So imagine some sort of ultra doom band, like Bunkur or Moss or Corrupted, the downtuned low end heaviness, the brooding, harrowing blackened sound world; now imagine, if you can, a band like that that doesn't make doom metal, or sludge, or even dronemusic, but instead makes electronic music. Imagine some hellish danceclub, hidden away in some cavern, far below the surface of the earth, where only demons, and those that dwell in the shadows, could be found. And certainly not on the dancefloor - this music is not for dancing, it's too ominous, too grim, too blackened. That club is wreathed in shadows, with some mysterious DJ spinning records with ribcage rattling lowend, skull caving beats, the sounds droney and bleak, blown out and minimally murky, some sort of black avant dub maybe? That may all sound too good to be true, or classic aQ hyperbole, but this debut full length from Akkord, definitely evokes exactly that sort of scenario. Just check out the opener, "Torr Vale", preferably on a really loud speaker, or in a car, system BOOMING, or in headphones, volume cranked, it's stunningly immersive, the low end a physical presence, less dance music or electronica than abstract sound design, we're tempted to make comparisons to Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Pole, Demdike Stare, there's definitely a huge hauntological vibe going on for sure, but somehow, this is even more grim and sinister than anything Demdike Stare has conjured up. Swaths of blackened shimmer, clipped beats, submerged in a murky sprawl of tarpit ambience, squelchy synths add subtle colorations, but it's all about the low end, the rumbling, whirring, churning bass, peppered with sonar pings, and rhythmic pulsations for sure, but those elements play out more like light desperately trying to escape from a black hole, and that's what Akkord have conjured up, a sonic black hole, crushing, and blackened, dark and yeah, doomy. It took us ages before we could make it past that first track, and while nothing on the rest of the record is nearly as black and bleak, that dark energy definitely surges throughout, or more accurately, oozes. "Smoke Circle" cranks up the rhythm a bit, the feel sort of double dutch, a little tribal, with little blurts of free jazz skitter mixed in, but all draped over another ominous backdrop of low end rumbles, this time accompanied by a cool looped vocal, buried way down in the mix, the vibe undeniable groovy, but with a seriously sinister undercurrent.
Some tracks, like "3dOS" get downright house-y, sounding like they wouldn't be out of place on some Kompakt release, but even here, the sound is wreathed in shadow, about as feel-bad as a feel-good music can get, especially when it breaks down into, some swirling, pulsing death dub drifts. "Folded Edge" is another groover, almost jungle-y, but wreathed in creepy slowed down vox, and in the background, all manner of low end warble, and rib cage rattling thrum, the echo drenched vocal snippets dubbed out and psychedelic, the whole thing tripped out and trance-y. The rest of the record offers up variations on Akkord's grim sonic theme, pulsing, motorik rhythms, some house-y, some jungle-y, some techno, all clipped and fragmented, and all sort of shadowy and sinister. The best moments though remain tracks like "Channel Drift", where the beat is a monotonous pulse, buried beneath a sprawl of cinematic shimmer, weird field recorded clatter, all hazy and murky and washed out, it's not until more than halfway through that the beat emerges from the murk, a bit of skittery jungle, that devolves into a woozy lope, or the killer closer "Undertow", another bit of creaking low end grimnity, hauntological for sure, swirling and heavily panned, sounds swooping from speaker to speaker, sounding more like Nurse With Wound via Demdike Stare, some mutant strain of abstract industrial electro-dub minimal murk. So killer.
Fans of the Basic House record we made Record Of The Week recently, or Ben Frost, Roly Porter, Demdike Stare, Andy Stott, Vatican Shadow, Silent Servant, all all those various strains of dark mutant electronica, this could very well be your new favorite record. It is ours!
This East Bay avant-guitarist quipped that Dispassion finds him in his 'death-ray' mode. We were not all that sure what he might have meant by this; and we figured his 'death-ray' would be some fucked-up Keiji Haino styled exploration of infernal guitar noise; or perhaps a power-drone of sawtooth gnashing akin to a Zbigniew Karkowski or Kevin Drumm. But no, Anderson's 'death-ray' approach is one of atonal polyphony, through layerings of heavily processed guitar tones that are sustained, filtered, modulated, and whatnot, into beguiling phrases that more resemble the dissonant chords of mismatched church organs. In fact, if Anderson hadn't stated from the onset that this was a solo electric guitar piece, we would have assumed it to be some midnight black mass piece of diabolical pipe organ orchestration. There might be Charlemagne Palestine gleefully getting drunk on blood red wine whilst completely unaware of the psychotic technician who was tone-bending all of his minimalist, clustered drones through tricked out digital means. But no, it's just Bruce with his guitar and his pedals, and it's a very unsettling mood created by this death-ray of his. Limited to 50 copies.
Finally, a full length from these Finnish post punks, fronted by none other than Mat 'Kvohst' McNerney, who also fronts aQ beloved avant black metal weirdoes Code, as well as apocalyptic psych-folk combo Hexvessel. Fans of those Code records no doubt dug the many Interpol-isms, woven into the group's black buzz, and for us, it's what made that band so weird and special, and that brooding, post punkiness takes center stage in Beastmilk, whose sound falls more in line with groups like the Holograms, Iceage, Grave Babies, Cold Showers and yeah, Interpol. Fans of that sound, that sort of modern, Joy Division beholden, gothic gloom punk, will flip their shit over Climax, which is chock full of noisy guitar squalls, angular minor key melodies, angsty, dramatic vox, pounding drums, angular riffage, all woven into tight, taut, tense, Wire-y jams that push all those same buttons. There's even a sort of Woven Hand vibe happening, McNerney's vocals a dead ringer at times for David Eugene Edwards, and Beastmilk's sound not that far removed from WH's more rocking apocalyptic swampy swagger. Noisy, punky, sinewy, hooky and still pretty heavy, Climax is a pretty perfect chunk of modern post punk gloom rock that we can't seem to stop listening to, although we haven't been trying all that hard either!
A while back we reviewed issue number three from this awesome Chicago zine, focusing on, as the title suggests, Black Metal of the Americas, and while we first discovered that third issue (we missed out on the first two) via a big piece on local weirdo black metaller The Botanist, we ended up digging pretty much everything in that ish, some stuff we already dug, but some new discoveries as well. So here we are, a couple years later, and we've got not one but TWO new issues, and like the first, both are classic old school folded 8.5" x 11" style photocopied black and white, cut and paste, and like #3, tons of stuff to dig.
Issue IV features an extensive interview with aQ faves Book Of Sand, there's an interview with Canadian black metal horde Aesahaettr, a piece on another aQ fave, Servile Sect, as well as pieces on one man, Velvet Cacoon related project Queen Of Heathens, Bastard Sapling and Cara Neir, plus loads of reviews! Issue V features more aQ faves, like Deafheaven and Dressed In Streams, as well as new to us names like Aksumite, Chrome Waves and Yellow Eyes, there's also a piece called "Intersections Of Discontentment In Black Metal And Emo" and another batch of reviews. Both issues essential metal mag reading, that again, belong on your shelf next to Chips And Beer, Rape And Honey, Convivial Hermit, Decibel, Terrorizer and all the rest...
A while back we reviewed issue number three from this awesome Chicago zine, focusing on, as the title suggests, Black Metal of the Americas, and while we first discovered that third issue (we missed out on the first two) via a big piece on local weirdo black metaller The Botanist, we ended up digging pretty much everything in that ish, some stuff we already dug, but some new discoveries as well. So here we are, a couple years later, and we've got not one but TWO new issues, and like the first, both are classic old school folded 8.5" x 11" style photocopied black and white, cut and paste, and like #3, tons of stuff to dig.
Issue IV features an extensive interview with aQ faves Book Of Sand, there's an interview with Canadian black metal horde Aesahaettr, a piece on another aQ fave, Servile Sect, as well as pieces on one man, Velvet Cacoon related project Queen Of Heathens, Bastard Sapling and Cara Neir, plus loads of reviews! Issue V features more aQ faves, like Deafheaven and Dressed In Streams, as well as new to us names like Aksumite, Chrome Waves and Yellow Eyes, there's also a piece called "Intersections Of Discontentment In Black Metal And Emo" and another batch of reviews. Both issues essential metal mag reading, that again, belong on your shelf next to Chips And Beer, Rape And Honey, Convivial Hermit, Decibel, Terrorizer and all the rest...
Tee Pee brings us the rousing debut full-length from this Pittsburgh based band, who put out a 7" last year in Mind Cure's single of the month series. The Carousel quintet are another in the current crop of '70s worshipping heavy rockers (a crop of which we heartily approve), taking their cues from such classic bands as Thin Lizzy, Thin Lizzy, and (you guessed it) Thin Lizzy. Catchy rockin' songs with lots of tasty guitar harmonies and real singing. And they remind us in particular of a couple other bands we like a lot who've been drinking deeply from the same well of inspiration: Gypsyhawk and, even more so, Bible Of The Devil. In fact, some of us were fooled into thinking this was a new Bible Of The Devil album the first time we put it on in the store; especially as the cigarette-damaged, whisky-soaked vocals are a dead ringer for those in that band, melodic but gritty.
Carousel are well worth checking out for any fan of the retro stoner metal sound, who wants to hear it done right (i.e. with the correct amount of cowbell!). These boys mix in some other influences besides the aforementioned Thin Lizzy too, ferinstance giving a tip of the hat to the NWOBHM on such songs as speedster "I'm On My Way" which rips along like a vintage Diamond Head or Savage number, or trying their hand at a full-on power ballad on the relatively mellow "Nightfall".
So, "RIYL" bands like Bible Of The Devil, Gypsyhawk, Kadavar, Horisont, Scorpion Child, et. al.
Oh, and another thing we dig about Carousel: the font choice for their logo. Yeah, it's the same one used on the James Gang's Rides Again album, which means it's the same one WE use for the aQuarius logo!
