Two chunks of heavy-handed black ambience courtesy of Actuary and Gnaw Their Tongues. The former hails from Los Angeles, mustering gristly slabs of toxic noise and low-end rumble all enshrouded in electronic dread and hellbound sonic monstrosity. Aside from a well-received album on Crucial Blast a while back, much of their work came and went through the sub-underground noise networks of small edition cassettes and cd-r's. This cacophonous slab of blackened noise pummel from Actuary easy holds up against the tortured groans and blackened miasma that exude from Gnaw Their Tongues on the other side of this lp. On their oppressive tracks, Gnaw Their Tongues presents a couple signature pieces of atonal chunks of cinematic horror drones incorporate thick reverberations of crawling noise, mysteriously mechanical textures, and the distant bellowings of a screaming madman.
Originally released as a tape in 2014, this killer mix of far out, experimental hip hop, heavily influenced by Riot Grrl and queercore, now gets new life on vinyl, thanks to Ormolycka. And it's a good fit alongside the rest of Ormolycka's damaged hip hop roster (Antwon, Death Grips, Lil Ugly Mane, Burqa Boyz, Narwhalz, Bromp Treb, Juiceboxx, Shed Dwellaz), the music being a dizzying collage of grimy synths, twisted loops, stuttering, fractured beats, lots of buzz and static. The vibe is sometimes a little Digital Hardcore, sometimes a bit Anticon, shades of cloud rap abound, but MB gets way more gritty and fucked up, a sort of avant-trap, and damn, if this was straight up instrumental, it would be THEE beats and breaks record to beat, but then add in MB's crazy flow, and it becomes some seriously head spinning, next level, WTF?-hop, that is like nothing you've ever heard. There are a handful of guests too, most notably, Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna, who does a sung/spoken thing over a seriously grimy, beat-heavy, distorto groove!
Pressed on opaque, lavender vinyl!
For a band called Bludded Head, we're a little surprised it took until record number three for them to christen an album Reign In Bludd. But Bludded Head definitely more than live up to the promise of that loaded title, their sprawling doom/sludge heaviness existing somewhere between the epic majesty of Harvey Milk, and the psychedelic sonic bar brawl of Rusted Shut. The 8 minute opener perfectly demonstrates this, with it's slow build creep, all shrieked vox atop rib cage rattling lumber and churn, only to explode into a squall of wah wah drenched psych-noise chaos. Over the course of the other three tracks, these Neanderthal noiseniks from Texas (not sure why we thought they were from NY before), pull apart the carcass of noise rock, and reimagine it as some sort of filthy plaything, the way some redneck mouthbreather might toy with a wounded animal, "Fuckitdry" lurches from math rock crush, to angular, dizzying falling-apart-ness, while "Pouring Rain" gets all Slinty, but with some extra sludgy slabbage on the side, and finally, a heartfelt, slo-mo, crumbly (and very Harvey Milky) cover of Codeine's "Pea".
Cool spot varnished covers, and includes a download as well.
Okay, all you GOAT fanatics out there - and we're talking the mysterious Swedish afro-psych troupe, not the horned barnyard beasts (although we're guessing there's probably some crossover between fans of both) - Capra Informis is the project of the nameless Djembi player in Goat, and for his first solo outing, he doesn't drift too far from the sound he and his compatriots whip up as Goat. If anything, Capra Informis is less overtly rocking, less heavy psych, and more dense psychedelic tribalism, crafted from droned out synths, wild percussion and deep, monk-like vocal incantations, in fact most of the record sounds like it's being transmitted from some alternate reality sixties, where everyone is masked, and garbed in strange colored robes, and spends all their time creating ritualistic rhythmic psychedelia. The sound is dense and rhythmic, hypnotic and druggy, it's more spacey and woozy than hard rocking for sure, although "Womb Of The Wild" features plenty of psych stomp and guitar buzz, and sounds like it could actually be a stripped down Goat jam!
SUPER DUPER LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! We only have a handful and that's it.
Herzog! Weed! Swearin'! Milk Music! You've probably been noticing us freaking out over a whole mess of new bands heavily influenced by the sound of the nineties underground, so we figured it was the perfect time to heap some serious praise on a couple actual records from the nineties, and not just the underground, the WAY WAY underground, in fact, if you didn't live in central Illinois, you likely had never heard, or even heard OF these guys, but goddamn, now that we have, we're kind of obsessed! And we were warned. The guys at the Bird Dialect label had been talking up this nineties Chicago grunge/noise/power pop outfit for ages, we had never heard of them, and hadn't heard a lick of music, and were thus a bit skeptical, cuz really, what label DOESN'T hype their next release? But holy shit, these guys are amazing. It's hard to imagine a band like this not making it big. Cuz they had it all, heavy and hooky, killer songs, a vocalist with a seriously rad raspy yowl, the band whipping up a sort of grungy, glammy power pop, but with shades of classic Twin/Tone bands, and early Homestead Records, if we had heard these guys in the nineties, no doubt they'd be one of our favorite bands. Swaggery glam punk meets garage pop, fuzzy grunge meets ramshackle noise rock. The label calls them Peoria's answer to Urge Overkill, and we can definitely hear that, but imagine UO without all the kitsch and smarm, and add WAY more grit and punk rock swagger, we also hear tons of early/classic Aerosmith, there's a huge Seattle grunge vibe a la Green River/Mudhoney or actually more like grunge lesser knowns like Swallow, we also hear lots of Skunk (pre-Chavez), and heck maybe some Chavez too, definitely Soul Asylum as well, back when they were AWESOME (which they were, for a long time), not to mention Finnish grunge/glam wastoids Smack, and heck, if we're going totally obscure, they reminded some of us of the band Clumsy, whose Center Of Attention Deficit Disorder is a mostly unheard nineties classic. So yeah, these guys, at least sonically, seemed poised for the big time, and listening to this now, it's almost criminal that more people haven't heard (of) these guys.
