Never really thought we'd ever see anything from Allegory Chapel Ltd ever again. This was the project of one very dark soul named Elden M, who resided in the Bay Area throughout the '80s and '90s, lurking about the experimental / noise / industrial crowd and working in the dank warehouse at Subterranean Records. He released a dozen or so cassettes during that time period, of bombastic, synth and sample heavy noise that lumbered between the sewer-dwelling of Factrix and the dystopian electronics of Dissecting Table, with plenty of more noise filling in the gaps. Much of his cassettes were self-released, though the work was also published by G.R.O.S.S., Sound Of Pig, and Charnel Music. By 1996 though Elden shifted his attention to the realm of black metal, running the label / distro site blackmetal.com. Some 18 years later, we have the return of Allegory Chapel Ltd. - on a cassette of course! Resurrection is an apt name, but only in terms of the ACL reboot. Aesthetically, this has a very different bent with Elden eschewing midi-based lattice works of rhythm and melody and focusing instead on the dynamic interplay between several streams of aggressive noise. Tone pulse monstrosities trudging through toxic blooms of asbestos dust, long dive-bombing arcs of atom-smashed noise gliding in and out of blackdrone morass, and a fraught psychic energy that equivocates between nihilist torpor and vehement antagonism. One could think of the more mature works of Grey Wolves or Consumer Electronics, if mature and power electronics could cohabitate in the same descriptive arrangement. Wholly recommended, regardless.
It's been a while since we've heard from the Magik Markers, but the way we remember MM frontwoman Elisa Ambrogio is as some kind of wild whirling dervish, screeching and caterwauling, crawling into the crowd, a disheveled demonic presence and most certainly the main musical motivator behind MM's sloppy, chaotic noise rock. More recent MM records found the group drifting toward a more polished, almost poppy sound; but that sound remained plenty wild and dissonant, which makes Ambrogio's first solo record that much more of a surprise, just check out opener "Superstitious", which sounds like Best Coast, or the Dum Dum Girls, a hazy, softly swirling, psychedelic gloom pop torch song, rife with classic melodies, gorgeous vocals, echo drenched piano, a pulsing minimal rhythm. A darkly dreamy slab of minimal garage pop beholden to sixties girl groups way more than the noise rock that spawned the Magik Markers. And while at first we thought maybe that first song was an anomaly, steeling ourselves for the onslaught of noisy chaos, it never really comes. The Immoralist is a dark-psych pop confection all the way through. Woozy harmonies drift amidst skeletal arrangements, some fuzzy guitar glides weightless over plodding beats and moaning sinister strings. It's all wound up in a grainy, gauzy production, rife with dubbed out FX, reverb and echo, those FX sometimes billowing into clouds of granular distortion, but again, instead of making it noisier, it just adds even more of a lysergic vibe, the record unwinding languorously, a gloriously dreamy dark pop that will definitely appeal to fans of all the Girl bands (i.e. Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, U.S. Girls, Girls At Dawn), as well as other psychedelic dream pop combos like Beach House, Brilliant Colors, Best Coast, etc.
This classic gets the Heavenly Sweetness reissue treatment, coming on the heels of their Ethiopiques series 'Best Of' double lp collection earlier this year. We've had a vinyl reish of it before, but this one is in freshly in print and much nicer too (though a little bit more expensive).
Mulatu Astatke's Ethio Jazz was released as Volume 4 of the beloved Ethiopiques compact disc series (expanded from 9 to 14 tracks for the cd issue) and is easily THEE single most popular release out of 'em all (at least here at AQ anyway.) Astatke had the unique privilege to be sent off to school in 1960 (at the age of 17) to study music in London. From there he continued on to the United States, attending The Berklee School of Music in Boston and later moving to New York. One can imagine he picked up a wide range of influences, and that he did. He became absorbed in Latin and Caribbean music, eventually forming his own group the Ethiopian Quartet in New York. Upon his return to Ethiopia in the late sixties he was treated like a king, being hailed as "the first-Ethiopian-musician-educated-abroad" and as a arranger/bandleader he was unequaled.
This record, originally released circa 1974, is an absolutely stunning collection of instrumentals. Most are composed by Astatke, while others are arrangements of traditional songs or other composers. A "jazz" record, yes this is, but hardly just. Ethio Jazz is a wonderful amalgam of swinging jazz tunes, sweet soul and punchy funk, laden with fuzzy electric guitars and tremolo drenched electric pianos. What's more is that, unlike the Afro-funk of Nigeria, the rest of Africa or the world even, the unique scales of Ethiopian music produce the most haunting melodies that we've ever heard. For better or worse, this record has probably the broadest appeal of any release we've had. Very highly recommended (and for cd buyers, if you haven't picked up Ethiopiques vol. 4 yet, we usually keep them in stock.)
Oh, and this is the album featuring the track "Yekermo Sew", recently covered by modern-day Turkish psych instrumentalists Hayvanlar Alemi, by the way.
These UK psychedelic dronelords began life as something altogether different, for years conjuring up some mutant strain of modern minimalism, dreamily lysergic noise drenched ragas and longform avant-psych kosmische kraut-age bliss outs. At some point their sound shifted and became decidedly more electronic, transforming in some cases into actual techno, albeit a super noisy, deliriously fucked up version, but it seemed they had perhaps made the move into dance music full time. But with the last few releases, the sound seems to have been drifting back to that early sound, or perhaps more accurately, the two sides of ASC seem to have merged, creating some dizzying psychedelia that within a single song can flit from fractured techno, to glimmering, prismatic psych-noise, to full on meditative raga-drone spiritualism, that strange confluence is in full effect here.
The opener "Infinity Thug" is a wild collage of electronic bloops and bleeps and buried-in-the-mix tabla like rhythms, a cascade of distorted soft noise swirl that leads directly into the gristly cosmic sprawl of "Phantom Transmitters" that sounds a bit like the music from a planetarium light show, wreathed in a cloud of sculpted static, and draped over a soft guitar strum and softly undulating layers of buzz and thrum. And as you might have gathered from the above, after that, all bets are off - pulsing sitar like ragas drift through fields of chanting monk like vocals, pocked with electronic squelches, and spacey FX. Churning alien techno sprawls into psychedelic cosmic-kraut grooves. Billows of distant chordal shimmer drift weightlessly beneath spiritual spoken word, peppered with guitar fuzz and mysterious sonic filigree. It's a swirling sonic chaos that manages to be both noisy and psychedelic, dreamy and meditative, with fractured noisiness and jumbled melodies. The extended stretches of staticky electro-minimalism are almost like some home-brewed Raster-Noton release, at times sounding like some damaged variant of heroin house, at others like it could have been constructed from intercepted alien transmissions. And finally, there is a soft bit of spacey glimmer, that explodes into the wild bombastic psychedelic squall that is the closer "Squeegee Anthem #3", which by 9 minutes in (of 18) sounds like Burnt Hills or the Heads, doused in spaced out electronics and cosmic FX, a totally hypnotic, noise drenched, electronic flecked, heady, hard rocking, psychedelic blow out.
The record is split into THREE sides, the first two on the vinyl, the third 'side' on the included cd. But fear not, a download is included that features all three.
Reissued once again! Hi-Scores is the first EP that Boards of Canada produced for the exemplary electronica label Skam. "Turquoise Hexagonal Sun", a track that later appeared on the acclaimed debut album Music Has The Right To Children, is featured in a slightly more skeletal form. The other five tracks retain their signature rainy-day electronica (albeit a bit dirtier than their later more nuanced sound) grounded by softened hip-hop breaks and post-Eno ambience. As always, Boards of Canada makes for a very pleasant if often slightly unsettling listening experience!
Next up in the latest series of remastered vinyl reissues of the greatest works (we haven't yet gotten to the slighty-less-great ones) of seminal krautrockers Can, is this, the sublime Future Days. We're told these reissues (Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Tago Mago, and now Future Days) boast better sound than some previous versions, but please note the sound samples we're providing come from another source (and, in general, you can't expect to judge sound quality from an mp3 on our website, of course, anyway). So, on to our write up from the last time we celebrated a reissue of Future Days:
This is Krautrock at its absolute dreamiest. Next to Ege Bamyasi, this is one of our most favorite Can albums. A regulation-size track, "Moonshake" is surrounded by three long ones to create a lush, lifting journey. Suzuki's vocals just merely whisper in and out of the scene as the percussion and organ work itself into a transfixed polyrhythmic atmosphere and becomes balanced again through use of some constant and pulsating bass. "Moonshake" is a Can-brand pop track, barely truly "pop-ish" but as much in that vein as they ever reached. Then the album ends in pure elegance and glory. Very, very recommended if you don't have it in your collection already (and maybe even if you do, and want the new vinyl pressing - after all, these Can records are the sort worth buying more than once, right?).
It's been 4 years since Dan Snaith's last record under the Caribou moniker, though he took a detour to record a techno-oriented album under a new moniker Daphni in 2012. Here on Our Love, he returns to form melding the Arthur Russell-ish dance floor excursions from his last outing, Swim, with some of the hazy pop bliss of older efforts Andorra and Milk of Human Kindness, into a slow disco candyland of blissfully moving synthforms, low-key soulful vocals and ear-wormy edits. Our Love may be his most fully realized record, its nuanced sound more polished and less experimentally pulled together from various approaches than previous efforts, marked by a noticeable restraint that keeps the tracks lean, but never lacking. In fact, it's got plenty of dynamic shifting movement and bounce, while retaining a deep emotional core in the songwriting. Admittedly, it took us awhile to get into this, mainly because we weren't sure that its attention to surface detail would penetrate deeper. But once we did we haven't stopped playing it.
New vinyl only collection from these spaced out psychedelic kraut-punks, collecting a bunch of, as the title suggests, their singles from the last 6 or 7 years, a few we've already reviewed, so probably best to revisit those, which will no doubt give you an idea of what you're in for. Included is their single on Trensmat, which begins with the weird protofunk of "Butthash", a bouncy groover, with swirly synths, caffeinated rhythms, and buried vocals, a bit angular, a little new wave, equal parts krautrock, and spaced out shimmer, but all tangled up and kaleidoscopic, which leads directly into "Machines & Muscles" with its Circle-like guitar groove, some hand drums, very tribal and looped sounding, suspended in a field of space streakings and smears of soft effects in the background, the drums get a little more obtuse, a bit busier, but that main riff stays LOCKED in, until it begins to get ALL tripped out, distorted, effects drenched, swinging from speaker to speaker, dizzyingly tripped out, and then finally, the drums kick in proper, and we're in total hynorock bliss, little bits of keyboard pepper, the stuttery rhythm, the main riff staying solid and unwavering, while all around it various other sounds swoop and shimmer.
