NOW ON VINYL, VIA THE FLENSER!! Originally put out on cd a few months ago by Profound Lore, now this "dense, twisted, chaotic masterpiece" (to quote ourselves, see the next paragraph) is issued as a deluxe double lp with a large 12-page pamphlet-style booklet. What we said before:
Full-length number four from the Bay Area horde, and their most fully realized work to date, but what else did you expect? All Fours is a dense, twisted, chaotic masterpiece.
"At Night" wastes no time - a noisy squelch and then a dive right into frantic black metal madness. Like we've said in every Bosse-De-Nage record we've reviewed, the marriage of the Slint-ish/post-rock elements and the black metal fury gets better and better. That becomes especially apparent as the first track comes to an epic, crashing close, with a simple melancholy guitar line lead by ferocious blast beats (the drumming on this record, by the way, is seriously jaw-dropping!).
Despite being a band that gets lumped in with the Alcest/Deafheaven school of blackgaze, All Fours doesn't rely on the typical "huge" shoegaze guitar sound - the atmosphere here comes from a crystal clear but layered and dense production. And honestly, a welcome departure from a lot of the overblown black metal records already out there.
"Washerwoman" is the clear opus on this record - a song we imagine they've been trying to write since their inception. The Slint comparisons are hard to deny here (song title and content alike), but this is far from a rip-off. Everything that made Slint such a powerful band, Bosse-de-Nage captures here - subtle instrumentation, raw intensity, and powerful dynamics.
By the time the record ends, you get the feeling you're watching a bands original vision and current talent coalesce perfectly - All Fours is the record Bosse-De-Nage has been working towards all these years. Highly recommended!
Third album from experimental guitarist and synthesist Ken Camden, whose dreamy and drifting solo work is a such a departure in mood, rhythm and tone from his group work in monolithic mopegazers Implodes that we didn't know right away they were even connected.
It's taken some time to catch up, but where Implodes has drug us through the darkness (ever so willingly), Camden, through his unique attention to sonic detail, sends us floating slowly through the light. Using guitar, modular synths and voice processing, Camden delivers an ambient excursion through texture and mood, repetitive forms, chordal clusters and harmonic tonal shifts that are pensively alien, yet serene and ponderously resonant. Fans of library records, sci-fi soundtracks, and cerebral new age music will find lots to love here!
While they last, which won't be long, we have a few of the special limited-to-200-copies-only GOLD VINYL edition of this, the latest glorious solo outing from the sound-sculpting Mr. Caminiti, whom you probably know as being one half of the aQ fave duo Barn Owl, who on their last album V, had really begun to morph from making dusty guitar-based doom drone und twang into something whose shimmering psychedelic sonics were ever more reliant on synthesizers, electronics, machines...
Further electronic exploration continues on Meridian, wherein Caminiti conjures a mysterious, mostly electronic soundscape, having set his guitar aside to deftly orchestrate droning synths and processed field recordings in a densely detailed, actively ambient, Tangerine-Dream-y production. Cinematic and somber, and still very organic-sounding despite its electronic origins, Meridian is a gorgeous all-instrumental set of one-word-titled tracks ("Signal", "Arc", "Mercury", etc.), somehow both intimate and spacious, that should still very much appeal to Barn Owl fans despite the lack of ye olde guitar.
Caminiti's somnolent, sometimes sinister synth drones tend to be all frayed and glitchy around the edges, the listener slowly swimming/sinking through static buzzings. echoing tones and submerged hum. At times, suggestions of percussive beat-skitter comes to the surface, driving these darkling mood pieces forward into more rhythmic territory, drifting and pulsing and crackling with latent energies. Deep and lovely this is. Truly, we can understand being jaded about the glut of droney electronic music these days, but trust us, as you should expect from either of the Barn Owl boys, this is really good and worthy!
As mentioned, Thrill Jockey were nice enough to provide us with copies of the limited gold-colored vinyl version, meant for their mailorder, when they're gone we'll get the regular black vinyl. Includes digital download. Note: this is also available as a cd release, we'll have some next time...
Wow. Of the many recent Alice Coltrane reissues, I have to say this is the best one yet. Recorded in 1971, the record swells with beauty and emotion. It is serene not in a boring way, but in a sort of drone-y way, a state of suspended bliss and yearning that is colored with propulsive drumming courtesy Rashied Ali and Jack DeJohnette, tensely highpitched violin from Joan Kalisch, shimmering bells, and of course Alice's manic improv on the harp and ocean-lulling notes on the organ.
This record is so incredibly unbelievably beautiful, there's not a track that fails to attain superlative heights, and I highly recommend you get it, whether you're a beginner or an Alice fan from way back. Fans of modern experimental work like Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof! should also definitely check this out. Comes in a cd-sized mini gatefold sleeve (like an LP). Really well done!
