In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule, which you'll find reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork, and while they last, available ONLY at aQ (or from the band on their upcoming tour, which begins a few days after this week's list!), both records are bundled together (4lps!), for a special low price, and housed in a silkscreened tote bag, with a killer new AMF logo by none other than Christoph Szpadjel, the Lord Of The Logos!
One of the remnants from Record Store Day 2014. Each of the Bishop brothers from the Sun City Girls gets a side of vinyl to bloody their knuckles on the guitar. While the cover sports a sunken portrait of Alan Bishop (aka Alvarius B) at the microphone with cigarette in hand, he doesn't turn up in his Uncle Jim guise. In fact, he doesn't even sing at all. His spluttering acoustic guitar instrumentals are full of piss and vinegar, taking up the violent folk-punk strum that was one of many focal points for the Sun City Girls as well as much of his Alvarius B output. Richard Bishop offers a set of his cocksure flamenco-meets-Egyptian acoustic guitar solos of effortless esotericism and beguiling mastery of his instrument. Just a few left.
While UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm mostly specializes in outsider, oddball sonic wonders, mostly created by groups we've never heard of, or by sideprojects of groups we have, every once in a while a bigger name pops up, which in this case is aQ beloved guitarist/soundscaper Oren Ambarchi, whose Amulet is a great fit for The Tapeworm, without deviating too much from the sound of some of our favorite Ambarchi records proper. All recorded on an iPhone, and edited into one sprawling soundscape/sonic suite, Amulet is indeed a dark gem, all tinkling chimes, whirring thrum, keening distant tones, groaning, heaving swells of distorted buzz, everything smeared and blurred into a gauzy soft-noise drift, that slips from hushed shimmer to roiling psychedelic squall and back again, a black ambience that's gorgeously dreamlike and sonically spacious, a lushly layered sonic event that infuses what would otherwise be a dreamy bit of blissfulness, into something much more shadowy and ominous, with low tones rumbling in the background, fields of clatter and clink, gamelan like crystalline percussion, set amidst thick swells of minor key chordal thrum, haunting and it its own way, heavy as well. The various bits of percussion, also have the feel of a field recording (which they technically are), but it evokes the sense that this is some strange ritual, or some mysterious world, captured surreptitiously, viewed from the shadows, a glimpse of something strange and blackly wondrous.
Cover art by Savage Pencil. And as always, super limited!!
First full length in seven years from former Man Is The Bastard noisemaker Henry Barnes, who since leaving the Bastard fold, has been crafting a strange mix of Xtian home brewed psychedelic folk, and avant experimental noise, a worshipful hybrid of spaced out ragas and lilting pastoral avant Appalachia. An instrument builder as well as a musician, much of Amps' music is created on home built kitchen-sink contraptions of Barnes creation, which helps give AfC its strange, haunting, otherworldly sound. If you ever saw MITB back in the day, you know doubt saw Barnes huddled in the corner in front of a huge pile of weird electronics, and amplifiers built from plywood, all adorned with primitive drawings of trees and winged guitars, that spirit eventually blossomed into Amps For Christ.
On Canyons Cars And Crows, it seems very little has changed, opening with a lilting bit of devotional psych folk flutter, with Barnes' plaintive vocals, draped over simple strum and fuzzy soft psych filigree, which leads directly into "Miss You Mother", which finds a harmonium like drone buzzing beneath a washed out and woozy guitar melody, dreamily sundappled and drifty. In fact if anything, on this new record, the whole vibe is a lot more laid back and blissed out, it's not really until the fifth track, "Hills Of Padua", that we hear that twisted Amps For Christ electronic bagpipe avant jig that peppers much of the Amps back catalog, a buzzing analog melody, crumblingly distorted, but weirdly and noisily lovely, and then it's right back into more dreamy psychedelic strum. Fans of the Woods will definitely find much to love here, like the Woods more eccentric older brother, the one that lives in the basement, and spends all day and all night 'tinkering' with weird machinery, we always just assumed he was building a time machine or a weapon, but in fact, he was making strange musical instruments, and using them to create beautifully twisted music like this!
One of our favorite musicians considered part of the new wave of modern Appalachia / guitar soli, has to be Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson, who manages to take that classic sound, and essentially transform it into something all her own, which is no small feat, considering how many modern guitarists try. It's even more impressive here, a record, as the title makes clear, of traditional and public domain songs, like "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic", "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", et cetera.
Anderson played an instore a while back and we were all spellbound, her playing fluid and lyrical, able to conjure up aching melodies, as well as dense noisy squalls, and here, these classic songs are given new life. Anderson's version of "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic" is the perfect example, it's somehow faithful to the original, while being almost unrecognizable, in fact those unfamiliar with the song, could easily assume this was one of Anderson's originals, which is true of all of the tracks here. Anderson's guitar, warmly distorted, fuzzy, and pulsing hypnotically, weaving together lush layers of melody, and unfurling delicate dreamlike instrumentals, some surprisingly fierce and almost psychedelic, others hushed and minimal, spare and spacious. So great. And so pleased that she's finally getting so much well deserved attention, with this lp, as well as the recent reissue of her Mercury record on Important.
These are extremely limited, so be warned that if we run out, it may take us a while to restock, assuming we can get any more at all! (Though fortunately, there will also be a cd version upcoming.)
As mentioned on last Friday's in-betweener, for this year's Record Store Day, we finally got around to producing some aQuarius tote bags! People are always asking, and it's the eco-friendly thing to do, hope you like 'em.
It's a black bag, with metallic silver print, featuring a brand new, elaborately 'black metal' styled aQuarius Records logo, done by "the Lord of the Logos" himself, the very talented (and super nice) Christophe Szpajdel. He did Emperor's logo, among many others. He's the man. It's a nice lookin' logo, kind of black metal meets art nouveau. These 14 1/2" x 16" bags, with securely cross-stitched straps, are big enough to hold a bunch of lps (like, up a dozen single lps).
Ah, the many tentacles of Gordon Ashworth. Once, this Portlander recorded as Concern delivering an updated version of American holy minimalism through Riley, Maclise, and Conrad in fine style. He also had his wall-noise moniker Oscillating Innards, and plenty of black/grind/scuzz-fuck/noise projects to extend his aesthetic range (e.g. Knelt Rote, Deep Jew, etc.); but it was always the work of Concern that tickled our fancy. While he shelved Concern as a project back in 2010, this solo album released under his given name seems to be carrying on that aesthetic thread. Languid drones blur between field recordings from his one-time job as a taxi driver and subtle melodies sketched out via banjo and piano for the first couple of tracks, lend a less digital but equally favorable comparison to Tim Hecker's fizzing post-ambience. On "Suite For Broken Sex," Ashworth really hits his stride through the billowing minimalism for a hypnotic piano, churning through notes akin to Lubomyr Melnyk's less frenetic compositions, all brightly rasping with overtones and swirling raga-drones from the interlocking arpeggiation. The wistful banjo fingerpicking of "To Be The Man I Want To Be" and "Desperate & Indebted" takes on a Tim Hecker / Christian Fennesz jaggedliness adhering to the hillbilly minimalism of Henry Flynt, plucking away at a tearjerkingly maudlin series of melodies over the course of side two. Gorgeous stuff for sure! Limited to 300 copies on clear vinyl with a download.
It's been ages since we last heard from Bear Bones Lay Low, and that review mentions us knowing nothing about the man behind BBLL other than he was an 18 year old Venezuelan kid living in Belgium, who had just become a member of aQ faves Silvester Anfang, which is all we needed to know. Ever since, we've done our best to track down anything we could find, which was not much. But now BBLL is in the US, touring with another aQ favorite, Jooklo Duo, so obviously catch them both if you can. To commemorate the tour, BBLL put together this ultra limited (66 copies!) cd-r, available only from the band on tour, or from aQ, while they last.
Like the other Bear Bones recordings we'd heard, Recalentaitos, is another dreamily psychedelic collection of psychedelic vibrations, rhythmic pulsations, blurred chordal textures, ritualistic and avant, primitive and home brewed, opener "A Fifth Ring" sounds like some Finnish forest folk outfit doing krautrock, all buzzing synths, minimal percussion, a sort of pulsating kosmische via campfire jam, hazy and druggy and drifty, which leads right into the even more spacey "Lacreo", an undulating field of reverb drenched rhythms, soft swirls of sci-fi FX, again, a weird sort of motorik propulsion driving the track, but buried beneath layers of murk, and tangles of atonal distorted psyche guitar, that's woven into the gristly fabric of the song.
The other three tracks continue to delve deeper into some subterranean soundworld, from the bird call flecked muted creep of "Perdido Entre Las Ramas", to the mutated varispeed collage of "Name Game", which sounds like Monopoly Child Star Searchers doing their best Tangerine Dream, to closer "Green Temple", which sounds like some alien horror movie circus music, puled apart, and blurred into a mysterious sprawl of glitch-drone shimmer and crumbling space-drift ambience.
As we mentioned above, SUPER DUPER LIMITED! Only 66 copies, each on hand numbered, housed in a plain brown sleeve, with a full color printed insert. Once these are gone, they are gone for good!
On our last list, we celebrated the return of this cult horror-obsessed heavy psychedelic doom unit, with their brand new album, Headless Eyes, which, believe it or not, was the Blood Farmers' first album since their self-titled 1995 debut! A long wait, but worth it, for all fans of moody, garagey, fuzzed out doomadelica.
