Seminal Seattle crossover hardcore punk/metal band The Accused's most metal releases came out, oddly enough, on the rap label Nastymix in the early '90s. Probably our favorite Accused album, Grinning Like An Undertaker (1990), was one of those, along with the subsequent Splatter Rock record (1992) and intervening Straight Razor ep (1991), and all of 'em are out of print and currently pretty hard to find, and crazy expensive if you do, on cd or vinyl or even cassette.
Now, not all Accused fans will agree with us that the Nastymix era represents their very best stuff, but few could dispute that if you're looking at The Accused discography from the perspective of a thrash-fiending metalhead, rather than a punk, those recordings are their most full on metal, especially Grinning Like An Undertaker. Like we said, they're out of print, but we did discover that there's this compilation lp bringing together a 'best of' The Accused's Nastymix years, 14 tracks of their splatter rock mania, including a hefty portion of Grinning Like An Undertaker (all but four of that album's cuts). Sadly, their remarkably effective cover of "Boris The Spider" is one of the few tracks omitted; but perhaps wisely, so too is "Down & Out", the band's really-not-all-that-embarrassing foray into rapmetal (which was to be expected, since it was the '90s and they were on a hiphop label after all). So, you do get the nastiest cuts indeed from the heavy shredfest that is Grinning Like An Undertaker, plus some choice morsels from those other two, later/lesser releases - when picking from Splatter Rock, they also stick to the total rippers, not choosing any of that album's more off the wall efforts, like the stuff that sounded more like it belonged on a Big Chief album. Nope, it's only the most frenzied hardcore metallic crossover cuts. Frontman Blaine Cook's inimitable, phelgm-choked snarl is in full effect, as is the machinegun speed metal guitar riffery and blasting drums of the rest of the band.
Anima Morte make their home in the frosty Swedish North, but you'd never know it from listening to 'em. There's no cavernous old school death metal here, and there sure ain't no glistening electropop. Instead, Anima Morte deals in the grisly trade of Italian style instrumental horror prog. The Nightmare Becomes Reality is actually their third full length, and it was released way back in 2011 on cd, but we only just found this vinyl version. In fact, Anima Morte have been dabbling in their own brand of epic blood-soaked prog rock since 2007, which by our calculations puts them right at the forefront of the current Giallo slasher revival craze that we here at aQ HQ can't get enough of.
The album opens with a brief wall of droning skittery back alley synths, barely masking the disembodied weeping, whimpering and agonized screams hiding underneath, but this is one of the few moments of relative reprieve on the record, and soon we've entered into a surreal realm of nightmarish groove and technicolor terror. The plucked dissonance of acoustic guitars chime like the monstrous bell of some crumbling ghostly church. Dizzying haunted pipe organs send the listener spiraling helplessly into a sweat-soaked lightless nether realm. Blood curdling stabs of hypnotic cyclical piano slice their way to the forefront like a straight razor gleaming in the moonlight. With its groovy bass, shuffling drums and moments of bright melodic spaciousness, the majority of this record sounds like Goblin at their most progged out, syncopated and heavy. And while the band also list progressive heavyweights like ELP, King Crimson and Rick Wakeman as influences (and justifiably so), the clean modern production almost give the album the feeling of a more contemporary group like Astra or latter-era Opeth funneled through hours of twisted video nasties and low grade slasher flicks. The more overtly gothic flourishes even recall the theatrical Transilvanian madness of a band like Notre Dame. And it almost goes without saying: if stalking the city streets in the dead of night with only the dread sounds of Blizaro, Orne or Tony Tears oozing from your headphones for company is your idea of a pleasant night out, then you should definitely check this out. Music to be murdered by indeed!
Like Circle, Earth, Boris, and The Necks, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore is one of those long time fave bands that you can always count on us getting all excited about here at aQuarius, even when it's essentially 'more of the same' - we WANT more of the same, since theirs is a unique, wonderful sound. So, yay, the German "death jazz" greats are now back with their 8th full-length album. Piano Nights features piano, yes, lovely placid piano, and also all the other usual Bohren ingredients: restrained minimal timekeeping on the traps, lots of low end from the double bass and baritone guitars, additional atmosphere and melody from mellotron, organ, and vibraphone, and some smokey noirish saxophone too.
There's nine more gorgeous, soft focus, slow moving tracks here in the Bohren tradition of all-instrumental slowcore jazz noir, gently doom laden twilight moodiness that's practically hauntological, to use a term often used to describe stuff like Demdike Stare and The Caretaker - especially the portions of these tracks wherein an underlying ghostly ambient hum is made evident. Although this is not so much scary-haunting, as it is wistful-haunting. Also almost romantic, as if maybe Rodelius had joined Bohren, especially with the piano playing.
Bohren's previous outing on Ipecac, Beileid, had a bit of a weirdness factor (mainly due to an unexpected cover of an '80s German metal song, with guest vocals from Mike Patton) that Piano Nights perhaps wisely retreats from, instead simply providing the sort of aching, intimate yet cinematic sounds we have enjoyed from them since back when we first discovered the music of Bohren on a trip to Germany so many years ago.
This just came out this week, so it's just sinking in, but what a feeling, this music is all about sinking in. We'll be spinning it a lot, it's the perfect late night relaxing in an armchair with a glass of whiskey sort of record, lights low, eyes half closed... The libation, furniture, time of day, etc. can be purely imagined, but this music sure conjures that vibe. Another classic Borhen opus in other words.
The return of Bong! We may have had the amazing Live At Roadburn disc to tide us over, but what we were really hankering for was a brand new full length from these UK psychedelic space doom heavies, and we're not and here it is. Beyond Ancient Space is three loooooong tracks, titled "Onward To Perdondaris", "Across The Timestream" and "In The Shadow Of The Towers" respectively, and described on the cd sleeve as 'unsere kosmischen musik', and after a creepy deeply intoned, reverbed spoken word intro, delivered over a glimmery spacescape of twinkle and shimmer, we are suddenly sucked into the strange world of Bong, as massive guitars come cascading down, a plodding ultra heavy doomic lumber, the drums spare and loose, the churning rumble and thrum laced with some sitar like buzz, which is no doubt the Shahi Baaja, an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys, that figures prominently in Bong's sound.
"Onward To Perdondaris" is a sinister creeping crawl, a nearly 25 minute, tranced out buzzing space doom mediation, the guitars not so much riffing as unfurling sheets of rumbling low end, a sprawling layered expanse of thick blackened thrum, a spaced out dirge, the buzzing Shahi Baaja transforming the sound into something exotic and alien, the vocals too, a monk like chant, long low tones, all very mesmerizing and meditative but still heavy and buzzy and droney, like Hawkwind covering SUNNO))), or Ravi Shankar jamming with Earth, or maybe some blurred confusional mix of the two.
"Across The Timestream" is another 25 minute epic, beginning with a crumbling, rumbling bit of corroded guitar buzz, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in that the drums surface, and even then, they're barely there, a skeletal rhythm underpinning the group's smoldering blackdrone, finally, the Shahi Baaja begins to buzz, and the track locks into a mesmerizing, motorik space psych dirge that will carry us through the whole 25 minutes, this is not headbanging music, this is blissed out drug drone music, a zoner cough syrup space rock soundtrack to some serious innerspace exploration, the track does build gradually, growing more intense, but subtly and slowly, they're called Bong for a reason, it's 25 minutes, but it could be 2500, or 2.5, time does not exist, once you're lost in these sounds, time becomes liquid, it's the perfect sonic tranceout, drifting off, alternate plane, next level, ur-drone ur-dirge bliss out.
Finally, there's the nearly 30 minute final movement, "In The Shadow Of The Towers", which begins with a SUNNO))) like riff, all foghorn moan and blurred slo-mo melody, the drums way more up front here, a slow, meandery lope, pounding away, the rumbling guitar a lush backdrop, the cymbal sizzle spilling over, a slow burning space rock dirge, blurred and bleary, hypnotic and lysergic, druggily monochromatic, it's not until about 20 minutes in that things get seriously intense, the drums wild and chaotic, the sound blown out and in the red, a sonic squall climax, that quickly gives way to a smoldering blackened slow fade outro.
Like all the Bongs that have come before, a heady chunk of krautrocky psychedelic dirge-y doom recommended for fans of SUNNO))), Gnod, The Heads, White Hills, Grails, Sylvester Anfang, Electric Wizard, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Monster Magnet, Black Sabbath, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and their slow and low doom dirge alchemist brethren
And it's not just us, our customer Glenn was so blown away by the new Bong he felt compelled to send HIS review which is way more succinct than ours:
"Album of the year so far. Absolutely fucking amazing. Imagine if Hawkwind had taken downers rather than acid and you played their albums at 16rpm. A total kosmische trip into another dimension."
Fuck yeah! Bong on!
The cover sticker says "Dream River in dub". Yes, you read that right. This is indeed a dub version of last year's popular album by indie troubadour Bill "Smog" Callahan, Dream River! Dub version, as in, remixed in the Jamaican stylee... stripped down, stretched out, massively echo effected. Not unlike the 'chopped and screwed' concept with rap albums. Callahan's deep voice still sounds solid and grounded though, while everything else around it gets totally stoned. Less country, more beachy.
Actually, we never even reviewed Dream River. We didn't really need to. They sold just fine. You probably got one, right? This, though, we're writing up 'cause it's a bit of an oddity, a surprise (though Drag City has previously brought us dub versions of OM, but that doesn't seem so strange). And it works, remarkably well. Callahan does his best Lee Hazlewood impression amidst the mellowed out music, but the gentle dub edit makes his delivery seem more laconic and tends to turn his lyrics in the direction of non-sequitur. Or maybe they were before, but it's hard to remember. We're feeling so... spacey.
Seriously, even those of us here who aren't the the biggest Bill Callahan fans (which almost everybody else seems to be!), found this to be a very enjoyable listen. But then again, we think there should be dub versions of EVERYTHING.
In an interview for Re/Search sometime in the early '80s, J.G. Ballard quipped that San Francisco must have the highest population of deviants with college degrees. Back then, the Bay Area did boast a sizable contingent of acid-damaged drop-outs, sexpot performance artists, transgendered punks, mischievous hucksters, members of Caroliner, and the unclassifiables, all flying their freak flags, with those numbers gradually dwindling, relocating, and/or aging over the ensuing decades. The weirdos and the degenerate artists still exist; yes, they do! But San Francisco should be a little ashamed that most of them live in the East Bay. Berkeley denizen Gregory Scharpen is one such character, who sometimes goes by the pseudonym Thomas Carnacki and sometimes is the absurdist bandleader for various minstrels operating under a banner of the same name, that being Thomas Carnacki. A gnomish / wizardly type with an old-growth beard and extraneous tentacles dipped with ectoplasm, Scharpen / Carnacki is a larger-than-life character who toils in film, theatre and sound design, with his expertise finding sympathetic ears and fingers in irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound.
This split release marks the first slab of vinyl for Carnacki, and finds him / them working in parallel with the equally obtuse but less flamboyant outfit Vulcanus 68. The Carnacki ensemble for this 20 minute track includes stalwarts Jesse Burson and Gregory Hagan (the latter also being in Common Eider, King Eider) and occasionalists Sheila Bosco and Cheryl E. Leonard. What these five are doing in a room is really anybody's guess. Huffing glue and fumbling with Tibetan bowls? Channeling the spirits of grizzled thugs and wrestling with those ghosts? Ripping apart a piano and putting the whole thing back together all wrong? All of these could be the method acting principles behind these nocturnal collages and strange actions of slow-moving events. Oakland's Vulcanus 68 (nee Jared Blum and Dominic Cramp) dial in something not too dissimilar to Homotopy To Marie, with plenty of gurgling noises, radiophonic allusions, backmasked gestures, and hauntologically challenged puffs of smoke. These too could have originated from similarly liver-destroying acts of sound immolation as on the Carnacki side of things. Yeah, this really could have been a United Dairies release circa 1983. Limited to 250 copies and comes with a download.
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!
