If they weren't from Japan, we'd have a lot of trouble with an album entitled Doobie Wonderland (not to mention a song called "Do You Remember Doobie Wonderland"?). Suburban juggalos in backwards baseball caps playing acoustic-ska-punk-rap might make an album called Doobie Wonderland, and it would be as bad as that sounds. But of course Japan's AMT get a pass, we're used to their dumb/awesome song and album titles, and heck this SOUNDS like a doobie wonderland - one that we'd like to visit. Spacey, stonery, cosmic funked out JAMZ. They're having fun, you can tell, the happy, Hawkwindy vibes positively exploding from this shining disc. There's 5 long songs, the shortest just under 12 minutes, the longest, over 21. Full tilt drums collide with wild wah wah soloing, chaotic electronic FX compete with chanted vox, it's a doozy of a doobie wonderland indeed. There's some moments (say, in track 3, "Dance With The Space Gypsy Queen") that get all mellow and jangly, but utter manic-psych-groove-guitar-FX-freakout overload is never all that far away.
Finally worked our way through the last batch of tapes from UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm; over the last few weeks we've reviewed tapes from Wouter Van Veldhoven, Hanno Leichtmann, Robert Curgeven, and Elektro Guzzi.
Which brings us to Amy Winedeath, who's shown up once before on a Tapeworm tape, a collaboration with the Automatic Group, and like that tape, Speakeasy is another fantastically noisy and confusional affair, this new one starting off sounding a bit like a more corrosive, blown out Conet Project, all fields of gristly static, fragmented shards of high end skree, buried rhythmic pulses, a dark playful melodic sense pulled apart and recombined into a blurry, smeary, dizzyingly abstract squall, shortwave interference, low end pulsations, hiss and hum, weird intercepted female voices, the whole thing sounding like a collage of mysterious radio transmissions, haunting and otherworldly, and definitely the sort of thing Conet nerds will dig. The second side is more of the same, maybe even more abstract and textural, droned out and darkly hypnotic, a staticky landscape of slow shifting textures and murky glitched out thrum. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
Nice 200 gram vinyl reissue of the 1981 debut from this British post-punk quartet that reminds us of a Pylon/Pretenders hybrid with sharper teeth. Smashing the power politics of sexual relationships with biting critique, this two female, two male foursome deliver cleverly disaffected songwriting with an urgent rhythmic energy. The band only put out two records and this one is their best, with infectious hooks and a bracing cynicsm that remains razor-sharp. They even pull off the rare David Bowie cover that far surpasses the original with "Repetition", a creepily banal look into the mind of an abusive spouse. For fans of Gang of Four, Delta 5, Xmal Deutchland, The Slits, Mo-dettes and the bands mentioned above. Recommended!!
Another beefy dose of industrial rhythms and bad vibes from San Francisco's Bad News, who as we mentioned before have nothing to do with the British comedy troupe of the same name that brilliantly parodied all of the cliches of heavy metal back in the early '80s. This single takes up a Crash Worship frenzy of drums extracted from the pagans and programmed into the machines of the Hypo Luxa & Hermes Pan school of Wax Trax productions circa 1989. Clipped, machine-gun snare fills and metal-bashed samples stand at the foreground of the A side, with the vocals from Sarah Bernat warped from her already diabolical chant through a square-waved tremolo pattern. The B side is a remix, with the vocals pushed towards the foreground for more of a cold-wave feel buttressed by swarming synths provided by Marc Manning; and the aggression of the programmed drums certainly remain. Super limited pressing on lead-gray vinyl. Download code? Yes and thank you.
No, not the same Bad News which offered up a British version of Spinal Tap's heavy metal stupidity and awesomeness; although there is a certain incredulity about this Bad News as well. Of course, styles come and go with each season, and many of the sounds that defined the '60s, '70s, and '80s have eventually come back around through whatever cultural zeitgeist is spurning them on. So, this Bad News is one of several bands currently at the forefront of a minor movement that is pushing beyond the minimal wave aesthetic out of the early '80s and into the more aggressive, blustery sounds of industrial uttered by Wax Trax, PIAS, and Nettwerk from 1986 to 1990. Yeah, think Vivisect 6 era Skinny Puppy or Twitch era Ministry. Bad News is the work of Alex Lucas and Sarah Bernat, the latter being renowned for her work in the chairkickingly punk-as-fuck noise trio 16 Bitch Pile-up; and her bad-ass swagger on vocals and guitar is amply matched by the heavy sequencing and blister-popped electronics from Lucas. "Decay" sports a Missing Foundation / Skullflower guitar churn amidst a slow dive bomb squalor of electric noise and Bernat's gray-colored monotone vocals, with the rhythms and electronics embued with a heavy, machined plod. Sweaty. Smelly. Greasy. The title track throws a monophunk basskick into the foreground with hypnotically aggressive intentions matched by what could only be seen as an industrial strength / megaphone raga in which Bernat chants those titular words. "Typical Illusion" is Bad News' finest moment of post-hardcore riffage affixed to militantly double-timed rhythms and cluster bombs of heavy noise, electronic confusion, and ill will. If anybody remembers when Controlled Bleeding released a couple of really ho-hum records on Wax Trax in 1989, THIS is what Paul Lemos, et al. should have been doing.
We had this on cassette briefly, and we gotta say that the vinyl mastering job renders a truly superior product. Fucking rad.
Ah, William Basinski. How your sounds soothe the soul. His beautifully drifting, tape-loop constructions once again waft from our speakers here at aQuarius, with the release of Nocturnes. The titular composition is a 41 minute piece that originates from prepared piano recordings made during his 'San Francisco' period circa 1979-1980. The notes that Basinski tapped out are singular, haunted stabs that form a simple progression into a resolving chord. It's a very subtle melodic flourish that only comes into focus through the slow, cyclical repetitions that has become the Basinski trademark. Similarly, he judiciously employs his signature production tricks of suspending washes of reverb and ghost-imaging echo patterns. In other words, it's a classic William Basinksi piece. The relatively short 28 minute "Trail Of Tears" is the recontextualized sound design that Basinski composed for Robert Wilson's opera The Life And Times Of Marina Abramovic, which also featured the songs of Antony Hegarty and the lead roles acted by Abramovic herself and Willem Dafoe. Basinski builds his soundtrack through a languid and slippery fretless bass motif which he deftly augments through steady equalization modulation and a billowing aggregated drone mass that eventually overtakes the bass melody, burying it in an snowdrift of accumulated blurriness. After he allows this construct to collapse toward silence, a second, equally elegant and equally languid motif from some unknown orchestral appropriation materializes. It's a trick that Leyland Kirby / The Caretaker has done plenty of times before, with Basinski's aesthetic manifesting an oceanic gravity in his looping patterns that is unparalleled. Bloody hell, that man makes good record.
Full length number two from these new wave / chill wave retro revivalists, which surprisingly finds the duo ditching their synths and drum machines completely, and crafting a gorgeous blast of guitar driven, nineties style indie rock dream pop that we're digging like crazy. Just give a listen to the title track, all processed ethereal female vox, draped over acoustic guitar strum, and some shimmery swirls of shoegaze guitar buzz, simple drumming, all anchored by some murky Joy Division-y bass, a hazy swirl of killer hooks, warm psychedelic jangle, a little guitar rock crunch, all sculpted into some seriously catchy gloom poppy dreaminess, that positions Blouse Mk. II closer to groups like the Dum Dum Girls, or Beach House, their sound woozy and druggy, seemingly channeling the spirt of the Velvets and Mazzy Star, through something a bit fuzzier and janglier. Our favorite tracks tend to be the crunchier, fuzzier, noisier ones (check out "In A Glass"), but even with some sonic heft and distorto guitar buzz, the sound remains gloriously washed out, dreamy, druggy and drifty. LP includes download too...
We can only listen to so much music in our lifetimes. That's a sad fact, one we all have to come to terms with. Or not. But if you're like us, and if you're reading this, you probably are, then much of your life is spent trying to do just that. Listen to as much amazing music as possible. And at some point, like us, you realize that your biggest fear about dying, is that there will be so much music you won't get to hear, well then, that's when you up your game, and decide to make every moment count, and listen to music ALL THE TIME. But even then, there's only so much time in the day, and the night, and you have to eat, and work, and maybe watch TV, hang out with your significant other, and yeah, most of that stuff you can do WHILE you listen to music, but odds are some music is gonna slip by you, no matter how insanely obsessive you are. So now, take the music you already own and want to listen to, and add to that a constant influx of new music to check out, which is what happens here, and while we LOVE that, so much amazing new music and so many fantastic discoveries, it really can end up being too much. We get overwhelmed, and well, we miss out on some stuff, which is exactly what happened with World, by Aussie shoegaze noise rockers the Bunyip Moon. We were cleaning up, and organizing, and going through boxes and drawers, and discovered this cd, and threw it on, and were immediately blown the fuck away. Struck by all sorts of feelings, feeling bad for taking so long to give it a listen, feeling like we COULD have been listening to this already for ages, but mostly feeling like we had to get this reviewed so all you folks out there could add one more amazing record to the stack of music already waiting to be listened to. But here's where we suggest you bump the Bunyip Moon to the front of the queue, cuz holy shit is this great.
