First of all, now that's a name! To which your reaction might be, okay, this band must really be into 17th and 18th century British military history, to name themselves after a heroic naval officer who perished in a shipwreck in 1707. Or, if you're like us, you might think, hmmm, seems a bit like the moniker of Sir Lord Baltimore, the fuzzed out early '70s proto-metal greats. And that's definitely relevant to Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's also very much fuzzed out sound, all right. Like Witchcraft, Gentlemans Pistols, and the elusive Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats, these guys are another band on Rise Above (licensed to Metal Blade in the USA), who kick out the Sabbathy jams and sound like they actually -really- belong on Rise Above Relics, that UK label's imprint for reissues of swaggering '70s heavy rock obscurities. Yeah, the Shovell (as they like to be called, for short) deliver the goods, a ramalamajama of high energy brutal boogie with distorted to heck vocals, and noisy psych geetar explosions all over the place. 'Tis total guitar heavy, FX laden, rifftastic kickass rock n' roll. Extreme enough that while they've got one foot firmly in '70s rockarolla, they've almost got the other in, like, '90s noiserock� We say that 'cause sometimes the guitars break out stuff that's so sinewy and mathy, and the vocals get even more gruff and gnarly, that suddenly we start thinking the Melvins (meet Blue Cheer). It's just that they're waaay more freaked out and crazier than, y'know, mere Led Zep copyists. Much more like, The Heads, if they were all proto-metal about it. In fact, we'd say that this is definitely recommended to both fans of The Heads -and- Sir Lord Baltimore, of which we'd imagine there'd be plenty. Also if you like Danava, the aforementioned Gentlemans Pistols, Harvey Milk circa The Pleaser, Dzjenghis Khan, plus oldies like High Tide, Budgie, Toad, Dust, Buffalo, the Groundhogs (whose Tony McPhee gets in a guest guitar solo on one track here!), Captain Beyond, etc.
In a word, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell SLAY. And do so in style. Which includes, slipcase packaging. Oh, and there's a hidden bonus track, a cover of "Bean Stew" from Buffalo's Dead Forever, so stay tuned at the end�
Better be ready to bang your head, 'cause here's a brand new 7" single from this badass band, the (self-proclaimed) "Finnish Kings of Lovecraftian Hard Rock & Death Metal". It contains three tracks, about such subjects as undead priests and sadist wizards, recorded during the same sessions that produced their debut full-length Torches Ablaze that we reviewed not long ago (cds and vinyl of that are both still in stock and highly recommended too). Arkhamin Kirjasto, if you didn't know, is a(nother) side project of Circle, featuring Jussi Lehtisalo, a man as prolific as he is talented, and whose Collected Solo Works cd is in fact our Record Of The Week this week. This band basically combines the the spacey Gregorian monk chant sound of early Circle with what the crusty heshers in Darkthrone have been doing lately, so it's for both space rockers and church burners - but definitely on the more metal side of that equation despite some experimentation. The filthiest of '80s and '90s extreme metal is referenced, trad old school metal too, and we hear a hint of Ghost B.C.'s successful Satanic pop sound as well, at least in the incantatory title track here, which utilizes both slowly grinding evil riffage, and epic vocal choirs to hypnotizing effect.
Limited to 500 copies, adorned with cool cover art depicting the Lovecraftian 'Arkham Library' which is what their name means in Finnish.
It's difficult to review records by Author & Punisher, cuz as longtime readers of the aQ list know, the music is only part of the equation. A&P is in fact Tristan Shone, who builds some of the most beautiful musical 'instruments' we've ever seen. Instruments that look more like pieces of art, or the guts of some super advanced aircraft, massive steel drums, weird science fiction style triggers attached to tracks, that slide along steel strips like some futuristic weapon. He sings through a mask that looks a little like that weird mouthpiece Bane wears in the Batman movies. And the act of making this music is extremely physical. Watching Shone play, he's spinning that massive metal drum, and slamming those weird triggers, sliding pieces of steel into other pieces of steel, there are huge dials and knobs, and chains, and cords, it's like he's in the cockpit of some alien spaceship, the act of flying said spaceship just so happens to produce the music of Author & Punisher, at least, that's how we envision it. And it's these gorgeous machines that while integral to the sound are inherently not present on the record. So if you've never seen the machines, or seen A&P play, then it's all about the music. Thankfully, the music is fucking awesome. Granted, it's a lot better listening to this stuff, and imagining those huge machines grinding away and spewing out these sounds, but even sans the visuals, this stuff kills. At times it's like an even more blown out, more machine like Godflesh. Although this time around, there's a lot more melody, which gives some parts a sort of dark gloomy rock vibe. We hear a little Deftones weirdly enough, and some of the post Godflesh outfits (Jesu, JK Flesh), there's definitely a serious dub vibe going on too, the vocals doused in effects, and looped and layered, the drums too, pretty dubby, and the bass, holy shit, the low end on this A&P record is unlike anything you've ever heard, like the rib cage rattling wobble of dubstep, but times ten, even more blown out and cranked up, noisy and thick, subsonic, corrosive and caustic. The sound will be heavy and churning, when suddenly, the bass drops, and it's like someone snuck in and spun your bass knob to ten. And cranked up the volume too. We can vouch for the extreme bassiness. We were lucky enough to host an Author & Punisher instore a while back, and one song in, our upstairs neighbors came rushing downstairs to see what the hell was going on, as EVERYTHING in their apartments was shaking and vibrating and sliding off shelves. THAT part of the A&P sound is pretty accurately represented here, the sound MASSIVE, and thick, and dense, and utterly CRUSHING.
This time around Shone seems to have honed everything he was going for on past records. The production is huge, the bass is punishing, the arrangements are dense and intricate, the sound is equal parts dubbed out and electronic, super dynamic too, with long stretches of more skittery minimalism, the heaving slabs of skull smashing heaviness more spaced out, plenty of gothy and gloomy passages, the vocals slipping easily from effects heavy clean croon, to demonic distorted bellow, the beats flit from skittery to devastating pound and back again, the overall sound is more textural, more fully realized, heavy, and rhythmic, mesmerizing and seriously fucking brutal. Anyone into Godflesh, Necro Deathmort, JK Flesh, old Digital Hardcore, heavy dub, blown out beatscapery, and of course alien robotic metal-dub, this shit is unbeatable!
Cool small world aQ crossover postscript: Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt familiar with the comic Wuvable Oaf, we've reviewed several issues, and raved about it like crazy, our very own Andee even appeared in one issue, as did aQ, lots of big hairy dudes, cats, strange sex and plenty of METAL. Anyway, one of the imaginary bands featured in the comic, Ejaculoid, who is in fact a 'real' imaginary band (featuring some aQ beloved hardcore luminaries!), were given the 'real' remix treatment by a handful of actual real bands, one of which was Author & Punisher, whose Ejaculoid remix is included here!
In case you missed it on our mystery themed in-between list last week, something we reviewed just for that, for the first time...
It's pretty much acknowledged that Bad Brains are one of the most influential American bands of the 20th century, having blown the minds of every young hardcore band in the D.C. and New York scenes and beyond. Their sound went way further than just "punk" or "rock", blending jazz, fusion, and reggae into something that defies simple classification. While most people might be familiar with the group from their godly self-titled debut and after, Black Dots collects early material recorded at the then fledgling Inner Ear Studios from a session in 1979. The studio at that point was in owner/engineer Don Zientara's basement, with band members situated inside while H.R. did his thing in the backyard. It's easy to imagine how cramped things were, but between song banter reveals a band in good spirits as they tear the living fuck out of their early material. Bad Brains in '79 weren't as fast, distorted, and manic as they would become, but the chemistry is still totally unbelievable, sounding both loose and ridiculously tight at the same time. And even with modest recording gear the band sounds HUGE. This looser style works particularly well for their reggae numbers, always a point of contention with many fans. These recordings almost sound like some hyper charged group from the 60s taking things into new worlds. Not many bands could sound this bad ass while also sounding like they are having the most fun ever - but I guess if you wrote songs like "Pay To Cum", "Regulator", "Banned In D.C.", "Attitude" and everything else here, you'd also be having the best time ever. Loads of personality with this band (check out H.R.'s hilarious kiss off of "Bye, Celeste" at the end of "Red Bone In The City", their reworking of "God Save The Queen"), it's completely easy to see why they were such a force to be reckoned with. They were just different. Better. And again, completely bad ass. There's almost no point in going on with this review, sure you'll have some people who prefer what Bad Brians became, but others will tell you that music kind of doesn't get any better than this, stripped to its bare form. Whatever the case, it all leads to the same recommendation: ESSENTIAL.
Tayatha is the latest release from aQ beloved composer/pianist Anton Batagov, and it just might be his loveliest and most haunting work to date. Which is saying a lot, considering how much we love pretty much everything we've heard from him, we've even made several of his records Record Of The Week, before this one, and his triple cd Wheel Of The Law remains one of our favorite modern minimal releases EVER (and would have also been a Record Of The Week, had we been able to get more). But this new one is something else entirely.
On past records, Batagov has enjoyed the act of collaboration, and has explored playing with rock bands, with experimental electronic musicians, incorporating electric guitar, pounding drums, different vocalists, Buddhist recitations, all a part of Batagov's idiosyncratic approach to modern composition, but never has one of his collaborations been so potent, and so moving, as on Tayatha. Yet another Buddhist based composition here Batagov is joined by Tibetan vocalist Yungchen Lhamo, and that's it, just piano and vocals. And it's stunning. Absolutely. Some of the most beautiful and lyrical piano playing we've heard from Batagov, the sound so rich and emotional, moving and personal, even sans vocals, Tayatha would be a revelation, but Yungchen's voice is a marvel, lush and lustrous, but super distinctive, slipping from rich throaty croon, to something more abstract, and back again, and similarly sans piano, this would be a gorgeous a cappella performance, in fact, Lhamo has been performing solo and a cappella for years, but it's how Lhamo's voice and Batagov's piano fit together so perfectly that makes this record so special.
It's hard to put into words what exactly it is about this record, but without sounding overly dramatic, we got chills the first time we put this one. It's lush and lovely, but definitely haunting, and subtly harrowing, Batagov and Lhamo somehow imbuing the sound with intense emotion, the music surprisingly personal and intimate. We won't pretend that there wasn't a potential for new age schmaltz, what with the female vocals and piano, and the rather new age-y looking cover, but don't be misled, this is a powerful collection of dark, dreamy, moody and meditative music that is truly transcendent. Might be best to just listen to the samples below, we find it hard to imagine you won't be immediately smitten.
And what's even cooler about Tayatha, is that the sound and the compositions are super varied, tracks like "Medicine Buddha" are almost poppy, it's not hard to imagine someone like Tori Amos or Regina Spektor performing the same song, but with dramatically different results, yet even in the hands of Batagov And Lhamo, the song swells dramatically, the piano melodies super intense and strangely catchy, the vocals too, since we don't speak the language, often act like another instrument, imbued with the power of the human voice, but not beholden to any sort of lyrical interpretation. Other tracks are more tranquil and meditative, some are lilting and and dreamlike, others brood and pulse with a mysterious dark energy, and at least one, "Flying Dakini", almost sounds like some 'Nighthawks At The Diner' Tom Waits style balladry, albeit in Tibetan and a bit more modern minimalist. But all the tracks here, every one, is heartbreakingly beautiful, the whole somehow is so much more than its constituent parts, repeated listens have transformed Tayatha into more than just voice and piano, it's almost liturgical, a mysteriously lovely spiritual sonic journey, that manages to turn sound into something divine.
It seems that art world darlings Black Dice have abandoned their super spastic noise assaults in favor of a more subtle, spacious, psychedelic approach, a path not unlike the one the Boredoms followed on the way to making "Super ae" and "Vision Creation Newsun." What happened? It's like someone set those responsible for "Cold Hands" loose in the forest with some shrooms, a couple Amon Duul records and a mission to get in touch with their primal selves. However they got their inspiration, the results are a glorious realization of intensity achieved through built-up layers of evocative, tension filled sound rather than freak-punk pummelling. This is an affair of shimmery guitars, cascading oscillations, tinkling chimes, and even a new agey wind line, worrisome until it gets obliterated via sample manipulation. An element of tribalism pounds its way into Beaches & Canyons, both through hypnotic drumming and yelping "Ah oh ah oh oh ah ah oh YEW! YEW! YEW! YEW!" vocal outbursts. The whole thing teeters precariously on the edge of hippy-dippydom, but Black Dice manages to pull off the jams while avoiding wanton self indulgence. Expansive, unexpected and awesome.