The outstanding Austin-based Holodeck label returns with a gorgeous nocturnal outing by Montreal-based electronic artist Marie Davidson. Un Autre Voyage is a sleek dimly-lit synth soundtrack-like affair that combines futuristic French progressive electronics and minimal wave rhythmic qualities into a stark night journey of the mind. Fluorescent synthetic pulses, robotic rhythms and a monotone narrative delivery offer up Ballardian tropes of natural and synthetic forces at odds. What begins as a mutated form of aggressive glamour-cool eighties synth-wave soon grows real skin with dark industrial reflections and becomes suggestive of film with ambient, abstract forms and textures and a performatively suggestive male and female dialogue in French. Imagine a combination of Igor Wakhevitch and Nini Raviolette and you're getting close.
The Bay Area stalwart Thomas Dimuzio has long been known for his improvisation chops with electronics and live sampling strategies, sporting a discography littered with the who's who of the avant-garde elite (Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Matmos, Dan Burke, Wobbly, Joseph Hammer, Negativland, Psychic TV, amongst a litany of others). His albums can be filled with wildly colorful bursts of electrical jitter and post-Bayle clusterings; and at others, they can embrace the slow-motion rippling of the finest by the holy minimalists of the last century. Amid Zero Echo falls into the latter category, one that he has mastered within the Dimmer collaborative project with Joseph Hammer in particular. Guitars are what we are told to be the source material for this double 10" released on the ever reliable Substantia Innominata subsidiary of Drone Records. The four sides to this album each sport low rumbling dronecraft with variable hues and swarms, with streaks of machined feedback and motorized abrasion peppering the gravity-suck drone heaviness. Dimuzio tracks through his bleak / black spaces with glacially paced metallic buzz, evanescent mysteriousness, and some downright gorgeous chordal smolder that falls somewhere between the form destruction dronework of RST and the vacant space orchestrations from Thomas Koner.
Sometime in the late eighties, John McBain, member of mighty space rockers Monster Magnet, frontman of psychedelic groovers Wellwater Conspiracy, and (not so) secret weapon of local space-psych explorers Carlton Melton, birthed this brilliant, sonic abomination. A dizzyingly tripped out sprawl of oozing, churning, abstract drone-noise-psych, In The Name Of All That Is Unholy sounds like classic psych rock, slowly unravelling, revealing all manner of crumbling sonic detritus within. The multiple movements shifting from plodding doomy creep, to tranced out pulsating dronemusic, to wild, blurred space shred, with sounds in constant flux, pitch shifts and tonal warbles, everything off kilter but somehow hanging together as some sort of drug addled, heart-of-the-sun, damaged cosmic epic.
To us, the heavier moments sound a bit like Philip Jeck or John Oswald constructing a Greyfolded style collaged megamix from old Butthole Surfers records, all smeared into hazy indistinct lopes and lumbers, the melodies distorted and processed, almost like some sort of acid fueled fever dream, the music melting before your very ears. The opening track in particular is reminiscent of the Butthole's "Jimi" (from Hairway To Steven), albeit slowed way down and stretched out into even more twisted brainmelt dirgery. But the deeper you get into the record, the more abstract and weirdly blissed out it becomes. Moments of extremely mesmerizing tranquility coexist alongside murky power electronics, and full on kosmische shimmer, the whole middle section is basically some sort of WTF? soundtrack for an alien planetarium show. You can almost hear the bizarre shapes and prismatic colors warping and curdling, before blossoming into a hyper-delirious barrage of flickering, fluttering, fractured melodies, all tangled up into a thick, layered stretch of hypnotic, undulating sonic mesmer.
But those sounds eventually rupture, and splinter, and lock into stuttering looped hiccups, all wrapped in more of those super distorted psychedelic leads, and underpinned by what sounds like growling beasts, locked into a skipping-record style riffage, delivered as some sort of mind-control metallic mantra. A mantra that quickly (d)evolves into more Jeck-like repletion, albeit a distorto-psych variant, the chug and churn slipping beneath a murky industrial pulse, before exploding again even more blown out, growly and buzzy, before a blast of uber-distorted, FX drenched guitarnoise, and some robotic/alien/monster vocals dissolve into a final squall of crumbling crunch and decaying distortion.
Truly some next level outsider, sampler-damaged psychedelia, that should of course appeal to fans of McBain's other groups, as well as like minded psychedelic noise makers, but also folks into wilder strains of electronic psych-noise weirdness (Our Love Will Destroy The World, Astral Social Club, etc.) will find much to dig here as well.
Originally released on cassette, now the full Evil Acidhead experience is available again, thanks to Agitated, on both on cd and swank double lp. The vinyl version comes on colored wax and also includes both a cd copy of the record and an 'eye-searing' poster!
