THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
In addition to the eagerly awaited new Agalloch full-length on Profound Lore that we're listing this week, a few copies of this ultra-limited new Agalloch 7" just walked in the door, too - originally only available at their album release shows in Portland and Seattle! The two tracks here are to be considered as missing material from The Serpent & The Sphere. Get it while you can, we're told it's already on eBay for crazy dollars. Pressed on clear wax and limited to a hand numbered 500 copies!
Got a big ol' batch of new releases from UK psych label Cardinal Fuzz, and while we're one of the only places in the US to carry em, they're super limited so odds are they won't be around for long.
This one is full length number two from Anthroprophh, aka Paul Allen, frontman of psychedelic space rockers The Heads, but the sounds here, like on the debut, are pretty well removed from the blown out heavy psych of The Heads, instead, Allen weaves long form kraut-psych sprawls, two side long epics this time around, the first, a woozy spaced out shimmer, draped over some motorik tribal rhythms, a tranced out drift that soon morphs into some seriously propulsive hypnorock, with muted guitar chug, softly swirling FX, and eventually, some wild Hendrixian guitar shred, blown out and wildly psychedelic, while in the background, that rhythm churns away, wreathed in billows of spaced out thrum. The flipside adds some creepy Carpenter vibe to the mix, another loping drum rhythm, this time laced with strange industrial clanks and clatter, over which snake charmer melodies buzz and warble, before the guitars swoop in, adding extra layers of riffy buzz and blistering arcs of distorto guitar, before gradually slipping back into a hazy drone-psych swirl, which stretches way out into an extended finale of woozy, drifty sonic mesmer.
SUPER LIMITED, housed in cool black on green silkscreened sleeves, and NO download.
We first heard these Portuguese psychedelic space rockers via their super limited Record Store Day release on Permanent this year, that we were never able to get enough of to review (although we might have a couple in the store still, if you want one, just ask!), so we were psyched to get this new one on Cardinal Fuzz, and on first listen we were actually reminded of Swedish afro-psych outfit Goat, the sound driven by thick buzzing bass and loping tribal drumming, over which, thick, distorted guitars soar and howl, not so much riffs, as thick gouts of sound, blurred arcs of psychedelia, shaped into strange Eastern melodies, the track spreading out over a whole side of the lp, eventually, a few minutes in, the drums exploding into something more rocking and propulsive, the guitar following suit, the result a wild, tranced out heavy psych groove that explodes into a wild squall of psychedelic heaviness, before settling into a stripped down drift, all spidery guitar melodies and that thick bass buzz, but now joined by jazzy sax, giving it a sort of jazz-psych vibe, which quickly builds to another Goat like psych-funk blowout, all dizzying guitar freakout, and churning hard psych heaviness, with the horns swooping back in for a kick ass, free jazz / hard psych finale.
The flipside is another blast of groovy psych, the guitars blown out and gorgeously in-the-red, the bass again thick and buzzing, the drums loose-limbed and sort of funky, the band again, slipping easily from churning metallic crunch, to soaring, almost progged out majesty, to super melodic pop flecked jangle, to stripped down psych-funk, and then back to tranced out wild psych freakout. So good. And so absolutely recommended for fans of Goat and other spaced out psychedelic groovers...
Like all Cardinal Fuzz releases, this is extremely limited, and we're one of the only places in the US carrying it, so these are likely the last copies we'll be able to get. Comes housed in a super swank full color jacket, pressed on clear red vinyl, with NO download.
First full-length lp from Nelson Bean, aka Black Hat, whose previous two releases blew our collective minds, and this new one is somehow even better. Bean traffics in a sort of psychedelic, dark cosmic electronica, that in the past, has touched on aQ faves like Demdike Stare, Tim Hecker, Techno Animal, DHR, even weirdo industrial like Esplendor Geometrico. On this new one, it seems that all of those influences/references have been distilled into something much more pure and organic sounding. Three sprawling tracks, the first, a hauntological skitterscape, that fuses slow-beat lope to heaving swells of pixelated crunch, a little bit witch house, a little bit IDM, but blurred and blackened, transformed into something more sinister, and more abstract, the opening 9+ minute track in constant flux, so much so, that it's nearly impossible to review without explicitly describing each iteration, and yet, over the course of the song, Bean manages to keep some sort of sonic narrative, the song not at all fragmented, and not sounding like a bunch of random ideas mashed together, instead, the sound blossoms and unwinds, from hazy, washed out skitter, to dense gristly thrum, rife with rib cage rattling bass pulsations, to claustrophobic minimal electro that sounds like it was plucked from some obscure cassette release on Hospital, to blown out industrial techno crunch, and that's just the first track.
The second half of the A side is much more abstract, with gorgeous swirls of chordal thrum, drifting and shimmering, a sort of sinister new age, dense and cosmic, lush and layered, a sprawling landscape of overlapping tones, and buried melodies, the sounds unwinding in slow-motion, hazy, and washed out, bleary and blackened, but smeared into strangely prismatic streaks of sound, hauntingly hypnotic. The whole of the B side is taken up by the nearly 18 minute "Memory Triptych", and might be Bean's finest moment, an epic sprawl of hushed skitter, of murky loops, of keening, melancholic melody, all woven into something at once bleak and mysterious, but also warm and lovely, the sounds warbly and woozy, the beats more like constellations of crackle and pop, wound around soft swirls of static soaked shimmer, and strange alien pulsations, at one point, a melody surfaces, that sounds almost like humming/crooning, that 'vocal' is accompanied by a sonic shift, where the sounds begin to fracture, and become more agitated and aggressive, the vibe much more industrial, but fused to a sort of wistful pop ambience, a dizzying dream-drone dirge, driven by a strange rhythmic tangle buried beneath the surface, the sound gnarled and roiling, before about halfway through, like a storm breaking, the sounds shift dramatically, and become downright lovely, laced with what sounds like faux birdsong, the sounds suddenly warm and lush, softly soaring, all the grinding industrialism, now pushed into the background, smeared into a dense, churning backdrop, that adds a soft bit of shadow, to the otherwise, glimmering, gristly, glitchy dreaminess...
Super swank packaging, heavy full color jacket, with printed insert, and download code!
Besides having an awesome band name (that perfectly suits their sound), and killer song titles ("My Ice Cream Fell On The Ground And Someone Ate It!", "Rotten Demon Shit", "Boo Boo Halloween"), these NY knuckle draggers specialize in the sort of down tuned caveman creep we can't ever seem to get enough of. Thick, gristled guitars that ooze, loooong songs that rumble and lumber, the sound lo-fi but still heavy, shrieked almost black metal sounding vokills, landing somewhere between the Body, Noothgrush, Megaton Leviathan and Prizehog, or like a way more home brewed punk rock Corrupted, these guys deal in abject doom sludge misery, but one that's shot through with all sorts of sonic weirdness, be it long stretches of hushed drift, weird breakdowns of barely there drums and distant guitar twang, or wild almost psychedelic squalls of swirling feedback and black noise skree. Oh and did we mention the creepy monk like vocals, or the strings, the free jazz drum splatter? At times sounding like No Neck Blues Band, at others like some strange minimal experimental soundscape, and at others sounding like some slow core dirge gone haywire. Twisted, trippy, heavy and KILLER. Super limited of course, swank packaging too.
So when you were a kid, what do you think your Mom got up to while you were at school, or out playing with your pals? Doing laundry? Cleaning the house? Doing the dishes? A little gardening? Or maybe playing bridge? Canasta? Going to the grocery store? How about collecting and building analog synthesizers? Building a soundproof recording studio in the extra room? Recording strange space-y minimal electronic music on reel to reel tapes? Or building an 'orgon accumulator' in the backyard? Such were the activities of a mild mannered housewife named Ursula Bogner, who in addition to being a pharmacist, as well as a loving wife and mother, just so happened to also be obsessed with electronic music and analog synthesizers, but unlike others with similar interests (were there other 30 something housewives so obsessed?), Bogner didn't just read about electronic music, she attended seminars, followed the activities of various groups and musicians (even apparently sharing her children's enthusiasm for new wave pop!) eventually deciding to create music herself.
She never released any recordings, didn't even really make public her hobby, instead, she simply spent her free time, creating, composing, recording, experimenting, for over 20 years, amassing an incredible body of work. All of that wouldn't merit anything but a cursory glance and maybe a chuckle, if the music weren't amazing, but it is, fantastical and inspired, primitive and raw, playful and childlike, but also, haunting and mysterious, otherworldly, and so incredibly varied, from spare academic sounding minimalism, to Perrey & Kingsley style playfulness, to super stark click and skitter that would be right at home on Raster-Noton, to swirling fantastical spaced out soundscapes that could have been sixties sci-fi soundtracks. The sounds are so evocative, so mysterious, it almost seems impossible that they were recorded by a Mom in a spare room in a house in the suburbs.
