BACK IN STOCK!!!
Oh boy, the Aktor full-length is here!! We've been eagerly awaiting this ever since the 7" single Aktor teased us with in 2013. How could we not be super stoked? It's a team-up of a couple big aQ faves - you've got Jussi and Tomi from Finnish hypnorock weirdos Circle and associated 'NWOFHM' bands in cahoots with metal master Chris "Professor" Black of Dawnbringer/High Spirits fame, whoa. The Circle guys do the heavily pulsing, ridiculously synth-laden music, while Professor Black handles the vocals in his inimitable melodic and earnest style. It's metal, sorta, or hard rock at least, though we're sorta surprised German traditional metal label High Roller were the ones to release it (probably, they did 'cause High Spirits are on High Roller). It's just so quirkily POPPY, and sometimes strangely moody and non-metallic too - like, just check out the dissonant synth-funk fusion sounds slathered all over the track "Where Is Home", combined also with metal gallops and depressive sci-fi lyrics... WTF??? We wonder what High Roller thought when they heard that. Maybe it's sorta Voivod-y (circa Angel Rat or The Outer Limits), and of course, as with the preceding "I Am The Psychic Wars" single, Blue Oyster Cult is an obvious big influence - but as much '80s cheezoid synthesizer overload BoC as '70s black & white psychedelic BoC. We're talking Club Ninja, here. Club Ninja with Chick Corea sitting in, possibly. Yeah, and Club Ninja is nobody's idea of a great, or even good, BoC album, is it? Yet, it can be a guilty/ironic pleasure for sure (Allan owns a copy, and is gonna spin it right after finishing this review), and so is Aktor... especially since Aktor bring in their own strange slant, due to the proggy Circle-factor, and the natural sincerity of Professor Black's emotive vocal delivery, making for a delirious dose of urgently, angularly rocking WTF? poppiness, living up to the cool album art of melting skulls and floating eyeballs, with lyrics that are cryptically mystical and/or psychological, it seems, having sickness, mental and otherwise, as a frequent theme. They titled it Paranoia for a reason. Yet, ultimately, the music is bright and uplifting - the "motivational montage" vibe common to both High Spirits and the Falcon (Ex-Circle) album is in full effect. Fans of either should definitely check this out, especially if you're also into Steel Mammoth or other Circle "NWOFHM" side projects. We'd say, expectations are met, but also confounded and confused! There are probably a myriad ways this collab could have gone, and we could imagine one a little less campy in some respects... nah, maybe not!
Latest ep length blast of poppy, propulsive alt-rock from this buzzworthy local combo, lead by namesake singer/guitarist Annie Girl (that's her, at a much earlier age, all magic-markered-up on the cover!). Members of "The Flight" include not only aQuarius staffer Nick Ott (Vaniish, Emily Jane White, The Holy Kiss) on drums, but also crazy talented aQ pal Josh Pollock (3 Leafs, DJ Female Convict Scorpion, Gong, Citay, The Lake Millions, Six Eye Columbia, etc.) on guitar. So we're predisposed to like the band, naturally, and we do, but we're pretty sure we'd be professionally impressed by this outfit anyway, Annie & company having a knack for undeniably hooky, hypnotic tunage, with guitars psychedelic and arty, vocals breathy and dreamy, the sound certainly getting a bit grungy-punky here. They just toured opening for Against Me! so it makes sense they're mostly doing the louder faster thing on this, with six songs that clock in under 20 minutes.
From the folks who brought us that recent German Army collection, comes a new disc from the New York duo of Tom Carter (the alchemical psych-folk guitarist from Charalambides and a million other collaborations and solo projects) and the equally abstract and esoteric sonic explorer Pat Murano (of Decimus, No Neck Blues Band, K-Salvatore, & more). Not sure if these two have played together before [they did, we looked it up, one previous lp back in 2012], seems like they should have. Certainly from the sound of this they're on the same wavelength, one that vibrates with both delicate guitar pickery and heavy-duty drone.
The two, untitled, tracks on this disc are long ones - around 24 and 23 minutes, respectively; and after you've been enveloped by the first of them for about ten minutes or so, you'll surely be mesmerized for the remainder of the journey. The first track begins gently, its whisper-soft improvisations swathed in echoing ambience. Carter and Murano's M.O. here is a heavily effects laden one, with backwards swoosh and swooping loops, the piece hushed yet vibrant, a layered, shifting transmission of rapid strum and constant drone.
it's a slow build, slow burn affair, eventually turning towards sharper sounds, with what sounds like the searing, psychedelic soloing of an electric guitar, in fractured fashion, rising from the bed of glistening electronic reverberations and shortwave static sounds. After some time (15 minutes or so) the first track really enters into an amplified zone, much louder and even more distorted than before, a grinding cosmic howl, like some sort of overloaded snake charmer music to charm the world-snake. It could be difficult listening for some, certainly a bit harsh 'round the edges and towards the end, but possessed of a radiant warmth and brittle beauty that's calming; not as chaotic as it may seem.
The second track falls back into spacier, sparser realms at first, with feedback seeping through cracks in its ominous soundscape of creeping, cyclic drones, dragging chains and nebulous melodies, that again all gradually expands and engulfs, volume rising, amplifiers glowing... a quite satisfying conclusion. Fans of Carter and Murano both will be pleased, we think, and we could also compare this in some ways, with its glitches and drones, to what a hypothetical Radian/Urthona collaboration (on a horror soundtrack?) might perhaps sound like...
The current homogenization and "clean up" of San Francisco has caused many of its coolest bands to depart, leaving many of us starved for the true weirdness and drugged out sounds of the city we fell in love with. But for the last few years, CCR Headcleaner have been one of a handful of groups helping keep San Francisco weird and warped, whipping up their dirty, scuzzy rock and roll. Loads of aQ customers freaked out over the totally helter-skelter sounds of the Viles lp by Jealousy a few years back, and it just so happens that the musical wonder/weirdo behind that that project is also at the helm of CCR Headcleaner (which also includes members of late great garage-noise misfits the Hospitals!).
With an acid-baked aesthetic that feels totally natural and never forced, CCR Headcleaner excel at creating damaged, synapse-frying rock that definitely seems to be channeling Royal Trux in their drug addled prime. These guys sound like they were weaned on the 13th Floor Elevators as much as Stiv Bators, Swell Maps and various '70s outsiders like Todd Tamanend Clark. Recorded with JR from Girls, Cokesmoker is a perfect bleary, blurry introduction to the band, and one that has us eagerly anticipating the forthcoming full length they're recording with Ty Segall!
Yet another collection of moody, minimal, abstract beatscapes and home-brewed pulsing ambience from this one time member of Nine Inch Nails. And like the previously reviewed Sonno, Risveglio definitely transcends its humble makings. With just a drum machine, a couple synths and a delay pedal, Cortini crafts haunting, harrowing soundscapes that evoke the sort of cinematic dread of the best John Carpenter scores, as well as the swirling kosmiche mesmer of the current crop of retro synth wranglers (and perhaps more accurately the originals they're all paying homage to), as well as the beatless blur of the best Pop Ambient, and some mutant strain of lovely industrial sound design - all woven into hypnotic stretches of slow shifting atmospherics and murky, muted pulsations.
Most of the tracks remain mired in a sort of fantastically hazy sonic netherworld, while some allow the buried beats to drift to the foreground, but even then, the vibe is mysterious and seriously tripped out, the sounds themselves distorted and rough around the edges, the beats and melodies wreathed in distortion, and that distortion rippling out in clouds of zoner-psych shimmer. Sounds crumble and decay, drift and swirl, undulate and waver, the whole thing sounds fantastically ramshackle and haphazard, only adding to its transient nature, and its organic feel. The sound is super cinematic, but also strangely introspective, makig for a mysterious missive that could be the soundtrack to some strange seventies art house film. Or it could be the electronic ramblings and ravings of a sonic shut-in, an undiscovered musical alchemist, whose mastery only surfaced via some dusty cassette tape found in a box in a back room of a shuttered record store. Both scenarios are equally plausible, and while neither are quite true, the sounds here may make you believe they are.