Born and bred (and still residin') in Como, Mississippi, 58-year old bluesman R.L. Boyce grew up singing gospel in the church choir and playing the drums in fife-and-drum bands (Otha Turner is his uncle). He then eventually took up the guitar. Now has finally just released his first full-length album, on vinyl only via the down home music fiends at Sutro Park. One side was recorded in a studio - the other on R.L. Boyce's porch! He plays here with Sutro Park veteran Luther Dickinson (guitar), Lightin' Malcolm (guitar), Calvin Jackson (drums), Calvin's son Cedric Burnside (drums), and others. R.L. does a few of his own compositions, plus two by that other R.L., R.L. Burnside, and one traditional number as well. In all cases, the good times roll. Boyce's style is loose and improvisational, with lots of unedited laughter and impromptu banter in-between takes, though these rambling songs would be long anyway - album opener "R.L.'s Boogie" is over 9 minutes long, fans of Endless Boogie take note! Definitely our kind of blues, expressive and unconcerned with propriety. Despite its deep roots in tradition, this ain't museum-piece blues, it's the living thing.
180 gram vinyl pressing. The jacket includes detailed sleeve notes (with footnotes!), and bears the motto "World Boogie is Coming".
After a full length and a split with fellow math/noise rockers Hawks, we still can't seem to get enough of Minneapolis rockers Buildings, who deliver another blast of bass heavy AmRep style pigfuck noise rock radness, sinewy distorto guitars wrapped around thick buzzing bass, shards of shrieking feedback, and some serious drum pound, not to mention a killer hook and some fierce riffage, the Buildings track here might only be 2:41, but odds are you'll find yourself listening to it over and over.
On the flipside, we're introduced to Made In Canada, who weirdly enough were actually made in France, and these guys do the whole brooding mathy noisy rock thing too, but there sound is more muted and restrained, reminding us a bit of Shellac, right down to the sung/spoken vox, and the dense tangle of bass buzz and dense drumming, but the bass here is way more thick and filthy, the sound a bit more blown out, but the band more than capable of whipping up some gnarled bass heavy riff rock that fans of all things mathy, noisy and heavy will no doubt dig big time. And they even manage to infuse some cool, delicate psychedelic parts into their mathy churn. Definitely wanna hear more from these guys...
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!!
Whew! People were starting to panic 'bout this, cause it seemed that this desirable Death Waltz release was so terrifically limited that none of 'em were gonna make it across the pond from the UK. But thankfully the label relented and pressed some more, so now we have some - but still not very many, so act fast if you want one!
And you DO probably want one, 'cause of the many awesome soundtracks that John Carpenter composed for his movies, this is one of the best. The film The Fog itself may or may not be among his best - there's a difference of opinion at aQuarius about that, we'll argue about it offline - but we all agree about the soundtrack. Of course, whether 1979's The Fog is for sure worth the rental if you haven't seen it lately, after all (spoiler alert!) it's got ghost pirates in it (undeniably a cool concept, if perhaps not the scariest idea ever), and Jamie Lee Curtis, and of course the titular fog. Fog is always spooky.
But the soundtrack, that's what we really remember from the movie. And it's not actually as typically John Carpenter-y as what we usually mean when we call something John Carpenter-y in our reviews. It doesn't have the groovy '80s disco-synth beats, not so much. Really, it's more of a drone record. Slow and low stuff, y'know. Inspired, no doubt, by fog horns! But played on electronic synthesizers, of course. At times, it's not unlike what what a lot of today's experimental drone artists might come up with - if they were scoring a horror film, that is. Distorted whooshes of sound, ponderous piano plinking, crushing church organ chords, subsonic detonations, ringing electronic pulses forming into slow building, nerve-wracking rhythms... just imagine the best Umberto album ever.
This soundtrack has a creepy ambient quality that's really engaging, completely apart from the story or visuals. It's beautifully ominous, and also in a way quite HEAVY.
Furthermore, the eerie, melodic main theme, a few notes tinkling in sinister sequence, reprised of course throughout the album, is a classic, up there with our faves from Goblin. By itself it would keep the hairs on the back of our necks up all night.
Well we could go on, but we suspect there's no need. Get it while you can, and we apologize in advance if we run out.
This Death Waltz version is an expanded edition of the soundtrack (also recently made available in the States as a double cd by the Silva Screen label, which we will list soon too), featuring 33 tracks over four sides of 180 gram gold vinyl, including a large number of cues from the movie not found on earlier versions. Also, of course, course, Death Waltz provides brand new artwork by Dinos Chapman for this release, along with new liner notes by John Carpenter, Dinos Chapman, and Randall D. Larson.
This is the very first we've heard from Caudal, a trio featuring Nadja's Aidan Baker. Their new lp, Forever In Another World, is one of three new releases on a newish UK label called Oaken Palace, the first totally non-profit label (at least intentionally!), a purely charitable endeavor, that takes all the monies made from record sales and donates them to various environmental organizations around the world. The label focuses on dronemusic and psychedelia, with two of their first few releases being Aidan Baker projects, and the third being a group featuring members of another psychedelic drone outfit we dig, Thisquietarmy, needless to say, sonically this stuff is right up our alley. And we can definitely get behind the label's mission as well, aiming to strengthen the connection between music and nature, in a much more tangible way than just singing about trees or having a forest on the record cover.
Taking the concept even further, each group on the label picks a specific endangered species or habitat, to which their record is then dedicated, the record is produced in a super environmentally sustainable manner, 100 percent recycled sleeves, zero carbon vinyl pressing, etc., and then each artist picks a charity related to dedicated species or habitat, and that's where all the money goes. So cool!
Caudal have chosen an odd animal, the European ground squirrel. With all the profits donated to support the protection efforts of the Austrian Union for Nature Preservation. Nice.
Caudal is another in a long line of recent Baker projects that have been moving away from the doomgaze of the Nadja mothership, and the hushed ultra minimalism of his early solo records, instead focusing on sounds much more spaced out, psychedelic and krautrocky, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes of opener "River's Edge" to lure you in, and drag you down into their gorgeous, laid back, washed out, softly psychedelic sprawl. Thirteen minutes of tranced out motorik mesmer, the drums and bass locked into a gorgeously languid groove, which for nearly twelve minutes remains unwavering and locked TIGHT, with Baker doing most of the textural and sonic heavy lifting, in the first half adding softly chiming spidery melodies, warm chordal swells, shimmering soft focus clouds of dreamlike FX, the vibe super drowsy and drifty, only adding some distorted heft for the last couple minutes, but even then the bass and drums don't blink, anchoring Baker's final swirling squall.
"Threever" ups the tempo a bit, sounding not unlike a mellower Circle, total space rock / kraut rock trance out, Baker unfurling gorgeous swaths of sound over the relentless rhythm, super hypnotic, and totally mesmerizing, and surprisingly dynamic, with a handful of subtle tempo shifts, the sound setting into something much more hushed and ethereal, before returning to that hypno rock head nodding groove. "Walrus Tusk Scrimshaw" is a dark loping dirge, the background sounds ominous rumbles and deep resonant swirls, a sort of slow-core post rock doominess that sprawls malevolently, the guitars buzzing and distorted, delivered in fierce arcs, while deep swells shift and pulse in the background, eventually getting downright heavy, but again, it's mostly the guitar, wild sheets of feedback, crumbling downtuned distortion, all draped over that unfuckwithable rhythm section, who play on, unfazed.
Finally, "Forever In Another World" finishes things off with an epic stretch of moody minimal hypnorock, again, Circle fans, you're likely to flip, or if not flip, trance out big time, the sound never letting up, or even changing that much over the track's 13+ minutes, the drums and bass busier than before, but still locked tight, while Baker's guitars gradually build, not so much in volume or in heaviness, they seem to expand outward, processed swirls of sound that billow and shimmer, the drums this time following suit a bit, loosening up, the last few minutes, the band in full on psychedelic space rock mode, the sort of druggy dreamy space jam that could easily have stretched on forever.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, 180 gram black virgin vinyl, 100 percent recycled sleeves, includes a download code too!
Originally released as an extravagantly packaged cassette via local label Black Horizons, the latest from this beloved Bay Area combo is now available on cd, also presented in a super swank package (more on that below), and like the cassette, the gorgeous packaging perfectly reflecting the epic sounds within.
It begins with a slow building sonic brood, that immediately conjures Arvo Part, the rich thrum of ominous strings, the swirling voices woven into some sort of haunting chorale, a chorale that is quickly subsumed by a cloud of fierce psychedelic guitar buzz and brittle metallic clatter, all blurred into a burnished squall of warm dreamnoise density, before gradually decaying to a sea of black cloud shimmer. The second track, "Mound", begins with some distorted buzz, sounding almost metallic, stretching out into a mesmeric sprawl of lush, black buzz, sculpted into a series of swells, almost like a way more dynamic SUNNO))), but soon the vocals swoop in, hovering above those dense, crumbling, distorted bursts of black noise buzz, but tempered by spectral voices, and distant hovering drones, soon laced with streaks of feedback, and melodic shards of high end howl, still locked into that mesmerizing ebb and flow, finally disappearing in a cloud of crumbling sonic decay.
The sound grows even more ghostly, CEKE unfurling a spectral sprawl of ethereal ghostlike voices, and the soft shimmer of slowly bowed strings, all smeared into soft billowy swirls, the vibe sort of classical, like an abstract chamber music, performed in some lost glade, in a dark forest, lit only by firelight, a mysterious musical ritual, timeless and otherworldly. Finally, Earth Liver concludes with "Child", beginning with some echo drenched steel string guitar, hushed reverbed vocals, a dark apocalyptic blackened folk, minimal and murky, a funereal lament drifting and droning, before unexpectedly exploding into some seriously blown out distorted doom, the guitars thick and buzzing, the drums a caveman pound, the sound though epic and brooding, the vibe more Godspeed or Mogwai, than doom proper, and before you know it, they settle right back into that folky drift, and the song continues to swing wildly, from hushed and haunting, to dense and explosive, building to a soaring climax, rife with wild streaks of psychedelic guitar, the song fading out, leaving JUST that guitar to leave a shadowy streak of high end shimmer...
The tape also includes Common Eider's Amnesia, a super limited one sided picture disc, which we described thusly:
Amnesia patiently opens with deep stretches of weeping violin, quiet vocal haze creeps into the murky horizon, subtle cymbal splashes accent the deeply ambient swells and the piece grows into a huge orchestral bellow. A single composition that breathes and changes like a sweeping ocean tide, a wash of crystalline tones wavering from the forest floor, long-form melodies echoing from the evening sky, the strings, vocals and minimal percussion all melting together into a gloriously kaleidoscopic fever dream!
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!! And the packaging, again, WOW. A hand screened multi-panel gatefold mini cardstock sleeve, the text printed in gold metallic ink, each disc hand painted with the group's sigil, also in metallic gold ink.
Black Dice started out as one of those groups that you HAD to see live, in part because their performances were spectacles, total club destroying free-for-alls, but also because in the early days, the music was not so much a focus as seemingly an excuse for those drug destroying antics. So while those early records did in face have some good moments, they were for the most part brutal noise drenched freakouts, better appreciated in the flesh, preferably with a brain addled by plenty of booze.
A weird thing happened though, and over the years the band morphed into something much more musical, and much more electronic, and psychedelic, as is evidenced by the recently reissued BD record where the band's sound had blossomed into something more akin to later era Boredoms, or current day Fuck Buttons, with hints of classic krautrock, and seventies hippy psych, all woven into something kind of trippy and transcendent. So what might one expect from Eric Copeland? Well the apple doesn't fall far from the psychedelic tribal rhythm-ed tree. It is on DFA after all, so there is definitely a groovy danceable component to the proceedings, more than the aforementioned Black Dice record, but that is more than balanced by a seriously ramshackle kitchen sink aesthetic, each track is a cascade of jumbled loops, of vocal snippets, little bits of horn bleat, or guitar squiggle, all draped over stumbling breakbeats and fractured rhythms, the result is dense and dizzying, less epic and sprawlingly psychedelic than later Black Dice, and more like some home brewed mad scientist alien dancefloor experimentation, with some tracks piling on the sounds, bowing under the weight of a million samples and a wild tangle of clashing beats, while others are laid back and woozy, sometimes sounding like Ween covering "Lowrider", and other times like a 'dance' remix of some Ariel Pink B side, and at others like Art Of Noise jamming with the Boredoms. All in all, it's gloriously noisy, loose and on the verge of collapse, fractured and fucked up, seriously psychedelic, and kinda summery and fun, but with plenty of shadowy sinister sonic weirdness lurking just below the surface of even the sunshiniest popsounds here, positioning Joke In The Hole somewhere between weirdo noise rock, damaged dance music, and avant collaged art rock...
