Finally, a remastered vinyl reissue (in Mono no less) of this undersung sixties bummer-folk masterpiece becomes available for the first time since its initial 1968 release. Dino Valenti (note the spelling, more on that below) is one of the more storied figures of sixties counterculture and the folk-rock movement. An early innovator and influential songwriter (he wrote one of our favorite songs, "Something's On Your Mind", for Karen Dalton) whose ego and largesse kept him from capitalizing on his enormous talent. Born into a family of carnies and gypsies, Valenti was an early key figure in the Greenwich Village folk scene along with Dylan, playing the 12 string acoustic with machine-gun agility. He wrote "Get Together", the proto-typical sixties hippie anthem, but due to legal entanglements from drug busts never saw much fame or money from it until later in his life. A stint in Folsom prison prevented him from joining Quicksilver Messenger Service for their debut, instead joining them later in the early seventies, when they were much less heralded.
His 1968 solo album recorded for Epic Records remains the quintessential document of a talented songwriter who disliked the recording process, and tended to unnerve many a recording engineer. The story goes that a full record was recorded by Jack Nitzsche using many of The Wrecking Crew as session players, but Valenti didn't play well with others (his performances tended to veer wildly in tempo and mood making it difficult for musicians to follow along), so the record was scrapped and re-recorded. He cost the studio so much money and bad blood that they didn't bother to fix a misspelling of his last name on the record release, and failed to promote it, so it sank like a stone. No one basically heard it until the nineties when it was issued on cd.
Despite statements from friends that Valenti was best heard live in person, his solo album in retrospect is undeniably moving. His twelve string guitar and nasally voice, which may be an acquired taste for some, are beautifully sheathed in warm reverb. Some of the tracks like "Tomorrow" may have been salvaged from the Nitzsche sessions as they have full orchestral treatments, and there's even some studio experimentation with the spacious "Test", but largely it's just guitar and voice in long meandering ballads that showcase Valenti's world-weary outlook with incredible songwriting.
For fans of Jim Sullivan, Karen Dalton, Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, Skip Spence, Dave Bixby, Fred Neil and MIJ. Highest Recommendation!
For those that haven't heard the legendary Hungarian group VHK (aka Vagtazo Halottkemek, or the Galloping Coroners) before, how the heck to describe 'em? Well, this primal psychedelic punk ensemble has been around for years (their first album came out in 1988, but they had formed as far back as the mid '70s!) and they're for sure a band equally at home in a radical '80s punk squat, or on an ancient Indo-European battlefield, or out in space among the stars. As well as at home now on Ektro / Full Contact, the eccentric label associated with our fave Finnish space rock weirdos, Circle. They have put out previous albums on Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label, and can certainly be considered one of the most significant, and definitely unique, Eastern European "punk" bands ever. Their sound is part pagan improv, part raucous gypsy-punk hoedown, part Hawkwind style blast-off. Their naturally "tribal" sound even reminded one person here, who hadn't heard 'em before, of Echo And The Bunnymen - but way more raw and wild and loose and heavy.
They've been on some sort of hiatus for quite a few years now (their last release came out in 1999), so it was a pleasant and exciting surprise to find 'em back again with this record, and at full force! The powerful, expressive voice of VHK's frontman, "Grandpierre Atilla", leads the charge, singing and screaming with passion in his native language. Yet, this album begins in a deceptively mellow mood, VHK conjuring a shamanistic campfire ritual on opening track "Handshake", at least at first, being acoustic, melodic, and in a way almost comforting. Those aspects persist, but as the album progresses, it builds and builds in intensity, always offering much compelling rhythmic drive and dark atmospheric vibes, culminating in a track, "Hun Testveriseg" ("The Hun Brotherhood"), recorded live at a festival last year called Black Noise, where we really can imagine these guys coming across as reincarnations of their ancestors, channeling their warrior spirit with electricity and amplification.
You want some "music review math"? Well, there's moments on this album that sound like the Sun City Girls jamming with Neurosis, and we'd further suggest that VHK are perfect for anyone who enjoys both Acid Mothers Temple and Rudimentary Peni.