And great in that way that makes what it sounds like actually pretty tough to describe. The vibe is sorts of nineties, shoegaze-y for sure, but with a bit of a gloomy feel, deep dramatic vocals buried in the mix to the point of being nearly inaudible, everything buried beneath super distorted and blown out, crumbling and hiss drenched fuzz and buzz and thrum, total blissed out heart-of-the-sun noise-gaze dreaminess, and the drums, wow, the drums are super distorted too, bursts of wild tribal rhythms that almost sounds like swarms of bees, each song a churning jangle flecked squall of noise drenched indie rock / noise rock, at times we hear Crystal Stilts, at times Loop, at others Bailter Space, even a little Dinosaur Jr., lots of NZ Flying Nun, at least the weirder, heavier stuff, and of course all the Australian bands we love, Celibate Rifles, the Scientists, Lubricated Goat, etc, but here those influences are blurred into something fuzzy and washed out and gloriously and blissfully noisy, this IS one of those records, where we're tempted to just have a single sentence review that says "BUY THIS! It's so great, it's all we want to listen to, it's fuzzy and poppy and noisy and psychedelic, and it's one of the best things we've heard in ages, and we've been listening to it non-stop to make up for all the time it languished unlistened to." And we definitely traffic in hyperbole in our reviews, but believe us that nothing in this review is hyperbolic, this band, and this record is so goddamn good, their sound is exactly what we want to listen to, it's the sort of band we wish we played in, it's damn near perfect, warm and fuzzy, noisy and dreamy, the production is bizarre, but bizarrely perfect, it's druggy and psychedelic, and seriously heavy, twisted and experimental, laced with loops and bizarre effects, for every bit of distorto crunch, there's some super melodic jangle, more often then not, the two mashed together, there are long stretches of brooding moodiness, extended hypno-rock epics, short bursts of furious noise pop, and sprawling near-Godspeed slow builds, and even some gloomy almost new wave, and it all sounds so goddamn good. If these guys had popped up on Slumberland they'd be HUGE right now. They should be, and if all is right in the universe, WILL be, cuz really, this is easily some of the best jangle pop / noise rock / shoegaze we've ever heard.
We listed a fairly expensive vinyl reissue of this not too long ago, but just managed to track down some copies of the double compact disc version too, for those of you who would prefer that format...
One of our most popular Records Of The Week of recent vintage was the double cd by ambitious UK ensemble the Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere, and in our review of that we mentioned this, an unjustly obscure classic from the early '70s, a joyous symphonic jazz prog outpouring from another HUGE ensemble, that the UOA reminded us of just a bit - it probably was one of their inspirations, in fact. Centipede was a robust 50-piece orchestra, lead by composer Keith Tippett, featuring a host of rock and jazz musicians from the Canterbury scene (Robert Wyatt wrote the original liner notes), including members of King Crimson, Soft Machine, and Nucleus. Heroically recorded & produced by King Crimson's Robert "Bob" Fripp, Septober Energy was originally released in 1971 (yep), and has now been reissued by Klimt in a gatefold sleeve on double vinyl, that barely contains this sprawling, vibrant masterpiece, which morphs continually through jazz and prog and 20th century avant classical idioms, incorporating droning wordless vocal choirs, violin and cello scrape and skitter, crazed crescendos of jabbering kecak-like chant, delicate piano passages, masses of trumpets, saxes, and trombones, and more... Imagine William Sheller's Lux Aeterna album with a whole bunch of Albert Aylers on board, maybe, especially with Centipede's dynamic shifts from driftingly pleasant melodic horn passages to total free jazz freakout to righteous, swinging "hairy funk" grooves. Moments might possibly get too "fusiony" for some folks, but not for us though.
Fripp was supposed to play guitar, but instead he was too busy with his recording duties, so the fat fuzz riffery that occasionally appears comes courtesy of Brian Godding of Blossom Toes (who, even more germane to this music, later on played with Magma!). There's also lyrics by (and singing from) Tippett's then-wife Julie, who now actually often collaborates with UOA's Martin Archer, see.
Andrew Chalk's well revered around these parts for sheer impressionist beauty of gauzy drones and spellbinding minimalism, but Tom James Scott is a new name for us, even though this British composer has a number of releases on the avant-everything label Bo'Weavil. A classical guitarist by training, Scott tickles the keys of the piano on Wild Flowers, handing over a set of recordings he made for Chalk to augment with his own strings and treatments. We're told that the two have performed together a few times in the past, in what must have been a live performance as part of a quartet alongside Jean Noel Rebilly and Timo Van Luijk. The former produced an album with Chalk and his partner Vikki Jackman not too long ago, and the latter records with Chalk under the moniker Elodie. It's all starting to sound very Jewelled Antler, especially with the results consistently being some of the best rainy day albums for tea-drinking melancholy and vivid introspection we've heard. Even in Chalk's repertoire, the piano is a recurring sound object, and he's long proven deft in blurring the notes elegantly into languid reverberant pools of liquid gold and silver. Where his work with Vikki Jackman would highlight the creakiness and antiquity of their living room piano with all of its flaws and warbles, the recordings from Scott seem impeccable in origin. The richness of the piano at Scott's disposal shines in these recordings, even as Chalk softens the edges and creates a beautifully oozing sadness from these pastoral, Satie-like clusters of notes. Limited to 300 copies.
Yet another brilliant, and hyper limited one sided 12" from this mysterious minimal electronic music producer, whose sound hovers somewhere in the shadows between the dark industrial churn of outfits like Silent Servant and Vatican Shadow, and the dark techno minimalism of Shed and Terrence Dixon. An abstract, almost-dubstep, stripped down to its bare essentials, just a skeletal rhythm, a throbbing bass pulse, and a softly swirling halo of ominous abstract sound, distant minor key melodies, raga like drones, clouds of gritty thrum, weird processed voices, sample breathing transformed into weird swaths of staticky hum, as the track progresses, the surrounding sounds gradually overtake the beat, pushing it further into the murk, and billowing into hazy clouds of fractured melody and shimmery textures, getting downright house-y for the second half, but even then, it's super spare, ultra dark, and utterly mesmerizing. Less dance music, and more late night, chill out, futuristic, speeding down the autobahn, abstract electronic beat laced blackened ambient techno minimalism that's tough to beat. Odds are you're gonna end up wanting to track down all the Chasing Voices you can. But be warned, they disappear quick, so you know what that means...
Hands In The Dark was the first single for Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day, originally released in 1979 on the Lust/Unlust sublabel Strike It From The Records. At that time, Crutchfield had recently parted ways with Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori, with whom he had founded the legendary no wave trio DNA; and he envisioned Dark Day as being something of an inversion of the gender paradigm by employing women to play drums and guitar while he relegated himself to the synths. His idea didn't entirely work out exactly how he wanted throughout the entire history of Dark Day; but he was able to recruit Nina Canal (who later went on to found UT) and Nancy Arlen (from Mars... the no wave band, not the planet) for the earliest incarnation of the band whose line-up only managed this one single. The lead track is a quintessential no wave song with Canal's hard-plucked guitar tones and Arlen's weirdo percussive march of sporadic rhythmic splutters on the snare syncopated with the steady kick drum pulse; but all of this serves as a backdrop to the creepy synth and vocal melodies from Crutchfield. It was this melody that inspired the Chromatics to re-invent the song as a sultry, faux italian-disco number; and we'll give credit where credit is due, stating that both versions are totally rad. "Invisible Man" - the B side on the original single is found on the A side here, and follows the savant drum-pulse, bloody fingered guitar work, and Crutchfield's serpentine voice & synth arrangements. On this pressing from the esteemed Dark Entries, the flipside features the side to the Trapped 12" which had 6 short excerpts of reworked synth lines from the Exterminating Angel lp. So, with this release, Dark Entries has issued everything that was done by Dark Day in the early '80s. As with the other Dark Day albums, this is a necessary reissue!
Limited tour-only cd-r of demo versions, live recordings and unreleased tracks from the same sessions that produced their gorgeous Thrill Jockey debut album. We only have about 10 of these and are not sure if we can get more, so act fast.
Highlighting the core tracks of the Dusted Sessions in illuminating stripped down versions, the first track "Dusted County Stomp" establishing itself on a repetitive Hex-era Earth electric guitar riff, before Marielle Jakobsons' violin responds in counter-play in true Henry Flynt-ish fashion. "Yuba Groove" is a faster version of the sprawling majestic central suite "Yuba Source parts I and II". Then there's a live on-radio version of "Exodus Due West", that the band performed on KFJC, a heavier demo version of "Dusted Down", a majestic flute-fronted demo of "Mercy Springs", not really featured on the original album and finally, "Sky Trails" which has a really nice Fripp and Eno "Evening Star" vibe with gorgeously picked guitar and pedal steel. There's even a secret track at the end. Beautiful!
