"Some things have to be endured, and that makes the pleasures so much sweeter!" So spoke the villainous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's first Hellraiser movie. It is interesting to think back, and realize that Coil had their proposed soundtrack to that same movie rejected with some citing that Coil's themes were 'too frightening' or (more likely) 'not commercial enough' for a major studio motion picture. Anyone with ears who has listened to Coil's unreleased themes to Hellraiser will not find anything frightening or scary at all. In fact, Coil was quite reverential to somebody like David Shire, especially with his minimalist and maudlin score for The Conversation, with Coil composing everything on the Fairlight synthesizer, which itself had a distinct sound but one that didn't fall in line with the Goblin / Carpenter axis. Had Coil turned in to the film studio something like what they produced on their grand statement to the apocalypse in Horse Rotovator, it might have sounded close to where Theologian ended up on this death-synth industrial opus.
Here, Theologian - the project of a cold-hearted character simply given the name Leech - has employed the talents of a host of female vocalists from the darkwave and noise underground. The conceit has a similar feel to Lustmord's recent album The Word As Power; and thankfully, both albums transcend any notion of female tokenism. Furthermore, both albums do not suck. Far from it for Theologian; as this album triumphantly extends the M83-produces-Swans analogy that we posited regarding the 2012 epic The Chasms Of My Heart album. After a garbled, witchy cackle that introduces the album's first track "Black Cavern Myopia," Leech uncorks a dark-minded, power techno rhythm, crunched through distortion, echo and sinister atmospheres featuring the deep-in-the-catacomb vocalizations of Hecate's Rachael Kozak. A more familiar militantly bashed rhythm keeps with a Swans-styled corporal beatdown on "The Conjoined Deviant Procession" with the monotone chanting delivered by Kristen from Sewer Election. The vocals never really come to the foreground throughout the album, instead they swirl and commingle amidst the metalgaze hiss, powerdrone murk, and audio sickness from Leech's decomposing productions. Even when he employs the talents of opera singer Melissa Kelly (the only vocalist not hailing from noise culture), her voice is cacooned in billowing reverb as it flutters throughout the ghastly synth melodies and blackened industrially crushed doom plod on "Ectothermism." Aside from Sewer Election and Hecate, we've not encountered any of the other vocalists, but their legion is Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), and Shari Vari (Void Vision). Leech has crafted monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies - think the Cure's Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow. So good!
More tripped out avant blackness from Santa Cruz, and yet another twisted project from the drummer of Fell Voices. His last solo outing was as Sleepwalker, who released a couple demos a few years back that we LOVED, and now he's on his own again with Vorde, and like Sleepwalker, in a way, it's a reimagining of Fell Voices' sweeping, epic black buzz, recast as something much more warped and melodic, psychedelic and strange. Just check out the first few minutes of the opener "Hatewave", which sounds like some sort of lysergic funhouse ambience, all roiling clouds of warble whir, and woozy shimmer, washed out and ethereal, honestly we would have dug it if the whole record was just this weird atmospheric drift, but fear not, in swoops the blast and the buzz, but instead of being a furious buzz, it's more loping and hypnotic, the guitars swirling and almost cinematic, the vocals a raspy bellow, drenched in echo and delay, the track exploding at one point into something much more dramatic, the vocals following suit, a heaving, galloping heaviness underpinning over the top, dramatic crooning, a sort of black buzz cabaret, but imbuing the whole thing with a gothy, depressive vibe, all the while, the black buzz in the background gets more and more frantic and chaotic.