The Vancouver based minimal wave outfit Cosmetics floored us a couple years ago with two singles they made for Captured Tracks. Those singles now command collector's prices, having gone quickly out of print. A proper full-length record has been long in the works, supposedly to be completed by sometime in 2015. While we eagerly await that one of these days, at least we've now got this compendium featuring those two singles, along with some unreleased material and a couple of tracks that only previoulsy showed up on their Bandcamp page. Here's what we said about "Soft Skin / Black Leather Gloves" - two stellar variations on the death-disco synth sexiness of Miss Kitten & The Hacker. These two songs are dripping with a chic and sensual haze that we can't get enough of. Lo-fi synths, woozy lysergic vocals, and a stripped down DIY aesthetic that makes the Cosmetics' sonic silver clouds sound that much better. It's like they took the most rudimentary elements of early Gina X, Grace Jones, Eurythmics and Ruth, stripped away the gloss and shiny big production and brought it all into a seedy basement in the wee hours of the morning after a drug fueled wild night. In lots of ways its like a less glossy and more smoldery version of the Italians Do It Better groups (Chromatics, Glass Candy, etc.). As for "Sleepwalking / The Cries," it's like the most sensual, seductive steam just comes pouring out of the speakers and takes us to a dark lit, after hours nightclub made for coming down softly, a sonic soundtrack for chilling out in the most striking and sexy way imaginable. As hot and seductive as the Chromatics are, somehow Cosmetics roam in a very similar territory but turn up the heat, with a dark dripping potency that washes through our bodies with a sound so pleasing and yet still slightly sinister. Taking cues from synth wave seducers like Ruth, Dark Day, and Liaisons Dangereuses. Fans of all things minimal wave will definitely want to check this out!
Sub Pop's release of a 7" by these awesome Aussie noise rockers last year was indeed the herald of a full-length on Sub Pop, it's here now and ready to rumble. With an excellent band name like that, and the to-the-point album title, they have a big responsibility to be loud and noisy and aggressive, and they sure follow through, with pounding drums, gnarly scrambling guitars, upset vocals... but amidst all the din and distortion there's often a catchy, heartfelt pop center. Albeit one that's bruised and bleeding, perhaps, swathed in howling nauseous guitar as much as jangly melodicism. On the mic, whether crudely shouting, crooning, or swooning, you get both ragged rough male vocals, and only slightly sweeter female ones, as these love songs / pain songs range and rage from full-on punk to more shoegazey noisemaking. The raw and tender. Recommended to all punk rock romantics, and the hard of hearing, for fans of Sonic Youth, feedtime, Pissed Jeans, even MBV...
Beloved local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another mysterious gem, this time it's The Doubling Riders' Garama, TRS's first reissue, in fact. Garama was originally released in 1991, on the Italian label Italian Il Museo Immaginario, and is an ambitious ethno-ambient, pseudo-operatic, songsuite and concept record. The concept concerns an ancient Saharan kingdom, and the Garamantes who lived there, there in this case now Libya.
But even without knowing the story behind the sounds, the music is pretty stunning, mysterious, evocative, cinematic. The music itself is made up of ethereal chordal swirls, delicate pianos, theremin like melodies, haunting, ethereal drifts, on their own, the sound falls somewhere between a haze seventies new age, and a more tripped out avant kosmische psychedelia. The vocals change the vibe considerably, male/female operatic vocals doing a delicate dark dance on one track, while a spoken word weaves a melancholy tale on another, all the while, the background sounds swirl and shimmer.
At times, The Doubling Riders dip into some moody jazziness, at others fluttering flutes, tribal percussion, and distant steel string strum guide the sound toward a more ethno-ambience, some tracks sound like lost psychedelic operas, some sound like groovy fusion, and the final track is a sprawling 24+ minute epic that allows the 'Riders to stretch WAY out, and create an expensive stretch of ethno-drone / chamber ambience, more avant grade than anything else on the record, it combines all of the group's best elements into a dizzying, ambitious masterwork, that would sound right at home alongside classic tracks from Magma, Van Der Graff Generator and the like.
And as always, it's a Time Released Sound release, which means there are two versions, one, the super fancy and super limited version, which in this case means it's limited to just 75 copies, and comes as a set of three hi-res, hand-worked color photos of the ruins of Garama. There's also a trifold 9" x 17" double sided poster, each with a stenciled aerosol pictoglyph painting embedded with Amazonite dust. The poster comes hand printed in an original print from an antique book on the Garamantes, and each of those is housed in a translucent envelope that is had colored and sprayed. Then that envelope is tied up with a strung set of Amazonite beads. Phew!
We highly recommend grabbing the fancy version if you can. They're meticulously hand made, and every release seems to be more mind-blowing than the last. But fear not, if that's too splendy for you, 'cause there's also a standard version, which comes in a swank digipak, with a 4 page booklet, and is limited to just 150 copies!!
Beloved local label Time Released Sound unearths yet another mysterious gem, this time it's The Doubling Riders' Garama, TRS's first reissue, in fact. Garama was originally released in 1991, on the Italian label Italian Il Museo Immaginario, and is an ambitious ethno-ambient, pseudo-operatic, songsuite and concept record. The concept concerns an ancient Saharan kingdom, and the Garamantes who lived there, there in this case now Libya.
But even without knowing the story behind the sounds, the music is pretty stunning, mysterious, evocative, cinematic. The music itself is made up of ethereal chordal swirls, delicate pianos, theremin like melodies, haunting, ethereal drifts, on their own, the sound falls somewhere between a haze seventies new age, and a more tripped out avant kosmische psychedelia. The vocals change the vibe considerably, male/female operatic vocals doing a delicate dark dance on one track, while a spoken word weaves a melancholy tale on another, all the while, the background sounds swirl and shimmer.
At times, The Doubling Riders dip into some moody jazziness, at others fluttering flutes, tribal percussion, and distant steel string strum guide the sound toward a more ethno-ambience, some tracks sound like lost psychedelic operas, some sound like groovy fusion, and the final track is a sprawling 24+ minute epic that allows the 'Riders to stretch WAY out, and create an expensive stretch of ethno-drone / chamber ambience, more avant grade than anything else on the record, it combines all of the group's best elements into a dizzying, ambitious masterwork, that would sound right at home alongside classic tracks from Magma, Van Der Graff Generator and the like.
And as always, it's a Time Released Sound release, which means there are two versions, one, the super fancy and super limited version, which in this case means it's limited to just 75 copies, and comes as a set of three hi-res, hand-worked color photos of the ruins of Garama. There's also a trifold 9" x 17" double sided poster, each with a stenciled aerosol pictoglyph painting embedded with Amazonite dust. The poster comes hand printed in an original print from an antique book on the Garamantes, and each of those is housed in a translucent envelope that is had colored and sprayed. Then that envelope is tied up with a strung set of Amazonite beads. Phew!
We highly recommend grabbing the fancy version if you can. They're meticulously hand made, and every release seems to be more mind-blowing than the last. But fear not, if that's too splendy for you, 'cause there's also a standard version, which comes in a swank digipak, with a 4 page booklet, and is limited to just 150 copies!!
