There's a lot of stuff you could buy off this week's list - or any aQ list - that we describe as "psych" or "psychedelic". Psych's an overused descriptor for sure, but we could never be blamed for using it too much with regards to anything by these Japanese communal freaker-outers, the outrageously prolific ensemble known as Acid Mothers Temple (and the something something something or other, usually). Psych psych and more psych, if that's what you want that's what AMT have got!
Here's the latest fix for AMT addicts (just give it a shot if you're not - what could go wrong?), and it's a dang good one if you like to hear 'em rock it and roll it. The first track lives up to its title "Space Speed Suicide" with some real dense psychedelic (there's that word) heavy guitar splurt n' skree. Track two "Skillful Grinning Skull" follows that up with some flute freakery, calming down into a lengthy, echoing, plodding groove, spaced-out all nice like with moaned and muttered vocals, that fans of Can should dig. AMT funk it up a bit on #3 with some hard edged urgent riffery amidst the FX & electronics swirl. The gargled vocals get intense too. That one's called "Born Free Stone Free", and that being the case, they're quite willing to put some Buddhist drone in a free jazz zone on the next track, "Escape Horoscopes". It's loose and tangled at the same time, going forwards and back in bits and blurts and blasts.
Ok, ok, we'll stop with the track-by-track commentary (there's a couple more, including an epic grand finale) or we're bound to use the word psychedelic again. Suffice to say the rest of the record is equally out there, wild and wooly - including one that's an extremely damaged "blues". Once again, AMT deliver the hallucinogenic, higher-than-thou "hard rock" in their inimitable fashion. Anyone who picked up our recent Record Of The Week pick by Makoto Kawabata's Mainliner, might wanna check this out too and see where Kawabata's been flying the AMT mothership lately.
Digipack cd or double lp gatefold vinyl, the latter limited to 1000 copies.
The last few non-Nadja Aidan Baker releases have found Baker delving deeper into a hushed minimalism, which was definitely always a part of his sound. In the old days it seemed like Nadja records were loud and heavy, and his solo records were hushed and haunting, recently though, the sound Baker seems to gravitate toward is a sort of Necks like minimal skitter, still hushed and haunting for sure, but more rhythmic, and often more jazzy, whether it be the brooding torch songs of his Already Drowning record, or the psychedelic krautrocky shimmer of Smudging, a record he made with his brother.
So we were expecting more of the same with this new project, a drum and bass duo in which Baker handles the drums, and at first, at least for a minute or two, it did sound like that's what we were in for, albeit with a thick swath of buzzing bass over the top, but as the first 27 minute track unfurls, it reveals itself as something WAY heavier, the drums a simple driving pound, the bass thick and distorted, there's definitely an OM vibe going on, not hard to imagine those distinctive chanted vocals swooping in, but instead, the duo lock in tight for the long haul, dishing out a totally instrumental, droned out, roiling, slomo low end dirge, one that's super hypnotic and super heavy - and it only gets heavier as it goes, with the bass getting more and more cranked, spitting out thick chordal washes and huge gouts of buzzing rumble, while Baker pounds away beneath, the song seesawing between trancey churn and almost shoegazey blown out thrum.
The second track is even longer, and spends its first few minutes shuffling jazzily, the bass woozy and melodic and ethereal, wreathed in a lush reverby haze, while beneath Baker conjures up clouds of cymbal wash, and soft flurries of hushed snare skitter, before once again, the bass heaves and splinters into something much more aggressive and distorted, not so much riffing, and filling the speakers with a thick corrosive low end drone, while Baker goes apeshit on the drums, sorta free jazz, sorta free noise. Eventually it settles down into a slow wind down creep, the bass still mostly shapeless, pulsing and swirling, sounding like way more than a single instrument, while Baker, holds it together with his simple pound, the last stretch peppered with some almost metal moments, that eventually fade into a final drone drenched death march dirge. Fans of Nadja (and OM) must check this out, it's some seriously heavy, slow and low, doom-duo minimalism!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The enigmatic Agnes returns with yet another suitably dark and suitably mysterious transmission of gritty textures and carcinogenic drones. As we mentioned before in our review of her oblique, eponymous 3" cd-r, we can find little information on who Agnes is. She hails from Chicago; and this is the second release we've been able to track down, but that seems to be all we can discern. Who else she's worked with or what she's done before these two releases remains an unknown. All of this matches with the sounds she produces, bringing to mind the early work of Maurizio Bianchi, in part finding parallels to his mythic disappearance by 1983 from the noise community with all sorts of conspiracies and hearsay getting tossed around; but also in hearing a sympathetic aesthetic through Agnes' zombified electronic swarmings, high voltage crackle, and generalized bad vibes. The first side buzzes and marches along grimy arpeggiations which seem both organic and machined at the same time. The second side laces a more noxious crackle against a chugging rhythm that steadily loses its will to live and gets consumed by tactile drips, clicks, whirs, and squeaks sending visions of greasy machines dating to the early 20th century whose gears spit out metal filings, run at unsafely hot temperatures, always on the verge of blowing a cog and causing the whole operation to grind to a halt. It's really nice to hear Agnes stretch out her compositions along a broader axis beyond the 15 minutes or so of that aforementioned cd-r; but unfortunately, this tape is super limited and already out of print. That said, we've heard rumors of a full album on wax from Ms. Agnes. Bring it on, lady!
Another amazing Italian Library missive from the same folks who brought us the Daniela Casa we reviewed a while back. Alessandroni, most famously known for being the whistler for Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks, was a fantastic composer in his own right as we heard previously on Prisma Sonoro, a haunting library score reissued on the Australian Roundtable label last year. On this 1970 release he created the vocal group, I Cantori Moderni Di Alessandroni, an eight to sixteen person choir, who have lent their talents to many soundtracks by Morricone, Piero Umiliani, and many other Italian composers of the 60's and 70's (and were also featured recently on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained soundtrack). This was the only full length the choir recorded. Through 12 original compositions by Alessandroni, the choir evoke a lilting cinematic pop sound of Italian Bossa vibes and moody themes, augmented by harpsichord, flutes and twangy guitars. The choir not only featured Alessandroni's first wife, Giulia De Mutiis, but also the incomparable Edda Dell'Orso whose wordless vocals epitomize many of Morricone's Italian western and horror scores. Fantastic and Limited!!
The phrase "post black metal" gets bandied around quite a bit these days. It's seemingly become a catch-all for any BM-leaning band that doesn't wear corpse paint and/or spikes and doesn't shriek about Satan and/or Odin, and when there's so much rampant experimentation going on in a genre it can create a certain desensitization. Nothing's shocking anymore! That's why it's all the more rare nowadays for a band to emerge from the black metal scene that could truly be considered challenging and progressive, but Ireland's Altar of Plagues are most certainly one of those bands. Teethed Glory and Injury is, first and foremost, massive. An enormously modern rebuttal to metal's often backwards-looking tendencies. The album shifts seamlessly from immersive instrumental drone to frantic blurring blast beats with a surgical precision. The decayed buzz of the ambient passages (which make up a pretty big portion of the record) perfectly compliment the more "metal" tracks without ever feeling like filler. Instead they feel just as essential, giving the record a sense of patience and an ebb/flow not often found in this sort of band. The effect is oddly hypnotic and peaceful, even if at the same time the album is often undeniably crushing and unnerving. When it isn't lulling you into a false sense of security with its more spacious moments, it's absolutely pummeling you with an overwhelming aural assault of hyper blasts, chilling frigid vokillz and calculated mesmerizing riffs, like crackling transmissions relayed from an alternate future where the decomposing urban desolation of early Godflesh and Swans have replaced the usual Bathory/Darkthrone blueprint as the primary black metal template. The result is singular and thrilling - a brief and terrifying glimpse at the ruined dystopic landscape black metal will one day become. But first we'll have to wait for all of those other bands to catch up!
Another guest review here courtesy of longtime aQ pal and expert music enthusiast David Katznelson (also head honcho of both the Sutro Park and Birdman labels, amongst others), this time he's raving about a sixties artifact that's been blowing his mind lately:
It is unbelievable to me that after all of this time, and all the reissues that have been coming out steadily for years, that there are still unknown gems from the psychedelic period of the late '60s that surface. And yet, there was a UK band called The Apple who released An Apple A Day in 1969 and over 40 years later, they are being played nonstop around my house. Think Open Mind... July (yes!!)... maybe even The Move: call it freakbeat or RnB fueled psych. Whatever you call it, An Apple A Day is a mighty fine platter. It starts with an instant classic (and great suggestion), "Let's Take A Trip Down The Line" and flows into a song that I truly do not understand how it never made a Nuggets comp: "The Otherside", complete with a more poppy (in a good way) groove and a great guitar line. Side B is harder... more aggressive... with some great covers (The Yardbirds, Loving Spoonful) leading the way for a dirty and power-filled psych-blues set.
This reissue comes with a very English recipe pamphlet around "Cooking With Apples". I have not tried the recipes yet, but something tells me that with the right ingredients, this record could take off into universes still unknown.
180 gram vinyl, with inserts including lengthy liner notes.
We first came across the work of Thomas Bel through a compilation track he provided to the beloved ambient label Time Released Sound. This French musician has quietly hand-fabricated his own releases, an aesthetic that both TRS and Invisible Birds also share. To Dye Every Night is something of a personal soundtrack for an emotional landscape of melancholy and introspection. The materials are spare but wholly elegant - field recordings of a rain storm, guitar, and voice. That rain storm is recorded in such a way to capture the smacking textures of water and mud. So sharp are some of these aqueous plonks and drips that Bel gives the impression that these recordings were made at near freezing temperatures. Bel's elliptical guitar picking cycles through a desolate melody whose mood completely fits those rainy, miserablist field recordings, and the slow, funereal piece is more in keeping with the latter day Earth recordings although the melodies certainly align themselves with the Slint / Mogwai / Codeine sensibility. Very slowly, Bel's voice rises out of the rain and mud, presenting itself as a singular, tonal chord (obviously looped, unless he's mastered circular breathing to an extent that's beyond even Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young!). It's a beautifully lilting piece of maudlin, super stripped down mope-rock meets ambient soundscaping. Limited to just 100 copies and hand assembled by the fine folks at Invisible Birds.
