****Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert!****
Another great archival collection of Greek Rebetiko music, this time songs by the fiery and tempestuous vocalist Rita Abatzi. Like a mix of the sultriness of Edith Piaf and the anguished urgency of Selda, Abatzi was one of the most popular Rebetiko singers of the thirties. You can hear every nuance of powerful emotion in these songs through her incredibly impassioned vocals. It doesn't matter that we don't understand the words. There's such a haunting feeling of longing and pain that we're totally swept away as we listen. Comes with a booklet of notes about her history and unfortunately short singing career. Incredible!
The Golden Hour originally came out on Mississippi Records, a fantastic disc of improvised solo guitar from a Portland based guitarist named Marisa Anderson. We dug it so much, we had her perform like at aQ a couple days ago, and WOW. Not only was she super cool, but seeing her play live was even more impressive, and got us newly obsessed with the record. And while she was here, she also left us some cds of The Golden Hour, which she released herself. And if for some reason you've yet to hear it, do yourself a favor and pick one up! You won't be sorry. Here's what we had to say about The Golden Hour when we first reviewed the lp (which is why the intro is about Mississippi, even though the cd is self released, but it's relevant, really!):
We usually hate when reissue labels put out something contemporary, often it's some modern band that's making music in a similar vein, even more often it's a friend of the label, done out of obligation, and in both cases, most of the time, said release sticks out like a sore thumb. There are exceptions, and labels with great taste, can be trusted to make exceptions when they're called for. And Mississippi is definitely on of those labels we implicitly trust. In the past, they've peppered their mind blowing catalog of killer reissues with records by Spooky Dance Band (post Reeks And The Wrecks), PDX punk rockers Sad Horse, longtime aQ fave Mirah, and now a Portland based guitarist named Marisa Anderson.
Anderson plays guitar and lap steel, and offers up a dozen gorgeous tracks of her own particular brand of Appalachia, from the noisy, reverbed, chaotic and crunchy, almost psychedelic sounding "Drop Down", to the more traditionally folky "The Night Before Last", her playing is fluid and emotional, dexterous and original, channeling the spirits of the past (Fahey, Kottke, etc.) but infusing them with the spirit of today, and her own soul and feeling, and the results are indeed really quite nice. So lovely, sun dappled back porch guitar music, with the occasional foray into something a bit darker and stormier, WAY recommended. And you can now add Anderson to the elite roll call of Post-Fahey guitar gods (and now GODDESSES!) along side James Blackshaw, Jack Rose, Richard Bishop, Ilyas Ahmed, Matt Baldwin, and the rest.
For as much as we love this band, we had never seen them play live until a few weeks ago, and our minds were blown big time. Not only did they have an entire music store's worth of gear, so many speakers it required renting a U-haul to get them to the club, and also required setting up on the floor since they wouldn't fit on the stage, they also sounded incredible. Two super unassuming guys, kicking out the sort of rib cage rattling heavy jams that would make most 'proper' metal bands seriously envious. All that, and they were funny as fuck too, playing to a strange backing track, that not only included their drum machine, but also a strange robotic woman, who sort of narrated, explaining the different songs, pimping out merchandise, and even arguing with the band members between songs. So genius. And it's no small feat to be funny, and not be a joke band. But these guys have it nailed. If you've ever seen their hilarious non-music videos, you'll know what we're talking about. But none of that would matter if they didn't rule, and they most certainly do. Definitely heavily beholden to the late great Big Black, with churning, super distorted bass lines, impossibly down tuned guitar chug, the sound angular, thick and corrosive, tranced out and HEAVY as fuck, then there's guitarist Justin Foley's hilarious vocals, that slip easily from sardonic spoken word, to wild bellowed yowl and back again. And if anything, not only is this new record heavier, and more focused, it's also way more melodic, with a much bigger focus on actual songcraft, not to mention some seriously tripped out production and unlikely sounds throughout. That crazy catchiness surfaces in the most unlikely places, the songs themselves, complex and intricate and downright proggy, a dense, relentless crushingly heavy, impossibly hooky noise-pop, industrial metal-prog that is so goddamn good, it baffles the mind that these guys were always the unsung / less popular weirdos on the Hydra Head roster.
But hopefully, now that they've struck out on their own, this being the first release on their own label, folks will wake up and dig the crazy heaviness, and warped weirdo poppiness, these guys have (not so) quietly mastered over the last however many years. And yeah, it's definitely their best record yet. And no it's not all the same note (fuck you Justin). Definite contender for record of the year, so leave a space on that list, you won't be sorry...
Available on cd, vinyl, and as a 1/4" reel to reel tape, for the super music mega nerds out there (the band, also uber nerds, suggest that version, as it sounds the best haha)!
From the always impressive Sygil label, who in the past has given us stunning releases from
Aurora Dorey Alice, Charnel House, Avakr, OS, Sky Projection and more, comes this gorgeous missive of witchy, washed out dark wave gloominess/dreaminess. Falling somewhere between the drifty murk of Grouper, and the gothic torch songs of Zola Jesus, Bad Psychic unfurls stately, hauntingly meditative gloom-ragas, with soaring, tranced out vocals, over a bed of roiling dark drones, and softly churning synths. Woozy loops, and layered melodies, bleed and blur into softly undulating sonic tapestries, sometimes tethered to a spare, skeletal rhythm, but often left to float weightless in a sprawl of blackened shimmer. Some tracks (like "Dance Spell") slip into a sound a bit more overtly new wave, but even then, it's still creepy, and hazy, and drowsily lo-fi. Opener "Fortune" sets the mood perfectly, with it's tranced out, almost chorale sounding mesmer, that druggy, drowsy vibe surfacing throughout the record, sometimes morphing into a grim kosmische sound, other times blossoming into near poppiness, but always shadowy, and grey, and darkly dreamlike. Even after just one listen, we were compelled to just lift the needle and put it right back at the beginning again.
Fans of witchy, dreamy dark pop, especially folks who were bummed on the most recent Zola Jesus record, will find themselves wishing that had sounded more like this. A dark, droney, hypnotic, gloom pop gem, that comes WAY recommended. Includes a download code as well. LIMITED TO 200 COPIES!! Each one hand numbered.
Japanese doom/sludge titans, turned psychedelic hard rockers, turned weirdo J-pop iconoclasts Boris, have long been favorites around here, and with each new record never fail to surprise, or baffle, or confuse, and this new one is no different. While we all have different opinions about which Boris records are the best, around aQ, we were always partial to those earlier records, that sonically situated themselves alongside groups like Earth, SUNNO))), Corrupted and the like. But once their sound shifted toward something more 'rock', we found ourselves constantly debating the merits of different records, with some of us never quite being won over by their 'new' sound, and some of us embracing it big time, and only a few of us digging their weirdo electro/J-pop record the best.
This new one is bound to divide once again, as right out of the gate it reveals itself to be a sort of heavy, electronic flecked, psychedelic metal prog epic, the closest comparison being maybe later period Cave-In, around Jupiter, where that band, also previously sludgy and metallic, shocked folks (bumming out plenty) by transforming into something more like a heavier Radiohead. Opener "Melody" here, is a dead ringer for Cave-In, and to be fair, it's not all that removed from the last few Boris records, but something about it, the sound is much more focused, managing the tough task of being both poppy and catchy, hooky and heavy, laced with squalls of wild wah wah guitar freakout, and sprinklings of electronics, soaring vocals, wild drumming, it's total heavy-psych pop-prog bliss out of the highest order. And while the second track seems to slip right back into the fuzzed out riffage of past Boris efforts, it immediately opens up into another prog-pop epic, all tangled soaring leads, lush crooned vocals, layered textures, plenty of slow burn majesty, speaking of which, "Ghost Of Romance", sounds a bit like Boris channeling Les Rallizes Denudes, all super distorted and blown out, but dreamily poppy, a blown out ballad that explodes near the end into a fuzz drenched psych pop freakout. That smoldering balladry bleeds into "Heavy Rain" as well, that takes that prog-poppiness, and blurs it into a hazy, wasted dream-drift psychedelic dirge.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the nearly nineteen minute "Angel", which begins with glimmering harmonics, subtle percussion, and hushed melodies, almost 8 minutes of whispery soft focus drift, before blossoming into a gorgeous field of soaring psych guitar and swirling synths, before transforming into another brief bout of proggy pop, before finally devolving into a tranced out field of blissfully blurry, glimmering guitar noise, like a softer, dreamier Sunroof!
Finally, the record finishes off with the super metallic, hard rocking heavy psych prog of "Quicksilver", furious and frenzied, with some seriously tripped our vocals, and wild tangled arrangements, flecked with some crazy catchy poppiness, before the 3 minute final come down, a barely there soft focus shuffle, all dark twang, hushed rhythmic skitter, all drenched in echo and reverb, like a downer psych Earth.
Great stuff, and as far as a bunch of us are concerned, finally a return to form, and quite possibly the best record we've heard in a while from these guys (and gal)...
A couple lists back, we reviewed a Brainbombs related record called Regler, which was a terrifically and geniusly difficult listen (and yeah, we still have a few copies left, just ask), consisting of one side a continuous, blasting D-beat noise jam, the other side near silence, a high concept sprawl of musique concrete, ostensibly made up of all the cutting room floor between song silences, but c'mon, why wouldn't you expect difficult listening from one of the Brainbombs?
Somehow we missed out on the debut from this -other- Brainbombs offshoot, which is a much easier sonic pill to swallow for sure, but still plenty weird. In fact, if you can imagine the droned out miserablist garage sludge of that band, recast as something more tripped out and krautrocky, well, then Bremen is right up your alley. Long tracks, consisting of loping basslines, motorik rhythms, woozy, psychedelic organs, all blurred into hazy mesmeric grooves, with some weird fixation on space, so there's definitely something kosmische going on, but it's murky, and muddy, lo-fi, tranced out and darkly druggy, long layered tones draped over skeletal rhythms, and wreathed in thick siren like swirls, and nestled in thick, syrupy low-end. And that's just the first track.
The sound slips into something much more ambient and downright dreamy, a swirling hazy of disembodied guitar buzz, and smeared organ chords, slivers of reversed twang, all stretched way out into a dark, mellifluous thrum, haunting and downright lovely, eventually, blossoming into sweetly soaring, harmonic flecked psychedelic shimmer. For the rest of the lp, the sound remains rooted firmly in the abstract, ditching the drums completely, instead unfurling lush waves of psychedelic space drift, droned out kraut-psych, and softly swirling cosmic ambience, only slipping into something rhythmic right near the end, a pulsing tribal rhythm surfacing amidst the pulsing murk.
