Black metal bands often usually make a big deal about worshipping Satan, of course, but c'mon, at this point, while we still really enjoy the music, we're kind of over the ooooh, Satan part of it all. But, some bands can still make the Satan stuff seem interesting and seriously potent, like maybe this band really DOES believe in Satan and maybe that's actually kind of scary. Such is the case with Canadian two-man horde A.M.S.G. (not a food additive, the acronym stands for the Latin phrase Ad Majorem Satanae Gloriam, you can probably figure out what that means), featuring members of Rites Of The Degringolade and Gloria Diaboli. A.M.S.G.'s debut full-length for Profound Lore conjures an incredibly convincing and intriguingly original Satanic atmosphere, being in the grand Nordic church-burning black metal tradition (including one of the members having done a stint in jail for selling drugs and guns to finance his band activities) with plenty of cold freezing riff-blurr and rasping croaking vox that remind us of Inquisition, but also bringing in truly extreme blacknoize distortion (the opening moments of the album crackling like Merzbow's electronics) and also, the big surprise, saxophone! Not all the time - but on a couple tracks, probably our favorites here, you'll hear mopey, smokey, noirish sax improv emerge amidst the miasmatic skitter and plod and fuzz, resulting in gorgeously dark and moody but melodic creepy-crawl vibes and making A.M.S.G. the sort of black metal that fans of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore (that band themselves hugely into black metal) ought to check out.
And as strange as the Satanic Sax ritual is, that "jazz" element isn't the only surprise here, 'cuz A.M.S.G. worship Satan as much through sound as through song, so while they do standard black metal minor key blasting (and string together some effective hit-you-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach-from-the-pits-of-hell riff sequences), it's often the sheer sounds, and some strange juxtapositions thereof, they conjure with that really gets to us - the way they mix in not just the sax but all sorts of sound FX, noise, varied percussive patterns, mysterious sinister samples, and extreme vokill approaches. It makes for a disturbing headphone listen with the whispered / chanted vocal incantations - if you read the lyrics, its clear that each song is intended as some occult ritual, torn from the pages of the Necronomicon or some other forbidden tome. Their songs will take whatever twists and turns (well, left hand ones only, presumably) that lead to the greater glory of Satan. We might not worship Satan ourselves, but we'll consider worshiping A.M.S.G., at least for the duration of the disc's run time. Unique and compelling.
Comes in slipcased jewel case packaging.
A super limited new release from Amen Dunes, aka Damon McMahon, released on his own Perfect Lives label, and limited to just 300 copies. And it's awesome, and awesomely weird, a sort of avant deconstructed take on the old Amen Dunes sound, the vibe is super dark, a sort of bedroom loner folk or maybe a demented mad scientist Appalachia, whatever it is, it's woozy and off kilter and deeply and darkly psychedelic.
Here's a track by track play by play: 1) Creepy droney murk drifts beneath drowsy piano, wreathed in psychedelic shimmer, distant chant like vocals hover above subtle little melodic trills, the whole thing sort of Caretakery. 2) Dreamy Spanish guitar draped over a woozy varispeed backdrop, a murky reverb drenched slo-mo Appalachia. 3) Weird musique concrete, looped sampled breathing, skittery effected percussion and growled vocalizations, hauntingly abstract. 4) Fuzz guitar over warped and warbly vocals, detuned melodies and churning rhythmic skitter, the whole thing dubbed out and druggy. 5) Eighties echoey drumbeats suspended over muddy vocal loops, tripped out and darkly psychedelic. 6) An ominous Jandekian dirge, thick distorted guitar, and an almost Elvis sounding croon. 7) A dreamy melodic coda that almost sounds like some obscure Christmas carol, albeit one thoroughly deconstructed, all shimmering high end, clouds of cymbal shimmer and free jazz drum splatter. 8) A weird, lonely piano lament, with alien speaking-in-tongues vocals, all tangled up into woozy nonsense, all set to a haunting plaintive piano. Cool, weird stuff.
And again, we have VERY limited copies, so if you want one, order quick before they're gone, cuz they'll probably go fast...
It doesn't seem so long ago that these youthful Sheffield lads first burst into our consciousness with their exhilarating brand of punky Britpop, but now we're five albums in, and against all odds the Arctic Monkeys have become a band that one might be tempted to apply the "aging gracefully" tag to. AM finds Arctic Monkeys much more stripped down and streamlined. The reckless abandon and teenage mischief of their earlier records has been traded in for a certain slinky nocturnal sexiness, more suited for night drives to questionable locales than for rides in the back of police vans. There's a palpable hazy drunken wooziness that looms over much of the record. The lyrics are all dusky imagery: romantic obsession, unspoken implications, scandalous secrets, yearning to be owned by someone, yearning to own someone... that kind of thing! And that theme of reading between the lines is perfectly represented in the music. The songs are just as much about what isn't there as what is. The vocals are a lazy stand offish drawl often backed by breathy falsettos - sometimes channeling a sexually charged Morrissey, while the songs themselves are sometimes fantastically minimal. Twangy slithering guitars squirm over dusty sparse drum beats, many of which have a noticeably hip hop feel to them. But really there's plenty for heavier rockers to appreciate here as well. In fact, the band has cited not only Black Sabbath but also cult '70s proto-metallers Sir Lord Baltimore as direct influences on this record and it's not hard to see why. "R U Mine?" and "Arabella" both have a distinctly '70s stoner vibe to them - the latter of which even features a bit of a "War Pigs" homage in the riffing. "I Want It All", meanwhile, is a total glam rock stomp, recalling classic Sweet as much as it does Queens Of The Stone Age (with whom the band has been known to occasionally collaborate). Elsewhere, things take an even more retro turn with "Snap Out of It" which sounds like a classic Motown girl group cut colored a smokey midnight hue, and "No. 1 Party Anthem", a song which betrays its name, sounding more like a beautiful comedown - a glittery and twinkling piano ballad that almost comes across like a more seductive version of Radiohead's "No Surprises". Like so many great records, it's one that takes a couple of spins to really get its claws in you, but once it does it becomes irresistible and addictive - like an unhealthy obsession that feels too good to kick!
First solo full length from this Bay Area (by way of Australia) guitarist / bandleader, after a 7" and a cassette, and for Golden Theft, Beach is once again joined by Utrillo Kushner (Comets On Fire, Colossal Yes) for another collection of brooding post punk and twang flecked, Neil Young / Uncle Tupelo beholden classic psychedelic rock. Like we said before, it's a pretty potent combo. Beach's vocals a weary ragged raspy, the songs simple and urgent, driving and propulsive, and peppered with all sorts of strange compositional weirdness. A few songs from the tape get revisited/reworked here, including some of our favorites, like "Straight Spines", which starts with a blast of low slung bass heavy post punk, definitely reminiscent of the Wipers, with a killer weird constantly shifting tempo, slowing down, then speeding right back up again, in a way the deftly makes that tempo shift an integral part of the song. Hooky and a little bit heavy, driving and catchy like crazy, and that tempo shift just kills us every time, so unexpected, but so cool. "There Is No Edge Of The World To Run To" also shows up again, and still sounds like some lost Uncle Tupelo outtake, the vocals rough and warmly ragged, over some simple twang and strum, darkly emotive and intense, and when the drums come in, the song becomes a cool sort of droney countrified slowcore. Of the new tracks, some faves include the swampy swagger of "Dirt", with its bass heavy churn, and cool almost falsetto vocal flutter, the driving droned out country rock of opener "The Exhilarating Rise", those ragged vocals again seemingly belonging to a much older man, the hushed psychedelic shimmer of "In A Field", and the blown out psychedelic guitar noise freakout of "Central / San Joaquin".
The cd-r comes in a digipak, the lp is housed in a full color gatefold jacket, includes a poster, and a download code and is limited to 270 copies, each one hand numbered.
It's no secret that we've been smitten with the Dark Entries label from the very beginning. Over the years they've cranked out killer reissues of so many obscure lost gems, ranging from post-punk, to dark wave, minimal synth, to left field dance jams, and all with a curatorial hand that's always spot on. In fact this list we have TWO other great Dark Entries titles you should probably grab, but this one in particular stands out as being super unique in that it's a brand NEW recording from an artist right here in San Francisco. We've been waiting for this for a while, as Bezier (aka Robert Yang) has been a fixture in the underground club scene in San Francisco for years, most notably as a member of our favorite DJ collective, Honey Soundsystem.
With his debut release he puts his analog synths to use, creating a kind of hi-prog-nrg music that blows us away. Equally influenced by hi-nrg, disco, sci-fi, and a strain of prog that manages to inject sensuality and sexuality into that usually so nerdy of genres. When we caught Bezier live for a special test pressing release party of this record we were swept away, these songs making us move like crazy but also creating a space where sometimes we just closed our eyes and got lost in the swirling arpeggios and actual songs, brimming with movement and dynamics.
Ensconced makes us think of some awesome hybrid of Giorgio Moroder and Goblin, or maybe Patrick Cowley sitting in with Chris & Cosey. In fact that comparison is particularly apt, this record inspiring us to grab our favorite Chris & Cosey records, and feeling like Bezier is a modern sonic kindred spirit.
All thirty one minutes of the record feel thought out and purposeful, yet never too smart for its own good, allowing for both the mind and body to move in unexpected directions. So totally recommended!
This would have been a perfect entry on last week's "Ragadelic" in-between list, the debut solo recording from Guy Blakeslee, who most folks know as the man behind The Entrance Band. This is super limited, only 50 copies made, so we won't go into too much detail about it except that it is utterly amazing! Five long-form solo guitar excursions that cover Fahey-ish odes ("Oh Johnnie") to more raga-style workouts (check the Fahey-inspired titles like "Solitary Ecstasy Holiday Smile Prayer"). The last song, "The Night They Came From The Sky", is a 17 minute mind-expanding stew of looping reverse-delayed riffs that wind and coil in infinite meditative patterns. Rumor has it more volumes are in the works. A fantastic set. Get it while you can!
For a label inspired in spirit by Brian Eno's legendary Obscure imprint, we bet once-local label Root Strata was super psyched to be able to release a Harold Budd recording, especially one so incredibly beautiful. Perhaps is a live 2006 recording performed at Cal Arts on the occasion of the memorial of former academic colleague, composer and friend James Tenney. This 75 minute completely improvised piece is Budd at his most moving and restrained. Inspired by a kind of oblique instruction or aphorism given to Budd by Tenney in the seventies, that suggested something "very long, nearly white", Budd creates elegiac clusters of melodic fragments and stretches them out letting long notes decay and drift, never seeming to repeat himself. Only previously available digitally, this is the first time Perhaps has been released in a physical format and comes with absolutely the highest recommendation!!!!