Their 1994 debut Corvette Summer is a stone cold classic, opener "Kick The Ball" opens with a grungy, blown out riff, the sound is sort of power pop in punk rock clothing, like a meaner, noisier Cheap Trick, it's the sort of jam you can imagine inspiring some seriously sweaty crowds to go apeshit, the song lurching from chugging noise pop, to tangly noise rock and back again. "Timi Yuro Song" ups the pop ante, but that grunge vibe still shines through, especially when it slips into a low slung chug/dirge/swagger, and that voice, cigarettes and whiskey definitely played a part, and here we're definitely hearing some Love Battery, which is most definitely a good thing. "Half A Chance" is total Aerosmith worship, all woozy guitar shimmer, a total slow build ballad, like Dollface's "Dream On", and yeah, we don't make that comparison lightly, and we should mention the part where the vocalist sings "make them scream" and in the background, you can suddenly hear the sound of a wildly screaming crowd. Brooding, intense, minor key, some serious pathos heavy hard rock for sure. We could go track by track, but odds are you know by now if this is your thing, and if you're ANYthing like us, it most definitely is. The band do mix it up - there's the the power pop bounce of "Opportunities", the fuzzy almost psychedelic jangle of "Valentines Day", the playful pop punk of "No Duh No Doi", there's even hand claps on a few tracks, not to mention some seriously anthem worthy choruses, as well as some goofy, but pretty funny lyrics, all of which is well balanced by the bands grungier, more hard rocking side. This is fast becoming a new favorite, and definite contender for reissue of the year!
Herzog! Weed! Swearin'! Milk Music! You've probably been noticing us freaking out over a whole mess of new bands heavily influenced by the sound of the nineties underground, so we figured it was the perfect time to heap some serious praise on a couple actual records from the nineties, and not just the underground, the WAY WAY underground, in fact, if you didn't live in central Illinois, you likely had never heard, or even heard OF these guys, but goddamn, now that we have, we're kind of obsessed! And we were warned. The guys at the Bird Dialect label had been talking up this nineties Chicago grunge/noise/power pop outfit for ages, we had never heard of them, and hadn't heard a lick of music, and were thus a bit skeptical, cuz really, what label DOESN'T hype their next release? But holy shit, these guys are amazing. It's hard to imagine a band like this not making it big. Cuz they had it all, heavy and hooky, killer songs, a vocalist with a seriously rad raspy yowl, the band whipping up a sort of grungy, glammy power pop, but with shades of classic Twin/Tone bands, and early Homestead Records, if we had heard these guys in the nineties, no doubt they'd be one of our favorite bands. Swaggery glam punk meets garage pop, fuzzy grunge meets ramshackle noise rock. The label calls them Peoria's answer to Urge Overkill, and we can definitely hear that, but imagine UO without all the kitsch and smarm, and add WAY more grit and punk rock swagger, we also hear tons of early/classic Aerosmith, there's a huge Seattle grunge vibe a la Green River/Mudhoney or actually more like grunge lesser knowns like Swallow, we also hear lots of Skunk (pre-Chavez), and heck maybe some Chavez too, definitely Soul Asylum as well, back when they were AWESOME (which they were, for a long time), not to mention Finnish grunge/glam wastoids Smack, and heck, if we're going totally obscure, they reminded some of us of the band Clumsy, whose Center Of Attention Deficit Disorder is a mostly unheard nineties classic. So yeah, these guys, at least sonically, seemed poised for the big time, and listening to this now, it's almost criminal that more people haven't heard (of) these guys.
Lights The Pilot!!! was the band's second record, originally released in 1996, and like Corvette Summer, it's a hard rocking doozy, just give a listen to "Destiny, Oh Destiny", which sounds like some lost Nirvana B-side, right down to the vocalist's inflection, and the weird chugging grunginess, in fact, anyone who digs Nirvana (and modern Nirvana worshippers like Roomrunner) will lose their shit for this. It's like the weirder, darker, noisier side of Nirvana, which was sort of always our favorite, super melodic busy basslines, crumbling distorted guitar jangle and crunch, two and a half minutes that you'll likely find yourself playing over and over and over. But the rest of the record is not too shabby either, slipping from the pogo-y punk pop of "Rods And Cones", to the fuzzy, noisy, grunged out power pop of "I Breakdown And Cry", with its killer woozy bridge, and the awesome, about-to-crack vocals, and from the crazy catchy, chugging jangle pop of "Atlantis", to the the twisted experimental new wave weirdness of "I Light The Pilot, and so it goes. We hear some Rocket From The Crypt, some Hot Snakes (especially on "Monkey House"), lots of familiar sounds for sure, but all wound up into a pretty unique package, one that pushes pretty much all our nineties rock buttons, and along with Dollface's Corvette Summer debut, these are getting played around here like crazy!
It has been a while since we've experienced the wonderfully absurdist cataclysm that is Leif Elggren. He who has crowned himself co-king of Elgaland-Vargaland. He who has claimed every yellow and black piece of striped automotive signage as his own paintings. Leif Elggren. Das Baank is an incendiary piece of acoustic noise that hits more on a Matthew Bower / Stephen O'Malley aesthetic of scalded distortion, that sound more like a power sander than analog electronics, even as that's the likely source material. He couples this with backwards recordings of monastic chants, stretched and dragged out to haunted drones. All of this is aimed as something of an exorcism of the corruption from the usury that is a central tenent of the capitalist system. The liner notes go to great length to showcase the historical denigration of usury as morally incompatible with Christian and Muslim teachings, highlighting the irony that religion is often couched with conservative agendas to promote the extremes of capitalist exploitation for the benefit of a few. Sonically, it's one of the most compelling pieces of sound demolition we've heard from Elggren in quite a long time. Brilliant stuff.
We had almost given up on ever hearing from Flying Saucer attack ever again. After all, it's been 15 years since the last record (2000's Mirror), and now nearly twenty since Rachel Brook left the band to focus on Movietone. They (or now he really, as it's essentially been a David Pearce solo project for a while now) still rank amongst our all time favorite psychedelic shoegaze outfits EVER. And even on this new one it's easy to see why.
