreamily, modern minimalism woven into haunting hushed cinematic drift, hints of Stars Of The Lid abound, another group who routinely traffic in such sounds. Soon the sonic surface begins to roil, arcs of tonal color leaping over increasingly urgent strumming, the vibe becoming almost weirdly neo-folk at one point, but still wreathed in what now sounds like some mysterious processed cloud of choral shimmer. But for the last few minutes, it's that darkly strummed steel string buzz that is the focus, the surrounding sounds whipped into a frenzy of washed out sonic blur and dense muted howl, eventually disappearing in mesmerizing slow fade squall of looped distorted buzz.
The second track is a bit more propulsive, but only a bit, with a drowsy, woozy bassline, drifting through a field of disembodied voices, and some of that psychedelic swirl from the first track, not to mention all manner of random clatter and crunch, but that bassline, lends the track some gorgeously dark momentum, transforming what might have been another ambient epic into a darkly gloomy slo-mo groove, a haunting gothic dirge, rendered in smeared blacks and greys, sounding like at any point it could explode into full on lumbering heaviness, but instead, it broods and pulses ominously, indeed building to something more, but more blissed out and noisy, the low end seeming to dissipate as other sound swoop in and wrap that loping bass groove in sheets of hazy hiss and hum, wild whorls of psych guitar noise, and sculpted white noise crunch, all wrapped in a heady, hypnotic feedback melody that undulates hypnotically throughout, the whole thing totally tranced out and woozily mesmeric.
Packaged like all Latitudes releases in that distinctive white and brown sleeve, both the cd and lp bearing a cool purple metallic sigil, the cd folding out origami style revealing a small printed insert, the lp fantastically diecut, and containing the same insert. Both LIMITED TO 500 COPIES and hand numbered!!
We really wish we could tell you more about the Billy Boys. Other than that they're Finnish, and they're batshit bonkers (we suspect some causality there). Leave it to Jussi from Circle to unleash this sonic weirdness on an unsuspecting public. Ostensibly only of interest to the nerdiest of Finnish music historians, and of course aQuarius Records and all the weirdo Finnish music obsessives that sail with her, the Billy Boys were a super obscure Finnish outfit, featuring one member of legendary Finnish punk band Terveet Kadet, formed with the idea of creating a "country influenced trash rock band", which to a certain degree was a success. There are moments that definitely could be described that way, but as the label explains, that sound "mutated into something more grotesque". But then if you believe Jussi, the radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown poisoned the drinking water in Finland in the eighties, and did irreparable damaged to the Billy Boys, aka Mr. Hank Morlock, and Mr. Johnny Helicopters, actual brothers in fact.
Grotesque it is, label misinformation be damned, but gloriously grotesque, in that way it seems only Finnish music can truly be. Sure lots of you love Circle and Pharaoh Overlord, Avarus and Kemialliset Ystavat. But what about Aavikko, Deep Turtle, Death Trip, Liimanarina, Worms, Sperm, Chainsmoker, Radiopuhelimet, Dr. Gunni, Sweetheart, The Vacuum Cleaners, weirdo one man band Keuhkot, the haunting outsider psychedelic folk of Pekka Streng, the Cleaning Women (a bunch of Finns who dress up like housewives and play all manner of kitchen appliances and implements), Mieskuoro Huutajat (the Finnish men's shouting choir, who wear ties made from old innertubes and shout national anthems)?? Now that we read over all of that, maybe there really IS something in the water over there. Cuz what else could account for so much whatthefuck music being created in one little country? Whatever it is, we're grateful - we can't get enough of Finnish musical weirdness, and the Billy Boys are definitely right at home on that list, and are definitely toward the WTF? side of the Finnish sonic spectrum. Sure, take that "country influenced trash rock" thing, add some primitive synth blurt, some insanely low-fi production, crappy drum machines, probably throw in a lot of drugs, and go from there.
The collection starts off with the group's 1984 single "Mystery Train", which could be a sort of catchy pop ditty, had it not seemingly been recorded in a tin can, in a bus station bathroom - the resulting low fidelity as much a part of the Billy Boys' sound as the music itself. Tinkling melodies, yelped vox, a bloopy bleepy rhythm, all doused in blown out white noise crumble, which as you listen reveals itself as either a guitar or a keyboard, so distorted it just becomes a blur of sonic gristle, but somehow, it manages to be a kinda catchy ditty. From there on out, all best are off. "Get It On" takes a sonar ping rhythm, adds some weird electronic glitch, and some mumbled Finnish vox, not to mention some buzz and weird malfunctioning effects. The suddenly you realize, it's a cover of T-Rex's "Bang A Gong", but only once you hear the title moaned in heavily accented English, over what sounds like a primitive pong machine. WTF indeed!
Some tracks do actually do sound like countrified trash rock, with jangly guitars, crooned vocals and galloping rhythms, but in some cases, like on "Lonesome Train" after a minute or so, the track devolves into something else entirely, in this case a speaker blowing squall of noise, before transforming into a creepy slo-mo dirge, female vocals over stumbling drums and constantly shredding guitars way down in the mix. Elsewhere, that 'trash rock' devolves into an electronic flecked dirge, laced with all sorts of random sounds, detuned guitar strum, pulsating synthesizers, howled shrieks. And then check out "Harley Man" with its twang guitar and handclap rhythm, wrapped around enthusiastically belted out cookie monster vocals, or "The Spider And The Fly" which is a haunting sprawl of experimental minimal pop, that sounds a little like the Residents, or "My Wild Love", which is about as close as these guys get to a heartfelt ballad, croony and creepy, but weirdly beautiful.
The rest of the record unwinds just as confusionally, with blurts of damaged honky tonk, Teutonic echo-drenched industrial throb, warped drugged out damaged blooze blowouts, some cool twisted sort of rockabilly grooves, stumbling cold wave minimalism, a disturbing slo-mo cover of "Love Me Tender" that sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly twisted nightmare, some electronic flecked minimal dirge punk, super abstract experimental pop, that occasionally consists of motorik drumming over, hushed whispers and woozy low end thrum, or super spaced out glitch and skitter, flecked with fragmented vocals, and heck even some almost straight ahead pop, but of course the Billy Boys add some creepy ghastly vocals, and suddenly it is transformed into something "more grotesque".
There's so much going on here. Total warped whatthefuck outsider genius. There are moments of serious sonic brilliance for sure, peppered amidst some mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, confusional, demented sonic damage, but somehow, those two sides of the Billy Boys balance, and the result is a twisted, and valuable artifact of outsider Finnish underground music genius.
Not for everyone, obviously, maybe not even for most people, but we're pretty into this stuff, and have been listening to it like crazy. If you dig any of the weirdo Finnish outfits mentioned above, or just love totally twisted warped outsider sounds, these guys might be your new (old) favorite band. And odds are you can drive everyone else in your house batshit at the same time!
Includes a massive fold out booklet, with extensive liner notes, IN FINNISH, and lots of photos.
Record number two from this Seattle one man band, whose first release, a cd-r called Spectral Disorder on the Debacle label, was a huge hit around here. Spectral Disorder was a super psychedelic sprawl of blown out percussion, gristled rhythms, and swirling shimmering synths. There were definite moments of darkness, but it was definitely more prismatic and dreamily hazy. We made comparisons to Tim Hecker, lots of the record had the same sort of ethereal washed out pixelated quality. But this new one starts out way differently, a churning, grinding, gnarled industrial groove, that seems to meld the witchy avant beatscaping of modern outfits like Demdike Stare, with the more abject, greyed out rhythms of early eighties industrial outfits like Esplendor Geometrico and Le Syndicat. But listen close and you'll hear some playful blooping electro bass buried beneath the roiling rhythms, which gives the song a weird woozy twist.
After a brief bit of kosmische, new age-y flutter, the record shifts gears, and slips back into a sound more in keeping with that first record. Ghostlike swaths of ethereal chordal thrum, drifting over a haze the evokes some sort of sun dappled pastoral landscape, the beats here, skeletal and spare, wrapped around looped melodies that sound like harps, underpinned by cricket like chirps, the vibe almost Boards Of Canada like, warm and lush and lovely, but still a little bit twisted.
The rest of the record sort of splits the difference, flitting from chaotic blurred swaths of manic layered loops and cascading beats, bursts of tangled melodies and soft noise swirls, all churning hypnotically, to ultra minimal dronescapes, the sound like bleating horns, or weirdly processed synths, long tones that pulse and pulsate and undulate, unfurling all manner of overtones and sonic colorations, and finally to the dark, haunting techno closer, that takes that sound we've been digging so much lately, Silent Servant, Prurient, Shed and the like, and adds some twists, plenty of stutters and hiccups, disrupting what could otherwise be some serious driving, shadowy techno, and lacing it with all sorts of textures, and dynamics, caustic and crunchy one second, woozy, and muted and pulsing the next, finally finishing off in a flurry of sine wave swirl and skipping-cd skitter. Awesome!
Includes a download code too!!
James Blake is a curious case. We wonder if he had some standard folk guitar or piano backing to his frigid soul songs, would we be into this that much? But Blake's songs are far from standard, and despite the mainstream pop and RnB vocabulary he borrows heavily from (Auto-Tune, guest rapper stints, the gospel-tinged vocalizations), he creates something quite unpredictable and beautifully unique in the strange fractured arrangements. Like Nina Simone in reservedly dramatic avant-electronica mode, Blake keeps his songwriting emotionally effective while keeping enough distance so as not to become vocally overwrought or musically anthemic. The chilled production evokes an atmosphere of dreamy spaciousness, pillowy clouds of piano, filtered samples, bass pulses and far away post-dubstep rhythms. Blake is as close as we're probably going to get to Arthur Russell and Burial having a beautiful musical child together.
If you're at all into the new wave of the old school of heavy metal, like we are - especially the most cult and underground elements of both the old and the new - then we think we've got something here you're gonna be stoked about. This aptly titled ep by Detroit upstarts Borrowed Time represents 21+ minutes of some of the catchiest, best written, truly authentically '80s sounding heavy metal we've heard from a "modern" band yet.
Originally released by Irish label Sarlacc Productions in 2011, as a four-track ep, this has been recently re-released by the band themselves with two extra songs, taken from their debut 7" (also 2011). So, we're glad we waited a while to list it! Now you get six tracks of Borrowed Time's impressive NWOBHM worship (they're named after a Diamond Head album after all). Those six tracks also include one not all that out of the way detour into explicit Manilla Road worship too, in the form of a cover of fan fave "Necropolis", sounding as ancient and epic as the original from Manilla Road's classic Crystal Logic lp. So you know where these guys are coming from - straight out of the '80s, up from the underground, living out their fantasies of a time long long ago when (obscure) giants like Manilla Road, Brocas Helm, Cirith Ungol (on the American side) and Diamond Head, Cloven Hoof, Angel Witch, etc. (on the British) strode the earth. Seriously, if you heard "Fog In The Valley" or "Burning Mistress" on some blog devoted to long lost '80s underground metal gems, you'd be fooled.