Also included is the B side from the Made In Malaysia 7" on Important, "Boneyard", fuzzy, spaced out, murky, krautrocky, lysergic, druggy, lots of trippy effects laden psych guitar, a propulsive garagey groove, pounding metronomic drumming, WAY more Hawkwind and Monster Magnet and especially Loop than the full length proper. Think Heads and White Hills and other purveyors of hypno space rock, and this track will definitely push those very same buttons.
Beyond that, the comp also tosses in a handful of jams from records we were never able to get, which was presumably true for some of you folks too, the tracks from their Static Caravan 7", two tracks from Giradiscos 7" and one unreleased track only available here. The Static Caravan tracks are on the more rocking side, the band winding their krautrocky synths around some seriously hard rocking space rock, again channeling the Heads and White Hills and of course Hawkwind, with the second, getting all proggy and weirdly space-funky, wild tribal drums over percolating synth melodies, like a Neu! track jacked up and spinning at 78rpm. The Giradiscos tracks are even cooler/stranger adding a sort of Ethiopian groove to the proceedings, the first track sounding like some lost slab of cosmic Ethiopian psych funk, while the second gets all blessed out and laid back, another groover, but this one sort of dashed and dreamy and druggy. And finally, the unreleased track, which might be the oddest of the bunch, adding actual vocals, almost jam band sounding, the music on its own is still pretty motorik and propulsive, but those vocals make it sound like some warped hyper-charged version of the Grateful Dead or something, which sounds weird, but we're guessing it's a comparison the band would dig a lot.
Sadly no download, but there is an insert, with some liner notes, and comes housed in a super minimal stickered jacket.
Most aQ customers by now are familiar with (and fanatic about) both Circle and Pharaoh Overlord. Kind of like Parliament-Funkadelic, the two Finnish groups are more-or-less the same band really, making more-or-less the same kind of music, the Circle-Pharaoh Overlord thang all about repetitive, "circular", psychedelic sounds. Sharing members and a mesmeric M.O., both Circle and Pharaoh Overlord are masters of spacey hypno-rock, often heavy, sometimes "metal", frequently quite WTF?, all of which is what you get here for sure, in both cases, on this pair of vinyl-only live records with similar, sharp cover graphics and the same dang title. Turns out these are the first two in what promises to be a series of "high quality, multi-channel 'live' recordings" under the 6000 km/h banner (a name meant to connote "speed, dynamism and goal-orientedness" according to the tongue-in-cheek corporate jargon employed by the label's press release).
Circle's entry in the series was recorded on tour in Europe, Spring 2014. The set list must have been a strange one, indeed, so you get a diverse six tracks, including a couple minute-or-less hardcore blasts sourced from their 2007 Panic album. Going to the other extreme, duration-wise, there's also a version of a song, "Se Jonka Nimea Ei Mainita" that had only previously appeared on ANOTHER vinyl-only live Circle album, 2011's Maxim, where it took up the entire second side, as it mostly does here as well. Plus there's also a ten-minute track entitled "6000 km/h", presumably exclusive to this release, also one from a rare 7", and to open the album, they do a track originally from another 2007 Circle album, Katapult, called "Fish Reflection" - an operatic, over the top thrasher that morphs into shimmery drone-bliss in the course of its ten minutes. Indicative, really, of the "dynamism" of the entirety of this exciting document.
Black vinyl is what we've got, limited to 350 copies only!
The final release from Concern, aka Gordon Ashworth (brother of Owen, he the man behind Casiotone For The Painfully Alone), which uses as its main sound source a folk instrument called the box harp, or lap harp, and the record opens with a gorgeous Reichian figure played on the harp, which becomes the foundation of the whole record, an homage of sorts to the African kora and the a a similar stringed instrument from Madagascar. The creation of the record is almost as compelling as the sounds themselves, with Ashworth using super primitive looping techniques involving cassettes and speakers and microphones and delays, but even more exciting, using cavernous parking garages and a sort of crude echo/delay, like a modern day Taj Mahal Travellers. The results speak for themselves though.
Beginning with that rapid fire figure of notes played on the box harp, buzzing and percussive and darkly melodic, all over wheezing barely there chords, those opening harp notes soon disappear beneath a warm wash of lush layered shimmer, which we gradually realize is simply the same sounds, slowed down and blurred a bit, transforming them into something droney and dreamy, but the sound is constantly shifting, the opening flurry of notes surfacing now and again in different forms, all building to a lush dense dreamily blown out coda, all the while, the sounds constantly couched in a background of ambient sounds and field recordings, the crackle of fire, voices, footsteps, the clatter of dishes, the clinking of glasses, it all definitely adds a strange dimension to an already mysterious landscape of sound.
The B side continues right where the first side left off, the buzzing box harp notes now hazy and washed out and wreathed in a prismatic glimmer, lush, but super active, a roiling melodic swirl just under the surface, the sound mesmerizing and ever shifting, building gradually to a soft cacophony, before closing with a gorgeous sprawl of softly warbly mesmer, sounding like Philip Jeck spinning old recordings of box harps, everything dreamy and crackly and softly fading to black.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! In a super striking jacket, with teal foil metallic printing on black matte jackets.
Perhaps best known for being the 'electronics guy' in the live version of Nine Inch Nails, Alessandro Cortini is also a formidable solo artist, as well as one of the few masters of the Buchla synthesizer. Having heard none of his solo work to date, we were actually expecting some sort of analog synth, goth industrial hybrid, would make sense since it ended up on the Hospital label, but instead, Sonno is a gorgeously hushed and evocative collection of minimal synthscapes, recorded in various hotel rooms on tour, all with just a single synth and a delay pedal, occasionally some portable speakers, the sounds defined not simply by Cortini's compositions and the settings on the instruments, but also the rooms, open windows, resonant tiled bathrooms, faucets on, the whir of air conditioners, sounds from the outside leaking in, all of this subtle and deftly woven into delicate, crystalline sprawls of soft focus synthsound, some tracks here cinematic an sinister, but most are ethereal and airy, fans of Emeralds will find much to love here, although Cortini's vision is much more low fidelity, but it's easy to forget about the fidelity completely, as the sounds are lush, and lovely, even the darker, shadowier movements, are gauzy and dreamlike, sometimes building to ominous billows of resonant thrum, but just as often settling into something tranquil and tranced out.
Imagine Stars Of The Lid, and Emeralds, and William Basinski, and the Caretaker, all blurred into a hauntingly mesmeric ambient kraut-psych, a pulsing, atmospheric dream-drone drift... gorgeous stuff...
While the late great Patrick Cowley is best known for his amazing disco and hi-NRG production for folks like Sylvester and the Megatone label he started, very much like his east coast counterpart Arthur Russell Cowley wore many different musical hats. It hasn't been until the recent unearthing of literally hundreds of reels of tape from his archives that the world is getting a glimpse of all the way-ahead-of-its-time synth/electronic music he was madly creating before and during his reign as San Francisco's most respected disco maestro.
In the late '70s Cowley appeared on a record by his friend Jorge Socarras' band, the way left-field post-punk group Indoor Life (one of their great tracks was recently featured on the Finders Keepers comp, Cross Continental Record Raid Road Trip). During those same years the two were also collaborating on a project together which sadly never got released, which turned out to be Catholic, and is the first record to get unearthed from those deep vaults of Cowley's that have only just begun to be explored.
Recorded between 1976-1979, Cowley and Socarras really found a way to create charged synth-wave/post-punk that was very much in line with what other forward minded San Francisco folks like The Units and Tuxedomoon were making. With Cowley handling the bulk of the instrumentation (synth, guitar, bass, drums, drum machines, etc.) and Socarras delivering dramatic and ice cold vocals falling somewhere between Gary Numan and Public Image Ltd. Catholic displays lots of range, from more slow burning grooves to full throttle attacks, New Romantic leanings to proto-Industrial crunch. It's cool to hear what people think is actually playing when we have this on, we've heard everything from Foetus to Ultravox to Cabaret Voltaire. We can't wait to hear so much more of the amazing music that Cowley created in his much too short of life (he passed away in 1982, one of the earliest casualties of the AIDS epidemic) but luckily for all of us he left an incredible musical legacy that will live on forever!
The fertile metal mind of talented guitarist/vocalist/drummer/songwriter etc. Chris "Professor" Black brings us his latest opus, this time an album from his critically-acclaimed epic metal project, Dawnbringer, whose previous two albums on Profound Lore we've lauded as well. Now, as you hopefully are aware, aQ fave High Spirits is one of the man's other bands, but this, while sonically similar in many ways to High Spirits (fist waving metal), is more like, Low Spirits. Maybe the band name should have changed here to DUSKbringer... While as melodic and majestic as ever, there's something super bummed out about all these tracks, however anthemic and even flat-out rockin' they are. It's not exactly doom metal, more like gloom metal. Negative, downer vibes permeate, with songs like "Damn You", "Nobody There", and "Crawling Off To Die", the latter appropriately enough the album-ender (with its title also being the brief, sad song's only lyrics). Not smiley stuff. Certainly you'll get your fix here of tasty guitar leads, crunchy heavy riffs and Black's distinctive, warm, weary vocals - but you might need to up your dose of Prozac when listening to this...
Tempos and everything else are mostly sorta sluggish sounding - excepting the blasting, black metallic attack of "Not Your Night", towards the end of the album, where some other surprises lurk.
Black metal being an aspect of the Dawnbringer equation heard in the past but not such much recently, so when that track hits, if you're not paying attention you might think you're listening to a different disc entirely, as Black also trades his 'clean' singing voice for a more rough/raspy 'vokill'. And likewise, you could really be confused by the very next cut, "Funeral Child", Black's vocals on that one sounding like a tribute to King Diamond & his falsetto shriek! Unexpected. But, again, not unknown in the Dawnbringer discography. However entertaining this display of Black's vocal versatility is, it's the sad, folky, balladic likes of "One-Eyed Sister" from midway through the disc, sung in his usual melodic manner, that seems more in keeping with the primary, melancholic mood intended here.