While not a proper new -album- per se, Instrumentals plays out more like a collection of sonic sketches, impressionistic textures and guitarscapes, still covering much of the same found that FSA did back in the day, be it chiming, pastoral psych-folk, or shimmering ambient drift, or distorted, washed out soft-noise. The songs are mostly short here, none breaking the 10 minute mark, and many hovering around 90 seconds or less, and yet somehow, it manages to sound cohesive, these ideas, sonic suggestions, these hazy movements, all flow and ooze and bleed into one another, the whole thing gorgeously amorphous and mesmeric.
Fans of the group probably didn't have to even read this far, news of a new FSA record is likely all it took, and those folks will not be disappointed. But somehow, Instrumentals serves as a perfect introduction to the group, an easy entree into a catalog of subtly difficult music. And there are difficult moments here too, guitars detune, explode into squalls, settle into hushed whispery thrum, but even at its most caustic or bombastic, there's a tranquility, a depth and weight to these sounds, that unfurl like pieces not songs, fragmented for sure, but the fragments are allowed to billow and expand, the layers piling up, and often peeling away, as much about texture, timbre and tone as mood and melody, if not more so. The songs are even named generically, as if to not color the listener's impression, allowing the sound to reveal what lies beneath, and within. And like all the FSA records, this is far from a high fidelity affair, the sound gritty, and grimy, amp buzz, and tape warble, hiss and hum, all subtle shadings in the sound, and in many cases, perfectly blended with the music itself, to add heft, or gravitas, or hell, just some extra noise.
Throughout, it's hard not to be swept away. Pearce conjures up a musical world that's at once magical and mysterious, the sound transcendent and transformative, minimal on the surface, but hiding a maximal energy within. And yeah, we're far from objective. We've loved this band forEVER, and were dying for this record when we first heard about it, and were definitely inclined to love it no matter what. But after repeated listens, what at first seemed like a sonic sketchbook (albeit good one at that), has blossomed into something more purposeful. There's a melancholic, meandering, musical path that runs through these 15 tracks, a path that leads simultaneously inward and outward, and coheres into a darkly delicate songsuite of somnambulant lullabies and softly psychedelic threnodies.
Life (this album) is another fantastic(al) blast of dizzyingly prismatic, distorto-pop cotton candy psychedelia, a swirling sonic funhouse of sound, that like Friel's previous disc, Total Folklore (a Record Of The Week, btw), sounds like it should be on your shelf somewhere between Black Moth Super Rainbow, early Flaming Lips, Our Love Will Destroy The World, Sunroof!, and Zomes (that is, if you have the weirdest method of arranging your records). Playful and dayglo, distorted and noisy, glitchy and billowy, in a way, it sort of sounds like a SUPER poppy, 8-bit version of Lightning Bolt, some of the tracks sounding like music for the most drugged out, psychedelic video game ever, others getting downright noisy, but in that dreamy, deliriously blissed out noise way, the sounds totally in-the-red, but that saturation just making the various rhythms and melodies all bleed into one another and sounding like the musical version of a room full of preschoolers fighting with fingerprint and silly string. Totally over the top, and fantastically ebullient, it's pretty much impossible not to love Friel's maddening magical musical wonderland.
As promised, these brilliant Canadian metalpunks are now back with their second full-length album. Like their debut Cold Bitch, it's another "single-coil assault" of rollicking, punked-out, '80s influenced speed metal that's absolutely unfuckwithable. No, not in the sense that it's the most technically advanced musically, or super high in fidelity, no, we're talking about the sheer spirit of it. And it's the sort of thing that's just kind of perfect in its DIY imperfection. Not by any means a tired, unimaginative exercise in emulating the past that we hear from so many retro thrash bands, instead the Iron Dogs fashion inspiration from their '80s faves - the likes of early Iron Maiden, English Dogs, Exciter, Cirith Ungol, and Tank - into something newly vibrant and alive. Proudly old school while still sounding 'young'. Delightfully loose and exuberant, ready to rock right off the rails, but not careless or half-assed, despite the raw garaginess of it all.
As hopefully you well remember, we freakin' raved about Cold Bitch last year, likening it to a cross between Speedwolf and Slough Feg, and this new one takes the sound of that album and runs with it, delivering the goods with another batch of songs just as good or better than the first, if anything. So while Free & Wild isn't super different than Cold Bitch, that's just fine with us! Some bands are about 'progression', you want 'em exploring new sounds and ideas from record to record; others, you don't want anything to change, you just want MORE, new killer songs in the same style, which is what you get here. And since we loved Cold Bitch so much and spun it so often, we HAD to make Free & Wild a Record Of The Week. Free & Wild even sports a similar cover concept - a photo of a sword wielding, blood-drenched naked lady. She's being "Free & Wild" we guess, taking men's heads and putting them on stakes (or perhaps this tableau is inspired by track six here, "Cannibal Death Cult"). Cold Bitch's cover was a bit more clever but this one is no less striking.
One change with this album, not that you would notice it, is that Iron Dogs are no longer a trio, but a duo, with Dan Lee on on drums and Jo Capitalicide on vocals, guitar, bass, and even some synth. And as a two piece, Jo and Dan are now our favorite metal duo since Fenriz and Nocturno Culto - and we'd imagine that those two Darkthrone dudes would highly approve of what the Iron Dogs are up to, the mix of NWOBHM gallop and crusty punk fervor is right up their alley.