Automatic Music Volume II, as the title suggests, is the second in a series of recordings from Australian organist / soundscaper John Chantler, who has played with loads of folks, from Lawrence English to Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and who here presents two extended pieces of electronic music, obviously indebted to early electronic pioneers, but equally obviously quite modern, mixing glitchy fields of bleeping and blooping, with wildly chaotic bursts of noise, all laid atop a bed of super serene wheezing organs, it's almost like listening to the past and future collide, a man with a primitive pump organ, jamming with some twisted floorcore weirdo, or some brainy scientific soundmaker, surrounded by a mad scientist concoction of synths and electronics, blasting this sci-fi din, while right outside, a huddled figure hunches over a sruti box, the two inadvertently creating some sort of alien sonic ritual, heady and hypnotic, haunting and seriously out there, imagine Zomes remixed by the Radiophonic Workshop! Awesome.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We'd never heard of Luciano Cilio before, but of course Jim O'Rourke has. The ubiquitious O'Rourke (Wilco/Sonic Youth/you name it) contributes liner notes to this beautifully presented deluxe digipack cd reissue of what amounts to the collected works of Cilio, an Italian avantgarde composer from the '70s whose music is indeed experimental but less academic than you might expect. But even without O'Rourke's endorsement, a listen to the cd should reveal to you that Cilio was exquisitely talented, and maybe something of a genius. This disc is a simply fantastic document of what we might consider a hybrid of 20th century classical, minimalist psych-prog, and folk music, not entirely of this world. The all-white cover perfectly echoes Cilio's lovely, quietly haunting compositions for acoustic guitar, cello, piano and flute, sometimes visited by wordless female vocals. Achingly melancholic, immensely deep, truly beautiful. Limited to 500 copies, this cd consists of Cilio's sole album, Dialoghi del Presente, originally released on EMI in 1977, along with several previously unreleased tracks. Apparently he more or less abandoned music after the album's release, and sadly committed suicide in 1983. Allan's favorite new long-lost reissue after the Flamen Dialis disc reviewed on list #194...
Another haunting, meditative, dark sonic gem from local label Time Released Sound, this one a collaboration of sorts, two different groups, each taking every other track, and somehow, creating a surprisingly cohesive proper album. In fact, even though the title alludes to this being multiple groups, we sort of just assumed it was simply a strange band name, and this was all the work of a single entity. Thematically linked to the book Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, the tracks here are moody and minimal, mostly piano, but the pianos are wreathed in effects and textures, augmented by chiming melodies, and all sorts of layered ambience. There are definite differences between the two artists/sounds, with the Con_Cetta tracks, much more produced, lush and lovely, while the MonoLogue songs are murkier and gristlier, lots of hiss and static, gristle and grime. Field recordings surface throughout, and not sure if it's just us, but the last few TRS releases have been considerably darker, and Orlando is no different, with much of the record wreathed in shadow, brooding and ominous, cinematic mini-epics, that ooze dark emotion, and sinister sonic pathos. That's not to say the sounds here aren't lovely, they are indeed QUITE, but it's most definitely the sort of loveliness that disguises something darker just below the surface. And for all the differences, Con_Cetta are perfectly capable of getting grimy and murky, check out "Woe And Lamentation", which almost sounds like the two groups switched song order, and probably speaks to why both work so well together.
Fantastic stuff as always. Fans of TRS releases will of course find this essential, but for folks who have yet to delve into the mysterious musical world of Time Released Sound, and dig all things dark and mysterious, broody and moody, ambient and darkly dreamy, this could very well be the one that convinces you that you just might need to do some catching up. Fans of The Caretaker, Tim Hecker, and other practitioners of the hauntological glitch-drift arts, check it out!
As always, there are two versions, the deluxe version is totally over the top, extravagantly packaged, and LIMITED TO JUST 65 COPIES, already sold out from the label, we have THREE and that's it. It comes in a square box, covered, collaged and stamped, each with an attached antique enamel pocket watch face. Inside the box, a deconstructed / cut-up copy of the Woolf novel, a bird like nest of confetti like fragments, along with vintage paper ephemera, lace, leaves and other random bits and bobs, the cd is attached to a hub on the inside of the boxes lid, which is also printed, as is the underside of the box. Phew! The standard version is nice too, limited to 200 copies, and housed in a heavy, full color digipak.
Another haunting, meditative, dark sonic gem from local label Time Released Sound, this one a collaboration of sorts, two different groups, each taking every other track, and somehow, creating a surprisingly cohesive proper album. In fact, even though the title alludes to this being multiple groups, we sort of just assumed it was simply a strange band name, and this was all the work of a single entity. Thematically linked to the book Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, the tracks here are moody and minimal, mostly piano, but the pianos are wreathed in effects and textures, augmented by chiming melodies, and all sorts of layered ambience. There are definite differences between the two artists/sounds, with the Con_Cetta tracks, much more produced, lush and lovely, while the MonoLogue songs are murkier and gristlier, lots of hiss and static, gristle and grime. Field recordings surface throughout, and not sure if it's just us, but the last few TRS releases have been considerably darker, and Orlando is no different, with much of the record wreathed in shadow, brooding and ominous, cinematic mini-epics, that ooze dark emotion, and sinister sonic pathos. That's not to say the sounds here aren't lovely, they are indeed QUITE, but it's most definitely the sort of loveliness that disguises something darker just below the surface. And for all the differences, Con_Cetta are perfectly capable of getting grimy and murky, check out "Woe And Lamentation", which almost sounds like the two groups switched song order, and probably speaks to why both work so well together.
Fantastic stuff as always. Fans of TRS releases will of course find this essential, but for folks who have yet to delve into the mysterious musical world of Time Released Sound, and dig all things dark and mysterious, broody and moody, ambient and darkly dreamy, this could very well be the one that convinces you that you just might need to do some catching up. Fans of The Caretaker, Tim Hecker, and other practitioners of the hauntological glitch-drift arts, check it out!
As always, there are two versions, the deluxe version is totally over the top, extravagantly packaged, and LIMITED TO JUST 65 COPIES, already sold out from the label, we have THREE and that's it. It comes in a square box, covered, collaged and stamped, each with an attached antique enamel pocket watch face. Inside the box, a deconstructed / cut-up copy of the Woolf novel, a bird like nest of confetti like fragments, along with vintage paper ephemera, lace, leaves and other random bits and bobs, the cd is attached to a hub on the inside of the boxes lid, which is also printed, as is the underside of the box. Phew! The standard version is nice too, limited to 200 copies, and housed in a heavy, full color digipak.
It's been four years since the last apocalyptic transmissions from this intercontinental outfit, three Canadians and one Swede (whom the Canadians have never ever actually met, so the story goes!), and now Culted have returned with another harrowing dose of monstrously overwhelming blackened sludge. Oblique To All Paths is over an hour of immersive and corrosive sonic density. 20 minute opener "Brooding Hex" initially creates a false sense of security with its ethereal plucked strings, bathed in reverb, seeming to loop like something from a hazy half remembered dream. The sound of what seems to be rustling paper adding a further surreal layer. But before long, those crumbling lumbering guitars crash to the surface like some long sleeping leviathan reawakened and suddenly all light is sucked out of the room and we're ushered into a world of anguished growls and dissonant maddening leads over terrifying earth splitting grooves. Culted often recall '90s era Neurosis or Godflesh at their most unforgiving, especially with their use of crackling spoken word recordings, looped samples and minimal hypnotic riffing. There are moments of comparative calm here as well. Swirling disorienting clean guitars are layered upon white noise. Fluttering shoegazey leads fight to surface like dying rays of sunlight peaking through black storm clouds. Tribal toms thunder beneath a wall of droning feedback creating a strange sense of suffocating peace. But even these passages act more as an ominous calm before the storm than a moment of respite, only building the dread and magnifying the intensity when those world ending guitars kick back in. Enormous and all encompassing, and while perhaps slightly more musical than the harshest of doom drone acts, there's no reason why fans of Bunkur, Monument Of Urns, Indian or our recently reviewed Legions Of Andromeda won't appreciate this swirling uncompromising black hole of a record.
Your second chance to get your hands on Cybotron's seminal proto-Detroit techno lp, Clear, has arrived. Lauded as one of the most anticipated vinyl reissues of 2013, they sold right off the assembly line, but we just managed to snag some more. This is one funky futuristic slab of electro that sounds as fresh now as Kraftwerk did back then, to the band's young members who also dug Detroit radio DJ The Electrifying Mojo, Afro-futurism, and science fiction. Perhaps noting members Juan "Model 500" Atkins and Richard "3070" Davis's affinity for P-Funk in the album's syncopations, Fantasy Records in Berkeley, California originally released it in 1983 under the title Enter. It was later reissued on cd in 1990 with a different track listing and the title changed to Clear, after the track on here with the percolating synth line that everyone from Missy Elliot to T.I. has sampled. It's as recognizable as Afrika Bambaata's "Planet Rock."
Prior to Enter/Clear's release, Atkins had issued many of the tracks as singles under his Model 500 moniker. A young musician just learning to use electronic synthesizers and sequencers, his obsession with Kraftwerk makes itself known on tracks "Clear" and "R-9", while tracks like "Cosmic Raindance" and "El Salvador" align more with Europen synth pop. All ironically depict the dystopic city of man-machines working on the line building America's cars, a future that was already being buried into the past as the late '70s recession and oil crisis lead to the decline in demand for U.S.-made autos. Though Atkins was familiar with the concept of DJ mixes, he aimed to make Cybotron a band with guitar solos (by Jon "Jon 5" Howsley) and traditional song structure. The overall effect is more electro, with a dash of new wave, than for-real techno (that comes later with 1984's "Techno City" or Derrick May's 1987 "Strings of Life," but we'll let you duke that one out amongst yourselves). Fair to say that Atkins would go on to develop Detroit's techno sound alongside Derrick Mays, and Cybotron's original output remains a classic blueprint of where the world of music was heading. This second reissue on vinyl best celebrates the spirit of the Detroit techno DJ scene.
There are definitely a bunch of you out there who really dig the crazy technical progmetal stuff, the thrashier and more insane the better. Like Vektor, ferstance. You know who you are. Or rather, WE know who WE are, maybe we should say, since we love that sort of stuff too. We certainly sold a lot of the Confessor demos cd set that Divebomb put out a while back, and so we thought we ought to list this, another mathematically advanced Divebomb reissue. This one's a somewhat obscure tech-thrash masterpiece by the German band Deathrow.
Deception Ignored - what does that title mean, anyway? The deception failed? or it succeeded?? Anyway, Deception Ignored was Deathrow's third album, originally released in 1988. Their first two albums, Riders Of Doom aka Satan's Gift ('86) and Raging Steel ('87), were much more basic and barbaric Teutonic thrashfests, and also pretty awesome, but it was with Deception Ignored that they joined the ranks of such bands as Watchtower, Coroner, Voivod, Anacrusis, and Mekong Delta in the realm of progressive / technical thrash mastery. Probably the evolution had to do with the fact that they'd just acquired a new, more technically-minded guitarist. His chops seem to have rubbed off on the other guys in the band. So grab this and get ready for a dizzying performance. Deathrow on this album are still raging, speed-wise - and lyrically too, it's all sociopolitical subject matter. But their heavy riffage has become intensely convoluted, lashed to equally intense rhythmic complexity. There's a shit ton of weedly-weedly razor sharp guitar shred that's sometimes almost jazzy, spilling (in a precise fashion) all over these stop, start, spin on a dime song structures. Which also feature the occasional atmospheric segue - like the acoustic guitar intro to "Machinery", or the classical touch provided by the moody piano and church organ passage heard at the start of the math-mad epic instrumental "Triocton". Meanwhile, amidst all this incredible instrumental interplay, Deathrow's singer fits in where and when he can, his vocals sometimes shout-growled in an aggro manner, or at other times affecting a higher pitched, more "melodic" whine. Which kinda makes us think of Joey Belladona era Anthrax if they got into a total math-metal frenzy. Also, it sounds not unlike Confessor a lot of the time. So this is definitely for fans of that band, also the others mentioned, especially including those modern day prog-thrash faves Vector!
The cd booklet of this nicely done reissue includes lyrics, an interview with Deathrow originally published in Metal Forces magazine back in '89, and extensive new liner notes by Jeff Wagner, the prog-metal expert who also wrote the liners to that Confessor demos collection.
We would have made Demdike Stare's sprawling quadruple vinyl 12"s epic Elemental our Record Of The Week had it not been for a few things. One, the four records were released over the course of several months, two, the combined cost of all those records ended up being nearly $100, and three, we knew it was eventually gonna come out on cd. So now that the cd version is here, we can finally make this twisted hauntological epic our Record Of The Week, which is great news for everybody, EXCEPT maybe crazy completists, who will be dismayed (or perhaps perversely thrilled) to discover, that not only does the double cd version tack on a bunch of extra tracks (nearly 33 minutes worth!!), but it also features alternate versions of some of the tracks from the 12"s. So it's really up to the folks who already shelled out for all four 12" if they want to buy it all over again, but for everybody else, we can't recommend this highly enough. More on the bonus tracks at the end, but let's talk about Elemental proper first...
