Um, seriously folks? We've had this Razor reissue sitting sadly ignored in our metal vinyl bin for several months now. What's up with you 'bangers? Well maybe a raging mailorder customer will step up and grab this slice of Canadian speed metal history, the 1984 debut 12" ep from these north of the border thrashers, featuring Dave Carlo on axes and "Sheepdog" McLaren on lungs. True, the best of the seven trax here were rerecorded for their first full-length, Executioner's Song, a year later, so if you've got that maybe you don't need this. But it IS a historical document, with a great cover graphic (if you can't tell, it's a close up of Carlo playing the guitar using a razor blade as a pick), and it's a hard to beat slab of "Fast And Loud" "Hot Metal" (those are two of the song titles) for anyone in the mood for some old school rippage.
"The Surgeon General warns that this album contains Heavy Metal music, that might weld your mind together if played at low volume. To reduce the risk of mind damage play at FULL VOLUME."
We look to Medical Records for all sorts of fantastic electronic music reissues, and find ourselves digging pretty much everything they dig up. So much so that a bunch of Medical releases have ended up aQ Records Of the Week. But recently, Medical has been dabbling in contemporary recordings, their first was a record from darkwave/synthwave outfit Illustration Sonore that we reviewed recently. And while contemporary releases from reissue labels hasn't always worked out so well, so far, Medical's foray into the present, has been a big success, and this, the debut from Texas duo Roladex, keeps that streak going.
The label describes Roladex as sounding like Kraftwerk covering Magnetic Fields, which is really not that far off, the songs minimal and melancholy, the music bleepy bloopy, analog kraut-synth, boy / girl vocals, but we also hear Human League and other outfits from that era. Ultimately though, that label description is pretty spot on, the music fantastically robotic and krautrocky, and with the deep dramatic vocals, it's hard not to hear a little Stephen Merritt. But then there are tracks like the John Carpenter-gone-electro of "Empty Streets", or the groovy electro disco-kraut of "Nuke It Out", with its electronic squiggles, laser blast bleeps, and cascading synths, that definitely give this it's own distinct sound. The crazy thing is, that sound is so perfectly and accurately crafted, we never would have assumed this was contemporary, in every way, it sounds like some lost electro-pop / new wave rarity from back in the day, which is probably why we're digging it so much, and what makes it such a perfect fit with the rest of Medical's reissue roster!
Pressed on 180 gram transparent electric blue vinyl, housed in a heavy full color sleeve, includes a poster/insert as well.
There's a bunch of new tapes on this week's list from Oakland tape label Sanity Muffin, this one the first we've heard from Selaroda, who deliver three tracks of ominous drones, and buried rhythms, a sort of moonlit kosmische, all swirling synths and muted pulsations, the first track is mostly chordal smears and shimmery drift, with a brief rhythmic intrusion, being the only thing keeping it from pure aural blissout. The second track is a brief bit of staticky swirl, which quickly builds from white noise squall, to slow-mo space-kraut slowcore, all dreamy, prismatic thrum, and skeletal programed beats, wreathed in soft streaks of Michael Rother like guitars, before bleeding right into the epic closer, which begins like some bedroom Kraftwerk, all pulsing rhythms, and time lapse electronics, deep melodic ripples, and streaks of arpeggiated synth shimmer, a hazy, futuristic new age drift, that soon ditches the drums, letting the sounds billow outwards, weightless and ephemeral, but underpinned with a slightly sinister vibe, due in no small part, to the roiling sea of electronics, and the darkly blossoming drones, slowly surfacing, that build to a rumbling climax, only to collapse into another field of dubbed out rhythms, and glitchy electronic static, which in turn, blossoms into a gorgeously epic bliss-scape, the sound of sunrises and glimmering stars, of warm blue skies and deep black space, all blurred into one long swath of rich, lush, lustrous dronemusic.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!! And packaged in full color, two sided, embossed J-cards.
Despite the name, don't think parkas and scooters. Think, well, white rap. White rap by a pair of clever & cranky British blokes, who kinda sound like if Mark E. Smith from the Fall listened to a lot of Sensational or Kool Keith and decided to make a really WTF? electronic rap album of his own. Except there's two of him (seems to be one main guy, and a kind of a sidekick).