And so it goes, the 3rd side sounds like some strange hybrid of Expo '70 and Earth, lacing shimmering synths, with twang flecked riffage, a sprawling ambience, that sounds like the soundtrack to a moonlit desert beneath a field of stars. And that track is also pocked with coughing, as if this was just a couple guys messing around, which maybe it is, but it's also sort of weirdly transcendent and beautiful, especially considering it's the guy from the Brainbombs!!! The final side is even more blessed out and pretty, a spare, almost Durutti Column-ish guitarscape, that drifts and glimmers and shimmers, all washed out and sound dappled and impossibly lovely. Wow.
Unexpected, and unexpectedly fantastic. Not at all necessarily recommended for fans of the Brainbombs, but anyone into spacey, shimmery prettiness, and psychedelic cosmic ambience, this will definitely hit the spot.
Ah, Chasms! This has been one our favorite local acts in recent years, thanks to their smattering of cassette only releases and their impressive live performances of shoegazing heaviness and goth-laden electronics with an almost dark industrial vibe, which had us imagining Coil remixing Cocteau Twins or Slowdive! Subtle Bodies collects material from two of these (now out of print) cassettes along with a brand new track as a bonus! As we mentioned in an earlier review about the Riser tape (whose four tracks comprise all of side one of Subtle Bodies), the San Francisco duo are at their most focused and effective, starting off with flashes of hot white light, tapping into that classic shoegaze sound, with Chasms aiming and reaching so much higher then most of their peers. "Not In This Dimension" may very well be their most beautiful song yet, a shimmering gem that we had to play over and over after the first time we blasted this on our headphones. And each subsequent time we do, we close our eyes and let the song engulf us, gliding through a world of soft and swirling sonic sensations that we haven't felt since maybe Slowdive's masterpiece Pygmalion.
The flipside dives into a more narcoleptic and narcotic sound with the the drumless haze of "When It Comes" and the claustrophobic, blurred dirge of "Darker Outside" reminding us of some of those super creepy tracks by The Cranes from way back when. The eleven minute "Dissolution Into Light" rounds out the album as a blissed-out ride down the river Styx with desolate thrums of bass distortion and heartbreakingly sad melodies wavering through the feedback and reverb. Totally recommended!
A while back, we reviewed a gorgeous double lp from a New Orleans outfit called Chef Menteur, whose sound was a gorgeously blissed out psychedelic sprawl, all drugged out space rock and hazy shimmery drones, brooding psych-kraut and lush pastoral ambience. We sold a ton, and figured that maybe that just might have been it. But finally, here's a cassette-only follow up, and right out of the gate, it's another stunner. The opener is a hushed drift, all abstract Appalachia, wheezing harmonica, muted chordal thrum, sculpted feedback, like the prettiest Sunroof! track ever, a sort of spaced out raga, pulled apart into something even more ethereal and abstract, gorgeous and meditative and dreamlike. We figured that maybe the band had shifted their sound, and embraced their lighter, more ethereal side, but then in swoops the second track, with a rapid fire rhythmic melody, some almost funky bass, and some swirling electronics, quickly building into a sort of psych-funk that reminds us a lot of Swedish outfit Goat, which is definitely not a bad thing. As the song unwinds, the sound expands, adding more and more layers, extra instrumentation, eventually getting pretty dang heavy, with some swirling organ, building to a fierce finale.
"Death Wraith 2000" is a much darker and heavier beast, sounding like something on Cardinal Fuzz, murky riffage, swirling psychedelia, pounding drums, the sound shifting from dark and tribal, to wild and noisy and seriously freaked out. The rest of the tape finishes off two more heavy psych groovers, the first a lush, slow building Godspeed style space rocker, with gorgeous long stretches of moody minimalism, between the more in-the-red bombast, while the second and final track, brings the organ back in, things get droned out and trancey, a little bit noisy, a sort of garage prog that eventually mutates into a gorgeous stretch of soft noise, before one final blast of psychedelic space rock crush.
Probably super limited, we have a handful...
While the rest of the world is freaking out over Death Grips' drum driven aggro noise drenched hip hop, especially with the recent release of a downloadable new collaboration with Bjork called Niggas On The Moon, it might be a good time to also dig into the brand new Sub Pop debut from LA noise-hop trio Clipping. (and yeah, the period is part of the name). Their sound, like Death Grips, finds its roots in classic hip hop, but both diverge in interesting ways. In the case of Death Grips, it's a live drummer (Zach Hill from Hella), and some seriously bombastic noise, not to mention the confrontational flow of rapper Stefan Burnett. It's a sound we love for sure, but the sound of Clipping. we love even more. Imagine that instead of that drum driven noisiness, you replaced the music with super minimal abstract noise, the sort of stuff you might hear on an RRR comp, think Bastard Noise or Sissy Spacek making a hip hop record and you'd be close. Even more interesting though, is that the two guys responsible for the music in Clipping. are Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, whom avid readers of the aQ list, and film nerds too, might know more from their stunning score to the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy documentary Room 237, the soundtrack which was released on Death Waltz.
But this is no retro soundtrackery, this is twisted noisy weirdness, wild feedback drenched analog skree, squelch drenched gristle, hiss and hum and screech and howl and thrum and buzz, blasts of digital noise wound around low slung beats. Check out the intro, which features rapper Daveed Diggs, spitting rapid fire flow a cappella over an ear piercing sine wave tone, eventually delivering the closer "It's Clipping bitch", before launching into the record proper, which gets no less weird, and no less noisy. "body & Blood" rides a grinding industrial beat, with a creepy processed voice 'chorus', but then "Work Work" surprises (as does much of the record), with its almost dreamy looped glitchy gamelan, that transforms into some low slung low rider booming bass throb. And while at first blush, some of the lyrics sound typically hip hop sexist, dig deeper, and there's way more going on, which is again balanced when Cocc Pistol Cree delivers her bad ass verse. And there are other guests too, King T, Gangsta Boo, Guce and more, but it's the core three who have their sound down. King T's guest verse on "Summertime" is a crusher, especially when the background sound swells into a cloud of alien laser blasts, deep bass thrum, and woozy sonic squiggles. Then there's tracks like "Taking Off", which sounds like it was made from damaged cd's, all skipping rhythms, looped and layered into a weirdly lurching beat, the perfectly wasted stuttery backdrop for Diggs' rapid fire flow. Gangsta Boo delivers a killer verse as well, over a weird bed of creaks and gristly moans, again a weirdly perfect match for her toasting flow, not to mention the strangely Kanye-ish chorus croon, with a rumbling thick low end swell underneath, the sort of track that would be all over the radio, if there was any justice. And let's not forget the insanely infuriatingly brilliant "Get Up", where the music is essentially JUST the sound of an alarm clock, maddening for sure, but then so satisfying when they modulate the sound into a weirdly radio pop chorus. And so it goes, Digg's flow world class, the background sounds a continually shifting landscape of fractured loops, woozy synths, clanging pipe fight rhythms, digital glitchery, weird damaged turntable rewinds, and dizzying noise collages, so unlikely, but so impossibly catchy, the magic of Clipping. in that it can be so obtuse and difficult, but still so groovy, so hooky, so funky, and so goddamn, catchy, this is exactly the sort of shit we'd be blasting through our booming system, no doubt shattering glass and bursting eardrums as we passed.
On both cd, and vinyl, both of which are slightly different (the aforementioned "Intro" is not included on the lp, but the version of "Body & Blood" is longer for example) but vinyl nerds are still in luck, cuz the lp comes in a super swank spot varnish printed triple gatefold, with an extra lp side, loaded with ONE HUNDRED locked grooves, noisy, distorted, blown out, abstract, dubby, clicky, funky, bloopy, bleepy and pretty much every variation in between. Both versions feature a bad ass blinded out Sub Pop logo too...
Reissued for the first time on vinyl, A Monastic Trio was Alice Coltrane's remarkable 1968 solo debut. Made in tribute to the life of her husband John Coltrane after his death the previous year, its arrival heralded an incredible new voice, and seemingly from it a new spiritual direction in jazz was set forth. Deeply personal and reverent, A Monastic Trio is marked by Coltrane's cascading and majestic turns on both piano and harp, with musical support from Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Jimmy Garrison and Ben Riley. The pieces both burrow to the core of grief and longing delving into gospel and funereal blues forms while also using open Eastern musical influences to form ascending arcs of mystical transformative sound. While Coltrane had previously collaborated with her husband before he died, most notably on the epic Cosmic Music, her subsequent solo career after his death stood apart from his as she moved the focus away from his oft-frenzied and intense horn-led modalities and brought a deeper dedication to a vital cosmic musical core where her harp, piano and organ flourishes could intermingle more fluently with the rhythm section into an organically flowing life-affirming musical unit. This is essential!
The resurrection of dub reggae music and its influence on post-punk in the late seventies and early eighties didn't really take off in America as it did in Britain. It seems that the aura of Thatcherite austerity policies that were taking their toll on the impoverished lower classes and urban council-flat populace as well as the increasing population of young Jamaicans whose parents emigrated en masse to England after World War II due to a British labor shortage, caused a reinvigoration of the pounding rhythms, industrial echoes and rolling bass of dub as a music defined by struggle. You can still hear this sonic thread as it has evolved over the years through drum and bass, grime and dubstep. But Adrian Sherwood's On-U label was the first on the beat in the late seventies when he began to produce the first Creation Rebel albums which presented a heavy urban take on classic dub and reggae sounds and re-tweeked it with the stoned out spaciness of Tangerine Dream and the Grateful Dead. Collaborating with another Sherwood produced-group, New Age Steppers, a rotating collective of punk and reggae musicians that at one time included Ari Up from The Slits, Keith Levine from P.I.L (both featured here) and Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) amongst its members, Threat of Creation was released in 1981. Channeling the raw energy and urgent spirit of roots, punk and reggae, into a cerebral concoction of mind-expanding rhythms, pensive social dissatisfaction and scorching sonic decay. This is the first vinyl reissue since its release and it's as sonically hard-hitting and socially relevant as ever.