Ok, this is going to take a lot of explaining... Our favorite Finnish hypno-rock band Circle got this funny idea to change their name to Falcon (Ex-Circle), supposedly due to the pressures the musicians in Circle were feeling about the expectations of their audience, in continuing to operate under the "Circle brand" after so many years and releases. So, they became Falcon (Ex-Circle), under which guise they could follow their newfound dream of making poppy, retro-'80s hard rock - see our review of Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s Frontier album, simultaneously released with this Circle disc, below. No longer using the Circle name, they then "leased" the brand to a totally different bunch of musicians, who now have released THIS cd, Incarnation, as Circle. There's more to the plan, apparently the contract is for a year and then Circle will revert back to the original Circle guys, who will then supposedly be called Circle (Ex-Falcon). Right. So this is just the kind of ridiculous stunt we'd expect from our friends in Circle, we mean Falcon. And maybe they're just being silly and confusional, or trying to get extra publicity, but we do think it's a kind of a neat idea, certainly one that hasn't been tried before (wonder why?). And it raises a lot of interesting questions, some of them philosophical, and some of them musical. Like, is the new Circle still "Circular"?
So, first off, what you need to know about Incarnation: it's a DEATH METAL album (sort of). Make that, an experimental death metal album. But made by real deal Finnish death metal musicians, most of 'em from the band Stench Of Decay, also members past and present of thrashers Speedtrap and Pyrotoxic (the latter old faves from the Thrash Clash series).
Stench Of Decay have a pretty killer album of their own out on the Jussi of Circle's Ektro label that we've previously reviewed. And in that review, we actually said: "It remains to be seen if Jussi's interest in death metal heralds a harsh new direction that Circle and the NWOFHM might take, hmm? And while they sure don't sound like Circle (yet), in their own way, Stench Of Decay are quite brutally hypnotic, with repetitive riffs pulverizing repeatedly." Little did we know how prophetic that was, in a weird way. 'Cause now Stench Of Decay, more or less, ARE Circle. The heaviest Circle ever.
We're pretty impressed, 'cause when we first heard about this Circle/Falcon switcheroo idea, we thought that probably it was just a ruse, and the Circle record would be made by the Circle guys anyway, just under pseudonyms or something. But nope, they really did hand over the reins to these death metallers, who even made a new logo themselves, and did the cover art. It would appear that Jussi & Co. had no hand in it at all... But the new Circle lineup DOES rise to the occasion of being "circular", somewhat. Incarnation is both a brutal slab of crushing death metal, and also a unique, experiment in tranced-out avant-death-drone sonics, that embodies the Circle penchant for mantric repetition, in its own way. The drumming is quite different, of course, motorik beats replaced with double kick blasting, and the vocals are more extreme on the low end than anything Mika used to do on the high end, and the guitars unleash gnarly shredding solos also previously unheard from the Circle camp. But, it is hypnotic, in the most dense, droney way possible.
We're pretty sure open minded death metal fans, those into stuff like Portal, will dig this a lot. Open minded Circle fans too of course (is there any other kind?). Some of the five tracks thrash it up in proper metal fashion, others leave the realms of DM to sound more like Skullflower or Sunroof - like track three, "Transcending", with its building, crashing waves of doomed-out sound, almost like some imagined "extreme" 20th century classical composition, or the Gnod-like track five, "Burden", super dense and layered and propulsive, sounding like everything is going all at once, almost like several tracks overlaid, a mesmeric monster of abstract extremity. As is this whole album. So that's one question we CAN answer: yes, this is damn good and worthy of the Circle name. Also damn good and worthy of the death metal name, just imagine Incantation or Disma doing music for a Hermann Nitsch aktion. Here's another question we've got, though: will Circle, when the band is back to being the actual original Circle guys again, ever have to learn these songs that they didn't write, and try to play 'em live?
Two fantastic new releases from the Khrysanthoney label, elsewhere on this week's list, you'll find the latest from UK dreamo / screamo blackened bliss-pop combo Sleeping Peonies, and then there's this, the first full length from Pennsylvania one man shoegaze / blackgaze / blackbuzz bliss metal outfit Clouds Collide, and holy cow, the opener is maybe the blissiest black metal we've maybe ever heard, wintry winds over spidery minor key guitars, haunting and melancholic, warm shimmery chordal strum, and then suddenly, the song explodes in a gloriously prismatic blast of blown out beats, and blurred snowstorm riffs, all wreathed in a fuzzy cloud of crumbling shimmer, thick swaths of swirling sonic glimmer, and hazy smears of fragmented melodies, all tangled up into a softly having blackened dream pop psychedelia, before switching gears and slowing down to a darkly moody post rock lope, still wrapped in sheets of soft focus shimmer, harsh vokills surface at this point, but do nothing to distract from the pure buzzing blissiness of the sound. Fans of outfits like Alcest, Fen, and other post BM shoegazers will be in heaven.
Elsewhere it does get more metal, and more black, but even on tracks like "Endless Silence", with its shrieked vokills and brittle insectoid guitar buzz, the sound is still doused in FX, pushed WAY into the red, and blurred into indistinct black-gaze smears, and when things slow down, it gets all echo drenched and drifty, the guitars weightless and ethereal, the drums, booming and reverby way off in the distance. The record flits easily between pure dream pop shoegaze shimmer and wintry black buzz bliss outs, with most tracks settling somewhere perfectly right in between!
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, housed in a blue parchment envelope, with a printed cardstock Japanese style obi, an 11" x 17" poster, an 8 page 5.5" x 8.5" booklet, the envelope hand decorated with metallic ink!
We'd been hearing about this new Dalglish for a while before we realized that Dalglish was in fact none other than Chris Douglas, formerly of San Francisco, and formerly known as O.S.T back in the day, who was responsible for some of our favorite weirdo electronica of that era, his sound falling somewhere between Autechre, Aphex Twin and Coil. But on Niaiw Ot Vile, his first for the Pan label, Douglas displays a much different sound than we remember, less about beats, and more about texture and ambience, displaying a deft hand for sound design, immediately evoking Ben Frost, or Roly Porter, a sort of twentieth century modern minimalism filtered through a cracked avant electronic filter. Sounds ooze and sprawl and drift, the opener almost sounds like a deconstructed Godspeed jam, languid guitars (at least they sound like guitars) unfurl amidst a sea of blackened shimmer, and muted melodic fragments, all suspended in a slow motion swirl. The following track adds some propulsion, but instead of straight ahead beatscaping, it's more a jumble of tangled anti-rhythms, a field of glitch and squelch, gristly and dizzying, all draped over a darkly melodic landscape of chordal swells, and moody minor key thrum, and so it goes, the whole record an homage to a friend of Douglas' who passed away, that sort of threnody vibe present throughout, shadowy and wistful, melancholic, but also strangely dreamy, and subtly academic, slipping easily from gristly crunch, to dreamy blurred ambience, to abstract fields of layered, textured dronemusic, to swirling flurries of Oval like organic shimmer.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, and housed in a black and white sleeve wrapped in a super striking silk-screened PVC jacket, with the usual Pan style abstract geometric style artwork.
Lemmy of Motorhead looks like he's hanging in there on the cover of this issue of the premier US metal mag. Inside: Opeth enters the "Hall of Fame" with Blackwater Park, there's a live report from Phil Anselmo's Housecore Horror Film Fest, a rundown on what the magazine considers the 20 most anticipated albums of 2014, and stuff on such bands as Beastmilk, Mogwai, Satan's Wrath, Godflesh, among others. Reviews, funny columns, news bits, and all the rest round out the issue. As always, informative and amusing reading for the metal-fixated among you, we recommend it.
NOW ALSO AVAILABLE IN SPECIAL 'ETCHED COVER' VERSION. For a just couple dollars more than the regular vinyl version we listed last time, which we still have some of too. Originally released as a super limited tape on Digitalis back in 2010, Sonic Within, from Iranian sound artist and electronic composer Ata Ebtekar (aka Sote) finally gets a proper reissue on vinyl, via local label 333 Recordings, and it's a beautiful collection of modern electronic flecked chamber music, Ebtekar teamed up with pianist Mazdak Khamda and cellist Betty Wu, the core of the sound, Khamda's delicate, crystalline piano, plaintive and haunting, the piano ties every track here together, with Ebtekar working around the soft clusters of chordal thrum, and darkly pointillist melodies, conjuring up deep swells of metallic buzz, adding a subtly ominous vibe, weaving in Wu's moaning cello creating gauzy clouds of sonic shimmer. Some track are warbly and woozy, as if someone had their finger on the record, manually changing the pitch and tempo, like chamber music via Philip Jeck, lilting and lovely, but just slightly twisted. The piano drifts resolutely through fields of crystalline glimmer, and is draped over distantly churning backdrops of low end swirl and blurred abstract FX, all applied with a deft hand, so often, sans headphones, it sounds like solo piano, but deep listening here is definitely rewarded.
The flipside however is definitely more traditionally classical, at least on the surface, with the production tricks and studio affectations dialed back, once again letting Khamda's lyrical playing take center stage, but Ebtekar is still there, lurking in the background, subtly tweaking the sound, swaddling Khamda's piano in soft cottony clouds of ambient thrum, the B side building to an almost Hermann Nitsch style cacophony, before setting back down for a brief, playful and melodic outro. So nice.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
Fans of the NWOFHM, get ready for the NWOFAOR.
First off, please go read our review of Circle's Incarnation to get the whole back story about this release. 'Cause our pals Circle, the celebrated Finnish space/kraut/WTF? rockers, are not Circle anymore, they're Falcon (Ex-Circle). It's all part of an elaborate scheme we try to explain in that Incarnation review. But explanations are difficult, as there are multiple layers of meaning to what Circle, we mean Falcon, are up to here. On the surface, Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s debut album is all high concept hijinks, total retro '80s AOR good times party tunes love songs, a mix of arena-ready hard rock and radio-friendly soft rock with flashy guitars, melodic singing, and cheesy keyboards. Every track sorta sounds like a 'training montage' song from a movie, if you know what we mean. But we don't think it's ironic parody. Maybe homage, but not parody. If you pay attention, listen to the lyrics, it's not just joking. There's an underlying sadness, a yearning, a sincerity to Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s journey into, uh, the realms of Journey - a synth-laden, fantasy MTV rock n' roll pleasure zone. Take a close look at the cover art to see what we mean about possible divergent depths of meaning - what's that about?