Latest mysterious musical missive from this offshoot of two time Record Of The Weekers Von Himmel, but unlike the spaced out psych of VH, Black Thread explore the dusty corners of the shadowy sonic underworld they inhabit, opening with what at first blush sounds like pure static, a TV playing between-channel snow, or a car radio unable to pick up any stations, but then the static begins to stutter and crackle, and suddenly it sounds like maybe an old record, spinning on a busted turntable, the provenance of said static though is not as important as the dreaminess that lurks beneath, as hushed hazy melodies drift and shimmer, surface softly and fade out. Imagine a sound somewhere between Philip Jeck, the Caretaker and William Basinski - a blurred, decayed, crumbling sonic beauty, the buried melodies wreathed in a warm haze of sonic detritus, those melodies gradually growing more and more distorted, eventually vying with the static for sonic supremacy, the final few minutes a gloriously blown out swirl of soft psychedelic noise.
The relatively short title track acts as a sort of buffer between the two epics on either side, another smeared sprawl of prismatic noise, washed out and gauzy, a dreamily distorted ambience, that seems to grow more distorted and decayed as the track goes on, even glitching out here and there, but like the first track, it's the sort of soft noise that's more dreamy than brutal.
And finally, BT delivers an opening salvo on the closer that reminds us of Skullflower, distorted and dense, albeit doused in hiss and hum and static, but then the underlying melodies quickly become the focal point, the song turning into a strange blown out lullaby, which quickly settles into a more subdued, tranquil Caretaker like drift, all faded and indistinct, washed out and weary, slowly working itself back to another crescendo, a shoegazey squall that fades out as quickly as it was created, leaving the tape to unwind in a fog of crackly noisy hum, which blends perfectly with the background tape hiss, for an ultra minimal final fade out...
Super limited of course, as tapes like this usually are. Each cover is unique, all cut from a larger image. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
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...
Full length number FOUR from this local eco-terroristic, drum and dulcimer driven black metal one band band, whose first two records were released as a pair on our very own Andee's tUMULt label. At the time, as much as we loved Botanist's unique and warped take on black metal, we must admit we were a bit surprised when Botanist sort of blew up, making all sorts of year end top ten lists, even popping up on Pitchfork and NPR. We sort of assumed it was too weird to have much appeal, but it seems if anything, that weirdness only made Botanist more appealing to non-metalheads, and in another surprise twist, brought out the open minded experimental streak we had just assumed most metalheads might be missing. But it's easy to see why people dig Botanist. Heck Andee dug his stuff enough to put it out. Botanist's music is dark and twisted, droned out and buzzy, weirdly melodic, super trance-y and hypnotic, it's really barely black metal, the blasting drums and the croaked squashed spider vocals really being the only truly black metal elements, even the metallic buzz of the dulcimer, aping the sort of fast picked BM riffing, ended up sounding like something wholly other. Botanist's third record, on the Total Rust label, found him slowing things down, and creating his own version of doom, which like his take on black metal was appropriately and fantastically skewed. Which brings us to IV, the fourth Botanist full length in two years, and once again, a whole sonic shift has taken place, this one more difficult to quantify, it's not black metal, and not doom, and this time around, we're tempted to say it's not even really metal. Actually not at all.
When we first heard it, we were struck by how melodic it was, almost shoegazey, the dulcimer strangely recorded, to turn the brittle buzz of the early records into something washed out and gloriously distorted, single strings ring out like prismatic chordal swirls, and the more rapid passages blur into blissed out streaks of hazy blurred dreaminess. In fact, minus the vocals, Botanist IV sounds more like some experimental shoegaze pop band, even the blast beats seem to have been ditched in favor of more midtempo rhythms, and then those are mostly buried in the mix, beneath clouds of reverberant overtones, of whorls of FX drenched metallic chords, that all seem to sprawl like cloud of metallic shimmer, laced with keening melodies, the whole thing surprisingly sun dappled and prismatic, if we didn't know the grim story behind the lyrics of IV, we'd assume the theme was one of redemption and rebirth, or in keeping with the Botanist's themes, IV plays out like the soundtrack to post-human earth, once the human race has been eradicated, and the world is a lush nirvana, where nothing but plants grow, allowed to spread out endlessly, and reach forever heavenward. And heck, even with the vocals, it's hard to disguise the lush melodic elements that pretty much entirely define the sound of IV.
Considering the sort of surprising widespread appeal the first few records had, we can only imagine this one might just be the real big breakthrough record for Botanist, it's so catchy and melodic, so pretty and lushly layered, that it's hard to imagine that even some of the more metal averse folks wouldn't or couldn't be won over. We even suggested to the Botanist himself that he should release an instrumental version, imagining the pure psychedelic shoegaze sonic bliss that would result, but for now, IV's glorious mix of lush sonic bliss and grim verdant vokills is more than enough.
Oh lord, are we ever in filthy, crusty, demented, depraved, misanthropic, sludge rock heaven! That's right, FINALLY, it's the second collection of 7"s from Sweden's mightiest musical export (well, if you ask us, at least!) THE BRAINBOMBS! Everything we love about these musical miscreants is in full affect, the pummeling trash can percussion, the downtuned fuzz drenched ultra distorted guitars, the bizarre, sort of fey, sort of scary vocals, regaling tales of murder and mayhem, rape and torture, death and destruction, the warbly dented drunken trumpet, all wrapped up into a stumbling, hypnotic, and seriously fucking disturbed package.�
It's like they took their favorite Stooges riff, stole a bunch of instruments from the music store, and set up in the basement of the local highschool, where in between kidnapping and torturing students, they would record these slabs of abject musical horror, each one a single riff, pounded and pummeled into submission, sometimes flecked with bits of slide guitar, or that damaged trumpet, but always dripping and oozing with all manner of pestilence and putrefaction. And we can't get enough.�
Folks who love Bone Awl and Akitsa and other primitive droning black metal outfits, will probably hear lots of that foul blackness all tangled up in the Brainbombs primitive garage stomp, and folks who have bee digging stuff like the Violent Students and Clockcleaner and Shit And Shine and Rusted Shut and other similar noisy bastards absolutely need this!!
Includes the single that came out on Andee's tUMULt label, the most recent Stinking Memory 7" on Anthem, as well as the Wabana Gun Court single, the Ken Rock single as well as the Big Brothel single. Easily some of our favorite BB tracks ever, "Stigma Of The Ripper", "The Grinder", "I Need Speed"... fuck! If only more bands could do so much with so little. Stripped down and blown out, catchy as all get out but still grimy and brutal and very very very fucked up.��
Also included are some rare live tracks, all time BB classics, "Urge To Kill" among them, recorded live in Norway way back in 1993, the sound appropriately distorted and low fidelity, and don't miss the hidden last track, a minute long, post performance Brainbombs sign off, with some demented crowd action, chanting for more...
Essential!
Here's a 2013 Record Store Day release that we just discovered we still had a small stash of! Well known collector/musician Joe Bussard doing a couple of acoustic guitar songs on an old-timey 78 rpm 10" record, packaged in a plain manilla sleeve like in the old days. Bussard's been collecting jazz, folk, blues, bluegrass, etc. 78's since the 1940s and so he sure knows how it ought to sound, the two tracks "Guitar Rag" and "Screwdriver Slide" (yep, played with a screwdriver) coming off like authentic dusty (but lively) old tunes indeed.
For fans of John Fahey (who's first recordings came out on Bussard's own Fonotone label), Jack Rose, and all the old-timey down-home stuff those guys were fans of, too...
LIMITED TO 625 COPIES.
Finally delivering on the immense promise of their 2010 debut ep, Cauchemar have arisen once again from their cold Canadian tomb to deliver their debut full length, and it's just as wild eyed, witchy and (most importantly) HEAVY as we could have hoped for. For those uninitiated, Cauchemar play a fist-pumping brand of doomy true metal, but what sets them apart from the legion of other traditional metal revivalists is the genuine sense of mystery (and mysticism!) to their music. This is in no small part due to vocalist Annick Giroux, who aQ-ers might know better as the mastermind behind the Hellbent For Cooking heavy metal cookbook, and whose trance-like haunting croon lends an unearthly gloom to the proceedings. Her voice is soaked with an appropriately heavy dose of reverb, making it sound as though its being delivered directly from some forgotten stone crypt somewhere, while the lyrics (sung entirely in French!) add a certain elegant menace. None of this is to take away from the other three fellas in the band of course. Musically, Cauchemar often recall the kind of doomy British heavy metal that bands like Pagan Altar and Witchfinder General perfected in the late '70s and early '80s, while their faster moments harken back to the proto speed metal sound of bands like Acid. The melodies are simple and catchy but also carry a certain gothic atmosphere that brings to mind things like ruined medieval castles, misty moors and dank lightless dungeons. The occasional addition of pipe organ adds a certain theatrical flare one might expect from some of the more horror-tinged Italian doom bands as well. Fans of the newer wave of female fronted witch rock bands like Purson, The Devil's Blood or Blood Ceremony would do well to check this out too. Just don't call it occult rock! It's true occult heavy metal, with an emphasis on the METAL.
This is the very first we've heard from Caudal, a trio featuring Nadja's Aidan Baker. Their new lp, Forever In Another World, is one of three new releases on a newish UK label called Oaken Palace, the first totally non-profit label (at least intentionally!), a purely charitable endeavor, that takes all the monies made from record sales and donates them to various environmental organizations around the world. The label focuses on dronemusic and psychedelia, with two of their first few releases being Aidan Baker projects, and the third being a group featuring members of another psychedelic drone outfit we dig, Thisquietarmy, needless to say, sonically this stuff is right up our alley. And we can definitely get behind the label's mission as well, aiming to strengthen the connection between music and nature, in a much more tangible way than just singing about trees or having a forest on the record cover.
Taking the concept even further, each group on the label picks a specific endangered species or habitat, to which their record is then dedicated, the record is produced in a super environmentally sustainable manner, 100 percent recycled sleeves, zero carbon vinyl pressing, etc., and then each artist picks a charity related to dedicated species or habitat, and that's where all the money goes. So cool!
Caudal have chosen an odd animal, the European ground squirrel. With all the profits donated to support the protection efforts of the Austrian Union for Nature Preservation. Nice.
Caudal is another in a long line of recent Baker projects that have been moving away from the doomgaze of the Nadja mothership, and the hushed ultra minimalism of his early solo records, instead focusing on sounds much more spaced out, psychedelic and krautrocky, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes of opener "River's Edge" to lure you in, and drag you down into their gorgeous, laid back, washed out, softly psychedelic sprawl. Thirteen minutes of tranced out motorik mesmer, the drums and bass locked into a gorgeously languid groove, which for nearly twelve minutes remains unwavering and locked TIGHT, with Baker doing most of the textural and sonic heavy lifting, in the first half adding softly chiming spidery melodies, warm chordal swells, shimmering soft focus clouds of dreamlike FX, the vibe super drowsy and drifty, only adding some distorted heft for the last couple minutes, but even then the bass and drums don't blink, anchoring Baker's final swirling squall.
