Yay! We LOVE Aavikko. This would belong at the top of the list even if their name didn't start with two A's. It's been a long four years since Aavikko last entertained us, with 2009's Novo Atlantis, and we've been jonesin' for more of this trio's delightful Finnish synthbeat krautgroove "monkey-jazz" weirdness, or as they put it, "Synthesator Disco Muysic Finland". True, this new release is but a "mini-album", but it'll do. It'll do nicely. Six new tracks, totaling 27 minutes, of spacey synthy discofied burble from another planet - Planet Fun-Fun! Two of the tracks feature some vocal parts, a rarity from this usually-instrumental outfit, they're provided by guests including Swedish singer & "Pop-Sensation" Slobyn. With vocals or without, electronic synthesizer sounds whoosh and swoosh and zap and zip - and form catchy melodies - whilst precision drum beats percolate incessantly & infectiously. Those beats are of course provided by the "human metronome" known as Tomi Leppanen from those other Finnish aQ faves, Circle (he's also in Pharaoh Overlord, K-X-P, and a bunch of other bands too). Meanwhile, Tomi Kosonen and Paul Staufenbiel both man the synths, with Staufenbiel being the band's main songwriter - which is why he gets his bust on the cover, as if he were a classical composer, this bit of hubris merely an example of typical Aavikko absurdity. (Busts of the other two appear on the back cover.) Kosonen also plays the "electronic wind instrument", some kind of a synth-sax, adding an extra jazzy touch. There's some electric guitar on at least one track too, apparently for the first time ever on an Aavikko recording, from another guest, a guy from a death metal band we think (?).
All all it's what we want from Aavikko: quirky, poppy, synth-laden good times!! They mix together Moroder-esque Italo-disco, space age bachelor pad exotica, cosmic experimental electronics, skweee-like video-game funk, faux-classical motifs, and more into these fun-fun tunes that you'll be flipping over repeatedly (both you and the record we mean) as you play it again and again. Or so we assume you will, unless you a have a cold, serious heart of stone. And this might even fix that.
Limited-edition 12" vinyl only. Includes an mp3 download card, however!
Algebra Suicide was an oddball, avant-pop project from the mid-'80s, whose first album actually landed on the legendary noise label RRRecords; but the DIY ethos of Algebra Suicide was clearly an anomaly even for RRR! This outfit was a Chicago-based, husband/wife duo of Lydia Tomkiw and Don Hedeker, with the former being the lyricist and the latter the engineer / songwriter / guitarist. Musically, Algebra Suicide was incredibly primitive with lots of space around the drum machine, synth, bass, and guitars all of which would lend towards a Young Marble Giants reference, with a fragile naivete to these machined click tracks and the chicken-scratch guitars. But on first exposure to Algebra Suicide, you'll quickly realize that it's all about Lydia. Her recitations are a cross between Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Karen Finley delivered in a coy monotone all with a very Midwestern accent, ruminating on death, modern love, clever-as-fuck malaise, urban boredom, and misrecognized mythologies. The band received a considerable amount of press by the late '80s through airplay on WFMU (where else, of course?) and some choice reviews in the Trouser Press guide, but by the early '90s their marriage faltered and the band collapsed. Feminine Squared is a collection of works from all of their albums as well as a compilation track or two. Dark Entries has issued this album with a booklet filled with articles, interviews, and reviews from back in the day as well as a live dvd from a performance in Chicago from 1984.
We went kinda nuts for the first record from these Pacific Northwestern psychedelic shoegaze doom drifters, who were friends of some other aQ faves, Megaton Leviathan (which is how we found out about them in the first place), both groups seems to be sort of doom metal, but each takes that doom and makes it their own, in both cases, rendering it less metal and more sort of blissed out and almost shoegazy, a sort of soft doom psych, or maybe psychedelic doomgaze, regardless of what you call it, we were super psyched to have the band show up at aQ out of the blue, and drop off a brand new record!
Fans of the first one will not be disappointed, but might need some time to adjust to a few things, the sound is still spacey, and psychedelic, heavy and doom, but if anything, it's a whole lot poppier, the opener kicks off with the sort of sound that if all the pieces fell together perfectly, it wouldn't be hard to imagine these guys playing with Queens Of The Stone Age or Alice In Chains! Not that they sound like those bands (but here they sorta do), but they have the same sort of heavy psychedelic hard rocking vibe, with actual singing, soaring choruses, they'd be like "that weird, noisy, tripped out band" that played with so and so. Which is usually the band we end up digging the most anyway. And we have to say, we're loving this, heavy and hooky, like Nadja crossed with Mastodon, but with some Hydrahead style noise rock heft. Hard to explain, but it's one case, where we're happy to sacrifice some of the blown out trippiness for some actual heavy rocking. But fear not, these guys haven't sold out, the second track is a slithery, piano laced near ambient doomfolk creep, all strummed steel strings, deep chantlike vocals, swirling atmospheres, creepy piano melodies, dark and ominous and dramatically brooding. And then we come to "Altars Before The Unsees", and suddenly we're thinking, maybe these guys DID sell out! Only kidding, but it does push the sound of the opening track even further, brooding, stripped down, synths over clean guitars, driving drums, chugging and churning, but measured and muted, it's almost like a meaner, more lo-fi, more experimental and noisy Tool, which is not a bad thing at all, but again, positions these guys at a place where there days of touring in a van, and silkscreening self released cd-rs might be limited, cuz tracks like this definitely have the potential for some serious crossover, and these guys pull it off, without losing what it is that made us dig em in the first place. But it is seriously catchy, and hooky, and it's just a great goddamn song. As is 19 minute closer "Leviathan Smiles", a dark moody brooder as well, but super slow and spare, lots of space, a drowsy softly psychedelic dirge, and again, the raspy voices doomfolk gradually builds into some epic heavy psychedelic rock, that sounds like it might be right at home on a label like Neurot, especially when it explodes partway through into some swirling soaring guitar skree, and chugging mathed out psych metal, but only to slip right back into more loping strummy drift, the last stretch of which almost sounds like some lost Nirvana B side, which is never a bad thing. Killer stuff, a definitely stylistic shift for sure, but one that was definitely hinted at on their first record, and one we're digging BIG time!
The packaging is super DIY fancy, at least the cd-r version, a printed cd-r in a jewel case tray, accompanied by a printed booklet (it's essentially like a cd, minus the case, and the tray card), all housed in a super cool, hand screened sewn canvas pouch, silver ink on black, super striking. And while the tape packaging is no great shakes, Antikythera makes up for it by tacking on a whole extra side of dark ambient atmospheric bonus material, NOT on the cd-r, and as you might imagine, both the cd-r AND the tapes are pretty limited, and when we run out, we won't be able to get more 'til the band is back from tour (when we'll also hopefully get more of their 1st album) so grab one quick!
A Word From Within is the debut from this Indiana duo, just drums, guitar and vocals, these two conjure up gorgeously tranced out black metal minimalism, lengthy tracks that drift from hushed near silent drifts of ethereal guitar shimmer, to pounding, lo-fi, noise drenched black metal dirgery, a cool fusion of abstract haunting slowcore and raw blackened primitivism. The near 13 minute opener spends its first few minutes in some sort of moody musical dreamstate, the guitar weightless, swaddled in near silence, minor key melodies unfurled over long stretches of hushed murmur, before exploding into a furious chaotic onslaught of pounding caveman drums and noisy buzzy guitars, and throat shredding shrieks, the vibe is a sort of raw noise rock meets old school black metal buzz, the whole thing peppered with surprising melodies, that hint at a poppiness in the shadows, the song returning to the more contemplative strum of the opening, but this time with some distorted almost industrial percussion, the sound murky and moody and brooding, and again surprisingly melodic, before finishing off in a blaze of buzzing black frenzy.
The other two 'proper' songs offer up more of the same, what ultimately sounds like black metal played by noise rockers, or hell even the other way around, but it's awesome, dense and intense, raw and urgent and passionate, the sound lo-fi for sure, but noisy and blown out and heavy, droney and tranced out in places, almost mathy and post rocky in others, there's a brief bit of dirgey shamanistic folk, which is far too short at just two minutes, but that bleeds into the 11 minute closer, which begins much like the first track, a brooding folk flecked creep, before exploding into another chaotic sprawl of wildly pummeling noisy raw black energy.
Probably super limited, as these things usually are, so grab one before they're gone for good...
The latest lovely musical missive from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this stunning collaborative effort from two artists we had never heard before, Christophe Bailleau and Julien Demoulin, who create billowing sprawls of softly swirling synth shimmer percolating melodic glimmer. Liquid, languid expanses of electronic flecked kosmische synthscapery, equal parts psychedelic space out, drifty new age ambience, and hushed atmospheric mesmer.
The tracks range from pastoral and melancholic, to haunting and ghostlike, the sounds warm and organic one minute, dark, rumbling and gristly the next, drifting moodily from prismatic sun dappled dreaminess, to dark contemplative mesmer, long stretches cast in shadow, that move gradually into the light, blossoming into lush, layered beauty. So nice.
Like all Time Released Sound releases, there are two versions, this is the super limited Deluxe edition, which is limited to just 100 copies, and is housed in an 8" x 5.5" machine sewn booklet, each booklet is made from an antique negative still, with all sorts of original artwork sewn into the pages of the booklet, diagrams, drawings, wall paper and other antique papers. Every book is hand stamped, drawn on, scribbled in, and beautifully personalized. The whole thing packaged in a hand stamped translucent envelope.
The latest lovely musical missive from local label Time Released Sound comes in the form of this stunning collaborative effort from two artists we had never heard before, Christophe Bailleau and Julien Demoulin, who create billowing sprawls of softly swirling synth shimmer percolating melodic glimmer. Liquid, languid expanses of electronic flecked kosmische synthscapery, equal parts psychedelic space out, drifty new age ambience, and hushed atmospheric mesmer.
The tracks range from pastoral and melancholic, to haunting and ghostlike, the sounds warm and organic one minute, dark, rumbling and gristly the next, drifting moodily from prismatic sun dappled dreaminess, to dark contemplative mesmer, long stretches cast in shadow, that move gradually into the light, blossoming into lush, layered beauty. So nice.
Like all Time Released Sound releases, there are two versions, this is the more nice priced, slightly less limited version, which houses the cd in a hand stamped printed envelope/sleeve, with a printed cardstock insert.
We had never heard of Ron Berry before, but Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin has unearthed two psychedelic space synth gems from this unsung synth pioneer. Building his own synths, sequencers and drum machines, Berry created two albums of dreamy kosmische synthscapery, beholden to folks like Klaus Schulze and JD Emmanuel, but also predicting much of the new synth music coming out today.
A Voice In The Wilderness was record number two from Berry, originally released in 1983, and is a sprawling two part, 44 minute cosmic synth epic, which starts off like some mysterious planetarium show, the soundtrack to the birth of the universe, all swirling shimmers, and deep rumbling pulsations, a slow build from ark to light, the sound eventually transforming into a prismatic tranquility, very cinematic, lush and layered and darkly dramatic, the first side/track moving through multiple movements, brooding and hushed one minute, propulsive and almost krautrocky the next, the rhythms when they surface skeletal and skittery, with a definite Kraftwerk / Tangerine Dream vibe, but most of the first side spent in spaced out drift mode.
The second half/side starts of similarly, moody minimal drift, sun dappled and dreamlike, slowly fading to near silence, a stretch of barely there thrum and distant pulses, what sound like faux field recordings, eventually erupting into a Geiger counter like electronic freak out, swirling and percussive, only to slip right back into that whispery drift, this time laced with subtle percussion, only to slowly build to a dreamy, melancholy drift of soaring softly swirling synths, moody minor key melodies, spare skittery rhythms, a laid back, electro-kraut synth pop that gradually fades into a soft psychedelic shimmer. Gorgeous stuff, and absolutely essential for fans of early minimal synth music for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
We had never heard of Ron Berry before, but Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin has unearthed two psychedelic space synth gems from this unsung synth pioneer. Building his own synths, sequencers and drum machines, Berry created two albums of dreamy kosmische synthscapery, beholden to folks like Klaus Schulze and JD Emmanuel, but also predicting much of the new synth music coming out today.
