This is one of those essential reissues that remind us that everything cool was already done about thirty years ago. Yep, these Swedish hippies sure knew what they were doing. Timeless psychedelia from 1972. Certainly everybody who gets worked up over the
This reissue (which actually came out back in '95 and we've had before, but never in big enough quanities or at low enough prices to list until now) adds two amazing live bonus tracks that Byram will tell you are worthy of the price of the disc alone!
These live tracks, along with the whole of the album proper, reveal Algarnas Tradgard as creators of dark stoned driftdrone every bit as cinematic as the best GSYBE! and even more authentically psychedelic than AMT leader Kawabata's beard. It's lovely, blissful, transportational stuff indeed. Our quick AQ-guide to the crucial Swedish psych essentials definitely includes this disc, along with the Parson Sound double cd, Bo Hansson's "Lord Of The Rings" opus and the International Harvester album. (Those are the top of the list, but once you've gotten into those you'll need to investigate Harvester, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Kebnekajse, and others from the Silence catalog, including Algarnas' lost-until-now second album, "Delayed", reviewed nearby!)
For months now, we've been trying to list a cd from a local one man black metal band called Wikkid. And the way we know it's a one man black metal band is it says so right on the front of the cd, along with the location "Bay Area California". It's a damaged chunk of extremely weird outsider blackness, that we really want to share with you all, but the man behind the band is extremely elusive. When he initially showed up here, in a 49ers jersey, a big black straw hat, and smoking a cigar in a cigarette holder, we weren't expecting the cds he wanted to consign to be anything like Wikkid. And before you knew it, they were gone. So we pestered him for more, instead he brought in some Wikkid T-shirts that he had printed at home with spray paint. So we kept pestering him, but this time, instead of Wikkid cds, or more spray painted shirts, he brought in THIS, the first release from his "black metal influenced organ/keyboard instrumental" project. We were intrigued, not knowing at all what to expect, and while there is definitely some sort of sonic thread tying the two together, Alturaz is a whole different beast, in fact without the above backstory, this could definitely pass as some modern minimalism or spaced out psychedelic kosmische. The first track is just church organ, the chords unfurling ominously, over whirring organ drones, haunting and liturgical, sounding a bit like a black metal intro stretched out into a song proper, we're reminded of Jacula too, sinister and ritualistic, haunting and darkly cinematic, super simple for sure, but really, it's more about mood and vibe, and the sound has plenty of both to spare. The second track is even more minimal, a super spare sprawl of processed organ blurts, rumbling low end thrum, fragmented melodic swirls, lots and lots of space, creepy and soundtracky and very abstract.
It's on track three, "Split Demonic Versonalities" that things get cosmic, the organs now wreathed in space-y FX, the sound swirling and shimmering, sounding like a planetarium show composed by John Carpenter, pulsing and sinister, swirling and ominously cinematic. And then finally, another super hushed, ultra minimal, barely there coda, all low end pulsations and super subtle colorations, like black billowing ripples in a sonic pond, tranquil and hypnotic, but like the rest of the record, infused with a strange ineffable dread.
Recommended for fans of psychedelic space synth, and abstract kosmische, as well as creepy soundtrack music, and it just might hold us over until we can finally get us, and you some WIKKID!
ALSO ON CD!!!
A while back we reviewed Three Virgins, the 1986 debut from NZ pop weirdos the Axemen, and as a frame of reference for what sort of deviant pop to expect, we mentioned Strapping Fieldhands, Guided By Voices, Sebadoh, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and older outfits like Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, we also posited that these guys would have sounded right at home on legendary label Shimmy Disc. Well by 1989, very little had changed when the Axemen unleashed their second long player, Derry Legend. If anything, the songwriting was better, with some crazy catchy poppiness tucked amidst the sonic chaos, but otherwise, the sound was as ramshackle and al over the map as ever. The sound has definitely got some Flying Nun DNA running through it for sure. But those genes were mutating big time, and whatever similarities these guys shared with their fellow 'Nuns, the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, in the Axemen, those sounds were all twisted and tangled up into warped and warbly shapes, the sounds melty and druggy, loose and wild, and on the edge of total collapse. No surprise that Derry Legend was one of Kurt Cobain's favorite records, cuz it definitely has much in common with lots of his other faves: The Vaselines, Half Japanese, the Shaggs, etc. From snarly, snotty, swaggery jangle glam pop, to noisy, stumbly, fuzz drenched post punk, to hazy, drugged out fug-pop balladry (replete with Velvets style 'do-do-do-do' background vox), to damaged twee pop warble, to organ driven garage rock crunch, to almost fifties sounding rock and roll, to ominous, brooding drug folk, these guys tied all these disparate sounds into one ever-shifting, outsider mutant pop that will have weirdo pop obsessives freaking the fuck out!
An earnest and bespectacled introvert may be what you have in mind when it comes to the visage of a new age musician. Maybe a bunch of crystals casting prismatic beams of light simultaneously from candles and streams of sunlight. Maybe a billowy sarong as garb with a plethora of beads around the neck. According to the liner notes for the acclaimed I Am The Center compilation of New Age private pressings and rare recordings from the '70s and '80s, Mark Banning came across looking more like a "broke down Hells Angel." The context of busted knuckles and oil-stained leather is a wonderful counterpoint to enshroud a pristine sparkle of quiet New Age ambience for guitar, zither, and soft electronics. Tracy, California is the town where Banning called home at the time; and that's one of the neighboring communities to the fictional city of Charming from the TV motorcycle drama Sons Of Anarchy. In 1984, Banning recorded and released Journey To The Light as a private pressing, and he did have an excerpted track from a different recording included on the aforementioned I Am The Center compilation. Journey To The Light wafts along Banning's guitar playing which alternates between chorus-laden, E-Bow guitar explorations that recall a lighter version of the Manuel Gottsching ethos and a painterly lyricism of brightly ringing chords similar to Maurice Deebank. The lush electronics that surround the guitars are accompanied by a celebratory strum across the zither. This is the real deal when it comes to the New Age, regardless of the rough context in which it was recorded. Lovely, contemplative, inner-mind music reissued by the impeccable imprint Students Of Decay.
ALSO ON CD!!
A brand new full length from these aQ beloved Aussie psychedelic garage rockers, and unlike the last few, which we described as sounding like a mix of the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, krautrock, garage pop and Japanese psych, these scruffy punks seemed to have polished up their sound, and what do you know, they actually clean up pretty nice. What was once murky, fuzzy, wild, and loose, primal and druggy, dirgey and tripped out, is now sorta jangly and fuzzy and downright poppy. But it totally suits them. A little bit glammy, a little bit power poppy, like some Flying Nun missing link, but roughed up just a bit, retaining a little of their previous scrappiness, but recast here in a whole new light. Opener "Back The The Flood" is some seriously hooky classic sounding pop, crunchy and fuzzy and jangly, rambunctious and a little loose, but also sorta sunshiney and feel good, swirling synths abound, the only hints of the old Blank Realm here is the slithery Joy Divisiony bassline, which rumbles ominously, beneath the otherwise fuzzpoppy surface. And while we expected to say something like, "fear not though, the rest of the record...", but really, if anything the record continues down that rosy pop path, follow up "Falling Down The Stairs" is even poppier and janglier, still a little bit twisted and off kilter, sounding even MORE like it could have come out on Flying Nun back in the day. And somehow, while getting poppier, it also gets sort of weirder and more unpredictable. "Bell Tower" is a woozy sort of slowcore ballad, with shimmery guitars, and fragmented angular melodies, warped crooned vocals, dreamily psychedelic and washed out, while "Bulldozer Love" is another dreamy pop jam, soft focus guitar, crooned vox, and some squelchy synths in the background. "Violet Delivery" trades in the drums for programmed beats, adds some bleeps and bloops, and stretches out into some hazy, glammy krautpop drift. And so it goes, from dreamy feedback flecked jangle, to fuzzy electro garage pop, but remaining solidly on this side of the druggy, droney, murky, muddy divide, almost essentially a whole new band/sound. Hints of the change popped up throughout the last record, but similar to the transformation recently by NY noise rockers the Men on their new record, it wasn't a change we were expecting, but it's one we're digging quite a bit.
Legendary free jazz giant's first record, remastered and available for the first time on cd! Originally released in 1967 on Brotzmann's BRO label, he is joined by bassist Peter Kowald and Sven-Ake Johansson on percussion. This remastered version also tacks on a bonus cut featuring pianist Fred Van Hove. Raw and edgy, though not as demanding and brutal as Brotzmann's subsequent "Nipples" and "Machine Gun".
Finally! A new full length from these psychedelic sixties style garage murk masters, the first in fact we've actually managed to get (it's their third apparently), and it's a doozy, washed out and warped, drowsy and druggy, but super catchy, and impossibly lush and psychedelic. The opener "Pulse" sounds like the Kinks, albeit a way more wasted version, the sound fabulously muddy and murky, melodic and catchy as all get out.
We first discovered these guys on the second Group Flex flexi-book on Castle Face, then on the Castle Face Velvet Underground tribute, and most recently, on the I Need You Bad comp on Polyvinyl. In each case, we inevitably found ourselves going straight to the Burnt Ones' tracks, and then playing them over and over. So, Gift is totally hitting the spot, a gloriously prismatic and cracked collection of paisley pop doused in LSD and sent sprawling through fields of slow motion motorik marches, hazy organ wheeze whirls, and blurred guitar shimmer, the sound super amorphous and abstract, and then without warning, the sound will suddenly come together into a blast of practically perfect baroque pop, albeit still swaddled in fuzz and buzz and hiss, in fact "Money Man" does just that, spending its first two minutes in a sort of bleary suspended animation, before erupting into a riffy, psychedelic stomp, equal parts Kinks, Beatles and Bee Gees, but then roughed up and sent careening wildly into the fray, replete with a final burst of falsetto crooning. And so it goes, the whole record lurching druggily from woozy psychedelic gem to warped dirge pop ditty, every song blossoming like some prismatic sonic flower, revealing more and more as the sounds unfurl and unwind, melodies swoop in from nowhere, hooks hover, fade out, and then suddenly pop up minutes later, lilting, chiming loveliness wrapped in grunge and gristle, there's some crazy primitive drum machine weirdness, some glammy swagger, some 8-bit bleep bloop, plenty of fuzzy synth swirl, FX all over the place, but none of the noisiness or damaged sonic weirdness can disguise the perfect poppiness lurking within pretty much every single of of these twisted psych-garage gems.
