"Come a little closer," Victoria Legrand croons on "All Your Yeahs", inviting us to lean in to Beach House's new (nearly surprise) release, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Trailing their last album by only a handful of weeks, really, it'd be easy to see Thank Your Lucky Stars as no more than a sequel to the highly-hyped, velvet-coated opus that was Depression Cherry. However, Thank Your Lucky Stars stands on its own. Its shoegazey guitar solos weave their way through warm synth melodies (notably on "One Thing") and Legrand's vocals shine through more clearly than on past releases. This album is a bit of a darker and heavier take on their style of twinkly, extra-terrestrial style of dream pop. The weight can be felt most on this album's twisted and tortured B-side tracks "Rough Song" and "Elegy to the Void". But, with the perfect amount of lo-fi fuzz and room to breathe between each song, we're given the time to appreciate how simply beautiful this album is. Every other Beach House release has felt like the soundtrack to a loving embrace. Thank Your Lucky Stars reaches out to us as honest reassurance on the nights where we feel alone remind us that, though we are each singular stars, we reside in a sky populated with billions of constellations.
(Compact disc version forthcoming, but this was such a rush release they didn't get it done at the same time as the vinyl.)
NOW ON VINYL, the latest from these doom masters!!!
Lament ye doomsters!!! For a sorrowful judgment is cast down upon thee from the realms of mist strewn Seattle, courtesy of that mournful town's most downcast constituents: Bell Witch! It's hard to believe that this is only the second full length from a name that is now so synonymous with heart-rending funeral death doom - you'd think they were one of the genre's forefathers! But that's just a testament to how exquisitely Bell Witch nail this style, and for those so far left unpummeled by their weeping crushing presence, said style is as follows: Glacial, monumental riffing. Devastating walls of distortion give way to melodic slow-motion leads, oozing with regret and loss - the ghostly echo of deathgrowls and the mournful mantra of minimal monk-like singing in the vast cavernous distance. The drums erupt from a dull heartbeat thud into a light-swallowing wall of crash cymbals. And all of this misery & majesty accomplished with no instruments other than bass and drums. That's right, there is nary a guitar to be heard on this record, and it still manages to out-heavy even some of the doomiest contenders. It goes without saying, this is not the record you put on when you're getting dolled up for a night out. This is something to listen to in the darkness, mustering the courage to confront the darkest recesses of despair! An album to stand proudly despondent next to similarly tormented testaments by the likes of Asunder, Loss, Warning & Pallbearer, and at times even conjuring the same sparse bleak corners as slowcore legends Codeine. To put it bluntly: Slow, sad & oh so recommended.
Reissued on cassette, in advance of the ever-forthcoming / inevitably-delayed 10cd boxset on Important!!!
Harry Bertoia's sound sculptures developed from years of work as both a commissioned furniture maker for Knoll and as an environmental sculptor who built large scale balancing kinetic pieces, usually out of bronze. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Bertoia and his son Val began experimenting with resonant properties of metal itself with huge sculptures of vertical metal shafts that were affixed to a base. They discovered that at those lengths - some upwards of 20' - the metal was flexible enough to sustain an extended vibration that continued to resonate within the symphony of tiny strikes with the adjoining metal rods. Thus a slight brush against one of the Bertoia sculptures would trigger a massive swell of metallic drones. Bertoia made an incredible number of recordings in the barn that housed the majority of these sculptures, and produced 11 records from his favorite recordings. "Happy Spirit" features two tracks from the first record "Bellissima / Nova." If possible, it is highly recommended to try experience the Bertoia sculptures themselves. Val Bertoia does maintain the barn where his father kept these sculptures in Bally, Pennsylania... and I (Jim) got to play with one at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. But the recordings do make for a pretty good substitute. Limited to 100 copies.
This Italian band's sole album from 1985 is a tough one to figure out. An oddity all right. They're definitely a metal band at heart -- the fast-paced, pre-album demo track "Midnight Madman" included here as one of four bonus cuts is proof of that -- but on their album itself, they somehow created a much more unexpectedly PSYCHEDELIC and spacey, synthy sound. Totally dark and gothic in a metal way, yeah, but lost in space at the back of a black hole (of course), a slowed-down, doomed-out, dosed-with-cough-syrup vibe, splicing bits of Voivod with the likes of Jacula... in fact, the lurching music on this crackly disc (mastered directly from a none-too-pristine vinyl copy, the original reels having been lost to time, and sounding to us all the better for it!) could be AQ-faves Jacula given an '80s metal makeover... the church organ strains that open "Demoniac City" surely set that tone. Meanwhile, the title track cops a riff from Sabbath's "Electric Funeral", as if to give the nod to their biggest influence we're pretty sure. But the doomy compositions of vocalist/bassist/organist Robert Measles (great name!!) also derive from phantasms far beyond our plane, we're pretty sure of that as well.
Those in the know about Italian '80s metal acts like Death SS, Paul Chain, Bulldozer and Dark Quarterer are aware that a bizarre, poverty-stricken sort of prog weirdness often infects the proceedings, and Black Hole are no exception. In their case, on this album, it makes for something really strange and special, creating a cultish legacy that led to this cd reissue. We're glad to get to hear it! Now it's time to burn the black candles and visit Black Hole's "Spectral World" ruled by "Blind Men And Occult Forces"...
Maybe the most instantly compelling thing we can say about Country Agenda is that every single time we've played it in the store, we've seen customers unabashedly and openly dancing along. The psych-folk vibes on this album are straight up groovy, no question about it. Alex Bleeker also plays bass in the sunshiney, dreamy rock group Real Estate (there are two Real Estate-rooted solo ventures on this list - check out Martin Courtney too!); Country Agenda is the third full-length from Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, a group of friends who have been making music together since college. With the knowledge that this band made their rounds this summer playing Grateful Dead tribute sets with everyone from Kyle Field of Little Wings to Jenny Lewis to Lee Ranaldo to Mr. Bill Kreutzmann himself, the Dead inspiration on Country Agenda is no surprise. The troubadour-folk vox bring a little bit of a woozy Neil Young sensibility to this collection as well. At the same time, maybe due to the collaborative nature of the music, something about AB&TF's concoction of down-to-earth guitars, stand-out bass lines, and swooping keys is really all their own. The jangly, laid-back strumming paired with marine references and track titles like "California" and "Downright Stinson" make this the perfect California-coastal roadtrip album, which is delightfully ironic coming from a New Jersey transplant. Bleeker's unique croon, especially beautiful on "The Rest" and "Sealong Hair", feels carried to us on a distinctly Pacific Ocean breeze (the Atlantic can suck it), and we've been humming along ever since it arrived.
