Local metal guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum, Hammers Of Misfortune, Amber Asylum, Saros, etc.) shows us a surprisingly different side to her talents with this vinyl-only solo debut! Here she's set herself up as a cinematic-style composer, working with brass and piano, and a little gentle singing, amongst other sonic elements woven into the dreary, drifty, droney soundscapery of Cold And Cloud, the title of the record and its music apparently (not that we doubt it!) inspired by summers in San Francisco (& probably winters too, just look out the window today...). You know the old saying attributed to Mark Twain, about the coldest winter he ever spent being a summer in San Francisco.
Ambient and intimate, this is probably something that those who know Abdul-Rauf from her work with chamber goth group Amber Asylum will likely be more into, than those who know of her as a six-string shredder in filthy deathmetallers Vastum or the progoperatic Hammers.
Album art by Tor Lundval.
We described the 2012 R.I.P. album from Actress, aka Darren Cunningham, like this: "subtly detailed, psychedelic sonic prisms drip playfully onto murky haunted fuzz-drones, other worldly squelches and squiggles interplay with analog drum machines, and science fiction melodies get tangled up with hazy, half remembered samples, creating an electronic alchemy that of which this world has never seen!" Tall praise for sure, but that record, was a unanimous store fave, and got played to death in the shop. So the prospect of a new record had us all pretty excited. And while we were expecting, maybe even hoping for, more of the same, the sound on Ghettoville is much darker and more minimal. Which if you know anything about us, is most definitely not a bad thing AT ALL.
Things do still get woozy and alien and psychedelic, the sounds are in constant flux, but at least for the first half of the record, the vibe is super chill, low slung, and washed out. "Forgiven" sets the tone, with a sprawling, slo-mo slither, a gorgeous bit of downtempo slowcore, laced with field recordings, and little bits of gristle and rumble, but all anchored by a glitchy skeletal rhythm, and bolstered by some thick low end swells, it's the sort of dreamlike dirgery that could have stretched out for the entirety of the record, and we would have dug it just as much. If not even MORE!!! But this is Actress after all, so sonic restlessness manifests itself in the form of constant sonic shifts, although as we mentioned, things stay pretty murky in the early stages, so "Street Corp." is more of the same, an almost jazzy skitter, wreathed in crunchy crackle, a submerged bass pulsation, eventually, some soft billowy shimmer surface in the background, but again, a track that ends WAY too soon. "Corner" adds a bit of lo-fi hip-hop swagger, but casts it like those first two tracks in shadow, the edges blurred and smeared, everything sort of hazy and darkly druggy. "Contagious" is another beauty, almost metallic, industrial, a heaving distorted dirge, heavy and haunting, still super lo-fi, but with a different production, it could rival outfits like Nadja or the Angelic Process, bleary metalgaze churn that takes the dubbed out murk of Burial, and adds some serious heft.
It's right around here, that Actress starts sonically drifting into less shadowy spaces, with some chiming, almost Pop Ambient shimmer, some dreamy prismatic electro, even some almost new wave-y sounding house music, but even then, the sound remains gorgeously woozy and washed out, a little bit alien, and for every moment like that, there's another one like "Frontline" near the end of the record, that takes some groovy house, and submerges it in thick, tarpit murk, gristly static, hazy thrum, and again recasts it as something swirly and shadowy and sublime!
It's no surprise that we like this a lot, as it's a collaboration bringing together some big aQ faves (and friends of ours), Aktor consisting of Jussi and Tomi from Finnish prog weirdos Circle, joined by American metal musician Chris "Professor" Black of Dawnbringer and High Spirits fame! Wow, what a great idea! Jussi, Tomi and the other Circle guys already can do no wrong, their unique brand of "NWOFHM" quasi-metal weirdness being hugely popular around here. Put Professor Black into the mix and you've got gold!
This debut 7" features two songs, about three and a half minutes each, of hook-laden, sadly majestic, melodic rockin' heaviness, definitely inspired by the '70s likes of Blue Oyster Cult (a reference made by the title of the A-side song), there's A LOT of synthesizer keyboards all over this, getting a little R2D2-ish with the sci-fi bleep and bloop.
Darkly poppy, rhythmically driving and suspenseful, with the keyboards and catchiness it's sorta like the recent Falcon (Ex-Circle) album, but much more metal and more prog too. And of course with a different, very distinctive vocalist - Professor Black's emotive, softly weathered voice always a pleasure to hear. Great existential lyrics too.
If you're already a fan of High Spirits or Dawnbringer, you'll be right on board with this, 'cause it basically sounds like the most melodic gallop of either of those bands given an extra dose of WTF? electronic action. As the label (i.e. Jussi) says: "Aktor plays Top 40 Heavy Metal with a delicious psychedelic flair". Meanwhile, if you're coming at this as a Circle/NWOFHM fan, well, the extra-proggy B-side has a "lalalala" part that's very Circle-ish...
And while it's unlikely we're gonna sell you on this import 7" if you're NOT already into one side or the other of the Aktor equation, any random BoC fans reading this, oughtta give the sound sample a listen!
We REALLY hope there's gonna be a full-length.
From the same label that brought us the blackened atmospheric doom of Charnel House, the abstract doom-ed black metal of OS, the psychedelic industrial dronescapes of Agakus, the fuzzy, droney, cosmic weirdness of Sky Projection and the tranced out black metal minimalism of Avakr, comes this gorgeous collection of dreamy avant psych folk, from the oddly named Aurora Dorey Alice.
But this is very likely not the psych folk you might have been expecting, which shouldn't surprise you considering the label it's on, it's not strummy or croony, it's WAY more abstract and minimal, skeletal percussion suspended in fields of barely there shimmer, lots of abstract sound, scrapes and creaks, mysterious percussion, rhythmic and murky, prismatic and crystalline, the sounds blurred and hazy and gauzey and washed out, the music is gorgeously lush, but somehow also druggy and minimal and abstract, the music is reminiscent of outfits like Avarus, and No-Neck Blues Band at times, but at others the sound is some alien electronica, all swirling and pulsing, ADA's voice throaty and powerful, at times fluttery and ethereal, wreathed in echo and delay, not always singing, sometimes blending into the sonic backdrop, all shimmery streaks of vocal sound, very haunting and psychedelic and lovely, but also strangely sinister. And when she does sing, it's gorgeous and powerful, transforming the experimental drifts, and glitched out distorted dronescapes, into dark, brooding gothic torch songs, albeit, far out, experimental, avant ones. Fans of Chelsea Wolfe, Zola Jesus, Marissa Nadler will find it easy to get lost in ADA's twisted subterranean electronic flecked goth-psych drone-folk soundworld. So great!!!
They say a lot of things, whoever they might be. They've said that the '60s are back. They've said that '70s are back. They've LONG said that the '80s were back (beginning in 1992 or so); and now, they say that the '90s are back. Whatever. A good sound and a good tune are universal, and timeless, and Be Forest harken back to the best parts of the 4AD / Creation sound from the late '80s / early '90s, doing so with great songwriting, and not just the beautiful patina of that sound. This Italian band has studied their history quite well, picking up many of the songwriting tropes of the era they so adore. It's easy to hear in Be Forest all the things that Budgie did right in terms of creating that rollicking, ritualistic backbeat for Siouxsie & The Banshees. There's plenty of the bright sparkling guitar lines that harken back to what Johnny Marr brought to the Smiths as well as the spiralling melodies that could spin out of the shoegazing miserablism of Slowdive and Ride. And yes, all of these things in and of themselves are worthy of investigating. How many times have we jumped up and down for the dreamy gloom pop of any given Slumberland / Captured Tracks band (e.g. Heavenly Beat, Girls Names, Violins, Diiv, etc.)? But in Earthbeat, Be Forest has added to the equations, some impossibly memorable tunes, which is really at the core of what makes this band so great, lead by the chanteuse Costanza Delle Rose, who helps push the group's sound slighty more toward a more modest version of the swoonsome torch songs of Beach House. Great stuff!
Ok, this is going to take a lot of explaining... Our favorite Finnish hypno-rock band Circle got this funny idea to change their name to Falcon (Ex-Circle), supposedly due to the pressures the musicians in Circle were feeling about the expectations of their audience, in continuing to operate under the "Circle brand" after so many years and releases. So, they became Falcon (Ex-Circle), under which guise they could follow their newfound dream of making poppy, retro-'80s hard rock - see our review of Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s Frontier album, simultaneously released with this Circle disc, below. No longer using the Circle name, they then "leased" the brand to a totally different bunch of musicians, who now have released THIS cd, Incarnation, as Circle. There's more to the plan, apparently the contract is for a year and then Circle will revert back to the original Circle guys, who will then supposedly be called Circle (Ex-Falcon). Right. So this is just the kind of ridiculous stunt we'd expect from our friends in Circle, we mean Falcon. And maybe they're just being silly and confusional, or trying to get extra publicity, but we do think it's a kind of a neat idea, certainly one that hasn't been tried before (wonder why?). And it raises a lot of interesting questions, some of them philosophical, and some of them musical. Like, is the new Circle still "Circular"?
So, first off, what you need to know about Incarnation: it's a DEATH METAL album (sort of). Make that, an experimental death metal album. But made by real deal Finnish death metal musicians, most of 'em from the band Stench Of Decay, also members past and present of thrashers Speedtrap and Pyrotoxic (the latter old faves from the Thrash Clash series).
Stench Of Decay have a pretty killer album of their own out on the Jussi of Circle's Ektro label that we've previously reviewed. And in that review, we actually said: "It remains to be seen if Jussi's interest in death metal heralds a harsh new direction that Circle and the NWOFHM might take, hmm? And while they sure don't sound like Circle (yet), in their own way, Stench Of Decay are quite brutally hypnotic, with repetitive riffs pulverizing repeatedly." Little did we know how prophetic that was, in a weird way. 'Cause now Stench Of Decay, more or less, ARE Circle. The heaviest Circle ever.
We're pretty impressed, 'cause when we first heard about this Circle/Falcon switcheroo idea, we thought that probably it was just a ruse, and the Circle record would be made by the Circle guys anyway, just under pseudonyms or something. But nope, they really did hand over the reins to these death metallers, who even made a new logo themselves, and did the cover art. It would appear that Jussi & Co. had no hand in it at all... But the new Circle lineup DOES rise to the occasion of being "circular", somewhat. Incarnation is both a brutal slab of crushing death metal, and also a unique, experiment in tranced-out avant-death-drone sonics, that embodies the Circle penchant for mantric repetition, in its own way. The drumming is quite different, of course, motorik beats replaced with double kick blasting, and the vocals are more extreme on the low end than anything Mika used to do on the high end, and the guitars unleash gnarly shredding solos also previously unheard from the Circle camp. But, it is hypnotic, in the most dense, droney way possible.