Full length number two from this French Satanic crew, featuring members of aQ faves Peste Noire, but don't be expecting the warped WTF? weirdness of that group, instead, Christicide deliver some seriously epic and brutal blackness, with a production that dispenses with the tinny/lo-fi/practice space sound that plagues most black metal records, and delivers its malevolent message in gouts of crushing heaviness, with thick swirls of insectoid buzz, blasting pounding drums, and croaked demonic vokills. Just the sound alone had us from the first track, thick and heavy and massive, but the songs too - wildly complex tangles of woozy riffage, furious intricate rhythms, all locked into a tranced out blackmath crush, but rife with melodies too, just give that opening track a listen, the sound lurching from droned out riffiness, to furious blasting blackness, to weirdly psychedelic and surprisingly melodic epic-ness and back again, definitely shades of Katharsis, Deathspell, and other modern masters of avant blackness, but Christicide fuse those avant influences to more traditional old school black buzz, resulting in something that manages to sound both classic, and modern, the sort of furious blackened heaviness that we definitely don't hear enough anymore...
New converts to the garage-y goodness of Thee Oh Sees might not remember Oh Sees mainman John Dwyer's former outfit the Coachwhips, who set the template for what would in fact eventually become our beloved Oh Sees. But the Coachwhips were a much more feral proposition, seething sweaty blown out minimal/maximal garage punk stomp. Way back in 2001, here's how we described this fearsome threesome:
John Dwyer. Rhode Island via SF scene fixture, daily aQ-visitor, roundly acknowledged wise ass, some people just know him as "Pink" (of Pink & Brown). As crazy hyper leader of garage-trash trio Coachwhips, he'll twist you around, sass you to your face, make you duck for cover, he'll jump on the tables in a frenzy of just wanting to wake up this town, this scene, our sorry mellow asses. He'll screech into a voicebox and wreak havoc with the guitar while the other John (Harlow) pounds the floor tom and MaryAnn wields the tambourine so hard she might break it. Like Pussy Galore and the Gories ran over the White Stripes in the middle of the road! Grimy three chord rockin' with energy to burn.
And even a decade plus later, this reissued (first time on vinyl!) stuff still sounds so goddamn good. Fierce and fun, wild and loose, sweat soaked and bloody knuckled, a gloriously hyper kinetic, ear drum destroying blast of garage-y goodness that will surely hit the spot for fans of the current crop of SF garage rock combos, and a sweet blast from the past for those of us who were there the first time around! Now includes six "unheard" bonus tracks, and the vinyl comes with a download.
We usually love the Crocs and their garagey dreampop ways... but this time out, perhaps not so much. Some of this just sounds too much like bad Spiritualized, with, like, horns and soulful female backup singers. Disappointing, but you never know, maybe we're running afoul of our own expectations and there's folks out there that will like this a lot. Check out the samples and decide for yourself.
Taking off our curmudgeon hats for a sec, we'll admit that there's definitely some toe-tappers on here - like what we thought was the title track (based on the refrain) but is actually called "Marquis De Sade". And the guitars jangle with a nice amount of crunch and distortion too. Wait a minute, maybe we're starting to like this...
Latest from these local fuzzed out jangle pop shoegazers, and it's the perfect mix of classic twee pop, and something a little bit more distorted and dirty. At its core, the sound seems very indebted to classic nineties indie/college rock, especially Unrest, just check out opener "White Flag", with its urgent jangle, and crooning echo drenched vox, but whereas Unrest was often all stripped down earnestness, Cruel Summer occasionally pile on layers of distorted guitars, some dreamy background 'oooooh's and 'aaaaaah's, not to mention some cool sinewy post punk sounding basslines. The rest of the record though, does deliver some serious dreampop minimalism, the female vox over the spare jangle and psychedelic shimmer of "Silent Star", that at times sounds like a more subdued Sleater-Kinney, or the hazy jangle of "Venetian Blinds", which occasionally blossoms into warm swirling squalls of soft focus guitar noise, before slipping right back into chiming jangle, or the weary, distortion drenched "Strange Fruit" which reminds us of the late great Scrawl. Definitely recommended for fans of other local outfits like Grass Widow, the Mantles, etc.
LIMITED TO JUST 250 COPIES!!! Cool die cut cover too!
Yet another fantastical bit of mysterious audio alchemy from the always weird and wonderful UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from Australian composer/sound artist Robert Curgenven, who, armed with pipe organs, industrial fans, old acetate 78's, resonating dubplates, stereo test lps, custom made oscillators, and a handful of turntables, crafts some gorgeously lush hyperminimalism that exists somewhere between the woozy turntablism of Philip Jeck, the gauzy washed out ambience of the Caretaker, and the fields of industrial hiss and crackle of Restgeraeusch. Slow shifting fields of static, underpinned by softly pulsing chordal thrum, soft swirls of blurred, bleary shimmer, morphing into wheezing clouds of droning organs, stately and haunting, hushed and atmospheric, definitely headphone listening, or at least LOUD speakers in a quiet room, but it's worth it, some seriously mesmeric deep listening lowercase loveliness.
A little while back we reviewed the first installment of The Hermetic Drone, which was the first release from Dark Matter Halo, the most recent project of aQ pal Monte Cimino, who is head honcho of brooding twang flecked heavies Burial Tree, as well as the man behind BT ambient offshoot Time Spent. That original cd-r has now been reissued as a proper cd, with a second volume/disc added on!!!
Dark Matter Halo has more in common with Time Spent than the more rocking Burial Tree, but pushes the sound even further into the kosmische drift, ditching all of the rhythmic elements that drove Time Spent, barring the subtle pulsations caused by the ever shifting overtones, these two lengthy tracks, sprawling expanses of dreamlike shimmer, lush layered tones infused with a warm energy, softly undulating chordal swells, wreathed in a soft halo of gauze-y blissed out blur. The first track, "A.M.", definitely has a sun dappled morning vibe, bleary slowly unfurling melodies, a time lapse exploration of tonal color, a grey landscape gradually taking on color, the tones here seeming to fill the sky with a prismatic palette of warm sonic hues, gorgeously mesmerizing and dreamily meditative. The second track, appropriately titled "P.M." reverse engineers the first, effortlessly conjuring up a world in hibernation, a sky full of darkened blue, casting lengthening shadows, a lush crystalline expanse of low tones, woven into a gloriously textured backdrop, for the glimmering, glistening ghostlike melodies that hover above, spectral streaks of somnambulant mesmer, gliding lazily toward the dark, a soundtrack for drifting off, a sonic gateway to what lays beyond the veil.
The second volume, more recently recorded, doesn't deviate too far from the template laid out by part one, the bulk of the new disc taken up by the sprawling cosmic transmission "Caravan To The Stars", clocking in at nearly 42 minutes, and making the most of all that time spent (ahem) weaving lush swells of softly pulsing chordal shimmer, and slowly swirling clouds of ethereal thrum, the first ten minutes passing like some time lapse film about the galaxy, a hazy dreamlike minimal drift, before some subtle tabla like percussion surfaces, giving the nebulous sonic mesmer some muted propulsion, like a heroin house Muslimgauze, soon the background sounds arc and soar, keening high end streaks, long tones undulating and pulsing, all the while, that motorik rhythm burbling just below the surface. The synths coalesce into string-like swoons, the vibe super cinematic, with a definite Eastern tinge, before all blurring into a much more subdued final movement, the last few minutes in particular, some seriously ominous black ambience, that manages to sound sinister, without losing any of its psychedelic dreaminess. The relatively shorter second track is dedicated to ambient electronic pioneer Pete Namlook, who died tragically earlier this year, the sound slowly unfurling diaphanous sheets of soft focus sound, seemingly time-lapse shifting overtones, buried melodies, the whole thing glimmering and glistening and shimmering, so so lovely.
Has it really been more than 25 years? And close to 40 releases? These NZ noise rock legends have been making their particular brand of abstract, avant free-noise beauty for what seems like forEVER. And somehow, over all those years, and all those releases, they've both managed to keep making music that is distinctly and defiantly their own, while constantly re-inventing that sound in a way that has kept that sound impossibly interesting, extremely relevant and ridiculously influential on legions of other noisemakers, whether they realize it or not.
Listening to Armed Courage, we were initially forced to wonder, what exactly it is that makes a Dead C jam a proper record? Cuz barring their flirtations with pop songs (and there have been many), the sound of the Dead C, and of Armed Courage, does in fact sound like a band letting loose, jamming endlessly... Both the tracks here sound like the could have been plucked from even more epic jams, as if someone just pushed 'record' in the middle of a 24 hour jam, affording us a glorious glimpse into what could only be a never ending noise rock jam, our glimpse's brevity dictated by the limitations of recorded media. It tickles us to imagine Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats locked in a perpetual jam, the Hawkwind style heart-of-the-sun freakouts recontextualized into something WAY more loose and abstract and while not perhaps lo-fi in sound, certainly in spirit.
The two tracks here offer up the two sonic sides of the Dead C, alternately crafting an alien lo-fi avant indie rock minimalism, and at their most fierce and free, with Yeats delivering some of the wildest drumming we've heard from him on the opening track, a tangle of multiple free jazz freakouts, locked into weirdly unhinged krautrock style motorik grooves, that constantly splinter, fall apart and somehow come right back together again. All the while, Russell and Morley transforming their guitars into noisemakers, the drums wreathed in billowing clouds of rumble and whir, of crumblingly distorted drones, and fragmented riffs, tones pulsing and undulating, all blurred into constantly shifting sheets of smeared sound, the occasional bit of loose clattery percussion, the cool second half of the first track, where the band lock into a crazy Necks-like minimal groove, all skittery rhythm, pulsating distorto-buzz, and a cool, almost electronic sounding field of percussive guitar scrape that sounds a bit like a damaged synth, the whole thing barreling forward with a strange buried propulsion. It seems impossible that something this formless, and free, this shapeless and abstract could somehow be so sonically mesmerizing, but for all its shapelessness, the sound is teeming with strange sonic shapes, and for all its looseness, the group sound impossibly tight, flying into wild musical tangents, but always finding their way back, or not, sometimes just following each other on those tangents and changing the direction of the song and sound entirely. Nearly 30 years of playing together will do that to a group.
The second track shifts gears completely, the band slipping into their warbly low fidelity songcraft, the sound unfurling sedately, with a field of rhythmic static, some woozy guitars, some strange percussion, lots of tape hiss ambience, and weary, whispery, crooned vocals, the band seemingly locked into a somnambulant drift, before Yeats lets loose again, his octopoidal skitter mirrored by caustic guitar scrabble, and gristly electronic buzz, all still anchored by some detuned strum, the drums building, driving the song into a dense driving noise rock jam, laced with streaks of high end guitar freakout, before shedding all the noise and bash and howl, leaving just a shadowy sprawl of murky mesmer, which again, slowly builds from hushed creep, to a weirdly math bit of motorik churn, simple, but loud drumming, over FX wreathed wah wah, and streaks of droned out warble, a stumbling bunkurfunk dirge that gradually loses momentum, eventually disappearing into a soft fading cloud of Jandekian guitar-warble.
