Just found a very, very small stash in the back of the store of this we think now out of print release, which we reviewed way back on list #193, so let's list it again, and put it on sale too while they last (it was $14.98 before)...
This may not be the best Venetian Snares record, a brief 25 minutes (6 tracks) of Aaron Funk's immediately recognizable spastic cut and paste, drill and bass madness, but it's quite possibly the most striking, with some depraved and amazing Trevor Brown artwork (and supposedly banned, as the artwork is only fully revealed on the inside). You know, the usual TB business: naked young Japanese girl, toys, lollipops, dildos, etc. That said, this is definitely a decent slab of short attention span, anti-dancefloor splattery buzz, and not only will Venetian Snares' completists want to snap this up, so will you Trevor Brown obsessives.
One of two reissues of NZ obscurities on this week's list. Elsewhere is the complete recorded works of Scorched Earth Policy (featuring members of Pin Group, Terminals, Renderers, Vacuum), and then there's this, originally released in 1983 on Flying Nun, the lone self titled lp from the Victor Dimisich Band, and while you might expect there to be a Victor Dimisich in the band, like Scorched Earth Policy, VDB is in fact fronted by NZ scene staple Peter Stapleton who played in Pin Group, Vacuum and Terminals, and the sound of those groups definitely informs the brooding minimalism of the Victor Dimisich Band, Stapleton's deep dramatic croon somewhere between Roky Erickson and Scott Walker, the music a sort of gloomy psychedelia, a little garage rock, a little classic balladry, a little drugged out Morricone style twang, and yeah, a little distorted NZ noise rock, but overall, it's a darkly dramatic affair, Stapleton's vocals the driving force, while the band wove lush gothic sonic backdrops, lots of organ warble, Velvets-y jangle, the whole thing moody and minimal, with many of the tracks super stripped down, while others blossom into near orchestral arrangements, while still others splinter into atonal post punk, and a few others get downright noisy. Flying Nun obsessives who don't already have this will flip for sure. And any/everyone who dug that Pin Group reissue, this will likely be right up your alley!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Includes a download code!!
Dust off the fine china and pop open that economy sized barrel of cow's blood you've been saving for a special occasion, because there's a strange nauseating scent arising from the gloomy forests of Uppsala, and it can only mean one thing� Watain have returned! That's right, it's been a full three years since last these odoriferous Swedes disgraced us with their presence, and The Wild Hunt shows them further honing their razor sharp brand of accessibly grandiose black metal. Watain aren't reinventing the wheel here, simply smoothing it out, and that's by no means meant as an insult. In fact, its Watain's greatest strength. It's not until you pop The Wild Hunt into your stereo that you realize just how refreshing it is to hear a band playing old fashioned melodic black metal without any frills or gimmicky genre tags, and playing it really well to boot. There's nothing "post" about this, nothing avant garde, nothing "shoegaze". There's no drum machines. It wasn't recorded on a 4 track in someone's bedroom. There are just tons of well produced, catchy tunes. Fist pumping blackened thrash riffs grind away under Erik Danielsson's commanding authoritative vocals. Frantic manic guitar leads swirl on top of punishing double bass, recalling Slayer's glory days. There's a strong lineage of Swedish extreme metal coursing through Watain's music too. The mournful yet furious melodic sense of golden age Swedish black metal bands like Dawn and especially Dissection is clearly present, while elsewhere (mostly notably on the epically plodding "They Rode On") Viking era Bathory gets a look-in. There's even some Quorthorn-esque clean singing on that track! The album is cold, calculated and pristine in a similar way to latter day Satyricon or Immortal. The band sounds like a tightly wound killing machine. Nowhere is there a moment of hesitation or remorse. And like those aforementioned bands it's infinitely accessible, but without giving into the saccharine gothic impulses of other mainstream black metal bands like Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth. Sure, there are moments of slight experimentation: there's a bit of ballady clean singing like we said before (Allan here thinks they've been listening to R.E.M. or something), some more ambient clean guitar passages, even a bit of classical guitar! But for the most part it's flawlessly played, mercilessly executed metal through and through. And would you have it any other way??