The collection opens with "Begleitung Fur Tuba", which indeed features tuba-like tones, locked into a playful grove with a bleepy bloopy rhythm, which is eventually joined by streaks of static, and a warbly main melody. From there, highlights include "Proto" which is kaleidoscopic and groovy with a super minimal click-track rhythm. "2 Ton" is almost like space age lounge music, with it's reverbed guitar like shimmer, and slithery tempo. "Speichen" is another playful number, the burbles and bloops, and definitely predicts groups like James Bong, Luke Vibert, Boards Of Canada and the like. "Punkte" is another minimal groover, with a hissy static rhythm, a bloopy bassline, and all manner of descending and ascending electronic tones, as well as pizzicato bleeps that almost sound like an alien thumb piano. The longest track is "Soloresonanzen" and is maybe the dreamiest, taking the minimal click of Raster-Noton, and draping it over slowly shifting layers of electronic whir and buzz, peppered with bits of click and glitch, textural hiss, woozy melodic fragments, very dreamlike and meditative. And finally the record finishes with a brief burst of tangly scribbly electronic whir and skree, all mad scientist machines gone haywire, but deftly arranged into a pretty alien lullaby, weird and wonderful.
Bogner's music was discovered via some pretty incredible happenstance, Jan Jelinek, who runs the Faitiche label, met Bogner's son on a plane and the two got to talking, Jelinek was an electronic musician, so was Bogner's deceased Mother Weirdly enough, and well, the rest is history. Or is it? There has been much talk that this is all a massive hoax, or more correctly, the ultimate concept album. Carefully crafted down to the tiniest details, photos, back story, Bogner's artwork, everything. In some ways it doesn't really matter, in fact, it's almost more impressive if the whole thing was in fact fabricated, but you know what, fuck it, it's so much more fun to just go along with it...
The cd is gorgeously packaged in a thick book-like digipak, with extensive liner notes from Jan Jelinek, notes on each song, lots of photos, as well as various reproductions of Bogner's various outer space linocuts.
Killer blast of Bay Area garage rock / fuzz pop from two of our favorite groops, on this new split from local label Mt. St. Mtn., the A side a brand new jam from sixties styled, organ driven garage psych troubadours Burnt Ones, who deliver a delirious chunk of baroque-pop styled fuzz, all hazy vocals and jangly guitars, swirling and hypnotic and dreamily psychedelic, while the flipside is a new (old) track from sadly now defunct aQ faves The Mallard, whose track here is all lo-fi lope and reverby jangle, with washed out vocals, swirling soaring psych guitar melodies, crunchy riffs, and loose limbed drumming, with a cool stuttery bridge that pops up throughout, giving it a weirdly mathy vibe in places, and ultimately once again reminding us again how much we miss The Mallard!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Housed in a super swank, 4 color debossed sleeve, and pressed on crazy colored swirled vinyl!
Oh boy, oh boy it's another issue of Chips & Beer, The Magazine. 128 newsprint pages packed with esoteric wisdom pertaining to cult metal, movies, and more� Humorous and irreverent, cryptic and confusional, enthusiastic and informative, pretty much a must read for anyone into heavy shit that's not bullshit.
#7 continues Chips & Beer's run as one of our favorite 'zines. This issue contains a massive special section about everybody's favorite '70s Irish rockers, including a primer on their discography, a Thin Lizzy comic strip, and in-depth interviews with former Lizzy guitarists Scott Gorham and Eric Bell. Fascinating for any fans for sure! That should be reason enough to get this, but of course there's more: stuff about other cool bands old and new like Riot, At War, Cemetary Piss, Helstar, Holocross, Ritual Chamber, and more. Even a chat with Nocturnus drummer/mainman Mike Browning.
Meanwhile, on the cinematic side of things, you get a big section all about Chips & Beer's favorite Westerns, yippie ki-yay! Oh, and then interspersed throughout there's funny bits like the page filled with "100 words & phrases to be retired from music journalism" (no chance there, we couldn't do the list without most of 'em!) and the page heralding "the most important sub genres to watch for in 2014" (among our favorites: "Non-Violent Death Metal" and "True Detective Machine Gun Arsenal Cache With Jameson Stash Metal"). Plus, no issue of Chips & Beer would be complete without the completely hard-to-grok reviews section; we don't always agree with 'em, or understand what they're even trying to say, but still they're fun to read.
Calling all goths! Found two last copies of this 2014 RSD title - a 7" packaged with poster, featuring the tracks "Cavity - First Communion" (alt. version) on the A-side and "The Lord's Prayer" on the B-side. It's the Edward Colver edition because "photographer Edward Colver's photographs of the original Christian Death line-up are so integral to the band's oeuvre we decided to create a special 7" package to showcase them". Includes poster. White vinyl.
We made the recent double cd career retrospective from Charles Cohen, a composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer, our Record Of The Week earlier this year. Group Motion is one of the records included in that collection, now repressed and available again on vinyl!
Never heard of Charles Cohen? Neither had we. Which is really not surprising, considering this composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer (he's one of the few Buchla masters in the world), managed to remain largely unknown outside of Philadelphia, where he spent the late seventies and eighties composing for dance performances and art installations, famously refusing to record, concerned with the 'ephemerality' of his music, and being somewhat of a recluse outside of his music making. But oh the music he made! In a world and time where pretty much any unheard record is considered reissue-able, very little of it truly is, and yet Cohen's music is so well deserving of a wider audience, especially considering how sonically prescient his music truly was.
A mix of musique concrete, kosmische new age, electronic krautrock, alien exotica and layered dronemusic, the sounds collected here are at once all over the map and unpredictable, but also all somehow also sonically linked. Imagine a fluid soundscape in constant flux: murky, lo-fi flurries of percussion wreathed in swirling electronics, almost like some alien gamelan - weird abstract dub, all glitchy and spaced out, almost industrial, but also sort of dreamy and ambient - very Kraftwerk sounding propulsive electro grooves, squelchy and shimmery, but hazy and psychedelically cosmic - Les Baxter like electro-exotica, maybe as envisioned by Nurse With Wound...
A truly spellbinding, yet mysterious gem, with sonic surprises lurking around every corner, some short bursts, others, long, slow building epics, some playful and almost goofy, others somber and haunting, even sinister, but again, every second of sound here is utterly stunning.
There's tons more info in the liner notes, lots of rare photos and different writers and fellow composers offering their impressions of Cohen and his music, much of it truly fascinating, but like all great music, even knowing nothing about its provenance, doesn't take away from the magic and power of the sounds here. A truly fantastic discovery, and no doubt a contender for reissue of the year!
Math rock / post rock / noise rock nerds, celebrate! Henry Owings and Chunklet once again deliver a sonic holy grail that we didn't even know existed. Most recently it was a killer collection from late great unsung Chicago noise rock minimalists Tar, and now comes a whole unreleased record from nineties math rock legends Don Caballero!! And holy shit is it a doozy, recorded in 1991 at Carnegie Mellon as a three piece, the sound is super raw, ultra fierce, crazy heavy, and mathy as fuck, a furious frenzy of wild octopoidal drumming, chugging distorted guitars, fuzzed out low slung bass, the songs already twisted and tangled, and weirdly catchy, the sort of head nodding matched out heaviness few bands then or now could match, and the recording only makes it sound that much better, blown out and in the red, fierce and in your face, relentlessly rocking. A bunch (but not all) of the tracks would show up in different forms later, on early singles and their debut full-length For Respect, but they almost sound even better here, more raw and intense for sure. Fans of this group, this era and this sound, grab one of these before they're gone, cuz odds are these are the only ones we'll be able to get.
Housed in a full color gatefold sleeve, includes a download of the whole record, as well as the band's second ever live show as a bonus (and that's even more raw and blown out!!)...
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes) The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released -- with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
Four juggernauts of transgressive noise literally plugged their brains into mixing consoles for this wild documentation of high-concept / high-impact sound-art. For those not hip to the names of these jackbooted folk, Rudolf Eb.Er and Joke Lanz are two of the figureheads of the seminal Schimpfluch-Gruppe of Swiss aktionists, with the former taking on the moniker Runzlestirn & Gurglestock and the latter performing as Sudden Infant. GX Jupitter-Larsen is the principle architect (or demolition expert) in the California noise-project The Haters; and Mike Dando is best known for his unseemly power-electronics pseudonym Con-Dom. The high-concept in question was to sonify the EKG signals from these four extreme musicians as they sat, zen-like on a stage. Is it noise that streams through their veins, channels through their nerves, and vibrates the very molecules that comprise their corporeal bodies? In this context, the answer is a resounding YES! Over the course of the performance - which took place as the grand finale of the 2012 Extreme Rituals festival in Bristol which celebrated the excesses of all things Schimpfluch - the four brains dialed up a rancorous transmission of sawtooth waves and generative blossoms, recalling the complexities of digital programmers like Florian Hecker or the spasmodic Serge-synth modulations from Thomas Ankersmit. It's easy to think of this piece as a feedback loop, with the atonal squiggles from one participant's noggin translated into a particular sound which in turn triggers a thought in another participant's head, and so on. It makes for brilliantly impossible listening!