Astonishingly, these boys came and played in San Francisco recently - we saw 'em at Thee Parkside, opening for Castle and Occultation, a great show. Borrowed Time were fantastic, despite the absence of one of their two regular guitar players. Their energetic, young singer made up for it with his dramatic flourishes - with flowing long hair, mustache and leather jacket, he came across almost like a hesher version of Doug Henning - we half expected him to start doing magic tricks with scarves and whatnot (makes us think: how about a heavy metal singer who, like, produces colorful doves out of a hat or from his sleeve, and then instead of releasing them to fly away, bites their heads off a la Ozzy Osbourne??). Borrowed Time's vocalist didn't do anything like that, but he WAS entertainingly flamboyant, juggling many "invisible oranges" in his outstretched, gesturing hands throughout the evening. Which went so well with their music, the prime (and entirely sufficient) characteristic of which was that it was exceedingly singable SONG stuff, something we don't get enough of from most metal bands these days. But Borrowed Time have the knack, or the talent, or the magick, to have mastered that particular arcane metal art, conjuring mystic moods via heavy and epic songwriting. Up there with High Spirits and Christian Mistress in our estimation of metallic, melodic excellence that embraces the old school so successfully.
We're looking forward to their full-length, due out later this year on High Roller, we'll see if they can top this...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We were all ready to write an epic review of this, a special Record Store Day live record from our of our favorite outfits, local psychedelic spacelords Carlton Melton. We ordered as many copies of the 500 pressed that we could get, but as you might imagine we sold tons and as of the writing of this review, we're getting to where we have less than a dozen. Hopefully lots of you were able to grab one in the shop on the day, and those who didn't, might have seen our lists of Record Store Day leftovers and grabbed one then, but for those of you who did NOT, here's what is most likely your last chance, to grab one of these before they are gone (and by gone, we mean on eBay for crazy money).
Released on Agitated, and recorded in 2012 in Belgium and the UK, these four sides of primo CM display everything we lover about these guys, sprawling droned out atmosphere, clouds of synthy shimmer, spidery guitars, all druggy and dreamy, dense and hypnotic, some serious motorik hypnorock minimalism that gives way to seriously shredding heaviness. Lots of the hits here, from all the records, a bit more live and loose and free, but not much, since most of their records are recorded live anyway, so in that sense, this is almost like a sort of alternate version greatest hits. The first side and a half is seriously blissed out, not really kicking into gear until side two, at which point things get seriously heavy and super rocking, the band channeling Hawkwind into their own swirling spaced out brand of riffy freeform psychedelia. The rest of the record(s) shifts constantly from dirgey churn, to wild psych shredding to droned out mesmer and back again. Killer performances, awesome sound, the recording is massive, if it wasn't for the crowd sound at the end of the second record, this easily could have been a CM record proper!
Once again, CRAZY limited, these are the last copies we'll have EVER. Pressed on super psychedelic green/yellow/clear splatter vinyl, housed in an old school distressed looking heavy sleeve.
Ready Set Disengage is a brand new, and super limited release, created especially for aQ for this year's Record Store Day (the title a play on the abbreviation for Record Store Day, you'll notice), and unlike a lot of the RSD releases, we DO have a bunch of these, for all you loyal aQ-ers who couldn't be here in person on the big day. That said, this is SUPER limited, just FIFTY copies total, each one beautifully hand packaged and numbered by the band/man himself, and available ONLY from aQ!!
We'd long been a fan of Clarinette, aka Dan Vallor, long before it was revealed he was actually a local, his releases tended to find their way onto faraway micro labels, like Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, so we always sort of assumed that he was in fact from NZ, and in many ways, Vallor's mysterious sprawling psychedelic noisescapes did nothing to dissuade that notion, sounding right at home amongst groups like Birchville Cat Motel, 1/3 Octave Band, Omit, With Throats As Fine As Needles, RST, and lots of other aQ NZ faves. This latest is yet another mysterious missive from this audio alchemist, a fantastical collection of deftly linked, meticulously designed miniature sound worlds, and while there is definitely a sonic thread tying it to those past releases, it definitely forges its own distinctive path.
Opening with a haunting collage of effected pianos, swirling ominously, darkly cinematic and dreamily melancholy, panned heavily, the sounds drifting from speaker to speaker, Vallor is like a slo-mo Lubomyr Melnyk, adding lots of space and dousing the notes in a blurred dubbiness, all underpinned by a sinister low end melody, we would have been happy if the whole record had just been an hour long version of the first track. And in a way, it is, with that smeared dubby piano the focus of many of tracks here, but Vallor adds skittery drums, and glitchy skipping melodies, to turn one track into a sort of abstract cut and paste Necks, all looped and mesmeric, a loose tangle of melodies drifting above a slipstream of slow shifting layers and a dark jazzy shuffle, reminding us a lot of some of the jazzier recent releases from Aidan Baker. Elsewhere the sounds are layered into thick billowing clouds of swirling notes and bleary chords, the comparisons to Melnyk particularly apt on tracks like "A New Reason For Existence", that essentially sounds like a psychedelic collage of multiple skipping Melnyk cds, there's a bit of an Oval vibe as well, but the piano continues to lend even the most abstract moments a hint of jazziness.
At one point, deep into the record, those sounds melt and ooze into swaths of crumbling blackness, hazy washed out melodies buried beneath heaving slo-mo swells of dense low end thrum, sounding almost like the Caretaker at 16rpm, crackly, and warbly, and gorgeously gauzy, then the sound shifts once again, becoming a dizzying bit of tranquil ambience, all disembodied guitar strum, sampled birdsong, warbly rumbling drones, the various sounds a bit atonal and detuned, giving the sound a definite creepy, almost carnivalesque vibe, once again, very cinematic, before bleeding into the 20 minute closer, an epic brooding sprawl, that mesmeric Necks feel returns, but this time way more minimal and blackened, the piano sounds drifting in fields of rumble and hum, dense black pulsations, an epic slowly unfurling blackened classical creep, hazy and droney, dense and tense and bleakly beautiful, an abstract ambient dronescape that should definitely hit the spot for all you dronelords, and anyone obsessed with the slow and low, will likely find themselves playing that track (and this whole record) over and over and over...
LIMITED TO FIFTY COPIES, ONLY AVAILABLE AT aQ!! The cd is housed in a textured paper inner sleeve, housed in a printed, stickered, and hand numbered envelope!
The first new release in a while from these Dutch black metal shoegazers, who even at their heaviest, were barely black metal at all, existing on a plane only tangentially related to the typical BM buzz and blast, with a sound more akin to post black metal experimentalists like Alcest, Les Discrets and Amesoeurs, and even in that company, CBR were way on the poppy side of the spectrum, their sound lush and lovely, more 4AD and MBV than anything, and very little has changed on this new single, if anything their sound has grown even more lush and lovely. There's still some buzz, but it's washed out and drowsy, dreamy and ethereal. Crystalline guitars, warm woozy basslines, thick swaths of billowy shoegaze guitar, achingly melancholic melodies, clean, crooned vocals, there's definitely a Nadja feel to the sound, although it's much more blissed out and dreamy.
The B side here is a bit more propulsive and rocking, with some subtle electronic filigree, but even with a bit more crunch and buzz in the guitars, it's still the same gloriously dreamy, washed out sun dappled shoegaze poppiness. Black metal fans who dig the above mentioned bands, and have no aversion to shoegaze pop, might take a chance, but for folks who love My Bloody Valentine, The Swirlies, Teenage Filmstars, and all the rest, these guys definitely belong in your collection too, don't let the black metal classification dissuade you, this is pure fuzzed out shoegaze heavy pop bliss.
Packaged in a nice full color jacket. Sorry, no download.
Jacqui Ham may still be best known for her work in the band UT, who operated throughout the '80s in NYC and spilled out of the Glenn Branca / Sonic Youth / Live Skull morass of angular yet droning, art-rock damage. That project dissolved sometime around 1990, with Ham re-emerging with a self-released first album of radically deconstructed songs under the moniker Dial. That first album was a primitive churn of bleak-as-fuck electronics, codeine laced vocal slur, and lots of destroyed amp distortion; it was equal parts industrial abjection, classic NYC grime, and the No Wave pursuit of the transgressive. Since 1996, Dial have only released 4 albums, but all stand as minor masterpieces of visions from the depths of the underground. The Western Front is the first on beloved label Ektro, which is not all that strange a home for Dial, especially with Ektro reissuing the Rat At Rat R record not that long ago. Rat At Rat R being an obscure '80s gloomy, pig-fuck band from bowels of the Lower East Side with connections to Live Skull and Missing Foundation.
Production wise, Dial have got the nicotine stain cloud that hangs over every single Michael Morley production (Gate, Wreck Small Speakers On Expensive Stereos, and of course The Dead C). And just like in those projects, this is not lo-fi for the sake of being lo-fi. The grit, the noise, and the grime are all very intentionally applied to these hypnotically reductivist tracks of wheezing drum machine or motorik churn from a live drummer with abused guitar noises, deformed guitar riffs, and violently ripped basslines added into the mix. Ham's vocal snarl is much as it was in Ut, but it makes much more sense here as punctuations amidst her narcotized stream of consciousness that spills through the dirge and grind. "Helium" is certainly a standout track and is straight out of the Pussy Galore playbook with a groovy-hate riff of serrated blues repeating ad nauseam through the hypno-rock damage. In contrast, there's "Silent Way" with its slinky drum machine and quietly tense piano notes and agitated guitar bursts. The album's finale "Let's Forget" is a terse ditty of percolating programmed drums, atonally child-like electronics, and some heroin blooziness bleeding through the guitars. This is the sound of NYC way back when, with the aura of stagnant sewage, spent condoms, rusty needles, and lots of bum trash strewn about. Pretty, this ain't. Compelling? Fuck yeah!
Another archival treasure from the so far flawless Teranga Beat label, this one from Senegalese big band Dieuf-Dieul De Thies, featuring orchestra chief (i.e. chef d'orchestre) and guitarist Pape Seck, who also played in Guelewar, another reissue we raved about here a while back. And like Guelewar, Dieuf-Dieul De Thies deliver a stirring and emotional Afro-psych that's lush and passionate, groovy and jazzy, dark and sultry, three vocalists creating incredible harmonies, wild percussion, amazing horns, and cool FX drenched psych guitar explorations. Heady heavenly stuff for sure. Long sprawling tracks that give the musicians plenty of space to stretch out, the songs marked by epic instrumental passages, with plenty of amazing soloing. The vibe here is very reminiscent of the Ethiopiques series, in that the sound is super hypnotic and sultry, the horns lyrical and almost lysergic in places. The multiple percussionists weaving a dense rhythmic core for the soloists to ride, the vocalists too. One of those rare recordings where every player, and every part of the sonic puzzles is practically impeccable.
As much as we love all the Teranga Beat releases, this one is fast becoming our favorite. It's the most jammy and psychedelic. And while there are a few tracks that are more upbeat, and more poppy, the bulk of the record is gorgeously melancholy and minor key, the lengthy jams sinewy and so utterly hypnotic and entrancing. The sound too is warm and rich, there are occasional drop outs and some obvious damage from the original tapes, but it only enhances the raw immediacy of the sound.
The group has a crazy history too, one that resulted in these recordings (as well as more to be released on a future second volume) to never be released until now. Which is all detailed in the booklet, which also includes liner notes from two of the members of Dieuf-Dieul De Thies. So So So recommended. One of our favorite reissues in recent memory, and a record that's been getting nonstop play around here. Anyone who digs Sublime Frequencies, Yaala Yaala and other world music reissues labels, who for some reason ISN'T following Teranga Beat, you're missing out big time, and have some serious catching up to do. No better place to start than right HERE.