Floating in with the perfectly jangly progression and the words, "If 'the past is past' is just the point..." on opener "Awake", it's difficult to see Many Moons coming from anyone but Martin Courtney. Also known as frontman of jangle-pop-revivalist group Real Estate, Courtney has become associated with such golden nuggets of sun-dappled-armchair-dad-wisdom and this album, his first solo venture, is chock full of them. This brisk but lilting opus of psychedelic pop is star-studded, with Julian Lynch, Matt Kallman (Girls, Real Estate) and Aaron Neveu and Jarvis Taveniere (both of Woods) all lending their creative influences. For a solo act, this album feels collaborative in the sense that it lends all the rich warmth of something created in the studio by a comfortable group of friends. Many Moons keeps a light, slowed-down Kinks-esque groove throughout and the string arrangements lend an unparalleled fullness. The titular track stands out with a breezy sound, bouncy bass line, and delightful flute arrangement which all combined could easily land it on the Endless Summer soundtrack. Seriously, when was the last time you heard such a killer flute solo on a pop song?! We're all in with this album and with every solo album that comes from the individual members of Real Estate (see: Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, Ducktails), it's really beginning to feel like they're hitting their CSNY stride, creating just as much wonderful music separately as they do when they come together.
Deadly death death. The UK's Cruciamentum play death metal, pure and not-so-simple. Clearly disciples of the ancient gods of the genre, but utterly up to date in execution. This ripper of a full-length is their debut album after a few eps, including a split 7" on Hells Headbangers with old school mood masters Vasaeleth. Like that band, they're heavily into the filthy doomic vibes of early Incantation (who isn't?) but also bring in the grinding shred style of prime Carcass. Plenty of blast beats and whammy bar excess, guttural groans and horror movie atmosphere (via the modest application of occult-ish organ and synth sounds on certain charnel passages). Charnel Passages is both heavy and technical, most of all majestically pulverizing. It doesn't hurt that it sorta seems like all seven tracks are really one long, insanely brutal song.
Nice weirdly spooky artwork, slipcovered jewel case.
Fire up the message boards and prepare to choose your side, because the long awaited return of heavy music's most divisive band is finally upon us! Two years have passed since 2013's genre-melting crossover smash Sunbather and these hometown heroes (originating from the very same part of San Francisco as our humble shoppe) have returned with another titanic wall of overwhelmingly emotional post-black metal. Now personally, we've been firmly planted in Camp Deafheaven since day one, but it's no secret that their blend of shrieking blasting black metal and life-affirming skyward-gazing post-rock/shoegaze has rubbed some of the more conservative members of the metal community the wrong way. Well, New Bermuda seems to be a direct attack upon any mortal foolish enough to question the band's metal chops. This record is immediately darker, heavier, more frenetic, more suffocating, to put it simply more METAL - a flurry of palm-muted Slayer style riffery, adrenalized blast beats and anguished rasps contrasted with extended passages of absolutely stunning melody - invigorating, gut-wrenching, uplifting, and longing all at once. New Bermuda sounds like Sunbather in overdrive, twisted and tweaked just enough to evoke an entirely different mood - a tireless assault of raw desperate emotion. It's album closer "Gifts From The Earth" that offers the most in the way of surprises though, spending much of its running time operating in downcast uptempo indie rock (albeit with some black metal growls mixed in for good measure), all tambourine, minor chords and Johnny Marr jangle. That is until the track opens up into a headbanging slab of arena-ready heaviness. But that's to say nothing of the dreamy acoustic-led outro, awash in dreamy psychedelia, and we suspect a deliberate homage to Oasis' classic "Champagne Supernova"! Deafheaven could have easily rested on their laurels here, content to make Sunbather Pt. 2, but instead took a much thornier path, and this record is all the better for it.
FYI vinyl version(s) delayed, but upcoming, soon...
Sacred Bones' description of Negative Feedback Resistor is worth a read, as a glimpse into the total drug-addled, sun-drenched mind fuckery that goes into Destruction Unit's output. We won't quote the whole thing, but, the last paragraph is essential: "This is crazed-psychedelic-freek-noise guerrilla warfare and these are our streets. The pigs of the law can use their system to manipulate and censor our messages. The control creeps can keep their airwaves safe and comfortable. But none of them have been able to make us turn our voices or our guitar amps down. Destruction Unit sacrificed their ears to make this album as loud of a statement as possible. Will you lend them yours?"
If you haven't heard Destruction Unit yet, that manifesto might give you an idea of what you're getting into here. This record makes their last album, 2013's Deep Trip, seem downright spacious. This is total claustrophobia, every last instrument (and there is surely a lot) is pushed into the red, screaming but also buried in the muck. The rhythm section constantly pounds away, switching between a crushing d-beat and a half-time mosh-encouraging, knuckle-dragging hardcore stomp. The layers of guitar and synth blend into such a tornado of sound that it's often hard to tell what's what. Heavy, heavy, heavy psych that tries to recreate the effects of taking a bad dose of LSD in the middle of the desert, but with better song writing chops then they've ever had.
Almost nothing will top seeing them live (seriously, go see them live, it's a sight to behold), but this record comes damn close.
NOW LISTING THE VINYL...
It's been a long five years waiting for a new album by Swedish pop-psychsters, Dungen, but boy has the wait been worth it. Allas Sak doesn't see the band forging new territory, and really who would want that as they don't sound like any other contemporary band out there anyway. Instead, they expand upon the sonic palette they have forged over seven albums, but with a deeper concentration on nuance, instrumentation and song-writing. Flutes, horns, piano, vibraphones, congos have a more focused integration into the overall sound making this one of the richest sounding recordings the band has made. Done so without losing the signature drum sounds and psych guitar flourishes that have defined the band since the beginning, nor have they lost sight of the vintage global psych influence of fellow Swedes, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Pugh Rogefeldt and Turkish acoustic psych pioneers Mogollar. So great!