We're always �going on and on about the weirdest, most fucked up black metal bands ever, even elsewhere on this list, we review the new one from Tasmanian one man band Striborg, and declare it maybe the weirdest yet. But there's weird, and then there's Dead Reptile Shrine, who beyond being weird, are barely even black metal, the metallic elements far outweighed by the fractured folk and total whatthefuck elements, and the blackness, well that infuses pretty much every sound they produce, just not in the way most folks are used to or most metalheads want. Instead, DRS do their own thing, and their own thing is some fucked up mix of dark dronemusic, detuned free folk, stumbling chaotic black metal, some orchestral bits, tortured vocals, all wound into a confusional world of black rituals and mysterious sonic otherworlds. While we anxiously await the forth coming double cd on tUMULt, we have THREE new tapes to tide us over, two reissue of long out of print rarities, and another brand new album, to be released soon on cd and vinyl as well, but for now on the oh so cult cassette format. Each of these is limited to 400 copies, we got a bunch, 30 or so, but odds are those will go fast and we probably won't be able to get more.
Burning Black Intensity is the new album, and offers up a taste of what will be found on the soon to come sprawling tUMULt 2cd full length, and if BBI is any indication, then two whole cds of this stuff is going to DESTROY. This record begins with some creepy, orchestral Peter And The Wolf type sounds, strings and percussion, sampled we assume, while DRS croon over the top, offering up wavery clean vocals, strange incantations, and various other vocalizations, the result is truly twisted. This goes on for several tracks before the band launch into some black metal, but DRS black metal is a whole other thing, the drums buried in the mix, barely audible, the guitars strangled, and gnarled, buzzing, blurred and murky, dueling vocals, one a high howled screech, the other a rumbling demonic gurgle, both drenched in reverb, both howling maniacally, and relentlessly, while the guitars churn and the drums stumble, the whole thing lurching drunkenly, super raw and primitive and lo-fi and fractured and FUCKED for sure. The next track demonstrates that no matter how weird it gets, everything they do is deliberate, the guitars are thick and fuzzy, the drums simple but propulsive, the riff a near static black groove, the bass, pulsing and undulating, more typical black metal vocals screeching over the top, while way in the distance a voice shrieks hysterically, the two vocals all tangled up, the guitar spewing forth a super mesmerizing singular riff, totally hypnotic and trancelike, the vocals growing more and more unhinged. The next track is a murky muddy Wold style soundscape, melodies and guitars smeared and blurred into bleary eyed streaks of sound, the vocals an ominous rumble, the drums a chaotic blast beat, while the guitars swoon woozily, the whole track dizzy and druggy and weirdly dreamlike, the vocal eventually growing more and more warped, almost cartoonish, sing songy and almost operatic, wrapped in fluttery flutes and more distorted soft buzz.
Needless to say, this is brilliantly twisted stuff, totally wacked, outsider blackness, as true as any of the more classically TROO black metal, but unlike those, DRS are true only to themselves, any resemblance between their music and other black metal is not only coincidental it's a fluke, as most of this sounds like nothing you've ever heard.
If album covers have as much of an impact on sales as they're supposed to have, then it's hard to understand why this reissue isn't already at the top of the charts. Two happy, heavily bearded fellows proudly displaying the triple necked guitar-thing that they built themselves, emblazoned with their band name (the liner notes explain that they were trying to outdo fellow Turkish psych purveyors 3 Hur-El, who had a doubleneck). The previous reissue that we had by these guys had a similar cover concept, so it probably worked for them pretty well back then. That album was called Disko Folk (which is the subtitle here too by the way) and to them that meant traditional Turkish folk music done with modern electric instruments, the duo being wedding dance music specialists who catered to the immigrant market in West Germany. They released this lp (or maybe it was originally a cassette?) in 1985, so while some years removed from the heyday of Turkish psych it's still a kind of trippy example of Anadolu Pop on account of the blend of folk music and '80s technology - there's some thumping electronic drum beats alongside the more conventional trap kit percussion, and the track "Dom Dom Kursunu", for one, is interspersed with occasional blats of synthesizer zap.
Being a duo, they resort to overdubs on record, bringing in additional, emotive vocals - and even sound FX of bleating sheep! That triple necked guitar gets a workout, and the results on this record are somehow both stately and sprightly. Live, they had to do it all themselves of course, and apparently put it across with a lot of crazy showmanship (for example, see this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yBQhBa5RZk, featuring fancy footwork, behind the back guitar playing, nose-to-keyboard soloing, and more), enough to get large groups of people on their feet and dancing.
From the master tapes, and the vinyl version is a 180 gram pressing.
One of a whole mess of new releases from UK tape label the Tapeworm (we'll get to the others on the next couple lists), Circling Above is the latest from a longtime aQ faves, Elektro Guzzi, who are in fact a live techno band, as in they're a proper actual band, not a DJ or some studio whiz, a real band with real instruments, drums bass and guitar, who make a super tranced out techno music, without loops or drum machines or computers, it's actually a live group of real humans playing real instruments, and making music that sounds like it would be right at home on Kompakt or Raster-Noton. Beyond the concept, which is amazing, the music is pretty fantastic as well, a mesmerizing mix of woozy cyclical melodies and muted pulsing rhythms, total late night bliss out techno, that sounds digital but is purely analog, apparently even the label didn't believe this stuff was actually being played until they watched a live rehearsal video. No loops, no overdubs, but somehow, it still sounds loopy and dubby, hypnotic and heady, all the sounds wreathed in an organic crackle, the sound raw and organic, but somehow sculpted into something that sounds impossible electronic. We love these guys, and these three tracks are just more of what we love. Everyone who Elektro Guzzi's Live P.A. record, are gonna want this too. And if you've yet to hear these guys, check it out, you won't be sorry. And like all Tapeworm tapes, extremely limited!
It shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone to discover that Texas epic post rockers Explosions In The Sky have scored a film, after all, they're probably best know for providing the dramatic sonic accompaniment to the TV show Friday Night Lights, not to mention having various songs of theirs popping up all over the pop culture landscape. But hell, why not, their music is epic and moving, sprawling and explosive, understated and majestic,, who wouldn't look to EITS for a few seconds of epic instrumental swell, or brooding emo majesty, their music even sans imagery, evokes on its own the sort of heart wrenching emotion and fragility that indie film makers have been trafficking in for ever. The key being, that somehow these guys could make that music sound true and heartfelt, deep and original, in a field populated by hundreds of EITS wannabes, only Explosions themselves have truly nailed it, masters of gorgeous and emotional post rock soundscapery, which again, makes it not so surprising that some indie filmmaker would tap them for a score/soundtrack. What IS sort of surprising, is that Prince Avalanche is mostly acoustic, with songs that generally hover around the two minute mark, never going longer than five minutes, with the instrumentation mostly piano and acoustic guitar, with most of the tracks hushed and spare and delicate. We're not sure who David Wingo is, but we're guessing he's a piano player, considering that much of Prince Avalanche is driven by lovely lyrical piano lines.
There is still definitely an Explosions feel to the compositions, but as short as they are, much of the brooding slowbuilds that defined their sound as been swapped out in favor of something more intimate, and immediately dramatic, haunting minor key guitars are strummed and gently fingerpicked, beneath dreamy washes of melancholic piano, there are strings here and there, woodwinds too, it does sound very 'indie film' which is not a bad thing, but at times, you can almost picture the trailer in your head. Elsewhere Explosions and Wingo make that sound their own, like on the very Explosions sounding "Join Me On My Avalanche", one of the only tracks with drums, and one of the few to extend beyond 2 minutes, but it's got a classic Explosions feel, a sprawling brooder, with driving drums, percolating synths, a sort of post rock / kosmische hybrid, underpinned by more minor key acoustic guitar strum and some Polyphonic Spree like vox, and yet even here, it's somehow still easy to imagine that part in the movie's trailer (which we haven't seen) when everything comes to a head, and gets really dramatic, the music here perfectly capturing that emotional tension and cathartic release. Gorgeous stuff for sure. Not as bombastic and epic as other Explosions records, but then these songs were meant for something else entirely. Lovely stuff. Includes a fold out insert and a sticker. And for local folks, while they last, we've got passes to the movie's SF screenings, free with purchase!
Get cozy with your biggest most noise-canceling headphones, meticulously cover all windows so that no natural light infiltrates your room, and prepare yourself to be immersed in the overwhelming dystopic soundscape that is the third Fuck Buttons record. It's another unexpected left turn for these Bristol lads, this time into the realms of menacing antihuman electronica. Slow Focus is first and foremost massively hypnotic. More than half the songs surpass the seven minute mark (a couple passing ten), so the tracks are given ample time to really lure you in. There is an unnerving wooziness to much of the record, an almost nauseous sense of vertigo running throughout, like being plugged into some sort of drug pumping super computer or standing on the edge of a very tall building, gazing at the neon lights below. There are massive beats - tribal drums smashing against sci-fi synths, almost like a less sparse S U R V I V E soundtracking a film like Event Horizon (or some other comparable techno-horror epic!). It's a bit like listening to Daft Punk possessed by the devil - sinister and throbbing, but still gets the blood pumping. It's electronic music with serious grit, conjuring images of great shapeless space creatures drifting through a lightless void or immense black stone monoliths rising from the sea. You may hear the chiming of haunting bells colliding with decayed static transmissions from a distant dead star, the throbbing of John Carpenter-esque synths over scattershot drum patters, or what sounds like a cyborg choir accompanied by a chorus of sheet metal being sheered to pieces by velociraptor talons. Elsewhere, a drunken hip-hop beat lurches sweaty and anxious over the decay of buzzing synth drones causing the entire world to move in slow motion. The only reprieve from the menace comes from 10 minute closer "Hidden XS" which is legitimately melodically epic and moving, but all the while maintaining that Blade Runner future noir atmosphere. It's hard to describe this record without getting hyperbolic (clearly!), but that's just because it's so BIG. Simply describing the music doesn't seem to really do it justice. It is much more than the sum of its parts - an album that demands to be experienced. And undoubtedly one of the most cinematic and immersive records of the year.
Originally released as a super limited cd-r on Time-Lag in 2006, this is the long awaited vinyl resurrection of Good Stuff House's untitled debut. As you may know, Good Stuff House is (or was) the trio of Scott Tuma of Souled American and Mike Weis and Matt Christensen of experimental drift-drone duo Zelienople. We reviewed a while back a cd-r on Root Strata with the evocative title of Endless Bummer, and that was seemingly the last we heard from this mysterious crew. But since we never got a chance to review their first release, we're glad to bring it to you now, courtesy of the fine folks at the Indian Queen and Holodeck labels.
Rooted in the same sorrowful dust/dusk as Endless Bummer, Untitled feels freshly fertile, a spidery mist in a resonant boggy forest. The sound of splintery banjo, hand drums, church chimes and sleigh bells feels like a slow train ride of creeping death, but far removed from present time, instead in a sepia toned past where mournful violin and bowed strings march funereally into the woods for ceremonial burial, the body becoming one with the earth in the beautifully removed timbre of decaying drones, and skeletal Appalachia. Piercing through the murk, a host of voices far away bleakly sing with squalled guitar slides and cavernous ambiance, the sound bloating intensely or becoming deathly sparse in carefully wrought filigrees of graceful dreamy drift. Gorgeous and limited to 300 copies!
Download card included.
Recently we made the album Pearl Mystic by UK psychedelic space rockers our Record Of The Week, and really how could we not, the perfect mix of sprawling blown out, buzz drenched FX heavy space jams, brooding Spacemen 3 like druggy drift, and Stooges-y garage psych stomp. We played that record to death, and based on how many we sold, seemed like all of you were keen for more Hookworms as much as we were.