Elemental was probably one of the most anticipated records around here recently, the sprawling epic from hauntological duo Demdike Stare, a four part songsuite, Chrysanthe, Violetta, Rose and Iris, the duo's new sound seriously dark, much more industrial sounding, the vibe blackened, the sounds layered and way more dense.
Chrysanthe opens with "Mephisto's Lament", which is all foghorn buzz, deep whirring drones, keening high end melodic fragments, murky buried rhythms, peppered with creepy synth squelches, and when the song gets rolling, it's almost like a hauntological SUNNO))), the same sort of roiling downtuned heaviness, but here stretched into something a bit more sinister and abstract, almost like the soundtrack for some subterranean factory, all rumble and clang, all shadows and very little light. "Kommunion" is up next, a lush looped slow build, all repeated piano motifs wreathed in chanted vocals, and all blurred into fuzzy soft focus swells, the sound suddenly expanding into a blisteringly blown out in-the-red buzz, a swoonsome melody hidden in there somewhere, the sound slipping from caustic and crunchy to blurred and murky, before switching gears completely, lacing a sprawl of staticky hiss to a skeletal trip hop pulse, extra percussion provided by found sounds, clatter and crunch, atonal piano, all woven into a strange almost Art Of Noise sounding beat. Then comes "Unction", a super creepy stretch of undulating lowend, demarcated by a strange sonar ping rhythm, one that is quickly augmented by a twisted effected croaking frog skitter, and another beat seemingly assembled from the sounds of workman scraping and dragging, a crunchy noisy lurching groove, that is soon overtaken by another cloud of reverberating pianos, which finishes off the side with a coda of swirling minimal washed out thrum.
The second part, Violetta, begins with "Mnemosyne", a blissed out sun dappled bit of witch house-y skitter, all hazy and gauzy and dreamlike, until a sudden burst of clattery noisy rhythmic crunch changes everything, and then assembles itself into a strange lumbering cacophonous beat, the sound eventually underpinned by some Eastern style folk music, which drifts briefly, before that clattery beat crashes back in, now accompanied by that Eastern melody, sounding like a weirdly stuttery bit of gypsy electro. Which leads directly into "In The Wake Of Chronos", which opens with some distant mysterious melodies, some sprinkler like textures, some super minimal skeletal skitter, and some seriously deep bass thrum, the minimal drift soon peppered with short sharp bursts of metallic crunch, clipped bits of hiss and skree sculpted into a sort-of-beat, also soon joined by tinkling melodies, wreathed in echo, the sound gradually expanding, and becoming more and more lush, that beat drifting off, leaving the various other sounds to shimmer and hover ethereally over a blackened backdrop of blurred hum. And finally, Violetta finishes off with the title track, a soft cacophony of pounded piano, the chords allowed to ring out and slowly fade, all subtly warped, an ominous sort of avant classical doom, laced with little sonic squiggles, and wreathed in clouds of hiss and static, soon those little squiggles transform into beats, a wild chaotic looped rhythm, which is strangely at odds with that funereal piano, still pounding away in the background, a twisted bit of hauntological IDM, the piano subtly replaced by a hazy sprawl of synth simmer, which is left to fade out once the beat drops off, a thick swirling final movement, washed out and woozy.
Part three is Rose, and begins with a churning industrial chug, grinding through a woozy washed out haze, wreathed in a distant ethereal vocal drift, looped and mesmerizing, the sound is most definitely epic and cinematic, the sound laced with bits of clatter and crunch, and than BAM, the track is transformed into a gorgeous stretch of Middle Eastern string laden groove, all wrapped around that opening industrial rhythm, sounding like a more dense, more psychedelic Muslimgauze! The second track is more murky and dubbed out and spacey, anchored by a muted slo-mo house beat, buried in the murk, the beats wreathed in soft metallic billows, the surrounding sounds swirling dreamily, hazy melodic streaks and blurred background shimmers, clouds of tripped out drift, through which that industrial flecked rhythm soldiers druggily on.
The third track begins as a gauzy, ethereal thrum, that seems to hover wraithlike, before suddenly in drops an impossibly dense and heavy ribcage rattling bass pulse, accompanied by cool spare tabla like rhythms, that Muslimgauze vibe is definitely huge here too, a keening high end sine wave tone flutters over fragmented chunks of dubstep bass wobble, all drifting in the sonic ether.
Finally comes part four, Iris, which might be the grimmest and darkest of the bunch. Opening with buzzing cellos, and swirling blackened drones, which are soon joined by a plodding doomy rhythm, laced with streaks of prismatic feedback and hauntingly melodic harmonies, all the whole in the background, textures and layers softly swirl and undulate, the result is definitely creepy and cinematic, but also a bit blackened and industrial. The second track dials it down even further, unfurling a hushed, blurred thrum, a wash of hazy shimmer, a dubbed out murk laced with mysterious industrial percolations, reverbed clatter, and strange squelches, like a field recording of an old abandoned office building with all the air conditioners and printers and computers whirring away, a creepy disembodied hum which is soon enveloped by crunchy caustic high end, keening shards of buzz and skree, growing ever more dense and noisy. Next up some surfacing sonar pings, over a skittery, skeletal beat, shuffling through clouds of effects swirl, droned out bass warble, and more of that unidentified background shimmer, the sound is cavernous and hypnotic, the background sounds gradually solidifying into sheets of chordal whir, all wreathed in a cowl of soft buzzy sonic gauze, all the while that rhythm churns relentlessly, and that bass thrum stretches out into a strangely undulating low end drone.
Obviously, that should be more than enough to sell you on it, but folks who are after the bonus tracks will not be dissappointed, more than a half hour's worth minutes of extra music, six tracks, the first of which, "New Use For Old Circuits", opens up the set with a blast of psychedelic noise, before oozing into something much more liquid and murky, a sort of subaquatic space dub, a little bit like Chain Reaction style 'heroin house', but instead of hearing the music through a wall, we're hearing it through the thin steel walls of a submarine, stranded in the inky blackness of the deepest sea. "Shade" is a short stretch of gauzey high end shimmer, a haze of blurred melody and buried plink plonk piano, while "10th Floor Stairwell" is a fantastic chunk of thrumming low end pulsations, a minimal blackened drone that slwoly blossoms into something more tonally colorful, eventually becoming a sort of blackbuzz raga. "Metamorphosis" takes a field recording of voices and wraps it in soft swirls of static and tape hiss, soon introducing more of that impossible low end, the voices locked in a chant-like loop, while that skull rattling bass tone, pulses ominously, eventually introducing some throbbing 4 on the floor house music, but all murky and muddy, as if blasting in an upstairs apartment, just the rhythm oozing though the walls, a darkly propuslive slab of late night housemusic murk. "All This Is Ours (Sunrise)", unfurls soft swells of new age synth shimmer, a crystalline drift that soon sinks into a thick layed morass of crumbling bass-synth squelch and gradually intensifying distorted crackle, before finishing off in a squall of soft noise and sc-fi FX swirl, and finally, "We Have Already Died", strings some tribal skeletal skitter into a looped almost Muslimgauze sounding groove, all draped over an ominous sprawl of post industrial hum and layered swirls of blurred ghost-grey ambience.
Packaged much like the last Demdike Stare, in an oversized six panel digi-sleeve, with original Andy Votel artwork, mirroring the artwork from the original quadruple gatefold sleeve that housed all four 12"s...
If you can imagine a black metal DUB record, released on Chain Reaction, then this debut from Demdike Stare might be just what you're looking for. A collaboration between one half of the group Pendle Coven, and one of the guys who helps run the amazing Finders Keepers label, the duo craft suffocatingly dark drones, and stark skeletal minimal house music, fusing the two into some sort of mysterious rhythmic black beast. The sound dense and dark, grim and frosty, but infused with all sorts of world music elements, Middle Eastern folk, Indian soundtracks, Turkish psych, the result is really hard to pin down, super stark and dubby a la Pole one minute, then lush and Middle Eastern sounding a la Muslimgauze the next, but just as often, something much more spare and harrowing, buzzy and drone-y, and very very very dark.
The record opens with "Suspicious Drone", which is just that, a dense, deep, throbbing chunk of low end rumble, but shot through with undulating synth pulses, and laced with muted effects, before, a super skittery rhythm is introduced, all wreathed in a haze of Goblin-y synth. The second track, "Haxan Dub", is as you might have surmised super dubbed out, spacious and spare, the beats clipped and minimal, until about halfway through when a second beat joins in, creating a strange stuttery offbeat, very darkly groovy. And then there's "Regressor", a super abstract sprawl of rhythmic clicks, echo reverbed ambience, and very little else, bar the occasional synth squiggle or disembodied sample, the result is truly haunting and weirdly gorgeous. And so it goes, the second half of the record is a bit heavier on the world music, with much of the music being made up of chopped and looped samples, or recontextualized motifs, like on "Trapped Dervish, where a fragment of fiddle and a reverb drenched snippet of female vocals, are blurred into a gorgeous expanse of murky rhythmic ambience, but "Haxan" gets all Chain Reaction heroin house-y, while "Conjoined" is all tangled rhythms, and layered drums, until "Ghostly Hardware" finishes things off in appropriately ominous fashion, a long buzzing low end dronescape, all whirring synths, crackling textures, and pulsing bass, never truly locking into a rhythm, instead drifting and floating ghostlike. So good. One of our favorite new electronic records for sure.
Finally, Demdike Stare's dark and dizzying, murky and mysterious hauntological black dub triptych, previously available via three separate slabs of vinyl, is now available on cd, gathered up into a single, nicely packaged triple disc set. And loaded with bonus tracks (nearly 40 minutes extra all told), which makes this pretty much a shoe-in for Record Of The Week...
Demdike Stare are one of the few bands who seem to be a unanimous aQ favorite, everyone here LOVES these guys, and judging on how many of the various lps we've sold, everyone out there does too. Which makes sense, when you consider, DS basically create a kind of black metal dubstep, or as we (and others) like to describe it, a blackened dub record on Chain Reaction. Either one should give you an idea of the sort of dark sonic energy these guys conjure up. Thick claustrophobic atmospheres, skeletal rhythms, thick throbbing bass, skittering dubbed out beats, disembodied voices, stuttering minimal sort-of-dubstep, looped and processed African folk music (??), swirling glitched out electronics, deeeep pulsing dronemusic, reverb drenched post-rock-via-techno skitter, all woven into a swirling organic mass of dub flecked blacktronica, dark and sinister and dubby, and weirdly house-y, sprawling and epic and creepy and so totally sweeping and cinematic.
The first disc, Forest Of Evil, was originally two sidelong tracks, the first starts out all deep shimmer, with a softly melodic buzz, spidery acoustic guitars, long stretches of billowy black ambience, bits of shuffly jazzy drift, peppered with thick shards of buzzy fractured dub bass and Kompakt style skitter, giving way to glistening late night techno, whirling pop ambient, and blissed out ethereal dronemusic, while the second is darkly dramatic, epic and majestic, like some lost Italian soundtrack, big drums, orchestral and ominous, looped samples, blurred melodic smears over deep pulsing bass, whirling clouds of cymbal shimmer, insectoid FX buzz, jumbled atonal melodies (hints of Bernard Herrmann), the vibe tense and haunting, with some dubstep bass buzz, that slowly dissolves into a Caretaker like outro, all layered strings wreathed in hiss and crackle, hazy and druggy and divine. The bonus track "Quiet Sky" conjures up just what the title implies, a quiet sky, but a dark, bruised midnight sky, flecked with stars, soft swirls of metallic shimmer like gauzy clouds, the song gradually developing a strange minimal hiccuppy rhythm, underpinning the deep melancholic swells, a strange almost industrial tinged bit of pop ambience.