"Threever" ups the tempo a bit, sounding not unlike a mellower Circle, total space rock / kraut rock trance out, Baker unfurling gorgeous swaths of sound over the relentless rhythm, super hypnotic, and totally mesmerizing, and surprisingly dynamic, with a handful of subtle tempo shifts, the sound setting into something much more hushed and ethereal, before returning to that hypno rock head nodding groove. "Walrus Tusk Scrimshaw" is a dark loping dirge, the background sounds ominous rumbles and deep resonant swirls, a sort of slow-core post rock doominess that sprawls malevolently, the guitars buzzing and distorted, delivered in fierce arcs, while deep swells shift and pulse in the background, eventually getting downright heavy, but again, it's mostly the guitar, wild sheets of feedback, crumbling downtuned distortion, all draped over that unfuckwithable rhythm section, who play on, unfazed.
Finally, "Forever In Another World" finishes things off with an epic stretch of moody minimal hypnorock, again, Circle fans, you're likely to flip, or if not flip, trance out big time, the sound never letting up, or even changing that much over the track's 13+ minutes, the drums and bass busier than before, but still locked tight, while Baker's guitars gradually build, not so much in volume or in heaviness, they seem to expand outward, processed swirls of sound that billow and shimmer, the drums this time following suit a bit, loosening up, the last few minutes, the band in full on psychedelic space rock mode, the sort of druggy dreamy space jam that could easily have stretched on forever.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, 180 gram black virgin vinyl, 100 percent recycled sleeves, includes a download code too!
Another awesome French pop chanteuse gets resurrected from obscurity, thanks to the Born Bad label. Clothilde (whom we first heard through those awesome Sixties Girls and Swinging Mademoiselle comps of femme French pop) was the stage name of Elizabeth Beauvais, the daughter of an actress and writer who, despite wanting to follow her mother into the acting world, was pushed instead into the music business by producer Germinal Tenas.
Tenas, a producer known for arrangements involving unusual instrumentation, signed her to Vogue Records in the mid-sixties and rechristened her after the beloved medieval Queen and Saint instrumental in bringing Catholicism to France. Clothilde only recorded two eps for the Vogue label in 1967 (both captured here) before becoming fed up by the business and leaving it for good. Which really is tragic, because these are some of the most infectious French pop tracks we have heard in a while with swinging arrangements peppered with marimbas, flutes, violins, bells and Farfisas. Clothilde co-wrote a couple of tracks herself and they were noted for their shocking (at the time) use of sexual double entendres, perhaps adding to the sex-kitten image she really didn't want to have. Thus an untimely end of what could have been a promising singing career. Like so many French pop obscurities, we're thankful for the labor of love that goes into making sure these great tracks see the light of day once again!
Full length number three from this mysterious slo-mo psychedelic bedroom shoegaze dirge pop duo finds them delivering yet another fantastic set of songs, but with some definite new sounds in the mix. Right from the opening track, "Cross", with its almost jaunty tempo, fuzzy guitars, and oddest of all, a propulsive lurching mechanical rhythm, 29 offers up a much more song based, gloom poppy sound, taking all the hints from past records, of something more mainstream, and more traditionally indie rock, previously lurking just below the surface, and pushes all of that right to the front. In fact, the second song "Misfits 4x4" is even poppier, with a bouncy drum machine rhythm, a sinewy almost death rocky bassline, some sweetly murky guitar jangle and deep crooned vocals. When track three begins, all crunchy and crumbly, you might expect (like we did) the sound to sink back into a glorious muddy murk, but instead, it blossoms into some seriously perfect pop, a fuzzy main riff, a killer distorted guitar melody, some sweet raspy vocals, total classic nineties style indie rock, roughed up around the edges and slowed down a bit but so catchy and fuzzy and dreamily GREAT. Like past CC records, we're still reminded of the Swirlies, and MBV and Jesus And Mary Chain, but on 29 we're also hearing other aQ faves like the Grave Babies and Cold Showers.
The poppier direction definitely makes 29 feel like it really could have come out on Homestead in the early nineties, it's less experimental for sure, the sound reminding us at times of Sebadoh, or My Dad Is Dead, all those sorts of homebrewed 4-track sad boy indie pop songsmiths from back in the day, but the sound is definitely modern too, its murk and washed out haziness giving it a darkly dreamy lysergic feel, the programmed rhythms adding a gothic electro-pop almost cold wave vibe in places too, which should definitely hit the spot for the the Sacred Bones / Captured Tracks crowd. But really, 29 is the perfect progression from last year's Lately lp, these guys just getting better and better, now armed not just with a SOUND, which sounds better than every, gloriously gauzy and psychedelic, dirgey and dreamy and fuzzy, but with a clutch of perfectly poppy SONGS to make that sound count. So good!
Includes a printed cardstock insert, and a download coupon as well.
Here's a nice reissue of this English fuzz-filled psych rarity from '72, considered by collectors to be a bit of a holy grail, since they only made 50 copies of the original! And while THAT may have a lot to do with why this is blurbed as "one of THEE greatest guitar-heavy psych records in the world" by the Machu Picchu label, it's definitely a contender for one of the RAREST pretty great ones. So thank Machu Picchu for making it available again, this time officially licensed from the band, something most previous versions probably weren't.
You may have heard their track "Maypole" way back when, on the British installment of the Love, Peace & Poetry series. We likened 'em to Blue Cheer-ish acid rock in our review of that comp, but Cream would have been a better comparison. And actually that track's rather gentle compared to some of the truly fuzzed out onslaughts on here, fuzzy though it is. And by the way, remember the Wicked Lady reissues we recently reviewed? Well axeman Martin Weaver from Wicked Lady joined up with the Dark right before this was recorded, so that's his fuzz you're hearing, which should give you some indication of what this sounds like. A more sophisticated, proggier Wicked Lady perhaps, a Wicked Lady with more in the way of "songs" rather than freakout jams, though this gets bluesy/jammy at times too.
While Dark aren't as, uh, dark as their name suggests, having a light side too, no heavy psych/fuzz fan will be disappointed, they're right in there with the likes of Wicked Lady, T2, May Blitz, Human Beast, NSU, Clear Blue Sky, Arzachel, and other heavy fuzzy but still sorta poppy UK psych outfits of the era, and that's good company.
This reissue has been remastered and restored by His Name Is Alive guy Warren Defever, and features a band history written by the Dark's Steve Giles. Also included are lyrics and rare photos. The packaging is a digipack for the cd, or a tip-on gatefold jacket for the vinyl.
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 third in the super limited series of 'test pressings' from the genius witchy electronica duo Demdike Stare. As the other two earlier 'test pressing' singles are out of print (along with all other Demdike Stare vinyl at this point), those with any interest in the dark arts of Demdike Stare would be well served to pick this one, pronto. The A side "Eulogy" is cut at 45 rpm setting up an understated engineering somewhere between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. I (the really early stuff!), the techno minimalism of Carl Craig, or even the more subdued offerings from Sandwell District (i.e. Silent Servant, Rrose, Regis, etc.). Here, Demdike Stare serve up a bulbous acid-trak syncopation guided by a relatively downtempo rhythm quietly thumping behind cybernetic shimmer and off-world weightlessness. The B side darkens things considerably and follows up where Miles Whittaker left off on his recently reviewed 2013 solo album Faint Hearted. Tribal drum programming encircles the duo's interpretation of the classic Basic Channel sound of black-hearted techno accentuated by sharply rendered hi-hats and cavernously deep kicks, while haunted drones and distorted, metallic melodies creep throughout the rhythms. These singles are getting more and more 'clubby' but there's still plenty of Demdike Stare's hauntological production to keep things interesting. Grab it before it disappears!
Originally intended to be a Record Store Day release, the awesomely and confusionally titled Racial Golf Course No Bitches is the first full length from UK noise rock weirdos Dethscalator, fulfilling the promise of their kick ass split with fellow heavies Hey Colossus from back in 2009, somehow managing to trump their jams from that split, pushing the sound even further, getting heavier, filthier, noisier, and weirdly more melodic, and even dubbier too.
On the surface, these guys are total old school AmRep knuckle dragging numbskulls, sounding like a revved up Brainbombs or (slightly) less drug addled Rusted Shut, but dig deeper to discover all sorts of twisted shit going on. The above mentioned dubbiness is all over the place, drums, vocals, guitars, doused in echo and reverb and sent spinning into clouds of distorted noise, it's subtle in places, but not even remotely in others, the sound, like on the split, feeling almost looped in places, the band locked into churning cyclical riffage, that just grinds endlessly, while all around it, drums pound, FX swirl, vocals howl.
Check out opener "Black Percy" which pairs a Motorhead riff with some Butthole Surfers style tribal drumming, before exploding into a full on metal punk blowout, with wild unhinged David Yow (Jesus Lizard / Scratch Acid) style vocals, but then out of nowhere in swoops a crazy metallic melody that's so catchy, it almost sounds like another song. But it works somehow, and ends up being probably the catchiest jam here, which, as surprising as it might sound, is saying something, cuz there's a lot of unlikely catchiness tucked amidst all this skull caving, rib cage rattling noise. Tracks like "Grotto Crank" take a riff and work it to death, stretching it way out, while yowled vox disappear in clouds of dubbed out FX and are transformed into another layer of buzz, the song lurching and lumbering, almost like some sort of brain damaged slo-mo prog, before finally launching into some serious metallic pummel, only to almost immediately splinter, and collapse into some feedback drenched dirgery, again, everything dubbed out like crazy, turning an otherwise noisy plod into a freaky psychedelic damaged dirge. Fuck yeah. Another favorite is the awesomely titled "World War Two Hitler Youth Dagger", which adds some serious math to the mix, a roiling sprawl of tangled riffage and caveman drum pound, but laced with some soaring guitar shreddery, some droned out psychedelia, and again, some seriously damaged dubbiness as well.
We could go track by track, but by now, having read the above, and presumably listened to some of the sounds below, you know if this is your cup of PCP laced sonic tea or not. It most definitely is ours. Easily the best noise rock record of the year, and most certainly vying for a year end top ten spot, noise rock or otherwise.
Needless to say, fans of Brainbombs, Drunkdriver, Rusted Shut, Violent Students, Billy Bao, Twin Stumps, No Balls, Mayyors, White Mice, Liquorball, Hey Colossus, Homostupids, Shit And Shine, and other sonic shit stirrers, you can add Dethscalator to your arsenal of room clearing, ear drum destroying, speaker shredding crush.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!! Pressed on 140 gram pink bubblegum vinyl.