Carsick Cars was the first band we'd heard from this new crop of Chinese indie rock and noise pop bands, and we were initially intrigued cuz of the band name, but then ended up digging both their other records quite a bit. We'd been dying to hear this new one after getting a little tease/taste via their recent split 7" with Flavor Crystals. Their song on that 7" found the band sounding better than ever, super polished, and crazy catchy. We posited in our review of that 7", that part of the new sound might be due to the fact that it was recorded with Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, from Spacemen 3, and Hamish Kilgour of NZ pop legends the Clean. And it might just because we know that, but we're hearing a sound that definitely sounds like it's right between the druggy hypno-rock of Spacemen 3 and the fuzzy, NZ jangle of the Clean. Regardless, 3 is a stunner, from the very first track, a very nineties indie rock influenced instrumental groover that actually also reminds us a bit of Pell Mell, sort of driving and hypnotic and a little bit krautrocky. But it's on the second track, "15 Minutes Older", that the band get super poppy, and that Flying Nun / New Zealand influence really shines through. In fact, if you told us this was actually some long lost Flying Nun rarity, we would have totally bought it. Keening vocals, dreamy melodies, fuzzy, buzzy guitars, plenty of jangle, hooks galore, but with a bit of Sonic Youth style noisiness woven into the sound, it's infectious and pretty goddamn great. As is the whole record really, every song here a jangle pop gem, some sung in English, some not, some sort of proggy and mathy, others straight ahead pop, but all of them hooky and heavenly, and easily the best CsC record yet!
We have both the lp and the cd, apparently, they're both slightly different, different mixes, some songs are in English on one format, not on the others, we haven't really done a side by side A/B comparison, but we're guessing unless you're crazy anal or a super collector, you'll likely be happy whichever one you pick, if it matters, this review is of the vinyl version, which includes a download code as well!
We listed this last time, on the same day we got it, so we thought we'd list it again now after having had some time to give it a few more spins... though really we don't have much more to say - it's Circle, it's great! Here's what we said last time, with a little bit more commentary added in:
This new lp with the sibilant all caps title, by our & everybody's fave Finnish hypno-rockers Circle, just showed up at the shop TODAY, and is thus being treated to a fairly brief "first impressions" review so we can get it on the list, not that it really even needs a review cuz heck it's a new Circle lp after all, and one thing about Circle is that they're pretty darn reliable. Their previous record (if we don't count the recent avant-death metal Incarnation album, by the Circle-that-isn't-actually-Circle) was last year's Six Day Run lp, a soundtrack to a documentary by Finnish artist and filmmaker Mika Taanila. This one's also sort of a soundtrack for something by Mika Taanila, but it's a live album, recorded at a museum in Helsinki (the Kiasma Museum Of Contemporary Art), where Taanila was holding an exhibition called Time Machines, a retrospective of his works over the past decade. Circle wrote these songs to perform there, accompanying a film installation of Taanila's, and we get the idea that the visuals have to do with science and technology, experimentation and exploration. Hence, well-respected space rock band Circle makes a good match-up!
About the music on SSEENNSSEESS, there are four exclusive (and long) tracks here, two to a side: "Kudos", "Radiant", "Sleepwalker" and "Terminal". Giving it a first spin, and expecting the unexpected as always with Circle, we're happy to hear actually-not-so-unexpected yearning, surging, epic keyboard-laden stuff that's majestic and mostly instrumental (though keyboardist Mika Ratto does contribute some of his operatic glossolalia at key moments), tracks like the 11+ minute "Terminal" reminding us of Circle's Rautatie album. The volume and energy and slashing psych guitar soloing situates this somewhere between the shoegazing and the Stoogesy. Apparently Circle and Taanila are taking this music/film installation on tour, but probably only in Europe, so this lp is the closest our senses will come to experiencing the entirety of SEENNSSEESS, and while getting the full multimedia effect like at the museum would undoubtedly be cool, there's something to be said for being able to spin this again and again at home, as we imagine will we be doing a lot!
Finally, this avant Afro-jazz classic has been repressed, repackaged and re-released on vinyl. On The Beach compiles tracks from the late '60s output of Philip Cohran, one of the founders of Chicago's AACM and an early member of Sun Ra's Arkestra. While Sun Ra looked toward outer space for inspiration, Phil Cohran (himself an astronomer and mathematician) and his ensemble found manifestations of cosmic spirituality here on earth. Mining different musical traditions such as jazz, rhythm & blues, European classical, "Eastern" music, but most specifically reaching into elements of African experience and heritage, the ensemble builds complex rhythms around melodic elements usually provided by Cohran's "frankiphone", a gorgeously buzzing bell-like electrified thumb piano of his own design.
On "Unity," which appeared on the excellent Oulele comp a few years ago, the percussion-heavy groove is anchored by the steady droning of Cohran's violin uke. The results go beyond "jazz," even when adding modifiers like avant- or afro-. This is soul music on a higher plane. So beautiful and powerful, this work fits into a larger picture that includes the afro-centric work of John Coltrane, Art Ensemble of Chicago's free-funk explorations with Fontella Bass, and Fela Kuti's consciousness raising jams. Members of the Artistic Heritage Ensemble went on to play with the likes of Miles Davis and Earth, Wind & Fire. Incredible and Essential!
The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series.
Number 11 is the latest and features an exclusive A side from Mikal Cronin, driven by a Casio drum machine rhythm, all warm acoustic guitar strum and sweetly crooned poppiness, which eventually explodes into something much more rocking, a bombastic noise pop gem, swirling guitar fuzz wrapped around that acoustic strum, wreathed in keening buzzing melodies and all wound up into a super hooky chorus, with a post chorus bridge that's total classic baroque pop, before doing it all again. So good!
Cronin picked Wand as his up and coming fave, a name new to us, but listening to their track it's easy to see why Cronin digs 'em, a seriously psychedelic blast of tripped out heavy fuzzpop, which starts out with a sprawl of squelchy synth blurt over kinetic drumming and poppy crooning, before things get a bit noisier and jangle poppy, and finally, in swoops a fuzzed out almost metallic main riff, the sound wild and chaotic, sounding a lot like Ty Segall's Fuzz, soaring harmony vocals wrapped around plenty of crunch and pound, definitely need to hear more from these guys ASAP!
And like all the other singles in the series, as you probably figured out already, EXTREMELY limited!!!!
Black Mamba was the 2nd full-length album from the amazing "Afro-Noise" project of Whitehouse's William Bennett. We made it a Record Of The Week when it came out on cd in 2012. Now, at last, the tracks from that cd (most of them anyway) have made their way to vinyl, spread across two records - Afro Noise Volume 3 and 4. Two of the tracks from Black Mamba aren't included, but making up for that, these records DO contain a bunch of non-album tracks, including all four tracks (in remastered and/or reworked form?) from last year's hard to find Madwoman 12", plus what appears to be an entirely new cut, "Vaudou Take Me High" to lead off Volume 3.
Our review of Black Mamba is pretty big so we're not going to repeat it here (you can look it up elsewhere on our site if you like) but just a brief excerpt for those unfamiliar with Cut Hands:
...It's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty.
Vol. 3 features "Vandou Take Me High", "Krokodilo Theme", "Immersion", "Erzulie D'En Tort", "Witness The Spread Of The Dream", "No Spare No Soul", "Kongo", and "Madwoman". Volume 4 has "Eat Them Like Bread", "El Palo Mayombe", "Black Mamba", "Inchantment", "River Mumma", "54 Needles", "Nzambi Ia Ngonde", and "Nine-Night".
Each limited to 750 copies only.
Black Mamba was the 2nd full-length album from the amazing "Afro-Noise" project of Whitehouse's William Bennett. We made it a Record Of The Week when it came out on cd in 2012. Now, at last, the tracks from that cd (most of them anyway) have made their way to vinyl, spread across two records - Afro Noise Volume 3 and 4. Two of the tracks from Black Mamba aren't included, but making up for that, these records DO contain a bunch of non-album tracks, including all four tracks (in remastered and/or reworked form?) from last year's hard to find Madwoman 12", plus what appears to be an entirely new cut, "Vaudou Take Me High" to lead off Volume 3.
Our review of Black Mamba is pretty big so we're not going to repeat it here (you can look it up elsewhere on our site if you like) but just a brief excerpt for those unfamiliar with Cut Hands:
...It's about the beats, stunning, stuttering polyrhythmic tick-tockery, in and out of which Bennett weaves elements of distortion and noise to great effect. So it's a lot like the debut, only with the "almost machine-like intensity of the hand percussion" perhaps pushed to further extremes, but the harsh noise factor in fact toned down somewhat. Bennett's carefully constructed attacks of primal boom bap and metallic click-track chaos are powerfully "possessive", a pleasant sensation in combination with the more ambient, moody elements of this disc, of which there are plenty.
Vol. 3 features "Vandou Take Me High", "Krokodilo Theme", "Immersion", "Erzulie D'En Tort", "Witness The Spread Of The Dream", "No Spare No Soul", "Kongo", and "Madwoman". Volume 4 has "Eat Them Like Bread", "El Palo Mayombe", "Black Mamba", "Inchantment", "River Mumma", "54 Needles", "Nzambi Ia Ngonde", and "Nine-Night".
Each limited to 750 copies only.
One of three reissues from garage rock legends Dead Moon, part of a comprehensive campaign reissuing ALL of their records on cd, most for the first time EVER. Defiance was originally released in 1990, hot on the heels of their debut In The Graveyard, and the follow up Unknown Passage (both also reviewed on this week's list), and like those two, Defiance is another collection of impossibly catchy, raw garage rocking classics, with Fred and Toody Cole delivering the sort of songs that sound totally timeless, and crafting the sort of sound most contemporary garage rockers are still emulating today. Opening with a public domain blues classic, the band deliver a serious blast of fuzzed out, swaggery, distorted garage blooze that kills. And from there on out, it's just more classic Dead Moon, the buzzy, hypnotic crunch of "Not The Only One", which just oozes pathos, super anguished emotional vocals over dark minor key jangle, some tracks are all twangy and croony, like the dark torch songy "Dagger Moon", and when Toody takes over on vocals, like on "Johnny's Got A Gun", the sound is total sixties girl group radness, but still plenty raw and stripped down, crusty and fuzzy, and the AC/DC comparisons that we never really got before, still apply here, on tracks like "Kicked Out / Kicked In", with Fred's Bon Scott like vox perfectly complimenting the stripped down heavy blues stomp.