The second disc, Liberation Through Hearing, is thematically related to the Book Of The Dead, and focuses on the space between death and rebirth. Rendered in greys and blacks, in buzz and rumble, beginning with some woozy late night Portishead style downtempo trip hop, low slung looped skitter and swell, lush swirls of cinematic strings, ghostly choirs, a softly lurching rhythmic stutter, a deep cavernous throb, sounding like a ghostly stripped down dubstep. Which gives way to heaving expanses of black tidal thrum, muted scrapings, all wound into hypnotic pulses of dark energy, laced with distant chiming melodies, a haunting, gauzey faded memory in sound, drawn from radios with dying batteries and gradually slowing turntables, a soft focus symphony of creaks and rumbles and blurred low end shimmer. The first half finishes with a swoonsome smear of looped ambience, like a field recording of an after hours nightclub captured in a temporal loop, warm and druggy and fuzzy, strangely hypnotic and rhythmic, totally trancelike, a creeped out wasteland soundscape, mysterious and chilling, which is eventually augmented by thick slabs of corrosive low end, and heavily reverbed industrial clatter, which eventually emerges into a strange sea of crackle and hum, of warbly rhythms, chiming bells and distorted crunch, sounding a bit like Jeck spinning Pole record, abstract and spaced out and hauntingly lovely.
The second half opens with thick streaks of ghostly mesmer, all washed out and slowly decaying, underpinned by thick swaths of dubstep style bass wobble, but muted and smoothed into soft smears of undulating blackness. Subtle skitter surfaces, as do distant voices, the sound getting more and more dubby, a bit like a Caretaker record on Chain Reaction, that sort of hazy abstract drift, but anchored to barely there beats, the buzz building to an intense coda, all the while wrapped in throbbing woofer punishing low end.
Some super stripped down rhythms are laid over a swirling ghostly backdrop of fragmented melodies and a buried house music thump, tangled and blurred strings wrap the proceedings in a veil of softened reverb and subtle echo, the almost Eastern sounding pulse and swell reminding us a bit of the late great Muslimgauze.
Finally, the record collapses into some sort of melancholic sonic reverie, a hushed ambient outro, a tranquil sea of soft swirling swells, clouds of echo and reverb, a dreamy darkness, a blackened bit of blurpop minimalism, laced with muted streaks of fuzz and hiss, but all gradually sinking into Demdike Stare's endless trancelike billowing blackness.
The bonus tracks on this one (3 of them, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes) continue the record's surreal sonic journey, spidery rhythms, and chiming melodies are looped and layered over a simple pulsing propulsive groove, the whole thing slightly warped and warbled, as if recorded onto an old piece of tape, and played back on some dusty old ramshackle tape player, ghostly, but surprisingly playful at first, before slipping into some seriously creepy, deeeeeep droning rumbles, wreathed in shimmering solar winds, softly billowing sheets of hiss and static, eventually shedding all of that, leaving just a thick morass of softly undulating low end, shot through with a slo-mo house music pulse, only to have the hiss and whir return, this time relegated to the background, until the track finishes surprisingly with what sounds like a bit of African style funkiness, before disappearing in a brief cloud of swirling hushed buzz.
Finally, the third disc, Voices Of Dust, unveils the Tryptych's final movement, opening with "Black Sun", a short stretch of some super minimal electronic dronemusic, all layered overtones and strange sonic shadings, which gives way to the chopped and looped and stuttery vocal driven "Hashshashin Chant" which takes tribal drums and traditional folk music vocals, and twists them all up, and tangles those elements with strange percussion, industrial buzz, the whole thing a dizzying chunk of hypno-electronic collaged psychedelic mashup weirdness, before slipping into the much murkier and minimal "Repository Of Light", which unfurls like some sort of Hawkwind-meets-Pole spaced out digi-dub drift. And so it goes, the sound flitting between impossibly realized miniature sound worlds, cinematic electronic ambience, ominously pulsing low end rumble, hazy glitchy dubbed out Jeckian smears, super blown out electronic big beat bombast, almost industrial sounding avant big band abstraction, roiling corrosive soft noise, bellowing foghorn-like melodies, warped and woozy scratchy old lp warblescapes and beyond.
The bonus tracks are the perfect, hazy, ghostly coda, the first, a warm, whispery bit of keening abstract melody and thick pulsing thrum, all very washed out and space-y and dreamlike, a constantly vibrating living thing, a throbbing organic expanse of minimal space drone psychedelic ambience, until finally, the whole disc is laid to rest with 9 minutes of heaving, glacial, metallic creep and creak, wreathed in record crackle, the final sounds unfurl like some old dusty Tim Hecker 45 spinning at 16rpm, mournful moaning melodies, buried rhythmic thumps, shimmery sitar like buzz, all hazy and smeared and lysergic and mysteriously murky, the perfect slipping-into-darkness, leaving-this-world-behind finale...
Gorgeously evocative, creepy and cinematic, abstract and otherworldly, druggy and dreamy, fantastically haunting and utterly spine tinglingly stunning. And thus, absolutely recommended.
Packaged in a super swank, oversized, hardcover book style digipak.
Lots of folks have been pretty down on the last few releases from Ukrainian black metal horde Drudkh, as their sound moved further and further away from the classic grim blackness, toward something very post black metal, and downright poppy and jangly. So while some of you out there were steeling yourself for what a new Drudkh might bring, you'll have to wait a bit longer to find out, as this is actually a compilation, gathering up several super rare eps, most of which were only available in fancy boxsets or in extremely limited vinyl editions.
The Anti Urban ep from 2006 is classic Drudkh, mournful and melancholic, the guitars jagged and brittle with buzz, the first track a doomy midtempo lope, aching sonic miserablism, all instrumental, and weirdly lovely. The second track cranks up the tempo a bit, but doesn't add much in the way of blackened heft, the main riff is still more jangly then buzzy, but harsh vokills, and creepy minor key melodies, keep this firmly rooted in blackness, the whole thing mostly one part, trances out and mesmerizing, droney, and blackly hypnotic. Slavonic Chronicles was released in 2010 and features two covers, the first, Drudkh's version of a Sacrilegium track, which begins all blissed out and jangly, before exploding into some seriously blackened Viking classic metal chug, the sound grimey and distorted, and super heavy, this time, plenty of blast beats and swirling synths. Finally, from last year, three tracks from the Thousands Of Moons Ago ep, a split with Winterfylleth. Again, all covers, the first, a Hefeystos cover, which could easily be a Drudkh original, grim and black, epic and majestic, replete with soaring synths, and some seriously heavy black buzz, blast beats, and furious riffing. Which leads directly into an Unclean cover, all dirgey and murky, laced with acoustic guitars, and booming percussion, before launching into some epic classic metal crush, with a wild outro, mathed out drumming, more of that strange percussion, and cool droned out guitar buzz, sorta wished that end portion stretched out for another 10 minutes. Finally, another Sacrilegium cover, a brutal blast for furious buzzing classic blackness, but laced with some gloomy midtempo dirgery part way through, and wreathed in still more shimmery synth swirl. Killer stuff, and plenty to tide you over until the (hopefully) forthcoming full length...
The fuzzy, lo-fi, garage pop of the Dum Dum Girls has gradually been drifting toward something more polished and poppy, arriving finally here, with Too True, an album which has essentially shed all of that jangly buzz and urgent garage-y crunch for a shimmery, surprisingly commercial dream pop, that at times sounds bit like newer Best Coast, but with a decidedly gothy, new wave-y bent. Just check out the opener, which is all low slung, and gorgeously gloomy, laced with spidery guitar melodies, some fuzzy twang, so, the drums sounding like they were lifted right out of some eighties MTV new wave classic, all reverbed and echoey, and then about halfway through, big guitars come in, the sound gets crunchier, and more rocking, but only briefly, before slipping back into a gothy groove, replete with handclaps, and shimmery, hazy vocal harmonies. To be fair, it's not all that removed from the early sound, and one could argue this is the sound they were shooting for all along, but were limited by experience, budget, etc. That said, this is a whole different beast, but not at all an unappealing one. It's not difficult to see this record being the one that gets the Dum Dum Girls the kind of mainstream attention currently heaped on Best Coast, and heck, it would be well deserved. Fantastically catchy, perfectly crafted, new wave-y jangle pop, Dee Dee Dum Dum sounding more like Chrissy Amphlett from the Divinyls than ever! The sound just retro enough to push all your eighties new wave MTV buttons, but shiny and modern enough to sound fresh and new. And while hints of the old Dum Dum Girls sound surfaces throughout, we're actually digging the new sound, and tracks like "Lost Boys & Girls Club", which finds the band adding programmed beats, and crafting cool anthemic gloom pop gems, that we find ourselves liking more with every listen!
Drugs. Hallucinations. Isolation. Death. Some pretty classic / heavy-as-fuck metaphors run through the work of Brian Pyle, the mad genius of Manilla Beach up in Humboldt County, California. He's been at it for a long time now, first knocking on our door with his homespun variations of floorcore psychedelia with the seemingly inactive collective Starving Weirdos; then, there was the fraternal act of nature jamming drones through RV Paintings; and Ensemble Economique is Pyle all by his lonesome, where he's proven deft at density of sound laced with a nocturnal pop streak that could even warrant some Demdike witchy references. Pyle's hypnotic structures are deceptively simple and proven emotively effective - a lilting layer of blown-out guitar drones cycling through elegiac melodies, another layer of electronic sequences, oceanic driftings, chanted vocalizations, rasps of bowed metals, maudlin church organ explorations, or thumming dial-tone samples, with crumbled film samples of what could be some Russian / French / Hong Kong noir film of some woman frantically whispering about some crime that may or may not have happened. The individual tracks glide into a purposeful, cinematic song cycle narrative that begins with the thoroughly gloomy, portentous opening track "If You Need Help" that is a real downer of an acid trip spent staring at a ghost ship sinking in the depths of the Pacific with sand, sea foam, and black rain kicking you in the face to make the sense of hopelessness all the more real. Pyle links the two sides of the album with "Ksenia" - a track split in half of percolating acidic electronic sequences girding those female vocal samples and guitar drones. By the end of the album, his delirious slow-motion take on '80s bombast lifts the album's weightiness with two drone-pop ballads of marching rhythms and radioluminescent hypno-melodies. Another mighty fine album from Brian Pyle!
S e r g e y [S] is a tireless Russian dronemuzik composer who records under the monikers Exit In Grey and Five Elements Music (amongst many others), and whose back catalog resembles that of Aidan Baker in terms of scale and quality. A while ago, you could randomly grab any given Aidan Baker disc and rest assured that he'd deliver an impeccable album of billowing ambience rippling with emotional impressionism and melodic subtlety. The same can be said for pretty much anything that Sergey [S] touches, with the bulk of his releases short-run albums self-produced in his motherland, with only a few albums seeing European release. We listed a couple of things that Sergey put out through Mystery Sea, that Belgian proprietor of night-ocean drones, both of which were very impressive; and everything we've managed to scrounge up has been amazing.
Dust Storm - a collaborative project with the enigmatic Fanum (who seems to be the work of another Russian character named Ascet) - does not sway our esteemed opinion of Sergey [S]. The three tracks brilliantly embrace the analogy of dense sound amorphousness with the harsh/soft, soothing/terrifying duality from a looming sand storm. The suspended tones from Sergey and Ascet spiral slowly into sad, fugue-like melodies that are cloaked in the slow-motion miasma as if melding the cold, deep-sea waters and the boiling methane spewing thermal vents. The shortwave radio textures of the album's finale bring more of the psychological disruption found on early John Duncan works, but much of Dust Storm recalls the best of Troum / Maeror Tri. Not sure how limited this album is, but stuff from Russia arrives at a snail's pace, so if we run out, it might take us a while to restock...