We'd never reviewed that self-titled album, originally issued by Germany's now defunct Hellhound label. But when we got Headless Eyes direct from the band, we found they still had copies of the debut available, too - a cd reissue done a few years back by Japan's also-now-defunct Leaf Hound label. So we figured, heck if folks liked Headless Eyes so much (which they did, we had to restock) let's get some of their first cd too, to list - and here it is. You'll find that the Blood Farmers' sound is pretty similar on both albums, despite the nearly twenty years between 'em. The same core members are doing their thing - guitarist Dave Depraved kicks out the Sabbathy riffage and unwinds FX-laden, spindly acid rock leads, very much under the influence of Dave Chandler & Saint Vitus (and tons of '60s/'70s heavy rock obscurities), while vocalist Eli Brown bellows trippy tales of terror derived from a lifetime of watching '70s horror/exploitation cinema (the band is named after such a B-movie, Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, from '72, a film so low-budget the actors were paid with six-packs of beer). That's the Blood Farmers formula, basically, and it works darn well, making for a good mix of psychedelic atmosphere and heavy, headbanging catchiness. Anyone (like us) who thought Headless Eyes was killer will find this disc very enjoyable too, and vice versa. It provides more riffs, more fuzz, more horror, more cowbell!
And stick around for the lovely acoustic instrumental coda at the end, "After The Harvest".
We've long been fans of burly bearded post doom crushers The Body, their sound like the classic two man pummel of godheadSilo expanded into something even more majestic and sprawling, black hole heavy, infusing their ultra doom glacial sludge with plenty of post and rock mathisms, the cinematic tension of groups like Godspeed, and heck, they even cover songs by folks like Crass, Danzig, Black Flag and Sinead O'Connor! For a two piece, these guys pretty much transcend and obliterate any sort of limitations that lineup would pose to most mere musical mortals, but that said, plenty of two pieces have seen fit to expand, say to a trio or a quartet, maybe just to record, get a few guests, or even permanently, ditching the duo which sometimes gets focused on more than the music. But few bands (dare we say, practically none) expand further than that, say from 2 members to THIRTY TWO! But that's exactly what The Body has done for All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood, their second proper full length in ages, one that marks ten years as a band, and more importantly, marks a serious sonic shift. No longer are they scrappy DIY punk rock noisemakers, setting their sites above and beyond, these guys have gone for it, meticulously crafting an album of extreme heaviness, of sonic mystery, haunting, and epic, metal for sure, even going so far as to include an actual 13 member choir, and not just for little random bits here and there, nearly seven minutes of the ten minute opening track, is just choir, lilting and angelic, lovely and otherworldly, only making the sudden shift from ethereal vocal harmony to crushing downtuned ultra doom all the more jarring. But the coolest part, is that the parts aren't clearly delineated. The choir continues on into the heaviness, so the howling churning crush, is peppered with gorgeous hymn like vocals, creating some sort of strangely liturgical sounding swirly sludge. And it's not just the vocals, there's saxophone, samples, piano, plenty of noise. And that pretty much sets the template for the whole record.
Besides the Assembly Of Light Choir, who are featured on almost every song here, the record also features Robert Lowe of Lichens offering up some additional vocals, not to mention the other 15 or 16 guests who contribute, beyond the core Body duo of drums, guitar, samples and vocals, a pretty crazy array of soundmakers, more vocals, saxophone, sousaphone, guitar, piano, keyboards, Moog, baritone saxophone and more drums. LOTS more drums. In fact, on the final track, "Lathspell I Name You" drummer Lee Buford is joined by EIGHT extra drummers!!! More on that in a moment.
The second track "A Curse" begins with a loping post rock beat, swirling synths, a melancholy melody, soaring chiming guitars, very moody and slow burning, before the band explodes into full doom, the sound shifts too, the crystalline clearness, becomes big and booming, the sound blown out, but more sort of warm and muted than in the red, the drums massive and pounding, while the guitars swirl in little chordal clouds, and the anguished vocals howl and wail, which gives way to "Empty Hearth", which sounds like some abstract experimental Swans style track, looped sample of what sounds like speaking in tongues, lurching mechanical crunch, glitched out electronics, shrieking vox, the whole song occasionally stuttering to a halt, as if the song was being remixed or was gloriously malfunctioning, there's also some awesome guttural throat singing, laced underneath the start stop, sample skitter, and super distorted bass buzz.
"Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss" starts with tarpit riffery and blurred hiss, strangely atmospheric, the drums skeletal but subtly mathy, the choir adding their gorgeous harmonies, an epic spiritual doom, tolling bells, everything dropping out, leaving just the booming drums, the shrieked vox, those bells, until a thick layer of low end washes over everything, and the track unwinds as some classic funereal doom.
"Song Of Sarin The Brave" begins all blown out and tangled up, sheets of feedback, huge heaving bursts of titanic metallic crunch, mysterious voices, finally the band launches into the song proper, and things get really weird, the drums stripped way down, the whole track slathered in strange murky blur and melting effects, while underneath, a strange sampled voice drifts, through clouds of other voices and mysterious sounds, totally creepy, and beautiful, and so mesmerizing, it goes on forever, and could have gone on way longer, but instead finishes off in a minute long blaze of shrieking black doom sludge crush.
"Ruiner" is another smoldering slow starter, haunting, downtuned minor key riffs ring out, doomic drums pound out a barely there rhythm, again, all underpinned by a strange staticky cloud of hiss and gauzy atmospheric hum, the track starting out super spare, but gradually growing more and more dense, more and more doomy, gathering momentum, not rhythmically so much as sonically, the progression laced subtly with strings and horns, little streaks of psychedelic guitars, until finally exploding into a lumbering dirge, the instruments blackened and crumbling, less riffy than a throbbing organic black buzz, pounding and pummeling before blinking out abruptly.
Which leads us to the final track, the 14 minute, multiple drummer-ed side long "Lathspell I Name You", a heaving, expansive ultra doom epic, a churning looped riff and some busy drumming start the track off, not doomy at all really, more noise rock or post rock, with some gorgeous folky melodies woven in, the choir offering up their lovely harmonies, but in this context, they sound less angelic and slightly demonic, locked into their own looped pattern mirroring, the motorik metal loop underneath, which gives way to a weirdly records, noise drum blowout, voices and instruments hissing and buzzing while a cacophony of drums pound and crash, mesmerizing and hypnotic, before the glacial chug resurfaces, along with the choir, and the band lock into a seriously slow motion, abrasive cathartic doom sludge crawl, the sound growing more and more blown out until every drum hit pegs the needles and distorts everything, making the sound that much more caustic and emotional and intense.
The roots of The Body's sound may be in doom or sludge, or even simply metal, but All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood has taken that sound so far beyond, transforming sludge and doom into something way more transcendent, way more difficult to immediately categorize, it's melodic, and poppy, and mathy, and drone-y, and electronic, and experimental, epic and majestic and mysterious, while somehow still remaining brutal, and pummeling and heavy as fuck. Fans of the usual suspects will probably dig this big time, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, Monarch, Nihill, Otesanek (in fact the liner notes read: "All Praise To Otesanek And Man Is The Bastard"), Eyehategod, Habsyll, Fleshpress, but be prepared to look beyond the realms of traditional doom, or of conventional heaviness, because The Body are anything but traditional or conventional, and All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood just might be the coolest, weirdest, most original doom record EVER.
Incredible packaging too, heavy vinyl (3 sided, the 4th side is blank), thick, gatefold sleeve, with some chillingly striking artwork, a printed 12" x 12" insert silver reflective ink printed on black cardstock, liner notes and lineup on one side, lyrics on the other...
Got this super limited tour cd-r from one of our favorite Chinese indie rock outfits Carsick Cars who were just here on tour. This 5 song disc collects a handful of singles tracks and alternate versions, including two of our recent favorite CSC jams, one being a version of maybe the best track from the recent 3 album, which found the group getting super poppy, and heavily influenced by that classic Flying Nun sound (due in no small part to the fact that New Zealand indie legend Hamish Kilgour helped record that record), along with the group's track from the recently reviewed split with Flavor Crystals, a jam that we described as being super bubbly, poppy and sunshiney, all fuzzy guitars, fuzzy melodies, an effervescent blast of power pop, crunchy and jangly in equal measure.
The opening track too, sounds straight out of eighties NZ, albeit with a little bit of modern sheen, but got Flying Nun nerds who miss that sound, holy cow, the fact that it's NZ by way of China only makes it that much more confusionally cool! "Shelter" is more stripped down, a dark jangly brooder, while "She Will Wait" adds some drum machine, and pushes the sound into a slightly shoegazier noise poppier direction, that definitely suits them.
A great introduction to the band for sure, and essential if like us, you're turning into a Carsick Cars completist. SUPER LIMITED cd-r, once we run out, will have to get more from China, so act fast or be prepared to be patient...
Cleveland's Cloud Nothings began life as fuzzy jangle poppers, but even in those early days, the group displayed a knack for not just crafting killer hooks, but also for being pretty adept and serious psychedelic noisiness and blown out bombast, which all came to a head with their most recent full length, Attack On Memory, which was way darker and noisier than anything that came before. If anything, this new one splits the difference, still heavily indebted to that classic nineties indie/college rock sound, Cloud Nothings make it their own, crafting noisy, poppy gems that slip easily from hooky, fuzzy crunch, to wild, blown out shoegaze noise rock pound. Opener "Now Hear In" sounds like something you could have heard on the radio back in the day, roughed up a bit and doused in distortion. Which when we think about it pretty much describes the whole record. If you love that sound, and as we've established by now, most of us do, then Here And Nowhere Else is about as good as it gets, a perfect approximation of that sound, but cranked to high heaven, rife with impossible hooks, raspy vocal howl, wild tangled of buzzy guitars, sheets of noisy distortion, wild chaotic drumming, some tracks slowing it down a bit, but even those seem to always eventually explode into full on frantic and frenetic noise rock blowouts, that like on Attack On Memory, often verge on total emo/screamo, and all with a bit of gothy, gloominess running throughout, which means fans of Interpol, Ceremony, Holograms, Iceage and the like will dig this too.
Closing track "I'm Not Part Of Me" might be the catchiest jam here - which is weird, cuz what band tucks their catchiest potential hit way at the end of a record? A band like Cloud Nothings with hooks and potential hits to spare!