Here's some seriously warm, wobbly, surfy, tropical sounding lo-fi gems that have totally captured our attention! Dripping with such melty, melodic yet slightly tripped out perfection. Ducktails had a lot going for it before we even heard the music, the name obviously (!), the great cover art by Jan Anderzen (Kemialliset Ystavat) and the fact that it was mastered by Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring already lead us to believe there might be some kind of magic being brewed under the colorful, inviting cover, so we threw this on the stereo right away and it's been beyond the perfect soundtrack for the bright and sizzling sunshine days we've been baking in for the last couple weeks. Ducktails is the work of one person, Matt Mondanile who has found such a unique sound, melding elements of the lo-fi pop movement that came out of New Zealand in the '80s with a tropical undertone and wandering spirit that sounds like bits and pieces from some gem of a find on a Sublime Frequencies compilation, the kind of rare multidimensional sound that Pumice is able to achieve, or the more pastoral side of prog that folks like Bo Hannson explored, or a sun-soaked instrumental passage from an Ariel Pink record (actually this actually reminds us a lot of the great Holy Shit record Ariel Pink made with Matt Fishbeck a while back), or maybe White Rainbow shining their hypnotic rays through the bodies of a band on Woodsist. The album's closer "Surf's Up" is almost like a new generation's version of Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air!
This record is like a soft edged maze that leads in a million different directions and takes you around on a sonic adventure that isn't as concerned with destination as it is in creating a totally and wholly encapsulating journey. While many in the new wave of one-man-band lo-fi noise pop combos have been focusing their sonic scope more on the fuzz, and burn, and rocked out side of things, Ducktails have a much more languid, dreamy and enchanting approach to finding lo-fi bliss through conjuring up so much warm sun soaked color in their hypnotizing sounds. Highly Recommended!
Rather surprisingly, vinyl of this was one of this year's Record Store Day releases. Wish we still had 'em but we sold all the copies we could get already. However, they also reissued it, as a two-for-one disc, on cd, and not being a RSD release we were able to get some of those to list. We've had reissues of both Dust albums before, most recently as rather expensive Repertoire imports, so here's the reviews of both of these proto-metal essentials.
For those who need to know: the American hard rock trio known as Dust are another of those legendary early '70s bands that get mentioned in the same breath with heavies like Captain Beyond, Sir Lord Baltimore, The James Gang, Bang, Stray, Leafhound, Highway Robbery, and the like. They cut two excellent lps of late-psychedelic-era proto-metal back in '71 and '72. Of their two albums, the first, self-titled one is swampier, with a lot of slide and country/southern rock moves on tracks like "Stone Woman" and "Chasin' Ladies". But then there's the lugubrious and weighty 10-minute epic "From A Dry Camel", and conversely, the gentle acoustic dreaminess of "Often Shadows Felt". Mostly, though, the album kicks ass with uptempo hard rockers, including the ripping, rollicking instrumental "Loose Goose" that closes the album quite frenetically.
Following that is 1972's Hard Attack, generally considered the harder of Dust's two albums, the more metal. Though that may be in part 'cause of the awesome Frank Frazetta cover painting, and album title! But perhaps it is somewhat more Sabbathian. "Downer rock" they called it back then (we're told). Their song "Suicide" (the penultimate track on side 2 of the original vinyl) - whooah, that could be Pentagram! That song alone makes this an essential purchase for any true doom/psych fan. It's an all time classic.
But it's not all doom n' gloom n' barbarians - Hard Attack has its lighter side, but unlike a lot of their peers, the poppier and/or less rockin' stuff Dust do here is actually really great. Sure, a song like "Thusly Spoken" features strings and a Beatlesy melody, but the lyrics still name-check Satan and speak of dancing demons. Lush, gorgeous downer-pop that sets you up to be crushed by the following, urgently hard-rockin' track "Learning To Die". They do that throughout the album, alternating gentle - even acoustic - numbers with the proggy proto-metal workouts that the headbangers of 1972 must have loved.
It's hard to understand why Dust didn't "make" it, as this stuff is certainly the equal of big sellers from their era by Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Great singing, riffs, melodies, and that "feel" - it's all here.
We mentioned Pentagram above - if you've got that Relapse anthology of Pentagram's original seventies recordings, First Daze Here, you should definitely check out the work of Dust, who were both contemporaries of, and an influence on, the Ram's Head boys. Yes, Dust are an important name on the list of forgotten but godlike '70s hard rock bands that make today's so-called stoner rockers sound like punk/grunge wanna-bes. In a word (again): classic. Too bad you'll never hear 'em on your local "classic rock" radio station...
Oh, and Dust featured the future Marky Ramone on drums, by the way, before he decided punk was the way to go (or even had that option).
This remastered reissue sports its own new cover design, but inside the thick cd booklet there's smaller versions of the original album art, plus lots of vintage photos, and plenty of liner notes (including some from Marky), etc.
A couple lists back we reviewed the most recent full length from Northwestern black metal one man band Eldrig, whose sound was, and continues to be essentially a super epic, ultra majestic power metallized take on black metal. And it's a sound we can't seem to get enough of. But Eldrig is in fact the solo project one one half of this band right here Fanisk, whose third full length just arrived, their first in TEN years. And very much like 2003's Noontide, full length number three continues to meld grim black buzz, to soaring melodic symphonic heaviness, incorporating all manner of folkiness and psychedelia, some passages downright experimental, but somehow sonically in keeping with the whole, just check out the strange orchestral cinematic breakdown in "Departure Rose Garden", and the way the strange energy of that interlude bleeds right into the black buzz of the song proper. While not quite as melodic or overtly 'power metal' sounding as Eldrig, it's easy to draw comparisons between the two groups, as many parts here could easily have ended up on an Eldrig record.
But Fanisk is definitely its own beast, and is obviously a collaboration, but listening to the first track here, it's dizzying how dense and lush and elaborate the music here is, and it becomes plain to see why it took ten years to complete these three tracks. From furious frantic blasting blackness, to soaring black buzz majesty, to dense tangled mathy progginess, some parts downright poppy, others as grim as it gets, often falling somewhere gloriously right in between. The are cool ambient parts that almost sound new agey, pizzicato stings that remind us of that song "sail away sail away sail away', but in this context sound more dramatic than cheesy, and others that pair clean emotional vocals with soaring slow build Godspeed like post rock arrangements for a sound even MORE epic. There are cool stretches of Tangerine Dream like synth swirl, and others that seem to be just the sound of surf or wind, or at least a sort of blurred static simulating such. The arrangements don't balk at going from lightning fast blast, to churning doomy plod, to midtempo post rock like lope and back again, and somehow, there's some overarching logic that ties it all together into what is a seriously epic sonic undertaking.
While some of this may be too melodic for the troo grim hordes, we'd be hard pressed to think of any metalhead who wouldn't be totally blown away by Fanisk's atmospheric black metal epics, and we had sort of forgotten how fucking incredible these guys were. In a review online we saw someone mention that this should give My Bloody Valentine's mbv record a run for its money as comeback of the year, and we'd definitely have to agree!
We never really stopped digging the Flaming Lips. We'll always probably be partial to the early days, the chaotic, drug addled noise rock psych pop era of course, but even more so that transitional three album arc that marked the band's transition from fucked up underground legends to weirdo stadium rock popstars, Hit To Death In The Future Head, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic. With The Soft Bulletin, the band embraced their pop side, and it paid off, and we have to say we're pretty thrilled, that a band this weird, could end up being one of the most popular bands in the world. And it's pretty heartening, that even while they were crafting these crazy commercial records, they continued to be willfully difficult, and extremely experimental and unconventional. From crazy elaborate performances to bizarre limited releases (thumb drive in a human sized gummy skull!), they're essentially one of the only bands who never seemed to be corrupted by success, and who never let that success go to their heads, or really affect their music. In fact, if anything, the Lips seem to have peaked pop wise with the trilogy of The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and At War With The Mystics, and ever since, they seem to have been getting less and less commercial, like some sort of musical Benjamin Buttons. 2009's Embryonic was pretty weird, but The Terror trumps it big time.
Originally rumored to be a return to the band's old sound, The Terror instead finds the band slipping into a sort of abstract experimental almost krautrock sounding psychedelia. The sounds are lush and layered, fantastically atmospheric, the vocals sparse and minimal, no proper pop songs to be found anywhere, instead, The Terror delivers long sprawling dream-psych jams that are some of the best songs we've heard from these guys in ages. The opening tracks set the scene, pulsing electronics, woozy looped synth melodies, skittery drums, hazy vocals, the opener "Look... The Sun Is Rising" maybe the closest to modern Flaming Lips, and actual pop song structure, but even here, there's lots of jagged angular crunch, droned out synths, shimmering layers, everything washed out and hazy, the song leading directly into "Be Free, A Way", which is like an even more abstract extension of the opener, with a woozy soporific hook that will stick in your head forEVER, all over a lush landscape of synths and electronics, and murky pulsing rhythms. "Try To Explain" continues on in that drifting ethereal ephemeral psychedelic dream pop style, laying vocals over a lush bed of electronic pulsations, soaring symphonic arrangements and weird sound effects.
It's on "Your Lust" where the band seem to slough off the vestiges of pop that defined the opening few tracks, unfurling a heady sprawl of hypno rock electro-kraut grooviness, all sun dappled and woozy, eventually fading out into a lush and lovely coda of warble organ, and distorted chiming melodies.
And while there are moments of poppiness popping up throughout the record's remaining five tracks, those tracks seem to bleed together into one gorgeously lysergic sprawling songsuite. The rhythms minimal and motorik, the vocals wispy and ethereal, the sound often bursting into weirdly corrosive crumbles, or densely swirling buzz, blossoming into blown out shoegaze heaviness, before settling back into a twisted bit of swirling sci-fi kraut-pop drift, or some stripped down Can like minimal mesmer, but all wreathed in a constantly shifting cloud of effects and textures and disembodied voices, at one point the band slip into some hushed electronic creep, with falsetto vox, and lots of glitch and buzz, sounding a bit like Thom Yorke's solo record The Eraser, but things here are much weirder, the sound exploding into a noise drenched buzz pop, before devolving into the gorgeously abstract weirdo noise-pop prog of the closer "Always There In Our Hearts", which manages to be both poppy and impossibly catchy, as well as dense and claustrophobic, intense and super dramatic.
The whole record bleeds into one fantastic and lysergic whole, it's hard to pick out a single song, or even a single part. in fact we've yet to NOT listen to the whole record in a single sitting, the only thing that separates the songs for us is hearing a phrase, or part of a title, the record in many ways feels like one huge piece, an interconnected songsuite, and while with every listen, certain parts stick in our heads, certain melodies, specific sounds, even textures, or rhythms, we still just can't bring ourselves to not listen to the whole thing, all the way through, over and over and over.
(By the way, we're still waiting for the vinyl version of this to arrive, we're now told next week, supposedly.)
With a name like Gay Witch Abortion, and some awesomely aberrant cover art, featuring a twisted collage of children and teeth, and huge harelips and organs, and song titles like "Prison Charm", "Gun Mad Mountain Folk" and "Prison Charm", most bands would have a tough time living up to the sort of sonic expectations those non-musical elements seem to promise, but once again this duo delivers. Delivers a twisted, hyper rhythmic, noise rock, that more than ever seems to have a bit of a new wave vibe. The opener "Cult Chimera", after a long stretch of abstract noise and buzz, explodes into what sounds like a super charged Devo, with a little bit of No Means No, and that's some seriously unfuckwithable band math for sure. In our review of their Maverick record we also compared them to Lightning Bolt and Wizard Rifle too, and those still fit for sure. But this time around, there's some serious poppiness going on amidst all the twisted sonic fuckery. Check out "Hornet Japonica", which features some ridiculous mathed out drumming, wild dexterous bass playing, the band lurching and leaping from part to part, if it was any other band we'd think they were showing off, but that sort of twisted what the fuck freak outs are just part of what these guys do.
