Folks lucky enough to attend the 3 Leafs record release party for this latest lp, here in SF a few nights ago, were treated to an epic re-imagining of the group's favorite Metallica song, actually not even song, their favorite PART of a song, the group transforming that part, harmonized guitars and all, into a sprawling, metallic, repetitive psychedelic hypnorock epic, one that we can only hope the group eventually record. But as you might imagine, no such metallic shenanigans to be found here, just another collection of gorgeous tripped out psychedelic space rock, the group recording live with a stereo mic, no mixing and natural reverb, the space adding a warm glow to the proceedings, everything lush and lustrous. Opener "Traumvogel" offers some seriously dreamy kraut-age shimmer, a softly pulsing barely there rhythm, soft swirls of muted strum, the sky above filled with lovely little melodic tangles, and clouds of hushed cymbal shimmer, the Leafs at their most restrained, never exploding into something heavy, no driving rhythms, instead, just locked into this woozy, dreamily druggy drift.
The title track though does darken considerably, adding thick swaths of shadowy thrum, laced with crumbling distortion, and subtle swirling FX, the drums slowly gathering momentum, eventually settling into a quietly motorik groove, over which the rest of the band lay down clean guitar strums, layered drones and shimmery melodies.
It's not until the third track that Tim Cohen's (Fresh & Onlys, Amocoma, etc.) vocals first surface, echoey and softly reverbed, his vocal refrain drifting atop what sounds like a banjo, unfurling a lilting melodic loop, everyone locked into a simple, stripped down, minimal pulse, tinkling piano, swirling synths, wild squiggly FX surround the main melody/riff, minimal percussion, tinkling chimes, epic and a little bit folky, it's as if 3 Leafs were channeling some lost forest folk, through their own smoldering spaced out psychedelia, and it sounds GREAT.
The rest of the record follows suit, with the group stretching out a bit sonically. "Karlsoy Island" is all sun dappled synths, and pulsing bass grooves, a weirdly exotica vibe happening here, with some distorted guitar melodies draped over the top, laid back and hazily dreamy. "The Rose, The Crap, The Horse", though, is another darker one, all bowed metal and cymbal shimmer, tinkling music box melodies, clattery and clangy, before settling into something more abstract and almost free jazzy, xylophone (or vibes?) add some lush tonal color, the group eventually honing in on a cool skittery groove, that wraps distorted melodies around a skeletal rhythm, the group once again drifting into Necks territory, which is never a bad thing.
Finally, things finish off with the awesomely titled "You Will Be Mist", churning and tribal, with some fierce psych guitar swirl, lots of droned out buzz, some plodding percussion, atonal melodies, all wound up into a tense swirl of dark psych groovery, that ends way too soon after just 6+ minutes.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Includes a download code as well!
Some time ago we reviewed a double cd featuring (supposedly) everything ever recorded by this obscure, outsider-y late '70s / early '80s UK psychedelic "hippy punk" outfit called, variously, Afflicted, The Afflicted Man, and High Speed and The Afflicted Man. It's been out of print for a while - but now, both of the albums that constituted that set's second and best disc, the one where, as we said, the fuzz really hits the fan, have been reissued again, almost simultaneously, with Permanent putting out 1981's I'm Off Me 'Ead on vinyl (only), and Spanish reissue specialists Guerssen doing 1982's Get Stoned Ezy on cd (with vinyl forthcoming as well). Both are issued under license from The Afflicted Man himself, guitarist/vocalist Steve Hall, unlike that previous collection, apparently.
Get Stoned Ezy in particular has been raved about, quite deservedly, as a Holy Grail of wah-fuzz-feedback psych insanity, kind of an unknown precursor to the blown-out speed freak sounds of Japanese heavies like High Rise and Mainliner. Bearing the not entirely hyperbolic warning on the sleeve "This Record Is Very Powerful And Could Give You Earhole Damage", Get Stoned Ezy consists of three lengthy throbbing songs of rollicking fuzzed out guitar splooge with unhinged vocal drawling and pounding repetitive rhythms from this loosey-goosey power trio, total swarming distortion jams to the max.
Meanwhile, the slightly earlier I'm Off Me 'Ead is really almost as good, just a bit different, being marginally more song-oriented (well, there's more of 'em here) than Get Stoned Ezy, more shambolic and "Messthetics-y", if you're familiar with that series of UK DIY comps. It's definitely also about the monomaniacal, messed-up distortodelic guitar wrangling, you're in for plenty of that on either album.
Charming stuff for fans of Hendrix, Hawkwind, The Stooges, Wicked Lady, Groundhogs... and with the vocals factored in, these albums also oughtta appeal to fans of aQ fave Michael Yonkers, big time!
I'm Off Me 'Ead, limited to 500 copies, features remastered sound, and a full color inner sleeve with rare pics, a previously unpublished Steve Hall interview, and more.
Get Stoned Ezy is also remastered from an original vinyl copy (cuz the master tapes are long gone), and the cd booklet contains vintage photos of the band in action plus extensive & enthusiastic liner notes newly penned by the editor of Black To Comm 'zine, Chris Stigliano.
If you need any more convincing, heed the cover sticker blurb on that release from Ripley of Wooden Shjips, who sez: "Fucking essential". Speaking of Wooden Shjips, yeah if you like them and other current practitioners of "heavy psych", like White Hills and The Heads and Carlton Melton and Mainliner and Gnod and Earthless, then really you need to expose your toughened-up earholes to both Get Stoned Ezy and I'm Off Me 'Ead, pronto.
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!
Full length number two from this Canadian combo, and like on their oddly titled debut, Through The Cervix Of Hawaah, Antediluvian continue to hone their warped, damaged and demented blackened death metal, and based on the opening track here, have succeeded in sounding even more fantastically fucked up this time around. Their death metal still bordering on a mutant strain of black metal, the sound here sees the group moving sonically closer to outfits like Wold or Portal, a grinding, dense, chaotic churn of frenzied riffage, wild mathed out drumming, monstrous gurgling vocals, and dense blackened atmospheres.
The aforementioned opener begins with what sounds like chanting, some old liturgical music, only to erupt seconds later into a dense, dizzying tangle of downtuned blackened metallic churn, a furious, frenetic tangle of sounds and parts, it's so wild and woolly and there's so much going on, it's nearly impossible to imagine this being actually composed, and to think of this as a song, as much as pure black sound, cuz the sound of it is more than enough to have us utterly mesmerized, a sort of blacknoise rendered in progged out chaotic death metal form. There are moments of doomy dirgery, and crusty thrashing, but it all seems to be woven into a bigger, more fractured and fucked up whole. We described the group's debut as being some of "thee most gnarled and twisted blackened heaviness" we'd heard, but that honor now seems to describe this new one even more, as it takes everything we loved about that first record, and pushes it even further, a dizzying. An utterly exhausting, exhilarating listen, total blackened tech-metal doom-death genius for sure, and like the first record, another roiling, churning, dizzying, mathed out blackdeath blowout. Fans of diSEMBOWELMENT, Wold, Winter, Abyssal, Gevurah and other weirdo death metal, rejoice!
Somehow this is the fifth full length from these North Carolina psychedelic stoner heavies, but it's the first one we've heard, which is a bummer cuz Blood Drive is a doozy, a killer classic rock / hard rock / Southern rock / stoner rock hybrid, big groovy riffs, hooks galore, crushing drumming, soaring vocals, everything spacey and fuzzed out, psychedelic, and super melodic, the sort of stuff that should be HUGE, in a perfect world. To our ears this sounds a bit like a weird mix of Raging Slab and Kyuss, but with plenty of the laid back wasted psych of outfits like Dead Meadow and Psychic Ills, and as much as we love grim, damaged blackness, and avant minimal dronemusic, and all the other fucked up stuff we listen to, sometimes it's tough to beat straight up, super catchy, big riffing heavy rock, which this most certainly is. The sound slips effortlessly from woozy doomy groovy stoner rock, to mathed out proggy noise rock (check out "Castlestorm"), to dense swirling psychedelia ("Scrappy's Trip" sounds almost like Janes Addiction if they had happened in nineties Seattle, which we can guarantee is a VERY good thing), to swampy apocalyptic dirgery ("Blues For Bama" which starts out sounding like Woven Hand, before blossoming into something much more epic and metallic), to spacey druggy trippiness ("Earthwalk"), to epic almost arena rock sounding hook heavy crush ("Stargazin") that sounds like Torche crossed with old Queens Of The Stone Age, and once again has us wondering why these guys aren't a way bigger deal. And we're so grateful that we're finally almost finished with our reviews for this list, cuz after a couple spins through Blood Drive, we're counting the minutes 'til we're done so we can go for number three (and four, and five and...)!
PS. Vinyl version includes a bonus track NOT on the cd!
Yet another psychedelic dispatch from the mysterious world of Black Thread, aka Greg from space/kraut duo Von Himmel, who as Black Thread explores a soundworld well removed from the monolithic collaged-krautscapes of the VH mothership, specializing in a crumbling, super distorted world of washed out murky, of muddy melodies and blurred ambience, merging the faded Victrola flashback of The Caretaker with the psychedelic soft noise of Tim Hecker, but way more lo-fi and homebrewed, utilizing all manner of primitive analog recording gear, the sounds seemingly dubbed from tape to tape to tape, then perhaps played back on a microcassette player held up to another microcassette recorder, then onto an old VHS tape, played back through a crappy black and white TV, recorded onto an old answering machine, then re-recorded onto a busted up old 4 track, before being broadcast at extreme volume, where it was all then recaptured a final time, and recorded onto a good ol' cassette. At least that's what it sounds like to us.
Where the other Black Thread tapes tended toward the more melodic side of the soft noise spectrum, Aurora is definitely a bit more aggressive, and caustic, opening with a dense cloud of roiling grey noise, but with headphones on, or at least speakers cranked, this cloud seems to barely be obscuring all manner of softly tangled melodies, and slowly swirling textures. Eventually, the noise recedes, leaving some hushed staticky drift, some woozy foghorn like melodies, lots of crackle and muted feedback, the middle portion of the A side downright pretty, but soon that grey/brown noise rears its only mildly ugly head and wraps that prettiness in hazy sheets of pulsing buzz and near dreamy distortion, rendering the noisiness almost shoegazey.
The flipside follows a similar sonic path, balancing tranquil drift with blunted noise, the sound erupting into gorgeous blossoming billows of majestic sound, buried beneath layer upon layer of sonic grit and recording detritus, which only gives the sound a faded, sun bleached feel, the B side definitely wilder, getting super crunchy, the buried melodies transformed into wild distorted squiggles, a heady swirling skree of psychedelic soft noise that eventually fades out and gradually works its way through various stages of static, dense TV static white noise, transforming into a a field of hissy crackle, transforming again into barely there, warm, liquid thrum, before fading into a hushed, haunting slow fade to silence.
Like the other two recent Black Thread tapes, super limited of course, each cover is unique, all cut from a larger image. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Sometimes we find ourselves reviewing music that we don't necessarily have the vocabulary to describe in a way that properly references all the sonic touchstones, but in a lot of ways, those sorts of the reviews are the ones we dig the most, where the comparisons are not the ones from right off the label's onesheet, or borrowed from some other reviewer who is an expert in whatever genre is being discussed. Which is appropriate since we know very little about EBM, or electronic body music, a strain of electronic music popular in the late eighties, which is how Body 11 would most likely be classified, alongside more well known bands like Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and labels like Wax Trax and Nettwerk. The label does mention Skinny Puppy, which definitely gets more to the heart of why we dig this so much, and we DO.