So here we have not a new record, but a reissue of an earlier Hookworms, a 4 track ep originally released in 2011, now available again, with a handful of bonus tracks, but more on those in a second. Anyone who bought and dug Pearl Mystic is gonna want this one too, cut from the same LSD soaked cloth, it's another batch of tripped out psychedelic heaviness, this one a bit more raw and noisy, with songs exploding into billowing clouds of swirling FX, buried vocals, and pounding motorik rhythms, laced with long stretches of krautrock like drift (check out the very Can-like opening of "Teen Dreams"), and minimal washes of druggy ambience, some tracks wreathed in warm whirring organs, others smoldering beneath tribal rhythms, and chiming guitars, all four eventually building to full on psychedelic freakouts, but each spending varying amounts of times drifting and shimmering, brooding and drifting dreamily, "Resolution" might be the dreamiest of the bunch, with only a brief foray into freakout, the rest of the track, pulsing and buzzing warmly, and eventually settling into a tranquil sprawl of washed out ethereal ambience. All four tracks really sound like they could have been plucked right off of Pearl Mystic which is not a bad thing at all.
The bonus tracks are culled from singles and compilations and again, are not that far removed from the record proper. "Form And Function" is all warm psychedelic churn and simple propulsive rhythm, but with the vocals soaring over the top, wreathed in echo and reverb, sound more 'rock', a little bit blooze-y, sorta Velvets meets Spacemen 3, but with some serious psychedelic heft added to the proceedings, while "The Correspondent" is all hazy and druggy, woozy and laid back, the sounds seeming to melt and ooze out of the speakers, the vocals even more drenched in FX, super tripped out and hypnotic, the sound lush and layered and eventually blown out and blissed out, and finally, there's the very brief "Deu" which compacts a psychedelic space rock epic into two minutes, fading in at the beginning as if someone popped on the recorded mid-mega jam, pounding drum pummel, swirling guitar skree, the band locked tight, almost looped sounding, until the drums drop out, the guitars turn backwards, and things get even more abstract and trippy. So goddamn good. Here's hoping the rest of that jam didn't end up on the cutting room floor and will pop up on some other record eventually... But for now, these seven tracks are more than enough to tide us over until the next full length!
As always, if your psych/space rock pantheon includes Carlton Melton, White Hills, Heads, the Janitors, Hills, Moon Duo, Wooden Shjips and all the rest, and for some reason Hookworms is not in there, now's the time to right that wrong!
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
For whatever reason, we never paid much attention to LA psych/punk rockers the Icarus Line. As we mentioned in our review of their Live In London lp (the first time we had actually heard the Icarus Line) we did of course know of the legendary story where during a show at the Hard Rock Cafe, the singer smashed a display case and pulled down one of Stevie Ray Vaughn's guitars, before being tackled by security, which is of course supreme rock radness, but still, until that live Record Store Day lp, we kinda didn't know what we had been missing. So since then, since discovering that these guys were and are indeed seriously kick ass, we've been playing catch up, going back and tracking down as many of their old records as possible, and making it a point to not miss any new ones. Which brings us to Slave Vows, the group's FIFTH full length, and like the ones before it that we've tracked down, it's a doozy. The opening track along should have most aQ psych/space headz similarly reassessing their stance on The Icarus Line, that is if they weren't fans already.
"Dark Circles" spends it's first 6 minutes building up from a hushed shimmer, pounding tribal drumming, swirling clouds of buzzing guitar, buried vocals, eventually arriving at some tranced out psych-noise climax, which we were convinced would continue for the remaining 5 minutes, all screeching guitar skree, doused in feedback, swirling and dense and darkly psychedelic, but instead, these guys do just the opposite, peeling away all the noise and buzz, leaving a woozy, wistful shimmer, subtle percussion, soft tendrils of clean guitar melody, crooned proper vox, the vibe almost folky, broody and while some buzz does surface here and there, the rest of the song is a sort of swaggery apocalyptic psych folk that KILLS. And that's just the first track.
And in fact, the rest of the record splits the difference between those two sides of the band, the howling psych freek-outs, and something more swaggery and bloozy. In fact, much of Slave Vows sounds like aQ faves Woven Hand, just cranked up and doused in psychedelic energy, check out "Marathon Man", which starts out all laid back and woozy, finishing off the same way, but in between exploding into a squall of blown out guitarnoise and damaged FX. There's definitely a little White Stripes vibe too, in places, but again, way more freaky and psychedelic. Fans of another aQ fave Hookworms would do well to check these guys out too, a similar mix of Stooges-y swagger and stomp, and heart of the sun heavy psych trip-out, which also means if you're into Carlton Melton, the Heads, Mugstar, Bardo Pond and the like, odds are you're gonna dig these guys too. A LOT.
Not one, but two new(ish) singles from this Aussie post punk downer pop combo, whose Siltbreeze lp we flipped for a while back, and ever since have been on a mission to find as much KF as we can, so up first, is the awesomely titled "Deadshits", which finds the band in a seriously weird and seriously stripped down mood/mode, getting all Jandek-y, with urgently strummed acoustic guitar, primitive drumming, warped percussion, distorted vocal warble, and on the opener, a demented sounding falsetto chorus, the whole thing unwinds like some brain damaged outsider bedroom 4-track pop, although in places, like on "Left", the band get a bit more melodic, adding some female vocals, sounding a bit like a super minimal Eric's Trip, still super spare and mostly acoustic but a bit more melodic and poppy, the whole record has a serious early Flying Nun /Xpressway outsider indie jangle vibe to it, which was present to a lesser degree on the full length proper.
On Regrets, the band drifts a bit closer to the sound of the Siltbreeze lp, still pretty lo-fi, but with buzzy gnarled guitars, stumbling trashcan drumming, wild squalls of psychedelic leads, and the vocals buried in the mix, a bit more punk than Deadshits, but not nearly as poppy and polished as the full length, but hidden amidst all the stumbling pound and atonal guitar noise, is some seriously dreamy gloom pop, and minor key jangle, culminating with closer "Still Night", which adds deep dramatic vox, much higher in the mix, a primitive druggy drone pop that somehow still hits the spot. Both are probably crazy limited, as things like these usually are...
Not one, but two new(ish) singles from this Aussie post punk downer pop combo, whose Siltbreeze lp we flipped for a while back, and ever since have been on a mission to find as much KF as we can, so up first, is the awesomely titled "Deadshits", which finds the band in a seriously weird and seriously stripped down mood/mode, getting all Jandek-y, with urgently strummed acoustic guitar, primitive drumming, warped percussion, distorted vocal warble, and on the opener, a demented sounding falsetto chorus, the whole thing unwinds like some brain damaged outsider bedroom 4-track pop, although in places, like on "Left", the band get a bit more melodic, adding some female vocals, sounding a bit like a super minimal Eric's Trip, still super spare and mostly acoustic but a bit more melodic and poppy, the whole record has a serious early Flying Nun /Xpressway outsider indie jangle vibe to it, which was present to a lesser degree on the full length proper.
On Regrets, the band drifts a bit closer to the sound of the Siltbreeze lp, still pretty lo-fi, but with buzzy gnarled guitars, stumbling trashcan drumming, wild squalls of psychedelic leads, and the vocals buried in the mix, a bit more punk than Deadshits, but not nearly as poppy and polished as the full length, but hidden amidst all the stumbling pound and atonal guitar noise, is some seriously dreamy gloom pop, and minor key jangle, culminating with closer "Still Night", which adds deep dramatic vox, much higher in the mix, a primitive druggy drone pop that somehow still hits the spot. Both are probably crazy limited, as things like these usually are...
We had never heard of Kowton before, aka producer Joe Cowton, and picked this up initially for the Andy Stott remix (more on that in a second), but were pleasantly surprised to discover that Kowton trafficked in a strain of dark minimal techno we can't seem to get enough of. Fans of Function, Shed, Raime, Terrence Dixon, Andy Stott obviously, and even Demdike Stare will immediately feel right at home. Or as home as one can feel when surrounded by bleak, abstract, sinister skitter and raspy rumbling low end crunch.
The A side is all spare hauntological stutter, peppered with strange shards of industrial clatter, bell like tones, distant swirling strings, fuzzy synth squelch and thick bass blorps, all dubbed out and super minimal, with headphones the sound sucks you right into its creepy sonic maw. The B side starts out all murky and washed out, a bit of a Caretaker vibe, all hazy and faded, but then Cowton crafts a brittle metallic beat, sounding like struck metal and super processed crunch, woven into a looped dubby breakbeat, that sounds a bit like some old jungle beat slowed way down and stretched out, all the whole those murky sounds in the background continue to swirl and pulse. And then finally, the A side gets reworked by Andy Stott, and it's just as good as you might expect, all blurred and smeared, laced with thick bass pulses, and super sharp shards of glitch and buzz, it's a sort of disembodied dub, one that doesn't really get going until almost 4 minutes in, at which point the beats get super skittery and chaotic, the bass do rumbles and buzzes ominously, the whole thing transforming into some sort of avant spectral minimal avant house music, the sort of sound that should have fans of Stott (and Demdike) freaking out big time...
Heck yeah, some more "Peru Psicodelia Punk" from these explosive South American garage-fuzz faves. That means it's time to ROCK, let's go! Lima's La Ira De Dios offer up another energetic dose of their can't-sit-still-listening-to-it distorted wailing grooviness on this, their fifth album. When we first heard these guys some years ago, they played spacey stoner rock, kinda like Kyuss meets Hawkwind, but their interest in freaky fuzz mongering has seemingly sent them on a path into the past, so by now it sounds like they've REALLY studied their '60s proto-punk stuff, with a concentration on Detroit. They even have backup vocals by a "girl group" of sorts, "The Borrachettes". The heavy Hawkwind-y space rock sounds are still there, though, too, along with the "Rumble" of Link Wray and some Nuggets-y jangle - and its a combo that's tough to beat, we love hearing La Ira De Dios bash it out in this style, with their gruff, sandpapery singing (some in Spanish, some in English) sounding sincerely urgent and desperate, contributing to this album's generally dark vibe.
They do take a few breaks from the rawk, allowing for some moody, melodic moments amidst the high energy mayhem, such as on the title track at the end of side A, all windswept acoustic strum and hushed downer vocals, before winding up with a jet engine blast of feedback noise, heralding a return to the uptempo rock action of "Underground" that begins side B. In some ways, this might be this trio's best or at least most multidimensional record yet, one that we'll listen to for their trademark "MAXIMUMVOLUMEROCKNROLL!!!" and much more besides.
As always, recommended! Especially to fans of very early Monster Magnet, as well as the likes of Vee Dee and DMBQ and local boys Hot Lunch. But really there's not too many modern day bands doing this sort of thing so darn well, demonstrating the true power of rock. For sure La Ira De Dios owe a lot to the greats - "Ghost City" reminds us a lot of Radio Birdman, and on "The Unrest" they channel the shake appeal of the Stooges - but nothin' wrong with that, in fact, everything is right about it, especially when you've got this cranked on 10 and wish you could turn it up even louder.
Last year we raved about a cassette (and then vinyl lp) called Interludes For Prepared Beast, the second solo release from Jussi Lehtisalo, the bassist/mastermind behind our favorite Finns, those mighty hypnorockers Circle (and many more 'NWOFHM' bands besides). Those of you who prefer compact discs over vinyl, let alone tapes, might have felt a twinge of turntable envy then, since you were missing out on an amazing album (our review concluded with: "Easily one of the coolest weirdest things we've heard from Jussi", and that's saying a lot). Thankfully, Jussi, who loves cds as much as we do, has just released Interludes For Prepared Beast on cd via his Ektro imprint - and even better, the disc also includes Jussi's first solo album, from 2010, entitled Rotta, which is also (of course) quite fantastic, and was a limited vinyl release we never even got any copies of the first time around. So even more to be thankful for, and another reason to pick this up.