Man, we'd thought that Graves At Sea were long gone, sunken deep into some pit in the ground, maybe playing their ultra doom dirges for the denizens of Hell at this point, but no longer active in our surface world. Turns out the band, in fact defunct since 2008, recently reformed with a new lineup, so they're essentially back from the grave (back from the sea?) - and here's a new recording from 'em, on a split with another hoary bunch of heavies, Sourvein, whom we haven't kept up with lately either, but are also are still kicking out the stoner sludge jams like every day's doomsday.
Graves At Sea take the first half of this split, with two tracks, each over seven minutes long, their blown-out, droned-out sludge stomp as forceful and abject as ever. Headbanging to this makes your skull feel like it weighs a thousand pounds. Their vokills are like we remember 'em too, a gruff shrieking gargle that sometime sounds witchy in a way - not witchy like all those sultry female "occult rock" singers, but witchy like a cackling hag putting a curse on you. (It's a dude singing by the way, we don't want to mislead.) Awesome shit, bad vibes you can rock out to.
The Sourvein half is awesome shit too, three tracks of their slo-mo, Southern Sabbathy sludge sound, pretty much as heavy but more spaced out and psychedelic than the Graves stuff, not quite so grim, the vocals a bit more wasted Ozzyish, the riffs and leads a bit more overtly classic '70s inspired - man, makes us realize we need to go back and check out the Sourvein recordings we've slept on - the last thing we reviewed by them was back in 2005, must rectify that pronto!
Both bands kill it here, a superb split for anyone into the sludge!! (FYI, there's also vinyl of this, we should get some soon...)
It seems like every time we start a review with something like "Well, we don't need to say a whole lot about this one", we typically go on to say a whole lot anyway. But in this case, there really is no need. It's yet another new Guided By Voices, the fiftieth or hundredth or thousandth since the band started up again recently after a brief retirement/hiatus, and like the last 4 or 5, all of which came out in the last 12-15 months (!!) it's another good one, chock full of classic sounding GBV jams, hooks galore, some home brewed weirdness, some curious sonic oddities, some dirge noisiness, some perfect pop, and a dizzying mix of everything in between. Like we've said about most of the new GBV's, if you're new to the group, go way back, and get Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes and become properly obsessed, and then start the arduous task of trying to get them all, but heck, you could do worse, and who knows, had we never heard any of those old records, this new one might have had us just as smitten. Either way, as always, totally recommended for obsessive fans (are there any other kind of GBV fans?) and newbies alike...
Yay, You Are Here is here! Man, we love this band - or man, since the band is just one fella, Chris "Professor" Black, one of metal's most prolific and prodigious talents at the moment. He's guy behind Dawnbringer, for one thing. Just a little while ago, we listed High Spirits' latest demo disc, as well as another brainchild of Chris', the MetalUSAfer 7" (a brilliantly conceptual tribute of sorts to cult Japanese true metal stalwarts, Metalucifer). Not long before those, we had that unique Aktor single, featuring Chris in cahoots with Jussi from Circle.
So we, and hopefully you too, are pretty well primed for this brand new full-length album from Chris' purest (purist?) metal project, High Spirits, full of more of the NWOBHM-inspired, 'motivational montage metal' (our phrase) we love about them, er, him. (High Spirits do have a live formation, by the way, with Chris joined by guys from Zuul, but in the studio, it's all Chris.)
The prime paradox of High Spirits' songs are that they're seemingly deliberately calculated to be the soundtrack for rainslick city streets at night, illuminated in neon light (kinda cheesy and cinematic, on the poppier side of '80s heavy metal stylings, right?), but they're also, in part due to Chris' earnest voice, very sincere and heartfelt sounding too, not ironic or anything. On this album, High Spirits pulls it off again. Great stuff, super catchy as always, from the uptempo opener "When The Lights Go Down" (the only track here to also appear on that demo disc), to anthemic rocker "I Need Your Love", to moody but also rockin' breakup track "Reminding You Of Me", to their fantastic theme-song closer "High Spirits" (reprised from their debut demo of 2009), heck all nine cuts are great. There's tons of fuzz on the guitar, tasty solos abound, and lyrically it's all about loves won and lost, mostly the latter. Simple, fun stuff in a way, but who does this anymore? And does it so well? And with such gravitas and aplomb? Gotta love it. Also gotta love the cover art, High Spirits' ditching the usual metal graphic conventions for a celebration of public mass transit.
Ok, we could go on and on, but we already told ya how much we love High Spirits, just listen to the sound samples if you're still undecided; if the songs don't tug on your heartstrings and/or get your head to banging, then you're no friend of ours (not really, but it always sounds cool to say that).
We have cds, and colored vinyl while they last.
Tomorrow is the first ever solo record from Carl Hultgren, aka Carl of psychedelic bliss pop drifters Windy & Carl, and we're happy to report, that even on his own, the sound doesn't fall to far from the dreamy psychedelia of W&C.
Lush, layered guitars capes, that shimmer and glimmer, soft strums are blurred into heaving billows of chordal thrum, notes chime, and harmonics ring out, distortion if muted and smeary, and gives everything a druggy, dreamy vibe, all sun dappled and blissed out. There are some subtle bits of processing, electronics here and there, even some buried rhythms, but for the most part, Tomorrow is all glistening guitars, softly soaring, sonic streaks across the heavens, that blur into hazy, prismatic driftscapes, with some tracks reminding us of the Durutti Column for sure, the same sort of soft focus melancholia, but others getting downright noisy, a bit darker, even then though, the sound has a heavenly glow, a warm, enveloping sonic center that bathes everything in a blissful soft afternoon light. Others are strummy and melodic, with spidery guitars wrapped around a skeletal Appalachia, again all softly smeared into something a bit more otherworldly, and ethereal, a wonderfully wistful collection of soft-psych, dream-drift blissout.
The cd version is limited to 350 copies and comes in a nice, hand letterpressed sleeve, with full color pasted on front cover artwork, the 2lp version is limited to 500 copies, comes in a heavy gatefold sleeve and is pressed on one black lp, and one orange. Both come with a download code, with 6 bonus tracks available only via the download!
The final (?) installment in the Intrigue & Stuff 12" series from Leyland Kirby (aka The Caretaker). Unlike The Caretaker records, which delve into washed out wastelands of sepia toned shimmer, and faded memory ambient drift, Kirby's Intrigue & Stuff records are twisted jumbles of experimental electronica, sonically all over the map, and the 4th volume is no different, beginning with a strange bit of almost classical sounding synth tangle, all cascading pizzicato melodies, and clipped sonic fragments, woven into a relentlessly tranced out rhythmic stutterscape, that manages to be both dizzying and mesmerizing. From there on out, the sound flits from creepy, eighties styled, soundtrack dirgery, all blunted drum machines, soft synth swirls, strange industrial sound effects and moody atmospherics, to fuzzy avant synth pop, shimmery swirls draped over hiccuping drum loops, and still more eighties style new wave-isms, blurred into dreamy, bleary smears, to strange sprawls of drum driven murk, echoey handclaps, and throbbing bass, all buried beneath gristly swells of whirring static, and surf-like thrum, and finally, a gorgeous kosmische closer, all distort synth melodies, blurred human voices, a drifty overdriven lullaby-like chorale, hazy and haunting and dementedly lovely.
Like the other installments, super limited, and housed in plain black sleeves, with hand stamped center labels.
Whew! Here's quite an anthology of the rehearsal tapes that Mark Cunningham dug up from the archives. Mars is a band that really shouldn't need any introduction, as they were one of the four seminal No Wave outfits along with Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, James Chance & The Contortions, and DNA, featured on the No New York compilation from 1978. At the time of that compilation, the band had only issued one single, but they recorded furiously with enough material to warrant the 78 album released by Lydia Lunch in the late '80s and a couple of live recordings some 20+ years after the fact.