Listening, we're hearing hints of lots of stuff we used to hear on the radio growing up - from Billy Idol to Styx to the Psychedelic Furs to Golden Earring to Aldo Nova to Neil Young (circa Trans?), and more. These former Circle guys have gone beyond their previous forays into the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" to get waaaay more pop than metal here, though we do hear a bit of a galloping Thin Lizzy-ish riff on "Leather Seat", sprinkled however with magical synthesizer fairy dust. Tracks like "Horses" and "Ace Of Hearts" also boogie pretty hard.
Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s songs are good, good enough to make the grade as undeniable "guilty pleasures" just like some of their obvious inspirations. Almost the only thing that makes this NOT seem like you must have heard it on the radio back in the '80s is that the vocals, while melodic, can have a bit of a rough edge to 'em, plus the Finnish accent.
Really, we thought the Falcon (Ex-Circle) 7" that came out earlier last year, was a one-off, that was going to be the extent of the joke. Instead it was the lead single for this album. So, as with a lot of Circle & Jussi related projects, one begins to wonder... maybe it's not a joke? In fact, Jussi insisted to us that this whole Circle/Falcon (Ex-Circle) stunt is actually an artistically significant, serious thing for him. He even wrote an essay about it, explaining what he's trying to achieve, but unfortunately we couldn't read it 'cause it's all in Finnish. He did ask us to list/review both Frontier and Incarnation at the same time, that was important. And so we comply.
Of the two albums, Frontier and Incarnation, the one under the Circle moniker is indeed easier to see as Circle, on the extreme experimental/drone side of their aesthetic. Even though it's not "really" Circle. Meanwhile, this Falcon disc, actually by Circle (confused yet?), does not sound much like anything Circle has ever done. Cause these are more traditionally structured pop/rock songs, verse/chorus/verse stuff, although they can't get away from the hypno-rock repetitive thing entirely.
Anyway, like we say in the Incarnation review, lots of interesting questions raised, but at the end of day, what's important is are you gonna like listening to it? Well we do, these songs are BUILT for heavy rotation and that's what we're giving this disc. At first we were like, haha, but now we're addicted!!
Oily drones be found on Hierophany, an album released on the Russian imprint Monochrome Vision, inspired by the ancient rites of Russian orthodoxy, and produced by a Belgian on a working holiday whilst touring to the east of his homeland. Over the years, Franck has worked with Pietro Piparbelli (aka K11) with the two of them collaborating on a project based on recordings from Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema (yes, K11 has released at least three other albums drawn from Thelemic residues). Theological differences aside (which are obviously massive), Franck's interest in both Crowley and the Russian Orthodox church seems to find common ground in the gnostic mysticism of meditation rituals and their capacity to introduce the process of transcendence. The massively thrumming drones that Franck presents on Hierophany seem to be based on field recordings made within a cathedral during a service, with the bell tones and chants reflecting into a gray wall of steely reverb and delay. Elements of human speech sporadically bounce within his system of acoustic and processed sound, creating something of a feedback loop of particular sonorous frequencies, reinforced and thickened by Franck's sonic sensibilities. The album quickly hits a uniform plateau of saturated environmental and electronic din, slipping rather subtly from one complementary movement to another. Well executed work that conceptually and aesthetically may have more than a few similarities to Current 93's early tape collage days.
The metal label Stormspell's motto is "Old farts stuck In the '80s and proud of it". They're the folks who have been bringing us a lot of cool cd reissues of obscure, cult metal bands from the '80s (such as Max Planck, Xinr and Detest), some of 'em as part of Stormspell's ongoing "Red White and Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" featuring long-lost demos from bands that are SO cult and obscure they never even got signed to make a proper album.
Well, the old farts at Stormspell have now found some young bands also stuck in the '80s, and have begun a new series of releases, putting these bands' demos out on cd but this time not waiting 30 years to do it. Fantastically dubbed the "Jewels Of Gwahlur" series (the Jewels Of Gwahlur being the macguffin of a Conan story of the same name), five volumes have now been released, and we're reviewing 'em all this list. It's a bit like something else Stormspell did some years ago, the "Thrash Clash" series of splits by underground thrash acts. But these bands are even more "old school" in sound.
Each entry in the series comes in nice trifold digi-wallet packaging, the covers pretty much identical except for the band logos, with a standardized "bejewelled ancient leather tome" look, a la the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks if you're familiar with those; doubtless some of these bands are! However, despite the uniform design, each entry in the series gets its own unique artwork on the inside, as well as credits, liner notes, etc. Most of these discs are ep-length, around 4-6 tracks, but it should be noted that they're quite cheaply priced. So even though we're reviewing each one individually you might as well buy 'em all and let your cd player sort 'em out! As for us, we're looking forward to hearing more from all these bands (pretty sure we will!), and are curious as to what further Jewels Of Gwahlur will be uncovered by Stormspell in the future.
GLADIUS from up in Portland start the series off with with a fierce barrage of hectic thrash metal, with pounding battery, piercing screams (and gruffer vox too), and hyperspeed guitar widdle. Fast n' heavy, for sure. For a band that appear to be teenagers, they show a heck of a lot of promise, being as skilled as they are aggressive. Sounds pretty 'pro' for a demo. Fans of Hatchet, Havok and other current thrash revivalists should dig this. Not a bad beginning to this series, but some of the other Jewels shine a bit brighter in our eyes.
Here's the third album from this all-instrumental Bristol UK heavy psych trio. It's been a while (like 5 years) since we last heard from 'em, they used to be on Invada, now they record for their own ToneHenge label... and they still bring the long haired Sabbathy jamming sans vocals in spades. Gonga are a chugging instrumental stoner-doom riff machine, with a mega-fuzzed guitar tone we can't help but love. They sound kinda like a cross between Earthless and UFOmammut, a little bit Gore-y too, all endless lumbering grooves, psychedelic leads, and spaced out FX. In other words, pretty killer. Metaphorically put this in your pipe and smoke it, you'll see what we mean.
Best line from Gonga's otherwise druggily arcane/philosophical press release about this album: "Their favourite colour is black or green or something probably."
FYI, vinyl version comes with poster and download and is limited to 400 copies.
The metal label Stormspell's motto is "Old farts stuck In the '80s and proud of it". They're the folks who have been bringing us a lot of cool cd reissues of obscure, cult metal bands from the '80s (such as Max Planck, Xinr and Detest), some of 'em as part of Stormspell's ongoing "Red White and Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" featuring long-lost demos from bands that are SO cult and obscure they never even got signed to make a proper album.
Well, the old farts at Stormspell have now found some young bands also stuck in the '80s, and have begun a new series of releases, putting these bands' demos out on cd but this time not waiting 30 years to do it. Fantastically dubbed the "Jewels Of Gwahlur" series (the Jewels Of Gwahlur being the macguffin of a Conan story of the same name), five volumes have now been released, and we're reviewing 'em all this list. It's a bit like something else Stormspell did some years ago, the "Thrash Clash" series of splits by underground thrash acts. But these bands are even more "old school" in sound.
Each entry in the series comes in nice trifold digi-wallet packaging, the covers pretty much identical except for the band logos, with a standardized "bejewelled ancient leather tome" look, a la the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks if you're familiar with those; doubtless some of these bands are! However, despite the uniform design, each entry in the series gets its own unique artwork on the inside, as well as credits, liner notes, etc. Most of these discs are ep-length, around 4-6 tracks, but it should be noted that they're quite cheaply priced. So even though we're reviewing each one individually you might as well buy 'em all and let your cd player sort 'em out! As for us, we're looking forward to hearing more from all these bands (pretty sure we will!), and are curious as to what further Jewels Of Gwahlur will be uncovered by Stormspell in the future.
GRAVEN RITE from Texas play "arcane heavy metal", super epick, doomy, and majestically melodic, with commanding but melancholic vocals delivered with a slight nasal inflection. Inspired by pulp swords & sorcery fantasy of the Weird Tales variety, the five tracks this five piece offer up here should especially appeal to fans of Manilla Road. This is definitely the sort of thing that if it came out in the '80s (which it sounds like it could have) would be highly sought after by collectors and probably reissued by a label like Stormspell! Alternate universe mission accomplished. Out of the whole Jewels Of Gwahlur series, this one and Volume III by Terminus, are vying for being our personal top faves.
It seems that when Jim Haynes is not behind the counter at aQ, he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker, or perhaps a network of caves that reach all the way into the center of the earth, or even still, some abandoned space station, drifting weightless miles above the earth. What else could explain the harrowingly abject sounds that make up his various recordings, none moreso than Ununtrium's Daughter, another fantastically and abstractly mysterious selection of deftly manipulated field recordings, and carefully crafted sounds, that Haynes weaves into mesmerizing expanses of lowercase dronemusic. But not the sort of static drift of most drone music, the drone here is often implied, the sounds active and alive, alien field recordings constructed from short wave radio dispatches, and lush, cavernous thrum built from all manner of sonic detritus.
The opening track here sounds like a muted Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, all of the metal elements stripped away, leaving just a murky sonic husk, a thick rumbling, a deep, layered whir, laced with what sounds like human breath, or perhaps that's the rumbling of distant subway cars, it never really matters where the sounds come from, since in Haynes' hands, they become something wholly other anyway. In this case, it's a geiger counter symphony, underpinned by a lush, almost melodic hum, peppered with what sounds like the clunk of someone changing the channels on an old TV, that is if every station was broadcasting some sort of glitchy electronic thrum, and then before you know it, the sound transforms into some Conet Project like transmission, voices drifting in the ether, the ether in this case of Haynes' construction, thick, blackened swirls, that over the course of the track, build to a power electronics like intensity, before settling back down into a slow smolder, all crackle and crunch, hum and hiss. The rest of Ununtrium's Daughter exists in a similarly bleak sonic wasteland, again evoking the aforementioned caverns and bunkers, abstract crumble, staticky drones, ominous black ambience, all laced with strange industrial happenings, creaks and clatter, the sounds of buttons pushed, of levers pulled, of dials twisted, all re-contextualized into abstract anti-rhythms, long expanses of barely there, whispery drifts, offset but roiling clouds of grim, grinding, crunch. A few moments evoke an underwater world, adding abandoned undersea research laboratory to the list of potential Haynes' hangouts, all warbly and woozy, blackly bloopy, respirator like rhythms woven into softly bubbling grey noise arpeggiations, often building to symphonies of chitter and skitter, the occasional insectoid chorus drifting atop black swells, settling into a final stretch, the most hushed and dreamily sinister of the bunch, a muted swirl of blackened thrum, wreathed in gristled layers, the prickly texture constructed from a tangle of processed static, smoothed out into a pulsing sonic cowl, beneath which a strange sound world winds down, gradually, toward eventual oblivion...