1982's Where Dark Forces Meet weaves a lush, ominous sprawl of deep cosmic drones, and percolating synth melodies, with playful pulsing poppiness, check out the opener "Sea Of Tranquility", which broods and drifts ominously for the first few minutes before the drum machines surface, and the song is transformed into a weird sort of electro-synth groove, but which soon blossoms into something much more dreamy and blissfully psychedelic, which is basically Berry's MO here, unfurling gorgeous hazy shimmers, and soft focus sonic ripples, tranquil sprawls of softly pulsating synths, occasionally peppered with motorik rhythms. The best moments for us are where the rhythms are abandoned, leaving just gauzy celestial drifts, like the glimmering sonic starfield of the title track, or the moody, minor key drift of "View From A Bedsit Window", which almost sounds like some lost video game music. Gorgeous stuff, and absolutely essential for fans of early minimal synth music for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
The latest Dean Blunt affliction, which is what he calls his music, is not what you might have been expecting. If in the past we've been prone to describe the afflictions of the artist formerly known as Hype Williams as drug music, then The Redeemer is the come down. At times it casts a harsh light on reality, but always in a beautiful, revelatory kind of way - like when the cold glow of day comes streaming through the drawn curtains. As with Black Is Beautiful (2012, Hyperdub), Blunt's eclectic-electric collaboration with cohort Inga Copeland, each track here flows into the next, so much so that pulling one from the line up would throw the whole thing out of wack (or at least come across like a major musical party foul). If nothing else, the dude knows the power of the segue and how to work you in and out of moods. Redeemer takes what Blunt's learned in the British underground club scene of dub and grime that informed his earlier work (or afflictions, if you prefer) but ditches the smoked-out hissy/buzzy beats in favor of vibrant strings, plucked harps, just a whisp of horn here and there, gentle wave undulations, and choir-like vocals. The weirdness of his beats have been forsaken for traditional rock kick drums. Does this mean that the provocateur known for playing live at lethal volumes, staging ruses, and comparing himself to Steve Jobs (before Kanye West!) has mellowed out and matured? Probably not. The opening track here, a synthesized string quartet, is colored with false rap bravado by calling it, "I Run New York." And one crucial inclusion suggests something more than mellowing is at play. Recurring answering machine messages (who still has an answering machine?) from a woman who is in the process of ending a relationship align with "Pedigree", in which Blunt sings in his croaky baritone, "Call me when your heart is empty. Happy we can still be friends." So perhaps the dude is just hella sad. After all, only two songs � "Demon" and "Imperial Gold", feature female vocals, and neither are attributed to Inga. Then again, there are no credits on The Redeemer, there isn't even a title on the cover � just two hands, held palm to palm as if praying or pleading. But is Inga gone forever? Is that her wispy voice on "Imperial Gold". Isn't Inga known for being a master of vocal imitation? Are they fucking with us again? That's reason enough alone to consider viewing this record on the same snarky anti-art (specifically anti-hip-hop) level as previous releases but now Blunt is taking on the act of making music itself. Or maybe he's just really sad. In any case, The Redeemer is gorgeously produced and wonderful to just give yourself over to.
It's been eight long years since we last heard from this much loved but mysterious electronic duo and every new release always seem to bring a lot of fanfare and debate. It's always a difficult proposition to have a highly anticipated release from a band with a devoted, perhaps even cultish, following, as it seems that everyone wants it to sound different enough from their classic sound yet still retain the same qualities that endeared you to that band in the first place. And of course, if it leans too close to either side of that spectrum, division occurs. Folks either find comfort in the familiar, or are completely indifferent. Or are thrilled by the new direction, or angered by it. Case in point, the last My Bloody Valentine record.
Boards of Canada have never deviated much from what they're best at: well composed and structured melodies that have a worn, warm and warbled sense of nostalgia. Aged library sounds, abstract organic design and educational nature film scores were often the heart of the bands reference points. On 2005's Campfire Phases they added more folk music atmospheres with delicate guitar work, but it wasn't significantly different from their most heralded and beloved release 1998's Music Has The Right To Children. Both records even had similar cover art, which of course had some fans crying foul!
So it's 2013 and we finally have a brand new record and it's definitely their most mature and complex record to date. We're also happy to report that it's fast becoming one of our favorite releases this year. While it has certain touchstones that make it sound distinctly like a BoC record, the feel overall is much darker, tense and moodier, reading like a score to some environmental science fiction film like Idaho Transfer or Phase IV (or more recently, Beyond The Black Rainbow!). Just check out some of the song titles: "Reach For the Dead", "Cold Earth", "Sick Times", "Come To Dust". Even the album title and the cover shot (of San Francisco, taken from the Alameda Naval Shipyards) gives off a Soylent Green vibe. The nostalgic quality that permeates the band's sound has a more toxic feel this time around too, as if hearkening back to a place now poisoned, a kind of daylight horror dread.
The opening track, "Gemini" starts out with a crackly filmstrip fanfare like from some old seventies educational film, and that sort of faded, gristly, sci-fi vibe pervades throughout the first track, a dark, blurred, fuzzy field of pulsing synths and ominous atmospheres, it's immediately evident, that the new BoC is a much darker beast than the group who brought us the pastoral, autumnal Music Has The Right To Children. Even when the second track kicks in, the sound remains shadowy and sinister, the pulsing rhythm wreathed in a field of crackle. The sound does eventually lighten a bit, processed voices drift in (reminding us of The Conet Project!), rumbling bass melodies surface from below, until eventually some of the old BoC returns, big beats, a churning propulsive rhythm, locked into a disjointed, but weirdly hypnotic groove. But almost as soon as it gets going, the track ends, leading directly into another haunting cinematic sprawl of swirling synths, and pulsating melodies, sounding like an alternate soundtrack to the aforementioned recent throwback surreal sci-fi art house film Beyond The Black Rainbow, conjuring up all sorts of lysergic images and psychedelically induced fever dreams. And so it goes, BoC fusing the old loping, meandering beat driven dreaminess, to something a shade darker. Some tracks locked into tranced out smoldering grooves, draped in chiming softly distorted melodies, others, brooding menacingly, some peppered with creepy processed voices, only adding to the seventies creepy sci-fi/horror flick vibe, and still others blossoming into time-lapse slow motion sprawling expanses of experimental rhythmic textures, shifting dreamily, tonal colors bleeding into each other, woozily prismatic, like the music from some old crumbling, planetarium show. While the old BoC sound surfaces throughout, Tomorrow's Harvest, definitely exists in a much bleaker soundworld, where Tomorrow's Harvest is perhaps meant as a cautionary tale, these sounds the score to a future world scorched and barren, a world of faded memories of what once was, and what could have been, had it not all gone terribly wrong...
Another new release on Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin (along with Moevot, Starlite Coffins, Rich Jacobs and more on this week's list!), this one from new to us Oakland outfit Bre'r, who traffics in the sort of sound we can't ever seem to get enough of, sun dappled and dusty expanses of hazy drift, washed out and softly psychedelic, faded and wreathed in a sort of soft focus gauze, sounding a little like Stars Of The Lid recorded By Tim Hecker, or something that might end up on Time Released Sound, pastoral smoldering drifts of reverbed guitars, floating above soft swirls of rumbling drones and roiling soft noise shimmer, meditative and tranquil, darkly contemplative, blissfully burnt zoner drift of the highest order, the perfect late night soundtrack, the ideal headphone score for a lonely wander through the empty streets of some mysterious city, lush and lovely, but with just a hint of sinister sonic shadow. Gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
For this latest full length from psych rock legend Brother JT, who now finds himself on the venerable Thrill Jockey label, we give up the floor to aQ pal Matthew Crain, self described "#1 Harvey Milk Fan", and serious psych-head to boot, who has MUCH to say about BJT's latest psychedelic missive, and delivers a rambling demented genius stream of consciousness review, that is quite possibly more freaky and psychedelic than the record itself! Take it away Matthew...
The Svelteness of Boogietude is John Terlesky's, eight (!!) full length album, delivered as always via his psychedelic ego Brother JT. To describe Boogietude, we must first say what it does.
It steals your last sip of coffee.
It says "stink of dynamite."
It grows two inches overnight in an empty glass.
It doesn't - and this is key - footnote its poundcake recipe.
Tracks four, five and six are the core, so let's start with number four, "Muffintop": A geriatric oroborus of a hoaky Wurlitzer beat keeps gulping-and-swallowing itself under a stoned Roger McGuinn and his band of replica doppelgangers all elbow-to-elbow in a mirrored booth sitting stock-still, the better to "get down" on a frothy, vibrato-tinged, hammer-on-y, dropped-D major/minor/modal Major Matt Mattel "Indian/Sufi" blues riff guaranteed to get Grace Slick wet - no, we're not stoned, we're writing this while listening to the song and under its influence, a dense music demanding a dense language - a quiet, "shy" lick loving the prayer beads and flowers hung around its neck, loving its long hair and especially its bangs in its eyes, smiling despite its chipped front tooth, unsure how to spell "Secobarbital" but as rich and drunk as a lord and always on the verge of feeding back (and how it sizzles when it spills lickably over between the verses - Steve Miller's synthesizer never sounded so good and fat and Moog-y), while Frank Zappa (of all people!), wearing the face of Barry White after a long night in Vegas, pushes the wad of burnt weenie sandwich to one side of his mouth and, between puffs off the Winston in the other side, takes the stick of Am9sus11b5 out of his ass and, for now and all time, teaspoons it into Muffintop's ear about being so bad in heat, baby, it hurts can't you hear me crying in the alley for your oo! and your oh! and your uh-huh! and your big yowza-yowza...
Okay, press Pause, because we want to be clear about one thing: The Byrds, The Mothers, Steve Miller, Golden Earring - young JT never forgot any of the great '60s and '70s musicians he listened to over the truck radio while laying on the floorboard with his shirt off. He has a photographic ear, as illustrated on track five, "Be A."
This Bruder von einem anderen Planeten gets what he wants on this one (for that matter, so do you), and just as you're pulling up out of your own sticky buttprint on the naugahyde car seat and looking around for your skirt and listening for spies whispering into their walkie-talkies on the other side of the lean-to, eager to get out of this hot box and into some fresh air, here comes "Be A" in which JT, channeling Tom Fogerty the day he sat in with The Mamas and The Papas to try to get to the heart of Herman's Hermits, strums a Rickenbacker through a Vox AC-30, warm-glowing tubes, gold lattice on its chocolate grill, and reminds himself/themselves of what got/didn't get him/them where he/they are/were today - not trying to sound like The Kinks, and by being everything you are and everything you are not (but don't forget that not every skin you try on will fit) - because, hey, everybody on this Earth (or at least in JT's part of Pennsylvania with its glorious history of endless, mindless toil in steel, coal, slate mining, barge pulling, and packing boxes of crayons); everybody gets sanded down to nothing; ergo, don't aid your own destruction by sabotaging yourself; in other words, do like JT: "Be a gypsy!/Be tipsy!/Be Nipsy Russell if you please!"
Perseverance, courage and self-confidence are important themes throughout this record. But its idee fixe, well... here's track six, "Sweatpants."
Yes, that's that old Wurlitzer riff again trying to gum us to death, but this time it has brought along its new best friends, the Six Million Dollar Man's boop-boop-boop when he zeroes in on a target, a rubber ducky going squeak-squeak-squeak, and a Casio's big yellow fuzzy bass note that can do one thing better than anybody else in this world and that is to run its arm down to the bottom of a galvanized bucket of cold cherry Jello and begin snapping its fingers, the snapping causing moist explosions to bubble up and become a Stratocaster-y riff splattering here and there, the riff so phase-shifted and its single coil so split that what we got here, Luke, as we see it, is not a failure to communicate but a dog about to choke on its choke-chain trying to get out of its cage. Which is merely the mirror of what's happening this very moment in the Locus Ceruleus (the dreaming part of the brain) of this Funkenstein that ought to tape that thing to his leg; honestly!; c'mon, by now everybody knows what Tommy James and The Shondells' song is on his mind (the crimson, the clover, the Yeeeeeaaaah! Sha-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah!) of this Gram Parsons swooning over his big fat sweatystcky Aretha, this one-man mighty cloud of joy that's got to got to sing about that "jam-and-jelly top" and those sweatpants: "It's what you're showin/It's what we're knowin/Do I see a camel toe in those sweatpants?"