We're pretty sure open minded death metal fans, those into stuff like Portal, will dig this a lot. Open minded Circle fans too of course (is there any other kind?). Some of the five tracks thrash it up in proper metal fashion, others leave the realms of DM to sound more like Skullflower or Sunroof - like track three, "Transcending", with its building, crashing waves of doomed-out sound, almost like some imagined "extreme" 20th century classical composition, or the Gnod-like track five, "Burden", super dense and layered and propulsive, sounding like everything is going all at once, almost like several tracks overlaid, a mesmeric monster of abstract extremity. As is this whole album. So that's one question we CAN answer: yes, this is damn good and worthy of the Circle name. Also damn good and worthy of the death metal name, just imagine Incantation or Disma doing music for a Hermann Nitsch aktion. Here's another question we've got, though: will Circle, when the band is back to being the actual original Circle guys again, ever have to learn these songs that they didn't write, and try to play 'em live?
Another platter of fantastically druggy, droney dub from the man responsible for the stoner rock epicry of Sleep, and the minimal psychedelic drone-dirge of OM, but who has always (obviously) been obsessed with dub, and who recently decided to start doing some actual dub himself, and over the course of a handful of limited releases, has crafted some pretty fantastic stuff, with a sound that's not so much classic Jamaican dub, as it is informed by the sounds that that music influenced. Like on Cisneros' other dub records, we hear lots of Muslimgauze and African Head Charge here too, loping, minimal rhythms, deep, throbbing basslines, tons of echo and reverb, each track essentially a single groove, stretched waaaaay out, the sounds dense and lush and layered, rife with Middle Eastern strings and melodies, total trip out, drone dub dreaminess for sure. Darkly psychedelic, but infused with a deep sonic warmth, the sound laid back and mesmeric, most of the tracks here are woozy and washed out and seriously stoney, but there are moments, where things darken and get slightly more industrial, with a vibe reminiscent of the post dub excursions of outfits like Vatican Shadow or Silent Servant. Housed in a plain brown 12" sleeve, and most likely quite limited...
There's no difference for John Davis in the division of labor between sound and image. This Bay Area media-artist is a frequent collaborator with filmmakers and musicians, sometimes plying his craft as a sound designer to the films of Paul Clipson or Craig Baldwin. Othertimes, he's working with long-form dronesculptors like Jefre Cantu-Ledesma or Joshua Churchill, presenting his own impressionistic yet mechanical 8mm film projections. What becomes the mark of his strength as an artist is in how seamless these movements are between media. So when it comes to his own recorded work, the sounds are very much informed by the images he captures of transcendent glimpses of the California landscape (highways, sunsets, forests, deserts, etc.) with a mechanical time-stop / slow-motion jitteriness from one of his projections in a multi-beam configuration on the screen. Ask The Dust is his second major album following a handful of micro-edition cassettes, singles, and cd-rs. Davis' first high-profile release, Gold Hooped Nature, came by way the impeccable curators at Root Strata, and Students Of Decay is another well-suited home for Davis's meandering ambient drift and loose compositional tropes. Some of the melodic phrases that dot Ask The Dusk can be elegiac and refined through piano, field recordings, and guitar; and others can flare with a roman candle burst of Max/MSP granulation or a smoldering hot-wired signal concoction from Davis' modular synth arrays. But all of these fleck the undulating surfaces of his flotation tank ripples, echoes, and thrummings. Somewhere not all that far from Thuja's pine cone droning and Tarentel's thoroughly abstracted latter-day productions. Very nice work.
Dig it, whatever else is wrong with the world, at least it seems like there's always a Dead Moon reissue popping up, that's some good news. This week we're listing the Pacific NW garage punk legends' 10th (or 12th? we're not good at keeping count) album, circa 2000, newly back in print on vinyl, via Mississippi - and we also just got ANOTHER three Dead Moons, their earliest classics (In The Graveyard, Unknown Passage, and Defiance) at last individually reissued on compact disc thanks to M'Lady's...
Trash & Burn is full of energetic, atmospheric rockers in the Dead Moon tradition, frontman Fred Cole & Co. kicking out the lo-fi jams like they idiosyncratic vets they are - Cole has been at the underground rock n' roll game since the '60s! Lots o' fuzzed guitar, pleading/whining/weirdass vox, driving rhythms, murky swagger, you know the score, it's Dead Moon. You got this one?
Here's the much needed reissue of Death And Vanilla's first ep, which was originally released in a tiny edition of just 100 copies a couple years back; and truth be told, this reissue will suffer the same fate, as the vinyl has also sold out amazingly fast. Death And Vanilla are a low-profile Swedish duo that triangulate themselves in the forgotten futures of Duophonic era Stereolab, the Focus Group's curiosity shoppe of library music electronics, and Broadcast's avant-pop anachronisms. Given how well D&V manage to operate in this context, it is a bit surprising that a Thrill Jockey or a Matador hasn't banged on their door. But for us, it's all fine and good for the duo to remain in their perch above the largest cemetery in their hometown of Malmo, continuing to produce a Spartan catalogue of spellbinding, sublime albums. Like all of those more contemporary references, Death & Vanilla's impeccable taste in pop music telescopes back to the late '60s with French new wave films, sultry Cinecitta psyche pop, Italian horror grandiosity, and the tried and true motorik rhythms of Neu! The arrangements are baroquely set with fuzzed out / vibrato guitars, slinky basslines, theramin, moog, glockenspiels, vibraphones, and harpsichords, with vocalist Marleen Nilsson breathily crooning like an opiated but just as dreamy Brigitte Bardot. Brilliant stuff this Death & Vanilla; and this expanded version of the original ep features three exquisite bonus tracks, including one based on the work of Daphne Oram and sporting an unsettling extracted piece of dialog from the film Marathon Man. Oh, you know which one.
Can't wait to read the article entitled "Posing Hard: Yoga & Extreme Metal"! Also this ish there's Behemoth on the cover, Hirax, Pentagram Chile, Grand Magus, The Wounded Kings, Alcest, Thou, Indian and lots more. Plus plenty of reviews, funny columns, etc.
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!
The second album in as many weeks from the Russian industrial-impressionist Exit In Grey. At this album's core is a duality of gloomy exasperation and despair on one hand and a universal, meditative sense of calm on the other. Both of these emotional states co-habitate in a slow crawl of suspended drone construction and dappled shortwave radio reception from detuned military transmissions as well as the ethereal crackle of a VLF receiver. The initial gasps from Shadows Of Stillness spill from a claustrophobic synth tone, whose desolate, chemical transmission is accentuated with low-frequency rumblings and bone-creaking textures that wouldn't be out of place on a Sleep Research Facility or Lustmord recording. About halfway through "Speaking With Silence" the nocturnal mood lifts with a golden set of melodic ambient phrases akin to Popul Vuh's classic psychedelic instrumentals and a chipper satellite beacon signaling back to earth that all is well up in the heavens and we need not worry so much about our plight down here on this rock. The album's finale reprises this radiant shimmer as if all of the sounds were the sunblinding reflections of a midnight sun cast upon the placid waters of the Arctic Ocean north of St. Petersberg. Cold yet beautiful.
Fans of the NWOFHM, get ready for the NWOFAOR.
First off, please go read our review of Circle's Incarnation to get the whole back story about this release. 'Cause our pals Circle, the celebrated Finnish space/kraut/WTF? rockers, are not Circle anymore, they're Falcon (Ex-Circle). It's all part of an elaborate scheme we try to explain in that Incarnation review. But explanations are difficult, as there are multiple layers of meaning to what Circle, we mean Falcon, are up to here. On the surface, Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s debut album is all high concept hijinks, total retro '80s AOR good times party tunes love songs, a mix of arena-ready hard rock and radio-friendly soft rock with flashy guitars, melodic singing, and cheesy keyboards. Every track sorta sounds like a 'training montage' song from a movie, if you know what we mean. But we don't think it's ironic parody. Maybe homage, but not parody. If you pay attention, listen to the lyrics, it's not just joking. There's an underlying sadness, a yearning, a sincerity to Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s journey into, uh, the realms of Journey - a synth-laden, fantasy MTV rock n' roll pleasure zone. Take a close look at the cover art to see what we mean about possible divergent depths of meaning - what's that about?
Listening, we're hearing hints of lots of stuff we used to hear on the radio growing up - from Billy Idol to Styx to the Psychedelic Furs to Golden Earring to Aldo Nova to Neil Young (circa Trans?), and more. These former Circle guys have gone beyond their previous forays into the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" to get waaaay more pop than metal here, though we do hear a bit of a galloping Thin Lizzy-ish riff on "Leather Seat", sprinkled however with magical synthesizer fairy dust. Tracks like "Horses" and "Ace Of Hearts" also boogie pretty hard.
Falcon (Ex-Circle)'s songs are good, good enough to make the grade as undeniable "guilty pleasures" just like some of their obvious inspirations. Almost the only thing that makes this NOT seem like you must have heard it on the radio back in the '80s is that the vocals, while melodic, can have a bit of a rough edge to 'em, plus the Finnish accent.
Really, we thought the Falcon (Ex-Circle) 7" that came out earlier last year, was a one-off, that was going to be the extent of the joke. Instead it was the lead single for this album. So, as with a lot of Circle & Jussi related projects, one begins to wonder... maybe it's not a joke? In fact, Jussi insisted to us that this whole Circle/Falcon (Ex-Circle) stunt is actually an artistically significant, serious thing for him. He even wrote an essay about it, explaining what he's trying to achieve, but unfortunately we couldn't read it 'cause it's all in Finnish. He did ask us to list/review both Frontier and Incarnation at the same time, that was important. And so we comply.
Of the two albums, Frontier and Incarnation, the one under the Circle moniker is indeed easier to see as Circle, on the extreme experimental/drone side of their aesthetic. Even though it's not "really" Circle. Meanwhile, this Falcon disc, actually by Circle (confused yet?), does not sound much like anything Circle has ever done. Cause these are more traditionally structured pop/rock songs, verse/chorus/verse stuff, although they can't get away from the hypno-rock repetitive thing entirely.