Packed in an oversized slim DVD style case, and as you might have figured, quite limited...
Now for the final installment (or is it?) in the Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever saga. Tom Neely & Co's hilarious cartoon love story, casting punk icons Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig as a devoted gay couple (having surreal adventures) wraps up, for now, long before jumping the shark. As always, this issue is super cute and clever and funny and bizarre. That other couple, Daryl Hall and John Oates, also appear, and the back cover features a Johnny Ryan cartoon called Mark & Gary Forever... that'd be Mark Mothersbaugh and Gary Numan. Funny stuff.
32 b&w pages, with two alternate full color covers - one Egyptian themed (?), the other, a parody of the first issue of Love & Rockets.
And never fear, Henry & Glenn fans, 'cause though this mini-series is over, Neely promises more H&G action in the future.
HNAS's fourth album "Im Schatten Der Mohre" has often been cited as the best work from these '80s German eccentrics, following a longstanding opinion from HNAS's Christoph Heemann supporting such a statement. Yet the sporadic resurgence of HNAS recordings may challenge Heemann's claims, as evinced by this authorized cassette release of Melchior on RRRecords. Melchior is in our opinion, in fact, the best of the HNAS recordings; and was the 2nd official album for Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa (translated as Moose Without A Sofa), originally released back in 1986 through Steven Stapleton's United Dairies. The presence of Stapleton and his wife Diana Rogerson (aka Chrystal Belle Scrodd) certainly slants Melchior into the paratactic Dada and post-Faust idiosyncrasy of mid-'80s Nurse With Wound (especially Sylvie and Babs). Just as NWW has always been the studio-driven vehicle for Stapleton's absurd audio experiments, HNAS - in 1986 the duo of Achim P. Li Khan and Heemann - used the studio as an alchemical means to recontextualize Krautrock's experimentalism, cheeseball disco, Teutonic chants, and Eastern European prog rock, into an aesthetic collision, that always teetered between working brilliantly and collapsing into a mess of delay ridden effects. When Stapleton's freak-out guitar and Rogerson's eerily disembodied / disaffected voice appear, HNAS gets noticeably better in their monochord guitar blurts, plodding percussion, bleeding 23 Skidoo horns, and unnerving atmospheres. That said, we'll admit our bias in favor of NWW over HNAS. Regardless, Melchior should be required 'out-there' listening!
We raved about Ruthless Sperm, last year's full length from Italian gloom garage noise pop new wave outfit His Electro Blue Voice, who we originally discovered on a split 7" with another aQ fave 'faerical blasting punks' Nuit Noire. As much as we loved that single and whatever other tracks we could dig up from HEBV, Ruthless Sperm was a revelation, noisy and poppy, chaotic and catchy, anyone who's been digging Iceage or the Holograms or Beastmilk or the Grave Babies, His Electro Blue Voice were kind of a meaner, more feral version of all those bands, which is most definitely a good thing. So after listening to Ruthless Sperm pretty much constantly, we were thrilled to discover this 12" we had somehow missed, releases on Clay Ruby's (of Burial Hex) Brave Mysteries label, and needless to say, it's a good one. A three song blast of murky, gloomy noise pop, equal parts garage rock crunch, new wave slither, goth rock swagger, the guitars fuzzy and crunchy and angular, the basslines sinewy and Joy Divisiony, the vocals yelped and howled, and most importantly, the songs are catchy as hell, opener "Dead Mice" could have been plucked right off of Ruthless Sperm, with its fuzzed out bass, and furious punk rock energy, all droney and spacey, with a weird psychedelic breakdown midway through, the song collapsing into a weird free noise drift, all skipping records and looped voices, before transforming into a weird bit of psychedelic goth folk, right down to what sounds like a recorder solo(!), eventually working its way back up to something more rocking, but still blissed out and weirdly woozy. Definitely worth the price of admission for the first track alone, but follow up "Eat Sons" is cool too, a serious Interpol vibe, albeit WAY noisier, a crunch, murky main riff, pounding drums, total leather jacket, sunglasses, anthemic gloom punk radness. The song here we end up playing on repeat. The whole of the flipside is taken up by "Zum", a sprawling brooder, all laid back and washed out, fuzzy garage gloom murk, noisy and droned out, but muted and minimal, a sort of swaggery garage goth ballad, that like the opener, has a strange breakdown midway through, from which emerges a completely different song, wildly mathy for a minute, before locking into something much more rocking and swaggery, some fierce fuzz punk pound with some really weird falsetto vocal wails and wild squalls of spaced out psychedelic FX, all of which KILLS. This band is so great. Seems like only a matter of time before the rest of the world discovers these guys, and they end up getting the same love as all the above bands (Holograms, Iceage, etc.). Here's hoping...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
We can always count on local reissue label Companion Records to foster the kind of rare hidden musical gem that perhaps won't appeal to everyone, but will get a select group of enthusiasts very excited over the discovery of someone's sincerely unique, but oftentimes misguided musical vision. Companion's specialty has always been cd reissues of vintage private press vanity releases, such as the Luie Luie, Charlie Tweddle, Marc Mundy, and New Creation records, and for their first foray into vinyl, have given us two quite amazing but very different musical visionaries: the spirited orchestral lounge stylings of Michael Farneti (reviewed elsewhere on this list) and the latent stoner mope-psych of Stan Hubbs.
Released in collaboration with Gloriette Records (Nite Jewel, Ariel Pink, and Puro Instinct), Stan Hubbs' 1982 recording Crystal is more out of its time than ahead of it. Recorded in his rural Sonoma County living room, it seems like the band almost can't decide if they're latent hippie stoner boogie-folk, eighties shred-guitar rock or progressively disaffected mope wave, which makes for an unusually intriguing sound that is hard to pin down. Hubb's vocals sometimes sung in a near monotone with female singer Kriss O'Neil can sound as much like a downer Fleetwood Mac as it can resemble some of today's gloomy pop found in Beach Fossils or Crystal Ships. But it's Larry Doyle's kitchen sink electric guitar approach that makes it really out of sync in an amazing way. Using lots of psychedelic effects and sounding like he's eager to show off his shredding licks to anyone who comes along, Doyle shows just barely enough restraint not to overstep the hazy vibe the singers and keyboards are laying down. Imagine if Simply Saucer did a cover of America's "Tin Man", and you'll sort of get the idea. But this is regionalism at its best, taking lots of big musical ideas from different popular styles and making something completely home-brewed, a bit oft-kilter and super genuine. Limited to 500 copies, comes with a full reproduction of the 16 page booklet of lyrics and drawings that came with the original release. Hot Damn!
We had been planning on reviewing the new album from our favorite Canadian metalpunks Iron Dogs on this list, but alas the cds & lps we were waiting for still haven't shown up - next time, we'll have 'em. But, we can at least list this, the new disc from Iron Curtain. They're on the same label, and have the same prefix to their name, and also play old school speed metal - but of course are somewhat different than the 'Dogs.
Spain's Iron Curtain are hot rockin', Motorhead lovin', loud n' proud Flying V warriors, ripping it up with an abundance of energy and enthusiasm - and some damn catchy tunes too! The riffage is simple and speedy; the lyrical content is totally cliche (with "Cheaper Whiskey Woman" being the best song title here that hasn't been used before but sure sounds like it should have), and we love it. Somehow their interests in drinking, and the ladies, and being free to rock the hell out, are expressed with so much passion and purity, they're on another level. The ESL aspect adds to the poetry of it all, as well. Steel Mammoth couldn't write better lines than some of these. Plus, it's hard to argue for more 'sophisticated' lyrics when you're banging your head like a maniac. This is fun stuff, no denying it.
To digress briefly into a discussion of the packaging - Iron Curtain's female cover model here is a lot more demure than the much less modest girls Iron Dogs employ. While both Iron Dogs album covers feature naked women covered in blood, wielding swords, in the great outdoors, on this Iron Curtain album, the fully-clothed woman on the cover (which first off, is hidden by a slipcase with different artwork), and whose face you can't even see, is poised to, MAYBE rip her shirt open with both hands... maybe. She's presumably feeling an excess of the "Jaguar Spirit". It's a real missed opportunity that she's not shown again on the inside of the cd booklet, having revealed a jaguar tattoo on her chest or something like that.
Anyway... While we're not quite sure what "Jaguar Spirit" means exactly, we're guessing that jaguars must really like to rock! Certainly 'liking to rock' is the big takeaway from this album, and Iron Curtain's intensity level about that activity makes it a success.
Like their first album, reviewed here last year, there's a bonus track at the end of the disc, another cover of a song by one of their NWOBHM heroes, this time they do "Set The Stage Alight" by Weapon.
American Primitive guitarist Chuck Johnson now calls Oakland, California his home, but he originally hails from North Carolina where we first heard him back in the nineties playing with bands Spatula and Idyll Swords. That North Carolina lineage rings through on Johnson's Three Lobed debut of modern Appalachia, Crows In The Basilica. Resurrecting the ghosts of Roscoe Holcomb, Mike Seeger, Elizabeth Cotten and Robbie Basho, Johnson brilliantly conjures a mystical resonance of haunting loveliness, both texturally rich and achingly majestic. Layers of past traditions weave throughout, British folk balladry, 19th century parlor music melodies, Eastern modalities and Delta blues, marked by a lonely cascading melancholia that transforms these pieces to moving modern day ruminations on the slow passage of time and the fluidity of memory. One of the best modern guitar soli records we've heard in awhile, one that sets the eyes gazing into the vast ether of the mind.
Download card included with the lp. Limited to 768 hand-numbered copies.
Also available as a tour-only cd-r with an extra track.
