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!
Hmm, it's 2005 and we've got the 2006 edition of a record that originally came out in 1973! And it's an album that we first encountered five years ago via a previous (and now out of print and obsolete) compact disc edition released in 2000. But much more important than all these dates and whatnot, is that this is such a great record that we at AQ have loved for a long time, and are super duper happy to have back in again in this improved, special edition!! As you may know, we're also long time fans of the band Olivia Tremor Control, and when we first heard the Dreamies we were struck by the similarities. Indeed, our original review of this made much of the seeming OTC/Dreamies connection. And we still promise that you could totally mistake this for an OTC record...a *great* OTC record! (And come to think of it, it also reminds us a bit of another AQ fave band, When). But it was recorded over three decades ago by a fellow from Delaware named Bill Holt, who, nearing 30 years of age in the early '70s, dropped out of his corporate job working for a Fortune 500 company to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, despite having little in the way of prior musical experience! Holt invested in an early Moog Sonic Six synthesizer and set up a recording studio in his basement, where he created this lost classic, an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of '60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful... and definitely dreamy. Never was a name so well-chosen!
Like the Olivias, Bill Holt is obviously a huge fan of the Beatles. That's pretty clear. Sgt. Peppers definitely. And, he must really have liked the White Album's notorious "Revolution Number 9"!! With two side-long songs called (hmm) "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven", the Dreamies album is a similar venture into psych-pop meets musique concrete territory, an elaborate tapestry of samples -- and this is from long before anyone called them samples, and before there was such a thing as samplers and sequencers, which means Holt used the old fashioned, labor intensive tape n' razor blade splicing method, working at home on his beloved TEAC Model 3340 reel-to-reel four-track recorder. Densely woven into his otherwise highly laid back and melodic mix, you'll hear clocks ticking, chattering machine guns in Vietnam combat, JFK speeches, crickets, frogs, NASA transmissions, and ominous but unidentifiable minimalist pulses of electronic/industrial white noise. Or even samples of the Beatles themselves! (Bits of "All You Need Is Love" and others are buried in Holt's sonic collage.) It's both unsettling and soothing at the same time, like surfing through shortwave transmissions from the late '60s psyche. And along with all the sound bites/effects, he also weaves together what must have originally been several different, distinct, enchanting songs he'd written for his voice and acoustic guitar. It's one man and his melodies alone amidst the chaos of the times. Unfortunately, the Dreamies album didn't end up leading to a career in music for Bill Holt, so sadly he was forced to return to the straight moneymaking world of 9-to-5 work. But his venture into the realm of hippy psychedelic rock music concrete lives on. And happily he's proud of his creation, leading to this "special edition", remastered by Holt himself from the original LP, claiming "better stereo sound" and "enhanced audio detail". It certainly sounds good to us. It also boasts liner notes, lyrics and photos in the cd booklet, while the cd itself for the first time divides the two original 26-minute LP tracks into thirteen more convenient parts, although really you should still listen to 'em all the way through in one sitting.
By the way, we for some reason we always used to think that this record was titled Auralgraphic Entertainment: An Incredible Mental Experience, but it seems that that was just descriptive front-cover copy, not the actual title. It is, however, a fairly accurate statement! We're so happy that this has come out again, giving us the chance to get reacquainted with an old fave. And recommended it to anyone who missed it before (or who wants to upgrade their old edition).
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes) The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released -- with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
We first discovered the awesomely named Drug Honkey a few years back, via their 2008 record Death Dub. And at the time, before having actually heard it, or then, we figured it was probably too much to hope for, that a band called Drug Honkey would actually be good, and not some dumb bad band inside joke, and that a record by said band, called Death Dub, would and/or could actually deliver on the promise of a title like that. Dubbed out death metal? Metallic dub? Some sort of blackened dubbed out weirdness? Well, happy to say we needn't have doubted, these Chicago experimental drug doom space psych heavies did not disappoint, that record a churning morass of noise drenched, dubbed out blackened heaviness, equal parts droned out, pounding almost-industrial crush, woozy, sludge-y slo-mo creep, and crumbling distorto-dub noise rock weirdness. Imagine the Butthole Surfers via Godflesh via the Scientist via Eyehategod. Noisy, druggy, damaged, super intense, and blown out, and heavily psychedelic, the vocals only adding to the WTF level, a super harsh demonic bellow one second, a weird high pitched yelp the next, the vocals bleeding into the sounds around them, and all of those sounds then doused in FX and super processed, into some seriously heady heaviness.
We were never able to get enough copies to review/list, so when we discovered there was a new Drug Honkey,
full length number four if you're keeping track, we knew we had to get copies, and had a feeling it was probably gonna have to be Record Of The Week. And once again, Drug Honkey do not disappoint, if anything, Ghost In The Fire is like Death Dub part two, but if anything, everything we loved about Death Dub has been cranked up even more this time around, it's heavier, slower, dubbier, more tripped out, the production is MASSIVE, the sound filthy and crumbling and blown out, the band unfurling a loping, lumbering super psychedelic sludge-dub that once again sounds a bit like the Buttholes jamming with Godflesh, which is in fact a very very good thing.
Opening with a blast of detuned guitar churn, a pounding motorik rhythm, chiming distorted guitar melodies, looped and lurching, super tranced out and hypnotic, the vocals a bellowy demonic belch, that gets doused in FX and like much of the surrounding sounds, sometimes slows down to a grunting gurgle, other times splinters into weird swirling shards of sound, the music too, subtly dubbed out, but for the most part, roiling and churning relentlessly, the sort of super heavy psych-sludge trance-out, that could easily have stretched out for another 45 minutes and made for a super sweet single track drone-sludge epic.
But these guys have more sonic filth up their sleeves. The title track even slower, and dubbier, the guitars tarpit thick, the riffing spread out over a plodding death march rhythm, the vocals a throat shredding howl, and again, accompanied by various other processed voices, slowed down, sped up, doused in distortion, pitch shifted, like some sort of drugged out demonic choir, all over swirls of gristly effects, and crumbling distorted effects, and all driven by the group's impossibly dense chugging doom-sludge dirge, slipping from driving almost headbangable 16rpm demonic deathdub groove, to fractured, fucked up, psychedelic black-noise drift, but more often than not fusing the two into some seriously unholy union.
Some tracks are way more 'dubby' than others, like "Weight Of The World" which creeps and slithers, the guitars pushed into the background, laying down a softly undulating backdrop of droning rumble, over which a monstrous rhythm, pounds away in slow motion, beneath streaks of soaring fragmented high end melody, and some seriously fucked up and freaky vocals, lots of space and drift, swooping backwards effects, super psychedelic, totally hypnotic and tranced out, about as dubby as these guys get, but then there's tracks like "Dead Days ("Heroin III"), where the core sound is a super downtuned ultradoom sludge, the dubbiness seeping through in the form of the Gibby Haynes like vocals, and the atmospheric swirls, at one point slowing down to a near static drift, the only thing keeping it heavy, a super blown out distorted bass riff, over which all this other tripped out shit swirls and shimmers, and when the weird guitar that sounds like a proggy synth (or maybe a sitar?) pops up, total genius WTF trip out, the song drifting even further into tripped out zoner-psych territory. They even do a Scorn cover, which makes sonic sense for sure, Drug Honkey transforming the dark electronic skitter of the original into what sounds like a spaced out psychedelic sludge metal Necks, super drone out and loop-y, a little bit jazzy, but still heavy as fuck, before finishing off with a final fierce blast of dubbed out, super aggro, speaker shredding, doom-dub psych-sludge dirgery that KILLS. Holy shit. Imagine UK psych-drone space drifters Bong jamming with Godflesh, a dizzying concoction of super tripped out heaviness, ultra abstract sludge and blackened psychedelic dub that anyone into weird heaviness / heavy weirdness will lose their shit over! WAY WAY WAY recommended!
At the risk of quite possibly making our lengthy and floridly descriptive, effusive and over the top reviews totally obsolete, we can pretty much sell this one with one sentence. Grind metal, death metal, spastic drill and bass AND a marching band drum corps. And that's not even really a sentence!
Drumcorps is the work of one Aaron Spectre, who not only shares a first name with the man behind Venetian Snares, he also shares a similar penchant for ultra twisted and impossibly convoluted and mind blowing rhythms. But where Venetian Snares builds elaborate rhythmic tangles out of beats, beats and more beats, Spectre, while a consummate beat maker himself, as Drumcorps, he concerns himself as much with riffs as beats. At its very heart, this is a metal record after all. A snarling, grinding crush of acidic metallic riffs and huge downtuned chunks of chugging death metal grind, with howled throat shredding vocals, buzzing squalls of metallic guitar freakout and pounding blasting drums. But as each track develops, you begin to notice something a little strange about this 'metal.' Every once in a while, here and there, the drums will skitter and splinter into little bursts of ultra complex splatter. Or vocals will get twisted and chopped up into a wildly stuttering rhythm, blast beats will get faster and faster until they're nothing but a buzzy blur. Riffs splinter into jagged digital shards which are then tossed about wildly over a skittering expanse of junglistic beats. This isn't just metal, and it's definitely not electronica. It's like some sort of fucked up avant post metal grind laid over super dense hyper programmed drill and bass. Like Pig Destroyer jamming with Shitmat, or Dillinger Escape Plan with Venetian Snares on drums! In fact a quick listen to track three, the aptly titled "Pig Destroyer Destroyer" lays it all out for you. Beginning with a killer drum corps snare workout, that builds into a mesmerizing chopped and looped vocal guitar grind, eventually building into a full on blast of metallic fury, but all tangled up with sputtering, hiccuping strands of head spinning drill and bass.