Anyway, like we say in the Incarnation review, lots of interesting questions raised, but at the end of day, what's important is are you gonna like listening to it? Well we do, these songs are BUILT for heavy rotation and that's what we're giving this disc. At first we were like, haha, but now we're addicted!!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
Monkey Banana Kitchen was the band's first full album (following a string of singles including several head-scratching / loving homages to Debbie Harry's rumored hermaphrodism - yeah, how about that for a topic of a poptune?!). The album's jittery punk-dub songwriting has its roots in the British classics of Public Image Limited and the Clash, although the anthemic pop-hook has been tossed out the window in favor of a glossalaic patter of semi-coherent lyrics. The triumphantly kaleidoscopic "Savoir Faire" operates in the same art-pop lineage of Stereolab, with Family Fodder being freakishly unfettered in their exuberance where Stereolab would play it ultra cool behind their Moogs and Gauloise cigarettes. Then, there are the deep-dub tracks of "Organ Grinder" and "Bass Adds Bass" which could have easily get confused for anything by The Slits or New Age Steppers. Sprinkled throughout the album are a series of short slapstick pieces of spring-loaded vaudevillian tunes and elliptical dada / slapstick lyrics: "Darling, reason's in the monkeyhouse with a banana in the kitchen."
Fantastic stuff!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
Monkey Banana Kitchen was the band's first full album (following a string of singles including several head-scratching / loving homages about Debbie Harry's rumored hermaphrodism - yeah, how about that for a topic of a poptune?!). The album's jittery punk-dub songwriting has its roots in the British classics of Public Image Limited and the Clash, although the anthemic pop-hook has been tossed out the window in favor of a glossalaic patter of semi-coherent lyrics. The triumphantly kaleidoscopic "Savoir Faire" operates in the same art-pop lineage of Stereolab, with Family Fodder being freakishly unfettered in their exuberance where Stereolab would play it ultra cool behind their Moogs and Gauloise cigarettes. Then, there are the deep-dub tracks of "Organ Grinder" and "Bass Adds Bass" which could have easily get confused for anything by The Slits or New Age Steppers. Sprinkled throughout the album are a series of short slapstick pieces of spring-loaded vaudevillian tunes and elliptical dada / slapstick lyrics: "Darling, reason's in the monkeyhouse with a banana in the kitchen." The compact disc is fleshed out with the tracks from the Schizophrenia Party EP plus a couple of singles (sadly none about Debbie Harry). The highlight of these tracks (for some of us) is the ridiculously over-the-top "Dinosaur Sex" - a totally stupid / brilliant rock-opera / punk-dub number that parodies Broadway musicals in an engorged number about, ah, fucking like a dinosaur!!
Wacked-out French-not-French pop? Avant-dub? Post-punk for the anarchically happy? All of those are applicable and more for the bizarro-world citizens of Family Fodder. This was less of a band, and more of a ridiculously loose collective that spun around principal songwriter Alig Pearce and chanteuse Dominique Levillain, with a genealogical tree that is confoundingly complex. We CAN say that both Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward (of This Heat) passed through the quickly revolving door of Family Fodder with the Flying Lizards' David Cunningham also offering his disjointed madness; but there were probably dozens of different players who dotted each record. Those two projects - This Heat and the Flying Lizards - could be referenced for sure as a shorthand equation of what Family Fodder was up to; but there was also plenty of situationist stabs at jubilantly rendered black humor and boisterous sarcasm that rippled through the tumbling weirdo-punk joy of Family Fodder's music. Sparks meets Stereolab might be another non-entirely-off-the-mark description.
This lp contains all the tracks from the Schizophrenia Party EP plus a couple of singles (sadly none about Debbie Harry). The highlight to these tracks (for some of us) is the ridiculously over-the-top "Dinosaur Sex" - a totally stupid / brilliant rock-opera / punk-dub number that parodies Broadway musicals in an engorged number about, ah, fucking like a dinosaur!!
One of our all time favorite sludge/metal/grind bands, who until now, had only released tracks on compilations and seven inches. Must be at least 7 or 8 years now that Floor have been contributing their downtuned dementia to the underground scene and they have managed to remain pretty unknown. Hopefully this full length will change that. And it really should, cause their sound has definitely changed with the times. Instead of wallowing in their underground-basement-split-seven-inch past and rehashing their slow motion grind (in the style of Cavity and Eyehategod), they've added LOTS of clean vocals and a surprising amount of melody, ending up with a sound somewhere between your favorite pop punk emo band, the Melvins, late period Fudge Tunnel, and Nirvana, but way, way heavier. Seriously. They've turned into a honest to goodness pop band, but a downtuned, amps-on-11, super-distorted, kick-in-the-guts pop band. Great production too with super distorted low end that makes their huge bursts of guitar sound like the end of the world! Way recommended.
The first release from this twisted avant shoegaze, black-doom, new wave, industrial psych pop duo, Deathconsciousness, was a sprawling double disc, complete with a huge book filled with lyrics and obscure text, strange illustrations, sonically and conceptually it was utterly stunning, we had been getting emails about that band and record for months before we got our hands on copies, and in our review of that record, we proclaimed that it really SHOULD have been a Record Of The Week, but the band decided to stop making copies, and we had the last copies ever. We were so obsessed with the record that at one point it was even slated to be reissued on Andee's tUMULt label too, but sadly, that never came to fruition either, and we hadn't heard much from Have A Nice Life since, a tape, a cd-r of outtakes, a few live performances, we began fearing the worst, that Deathconsciousness was the first and final proper record we'd hear from these guys.
But now, six years later, local label The Flenser continues their shift from black metal to twisted dark pop and avant heaviness, and reveal a brand new Have A Nice Life record, and we get to right that old wrong, and finally make Have A Nice Life our Record Of The Week, cuz the new record is really damn near as good as the first. And sonically a good fit for The Flenser too, their new even less metal sound settling somewhere right between outfits like Aussie black-jangle noise poppers Loss Of Self and math-doom electro-sludge goth rockers Wreck And Reference. And yeah, HANL were really never metal, and now, they seem to have settled into a sound that's equal part gloomy death rock, noisy jangle pop and nineties style shoegaze, with a weird lo-fi production, almost entirely clean vocals, lots of angular guitars, reverb heavy goth rock drumming, and huge thick swirls of crumbling distortion and psychedelic freakout guitars. The record opens with "Guggenheim Wax Museum", a heady blast of fuzzy, super distorted dirge pop, blown out and shoegazey, with deep, dramatic vocals, and wild squalls of swirling psychedelic noise, like a slo-mo Godspeed fused to a blackened My Bloody Valentine, which bleeds right into "Defenestration Song" a super melodic, gloomy, goth pop gem, all thick fuzzy bass, a little Joy Division, molded into a sort of post industrial doom-gaze death rock with some super dramatic, almost emo vox.
"Burial Society" sets moody pianos amidst a slowly skittering drum machine, beneath crooned hushed vocals, buzzing guitars, sounding almost like a darker, meaner, more underground Deftones (which is a VERY good thing by the way), the same sort of goth informed, dramatic metallic pop, but filtered through a much more fractured and fucked up sonic filter, laced with some surprising vocal oooh's and aaah's that add even more poppiness. "Music Will Untune The Sky" unfurls as a creepy raga like drone, keening, wailing vox, heaving low end swells, lush and layered, slowly blossoming into something darkly melodic and prismatic, before slipping into the confusionally chaotic opening to "Cropsey", a tangle of overlapping samples, buried muted rhythms, chiming barely there melodies, before the song finally explodes in a frenzy of tribal drumming, swirling strings, and more strident death rock vox. "Unholy Life" is some serious, total eighties style goth pop, a little bit new wavey, echo drenched drums, minor key melodies, but with some cool angular metallic guitars, and a wild noisy, psychedelic shoegaze second half, which gets gloriously blown out and blissed out. "Dan And Tim" cranks up the mathy post punk, sinewy and slithery, before transforming into more hazy gloom pop shimmer, the mathiness of the opener continually churning away beneath ethereal swaths of fuzzy guitar and heavily reverbed vocals, blurry and bleary. And finally, closer "Emptiness Will Eat The Witch" is all hushed and dreamlike, buried melodies and muted shimmer, all beneath a hypnotic drone, that shifts subtly, changing timbre and tone, vocals surfacing, the sound coalescing into some dour pop dreaminess, but still darkly droney, it's not until 5 minutes in that the song truly takes off, but instead of exploding into something heavy, the vocals soar and swirl, thick clouds of dreamy, droney vocal harmonies, pulsing and pulsating, peppered with strange abstract percussion, before settling into one final drift, haunting, and hypnotic, and darkly and dreamily mysterious.
So goddamn great, and while it was totally worth the six year wait, let's hope we don't have to wait that long for more...
We recently reviewed an lp reissue for the soundtrack to Wes Craven's brutal exploitation flick Last House On The Left, and now One Way Static return to bring us another Craven classic, The Hills Have Eyes, the soundtrack by Don Peake, who might be most famous for composing the iconic theme to the TV show Knight Rider. For The Hills Have Eyes, the story of a vacation gone wrong, when a family becomes stranded in the desert and is terrorized by a clan of deformed cannibals, Peake conjured up a seriously weird score, combining traditional orchestral instruments, with electronics and some super weird noise makers, including something called "The Beam', which was a ten foot long aluminum beam strung with a single string, as well as the bone necklaces the cannibals wore in the film, which were used as shakers and percussion. Another cool thing about this reissue, is they left in all the studio chatter, which while it might take a little away from the mood, for soundtrack obsessives, is pretty fascinating. And heck, the music itself is pretty fantastic, lots of ominous electronic buzz, low end rumbles, droning synths, a lot of the moments reminiscent of John Carpenter for sure, peppered with bits of tribal folk that sound to us a bit like No-Neck Blues Band or Avarus, but wreathed in space-y synths. There's also some groovy funk, some long stretches of spare, spaced out electronic minimalism, that sounds like some lost 20th century classical, the best moments for sure are the organic/electronic hybridized tracks, piano plonks wrapped in keening strings and swirling synths, or bleating horns, blurring into synthy shimmer. The tracks are all SUPER short, more like cues, so a lot of the tracks are 30 seconds long, some are just one bar, but they all hold together pretty well. And we sorta forgot how crazy scary the score was, has us wanting to see the movie again.
And like the Last House reissue, One Way Static did a great job, a full color insert with rare photos and liner notes from the stars (including Dee Wallace and Michael Berryman) as well as the director, the cameraman/director of photography and Peake himself. All housed in a super heavy gatefold jacket, adorned with some awesome shots from the film, most featuring the instantly recognizable face of the movie (as well as a ton of other horror classics) Michael Berryman!
This blues album had us sold on it already just by being by a guy named Peg Leg! That he's 'Legendary' is practically superfluous. Not to mention that this record comes to us via the always excellent blues/country/folk reissue vinyl label Sutro Park.