We've been playing these three reissues to death, and we're already chomping at the bit for the next three!!!
Finally, for the first time EVER on cd, the debut from garage rock legends Dead Moon, part of a comprehensive reissue campaign that will find all the classic Dead Moon records reissued. But for now, the first three are ready for digital consumption, housed in fancy digipaks, that belie the grungy, fuzzy, wailing jangle genius within. Fronted by Fred and Toody Cole, the sound of Dead Moon is at once raw and ragged, hooky and catchy, that catchiness due maybe in part to Fred's previous stints in various psych/garage pop combos, including The Lollipop Shoppe, but Dead Moon, while poppy and catchy, are not anything like a proper pop band. Instead, they craft a sort classic garage rock sound, beholden to lots of early rock and roll, but definitely sonically more aligned with groups like AC/DC, the Wipers, Blue Cheer, 13th Floor Elevators - killer riffs, simple drum pound, stripped down and totally rocking, with Fred's super distinctive vocals, keening over the top (which is where much of the AC/DC comes from for sure), with occasional vox from Toody, making for killer harmonies, as well as some lead vocals, like on their cover of "Can't Help Falling In Love", and really, every song here pretty much as tone cold classic. It's not hard to understand why Dead Moon have such a massive cult following, hopefully with these long overdue reissues, that cult will grow and grow.
The Dead Moon compact disc reissue campaign is upon us, the first three records from these legendary garage rockers now available on cd for the first time EVER, and while most folks are probably well aware of Dead Moon's sonic legacy, there are no doubt legions of potential fans who will be discovering this stuff for the first time, and whose minds will most likely be thoroughly blown!
To us, Dead Moon was always sort of THEE quintessential garage rock bands, Fred and Toody Cole delivering plenty of fuzzy jangle and raw, stumbling lo-fi bash and pound, but we'd always seen people comparing them to AC/DC which for some reason didn't make much sense, but holy shit, opener "Dead Moon Night" is a dead ringer for those Aussies, the opening riff, the stripped down swagger, the ridiculous lyrics, right down to Fred Cole's distinctive Bon Scott like yowl, not to mention a chorus that kills. And the rest of the tracks are just as good, with some of the tracks getting broodier, others channeling classic early rock and roll, like the heartfelt duet "A Miss Of You", with Fred and Toody, crooning together over simple drum pound, and twang flecked jangle. But then it's right back into it, with the classic "54/40 Or Fight", a ragged stumbling garage rock blowout.
This album has another great cover, this time the Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today", which finds Dead Moon almost sounding like a noiser, more ramshackle Creedence Clearwater Revival. So good. We had sorta forgotten how much we love Dead Moon, but these records are just so goddamn great, long time fans will find themselves RE-obsessed, and if you're hearing Dead Moon for the first time, man are you in for a treat!
We've long loved Paul St Hilaire, aka Tikiman, THEE voice of minimal dub geniuses Rhythm And Sound, his gorgeous, otherworldly croon adding some serious soul to R&S' darkly digital world of gristly dubbed out, slow skitter creep, and really, if there was ever one of those 'could sing the phonebook' voices, it's St Hilaire's. Years back, St Hilaire performed with Deadbeat, aka Scott Monteith, another aQ fave, a dub scientist in Berlin by way of Canada, whose sound was and is equal parts Rhythm & Sound skeletal dig-dub, and Pole style click and pop minimalism. Over the years, Monteith and St Hilaire stayed in touch, even playing the occasional show, but this is the first proper recording the two have made together, and it's a total stunner. And as you might imagine from the above, it's pretty much just what you'd expect, a sprawling collection of gorgeous super spare electro dub, a lot like Pole crossed with Rhythm & Sound. But that sound is stretched way out, some of the tracks here almost house-y, some very Kompakt sounding, but regardless of the sonic influence or inspiration, Monteith and St Hilaire make the sound totally their own, conjuring up some spiritual musical magic that makes The Infinity Dub Sessions totally divine. Especially the first track, which is worth the $18 price tag all on its own. Maybe the most perfect, and perfectly mysterious and moody modern dub track we've heard, all woozy, thick bass rumbles, wreathed in static, deep mesmeric swells, laced with dubbed out upstroke chordal thrum, as well as the occasional dubstep style bass wobble, little bits of glitch and squelch scattered throughout, super minimal melodies drifting like bongsmoke in the background, even instrumental, this would be totally hypnotic and irresistibly mesmerizing, but add St. Hilaire's gorgeous croon, and it becomes something even more transcendent.
Nothing else is quite as dark and bass heavy, but all the tracks are tranced out, softly swirly and psychedelic, the sound simultaneously minimal and skeletal, but also deeply lush and layered, ranging from the super percussive churn of "Dopa", with some seriously twisted, echo drenched vox, to the more reggae sounding "What The Heck Them Expect", St Hilaire's vocals the focal point, the background music a dark, languorous groove. "Working Everyday" is a dubby, dreamy sprawl, all soft focus and prismatic, billowy chords drifting atop a lazily propulsive rhythm, while "Rock Of Creation" is a hazy techno-dub ballad, a field of gristly and crackle the framework for shimmery synths and hushed melodies, St Hilaire crooning seductively amidst ethereal clouds of sound. The final three tracks have a huge Kompakt vibe, but imagine if Kompakt was headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, with The Infinity Dub Sessions a chronicle of St Hilaire and Monteith's mobile sound system, the streets of Jamaica sonically transformed into some otherworldy dream-dub dancehall.
Monthly metal mag Decibel has put Carcass is on the cover, again, for like the umpteenth time since their reunion. What's up with Decibel and Carcass? I mean, we love Carcass too, but still. Heck they've got 'em headlining this year's Decibel Magazine Tour (hence the cover spot, this time), along with The Black Dahlia Murder, Gorguts and Noisem, who you can also read about inside. Along with stuff about / interviews with / information pertaining to: Gridlink, Morbus Chron, Cripple Bastards, Solstice (huzzah!), Cynic, Broken Hope, The Oath, Skepticism (inducted into the Hall Of Fame for Stormcrowfleet), The Shrine, and the return of supergroup Twilight, among others! Plus tons of reviews, all the usual good stuff. And the back page South Pole Dispatch by John "Mountain Goats" Darnielle is a hoot, as always. If only they really did release a book called Decibel Presents Electric Fucking Sun Featuring Uli Fucking Jon Roth You Pieces Of Shit, like John proposes. We'd buy one.
Herzog! Weed! Swearin'! Milk Music! You've probably been noticing us freaking out over a whole mess of new bands heavily influenced by the sound of the nineties underground, so we figured it was the perfect time to heap some serious praise on a couple actual records from the nineties, and not just the underground, the WAY WAY underground, in fact, if you didn't live in central Illinois, you likely had never heard, or even heard OF these guys, but goddamn, now that we have, we're kind of obsessed! And we were warned. The guys at the Bird Dialect label had been talking up this nineties Chicago grunge/noise/power pop outfit for ages, we had never heard of them, and hadn't heard a lick of music, and were thus a bit skeptical, cuz really, what label DOESN'T hype their next release? But holy shit, these guys are amazing. It's hard to imagine a band like this not making it big. Cuz they had it all, heavy and hooky, killer songs, a vocalist with a seriously rad raspy yowl, the band whipping up a sort of grungy, glammy power pop, but with shades of classic Twin/Tone bands, and early Homestead Records, if we had heard these guys in the nineties, no doubt they'd be one of our favorite bands. Swaggery glam punk meets garage pop, fuzzy grunge meets ramshackle noise rock. The label calls them Peoria's answer to Urge Overkill, and we can definitely hear that, but imagine UO without all the kitsch and smarm, and add WAY more grit and punk rock swagger, we also hear tons of early/classic Aerosmith, there's a huge Seattle grunge vibe a la Green River/Mudhoney or actually more like grunge lesser knowns like Swallow, we also hear lots of Skunk (pre-Chavez), and heck maybe some Chavez too, definitely Soul Asylum as well, back when they were AWESOME (which they were, for a long time), not to mention Finnish grunge/glam wastoids Smack, and heck, if we're going totally obscure, they reminded some of us of the band Clumsy, whose Center Of Attention Deficit Disorder is a mostly unheard nineties classic. So yeah, these guys, at least sonically, seemed poised for the big time, and listening to this now, it's almost criminal that more people haven't heard (of) these guys.
Their 1994 debut Corvette Summer is a stone cold classic, opener "Kick The Ball" opens with a grungy, blown out riff, the sound is sort of power pop in punk rock clothing, like a meaner, noisier Cheap Trick, it's the sort of jam you can imagine inspiring some seriously sweaty crowds to go apeshit, the song lurching from chugging noise pop, to tangly noise rock and back again. "Timi Yuro Song" ups the pop ante, but that grunge vibe still shines through, especially when it slips into a low slung chug/dirge/swagger, and that voice, cigarettes and whiskey definitely played a part, and here we're definitely hearing some Love Battery, which is most definitely a good thing. "Half A Chance" is total Aerosmith worship, all woozy guitar shimmer, a total slow build ballad, like Dollface's "Dream On", and yeah, we don't make that comparison lightly, and we should mention the part where the vocalist sings "make them scream" and in the background, you can suddenly hear the sound of a wildly screaming crowd. Brooding, intense, minor key, some serious pathos heavy hard rock for sure. We could go track by track, but odds are you know by now if this is your thing, and if you're ANYthing like us, it most definitely is. The band do mix it up - there's the the power pop bounce of "Opportunities", the fuzzy almost psychedelic jangle of "Valentines Day", the playful pop punk of "No Duh No Doi", there's even hand claps on a few tracks, not to mention some seriously anthem worthy choruses, as well as some goofy, but pretty funny lyrics, all of which is well balanced by the bands grungier, more hard rocking side. This is fast becoming a new favorite, and definite contender for reissue of the year!
