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.
Last list we reviewed a dvd from a 'group' called Author & Punisher, a one man industrial doom band, whose sole member, Tristan Shone, designed and fabricated an incredible array of massive sound generators: a 300 pound spinning metal disc, a huge hydraulic handled chain driven (and seriously physical) drum machine, a motorized handled bass generator, a headgear with a multi mic'd mask, to transform vocals into different sounds and rhythms... We were mesmerized by the footage, the sound was amazing, heavy and crushing, totally intense, but watching this guy, physically create and trigger the sounds, is what sealed the deal, an brutal and exhausting 'performance', a sweat soaked, instrumental work out, way more interesting than the legion of boring floorcore laptoppers and effects jockeys. That said, most of us tend to not re-watch videos, whereas records we'll spin over and over again. So we figured it would definitely be worthwhile to track down a proper record from A&P, and here it is.
The title says it all, Drone Machines, not to mention the front cover image of A&P maestro Shone, hunched over the huge spinning metal disc. So if you picked up the dvd, you know what sort of crushing sonic punishment you're in for, and if you missed out on that dvd completely somehow, then this is your chance to get introduced to A&P's churning, chugging, pummeling low end industrial doom crush.
Purely sonically, these sounds could have been played by a band, or created on a computer, but just realizing that it's one guy, and his army of sound generators, definitely adds something to the listening experience. Plus there's also plenty of weird sonic manipulation that could NOT be played by a band, thick bass tones slow down like someone pressing their finger down on a record while it's playing, that would be that massive disc, the booming percussion, involves a slamming of the huge chain driven hydraulic handle, hearing this, picturing that, makes it sound that much heavier, but screw it, taken on music alone, the sound of Drone Machines is classic post industrial metal crunch, but twisted and a little warped, a more robotic and machine-like Godflesh maybe, the tone and timbre definitely owes much to Broadrick's industrial beast. But then the record will offer up some weird buzzing almost synthy sounding bass, and weird high end tangles, strange haunting melodies swirling around, a totally tripped out psychedelic swirl, and we're in some far out sonic sci-fi universe, before it gives way to another stretch of lurching lumbering Teutonic pound. The vocals, when there are vocals, are gruff and howled, again harkening back to Broadrick, and add some serious menace to the already sonically menacing proceedings.
The best parts for us are the parts where the sound sources become obvious, or at least where you can tell something weird and special is going on, the swooping low end, constantly changing pitch, the various sounds becoming clipped or cut off, the grinding rumbling low end speeding up then slowing down, it makes the whole experience that much more warped and tripped out and psychedelic. The music becomes more than a chunk of industrial metal, it becomes a heaving metallic monster MADE from industrial metal, the various gears and servos emitting strange buzzes and whirrs, its thunderous footsteps the booming beat, the speaker rattling low end it's guttural growl, and the howling vox, the man that commands this beast, and instructs it to do his bidding, a futuristic steampunk, post industrial robotic doom metal dirge, that we just can't get enough of!
While it was obviously too much to hope for that the new Dean Blunt record could actually live up to its tantalizingly grim title, and contain ACTUAL Black Metal, it does end up being a sonic surprise anyway. Right from the get go, with the opening track a looped sunshine pop concoction of swirling strings, jangle pop guitars, and way-up-in-the-mix deadpan vocals, drawled and laid back, it's not ENTIRELY removed from DB's previous full length, the heartbreak comedown album The Redeemer, but things here get stripped down even further, and become further removed from Blunt's previous project Hype Williams. Black Metal is a collection of ultra personal downer pop, looped gloominess, a sort of fractured slowcore, the bulk of the record following the sonic template set by that first track, a series of looped pop jams, all swirling strings, jangle pop guitars, deadpan laid back vocals, Blunt's vocals almost comical in their awkward fit, which might rankle some listeners, but it's really what gives Black Metal its intimate, home brewed vibe, and if Blunt's vocals seems a bit woozy and warble, prepare yourself for the yowling, atonal female vox (a la Kim Gordon), courtesy of Joanne Robertson, which are even more strange and cold and more often than not charmingly off key. Robertson surfaces throughout Black Metal, occasionally lacing the proceedings with haunting guitar figures, but more often countering Blunt's wasted vocals with her own hazy narcoleptic call and response croon.