So yeah, it's good, an album originally released in 1964 when Joshua "Peg Leg" Howell was about 75 years old. Peg Leg had begun his recording career back in the 1920s, when Columbia Records discovered him busking on the sidewalks of Atlanta Georgia. But he hadn't recorded anything since the '30s and in fact was presumed dead until being rediscovered again in the '60s. As documented on this lp, Peg Leg is an old bluesman returning to the songs of his youth, now wizened and wistful, as you might imagine a septuagenarian singing songs like "Jelly Roll Blues" and "Let Me Play With Your Yo-Yo" might be. Other tracks here include "Blood Red River", "Worried Blues", and "Skin Game Blues" to give you an idea of the vibe.
Includes original liner notes and woodcut album art. 180 gram vinyl.
Matthew Waldron, the mad genius behind irr. app. (ext.), has toiled at his unwieldy craft of sonic surrealism for close to 20 years now. His work has long paralleled that of Nurse With Wound; and yes, Waldron has graced a number of Nurse recordings and live sessions. Unfortunately, he's often confused with fellow Nurse troubadour Andrew Liles, due to both of them shearing their scalps of any and all hair. That said, the NWW ethos is clearly defined by another mad genius, Steven Stapleton, who has a slightly different take on the art of sound obfuscation. Stapleton's avant-everything amalgams hedge towards the grotesque beauty from the universal themes of the id (sex, drugs, death, yup even rock 'n' roll), where Waldron's investigation into the uncanny has a wholly personal inflection of psychic failure and futility. Neognathae is the second EP that Waldron has produced for the East Bay cottage industry Petit Mal Music; and like the first, this album is dedicated to the pursuits of 'avian technology;' in other words, the 20 minute piece is entirely sourced from bird songs. Waldron once picked up a field guide to birds (if you must know, this was the reading material in the former bathroom of the Helen Scarsdale Agency) and turned the transcriptions of birdsongs into Kurt Schwitters-like, irritable blurts of dada sound poetry as a desperate impersonation of Dr. Doolittle. It was horrifying and it was hilarious. Even as Waldron uses the lyrical trills of various warblers, doves, finches, and thrushes on Neognathae Portentosus, his concoction is far removed from Messiaen's comparatively polite invocation of the birdsong in composition. Waldron twists and mutates the sounds of these birds into eerie blurs of silvery shimmer and the sonic equivalent of a fun-house mirror. At first, the piece lumbers and creaks with the clubfooted gait of a slumping golem. He builds and layers this malformed collage into a frenzied cacophony that would clearly provoke fear and dread in the Tippy Hedrons out there in the world. Whatever genetic bastard bird Waldron has created out of his black magic and devilry, it is a miserable creature. One that is not long for this world. Just 100 copies are around...
Another blast of twisted microtonal black metal from this long time aQ fave, and as we mentioned in our review of the last JG, this might be his 20th record, of which we've only managed to review a handful. But like that last one, Vast Chains, takes all the tropes of black metal, and transforms them into something super psychedelic and avant, the tunings, the arrangements, the melodies, fans of groups like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, who traffic in woozy, slippery riffage, and blurred blackness, Jute Gyte takes that experimentalism a step further, black metal fragmented, split into jagged shards, and somehow reconstituted into something at once heavy and harsh, but also weirdly melodic and mesmerizing, but also, totally batshit WTF, Ocrilim / Orthrelm worthy avant-shred, but that shred here is more about texture, as the guitar parts and riffs are so odd, so damaged and atonal, sometimes they conjure utter beauty, lush lovely sonic swells, other times, they're so warped they almost make your eyes water. Opener "Semen Dried Into The Silence Of Rock And Mineral", lays it all out, sounding a bit like a slow motion Mesuhuggah, or a super spare, 20th century Deathspell, the sound chugging and churning, creeping and slithering, the vibe more doomy really than black, the arrangement confoundingly mathy, intricate and constantly shifting, and the guitars, holy shit, even when the heaviness is peeled back, leaving just some haunting clean guitar shimmer, those parts somehow sound even MORE strange and alien.
There is definitely plenty of black buzz, the dizzying Voivod meets Deathspell fury of "Endless Moths Swarming", is so dense and droned out, it almost seems to smear into something beyond black metal, a sort of avant drone-buzz blackness. There's also weird poppiness, like the clean chiming guitar melodies woven into "The Inexpressible Loneliness Of Thinking", that at times almost sounds like some sort of blackened cold wave / gloom pop, but is laced with some impossibly catchy melodies, that seem to slip out of the microtonal tuning, just for a second, before collapsing back into a swirling black hole of avant sonics.
Holy shit this stuff is amazing and bafflingly brilliant. We're kind of shocked that this guy is still self-releasing it. It's really about time a label like Relapse, or Season Of Mist, or Profound Lore, finally step up and expose Jute Gyte's twisted blackness to the masses.
Packaged in a DVD style case with a full color cover, and a printed insert/lyric sheet.
New five song ep from these East Coast noise rockers, and true to the title, the songs here are all acoustic, not sure if they actually were recorded around a campfire, but hell, they probably could have been! It's not necessarily a whole different side of the band, the last full length, found them shedding much of their obtuse noisiness in favor of more jangle and a bit more poppiness, and that is definitely evident here as well, although don't be expecting spare strum and croon, the sound here is actually pretty lush and full, a little bit noisy, distorted and maybe mid-fi. Opener "I Saw Her Face" transforms acoustic guitars into something thick and blurry, while the multi-tracked (or dual?) vocals, keening and heartfelt, definitely add some pathos. Sounds like their could be a piano in there too, or maybe just another guitar, but for an acoustic jam, it's pretty noisy and psychedelic. Some of the other tracks are bit more acoustic-y, like "The Seeds", which is downright Beatles-esque, super melodic and classically catchy, laced with some shaker-percussion, but even here, the guitars seem to billow into clouds of strummy shimmer, giving the sound a definite psychedelic vibe. And so it goes, the other tracks here are similarly woozy and washed out, pretty, fuzzy and strummy, although "Turn Your Color" might be our favorite, it's definitely the droniest and most tripped out of the bunch, with minimal percussion, and long stretched out tones, super trancey and hypnotic, thick clouds of cymbal shimmer, and some mumbled, buried-in-the-mix vox. Nice!
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!)
A while back we made the most recent record from these Finnish spaced out psych-kraut drone-rockers our Record Of The Week, a single song, spread out over a whole record, rife with pretty much everything we love, crumbling distortion, swirling FX, motorik rhythms, lush swirling textures, heavy, heady, hypnotic, the kind of sound that should never end, even one record length song is not enough, total kosmische hypno-rock heaviness that we, and most of you, can't seem to get enough of. Sadly it seems like that record is no longer available, and word is, the band is working on a new record, a new SONG actually, that will fill up TWO whole cds, but until then, we got this new 7" to tide us over, and as is there want, it's just one song, about 13 minutes long, and another epic psychedelic space rock sprawl, one that sort of ups the sonic ante, taking the sound of that last full length, and pushing it even further out, a dark distorted field of slo-mo riffing, shimmering billows of blurred FX, and then the sound explodes into some seriously heavy, spaced out dirgery, echo drenched vox, simple Teutonic drum pound, everything hazy and prismatic, the sound shot through with swirls of synth buzz and spidery guitar melodies, gloriously epic and majestic, fans of Godspeed style bombast will flip for sure. Totally tranced out, transcendent, psychedelic, space-drone, hypno-rock bliss. Not sure how limited these are, but guessing they won't be around for too long...
Longtime readers of the aQ list know by now just how much we loved Cave In, from their crazy crushing ultra heavy early records all the way up to their more recent, way poppier 'Radiohead' period. And we've raved about pretty much everything Cave In frontman Stephen Brodsky has done since, his solo records practically perfect, and super poppy. So when we found out Brodsky was teaming up with drummer Ben Koller from Converge, we were thrilled, imagining all sorts of sonic scenarios, variations on heavy pop, or maybe poppier Converge style metallic mayhem, and truth be told, that's SORT of what Mutoid Man sounds like, but only sort of. Brodsky's songwriting is definitely on display, hooks galore, and his vocals, sound as good as ever, but the setting is definitely different, with Brodsky and Koller conjuring up some wildly technical, progged out metal weirdness, at times sounding like supercharged classic rock, and at others, like some furious metal-prog, with some super rad WTF sonic craziness in the mix, whether it's twisted churning mosh parts, or squiggly FX drenched psychedelia, or a ridiculously cool, and ULTRA heavy Animals cover (!), it all makes for some serious, and seriously kick ass heaviness.
We were sold one track in, opener "Gnarcissist" sounds like classic hard rock mutated and revved WAY the fuck up, killer riffing, fuzzed out bass, wild drumming, this track in particular sounds a LOT like Brodsky's poppier solo material but given a punk as fuck Converge style metallic makeover, THE rawk jam of the year, with its blown out wah guitar, frenzied riffing, progged out drumming, and soaring super hooky vocals, frantic and caffeinated, head bangable but hooky as hell, all of which basically applies to the rest of the record in equal measure. And while nothing is quite as overtly poppy as the opener, tracks like "Scavengers" wrap super tech guitar shreddery, around poppy hooks, and dizzying prog arrangements, the sort of sound that is exhausting to even listen to, but these guys make it sound effortless, transforming their hooky tech-metal punk-prog into something as crushing as it is catchy. Fans of Converge and early Cave In, who aren't averse to some serious goddamn poppiness, this ones for you. We've been jamming this NON-stop, and have no plans to stop anytime soon.
These occult Italian sonic shamans have returned from another extensive druggy doomy dreamtime journey into the realms of heaviness/trippiness unknown to most modern mortals, who aren't 'experienced' like these guys, and here's the recorded result to edify us all. Their 2013 debut Caosgon first turned us on to their strange ceremonial sound, improvised esoteric stoner sludge for fans of UFOmammut, OM, Orthodox, Gnod, Bong, Acid Mothers Temple, etc. Now a year or so later they're back with even longer hair, longer beards, longer songs... probably, at any rate it's a longer album, two whole sprawling discs this time, filled to the brim with freeform Moog mantras, lumbering heavy riffs, hypnotic slomo rhythms, freaky FX, and drug gobbling/gargling vocal invocations. It's a Paul Chain getting high in Nepal thing you wouldn't understand.