According to the insightful liner notes from Mars' bassist Mark Cunningham, the band's origins date back to late 1978 when Connie Burg (aka Lucy Hamilton) and Cunningham met Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen. Aside from Crane's ability to play the piano and Cunningham's school days with a trumpet, Mars was an entirely self-taught proposition, trying to learn the basics of rock'n'roll through their collective infatuation with the Velvet Underground. The first tape of this 3 cassette anthology features the band in their earliest, acoustic mode with Crane on piano, Burg on acoustic guitar, Cunningham on bass, and Arlen on "paper bag percussion." At that time, the band christened themselves China (a moniker later adopted by Burg); and they loosely worked through bluesy, drone-rock numbers that had the primitive fug of the Velvets or the Monks, minus all of the feedback squalor given the acoustic set up. The switch from acoustic to electric is described in Dylan-esque terms, along with the name change to Mars as well as introductions to Lydia Lunch and James Chance being instrumental in the development into a tour-de-force project of rhythmic dislocation and atonal distortion. As charming as the early tracks are, the potential for Mars becomes self-evident by the second tape and onward, as their songs began to lurch through the rhythm section and the strange, detuned guitars chimed into what could be seen as the 'classic' Mars sound of such noise-rock madness of "Helen Forsdale" (an obvious precursor to Sonic Youth) and the swampy morass of "The Immediate Stages Of The Erotic" (without which there would probably be no Wolf Eyes or Black Dice). Alternate mixes of the Brian Eno recordings for the No New York compilation are found on this collection as well as some mystery tracks of which Cunningham has no idea about their origin.
This set marks the third (and presumably final) pressing for these tapes. We'll try to keep these in stock, but don't hold your breath.
Further down the rabbit hole goes Dan Melchior! Slow Down Tiger is the latest sonic adventure of continuously deconstructed pop for the occasional collaborator with the beloved chanteuse Holly Golightly. That said, for those looking to his lo-fi garage pop quirks, Melchior does have an album on Castle Face due out in the summer of 2014; but we gotta say that he can continue to produce these long-form weirdo collages for as long as he wants! "Tongues" rolls out with an eerie, hypnotic sitar-n-electronics loop that grounds a series of media samples / spoken word snippets from a variety of sources. The fine people down at the Starlight Furniture Company (you should really see their storefront on Mission Street in San Francisco, they really DO sell furniture! really cheap stuff, too!) have mapped out many of the sources including BBC broadcasts about poll tax riots in the UK less than three decades ago, as well as Russian and Chilean poets, obscure film clips, and some cultural lamp-lighters who shine their philosophies of curmudgeonliness and traditional lore on those who care to listen. As Melchior cuts the power on the tape loop machine, a ghostly guitar drift trickles through the shadows, dripping in equal parts with maudlin syrupiness, inky depression, and overdriven spring reverb. The vocal readymades continues to dot this landscape of guitar dronescape as dreamy allusions to those Delia Derbyshire dream-reciting experiments from the early '60s or the delightfully subversive tract of daytime soap collaged by Daniel Steven Crafts some 30 years ago. The flipside "Hospital Poem" is a desolate piece of lo-fi minimalism for chord organ and electronics, evolving into a heartbreaking, loner meditation that in all likelihood takes up the theme of Melchior's wife's cancer and her ongoing struggle with the disease. Great. Great. Great.
Another record that was originally a Record Store Day exclusive, now thankfully more widely available. We were initially excited about this three way split for the new jams from aQ faves Milk Music, who start off with a killer Creedence Clearwater Revival cover ("Effigy"), which like all great covers, sounds like it could be a MM original, the guitars blown out, the vocals drenched in FX, the song gorgeously minor key and drowsily noisy, reminding us a little of Sub Pop unknowns (but also aQ faves) Rein Sanction. The second MM track sounds like it could have been plucked right off the last record, and weirdly enough, sounds like it could be another cover as well, all fuzzy and twangy, and then they finish off with another cover perfectly suited to MM's sound, Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory".
Destruction Unit deliver a blast of swagger, noise drenched garage punk, with bellowed dramatic vocals over, dizzying swirls of distort guitar, all wrapped around a churning lo-fi crunch, bathed in feedback, and noisy as fuck, but crazy catchy too, slipping easily into stretched out psych jams, before slipping right back into some stomping garage rock crunch. And finally, Merchandise from Florida, get all spacey and gloomy and dramatic, a drifty, slow core creep, laced with steel string shimmer, low slung bass buzz, and some deep, dark vocal crooning, the first track, a smoldering dark ballad, the second a bit more post punky sounding a bit like a popper, jangler Wipers. Cool stuff all around.
Comes with a cool, full color insert/booklet, and no download.
We've been obsessed with this Greek trio since we first heard their Som Sakrifis lp on Pan, a gorgeous collection of ultra low end minimalism, haunting, rib cage rattling drones, and ritualistic bass tone soundscapes, so much so that ever since, we've done our best to track down every single thing we could find.
This new one is the first in a three part trilogy, and finds the Mohammad trio, employing cello, contrabass and electronics to once again craft a stunning landscape of hushed sound, but unlike much of the music on those other releases, which took the instruments and transformed them into nearly unrecognizable sounds, blurred into softly undulating layers, and slow moving tectonic shimmers, the sounds here are much more organic, in fact, for the bulk of the record, Mohammad sound like a proper string section, albeit all VERY low strings.
The record starts with a field recording, voices, whipping wind, children laughing and playing, fluttering flutes, which quickly segues into a thick field of buzzing strings, but mysteriously arranged into something much more percussive and abrasive, the strings more scraped than bowed, the sounds percussive and rhythmic, haunting and sinister. The electronic component this time around is also subtle, adding texture more than anything else, the scraping strings, warm and reverberant, the melodies mournful and melancholic, often blurring into long form tones, and unfurling clouds of subtle overtones, with some of the tracks inserting long stretches of near silence, creating an even more mysterious low end landscape, and conversely, some of the tracks build to near cacophonous levels, the sound nearly psychedelic, before settling once again, into something melancholic and moody, the second to last track, maybe the most achingly beautiful of the bunch, before the closer, which bookends the record with what sounds like a nighttime field recording of crickets, mysterious and lovely.
Fantastic as always, and while this is in constant rotation around the shop, we find ourselves already looking forward to the 2nd and 3rd parts of the trilogy...
It was inevitable really. After a handful of 7"s, and a single mostly overlooked and way under appreciated full length that we raved about way back when, these guys are finally getting their due. This new full length on Important should finally position these guys at the head of the class, in the pantheon of modern spacerockers. White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan, we love em all, but they're all gonna have to step up their games, cuz Mugstar has definitely thrown down the drug rock heart of the sun gauntlet. Sun, Broken is a colossal slab of speaker shredding, in-the-red, druggy, psychedelic, hypnotic Hawkwind channeling space rock bliss. Heavy, lush, dense, mesmerizing, sprawling and expansive, epic and majestic, incredible drumming, tangled guitars, warm whirring organs, complex mathy almost proggy arrangements, songs that lock into looped stretches of near static throb and pulse, before splintering into convoluted freakouts only to explode moments later into black hole supernova psychspace blowouts.
"Technical Knowledge As A Weapon" pretty much sets the stage, a swirling cloud of effects gives way to a tribal chunk of primal hypnorock pound, which lurches into a killer stop start Hammond organ stutter, before launching right back into the fray, the track growing ever more urgent and explosive, peppered with organ breaks, the whole thing dense and repetitive, and so so epic. "Ouroboros" starts out all tangled and mathy, a churning hypnotic almost looped sounding sprawl of metallic prog, which slowly transforms into a sort of muted pulsing minimal space rock, swirling effects surround a static guitar melody, and dense drum flurries, and tripped out vox, before the inevitable psych-skree outro, all tangled and jagged fucking FIERCE.
"Labrador Hatchet" is the record's first breather, a two and a half minute space-y trip out, all thum and throb, through a billowing cloud of heavily effected scrapes and clicks and glitches, which gives way to "Today Is The Wrong Shape", a dead ringer for Finnish hypnorockers Circle at their leanest and meanest, the main riff and the pounding krautrock rhythm, like a super charged way revved up Circle, with a cool, angular proggy breakdown, before yet another crushing bout of extreme spaced out damaged FX heaviness.
Another brief bit of swirly psychedelic effects weirdness leads into the nearly 14 minute closer, "Furklausundbo", which begins with warm melodic swells, before the bassline slips in, then the simple stripped down rhythm, and from there it's a totally mesmerizing slow build, locked and looped, riff and rhythm in perfect sync, while all around, streaks of sound swirl and swoop, unlike the other tracks, there's no explosive climax, no freaked out space rock free for all, instead the songs twists and transforms, slipping into a doomy plod at one point, getting downright twangy at another, the main groove getting doused in clouds of reverbed high end guitar at another, but all the while, the pulse, the beat, stays solid, and unfailing, total mind trancelike hypnotic dronerock mesmer, that eventually dissipates in a blurred smear of layered organ and washed out drones.