We'll try to be brief about Rotta, 'cause we already wrote a lot about Interludes, as you will see. Simply put, it's gorgeous. Unlike maybe what you might expect from the man responsible for so much bombastic, heavy, progged out rock, Rotta definitely represents Jussi's softer side. Intimate and twilit, Rotta is a spacious sonic tapestry of gentle drones, cyclic guitar motifs, softly pulsating bass, and ambient field recordings interwoven with hushed, echo effected vocalizations (the words all in Finnish, we assume, so we don't know what he's on about, but it sounds deep regardless) and lovely layers of shortwave static n' hiss. The opening track "Veljeni" features some occasional harmonica twang, bringing to mind the cinematic, open spaces atmosphere of the likes of Earth circa Hex. Elsewhere, on "Aikoja Sitten", the vibe gets darker, the track lashed with stormy, sinister synthesizer sounds, before dreamily concluding with monkish vocal intonations over a bed of wavering bell-like tones and other mysterious, entrancing sound-swoosh. Fans of Circle's 'soundtrackier' side, mellowed-out albums like Miljard and Tower, will be in heaven. The "circular" sound of Circle is most certainly very present within these compositions; minimalist, mesmeric repetition being Jussi's forte of course.
So that's the first four tracks here, the Rotta portion of this disc, all indeed surprisingly beautiful and subdued, music to totally lose yourself in. Then there's the last two, over a quarter-hour each, representing side A and B of Interludes For Prepared Beast. They also beautiful in their way, but about as far from subdued as you can get. Much heavier, more "gritty" and intense. Both tracks are dense and layered, and constantly shifting. In some ways taking all the disparate sounds of Jussi's other bands (among them Circle, Ektroverde, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, Doktor Kettu, Pharaoh Overlord, Rakhim, Krypt Axeripper, Split Cranium, Steel Mammoth, and others), and somehow mashing them all together, into something surprisingly cohesive.
The A side (track 5 here), "Caterpillars", starts off sounding like some sort of abstract deserty ambient experimental doom, with churning guitars, spurts of metallic crunch, clattery bicycle spoke like percussion, woozy Morricone-esque twang and spidery minor key melodies, peppered with occasional twisted little synth trills, all beneath some monstrous growled vokills, before the song transforms into something more woozy and jazzy, a little late night bluesy, with crooned distorted vox, and thick low end rib cage rattling thrum, only to then launch into some seriously twisted buzz drenched rock pound, which initially sounds like it might explode into full on black metal, but instead, the pounding and buzzing is joined by more twisted xylophone like synth melodies, booming sub bass throbs and cool blasts of rad classic metal style harmonized leads, before once again slipping back into a spacey sort of moody, woozy slowcore, driven by frenetic high hat cymbal stutter, and trippy dubbed out snare drums, still more crooned vox, the sound dreamy and washed out, laced with strange swoonsome faux horns and glistening spaced out FX before finally returning to that strange xylophone driven metallic stomp.
The flipside (aka track 6) is equally schizophrenic. "Here March The Cranes" begins all grinding gnarled guitars in a cloud of cymbal sizzle, which is then joined by some Circle like hypnorock bass, the guitars coalescing into little soaring squalls of majestic fast picking, multiple guitars interwoven, those guitars growing more intense, unfurling wild psychedelic leads, everything getting noisier and noisier, until finally switching gears and mellowing out, into a twisted post rock sprawl, all ethereal guitar shimmer, wild jazzy drummy, and spaced out bass blurts. Soon those growled vox come back in, and the sound turns into some strange sinister epic prog rock, swirling synthy strings, a slow build, more and more intense and tense, before splintering into a stretch of cool droned out noise rock churn, that sound gradually growing more and more spacey and serene, dreamy melodies, more of those faux horns, all manner of strange percussion and swirling FX, as the noise recedes, the sound becomes a hazy, lilting bit of psychedelic dreamdrone raga like drift. Fantastic! Easily one of the coolest weirdest things we've heard from Jussi, which is saying a lot considering his whole career has basically been nothing BUT a series of cool weird releases!!
All told, 78 minutes and 48 seconds of amazing music that probably one no single person but Jussi could possibly have come up with. Hopefully this disc won't remain Jussi's 'complete solo works' for long, we'd love a volume two someday. WAY recommended.
English speakers may prefer to refer to this group simply as Circle Triangle Square (for their name is actually just those shapes, with no words English or Japanese). Yup, Tokyo's Captain Trip label has really dug up a weird obscurity here for fans of out-there
Liner notes (in English as well as Japanese) by leader Sakuro "Kant" Watanabe explain that his group travelled around Japan with tents and sleeping bags doing street performances in costumes and make-up. Meanwhile, along with releasing LPs, Watanabe also privately published underground magazines and played drums in another group called, in English, Social Ostracism. Other Maru Sankaku Shikaku members included a young Reck (later of Friction and Optical*8) and a fellow who also played the starring role in a local production of Hair!
It was apparently a very radical scene going on, in which these folks played a part. Watanabe speaks of his artistic efforts as being "tools for trips" and you'll believe it, particularily in light of this passage of free-association in his liner notes:
"Time, avant-garde, rock n' roll, vagabond, inhaling paint thinner, journey, beat, nihilism, underground, blues, hippie, Kohenji, genius, LSD, Shinjuku, yippie, painkiller, death, shoplifting, long hair, revolution, insanity, Kyoto, grass, hitchhiking, sex, commune, psychedelic, hashish, Zen, Asobi (playing or game), Satori (spiritual enlightenment), make-up, solitude, loneliness, anti-establishment, idiot, cool, rock festival, trip, Guru -- they were neighbors, part of us, and enemies sometimes."
These discs convey the vibe of a quiet, mysterious ritual, one which can build into a sudden frenzy, however. Seemingly random sounds coalesce into rhythm and structure. Vocals, sometimes quite wild, and percussion are the basis for their music, which appears to be entirely freeform and improvised, full of electronic blurts, whistles, bells, clapping, wah wah guitar stabs, plus many and various unidentifiable noises. There's even hints of a very primitive '70s Miles Davis/Sun Ra thing in this stew of sounds, but it's way out, way abstract, and certainly not jazzy or funky. It's either avant garde genius or babbling directionless indulgence, depending on how much into their mindset you can get.
And, it's very important to mention: there's SO MUCH beautiful cracky surface noise from the LPs (no digital clean-up here!) that it almost sounds like Maru Sankaku Shikaku is jamming with Philip Jeck! While perhaps not an intentional part of their music, it really adds to it, making this seem more ancient and secret and hidden and droney. Spiritual/artistic ancestors of the Sun City Girls, the No Neck Blues Band, Thuja, Hochenkeit, AMT, Boredoms, etc. Thus, definitely not for everybody!
It was a lot easier to fuck with the mainstream media back in the '80s. Negativland certainly had the most success thanks to the hoax that surrounded the cancellation of their 1988 tour as the band were under scrutiny by Federal agent Dick Jordan for their connection to a murders that took place in Minnesota by a presumed fan. While the crime was true, the idiocy and lackluster fact finding from the national media made Negativland an underground sensation, all of which was exposed on their 1989 album Helter Stupid. The NYC anarcho-industrial outfit Missing Foundation had their fun with CBS in 1988 who ran a ludicrously unchecked expose on the band, aligning their political declarations of classist warfare with Satanism and accusing them of being the root of most every problem in New York (drugs, blight, graffiti, vandalism, and of course those rampant Satanists who were lurking at every corner). Such is a commonplace error in discussing transgressive art - that the work at hand causes social diseases and not as the artist often intends for the work to be a mirror of the conditions that led to social collapse and malaise. It made for a sensational media event for Missing Foundation, whose relative high profile for a noise-junk industrial noise band led them to a publishing deal with Restless in 1990.
Missing Foundation's second outing 1933 was the album that set the stage for that CBS interview. It was released originally on vinyl in 1988 by the gritty scum-noise-punk label Purge/Sound League (later reissued in a campaign by Restless as well), and those Missing Foundation slabs of wax ironically became very collectible records. Where the debut smashed everything to bits and scattered the remnants of noise and rhythm to tape, 1933 was considerably more militant in the junkyard bashing, which provided much more comparisons to Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept. The infernally smoldering guitars are still present, but lockstep effectively with the bashed rhythms. "Martyr Of The City" and "Turmoil" entertain an aggro-hardcore / mosh-pit sound to the chugging guitar riffs, explosive drums, and the bullhorn vocals from Peter Missing. It can be very hypnotic, but it's also utterly nihilistic. Elsewhere, the sounds collapse into oil-stained and bum-trash strewn recordings of guttural distortion, indeterminate scraping, and throat mangled yelps that could be the sordid, psychic field recordings of New York's social malaise that festered in the late '80s. The Lower-East side of Manhattan will probably never sound like this ever again.
The logo of the upside-down martini glass that graces the cover of Missing Foundation's debut album was a ubiquitous graffiti tag in New York City during the band's zenith in the late '80s. The tagging of that logo went hand in hand with pre-Occupy movement declarations that "Your House Is Mine," "1988 = 1933," and "The Party Is Over" (the pictogrammatic translation of their logo) on buildings that were once squats or cheap rentals which speculators were looking to flip in the gentrification of Manhattan. Missing Foundation's politics may have anticipated those of the Occupy Movement, but their anarchic strategies were far more hostile, uncompromising and heroically degenerate. So much so that they were actually accused of starting the Tompkins Square Park Riot in August 1988. The band's figurehead Peter Missing had helped organize a demonstration protesting the police crackdown of the homeless through a curfew placed on the park. Missing Foundation was one of several bands that performed during the protest and the intensity of their metal bashing, industrial noise riffage, and sloganeering bullhorn vocals may have agitated the protesters into action; but the riot that took place probably would have happened one way or the other. It's a great urban legend that these squalid industrial art-punks started a riot, but that's not exactly true.
For all of the legends, lies, and myths that surrounded Missing Foundation, their recordings were every bit the sonic assault they were regarded as. The eponymous album from 1987 originally came out on the Purge/Sound League label which also put out albums from Borbetomagus and Rat At Rat R, which actually makes for a pretty good triangulation for Missing Foundation. Their first album emerges out of the whole pig-fuck sound of Live Skull and Pussy Galore with formless clouds of guitar negativity, loping basslines that might be traced to NYC hardcore or maybe across the country to Flipper, and junked metal percussion all tossed into a Bellvue bedlam of the No Wave anti-structures from Mars or even the more oblique moments from No Trend. The album's closing tracks "Waco Waco" and "Perversion" are probably the closest to something which might get confused with song as Missing Foundation wrenches Swans brutalism from their early Filth / Cop period into a hammered guitar / bass / junk plod. The originals of this album were going for a pretty penny on the collector's market, but for the time being Dais has this reissue in print. Bad vibes all around.
Local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another dark and dreamy sonic gem, this one fitting perfectly into the label's washed out and wistful modern chamber music aesthetic, but like all the TRS releases, manages to exist in its own mysterious soundworld. Colors In The Dark, by Monochromie, aka French pianist/composer/soundscaper Wilson Trouve, is all lush, layered landscapes of plaintive piano, fans of Lubomyr Melnyk and Anton Batagov will feel right at home, drifts of hushed melodic shimmer, swoonsome swaths of chordal thrum, all swirling softly beneath Trouve's gorgeous piano, the vibe achingly heartfelt, the arrangements sweeping and cinematic. We're definitely reminded of Eluvium, the music on Colors similarly sounding like it could be the perfect score for some low budget indie art film, dramatic and intense, melancholic and emotional, the sound alternately brooding and moody, before slowly morphing into something more warm and washed out. The melodies so lyrical and lilting, the whole thing wreathed in a hazy patina of gauzey soft focus shimmer, some tracks drifting dreamily, others slow building, smoldering and intense. Gorgeous stuff. We're tempted with every TRS release to say it's our favorite, and generally it is, at least until the next one. As always, WAY recommended.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, Colors In The Dark comes in two version, the standard, limited to 200 copies and housed in a full color digipak, and the deluxe, which as always, is totally stunning, this time around, the cd is housed in a printed envelope, affixed to an 8.5" x 8.5" square folder with aluminum screws. The front of the envelope features a diecut cardstock print affixed to the front, printed with silver metallic concentric circles, inside are 4 square prints made from spray stenciled and collaged pieces of vintage wallpaper, all sewn and folded together, everything, held shut with more aluminum screws, which have to be unscrewed to access. So cool. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another dark and dreamy sonic gem, this one fitting perfectly into the label's washed out and wistful modern chamber music aesthetic, but like all the TRS releases, manages to exist in its own mysterious soundworld. Colors In The Dark, by Monochromie, aka French pianist/composer/soundscaper Wilson Trouve, is all lush, layered landscapes of plaintive piano, fans of Lubomyr Melnyk and Anton Batagov will feel right at home, drifts of hushed melodic shimmer, swoonsome swaths of chordal thrum, all swirling softly beneath Trouve's gorgeous piano, the vibe achingly heartfelt, the arrangements sweeping and cinematic. We're definitely reminded of Eluvium, the music on Colors similarly sounding like it could be the perfect score for some low budget indie art film, dramatic and intense, melancholic and emotional, the sound alternately brooding and moody, before slowly morphing into something more warm and washed out. The melodies so lyrical and lilting, the whole thing wreathed in a hazy patina of gauzey soft focus shimmer, some tracks drifting dreamily, others slow building, smoldering and intense. Gorgeous stuff. We're tempted with every TRS release to say it's our favorite, and generally it is, at least until the next one. As always, WAY recommended.