The music of these Mogadon monks often takes the form of buzzing droning distortion, waves of it, interwoven with weird samples and those howling electronically treated vocals - moans akin to drones themselves - with the guitars chugging away behind the synths, intensive drums and percussion too, plodding and pounding, all part of Nibiru's truly otherworldly, seemingly never-ending throb. These tracks are tumbling, pulsating things that twist and turn in slow spirals, mutating more than anything else, as new components unexpectedly appear in the sound field: some Barn Owlish twang here, some primal vocal outbursts there; squiggling shortwave electronics, wavering guitar lines, 'liturgical organ', 'mini-digeridoo', feedback tangles, and occasional oddly relaxing melodies meandering about amidst the thicker sonic sludge.
We can't always guarantee these results - but under certain circumstances, at the right volume, if you play this at home, your rooms will fill with aromatic smoke, your walls will grow ropy green vines, and the sky outside will darken, swirling with alien colors, revealing hitherto unseen and confusingly arranged constellations of stars, dimly glowing through the mists... in your imagination at least, if not in reality... but what is reality? By the time you're onto the 2nd disc here you might not be sure...
So... Paging Julian Cope, we've got your new favorite album right here! Heck, the druid-dude probably know about this already, if he knows ANYTHING about psychonautic fantasias. However, we haven't read or heard much at all about this band anywhere, really, but if they keep it up we predict they'll develop quite a cult following for themselves, this is the sort of spaced out, improv-damaged, heavier-than-thou ritual we know you all love, we do!!
Limited to 300 copies only.
Heavy psych and metal freaks, perhaps you remember we reviewed a reissue of this power trio Poobah's 1979 album Steamroller a while back? While '79 was a late date for "proto-metal", that's definitely what this Youngstown Ohio outfit sounded like, heavy duty acid rock n' roll action with plenty of psychedelically shredding guitar work. Well, now you can check out where they wuz comin' from, 'cause this "Special Collector's Edition" of their 1972 independently released debut has just been "re-unleashed". Just peep the vintage b&w photos of the band, all long hair, beards, head bands. Total hippies! HEAVY hippies. Hard as nails. But definitely hippies (like the fabulous furry freak bro looking dude depicted in the crude cover cartoon, spitting up into a toilet - or is it the other way around?).
So, yeah, Poobah is "proto-metal" fersure on this one, right from the get-go with the aptly titled "Mr. Destroyer", which despite the peace-loving message of the lyrics seems to demonstrate that violence for violence's sake can work, in rock anyway! And aside from one (quite nice) laidback number, "Enjoy What You Have", the six tracks that make up the original release of Let Me In are all similarly raw rifftastic freakrock heaviness, very underground, their unhinged high wattage psychedelia almost kinda punk, a la the UK's Crushed Butler, Detroit's Death, or Australia's Coloured Balls. BAD ASS in other words. Heck the ominous creepy-crawl of "Bowleen" is practically doom metal, though Poobah do have their lighter side, with a penchant for funny voices and trippy rhythmic passages, hippy potsmoking stuff y'know...
The bonus tracks (there's 10 on the gatefold double vinyl version and 12 on the compact disc) are all also quite worthy, recorded circa '72-'73, mostly more high energy ass-kickery in the vein of the album tracks, with a few weird noisy studio experiments thrown in for good measure... or maybe not "studio" exactly as most of the bonus cuts were recorded live to 2-track in the guitarist or bassist's living room. It all sounds great though, from the surprise vocal harmonies in the midst of "Make A Man Out Of You" to the Ted Nugent style gonzo goings on of "Going To Rock City"...
Quite a treat, now we're waiting on a proper reissue of Poobah's second album, US Music, from '76, that's gotta happen someday too...
Wooha, Poobah! We've previously reviewed reissues of this kickass if undeservedly obscure Ohio outfit's 1972 proto-metal debut Let Me In, and also their third album, the aptly titled Steamroller, from 1979. Now at last we've got the missing link, their 2nd album, U.S. Rock, originally released in the bicentennial year of 1976 - hence the title, and the band's patriotic pose on the cover, dressed in Revolutionary-era costume.
Lead by guitar whiz Jim Gustafson, Poobah here deliver another potent dose of their gonzo acid hard rock action. There's a song here called "Let's Rock", and another one called "Keep On Rollin'", so you get the idea, yeah, they're all about the rock n' roll good times! The former is a total '50s style rave up with boogie-woogie piano; the latter a heavier, glammier Alice Cooper-ish number. But the thing with Poobah is that they've got a crazed psychedelic side to 'em, we've written before about 'em being "weird and wild and wacky" - and we're not just talking about the song here called "Crazy", definitely one for the Dr. Demento hit parade.
On a bunch of the tracks they pull off some maniacal falsetto screamin', and speaking of that, get a load of the almost-kecak-like "Chicky Chicky Cha, Chicky Chicky Cha" chant featured in the song "Watch Me", that had us staring at the stereo the first time we heard it. WTF? That's entertainment!
For this reissue they've added 4 bonus tracks to U.S. Rock's original ten, and really across the album there's a lot of varied moods, including some nice melodic stuff - like the dreamy and majestic "Your Way, My Way" (one of the bonus tracks, which also include a 9+ minute live version of "Steamroller").
The MC5 and Ted Nugent and Grand Funk could be common reference points, to cite some big names; also Poobah are in the same realm as other underground American seventies rockers reissued by Rockadrome like Cain and Hooker - but with more unhinged hippie humor we think!
(Note: Ripple also did this reissue on cd, unfortunately we were sent the wrong title this week, so we'll have to list the cd version next time... and it's the cd that has the 4 bonus tracks mentioned above, they're not included on the vinyl.)
It is a red letter day for us here at aQ, in that we finally actually get to write about and sell you a Pye Corner Audio release instead of lamenting the fact that our supplier for PCA recordings only sent us a fraction of what we had initially wanted - or is more often the case, that it sold out completely before we could get our hands on ANY. To be sure, over the past couple of years, a few of Pye Corner's releases have slipped in and out of the shop, leaving just an ectoplasmic stain of picture-perfect electronic retro-futurism on our collective minds; and it also seems fitting that Pye Corner Audio released an album of his hauntological disco on the Ghost Box label, which again we've never gotten enough of to list. But now, hurrah, we have this!! As the title specifies, this triple cd set collects the first four volumes of Pye Corner Audio's Black Mill Tapes, which were originally released on vinyl as a couple of double lp sets which are (as noted) long gone.
Pye Corner Audio is the work of audio wizard Martin Jenkins, who is one of the in-house engineers at Miloco Studios in London where he works alongside the likes of Alan Moulder, Flood, and Trevor Jackson - yeah, top flight producers for sure. It's obvious that the work of Pye Corner Audio did not develop in a bubble, as there are very clear ideas and a fully formed sound language that is very savvy in its references to Delia Derbyshire's sci-fi electronics, the autobahn precision of Kraftwerk's songwriting, John Carpenter's bold synth melodies, and the bad-ass swagger of Detroit techno. In a rare interview, Jenkins described the working methods of PCA as being quickly sketched-out variations onto quarter inch tape and even four-track cassettes with a couple of no-name Japanese monosynths and a drum machine. He continues that "I definitely embrace imperfection. In my days as an engineer, I spent so much time polishing performances and correcting mistakes that I realised it made for pretty sterile recordings. I also felt extremely liberated after coming to the realisation that there is no absolute final version of a song. There are just alternative interpretations. Once I stopped chasing that elusive perfection, things eased massively."
Through those monosynths and simple step sequencers, Jenkins builds a unique, forgotten sound of alien ambient passages made foggy through an almost Basinski-like approach to tape disintegration punctuated with crackingly good Italo-disco jams. These rhythms are where Pye Corner Audio really shines, presenting a whipcrack / leather-glove seduction that comes straight out of the Throbbing Gristle playbook for "Hot On The Heels Of Love", but if those four somehow had an imagined electronic music summit with John Carpenter at the other side of the table trying to score a soundtrack for Cronenberg with none of those super-egos getting in the way of each other. Yeah, this stuff is timeless. Just fucking timeless.
Full length number two from this Boston indie psych folk combo, whose first record got a lot of love around aQ, and this one might be even better. The sound could have been transported straight from the sixties or seventies, the only thing giving away the fact that this is NOT an old record, is the lush modern production, and the occasional burst of tripped out FX, but for the most part this is a perfect mix of jangly power pop, witchy psychedelic folk, and good old classic rock. The vocals are incredible, the harmonies lush and lovely. Vocalist Anna Fox Rochinski has one of those rare voices, that slips easily from wispy and ethereal to throaty and powerful, the oddly titled opener "Arctic Shark" is the perfect introduction, with Rochinski's vocals soaring into a fantastic falsetto, surrounded by clouds of sitar like buzz, rife with killer hooks and memorable melodies, a sweet little perfect pop gem, infused with some serious sixties psych shimmer. That track bleeds right into "Saturday Bride", which is much more rocking, still rife with that psychedelic buzz, the vibe here though Fleetwood Mac via Incredible String Band? Or something, sounds weird, but it's a pretty perfect pairing, and the whole record traffics in variations of that hybrid, some tracks sound a little Kinks-y, others sound like the early orchestral pop of the Bee Gees, some get all fuzzy and garage-y, and still others drift into Stereolab / New Lines / Rollo Treadway retro pop territory, but really, all the tracks here are gorgeous, and have been getting played like crazy lately. Just a fantastic collection of retro pop psychedelic folk dreaminess, that should definitely appeal to fans of classic popsmithery, but also new labels who dabble in modern strains of psych folks, neo-Appalachia and retro pop, like Woodsist, Sacred Bones, Captured Tracks, etc.
Finnish experimental black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, might be one of our favorite groups going right now. We've raved wildly about every one of their records so far, and then there's RfR electronic offshoot Will Over Matter, who we dig just as much. And it's not surprising, Ride For Revenge don't traffic in grim black buzz, they're not sonically similar to classic Norwegian black metal, or Swedish, or French - if anything, they're much more in the tradition of all the WTF? music we love from Finland, from Circle to Keukhot, Dead Reptile Shrine to Circle Of Ouroborus, their music is murky and dirgey, mathy and rhythmic, repetitive and hypnotic, and if you thought their records proper were fucked up and far out, this new double cd of singles and comp tracks and live jams will blow your mind.