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Truth be told, back in the day we didn't pay too much attention to Digable Planets after their first record Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) from 1993 and its hit single "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)". Their blend of jazz and hip hop was admirable and breezy, but they came across back then more as a novelty, than an act in it for the long haul. Listening now two decades later to their follow-up effort from 1994, Blowout Comb, we realize we should have paid way more attention. Newly reissued by Light In The Attic, Blowout Comb is a stellar missive from the nineties golden era of hip hop, right up there with the best of Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers and The Pharcyde. The tone here more gritty, the beats harder. The jazz samples are still present, but augmented by live musicians and complex urban rap structures between the three main players, Ladybug, Butterfly (also of Shabazz Palaces), and Doodlebug. While Reachin' brought them a large audience, Blowout Comb is their masterpiece, and though they broke up soon after this release, it holds up amazingly well. Forget Daft Punk, this is our new summer jam right here!!!!
We were introduced to the work of Ekin Fil via a super limited cassette released on Root Strata a couple years back. Now, Students Of Decay have released the first proper album from EF, and it's a jawdroppingly gorgeous piece of slumbering drone-pop. Ekin Fil is the solo work of Turkish songstress Ekin Uzeltuzenci, who quietly waltzes behind reverberant blurs and nocturnal driftscapes. There are songs that slip in and out of existence amidst the foggy production surrounding her voice and acoustic guitar; and if you maybe think this sounds an awful lot like the work of Liz Harris, you wouldn't be that far off. Uzeltuzenci has described her work is a means of escape from the mania of her native Istanbul; and it's not just a therapeutic salve of cathartic torpor for her, she invites the audience to follow along in these dreamy, droney pieces. Like that cassette on Root Strata, this eponymous lp is quite an enchanting journey. She hypnotically strums her way through dour avant-folk songs whose melodies are entirely enshrouded in gauzy shadows, ghostly ectoplasm, and cavernous echo. No sharp edges whatsoever, but some of her songs can delve much further into the spooky than Grouper ever has. For example, there's the rocket-engine roar which girds her gasping track "Sea Holly" and the chords of "On Vanity" recall the desolate, acoustic balladeering that Bauhaus would sprinkle throughout their glam-goth bombast. Certainly for fans of Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, The Slaves, Vestals, and of course Grouper! Yup, download card included.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not that many of these on stock, we're afraid to say... and we will not be able to get any more of these once they're gone! The label tried to press a decent sized run of 300 copies, but less than half of those made their way into circulation for reasons that seemed to be lost in translation. This strange bit of record-release self-immolation is almost fitting for this strange piece of outsider audio collage. Embudagonn 108 is the work of the hermetic Wataru Kasahara, who smashes field recordings and subconsciously selected radio transitions together into a quivering mass of phased patterns that latch onto the antiquated, syrupy sentiment of forgotten big band arrangements and jitterbug jazz that Leyland Kirby might submerge within his hauntological ambience. But Kasahara punctures the mood with the deadpan delivery of newscasters, hurricane force drones, and unsettled screams. With everything roughly cut and spliced to and from cassettes, there's plenty of hiss to go around; but the effect is hardly the dreamtime din of a Phillip Jeck recording. It's much closer to the Dada discombobulation of Walter Ruttmann's 1930 radiophonic classic "Weekend." Kasahara describes the album thusly, "those tracks have flowed into and merged with the shit-cawing crimson shitbirds that circle endlessly around the mountain of shit on my skull peak." He's bundled the whole thing with a hand fabricated book with pornographic collages, scrawled drawings, and wood block prints. A disturbingly, visionary piece of work!
After a handful of weird and wonderful unearthed sonic rarities rescued and reissued by the Dead-Cert label, run by aQ faves Demdike Stare and Finders Keepers label head honcho Andy Votel, which included rare experimental radiophonic electronic recordings from Suzanne Ciani, an early eighties souvenir recording from a sculptural installation project that utilized stainless steel sculptures, and a reissue of a rare eighties Folkways release that mixed modular synth, tape manipulations, field recordings and traditional Persian string instruments, comes this collection of early space music / new age from the boyfriend / girlfriend duo of Kat Epple and Bob Stohl, who would later go on to some measure of cult fame with their group Emerald Web, but these recordings predate the formation of that group, documenting some of the earliest recordings from Epple and Stohl, a couple of the first musicians to combine synthesizers with organic instruments like flute, guitar, percussion and of course the human voice. The liner notes mention the music of Epple and Stohl, as well as their subsequent group Emerald Web, fitting more in the 'space music' scene, than the new age scene (which definitely embraced them), and we can definitely see that, the sounds here are cosmic and expansive, darkly psychedelic. Shades of current groups like Expo 70 are all over Sanctu Spiritus, deep swirling ambience, the synths fuzzy and buzzy (or are those effected guitars?). This record consists of five long tracks, each a sprawling, smoldering drift rife with deep low end pulsations, sizzling arcs of melody, drifting through soft clouds of washed out chordal shimmer, the vibe softly psychedelic and mesmerically melancholic.
Which is not to say much of the music here is not new agey, it most definitely is, but it's less relaxation massage style new age and more interdimensional cosmic drift new age, with glimmering fields of softly cascading synth textures, tinkling chimes, harp like shimmery strum, fields of fluttery flute, super chilled out and almost jazzy in places, a little folky in others, some seriously dreamy zoner drift for sure, and for every bit of new age fluff, there's some brooding, ominous moaning low end, like the brief closer on side one, a seriously dark ambient drift that's surprisingly menacing considering the context, foghorn like tones over the muted rumble of what sound like reverberating metal, thick slow moving sonic swells, and dense almost noisy crescendos.
But then the second side shifts toward something more airy and ethereal, the first half soft and swirly and slowly unfurling, but by the second half, clouds begin to gather, the same new agey drift now wreathed in shadow, moodily brooding, a cosmic dark jazz drift wreathed in the subtle sound of whipping wind, and slow moving fields of shimmering sci-fi FX.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!!
All right! Just in time for summer, some hot rockin' action outta Sweden! This is an aptly titled debut of catchy, classic hard rock / metal in the grand tradition of AC/DC, with a dash of Van Halen - updated with a bit of a heavier sound. Free Fall was formed by the ex-guitarist from popular garage psych act The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, in cahoots with a few other hotshot musicians (in Sweden, there's lots), including the drummer from International Noise Conspiracy, and, crucially, a previously unknown vocalist named Kim Fransson whose sandpapered pipes convincingly conjure positive comparisons to the likes of AC/DC's Bon Scott and Humble Pie's Steve Marriott - when Fransson sings "I'm the king of rock and roll" on the album's title track, his voice sells it, despite the fact that we've never heard him or them before.
There's a wild abandon to this, the guitar solos in particular, and in addition we dig how Free Fall have a formula and do it well - but also stick to that formula only as much as they wanna, allowing for some originality and surprises. The track "Attila" ferinstance, slows things down and establishes an interestingly moody vibe, still appropriately within the context of this band's '70s inspired hard rock concept, being a heartfelt semi-ballad with lashings of sinister riffery.
They cite The Who as a big influence and that's heard here, on eponymous track "Free Fall" for sure, along with the aforementioned AC/DC, VH, UFO, Montrose, Nazareth, etc. Unlike some other bands trying to capture the same sort of retro rock magic, Free Fall really do deliver - possibly the secret to their success is that these are garage/punk dudes, not metallers, so they're kinda coming at these sounds on the same trajectory as musicians back in the day.
In a just, rockin' world, these guys would be huge. Heck maybe they will be, and Fransson's line will be proved no idle boast. Recommended if you're ready to rock.
For whatever reason, we were expecting this to be some sort of fuzzy jangle pop, maybe it was the name? But this is in fact nothing of the sort, instead, Glochids, aka sonic mad scientist James Roemer, conjures up a seriously twisted, and gorgeously noisy collection of field recording driven, 20th century beholden, fractured avant collage soundscapery. The backdrop for most of these tracks do seem to be field recordings, gathered, we discovered via the label, from locales as diverse as South American bus stations, Wisconsin in the winter and the Sonoran desert to name just a few. But those recordings are reworked and reimagined, and while recognizable on some tracks, on others they're transformed into woozy smears, or crumbling, corrosive ambience, over which Roemer plays an assortment of instruments, piano and guitar, but also primitive computers, gamelan, even cactus quills, it could be a case where the making of is much more interesting than the actual music, but thankfully, Roemer weaves all of that random instrumentation, and the various processed field recordings into something quite mysterious and lovely. Some tracks are dark psychedelic blurs, others are chiming bell like melodies, still others seem to be formed from chopped up vocals tangled up with splattery percussion, and still others are murky staticky drones, laced with buried melodies and random rhythms, there are noisy bits for sure, but even then the sound is textured and nuanced.
Most of the record seems to exist in some weird faux early music / avant garde soundworld, as if this was some alien Folkways collection, gathered up on various trips, going door to door, or maybe planet to planet, capturing songs on porches and in fields, in spacecraft? And then sending them back via wormhole, where they get garbled and recontextualized, before they emerge here, in this time, gloriously corroded and splintered, doused in all manner of cosmic sonic detritus, the resulting abstract experimental folk music a strange strain of lovely, one that's often difficult, but deep listening is definitely rewarded.
We're actually reminded of an old aQ favorite, Brian Harnetty's American Winter, which took snippets of dialogue and oral histories, and wove them into field recordings and radio transmissions, wheezing chords and toy instruments. Glochids sounds a lot like a deconstructed, more Nurse With Wounded version of Harnetty's haunting collages. Which is a very good thing. Wonderfully weird and warped, and in its own twisted way, quite lovely as well.
Pressed on 160 gram vinyl, includes a download code and is LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!
Time Off marks the first album from psychedelic axe slinger Steve Gunn (GHQ, Magik Markers) out on his own as bandleader, and the first thing we noticed, is that maybe his recent collaboration with Hiss Golden Messenger (for the recent Record Store Day Golden Gunn release, now sadly out of print) rubbed off on him, because opener "Water Wheel" is some seriously lush, twangy country rock goodness, Gunn's usual druggy psychedelic folk here wreathed in swirling acoustic guitars, woozy basslines, simple shuffling rhythms, sounding like classic Appalachia fused to seventies classic soft rock, all warm and hazy, softly psychedelic, with Gunn's swoonsome raspy croon, it's pretty great, but definitely slightly unexpected. In fact, it was actually reminding us of a slightly darker, slightly more psychedelic Iron & Wine, which is most definitely not a bad thing at all.