Andee seems to always find one thing on the list to rave about. This week is no different, here's
Andee raving about this Decemberists disc:
I can't figure out why I like this record so much. On first listen it really doesn't sound like my kind of thing at all. Yet it just sort of grabbed me and I can't stop listening to it. Which is pretty exciting considering how much music I hear everyday and how seldom something just completely takes my breath away. Especially when I'm not expecting to like it! The Decemberists play a sort of mutant hybrid of indie pop and folk. And it is a bit twee, which would usually put me off right away. But for some reason, this record manages to claw it's way out of the twee-pop ghetto. The singer has a very affected, sort of British air which reminds me a bit of Belle And Sebastian (who I'm not a huge fan of), but way less wispy and more gritty and world weary. A bit like Robyn Hitchcock or Dan Bejar of the Destroyer (and the New Pornographers) The music though sounds a lot like Neutral Milk Hotel, all strummed guitars and belted-out vocals, but mixed with the dreamy and pastoral popscapes of Belle and Sebastian and even a little bit of the Pogues sort of celtic campfire stomp/gypsy street music vibe. Lilting and dreamy, but also really sharp and emotional. The lyrics are very bookish and the subject matter is very Dickensian, evoking cobblestone streets and gaslamps and hungry street urchins and idealised Victorian romance. Heartbreakingly bittersweet and once in a while even sort of funny. Like Edward Gorey drawings set to music. A lot of that has to do with the instrumentation, wheezing almost Parisian sounding accordions, ominous rumbling cellos, ghostly theremins, and droning warbling organs that affortlessly create that sort of late night, empty streets, drunk and bitter, wistful and sort of hopeful, broken hearted aura that so much music strives for.
From loping waltzes to bouncing pop to crawling dirges, the Decemberists weave a totally magical spell that totally envelops you and transports you to wherever it is the Decemberists are plying their wares. It's all just so beautiful and catchy and melancholy and absolutely fucking great!
We can probably count the major female figures of Krautrock on one hand. Most of them like Rosi Mueller of Ash Ra Tempel, Renate Knaup from Amon Duul II, Djong Yun from Popol Vuh, or Sabine Merbach from Gila were either singers or muses for their male-led bands. And don't even mention Clara Mondshine, which was a pseudonym for Walter Bachauer, a very real actual man. But even among those women, you don't find too many female krautrock composers. Actually, we really couldn't think of any, offhand. Can you? If so, please enlighten!
Thankfully, the brand new reissue label, Medical Records, who has bolted out the gate running with not only one but two amazing (and amazingly limited!) vinyl-only reissues, sets the record straight! The other reissue, Alexander Robotnick, reviewed elsewhere on this list, is a weirdo Italo-disco / French electro classic we've known about for awhile and we're super psyched to see finally reissued. But this one, Deutsche Wertarbeit , the solo project of Dorothea Raukes, is altogether completely new to us and what a fantastic discovery it is!
Released on Sky Records in 1981, Deutsche Wertarbeit was Raukes' first solo effort after years of being the singer for a German Progressive band we're not familiar with called Streetmark, who started in 1968, and released 4 lps between 1976 and 1981. Two of those were also released on Sky Records and one of them was even recorded in collaboration with Wolfgang Riechmann, the same year he was murdered. What? Really? Why didn't we know of this already? Just goes to show, there are still many treasures to be unearthed.
And if you dug Wolfgang Riechmann's Wunderbar reissue, that we raved about awhile back, or Klaus Schultze, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Peter Baumann, or even some of the later Manuel Gottsching recordings such as New Age of Earth, then add Deutsche Wertarbeit to the essential kosmiche synthscape canon. But while she definitely fits in with those artists, she carves out her own defining sound of warm minimal hypnotic rhythms and vocoder voicings that display a joyous exhuberance you don't see as much in artists like Schultze or Baumann. In fact this would fit in well with the stuff on that Dirty Space Disco comp, as it sounds like a mystical combination of Vangelis and Popol Vuh, expansive and cosmic, upliftingly propulsive while keeping it all beautifully reigned in.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each 180 gram colored vinyl and hand-numbered. We're not sure how long we'll have these, so don't wait too long. Highest Recommendation!!!!!!
Experimental electronica (particularly the glitch techno and collage work on the Mille Plateaux label) is getting dangerously close to self parody, with the definitions of very specific electronic music forming ever increasing legions of devoted followers
Fennesz' third album -- the aptly titled "Endless Summer" -- picks up where his ep of Rolling Stones / Beach Boys covers left off with a digital dispersion of "fun in the sun" rock mythologies. While there are no obviously discernable pop culture references, Fennesz builds a sound that really is quite summery from odd duets between disintegrating acoustic guitar strums and the coalescence of digital errata. Thus, this album has the feeling of the classic Beach Boys sound, but very little of that structure. These are NOT Beach Boys covers; but if he said they were, we'd have no basis to call him a liar. Regardless, Fennesz's "Endless Summer" is just fucking great.
Another new list, another fantastic new discovery from local boutique label Time Released Sound. This week, it comes by way of yet another hitherto unknown to us artist (we should really get TRS to do some A&R for aQ!) named Francesco Giannico, an Italian sound artist who conceived of this single 40 minute track as an installation, recording the entire route of one of the subway lines in Rome, using those recordings as the basis for this gorgeously serene sonic sprawl. While many of the recordings are left intact, field recordings in the background, others are transformed and re-contextualized, becoming as much a part of the surrounding sound, as the synths and guitars, the pianos and the violins, the piece structured in such a way that it almost sounds like each trip, from one station to the next, is in fact, the musical component, that music fading out and letting us hear the sound of the announcements, of the commuters shuffling from train to train, all the ambient sounds of each station, familiar to most everybody, before gradually disappearing, as the train leaves the station, transporting the listener once again into slow moving clouds of hazy, gauzy sound - at times, low slung, spidery fields of post rock guitar minimalism, at others dense droney, synthscapes, at others, melancholy string shimmer, and at others still, dreamlike fields of almost psychedelic sounding glimmer. In each iteration, the vibe is mesmerizing and hypnotic, the various pieces woven into a slow shifting whole, with some of those field recorded sounds becoming pulsing rhythms, or mysterious melodies, the whole thing a songsuite of sorts, a sonic travelogue, that instead of sounding like a ride on an Italian subway, sounds like something more ethereal and abstract, a journey into the ether, into the other, into the beyond. Fantastic!
And yeah, it's Time Released Sound, so you can bet the packaging is over the top. And as always, there are two versions, the first, an ULTRA limited deluxe version, limited to just 75 copies, which includes hand silkscreened square prints of photos from the actual subway where these sounds were recorded, each print on a different sort of paper, music sheets, vellum, ancient ledgers, all housed in a vintage, hand stamped 7" sleeve, from sixty year old vinyl binder (!), then each one is tied with string, to which is attached a used ticket from the Rome metro, again, from which all these sounds were sourced. Also inside are random ephemera an scraps of paper found on various trains and platforms during the recording process. There's also a less limited, more affordable version, that comes housed in a swank, full color digipak, and is limited to 150 copies!
Another new list, another fantastic new discovery from local boutique label Time Released Sound. This week, it comes by way of yet another hitherto unknown to us artist (we should really get TRS to do some A&R for aQ!) named Francesco Giannico, an Italian sound artist who conceived of this single 40 minute track as an installation, recording the entire route of one of the subway lines in Rome, using those recordings as the basis for this gorgeously serene sonic sprawl. While many of the recordings are left intact, field recordings in the background, others are transformed and re-contextualized, becoming as much a part of the surrounding sound, as the synths and guitars, the pianos and the violins, the piece structured in such a way that it almost sounds like each trip, from one station to the next, is in fact, the musical component, that music fading out and letting us hear the sound of the announcements, of the commuters shuffling from train to train, all the ambient sounds of each station, familiar to most everybody, before gradually disappearing, as the train leaves the station, transporting the listener once again into slow moving clouds of hazy, gauzy sound - at times, low slung, spidery fields of post rock guitar minimalism, at others dense droney, synthscapes, at others, melancholy string shimmer, and at others still, dreamlike fields of almost psychedelic sounding glimmer. In each iteration, the vibe is mesmerizing and hypnotic, the various pieces woven into a slow shifting whole, with some of those field recorded sounds becoming pulsing rhythms, or mysterious melodies, the whole thing a songsuite of sorts, a sonic travelogue, that instead of sounding like a ride on an Italian subway, sounds like something more ethereal and abstract, a journey into the ether, into the other, into the beyond. Fantastic!
And yeah, it's Time Released Sound, so you can bet the packaging is over the top. And as always, there are two versions, the first, an ULTRA limited deluxe version, limited to just 75 copies, which includes hand silkscreened square prints of photos from the actual subway where these sounds were recorded, each print on a different sort of paper, music sheets, vellum, ancient ledgers, all housed in a vintage, hand stamped 7" sleeve, from sixty year old vinyl binder (!), then each one is tied with string, to which is attached a used ticket from the Rome metro, again, from which all these sounds were sourced. Also inside are random ephemera an scraps of paper found on various trains and platforms during the recording process. There's also a less limited, more affordable version, that comes housed in a swank, full color digipak, and is limited to 150 copies!
After the four song Decline & Fall ep from earlier this year, legendary industrial metal duo Godflesh follow it up with their first full length in THIRTEEN YEARS, the first since 2001's Hymns, and like Decline & Fall, it's a total time machine trip, the band sounding pretty much as good as they did back in the day. All the elements are present, the robotic drum machine pummel, the crushing down tuned riffage, the thick rumbling bass, Justin Broadrick's throaty bellow. When we first heard about Godflesh's reformation and return, we were sort of expecting it to be more of a Godflesh lite, with some of Broadrick's other more poppy band Jesu finding its way into Godflesh's new sound. But that new sound is pretty much their old sound, and we're definitely not complaining. Other than the first couple Pitchshifter records, which were widely considered to be Godflesh ripoffs anyway, no other industrial metal band has managed to pull it off like these guys, creating epically tranced out mechanical metal mesmer, pounding, and churning, a bleakly psychedelic mechanoid doom, that at times had us thinking of modern, machine-making, one man doom band Author & Punisher, which makes sense since he no doubt owes pretty much his whole sound to Godflesh, but for folks late to the party, young 'uns who maybe missed out on Godflesh the first time around, and who have been digging stuff like A&P, this is the OG shit, or the OIM (original industrial metal?) shit.