The first track alone is worth the price of admission, RfR getting all Will Over Matter, and unfurling a 21 minute electronic/black buzz hybrid, the first 6 minutes of which, is just weird squelches and bleeps and bloops, with some creepy voice intoning over the top. And when the riffing finally comes in, the song doesn't explode into metallic gallop, or burst into furious blasting, instead, that riff, just sort of buzzes in the background, while the bleeping and squelchy blooping continue, the whole thing a sort of damaged black buzz kosmische or something. And then at about 9 minutes in, another guitar (or is that a synth?) comes in, all thick and crumbling and corrosive, drums too, plodding and spare, and again, no blasting or galloping, now it's just a woozy, murky creep, still spaced out and cosmic, but now buzzy and blurry lumbering, and then vocals come in, raspy and sinister, over a bed of what is essentially blackened power electronics, the vocals mutating gradually, until they sound robotic and alien, a little like Cylons from the old Battlestar Galactica!!! What the fuck? And that's just part one. Part two of the 32+ opening jam, finds the band slipping back into a field of blooping FX and electronics, that again, are eventually subsumed by some damaged drumming, and crumbling distorted guitar buzz, noisy and chaotic and fucking demented. This time, the sound does get fast and buzzy, but it's a loping, stumbling blackened mess, that eventually resolves in a tangle of buzzing, glitched out electronics. Phew! Only two other tracks on the first disc, but they're lengthy WTF? workouts. One's an old track from 2009, that is freaked out NOISE, sounding very Japanese, or Japanoise. Total skree and screech, howl and throb, feedback, and gristly grinding crunch, howled vokills, some seriously brutal blacknoise. The other's a 20 minute epic, recorded in 2013, the same time as those first two tracks, this one ditching the electronics, and unfurling a murky rumbling ambience, which soon turns into some weirdly dubbed out black dirge murk, sounding a bit like Aluk Todolo, a sort of black-kraut hypno-rock, totally mesmerizing, and if those first two tracks didn't make it worth it for you, this one definitely will...
The second disc is much more 'metal', the first few tracks live, the band sounding a bit more conventional, but only a bit, the sound distorted and blown out and lo-fi, but still tranced out and minimal, very much in the vein of Aluk Todolo, some dirge-y occult rock, with some sick, howled vox, loping, lumbering, minimal black murk, that veers from churning almost-doom, to stumbling metallic frenzy and back again, with at least one guitar doing nothing but spraying thick crumbling black drones over the proceedings, either that or the riffs, just blur into blackened smears, either way, it's plenty tripped out and hypnotic. There's a few awesome demo tracks, super brittle and muddy, with weirdly clean guitar riffing, distant drumming, rumbling vokill rasps, all smeared into some minimal black metal murk. There are some other rarities, a fantastic 10 minute ambient creepfest, all grinding low end, mumbled vox, pipe fight percussion, spare and SUPER creepy, laced with some electronic flecked guitar buzz, and some seriously tripped out production, and a second track, that's cut from the same cloth, but then adds a shit ton of furious blackened guitar-noise to the proceedings, not to mention some super fucking creepy vocals, making it sound like some blackened bastard offspring of Whitehouse and Suicide! Then finally, more old demos, these the most metal of the bunch, epic riffing, simple drumming, the first of the three almost sounding like 'true' metal, old school lo-fi crusty filthy blackness, raw and fierce and pretty fucking rad.
5 is the magic number for this central California duo of stoner over-driven electronica, looped samples and big noisy drum breaks. The oddly monikered Scantily Clad not only celebrate their fifth cd-r release, but it contains 23 tracks (2+3=5), limited to 55 copies and priced to move at $5.55! That's a lot of high fives! But seriously, we have loved this duo since their first cd-r, their sound a home-brewed collaged confection of dirty over-driven electronics and big beats with a humorous Lynchian sensibility for melody, song titles and packaging, each one a hand-assembled venture of surrealist clip art collage and scrappy recycled cd cases from what must have been from those free AOL trial cds they used to mail out in the nineties.
On their fifth release, the sound is more sample-based and dreamier then ever before. Each track is a miniature world of vintage electronic soundscapery with often a mysterious jazz soundtrack vibe deconstructed, cut and repasted that reminds of something like Madlib or J Dilla remixing Dymaxion or Quintron, or a less self-aware Tipsy. Way eccentric and off-kilter, but also shimmery and narcotic, with occasional clipped vocal snippets peering through the stony layers of hazy sound, twangy strings, cascading harps and drum breaks. Super unique and very likely our favorite release from them so far. Again, LIMITED to 55 copies. Grab one while you can!
Surface crackle, yes! And the record from which this cd was transferred sounds maybe a little warped. But no matter, we like all that!! Makes it all the more psychedelic, eh? This is a reissue of some potent Turkish protest pop from the '70s, featuring folky strumming, irresistible Anatolian grooves, and Selda Bagcan's beautiful, often urgent-sounding voice. Sounds like something that should immediately be of interest to any AQ customers into radical East meets West psych-folk from Turkey (of which we know there are plenty, nowadays!) particularily those who've already heard Selda via the inclusion of her songs "Bundan Sonra" and "Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar" on the recent and quite recommended Turkish installment of the Love Peace and Poetry series ("Bundan Sonra" shows up here, too).
As alluded to above, this certainly isn't digitally remastered from the pristine master tapes, but at least folks that put out this cd deserve kudos not only for digging it up for us but also providing lyrics and liner notes in the cd booklet -- although the lyrics are given only in the original Turkish, with no English translations, which would have gone a long way to making Selda's message more understandable to us today, outside of Turkey. Ah well. At least the liner notes, which are in English, provide some context. It's a little unclear, but it seems that Selda was considered a subversive figure by the repressive Turkish government at the time. This record may in fact have been banned -- at the very least we're told that original copies were (and are) hard to find due to government disapproval. And Selda was banned from foreign travel at least until 1987.
The first 12 tracks on this cd are from a 1976 album entitled Selda Vol. 2 (aka Vurulduk Ey Halkim Unutma Bizi, it seems), and then there's also eight additional, bonus tracks taken from Selda singles released in 1971 and '73, songs that are slightly less-rock, more-folk than the Vol. 2 material (which are already pretty folky). However, electric guitar, whining and fuzzed, figures into a few of this disc's tracks, while a lot of the rest is much more in a traditional (if electric) folk vein, with lush arrangements and a great emphasis on Selda's powerful, emotional voice.
To be filed with your reissues of 3 Hur-el and Mogollar (members of which are apparently are in Selda's backup band for some of this)...
Another super obscure New Zealand post punk rarity dug up by the fine folks at Siltbreeze, this one from a band most folks had never heard, or even heard of, and we mean even folks who fancy themselves New Zealand underground rock experts, hell even the NZ obsessives around here who have pretty much every Flying Nun and Xpressway record, had never heard these guys (and gal) before, which maybe makes sense, when you consider the fact that they only ever recorded one 7" in 1981, and this is actually a live recording, which was discovered in the possession of famed NZ archivist Bob Sutton (although the 4 tracks from that 7" are included on the digital download, or we can order you the 7", which Siltbreeze also just reissued, just ask!). But based on this live recording, these guys were a pretty fierce proposition, propulsive frenetic drumming, angular, guitar crunch and scrape, snarly snotty vox, the songs twisty and tangly, lurching from tribal churn, to super poppy and melodic, to mathy and punky and back again, the vibe a bit gloomy and a little gothy too, a few of the tracks are stripped down and minimal, but for the most part the sound is frantic and jittery, and the sound blown our and vicious, reminds us a bit of 100 Flowers or the Urinals, the Fall too, but with a distinctly NZ bent, we'd heard them compared to pre Bailter Space outfit the Gordons, which is pretty close, but we also hear a lot of Aussie post punk like the Scientists, Celibate Rifles, etc. Really though, these guys are their own special thing, noisy and hooky, jangly, angular and pretty goddamn wild, and listening to this live set, we can't help but wonder why these guys didn't get as big as some of their countrymen, cuz this is fast becoming one of our favorite archival NZ discoveries!!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, includes the above mentioned download code, complete with the bonus tracks from the original 7"!
Two killer tracks self-released by the highly acclaimed minimal wave / gloom pop maestro The Soft Moon (aka Luis Vasquez). The A-side - "Feel" - is a chugging track, beginning with an industrial / muscular rhythm track straight out of a Killing Joke and / or Twitch-era Ministry number, gradually overlaid with an echo-bombard of vocalized whisper that's been rendered a roar and those spidery, cold-cold-cold guitars that Vasquez has laced throughout all of his previous albums. "Feel" is a quintessential Soft Moon jam, we gotta say. The B-side - "Hunger" - though, is way more abstract, more akin to the Bermuda Drain stuff that Prurient released a while back, with a thick, snarling synth drone dragging down Vasquez' spiky guitar melodies, all crusted over with crumbling noise. The slow doomplod of a drum machine creeps into the scalding feedback and synth morass about halfway through. As with any single worth their weight, both tracks are non-album songs. Nope, there's no download code available.
Who is The Space Lady, you ask? Well, among San Franciscans who were here from the late seventies to the nineties, many may remember The Space Lady's (aka Susan Dietrich) busking presence on the streets of the Castro. Wearing her plastic winged helmet with a flashing red light on top, and flamboyantly dressed, she would sing dreamy covers of popular hits ("I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", "Major Tom") and some originals too, with just a Casiotone, or sometimes an accordion and a reverbed microphone, adding a cosmic flair to her sound. Always pushing her wares, she would often pause mid-song to passers-by and hawk buttons, tapes, postcards, all featuring her winged-helmeted profile - Scott here still treasures his original tape! Before San Francisco, she busked in Boston/Cambridge and has been seen in Berkeley too, but nowadays resides in Colorado, where she is still at it. She even travels to Roswell, New Mexico and plays often in front of the UFO museum and research center. Like other notable eccentric street musicians of San Francisco like Omer (notoriously known around the aQ neighborhood as Bum Jovi) and the loincloth-wearing violinist Thoth (who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary short), The Space Lady was previously featured in the Songs in The Key of Z compilations of eccentric outsider musicians. All three have moved on from San Francisco leaving our neighborhoods a lot less exciting (though in Omer's case, people are probably getting more sleep now). The Space Lady was the best of them all, and it's so awesome to have her music on vinyl for the first time. Perfect for anyone into the charmingly eccentric outsider sounds of free-spirited performers like Medico Doktor Vibes, Michael Farneti and Mij. Highly Recommended!
Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. This picturesque hamlet is situated on the south end of that remote island, but there's not really a whole lot going on in town. Well, probably not much until recently - we are extremely curious about the Museum of Old and New Art that opened there up not too long ago, a real head-scratcher with its radically adventurous programming (seriously, lo-fi black metal weirdo Striborg is scheduled to perform there sometime this year, under the shadows of works by such figures as Chris Olffi, Anselm Keifer, and plenty of decay-oriented Australian artists... and yes, The Stickmen played the 'Dark Mofo' festival at MONA in 2013). So, the creative kids from Hobart back in the '80s and '90s were much more likely to flee to the much larger metropolises of Melbourne or Sydney over in mainland Australia. The Stickmen were the rare band from Hobart who persevered in their hometown long enough to develop into an amazing antipodean amalgam of Flying Nun / Xpressway NZ fuzz-pop, post-Birthday Party scum rock, and dour American math-rock, but probably not that many people ever heard about them. In fact, WE had never heard of them, until this album showed up in the shop; and yeah, they are pretty goddamn great.
Their eponymous debut album originally came out in 1998 as a mutant, garage punk blast of sharp guitar riffs, driving rhythms, cheap-ass transistor radio vocals, and weird sounds transmitted from a turntablist who spun drones and noises on his decks. The photo on the inner-sleeve is worth a thousand words with the microphone taped to a broom (complete with bristles) and suspended from the ceiling via a thick piece of rope for the guitarist to sing into (or not), while one of the band members fiddles with a mess of pedals and reaches up to backspin a record. The sound broadcast from such a Rube Goldberg contraption is brilliantly intense, somewhere between the Swell Maps avant-punk melodies, The Oh Sees' jubilant mania, and the scientific aggression of Pitchblende. Tracks (like the emphatic "No!" or the belligerent "Wired Wrong") accelerate from a Tracy Pew swagger up to wah-wah freakout guitar explosions that wouldn't be out of place in a Comets On Fire jam, albeit much more punk and violent. It was around this time in The Stickmen's career that they played at the Risdon Medium Security Prison; and you gotta wonder if the energy these guys could muster should have started a riot... if it didn't happen, why the fuck not? A great, great find! We're all totally stoked on this!!
Fancy tip-on sleeve with super high gloss printing in a pretty limited edition. Download code? You bet!
This record seems like it was made for AQ. A scientist, Bob Sturm, attaches microphones to buoys to record different oceanic events. These events translated into sound become gorgeous deep drones, and haunting alien soundscapes. Right up there with the singing telephone wires of Alan Lamb or the subtle vibrations recorded by Toshia Tsunoda. A natural phenomenon that can be studied and explored as sound. That would be enough right there, since the sounds speak for themselves. Gorgeous shimmery ripples, dark muted metallic buzz, if we didn't tell you, you'd probably believe this was some strange limited drone cd-r or a new release from Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk. But Sturm is a scientist, and these sounds are just one part of his study of the ocean, the atmosphere and their behaviors. So the booklet is packed with serious scientific data, graphs, measurements, algorithms and photos. Included is a research paper AND a Flash presentation on the "sonification of ocean buoy spectral data" originally presented at the 2002 International Conference On Auditory Display held in Kyoto, Japan. Holy crap. This is some dense stuff. But even if the science is way over your head, or all you want is some deep dark mysterious music, then dig in. The track lengths tend to be short, but they manage to blend into long stretches of drifting dreamy drone, very minimal and soft focus, many of the tracks have a strange metallic tang, that sounds more like some alien reverb, giving the drones a steel string like buzz, a few tracks are much more active, high end hiss, and prickly fuzz, but for the most part, the oceanic data translates into huge cavernous rumbles, delicate glistening murmurs, or soft billowing clouds of whirring vibration. So completely captivating. And for the drone obsessed among you, absolutely essential!
Originally released as a super limited tour cd-r back in 2003, Rock Power is supposedly Sunroof!'s tribute to Crazy Horse, and you can actually hear it on the opening tracks on each side, both are sprawling mega rock jams, albeit filtered through the blown out Sunroof! space-bliss noise-raga filter, but even then the drums are locked down, a pulsing almost motorik rock rhythm, while Sunroof! mainman Matthew Bower goes apeshit on the axe over it all, pealing squalls of noise guitar, that occasionally coalesce into almost-riffs, but more often then not, blossom into prismatic clouds of droned out, crumblingly distorted psychedelia. Bower is joined by Mick Flower, from Vibracathedral Orchestra, and the two make a seriously rocking racket on those two tracks, but fear not, the rest of the jams here are much more spaced out, and in keeping with what you might expect from Sunroof! and a dude from VCO, pulsating electronics, kosmische shimmer, clouds of swirling skree, cool sitar like buzz, and spaced out noise-ragas, psychedelic power electronics filtered through a Spacemen 3 like throb, the sound dirgey, crumbling, trance-y and blissed out, the perfect balance for the heady hypnotic 'Rock Power' of those other two tracks. Killer stuff, and obviously recommended for fans of all of Bower's projects (Skullflower, Total, Hototogisu, etc.) as well as Vibracatherdal Orchestra and other purveyors of droned out psychedelic sonic drift!
Packaged in swank full color jacket, and LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Another month, another issue of this metal magazine out of the UK that we've been reading for YEARS. This issue's got their preview of what to look forward to release-wise in 2014 (including a chat with Tom G. Warrior of Triptykon among others... personally we're most excited about the impending Immortal), also a bit of a look back at 2013 in the form of their critics' and readers' poll results (Carcass #1 in both!). Other stuff: Satan's Wrath, Ghost B.C., Year Of No Light, Iced Earth, Carcass, and more. Reviews, news, cd sampler stuck to the cover, all the usual stuff!
Holy moly, this is quite a discovery. A hitherto unknown album of wonderful Sgt. Peppery (flower) power pop, that ought to make fans of the Beatles, early Bee Gees, The Kinks, Big Star and so forth very, very happy indeed.
We admit were a bit skeptical when we first heard about it, 'cause there's so many reissues and whatnot these days that claim to be lost classics, but as soon as we put this on we were hooked! And more amazingly, while we'd certainly consider this a lost classic, it isn't even technically a reissue (despite the blurb saying "Original 1967 Release" on the back). Except for two songs here that appeared on a 7" single, this material was never actually released to the public, until now! Recorded in 1967, yes, but the tapes languished forgotten all these years, which is hard for us to understand - how could this gem stay unknown for 46 years?! These songs are so great! As always, makes you wonder what else is out there... And, at first, it also made us wonder if this was even really a group from the sixties - we suspected it could be a more modern-day band (a really good one!) emulating the sounds of yesteryear, a la The Dukes Of Stratosphear, The High Llamas, or Jellyfish. Especially since the production job, while vintage-sounding, is also so top notch (even though the liner notes tell us the whole thing was recorded and mixed in merely a weekend). Heck, a modern band trying to put one over could have added the analog tape hiss. But no, our skeptical conspiracy theories are all wrong, we have it from trusted sources that this is indeed for real, from 1967, the work of a bunch of talented, Anglophilic youngsters from Louisiana. But the vocals here are often (but not always) delivered in a lilting faux English accent, a common practice amongst the paisley-clad syke popsters of the day, wherever they were from, wanting to sound like they too were a part of the British Invasion. So, definitely Beatles-esque; as with Peru's We All Together, there's quite a few tunes here, like "Marigold", that sound like they were written by Paul McCartney - and the band name is an obvious homage to a certain Sgt.'s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Though this is sometimes more White Album than Sgt. Pepper's, really, the band even pushing into edgier sounds like the rather manic "Have You Been To The Light" - that's a weird one, and great. "Hope" is another of the album's harder, garage rockin' tunes.
But so much of this just delightfully sunshiney stuff, sometimes quite melancholic too. There's super melodic, energetic toe tappers and dreamy blissouts both, stuff that will get stuck in your head immediately, sounding so lovely and familiar right from the get go. There's the gentle, hushed intimacy of "Merlin", the lively, layered "Alexander Graham Bell", the heartfelt grandeur of the ELO-ish "Walk Out With Your Heart", the sweet & mellow soft pop of "Common Attitude" (which reminds us of Curt Boettcher's Millennium), and so many, many more highlights, that we can't possibly detail them all (and deciding which ones to make sound samples of was tough!). Oh, and the album's final track, a brief "outro" of druggy, tape-manipulated studio trickery, is titled "Dream Me Up Snotty"!!!
The only real complaint we have at all about this is that it's kind of too bad the prolific reissue label Gear Fab got to be the lucky ones to put this out, 'cause their attention to detail in terms of the physical product borders on shoddy. The crappy graphics they came up with for the cover of this digipack don't do justice to the music within; the quasi-informative liner notes (printed on the inside cover, there's no booklet) were written by someone who couldn't decide (or care to be consistent) between using all caps, bold face, or quotation marks to set off the various proper names mentioned; some proofreading could have helped in other areas too; and there's a strange one page, one sided insert with a thanks list on it that you don't really know what to do with once you've torn off the shrink wrap. Well, at least there ARE liner notes (from which we did learn, that the group's guitar prodigy Richard Orange went on to write music for the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Jane Wiedlin and even Terry Bozzio!). But there's many labels out there that would have done this a lot better, oh well.... perhaps someone else will eventually get to do a vinyl release...
We just hope this album isn't overlooked as a result of its Gear Fab-ness, it would be a shame if after 46 years it still went unnoticed. If people HEAR it, though, it won't - another reason we're doing our part by making it a Record Of The Week. So please grab this and get in on the ground floor with the first ever release of an unheard, utterly obscure '60s artifact that ought to be way up there in the psych power pop pantheon!!
Another twisted chunk of archival Rhode Island underground rock from John Dwyer's Castle Face label. A little while back, Dwyer resurrected the weird stripped down Six Finger Satellite offshoot La Machine, whose sound was all minimal stripped down rhythmic punk-dub and psychedelic bunkurfunk, and while the Traps are similarly minimal, their jams falls much closer to the Castle Face 'sound', a murky, churning, distortion drenched, sweat soaked, bloody knuckled, garage rock, that in a lot of ways reminds us of Dwyer's old band the Coachwhips, the sort of band you can imagine playing in some crumbling warehouse, and tearing the fucking roof off. Two guitars, no bass, those guitars jangly and noisy, the sound seriously lo-fi, heavy and gloriously blown out, gloriously Neanderthal drumming, locked into simple pounding grooves, and the vocals, wild and wooly, howled and shrieked, mush mouthed, and belted through what sounds like a damaged megaphone, we were actually reminded a little bit of another Rhode Island outfit, Thee Hydrogen Terrors, but the Traps were way more raw, their sound way more murky and minimal, it's easy to see why Dwyer wanted to reissue this, cuz it actually sounds like the kind of band he would have played in back in the day. So yeah, fans of the Coachwhips, Pink And Brown, the noisier, more blown out Oh Sees jams, and just wild, loose, noisy, blown out garage rock minimalism, this is your shit.