Now, some other, less enlightened people might find fault with the production (solid but certainly not slick), or not be on board with Capitalicide's untrained rough-and-tumble vocal holler (with Dan Lee's backing vox adding even more jubilance). But those folks are obviously not punk rock enough - and/or cult metal enough - to 'get it'. To us what makes this so special comes through loud and clear in each of this album's eight tracks, all of 'em exploding with energy, catchy hooks and epic feel, crammed full of delicious bits of metallic goodness. Opener "Firebird" (for which they've made an entertaining low-budget video, perhaps inspired by Benny Hill as much as the videos of Canadian antecedent Thor, see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWZsD2kFeSo) is a melodic, motivational speedy anthem to get things going. From there, the half-hour run time of this album rips by with highlight after highlight, Jo singing of fighting, freedom, and fantasy. We love every bit of this. The heartracing riffage. The majestic Moog moments. The up-and-down cascade of wordless vocal woah-oh-oh-ohs in the middle of "Island Of The Dead". The way Jo's voice cracks on that one verse in "Storm Warning". The folky fast picked guitar motif on "Adversity" - indeed all the melodic guitar licks bursting out everywhere. This rousing Iron Dogs album, non-ironic but not over-serious, epitomizes the positive power of metal in a shitty world.
Ok, so we're hopeless Iron Dogs fanboys... but there's a reason for that! Listen and learn. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. We won't call you a poseur. But we'll still feel sorry for you. 'Cause Iron Dogs RULE!
(Note: this is the handsome cd digipack edition - but if you act fast and ask, you could possibly snag one of the few "vinyls" we have left, or even a cassette, neither of which we're actually listing 'cause we have so few.)
If Lightning Bolt had boy/girl vocals and ditched the guitar for a couple of synths, the result might be something akin to Le Flange du Mal. The band, which existed in the early part of the 2000s and is finally, posthumously, releasing this record, had a somewhat silly exterior (hence the pun in the title) which veiled bombastic, danceable drumming, a political agenda, and excellent weird melodies. Carrion, My Wayward Son varies between frenetic Melt Banana-esque thrash and percussive dirgy marches reminiscent of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, especially when lead vocalists Liz Allbee and Chris Rolls team up and sing together. Allbee has since moved on to perform with Oakland's south-Asian songsters Neung Phak, and although the two projects have little to do with each other sonically, it's easy to picture Allbee's vocal skills finding a home there. The record comes with a digital download code (printed not on a card, but on the vinyl's center label) for not just this lp, but also the band's previous two lps and a video of an entire concert.
First we've heard from this LA (by way of Mexico) power trio, which includes members both of the Melvins and Mr. Bungle. And while there's not a whole lot of Bungle-isms, the Melvins connection is definitely solid. Low Flying Hawks traffic in a slow, lugubrious sludge pop, slipping from downer dirge, to fuzzed out heaviness, to brooding death rock, to swirling psychedelia, all driven by the killer rhythm section of Dale Crover and Trevor Dunn. The mysterious third member / LFh mainman more than holds his own, his guitar crunchy and melodic, crumbling and blown out in equal measure, his vocals landing somewhere between the bellow of Buzz from the Melvins, the anguished wail of Creston from Harvey Milk, the mumbled croon of Dan from True Widow and the sneery snarl of Mark Arm from Mudhoney. The songs lurch and lumber, a sort of shoegaze stoner metal, heavy and doomy and tripped out, melodic and catchy, weary and woozy, a dreamily downer slowcore dirge rock that evokes all kinds of favorites from the seventies, eighties and nineties.
Fans of all stripes of depressing heaviness, moody miserablism and wasted, downer psych, will definitely dig this big time.
Way back in 2007, we made Mammal's Lonesome Drifter our Record Of The Week, a twisted, darkly tripped out mix of mutant, metallic minimalism, gnarled downer folk, and synth soaked experimentalism. Lake & Sad was actually recorded right after Lonesome Drifter, but not mixed until 2013 or released until now. Sonically though, it's very much in line with LD, although if anything, it's even more of a downer, way darker, more introspective, and definitely more raw and stripped down. We're reminded a bit of Harvey Milk at their most ballady, but even more hushed and haunting, there are (very) occasional moments of blistery distorto psych guitar, and some simple drumming, but for the most part, it's a wasted sort of skeletal doom folk, woozily washed out, and darkly beautiful, like if Songs: Ohia was raised on industrial music, got high on peyote, and covered Harvey Milk songs in his bedroom, sonically convalescing after a brutal breakup. LOVE it.
We first heard from weirdo Italian kraut-psych trippers Mamuthones a while back on a split 12" with UK noise rock punks. On this new 12", they take their already freaky, funky, experimental space psych sounds even further out. Look no further than the opening track, a totally transformed Rolling Stones cover, layed into a pitch perfect appropriation of the rhythm track from LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" - all jittery, post punk rhythms, crunchy guitar jangle, strange sung/spoken vocals, not to mention looped background vocals (ooooh ooooh), the sound gradually building momentum, the song soon smothered in swoonsome melodic swaths in wild swirls of FX. The second proper track is more of the same, spoken word over tribal hypno-psych pound, squalls of gristly guitar crunch, a sort of skeletal space psych freakout.
The flipside of the 12" is filled out with remixes, both A side tracks get seriously reworked, one becomes super minimal, sounding a bit like some druggy Steve Reich / Moon Duo mashup, the vocals dripping with reverb and delay, the background sounds, bleeding and blurring into a psychedelic smear, while guitars howl and wail over the top, the other ditches the guitars completely, and is just drums and vocals, with some swirly synths, which makes for a trippy avant kraut-funk, jittery post punk workout.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!
If there was ever a band that sounded like they were transported directly from the heyday of AmRep records and nineties noise rock, it's Multicult. These Baltimore bruisers channel classic Jesus Lizard and Midwestern pigfuck heaviness through their own twisted take on modern math rock. Looking back on past reviews of previous Multicult records, that's essentially what we've said every time, and goddamn if it's not still true. Surgery, Helmet, Tar, Unsane, Janitor Joe, Hammerhead, we could go on, needless to say, if you like your rock dense and driving, your basslines sinewy, your guitars alternately jagged and brittle, crumbling and distorted, everything lathered in a sickly sweet patina of sonic grime, howled vocals over lurching grooves and fractured rhythms, then look no further. And that's not to mention some seriously great songs - "Foreign Object" might be THEE catchiest noise rock song we've heard in FOREVER!
Includes a download too.