And like we said, SUPER limited. Get one while you can, Date Palms fans!
"116 purulent pages" it sez right here on the cover of this new issue of this recommended metal read, and since that cover also features the return of CARCASS, that seems appropriate. Also to be found within those 116 pages of purulence: Gorguts, Trouble, Baroness, Broken Hope, Windhand, High On Fire (entering the Decibel Hall Of Fame with Surrounded By Thieves), Gwar, Fleshgod Apocalpyse, Witherscape, and more - including the usual amusing John Darnielle column on the back page.
Killer archival reissue from local label SmartGuy, a lost 1983 demo from ultra obscure Aussie new wave post punks Division Four, a vinyl reissue of their only tape, and actually we wouldn't have been surprised had this come out on another local label, Superior Viaduct - fans of that label's reissues would do well to check this out, some seriously swaggery synth driven punk, with a heavy new wave influence, spidery angular guitars wrapped around buzzing synths that seem to drive their sound, with some seriously snarky/saucy lyrics, delivered in a very Johnny Rotten style snarl/yowl, all anchored by some low slung Joy Division-y bass. The other 5 songs are just as killer. "Kamikarzi" pairs woozy flanged guitars with sing songy vocals and frenetic drumming, all laced with swooping synths, while "Blank Prostitutes" is all crumbling distorted guitars, more woozy synths and some thick sinewy bass. "I Was Walking" is downright poppy, which gives way to "Azzaria" which is fierce, and driven by some helicopter like synth flutter, and with a weird tranced out chorus. And closer "Sewer Song" gets almost industrial, thick bass blurts, wild squalls of noisy synth, more swaggery vox and harsh lyrical subject matter, dirge-y and darkly new wave-y. Killer stuff. Sad they only ever managed six songs, but thanks to SmartGuy for giving us the chance to even hear 'em...
Really fucking spooky! Of course, we wouldn't expect much less from John Duncan, whose sound research specifically seeks out the most intense of psychological states. As the most infamous case, Duncan's Blind Date performance piece tells of his presumed experience with necrophilia as a masochistic ritual for depositing his last seed in a dead body before undergoing a vasectomy. While the audio documentation of Blind Date is cold and precise in what it says, Duncan neither confirms nor denies any of the details beyond what is told in that recording. It could have been a fabrication; but he plants the idea that he *might* have broken the most significant taboo of human civilization. Since then, Duncan's psychological research through sound, visual art, and performance has become far more sophisticated in approach and content. For example, there's his convoluted Pynchonesque album Our Telluric Conversation with CM von Hausswolff, and there's the masterful recapitulation of the sounds from the Stanford Linear Accelerator into The Crackling - a cavernous, sublime electric chorale which magnify the smallest of particles into massive discordant drones.
There Must Be A Way Across This River was a performance / installation that Duncan presented inside a refrigerated basement at a performance hall in Bologna, where he presented a slow-developing soundtrack of arctic drones layered with darkly vibrating shortwave patterns, whispered declarations from Duncan himself, and these strange violent bursts of electronic noise. While he never stated this to be the case, we wonder if he demanded that the audience be naked, as he has done for a handful of his other claustrophobic, black-box performances. That might have been even too cruel for Duncan! The sounds of There Must Be A Way Across This River are relatively subtle for Duncan's catalogue of work, but they are darkly evocative, eerie, bleak, and ominously threatening. Another very strong piece in his ever impressive body of work.
The flip side of the record is a strange collaboration between Duncan, Z'ev, and the EVP hunter Michael Esposito. Originally, Esposito, Duncan, and the medium Heidi Harman set out to make recordings in Duncan's childhood home outside of Chicago. Despite making arrangements with one of the occupants at the house, they were refused access, all the while Esposito was recording their conversations. During those recordings, 18 EVP invocations occurred, one of which addresses Duncan by name - an allegation that Harman confirmed through her own psychic contact. These 18 invocations were then given over to Z'ev who manipulated them into a suitably frightening set of interwoven drones and spectral undulations. If that particular EVP citation of Duncan's name is on these recordings, Z'ev has thoroughly eradicated the syntax into a slippery, ectoplasmic sound. It's one of the best things we've heard from Z'ev outside his kinetic percussive assaults, and rounds out a terrifyingly great piece of wax!
Got a couple copies of this under-the-radar (our radar anyway) 2012 release, a three way split that's pretty self-explanatory in regards to about why you might want it, bearing the following 3 slogans on the cover: "Electric Rock N' Roll", "It's Outta This World!" and "Jams To Groove Your Soul!".
Cosmic jammers Earthless offer up a 23+ minute live improvisation that takes up all of side A, while side B has Wino's band Premonition 13 doing their stoner thing for over 14 minutes, and then blues rockers Radio Moscow follow that with two relatively brief (in comparison) numbers, around six minutes each. Fans of any/all might wanna consider grabbing this. Includes download, we're told.
Ding, ding! (x4) Something ring a bell? That's cuz Eight Bells is the new group formed from the ashes of veteran spacerockers Subarachnoid Space, whose last album before they disbanded in 2010 was titled, Eight Bells. Since we liked that record a lot, we're happy to report that Subarachnoid Space guitarist Melynda Jackson has teamed with erstwhile Subarachnoid Space drummer Chris Van Huffel, plus bassist Haley Westeiner, to take up where Subarachnoid Space left off, this trio continuing Subarachnoid Space's latter-day trajectory into heavier and heavier territories, to the point that it makes sense that this would be recorded by Billy Anderson, and come out on Seventh Rule. And woah this is good, damn good. Mostly instrumental (even when there is singing, it's often kinda used as another instrument), and definitely progressive, with sinuous song structures and intricate epic arrangements, they play a kind of mathy, moody spacerock that at times even ventures into black metal territory - Cascadian black metal we guess, to be precise, since that's where they're based, up in the Pacific Northwest. Seriously, if you didn't know the context, there's stretches where you'd think it was a BM record for sure. And as space rock or post rock, it's definitely rockin'. Think Kinksi meets Wolves In The Throne Room...
A good example of Eight Bells' dynamic, apocalyptic mathrock is how the urgent angular quickstep of track two, "Fate And Technology" takes a sudden shift into slower, quieter, more placid territory adorned by dreamy, gentle female singing, but then builds up again to sheer, near black metal blasting complete with harsh, throatripped vokills. Those vokills and vocals are both handled by Haley, but the title track does bring in guest vocalist Kris Force of Amber Asylum to add her haunting pipes to the mix, for some extra atmosphere, that track reminding us, with its scrambling riffery, of Stinking Lizveta, at first anyway, then getting seriously epic in a postrock way, 12+ minutes full of drama and majesty (and intense chops!), climaxing with thunderous drum pound and wordless high end operatic vocalizations from Force. Here and elsewhere there's droning synths, echoing effects, and a thick, muscular bass presence, part of what makes Eight Bells so heavy and propulsive.
For fans of Subarachnoid Space (of course) and Liturgy and maybe the likes of Worm Ouroboros too. Recommended!!
Yeah, the band is called Fetus Eaters. And their particular brand of metallic grind is called vomitcore, which for a particular strain of weirdo music obsessives, is pretty much all it should take to get you interested in these musical misanthropes. And for those who might be put off, well, odds are this is not your cup of black bloody fetus laced tea. But for the rest of you, this is some primo grind-metal heaviness, replete with furious blast beats, wild shredding guitars, insectoid riffing, twisted effects heavy vocals, lots of warped production and processing, and yeah of course plenty of weird samples. Full length number five finds the band slightly more polished, but really only slightly, it's still raw and blown out, punk as fuck, super noisy, and downright psychedelic at times, most of the songs clocking in around the minute mark, which is more than enough to cram in loads of tangled shreddery and blasting headbanging crunch, with the occasional foray into lumbering doominess, face melting noise rock, and grim black buzz, but really, FE are grinders at heart, and a quick listen to "Fetal Sushi Delight" or "Embryonic Chow" of "I'll Snap Your Spine" makes that pretty clear. Not sure why we never listed anything by these guys before, cuz we're digging this big time. Anyone into the various strains of grind, from old school grind, to grinding death metal, to gore grind, to just flat out WTF grind weirdness, might find themselves surprisingly into 'vomitcore' all of a sudden, and fear not, we're right there with you.
Pressed on bloody red vinyl, includes a printed insert/lyric sheet/poster.