Highlights include "100", which sans vocals could be Galaxie 500, or some other similarly minded jangle pop outfit, but then Robertson and Blunt join the proceedings, and the song is transformed into something more off kilter, and home brewed sounding, still hauntingly intimate, but with a warped DIY vibe, Robertson's vocals in particular reminding us of early 4-track twee pop, but here set amidst a landscape much more lush and layered. There's the sprawling 13 minute epic "Forever", all stumbling, stuttery programed rhythms, over wheezing shimmers and delicate piano, Robertson crooning forlornly, before the sound starts to get a little bit dubby, with echoes and strange sound effects, only to eventually be joined by some (purposefully?) cheesy sax. Which is followed by the mesmerizingly creepy "X", all spidery guitars draped over softly billowing chordal thrum, a gauzy raga like drone, haunting and hypnotic, which unexpectedly blossoms into some woozy, warbly lo-fi electro, and again more of Robertson's endearingly off-key vocals, all driven by what sound like the hiss of a life support machine (!).
The rest of the record is populated by fantastic little electro-dream pop fragments, that again, sans vocals are alternatingly sweetly psychedelic or charmingly experimental, whether it's the cascading shoegaze shimmer of "Heavy", or the spare Doug Blunt styled (no relation? this song has us wondering!) skeletal funk groovery of the misleadingly titled "Punk", which is also laced with soft undulating swirls of faux strings, and some cool Appalachian guitars, the distorted electronic tangle of the also misleadingly titled "Country", which sounds like it could have come out on the Pan label, or the dizzyingly looped murk-pop ballad, again rife with "Careless Whisper" style sax, or even the synth heavy closer that sounds like Blunt and Robertson are channeling Angelo Badalamenti, the whole thing collapsing into some twisted synth dirge, driven by stumbling programmed beats, and Blunt sounding almost like SpaceApe (R.I.P.), a gorgeously bleak electro-jazz, gloom pop dirge that unwinds like the score to some lost Lynchian art film.
Fantastic stuff. And perhaps appropriately, minimally and confusionally (and handsomely) packaged in all black with practically no information, other than the track titles.
Philip Best (Whitehouse, Ramleh, Skullflower) along with legendary noisemaker/producer Russell Haswell and the previously unknown to us Sarah Froelich, an American artist deliver this modern slab of abject, power electronics synth-noise. We originally figured this for an archival reissue, some lost gem from the Shock Records / Broken Flag axis, but it is in fact a brand new record, although sonically, it's not that far removed from CE's early releases, still obviously beholden to that whole Shock / Broken Flag sound/scene. The whole program is only about 20 minutes long, a double lp mastered specifically for vinyl, and to spin at 45rpm, the cd separately mastered for digital, but that's more than enough, CE's nihilistic onslaught directly descended from Bet's tenure in Whitehouse, feral and frenzied, caustic and confrontational. The music itself almost lovely at times, minimal synthscapes, blurts of gristly squelch, spread out into weirdly dynamic pulses, not so lovely at others, lurching from undulating walls of grumblingly distorted synth, to minimal cold wave electronica, to full on grinding, speaker shredding synthnoise. All of which is essentially just a backdrop for Best's venomous vocalizations, some seriously vitriolic spoken word, that again, fans of Whitehouse will definitely dig, on the more minimal tracks, Best's vocals are WAY up in the mix, and are harrowing and sort of terrifying, but as the record progresses, those vocals are subsumed into the chaotic, feedback drenched electronic squalls, and while we might not say it becomes more 'listenable', it does transform into something more musical, Best's voice, just another part of CE's harsh, electronic industrial puzzle.
Pressed on heavy 180 gram black vinyl. Housed in a glossy gatefold sleeve. First 500 copies include a cd version of the record, differently mastered than the vinyl.