A radiant hue echoes out of a violent explosion at the onset of Brittle, a cassette only job from the darkened mind of Grant Evans. Over the years, he has explored, traced, and mined the furthest corners of the underground, emerging as a well-heeled polyglot of ruptured noise, cosmic electronics, dour drone construction, and even some dabblings in the black arts to keep a future Jack Parsons allusion in the cards, if rocket fuel comes into the mix at some time or other. Evans along with his wife Rachel had run the beloved cassette imprint Hooker Vision and the two had collaborated under the banner of Quiet Evenings, as an avenue for their most pastoral, hushed, and meditative sounds. The smattering of cassettes that have lead up to Brittle have been a menacing brood of crushed noise and textural onslaught, with Brittle tempering the antagonism and the angst just a bit. That said, Evans' tactics to confront and assault remain at the beginning of both lengthy tracks to the tape. Out of these chunks of noise, Evans coaxes pools of levitating yet organic drone, rich with industrial murk, labyrinthian contours, death rattle vibrato, and nocturnal unease. The spectral harmonics of Organum's acoustic noise accretion meld into Pedestrian Deposit's raw expressionism into what Evans has now masterfully constructed here on the somnolent and spellbinding Brittle. If lead could sparkle like it does here on this recording, who needs alchemy?
We've been meaning to list something by these guys for ages. Some fierce and furious Santa Cruz hardcore, or fastcore, actually kind of powerviolence too, fuck it, whatever you wanna call it, these guys are brutal, and fast as fuck, heavy too. Very reminiscent of the classic Slap A Ham days, the songs are short, grinding mini epics, most clocking in at a minute or less (often WAY less), 8 tracks crammed into seven inches, but they manage to cram a shitload of frantic punk rock energy into each, deftly flitting from galloping punk rock, to churning lumbering chug-metal, to wild, chaotic hardcore. The dueling vocals are shriek versus bellow, the riffs are fucking killer, goddamn these guys rule, and we didn't even think bands like this still existed. And if you need further convincing, we just listened to this whole 7" about 5 times in a row, and we can't see ourselves stopping anytime soon.
Pressed on grey and pink swirled vinyl, includes a full color printed insert/lyric sheet, and stickers!
Reissued on cassette for a limited time!
Morton Feldman's 1971 commissioned piece for the Rothko Chapel is one of the most sublime works in his vast catalog of recordings. In tribute to the chapel and to his friend the painter Mark Rothko who killed himself a year before the chapel opened, Feldman uses tonal rhythms, bells, viola and a chorus in stark but lyrical consort with the reverential acoustics provided by the chapel itself. Long fascinated by the sonorous qualities of tones and how they decay and diminish over time, Feldman shared with his friend Rothko the aim to unveil the mystery of perception. Performed with a slowly unfolding arc of restrained movements and silences, there has never been a more appropriate matching of acoustics and vision than the pairing of these two 20th century mavericks. Limited to 100 copies.
We've long cited the metaphor of sonic exhumation in describing the proponents of a ruined sound design. How often have we likened a marvelous hauntological recording to sound as if it were lifted from the bottom of a bog, still dripping with bunker fuel and vegetal rot as the author feeds this (fictionally) exhumed tape through the reel-to-reel in order to captured the woozy, decayed sounds transformed through time and chemical decomposition. In the art of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, we have EXACTLY that process. Well, not the swamp-rot seepage per se, but the accumulation of time-ravaged material from abandoned drive-in movie theaters using the scratched, crumpled, and torn bits of the optical soundtrack from 16mm film. This semi-anonymous outfit has been scouring the forgotten sites of the American rust belt for such material over the past three decades, but only recently have they received any notoriety for their work. After a couple of high-profile collaborations with the like-minded :zoviet*france:, Fossil Aerosol delivers this complete masterpiece in The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 for their first solo piece of vinyl. Fossil Aerosol snatches bits of dialogue and overly maudlin orchestration from that source material, alongside the various dropouts, abraded noise, and tactile grit; and all of this gets tossed into an overlapping network of tape loops, complete with squiggled machinations, dub accumulation, and uncanny hypnosis. The process of building each track emerges through negation and erasure as much as it is in the accretion of layered sound upon sound. What remains are the ghosts from the process, not only sonically but also allegorically pointing very specifically back to the unearthed 16mm film. The presentation for all this disintegration, rupture, bleachings, shatterings, debris, and lagged delay follows the ley lines of the American psyche - entangled notions of grandeur, ignobility, spectacle, spirituality, and insecurity. Fossil Aerosol take on the part of detached archeologists for the American wasteland, with their aestheticized miasma and dislocation imparting nuanced readings into America's forgotten recent past. Demdike Stare and The Caretaker may have the entire history of the British empire to excavate for their sounds, but Fossil Aerosol's hauntings are so much more eerie given the proximity in time and space. Without a doubt, this is one of THEE best experimental / drone-on records of 2015.
The first 200 copies of The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 come with a piece of scavenged 16mm film mounted to the cover!!
So, if you wanted to tell someone, hey, there's this band, called The Fresh & Onlys, from San Francisco, and they're really fantastic, it wouldn't hurt to start 'em off with this disc. Unreleased stuff from the prolific garage pop outfit's early days (obviously), circa 2008 (?), a dozen tracks that will have all fans of Tim Cohen & Co. rejoicing - as well as aforementioned person you play this for to demonstrate to 'em that The Fresh & Onlys are really good.
It's a convincing batch of foot tapping tunage, sensitive and sunshiney, rocking out too with classic garaginess. Some of this sure has an '80s indie feel, like these songs wouldn't feel out of place on the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, with the likes of "Pile Of Bones" giving off a Jonathan Richman vibe. No idea why these songs weren't released at the time - glad they dug 'em out of the vaults, making our day. Hindsight is 20-20, but listening to this, we venture to say that The Fresh & Onlys are a band likely to go places!