Fucking fantastic.
We've been digging so much Chinese indie rock around aQ lately, including a recent Record Of The Week from synth/drum duo White+, the dissonant shoegaze Sonic Youth meets MBV of Boyz & Girl, and Dear Eloise, whose full length we reviewed recently, and who traffic in a sort of fuzzed out noisy jangly shoegaze, not that far removed from early Dun Dum Girls, that sound in full effect here on this new split, their track crumbling and noisy, washed out and dreamy, ethereal female vox over crunchy psychedelic guitar, laced with bits of twang and a woozy wandering bassline, lo-fi and fuzzy, a Velvets style minimal rock doused in distortion. The flipside features another Chinese group, Underground Lovers, who we had never heard before, and who deliver a sort of eighties style retro new wave jangle pop, the sort of thing you might hear from some Brooklyn band on Sacred Bones or Captured Tracks, boy girl vox and lilting lovely guitar jangle.
Housed in super striking silkscreened sleeves, and pressed on clear vinyl!
Now reissued on vinyl! An old, old fave here at aQ, this album originally from 1973, that wowed us when we first heard it 'cause, as you may know, we're also long time fans of the band Olivia Tremor Control, and we were struck by the similarities. You could totally mistake this for an OTC record... a *great* OTC record! But it was recorded over three decades ago by a fellow from Delaware named Bill Holt, who, nearing 30 years of age in the early '70s, dropped out of his corporate job working for a Fortune 500 company to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, despite having little in the way of prior musical experience! Holt invested in an early Moog Sonic Six synthesizer and set up a recording studio in his basement, where he created this lost classic, an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with Spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of '60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful... and definitely dreamy. Never was a name so well-chosen!
Like the Olivias, Bill Holt is obviously a huge fan of the Beatles. That's pretty clear. Sgt. Peppers definitely. And, he must really have liked the White Album's notorious "Revolution Number 9"!! With two side-long songs called (hmm) "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven", the Dreamies album is a similar venture into psych-pop meets musique concrete territory, an elaborate tapestry of samples - and this is from long before anyone called them samples, and before there was such a thing as samplers and sequencers, which means Holt used the old fashioned, labor intensive tape n' razor blade splicing method, working at home on his beloved TEAC Model 3340 reel-to-reel four-track recorder. Densely woven into his otherwise highly laid back and melodic mix, you'll hear clocks ticking, chattering machine guns in Vietnam combat, JFK speeches, crickets, frogs, NASA transmissions, and ominous but unidentifiable minimalist pulses of electronic/industrial white noise. Or even samples of the Beatles themselves! (Bits of "All You Need Is Love" and others are buried in Holt's sonic collage.) It's both unsettling and soothing at the same time, like surfing through shortwave transmissions from the late '60s psyche. And along with all the sound bites/effects, he also weaves together what must have originally been several different, distinct, enchanting songs he'd written for his voice and acoustic guitar. It's one man and his melodies alone amidst the chaos of the times. Unfortunately, the Dreamies album didn't end up leading to a career in music for Bill Holt, so sadly he was forced to return to the straight moneymaking world of 9-to-5 work. But his venture into the realm of hippy psychedelic rock music concrete lives on - now, again, on (remastered) vinyl!
A while back we reviewed two tapes from this mysterious black metal band, who play "atmospheric Indian black metal", and as we mentioned in those previous reviews, we actually assumed Dressed In Streams was from India, although we later discovered they are in fact from right here in the US. Sadly, both those tapes went out of print, super quick, and there was even a third, that we were never able to get at all. So kudos to Handmade Birds, for reissuing on cd, two of the three tapes (wish it was all three!), Azad, and the most recent self titled cassette (and the one we were unable to stock!), along with a bonus track, from an also now out of print compilation...
For those who missed out on those tapes, Dressed In Streams mixes murky soaring majestic buzzing blackness with actual Indian music, the first track from Asad starts off with a sample of some traditional Indian music, all buzzing sitars, skittery tablas, intense emotional vocals, then all of a sudden, furious riffing swoops in, the sound exploding into some echo drenched buzzing blackness, the vocals a deep raspy demonic bellow, the drums not blasting so much as pounding, while the guitars are sharp and jagged, and doused in effects, the whole thing noisy, and reverby and sorta psychedelic. The sound gets even more psychedelic as the track progresses, slipping into long stretches of tranced out drone metal and even erupting into something near symphonic at one point, the sound laced with synths (?), giving the track a seriously tripped out vibe, and then near the end, it gets super melodic, and crazy catchy, before finally fading out in a cloud of blackened swirl and atmospheric synth shimmer. The second track (side two on the original cassette) is more of the same, a dense dizzying swirl of sound, frantic and frenzied, tons of echo and reverb, the sound bordering on utter chaos, but constantly slipping into something more structured, with some cool chugging almost math metal parts, not to mention more epic synth swells, and as if to bookend the two tracks, the blackness fades out leaving just tablas, that mesmerizing Indian rhythm this time wreathed in strange demonic hiss and softly shimmery synths. Super cool.
The cd is rounded out by DiS's most recent cassette which offers up three more tracks of psychedelic blackness, the first a plodding, doomy dirge, wreathed in strange swirling melodies, majestic synths, the drums lo-fi and LOUD, the vokills more of a background rasp, everything sort of blurred and washed out, the guitars too, less buzzy and black, and more sort of background sonic coloration, and then near the end, when the track settles down into a darkly strummy drift, it's really super haunting and strangely lovely. The second track is much more traditionally black, a lo-fi buzz, blasting and black, but given a sort of Caretaker makeover, the sound cavernous and smeary, the various sounds loose and almost weightless sounding, with bits of melodies, or crashing drums occasionally surfacing from the murky miasma, and there's some amazing synths too, that are super loud, and leap out of the mix, the vibe like some ancient martial ceremony. Finally, the last track launches right into a frantic furious black buzz, the sound gradually getting blurrier and murkier, furious and blown out, before getting all strummy and melodic for the second half, a sort of smoldering post rock epic-ness, that gradually builds to one final black buzz squall, before a brooding synth coda.
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
The very first release from reissue imprint Dark Entries was the highly collectible, if obscure album Bas Relief by Eleven Pond. Originally self-released in 1986, that album slipped out of view except for those avid synth-pop / minimal-wave collectors. Yet, when Dark Entries reissued the album in 2009, the album went viral, reflecting a particular historical revisionist strain of the mid-'80s that earnestly held onto the romantic poetry that oozed out of 4AD and Factory Records from those seminal days. Even two decades after the fact, Eleven Pond had a verifiable 'hit' single on their hands with the track "Watching Trees" which landed on many a retro-garde compilation and even warranted a limited edition 12" single from the art-rock imprint Angular Recordings in 2012.
So, with Assemblage, we have another set of Anglophilic synth-pop from these upstate New York lads; but unlike Bas Relief, this album was recorded and then languished for 25 years (!) until Dark Entries was able to get the songs remastered and released. The bulk of the sound, all bittersweet chiming Marr / Sumner guitars meshed with minor-key synth percolations, carries over from Bas Relief, with a difference found in a new drummer using electric drums instead of a kit, really giving Eleven Pond a pretty serious New Order vibe. Certainly nothing to scoff at! There's a reprise of the aforementioned single "Watching Trees" appearing as a bedroom demo, which still sounds pretty damn good in a more stripped down, electronic context. Listening to this, you gotta wonder if there'd ever be a Bolshoi reissue campaign in the works... Great stuff as always from Dark Entries.
At this point Roky Erickson's turbulent story has been pretty well documented (there's even a movie about it!), and it now seems to occupy the same strange annals of musical history as the Norwegian black metal murders and the rise/fall/rise/fall/rise again of Pentagram's unsinkable Bobby Liebling - gazed upon with morbid car-crash curiosity by the casual listening public! But it's still probably the best place to start for those uninitiated souls considering taking the one way trip into the bizarre landscape of The Evil One. The abridged version is this: Roky Erickson first made a name for himself as a founding member of psychedelic pioneers and vocal LSD proponents 13th Floor Elevators (bonus fact: they're thought to have invented the term "psychedelic rock"!), but as a result of a minor drug arrest and a schizophrenia diagnosis he wound up in a mental institution subjected to the horrors of involuntary electroshock therapy.
In the years that followed his release he publicly claimed that a Martian had begun inhabiting his body, was arrested for mail theft after developing an obsession with the postal system... only recently, in the 2000's, has seemingly pulled himself together, and thankfully has started playing live again. It's definitely a sad and a fascinating story, but all throughout those tumultuous years Roky kept putting out albums, and it's important not to let the backstory overshadow that fact. Because regardless of everything else, there is absolutely no doubt in our minds that The Evil One is a bona fide MASTERPIECE, and is probably as good as any hard rock record you will ever hear. Originally released in 1981 and collecting some of Roky's earliest solo material (a few of the tracks were featured on the I Have Always Been Here Before compilation that we reviewed some time back), The Evil One is as timeless a rock record as there's ever been. It seems to exist in some sort of vintage vacuum - it has that vague sense of sounding "old" but doesn't seem to belong to any specific period in music. It has the unique quality of sounding both ahead of its time and strangely retro, even for 1981 - like it was transported from some alternate rock & roll past where the Billboard charts were topped by pop/rock occult ballads and catchy demon worshipping jams.
"Two Headed Dog" opens the record with a jarring, almost post-punk wall of guitar dissonance before a snare drum ushers in an absolutely perfect swaggering proto metal riff - recalling the best moments of classic Alice Cooper and Blue Oyster Cult. Great leads and tight flawlessly simple drumming abounds, all while Erickson wails about children being nailed to crosses like some sort of deranged bizarro Neil Young, if he'd perhaps become a Satanist preacher or delirious doomsday prophesier. There's a Southern twang to Roky Erickson's vocals as well, that lend a certain Americana baptist noir to much of the record. The production is soft and almost subdued - but it's the perfect compliment to the deceptively simple songs and Erickson's surreal stream of consciousness lyrics (perfectly represented by the album cover's chaotic collage that seems to be exploding from Roky's head). The Evil One is certainly a strange record, but it's a subtle creeping strangeness. It's a strangeness that never compromises the songwriting. As we said earlier, first and foremost The Evil One is a fantastic rock record - chock full of catchy choruses, great guitar leads and extremely tight understated playing.