We loved this the very first time we played it, but with every listen we dig this record more and more, and for the noise pop nerds around aQ, this is fast becoming a contender for our favorite record of the year! Definitely a Record Of The Week.
Every year on Record Store Day, there's inevitably a record from psychedelic space rockers Bardo Pond, and every year, it's SO limited, we barely get any, and thus there are a lot of disappointed BP fans. This year was more of the same, the number of Bardo Pond records once again fell woefully short of the demand (it didn't help that of the 30 we ordered, we got ONE). But this year at least, Bardo headz can console themselves with this sweet set of jams, a split that features on one side, Vapour Theories, aka the Gibbons brothers, they of the aforementioned 'Pond, and on the flipside, iconic guitarists Loren (sometimes 'Maazacane') Connors.
The Vapour Theories side, is a gorgeously druggy sprawl of smoldering psych, a bed of crystalline acoustic guitars, bristles quietly beneath thick, softly undulating sheets of blissful buzz, laced with blistering arcs of psych guitar swirl, and keening, aching, melodies, the whole thing gorgeously laid back, and washed out, a woozily wasted psychedelic dream jam that should most definitely hit the spot for fans of the Bardo Pond mothership.
The Loren Connors side manages to be both noisier, and more abstract, the sound much more raw and lo-fi, softly billowing clouds of static give way, to tangled little tendrils, buzzing melodies drifting through fields of hum and thrum, lots of space, a much darker, introspective psych, everything murky, and blurry, smeared chordal washes blossom into strange soft noise flurries, and just as quickly fade back into tranquil swirls and shimmers, and often into near silence, Connors' delicate guitarscapes hushed and haunting and ethereal, in fact much of the side requires headphones, or an extremely quiet listening environment, to truly apprecciate Connors' sweetly sublime, guitar psych ultraminimalism.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Pressed on random colored vinyl.
One of the few contemporary projects from the crate-digging local label Dark Entries, Cute Heels is the work of the Belgian electronic music Victor Lenis, with Spiritual being his first outing in a physical format. Squelchy, almost acid-like syncopations glide through each of these mid-tempo yet steroid-injected drum machine grooves that maintain a retro-garde pastiche of the Robert Gorl / Chrislo Haas productions of early D.A.F. / Liaisons Dangereuses and the darker moments of early Detroit techno, especially those Model 500 and Cybotron singles from the mid-'80s. Going through each of the tracks on Spiritual, one can pick out very specific homages in his jagged, industrially-minded productions. "Watch The Neon" and the title track cop the same angular, fetish-club funk that Front 242 barked on albums like Geometry and Official Version, where "Metal Disco" pops its limbs out of joint with the cyborg jitteriness of Chris & Cosey's Songs Of Love & Lust. While many of the Lenis' influences used these types of arrangements within the context of popsongs complete with vocals, lyrics, and ego, Spiritual is wholly instrumental leaving the electronics to speak through the blacklight and strobe-fired grids of rhythm and modulated step sequencing.
The trilogy is complete! The third and likely final volume of unearthed archival recordings from now-celebrated '70s Detroit rockers Death has now been released via Drag City. Who knew it was going to be a trilogy? Well of course it would have to be, what with Death being a trio of brothers. It's obviously another thing orchestrated from beyond the grave by Death's late mastermind, eldest brother David Hackney.
We probably don't have to explain the whole amazing story behind Death to you at this point - hopefully you've picked up one or both of the their other two full-length releases, and seen the really excellent and touching documentary film about them, A Band Called Death (you really should see it if you haven't!). But it's not just that Death is such a great story - it wouldn't matter as much if their music wasn't so killer, which it is.
So what did they find to fill up this third volume? With recordings done in 1975 and '76, some more from 1980, and one final cut from 1992, it's all over the place. You do definitely get another dose of Death's intense post-Hendrix, proto-punk - this is especially worth it for "North Street", full of hyper caffeinated drumming and living-in-the-ghetto lyrics. Totally could have been on the first Death album, For The Whole World To See. However, a lot of the rest of the material here wouldn't exactly rank among the "hardest" tracks that Death ever cut, much of it being more gentle and soulful, with sunshiney, R&B grooves. There's spacey psychedelic noodling, and even a track of almost country-folk balladry. But it's all pretty good, still possessing the mystical, out-there Death vibe for sure, if exhibiting a lot less of the punked out attack that caught everybody's attention in the first place. Really some of it's quite moving, particularly if you've seen the heartwarming movie, in which one of these songs previously was heard (the ballad "We're Gonna Make It").
We'd say Death newbies need For The Whole World first and foremost, but if you're a fan, you'll want this also.
What's release without tension? What if there's no real release, just an ongoing tension? Like you are hovering over a brink of a precipice but somehow knowing you are not going to fall and die you really get into the powerful momentum of floating fixed in space between the universal expanse above and the bottomless nothing below. That is how The Field (aka Axel Wilner) fashions his tightly edited minimal trance compositions on his Kompakt debut, From Here We Go Sublime. Like the best Kompact releases, from The Pop Ambient series to Wolfgang Voigt's Gas albums, The Field make the most out of nothing much at all. But what incredible nothings! The evolving repetitions of finely honed razor-sharp edits off of bits of samples, such as the vowel sounds of words, belied by rudimentary drum programming only occasionally reveal their source, including a bit of Lionel Ritchie's, "Hello" and The Flamingo's "I Only Have Eyes For You", more famously sampled by The Fugees. Dare we say it, This is sublime!
Of all the 2014 Record Store Day releases, this might have been one of the most exciting. The vinyl version is already gone, but we still have some of the cds set, which is cheaper anyway. French pianist Jef Gilson, whose 'best of' comp on Jazzman we raved about a while back, spent the end of the '60s traveling to Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, studying the indigenous music, and spreading his love of jazz, and in the process, recording with some of the locals, playing a bunch of shows, all of which resulted in three albums, all of those are included here, along with two more collections of previously released material from the same era, and needless to say, if you're a fan of ethno and spiritual jazz, this is some sort of crazy sonic holy grail. As always there's plenty in the liner notes about the history of Madagascar, and the life of Gilson, but even without the backstories, the music here is incredible, a little bit Ethiopiques, a little bit European free jazz, a little classic bop, dark and sultry and groovy, one of the records here doesn't even feature Gilson, and is a record he produced for some of the guys he played with in Madagascar, and that one is a doozy, the most distinctly African sounding, extended Afro jazz jams that are so heady and hypnotic, often more world music in fact than jazz, but the fusion is otherworldly, and had us wanting more more more. The final record features Byard Lancaster (Magma's Christian Vander was played with Gilson too, pre Magma), and might be the wildest, and freest of the bunch, a handful of the tracks untitled, discovered on old unlabeled tapes, but some of those are the best here, super inspired spiritual jazz that totally transcends, lots of flute (!!!!), some of the tracks blissed out and super spacey, others wild and chaotic, the live tracks on the final disc especially fiery and intense. The whole set is pretty stunning. Three and a half hours, all of it fantastic.
The discs are housed in a little box, each cd in its own sleeve, and accompanied by a big booklet with liner notes (in English and French) and loads of rare photos.
We quipped in the review of our very own Jim Haynes' last album that when he wasn't spending time behind the counter here at aQuarius recOrds that he must be holed up in some subterranean bunker. Apparently, that wasn't far from the mark, as his studio is actually a shipping container perched in the industrial wastelands of East Oakland. Yeah, that makes sense, though he does mention that he would happily switch to a subterranean bunker if one were available. It's a landscape of diesel fuel spills, empty expanses of asphalt, soil tainted with mercury, and the ever present the echo of gunshots. The Shudder Of Velocity is the latest album from Haynes, released by the tiny Portuguese imprint Noisendo who generated the very un-Haynes like collages of '60s pin-up model June Palmer gracing the cover instead of his signature mark-making through rust. The album opens with a tectonic rumble that snaps against tone-split frequencies and electro-shock drones all of which are scraped with these harsh pricks of noise that jettison from the speakers like bolts shaken loose from a perilous decent through the atmosphere in some shoddily build spacecraft right as the fuselage of said spacecraft is about to come apart at the seams. There may be some sort of landing in the future for that spacecraft; but Haynes does puncture a massive hole, whose implosion sends shockwaves throughout the remainder of the track. The woozy, sonar-bleep tone of the second track is ominously prescient of the lost signal from the black-box transponder never to be found from the Malaysian airplane that presumably crashed into the Indian Ocean in the early spring of this year. The smoldering frequencies of overlaid drones and radioactive crackle bury those tones, replacing them with the disembodied shortwave transmissions of detuned voices. Bright electrical hums from a chorale of fluorescent lights, discarded medical equipment, poorly grounded neon build with the smoldering intensity of Phill Niblock's psychoacoustic minimalism on the final track, coupled with slashing waves from bowed metals that lend an updated version to the classic acoustic clatter of Organum, all dappled with prickly textures, corroded atmospheres, and earthmover rumblings. Awesome. Limited to just 100 copies.
Been trying to review this for a while, but everyone kept selling out, the debut full length from these hardcore punks, their sound a furious, grinding frenzy of wild drumming, distorto rigging, and some seriously SICK vokills (and yeah, usually vokills are metal, but this guy could be doing time in a black/death metal band if he wanted), which make this sound seriously fucked up and frantic, the production massive, the guitars monstrous, and those vox, vitriolic and borderline disturbing. There's an intro here (penned by Phamakon!), which is all buzzing rumbles, and weird grinding industrial sounds, coughing and vocal grunts, all swirling and murky and extremely ominous, but once the record proper kicks in, it's a nonstop face melting crush. The sound's a bit sludge-y and crusty too, especially when they slow down into churning, lumbering tarpit dirgery, but i's never long before they explode into another frenzy of blasting pounding ferocity. And did we mention leads? Yep, the occasional burst of shredding lead guitars, angular and atonal, which are generally quickly swallowed up by another onslaught of hardcore pummel.