Nexus is an earlier album from the ever prolific [S], the same Russian sound artist who recently blew our minds with his zombified tape smoldering noise under the name Radioson, and continues to work with the drone based projects Five Elements Music and Exit In Grey. While there clearly a difference from the operations of [S] as Radioson, the boundaries between Five Elements Music and Exit In Grey are far more porous. Environmental recordings, found object manipulation, and electronics are all common within these two bodies of work, accreting into hypnogogic drones and pools of deep ambience. Nexus dates back to 2008, but is one that we've not had the pleasure to delve into until now; and it like so much of the work by [S], is a gem. Here we have an almost literal transubstantiation of five elements (presumably earth, water, fire, air, and ether) into sound itself. There's an incredibly rich tactility that ebbs and flows throughout these two longform pieces, which seamlessly melds brittle fracturings of ice, infernal rumblings of burning embers, and murky clumps of sodden earth. Out of these textures, resonant and mesmerizing drones emerge. While not quite as intense as Small Cruel Party, Nexus easily parallels the luminous, environmental soundscaping of early BJ Nilsen, Jonathan Coleclough, and John Grzinich. Hard to say how many of these cd-rs are left in the world. Our guess, probably not many.
The return of maybe our favorite modern Southern stoner rockers, Freedom Hawk of Virginia, whose previous three records have effortlessly pushed all our drugged out stoner/zoner metal buttons, and not just 'cause of their rad name. The riffs are massive, buzzy and fuzzy, the rhythm section is tight as fuck, but still SWINGS with the best of 'em, there's some moody psych stuff on here too amidst all that massive riffola, and the vocals are a dead ringer for Ozzy, which would be more of a problem if Freedom Hawk's sound was more Sabbathy, but instead, these guys seem to be fusing the sun baked desert rock of Kyuss (and later QOTSA), not to mention maybe a little Monster Magnet and Soundgarden, and hell some actually proper Southern Rock. Plenty of the jams here sound like they could be covers of Black Oak Arkansas, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, the Marshall Tucker Band, just cranked WAY WAY up, and then those Ozzy-ish vocals, shit, at times it's almost like Ozzy singing for Raging Slab, which to be honest, is about the coolest thing we could think of.
You can go back and read our reviews of the other Freedom Hawk records, but by know you should know if this is your kinda Southern hard rocking riffiness, which if you're anything like us, it most goddamn certainly is. And like every Freedom Hawk record, we're gonna play this nonstop until there's another one to take its place!
Sun City Girls acolytes from Turkey, Hayvanlar Alemi ("World Of Animals") have been wowing with their exotic-international-psych-surfing ways for a while now - they started back in '99 but we (and most of their non-Turkish fans, we can assume) only got hip to them when Sublime Frequencies released their fab second album, Guarana Superpower, in 2010. Visions Of A Psychedelic Ankara was originally a self-released cd-r they put out that same year, now reissued on vinyl for the first time as the A-side here, with the B-side of this record, Selected Visions, consisting of other, related, unreleased Hayvanlar Alemi rarities circa 2009-2011.
The title Visions Of A Psychedelic Ankara references African Head Charge's Visions Of A Psychedelic Africa, and that's 'cause it's Hayvanlar Alemi's heavily echo-effected expedition into the realm of DUB. It's no surprise that the group's instrumental global-psych sound would align well with reggae/dub, so really that they had to dabble. They do a cover of an Eek-A-Mouse track, and some Turkish radio jingle, also giving the dubwise treatment to a bunch of their own compositions as well, some are older tracks, others were written with reggae rhythms and melodicas for this release. As per usual we think the dub version of anything is always the better version so for our money the already great Hayvanlar Alemi shoulda just kept on doing this dub thing!! Think Rastas with hookahs (and bit of a trippy spaghetti western vibe too, with all that reverb). Definitely a treat for fans.
Vinyl only, 180 gram, gatefold sleeve, limited edition of 500 copies.
The ridiculously rockin' quartet of Sir Serpent, Lightning Lord Python, Don "The Warrior" Viper and Ringo Snake are back to the attack, on this new disc, an assuredly "advanced" follow-up to their enjoyable Dungeon Masters album from 2012 - though once again it sounds more like 1985, being all about speedy, rollicking, retro metal glory. While this Teutonic heavy metal squad surely can't expect to be taken entirely seriously, it's not like we don't think they mean it, either. We think they DO mean it, more than most maybe. In fact, the very absurdity of their over-the-top, poser-killing metalness gives them the freedom to do what they do even better, with total abandon. So, abandon yourself to it and you'll be gleefully banging your head too. Especially for this album's most punked-out and Manowar-ish anthem, "Born To Play On Ten", the chorus of which has to be heard to be believed (but still probably not easily understood), as the combination of the singer's German accent and shrieking, all-in-one-breath crescendo'd delivery of the lines "Born! Born! Born to play on ten!" make for one of the more indecipherably nutzoid things we've heard in a while, for a metal song refrain anyway.
For fans of Metalucifer, Sacred Steel, Ironsword, Iron Dogs, Thor...
It's been YEARS since we last heard from weirdo black metal / ambient soundscaping one man band Jabladav, who we were first introduced to via his Dead As Duck debut, an unabashed homage to late great Bay Area black metallers Weakling, from the title (a reference to Weakling's Dead As Dreams), to the artwork, and yeah, right down to the music. But as we mentioned before, while it was plenty black, and plenty metal, it was also pretty far out, kinda post rocky and psychedelic, home brewed and pretty fantastically fucked up. Since that first release, we've reviewed a dozen plus Jabladav discs, all of them pretty great, and all of them pretty weird. Lots of black buzz, but also plenty of atmospheric ambience.
We had actually begun to think that Jabladav was no more, when what should show up in the mail, a huge box, with not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR new releases. Two Jabladav full lengths, an EP, and James Harlow's (aka Jabladav) first solo record under his own name. Phew! We'll tackle one at a time, but if you want all four the rest are to be found on the list below in the 'In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed' section, or just ask. But be warned, they are all extremely different.
Figured we'd start with the one closest to the 'classic' Jabladav sound, which is Fin, indeed the only properly black metal release of the bunch. Like past Jab jams, it's all twisted sinewy black buzz, progged out drumming, and raspy demonic vokills. That post rockiness is still present, keeping the sound from ever being truly grim, but instead, it ends up being almost avant, with burst of double kick erupting beneath woozy minor key melodies, the sound never truly dense, more spare and expansive. There are also acoustic guitars, and some seriously weird crooned vox, as well as some distorted buzz SO distorted it almost sounds like your speakers are fried. The guitar playing also displays Harlow's Black Flag obsession, with plenty of Greg Ginn-isms, and gristly, angular gnarl, the songs lurching from fractured stop/starts to furious metallic pound.
But it's Jabladav, so there's some kosmische drift at some point, all ethereal and blissed out, as well as some sitar like buzz, and one track that sounds like jazz fusion black metal, with a weird mix, that relegates most of the sounds to the background, while the guitar howls and screams and shreds. There's also some total planetarium dreamdrone synth shimmer, and one long final sprawl of rumbling thrum, that seems to be constructed from the low notes of a piano reverberating into a slow shifting black fog, before actual notes surface right near the end.
Another baffling sonic slab of avant WTF outsider metal genius from Jabladav, and we're glad to have him back. We'll review one of the other ones next time, but they are SUPER limited, and we got most of the copies. In fact, Fin is LIMITED TO JUST FIFTY COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered and signed, on the disc itself, on the booklet AND on the tray card as well!