The amazing thing is, that Drumcorps doesn't sound like some sort of DJ mash up, where some clever fella with a wicked record collection just assembled and sequenced. No, these are real songs, with melodies, atmosphere, riffs, parts, choruses, it seems impossible that Spectre composed and performed a whole metal record only to electronically fuck it up, but if these are all purloined riffs, which at least some of them must be, then it had all the metalheads around here completely fooled. And LOVING it.
But it's not all just furious jungle metal weirdness (although most of it most definitely is!). A few tracks are droning ambient soundscapes, with huge cavernous rumbles washing over brittle complicated snare drums, others are almost funky jungle jams peppered with crunchy clipped riffs, and still others are moody midtempo jams, assembled from slowed down pitchshifted vocals and crumbling distorted guitars, sheets of feedback, and awesome Maiden-ish dual guitar leads. This is another one of those times we almost wish there were actual bands that sounded like this, as opposed to being the mad idea of a single twisted individual, crafting his dream band from a drum machine and his favorite metal records, an impossible metal / drum and bass hybrid. But who cares really, when it sounds this fucking amazing. Fans of past record of the week Drummachinegun should definitely check this out, as should folks into DHR, Venetian Snares, Shitmat and that sort of sputtering spastic drill and buzz (especially if they've got a soft spot for metal). But c'mon, this is a METAL record, so metalheads should absolutely take a chance, and give this a try, but should be well prepared to have their whole world turned upside down.
Full length number three from 'hypnogogic pop' outfit Ducktails, aka Matthew Mondanile, whose day job is playing guitar in lo-fi pop combo Real Estate, and whose records as Ducktails tended more toward the murky and druggy and hazy, a tropical infused low fidelity avant pop warble, but on Arcade Dynamics, Mondanile has definitely jettisoned much of the murk and moved his side project a bit more toward the more traditional pop of the Real Estate mothership. That said, it's all relative, things in Mondanile's world of Ducktails is still warped and woozy and warbly and dreamily druggy, but this time around, the guitars are more jangly, and chiming, the sound is more sunshiney and sun dappled, and most noticeably, there are way more vocals, less meandering experimentation, and more proper songsmithery, and it definitely suits him.
The record begins with a more traditionally Ducktailed mini jam, instrumental and a little bit tropical, a simple beat under effected jangle and swirling melody, but as soon as the second track starts up, it's easy to hear something has changed, the song a bit more brooding, still rife with gorgeous hooks and melodies, but the sound is more measured and hypnotic, the vocals hazy and reverby, but not at all to the point of distraction. "Sprinter" is a total eighties throwback, with gorgeous tangles of guitar harmony and muted thumping percussion, and while "The Razor's Edge" does find Mondanile dipping back into the more experimental side of Ducktails, it's actually pretty great, a brooding minor key almost sci-fi sounding bit of glitchy twang and motorik throb. "Killin' The Vibe" is a hazy bit of sunshiney psychedelia wrapped around a stripped down electronic pulse, and rife with hand claps and gorgeous multitracked vocals, while "Art Vandelay" might be the highlight of the record, reminding us of recent Record Of The Week Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss, the same sort of lo-fi retro classic pop sound, with a big chorus (big for Ducktails at least), flanged steel string strum, and another skeletal programmed beat, all wound into an impossibly perfect chunk of hook-heavy lo-fi jangle pop.
And like some of the other Ducktails records, it seems Mondanile likes to finish off with lengthy experiments, and III is no different, a sprawling 10 minute stretch of minimal reverbed guitarscapery, warm and shimmery, hypnotic and mesmerizing, laced with strange percussion and mysterious field recordings, a beautiful and chilled out finish to what is most definitely our favorite Ducktails yet!
The vinyl version comes with a free download, which includes a bonus track NOT on the cd, an alternate version of "Killin' The Vibe" featuring Panda Bear from Animal Collective!
PS vinyl coming February 1st!
And as promised last list, when we made the reissue of seventies Mexican psych legends Los Dug Dug's 1971 self-titled debut a Record Of The Week, here's their equally Record Of The Week worthy second album, 1972's Smog, now also reissued on both cd and, for the first time, vinyl! And as we said then, we love this band! Why? 'Cause Los Dug Dug's kick out jams that are part garage rock grooviness, part Beatlesy bliss, part power pop, part proto-metal, and part prog (with flute!!). What's not to love? And we haven't even mentioned the heavy dosage of FUZZ they supply, either!
Unlike the debut, which was Mexico's first rock record sung all in English, Smog is sung in Spanish, and sees Los Dug Dug's stripped down to an amped up power trio format, led as always by guitarist/vocalist Armando Nava (he's on the right in the cover picture, with the dyed grey long hair and beard, looking like some pensive psychedelic wise man or wizard). Pretty sure he's also the one playing the flute here, pumping up the progginess in a hard rock context that could kinda be likened to Jethro Tull meets the MC5, yeah, and reminds us of Italian prog faves Osanna, too.
Smog is one smokin' album, it's hard to pick favorite tracks, as they're all so good, but we'd have to mention both the lovely ballad "Voy Hacia El Cielo (Voy Hacia El Sol)" and the motorcycle revving, ecological protest rocker "Smog". Yep, just like their self-titled debut, this one's got plenty of both the heavy rockers and the gentler, poppier stuff, but leans towards the former, and seems more '70s than their first album, which had more of a '60s feel to it.
Air pollution is certainly a '70s theme, also something that any band based in Mexico City would be concerned about, and the title Smog gives this a heavier vibe than if they'd called it something like Flowers & Incense, eh? In keeping with their new style and attitude, they do a Spanish-language remake / update of the debut's frantic garage beat number "Let's Make It Now", stretching it to almost 12 minutes, as a totally progged out, flute-fortified five part suite, now titled "Hagamasolo Ahora (2a. Parte)", while retaining all the energetic excitement of the original. The energy level of this entire album is exhilarating, there's a couple pleasant acoustic numbers but otherwise it's quite rough, rhythmic, and riffy.
As we said when we reviewed the reissue of the debut, we've listed this album (and several others by the band) before, but it was always tough to keep enough of 'em in stock, they were Mexican imports and never reliably available, seemingly going in and out of print in quite random fashion. Hopefully these new editions will be around longer, and remain easy to stock. Also, these reissues are the very first time we've seen any Dug Dug's reissued on VINYL, yay!!!
As with the self-titled debut, the new cd version of this comes packaged in a handsome plastic-protected miniature lp style sleeve, complete with obi strip. Other than the text on the obi, there's no liner notes for this reissue, which we're told is a result of the difficulties inherent in licensing a release like this from a major label (it's owned by Sony BMG). In any case, we're glad it got reissued again, at all, and it's nice enough! Sooo recommended, equally up there with the debut, maybe even better, especially for folks who dig the cowbell-knockin', fuzz rockin' action.
This nice new reissue - and first time reish on vinyl - just HAD to be Record Of The Week. Boy oh boy do we love this band. An old, old favorite - in more ways that one, since these guys hail from the '70s. When we first discovered them some years ago, via their track on the Love Peace & Poetry: Latin America compilation, and then got their reissued albums on import cd, we were like, why aren't they famous?? Well, perhaps they are, or at least were, in Mexico where they're from (they're called Los Dug Dug's on account of being from the city of Durango, in the Mexican state of Durango).
Los Dug Dug's are, for us, a perfect blend of rock n' roll things we love: garage rock, psych-pop, power-prog. Lotsa cowbell, fuzz guitar, and flute, yes flute (especially on their second album, Smog). Part Tull, part Beatles, part Kinks, part Kiss...pretty darn kick ass really.
This self-titled album was their first, from the magic musical year of 1971, though sounding very sixties, and features English language vocals. It includes some of our favorite Dug Dug's songs, including the brilliant "Lost In My World" (also heard on the Mexican installment of the Love Peace & Poetry compilation series). There's also the frantic fuzzfest "Let's Make It Now" (which also boasts a drum solo), the groovy jangle of "I Got The Feeling", the equally groovy "It's Over" (with a nice JB's style intro), the very Beatlesy "Going Home", the lovely, spaced out "Sometimes", and the flutey, fanciful "Who Would Look At Me?", among other great flower POWER tunes. And when we say great, we mean really great. As in, this album is all-time favorite stuff for those lucky enough be clued in. Sure there's lots of wonderful obscurities out there, but Los Dug Dug's are one of those bands, like Q65, or Flower Travellin' Band, who you'd be hearing all the time on classic rock radio if they'd come from Detroit instead of Durango.
Now, we love ALL the Dug Dug's albums, and are happy to tell you that Smog (1972) will soon be getting the same reissue treatment by Lion/Get On Down soon, we should have it in a few weeks, and it'll probably have to be a ROTW too. Hopefully they'll also be reissuing Los Dug Dug's other albums Cambia, Cambia (1974) and El Loco (1975) eventually as well, one of these days.