There are some weirdly melodic moments scattered throughout the record, and lots of surprisingly lush textures, some almost Godspeed-y slow builds, but those elements are less 'weird' and 'experimental', than just another facet of their sound, seamlessly woven into what is essentially some seriously crushing, classic metallic hardcore, that KILLS. Punk rock record of the year hands down. Even though it's from last year. But odds are you're not gonna hear a record this brutal and heavy and punk as fuck this year anyway, so there.
One of the most elaborately packaged punk rock records in recent memory too. A fold over full color jacket, with a super striking, dude-hanging-from-his-foot-from-a-tree cover image, and inside, SIX, that's right six, HUGE two sided posters!
One of two cassettes that we're listing from Serbian cassette / objet d'art label No Basement Is Deep Enough. This one comes by way of local wackadoodle Hora Flora (nee Raub Roy); and the tape itself is buried within a large knot of rope braided out of plastic bags that stands in as the ready made artwork. Annoying? Awesome? Stupid? Brilliant? Yes to all of the above. The two twenty minute pieces document one of Roy's sound installations that involve a series of simple aeolian harps constructed out of flexible bamboo rods and giftwrapping ribbon which resonates with all of the eerie harmonics of Egyptian reeds. The first side is a straight field recordings of these objects through a couple of well-placed condenser microphones that never get overblown by the wind itself, with the sounds of passing trucks and wind-chimes swirling around the constant raga-drone flutter from Roy's aeolian harp. The second side finds the objects recorded by contact microphones, offering less of the harmonic interplay and more of a dichotomy between death-knell rattlings and deep thrumming vibrations. This is one of those pieces that falls into the Fluxus category of sound research alongside the works of Gordon Monahan, Alvin Lucier, and George Macunias. We've got five of these; and it's VERY unlikely to be restocked.
We had never heard of House Of Lightning, but who can resist a sticker that says: Members of Floor, Cavity & Dove? Not us that's for sure. And we're guessing plenty of you as well. And it only took about 30 seconds to convince us that we were right to not resist. The Sound is immediately recognizable as that sort of Torche style sludge/pop heaviness, but if anything, HoL is way weird, simultaneously more punk, and MORE METAL. It's strange but the first song explodes into a punk rock gallop, before devolving into some classic metal riffery, plenty of chugs, and pick squeals, and double kick drumming, it's not hard to imagine some wailing air raid siren vocals, but instead, it gets all math metal, a churning, roiling sonic swirl. The second track too, is a weird mix of ethereal wispy vocals, draped over wild progged out drumming, and furious helicopter riffing, the song so intricate and mathy, at times it almost sounds like a wild chaotic jumble, that is until it all manages to fall perfectly into place, and those dreamy drifty vocals swoop back in, for some shoegazey metalpop, before once again, fracturing into some proggy tech-metal. Imagine Breadwinner or Don Caballero mixed with a little Cynic and a lot of Torche, sounds like a weird mix, and it is definitely pretty weird, but it sorta works. In fact as much as we love Torche, from what we've heard of the new one, House Of Lightning is WAY weirder and trippier and more experimental, and is pushing lots of our math metal and weirdo prog buttons, while remaining just poppy enough to be impossibly catchy, even amidst all this tangled weird time signatured freak out. And as you get deeper into the record, the sound get even more varied and twisted, at one point the sound gets all super melodic, the bass CRANKED so much so, that it's like the lead instrument, all the while, the rest of the band is spitting out metallic mathiness just beneath the surface, that bass resurfaces on the B side, as the sound gets briefly super doomy, before erupting into more noisepop-techmetal mayhem, catchy and crunchy, shredding and soaring.
Comes in a full color jacket, with a heavy printed inner sleeve. Pressed on clear green vinyl, but sadly no download, and thus, no sound samples.
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 must admit, we don't know too much about these mysterious local post-metallers. Here's what we do know: They're from San Francisco (we think?), this is their debut full length (maybe??), and they're called Ion (we're actually pretty sure about that one). Oh, and they play totally killer, frenzied, chaotic, hyperblasting post black metal. Ion are all about contrasts: Beautifully melancholic melodic riffs suddenly dissipate into a whirling disarray of dissonance. Frantic blast beats give way to wide open minimal spaciousness before becoming enveloped again in an avalanche of buzzing guitars and pummeling drums. The vocals alternate between anguished rasps and bellowed death metal growls. During their downtime, the songs may descend into disembodied shortwave ambience. Hushed acoustic guitars haunt the landscape. A full five minutes may go by spent on reverb soaked drifting sonic post-rock bliss, before the music erupts again into a wall-of-noise onslaught of rolling double bass and grinding guitars. The affect is certainly suffocating, overwhelming and emotionally draining, but also somehow sleek, postmodern and bleak, kind of bringing to mind Altar Of Plagues' last record that we loved so much around these parts. And although Ion are definitely melodic (even downright pretty) and certainly fit comfortably into the post-black metal spectrum, their music feels too technical and scatterbrained to stand right alongside bands like Alcest or Deafheaven (although there's no reason they won't appeal to fans of those bands). Instead their relentless approach, while still maintaining a constant ear for lush melody, recalls someone like Panopticon. Meanwhile the hints of Isis-style doom and prog-metal flirtation bring to mind bands like Vatnett Viskar or even a much less earthy Agalloch. It's one of our favorite things here at aQ when a local band we've never even heard of comes out of the blue with a release this good. We're thinking they won't be going unnoticed much longer!
Fifth record in less than a year, from legendary noisenik Stefan Jaworzyn, former member of Skullflower, Whitehouse, Ascension, Descension and head honcho of the legendary Shock label. After a self imposed hiatus, Jaworzyn has released more in the last few months than he has in the last decade, including two reissue/retrospectives, and now THREE proper new releases, and they've all been pretty great, all focusing on some seriously twisted modular synth wrangling and obtuse rhythmic soundscapery. The A side here is actually quite dreamy, in its own fucked up way, a synthscape for sure, but don't be expecting any of that kosmische bollocks everyone and their mother seem to be making these days, no Jaworzyn is crafting something much more tweaked, a layered creation that fuses a backdrop of what sounds like synthesized rainfall or maybe crickets, to a burbling percolating psychedelic swirls, and some seriously caustic, percussive punctuation, the sound super dynamic, hushed one second, blown out, and ultra distorted the next, those percussive thunks, nearly flipping the needle off the record, while the background sounds are wild little tangles of squiggly electronics, blurred into constantly shifting textures.
The flipside is like some alien transmission, being misinterpreted by an ancient computer, and being spat back out as a garbled squall of synthnoise. A bed of tense layered drones, pulses and undulates, gristly around the edges, laced with crackle and staticky hum, while over the top, clouds of melodic squiggles, and malfunctioning FX, swirl and flit wildly, the sonic equivalent to a jar of fireflies AND bees, shaken wildly, producing a seriously unstable reaction, a sonic cacophony, that ends up being surprisingly listenable, certainly maddening to the less iron eared, but for the rest of us, some seriously mesmerizing psychedelic synth trance out.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A few years back Italian free jazz / experimental outfit the Jooklo Duo, played a fantastic instore at aQ, while on tour in the US, playing exclusively on toy instruments, it was lovely, and super unique, playful and really special. Around the same time they played a woefully unattended show, at which they destroyed, a furious free jazz psychedelic freakout a la Brotzmann / Fushitsusha, drummer David Vanzan destroying his kit, brutal and punishing, measured and finessed in equal measure, whole saxophonist Virginia Genta wailed like a psych-jazz banshee. The tour cd-r we had briefly around that same time, was a blast of face melting psychedelic jazz crush, and as we mentioned at the time, about as heavy as 'free' music gets.
Well, Jooklo Duo are back in the US, playing a handful of shows, which should NOT be missed, and we managed to get a little handful of their tour only cd-r, limited to just 66 copies, and unlike the aural punishment of that previous disc, Live At Occii spends much of its time skittering and shuffling, the first four or five minutes sounds like a more free jazz No Neck Blues Band, a field of constantly in flux bleats and breathy flutters, over a bed of spare percussion, and loose abstract drumming, eventually the disc explodes into some serious free jazz intensity, both Genta and Vanzan sparring relentlessly, the horns dropping out, for a long stretch of wild percussion, which is soon joined by wild vocals reminiscent of Art Ensemble at their very wildest, and over the next 20 minutes or so, the sound veers wildly from tangled free jazz bleat, to dizzying drum solos and octopoidal percussion workouts, they even manage to infuse some groove here and there, not to mention some Borbetomagus worthy skronk, the vibe and intensity super energetic, and extremely psychedelic, dynamic to the point of exhaustion, perfectly capture what made them so mind blowing at that previously mentioned show. Killer!
And again, this is SUPER LIMITED. Only 66 made, each one hand numbered, housed in a mini plastic case with printed covers and inserts, only available from the band on tour, or from aQ, while they last...
One would usually never align The Beach Boys with early freak folk, but then this strange and lovely oddity suddenly emerges out of nowhere and all kinds of links can be made. Stephen John Kalinich was (and still is) a poet and songwriter who with the help of Lindsey Buckingham in a project called Zarathurstra and Thelibus cut a demo of "Leaves of Grass" inspired by the Walt Whitman poem. Moving to LA in the mid-sixties, he met the Wilson brothers and based on the strength of the demo was signed as the first artist on their newly formed Brother Records imprint. He co-wrote songs mainly with Dennis such as "Little Bird" and "Be Still" from the Friends album (one of our Beach Boys favorites) as well as songs from the recently reissued "Pacific Ocean Blue". "A World Of Peace Must Come" was to be his debut release. Recorded by Brian Wilson at Brian's house in 1969, the tapes were immediately lost and never heard from since... until now. The production is not what you might expect from Brian Wilson, instead these are beautiful lo-fi recordings of beat-like impressionistic poetry and song, backed by simple arrangements of acoustic guitars, field recordings and tablas, with bits of dialogue between Brian and Stephen interspersed. One can't help but be reminded of the Jewelled Antler collective's foresty acoustics when listening to tracks like "The Deer, The Elk, The Raven". Or the gentle spoken word psych of Bobby Brown. Like Eden Ahbez was to Nat King Cole, Kalinich was a strange visionary figure in the Wilson's lives, and this is a fascinating document of their relationship, and an interesting curio of The Beach Boys in their peak era. Now if someone would only reissue that American Spring album........