Herzog! Weed! Swearin'! Milk Music! You've probably been noticing us freaking out over a whole mess of new bands heavily influenced by the sound of the nineties underground, so we figured it was the perfect time to heap some serious praise on a couple actual records from the nineties, and not just the underground, the WAY WAY underground, in fact, if you didn't live in central Illinois, you likely had never heard, or even heard OF these guys, but goddamn, now that we have, we're kind of obsessed! And we were warned. The guys at the Bird Dialect label had been talking up this nineties Chicago grunge/noise/power pop outfit for ages, we had never heard of them, and hadn't heard a lick of music, and were thus a bit skeptical, cuz really, what label DOESN'T hype their next release? But holy shit, these guys are amazing. It's hard to imagine a band like this not making it big. Cuz they had it all, heavy and hooky, killer songs, a vocalist with a seriously rad raspy yowl, the band whipping up a sort of grungy, glammy power pop, but with shades of classic Twin/Tone bands, and early Homestead Records, if we had heard these guys in the nineties, no doubt they'd be one of our favorite bands. Swaggery glam punk meets garage pop, fuzzy grunge meets ramshackle noise rock. The label calls them Peoria's answer to Urge Overkill, and we can definitely hear that, but imagine UO without all the kitsch and smarm, and add WAY more grit and punk rock swagger, we also hear tons of early/classic Aerosmith, there's a huge Seattle grunge vibe a la Green River/Mudhoney or actually more like grunge lesser knowns like Swallow, we also hear lots of Skunk (pre-Chavez), and heck maybe some Chavez too, definitely Soul Asylum as well, back when they were AWESOME (which they were, for a long time), not to mention Finnish grunge/glam wastoids Smack, and heck, if we're going totally obscure, they reminded some of us of the band Clumsy, whose Center Of Attention Deficit Disorder is a mostly unheard nineties classic. So yeah, these guys, at least sonically, seemed poised for the big time, and listening to this now, it's almost criminal that more people haven't heard (of) these guys.
Lights The Pilot!!! was the band's second record, originally released in 1996, and like Corvette Summer, it's a hard rocking doozy, just give a listen to "Destiny, Oh Destiny", which sounds like some lost Nirvana B-side, right down to the vocalist's inflection, and the weird chugging grunginess, in fact, anyone who digs Nirvana (and modern Nirvana worshippers like Roomrunner) will lose their shit for this. It's like the weirder, darker, noisier side of Nirvana, which was sort of always our favorite, super melodic busy basslines, crumbling distorted guitar jangle and crunch, two and a half minutes that you'll likely find yourself playing over and over and over. But the rest of the record is not too shabby either, slipping from the pogo-y punk pop of "Rods And Cones", to the fuzzy, noisy, grunged out power pop of "I Breakdown And Cry", with its killer woozy bridge, and the awesome, about-to-crack vocals, and from the crazy catchy, chugging jangle pop of "Atlantis", to the the twisted experimental new wave weirdness of "I Light The Pilot, and so it goes. We hear some Rocket From The Crypt, some Hot Snakes (especially on "Monkey House"), lots of familiar sounds for sure, but all wound up into a pretty unique package, one that pushes pretty much all our nineties rock buttons, and along with Dollface's Corvette Summer debut, these are getting played around here like crazy!
More cool music from China, this one a 7" from a duo called The Dyne, who deliver some cool droned out psychedelic post rock on the A side, all sinewy basslines and mathy drumming, anchoring clouds of distorted riffage, and pulsing guitar shimmer, motorik and hypnotic, laced with subtle FX and little sonic curlicues, but with some crazy catchy melodies, almost like it could the theme song / credit music from some super cult show, check out the segment at about 1:15, the sort of part you kinda want to go on forever, made all the cooler but only surfacing a couple times. The flipside though find the band crafting something more poppy and proper songlike, the sonic palette similar to the A side, but a bit more frantic and frenetic, with chiming melodies and jagged guitar crunch, the vocals buried in the mix, a little droney and croony, the song seesawing back and forth between crunchy indie jangle and more brooding indie rock drift. Cool stuff. And yet another band to add to the long list of recent discoveries from the impossibly fertile Chinese underground rock scene!
At his marine outpost on the western shore of Humboldt County, California, Brian Pyle (aka Ensemble Economique, as well as a member of the Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings) is in a prime location to dial into the ether for radiowaves across the Pacific. With the nearest communities of Eureka and Arcata far less irradiated with electro-magnetic interference which makes shortwave radio listening down right impossible in urban areas, and with Pyle's proximity to the Pacific Ocean (it's a couple hundred yards from his back door) acting as a massive antenna, he's able to listen to transmissions that seem to come from Russia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, China, and numerous other locales. Along with the baffling radio phenomena of utility signals and numbers stations, Pyle found himself captivated by the sounds of 'interval signals'. These are the specific sounds, phrases, or melodies that announce the end or beginning of a particular program. Often very simple, so as to work within the limitations of shortwave, these signals can sound very eerie and truncated when broadcast halfway around the world. Pyle first incorporated these sounds into a performance back in 2011 for 23five's now-defunct Activating The Medium festival, and those echoing phrases have become a staple in Pyle's live sets. So this entire album dedicated to interval signals, finds Pyle lacing these sounds with insistently dark, piano solos and bleak field recordings of abandoned spaces pounded by monsoonal winds and rains. Interval Signals is a very solitary, impressionist work, showing a sense of spaciousness found more in the likes of Basinski and Coleclough than in most of Pyle's previous work. Still very cinematic in scope, but its an entirely different movie for Pyle this time. A Pixelvision version of Last Year At Marienbad? Yeah, it's that cool.
We were pretty much already sold before hearing a single note from this new Bay Area metal horde, based almost entirely on the record cover, a super bad ass D&D style drawing of a compliment of orcs (we presume, nerds feel free to correct us), wielding axes, shrunken heads on pikes, weird bird dragon things, not to mention a hot naked human female, no doubt the spoils of whatever metal war these guys were waging, and they're called Fortress, the band logo like some stone hewn castle, and of course there's the description of the band on their website: "Fortress are ancient battle sorcerers, who, for one thousand sun cycles, have cheated death and dealt blistering heavy metal thunder upon the known and unknown worlds. They are also nerds." Both of which are true, they most certainly do rain down heavy metal thunder, the sounds classic metal riffery, harmonized guitar leads, the sound epic and supremely majestic! And they are also most definitely nerds, check out the song titles: "Goblin III", "Rad Racer", "Kevin Bacon", "Huxtability Verified" and of course opener "Jumanji", complete with the bellowed chorus: "Robin Williams, you're full of shit!". So yeah, already you can tell, these guys have tongue firmly in cheek, but their metal is no joke. With a slightly different cast these guys could find themselves sonically aligned with Slough Feg instead of Hot Fog, but hell, we digging this, inside jokes and all. The vocals might be the one thing that keep Fortress from being true metal masters, unlike the majestic metal croon of someone like Slough Feg's Mike Scalzi, the vocals in Fortress are more of a raspy punk rock bellow, which had us thinking of bands like Karp or Godheadsilo, but for folks who dig both classic metal and metallic punk, these guys definitely kill it, lacing their sonic epicry with the appropriate sound effects (thunder, rain, etc.), and mood music, and interludes, and even with the punkish bellow, and some straight up joke tracks, the second their sound soars into some majestic metal moments, all fist pumping, head banging, harmony guitars, or power metallized pummel, your metal heart would have to be dead for you not to dig it.
180 gram black vinyl with blood red splatter, the aforementioned killer cover art, and includes a digital download too!
We've been hearing about this release for some time now. It was supposed to be out last November, but somehow it took forever for our suppliers to carry it. Nils Frahm is a modern German pianist and composer who has been releasing piano and synth-based ambient music since 2005. But we hear it's his live performances that are truly compelling as he showcases an incredible sense of control and restraint while at the same time opening up to all kinds of musical experimentation through building of passages and filtering and electronic processing. Spaces is the result of such experiments combining two years of live recordings and weaving them into each other, building up from organically plaintive melodies into full range ambient fields of sound and back to cascading watery piano passages. Gorgeous stuff!
Light in the Attic has begun a deep investigation into the dusty corners of the stalwart Vanguard label to dig up some little-known folk gems. Vanguard was always the hippest of folk labels in the sixties and seventies with classic releases by Joan Baez, John Fahey, and Buffy Saint Marie just to name a few. Bob Frank wasn't as well known as his more famous labelmates, but this 1972 slice of southern-fried hippie folk is a rare unbridled diamond in the rough. Like a mixture of Dylan, Elvis and Johnny Cash, Frank's songs of outlaws, stoners and off-the grid burn-outs are candid and funny, a bit goofy at times, but with real world-weariness observed through a life of hard-living. A stoned country folk lost classic!
The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series.
Number 10 comes from none other than Fuzz, Ty Segall's heavy psych combo, who offer up, you guessed it, a fierce and fuzzy slab of super rocking psychedelic garage crunch, churning, blown out distortion, wild drumming, shredding leads, wailed vox, this jam in particular reminds us of Redd Kross at their heaviest, which is a very good thing for sure. A jam that would have been right at home on the recent Fuzz full length.
Fuzz's pick for up and coming artist is a band we had heard of but never heard until now, CCR Headcleaner, and it's easy to see why Fuzz would have picked them, murky, drone-y, druggy psychedelia, urgently strummed acoustic guitar, wreathed in a gnarly haze of blurred distortion, wasted, drowsy vox, the whole thing woozy and washed out and seriously trippy. Mesmerizing psych-noise garage-dirgery that sounds a bit like a ramshackle, lo-fi Loop! Killer tracks from both bands. And as you might imagine, also SUPER LIMITED!!!
For much of industrial culture, the Berlin Wall was an allegory for the severance of the self from society, whether that rupture be self-imposed or enforced by greater social forces. Even for those bands not residing in Berlin or Germany, the dismantling of the Wall marked a shift in aesthetics that was not quite so abject. Einsturzende Neubauten, for sure, marched to an entirely different beat after the Wall came down; but so did Coil and Test Dept. and Cabaret Voltaire, consciously or not. Yes, the jackbooted young men and women started to dance. But for those from Eastern Bloc countries, the mythologies, symbols, and rituals of industrial culture seem to speak beyond a particular time and place. Russia, in particular, has developed a lively underground of malcontents with DIY electronics making all sorts of nasty noises as well as ritualized meditations through metal bashing that have trickled into the West at a very slow rate. There are probably a number of cultural and social factors for these aesthetic and conceptual frameworks in Eastern Europe; but we are more keen on the results. Hati represent one mighty fine continuation of an industrial state of mind. This Polish duo of Rafal Iwanski and Darek Wojtas operate somewhere near the Thelemic practices of esoteric rites through sound with a slant towards the TOPY sects (hence the Magick in the title) in their ritual-industrial klang on junkyard metal, bellowing through animal bone horns, gongs, bells, etc. Not surprisingly, they have a long-standing relationship with Z'ev, whose clearly been a major influence on their work alongside the death obsessed exploration from Metgumbnerbone, Coil's energy rituals found on How To Destroy Angels, and even some of the pine-cone droning of Thuja and Jeph Jerman. There seems to be very little processing, maybe some back-masking and some judicious EQ, but that seems to be it for Hati who give the impression they are recording in the caves that were used for ancient invocations by early Visigoths, so transcendent is their reverb.