John Balance once suggested that Coil was attempting to compose music in the same manner that Austin Osman Spare had written his theosophical musings, laced with magic, sigils, and a highly personalized cosmology. The same could go for the thoroughly enigmatic project Kama Rupa, a loose occultist undertaking that also conducts their dark spiritualism through the lens of music. Whatever meaning lays within the cryptic philosophies of Kama Rupa, they are keeping it to themselves, only sporadically broadcasting their beliefs in the form of a handful of ritualized industrial productions. Such epistemological secrecy informed Kama Rupa's earlier works in parallel with the ceremonial / apocalyptic imagery of Metgumbnerbone and Zero Kama; but here on Sistinas Sanguis, there's much more emphasis on electronics. Very dark electronics. At the onset, carillon bells are sampled and laid upon a static encrusted surface of somber sequencing, a strategy that wouldn't be out of place on any of Coil's majestic, instrumental numbers. Darkly sequenced tracks of modulated noise, with sinister vocals lurking in the shadows, and maudlin piano dirges square as elegant meditations on death and dying without ever sounding like the overwhelming flood that Lustmord and Brighter Death Now would unleash. The four tracks found on this mini-album are exceptional, with the only quibble we have being the brevity of the work. About 20 minutes, fit onto just one side of the vinyl. Limited to just 250 copies, we've been told.
An interesting twist on the guitar soli genre sees these two old friends who both have deep roots in various hardcore, skate culture and street art scenes come together for a series of cinematic dual guitar vignettes. Rich Jacobs, whome we have featured here before with a tape on the Sanity Muffin label, is a prominent Bay Area artist with ties to the Mission School, who has designed skateboards, shoes for Vans and many of the album covers for Salt Lake City avant-hardore collective Iceburn. Tim Kerr, who most folks may know from Texan punk legends The Big Boys, is also a graphic portrait artist whose work has been featured nationwide in books, magazines and skateboards as well.
Both long inspired by roots and folk music, they craft here a variety of sounds with electric and acoustic guitars that look back on a dusty Americana filtered through a rigorous DIY indie sensibility. Beautiful strummed and picked melodies countered by searching improvisations and roughhewn noisy atmospheres weave oblique tales of small boondock towns and wide open abandoned spaces. A wondrously sublime take on the "soundtrack without a film" convention, mainly because it doesn't try too hard and their mutual compatible playing style ends up coming through quite effortlessly. For fans of Bill Orcutt, John Fahey, and Sir Richard Bishop.
When we first heard King Dude, aka TJ Cowgill, he came across as some sort of mysterious goth troubadour, his music super lo-fi, his voice impossibly, dramatically low, the whole vibe was like a bedroom Elvis crossed with drunken country heartbreak ballads and obscure downer death rock. And it was a concoction that worked for us big time. Those early records evoked long nights of sitting beside a fire, outside a rickety house, deep in the bayou, while this man in black crooned and strummed, spinning tales of death, and loss, love and betrayal.
Thus, the first track on Songs Of Flesh And Blood - In The Key Of Light threw us off a bit, sounding unlike anything we'd heard before from King Dude, instead reminding us of Iceage or the Holograms, being crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, with electric guitars and driving drums. Gloomy post punk of the highest order for sure, and catchy as all get out. While we were hoping for a whole record of this post punk bombast, the second track settles back into more familiar territory, although much less murky and muddy, the production pristine, guitars shimming over reverbed piano, hand claps, KD's deep vocals out Nick Caving Nick Cave himself, in fact, we're hearing some twisted mix of Nick Cave, along with Woven Hand, Majical Cloudz and even some Tom Waits, at his very swampiest. Snarly slither gives way to lilting popsmithery, and lovely, heartfelt ballads collapse into grinding black miserablism. And just to prove that first track wasn't a fluke, that more rocking sound pops up several more times, most notably on "Rosemary", which sounds like a garage blues Suicide, or Chrome covering the Velvets.
And so it goes, King Dude delivering an ever shifting collection of sonic darkness, heartfelt introspection, wistful folkiness, twang flecked gloom rock, and over the top, almost goth cabaret. Cowgill is the master of his craft for sure, and that craft continues to grow ever more varied and expansive, baffling and mysterious, and with every record, as the sound and sounds continue to fracture and mutate and push well beyond the boundaries of those early record, they somehow also manage coalesce ever more neatly into an already difficult to define sound, perhaps one who's magic is in its indefinable nature, one that is perhaps best left impressionistic, to be heard and felt and maybe, but only maybe, one day truly understood.
Attention New Age Heads! Just click add to cart now because these will be gone before you know it. The first pressing is already out of print and we have just a handful of these, so don't sleep! This is a deluxe 3 cassette reissue of master zither excursionist Laraaji's seminal cassette releases made between 1978 and 1983: Lotus Collage (1978), Unicorns In Paradise (1981), and Connecting With The Inner Healer Through Music (1983). Originally hand made and distributed by Laraaji himself, the cassette form was perfect for immersive meditative listening. Indeed this is the first time these recordings have been reissued in their original form, as only excerpts have been included on compilations previously. Recorded before Brian Eno's "discovery" and release of Laraaji's Ambient 3: Days of Radiance, these pieces are blissfully extraordinary and come highly recommended. Packed in orange embossed cardstock sleeve around the 3 hardshell cassettes replicating the original tapes' j-card artwork. Uber-limited! Unicorns In Paradise!!
Even with the endless barrage of reissues over the last decade, the music headz here at aQ are still so psyched when something shows up that none of us have heard, or even heard of, only to fall in love with it and wonder where the heck that record had been our whole life?!
Such is the case with this awesome and endearing set of '70s outsider jams from the singularly monikered Laurice, who apparently went on to have a big career and even hit the top of the charts in Canada with some dance-pop and smooth-jazz. But this collection is pre-Canada Laurice, when he was still living in the UK in the '70s and creating seriously infectious proto-punk (and proto-disco!) with a keen pop sensibility and a sweet girl-group like vibe. It seems like you can draw a pretty direct line from many of the early releases on Lookout! to the music of Laurice, which is equal part rock crunch, pop hooks and punk energy. There's doubt Pansy Division would freak the fuck out hearing these songs, and really, if anybody was down with Laurice, it would probably be them! It's not difficult to imagine everyone from The Cramps to B-52's being influenced by these songs, if in fact they ever actually heard them.
Turns out it wasn't just Jobriath who was out and proud in the 70's, cuz Laurice holds nothing back with songs like "He's My Guy" and several tracks like "Born To Serve", "Wild Sugar", and "Rock Hard" that directly reference gay S&M/leather culture. In fact, as much as we love Jobriath (which is a LOT), we find Laurice to be way more up our alley, with sound that at times is totally blown out, raw and fuzzy and would sound right at home right now on Burger records.
Lots of modern groups like Shannon & The Clams, Wand, and Hunx & His Punx also seem sonically (and spiritually) aligned with Laurice, whose tracks do seem like blueprints for the warped garage-pop those groups specialize in. If John Waters were ever to curate a Nuggets-like compilation there's no doubt any and all of the songs here would feature prominently. We could just imagine Divine, in full force, with these songs blasting on the soundtrack. Lots and lots of fun. Plus, the poppy proto-punk of "I'm Gonna Smash Your Face In" and the like is pretty classic even without any campy / gay angle to it.
Lavender is the new project of local San Francisco (by way of France) synthesist Hugo Paris. His debut cassette release, Mystique Youth, is a beautiful visionary piece of prismatic sci-fi electronic romance largely inspired by Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel Dune. Though one can feel the moody strains of Vangelis' Blade Runner score as well as Edvard Artemiev's existential planetscape drones, Paris puts those influences to use in a most forward thinking way. He's no novice when it comes to equipment either. A technical engineer by trade, Paris employs a dizzying array of synthesizers, space-echo, oscillators and effects to bring in a vibrating quality of light, space and movement that gives his music an unconventional uplifting warmth and soulfulness. Mystique Youth is sublimely serene and progressively dreamy, but with an alien mystery that feels as if everything we hold dear will soon change. If you dig Nils Frahm, Jamie XX, or any of the artists mentioned above, you will find lots to love here. A stellar debut!