For those mourning the recent passing of creeping doom sludge lords Khanate, we've got the next best thing. In fact in some ways, it might almost be the next -better- thing. Khanate low-end technician James Plotkin suddenly jumped ship only to start up this dour little duo with Runhild Gammelsaeter, the Nordic goddess you might remember as the vocalist for bleak black/doom metal outfit Thorr's Hammer.
On first listen, Khlyst sounds remarkably like Khanate, huge sluggish low end doom, a thick glacial sludgey plod, while over the top a shrieking, impossibly guttural mewling howl, like a demon clearing her throat or a hysterical cheerleader possessed by the devil and spewing impossible foulness. But even at their most Khanate, Khlyst ends up sounding just a whole lot weirder. Instead of downtuned riffage, the guitars are twisted and processed into strange slippery licks, drenched in chorus and phaser, like some sort of alien guitar synth, sputtering and stumbling, a jagged series of noodly little six string blasts, fragmented metallic chunks, over ultra dense tangles of free jazz drum splatter, everything thick with buzzy guitars and ominous ambience. A super freaked out, utterly demented psychedelic doom sludge stretched and twisted into a sputtering spastic black buzz, pelted with bits of prog and wrapped in thick layers of damaged drone.
Elsewhere, the duo, stretch out into hauntingly blissful soundscapes constructed from processed vocals, swirling billows of reverb, echoey guitar shimmer, almost like a creepier Grouper. Drifty and hauntingly lovely. And sometimes the rhythmic furor builds into a vortex of impossibly dense drumming, over thick swaths of low end drone, with growling panting Diamanda-like vocalisations struggle breathlessly over the top. Like some sort of demonic sludge jazz drum solo torture session.
Imagine weirdo black metallers Rehtaf Ruo crossed with UK doomlords Moss, featuring Buddy Rich and Rashied Ali on dueling drums, and a vocalist one part Bathtub Shitter, one part Kevin Sharp from Brutal Truth and one part Dani Filth from Cradle Of Filth, the whole thing recorded by Lustmord.
Bleak and blackened, squirming and slithery, shivering and stumbling. An epic and deranged slab of ultra-ambient-doom-prog-drone-sludge splendor.
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First there was Death Waltz, then Waxwork, and now One Way Static throws their bloodied and battered hat into the horror soundtrack vinyl reissue ring, with their reissue of David Hess's soundtrack to Wes Craven's depraved exploitation classic Last House On The Left. We listed this on last week's special horror soundtrack vinyl in-between list, but figured we'd list it proper again this week.
Composer David Hess has an interesting history, having recorded the original version of "All Shook Up", before Elvis Presley's version became a number one hit just a year later. But Hess ended up writing songs for Presley, as well as Pat Boone, eventually ending up an A&R man, before finally becoming an actor / writer / director, although for us, he'll always be the serial killer and gang leader in Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, although the strangest part of this whole story, and this soundtrack in particular, is that not only did Hess star in the movie, he also composed and performed all the music! Even stranger, is that the songs are folky and poppy, and weirdly catchy and upbeat, a strangely lovely contrast to the horrific images on screen, a legendarily stomach churning display of depravity and ultraviolence, much of it perpetrated by Hess himself!! There are moments of abstract experimentation, and weird studio FX, but for the most part, the score consists mostly of groovy seventies folk, fuzzed out psychedelia, strummy, sunshiney pop ballads, funky almost Blaxploitation sounding wah guitar workouts, and yeah, the occasional bit of synthy weirdness or brooding ambience.
The packaging is super swank as well, deluxe tip-on style gatefold jackets, with printed inner sleeves, no doubt Death Waltz fans (and Waxwork fans too) will dig big time! Note, this is also eventually coming out on as a limited edition digipack cd, with 4 bonus tracks. Both formats include extensive liner notes and photos.
Finally! New music from these aQ faves, Megaton Leviathan Northwestern masters of psychedelic doom, or doomgaze, or, well not sure what we should call it now. When we made their Water Wealth Hell On Earth album an aQuarius Record Of The Week, their sound was definitely doom, like doom with MANY oooooo's, but even then it was blurry and washed out and super psychedelic, and at times, barely even metal. Which is where this new one lands for sure. It's definitely heavy, but it's more spacey, and droney and dreamy, two epic songs per side, the first more of a slowcore shoegaze blissout, slow, but not a doomy crawl, just sort of mesmerizingly hypnotically midtempo, the guitars warm and billowy, the vocals whispery and washed out, almost like another layer of drone, the whole thing a dreamy dirge that really could go on forever. Gorgeously tranced out psych-doom bliss of the highest order. There are strings too, courtesy of Amber Asylum's Kris Force, which just adds to the epicness and spaciousness, fans of Godspeed and all who sail with her, if you've yet to discover Megaton Leviathan, now is the time, and this is the record, er, tape. Soaring, slow building musical majesty. Henry Barnes from Amps For Christ contributes sitar and 'oscillations', again, adding to the trancey raga-like mesmer of the songs.
The B side is a bit more doomy, but only a bit, the heavy downtuned churn is blurred into extended chordal streaks, and hazy black ambience, the sound on the B side hews closer to the minimal dub-doom of OM, fans of that band will flip for these guys too, the same sort of lumbering, minimal, metallic crush, but here, wreathed in swirls of effects, constantly shifting atmospheres and textures, laced with minor key melancholic melodies, pulsing, undulating until the momentum begins to ebb, leaving just a field of abstract chug, clouds of cymbal shimmer, only then to blossom into something even heavier, a murky death march plod, the bass and guitar impossibly distorted, the drums a rib cage rattling crush, locked into Gore-like minimal-metal mesmer, before exploding again, into some serious psych-doom drift, replete with FX heavy guitars and angelic female vocals.
The tape finishes off with maybe the oddest of the bunch, a sort of slowcore psych folk ballad, all clean guitars and crooned vocals, still plenty murky and druggy, and HEAVY, even sans metallic heft. Only on tape for now, but rumors of more formats in the future. For now, this is extremely limited, nice full color printed J-cards and green cases, sadly, no download.
Folk-psych fans, 'tis time to gambol in the old oak tree grove at dusk, wander the windy moors, or perhaps sit by a fire, recounting sad tales of ancient times. Because those are the vibes of the perfectly named Midwinter - bleak and beautiful - an obscure underground '70s British acid-folk outfit whose 1973 demo recordings are collected on this disc (they never released an actual album, though they did later morph into the band Stone Angel, whose privately-pressed lp from '75 is another English folk-psych gem). So this should sound good to anyone into Stone Angel or others of that ilk: Mellow Candle, Trees, Caedemon, Shide & Acorn, Parameter, etc., not to mention better known hippie Brit-folkies like Fairport Convention and Pentangle.
Midwinter's music is nicely melancholic, tweeness balanced by darkness, with folk instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, recorder, autoharp, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo, jews harp, and hand percussion joined by occasional lashings of distorted electric guitar. There's a female vocalist with a lovely lilting voice, singing lyrics seemingly passed down over many dusty centuries. Meanwhile, the male vocals remind us a bit of the wonderful Roy Harper. They do an especially haunting rendition of "Scarborough Fair", alongside other traditional numbers as well as those written by Midwinter, all quite nice and evocative.
'Twas previously released on cd in the early '90s on the Kissing Spell label, by the way, with a different cover. This disc also includes two bonus tracks taken from Midwinter/Stone Angel frontman Ken Saul's solo single, circa 1970. And there's plentiful liner notes.
Another Record Store Day exclusive, and one of the few we had enough (maybe) copies of after the big day, to list and review, for all our beloved aQ-ers who live far and wide. And it's a good one. Matching up Jenks Miller, he of big time aQ faves Horseback, and James Toth, of Wooden Wand, and once again, as with recent Horseback joints, Miller continues to confound, pushing his sound in whole new directions, moving ever further from the blackdrone creep of those early HB records. After a brief bit of psychedelic blooze drift, Miller launches into some organ driven, super distorted twang flecked post rock, all grizzled melodies, motorik rhythms, swirling FX, still pretty bluesy, but a sort of minor key psych blues, which is even more surprising when the vocals come in, a softly distorted croon, transforming the sound into something like a more metallic, more psychedelic Sparklehorse maybe? Not a bad thing at all. The final track from Miller name checks Roy Montgomery in the title, and sonically is essentially an homage, a sky full of layered, pulsing guitars, looped into slow shifting shimmers, and smeared chordal swirls, before disappearing into a cloud of dreamy distortion, and adding some subtle propulsion, the second half a gorgeous, fuzzy, druggy, droned out psychedelic drift. So good!
Toth's side is much more stripped down, acoustic guitars wedded to wheezing harmoniums, and strange clattery percussion off in the background, a woozy campfire drone-folk that's quite lovely. And while the vibe is abstract and spacey, the vocals bring it back down to earth, transforming it into more of a dark Appalachian psych folk, but the minute the vocals fade out, the song seems to soar skyward once again. The other two tracks are shorter, and less abstract/experimental, the first, more psych folk, the second like some lost Laurel Canyon classic folk-rock B-side, right down to the female back up vox.
SUPER LIMITED, as in these are likely the very last copies we'll see, so you know the drill. Also includes a download code, and comes housed in a handsome full color, matte finish gatefold jacket.