The day-glo anarcho/dub-punk of Rubella Ballet and the convoluted anti-funk of Eight Eyed Spy might be a few of the choice throw-back references you'll find in Naked Lights. This Oakland quintet has produced one of those fantastic wildcard albums that we love, pushing against all expectations of what a Castle Face album should sound like. Twin guitars squiggle and splutter in a dizzying chatter whilst the deft rhythm section belongs to a lineage of complicated grooviness that traces back to Can and This Heat and up to Laddio Bolocko. Vocalist Aurora Crispin maintains a slurred yelp that drags her syllables in an uncanny resemblance to Mark E. Smith. Collectively, the band seems to adopt a number of different strategies in penning their songs - complicated time-signatures, jigsaw puzzle angles and contours, and repetitive grooves that shouldn't work but do. Even when the tracks snap against verse and chorus, these components are fractured and detoured in deft art-punk fashion. Recommended!
After a self released 7", and a split single with recent Record Of The Weekers, weirdo biker metal ne'er-do-wells Satans Satyrs, Canadian noise rockers / metal punks Ohmwar deliver their first full length, and it's sonically quite surprising, super polished and all over the sonic map, taking the Maiden / Motorhead / Speedwolf sound of their 7" and infusing it with a surprising amount of poppiness, crafting a record that manages to be heavy, and punky, but also impossibly catchy, the opening track begins with some chiming Sonic Youth like guitars, and thick fuzzy bass, before eventually erupting into something more punked out, and that's not even mentioning the strange almost reggae sounding outro (!)...
The second track starts off crazy poppy too, with some almost NWOBHM sounding guitar harmonies, which blur into feedback drenched tones wrapped around some galloping punk rock crush, peppered with little blurts of tangled progginess. And it really doesn't settle into a single sound for the rest of the record, although in not settling, they seem to be defining their own super distinctive sound, a dizzying hybrid of post punk poppiness, mathy metal, and fierce punk rock stomp. Tracks like "Blithe Reaction To An Unfortunate Life", begins all slow burn majesty, and almost Godspeed like slow build, before transforming into a strange (at least for metal/punk) bloopy guitar melody, draped over another galloping rhythms and some thick, rumbling bass buzz, the guitars then splintering into atonal/angular shards of keening high end, the sort of sound that at a slower tempo, minus the gruff vox, could easily end up being some twisted avant art rock, and even in its punkier incarnation, much of that art rockiness remains, and then mid song, there's a killer little guitar lick/melody, that will stick in your head like crazy. And so it goes, most of the songs clocking in around the two minute mark, but these guys cramming as much as they can into those two minutes, with almost every song offering up some sort of unlikely sonic surprise, transforming, what could have been straight ahead metallic punk, into a way more twisted and progressive record, pop punk collides with chugging metal, nineties style math rock bleeds into pounding hard rocking, Refused sounding anthemic post-hardcore mixes with straight up heavy pop, all wound up into something pretty goddamn great.
Awesomely over the top, black and white Nick Blinko style cover art, but Blinko by way of Bosch, a twisted punk rock underworld of mouse headed hipsters, people with exposed spines, astronauts on rafts drifting across lakes of blood, insects on swings, man eating fish, alien swamp sound systems, wheelbarrows full of teddy bear skeletons, creepy cave eyes and more. Includes a massive glossy, fold out poster/lyric sheet, with more of that gloriously gruesome and garish artwork.
Instrumental improv supergroup (in our realm, for sure) Rangda, featuring the six-string talents of Ben 'Six Organs' Chasny and Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls infamy, accompanied by drum dervish Chris Corsano, are back with their third album (not counting a live 10" and split with The Dead C). This outing sees Rangda in the mood to have some fun, it would seem, with one randomly song named after Spiro Agnew (Google him, ye millennials) and the music here can get pretty jaunty too - Irwin says it made him feel like he was on a boat (?). Zippy instrumental toonage, with angular grooves and the expected type of esoteric shred that Chasny and Bishop can lay down, coming off a bit like Sun City Girls Lite, not a bad thing says anyone who, like us, has been revisiting the recently reissued Torch Of The Fucking Mystics. And, on the likes of "Hard Times Befall The Door-to-Door Glass Shard Salesman" and a couple other long-form burners, Randga delve into some moody noise-scaping as well, balancing out the zippy boaty-ness elsewhere. Heck, the nearly 20 minute epic "Mondays Are Free At The Hermetic Museum" that closes the album is the sort of tour-de-force only Rangda (or maybe the SCGs) could make seem easy. All in all, another winner from these weirdos, wowza!
Finally reissued on vinyl!!
Twenty-two years after his death, the music of Arthur Russell is more alive than ever. Mostly known as a left-field disco producer and classically trained cellist, Russell was also an accomplished avant-garde composer, as evidenced here. Listed by us recently on limited cassette, and once reissued on cd in 2006 as part of the Audika collection First Thought Best Thought that documented his orchestral work with luminaries of the New York Downtown Scene (Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson and Peter Gordon) following his stint as musical director at The Kitchen in New York, Tower Of Meaning was originally released on Philip Glass's new music label, Chatham Square in 1983.
A suite of seven movements performed by an ensemble of horn players and conducted by Julius Eastman (whom like Russell, was a gay modern classical iconoclast), Tower Of Meaning has a slow epic funereal vibe reminiscent of Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of The Titanic, or indeed like a Philip Glass piece in slow motion. While not quite as emotionally devastating as the Bryars piece, the horns in Tower Of Meaning play out long plaintive tones simultaneously resulting in unusual intonations and harmonics as the tones overlap creating modalities of clustering chords that aurally seem to both march forward and float upward without ever quite resolving itself, the "meaning" in the title forever remaining elusive and out of reach.
The Bryars connection is a bit ironic however, because Tower Of Meaning was originally intended as incidental music to accompany a staging of Robert Wilson's Medea, but creative squabbling between the two forced Russell out and Gavin Bryars took over the project. The resultant recording is only a fraction of Russell's score which included voices and other instrumentation as well. Embittered by the experience, it was sadly Russell's final orchestral effort.