So. While The Spirit of Frank Marino gets all lost in the supermarket of the teaches of peaches, we, no shoddy Mahogany Rush ourself, return to track three, "T. Rex Blues," and pop a chubby over this riff that sounds like a foghorn run through a Big Muff: a hook with a capital H, a call to arms despite being a goof on "Walk This Way" joined at the hip with a little A-minor filler from "Stairway to Heaven." In our book, fuzz is a primary color and Rex's riff is alizarin red-blood, we're talking about here, people: blood quickened and about to burst. The song's blobby, purple-orange, lava lamp verses go up and down like S curves (like an accountant's nylon socks as he chats up Sasha Grey at the Adult Movie Awards). But maybe it isn't what it seems to be - a knockout tribute to the late Marc Bolan - but is really a glimpse behind the facade of "rock star," because the ambiguous "you" the singer keeps singing to may actually be himself, in which case it's a demon - so you can see what a battle JT's in for; I mean, what are we to make of "Trippin down the lane/About to blow out my brain/It's marvelous magnifico"?
An ode to hallucinogens? A portrait of desperation thanks to the suddenly sarcastic "magnifico"? As for the guitar solo on "Sweatpants," it's like Eddie Van Halen's on "Running With The Devil": its hair is parted on the side, sprayed and blow-dried in place, its on its best behavior, a very nice young solo with a corsage pinned to its lapel and no danger of it keeping Lula out past curfew or of wrecking the family car. But don't be fooled: This is the one Mama warned you about: This solo only hints at what comes out of JT when he's onstage, and his eyes roll back in his head a la Son House and his head begins bobbling side to side, and he starts pouring it out: so what if there's a handful of the most grim, miserable men, drunk in their tank tops, there for a cheap adventure and to try to obliterate the fact that very soon, in a few hours, even, they will get up off their dirty mattresses and return to driving their forklift back and forth across the warehouse, to taking their place in the line at the trencher plant to make adjustments and corrections and perform specific duties in vaults and manholes, and if they ever once think of "musicians" or "artists" it is with disdain because such people don't "work": he pours out his pearls for them.
From the moment we heard this guy play live, we've been wanting to say something, and we see no reason to hold back: John Terlesky is one of the most passionate singers and guitar players we've ever heard - right up there with Creston Spiers of Harvey Milk. Their styles are exact opposites. But, like Mr. Spiers, Mr. Terlesky is (1) inspired, (2) fearless, (3) he puts it to you like nobody else, (4) he goes out and he stays out, and (5) after the song's over, drenched in sweat, he steps up to the mike and whispers, "Thank you."
So what about the other nine songs? They oscillate between sweet ballads (imagine Robert Burns setting his poems to music) and smart, funny psych-garage tunes (imagine Rev. Howard Finster setting his glass house on fire). Brother JT is a Nasty Dog, A Funky King, a preacher that never went to school to "learn to be a preacher" - he was called, and, rude and shoeless, he answered his god's summons. The Svelteness Of Boogietude is his Sermon on the Mount: Lotta good stuff here to live by - if you take it to heart.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
We've long been fans of this mysterious outfit from Indiana, whose witchy blackened atmospheric black doom doesn't sound so much Midwestern as it does like it was conjured up from some other realm, via some mysterious ritual that involves much bloodletting, torches, robes, goats, a full moon, and probably some virgins, but as we mentioned in our review of record number two, Charnel House's sound seems to gradually be growing more atmospheric and witchy, and less overtly metallic. The debut was a murky muddy sprawl of doomy riffage, noise drenched creep, and furious blasting blackness, but even back then the haunting ethereal vocals gave the music a seriously witchy, ritualistic vibe, and if anything, that sounds has moved completely to the fore on Black Blood, just check out the opening track, which pairs buzzing sinewy bass and loping minimal drumming, to very minimal guitars, no riffing or buzzing really, more sort of swirling and atmospheric, with everything dropping out occasionally, leaving just those hazy vocal incantations, and a skeletal rhythmic backdrop, and when the sound does shift into blasting blackness, the production is so strange, that it doesn't even really sound heavy, or necessarily black metal, instead, it's a strangely frenzied rapid fire skittery blast, none of the music changes, just the drums, blasting lo-fi beneath the wraithlike vocals, and gauzy atmospheric drifts, freaky and far out and super cool.
Here's where we might say, and so goes the rest of the record, and while much of the rest of the record does involve the same elements, the structures and arrangements are all over the place. "Atavism" launches immediately into a pounding, blasting, noise rock churn, but there seem to be no guitars, just buzzing bass, and those ever present witchy vocals, it's a super strange combo, and again, the production is bizarre, brittle, space-y, we're reminded at times of Aluk Todolo for sure, the same sort of occult rock vibe, but Charnel House are much more chaotic, a little ramshackle, lurching from chaotic noise rock crush ("Of The Sea") that minus those vocals, could be some weird band on Load, to wild chaotic drum heavy blowouts like "When You Become", that sound a bit like a dialed down Lightning Bolt performing some sort of arcane sonic ritual, to the almost post rock meander of "Sewn Shut", the haunting spectral vocals tying them all together into some sort of otherworldly blackened avant psychedelic occult rock ritual, that is deeply and darkly mesmerizing.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!! Beautifully silkscreened fold over sleeves, the back half revealing the lp inside, each one hand numbered, includes a download code as well!
Perfect! Who better to do the soundtrack to a film about people running around in circle, than, of course, Finland's masters of repetitive hypno-rock, Circle?? Six Day Run is a short film made by Finnish documentarian Mika Taanila, all about something called "The Self-Transcendence Six Day Race", which takes place every year in the vicinity of New York City. No, we'd never heard of it either, but we'd be curious to see the movie sometime and find out more about this extreme endurance running event and the presumably equally extreme people who decide to compete in it. Sleeping as little as possible, the runners have six days to try and log the most miles around a paved one-mile loop in a park (Flushing Meadows, Queens). Apparently it's a tradition dating back to the 1870s! So it's sorta like an ultra-marathon run on a treadmill, running and running and never really getting anywhere (except maybe somewhere deep within/without yourself). You can check out the YouTube trailer for the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqTrJVMZnZE.
Of course, when we first heard about this, we imagined that the runners were running in, like, a ten foot diameter circle for the six days, with Circle playing in the middle the whole time, wouldn't that be cool?
The album contains six tracks, one for each day of the race. It starts off with the upbeat "Day One", with one of Circle's usual motorik rhythms in motion from the get-go, augmented with handclap/whipcrack sounds, sounding bright and jaunty, the sort of thing that in the headphones of a runner might help energize and encourage them, without making 'em burst into a sprint or anything, allowing them to pace themselves. On "Day Two", though, things get a bit darker and hazier, the music more nervous and pensive sounding, some sense of doubt creeping in: "Can I do this? Why AM I doing this?" one imagines the runners thinking as their bodies begin to grow weary. For those of us merely sitting still at home, though, it's another atmospheric and incessantly rhythmic Circle track, full of lovely floating tones and drones. And so it goes, each track/day offering moments of gauzey, gossamer beauty as well as constant, churning, endless rhythms. Definitely trance-inducing, as Circle so often is - and as the act of running in a circle for six days straight also must be, indeed HAS to be, if one were to ever hope to get through it!
Circle's music here gets at the intensity of the Six Day runners' extreme test of their own stamina physical and willpower, and yes also the transcendent quality of the experience, being at times both dense and exhausting, and also triumphantly airy and uplifting. And it's really some of the most straight-up "circular" Circle music we've heard from them in a while. Because it's a soundtrack, this album is all-instrumental, without any detours - none of the absurd, operatic vocal antics, no ironic faux-metal moves. Not that we don't love those common aspects of Circle, but this focuses pretty tightly on the repetition thing, and of course does it well. It's got a bit of an early '80s krauty/new age vibe, prominent use of synths reminding us a bit of recent works by Life Coach and Emeralds, and harking back of course to Michael Rother and Harmonia.
Good thing the filmmaker was Finnish, as Circle are certainly THEE obvious, best choice to make this soundtrack, one that is makes for a nicely trancey, energetically meditative (is that an oxymoron?) listen in the comfort of home too, for all of us armchair joggers, watching the record spin rather than running in circles ourselves. Although, one could also get up and clean the house, this would be good music for a task like that too!
The first volume, collecting the early, long out of print works of this seminal eighties indie pop combo, was originally released in the beginning of 2012, as a five lp box set for Record Store Day. The box quickly went out of print, but the triple cd version surfaced soon after and immediately, and ever since, became what might be the most regularly listened to record in the shop. Those three Cleaners From Venus albums, 1981's Blow Away Your Troubles, 1982's On Any Normal Monday and Midnight Cleaners, also from 1982, are in heavy rotation, pretty much everyone at aQ, customers too we're guessing, know those albums by heart, backwards and forwards, and the crazy thing is, somehow, we're still not sick of them. And we can tell you right now, when we first heard about this Cleaners From Venus reissue campaign, the only thing more exciting than the impending release of those first three albums, was that it was just volume one, which meant to us, even way back then, that there was a second volume coming. And finally, here it is!
And it's not surprisingly, just as good as the first set, sonically, songwriting, everything, perfectly taking up right where the first volume left off, a sprawling collections of homebrewed outsider indie pop, fuzzy, jangly, catchy, quirky, lo-fi, this collection spanning the years 1983-1985 for the three proper albums included, but this time around there's a bonus disc of early Cleaners jams, and some Pre-Cleaners tracks as well, going all the way back to 1967!! Wow.
Before we get to the records themselves, we figured we oughta give everyone a refresher on the band itself, its history and influence, and we probably can't say it any better than we already did in our review of Volume 1:
Bandleader Martin Newell, who was bitter after some bad record label experiences with his previous band, became obsessed with doing everything himself (a real DIY band for sure), which meant recording records on a 4 track in his bedroom, dubbing the tapes himself, and releasing those tapes in super limited editions, of course distributed by Newell himself, which probably has a lot do with why these guys didn't get more attention than they did. But masterful pop music like this with such incredible songwriting was bound to work its way to the surface, and this stuff did manage to make its way into the ears of obsessive pop nerds, and quickly attained a cultlike status, and for good reason. Listening to this stuff now, it's easy to hear what a huge influence these guys had, and that their lo-fi pop was years ahead of groups like Ariel Pink, who would trawl the same sonic territory, albeit a bit more ironically. Jangly outsider pop, with strange homebrewed production weirdness, bizarre edits, twisted little intros and outros, brief snippets of conversations, sudden fade outs, that inexplicably fade right back in, the programmed drums, gorgeous vocal harmonies, hooks galore, definitely a product of the early '80s, with a different production and a less skewed take on pop, it's not hard to imagine this stuff on the radio or on MTV alongside groups like the Style Council or Human League or any of the other bands popular at the time, but Newell's Cleaners had it's own twisted take on the sound of the time, channeling Elvis Costello, XTC and the rest, but transforming that commercial pop sound into something much more personal and urgent, and without any restrictions, or any hopes of mainstream popularity, Newell never shied away from trying anything, no matter how weird it may have seemed, and the results definitely speak for themselves.
There might not be too much point in going through these records one by one, or track by track, all three of the albums proper fall so close chronologically to the first set, that it's easy to imagine these having been bundled with the first volume for a massive seven disc set, and thus, sonically, many of these tracks sound like they could have been plucked from any of those records on the first set, which then got us wondering if the dates of the records might not even necessarily correlate with the songs' creations. As in perhaps Newell, like most obsessive home recorders, just amassed a huge collection of songs, recording day and night, stacks of tapes all over the house, recording more and more and more, only then later, gathering up songs and assembling them into 'albums', which really seems much more likely, especially listening to some of the tracks here on the second volume.
We'd focus on some of the gems here, but there are literally SO many. That are SO catchy. But if you doubt, check out the first sound sample below, right out of the gate, we're in lo-fi jangle pop bliss, "Renee (Who's Driving Your Car)" is so catchy, the recording so warm and fuzzy, the vocals all echoey, hooks galore, lo-fi, but still lush and psychedelic and so perfectly poppy. And that track basically sets things in motion, with song after song of crazy catchy jangle, fuzzy new wave-y poppiness, and home brewed bedroom folk. Not to mention plenty of damaged and demented mad scientist WTF fractured pop weirdness, all perfectly balanced, careening madly from one to the other, some lush bit of balladry, leading into a bizarre tape experiment leading into some super rocking classic sounding power pop leading into some woozy new wave and on and on it goes. We can't help but be reminded of Guided By Voices, besides sharing a similar aesthetic, being heavily beholden to classic British pop, having a penchant for serious WTF pop moments, but yet being capable of conjuring up impossibly catchy hooks, both groups have a huge amount of songs, and often recycle melodies, so much so that you can hear one song, and be convinced you've heard it before, but only because it shares certain elements with another song you're heard a million times. But that shared DNA does not dilute the power or originality of these songs at all, just the opposite, if anything it links them all together, into a strangely insular soundworld that is all Newells', a world in which Cleaners From Venus could do no wrong,s and could do anything they wanted. Which is exactly what they did. So goddamn great. And destined to become, like Volume 1, another of the most played records in the store! At least until volume THREE!!!