This fantastically frosty bit of glacial electronic ambient drift comes from the strangely named Monolyth & Cobalt, a French sound artist who finds himself right at home on local label Time Released Sound, his guitar flecked chordal swells, and hushed ambient atmospheres a perfect fit alongside the other ambient alchemists in TRS's stable.
Fans of the 'Time Released SOUND', will be in heaven, as M&C effortlessly conjures up softly heaving swells of gristly thrum, pocked with subtle bits of glitch, and laced with flickering fields of crystalline guitar, all wreathed in clouds of softly swirling shimmer, the sound in constant flux - lush and billowy one second, a barely there whisper the next, some tracks are darkly cinematic, fields of moaning low end beneath weightless melodies and abstract anti-rhythms, others are more ethereal and electronic, sun dappled sprawls of pastoral electronic flecked drone/drift mesmer. Some tracks seem to blossom into Sunroof! like psychedelic ragas, all prismatic and kaleidoscopic, while still others erupt into grinding, lurching rhythms, but even then, those rhythms are pulled apart and recontextualized into something much more tripped out and free form, subtle and minimal, everything eventually blurring and smearing into strangely lovely electro-psych-folk ambience and neo-classical chamber-drone polar drift. All quite lovely, haunting and hypnotic.
Like all TRS releases, there are two version, the standard, which is limited to 150 copies, and is housed in a nice full color digipak, and the deluxe, which is limited to just 70 COPIES, and in this case finds the disc housed in an antique metal 16mm film canister, each one hand labeled, collaged and stamped, inside the canister are 10 round, hi-res photos of the polar ice caps, two attached to the inside of the canister, the others hand sewn into an accordion like booklet. Each one hand made and totally unique. Fantastic!
This fantastically frosty bit of glacial electronic ambient drift comes from the strangely named Monolyth & Cobalt, a French sound artist who finds himself right at home on local label Time Released Sound, his guitar flecked chordal swells, and hushed ambient atmospheres a perfect fit alongside the other ambient alchemists in TRS's stable.
Fans of the 'Time Released SOUND', will be in heaven, as M&C effortlessly conjures up softly heaving swells of gristly thrum, pocked with subtle bits of glitch, and laced with flickering fields of crystalline guitar, all wreathed in clouds of softly swirling shimmer, the sound in constant flux - lush and billowy one second, a barely there whisper the next, some tracks are darkly cinematic, fields of moaning low end beneath weightless melodies and abstract anti-rhythms, others are more ethereal and electronic, sun dappled sprawls of pastoral electronic flecked drone/drift mesmer. Some tracks seem to blossom into Sunroof! like psychedelic ragas, all prismatic and kaleidoscopic, while still others erupt into grinding, lurching rhythms, but even then, those rhythms are pulled apart and recontextualized into something much more tripped out and free form, subtle and minimal, everything eventually blurring and smearing into strangely lovely electro-psych-folk ambience and neo-classical chamber-drone polar drift. All quite lovely, haunting and hypnotic.
Like all TRS releases, there are two version, the standard, which is limited to 150 copies, and is housed in a nice full color digipak, and the deluxe, which is limited to just 70 COPIES, and in this case finds the disc housed in an antique metal 16mm film canister, each one hand labeled, collaged and stamped, inside the canister are 10 round, hi-res photos of the polar ice caps, two attached to the inside of the canister, the others hand sewn into an accordion like booklet. Each one hand made and totally unique. Fantastic!
This excellent collection of early Roy Montgomery material gets the limited vinyl treatment courtesy of Yellow Electric, the imprint run by Liz Harris, aka Grouper. Originally released on cd in 1999 on Drunken Fish, this album documents the more vocal-centric output of Roy Montgomery's early solo work after leaving New Zealand and setting up temporary residence in New York (the address of the title is where most of these tracks were recorded.)
"Then those little Yankee microlabels put them out and they floated to the top of the seven-inch glut, and we drank 'em down, and bought 'em up, and traded 'em for foolish amounts of money after they sold out." This quote, from the liner notes, perfectly describes the near constant stream of Roy Montgomery singles which seemed to be coming out every week in 1995 - 1996. This very prolific period of Roy Montgomery's career follows the shift in his aesthetic from the post-Velvets/Joy Division/Wire strum of his early days with Dadamah, The Pin Group and The Shallows (whose only single begins this collection) to his current soaring, guitar reverb space-rock mantras. Aside from the convenient consolidation of all of these out-of-print singles, this really is some of his best material. Also contains four previously-unreleased tracks (Also on the cd btw), along with guests including Bill Direen and Barbara Manning, as well as some awesome covers of Wire ("Used To") and The Victor Dimisich Band ("It's Cold Outside").
Regular readers of the aQ list no doubt know by now, how obsessed we are with Obnox, aka Lamont Thomas, drummer for psychedelic noise rockers Puffy Areolas, who on his own, has been kicking out jam after jam, a body of warped, distortion drenched soul infused garage punk that is quickly eclipsing that of the Areolas mothership. Due in part to the relentless release schedule for sure, about a million records in the last year, but also, there's just something about Thomas' solo stuff, noisy and weird as fuck, home brewed and constantly on the verge of collapse, but also impossibly catchy, twisted idiosyncratic noise pop / garage rock, that doesn't shy away from slipping into blown out hip hop / punk hybrids, or delivering some straight up fuzz pop, or some wah wah guitar dosed soul punk, a sound that combines the noisiness and psychedelia of PA, with something much more personal and WTF?!
The opening one two punch here, "Prime Time Sista", might be the catchiest Obnox jam yet - fuzzy, dirgey, noisy, heavy, a little druggy droniness, a little stonery swagger, but melodies galore, and a hook / chorus most bands would kill for. But then comes "Molecule" which sounds like a garage punk Cypress Hill, all staccato groove, FX heavy wah guitar, almost rapped vox, but noisy as fuck and super lo-fi. imagine Rage Against The Machine covered by Rusted Shut! That fucked up, that weird, and that cool. And on it goes, the record veering wildly from jams like "Raindrops", another blast of fuzzed out garage pop bliss, this time rife with some super dramatic over the top vox, to tracks like "How To Rob (The Punk Years)" which is straight up lo-fi punk rock hip hop, and in between, all stripes of fuzzy punk, groovy noisy psychedelia, funk flecked garage rock, shredding epic jammage, short sharp punk-buzz stomp and distorted soulful ballads. Check out closer "Feeling Real Black Today", a distorted soul-punk dirge/ballad, that sounds like it could have come off that killer Forge Your Own Chains comp. Fuck yeah. Best Obnox yet for sure, every record he just keeps getting better and better...
Includes a download code too!
It seems like the demise of SF's favorite garage rockers has been greatly exaggerated, considering there's now this, a brand new record, and the fact that the band are about to embark on another massive tour. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief, save our mourning for some future date, and for now, can revel in yet another blast of garage pop brilliance from John Dwyer and company, whose latest, Drop, is as we might have predicted, a doozy!
After a brief bit of percolating synth shimmer, which had us thinking that maybe Dwyer's solo record as Damaged Bug might have bled over into his main project, the song explodes into what might be the heaviest hookiest jam yet from these guys, but fuzzed out guitars, swirling sci-fi synths, almost stonery and spacey and psychedelic sounding, but as always rife with melodies and hooks galore. And from there on out, it's just classic Oh Sees, fuzzy, jangly, hooky, albeit with a bit more synth than we remember (seems like maybe that whole Damaged Bug thing did have an effect on Thee Oh Sees!), "Encrypted Bounce" adds wild tangled angular guitars, and squiggly synth shimmer, to a stripped down garage groove, as does "Savage Victory", all spaced out and laced with strange sound effects, big blurts of fuzz guitar crunch, all trippy, and very psychedelic, with fields of swirling backwards guitars and affected noisescapes, that experimental noisiness all over Drop, the band crafting some of their catchiest music yet, but then going hogwild on the psychedelia, creating a sound that's at once totally beholden to the classics, but all tangled up and twisted into new, weird, far out shapes, and Dwyer not shying away from whatever the fuck he wants to do, whether it's the strange horn blurts on "Put Some Reverb On My Brother", the almost Redd Kross sounding sixties buzz pop of the title track, the lysergic Beatles-esque baroque pop of "King's Nose", or the synth heavy shoegaze trip out of "Transparent World". And yet, it all remains distinctly Thee Oh Sees. And we say it every time, but this really might be the best record yet from these guys, and if it really is the last one, what a way to go. But here's hoping, that even with Dwyer's move down south, they can keep this going, cuz we're already playing this to death, and already looking forward to more...
Only on cd for now, lp repress coming soon!
Here's full length number three from this Michigan retro garage psych crew, and with every record these guys seem to travel further and further into the past, or more specifically, manage to sound even more like they're from 1965, or maybe some other musical universe, where time simply ground to a halt about 50 years ago. But we're not complaining, People's Temple and their musical time capsule offer up some seriously heady, psychedelic garage blooze, lots of fuzzed out reverb, extended spacey jams, wild drumming, swaggery Stones-y, Stooges-y crunch, tripped out retro rock jams, but mixed with plenty of unlikely sonic detours, some classic almost fifties sounding balladry, some seriously lovely Beach Boys-esque harmonies (check out "I Don't Mind (Prelude)"), some furious hard rock shreddery and even some twisted classic rockisms, but all of that stuff is woven seamlessly into what is essentially, a lost sixties hard psych classic, channeled via modern musical shamans, the sort of record that if you didn't know it was new, you'd be hard pressed to NOT think it was actually some sort of reissue. All that aside, the sound is killer, the songs are great, and we find ourselves wanting to listen to little else...