And it's not just the sound, the songs too, long stretches of grinding riffage, give way to more spaced out psychedelic passages, cascades of minor key melody draped over stuttering drum machines, and undulating bass buzz, the vocals too, even occasionally slip into a more sort of monk-like chant before returning to that distinctive bark, the songs weirdly catchy, which is quite a feat for music like this, but for every atmospheric bit, every buried hook, every melodic moment, it's more than made up for by some seriously brutal metallic crush, flurries of pounding behemoth beats, and probably some of the most punishing, skull-caving, down-tuned distorto, industrial-doom riffage you've likely heard in a long, long time. Killer.
Piano and voice. That's what we encounter in the latest incantation from Liz Harris, once again recording as Grouper. Chillingly beautiful smears from dankly shoegazing guitars, loop-station electronics, mumbled vocals, and a near constant wash of stoned introspection were the common elements of those albums of hers that captured our imagination like Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and AIA: Dream Loss. She's eschewed pretty much all of the gauzy blur and the narcotic diffusion that runs through all of her previous albums; but the delicacy of these songs on Ruins and beguiling poetry of sadness makes this very much another fantastic Grouper album.
Harris wrote all of the material for Ruins during a residency in Portugal back in 2011. There, she made full use of an upright piano, recording these songs onto a four-track with occasional overdubs, just for an additional layer voice here and there in order to harmonize with herself. Without all of the fuzz and drone, Harris' lyrics enjoy a bit more clarity, though she has long been one to slur the syllables into a cooing gasp of pitch-perfect intoxication. Her songs arpeggiate on simple piano chords evolving the minor key repetition into secretive, plaintive lullabies, slowly tapped out to match the torpor of her voice. The album is starkly naked in the emotional fragility of these arrangements, but Harris is very much in control of the poetics calmly painting her songs in a sonic palette of rainy-day blues and greys. It's much closer to the under appreciated Mirroring collaboration that hopefully wasn't just a one-off with Tiny Vipers' Jesy Fortino. Yes, another gem from the wintery soul of Liz Harris.
Note: we're listing the Kranky cd and vinyl now, but we'll also soon have a handful of the special self-released vinyl edition direct from Liz, which includes a bonus cd of a thunderstorm field recording... if interested, please let us know now!
It's kind of a 'thing' now, heavy bands releasing an album that consists of just one long (loooooong) track. Well, actually the big year for it was way back in 1996, when Edge Of Sanity, Boris, Sabbat, and (most famously) Sleep all released one-long-song albums! But, more recently, we can cite single-song, full-album efforts from Corrupted, Pig Destroyer, Jesu, and Lesbian, among others. Then there's that obscure old aQ fave by Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra... and of course, Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick, if you wanna go waaaay back. Ok, so maybe not enough bands have done it that we could actually make it a theme for one of our in-between lists, but still, it's a thing. And now Inter Arma has done it too.
Richmond, VA's impressive Inter Arma have proved themselves an ambitious and capable "kitchen sink" metal band, hybridizing all sorts of extreme heaviness and postrock strategies, their usual compositions already pretty long and densely packed to begin with, so to discover that they'd come up with a 45 minute, 46 second long track/album called The Cavern is not exactly a surprise - but most definitely something we were excited to hear. And, yep, they pull it off, one massive majestic march-like song that doesn't end (for a long time). With some quiet and lots of loud, it incorporates raging Neur-Isis crush, bellowing vokills, mathy technical instrumental wig outs a la Don Caballero, proggy, droning chamber music ambience (like maybe something on Constellation), and even, at about a half-hour in, some heartfelt, country-flecked indie rock epic-ry with lap steel twang and clean, sincere vocals. Holy fucking wow. A lot of that we'd have expected from Inter Arma, but some of it came as a surprise - a good thing when it's a 45+ minute song you're dealing with. There's harmony guitar parts here to make you cry, also techie metal shred to spin your head; it can sound like True Widow one second, The Fucking Champs the next (or at the same time). The band brings in theremin, violin, extra synthesizers, and more, courtesy of a bunch of guest players; it's a BIG dang enterprise with room for it all, and they manage to keep kicking things up a notch every little while as the piece progresses. Granted, we'll need to listen to it a bunch more times to really begin to take it all in and understand (and critique) it as a whole, but that's some good attention-span exercise. Heck, if you can binge-watch an entire TV series any given weekend, you can spend 45 minutes getting into this 'song'. And certainly if you liked their last album, Sky Burial, you should be up for this. Another one for the pantheon.
The cliff notes version of Invisible Hands might read something like "spaghetti-western cow-punk from Cairo with one of dudes from the Sun City Girls." The dude in question is the curmudgeonly Alan Bishop (aka Alvarius B.) here working with four Egyptian musicians, two of whom had been in the Egyptian rock band Eskenderella. As we mentioned before in the previous review about Invisible Hands' first album, this is a remarkably sensible project for Alan Bishop, known for his confrontational fuck-you-in-eyeball attitude and discordant avant-folk splutter. Where the first album had a sand-blasted alt-rock prettiness about akin to Giant Sand and Calexico, Teslam finds Bishop pushing more of the insidious, diabolical aesthetics for which he is known. "Eyes In The Back Of Your Head" is a blackened, sardonic waltz with Bishop and Co. alternating between languid Morricone-esque melodies and harshly plucked Brechtian venom, all in the steampunk time of three. When Bishop and fellow Invisible Hands Aya Hemeda sing in tandem as on "Slaughterhouse" and "The Great Implosion", it's akin to the unkempt harmonies that Exene Cervenka and John Doe delivered in X.
Kleistwahr is the lesser known project of Gary Mundy, probably better known for his long running industrial/noise/psych project Ramleh, and probably even better known for his occasional membership in Skullflower. Kleistwahr began life with a couple early tape release, and has been active sporadically over the last few decades, this however, is in fact new music from Mundy, and is a sonic stunner, much like past missives, a massive sprawl of psychedelic power electronics and dense distorted industrial-drone atmospheres, blown out and harrowingly heavy, the first few seconds are misleading in a way, a warm hazy melodic swirl that had us thinking Mundy might be going soft, but fear not, soon that hushed shimmer is swallowed whole by a blizzard of gristled guitar, distorted samples, disembodied voices, grinding textures, a dizzying assemblage of noise drenched sound that like much of this stuff, to the casual listener, might just sound like noise. And let's not kid ourselves, noise it is, but Mundy is surprisingly deft at sculpting these sheets of furious guitarnoise into something strangely lovely. A roiling blackbuzz howl on the surface, but beneath, all manner of murky melodies, and fractured chordal drift, even the bellowed, echo drenched vocals contribute to transforming white/grey/pink/black noise into something more.
And it's not all speaker melting crush, this 39 minute songsuite, seven tracks fused into a single epic, moves through all sorts of sonic permutations, even returning to that opening shimmer, at about 11 minutes in, sounding like the Caretaker by way of Skullflower, a warm, undulating chordal thrum barraged by a cacophony of clatter and crunch. From there, the sound blossoms into prismatic flurries of crumbling distortion, before coalescing into a sort of burnished kosmische ur-drone, pulsing and pulsating, drifting atop a bed of gnarled buzzing blur, and pocked with strange rhythmic throbs, but again, it's all somehow prismatic and glistening and glimmering, even the final movement which finds everything slipping into keening sheets of high end and crooned distort-vox buried beneath, the sound is shimmery and mesmerizing, very reminiscent of the prettiest moments from Our Love Will Destroy The World, a bleary, smeared soft-noise that manages to be dense and completely crushing, while somehow washed out, ethereal and totally transcendent.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! In cool Broken Flag style packaging.
A beautiful reissue of spacey melancholic chanson from this Belgian chanteuse who notably won the Eurovision song contest in 1968 a year before this debut release. But what sets this apart from standard '60s Euro-pop are the electronic, almost avant-garde arrangements made mostly with an Ondes Martenot, a theremin-like electronic keyboard famously used in the Star Trek theme and championed at the time by French avant-classical composer Olivier Messaien. Fans of Stereolab and Broadcast as well as Linda Perhacs and Brigitte Fontaine will surely find lots to love here, and we would love this even more if the reissue retained the original cover which is more haunting and ethereal than the nineties /sixties space-age bachelor pad design featured here, but that's a very small complaint. Limited stock!
After The Dagger last list, our latest vintage-sounding (but utterly brand new) true, trad metal obsession comes in the form of the debut disc from Finland's Mausoleum Gate. You'd be forgiven for thinking this album came out years and years ago, like in 1985, 'cause it's rocking, twin guitar NWOBHM influenced stuff, with heavy nods to '70s Deep Purplish prog too, featuring lots of keyboard (Hammond organ, Mellotron), songs about Gypsy Queens, and better yet, Demon Droids - in fact our fave cut here, maybe favorite metal song in a while, is indeed "Demon Droid", how can you not love it for the title/concept alone? It's a kickass tune, too, and we also dig how the vocalist throws in some wordless "Aaah aaah aaah aaahs", nice touch. Speaking of the wailing, commanding vocalist, we're pretty sure he must have one or both hands permanently locked into making the "invisible oranges" gesture, or Dio-esque devil horns!
Cliches abound, perhaps, but they're delivered with panache. Like fellow Finns Lord Fist, Mausoleum Gate sure have got the spark, and conjure an entertaining, none too serious "evil" atmosphere, perfectly captured by the cover art. You can practically smell the brimstone. Also they ROCK. Moreover, you really don't often hear this sort of doomy/proggy/rocking combination (at its most doomyproggyrockingest on the nearly 12 minute closing epic, "Mausoleum Gate"), so it's a ton of fun for fans of the likes of Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Priest, early Savatage, old Heep, Dio (and Martin) era Sabbath, and other demon-pact class acts of yore.