This disc compiles two very hard to find documents - the Zero Coma Zero recordings which lands more on the slow mantras of ritualized rhythm and Recycled Magick Emissions which drones through the vibrations of metal.
AWESOME, REPRESSED!!!! Originally released in 2009, out of print for years. If you missed it, at last here it is again - for a little while anyway. What we said originally...
As much as we dig the new breed of psychedelic space rockers, none of them can touch the Heads, whose sound is some impossible union of Hawkwind, the Stooges and Monster Magnet, able to whip off a 3 minute pounding garage psych jam one minute, and a 30+ minute free form metallic space drone the next, usually choosing to meld the two into super rocking, ur-psych blowouts, sprawling and heavy and blown out and EPIC.
This 2lp live set, recorded while the band were on tour with SF's own Wooden Shjips, finds the Heads in fine form, effortlessly kicking out the jams live, BIG TIME, and in the process offering up a primer for all those young psych rock whipper snappers.
Brooding slow burn space-out to full on supernova lysergic psych meltdown, effects everywhere, swirling clouds of hazy blurred distortion, drums, heavy and pounding and rock solid, but occasionally getting all skittery and abstract, the songs slip from dirgey and doomy to hypnotic and heavy to super rocking and chaotic, the vox (when they do surface) are distorted and howled and buried in the mix, and the riffs, oh the riffs, for all the atmosphere and the vibe and the effects, the riffs slay, the melodies are insanely catchy, the leads stick in your head as if they were the chorus from a pop song, hooks buried everywhere beneath the roiling incendiary space rocking and free form psychedelia.
So goddamn good, the band's already heavy and unhinged sound gets even more far out live, the songs and sounds let loose, the unfurling into super spacious drone drenched spaced out psychedelic heaviness. Fuck yeah.
SUPER LIMITED, once again. Gorgeous Day Of The Dead sixties style psychedelic cover art, thick stock, nice heavy vinyl, killer sound, essential...
For past releases from this UK noise rock combo, we've employed descriptors like: head caving, throbbing, distorted, bad trip psychedelia, fuzz-distorted metallic, rhythmic heaviness, sheer nihilistic sludge, bludgeoning... you get the point, these guys are sonic crushers of the highest order. Or maybe WERE. Cuz this new lp displays a whole 'nother side to Hey Colossus, one that falls much closer to the psychedelic space rock side of the sonic spectrum.
The record opens with a super psychedelic groove, sorta space-kraut, chordal synth swirls wrapped in clouds of shimmer FX and laced with streaks of feedback, total hypno rock bliss out, that is until the vocals come in. Growly and demonic and raspy and intense, removed from HC's normally noisier sound, those voKILLS take on a much more sinister vibe, and make for a weird combo, mad man ranting over otherwise tranced out psychedelic mesmer, but it works. And those clouds of effects bleed right into the next track, all tribal drumming and spidery guitar melodies, and yup, those crazed vocals, the whole thing building to something much more noisy and rocking, but only briefly, before slipping back into a sort of proggy space kraut psychedelia. Minus those vocals (heck, even with 'em!), the sound falls somewhere closer to outfits like White hills, Mugstar and Carlton Melton, which is not a bad thing at al, just maybe a bit surprising.
The B side though is a bit sludgier and heavier, with thick, almost metallic riffing, but still, kinda space-y and proggy, those swirling FX from the A side still all over the places, the B side remaining pretty dark and heavy, at least until the weird, almost croony, countryish outro, which adds dusky twang, to the broody space-y drift, and of course those vox!
Cool weird stuff. Hey Colossus fans will probably still dig, but so might space/psych rock fans this time around.
On the same label that released the recent live White Hills tape as well as a post Brainbombs No Balls jam we were never able to get, comes this brand new 7" from these San Francisco psychedelic stompers, thick with blown out guitars, classic rock riffage, wild octopoidal drumming, Stooges-y stomp and wild manic almost Jello-like vocals, the sound a glorious tangle of sixties style psych, eighties punk rock, hairy fuzzy proto-metal and seriously shredding guitar mastery, the lyrics and unhinged vox remind us of some lost proto-punk classic, but then it's all set amidst some BIG riffs and killer melodic leads, which sound way more heavy seventies. Either way, killer stuff, and we're definitely hankering for a full length. Features some super scary green-goo'd space teeth cover art.
Tinariwen, Group Inerane, Bombino, Koudede, Tartit... there's quite an amazing scene of North African groups making groovy guitar sounds out in the desert, isn't there? Add Mali's Imarhan Timbuktu to the list - though they're not that new, having been around since 1993, regularly playing the Festival au Desert as well as touring further afield in Europe and the States (in fact, they just played SXSW). They also share members with the aforementioned Tartit. But this is the first recording we've had from this Tuareg ensemble, lead by guitarist/vocalist Mohammed Issa Ag Oumar El Ansar (also simply known as Medissa). It's largely a family affair with Medissa and his brother on interwoven electric guitars, and their two sisters backing them up with traditional hand drums. There's also a bass player, and someone rockin' the calabash (a gourd-based percussion instrument). Together they provide more of that rhythmically satisfying, intricate desert blues goodness we've come to expect from all these exciting groups from the Sahara. Proud musical transmissions from a culture in turmoil and transition, protest music that's definitely danceable, with twanging, jangling, sometimes searing guitar, and jubilant, mellifluous vocal lines. Great stuff.
FYI, just on cd for now, but there's a limited vinyl version upcoming for Record Store Day!
We started our review of the last Indian record with the words "It's been a long time since we've heard from these Chicago heavies", which had we not checked first, was exactly how we were gonna start this one, cuz once again, it seems like ages since that Guiltless record, and it has actually been a little over three years. Thankfully, very little has changed since Guiltless, as From All Purity is another crushing, abject, slab of shrieking, downtuned doom sludge crush, with some of the sickest, filthiest distortion we have ever heard. The guitar tone on track two, "The Impetus Bleeds", sounds like they're playing through cabinets full of blown speakers, huge riffs that devolve into rapidly decaying crumble, while elsewhere, like on "Directional", that crumbling distortion becomes something else entirely, sounding a bit like malfunctioning electronics (which to be fair it actually could be), but it sounds killer, and it gives the track a weird sci-fi, zoner-psych vibe, which when mixed with the churning riffage, and tarpit stoner doom swagger, transforms the doomy sludge into something way more next level. A few tracks crank up the tempo, but even then, the arrangements are such, that the sound swings and lurches and lumbers more than blasts or pounds. And when the sound collapses into serious psychedelic churn, it's easy to see why these guys are so special. Check out the end of "Rhetoric Of No", sure it's dirgey and filthy and brutal, but the roiling black sludge is wreathed in swirling electronics that seem to swing wildly from speaker to speaker, in fact, it's mixed so that when you have headphones on, that weird insectoid buzz seems to be circling your head, it's totally disorienting, the group locked into some serious hypno-sludge mesmer, the vocals too a strange mush mouthed demonic incantation, fucked up and twisted avant doom genius for sure. The second to last track is all noisy, feedback drenched, shrieking, power electronics, but then the record closes with the epic doom crush of "Disambiguation", which drops in a few little black metalisms right at the end, each burst a frantic salvo of blackened riffage, shrieking vokills, and furious double kick drumming, the sound lurching back and forth, between that black buzz, and a more lugubrious creep, before a surprisingly sudden finish, the sound almost just cutting out. A twisted, unexpectedly dramatic end to a record that's definitely one of the coolest, weirdest, doom / sludge records we've heard in a while. And for a genre that can definitely sound same-y, and can so easily end up being boooooring, Indian will make your avant-doom loving head spin. Awesome!
Rockadrome's Vintage label has been on a roll of late, delving into the misty, musty, mystic proto-metal past to find some heavy holy grails - first and foremost, our recent Record Of The Week, 1972's self-titled album by Jerusalem! Also a reissue from New Zealand heavies Human Instinct, and now this, the eagerly awaited yet ultra obscure collection of previously unreleased tracks from a '70s Scottish band called Iron Claw. Well, previously unreleased except for bootlegs, which accounts for the anticipation with which we looked forward to this fully authorized, carefully compiled disc. Iron Claw never managed to put out an album in their lifetime, but they did record quite a few studio demos circa 1970-1974, which is what you'll hear here. And yes the Claw is HEAVY.
We've heard plenty of bands over the years who have tried to sound like Black Sabbath in various ways. A lot of our favorites in fact, being as into doom metal as we are. But before Witchfinder General and Saint Vitus and Trouble, before Candlemass and Cathedral, before Sleep and Sheavy and Electric Wizard and Witchcraft... there was Iron Claw. They didn't grow up listening to Black Sabbath albums. No, this is a band who fell under Black Sabbath's spell after seeing 'em play... in 1969! That was *before* the first Sabbath album came out, please note. (Which brings up another interesting story - apparently Iron Claw's bassist had actually recorded that Sabbath gig - and not long ago made a pretty penny selling the tapes to Ozzy and Sharon, it being the earliest known live Sabbath material extant.)
Pretty soon after this "revelation" of seeing Sabbath, the mostly teenaged blues rock combo Iron Claw became what must have been the world's first Black Sabbath tribute band, doing Sabbath covers, while simultaneously working on original material for the first time. So the influence of Sabbath over Iron Claw's own songs is pretty strong, especially in the guitar dep't, less so with the vocals. But for heaviness and a general doomy vibe, Iron Claw are clearly indebted to Iommi & Co., while also reminding us of such bands as T2, May Blitz, Nazareth, and Budgie. Maybe some Grand Funk Railroad too. This was heavy stuff, especially for the era. Heck you've got to admit that the band name (which comes from the lyrics to King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man") is pretty darn metal. IRON CLAW!!! Plus, good grief, they did a song called "Skullcrusher" in 1970 when everybody else (except for Sabbath) was all peace and love and flowers and beads. Inspired by Sabbath they sure were, but they get credit for being one of the first, taking it (down?) to the next level of underground downer rock worship and metallic menace. Later on when bands like Judas Priest and then the whole NWOBHM thing took over, these guys must have known they'd been ahead of the curve.