But Vorde is no one trick pony, check out "Transformations Of the Vessel", which begins with some super melodic, almost power metal sounding guitar swirl, before the track explodes into wild dense swirls of cosmic buzz, or the cave-ish creep of "Blood Moon", which drapes spidery clean guitar and moaned vocal incantations over a bed of furious drumming, and swaths of black ambience. That doomy creepy-crawly dirgery extends into the sprawling "Crown Of Black Flame", which again, oozes malevolently, at least in the beginning, before blossoming into another blown out cloud of cosmic black buzz, the vocals this time buried in the mix, but twisted into a strange melodic mewling, again, the vibe more akin to some buzz drenched gloom that straight up black metal, those ominous, over the top vocals defining the sound, with even the grimmest, buzziest blast, when paired with that croaked demonic torch song croon, transformed into something darkly dramatic, moody and mesmerizing, all the while remaining buzzy and blackened. Especially the super melodic closer, which almost sounds like Iceage or the Holograms playing black metal, right down to the stretches of bothy guitar shimmer, and almost Joy Divisiony sounding outro.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! On 180 gram vinyl (with random copies on purple wax, don't ask, it's RANDOM), housed in a super striking black and purple sleeve, matte finish with spot gloss printing.
Never has a record's title more accurately described its contents, cuz we really had no idea what to expect from Hartley C. White's This Is Not What You Expect. Based on the cover, we thought this would be some sort of blues rock, but this is WAY further out. Some serious outsider, next level avant-blues-dub-reggae-funk weirdness, that careens wildly from echo-drenched, looped and layered a cappella rounds, to fractured lo-fi funk, to dirgey, groovy, doomy, psychedelia, to hard rocking, angular, buzzing, sung/spoken WTF? trippiness. White, who was living in Queens when he recorded these jams (between 1984 and 2009), was raised in Jamaica during the turbulent sixties. He conceived of his sound, which he describes as 'Whopazootic', as a musical reimagining of Bruce Lee's martial arts, White's 'broken rhythms' meant to be both offensive and defensive. Wow. But this stuff actually does kind of conjure that vibe, lots of overdubbed vocal workouts, but just as many Funkadelic style freakouts, all wound around classic Jamaican dub styles, some swirling sampled strings, some seriously confusional avant pop, dreamy psychedelic balladry, singsongy almost lullaby like sweetness, all crafted from funky basslines, fluttery flutes, skronking horns, shimmering kalimba melodies, primitive drum machines and FX heavy guitar strum, White's vocals alternately sweetly crooning, chanting hypnotically, or toasting boisterously. The label sez recommended for fans of 10CC, Sly & The Family Stone, Willis Earl Beal and Ariel Pink, and while we'd usually scoff at such disparate comparisons, in this case, that's really not that far off.
So far we've made both full lengths from Asa Osborne's Zomes project Records Of The Week, and for good reason, each one a gorgeous assemblage of lo-fi keyboard mediations, and haunting rhythmic ragas, hiss drenched melodies unfurling over murky beats, everything blurred and bleary and meditatively blissed out. Many recent converts to Zomes might not realize that Osborne was previously the guitarist in late great Baltimore hypnorock combo Lungfish, which also of course featured mystical musical shaman Daniel Higgs, who also gets a lot of love on the aQ list.
Between those two ROTW full lengths, Osborne released a cassette called Improvisations 1 + 2, which as the title suggested, found Osborne improvising on some similar sonic themes, that tape fitting perfectly between those proper albums. Variations takes up where that tape left off, with a series of short form tranced out synth mediations, rhythmless this time, so the feel is much more abstract and free, more celestial and yeah, even more kosmische. It's hard not to draw a parallel, at least melodically, to another aQ fave, Amps For Christ, Zomes' sound treading similarly warped electronic ground, with some tracks revealing playful melodies, as if reinterpretations of some old folks standard, played here on some primitive analog synth, and recorded onto old dusty tapes, while others blossom and unfold like some long lost new age prog artifact, captured surreptitiously on a handheld tape player, the strange low fidelity production and soft swirls of tape hiss adding all manner of texture and grit to the proceedings, so even at its most washed out and serene, the sound is rough and raw, the tones gristly and crunchy, everything gloriously warm and buzzy.
Not much else needs to be said really, Zomes fans will want this for sure, but really anyone into tripped out lo-fi kosmische explorations and hushed minimal synthscapery should grab one of these, and will most likely find themselves falling under Zomes' sonic spell.
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