More WTF sonic weirdness from our pals at Ormolycka, this one from the previously unknown to us Shams, whose sound is a strange fusion of gothy new wavery, high energy techno and spaced out, synth soaked house music. Like the soundtrack to some alternate dimension Studio 54, or some grimy seventies sex club, Romantic Choking is a coke fueled, dance floor destroying, retro-disco time warp, all moody, mutant grooves, and dimly lit club-at-the-end-of-the-world waste-age. Pressed on bright orange vinyl.
Ormolycka might just be the ultimate masters of discovering weirdo what-the-fuck sounds. We consider ourselves to be pretty deft at digging up totally unheard of records, an uncovering bands nobody has heard of, but holy shit, half the stuff Ormolycka releases usually has us totally stumped. Another case in point, Skull Katalog, who none of us here had ever heard (of) before, and some internet research revealed� well, not much at all. A few mentions, some random photos, and finally after much digging, we did at least discover that Skull Katalog used to be called Sewn Leather� Anyway, Skull Katalog are some kind of post punk / funk punk / noise-hop one man band, consisting of bellowed vocals, gristled effects, and metal guitars, all over primitive programmed (?) beats, sounding like a meaner, more industrial / no wave version of some twisted Beastie Boys / Warlock Pinchers / Pop Will Eat Itself hybrid. Noisy, DIY, punk as fuck and pretty fucking cool.
Pressed on swirly, piss colored vinyl.
Besides having one of the best band names ever (Google it!), this Seattle trio kick up a serious din, equal parts classic grunge, angular new wave, and aggro post punk. Neo is a chaotic sonic free-for-all, with most of the songs seemingly on the verge of total collapse, delicately balancing melody and mayhem, drawing everything in FX and feedback, the guitar sounding like they're continually going in and out of tune, the vocals a wild, dramatic yarl, some songs frantic and frenetic, sounding like some lost eighties whatever-wave, while others trudge all hairy-knuckled through Flipper like muck, and still others creep and slither despondently (and at least one of those has some kind of weird robot vocals!). There's some gothiness, some gloominess, at least one track (if not more), sounds like an even more pissed off, and maybe slightly more wasted Nirvana, while most of the rest sound like some virulent strain of noisy, murky gloom pop, albeit one with stadium rock aspirations, resulting in some crazy catchiness, doused in all manner of sonic grit and grime.
Eighties Texas psychedelic noise punks Stick Men With Ray Guns never released a proper record, but here is a vinyl collection of their most crucial recordings - tracks that popped up on comps throughout the years and some live tracks too, that document the antagonistic, violent, transgressive and all too brief history of these far out freaks. Cut from the same cloth as the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, Rusted Shut, Flipper and other Neanderthal noiseniks, the sound is mostly plodding and dirgey, driven by thick, sludgy throbbing bass and caveman drum pound, but laced with weird, almost metal guitar shred and driven by the weirdo vox of frontman Bobby Soxx, whose snotty snarl sounds like proto Alice Donut, and is constantly exploding into high pitched witchy shrieks. Some of the tracks get into total rockabilly territory (and weirdly, those are the ones that sound most like the Butthole Surfers), while the live tracks somehow sound even more caustic and damaged, like sludgy punk mixed with Throbbing Gristle industrial noise. Recommended vinyl documentation of the OTHER-legendary-drug-addled-shirtless-drunk-stumbling-rocking-LOUD-punk-as-fuck-Texas-combo (other than the Buttholes that is).
**SALE **SALE* *SALE** (was $21.00, now $13.98)...
RECORD STORE DAY 2015!!
Did you listen to the Serial podcast, that This American Life spinoff? If not, that's weird 'cause EVERYBODY did (heck it was popular enough to be parodied on SNL), and also you should maybe listen to it 'cause it was pretty great, a fascinating true crime mystery about a high school student accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend that leaves you wondering how we can ever be sure of anything at all, ever. Is Adnan an innocent man, wrongly convicted? Seems likely. Or or instead is he a complete psychopath / brilliant actor? Maybe that's the explanation, just as likely perhaps. Anyway, the gripping and quirky podcast was accompanied by some very cool moody soundtrack music by Nick Thorburn, of various indie bands like Islands and The Unicorns, and it got a special vinyl-only Record Day release this year. Listening to this will definitely send Serial fans right back into the hole of puzzling about this confounding case, for sure. And even if you weren't ever addicted to Serial, this music is enjoyable and evocative - though we should note that none of the 16 tracks here are much longer than a minute or two.
Yes! Maximum damaged Swedish guitar psych jamming in the house! Knowing how much we at AQ LOVE the sixties Swedish psych sounds of Parson Sound/International Harvester/Harvester/Trad Gras Och Stenar (multiple manifestations of basically the same band, whose crucial original LPs and unreleased recordings have been reissued on cd over the past couple of years, a boon to music-lovers everywhere -- see elsewhere on our website for reviews) you can imagine how excited we were to find out that TWO MORE Trad Gras Och Stenar LPs of early seventies vintage were now being reissued by new US label 1/2 Special, who indeed do a bang up job with these two discs. The booklets feature lots of photos and posters, a discography, and detailed liner notes from the band (delving into remembrance of the personal and social transformations of the hippie era). Plus, each disc's got a hefty bonus track (32 minutes on "Djungelns" and 27 on "Mors")! And of course it's the music that really makes these essential.
Influenced by Scandinavian folk music, drugs, radical politics, Terry Riley, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Indian ragas, etc. this is some awesomely messed-up far-out rock music for sure. If these guys were German instead of Swedish, we'd be talking about a Krautrock legend. TGOS, as the final incarnation of group that started as Parson Sound, features a stripped-down line-up playing music that is perhaps more conventionally "rock" based than earlier formations, but definitely the heavy minimalism of Parson Sound and the Amon Duulish folked-out trippiness of Harvester remain important elements of their lugubrous sound.