We got turned on to the Sleaford Mods thanks to a really cool record shop over in England, Norman Records, who put this album at the top of their Best of 2013 list, an apparently controversial choice even among the shop's own staffers. Some unconventional, outside of the box thinking there! So we figured we ought to check it out. And guess what? We can see why they picked it, though we can also see why it was a bold choice. Had we heard it last year, we might have been tempted too. It's addictive! And we don't always even understand half of what these geezers are on about, that's part of the charm - the thick accents (lots of "fookin'") and the British slang, only makes more wonderfully confusional their own weird brand of free-association wordplay, resulting in plenty of cryptic non-sequiturs that may or may not be intentional, though there's plenty of obvious witticisms too. The lyrics, near as we can tell, are mainly complaints about life and society and shitty music business stuff, full of references to wankers and "donkeys".
Here's some lines from the track "Shit Streets Runny" (that is, if we managed to transcribe it correctly): "Attention to detail / attention to detail / fookin' email / wap! mp3 / I need a fookin' bath / you ain't no roadrunner / you ain't no shoot shoot the runner / shit take on it / meanwhile back in the crap cave / I trod on my cape by mistake / and fell into the fridge mate / I fookin' hate Northern Soul / it's like Motown on the dole". Then the sidekick guy gets some good bits in too, like the one about "Brain Eno / what the 'ell does 'e know?"
And all that, their ranting and rhyming, and even a little bit of singing, sort of, comes on top of quite catchy minimalist hiphop backing tracks, with ticktocking drum machines and laid back grooves, simple and hypnotic, making for an oddly humorous and headnodding listen indeed, full of sing-song bits that will get stuck in your head, catchphrases too - we're all going "Wobble wobble wobble" ferinstance. Maybe it's even more amusing to us since we're American, and whatever we're lacking in context is made up for in sheer absurdity. Anyway, diggin' this a lot!
This is the debut full length from Italian psychedelic garage pop combo Sultan Bathery, and if you can disregard the punny band name (that some of us didn't even notice), you'll be treated to a heaping helping of everything we love about that 'sound', a lot of fuzz, a little bit of jangle, a loy of poppiness, a little surf rock, some tripped out Spacemen 3 drugginess, all wound up into some seriously addictive, crazy catchy surf garage fuzz pop pound, that falls sonically somewhere between local garage rock heroes Thee Oh Sees, and the now sadly defunct San Diego surf pop geniuses Mrs. Magician, there's even a bit of swampy swagger that reminds us of another more obscure aQ fave, the late great Railroad Jerk, which for us is high praise indeed! And to be honest, on first listen, we weren't totally blown away, SB sounded great, but sounded a lot like so many other bands, but repeated listens has revealed this to be a serious garage rock gem, with some fucking great songs, and we find ourselves listening to this like crazy, which as always, is about the best recommendation we can give... WAY recommended for fans of the above mentioned bands, as well as other aQ faves like the Liminanas, Lorelle And The Obsolete, Davila 666, etc.
For whatever reason, we have never reviewed 1997's Indoor Living, from longtime aQ faves Superchunk, and coincidentally, of all their records, it seems like that one gets way less love than it probably deserves. When people are asked for they favorite Superchunk record, most probably pick No Pocky For Kitty, or On the Mouth, or Foolish, or even Here's Where The Strings Come In, and it's not hard to see why Indoor Living might get left off that list, cuz really, it's kind of a weird record, and sort of low key, with none of the tracks leaping out as a Superchunk 'classic' or 'hit', but in a way, that makes it all the more enjoyable now. Even for us, HUGE Superchunk fans, it's probably the record we've listened to the least, and digging into it now, as it's just been reissued, we're liking it a BUNCH. It's like a whole Superchunk record of deep cuts, some of which really are pretty fantastic. It sounds a bit more introspective, not as hyperkinetic or noise-poppy as some of the others, and there seems to be more keyboards too, and the songs themselves, are slower, and moodier, but there's still plenty of fuzz and crunch, and some serious hooks, and really, the least catchy Superchunk record is still catchier than most bands' least catchiest records, and that definitely is the case here. And if you're a fan, and neglected this one like we did, you don't often get a chance to (re)discover a record from a band in their musical prime, and the more we listen to Indoor Living, the less we understand what the heck we were thinking the first time around. And while, this might not be the one we'd pick as the best introduction to Superchunk, hell, it's sounding pretty goddamn great, and we'd be hard pressed to imagine hearing this, and not wanting to hear more. A new OLD favorite!