Yet another record from Mark Deutrom, previously and probably still best known for playing bass in the Melvins once upon a time. But for a while now, Deutrom has been cranking out incredible solo records, most on the Rock Is Hell label, and somehow remaining well under the radar. We'd say something like "this one will change everything", but we're guessing it probably won't, and who knows, perhaps he's content to be right where he is. We sure are if it means we keep getting more and more records like this.
With every record it's sort of hard to know what to expect, the last couple were sort of matched out proggy pop, and super catchy sooner rock heaviness, but this new one, begins with an epic 20 minute side long jam titled "Dick Cheney", which spends its first 4 minutes droning ominously, lush layered textures, slowly shifting, finally some buzzing metallic guitar drifts in, as does some percussion, it feels like the song is about to explode, but then instead, transforms into a lurching minimal avant doom creep, spaced out chugs, loads of space, the vibe very Harvey Milk-ish actually, and then the vocals come in, and the song is somehow transformed into something way catchier and popper than it has any right to be. Especially near the end, when the guitar swoops up into a super catchy melody, before devolving into a weird little chug flecked, industrial noise outro. Phew. Most bands would be content with that 20 minutes, but there are three more sides here to dig, all of which display Deutrom's mastery of whatever the fuck he wants to do, from the brooding slow burn psych of "Winter Haystacks At Twilight", that almost sounds like the intro to some doom metal jam, to the very Melvins-y "Sky Full Of Witches", which also displays a seriously poppy vibe, a woozy, lurching stoner pop groove that sounds like it could have been plucked right off some Kyuss B-side. And that pretty much sets the tone, the sound lurches from groovy, mathy, prog-sludge, to groovy stoner pop, to dreamy almost jazzy psych, to super trippy avant abstract space-doom, to twang flecked, reverie balladry, often with several of those bleeding into each other.
Goddamn, this guy is a genius, and a seriously unsung one at that. Fans of the Melvins, Harvey Milk, Prizehog, Kyuss, and just twisted abstract heaviness, and moody metallic avant-gardery, get this and every other thing you can find. You'll thank us later!
***Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert! Mississippi Alert!***
Originally released on Smithsonian Folkways in 1969, Ghetto Reality features songwriter and educator Nancy Dupree as she works with a group of inner-city elementary school kids from Rochester, New York. When she was initially met with resistance to participate by the kids, she dropped the state standardized music curriculum and began to write songs that were more relatable to the keenly aware and grown-up lives the young students were living as well as the various contemporary social issues they were facing. Using piano and tambourine in groovy and soulful numbers, the songs take the form of spirituals and rhyming games, but the content is more modernized as they sing songs about James Brown, civil rights, and building their own self-esteem. This method proved highly successful as the more relatable the song, the better the participation by the kids, and the more they participated, the more the kids realized their natural talents for performing, offering a critical lesson in empowerment. This is an amazing record full of charm (especially cute are the kids imitating James Brown's grunts!) and with really great songs. Fans of Langley Schools Music Project, or that proto-hiphop lp on Smithsonian Folkways, Street And Gangland Rhythms, we listed awhile back, will find lots to love here.
There's nothing like a visit to hospital and the clinical confrontation with ones own mortality to provide a profound sense of clarity. The Georgian tape-minstrel Grant Evans completed Lacerations after such an excursion. Much of the source material for the album was intended to be released on an unnamed label, who ceased communication with Evans after the masters were supplied. While it remains to be seen if Evans will be donning his kosmische / new age cap once again (especially in the placid electronic hymnals recorded under the moniker Quiet Evenings with his wife Rachel Evans / Motion Sickness Of Time Travel), Lacerations is very far removed from anything remotely new age. Torn scabs of noise are scattered liberally through Grant Evans' corroded drones and tape-scum splutter. It appears that Evans is bouncing sordid field recordings (seemingly nocturnal investigations into resonant warehouses full of wood, metal, and glass to be tossed around) and computer sourced data-streaming onto those tapes, which sound exhumed from the bottom of some brackish sinkhole, flush with blind salamanders, translucent crayfish, and decomposed limestone. The digital-to-analog degradation recalls some of the more cerebral savages of US noise (e.g. Crawl Unit, Pedestrian Deposit, Howard Stelzer, etc.) with exemplary results made evident throughout the pronounced tape warble of Lacerations. Limited to 100 copies...
Finally! A new record from one of our favorite purveyors of kosmische kraut-psych and spaced out synthscapery, Expo '70! AND it's on one of our favorite labels, Essence (along with a new one from Japanese psych crew Up-Tight, elsewhere on this week's list). And while we'll have the standard version of this new Expo '70, this is in fact a PRE-ORDER for the super deluxe, super fancy, handmade BOX SET version, which comes not only with a bonus disc, but also housed in a crazy pyramid shaped box. It's limited to 99 copies and that's IT. We might be able to get 20, but we're only getting as many as we get pre-orders for, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item). And if you're already a fan, you're definitely gonna want one of these, the pyramid box is super striking, psychedelic inks and textures, in a carefully constructed 'handmade cosmic pyramidal boxset', that unfolds revealing still more artwork, and along with the new record proper, it also includes an exclusive bonus album, a cd-r called All Hues From Beneath A Velvet Cloud, and is ONLY available in this box. So needless to say, Expo nerds grab one before they are gone.
As for Virtually From The Unknown, it's another gorgeously sprawling cosmic sonic missive, the opening track clocking in at 31 minutes, a smoldering slow burning epic, all swirling synths, cascading keyboard textures, minimum motorik drumming, layers and drones, the sound eventually building to a dark dolorous psych-kraut drift, and then exploding into some seriously muscular space rock, all deep rumbling drones, powerful drumming, thick almost SUNNO))) like riffage, eventually launching into a full on navy psych blowout, all wild drum damage and thick squalls of freakout guitar, tethered to a furious galloping groove. Worth it for that track alone for sure, but there's of course more. The stonery psych of "Closet Full Of Candles" is a loping space doom juggernaut, with some wild distort leads, and some sick, thick bass buzz, sorta like Kyuss via Hawkwind, slowly working its way up to another in-the-red crescendo. Finally, there's the 17 + minute closer, awesomely titled "Planet Ego, The Astral Return To Yourself", which lays down distant guitar rumbles, beneath swirls of alien FX and squiggly laser blast blort, the background guitar buzz gradually gaining momentum, a thick slow moving swell, eventually overtaking the sound effects, and finishing off as a blurred, downtuned space-drone, before gradually drifting off, and leaving shimmery contrails of fast fading FX. So good, of course. And as we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know that too, and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is specifically for folks who want to nab one of the boxes before they're gone for good.
Back with their sixth album, these local boys are still sounding pretty fresh - whilst also sounding so very comfortably familiar. House Of Spirits finds Tim, Wymond, Kyle and Shayde kicking out another set of sweetly wistful indie pop jams/gems, replete with the usual head-nodding melodies, guitar jangle and (soft) fuzz... This time 'round, it sounds like they've been listening to a lot of The Cure, early Cure, yep that's what we're hearing here, it's just a bit downer-moody, their once-apon-a-time garaginess gone kinda gloomy, Tim's lyrics suitably strange and spooky. But the F&O's still can't help but let some sun shine in, some of the time. Nice stuff, as usual, even if a bit different!
We just realized, these guys have recorded full-lengths and singles for the following labels: Castle Face, Woodsist, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, In The Red, Hardly Art, Hozac, Agitated, Trouble In Mind, and (their current home) Mexican Summer, among others. Wow, could they possibly have MORE indie cred?
Ben Frost records are scary. And beautiful. They're the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. They're like soundtracks for films that can never be made, the music conjuring up images that can only exist in the imagination. It's musical magic, or sonic alchemy, whatever it is, it's something few have mastered, and even those that have, barely approach the mysterious mastery of Ben Frost, whose previous record, By The Throat, remains one of the most terrifying documents of electronic sound art we have ever heard, weaving the sounds of snarling wolves into thick swells of corrosive bass buzz, and brilliantly bleak, yet impossibly lush sound design, and balancing that sonic grimness, with glimmers of hushed beauty, in a way that makes the sound both mellifluous and malevolent in equal measure.
Aurora is another stunning sonic missive, and one that immediately conjures up yet another lost world, one that lurks in our collective imagination, but that has begun to bleed through, into our every day world. The shadows seem deeper and darker. The grey skies shout through with streaks of blood red, the nights interminable, the days, scorched expanses of endless time. All of this represented by strange sprawls of layered electronic drones, of gristled pulsations, of strange staticky rhythms, and mysterious buried melodies, the sounds this time around brittle and jagged, the loveliness sharp edged and flecked with rust and dried blood, the rhythms that surface are hauntological, reminding us of the dubbed out avant mesmer of groups like Demdike Stare, but here those rhythms seem to gradually splinter and fray, wreathed in thick swirls of soft noise, sculpted into weeping melodies, and darkly decaying textures, all hiding some glowing inner warmth, suffusing these sounds with an organic quality, that transforms a series of sounds into something alive, a crackling energy that is barely contained on the record, one can almost imagine the sound as colored sparks leaping from the speakers, bursting from the headphones, a cascade of brilliant sonic flares, raining down from above.
Lurching robotic percussion is shaped into strange skeletal shapes, lumbering behemoths trading through fields of groaning, creaking chordal thrum, pelted with prismatic streaks of sound, a beastly groove, that builds to a thick swath of soaring epic psychedelic electronic majesty, like a meaner, moodier, more metal M83, a brilliant blacknoise blur, that blots out the stars, painting the sky in shade and shadow, eventually morphing into burnished stretches of grey ambience, laced with dubby skitter, all of which blossom further into a flurry of blissed out electro flares, which fade into crackling seas of gristle and hum, undulating imperceptibly beneath hazy layers of grumblingly distorted shimmer and grinding sheets of druggy thrum. A heaving landscape of tense cinematic atmosphere, smeared fields of tangled melody, wildly colliding synth streaks, and jumbled beats and rhythms, all wound up into a tightly coiled swirl, flurry of frenzied electrons, gradually crumbling into the ether, leaving just a barely there cloud of sonic static discharge, until finally, nothing. And emptiness.
Simply stunning.
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...)