Local electronic/ambient label Time Released Sound adds another act to its stable, and continues in what seems to be a gradual movement toward soundworlds more sinister and ominous. Previously, we tended toward words like 'pastoral', and 'meditative', 'shimmery' and 'blissed out' to describe most TRS releases. But recently, the sounds have definitely drifted into shadow, culminating perhaps in piece of haunting black art, Nefelibata, by LA mystery man Gypsy Eyes.
While ostensibly the musical math remains the same - drones, and ambience, field recordings and lush layered soundscapes - Nefelibata plays more like some grim soundtrack, the score to some black and white art film, all brooding thrum, and tense drones, and the field recordings, the trudge of footsteps, heavy breathing, the agitated caws of birds, all beneath a blackened sprawl of long, softly undulating tones, and that's after the even more caustic and chaotic opener, a jumble of tangled voices, squiggles of static, clouds of shortwave buzz, plenty of crackle and gristle and distorted crumble.
Further on, the sound seems to be settling into something much more serene, before being overrun with super blown out, almost DHR style beats, but instead of sounding like proper beats, they're deconstructed, and pulled apart into jagged fragments of grinding static, all over a hushed field of bell like chimes and gauzy pop ambience.
The second half of the record does brighten quite a bit, and yeah, suddenly 'pastoral' doesn't seem so off the mark, but even then, the sound is infused with a tension, and a pathos, that at times is palpable and right near the surface, but more often is just a distant shadow, a darkening on the horizon, a mysterious glimmer, all nearly forgotten, as the sounds blur and smear into haunted lullabies and muted music box threnodies.
And of course, since this is on Time Released Sound, there are two versions, a deluxe and a standard, this time even more limited than before. The deluxe, of which we were only able to get a VERY few copies, is limited to just FIFTY COPIES, and comes housed in an art deco, antique, collaged folder, each with two seventy five year old palmistry prints, vintage photos, antique fortunes, and bits of hand written sheet music. Everything is stamped and handworked, and the cd is affixed to the packaging with a Tibetan meditative text strip. There's also of course the standard version, just a HUNDRED COPIES, and as usual is packaged in a swank digipak.
Local electronic/ambient label Time Released Sound adds another act to its stable, and continues in what seems to be a gradual movement toward soundworlds more sinister and ominous. Previously, we tended toward words like 'pastoral', and 'meditative', 'shimmery' and 'blissed out' to describe most TRS releases. But recently, the sounds have definitely drifted into shadow, culminating perhaps in piece of haunting black art, Nefelibata, by LA mystery man Gypsy Eyes.
While ostensibly the musical math remains the same - drones, and ambience, field recordings and lush layered soundscapes - Nefelibata plays more like some grim soundtrack, the score to some black and white art film, all brooding thrum, and tense drones, and the field recordings, the trudge of footsteps, heavy breathing, the agitated caws of birds, all beneath a blackened sprawl of long, softly undulating tones, and that's after the even more caustic and chaotic opener, a jumble of tangled voices, squiggles of static, clouds of shortwave buzz, plenty of crackle and gristle and distorted crumble.
Further on, the sound seems to be settling into something much more serene, before being overrun with super blown out, almost DHR style beats, but instead of sounding like proper beats, they're deconstructed, and pulled apart into jagged fragments of grinding static, all over a hushed field of bell like chimes and gauzy pop ambience.
The second half of the record does brighten quite a bit, and yeah, suddenly 'pastoral' doesn't seem so off the mark, but even then, the sound is infused with a tension, and a pathos, that at times is palpable and right near the surface, but more often is just a distant shadow, a darkening on the horizon, a mysterious glimmer, all nearly forgotten, as the sounds blur and smear into haunted lullabies and muted music box threnodies.
And of course, since this is on Time Released Sound, there are two versions, a deluxe and a standard, this time even more limited than before. The deluxe, of which we were only able to get a VERY few copies, is limited to just FIFTY COPIES, and comes housed in an art deco, antique, collaged folder, each with two seventy five year old palmistry prints, vintage photos, antique fortunes, and bits of hand written sheet music. Everything is stamped and handworked, and the cd is affixed to the packaging with a Tibetan meditative text strip. There's also of course the standard version, just a HUNDRED COPIES, and as usual is packaged in a swank digipak.
A new five lp box set devoted to the works of krautrock supergroop Harmonia has just come out (and are already backordered) and for those of us who already have most of the stuff in the box except for the fifth lp of unreleased material, and couldn't afford the hefty price just for that, Gronland has kindly released that material on cassette for a limited time.
A cassette may not satisfy everyone, but the amount of unreleased material is actually quite slight, just 4 tracks from 1975, a tad over 30 minutes, two live and two studio alternate takes of what would be fully realized tracks on other records. So far this cassette is currently the only means to get this material outside of that box set.
Here is the track listing:
A1 "Tiki-Taka At Harmonia Studio In Forst " 6:28
A2 "Live At Onkel Po In Hamburg" 9:12
B1 "Proto-Deluxe At Harmonia Studio In Forst" 4:30
B2 "Live At Fabrik In Hamburg" 11:38
Needless to say again, but this is very limited!!!
Hey, Hey Colossus - you're on a roll! This out-there outfit from England, unclassifiable specialists in heaviness and krautiness and spaciness and other awesome-ness, wowed us earlier this year with an eclectic album entitled In Black And Gold, and now are back already, somehow, with another groovy album full of surprises, Radio Static High. Seriously, Hey Colossus are one of those rare bands who seem like they must have secretly broken into our homes and carefully studied our record collections before going into the studio and synthesizing a sound that brings a bunch of stuff we love together in unexpected ways. Certainly some Circle, a little Harvey Milk, a bunch of krautrock, a lot of '80s UK prog & post-punk... Hey Colossus themselves claim that this album was inspired by, uh, Jane's Addiction, Fleetwood Mac (late '80s Fleetwood Mac, no less), and Cypress Hill - probably they were joking, but if true in some weird way, that's pretty cool. In any case, these ten tracks are filled with driving rhythmic pulsations, dubby psychedelic effects, new wave-y catchiness, fuzzed out riffage, post-rock moodiness, stomping distortion, and melody, yes melody - compared even to In Black And Gold, this seems to us to be the most melodic album Hey Colossus have yet made. Maybe it's the vocals, starting with the spaced-out stoner pop of the title track. Though the 'groove' here is also very, very significant, tracks like "Hop The Railings" sounding a lot like Circle. Then you've got the precision prog element, with the likes of "Snapping Undone" in the mode of Belew-era Crimson - but also sorta Circular. It's a pretty unusual & fantastic mix as far as we're concerned, even if we can't really hear the Fleetwood Mac et. al.!