"Djungelns Lag" ("Jungle Law" in English), originally issued in 1972, collects tracks recorded by TGOS on tour in Sweden and Norway during the summer and fall of 1971. You get extended dual guitar tangle and lovely sad folk laments, brief bouts of sunshiney nonsense vocals backed with acoustic guitar strum ("Dibio"), and even hippie hoedown jaw-harp jams ("Munfiol"). Wherever they wander, this is generally mellow yet moving, always measured and stately even when at its most abstract and electric.
Likewise with "Mors Mors" (aka "Bye Bye"), a 1973 album of tracks originating on tour in Sweden and Denmark in '72, which continues with both the gentle freakiness and distorted thud. The Rolling Stone's "Last Time" gets a TGOS treatment (not quite as blasted as their take on "Satisfaction" found on their self-titled album, though) and again their originals feature plenty of what we dig: moments of ragged Haino-worthy axe attack, tripped-out Quicksilver leads, and lovely pastoral folk-drone...
So it's appropriate that both discs were reissued simultaneously, if you want one you'll want 'em both. What else can we say...well, anyone who buys Acid Mothers Temple discs ought to be sure to take some Trad Gras Och Stenar home too, that's for sure. As with all the reissues from this camp, highly recommended.
Yes! Maximum damaged Swedish guitar psych jamming in the house! Knowing how much we at AQ LOVE the sixties Swedish psych sounds of Parson Sound/International Harvester/Harvester/Trad Gras Och Stenar (multiple manifestations of basically the same band, whose crucial original LPs and unreleased recordings have been reissued on cd over the past couple of years, a boon to music-lovers everywhere -- see elsewhere on our website for reviews) you can imagine how excited we were to find out that TWO MORE Trad Gras Och Stenar LPs of early seventies vintage were now being reissued by new US label 1/2 Special, who indeed do a bang up job with these two discs. The booklets feature lots of photos and posters, a discography, and detailed liner notes from the band (delving into remembrance of the personal and social transformations of the hippie era). Plus, each disc's got a hefty bonus track (32 minutes on "Djungelns" and 27 on "Mors")! And of course it's the music that really makes these essential.
Influenced by Scandinavian folk music, drugs, radical politics, Terry Riley, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Indian ragas, etc. this is some awesomely messed-up far-out rock music for sure. If these guys were German instead of Swedish, we'd be talking about a Krautrock legend. TGOS, as the final incarnation of group that started as Parson Sound, features a stripped-down line-up playing music that is perhaps more conventionally "rock" based than earlier formations, but definitely the heavy minimalism of Parson Sound and the Amon Duulish folked-out trippiness of Harvester remain important elements of their lugubrous sound.
"Djungelns Lag", originally issued in 1972, collects tracks recorded by TGOS on tour in Sweden and Norway during the summer and fall of 1971. You get extended dual guitar tangle and lovely sad folk laments, brief bouts of sunshiney nonsense vocals backed with acoustic guitar strum ("Dibio"), and even hippie hoedown jaw-harp jams ("Munfiol"). Wherever they wander, this is generally mellow yet moving, always measured and stately even when at its most abstract and electric.
Likewise with "Mors Mors" (a 1973 album of tracks originating on tour in Sweden and Denmark in '72), which continues with both the gentle freakiness and distorted thud. The Rolling Stone's "Last Time" gets a TGOS treatment (not quite as blasted as their take on "Satisfaction" found on their self-titled album, though) and again their originals feature plenty of what we dig: moments of ragged Haino-worthy axe attack, tripped-out Quicksilver leads, and lovely folk-drone...
So it's appropriate that both discs were reissued simultaneously, if you want one you'll want 'em both. What else can we say...well, anyone who buys Acid Mothers Temple discs ought to be sure to take some Trad Gras Och Stenar home too, that's for sure. As with all the reissues from this camp, highly recommended.
The fourth in the impeccably curated series of albums by Stefan Knappe (Troum / Drone Records) that followed a very impressive Drones singles collection. Here, we've got fourth hither-to-unknown artists mapping various trajectories of Drone Muzik from the far corners of the world (literally, Siberia, Cambodia by way France, Portugal, and Pakistan!). Kirill Platonkin: beautiful emotionally draining, guitar-driven dronescaping akin to the sound at the transition between Maeror Tri and Troum. Jeremie Mathes: super creepy haunted asylum atmospherics with plenty of insidious clangs, scrapes, and bumps in the night, not surprisingly this was recorded inside a massive, empty water tank. Iliou Persis: reverb saturated ritualism involving detuned zithers, electronics, and percussion, not dissimiliar to Voice Of Eye or Vasilisk. Roman Kharkovsky: deep, dark ambient with thrumming basstones and voluminous clouds of hiss, hum, and wash that takes up the cyclonic portent of Inade or Yen Pox. Drone can do no wrong!
Never has a record's title more accurately described its contents, cuz we really had no idea what to expect from Hartley C. White's This Is Not What You Expect. Based on the cover, we thought this would be some sort of blues rock, but this is WAY further out. Some serious outsider, next level avant-blues-dub-reggae-funk weirdness, that careens wildly from echo-drenched, looped and layered a cappella rounds, to fractured lo-fi funk, to dirgey, groovy, doomy, psychedelia, to hard rocking, angular, buzzing, sung/spoken WTF? trippiness. White, who was living in Queens when he recorded these jams (between 1984 and 2009), was raised in Jamaica during the turbulent sixties. He conceived of his sound, which he describes as 'Whopazootic', as a musical reimagining of Bruce Lee's martial arts, White's 'broken rhythms' meant to be both offensive and defensive. Wow. But this stuff actually does kind of conjure that vibe, lots of overdubbed vocal workouts, but just as many Funkadelic style freakouts, all wound around classic Jamaican dub styles, some swirling sampled strings, some seriously confusional avant pop, dreamy psychedelic balladry, singsongy almost lullaby like sweetness, all crafted from funky basslines, fluttery flutes, skronking horns, shimmering kalimba melodies, primitive drum machines and FX heavy guitar strum, White's vocals alternately sweetly crooning, chanting hypnotically, or toasting boisterously. The label sez recommended for fans of 10CC, Sly & The Family Stone, Willis Earl Beal and Ariel Pink, and while we'd usually scoff at such disparate comparisons, in this case, that's really not that far off.