Comes packaged in a ten panel fold out digipak style sleeve, with a huge booklet, tons of liner notes, rare photos, and really great and amusing notes about the tracks on the fourth disc of early archival material!
The final missive / swansong from this long running Bay Area emo/screamo outfit, and like the records we've reviewed before from these guys, it's another dense, mathy, moody, super heavy, crazy catchy, intricate and emotional blast of post hardcore heaviness/hookiness that KILLS, and once again has us wondering why they weren't way more huge. And while much of the ferocious energy of their early releases is still present, there definitely seems to be a more pronounced pop/melodic element. Even on tracks like "Cold Rain", it's mostly just the shrieked vox that make this screamo or emo, otherwise, it's more some sort of super poppy crazy catchy post punk, with a main guitar hook that kills, and a bouncy crunchy main riff that would be just as at home in a proper pop song. And while these guys always had a pop element, this time around, they've cranked the pop through the roof, and that poppiness is literally all over the place, which makes it even more of a tragedy that this is the last we'll hear from these guys. And sure there are some tracks that are way more rocking and punky, furious and fierce, but even at their most aggro, the sound is shot through with a poppiness they just can't seem to shrug off, but who says they even want too, the combination of shrieked chaotic heaviness, lilting melodies, weird electronics, occasional piano, organ, driving rhythms, and hooks galore, seriously tough to beat. So catchy and crunchy and heavy and so goddamn good. RIP Comadre.
Vinyl version comes in a thick gatefold sleeve, pressed on 180 gram wax, with a big 12" x 12" booklet, the cd version in a digipak.
Date Palms make their long awaited Thrill Jockey debut and we couldn't imagine a better way to celebrate the Summer Solstice than with this Oakland outfit's sun scorched desert ragas. The band headed by Marielle Jakobsons and Gregg Kowalsky have expanded their sound since their last release on Mexican Summer, adding flute and guitars (both pedal steel and electric) to the mix of violin, keys, tambora and bass. This was recorded in one long session last year during the solar eclipse, and it has the feel of shimmering sky worship as it finds kinship with the earth along an arid expansive plain. In the three part "Yuba Source" suite that makes up the bulk of the first half of the album, the tamboura and keys buzz in a cloudy atmosphere while the violin and pedal steel soar above, the loping basslines keeping everything grounded but moving, building to a heavily dense concentration of sound. On other tracks, Kowalsky's electric piano riffs dominate reminding us of Brightblack Morning Light or Bruce Palmer, bringing spiritual jazz vibrations to a kaleidoscopic core. Prismatic drones and flute trills simmer like sounds of night lit by flickering campfires, with bass tones like falling stars, plummeting earthward with dramatic emphasis. "Night Riding the Skyline", the longest track on the second half of the record, brings in scorched acid guitar and plodding drum machine rhythms for a distant night journey into the sand dunes. Probably their most complexly composed and deepest record to date, each song connected to each other, but remaining distinct and distinctive on their own. Highly Recommended!
The lp for a limited time comes on dusted pink vinyl, black vinyl after that and always with a download card.
Album number two from these local lads and the term "sophomore slump" has clearly never entered into their lexicon. Sunbather is an enormous slab of post-rock tinged black metal (or black metal tinged post-rock??) that expands and improves upon everything that made Roads to Judah such a buzzed about debut. Imagine Godspeed! You Black Emperor in a blender with Filosofem-era Burzum and you might get an idea. Or try and picture Ihsahn circa In the Nightside Eclipse howling over classic Smiths or U2 at a hyperspeed 666rpm and you might come even closer. The end result is like a far more furious Alcest (Neige even pops up to provide a bit of spoken word on one of the album's several ethereal interlude tracks). But what really makes Sunbather such a success is how it takes these myriad influences and melds them together so seamlessly. Not a moment of it sounds forced or contrived. The production is perfect. The guitars are an immense wall of grinding shimmering beauty. The drums a precise and deadly frenzy. The vocals an anguished wail, wonderfully at odds with the album's minimal luscious pink cover art. Sunbather is like hearing an emerging genre finally coming into its own. Deafheaven aren't the only band to combine post-rock and black metal, but they might be the first band to make it sound like something entirely new, but entirely natural at the same time.
Vinyl version, with a nice die-cut cover, includes bonus track not on cd (which we don't have yet anyway).
The latest from DJ Female Convict Scorpion comes in the form of this SUPER limited cassette, one that requires some work on the part of the listener to truly enjoy, or at least enjoy as the artist intended. That artist being Josh Pollock, member of psychedelic space rockers 3 Leafs and weirdo noisescapers White Pee, among others, but as DJ Female Convict Scorpion, he concocts lush landscapes of cinematic sound, purloining various bits from other songs, and movies, playing some bits himself, a lo-fi DJ Shadow of sorts, whose past outings have blown our minds and been hugely popular around here. This new one looks to be no different, the rub this time around being, that BOTH sides of the cassette are meant to be played simultaneously, a la Zaireeka or something. So you have several options, the first of course means buying two tapes, and playing them on two tape players, the second is buying just one tape, and using the link that comes with the tape to play the other side on your computer, while you play the first side on your tape player. Phew! A third option, is to attend the upcoming debut performance of Los Balls Del Norte, happening across the street at Lost Weekend, during which, both sides will be played, accompanied by a special film created just for the occasion. More info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/147509788771228/?fref=ts
And finally, one last option, one that isn't mutually exclusive, which is to listen to each side of the tape on its own. We did, and both sides sound great, killer breakbeats, shifting textures, mysterious voices, movie samples, vocal snippets, dizzying sonic collages that unwind like psychedelic krautrock grooves and funky heavy soul breakdowns, dreamy lullabies sung in other languages, banging gongs, shimmering FX, woozy slowed down basslines, soft symphonic swirls, muted ambient murk, loose free jazz drum freakouts, squiggly theremin like melodies, rumbling crumbling distorted low end, new wave-y electronics, swirling cosmic synths, and more more more more more!
But what does it sound like all together? A seriously warped psychedelic sonic headtrip. Check out the sample, that's a little snippet of the two sides in perfect sync, which ultimately they never will be, which is part of the joy, every listen the sounds will shift, and interact differently, a perpetually unique recording, in fact, essentially MULTIPLE recordings, all of them super cool, one side, both sides, one side started 5 minutes in, 10 minutes, hell, play one backwards, every variation is its own special warped lysergic soundworld to get lost in, over and over and over and over...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
We first discovered the awesomely named Drug Honkey a few years back, via their 2008 record Death Dub. And at the time, before having actually heard it, or then, we figured it was probably too much to hope for, that a band called Drug Honkey would actually be good, and not some dumb bad band inside joke, and that a record by said band, called Death Dub, would and/or could actually deliver on the promise of a title like that. Dubbed out death metal? Metallic dub? Some sort of blackened dubbed out weirdness? Well, happy to say we needn't have doubted, these Chicago experimental drug doom space psych heavies did not disappoint, that record a churning morass of noise drenched, dubbed out blackened heaviness, equal parts droned out, pounding almost-industrial crush, woozy, sludge-y slo-mo creep, and crumbling distorto-dub noise rock weirdness. Imagine the Butthole Surfers via Godflesh via the Scientist via Eyehategod. Noisy, druggy, damaged, super intense, and blown out, and heavily psychedelic, the vocals only adding to the WTF level, a super harsh demonic bellow one second, a weird high pitched yelp the next, the vocals bleeding into the sounds around them, and all of those sounds then doused in FX and super processed, into some seriously heady heaviness.
We were never able to get enough copies to review/list, so when we discovered there was a new Drug Honkey,
full length number four if you're keeping track, we knew we had to get copies, and had a feeling it was probably gonna have to be Record Of The Week. And once again, Drug Honkey do not disappoint, if anything, Ghost In The Fire is like Death Dub part two, but if anything, everything we loved about Death Dub has been cranked up even more this time around, it's heavier, slower, dubbier, more tripped out, the production is MASSIVE, the sound filthy and crumbling and blown out, the band unfurling a loping, lumbering super psychedelic sludge-dub that once again sounds a bit like the Buttholes jamming with Godflesh, which is in fact a very very good thing.
Opening with a blast of detuned guitar churn, a pounding motorik rhythm, chiming distorted guitar melodies, looped and lurching, super tranced out and hypnotic, the vocals a bellowy demonic belch, that gets doused in FX and like much of the surrounding sounds, sometimes slows down to a grunting gurgle, other times splinters into weird swirling shards of sound, the music too, subtly dubbed out, but for the most part, roiling and churning relentlessly, the sort of super heavy psych-sludge trance-out, that could easily have stretched out for another 45 minutes and made for a super sweet single track drone-sludge epic.
But these guys have more sonic filth up their sleeves. The title track even slower, and dubbier, the guitars tarpit thick, the riffing spread out over a plodding death march rhythm, the vocals a throat shredding howl, and again, accompanied by various other processed voices, slowed down, sped up, doused in distortion, pitch shifted, like some sort of drugged out demonic choir, all over swirls of gristly effects, and crumbling distorted effects, and all driven by the group's impossibly dense chugging doom-sludge dirge, slipping from driving almost headbangable 16rpm demonic deathdub groove, to fractured, fucked up, psychedelic black-noise drift, but more often than not fusing the two into some seriously unholy union.
Some tracks are way more 'dubby' than others, like "Weight Of The World" which creeps and slithers, the guitars pushed into the background, laying down a softly undulating backdrop of droning rumble, over which a monstrous rhythm, pounds away in slow motion, beneath streaks of soaring fragmented high end melody, and some seriously fucked up and freaky vocals, lots of space and drift, swooping backwards effects, super psychedelic, totally hypnotic and tranced out, about as dubby as these guys get, but then there's tracks like "Dead Days ("Heroin III"), where the core sound is a super downtuned ultradoom sludge, the dubbiness seeping through in the form of the Gibby Haynes like vocals, and the atmospheric swirls, at one point slowing down to a near static drift, the only thing keeping it heavy, a super blown out distorted bass riff, over which all this other tripped out shit swirls and shimmers, and when the weird guitar that sounds like a proggy synth (or maybe a sitar?) pops up, total genius WTF trip out, the song drifting even further into tripped out zoner-psych territory. They even do a Scorn cover, which makes sonic sense for sure, Drug Honkey transforming the dark electronic skitter of the original into what sounds like a spaced out psychedelic sludge metal Necks, super drone out and loop-y, a little bit jazzy, but still heavy as fuck, before finishing off with a final fierce blast of dubbed out, super aggro, speaker shredding, doom-dub psych-sludge dirgery that KILLS. Holy shit. Imagine UK psych-drone space drifters Bong jamming with Godflesh, a dizzying concoction of super tripped out heaviness, ultra abstract sludge and blackened psychedelic dub that anyone into weird heaviness / heavy weirdness will lose their shit over! WAY WAY WAY recommended!
We first heard Irish indie rockers on a split with Japanese heavies Boris, and even then we were a bit flummoxed, Boris delivering their usual monstrous slab of downtuned psychedelic Japanese fuzz rock, and The Dudley Corporation countering with some sweetly melodic indie jangle, not that we were complaining, we'd always rather hear lots of different sounds, on records, at shows, 5 bands playing sludge metal, are not nearly as entertaining as a weird metal band, a catchy pop band, a cool synth outfit, you get our drift, anyway, beyond the strange juxtaposition, we ended up digging these guys a lot, and it's been a while since we've heard from them, but here on their fourth full length, much of what we dug about the old DC sound is still present and accounted for, jangly guitars, hooks galore, bouncy rhythms, crazy catchy melodies, but actually, it does seem like their sound has darkened, grown a bit more intense and complex, with the songs more intricate and almost proggy sounding, with some electronics, some serious heft, crunchy guitars, and lots of moody, broody intensity, in fact, the vibe these days is almost more Radiohead or Cave In (during their Radiohead phase) - check out opener "DLQ", with its shuffling minor key main riff, its dense driving moodiness, proggy pound fused to almost new wave sounding crunch, maybe also reminding us of Franz Ferdinand or Maximo Park, not the sound we remember, but one we dig, a LOT, and one that seems like it should have these guys poised for some serious mainstream success.
