Medical Records branches out from their cold wave / new wave / synth wave bread and butter to delve into nineties indie rock, with this vinyl reissue of 1993's Shoulder Voices, the debut lp from Irish avant pop shoegazers Rollerskate Skinny, fronted by Jimi Shields, little brother of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. While there are hints of MBV in Rollerskate Skinny's sound, Shoulder Voices actually falls closer to that of Mercury Rev, the same mix of orchestral pop bombast and twisted songsmithery, but in Rollerskate Skinny's case, with a bit more fuzz and crunch, and some super distinctive vocals, that frequently swoop into a soaring falsetto, over a sound lush and proggy, distorted and psychedelic, a dizzying psych pop concoction of dreamy indie pop jangle exploding into heavy guitar shoegaze freakouts, with long loping stretches of woozy psychedelic meander, as well as dreamy ethereal ambience.
Some seriously tripped out nineties style indie prog, psych pop genius, that is definitely recommended for fans of other outfits from the era like the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Laika, My Bloody Valentine, Moonshake, etc.
Super swank packaging, heavy full color jackets, with a full color printed insert featuring an interview with Jimi Shields, as well as a Rollerskate Skinny retrospective written by Sean Kirkpatrick.
Pressed on heavy 180 gram red vinyl.
Sister Loolomie is yet another project from Sergey Suhovik, the Muscovite mood engineer who has graced us with luminous drones via his other pseudonyms / projects Five Elements Music and Exit In Grey. Signals is our first exposure to Sister Loolomie, which appears to be hedging more toward a '60s computer music / radiophonic feel. Compositionally, Sergey maintains the cyclical patterns of shimmer and drone found in those other projects we've long championed; but the tools, instruments, and sounds seem to be of another origin. Several of the tracks add a ring modulated / sawtoothed grit to his source material, which immediately leads to the impression that Sergey has dug up some obsolete piece of telemetry / signaling technology from the cold war era, extracting a warm, fizzing, pixelated graininess from this imagined piece of equipment. And at other times, he posits warmer tones of bitcrushed suspension, rasping half-melodies, and sunblind mirages which has us thinking of those latter day Lovesliescrushing recapitulations of lost-then-found tapes. Super limited pressing of just 100 discs, of which we have the last copies.
Admittedly expensive, import 7" from this amazing band of Swedish throwbacks. Retro '70s heavy rockin' with tons of FUZZ, these guys are dang good at sounding like it's 1973 and they're the ones inventing punk and glam and heavy metal while partying hard at the same time. The A-side, "Mr. Fantastic", sounds kinda like one of the happy songs on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, but with a Swedish singer and lots of drum fills. It goes through a bunch of changes, eventually it taking off into space with plenty of synth squiggle, but also intensifying the headbanging quotient too. Bonus points for the toilet flushing at the end. The B-side is called "Hickory Dickory Dog (Song Overheard In The Night)", and that gets bonus points for its title alone!!
Latest in the LAMC series of split 7"s from the Famous Class label, each single featuring a known entity on the A side, and then a more obscure band on the flip, chosen by the A side band. This marks the first appearance on the aQ list of Speedy Ortiz, which is CRAZY, cuz some of us here have been fans for ages, not sure how that happened, but needless to say, their track here is a gem, heavily beholden to nineties indie rock, in particular the Pixies and the Breeders and Veruca Salt, fuzzy bass beneath crooned female vox, kinda swaggery, and dirgey, but hook heavy and poppy, the chorus super Beatles-esque, soaring and majestic, lilting and melodic, and catchy as all get out. One of our favorite modern day outfits mining our favorite era of indie rock for sure.
We had never heard of Chris Weisman before, and while we were maybe expecting something more indie rocking, instead, it's just acoustic guitar and vocals, the vibe sort of Big Star-ish, maybe a little bit like the Posies, dreamy vox, lush steel string strum, super dreamy and classic pop sounding, at points even reminding us of Emmit Rhodes, which is most definitely a good thing. Will for sure be tracking down more from Weisman...