Download code included. And for a very limited time, we have a deluxe package that comes with a t-shirt, as well as a regular cassette version by itself. If ordering the deluxe package, please specify desired t-shirt size in the comments section of your order.
And by the way, we loved this release so much, we are hosting a Lavender in-store performance next week, Friday August 21st at 6 pm! Come on down to see and hear these amazing synths in action!
Lavender is the new project of local San Francisco (by way of France) synthesist Hugo Paris. His debut cassette release, Mystique Youth, is a beautiful visionary piece of prismatic sci-fi electronic romance largely inspired by Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel Dune. Though one can feel the moody strains of Vangelis' Blade Runner score as well as Edvard Artemiev's existential planetscape drones, Paris puts those influences to use in a most forward thinking way. He's no novice when it comes to equipment either. A technical engineer by trade, Paris employs a dizzying array of synthesizers, space-echo, oscillators and effects to bring in a vibrating quality of light, space and movement that gives his music an unconventional uplifting warmth and soulfulness. Mystique Youth is sublimely serene and progressively dreamy, but with an alien mystery that feels as if everything we hold dear will soon change. If you dig Nils Frahm, Jamie XX, or any of the artists mentioned above, you will find lots to love here. A stellar debut!
Download code included. And for a very limited time, we have a deluxe package that comes with a t-shirt, as well as a regular cassette version by itself. If ordering the deluxe package, please specify desired t-shirt size in the comments section of your order.
And by the way, we loved this release so much, we are hosting a Lavender in-store performance next week, Friday August 21st at 6 pm! Come on down to see and hear these amazing synths in action!
The mid-'80s were very productive for Le Syndicat, the French industrial noise outfit that formed in 1982 with the noble intention to make the most noise possible. The bulk of the tracks from Timespace Losses has been culled from various cassette compilations Le Syndicat contributed to during that time period, with the final track on the album being a rare live recording. These works defined their earlier noise bruitism before iron-fisted rhythms locked down Le Syndicat's latter-day panzerbeat aesthetics. Overblown screams and garbled vocalizations dissolved amidst the acrid feedback, mottled distortion and blackened noise which seeped out of Le Syndicat's repurposed consumer electronics (e.g. shortwave radios, televisions, walkmen, etc.), inspired by the mediated chaos of SPK, Merzbow, Ramleh, Whitehouse, Controlled Bleeding, and other early practitioners of power electronics. Not surprisingly, Le Syndicat managed to land their work on tape compilations released by Broken Flag, ZSF Produkt (run by Masami Akita back in the day), Placebo, and Beast 666. This collection splatters itself as a very primitive, nasty set of recordings. Conet Project fans should take note that the Swedish Rhapsody numbers station is featured heavily in the very John Duncan like collage of shortwave transmissions from the Le Syndicat live track concluding the album. Recommended for all of you noise freaks out there!
LFZ is the new homemade kosmiche venture of former Bay area guitarist Sean Smith and his contemporary new age concern Stimulus Progression, which has been releasing both new and obscure archival recordings on cd-r and cassette, such as the Les Vampyrettes cassette we listed last time. The self-titled release from LFZ is inspired by Harmonia, Fripp and Eno and Terry Riley, but we also have a handful of their second release, Pointless Prism which features 14 shorter trance-inducing pieces in a more kind of Steve Halpern vein based on timbre, colors and sonic frequencies. Not as dynamic as the self-titled release, but highly purposeful for any hypnotic states you might be seeking.
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LFZ is the new homemade kosmiche venture of former Bay area guitarist Sean Smith and his contemporary new age concern Stimulus Progression, which has been releasing both new and obscure archival recordings on cd-r and cassette, such as the Les Vampyrettes cassette we listed last time. LFZ is inspired by Harmonia, Fripp and Eno and Terry Riley, bringing us two longform pieces that progress through various movements of modular synth, electric guitar and an array of analog and digital effects. In an effort to convey the journey of life and death, synthesized raga modes are employed through searching improvisations and oceanic expanses of sound. Sonic spaces morph seamlessly from cosmic floating fields to pulsating jet streams, and intrepid wonder to pensive hallucinatory explorations. Available on cd-r and cassette. Quite lovely, but limited to 100 copies. You know what that means!
We also have a handful of their second release, Pointless Prism which features 14 shorter trance-inducing pieces in a kind of Steve Halpern vein based on timbre, colors and sonic frequencies. Not as dynamic as the self-titled release, but highly purposeful for any hypnotic states you might be seeking.
First release we've listed from these Sonoron desert drugged-out weirdos, and as far as first releases go, it doesn't hit much harder than this. The punk/hardcore pedigree of Marshstepper's members shows in both their aesthetic and rigorous touring schedule, but the music on here is much more twisted and disorienting than most punk. Seeing Marshtepper live (or just listening to this really fuckin' loud) is probably the best way of truly appreciating how MASSIVE these guys sound. Lurching, industrial nastiness (think the slow, haunting rhythms of 20 Jazz Funk Greats) gives way to cavernous walls of pulsating synth and guitar that bring to mind the apocalyptic soundscapes of aQ fave Theologian. These guys have been BUSY touring everywhere and releasing a series of cassettes on Tempe label Ascetic House, and it's fair to say that any future output is only going to improve. Probably fairly limited, housed in a mysterious sleeve with three awesome and mysterious pictures inside, and also no indication whether this is supposed to be 33 or 45 rpm (it's 33).
It's hard not to start every Monument Of Urns review the same, and since we can never seem to resist, and actually don't try that hard anyway, it is once again, time to prostrate yourself before the 7th coming, the most recent return of the Urns, which is indeed the 7th installment in their (his actually!) ongoing series of single track mini epics. Broken, like the previous six releases, consists of a 20 minute (or so) track, housed in elaborate home made packaging, and is a thick, festering, caustic sonic crawl, that manages to be brutal, blown out, punishing and pummeling, but also strangely mesmerizing and blackly beautiful.
Ever new Urns record has us immediately thinking it's the heaviest one yet, or the meanest, or the murkiest, and without going back and listening to them all again (which we're now dying to do), Broken elicits the same impression. The riffs bleed and ooze, a gristly, tarpit creep, the seems to blur and smear and grow more indistinct with each passing second, the drums driving this sluggish behemoth are echoey thuds, Neanderthal pounds, spare and sparse, but still bombastic and pulverizing. There are vocals too. Harsh ones that just sort of soak into the surrounding sounds, but also what sounds like clean singing (or maybe just some strange effected guitar melody), that add some haunting almost horror movie sounding melodic counterpoint part way through.
But barring that, and a bit of wild psychedelic squall near the song's end, the bulk of Broken remains locked into a sort of lugubrious lumber, heady and hypnotic, trudging relentlessly, a moody, metallic drag, that borders on industrial at times, sounding almost like a slowed down Godflesh, monstrous and monolithic, seriously some of the most epic and majestic downer doom / sick sludge EVER, and it remains kind of shocking to us that Monument Of Urns doesn't get the same love as groups like Moss, Bunkur, SUNNO))), etc. At least he does from us. And very likely you too, especially if you dig that sort of downtuned, dopesick dirgery as much as we do...
Moon Pool & Dead Band are the twisted, weirdo, electronic offshoot of freaky noisemakers Wolf Eyes, and for this latest release they dig deep into the archives for an early, early jam, the title track "Meq", and it's a doozy: total scuzzy, cyborg techno, loose limbed, electro-noise groovery. A chaotic sound that manages to be both freaky and funky, sexy and sci-fi, but seriously gritty and grimy as well. It's a propulsive dance floor destroying workout that sounds like some classic Detroit 12", spinning on a busted old turntable and run through a bank of fucked up FX. Whatever it is, and wherever it finds its inspiration, it pretty much kills, and we'd happily dig a whole record of this stuff. Which thankfully is precisely what this is, with that track getting reworked by a bunch of folks who take the original into a bunch of different directions, most of them twisted techno variants.