By the way, the album title is also a song lyric, but the vocals and everything else are so distorted that when one of us here heard it (not knowing what it was), he guessed it was some Japanese speed freak garage/noise band like High Rise!
Thank God for the nerds! The Framework Seasonal series continues with an amazing set of archival recordings from the Derby Tape Recording Club and the Leicester Tape Recording Club. Yeah, you read that right. Tape Recording Clubs! These represented two regional clubs which operated in this little known phenomenon that reached a peak in the late '60s and early '70s with commercial grade technology becoming readily available. Many of these clubs would actually record onto reel-to-reel tape, organizing outings upon which the participants would pool resources in order to collect primitive field recordings of motorcycle races, the howler monkeys from the Paignton Zoo, bowling tournaments, a guided tour from a power turbine... and yeah, there's a recorded example of trainspotting with a young man reading off the line and make of a particular train to the heart of England. Many of these recordings show their age with lots of tape hiss, compressed frequencies, clunky hard-stop edits, and a few bits of blown-out microphone distortion; but, really when is that a criticism here at aQuarius? But the charms of these recordings are not just found in the patina of crackle and flutter; the documented sounds themselves are often accompanied by narration from the various club members. One of our favorite field recordings is the bicycle ride of Leicester's John Buckler, who huffs and puffs his way through traffic noting the fish and chips shop to his left and how out of shape he is from a two minute bike ride uphill. There's a couple extracts from the Derby club's Christmas Party including a spirited round of musical chairs; and another gem is the radio advertisement from the Derby club complete with Derbyshire-ish bleepity electronics and an earnest call to join the club. Library Music enthusiasts will be rapt with joy over these antiquated sounds! What a gem of an album!
As we've noted before, the proceeds from the Framework Seasonal discs go to support the Framework Radio series of broadcasts dedicated to field recordings and their use in composition. Hence, the price.
Of all the Sublime Frequencies releases, we'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite. We've made a BUNCH of them our Records Of The Week, and rarely does a couple lists go by without some new fantastic world music obscurity for us to rave about. But if we had to, we'd probably have to go with the series of 'Radio' releases. They're essentially recordings straight off the radio, the Sublime Frequencies guys traveling all over the world, sitting in their hotel room, or at someone's house, and just recording the radio. The results are fantastic and fascinating, and pretty excellent sampling of the culture, not just the music, cuz you get songs and bands and singers of course, but also advertisements, talk shows, politics, DJ's, and often, it's kind of dizzying, almost like someone's just flipping through the stations. But every one so far has been a blast.
For Radio Niger, the pace is not so frenetic, but the sonic breadth is as expansive as ever, with some of the coolest music we've heard, but liberally laced with all manner of diverse sounds and sonics, as the liner notes describe, some of what you hear: shout-outs to girlfriends, drunken storytellers who just wander into the studio, comedy skits, lots of amazing Tuareg desert blues, news snippets in English from the BBC, lo-fi marketplace cassettes, auto-tuned Nigerian pop, DJ's sing along with songs on the air, there are super avant cut up collages, classic African folk...
It's all pretty fantastic, but unlike the other installments in the 'Radio' series, this one is much more musically fleshed out, with almost full songs getting played, and lots of it amazing, from dirgey desert blues to wild psychedelic guitar buzz, cool, groovy new wave pop to wild drum heavy, high life, some minimal vocal/hand drums, and some seriously twisted juxtapositions, a jam that sounds like an African Steve Miller, bumped up next to wild, spastic tribal drumming, and rapid fire vocalizations, or more modern radio pop nestled right next to cool soundtracky, horn flecked funk! Like the other comps, Radio Niger is another fascinating sonic travelogue, and a glorious glimpse into the music, the culture, and the people of Niger.
Includes a booklet with liner notes, and lots of photos! (Oh, and did we mention the awesome song titles? "Sahel Drum-Machine Gun", "Moussa Poussy Galore", etc.)
The latest from these noise rockers find them delving even further into melody and poppiness, but fear not, their AmRep roots are still showing (two members of Vaz used to play in the late great Hammerhead!), and while much of the sound on recent records is still on display, churning riffage, wild, mathed out drumming, thick buzzing bass, super rhythmic and hypnotic, even in our reviews of their other records, we mention sludge poppers Torche, and describe their sound as being both hooky and heavy, and at least for the first few songs on Visiting Hours, hooky seems to be winning, and we're digging it! It actually sounds a bit like a noisier, mathier Husker Du, with plenty of downtuned chug, and the aforementioned wild drumming, but the vox are way more up front, and weirdly, it kind of reminds us of a noise rock My Dad Is Dead, the same sort of wistful melancholia, especially and specifically in the vocals, and while the sound occasionally erupts into something more noisy and AmRep-y, it always seems to slip back into something more poppy and melodic. That said, as the record progresses, it gets more dense and chaotic and heavy, and by the last song on the first side, it's (d)evolved into blown out math rock radness, until the vocals come in, which deftly pushes it back into poppier realms, without losing any of the heft. The B side follows a similar pattern, but culminates in a churning, gloomy, extended moody dirge, that sounds like Vaz-style death rock and it KILLS. Here's hoping that signals a new sonic shift toward some more tripped out noisy, gothy death rock from these guys in the near future!!!
Another fantastic batch of broody, moody instrumental guitarscapes from the man who used to swing his axe in Northwestern garage rock outfit Federation X, but who has since transformed into a bit of a wandering troubadour, a veritable one man band whose twisted take on guitar soli, sounds more like some impossible John Fahey / Ennio Morricone / Sir Richard Bishop / Joe Meek hybrid, slipping easily from haunting hushed strum, to groovy, smokey, jazziness, to twisted cinematic ambience, and it's not just guitar BVW wields, there are drums, and organs, bass, all woven into some super striking darkly psychedelic mood music. The A side sets the mood with a slow burn sprawl of twang flecked, post Appalachia mesmer, before disappearing into a black cloud of pulsing, almost John Carpenter-ish soundtracky malevolence, could be synths, could be processed guitars, either way, dark and creepy, and trippy and psychedelic, but then effortlessly, the sound slips right back into some skittery, almost bop-sounding jazziness, replete with crowd sounds, shuffling feet and a smattering of applause. From there on out, anything goes, a quick burst of super distorted angular crunch, some Waitsian / Ribot style spidery atonal guitarscapery, a bit of swoonsome tango, albeit wreathed in feedback, cool murky dream folk, lo-fi and laced with tape hiss and strange samples, some experimental ambience that sounds almost like Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, all warbly and woozy and washed out. And that's just the A side.
The flipside is another dizzying sonic journey through BVW's twisted soundworld, opening with some darkly contemplative, drone swaddled, twang, before the drums come in, and we're suddenly in post rock territory, the sound like early Tortoise, a sort of jazzy slowcore. The side continues its meandering trajectory, some gristly, glitchy, distorted back porch blues, a bit of hushed folky shimmer, some FX drenched kosmiche folk, some almost straight up Appalachia, a short stretch of haunting, dusky piano laced balladry, and finally finishing off with some spare, abstract steel string wrangling. And if that wasn't cool enough, one of the aforementioned jams, is in fact a cover of the theme song from Cannibal Holocaust!
Cool packaging too, the tape housed in one of those plastic bags, sealed at the top with a paper label, the kind you see hanging from hooks in the drugstore! Probably limited, so don't dawdle... Includes a download code as well!
Like Terrorizer, we've been reading The Wire every month for years, too. Here's the latest. On the cover, Actress! Inside, even more about Jandek (following last month's cover story exclusive interview, yes there's more to say about the mystery man). Also, long string composer Ellen Fullman takes the Invisible Jukebox test, a Primer on jazzer Steve Lacy, Gnod, Wm. Basinski, Carla Bozulich (writing about Billie Holiday), and more.
Dark, ritualistic, blackened ambience, and experimental psychedelic black metal from members of Dead Reptile Shrine, Ride For Revenge, Will Over Matter, Blutleuchte and Cloama, all of whom we've raved about separately on the aQ list before, and who have all come together to create this hour long songsuite, that fuses twisted electronics, shimmering kosmische drift, minimal percussive post industrial murk, and tranced out hypno-psych mesmer. Separated into four movements, and given titles like "Satan Universe Moloch", "Bug Humanity", "She male Vegetarian" and "Neptunean Crystal Rain", at first blush, the sound seems to fall closest to the weirdo minimal electronics of Will Over Matter, the opener laying down a gristly sprawl of glitched out electronic buzz, but bolstered by some dreamy, almost krautrock sounding guitar, a twisted kosmische / avant electronic hybrid, those guitars soon dropping out, leaving a wild tangle of damaged FX and mutated synths, a darkly chaotic blacknoise, that eventually resolves into some dark, almost John Carpenter sounding cinematic dronemusic. Those hazy soundtracky atmospherics bleed into the second track, this time accompanied by some twisted vocalizations, wreathed in static and distortion, and drifting beneath thick undulating sheets of synth, everything peppered with bursts of glitch and crackle, moody and ominous, haunting but weirdly tranquil. Soon industrial rhythms surface and enter the fray, they remain muted and in the background, while once again, the electronics take over, this time drifting atop mutated vocals, pitch shifted and heavily effected, not to mention fluctuating fields of woozy melodies and strange, damaged samples.
It's not until track three ("She Male Vegetarian") that there's any actual black metal, and even then, there's a buzzing blackened main riff, but instead of exploding into a furious blast, that riff lumbers ominously through fields of chaotic murky drumming, the result much more trancelike and weirdly hypnotic, and quickly that riff splinters into a weird stretch of chiming distorted harmonics, and tangled sonic skree, before slipping back into the black churn, now joined by more guitars, the sound more lush and expansive, but still woozy and stumbling, you can definitely hear the Dead Reptile Shrine here, but before you know it, the sound shifts, transformed into a lovely bit of soft synth ambience, before once again, exploding into a field of blackened power electronics, smeared into something droned out and murkily mesmerizing, finishing off with what sounds like a bit of sampled Finnish folk. Finally, the close is announced by the sound of thunder, which is quickly subsumed by some bleak, blurry, tinny black metal riffage, smeared into staticky swaths of blacknoise, laced with moaning, anguished vokills, the sound growing gradually less and less noisy and buzzy, another barrage of alien electronics soon taking over, the record finishing off with a weird bit of black ambient electronic ritualism, that grows more hushed and haunting, before fading out completely.
Twisted and lovely, bleak and black, mysterious and bizarre, minimal and murky, fans of any / all of the members' other projects will no doubt dig. But best be quick, this is LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!! These are the ONLY copies we will ever be able to get, and once they're gone, they are gone for good!!!