We made the last record from these Ohio noise poppers our Record Of The Week, and that one, Cartoon Violence, was the perfect mix of classic nineties indie rock, and the sort of hook heavy noise pop we can't even seem to get enough of, and seems like lots of you agreed cuz we could barely keep that one in stock. So we were of course super psyched to discover there was in fact a brand new record, and this is it, Boys. While it does have loads in common with Cartoon Violence, it's also different enough, and enough of a progression to make it both familiar, and super exciting and adventurous. The sound is noisier, and grittier, the production too, the whole thing sounds heavier, a bit more punk, but not in any way that disguises the pop geniuses these guys are, and with every listen we're more and more convinced that that's just what they are. Opener "Full Stick" is 100 seconds of impossibly catchy fuzz drenched bash and pound, with a sing along chorus that any other pop band would kill for. And from there on out, it never lets up. Every track here crazy catchy, lurching from fuzzy jangle, to blown out noise pop heaviness and back again, the guitars are thick and distorted, just listen to "Alcoholics", dig the jangly verses, and then let that super guitar heavy chorus get your pop head banging. It's tough to balance poppiness and heaviness so deftly, but these guys do it like it's nothing, the songs sound just loose enough to feel like that band that plays at the bar down the street from your house, the one you're convinced would be huge if just the right people heard them, and that's pretty much how we feel about these guys, why the fuck are they not MASSIVE. Like the Ovens, another pop fave, this band is so much better than so many of the other groups that get hyped to high heaven, so all we can do is hype the shit out of it ourselves and hope it gets into the right ears. Although really, the right ears are YOURS, cuz if you dig noisy, catchy, heavy pop, fuzzed out jangle, silly, sardonic lyrics, and sing along choruses that should be all over the radio (speaking of which, check out the Weezer like synth solo on "Publishing"!), this is so up your alley. But for now, like so many other amazing insanely talented bands we love, these guys will just remain our little secret, but it's one of those secrets we'd be so happy to NOT keep. Here's hoping this record is THE ONE, that finally gets the rest of the world to wake up and become as obsessed with these guys as we are, cuz goddamn, this stuff is so good. For now though, they're all ours. And yours...
It's been a while since we've heard from psych-kraut-drone duo High Mountain Tempel, but Gnosis quickly reminds us why we missed these guys. Tempel-ers Keith Boyd and Eric Nielsen unfurl a softly billowing psych folk raga, that's all softly swirling steel string strum, circular melodic shimmer, crooned, almost chant like vocals, the disc also featuring a bunch of guests, including some Acid Mothers Temple folks, as well as Charles Curtis and Isis Aquarian (!). Unlike the more purely ritualistic minimalism of the other records, the opening track here sound more like some Appalachian psych-folk, blurred into something a bit more abstract. But the group quickly returns to that ritualism, conjuring up strange fields of softly shimmering dronemusic, subtle bits of percussion, chiming harmonics, whispered incantations, those two sides of HMT's sound constantly in flux, delicate piano draped over processed whispered vocals, transformed into clouds of grey hissing sibilance, sounds pitched down to create ominous bellows, that become dubbed out drones, sampled voices also doused in FX drift over the top, churning industrial noise gives way to almost Native American sounding minimalism, fluttering flutes, shakers and bells, distant field recordings, swirling backwards melodies, swooshing ambience, and muted droning FX, occasionally blossoming into a sort of collaged soft noise-psych, and just as often expanding into a sort of free-rock campfire forest-folk. The long tracks laced with bits of psychedelic freakout, shards of feedback, buried voices, and constantly shifting layers and textures, all blurred into a heady, heavenly psych-drone ritual, that is mesmerizing and dreamily hypnotic.
It's a cd-r, but comes housed in a nice full color digipak, and yeah, probably pretty limited too...
Behold, the first full-length, facegrinding slab of psychedelic stoner rock malevolence from these San Francisco heavies, the all-caps and very plural HORNSS, who appeared on that Monsters Of Mission Rock comp lp we listed last time. Hell yeah. A little Sabbath, a little Hawkwind, probably a lot of beer and weed, this is kinda trippy, and super HEAVY - another thing we must put in all-caps about 'em.
HORNSS sure have a lot of gnarly gargly punked out energy to their hard, rollicking riffing, which goes hand in hand (and fist in face) with the raggedly wailing vocals that, while gruff, we found to be much more melodic than expected (and we're not talking about the dainty female guest vox on the track "Ejaculation Of Serpents"). Groovy sludge, sludgey groove, did we already say "hell yeah"? We did. And we will again, every time we spin this. No Blood, No Sympathy sure can be a real ripper, reminding us of young hardcore Melvins on such cuts as "Graceless And Aged", while also having its laid back moments of spacey Sabbathy "Planet Caravan" style psychedelia, elsewhere. The Melvins comparison also comes into play on "Debreeding", where the vocals make us think of Buzz Osbourne singing an Alice Cooper cover.
All lovers of the riff, all lovers of the rockin', can chalk up another big win for the Easy Rider label (billed here as Riding Easy for some reason, but it's the same label we're pretty sure, they're not foolin' anyone)!
These Northwestern heavies came highly recommended by aQ faves Megaton Leviathan, but don't be expecting a similarly spaced out psychedelic doom, instead Hungers deliver a super dense, blackened heaviness, that actually reminds us of the newest Satyricon, but these guys have more up their sleeve for sure. After blasting out of the gate with a mid tempo black metal / heavy rock churn, they switch gears into something more melodic and post metal, only to then explode into a dense progged out squall, only to return to that opening blackness. The sound is epic and thick, almost like Pelican crossed with Satyricon if that makes any sense, the raspy vokills definitely contributing much of the blackness, the music itself, lush and layered, dense tangled melodies, thick, distortion drenched chug, veering from blasting buzz, to woozy lope, to smoldering epic slow build, to mathy metallic crush, to churning Neur-Isis style majesty, super epic, and crushingly heavy, but still super melodic and nuanced. Not at all what we were expecting. These guys sonically are well beyond self releasing their own tapes, they sound like they should be on Relapse or Century Media, or back in the day, even Moonfog. Check out the sound samples, it's kind of a tough sound to describe, other than they kind of mash a bunch of stuff we love together, which shouldn't work, but does, big time. Epic, blackened, melodic, post metal, math-prog heaviness that we can't stop listening to, and we're guessing means big things to come for these guys.
Limited of course, and includes a download code as well.
As if all of the projects that Emeralds' synth wrangler John Elliott weren't enough, he's adopted a pseudonym to record under the Imaginary Softwoods banner. The name's Blue O'Randa here, although there's little doubt as the authorship of the sounds. With the exception of the bittersweet attitude of "Rainbow Obsidain Key" and its faux-harpsichord melodies, The Path Of Spectrolite fully embraces the New Age path that Elliott, ummm, O'Randa has been teasing us with through all of his recordings. With all of the aquatic bubbling, bright-eyed synth pads, cosmic shot dream-drone, and harmonic tonal shimmer, Imaginary Softwoods bare more than passing resemblance to the likes of Iasos. Limited to just about 500 copies.
Two song Svart seven-inch from Swedish sensations In Solitude. The A-side originally appeared on their 2011 The World. The Flesh. The Devil. album, so you should have heard it already (unless you're only into 'em for their more recent disc, Sister). The B-side is a Samhain cover, recorded in 2011 - so perhaps part of the band's transition from the more trad Mercyful Fate-ish metal of The World. The Flesh. The Devil. to the gothier, rockier Sister stuff...
As promised, these brilliant Canadian metalpunks are now back with their second full-length album. Like their debut Cold Bitch, it's another "single-coil assault" of rollicking, punked-out, '80s influenced speed metal that's absolutely unfuckwithable. No, not in the sense that it's the most technically advanced musically, or super high in fidelity, no, we're talking about the sheer spirit of it. And it's the sort of thing that's just kind of perfect in its DIY imperfection. Not by any means a tired, unimaginative exercise in emulating the past that we hear from so many retro thrash bands, instead the Iron Dogs fashion inspiration from their '80s faves - the likes of early Iron Maiden, English Dogs, Exciter, Cirith Ungol, and Tank - into something newly vibrant and alive. Proudly old school while still sounding 'young'. Delightfully loose and exuberant, ready to rock right off the rails, but not careless or half-assed, despite the raw garaginess of it all.
As hopefully you well remember, we freakin' raved about Cold Bitch last year, likening it to a cross between Speedwolf and Slough Feg, and this new one takes the sound of that album and runs with it, delivering the goods with another batch of songs just as good or better than the first, if anything. So while Free & Wild isn't super different than Cold Bitch, that's just fine with us! Some bands are about 'progression', you want 'em exploring new sounds and ideas from record to record; others, you don't want anything to change, you just want MORE, new killer songs in the same style, which is what you get here. And since we loved Cold Bitch so much and spun it so often, we HAD to make Free & Wild a Record Of The Week. Free & Wild even sports a similar cover concept - a photo of a sword wielding, blood-drenched naked lady. She's being "Free & Wild" we guess, taking men's heads and putting them on stakes (or perhaps this tableau is inspired by track six here, "Cannibal Death Cult"). Cold Bitch's cover was a bit more clever but this one is no less striking.
One change with this album, not that you would notice it, is that Iron Dogs are no longer a trio, but a duo, with Dan Lee on on drums and Jo Capitalicide on vocals, guitar, bass, and even some synth. And as a two piece, Jo and Dan are now our favorite metal duo since Fenriz and Nocturno Culto - and we'd imagine that those two Darkthrone dudes would highly approve of what the Iron Dogs are up to, the mix of NWOBHM gallop and crusty punk fervor is right up their alley.
Now, some other, less enlightened people might find fault with the production (solid but certainly not slick), or not be on board with Capitalicide's untrained rough-and-tumble vocal holler (with Dan Lee's backing vox adding even more jubilance). But those folks are obviously not punk rock enough - and/or cult metal enough - to 'get it'. To us what makes this so special comes through loud and clear in each of this album's eight tracks, all of 'em exploding with energy, catchy hooks and epic feel, crammed full of delicious bits of metallic goodness. Opener "Firebird" (for which they've made an entertaining low-budget video, perhaps inspired by Benny Hill as much as the videos of Canadian antecedent Thor, see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWZsD2kFeSo) is a melodic, motivational speedy anthem to get things going. From there, the half-hour run time of this album rips by with highlight after highlight, Jo singing of fighting, freedom, and fantasy. We love every bit of this. The heartracing riffage. The majestic Moog moments. The up-and-down cascade of wordless vocal woah-oh-oh-ohs in the middle of "Island Of The Dead". The way Jo's voice cracks on that one verse in "Storm Warning". The folky fast picked guitar motif on "Adversity" - indeed all the melodic guitar licks bursting out everywhere. This rousing Iron Dogs album, non-ironic but not over-serious, epitomizes the positive power of metal in a shitty world.