The sixteen tracks here span several years and several slightly differing Iron Claw lineups, and we were impressed by all of 'em, from their earliest, rawest recordings like the lumbering, blown-out "Clawstrophobia" (about the mental breakdown of someone stuck in an elevator!) to the riffy blitz of "Crossrocker" to their occasional attempts at something more 'pop' (but still heavy, even with horns, as on "Loving You").... all the way to the proggier final phase of Iron Claw's existence, on tracks like "Winter", with flute, yay! There's also a bit o' harmonica on "Strait Jacket" (a la "The Wizard"). But mostly, the Claw is all crunching guitar distortion, pounding drums and wailing vocals. Plus, psychedelic freakiness abounds in interludes (like the backwards Mellotron at the start of "Pavement Artist" and the spooky tripped out FX going into "Devils" - a song inspired by the band seeing the premiere of the Ken Russell movie of the same name at the Edinburgh Film Festival).
It's all pretty badass early doom action. Seriously we think folks into Sabbath (of course), Witchcraft and suchlike are gonna be blown away by a lot of this. And it's a really nicely done disc, the cd booklet featuring photos and several pages of band history, along with lyrics and notes on each track written by one of the surviving Iron Claw dudes (sadly, a couple of the members have passed away already). Sound-wise, it varies, generally lo-fi but pretty decent for demos, and not nearly so rough as that Bedemon disc ferinstance. No complaints there. Way to go Rockadrome, again! Now that they've unearthed the Claw, perhaps we can look forward to a sequel second cd of archival live material - we'd love to hear Iron Claw's cover of "War Pigs" with complete with their use of Ozzy's original, alternate lyrics....
More audio absurdities and surrealist aktionism from irr. app. (ext.), this double disc set collects the recorded vagaries from the practice sessions leading up to a very rare live performance from irr. app. (ext.) in Portland back in 2012. Matthew Waldron - the man behind the curtain - has long been associated with the idiosyncratic practices of Nurse With Wound, both aesthetically and as a steady member of the Nurse touring brigade. Like Nurse With Wound performances, the irr. app. (ext.) gigs loosely splay themselves upon a basic outline with plenty of opportunities for detours and dead-ends. As such, Waldron couldn't decide which was the definitive variation of this body of work, so he included three rehearsals along with the live performance itself, leaving the task of sorting everything out up to his audience. We'll start by describing the conclusion of the set which was a naked discomforting rendition of Little Peggy March's "My Teenage Castle" a bubblegum pop hit from 1963, now given an arrangement of randomly struck bells, VHF radio interference, and field recordings of cows with Waldron crooning psychotically. He only allows for one version of this song amongst all of the variations, as he prefers the abstractions to wander hither and yon. A wise choice we must say. Some of the recurring themes involve a ritualist percussive groove, the eeriness of Tibetan horn harmonics, the warbliness from a vibrator-enhanced mouth organ, Waldron's knife-on-the-guitar splutteriness, and the sound poetry of hurled spittle and sloshed saliva. The variations of the pieces are considerable. While Waldron may lament this as a 'lack of consistency', we're happy to see it as peripatetic creativity at its finest.
A hitherto unknown to us British sound artist, Alice Kemp seems to have honed her craft of cloak-n-dagger electroacoustics through the realms of performance art, with this long-form piece being a reworking of the sound designs that were commissioned by the performance art duo Weeks & Whitford. The imagery and allusions from Weeks & Whitford are gruesome (with Rebecca Weeks holding a malformed Eraserhead-like creature molded from livers and hearts in one of the photos accompanying this album) and spooky (a human hand made of frozen wine that melts all over a wedding dress worn by Weeks), in "tracing the scars that are left as the trophies of love." Admittedly, there's only the various project descriptions and photographic evidence of those pieces, but Kemp's sound design must have been a disturbing, claustrophobic addition to those performances, as this album would easily make her an honorary member of the notorious Schimpfluch-Gruppe. In fact, she was invited to perform at the Extreme Ritual festival alongside all of the Schimpfluch artists (e.g. Rudolf Eb.Er, G*Park, Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Raionbashi, etc.) with the participants and audience members alike astonished / aghast at her work. The tick-tock rhythms of a clock brace empty spaces and shadowy rumblings of tactile sounds that could very well be the calving of massive icebergs or the amplifications of blood vessels hemorrhaging just underneath a trepanned skull. Taut wire snaps and VLF crackle slowly enter the fray as Kemp's overarching composition follows what Nurse With Wound's Stapleton did on Salt Marie Celeste, with a leviathan crawl of incremental psychic intensity. Lets hope this album isn't just a minor excursion for Kemp; but as it stands now, this is all we know of... and it's a pro-duplicated cd-r in a nice digipack with an edition of just 100 copies.
Another transmission from the strange sonic universe of UK psychedelic space rock weirdos Gnod, this one from a particular member of the group and his friends, a twisted offshoot of the mothership's sound, we first heard via the Gnod record Presents Dwellings & Druss, and at the time, we had yet to realize, that both Dwellings and Druss were in fact each single members of the group. Which in retrospect is a bit obvious considering how freaked out and UNlike Gnod that record really was. Well Druss returns, this time teamed up with a mysterious Russian duo called Love Cult, and the three of them craft a truly creepy soundscape of drones and psychedelic collages, of twistedly rhythmic anti-grooves, and wild experimental FX drenched noise. Apparently the tracks are split up between the groups, some Druss, some Love Cult, some both, but really you'd be hard pressed to tell, as all the songs bleed into one constantly shifting whole.
Deep rumbles ooze ominously out of the speakers, before a voices is chopped up and layered into a maddeningly looped pulse, wrapped in streaks of hiss and static, peppered with abstract percussive thwacks, eventually coalescing into a sort of abstract, drugged out alien house music maybe? From there the sound darkens and drift even further into the shadows, the vibe distinctly hauntological, fans of Demdike Stare will find much to dig, dense pulsations, synth squelch blurred into chordal thrum, multiple voices whispering ominously, a strange fractured rhythm anchoring the proceedings, a softly churning, ritualistic, blackened electronica that gradually grows more and more tweaked and twisted.
Elsewhere, the sound slips into a hazy almost Pop Ambience, all washed out and ethereal, a motorik throb, buried beneath layers of shimmer and softly gristly gauze, the sound disappearing beneath a cascade of blurry, bleary low end, before blossoming into some spaced out electro. The record fragments into wild psychedelic soundscapery, jittery and frenetic, before devolving into a weird retro electronica, that sounds like a super creepy, damaged take on Paul Hardcastles's "19", the final trilogy of tracks slips from grim, rib cage rattling buzz, wreathed in cinematic swirls, to another batch of electro, but something more akin to John Carpenter electro, with a little witch house mixed in, and then finally, some super minimal dubbed out electronica, all blurred voices, wobbly almost dubstep bass, and a hazy voice like melody, the vibe simultaneously tense and intense, washed out and dreamy!
As always, includes a download with the whole record, as well as two extra digital tracks. And as always, very very limited!
The two Meditamentum collections stood as the 'best of' Maeror Tri's offerings culled from their numerous cassettes released from 1989-1996 at the tail end of the first wave of cassette culture as we know it; and these collections had in fact gone through a couple of different reissue iterations themselves eventually getting released through the seminal dark ambient label Manifold, some fifteen years ago. Of course, those are long out of print; now the Polish label Zoharum has brought all of the material from those anthologies into this double-disc set, with much nicer packaging and artwork than any of the previous versions. But the strength is still in the sounds produced by Maeror Tri, whose Stefan Knappe and Martin Glitsch continued as Troum after Maeror Tri disbanded in 1996. Melody and rhythm soon became parts of Troum's droned-out vocabulary, but these musical aspects were far more fleeting in the work Maeror Tri, which hinged on an abstraction of grim noises that have more in common with the formation of cold planets out of comet dust, iron ore and ice than the instrumentation of guitars, bass, synths, flutes, accordions, etc. Here, it is the thrumming reverb of inhospitable galactic forms colliding in deep space, rippling through time and the cosmos as an existential shot of raw nihilism. As such, the recordings of Maeror Tri have much more of an industrially tinged, thousand-yard stare, which is fully on display on Meditamentum. The cassettes from which this collection was drawn include Peak Experience, Somnia Et Expergisci, Ambient Dreams, Sensuum Mendacia, Sublimal Forces, Allianz, Hypnobasia, Venenum, Beauty Of Sadness, Archaid States, Ultimate Time, and a handful of tape comps. Yes, a few of these cassettes have enjoyed reissues themselves; but this collection makes for one of the best bodies of work that Maeror Tri has ever produced.
Finally available again, the Death Waltz soundtrack to Frank Khalfoun's remake of the 1980 slasher/exploitation classic Maniac! The new version stars Elijah Wood, as the demented owner of a mannequin shop, who scalps women and attaches the purloined hair to his mannequins. The movie itself is interesting for how it was shot, so you never see the main character except in reflections, and you see his hands, via the killer's POV as he does his dirty work. Not nearly as gritty and grimy as the original, it's still pretty intense, and the soundtrack is fantastic. Definitely harkening to the soundtracks of old, John Carpenter of course, each track a mini epic, swirling, soaring synths, dark haunting melodies, pulsing motorik rhythms, shimmering crystalline chords, all blurry and gauzy, and hauntingly harrowing. The single named Rob who did the soundtrack is rumored to be one of the guys from Phoenix, although we couldn't find any definite corroboration. Some tracks, like "Haunted" sound a bit like a creepier, moodier M83 too, but the bulk of the tracks are very cinematic, minor key piano melodies, nestled amidst swirling synthscapes, some are super stripped down, and minimally kosmische, others are sort of new wave-y, very eighties style, as if an homage to the original film/era, and still others are weird assemblages of swirling FX and arpeggiated synth shimmer, all of them are fantastic, including a surprising closer, complete with female vocals, a sort of modern re-envisioning of eighties new wave pop, the sort of song that seemed to play under the credits of pretty much every movie in the eighties.