Full length number six from Dirty Beaches, aka Alex Zhang, whose from Taiwan but now calls Canada home. And like other recent DB outings, the sound of Stateless is far removed from the avant RnB murk of some past records, and more closely aligned with his more moody cinematic soundscaping, especially his gorgeous Water Park soundtrack. Stateless is similarly somber and dreamlike, four long songs, all instrumental (or mostly instrumental), unfurling a soundworld of pulsing guitarscapes, buried vocals (if those are vocals) stretched out and blurred into hazy droniness, a woozy, psychedelic thrum, that's meditative and washed out, and throbs mesmerically, almost like a more abstract take on Riley or Reich, but also wreathed in clouds of hushed drones and muted buzz. The record blossoms into lush Pop Ambient like billows, waves of chordal thrum, sun dappled and dreamy, a sort of ethereal kosmische, rife with subtle overtones, slow shifting patterns in a field of near static shimmer, that by track three, have grown even more lush and oceanic, a soaring prismatic sonic sprawl, majestic and epic, before finally settling down into a smoldering, subdued, minimal drone-folk drift, all wavery strings, and mournful melodies, a lonesome campfire threnody, but maybe more in the style of Stars Of The Lid, a glimmering sky full of muted moody streaks, haunting and melancholic, a brooding, achingly poignant slowcore ballad, that gets a little darkly jazzy right at the end, with horns subtly adding more layers to the slowly fading soundscape, evoking lonely rainswept streets, flickering streetlights, a late night in a lost city, as that city slowly disappears into the shadows, darkly and delicately dreamy, wreathed in an ethereal haze, like a faded sonic memory.
San Francisco's The Mallard called it quits recently; they being something of a weirdo outlier of drone-rock + fuzz-pop on the beloved Castle Face label. That said, they were long one of our personal favorites on Castle Face, given their charmingly stoned take on The Pin Group or Bailter Space, or hell even Stereolab for that matter. Thankfully, this was not the end of the creative spirit for those who left the band. The Mallard's frontwoman Greer McGettrick has re-christened herself Eline Cout, delivering her first set of recordings in a micro-edition slab of vinyl on Pretty Penny Records. While there are hints of The Mallard's lo-fi dreamy droniness are found throughout the Eline Cout tracks, this is starkly mechanical album of analog synth crunch, noise-pulse rhythms, and murky industrial strategies circa 1982. McGettrick quips on the back of the record that this is "to be listened to loudly in one room, while working on a monotonous task in another." Thirteen untitled tracks of quasi-instrumental tracks for chiming monotone guitars, bass-throb, primitive synths, and drums with strange / strangled tape-splice interjections of stolen voices, found sounds, and other utterances that may be confused as lyrics. While there is a certain adherence to structure, McGettrick is stripping away all of the melody from what she brought to The Mallard, engaged in a similar punk deconstructionist adventure that Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert began in their Dome recordings. Match that with the squalid noise-junk dourness of Maria Zerfall (seriously, look her up!) and the tumbled-rock percussion of Mars, and there's something close to Eline Cout.
Super limited pressing of 100 copies with each album sporting a unique woodcut print of a 10x10 inch square grid, with one square taken away during each pass through the printing press, amounting to different grid configuration cover art for each piece of vinyl. And, each record includes the wooden square removed for the printing of that particular cover, in a little baggie. We've only got a handful of these! A very cool record all around!
Babyfaced Danish dreamboats Iceage return for album number three, and we're happy to report that amidst all of the hype and hyperbole surrounding these dudes that this here is a seriously great record in its own right, not to mention one that's not content to simply sow the same seeds as their records past, but instead marks another leap forward for these Scandinavian scoundrels. Plowing Through The Fields Of Love immediately marks a more dramatic sound for this band. There's a heavier reliance on piano for a start, and there's a sort of looming specter of humid gothic Americana permeating the swaggering barroom (post)punk. Elias Ronnenfelt's off key caterwauling moans seep over the songs like drunken sermons from a derelict pulpit. Plaintive piano stabs drift over clattering stumbling drumming. Slinking serpentine rockabilly rhythms fall in and out of time like some dizzy drunkard's long walk home from the bar. But this record knows how to brood just as much as it knows how to lurch, and amidst the militaristic drum marches, stuttering guitars and clanking dilapidated saloon piano there are moments of gorgeous whiskey-soaked balladeering complete with soaring violins, stretched to their breaking point by stale dry bows. It's a sound that owes a a lot to Tender Prey-era Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to be sure, but would also probably equally appeal to mourners of dearly departed local AQ faves Pleasure Forever. Fine company to be in for sure, and Iceage takes their place amongst these fellow squalid lovable lowlifes with the confidence of a man with an empty bourbon bottle, a three day old seersucker suit and not a thing to lose. Highly recommended!