As with all Time Released Sound releases, Colors In The Dark comes in two version, the standard, limited to 200 copies and housed in a full color digipak, and the deluxe, which as always, is totally stunning, this time around, the cd is housed in a printed envelope, affixed to an 8.5" x 8.5" square folder with aluminum screws. The front of the envelope features a diecut cardstock print affixed to the front, printed with silver metallic concentric circles, inside are 4 square prints made from spray stenciled and collaged pieces of vintage wallpaper, all sewn and folded together, everything, held shut with more aluminum screws, which have to be unscrewed to access. So cool. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Way back when, we actually had copies of the original cd-r of Monos' Everyday Soundtracks which was originally released in 2001 in an edition of 100 copies. The artwork was pretty dumb but also highly memorable, as Darren Tate simply affixed a sticker of a car or a truck or bulldozer to a black piece of paper. Dumb, maybe, but we definitely remembered that one coming in the shop. The music however was far more subtle than the cover implied, a collection of dense fog and rumbling overtones emanating from these manipulated field recordings. Monos is the ongoing collaborative project between Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, etc.) and Darren Tate (Ora, etc.); and their work typically begins with the cryptic recordings from Tate (field recordings? actionist events? slumped synth drone? spectral guitar voids? all of the above?) and ends in Potter's studio where he amplifies and manipulates vibrant sonorities and eerie drones from the source material. Such is the case for the three lengthy pieces on Everyday Soundtracks. Tate and Potter allow glimpses into the source materials by allowing for intrusions of the muffled hum of cars passing by or the cooing of a dove or the burbling of water dripping through pipes; and out of these sounds, Monos builds a deep, somnambulant drone that swallows those natural sounds into a lulling stasis. Like the original pressing all those years ago, this one is limited to 100 copies.
The latest from long running and uber prolific doom-drone-dirge duo Nadja is one of three new releases on a newish UK label called Oaken Palace, the first totally non-profit label (at least intentionally!), a purely charitable endeavor, that takes all the profits made from record sales, and donates them to various environmental organizations around the world. The label focuses on dronemusic and psychedelia, with two of their first few releases being Aidan Baker projects, and the third being a group featuring members of another psychedelic drone outfit we dig, Thisquietarmy, needless to say, sonically this stuff is right up our alley. And we can definitely get behind the label's mission as well, as they aim to strengthen the connection between music and nature, in a much more tangible way than just singing about trees or having a forest on the record cover.
Taking the concept even further, each group on the label picks a specific endangered species or habitat, to which their record is then dedicated, the record is produced in a super environmentally sustainable manner, 100 percent recycled sleeves, zero carbon vinyl pressing, etc., and then each artist picks a charity related to the species or habitat their record is dedicated to, and that's where all the money goes. So cool!
So Nadja's Flipper, as the title might have given away, is of course dedicated to dolphins, with the proceeds going to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation organization. And it would be easy to say, that for Flipper, Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff made a record that was all underwater sounding, with maybe whale call like guitars, or squeaking dolphin like melodies, but no, it's another classic slab of Nadja slow-burn brood peppered with occasional (very occasional) squalls of swirling psychedelic majesty, heavy and distorted and darkly epic. The first track, clocking in at about 10 minutes, spends its first eight, drifting eerily through a hushed landscape of whispered vocals, deep burbling bass rumble, barely there guitar strum, and programmed drums that seem to be mostly cymbal sizzle, the resulting sprawl is a dreamy, druggy sibilant shimmer, a woozy slowcore creep, meditative and soporific, only exploding into something more at the tail end, and even then, it's not so much heavy as grand, billowing guitar chords, swirling melodies, everything gorgeously hazy and softly crumbly. And really, except for a little stretch at the tail end of the third track, which builds to a lush lovely crescendo, the entire rest of the record is wreathed in shadow, dark chordal clouds drifting over skeletal barely there rhythms, the sounds oozing and slithering, sometimes distorted and ominous, but at others, ethereal and atmospheric, the sound balanced delicately between total entropic decay, and dark, brooding slo-mo mesmer. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, clear vinyl, includes a download code! In 100 percent recycled sleeves, and all proceeds are donated to Whale and Dolphin Conservation.
Way back in 2005, we reviewed the first volume of the Nath Family's Sounds Of The Indian Snake Charmer, a collection of recordings made by Wolf Eyes' Aaron Dilloway, when he was living in Nepal with his wife. While she was in school, Dilloway befriended the Nath family, a group of hustlers / street performers / snake charmers, and spent virtually all his time, in a tiny alley, recording the family's performances. The first volume was a collection of proper recording, captured on a digital recorder, and mixed in stereo, with various instruments panned to create a super stereo (and super psychedelic) sound field. For volume two, Dilloway selected recordings culled from video tapes and cassette tapes, so the recordings this time around are more raw and lo-fi, but no less psychedelic and mesmerizing. And like the first volume, these three tracks are dizzyingly melodic and exotic, multiple horns unfurling buzzing, bleating melodies, all tangled up into strange harmonies, draped over super tranced out percussion, propulsive and hypnotic, woozy and wildly psychedelic, it's not hard to imagine cobras being mesmerized by these amazing sounds, cuz even we humans find it pretty difficult to resist. These recordings also offer up a little slice of life in Nepal, as street sounds are everywhere, voices, honking horns, shouting, footsteps, and those sounds seem to be as much a part of the Nath Family's music, as that music is a part of the fabric of daily life. Gorgeous, mysterious, magical stuff, that's so highly recommended!
Originally released on cassette in 2005, now available on vinyl, LIMITED TO 600 COPIES, and housed in a super swank silkscreened sleeve.
Over the course of a handful of releases, San Francisco electronic artist Brandon Nickell has revealed to us a number of facets to his sound, typically landing on the psychonautical side of digital abstraction and bitcracked noisemongering. The Art Of Memory finds Nickell eschewing much of the DSP-systems and laptop codeslinging in favor of modular synthesizers that reflected his infatuation with the rhythmic / IDM-inspired electronic music from the late '90s and early '00s. Tundra Dubs had approached Nickell on the strength of a tape he released concurrently with Holly Herndon's Car cassette on Third Sex a couple years back; and whether intentional or not, there are some parallels to the atonality, precision, sci-fi dystopian vibes, and compositional complexity between Herndon's acclaimed album Movement and Nickell's The Art Of Memory. The title track to this long ep bangs through a shuffled techno rhythm alternating taut step sequencing with glacially dark drones falling between Sandwell District's industrial reclamation project and early Alec Empire rhythm explorations. The 8 minute long workout "Progenitor" laces a skittering Coh / Thomas Brinkmann rhythm with witchy vocal elongations and bellowing drones, punctured with dry, whipcrack snares. The closing track "Sutro" takes after the monophunk of Reinhardt Voigt reprising the spiralling step sequences and arpeggiations from the title track as fractal patterns that splinter, dissolve, and blossom into infinity. Limited to 150 copies!
After years of desperately tracking down bootlegs, of ordering low quality cd-r's on eBay, of watching grainy YouTube clips and lamenting the ridiculous dearth of proper recordings, we're so happy that Bear Family has finally stepped up to give this country shoulda-been-superstar his due. But before we get into it, and before all you country haters skip to the next review, give the samples below a listen, specifically "Psycho", which gives this collection its title, easily one of the best country songs EVER. Certainly the most twisted and misanthropic. The story of the song's singer, singing to his mama, about how he killed his ex, her new beau, the dog, their son, the little girl next door (with a wrench by the way!), the song culminating in the realization that the singer was singing the whole time to his dead mother, who we can only assume he also killed. WTF?? But beyond being creepy and a little bit demented, it's also a gorgeous song, the guitar playing understated and perfect, the vocals heartfelt and dramatic, the song laced with all manner of little sonic filigree, it's hard for us to envision a more perfect country song. Sure there were plenty of murder ballads before, but this one takes the cake. But then there's the follow up, "Dolores", which finds the singer crooning to his wife, suggesting that she stay in the house, because there's a killer wandering the streets murdering women, and apparently Dolores is just the sort of woman he preys on, and again, at the end of the song, the singer is called to identify the body, not realizing that he killed his wife, and ending with him chastising his deceased wife, if only she had stayed inside. Crazy stuff, even now, but back in the day, this stuff was even more shocking. And while the majority of Eddie Noack's music wasn't nearly so demented, those two songs, "Psycho" especially, ended up being the songs he was mostly remembered for.
Which is a shame too, cuz he could have / should have been a country superstar, he wrote hits for Hank Snow (whose Omni reissue we reviewed a while back), all sorts of big country names recorded his songs, Lefty Frizell, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, his songs are AMAZING, and heck, he didn't even actually write "Psycho", but his is most definitely THEE definitive version, sadly, like many of the country greats, Noack's story is a sad one, and one that is explored in great detail in the liner notes (like all Bear Family reissues, the booklet is massive, like reading a mini book!), besides the usual hard luck story of general bad luck, constantly being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and success so close he could taste it, constantly just outside his grasp, there was of course problems with alcohol, which eventually led to him drinking himself to death, not to mention that BOTH his fourth wife and his mother committed suicide by shooting themselves in the heart. Wow, heavy stuff. And yet, he persevered, working in the song-poem industry (can you imagine having had Eddie Noack turn your poem into a song?!?!), eventually recording tons of tracks for a succession of tiny labels, and amongst those in the know, becoming a country / honky tonk icon. There is another Bear Family collection released recently, that focuses on his early tracks (which we can order for you if you like, it's a triple cd so it's kinda extra pricey), but this is the one that collects our favorite songs, the ones he recorded for K-Ark and Allstar in the mid to late sixties, and which of course include both "Psycho" and "Dolores". Yet as much as we love those songs, and those two tracks are ABSOLUTELY worth the price of admission alone, there's so much other great stuff here. Folks who collect Omni reissues, this easily could have been one of the best Omni reissues, in fact, we meant to email Omni, and try to get them to do a Noack compilation, cuz again, this is some of the best country music EVER. Besides "Psycho" and "Dolores", there's "Invisible Stripes" which is a fantastic song, but was the B-side to "Psycho" and thus got a little overshadowed. There's "Barbara Joy" which is another gem, and another track with morbid lyrics, sung, we can only assume from a man on death row, accused of rape, asking his mistress to admit that she was a willing participant in their tryst, to save him from death. Wow. But on the surface, it's pure classic country. And so it goes, the Johnny Cash like "Cotton Mill", the mournful ballad "The End Of The Line", plus lots of drinking songs of course, "Sleeping Like A Baby (With A Bottle In My Mouth)", "Beer Drinkin' Blues", not to mention some early tracks that feature Noack's song poem work, and even the songs the liner notes admit to not being so good, are in fact pretty great. But really, come for the "Psycho", the "Dolores", the "Barbara Joy", and stay for the rest. We were SO excited that there was finally a proper Eddie Noack collection, and we've been listening to nothing but. And even if country's not your thing, know that over the years, "Psycho" has been covered by all sorts of folks, including Elvis Costello and the Cramps! Noack's songs (and his cover of "Psycho" especially) almost transcending genre, classic twisted songsmithery, that has made some of these songs obsessions of ours for years!
The Bear Family packaging is fantastic, housed in a full color digipak, with a huge booklet affixed to the inside, tons of rare photos, interviews, lyrics, and creepy new artwork by artist Reinhard Kleist, on the cover, and inside, illustrating both "Psycho" and "Dolores". So totally and utterly recommended. Reissue of the year hands down!!!