Released on vinyl at the same time on Rural Isolation, we just got in a handful of copies from the eponymous album from the enigmatic JT Whitfield on cassette through Chondritic Sound! Here, we have another four tracks of industrial strength bad-vibes. The synthetic murk and tangled ectoplasm which Whitfield dubbed out on that the previous cassette continue here with the heavily thumped rhythms swapped for more of a ritualized, nocturnal set. At times, this has the feel of clandestine happenings by denizens of a subterranean community who have constructed dank hymns and electric chorales in the only cathedrals they ever knew - sewers, drain pipes, and cisterns. Much more akin to Lustmord's Heresy or Paradise Disowned, as a result, and excellent.
If you're a follower of the aQ list, you know that there's this retro-but-fresh Canadian metal band called Iron Dogs, that we think is really, really special, eh? We've raved about their two records of punked out, DIY old school heavy metal worship - in fact, we made their Free & Wild album a Record Of The Week about a year ago. Well, the singer/guitarist in Iron Dogs, a talented & busy bloke with the very punk name of Jo Capitalicide, is also in a few other cool bands, one of 'em being the freaking great Zex, who sound kinda like a cross between Iron Dogs and the Rezillos, because compared to Iron Dogs they're more punk, more poppy, and they've got a female singer. This is their debut album, which also has to be aQ Record Of The Week for sure, 'cuz they've waxed a classic, we think, when it comes to records with a "youth gone wild in the streets", us-against-the-world vibe, that will make you feel like a 16 year old runaway again. Heck, we've been wanting to list something by Zex for a while, ever since we first heard 'em, but their two 7"s sold out too fast. But now we're so happy Magic Bullet has just released a US edition of their full-length on both cd and vinyl that we can at last stock and shout about.
Zex, who like Iron Dogs are based outta Ottawa, find Jo playing guitar alongside Gab Sex (bass), Tasha G (drums) and Gretchen Steel (vocals).
On Fight For Yourself this crew crank out ten catchy 2-to-3 minute long blasts of energetic, anthemic streetwise punk with a NWOBHM inspired flair. (That's New Wave Of British Heavy Metal - though plain ol' New Wave is a factor here too!) Really, take Iron Dogs, keep the early Iron Maiden influence, but add a bunch more Ramones, maybe some Fuzzbox, the aforementioned Rezillos, some Joan Jett perhaps, and you've got Zex. So Iron Dogs fans oughtta dig this if they're into punk at all; really quite a few of the tracks, like "Savage City", could easily have been Iron Dogs songs, they've got the same guitar tone, same riff-writing knack, same gnarly, twangy Strat soloing from Jo - but when the vocals kick in, instead of Jo's charmingly rough yobbish yowl, you get Gretchen's more melody-capable, obvious-frontperson-worthy singing, which is tough & sneering enough to convey commanding metalpunk attitude, while also sealing the deal on the uplifting pop side of this band. And, she's got zex appeal (ba-dum-bump). Gretchen's vocals and Jo's riffing make for, at the end of the day, quite a poppy listen indeed - just spin songs like "XXX" or "Wanderlust" and dare them not to get stuck in your head, especially when the choruses (often with gang vocals) roll around. This is one of those albums where it was tough (or easy, depending on how you look at it) for us to pick which tracks to make our sound samples for, 'cuz they're pretty much all killer.
Obviously, we got into Zex 'cuz we love Iron Dogs, and Zex have so much of the same sound & spirit. But even if we'd never heard Iron Dogs, we're pretty sure this still would have grabbed us. So for those of you not yet hip to Iron Dogs, well, do you like, say, the garagey metalpunk of Zig Zags? Or, do you the ripping girl-powered power pop of Ex Hex?? Fans of either could totally get into this. For that matter, d'you just like the teenage excitement of some good ol' rock n' roll? Then check this out. We've been spinning it so much that you could almost call us Zex addicts...
FYI, vinyl version we have at the moment is limited colored (clear, actually) and includes insert with lyrics and show fliers, whereas the cd comes in a slim cardboard sleeve.
SWEET! REISSUED ON VINYL. We listed an earlier (and now out of print) cd reissue of this gem a while back, thusly...
Awesome garagey/glammy '70s hard rock that sounds like a demented Led Zeppelin some of the time, featuring frontman Fred Cole, future co-founder of the legendary Pacific NW punks Dead Moon! For as big of proto-metal, '70s rock nerds as we are here at aQuarius, we don't understand how we'd somehow NEVER heard of this band until quite recently.
So, Zipper's sole album, originally released as a private pressing (by the Cole's own "Whizeagle Records") in 1975, features nine cuts of high energy ramalama and bluesy grunge. The album opens with a bang, the song "Bullets" being the one that immediately made us think Led Zeppelin, with extremely lewd & lascivious lyrics delivered in what sounds like an exaggerated parody of a lemon-squeezin' Robert Plant. The sexual innuendo here is pretty outrageous / hilarious if you pay attention ("wanna stuff my face in your swimming hole, stroke it so hard I'm gonna break my pole", for example) and the guitars riff it up with wild abandon.
Cole's over the top vocals are big part of Zipper's sound, for sure, and at first (before we realized it was Fred Cole singing) we were kind of taken aback by his style, sneering and screeching, part Percy, part Mick Jagger, often doing a scrappy, campy falsetto that makes us think of Wayne Kramer warbling "Rambing Rose" on the MC5's Kick Out The Jams! Overwrought and ridiculous, but damn it works, with the downer epic "Face Of Stone" ferinstance being truly emotional wrenching. Some big influences are probably late '60s Stones, Zeppelin of course, perhaps early Detroit-era Alice Cooper, and maybe a bit of Black Sabbath. There's some sweet aching ballads, some lumbering blues rawk blasters, some glammed-up punkers, and even a '50s style raver. Good stuff - for raunchy, kickass, low-budget heavy jams from the garage circa '75, look no further!