The second album in as many weeks from the Russian industrial-impressionist Exit In Grey. At this album's core is a duality of gloomy exasperation and despair on one hand and a universal, meditative sense of calm on the other. Both of these emotional states co-habitate in a slow crawl of suspended drone construction and dappled shortwave radio reception from detuned military transmissions as well as the ethereal crackle of a VLF receiver. The initial gasps from Shadows Of Stillness spill from a claustrophobic synth tone, whose desolate, chemical transmission is accentuated with low-frequency rumblings and bone-creaking textures that wouldn't be out of place on a Sleep Research Facility or Lustmord recording. About halfway through "Speaking With Silence" the nocturnal mood lifts with a golden set of melodic ambient phrases akin to Popul Vuh's classic psychedelic instrumentals and a chipper satellite beacon signaling back to earth that all is well up in the heavens and we need not worry so much about our plight down here on this rock. The album's finale reprises this radiant shimmer as if all of the sounds were the sunblinding reflections of a midnight sun cast upon the placid waters of the Arctic Ocean north of St. Petersberg. Cold yet beautiful.
Since Slumberland reinvigorated itself in 2008, we've been amazed at the number of bands that have landed deals with the label that really sound EXACTLY like what we would expect from somebody on Slumberland back circa 1992. Delightfully imperfect indie-pop songwriting, raucously shoegazed blur, and candy-colored lunchbox punk-rock all have come through the recent roster of Slumberland's bands, with the Welsh quintet Joanna Gruesome quite up to the task of carrying on this impressive tradition that began with the Lilys (amongst countless others) and continues through Veronica Falls (amongst many noble contemporaries).
Peanut Butter is a sparkplug of a second album by aQ faves Joanna Gruesome, making up for its manic punk-pop sprint of merely 21 minutes with more tempo and time changes than we can really count. They may not clock the amount of mathematical tumblings that gave credence to P.E.E.'s willful attempt to craft songs entirely out of the bridges; but it still makes for one hell of a great album of quick-change artistry that takes the sweetie-pie pop of Heavenly crashing into the turbulent (if non-threateningly cute) noise-rock of Boyracer. Lead vocalist Alanna McArdle can stop on a dime from her ethereal, swoonsome vocals into a bloodcurdling snarl, alongside the rest of the band as they unleash their splinters of guitar noise and crushworthy pop narcotic riffs. Recommended, of course!
In early 2015, B. Moloch stated that he would be closing the book on Anenzephalia - a project that has authored a handful of thoroughly terrifying albums of death-industrial theatrics over the past two decades. Fortunately, he has turned his attention on another venture, Ke/Hil, with his occasional comrade in arms Wilhelm Herich, the principal agitator of Genocide Organ; and here, the two transmit an equally insidious black energy. Zone 0 marks their second outing under this moniker, and it cracks open with an urgent / anxious throb of clinically machined rhythms, analogue synth-noise, and woozy electro-drone hums serving to buttress the alternating vocals between Moloch and Herich - with the former barking through the sonic rumble of megaphone distortion and the latter demonstrating stentorian clarity delivered in his German. The dialetics of state control and personal freedom seem to be addressed within the electroshock sermons, as these play out through the social constructions of work, religion, governance, and poverty. For all of the dogmatic themes that Ke/Hil have brought to the table, they are more interested in exposing and highlighting the horrors that persist within these arenas, all of which fall under the larger banner of mankind's cruelty towards itself. These poetics of misery and brutality manifest throughout the album's bleak score of suffocating drone construction, industrial-clad shadow, septic atmospherics, and jabs of metal-on-metal percussion. So good to hear B. Moloch is back at work again.
Most Americans (well, not most Americans, but the ones paying attention) were first introduced to the progressive versatility of Norwegian jazz singer Karin Krog back in the nineties when European distribution regulations finally relaxed enough for wider promotion and availability across the Atlantic, and what a discovery it was. Having performed and recorded since the early sixties, Krog was essentially a household name in her native country, having worked with the some of the most esteemed bandleaders and arrangers of the post-bop jazz world, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, Jan Garbarek, Steve Kuhn, and John Surman among them. Her then 30 year old back catalog was a treasure chest for crate diggers and beat heads and sure enough compilations of her work along with other groove heavy "Black Forest" jazz figures from Scandinavia, Germany and Poland, like Wolfgang Dauner, Michael Urbaniak and Urszula Dudziak, began to crop up in the early 2000's.