And in the past we described DC as sounding a bit like Pinback, but now, along with this heavier sound, and more dense and complex arrangements, while that resemblance is still present, it almost sounds more like pre-Pinback outfit Heavy Vegetable, not nearly as tangly and super mathy, but with the vocalist still often sounding like a dead ringer for Rob Crow, and some serious mathiness creeping in, it's definitely closer, and pretty goddamn great (check out "Under The Lamb")! WAY recommended for folks who like their pop dark and complex, proggy and melodic, which we're guessing is a whole lot of you...
For a while the identity of this local garage fuzz combo was a big mystery, and the group's first single disappeared in a heartbeat, multiple pressings gone before you know it, with most of those ending up on eBay for stupid amounts of money. At that point we still hadn't actually heard Fuzz, but they were rumored to be like a garage rock Black Sabbath, and to include some local garage rock bigwig. Well, the second part definitely proved to be true, as Fuzz was revealed to be none other than Ty Segall and a couple of his pals, kicking out jams, a bit more heavy and fuzzed out (so much so that it even spawned a custom Fuzz distortion pedal!). And while it might not quite be Sabbathy, it is pretty fierce and fuzzed out, blown out and super rocking, with big chunky chugging riffs, and LOADS off fuzz (obviously), and yeah, the vibe IS sorta sixties/seventies proto metal, wild drumming (courtesy of Segall, who mans the kit here, while Charlie Moothart handles the axework), a little bit progged out, the recording super hot and in-the-red, and the songs, both of 'em here, could almost be lost proto metal artifacts, the B side in particular, has a serious "Godzilla" vibe, a lumbering, churning BIG riff crunch, peppered with slithery psychedelic breakdowns, which continually explode into wild proto metal freakouts, and it's not that difficult to imagine these guys, and these songs on one of those seventies TV shows, where the band plays on a stage, while trippy primitive video FX swirl all around them. Needless to say, it's fuzzy, crunchy, heavy and hooky, Ty Segall fans who aren't already hip to these guys, here's your chance, and anyone else into the current crop of garage fuzz locals (Thee Oh Sees, Segall, Mikal Cronin, Blasted Canyons, etc.) these guys might be your new favorites. And while this must be pressing #3 or #4 by now, imagine even this batch won't stick around for long, so you know what to do...
First proper solo record from the mysterious M Geddes Gengras, who recently collaborated with Sun Araw and the Congos, and has popped up on records by Robedoor, Pocahaunted and others. And while we weren't entirely sure to expect from Gengras on his own, the first clue was probably the fact that this was released on the Intercoastal Artists label, run by folks from Cloudland Canyon, cuz this definitely explores some of the same territory, sprawling kosmische synthscapery of the highest order. The entirety of the first side is taken up by the epic "Waldorf (Pts 1 & 2)", which sends ping ponging electronics back and forth through a field of swirling synths, and percolating melodies, a woozily sequenced sprawl of futuristic pulsations, tinkling chimes, and washed out new age-y shimmer, gradually building momentum, a panning shot of the endless depths of the solar system gives way to some sort of sci-fi chase scene. This definitely fits in well with the usual suspects, Cloudland Canyon, Umberto, Majeure, Zombi, lovers of all things Goblin and Carpenter will definitely be in heaven, but it's not all pure bliss out, the sound is underpinned by a haunting minor key malevolence, that infuses the sound with a definite pathos, the track eventually blissing out into near ambience, before finishing off in a tangle of distorted electronic crunch.
The flipside mixes it up a bit, adding in some skittery skeletal programed rhythms, deep ominous thrum, and clouds of glitch and static. The krautrock vibe is huge on the first track "Night Work", propulsive and motorik, giving way to the way more dense "Cairo", which explodes like a swarm of electronic bees, a dizzying churn of layered melodies, swooning and swirling and roiling, dense and driving, but still spaced out and seriously mesmerizing, probably our favorite track here. Finally, the record finishes off with the third part of the "Waldorf" suite that began on side one, a hazy, washed out softly psychedelic coda, that runs MGG's retro-synth sound through some sort of Tim Hecker like filter, resulting in a gorgeously blurry, crumbly stretch of muted bloopy bliss out that builds to a seriously dreamy, softly noisy, densely layered finale.
Includes a download coupon!!
Japan's noise-junk / industrial project Grim began back in the early '80s, mostly as the one-man project of Jun Konagaya with occasional help from Tomosada Kuwabara and Yukio Nagoshi. All three had formed the politically charged noise-punk trio White Hospital in 1983, with that outfit being discontinued in favor of other means of expression. The project that Kuwabara and Nagoshi started was Vasilisk - a ritualistic, post-industrial project of much greater notoriety with Konagaya occasionally working in that ensemble as well. Grim went in an entirely different direction seeking the more violent and the more extreme forms of music making. Konagaya finds parallels in Japan obviously through Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Dissecting Table (although Grim predates Dissecting Table by a couple of years), but also the classic industrial works of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Whitehouse. In the mid-'80s, Grim issued three proper releases (two lps and a single) along with a handful of compilation tracks. This compilation features everything from those three releases plus a couple of the comp tracks; and we should mention that everything here is also found on the Vinyl-On-Demand 3lp boxset released a couple years ago. Yeah, the VOD box had slightly more material than found here, but that was crazy expensive, and is long out of print, meaning this is the only way to get a hold of this material for the time being. As for the contents of Grim's musical destruction, there's plenty of metal bashing, atonal synths, crude basslines, and blown-out, blister-pocked noise to accompany Konagaya's gargling-with-acid vocal discontent throughout. The rhythmic spines of Grim's noise tracks separate him from much of the freeform noise constructions from his fellow countrymen, although it's hard not to hear the Tetsuo The Ironman soundtrack emerging out of Grim's demolition music. This was the course of action for the first two Grim releases in 1986, but by 1987, Konagaya made a radical detour for into a bleak Japanese folk sensibility, akin to what David Tibet did with Current 93 around the same time. The songs are presumably still about war and death, although sung entirely in Japanese with a highly introspective whisper and quiet, gentile plucking on the acoustic guitar. The juxtaposition between the brutalist noise and the naive-folk stylings is quite disturbing, much more so than the C93 switch from the Crowleyan collages to the apocalyptic folk. When the noise returns at the end of this album, there is a very twisted logic that seems to become apparent... that this is just really dementedly fucked up. And of course, we dig it.
Ostensibly, this is a 'new' album from Grim, but in keeping with the obscurant aspect of Jun Konagaya's industrial noise & outsider folkmuzik agenda, there's no real way of knowing if he made this in 1986 or 2013. As we mentioned in our review of the Grim anthology Folk Songs For An Obscure Race (found elsewhere on this week's list), Konagaya's aesthetic alternates between noise-laden abjection and weirdly compelling Japanese folk songs, delicately performed for voice and guitar. The subject matter of all the Grim material - noise or otherwise - is presumably war and death. It would be hard to imagine those metal-bashed dirges with their bloodcurdled vocals to encapsulate the poetics of cherry blossoms in the spring time; so we'll take Konagawa at his word that the folk tunes maintain that interest in the bleaker aspects of the human condition. On Love Song, those folk songs are Spartanly performed on a small organ with gritty recordings of some sort of political speech laid over the somewhat sweet melody. The subject matter of the speech is unclear given that it's delivered in Japanese, but it has the same feel of any given power electronics appropriation of Nazi imagery. But these instances are few and far between on Love Song, for the most part, Konagaya bashes out industrial rhythms on junked slabs of metal with accompanying blown out synth-noise drones and impossibly corroded chunks of distortion. If anybody remembers the anarcho-industrialist outfit Missing Foundation who jubliantly smashed everything around them in the late '80s, Grim's Love Song is similar, but all the more septic and mutated. Or if anybody is longing for the days when Neubauten was actually threatening, Grim is neccessary listening. This lp comes housed in an oversized box, each featuring a handmade etching from Konagawa. Very limited stock on this one!!!
A mighty fine album of amplified textures, droning experiments, and sonorous acoustics by the American ex-pat John Grzinich, who quietly operates in the Estonian countryside. There, he searches out Soviet-era ruins which have long served as a very rich source material for the tactile events that lace his compositions for long-thin wire instruments and field recordings. While Grzinich laments the fact that Estonia is slowly cleaning up those crumbled sites and once architectural monuments that are now piles of rumble, there are still plenty of sounds to discover and investigate. As his work unfurls, a sense of mystery surrounds his process and the resulting sounds. It seems that it is the wind that drives his wire instruments, but these could be bowed or agitated by mechanical means as well. Regardless, the first lengthy track opens with slow rumbling waves that trace through a quiet passage of wooden creakings, before an ominous, electrically charged buzz slips into the mix. This hum is clinical and inhospitable, leaning towards allusions to abandoned hydro-electric dams or poorly guarded nuclear facilities. By the end of the track, watery recordings cycle forward and overtake the amassed acoustic drones before snapping to an abrupt conclusion. The second piece features an even richer wire-driven drone whose overtones and sub-harmonics glisten in spite of their leaden frequencies. The additional layers of a crackling, rustling, scraping, and other nocturnal bumps in the night parallel the compositional strategies employed by Small Cruel Party and Giancarlo Toniutti, who both allow for the simple interaction between disparate elements which orbit a gravitational drone. Some of the best work we've heard from Grzinich in a while! Limited stock on this one, as it's a Russian pressing. And by the way, it's an actual legitimate Russian pressing, not one of those "Russian" grey area editions.
The original soundtrack to the classic Akira Kurosawa-directed, Toshiro Mifune-starring samurai film from 1954, now on vinyl AND cd, in one package. The cd includes nine bonus tracks. Hayasaka's varied score incorporates majestic martial fanfares, sweet melodies, traditional Japanese folk music, and even a bongo-driven mambo.
Gotta say, although we're glad the "free bonus cd" is included along with the 180 gram vinyl, Doxy has come up with a pretty dumb way of doing it on their releases - the compact disc is affixed by a nub to an obi-like strip that doesn't even wrap around the lp jacket, so once the shrinkwrap is off, it's liable to move around and get scuffed, even if you put the whole thing in a plastic sleeve.
Regardless, soundtrack aficionados will agree it's nice to have this in circulation.
When we first heard Hiss Golden Messenger, we weren't entirely sold, we definitely dug it, and tons of people we love were involved, and the sound was definitely reminiscent of the late great SF outfit the Court And Spark, whose M.C. Taylor fronts HGM, but where that band channeled classic country and folk, this new group explored the members' love of groups like Traffic and the Grateful Dead, especially the Grateful Dead. And while Jussi from Circle has spent the last ten years trying to convince us to love the Grateful Dead, it's been a tough sell, and it was maybe the one sticking point that kept us from loving HGM. But somehow, the more we listened, the more we got it, and it wasn't just the Dead, then, it was seventies AM radio, classic rock, Laurel Canyon country, hell even soul and classic pop, Taylor and his parter Scott Hirsch deftly cramming all of those influences into something weirdly timeless, modern, but entirely beholden to the music that came before, and we found ourselves pretty smitten. And more so with every record. The sound growing darker and darker, more polished, the songwriting better and better. It's hard to put a finger on just what it is, but 2011's Poor Moon sealed the deal. And the recent Record Store Day collaboration with Steve Gunn, was a stunner, and it's tragic that it was allowed to go out of print before all but a tiny handful of folks got to hear it.
But with Haw, HGM have moved to the next level, crafting a dense, layered, lush, country rock, soul pop, folk flecked, classic rock gem that should be a no brainer for the usual No Depression suspects, but it's also the sort of record that has the crossover potential to hook fans of more mainstream pap like Mumford & Sons and all that Starbucks country rock. And heck, Fleet Foxes fans, this might hit the spot for you too. At its core it's folky, and country, but there's so much more going on, soaring strings that bring to mind E.L.O., and that's in the midst of a brooding ballad, there are horns too, even some soulful female background vocals, which are usually the kiss of death, but here, they kind of work. Lots of the songs are wreathed in field recordings, chirping crickets, chickens, barking dogs, the sound of life in the country. And pretty much every song here is a sprawling epic, almost symphonic in scope, multiple parts deftly woven into pop song form, and the songs themselves, gorgeously rendered, lovely lilting melodies, subtle hooks, the arrangements stunning, it's all pretty fantastic, and is easily the best thing we've heard from Taylor since the Court And Spark. Also doesn't hurt that Taylor's band now also seems to include recent aQ Record Of The Weeker William Tyler!