Ok, so we're hopeless Iron Dogs fanboys... but there's a reason for that! Listen and learn. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. We won't call you a poseur. But we'll still feel sorry for you. 'Cause Iron Dogs RULE!
(Note: this is the handsome cd digipack edition - but if you act fast and ask, you could possibly snag one of the few "vinyls" we have left, or even a cassette, neither of which we're actually listing 'cause we have so few.)
The drums stagger forward in a drunken lurch and a pseudo-bluesy rocktastic bass line oozes forth occasionally reaching towards brassy moans in jazz-not-jazz pools of structural devolution. Here is the anonymous rhythm section for Jandek's Saturday performance back in June of 2013 in his hometown of Houston, Texas. Anchoring all of this activity is Jandek himself, firing off taut, sharp, yet meandering phrases and notes from his guitar with the stream-of-consciousness poetics that wax and wane unintelligibly as he warbles through the notes. His freeform live shows are always without practice and with his backing band given only the instructions for 'blues', 'ballads', or 'brutal.' The Houston gig seemed to fall into none of those categories, although it seems to slant closest to the blues in a super abstract, Jandekian way. The overall feel is closer to the completely wasted sessions that The Stooges belligerently recorded while completely fucked up as they struggled to work through Funhouse between bottles of alcohol and heroin fixes. The crack from reality that Jandek describes is not through the delirium of bacchanalian excess but rather through an exasperation with existence itself. Jandek huffs and heaves his lyrics about his excitement and physical obsession with an unnamed dreamtime figure, betrayed by a throaty voice and old age. It's long been a compelling journey of non-representational songwriting, and here's to many more years to come!
There's something truly magical about music in nature. And we don't mean the music we find in nature, although more often than not, that natural music is far more interesting and beautiful then anything we humans can conjure up. No, we're talking about playing music -with- nature, -in-nature. The act of collaborating with something so big, so grand, so overwhelmingly complex, that sometimes just the mere act of creating sounds away from the studio or stage, just being outside in nature with your music, can seem truly divine. And as listeners, there is something thrilling about man and nature working together to make music. From the primitive forest black metal blast of Ulver recording Nattens Madrigal in the Norwegian woods, to the Jewelled Antler collective communing with nature, allowing wind and rain and sticks and stones to play as important a part in their music as they themselves, to the rain soaked ritual of Koukiji Kougezan's Live [11th] Final Hyakusenmansyuuraku, a near ambient performance for flute and sitar, with the falling rain, and thus nature, the focal point of the ritual / performance. So lovely, and vital, the music seems so much more whole, so much more alive, all intertwined with the elements.
Osmose was originally released in 1978 and found minimalist composer Ariel Kalma using all manner of keyboards, saxophone, harmonium, delays, effects, even circular breathing, to compose gorgeously minimal, softly spacey slow drifting ambient soundscapes, which were then mixed with the sounds of the rainforest (recorded by Richard Tinti). But unlike new age meditational music, this wasn't just music layered on top of random bits of field recordings, Kalma actually composed and mixed, edited and arranged his compositions to work with and within the sounds of the rainforest. Abstract melodies and warm chordal swirls, simple tribal war drums, perfectly blended with the calls of crickets and frogs and cicadas, the falling rain, birdsongs, flies, and all the sounds of the jungle forest. It sounds almost as if, while walking through the forest, you'd be just as likely to stumble across a bunch of analog synthesizers basking in a sunny glade or a wheezing harmonium perched in low hanging branches as you would frogs gathered by the edge of the stream. Sounds strange, but that's how interconnected the natural sounds are with Kalma's compositions. The distant animal calls sometimes form primitive loops, while Kalma paints them with warm soft smears of sound, extended drones and dreamy drifty ambience. Simple rhythms repeat while the sounds of the forest drift lazily by, everything sun dappled or rain soaked, It's almost like a pop ambient record recorded deep in the forest primeval. Or stumbling upon some ancient burial ground and discovering traces of some long gone krautrock jam, which over time had somehow sunk deep into the earth, or floated off into the sky, leaving nothing but memories, a handful of bones, sonic echoes of its former self. Sounds like ghosts, drifting like spirits through the leaves of the trees, floating weightless above the wet leaves and rich soil. Warm and fuzzy, dreamy and blissed out, so completely lovely and quite possibly our new favorite record to drift off to...
Includes three bonus tracks recorded at the same time as the original lp, but unreleased until now, as well as a booklet of liner notes detailing the lives of both Ariel Kalma and Richard Tinti, as well as the genesis of Osmose.
Well, troo Melvins freaks are prolly gonna want this, and maybe some non-Melvins fans will get curious about it too. Imagine the Melvins minus most of the heaviness, stripped down to just voice and acoustic guitar strum. Basically, this solo album from Melvins frontman Buzz Osbourne really just sounds like it could be his acoustic demos for the next Melvins record, like before he brought the songs to the band, which is kinda cool, though we'd rather hear these songs with amplified electric guitar and the full band (which would include at least one, if not two drummers). But, still, we can dig this. The riffs, hooks, Buzz's charisma, it's all there, like a skeletal Melvins album really, though a couple tracks he's polished up and really focussed on the poppiness, and then this sorta sounds like Alice In Chains' "unplugged" Sap ep! Which we all liked, right? Remember?
Buzz does attack his acoustic with commendable ferocity, and his sometimes effects-laden voice is still in the 'heavy' style of his main band. Any coffee house where he performed like this would get complaints for sure.
So, definitely interesting to hear Buzz in this context, for the novelty of it at the very least, but as Melvins fans, we wouldn't want him leaving the Melvins to do this full time or anything.
For RVNG's third installment in their archival series (the other two being the great Harald Grosskomp and Sensation's Fix collections), the focus is on lesser known American ambient visionary, Kerry Leimer (or, K. Leimer, the abbreviated initial a nod to Kafka's Joseph K from The Trial). Hailing from Seattle, where he began his Palace of Light imprint in the late seventies (one of the first experimental labels in the region), Leimer had an almost savant-like obsession with generative music largely spurred on not only by the influences of Dada and Surrealism but also the works of Cluster, Eno, Terry Riley and Robert Fripp of which he saw a musical corollary, in that the tape loop became its own instant but fatalist structure. Realizing the potential to compose his own music with little background or training, Leimer used second-hand tape machines, a mini-moog and other cheap instruments and developed a vast archive of recordings. He took cues from the DIY cassette culture of the burgeoning new wave and punk scenes of Seattle and began carefully packaging and releasing his own records as well as cultivating a scene of experimental artists and releasing their works as well.
Instead of reissuing Leimer's Palace of Light recordings, RVNG digs deeper into his archives to highlight unreleased works from as early as 1975 to reveal a wide range of styles and forms: billowy, delicate and glacial as well as pensive, rhythmic and nervous, but all of an elegant unified voice. It never seems like Leimer is trying on hats, but rather investigating the possibilities of sound given limited parameters. This is an amazing release that is sure to bring Leimer's work out of the shadows. Highest Recommendation!
One of the more intriguing private press recordings we've heard, this 1983 soft-focus epic of romantic longing and regret is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. The music itself is a brooding country-western tinged affair of delicate airy synth washes, gentle loping piano and soft acoustic guitar strums lushly arranged into expansive emotional ballads sung with a ghostly mumbling barely-there vocal delivery that reminds us a lot of Arthur Russell, but much more introspective. Newly reissued and remastered by Light In The Attic, not much information was given out in the original release except for a dedication to swimsuit model Christine Brinkley, a photo credit to legendary punk photographer Ed Colver and the Germanic movie star good looks of the artist himself, who has since disappeared without a trace.
Trying to uncover the mystery of who Lewis is (or was) and what happened to him, has only led to more questions as rumors began to swirl of the singer being a con-artist who arrived in LA seemingly out of nowhere driving a white convertible Mercedes with a beautiful model, stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hired session musicians, recorded this album and did a photo shoot only to skip town without paying any of his bills. The record eventually showed up at flea markets and fell into the hands of private press aficionados where its cult-status grew. While the larger than life mystery of the singer largely fuels the appeal of such a bafflingly sensitive and otherworldly record, the music is actually quite captivating once your ears are opened to its languid and slowly unfolding pace. Definitely a headphone record, it's a narcoleptically sublime take on the Western landscape in musical form offering up a romantic big sky worldview with a dreamy celestial-minded quietude.
We only have the cd version available now. The lp version will be released next month.
Premonicion De Guerra is the debut release from this grim black metal horde, and it's two 20+ minute tracks of glorious, haunting, hateful black metal. There isn't a ton of information to be found on this project. Hailing from either Santa Cruz or Mexico (or both), and featuring possibly only one member, Lluvia specializes in orthodox black metal performed with utmost precision, class and respect. The record opens with a lonely torrent of rain and the crack of distant thunder whispering underneath listless clean guitars. It's a very literal calm before the storm, because before too long we're met with the foreboding buzz of a single grinding guitar that seems to exist in stasis for an unnaturally long time, lulling the listener into a false sense of calm before the blasting begins. When all of the pieces finally come together it's an overwhelming wall of sound. Pummeling blast beats and mournful, oppressive guitars give way to heart-wrenching mid-paced breakdowns. The whole record is awash in tons of reverb, soaking every moment with the cavernous atmosphere of a moss specked catacomb. The vocals are distant and echoed, like some hateful unsilent spirit craving revenge from the afterlife. The drums are enormous, every fill sounding like an avalanche. On paper it would be easy to say that Lluvia are dealing in the same traditional, Transilvanian Hunger style black metal as someone like Sargeist, but in execution the scope seems to be much larger. Instead the affect isn't far off from the hypnotic transcendence of Ash Borer or Fell Voices, but with a much more orthodox approach, which makes the results all the more impressive. The end result is overpowering yet strangely distant, sorrowful yet proud - invoking a feeling ancient and sad. It's black metal that can truly be called atmospheric in the purest sense of the word, but without one iota of the hate or the fury sacrificed.