Definitely one of our favorite of the Death Waltz releases, so much so, that some aQ-ers tracked down copies overseas when the original disappeared and it seemed like maybe no more copies would make it to the US. So grab one while you can.
And like all Death Waltz releases, the packaging is exquisite, the cover a super striking and disturbing shot of mannequin heads (a still from the movie?), pressed on thick vinyl, the sleeve an old school heavy tip-on style jacket, includes a poster and liner notes, including notes from Rob himself. And yeah, as always, very limited as well! (If we thought it would be easy to get more of these, we'd have made it a Record Of The Week, by the way.)
We have a certain soft spot for that brief period of early '80s British underground female-fronted new wave pop that has been getting revived a lot lately. Namely on Cherry Red Records, the label that championed such sounds to begin with. We made the Young Marble Giants reissue a Record Of The Week a while back, and in its influential wake the whole face of British music had seemingly changed. Bands like Antenna, The Ravaging Beauties, Virginia Astley, Carmel, Everything But The Girl, The Gist, Weekend, and The Marine Girls had kept up post-punk's DIY enthusiasm, but tempered its urgency into breezy and soft, almost loungey acoustic pop. The Marine Girls were a three girl band started by Tracy Thorn, later of Everything But The Girl. All the members sang with simple bossanova-style guitar and bass arrangements with no drums, each song clocking in at under three minutes. Beach Party from 1981 is the Marine Girls first and best and features Thorn before she left to do a solo record and then join Ben Watt in EBTG. Fans of Nouvelle Vague, Liliput, Cub, The Raincoats, or the recently reissued Weekend demos (also reviewed this list!) as well as contemporary bands like Beach House and Grass Widow will find lots to love here.
Long lost third record from this Bay Area crew, who back in the day (mid 2000's) released two killer blasts of grinding sax flecked grind metal crush, both released on the always stellar Crucial Blast label (licensed from UK label Monotreme), and Holocene, recorded right before the band broke up, and originally 'released' in 2007 (these copies come from the band's stash), finds the group still in fine form, continuing on from where record #2, Perfect Picture Of Wisdom & Boldness, left off - a dizzying assemblage of tangled math metal, blown out noise rock, mathy post-hardcore, all wound up into four blasts of furious pounding pummel, laced with plenty of avant experimentalism, little brief bits of almost jazziness here and there, long stretches of droned out metallic hypno-rock churn, flurries of chugging riffage draped over wild octopoidal tribal drum damage, the songs and sound lurching from near death metal blasts to knuckle dragging, bass heavy throb, often splintering into weird atonal mathy breakdowns, and often that's when the sax swoops in, the sound suddenly getting sort of death-jazz, before exploding right back into it.
The centerpiece here is for sure the nearly 12 minute closer, with its opening doom/sludge dirge, a downtuned trudge, subtle mathed out, the timing in constant flux, that mathiness gradually taking over, until it's a wild, neck snapping, math-metal blowout, only to slip right back into an even doomier sludgier creep, replete with sick, FX heavy vokills, the sort of thing current bands like Indian and The Body specialize in, but this is the Mass after all, so about halfway through, the sound shifts again, the guitar locked into a muted chug, then in comes the sax, the vibe is weird, and weirdly catchy, an avant doomjazz that quickly explodes into something much noisier, underpinning some wild guitar shred, before slipping right back into that dirge-y chug, which gradually crumbles, and distorts, the sounds more and more blown out and in the red until they finally devolve into near Merzbow digital blacknoize.
Killer, creepy artwork by comic artist Jon Wayshak, who not only did the front and back covers, but also did some awesomely gruesome portraits of each of the band members inside the booklet.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!!!
Some bands are considered 'punk' or 'underground' or even 'alternative' based more on lineage, their record label, or membership than actual sound. And weirdly, we find ourselves often digging more mainstream sounds made by those underground bands. Not sure if it's a lifelong aversion to 'the man' and his 'corporate rock', or maybe more likely, it's that popular music is popular for a reason, but when an artist makes 'popular' music and comes at it from a whole different direction, with a whole set of non-popular sonic references and resources, that just makes for something more original and compelling and interesting. A perfect example is the recent Orange record from Diamond Youth. A record we originally bought cuz it was on the same label as another band we love, one that's super punk and noisy and screamo, but the fact that Diamond Youth sounded like something you could hear on the radio, maybe SHOULD hear on the radio, only made it that much cooler.
Which brings us to Men Of Fortune, who we've raved about on the list before, and who are on a cool weird underground label, and who play shows with all sorts of heavy rock and punk bands, but whose sound is maybe closer to outfits like Kyuss or Queens Of The Stone Age. Or at least it was last time we heard em. But this time around, the label references Santana and King Crimson as well. Which at first blush we thought was sorta ridiculous, but the more we listen to Time Lovingly Bled, the more the weirdness, and proginess, and tripped out jamminess shine through. The split we first heard these guys on, they came across more as a sort of stonery noise rock outfit, but here, the band have stretched WAY out, and transformed their sound into a kind of sprawling stoner prog psychedelic space rock. Churning riffs and pounding drums give way to epic droned out psych-dirge drifts, the sound slipping sometimes into near metallic crush, but just as often, getting super spacey and abstract, meandering post rock psychedelia, the kind of thing that wouldn't be out of place on Agitated or Rocket or Cardinal Fuzz. And it's sorta funny, all that talk above about weird underground bands playing popular music, well, with every spin of this record, the actual sound becomes more and more tripped out, proggy, tangled and fucked up, which maybe speaks to the power of MoF's vision, cuz really, some of the moments here are catchy as hell, lots of moments in fact, but those moments are surrounded on all sides by strange swirls of buzzing synths, or tranced out hypno-rock blowouts, or brooding post-rock creeps, the arrangements dense and intricate, the prog vibe looms large, as does the sort of Isis / Neurosis style post metal, although these guys are less about bombast as they are about mood and vibe, texture and tone, some of the jams here, we could get lost in for hours, the band laying down dense tribal rhythms beneath skies full of swirling spidery melodies, and blurred chordal shimmers, the bass thick and sinewy, but the songs always seem to coalesce into proper songs, and in places, those songs verge on classic DOOM, just check out "The Passing Shame", which sounds like modern day Cave-In playing doom metal, and as unlikely as that may sound, the actual SOUND of it is pretty fucking excellent.
We definitely dug the previously reviewed split, but this full length has won us over big time. If you dig progged out heaviness, droney space rock, and all strains of psychedelia, and aren't averse to a little poppiness and proper songcraft, Time Lovingly Bled should push all your musical buttons. Pressed on 180 gram, 100 percent virgin vinyl. Includes a download of the whole record, as well as tracks from MoF side project Leaves Aflame!!
We had been hearing about this for ages, local pop heroes the Ovens had been RAVING, as had our very own Andrew, and about a million blogs, hailing these guys as the second coming. Of what you ask? Husker Du? Dinosaur Jr? The Wipers? All three is more like it, these guys offer up six songs in 21 minutes of buzzing, grungy, slightly sludgy ultra heavy indie pop, that takes that classic punk / pop sound, and adds some Torche-like heft, the guitar impossibly thick and crunchy and fuzzy, the songs hooky as hell, the vibe sorta washed out and woozy, a little druggy and laid back, the perfect mix of nineties guitar rock, eighties punk rock, and modern post punk heaviness, super emotive about-to-crack vox, and the solos, total J Mascis guitar tone, short and simple, just sort of mirroring the vocal melody, and then right back into it. Stripped down and simple, every jam a goddamn anthem, total windows down, stereo cranked, feeling young again, summer jam bliss, and fuck, if a band like the Ovens, who write catchy pop songs like it ain't nothing, lose their minds over a band, proclaiming them THE BEST EVER, well, then, you know you better figure out what the fuck is up, and what the fuck is up, is that this just might be your new favorite band.
A few lists back, we mistakenly reviewed THIS Moloch tape, instead of the one we actually had in stock (Depressive Black Metal Plague), even though this one had not officially been released. We'll review THAT one next time, but for now, Verwustung is in fact finally out! If you were one of the few folks who ordered the other one, based on the wrong review, but still dug it, you're probably gonna want this one too. For everyone else, here's the RIGHT review for this, the latest from this Ukrainian one man black metal / black ambient project, and while we knew he had tons of releases, it's still hard to believe this is in fact his TWELVTH full length, out of almost NINETY (!!!) releases since 2004 (!!!!). Number twelve, Verwustung, is one of the harshest and heaviest things we've heard from Moloch, grim and brutal, anguished and minor key, the sound raw and fierce, the guitars buzzsaw black, pounding drumming, and some seriously intense vokills, equal parts guttural demonic growl and hysterical shriek, the vibe still darkly depressive, but unlike past records, that depressiveness is on display here mostly in mood and vibe, with the music itself furious and frenzied, relentless and intense, with the sound only occasionally slipping into doomy miserablism, and here and there, exploding into full on noise drenched chaos, that sounds surprisingly psychedelic. But really, Verwustung is just, raw, pure, true, grim Ukrainian black metal, the very essence of cult one man BM, the sound infused mysterious black energy, which is reflected in the opening and closing tracks as well, displaying the other side of Moloch's sound, both haunting, droning, moody and minimal sprawls of black ambient drift...
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Probably the last we'll ever see...
When the Siltbreeze label isn't digging up archival rarities from the golden age of New Zealand underground rock, they're still delivering plenty of modern day murk, including this dark and dingy gem from Johnny Noise, a member of Mexican garage dirge weirdos Los Llamarada (who we've somehow never reviewed on the aQ list before). His solo joint The Day Is Coming is a glorious sprawl of creeping sonic ooze, fuzzy primitive guitar gristle, motorik, robotic rhythms, a sort of slowed down psych rock, melting before your very ears into something sludgey and druggy, while Johnny's wasted croon drifts above in a cloud of hazy reverb and crumbling FX, sounding a bit like Suicide or Chrome by way of some sweaty, poorly ventilated dive bar, total DIY what-the-fuck drug-dirge, garage-punk, alien-psych weirdness of the highest order. Lots of the tracks unwind like freaky alternate universe karaoke blooze, others are dense tangles of experimental avant garage wooziness, and still others sound like homemade mad scientist caveman psych, bedroom-brewed, drug fueled, lo-fi, droned out and dementedly damaged. Fucked up and confusionally fantastic. WAY recommended for fans of weirdo outsider avant psychedelia, and twisted, experimental garage rock damage.