We'd been hearing a lot about this band, lots of folks calling them the 'next big thing' which tend to make us pretty skeptical. But the descriptions made us think we'd actually probably dig it, and we do. Like a lot of recent faves, Swearin' channel that while nineties indie/college rock sound (Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, Pavement, etc.), and sound like they would have been our favorite band back in the day, and since it seems folks our age, never really got over THAT sound, they definitely have potential to be a new favorite. The sound is definitely derivative, but that's the point right? To these ears, sometimes Swearin' sound like a super charged Blake Babies, with Dinosaur Jr. guitars, and at others, like Pavement crossed with Sebadoh, and really, we'd be hard pressed to think of better band math than that. And although aping a sound is pretty easy, with the right gear, and the right recording, it's not nearly as easy to come up with the sort of SONGS to go with the sound. But Swearin' have it dialed in. With multiple vocalists, boy AND girl, they kick out the nineties indie rock jams, like, well, like it was still the nineties, swaggery and slackery, noisy and a little bit shoegazey, fuzzy and distorted, loose and ramshackle, jangly and hooky as hell, it's hard not to love, and really why try not to. A BIG TIME new favorite around here for sure. For fans of the Pixies, the Swirlies, Pavement, Dinosaur, Liz Phair, Superchunk, Sebadoh, Built To Spill, the Breeders, the Silver Jews and all the rest...
Leave it to Darren Tate to throw us for a loop, if only for 53 seconds. Smack in the middle of Secret Mantra is the untitled fifth track, puncturing all of the weirdo DIY electronic spaciousness that came before and comes after it. Just 53 seconds of Tate fingerpicking the guitar, and the melody there is so so sad, so heartwrenching, so damn near perfect a recapitulation the bleakest of British folk, and so fucking brief. Over the years, Tate has been confounding us with his uber-sparse concoctions of zoner radiophonics, field recordings of various English gardens, and slumping drone hypnosis. Secret Mantra would have nestled nicely into his extensive catalogue of eccentric soundscaping, but those 53 seconds make us wonder if Tate might have quite a second career in front of him as England's answer to Jandek, one who carries forth the traditions of indigenous folk songs but through a cracked visionary lens. As it stands, that vignette is just a tease while he turns back to the monosynth, the radio static, the bells, and the clocks that culminate in the smoldering miasma of dub-patterned rhythms and nocturnally mechanical clatter on the untitled ninth piece, which has something of an acoustic :zoviet*france: quality to its eerie repetitiveness.
Secret Mantra celebrates the fifthieth album that Tate has released though his own imprint Fungal Records, and like so many of its predecessors, this is limited to a mere 100 copies. Professionally duplicated, we might add.
On The Steps Of The Temple is the debut from this Arizona duo, who offer up a killer slab of instrumental post-black metal, their sound thick and downtuned, the guitars MASSIVE, slipping easily from buzzing blast, to something more churning and mathy, the songs laced with soaring melodies, subtle swirling synths, grinding and metallic one second, with lots of stop/starts and tangled almost progged out arrangements, soaring and majestic the next, with a serious post rock vibe running throughout, at times sounding a bit like a blackened, more metallic Godspeed, and at others, ditching the metal completely, and unfurling some fantastically brooding musical moodiness that manages to be tense and intense without ever exploding into actual metal. That said, the bulk of the record IS spent in metal mode, somewhere between the doomy bombast of Neurosis, the epic slow build of Isis, mixed with some serious metallic mathiness and some furious blackened blasting, with much of the record mixing being a dizzying mix of all of those, the end result something melancholy and mesmerizing, moody and metallic, atmospheric and HEAVY.
First we've reviewed from this Midwestern misanthrope, a one man, synth swinging, electro-punk, garage pop wrecking machine, who sounds little bit like some musical DNA splicing experiment gone fantastically wrong, equal parts Suicide, Thee Oh Sees, David Bowie, Fabulous Diamonds, Chrome... well, you get, seriously twisted and WTF, darkly sci-fi, a little bit droney, spaced out and psychedelic. Opener "Fashion Has Happened To Fashion" sounds like Bowie's "Fashion", and not just because of the "Fashion" in the chorus/refrain (although that helps), it's stripped down and refashioned into a psychedelic kraut-garage groove, and the follow up also sort of sounds like the same Bowie jam at first, but it's soon pulled apart and reconstituted by some sonic mad scientist, into something much more sinister, wrapped in pulsing, pulsating FX drenched guitars, and tethered to a hypnotic robotic rhythm, with a killer recurring melodic flourish that will get stuck in your head like crazy.