A long, long time ago we reviewed this album, originally released on Up Records in 1996. Now at long last it's been reissued on vinyl, with two bonus tracks, and the review, written by our Andee, still applies, it's short and sweet and a definite thumbs up: One of my favorite records. A little Pixies, a little Violent Femmes, lyrics that make you want to cry, and a whiny cute singer boy with a lisp.
Unflaggingly familiar is The Best Day, the first solo record by Thurston Moore since the dissolution of Sonic Youth, if we and everyone else are not to consider Chelsea Light Moving a solo project of Moore's with a couple of likeminded avant-rock noiseniks. There's plenty of bad blood that Moore may need to overcome thanks to the refuse that spilled forth from the dissolution of his marriage with Kim Gordon; but it seems that via both Chelsea Light Moving and The Best Day, Moore is doing his a damn good job of overcoming all of that crap by making a couple of damn good records. It's been long known that the slipstream noise-pop jams that Moore wrote for Sonic Youth, with their Mack truck riffs balanced with avant-geek noodliness and craftsman-like ease, made for the strongest tunes in Sonic Youth's dense catalog. Even more so than the first solo 'pop' album for Moore, the languid Psychic Hearts from 1995, The Best Day recalls everything that we love about Sonic Youth. Those long-form post-pop passages of chiming guitars, his pleading vocal delivery that still has a youthful demeanor despite his elder statesman status, hypnotic unboringness of charmed motorik jangle, unconventional tunes providing occasionally strident overtones that are quelled with a beautifully turned chord change, and pretty much everything else you might love about a Sonic Youth song, well except for the obvious absence of Gordon and Lee Ranaldo. Moore did recruit the much under appreciated timekeeper Steve Shelley for drum duty and Deb Googe of My Bloody Valentine on bass. A jubilant record for sure, and one that is more than worthy of your attention!
We love Aidan Baker. That should be abundantly clear from a quick look at past reviews on the aQ list. The artist that can hold our attention, and can continue to push the boundaries of his or her sound, are few and far between, especially after 20, 30 or more releases. It helps in Aidan's case, that he has multiple outputs, Nadja for the heavy stuff, under his own name for the more abstract minimal stuff, as well as various other ensembles and collaborations. As much as we dig everything we've heard, our hearts belong to Nadja. Blending huge roiling waves of downtuned doom, and glistening blissful ambience, Nadja just might be the masters of this new wave of post-metal shoegaze blisscore or whatever you want to call it.
In addition to the steady stream of new releases, Baker has been picking older, long out of print classics, and not just re-issuing them, but also reworking them, after all, years later, given the opportunity, most folks might ant to make some changes to recordings they made years earlier. Frustrating for the true completists probably, but won't matter to most folks, as those cd-r's were limited enough that only a handful of folks actually got to hear them.
One of our favorite Nadja discs was always Bliss Torn From Emptiness, so we're super psyched to finally have it as a real cd, with better sound, and all new fancy artwork. We didn't play the two versions side by side, so we'd be hard pressed to point out any distinct differences, regardless, Bliss is a fucking massive, gorgeous, collection of dreamy Teutonic crush.
Unlike the more fluid washed out shimmer of later Nadja, Bliss finds the band lurching and pounding, almost industrial, with plenty of Godflesh going on. The drums, a staggering stuttering staccato, the guitars long streaks of blistering psych blur, gauzy clouds of whir and buzz, the whole song like some massive sonic beast, lumbering into the twilit night. The melody and mood intense and emotional, very cinematic, and very darkly dramatic.
As the record progresses (it's a three part suite), the rhythms smooth out a bit, slow down, lurch less and groove more, the atmospherics growing more shimmery and soft focus, with more stretches of tranquility, softly processed vocals, glimmering minimal drones, gauzy glitchery, while remaining really really heavy, the final part, after a looooong stretch of fuzzy warble and sun dappled drift, finishes off with a deafening supernova of sound, the guitars so white hot that they almost drown out the drums completely, a swirling chaotic soundscape, all end of the world psych blow out and bleary eyed solar eclipse shoegaze, a bit like playing ALL your M83 records at the same time and blasting them through loudspeakers mounted on satellites, showering the planet with brilliant blinding shards of glorious buzz.
Elsewhere this list (and last) you'll find the SUNNO))) + Scott Walker collaboration, while this album is the 2nd effort to see half of the SUNNO))) duo teamed up with Japanese psych shaman Keiji Haino. We're hoping that this somehow means that we'll soon see a Scott Walker + Keiji Haino team-up, too... There's not too many degrees of separation left, c'mon!
But, that's not what this review is about. It's about the sophomore outing from the in-and-of-itself awesome Nazoranai trio, featuring guitarist/vocalist Haino, bassist Stephen O'Malley of SUNNO))), and on percussion, the ubiquitous Oren Ambarchi - who plays with Haino in another trio also well, with Jim O'Rourke instead of O'Malley. O'boy, these guys do like each other for dance partners, recall also that recently Ambarchi and O'Malley got together with Randall Dunn, too...
Anyway, we super duper dug the 1st Nazoranai, as did a lot of you, it's gone out of print (too bad if you missed it) but this is a fine follow-up, again allowing (as if there was any choice) Keiji Haino's musical personality/aesthetic to take the fore: ultra intense dark psychedelic out-rock improv, made all the darker and heavier by the presence of O'Malley, as you can imagine.
As usual with anything Haino related, the track titles are long and cryptic, starting with "You Should Look Closely Those Shattered Spells Never Attaining Embodiment As Prayer They Are Born Here Again" (whew!) and the tracks are long, too (that one approaches 19 minutes). All four cuts here are fairly heavy and harrowing, featuring plenty of grinding droning guitars (abetted by some synth played by Haino too). Ambarchi's drums skitter and shake, Haino offers up the gut wrenched vocal lamentations like nobody else, and O'Malley keeps the bottom end solidly way, way down in the abyss. The rapport these three possess is evident, and emotive, whether whilst bringing the freeform freakout action to a boil, or when they lock into more structured passages - as on the album's final cut and title track, another 19-minute epic, that rides a lurching, repetitive rhythm reminding us of some of Haino's legendary band Fushitsusha's 'rockier' moments. Needless to say, recommended to all with fearless ears, poetic hearts and/or sorrowful souls.
MPEG Stream: "You Should Look Closely Those Shattered Spells Never Attaining Embodiment As Prayer They Are Born Here Again" [/audio/nazoraniyoushould.m3u]
Second transmission from this strange super group, headed up by Finders Keepers mastermind Andy Votel, who on the last NeoTantrik record, was accompanied by Sean Canty from Demdike Stare, electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, Swiss jazz legend Bruno Spoerri, and folk songstress Jane Weaver. We're getting the impression that the rest of the crew might not have made it along on this second voyage, it's a much more minimal affair, and way murkier, and moodier, unfurling as a kaleidoscopic cosmic drift, a sprawling psychedelic slow burn ambience, that sound like mysterious transmissions from beyond the outer reaches of the galaxy, sun dappled, but likely by some other, alien sun. Background of smoldering shimmer, gauzy, and hazy, overlaid with strange chittering electronics, that sound more like weird interference than proper rhythms, textures ebb and flow, pulses surface and recede, soft squalls of smeared noisiness wash over but soon drift away, ghostly long tones stretch out into lush, undulating layers, the sound manages to be equal parts hushed and intimate, sinister and psychedelic, cinematic and surreal. Buried percussion bobs on dreamlike expanses of softly distorted shimmer, before settling into a darkly rhythmic groove, woozy and dreamily druggy, a sort of soundtrack electronica, that at times sounds like it was plucked from some obscure seventies soundtrack, and at others, like some collaged landscape of ominous ambience, wreathed in reverb, peppered with little flurries of what sounds like xylophone, tolling bells, a combination of archival sounds, old tapes, and improvised performances, deftly woven into some a truly trippy slab of kosmische cinematic psych.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Yet another new label enters the increasingly crowded horror movie vinyl reissue field (alongside Death Waltz, Waxwork, No Static, etc.) although their first foray is an especially bold move, in two ways, the first, it's a 7", and not an lp, the second, it's not the creepy, incidental score, the Carpenter like synths or Hermann like strings, nope, it's the 'hit song', a cheesy eighties rocker called "Everybody But You", from the 1985 cult classic Night Train To Terror. Perhaps you recall that movie, a crazy cool, cheesy horror flick, in which God and Satan are on a train together, to discuss the fates of three unlucky (or potentially lucky) souls, a sort of Creepshow style anthology, featuring a crazed killer who hoards body parts of his victim, a death obsessed woman and a weird Russian roulette ritual, and a Holocaust survivor terrorized by the son of Satan. It's been a while since we've seen this (20 years at least), so we're not sure how the song here fits into the movie, but it's just what you'd expect from the token rock song from an eighties slasher flick, all wheedly guitar shred over pulsing new wave-y rock, a throbbing synth rhythm, cheesy lyrics, wild sorta funky saxophone solo, the best part is when the song fades out, and plays in the background beneath this exchange between the band (?) and a sinister voice that sounds a lot like the Tall Man from Phantasm:
"Hey George, I'm starving, how about some hamburgers and beer?"
"There's no food on this train."
"What kinda train is this?"
"Some call it the heavenly express. Others Satan's Cannonball! But we guarantee to deliver every passenger to his right destination."
"Like I really wish our bus hadn't broken down, you know?"
"No way! This train is cool!"
"From the top!!!!"
And then it's right back into it.
The flipside features a track from an entirely different film, called Gretta, at first we didn't get the connection, but then we discovered that Night Train To Terror was in fact, a sort of cash grab, created from chopping up three other films, and editing them into one, and one of those original films was in fact, the aforementioned Gretta, which was included as a bonus on the recent dvd issue of Night Train. That track is just tinkling music box, and parlor room piano, not so much creepy as wistful and melancholy, easy to imagine that music playing beneath the credits, lulling the viewer into a false sense of safety, before letting the hammer fall. Or machete. Or chainsaw. You'll just have to see the movie(s) to know for sure.