If those above bands mean nothing to you, don't despair, cuz to these ears, the sound of Body 11 is more proto-grebo, 'grebo' being shorthand for greasy bastard, a phrase coined to mean a group of bands that included Pop Will Eat Itself, Gaye Bykers On Acid and the like. And that's actually more what we hear in the music of Body 11. Super dramatic vocals, crooned, howled, drenched in reverb and delay, the vibe swaggery and almost glammy, the pulsing electronic backdrop, peppered with super distorted percussive blurts, and the occasional slash of crunchy fuzzed out guitar, which is why we'd do the musical math for Body 11 like Sigue Sigue Sputnik meets Suicide? Or Pop Will Eat Itself fronted by Gary Glitter, via the aforementioned Skinny Puppy?
Of all the Medical reissues, this is the grittiest, and grimiest of the bunch we think, and we're digging it like crazy, the first four tracks, culled from Body 11's original 1988 single are untouchable, swarthy and swaggery, creepy and crunchy, slithery and groovy, snarly and pulsing, like early Depeche Mode demos roughed up and transformed into something altogether more misanthropic. Way worth it just for those 4 tracks for sure. The bonus tracks are cool too, but are missing some of that attitude, and are a bit more polished, and thus less grimey and grungey, definitely a fun listen, but we find ourselves listening to those first four over and over and over...
LIMITED TO 650 COPIES!! Pressed on heavy 180 gram milky clear vinyl. Includes a printed insert with extensive liner notes!
In the age of the internet, it's rare for any record or band to exist without a comprehensive backstory, or a million blogs with everything you could possibly want to know abut said group or record, but this, the sole album from the awesomely named Bram Stoker, a record with an equally awesome title, Heavy Rock Spectacular, seems to be quite a mystery, released in 1972 on a tiny label, and mostly the work of a chap named T. Brondson, there seems to be very little else known about this guy/these guys and this record. Even though it's been reissued multiple times over the years (once with a whole new cover, and new title: Schizo-Poltergeist!), but really it hardly matters, cuz what does matter is this is a primo slice of heavy hard rocking psychedelic organ driven prog that KILLS. Think Emerson Lake & Palmer, Atomic Rooster, Black Widow, Buffalo, Lucifer's Friend, if that reads like your psych/prog dreamteam, then you'll probably gonna dig Bram Stoker.
The ELP comparison might be the most apt, cuz the organ really is the main instrument, unleashing wild flurries of tangled melodies, locked tight with the drums, the tracks intricate and dizzyingly complex, and with plenty of classical influence, which of course harkens back to ELP tracks like "Toccata", but unlike the guitarless ELP, there's plenty of fuzz guitar going on, some of it extremely blown out and distorted, check out "Born To Be Free", that has to be some of the filthiest, crumbliest guitar EVER, total heavy psych proto metal radness for sure. Those moments of proto metallic heavy psych fuzz guitar though are most definitely outnumbered by all the fierce and furious psychedelic organ jams, but they do make for a pretty sweet combo, especially when the guitar and the organ get all tangled up into wild dueling psych-prog blowouts. Stick around for creepy closer "Poltergeist", which obviously inspired the alternate title, with dense drumming, thick guitar crunch, swirling organ, lush vocal harmonies, some weirdly haunting, hushed passages, and a wild frenzied organ/guitar finale! So good!
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.
Behold the final chapter (after Twilight Of Europe, A Chronicle Of The Plague and The Tractatus De Hereticis Et Sortilegiis) in this long running series of releases from the appropriately monikered Dark Ages, a Ukrainian duo made up of members past and present of Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, Hate Forest and Old Silver Key, who specialize in a virulent strain of medieval dark ambience, each record brilliantly captivating in its sonic representation of the middle ages, of crumbling cities, and a plague ridden populace, each record rife with brooding, haunting atmospheres and melancholic melodies, slow shifting synthscapes, swoonsome strings, all layered and textured, cinematic and darkly mysterious. This latest might be the prettiest of them all. Although you might not have thought so, considering that once again, the cover is adorned with some horrific Bosch / Breughel style art, and the record is called Rabble, Whores, Usurers, and the song titles include: "Leprosy", "Deformity", "Malice", "Depravity" and "Sin".
And while the sound of Rabble is in fact lovely, it remains sinister, and ominous, moody and brooding. The opener "Leprosy" is all lush layered shimmer, chanted vocals, a haunting chorale, laced with tinkling chimes, of dramatic strings, what sounds like muted horns, a miserablist fanfare of sorts, you can almost imagine an imaginary camera panning across a wideshot of a post plague village, burned houses, piles or rubble, charred corpses, beggars in the street, emaciated beasts wandering throughout, the sky choked with ash, the sound evoking a sort of melancholy, a feeling of loss, and of hopelessness, those dramatic strings growing more and more feverish, the song growing more and more tense. Every time we play this in the store, someone comes up to see what it is, and always seems to find it hard to believe that it's a concept record about the dark ages.
The rest of the record is equally stunning. "Chastity" is a lush landscape of crystalline shimmer, weirdly processed into something strangely rhythmic, with ethereal female vocals, and even a pulsing beat, "Avarice" is a grim sprawl of dense rumbles, and music box like melodies, "Deformity" is super dramatic, all swirling organs, total seventies horror score, while "Malice" might be the most overly medieval of the bunch, martial snares, deep vocal chants, moody strings, clouds of cymbal shimmer. "Depravity" is a hushed, subterranean sounding creep, long droned out tones, strange percussive scrapes and mysterious synth melodies, a murky blackened psychedelia, which leads into the closer, "Sin", which is the most minimal of the bunch, a slow, softly smoldering synthscape, a little bit kosmische, a little bit black ambient, drifting vocal like tones, transform the second half into something almost liturgical, darkly lovely and hauntingly austere.
As we get more and more new music from China in the shop, we do our very best to get as much of it reviewed as we can. We made the strange synth and drum duo White+ our Record Of The Week a while back. And raved about the most recent record from Boyz & Girl, and on the last list we reviewed a single from Dear Eloise, promising that we would review one of their full lengths eventually, and here it is. Like that single, Beauty In Strangers is a gorgeous collection of distortion drenched shoegaze twee pop. Minus the hazy buzz and squalls of soft focus feedback, this might be the sort of record you'd expect to find on Slumberland (or back in the day, maybe Sarah or K), but Dear Eloise take their lilting jangle pop and wrap it in thick warm swirls of shoegazey distortion, gauze-y sheets of buzz and thrum, the perfect prescription, lush noise pop bliss out, equal parts classic jangle pop and experimental shoegaze, just check out the opening two tracks here, the first a laid back, sun dappled dose of dream pop, opening with what sounds like TV static, and barking dogs, that static transformed into a shimmery backdrop for the crystalline guitars and angelic vox, simple melancholic melodies, and stripped down instrumentation, but then the second track (the titles are all in Chinese), is a whole different beast, opening with a squall of feedback, the sound way more hi-fi, laying down a driving bass and drum groove, a little bit gloom poppy, the vocals soaring dramatically over the top, soon, swells of crumbling static begin to surface, as well as some spidery guitar melodies, those guitars eventually growing more and more distorted until they finally explode into a a dense psychedelic swirl of feedback and grinding guitar noise, all the while the song pulses hypnotically and dreamily beneath. Which is pretty much the musical math of Dear Eloise, their sound a collision of classic twee pop songsmithery, and modern avant noise pop, Sonic Youth, the Swirlies and the like, both sides of the band equally appealing, but the band is at their best, when they land somewhere right in the middle.
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A few years back, there was a comprehensive reissue campaign for moody atmospheric pastoral eighties jangle poppers Felt, a group we had convinced ourselves we wouldn't like, until we finally heard them, and not only liked 'em but became a bit obsessed. And while most folks are probably familiar with Felt mainman Lawrence (nee Lawrence Hayward) who was the face of Felt and who would go on to front Denim, and less successfully Go Kart Mozart (ugh), it's the lesser known Maurice Deebank who helped create Felt's signature sound, which is evidenced on here, a reissue of Deebank's 1984 instrumental solo debut, which finds Deebank creating lush landscapes of shimmer and jangle, swirling minor key chords, looped, cyclical melodies, and warm whirling layered ambience, introspective and heartfelt, the music here shadowy and dreamlike, lovely and lyrical, reminding us at times of Roy Montgomery, and at others Vini Reilly, but really sounding like our favorite moments on those early Felt records. Deebank would leave Felt in 1986, as Lawrence moved more toward the bubblegum pop that would begin to seep into the later Felt outings blossoming into the pure pop of Denim, while Deebank continued to look inward, creating gorgeous soundscapes of soft psychedelia and glistening guitar shimmer. "Dance Of Deliverance" might be our favorite track here, ominous low end, soft swells of shimmering synths, all swirled into a sort of shadowy new age drift, or it might have sounded new age if it wasn't so dark, a brooding mini masterpiece that is the perfect balance to the rest of the record's more sun dappled crystalline dreaminess. So great!
One of two great new reissues from Medical on this week's list, elsewhere you'll find a reissue of the Body 11 record (which reminds us of Pop Will Eat Itself and Suicide!), and then there's this, another one from Germany. It's the self titled debut from a group called Die Gesunden, a duo made up of Mabel Aschenneller and Eschi Rehm, who were one of the first Neu Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) bands, and who released their debut on the Innovative Communication label started in 1978 by none other than Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream. It is a weird one, right from the first track "Instru-Mental", which sounds like maniacal mad scientist electro, all skeletal and glitchy and buzzy, before the synths swoop in, and processed vocals, warped and carnivalesque, sounding like it could be the theme from some seventies or eighties low budget Z-movie, which means AMAZING. And while we were prepared to write "while nothing else is nearly as weird", the second track stopped us cold, a weird, buzzing, squiggly droned out, noisy industrial intro, gives way to some noisy, bloopy, bouncy, crunchy distorted synth pop, laced with whispered sinister vocals, the sound raw and lo-fi, it reminds us tonally of early Devo, especially when the second synth line comes in, all thick and fuzzy, the whole thing really dark and intense. Not at all what we were expecting. And the rest of the record is more of the glorious twisted same, a fucked up and freaky electro synth pop, all the sounds rough around the edges, lots of drone and buzz, crunchy crumbling distortion, lurching rhythms, even the poppier songs are twisted and tweaked, noisy and industrial, and just plain weird. After reviewing the Body 11, we were ready to proclaim it the weirdest Medical reissue yet, but this one is definitely giving it a run for its money. This and the Body 11 just might be our two favorite Medical reissues since either the Axxess or the Lou Champagne System, both of which were Records Of The Week, and now that we've reviewed both of these, we're thinking either or both could/should have been ROTW as well...
LIMITED TO 650 COPIES!! Pressed on heavy 180 gram pink vinyl.
Another one of them 'supergroups', this one featuring members and ex-members of Witch, Earthless, Golden Void, Annihilation Time, Lecherous Gaze, 27, and The Ruffians! With a cover by Alan Forbes (so you'd almost think it was on his label Valley King). Definitely in the ballpark of Valley King stuff like the recent Feral Ohms. Rock!!