"Prison Charm" even adds a little bluesiness to the proceedings, sounding a bit like a more melodic Killdozer, which too is not a bad thing at all, the song flitting from vocal driven grooviness, to tangled mathy freakouts, to furious rhythmic churn. All of the density and musical mathiness that defined Maverick, is still present, in full force, but is most definitely tempered by this new found pop side, that makes for some awesomely confusional radness, that ultimately sounds like no other band we can think of. New wave noise rock math prog punk, or something. These guys seem like they must be amazing live, although there's so much going on, it's hard to imagine two people could pull it off, regardless, if you're in the market for some seriously twisted, densely rhythmic, weirdly catchy, heavy as fuck, new wave noise rock weirdness, then this is pretty much IT.
WAY recommended. Comes in an eye popping full color gatefold sleeve, and includes a download coupon to boot!
Like most of you, we kinda flipped for the 2010 debut record from mysterious Swedish hard rockers / retro metallers Ghost. And some of our pals / customers went absolutely apeshit about 'em - going to every show, buying every possible permutation of the record, picture disc, import cd, along with shirts, hats, whatever. And while we were perhaps not as over the top nuts for Ghost as that, we definitely loved that record, a lot, and played it like crazy. The sound being a strange hybrid of Mercyful Fate like metal, and Blue Oyster Cult like classic heavy rock. The band fronted by a ghoulish Pope-like figure, wearing corpsepaint, and wearing papal robes, often carrying some sort of staff, while the rest of the group were a mystery, their identities hidden by robes and masks. A silly gimmick maybe, but it definitely kept everyone talking about these guys, trying to figure out who they were, which famous metal guys from other Swedish bands were actually involved. And plus, let's admit it, watching some super theatrical performance with costumes and characters, is way more satisfying than a bunch of dorky long haired dudes in jeans rocking out.
So anticipation was high for record number two. The band were rumored to have been given $750,000 to record. They flew to the US, and got a high profile producer, and the results are here, and well, the response has been divisive to say the least. Now re-christened Ghost B.C. due to to some legal difficulties, the new record finds the band almost completely ditching the metal, their sound even more firmly entrenched on the seventies hard rock side of their sound. Some of us were thrilled, as we dug that side of the band WAY more, while others, not so much. In fact one of the above mentioned superfans, hated the two songs he heard so much, he didn't even buy the record, and had no plans to do so. While that seems a bit dramatic, considering, minus the less metal, the sound is ultimately not that far removed from the first record, and in fact, the songs are way better, and way catchier, and the production, while to some ears sounded too slick and polished, ultimately sounds perfect for the songs, and with every listen, we become more and more obsessed. In fact two aQ staffers were really, really keen on making this a Record Of The Week. Certainly those two aQ-ers have listened to virtually nothing else since this came in. But there was some dissent, so we'll leave it up to you. The samples below say more than we ever could, but we'll try anyway.
While the first record was definitely a metal record, the most you could say about Infestissumam is that it's hard rock, but really it's almost more like hard pop. The songs are crazy catchy, the guitars are distorted, and a little bit buzzy, but the production is such that they don't sound heavy exactly, and the organs from the first record are all over the place here, giving some songs a very carnivalesque, circusy feel, and others a weirdly Partridge Family vibe. The songs so hook heavy, with huge choruses, and equally catchy bridges, the solos are simple, the sort that mirror the main melody, and stick in your head like the vocals, the vibe is actually kind of mellow, slightly ominous, a little bit sinister, but only a little bit. It's bouncy, almost power poppy, epic and lush and super detailed, headphone listening reveals so much sonic detail, that at times it's not hard to believe this record could have cost almost a million dollars. When we were all arguing about whether to make this a Record Of The Week, one aQ-er sent this text to another aQ-er: "Ghost is Satanic bubble gum. Total genius. I've listened to it like fifty times already!" And the aQ-er writing this review wouldn't deign to argue. Cuz it is like Satanic bubblegum. Catchy and bombastic and almost orchestral in places, pure pop in others, hard rock in others, but so far removed from the metal that popped up throughout the first record, it seems insane to call them a metal band at this point. But whatever you call them, and however you feel about their sonic progression from their debut to this new one, have a listen to those sound samples, and see if you can resist. We're guessing you won't be able to. And why fight it??
While they last, we have the deluxe version, which tacks on to bonus tracks, one of which is a hazy, strummy, psychedelic sixties sounding ballad, the other their kick ass cover of ABBA's "I'm A Marionette", which weirdly enough sounds more metal than ANYthing on the record proper, which should tell you all you need to know about this glorious slab of Satanic bubblegum hard pop genius!
FYI, vinyl should be showing up here soon too, next week we're told...
We've gotten to the point with every review of a new Gnaw Their Tongues record, where we're essentially at a loss for words, if you have a look on the aQ site at past reviews, you'll see these sprawling ultra wordy descriptions that read like some sort of sinister poetry, because really, that's the only way to describe the twisted sound world of cinematic black doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, the work of a single man called Mories, who as we've established in the past, must be one twisted fellow. Cuz no one that wasn't utterly demented and deranged could create sounds like this. We have the genre in iTunes for this as 'Industrial Symphonic Cinematic Black Doom', which is as succinct a descriptor as we could come up with. And is fairly accurate. Odds are if you're a fan, you can't get enough, and you're gonna want this one too, after all these sorts of sick sonics engender obsessiveness, trust us, we're totally under Mories' thrall as well, and greet every new slab of twisted genius filth, like some bowl of rotting porridge slipped between the bars of our cell. We beg for the darkness, we imbibe of the blackness, we devour the sounds we are given.
But for those new to this bleak world of chaotic sonic mystery and abject cinematic noise, have a gander at the song titles, "Human Skin For The Messenger's Robe", "Urine-Soaked Neophytes", "Fallen Deities Bathing In Gall", "Bonedust On Dead Genitals", "The Storming Heavens As A Father To All Broken Bodies", which should give you at least a rough idea of the spirit of GTT, now imagine those sentiments rendered in sound, and you have Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus, which in English translates as "with blood and whip, we worship the dark", which again, should leave no doubt as to what lies beyond the blackened gates, a world of churning black metal offal, of demonic symphonies, the sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is precisely what we would imagine Satan's symphony must sound like, epic and majestic, but utterly bleak and blackened, the sound swirling and blurred, erupting into thick gouts of black buzz, but just as often collapsing into something more akin to the score for a bloodletting. The sound does occasionally let up, but it's usually only to build tension, offer dynamics, or unveil the sound of some poor wretch retching, or the cries of people as their skins are flayed, Gnaw Their Tongues is a torture chamber in sound, but so exquisitely rendered, we often find ourselves wondering why Mories isn't scoring every twisted horror film in Hollywood, probably because these sounds are too evocative, and paint too much of a distinct picture, that the need for actual images is practically null.
The thing with GTT records, is that often, there's too much going on, and the can become a head spinning wall of sound, a swirling roiling cauldron of black noise, but more often the balance is just right, and Mories' creation is perfectly balanced, equal parts buzzing blackness, abject doom, and haunting symphonic mesmer, a melding of horror score, outsider abstract doom metal and epic classical music, and Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus seems to be maybe the most perfect specimen yet, spending less time grinding and howling and blasting and buzzing, and more time conjuring up some seriously soul stirring ambience, and some blackly symphonic sonic horror.
As always, utterly intense, ridiculously epic, and has us wondering what kind of demented mind can conjure up such glorious filth, and then actually creates it. Grim genius!
Another special Record Store Day release, and another one we were truly excited about, two 12"s of remixes from former aQ Record Of The Weekers Goat, whose ROTW, World Music, was a dizzying collection of twisted and mysterious Swedish psychedelic space rock, heavy on the twisted grooviness, rhythmic and propulsive, and laced with cool double-dutch style vocals, wild percussion, we weren't the only ones who flipped for these guys (and gal).
So Rocket Recordings picked what seems to be most folks favorite track, and got some like minded sonic saboteurs to take a stab and remixing it and making it their own. A bunch of remixers we knew: High Wolf, Teeth Of The Sea, Gnod, Cherrystones, Hookworms and Tom Furse (of UK goth rockers the Horrors), but a bunch we didn't: Raikes Parade, Thought Forms, Redg Weeks, Cage & Aviary. While a lot of the remixers only slightly tweaked the originals, some went all out and pulled the song apart and reassembled the pieces into something entirely different.
The first volume starts off with Thought Forms, who are one of the groups who don't mix it up too much, and instead just does some looping and layering and rearranging, adding some sound effects here and there, dubbing out certain bits, and stripping away a lot of the guitar, letting the drums drive the proceedings. High Wolf also does some looping and layering, but the resulting sound is a lot different, much more tripped out, sounding a bit like Muslimgauze at 45rpm, rhythmic, groovy, the vocals relegated to the background, lots of buzzing sitar like sound, the whole thing dense and druggy, swirly and shimmery.
Redg Weeks gives the original a serious dub overhaul, the bass CRANKED, the drums heavily reverbed, the snare hits sent careening into the ether, the whole thing dirgey and hypnotic, dark and droney, some seriously mesmeric loping dub psych minimalism for sure. Tom Furse from the Horrors, hews a bit closer to the original, adding subtle synth swirls, and tonal colorations, adding textures and layers, the overall effect making the song a whole lot more spacey and trippy.
SUPER LIMITED!! Like most of the Record Store Day releases, while we have a bunch, it's very likely, we won't be able to get (many/any) more. Comes housed in an old school style big hole 12" sleep, decorated with the same sort of fractal design as the cover of the full length.
Another special Record Store Day release, and another one we were truly excited about, two 12"s of remixes from former aQ Record Of The Weekers Goat, whose ROTW, World Music, was a dizzying collection of twisted and mysterious Swedish psychedelic space rock, heavy on the twisted grooviness, rhythmic and propulsive, and laced with cool double-dutch style vocals, wild percussion, we weren't the only ones who flipped for these guys (and gal).
So Rocket Recordings picked what seems to be most folks favorite track, and got some like minded sonic saboteurs to take a stab and remixing it and making it their own. A bunch of remixers we knew: High Wolf, Teeth Of The Sea, Gnod, Cherrystones, Hookworms and Tom Furse (of UK goth rockers the Horrors), but a bunch we didn't: Raikes Parade, Thought Forms, Redg Weeks, Cage & Aviary. While a lot of the remixers only slightly tweaked the originals, some went all out and pulled the song apart and reassembled the pieces into something entirely different.
The second volume starts off with Gnod, who team up with the previously unknown to us Raikes Parade, for something a whole lot more minimal, that main riff, suspended in a haze of disembodied vox, tinkling chimes, fractured music box melodies and ominous synth squelch. Soon a stuttery beat surfaces, giving the song an almost dubstep vibe, the original elements of the song blurred into thick swirling clouds of atmospheric background sound. Cherrystones version transforms the more rocking original into a lurching creep, a hiccuping beat and some blorping synths, draped over the washed out remnants of the original, woozy melodies all tangled up in the proceedings, the feel very Eastern and exotic, this track too, dubbed out and a little bit Muslimgauze-y.