Like we said, we've listed this album (and those others by Los Dug Dug's) before, but it was always tough to keep enough of 'em in stock, they were Mexican imports and never reliably available, seemingly going in and out of print in quite random fashion. Hopefully this new version will be around longer, and remain easy to stock! Also, this is the very first time we've seen any Dug Dug's reissued on VINYL, yay, and they've done a fine job of it.
Meanwhile, the new compact disc edition comes packaged in a nice, plastic protected miniature lp style sleeve, complete with obi strip... unfortunately beyond the brief blurb on the obi, there's no liner notes for this reissue, which is too bad 'cause we'd like to know more about this band who should be much better known north of the border. The obi alludes to the band's "failed trip to NYC" where they were hoping for their big break, that didn't work out but then they went back to Mexico and recorded this album, starting a sterling career regardless. We'd like to know more... according to Wikipedia, apparently they had some problems with the musician's union in New York, but upon their return to Mexico, bringing with them the music of the Beatles, they became one of the country's biggest rock acts, leaders in the new youth culture there. So it's unfortunate that some knowledgeable liner notes couldn't have been arranged, we're sure the Dug Dug's story is a fascinating one, but at least in all other respects the packaging is top-notch (though it would have been nice to have the tracklist someplace other than just on the obi, like on the back cover the way it is with the vinyl). In any case, it's the music that matters, and regarding that the obi has all the facts: "must have"... "essential".
Like a wonderful melding of Spoon (Girls Can Tell) and The Jam (but not Jam & Spoon!), this is the third full-length from this super-sharp Canadian pop duo (their first two were "Smash the Ships and Raise the Beams" and "The Cons and the Pros") with a
Eccentric outsider doom metal from the '80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words "doom" or "metal" make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn't like any metal you've ever heard, really. More like spaced out '60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song's called "Heavy Vibrations", man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects... That's where the "outsider" tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It's so DIY that the cds have his phone number on 'em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double cd anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an '80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it's hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.
Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that's a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we're guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other "metal" albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.
Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you'd almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr's for real, something we'd vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother's bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the '80s, two from the '00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and "heaviest". A Record Of The Week, easy.
There's 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There's nothing that's NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track "Animals") are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock/metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of "Chocolate Mescalyne", a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.
And then there's the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it's not "normal" doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. "Ghost Lover", for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs' "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", and Duane's vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy "Evil Lures" too... Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks "to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments". We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin' like that. It's pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above...
BACK IN STOCK AGAIN!!! This all time AQ fave and former record of the week continues to be super difficult to restock for some reason. But it's again, so don't miss out!! And there's a new Earl Shilton expected in the next little while so be prepared! Here's what we had to say about Earl Shilton when it was Record of the Week a long time back:
We somehow knew this was an Aquarius Record of the Week the minute we first laid eyes on it. Well, okay, maybe that's not entirely true. But it had the potential, that much we knew for sure, just from the cover: a huge double bass drumkit, set up in the middle of the forest with the name 'Earl' scrawled on one of the bass drums. A very evocative image, combining our love of heavy rock (the kit), with my personal thing for drums (the kit again) and our love of all things forest-y: nature sounds, field recordings, animal sounds and all that. My mind was reeling. Was it a drummer just playing solos out in the woods? Was it some sort of Jewelled Antler style rock band / field recording hybrid? Or something else entirely? Stranger yet, the song titles were all in German while the label was British. Intriguing. Better give it a listen... Well, the first track revealed very little. A weird minimal rhythmic workout composed entirely of backwards drums and cymbals. Thhwwp....thhhwwwwip...sssssssp.... Very cool, but was that the gist of it? After a minute or so of that, the record exploded into something entirely unexpected -- a crushing metal riff, with weird syncopated drumming, a sort of chunky Pantera / Prong meets the Fucking Champs vibe, with whispered vocals. Then it shifted gears again and entered into a super melodic Carcass-style death metal breakdown with howled black metal vocals before it shifted back to the machine-like opening riff. And then I knew for sure. Record of the Week!
Only later, with some Internet research, did we figure out what the heck was going on. The dedication on the inside to UK death metal crusties Bolt Thrower should have been our first clue, as it turns out that Earl Shilton is a pseudonym for Alex Thomas, former drummer for those very same metalheads. For some unknown reason, Earl Shilton is the name he has assumed for this project "of crushing death metal brutality and total corpse raping necro-blast carnage" as his website puts it. Indeed!
Furthermore, that website tells us that on tour, the band features a quite young, brother and sister rhythm section! Live, Earl steps from behind the kit to handle the guitars and vocals, while the brother plays bass, and the 16 year old sister mans the drums!!! Fuck yeah! This is getting more Record of the Week by the minute, we're thinking! And the music is well worthy too, lest we forget -- Two Rooms (Full Of Insects) is a blasting, hyper complex, super varied blast of metallic mayhem. From motorik, ultra-precise technical riffery, to stop/start math-metal complexity, from grooving, galloping death metal fury, to screeching blasting black metal, from eighties Earache style thrash to modern metallic fury, with all sorts of tripped out breakdowns, fucked up production and some really really weird parts, like the breakdown a little more than halfway through the album where everything drops out except for a simple, quietly played hypnotic tom tom rhythm, joined by backwards, super creepy Orcish vocals, and the hissing backwards drumming that started the record, before the whole thing bursts back into motion, in an explosion of grandioise Maiden-ish metal. Whew, so good. And while it may not be the best (or truest) metal record on this list, it certainly is the weirdest. And the coolest. And certainly the one most suited to being Record of the Week!
We made this a Record Of The Week on our special Halloween in-between list last week, here it is again in case you were out trick-or-treating and missed it:
Man, were we ever bummed when Sub Pop told us that Earth's first album (or ep?), their seminal doom-drone debut Extra-Capsular Extraction, had gone out of print (again). WTF? How could that be? That's so wrong. Well, thankfully, it hasn't stayed OOP for long. Southern Lord has just repackaged, remastered, and reissued it, incorporating a whole bunch MORE music recorded at the original Extra-Capsular sessions back in 1990, material that previously appeared only on bootleg 7"s long ago (and/or showed up as bonus tracks on the also-quite-out-of-print Sunn Amps And Smashed Guitars Live disc). So what you get here is the COMPLETE Extra-Capsular album as Earth mainman Dylan Carlson originally intended it. So if you don't have the Sunn Amps disc, this is totally worth getting again even if you already have the Sub Pop version! Plus, the packaging is aces, with gorgeous new art by Simon Fowler, designed by Stephen O'Malley, and there's new 2010 liner notes from Carlson. He talks about how they got signed by Sub Pop after opening for L7 at a show in Seattle, fortuitously 'cause they had been having no luck up 'til then finding a label interested in putting out the record they'd recorded, this one. Apparently it cost just $300 to make at Smegma studios, and the "guest musicians worked for Pabst and Percodan"... Earth back then consisted of Dylan Carlson (guitar/vocals), plus Dave Harwell (bass) and Joe Preston (bass/percussion). Joe of course later went on to fame and fortune in the Melvins, and later, his one man band Thrones (and High On Fire, and Harvey Milk, etc.). Oh, and this is the Earth record that one Kurt Cobain (spelt "Kobain" here), sings on as well, which we know confused and dismayed a lot of frat/jock guys back in the day, who bought this hoping for something that smelled like teen spirit and instead got what turned out to be the inspiration for SUNNO)))!
So, here's what we said about this when we reviewed the prior version, back on list #135 in 2002, when Sub Pop repressed it (at our urging, we like to think):
Kind of a holy grail for those who didn't pick up the long-out-of-print original version of this when it was first released, the 1991 debut cd by the Pacific Northwest's late great drone/doom masters Earth. Originals sell for big $$$ on eBay. And those who DO have one consider it an old friend. Now Sub Pop has finally got their act together (prodded by the pleas of many an Earth fan, including Allan here at AQ, who takes full credit, so you can thank him) and have reissued it at last - this time in a jewel case instead of the mere cardboard sleeve of the original version (another triumph for Allan). The artwork is the same, though: the medical-text inspired 'Postgraduate Seminars: Eye Surgery - Concepts and Problems' graphics. There's no extra tracks or anything, but the original three tracks ("A Bureaucratic Desire For Revenge Parts 1 & 2", "Ouroboros Is Broken") are more than enough: 32 minutes of downtuned dirge, metallic slow-motion sludge riffery that goes to extremes of low, slow heaviness that even the mighty Melvins never achieved. The lengthier, airier follow-up "Earth 2" might be Earth's masterpiece, but "Extra-Capsular" was their devastating opening act, sounding like the grand, ominous martial music meant to accompany an invasion by malevolent Underearth Dwellers. We remember when I first got this, most of our friends thought it was the most retarded record ever. Now they know better. Well, actually, they probably don't, but WE know. So recommended. Also "Geometry Of Murder" seems to sneak in a Saint Vitus riff!
So NOW thanks to Southern Lord, this album by the still great (and no longer late!) Earth is back in print, as God and/or Satan intended, in its complete version for the first time, extended to seven tracks over 55 minutes. The extra stuff fits right in, more-Melvinsy-than-thou slow-mo sludge riffery that outshines almost anything that came after.
An obvious Record Of The Week, and perfect for our special Halloween list, as it's super heavy and menacing, as well as such a long-time fave - and also the eye-surgery theme of the cover art always gave us the chills.