French black metallers Glorior Belli continue down the lefthand path, moving ever further away from the Deathspell style angular black buzz that defined their early sound toward something that sounds more, well, like Pantera maybe, or Down? Crazy we know, but their last record, The Great Southern Darkness paired the aforementioned black buzz, with some serious rocking, as in Southern rock, as in shit kicking, skull stomping, BIG riff, hard RAWKing heaviness. And c'mon, this new one is called, Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls, how can you not expect more of that blackened heavy rock? Which is precisely what you get on opener "Blackpowder Roars", with a killer main riff, totally Sabbathy, spidery stoner rock leads, bellowed vox, that veer dangerously close to Phil Anselmo territory, there's even some total wailing super rock clean vocals, that get a little Alice In Chains, and this is all fucking awesome, imagine those bands but heavier and blacker, and this is IT, and it sounds killer. But maybe it seems like they've yet to commit wholly to this new sound, cuz the second track slips right back into gnarled black metal buzz, and these guys are still masters, the sound fierce and fucked up and furious, fans of DSO, Katharsis, Funeral Mist, this is your shit, oh wait, at least until the swinging kick ass Southern rock breakdown a minute or so in, and then it's right back into more atonal black buzz. What the fuck! So killer. The new sound so much more seemingly integrated into their old sound, the shift between the two, as natural as anything, the songs eminently more headbangable, the grooviness not at all taking away anything from the black fury, if anything, it seriously just makes it that much more ROCKING. And then they go whole hog balls out stoner groove, like on "Ain't No Pit Deep Enough", it's like the heaviest stoner rock EVER. And so it goes for the rest of the record, with the blackness more serving the stoner rock than the other way around, check out "A Hoax, A Croc" - a jam later day Corrosion Of Conformity would have killed for, like a supercharged ultra heavy Allman Brothers blowout, that eventually erupts into something blacker and buzzier, only to slip right back into that main riff. Holy fuck, this is fast becoming our new favorite records. Troo grim hordes be damned, this shit KILLS, so catchy, so heavy, so groovy, stoner metallers who never gave black metal a second glance, this is THEE record that will change your mind. And if you like the idea of blackened groovy stoner metal heaviness, this might be your new favorite too.
Grace Sings Sludge is the solo project of Grace from the haunting SF dream poppers the Sandwitches, and while we were secretly hoping that the project name meant that this would in fact be Grace doing hushed, delicate, ethereal version of songs by Corrupted, or Bunkur, or Moss, instead, Grace, umm, graces us (sorry) with two gorgeous slabs of whispery intimate soft-focus folky pop drift. We listened to the B side first, which begins a little bit Grouper-y, all gauzey and washed out, but the song gradually crystallizes into a lovely bit of simply strummed melancholia, Grace's voice so lovely, the guitar spidery and fragile, there even seems to be some harmonica, all floating in a spectral thrum, and since it's a lathe cut, it's super noisy, which only adds to the mood, wreathing everything in soft billows of crackle. Darkly intimate and so lovely. The A side "Longshot" sounds like some alien Appalachia, the vocals way more pronounced, throaty and powerful, draped languorously over a swoonsome funereal campfire ballad, a moody balladic dream-folk dirge that at times sounds a little like an acoustic Zola Jesus or Chelsea Wolfe, but way more spare and skeletal. Fantastic, gorgeous stuff, too bad it's so limited. And it is SO limited. Only TWENTY COPIES! That's IT. We got a little less than half, it's a hand cut, clear, square lathe cut, so it's really noisy, and crazy crackly, so if you're super anal about sound quality, steer clear, this is not for you. But like we said, it totally compliments the music, as does the beautifully hand drawn and water colored covers. Each one hand numbered. And once they're gone, they're gone for good. Here's hoping the next Grace Sings Sludge, finds Grace REALLY singing Sludge!
Can you imagine if "Music To Moog By" maestro Gershon Kingsley had dropped acid, joined a commune, got religion, and jammed with the Silver Apples and Lothar And The Hand People? That might approximate what the unique, wondrous psych-pop "Mooglove" of 1970's The Electric Lucifer sounds like!
YES!!! It's about time. We've always wanted this album to come out on cd. This HAD to be our Record Of The Week. Heck, years and years ago, Allan (long before he worked at Aquarius) became a bit obsessed with this record. He'd found a beat-up old LP of it at a yard sale, bought it mainly 'cause of the title and the freaky colorful cover graphics, and then was blown away by the weird music within. It's what we've described as being "perhaps the most awesomely bizarre psychedelic pre-Kraftwerk electronica album ever to be released on a major label (Columbia) or elsewhere." Allan actually went so far as to try to track down Bruce Haack for an interview, but without any luck (turns out Haack had already passed away back in 1988, a couple years before Allan discovered the record). And Allan's not the only one here at AQ to have a longtime soft spot for this record... so we're all so happy that it's finally, FINALLY been given the cd reissue treatment. It's absurd, really, that this wasn't reissued sooner. The legend of eccentric electronica pioneer Bruce Haack has only grown in recent years. There's been several compilations of his work (Hush Little Robot was the best, since it featured a couple tantalizing cuts from this album), expensive imported Japanese reissues of several of his Moog music albums for kids, a posthumous Electric Lucifer sequel from the vaults, and even a documentary released on DVD, entitled Haack - The King Of Techno! But Haack's crowning glory, his masterpiece The Electric Lucifer, wasn't available at all. Until now. And The Omni Recording Corporation (a label new to us) have done it right, even down to the very welcome notion of including a 5-minute track of silence to separate the 13 tracks of the album proper from the over thirty minutes of additional bonus material that they've added on -- which consists of a 1970 Canadian radio interview with Haack on the subject of Electric Lucifer and an alternate take of "Electric To Me Turn". The packaging is top notch as well, reproducing the amazing artwork and Haack's trippy sleevenotes from the original LP (wherein he discusses his concept of "Powerlove"), plus cramming tons of additional stuff into the thick cd booklet. There's loving liner notes by several of Haack's friends and colleagues and lots of vintage photos and graphics. Nicely done.
How can we explain the utter charm of this album? Well it's about as psychedelic as you can get, a concept album that's futuristic and Biblically ancient at the same time. Haack used an electronic "computer voice" (long before it was cliche) that he named FARAD, as well as regular human vocals, to convey deep Age of Aquarius astrological/philosophical concepts, sometimes in the form of sinister liturgies, at others like playful rhyming lullabies. These Moogy, moody and groovy compositions feature churchy organ sounds, bleeps and bloops, and rhythmic percolations that wouldn't sound out of place in the Star Wars cantina. There's lugubrious droney passages, mechanical beats, switched-on classical flourishes, and musique concrete style sound collage. Very weird *and* oh-so-catchy. It's definitely every bit as wonderful and essential as the Silver Apples albums, which we know so many AQ patrons love dearly. Again, we're so happy this has been reissued. Highest recommendation. Listen to the love angel, people!
Hmm, they're called Harsh Toke, they're on Tee Pee, huh, jammed out psychedelic stoner rock anyone? Yup you guessed it! Harsh Toke's music isn't itself a 'harsh toke', not if you dig stuff like Earthless. Harsh Toke are from San Diego too, and feature pro skater Figgy Figueroa on wailin' guitar. There's only four songs here, but except for the kickass 4:11 opener they're all pretty long, up to 14 and a half minutes for "Weight Of The Sun", which takes up the rest of side one. If you did that track you'll dig the whole record - it starts off with some hippie/kraut freeform flute flutter and drum circle percussion before taking off at about the 3 minute mark into stratospheric realms of distorted guitar. It's a real spaced out, riffed up jamdown.
The heaviness and Hawkwindiness continue on side two's two lengthy groovers, "Light Up And Live" and "Plug In To The Moon". Yes indeedy, the mostly-instrumental Harsh Toke sure do crank the amps and bash it out, their cosmic jams having a bit of jazziness to 'em, and a LOT of long haired feedback/FX abuse. Surefire stuff we think for fans of Acid Mothers Temple, Comets On Fire, Fuzz, the aforementioned Earthless.
Just got these today, and word is we might not be able to get more. So figured we'd write a super short review and get it up on this week's list, so those of you already hip to Hell, could get your grubby mitts on a copy before they're gone. If we do manage to get more, we'll post a proper (longer) review, but for now, here's record number three from this black/doom/sludge outfit from Salem, Oregon, and like the first two, it's another fantastically, grim, hellish, hateful collection of harrowing blackened creep, blurred doom-ed buzz, and churning blacknoize crush. And as with all Pesanta Urfolk releases, deluxe packaging, including a gorgeous black and red woodcut jacket, printed on SUPER thick stock, the vinyl HEAVY and BLACK, and comes with a huge foldout poster!
More fantastic electronic weirdness from the Pan label, this one, the latest from Luke Younger, aka Helm, who crafts a dizzying expanse of blunted post industrial rhythms, and blurred psychedelic ambience, lazer blast blurts that sound like light sabers are tangled into strange shapes over throbbing low end pulsations, while all around clouds of hiss and static and thrum swirl and shimmer, noisy and psychedelic, but darkly hypnotic. Elsewhere the sounds splinter into weird avant musique concrete, blasts of noise swooping from speaker to speaker, a wildly ecstatic 'pipe fight', sculpted into an abstract psych-noise groove. Younger also delves into power electronics, with keening arcs of feedback, draped over a churning chordal thrum, peppered with bursts of strangely melodic static, sounding almost like Skullflower attempting to make dance music, and failing fantastically, before finally finishing things off with a haunting bit of deep drone loveliness, sinister shimmering clouds of muted rumbles ripple out in soft clouds, an ominous, haunting and harrowing sprawl of hushed mesmeric murk that might be the dreamiest bit of grim black ambience we've heard in ages!
Like all Pan releases, the packaging is stunning, a plain white sleeve in a clear PVC plastic jacket, printed in purple ink, liner notes on one side, the band name all tangly and geometric on the other. And yeah, limited too!
Gruesome/frosty looking logo, very metal-sounding name, morbid b&w cover art. looks like proto-metal... maybe even proto-BLACK-metal?! Icecross has intrigued us for years. Long ago, we read about 'em in one of those encyclopedic psychedelic record collector reference works (Scented Gardens Of The Mind, most likely) and were struck by the description. An ICELANDIC hard rock band from 1972, comparable to Black Sabbath, supposedly! Man we wanted to hear that. Certainly the scary album cover and song titles ("Jesus Freaks", "Nightmare", "Scared", "The End") suggested they played some sort of heavy, Satanic psych-metal. Of course, the book said the record was super rare and impossible to find. Oh the despair. Then, some years ago, a bootleg cd edition surfaced, and we got to hear it. Was it everything we were hoping for? Yes and no - no, it didn't sound much like Black Sabbath, not nearly as heavy as that, or metallic. But, yes, it was pretty darn cool, and weird. Once past the relatively normal first track "Wandering Around" (a standard bluesy boogie with lyrics about "looking for my baby"), then things get hella freaky. Icecross definitely deliver the dark and twisted psych, with songs full of sharp slashing tangles of dissonant guitar, total primal-prog power trio action, playing hard and fast on cuts like "Scared", with wailing psych leads. The vocals remind us a bit of the drama of Van Der Graaf Generator - or on downer-ballad "A Sad Man's Story", of uber-mopey krautrockers Paternoster. Lyrically, the anti-Christian "Jesus Freaks" stands out, with the line "They believe in Jesus, we believe in ourselves" - though the liner notes to this new, at long last legit cd release, indicate that one of the former members of the band did later become religious. This new edition also states the original lp was released in '73 by the way.
So, while not exactly an early Icelandic example of heavy metal as described in that reference book, these demented Viking hippies maybe do belong somewhere far back in the lineage of Scandinavian blackness, yeah.
Thanks to Vintage/Rockadrome for reissuing this, complete with a booklet full of vintage photos and firsthand accounts of the band's history. And, they're doing a vinyl version too, upcoming in a few months.
We started our review of the last Indian record with the words "It's been a long time since we've heard from these Chicago heavies", which had we not checked first, was exactly how we were gonna start this one, cuz once again, it seems like ages since that Guiltless record, and it has actually been a little over three years. Thankfully, very little has changed since Guiltless, as From All Purity is another crushing, abject, slab of shrieking, downtuned doom sludge crush, with some of the sickest, filthiest distortion we have ever heard. The guitar tone on track two, "The Impetus Bleeds", sounds like they're playing through cabinets full of blown speakers, huge riffs that devolve into rapidly decaying crumble, while elsewhere, like on "Directional", that crumbling distortion becomes something else entirely, sounding a bit like malfunctioning electronics (which to be fair it actually could be), but it sounds killer, and it gives the track a weird sci-fi, zoner-psych vibe, which when mixed with the churning riffage, and tarpit stoner doom swagger, transforms the doomy sludge into something way more next level. A few tracks crank up the tempo, but even then, the arrangements are such, that the sound swings and lurches and lumbers more than blasts or pounds. And when the sound collapses into serious psychedelic churn, it's easy to see why these guys are so special. Check out the end of "Rhetoric Of No", sure it's dirgey and filthy and brutal, but the roiling black sludge is wreathed in swirling electronics that seem to swing wildly from speaker to speaker, in fact, it's mixed so that when you have headphones on, that weird insectoid buzz seems to be circling your head, it's totally disorienting, the group locked into some serious hypno-sludge mesmer, the vocals too a strange mush mouthed demonic incantation, fucked up and twisted avant doom genius for sure. The second to last track is all noisy, feedback drenched, shrieking, power electronics, but then the record closes with the epic doom crush of "Disambiguation", which drops in a few little black metalisms right at the end, each burst a frantic salvo of blackened riffage, shrieking vokills, and furious double kick drumming, the sound lurching back and forth, between that black buzz, and a more lugubrious creep, before a surprisingly sudden finish, the sound almost just cutting out. A twisted, unexpectedly dramatic end to a record that's definitely one of the coolest, weirdest, doom / sludge records we've heard in a while. And for a genre that can definitely sound same-y, and can so easily end up being boooooring, Indian will make your avant-doom loving head spin. Awesome!