Another recommended release from these guys, making us wonder, what will they come up with next (and when)?
NOW ALSO ON COMPACT DISC, the new album of evilized, primitive, garage rock crunch from these Satanic (?) weirdos, and while this new one still has much in common with the other records, it's at once simultaneously more raw and primitive, but also kinda more proggy. In fact, opener, "Satan II" almost sounds like a metallic, heavy garage version of prog-pop masters The Cardiacs. Albeit with plenty of spooky drones, spacey synths, and creepy atmospherics. But honestly, this is about as heavy and intense and brutal as 'garage rock' gets. A little bit surprised they haven't done a record for Castle Face, cuz it's the sort of sound that would definitely appeal to the Ty Segall / Thee Oh Sees / Mikal Cronin set. But it's not all pummeling crunch and howling bash and pound, although most of the songs feature some of that. They're also pretty goddamn good at whipping up hook heavy distorted pop, and wrapping it in almost Hawkwind-y psychedelic swirl. It's a strange concoction, and as you can tell from the review so far, pretty tough to accurately describe, but if some super poppy, ultra heavy, FX drenched, proggy and metallic, occultic, new wavey, distorto-garage sounds right up your alley, not only will this hit the spot, but J.C. Satan might be the only outfit even remotely capable of whipping up this sort of damaged, genius racket. Their best record so far by a long shot (which is saying a lot, considering how much we log pretty much everything they put out) and the sort of shit anyone into ANY of the other garage rock happening now should be flipping the fuck out over!
LAST COPIES EVER! We had thought they were gone already, but Jabladav just sent us a final handful of this 2009 release...
Three new songs from one man black metal band Jabladav, limited to only 100 copies, so grab one while you can. Jabladav explores some different sounds on here, the opener "Coldest Last Winter" begins with just keyboards, and clean guitar before the distortion kicks in, but instead of exploding into a frenzy of black buzz, the song lopes drearily, the keyboard remaining, plinking out a sorrowful minor key melody, while the drums pound out a doomic tempo, and the guitar buzz all washed out and Striborg like. It's heavy but more sort of dreamy and ethereal, near the end things get a little more mathy and convoluted with some cool stop starts, but for the most part it's all drift and haunting and doomy.
The second track is another keyboards and guitar jam, the guitars tangled and folky, intricate and lush, the keyboards set on some strange human voice setting, so it sounds like a stuttering choir, and again, the 'band' kicks in, a trudging plod, harsh vokills over angular distorted chug, before things build to a full on black blast, the keyboards drifting creepily below the surface the whole time.
The final track is way more classic Jabladav, the guitars sharp and jagged and buzzy, the drums frenetic and blasting, the melody epic and haunting, with some cool stumbling, lurching gnarled arrangements and a cool black ambient outro. Rad stuff as always. A bit different, but still shot through with that same twisted Jabladav vibe.
Comes in a printed color sleeve, the 7"s are each numbered, there's an insert too, also numbered and signed and each with a little drawing, ALSO comes with a cd-r featuring the tracks from the 7", that too is hand numbered.
For a band that didn't exist for very long, only had one record and who have been broken up for years now, SF's mighty Weakling still cast a pretty long shadow. We still sell Dead As Dreams like crazy, more and more people are professing their undying love for Weakling's black grandeur every day, and band after band, some more subtly than others are displaying in their music, some serious Weakling worship. Wolves In The Throne Room are a recent example, they obviously expanded on the sound but there are moments where WITTR are a dead ringer for Weakling. Then there is Jabladav, who almost come off as a sort of Weakling homage, what with the very Dead As Dreams-ish title, the album artwork, and of course Weakling topping the thanks list, which also includes Burzum, Darkthrone, Black Flag, Ildjarn and Wolves In The Throne Room. But Jabladav, seem to approach metal from a distinctly non-metal background. It's subtle, but noticeable. Black Flag in the thanks list should give you some indication. Not that this isn't black and buzzy, heavy and thrashing and brutal, it is, one man, just guitar bass, mellotron and drums, but there is a distinctly post rock, punk rock vibe that permeates much of Dead As Duck. Take out some of the thick swaths of dramatic keyboards and insane bursts of double kick drumming, and sometimes you're left with some very Greg Ginn-ish angular metallic post punk. But when all is said and done, Jabladav whip up some serious black skree, with buzzy crunchy guitars dominating the mix, some murky drumming, bits of bass here and there, a little keyboards, mostly instrumental, but when there are vocals, they are a haunting croon, much like the madman in Urfaust. There are even some dreamy folky interludes. Fucking awesome stuff for sure. We've been playing this like mad since we got it. So if you dig any of the aforementioned bands (we might even include in the list Earl Shilton, Carcass, even the Champs maybe) you'll definitely love this! LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc hand numbered.
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.
A Balearic holy grail of the highest order, we only have a handful of these, the last copies our supplier could scrape up, and they're pretty much gone after that unless this gets a repress, which is so far unlikely. You have been warned!
This singular 1983 recording of global wave exotica featuring Japanese musicians and an Armenian female singer, pressed in small quantities on its first issue has always had an air of mystery and rumor among beat heads and crate diggers. Its cross-pollination of styles from synthesized dance to post-punk to minimalist composition and global classical music (often in the same track), makes it difficult to easily pigeonhole. It definitely sounds more like the crazy Bollywood film vibe that Haruomi Hosono was going for when he recorded Cochin Moon, than Cochin Moon actually sounded like. But Uta Kata No Hibi's six tracks reach beyond dance to a moody exoticism that is spellbinding and captivating, predicting Asa-Chang & Junray's furtive global excursions, as well as a host of Indian and Middle Eastern rhythmic qualities that have inflected the modern day productions of M.I.A. and Grimes. Don't Sleep!