Like all the LAMC singles, as you probably already guessed, this is VERY LIMITED!
We LOVE Street Trash, one of the silliest, goriest, goofiest movies ever, and easily one of our favorite good 'bad' movies. The label describes the 1987 horror flick as the ultimate "melt movie", which is definitely true, although we never realized that was an actual genre. And for lots of you, that probably makes no sense at all. But it will. Street Trash begins when a liquor store owner finds an old case of 'Tenafly Viper' in his basement, some kind of cheap wine, and decides to sell it cheap. It's of course snapped up by the city's homeless population, who begin to, yep, you guessed it, MELT!! THEY MELT!!!
There's also a subplot about a mean Vietnam Vet who rules the junkyard, but really it's all about the glorious gore, and again, it's not bloody gore as much as it's a sort of over the top Technicolor gore, with the hapless victims of the tainted malt liquor dissolving into greasy pools of rainbow hued goop, most notably one guy who sits on a toilet to drink in peace, and who begins to melt and drip and ooze and eventually becomes a mushy prismatic pool in (and around) the toilet bowl...
And really all the rest is just window dressing, you know, there's some story and a little plot and all that, but it's all about the melting, a grossout hobo holocaust that is like that head melting scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark stretched out into a feature length film!
And like a lot of these films, we didn't necessarily remember the music, but revisiting now, we were pretty blown away. The score by Rick Ulfik is pretty cool, creepy and synthy, some tracks all weird echoey percussion, moody, haunting atmospheres, really cool stuff, but it was the eighties, so there's also plenty of goofy synthy drum machine dorkiness, and some geniusly cringeworthy, ultra cheesy sax driven groovers, what one aQ staffer described as 'trashjams', but to our ears sounds like the retro-futuristic schmaltzy VHS mall music of ex-Skater James Ferraro. One of those tracks is so good (bad?) that it gets lodged in our head like crazy, and we find ourselves not just digging it, but humming it to ourselves at odd times during the day, LONG after having actually listened to it.
But the bulk of the record is made up of grim, ominous creepscapes, the whole thing in fact reminiscent of another aQ fave soundtrack, The New York Ripper, a similarly weird mix of cheesy eighties funkiness and seriously scary soundtrackery, the difference here being that most of the sound FX are left in, we're guessing because no real masters exist, so perhaps this was all mastered direct from someone's original VHS copy, and it sounds like it, as it's sort of tinny, and lo-fi, but it suits the sounds, and the movie if you've seen it, perfectly. And that's also a part of the score's charm, that most of the cheesiest tracks are bookended by the anguished FX drenched howls of some hapless soul melting, screaming in anguish, those screams turning into wordless gurgles, and usually leading right into another long stretch of creepy, synthy ambience.
Then there's the final song, what we remember as the end credits track, a sort of bastardized version of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" kind of jam, with some of THEE most ridiculous and hilariously over the top lyrics EVER. In fact, we had forgotten about that track completely, and the first time it played in the store, had we all been drinking, it would have induced some seriously comedic spit takes, as it is, we were in stitches, lines like:
"Shut your face, you little scumbag", "You can stop the bullshit cuz this is the end", "Oh what's this?? I'm startin' to ooze! you little creep! What's this fuckin' shit??" and of course "Your face I'm gonna reshape - I'm gonna eat your fucking eyeballs like grapes", all delivered in a dramatic croon, one that becomes increasingly more unhinged as the track progresses, and as the singer presumably begins to melt himself!
So great! Easily one of our favorites in this recent spate of horror movie reissues (obviously, as it's our Record Of The Week). And the Lunaris label, the latest to throw their bloody hat in the horror movie vinyl reissue ring, did a great job, killer new artwork, extensive liner notes, the whole shebang. And like all the best soundtracks, it has us wanting to watch Street Trash again SO BAD!!