Doomheads rejoice (slowly and mournfully of course), because Rhode Island's most sluggish misery wizards have slithered forth once more from their crumbling Victorian mansion, suffocated and overgrown with ivy (we assume), to deliver their second crushing heap of cavernous ominous DOOM. Void Worship is an album full of oily gothic horror, adorned with creeping Vincent Price melodies that seem to creak like a haunted shadowy staircase. The songs crawl and lurch like a sick and dying leviathan - occasional lush guitar harmonies peaking through, providing momentary glimmers of sunlight, before being swallowed again by the looming grey stormclouds. The drums are a dreary inevitable plod that almost seem to slow down the more the songs progress, giving the sense that the music is buckling and collapsing under its own insurmountable weight. The vocals of The Wizard (yeah, that's his name) are dramatic and theatrical, looming like a silhouetted specter, bringing to mind some of doom metal's more expressive frontmen like Albert Witchfinder from Reverend Bizarre or Robert Lowe of Solitude Aeturnus. His voice is drenched in reverb and somewhat buried in the mix, sounding ghostly and distant yet also proud and direct, as if he were conjuring sad spirits with arcane regretful spells! The extended instrumental passages where his voice disappears entirely (four of the eight tracks on this record are entirely instrumental) only add to the fleeting mystery of his presence. There are some more uptempo moments, like the dusty graveyard boogie of "The Paladin", but for the most part this is an album of lamenting Lovecraftian bleakness in the tradition of early Warning or Pallbearer, the music moving carefully through the shadows like something from Nosferatu. Light those skull candles, draw those purple velvet curtains, and adorn yourself in your finest ceremonial robe - the time has come to give yourself over to the void!
We missed out on Pure X's second album Crawling Up the Stairs, but the band has taken on some major shifts in sound since 2011's Pleasure. Angel finds the band less brooding and more summery, really delving into the sounds that made seventies soft-rock such a guilty pleasure, but at least Pure X has the musicianship and production to really deliver the goods. Opener, "Starlight", could easily have been a lost track by America or even, Seals and Croft, but Pure X redeems the sound by really focusing on the breezy effervescent pop hooks and falsetto vocal harmonies and steering clear of the cokey yacht rock indulgence. The songs continue in this infectious vein, crafting beautiful pop confections from the nostalgic ashes of Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys in their best moments, putting their own unique atmospheric ambiance and song craft on them. Summer Breeze indeed!
The return of bedroom psych rockers Purling Hiss, who we've long been sorta obsessed with, in fact we made PH's Public Service Announcement lp our Record Of the Week back in 2010. And really it's not so much a return, since this is not a new record, but is in fact a vinyl reissue of a super limited cd-r, released in an edition of 50 copies way back in 2006 (and reissued on tape in 2011 with some extra tracks). The interesting thing is that for some reason, we thought the other Purling Hiss records, including our favorite, Public Service Announcement, were more recent, but Public Service Announcement was recorded just a year after this one, so if you dug that record or any of the Purling Hiss records, as much as us, then you're gonna want this one too.
It's the same mix of 4-track home brewed loner psych folk, and fuzzed out psychedelic power pop, with most of the tracks landing somewhere right in between. "She Don't Mind" is all hushed strummy loner pop, but then the sound blossoms into the hard rocking psych fuzz of "Icelator", which barring the low fidelity, sounds like it could be some lost seventies power pop lost classic, replete with groovy leads, aching vocals, and a killer main hook and bad ass chorus. From there on out, the sound shifts constantly, from the blown out noise drenched lilting dirge pop of "Digh High" to the strummy, lo-fi Yellow Pills fuzz and crunch of "Sifting Through My Hands". And so it goes, the B side is chockablock with buzz and jangle, warped noisiness, soaring melodies, lilting psych folk ballads, groovy garage rock, and some seriously and impossibly classic sounding songsmithery.
Sadly, no download code, and thus, no sound samples. But trust us, if you dig any/all of the other Purling Hiss records, you're gonna LOVE this one too!
Debut release from this local all girl garage pop combo. A killer mix of classic nineties style jangle pop and more frantic punk rock, reminiscent of classic Riot Grrl for sure, especially when the band bust out and get super rocking, the ultra distinctive vocals definitely harken back to Corin Tucker's more feral wail in the early days, the music, by turns super minimal and stripped down, jangly and melodic, furious and fuzzed out, complete with some almost Greg Ginn like angular guitar leads, check out the first two tracks to get a feel for the two sides of Quaaludes, the opener, "Blood On The Ice", sounds like some classic K Records releases from back in the day, broody, strummy verses giving way to stomping, fiery choruses, while "Call You Up" is a sweaty, snarly blast of raw girlpunk energy, beholden to classic punk rock, but filtered through the sound of current garage poppers. And so it goes, the group splitting their time between raw punk rock energy and almost dreamy poppiness, the best moments, when the two are crammed together into dizzyingly, and fantastically schizophrenic blasts of furious, wildly energetic jangle punk ("Mistake", "I Don't Care", "Stiff Little Single").
Fans of Heavens To Betsy, Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, will dig big time, and at times will feel like it's 1991 all over again, but folks who dig current outfits like Grass Widow, Brilliant Colors, Brave Irene, Super Wild Horses and the like should check this out too!
One of our favorite 2014 RSD releases was this incredible collection of Alexander Robotnick rareties by the always reliable Medical Records, and thankfully we've still got a few left...
Robotnick was an early purveyor of Italo-disco and electro, crafting some of the most infectious dance grooves of the early eighties. Sexy, exuberant and at times wonderfully sleazy, Robotnick's productions mixed the best of disco, electro and euro-minimal wave into a hybrid of sublime movement and groove. Opening with the extended single, "I Wanna Believe" released under the moniker of Gina & The Flexix in 1985, we're taken on a freaky journey through the nightclubs of Europe, basking in the glowing energy of the dancefloor as well as loitering in their darkest corners where anything could happen. So good! Mutant disco freaks, the line starts here!
Saaad is a French duo with a small catalogue of mostly digital-only releases, and Deep/Float is quite a feather in their cap, as not only their first piece of vinyl but also an album released by the tastemaking imprint Hands In The Dark, who have previously put out records by the likes of Death & Vanilla, Robedoor, Cankun, and Ensemble Economique. Saaad are probably selling themselves short with their lackluster name which might come across as a mere mnemonic shorthand for any given ambient project over the past 30 years. Within the album, cinematic vapor trails course through these blurred ambient orchestrations, that could easily draw comparisons to the dreamy dreamtime sounds of A Winged Victory For The Sullen or the psychonaut introspection of Tangerine Dream or even the more industrially minded rumblings of Troum. These thick, immersive arrangements for synths and reverb hinge on simple melodies that flicker through head-swimmingly dense accretions of echo upon delay upon reverb upon more echo, delay, and reverb. The elliptical melodies require a considerable amount of space to articulate themselves with all of the ghostly haziness, making one melodic phrase appear like carlights in a nighttime fog, becoming blindingly obvious only to dissolve into an inky blackness. Not surprisingly, Saaad's pacing is suitably slow and creeping, but the darkness of their tones is hardly ominous. Theirs is a sound that envelops and soothes. This feeling is emblematic of the majestic stasis of "New Helicon" which has all of the forest-borne transmission of the pure ambient tracks on those stately Gas albums. "Valley Of Quartz" sparkles with twinkling trills that lace the gaseous arcs of what could be the ion-engine hums from alien rocket ships accelerating through a deep space nebula. The album's finale "After Love" is a bleak funereal ambient dirge with Caretakerish melody slowly descending into the event horizon of a black hole. Sounds to tug at your heart strings; and limited to 300 copies!
Remember the movie 2000 Maniacs? Where tourists are lured to a small Southern town and are forced to participate in 'games' that are essentially elaborate and ultra gory (and quite inventive) excuses for extreme torture that ultimately lead to their deaths. Or howabout the sixties biker classic Easy Rider? The ultimate drugged out hippie motorcycle road movie. Or maybe the seventies British horror flick Psychomania, about psychopathic suicidal bikers who make a pact with the devil, kill themselves and return from the dead to terrorize the squares? So now, imagine some crazed, druggy, doomy, psychedelic, psychotropic, head spinning mix of all three, and Satan's Satyrs are pretty much the perfect house band. Similarly, Die Screaming is essentially the soundtrack to the above, some impossibly insane, low budget, blood drenched, exploitation-splatter Z-grade alien biker undead epic. The opening track "Thumper's Theme" is uncharacteristically upbeat, but you can almost imagine this fuzzed out organ fueled jam playing beneath the credits as a porky, leather vested biker, presumably "Thumper" rolls into town, as the townsfolk lock their doors and lower their blinds, all to the strains of fuzzed out distorto riffage, wheezing organ, tumbling toms, all a little bit surfy, infused with just a bit of sonic swagger. But it's on "Instruments Of Hellfire" where things get really good, or perhaps bad if you're one of those innocent bystanders, wild squiggly psychedelic leads over blown out Stooges-y metallic garage punk pound, plenty of wild wah wah guitars, totally tripped out, and when the vocals swoop in, totally whiney, high pitched, and echo drenched, somewhere between a young Ozzy, and a more unhinged hysterical version of Uncle Acid, and in fact, Uncle Acid fans should be ALL over this. It's like a more raw and primitive take on the same sort of seventies psychedelic hard rock, but with SS, it all sounds so much more desperate and unhinged, frantic and dangerous. Oh and then out of nowhere, in comes a barrage of bongos and hand percussion, that gives the sound a little bit of a Goat vibe, but only for like 10 seconds, and then it's right back into another, lurching, lumbering psych-doom garage rock blowout.
Apparently UK doomlords Electric Wizard are huge fans, which makes sense, as they share much of the same sonic DNA, a similar psych-doom bent, and the same obsession with exploitation movies, horror flicks from the sixties and seventies, SS's jams even more that EW's evoking rubber suited beasties, blood spurting ultra violence, greasy bikers and bodacious bikini babes, if it's possible for a 'sound' to be greasy, and filthy, dirty and caked in dried blood, well, Die Screaming is as filthy, bloody and lysergic as it gets. And stick around for the sprawling creepfest closer, the 12+ minute title track, which is a drugged out doom crawl: over a bed of whirring organs, SS unfurl a lumbering dirge, a wasted psychedelic downer rock sprawl, that explodes in the last few minutes into a final, frenzied blast of heavy-horror biker rock crush that KILLS!!!