Swank packaging, full color front cover with scary Night Train cover art, the back with a still from the film, three new wavers rocking out (we're guessing) and the legend: A rock band gives their final performance on a hell bound trip into the outer reaches of horror! Obviously fans of Death Waltz and Waxwork and all the rest are gonna want this for sure.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Each one hand numbered.
Ah, the plight of the supergroup touring the world with fits of drunkenness, wanton groupies, the drudgery of long travel days, and of course a couple of good gigs between. Such is the fictional landscape mapped out by the dada-punk sound artists BJ Nilsen, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson & Helgi Thorsson (aka Stilluppsteypa), and Anla Courtis. Nilsen & Stillupsteypa have been working together for many many years now, alternating releases between Editions Mego and The Helen Scarsdale Agency, proving to be a rare commodity in the realm of avant-electronics that a collaborative project can develop beyond the one-night stand of hedonistic improvisation followed by bouts of slumped file-sharing. No, their wintery psychedelic collages of existential madness, sheering drone, VHS horror sound design, and Haflerian confusion have developed into one hell of an expressionist vocabulary. In bringing the tireless traveller and exemplary paratactilist in his own right Anla Coutis into the fold, the notion of these four embarking on some stupid-ass world tour akin to the Travelling Wilburys seemed apt. So, they ran with it in the same lysergic madness that Leif Elggren musters in his ludicrously brilliant artforms. The languid drones of the opening number "Aurora Australis" (named for the southern hemisphere polar-light phenomenon) suspends cryptic field recordings and nocturnal creaks upon corona-glow drones that ebb and flow with a psychological tension that Lynch & Splet mastered on the Eraserhead soundtrack, but here pocked with frightening gasps for air and violent jabs of noise. Side B's title "Fish Is God" seems like the punchline to a surrealist's knock knock joke; and if that may be an apt analogy, these four take that credo of absurdity rather seriously. Rolling out oceanic swells of rippling tone that rise up its tidal crescendo only to have its motion cut out with a dramatic tug to silence before an unsettling chunk of guttural vocalizations of an one-man orgy fitted to scabs of fragmented white noise. It's hard to really tell what Courtis may be up to in these procedures, as the album is very much a continuation of those amazing records that Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa have crafted over the years. Brilliant stuff.
Two years on from their Three And Seven debut, the two doomladies and one doomlord of the Occultation trio return from their negative plane (one of them is IN the band Negative Plane, actually) to offer up another spooky slab of their dimly-lit darkside rituals, playing again an obscure, ominous style of female-fronted, majestic dirge-doom, lashed to hectic bursts of prog-pounding.
The witchy, gothic vocals dip and soar, while flurries of organ notes send shivers up the spine... Shades of Paul Chain and other esoteric Italian doom, that sort of arcane atmosphere, as if performed by Ides Of Gemini or even Hammers Of Misfortune. Also, Sabbath's "Electric Funeral" seemingly is always echoing in these compositions (along with some melancholic organ runs out of "Hotel California"). 'Tis haunting and HEAVY and sometimes even quite lovely. Quite a cult-sounding hybrid of many things - '70s prog, '80s metal, goth, doom, even a hint of surf at one reverby-moment or two. Light some candles, play it loud, let it really sink in.
Recorded, appropriately, in Salem, Massachusetts, with producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, Beastmilk, many others).
Soaring, heartbreaking, really heavy and *gasp* REALLY CATCHY. The treacherous "difficult second album" from Arkansas' epic doom dealers Pallbearer is one of those records that you kind of wish every doom album sounded like, yet so few seem to pull it off. A heavy metal record absolutely unashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve and to embrace shimmering melodic bliss, Foundations Of Burden joins such classics as Solstice's New Dark Age, While Heaven Wept's Of Empires Forlorn and Warning's Watching From A Distance as a towering testament to how beautiful, cathartic, honest and human doom metal can really be. (Although we're guessing this is the only one on that list that debuted in the Billboard Top 100 - Wha???). All pretenses are stripped away. There's no concern here with sounding evil, occult or clinically suicidal. Instead this is gut wrenching, soul baring stuff. As a band Pallbearer have improved immensely since their already highly acclaimed debut Sorrow And Extinction, and no element more so than Brett Campbell's vocals. While before they took a bit of a backseat to the immense riffery, here the vocals are much more in focus, no longer buried in the sludge, sounding like some shadow cast hybrid of Ozzy, Trouble's Eric Wagner and Patrick Walker from the aforementioned, much missed and deeply mourned Warning/40 Watt Sun. The balance of weariness and drama he's able to convey really elevates Pallbearer's songs, imbuing them with a sort of classic theatrical tragedy. The production on the record (courtesy of Billy Anderson) is also perfectly enormous. There seems to be space everywhere, but also a real warmth and cohesion between the instruments - overwhelming, crushing, but strangely comforting. And as for that catchiness we mentioned earlier� These songs have some serious hooks, and for 10+ minute songs that move approximately apace of a huge and heavily sedated prehistoric snail, that's no small feat. But there's a real ear for songwriting and harmony here, that manages never to sacrifice the heaviness or punishing plod of the music. And while heaviness, heartbreak and humongous riffs are all well and good, the album's true highlight might come in the form of the penultimate "Ashes" - clocking in at only three minutes and consisting mostly of electric piano and vocals, it sounds like it would be more at home on a Mogwai record. It's easily the album's least heavy and most sparse moment, but it's also the most devastating and beautiful, and a perfect offset to the slow motion crushing gravity of the rest of the album. Doom album of the year contender. Metal album of the year contender. Let's just say album of the year contender and leave it at that.
FYI, the vinyl double lp version pretty much sold out already, but is being repressed...
With pretty much every previous record from these Michigan based, sixties worshipping, psych-surf garage rockers, it seemed like they were sonically moving back in time, their sound transforming from some worshipful Nuggets style retro-jangle, to a sound that ACTUALLY sounded like it was from back in the day. And while on this new one, much of that sound remains intact, for whatever reason, Weekends Time doesn't sound quite as much like some obscure sixties reissue. Instead, Peoples Temple now sound like a kick ass surfy, garage rock band, with plenty of Stooges-y swagger winding through their fuzzy, druggy jangle, a sound that wouldn't be at all out of place on the Castle Face label.
It might be the production, the sound this time around is much more lush and warm, a bit more modern, there's even some power poppiness in the mix, or maybe it's the songs, heck, they do a couple Ariel Pink covers, but even those two cover versions, if you didn't know any better, could be PT originals, or even some obscure sixties psych obscurities the band dug up. All the songs here though, like on the other records, are fantastically fuzzy, sunshiney and jangly, hook heavy, surfy and groovy, a little bit druggy, and plenty psychedelic, and at times fuzzy and folky (check out the super sixties, fuzz-folk closer!), and once again demonstrate that these guys are one of the best bands around channeling that far out sixties psych psound...
Most aQ customers by now are familiar with (and fanatic about) both Circle and Pharaoh Overlord. Kind of like Parliament-Funkadelic, the two Finnish groups are more-or-less the same band really, making more-or-less the same kind of music, the Circle-Pharaoh Overlord thang all about repetitive, "circular", psychedelic sounds. Sharing members and a mesmeric M.O., both Circle and Pharaoh Overlord are masters of spacey hypno-rock, often heavy, sometimes "metal", frequently quite WTF?, all of which is what you get here for sure, in both cases, on this pair of vinyl-only live records with similar, sharp cover graphics and the same dang title. Turns out these are the first two in what promises to be a series of "high quality, multi-channel 'live' recordings" under the 6000 km/h banner (a name meant to connote "speed, dynamism and goal-orientedness" according to the tongue-in-cheek corporate jargon employed by the label's press release).
Pharaoh Overlord's 6000 km/h release documents the band's performance at a festival in Turku, Finland, Summer 2014. There's four songs here (one straddling two sides), all of them exclusive "world premieres". Typically it's jazz groups who make live albums that are actually 'new albums' in that sense; rock bands doing live recordings historically tend towards greatest/latest hits collections - not that that's what you get with Circle's 6000 km/h, either, even though they're not (all) new songs on there� Anyway, there's something jazzy about this, and proggy and noisy too, PO sounding both epic and experimental on such cuts as the 16+ minute "No Ota Sitten Kolmekymppia" (that's the one that starts on one side and ends on the other). Groovy, dense, strange...
Oh, and we love that it admits on the sleeve that there are "a couple of overdubs... but who gives a **** anyway!"
Black vinyl is what we've got, limited to 350 copies only!
Just in case you were wondering, there IS a universe. A universe in which a band from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley released a privately-pressed lp in 1975 containing some crazy sci-fi jazz fusion prog rock jams. You may not have heard that record yet, but you live in that universe, too. That band was called Probe 10, and that lp was called There Is A Universe.
Imagine an underground hippie space rock band, with plenty of acid rock guitar and fuzz bass, teaming up with a groovy trumpet playing jazz cat who wandered in from some '60s nightclub. It's like Herb Alpert, smoking a lot of herb (ha).
Usually when obscure private press reissues are billed as long lost psych/fuzz gems, especially when there's any sort of 'jazz' component, you have to be skeptical. But, in this case, it's actually pretty cool artifact. Super over the top with chops, and with the fuzz. The band, obsessed with the likes of Return To Forever, get busy with hectic tempo changes and rollercoaster song structures, brassy attacks, and flute too, lots of flute. And there's a big drum solo on here as well, part C of the five part suite "Invasion Of The Malladroids". Just ridiculous, really. And when they aren't conjuring jazzy sci-fi space battles with their instruments, they get all new agey, check out the babbling brook and spiritual spoken word on "To Improvise A Dream", and then there's the very first song, the title track, the only one with singing on it (courtesy guest vocalist Susan Rudelich), shrill and sweet at the same time, misleadingly melodic and hippified though, setting you up for a surprise as the band kicks into the first of the Malladroid invasion cuts immediately afterwards, some of the fuzziest, freakiest prog fusion absurdity we've ever heard.
Nicely packaged in a miniature lp sleeve, the cd booklet featuring personal liner notes from two of the band members, Jim McGee and Barry "Buzz" Bachman. Also, there's five unreleased bonus tracks on the cd (a vinyl version of this reissue is forthcoming too, btw).