First we've heard from these Seattle trippers, who may or may not have some connection to some aQ metal faves from the same region, but digging metal is most definitely not a prerequisite for getting lost in Fungal Abyss' freaky soundworld, and freaky it is. These guys couldn't really be more perfectly named. The sounds of these four epic tracks, sound exactly like the sort of brain melting abyss, one might fall into after inhaling a lungful of spores from some mysterious alien fungus found deep in the forest. Sprawling kosmische psychedelic drifts, the shortest song clocking in at 10:20, the longest 24:06 (!), all doused in FX, fields of crackle, strange samples, skeletal percussion, woozy looped guitars, skies full of tripped out squiggles, it's like an even more abstract, druggy strain of the sort of space and psych rock folks have been flipping out over the last little while. Total slo-mo Hawkwind drift, or like The Heads and White Hills, stewed to the gills on cough syrup. Woozy and droney and darkly psychedelic, epic, endless, smoldering drug-jams that seem like they could and should go on forever. But the band do ramp it up, launching into full on motorik style kraut-psych, check out the opener "Arc Of The Covenant", about halfway through, the band sounding like they should be on Cardinal Fuzz, fans of the Janitors and Hills and all the rest will be in heaven. Swirling, and tripped out, propulsive and hypnotic, the slower parts sounding a bit like a less free No Neck Blues Band, but when they get rocking, total heavy psych space rock bliss. Obviously WAY recommended!!
The latest single from these local psychedelic fuzz rockers, featuring none other than Ty Segall behind the drumkit. Although listening to this (and the other singles) it definitely sounds like Segall had more to contribute than drumming, cuz Fuzz definitely doesn't sound that far removed from Segall's own records, maybe a bit more fuzzed out (obviously), but fans of Segall, Mikal Cronin, Thee Oh Sees and all the rest will no doubt flip for these guys too. Imagine a slightly Sabbathier Segall, and you're getting closer, the A side is total sixties psych radness, super charged and doused in crumbling fuzz guitars, a wicked hooky, and some wild drumming, has us dying for the forthcoming full length (soon!).
The B side features Fuzz taking on the oft-covered "21st Century Schizoid Man", by King Crimson of course, and they definitely do it justice, sounding like some lost proto metal band, the sound furiously fuzzy, more wild drumming, the vocals raspy and feral, the whole thing appropriately fierce and heavy, especially the double time freakout, here totally supercharged and seriously metallic. Fuck yeah!
Back in 2010, G*Park performed in San Francisco for 23five's Activating The Medium festival, presenting the early sketches of his eviscerated musique concrete and disembodied field recordings, surging from vacuum-sucked voids through ice-cave drones into tumultously compacted rumblings whose frequencies were on the verge of tearing The Lab at the seams. It was an exhausting emptiness that G*Park constructed through all of his sounds, grimly alluding to a science-fictional apocalypse of an endless winter and relentless viral agents. For the next two years, G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) finessed the details of that work, tightening up the tension and further hollowing out the noises, resulting in Sub - easily the best release from his impeccable catalogue, and one of the finer outings from the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Along with the likes of Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and Dave Phillips, G*Park hails from the Swiss collective Schimpfluch, which extends the ideas and concepts of the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Muehl, etc.) of aestheticized violence and abject transgression through the histories of punk, performance-art, industrial/noise, and DIY cassette culture. There is horror, dread, fear, and scorn in all of the work of Schimpfluch; and it manifests in many different ways. In Sudden Infant, you will find the Dada-prankster; in Phillips, you have the psycho-sexualized demon; in Eb.Er, you've got a scatological shaman, but in G*Park, you have the haunted existentialist. Easily the most introspective and mysterious of the lot, G*Park doesn't have the numerous world tours that the other members of Schimpfluch do, but his work is revered by those in the noise and sound-art communities as being a hidden gem of grizzled collage-based compositions. His work exists somewhere between the technical constructions of Luc Ferrari and the more vacant strategies of industrial culture (i.e. Thomas Koner, John Duncan, etc.); Sub is spacious album girded by darkly radiant drones and shadowy thrummings that ebb and flow as a strange subcutaneous current akin to blood streaming though veins or a toxic algae bloom fed by the strength of the sun; but that spaciousness is not one of calm pools of ambient bliss. No, this is a very tense album as he pricks, shatters, ruptures, and bleeds out those drones with agitated harsh snaps and slaps of acoustic debris - the suffocating last breath of oxygen extracted from a scuba regulator, the murderous caw of a crow, a whipcrack burst of unknown energy, a brutalist thud of a fist striking a ribcage, static errata from EMF detectors that may or may not be dialed into paranormal activities, or just the drippings of an ice cave whose entry way has just collapsed leaving you with no escape. An unsettlingly brilliant album.
We've been enjoying a barrage of weird new tapes from East Bay tape label Sanity Muffin over these last few months, and this week marks the release of yet -another- batch, one of which is this one right here, the latest from Galena, the blackened synth-drone project of the man behind the label, and like the Galena jams we've heard before, Buried Finch is another collection of smoldering kosmische space outs that often splinter into grinding, glitched out psychedelic noise. Give a listen to the opener, beginning with soft shimmery celestial swirls, before a crumbling caustic buzz surfaces from below, pulsing and sinister, wrapping its inky tendrils around the otherwise dreamy drift, but while it's that buzz and crunch that seems to sonically dominate, much of Buried Finch finds Galena exploring much more abstract and spacey sounds, deep rumbling thrum, bleary, blurry swaths of chordal shimmer, gristly Tim Hecker like shoegaze-synth buzz, mysterious disembodied voices, deep dramatic vox, dubbed out barely there rhythms, a few moments of Casio drum machine driven Goblin / Carpenter style grooviness, but with plenty of jams that could be remixed Will Over Matter tracks. Thick gnarled sprawls of synth buzz, minimal and mesmerizing, here wrapped around motorik rhythms, and swirling space-y textures, like the soundtrack to some tripped out low budget art film, or the music accompanying the scariest planetarium show EVER.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
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We've said it before, but it bears repeating, we LOVE when we discover amazing music made by one of our customers. Gyron V is in fact our customer / pal Terje Oeveraas, from Norway, who has been quietly self-releasing limited cd-r's, very few of which it seems have made it over here, in fact if we didn't know Terje personally, odds are we wouldn't have heard or seen any of them. So thanks to Jason at Living Tapes, who's stepped in on the 10th anniversary of Gyron V, and put together a sort of greatest hits / career retrospective, gathering up tracks from the first five cd-r's as well as some compilation tracks, and thus we have Muscae Volitantes. But what does it sound like? Well, the label describes the music of Gyron V as being "fueled by folk music and new wave in equal measure", and that's not all that far off. There's definitely a serious neo-folk vibe happening here, deep dramatic vox, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, spidery melodies, a moody intimate ambience, everything echo drenched and bathed in reverb, the opener "Climbing The Blue Pavillion", reminds us a bit of country-goth crooner King Dude, while "In The Circles Of Ether" adds primitive drum machine, a motorik mechanical rhythm beneath, shimmery chords, and some dreamy falsetto vox. There's definitely a new wave feel to some of the songs, but it seems to be more in mood and melody than sound, as most of Muscae plays out like a super intimate home recorded bedroom folk, although at times, we're alternatingly reminded of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Death In June, New Model Army, Angels Of Light, Current 93, Roy Montgomery, fans of any or all of those bands will dig this stuff big time, and will most likely find themselves hunting down the original cd-r's as well. Moody and darkly psychedelic, the instrumental backdrops lush and brooding, melancholic and achingly contemplative, the vocals transforming the mood of each song, whether it's haunting and hushed, moody and brooding, or strident and majestic. Gorgeous stuff for sure.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Everybody's favorite same-sex couple, Henry (Rollins) and Glenn (Danzig) are back, in the latest issue of the cult comic book all about their fantastical adventures. In an alternate reality (also known as real life) it may be that punk rock icons Henry and Glenn are NOT in fact gay, and perhaps not even that close of buddies, who knows. But we prefer the comic book version, they're so cute together!! And so manly.
In this issue, there's some record shopping (yay!), Henry hangs out with Gaahl from Gorgoroth (or we think that's what's going on), they take a trip into the depths of "Gaydes", and more. Totally bent and hilarious as usual.
There's two alternate covers for this ish, the one pictured here, by Tom Neely, the other a retro Kirby-ish looking one by Shaky Kane.
If the White Stripes were a goth band? Perhaps. Industrial Park are the Portland duo of Emma Barnett & Nick Makanna, who produce their dour post-punk songs with only guitar, voice, and drums - and the opening number seems to be the only track with a bass (which is certainly unusual in the land of the goth). Very little production, and certainly no synths to speak of what so ever. The songs themselves brace themselves between Christian Death and the March Violets with the gloomy vocals from Barnett cast in the sparest of echo; and Industrial Park offers up a rather uptempo cover of the Sisters Of Mercy's mega-dirge "Valentine." Beautifully smeared black & white vinyl, and limited to 300 copies.