The BMG Interdimensional Mix though is a standout, sending tones careening from speaker to speaker, before a skittery, skeletal beat surfaces beneath a churning morass of thick, rumbling bass buzz, the end portion peppered with some seriously spaced out squelch. But perhaps our favorite is the Nate Young / Wolf Eyes mix, where Young pulls apart his own track, fashioning it into something equal parts fractured and fucked up, and also strangely sort of hypnotic and post rocky. Sounds like a weird mix, but it works, and had us hankering for a whole record of Young remixing Young. Beyond those two jams, the rest of the tracks are pretty bad ass too, each a fucked up, freaky and funky, technoid reinterpretation of a track that was already pretty freaky and fucked up on its own.
And speaking of fucked up and freaky (once again!), dig the demented cover art!
Land is the first full length from this all female British psychedelic noise pop crew, who have previously shared a split with another aQ fave, nineties shoegaze revivalists The History Of Apple Pie, and while their sounds aren't all that familiar, they're definitely complimentary.
And fans of that sort of dreamy jangly retro-indie rock sound will definitely find much to love here, a sound reminiscent of groups like Stereolab, Electrelane, Lush, Curve, and the like, but these ladies give the psychedelic space rock boy's club a serious run for their money as well, fusing those super melodic pop elements to seriously heady stretches of droned out, motorik mesmer, dense hypno-rock grooves wrapped in distorted spidery guitars, the group slipping effortlessly from straight psychedelic indie pop, to explosive heart-of-the-sun, out-jams that, minus the vocals, would likely elicit comparisons to heavier psych/space/neo-kraut rockers like Wooden Ships, White Hills, Carlton Melton or even Loop. In fact there are plenty of moments on Land that sound like total Loop worship, channeling the taking-drugs-to-make-music-to-take-drugs-by grooviness of Spacemen 3 and cranking it way up and looping (yup) those supercharged sounds into a druggier, more driving sprawl.
But at their heart, Novella are definitely a pop group, with a handful of hooks to die for, with pretty much every track here boasting some earwormy melody, some fantastic vocals, lovely harmonies, which just happen to be often paired with some groovy, fuzzy, jammy psychedelic trip out. It's a pretty stunning combo, and one that will likely have pop kids, space nerds and psych freeks equally smitten. Slipcased cd or vinyl with 'bonus' 7" featuring two tracks also on the cd.
Pagan forest dwellers and Kvltists alike, unite, a new Obsequiae album has been brewing in the cauldron and is ready to be drank from the goblet! Like a medieval Marduk or a madrigal Mayhem, Obsequiae capitalizes the METAL in folk metal.
Ostensibly a band since 1998 (then called Autumnal Winds), Obsequiae released their debut Suspended In The Brume Of Eos in 2011, a stunning and powerful debut that left many, like us, wanting more. Finally, enter Aria of Vernal Tombs, a mighty follow up to that record. Obsequiae's Tanner Anderson and Co. mange to combine beautiful, haunting medieval harp tracks with a riff-centric and heavy-yet-melodic black metal assault. On the black metal tracks, Anderson's dueling guitar melodies are the driving force, catchy, melodic, but always heavy.
Aria Of Vernal Tombs (Google tells us "vernal" means of or relating to springtime, fyi... still don't know what a "Brume of Eos" is, though) never feels cheesy or hamfisted in its attempt to incorporate medieval melodies into the songs; rather, these feel like cohesive, melodic pieces that are equal parts beautiful and heavy. Obsequiae is much more interested in making you breathe the medieval air and feel the crumbling stone than playing make-believe at the Ren Faire (no offense to Ren Faire lovers, aQ's own Harry among them). This record will easily slide into our top metal albums of the year chart!
From the ashes of Sic Alps comes Peacers, Mike Donovan's new band venture into lo-fi hiss and thrum, stabilized by the driving hand of Ty Segall who produces and contributes musically to half the album! Inspired by The Kinks and Modern Lovers, in intrepid bursts of bluesy noise and off the rails wobbliness, this is the best set of songs from Donovan in awhile, and cements Donovan's place as the last hold out of San Francisco's weirdo garage punk energy and anger (see "Super Francisco" to see what we mean). Something we very much need around here right now. Recommended of course.
With a name like Pissgrave, you might already have an idea of what you're likely in for. But even then, you might not be prepared for the all out ferocity of these Philly death metallers' debut, a furious, frenzied aural assault that takes pretty dense technical death metal and douses it in noise and utter sonic chaos. The recording is not lo-fi, but somehow the sound is filthy, and grimy, and gritty, and at times borders on full on, blown-out white noise. The vocals too - unlike the guttural cookie monster vox of most death metal outfits, here they're super-distorted, a caustic caterwaul, that not only sounds inhuman, they're also somehow beyond demonic, almost alien, like the band have some weird Man Is The Bastard style noise-ician, injecting bristling gouts of crumbling, garbled FX into (or, out of) Pissgrave's sick sonic maw instead of actual vokills.
It's a dizzying, and dizzyingly dense onslaught, not that far removed from the likes of Portal or Wold, but somehow, Pissgrave take the noisy experimentation of those groups and fuse it to a more classic metal sound. Roiling swaths of death-noise occasionally part, revealing a frantic bit of riffing, or some progged out burst of tech-death, or a wild splatter of octopoidal drumming, inevitably collapsing again into a blurred black maelstrom. And did we mention the shredding leads? They don't pop up often, but when they do, they're wild, freaked out tangles that sound totally unhinged. The band do slow things down here and there, unfurling massive walls of deathmarch doom, but those moments too are fleeting, quickly erupting into another barrage of deathlike brutality.
We're total suckers for classic, old school death metal. And even moreso for fucked up, weirdo, avant death metal, and somehow, Pissgrave satisfies our love of both. Big time!
THE VINYL VERSION IS HERE! The ever-prolific Dom Fernow is back with another Prurient release (the 23rd we've reviewed, actually!!), and it seems the days of nonstop releases of pure harsh noise are long in his past. There was a time not too far back when 30 minutes of mic-against-amp feedback squall on limited release cassette was all you needed to be a noise all-star, but luckily for everyone it looks like we've moved past that. Fernow, in addition to the "whatever I'm listening to right now" vibe of Prurient, has been busy with, let's see, Vatican Shadow, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Exploring Jezebel, and Cold Cave (probably a bunch more too).
On Frozen Niagara Falls, Fernow has THREE slabs of vinyl to explore everything he's been busy with for the past ten plus years of work, and it shows. He drifts and darts between bleak industrial soundscapes, the overblown amp-shattering noise of early Prurient, cheesy coldwave sawtooth synth leads, and pounding, overtly sexual Whitehouse worship. There's moments when Fernow lets a track or an idea really breathe and envelop, and there's some actual tranquility. In the liner notes, in fact, Fernow recommends you listen "at night while snow falls silently under street lights". But, this is still a Prurient album, and what kind of Prurient album would it be if it didn't have the occasional outburst of pent up hypersexual rage? Channeling the distorted, fucked up rhythms and lyrical themes of classic power electronics, Fernow makes you look up and listen, to forget the snow falling under the street lights and pay attention. Those moments quickly disappear into the albums frozen landscape, though, as this album is more brood then bludgeon. A huge fucking statement of an album, easily the best Prurient record thus far, and highly recommended for old fans and new.