Limited to 333 copies, on 180 gram gray/black swirl vinyl, gatefold jacket w/ inserts.
We already loved this Mexican duo based entirely on the name, even more so when we discovered that it wasn't just a band name. Lorelle sings, plays guitar, bass and organ. The Obsolete plays drums, percussion, bass, Casiotone, organ, synth, piano guitar and also sings. Not sure if they're a proper couple, but they should be, so we're just gonna assume they are. And they do in fact make beautiful music together. A sort of psychedelic krautrock, noise pop, garage rock. In a way, they remind us of another recent fave Liminanas, but where that band channeled French pop, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete seem to be drawing their influence from something much more noisy and raw, psychedelic and dark. Sure it's jangly and poppy in places, but they lock into seriously hypnotic grooves, fans of outfits like the Moon Duo will be utterly enthralled for sure. They also have a bit of swaggery twang, reminding us at times of Crystal Stilts, and at others a little bit of Stereolab, albeit a much rougher low fidelity version.
The sound here is lush and warm, woozy and hypnotic, druggy and dreamy, tracks like "The December Riots" sound like the Dum Dum Girls slowed down to a gloriously murky crawl, slo-mo girl group bliss out, while tracks like "Art For Free", add some new wave to the group's garage pop crunch. All the songs here though at their core are jangly and catchy, Lorelle and her partner delivering them in varying states of decay, and varying states of tranced out drugginess. At their poppiest, this is the sort of thing fans of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees and Mikal Cronin will flip over, and at their droniest and druggiest, it's a sort of lysergic dirge that should appeal equally to fans of old school drug drift mesmer a la Spacemen 3, and more modern psychedelic noise purveyors like Carlton Melton. Although really, this is just some noisy krauty fuzzy pop, and we LOVE it. A new favorite for sure!
A few lists back we made the oddly named duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete one of our Records Of The Week. And as we explained then, it's not just a cool weird band name. Lorelle is the woman who fronts LMTO, and her partner is in fact named The Obsolete, and together, the duo whip up a head, druggy brew of darkly psychedelic garage-kraut mesmer, and actually, when we made Corruptible Faces our Record Of The Week, it easily could have been this record instead, as we discovered both albums at the same time, and they feel sonically like two parts of a bigger whole, which means, any/every one who dug Corruptible Faces, is gonna want this one too, the same mix of murky, motorik mesmer and psychedelic garage groove. The opener gets all Stooges by way of Spacemen 3 by way of Moon Duo, fuzzed out riff, loping, minimal rhythm, processed vocals, wheezing organ, everything wreathed in delay and echo, washed out and druggily woozy, totally blissed out zoner-groove garage psych radness for sure. The sound soon morphs into something much more stripped down and acoustic, but no less droned out and druggy, a hazy sprawl of steel string strum, and acoustic percussion, all tangled up beneath whirring organs, and echo drenched, breathy vocals, the whole thing blossoming into something a but more lush and layered, the vibe sorta Suicide via Bob Dylan, but druggier and garagier if that makes any sense, but before you know it, the sound shifts again, and we're in total psychedelic trance mode, buzzing drones, and reverby female vocals, swirling FX, languorous ruffs and abstract percussion, all drifting in a cloud of sonic fug, and all tethered to a simple, pulsating groove, it's the sorta song that most bands would stretch out for 10 or 20 minutes, but here it's less than 4, LMTO restlessly moving on to yet another subtle variant of their dreamy druggy sound, this time it's all sixties soft focus shimmer, classic girl group sound stripped down to a haunting bit of skeletal drift, before the organs swoop to the fore, wrapped in strange swirling FX and slowly drifting swaths of gauzy shimmer, which eventually blossoms into some sweetly melodic fuzz bass garage rock girl pop, and so it goes.
Lorelle and her partner The Obsolete have a knack for weaving disparate short songs into a lush, interconnected whole, a gorgeous, gloriously psychedelic songsuite that's druggy and dreamy, hazy and hypnotic, and like Corruptible Faces, is one of our new favorites...
Our favorite 'zine devoted entirely to comedy (theory & practice) is back! The big feature this issue is an appreciation of none other than Gilbert Gottfried ("New York Punk"), and Gilbert himself contributes two pages of cartoon artwork. There's also an interesting historical piece about Funnyman, a failed 1940's comic book hero created by Superman's Siegel & Shuster. And much more, including fun bits penned by the likes of Rick Moranis. If you like to laugh, or think about laughter, and the people who make us laugh, this is the 'zine for you!
We've reviewed a few records by ultra heavy metallic math rock duo Reflector, so we were curious to hear Mental Terror, the grindcore side project of 1/2 of that band, and while we were expecting something super heavy, dense and ultra metallic, instead, it's super fucked up, ultra lo-fi, wildly chaotic, and totally damaged, sounding more like Mick Barr crossed with Faxed Head, stumbling, dizzying blasts of unhinged heaviness, that seem to be crumbling into something akin to a metal Shaggs, the vocals a wild, hysterical shriek evolving into a demonic howl, the songs super tangly and proggy, but loose and on the verge of collapse, totally what the fuck outsider grind, that is leaps and bounds better and weirder than we expected. It's seven songs on one side, so it's short, but so brain meltingly sweet, pushing all our demented music buttons, not even metal or grind enough to only appeal to those folks, in fact, it's so fucked up, metalheads might be severely bummed, instead, this is way more recommended for anyone into damaged weirdness and ultra confusional avant grade heaviness, which is probably most anybody who digs stuff on the Rock Is Hell label. Fucking GREAT!!
Pressed on transparent green vinyl, one sided with a cool silkscreen on the other, visible through the vinyl, LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
A precocious one, that BJ Nilsen! Morthound (sometimes spelled Morthond on a couple of releases) was Nilsen's project when he was just a teenager, producing some of the more abstract convulsions of dark ambient and collaged electronics that appeared on the seminal Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industries. This anthology collects the four Morthound / Morthond records recorded from 1991-1994 before Nilsen dropped the moniker in favor of Hazard, through which he matriculated onto Ash International / Touch Music shortly there after. Nilsen appends most of the discs of Mortology with various tracks from the CMI compilations and rounds out the entire collection with a whole disc of unreleased material. Death Time was Nilsen's first outing - a cassette from 1991 on CMI imprint Sound Source - and speaks much beyond the years of a 15 year old kid in Sweden going down to the library to check out sound effects and wildlife recordings to run through his Akai sampler and into a four-track. Along with those source materials, Nilsen also relied heavily on his shortwave radio, whose detuned transmissions and numbers station broadcasts he liberally cut-up into eerie collages full of shadow, drone, and dread. This Crying Age (also from 1991) was the first widely available Morthound cd, with a deep soundtrackish sensibility that recalled more of the early soundtrack work of Graeme Revell / SPK especially the Zamia Lehmanni album with its esoteric / occult mysteriousness through hypnotic, metal klang loops, emotionally somber rumblings, and wispily opiated flute melodies which sporadically graced the dark electronics. In the liner notes, Nilsen explained that he has never wanted to stick within one particular aesthetic, and Spindrift (1992) was very much a departure for Nilsen with this foray into legitimate psychedelic pop, with "Stairhead" being something of a hypno-drone-pop track of glistening guitars and summery organs with much more in common with Ultra Vivid Scene or A.R. Kane than Brighter Death Now! This track is a bit of anomaly as much of the rest of Spindrift is fleshed out with baroque, synthetically orchestral pieces full of John Carpenter / Halloween arpeggiations, David Lynchian themes within the creepy / maudlin scores, and plenty of saddened atmosphere. The final album recorded as Morthound was The Goddess Who Could Make The Ugly World Beautiful (a quote from Taxi Driver, fyi!), finding Nilsen shifting closer to the sound he would soon perfect under the moniker Hazard with stealth-bomber drones and arctic field recordings, but not before unleashing a handful of tracks inspired in equal parts by early Coil and contemporary In Slaughter Natives with a baroque pagan bombast through thrashy guitar riffs and muscular drum programming. The disc of unreleased Morthound material is uniformly bleak, spacious, and eerily abstract. Again, the material here points closer to the Hazard tracks that soon followed; and actually stands as some of the best material that Nilsen recorded during this time period. We have very limited stock on this boxset!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
When does she ever sleep? Even during a year-long project in releasing monthly albums in homage to the full moon, Rachel Evans / Motion Sickness Of Time Travel has found the time to also release a handful of mighty fine cassettes, including this one, Alpha Piscium, on her ever impressive Hooker Vision imprint. A simple melodic phrase waltzes through the introduction of the tape, dissolving and re-emerging amidst the moon-lit pools of oscillating, spritely ambience. More jagged radiophonic percolations snake amidst Evans' free-floating vocals which drift through all of her electronics with the phosphorescent eeriness of fireflies in the night sky. On the two part "Ikebana", Evans dissolves the tension from her arpeggiated step sequencing and tremolo patterns amidst lepidopteric flurries of meandering psyche-synth melodies which might as well align themselves with those baroque, deep-space improvisations from JD Emmanuel. The B side continues on her path of lysergic inner-mind navigations of flanging synths, oblique bass-tone melodies, haunted vocalizations, and downright beautiful psychedelic electronic explorations. Already out of print at the source, so there are the last copies we'll be able to get...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We're slightly behind in listing these, as the Seed Moon correlates to the full moon for the month of April (or perhaps just the fourth lunar cycle of the year); and as it stands, we only have a few of these super limited cd-rs anyway. The year-long Ballade series is running through all of the full moons as noted in the farmer's almanac, with Motion Sickness Of Time Travel offering her dreamtime interpretations and impressionist visions for each of particular moon. As she started this series a little over halfway through 2013, this marks the eighth in the twelve part series; and so far, each stands as a single 50+ minute track of her spacious kosmische synth+voice excursions somewhere between JD Emmanuel, Iasos, and Klaus Schulze. On Ballade For A Seed Moon, she drips elegant, sparkling synth glissandos upon an oceanic wave of analogue, kosmische blissed-out ambience with her hushed, dreamy vocalizations interspersed in equal measure. One of the airiest and most effervescent things she's ever done! As noted before, we have super limited stock; and it's already out of print at Hooker Vision.