Cold wave / new wave / electro pop reissue label Medical Records seem to traffic in the extremely obscure, and it doesn't get more obscure than Laugh Clown Laugh, a UK duo who only ever released a single track! But that track, "Feel So Young", is a killer, a fantastic slab of super catchy synthpop, all skittery programmed rhythms, squelchy synths, lilting melodies, and dreamily crooned vox, the sound very reminiscent of early Depeche Mode and Human League, and that song opens up the proceedings here, and the record finishes with a dub version of the same song, which makes it even cooler. But in between, are 10 songs, previously unreleased, and never heard before now, all restored from the original master tapes, that had been in storage for nearly thirty years! And some of those songs are nearly as good as "Feel So Young", the dirgey, brooding "This Side Of Heaven" is maybe the darkest jam here, and is the sort of track some modern band could and should cover, the strangely titled "Track 14" is a killer chunk of instrumental synth wave, playful and weirdly psychedelic, while "Give It Back" almost sounds like a synthpop Devo, all herky jerky and new wave-y. "Aquarium" almost sounds like John Carpenter of Goblin gone new wave, and "One In The Bush" sounds like Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" played by Perrey And Kingsley, and in between, are plenty of electro pop and synth pop gems.
Like all Medical Records releases, this is SUPER LIMITED, and fantastically packaged, a heavy full color sleeve, with a printed full color insert with liner notes, photos and lyrics, the vinyl heavy on 180 gram, and transparent orange!
More Chinese music, thanks to our pal Ricky, who's been bringing us all kinds of amazing music from overseas, this one from a guy called Li Dai Guo, a super skilled improvisor who's proficient on at least a dozen traditional instruments, and who fuses those with more modern sounds, samples, beatboxing (!), experimental vocals, the result is pretty fantastic based on this single, which apparently consists of a series of sonic advertisements for various locations he found appealing during his 6 year stay in the city of Chengdu, the buzz of a traditional Chinese stringed instrument, is laid over weird percussive burbling, and laced with fluttering flute like melodies, before blossoming into a strangely lush bit of choral drift, throat singing, beatboxing, and all manner of humming and crooning. Other tracks take the traditional instruments, and add a bit of propulsion, while others get downright far out, chirping birds, what sounds like prepared instrumentation, operatic vocals, moaning violin like melodies, moving and dramatic, and still others add horns and approximate what sounds a bit like Klezmer music. From there on out, the sound flits from modern grooves to minimal Chinese folk, to what sounds like a strange electronic musique concrete / traditional folk hybrid. So cool.
Housed in a super cool fold out map sleeve, with pasted on artwork. Probably quite limited too, and if/when we run out, be patient as we have to order more from China!
The eighties noise rock scene in New York may have been all about the Swans and Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, but Live Skull were just as potent as those bands, and most definitely carved their own sonic niche, one that maybe actually influenced those other bands. Bringing Home The Bait was the group's second record, and first full length, and found them harnessing dissonance into something lush and layered, the tribal drum pound (courtesy of James Lo, who would go on to play in Chavez!) and slithery low slung bass wove a dense churning backdrop for the tripped out almost psychedelic guitars, that would alternatingly unfurl roiling atonal riffage or chiming minor key chords, or spew gouts of hauntingly textured noise, the sound dark and moody, gloomy and gothic, often slow, lumbering, almost doomy, but just as often wildly careening noise rock blasts, the sounds oozing and melting, the guitars tangled into strange shapes, the songs almost sounding like those guitar lines gradually untangling, heady and hypnotic, an early strain of hypnorock that now almost three decades later, seems to have been predicting so much of what's going on now. The sound of Live Skull was so subversive, but weirdly musical and melodic, the band applying an almost avant sensibility to their knuckle dragging crush, the dueling boy / girl vocals, the dour gloom rock, that also made them sound less NYC noise rock, and more West Coast goth-rock, at times sounding like the sort of band that would play at the Scream, or would open for Jane's Addiction back in the day. In fact, anyone who dug the recent Red Temple Spirits reissue, will find much to dig here as well, with some of the tracks sounding like the Abecedarians or Kommunity FK! And really, for being classified as 'noise rock' much of BHTB is surprisingly not noisy, sure the guitars are dense and layered, and the band do weave thick swaths of 'noisiness', but most of the time, that noisiness is blurred and smeared into moody chordal thrum, or almost shoegazey blissouts, a sort of post punk noise rock new wave that sounds as good now as it did thirty years ago!!
This is the first time Bringing Home The Bait has ever been available on cd, and includes a bunch of rare bonus tracks, as well as a big booklet with rare photos and new liner notes!
At last, a reissue of the debut album from Japanese heavy psych trio Mainliner. It came out on Charnel Music in '96, but has been out of print for a long while now and with its unavailability has grown in stature. Of course, it's a great record, the one that Acid Mothers Temple were trying to emulate on their recent "Electric Heavyland" set. And yep, it does feature AMT's Kawabata Makoto on 'motorpsycho' guitar, along with free jazzer Hajime Koizumi on drums and bassist Nanjo Asahito of the legendary High Rise. Mainliner always was just a slight variant on the High Rise template (themselves a variant on the Les Rallizes Denudes template it seems), formed originally by Nanjo 'cause his High Rise bandmates were averse to touring and he wanted to take his rock on the road, or so the story goes. Anyway, this disc was Mainliner's first and best, all players outdoing themselves in the realms of psychedelic heavy garage improv distortion overload. So, if you missed it the first time around, now's your chance to experience this classic. It's nice to have it back in just 'cause now we're listening to it again and we'd forgotten how great it is. Rock!
MPEG Download: "Black Sky" [/audio/mainlinerblack.mp3]
First we've heard from this witchy Northwestern psychedelic kosmische prog-synth outfit, even though they've been at it since way back in 2008, but this sort of synth heavy, hypnorock trippiness is definitely ripe for some love, cuz sonically, this definitely seems to fall in line with the current crazy of synthy retro-futurism, but Midday Veil definitely add their own twist, sound like an impossible mix of local psychedelic space rockers Lumerians, future synth wranglers Majeure, weirdo heavy psych Swedes Goat, legendary synth prog combo Goblin and witchy occultic metallers The Devil's Blood. The core of the sound is swirling synths, and motorik rhythms, simple grooves wreathed in cascades of tangled keyboard melodies, and spidery guitar melodies, with vocalist Emily Pothast's witchy, soulful croon definitely defining their sound, giving it an almost funky vibe at times (hence the Goat comparison), the title track sounds like some lost Kraftwerk jam reimagined as something darker and dirgier, while the mainly instrumental "Choreia" is total John Carpenter style cinematic broodiness, woven into a much more propulsive hypnorock framework, reminding us a bit of Finnish faves Circle. "Remember Child" is all celestial / cosmic synthscapery, a smoldering slow build, before the vocals drift in and transform it into some sort of gothic sonic ritual. "Without And Within" is all buzzy raga dirge, heavy on the Eastern style melodies and sitar like buzz, the vocals heavily processed and draped over the woozy blackened exotica. "Sun Stone" is a brief bit of experimental psychedelic synth drone, before the 11+ minute closer, a total hypno rock psych-prog epic, the vocals getting super dramatic, the vibe completely over the top and majestic, getting downright shreddy and bombastic near the end.
Gorgeous packaging too, with stunning cover art by Robert Beatty.
Found a VERY small stash of these original 1993 vinyl pressings at one of our suppliers. At original 1993 vinyl prices too! (Yes, remember when vinyl was cheaper than cds?). This release was the debut from Milk Cult, a beats-and-sound-collage side project of Dale "C.C. Nova" Flattum from San Francisco's late great grungy noiserock heavies Steel Pole Bath Tub, and it predates our "list" by a couple years, so we've never reviewed it, though much later on we did make Milk Cult's fourth and final album a Record Of The Week (2000's Project M-13, now long out of print unfortunately).
Love God opens with the title track, well worth the price of admission alone, 10+ minutes of chugging distorted Slayer riffage meets turntablist whip-whip-whap in a sampledelic maelstrom. All kinds of other insanity enters into the pounding mix, from flamenco dance music (?) to police sirens. It's apparently the soundtrack to a short film by Frank Grow which we've never seen but we figure it must be pretty freaky. From then on, the warped vibe of underground '90s plunderphonic noiserock industrial soundtrack mayhem continues, in a surrealistic style where, like, moments of sepia-toned old tyme record crackle loopage that could be from a Leyland Kirby disc, will be rudely juxtaposed with sudden onslaughts of -actual- Slayer samples, or even blasts of machingun fire. It's definitely very '90s, in a good way, think Pain Teens, early Scorn, Sucking Chest Wound, experimental Melvins, Cosmonauts Hail Satan, WordSound label dubby "illbience", and of course Steel Pole Bath Tub themselves - they always used samples, weird voice-overs and whatnot, and if you're familar with them, what you'll hear here will remind you of that aspect of their sound, but given center stage. Chaotic and/or creepy for sure, but "groovy" too in a way. Needless to say, these are the last copies we're gonna see, and when they're gone, they're gone. (Honestly, we only found 4 of these, so apologies in advance if they're all been snagged by the time you read this.)