LIMITED PRESSING. We have what we have, not sure we'll be able to get more anytime soon.
Killer second album from Pure Ground - the minimal wave / EBM analog synth fetish project of Greg Holger and Jesse Short, who have been touring both the States and Europe pretty relentlessly over the past couple of years. Holger is best known as a feral noise technician working as Hive Mind (amongst many other pseudonyms), along with running the inimitable Chondritic Sound label. Jesse Short doesn't have as extensive a discography as Holger, but has honed an impressive synth-pop sound through his sporadic work with New Zealand synth-wrangler Max Brotman, who also popped up on a couple of choice minimal wave albums in recent years. They maintain an aggressive sound of feverish, machined rhythms and lacerating electronic sequences with barked vocals of dystopian slogans for a fractured society - futuristic, contemporary, and / or anachronistic. Standard Of Living adheres tautly to a structuralist electro-pop approach with microwave pulses of flinty synth bursts shaping the most minimal of melodies. The assertiveness of the album lends to plenty of very complementary similarities to Klinik (and pretty much all of the Dirk Ivens catalog for that matter), Nitzer Ebb, Snowy Red, and even contemporaries like Youth Code or Xeno & Oaklander.
It was the chilling fury that Liz Mahoney brought to Screature's recent gig opening for Lydia Lunch here in San Francisco in the summer of 2015 that caused us to really stand up and take notice of the band. Let's be clear though, Screature's post-punk propulsion and unsmiling drone rock never achieved the searing misanthropy of Lydia Lunch's four decades of hellish show-womanship. Yup, that something for Screature to strive for! But that's nothing to diminish how good this band is, and how great their records continue to be.
Four Columns is their second album, and there's no sign of a sophomore slump here. This follows the perpetual car-crash of black denim goth that Screature delivered on their eponymous debut. Mahoney's full-bodied voice bellows with all of the operatic falsetto of Diamanda Galas and Siouxsie (especially on her notoriously bar-clearing rendition of "The Lord's Prayer"), while the band behind her rips through the songs with a serrated, pneumatic pulse of jagged guitar riffs akin to Killing Joke and early Christian Death, with thumping backbeats that keep the clock ticking rather quick-like while alternating between disco-punk grooviness and VU-primitivism, and bass-synth lines that give this a psychoid Martin Rev feel to the whole album. Modern day, death-rock par excellence!
Dark Entries has done the post-punk lovin' world a huge favor in reissuing this dark wave gem from 1981. Second Layer was a side project of Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey of British post-punk group The Sound, that focused on a more detatched mechanized aesthetic driven by guitars synths and drum machines. Not too far from their main band's initial bleak anger at an increasingly militarized and dehumanized society, Second Layer seemed to be a better outlet for their darker (and starker) themes. World Of Rubber was their only full length, originally released on Cherry Red records, but this reissue is bolstered by the inclusion of their first two eps, State Of Emergency and Flesh As Property from 1979 and 1980, as well as demos from a self-titled compilation released in 1987, making this reissue a complete anthology of the project's output, and a revelation for listeners more familiar with The Sound. Essential!!!
We've written about this minimalistic, often hilarious, post-punkish English 'rap' duo before, and we REALLY like 'em, and here's their new record and you should buy it!
Beyond that, it's not that easy for us to review this, 'cause we don't necessarily feel qualified to do so, in part because we don't really understand, like, 50 percent or more of what the guy is saying!! And there are even lyrics printed in the booklet. But he's got his thick English accent, he's talking this English slang lingo, about subjects that often unfamiliar to us, pertaining to British society, subculture, etc. Yet, maybe 'cause we're Anglophiles, maybe 'cause you gotta love a good beat and some silly words, we find it all hugely entertaining.
This new disc, their eighth (!!!) album, opens with a crowd chanting their name, an appropriate reflection of how these guys have risen in popularity over the last couple of years here, since we first heard about 'em. And then immediately you've got one of their simple, fairly rudimentary bass and drum grooves, stripped down, kinda funky, with what this time what sounds like live bass if not live drums, over which the main what we'd call rapper in the group does his thing, telling like it is, usually in a spoken word rhyming way, but sometimes venturing into a bit of quasi-singing-ness, and again we can't always understand what he's on about, but we glean enough to know he's talking shit about stuff, and it's funny. Sleaford Mods' urgent and sardonic critiques of pretty much everything are full of "Did he just say that?" double take moments that require a rewind or look at the lyric sheet. One such instance comes up when he disses somebody for dressing like they they they're "Snake fucking Plissken" (Escape From New York reference, yeah!). That's in a track, titled, uh, "Cunt Make It Up", which appears to be about a particular band or a scene of bands general that he doesn't like much to say the least. Another line in there that caught our ear is when goes on to say the band looks like "Rocket From The Crypt meets an old codger with one leg". WTF? So that one's a good one, and the whole album is pretty good. If you're already into the Sleaford Mods you'll like this (and if you don't like 'em, you won't like this one either!). If you haven't heard 'em before, this would be as good a place as any to start. So that's the basic 'review' right there, eh? Good job, us.
David Stubbs has authored one hell of book in Future Days, on the history of Krautrock, asking the leading question: "How did Krautrock, so lightly regarded in its own day both at home and abroad, become one of the cornerstones for modern pop and rock music?" He quickly maps out the differentiation between the bloated myth-making of progressive rock, the Anglophilic tendencies of psychedelia, and the mottled spectrum that loosely is defined as Krautrock - a term that was actually despised by many of the Germans making said music back in the day (and was perhaps used ironically by Faust). John Weinzeirl of Amon Duul has some particularly harsh words for Julian Cope whose fanboy gushing in his cult-classic Krautrocksampler was instrumental in one of the many waves of Krautrock revivalism that has taken place over the years. Stubbs takes care to tread carefully in the identity politics, here, speaking to the cultural coalition of multiple forces, ideologies, and aesthetics that were at a temporal cross-section of what was seen as the past and what was seen as the future.
After a lengthy prologue digging into the post-war culture of conservative German pop music, and introductions to the various protagonists, Stubbs gets into the meat of the book with very engaging interviews with and ruminations on pretty much all of our favorites: Amon Duul, Can, Kraftwerk, Faust, Cluster / Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Popul Vuh, and even Einsturzende Neubauten as the next logical step of the Krautrock ethos, through the turbulent '80s. He goes on to discuss the numerous bands influenced by Krautrock, beginning with Bowie's Berlin and moving on from there.
A totally great read!
Finally! After we rightfully raved about their gleaming jewel of a demo (Jewel Of Gwahlur that is!) about 40 or so lists ago, Northern Ireland's epic purveyors of rousing sci-fi themed true metal have jettisoned forth from distant dimensions to unveil their debut full length. And man alive, if it wasn't worth the wait! Brought to us once more via Stormspell Records (who are fast becoming one of our favorite sources for arcane heavy metal both old and new), The Reaper's Spiral is an altogether breathtaking display of hard hitting melodicism, galloping dual guitar harmonies, and glorious heavy metal craftsmanship. Theirs is a style of epic heavy metal both regal and charged, somber yet undeniably high energy - otherworldly, timeless and arcane, yet as fist pumping, head banging and face melting as any new metal band you're gonna find in this galaxy or the next, drawing to mind such past luminaries as Solstice (or maybe more aptly the short lived Solstice offshoot Isen Tor), Grand Magus and Traveller-era Slough Feg, along with a classically NWOBHM-ish knack for hooks a la Satan and Iron Maiden. Four of the demo's tracks are redone here, and they continue to mine Asimov's Foundation series for inspiration, as well as tackling other, epic subjects. If recent releases by Visigoth, Stone Dagger and Dawnbringer have left you awaiting the next battle call summoning you to the nearest air guitar, then look no further! Terminus are here for you. Some of us here (Harry, Allan) can't stop listening to it... Epickallly recommended!