Keiji Haino, Takashi Mizutani, Munehiro Narita, Kawabata Makoto... these are (some of) the gods of Japanese psych guitar. Add Suzuki Junzo to the list, if you haven't already. He's quickly becoming one of our faves, for blacker-than-blues guitar/feedback wrangling. Back with another solo disc for the always-on-it (and out-there) experimental Utech label, Junzo, who has played guitar for such bands as Overhang Party and Miminokoto, delivers a gorgeous, darkly entrancing mixture of both noisy, heavy-duty distorto drone whoosh and quietly lovely acoustic atmospheres. Regarding the former, the epically titled (and epic otherwise as well) opener "When The Grey Skies Turns Into Blood Red" launches right into a session of wind-tunnel psych guitar grind, tumbling end-over-end with skittering percussion accompaniment to match, courtesy of Junzo's colleague Ikuro Takahasi (LSD-March, ex-Fushitsusha, etc.). That 15 minutes and 15 seconds of amp-worship improv is beautiful in its way, as is the quite contrasting next track (and title cut), Junzo shifting gears for an intimate acoustic reverie, a la James Blackshaw or Jack Rose.
Junzo is back to laying on the ghostly reverb (and some whispery hushed vocals too) with track 3, "La Notte", and the freely-textural percussion returns as well. That one's lovely enough, but then the finale, at 17 minutes even more epic than the opener (and with an even more epic title, too: "Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Invisible Tower In The Ring Of Holy Mountain") takes us a way on a tremulous trip of slow sad strum and minimalistic string buzz. Tune in, zone out.
Yeah, another very nice one from our man Junzo!! In the usual swank Utech packaging.
Krust! Nekkro! Grimm! Kvlt!!! If it's evil-sounding and spelled weirdly then it most certainly applies to this filthy oily mass of lice infested, punk infused black metal that has slithered its way through the front gates of aQ HQ. Hailing from right here in San Francisco, Tare seems to be a totally new proposition, formed just last year, and they name the Finnish orthodox hordes as their primary inspiration (i.e. Horna, Sargeist, Vordr), but their blown out brand of venomous, simplified BM will surely appeal to fans of Bone Awl and Raspberry Bulbs as well (and maybe even worshippers of black metal ultra minimalists Ildjarn!). The guitars are a staticky stab, the drums a relentless minimal caveman plod, the vocals a garbled howl. If you like your black metal dirty, nasty and truly ugly then you don't want to pass this up. Plus it's housed in a swanky oversized case that includes both a cassette and a 3" cd-r (that both feature the same music we presume??).
What's this? Maybe the cover, all-black but for the name Tarkus, caught your eye? Holy grail time here, people. We've been wanting to get this album on cd FOREVER. There was a hard-to-find LP reissue some years ago, but we'd never yet found a cd version -- until now, at last, and it's a totally legit one from the master tapes! Released (barely, in an edition of just, like, 50 copies) in Tarkus' native Peru back in 1972, this is an album to go down in the annals of heavy rock, proudly belonging to the pantheon of proggy proto-metal!!! We'd definitely rank this with favorites of ours in that truly cult realm, other early '70s stuff like Necronomicon and Night Sun and Eduardo Bort and Steamhammer's Speech!
It may be that they're named after the ELP's 1971 album Tarkus (you know, the one with that freaky armadillo/tank on the cover), but they don't sound much like ELP in any event. While progressive rock is part of their sound, this Tarkus come across more like a bizarro hybrid of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and some of the more out-there and baroque Italian prog outfits of the era, rather than ELP. It's music that's dark and doomy and powerful and psychedelically dosed, sometimes with really weird operatic vocals -- and always with about a zillion cool, heavy guitar riffs. It's meant to be played LOUD. Shouldn't be hard to comply!
With some very pretty melodies and acoustic moments, Tarkus somehow seem like a '60s garage psych act (which they previously were, Tarkus being formed by members of Peruvian psych-pop group Telegraph Ave.) in possession of a crystal ball that enabled them to gaze into the future to be anachronistically inspired by Black Sabbath's Sabotage album, which was released three years later in 1975 (we'll have to assume that crystal ball had a place to plug in earphones).