Two new lps from UK label Trensmat this week. The latest from Astral Social Club can be found elsewhere on this week's list, and then there's this one right here, the latest from Italo-outsider-alien-folk-psych siblings My Cat Is An Alien, aka Roberto and Maurizo Opalio. Sadly, MCIAA is one of those bands who for a while churned out so many releases it got difficult to keep up, and at some point it seemed like lots of folks reached a definite saturation point. Thankfully now it's been just long enough, that a new My Cat Is An Alien record is actually kind of exciting, and listening to Alien, All Too Alien, it's easy to see, why, for a while there, so many folks were sort of obsessed. Two sidelong sprawls of freeform outrock dronefolk splatter, tons of space, the percussion skittery and skeletal, disembodied tangles of atonal guitar twang, wheezing harmonica, it's almost like a psych folk Dead C, which is not a bad thing at all. The harmonica oozes and blurs into sheets of keening high end thrum, which is soon joined by some low end buzz, what sounds like some sampled birdsong, mysterious falsetto vocals, building to a woozy, detuned Jandekian dirge, before everything splinters into a dizzying squall of tangled loops and swirling FX. The flipside seems to take up right where the A side leaves off, two halves of a single near 40 minute epic, lilting guitars over a bed of gnarled buzz and undulating textures, some seriously mesmerizing drone-folk, which seems to splinter into something way more abstract, ultimately landing closer to a sound that reminds us of a campfire No Neck Blues Band, the harmonica returns, as do weird distant drums, a slow motion tribal creep, that is soon subsumed by thick swaths of industrial buzz, and wreathed in squiggly effects and spaced out sonic streaks, while the drums lock into something darkly propulsive, a minimal softly noisy hypnorock coda, that we sort of wished would have spilled over onto a third side, or heck, even a fourth.
Like all Trensmat releases, this is SUPER LIMITED, already out of print at the label. We will most likely be able to get more, but probably best to grab one before they're gone for good. Includes a link to a download of the lp tracks.
The third full length from this post-Drive Like Jehu / Hot Snakes combo explodes right out of the gate with the furious "Taste The Diff", which finds frontman Rick Froberg's already feral raspy caterwaul sounding even more gristly and grizzly, sounding like a mix of Mark Arm and Kurt Cobain, Froberg's yowling rasp the perfect match for the music, which is maybe the fiercest we've heard these guys yet. Swaggery and caustic, tightly wound and minimal, but energetic and seriously fucking rocking. In our reviews of the other Obits records, we talked much about how their sound was much more mature than previous projects, which makes sense, cuz, well, these guys are old like us! But that maturity worked, the songs darker and broodier, so we were thrown for a loop by "Taste The Diff", with its blast of youthful exuberance, and while there are moments like that popping up throughout, the bulk of Beds & Bugs definitely lines up closer with the sound of the past records, the songs sinewy and slithery, occasionally swaggery and stompy, but for the most part, low slung, darkly melodic, the guitar playing as always, totally ruling, understated at times, explosive and chaotic at others, and Froberg's voice, sounds better than ever, heck, maybe even better than back in the day. And the new songs, holy shit, we often wonder why old bands can come back and are somehow capable of conjuring up that sound we love, but not the songs, but nothing like that going on here, then again, this is no nostalgia trip, and the songs this time around, more than ever, KILL, groovy and dark, crazy catchy, moody and super melodic, loud and raucous, one of those records we just can't seem to stop listening to...
Killer cover art too, the cd is a reversible gatefold, with a dizzying printed pattern and a printed inner sleeve, the lp kinda like a giant old school 7", or a seventies disco 12"!
We've been reviewing tons of amazing Chinese indie rock and experimental underground rock over the last year, we even made one record by the duo White+ our Record Of The Week, but have also raved about Boyz & Girl and Dear Eloise, and if you come in the store, you'll see a Chinese Rock section overflowing with artists and titles, that we're attempting to gradually get reviewed and up on the site. One of those groups is P.K.14, one of the longest running (going on 15 years now) and most respected bands in the Chinese underground, and beyond, having won lots of awards and performed with lots of big name bands, this newest record found the band flying to the US and recording with none other than Steve Albini. But don't be expecting any sort of noise rock, P.K.14 are more like Television, or maybe the Talking Heads, their sound stripped down and a little bit angular, the vocals in particular super distinctive, a keening croon, often soaring into a near falsetto, emotional and dramatic. But the music on 1984 definitely suits Albini's aesthetic, a darkly brooding hypnorock, that at times sounds a little bit like Nirvana, at others a bit like the Pixies, the sound slipping from angular jangle to moody minimalism, the traditional rock instrumentation augmented by piano, which is often employed in weirdly angular clusters, giving the sound a dark off kilter sound. And again, this is not super underground, not especially noisy or psychedelic or krautrocky or whatever. This is basically dark moody rock music, definitely bordering on mainstream, maybe an American analogue would be Radiohead, or the Editors, or something like that. But there's definitely some excellent songcraft going on here, and the production is fantastic. The lyrics are Chinese, which makes the sound more interesting as well, but on the lyric sheet are translated into English too, so you can (sort of) follow along. Very few copies of these, got them direct from the label, features some super twisted intense cover art, includes a printed inner sleeve with liner notes and lyrics in Chinese/English, and a download coupon as well!
Medical Records keeps the obscure reissues coming with two new releases on this week's list, this one a singles collection from a UK group called Play, which features a member of Drinking Electricity, also reissued on Medical, and recently reviewed here, and the sound of Play is not that different, a bit poppier maybe, more a sort of gloomy electro pop, spare and minimal, with deep crooned vocals, and softly swirling synths, with the occasional bit of angular guitar. We're reminded a lot of the Fixx actually, and of course New Order, Depeche Mode, Human League and the like. Our favorite tracks are the more post punk sounding jams, like "Deeper Than Blue", which is all spidery guitar and squelchy synths, but tracks like the brooding "In My Mind" (and the cool, even more twisted remix), with its ominous intro that blossoms into some seriously new wave poppiness , push all our eighties new/cold wave buttons. Red Movies gathers all the group's various singles, a compilation track and a handful of bonus tracks. The sort of sound that so many bands continue to mine these days. Folks who dig Dark Entries, should also be following Medical, and everyone who's been digging all the retro-synth action on Sacred Bones and Captured Tracks, none of those bands would exist if it weren't for bands like Play...
As always, super limited, and fantastically packaged, the original cover art reproduced, and the record itself super heavy weight, and pressed on split red/blue vinyl! Cool!
*MISSISSIPPI ALERT*
Of the several new/recent Mississippi releases that we haven't gotten around to reviewing quite yet, this one is one that's been really selling steadily in the store. Figured it deserved a write up for all you non-local folks who wouldn't just see it in our Mississippi bin... So, what this is, is an album of early, 1960s recordings from the legendary "King Of Palm Wine Guitar", Sierra Leone's S.E. Rogie (1926-1994), one of West Africa's most popular and beloved musicians ever.
There's a Bay Area connection too, S.E. Rogie having lived in the East Bay in the '70s and '80s. This material is all from long before he immigrated to the USA, though, and includes "My Lovely Elizabeth", voted in a 2004 poll conducted by the BBC as one of the top ten African songs of all time. Of the dozen here, it's only ONE of the loveliest - they're all really nice, showcasing Rogie's gentle, lilting vocal style, accompanied in most cases by his own acoustic guitar and simple percussion. Sweet and tender in both sound and lyric, it's hard to imagine this record not making most listeners quite happy. Fans of highlife for sure need this, clearly a classic collection.
At this point, it's probably easier to think of the bands you used to love, who have NOT reformed, cuz this really seems like the age of reunions, not that we're complaining... Some of our favorite bands, alive and kicking, touring and making records again! What's not to love? And while everyone was freaking out about the resurrection of Dinosaur Jr, we couldn't help but think, even back when Beyond came out, Dinosaur's first record in a decade at the time, how amazing it would be if Lou Barlow reformed Sebadoh. We never stopped being a little kooky about that band, as much as we loved Dinosaur, Sebadoh always occupied a super special place in our hearts, in fact both reissues of The Freed Man and III we made Records Of The Week here, and heck, we probably should have done the same for Bakesale, so when Sebadoh actually started playing shows, we were giddy, and when this new record was announced, holy crap!
So here it is, the first new record in 14 years, since 1999's The Sebadoh, and we're pleased to report, it really does sort of sound like it could have come out immediately after The Sebadoh, the sound is warm and familiar, jangly and fuzzy, dark and broody at times, goofy and irreverent at others, but Barlow still has a knack for crafting dark, emotional jangle pop, and his partner in crime Jason Lowenstein (aka Jake) continues, we can only assume, to add his own twisted sonic perspective to the proceedings. And like on past records, there are moments of willful sonic spikiness, and some sweetly schmaltzy sad boy loner folk wistfulness, and this time some countryish twang here and there, but most of Defend Yourself, is just crazy catchy, classic sounding indie rock jangle pop that manages to channel the spirit and sound of the nineties, into something that doesn't sound nearly as nostalgic as it could have...