It's been about 13 years since Crippled Dick released the first Krog survey, Raindrops, Raindrops, which mainly focused on her seventies work. Some of those tracks reappear here, like the great Herbie Hancock composition, "Maiden Voyage" and "We Could Be Flying". On Don't Just Sing, Light In The Attic expands that survey into the margins on both sides of her career from the sixties to the nineties, and truly highlights her wide range from funk-laden jazz pop to cosmic fusion explorations into freer modes of vocal expression and electronic experimentation. Krog's delivery can weave an incandescent tapestry no matter if the material is traditional or experimental. Her approach to standards is by no means by the book and indeed is quite innovative. Who else could turn the Mississippi Delta twang of Bobbi Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe" into a Scandinavian jazz groover? Or transform John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" into such blithely cool rapturous devotion? Krog's dry lilting voice is effortlessly breezy, at times near lackadaisical as it almost trails off a the end of a phrase - but also at times spitfire, full of life and in total control. "Don't Just Sing" is not only a track here exploring how much the voice can do without words, it's also a personalized mantra for how the voice can convey emotional and tonal complexities as well as transform audible worlds into poetic vision.
While we long for full reissues of her essential records like We Could Be Flying, Hi Fly (with Archie Shepp) and Joy, any survey of Karin Krog is warmly welcomed and this one is particularly great! Includes archival photos and liner notes including a Q& A with Krog herself. We cannot recommend this compilation enough! (Also be sure to check out her feature in this month's Wire magazine!)
There's a deep cosmology at work in the recordings of Sergey Uak-Kib, the Russian dronescapist who uses the Sanskrit for 'warrior', Kshatriy, as his nom de plume. This album, his second, is equally as spectral and bleak in its content as his 2009 debut Slepok Soznaniya; and it stands as a harbinger to the end of the Kali-Yuga - the final stage in the four-part cycle for the material world, as mapped out in the various Hindu scriptures. Uak-Kib identifies this prediction through the ongoing "technocratic lack of spirituality and moral decay" - ignominious traits that unfortunately shape the future for much of the world's population. Yet, he also maintains a considerable optimism that the cycle of life will also produce an "attainment of human awareness of the Unity." Transforming Galaxy is about a literal as one could get with the processional unveiling of this album's ambient tapestries, beginning with the darkest passages and gradually lightening the chromatics without diffusing the overall potency of these radiant droneworks. Isolationist undercurrents of black ice floes accrete with teeth-clenching sawtooth electronics at the front of the end record, ominously giving way to stormy drone recordings strafed with the unnerving choruses of ravens; and steadily, the ambience slips away from these endtimes allusions and towards full-bodied swirling miasma of cosmic synth drones. Altogether, it's very much on par with the last recordings made by Maeror Tri of industrial impressionism and hypnogogic echo.
Lyoto Music was a short-lived collaboration by the Italian noise technicians Pietro Mazzocchin (aka Swastika Kommando, Observation Clinique, etc.) and Pierpaolo Zoppo (Mauthausen Orchestra). The history of this project is a bit murky at best, with Zoppo having died back in 2012 and the only bit of historical context provided by Andrea Cernotto - the label boss of Aquilifer Sodality, which released this, and a bunch of Mauthausen Orchestra cassettes back in the early '80s. All that Cernatto recalls is a blistering concert played by Lyoto Music in which he was the only audience member. Oof. How sad given how thorough a noise assault these two delivered on their one and only recording, which was produced in 1984. Both sides of the record make for extended paroxysms of roiling distortion, asynchronous synth-noise, and ignominious vocal barks. One can hear the feedback abuse that's one of the signatures for the Mauthausen Orchestra side of the equation, and there's a leaden smoldering from the enveloping noise that smacks of what Mazzochin had produced as Swastika Kommando. The final six minutes bristle with a Leichenschrei / Leibstandarte SS MB drum machine march that struggles to crack through the noise in its lurching, yet clinical pulse. The unrelenting force from these two pieces as well as their extended durations makes for an exhausting / exhilarating album. Quite a rarity indeed, as the original tapes were highly prized amongst the noise collectors; and this reissue, which was remastered by Cenotto under supervision of Mazzochin, comes in an edition of just 199 copies.
The material from the cassette releases of Maeror Tri have been trickling back into circulation over the years thanks to a nearly global campaign to keep these recordings into print. Maeror Tri should need no introduction from us by now, they being the German industrial-drone trio that enjoyed a vibrant existence from 1988 to 1996. In the best tradition of the DIY / mail-art / cassette-culture values, they eagerly recorded material for pretty much every request that came their way, with cassette releases and compilation tracks that barely saw much in the way of distribution during that time period, given the limited pressings. Ambiguitas was one of these cassette-only releases that was released in 1995 by the Lebensraum subsidiary of the French power-electronics / dark-ambient imprint Nuit Et Bruillard. It should be noted that the recordings are actually much earlier, dating back to 1991. This is a very bleak album even by the standards of Maeror Tri, who seem to be augmenting their thrumming drones with power-tool expressionism and nocturnal percussive clamor as heard on "Fusion Of Sementary Intelligence" which follows the guttural tape-noise chimney sweeping of the aptly named "Death Surrounds You". The latter half of the album shifts towards those achingly maudlin, long-form guitar drones that Maeror Tri's Stefan Knappe has mastered over the years, transitioning into those into a epochally cinematic form within Troum. Ambiguitas is fleshed out with two possibly unreleased tracks that date back to 1988, when the trio buttressed their ashen bellows with lugubrious synths and delay-pedal dub tricks.