This comes packaged in a gatefold, miniature LP styled sleeve. There's a folded color insert, another black and white lyric sheet, and also separate liner notes in both Spanish and English, which make mention of the band dressing like monks when they made one of their rare live appearances.
And by the way, we'd somehow suspect that Portland's Danava have heard this record. If not, they should -- we think they'd like it! And we think you will too, if any of the above raving and referencing strikes a chord!
First we've heard from Tin Man, aka producer Johannes Auvinen, who specializes in a gorgeously melancholy, minor key house music, downcast and skeletal, total morning-after, minimal, come down electronica. You can almost imagine this stuff playing at full volume, through huge speakers in a massive, totally empty warehouse, the floor covered with trampled rave flyers, empty cups, and discarded clothing, a sort of dance music 'world without us', Ode playing like the soundtrack to a series of images of empty clubs, of decrepit spaces, night clubs laid bare in the cruel light of day, the beats, dubby, and murky, the surrounding sounds bleary and hungover, super tranced out and mesmeric, most definitely dance music made NOT to dance to, but instead the soundtrack to an endless night, the listener hunkering down in a dimly lit corner both, waiting for a morning that may never come.
A handful of the tracks here are 'vocal' tracks, which we were quite wary of at first, especially considering that with house music, that generally means some sort of cringeworthy diva vocals, but not here. On Ode, Tin Man delivers his own dour vocalizations, a softly effected croon, deep and dramatic, sung/spoken, way down in the mix, laid back and a little bit wasted sounding, perfectly complimenting the wasted nocturnal house grooves beneath. Maybe our new favorite NON dance music, dance music record...
The first track on this new record from Aussie new wave garage punks Total Control had us thinking for a second that they had ditched their garage side completely, in favor of going all 'wave all the time, just check out the first sample below. Sure the last record, Henge Beats, was laced with little bits of new waviness, but "Glass" is straight up new wave, sounding remarkably like New Order, all programmed beats, swirling eighties synths, moody, swoonsome melodies, and deep, crooned vox, it almost sounds like it could be some lost gem reissued on Medical or Dark Entries, but fear not, the next track, "Expensive Dog", is all knuckle dragging old school punk rock, a chugging, churning main riff, the vibe swaggery and sloppy, the vocals a mush mouthed bellow, way down in the mix, it's hard to believe it's the same band even, but then in swoops "Flesh War", which somehow melds the two, channeling some synthy post punk via a serious John Hughes soundtrack flashback vibe, a fuzzy riff, a pounding beat, but then over the top, swirling synths, ethereal textures, and the vocals reverting to that new wave-y croon. And so it goes, the band seemingly a little sonically schizophrenic, leap frogging from synth pop, to garage punk, and back again, with plenty of stops in the nebulous region right in between, which for us is really the sweet spot here. Although the more we listen, the more we're smitten by the even weirder, harder to pin down tracks. Like "Liberal Party", which sounds a lot like some actual obscure post punk/pop rarity, replete with angular guitar, kazoo-like buzz and horns! Or the murky electro-pop dirgery of "The Ferryman", which sounds like some lost Flying Nun B-side. Or "Hunter", which is a fantastic blast of swirling-synth, electro-wave bliss out. And while we were prepared for the record to finish with one final burst of bristly punkiness, these guys instead deliver what might be the poppiest jam here, hook heavy, synths galore, a soaring chorus, another nod to the sound of classic John Hughes movie music, and the sort of track that would be all over MTV if it was 1985...
LISTED THE DOUBLE CD EDITION OF THIS COMP LAST WEEK, ALSO NOW HERE'S THE VINYL VERSION, IN TWO PARTS...