With all of the black noise swaddled in runes and death-obsessed iconography, it was only a matter of time before the cult label Vaald released a proper black metal project. Negative Crown seems to hail from an undergrowth somewhere near Athens, Georgia; but this diabolical horde keeps this suitably inscrutable on their first demo. Chiming, loner chords leave a Slinty taste in our mouth at the onset of this tape before a blizzardy blast-beat and some matching guitar fury tear through the plane of existence followed by a sustained blood-curdling scream. The track soon collapses into a swirl of blackened, dense FX, completely fuzzed out and drone-on white noise that is more hypnotizing than pummelling. This and the other two tracks on the A-side (all parts of a trilogy called "Bracken") aligning in all the best possible ways with Paysage D'Hiver. The B-side opens with a black ambient swirl of mournful and sinister synths, giving way to a throat-ripping finale of start-stop-start BM buzz'n'riff, and as before the blast-beats and diabolical vokills melt into a soft-focus blur of hypnotic, grim, miserablist drone-sheeting. Super fucking limited, and pretty fucking epic.
Finland's self-proclaimed Undisputed Kings of Lasermetal are back! Note that 'Lasermetal' as a genre exists ONLY in connection to Nightsatan, and is definitely NOT actually metal, though these guys do look pretty metal - you've got one guy, Inhalator II, wearing all sorts of studded gear, including studded headband; another guy, Wolf-Rami, who has a scary skull face inside his motorcycle helmet; and a third, Mazathoth, who wears a Boba Fett style helmet, and a cape, and has antlers inexplicably growing out of his back. But they're an instrumental synth trio, not metal in the slightest, except conceptually perhaps.
If you recall, we made Nightsatan's debut album Midnight Laser Warrior an aQuarius Record Of The Week a few years back, blown away by their brand of "crazy, futuristic, electro prog", a soundtracky, synth-heavy sound inspired by John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream, not unlike Zombi or Umberto, but taking that into a ridiculously fantastical Finnish realm of over-the-topness. Well, with this new release they somehow go even FURTHER over the top, 'cause instead of just sounding like a soundtrack, it IS a soundtrack, to a real movie that's included here on its own dvd disc packaged with the cd. And the movie stars Nightsatan, playing themsleves, as surreal sci-fi superheroes wandering a futuristic wasteland encountering (and slaying, or having sex with) strange characters. It's an homage of sorts to Italian '80s post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, complete with dialog dubbed in Italian (English subtitles are provided). It comes across like a mix of Mad Max and Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, truly bizarre and absurd, full of gory special FX and nudity. Sex, violence, and synthesizers! Basically, an extended, insane music video for Nightsatan. It's a professional production, including some impressive special effects (it's worth watching the 'making of' bonus feature to see how they did it - 'cuz we didn't think they had deserts in Finland), with a plot involving, yes, 'loops of doom' - we can't explain it but it does sort of make sense. it's really a bit disturbing at moments, and twistedly funny too, and of course the music is pretty rad, and you can enjoy it alone on the soundtrack cd, which is twice as long as the movie, consisting of 14 tracks, 48 minutes of Nightsatan's retro-futuristic synth-splorations, droning and glistening, often underlaid with propulsive beats via Inhalator II's 'laserdrums'. Mood-wise it ranges from sinister suspensefulness, to exciting electro-rock, to maudin, melodic 'love theme' moments.
Fans of Umberto, Trans Am, Blizaro, Emeralds, all ought to dig - imagine a mix of all those, but with an added element of pure Finnish WTF?-ness. It's hard to believe that Nightsatan are NOT one of the so-called NWOFHM bands put together by the guys in Circle, like Steel Mammoth. But nope, they're just friends, apparently this sort of thing just what they do in Finland these days. Ah, Finland. Ah, Nightsatan!
The same people who have been going on and on about the death of the record store, have also been heralding the end of print media. But you know what, screw them. Who wants to spend their whole life sitting in front of a computer? Listen to music at your desk, shop for mp3's, read that article on the laptop... whatever. Sure that stuff is convenient, and we all partake a bit, but nothing will ever replace your local record store, thumbing through bins of lps or digging through stacks of cds, just like a gorgeously designed and laid out magazine will never be�replaced by a website. Especially a magazine as gorgeous and jam packed with black metal weirdness as Oaken Throne.�
Beginning life as a super strange, WAY oversized zine, impossible to ship, and difficult to display, but brilliant in its obstinacy, Oaken Throne has just gotten better and better, easily the best magazine devoted to underground black metal and strange heavy musicks. With amazing writing, great art, and some of the most stylish, but subtle layout and design of any magazine we can think of. The cover is always metallic silver on black, inside, the ads are often as striking as the illustrations accompanying the articles (which makes sense considering one of the two OT head honchos designs many of the ads as well). But Oaken Throne is not just another pretty corpse painted face. Nope, it's packed with articles and interviews on and with some of the most infamous artists in the black metal (and generally heavy) underground.�
This time around, a bunch of AQ faves: Asunder (featuring John from Weakling), Harvey Milk, Wold, Portal, Moss, Coffins, Caina, as well as some other amazing groups who have yet to get reviewed on the AQ site:�Acrimonious, Adorior, Archgoat, Blacklodge, Cult Of Daath, Dapnom and Necromorbus...
Tons of killer photos and yet another amazing illustration from AQ pal Justin Bartlett (whose art has also adorned a bunch of SUNNO))) and SUNNO))) related records). In addition to all that, there are a bunch of record reviews too... easily one of the best mags, metal or otherwise going today...
This is the first issue that includes comes with a cd, containing tracks from each of the bands featured in the magazine, none of them exclusive or rare really (except maybe the Asunder track, recorded live on KFJC) but a pretty killer metal mixtape (er... cd) for sure... As always, totally recommended and essential.�
It's finally here, the latest issue of one of the best magazines going, Oaken Throne, specializing in the grim black metal underground, but gradually expanding their scope to cover all things dark and heavy and droney, definitely our kind of rag, and yours too judging from how many we sell, and how many emails we've been getting asking about this new issue.
The latest issue has indeed arrived, and is mindblowing as always, bigger than ever, now a perfect bound 7" x 7" book style mag, the covers printed silver metallic ink on black cardstock, as always, a gorgeous tUMULt ad on the back cover (designed by OT designer Ben West) and inside tons of aQ faves and then some.
Canadian black metallers Akitsa, French metallic post rockers Aluk Todolo (featuring members of Gunslingers and Diamatregon), Swedish black metal duo Avsky, long time aQ favorite, Dialing In, weird black doomscapers Gnaw Their Tongues, Polish black metal folk freak Dead Raven Choir, legendary death metallers Immolation, Swedish black metal supergroup IXXI (featuring members of Ondskapt, Lifelover, Dimhymn and Zavorash), Dutch brown metal weirdos Lugubrum, Nordvargr's black metal incarnation Vargr, legendary Polish black metallers Throneum, German blackened death metallers Necros Christos and Swedish death metallers Necrovation. The layout and design is fantastic, with illustrations by Justin Bartlett, Ben West, Adam Watson, Scott Langlais, Chris Parry, as well as tons of striking photography, plenty of reviews, and loads of ads for stuff you need. Pretty much ace all the way through. And as if the magazine on its own wasn't enough, it also comes with a cd featuring a track by every single band covered in this issue, two of 'em (for now at least) exclusive to this comp.
The price of OT has gone up slightly, but holy shit is it ever worth it. This is the kind of magazine you'll save forever, that will sit on your bookshelf with the BOOKS, not in a pile with the rest of the magazines, OT is something you'll read over and over, and odds are, eventually you'll need to at least check out all the artists covered. So totally recommended. We're already looking forward to the next issue!
Oakland's Once And Future Band, featuring among their ranks guitarist Eli Eckert (ex-Drunkhorse) and keyboardist/vocalist Joel Robinow (ex-Howlin' Rain), have become minor sensations in the local scene, with friends of ours like Phil Manley (Trans Am, Life Coach), singing their praises. And having heard this record, and also having seen 'em live, we can see why - musically, they're REALLY GOOD, and they have to be, 'cause their chosen style - super '70s soundin' laid back groovy pop prog jazz fusion (!!!) is all about chops, after all. And they have 'em. Chops, chops, chops - more chops than a kung-fu flick. But, also due to their chosen style, we can see how one -could- have a differing opinion about 'em. Depends on your taste/tolerance for certain aspects of '70s kitsch. What we mean, is, ok, virtuosic '70s keyboard prog, yeah, we like, a lot actually, maybe more than we should (ELP! ELP!). So go whole hog on that, ok. Er, but then, the more yacht-y, Steely Dan-ish side of Once And Future Band, well, is it ironic? Is it NOT ironic? We suppose it doesn't matter, if you like Steely Dan, which you certainly can. Still, it's funny how these guys are SO perfect at every detail of what they're doing that it comes off a bit like historical reenactment. That's not a criticism - in fact, it might be a compliment. A matter of perspective. We never complain about bands that sound like Goblin, after all, and parts here do. A band like these guys, who also have parts that sound like Caravan, and parts that sound like Return To Forever, is perhaps just braver and bolder (and better?) than most.
Anyway, Brain, their 24 minute mini-album debut, is what they call "a four-song suite of soaring psychic jazz and Rundgrensque pop" and well that does describe it pretty well, leaving aside the question of just what is 'psychic jazz'. Something to do with their collective chops perhaps. But Brain is about more than chops, melody is big too. The songs and the singing strongly support the pop side, and all in all, it's pretty dang impressive - and quite enjoyable, if you like listening to music now that, when very similar music was made in the '70s, was more or less the reason punk rock happened (in reaction to it). Let the pendulum swing back!!
140 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve, download included.
We had been hearing about these guys for ages, the saviors of indie rock, the darlings of Pitchfork and pretty much every other taste making blog out there, and the first time we heard them, all we could think was, "holy cow, these guys sound so much like Pavement". Which is definitely true, these guys have that slacker jangle thing down pat, and by now, longtime readers of the aQ list know we have nothing against derivative sounds, as long as those sounds are done really well and creatively, and are derivative of something we love, which Parquet Courts definitely deliver. We find ourselves writing stuff like 'they don't make music like that anymore' in lots of reviews, and as far as Pavementy jangle pop goes, that's definitely true, so in keeping with our endless obsession with that nineties sound, we're digging this new Parquet Courts a lot. And even though we never managed to review their debut, that one got a lot of play too.