Isaiah Mitchell of Earthless, etc. puts down his guitar to just do vocals, but there's two other guitarists on here to provide plenty of axe umph, don't worry. Consequently, like Mitchell's Golden Void, the two songs on this 45 are very "classic" sounding with long haired '70s influences, these punks doing their best to make music like their dads would have done if they were in bands back then, as perhaps indeed some of their dads were.
Invariably whenever we play this in the store, a customer will ask, "Is This Gary Numan?". We can understand the confusion. Both artists are synth-wave pioneers and share a Ballardian sense of imagery of fetish-ized car crashes and cold urban architecture. But ultimately it was Foxx's role in the first incarnation of Ultravox!, one of the first British bands in the mid-to late seventies to combine electronics and rock in a frigid form of post-punk romanticism, that makes him the true innovator of the genre. Foxx, who left that band after three albums and before they found mainstream success, ambitiously pursued a solo career in the early eighties and created an influential studio, The Garden, where many bands recorded (including Depeche Mode, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, Bronski Beat, The Cure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tina Turner, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Tuxedomoon). Foxx, who has been having a revival lately touring with his new band John Foxx & the Maths, opening for OMD and recently doing a split 7" with The Soft Moon, might not have as well-known songs as Numan, Depeche Mode and his other contemporaries, but Foxx had decidedly more complex lyrics and a stronger sense of nuance when it comes to atmosphere and texture. This 2cd anthology is a great intro to his particular sound world, with both dystopian pop songs and Blade Runner-ish ambient themes. There are even solo recordings of some of the early Ultravox! material like "My Sex" and Dislocation". Not all of the material dates well, but as prolific as he was (this antholgy collects nearly 30 tracks), there are many more hits than misses.
Latest full length from this Bay Area post rock outfit, whose And The Sea Won The Battle was a huge hit around here. Mirrored Through The Ancients finds the band mining much the same territory but with some extra heft. Opener "Last Rites First Breath" sounds pretty fierce, the production massive, big thick guitars, pounding drums, still beholden to the golden era of post/math rock, but sounding modern enough to have fans of Mogwai, Godspeed and Explosions In The Sky pricking up their ears, cuz these guys do that sound so well, there's really no reason they shouldn't be getting the same love as those other groups.
The whole record displays that new found sonic heft, even on mostly minimal, hushed drifters like "Pierced By The Sun". That track starts off with some near metallic riffing, suspended in a field of swirling effects and rumbling drones, swirling cymbal shimmer and churning psychedelia, only to quickly settle into a serene sprawl of loping, lilting meander, all clean crystalline guitars, some moody twang, skittery drumming, we had just about settled in for some blissed out post rock drift when the song and sound begins to gather momentum, building to something much more fierce and rocking, and then finally exploding into near metallic majesty, epic, soaring, the guitar howling, the drums wild and loose, all before locking into a droned out driving dirgey chug, the whole thing shot through with plenty of melody and texture, giving even the darkest and heaviest moments here a sort of sonic expansiveness, these guys KILL it.
Some of the tracks here get downright psychedelic and stonery (check out the main riff of "Veil Of The Phoenix"), others remain hushed and haunting, brooding and drifting dreamily, and then there's the awesomely titled closer "Southwest Of Heaven", which sadly, isn't nearly as Slayer-y as we hoped, but it is a gorgeous stretch of washed out, twang flecked, druggy, droney post rock moodiness, that again surprises near the end, after fully four minutes of drifting and loping, launching into some seriously noisy progged out heavy psych crush, before once again slipping right back into another stretch of woozy post rock brood.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, on smoke colored vinyl!!
Yet another awesome vinyl-only document from the mighty Sublime Frequencies, this one a continuation of sorts, again exploring the world of Tuareg guitar music from Agadez in Niger, first explored on the amazing Group Inerane release a while back. And strangely enough, both band share members, so folks who loved the Group Inerane will likely love this too.
The music scene in Agadez is unique in many ways, but perhaps the strangest element is the fact that none of the bands can afford to own their own instruments, there is one PA and one set of amps that get passed from show to show, and guitars are borrowed and lent out, as are band members, with musicians joining different groups as they are available. Remarkably, while the sounds are indeed similar, they are also quite unique.
Group Bombino is headed up by 28 year old Oumara Almoctar, aka Bombino, who was inspired by more well known Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen and Ali Farka Toure to create his own music and to continue to spread the sounds and spirit of Tuareg and Agadez.
So here we have the first proper worldwide release by Bombino and his group, and it's gorgeous. Two distinct sides, the A side features Bombino's "dry" guitar sound, sort of acoustic, the guitars, spidery and slinky, the percussion simple and spare, hand claps, hand drums, the vocals lilting and emotional, all very repetitive and hypnotic, the vocals chantlike over the propulsive rhythms and the almost looped sounding guitar parts.
The flip side features Group Bombino plugging in and letting loose, the root sound is quite similar, but the guitars buzz and wail, chugging out those hypnotic riffs, but also spiralling out into wild leads, tangled melodies, the drums a bit hard, the vocals sitting further back in the mix, ebullient and joyous, but not without tension and emotion and some subtle sorrow and anger, this is after all the sounds or rebellion and revolution, an outlet for the frustration at the unrest and upheaval in Niger and Agadez. So fantastic.
As with pretty much everything Sublime Frequencies, ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED, and for sure, anyone who dug the Group Inerane (a past Record Of The Week), will go crazy for Group Bombino as well!
We flipped for Heavy Times' 2011 full length Jacker, a killer collection of scuzzy, fuzzed out, jangly, noisy garage pop that somehow combined elements of the Pixies, the Ramones, and the Misfits with the current crop of garage rockers (Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, etc.), and this time around we're hearing much of the same but somehow, the sound now is even catchier, without losing any of the grit and lo-fi grime of Jacker, just check out "Might Not", which as one of those main riffs/melodies, that pretty much seals the deal a matter of seconds into the song. Then there's the vox, which remind us a LOT of the the Grave Babies, a little bit gloomy, multi-tracked, more shouted than sung, but when paired with THAT melody, pretty tough to beat. And another one of those cases, that for a while ALL we wanted to listen to was that one song. So it took us a while to get any deeper than track two, but once we did, we discovered that there was most definitely more where that came from, from the gloomy, chuggy garage of "Night Looks", with its murky jangle, and a chorus that sounds like it could have been plucked from an alternate universe John Hughes movie, or "I'm Single" a frantic punk pop blowout that features a cool modulated melody, and more super catchy buzzing guitar, or the super brief and super punky "Future Creeps" that pairs a pounding punky verse with a weirdly twang flecked catchy noisepop chorus, or the strummy Summery garage poppy "American Love", and it goes on and on. Hozac has been on a roll lately (see elsewhere on this week's list for our review of the Shocked Minds, also on the label) and so has Heavy Times, we've been listening to this new one nonstop, and are maybe digging it even more than Jacker... now we're just hoping someone will finally reissue the first Heavy Times record, Dead. Hozac, we're looking at you!
Sint-Denijs is the second solo record from Glen Steenkiste, he of Belgian psych-kraut collective Silvester Anfang / Sylvester Anfang II, and much like the Hellvete debut, De Gek, released on Kraak back in 2009, Sint-Denijs finds Steenkiste continuing to explore his love of modern minimalism, ditching still more of the folky, krauty shamble of the Anfang mothership and delving deeper into longform dronemusic. With an arsenal consisting of harmonium, bowed banjo, electric tampura and analog synths Steenkiste fills both sides of this lp with gorgeously lush layered shimmer, softly pulsing tones, constantly sifting textures and ghostly overtones, the oddly titled "C-142" is some primo kosmische bliss out, beginning as a simple drone, but gradually blossoming into something much more, a dense tangle of melodies, that seem to gradually peel off, the slowly swirling super nova of sound releasing melodic flares, with headphones, it's easy to sink deep into the sound, lush, and lustrous and luxurious, super melodic, but with the various melodies bleeding and oozing into one another, a constantly evolving molten sonic core, that gives us glimpses of those melodies, as they softly shift and slowly swirl.
There's a brief interlude of sorts, the equally oddly titled "MDD-409", which must be an interlude based entirely on space limitations, cuz it's another gorgeous layered dronescape, one that given another side of vinyl, would most definitely transformed into yet another epic sprawl of ur-drone majesty. But instead, it acts as a bridge, keeping us suitably entranced, before culminating in the B side filling "G-356", which begins a bit more minimally, with sitar like drones, over soft low end pulsations, reminding us of local outfit Date Palms, the same sort of classic modern minimalism fused with a sort of Spacemen 3 like druggy drift, drowsy and dreamily divine, the low end growing more dense and dark as the track progresses, before the melodies once again begin to peel away, filling the sky with arcs of prismatic shimmer, grounded by the warm, liquid pulsations beneath, slowly building to a swirling tangle of softly psychedelic sound, totally tranced out tranquility of the highest order. Fantastic!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a digital download code too!
Some time ago we reviewed a double cd featuring (supposedly) everything ever recorded by this obscure, outsider-y late '70s / early '80s UK psychedelic "hippy punk" outfit called, variously, Afflicted, The Afflicted Man, and High Speed and The Afflicted Man. It's been out of print for a while - but now, both of the albums that constituted that set's second and best disc, the one where, as we said, the fuzz really hits the fan, have been reissued again, almost simultaneously, with Permanent putting out 1981's I'm Off Me 'Ead on vinyl (only), and Spanish reissue specialists Guerssen doing 1982's Get Stoned Ezy on cd (with vinyl forthcoming as well). Both are issued under license from The Afflicted Man himself, guitarist/vocalist Steve Hall, unlike that previous collection, apparently.
Get Stoned Ezy in particular has been raved about, quite deservedly, as a Holy Grail of wah-fuzz-feedback psych insanity, kind of an unknown precursor to the blown-out speed freak sounds of Japanese heavies like High Rise and Mainliner. Bearing the not entirely hyperbolic warning on the sleeve "This Record Is Very Powerful And Could Give You Earhole Damage", Get Stoned Ezy consists of three lengthy throbbing songs of rollicking fuzzed out guitar splooge with unhinged vocal drawling and pounding repetitive rhythms from this loosey-goosey power trio, total swarming distortion jams to the max.
Meanwhile, the slightly earlier I'm Off Me 'Ead is really almost as good, just a bit different, being marginally more song-oriented (well, there's more of 'em here) than Get Stoned Ezy, more shambolic and "Messthetics-y", if you're familiar with that series of UK DIY comps. It's definitely also about the monomaniacal, messed-up distortodelic guitar wrangling, you're in for plenty of that on either album.
Charming stuff for fans of Hendrix, Hawkwind, The Stooges, Wicked Lady, Groundhogs... and with the vocals factored in, these albums also oughtta appeal to fans of aQ fave Michael Yonkers, big time!
I'm Off Me 'Ead, limited to 500 copies, features remastered sound, and a full color inner sleeve with rare pics, a previously unpublished Steve Hall interview, and more.
Get Stoned Ezy is also remastered from an original vinyl copy (cuz the master tapes are long gone), and the cd booklet contains vintage photos of the band in action plus extensive & enthusiastic liner notes newly penned by the editor of Black To Comm 'zine, Chris Stigliano.
If you need any more convincing, heed the cover sticker blurb on that release from Ripley of Wooden Shjips, who sez: "Fucking essential". Speaking of Wooden Shjips, yeah if you like them and other current practitioners of "heavy psych", like White Hills and The Heads and Carlton Melton and Mainliner and Gnod and Earthless, then really you need to expose your toughened-up earholes to both Get Stoned Ezy and I'm Off Me 'Ead, pronto.