Obviously, we listen to all sorts of music here, and maybe also obviously, a lot of it is way outside the mainstream, whether it's psychedelic space rock, cinematic avant doom, dirgedronedrift, but when we're totally honest with ourselves (some of us at least, sure you can guess who), there are two genres that we always go back to. The stuff we listen to when we're NOT writing reviews, for pure pleasure, on roadtrips, on iPods, the soundtrack to many a journey, and those two genres would be eighties metal, and grunge. And for sure it has to do with our ages, and when we grew up, and what we grew up listening to, but grunge was HUGE for some of us. We subscribed to the Sub Pop singles club, we hunted down obscure 7"s on C/Z, and other smaller labels, we of course dug the usual suspects, Tad, Nirvana, Mudhoney, Green River and all the rest, but we were (and are) pretty obsessed, digging way deeper, and trust us, we could go on and on about our favorite super obscure (and sort of obscure) grunge outfits: Swallow, Cat Butt, Sprinkler, Thirty Ought Six, Malfunkshun, Love Battery, The Fluid, Green Magnet School, Gruntruck, Best Kissers In The World, Truly, Blood Circus, and yet not a single one of them are found here, nope, the folks at Soul Jazz dig REALLY DEEP, so much so, that even the grunge nerds around aQ only recognized EIGHT of the bands included on this comp, so we were super psyched to get schooled on one of our favorite genres. And to be fair, not all of this is strictly grunge, some of the stuff here is more straight up punk rock, some is pretty experimental, but some is seriously and fantastically grungy. Things start off with a band we knew and loved already, Starfish, whose girl grunge dabbled heavily in shoegaze, sounding to us at least, like a grunge version of Team Dresch, which is most definitely a good thing. Vampire Lezbos are pretty grungy too, and before now totally unknown to us, but all swagger, snarly riffage, some hard rock shreddery, that is until the song explodes into full on punk rock bash and howl, the rest of the song seesawing back and forth between the two. Nubbin are pretty great too, definitely grungy, a little bit jangly and Nirvana-esque, their song "Windyyy" borrowing the opening riff from a much more famous sing with the same (sort of) title. Saucer, who we had never heard before, are total grunge, all sort of hard rock swagger, and laid back riffage, heavy but also sort of stone-y. The first real WTF moment comes from Hitting Birth, who we were of course familiar with, but who we never considered grunge, and they're not grunge here either, more sort of early lo-fi industrial, to be fair it is SORT of grungy, but the metallic rhythms, the strange percussion, there's even some turntable scratching, makes it an interesting sonic reference point for the movement, and we do have to say, it's the coolest Hitting Birth song we've heard.
Other favorites include Pod, the pre-Mudhoney, pre-Tad outfit Bundle Of Hiss, the very Skin Yard sounding Helltrout, who were considered one of the heavier bands in Seattle at the time (late eighties to mid nineties), then there's the fuzzy jangle pop of Chemistry Set, that seems to owe more to R.E.M. than anything, and My Name, who are almost like funk-grunge (and we mean that as a compliment), the all female grunge-chug of Shug, and the noisy girl-grunt post punk of Calamity Jane, and so much more. Anyone into grunge will dig this like crazy, and a bunch of these bands have full lengths, well worth tracking down, and of course, it's Soul Jazz, so there's a huge book, full of extensive liner notes, with rare photos, and a blurb on each band, as well as some appendices, like a list of various band members still active today and what bands they play in now, as well as a six degrees of Nirvana chart, that connects each band on the comp to the godfathers of grunge, in some cases in just one move, with a handful of band members having actually played in the group, and at least one having had the group play their birthday party!
Available as a double cd, or a fairly pricey 4 lp set, sold in two separate 2lp volumes.
LISTED THE DOUBLE CD EDITION OF THIS COMP LAST WEEK, ALSO NOW HERE'S THE VINYL VERSION, IN TWO PARTS...