Oh, and if you're a vinyl only type, well, this just on cd, but we do also have a tiny, tiny handful of the Eddie Noack 7" single that Bear Family put out along with this, featuring "Psycho" on the A side and "Dolores" on the flip, just FYI.
The latest single from local label Valley King comes via Pins Of Light, a local outfit featuring members of
Dead And Gone, Triclops and Hightower, who deliver a seriously dense slab of progged out metallic gloom punk that winds sinewy riffage, around super frantic intricate drumming and some wild soaring vocals, the A side sounds a bit like Voivod via Pink Floyd, the arrangement dense and constantly shifting, with a killer main riff, and some surprisingly poppy moments, dense and tense, there's even a little stonery groove to the proceedings, definitely psychedelic, but a sort of gothy mathy metallic psychedelia that kills.
The flipside begins with a sky full of swirling psych guitars, before they're joined by some busy drumming and a proggy bassline, eventually erupting into some full on prog metal crush, but once the vocals come in, the song is transformed into a sort of part two of the A side, catchy, weirdly subversively poppy, but still heavy and proggy and metallic, the outro gets seriously blown out and psychedelic, the band locked into some serious space metal churn, before the vocals come in again, and the sound becomes some sort of twisted Voivod / Judas Priest / Hawkwind hybrid, which is most definitely a good thing.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Killer spaceman skull cover art by Alan Forbes, each one signed and numbered, includes a printed insert, and a sticker too!
We had never heard of these Baltimore heavies before their super limited Record Store Day 7", which sadly, we never got enough to review/list post RSD, but we were impressed enough to keep our eyes peeled for more, and now more has arrived, in the form of this bruiser, and like that 7", SSoS deliver a bludgeoning blast of blown out stoner sludge, crusty hardcore, and brutal blackened heaviness, opener "Ghost Plains" displays all three, starting out Eyehategod style, with gurgling basslines wreathed in a swirling cloud of feedback, before launching into some slithery, sludge-y downtuned creep, bellowed monster vox over thick tarpit riffage and caveman drum pound, eventually splintering into a full on blast of D-beat crust-punk, shrieked and furious, mathy and metallic, and a little bit blackened, only to wind down into some old school big riff classic sounding doom, before adding some frenzied double kick drumming, and some wild shrieked vokills. And while that seems like a dizzying mix, it somehow all gels, the band effortlessly slipping from metal to punk to sludge to doom and back again, some tracks like "Moths" lock into a woozy funeral doom-ic crawl, but before you know it have morphed into a sort of mathy metallic churn, and others are hateful ultra doom sprawls, that also eventually transform into something more dense and driving. Needless to say, absolutely essential for folks who like their metal blackened, crusty, sludgey, stonery, doomy, riffy, crushing, pummeling, downtuned and HEAVY AS FUCK. Includes a 32 minute bonus track that's a whole live show from 2012!
We don't care what the rest of the world says, we still love Witch House, or drag, or grave rave, or cave rave, or whatever you want to call it, we still can't seem to get enough of it, the murky slithery soundscapes of slo-mo rhythms, tarpit soul, slowed down vocals, everything wreathed in a cough syrupy haze, it's the perfect late night music, like a bastardized drug addled Portishead, which sounds amazing right? We've been particularly partial to the recent spate of groups crafting a sort of abstract soul, a minimal, washed out, woozy RnB that takes the tropes of the original sound and stretches 'em waaaay out and slows them waaaaay dooooown, the result being a blissed out sonic comedown, all lumbering shuffling beats, woozy washed out melodic swells, vocals alternatingly chopped and screwed or left to drift angelically amidst hazy clouds of druggy drift. Think How To Dress Well, Crypt Thing, D'eon, Holy Other, Dirty Beaches, Hype Williams and the like.
We had never heard Shlohmo before, and actually first discovered him via a recent local show featuring Water Borders, oOoOO, White Ring and other sonically similar soundscapers (think Witch House if you want, it's okay). Shlohmo definitely traffics in a similar sound. fans of any of the above mentioned bands, will no doubt dig Shlohmo as well, his sound leaning more toward the swirling slow motion melodicisim of Balam Acab or Clams Casino, the sound all slow strummed chords, wreathed in effects and layered beneath blurred vocals, occasionally deep and dramatic, but more often, a fluttery Prince like falsetto, spidery melodies, creepy rickety rhythms, slow motion stutters and woozy warble, those distinctly witch house-y female vox all layered into a sort of chordal thrum, the sounds here hovering mainly in some ethereal sun dappled Technicolor dreamworld, but once in a while the sounds gain momentum, and become darker, the sounds more caustic and crunchy, but even then, the vibe is more shoegazey and dreamily druggy, with the sound eventually slipping back into something much more drifty and ephemeral.
Gorgeous stuff. WAY recommend for fans of prettier dreamier drag (Balam Acab, Clams Casino, etc.)�
Packaged in a super swank full color gatefold sleeve, includes a download code as well.
Silent Servant's dour techno emerges from the now defunct Sandwell District collective of techno-heds keen on bending the Detroit / Berlin axis to allow for the grim pathologies of Industrial culture and all of its post-punk offshoots to infiltrate the boom-boom-boom of a 909 drum kick. Sandwell's Karl O'Connor is certainly the most vocal, hardlined, and aggressive of the District's members through the brutalist techno that he's produced over the years. His DJ sets are notorious for dropping Whitehouse and other power electronic squalor amidst furiously hard breakbeats. Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) strikes a gloomier pose than O'Connor through the Sandwell District and carries this over into the ethereally witched-out Tropic Of Cancer. Silent Servant's Negative Fascination drops from Hospital Productions, whose ghastly noise aesthetic parted once before for Cold Cave's gritty synth pop, making room for head honcho Dominic Fernow to follow suit with his own adventures in rhythm (e.g. Vatican Shadows, Christian Cosmos). If one were to imagine what Dom would want out of a techno record on Hospital, Negative Fascination is exactly what comes to mind - Chain Reaction's dub-inflected heroin house, Clock DVA's cybernetic futurism, and the atmosphere from the mournful dirges of New Order's first album.
A fine grit coats the production of Negative Fascination, and it's something that electronic purists may find off-putting, but it suits the bleakness and dystopian overtures that Mendez injects into his production. Acid-like gurgles propel the minimalist techno thump of "The Invocation Of Lust" and "The Strange Attractor" both of which rise and fall through a complex sequence of churning rhythms and shifting drones. "Temptation & Desire" lifts a taut rhythmic stab straight from The Sisters Of Mercy circa Body Electric and mutates it into a punchy minimal wave number with appropriately coldly theatrical drones hovering in the distant. The finale "Utopian Disaster" is right out of the Sandwell playbook of modulated techno sequencing, Chain Reactive dubby rhythms, and stealth bomber vibes. A fucking great record. (FYI, turntable types: the vinyl version's first pressing sold out, but is being repressed right now, so back in soon.)
Feverish excitement might describe it when we heard that a bunch of crucial early Skullflower artifacts were due for impending reissue! Now they're here, four volumes of some of the most heavy and noisy and extreme "rock" ever. We're highlighting the first two discs (Birthdeath and Form Destroyer) this week, and will do the same with the discs three and four (Xaman and singles collection Black Sun Rising) next time, though they're in stock if you want 'em now.
While Skullflower is virtually synonymous with the madness of Matthew Bower, the project emerged out of a motley bunch of crusty noise merchants including Stuart Dennison, Stefan Jaworzyn, and Gary Mundy. According to the lengthy interview with Mundy in As Loud As Possible on the history of his Broken Flag label, this Skullflower line-up was virtually identical to that of Ramleh at the time, with Mundy calling the shots for the latter and Bower for the former. Both Bower and Mundy came into Skullflower through the UK power electronics / industrial scene with Ramleh and Bower's solo projects Total engaged in the throat gargling vocal shrieks and scorched-earth noise generated through both monikers; yet, by the late '80s, the noise nestled into a primitive bleak psychedelia and a black hearted, riff-heavy brute-rock with very obvious connections to the acid-fried grooves of the early Butthole Surfers and the monstrous hypnosis of Les Rallizes Denudes.
Birthdeath was the very first Skullflower release, originally a four-track 12" released on Broken Flag in 1988. Sometimes this 12" is referred to eponymously, but Birthdeath is the title it has been officially granted for this reissue campaign of the band's earliest recordings. The title song is an apocalyptic plodding rhythmic track with the basslines violently played by Bower who grabs all the strings at once and nearly yanks them from the instrument's neck. A diseased whistling of guitar feedback morosely wheezes and moans behind the primitive bass & drum throbbing dirge, but the band's feral-rock demons really come out on "Grub Song" which debases the already deconstructed sound of Public Image Limited's motorik post-punk into a shit-stewn brainmelt of Sister Ray distortion, bullhorn garbled vocals, and lead-guitar freakouts cranked through a brutal-yet-groovy muscularity. This one song could have established Skullflower's legacy even if they just stopped at this 12" with a lineage from the Stooges through Swans into Skullflower and onto the likes of Aluk Todolo. Thankfully, the band did not stop. In fact, Bower's madness continues on to this day albeit in a very different form. Also, he somehow found six additional tracks of unreleased material dating back to the earliest Skullflower recording sessions. No shit!
This is some serious holy grail reissue action here, a handful of crucial early Skullflower releases remastered, reissued, repackaged, with bonus tracks to boot! We'd been hearing rumors for ages, but they're here now, four volumes of some of the most heavy and noisy and extreme "rock" ever. We're highlighting the first two discs (Birthdeath and Form Destroyer) this week, and will do the same with the discs three and four (Xaman and singles collection Black Sun Rising) next time, though they are here if you want 'em now (and trust us, you do!!).
Form Destroyer. What a fucking perfect name for this record! The title had become adopted as shorthand by David Keenan / Volcanic Tongue to describe the obliteration of rock into noise only to be shaped back into rock with lots of malice and / or drugs tossed into the mix. Maybe it was Byron Coley. It doesn't really matter, now does it? Form Destroyer was the first full length album from Skullflower, released in 1989 on Broken Flag following the Birthdeath 12" from a year earlier. For the most part, these sessions again featured the same rotating cast of characters as on that earlier release - Stefan Jaworzyn and Ramleh's Gary Mundy joining the stalwart Skullflower partners Matthew Bower and Stuart Dennison - with additional insight from Anthony "Ax" DiFranco and Coil's Stephen Thrower.
The rock-primitivism of Skullflower can be traced back to Sabbath, Swans, and the Stooges; but Bower and company intercede the stoner fuzz plod with a muddy miserablism and squallid filthiness. The wah-wah freakouts from Jaworzyn's guitars on "Elephant Graveyard" are mixed into a monochromatic smear of swirling black chaos amidst the suitably grim rhythmic pounding; and the twin guitar corrosion from "Thirsty Animal" lands on the abject side of Sonic Youth's mack-truck riffage circa Confusion Is Sex. The moroseness is felt most clearly on Skullflower's epic "Woodland Death March" with Bower's distorted basslines setting a bleak hypnotic melody that stablizes the cavernously echoplexed guitar explorations from Mundy and Jaworzyn. "Procession Of Eternity" closes the album with a slumping wall of mercury-poisoned freenoise and downpitched subharmonic riffs that looks foward to the viscera churning avant-dooooooom of Earth, SUNNO))) and the like. The cd reissue of Form Destroyer features the two cuts of bad acid trip alchemy that had also appeared on the Ruins anthology from 1990 and two unreleased bonus tracks as well! With the Ruins anthology suffering the curse of cd bit rot, much of this early material from Skullflower has been the stuff of legend. Yeah, it does exist, and it's just as good as everybody is claiming it to be. Form Destroyer is in fact Jim's favorite Skullflower album of all time. (For Andee and Allan though, that honor still belongs to IIIrd Gatekeeper, at least as far as the early SF records, although in a desert island disc scenario, we'd probably try to figure out a way to bring em all!). So absolutely essential!!!!!!!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
It's a bit of surprise that we actually got some of these, and even more shocking that we got enough in stock to list, as we got the impression that we would NEVER be able to get very many at all, if any. But we did manage to get a handful, not sure how long these will be aroubd, but guessing not long at all... What's all the fuss? Well, Slow Walkers is in fact a collaboration between Liz Harris (aka Grouper) and Lawrence English - one of the preeminent ambassadors of Australian sound art; and their first fruits are as good as any of us had hoped. The album is dripping with all of the haunted, spectral atmospherics that Harris has brought to her Grouper records as of late, with both artists collaborating on the damp, dreary shadows of melody and drone that float, drift, and creep throughout. The two eschew the song and the voice in favor of a dark, lugubrious ambience that's probably got more in common with the morose tendencies of Cold Meat Industries than the ephemeral shimmer of Kranky, but it's totally entrancing and totally beautiful nonetheless. With this limited to 400 copies and sporting handpainted gold artwork, there's no need to belabor the issue. Grab it while you can, you won't be disappointed. And they'll be gone before you know it...