There's tons of variety too. You only need to look at the transition from the aforementioned "Two Headed Dog" into the album's second track "I Walked with a Zombie" - a pristine slab of Saturday night drive-in B-movie doo wop (complete with "I walked with a zombie"/"He walked with a zombie" backing vocal tradeoffs!). Elsewhere there are more upbeat cuts: it's not too hard to imagine "Mine Mine Mind" or "I Think of Demons" being played by Tom Petty or The Cars while "Don't Shake Me Lucifer" is classic Chuck Berry/Rolling Stones blues rock boogie woogie. But all the while Roky is still injecting even the album's poppiest moments with bizarre imagery about devils, goblins and gremlins. It's unsettling, fun and bewildering all at the same time. There's plenty of heaviness as well though. "Night of the Vampire" has a staggered militaristic intro that recalls Diamond Head's NWOBHM classic "Am I Evil" before slithering into repetitive clean guitar gloom accompanied by epic guitar leads and bubbling horror movie synthesizers. Then this incredible closing duel synth/guitar lead comes in that seems to recall the same crumbling castle gothic horror of Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley." Elsewhere the loose driving groove and jagged guitar harmonies of "Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play" would totally do Thin Lizzy proud - you can almost hear the unquiet restless spirit of Phil Lynott singing over it!
But moreso than referencing older bands, this record's influence can be heard in so many places after its release - most notably in the current wave of modern witchy, occult obsessed groups. It's as essential to Witchcraft's hazy organic seance-rock as vintage Pentagram is. The glorious proto-doom of "Stand for the Fire Demon" is clearly the template for The Devil's Blood's entire sound. The opening riff of "White Faces" sounds more than just a little bit like Ghost's "Ritual" (and was covered by both The Devil's Blood AND Witchcraft to boot!). And one group of dudes from North Carolina just went ahead and named their entire band after the pulsing proto metal of "Bloody Hammer"! It's not even a stretch to imagine this could have been a pretty big influence of the stripped down rock & roll darkness of Danzig's first couple of solo albums - even the "whoa-oh"s in "The Wind and More" sound a bit Misfits-y!
Just in case it's not obvious yet, this comes with the highest recommendation, and we won't hesitate in declaring it absolutely one of the best hard rock/proto metal records ever recorded. And also one of the weirdest! It's so bursting with great songs and absolutely overflowing with character in fact that it's hard to imagine ANYONE not loving this record. So give yourself over to Roky's monstrous world. Stay a while! See what strange creatures you encounter there. But don't blame us if you never find your way back home again!
This is the long lost recording of Andrew Chalk's 1985 album Meiosis, which was originally issued as a cassette on the seminal UK noise imprint Broken Flag. For those of you (and we know there are many of you out there) who are enamored by the impressionistic pools of dreamtime sound that make up most of Chalk's more well known albums, the Ferial Confine aesthetic is a considerable departure. But for those of you who can also sink your teeth into a delicious chunk of noise (and yes there are plenty of you out there too!), this album will hit that teeth-gnashing sweet spot. In the mid '80s, Chalk was not only involved with the Broken Flag circle, but also with Organum and The New Blockaders; and parts of this albums parallels much of the TNB / Organum strategies for densely aggregated, metal-compacted noise junk. Unlike the power electronics sound of Ramleh / Whitehouse, this shared aesthetic sounds like recordings of sheared metal plates being sped up and having the high-pitched frequencies of those scabrous grinds amplified into frenetic transmissions of aggravated tactility. It's almost a more listenable, more psychedelic, more acoustically based form of the aggro-minimalism of the Harsh Wall Noise format which was proposed a couple years back. While this aforementioned sound is the dominant strategy for the first three tracks on Meiosis (following suit from the first Ferial Confine album The Full Use Of Nothing), the middle tracks predict the more contemplative, dark drones that Chalk would produce on his late '80s albums Crescent and East Of The Sun. Here, deep rumbling electronics ripple through delay patterns alongside the resonant acoustic frequencies of suspended pieces of metal and even some field recordings of bird songs. Certainly not the pastoral impressionism of his current output, but very much looking forward to what he would be doing nowadays through a more industrially minded and jackbooted lens. By the end of the album, the searing feedback-blistered frequencies return, albeit with a weirdly psychedelic series of electronic glissandos buried beneath that's akin to early noise-junk Merzbow jamming with Daphne Oram. Very cool. If anything, Meiosis is a fantastic archive from the British underground; and given the collectability (and bootlegs) of the Broken Flag cassettes, this is necessary reissue. Hand fabricated by Andrew Chalk in a tip-on style sleeve with an obi that sports the title in Japanese.
This is the first we've heard from Canadian outfit Fresh Snow (they apparently shared a split with noise rockers Metz), and it's a stunning introduction. We had heard OF them, lots of comparisons to classic krautrock, which is what had us intrigued initially, and indeed that band prove to be experts at crafting tranced out motorik grooves, but where most bands approach their post-krautrock minimally, Fresh Snow's take is supremely maximal. Just check out the opener, a sprawling 14 minute epic that begins as a hushed sort of chamber music, all swirling strings, and melancholic melodies. We were prepared for a slow build, Godspeed style, but instead, the band leap right into it, exploding into a super saturated, dreamily distorted pulsing drum heavy chunk of kraut-influenced post rock mesmer, slithery basslines wrapped around a solid simple drum beat, while all around, the band fill every possible space with grinding guitars, howling streaks of feedback, rumbling synths, tangles of psychedelic shred, sci-fi FX, it's seriously noisy stuff, but all anchored to the woozy krauty groove. Fans of recent space-psych-kraut combos like Hookworms, and the Cardinal Fuzz stuff (Janitors, Cosmic Dead, the Hills), will immediately be smitten, and it's not all full bore psychedelic kraut freakout, the opening track goes through all sorts of equally mesmerizing permutations, a cool stretch where the guitars and synths are woven into a super trippy pulsating tangle of melodies, which leads to a synth driven dirgey but, that gets downright metallic, and is flecked with caustic blasts of twisted production and squalls of white noise, and the guitars, blown out and acid fried. There also seems to be some pizzicato strings, some shrieking electronics, all manner of noise and gnarled effects, but even with all that chaos, the band somehow manages to reign it in, and create ate something impossibly song-like out of what sounds a time like a sonic free for all.
The second track, while half the length, is even more confusional, transforming the noise-kraut of the opener into a weirdly folk flecked bit of Stereolab-ish fuzzpop, rife with strings, and playful melodies, the sound soaring and super melodic, sun dappled and dreamy, but still rough around the edges, with the various sounds always on the verge of psychedelic blowout, infusing even playful poppiness with a sort of intensity that is unexpected but super cool. From there on out, the sound continues to drift into unlikely avenues, from a moody sort of muted electro-pop shimmer, that blossoms into some almost dancefloor-worthy electronic, to a bit of dirgey twang flecked garage rock pop, that is more dreamy and sun dappled than it should be, to some fuzz drenched psychedelic space rock, again heavy on the krautrock vibe, but with all sorts of weird electronics, garbled samples, and some wild blown out noise guitar (and it's named for a sketch from one of our favorite British sketch shows!), to a hushed stretch of reverby dreampop drift, all female vocals and woozy guitar shimmer, before finishing off with another epic, a massive 12 minute closer, that's the sort of bass and buzz heavy psychedelic space-kraut grooviness that should have most aQ-ers flipping their lids.
Easily one of the coolest new discoveries, and a new favorite big time. Available both on vinyl and cassette, and tape nerds, you shall be rewarded, as there's a bonus track that's ONLY on the the cassette!!
Amplifiers begin to quiver in fear whenever Gunslingers guitarist Gregory "GR" Raimo straps on his axe, 'cause his band (a trio, with the rhythm section being the two guys from blackened krautmetalers Aluk Todolo!) is all about amp-frying psychedelic garage rock mayhem. The latest blast from these French freeks, a 12" vinyl-only release, will do nothing to calm an innocent amp's nerves, that's for sure.
It consists really of one single 17 minute long track, sprawled over two sides, parts one and two of the same massive "massacre-rock" inquisition from these deviants, and no we don't know what the title means either, but we do know the title "Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors" does describe Gunslingers pretty well, somehow, as do the descriptions of what each member of the trio brings to the party - "Thunderbass", "Prophetic Drums", and "Guitar Distillation Arguments". You can tell it's gonna be loud, you can tell it's gonna be weird. And most importantly, the third pillar of the Gunslingers' sacred promise to you the listener, it's gonna rock. In the most primal, punk-as-psych manner possible. Bloody, groovy, greasy, splintery, freaky freeform rock n' roll the way ol' Link Wray just might have envisioned it in his worst nightmare or on a bad drug trip.
One that nearly slipped through the cracks, here we have The Hafler Trio's impressive Dislocation. Originally recorded to tape back in 1986 on Staalplaat, who later released it on disc in 1990, Dislocation was certainly one of their more obscure albums both in terms of distribution and in terms of content. It has been speculated that these recordings represent the final material that Chris Watson contributed to The Hafler Trio before embarking on his own impressive field recordist career; but there's no discernible 'proof' to back up that claim. Such is the way for the man behind the curtain of The Hafler Trio - that man, of course, being Andrew McKenzie. The title here couldn't be more apt in describing this very decentered collage, which leaps, cuts, and jumps from one tape-spliced collage of oblique, industrial-stained musique concrete to electronic decompositions of found sound, marked by short snippets of near silence and ambient room noise. In this collage, you might find yourself confronted with electrified voltage arcs bursting out of field recordings of fighter jets racing above and waterlogged ships creaking below. Elsewhere, h3o presents an unsettling sonic clamor prescient of the Schimpfluch aktions that may or may not be part of some unknowable gnostic ritual, or the sonic detritus from a display of guttural abjection. Blurting alarm calls and scraped metals disrupt streams of disembodied voices and heavily collaged media samples, and electrical drones are plucked from the ether of the shortwave radio band. There are elements from Dislocation that reappear throughout the Hafler Trio's early catalogue, say from 1984 - 1992; but with Andrew McKenzie, the act of recontextualization is a critical component to the process of splintering mediated and social metaphor. McKenzie states that he's reprocessed and even replaced some of the original material with this reissued disc on Korm Plastics. The material all has a gritty tape-grafted feel, so whatever is replacing the old material has the spirit and feel of the original. As with all of the Hafler Trio releases, sound samples are verboten by decree of the man behind the curtain.
It's been a while since anything from The Hafler Trio has come through our doors. So long in fact, we probably need to revisit the complex history into the Trio's work. There was never a time when The Hafler Trio was an actual trio, although the group's founders Andrew McKenzie and Chris Watson (then of Cabaret Voltaire fame and now the world's preeminent field recordist) had constructed the identity of a third member Dr. Edward Moolenbeek back in the early '80s. This Moolenbeek character was supposedly interested in the physical and psychological effects of sound upon the human populace, with an emphasis on presenting sound as an obfuscated means of communication through his research to the point of gnostic cryptography. Throughout the career of the Hafler Trio, a steady stream of interlocking and heavily encrypted set of allusions and allegories were conjured and manifested, but then all but disappeared from the public realm. Now, McKenzie (the sole pilot of the project for many years now) is offering his music solely as individual commissions to collectors who can pay a premium for his work.