Both the cd and the lp have a swank diecut slipcover-ed packaging (though we are out of the cds at the moment, grrr).
Silent Servant's dour techno emerges from the now defunct Sandwell District collective of techno-heds keen on bending the Detroit / Berlin axis to allow for the grim pathologies of Industrial culture and all of its post-punk offshoots to infiltrate the boom-boom-boom of a 909 drum kick. Sandwell's Karl O'Connor is certainly the most vocal, hardlined, and aggressive of the District's members through the brutalist techno that he's produced over the years. His DJ sets are notorious for dropping Whitehouse and other power electronic squalor amidst furiously hard breakbeats. Juan Mendez (aka Silent Servant) strikes a gloomier pose than O'Connor through the Sandwell District and carries this over into the ethereally witched-out Tropic Of Cancer. Silent Servant's Negative Fascination drops from Hospital Productions, whose ghastly noise aesthetic parted once before for Cold Cave's gritty synth pop, making room for head honcho Dominic Fernow to follow suit with his own adventures in rhythm (e.g. Vatican Shadows, Christian Cosmos). If one were to imagine what Dom would want out of a techno record on Hospital, Negative Fascination is exactly what comes to mind - Chain Reaction's dub-inflected heroin house, Clock DVA's cybernetic futurism, and the atmosphere from the mournful dirges of New Order's first album.
A fine grit coats the production of Negative Fascination, and it's something that electronic purists may find off-putting, but it suits the bleakness and dystopian overtures that Mendez injects into his production. Acid-like gurgles propel the minimalist techno thump of "The Invocation Of Lust" and "The Strange Attractor" both of which rise and fall through a complex sequence of churning rhythms and shifting drones. "Temptation & Desire" lifts a taut rhythmic stab straight from The Sisters Of Mercy circa Body Electric and mutates it into a punchy minimal wave number with appropriately coldly theatrical drones hovering in the distant. The finale "Utopian Disaster" is right out of the Sandwell playbook of modulated techno sequencing, Chain Reactive dubby rhythms, and stealth bomber vibes. A fucking great record. (FYI, turntable types: the vinyl version's first pressing sold out, but is being repressed right now, so back in soon.)
Not sure how we managed to miss this one, with a name like that. Well, making up for last time, this one got sent to us a while back, and we finally gave it a listen and we were thoroughly blown away. And what's not to dig? The work of just one man, Christopher Ashley, aka The Slasher Film Festival Strategy, Crimson Throne is a stunner, trafficking in a sound similar to the current crop of retro synth wranglers, conjuring up lost scores to never-existed seventies horror flicks and lost art house giallos, and while that sound has been done to death recently, A) it's a sound we never get tired of, and B) this guy does it way better than most. The synth sounds are thick and gristly, the melodies sinister and ominous, the tracks laced with skeletal drum machines, and sweeping epic backdrops, as far as Carpenter / Goblin worship goes, it doesn't get much better than this. The opener sets the scene, a smoldering sprawl of gristly synth buzz, anchored by a low end bassline, a melody soon creeps in, it's not hard to imagine the credits rolling, a lonely figure walking through an abandoned town, strange shadows behind the darkened windows, is the figure a potential victim, or the person everyone fears? A pulsing throb surfaces, ominous synth swells add some emotional tension, and soon the song blossoms into a full on moody minor key synth dirge, the drums pounding, the various synths swirling, so sinister and creepy and so obviously sonic portent of impending doom!
And so it goes, every track here the potential soundtrack for some lost B movie classic, from the almost disco drums and groovy synth pulse of the title track, wreathed in sweeping swaths of keyboard shimmer, to the creeping kosmische swirl of "Weightless", which would no doubt score some 2001 A Space Odyssey type sentient computer / alien on board seventies sci-fi thriller, to the drum machine driven new wave-y grooviness of "Solar Winds", which sounds like the weirdly and creepily jaunty music that plays beneath the closing credits, over the last image freeze-framed, alternately, it also sounds like some lost cold wave gem that could be a Dark Entries reissue! And there's so much more. Rad synthscapery of every stripe, total retro, creep out, imaginary soundtrack, kosmische, new age, space drift bliss, peppered with blasts of disco-y grooviness, woozy psychedelic synth drift, and haunting woozy vocodered minimal wave (check out closer "Day Eighteen"). The whole thing dedicated to the Space Shuttle Ambition!? So good.
Essential listening for fans of Expo 70, Umberto, Blizaro, Zombi, Majeure, Xander Harris, Gatekeeper, Nightsatan, etc...
A short sharp blast of killer garage rock / post punk / power pop from these Aussie bashers, featuring a member of aQ faves Total Control. Originally recorded back in 2005, armed with two guitars and a drum kit (no bass), these songs are lean, fuzzed out, punky and poppy, only one breaking the three minute mark, most hovering around 120 seconds, the opener "Zip" is Soviet Valves at their punkiest, super charged and swaggery, but it's on the follow up, "Carrion Luggage", where the band display a wicked pop sensibility, channeling classic Yellow Pills style power pop, and sounding like some lost seventies/eighties artifact ripe for reissuing. And throughout Death Trumps Romance, the band delicately balance between the two, snarly punk and hook heavy pop, the finest moments, as you might imagine when the two collide. Fans of the current crop of garage rockers, and of course who already dig Total Control, will find a lot to love here as well!
Shoulda known that Shadoks would get to this one eventually. We've had previous import reissues of this cult Latin American psych platter at other times in the past, but they never were easy to keep in stock for very long - now we can count on having it available for a while at least, we hope.
Here's what we said about this before, if you missed it maybe six or seven years ago when we reviewed one of those earlier reissues: Whoa, this is a strange disc, a reissue of some primo Colombian psych acid-rock pop weirdness circa 1968! Totally trippy and weird, starting with the wonderfully freaky cover drawing of the band, with the music being even freakier. Probably inspired by Sgt. Pepper's and buttloads of drugs. The Speakers (also known as "Kris Kringle" on a previous lp reissue of this, for some reason) play nice Spanish-language pop/beat music that's been TOTALLY messed with, coming closer to Nurse With Wound than the Mutantes (although if you can imagine all the ridiculous moments of studio-fuckery on the Mutantes cds crammed into one disc, this would be it). Completely odd and delightful! And who can forget that track sung in the bizarre squeaky baby voice...
Some additional interest might be stirred regarding this due to the fact that the band was profiled in issue 22 of Ugly Things magazine. We learned a few interesting things from that article, among them that The Speakers, at the time, were apparently quite popular in their home country. Who would have thunk? And, "En El Maravilloso Mundo De Ingeson" is explained - Ingeson was the name of the studio where they were able to record for free at night, in return for putting Ingeson's name in the album title (The Speakers In The Marvelous World Of Ingeson)!
We dug the Medicine Eagle tape from Oakland synth-noise-drone combo Starlite Coffins like crazy. Sadly that tape went out of print WAY too fast. But here's their latest, and another chance for you to nab some of this glorious psychedelic noisiness. A full hour of smoldering, layered soft noise bliss, sprawling expanses of blurred buzz and processed synths, woven into softly undulating fields of spectral shimmer, peppered with bits of glitch and all manner of buried percussive murk, the sound slipping easily from ethereal kosmische drift, to grinding gnarled distorto crush. The sound laced with ur-drone like ragas, and hazy melodies, the sound woozy and warble, recorded at extreme volume, the tape speed in constant flux, creating a fantastically uneasy spatial soundworld, that at times reminds us of Our Love Will Destroy The World, Tim Hecker or a much darker, dronier, heavier Expo 70. Some tracks slip into full on washed out Caretaker-like mesmer, all bleary faded shimmer, while others, dial it down even further, slipping into Stars Of The Lid territory, smoldering, slow burning epics, that feel on the verge of blossoming into something explosive and Godspeed-like, but instead, are stretched out into tense, dense dronescapes, that are at once intensely sinister, and washed out and almost ethereal. Gorgeous stuff for sure. As is the packaging, 1960's Op-art style two color hand screened J-cards, the tape a deadstock bi-color yellow and blue cassette, custom inserts and all housed in blue, white or clear cases. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
Two brand new songs from one of our favorite bands EVER. Regular readers of the aQ list no doubt remember back in 2010, when we made the Strapping Fieldhands' Discus, our Record Of The Week. Go check it out, we gushed like crazy, cuz, well, that record rules, and even decades later few bands could come close to matching the twisted pop brilliance of Discus. And while the band made some killer records afterwards, we hadn't heard a peep since the early 2000's. But here we are, after a decade of near silence, treated to two new perfectly imperfect slabs of the Fieldhands' warped popsmithery, and holy shit do these guys still sound as good as ever. The A side, "Impossible To Say", is all warbly sixties style jangle, complete with woozy horns, all fuzzy and psychedelic, like classic Kinks but seriously tweaked and not a little bit druggy. The vocals that weird faux British accent that pretty much defined Discus, the song catchy and warped and fantastic! The flipside is also pretty Kinks-y but more of a ballad, but Fieldhands style, a heartfelt ditty about a bearded lady, who of course ends up "Sitting On Her Whiskers". So great. Here's hoping there's a new full length on the horizon...