Of course, if you already know VHK, you'll be happy they're galloping again! Old fans like us will love this. And for those who have yet to be trampled underfoot, this is a fantastic introduction to the mythology of this strange band. We realize that we we've never previously reviewed anything by VHK (we've only referenced them twice before on our site, in fact, in reviews of records by countryish space rockers U.S. Christmas and avant-folky black metallers Hollenthon). Glad we're able to rectify that now with this write-up.
Limited vinyl version available now, get 'em while you can. We also should hopefully be stocking a cd of this at some point in the future.
If there was ever a perfectly named band, it's definitely Washed Out, whose woozy dreamy chillwave retro pop seems to get more and more, well, washed out, with every release. On more than one occasion, when this new one was playing in the store, some of us were totally convinced it was some old eighties pop band, sounding like it could have been plucked right off the soundtrack to some classic John Hughes movie, shades of Simple Minds, Dream Academy, OMD, New Order and the like. Paracosm takes all of those classic old school new wave pop-isms, and runs them through a (slightly) more modern filter, everything shimmery and crystalline, delicately psychedelic, the record even opens with bird song (which pops up throughout) and soft swirls of cascading zither like melodies, before the sound proper kicks in, all hazy and lush and a little bit looped, laced with swoonsome strings, laid back lazy rhythms, softly crooned sad boy vox, all wistful and yeah, washed out. If you dug the other WO records, this one will push all the same buttons, and it's most definitely our favorite set of Washed Out songs since Life Of Leisure! Divine pop dreaminess!!
There's a considerable backstory to this collection of subtly processed field recordings from the master of phonography, Chris Watson. Our man was commissioned to create the soundtrack to an exhibition for the Lindisfarne Gospels on display at Durham University in the summer of 2013. These Christian texts were transcribed in the 7th Century on the tiny British isle of Lindisfarne, otherwise known by the locals as Holy Island. The monastery responsible for these Gospels was also home to an interesting character named St. Cuthbert, whose hermeticism led him into greater communion with the natural world, in particular the avian life that used Lindisfarne as a way station while traveling from Scandinavia to Western Europe and vice versa. Chris Watson himself has long been an avid birder and an active member / recordist of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; and this call for stewardship is where Cuthbert and Watson find common ground. On the four tracks of field recordings, you'll hear birds, birds, birds, and more birds. "Winter" finds a chill in its air with a threatening Aeolian drone that doesn't seem to bother the sea birds coming in for a landing. On "Sumor," these gulls and terns unleash all of their tempestuous blurts and bleats and seem pissed off or horny. If you've ever pondered the profound question - are those two birds fighting or fucking? - here's the soundtrack that has no answer to that existential quandary. The irritated / lusty birds eventually depart the soundfield leaving a marsh wren to croon from its perch above a snoozing elephant seal. The lapping of the ocean forms a gentle patter on "Haefest" whose relative calm is broken by periodic swarms of twittering sandpipers and uncouth eider ducks. We're guessing on the bird identifications here, and corrections of course are welcome. Still, this is a Chris Watson recording, meaning you really can't go wrong here. He's always been an incredible documentarian.
Exploding once more from the furthest galactic reaches of our Eastern most solar quadrant (aka New York City), White Hills have returned via arcane cosmic pathways to deliver another trippy transmission of their self described "fuzzed out motorik space rock." And So You Are... is everything you could hope for from that descriptor: psychedelic, immersive, monolithic, mesmerizing. It's space rock, but thankfully with a serious emphasis on the rock! Heavy circular riffing, primitive yet spacious, drifts over driving hypnotic basslines, while ghostly vocals echo in the darkness like dying transmissions from Planet Hotbox. The disorienting sounds of Technicolor laser beams ricochet over a proto-punk groove, drums clattering, seeming to invoke the dizzying feeling of falling down a flight of stairs for all of eternity. Elsewhere things gets a bit more ambient. A warming synthetic glow gives way to fluttering static melodies over the weeping of slinking slow motion guitar. Snippets of conversation collide with robotic stuttering like the staggered rambling of a malfunctioning super computer. It's all very conscious altering, very mind expanding, maaaan - but without using that as an excuse to get too meandering or too jammy. So You Are... never overstays its welcome. In fact at a relatively brief 45 minutes this album seems to burst and fade in the blink of an eye like a sudden supernova! You know the drill: Tune in, turn on, drop out - collapse onto a beanbag and allow your astral self to be transported elsewhere, even if it's just for three quarters of an hour - you may find time becomes meaningless where you end up anyway!