Easily the space rock, kraut drone, buzz drug, psych swirl jam of the year!
Very much like the recently reviewed Sucks Cocks In Hell album from Shitfucker, you pretty much know just what to expect from a band called Nekrofilth. After all, the record's called Devil's Breath, and includes songs like "Scum Freak", "Wormskull", "Junkie Cunt", "Smear The Sleaze", "Blood Bug", "Volcanic Zit", you get the picture. So yeah, everyone who freaked out over Shitfucker (and it was a whole lot of you), prepare for another blast of filthy, noisy, distorted, punked out thrash metal heaviness, from these Ohio thrashers, featuring members of another sonically similar outfit, Nunslaughter.
Nektrofilth play simple, stripped down, raw, crossover punk/thrash metal with some blackened overtones, the guitars buzzy, the bass, thick and super distorted, there's even some wild shredding here and there, the vokills a demonic bellow delivering offensive misanthropic lyrics, the sound more punk than metal, but it suits Nekrofilth's necro sonic filth for sure. Crusty, headbangable, and crazy catchy to boot, but ultimately, just a sick and sleazy slab of filthy, raw mayhemic metal recommended for fans of depraved metallic sickness and grim, raw howl and buzz. Recommended to all filthy fuckers.
Now, for a limited time, we have this classic NWW recording on cassette!
Merzbild Schwet was the third album to appear from the twisted minds of Nurse With Wound. At that time in 1980, Steven Stapleton was essentially on his own, with John Fothergill and Heman Pathak already departing over disagreements about a previous recording, although Stapleton did give credit to Fothergill on this album. Where the Fothergill / Pathak / Stapleton collab unleashed the infernal, freeform psychedelia of Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table..., Merzbild Schwet shows the first signs of two distinct aesthetics which became amazingly potent themes upon which Stapleton crafted many a variation. "Dada" (sometimes referred to as "Dada X") takes up the feverish, comic surrealism of NWW with a collage of exotica and lounge records played at various speeds, cut up, and fucked up into a orgy of slow-motion brass, hysterical vocalizations, squalid feedback generative noise, and vinyl crackling madness. "Futurismo" is a darkly discordant piece of intermittent events - rumbles, drones, squeaks, and other nightmarishly unknowable sounds - with a spliced narrative from women speaking in monotone. This was a ploy probably extracted from Robert Ashley's "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" and later used extensively with the aid of the inimitable Diana Rogerson. It's Nurse With Wound. Of course, it's recommended.
Now, for a limited time, we have this classic United Dairies recording on cassette!!
Mi-Mort was originally released as a split cassette by Nurse With Wound and Current 93 in 1983; and by some accounts, this marked the very first release by David Tibet as C93. These were the days of Crowleyian tape loops in the background with Tibet ranting his apocalyptic proclamations about the death of Maldoror. While the time period of Current 93's bleak, pyre-ritual abstractions was considerably short (1983-1987), it located Current 93 firmly within the context of industrial culture before Tibet shifted his course radically to a Comus / Wicker Man inspired British folk sensibility. This 18 minute exegesis growls with the drug-induced and Thelemic demons in Tibet's head and still makes for a very terrifying listen. A couple of the tracks from Nurse With Wound's side had made the rounds on various compilations including "Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree," on which a little German girl pleads for her father accompanied by an ever intensifying psychoacoustically challenging high frequency drone (muffled somewhat by the tape compression of this cassette release), and "I Was No Longer His Dominant" is an unsettling meditation of undulating metallic low-end feedback backing a muffled conversations which mysteriously expresses a psychological crack in the narrator. The other two tracks, on the other hand, are exclusive to Mi-Mort, both scraping on pieces of metal in see-saw grinds with suitably intense electronic sirens blaring about. Yup, it's a winner.
Along with the Teenage Filmstars lp reissue found elsewhere on this list, O Level was another band of weirdo retro pop genius Ed Ball, and like the early Teenage Filmstars records, O Level specialized in fuzzy, sixties style new wave jangle pop, which found Ball teaming up with some of his pals from the Television Personalities, but unlike the polished jangle pop of Teenage Filmstars, O Level was much more raw and urgent, the track "East Sheen" which starts things off is a perfect chunk of fuzzy, garage pop crunch, the guitars super distorted, the vocals raspy, the hooks crazy catchy, the sound lo-fi, but still plenty crunchy and fuzzy, which pretty much describes O Level's sound in general. "Pseudo Punk" has a weirdly Young Ones vibe, if that makes any sense, as it so captures the spirit and sound of the era, it's hard to imagine it's not a perfectly executed pisstake, a parody that transcends parody and becomes even better than the original, cuz goddamn it's so good, as is everything here, a collection of the group's first two eps, as well as three tracks never available on vinyl before. Originally released for Record Store Day, these luckily became available again, but who knows for how long...
Though we spend a lot of time toiling over our carefully worded, expertly-informed, well-thought out (ahem) reviews, we realize that a lot of folks probably just scan 'em looking for a few keywords that might jump out, and to see whether we are giving something the thumbs up or not (and furthermore, if we seem particularly enthusiastic in doing so, by like, using all-caps or something). So... here's some keywords for you: CELESTIIAL, FOLK-METAL, AWESOME. Working those terms into sentences, results in the following: this blackened but not necessarily black metal (they say "melodic dark metal") band from Minnesota, who started back in the '90s as a demo-only band under the moniker Autumnal Winds, is a duo featuring guitarist/vocalist Blondel de Nesle, aka Tanner Reed Anderson of fellow Bindrune recording artists Celestiial. Suspended In The Brume Of Eros is Obsequiae's debut full-length, and while we don't know what Obsequiae means (help, Heavy Latin blog!) nor are we sure what a "brume" is, let alone just who or what "Eos" might be, we do know we like this. A lot. And we didn't even know they were related to AQ frosty, forest-y funeral doom faves Celestiial when we first heard this and dug it, though we did know it was on Bindrune, almost always a sign of quality pagan metal with a weird or avant garde bent.
We said Obsequiae play folk-metal, that's right, it's real medieval /madrigal sounding for sure, but with the emphasis on METAL, despite an assortment of minstrel-like acoustic interludes. So the melodic, intertwined twin guitars are heavy with fuzz, and their harmonies more twisted than twee. Likewise, the vocals are harsh, and rhythmically the band gallops like true metal ought to, propelled by the other half of the Obsequiae duo, drummer/bassist/guitarist "Neidhardt von Reuental".
In other words, it's something that even those of us a bit burned out on "another grim black metal band" found quite compelling. Lots of (autumnal) atmosphere, lots of actual music, Obsequiae doing justice to both halves of the folk-metal equation, mixing acoustic guitars in with weird, killer riffage and soloing for an album that's epic and interesting and, as we said, AWESOME.
There, 'nuff said?
There's a whole lot of history and a whole lot of meaning loaded in that title. The simple translation from the French is just "put in center" and its earliest etymology refers to the repeating pattern in a coat of arms as a symbol of the aristocratic / familial traditions being passed on from one generation to another. With this repeating formal motif, the phrase has become a term in critical theory to define self-reflexive structural forms and the potential for an instability of meaning, structure, reality etc. through repetition upon repetition. The results are the deliberate mindfucks of the play within a play, the dream within a dream where the dreamer is unaware of dreaming, and the infinite replication of images like the one found on the cover of that first Guardian Alien album (woah, so trippy, dude!).
The application of this phrase to the work of Raison D'Etre points to a gnosticism of darkness that compounds upon itself within the depths of the human soul. That seems suitable to Raison D'Etre's, um raison d'etre, as this has been the long-standing project for Peter Andersson who has recorded for now two decades under this moniker, almost exclusively for the now-defunct Cold Meat Industries. For all of the torturous death-ambient and grinding industrialisms of that imprint, Andersson (not to be confused with the other Peter Andersson on CMI known also as Baby Lina Doll of Deutsch Nepal) offered up a ghastly beauty through his haunted ambience that seem to echo with the maudlin sense of loss from Tarkovsky's lesser known film Nostalgia which ends with a scene of snowstorm quietly precipitating on the innards of the desicated Gothic cathedral. All of the Raison D'Etre albums have dreamily wandered through medieval chants and extracts of Germanic hymnal music, but these albums speak more of Andersson's position on the absence of God rather than a glorification. Mise En Abyme channels these thoughts into cold sweeping passages of melacholy ambience and cinematic overtures which glide along a stately trajectory in and out of cold silences. Machined rhythms and fabricated noise disrupt the ghostly ephemera about half way through the album, but this counterpoint is hardly a distraction. Recommended for those enamored by the work of Deathprod and Svarte Greiner / Deaf Center!