Looks like we like this one so much that both Allan and Andee, unbeknownst to one another, each wrote reviews of it for this list, whoops! But they're almost the same review, which just goes to show that what they say about Hills Live must be true. For an exercise in comparative literature, here's both reviews, Allan's first:
This is one of the first records we've managed to get in on the new Cardinal Fuzz label out of England. Frustratingly, we missed out on some stuff they did earlier by the likes of The Heads and Hookworms, but at least we now have THIS, a live album from Swedish hypno-rock jammers Hills, whose previous two albums we're totally loved (we reviewed Master Sleeps on list #391). Their spacey, krautrock channelling grooves hit the spot like those of that other 'Hills' band, White Hills, and we recommend 'em to fans of Wooden Shjips too, big time, for another positive contemporary comparison.
This record finds Hills in their element, the title simply says it all: Live. Stretching out improvisationally over two sides of vinyl, this contains two roughly 15-minute long tracks, "Kristallen Den Fina" and "Frigorande Musik", the latter recorded exclusively for this release. Both are just want we want - massive, mantric, sometimes flutey rhythmic churn with underlying Eastern drone vibes...
What's especially obvious from the music here, and dunno why we didn't mention it before, is how much Hills are serious acolytes of their aQ-beloved countrymen Trad, Gras Och Stenar, sounding a heck of a lot like them in their various incarnations of decades past (TGOS, Harvester, International Harvester, Parson Sound). If you love those groups you'll totally dig this!!
And then Andee's very similar take on this lp:
We've been dying to carry records on UK label Cardinal Fuzz, but with no US distribution, we had no luck at all, UNTIL NOW! Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a double lp from Swedish heavy space psych combo the Janitors, and then there's this, a long out of print cassette from hippie psych space rockers Hills, reissued on vinyl with a whole second track/side exclusive to this release! Recorded live, the A side (and the new B side for that matter) find these guys channeling their Swedish forefathers (Parson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, etc.), and we're ALWAYS skeptical when a band is compared to a group like Parson Sound, but these guys totally pull it off, and if we didn't now any better, we might have even bought that this was some unearthed live tape from back in the day. Tranced out psychedelic krautrock style instrumental minimalism woven from motorik drumming, buzzing distorted guitars, looped sounding psych guitar riffage, everything fuzzy and hazy and druggy, laced with cool wah guitar leads, and rife with subtle shifts and sonic variations, but ultimately, the band locked tight into a single groove, playing on endlessly, utterly mesmeric space-kraut that sounds like classic minimalism (Reich, Riley, Young) recast as heavy psychedelic hippie folk hypno-psych. The flipside is even cooler, slower, dirgier, murkier, just as tranced out and hypnotic, but all woozy and washed out, all churning low end, and killer drumming, loose and free, but forever bound up in this droney druggy psych-murk mega-jam, that sort of epic psychedelia that could and SHOULD go on forever...
Obviously WAY recommended! LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES for the USA, vinyl only, get 'em while you can. With this as a teaser, we're really looking forward to Hills upcoming album on Rocket, as well!
Another fantastic new release from our favorite horror movie soundtrack reissue label, Death Waltz, this one the creepy psychedelic soundtrack to Lucio Fulci's 1981 supernatural splatterfest House By The Cemetery, this time not scored by his longtime musical partner Fabio Frizzi, but instead, a fella by the name of Walter Rizzati, who previously was maybe best known for a handful of sexploitation comedies, but he adapts pretty darn well, delivering a very Frizzi like collection of dark swirling psychedelia, and organ heavy, phantasmic, almost Goblin-ish Italo-prog moodiness.
It's been ages since we've seen House By The Cemetery, so the plot eludes us, it's a twisty tangly one like all Fulci movies, we do know there's a mysterious dead girl, a murdered woman, a strange locked cellar, and a Victorian surgeon who has been experimenting on humans to become immortal? And is hundred of years old? The liner notes say it's one of Fulci's more coherent plots, but fear not, it's still batshit insane! And totally worth seeing, as are all the movies Death Waltz tackles, besides rescuing amazing lost soundtracks, DW's reissue campaign is a great classic horror primer as well!
Sonically, House By The Cemetery fits pretty well with past Frizzi / Fulci collaborations, Rizzati unfurling lilting melodies over darkly drifting bog-fog shimmer, heartfelt synths wreathed in reverb and echo, peppered with little piano flourishes, those gentle melodic moments balanced by tense and intense haunted house church organ fugues, as well as some darkly atmospheric psych prog. Creepy voices drift wraithlike over buzzing synths and twisted FX, swirling atmospheric proggy ambience gives way to almost symphonic swells, there's some heavy psych guitar too, flanged and freaky, but none of this is actual 'psychedelic rock' like some other scores we've dug recently, the guitars are woven into a much broader psychedelic sprawl. Although some tracks, like "Blonk Monster" (named for Izzati's co-composer Alessandro Blonksteiner) do have a seriously fuzzy psych guitar main riff, the song sounding like it could burst into hard rock at any moment, but instead, it splinters into dense swirling clouds of hazy psychedelic noise, cymbal shimmer and tranced out drones, before returning to that doomy riffy prog-psych creep. It's definitely the track we find ourselves returning to, but there are plenty more moments like that throughout. Needless to say, super recommended, and it definitely has us wanting to see the movie again too...
Pressed on blood red vinyl, housed in a gorgeous jacket with stunning new artwork by artist Graham Humphreys, whose new art is definitely in keeping with the spirit of classic Italian horror movie posters. On the back of the jacket are some killer shots from the movies as well as extensive liner notes on the back cover, about the score and the film. Inside is a 12" x 12" print of the cover art, as well as a massive fold out poster version as well. And more notes on the printed inner sleeve from Humphreys about his inspiration for the artwork. And as always, EXTREMELY LIMITED!!
MISSISSIPPI ALERT!!!!
It seems like most "never-made-it" bands of the psychedelic era have a similar story. One seemingly trivial missed opportunity ended up having grave consequences for the band's future. LA's Human Expression offered the same gritty trippy vibe as The Seeds and Thirteen Floor Elevators, and in hindsight, they may even seem like a Seeds rip-off, but they were seemingly headed for bigger things than The Seeds with a more mature sound and song-writing. But they slept on a chance to record "Born To Be Wild" for their third single, before it was given to Steppenwolf who turned it into a mega-hit. The band never recovered and they were lost to the dustbin of history, which is too bad, because they had some awesome catchy songs with interesting psychedelic electronic effects. This records captures most of their entire output including a single by the singer who tried to pursue a solo career. This album has been reissued before on cd by the Cicadelic reissue label, but it's nice to have an affordable vinyl version. Hope Mississippi does some other cool psych lp reissues in the near future!
Proto-metal alert! Note the title - this slipcased reissue on Rise Above Relics contains music by "the original" Iron Maiden, an obscure early '70s outfit playing heavy, doomy, bluesy psych/prog rock, whose cool name was later borrowed by some folks who went on to become much more famous heavy metal giants. Interestingly, this original Iron Maiden, also from the UK, had a twin guitar thing going on too, sounding a lot like early Wishbone Ash on such songs as "Falling", being super epic and folky in the manner of that band. We first heard that track on a great proto-metal comp called Dower Rock Genocide, so now it's cool to hear some more from this band, this disc containing the two cuts from their sole 7" single circa 1970 plus a bunch of unreleased material meant for an album that was never finished. The disc's opening track "God Of Darkness" is an occult-oriented highlight, but later on they do go all barroom blues with a cover of "C.C. Rider", which kinda breaks the spell. The good stuff is worth it though, for heavy psych/prog freaks.
While if we had to pick just one Iron Maiden it wouldn't be this one, there's nothing wrong with liking 'em both. Just like the grunge Nirvana and "the original" '60s psych Nirvana, eh?
For ages now we've been trying to stock releases on the Cardinal Fuzz label, with no luck at all. UNTIL NOW! Finally managed to get a hold of a couple Cardinal Fuzz releases, one of which is this sprawling slab of psychedelic space rock from Swedish outfit the Janitors, whose two previous eps are compiled here (along with a couple of bonus remixes) into a single sprawling epic double lp. And all you space/psych rock freeks, everything about this will push ALL your buttons, buzzing tranced out guitars, driving motorik rhythms, echo drenched vocals, equal parts Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, the Velvet Underground, folks who have been digging recent records by Carlton Melton, the Spyrals, Mugstar and the like, add the Janitors to your space psych pantheon.
Droned out and dirgey, drifting and druggy, the tracks are smoldering slow builds, that float through a haze of lysergic shimmer, tranced out and mesmeric, often eventually erupting into some proper heavy psych pound, with blown out buzzing psychedelic guitar shred, clouds of wah guitar swirl, pounding drums, some tracks are laced with Eastern sounding sitar-like melodies, wreathed in clouds of softly swirling effects, others are slow slung and slithery, and still others have some seriously Stooges-y swagger to them, pounding and fierce as fuck, sort of noisy garage rock crossed with classic space rock, an echo drenched and wildly distorted, in-the-red, hypno-psych that KILLS. And while the songs are surprisingly varied, they're woven into a fantastically druggy and tranced out, psychedelic whole, one that definitely ranks as one of our favorite spaced out heavy garage psych releases in recent memory. The remixes are cool too, Al Lover transforms the Spacemen 3-ish slo-mo groover "Death Song" into something more akin to Moon Duo, with motorik programmed rhythms, and some extra psychedelic noise, while Strssmmnt turns the brooding space pop balladry of "Coming Down", into a weird bit of psychedelic electro, shimmery guitars, echoey vocals, warm buzz, and some skittery bloop-bleep rhythms. And the new track, "Nevererverism" (listen below), might be one of our favorites, and already has us hankering for more!
LIMITED TO 230 COPIES!!!!
Mark Ernestus is probably best known as one half of the Basic Channel production team and record label (along with Moritz Von Oswald). The two also ran the Chain Reaction label, and both continue to make and release music, Ernestus most notably recently remixing tracks by Konono No.1 and Tony Allen as well as co-releasing the amazing Shangaan Electro compilation we reviewed a while back. Apparently, over the last few years, Ernestus became increasingly obsessed with Senegalese Mbalax music, which is super rhythmic, featuring multiple drummers playing wildly syncopated rhythms, the drums augmented with marimba like synths, the music wild and tangled, dense and driving, groovy and funky, dubbed out and super trancey - it's not hard to see why a techno visionary would find this stuff utterly mesmerizing. And thus was born Jeri-Jeri, a collaborative project between Ernestus and a griot clan of Senegalese drummers. At first we were maybe expecting a sort of African/techno hybrid, but wisely, Ernestus let's the drummers and other musicians do their thing, while he mostly mixes and produces. And that THING is track after track of hyper rhythmic grooviness that definitely speaks to the sort of looped mesmer of techno music, even moreso here, as this is the instrumental version of the Jeri-Jeri record, the 'versions' in dubspeak. Which is not to say the record proper is not great, it is, and features a handful of amazing vocalists including Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour doing their own thing over these rhythmic workouts (and we do have copies in stock, just ask!), but stripped of the vocals, it somehow becomes even more mesmerizing, the drums obviously the focal point, but there's also sinewy basslines, the occasional keyboard and synth, often adding yet another rhythmic component, and some subtle melodies, some guitar jangle here and there, adding some subtle tonal coloration, and remnants of the original vocals surface here and there, dubbed out and heavily effected, but really, every track here is a glorious celebration of rhythm and sound, of drums as divine, and they sound so divine here, with most tracks featuring both a complement of Sabar drummers as well as a drummer on a traditional kit, the overlapping rhythms, the syncopated grooves, the barrage of beats, cascading grooves, all wound around simple looped melodies, and locked tight, it's totally irresistible, the sort of singular sound that is both dancefloor ready, but also dense and nuanced enough for headphone listening, some track wild and raucous, others tightly wound and darkly groovy, all of them sublime, emotional, and energetic, lush and organic and ALIVE. Drummers, and fans of drum music will be in heaven, but really, anyone and everyone who is drawn to the rhythm in sound, whether it be techno music, world music, metal music, will be hard pressed not to be totally mesmerized by these sounds.