Mohr was the work of German avant tape-machinist Andreaz Vogel who ran the ZNS Tapes label in the late '80s and early '90s; and our introduction to this work dates way back to the very second Drone Records single, released in 1993. This was about the time when Vogel pretty much called it quits on sound construction; but given how many great artists had been introduced through the Drone Records series of singles, Mohr's work had always been intriguing even as it had been quite elusive in the global cassette underground at that time. By the end of Mohr's tenure, Vogel had embarked on three mail-art pieces in which various audio sculptors and sound destroyers would rework / deconstruct a 30 minute track from Mohr. The second in this trilogy was notable to those Andrew Chalk enthusiasts as an unknowable Ora cassette from 1992. The third - and never released - cassette was to include Maeror Tri, The Haters, and PBK. With Hafenstadt, we now have a glimpse back into the gristled, contorted, and mangled tape construction that Mohr had been producing in conjunction with a pretty stellar set of black hole implosion of x-ray drone courtesy of Maeror Tri. Vogel took something of a Fluxus approach to his industrially bent constructions, purposely avoiding musical instruments in favor of the found sound that got flung into orbit in a spiraling descent of his tape loop dub and squeaky wheel rhythmic errata. These are deliberately raw and malformed cyclical patterns for a DIY musique concrete. Maeror Tri's brain-crush of sustained reverb and backwards masked flares of dark energy bury much of the insistent hypnosis from Mohr well beneath their grim wall of leaden noise and nuclear winter drone. It's always a wonder to behold the early works from Maeror Tri, and here it's nicely paired with Mohr's mangled hypnogogia.
It's impossible to listen Joanna Newsom casually, and you can never rely on first impressions with her music. In fact as much as some of us here deeply love her albums, there is always a resigned feeling of an endurance test at first, that slowly lets up through repeated listens, until it wears in on you quite nicely. Once comfortable in its structure, its labyrinthian nuances set up like traps of discovery and the overall effect is like a garden just coming to bloom. Divers sits somewhere between her last two records, a couple of long jewel-laden epics, but mostly shorter and more digestible songs. Not as rife with emotion and symbolic as Ys, but more complexly intricate than the '70s California song cycle of Have One On Me.
The hooting sound of an owl opens and closes the album suggesting an Autumnal shift in mood. Indeed Divers reads like an album to be played over a long night, from dusk to dawn. For starters, the piano (as well as Fender Rhodes and harpsichord) dominate. Her signature harp doesn't appear until the third song and though it has a strong presence on Divers as a whole, Newsom seems to want to appear less attached to it, or showcase other talents instead, in which there are plenty here. The orchestrations are incredibly arranged without overwhelming the songs, and her voice and song structures are definitely moving more into Kate Bush territory. It may also be the first time she has tackled a cover, the traditional folk song, "Same Old Man" sung most famously before by Karen Dalton on her second album, and she delivers it beautifully.
Divers won't change the minds of folks who have never got into Newsom before, but longtime fans of her previous work will find more to love. Though we secretly hope her next record will be more of an immediate and less precious affair, like her first album was.
A frightening record. Even by the standards set by the darkened mind of Steven Stapleton, the Surveillance Lounge is a terrifying album in fact. This set of recordings began through a 2007 commission by the F.W. Murnau Foundation to provide a live soundtrack for the 1922 Murnau film Der Brennende Acker ("The Burning Soil"). A silent film that was thought to be lost until 1978, it tells a tale of a man who grew up in the rural life but cut himself from that existence through greed, lust, and ambition, rife with moral and psychological dilemmas. Nurse With Wound is no stranger to the art of the homage, having constructed the ultra-minimalist masterpiece A Missing Sense under the influence of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing and the two Echoe Poem discs drew inspiration from the French New Wave film Last Year At Marienbad. The sessions, which gave us The Surveillance Lounge, came out of the initial material used for that soundtrack and were completed during the ensuing years. The bulk of those sessions actually had been encapsulated in a super limited edition box-set called The Memory Surface, which may be out of print by now, if not impossible to track down. That said, the Surveillance Lounge represents the best of this material, which was produced by Stapleton and Andrew Liles with vocal support from David Tibet, Freek Kinkelaar, and a host of others.
Moaning vocals and creepy whisperings set a darkened hue for the Surveillance Lounge, which also adopts a chilling set of piano notes that seem to allude to another soundtrack, Coil's rejected score to Hellraiser. Soon afterwards, a textured smearing of sand, earth, and rock conjoin to a deep wooden creaking that ominously lurch forward in a similar manner to the epochal NWW album Salt Marie Celeste. The use of vocal snippets - in French, in German, from David Tibet, of children wailing - are signature moves from Stapleton, and are used in some of the best collage material that Stapleton has generated since Homotopy To Marie. Vocal and textural elements always seem to collapse into darkened shadows, only to find Stapleton and Liles forcing another scream of noise, voice, and electronics to the foreground with jarring effect. For the central track "The Golden Age Of Telekinesis," NWW slowly build a shuffling rhythm out of the shards of broken glass that intensifies through the development of a screeching noise buttressed by the rapid-fire glossolalia of what sounds like an auctioneer. Expect to find a dynamic chasm between the relative quiet of the early moments of this track to the ear-splitting crescendo of a tape machine whirling out of control. As the album draws near to a close, NWW explode land mines of noise, scorched earth, and Tibet's screams in barren soundscapes of disembodied voices and shadowy drones. By contrast the album ends on a note of soft-hued easy listening muzak with its politely swaggering guitar, which is creepy given the context of its cancerous segue. Like we said, frightening! This might be a good entree to NWW for those of you who normally only by black metal or ultradoom albums...