Last list we highlighted the Kompakt mix cd from Mexican DJ/producer Rebolledo, Momento Drive. This 12" ep with the same name features three of the rarest trax from that mix, released on vinyl for the first time, including probably our favorite from that mix, Rebolledo's own "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", here presented in an 'extended raw version'. Again, totally mesmeric and relentless, and a bit bizarre as well due to the vocal part (the title, repeated over an over in a weird, intense accent and manner). The other two selections have Rebolledo's hand in 'em too, one's the Pachango Boys (Rebo's duo with Superpitcher) doing a remix of "Flash" by Stove, the other a Rebo remix of a track by Red Axes. DJs, in particular, ought to think about grabbing this.
Easily one of our favorite post punk / death rock groups EVER. Tense and angular, angry and ominous, sinister and sinuous, dark and gothic, every song here a stone cold gloom punk classic, the bass thick and almost new wavey, the guitars jagged, fuzzy and distorted, raw riffage and driving drum pound, all in support of the twisted vocals of Nick Blinko, whose distinctive vocals are only rivaled by his even more distinctive artwork, which adorns the cover (and the cover of all their records), a dizzyingly meticulous black and white horrorscape, that perfectly captures the world of nightmarish, anxiety ridden terror that lurks within the grooves of Death Church, and presumably within Blinko's mind as well, which is probably what resulted in several stints in mental institutions.
Even all these years later, Rudimentary Peni sound so good, their music so relevant, and whether consciously or not, aped by far too many modern bands to count, powerful and personal, depressive and kicking-against-the-pricks pissed off, and catchy as fuck, this record has lost none of its twisted black energy in the nearly twenty years since it was first released.
Doom. Vinyl. Die Healing. Need we go on?? Doom metal fans, probably all you need to know is that this album by LA godfathers of doom Saint Vitus, never before on vinyl, and long out of print on cd, is now here. However, we will go on...
Nobody could have guessed it back in 1995, when this album was first released, but 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for ol' Saint Vitus. Not just one reunion show, but an extensive, well-attended tour! Vinyl reissues of their SST era records (we've got some in stock, getting more soon)! And this, a lovingly crafted vinyl version (first time on wax!!) for what was their 7th and final full-length studio album before calling it quits! We also hear rumors of a NEW album being made. However, as much as we'll be excited to hear it, there's no way they can top THIS.
While it might have been their final record, a last hurrah, hardly noticed by an uncaring world, it was also one of their best ever. For one thing, it marked the brief return of their original and best vocalist, the amazing Scott Reagers. Apologies to Wino, who's fronting the band for their current reunion... Some will differ, Wino certainly has his fans, we like him a lot too, Born Too Late and Mournful Cries are great albums, but let's just say there's no other singer quite like Scotty Reagers. Vitus was lucky to have had him in the first place, and lucky to have had him back for this. His dramatic and dynamic delivery, gloomy and ghoulish, yet classic castle-metal through and through, keeps us spellbound. Guitarist Dave Chandler steps up with some great sludgy slo-mo Sabbathy riffs (of course) and wah wah'd out, psychedelic punk soloing (of course). The atmosphere is sooooo despairing. Opener "Dark World", later covered by Reverend Bizarre, is a classic, what a riff! But that's just the beginning... "One Mind", "Let The End Begin", "The Sloth", "Return Of The Zombie", heck all the tracks are awesome, any Vitus fan should agree. The entire album harks back to the feeling of their first few records in the mid '80s, really as if Reagers had never left the band. And again his singing is crucial here, over the top wailing with a wretched, grotesque edge to it. Emotive and eccentric. Perfect for the plodding, fuzz-filled creepy-crawls that fill this pestilent platter. He might be singing about sloths and zombies (he IS singing about sloths and zombies) but damn does it sound sincere and MEANINGFUL - ignore him at your peril. Drop the needle on this and learn what it is to be doomed!!
While we should also list the abovementioned SST reissues, many of them must-haves too, this seemed even more exciting 'cause so few folks ever got the chance to get it, the cds were imports and it was one of the last releases on the label (Hellhound) before it folded. And like we said, there never ever was vinyl. Now there is, and fairly deluxe vinyl at that, complete with embossing on the cover for the Vitus logo. And yeah, of course it's limited... even if it wasn't, though, you gotta get it, we'd just be telling you to buy two of 'em!!
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Some early '70s vintage, groovy orchestrated French psych-pop sound good to you? Maybe even better if created by a very hip, mystic-minded musician (Skornik) inspired by LSD and the esoteric writings of a controversial Gurdjieff disciple (Louis Pauwels, author of counterculture bestseller The Morning Of The Magicians)? Well then have we got a reissue for you!! Guy Skornik's Pour Pauwels is a fantastic progressive pop opus, its symphonic, psychedelic sounds mixing together dramatic French vocals (both spoken and sung), romantic piano, moody melodies, jaunty horns, sudden curlicues of psych guitar wail, and more. A song-based soundscape, almost cinematic, it's for fans of the freakier side of the Serge Gainsbourg oeuvre for sure, a la Historie De Melody Nelson. Freakier than that, really - this was originally issued in 1970 by the Pathe label, who around the same time also released records by Igor Wakhevtich and Gerard Manset, and this fits right in with the likes of them. If you're like us, oui oui this sounds good, in fact it's pretty much irresistible.
The thick cd booklet, in both French and English, features very interesting and extensive liner notes, delving into the careers of both Skornik and Pauwels, including an in-depth, present-day interview with the former.
Here's the latest from this British white rap trio, who we've all become sort of obsessed with, so much so that after some initial skepticism when we first had a listen, these guys might end up being the most played group on the aQ stereo this year. And as much as we love this, and love these guys, it's hard to say exactly why. When the first record from these guys was picked by Norman Records in the UK as their record of the year last year, even the employees at Norman couldn't help themselves, explaining that they weren't sure either. But all it took was a handful of listens and now we can't stop. And we played that first one to DEATH. To the point that most of us knew some of the lyrics by heart ("Brian Eno! What the fook does 'e know?!"), totally addictive, rhythmically mesmerizing, and the lyrics and delivery, pissed off and hilariously snarky. In fact, it's only barely hip hop, instead it's like some poetry slam punks, spitting lyrics over post punk grooves, fuzzy bass and looped drums, and then a wicked stream of consciousness flow that would have most proper rappers scratching their heads.
The sound on Divide And Exit is actually a bit more punk rock sounding. We compared the vocals to Mark E. Smith the first time around, and the music this time sounds a bit more like an even more minimal Fall, which is most definitely not a bad thing. Plus, while there's no Brian Eno line, at least not one we've glommed on to yet, there is this one that keeps jumping out at us: "It's the final countdown by Journey!", or this one: "Have you been for a poo poo bomb" (or maybe barn?, either way, WTF??), plus there's a song about corgis ("The Corgi").
Needless to say, it's ridiculous, and absurd, but goddamn addictive, and all it's taken is another few listens, and this new one is now getting played as much as that first one did. We joked about making that first one (and this one too) Record Of The Week, just based on how much we listen to 'em, which really, pretty much says it all...
Cumbiadelic!! That's how this youthful, nine-piece instrumental outfit out of Mexico City would describe their sound, a delightful hybrid mixing together '60s Peruvian cumbia and garage psych, with other assorted flavors - Andean flute-folk, surf music, Spaghetti western soundtracks, and more. Sonido Gallo Negro (aka Black Rooster Sound, in English) here present their 2nd album, and first release outside of Mexico, and it's pretty fab. It sure would take a hard heart not to love this, a record that's utterly as lively and colorful and groovily trippy as its cover art! Percussive Latin rhythms (boogaloo, chicha, sonidero cumbia, rhumba, etc.) propel these ten pieces, underpinning groovy Farfisa organ and electric guitars; many tracks are energetically uptempo and danceable, while others zone off into eerie atmospheres via spacey theremin... Overall there's a definite exotic space age bachelor pad vibe, but one with a psychedelic Latin twist, and lots of garagey grit to it - acid fuzz guitar leads take the fore on "Mystery Of Zangbetos", ferinstance. This platter is littered with funky breaks, echo-effected Spanish-language samples, and strange synth textures, while the heavy rhythms dominate throughout. To compare to some aQ faves, at times we're reminded of Finnish exotic electronic instrumentalists Aavikko, and at others, we're also totally thinking Swedish voodoo psych sensations Goat, whose fans should totally check this out. Like Goat, apparently SGN's live shows are pretty special, some kind of ritualistic, multimedia spectacle, with video projections, the band costumed in monk's robes (why are monk robes so popular with so many bands nowadays?). Love to see 'em some day. In the meantime, we'll be spinning this, A LOT!