UK space rockers Hookworms, whose full length we'll be reviewing hopefully soon, turn the original into something way more laid back and washed out, employing mostly the drums and the bassline from the original, smearing all the other sounds into a druggy swirl, the perfect backdrop for some slowburn guitar, and spaced out psychedelic shimmer. Finally, Cage & Aviary strip Goat's sound WAY down, and craft some woozy, warbly, electro-house groovery, pulsing and loping, warped melodies draped over sheets of crumbling guitars, all faded into the background, the vox too, chopped up into weird little melodic blurts, all beneath woozy basslines, warped FX and that hypnotic relentless rhythm.
SUPER LIMITED!! Like most of the Record Store Day releases, while we have a bunch, it's very likely, we won't be able to get (many/any) more. Comes housed in an old school style big hole 12" sleep, decorated with the same sort of fractal design as the cover of the full length.
One of our most anticipated releases for this year's Record Store Day was definitely this two song slab of heavy, seventies style, psychedelic space rock blissout from these former aQ Record Of The Weekers, fronted by Earthless axeman Isaiah Mitchell, along with Camilla Saufley-Mitchell from Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound and a couple other local rockers. And like on their self titled debut, the two tracks here find Golden Void channeling some serious classic psych rock sounds, swirling clouds of FX drenched guitar shreddery, draped over spidery reverby melodies, throbbing basslines, echo drenched vox, and stoned motorik rhythms that occasionally explode into wild flurries of chaotic bombast, heady and hypnotic, the A side here sounds like it could have been plucked right off their record proper, a little laid back, spaced out, druggy and drifty, slipping from hazy sun baked stoner rock to sixties/seventies style psychedelic jangle and back again, and of course the whole thing is teeming with killer guitarwork, crunch riffs, swirling atmosphere, and yeah, some kick ass soloing. The B side though is a whole 'nother story, the band seeming to ditch an semblance of song, in favor of total Hawkwind style endless space jam, from the get go, the band lock into a slow spiraling zoner spaceout, in fact, it fades in as if we're just joining a jam already in progress, and it plays out like that, the band filling up the whole side with one billowing cloud of bongsmoke psych shred freakout, the drums and bass locked into a woozy drift, while Mitchell basically unfurls a sky full of wild guitar tangle, the song smokes, but then smolders as it settles down into something broodier and more mellow and hypnotic, which is where it fades out, but we imagine the jam most likely went on way longer!!
This was as we mentioned, a Record Store Day release, so it's super limited and now out of print, we ordered extras so aQ list readers would get a shot, and were lucky enought to get a bunch, but they're going fast, and once we run out, we won't be able to get more.
The THIRD repress of this exquisite album on vinyl. If you missed it the last two times, don't expect this one to last any longer! The only difference is the black & white artwork, but the musical content is the same. Here's what we said way back when...
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill opens with an entirely characteristic yet coy swell of effected elemental smear, crumbling delicately yet forcefully, until giving way to what is, to date, and here is the coy part, Liz Harris' most songwriterly and structured album. As opposed to the rich swaths of drone that up until now defined her sound, Harris has shifted from the abstract towards a more distinct and figurative sound. True to the title, the record unfolds like a sort of mysterious and morbid fairytale, innocent in its clear and elegant melodies, yet creepy and highly abstract in its more droney and sublime interludes. For the most part, her guitar playing is laid bare, removed from the dense fog of effects that typically occlude them. And what we discover is actually a pretty strummy record, with plenty of clean guitar articulation though certainly the aroma of her previous tech heavy approach remains in what is relatively speaking still pretty effected. At times she even reverts back to the gorgeous icey crunchy string attack of some previous efforts. With so much space liberated in the absence of drones, we also get to hear her stunning voice. Furthermore, the occasional audible lyric creeps to the surface, one standout fragment being "Love Is Enormous," a somewhat shockingly affirmative sentiment from an otherwise darkly mysterious and abstract persona. From start to finish Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill lulls you into its graceful murmurings and hypnotic thrumming. An exquisite addition to an already compelling discography. Recommended.
We know, it seems ridiculous to be reviewing ANOTHER new Guided By Voices record, after three whole full lengths last year (or was it four?), and of course that's not counting solo records or side projects or who knows what else. But Robert Pollard seems to have a bottomless supply of songs, and we're talking good songs. For a man whose prolificity seemingly defies the concept of quality control, there's a surprising amount of quality to be found in the now perhaps thousands of songs he's recorded. It's a good thing too that GBV fans are crazy obsessives, but then they'd sort of have to be really, but we count ourselves among them, and with every new record, even when it's the fourth or fifth in 15 months, we find ourselves super excited, and when we throw it on, it's warm and comfortable, and it's a whole 'nother set of songs to dig into and become obsessed over. And it's not hard, the songs here like the last few are crazy catchy, still a little bit skewed and fucked up, some total perfect pop gems, others fuzzy off kilter rockers, and still others the musical ramblings of a madman surrounded by yes men, just lucky for us said madman seems to strike some sort of gold even when he seems to be veering into whatthefuck territory. We're beginning to think Pollard must have struck a deal at the crossroads, cuz for fuck's sake he's FIFTY FIVE years old, and he kicks the ass of pretty much any and every indie rocker you can think of. And even after maybe 20 solo records, and 20 GBV albums, and about a million other releases, he's still got a songwriting pen few can compete with, and only the foolish would even try.
No need to go into great detail about this new one. Fans, if you're like us, you're gonna want it, just like all three (four?) albums from 2012, and you're gonna love it. And like we mention in pretty much every GBV review, folks who STILL haven't figured out this GBV thing, buy Bee Thousand, or Alien Lanes, or Vampire On Titus, or all of those, and we guarantee, before long you'll be like us, equally obsessed with an embarrassment of warped pop gems, and a whole lot of catching up to do!
Hey, these three must really like playing together (and WE really like 'em playing together too). 'Cause this Haino/O'Rourke/Ambarchi collaboration has turned out to be not a one-off, or even two-off; this international power trio are on their fourth full album, now, in just four years. And just getting better and better it seems. This outing again combines the colossal void-sculpting electric guitar & emotive, echoing vocal yawp of Japanese psych shaman Haino, with sturdy rhythm section backup from indie/experimental superstars Jim O'Rourke (bass) and Oren Ambarchi (drums). You can imagine the latter two doing the whole 'we're not worthy' routine in the face of Haino's overpowering black-on-black aesthetic, but actually they ARE pretty worthy, O'Rourke's Brise-Glace background (and oh, yeah stint in Sonic Youth) aligning with dronester-by-day Ambarchi's interest in motorik krautrock percussion stylings (e.g. Sagittarian Domain) to definitely hold up their end and provide plenty of interest and umph to the improvised (?) soundscapes through which Haino's guitar carves wide swaths.
This time round, there's some surprises, too - including a cameo appearance by famed minimalist drone-pioneer Charlemagne Palestine! That's on the opening, nearly 10 minute track, which also features Japanese guest Eiko Ishibashi, both playing wine glasses (yes wine glasses) making dulcet drones over which Haino gently (yes gently) sings and plays guitar. That's another surprise, how quietly and peacefully this begins, and continues, on the spacious second track too, where Haino plays flute (yes flute)� quite nice. But have no fears, fans of the Fushitsusha-freakout-mode of Haino's guitaring, as despite the relative restraint and loveliness of those first two tracks, this set does get heavy and noisy as it goes on, the group erupting into amped-up action by the time track three rolls around, replete with the choppy attack and grinding tones of Haino's guitar. Ambarchi provides a steady beat, steadier than on your usual Fushitsusha fare, pounding away alongside the distorted bass of O'Rourke in cyclic rhythmic grooves, providing compelling, mesmeric support for Haino to do 'his thing' - and this is very much his thing - as the cryptic/poetic song titles will attest. Somewhat in contrast to Haino's reactivated Fushitsusha unit, which has gone in the direction of dealing in beautifully difficult, short, sharp shocks, getting almost no-wavy on their two recent Heartfast label albums, this Fushitsusha-like trio has stayed more in stretched-out jam territory, all right with us too. So, recommended for any fan of Fushitsusha OR this band, and we do consider them a band at this point, albeit as mentioned, and as it should be, a Haino-centric one.
Another release on the awesome Starlight Temple Society (which while now sadly defunct, seems to have mutated into Khrysanthoney, home to recent aQ faves Clair Cassis and Necktarium), this one from a mysterious European duo, whose sound is inspired by, according to the band themselves, Low, Labradford, Earth, Burzum, Skepticism, Nortt and Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. But imagine those influences channeled into something more medieval sounding, and WAY more post rocky, a sort of droning medieval slowcore laid beneath softly buzzing metallic rumble and shimmer, and you'll get an idea of Hamnskifte's sound.
The opening track is the perfect example, the core sound, a simple minor key guitar jangle, the drums sparse and spare, the rhythm slow and stately, all beneath a gauzy layer of slo-mo glacial riffage, that sort of Earth/SUNNO))) black buzz, smeared and blurred into something much more washed out and ethereal, while beneath, the band introduce other bits of buzz and drone, what sound like accordions or harmoniums, a gorgeously smoldering blackened slowcore, meditative and hypnotic.
The next track is even more blissed out. The metal/buzz element relegated to a more minimal bit of pulsing droniness, beneath the gorgeously skeletal arrangement, the guitars crystalline and shimmery, it's not hard to imagine this being on a label like Temporary Residence, reminding us a bit of a more minimal instrumental Pinback, or even Temporary Residence unsungs Lumen.
The rest of the record unfolds similarly, the sounds laid back and languorous, a darkened slowcore/postrock hybrid, that seems to be only slightly blackened, and instead, shuffles and meanders, the sound hypnotic and mesmerizing, the arrangements simple and cyclical, droney and dreamy and surprisingly poppy.
Odds are this might get overlooked by the folks who would dig it most, considering the label, and the other way blacker and heavier bands on the label, but anyone into dark, droney minimal, brooding and beautiful slow motion post rock, this will definitely hit the spot.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES. Packaged in an oversized silver metallic envelope, with an 8 page booklet, a pull out poster, and recorded onto gold cd-r.
Record number two from these Virgina heavies, who kicked our asses with their Omen Mas debut. And this new one is just as good, if not even better. The core sound is still the same, thick, dense churning guitars, frenzied mathed out super complex drumming, thick sinewy bass, and cool howled/crooned vox, hell if this had been Omen Mas Mark II, we would have been perfectly happy, but from the first track it seems like these guys got a whole lot poppier. Or catchier, or both. For all the gnarled guitarnoise and noise rock grind of opener "Chub", it's also got a killer main melody, and a hook most pop bands wouldn't be able to pull off. And it's all the better for the fact that it's delivered wrapped in face melting noise rock crush. But don't panic, Hex Machine haven't gone soft. The second track opens with a barrage of double kick driven math rock noise, that's as heavy as anything on the last record, but then bam, in come the vocals, and goddamn if it ain't crazy catchy again.
Seems like maybe these guys just unlocked the secret code. It's a tough thing to pull off, being super heavy, super noisy AND super catchy, in fact most bands who try to pull it off fail miserably. We don't need to tell you about the bands that DID pull it off (Torche, anybody?), but you can now add these guys to that elite pantheon of hook heavy heavies. And while there's plenty here that is absolutely and intentionally NOT poppy, the band seem to fall into it sort of naturally now, with even the noisiest, gnarliest, heaviest jams here displaying some serious hookage, even (and especially) warped weird unexpected catchiness which is the best kind, and the sort of thing most bands luck out and stumble on, but seems like something these guys just do. A Lot.