If you've ever taken an anthropology course in college, you should be familiar with the indigenous Yamomami people of the Amazon. A primitive stone-age tribe dwelling deep in the rainforest that has persisted into the modern day. They're fascinating to academic researchers and curious lay people alike, the subject of various books and documentaries, noted for such traits as their supposed propensity for violence, their communal living arrangements, consumption of the ashes of the bones of their dead, and hallucinogenic drug abetted shamanism.
Back in 1978, British musician/writer/theorist/recordist David Toop (you've likely read his pieces in The Wire or listened to one of his many carefully curated compilations) had the opportunity to travel to Venezuela to visit the Yanomami, which resulted in a privately-pressed lp of some of the ethnographic sound recordings he made on the expedition, released in a small edition in 1980 and never repressed. This double cd release expands upon that original lp, presenting a fuller selection, two discs' worth, of Toop's Yamomami recordings, wherein mostly unaccompanied human voices (that can sound far from human) chant and sing, imitating animals and speaking with spirits, alongside the jungle sounds of insects, birds, and moths. These healing rituals are certainly interesting from an anthropological point of view... but that's not really why we're listing this. The real reason we recommend it is just 'cause, anthropology aside, the tracks on here are some of the CRAZIEST SOUNDING SHIT we've ever heard. Utter insane gobbledy gook, to put it in perhaps less-than-PC terms. Seriously, just listen to the sound samples below, have you ever been that messed up? Grunts, growls, weird warble, bizarre babble, sudden screaming outbursts, mysterious mutter, squeals and whoops. So if you like fucked up sounds, you need some Yamomamis in your collection. Eye from the Boredoms has NOTHING on these guys. Played loud, these tracks would be perfect for anyone who wants to drive their unsuspecting spouse or housemates mad. And boy would they make good outgoing answering machine fodder. Ok, we know people don't have answering machines anymore, but this might be a good reason to sign up for a landline and go find one!!
Reason enough to buy this. That said, there's also much more to it than that, and of course you could get in deep, listening to this, reading along in the thick booklet of liner notes that Toop provides, putting you in the moment, there in the jungle, via his 1978 expedition diary, also referencing various surrealists, philosophers, Butoh dancers and avant-garde composers as he shares his thoughts and observations, pondering the meaning and wonder of it all... OR, like we said, just be astounded and amused and amazed by the freaky sounds of these shamans!!!
U/V Light is the solo project of Kip Ulhorn from Cloudland Canyon, whose expansive psychedelic, electronic krautrock-influenced spaciness we've raved about here many times. Perhaps not surprisingly, Cenotaph, Ulhorn's first proper outing as U/V Light, shares many sonic similarities with Cloudland Canyon, but unlike the unabashed cosmic Krautrock worship of that project, U/V Light is more rhythmic and poppy, pulsing and shoegazey, a hazy, mesmeric Kraut inflected synth pop, equal parts sequenced Tangerine Dream style synth-swirl, and dreamy, prismatic electro pop.
Opener "Arriviste" sets the tone perfectly, unfurling a lush, pulsating landscape of undulating tones and textures, a sequenced swirl of retro-electro psychedelia, wound around deliriously effervescent drum machines, and vocalist Gabby Weiss' dreamy vox, ethereal and wreathed in reverb, giving the proceedings a sort of 4AD feel as well.
The rest of the record splits the difference between the sorts of old school synth wave and electronic pop that Medical generally specializes in, and Ulhorn's predilection for far out kosmische drift and heady kraut-psych mesmer, and it's somehow all held together by a dream pop shoegaze sensibility that makes tracks like "Celestial Cenotaph", which almost sounds like a seventies electro-synth version of slowcore legends Low (due in no small part to Ulhorn's weary vox), and the gritty, retro synth wave crunch of "Semaphone", perfect sonic bedfellows.
Moody minimalism meets epic, inner/outer space-drone-drift meets pulsing synth-gaze meets ethereal electro dream pop meets electronic psychedelia... Well, you get the picture. WAY recommended for fans of Cloudland Canyon (obviously) and most of Medical's releases as well!
And like all Medical records, pressed on nice 180 gram colored vinyl!
Two new songs from these groovy psychedelic garage pop noiseniks, the A side launching right into it with a squelchy, grimy, synth-blurt intro, a super distorted lo-fi buzz that ends up running through the whole track, although once the song proper kicks in, it becomes all tangled up in a seriously hooky slab of new wave garage punk, heavy on the fuzz, with a wicked power pop / glam pop vibe, big guitars, soaring vox, a bit like a punk rock Sweet, mining the same sonic territory as pal Ty Segall, before slipping into a cool, spaced out sprawl, all swirly and droney, before a final burst of cosmic garage rock crunch.
The flipside finds the band tackling Gary Numan's "M.E.", and if you weren't familiar with the original, it sounds like it could actually be a Wand song proper, fitting perfectly with the garage-wave of the A side, the Numan's already kick ass version getting a grittier, crunchier makeover, but still hewing pretty close to the original. Both sides of this single RULE, and seem to announce in no uncertain terms that Wand might be next in line to follow up the mainstream success of Wand compatriots and cohorts Segall, Cronin and the rest.
Wyrd Visions as the name for a psychedelic new weird wherever folk act? Hmm, a bit overt, perhaps, like naming your metal band Brutal Riffage or something. Too much on the telling side of the showing/telling divide taught in all beginning creative writing classes. How 'bout having a wyrd vision, putting it into words, and then using THAT for the name of your band? But, then again, it did pique our interest, and we wanted to know more... Wyrd Visions appear to be Swedish (perhaps now based in Toronto, Canada?) and have some affinity to the Nordic black metal scene despite sounding (almost) nothing like a black metal band. Instead, this is simple, sparse, funeral-paced, ominous doom-folk... the genre inhabited by such singular entities as Wolfmanger, Silvester Anfang, and Greg Weeks. Songs, especially the opening track "Sigill", are loooong, repetitive, hypnotic and haunting. Voices (both male and female) are gentle and hushed, cloaked in droning atmosphere on such cuts as "Bog Lord" and "Ceremony". The instrumentation is for the most part simple, wooden, acoustic. We mentioned black metal, in part due to the presence of "Freezing Moon", originally by seminal Norwegian black metallers Mayhem (another "overt" name we suppose). Wyrd Visions' version is soooo slow and spare and cruel and, actually, lovely. Maybe more affecting than the original which appeared on Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album back in 1994. The rest of WV's album falls into the same mode for sure. And with the final track "Air-Conditioning" they break out the fuzzed electric guitar, bringing things more and more into an abstracted, molasses-drowned black metal riffing realm for reals.
You might have seen this on our special 'Z' list last week, but if not...
Hubba hubba! One of our fave blasts of metalled-up punkery or punked out metallurgy last year came from LA rad boys the Zig Zags. Now they've followed up that self-titled debut full-length with another of their killer 7"s singles, this one from the Famous Class label, on translucent slime green vinyl, in a silkscreened gatefold sleeve, limited to just 500 copies. Hella punk cred is pretty evident whenever you crank the Zig Zags anyway, but this four song ep underlines that indisputable fact by including a live 7 Seconds cover, "We're Gonna Fight", as well as a poppy original shredder, "Sunken City", inspired by San Pedro's finest, The Minutemen. But yeah, they're plenty metal too, the lead-off track on the A-side even boasts an umlaut in the title. Scuzzy, heavy, hooky, what's not to like about these dudes? Just played the Hemlock here in SF last week, which was great since it's probably best to hear 'em with a fully-stocked bar conveniently to hand.
Includes download code, nerd!