And FYI, Southern Lord will also being doing this on double vinyl, due out November the 22nd!
It's all been leading up to this. In the early nineties, when most of us heard Earth for the first time, our minds were totally blown. What was that massive slab of fuzzy sludge doing on Sub Pop? Why didn't it sound like Soundgarden or Mudhoney or Tad? It didn't take long before we stopped asking questions like that and began wondering where the hell were all the other bands that sounded like Earth. Well, it took 10 years, but now that whole downtuned slow motion sludge thing is an actual genre. With more and more new bands popping up every day. All honoring the mighty sludge that was Earth. But those of you who were into Earth the first time around, might remember the band changing directions pretty dramatically, adding a drummer, and playing actual songs, even doing a Hendrix cover at one point, the Earth of old having mutated into a groovy sort of stoner post rock, propulsive swinging riffs, relentless chugging guitars, all wrapped in a druggy spacy swirl. Back then we were all a bit bummed out, as Earth became, well, more normal, at least to our ears. It was as close to selling out as Earth were liable to get.
Back to the present day. Recordings started popping up here and there, along with rumors of actual Earth shows, limited 7"s and tour only 12"s, all filling us with an impossible anticipation. Earth was back. But if they were back, why were all the recordings from live shows and all several years old? It made sense, the sound of the new Earth practically picked up right where they left off, stretched out, spaced out, druggy post rock with simple drumming and wavering distorted riffs, not heavy per se, but dark and dreamy and mesmerizing. But none of that could have prepared us for the desolate, sun baked, slow crawl, shuffle and twang beauty of long-awaited new studio album Hex. Definitely hewing closer to Earth's more recent post rockisms, Hex is warm and expansive, slow building and contemplative, with simple drums, heavily reverbed, not distorted, guitars, occasional lapsteel, the whole thing unfurling into a haunting twang, a ghost town desert lullaby, a Cormac McCarthy novel in song, tumbleweeds, miles of scrub and windblown landscapes, old dead trees, plenty of space for the cymbals to sizzle and each riff to drift into black clouded skies. Drone / doom / dirge / sludge purists (if there can be such a thing) may well be a bit disappointed, or at the very least confused. And Earth's history / reputation for black hole heaviness might be an albatross at this point as this new sound falls squarely within the territory of groups like Low, Codeine, Friends Of Dean Martinez, Calexico, Scenic, Torrez, Sixteen Horsepower, even Mazzy Star or Godspeed You Black Emperor. But ultimately none of that has anything to do with the fact that Hex is just simply beautiful. A dark and mysterious and truly haunting record. Huge swells of instrumental tension dissipate into warm washes of drift and shimmer, melodies are slowly uncoiling snakes, waking drowsily and slithering off sun baked rocks, every note and every drum beat, every slippery lapsteel swoop, every stretch of near silence, are all draped lazily over broken fences, fallen power lines, rusted out tractors, fallow fields. Dark clouds drift above, across a steel grey sky, sending small shadowy shapes scurrying across the landscape like mysterious creatures, the breeze is warm and smells of death and desolation. Every one is lost and alone, out of money, out of time, just waiting around to die. The mood is bleak, but the sound of Hex is so so beautiful. Somehow hopeful and full of joy, but the sort of joy that comes from being powerless and close to despair, and simply choosing joy over misery, finding happiness the way animals in the desert seek out moisture. The heart of Hex is heavy, the sound appropriately heavy as well, but in a way few conventionally heavy records can manage. A brooding, storm about to break, dam about to burst, soul about to loose itself from its earthly moorings and escape to a better place kind of heavy. The sound of the desert, and the human spirit, of death, of sadness and horror, of loneliness, of abandonment, of hearts breaking, lovers lost and drifting apart, of life. The sound of laying in the dry dirt, the breeze stretched across you like a moth eaten old blanket, eyes closed, the sun sending all sorts of shapes spinning behind your closed eyelids, memories becoming fuzzy and drifting away, your whole body and soul wrapped in a warm darkness, the world fading into nowhere, you fading into nothing.
We continue to be obsessed with the darker side of techno and house music, the strains that are all murky and shadowy and mutated, the four on the floor beats slowed down to a dying-heartbeat pulse, most of the dancefloor sucked out of the sound, leaving just the twisted skeletal remains. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a new record from Lucy, whose sound is just that sort of dubbed out techno-murk we can't get enough of, but this new one from Echologist is something else all together. We just discovered this is the TENTH record by Brendon Moeller, aka Echologist, but the first one we've heard, and we are totally smitten. Not nearly as murky and dark as much of the stuff we dig, what Moeller does is, is something similar to The Field, creating super lush, layered repetition, little blurts and pulsations, bits of glitch and static, sculpted and woven into deep undulating electronic soundscapes, that only sound tangentially like proper techno, and instead, sound super tripped out and psychedelic, almost like some sort of avant experimental noise music, but in the guise of techno.
The opener here "Frequency Of Love" pretty much lays it all out, exactly what is so amazing abut Echologist and why we knew this had to be Record Of The Week. A dense field of pulsing squelch, all hazy and gauzy, some alien machine language transformed into sound, a glorious blend of droned out raga-shimmer, and percolating electro, droney and trancey, and less about the rhythm, as the texture created by the rhythm, and when the low end drops out, as it occasionally does, the sound becomes some sort of airy drift, before the low end swoops back in and the sound gets, well heavy again, for lack of a better word. But then heavy is the word for what happens next, when the sound begins to thicken, the tones all gradually descending in pitch, those sounds suddenly coalescing into a thick, buzzing drone, which grinds away malevolently, before dropping out completely, leaving just a field of glimmering chiming melody, and a hazy keening high end drone. Fuck! We say it a lot, but that track, could easily have been the whole record, and we still would have made it Record Of The Week. We're guessing it'll take some serious will power to keep from setting that track on repeat play. But you know, fuck it, go for it. Still worth the price of admission if you never make it any further in.
But if you do, you'll be rewarded with more of Echologists, haunting, propulsive and mesmeric machine music, from churning industrial crunch, to loping tranced out techno, and from squelchy and cinematic low end deep dub, to gristly static drenched skitter, and from lush, almost poppy, drone-gaze electro, to stuttery sci-fi glitch-buzz groove. But those thumbnail descriptions are only part of the equation, cuz once Moeller sets the scene, lays down the beat, loops the sample, whatever electronic voodoo he does, it's all about how the sounds develop, and pro/re-gress, tone and timbre in constant flux, the background sounds a dizzying, hyperactive soundworld all their own. The sound impossibly immersive, the sort of rare electronic music that manages to be weirdly dancefloor appropriate, while still the perfect bliss out / chill out / come down soundtrack, and equally rare in that sonically, it's way more than 'dance music' or 'techno', it's a fantastically next level mutant strain of electronica, or even more specifically, some modern minimalist avant electronic experimental soundscapery, that just happens to involve elements of techno and house music, and that we find utterly and endlessly addictive. We're guessing most of you will too...
A few years back, we were enraptured by a strange alien sound, one that opened our ears to a whole genre we had ignored for the most part up until then, an offshoot of techno that eventually became affectionately (and surprisingly accurately) referred to as 'heroin house'. A strangely propulsive sound mired in dense fields of hiss and murk, of fuzz and blur, the beats relegated to a distant pulse. The label was Chain Reaction, and its tiny stable of bands, Fluxion, Matrix, Hallucinator, Substance, Vainqueur, Porter Ricks, Monolake and a few others, completely changed the landscape of techno, and had us all in a frenzy. Albeit a nocturnal druggy soporific one.
Chain Reaction folded, but the sound lived on, in the abstract dub of Rhythm And Sound (the same producers behind the Chain Reaction sound), in the sound of German Chain Reaction acolyte Pole, and the Pop Ambient of Kompakt, but as much as we love all that stuff, it wasn't quite the same. The sounds were similar, each twisted into some new shape, but there was just something so special about those Chain Reaction releases. So mysterious, the sound so haunting and otherworldly, like a rave on the ocean floor, barely audible through the walls of your submarine, further obscured by the hiss and low level buzz of all the onboard machinery. Or some DJ playing microhouse into the wee hours, 5 or 6 floors below you, or better yet, in the old concrete bunker across the street, the only hint of anything going on the muted throb felt more than heard.
It's one of THOSE SOUNDS we always go on about. Like old school ragga jungle or black metal buzz, a sound that is so pleasing to our ears, we could almost listen to a simple loop of those sounds forever. The Chain Reaction sound is another, gorgeous and creepy, moonlit and languorous, the perfect music to drift off to, or to troll the dark rainswept streets of some mysterious European city.
Thus we come to this debut full length from Echospace, the duo of Rod Modell and Soultek's Steve Hitchell, both legendary techno producers, who released a handful of 12"s at the tail end of the nineties, and who were taking the Chain Reaction sound in their own new direction. Years later, the duo returned to THAT SOUND and goddamn if it doesn't sound like being transported right back to mid-nineties Berlin. Using only old school analog equipment: Roland Space Echo, Echoplex, Korg tape delay, vintage signal processors, noise generators, Sequential Circuits 8-bit samplers and analog synthesizers, the sound these two have conjured up hews crazily close to Chain Reaction, but manages to make it sound modern and new at the same time.