And it's not just that first song, not sure if it's a permanent shift, but Gunn's 'new' sound is definitely following a similar path to his Hiss Golden Messenger compatriots, doesn't seem like a coincidence, that both the new HGM and the new Steve Gunn are being released at the same time, and on the same label, cuz they're definitely sonically similar, warm and sun dappled, darkly dreamy, the seventies vibe huge on both, but on tracks like Gunn's "New Decline", it sounds like he's channeling classic Grateful Dead, a super tranced out extended country psych jam, that could easily have sprawled into a 20 minutes space jam. And those jams pop up throughout, check out the last half of album closer "Trailways Ramble", the same sort of laid back druggy drift, all acoustic guitars and tangled spidery leads, all over a softly propulsive groove, and laced with wild sawed cello. Other tracks look back to classic seventies folk, "Old Strange" has a definite Incredible String Band vibe, with cellos and flutes, and simple percussion, and some gorgeous finger picked steel string guitar, but inevitably Gunn brings the sound back to that twangy, groovy, psych country folk, which we're definitely digging more and more with every spin.
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
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Latest from this Oakland tape label, who has been killing it recently, with the reissued synthscapes of Ron Berry, the grim, liturgical Black Legions black ambience of Moevot, the droned out buzzscapes of Bre'r, the grinding and gorgeously glitchy Starlite Coffins, the debut tape release of solo surf twang guitar from artist Rich Jacobs, sheesh, we can barely keep up, but it's been a blast trying. There's two more good 'uns from Sanity Muffin on this week's list, elsewhere you'll find some fantastic bay area new age from the eighties, and then there's this, the first we've heard from a mysterious outfit called Holy Family, which in fact is a duo half of which is none other than Lawrence English, and whose sound is settled uneasily right between the classic psychedelic minimalist drones of groups like the Taj Mahal Travellers, and the more noisy, blown out floor-core of modern synth/drone combos. Three sprawling slabs of minimal dronemusic trip out, thick sheets of pulsing, pulsating thrum, gristly and distorted, churning and blackened, but sort of blissed out and cosmic, the first track begins as a total zoner-drone drift before splintering into something a bit more atonal, sound like some lost Hermann Nitsch aktion recast into something a bit more blurry and abstract, a sky of bleating keening tones, smeared into lush chordal swells. So good.
The relatively brief second track, begins as a barely there shimmer, a whispery low end creep, before blossoming into some seriously corrosive crumble and crunch, a weird stretched out upper register drone wreathed in swirls of superdistorted buzz, heady and hypnotic and seriously dense and heavy. Which leads directly into the 16 minute final track, a weird field of fractured, fragmented electronic melodies, delivered in sharp spurts, chopped and spread out, surrounded by wide open expanses of hum and thrum, laced with little soft swirls of effects, all above a sea of ever shifting textures, super laid back by comparison, a tranquil bit of buzzy, dreamy drift, that seems to smolder with some sinister shadowy undercurrent, one that always seems to threaten to overwhelm, but instead, just pulses ominously beneath the roiling soft noise shimmer above, when what finally overtakes the sound, is a sort of gristly static, that rises up in an insectoid cloud, before fading out into a hazy, hardly there hum...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! Individually tea-stained tape labels!
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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.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Along with the reactivation of the Khrystanthoney label (check out reviews of Korouva and Melankoli elsewhere on this week's list), comes the introduction of a new label, a Khrysanthoney sub-label, the first two releases, both EXTREMELY limited eps from UK 'dreamo' outfit I Am A Lake Of Burning Orchids, whose sounds is a gloriously distorted, ultra blown out, electronics heavy blackened, crumbling shoegaze. And it's just as good as that sounds. Just check out the first track on "Summer In My Veins" from the group's first ep, which sounds like My Bloody Valentine, Mohinder, Tim Hecker all blended up and mixed by Alec Empire, or something. It's a dizzyingly dense tangle of ultra buzzy crumble, grinding distorto electronics, shrieked vox buried in the mix, lilting minor key melodies transformed into jagged streaks of furious fuzz, the production too, warped and woozy, almost Faxed Head style, with the sound swooping in and out, fading to near silence, then exploding into blow out speaker shredding howls, the sound stuttering and glitching out, often woven into strangely dynamic sprawls of start stop psychedelic noise, just as often smeared into prismatic FX drenched swirls. Some of the music sounds a bit like a crappy old Casio keyboard run through a million distortion pedals and then broadcast through a wall of Marshall amps, some sounds like pure abstract electronic komische melted down into pure, swirling, crystalline noise, and some sounds like malfunctioning techno, draped with harsh vokills and then doused in gouts of distortion and fuzz. Glorious, ear melting, head spinning, rainbow colored, blown out, buzz drenched, metallic dreamo bliss out of the highest order.
Morning - Hands is IAALOBO's second ep and explores a different side of the group, harnessing many of the same sounds and textures, but trading in the Melt-Banana style short-sharp-shocks for long sprawling dronescapes, total Tim Hecker style epic crumble, like a super distorted blown out Caretaker record, the tracks here rumble and smolder, the sound delivered in swells, that build and build, before decaying into abstract swirls of sound the opening salvo is just total droned out heavy psychedelic dream-noise mesmer, but the second half is much more abstract and ambient, slipping from hushed hazy drift, all warm soft swirls and muted gauze-y crackle, to an almost krautrocky like komische, albeit one doused in distortion and effects, and finally, a sprawl of processed field recordings, which gradually blur into a murky sprawl of grey thrum, before dissipating and once again revealing the found sounds within. Both eps are SO GREAT, such a crime they're so limited. How limited? THESE ARE LIMITED TO JUST 50 COPIES!!! We have only a handful of each, and then they're gone for good. Beautifully packaged in an 8" x 17" fold out insert, housed in a translucent envelope, hand numbered in metallic ink.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Along with the reactivation of the Khrystanthoney label (check out reviews of Korouva and Melankoli elsewhere on this week's list), comes the introduction of a new label, a Khrysanthoney sub-label, the first two releases, both EXTREMELY limited eps from UK 'dreamo' outfit I Am A Lake Of Burning Orchids, whose sounds is a gloriously distorted, ultra blown out, electronics heavy blackened, crumbling shoegaze. And it's just as good as that sounds. Just check out the first track on "Summer In My Veins" from the group's first ep, which sounds like My Bloody Valentine, Mohinder, Tim Hecker all blended up and mixed by Alec Empire, or something. It's a dizzyingly dense tangle of ultra buzzy crumble, grinding distorto electronics, shrieked vox buried in the mix, lilting minor key melodies transformed into jagged streaks of furious fuzz, the production too, warped and woozy, almost Faxed Head style, with the sound swooping in and out, fading to near silence, then exploding into blow out speaker shredding howls, the sound stuttering and glitching out, often woven into strangely dynamic sprawls of start stop psychedelic noise, just as often smeared into prismatic FX drenched swirls. Some of the music sounds a bit like a crappy old Casio keyboard run through a million distortion pedals and then broadcast through a wall of Marshall amps, some sounds like pure abstract electronic komische melted down into pure, swirling, crystalline noise, and some sounds like malfunctioning techno, draped with harsh vokills and then doused in gouts of distortion and fuzz. Glorious, ear melting, head spinning, rainbow colored, blown out, buzz drenched, metallic dreamo bliss out of the highest order.
Morning - Hands is IAALOBO's second ep and explores a different side of the group, harnessing many of the same sounds and textures, but trading in the Melt-Banana style short-sharp-shocks for long sprawling dronescapes, total Tim Hecker style epic crumble, like a super distorted blown out Caretaker record, the tracks here rumble and smolder, the sound delivered in swells, that build and build, before decaying into abstract swirls of sound the opening salvo is just total droned out heavy psychedelic dream-noise mesmer, but the second half is much more abstract and ambient, slipping from hushed hazy drift, all warm soft swirls and muted gauze-y crackle, to an almost krautrocky like komische, albeit one doused in distortion and effects, and finally, a sprawl of processed field recordings, which gradually blur into a murky sprawl of grey thrum, before dissipating and once again revealing the found sounds within. Both eps are SO GREAT, such a crime they're so limited. How limited? THESE ARE LIMITED TO JUST 50 COPIES!!! We have only a handful of each, and then they're gone for good. Beautifully packaged in an 8" x 17" fold out insert, housed in a translucent envelope, hand numbered in metallic ink.
The return of our favorite lo-fi, distorto boogie, zoner-psych one man band, King Blood! Is there even more than one? Hell, even if there was, we'd be hard pressed to dig their music more than the dirgey, distortion drenched trance-out mesmer KB kicks up, and on this new two track single, it's another couple blasts of hypno-drone, modern minimal dirge boogie bliss. We've mentioned Reich and Riley in past reviews, positing that KB sounded a bit like deconstructed, decayed guitar boogie, via modern minimalism, with each 'song' a looped cyclical sprawl crafted from single riff, or melodic line, repeated over and over and over, super mesmerizing and intensely druggy and so easily to get utterly lost in. We were extra excited for this single, knowing a little secret about both tracks here, one that becomes more obvious once you get a load of the B side, and one that's probably more fun to discover on your own, so fans of King Blood here's your SPOILER ALERT!!! Both tracks here, while not specifically 'covers', are in fact impressions of / variations on / ruminations on, tracks by none other than the mighty Guns & Roses. The A side is not so obvious, so let's start with the B side, which is essentially the main riff from "My Michelle" (the title is "Well, Well, Well" after all), slowed way down, slathered in soft swirly distortion, and wreathed in crackle and amp buzz, and transformed into a woozy, slithery, looped crawl, hazy, and druggy, and dreamily dirgey. We say this all the time, but we would have been so happy to have this track / side stretched out for the length of a whole lp, total G&R minimal boogie bliss trip out radness for sure.
And while the A side is not so immediately recognizable, it's equally rad, with a huge echoey, cavernous main riff, reminding us of a slightly better produced Les Rallizes Denudes, swaggery, snarly, slithery, with a killer distorted psychedelic melodic lead, draped over the churning distorted tarpit riff, again, some seriously woozy slo-mo glam-boogie dirgery that RULES.
And if you really wanna get dirgey and sludgey, crank it down to 33rpm... sounds even more like some lost seventies Japanese psych bootleg!