We've been meaning to review something from these modern retro power poppers for a while now. We first discovered Lame Drivers via aQ faves Home Blitz, whose O.ut O.f P.hase record we made Record Of The Week back in 2009, and who played our first South By Southwest showcase around the same time. At some point, Jason from Home Blitz struck off on his own, and took all the power popisms of Home Blitz, of which there were many, and honed them to perfection, so much so, that most Lame Drivers songs sound like they could have come straight off some obscure Yellow Pills style power pop compilation from back in the day. This flexi-book is in the style of those Castle Face Group Flex compilations we reviewed a while back, a little 7" book, with five flexi discs, assembled into a little playable book, seven songs, killer artwork from a handful of different artists, but really it's the songs that makes this essential. The Yellow Pills comparison is the most apt, think classic seventies power pop, Dwight Twilley, Cheap Trick, crunchy, fuzzy, jangly, catchy choruses, even catchier verses, fans of more modern retro power pop revivalists like Warm Soda and Bare Wires, will flip their lid for Lame Drivers too, and the packaging is ace to boot, the artwork eye popping, and sort of an essential music nerd object, that just happens to also be musically kick ass. WAY recommended, and crazy limited too, so grab one quick before they're gone...
One of two new releases from modern retro power poppers Lame Drivers. Elsewhere on this list you'll find their Group Flex style flexibook ep, and then there's this, a killer split with Northwestern post punks Woolen Men. Lame Drivers deliver two short sharp blast of fuzzy, jangly pop. The first channels The Fall through some swaggery, angular crunch; the second sounds like it could be a new Matthew Melton (Bare Wires, Warm Soda) project, all hushed whispery vocals, fuzzed out guitars, hooks galore, swoonsome and melodic, also reminds us a bit of Purling Hiss. Killer stuff for sure.
Woolen men counter with a kick ass slab of fuzzy indie pop that sounds a bit like the Wipers via early Guided By Voices, which is a VERY good thing, and follow that up with a Terminals cover, the band making that classic NZ Flying Nun sound all their own, bass heavy, swirling synths, monotone vox, all wrapped around another killer hook. Both sides of this 7" are stellar, and should have everybody tracking down everything they can from both of these bands!
A fantastic career retrospective of long time aQ fave Mark Lanegan, two cds or three lps collecting tracks from most every one of Lanegan's solo records, going all the way back to our favorite, his debut The Winding Sheet, originally released on Sub Pop way back in 1990. But we've been fans of Lanegan since he fronted classic grunge combo Screaming Trees, where his deep, dramatic, smokey and soulful vocals helped define that sound, but solo, with a more stripped down minimal sound, those distinctive vocals are front and center, right where they belong. You'd have to be a pretty obsessive fan to want this, since most of this is culled from records you probably already have, but most of the Lanegan fans we know (ourselves included) are in fact pretty goddamn obsessive, so having what is essentially a killer greatest hits, or a practically perfect Lanegan mixtape makes it worth picking up for sure. PLUS, there's also TWELVE unreleased tracks, all of which are pretty goddamn great. And hell, if you're new to Mark Lanegan, this is a pretty stellar introduction, we have trouble imagining ANYone not being totally mesmerized. The music throughout, is pretty consistently stunning, dark, and brooding, haunting and moody, simple and stripped down, laced with subtle slide guitar, bits of twang here and there, it's a dark, smokey, late night, softly psychedelic back room blues, all heartbroken balladry and tragic slowcore miserablism, but really it's all about THAT VOICE, rough and ragged, a warm whiskey soaked rasp, that's so perfect. And that's not even mentioning the classic songsmithery at work here, and when Lanegan teams up with other vocalists, PJ Harvey, Isobell Campbell, etc., the results are pretty goddamn fantastic, like a darker more demonic alternate universe Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. And we should mention the cover of the Leaving Trains' "Creeping Coastline Of Lights", which was already one of the greatest songs EVER, here, made even slower and darker, with vibes and xylophone, and woozy guitar shimmer, total wasted, rainswept, Hollywood wasteland, nothing-to-lose grim heartbreak balladry that is untouchable.
As mentioned above, the bonus tracks are killer too, unclear how they ended up being left off the records proper, another set of brooding balladic blues and swampy twang flecked stomps, that are honestly as good as anything on any of the albums proper, and Lanegan obsessives will not want to be without ANY of them.
Both the cd and the lp version comes with a big booklet full of rare photos and hand written lyrics.
The mid-'80s were very productive for Le Syndicat, the French industrial noise outfit that formed in 1982 with the noble intention to make the most noise possible. The bulk of the tracks from Timespace Losses has been culled from various cassette compilations Le Syndicat contributed to during that time period, with the final track on the album being a rare live recording. These works defined their earlier noise bruitism before iron-fisted rhythms locked down Le Syndicat's latter-day panzerbeat aesthetics. Overblown screams and garbled vocalizations dissolved amidst the acrid feedback, mottled distortion and blackened noise which seeped out of Le Syndicat's repurposed consumer electronics (e.g. shortwave radios, televisions, walkmen, etc.), inspired by the mediated chaos of SPK, Merzbow, Ramleh, Whitehouse, Controlled Bleeding, and other early practitioners of power electronics. Not surprisingly, Le Syndicat managed to land their work on tape compilations released by Broken Flag, ZSF Produkt (run by Masami Akita back in the day), Placebo, and Beast 666. This collection splatters itself as a very primitive, nasty set of recordings. Conet Project fans should take note that the Swedish Rhapsody numbers station is featured heavily in the very John Duncan like collage of shortwave transmissions from the Le Syndicat live track concluding the album. Recommended for all of you noise freaks out there!
Le Travo were a quick flash across the Belgian griddle of minimal wave, post-punk, and whatnot, releasing a short lp (or long ep, depending on how you want to look at it) and a split 12" between 1984 and 1985 only to disappear entirely. The principle songwriter for the project was Patrick Bollen who recruited Luc Van Acker (later of Revolting Cocks infamy) to produce the tracks on that split 12" along with a handful of other musicians sitting in on this track or that. But beyond the 10 tracks that Dark Entries has compiled onto this lp, Bollen never did anything else. For the most part, Bollen keeps his influences local, finding comradery in the lugubrious angst-pop of fellow Belgians Siglo XX, but there are more than a few hints of Modern English (who did write some memorable goth-pop anthems aside from the one that would immediately come to mind) and Colin Newman's re-engineering of The Virgin Prunes. It all speaks of decadence and despair with the midtempo drum machines dialing in a casual strut behind the disco-punk basslines, gloomy synths, and spidery guitar jitter. Whether or not the result of Van Acker's guiding hand, Bollen is at his best on the three tracks produced by that Revolting Cock, including the urgently marching plainsong of "Chiaroscuro" and the Xmal-ish drone melodies on the "Glow Of Gnome". Another gem from Dark Entries.
The final two installments in the long overdue comprehensive Loop reissue campaign are finally here. World In Your Eyes, the newly expanded 12" collection, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this right here, the final proper Loop album, A Gilded Eternity.
Contemporaries of legendary drug rockers Spacemen 3, Loop took the same sonic influences but rocked a little harder, opting out of the extended soporific drifts the defined the Spacemen, (although they were perfectly capable of blissing out with the best of them) and instead creating looped, krautrock spacejams, that were downright heavy, as well as being space-y, druggy and surprisingly catchy. Guitars were fuzzed out, vocals way down in the mix, reverb and delay EVERYWHERE, riffs often processed into stuttering textures and looped rhythms, the drums alternatingly motorik and skeletal, and pounding and explosive, all wreathed in a glorious otherworldly haze.
A Gilded Eternity, their final record, originally released in 1990, might just be their heaviest and most rocking yet, definitely their tightest, album opener "Vapour" has one of those riffs TO DIE FOR, the main melody is so completely catchy, the song a woozy, repetitive chunk of gloriously propulsive dronerock, less space-y than much of what came before, but definitely more rocking and relentless. the next track "Afterglow" pushes that new heaviness even further, sounding not unlike Swervedriver, big crunchy distorted guitars, pounding tribal drumming, the arrangement a lurching start stop, that slips into cool washed out breakdowns, before exploding right back into the stuttery groove. And so it goes, the band unfurling their masterwork, in a career of masterful works, "Blood" is total abstract minimal krautrock, the guitars stripped away, leaving just a super spare drum part, wrapped all up in processed vocals and swirling effects, another jam that easily could have gone on for 10 more minutes. But then just like that, the band slip back into "Breath Into Me", whipping up another killer riff, the track a looped space garage groove that rivals record opener "Vapour". The record proper ends with the nearly 10 minute "Be Here Now", the Loop version of a slow jam, beginning with some strange processed guitar, the band ease into a languorous groove that drifts druggily through soft focus clouds of lysergic buzz, brief squalls of wild wah guitar, but remaining locked and looped, the weary vocals drifting above the warm endless buzz.
A Guilded Eternity comes with a bonus disc as well, perhaps the least critical of the bonus material, considering it contains 5 demo tracks and 3 Peel Sessions, BUT, it also includes the Loop track "Shot With A Diamond", which happens to be Jim's favorite Loop track alongside "Arc-Light." This track provides the perfect sonic segue between Loop and the sounds guitarist Robert Hampson would later explore with his post Loop solo project Main, an ominous bit of electronic sample laced dronemusic, creepy and haunting and so fucking awesome. Previously only available as a 7" single, and as a bonus track on the original cassette version. Essential!
In fact, all four of these Loop reissues are absolutely required listening for anyone with even the mildest interest in sounds space-y, druggy, metallic and psychedelic!!!
From right here in SF comes this kick ass debut of fuzzy, jangly, shoegazey, noisy, bliss pop, from a group called Modern Charms, who sound like they've been studying their nineties indie rock songbooks, in particular, the Swirlies, My Bloody Valentine, Curve, Lush, Slowdive, and really, if that reads like a list of your favorite bands, then Modern Charms are gonna knock your pop-gaze socks off. A few seconds into the first track, "When We Get There" should be all it takes, muted minor key riff, chiming harmonics, angelic ethereal female vox, softly swirling guitar textures, all blurred and smeared into epic billows of chordal swirl, and shot through with shards of feedback, and wild burst of noisy psychedelia, Modern Charms have the sound DOWN, in fact, if you told us this was actually some lost shoegaze gem from the nineties, we'd totally buy it. The music is pitch perfect, right down to the production, and while much of MC's sound is wispy and washed out, the band display plenty of musical muscle as well, with big crunchy riffs, and some seriously noisy psychedelic shoegaze freakouts. But the icing on this retro pop cake has to be the super distinctive voice of vocalist Inna Kurikova, whose gorgeous vocals drift ethereally through thick swaths of noise guitar, and wrap themselves languidly around moody, brooding jangle. And it's not just the sound, the songs too, plenty of subtle hookiness, catchy choruses, the group deftly transforming simple jangle pop into something much more epic and expansive, heady and hypnotic.