As promised, these brilliant Canadian metalpunks are now back with their second full-length album. Like their debut Cold Bitch, it's another "single-coil assault" of rollicking, punked-out, '80s influenced speed metal that's absolutely unfuckwithable. No, not in the sense that it's the most technically advanced musically, or super high in fidelity, no, we're talking about the sheer spirit of it. And it's the sort of thing that's just kind of perfect in its DIY imperfection. Not by any means a tired, unimaginative exercise in emulating the past that we hear from so many retro thrash bands, instead the Iron Dogs fashion inspiration from their '80s faves - the likes of early Iron Maiden, English Dogs, Exciter, Cirith Ungol, and Tank - into something newly vibrant and alive. Proudly old school while still sounding 'young'. Delightfully loose and exuberant, ready to rock right off the rails, but not careless or half-assed, despite the raw garaginess of it all.
As hopefully you well remember, we freakin' raved about Cold Bitch last year, likening it to a cross between Speedwolf and Slough Feg, and this new one takes the sound of that album and runs with it, delivering the goods with another batch of songs just as good or better than the first, if anything. So while Free & Wild isn't super different than Cold Bitch, that's just fine with us! Some bands are about 'progression', you want 'em exploring new sounds and ideas from record to record; others, you don't want anything to change, you just want MORE, new killer songs in the same style, which is what you get here. And since we loved Cold Bitch so much and spun it so often, we HAD to make Free & Wild a Record Of The Week. Free & Wild even sports a similar cover concept - a photo of a sword wielding, blood-drenched naked lady. She's being "Free & Wild" we guess, taking men's heads and putting them on stakes (or perhaps this tableau is inspired by track six here, "Cannibal Death Cult"). Cold Bitch's cover was a bit more clever but this one is no less striking.
One change with this album, not that you would notice it, is that Iron Dogs are no longer a trio, but a duo, with Dan Lee on on drums and Jo Capitalicide on vocals, guitar, bass, and even some synth. And as a two piece, Jo and Dan are now our favorite metal duo since Fenriz and Nocturno Culto - and we'd imagine that those two Darkthrone dudes would highly approve of what the Iron Dogs are up to, the mix of NWOBHM gallop and crusty punk fervor is right up their alley.
Now, some other, less enlightened people might find fault with the production (solid but certainly not slick), or not be on board with Capitalicide's untrained rough-and-tumble vocal holler (with Dan Lee's backing vox adding even more jubilance). But those folks are obviously not punk rock enough - and/or cult metal enough - to 'get it'. To us what makes this so special comes through loud and clear in each of this album's eight tracks, all of 'em exploding with energy, catchy hooks and epic feel, crammed full of delicious bits of metallic goodness. Opener "Firebird" (for which they've made an entertaining low-budget video, perhaps inspired by Benny Hill as much as the videos of Canadian antecedent Thor, see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWZsD2kFeSo) is a melodic, motivational speedy anthem to get things going. From there, the half-hour run time of this album rips by with highlight after highlight, Jo singing of fighting, freedom, and fantasy. We love every bit of this. The heartracing riffage. The majestic Moog moments. The up-and-down cascade of wordless vocal woah-oh-oh-ohs in the middle of "Island Of The Dead". The way Jo's voice cracks on that one verse in "Storm Warning". The folky fast picked guitar motif on "Adversity" - indeed all the melodic guitar licks bursting out everywhere. This rousing Iron Dogs album, non-ironic but not over-serious, epitomizes the positive power of metal in a shitty world.
Ok, so we're hopeless Iron Dogs fanboys... but there's a reason for that! Listen and learn. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. We won't call you a poseur. But we'll still feel sorry for you. 'Cause Iron Dogs RULE!
(Note: this is the handsome cd digipack edition - but if you act fast and ask, you could possibly snag one of the few "vinyls" we have left, or even a cassette, neither of which we're actually listing 'cause we have so few.)
This compilation of singles circa 1971-1975 by new-to-us Anatolian folk-psych singer and guitarist Fikret Kizilok has been blowing our minds this week We don't much about Kizilok, except he was a dentist who, inspired by the Beatles, got into music, and recorded with Baris Manco, which led to a friendship-ending affair with his girlfriend. He is also rumored to be one of the first Turkish musicians to introduce the sitar into Turkish popular music (a bit hard to believe, and strangely there is no sitar on these recordings, but nevertheless that is what a cool-looking photo from a music magazine in the liner notes seems to state). However, Kizilok's hypnotic psych-tinged folk music, played with both electric and acoustic instruments (including lots of hand percussion and electric organ provided by Mogollar's Turhan Yukseler!), is impossible to ignore. Equally dreamy, moody, groovy, complexly arranged and politically driven, this is another great Turkish-psych discovery right up there with Selda, Mogallar, Cem Karaca, 3 Hur-el and Edip Akbayram. Also if you loved those Psych 101 compilations, this will be right up your alley!
One of two new releases from UK psych/space rock label Cardinal Fuzz, this one might throw you for a loop, especially if you've been faithfully nabbing whatever CF releases you could get your hands on, the Cosmic Dead, Dead Sea Apes, the Janitors, Hills, etc., all of 'em spaced out and heavy, falling somewhere in the spectrum between the Heads and White Hills, and channeling the classic sounds of Hawkwind into something new. But this record from Philly rockers Lantern, while still psychedelic, is definitely something else all together. Right from the first few minutes, you'll know what we mean, considering the song opens with just drums and horns, or guitars made to sound like horns, it's groovy and swaggery, more Stooges than anything, the beat with a sort of Go-Go groove to it, and then the female vocals deliver another curve ball, the guitars whipped up into wild squall of wah wah drenched psychedelic freakout. The label references Dead Moon, the Gibson Brothers, Billy Childish, Hasil Adkins and the Flaming Groovies, none of which are that far off. But it's definitely still spacey and psychedelic, just not so far out and tripped out. A lot of the tracks have that sort of Gary Glitter drum beat, and there are horns, all over the place. C'mon, it's got rock 'n' roll in the title, and really, if anything, this IS scuzzy, fuzzy, FX drenched rock and roll, alternately kinetic and rocking, dour and dirgey, just check out the heavy fuzz creep of "King Of The Jungle". In fact, Cardinal Fuzz nerds might want to check out all the samples before pulling the trigger, cuz it's definitely a lot different than other stuff on the label, but even so, it's still a serious slab of heavy rocking psychedelic rock, that should push all those same buttons!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Includes a cd version of the whole record, along with FOUR bonus tracks!!
Even the truest of true metal warriors would have to admit that when one thinks about "metal" and "Norway" the first things that come to mind are probably facepaint, spikes, pretty looking old buildings gettin' set on fire, that kind of thing. In two words: Black Metal. But nonetheless from that grim/frostbitten land comes Magister Templi, and far from dealing in shrieked vocals and blastbeats, they're instead one of the finest new true metal acts to lumber forth from the darkness in quite some time. Lucifer Leviathan Logos is Magister Templi's first full length, following up a demo and an ep, and it is much more fully realized and oozing with way more character than any debut album has any right to be. It would be tempting to lump these guys in with the countless other retro metal throwback acts currently burning up fretboards across the globe, but that would be doing this band a disservice. Magister Templi aren't content to simply ape the masters, but have instead crafted a totally unique and singular slab of doom laden occult heavy metal. "Master Of The Temple" is a near perfect opener - constantly and abruptly changing direction with neck snapping deftness, from twisted stop-start Mercyful Fate riffery to the driving gallop of early Trouble to a funerary doom metal dirge. And when the vocals kick in courtesy of Abraxas d'Ruckus (what a name!), they're not the kind of ghostly shrill falsetto King Diamond worship you might expect. Instead they're a deep and kingly bellow, sounding like some blood hungry wargod throwing down curses from the heavens, or a fanatical robed prophet dictating from a candlelit pulpit, only ever pulling back for some theatrical Crowley-esque spoken word, raving about his undying devotion as a "servant of the order"! And that's just the start. Elsewhere the mid-paced chugging thrust of "Lucifer" recalls Dio-era Sabbath pulsing with an added somber quality, the lyrics "My white robes, they're getting darker, and my black ones reek of smoke" peppering the proceedings with some mysterious opaque imagery. "Innsmouth Look" shifts between a slinky doomy groove and pummeling double bass, the lyrics dripping with a Lovecraftian sense of dread. "Leviathan" opens with a dizzying slab of claustrophobic doom, its serpentine guitar leads invoking the feeling of endlessly falling down some reality-defying MC Escher spiral staircase. All the while, d'Ruckus raves about fools desecrating his temple and resting his head upon the snakes in the grass! Closer "Vitriol" is all dark twangy campfire folk before that shadowy doomy groove emerges for the last time, driven by some seriously tasty cowbell. Lucifer Leviathan Logos is the kind of rare record that should appeal to a seriously wide variety of metal maniacs. Their seemingly effortless knack of shifting from the heaviest doom to fist pumping uptempo heavy metal recalls Trouble in their early to mid '80s prime, but there's no reason why fans of any metal on the darker, more epic edge of the spectrum won't find plenty to love here. If bands like In Solitude, Satan, Candlemass, Lamp Of Thoth, Solstice, Pagan Altar, or the recently reviewed "Jewels Of Gwahlur" demo series are your particular cup of frothy ale, then this is absolutely essential.
The tactile squiggles, zoner-drool time suspension, and tape machined guttural splutter of Collin McKellvey's Macro-negative conjure the lovingly grossed-out images of long lost Schimpfluch tapes. There was a legendary-yet-unheard performance of three of the Schimpfluch dudes (probably Phillips, G*Park, and Joke) smashing their contact miced faces into plates of spaghetti while a lithe woman serenaded them with electrified violin drones. While we've not actually heard any actual documentation of this particular aktion, we have a pretty damn good idea of what it might have sounded like. It would be a stretch to think that Bay Area audio-visual artist Collin McKellvey has taken up a similar strategy of fucked-in-the-head method acting, but some of the sounds he's grafted onto this tape have a profoundly scatological implications. One of the sides of this cassette opens with a disturbing set of pitch-shifted samples of intestinal gurgles and saliva dripped smacks (well, that's what it sounds like) which are overtaken by a slumped drone of 60hz electric hum cycling. The other side is grounded with a similarly electrocuted tonefloat with what sounds like a mass extinction of thousands of shrimp having their exoskeletons ripped off in mid-swim. Either that or it's a Small Cruel Party / Yeast Culture collage of tiny shards of flint, shale, and sandstone. Sicktones abound. It's limited to 50 copies and comes with a silkscreened cover.
While the title of the new full length from these longtime aQ faves had us secretly hoping for a record of straight up, ACTUAL rave music, the first track quickly reveals that Rave Tapes is in fact simply more of the Mogwai we know and love. So after the brief bit of inevitable no-rave let down disappointment, it's impossible to not get immediately swept up in Mogwai's lush loveliness, the opener a fantastically dreamy sprawl of blissy drifty post rock majesty, hushed, and melancholically brooding, darkly dynamic, expansive and layered. But fear not, this is not just Mogwai by the numbers, or maybe it is, but those numbers have been getting progressively less predictable over the last few albums, just check out "Simon Ferocious" with its buzzing synths, driven by a hypnotic, loping slow-mo, post rock groove, the guitars bordering on metallic, settling eventually into a cool buzzy bit of krauty post rock mesmer. Or the awesomely titled "Remurdered", which is all low slung throb, muted chug and Tortoise-y rhythms, in fact, it sounds a bit like a less jazzy, more skittery electronica flecked, synth heavy komsiche hypno-rock. There's one track with a hilarious sample of anti-Satanic ranting, which is fun the first time, but doesn't have a whole lot of replay value, but that hardly detracts from the rest of the record which slips effortlessly from Godspeed like instrumental epicry, to synthy, almost Circle sounding mathiness, to sweeping moody cinematic drifts, and to murky piano driven balladry, complete with vocals, a haunting bit of slowcore that sounds a bit like Codeine / Low / Galaxie 500, but it is Mogwai, so it eventually erupts into a soaring soft-focus squall of swirling psychedelic beauty.