On the same label that released the recent live White Hills tape as well as a post Brainbombs No Balls jam we were never able to get, comes this brand new 7" from these San Francisco psychedelic stompers, thick with blown out guitars, classic rock riffage, wild octopoidal drumming, Stooges-y stomp and wild manic almost Jello-like vocals, the sound a glorious tangle of sixties style psych, eighties punk rock, hairy fuzzy proto-metal and seriously shredding guitar mastery, the lyrics and unhinged vox remind us of some lost proto-punk classic, but then it's all set amidst some BIG riffs and killer melodic leads, which sound way more heavy seventies. Either way, killer stuff, and we're definitely hankering for a full length. Features some super scary green-goo'd space teeth cover art.
We've been huge fans of the Greek born new-ager Iasos since discovering his 1975 masterpiece, Inter-Dimensional Music through EM Records' 2006 reissue. That record had us totally rethinking our understanding of new age music and helped give us a whole new love for the genre. While that record has been reissued a few times since, the rest of Iasos' material been harder to find, so it's nice to get this overview of hisseventies output, nicely released by the fine folks at the Numero Group. For those concerned, there are 5 tracks here from Inter-Dimensional Music, but 8 others that are totally new to us, and for anyone familiar or new to the gossamer vibes of Iasos, this is a great collection, and a perfect introduction.
Most all of this music was created on a houseboat in Marin, where Iasos conducted musical experiments with tape reversal, electronic processing of acoustic instruments (phase-shifted flutes and harp strings) and the first commercially available synthesizers. He believes he was transcribing music from Vista, a benevolent music-maker from a distant dimension, and in doing so essentially created a new genre of music. There is even evidence of a psychology paper from 1989 that states that Iasos' music bears a striking resemblance to the sounds people hear in near-death experiences. It is indeed heavenly music! This release features never before seen photos and extensive liner notes, detailing Iasos musical process and history. So great!
Innode is the project of Stefan Nemeth, an Austrian electronica engineer aQers might be more familiar with as a member of glitchily elliptical, post-rock trio Radian. Here, he's working with Steven Hess (that jetsetting percussionist who seems to be everywhere these days) and Bernhard Breuer (responsible for the drums in the shockingly good 'live' techno ensemble Elektro Guzzi). The idea behind Gridshifter was to incorporate live drums as counterpoints to a rigid latticework of electronic patterns - hence, the title. But the results from Nemeth and his drummers totally transcend any formalist concept, as Gridshifter is full of some serious noise crunching swagger. The live and / or electronic breakbeats stalk through all of the tracks on this fantastic album with glistening waves of controlled, tonal feedback, jarring bursts of whipcracked noise, and ominous rumbled pulsations. In otherwords, it sounds just like Pan Sonic or Alva Noto played with a 'live' drummer. Even some of the analog synths have a bit of a warmer hue as well as if there could be something akin to a chord organ or wurlitzer tossed in for good measure. This would actually be an incredible performance to see live! Let's hope Nemeth can pull off a tour and not just of the European festivals, but into the US as well. Kudos to Editions Mego once again for a killer record.
Slowly but surely, the mighty work of irr. app. (ext.) has been oozing out from the Santa Cruz mountains through various outlets such as Crouton, Helen Scarsdale, and Beta-Lactam. Perekluchenie was originally commissioned as part of a Beta-Lactam Ring subscription series (which if you were lucky enough to sign up would earn you a bonus picture disc with the LP) but the growing interest in irr. app. (ext.) warranted a regular pressing, thanks to such high-profile releases as the irr. app. (ext.) contribution to Nurse With Wound's Angry Eelectric Finger trilogy as well as the Salt Marie Celeste performances with Steven Stapleton himself! The relationship between irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound has gotten even more convoluted as Stapleton has joined irr. app. (ext.) in their last couple of performances. We should be quick to point out the irr. app. (ext.) and the genius behind the tongue-twisting project is far from a Nurse With Wound copyist. Hardly! While both projects draw inspiration from Surrealism and avant-garde composition, they both express strong divergent aesthetics that show how rich and open the field of Surrealist-tinged sound art can be.
Qualified as "a pointless theatrical exercise in one act or less," Perekluchenie actually spans four lengthy pieces of audio madness. Waldron wanders through desolate strums across a prepared piano (or some other instrument that's equally heavy and reverberant) which gives way to ill-tempered birds, ominous windswept drones, and funereal bells. Waldron shatters the grim atmosphere with an unnerving passage for tactile squeakings and poltergeist driven furniture. Elsewhere, discordant horn bleats rupture the heavenly glow of elegaic tones and genuinely baffled exclamations erupt from a very young Django Stapleton. Waldron includes other vocal contributions from Lori Anne Anne Lori Chambers, Aquarius' former owner Windy Chien, and Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd.)
All in all, Perekluchenie is a truly wonderful album! We've been fans of Mr. Waldron for many years now, and he's yet to let us down.
This soundtrack review requires a bit of a backstory, as it played a pivotal role in one particular aQ staffer's formative years. Way back when, this aQ-er had a super cool babysitter, she was a skateboarder, played cool music, was not at all strict about bedtimes, and most crucially, would let said staffer watch cable, and in particular, R rated movies!! Which would prove to be her eventual downfall. This babysitter, allowed said aQ-er (OK, it's Andee!) to stay up late, and watch Larry Cohen's infamous horror flick, It's Alive, about a family whose spawn is some sort of horrific demon baby, who, mere seconds after being born, proceeds to kill the nurses, and escape from the hospital, terrorizing the city, before being hunted down. Well needless to say, as giddy as Andee was to be watching such gleefully subversive stuff, that night, he was plagued with nightmares, and the nightmares continued until he was forced to come clean with the folks, which resulted in the end of the super cool babysitter's reign. Sad stuff indeed, but the power of this low budget flick definitely transcends simply terrifying a easily frightened child. Even rewatching this as an adult, the film is well crafted, beautifully filmed, and has a terrific dark and brooding score.
The plan apparently was to reunite the stars of Hitchcock's Psycho, which is also where the idea to have Hermann do the score came from, and while the casting didn't work out, Hermann did end up doing the music, and it's fantastic. And it was one of Hermann's last scores, along with Brian DePalma's Obsession and Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. And much like those scores, it's classic Hermann, with a strange orchestral arrangement of 6 clarinets, 8 French horns, 6 trumpets, 6 trombones, 2 tubas, 2 harps, and then bass guitar, organ, percussion Moog synthesizer, and the only stringed instrument was a viola d'amore, a strange Baroque instrument with tuned sympathetic strings. And while those last few instruments might have you thinking this might be far out and freaky, and maybe even a little psychedelic, it's actually much more traditional, and very Hermann like, lots of hushed horns, huge brass crescendos, tense moody build ups, lots of space, layered low end drones, mournful melodies, it's haunting and at times harrowing, and when paired with the stylized visuals, it becomes even more effective. And like the best scores, Hermann's It's Alive is a fantastic listen sans film, the sort of intense dark ambience, and brooding orchestral atmospherics that should appeal to dronelovers and dark music obsessives, as well as all you soundtrack nerds, for who, of course, this is most definitely ESSENTIAL.
Like all Film Score Monthly releases, the cd is accompanied by a super elaborate booklet, extensively researched, with tons of liner notes, interviews, rare photos, and notes on each track.
The Swedish musical oddities never cease to amaze us, whether it be the hermetic psych of Joakim Skogsberg or the voodoo heaviness of Goat, Swedish musicians always seem to extremely commit to whatever thematic conceit informs their musical output. When we first got this release by Ixtahuele, we thought it was indeed a reissue of some obscure pagan exotica record from the fifties, but a closer look at the photo of the blonde lads on the back cover decked out in forties tuxes, one wearing a fez, just seemed a tad too modern and lo and behold, we realized Ixtahhuele is indeed a modern ensemble mining the sounds of Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter and Martin Denny! Using classic exotica instrumentation, of you know, marimbas, piano, stand-up bass, and all sorts of exotic percussion: bongos, gongs, taiko drums and cymbals, this group does a pretty stellar job of performing original classic sounding music without trying to put a modern spin on the sound. Instead of overdoing the hipster tropes of tiki bars and island girls, the band does its best to get to the heart of the alluring spell-binding qualities of true exotica: ritual dances, evil flora, island fever, stone relics and sun gods, the music oceanic and dreamy, beautifully hypnotic and sometimes fraught with an uncertain sense of danger, mystery and intrigue. Nice!
The first in a new series from Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, in which visual artists, most of which are not actually musicians, are asked to create a tape, both the music and packaging, with the only caveat being that they do whatever they want. The first installment comes from aQ pal Rich Jacobs, who most art nerds are no doubt familiar with, who has conjured up a cool, dark, brooding collection of guitar instrumentals, the label describes the sound as improv surf and Western cinematic, and there's definitely some of that going on, but we're hearing lots of Sun City Girls too, a sort of Eastern vibe, droned out, buzzy, exotic and mysterious, spidery melodies wrapped around reverby riffs, a sort of slow motion surf twang brood that is haunting and hypnotic, tranced out and woozily mesmerizing, hazy and washed out and dreamily psychedelic, it's a gorgeous dusty dreamlike sound that we find ourselves getting utterly lost in.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES! Super deluxe packaging by Jacobs himself, printed tape labels on blue tapes, a mini screen printed zine, a mini Gocco print, a Japanese style obi, stamped and hand numbered.
This would have certainly been a great fit on our last in-between list of amazing Christian-themed oddities. Otis G. Johnson might be known to some who dug the Personal Space compilation of electronic soul from 1974-1984 we listed a while back. Johnson's track "Time To Go Home" suitably ended that release with a quietly funky, but intensely devotional hymn urging us to prepare for Heaven. Performed on Hammond organ with repetitive riffs and a rudimentary rhythm machine, Johnson's vocals emitting a hushed and mumbled gospel cry turned inward, repeating in a soulful mantra that "It's time". That song was of course from this lone 1978 private press record nicely reissued on the Numero Group label and it has to be one of the most minimal gospel records we've ever heard. In fact, it's almost the opposite of gospel, as its restrained devoutness is so personal and intimate that it seems antithetical to gospel music's more well-associated louder, boisterous display. Reminding us of a rare combination of Zomes' plaintive melodic loops and the soulful economy of Timmy Thomas, the Memphis organist and singer whose biggest hit was "Why Can't We Live Together". Johnson's skeletal organ funk has a distinct charm for being a late night religious listen, filled to the brim with the Holy Spirit, and whispering soft and sweet amens in your ear.
It was beginning to get pretty ridiculous, for ages we were hearing all about this band, how great they were, reading about them in metal mags, hearing other metal bands rave about them, much talk of how amazing their record was, appearances in top ten lists, pictures of the super striking John Baizley cover art everywhere, even beginnings of a backlash on the blogs about how overhyped they were, but the only problem was, you couldn't find the record ANYWHERE! At least in the US, we spent months and months, trying every metal distro, every non metal distro, we had just about given up, when voila, it finally got picked up and released domestically, with a whole mess of bonus tracks to boot. So was the wait worth it? Does Kvelertak live up to the hype?
Well, yeah, actually it was. This stuff IS pretty awesome, and bizarre, a weird blend of blasting black metal and D-beat cock-rock Turbonegro style over the top rock. Just have a listen to the opening track, which explodes in a frenzy of buzz and blast and shriek, only to switch gears into a way more groovy heavy metal punk pound, the shrieked vocals the only thing keeping it from going full Turbonegro. In fact, the NON black metal parts kind of sound like a supercharged Hellacopters, which is not at all a bad thing. And the sound is epic, the production massive, the energy through the roof.
But it's that sort of heavy rock groove thing, that might deter lots of the more true and kvlt metalheads. "Mjod" is all pounding pianos and tamborines, and big rock riffage, epic and swinging, that Hellacopters vibe huge, and the vocals are shrieky, not counting the deep bellowed gang vocals on the chorus, there's even a little acoustic guitar break, and then suddenly, a stretch of blasting black metal, which slips right back into the soaring cock rocky chorus. And so it goes. Hard to tell if these guys are black metallers indulging their inner KISS (or Turbonegro, or Hellacopters, or...), or if it's just some heavy rockers who toss in a blast here and there or a little tremlo picking to add some cult cred. Cuz it is a weird mix, and it doesn't always flow so smoothly, but we're digging it a lot, and if anything, it sounds like these guys probably KILL live. And that definitely comes across here big time.