Long overdue reissue of the long out of print 2008 debut lp from Kyle Thomas aka King Tuff, he of psych folk outfit Feathers, heavy psych rockers Witch (along with J Mascis) and aQ beloved power pop combo Happy Birthday, and like the self titled King Tuff record on Sub Pop from last year, Was Dead is a glorious concoction of home brewed power pop, swaggery glam stomp and fuzzy garage pop jangle, Thomas's distinctive whiny boy vocals over crunchy riffs, low slung bass, wheezing organs, kinetic drumming, hooks galore, catchy as all get out, a little bit laid back and stoney, fuzzed out and summery, just total (sun) baked jangle and fuzz garage pop, that ends up sounding equal parts seventies style Yellow Pills pop (Warm Soda / Bare Wires fans will flip) and more modern garage rock a la Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees etc, but with a seriously classic pop bent. We're also reminded quite a bit of another band with a serious sixties/seventies fixation, Redd Kross, we're guessing Thomas is a big fan, if not, they must share some musical genes. Plenty of these jams could easily be mistaken for actual old school power pop tracks from back in the day, the arrangement, the hooks, right down to the recording itself, a little bit lo-fi, but still plenty loud and fuzzy, the perfect summer jams for sure, while it's still summer, and to keep the summer going long into winter as well!
Finally, the third in this series of reissues, of all three full lengths from Miranda Lehman, aka Korouva, who, as we mentioned in our reviews of the first two (Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette and Sleepwalker, which we still have in stock!), is maybe best know for having her 2007 record Shipwrecks & Russian Roulette, appropriated by black metal jokers Velvet Cacoon. We posited that she was probably in on it, and played some part in the hoax, cuz really it worked out for both groups, cementing VC's reputation, and getting Lehman's music out there and into the ears of folks who otherwise might not have discovered her creepy, gothic, piano ballads. And really, this is about as far removed from the black metal of Velvet Cacoon as you could get, hushed and haunting, dark and dreamily druggy, Unbearable Romance recorded four full years after that purloined Shipwrecks lp, yet instead of displaying a more polished production, or more full arrangements, in fact seems to have gone the opposite way, a super stripped down, bare bones, skeletal songsite, of mostly just vocals and piano, recorded live it sounds like, all the sounds bathed in natural reverb, and wreathed in warm swirls of tape hiss, total 4 track bedroom balladry that is so gorgeous. At times, we're reminded of PJ Harvey in fact, albeit super spare and stripped down, a bit like her White Chalk record. In the other reviews we mention Zola Jesus and Chelsea Wolfe as well, and those comparisons are still pretty spot on, fans of either of those women, will find much to love here, but the sounds on Unbearable Romance are much more intimate and personal, the sounds immediate and organic, more than the other two records, this sounds like Lehman is performing just for you, the listener, as if you're curled up in front of her piano, while he serenades you, her harrowing torch songs ghostly and spectral, mysteriously moody and so so lovely. If you bought the other two already, you're gonna want this one too. And if you've yet to check out Korouva, this record will very likely convince you to by all three!
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, packaged in a thick full color jacket, with an 8 page lyric booklet and a Khrysanthoney insert.
How rad is this? One of our favorite Record Store Day items this year was not a record, but a book! A hefty, 508-page tome that thoroughly chronicles the history and obsessions of one of the largely misunderstood and under-appreciated niches of recorded music, the "vanity record" - also known as "private press recordings". Enjoy The Experience, edited by noted collector Johan Kugelberg, delves deep into the uniquely 20th century phenomena of the custom-made record and the little-known artists who made them, as well as the collectors and reissue labels that have obsessed over them and ultimately prevented them from fading into obscurity. A lot of our faves are here, including many we have reviewed over the years like The Shaggs, Michael Farneti, Gary Wilson, Jr. and His Soulettes, Bob Chance, Luie Luie, and Hans Edler, many with extensive back stories about their creation. But there is sooooo much more. Including Christian family recordings, ventriloquists, creepy loner folkies, restaurant /resort entertainers, over-the-top lounge singers and just outright bizarre musical artists who just wouldn't have been able to release a record any other way. There are pages and pages of beautiful color reproductions of the cover art to these home made records, some even hand drawn, in all of their earnest naive glory. There's even a chapter on Century Records, one of the most well-established custom record manufacturers, who provided stock album covers for individual artists - and it's funny to see how many different albums utilized the exact SAME cover (including the one seen on the front of this book!). Enjoy The Experience is a joy to behold and will renew your faith in the self-released record.
Comes with a download card for a 20 song playlist including a song from a hopefully up and coming aQ Record of the Week, when it gets reissued - try and guess which one! While supplies last, this special RSD edition also comes with a clear vinyl 45 reissue of a recording by the Century Records marketing department, on how to customize and create your own record. So Awesome!!
This is a reissue of one of those deep "in-the-know" records that we're perplexed that we had somehow never heard of before now, especially given its pedigree. It seems to be one of those weird anomaly recordings that when it's not acting as a "proto" example of genres that now exist today (dub-step and minimal techno), it works as a bridge between genres we never imagined being connected before (new age and industrial music, minimalist composition and new wave, minimal synth and ethno-folk music). It's a rare six-degrees-of-separation record that bafflingly connects Suicide to John Fahey, and it's utterly gorgeous to boot.
Craig Leon may not be a well-known name to most, but he was the producer or co-producer behind many of the bands of our youth including Blondie, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Suicide, The Weirdos, DMZ, The Zero's. The Bangles and 45 Grave. But he's also a classically trained composer and orchestrator who has worked with Lucio Pavoratti, Sir James Galway and The London Symphony Orchestra. Nommos was the first album of his own material, originally released in 1981 on John Fahey's Takoma label and there really is just nothing quite like it.
With evocative titles like "Donkeys Bearing Cups", "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife" and "She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap", Leon uses minimal synthesis to explore repetitive rhythm and texture in hypnotic trance inducing compositions. The opener, "Ring With Three Concentric Circles" explores a kraut-y kosmiche sound employing cosmic synth washes over skeletal mechanical rhythms, but it's the second track, "Donkeys Bearing Cups" that prognosticates many of the production tropes of modern dubstep and minimal techno, the shuffling almost dance-y mechanized rhythms, as well as the squelched siren noise that opens it. Many of the tracks could be paired down backing tracks for Suicide songs, minus Alan Vega's vocals and Martin Rev's knack for propulsion. Instead Leon seems to dwell on the nuance of his robotic rhythms, tweaking the reverb and decay in bass pulses and cymbal clangs, but encasing them in a beautiful floating stasis.
The longest track at nearly 12 minutes, "Four Eyes To See The Afterlife", seems to have the least going on. It's plodding hiccupping rhythm stretching for minutes before we notice a woman's voice almost operatically singing way off in the background. Her voice almost feels like another synthetic texture in the composition and we at first had to turn the volume down to see if we were hearing things, but it's just another impeccable detail that Leon is carefully layering and weaving into seemingly bare-bone compositions making us ever conscious of the meditative nature of the work. This is definitely a producer's record, and an incredible one at that! If you are a fan of modern techno composers like Vladislav Delay, Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, anything on the Dead-Cert label, or even outlier composers like Moondog, Julius Eastman or Barton Smith, this is essential!
Download card included!
When people think of spaced out, drone-y drug rock, Spacemen 3 seem to get all the love, which is of course fair, Spacemen 3 totally rule, their music is magical, especially for some of us who will probably only ever experience drug use by strapping on a pair of headphones and blasting Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. But c'mon, let's share the love, with another group, who existed during the same time, in basically the same place, and who were sonically quite similar, yet crafted their own distinctive and incredibly iconic body of work, one that has been criminally unavailable for years now. These two reissues are the first in what will hopefully be a comprehensive reissue campaign for London space rockers Loop.
For years, Loop have been a favorite of in-the-know music nerds, whose Spacemen 3 collection is most likely rivaled by their Loop collection, and basically, to love one, is indeed to love the other. You like thick looped guitars, blown out distorted buzz, krautrocky rhythms, song structures that are simple, cyclical, repetitive, hypnotic, guitars dripping with effects, vocals drawled lazily and buried in the mix, everything hazy and washed out and bleary eyed and druggy. Wait, were we talking about Loop or Spacemen 3? Exactly. The main difference to our ears, was that Loop always seemed to rock way harder. The Spacemen would often flutter off in tripped out ambient flights of fancy, dropping the drums completely, letting the guitar pulse and throb, the vocals drifting ethereally over the top. And sure, Loop were capable of that too, but seemed to hew closer to a more driving sound, the drums much more integral to their overall vibe. The sound of Loop was equal parts krautrock and space rock, and their name was definitely referenced their sound. Loop mainman Hampson would even go on to form Main, a more tranquil guitar loop based outfit, whose obsession with texture and loops absolutely informed all of the Loop recordings. The guitars were thick, wreathed in distortion, delay, reverb, doused in effects, that not only altered their timbre, and their tone, nut also often made the guitars sound backwards, creating woozy of kilter jams that seemed to slowly and subtly shift and change shapes before our very ears. The vocals weary and washed out, the drums skeletal and simple, but all fused into totally tripped out, drugged out, kraut-infused space rock bliss.
Fade Out was record number two for Loop, and found the band making a definite move forward in terms of production and sound, and an obvious shift away fro a sound they shared with countrymen Spacemen 3. The sound on Fade Out is much heavier, and way louder, the guitars sharper and more jagged, the bass more present, the vocals way more prominent, the sound immediately less druggy and washed out and more rocking. "Black Sun" is a propulsive slab of spaced out garage-y krautrock, the guitars ringing out, the second guitar a buzzing over the top, the drums busy and powerful, the whole thing still wreathed in effects, but now the murk had been replaced with something much more effulgent, a strange burnished glow, suffusing the sound, less like laying in darkness and watching colors swirl and shimmer, and more like staring directly into the sun. "This Is Where You End" continues on in the same vein, with gruff almost growled vocals, over that distinctive looped guitar figure, with multiple guitars offering up extra melody and texture.
"Fever Knife" stands out as it slows things way down, and the guitars are muted, not quite as sharp, with plenty of squiggly fun house mirror guitar melodies intertwined with that main riff, the tempo, a head nodding soporific groove, definitely reaching back a bit to the sound of Heaven's End. But then comes "Torched" with a incendiary guitar sound so loud and in the red, it threatens to blow your speakers, dwarfing the drums and bass in the background, churning and soaring, white hot and blown out big time.
The title track is another slowed down druggy dirge, the main riff lumbering woozily along side a steady simple beat, haunting processed vocals, and chunks of extra guitar buzz, the whole thing downright doomy. The last three tracks are gorgeous squalls of druggy throb and crumbling guitar buzz, the record finishing up with a short stretch of shimmering ambient drift. SO GREAT!!