All the tracks here are super creepy, slow motion, underwater muted blurs of abstract techno, where the beats seem like more a byproduct of the soundmaking than the reason for it. Some tracks do thump and bump but others merely drift in a thick haze of hiss and crackle. Basslines are deep and rubbery, drenched in reverb and pulled apart into super spare space dubs, bits of percussion are sent careening into a black void, but it's the textures and the ambience that make this record so special. The opener spends the first half of its 6+ minutes offering up huge slow motion crashing waves of surf like static, of buried melodies and off fuzzy shimmer, before any beats even surface, and when they finally do they pulse and throb for a couple minutes before they're swallowed up by the wash of soft white noise. In fact, in addition to sounding underwater, it sounds like the whole disc is being broadcast over a radio between stations, all the sounds wreathed in sonic gristle and buzzy static, but all smeared into huge billowing clouds of sound.
Most of the tracks definitely have a groove, a super slithery abstract alien funk, but more often than not, it's buried beneath gorgeous layers of constantly shifting sound, offering up some barely audible thump, a four on the floor framework for the glacially shifting tectonic sonic plates above. But there are some that don't, like the 11+ minute "Ocean Of Emptiness", a muted smeared ambient drift, that sounds like standing on some vast windswept snow covered plain, under a black sky, watching the snow fall, each snowflake a tiny bit of hiss or crackle, coming in epic waves, glistening and glimmering but strangely warm and inviting. Our favorite track might have to be "Winter In Seney", which sounds like a more dubbed-out Gas. A warm swirling hissy gristly minimal smear, sprinkled with bits of record crackle, and haunting echo drenched bits of glitch and melody, the whole thing wrapped in a gorgeously hypnotic, super spare rubbery bassline, the notes blurring into each other, spreading out like a thick black cloud of dub, totally and utterly mesmerizing.
There's been so much amazing techno lately, lots of Kompakt action, The Field, Gui Boratto, the last Pop Ambient comp, then there was the long overdue Vladislav Delay Chain Reaction reissue (C'mon! Someone reissue ALL those out of print CR discs!!), but this disc has been OWNING the cd player. At work, at home, and has quickly become the new drifting off, late at night, chill out, space out, record of choice. WAY recommended!
Woah, kinda blown away by this, a super nice surprise since we didn't have any expectations... or ex-plekzationz! Had never heard of Bristol's Nick Edwards before, nor his cassette-prolific alter ego Ekoplekz, nor his Gutterbreakz blog for that matter either. We just knew this was a new album from some bespectacled fella on Editions Mego, who (as we could see from the photo on the inner gatefold sleeve) employs a tabletop tangle of effect boxes and other electronic devices to make his music. Like all eMego stuff, seemed worth checking out, and it sure was.
A quick and too easy description of this might be lo-fi analog electronic synth experimentation with a heavy dose of dub... or even "Merzbow doing dub", though it's not nearly as noisy as that might suggest. But it IS quite abstract and soundscapey. These are noises, not noise. And the dub here is that rare kind we've hardly ever encountered, that's dub but definitely NOT reggae. (In contrast to, say, that rad Seekersinternational record we listed last time, a great modern day dub album whose reggae roots are quite clear... or even aQ faves Peaking Lights). Edwards loves his King Tubby, for sure, and kosmiche krautrock and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and techno too... But we can't label his music as being like any of those things exactly, even though that's all in here. Nor is it the clinical, minimal-techno sort of dub (we also like), a la Pole or Vladislav Delay. This is even less reggae than that, and way more 'natural'. It's cosmic-y without being too referential to anything, very loose and flowing and free. The rhythms, which grow organically out of the interaction of effects, are varied and not 'grided' like so much other electronic music. Each and every moment fills our ears with the sort of echoing dubby soundz we love to hear, in constant flux. But, for something that's changing so much, it still has a 'groove' to it, if not necessarily always a 'beat'... in other words, it's strangely hypnotic, its odd percolations fitting into a larger wash of sound that seems to extend out to infinity, swirling and shwooshing and reverberating into new shapes and patterns.
The album is divided into four parts of roughly equally length, the whole thing about an hour-long trip. Although recorded at four separate sessions, these 'decompositions' and 'spontaneous combustions' are woven into one extended piece, calmly chugging and looping, softly exploding with distortion over and over and over...The final track might be our favorite, with its slowly creeping-up-on you vibe. All are great, though.
Look, we LOVE the echo echo echo of dub, and have admitted previously that several of us here wouldn't be into reggae at all if it weren't for the dub variety. So the idea of dub WITHOUT the reggae is interesting and appealing and that's what Mr. Nick Edwards has accomplished here, the echoing of the electronics on this album like a field recording of a mad scientist's laboratory, done dub style. This is maybe, maybe what Sun Araw would/could sound like if he'd ditched his trip to Jamaica for an extended stay in Mego's Austrian studios instead...
Yup, for something we had no prior expectations about, it didn't take long before we were hooked!
You suckers without turntables get yet another temporary reprieve, as Ekkehard Ehlers' five lovely mini-albums, previously released only on vinyl, are here compiled onto one handy cd. And lovely is most certainly an understatement. This is some of the most gorgeous, sublime and moving electronic/glitch/sample based music we have ever heard. Sounds are completely recontextualised into cloudy, indistinct but somehow emotionally and sonically spot-on homages to some of Ehlers' influences. Falling somewhere between Stephen Mathieu and Oval, Ehlers adds remarkable depth and emotion to what is quite often a cold and clinical artform.
Tracks one and two are the "Plays Cornelius Cardew" lp and are lovely layered soundscapes as only Ehlers can conjure. Sampled sounds are seamlessly woven into dense, textural tone poems again highly reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas. The second (track three and four) in the "Plays" series is a 'tribute' to the German beat poet Hubert Fichte. Where those previous tracks are dominated by ephemeral drone work with refined patinas of digital corrosion, this piece curiously sounds like Pole doing free jazz, with erratic squiggles of granular synthesized saxophone and really lazy strums from a guitar seeping up from an electronically sculpted metallic haze. Even those slowly developed basslines that Pole plops into his neo-dub show up in "Plays Hubert Fichte" although Ehlers disregards Pole's structuralism in favor of an amorphous improvisation of deep hovering movements. "Plays John Cassavetes" (tracks five and six) is part three in Ehler's series of 'tributes' and for these pieces he seamlessly weaves orchestral samples into beautiful landscapes of sonic reverberations. Very reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt's work as Gas, or those brief, subtle moments of bliss found on My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" record. Tracks seven and eight find Ehlers sampling fragments of Albert Ayler. However, as with most of these pieces, it is debatable as to how much Ayler is actually present on this recording, musically. Consisting entirely of digitally altered cello recordings, these two sidelong pieces gently swell, teeter and expand, forming beautiful, haunting drones that lie beneath digital snippets of arrhythmic ephemera. Somehow, Ehlers manages to restructure a mundane cello recording into a wonderfully reticular songpoem. The final two tracks are from the 'Plays Robert Johnson' 7" which we were never able to get enough of to list. Two short tracks: the first is an abstractly plucked, slow-motion, Reynols-on-cough-syrup style tarpit blues jam, while the final track is all throbbing four-on-the-floor Kompakt style minimal/heroin house.
Trust us, we plow through a lot of pretentious electronic crap that takes itself too seriously -- and while the conceit of the five Ehler tributes might suggest that he could fall into this trap -- he does not. Ehlers delivers, and you'll love this. We all do.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
What a breath of fresh air! As if a new Circle album wasn't enough (see "Prospekt" elsewhere on this list), there's also a new release from this Circle side-project. A side project staffed *entirely* by members of Circle, we might add. Hence, there's an unavoidable but definitely welcome similarity between the two bands.
Ektroverde are kind of like Circle's alter-ego -- less intense (and yet, still really intense!), sometimes jazz, sometimes fucked up hi-NRG pop. The trademark Circle rhythmic hypnosis remains, but the sometimes austere riff-mongering and prog-rock precision is mostly superseded by a generally more playful and groovier approach, certainly nothing as heavy or "rockin'" as what's found on "Prospekt". Gorgeous, psychedelic instrumental explorations, even venturing into the realms of primitive techno electronics at points (Ektro-house?)... There's actually many moods to this record, some parts silly and some downright spooky. To get a sense of the album's range, please listen to all three soundclips. We are especially enamoured of the track "Gradient" with its baa-ing sheep (this must be heard to be believed!) and Pansonic-like pulsations, and equally in love with the following track of creepy drone-effects, more like an Organum piece. In fact, this disc at moments reminds us of everything from Goblin soundtracks (creepy keyboards) to Van Halen's "Jump" (well, that only briefly). Very highly recommended!!