The final two song salvo, begins with some classic Mogwai, spidery minor key melodies, over chiming harmonics, buzzing bass, shuffling rhythms, slowly building from hushed shimmer to fuzzy muted bombast, before finishing off with the weirdest of the bunch, all programmed drums, vocodered vox, swirling synth wrapped guitars and fields of prismatic shimmer, the whole thing sounding more like Zombi or Umberto, albeit mixed with Mogwai's epic smoldering post rock tendencies, which is just as good as it sounds.
Both the lp and the cd come housed in super striking, retro-futuristic, psychedelically geometric, eye popping, die cut sleeves! LP includes a download code too...
(Compact disc folks, FYI, we have a few of the cd, but Sub Pop forgot to ship our order this week so more will be restocked early next week and we'll of course list it next time!)
OOOHHH!!! NOW ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OVER THREE DECADES!!!
Konrad Becker released only a couple of albums in the early '80s under his moniker Monoton. The modest editions of his recordings relegated him to inevitable obscurity back then, but thankfully through the magic of reissue technology more folks now have had a chance to enjoy his genius work, a hyper-bleak precursor of electronica, that bridged the kosmische sounds of Cluster and Conrad Schnitzler with the more contemporary sounds of Pan Sonic and Coh to come.
We're sure that there are more than a few modern music nerds out there who hang on every word printed in The Wire, so the reissue of anything by Monoton will no doubt thrill those avid Wire readers. Of course, not everyone keeps one eye on The Wire; so allow us to reiterate what that fine British music magazine penned about this album in 1996, The Wire did a cover story entitled "100 Records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening)," and which featured plenty of favorites already heralded in their pages (Derek Bailey, Faust, Fushitsusha, Nurse With Wound, Bernhard Gunter, etc.) as well as a handful of brilliant records which apparently nobody else had ever heard. Monoton's 2nd album, Monotoprodukt 07, from 1982, found its way onto that list of 100 seminal albums, despite the fact that barely anyone actually owned copies of this self-released album of Germanic proto-electronica. Wire scribe Biba Kopf was one of those lucky few, and certainly said it better than we could have: "[This album] is so alive with the pulses that triggered many electronicas to come, from techno through trance to Mego's creeping static, you could make a case for Konrad Becker's guruhood. Yet for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over electronica's urfathers, picking up on Suicide's jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF's throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams."
Lo and behold, the good people at Oral in Canada were kind enough to reissue Monotonprodukt 07 first on cd back in 2003 (long since out of print) and now at last on vinyl, complete with a beefed-up re-mastered sound complements of the best in the business, Rashad Becker (no relation?), making for a very cool and highly recommended listen! We concur with The Wire about this album's importance. This really is one of aQ's experimental electronica essentials.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Not long for this world, Ballade For A Cold Moon is the third in a monthly series from Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. All of the previous editions (as well as the one that came out right after this one) sold out almost immediately. We were able to snag a few of this one; and we'll try to get the future editions as she releases them. That said, Cold Moon is a longform dreamtime transmission of analogue synth worship hitting all the right sweet spots: Tangerine Dream's Zeit, Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, and some fine style J.D. Emmanuel for good measure; but all those liquid melodies that drip from the sustained tones and watery ambience are pure Motion Sickness! Can this lady do no wrong? Limited to 50 copies with hand-printed artwork and wrapped in twine.
We had never heard, or even heard of Jack Name, a mysterious avant/outsider psychedelic popsmith from LA, who could apparently sometimes be spotted on stage at White Fence shows making crazy noise on an old beat up laptop, but really all we knew about this guy was what we heard via John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, who describes the music of Name thusly: "Light Show lifts off over an alien plane - immediate, skimming the surface of the landscape where the story unfurls. Whiffs of young Brian Eno, Gary Numan, Chrome, ELO, Bruce Haack, even Richard O'Brien and Stefan Wul stain the sleeves of this story. A powerful and inspiring message to all who will give ear to it." High praise from a man who knows his warped weirdo pop. And we'd have to say, Dwyer sorta nailed it. Total Joe Meek kitchen sink garage glam psych pop genius, opener "My Own Electric Ladyland", sounds like an impossibly lo-fi Olivia Tremor Control, all swirling and majestic, murky and blearily power poppy, while "Do The Shadow" sounds a little like the Dickies doing The Rocky Horror Picture Show! "Born To Lose" wraps thick buzzy guitars and echoey vox over a muted krautrocky rhythm, smoldering and moody, a little bit swaggery, droned out and darkly psychedelic, which leads right into "Sound Was The Castle" a primo chunk of home brewed baroque pop, chiming and ethereal, with some woozily processed vox. We could go on, and we usually do, every track here, a fantastically hooky WTF twisted pop gem, some tracks sounding like James Ferraro doing his best Oh Sees impression, others like they could have been plucked right off some Yellow Pills power pop collection, some possibly genuine lost art-pop artifacts, others are more psych folk, all strummy and fluttery, some even add horns, bleating and moaning, woven into swoonsome almost funereal ballads, and some sound like the second coming of UK avant pop geniuses the Cardiacs. Needless to say, weirdo pop nerds, this is your new favorite record!
We were introduced to these East Bay crust metal crushers via a split lp with Aussie heavies and long time aQ faves Whitehorse (reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), but this right here is the Negative Standards' first proper full length, a relentless and furious onslaught of churning D-beat crust punk and epic, chugging, Neurosis style sludge metal heaviness.
No song titles just numbers, tracks I through V can be found on their debut ep, and tracks XII and XII are on the split with Whitehorse, but "VI" though "XI" make up this 12", and deliver a punishing barrage of sick riffage, and skull caving drum damage, and the vocals, a throat shredding demonic bellow, the whole thing a brutal chug fest, songs lurching from driving crust punk, furious and chaotic to tarpit, downtuned doom sludge crush, with some super blown out weirdness that gives the sound a seriously psychedelic vibe, the band equally adept at knuckle dragging, pit stirring, ferocity, and soaring, majestic sonic epicry, just check out the 8+ minute "X", which spends the first half of those minutes, unfurling a gorgeously morose and melancholic true doom crawl, moody and mesmerizing, somewhere between Bell Witch and True Widow, slowcore downer doom, that creeps and lumbers, before exploding into a noise drenched, punk metal blast, those two disparate sound somehow fusing together for the last few minutes, the guitars soaring, the arrangement a slow build toward a Godspeed / Neurosis style crescendo, but still punk as fuck, and seriously crusty. Killer stuff. Every track here, some sort of black-crust / punk-doom hybrid, that we can't get enough of. Not sure how we'd never heard of these guys before, but doing our best to make up for it now.
Released on the always great Vendetta label, with a super striking, creepy dead body / surveillance photo album cover. Sadly, there's no download (although you can get the digital versions for free on their bandcamp!)...
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The cult metal label Stormspell (who brought us all those obscure Jewels Of Gwahlur discs listed last time) has just released the cd version of this Oakland-based outfit's full-length debut, previously issued on vinyl via the band's own Magic Hermit imprint. Ovvl (or Owl - the band's name is obviously Owl but it says Ovvl here, perhaps for legal reasons 'cause there's probably a dozen other bands called Owl, or just to be weird) is a four-piece, featuring three brothers on guitars and drums, plus an unrelated female bass player. We'd seen 'em in person before, opening some local metal shows, playing heavy duty sludged-out stoner rockin' stuff, but they hadn't made much of an impression - until we heard this disc. Sometimes (as it was with Saviours) that's what it takes, a chance to listen to 'em at home, undistracted, not at the bar getting beers and talking to friends. And turns out, for this sort of thing, they're pretty dang good!
What sort of thing? Well, Stormspell aren't just about '80s styled true metal and thrash, they're also into heavy retro '70s psych sounds (they did the debut Noctum disc after all). And that's what Ovvl delivers, clearly influenced by the likes of Sabbath and Budgie, and at times reminding us a lot of early Monster Magnet. Fuzzed out, bell bottomed badassery!
The album opens with the energetic "Gypsy River", a concise biker boogie rocker with cleverly cliche hippie blues lyrics we can't help but dig (mostly about how the titular Gypsy River is driving the singer insane). The second track, "Medicine Mirror", mixes together Sabbathy riffs, Thin Lizzy-ish guitar harmonies, and UFO vocal melodies (we're hearing a little "Doctor Doctor" in the refrain). Yeah, it's easy to play a game of spot the influences from Ovvl's dad's '70s classic rock record collection, but they do it in a way that's not at all unacceptable, mashing all that good stuff up and making it heavier - and at least there's more than one influence at work, unlike with, um, those other local heavies, Orchid.
Then on track three, "Glaurung", Ovvl stretch out for a 10+ plus prog suite fixated on Middle Earth fantasy, that begins in an acoustic Led Zeppelin mode before turning into more of a lumbering Pentagram-style riffer, with vocals that totally remind us of Bobby Liebling. And there's a drum solo! Other tracks on the album adopt a rougher vocal style, and crank up the punk energy, sounding more like contemporaries The Shrine or Hot Lunch.
And so it goes, these presumably pot-puffing throwbacks telling tales of demon rides and snake-eyed goblin women. Music for mystic partiers, basically. And who wouldn't want to be a mystic partier? We'll be spinning this a lot. GYPSY RIVER YOU ARE DRIVING ME INSANE!!!!
The last Pontiak record, 2012's Echo Ono, seriously threw us for a loop. Not only was it the group's seventh record (and yet the first one we'd heard), but it was also sonically, at the time at least, totally removed from what we normally expect from Thrill Jockey. Some seriously heavy, riffy, psychedelic, stoner rock, massive fuzzed out guitars, bombastic drumming, wild whooping vocals, but whatever it was, we dug it BIG TIME. So here's the follow up, and from track one, it's more of the glorious same. The first track a short sharp blast of crunchy riffage, spidery psychedelic leads, everything doused in fuzz and echo, a little bit mathy, seriously stonery, it's the sort of stuff that should appeal to underground heavy rock nerds as much as more mainstream folks into Queens Of The Stone Age and the White Stripes. In fact, spun correctly, it's not hard to imagine this being Pontiak's breakout record, and if some band like the Black Keys took them on tour, their big-rock-success fate would be sealed. But for now, they're still ours, and they're still plying their sweaty, bloody knuckled, hard rawking wares in tiny clubs and spitting out darkly psychedelic, eminently headbangable stoner groove, hard psych records like this one, and we seriously can't get enough. Fans of Golden Void, Dead Meadow, Comets On Fire, Bardo Pond, Burning Brides, will flip their lids. Swirling organs underpin some tracks, sounding straight up seventies psych prog ("It's The Greatest"), others like "Ghost", sound almost like Dutch instru-metallers Gore given a serious heavy fuzz makeover, the band locked into cyclical tranced out hypno-rock grooves. Other tracks are laid back, Southern rock slow jams, channeling the Allman Brothers or the Outlaws ("Noble Heads"), and still others are seriously slithery heavy rock dirges, with some of the fuzziest guitars since Kyuss (check out the chugging, churning "Surrounded By Diamonds") and a bunch are just awesomely noisy, psychedelic garage blowouts, swirling clouds of FX, the band kicking out the jams, swaggery, stomping hard rocking, hooky heaviness that just KILLS.
And while they last, which won't be long by the way, the copies we have will come with a bonus cd, featuring 44 minutes of exclusive material called "Heat Leisure", recorded on the band's farm in Virginia with Greg Fox from Guardian Alien and formerly of Liturgy, as well as a dude from Arbouretum and Beach House, and originally featured in a short film. The bonus cd is only available direct from Thrill Jockey, the band, and a tiny handful of stores, one of which is OURS!