Record number two for Pan from this LA soundscaper / visual artist takes up where the last one, Commercial Mouth, left off, a dizzying sonic collage that we compared in that first review to both Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World and local turntablist DJ Female Convict Scorpion, and this new one definitely falls more toward the latter, a heady psychedelic soundscape of orchestral blurts, noisy, avant chaos, densely layered headphone deep listening rife with moaning brass, atonal symphonic sprawls, at times sounding like Philip Jeck spinning multiple Art Of Noise records, while an orchestra tunes up in the background, everything wreathed in clouds of alien electronics, lilting melodies, thick swells of grinding low end thrum, buried percussion, another record with impeccable sound design, reminding us of other aQ faves like Roly Porter or Ben Frost, but Jar Moff's modus operandi is way more chaotic and abstract, a Joe Meek kitchen sink approach that defines JM's maximal soundworld, one that sans headphones can be a bit overwhelming, but close listening reveals the constantly shifting layers, the collapsing textures, and blossoming melodies, distorted guitars, plinkety plonk piano, sawed strings, all smeared into swirling zephyrs of sound, coalescing into dense, deep psych-noise dronemusic, then just as quickly splintering into more abstract, avant ambience and spacious psychedelic drift.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, and housed in a white sleeve wrapped in a super striking yellow and black silk-screened PVC jacket, with some primitive glyph like abstract artwork.
We've ballyhooed Brendan Murray's exceptional, yet perennially overlooked drone & din work in the past; but nothing could have prepared us for Commonwealth. Damn, this guy is good. No, wait; he's fucking great! After a handful of cd-r productions, a Twonicorn cassette, and a fine cd release on Intransitive of processed shimmer, shifting frequencies, and some low-end girth rumblings for our obligatory SUNNO))) reference, Brendan Murray has produced his best work to date with Commonwealth. Compositionally, it's incredibly simple: a drone goes up, and it goes down. It lasts a little under 50 minutes. But buried with this single minded composition, there are thick spun rumbles, reflective vibrations, sympathetic sub-harmonics, and rich tonal frequencies. Out of the constant tectonic whir that introduces Commonwealth, shimmering clusters sound like a battery of reed organs or hurdy-gurdies, slowly modulating into heavier, deeper drones. We've been told that the source material for these sounds is guitar, although you'd be hard pressed to hear anything guitar-shaped anywhere on the disc. It's far more like the hallowed minimalist sound of Charlemangne Palestine and LaMonte Young. Dare we say, it's better? Yes, Murray's drone hums like a perfectly tuned machine, with multiple pistons purring in a steady progress along Commonwealth's compositional arc. When Murray shifts the focus of the album downward, which begins not even halfway through the piece, the descent is noticeable; but it actually becomes Murray's most fertile work within Commonwealth. Here, low rhythmic thrumbs crawl beneath the surface of the slowly collapsing drone, precluding its inevitable terminus. Perfect trance-enducing dronemuzik. Fans of Aidan Baker, Andrew Chalk, and Phill Niblock should definitely take note!
Uhhh, what?? Leave it to Mike Patton's Ipecac label to put out this head spinning disc of super spastic & grinding bizarro-world "pop". It's the debut of Mutation, a band whose lineup is equally mind boggling as its music, featuring Ginger from '90s UK rockers The Wildhearts (who, strangely enough, masterminded this), Jon Poole from aQ fave UK prog-punk act The Cardiacs, the ubiquitous Shane Embury from Napalm Death (and a million other projects), Mark E. Smith of The Fall, and even Japanese noisican Merzbow!! The most unlikely, unexpected "supergroup" ever? Yet this meeting of musical minds garners predictably demented results. Mutation is a crazy, catchy synthwave mathmetal noisepop collision, kinda like Sparks meets Meshuggah, or Devo + Dillinger Escape Plan, or Melt-Banana under the influence of Queen, trying really hard to have a hit (and somehow succeeding - but again, only in bizarro-world). Heavy and hectic, these tunes blenderize blasting onslaughts of industrialized chunkiness and majestic processed poppiness. The complex, chaotic song structures find electronic glitch freakery alternating with soaring melodic vocal choirs. It's some infectious ADD weirdness all right, and while anything this intentionally outre, combining all these diverse artists and aesthetics coulda been a trainwreck, it's actually pretty amazing, if perhaps a bit too Mr. Bunglized for some folks. If what we've already said so far, any of the names mentioned, makes you think you MIGHT like this, then we're pretty sure you WILL like this. A lot.
Longtime readers of the aQ list know by now just how much we loved Cave In, from their crazy crushing ultra heavy early records all the way up to their more recent, way poppier 'Radiohead' period. And we've raved about pretty much everything Cave In frontman Stephen Brodsky has done since, his solo records practically perfect, and super poppy. So when we found out Brodsky was teaming up with drummer Ben Koller from Converge, we were thrilled, imagining all sorts of sonic scenarios, variations on heavy pop, or maybe poppier Converge style metallic mayhem, and truth be told, that's SORT of what Mutoid Man sounds like, but only sort of. Brodsky's songwriting is definitely on display, hooks galore, and his vocals, sound as good as ever, but the setting is definitely different, with Brodsky and Koller conjuring up some wildly technical, progged out metal weirdness, at times sounding like supercharged classic rock, and at others, like some furious metal-prog, with some super rad WTF sonic craziness in the mix, whether it's twisted churning mosh parts, or squiggly FX drenched psychedelia, or a ridiculously cool, and ULTRA heavy Animals cover (!), it all makes for some serious, and seriously kick ass heaviness.
We were sold one track in, opener "Gnarcissist" sounds like classic hard rock mutated and revved WAY the fuck up, killer riffing, fuzzed out bass, wild drumming, this track in particular sounds a LOT like Brodsky's poppier solo material but given a punk as fuck Converge style metallic makeover, THE rawk jam of the year, with its blown out wah guitar, frenzied riffing, progged out drumming, and soaring super hooky vocals, frantic and caffeinated, head bangable but hooky as hell, all of which basically applies to the rest of the record in equal measure. And while nothing is quite as overtly poppy as the opener, tracks like "Scavengers" wrap super tech guitar shreddery, around poppy hooks, and dizzying prog arrangements, the sort of sound that is exhausting to even listen to, but these guys make it sound effortless, transforming their hooky tech-metal punk-prog into something as crushing as it is catchy. Fans of Converge and early Cave In, who aren't averse to some serious goddamn poppiness, this ones for you. We've been jamming this NON-stop, and have no plans to stop anytime soon.
Wow, just a bit different from other stuff we've heard from Australia's Homeless label, who usually specialize in gutter-dwelling punk noize (Cuntz, Bits Of Shit, etc.). The Night Terrors aren't punk, they're prog, being all about instrumental suspense film soundtracky synthscapes and spacey theremin vibes - in fact, they supported Goblin on the recent Australian tour by those Italian soundtrack-prog maestros. So, yeah, this is one for fans of artists like Umberto, Zombi, Steve Moore, Majeure, and The Oscillation. Again it's a bit surprising this came out on Homeless; it sounds more like it belongs on Death Waltz!! But while quite cinematic, The Night Terrors are undeniably a (post)rock band, albeit one with more lead theremin than lead guitar.
Sometimes gently atmospheric (someone mentioned Sigur Ros), sometimes noisy and distorted (someone mentioned MBV), always compelling and evocative, The Night Terrors almost seem specifically designed for aQ appreciation. Plus, this is one of the song titles: "Existential Revelation In The Circle Pit At Slayer"!
So yeah, pushing all our buttons: there's lots of lovely moody moments on this record, with the theremin suggestive of wordless female vocalizing, as well as plenty of heavier parts too - the majestic melodic synth swoosh going toe to toe with the churning rhythm section, all heaving Magmoid bass burble and propulsive drumming.
It's import, gatefold, numbered, colored double vinyl, remastered from the original cd release circa 2009. Includes download. We've got the last 5 copies we could get of this record (the label is sold out), but if you miss snagging one, don't despair entirely 'cause they DO have a brand new album, Spiral Vortex, on the way quite soon, we're told.
This one shouldn't need to much of a description, these have been flying off the shelves since we first got them in. Originally intended to be a Record Store Day release, this double lp collects essentially ALL of the Oh Sees singles: The Carol Anne 7", Peanut Butter Oven 12", the split 7" with Paul Cary, the split 7" with The Intelligence, the Grave Blockers ep, the Tidal Wave single, the Blood In Your Ear single, the Sub Pop single, the tour split 7" with Jay Reatard, as well as a few previously unreleased surprises. The first lp is actually the same stuff that was on the bonus cd that came with the Zork's Tape Bruise lp released on Kill Shamen, while the second lp is newly compiled. It's a pretty bad ass collection, Thee Oh Sees were and are definitely one of those bands who seem to do their best rocking in the short format, and these are definitely some of our favorite Oh Sees jams. Absolutely essential for fans of course, and newbies, well, we can't really think of a better place to start.
Need more? Here are several excerpts from reviews of a few of the singles included in this collection:
Blood In Your Ear: Some fuzzy, distorted lo-fi sixties pop infused garage rock that totally rocks. Crunchy, distorted, fuzzy, groovy, doused in reverb and delay, the vocals a distorted yelp, the guitars all jangly, this time around there's even some harmonica, stomping and hooky and kick ass. That's just the A side. The flipside just might be one of our favorite Oh Sees jams yet, all brooding and power poppy, reminding us of the Wipers, but with strange bloopy keyboards, and a weary washed out minor key vibe, so super catchy, we find ourselves humming it through the days, and running to the front of the store when it gets played. Awesome.