The sound is all fuzzy, crumbling guitars, swirly sci-fi synths, skeletal Casio beats, and yelped, occasionally almost falsetto vox. It's dirgey and murky one second, frenetic and frenzied the next, the sound simultaneously spacey and futuristic, raw, primitive and retro. There's an awesome pic of Mr. Trin Tran himself on the sleeve, jamming on synths, guitar strapped across his chest, weird mic contraption hung around his neck, a strange sort-of-Batman mask (of course), with some cymbals, seemingly strapped to his synths, all set up in what appears to be the dingy corner of some run down bar, adorned with a sad little string of Christmas lights, and a closet filled with empty hangers in the corner. If we had to imagine what kind of weirdo was making this music, nothing we could have imagined would have been as perfect as that pic. A sonic space alien, stranded in some podunk town, sending these musical distress signals to his home planet hoping to be rescued. We're digging these jams enough, that we're intercepting those signals, in the hopes that help might never come...
Finally after years of waiting, the Uncle Tupelo back catalog gets the deluxe reissue treatment it so deserves.Belleville, Illinois' favorite sons almost single handedly made it okay for indie rockers to don sparkly jean jackets and publicly profess their love of all things Byrds and Gram Parsons, creating in the process a genre that would carry on their proud tradition to this day. From the gorgeously-twangy-country-intertwined-with-raucous-punk-rock of their early days to the lush-and -perfect-Nashville-via-Midwestern-backwater -country/bluegrass of their final years, no one can hold a candle to Farrar and Tweedy, the dynamic duo whose different (but equally compelling) songwriting styles and dramatically disparate voices helped form the foundation for one of the greatest rock bands (or country rock bands) of the last decade.
This is the record that started it all. Alt-country, No Depression or whatever it's called these days. Named for a Carter Family song and influenced as much by punk rock as folk and bluegrass, No Depression is a wild, rollicking, twangy, thrashy record full of amazing hooks, mournful melodies, and kick ass rock and roll. Never had a rock band managed to make country so cool (the Byrds came close, but I mean a ROCK band, a PUNK ROCK band!), opening up the ears of indie rockers everywhere. Perfectly captures the teen angst and dreary hopelessness of rural midwestern farm life, that no-way-out resignation mixed with just a dash of maybe-I-won't-end-up-like-my-folks-poor-and-miserable. It also introduced us to the amazing songsmithery of Farrar and Tweedy, whose tunultuous partnership would only last a few more years, but who would separately continue on (Wilco, Son Volt) to define the genre they practically invented. Tons of photos and liner notes.
Bonus tracks: The vinyl only bonus track 'Left In The Dark' from the Anthology 2lp, 'Won't Forget' from the A Matter Of Degrees soundtrack (terrible movie, great soundtrack!), a kick ass cover of the Byrds' 'Sin City' from an old 7", a live acoustic version of 'Whiskey Bottle', a 1988 demo of 'No Depression', and 'Blues Die Hard' from the Colorblind And Rhymeless 1987 demo.
FINALLY REISSUED, ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME! One of our early faves in the great Sublime Frequencies series, originally released in 2004 on (now out of print) compact disc. What we said back then...
Given the sheer volume of commercially available music that's come out of Mali (to say nothing of its West African neighbors, and the rest of the continent), one would think there would be a lot more field recordings of street musicians and the sundry other less commercially viable artists who don't attract the attention of the mainstream world music market. There certainly were labels such as John Storm Roberts' Original Music (R.I.P.) which had been hard at work on just that task many years ago, but recent years - what with "world beat" becoming a commercially viable genre targeted to the lowest common denominator - there's been less and less new, raw, unadulterated sounds to be had from the region. The first, in what is hopefully not the last, attempt from Sublime Frequencies to ameliorate this oversight comes from Tucker Martine. And what a nice collection of tracks it is. Recorded in the Fall of 1998 with, if we may say so, some incredibly nice field recording equipment, Bush Taxi Mali is like a really nice panoramic snapshot of music and sounds. The tracks range from miscellaneous street sounds, the dulcet tones of the kora (a bridged 21 stringed lute with a large calf-skin covered gourd resonator), fife and drum music, children singing and clapping, gorgeous acoustic guitar, and an absolutely frenetic wedding celebration with distorted bull horn amplification.