Stoner rock, anyone? But not just any ol' stoner rock. What this trio from up in Portland, Sons Of Huns has going for 'em, besides being darn heavy, is that they RIP. As is amply (and amp-ly!) demonstrated on this, their debut full-length for the newly dominating Easyrider label. We've heard lots of stoner rock bands content with making your head nod, these guys will have it not just 'banging but spinning 'round. They play slow, sure, but also they play FAST, so there'll be the usual lumbering stoner riffage that will suddenly shift into overdrive, no longer lumbering but shredding, the instrumental interplay tight and tenacious. With fuzzed out '70s sounding riffs (great riffs), air guitar worthy solos, and swinging rhythms, like most bands in the genre, they're beholden to Black Sabbath, but these guys remember when Sabbath was basically a (heavy) prog band, jamming hard. So imagine if, like, Sleep had started to sound more like Stinking Lizaveta... Sons Of Huns are kinda like that, it's ADD stoner rock, lots of parts and changes and sheer MUSIC on here, these guys always keeping it interesting, with chops galore, nothing lazy 'bout 'em despite the (presumed) pot smoking. In fact, that's a good tag for 'em, pot smoking music that's SMOKIN''!!
The eleven tracks here offer a fair amount of variety: heck, the gonzo punked out rippage of "I'm Your Dad" is followed by the mellow-jazz instrumental interlude of "Waking Sleep"� there's stuff that's aligned with the stoner skate rock of bands like The Shrine and Hot Lunch, other moments more Melvinsy (somehow mixed with a little Dick Dale, on the epic "Super Kanpai Rainbow"), and oh yeah the rollicking retro proto-metal prog of fellow Portlanders Danava is obviously a good reference point too. And then we're back to the Sabbath again.
Sons Of Huns in a word: Badass.
The latest from this local black metal / black ambient outfit is part three in an unofficial trilogy of releases, and captures the band in their brief tenure as a four piece, complete with live drummer (they're back to a trio, now drum machine driven), although even live drummer-ed, they group's overall M.O. remains the same, crafting gorgeously lush expanses of grim psychedelic black ambience, and face melting blasts of noise drenched black buzz, that black buzz given a bit more heft here with the live drums. But unlike on past record, where the atmospheric intro would lead to an explosive blast of blackness, the four songs here are each self contained, and display some of the most experimental work from the band yet. Opener "Lastness", is a creepy, organ driven swirl of blackened shimmer and strange demonic vocalizations, the main melody looped maniacally and played on what sounds like an old children's organ, that melody buried under layers of grit and grime, and a chorus of ghostly voices, the whole thing gradually blissing out into a strange bit of abstract drift, processed vox and minimal percussion. Which leads directly into "Of Emanation", which finds SH making a noisy black mess, the live drums blown out, the vocals even more blown out, everything wrapped in thick sheets of in-the-red guitar buzz, the whole track laced with some twisted/warped production, the whole sound becoming muted and murky for a few seconds only to explode again moments later, stretches of almost white noise static, the various instruments drifting in and out, just drums and noise one second, just guitar the next, everything cranked to almost Merzbow-ic proportions the next.
"Dhumavatis Hunger" is all power electronics gristle, underpinned by deep Teutonic rumbles, and wreathed in clouds of swirling static, and blasts of distorted crunch, extremely noisy, with some surprising melodies surfacing beneath all that chaotic noise, the sounds coalescing into something weirdly songlike, albeit still doused in blown out distorted crumble, an epic and majestic slab of blacknoise, that eventually reveals some insectoid guitar buzz lurking beneath the surface, everything gradually getting lost in one final squall of speaker shredding sonic howl. And finally, "Dakhma", begins as a hushed drift, gradually gaining momentum (and volume), but instead of bursting into black metal buzz, the sounds seem to soar, a slow build to something ominously epic, a sort of grim black Godspeed, darkly and harrowingly lovely, building to a seriously noisy coda, before once again fading out, leaving a sky full of blackened sonic contrails.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!! Packaged in super swank full color jackets, printed in metallic ink, and including a full color printed insert.
The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans.
That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records.
There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there.
The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play.
Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.
What a gorgeous album! Taiga Remains is the former drone-out-of-noise project of Alex Cobb, with Works For Cassette being the final sonic statement under that moniker. He's hardly calling it a day, as he is continuing to record under his own name and is also responsible curating the impeccable Students Of Decay label with well over 100 releases of top-shelf neo-psychedelia bathed in reverb, drugs, or both. His own recordings emerge from this same curatorial vision for beautiful, blissful, drone-on delirium. He blew us away with a disc on Root Strata a couple years back, but THIS one is THEE album!!! With a swooning guitar half-melody slipping out of focus from the beginning of Works For Cassette, we knew this would be a gem, immediately fixating itself in a staring contest with those long-form sprawls of Andrew Chalk or the glassy-drone hypnosis occasionally produced by Tim Hecker. We know that Chalk is wide-eyed through his own magical realm of English dreariness and Hecker's ambitions would mount matchsticks between his eyelids in his pursuit of greatness; but Cobb never blinks. His darkly kosmische gaze extends beyond that metaphysical staring context and peers up the the coast of California beyond the green flash of a disappearing sunset to the west and toward the distant aurora borealis twinkling at the north in sheets of irradiated greens and yellows. So speaks from the mind's eye of Alex Cobb.
Golden tones of metallic buzz swaddled in radiant timbres and ghostly reverberations. Majestic blurrings from time-dilated meditations on the minutiae of existence exploded to the scope of the infinite. Sublime, oceanic roilings where the division of land, air, and sea is so diffused that a bathysphere is required for any means of transportation. Blissed-out pleasure-seekers, psychonauts, dronologists, daydreamers, inner-mind pioneers, and psychic malcontents seeking something to soothe the soul; here's a perfect album for you. Works For Cassette is an epic, cinematic feat of dronescaping; and one of the finest that we've come across.
While Teenage Filmstars would go on to rival the legendary My Bloody Valentine, in crafting some of the most intense, next level, tripped out shoegaze (in fact some aQ-ers believe TF are way better than MBV, hate mail welcome!), in the early days, they were essentially an extension of Filmstars mastermind Ed Ball's other outfits, the Times, O Level and Teenage Filmstars, belting out crazy catchy sixties influenced new wave jangle pop. This lp was originally released as a super limited Record Store Day release, and gathers up the group's first three singles, reissued on vinyl for the first time ever. All the tracks here are super catchy, but their 'classic' track "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" is definitely the gem here, replete with a goofy mid song breakdown with the group reciting classic lines from The Prisoner, not to mention a chorus so catchy, it's hard to believe it's not actually a classic jam from the sixties. The other singles are great too, "(There's A) Cloud Over Liverpool" is another impossibly catchy sixties pop jam, but "Odd Man Out" might be the weirdest, a horn flecked ska-pop groover, reminiscent of the Specials and Madness.
A whole different beast than later Teenage Filmstars, but for fans of retro sixties style pop, it doesn't get better than this (or the -other- Record Store Day lp included elsewhere on this list, a vinyl collection of early singles from Ed Ball's O Level!)...
The schizophonic erasing and minimalist-dub-industrial aktions of Thought Broadcast are strategies directly replicated from very obscure sources from a very specific time frame. One admitted source is the unheard catalogue of Vanity Records flexidiscs from Japan circa 1981. In positing the work as an outright forgery, Thought Broadcast's copies of copies of copies of copies engender a punk-situationist zenith of radically free appropriation as artform. Where Through Broadcast is taking its cues from Vanity; Vanity was obfuscating the work of Maurizio Bianchi (amongst others), who in turn took after Conrad Schnitzler (amongst others), who leapt into sound upon his tutelage from Joseph Beuys. The network of influences and detours and rhizomes through both time and space is never a linear one, always convoluted and morphing; and Thought Broadcast is very clearly aware that the simulacra of signifiers can be an exhausting, unending cycling of ideas. In the replication and variations on stolen, damaged goods, Thought Broadcast re-ignites an obsessive, psychological tension which speaks of VHS video nasties, conspiracy theories of subliminal messages coded in television static, and the liminal horror of sound being used a control mechanism. Yes, these were the ideas that were spawned out of the Industrial Culture Handbook (e.g. Burroughs, TG/PTV, Z'ev, etc.); and Throught Broadcast's distillation of synth-punk ideas and aesthetics through the variation upon the most minimal of means -- a flanging, noisy-as-fuck synth droning above a grittily-phased drum machine -- is undeniably perfect in it's reminiscence for a time when everything else was fucking boring and fucking horrible. Yeah, one of the best electronic records of year. 1981? 2014? It matters not.
We were super stoked on the Life Coach album Alphawaves last year. Turns out Life Coach mainman Phil Manley is also in some band called Trans Am, who have a new album out now too - their TENTH full album, actually, hence the title Volume X (it also has exactly ten tracks on it). Life Coach fans should definitely check out Trans Am.