Obviously, we listen to all sorts of music here, and maybe also obviously, a lot of it is way outside the mainstream, whether it's psychedelic space rock, cinematic avant doom, dirgedronedrift, but when we're totally honest with ourselves (some of us at least, sure you can guess who), there are two genres that we always go back to. The stuff we listen to when we're NOT writing reviews, for pure pleasure, on roadtrips, on iPods, the soundtrack to many a journey, and those two genres would be eighties metal, and grunge. And for sure it has to do with our ages, and when we grew up, and what we grew up listening to, but grunge was HUGE for some of us. We subscribed to the Sub Pop singles club, we hunted down obscure 7"s on C/Z, and other smaller labels, we of course dug the usual suspects, Tad, Nirvana, Mudhoney, Green River and all the rest, but we were (and are) pretty obsessed, digging way deeper, and trust us, we could go on and on about our favorite super obscure (and sort of obscure) grunge outfits: Swallow, Cat Butt, Sprinkler, Thirty Ought Six, Malfunkshun, Love Battery, The Fluid, Green Magnet School, Gruntruck, Best Kissers In The World, Truly, Blood Circus, and yet not a single one of them are found here, nope, the folks at Soul Jazz dig REALLY DEEP, so much so, that even the grunge nerds around aQ only recognized EIGHT of the bands included on this comp, so we were super psyched to get schooled on one of our favorite genres. And to be fair, not all of this is strictly grunge, some of the stuff here is more straight up punk rock, some is pretty experimental, but some is seriously and fantastically grungy. Things start off with a band we knew and loved already, Starfish, whose girl grunge dabbled heavily in shoegaze, sounding to us at least, like a grunge version of Team Dresch, which is most definitely a good thing. Vampire Lezbos are pretty grungy too, and before now totally unknown to us, but all swagger, snarly riffage, some hard rock shreddery, that is until the song explodes into full on punk rock bash and howl, the rest of the song seesawing back and forth between the two. Nubbin are pretty great too, definitely grungy, a little bit jangly and Nirvana-esque, their song "Windyyy" borrowing the opening riff from a much more famous sing with the same (sort of) title. Saucer, who we had never heard before, are total grunge, all sort of hard rock swagger, and laid back riffage, heavy but also sort of stone-y. The first real WTF moment comes from Hitting Birth, who we were of course familiar with, but who we never considered grunge, and they're not grunge here either, more sort of early lo-fi industrial, to be fair it is SORT of grungy, but the metallic rhythms, the strange percussion, there's even some turntable scratching, makes it an interesting sonic reference point for the movement, and we do have to say, it's the coolest Hitting Birth song we've heard.
Other favorites include Pod, the pre-Mudhoney, pre-Tad outfit Bundle Of Hiss, the very Skin Yard sounding Helltrout, who were considered one of the heavier bands in Seattle at the time (late eighties to mid nineties), then there's the fuzzy jangle pop of Chemistry Set, that seems to owe more to R.E.M. than anything, and My Name, who are almost like funk-grunge (and we mean that as a compliment), the all female grunge-chug of Shug, and the noisy girl-grunt post punk of Calamity Jane, and so much more. Anyone into grunge will dig this like crazy, and a bunch of these bands have full lengths, well worth tracking down, and of course, it's Soul Jazz, so there's a huge book, full of extensive liner notes, with rare photos, and a blurb on each band, as well as some appendices, like a list of various band members still active today and what bands they play in now, as well as a six degrees of Nirvana chart, that connects each band on the comp to the godfathers of grunge, in some cases in just one move, with a handful of band members having actually played in the group, and at least one having had the group play their birthday party!
Available as a double cd, or a fairly pricey 4 lp set, sold in two separate 2lp volumes.