Much better than Zola Jesus' recent rebranding of old songs with a string quartet, is Chelsea Wolfe's Pain Is Beauty. These two records have emerged at about the same time, at summer's end of 2013, and these two personalities seem to share the headlines of whatever glossy blogspottumblffeedtweeterbirdpitchfulking thing you might frequent. Yeah, the goth subcultures have long enabled their ice queens to emerge as fashion icons of a cold hedonism and sexually charged detachment, all the while looking fantastic in smeared coal-eyed make-up and frost-white skin. For now, it's these two ladies who are holding court in the land of the gloomy; but when it comes to delivering the art, Chelsea Wolfe has stepped up her game on Pain Is Beauty, easily bettering Zola Jesus' tepid stringed album and producing what is probably the best album of her young career. Her last album of acoustically driven songs - Unknown Rooms - showcased her songwriting chops and an elegant quivering falsetto that wrapped around her plaintive death-folk ballads. In fleshing out these songs with drums, bass, electronics, and yes some strings, Wolfe's songs all amass into a delicious album of moody witchiness and haughty debauchery, while retaining the magickal aura of her unhinged apocalyptic howl that manifested out of some arcane blood ritual. The use of electronics on the album is particularly striking, to the point where we have begun to hope for a full album with just purely electronic minimal wave arrangements. The opening number "Feral Love" is engineered upon a hammering blastbeat although the volume is dialed down beneath the infernal guitar noises and her bleak siren song. "The Warden" is another electronic track that hypnotically cycles through chorale vocals, a taut dulcimer riff, and sparkle-clad rhythms. Yeah, it's brighter than anything else she's done, but there's plenty of doomified plod, bad-ass villain vibes, and ravenously empty folk tunes that haunt the rest of the album. Time to break out the black nail polish again.
We dug the second volume of Nate Young's Regression series (Stay Asleep, on NNA), but volume three is even better, taking the zombified beats and creepy plodding of that record and pulling it apart into something even more abstract, transforming it into some sort of hauntological musique concrete, which so impressed the dudes from Demdike Stare, that not only did they release it on their label, but they also contributed their own track / remix. And in fact, when listening to the record all the way through, Demdike's track is almost indistinguishable from Young's, the whole of Regression Volume 3 in keeping with Demdike's idiosyncratic approach to soundscaping, albeit filtered through Young's Wolf Eyes style junkyard aesthetic. And in some ways, this does bear some similarities to our favorite Wolf Eyes records, but here Young is using some of those sounds, as well as a whole bunch of new ones, to craft a seriously bizarre alien sound world. Minimal percussion forms the basis of most of the record, creating a sort-of-electronica, but super slow, woozy and stumbling, some tracks laced with ominous synths, giving the the feel of more recent Carpenter/Goblin worshippers, but something altogether more fucked and fractured, while throughout, bursts of static, fields of hiss and thrum, squiggles or radio interference, damaged FX, all get tangled into the spare and spacious mix, of what is in some ways a noise record, but a surprisingly lovely, textured and nuanced one, some tracks sound like field recordings, reminding us of the Conet Project, or the S.E.T.I. recordings, others are pure power electronics, gouts of buzz streaked with high end squiggles, grinding low end peppered with caustic pulsations, and still others are murky plods, wreathed in clouds of shimmering effects, and driven by thick swells of deep rib cage rattling rumbles. In some ways, this is a perfect companion for the recent Will Over Matter record we made Record Of The Week, a similarly twisted collection of outsider electronic minimalism, but where WoM was an exercise in longform tones and caustic dronology, Regression Volume 3 is in some ways much more nuanced, with almost proper songs, some surprisingly melodic moments, with much of the record classifiable as actually being lovely, which is definitely not a descriptor that gets hauled out very often for Young and his Wolf Eyes compatriots.
A fantastic, and fantastically abstract collection of hauntological minimal outsider electronic soundscapery, that we have been listening to like crazy! Packaged in a gorgeous gatefold jacket, the vinyl lps pressed on two different colored vinyl, one clear, one black.