And while they last, we have a very limited number of the deluxe vinyl version, pressed on green wax, housed in a fancy old school tip-on style gatefold jacket, which also just so happens to be bundled with a whole extra 12" record (sorry cd nerds, it's only with the vinyl) called Timeless Tracks For Aural Pleasure, featuring 30 minutes (3 tracks) or previously unreleased material, the bonus lp in its own bootleg style sleeve.
(FYI, mailorder folks, once we run out of the deluxe lp, we'll automatically ship the cheaper single lp version instead, unless you tell us explicitly you only want to order the deluxe edition.)
Goddamn we love this band. And goddamn they're hard to pigeonhole or review. They're the sort of band that leaves critics throwing their hands up and saying weird things like "Animal Collective playing metal", or finds us comparing 'em (on past albums) to everyone from MBV to Redd Kross to the Swans to Gaye Bykers On Acid to the freaking God Bullies...
They sound like a lot of things, but ultimately their own special Wildildlife thing - and we don't have enough hypens handy to describe all the genres they glom together into that. Yeah they're heavy and noisy and fucked up, palling around with Harvey Milk and other sludgey/doom metal types, but also have an almost glammy, "buried pop" side to 'em that's become less and less buried from record to record. This new one is perhaps their poppiest, catchiest yet, without sacrificing any of the delicious distortion, noisiness or heaviness, though.
Details, its front cover bearing appropriately demented, deliberate eyesore cover art scrawlings (the back of the sleeve is even better - a drawing of a cat in corpsepaint), is awash with spacey swirling FX, stonery druggy vocals, and sinuous grungy riffage, making for some seriously psychedelic fuzzed out noise pop that's maybe still somehow sorta metal - definitely mental though. Take some Butthole Surfers, some Dead Meadow, some '90s alt-metal (Nudeswirl, anyone?), some slowcore and shoegaze and old school Sub Pop, and you're getting close to the idea of what's going on here.
We suppose we could just mention a few highlights among this album's seven tracks, but it's tough to choose. The short-and-sweet blast of the excellent opener "Dub 1"? The majestic keyboards of "Water Underneath"? The sleazy riffage cranked out on badass rocker "Conditioner"? The tripped out, lumbering awesomeness of, uh, everything??? Yeah we love it all. You should just get this and listen to it yourself, and let it sink into you and you into it, that's our recommendation. Oh, but speaking of sinking into it, let's also mention how the second side closes out with not one but two 8+ minute hypnorock epics. There's the big roiling drums, droning keys and almost bagpipe-like guitar soloing of "Love Hums", and then the even heavier/dirgier "Edge Of The Apocalypse (Forever)", the latter with a pretty little come-down electronica bit at the end, as the song gently fades out... Nice.
We may be a bit biased of course, 'cause Wildildlife singer/guitarist Matt Rogers is an aQ alumnus, but honestly, we had no expectations, in fact we were surprised this even came out, 'cause we thought the band had basically broken up long ago, the guys living in different cities, Matt more into techno DJing than playing rock music, but here it is, and if it's their swansong it's a damn good one, but hopefully the release of this record might spur 'em to get their shit together and get back on stage and play live again 'cause they KILL and it would be great to see Matt writhing around with his guitar again (and the other guys going off too) and hear these tunes super LOUD in person.
Vinyl-only (grrrr) but it includes a download!