After a bit of a hiatus, the Khrysanthony label returns, with a handful of new releases, as well a a newly hatched label (Loveswirls). The first new release on Khrysanthoney proper comes in the form of Korouva's Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette, a reissue of a long out of print cd-r / download, available on vinyl for the first time, and part of a three lp trilogy (we do have the other two installments, to be reviewed later, but if you want 'em now, check the in stock not yet reviewed section of this week's list). Shipwrecks is probably best known as one of the records 'stolen' by black metal duo Velvet Cacoon, only adding to that group's mystery and controversy, although we imagine there was likely some serious collusion going on between Korouva and VC, regardless, much like the first time we heard this years back, even then thinking it was in fact VC, we were struck by what a darkly lovely and hauntingly creepy record Shipwrecks really is. Folks expecting black buzz or blown out shoegaze will likely be disappointed, as this is all brooding balladry, haunting washed out piano, the sound of rain, and plaintive vocal croons. Miranda "Korouva" Lehman's voice is deep and sultry, reminding us at time of Fiona Apple actually, but much more abstract and minimal, often cooing mumbly wordlessly, those vocals drifting above a slow shifting backdrop of creaking ambience, witchy wheezing harmonica, tinkling chimes, soft swirls of subtle barely there effects, the sound sometimes do distorted it becomes almost avant garde, but at other times so hushed as to be ghostly, the vibe washed out and woozy, faded and dreamily murky. A collection of minimal abstract torch songs, moody, melancholic and mesmerizing, not hard to imagine wandering through some strange city, the rain pouring down, looking for someplace to duck out of the downpour, only to find some mysterious dimly lit dive, and inside, a strange collection of shapes hunched over their drinks, lit only by the flicker of candlelight, while in the corner, sits an old piano, with a shadowy shape at the keyboard, the woman at the piano, providing a mysterious musical balm for the rainsoaked dispossessed, each song a haunting threnody, an aching lament, that speaks to the collective misery, and sadness and hopelessness of the clientele, all drowning their sorrows, waiting for the end.
So gorgeous, and darkly, depressively dreamy. Fans of folks like Chelsea Wolfe and Zola Jesus should check this out too, Korouva's sound laced with a gloomy/gothic vibe that seeps into every ghostly note.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, while they last we have the opaque red / black swirl colored vinyl version. Packaged in a thick full color jacket, with an 8 page lyric booklet and a Khrysanthoney insert.
Second release from this mysterious outfit, their second for local black metal tape label Brotherhood Of Light, and like their previous tape, Heathen, the sound maybe be blackened, but it's definitely not black metal. At least not for much of the time... Opening with some creepy hushed barely there ambience, the sound explodes into a sprawl of crumbling distorted buzz, wrapped around what sounds like a programmed beat, the result is a sort of post industrial blackened electronica? The guitar is fuzzy and minor key, the melody melancholic and mournful, a blurry cloud of drifting buzz, driven by that beat, and draped over some buried vokills that growl and occasionally shriek in the background. For being buzzy and black, it's surprisingly washed out and softly trancey, almost dreamy at times.
The sound does drift more toward a blackness that's more traditionally depressive, but it remains kinda blissed out and shoegazey. Before drifting into an almost kosmische sounding stretch of dreamy celestial glimmer, before again exploding into some much more traditional black buzz, but even then, the sound is murky and muddy and blurred into something more tranced out and hypnotic, and the sound is shot through with some strange keening melodies, that again, add a strange avant melodic vibe to the proceedings.
And then it seems like Llyr settle into something much more straight ahead, midtempo black metal, buzz and pound, dark and sinister, when all of a sudden, BLAM, another programmed beat lurches into action, churning away beneath another sprawl of swirling hazy buzzy blackness, the sound once again a weird sort of black electronica... Cool, and darkly twisted, another weird winner from Brotherhood Of Light, and like all the previous BoL tapes, SUPER LIMITED.
The duo of Andre Foisy and Terence Hannum, aka Locrian, may have started life as purveyors of grim black ambience, and even with the addition of drummer Steven Hess, and an expanding sound that found their black buzz dronescapes blossoming into more rhythmic, and fully realized sonic sprawls, we still weren't entirely prepared for Return To Annihilation, which finds the group's crystallizing into something surprisingly melodic, what in the past might have been slow shifting fields of static rumble, and churning dark psychedelia, here has been transformed into something, dare we say poppy. Opener "Eternal Return" begins with some sinister synth buzz, darkly sci-fi and ominous, so we were prepared for more classic Locrian, but then BAM, the song explodes into some seriously prismatic, synth heavy dirge pop bliss out, think M83, Jesu, Mogwai. Minus the shrieked black metal vokills, this could be any of those groups, super melodic, dense and lush and layered, crazy melodic, epic and majestic, almost a crime it's over after less than three minutes.
But fear not, there's plenty more of this 'new' Locrian to be found. "A Visitation From The Wrath Of Heaven" begins like the opener, all crumbling, pulsing synths, woozy minor key swirls, again, seemingly setting us up for some droned out black mesmer, but instead, in come the drums, some swirly backwards melodies, and the track gradually settles into a sort of dreamy, drifting slow-core, something you might expect to be on Kranky, everything wreathed in psychedelic shimmer, but all smeared into a softly fuzzy, hypnotic rhythmic churn. Although they do drop in some harsh vox right near the end, really, again that's the only thing keeping this from being some weird minimal experimental drone pop. That and the crushing minute long doom/sludge finale, that soars majestically, the buzzing guitars wrapped around wordless vocals, and draped over some seriously crushing drum damage.
And so it goes, the record unwinding in all sorts of sonic directions. "Two Moons" is all softly tangled acoustic guitar, over a buzz drenched post rock lope, a sort of Mogwai / Tim Hecker hybrid, heavy certainly, but more heady and hypnotic than anything, then there's the title track, which begins as a brooding gloom pop, before blossoming into a freeform bit of black metal riffing, but blurred into something much more abstract, a gorgeous sprawl of minor key distorted guitar crumble, before returning to a sort of Mogwai / Godspeed style post rock slow build, albeit augmented with some extra metallic heft and more vokills. The final three tracks drift from hushed buzzy thrum, beneath soft curlicues of reverbed guitar shimmer, noisy blown out freeform guitar noise, laced with wild drum splatter, and harsh howled vox, to the final 15+ minute sprawl of "Obsolete Elegies", which begins as an acoustic guitar / piano threnody, dark, twang flecked swirls, set amidst billowing clouds of soft psychedelia, brooding and dusky, a little bit of Barn Owl maybe happening, moaned vocals, buzzing sci-fi synths, the sound transforming part way through into some strange dubbed out synth-prog, before once again launching into some epic, super distorted post rock majesty, soaring melodies, churning drum crush, all of which fades out into a field of synth swirl and disembodied sitar buzz, muted and haunting, only to eventually explode into a final blast of heaviness, of blasting black metal in fact, chugging and churning at first, before in swoops a second guitar transforming the sound into some insane and epic black prog heaviness, and suddenly we find ourselves wishing for a whole record that sounds like the last two minutes. Fingers crossed for next time.
NOW ON VINYL!!!
These guys have been getting a ton of hype lately, not to mention some controversy, and not necessarily because of their music, although that has something to do with it. These modern doomlords have a classic sound not that far removed from say, Black Sabbath or Pagan Altar or Witchfinder General - lumbering, true doom riffage, and some seriously wailing Ozzyish vocals - which is nothing new obviously, but these guys caused quite a stir cuz this true doom combo is in fact made up of a handful of Boston hardcore luminaries, guys who used to play in Mind Eraser, Rival Mob, Battle Ruins and Doomriders. So that fact had punk rockers crying sell out and metalheads crying poser, certainly everybody kind of shocked/surprised. And while there remains not a shred of their punk past, really, metalheads have nothing to complain about, just give "Scream Evil" a listen. Holy shit, who thought these punks had it in them? Especially the vocalist, who manages to conjure up a killer Ozzy beholden wail, without falling in to the Sabbath copycat trap lots of other doom vocalists seem unable to avoid. It's hard to say exactly what it is, but the phrasing is different, and the timbre of his voice, more rough and raspy, which gives these songs a different kind of emotion and energy, and a raw urgency. And heck, let's not forget about the riffs, which KILL. When you're done with "Scream Evil", give "Magic Circle" a try. There a distinctive pop element running throughout, making the songs crazy catchy, besides being heavy, and sorta psychedelic, the overall sound is actually quite minimal, the occasional classic metal lead, some harmonized guitars once in a while, but lots of tempo shifts, the band not afraid to crank it up, "Magic Circle" morphs into "Cloven In Two", which adds some serious swing, slipping into something very NWOBHM sounding. And "Scream Evil" too, gets downright rocking, launching into some metallic pound that sounds more like Angel Witch.
Those two tracks, originally released on a super limited 7" are buried WAY deep on the record, but opener "Winter Light" sets the stage just fine, with it's slithery downtuned main riff, a classic doomy dirge, and those vocals soaring over the top, a killer chorus, the whole thing darkly psychedelic and totally epic, as are the other three tracks, the most notable being the furious galloping onslaught of "Rapture" which almost has a Tokyo Blade feel too it, and has some seriously kick ass lead guitar, that sounds super processed and tripped out, but "Conquering Nocturnity" is pretty amazing too, another jam that sounds like it could have been transported here from back in the day, classic, soaring, majestic, emotional doom of the highest order. Fuck the haters, the doomlords around here have been digging this like crazy, and all you aQ-ers into true doom, past and present, enter the Magic Circle!
Full length number two from these beloved SF psychedelic jangle poppers, and like their debut on Siltbreeze, Long Enough To Leave is another gorgeously fuzzy retro-pop garage-psych throwback, which sounds even more like some lost popsike reissue this time around, the group seemingly finding the perfect home on local pop label Slumberland. Unlike the more fuzzed out crunch of local outfits like Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall, the Mantles seem more aligned with modern jangle poppers like Woods or The Babies, and so so so reminiscent of classic jangle poppers on labels like Sarah and Flying Nun, as well as the Swell Maps and the Velvet Underground, a little bit lo-fi but still strangely warm and lushly layered, all dreamily druggy and laid back, their arrangements stripped down and minimal, every song warm and fuzzy, shimmery, summery and softly psychedelic, hooks galore, but those hooks tucked away, and employed subtly, the vibe more tranced out and hypnotic, the catchiness surfacing more and more with each repeated listen, eventually transforming their jangly hypno-pop into pure perfect pop gems, like "Brown Balloon", which over the course of 3:34 lodges itself in your head permanently, the catchiest part a single little guitar lick, that is the key to unlocking just how goddamn catchy every other part of the song truly is. "Bad Design" too, which right out of the gate delivers some classic pop catchiness, which somehow only gets more and more catchy over the next two minutes.
Repeated listens yields still more hooks, and reveals Long Enough To Leave as a fuzzy, psychedelic jangle pop (soon to be) classic!