Here's the sixth in the ongoing cd series from Framework, the weekly radio series hosted by Patrick McGinley (aka Murmer) who defines the broadcasts as a "show consecrated to field-recording and its use in composition. Field-recording, phonography, the art of sound-hunting. Open your ears and listen!" All of these recordings found on the Framework Seasonal series are exclusive tracks, and as on the radio series, McGinley actively seeks out and encourages many emerging sound artists by including their work alongside some of more well known phonographers and sound ecologists. Mathieu Ruhlmann's exemplary piece of tactile slithering only cites amplified medical equipment and debris, with the hushed white noise of rumpled textures reflecting similar sounds from Small Cruel Party and Loren Chasse. One the finest composers of phonography Eric La Casa does not disappoint with his concrete-styled piece of clanging metal, military-installation rumblings conjoined with ominous bursts of thunder and seemingly indifferent field recordings to the tectonic shifts occurring throughout. Chris Whitehead's expressive chemical reactions emerge as small skittering events with echoing reverberations across plates of metal; but with the small interludes from what sounds like a muffled guitar, the piece almost recalls a super stripped down / subdued version of a Michael Morley / Gate track. Kim Walker's slow psychographical collage traces the various sites of sonic interest from the ancient kingdom of Moray located in what is now Scotland. Seafaring birds, oceanic roar, and the sounds of urban din lace this sunny sounding recording. Artificial Memory Trace, Sawako and David Velez take very hands off approaches to their straight field recordings - with AMT & Sawako recording the din of insects in the forest and Velez setting up a microphone inside an empty metal oil drum being struck by branches in the wind. These Seasonal Issues are super limited, and the proceeds of each issue goes towards the continued production of the Framework radio series.
The Ethiopiques series, begun in 1997 and now running to 28 volumes, is one of the best things ever in the history of compact discs. So much amazing music, mostly from the golden years of the early '70s Ethiopian jazz/funk/groove scene, but also touching upon modern recordings and more traditional Ethiopian sounds too. Mississippi Records has been bringing some of the Ethiopiques material (back) to vinyl, having reissued a few records we first heard as part of these collections, and the Heavenly Sweetness label has done a few too.
But for folks who are new to the wonders of Ethiopian music, and perhaps are daunted by the size of the Ethiopiques series - or who maybe already have a bunch of the cds in the series but want some vinyl to spin too, how about a 'Best Of'? And this 180 gram vinyl double lp is indeed a best of, a best of the best of, really, expertly selected by the guy at France's Buda Musique who put together the series in the first place. It features tracks from such now familiar names (thanks to our exposure to the Ethiopiques series, that is) as Alemayehu Eshete, Mulatu Astatke, Getatchew Mekurya, Mahmoud Ahmed, Talahoun Gessesse, and more. 20 tracks in all, culled from the full wide range of the series pretty much. Volume 1 is heavily represented, as is vol. 24, but vols. 5, 8, 13, 14, and others have tracks on here too, all the way up to vol. 28, which we haven't even gotten in yet on cd!
Whether it's the sultry soulful crooning of Mahmoud Ahmed or the equally tight smoky grooves of Alemayehu Eshete or any of the others here who could lay claim to being 'Ethiopia's James Brown', or the ethnic-folk inflected saxophone instrumental from Getatchew Mekurya, or even the gorgeous piano piece by Ethiopian nun and composer Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, this is all amazing stuff, such a nice package. But it's just the tip of the Ethiopiques iceberg. Clearly, a Best Of Volume 2 is in order, and then a Volume 3, and then...