All that, and then when you add in the blood dripping logo, and melting skull cover art, it's pretty much a guaranteed aQ Record Of The Week! YOU WILL DIE SCREAMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you ever wish classic hardcore was more, well, you know... Satanic? Well, then this is for you. A tribute/homage to legendary straight edge hardcore heroes Minor Threat, with those short/sharp paeans to punk purity reimagined as something much more sinister, transformed into blasts of blurred sonic blasphemy, but really, as usual, we were sold before we heard a single note. The original black sheep / Out Of Step cover art, here features the black sheep as an evil black ram with glowing red eyes, retitled In To Hell, with a printed sticker price of $6.66 (of course), and song titles like "Guilty Of Hating Christ" (original: "Guilty Of Being White"), "Satanic Threat", "Small God, Big Cross" (original: "Small Man, Big Mouth"), "Cursing At The Cross" (original: "Screaming At A Wall"), you get the drift.
The back cover is also adorned with a super metal looking Jesus, tongue out, flashing the devil horns, upside down cross in hand, stigmata dripping blood, what's not to love? But don't be expecting super metallized version of hardcore songs, other than the new lyrics, the sound here is straight up old school hardcore, furious and frenzied pissed off and punk as fuck, yowled vox over blasting, galloping hardcore heaviness, just way less positive, and WAY MORE EVIL! The super short album proper is filled out by a live show, with mostly the same songs, this time including ST's version of "Steppin' Stone" (which Monor Threat also famously covered), as well as some pretty hilarious stage banter, and plenty of excellent heckling!
Of all of this year's crop of Record Store Day releases, this is one of 'em that we were probably most excited to hear about - in fact, did you see our blurb in (of all places) Entertainment Weekly, for their Record Store Day feature? They asked Andee for his two RSD picks, he chose this and (naturally) the A Minor Forest reissues.
So, Rock, Rot & Rule, if you don't know, was originally a cd released years and years ago. It's an old aQ favorite. The cd's out of print, but someone got the great idea to do (red colored) vinyl for Record Store Day, yay.
The story goes something like this: "Rock, Rot, & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler" is supposedly a 98 page book which simply lists band names and states whether these groups ROCK, RULE, or ROT. Published with a cover price of $25.00, it is the brainchild of one Ronald Thomas Clontle. This record documents a live radio interview between WFMU DJ Tom Scharpling and Mr. Clontle, in which irate, exasperated callers attempt to argue the inaccuracies of Mr. Clontle's analysis - challenging such Clontle proclamations that Madness RULE ("because they invented ska"), while the Beatles only ROCK ("because they wrote some bad songs like 'Strawberry Fields Forever'"), and Stereolab ROTS ("because they don't use guitars"). All the while, the bemused host prods the painfully unhip yet obnoxiously opinionated Clontle to more and more absurd critical appraisals. It is frickin' HILARIOUS.
Needless to say, if there is anybody who is baffled by aQuarius' aesthetics, we insist that you buy this, as we agree with ALL of Mr. Clontle's tautological sputterings. As Mr. Clontle predicts, time will vindicate us!
By the way, Mr. Clontle is a pseudonym for Jon Wurster - the drummer of Superchunk. He and Tom Scharpling's show on WFMU was always super funny, Wurster playing different weirdos being interviewed by straight man Scharpling. Ronald Thomas Clontle is one of Wurster's best characters, and this recording (originally broadcast live, November 9th, 1997) is our favorite Scharpling & Wurster thing EVER. Especially funny for people like us who have our own 'Rock, Rot & Rule' style conversations all the time. How they didn't crack up doing this, we don't know.
We endeavored to get a lot of these 'cause we knew we'd want to list it, but we don't have a ton left, it was limited to 1000 copies and may well be sold out at the source.
Seems only logical that local songsmith Dylan Shearer would end up on Castle Face, the record label run By John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees, even though Shearer's music is markedly different than most of the fuzzy, jangly garage punk/pop that is CF's bread and butter. But Shearer is a master songsmith, his music darkly psychedelic, broody and hypnotic, from the very first few seconds of opener "Time To Go", deep vocals, and laid back piano, shuffling percussion, all blurred into a hazy, softly psychedelic baroque pop reminiscent of Cardinal, the Moles, the Elephant Six bands, even going as far back as Van Dyke Parks, early Bee Gees, lush and lovely, grandiose, and timeless. The whole rest of the record follows suit, a stunningly mature songsuite, that really does sound out of time. And really, this is actually the record that should be getting all the hype that's being heaped on that Mac Demarco record, they both seem to be drawing inspiration from the same sonic gene pool, but while both most definitely count the Kinks and the Beatles and the Zombies as influences, Demarco's music ends up sounding more like a Jack Johnson / Jimmy Buffet style easy listening classic rock, while Shearer's most definitely positions itself in that selfsame pantheon, crafting moody, lovely chamber pop, and haunting softly psychedelic balladry, that taps into a classic strain of modern pop music, adding a few modern flourishes here and there, but ultimately, Garagearray sounds like some long lost classic from the vaults, some rediscovered and recently reissued lost holy grail of vintage psychedelic pop. Maybe too mellow and laid back for some of the Castle Face diehards, but for the rest of us, a stone cold modern / retro pop-psych classic.
What would you expect from a band called Shitfucker? Whose record is called Sucks Cocks In Hell? And whose cd cover features a 'shiswastifa', or a 'shitstika', essentially a swastika, but made from an 'S' and an 'F', for Shitfucker (only on the cd though btw)? And with song titles like "Satanisanity", and "Smash Your Skull (Against the Wall)", and "Sex Dungeon", and maybe best of all "Rock N' Roll Freaky Dude"�? You'd probably expect something filthy, and depraved, some sonic scum designed to offend and outrage, and hell, that's exactly what you get from these Detroit scumfucks, who take knuckle dragging, head banging thrash metal, tangle it all up with some snarling punk rock, and some crusty D-beat, and vomit it all back up in a glorious lo-fi rush of noisy thrashy riffage, wild metallic gallops, trashy drumming, belched, glass gargling vokills, the label compares 'em to Gism, Sodom, Abigail and Bathory, and yeah, that pretty much nails it, we'd also probably include Motorhead, and Venom, especially Venom in regards to the aforementioned "Rock N' Roll Freaky Dude", which even starts out with a pretty hilarious, heavily accented, spoken word intro, that either sounds just like Venom, or maybe Dethklok, or even Bad News, but it leads right into the dumbest, and thus greatest song ever, with the title delivered in a hellish rasp, over a galloping blast of chaotic thrash punk, and the weird part it, it's kind of catchy too. A total drunken headbanging anthem for sure. And hell, that basically describes the pretty much every song here. There's some weirdness going on as well, the clean kinda crooned almost falsetto vox on "Demonic Rock", some weird samples (a la Church Of Misery) on "Sex Dungeon", tolling bells on "I Am Of The Devil", not to mention the truly creepy intro and outro, but the weirdness is just a byproduct of whatever crazy shit these guys were smoking, cuz really, it's about the metal, a metal that reeks of booze and weed, leather and denim and spikes, filthy dreads and band patches, motorcycles, beards and of course SATAN.
These irrepressible SoCal stoner skate punks come ripping and raging back with their 2nd album for Tee Pee. Not unlike the self-proclaimed "primitive blast" of their debut, it's again an explosive concoction of high energy rock 'n' roll, sure to catch your ears and show 'em a good time, even as these tracks speed by in full on party mode. Part metal, part punk, The Shrine are both heavy and hooky, mixing up some Kill 'Em All era Metallica riffage with SST/Black Flag 'tude too (and in fact, one song features lyrics by Chuck Dukowski originally written for an unrecorded Black Flag tune from '83). Lest we forget, some other longhairs named Soundgarden got their start on SST, and The Shrine probably say, Ultramega OK to that.
Among this album's highlights, we'll single out the remarkably poppy shred of "Tripping Corpse", you just gotta love lines like "he combs his hair / he doesn't care / he's living free / acid casualty", as sung over some suitably tweaked Voivoid-esqe chords. The sheer no-fucks-gven rock power of that track is fairly representative of the whole dang disc.
No sophomore slump here! No slump of any kind. Indeed, this is pure anti-slumping music for sure. It's get up, get going, skate and destroy music!
One of two cassettes that we're listing from Serbian cassette / objet d'art label No Basement Is Deep Enough. The artwork itself is totally fucking ridiculous - a gold painted wooden frame with faux-baroque trim that perfectly houses the plastic clam shell with an ironic / not-ironic photograph of the handsome mug of Mr. Sigmarsson himself, looking all the part of a 'serious' composer. Yeah, it's very cool looking; and Sigmarsson is the mad genius behind the long-standing, dada-electronic-drone outfit Stillupsteyppa out of Iceland. Sigmarsson does have a smattering of solo releases, and the sonic solo fruit doesn't fall that far from the Stillupsteyppa tree. A strain of very dry, black comedy can be found in much of Sigmarsson's work, evident in the title to this cassette and the snippets of half-strum, seemingly drunken Icelandic folk tunes that periodically get collaged into the arctic wash of holy minimalist organ drones, backmasked swells of maudlin orchestral music, skin-crawlingly Otto Muehl-esque vocal garblings, delirious tape-noise machinations of slasher film incidental music / sound design, and riveting miasmas of dreamy post-Derbyshire radiophonics. Much of it sounds very much like Sigmarsson's one-time collaborator Andrew McKenzie aka The Hafler Trio, especially in those manic collage drones that McKenzie cranked out in the late '80s and early '90s. It's a wild trip that could only be engineered by Sigyrggur Berg Sigmarsson. We've only got 5 of these, and there will be no restocks, sad to say.