Fortunately, Korm Plastics had reissued a good chunk of his back catalogue including the Hafler Trio's brilliant sound collage experiments Kill The King and Mastery Of Money. The Name Of Someone stands as the last in Korm Plastics reissue series, collecting three records that had been very difficult to find --Brainsong (1986, originally an lp on Touch), Kuklos (1988, also released through Touch), and (Antarctica) Brahma (1996, which was the accompaniment to a book whose contents are suitably elusive). We'll not belabor the conceptual agendas to each of these works, but the sounds are wholly compelling and well worth investigating. Brainsong is an oblique collage that begins with an overlapping of water field recordings sloshing against undulating drones, that are consumed within a caustic synth pattern that is sterile and bleak. Through a series of jump-cut edits, additions, and subtractions (a technique which is a signature of The Hafler Trio's work in the '80s), McKenzie offers a slow descent of tonebent drones seemingly built from the sustained wails of a female choir rendered as disjointed ghosts of a Cornelius Cardew piece of minimalism. Antarctica finds Hafler Trio in his long form compositional style of the late '90s and early '00s, structured from heavily layered filters and alien frequencies shot from other dimensions and / or other parts of the universe. One could think of Thomas Koner as someone operating in a similar field of desolate sound design and impeccable production techniques. Kuklos was also a soundtrack to a film about the graphic designer Neville Brody, and is a smear of thick grey drones and ghostly residues. It's hardly an 'ambient' record, but Kuklos is far less of the shapeshifting collage work that McKenzie had been producing around that time. All of his work comes highly recommended, even as it can be a difficult to get into... perhaps because it can be difficult to get into.
Unfortunately, McKenzie does not allow anyone to post sound samples of his work, so you'll have to take our word on it: this is brilliant.
THIS ALBUM FROM AQ FAVE HECKER, ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME, VIA KRANKY!!! Here's what we wrote about the now out of print Alien8 cd version back in 2004:
Yet another gorgeous missive from the ether, courtesy of AQ fave Tim Hecker. Hecker, along with Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz and a handful of others, crafts the kind of music we here at Aquarius think is absolutely perfect. Lost transmissions from another world. Dark ambience pregnant with the possibilities of wide eyed discovery and fleeting glimpses into the beyond. Fuzzy and scratchy and indistinct. Gorgeously haunting soundscapes crafted from the sounds often discarded by "more discerning" musicians, fuzz, amp buzz, distortion, record static, radio interference all lending the proceedings a foggy, dreamlike hue. This is the sound of our dreams. We watch other lives, and other people, move in slow motion, drifting through a staticky haze, while we are left to peer as if through a frosty window, at once safe and warm, but also wishing we could step through the looking glass and feel the warm ambient blur wash over us like a spring shower, or feel the shards of sound gather on our coat like snowflakes. Fuzzy melodies drift through the grey skies like ribbons loosed from their moorings and left to twist lazily in the breeze. Occasionally storm clouds gather, unleashing squalls of crumbling digital decay, obscuring the afternoon tranquility with a fine layer of dusty crackle. An absolutely stunning world of sound.
Extra sonic contributions from le Fly Pan Am, Christof Migone, David Bryant and Oren Ambarchi.
We weren't sure what to make of this one at first, a mix of modern electronica, and traditional African music, the story of how these two guys got together is a good one, John Wizards, aka John Withers, was living in Africa, when he met Rwandan singer Emmanuel Nzaramba, the two talked music, while Nzaramba was at work, and Withers was walking around with a guitar, they then parted company, Nzaramba losing his job and his cellphone, only to meet a year later, in a different city, at which point the two decided to work together. The results are pretty strange, but wonderful too, minus the vocals, this might be some idiosyncratic Planet Mu oddity, but the vocals root the music in the traditions of classic African folk music. The sound is a dizzying hodgepodge that aQ-ers might imagine would result from a mix of Shangaan Electro, Music From Saharan Cellphones, and some of the weirder Sublime Frequencies releases. The first two tracks deliver what sounds like a plunderphonic collage of sounds and influences, swirling calliope like melodies, twangy guitars, reverbed piano, disco-y drumming, groovy psychedelic synths, handclaps, what sounds like a looped field recording, transformed into a woozy melody, whistles, thick bass buzz, steel string guitars, wild psych jams, drum machine stutter, all of which gives way to some stripped down drums, and what must be Nzaramba talking to Withers over a strangely electrified version of African high life, then some autotuned vox, and the song unfurls as some warped modern day variation of classic African music, laced with all sorts of warbly electronics, dubbed out drum beats, mutated synths, the song stripped of all the weirdness might be too saccharine and straight, but as imagined by Withers, it becomes something super freaky, and super fun. And so the whole record goes, the songs leaping from sound to sound, style to style, groovy disco-funk, stuttery R&B, woozy slow jams, mellowed out dubstep, cheesy eighties MTV style pop, dreamy collages glitchery, and pretty much every twisted variation in between, the recording super loose and abstract, with some of the songs just stopping, allowing us to hear Withers and Nzaramba talking in the studio, before the song bursts back into action. So good, so strange, and so fun. Easily the coolest, weirdest 'world' music record we've heard in a while. Anyone into the above mentioned comparisons (Sublime Frequencies, Music From Saharan Cellphones, Shagaan Electro), should definitely check this out...
Simon from aQ faves The Heads is back with his second stellar solo opus under the name Kandodo. Once again he draws upon the rhythms and vastness of the sea and the sky to inspire the music on this album, which is a much more spacey and organic affair than the more intense fuzz freakage he indulges in UK garage psych masters The Heads. If you liked Kandodo's first one, you'll dig this too - it's again lovely and zoned-out, the tracks being pretty much entirely instrumental, composed of overdubbed, effects-laden guitar, shimming and fuzzy and droney, slowly and gently unfurling, sometimes building to a steady, krauty throb - as on the side-long epic "Swim Into The Sun", which Moon Duo fans will certainly love. The longer tracks like that are totally mesmeric and even the shorter interludes are too, before they fade out into the next.
These pieces aren't so much "songs" as they are mood-setting soundscapes, the repetitive, layered guitar parts working alone or in many cases mixed with field recordings (the sound of surf, appropriately, on both "Waves" and "Swim Into The Sun"), subtle bass pulsations, and occasional hippie hand percussion. Some voices are heard too, in a couple places, but they're buried samples, almost unintelligible, though we did figure out that the track "Grace And" incorporates an edited audio-tour of Elvis Presley's Graceland, to hypnotic effect. Odd, but there's a sort of soothing Conet-quality to it.
This radiantly glowing album is quite nice indeed and recommended; we can imagine Barn Owl fans enjoying the twang of "July 28th", we already mentioned the likes of Moon Duo, and also this has some post-rock appeal - folks into the softer side of Mogwai or Godspeed for instance might feel at home with a lot of this, though Kandodo is much more "wah wah psychedelic" in sound than yr usual post-rock.
Vinyl comes with bonus limited edition 7" with an exclusive B side, "Left My Heart In Monkey Bay" (the A side is on the cd).
One of several new tapes this week, from UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one a dizzying chunk of plunderphonia from the previously unknown to us Hanno Leichtmann, who took the last 30 or so tapes remaining from his once huge tape collection, and extracted super short snippets, reorganizing them into a dreamy bit of collaged psychedelia. Like an analog Oval, Leichtmann weaves softly undulating landscapes of softly stuttering rhythms and prismatic smears of fragmented melody, the recontextualized sounds transformed into wholly new 'songs', similar to the way repeating a single word turns that word into nonsense sound, but here that nonsense sound is deftly assembled into perfect little sonic gems. Unfinished Portrait Of Youth Today hypnotically unfurls warbly textures and woozy layers, the whole tape fantastically dreamy and playful, sun dappled and softly psychedelic.
Local label Time Released Sound keeps cranking them out, so much so that we can barely keep up. But it's well worth trying, as pretty much everything they put out ends up being fantastic, the music most certainly, but also the extremely elaborate, lovingly packaged handmade deluxe editions (more on that in a second). By now, TRS obsessives no doubt realize there is definitely a Time Released 'sound'. Lush, electronic flecked soundscapes that fuse organic instruments with less organic filigree, strings, pianos, draped over synths and computers, all woven into sprawling soundworlds that manage to be both pastoral and dreamlike, hushed and cinematic. Unsettled Beings is no different, the third album by Swedish musician Mikael Lind, who now lives and works in Iceland, and the Iceland vibe is huge throughout, with much of the record sounding like it would definitely not be out of place on a Sigur Ros record (and there IS a Sigur Ros connection by the way!).
Pointillist piano, drifting ethereal female vocals, crooned softly reverbed male vocals, swaths of processed electronics, swirling strings, dreamlike swells, hushed and hunting, but warm glowing and sun dappled, violins drifting in soft focus clouds around melancholic piano melodies, all blurred and smeared into something more dreamily psychedelic and abstract, a swirling smoldering dream-folk fused to woozy atmospheric ambience, the tracks drifting easily from proper songcraft, to free for soundscapery and back again, fans of previous TRS releases will definitely not be disappointed, and even folks new to the label, Land's Unsettled Beings is a gem, and just might be the most polished and well produced release we've heard from TRS, the sound alternatingly epic and majestic, minimal and melancholy. So fantastic. And we say this every time, but the label has outdone themselves with the packaging, which is once again totally over the top. And as always, is available in two versions, a standard version, packaged in a digipak, limited to 200 copies, and a deluxe version, which this time means a handsewn 12 page book of photos, bound in an antique book cover, each of the pages hand burnt, so the page before or after is partially visible, all of the art by Icelandic illustrator Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir, with some of the art 'fingerprinted' with volcanic ash, there's an original Polaroid print in a translucent envelope, filled with dried flowers and leaves, a printed insert, antique Icelandic stamps, and a tiny hourglass vial full of Icelandic poppy seeds! Wow!!
Local label Time Released Sound keeps cranking them out, so much so that we can barely keep up. But it's well worth trying, as pretty much everything they put out ends up being fantastic, the music most certainly, but also the extremely elaborate, lovingly packaged handmade deluxe editions (more on that in a second). By now, TRS obsessives no doubt realize there is definitely a Time Released 'sound'. Lush, electronic flecked soundscapes that fuse organic instruments with less organic filigree, strings, pianos, draped over synths and computers, all woven into sprawling soundworlds that manage to be both pastoral and dreamlike, hushed and cinematic. Unsettled Beings is no different, the third album by Swedish musician Mikael Lind, who now lives and works in Iceland, and the Iceland vibe is huge throughout, with much of the record sounding like it would definitely not be out of place on a Sigur Ros record (and there IS a Sigur Ros connection by the way!).