Hark! By the telltale crumbling ceiling tile and violent vibrating of the floorboards we can only deduce that Massachusetts stoner-doom-sludge heavyweights Elder have returned to wreak a foul bongload of havoc upon the unwitting civilians of the Aquarian realm!! After much love received around these parts by Elder's earlier highly-reliable slabs of psychy blown-out heaviness, we were all ready to settle in for more of the same, which we certainly wouldn't have complained about, but what Lore delivers isn't really that at all. Lore is one of those dramatic forward-leaps that your average band never quite gets around to making (especially one of the stoner doom variety - a genre often a little too ready to rest upon its laurels of simple slow riffery!). Instead here we have a heaping dose of what could probably be best described as... stoner-math? Or maybe doom-gressive?? Prodge??? (That's prog & sludge combined, if that wasn't clear.) Literally within the first two seconds of album opener "Compendium", with its twitching insectoid riffing & dizzying stop start time signature, it's abundantly clear that things have changed. Don't get us wrong, there's plenty of lurching grooves & thundering drumming here for true doomheads to sway madly too, but there's also a lot of unpredictability, not only in the song structures but in the sound in general. There are shades of Tool if they'd been weened on way more Sleep & Kyuss, Mastodon if they were feeling a bit meditative, Pallbearer funneled through Fragile-era Yes, Baroness on Quaaludes. There are even flirtations with glistening drifting Explosions In The Sky style post-rock and loopy hypnotic Comus-esque psych-folk. On paper, noodly time-signature manipulation and stoned out Sabbath wizardry shouldn't really a match in Heaven make, but in a scene so rife with by-the-numbers plodding (as much as we love that sometimes) it's pretty damn refreshing to hear this kind of take on it. Above all Lore sounds like a serious shot at the quote-unquote BIG TIME from a band no one really had any right to expect it from. Lore climbs the summit of heaviness and screams confidently from the precipice! A vibrant, daring slab of tricked-out progressive doom.
FYI, the vinyl version has a fancy die-cut cover, and comes with download, though we're out of 'em right now unfortunately; the jewel-boxed cd we're listing now is nice but not so fancy - and a lot cheaper.
With every Elf Power release the band grows in leaps and bounds, gleefully becoming more psychedelic and less sweetly pop. This is a good thing! Developing their own, original spin on the tried and true Elephant 6 sound (the underground pop collective typified by Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, and Apples in Stereo) has resulted in "Winter is Coming", which is filled with delightfully ambitious psychedelic rock with a few nods here and there to their toothy pop roots. Very well executed and stunningly melodic. Highly recommended!
Nearly every week, there seems to be another crop of Emeralds related works. The format does not matter to the band - cassette, vinyl, cd, and hell, we bet they'd release an 8-track if they could - and the three Emerald dudes are not averse to venturing into side projects and other collaborations. Hence, the growth of the band between what could be qualified as their major productions has been huge. On the 2008 release of Solar Bridge, Emeralds slumped upon synths and guitar pedals in the construction of two mighty fine arcs of cosmic zone-out. Through the next couple of larger releases (What Happened and their self-titled album), Emeralds honed their craft of interlocking arpeggiations from the multiple analogue synths matched with motorik guitar excursions. They alluded to forgotten futures that were forecast by the likes of Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Heldon, and Omit. With all of Emeralds' explorations and variations on these specific themes, it was inevitable that the band would only be improving, and that certainly shows on the 2010 release of Does It Look Like I'm Here.
The biggest change that you'll notice between this album and everything that came before is the crystallization of the Emeralds sound into brief 4 to 5 minute chunks. It's hard to call these pieces 'pop songs,' but Emeralds are working with a greater economy than ever before. So much of what they had done seems to be the result of hanging out, turning on the tape machine, and seeing what happens... with amazing results. But, the shorter program speaks of the band working out particular compositions and tightening up the dynamics between the instruments. Don't worry, there will inevitably be another awesome Outer Space cassette or a Mark McGuire cd-r of the long-sprawling zoner-jams in the very near future! (In fact, likely on this very same list!)
Warm bubbling synths and kaleidoscopic guitar chiming melts into a bittersweet mid-tempo number with a thread of end-of-summer melancholy running counter to all of the glistening synth tones on the album opener "Candy Shoppe." The track "Double Helix" is aptly named for its tight spiralling of bright percolations and overlapping sequences. "Genetic" embraces a baroque almost harpsichord set of synth tones, with soaring-into-the-heavens ambience, and an elegant display of glowing guitar workouts. Lovely, lovely stuff.
Perhaps you've already come across the cover of this album, it's one of those classic kitschy covers, two innocent looking teens, in cheesy white jumpsuits, unzipped in the front, with huge collars, one of the guys wielding a guitar, both looking pretty earnest and heartfelt. The record's called Dreamin' Wild, which is printed in bubbly red letters. We had seen this pop up on best/worst album covers lists forever, and like most everyone else, we had a chuckle and forgot all about it. But then we started hearing about this song called "Baby", most notably covered by weirdo outsider pop nerd Ariel Pink (the 12" of which we just got in today!), originally recorded by a couple kids named Donnie & Joe Emerson, and holy shit, we suddenly made the connection. We assumed the original version of "Baby" must suck, and Ariel Pink just took a crappy cheesy old song and weirded it up and made it warped and catchy, but instead, it turns out, the original just might be THEE coolest jam we'd heard in ages. Then we learned that Light In The Attic was gonna give this lost gem a proper reissue and we were pretty excited, even before we learned about the record's crazy backstory.
Apparently Donnie and Joe were raised in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Washington state, lived and worked on a farm, when their dad, after making them promise to focus on writing and recording original material, took a second mortgage out on the farm and built his sons a recording studio filled with amazing equipment, spending more than $100K! But that's not all, he also built them a THREE HUNDRED SEAT venue, complete with stage, ticket booth AND snack bar. As you might imagine, those 300 seats were never filled, and while the boys toiled diligently on their original music, even being featured in a local news special, all culminating in their dad paying to release the original version of this record, a selfless act that ended up causing the family to lose a significant amount of their farm when the record failed to sell. And thus, very little was heard from these boys, until now.
And while these days pretty much any old unknown record can be dug up and presented as some sort of lost treasure, very few deserve the accolades bestowed upon them, and even fewer fulfill the promise of crazy album covers and over the top backstories like Dreamin' Wild.
Really, just check out "Baby", somewhere between the sweet soulful shimmer of Shuggie Otis and the dreamy reverby pop of Roy Orbison, it's lush and lovely, the sort of mix tape killer that had we heard it before would definitely have featured prominently in past courtships. And while we're tempted to say, that it's worth the price of admission for that track alone, there's so much more to dig here, the wah guitar disco funk groove of "Feels Like The Sun", the classic rocking bass heavy buzz of "Good Time", the old school soulful smolder of "Give Me The Chance", the psychedelic yacht rock balladry of "My Heart" which manages to sound fantastically droney and druggy and dreamy, and makes it obvious just what had Ariel Pink so smitten. The record is rife with reverbed psychedelic guitars, lush vocal harmonies, ingenious arrangements, and some KILLER tunes, all cooked up by two teens in a basement studio on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So awesome!
Includes a massive booklet with extensive liner notes and tons of pix. And check out this mini-documentary on Donnie and Joe: http://vimeo.com/39424998#at=0
FYI vinyl lovers, this is on lp too, we've got a few but not enough to list, our supplier just happened to be out this week, but we should get some more soon!
As faithful readers of this here aQ list no doubt figured out long ago, we love insane music. It doesn't even matter whether it's pop or metal, indie rock or hip hop, the more twisted, and damaged, and confusional and what-the-fuck, the more we love it. If you do a search on the aQ site for words like "fucked", "freaked-out", "demented", you'll get a (maybe not so) surprising number of results. And also maybe not so surprisingly, it would probably read like an all time aQ best-of. Knowing all this, a friend of ours suggested we check out Encenathrakh, the new WTF improv death metal / free grind outfit made up of a who's who of difficult heaviness - there's the inimitable Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers, Burmese, Hatewave, Cellular Chaos and lots of others), weirdo shredder Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Ocrilim, etc.), weirdo shredder #2 Colin Marsten (Gorguts, Behold The Arctopus, Krallice, etc) and weird shredder the third, Paulo Henri (Copremesis). If you're thinking all these shredders means a goddamn glorious, chaotic mess, you wouldn't be far off. Especially considering this stuff is supposedly all improvised.
Thus what you've got is a dizzying barrage of impossibly furious and frenetic, free-form death-grind. Not that far removed from the gore grind we love, all insectoid buzz, machine like blurred beats, and of course guttural gurgling vokills. But imagine one of those bands being covered by Naked City, or maybe the other way around. The drums are all over the place, brutal blasts to wild machine-gun splatter, the riffs too, like all three guys were shredding wildly in the studio sans headphones, a furious musical rat king like tangle, that will have your head spinning and your ears begging for mercy.
That's not to say it doesn't gel, cuz it does, at least sort of, well, maybe once in a while, or really about as much as you'd want something like this to. Which if you're anything like us is probably not much at all. Fans of the recent Mastery record, might find this even more wildly, and willfully, next level baffling, cuz really, for all the metal that's going on, it's almost like Borbetomagus, with the sax swapped out for more guitars. Churning, roiling, blurry, swaths of swirling buzz and blast, laced with blurts of atonal shred, and even some mysterious electronics, all wound up into what might be the craziest, coolest, metalhead-frustrating chunk of avant death metal EVER.
Oh, and here's a list of this album's selling points, according to the label: NO DIGIPAK. NO LOGOS. NO SONGS. NO TRIGGERS. NO LYRICS. NO BASS. NO SWEATPANTS. 1000 percent Technical Guttural Supremacy!