The deluxe reissue of Fade Out not only comes in a super spiffy full color mini lp style gatefold sleeve, with printed inner sleeves, it also comes with a whole bonus disc, featuring a whole mess of extra stuff, alternate mixes of three tracks on the record, an awesome demo version of "This Is Where You End", the Peel Sessions from the Fade Out era, and most exciting of all a series of Fade Out Guitar Loops, from shimmering high end buzz, to whirring smears of low end rumble, definitely hinting at Hampson's post-Loop outfit Main.
SO TOTALLY AND UTTERLY RECOMMENDED. ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL! And for recent converts to the world of druggy space rock, anyone who has been digging local droney drug rockers Wooden Shjips (and we know there are LOTS of you out there), will definitely fall in love with Loop!!
The Word As Power is the first Lustmord record to incorporate the human voice with such prominence. Sure, Brian Williams - dark lord of ambient music behind the Lustmord project - has used vocal samples and disembodied screams to punctuate his cavernous drones and atmospheric horror in the past; but here on The Word As Power, he's crafted an entire album around the eerie ululations, glissandos, vibrato, and harmonic vocalizations from a handful of vocalists, none of whom fortunately utter a single recognizable lyric. Instead, these vocalists offer their talents as a secular (or Satanic, given Lustmord's alignment with the dark arts) form of sacred music. The hybridization of wordless vocalizations and dark ambient music is nothing new, as it's a common trope within Hollywood filmscores to combine the two in the sound design for anything mystically exotic and / or darkly enigmatic.
Lustmord's production sensibility is as impeccable as ever, with a judicious use of reverb dripping over the vocals, which hover above ghostly shadows and echos with subharmonic drones and leviathan rhythmic plods interspersed throughout. Lustmord has employed the talents of four vocalists - the most prominently featured one being the hitherto unknown Aina Skinnes Olsen, who does have pipes akin to Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance. The Butoh-trained vocalist Soriah offers his thrumming throat singing, Jarboe provides the best work she's done since the World Of Skin albums from back in the late '80s as a Swans side project, and Maynard Keenan of Tool pulls out some impressive Gregorian chanting for Lustmord's blackened ambience. We have to admit being very skeptical of this record before hearing it, but it turns out to be much better than we could have ever thought.
Sacred Bones, who brought us (briefly!) the all too limited Eraserhead soundtrack vinyl reissue, now present the latest musical endeavor from the eccentric auteur himself, David Lynch. As a follow-up to 2011's Crazy Clown Time, this is again, OF COURSE, still fairly weird, but also somewhat more accessible, Tom Waits-y pop music, with Lynch singing/speaking lyrics that only he could dream up, in his distinctive drawl, sounding a bit like a nasal George W. Bush, or the guy from Jon Wayne (the band). The music, a sort of slow-motion, almost dubby electronica meets rockabilly, is less surreal than on Crazy Clown Time, and the lyrics are less -overtly- surreal as well - there's no "Rotting Teeth" this time around. Maybe the weirdest thing is hearing Lynch do a cover of Dylan's doomy "The Ballad Of Hollis Brown". Yet how, dare we say, PLEASANT this is is maybe even more disturbing, 'cause you know being by Lynch it's still creepy at heart.
Vinyl version includes a bonus 7".
The recent instore by this Canadian duo was a total stunner, their broody, minimal electro pop balladry sounding just as good live as on record, with the added strangeness of a vocalist who looked like he should be fronting a hardcore band, shaved head, boots, white t-shirt, grasping the microphone with a steely gaze, but those vocals immediately transformed him into a very unlikely balladeer.
"Turns Turns Turns" might be one of our favorites from their debut full length, Impersonator, and maybe the least minimal of the bunch, with programmed beats, a woozy vocal loop, lush and layered, those deeply dramatic vocals, intense and emotional, classic pop through a modern minimal filter, folks who have yet to check out Impersonator, give this a listen, and see if you aren't as smitten as we are. And being that smitten, had us frustrated that the group only had that one full length. So we were super excited that there was a 12" with three additional non-album tracks. So beyond "Turns Turns Turns", there's also "What That Was", which is much more lo-fi, all buzzing synths and primitive Casio rhythms, but then the vocals swoop in, and it's pure Majic. Fans of Magnetic Fields should definitely check these guys out, could be your new favorite band.
The flipside starts off with another more lo-fi jam, simple programmed beats, a dreamy piano refrain, some swirly ghostly vox, and a strangely psychedelic high end melody near the end, but it's the next track, "I Want To Warn You", which makes this woth grabbing, broody and buzzy, moody and darkly dramatic, like a demo version of a track that SHOULD have been included on Impersonator, and a song that helps hold us over until there's finally more Majical Clouds to be had...
Is it right to call The Mallard's final album a swan song? Wouldn't a duck call be a better metaphor? Even for the charmingly weirdo, garage-pop label empire Castle Face, The Mallard were an odd bird in a flock that includes Thee Oh Sees, Warm Soda, and Blasted Canyons. Finding Meaning In Deference is only the band's second album and its release is a posthumous one, after the band's somewhat public demise in the spring of 2013. The minor-chord jangliness that The Mallard churns out is a weird amalgamation of a whole lot of Flying Nun bands, all of whom are wholly misremembered in a drunken / drugged-out / art-damaged haze. One can pick out bits of The 3Ds, The Pin Group, and Straightjacket Fits, but it's always deranged into a woozy, yet totally groovy swarm of psychedelically tainted gloom pop, or gloom filled psyche-pop if you wanna approach from the other direction. Frontwoman Greer McGettrick finds herself half-asleep and half-awake in monotone melodies she croons between the swaths of spring reverb and analogue delay, while the band behind her jangles and lurches through the slithery, narcotic reinventions of garage-pop tropes. On "Out The Door," McGettrick wakes up enough to climb up and down a sublimely simple lo-fi vibrato that grates against the creepily skeletal guitar chords and zombie-stutter rhythms. The playfully elliptical basslines of "The Communist" with its fucked-up, lo-fi low-pass filter sweeping makes for a particularly woozy number. It's almost fitting that they end the album with the extended drone-rock epic "Iceberg" where The Mallard cruises in a holding pattern of Parson Sound hypno-rhythms, only to plummet back from the sky in an extended tumble of gasping vocal mantras, thrumming basslines, and Velvety minimalist jangle. A perfectly aQuarius record of imperfect pop perfection.
Well, if you've wondered where in the world has Robert Millis been for the past year, the answer is India, as the avant-everything guitarist from the Climax Golden Twins somehow cajoled his way into getting a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year conducting ethnomusicological research on the subcontinent. Truth be told, our man Millis stained his fingers on curry and cigarettes while thumbing through old '78s for a year. Not a bad gig, if you can get it! But his working vacation was a productive one too, as a spate of new releases are on the immediate horizon of his sidereal collages for prismatic drone, raga mysticism, and polyglot psychedelic narcosis. Millis declares this cassette to be a re-imagined construct of solo material and Climax Golden Twin tracks of old; but even for CGT / Millis completists like we are, it's hard to pick out much of anything that is obviously tied to a gem like the Imperial Household Orchestra, Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds, or those asskicking AFCGT records. Millis stitches together disembodied drones, skittering satellite transmissions, and swampy field recordings that on the A side of this tape could be some unearthed Steven Stapleton / Chris Watson collaboration. Until that improbable event happens, we'll happily settle for Millis' tape. The flipside is all slippery minimalism through purring overtones and sensually rippling glissandos hitting all the right sweets spots of La Monte Young transcendentalism, before Millis introduces some found recordings of Jonestown-esque ritualized vocal incantations that turn the vibe from pleasantly opiated to seriously creepy. Fucking great stuff that's limited to something like 200 copies.
First ever legit vinyl reissue of the only record, circa 1973, from this fairly obscure '70s British rock band, best known 'cause their lead guitar player was none other than Ray Russell, the cult free jazz/fusion/psych rock guitarist who did session work as well as a few albums of his own, his fans include Alan Licht and Jim O'Rourke, who put out a double cd Russell anthology on his own Mokai label a while back. In Mouse, Russell definitely goes more rock than jazz, in fact venturing pretty heavy territory at one point. The record is really all over the place, with stuff we love about '70s rock - from groovy, glammy honky tonk to poppy Beatles-y soft rock balladry to full on proto-doom riffery.
The festivities begin with a jolly good time of a song called "Going Out Tonight", a glam rockin' number with campy lyrics, that nicely transitions into an extended, spaced-out psych section which features Russell coaxing some strange sounds from his guitar, fading out eventually, making way for "You Don't Know", a quite pretty & melancholic pop ditty with wistful vocals. Following that, "Electric Lady" finds Mouse cranking up their amps for more of a riff rocker, but one that still has a pop sensibility to it. Next, "All The Fallen Teen Angels" is a cover, and good one, of a song by Medicine Head. Then the side closes out with the mostly instrumental and suprisingly doom-ridden "Asher Besher", the song's lengthy intro of heavy guitar chords and plodding drums being shockingly Sabbathy, what vocals there are closer to croaking crow-cries, before an urgent, burbling bass line kicks in and the track takes off into gnarled psychedelic guitar soloing - followed by a brief acoustic coda. Nice one, that, especially for proto-metal obsessives.
And if you thought that somehow side one had covered all the bases, not quite. Side two starts off with another excellent pop rocker, "We Can Make It", but that's followed by the spooked-out "East Of The Sun", a droning string-laden psych track that mostly sounds like 20th century avant-garde classical music! And then they start in with fuzzy proto-metal riffery again, with "Its Happening To Me And You", with wailing acid rock guitars and lyrics like these: "Waiting for the candy man / wondering who I really am / do you really need to care / if you're here or if you're there / why why why / why don't you try / gotta get high / it's happening to me and you / changes that you're going through / doing what you wanna do / moving like a movie queen / drifting through a purple dream". Druggy, eh? And so it goes, Mouse mixing lovely orchestrated pop with drug addled hippy trippiness and lashings of distorted guitar.
This record is the kind of thing that we'd imagine John Peel would have played a lot, but even if so, probably nobody else did and thus it was Mouse's only release. Still, a bit of a gem nice to have reissued, not just for fans of Ray Russell but also proto-metallers Steel Mill (whose ex-bass player was a member of Mouse), and early '70s UK prog, glam, and pop rock in general.
Remastered, 180 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve, includes liner note insert, etc.
Like many of our favorite black metal outfits, this Canadian one man band is masterful at fusing epic swaths of atmospheric black buzz, with brooding psychedelic ambience, the sound a series of sprawling epic slow builds that drift through soft swirls of folky thrum, cinematic synthy shimmer, and mysterious field recording flecked soundscapes, before exploding into furious squalls of black buzz majesty. However, don't be expecting any black buzz here, as Natura Mortis Sonoris gathers up the group's 'deathcraft', i.e. dark ambient tracks that appeared on various releases between 2006 and 2013, re-envisioned, and reworked, and presented as a proper album of sorts. Generally we'd scoff at a collection of what is essentially a handful of 'scary' black metal intros, but N&N's 'deathcraft' really is so much more than that, deftly conjuring up other worlds, a sonic travelogue through some mysterious alternate universe, filled with deep dark forests, subterranean caverns, endless expanses of star filled sky, and scorched barren wastelands, haunting and harrowing, lush synth swells blossoming into soft kosmische shimmer, leading us toward something all together darker, acoustic guitars draped over a reverbed metallic buzz, a firelit folk that's sinister and ominous, but somehow still darkly lovely, laced with swoonsome strings, a blackened chamber folk that gradually bleeds into a woozy stretch of softly psychedelic kraut-age dreaminess.