Pointillist piano, drifting ethereal female vocals, crooned softly reverbed male vocals, swaths of processed electronics, swirling strings, dreamlike swells, hushed and hunting, but warm glowing and sun dappled, violins drifting in soft focus clouds around melancholic piano melodies, all blurred and smeared into something more dreamily psychedelic and abstract, a swirling smoldering dream-folk fused to woozy atmospheric ambience, the tracks drifting easily from proper songcraft, to free for soundscapery and back again, fans of previous TRS releases will definitely not be disappointed, and even folks new to the label, Land's Unsettled Beings is a gem, and just might be the most polished and well produced release we've heard from TRS, the sound alternatingly epic and majestic, minimal and melancholy. So fantastic. And we say this every time, but the label has outdone themselves with the packaging, which is once again totally over the top. And as always, is available in two versions, a standard version, packaged in a digipak, limited to 200 copies, and a deluxe version, which this time means a handsewn 12 page book of photos, bound in an antique book cover, each of the pages hand burnt, so the page before or after is partially visible, all of the art by Icelandic illustrator Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir, with some of the art 'fingerprinted' with volcanic ash, there's an original Polaroid print in a translucent envelope, filled with dried flowers and leaves, a printed insert, antique Icelandic stamps, and a tiny hourglass vial full of Icelandic poppy seeds! Wow!!
A few lists back we made the oddly named duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete one of our Records Of The Week. And as we explained then, it's not just a cool weird band name. Lorelle is the woman who fronts LMTO, and her partner is in fact named The Obsolete, and together, the duo whip up a head, druggy brew of darkly psychedelic garage-kraut mesmer, and actually, when we made Corruptible Faces our Record Of The Week, it easily could have been this record instead, as we discovered both albums at the same time, and they feel sonically like two parts of a bigger whole, which means, any/every one who dug Corruptible Faces, is gonna want this one too, the same mix of murky, motorik mesmer and psychedelic garage groove. The opener gets all Stooges by way of Spacemen 3 by way of Moon Duo, fuzzed out riff, loping, minimal rhythm, processed vocals, wheezing organ, everything wreathed in delay and echo, washed out and druggily woozy, totally blissed out zoner-groove garage psych radness for sure. The sound soon morphs into something much more stripped down and acoustic, but no less droned out and druggy, a hazy sprawl of steel string strum, and acoustic percussion, all tangled up beneath whirring organs, and echo drenched, breathy vocals, the whole thing blossoming into something a but more lush and layered, the vibe sorta Suicide via Bob Dylan, but druggier and garagier if that makes any sense, but before you know it, the sound shifts again, and we're in total psychedelic trance mode, buzzing drones, and reverby female vocals, swirling FX, languorous ruffs and abstract percussion, all drifting in a cloud of sonic fug, and all tethered to a simple, pulsating groove, it's the sorta song that most bands would stretch out for 10 or 20 minutes, but here it's less than 4, LMTO restlessly moving on to yet another subtle variant of their dreamy druggy sound, this time it's all sixties soft focus shimmer, classic girl group sound stripped down to a haunting bit of skeletal drift, before the organs swoop to the fore, wrapped in strange swirling FX and slowly drifting swaths of gauzy shimmer, which eventually blossoms into some sweetly melodic fuzz bass garage rock girl pop, and so it goes.
Lorelle and her partner The Obsolete have a knack for weaving disparate short songs into a lush, interconnected whole, a gorgeous, gloriously psychedelic songsuite that's druggy and dreamy, hazy and hypnotic, and like Corruptible Faces, is one of our new favorites...
We reviewed the self-titled demo from this Australian duo a while back, and were immediately smitten by their twisted take on black metal, which was in fact way less metal, and more a sort of shoegazey minimal post punk noise pop, that just so happened to contain some black metal elements, but whatever you call it, we dug it like crazy. That whole demo is included here as secret hidden bonus tracks, we'll include the review of that demo below, but first, the new Loss Of Self record, Twelve Minutes, which thankfully clocks in at nearly seven minutes more than that! No sprawling epics, no 30 minute megajams, nope. Ultimately, even though they're on Flenser, and are constantly described as a black metal band, they are ultimately really just a weird blackened pop band, so under 3 minute song lengths are ideal. Opener "Paradise Overgrown" is pretty much the perfect sonic representation of what these guys do, clan indie guitar jangle, soon joined by a sort-of-blastbeat, raspy vokills too, but the music, super melodic, fuzzy and shoegazey, minus those vox, this would be some seriously blissed out pop, even with the blast beats, and then midsong, when it slows down and gets even more pretty and melodic, it really is only those vokills that keep this from being pure pop. "Isolt" strives to be more black, but purposely foils that plan, adding deep dramatic clean vocals, and thick swaths of fuzzy guitar shimmer, all wrapped around more grim vox and another blast beat, but this song too, near the end this time, transforms into a weird almost new wave sounding post punk. The title track too, soaring and super melodic, total fuzzy dream pop, with weird mathy drums, and a cool super melodic bassline, this track IS peppered with some actual black buzz blasts, but they're surrounded on all sides by some seriously sun dappled shoegaze poppiness. And so it goes, the second half of the record a push and pull between melodic poppiness and blackened buzz and blast, to be fair, there are more moments on the second half that approach proper grimnity, but even then, the sound can never seem to shrug off that poppiness, although we're guessing they're not trying that hard anyway. Love this stuff, and so psyched that the insanely limited cd-r demo is included here too. Here's what we had to say about that one:
The first demo track is a sort of gloomy, dirgey creep, at least in the beginning, all chiming guitars, and woozy, moody atmospheres, sinewy basslines and crumbling distorted chords, all hanging weightless in a field of what feels and sounds like classic shoegaze, the drums super distorted and blown out, the vibe laid back and languorous, at least until the last 45 seconds (the song's only 2 minutes long after all), where the song explodes into a dense tangled blast of blackened math metal, all shrieked vokills, pounding drums, squiggly psychedelic guitars, and swirling hazy atmospheres. The second track is more of the same, starting off galloping furiously, but the sounds washed out and gauzy, yeah, there are vokills here too, but the music is downright dreamy, sans the vocals, this would be pure shoegaze pop, lots of jangle and chiming chords, which is precisely what you can expect on track three too, although everything is slowed way down, the drums a swinging shuffle, the guitars woozy and bleary, everything sun dappled and prismatic, the sound slowly building to a epic, majestic, swirling post rock style crescendo, before finishing off with a final blast of pounding black shoegaze blissout.
Among Ethiopian Jazz aficionados, Hailu Mergia may not have as big of a name as Mulutu Astatke or Mahmoud Ahmed, but this 1985 recording of traditional Ethiopian jazz pieces played on analog synth, piano and accordion could of easily (and SHOULD OF, in our minds) been part of the great Ethiopiques series. That we come late to the pleasures of being wowed by Mergia's dexterous multi-instrumental talents, only tells us that there are many more riches of African jazz are out there waiting to be discovered.
Mergia cut his teeth with The Walliaa Band, the legendary group founded by Mulatu Astake, and has backed many of Ethiopia's greatest bandleaders (the band still performs to this day at the Addis Ababa Hilton). But it's this solo excursion, played in true one-man-band style that takes the sensual loping rhythms of ethiojazz into realms so warm and personal and utterly unique. Recommended!
This 4 track ep is unfortunately out of print, just a few weeks after getting released into the world. While this will undoubtedly cause consternation for many, the few who will be fortunate enough to grab this record will have a treasure in their hands. Mountains are the NYC duo of Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, both of whom have a couple of solo recordings with Holtkamp's Field Studies album on Type being the most recent. The A side tracks most clearly reflect where Holtkamp took his solo work, with shimmering acoustic guitars spiralling in tricked out electronics that buzz, sing, chime, and fizzle into a minimalist patter of hallowed drone set against their elliptical finger picking. Very nice. But the B side pieces are where Mountains really shine. These two tracks had originally appeared on some micro-edition 3" cd-r thing that probably even disappeared even faster than this 12" will. Here, their guitars slowburn with the constant roar of post-shoegazing luminescence, set languid with a melachonic air. Belong would be a close reference, but there's a lot more sun-flecked shimmer than you get from Belong's narcotic wash. It's beautiful stuff, no matter how you look at it. Limited to 500, but these are the last copies we'll ever get...
Strange Heaven, the debut from San Diego garage poppers Mrs Magician, was and actually still is one of our favorite records of the last few years, played to death then and now, overflowing with fuzzed out surf-garage jangle pop gems, with some of THEE best songs we've heard in ages. In fact, just writing the first few sentences of this review, has a bunch of those songs rushing back in filling our head with a swirl of crazy catchy hooks and jangly fuzzy garage rock bliss. Needless to say, after about the millionth listen, we started hankering for more, for a new record, for some new songs, there was a Record Store Day split 7", and that song immediately joined the rest of Strange Heaven on heavy rotation, and now finally, there's THIS. Which is technically not a new record, but it is, a whole new collection of songs, new to us at least. All the B-sides, and demos, and unreleased tracks that never made it on any records proper, but which all sound like they COULD have. In fact, if the quality of the tracks MM did NOT use is any indication, we can only imagine how great record number two is gonna be. But until then we have B sides, which is essentially like Strange Heaven part two. A bit more lo-fi and unpolished, but the songs themselves are crazy catchy, and honestly, so goddamn great. Anyone and everyone who bought Strange Heaven, you are gonna want this one too for sure. And while if given the choice of an introduction to Mrs. Magician, we might suggest Strange Heaven, the more we listen to B Sides, we're pretty sure it would work just as well. Destined to be our most played record, at least until the next proper full length comes out. We can not wait!
Nagamatzu was the duo of Steven Jarvis and Andrew Lagowski, the latter going on to collaborate with Lustmord on a few projects, to pen some rather muscular techno tracks in the early '90s under his own name, and engineer the exceptional sci-fi bleakness of his S.E.T.I. and Legion records. A couple years back, Dark Entries re-mastered and reissued the second Nagamatzu cassette; and here, they've given the same treatment to the first, originally self-released in 1983. Nagamatzu's skeletal post-punk developed through bass, electronics, and the occasional voice, all inspired by a mutual appreciation of Clock DVA, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, and OMD. Yes, that's a very good place for anybody to start. The liner notes sport a handful of reviews from back in the day, pointing out the comparisons of Nagamatzu to The Cocteau Twins. In 1983, this comparison would have been quite apt as the Twins contemporary album Garlands was a bleak affair, pushing the bass and mechanical rhythms to the foreground with none of the ethereal dream-pop that became their signature. But back to the matter at hand, Nagamatzu's electronics for skittering arpeggiations, clockwork drum programming, and string-pad sustained synths were countered by the foregrounded basslines from Jarvis, whose haircut was not the only thing he borrowed from Simon Gallup. Where the latter Nagamatzu work filled in the blanks with cut-up collages of radio broadcasts and slasher film screams, Shatter Days is darkly hollowed out. The original tape was just 5 tracks, and Dark Entries has fleshed it out into a full album with songs from compilations and unreleased tracks from the same period, all of which hold up very well under historical scrutiny. Another gem from Dark Entries.