Hi-Tech Boom is the debut from SF synth punks Pow!, and it's a doozy. Fuzzy, poppy, synth, new wave-y, not that far removed from a lot of the Castle Face stable, but with some retro-futuristic synthiness that positions it somewhere between classic Gary Numan, vintage Suicide and newer outfits like the Mind Spiders. The synths slither and buzz, even the poppiest jangliest numbers are underpinned by thick buzzing layers of synth, and peppered with wild squalls of glitched out synthy psychedelia, but for the most part, the tracks are minimal, stripped down and tranced out, the vibe sort of druggy and laid back, the vocals snotty and snarly, but laid back and sorta wasted, and while some tracks get kinda rocking, the record seems to tend toward sorta midtempo groovers and swaggery stomps, often bordering on zoner dirgery, everything doused in echo and reverb, some total freaked out electro-garage weirdness ("Sugi Walks"), some eighties post punk wrapped in distorto sci-fi synths ("Switchboard Scientist"), and hooky synth flecked garage pop ("66") in equal measure. Castle Face obsessives will no doubt flip for this stuff, and we're suckers for synthed out garage punk anyway, especially when it's all sorta druggy and hypnotic, and thus, this comes highly recommended!!
Not much needs to be said about this in the short term (you probably know if you want it, based on if you have Volumes 1 & 2). But do not fear, we will be spewing buckets of grandeur about the FULL set of Pye Corner Audio's complete Black Mill Tapes, when it gets compiled on to a massive triple cd compendium in a few weeks. Until then, we've got less than FIVE copies of the vinyl for Volumes 3 & 4. You may notice we never got around to reviewing Volumes 1 & 2; for the same reason, it's a super fucking limited vinyl edition. Here's the shorthand description of Pye Corner Audio - brilliant retro-futurism synthesizes the analog electronic horror of John Carpenter, the hard-drive dreamspace of Autechre's first couple of records, and the cold, sleek sexiness of Italo-Disco aloofness.
Raudive's A System Of Objects plays like some lost musique concrete classic, albeit modernized in such a way, that it sounds like it could just as easily be some weirdo noisemaker with a new limited lp on Pan. It's tough one to describe, and as frustrating as that is, it also generally means the music in question is truly unique. And holy shit is this stuff unique. Imagine a latticework of ping-ponging rhythms, built from squelchy synths, echo drenched percussion, garbled voices, various samples, conversations, birdsong, then stir in some Logan's Run style sci-fi bloops and bleeps, all underpinned by softly swirling shimmers, and often driven by pulsing kraut-house rhythms, and you'd only be getting sort of close, but if that sounds at all good to you, how this actually sounds is probably even cooler. It's no accident that this is on the same label that also gave us the warped avant techno of Stefan Goldmann, as well as multiple records of LIVE 'electronica' from Elektro Guzzi. Raudive, aka Oliver Ho, also exists in some strange sonic nether region, the music ostensible techno, or house, or at least electronica, but constructed from unlikely elements, and often shaped into something that most definitely doesn't conform to typical dance music. Check out "Ruins" which sounds like a warped housier avant garde take on Yello's "Oh Yeah", or the horn flecked groovy almost Latin sounding "Visitor", which is laced with what sounds like Japanese voices, and lazer blast blurts. There's the free jazz / fragmented techno weirdness of "Furniture", the sci-fi future-dub of "Carcass", and the spaced out 20th century alien classical weirdness of "Blood And Hair", and the woozy electro of "Summoning". Some of the tracks sound like they could be on Kompakt, others sound like they could be on Hyperdub, but in both cases, that sound is warped and weird, and transformed into something that couldn't possibly end up on either, whether it's clouds of swirling chirping high end skitter, or strange female robotic voices, gristly tarpit rhythms, or prepared piano and sloooooowed down vocals, every track here is a serious chunk of avant electronic weirdness, seemingly designed for some druggy alternate universe dancefloor. So cool!
NOW ALSO ON CD!
UK horror soundtrack vinyl label Death Waltz, deviates again from their ongoing reissue campaign to offer up another modern soundtrack, but fear not, Room 237 stacks up pretty well against all the classics the label has been resurrecting recently, it would be really easy to mistake this for some classic slab of grimy cinematic sonic creep from back in the day. Jonathan Snipes and William Hudson channel the greats, John Carpenter, Goblin, equal parts sinister synth drones, twisted electronics, blackened ambience, seventies kosmische, haunting melodies, Italo-disco, groovy synth wave, the craziest part of all is that it's the soundtrack to a DOCUMENTARY! But then it's not any documentary, it's a 2012 film about Stanley Kubrick's classic, The Shining, or more specifically, all the crackpot theories folks have about the Shining, with interviews with various people, each presenting their take on the hidden meanings behind The Shining, and some of them are doozies, from the genocide of the American Indians, to the Apollo 11 moon landing, and yeah, even the Holocaust. The movie is twisted, and fascinating, hilarious and disturbing, some of the theories totally far fetched, others not so much, with plenty of visual evidence given for each. Watching the movie, we were actually struck by the score, which at times reminded us of the music from Phantasm (Death Waltz, reissue that one!!!), or Halloween, which seem like they wouldn't be suited to a documentary, but somehow, they add a sort of cinematic gravitas, even more so when this new score is coupled with original footage from The Shining. But hell, even removed from the film, Snipes and Hutson's score is fantastic, big bombastic percussion, darkly swirling synths, choir like vocals, haunting melodies, pulsing almost disco-y synthscapes, plenty of futuristic electronics, cascading keyboard arpeggiations, and shimmery chordal swells, fluttery psychedelic flutes, some of the music super tense and ominous, reminding us also of the incredible score for the recent Beyond The Black Rainbow (Death Waltz! Do that one too!!), sort of cosmic prog, infused with a heaping dose of the sonic heebie jeebies. So goddamn good. And again, fans of classic old school horror scores, will likely flip their lids! As will anyone into the retro futuristic faux-soundtracks of Zombi, Majeure, Umberto and all the rest.
Like all Death Waltz releases, the packaging is super swank, the cd comes in an eye popping full color six panel gatefold digisleeve, complete with the cool pop up cd holder featured in other DW cds, the vinyl is 180 gram, red and yellow, cut at 45rpm, and housed in a heavy casebound tip-on sleeve. The vinyl version also includes a cd of the complete score as well!!
The horror movie vinyl soundtrack reissue war continues! Death Waltz might have the market cornered, with an undeniably kick ass aesthetic, a bunch of killer obscurities, not to mention the bulk of the classic John Carpenter soundtracks, but Waxwork is definitely looking to give them a run for their money, especially now, with this reissue of Krzysztof (here Christopher) Komeda's seminal score for Roman Polanski's 1968 horror hit Rosemary's Baby. The soundtrack itself a stone cold classic, the main title theme immediately giving us chills with Mia Farrow singing a haunting nursery rhyme over ominous piano, buzzing organs, instantly recognizable and totally terrifying, and the rest of the soundtrack is pretty stellar too, some tracks swirling and symphonic, others droney and atonal, very 20th century sounding, the ritualistic chanting is present too of course, there are super dramatic choral arrangements, tense and intense, plenty of Bernard Hermann like atonality and intensity, moments of sweetly melodic jazziness, but just as many moments of bleak, sinister horror. A few moments of swirly psychedelia, the whole thing pretty darn fantastic all the way through, and has us wanting to rewatch the movie now, it's been way too long.
And Waxwork has pulled out all the stops too with the packaging, the lp pressed on 180 gram clear vinyl, the score remastered from the original master tapes, with killer all new artwork, and a 12" x 12" art print, all housed in a thick full color gatefold sleeve, extensive liner notes and rare photos on the inside, with super striking spot varnish printing on the outside, and yeah, probably CRAZY limited too...
One of three new releases this week from what might be our favorite tape label, The Tapeworm, who as always remain impossibly sonically unpredictable. This one from the oddly named duo SGR'CAV is in fact a collaboration between someone you likely know, Cristian Vogel, and someone you likely don't, SOS Gunver Ryberg, and together, these two whip up a very Tapeworm worthy soundscape of staticky alien broadcasts, haunting chordal drift, lots of hiss and hum, loads of space, a field of warped sonic events that seem to be drifting in a haze of near silence, the sound building to thick tarpit buzz, then splintering into skittery blasts of fragmented crunch, occasionally smoothing out into gauzy swirls of soft focus shimmer, but just as often, collapsing into tangled collages of psychedelic free-noise ambience. At times primitive and lo-fi, at others, heavily textured and caustic, and still at others, dark and delicately lovely.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
One of our fave albums and all-time best sellers, Josh "DJ Shadow" Davis' seminal Endtroducing debut, finally in stock on vinyl!! For a long time, our website's listing of it had just a single word review, but that word was "amazing". A while later, when a deluxe cd reissue came out, we took the opportunity to write a few hundred more words, pretty much amounting to saying the same thing, "amazing". Here they are:
Shadow's masterpiece is a brilliant example of hip hop DJ-as-composer, sample-based songwriting, a mostly instrumental suite of songs built entirely from sounds, hooks and grooves sourced from the depths of Shadow's extensive record collection. He didn't invent the idea, of course, but he did do it better than almost anyone before (or after!) him, garnering for himself worldwide fame and heaps of deserved critical praise.
And even if you scratch (heh) your head when we talk about turntablists and sampling, rest assured that, process aside, this is a great album that transcends genre tags and easy categorization. It's dark, dramatic, bright, hip-hop, soul, and jazz. It is very accessible. Shadow picked cool samples (like the Pugh Rogefeldt bit that helped us sell a ton of reissued cds by that particular Swedish '60s psych-folkster) AND also turned these samples utterly into his own, new music. Music that's groovy and moody and challenging, never all that easy to figure out, and not at all about turntablist hi-jinx or trickery, just about careful listening and the love of all kinds of old LPs!! Cut Chemist, in the liner notes, is quoted as calling DJ Shadow "The King Of Digging" and vinyl collecting/crate digging for sure is celebrated by Endtroducing, from the famous cover shot of the racks in the vast Sacramento shop simply called Records to the grooves reborn within. As Shadow himself put it: "this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture". He never topped it and probably never will. Not that anyone else has either! So if you don't have it already - or even if you do, but not on wax - what the heck are you waiting for?
Two new releases from UK psych/space label this week, and both are fairly dramatic departures from the label's usual sound, which tends toward the drugged out, heart of the sun, Hawkwind worshipping mega space jammage of groups like the Janitors, Hills, etc. The other new Cardinal Fuzz record is from a Philly outfit called Lantern, who channel the Stooges' swagger garage psych on their new record, and then there's this, which is essentially straight up sixties style psych, the group made up of members who've done time in the Black Angels, the Rondelles, Woven Bones and others, and who have crafted a seriously kick ass chunk of psychedelia, that barring the modern production, sounds like it could actually be some lost sixties psych artifact, the songs especially, pitch perfect psychedelic jangle, groovy riffage, killer harmony vocals, buzzing organs, swaggery and a sound closer to the Fuzztones or the Lyres or Redd Kross or any number of other sixties psych worshippers, but these guys do get spaced out and heavy, unfurling some seriously fierce psych guitar blowouts, and the sound is fantastically druggy and fuzzy and far out, and the songs crazy catchy, the production too, super hot, all the sounds in-the-red...
We were honestly thrown a bit at first, expecting something way more spaced out, but the more we listen to this, the more we're digging it, and the fact that these songs are so catchy, definitely makes this potentially a serious repeat listen, even after a few times though, a handful of these songs are pretty firmly lodged in our heads. A new favorite for sure, but psychedelic spacelords maybe listen to the sound samples first, but anyone else into heavy sixties psych, and jangly retro garage rock, this will definitely hit the spot.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! Comes with a download code that includes the album proper PLUS three bonus tracks!
All that we get from this label about this here cassette is "debut tape of hushed, lonesome ballads from this haunted bedroom troubadour." There's not much said about the shadowiness that is Vaald Tapes either, although the black noise, impenetrable goth demeanor, and funereal dirge-drones from the label's mysterious artists have all been top notch. Silver Casket's stripped down ballads for dour acoustic guitar impressionism strip away all of the electronic floweriness of Mountains, leaving behind the plaintive spaghetti western motifs spun in some loner's bedroom with only a melodica or a couple of bells to simulate Morricone's flourishes. An atmosphere of futility, sadness, and desolation hangs heavy on these skeletal tracks dripping in reverb, echo, and subterranean vibes; and after the brief 23 minutes of ghostly deathfolk gloominess, we're left wanting much much more. Whoever the fuck this is, keep it up. This is great work! Unfortunately limited to 25 copies of which we have a good chunk of the run.