The Meads Of Asphodel are a strange bunch, everything about them has always been just a bit off, but brilliantly so, their sound sonically schizophrenic, their black metal flecked with whatever weirdness mainman Metatron feels like throwing into the mix. In their band photos, they're always wearing medieval Crusader armor, wielding shields, maces and swords, their song titles are bizarre, their records filled with unlikely guests, and seemingly designed to baffle or piss of in equal measure, and while much of what they do seems like it must be a joke, like they're constantly taking the piss, arriving now at full length number six (and that's not counting splits and eps), it's more obvious now than ever, that these guys are deadly serious, it's just that they're also kinda nuts. And it's that seriousness, that dedication to their high concept warped songcraft, that makes this new record make a bit more sense. Just a bit.
While there's no shortage (unfortunately) of Nazi black metal, there has not yet been, as far as we know, a black metal concept record about the holocaust, not celebrating it in any way, just exploring the horror, from both the perspective of the perpetrators AND the victims. Well, at least until now. That's right, like the last Meads concept record, also a pretty intense one, about the life and death of Jesus, titled The Murder Of Jesus The Jew, Sonderkommando is another concept record, one that is indeed about the Holocaust. The music is the usual twisted batch of Meads weirdness, with another collection of ridiculous guests, who only add to the confusional sonic chaos, but the lyrical content this time around is appropriately harsh, as is the gruesome cover art, and while folks will no doubt cry foul, this is serious stuff, even if sonically, it doesn't always seem like it. Mainman Metatron spent YEARS researching and conceptualizing, and the bafflingly brilliant results bear that out, an epic sonic sprawl equal parts grim black buzz, murky blackened prog, and over the top, super dramatic, melodic Broadway musical style glamminess. Yup. But what did you expect, it's the Meads after all. And just to drive that point home, in the band pictures they're still dressed like medieval warriors!
The core Meads lineup this time around is augmented by a whole mess of guests, including members of Hawkwind, God's Tower, Amebix, Sigh, even Gnaw Their Tongues, and hell, Metatron's son even makes an appearance as well.
It all begins with the 12 minute title track, which begins like you might expect, with samples of archival voices, all scratchy historical recordings, which is soon joined by a strange bit of wheezing almost gypsy folk, piano, female vox, but then what you might not expect, is the song exploding into some Bowie-esque glam, or what sounds like some strange stage musical, with wailed dramatic vocals, singing "You don't have to die to walk in hell, for here is hell", sounding a bit like a number from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, all over a backdrop of weirdly swirling, murky slithery jazziness. It's not until about 6 minutes in, that the sound explodes into some furious black buzz, but it's the Meads, so no straight ahead black metal here, instead it's super tangled, near proggy weirdness, laced with twisted melodies, multiple dueling vokills, cool expanses of churning chug, some stop/start dynamics, a dizzying black tangle, before returning to the glammy over the top melodic musical style bombast of the beginning, this time paired with a little black buzz.
From there on out, all bets are off, the sing-songy almost folky "Wishing Well Of Bones", the synth swaddled black buzz of "Aktion T4", then there are tracks like "Silent Ghosts Of Babi Yar", which like the title track, are exactly what makes the Meads so good, and so fucking nuts, blasting out some seriously buzzing blackness, all churning riffage and pounding drums, harsh hateful vox and dizzying blasts, before blossoming into another stretch of fill on epic glam pop, soaring clean vocals, over swirling synths, all wedded to some black metal buzz, a twisted, but weirdly appealing combo, and then paired with the lyrics, and the concept, totally over the top WTF genius for sure. Dig deeper and there's still more weirdness, the creepy dramatic reading of "Lamenting Weaver Of Horror", a dialogue between a child (Metatron's kid) and death, all over some murky black ambient rumbles, and some creepy atmospherics, dripping water, distant creaks and groans, which splinters into some twisted blackened power metal, before transforming into some loping spaced out psychedelia, then there's the insanely titled "The Mussulmans Wander Through The Infernal Whirling Fires Amongst Silent Shadows To Be Fed Into The Thirsting Jaws Of A Godless Death Machine To Cough Up Their Souls To The Nazi Moloch Who Sits Within A Ring Of Smoking Infant Skulls", which begins with a weird looped vocal round, and soon explodes into some almost Viking sounding black metal, laced with soaring female vocals, wildly proggy and super melodic, psychedelic too, with dueling vokills/vocals, the whole thing suddenly devolving into a woozy, slithery blackened blooz jam, replete with harmonica! There's plenty more strangeness throughout, the clean vocals pop up everywhere, giving the record a super dramatic over the top vibe, but for every bit of melodic bombast, there's some twisted blackness, all tangled up into one epic sonic headtrip, that might be the Meads finest moment yet. Certainly their most brilliantly baffling!
The Khrysanthoney label returns after a bit of a break, with a barrage of new releases. Including this, the debut full length from Russian depressive black metal one man band Melankoli, whose sound is a perfect fit for Khrysanthoney, melding the downtuned dirge and melancholic creep of depressive black metal, with something much more lush and cinematic. The nearly 20 minute opener begins with lush synth swirls, strange field recordings, tinkling chimes, dramatic pianos, swirling FX, it almost sounds like M83, or some strange sci-fi soundtrack, the drums come in gradually, a spare, echo drenched pound, a deep dramatic spoken vocal, over a shimmery swirl of piano, total haunting shoegaze slo-mo blissout, swirling harmony vocals, wreathed in the sound of wintery winds, until finally, the guitars come cascading in, and the harsh vokills, but even then, they're paired with the more dreamy, dramatic sounds of the first few minutes, lilting and lovely, anguished and aching, epic and majestic, at times, the sound does grow dense and blackened, seriously heavy, but just as quickly, those moments dissipate, leaving soft synth swirls, or weirdly processed sprawls of electronic flecked drift, the programmed drums transformed into something much more trippy, before once again returning to the brooding, moody, cinematic churn, sprawling like the score for some end of the world epic. And while nothing else on the record is nearly as grandiose, the other four, shorter tracks here conjure up similarly stunning sonic moments, from the whispery electronic intro to "Embrace Of Winter", which runs throughout the whole song, giving it a weird electronic gloom pop, goth wave vibe, to the moody minimal blackened slowcore of "Coma", which should have Alcest / Amesouers fans in heaven, to the synth soaked sprawl of "Through The Shining Stars", which true to its title, sounds like the score to some super psychedelic sci-fi epic, images of huge expanses of space, of endless starfields, super melodic and darkly emotional, peppered with minimal percussion, and lilting electronic melodies, again, hard not to hear a little M83 (maybe M83's recent score for the movie Oblivion?).
Melankoli finishes things off with a Death Aura cover, a weirdly epic, murky, moody death march dirge, the sounds blurred and washed out, the vocals a buried-in-the-mix demonic rasp, the melodies minor key and melancholic, a beautifully brooding bit of black buzz loveliness.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
First we've heard from these local math rockers, who KILL IT in a way few bands have since the heyday of this kinda stuff. These guys are obviously totally beholden to nineties style math rock, which we're totally fine with, as longtime readers of the aQ list know, we LOVE math / post / noise rock, and love all the old bands from back in the day, and actually, some of the guys in Minot may even have a pedigree that reaches that far back, regardless, this is so good, with a sound that manages to evoke that old sound we love, but still be super modern and not any sort of retro trip at all.
Instrumental, dense, melodic, intricate, driving and heavy, but super moody and textured, the A side manages to be catchy as fuck while delivering said catchiness in a barrage of constantly shifting arrangements and tempos, in fact in a way it sounds like slow build Godspeed style post rock all cranked up and tangled up, into something more dense and dizzying. We actually played the A side like 4 or 5 times before we even made it to side two. And as you might imagine, the B side kicks ass too, digging a bit deeper into the moody meandery side of math/post rockiness, but after a few second of rhythmic loping, the sound explodes into a dense drum heavy groove, driven by a super melodic bassline drifting over the roiling instrumental below, it begins to sound like strings at one point (probably a mellotron, which one of the guys plays in addition to bass!), and then the song splinters into a jagged start / stop breakdown before swooping right back into into it. The 'strings' surface again, and even though it's a wild wrangle of guitar and drums, the sound blurs into a brooding, dreaming epic that so much has us wanting to hear more!
Pressed on pretty clear blue vinyl, and includes a sticker. And they just so happen to be named after one of our favorite places on earth, Minot, North Dakota!!
The latest from long running and uber prolific doom-drone-dirge duo Nadja is one of three new releases on a newish UK label called Oaken Palace, the first totally non-profit label (at least intentionally!), a purely charitable endeavor, that takes all the profits made from record sales, and donates them to various environmental organizations around the world. The label focuses on dronemusic and psychedelia, with two of their first few releases being Aidan Baker projects, and the third being a group featuring members of another psychedelic drone outfit we dig, Thisquietarmy, needless to say, sonically this stuff is right up our alley. And we can definitely get behind the label's mission as well, as they aim to strengthen the connection between music and nature, in a much more tangible way than just singing about trees or having a forest on the record cover.
Taking the concept even further, each group on the label picks a specific endangered species or habitat, to which their record is then dedicated, the record is produced in a super environmentally sustainable manner, 100 percent recycled sleeves, zero carbon vinyl pressing, etc., and then each artist picks a charity related to the species or habitat their record is dedicated to, and that's where all the money goes. So cool!
So Nadja's Flipper, as the title might have given away, is of course dedicated to dolphins, with the proceeds going to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation organization. And it would be easy to say, that for Flipper, Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff made a record that was all underwater sounding, with maybe whale call like guitars, or squeaking dolphin like melodies, but no, it's another classic slab of Nadja slow-burn brood peppered with occasional (very occasional) squalls of swirling psychedelic majesty, heavy and distorted and darkly epic. The first track, clocking in at about 10 minutes, spends its first eight, drifting eerily through a hushed landscape of whispered vocals, deep burbling bass rumble, barely there guitar strum, and programmed drums that seem to be mostly cymbal sizzle, the resulting sprawl is a dreamy, druggy sibilant shimmer, a woozy slowcore creep, meditative and soporific, only exploding into something more at the tail end, and even then, it's not so much heavy as grand, billowing guitar chords, swirling melodies, everything gorgeously hazy and softly crumbly. And really, except for a little stretch at the tail end of the third track, which builds to a lush lovely crescendo, the entire rest of the record is wreathed in shadow, dark chordal clouds drifting over skeletal barely there rhythms, the sounds oozing and slithering, sometimes distorted and ominous, but at others, ethereal and atmospheric, the sound balanced delicately between total entropic decay, and dark, brooding slo-mo mesmer. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, clear vinyl, includes a download code! In 100 percent recycled sleeves, and all proceeds are donated to Whale and Dolphin Conservation.