Another Sutro Park vinyl release of some authentic down home blues, a set recorded in 1971 at a moonshine shack in rural Tennessee, apparently never before released. Featured artists include Lattie "The Wolf" Murrell and William Floyd Davis, along with their host, the anonymous bootlegger!! And a bunch of other unknown folks, customers who came for the bootlegger's illegal liquor and stayed to add their voices to the night's impromptu festivities, fortunately recorded for posterity by interested 'white folks' (young Swedish blues documentarian Bengt Olsson). Tracks include such blues standards as "Spoonful" and "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", with a few also specifically alluding to drinkin' and booze. So grab a can, bottle or jug of whatever's yer poison and kick back with this archival time capsule of a damn good time being had on a Saturday night in '71.
Includes entertaining liner notes on the sleeve that also help to bring the scene to life, as does Cameron Forsley's cover drawing, though the music sez it all anyway.
Holy cow! Yet another fantastic Sublime Frequencies release, this one a double lp of Rajasthan street music from Western India, a region plagued by power failures, droughts, dried up rivers, and the ever encroaching deserts, with a history of continuous invasions, epic battles, and brutal slaughters. (Sorta sounds like this is gonna be a metal comp, but no it's not.) The people of the region are resilient, and this history and the surrounding folklore are forever immortalized in music, a sound at once devotional, traditional and celebratory, the songs on this compilation collected over a two year period between 2007 and 2008, recorded live on street corners, and in people's homes, capturing the raw emotion and deep beauty of the music, and all it embodies and represents. The sounds are super varied, from droned out ragas, trancey and hypnotic, with gorgeous lilting vocals and long layered tones, some peppered with wild percussion, and on some tracks, the singer will just break from the song, and talk to someone else in the room before slipping right back into it. Other tracks sound a bit like stripped down Bollywood musicals, soaring female vocals, buzz wreathed rhythms, and still others are groovy, hazy, psychedelic Indian folk music, shimmering strings, stunning vocal melodies. And while there are moments of meditative melancholia, much of the record seems to celebrate life, the music and voices, infused with a vitality and positive energy, that belies the trials and tribulations of the region and its people. Truly gorgeous stuff.
Packaged in a super heavy, full color gatefold jacket, with tons of cool photos, and extensive liner notes, as well as a two sided printed insert, with still more liner notes, on these recordings, the region and its history, as well as notes on each song and performer.
The making of this record is almost as fascinating as the record itself. Vantzou, a member of the Dead Texan (along with one of the Stars Of The Lid guys), delivers her second solo record, which was conceived of and composed over a four year period, while she was an SAT exam mathematics tutor. She wrote the whole record using synthesizers and mutated samples, and only then went about notating the music for a proper ensemble, strings, woodwinds, brass, piano, etc. And the results are stunning. The opening track sounds like it could be a Stars Of The Lid track, big swirling clouds of sounds, flecked with starlit piano, lush and lovely and layered, far too short at just two minutes, could easily have listened to a record length version of just this song, but Vantzou and her ensemble have much more to offer, whether it's the haunting, contemplative cinematic drift of track two "Going Backwards To Recover That Which Was Left Behind", a moody balladic dream-dirge, that wreaths pointillist piano in swaths of swoonsome strings and dramatic horns, or the ominously orchestral "Brain Fog" which sounds like Bernard Hermann composing a 20th century classical version of a John Carpenter score, at least until it settles back into something again more Stars Of The Lids-ish. The whole record is darkly dramatic, and VERY soundtracky, alternately achingly lovely, hushed and harrowing, droned out and drowsy, softly psychedelic, with a few tracks introducing a very Arvo Part like choral element, while others sprawl languorously, all dusky and firelit, and a few, get downright epic and bombastic. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff.