Newly available on vinyl again, the 1983 second album from Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson's experimental collective Psychic TV after the demise of Throbbing Gristle remains one of our very favorite aural documents from the entire post-TG catalog. It almost reads as a companion piece to TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats in that it invites unusually accessible chamber folk and pop tropes into their sound only to subversively twist them into something much more underlyingly sinister. Recorded using Zuccarelli Holophonic technology to create an atmospheric spatiality of near and faraway sounds (this is a headphones record if there ever was one!), the group was then able to record in some very unusual places like The Hellfire Club Caves (a notorious British site of aristocratic Satanic liturgies and hedonistic ritual) and take advantage of the systems 3D effect. The album's mixture of sweetness and light with ritual creep and foreboding is at once beautiful and deeply unsettling and on first listen it's hard to decipher what you are hearing and its mystery still beguiles 21 years later. We're invited in by the melancholy pastoral chamber pop of "The Orchids" with its vibraphone, guitar and oboe and Genesis' dueling vocals welcoming the morning light in innocent VU "Sunday Morning" fashion. But then the totality of the album swings from reverential to eldritchly mystical and from remotely animalistic to eerily brutal and back again mimicking the cycle of a day or a season as it moves between songs and strange far-off occultish musique concrete. There are lots of guest appearances both real and invoked. Monte Cazazza is heard reciting lyrics over the phone, and one can hear Jhonn Balance of Coil getting a tattoo. There is an angelic choirboy singing a Charles Manson song, and most notably on the track "White Nights", a sweet Christmas-y pop number is sung by Genesis (with doo-wop backing vocals, no less!) with lyrics creepily taken from Jim Jones final sermon at Jonestown. Throughout, bells intone, chants are muttered, a lot of acoustic exotic instruments are played with atmospheric intentions more than melodic ones. But the full power of the collective's brutal aural abilities culminates in the penultimate track - "In The Nursery" - which invokes fairytale symbolism and ritual and industrial soundscapes in a nightmarish blend of hellish terror. Essential listening!
Redrot is one of the psycho-electronic projects of midwestern malcontent Ryan Oppermann who graced us with the bleakly industrial music of Klinikal Skum in the recent past. Previous Redrot recordings have gaped with a death-industrial pall, thrumming with macabre noise and oppressive atmosphere. On Drowning amplifies those bad moods with much of the rhythmic structure that Oppermann delivered on the Klinikal Skum tapes. The tinny drum machines, power electronic styled throat clearing vocalizations, and deliberately atonal phrases of synth blorp may bring thoughs of Wolf Eyes. And it's certainly true that Oppermann pecks his notes with a similar ear to Maurizio Bianchi in setting down discomforting juxtapositions of seering synth tones. But the pace is far mor manic and propulsive, presenting a cybernetic brittleness to what Oppermann has crafted and lending much more of cracked mirror comparison to Youth Code's recapitulation of the more aggressive parts of Front 242 and Skinny Puppy from say 1985. On Drowning is quite a harrowing piece of retro-garde electronics and bad intentions. Super limited pressing, and it already appears to have been discontinued at the label. Restocks are unlikely, we're afraid.
Second blast of gloriously grungy noise rock from these recent aQ faves who seem to have taken the blatant Nirvana obsession of their Ideal Cities and tempered it a bit, the new ep way more polished and poppy. All of which was hinted at on that first one for sure, but here, the moments of noisy crunch and fuzzed out pound are more in service to some seriously kick ass songwriting and big BIG hooks. We're tempted to even say 'radio ready', cuz goddamn if this stuff wouldn't sound right at home alongside the usual modern rock suspects. That said, Roomrunner are still plenty scrappy, and the influence of classic grunge is all over their sound, but they've managed to finally make those influences less obvious, crafting a sound that ultimately sounds like Roomrunner, and not the bands they grew up on. Opener "Ms. DNA" takes up right from where Idea Cities left off, a pounding grunge groover, but quickly the sound blossoms into something way more melodic, with spidery guitar melodies, wound around equally spidery melodies, giving it a sort of psychedelic vibe, before the chorus swoops in, all anthemic with vocal harmonies galore, before lunging right back more grungy crunch. And the rest of the record plays out similarly, most of the songs starting with a very Nirvana-esque sonic seed, often transformed into some very familiar sounding grunt riffing, but then in EVERY case, the song becomes something else entirely, jangly, catchy, poppy, the vibe is still super nineties, and given no context at all, you'd likely think this was from back in the day, but somehow it sounds simultaneously nostalgic and fresh and exciting at the same time. A rare feat for sure. And while it's still noisy and weird enough for underground weirdos, it definitely sets these guys up for some mainstream love, which is not a bad thing at all.
Includes a download too!
A thoroughly anomymous proposition located somewhere in Los Angeles, Secam Kino mines the suitably obscure corners of industrial culture and synth-punk nihilism, picking over the choicer bits from such non-household names as Happiest Tapes On Earth, Trance Port Tapes, Cause & Effect, or any jackbooted label promoting dourly industrial electronics circa 1985. The templates for this sound were generated by the likes of SPK and TG, although many of the bands on those labels (and by extention, Secam Kino) have dropped any overtones to a rock/pop structure. No lyrics, no melodies. Just rhythm, noise, disease, and abjection. The tracks can roar with the fluttering wow of varispeed tapedecks lurching toward oblivion with densely packed tricklings from subterranean catacombs, and others lace simple drum-machine through cable-buzzed dischord, horror-score step sequences, and found tape dialogue of a psychosexual nature. The whole thing has the feel of the paranoiac tension of a nuclear command outpost devoid of inter-personnel communication and fraught with military prescribed amphetamines and sleepless delirium. While it sounds very little like Thought Broadcast, Secam Kino taps into a similar fetishization of a very particular sound long since lost to the annals of history. Super limited pressing with silkscreened covers and spray painted cassette shells, as with all of the Chondritic Sound tapes.
Look out, it's another ugly onslaught from this hardcore Midwestern pigfuck punksludge wrecking machine, who oddly enough record for our pal Jussi from Circle's Ektro/Full Contact label, though they sound more like they belong on AmRep back in the day! From St. Louis, but far from saintly, Shaved Women (nice name, guys) bring the noise, the chaos, the feedback, the bashing drums, the barking vocal gargle, the all-around bad attitude. If you dig bands like Pissed Jeans, Rusted Shut and Cuntz, then you will be perfectly happy to bang heads and break bottles to this record too.
Black vinyl, limited to 350 copies. Includes 24" x 24" two-sided poster insert.
PS we still have their earlier, self-titled Ektro cd release in stock as well if you missed it, which includes a Die Kreuzen cover...
SklavenTanz are a Korean duo who craft site specific soundworks and performances, rooted in an exploration of what lies beneath their sprawling city, and the various unheard sounds that lurk just below the hubbub of daily life, in this case, they broke into an old abandoned rainwater pumping station, and used the space's natural acoustics and incredible reverb, to weave a gorgeous, and hauntingly bleak soundscape of industrial sonic ruin, skeletal rhythms, mysterious pipe fights, and hushed industrial mesmer. At its core lies the natural sounds of the space, dripping water, distant rumbles, the space resonating along with the city around it, but then SklavenTanz begin to create incidents, interacting with the space, rubbing wood on concrete, stomping their feet, striking metal railings, there also seem to be some sort of actual instruments, as subtle melodies surface throughout, and drift forlornly in austere expanses of barely there shimmer, some of the moments are downright beautiful, serene and tranquil, meditative and mysterious, while others explode into acts of sonic violence, pounding metal on metal, echo drenched howls, primitive musical rituals, howling and feral, urgent and angry - but those moments are few and far between, with the bulk of the record spent in a dreamy subterranean drift, monk-like chants, extended chordal drones, intercepted shortwave broadcasts, all wreathed in a patina of disuse and decay. However, the last ten minutes, shrugs off much of that sonic ruin, and letting the warm melodic thrum underpinning the action move to the fore, softly pulsing and undulating, rife with rich overtones, finally transforming into a strangely lovely, sun dappled ur-drone, as if emerging from the dank dark and into the light, all the while, in the background, the duo continue to mine mysterious sounds from the space, creating a strange background framework, over which is laid this gorgeously serene and mesmeric coda.
Comes in a full color digipak, with a printed poster/insert with photos and liner notes.
Fell in love with this band over 20 years ago!! Slant 6 were an all-girl indie-punk trio from DC, who made two albums for Dischord back in the early nineties. Soda Pop*Rip Off was their first, and arguably best (though Inzombia was good too, hopefully Dischord will soon be reissuing it as well). You might have noticed we mentioned Slant 6 in one of our Record Of The Week reviews last list, Rips by Ex Hex. Ex Hex being the new band of Mary Timony of Helium/Wild Flag - who long ago, before Helium, was in a band called Autoclave with Christina Billotte. Christina then went on to front Slant 6, and later, Quix*o*tic (with her sister Mira, later of White Magic), as well as the Casual Dots. We detected a hint of Slant 6 in Ex Hex's garagey pop, for sure, and as it turns out Ex Hex has even covered Slant 6's "What Kind Of Monster Are You?", so it's such good timing that this album, originally released in 1994, has just been reissued on (red) vinyl - which now also includes a download.
It's an obvious choice for Record Of The Week, when a great old fave like this happens to get the vinyl reissue treatment (or even, sometimes, if we just find a cache of original copies, like that Treepeople we made a Record Of The Week recently). After all, there's got to be lots of you out there who missed out the first time, right? So we're super happy to have this to write about this week, and fall in love with all over again. And if you liked the Ex Hex, you gotta hear this, Slant 6 still an inspiration all these years later, an exemplar of youthful, girls-that-rock energy and girls-that-take-no-shit attitude. Super catchy, super cool, more fun than Sleater-Kinney (who came along a little later), less didactic than some of their Riot Grrrl contemporaries such as Bikini Kill, just a killer band fervently kicking out the pop-punky, new wavy blasts, and often having something serious to say while they do it.
All 16 tracks here are great, some dark and angry, some moody and melodic; usually pretty tightly wound, topped off with Christina's excellent, distinctive vocals and slashing guitar. The trio also included Myra Power on bass and backing vox, and Marge Marshall on drums. We note that Marshall sports a Boredoms sticker on her kit in the back cover photo - and also plays trumpet, a la Yoshimi, on one odd instrumental jazz-march song here. Part DC hardcore, part surfy garage, part art-femme-punk, so very rollicking and choppy and hooky and right on.