Holy Fuck! Six cassettes of Le Syndicat? Fuck! FUCK!! FUCK!!!! This is a serious head-cleaner of brutalist / bruitist / rhythmicist / industrial noise, collecting some of the best work from this seminal French outfit and recreating the original artwork of the old tapes within a super swank hand-stenciled box. Le Syndicat followed in the wake of what Throbbing Gristle had done in England, in creating a unique visual iconography to complement the churning mechanoid bursts of noise within. It seems that the divisions of labor was split between two of the principles in Le Syndicat with Ruelgo taking up the sound design and Zorin handling the graphic output. While Zorin eventually departed from Le Syndicat's sound constructions, he continued to offer his visual skills which have long placed him as a more transgressively themed Neville Brody with both adhering to a futurist / postmodern take on art deco. The rhythm and noise for Le Syndicat evolved through process mingling tape-loops, overblown drum machine programming, shortwave radio experiments, short-circuited consumer electronics, and eventually rudimentary sampler technology. Through these simple means, Le Syndicat's industrial orchestrations lead them to a sound that blurred the lines between the feral power of Whitehouse, the bombast of Laibach, and the grim rhythmic component of MB's early catalog. The six cassettes housed within this collection include Phase Segments/Boucles (1982), Tot Mortar (1983), Audiostatik Repress (1983), Vagynaestetatis (1985), Staying Alive (1985), and L'Arme De Force (1986). All of these cassettes were originally released through Le Syndicat's eponymous in house label, with the exception of Staying Alive which Masami Akita released through his ZSF Produkt. The aforementioned Maurizio Bianchi reference is most apt on the first cassette of this set - Phase Segments / Boucles with the skeletal rhythms and gain-saturated noise oscillation paralleling those early Sacher Pelz tapes by Bianchi. While these experiments are both intriguing and of archival importance as some of the first published works, Le Syndicat fully hits the mark from Tot Mortar onward with an integrated noise/rhythm/scream/shortwave/orgasm/tapemachination excess that come to define the quintessential Le Syndicat sound. All of the cassettes were remastered, bringing out even more clarity to the grime, distortion, and exhaustive noise. It is limited to 250 copies, but don't expect these to be around for long! FUCKING AWESOME!!!
Originally released in 2012, as three cassettes, each limited to just 99 copies, this sprawling collection of hauntological rhythmic black ambience / post industrial soundscapery is finally collected into one double lp set, slightly less limited than the tapes, but needless to say, these will probably disappear before too long. Like Lussuria's Ghost Entanglement lp we reviewed a while back, American Babylon is another stunning assemblage of hazy grey ambience, murky tribal rhythms, ominous low end thrum, a continually mutating landscape of slow shifting tectonic layers, heaving swells of chordal crumble, processed vocals, electronic shards, sinister pulsations and percolations, a world of burnt black gauzy grimness, assembled from fractured loops and woozily woven into epic stretches of cinematic creep and caustic electronic shimmer.
Most of the tracks evoke a deep dread, exploring some harsh sonic innerspace, where death and destruction are rendered as gauzy smears, minor key chordal streaks the bleed and ooze, occasionally tethered to lurching, lumbering rhythms, but just as often, loosed and set adrift, a sky filled with black clouds, a sea stained blood red. Here and there, strange samples surface from the murk and offer glimpses of the often obfuscated source material, allowing the listener to experience a world now dead and gone, in the form of these faded musical memories, while elsewhere, the music is simply a ghostlike impression of loss and sadness, hazy, washed out, indistinct, a swirling stretch of hushed thrum and found sound detritus, like The Caretaker, if he somehow survived the end of the world, and was left in some buried bunker, creating these slowly fading sketches of the world as it once was, pocked with slabs of ribcage rattling rumble, and churning low end throb, the whole thing culminating in the crushing emotional and sonic heft of the title track, which pairs a weird bit of video diary narration, with shimmery wraithlike ambience, all of which eventually is swallowed up by a final squall of blackened near metallic noise.
We went a little crazy for the last Lust For Youth full length, Growing Seeds, having only just discovered the group via some random witch house mix, and while as we mentioned in that review, LFY are most certainly no witch house, they definitely share some of the sonic traits, swirling and psychedelic, murky and electronic, but LFY has a definite Euro EDM vibe, a post industrial new wave feel, that when fused to LFY's more witchy, moody atmospheric inclinations, the sound is transformed into something super cool, and weirdly warped. Check out opener "I Found Love", which begins with clouds of cricket chirp electronics, woozy synth melodies, sweeping chordal swells in the background, weird skittery rhythms surface, as does a weirdly reverbed loop of a woman laughing (sobbing? hard to tell), but as that loop is repeated, and a pounding pulsing beat swoops in, the swirls dark and minor key, the vocals proper a sort of shouted sloganeering, that weird sample becomes a bit more intense, the whole song brooding and mesmerizing. Rhythmic and groovy, swirled in shimmery psychedelic colorations, minimal and abstract, but darkly intense and a little bit sonically harrowing.
And while the rest of the record isn't nearly so dark, that shadowy something seems to run through the whole record. "It's You" sounds like it's gonna be some Depeche Mode style electro pop, and it sort of is, a thick warm main melody, soft billows of analog shimmer, a super hooky main melody, but then those vocals come in, mush mouthed and lazy, doused in reverb and effects, sucking the energy out and transforming this electro pop, into something creepier and darker and more menacing, the vocals sounding like they were plucked from an Iceage song and dropped into LFY's woozy electro swirl.
And that's definitely the vibe of the whole record, a cool. twisted juxtaposition between synthy electronic pop, pulsing rhythmic dance music, and crumbling distorted synths, those sneery washed out vocals, pulsing beats draped with billowy synth swirl, the sound just on the edge of distortion, everything blown out and in the red, also giving the record a more sonically intense vibe. Like DHR produced Depeche Mode maybe, but it's those vocals that really give the music it's sort of wasted nihilistic vibe, made even more pronounced when they're paired with super melodic synths, or almost groovy rhythms. Whatever it is, we dig it a lot, a gloomy, dystopian synth-kraut gloom pop darkwave that somehow fuses the abject future funk of Suicide to the blissed out sci-fi synth pop of M83 and comes up with THIS! Awesome!
It's been ages since we reviewed anything from this one man Ukranian black metal horde, in fact we only ever listed his 2008 album De Profundis, but that record was a huge hit with the black metalheads around here, combining raw, blasting blackness, with some insane over the top suicidal shrieking vokills, and 5 years, later, on full length number eight (!) very little has changed, if anything the music has gotten tighter and more polished, still furious and frenzied, blasting, buzzing and epic, but much less harsh, which means folks into raw primitivism and TROO old school blackness might be a little put off, but as far as we're concerned, the sound here is killer, the riffing fierce and fast, the drums pounding, the production making all the sounds clear, without losing any of the sound's heft or heaviness, the arrangements epic and intricate, with some weird mathiness, occasional woozy doominess, even some sweeping midtempo epicry, but for the most part, the sound is frantic and furious. The sound is ALSO super melodic, at times almost surprisingly so, like minus the vocals, it could be a whole different sonic beast (check out "Don't Put Out!"!), and those vocals, still a weird shrieky almost falsetto, definitely a love 'em or hate 'em element, one that we of course totally love, and it's really what gives the songs, even, and maybe especially, at their most melodic, a sort of unhinged maniacal vibe, which helps balance the more polished super melodic sound. Needless to say, fans of past records will definitely dig, but if you're looking for some melodic super fast black buzz, or just love Ukranian BM bands like Drudkh, Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortum, Astrofaes, Lucifigum (of which Mr. Lutomysl was once a member!) and Blood Of Kingu, this might just hit the spot.
Sometime last year we made reissues of the first and second records from legendary Boston garage rockers the Lyres, our Records Of The Week, and for good reason, both records brimming with incredible garage pop jams, hooky as hell, timelessly kick ass, and displaying a sound that somehow ended up being as relevant today as it was then, with a whole new crop of young'uns aping that sound: Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Blasted Canyons, heck pretty much everything on Castleface and In The Red and a ton of others, owe a little tip of the hat to the Lyres, and that genius actually didn't stop with record number two. Here's 1988's A Promise Is A Promise, finally getting the deluxe reissue treatment as well, and pretty much takes up right where Lyres Lyres left off. A heady concoction of classic garage rock, sixties freakbeat, another killer mix of originals and covers, and for those not super well versed in the era, it's actually hard to tell which is which, speaking to both the Lyres radness, and the impeccable song choice.
Beginning with "Here's A Heart", which we would have just assumed as a Lyres original, but is in fact a cover, Jeff Conolly (previously of seminal punks DMZ) joined by Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys on vocals, the song super catchy classic sixties pop roughed up and transformed into a fuzzed out Lyres style garage rock classic.
Which leads directly into the second track, an original called "On Fyre", and that's where the band remain for the duration, on fire, crunchy guitars, wild drum pound, Conolly's feral raspy how, plenty of Stoogesy stomp, whirring organs, woozy basslines, and as mentioned a whole batch of killer covers, "Jagged Time Lapse" by John's Children (Marc Bolan pre T-Rex), the first half of which is all shimmery power pop jangle, until the vocals come in, and it gets super weird, and catchy, then there's "She's Got Eyes That Tell Lies" originally by Him & The Others, all slithery creep and minor key twang, with a wicked catchy chorus, dark and ominous, and again, EASILY could have been a Lyres original, there's also a live version of the Sonics' "Witch", and it's on the live tracks that you can really hear the power and intensity of the band, the organ driving everything, the vocals blown out and crazy sounding, fierce and freaked out and so goddamn good! They also give an old DMZ jam a Lyres makeover. It's all great stuff, and needless to say if you dug both of the previous Lyres Records Of The Week, you're gonna probably want this one too. And while On Fyre might be our all time favorite, A Promise Is A Promise is pretty goddamn great too. And like the other two is HIGHLY recommended.
Comes in a mini gatefold lp style sleeve, with one of those band family trees printed in the gatefold, and a big booklet filled with liner notes and rare photos.
We weren't at all sure what to make of this at first. Apparently there's been some degree of hype around these guys, the usual 'next big thing' stuff, of which we were blissfully unaware, instead we threw Impersonator on having no idea what to expect, and initially we were a little perplexed, faced with a moody, minimal drift, underpinning some big, super dramatic vocals, a world weary emotional croon, draped over a strange swirl of layered and looped vocal fragments, we were almost immediately mesmerized. The strange thing is that it landed at aQ right around the same time as two other sonically similar records, both reviewed elsewhere on this week's list. One is the Mayerling, which is another sort of slow croon minimal pop record, but that one is more electronic, and there's the new Dean Blunt, which also recasts his/their sound as something more darkly and electronically croony.
And while we dig all three of these records, there's definitely something special, and yeah, majical, about this record, hushed and haunting and heartfelt, the melodies aching, and in their own way timeless, the musical accompaniment so minimal in some cases, as to be nearly not there, a whispery organ whir, a chordal smear blurred into a soft focus drone, but elsewhere, beats percolate and surface, synths swirl, sounds blossom into prismatic flurries, sounds crumble and fade, at least one song sounds like some old eighties new wave ballad, but for the most part, these are dark, mysterious modern minimal torch songs, the vocals the focus, and the driving force, the melodies gorgeous and unforgettable, we're reminded of Scott Walker, Ian McCulloch from Echo & The Bunnymen, Midge Ure of Ultravox and even more so, the more we listen to Impersonator, the more it sounds like it could actually be the sonic sketch for a much bigger, more bombastic record. From the choruses, the arrangements, the vocals, even the minimal instrumentation, it's easy to imagine reworking this songs with buzzing guitars and pounding drums, sheets of synth buzz, which might be why they're so effective in this much more minimal form. It actually sounds like these could be tracks by groups like the Editors, or Interpol, or The National, with all the elements stripped away, leaving just the bare minimum, and somehow retaining the dark energy, the emotional heft and musical intensity of 'the original'.
A truly strange, and truly wonderful record, one that we've been listening to almost non stop since it came in. And for some of us, already a definite contender for our end of the year best of 2013 list...