Anyone into noise rock new or old, catchy or brutal, mathy or dirgey, heavy and hooky, if you've yet to discover these guys, this record is gonna kick the living shit out of you, and you're gonna love every second of it.
Newest disc from this long running depressive funereal black metal outfit. Originally formed in 1995, This Midwestern one man band has averaged about one record every four and a half years, although it seems that the band actually spent a good long stretch inactive, since the other two ISB records we reviewed were both recorded before the turn of the century, one under a different monicker.�
So, in fact, this is the first full length in almost a decade, and it sounds fantastic, even better than the other two discs, the sound beefed up and much more produced, but without losing any of the sound's miserable grimnity, a record of swirling murky buzzy slow motion doomscapes, distinctly USBM, very reminiscent of Xasthur actually, but ISB is even more blurred and indistinct, most songs having only one or two parts, locked into a mesmerizing looped crawl, the guitars buzzy, but blurred into soft waves of low end, churning and throbbing, everything bathed in a warm gauzy patina, a sea of shimmering keyboards, all very epic and majestic, but so layered and washed out, that it barely sounds metal at times. Instead sounding like some drone drenched super distorted Godspeed, huge crashing waves of sound, everything bleary eyed and smeared into shadows and shapes, even when the metal components drop out, leaving a simple keyboard line to repeat hypnotically or a minor key guitar melody to loop over and over, the sound is more akin to Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker than any sort of black metal, and when the guitars and drums and buzz do return, that doesn't really change. It's still some sort of hazy smoky impressionistic ambient black metal, washing over you like dreamy soft black waves of buzz and whir. Sometimes this feels like the sort of black metal band those guys would actually start. Imagine Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz and William Basinski, all in corpsepaint, lurking in a wintry forest, hunched over their instruments on a dimly lit stage, unfurling these roiling waves of gauzy blackness and looped blur. So intense and hypnotic and beautiful. If you ever wanted to get someone into black metal, this could very well be the record to do it with. WAY recommended.
A special Record Store Day release from this witchy blackened dreampsych trio, featuring rock scribe J. Bennett on guitar, along with Sera Timms (of Black Math Horsemen), and Kelly Johnston, on guitar and bass respectively, two willowy women, both of whom very much look the part of the witchy temptress, performing live hey both wear old white wedding dresses, looking like they stepped right out of some old daguerrotype, and who provide the haunting harmonies, which are definitely what make IoG so magical and mysterious sounding.
While their past records were laced with a bit of black buzz, the sound here is much more moody and minimal, the A side sounds a bit more like nineties slowcore filtered through a more modern shoegaze aesthetic, but even here, Bennett introduces some blackness, in the form of his slo-mo black metal riffing, which is transformed into something more hazy and washed out, a doomy drifty churn, the song slipping into some full on dirginess, a heaving, heavy, reverbed creep, the whole thing a little bit noisy, a little bit gothy, the vocals keeping the sound grounded, transforming what might otherwise be some minimal doominess, into something more ethereal and hauntingly trancendent, the plodding minimal drumming, adding a primal pulse to the blurry buzzy dreaminess. The B side gets even more dreamy, ditching all the buzz and plod, in favor of something more atmospheric, lilting minor key piano, wreathed in a gauzy sonic haze, seems to blur and drift, the vocals doused in echo and reverb float spectrally above, the whole thing a dreamlike sprawl of gothic slowcore ethereal dreampop soft-psych bliss, the vocals reminding us of Cheslea Wolfe or Zola Jesus, but set amidst a landscape much more cinematic and abstract. So gorgeous.
This was in fact a Record Store Day release, and thus was super limited, we did get a bunch, but once we sell out, these are probably gone for good.
The record comes in different colored sleeves, and multiple colors of vinyl, includes a nice printed insert with lyrics.
Yay, more delightful music from Ilaiyaraaja, illustrious composer for South India's Kollywood (not Bollywood, but close) film industry. Finders Keepers / B-Music has previously brought us a couple other comps full of Ilaiyaraaja's tremendously enjoyable and unusually arranged tunes, so hopefully you know all about him already and are eager for more, 'cause look out, here's another seventeen tracks of the man's colorful and creative East-West mashup music, circa the synth-pop Eighties (his prime), full of electro funk drum machine grooves, '80s future shock synthesizer (Yamaha DX7 keyboard in the house!), orchestral flourishes, and the often amorously impassioned vocalisations of a variety of famous playback singers including K.S. Chitra, aka the "Tamil Nightingale".
Ilaiyaraaja himself can lay claim to the honorific "The Maestro". He's also been called "The Crown Prince Of Tamil Pop", and it's easy to hear why from this disc of so very lively and infectious and not overly-serious music, joyful songs designed to get characters in Tamil films - and maybe you too - singing and dancing.
Apparently Ilaiyaraaja, currently 69 years of age, has written/recorded over 4,500 songs in his career (and counting), so we can probably look forward to more collections from Finders Keepers and other equally hip labels, but don't let this one slip by, it's got a lot of gems on it. Imagine if Axel F went to India...
Extensive, interesting, informative (as usual) liner notes from DJ Andy Votel are included, the disc having been compiled by Votel and Doug Shipton.
Import double vinyl version also forthcoming, by the way, we should have that in time for our next list.
Here's another Record Store Day find for you! The Invisible Hands is one of the new projects for the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop, here working with a cadre of Egyptian musicians to produced a decidedly less volatile sound than what we are used to from Bishop in either the Sun City Girls or his solo project Alvarius B. All of the material found on this super limited 7" comes from the Alan Bishop songbook, with the medley on the A side of "Insect Dilemma / Disallowed" culled from the legendary 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda album by the Sun City Girls and the self-titled 2lp from Alvarius B respectively. The B side is a cover of a Moroccan folk song entitled "Lili Twil", but those who know the SCG back catalogue will recognize the tune as "Cruel & Thin" also from 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, but with Bishop reconfiguring the words into neological gobbledigook. Musically, this follows what Bishop arranged for the Invisible Hands album released earlier in 2013, with straightforward rhythm sections straddling the desert blues ethos and American indie-rock songsmithery, with the lead guitars buzzing with Arabic intonations and fanciful flourishes. The cover of "Lili Twil" is sung by Aya Hemeda, whose languid vocals do recall the beautiful folk melodies that Selda recorded back in the '70s.
To top it all off, when you buy an Invisible Hands 7", you will be automatically entered in a contest to win either an Invisible Hands banner or an Invisible Hands throw pillow, both of which feature crudely painted Egyptian imagery of minstrels and cats eviscerating chickens.
Ready to go clubbing? In another galaxy? With his latest record under the not-a-person-but-a-band Jonas Reinhardt moniker, Jesse Reiner (and friends) have turbocharged the synth swells and flourishes of their previous kosmische krautrock-inspired releases with some powerful booty-shaking beats. As much as we loved their self-titled debut, and Powers Of Audition (both on Kranky), we're happy that Jonas Reinhardt are providing fuel for our dance-making body parts. Such an effort seems fitting with their new home on Not Not Fun Records, a serious concern in new electronic and dance music that has also released material by aQ faves Peaking Lights among others. The result is an entrancing visit to planet space disco that owes as much to Giorgio Moroder and other Italo devotees as it does to Neu!...
To kickstart the party, Reiner and co. rely less on the amazing motorik drumming of Damon Palermo and more on drum machines, which creates an equally ecstatic vibe, but for a more vertically positioned human. Frequent Jonas Reinhardt participants Phil Manley (Life Coach, Trans Am, The Fucking Champs), Diego Gonzalez (3 Leafs), Tim Soete (The Fucking Champs), Steve Moore (Zombi), and others are also on on board. Don't let all our talk of discoing make you think Mask Of The Maker is a soundtrack to the coke-fueled lives of mere beautiful people, because Jonas Reinhardt forms melodies with otherworldly synth sounds and stratospheric mantras from the ethereal mouth of Meryl Press (check out "Elimination Street") to guide you on your imaginary extraterrestrial journey. Thus Emeralds is still a definite comparison.
Perhaps the Philip K. Dick quote "It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity" on the inner-sleeve suggests the journey you are on is actually to a star called The Real You. Or maybe this turn towards real-deal dance music is the revelation that follows. That's just a guess, though. Jesse Reiner and his Jonas Reinhardt cohorts may have pulled back the veil a bit, but we still don't know what truths lurk under Reiner's red beard (which is on full display on the front cover), now do we?
First record we've reviewed from these Portland crushers (who count a member of aQ faves L'Acephale among their ranks), whose sound has changed dramatically over the last 4 years and 3 full lengths, having started life as something much more noisy and chaotic, initially some sort of twisted power electronic / grindcore combo, their sound blackened considerably, their music growing more and more dense and darkly metallic, arriving here, at Tresspass, where they have essentially made the transition to full on black metal band, but what makes these guys so good, and this record so compelling, is that it's informed by that transformation, for all the black buzz, and gnarled riffing, there are gouts of grinding fury, or weird stretches of processed vocals sounding like a symphony of gurgles. In some ways they're like a more punk rock Deathspell Omega, they have a similarly dense sound, and a similar knack for creating lush blackened crush from multiple layers of droned out guitars, tangled riffage, and impossibly chaotic drumming.
Even at their blackest, their punk roots show through, whether it's a barrage of squealing pick slides, or some serious punked out D-beat pound, the guttural vocals more death metal, but again, it just adds another cool element to their already wildly hybridized sound. Relentless and furious, the production MASSIVE, the sound epic and crushingly brutal, downtuned and HEAVY, the tracks occasionally splintering into droned out doom, or blurry stretches of rumble and thrum, or crumbling industrial blurscapes, but just as often exploding into wild gouts of metalpunk chaos, before slipping right back into another blast of grinding blackbuzz churn.
Super swank gatefold sleeves, with printed cardstock insert.
How rad is this? One of our favorite Record Store Day items this year was not a record, but a book! A hefty, 508-page tome that thoroughly chronicles the history and obsessions of one of the largely misunderstood and under-appreciated niches of recorded music, the "vanity record" - also known as "private press recordings". Enjoy The Experience, edited by noted collector Johan Kugelberg, delves deep into the uniquely 20th century phenomena of the custom-made record and the little-known artists who made them, as well as the collectors and reissue labels that have obsessed over them and ultimately prevented them from fading into obscurity. A lot of our faves are here, including many we have reviewed over the years like The Shaggs, Michael Farneti, Gary Wilson, Jr. and His Soulettes, Bob Chance, Luie Luie, and Hans Edler, many with extensive back stories about their creation. But there is sooooo much more. Including Christian family recordings, ventriloquists, creepy loner folkies, restaurant /resort entertainers, over-the-top lounge singers and just outright bizarre musical artists who just wouldn't have been able to release a record any other way. There are pages and pages of beautiful color reproductions of the cover art to these home made records, some even hand drawn, in all of their earnest naive glory. There's even a chapter on Century Records, one of the most well-established custom record manufacturers, who provided stock album covers for individual artists - and it's funny to see how many different albums utilized the exact SAME cover (including the one seen on the front of this book!). Enjoy The Experience is a joy to behold and will renew your faith in the self-released record.