This cd edition was reissued by Sergey of Five Elements Music / Exit In Grey on his new imprint Teta-Morphosis in an edition of 500 copies.
"Like a waterfall in your mind" reads a pithy text on the back of this reissue from the German industrial-drone iconoclasts Maeror Tri. It's very much a fitting descriptor to the sprawling, long-form bass-rumble that those three had developed as their signature sound during their prolific career from 1988 to 1996. Hypnotic, transfixing, ominous, sublime. Subliminal Forces was one of the many cassettes that had been released in a tiny edition at sometime during their career. The sub-underground imprint Tonspur put out the original cassette, doing so in 1993, which was a couple years after the recordings were completed. Suspended tones of flanging guitar noise and flecked electronics hang above inky black, gothic, shadowy, sepulchral, subterranean, and otherwise dark-as-fuck tones, lending to an post-apocalyptic imagery of flickering strands of Christmas lightbulbs that somehow managed to stay illumined while the remaining landscape is charred, bombed-out, deserted, and strewn only with rubble. After seven tracks of expressively desolate slabs of industrial drone, album's isolationist tendencies crack only slightly with the final track "Memento." Here, pools of synths and guitars ripple against each other's languid reverberations and spectral decay. Very lovely. Reports from the peanut gallery about the original tape's inconsistent sound seem to have addressed with the remastering of this album for the 2014 relaunch. As such, it's a necessary reissue on all fronts.
Here's one of two Mauthausen Orchestra reissues of incredibly rare tapes from one of the pioneers of Italian power electronics. From Homicide To Slaughter was completed in 1983, and appears to have been released through Aquilifer Sodality around that same time period, at least that seems to be the case in regards to an equally hard-to-find 12 cassette boxset issued by Slaughter Productions that claimed to anthologize all of the tapes Mauthausen Orchestra produced for Aquilifer Sodality. Eh. It matters not, as From Homicide To Slaughter is a downright classic recording of grimy electronics showcasing much more of a composed attack from Pierpaolo Zoppo. The six untitled pieces each take the Maurizio Bianchi approach of harsh starts and stop of the pieces, as if these noises were the mere extracts from an electronic seance of demonic forces and self-immolating ectoplasm. The first track on Side A is a monstrously grim piece of low-frequency amplifier destruction akin to the very early noise-based Lustmord works, where the remainer of the side kicks up a storm of radiowaves similar to John Duncan's collages of the medium at the time. Primitive looping or sampling techniques seem to capture the lurch from a disfigured machined rhythm that trudges through a thicket of hostile noise and divebomb arc of squalid feedback. Probably the best recording we've heard of the Mauthausen Orchestra back catalog. Limited to just 199 copies!
Pierpaolo Zoppo does not leave much up to the imagination with the title for this early Mauthausen Orchestra album. Sex. Death. The Third Reich. It's all very unseemly stuff Zoppo pulls from the darker regions of mankind's collective id; and Mauthausen Orchestra remains one of the pioneering exploits from the incredibly macabre Italian industrial scene that began with Maurizio Bianchi and continued through Mauthausen Orchestra, Sigillum S, The Sodality, Atrax Morgue, etc. It's hard to ignore how the extremity of the poetics from the Italian scene literally bleeds beyond art and into life for many of these artists. Zoppo, like Bianchi before him, announced a retirement in 1986, only to jump-start the project a little more than a decade later, up until his somewhat mysterious death in 2012. Necrofellatio was originally released in 1983 on the Italian cassette imprint Aquilifer Sodality, which was responsible for much of Zoppo's classic recordings. It's a brutal distillation of the skeletal yet ultra-violent aesthetics that Whitehouse espoused early on - shrill, ear-drum piercing feedback against deadened low-frequency black drones and inhumanly barked vocals. Zoppo's nihilist electronics explode in acts of self-eradication amongst crude electronics, working against the rational parts of the human psyche, almost a literal excavation of the dark corners from his mind and spilling those sick thoughts onto tape. Necrofellatio is available for the first time on vinyl (after a couple of editions on cassette and a dodgy cd-r edition), remastered from the original tape and pressed in an edition of 199.