So yeah, this is essentially a modern strain of nineties style indie/college rock, and these guys do it really well. The songs aren't quite as catchy as vintage Pavement, the vocals take some getting used to, a sort of deadpan Lou Reed meets Stephen Malkmus, but with each listen these jams grow on us more and more, and we find ourselves getting these tracks lodged pretty solidly in our heads. Which is always a good sign. Hard to pick out a favorite, although a quick listener to opener "Bodies Made Of" should tell you all you need to know. Definitely a thumbs up from us, way recommended if you dig that sound, and if for some crazy reason you're thinking to yourself right now "Who's Pavement?", stop what you're doing and get yourself a copy of Slanted And Enchanted, and then we can talk Parquet Courts...
If we didn't tell you that Salem's Pot was a heavy, stonery, very Electric Wizard-y psychedelic doom metal outfit from Sweden, the band name kinda shoulda already given you a good idea of what they might sound like - and also an idea of their sense of humor. Yep, they like puns - an earlier album was called Sweeden... geddit? S-WEED-en. Heck, the title of this new disc could possibly be a pun too; we don't know Swedish so we can't be sure. But anyway please don't let the pot-themed punning dissuade you, Salem's Pot aren't just some bogus toker jokers, no, they really ARE damn heavy and occultishly effective at the slow, low, Sabbathy psychedelic sludge thing.
There's three looong tracks here, "Creep Purple" (egad, another pun!), "Dr. Death", and "Nothing Hill", and they're all creepy, crawly, brainwrecking doomfests with wasted, wailing vocals (Ozzy-ish but super distorted) and hypnotically lumbering grooves. Yep, if you wanna call it Electric Wizard worship, well, sure, and it's done damn well. But they have their own weirdly woozy angle on this sound, really. The heavier-than-thou guitar riffage and plodding percussion is augmented with droning organ and, at one point, even some sinister, warbly accordion!! Going back to the guitars, gnarly feedbacky soloing is another essential element of their sound. Yeah, we like how Salem's Pot really accentuate the creepy vibes - it's a 3am hazy Satanic drug thing you wouldn't understand, quite compelling and almost (almost) serious sounding, puns aside.
So of course recommended big time for fans of Electric Wizard, but also to for fans of Uncle Acid, Blood Farmers, Satan's Satyrs, Monster Magnet, Windhand, The Wounded Kings, Sourvein, fellow Easy Riders HORNSS, and all others into witches and weed�
FYI, there's vinyl, we had some but sold out and are waiting for a restock (or repress?) soon...
The Tri Angle label has brought us some of our favorite weirdo electronica, from witch house to slo-mo-soul, from dronestep to warped hip hop, just a quick list of some of our favorite Triangle artists speaks volumes: Forest Swords, Vessel, FiS, Haxan Cloak, Water Borders, oOoOO, Clams Casino, Balam Acab, Holy Other, How To Dress Well...
So the fact that this might be the weirdest, noisiest, most out there Triangle release yet should not be taken lightly, cuz the bar had already been set pretty goddamn high, but the oddly monikered Sd Laika, aka Milwaukee producer Peter Runge, knocks it out of the park, with what is some sort of post grime, post dubstep, electro noise oddity, that pushes ALL our buttons. The sort of thing that you might have expected to come out on DHR back in the day. The opening one two punch is all it should take, the 90 seconds of "Peace", all grinding gristly synth buzz, keening high end skree and squiggly psychedelic melody, wreathed in swaths of hiss and him, fragmented and blown out, noisy, lurching and lumbering, it kills us that that song didn't stretch out to fill up the whole record. But then comes "Great God Pan", which eases our pain a little, with big billowing clouds of buzzing low end, glitches out drones, and staticky buzz, a field of hazy drift, that is soon interrupted by a seriously twisted beat, that sounds like it was assembled from discarded fragments of others songs, noisy, clattery, skittery, stuttery, all the while, in the background, thick swells of black buzz pulse ominously, and over the top, haunting alien melodies, all tethered to that super sick, unholy anti-groove. Murky and sinister and seriously fucking next level.
And it never lets up, all the beats sound like they were filtered through some homespun analog telephone transistor radio broadcast system, fuzzy, and crackly, always dropping out, and then swooping back in, imagine a grime record recorded onto a wax cylinder and then broadcast via short wave radio, in a moving vehicle so the reception is in constant flux. And even when everything is in range, and the sound is relatively hi-fi, the sounds are still warped and woozy, and before long the sound devolves into another gloriously distortion drenched sprawl, often sounding like Leyland Kirby's Caretaker having a go at dubstep, and failing spectacularly.
There are some mysterious shards of 8bit sound, some twisted fragmented samples, some flurries of tangled melody, and cascades of synth blorp and grinding fields of staticky thrum, the sound occasionally dipping into cubby tranquility, but again, quickly snapping back into a twisted variant of alien IDM. The whole record is a dizzying collage of fractured sonics, of shattered rhythms, reassembled into damaged, demented rhythms, hints of minimal techno, Pop Ambient, dub, house, electro, all find their way into the sound, but in true mad scientist fashion, those elements are melted down, dissected, and transformed utterly and completely into some strange hybrid of experimental dada-soundscapery and avant electronica, a gloriously mind bending, brain melting, dance floor defying masterpiece.
After the last batch of releases on Hospital, you'd likely be expecting some sort of grim electronica, or downcast techno murk from this UK outfit, but the punky cover art is your first hint that this might just be a bit different. Which it most certainly is. Sure it's grim and murky, but instead of minimal beats and bleak atmospheres, this is classic old school death punk / crust, a la Amebix, Rudimentary Peni, Christian Death, etc. Filthy, fuzzy guitars, simple drum pound, total nihilistic leather jacketed, spikes and denim, backpatch crusty punk, gloomy and atmospheric, with some dark woozy passages, but otherwise a fierce blast of knuckle dragging smash-the-state ferocity, the sprawling B-side spending much of its time in a downtuned crust punk death march ballad, all echo drenched vocals, weird spluttery drumming, down tuned guitar-noise, streaks of feedback, all anchored by a simple, caveman beat, and eventually disappearing in a clouds of primitive electronics.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!
Another twisted gem from UK horror movie vinyl soundtrack reissue label Death Waltz, this one the infamous Roger Corman slasher exploitation flick, The Slumber Party Massacre, originally released in 1982, and initially reviled and ridiculed, but later, it would become a cult classic, due in no small part to the fact that it was written by a feminist writer Rita Me Brown, and directed by a woman (Amy Holden Jones, who would go on to write and direct much more mainstream fare, like Indecent proposal, Mystic Pizza, etc.) and was considered by some to be a feminist parody of the classic slasher flick. But classic slasher flick it is, lots of scantily clad co-eds, power tool torture, gratuitous nudity, and over the top gore. The soundtrack also is a strange surprise, the whole thing composed and performed on a primitive Casio keyboard, purchased at a Macy's by composer Ralph Jones, augmented by a single cymbal and some wine glasses, the resulting score is fantastic, haunting and ominous, dark and noisy, creepy and cosmic, hits of John Carpenter (of course), but also Perrey & Kingsley, the sound by turns playful and bloopy, droned out and sinister. A trippy sonic fantasia, that blends kosmische drift with classic soundtrack tropes, noisy experimentation, with a sound that impossibly emulates a huge church organ, removed from the movie, the score could be some trippy Umberto style modern retro homage, some limited home brewed cd-r, fantastic stuff for sure, and like all good scores/soundtracks, has us hankering to see the movie again.
And like all the Death Waltz reissues, the packaging is fantastic, the vinyl is pressed on heavy, milky clear vinyl, the jacket is a super thick tip-on jacket, inside is a full color booklet with liner notes from Jones, and artist Luke Insect, who provided the new cover art, as well as a big poster of said cover art. So cool!
A functionally difficult proposition, Small Cruel Party is the defunct sound-art moniker of US ex-pat Key Ransome, who generated a considerable amount of material back in the late '80s and early '90s when he was residing in the Pacific Northwest. His post-industrial / phenomenologically centered work is always tactile with the scraping of found objects, the grinding of wires, the cascade of bells, the whir of some unseen turbine, the rustling of abject garbage strewn in a sodden warehouse. Very little electronic processing seem to go into the whatever Small Cruel Party happens to be recording, just some overdubbing here and there maybe. Unroof The House Of The Fishes was originally a cassette from 1993 on the seminal if obscure Japanese label G.R.O.S.S. curated by Akifumi Nakajima aka Aube. Both sides of this record operate as two distinctly different pieces, with one side quietly rumbling with somatic gurgles, nocturnal thrumming, haunted chanting, and the din of cargo ship engines echoing through abandoned warehouses. It's not far from Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing, though far more ominous and creepy. The otherside is quite a bit more tortured with layering metal-on-metal grinding and deep resonant frequencies with the near constant churn of cobalt black textures scraping against each other. Here, Small Cruel Party's nearest neighbor would be the more scabrous moments of Organum or perhaps the anti-mnemonic compositions of intertwined frequency and texture from Giancarlo Toniutti. Remastered for vinyl by Scott Konzelmann (aka Chop Shop) and features new artwork by Ransome.
We love when weird stuff just shows up in the mail, especially when that weird stuff turns out to be some grim, rhythmic, experimental blackened industrial avant-noise, like this, the first we've heard from Solitary Torture, whose sound is tough to describe beyond the above. Somehow super varied, but woven into a strange black sonic ritual, beginning with whipping winds, and some glitched out primitive rhythms, which is soon swallowed up by a blast of howling heaviness, before transforming into a swirling psychedelic blacknoise freakout, moaning vocals, and gristly electronics. At that point, we were sort of expecting this to be a straight up noise record, but instead, the second track unveils a melancholy, buzz drenched black metal riff, but instead of exploding into your standard blasting metal, in stretches way out, for the length of the track, spaced out and truancy and minimal and super hypnotic, the final minute or two erupting into some speaker shredding crush.
The rest of the record splits its time between, grinding black electronica, post industrial thrum, woozy abstract black ambience, blurred grim riffage, strange minimal noise collages and dense, blasting blacknoise blowouts. Killer stuff for sure. Surprised this isn't on Crucial Blast.
Needless to say, we only got a tiny handful of these, so not sure if/when we'll be able to get more. Comes housed in a DVD style case, with two xeroxed black and white inserts.