Peanut Butter Oven: Full of that sixties big beat cavernous murky wall of feedback pop that we love. "Kingsmeat" is all melancholy Farfisa over upbeat rhythms and ringing feedback tones before turning up the Bo Diddley pace for "The Freak Was Clean", before the almost shoe-gazy "Kids In Cars" winds us down quite nicely.
Tidal Wave: Totally perfect, ultra catchy blasts of pure garage pop genius!
Split with The Intelligence: The two Ohsees songs end before you know it but they're so good and infectious that we've just been playing them over and over and over.
You get the picture. Super limited too, of course. Pressed on red and green vinyl, and housed in a topless magic marker fake tattoo Oh Sees fan boy sleeve. Nice! We have a bunch, but it's sold out, and the label is in the process of making more, so if you order one, and we've already run out, might take a week or two to get them back in.
We listed a cd version of this WAY back in 2000, but Chunklet has stepped up to deliver a super swank, newly remastered, & first time on vinyl, version of this classic slab of psychedelic pop from our beloved Olivia Tremor Control. Recorded live at the John Peel studios in the UK, when the band was on tour in 1997, some of our favorite songs get reworked here, sounding surprisingly polished and high fidelity considering the album versions were recorded relatively lo-fi, and thus, here, opener "I'm Not Feeling Human" is a glorious slab of Kinks meets the Beach Boys, via nineties indie rock pure pop bliss, lilting, playful, quirky, catchy, swirling FX, whirring organs, fuzzed out crunchy guitars, fantastic vocal harmonies, all jangly and glimmering and so goddamn good. The rest of the A side is made up of a song suite of tracks culled mostly from the Olivia's classic Dusk At Cubist Castle record, as well as the equally ruling "Giant Day" 7". The sound is supercharged, noisier than the records proper, the psychedelic freakouts, more freaky, but still consistently dreamy and fuzzy and jangly. The flipside is another song 'suite, which is essentially a OTC greatest hits part two, the second suite tending a bit more toward the washed out, an dreamily tranquil, but still balanced out with plenty of fuzzy psych pop crunch. There are also a couple unreleased gems tucked away in the two song suites as well!
Pressed at 45rpm, and housed in a heavy Stoughton style tip on jacket, includes a download code as well!
We've fallen behind - like, WAY behind - in keeping up with John Zorn's output in recent years. (Sorry JZ!) But we are fans of the downtown NYC avantgarde saxophonist/composer, if not to the obsessed extent of certain people we know. And when we found out about this, we had to get it in! One of our favorite of Zorn's many projects, Painkiller is an extreme jazzcore power trio, originally featuring Zorn, bassist Bill Laswell (whose discography is also pretty hard to keep up with), and drummer Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Scorn). Painkiller's first recordings of deathjazz improv came out on grindcore label Earache, natch. Later on, they got more dubbed-out and ambient (illbient?) on the amazing Execution Ground set.
Well, now Painkiller returns, with this recording. Zorn and Laswell of course have kept up their chops, but Mick Harris probably hasn't touched a drum kit in a while, so he's been replaced. They've found a suitable substitute, however, making us maybe even more excited about this: Tatsuya Yoshida of Japan's amazing Ruins!!
So yeah, we'd be happy to hear all three of these guys simply solo for hours, and, well, that's basically what you get here. A thrilling onslaught of drums, sax and bass, soloing separately and all at once (which technically isn't soloing, but you know what we mean), it's quite a ride. There's of course some moments of relative calm, it gets melodic even, and groovy, but intense is pretty much the word for it. There's three tracks, the first, "Prelude", not much more that two minutes long, and when it ends it's a bit disconcerting to hear audience applause already ('cause this was recorded live on tour in Europe, in 2007) but then they launch into track 2, the title track, and that one's over an hour long, so you forget about it being live, you forget about everything, except insane squealing sax skronk, eight armed drum damage, and how-low-can-you-go, wah-wah'd bass warble! This tour-de-force is followed by a brief "Postlude", and then it's time to spin the disc again because when it stops suddenly silence seems crazy and Painkiller's music is now what sounds normal to your ears. Maybe.
Killer live set from this avant supergroup, featuring, as the name suggests, Pelt, Gate and Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides, who performed together at a festival in 2012, mostly on gamelan as unlikely as that may seem, not the sort of raga-like psychedelic skree we had expected, instead, the set sprawls over both sides of this lp, unfurling dreamily, a totally tranquil expanse of tinkling chimes, warm and languid, the A side delving into something a bit darker part way through, adding some dense rumblings, before settling into something even more hushed and minimal, clouds of metallic shimmer underpinning warm chordal drifts and still more hushed tinklings. The B side is more of the same, this time adding some bird song, the field recordings adding an even more pastoral vibe to the already tranquil proceedings, the second half two is marked by a brief passage of more sinister sound, with droned out low end reverberations, but it too returns to a lovely shimmery drift to finish things off. Quite nice!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Comes with a printed insert, and includes a digital download!
Our pal Jason's Ormolycka label puts out some of the coolest weirdest shit, all of it super limited, most so much so that we rarely get enough to list, in the past we've had the tape version of the Liturgy record (which featured a remix by our very own Andee!), as well as the Death Grips Exmilitary tape (relisted elsewhere on this week's list), and now this week we have a whole bunch of releases, finally in amounts enough to list, one of which is this tape, from Denver witch house / electro pop outfit Pictureplane, whose sound drags the woozy lo-fi drag of witch house into total bumpin' electro pop territory, big beats, fuzzed out synths, sexy vox, skittery rhythms, warped loops, soulful and synthy, funky and poppy, super summer jams for late night dancefloor bliss outs.
Two new tracks from Dom Fernow, Hospital Records head honcho, and the man behind a multitude of projects these days including Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, among others. Prurient is Fernow's original project, but the sound of Prurient has come a long way since the harsh noise of his earlier releases. In fact, these two new tracks, like much of the recent Prurient output, most definitely falls more in line with Fernow's more recent electronic releases. Not that we're complaining, the A side is a fantastically grim slice of dark ambient drift, with distant vocal drones, and buried keening sine wave tones, draped over subtle murky pulsations, building gradually to a more driving rhythmic pulse, wreathed in static, the whole thing eventually engulfed in squalls of gritty noise and blown out crunch. The flipside though is whole 'nother thing, tranquil and almost new age-y, swaths of swirling synth, the whole thing hazy and ethereal, and hauntingly meditative.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! All on colored vinyl!
Volume three in the Secret Museum Of Kind Men, named for the Secret Museum Of Mankind compilations of early ethnographic field recordings, from which the songs on these singles are drawn from. As we explained in our review of volume two, we originally thought that Secret Museum Of Kind Men was in fact the name of a band, covering tracks from those old comps, and while these are in fact covers of songs from those compilations, each single is a different band, the common denominator being Matthew Clark, who runs the Casual Acid Tea label, and who has drummed for Premonition 13, among others. Here he sits in on the kit with aQ psych rock faves Residual Echoes, who tackle two Secret Museum tracks on from India, one from Tajikistan, the first, is all instrumental, and definitely reminds us a bit of Torch of the Mystics era Sun City Girls, soaring violas, over a bed of tribal drumming, and swirling psychedelic guitar, all Eastern melodies, and psych folk shimmer, while the second takes those buzzing Eastern melodies, and wraps them around gorgeous vocal harmonies, slowly building to something more droney and psychedelic, reminding us a bit of Swedish psychedelic hard rockers Goat actually! As always, VERY recommended, and also VERY limited...
Hey guess what? It's a sequel to the first Sax Ruins record, 2009's Yawiquo on Ipecac, which we had kind of assumed was a one-off. But nope, they're at it again, sax and drums to the max! In Sax Ruins, Japanese drummer extraordinare Tatsuya Yoshida, who (in Ruins) normally teams up with a bass player, is instead accompanied by the saxophone stylin's of Ryoko Ono. She's got a set of lungs on her, all right. Squealing and bopping like John Zorn hopped up on happy pills.
Of the 13 instrumentals here, four are improvs (all in a row at the end of the disc), two are brand new Yoshida compositions, and the rest are interpretations of pieces from previous 'real' Ruins releases, some of their most 'mathiest' in fact, the songs being mostly drawn from Vrresto, Pallaschtom, and Refusal Fossil, though our resident aQuarius Ruins nerd (Allan!) was particularly happy to hear a much older fave, "Bighead", from 1990's Stonehenge.
As before, hearing these Ruins tunes with saxophone rather than distorted bass, they are less heavy but no less intense. The complex structures remain, and the melodic content becomes more pronounced. Some of this is really lovely - but hectic hyperactivity is always, like, a nano-second away. Of course! So, if you forget what you're listening to, it's a little bit like the jazzy theme music to some old TV variety show GONE CRAZY. Or, as we said about their first effort, "Imagine a stripped down, pepped up marching band playing really wild Carl Stalling / Raymond Scott style cartoon music". Also, just think of the sort of sounds the saxophone/peacock collage creature on the back cover might make. Recommended to serious fans of Ruins, Zorn, and all crazy math/jazz crossovers.
By the way, we noticed that along with the array of saxophones Ono plays (alto, baritone, soprano, and tenor), she also is credited with flute. But not enough of it. That's what we want for their next album together, please - Flute Ruins!
FYI, Blimmguass vinyl version upcoming in January 2014.
Year Zero was 2004 for Gerritt Wittmer and Pete Swanson, when these two titans of West Coast noise joined forces under the banner Seers for a smattering of performances and one hell of a studio session. Somebody had offered to release those studio tracks; but as can happen in the world of independent music, the label in question quietly dissolved. Ten years later with Wittmer transitioning into a method-acting debauched balladeer for his Names outfit (whilst continuing his challengingly obtuse vocal-driven sound & noise work) and Swanson departing the Yellow Swans for greener pastures as a globetrotting solo artist from a base in Portland, Oregon (where else?). The sizzlingly white-hot frequencies from the Wittmer-Swanson axis seem to originate from modular synth exploration, feedback immolation, and the volatile jitters of floorcore pedal abuse with the resultant electricity always staring at the precipice of aural violence. We might have mentioned this before, but the Bay Area noise community (think Joe Colley, Scott Arford, Michael Gendreau, R.H.Y. Yau, Antimatter, etc.) seems to tightrope the arenas of noise, electro-acoustics, theory, transgressiveness, transcendence, etc. Wittmer's solo work has often veered into this camp, and he seems to be pulling the psychedelic psychosis of Swanson's aesthetic closer to his on Seers. On the studio recordings, the blistering tones and drones are softened (slightly) through the echoing phasing salve of delay patterns at the beginning of the album; but by the last track, the pure lazerbeam frequencies caused our collective tinnitus to ring loudly with heads cocked alongside Nipper, the RCA / Victor dog.