Another disc we knew nothing about and just luckily stumbled across (with our interest whetted due to its label affiliation, Kning usually being quite interest-ing). We were initially struck by the gorgeous cover, an embroidered landscape, all oranges and blacks, the texture of the background fabric adding grit to the already dark and mysterious shapes and hues in the foreground. The words Farval Falkenberg printed in huge gold metallic letters, strangely poetic song titles.
We later discovered that this is in fact the soundtrack to a Swedish film, a coming of age story, sad and bittersweet, and the music couldn't be more perfect. The opening track had us completely smitten within seconds. A gorgeously melancholy acoustic guitar, spinning a soft sad melody, mournful and moody, the main melody is whistled, giving the track a certain childlike vibe, a bit of a Morricone / Bjorn Olsson feel too, it seriously gives us shivers just writing about it. Then the 'chorus' kicks in, and adds soft focus piano plinking in the background, another guitar higher up in the mix, simple tambourine percussion. It's so evocative, you can't help but let your mind start making up different scenes from this movie you've never seen. Lonely walks, sitting by the window, rain pouring down, wandering along railroad tracks, laying in bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Wow.
And the rest of the record is just as compelling. Every song a mini super emotional epic. Organs wheeze ominously, acoustic guitars flutter and flit, chimes drift and shimmer, the piano returns in dense swells, bits of static and glitchy hiss intrude like someone changing stations on the radio, there are creaks and groans, distant rumbles, bits of electronic skitter, subtle drones, chimes, bells, even the occasional vocals, but it's always about the guitar, it's delicate dreamlike melodies, and how it's so perfectly intertwined with the piano and the organ. So moving and intense. Think Rachel's, Dirty Three, Pinetop Seven, Japancakes, Godspeed, but somehow much less arty, and more genuine, subtly experimental, but practically perfect, dark, emotional, so incredibly moving. Makes us want to see the film so bad, but in the meantime, it's the ideal music for whatever film you have running through your head. And of course the absolutely perfect soundtrack for lonely walks, staring at the ceiling, staring out the windows in the rain, wandering along railroad tracks, etc...
Ensemble Pearl is a new psychedelic supergroup of sorts, featuring SUNNO))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, Boris basher Atsuo, legendary Japanese psychedelic axeman Michio Kurihara, and William Herzog (guitarist for Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter) along with a handful of guests including violinist extraordinare Eyvind Kang. This unlikely collective have whipped up a heady brew of smoldering slow motion doom psych lumber and blackened kosmische drift, all murky and muddy, wasted and washed out, the core sound a smoldering, twang flecked tarpit trudge, a little bit Earth, a little bit Barn Owl, a little bit former Record Of The Weekers Torlesse Super Group - the same sort of windswept, apocalyptic, desert drone dirge, only this time, imbued with a pulsing psychedelic cosmic energy, a ferocity and intensity that seems to lurk just below the surface, as if barely restrained, a glowing black heart beating within Ensemble Pearl's bleak, bleary, blackly blissful exterior.
The sounds here are dense and dark, and yet simultaneously free and abstract, a trudging rhythmic plod, offering the only real structure, the sounds only tenuously moored to the surface, as if all it would take is a subtle shift in the solar winds, for the whole thing to drift heavenward, which it does at several points, the sound then seeming to blur into a more spaced out version of modern minimal dronemusic, almost like a more blackened, demonic Tangerine Dream, or a seriously sinister Phill Niblock, a hazy, softly churning kosmische thrum, lush and layered, pulsing and rich with chordal coloration and slow shifting overtones, laced with all manner of mysterious tonal shifts, like the soundtrack to some super abstract sci-fi art film, those stretches of droned out buzz could be the music of the cosmos, the streaks and contrails in the night sky translated into sound, a haunting, serene sonic stasis, that still somehow seems to be in perpetual motion, tranquil, slow swirling clouds of sonic debris, imbued with a warm glow of divine dreaminess.
But those sounds invariably coalesce into the dark dirgery that defines Ensemble Pearl's soundworld, the record bookended by to slowburn epics, the closer maybe our favorite, an epic sprawl of smolder and shimmer, a dreamy sonic death march, the guitars doused in reverb, the drums subtly dubbed out, the whole thing a woozy weary wander, a skeletal slo-mo lope through softly undulating swirls of smokey chordal shimmer, and heaving hushed drones, wreathed, like the opener, in fragmented shards of blurry ambience, spidery melodic tangles, the soaring sheets of keening high end here muted and smeared into distant glimmers, the occasional howl of feedback, or soft squalls of achingly keening high end guitarnoise, disappearing into fields of dubdrone blur, before returning to the motorik dirge creep that churns ever onward, gradually disappearing into a hushed field of atmospheric black buzz, warm and darkly billowing.
Fans of minimal drone smolder and abstract cosmic psychedelic space-doom drift will be in heaven.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Whoa! I thought that Weakling's "Dead As Dreams" was gonna be the uncontested "Black Metal Record of the Year" until I heard this, the new album from Norwegian Viking-metallers Enslaved. Now Weakling has some competition! "Mardraum" ("Nightmare") is probably Enslaved's best record to date, no mean feat considering that their "Frost" and "Eld" albums are two of the best Nordic black metal discs ever, in AQ's humble opinion. This new album somehow combines the violent and epic qualities of Enslaved's past works with what can only be considered (despite our dislike, and over-use, of the term) a 'post-rock' sensibility. And, on top of that, there's a full on ROCK element at work here too. During the very first track ("Larger Than Time -- Heavier Than Night") you'll swear that (despite the very metal attack) you can hear in the droning guitar harmonies and mathy drumming the post-rock of a Codeine or A Minor Forest! Enslaved have created a new, multi-layered complexified psych-metal, mixing dangerous speed with slow doom epic majesty (the waves pounding on shore during the Viking longboat raid)...then, amid all this beauty and brutality, they'll go and whip out some leather-clad, almost-punk rock n' roll riffing that's just as foreign to the black metal template as the 'post-rock' aspect just discussed. Not that any of this seems purposefully jarring or ill-fitting (or Mr. Bungle-like) -- it seems quite natural, more artful than artsy. Another example: track seven, "The Ending Empire", starts off with a catchy riff-cycle that strongly reminds me of something like "Insidious Detraction" off the first album by Greg Ginn's Gone, but then the song takes a turn into an almost honkytonk country-western flavored breakdown with a melodic rock guitar solo, before the Viking battle re-commences! Brilliant. Is this the most intense, heaviest, most psychedelic, rockin'est, 'post-black-metal' album ever recorded? We think so. Norwegian genius that puts almost all heavy-duty avant-rock acts to shame, metal or not.
We didn't realize how much we had been missing this beloved Bay Area post-punk trio. It's been over EIGHT years since their last album, but the moment Lost Weekend came ringing out our speakers, we were again enveloped into the band's familiar warm & urgent sounds, and after just a few listens we could feel these songs digging deeper and deeper into our brains/hearts/souls in a way we knew wasn't going to stop.
While the previous Erase Errata albums that we love so much were marked with more of a herky-jerky and angular disposition, this is a different and even more potent beast. The songs and playing are more assured, a slow burn is thrown into the mix, and the riffs are as heavy and chunky as they are punchy and catchy. The darker elements of their sound that came to the surface on Night Time, their last lp all those years ago, is present here with even more of a hypnotic and propelling glow.
It goes without saying that a lot has happened in the 8 years since their last release. The face of San Francisco has changed, as has much of the lives of the three members of Erase Errata. While not all the members of the band live in the Bay anymore, there is something forever San Francisco about their sound and energy. The band's vocalist/guitar shredder Jenny Hoyston moved to Texas but the legacy she left in the city working and booking shows at El Rio makes us remember a more inspired and hopeful time in the city. The band's drummer, Bianca Sparta, became a proud mama, and it's no accident that the record's title Lost Weekend is the name of our all-time favorite video store of the same name, which is located right across the street from aQ, as Bianca worked their for years.
On this record the band taps into a psychedelic groove that's both swirling, steady, direct, and deep cutting, but with room to twirl and freak out. They continue to show how they are masters of musical economy as there is not a wasted note or second on the album, yet it feels like the most expansive and wide reaching set of songs they have created yet. We've been listening to Lost Weekend alongside classic albums by bands like Wire, The Fall, The Ex, Sonic Youth, and Siouxsie & The Banshees and the quality and space those bands were able to tap into so very much resonates on this album too. It's kind of crazy how much this record has grabbed a hold of us, as we find ourselves listening to it over and over and over and still not getting sick of a single second. Much like Deerhoof, another of our favorite all-time bands that began during what is a very special era for many of us in the city, the second you hear an Erase Errata song you know it's them. It goes beyond just their distinct playing, tuning, and style and into those intangible qualities like spirit, soul, and electric energy. They have kept the potent intensity of what we love about punk rock but have always found a way to transcend the limitations of genre and create music that rings with relentless and purposeful intention.
At this point Roky Erickson's turbulent story has been pretty well documented (there's even a movie about it!), and it now seems to occupy the same strange annals of musical history as the Norwegian black metal murders and the rise/fall/rise/fall/rise again of Pentagram's unsinkable Bobby Liebling - gazed upon with morbid car-crash curiosity by the casual listening public! But it's still probably the best place to start for those uninitiated souls considering taking the one way trip into the bizarre landscape of The Evil One. The abridged version is this: Roky Erickson first made a name for himself as a founding member of psychedelic pioneers and vocal LSD proponents 13th Floor Elevators (bonus fact: they're thought to have invented the term "psychedelic rock"!), but as a result of a minor drug arrest and a schizophrenia diagnosis he wound up in a mental institution subjected to the horrors of involuntary electroshock therapy.