Comes with a download card for a 20 song playlist including a song from a hopefully up and coming aQ Record of the Week, when it gets reissued - try and guess which one! While supplies last, this special RSD edition also comes with a clear vinyl 45 reissue of a recording by the Century Records marketing department, on how to customize and create your own record. So Awesome!!
This super limited (and hand numbered) cassette from legendary Finnish composer, inventor, instrument designer and musician Erkki Kurenniemi, celebrates the 50 year anniversary of his first, and perhaps most famous record work, 1963's "On-Off". This track has been included in various Kurreniemi compilations, and was inspired by the roar of turbines Kurreniemi heard as a child once while visiting a power plant. It's a sprawling abstract expanse of howling buzzing electro acoustic musique concrete, lots of thrums and rumbles, disembodied voices buried in the background, slow shifting textures, and gristled drones, all spread out into shimmering, undulating sheets of sound. Super dynamic too, flitting from hushed murmur to explosive and caustic howl, and often settling somewhere right in between. It sounds occasionally like jet engine noise, and at others, rushing water, or whirling wind, multiple variations of dense hypnotic sound. Noisy enough to predict much of the industrial/noise music that would follow, but also prescient of so much electronic and experimental music as well. Grey and austere, but somehow also lush and lovely.
This tape includes the original version of "On-Off", along with a second, shorter German edit. The flipside features a 2013 reimagining of / homage to "On-Off", which attempts to capture the same spirit with a whole different set of sounds, lots of electronics, and strange FX, the sound less grey and more multihued, not as raw or primitive, and a bit more psychedelic, but quite a cool piece, regardless of its provenance.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered and housed in a thick black and white J-card, the whole tape sealed in a plastic bag.
Back in 2010 or 2011, these guys were being touted as the next big thing, which was crazy, cuz we couldn't track down their record. We were reading about them everywhere, and seeing the on all sorts of top tens, all before we heard a lick of music. Well when we finally did, we definitely understood what everybody was so excited about. That first record was heavy and hooky, and was a sort of mish mash of influences, black metal, D-beat, cock rock, stoner rock, and somehow it all worked, it might not have knocked out socks off like everyone else, but we did dig it a lot. Enough that we were pretty excited to discover there was a new record.
And if anything, this new one Meir, pretty much oneups that first record in every way. Well, almost. The first one was definitely meaner, and had more of the black metal and D-beat stuff going on. This new one is a whole lot poppier, and the clean vocals are really good, like proper singing, with some of the songs here catchy enough that we wouldn't be at all surprised to hear them on the radio. We mentioned Turbonegro in our review of the first record, and recently when someone was in the store asking what these guys sounded like, we came up with "Turbonegro, if they weren't joking", which isn't all that far off the mark. The sound is crazy catchy, over the top, totally bombastic, but still pretty heavy, most definitely metal, but there are some crazy melodies that sound like they were plucked straight off some top 40 jam, the saving grace is that they're then doused in distortion and someone howls their guts out over the top. And most of the songs have full on blast beats, furious riffing and lightning fast pounding, but often those blasts don't sound mean or black, just epic and triumphant, and like a faster version of the catchy part already in play. Check out the first two sound samples, those have to be the happiest, most sunshiney blasts EVER. And the third track starts off with a full on blast, but with gang vocals, and some swirling guitars, and the blast blossoms into some classic sounding anthemic eighties metal, or at least a meaner more modern version. Again, catchy like crazy, but still heavy, there's even some slide guitar giving the sound a sort of Hellacopters vibe. In fact, every time the clean vocals come in, the sound gets VERY Hellacopter-ish. Allan hates when we mention bands like Queens Of The Stone Age or the Foo Fighters, but in some ways, Kvelertak sounds like a heavier, meaner, louder and WAY better band than groups like those. Holy shit we just got to a part with handclaps and footstomps, the band suddenly sounding like a super metal version of Queen. Which is absolutely a good thing!!
These guys are Norwegian, so this stuff probably IS top 40 there, that's usually how it works, in a country where Dimmu Borgir win Grammies, but really, this record is so good, and these guys are genuinely fucking great, it's sort of a crime this stuff is not all over the radio EVERYwhere. Which of course means, if you couldn't tell, WAY recommended.
Um, last list we had the Quintet recording on Sub Rosa featuring these two unusual, improvising vocalists backed by drums, bass, and double bass. We might have scared some of you away by saying that sometimes the singing sounded like "Muppety monsters with gastric disorders" but it was REALLY GREAT (and we still have a few, be brave). For the adventurous folks who agreed with us (and perhaps more folks whom we might now convince to take a chance), here's the other, simultaneously released Sub Rosa disc we mentioned in that earlier review, Minton and Chen as an acoustic vocal duo only, no instrumental accompaniment at all. So everything you hear here, believe it or not, comes out of their mouths. Once again, it's quite weird and reminiscent perhaps of the most extreme vocal experiments you might have heard from Mike Patton or Eye Yamatsuka, though they mostly never scream or shout, making all these weird noises without really raising their voices at all.
We listed the other one first 'cause we thought (perhaps foolishly) that it was the more accessible, but really this one too, once you get into it, is a fascinatingly varied, corporal soundscape that can be both atmospheric and ridiculous, all the more impressive considering the "limitations" of the sound sources - two human voices - which don't really sound all that limited here! Being human voices (or whatever you would call noises emitted from someone's mouth - these aren't regular speaking or singing voices by a long shot) the sounds here have an emotional resonance even at their most nonsensical, something you wouldn't always get as immediately with free instrumental improv (which makes us think: the way the late Hans Reichel's bowed wooden "daxophones" were so effective, was in how they mimicked the human voice - and it's the lung power blowing the breath of Brotzmann through his horn that truly speaks to us). Minton and Chen cut out the middleman (instrument) and do it themselves, with artistry and inspiration. Intriguing and (for us at least) entertaining too - c'mon, 50+ minutes of moanings and groanings, mutterings and croakings, babblings and raspberry-blowings can't not be kind of funny, eh!
Record number three from this Greek trio, but the first one we've managed to stock, and holy moly were we blown away. Mohammad specialize in long-form drone works, focusing on the low LOW end - drone lovers be warned, this will blow your mind. Anyone can coax rumbles and buzz from a guitar leaned against an amp, but these guys, utilizing just cello, contrabass and some oscillators, conjure up a sprawling expanse of ribcage rattling, soul stirring thrum, a breathtaking acoustic dronemusic, lush and organic, resonant and expansive. Super shorthand would be to say these guys sound like an acoustic SUNNO))), but their sound retains much more melody and nuance, sounding almost folky at times, near symphonic at others, and occasionally liturgical. The reverberant buzz of vibrating strings, slow shifting overtones, a dirgey doom folk by way of La Monte Young, slowed down to the point of near stasis, but still rife with texture and dynamics. The fact that these sounds are acoustic, give the sound a very organic feel, the sound or resonating wood is tough to simulate, and at high volumes, the music here is near transcendent, the sounds extremely physical in their heft, primal and powerful, but also intimate and emotional. It's a soundtracky atmospheric ambience, but fused to a mutated strain of modern minimalism, with the vibe of something ritualistic and timeless. It's impossible not to imagine these sounds being performed by some cloaked court musicians, in some mysterious black castle, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. It's also hard to not imagine these guys teaming up with Russian drone vocalists Phurpa, for what would have to be the heaviest, droniest, acoustic performance EVER.
This will no doubt make lots of our year end lists, and it's only April. Dark and heavy enough for folks into extreme drones, but mysterious and musical enough to appeal to modern minimalists, and really anyone into mysterious sounds and dark dreaminess.
Like all Pan releases, the packaging is fantastic, a printed heavy stock matte sleeve, housed in a heavy plastic PVC jacket, screen printed in silver metallic ink, super striking!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Like the Carlton Melton double live lp reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, this new one from aQ beloved UK psychedelic space prog combo Mugstar, was also a special ultra limited (300 copies!!) Record Store Day release, and like the Carlton Melton, we ordered as many copies of the Mugstar as we could get. We sold most of them already, and are left with less than ten, so any of you who still want one of these, best act fast, cuz once these are gone, they are gone for good.
Centralia is the first release we've managed to get on the Cardinal Fuzz label, and it's definitely an auspicious introduction, with Mugstar blending kinetic psychedelic progginess, with wild drumming, swirling guitars, loops and samples and FX, and blissed out cosmic minimalism. The B side starts off super mellow and blissed out, sounding almost like a way more tripped out Pink Floyd, before building to some seriously dense riffing, thick swells of chordal buzz, and more wild drumming. The record finished off with some seriously kick ass post rock infused psychedelia, that kills!!! As we mentioned above, we have less than ten copies, of only 300 pressed. These are the very last copies we'll be able to get EVER, so act fast!
Another Record Store Day release we were super excited about, a split 7" between the Night Marchers, which is essentially Hot Snakes redux, with John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt and crew kicking up some super hooky Rocket style noise pop - including this little gem, which might be the poppiest thing we've heard from them yet, with lilting melodies, a bouncy rhythm, and hooks galore, a big chorus, and lots of "la-la-la" style vox, which sort of makes sense since they're sharing this split with San Diego pop combo Mrs. Magician, whose Strange Heaven record (released last year on Reis' Swami label) was easily our pop record of 2012, and MM's side of this here split is more of everything we loved about the full length, a little bit surfy, a little bit garage-y, the sound washed out and reverby, lots of chiming harmonics, fuzzy jangle, kinetic drumming, amazing vocal harmonies, the whole thing a insanely hooky blast of crazy catchy practically perfect garage pop, that has us hankering even more for a new full length.
As mentioned above, this was a Record Store Day release and thus was extremely limited - we do have a handful left, far fewer than we'd like though, and the last we'll see. White vinyl, with a thick printed full color insert.
Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion may be a live cd / dvd set of this venerable SF outfit, but it also serves as a "best of" of sorts as well. Pulled mostly from the last four records, the point the band changed their name from OCS to its many incarnations of "Ohsees", "The Oh sees", or "Thee Ohsees", and the record titles went from numbers to quasi-absurdist phrases. Those who may shy away from live albums over fidelity issues should not fret here, as Dwyer and his cohorts are seasoned and energetic live players and hi-fidelity has never been a major concern on their studio records anyway; so there's really not a discernible distinction between live and studio sound quality. In fact, this may be just as good as a starting point into the band as any one of their studio records, which just keep getting better and better. Got to love a band that can move so effortlessly from southern garage to one of the best Shirley Collins interpretations ("Highland Wife's Lament") we've heard in awhile. Plus the dvd showcases the band's wild and wooly performances.
A while back we reviewed Hypnos, the most recent release from composer/guitarist Mario Diaz DeLeon, which at the time we described as sounding like the soundtrack to some strange apocalyptic planetarium show, fusing tranced out minimal kosmische drift and processed guitar textures to churning SUNNO))) like doomdrone, all blurred into a constantly shifting landscape of seriously heavy modern minimalism, that bordered on the maximal.
So here we have DeLeon's most recent release, now under the name Oneirogen, the name of a track from Hypnos, and it should this come as no surprise that Oneirogen is not all that far removed from Hypnos, if anything the sound here are more song-like, and overall more metallic. Just check out the first track, which begins as a swirl of processed guitars, before suddenly a massive downtuned riff rolls in, thick, sludgey and doomy, and soon those two disparate elements seem to coalesce, and a second guitar swoops in the lay down soaring dramatic guitar melodies over the top. Almost leads in fact, giving the whole thing a seriously epic power metal vibe. It's not hard to imagine this as the intro track to some unreleased Lost Horizon or Blind Guardian record. Which if you couldn't tell, means we're digging this like crazy.