Now also reissued on vinyl!!!! The second and final album of blackened kosmische drone-synth drift from this mysterious one man band...
Well maybe not THAT mysterious, since Neptune Towers was in fact the alter ego of hilariously and hyper opinionated black metal mouthpiece Fenriz, one half of black metal legends Darkthrone, which is initially how we discovered Neptune Towers, Caravans To Empire Algol, the first album being the first in a planned high concept trilogy. But the music of Neptune Towers was about as far removed from the black buzz of Darkthrone as can be, instead, Fenriz in his NT guise trafficked in blissed out, kosmische, psychedelic synthscapery a la Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze, which considering the current onslaught of retro-synth outfits, proves Fenriz quite prescient back in the day. And thus, for ANYONE into all the modern day practitioners of sci-fi synthwave psychedelia. Zombi, Umberto, Majeure, Cloudland Canyon, M. Geddes Gengras, Gatekeeper, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice, Bitchin Bajas, etc., Neptune Towers is definitely worth checking out. But be warned, it's of a much darker strain than a lot of that stuff, gritty and low fidelity, but still impossibly spacious and epic. Black billows of spectral synth swirl around grinding cascades of low end buzz, everything swaddled in clouds of sci-fi squiggle and driven by dense echo drenched pulsations.
Like his Caravans debut, Transmissions is divided into two epic halves, the two lengthy tracks that make up Transmissions seeming to ooze from the darkest reaches of the galaxy, spectral sonic artifacts captured by arcane machinery in some abandoned bunker, the music pouring forth from the old dusty speakers, captured on those giant spinning tape reels, played back to a room full of baffled scientists, given this fleeting glimpse into some other world, in some far away galaxy, darkly cinematic, gritty and grimy, very rough around the edges, lush layers of gristly squelch, that suddenly explode into dizzying swirls of prismatic shimmer, all glistening and glimmering and downright new agey, before being sucked back down into the roiling blackened space-synth morass, only to emerge seconds later, transformed into a weirdly motorik pulsing groove, which again, soon dissipates leaving just shadows and ghostly melodic traces.
The sound throughout is in constant, glorious flux, hazy cosmic percolations, fractured, fragmented rhythms, swirling shimmering melodies, long droned out sprawls pocked with lazer beam blorp and space-sonar pings, the sound most definitely drifting into Goblin / John Carpenter territory here and there, with haunting little melodic refrains, that resurface, like the theme from some imaginary seventies sci-fi art film, or the perfect music for some blackened planetarium show.
This reissue tacks on four bonus tracks, excerpts from the aborted third part of the trilogy, 1994's Space Lab, four short sonic fragments that continue on right from where Transmissions fades out, continuing further into the reaches of the cosmos, lush, chordal swirls, arpeggiated melodies, all drifting through wide open expanses of deep black thrum, drifting somnambulently from swoonsome softly shimmering blackened cosmic-drone, to blissfully brooding synth-psych mesmer.
Latest from these NY noise rockers, and like their last record, The Horror, the awesomely titled Imps Of Perversion is another killer collection of dark, rhythmic noisiness. In our review of the The Horror, we compared these guys to everything from Aussie knuckle draggers Lubricated Goat, to fellow NY noiserockers The Men, imagining then that they would be way more at home on AmRep circa '95, and all of that definitely still applies. Some things have changed though, Imps is not nearly as raw and lo-fi, less noisy too, and the Cop Shoot Cop style junkyard percussion that peppered the Horror seems to have been ditched too, but all a fair trade off for a sound that's much more confident, better songs, better production, and while some of the raw energy might be missing, this is still and awesomely fierce and broodingly heavy and noisy blast of gloomy noise rock swagger. And there's plenty of sonic weirdness going on as well, between the blasts of organ driven stomp and pounding downtuned crush, there are spaced out swaths of FX heavy psychedelia, sounding a bit like some sort of Hawkwind / Clockcleaner hybrid, or the super blown out Pussy Galore-ish intro to "Population Control", that sounds like it was recorded on a handheld tape player, the drum set sounding like a pile of rusty old trash cans, when the sound suddenly attains high fidelity, the song now a drum machine driven noise rock new wave, that almost sounds like a super charged alien Devo. There's the synth heavy "Do The Anglerfish", which pairs some punk swagger and stomp, with some psychedelic synthwave, or the creepy slo-mo FX drenched blooz jangle of closer "Riding Shotgun", and hell, even the less far out songs are peppered with random weirdness, all of which would be pointless if the songs didn't kill, but they do, and they'll end up getting lodged in your head like crazy, every twisted little blurt, just give "Lights Out" a listen and see if you don't find yourself wanting to listen to it over and over, or even humming it to yourself days later...
The latest project from Dom Fernow, of noiseniks Prurient, and more recently a handful of various electronic/techno projects (Bronze Age, Christian Cosmos, Vatican Shadow) comes in the form of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, which finds Fernow exploring a murky sort of avant new age, equal parts Chain Reaction style Heroin House and ultra minimal digidub, the A side a sprawl of moody industrial murk, a skeletal four on the floor pulse, buried in the mix, over a backdrop of woozy chordal swells and looped rainfall, a blurry hazy wash of staticky shimmer, that enshrouds the barely there rhythmic pulsations.
The B side is even more abstract, spare and spaced out, a muddy expanse of processed field recordings, animal calls, birdsong, the distant hiss of a waterfall, all spaced out around deep low end thrums, and a hushed buried rhythm, the sound of dripping water, looped into another abstract rhythm, the sound a deep, dark blackened slab of shadowy new age ambience, tethered to the skeletal remains of some damaged and decayed techno.
Doom. Vinyl. Die Healing. Need we go on?? Doom metal fans, probably all you need to know is that this album by LA godfathers of doom Saint Vitus, never before on vinyl, and long out of print on cd, is now here. However, we will go on...
Nobody could have guessed it back in 1995, when this album was first released, but 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for ol' Saint Vitus. Not just one reunion show, but an extensive, well-attended tour! Vinyl reissues of their SST era records (we've got some in stock, getting more soon)! And this, a lovingly crafted vinyl version (first time on wax!!) for what was their 7th and final full-length studio album before calling it quits! We also hear rumors of a NEW album being made. However, as much as we'll be excited to hear it, there's no way they can top THIS.
While it might have been their final record, a last hurrah, hardly noticed by an uncaring world, it was also one of their best ever. For one thing, it marked the brief return of their original and best vocalist, the amazing Scott Reagers. Apologies to Wino, who's fronting the band for their current reunion... Some will differ, Wino certainly has his fans, we like him a lot too, Born Too Late and Mournful Cries are great albums, but let's just say there's no other singer quite like Scotty Reagers. Vitus was lucky to have had him in the first place, and lucky to have had him back for this. His dramatic and dynamic delivery, gloomy and ghoulish, yet classic castle-metal through and through, keeps us spellbound. Guitarist Dave Chandler steps up with some great sludgy slo-mo Sabbathy riffs (of course) and wah wah'd out, psychedelic punk soloing (of course). The atmosphere is sooooo despairing. Opener "Dark World", later covered by Reverend Bizarre, is a classic, what a riff! But that's just the beginning... "One Mind", "Let The End Begin", "The Sloth", "Return Of The Zombie", heck all the tracks are awesome, any Vitus fan should agree. The entire album harks back to the feeling of their first few records in the mid '80s, really as if Reagers had never left the band. And again his singing is crucial here, over the top wailing with a wretched, grotesque edge to it. Emotive and eccentric. Perfect for the plodding, fuzz-filled creepy-crawls that fill this pestilent platter. He might be singing about sloths and zombies (he IS singing about sloths and zombies) but damn does it sound sincere and MEANINGFUL - ignore him at your peril. Drop the needle on this and learn what it is to be doomed!!
While we should also list the abovementioned SST reissues, many of them must-haves too, this seemed even more exciting 'cause so few folks ever got the chance to get it, the cds were imports and it was one of the last releases on the label (Hellhound) before it folded. And like we said, there never ever was vinyl. Now there is, and fairly deluxe vinyl at that, complete with embossing on the cover for the Vitus logo. And yeah, of course it's limited... even if it wasn't, though, you gotta get it, we'd just be telling you to buy two of 'em!!
We've been trying to get the full length from these Virginia biker doom garage punks for ages now with no luck. So we were super psyched when this new single popped up, featuring Satans Satyrs teamed up with aQ pals Ohmwar. For those new to SS, the opening track is about all you need to know, starting out with a Black Flag cover, transformed into a massive blast of churning, metallic psychedelic biker doom, which quickly explodes into some snarly, swaggery metalpunk, all gristly guitars, and yowled vox, feedback galore, loose, wild and freaked out big time. The second track on the SS side is weirdly poppy, lots of jangle, almost sounding like a Kids In The Hall style theme song to some obscure cult TV show, minus the crazed tangle of blown out psych guitar squiggle, which is AMAZING. Man, we need to get that full length.
Ohmwar make a good match for SS, kicking out the classic post punk noise rock, with some fierce glass gargling vocals over some surprisingly melodic guitar lines, and sampled thunder and rain, minus the vocals, the sound would be more like Husker Du or the Nils, albeit, with a slightly more metalpunk bent, but the vox transform in into something way more aggro. The second track finds Ohmwar tackling their own Black Flag cover, "Nervous Breakdown" this time, given a sort of hyperkinetic punk pop makeover, with the cool addition of wild squiggly guitar shred and some awesomely mush mouthed vocals...
Siltbreeze continues to reissue some of our favorite classic underground New Zealand rarities, a while back there was the amazing Pin Group reissue, and now we have this, the complete recorded works of Scorched Earth Policy, who existed for 2 or 3 years in the mid eighties, and only ever recorded two 12"s for the legendary Flying Nun label, both of which are collected here. And while you might not know Scorched Earth Policy, you no doubt know some of the bands the various members also did time in: Vacuum, Pin Group, Terminals, Max Block, Renderers and a bunch more. The sound of Scorched Earth Policy was a sort of post punk flecked psychedelic garage rock, lots of low slung basslines, simple stripped down drumming, whirring organs, jagged angular riffage and fuzzed out jangle, boy/girl vocals, even some violin. The core 'sound' of SEP will definitely be familiar to fans of Flying Nun and NZ rock of the time, and everybody who digs the Bats and the Chills and the 3D's, the Verlaines, Snapper, etc, will probably dig these guys too (if they don't already) but even within that recognizable sound, the band definitely did their own thing, whether it was wild, loose punky jangle, or woozy, creepy almost country (foreshadowing the Renderers for sure), fuzzy playful poppiness, or brooding post punk, haunting organ driven balladry (which reminds us of Peter Jefferies as well!), or swaggery noise rock crunch. So good!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Includes a download coupon as well!!