A strangely compelling album of outsider pop, dreamtime electronica, post-rock languor, and distant memories of '80s bombast. If this sounds either like something M83 might attempt or perhaps like something that just shouldn't work, that's pretty much where we were upon hearing Cut Up for the first time. But upon the second, third, fourth, tenth listen, Mayerling's cinematic orchestrations became all the more spellbinding. Ambient trails of luminous synth drones spiral around pastoral guitars that wouldn't be out of place on some Explosions In The Sky or Notwist album, until the urgent baritone vocals leap forward out of the mouth of Sylvain Bombled. His gruff, throaty delivery would seem more appropriate barking for somebody like Mudhoney... yes, we know that replacing Mark Arm is a blasphemous statement, but the late '80 / early '90s Sub Pop, cigarette'n'whiskey approach to throat jagged is very similar to Bombled unique croon. The songs however are not punk. These spacious, desolate pieces have the baroque emptiness of some of the latter period Scott Walker records, flushed out with the post-rock ellipsis of intertwining bass and guitar melodies constructing dark, brooding passages that could be right out of Mogwai's Young Team or Come On Die Young. Drum machines gird half of the tracks on the album, but even then it's little more than a click track, leaving all of the darkened riches to rain down on this moody album. Limited to 100 copies!
Mike McGonigal, of Yeti fame, among other things, has written a book all about late '80s indie pop band Galaxie 500, cult shoegaze/slowcore pioneers. Well written maybe isn't the right word, maybe more, well curated? The text is mostly interviews with the band members and various associates, plus it's lavishly illustrated, with photos and fliers and album cover graphics and press clippings, kind of like the ultimate Galaxie 500 scrapbook! We haven't really delved into it much yet, but based on a flip-through - and on McGonigal's previous works - we're sure it's really well done, obviously something any big Galaxie 500 fan is gonna want/need. 192 pages, soft cover.
On the last list we reviewed a 12" from Miles, better known as one half of witchy electronic weirdos Demdike Stare, we mentioned in our review of that record, that we had been trying to get a hold of the full length for ages, and finally here it is, more than fulfilling the promise of that 12". Like a more techno Demdike Stare, Miles delivers some seriously dense skittery darkness, much in keeping with a lot of recent dark dance favorites from folks like Shed, Terrence Dixon, Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant, and as we mentioned before, anyone into any of those outfits, will flip for Miles' dense driving darkness. Right from the start, the opening track a mesmerizing dubby skitter, that wreathes the beats in crumbling noise and fractured FX, the beat tribal, mesmerizing, surrounded by a swirling cloud of noise, squiggly FX and crumbling textured layers, total head trip, dance floor bliss out, the sort of deep rhythmic mesmer that almost functions better on headphones late at night than on the dencefloor, which is just fine with us.
And all of Faint Hearted is equally dark and devastating, "Irreligious" is murky and glitchy, like Pole via Andy Stott, minimal, but darkly driving, with some dense, pulsating low end, while "Status Narcissism", is like some Kompakt style jam pulled apart and reassembled as a swirling, skeletal house-y drone-dub. "Sense Data" is all serene synth drift, deep oceanic mesmer, but laced with some warped woozy, processed metallic melodies, "Rejoice" is more deep dub, but this one super abstract, a little bit muddy and washed out, like a Wolf Eyes dub, and "Archaic Thought Pattern", is all ping pong beats and woozy swoonsome strings, that explodes into some super distorted beat heavy crunch, that sounds like some bad ass MC should be dropping rhymes over the top, sorta like The Caretaker via DHR? And finally, the record finishes with "Loran Dreams", which is Miles' tweaked take on kosmische synthscapery, which pulses and swirls cosmically, but is underpinned with some deep rubbery bass pulses, and wreathed in a haze of psychedelic shimmer.
So goddamn good. Fans of Demdike Stare, Andy Stott and other weirdo electronic aQ faves, this is absolutely essential (as is the previously reviewed 12", of which we have a very few copies left)!
Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes, Belketre, Torgeist... all groups that typically inspire a certain amount of reverence and awed respect in black metal circles, those outfits being the more well known members of Les Legions Noires, aka the Black Legions, a small underground group of black metal musicians, who came together in the late eighties / early nineties, and created a super distinctive, and extremely kult body of work. The Black Legions numbered maybe ten people, but in different configurations, those ten formed multiple bands and projects, and released super limited, and nearly impossible to get demos, from strangely named hordes like Vzaeurvbtre, Brenoritvrezorkre and Vermyapre Kommando. And while the sound was typically raw and primitive, black and buzzy, noisy and super lo-fi, there was another side of the Black Legions, groups who trafficked in a sound a bit more mysterious and moody, a black ambient strain that gave us outfits like Amaka Hahina and Aakon Keetreh. But by far, our favorite of those more black ambient Black Legions groups, was Moevot, aka Vordb Dreagvor Uezreevb, who also played in loads of other Black Legions outfits like Belketre, Torgeist, Brenoritvrezorkre, Vagezaryavtre, etc.
Moevot conjure up a seriously grim and creepy sound world, brooding and murky, the sound fuzzy and low fidelity but somehow simultaneously lush and layered. The overall sound has a vibe much like current soundscapers like The Caretaker and Tim Hecker, but more home brewed, more raw and primitive, stripped down and skeletal in places, but almost noisy in others. Some tracks sound like black metal riffs, played with no distortion, slowed down and blurred into swirling streaks of pulsing mesmer, others are just voices, and sound choral / liturgical, haunting and hushed. Scattered throughout are field recordings of crackling fires, chirping birds, whispering winds all woven into softly whirring organs, gentle acoustic guitar strum, monk like chanting, and woozy spectral croons, long stretches of near silence, bleed into dreamily melancholic slow motion melodies, tranquil and soporifically hypnotic. Hushed, barely there drifts, float over distant sonic swirls, buried murky melodies unfurl throughout, there ARE raspy vokills here and there, but they sound so much more mysteriously abject when placed amidst the otherwise dreamlike blackened sonic landscapes.
So gorgeous and otherworldly, a bleary, balearic sprawl of soft focus, creeping black beauty, a grimly blissful songsuite that's equal part slowed down nightmare lullaby and woozy atmospheric dreamdrift thrum. If this weren't a cassette that was LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, you can bet this would have / could have / should have been a Record Of The Week!
Only got a tiny handful of these, but couldn't pass up on a new project from aQ pal Mick Barr (Krallice, Oldest, Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.), who is teamed up here with former DC hardcore kid and current NYX avant gardist Chuck Bettis (credited here with "Throat + Electronics"), so you can probably imagine a Mick Barr driven duo of guitar and electronics and 'throat' won't be any sort of easy listening, and guess what? It doesn't take much more than a few seconds for that to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That said, these two, while kicking up a serious skree, a wall of keening, glitched out noise, do manage to work the sound into something weirdly listenable, with Barr doing his super intense, frenzied almost black metal riffing, sheets of fast picked high end unfurl into tense sprawls of upper register drone, swooping into more 'traditional' riffage' before splintering into more WTF shrieking shreddery again. Bettis more than holds his own, wrapped Barr's guitar in dense swirling clouds of crumbling distortion, woozy low end thrum, wild squelches and glitches, electronic squiggles and malfunctioning electronic curlicues, heaving robotic bloops and bleeps, layers of analog blorp, percussive thumps and dense tangles of grinding psychedelic noise, Bettis' vocals woven into the roiling backdrop, occasionally leaping to the fore, and slipping back into harDCore howl mode, transforming the sound into some muscly alien sci-fi noise-punk, or something. Black metal shrieks buried beneath avalanches of furiously roiling riffage, the vibe weirdly heavy and almost metallic, but simultaneously abstract and free form, black noise, power electronics, a super twisted, skull caving, ear shredding, metallic psychedelic noise juggernaut, that pounds and pummels, drones and grinds, dense and intense, and kinda fucking awesome! Definitely recommended for the iron eared, long time Barr fans will feel right at home, and noiseniks might dig Barr and Bettis' warped strain of noise, which while right on the edge of harsh noise, remains textured and dynamic, subtly melodic, like some super intense avant metal record, pulled apart, reassembled into strange shapes and then melted down into a swirling pool of caustic blackened sonic crush. Super cool. And SUPER limited... TO JUST 66 COPIES!!!!!
The first record from this post dubstep duo was a bit hit around here, ditching much of the big bass and deep bass wobble of harder dubstep for something more chilled and soulful, all atmospheric and dreamy, plink plonky rhythms driving sweet smears of come-down string wash bliss, but to be honest, for some of the dubstep fans here, it was a little bit too soft, a little bit too light and soulful, which is precisely what makes this new one so weird, and so good, in that MK seem to have moved back to a sound that's harder, and darker, the beats more gristly, the atmospheres minor key and a little bit menacing, and while vocals on electronic records sometimes scare us, the vocals this time around are amazing (much of them provided by the genius King Krule), but even opener "Home Recording", wraps a gauzy sonic haze and some chiming spidery guitar melodies over a weird hissy dubby beat, which underpins some moody soulful vocals, shimmery and slithery, and darkly groovy, the gristle and hiss occasionally peeling back, revealing some pulsing almost housiness beneath, before slipping right back into that staticky skitter.
"You Took Your Time" introduces us to King Krule, his heavily accented sung/spoken vocal, wound around a skeletal beat, wrapped in swirls of woozy synth, and what sounds like accordion (!), a haunting electro ballad, that's soon joined by shuffling drums, and sinewy basslines, eventually busting into something much darker and more driving, KK's vocals getting raspier and more aggressive to match, but as fierce as it gets, remaining plenty woozy and laid back.
From there on out, the vibe remains dark, and a little shadowy, but the sounds and songs are all over the place, "Break Well", is all sequences synths, and percolating melodies, soaring swirls of high end shimmer, the beat not dropping until the last 60 seconds, accompanied by a super catchy melody, and a woozy, ultra funky bassline, most bands would stretch a part this catchy out into a whole song, but here it's just essentially an outro! "Blood And Form" sounds a bit like a super lo-fi Tricky, a weird muffled militaristic drum beat pounds away beneath glimmering FX, some soulful crooning, wild tangles of horn like melodies, while "Made To Stray" is all hushed murky skitter, but soon blossoms into some echo drenched electronic poppiness, with more soulful vocals, again, the hook swooping in right near the end of the track.
King Krule pops up again on "Meter, Pale, Tone", crooning over wheezing organs, cool tribal drumming, slipper basslines, a backing track that almost sounds like a dubstepped Icicle Works, dense and driving, super hypnotic, making us wish Mount Kimbie and King Krule would make a whole record together. The rest of the record flits from big block rocking beats, to murky dubbed out synth house slither, crackly pulsing industrial, laced with old school dubstep wobble, deep digidub pulses, Andy Stott like processed vocal ambience, and more hushed vocals, again, the vibe sort of downtempo and Tricky-ish, albeit a bit more woozy and dizzyingly produces, to what sounds like a Kompakt like groover that gradually morphs into a murkier dubbed out version of some lost eighties new wave pop song, which is how the record ends. Perfect!
Been meaning to list this one for a while now, a collaboration between aQ beloved dronedirgedoom duo Nadja, and local black drone / synth noise outfit Galena, and like the best collaborations, it's difficult to tell who's responsible for what, but really it hardly matters, Konstruktion is gorgeously noisy, distinctly blackened sprawl of loosely structured noise, after a brief interlude the album immediately explodes into a wild squall of swirling black buzz, what sounds like the intro to some super fierce, epic black metal track, but instead of exploding into frenzied riffing and furious blastbeats, the riffs and guitarnoise seem to just swirl in on themselves, a dizzying tangled of buzzing metal, of heaving chordal thrum, there does seem to be drumming, but it sounds like a barrage of malfunctioning drum machine splutter, also blurred into the overall psychedelic swirl. It's not all dense and driving, the second half blossoms into a sort of sundappled synthscape, all woozy and shimmery, which bleeds right into the dirgey buzzy "Tears", a billowing blur of buzz and rumble, shot through with streaks of keening high end skree, a track that dissipates before it can fulfill it's heavy promise. Which leads to a songsuite of smeared streaks, and noise drenched swirls, roiling caustic churn, and hushed murky thrum, slo-mo drone-buzz drift, and washed out psychedelic drift, spidery ambience and woozy minimal shimmer, culminating in a dense black cloud of muted mesmeric murk. And that's just side one.
Flip the record over and get lost in the 22+ minute sidelong sprawl of "High Sea & Turbulence / Coda 2", a gorgeous, dreamlike haze-scape, total zoner bliss out, crumbling static swirled slow motion swells of distant chordal thrum, a smoldering slow build, shot through with keening shards of high end melody, which eventually transforms into some seriously tripped out slo-mo industrial metalgaze churn, all pulsing motorik drumming, hazy washed out riffage, dense psychedelic swirls, some seriously tranced out super hypnotic synth soaked kraut-dirge radness, like Nadja playing Faust, wrapped in some gauzy shoegaze atmospherics. Killer!!