We were all prepared to say that the rest of the record wasn't so overtly metal, but then track two "Pathogen" starts up with shimmering synths, pulsing cosmically, and then BAM, in comes the guitar, a roiling low end rumble, and a soaring distorted melody, another track that sounds like some strange hybrid of epic power metal and blissed out komische new age. And this time we won't bother, the rest of the record IS more of the same, and it's awesome, and epic, sure the guitars don't always come crashing in. Occasionally the sound stays locked in a shimmery synth swirl, or a gristly drone, but more often than not, those two sounds collide in a glorious supernova of sound. The 14+ minute centerpiece "Katabasis" is the ultimate example, with long stretches of wild squealing drones, and tranced out minimal buzz, but then total epic power metal riffage, some cool wavery high end sine tone shimmer, and some grinding epic upper register sort-of-shred, not to mention some creepy, twang flecked synth soaked ambience, and one stretch that sounds almost chorale. We were wondering when the worlds of kosmische new age, modern minimal composition and epic power metal would collide. And now that they have, it sounds so much better than we ever could have imagined.
Sceptre Hole was our first exposure to the the awesomely named Rat Columns, aka David West, who has quite the Aussie garage rock resume, which includes stints as a touring guitarist for Total Control, he played in the late great unsung post punk weirdos Rank/Xerox, and has played with the guys from Taco Leg, among a whole bunch of others. So we were of course expecting Rat Columns to sound a little like that, sort of Total Control style garage punk, maybe with a hint of new waviness, but instead, the sound is much closer to a warped sort of lo-fi indie rock jangle/power pop, which on Sceptre Hole is made even cooler/better by the addition of Matt Bleyle, of aQ faves Violent Change and Sopors. And anyone whose been digging either of those outfits' recent records (or heck even SF pop geniuses the Ovens) will find a LOT to dig here.
After an awesomely misleading opener, a creepy druggy dirge, all syrupy guitar buzz, slow drum plod and hushed haunted vocals, the record explodes into some serious kick ass poppiness, bashed drums, big jangle, lots of fuzz and buzz, hooks like crazy, the vocals a wispy croon, crunchy indie/power pop that's tough to beat. And again, we were sort of expecting the rest of the record to play out similarly, but there's lots of different sounds happening here. "Flowers" is more dour, a little bit Joy Division-y, with some weird arrangements, and cool gloomy chord progressions, "Nearsighted" too is a gorgeous slab of eighties beholden new wave pop, while "Dying Day" is super distorted shoegaze bliss out, all blurred buzz and buried vocals. There are plenty of experimental fragments, droney and darkly psychedelic, plenty of acoustic guitars too, all integrated seamlessly into a procession of CRAZY catchy power pop jams, and practically perfect blasts of fuzzy indie pop jangle. It definitely sounds like a record from the past, like this could maybe be some obscure reissue, but it's got a modern feel as well, and the music touches on so many of our favorite sounds, it's pretty tough to resist. But then why would you even try? A new favorite for sure. And absolutely recommended for fans of warped weirdo pop, and classic jangle and fuzz.
Includes a download code too!!
This is the second in the Secret Museum Of Kind Men series, in which a modern band reinterprets songs from those classic Secret Museum Of Mankind compilations of early ethnographic field recordings. Released on a label run by the drummer of Premonition 13 (Wino from St. Vitus and the Obsessed's new band!), it's hard to tell if this second single is by a whole different band, it's credited to an outfit called Ramble Tamble, and does have a bit of a different vibe, but for all we know, it's the same guys just trying something different. Either way, if you loved the first one, you're gonna dig this too, and if you missed out on that one, don't blow it again, cuz this stuff is incredible. Fans of Six Organs and the Sun City Girls' Torch Of the Mystics record, this is right up your alley.
The A side is a woozy prog workout, all slithery synths and soaring strings and shuffling percussion, equal parts gypsy folk, weird synth prog and tripped out heavy psych. Exotic and mesmerizing, it's a hypnotic heady sonic sprawl culminating in a final wild freakout of tangled melodies and warped progged out bluegrass breakdown. The B side is super groove and almost Klezmer sounding, with FX drenched piano, sawed Devil-Went-Down-To-Georgia fiddles and clouds of swirling shimmer, the bluegrass vibe is still pretty present, in fact, it sounds a bit like bluegrass traditionalist Black Twig Pickers after they dosed on a particularly virulent strain of L.S.D.
Like the first volume, WAY recommended. Comes in a super swank, silkscreened metallic blue inked sleeve, with a photocopied insert.
UK vintage/retro sounds magazine Shindig! returns, this time with Broadcast on the cover, kind of a surprise but it makes sense, the piece on them is accompanied by an article all about Giallo cinema & soundtracks. Also inside: The Sweet, Donovan, Mike Heron, Emerald Web, the Ghost Box record label, and bunches more, including the usual tons of reviews. 98 tall colorful glossy pages in all.
Anarchic is the long in the works second full length from Cascadian black metal duo Skagos, and unlike their debut Ast (which for some reason never got reviewed here) it's less about blown out black buzz onslaught and more about, well, it's hard to say. Metalheads will definitely be a bit confused by the opening few movements of the 35 minute, 4 part opener. The record begins with dense swirling swells of feedback, preparing the listener, one might presume, for a barrage of blasting drums and insectoid riffing. A gorgeous haze of feedback and spare drifting acoustic guitars, but instead of launching into it, what sounds like pulsing synths surface, and then the vocals, a lush, reverbed croon, and suddenly, we're in shoegaze dream pop territory, and not HEAVY shoegaze either, drifty, and wispy, and hushed, the vocals almost a whisper, the instrumentation barebones, and the harmonies, WOW, who would have thought these guys had it in 'em? At this point we were sort of hoping there would be NO metal, cuz what a total mindfuck, some Cascadian black metal that actually sounds like Low or Stars Of The Lid, it's really quite lovely, and we would have been perfectly happy had the whole first track unfurled similarly. But fear not, the song soon explodes into wild chaotic drumming, soaring swirling black buzz, the vibe appropriately epic and majestic, and the heaviness retaining much of the melodic wistfulness of the unlikely opening. Like many like minded bands, Skagos' sound is obviously informed by so much more than black metal. Post rock, math rock, indie rock, it all finds its way into the sound, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much. And when those harmonies resurface during the blasting buzz, it's a gorgeous combination, we almost wish the harsh vokills weren't there to obscure what is essentially a swoonsome shoegaze black buzz that's crazy melodic and catchy, but even with the rasping howls, it's still pretty stunning stuff. Alcest and Amesoeurs are definitely apt comparisons, although Skagos are WAY heavier and noisier. And so it goes, the first 'track' moves through its movements, melding hazy dreamy driftiness to blurred furious riffing, devolving at one point into some super hooky post rocky riffing, before exploding into probably the most chaotically black passage on the record. There's so much going on here, the sound shifting constantly, the composition epic and seriously proggy, the music itself, tending to always drift back toward the more melodic, as if instead of this being a black metal record with weird shoegazey bits and pretty melodies, it's exactly the opposite, some twisted heavy dreampop shoegaze record with black metal bits. In fact in the whole last ten minutes of the first track there's no metal to be found at all. Loping drumming over acoustic guitars, swirling psychedelic drifts, backwards melodies and distant rumbling drones beneath crystalline melodies, and then when the vocals come back in, holy shit, it sounds like Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat or Woven Hand or something, the vocals passionate and emotional, super dramatic, all over what sounds like accordions, everything underpinned by a hushed black ambient drift, a weird tangle of apocalyptic folk and psychedelic ambience that is pretty goddamn great. And more to have many metalheads scratching their chins.
The second track, and the three remaining movements, follow a similarly unlikely sonic path, starting out with a bit of hushed ambient shimmer, which is soon joined by muted pulsing drums, shot through with softly squiggly psychedelic theremin like melodies, it's a slow build to, yep, you guessed it, more sort of drifty, dreamy post rock jangle pop, a little bit slowcore, chiming melodies over a skeletal rhythm, the vocals a soft chantlike croon, again the vibe sort of darkly folk, and druggily dreamy, and then finally, at about the ten minute mark, the song dramatically splinters into a seriously dense blackened onslaught, a swirling chaotic frenzy, utterly at odds with what came before, but then sort of not, again the band deftly weaving the melody of the non metal part into the grim black buzz, at which point the band spends the most time they have yet on Anarchic in full on metal mode, but soon, they slow down to a slithery black doom crawl, buried double kick stutter under woozy riffic churn, and belched black rasps, before the metal peels away, leaving softly swirling steel string shimmer, shuffling jazzy rhythms, sing songy and melodic, the drums played with brushes, the group locked into a mesmerizing psych pop drift, that does get heavy, but barring the return of the rasp, is more like some sort of Godspeed / Explosions In The Sky sort of epic melodic coda, the soaring clean vox return, and it's pretty dramatic and intense, and not all that black metal sounding, the whole thing gradually settling into a slow shifting, hazy, washed out soporific slowcore dreamgaze fade out.
Such a fantastic surprise, and as you may have surmised by now, not so much for the true grim hordes, as folks into epic experimental, VERY melodic heaviness. Definite contender for year end top ten lists. Ours most certainly!
Oh yeah! Sweden strikes again! The great Subliminal Sounds label (who brought us Dungen, as well as reissues from the likes of Baby Grandmothers and Trad Gras Och Stenar) seem to have revved up their faux-way-back machine to bring us what sounds a heck of a lot like an early '70s proto-metal reissue but in fact isn't, the longhaired young rockers of Skogen Brinner belonging to the here and now, somehow. But man this sure sounds like 1971, sheer hellacious FUZZ filled heaviness, wild wailing retro-proto-metal-punk-garage action. The Skogen Brinner boys don't hold back at all, and this stuff sounds too raw and real to be for calculated effect, it's not mere 'cool' retro posing. No, playing what you hear here clearly comes quite naturally to them - maybe their parents raised 'em on steady diet of Black Sabbath, Pentagram, and Wicked Lady? And the records of Swedish '70s proto-metal masters November for sure.
The singing is almost all in Swedish, and is performed with manic, aggressive attitude, though both vocals and music don't lack for melody when required - track eight, "Vargen Till Forvirring", being a nice brief acoustic respite from all the fuzzed out madness. Mostly though, yeah, it's hard hitting psychedelic freakorama, with lotsa fuzz guitar, some organ, echoing studio effects, and "hairy funk" grooves that would get Finders Keepers DJ Andy Votel all hot and bothered if he found this music on some vintage 45. Oh, and there's even saxophone on two tracks, "Odjurtets Hamnd" and "Farsonas Berg", riffing just as hard as the guitars. The only song with an English title and lyrics is called "Speed Freak", if that tells you anything. That track somehow sounds kinda like Mainliner gone medieval & martial. Total biker metal brilliance, there!
Belongs in the collection (and in heavy rotation on the playback devices) of anyone who also loves Kadavar, Burning Saviours, Troubled Horse, Horisont, Danava, La Ira De Dios, Scorpion Child, and other current bands bringing these heavy '70s sounds back. Ok, look - you know we love this sort of stuff. And we say Skogen Brinner have got the goods, get it!
Digipack cd or gatefold vinyl, both adorned with band portraits in '70s underground comix style, perfect.