There are times we think we are on top of all the really amazing Brazilian gems from the '70s, and then something rare and beautiful comes out of left field that we've never heard before, and we're totally humbled. Such is the case with this 1974 masterpiece of hazy Brazilian psychedelic folk-pop by obscure singer/songwriter Sidney Miller. In the same esteemed realm as Lo Borges, Lula Cortes, Joyce, Congregacion and Eduardo Mateo, Sidney Miller takes us through a dreamy melancholic realm full of beautiful pop hooks, soft sedated vocals and soulful jazz-funk grooves with double tracked flutes and acidy-guitar leads. Sadly, this was Sidney Miller's best and last record, as he died mysteriously in 1980 at the young age of 36. A breezy summer record with a touch of sadness for sure, one that has us dreaming of warm nights, hazy sunsets and longing for days gone by. If Nick Drake made a Brazilian record, it might sound something like this! Thanks to Sol Re Sol, who also released the fantastic Alceu Valenca lp, Molhado De Suor (elsewhere reviewed on this list), for keeping these gems from total obscurity.
Also on compact disc! Here's what we said about the vinyl we listed last time, plus now we've added sound samples too!
We were so ecstatic when we discovered there was a new album by local ladies of indie-pop, The Sandwitches. It had been four years since their last record, and we were beginning to think the band was no more (although sadly, this IS apparently their final release). What's making us even happier is that not only have they made maybe their best album yet, but they've also made what might be one of the best records of the year. Even just listening to Our Toast once, it's easy to tell that the group is trying to make a serious sonic statement. Of course we've loved all of their past releases, but Our Toast really raises the bar, delivering a collection of songs overflowing with conviction and warmth. Not only are the new songs really great, but the recording too, is so rich and evocative, woozy and lush. It's clear that the band - along with Kelly Stoltz, who recorded it with them - had such a clear idea of how they wanted the album to sound, drenched in emotion and raw sensuality.
Musically, Our Toast sits somewhere between Cat Power's Moon Pix and a Karen Dalton record recorded by Phil Spector: the perfect mix of moody melancholia and hazy, dreamlike wonder. Highly Recommended!
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992.
Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting.
We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away.
For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!
Lo, another 176 pages of the Big Book Of Ugly Things hath been written. To which, we say, yay!
This Spring/Summer 2015 issue - and it could take a season, or two, indeed, to fully absorb everything in these densely-packed pages - brings us more "wild sounds from past dimensions", of course, with in-depth features on an array of uber-obscure but fascinating '60s and '70s bands of the garage/psych/punk persuasion. The big cover story is on a pioneering all-girl (who were all sisters!) act, The Clingers, whose Kim Fowley produced single on Columbia was advertised with the tag line "Soft Bodies, Hard Rock". Also this issue: The Mickey Finn, Pink Finks, Soul Vendors, Silverhead, Annie Phillippe, a look back at the genius of Brian Jones, and plenty more, including the usual pages and pages of reissue reviews, and another installment of "San Francisco Beat", being the always entertaining (if perhaps not 100 percent reliable?) memoirs of Cyril Jordan of the Flamin' Groovies. Yep, Ugly Things just keeps on truckin'. Get into it. One of our favorite magazines/fanzines there is.
Here we have a gorgeous set of recordings from the mysterious Russian drone collective Uhushuhu. The name of project is the transliteration of the call for the Barred Owl, a creature that inhabits the northern climates of Eurasia as well as North America. While Uhushuhu maintains a cryptic distance to their semantic attachment to the owl, these birds do have a different connotation in Slavic traditions than in Europe and America. Instead of wisdom, owls (in particular, small owls which the Barred Owl is not) are harbingers of death and disaster. Geoscience, the third production for Uhushuhu, does not seem to carry those allusions. But there is a deeply transcendent / quasi-mystical channelling that Uhushuhu dials up on Geoscience. They take a macro / micro view of the Russian forest itself - this monolithic, nearly impenetrable thicket of pines, birches, and lots of mosquitos that extends some eleven timezones (if Negativland is to be believed). Huge sweeping Aeolian drones seem to match the complex wind patterns of that cross back and forth from the arctic circle down to the Central Asia steppes, with tactile flurries of bark, branches, and beetles carrying about unconcerned to the blurred sound of the wind. These environmental recordings and mimetic sounds accompany a far more hallowed set of electrical and harmonic intonations far more commonplace in the holy minimalism of LaMonte Young or Charlemagne Palestine. Not necessarily a dark trip, but certainly a gripping one. The accompanying dvd-r features a 54 minute video of algorithmic animations that fractalize into crystalline structures and shatter into component parts in densely thickets of light. Quite lovely! Hand numbered and limited!