The Black Twilight Circle is Southern California's answer to Les Legions Noires, the elite circle of French black metal groups which included Mutiilation, Vlad Tepes, Torgeist, Belketre, Aakon Keetreh, Moevet and a handful of others. Like the Black Legions, the Black Twilight Circle also have a stable of different 'groups', that are made up of a small handful of artists, most of whom do time in multiple bands, an insular musical community, that manages to create a surprising varied catalog considering how much overlap there is between the bands and the various members. Tliltic Tlapoyauak is a killer collection of exclusive tracks from a handful of those bands, some we knew already: Blue Hummingbird On The Left, Volahn, Dolorvotre, Tukaaria, Arizmenda, Axeman, along with a bunch more we didn't: Cempopoloah, In Lakech Ala Kin, Kampilan, Blood Play, Acualli and lots more. And like the handful of full lengths that we've managed to hear from some of these groups, the sound of the Black Twilight Circle definitely tends toward the avant, melding classic grim buzz, with all manner of sonic experimentation, just check out the opening track from Kuxan Suum, who, after a brief bit of Native American sounding folkiness, all tribal drumming, shakers and whistles, launches into a furious bout of raw, churning, tangled black buzz, a frenzied berserker onslaught, but one rife with weird angular melodies, and twisted riffage, and then part way through, the track breaks down into a cool little stretch of clean guitar shimmer, almost a sort of alien Appalachia, before launching right back into it, this time way proggier and more angular, the sound lurching and slithering and sounding almost like a black metal Sun City Girls!
It's tempting to go through the whole record, track by track, as we are wont to do, cuz all the songs here are pretty incredible, but odds are, if you're into weird black metal, you are at least a bit familiar with these groups and this scene, but even if you're not, maybe especially if you're not, this is a killer place to start. The sound dizzyingly diverse, one second a wild wall of crumbling distortion swirling beneath super dramatic bellowed, almost go thic / post punk sounding vox, the next, total lo-fi grimnity, but even then, the sounds are twisted and obtuse, damaged and WTF, the mixes, the arrangements, the vocals especially, constantly lurching from gruff gurgle to wailing falsetto, to hellish shriek. There's very little in the way of straight ahead black metal to be found here, hell, we'd go so far as to say, maybe none at all. Even the most straight up buzz and blast, is only that way on the surface, and even then not for long, often sounds like it's melting, or collapsing, into a swirling black void. Elsewhere, the sound drifts into loping post rock territory, moody and meandering, while elsewhere the sound is some sort of twisted FX drenched noise rock, the demonic vokills the only truly black metal thing about it.
Somehow the second disc gets even weirder, starting with some detuned downer rock, a wasted zoner sprawl of woozy, melty slo-mo creep, gothic and gloomy and crazy psychedelic, before the second track explodes into totally tranced out black buzz epicry. Later, the blackness evolves into a weird sort of flute flecked, progged out post rock, only to then erupt into a barrage, of thick churning riffage, and smoldering slow build throb, and then some murky tarpit death metal, butted up against some blackened jazziness that transforms into more furious buzzing blackness, the comp finishing off with the weirdest of the bunch, from Axeman, which begins as a weird sort of over the top cabaret ballad, replete with flanged guitars, synths, and some crazy over the top vocal bombast, only to then splinter into a wild squall of tangled buzz, with some ridiculous, super distorted shreddery, and some classic metal gallop, the song lurching from sound to sound, working it's way through several shades of black only to dissolve some sort of South American / Native American outro, bookending the opener, this time though the tribal drumming, and whistles, accompanied by some inhuman shriek. So weird. And so cool! Easily some of the most adventurous weirdo blackness being made today for sure!
Killer packaging too, a full color triple digipak, with spaced out Aztec influenced cover art, and a huge booklet, printed with silver metallic ink, with a page for each of the band, including art, liner notes and lyrics.
The first full length from Vessel, aka producer Sebastian Gainsborough, 2012's Order Of Noise, was a perfect fit for the Tri Angle label, sounding very much like labelmates oOoOO, Balam Acab, Holy Other, etc. All warped and woozy, fractured slo-mo soul, dark, slithery, downtempo creeps that sounded like Portishead 12"s melted down, and then repressed into something much more alien, and otherworldly.