Ever wonder what it would sound like if Tatsuya Yoshida, drummer extraordinare and mastermind of Japan's hyperkinetic Ruins, somehow collaborated with classic, keyboard-fronted prog rockers E.L.P.? Well, Steamboat Switzerland essentially provide the answer. This instrumental, avant-garde trio of drums, electric bass and Hammond organ say, "Hell yes!" to that concept.
From, yes, Switzerland (not sure how the Steamboat part of their name derives, though), these guys have several prior releases of crazy improv-jazz-prog that we've liked, and some others we still need to find. On this album, and not for the first time, they're doing all pieces composed by their colleague Michael Wertmuller, who knows a thing or two about extreme, insane music, after having been the drummer in the amazing '90s jazzcore act Alboth!, who along with 16-17 were basically Switzerland's answer to John Zorn's Naked City. Wertmuller is currently the drummer for Nohome, feedback guitar wrangler Caspar Brotzmann's new Massaker-like trio, whose debut we highlighted last list, and he also plays in Full Blast with Brotzmann's famous father Peter, among much else on his c.v. of course.
As mentioned in our Nohome review, Wertmuller is a pretty impressive percussionist, so you'd expect the drummer in Steamboat Switzerland to be darn good too, and he is - thus garnering the comparison to Yoshida at the top of this review, his octopoidal playing pounding and precise. Indeed everybody in Steamboat Switzerland plays with virtuosic passion and precision, presumably taking Wertmuller's music to the level he must have expected, and beyond. Zeitschrei is a spectacular attack of avant-prog, with bombastic organ frenzies ably aided and abetted by the energetic, ADD rhythm section. At its most dizzying, this is some intense, "Flight Of The Bumblebee" skree. Heck, the manic, choppy organ runs here would make Keith Emerson stab himself, not his keyboard! There's also some semi-ambient passages of high end droning and skittering drumscapes, but those moody pulsations are often, if not always, violated by sudden machinegun outbursts of volume and violence. So it's not a mellow listen, but it can be a gripping one. Imagine a bass-heavy mathrock mashup of spooky Hammer Horror / Carnival Of Souls soundtrack music. Or, like we said, Ruins with E.L.P.'s organ. Wowzers!
We just found a small cache of this presumably out of print record at one of our suppliers, a 2001 reissue of the 1976 debut solo album from the late Egyptian-born singer Demetrio Stratos, famous as the frontman for the Italian "International Popular Group" Area. That avant-prog ensemble was rather more experimental than most, bringing in jazz improv, electroacoustic composition, and more - including what we have previously referred to as "dramatic and bizarre vocal experiments". Despite our love for Italian prog, we've never had an opportunity to review much by Area, but they were one of the best. Just ask Tatsuya Yoshida, he'll tell you that next to Magma from France, Area were probably one of his biggest inspirations for his band Ruins.
This solo album from their singer doesn't really sound like Area, though. Or rather, it appropriately focuses only on one specific aspect of Area, taken to an extreme - Stratos' vocals. We won't say "singing" though, not exactly. This is an album of CRAZED acoustic voice-only sounds, along the lines of later efforts by Phil Minton, Jaap Blonk, Makigami Koichi, and Mike Patton. Heck, we're pretty sure Mike Patton must own a copy of this record, it's basically the blueprint for his debut solo album on Tzadik, 1996's Adult Themes For Voice. We like this better though (sorry Mike).
On Metrodora, Stratos, who considered himself a "vocal researcher", presents the results of his research into what he can do manipulating his voice acoustically. Dramatic and bizarre indeed, as well as interesting and amusing. Gurgling groaning hissing hooting croaking shrieking. Overdubbing and multitracking (as well as extended techniques) allow him to do call and response with himself, to create dense droning hums and carry on nonsensical conversations in multiple voices (on the rhythmic, repetitive title track sounding like Tatsuya Yoshida's a cappella Zubi Zuva group). At times it's like a zooful of primates gone wild, at others much more 'musical', Stratos eventually doing some wailing, undulating singing in more typical Area-style on "Mirologhi (Lamento d'Epiro)" parts one and two, where he also manages to create what sound like synthesizer and percussive sounds in the background. Definitely a classic in the field, and, once you're into it, remarkably listenable.
After nearly a decade off, Superchunk returned in 2010 with the kick ass Majesty Shredding record, which sounded like hardly a day had passed, Superchunk at middle age sounding way more relevant than pretty much 90 percent of the bands half their age. Over the last couple years, the band has been dropping a single every few months, to remind us that we hopefully weren't gonna have to wait another decade for a new full length, so here's the teaser to the upcoming/impending I Hate Music album, the A side finding the band namechecking Jackie Mittoo and sounding a lot like The Cars! Total seventies/eighties style power pop Superchunk style. A short blast of nearly perfect pop that is balanced by the exclusive B side, which sounds more like classic Superchunk, all crunchy guitars, soaring vox, and a big sing-along-chorus, that sounds like it could be from the soundtrack of some teen movie, the music from the moment when the guy gets the girl, our heroes win the game, the town is saved, the bad guys are foiled, everything works out, and this is the summer we're gonna remember forever!!
Pressed on clear blue vinyl, and includes a download code!
Fresh off his collaboration with Aidan Baker and Andrea Belfi as B/B/S, Norway's Erik Skodvin aka Svarte Greiner outdoes himself on this one, one of the most "miasmatic" of the releases on his own Miasmah label yet. Doomiest anyway. And while some doom or dooom or dooooOOOOOoooom relies on heavy, highly amplified guitar riffs and anguished (or Ozzyish) vokills, Svarte G has none of that, pure instrumental atmosphere instead, drones and tones and ominous percussive sounds only, stately and suspenseful, "acoustic doom" he calls it and it IS. Seriously, imagine your most bummed out session of existential "why am I here, what is life about" angst, this is the soundtrack, but one that somehow finds the radiant beauty in that mood. Mood being doom spelled backwards as we all know, and Svarte Greiner has it both ways. Two long tracks, "Black Tie" and "White Noise" (hmm, is he a Bowie fan?), each 20+ minutes, both slowly unfolding, strangely soothing, yet total void-embracing, never-to-awake-or-return sonic nihil. How does he conjure such blissful darkness, with sudden soft-edged reverberating crashing chords interspersed amidst sparse, quietly textural soundfields? Sure probably with a piano or cello, guitar, synth and effects and other mundane everyday musical gear; but the results sound like they're sourced not from within an instrument or a computer but within the inner spaces of your own mind and (damned?) soul, for good or ill, the way you might, in a isolation tank, listen to your own heartbeat or bleakest unspoken thoughts and feelings, gaining solace from the blurred continuum of self and non-self. Whatever that means, but that's the sort of thing that the music of Svarte Greiner makes us ponder, and THAT at least should mean something.
If you're already a fan, and so many are for good reason, then that this gets the eyes closed, zoned out, thumbs up from us should be enough, get it, it's another transcendent slab of Svarte Greiner's cinematic downer drone loveliness. Also recommended to anyone into other Misamah soundscapes, Deaf Center and the like, stuff on Type too. Those still on the outside looking in, take a chance on crossing over and sink into this, it will sink into you.
For whatever reason, we (and lots of other folks) were convinced one man black metal band Svetovid hailed from the Great White North, when in fact, Svetovid is from right here in SF, and is a member of another local BM horde we dig Lascowiec. For the latest Brotherhood Of Light missive, Svetovid return with another sprawling psychedelic epic, which again begins with a shimmery clean guitar intro, sounding sort of psych folk, before the sound is transformed into something much more black and raw, filthy, muddy and distorted, the buzzing and blasting so washed out, that it almost sounds like some softly undulating dronemusic. The vocals the only concession to proper black metal, and even then it's less a harsh vokill shriek, and more a sinister reverbed whisper, drifting over a swirling, shimmering churn, and that vibe is all over Natures Fury, everything super tranced out and hypnotic, and when the vocals fade out, the sound is downright dreamy, and mesmerizingly blissed out.
Like we mention in our review of the previous Svetovid tape, the sound here (and there) definitely sounds just like the sort of blackened shoegaze you'd find on Starlight Temple Society or Khrysanthoney!
The second track lays down another backdrop of swirling washed out soft black buzz, buried blast beats, and smeared riffage, while over the top, strident bellowed vocals, wreathed in echo and delay, dramatic and almost industrial sounding, at least the vocals, the music remains a sort of blackened tripped out ambience, woozy tangled guitar melodies, warbly synths, hazy and hypnotic, clean guitar, shimmery and crystalline, the sound seasawing between druggy softly psychedelic drift and buzz drenched black crush, the timbre shifting constantly as well, brittle and high end one second, muddy and murky the next, and still super compressed and insectoid the next, those dramatic bellowed vox again surfacing throughout, and so it goes, Svetovid unfurling landscapes of blurred black buzz and abstract space-y drift, over which he delivers his harsh, FX heavy, anguished vokills. As always, cool, weird stuff from the local Brotherhood Of Light label!
Yay this is making us happy! Our pal Chris McVicker aka Swiftumz is back with a blissful blast of indie pop goodness on this new two song 7". Super catchy, sunshiney love song stuff here, with jangly guitar strum and sweet tender vocals, but don't worry there's something about it, some hint of heartache around the corner, that keeps it from getting too icky gooey lovey dovey, even when he's singing the letters (and number) "I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-4-E-V-A" in the chorus on the flipside, the track "4EVA Redux", an update of a song from Swiftumz's debut lp on Holy Mountain from last year. We loved that record, and it's nice to hear more from him. He should keep it up, 'cause there's no reason why Swiftumz shouldn't have as many fans as, like, King Tuff or Best Coast.
LIMITED TO JUST 200 COPIES, FYI!
Here's a second pressing of this micro-edition release from the hermetic, British sound artist Darren Tate. For many years, we've been championing his strange wunderkammer of drones, field recordings, radiophonic synth meanderings, and slumped stasis; but even so, there seems to be a number of releases that we somehow missed. Small Worlds was one of those recordings that was originally released in such a small edition that it flew completely under the radar; but Tate has remedied that somewhat with a second pressing, but still only in an edition of 70 copies. Working under such monikers as Ora and Monos, Tate has collaborated alongside the likes of Andrew Chalk and Colin Potter off and on over the years, providing some triangulation as to where his aesthetic lies, but his solo recordings tend towards stranger waters so to speak. He populates the astringently barren album Small Worlds with an undercarriage of rumbling, nocturnal drones and deep space meditations. Subtle tonebent phrases quietly cycle through a downer melody at the onset of the album which gives way to spooked-out, sci-fi vibes and eventually some of Tate's beguilingly soft-focus guitar plucks and plonks, all of which barely poke out of the shadowy tones and drones that manifest through the entirety of the album. A very nice one for sure!
Finally reissued on vinyl, the debut from, and our favorite record by, this kick ass Northwstern trio, who would blow up pretty big after this album, but More Parts Per Million remains the group's best we think. Here's our review from when we first reviewed it way back in 2003:
Everybody who's been worshiping at the altar of the Strokes for the last year will be facing some serious theological choices with this, the debut from the Pacific Northwest's Thermals. A buzzing blast of white knuckle pop in punk rock's clothing. The Thermals sound like the Strokes cranked on crystal meth and recorded on a boom box in a sweaty smelly basement. The lazy jaded stoned jangle of the current crop of New York hipsters is rolled in dirt and piss and whiskey and handed a beat up old guitar. Thirteen songs, most barely reaching the two minute mark, of blasting fuzz and ramshackle rooooaaaaarrr with a whiny, snotty vocalist climbing all over your table and spilling drinks in your lap. Or think Guided By Voices if their drug of choice was speed instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon and their influences were the Stooges and the Feederz instead of the Beatles and '80s/'90s college rock. So great!