Die Screaming, last year's killer album from these doomed-out, garage-rockin' dement-oids, we made a Record Of The Week, and it landed in several of our year-end top tens too, so yeah we are excited about this, the Satyrs' brand new album, and yeah, it rules!!! But, as with their previous record, it makes a weird first impression; if you haven't heard 'em before it might take a bit to get your head around - but for us, a few songs in and we were 100 percent hooked. It's just that, for a bunch who present themselves like a outlaw biker gang from some '70s, Z-grade exploito-movie shocker, they're more poppy than you might expect. They're psych and metal too, but lead-off track "Full Moon And Empty Veins" is soooo uptempo and upbeat, that it's really glammy pop we're hearing, super distorted and fuzzy, yeah, but also major key happy and bouncy. That poppiness persists in the Satyrs' speedy garage metalpunk sound as the disc spins, these high energy jams replete with fucked up freakout frenzies of solos and perhaps the Satyrs' most distinctive feature, the love 'em or hate 'em vocals - sneering, snotty singing taken to the most gnarled extreme ever. Like Ozzy after having been fed some really strange drugs, causing weird brain damaged speech impediment. Tracks like "(Won't You Be My) Gravedancer" sound like Pentagram's garage demos from the '70s given a bubblegum injection, while several others take off on way out psych-solo excursions - it's the sort of thing that when you've got it cranked, nothing could possibly be cooler.
Definitely another winner from this gang, for fans of Uncle Acid, Zig Zags, Fuzz, King Tuff, and we're just now thinking Fred Cole's pre-Dead Moon '70s band Zipper. Freakin' recommended.
Goddamn this makes us wanna see these guys live - missed 'em the last (and only?) time they were here, opening on tour for their comrades Electric Wizard, argh. It was the night before Record Store Day so we were too busy... Well hopefully they'll be back and we'll be there!
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Not sure what the rationale for this split was, other than local garage rockers The Burnt Ones, being as enamored of The Space Lady as we are. They somehow talked that mysterious songbird into making a record together with them - and both, disparate halves are pretty fantastic. The Burnt Ones have dialed their sound WAY back, and sound all warm, and syrupy, mellow and dreamily psychedelic, from the almost Spacemen 3 sounding "The Good Life", which sounds like a druggier, garage rocking Beach Boys, to the hazy brooder "Infinity Suite", which is very reminiscent of another aQ fave, Crystal Stilts. Appropriately enough, they cover The Space Lady 'classic' "Synthesize Me", transforming it into another drowsy, druggy torch song, before finishing off their side with another gorgeous slab of downer pop / mope rock in the form of "Not Here, But There".
For those unfamiliar with The Space Lady, she was an iconic street performer right here in San Francisco for DECADES, a beautiful busker constantly clad in wildly flamboyant outfits, topped off with a plastic winged helmet, doing dreamily abstract covers of popular songs, played either on a crappy Casio keyboard, or an accordion. For years, she was such an iconic part of SF, and then just disappeared. Only to be rediscovered recently, which resulted in several performances, all of which were breathtaking. And if you haven't grabbed The Space Lady's Greatest Hits collection, you are really missing out. Her tracks here are equally mesmerizing, a cosmic cover of the Beatles' "Across The Universe", a jaunty Casio-core version of Bowie's "Starman", a gorgeously lysergic lullaby version of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", and even an original, that sounds like she could be some mysterious one woman band in a dingy, Tiki bar in the sixties, all programmed rhythms, swirling synths and those distinctive echo-drenched vocals.
A weird combo for sure, but one that kind of works wonderfully, each complimenting the other in their own unique, and uniquely off kilter way.
"You were hired by a bitch to find scum!!" That striking dialogue taken from a '60s private eye thriller (Harper) begins the song "Misty Mountain Blowtorch" here, deep into side two, before the track launches into an especially distorted & catchy riff, and that combo somehow sums up the attitude/aesthetic of this album and this band. Heavy, noisy, grungy rock action laced with lots of cool/weird samples, it's an hallucinatory and head caving mix for sure!! As the label that did this necessary reissue put it, Tulip is a "twisted noir detective story on a bad acid trip". Damn right. Psychedelic, metallic, chaotic, freaked out, heavy as heck, full of surprises, and strangely hooky and melodic too, as it explosively lurches through a delirious daze of surfy, sludgy sounds and strange non-sequitur samples.
A little while back, you may recall, we we listed a warehouse find, the first lp by Milk Cult, Milk Cult being the sample-based side project of one of San Francisco's best ever bands (by way of Bozeman, Montana), Steel Pole Bath Tub, back in the late '80s / early '90s. Hopefully that piqued your interest if you weren't already into these noiserock madmen, the trio of Dale Flattum, Darren Mor-X, and Mike Morasky. They were sort of a surreal, soundtracky, noise-noir version of their pals The Melvins, in a way, also using and abusing samples as alluded to above. The kind of band that would do both Black Sabbath and Sonic Youth covers (they have - not found here though). Certainly a band that anybody into the Melvins back then would also have liked, and did, a lot. Stuff on Trance (like Pain Teens) and AmRep also comes to mind. SPBT even managed to eventually wind up, albeit briefly, on a major label (like so many unlikely, underground bands during the '90s alt-rock boom). Their bulk of their career more or less predated our "list", so we never wrote a review of this great album when it was originally issued back in 1990, their sophomore release. Thus it's especially exciting that this has been reissued on vinyl, at long last, and we can list it, finally. Probably our favorite record by these guys - though they made a bunch of good ones. There's just something about this one that's the complete package, the perfect witches brew of their unique sound, immediately compelling and highly entertaining.
Gatefold sleeve, with new jacket art, and an 8-page booklet with photos, art, and new liner notes by Henry "Chunklet" Owings, Noah Landis, and Tom Flynn, plus stuff from the members of the SPTB as well. Nice!
So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised...
So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.
It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.
In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.
An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.
A fantastic selection of private press country songs from the '60s to the '80s collected by Austin-based musician and record collector Jason Chronis who traveled through many small towns in Texas and nearby states to compile this first volume of country obscurities. Far removed from the Nashville hit machine, these 14 tracks define a streak of individual spirit that reveals some amazing discoveries: The primitive one chord guitar drone and bells of Donald Adkin's "Lonely Sidewalks"; the absolutely stunning "Shadows of You" by Kenny Brent and Donna Harris. What's beautiful about true country music is that it can shine without polish. Cracked voices and simple heartfelt tunes carry as much weight as a slick studio production, and compiled together, no one seems to follow a formula but their own determination. Even those on the fence about country music, considering the absolute garbage that is being spewed out today, will find lots to love here. Highly recommended!
Reissued on cassette for a limited time!