Includes a download code as well!
The shoegaze renaissance continues! This is the debut full length from this Philadelphia band after a string of singles and EPs, and alongside aQ faves True Widow, shows the typically metal-centric Relapse Records branching out further into the realms of atmospheric rock. Guilty Of Everything (a title that's leant an added weight by founder Dominic Polermo's two year jail stint prior to the band's formation) is an enormous monument of heavy shoegaze, loaded with bittersweet hooks and infectious melodies. What sets Nothing apart from most of their contemporaries, and even a lot of the first wave shoegaze bands, is how song oriented they are. Buried underneath an absolutely massive overwhelming production and what feels like a thousand layers of guitar, is an album full of genuinely moving nostalgic pop melodies and arena sized hooks that bring to mind the epic dreamy dirge of bands like Hum and Catherine Wheel. The contrast between these beautifully fragile yet addictive melodies and the wash of reverbed guitar, crunchy low end distortion and bombastic drumming is dramatic and totally perfect, and it plays a massive part in setting Nothing apart in a musical movement that's in constant danger of oversaturation. All the while the vocals hazily drift in and out, the lyrics just on the border of being indecipherable, fragments of sentences floating to the surface like half remembered afterthoughts. While the album is mostly pretty mid paced, there are also moments of driving groove and uptempo punk rock bop that help to momentarily break the hypnosis, but all the while the songs still drip with that same starry-eyed melancholic wonder. Catchy and immersive, rousing yet introspective and totally addictive. A no-brainer when it comes to your 2014 year end list. If you've lately found yourself smitten by the likes of Weekend, Alcest, Deafheaven and Whirr (with whom these guys will be releasing a split later this year) then this is absolutely essential.
The LAMC series of 7"s features tons of our favorite bands (Fuzz, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), delivering an exclusive track on the A side, while the B side features one of THAT band's favorite new artists. A pretty cool concept for sure and we're reviewing 3 of our favorites in the series.
Number 3 in the series comes from big time aQ faves and local garage pop heroes Thee Oh Sees, their track a crazy catchy, bubblegummy chunk of jangle and strum, garage fuzz dreaminess, a song so good, it's hard to believe this didn't end up on a record proper (it did end up on third Oh Sees singles collection, and was on of our faves!), but it's the perfect single track, in the old tradition of bands putting their best stuff out in a more bite size format. So good!
The up and comer Dwyer and Co. picked for the B side maybe be an unknown commodity to the rest of the world, but for aQ-ers, The Mallard are another favorite, and their track here makes it easy to see why, a dark low fidelity swirl of hazy organ, murky rhythms, swirling guitar shimmer, reverb drenched vox, and buried hooks, all whipped up into a frothy psych-garage murk-pop concoction. If you've yet to discover the joys of the Mallard, this track will definitely make you wanna hear more! Too bad they already broke up, but there are 2 full-lengths to check out.
And as you might imagine, also SUPER LIMITED!!!
We sold a whole bunch of the newest release from this Chinese outfit, one of the longest running and most respected groups in the Chinese underground, but as we explained in that review, not so underground. Unlike a lot of the other Chinese bands we've been championing of late, P.K.14 are extremely well known, and have won many awards, and performed with big bands at huge venues, but nonetheless, that record, 1984, was a big hit around here. Recorded in the US with Steve Albini, we described that record as sounding like Television or Talking Heads, so we were curious to hear what P.K.14 sounded like earlier on, assuming it would be more raw and less polished, which in fact proved to be true, but even here, several records before their 1984 album, the band sound pretty mature, dark and brooding, their sound more akin to maybe Radiohead or The National or the Afghan Whigs.
The opener is a ballady creep, all haunting piano, crooned vox, over a bed of distant static, and laced with little bits of electronic glitchery, spidery guitar filigree and barely there percussion, a brooding bit of minimal slowcore that leads directly into something a bit more upbeat, the second track laced with violin, guitars that jangle and chime, woozy wandering basslines, a little bit angular, all building to a soaring string laden chorus, dramatic and bombastic, and sonically very much more mainstream. And while they are essentially a mainstream band, that doesn't keep them from experimenting, the whole record rife with interesting sonic oddities, little stretches of hushed guitar texture, big booming drum blowouts, buzzing guitars processed to sound like synths, programmed drum machines, weird crumbling lo-fi riffs dotting more standard sounding rock songs, in fact while the songs themselves tend toward more standard rock forms, they're all separated by weird little experimental interludes, that experimentalism finding its way into many of the songs proper. Cool stuff for sure. Not nearly as freaky and far out as much of the Chinese stuff we champion, but if you dig modern rock, and wanna check out the Chinese equivalent, and/or if you dug their 1984 record, which we reviewed a while back, give this one a try (too)!
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Light Divide is the newest full length from Porras, who is likely better known to most folks as 1/2 of drone-doom duo Barn Owl (or to many of you as a former aQ-er), and on his solo records, as well as on recent Barn Owl records proper, Porras has seemingly been distancing himself from the twang flecked smolder of the earlier BO records, a sound that won them great acclaim, but found them permanently aligned with their sonic forebears in Earth, both sharing a similarly washed out, deserty sonic palette. But as Porras began to experiment more with synths and electronics, and even beats, his sound blossomed into something much more his own, eventually arrive here, at Light Divide, which takes the psychedelic witch house murk of Porras' solo project DVVLLXNS, and melds it to a dreamy, pulsing drift, not all that far removed from Kompakt's Pop Ambience, in fact, opener "Apeiron" would have sounded right at home on any of the Pop Ambient compilations, as as longtime readers of the aQ list know, there's hardly a higher compliment.
And if you can imagine a sort of witch house / Pop Ambient hybrid, that's definitely shorthand sonic band math for Light Divide. The aforementioned opener is all soft focus synth swirl, dense ominous drones underpinning the ethereal shimmer, the track flecked with tinkling high end sonic sparkles, laced with distant percussion, and instead of a beat proper, it's like the sounds are being subtly twisted and shaped into gristly pulses, and lush chordal swells, a blackened kosmische drift, that's heady and hypnotic, a gorgeously haunting late night sonic sprawl that manages to be both cinematic and expansive, claustrophobic and introspective.
"Recollection" takes the same template, and manages to make it even more skeletal, creating a crystalline latticework of click and thrum, of hiss and static, lots of reverb and echo, hazy and amorphous, like the digital dub of Pole pulled apart until there's barely anything left, a hazy, somnambulent dream-drift. "Divide" piles on multiple layers of hum and thrum, all softly undulating, lush and lustrous, tonal colorations gradually leached from the sound, leaving just thick rumbling swells and shadowy smears of melody, pocked with soft shards of static, and all blurred into a slowly shifting cloud of softly psychedelic shimmer.
"New Monument" might be the most kinetic of the bunch, gnarled melodies all tangled up below fields of hazy and smoothed out crackle, laced with whip crack percussion, single bursts swaddled in reverb and sent drifting into the ether, gradually blossoming into what sounds more like some sort of slow motion gothic ambience, a mutated 4AD miserablism, stretched out into a strangely percussive bit of wistful drift, before bleeding right into the closer "Pleiades", which finds the previous track being swallowed whole by lush billows of low end thrum, the result a drowsy, shadowy slo-mo dub, that halfway through is transformed into something much more kinetic, bathed in a soft sonic glow, the percussion and buried pulsations roiling below the surface, the sound closer to something like Vessel or oOoOO, which makes us think the next Porras solo joint could end up on Tri Angle or Blackest Ever Black. Fantastic stuff.
Robin Storey has always been a very prolific composer, certainly being the engine that pushed Zoviet France to produce so many titles in the '80s. When he left ZF in the early '90s, that work ethic continued on in his solo project Rapoon, which in many ways was a natural outgrowth of the tape-loop errata, the dark ritualism, the grim raga drones, and the ethnomusicological decenteredness of Zoviet France, although with some occasional, perhaps unwise, forays into contemporary electronica. The slippages, echoes, mirages, and reflections of sound through Storey's tape-loop and sampling contraptions have the potential for some truly inspired sidereal atmospherics, with the rhythms being almost inconsequential to the hypnosis that Storey could produce. As we mentioned, Storey has kept up an impressive work ethic over the years but the results have not always been as good as what he was able to do within the confines of Zoviet France. But when Storey is on, his stuff is fantastic; and this collection proves just how good he can be. The first disc on this collection culls from the numerous compilation tracks, oddities, seven inch singles, and outtakes that date to the best period for Rapoon right after his departure from ZF from 1993-1999, with the second disc being a super rare cd-r release from 1997 entitled Messianic Ghosts that was only issued in an edition of 50. As great as many of the compilation tracks are on the first disc, Messianic Ghosts is one of the highlights in his catalogue, drifting along a placid oceanic current somewhere in the North Atlantic while gazing up at the aurora borealis late at night with satellites raking across the summer night sky. The radiant mysteriousness to all of the hypnogogic patterns and echoes is offset by the warm dust of antiquated magnetic tape that collects within all of Storey's loops. Downright beautiful dronemuzik. Limited stock of this Polish import.
Having recently listed the highly popular Love Is Overtaking Me, we thought we'd bring in the other side of the Arthur Russell sound, World of Echo, a magical record he released towards the end of his life. We surprised ourselves realizing we never listed it previously, so it's time to do it some justice.
While Love Is Overtaking Me introduced a previously unheard side to Arthur Russell fans, it also brought in a new audience perhaps less in tune with Russell's more high-minded musical pursuits. World of Echo is a perfect in-between place for fans and new-comers. Released in 1987, World of Echo concentrates on Russell's use of the cello, percussion and voice filtered through a bank of effects. There is a minimalist oceanic dub vibe that weaves through these highly personal songs that are affecting, not so much by what he is singing but how. Soft and low, his voice quavers over spare echoing instrumentation that bends towards the beautifully abstract. Like floating in calm oceans towards the void of the sun, melting into its warmth, this is a record that influenced a generation of music makers (Grizzly Bear, Coconut, Final Fantasy, Juana Molina, Animal Collective / Panda Bear, Hanne Hukkelberg, etc) and continues to beguile us. Highly recommended!