A few years ago, we ecstatically reviewed an incredible anthology called The History of The Units that showcased the nearly complete recordings of San Francisco's legendary synth-punk anarchists. That release went out of print awhile ago, but the Futurismo label has just reissued the group's 1980 debut lp in a DELUXE package fully remastered with bonus tracks on colored vinyl with liner notes, digital download and poster. Most of our review of the anthology still holds for this reissue so here is what we said about Units back in 2009!:
Moog-enabled synth punk subversion straight outta San Francisco in the late '70s/early '80s, entertaining n' agitating electronic New Wave action excavated and reissued! And it's totally timely considering how many bands in today's scene would so love to sound like this.
We won't pretend we were familiar with The Units back in the day or even before 2009. Perhaps we'd heard the name before (or maybe we were confusing 'em with ol' Jandek's 1978 debut album, also under the name The Units), but we knew nothing about this band 'til we heard the disc a few weeks ago. And as soon as we did, it went into heavy rotation here at the store. These Units were definitely a important piece of San Francisco punk/new wave history, but just a bit before our time. Well, not Aquarius's time, just us folks who work here now! Actually, a close reading of the thanks list in the cd booklet will find a shout out to Aquarius, 'cause (if you didn't know) Aquarius was THEE punk/new wave record store in San Francisco in the '70s... (Which reminds us, we've got to get more of our history up on the AQ website.) And, in fact, this debut lp Digital Stimulation was the very first release on seminal SF indie 415 Records (who had their biggest hit with Romeo Void), a label run by one of Aquarius' owners at the time. So this most certainly isn't the first time that The Units music has been blasting regularly in the Aquarius shop, it's just been a few years, is all.
Not unlike Devo, The Units had a concept thing going, all about a critique of alienated modern industrial society, dehumanizing conformity, and corporate culture, with songs like "Cannibals" and "Work". Perhaps perversely choosing to use machines to make their point, The Units tried to take the human element out of the rock band equation, preferring for instance to project their own propaganda films rather than allow the audience to focus on a frontperson. And yes, they do also sound quite bit like Devo at times, which is way okay by us!
Their synth-obsession was also in part an anti-guitar thing, a reaction to the mainstream. In fact, they took their anti-guitar philosophy to the extreme of not only having a "stamp out guitars" logo, but also making fake guitars out of plywood to smash on stage, while letting their synths play on "cruise control". So definitely The Units were highly conceptual, art schoolish, but not academic - the liner notes are clear that the idea was to be an all-synth band that "kicks ass" (the full quote being: ""I wanted an all synthesizer band... and not some fucking polite, socially acceptable electronic experiment in academia. I didn't want a doctorate in electronic doodling. No, I'm talking about a synth band that kicks ass!") and according to what we're hearing here, they succeeded. And they were not without contemporaries. There were The Screamers, Nervous Gender, and of course Devo; all of whom wanted to take the synthesizer into punk. For many of the Units tracks, it would very easy to replace the lead synth lines with guitars and have an equally kick ass rock song, but the fact is that these are Moog-powered cuts which do oscillate between a quirky sensibility with angular chops and a full-throttle punk car-crash. If you would think the former finds the Units sounding like Devo and the latter like the Screamers, you'd be right!
There's loads of electric energy, some goofy humor, and certainly serious intent. So many gems here, incorporating buzzing droning distorted synths, propulsively skittering drum beats, and monotone vocals (both male and female). Their incredible singles "Cannibals" (a tempestuous, driving song that was pure '70s punk), "High Pressure Days", and "Warm Moving Bodies," are prominently featured here, all of which were impressively catchy. Other selections here include the cold wave weird science of "Digital Stimulation", and there's even an ode to our very neighborhood, "The Mission Is Bitchin", with lyrics about burritos and marijuana!
Putting things in proper place/time/scene perspective, is a whole bonus live set (it's a hidden track at the end of the cd, likely available via download for the lp) ending with an audio snippet of the late SF punk "godfather" Dirk Dirksen on stage at Mabuhay Gardens, good-naturedly mocking both The Units (accidentally referring to them by the name of another band, the Zeros) and their cheering fans (with the sardonic comment "obviously, people with as little taste as yourself would become ecstatic over such average talent").
Of course it's all a bit dated, of its era, and that's part of the charm... but like we said, a lot of this also sounds like it could be put out by a band today, since everything old is new again and the '80s New Wave / synth thing is a current retro craze. Definitely this is a good time for The Units to be reissued!