An entirely new (and entirely grim) prospect to us here at aQ HQ, Mysterium Coniunctionis brings together two hitherto unheard of corpse-painted practitioners of the dark arts: Italy's Krowos and France's Malepeste, both of whom thrive in the murkiest depths of mid tempo depressive raw black metal. The three Krowos tracks ply almost exclusively in a shuffling Burzumic plod (with the occasional daliance into a Transilvanian Hunger-esque blast) - a dreadful and inevitable suicide trance - the vocals anguished and shrill, the guitar work simple, patient, repetitive and hypnotic. The sound is muddy and lightless (as it should be), a slow motion abyssian slog into nothingness. Malepeste's contribution are no more uplifting, peppering their marching funereal thud with some deep droning Attila Csihar-esque vocals. Musically, they mine a similar field as Krowos, their brand of black metal slow, simple and bleak, but accented by an off kilter looseness that adds a certain sickening delirium to the proceedings. Those interested in black metal's darkest, most hopeless canals need look no further than this staggering, bleeding husk of a split.
The second installment in a proposed trilogy of 12"s from one of our favorite weirdo electronic outfits, UK duo Necro Deathmort, who besides having a grim and brootal, almost metallic sounding moniker, kick up a sound that's seriously warped, an atmospheric, blackened electronica, with the early records sounding a bit like SUNNO))) meets Squarepusher, the sound seems to be delving deeper and deeper into texture and nuance, beat driven moodiness, and almost cinematic sounding, tripped out psychedelic dub.
Still plenty ominous and sinister, EP2 opens with "Sundive", a droned out, industrial sprawl, that sounds more like the minimal techno murk of Silent Servant crossed with the grim-goth rhythms of Vatican Shadow, the pulsing echo drenched beat draped over a thick backdrop of ominous, rumbling thrum. "Mirus" begins life as a hushed swirl of low end pulsations, and gauzy synthesizer squelch, but before too long, the song explodes into some full on metal, a lumbering droney doom, thick down tuned riffage, minimal metallic drum pound, some serious metalgaze style hypno-dirgery, but the whole thing is wreathed in thick swirls of synth shimmer, and more droniness, the vibe almost like John Carpenter by way of Godspeed by way of Neurosis or Nadja. "Channel Fever" lays down a framework of gated beats woven into a skittery eighties sounding rhythm, again, drifting atop undulating waves of synthdrone and atmospheric shimmer, all spacey and washed out, still a bit ominous, but even more so in the last coupe minutes with some ribcage rattling bass, and some slowbuild atmospherics.
The second half of EP2 delivers more of the same. "Bleeding" sounding like it could have been borne of some obscure Justin Broadrick project, or perhaps a remix of Moss or The Body, a churning blackened doomic riffscape spread out over a sea of squelch and a backdrop of crumbling distortion, harsh metallic vokills, a lurching slab of electro-doom, swaddled in arcs of blurred melody, adding a strangely melancholic vibe to the proceedings, but for all the little electronic bits this is some straight up metal crush, that should have doooooooomlords digging it big time, but also probably a little confused, especially when that track bleeds directly into "Deadlight", which sounds like some creepy Carpenter soundtrack, all woozy synths and sinister minor key melody, kosmische drift meets eighties horror VHS ambience, sounding like it could easily have been an alternate soundtrack for recent dystopian seventies style sci-fi art flick, Beyond The Black Rainbow. That sound continues right into the closer "Are", all pulsing synths, and swirling cinematic ambience, unfurling like more soundtrack drift, before the drums come swooping in, transforming the sound into something weirder and heavier, a spaced out doom-psych maybe, or some cinematic psychedelic synth doom, not sure what to call it, but it's pretty fantastic, a lumbering landscape of rumbling, atmospheric drones, swirling synth shimmer, moody melodies, and minimal drum pound, all brooding and tense, super atmospheric, haunting and heavy, again sounding like the score to some lost avant / arthouse sci-fi epic.
LIMITED TO 333 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.