We remember being so excited seeing them live back in day, and this spinning this record still gives us a thrill. Check it out!
Note: lp lacks the 3 tracks from the "What Kind Of Monster..." 7" included on the cd edition, but the mp3 download does have 'em.
We listed this last week on our all-vinyl in-betweener. Been selling fast, but we do still have a few left, so here's probably your last chance if you haven't already pulled the trigger...
The very unexpected return of stoner doom heroes Sleep, their first new music in more than a decade. It's a single side long sprawl, originally released as part of the Adult Swim monthly series of digital downloads, now available as a super limited 12", and while they last, we have the even MORE limited green vinyl version, housed in a plain brown sleeve, and sporting a bad ass spaceman etching on the B side!
And as much as it can be, "The Clarity" is vintage/classic Sleep, starting out with a weird, almost electronic pulse, that soon supernova's into crushing, slithery, swaggery, stoner doom bliss, a massive main riff, the drums appropriately caveman crushing, the vocals the strangest part, seemingly beholden to post Sleep vehicle OM, sort of sung/spoken, doused in echo/reverb, but really, it's not all that different that the druggily chanted vox of the old days, and it all bleed and oozes into a perfect slab of druggy, downtuned heaviness, with plenty of tempo shifts, long stretches of doomy lumber, some seriously Sabbathy leads, the sort of head nodding crush few do better than these guys, the track bookended by a tranced out, spacey outro, where the drums gradually drop out, leaving just arcing streaks of guitar buzz, and droned out fragmented riffs, all tangled up into a mesmeric, pulsing, doom-buzz, minimal-drone coda that ends way too soon. Here's hoping this means there's a full length imminent...
As mentioned above, it's a limited edition green vinyl version, with etched art on the B side, brown cardstock sleeves, and no info except the label on the A side with the logo, the song title, minimal credits, and what could be Sleep's mantra or motto: "Praise Iommi"...
If you go back and look at our old reviews of past records from these Canadian power pop masters, you'll see that we often talk about how we didn't like the record at all, and it wasn't until way later that those records revealed themselves, and blossomed into eventual all time favorites. Which when you think about it is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. By the time a new Sloan record has in fact become our new favorite, we play it to death, listening to the songs over and over and over, obsessively listening, so when the next one drops, it's inevitable that the whole process begins again. There must be some musical method to their madness, but somehow, so far, not a single Sloan record has failed to find its way into our Sloan pantheon.
So with this new one, we're again faced with the same dilemma, even more so in that we just went to see them live, and of course they played tons of new songs that we weren't familiar with yet, and had still not become the pop classics we know they eventually will. But somehow the new songs mixed with the old, helped a lot in the transition to the new record, even though we're guessing it wouldn't have taken that long anyway for it to grow on us. And it is, more and more with each listen.
One of the interesting things about Sloan has always been that each member writes songs, but unlike other bands, those members sing their own songs, so if you see them live, they often switch instruments, trade off vocals, and that method is spotlighted on Commonwealth, but separating the record into movements, each a different playing card suit, representing one of the four main members, Chris is the Heart, Jay is the Diamond, Patrick is the Club and Andrew is the Spade, with each member getting a whole side of one of the lps (less obviously delineated on the cd obviously).
We generally tend to like Chris's songs the best anyway, and on Commonwealth, he remains our favorite. In fact, "Carried Away", the first track from Chris's 'songsuite' is probably the best song here, and the most like a potential Sloan 'classic', with one of those crazy choruses that sticks like glue, and you'll find lodged in your head for ages. "So Far So Good" is impossibly Beatles-esque, channeling classic rock, through Sloan's power pop prism, then there's "Misty's Beside Herself" which is extremely sonically similar to the aforementioned "Carried Away", so much so that for the first few seconds we though it was some sort of redux, but it quickly establishes itself as yet another potential Sloan Chris classic.
The record begins though with Jay's songs, and they're great too, but other than those Chris songs, much of the record sounds more subdued, more moody and brooding, but Jay's "You've Got A Lot On Your Mind" might be the best of his bunch, certainly the most immediately catchy. Patrick stars off his batch with the fuzzed out almost metallic sounding groover "13 (Under A Bad Sign)" which sounds like it could have been plucked right off of One Chord To Another (one of our favorite Sloan records). "Take It Easy" is another serious rocker, with more fuzzed out guitar crunch and a big hooky chorus.
Probably the track/songsuite here, and the biggest surprise is Andrew's side, which is a single sprawling 18 minute epic, beginning with barking dogs, atonal piano and echoey percussion, before gradually coalescing into some brooding, slow build popsmithery, which throughout remains in continual transformation. You could argue, that unlike the other guys, he just crammed a bunch of his songs together into one, which he did, sort of, but there's definitely a sonic thread that runs throughout, with melodies and lyrics and themes being revisited and subtly tweaked, it's like Sloan's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" and it's definitely a doozy.
And as always, while our heart will forever belong to Sloan records like Twice Removed, One Chord To Another or Smeared, check back with us in a few weeks, and Commonwealth could very well be our new favorite. For now!
We have just four (4) copies left of this recent limited edition Tapeworm label release, so here's their description: "Recorded on November 1, 2013 as part of Bergen Kirkeautunnale, Norway. Featuring BJNilsen and John Beaumont's "Black Death," a new project using voice (tenor) and electronics; Charles Matthews' repertoire includes performances of organ pieces by Arvo Part, Giacinto Scelsi and Johann Sebastian Bach; Marcus Davidson's "Ananta" is released for the first time, and Spire regulars The Eternal Chord and The Spire Ensemble also perform. Spire is an organ-based live project curated by Touch's Mike Harding and organist Charles Matthews, and is celebrating ten years of activity."
The return of prodigal sons Strawberry Smog, a band of bay area artists and musical friends (featuring former members of Pale Hoarse and Touched By A Janitor) some of whom have been roaming around the East coast since we last heard from the band when they dropped off their limited tape and cd combo debut before skipping town a year ago. Now they got a super packed cd of two full length albums released together of infectious sun-dappled jangle rock and psych-tinged folk. The sound is less laid-back, and more ambitiously arranged and recorded. They still wear the sixties / seventies west coast folk-rock banner very proudly, sounding somewhere between Kaleidoscope (US) and West Coast Experimental Art Band with just a tinge of Britishness in the studio experimentation. The momentum is upbeat, but varied enough that songs maneuver from poppy rock jams to psych folk to deep roots and trad tropes quite effortlessly. Recommended for fans of Woods, The Fresh and Onlys, Cool Ghouls and any of the bands mentioned above!
Steve Austin and his revolving door cast of psychologically damaged noise-mongers returns for album number 10 (!) and it's another twisted slab of warped dirges, tortured wails, off kilter guitar stabs and nauseating whispered menace. Animal Mother once again features an all new line up (save for founder and head torture artist Steve Austin of course), this time enlisting members of Enabler, Trap Them and Sidra into his straight jacket entourage, and they're more than able to manifest Austin's slanted noise-rock meets doom meets hardcore vision into this quivering unprepared shambling mass we refer to as "reality". From its most somber acoustic passages through to its most frenzied blastbeats, it's an unnerving and heavy affair (and also the perfect compliment to new Wizard Rifle record we've reviewed elsewhere on this list!).
This South American blackened dark-prog doom-noise psychedelia collective holds the distinction of having been the very first, and to this day only, CASSETTE Record Of The Week. And at the time, we were so blown away, we really had no choice, everything about Un Festin Sagital pushed all of our (and presumably your) buttons, occult prog metal meets creepy black ambient soundscapery, haunting minimal moodiness meets, propulsive post punk crush, howling metallic heft meets gently psychedelic folkiness, all wound up into one dizzying tangle of heady heaviness. Since then, we've dug deeper into the bands catalog, with much help from local label Black Horizons, who brings us yet another amazing collection of the group's tripped out sound, this one not that far removed from the others, if anything more of an extension, the sound sprawling and expansive, the opener especially, the group slipping into something more space rocky and dreamy, sounding almost like something you might expect to hear on Cardinal Fuzz, loping sinewy basslines, clouds of cymbal shimmer, fluttering flutes, minimal percussion, almost like a jazzier, soundtrackier Spacemen 3, hazy and hypnotic, before the sound builds to some seriously lysergic heavy psych, billowing clouds of FX drenched melodies, the drums more driving, eventually swathed in some seriously caustic noise guitar crunch. Holy shit, fans of the Heads and Carlton Melton and White Hills and all the rest, you might just want to check out these weirdos too.
Cuz goddamn if the rest of the record doesn't fall in line, the second track two, laying down a dark, motorik groove, wreathed in sonic swirls, and with a huge krautrock vibe, again, following that tried and true space rock sonic template, the sound eventually building to a wild freak out, but instead of straight up shred, it's all wild scrabbly tangles, and distorted chugs, roiling piano rumbles, scalding arcs of white noise psych swirl, seriously epic space/psych rock for sure. But these guys are NOT space rockers, they just happen to do it better than most. So there's plenty of other mysterious moodiness happening. The sound devolving into some churning slo-mo-doom, still folk flecked, a cinematic sprawl that lurches from noisy crashing pummel, to hushed whispery drift, the whole second half sounding like the score from some lost Italian seventies giallo. From there on out, the band whip out some mathy stop start post punk angularity, more distortion drenched spaciness, some groovy organ soaked fusiony prog-jazz, again pocked with bursts of wild distorted noise rock crunch, until finally, things finish off with the epic 21 minute title track, the unfurls like the bastard child of all those space rock bands we love, the usual zoner drift, is transformed into what sounds like 3 or 4 bands playing at once, a frenzied cacophony, somehow held together but a buried rhythm section, the end result a sort of kraut-noise, that about halfway through settles into one final stretch of noisy, motorik kraut-prog mesmer, psychedelic and hypnotic, and really fucking great.
As with all the Black Horizons tapes, super fancy packaging, this time an 8 panel J-card, silver metallic ink on green matte paper, inside a folded up mini-poster/insert, and as always, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.