The second disc in this set is printed up as a cd-r, which is baffling since the studio recordings were professionally replicated as a proper cd. It is a live session, clocking in around 20 minutes in length following what Swanson and Wittmer produced in the studio with seering upper register frequencies and innard-massaging rumblings. A damn shame it too so long for this to come out. Better late than never, that's for sure!
Finally, a new record from this UK black-bliss / screamo / dreamo / blackgaze outfit, who take the post black metal of groups like Alcest and Amesouers to the next level, transforming buzzing, blasting blackness into bleary, beautiful blissed out heaviness, less black metal and more black tinged dream pop. The last Sleeping Peonies was so limited we sold out in a heartbeat, and even though we are the exclusive distributor for this new one, we're expecting the same thing to happen again, as it's limited to just 130 copies, of which we got less than half!!!
It's a short record, less than 20 minutes, but it's more than enough, six tracks of gorgeously, melancholic and blissfully blown out heaviness, by turns poppy and prismatic, somber and haunting, the only real black metal elements remaining, are some insectoid guitar buzz, and some anguished vokills, cuz otherwise, sonically, it's much more aligned with classic 4AD goth, nineties shoegaze, modern bliss pop, and the production reminds us to folks like TIm Hecker or Leyland Kirby, all gristly and washed out, woozy and warbly, home brewed and super distorted, the sounds melting and crumbling, all wound up in gorgeous heart wrenching melancholy melodies.
The opener, with the very emo title "A Timid Eyelash Flutter", sets the scene, with dark piano chords, wreathed in reverb and echo, slowly enveloped by huge billowy squalls of blacknoise, swirling soft focus static, the sound super psychedelic, and totally mesmerizing. "Dreamrrz" adds some raspy vokills to what would otherwise be straight up fuzzy new wave goth pop, and sans those vocals could be some Brooklyn band on Captured Tracks. "Cemetery Kisses" too is all Cure and Kate Bush, tangled up into something fuzzier and blacker, but only just, a slow build to an epic softly psychedelic coda, replete with dramatic deep vox and wild swaths of distorted guitar. The title track takes buzzing black metal guitar, and wreathed it in prismatic shimmer, and recasts it as something totally dreamlike and blissed out, with a soaring sonic climax, that would give Godspeed a run for their money, but the sound here is pushed way into the red, crumbling and blurring into gorgeous abstract smears, while buried beneath all this swirl and shimmer, drums pound and piano plinks, leading into the hypnotically cosmic "Snowbound In Hazel And Furs", which begins all hazy and poppy, before the sound darkens a bit, burying the poppiness beneath some wintry buzz, heavy, but softly, and woozily heavy, settling into something much more gloom-gaze goth-pop than metal, but it's that metal underpinning that gives this bliss pop teeth. Finally, the record winds down with a gorgeous ambient closer, all looped and layered, and wreathed in soft FX, man, would we kill for a whole record of that mesmerizing dreaminess!
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Maybe too blissy and poppy for some metalheads, but their loss, and popkids might find this the perfect gateway to darker sonic climes, and really, anyone into all strains of shoegaze-y dream pop, who doesn't mind a bit of black and buzz in their jangle and shimmer, this is pure black-pop perfection...
LIMITED TO 130 COPIES, housed in a purple parchment envelope, with a cardstock Japanese style obi, an 11" x 17" poster, an 8 page 5.5" x 8.5" booklet, album notes printed on gray parchment, the envelope hand decorated and adorned with faeries!
Latest from this long running neo-folk outfit, a fantastic collection of traditional folk standards, performed with a reverence that displays Stone Breath's obvious sonic debt to groups like Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Comus as well as their modern descendants like Sol Invictus and Death In June. The sound is simple and spare, all acoustic, the instrumentation appropriately old timey: lute-guitar, dumbek, harp, bodhran, tamboura-lyre, ramyaj, etc. and multiple vocalists. Delicate steel string guitars drift dreamily beneath deep dramatic male vox and angelic female vocals, gorgeous harmonies, the sound stirring and timeless, a few tracks slip into almost bluegrass, drawing from classic Appalachia, but most have a sort of renaissance vibe to them, slipping easily from broody and balladic, to hushed and crystalline, soaring majestically, but then settling right back into something much more haunting and spiritual.
Pressed on thick vinyl, and housed in heavy jackets, and yeah, you guessed it, LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!!
Besides having one of the best band names ever, Strangulated Beatoffs have to be one of our favorite modern purveyors of what-the-fuck sonic weirdness, a group whose sound is impossible to pin down, sometimes a Drunks With Guns like dirgey scumrock sludge, other times, a twisted outsider electronica, groovy and loopy one minute, noisy and punishing the next. Although, not sure where this record would fall on that spectrum. To Begin with, as the title might have given away, The White Album is in fact, the Beatoffs' version of that classic Beatles record, here reimagined as something altogether more lo-fi and noisy, but by Beatoffs standards, not necessarily all that weird. "I Am The Walrus" starts things off, and sounds pretty much like a noisy psychedelic rock band doing a pretty straight ahead version, lo-fi and wreathed in guitar noise, but then things begin to devolve with "Norwegian Wood", the vocals a WAY up in the mix, atonal drawl, over simply strummed guitars, the song peppered with belches and studio chatter, and a whistle solo (!). Damaged and a little bit twisted for sure, but still strangely respectful to the original. Which is, quite surprisingly, how much of this plays out. "Ticket To Ride" is a pretty decent cover, all grungy guitars, and plaintive vocals, buried drums, distorted and blown out and psychedelic, then "Rocky Raccoon" is a warbly sprawl of darkly psychedelic croon and strum, echo drenched, and woozy. The rest of the record plays out similarly, the Beatoffs delivering a fuzzed out, droney, psychedelic take on this classic record, sounding like some warped, wasted bar band, inadvertently transforming the Beatles original into something that sounds more like Liquorball. And if you're wondering where all the other songs are, well, check out "Dear Prudence", which crams fragments of ALL the rest of the White Album, into a single song!
This recording from 1989 has been reissued on vinyl now by Skin Graft, as well as on pro-printed cd-r (yes cd-r not actual cd, not sure why).
First we've heard from these Swedish grinders, who were born of the late great Crowpath, and who traffic in a similarly punishing sound, albeit a bit more melodic. The A side opens quite misleadingly with a brief bit of shimmery strum, bleary slowcore soft focus math rocky riffage, which quickly explodes into some churning, downtuned melodic grind-prog, chugging and blasting, with some wild little mathed out sonic curlicues, not to mention some crazy catchiness that had us thinking of all the classic Swedish death metal that came before. The sound flits from more metallic chug to the sort of post/math rock heaviness we can't ever get enough of. The B side is more of the same, dizzyingly agile math metal, prog grind, rife with blasts and chugging riffs, but shot through with still more crazy catchiness. Definitely dying to hear more from these guys...
The metal label Stormspell's motto is "Old farts stuck In the '80s and proud of it". They're the folks who have been bringing us a lot of cool cd reissues of obscure, cult metal bands from the '80s (such as Max Planck, Xinr and Detest), some of 'em as part of Stormspell's ongoing "Red White and Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" featuring long-lost demos from bands that are SO cult and obscure they never even got signed to make a proper album.
Well, the old farts at Stormspell have now found some young bands also stuck in the '80s, and have begun a new series of releases, putting these bands' demos out on cd but this time not waiting 30 years to do it. Fantastically dubbed the "Jewels Of Gwahlur" series (the Jewels Of Gwahlur being the macguffin of a Conan story of the same name), five volumes have now been released, and we're reviewing 'em all this list. It's a bit like something else Stormspell did some years ago, the "Thrash Clash" series of splits by underground thrash acts. But these bands are even more "old school" in sound.
Each entry in the series comes in nice trifold digi-wallet packaging, the covers pretty much identical except for the band logos, with a standardized "bejewelled ancient leather tome" look, a la the 3rd Edition D&D rulebooks if you're familiar with those; doubtless some of these bands are! However, despite the uniform design, each entry in the series gets its own unique artwork on the inside, as well as credits, liner notes, etc. Most of these discs are ep-length, around 4-6 tracks, but it should be noted that they're quite cheaply priced. So even though we're reviewing each one individually you might as well buy 'em all and let your cd player sort 'em out! As for us, we're looking forward to hearing more from all these bands (pretty sure we will!), and are curious as to what further Jewels Of Gwahlur will be uncovered by Stormspell in the future.
TERMINUS hail from Northern Ireland, and like Graven Rite, another band in the Jewels Of Gwahlur series, also play what's described in the liner notes as "arcane heavy metal". Chugging forth speedily but with what seems like a sense of profound sadness, again this is quite epic. In fact, this four-song demo appears to be some sort of science fiction concept ep, with each song referencing a story from the first book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. That's where the band's name comes from too. The sweeping, epic feel of the music, along with the vocals, very much reminds us of doomy British metallers Solstice, big aQ faves. And Manilla Road, too, yep; the words "crystal logic" are even worked into the lyrics on the first track here. So, very cool, and with Graven Rites, one of the most "arcane" sounding entries in the Jewels Of Gwahlur series.
Shane Embury of Napalm Death (and a million other bands!!) is on the cover of this, the venerable UK metal mag's 20th anniversary issue (congrats!), plus Deicide, Hell, Sepultura, Avatarium, Rosetta, Beastmilk, Vaura, Glorior Belli, Code, Conan, and plenty more - including a big 20 year retrospective on the magazine and metal itself. Tom G. Warrior among others (like ol' Shane) provide commentary. There's also the usual plethora of reviews, news, etc., and a free cd sampler too, stuck to the cover.