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES!!!
Latest cloud of smoked out dub psych damage from this one man band, a massive sprawling double lp, every song bleeding into the next, one epic druggy abstract sonic trip. The Sun Araw sound keeps drifting further and further out, and in the process, approaching something that sounds a bit like reggae, but filtered through a cracked Not Not Fun filter, and a bank of busted amps and malfunctioning effects pedals. Oh and pot smoke. Lots and lots of pot smoke.
Woozy, warbly, prismatic, sun baked (and just plain baked), stripped down, dubbed out, inner space drift. Wah Wah guitars hover over skeletal rhythms, reverb and delay coats everything in earshot, disembodied chantlike vox are draped over SA's twisted mutant lo-fi dub. The record drifts into some warped murk, still peppered with plenty of upstroke reggae guitar jangle, but wrapped in wheezing keyboards and some super distorted fuzz bass.
The second record begins all ethereal and new age, some hushed glimmering ambient drift, near static, before launching into some dubby krautrock, muted and muddy and minimal, flurries of keyboard tangle spray notes at the relentless motorik pulse, still more abstract vox and lots of gorgeously spidery guitars, all tangled up into minor key melodies that seem to fade into the background, the whole record sort of hazy and ghostly, while somehow remaining krauty and dubby. The sidelong final side strips everything away, or piles it all on, blurring and smearing and winding everything into a dense layered drift, looped and hypnotic and psychedelic, that wouldn't sound out of place on a Monopoly Child Star Searchers record. Rad stuff. Thick vinyl, full color gatefold sleeve, and yeah, probably limited.
One of three recent releases from this Bay Area black metal / black ambient horde, that make up a part of a loose trilogy, which included the recent Monument Of Decay 12" on Black Horizons (reviewed on the last list, and still available) and continues / culminates with the Become lp, which was originally released in an insanely limited edition on aQ beloved label Auris Apothecary, in the form of a lavishly packaged reel to reel tape. Two sprawling fifteen minutes tracks, maybe SH's most abstract work to date, where other records displayed a distinct delineation between the atmospheric movements, and the buzzing black sections, no such separation exists here, with each track/side, existing as a single sonic ritual, the group's black buzz, smeared into blurred squalls of washed out noise, heaving swells of abject industrial thrum, buried vocals, oozing riffage, buried rhythms, according to the band Become was specifically created to inspire madness through repetition, a tranced out minimal/maximal cloud of roiling black sound. Playable at 45 or 33, both deliver a similar experience, although we are of course partial to the slower speed, which causes the sounds to grow even more indistinct and blurred out, a heaving, tarpit doom-drone that oozes from the speakers. But even at 45, this is more noise than black metal, a near psychedelic blacknoise, the A side featuring some seriously rib cage rattling low end, and when the noisiness abates, the sonic clouds part revealing some haunting beauty, tangled melodies and almost shoegazey textures, lurking just below the surface, eventually building back up to a dense death march crawl, more of a ghostly drift actually, the sound shedding low end, gradually growing more and more brittle, until at the finish its nearly Merzbowian white noise. The B side delivers more of the same, shadowed beauty, beneath cloud of demon breath vokills, of keening ur-drone shimmer, crumbling Caretaker-like atmospheres, occasional gouts of face melting howl and crush, but those moments are balanced by brief passages of sublime sonically tarnished beauty, that drifts darkly through the ether, before being obliterated by one final blast of speaker shredding blacknoise crush.
LIMITED TO 351 COPIES!! Packaged in swank Stoughton style tip-on jackets with super striking metallic gold offset printed cover art.
All the latest in the world of metal here, folks: on the cover, Watain, also there's stuff on King Diamond, Annihilator (yes!!), Exhumed, Cauldron, Powerwolf, Revocation, All Pigs Must Die, Ramming Speed, Morne, Arabrot, Huntress, and more. Free cd sampler stuck to the cover btw.
No good reason not to buy this, even if it's hard to read while banging your head, you can get the hang of it eventually.
Total '60s style groovy, moody, fuzzy psychedelic garage rock action is conjured here by this time-lost trio from down in Monterey, California, making their debut with a limited edition single on Burger records. No frills (like the cover art), but two great, authentically '60s sounding songs for those into the likes of The Jefferson Airplane, Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Lollipop Shoppe, Sproton Layer, Cold Sun...
The guitarwork is sinuous and searing, the vocals sensitive and sincere, the songwriting full of some tight twists and turns as each of these two 3-minute-or-so numbers unfold. When we saw 'em play here in town a few months ago, they had a psychedelic liquid light show projection going on behind them, and the music fits that perfectly. Great stuff, we can't wait to hear more.
Oh, wanna know a little secret? Well this band's guitarist and vocalist, one Tom B. Weaver, also happens to go by the name Angelo Tringali, under which guise he plays guitar in local heavy metal cult faves The Lord Weird Slough Feg. So you know his leads here smoke, even though the style is a bit different! While Slough Feg's weird metal harks back to the '70s and '80s, here Angelo takes things all the way back to the '60s, and we're impressed.
Some serious West Coast punk rock history here for sure. A double cd collecting the fourteen 7"s released on Dangerhouse between 1977 and 1979, featuring lots of names you no doubt know: the Avengers, X, the Bags, the Dils, the Weirdos, Black Randy, but some other more obscure artists that you might not, like the Alley Cats, the Randoms, Howard Werth, the Deadbeats, Eyes and Rhino 39!
We raved about the Avengers a while back, when we reviewed the reissue of their self titled lp, and odds are we don't need to tell you what X sound like, the early tracks from both those bands are of course awesome. But there's so much more good/weird stuff here, there's the snarly punk rock swagger of the Randoms, their songs, laced with some subtle power poppiness. Or Black Randy & Metrosquad's demented drum machine driven punk minimalism, all detuned guitar melodies, primitive Casio style programmed rhythms, and Randy's insane ranting vox, sometimes sounding like some seriously wacked outsider bedroom new wave weirdness, other times sounding like wasted knuckle dragging electro punk. The Dils of course, total classic SoCal punk rock, energetic and political, quirky vocals over frenetic drumming, and some seriously crunchy riffage. The Weirdos too, fuzzed out punk rock radness, and their anthemic "We Got The Neutron Bomb", which is one of thee best punk jams ever. The Alley Cats, whom we had never heard before, wrap chugging riffage, frenzied almost funky basslines, and intricate drumming, around some jagged guitar crunch, and wailing vox. Howard Werth delivers some fuzzy power pop, with a definite Yellow Pills vibe, which had us definitely wanting to hear more (if there even is more), and Rhino 39 kick out the noisy, raucous punk rock jams, with rapid fire Dead Milkmen style vocals over wild instrumental tangles, and Eyes are pretty poppy, organ driven and sing songy, super catchy and surprisingly un-punk. There's lots more, the always awesome Bags, The Deadbeats and of course more Black Randy weirdness (lots more, three singles worth!)...
The booklet includes a an extensive interview with Dangerhouse founder David Brown, who talks about the label, as well as all the bands, there are tons of rare photos, flyers and a second booklet which reproduces all the original single sleeves! So great. Absolutely essential punk rock radness.
BTW: We can also get the vinyl version, which is a box with all fourteen 7"s, and is super expensive, but if you want one, just ask and we can order it for you.
We have VERY few of these, as in just 3 or 4, so we'll keep this brief. But holy cow, is this something else, a massive 88 page oversized soft cover coffee table book, accompanied by two cds containing unreleased recordings made at the Institute For Psychoacoustics And Electronic Music at Ghent University in Belgium, which is sort of like the Belgian equivalent to the GRM studios in France, or DIEM in Denmark. The book celebrates 50 years and includes tons of rare photos of the various instruments and their operators, as well as a pretty extensive study of the Institute's contribution to the development of electronic music, the text in both English and Dutch, the book alone would be worth the price of admission, but the cds too, featuring tons of amazing music, from some names we recognize, but loads we don't, and the sounds, wow! Insane to think how prescient some of these noisemakers and academics were, considering much of this sounds like it could be contemporary, there are wild cut up collages, whirring blurry soundscapes reminiscent of the Caretaker, woozy, warbling ambience a la Philip Jeck, lots of drones, and abstract Musique Concrete, tape music and more, all recorded between 1963 and 1999. Again, the book is incredible, the music too, dark and mysterious, haunting and wildly experimental, SUPER recommended for weird music obsessives, and fans of early electronic / tape music. There's a good chance we won't be able to get more, so order super quick if you want one of the few we have, and be prepared to wait a while for more to come in, assuming we can even get more at all once we run out...