It's been a while since we've heard from this Canadian outfit, purveyors of minimal kraut-drone drift and abstract psychedelic ambience. We Described their sound as being a bit like "Flying Saucer Attack collaborating with Andrew Chalk", which still most definitely applies, we'd also probably compare them to The Caretaker and maybe even Tim Hecker, the two tracks here longform sprawls of slowmotion chordal swells, and washed out faded dreamscapery, the sounds a hazy, crystalline shimmer, the A side drifting blissfully along, through clouds of prismatic thrum, before settling into something a bit darker, the sounds muted and woozy, buried melodies drifting lazily beneath warbly loops and barely there reverbed percussion, a minimal abstract dub, that's more a buried field of crackles and hushed pulsations that a proper rhythm, the sound slowly transforming into something sun dappled and lovely, the second half of the song playing out like some lost bit of chamber music, slowly spinning on an old Victrola, laced with strange bits of percussion, and draped in a gauzey haze. The B side is even more washed out and abstract, a dark, brooding new age drift, all slow shifting slabs of low end rumble, and moaning distant melodies, the first few minutes almost sounding like some record being played bask super slowly, but then the sound explodes into an epic, majestic drone, moving and emotional, roiling minor key melodies just below the surface, imbuing the static sound with a dark emotional heft, all before the sound seems to loop in on itself, building a final stretch of looped tension, and woozy layered mesmer.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!!
It's another tall, colorful new issue of this vintage (or sounds like vintage) rock/pop/folk/psych magazine from the UK.
"Great American pop architect" Harry Nilsson is on the cover (another chance to find out why some folks are so obsessed). Other cool cats in this ish include: Swamp Dogg, Dave Davies of The Kinks, Captain Beefheart, Gene Clark, Billy Childish (& Thee Mighty Caesars)... There's a label profile of one of our faves, the Omni Recording Corporation, there's a sixties garage band from Bombay, India called The Combustibles, there's an appreciation of the cover art of Cauldron by 50 Foot Hose. And plenty more from fuzz monsters Morgen to stoner rockers Dead Meadow. Lots of reviews too of course.
We've been flipping out over all the Chinese indie rock that's been coming our way recently, including a killer slab of shoegaze noise pop from a group called Boyz & Girl, which we reviewed a while back, and maybe unsurprisingly is made up of several boyz and one girl. Well, that one girl also plays in this group, Skip Skip Ben Ben, and also maybe not so surprisingly, the sound of SSBB is not that far removed from B&G, channeling nineties indie rock, shoegaze pop, noise rock, even some twee pop into something that melds big fuzzy guitar, classic jangly shimmer, blissed out shoegaze, and dreamy ethereal female vox. Where B&G seemed to fuse the Pixies and Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, SSBB is more washed out and dreamy, the sound more moody and minimal, bass driven, with the vocals buried in the mix, the whole thing druggy and hypnotic, some songs, like opener "Last Night" are super rocking, driving and propulsive, while others, like "La' Lasta" are hazy and hushed and darkly dreampoppy, which tends to be the vibe of most of the record, minus some super kinetic rockers ("Walkmen"), but even then, the vibe is minor key and a bit wistful. Sometimes SSBB sound like a female fronted Crystal Stilts, other times like a more druggy and dour Dum Dum Girls, and at others like a heavier, broodier Beach House. But we find ourselves digging it as much, if not more than that Boyz & Girl record, which we loved! Obviously WAY recommended!
Housed in a super striking oversized full color jacket!
Weird. And wyrd. Way back in 2005 we started writing a review of this, but then something happened. Something spooky, it seems. The review was never finished, all the discs got set aside, it's like the Mary Celeste or something. But, we just found the stash of discs and since it's still a cool album, why not finally list it now? We've also knocked a few bucks off the price in order to further entice, and once they're gone, they're gone.
Here's what we started to say about it eight years ago, completed today:
This four-woman band is probably so sick of being called "witchy," but then again maybe not because they named their band Spires That In The Sunset Rise, didn't they? And they really do get into a cauldron bubble, bubble toil and trouble kind of vibe, in the vocal department especially. Female chant and cries and singing and moaning. Some more gothy post-punk vox too, and deeper warlock tones as well, hushed singing over creepy acoustic doom-folk strum and other haunting, droning, rhythmic textures. Instrumentation includes autoharp, bowed banjo, harmonium, cello, drums, bells, mibira, zither, electric guitar, slide, drums, and more, though the intertwining witchy voices are really what puts this modern day pagan folk gem over the top. It's all very Wicker Man, and really quite Comus-y, just like we said about their 2004 self-titled debut, it's both disturbing and dreamy.
Glad these remateralized from wherever they'd been mysteriously hidden all these years!
After several awesome tapes on local black metal tape label Brotherhood Of Light, comes the debut full length cd (don't worry, it's also available on cassette!) from this Bay Area one man band (run by the guy who also heads BoL), and continues on Sunchariot's blackened path, mixing grim black buzz, with blissed out kosmische ambience, infusing raw primitive blackness with washed out shoegaze-y ambience. Right from the go, the sound is all blurred swaths of smeared guitar buzz, and arcing melancholic melodies, and like much of this music, sans the vocals, we're getting into some seriously downright pretty sonic territory, the harsh howled rasps, really the only thing keeping the opening track from drifting into full on blackened bliss out mode. But Warrior Of The Winds is super diverse, delivering super raw pounding black metal grimnity ("Bald Eagles Of Resistance"), alongside mystical avant folk, all echo drenched and mysterious ("Flying Wheel With Lights"), leading into sprawling tranced out black drones, where buzzing riffage is transformed into huge swells of crumbling black riff-shimmer and drumless near-dreaminess ("Sunwheel Of Life Shines White In The Darkest Days"). Some tracks start out hazy and woozily washed out, all clean vocals and warble guitar strum, only to splinter into something equally dreamy, but way more black and buzzy ("The Wood Spirit's Path"), while others unwind gorgeous psychedelic drifts of smoldering spidery distortion drenched melodies over mournful synth shimmer, all meditative and hauntingly tranquil. And in between all of these are blown out blasts of grim black buzz, all woven into a pretty stellar batch of truly transcendental blackness.
Cool bald eagle cover art too!
The latest from this local black metal / black ambient outfit is part three in an unofficial trilogy of releases, and captures the band in their brief tenure as a four piece, complete with live drummer (they're back to a trio, now drum machine driven), although even live drummer-ed, they group's overall M.O. remains the same, crafting gorgeously lush expanses of grim psychedelic black ambience, and face melting blasts of noise drenched black buzz, that black buzz given a bit more heft here with the live drums. But unlike on past record, where the atmospheric intro would lead to an explosive blast of blackness, the four songs here are each self contained, and display some of the most experimental work from the band yet. Opener "Lastness", is a creepy, organ driven swirl of blackened shimmer and strange demonic vocalizations, the main melody looped maniacally and played on what sounds like an old children's organ, that melody buried under layers of grit and grime, and a chorus of ghostly voices, the whole thing gradually blissing out into a strange bit of abstract drift, processed vox and minimal percussion. Which leads directly into "Of Emanation", which finds SH making a noisy black mess, the live drums blown out, the vocals even more blown out, everything wrapped in thick sheets of in-the-red guitar buzz, the whole track laced with some twisted/warped production, the whole sound becoming muted and murky for a few seconds only to explode again moments later, stretches of almost white noise static, the various instruments drifting in and out, just drums and noise one second, just guitar the next, everything cranked to almost Merzbow-ic proportions the next.
"Dhumavatis Hunger" is all power electronics gristle, underpinned by deep Teutonic rumbles, and wreathed in clouds of swirling static, and blasts of distorted crunch, extremely noisy, with some surprising melodies surfacing beneath all that chaotic noise, the sounds coalescing into something weirdly songlike, albeit still doused in blown out distorted crumble, an epic and majestic slab of blacknoise, that eventually reveals some insectoid guitar buzz lurking beneath the surface, everything gradually getting lost in one final squall of speaker shredding sonic howl. And finally, "Dakhma", begins as a hushed drift, gradually gaining momentum (and volume), but instead of bursting into black metal buzz, the sounds seem to soar, a slow build to something ominously epic, a sort of grim black Godspeed, darkly and harrowingly lovely, building to a seriously noisy coda, before once again fading out, leaving a sky full of blackened sonic contrails.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Packaged in super swank full color jackets, printed in metallic ink, and including a full color printed insert.
Another killer tape from one of our favorite cassette labels (along with two others on this week's list), The Tapeworm, this one right up our alley for sure, a collection of minimal electronic music, a sort of mutant dark abstract techno, all created from an arsenal of "crippled tape machines", used to transform recordings of tape hiss, broken radios, a defective TV set from the fifties, some sine wave generators, and no doubt lots of other other cool junk, into a pulsing, pulsating array of skeletal sonic skitter. An army of 24 damaged reel to reel tape players all creating a hauntingly spare sprawl of weirdly psychedelic house music, the sort of lo-fi, industrial tinged ultra minimal techno that will definitely hit the spot for fans of Silent Servant, Sandwell District, Shed, Terrence Dixon as well as Porter Ricks and other Chain Reaction outfits. Moody, murky, primitive and raw, but still darkly groovy, tranced out and hypnotic.
From whatever gnarly realm they inhabit, Vasaeleth have crawled forth (or maybe they've learnt to walk, but they ought to crawl - to make an H.P. Lovecraft reference we're sure they'd appreciate), to bring us this insalubrious ep, following up their 2010 debut full-length Crypt Born And Tethered To Ruin. While we had expected another full-length, this is actually just as effective at providing a sonic gateway to festering, sick cosmic scenes (a la the cover art, once again by Antichrist Kramer). With just five songs here, about 18 minutes, Vasaeleth don't hold back, taking a crushing, chaotic approach to their blackened, doomed-out metal of death. All uproarious darkness, indeed! Rolling and rumbling, strangely energetic and even almost upbeat a lot of the time, this sounds like the Cookie Monster getting a good workout - we can see him doing jumping jacks to this, grunting along as the drums beat and blast, and guitars howl and harmonically squeal. Often slashing for the throat, but sometimes slowing into sludgy torpor, the riffage here is perfectly putrid, as are the vokills. Once again, Vasaeleth prove themselves to be one of the most potent and original of the many would-be modern incarnations of old Incantation vying for today's underground doomdeath throne.