Punish, Honey is something else altogether, though. Gone are the pitch shifted vocals, the spare dubbed out minimal moodiness, and in their place, something much more bombastic and percussive, dense and collaged, and WAY more experimental. While that first record channeled the soulful murk of Burial, the sound here is almost more post industrial, still soulful for sure, but with hints of Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, and other much more avant influences, that you might not expect to hear woven into what is ostensibly dance music. That said, the music here is truly not designed for the dancefloor. Instead, in some ways at least, it hews closer to the sound design of folks like Ben Frost and Roly Porter. In fact, imagine some sort of Portishead / Ben Frost mash-up and you'd be getting close. From the opening intro, you know something has changed, what sounds like a solo performance on snare drum, in a big empty room, that blown out snare soon joined by processed recordings of what sounds like jackhammers, the result is some super abstract 20th century sounding weirdness, replete with skittery, stuttery rhythms, and keening siren like tones. It's not all that far out, but a lot of it comes close.
"Red Sex" sounds like Latin Playboys if the group was made up of robots, Marc Ribot like guitars wrapped around metallic buzz, and a churning looped beat, the vibe hazy and nocturnal, you can almost imagine someone like Tom Waits hearing a track like this and then recruiting Gainsborough to work on his new record. It's the moody, murky "Drowned In Water And Light" that really seals the deal, a cloud of swirling tones, gives way to a lumbering big beat, those tones bleeding and blurring into sinister shimmers, the sound almost like the score for some silent movie, wound around a lurching plod and pound, the atmosphere in constant motion, buzzing and thrumming, rich and lustrous and seriously haunting. From there on out Gainsborough continues to push the envelope, his mutant electronica harrowing at times, wistfully obtuse at others, a few tracks, like "Anima" sound almost like Amps For Christ, a sort of noise-folk psychedelia subtly infused into the otherwise mesmeric churn, or tracks like "Black Leaves And Broken Branches", that sounds like some lost Jewelled Antler campfire jam, all wheezing chords, muted percussion, lazy, languorous melodies, clouds of cymbal shimmer, distant horn bleats, albeit pocked with the occasional industrial burst. The final track is the 'danciest' of the bunch, but even there, the sound is noisy, and distorted, and dizzying, clattery and psychedelic, and it's preceded by two tracks of dreamy soft noise skitter and blurred Caretaker like ambient drift. Love it!!!
Girls, girls, girls! The last few years has been filled with both bands with the name 'girls' in their moniker, as well as bands heavily influenced by girl groups and infusing it into a lo-fi garage rock sound. Vivian Girls were one of the leaders of this craze, and they still sound just as great, even amidst the legions of similar sounding groups that have popped up in the last couple years. Share The Joy finds the Girls shredding and rocking just about as hard as they ever have, while still finding moments for full on pop glory. While they have always been sonically aligned with '60s girl groups, we actually hear a lot of '80s and '90s pop/punk in this set of songs. Like a way raw and rocking Blondie, or Black Tambourine and Tiger Trap coming together to cover The Runaways. In other words, totally awesome once again!
Trampling you underfoot or simply, softly embracing in (muscular) arms of despair, the juggernaut of heaviosity known simply as Yob is back, offering up another four looong songs (all double digit durations) of their indeed epic extreme metal, a blackened blend of doom metal and post rock, with some seriously LOUD/soft dynamics. That they're now on Neurot with the cd release of this (vinyl via Relapse) makes sense, Yob somehow sounding more Neurosis-y than ever here, though still very much Yob, a distinction that comes from the guitar and especially the vocals of mainman Mike Scheidt, who does both throat-shredding death bellows and his trademark, heavily effected, clean, soaring singing here, which we always love.
This is, like, the band's 7th album, and really it's another doozy, for anyone into sheer, crushing riff sludge, majestically arranged. Track three, "Unmask The Spectre", could be this year's most perfect 15 minute marriage of melody, emotion, atmosphere, and utter heaviness - though track four, "Marrow", could be the best 18+ minutes of the same... Truly, the whole album's got plenty of all that, an over an hour long journey into the heart of the desolate dimension of Yob.