Last year was a rich one for some amazing Tropicalia reissues and rediscoveries of long lost classics. Whether it was the first five Os Mutantes records or classics by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso or more obscure gems from Luiz Eca, Som Imaginario, Rubinho E Mauro and maybe our favorite of the bunch the collaboration between Alceu Valenca and Geraldo Azevedo. Valenca's beautiful and mystifying vocal delivery and songwriting had us so hooked as that record became one of our most listened to treasures of last year. So of course we've been doing everything in our power to get our hands on more primo Valenca recordings and this one, recorded in 1974 is definitely another solid gold gem. A little more rocking and charged then the record with Azevedo, Mollhado De Suor shows a more extroverted side to Valenca, but still exploring a nice wide range of sounds, which is one of the things we love so much about Valenca. One song he is rocking and all you want to do is jump around in the grass and follow him wherever he decides to go, while the next song might be dreamier and more pastoral, painting him as an artist as comfortable with introspection as he is with bold and upfront fire. That might sound sort of like a modern day songwriter we love lots as well, Devendra Banhart. In fact last time Devendra was in the store he bought a copy of the Valenca & Azevedo cd and we have a feeling that he's been listening to lots of Alceu's recordings lately as a sneak peak listen to his forthcoming record made abundantly clear.
On Mollhado De Suor, Valenca is backed by some of the greats in the Brazilian scene of that time, Geraldo Azevedo actually appears on this record too, playing craviola and Brazilian acoustic guitar and AQ fave Lula Cortes is also in the mix playing dulcimer on most of the record. Another 70's gem from Brazil that demands your ears' attention!
To those bleak metal heathens whom dwelleth upon the white and wintry mountaintops, take heed!!! Vanum is a brand new ongoing project from K. Morgen and M. Rekevics (of highly acclaimed black metallers Ash Borer and Fell Voices / Vorde respectively) and rather than specializing in the sort of hypnotic, minimal modern black metal that you might suspect from their other ventures, Realm Of Sacrifice is instead a hugely impressive slab of melodic, melancholic and INCREDIBLY epic BM, drawing equally on the soaring windswept tremolo of such Norwegian forefathers as mid 1990s Ulver and Darkthrone, the glorious melodic sensibility of Swedish luminaries like Dawn and Naglfar, and the hateful regalism of Finnish royalty Sargeist and Horna. In short it's classic, rousing stuff, that actually sets itself apart from its more gimmick-oriented contemporaries by simply letting the massive, stirring melodies and furiously pummeling performances take center stage. The result is simple and unpretentious, yet entirely engrossing and timeless, and in our humble opinions the best album either member has been involved in thus far. If classic, no frills BM is your cup of tea (or indeed hornful of mead!) then this is essential listening.
Yes, that is "Ultimated" you are reading; and no, we're not too sure about it either. Vidna Obmama is the long-standing project of the Belgian electronic musician Dirk Serries. His best known work dates to the '90s, in a series of oceanic ambient records that spilled through an occluded / fictionalized ethnomusicology similar to what :zoviet*france: and O Yuki Conjugate were up to at that point in time. But the earliest cassettes by Vidna Obmana (which translates from Serbian as 'optical illusion') lives up that name as a completely different beast than those tranquilizing soundpaintings or even his smolderingly long-form guitar drone expeditions as Fear Falls Burning. The Ultimated Sign Of Burning Death was the very first release for Vidna Obmana, and has the distinction of being an aggressive industrial noise proposition, pretty much the exact opposite of what he's best known for. That said, Serries did release a compendium of his mechanically inclined industrial tapes on Vinyl On Demand several years back, showcasing his earlier more aggressive inception. But even in comparison to that box, Ultimated Sign Of Burning Death is a dense, almost power-electronic squall of unkempt distortion and hurricane-shock vocal bellows. Controlled Bleeding and early Ramleh would be very worthy reference points. Super limited pressing of just 99 copies on the ever-collectable Italian noise-imprint Urashima. Restocks are unlikely.
White Poppy's gaze down the Pacific Coast requires quite a powerful telescope to get through all the fog, rain, mist, and redwood trees that are situated between her native Vancouver and the fun-fun-fun-in-sun hamlets of Santa Barbara, Laguna Beach, and of course Los Angeles. But, White Poppy's Crystal Dorval is an artist entertaining all of those warm and fuzzy thoughts of California dreaming from her Canadian perch without any of the malaise attributable to Hollywood overload, traffic congestion, Helter Skelter bad vibes, and ongoing draught conditions. Yes, things can look so much better at such a wide distance. These wistful tunes of bliss-pop imperfection make for a luminous continuation of her previous, eponymous album on Not Not Fun released at the summer's end, 2013. Natural Phenomena was granted a midsummer release in 2015; it would just seem wrong to listen to this stuff in the heart of winter. Ringing guitar lines free-float amongst optiganally sounding drum programming, cotton-mouthed synth warbling, and Dorval's breezy, drifting vocalizations. There is even more of a shot of Ducktails' elixir of tropical intoxication to this, to match White Poppy's sunkissed 'n' stoned productions of buoyantly cherry-colored psychedelia. Get it while it's hot (out).