We have lots of friends who LOVE the Grateful Dead. When Andee was in Finland, aQ pal Jussi from Circle, even made him a mix of just the best jams. No "Truckin'" or any of that stuff, just endless spaced out psychedelic jammage, and we can safely say, that we can definitely get behind that side of the Dead. Really, it's almost like a mellower, more stoned Hawkwind, which definitely doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. Even so, we might still suggest Grayfolded as the only Grateful Dead record you really need to own. In part because it's only KIND OF a Grateful Dead record, well, it is ALL Grateful Dead, but it's multiple versions of the same song, "Dark Star", a bunch of different performances and recordings, all cut up and reassembled Plunderphonic style by John Oswald. So in a way, it's like a more experimental version of that mixtape Jussi made for Andee, and if you didn't know what this was all about, and weren't listening to it on headphones, you might just think it was a straight up psychedelic jam. The edits and the layering and the arrangement are pretty seamless, the multiple performances woven into a super cohesive, slow shifting, constantly mutating whole, spacey and laid back, drowsy, druggy and hypnotic, spidery guitar lines unwind, and tangle up with the same, slightly altered melodies from another performance, the multiple iterations almost ghostly the way they bleed into one another, like listening to the Dead in a carnival funhouse hall of mirrors, but if anything, that only makes it seem more psychedelic, yet all without losing the essence of the original track, which is no small feat. It's the sort of masterful editing that is almost too good, so much so that most folks listening to this won't appreciate the painstaking work that went into its creation. So in that way, headphone listening will be rewarded for sure, allowing the listener to sink deep into all of these many "Dark Star"s, and to not just appreciate the masterful skill of the musicians, but the new alien context they've been placed in after the fact. Psychedelic, plunderphonic genius!
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!
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.
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!
This is the second singles collection from ultra prolific glam-psych garage-popper Ty Segall, a sequel to the first, which came out in 2010 and was available only on cassette. $ingle$ 2 takes up right where the first volume left off, and unlike that one, this time it's available on all the different formats, and gathers up tracks from out of print 7"s and compilations, various songs from songs from 2011-2013, and includes all sorts of killer B-sides as well as some awesome covers (GG Allin, Velvet Underground, the Groundhogs).
First up is all three tracks from 2011's Spiders 7" on Drag City. Which at first blush sounds like some crazy heavy noisy freakout, the title track opening with SUPER distorted guitar, all crunchy and in the red, which proves to be just a false start, but then the main riff comes in, and it too is totally heavy and sludgey, and when we first spun the single, we were convinced it was playing at the wrong speed, but no, this is just a dense slab of psychedelic garage pop heaviness, all murky and dirgey and almost doomy sounding, distorted echoey vox over that churning blown out riffage as well as some rad psychedelic guitar. The second track ("Hand Glams") also has a bit of a false start, and while a bit more traditionally psychedelic and garage poppy, it too is petty noisy and distorted, lots of feedback, still a killer pop song, like the first one, just slathered in noisy distortion, and it sort of suits him. "Cherry Red", the Groundhogs cover, is way more groovy and sixties garage rock sounding, fuzzy and poppy with a killer chorus that definitely reminds us of Segall pal Mikal Cronin's aQ Record Of The Week.
Up next come two different B-sides to the I Can't Feel It 7" (at the time we didn't realize there were multiple versions), "Falling Hair" a laid back psychedelic groover, a bit of a glammy dirge/ballad, a bit Beatles-esque, hazy and psychedelic, with a slow build, hard rocking second half, while "Children Of Paul" has a sun soaked and dusty quality that smolders with a slow summery sizzle. Basking in some serious '60s and '70s psych vibes, echoes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Moby Grape abound.
Next up is a track from Segall's split with French garage pop dirge punks Feeling Of Love, which we never even got, and it's another retro-psych groover, all warm shimmery strum, and reverie jangle, reminding us of Redd Kross actually, with the same sort of paisley pop feel, but with a cool, and very weird almost mathy, and noise poppy bridge.
Then we have the B side from The Hill single on S & F, a swirly, glammy, fuzz pop gem, with a total Bowie vibe going on, hooky and heavy, fuzzy and jangly. Which leads directly into the B side from the Would You Be My Love 7", and another slab of sixties pop, but super stripped down and acoustic, some dreamy hippy psych pop, all dreamy harmony vocals, steel string strum, and even some whistling at the end. Not hard to imagine this song distorted and supercharged, and fitting perfectly on Segall's Twins full length, but in it's acoustic form, it's pretty much perfect.
Up next, Segall's track from the Group Flex II flex disc set on Castle Face, a super distorted blast of howl and pound laced with plenty of horns and sax bleat, followed by a killer cover of "Femme Fatale" from the Castle Face comp Velvet Underground & Nico by Castleface And Friends,with Segall adding lots of feedback, and some Stoogesy swagger to the original, the result noisy and chaotic and super rocking.