Joking aside, we've been with Trans Am since the beginning, giving their eponymous 1995 debut the "thumbs up" and lauding such releases as Futureworld as being "perfect"... though we admit that, for us, the band's career has had its ups and downs; however, right now, they're on the up, Volume X providing a varied showcase for a lot of what we love about Trans Am, in particular the trio's talent for making mostly instrumental, heavily synthesized music energized with live band ROCK chops. Their Kraftwerk meets Tortoise meets the faceless new wave / hard rock band from the soundtrack to some '80s VHS tape retro-futuristic aesthetic is in full force, sounding sorta like a post rock version of Neil Young's Trans at times. Or imagine an album of groovy 'library music' from the '60s - the 2060s that is!
Volume X is chock full of spacey synth-splorations, big blurpy electro beats, vocodered vocal mantras, and krauty motorik grooves - the album, as usual for 'em, very rhythmically oriented, but not without some effective doses of emotive melody in the mix (in particular the acoustic guitar laced finale, "Insufficiently Breathless", the song's title a clever Captain Beyond reference, perhaps).
Other highlights include the maniacally shredding "Backlash", which is basically thrash metal done Trans Am style (Manley used to play in The Fucking Champs, remember); the ominous, throbbing distortion shuffle of "Megastorm"; and the lovelorn robot balladry of "I'll Never" (the album's lead single?), to name a few.
The mighty Sublime Frequencies label keeps the impossibly cool comps coming, this their second collection of music from Algeria. The first focused on a very specific musical form from the region called Rai, whereas this new one is all about folk and pop music from the same era, and while on the surface it may seem more 'mainstream', it's still fantastically quirky, funky, groovy, and exotic, and all over the sonic map.
The seventies were a surprisingly good time for music in Algeria, 45's in particular, which was remarkable considering the socialist government at the time, and the legions of cops, and bureaucrats, and censors no doubt hell bent on suppressing any sort of social movement, and yet, music flourished, certainly a response to 'the man', who perhaps let these hippies have their music, assuming it might relieve some of the social tension of the time. Regardless, the 'hairies' embraced this sound, and were digging these very American influenced sounds, fuzzed out garage rock, groovy exotica, plenty of buzzing sitars, warbly organs, twangy surf guitar, wild percussion, male and female vox, some tracks sound literally straight out of the USA, others are fantastic hybrids of Western music and more traditional local sounds, but all the music included here is lively and powerful and personal and imbued with an energy that went well beyond just music and sound. And sure some of the jams are schmaltzy, almost easy listening, but even then, listening to those tracks, dressing wild and growing your hair our, was still extremely subversive and a serious rebellion, especially considering most of this music was officially suppressed. Like all Sublime Frequencies comps, so fantastic, and leaves us hankering for more more more!
And packaged as always, sublimely (ahem), in a heavy full color gatefold sleeve, with a super striking black and white portrait of an Algerian couple in their best rock and roll finery on the front, and inside, plenty of rare photos, liner notes and notes on each song and performer.
Looks like all the longhaired, unwashed, hesher-y heavy/psych/metal rockerz in the Mish got together to jam out, having a good ol' time, celebrating the scene - hell yes, we've still got a dirty underground hard partying heavy rock contingent in the neighborhood, ubiquitous Google busses and their techie riders be damned! This vinyl-only comp, limited to 500 copies, contains tracks by some bands aQ customers already know and love, plus others ripe for discovery. Not all cuts are exclusive, but many are. Bands include: Hot Lunch, Ovvl, Buffalo Tooth, Wild Eyes, Hazzard's Cure, Hightower, Lecherous Gaze, Solar Stoner, Hornss, Ironwitch, Chrome Eagle, White Barons, War Child, Tiger Honey Pot, and Winter Teeth. Lots of stonery, punked-out boss tunage here, which is what SF needs more of, rather than astronomical rents, parklets, trendy restaurants and brogrammers.
Rad cover art features naked witches and chopper-ridin' gorillas, with San Francisco landmarks Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge worked into the background.
For some reason, we just assumed these guys were Australian, could be that they had some records on Aussie labels, or that they have a very Australian sounding, murky post punk thud, gloom-sludge garage rock sound, but it somehow made even more sense when we discovered Watery Love was in fact members of late great Philly noise rockers Clockcleaner. So after a handful of killer 7"s on labels like Siltbreeze, Richie and Negative Guestlist, along comes the debut long player from these dirgey thud-punks, a downtuned garage-y churn, blown out and fuzzy, the bass thick and gristly, the drums a caveman pound, the vocals, a strange sung/spoken croon alternating with throat shredding howls, the lyrics twisted and demented, some tracks creepy crawly, muted and muddy, others wild and unhinged and noisy and punk, the vocals on those tracks exploding into a feral atonal bellow, the guitars following suit, the riffing eye waveringly obtuse, exploding into wild squalls of feedback drenched shreddery, but the sound is ultimately rooted to a knuckle dragging plod that manages to be both tranced out and mesmerizing, as well as unhinged and chaotic, and yeah, fans of Aussie outfits like Total Control, as well as the In The Red stable of garage-noise punks, will dig these guys big time.
The latest release from local label and psychedelic powerhouse Valley King is the latest record from stoner psych space rock visionaries White Manna, and like the two Holy Mountain records that came before, Come Down Safari, is another gloriously tripped out sonic sprawl, all hazy, buzzy throb and tranced out heart-of-the-sun mesmer, looooong tracks that seem to unfurl endlessly, the drums and bass weaving lush languorous backgrounds, that seem to pulse and ooze, over which the guitars soar and howl, melodic streaks blurred into heaving washes of chordal shimmer, riffs stretched out into druggy sonic mantras, the sound slipping effortlessly from churning psychedelic heaviness, to soporific, dream-drone drift, WM channeling the sound of their psychedelic forefathers, into heady, abstract sonic rituals, that manage to take the sound of classic early space rock and fuse it to a more modern take on retro psych.
Fans of the usual suspects (the Heads, White Hills, Mammatus, Carlton Melton, etc.) should already be WAY into these guys, and if they're not, this should fix that pretty quick.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, eye popping psychedelic picture disc artwork by Alan Forbes!
Still have a few of this Record Store Day 2014 release in the racks. Did peeps not know who White Mystery was? Maybe. But this is already the Chicago-based band's 4th studio album - or at least half of this is, the other lp in the set being a recording of a live show.
So, they're a brother-and-sister duo, kinda like the White Stripes (well, but they're siblings for real, we're pretty sure - they have the same frizzy ginger hair, and lots of it) playing hard hitting, high energy garagey rock'n'roll, the girl on guitar and vocals, the guy on drums. They kick out stripped down, anthemic songs about (to judge from the song titles) some fairly ridiculous/fantastical subjects. It's raucous good times for sure, simple and fun, for when you find yourself standing there with a PBR in your hand.
Ltd. to 1000 copies, colored vinyl. RSD release, so we don't think we'll be seeing any more than the handful we have.
So far, we've made EVERY record we've reviewed, but one, from post 16 Horsepower apocalyptic swamp-blues folk-gospel proselytizers Woven Hand a Record Of The Week. And really, we're not sure why we didn't make that other one (Blush Music) a ROTW as well, and for that matter, this new one too, a stunning collection of songs that displays David Eugene Edwards and co.'s continuing shift toward a sound more heavy and bombastic, while still managing to retain the gut wrenching moodiness and soul stirring sonic fire and brimstone of those other records. That shift is even more evident this time around, as Edwards' back up band on Refractory Obdurate is made up of members of hardcore heavies Planes Mistaken For Stars!
Just check out the opener "Corsicana Clip", which perfectly lays out the new WH musical math, beginning like a classic David Eugene Edwards jam, all brooding, and twang flecked, shuffling and loping, hypnotic and darkly majestic, brooding and harrowingly haunting, and we'd be perfectly happy if that's how the track played out, but then about halfway through, the song explodes into something seriously heavy, thick chugging guitars swoop to the fore, the drums get more bombastic, the echo drenched vocals wilder, a furious psychedelic blowout that's not at all what we've come to expect from WH.
A bunch of the tracks here are more restrained, playing out like just another great Woven Hand record, but others are fierce slabs of twisted post punk, some are smoldering slow build epics, and still others are super distorted hard rocking stomps, but they all sound perfectly and classically Woven Hand. The production is massive as well, giving the sound some serious heft, the new players injecting serious venom into the songs and sound, and consequently, Edwards also sounds more intense, his vocals snarling and feral, his guitar playing wild and frenzied, the dynamics dense and dramatic, the sound careening wildly from hushed haunting mesmer to furious almost noise rock crunch. Awesome.