Soon strange percussion surface, as does the distant rumble of thunder, and the sound of rainfall, insects, it becomes evident that we're now wandering beneath the canopy of some ancient primeval grove, when suddenly voices drift in, the sounds of some primitive ritual, voices chanting, a cacophony of tolling bells, a dense dizzying nightmare of swirling sounds, that coalesces into strange sort of looped rhythm, lurching and lumbering hypnotically, deep dramatic crooning and some rasping vokills drifting over the top, soon joined by percolating synths, and then before you know it, silence. And we're only three tracks in.
From there, Natura Mortis Sonoris unwinds languorously, weaving brief bits of near silence, to crystalline synth swirl, crows circling in the blood red sky above, drifting into near tranquil bits of campfire strum, only to devolve into blackend tarpit thrum, churning caustic fields of darkdrone energy, that decays into strange industrial crumble, before some of that firelit folkiness returns, with brief detours into Gobliny soundtracky synthiness, haunting drifts of whipping wind and druggy varispeed wooziness, anguished teeth gnashing psychedelia, burnished soft focus dreaminess, but always returning to the shadows, the record not so much a battle between light and dark, but of dark and darker, of darkness, and whatever lurks just beyond the darkness, a blackened sonic mystery that is utterly spellbinding.
We'd just about given up Caspar Brotzmann for dead, fearing we'd never hear his distinctive, heavier-than-thou, Teutonic guitar skronk on a new recording ever again. 1999's Mute Massaker was the last we'd heard from him, for years and years. But then we learned that he blew apart the Green Room at Roadburn 2011, with a reactivated incarnation of his group Massaker. Wish we'd been there! Rumors of other recent shows surfaced as well. So hopes were up that something more would be forthcoming from Caspar & Co., presumably a new Massaker album. Instead, it turns out he's now formed a brand new band, called Nohome - but once again it's a power trio, with another precision rhythm section backing up the axe-wielding Brotzmann's amplifier worship. Massaker again, essentially, in all but name.
For some of you, who were fans of Caspar Brotzmann back in the '90s, when he was THEE heavy "out" guitar god, like an avant-garde Jimi Hendrix (or better, yet Uli Jon Roth!), his band easily as heavy as the Melvins, well, you have been waiting for this album since 1999! And for those just being introduced to Brotzmann now, Nohome does it really well, and ought to make you into a rabid fan looking for his out of print early works - that is, if you enjoy apocalyptic feedback-sculpting guitar riffage that sounds like a jet engine in a wind tunnel (but captivatingly so, for those in the mood!). Keiji Haino fans, have you met Caspar?
For Nohome, Caspar has enlisted two musicians from Switzerland, drummer Michael Wertmuller and bassist Marino Pliakas, who happen to also play in a group called Full Blast with a famous hard blowing European free jazz titan - guess who? That'd be Caspar's dad, saxophonist Peter Brotzmann. Those Swiss sidemen are no slouches - Wertmuller (ex-Alboth!) in particular stands out, his drumming especially insane & impressive - and ol' Caspar hasn't lost a step either. He even still looks more or less the same as we remember, the handsome devil.
While Full Blast is "jazz" and Nohome is closer to "rock", both are improvisational, and it'd be hard to determine which was the most "extreme"; but where papa Brotzmann indeed blasts on his sax, his son wails more like an early warning siren, heralding sonic armaggedon.
The four long instrumental pieces here were recorded live in concert in Berlin, last summer. The moody drone of Caspar's howling guitar is matched by the agitated seismic rumble of the rhythm section - making it almost superflous that also guesting on two of the tracks is Caspar's pal, F.M. Einheit, from industrialists Einsturzende Neubauten (he of course plays "steel" - you can see him pictured on the back cover with a giant metal spring). The cataclysmic just gets cataclysmic-ier!
Let's hope it's not another 14 years before we get another record out of Caspar Brotzmann, though this one will be ringing in our ears for quite a while in any case!!
We first heard from this mysterious outfit via a cassette courtesy of weirdo UK tape label the Tapeworm, that tape a fantastic bit of broody, murky, home recorded experimental electronic ambience, which we mentioned in that review, hinted at another side of the band, which trafficked in a more dancefloor driven electronica, but if this is THAT, then suddenly that tape makes a whole lot more sense, cuz while this is electronic, and there are beats, it's also dense and dark and psychedelic, dubbed out and lysergic, atmospheric and seriously tripped out. Demdike Stare fans line up here!
Compendium collects the best bits from a handful of the group's early 12"s, weaving them into a darkly mysterious and gloriously hauntological whole, dense swirls of blackened ambience, gives way to Fuck Buttons like electro-buzz, before the sound slips into a dubbed out creep, all wisps of chordal shimmer, and weirdly disembodied beatboxing, woven into a super minimal abstract IDM, drifting beneath heavily reverbed, breathy vocals, which eventually splinters into some woozy glitched out electro, laced with swooping backwards effects, super minimal rhythmic skitter, spare, minor key melodies, a weirdly warped, hushed almost electro pop, but fear not, that 'pop' oozes with a definite Demdike style hauntological electro vibe, churning rhythms, echoey ambience, smears and swirls of gauzey thrum, warped slo-mo dirge-pop, anchored by lugubrious tarpit beats, and creepy slowed down vox, stuttery swirls of layered piano, cascading sheets of muted noise, sped up soul vox, lurching hip hop beats mired in fields of crystalline shimmer, the whole thing slipping dreamily and druggily from dark ambience to beat driven moodiness and back again. So good.
Most definitely recommended for fans of Demdike Stare, oOoOO, Pye Corner Audio, Burial, Holy Other and the like...
First full length from these jangle pop Scots in a decade, and it's almost like not a single day has passed. Softly fuzzy and summery, all hushed, earnest, heartfelt, jangle pop, the sounds shimmery, and sun dappled, the tracks flute flecked and gorgeously soft focus, laced with the occasional horns, little bits of synth filigree here and there.
those futuristic synths seemingly the bands only concession to the modern musical world, maybe in part cuz this was recorded by Tortoise's John McEntire, which also probably accounts for the music sounding more lush and produced, the sonic palette much more varied, with the Pastels lo-fi twee pop now existing somewhere closer to the sound of Belle & Sebastien or the High Llamas, but the songs themselves are pure Pastels, as the the sweetly innocent boy / girl vocals, the rough hewn harmonies of old tightened up a bit, but still sweetly melancholy, and while fans who still have the group's untouchable Truckload Of Trouble compilation on heavy rotation, might be a bit put off by the group's bigger sound and all the horns and flutes and synths, the rest of you popkids can revel in the Pastels warm jangle pop dreaminess!
The crazy success of UK horror movie soundtrack vinyl reissue label Death Waltz seems to have inspired someone else to start a similar concern, so similar in fact, that we were initially convinced that this new imprint Waxwork, MUST be some sort of Death Waltz sub label. Besides being a horror movie soundtrack vinyl reissue label, Waxwork also gets modern artists to design new artwork for the cover, they include a printed inner sleeve with notes from the composer and the director, they also include a poster of the new artwork, the cover is even adorned with a sticker that looks EXACTLY like a Death Waltz sticker, right down to the font and the layout. So yeah, no points for originality, but who can argue with a vinyl reissue of the score to Stuart Gordon's infamous/legendary/genius 1985 horror comedy classic Re-Animator, which if you haven't seen it, you should. Right now. It's gross, and ridiculous, and totally over the top, and scary and really funny, probably actor Jeffrey Combs' finest moment, and there is of course the infamous head-giving-head scene (so infamous it also gets referenced in the liner notes). It's definitely a fine choice for a first release, and not just because the movie is great, the score too, by Richard Band is really excellent. Heavily beholden to Bernard Hermann, and supposedly composed as an homage to the classic Hitchcock thrillers AND Citizen Cane, the liner notes even explain that the original credits in the film were meant to include the line "with apologies to Bernard Hermann", which for whatever reason got left out, and thus ended up with Band often accused of simply ripping off Hermann. So much so that apparently he once got a letter from the Hermann estate claiming that if Hermann were still alive, Band would most definitely have been sued.
And it's a fair cop, the Re-Animator score is a total classic score, lots of strings, lots of dramatic Psycho like moments, but Band definitely makes it his own, especially on the instantly recognizable main theme, which most weirdo movie buffs will recognize instantly. Tense and intense, dramatic and moody, it's essentially like a Hermann score with disco drums, which sounds crazy, but it totally works and sounds amazing. If like us you've seen Re-Animator a million times, that track will instantly bring back a flood of images, crazy, eye popping, gut busting blood soaked images, which is what the best scores SHOULD do. Nothing else on the score is as cool and crazy as the disco drummed theme, but it's all pretty great, and even removed from the film, still makes for a fantastic listen.
And as if we even need to describe it, this new version comes in a heavy sleeve, with cool creepy very GREEN cover art by artist Gary Pullin, inside there's a printed inner sleeve with rare photos and liner notes from both director Stuart Gordon and composer Richard Band, there's also a huge poster of Pullin's new art, and the record itself is pressed on heavy 180 gram green and glow in the dark swirled vinyl!
And up next on Waxwork: Rosemary's Baby!!!!
Wow! Ok, this is pretty darn amazing. We ordered a copy of this based on a brief description we read, something along the lines of: "long lost futuristic funky proggy electronic music from behind the Iron Curtain". That was enough for us. And maybe for you too, though we're gonna go on and on about this anyway. But yeah, if that description piques your interest, let us just say that you will NOT be disappointed. However incredibly weird and cool you might imagine this could be from that short synopsis, it is probably even better!
And we were listening to it, and loving it, before we delved into the detailed liner notes and found out what it was all about - or when exactly it was from. So that's another recommendation, the music stands on its own without prior awareness of its quite interesting historical aspects.
What you get here are ten killer tracks drenched in echo effects, dense with percolating beats, uber-distorted analog synths, and eerily ear-catching melodies, a sound utterly full of "flanged, phased, and fuzzed electricity". They're previously unreleased reel-to-reel recordings, circa 1978-1984, from the vaults of this pioneering Romanian DIY electro-prog-pop groop who only released two tracks officially during their career, on a state-sanctioned compilation lp in 1981, before fading into obscurity. Rodion G.A. was founded in 1975 by a fellow named Rodion Ladislau Rosca, who had been collecting prog records and experimenting with homebuilt electronic gear since the dawn of the '70s. The G.A. comes from the names of the other two founding members of the band, but it's really composer Rodion Rosca's show, the material here recorded in Rodion's home studio in Cluj, most instruments played and programmed by Rodion himself, with occasional 'real' drumming contributed by one of the other guys.
Despite the deprivations of living in an oppressive Communist dictatorship, Rodion's creativity flourished, and this music still sounds super fresh and ahead of its time, venturing even into full-on proto-techno with the likes of "Diagonala", though always in its own unique hybrid form, on that track ferinstance mixing in what sounds like Eastern European folk motifs and Goblin-y giallo soundtrack spookiness. Krautrock influences shine through too, Kraftwerk and Cluster for sure, plus we can't help but think of odd outsider aQ faves Bruce Haack and Wicked Witch - cool company to be in!