Record number two from local retro garage power pop geniuses Warm Soda, fronted by none other than Mr. Matthew Melton, who avid readers of the aQ list no doubt remember from his previous outfits, the equally genius Bare Wires and Snake Flower 2. But with Warm Soda, Melton and crew continue to hone a practically perfect strain of Yellow Pills style power pop, that sounds, right down to the production, and the songwriting, straight out of the seventies. In fact, if this was 1978, we can only imagine these guys would be HUGE, playing with Dwight Twilley and Cheap Trick, and heck, it's not hard to imagine a Warm Soda Live At Budokan record, cuz holy shit, if we dug the first Warm Soda record, this one is even better. In fact, EVERY time we play this in the store, someone comes up to see what we're playing, and often ends up surprised that it's in fact actually a NEW band. But it's easy to see why, Warm Soda's sound is pitch perfect, jangly fuzzy guitars, woozy super melodic basslines, simple propulsive drumming, and Melton's whispery croon, and of course the SONGS, which are amazing, so catchy, the sort of songs, that even on first listen, sound like you've heard them before, and get immediately lodged in your head, and even after only hearing them a couple times, you'll find yourself humming them days later. Assuming it was something you might have just heard on the radio. The production too, somehow manages to sound modern, while still sounding exactly like some classic vintage recording from back in the day. And the way the choruses are all fuzzy and washed out and reverb drenched, it's hard to explain, but they seem to just soar. We could go on and on and on, as we like to do, and describe this record song by song, but why bother, if you dug the first record, or any of Melton's other projects, you NEED this, and if you've never heard anything, all it should take is a couple of the samples below to convince you, that like us, you might have just found your new favorite retro-garage power pop record!!!
Don't know much about this UK black metal trio, other than they have a killer, and nearly illegible logo, and an amazingly ridiculous 7" cover, and that their debut 7" was recorded by none other that Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers) when you hear what these guys have cooked up, a weird hybrid of primitive, grim black buzz, and blown out chaotic noise rock skree, the label suggests Ildjarn meets Harry Pussy, or Ulver crossed with Black Dice, and we definitely hear that. It's like the sounds are black metal, but the arrangements are noise rock, or vice versa, but either way, it's a pretty heady proposition, loose and chaotic, grim and black, and pretty twisted, a stumbling, lo-fi, damaged noise drenched sonic assault, that pairs relentless caveman pound with Mick Barr like squiggle shred, the sound abruptly shifting into a churning death march dirge, the vocals following suit, transformed from blackened screech, to monstrous gurgle. The B-side opens with some soaring fast picked riffage, anchored by some stiff, robotic drumming, the guitars and drums conjuring up a seriously tense backdrop for the hellish vokills, until the sound collapses into a twisted, droned out, static black buzz, guitar skree, double kick drumming, and growled vocals, all stretched out into some sort of knuckle dragging black metal minimalism, only to eventually erupt into some loping, knuckle dragging metallic churn, only to lurch right back into that cool droned out minimal noise/skree part, that we sort of wish stretched on even longer, but instead, the band finish off with one final stretch of filthy black buzz and pound.
Killer stuff for sure. Can't wait for the full length. Pressed on blue vinyl, probably limited too, and housed in a nice thick sleeve with the aforementioned ridiculous and amazing cover art.
Some of you aQ-er's might remember the Songs From A Gated Community record, by a group/guy called MSG, that we reviewed a while back, an essential WTF? slab of lo-fi Casio-driven 4-track electro nerd pop, with songs about BMX, candy, car stereos, and at the time we wrote that we weren't sure if it was actually recorded by a precocious child, or an adult channeling his inner child, and in a way, even though we now know, we still don't REALLY know. But imagine if the weird suburban outcast, the latch key kid high on pop rocks with his nose buried in comic books and purloined Playboys, who was ostensibly the 'genius' behind that MSG record, was actively sonically chronically his adolescence on record, well then this White Glove record finds that same kid, slightly older, experimenting with pot, trying to make it with chicks, and most importantly SKATEBOARDING. Yup, this is all jangly, punk pop, lo-fi, swaggery SKATE ROCK. We hear shades of the Dead Milkmen, the Surf Punks, Spot 1019, and Camper Van Beethoven even, it's got that sort of simple strummy hookiness, mostly acoustic guitar, or electric guitar through a crappy little practice amp, simple practice space drumming, each song with just one or two parts, with some scrappy, emo-crooned vocals, and lyrics about, well, mostly skating, also being attacked by skinheads WHILE skating, getting stoned, then skating, their friend Jesse's supposedly bisexual girlfriend, some girls's pretty, pretty boyfriend, drinking beer (and then skating), getting pink eye (and not being able to skate), listening to dubstep (?), you get the drift. Like MSG, the songs are fun, and funny, goofy and dorky, but actually, really pretty good, and some of the jams here are super catchy, and you'll find stuck in your head like crazy.
Definitely recommended for folks into weird nerd pop, home brewed what-the-fuck songsmithery, and all manner of puerile, juvenile punky poppiness.
Includes a download code too!