White Noise's first album has long been one of the holy grails for kosmische / space rock collectors. Kinda strange, actually, because it's actually more on the "exotica" Moog side of things, as opposed to a Klaus Schulze or Conrad Schnitzler production... Released in 1968 on Island in a total vacuum, An Electric Storm could be a Perrey & Kingsley soundtrack to a Radley Metzger soft-core porn film with twee psych-pop vocal melodies (a la Beach Boys, Free Design, Monkees) topped off with lots of bizarre electronic squiggles that originated in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop (care of Delia Derbyshire!). White Noise's mastermind David Vorhaus keeps things pretty surreal with a track based around the recordings made at a orgy (as well as a Satanic mass!) and with a precursor to the John Balance vocal mumbles about how "darkness was enshrouded by darkness and the darkness was deadeningly dark." A sonic touchstone for Broadcast, The Focus Group and the Ghostbox label. Limited to 100 copies.
Collaboration number two from this oddball pairing, NY psychedelic space rock duo White Hills, and local avant noiseniks White Pee. Even though we're guessing it was maybe the shared 'White' in their monikers that got them together, they do make a pretty good team. This set, recorded live, starts out as a warped, sprawl of turntablism, sounding not unlike the work of White Pee member DJ Female Convict Scorpion, but soon, the space rock drops, and we're off, swirling FX, slow motorik drumming, blurred distorted riffage, White Hills locked into a seriously druggy, hypnotic groove, while it's presumably White Pee providing all the sonic filigree, whether that's dense swirls of garbled thrum, buried voices, disembodied samples, layered textures, all in constant flux, swirling in a lysergic cloud around the psychedelic mesmer at its core.
The set goes through all sorts of metamorphoses, from ambient drift, to near metallic chug, to Hawkwindy trip out, to hazy, cosmic drift, and finally to blown out psychedelic freakout fused with warped sound collage, a heady combination, that makes it sound at times like there's some free jazz going on, and at others, like the instruments are slowing down and gradually melting.
Killer stuff for sure. And WAY recommended for fans of the further out realms of psych and space rock. Fantastic packaging too, a beautiful letter pressed sleeve, with a glued on full color insert, LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Our only complaint, why is it a cd-r?!? The music is so good, the packaging so swank, would have been worth it to make proper cds. Oh well. Still totally and absolutely worth it!
AND NOW HERE'S THE VINYL VERSION!!
Holy shit... Not only were we surprised (like everyone else) by the sudden appearance of a new Wilco Record, but also by just how goddamned great it is. We haven't been so taken by a Wilco record in ages, but Star Wars (is it really ok for them to call it that?) is like an awakening, finding Jeff Tweedy and the rest of the band at their most alive and exciting.
Beginning with a blast of noise, it's easy to imagine the more conservative, middle of the road, dad-rock fans of the band being a bit confused and/or annoyed, but it's glorious and leads us directly into a whole album filled with some of the most immediate and well crafted jams Wilco have yet recorded, probably their best collection of songs since A Ghost Is Born, and belongs right up there with that album, alongside Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in the best-of Wilco pantheon! Not just catchy and rockin', it also has an experimental bent with weird-out guitar moves that might perhaps fill a bit of the void left by the dissolution of Sonic Youth, and it's that knack for noisiness, woven into Wilco's masterful songsmithery, that makes Star Wars sound so exciting and fresh.
It's pretty satisfying when when a band you once loved, but that you kind of lost interest in, conjures up something mysterious and magical that immediately relights that fire, and hooks you all over again. We're beyond hooked on Star Wars and have been blasting it over and over since we got it.
NOW LISTING THE VINYL VERSION...
Um, yeah!! Windhand. At this point, three albums in, doom lovers, do you need us to tell you they're freaking great? Bow down already. There are lots of lots of doom bands, and dooooom bands, and even dooooooooooooooooooom bands out there dooming it down these days, but Virginia's Windhand are easily at or near the top of that heaping heap. Do not sleep on this latest release of theirs. Heck, they know how to write a 14 minute long doom song that's so groovy and catchy and heavy and utterly hypnotically captivating, that you're startled when it ends. That's something a lot of other doom bands, no matter how long they make their songs, can't do.
Windhand wield plenty of heavier-than-thou (and heavier-than-Sabbath, Vitus, even Electric Wizard) massive fuzzy riffage, plus they have a bunch of other elements that make them unique, including the way they occasionally weave in acoustic Americana parts, and some ambient passages too, amidst the blown out heaviness of the whole thing. Also crucial is their singer, Dorthia Cottrell, who as a female vocalist in this genre is interesting 'cause some of the time you can't tell it's a woman singing, and sometimes you can, but either case she brings a lot of melody and emotion and presence to the vocal parts, adding a lot to the overall, multidimensional Windhand sound. On previous Windhand slab Soma, the band really started making use of the potential of Cottrell's vocals, and Grief's Infernal Flower builds on that.
"Hesperus", the album's quasi-title track (it's in the the lyrics), brings back the surprising Acid Bath comparison we noted in our review of Windhand's debut, in the vocals at least, delivering a catchy refrain, until the lengthy song's final 2 or 3 minutes, which ramp up the already stoned out sludge to incredibly hypnotic, even heavier and harder proportions, before the sudden ending gives way to the next (also 14 minute!) cut's ambient opening, but we're hitting repeat on "Hesperus" already. Damn it's the epic doom jam of the fall, utter doom trance nirvana. Oh, speaking of Nirvana�at times on this album we're reminded of Seattle grunge slowed waaay down, and interestingly enough, Jack Endino produced this.
There's one entire old tymey folky sounding acoustic song here, "Sparrow", following on from some efforts in this direction on Soma as well as Cottrell's solo album earlier this year. It's a nice change of pace, well not pace really� nor even mood� just change in volume and heaviness from most of the other tracks here, which ultimately are all about thee HEAVY sheer slomo groove, married to a melodic sensibility as well. Kinda like Electric Wizard run through some sort of 'especially-melodic, almost-sorta-dreamy' filter. So maybe Electric Wizard with some Mazzy Star to it?? Whatever, it's a beautiful thing. So once again all the doom fanatics here are in love. Windhand rules.