Rodion's bombastic "hairy funk" prog grooves are melded to melodic pop hooks, always cloaked with a wonderfully miasmic layer of lo-fi grime. Everything here has its unique charms, ranging from the sinister, grittily distorted bunkurfunk of "Citadela", to the motorik delightfulness of "Salt 83", so strangely warped and sunshiney, to "In Linistea Noptii", wherein lovely piano playing mixes it up with the electronic elements. Some tracks are instrumentals, some have catchy vocal choruses - and some are visited by what sound like the echoing cries of a prehistoric pterodactyl, presumably another synth effect, sizzling stabs of which are always swooshing around.
So THIS was the sound of underground Romania back in the day, who knew? We are so thankful this freaky music didn't stay a secret forever. Yep, these "lost tapes" are quite the discovery, minds have been blown for sure. Automatic Record Of The Week.
Packaged with extensive liner notes by Andy Thomas, illustrated with vintage photos, telling the whole fascinating story of Rodion's stunted career, and recent reemergence as the "Godfather of Romanian electronic music". Oh, and the vinyl version also comes with a cd!
We'd been hearing about these guys for a while now, and from all sorts of folks, metalheads, popkids, all pretty adamant about how we had to check them out, we didn't realize it was one of the guys from Double Dagger, but as much as we dig DD, we were hardly prepared for THIS. A seriously kick ass blast of hooky heaviness, equal parts AmRep pig fuck noise rock, tangled old school math rock crush and vintage grunge, just check out the opener "Bait Car" (even sounds like a Tad song title), super distorted guitars, pounding drums, a breakdown verse that's all buzzing bass, drum crush, squealing feedback, yowled vox, and then holy shit a seriously Nirvana worthy chorus, and then a killer mathy breakdown, and then another Nirvana style part that's even more catchy. Holy shit, we had to listen to that first track 3 or 4 times before we could go on to the rest of the record, and to be honest we had a similar reaction to almost every song here, hooky and heavy, sludgey, grungy, poppy, the Nirvana vibe looms large, but filtered through old school Midwest heaviness and modern Torche style metallic pop, everything here totally hits the spot, the guitar sound is massive, crunchy and crumbly, the songs swing and bounce, groove and grind, every single one has a hook most pop bands would kill for, but it's set amidst some serious downtuned riffery and muscly metallic heft, think Helmet and Hum, Polvo and Drive Like Jehu, lots of nineties influence for sure, but all woven seamlessly together into what might be simultaneously our new favorite pop record, and new favorite heavy record, all at the same time. Obviously CRAZY recommended!
The Sun Dogs is the debut full length from this this Northwestern outfit, who weave Eastern tinged slow burn psych and brooding post metal smolder and fluttery sun dappled hippie folk into something dreamily druggy and pretty goddamn great. The opener is a slow burn drift of buzzing drones, dusky acoustic guitar shimmer, distant swirling synths, fluttering flute, all laced with some country-ish twang, and some super distinctive vox, a woozy seventies style psych folk that definitely pushes all our buttons. At this point we were still expecting the whole record to be sort of fuzzy and folky, but then the second track, "Native Dreams", unleashes some big drums, and some seriously thick fuzzed out guitars, not to mention more flutes, synths, and some sinewy low slung bass. Organs whirr psychedelically in the background, while over the top, Eastern snake charmer melodies shimmer and slither, the vocals high and keening, reminding us of Janes Addiction actually, which much of The Sun Dogs does, the heavier tracks here all have a sort of Janes Addiction vibe, albeit a bit folkier, with the flutes, and plenty of swirly sitar like buzz. Mix in some Psychic Ills, Dead Meadow or Black Mountain, and we're talking some heavy stoner psych folk bliss out for sure.
The slower/mellower tracks have a definite hippie folk feel, and hints of more modern retro beardo folk a la Fleet Foxes, but even then, the vocalists keening plaintive croon, and the sort of swaggery swing, sets Rose Windows apart from their bearded brethren. And it's that classic rock swagger, a little Zeppelin, a little Terry Reid (the vocals for sure) wedded to the more strummy, fluttery folkiness, that make Rose Windows a strange sonic hybrid. Check out "This Shroud", an organ driver slow psych groove, all tangled spidery leads over warm organ thrum, and steel string shimmer, those Perry Farrell like vocals, the Eastern melodies, the distorted buzz, the fuzzy riff, the big booming drums, and finally the flutes swooping in, for a seriously fierce hard rocking psychedelic heavy riffing finale that sounds like a heavier, more classic rocking Bardo Pond, which is not a bad thing at all.
A strange record for sure, but one we find ourselves listening to constantly, a definite new aQ fave for sure.
FYI it's on vinyl too but Sup Pop has to repress (soon) 'cause they were all warped!
These Chicago noiseniks are already on full length number three, but the first we heard from them was their killer track on the second Group Flex flexi-book, and it sort of makes sense that they'd find their way to Castle Face (the label run by John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees), cuz as noisy and punk as they are, they also sort of sounds like a meaner, noisier Oh Sees, the vocalist's snarly reverbed yelp, the group's echo drenched garage rock crunch, it's exactly what you might imagine Thee Oh Sees would sound like on a seriously bad trip, which is of course good for us. Loads of feedback, caveman drum plod, the vocals doused in effects, often dubbed into oblivion, the guitars distorted and crunchy, the songs swaggery and slithery, lurching and lumbering, the guitar melodies woozy and wavery, dripping in weird effects, giving everything a warped psychedelic vibe, like a garage punk Butthole Surfers at times, but elsewhere, they're just seriously high energy garage rock radness that wouldn't be out of place on a bill with the Mayyors, or Rusted Shut, or The Intelligence, bands on the slightly weirder more warped side of the garage rock spectrum maybe, but really fans of the current crop of garage pop combos definitely might dig too, they just might have to push a little beyond their sonic comfort zone, but hell, it's so worth it, some seriously tripped out psychedelic garage punk that has us thinking we best track down those other two full lengths quick smart!
Nuclear Blast, after wowing us with the latest from Kadavar and the debut from Free Fall, not to mention the as yet un-aQ-reviewed new album from unabashed Sabbath appropriators Orchid, have just come out with ANOTHER catchy, killer album in the '70s retro-rock style, the debut full-length by a bombastic band from Austin, Texas called Scorpion Child. These guys list proto-metal & heavy krautrock acts like Pentagram, Hairy Chapter and Lucifer's Friend as influences, and yeah, we hear those for sure, but it must be admitted that they also have a bit of Sunset Strip swagger to 'em, if they were from LA in the '80s they'd probably have made it onto MTV. That's in part 'cuz the lead singer's raucous wailing vox are very Robert Plant-ish, and a lot of the '80s hair bands were trying really hard to sound like Led Zeppelin after all - so Scorpion Child woulda fit right in with the likes of Badlands or Blue Murder, ferinstance. They even throw in some Zeppish power ballady acoustic stylings on the album closing epic "Red Blood (The River Flows)". The singer also reminds us a lot of Dave King from Fastway, which we consider a plus. But Scorpion Child definitely sport a grittier, more vintage sound that all you '70s proto-metal lovers out there will dig, rocking out like a more party-hardy Graveyard or something, with muscular grooves, sticky choruses, and that aforementioned sensual yowl leading the charge. Just listen to tracks like "Kings Highway" or "Polygon Of Eyes"... one word (or is it two?) will do: badass.
Domestic vinyl version soon forthcoming. The gatefold compact disc includes a bonus track, that may or may not also be on the vinyl, however.
Another mysterious transmission from this alien black metal duo, whose black metal seems to get more and more alien with every release. This time around, the whole A side seems to recast SS's black metal as something much more abstract and indistinct, ultra lo-fi and darkly chaotic, a sprawl of murky free form drift, thick clouds of squiggly FX and gristly buzz, buried pulsing rhythms, heavily effected vokills, the vibe more black-drone-kosmische than black metal, the sound brittle and washed out, the opening track flowing directly into the follow up, which arranges the same ingredients but adds a bit more black buzz, to what sounds like blast beats, although they too are buried deep in the sonic murk, here too, everything blurred into a black psychedelic swirl.
The flipside cranks up the fidelity a bit unleashing a wave of thick droned out guitar buzz, laced with space-y squiggles, the sounds smeared into a heaving dronescape, until a buried rhythm surfaces, eventually transforming the sound into something more black metal, but still washed out to the point that it's almost ambient, before finally shedding all the blackness and all the buzz, leaving just a shadowy stretch of brooding kosmische synth swirl.
Pressed on super cool black smoke swirled clear vinyl!
This is another one of those instances where we're able to judge a band solely on the music, and not the band's pedigree, since we're almost wholly unfamiliar with all the previous bands that have led up to Shocked Minds. Some of which are apparently a big deal, but fuck it, we threw this on, not really knowing what to expect and BLAM, song one had us totally sold, fuzzy garagey-punk, liberally infused with lots of power pop hookiness, and some seriously catchy melodies, but plenty of snarl and swagger too. It actually sounds like the band were thinking punk, and the pop component was just a happy accident, which in our experience, ends up being the best possible combo. The sound of Shocked Minds, while heavily indebted to classic punk and Yellow Pills power pop, and a whole mess of rad outfits from the seventies and eighties, also isn't that far removed from many of their labelmates on Hozac, various garage rock contemporaries like Heavy Times, Far Out Fangtooth, Black Bug, Holograms, Fungi Girls, Liminanas, not to mention groups like Thee Oh Sees (check out the Dwyer-like yelp on "Suspect"). There's also a killer cover of a track by UK pop punks The Eat, which sounds like it could be a Shocked Minds original. Every track here rules, and along with the new Heavy Times record (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), we're finding it difficult to listen to anything else!
Amongst soundtrack composers, Michael Small was the king of the seventies thriller with amazing scores for the films Parallax View, Marathon Man, Night Moves, and Stepford Wives and AQ-fave Klute among so many others. His signature sound was infusing an uncanny subtlety and tension into his arrangements, that tension creeping up on you, but never overwhelming. This new double cd set combines 3 lesser known thriller scores from his later period and they don't disappoint: The Driver (directed by Walter Hill), Star Chamber (directed by Peter Hyams), and Black Widow (directed by Bob Rafelson).
The Driver (1978) starring Ryan O'Neil, Bruce Dern and Isabelle Adjani, is sort of an early incarnation of the recent movie Drive. Ryan O'Neil plays a cool, soft-spoken driver who steals cars to use in robberies as getaway vehicles, and Dern is the detective who uses a robbery witness (Adjani) to focus a sting on O'Neil. Like the movie Bullitt, there are amazing car chases and the music follows suit with atmospheric tension, slow and eerie with delayed trumpet squeals and hallucinogenic phased synth drones in a dark jazz score.
The Star Chamber (1983), starring Michael Douglas and Hal Holbrook, is about a secret underground committee of judges who reap violent justice on perpetrators who are set free through technicalities in the legal system. The score has a slow heavy orchestration fraught with horns and strings punctuating the weight of judicial power with an ominous presence.
And finally, Black Widow (1987) starring Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, is a cat and mouse thriller about a investigative journalist who believes that a string of murders of wealthy men are connected by their mysterious young widows who may or not may not be the same deadly woman. The score is creepily hair-raising with eerie flutes and subtle orchestral manipulations reminding us of spiders crawling on skin as we're sleeping.
Being creeped out never sounded so good!