Then we have something more recent, Segall's track from the Famous Class split with Chad & The Meatbodies, on which he lays down a super funky drum track, swaddles it in organ, then some super distorted percussion, bongos maybe, conjuring up a wild rhythmic freak out, that gets more and more wild and distorted as it goes, bursts of psych-squall noisiness, ultra distorted leads, all somehow wound up into a dense slab of cinematic psychedelic groovery!!
And finally, Segall's GG Allin cover, from a 7" of GG Allin covers called Rated G.G., which also featured the Mountain Goats, Fucked up, Ben Gibbard and Ted Leo, and which we also never even had. And as you might imagine, it's about the punkest thing we've heard from Segall, the vocals distorted and doused in FX, the guitars blowout and in-the-red, a galloping noise punk blowout, that somehow manages to still sound like Segall, or maybe more like his hard rocking 'other' project Fuzz, heady and heavy, swaggery and snarly, and still tripped out and plenty psychedelic.
All killer stuff, and an easy way to get caught up on all the TS singles stuff you might have missed!
Another wholehearted recommendation is in store for the 15th edition of the ongoing Pop Ambient series! As we mentioned many times before, the 'pop ambient' sound can be seen as a catch-all term for a blissed out electronica that scoffs at the practice of just making techno music without the beats. No, this global vocabulary (though conceived in Germany) re-engineers the very functional chill-out music into a divine meditativeness par excellence. Variations occasionally come along within the Pop Ambient vocabularies with entries that slide a bit towards a darker palette and others that engender more organic sensibilities; and we can say that 2015 glistens with the brightness of a well polished silver. As in previous editions, Kompakt allows for introductions to newer artists alongside the stalwarts in their roster of technicians. The hitherto unknown Thore Pfieffer opens the album with two gorgeous pieces of '70s inspired kraut-electronica passing through modern technological tools, thus ending up somewhere near those expansive guitar-n-electronics pieces that Mountains have crafted over the years with hypnotizing acoustic guitar loops brighted with slow-motion laser-show oscillations gently phasing about. Pfieffer's second track "Nero" is clearly the stand-out piece on Pop Ambient 2015, but there are plenty of other gems to track throughout the album. Dirk Leyers picks up right where Cluster & Eno parted ways so many years ago with brightly twinkled electronic sequences and brook-babbling melodic patter. Deep piano chords gird the domestic clicking of a clock that may be settled in Gregor Schwellenbach's living room as he lays down shimmering tones and cinematic contemplation upon the mundane. Further soundtrack references about on the eagle-soaring ambience from Leandro Fresco whose candy colored melodies recall the mood engineering of Angelo Badalamenti from his Twin Peaks sound design.
As lovely as ever, this entry from the Pop Ambient series!
A beautiful object d'art from the Bay Area cottage industry Land And Sea, Mixed Raced is a rare document of the harmonically charged compositions of Zachary James Watkins. He studied at Mills College under the tutelage of Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Alvin Curran, et al; and is now a professor at UC Santa Cruz in electronic music. Mixed Raced is one facet of Watkins' work for rarefied tonal perfection that is emblematic of many of the graduates who matriculate from Mills, though some of his other solo work does move into an angular dissonance of saw-tooth noise with all the right No Wave allusions. Here, we have two compositions with multiple movements involving guitars and strings respectively. "Positively Right On" is Watkins take on the Branca / Chatham guitar harmonics. Watkins's composition only calls for two guitarists, setting up a duality of the harmonic interplay of growling drones and rasping fundamentals; but the results expose the diminishing returns on the guitar symphonies from both of those aforementioned heavyweights of downtown minimalism. These pieces glide, drift, hum, and blur with the best that either of those had done over the years, though the 20 minute program in three movements (obviously a requisite for a vinyl release) is a bit limiting, where a much longer duration would have been thoroughly entrancing. Nonetheless, "Positively Right On" is quite a triumph for Watkins. "Movement III" for violin and doublebass is a more conventional piece of academic minimalism with rising and decline notes sustained upon those two instruments, played out over seven variations on that theme. Think Lucier, Curran, Ashley, and any number of the American minimalists who came to prominence in the '70s.
Features hand letterpressed artwork in an edition of just 100 copies.