Invisible Birds introduces us to another exceptional composer through their ongoing series of limited edition hand-fabricated cd-rs, where we had been previously graced by the langous tones of Arthur De Eriomem and got a brilliant full length out of Thomas Bel. Here, the imprint offers us an album from the Japanese ambient composer Tomonari Nozaki who started out in the techno scene, but grew fascinated with the purely analogue forms of tape loops and and synthesizers. A sense of rhythm and timing is definitely at play in his work, alluding to the beatless Pop Ambient sensibility that Wolfgang Voigt inspired through his classic Gas albums; but the placid, cinematic grandeur of Nozaki's sources harken more to The Caretaker and William Basinski's emotionally laden scores of forgotten dreams. The four lengthy tracks could endlessly cycle through their maudlin melodies that are stretched and swept as if carried away the currents of a cold, gray ocean. Like Basinski, Nozaki is not averse to including the dusty crackle, ferric drop-outs, and tape machined errors in with his composition. They do come across with a greater deal of randomness than on the aggregated decomposition of Basinski's Disintegration Loops; but all of the wooziness and gauzy ambience makes for a beautifully spellbinding listen. Limited to 100 copies.
While to most folks, 'witch house' was a sort of flash-in-the-pan, one of those musical genres that blogs and the media leap all over, it blows up big and pops up everywhere, before all of a sudden, poof, it's gone. As we've mentioned in past reviews of witch house and witch house related outfits though, we LOVE that sound, STILL, no guilty pleasure here, it's the sort of woozy, warped electronica we can't ever seem to get enough of. Witch House, also referred to as drag, due to the fact that everything drags, is all hazy and lazy, the beats molasses slow, the vocals too, slowed to a creepy crawl, jagged edits, fractured loops, dizzying collaged layers and textures, everything melty and oozy and gloriously murky and tripped out, and while lots of former witch housers have jumped ship, some have definitely stayed the course, and while pushing the boundaries of the WH sound, haven't deviated too much from THAT sound, if anything, digging even deeper, getting slower and murkier and even more fantastically druggy and darkly dreamy, while somehow fusing that haunted creep to something more polished and modern, which is precisely the case with this, the latest from local witch house warlock oOoOO (supposedly pronounced 'oh' btw), who does just that, starting out with some vintage old school witch house (albeit with a spiffier production than most of the witch house we first heard), "Sirens" unfurling as a weirdly cinematic dirge, wreathed in hiss and crackle, haunting female vocals drifting through clouds of shimmery hum, the looped background constantly shifting pitch, everything warbly and woozy, the beat a barely there skeletal pulse, the whole thing laced with faux strings and delicate piano, all choppy and glitchy throughout.
But then the second track swoops in, with a super soulful vocal, draped over a lurching half speed hip hop beat, some serious slo-mo soul, a la Burial or Vessel, some of the old lysergic pop yacht rock-isms (as described in our review of the last oOoOO record) surface here too, but in the form of mutated sampled backdrops that warble woozily, a la Ariel Pink or James Ferraro, but they're really just warped backdrops for oOoOO's swoonsome soul slither. And the rest of the record essentially splits the difference, some tracks, minimal and moody, total witch house murk, while others drift further into the more soulful modern minimal slow motion electronica, the best moments though, are on tracks like "3:51 AM", where both those sonic sides are melded into a subtly stuttery chunk of loping tarpit witch-hop, laced with weird sampled snippets, and boasting a gorgeous, lilting melody (the sort of track that should have big name rappers hitting this guy up for beats), or the brooding cinematic closer, a darkly moody, totally epic, slo-mo electro-soul ballad, that might be the most haunting and stunning track here. So good!
White Fur /// Black Cathedral from Canadian psychedelic spacerockers Parallel Lines /// (pretty sure the actual parallel lines are part of the band name, if they're not, they should be!), is the very first release from a very cool new UK label called Oaken Palace (whose other two releases are also reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, records by Nadja and Caudal). Oaken Palace are in fact, as far as we know, the first totally non-profit label (at least intentionally!), the label a purely charitable endeavor, that takes all the profits from record sales, and donates them to various environmental organizations around the world. The label focuses on dronemusic and psychedelia, which is obviously right up our alley, and besides the amazing music, we can definitely get behind the label's mission as well, which is to strengthen the connection between music and nature, in a much more tangible way than most groups, who just take promo shots in the woods, and adorn their record covers with all sorts of mysterious nature imagery.
The label takes this mission/concept a step further, having each group on the label pick a specific endangered species or habitat, their record is then dedicated to said animal/habitat, the record is then produced in an environmentally sustainable manner, with 100 percent recycled sleeves, zero carbon vinyl pressing, etc., and then each artist picks a charity related to the species or habitat the record is dedicated to, and that's where all the money goes. So cool!
Parallel Lines /// have chosen Polar Bears, and thus all the proceeds from White Fur /// Black Cathedral will in fact go directly to Polar Bears International, the world's leading polar bear conservation group.
Parallel Lines /// might be a new name to most folks, but at least one of the 'Lines will be familiar to longtime readers of the aQ list, Eric Quach, whose one man drone outfit Thisquietarmy is a huge favorite around here, and that sort of swirling blackened drift is definitely all over PL's sound but this is no ambient record, these guys belong more alongside outfits like Carlton Melton, crafting slow building, brooding psychedelic epics that transform from abstract cosmic drift, to dense swirling heaviness, two epic sidelong tracks, the first begins as some total interplanetary bliss out, swirling cymbal shimmers, cascades of sci-fi synths, prismatic and celestial, the drums gradually surfacing, before becoming a wild free form chaos, the surrounding instruments following suit, a thick billowy cloud of FX heavy soft noise trippiness, the drums soon settling into a simple motorik groove, suddenly anchoring the whole sound, and transforming it into something much more propulsive and psychedelic, the guitars growing more distorted, the sound getting heavier and heavier, before it all splinters into a dense, roiling swirl, which in turn soon fades out, and expands into a glimmering star field of sound, drifting spectrally, until the drums once again take charge, and harness the clouds of thrum and whir into some serious mesmerizing hypno-rock minimalism, a minimalism that quickly becomes maximal, blossoming into a gorgeous heavy psych crescendo, and then immediately slipping into some slow decay fade. Awesome. Fans of White Hills, The Heads, Carlton Melton, Hawkwind, all the purveyors past and present of total transcendent space psych, this will definitely push all your buttons.
And hell, there's a whole 'nother side to go, and it's another doozy, the opening a hazy stretch of washed out thrum, like the Caretaker or Tim Hecker, all gristly and grainy, the drums slowly surfacing through the murk, a little bit of twang, some lush chordal guitar swells, the rhythm an understated shuffle, the guitars thick and softly roiling, meditative and trancey, the vibe is slow build psych, but instead of exploding into another stretch of heavy jamming, the sounds seem to melt and ooze into a dreamlike glimmerscape, all softly pulsing synths and soft focus melodic glistening, a sort of kraut-age ambience, weightless and ethereal, but these guys aren't done yet, the sound morphing into some almost Necks like skittery jazziness, before quickly becoming yet another stretch of hypno-rock mesmer, all hazy and dreamily druggy, before one last blow out, heavy psych swirl giving way to a final field of crystalline shimmer.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, 180 gram white vinyl, 100 percent recycled packaging, and includes a download code too!
We got our first taste of these Texas weirdos on a split with psychedelic drone-drug-doom heavies Bong, and the virtually unpronounceable Quttinirpaaq were definitely a good match, countering Bong's longform sonic explorations with their own heavy psych / caustic noise / kraut-sludge pummel. What we didn't know at the time, was that Quttinirpaaq includes among its membership, members of former Record Of The Weekers Rubble as well as Shit And Shine offshoot outfit Same Sac! Which totally makes sense, as No Visitors is a serious blast of drug addled Southern psych, the opening 90 second blast a crumbling almost industrial sounding dirge that sounds like Brainbombs at 16rpm, filtered through some seriously Butthole Surfers style drugginess. Which if you're anything like us, had us sold pretty much right away. And while not all of No Visitors is nearly so noisy, it is all pretty goddamn great. From pulsing low slung krautrock style murk, like on "Malvert", which drapes the motorik mesmer with wild squalls of caustic guitarnoise, and creepy hissy whispery vocals, and what might be some detuned pianos, to slo-mo black noise doom-dirge crumble, like on "Ex-Batts" which literally sounds like the tape has been slowed down, so all the instruments rumble and crumble and moan, everything wrapped in sheets of wild squealing feedback, and near Merzbowian noise, all the while lumbering and lurching like some lost Buttholes jam played back on a broken boombox.
These guys exist somewhere between skull crushing noise rock, atmospheric noise drenched Japanese style psych and primitive caveman dirgery, the comparisons we've read mention Brainbombs, Skullflower and Les Rallizes Denudes, but we'd probably also include Drunkdriver, Twin Stumps, Violent Students, Rusted Shut, Burmese, Liquorball, you can probably figure out what sort of glorious, druggy noisiness we're talking about. Super heavy, ultra psychedelic, stumbling and crushing, tranced out and woozily hypnotic, massive slabs of churning low end, beneath crunchy, jagged, distorto guitars, wild streaks of feedback everywhere, the vocals yelped and yowled, sometimes bellowed, here and there delivered in a deeply dramatic, and sort of creepy croon, the sound constantly on the verge of collapse, but always seeming to eventually coalesce into some seriously demented, kraut-sludge heaviness that will have most aQ customers losing their shit big time. And hell, there's even some faux techno, check out the gristly pulsating "Golden Needles", that sounds like Shit And Shine on Kompakt. Fuck yeah!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Ultra obscure, freaky French '70s underground psychedelic proto punk reissued, oui!! Crazy how there's still stuff like this out there ready to be (re)discovered. The Rob Jo Star band originally put this out in 1975, probably under the influence of the Velvets and the Stooges, kinda like cult Canadian contemporaries Simply Saucer. Like SS, the Rob Jo Star Band packs these tracks with all kinds of ridiculous synth blurt, electronics swooshing and bleeping and farting all throughout this album, other key elements of which include jangling distorted guitars and heavily accented vocals... Pretty darn cool if you ask us! There's moments that sound like a French version of The Cramps, inside a spaceship; others where the singer gets kinda Damo, and basically it's a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) dose of throbbing fuzz, chugging rock n' roll rhythms, handclaps, wild vox, with song titles like "Acid Revolution" and "Blood Flower". File with the likes of Soggy, Angel Face, and Metal Urbain...
Limited edition, import.