In the years that followed his release he publicly claimed that a Martian had begun inhabiting his body, was arrested for mail theft after developing an obsession with the postal system... only recently, in the 2000's, has seemingly pulled himself together, and thankfully has started playing live again. It's definitely a sad and a fascinating story, but all throughout those tumultuous years Roky kept putting out albums, and it's important not to let the backstory overshadow that fact. Because regardless of everything else, there is absolutely no doubt in our minds that The Evil One is a bona fide MASTERPIECE, and is probably as good as any hard rock record you will ever hear. Originally released in 1981 and collecting some of Roky's earliest solo material (a few of the tracks were featured on the I Have Always Been Here Before compilation that we reviewed some time back), The Evil One is as timeless a rock record as there's ever been. It seems to exist in some sort of vintage vacuum - it has that vague sense of sounding "old" but doesn't seem to belong to any specific period in music. It has the unique quality of sounding both ahead of its time and strangely retro, even for 1981 - like it was transported from some alternate rock & roll past where the Billboard charts were topped by pop/rock occult ballads and catchy demon worshipping jams.
"Two Headed Dog" opens the record with a jarring, almost post-punk wall of guitar dissonance before a snare drum ushers in an absolutely perfect swaggering proto metal riff - recalling the best moments of classic Alice Cooper and Blue Oyster Cult. Great leads and tight flawlessly simple drumming abounds, all while Erickson wails about children being nailed to crosses like some sort of deranged bizarro Neil Young, if he'd perhaps become a Satanist preacher or delirious doomsday prophesier. There's a Southern twang to Roky Erickson's vocals as well, that lend a certain Americana baptist noir to much of the record. The production is soft and almost subdued - but it's the perfect compliment to the deceptively simple songs and Erickson's surreal stream of consciousness lyrics (perfectly represented by the album cover's chaotic collage that seems to be exploding from Roky's head). The Evil One is certainly a strange record, but it's a subtle creeping strangeness. It's a strangeness that never compromises the songwriting. As we said earlier, first and foremost The Evil One is a fantastic rock record - chock full of catchy choruses, great guitar leads and extremely tight understated playing.
There's tons of variety too. You only need to look at the transition from the aforementioned "Two Headed Dog" into the album's second track "I Walked with a Zombie" - a pristine slab of Saturday night drive-in B-movie doo wop (complete with "I walked with a zombie"/"He walked with a zombie" backing vocal tradeoffs!). Elsewhere there are more upbeat cuts: it's not too hard to imagine "Mine Mine Mind" or "I Think of Demons" being played by Tom Petty or The Cars while "Don't Shake Me Lucifer" is classic Chuck Berry/Rolling Stones blues rock boogie woogie. But all the while Roky is still injecting even the album's poppiest moments with bizarre imagery about devils, goblins and gremlins. It's unsettling, fun and bewildering all at the same time. There's plenty of heaviness as well though. "Night of the Vampire" has a staggered militaristic intro that recalls Diamond Head's NWOBHM classic "Am I Evil" before slithering into repetitive clean guitar gloom accompanied by epic guitar leads and bubbling horror movie synthesizers. Then this incredible closing duel synth/guitar lead comes in that seems to recall the same crumbling castle gothic horror of Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley." Elsewhere the loose driving groove and jagged guitar harmonies of "Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play" would totally do Thin Lizzy proud - you can almost hear the unquiet restless spirit of Phil Lynott singing over it!
But moreso than referencing older bands, this record's influence can be heard in so many places after its release - most notably in the current wave of modern witchy, occult obsessed groups. It's as essential to Witchcraft's hazy organic seance-rock as vintage Pentagram is. The glorious proto-doom of "Stand for the Fire Demon" is clearly the template for The Devil's Blood's entire sound. The opening riff of "White Faces" sounds more than just a little bit like Ghost's "Ritual" (and was covered by both The Devil's Blood AND Witchcraft to boot!). And one group of dudes from North Carolina just went ahead and named their entire band after the pulsing proto metal of "Bloody Hammer"! It's not even a stretch to imagine this could have been a pretty big influence of the stripped down rock & roll darkness of Danzig's first couple of solo albums - even the "whoa-oh"s in "The Wind and More" sound a bit Misfits-y!
Just in case it's not obvious yet, this comes with the highest recommendation, and we won't hesitate in declaring it absolutely one of the best hard rock/proto metal records ever recorded. And also one of the weirdest! It's so bursting with great songs and absolutely overflowing with character in fact that it's hard to imagine ANYONE not loving this record. So give yourself over to Roky's monstrous world. Stay a while! See what strange creatures you encounter there. But don't blame us if you never find your way back home again!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Very cool, fancy import vinyl reissue of this Carpenter classic (and onetime aQ Record Of The Week), from a mysterious UK label who have just started doing a whole series of uber desirable soundtrack reissues on lp. We're always going on about John Carpenter, citing his music as a big influence on a lot of underground bands today, and this is definitely a good example of what we love about his stuff.
Here's what we said about this when we made the cd reish a ROTW back in '05:
Why are we making a soundtrack for a movie from 1983 starring Kurt Russell (who hams it up in a piratical eye-patch) our Record Of The Week, this week? Well, we've got a few reasons... first off, the music is awesome and we love it (good reason right there). Secondly, this cd has been out of print and hard to find for several years now, going for silly sums on eBay, sought after by soundtrack collectors and electronic music fans.
While director John Carpenter is known for making quite a few classic films in the B-grade horror and sci-fi thriller genres (Halloween, The Thing, Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog, They Live etc.), it's perhaps not as well known that he personally composed the soundtrack music to many of his movies, starting with his first flick Dark Star back in 1974. Working out of a home studio with what was technically advanced equipment at the time (machines which would now be considered awesomely vintage), he composed electronic music soundtracks that some might say are even better than the movies themselves. Certainly they're worthy to stand on their own, anyway (just like Goblin's soundtracks for Argento's films). Carpenter's compositions have influenced other musicians, and not just soundtrack writers. Anyone who loved the Zombi album we recommended last year needs to have some John Carpenter in their collection for sure!
And we recommend Escape From New York as being one of his best. Somehow it combines a lot of stuff that we figure a lot of you like: suspenseful Goblinesque darkness, droning old school synths, kitchy Disco Not Disco style NYC '80s groove... Loaded with claustrophobic nervous tension, these tracks make use of taut, minimalistic, hypnotically repetitive rhythms that make us imagine an Electro version of AQ faves Circle. The atmosphere is further enhanced by the inclusion of sound FX from the film and snippets of dialogue - the tough guy banter of Kurt Russell's wiseass anti-hero "Snake" Plissken is priceless, especially due to Russell's constipated Clint Eastwood delivery.
Set in a dystopian, wartorn then-future of 1997, Escape From New York sends "Snake" into the maximum security prison that the island of Manhattan has become to rescue (at pain of death) the President of the United States, who is being held captive there by the city's "inmates" after Air Force One made a particularly poor choice of a place to crash-land! The film also stars the likes of Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasence, and Isaac Hayes, all of 'em capable of chewing the scenery right along with Russell. You definitely don't need to have seen Escape From New York to get a kick out of this soundtrack, but the movie is an enjoyable '80s action thriller worthy of its cult status and listening to this will probably get you to go rent it.
Carpenter composed and performed the score in association with sound designer Alan Howarth, whose home studio (stocked with an ARP Quadra, an ARP Avatar with 16 step sequencer, a Prophet 5 programmable analog synthesizer, and a Linn LM-1 drum machine) was used for the recording. Howarth was further responsible for remixing and remastering the album for the release of this "expanded edition" which first appeared in 2000. It includes several cues originally meant for scenes deleted from the theatrical release of the film, and runs to over 57 minutes in length. 'Bout time it was back in circulation!
This vinyl version includes a poster of its exclusive over art, by Jay 'Iron Jaiden' Shaw, along with liner notes from both Howarth and Shaw.
Birmingham's self described 'dark, vicarious, pernicious, sinister, hateful, drug influenced, tortured, philosophical, and barbaric doom' band return with three tracks, clocking in at almost 45 minutes, of the most brutal doom we've ever heard. Even better than their two previous double cds, because now the production, always their one shortcoming, finally matches the sheer power and intensity of their epic doomscapes. Walls of inpenetrable low-end dissolve into slow motion, spaced out, dire and tortured dirges. Utterly Breathtaking.
Two old doooooom favorites at last back in stock after a loooooong time! And at a way cheaper price. We've long been obsessed with bands like Skepticism, Earth, Burzum, Benighted Leams; all bands so "fucked" and/or with such a singular "vision" that they transcend the metal genre. And from the second we first heard Esoteric we knew they belonged on that list. Self-described as "dark, vicarious, pernicious, sinister, hateful, drug influenced, tortured, philosophical and barbaric doom", who are we to argue? Two double cds of ultra depressive, dirgey, near ambient drones. Each a murky morass of slow motion riffs, amphibious guitar solos and tortured cries. But also strangely beautiful, at times recalling the lugubrious soundscapes of Labradford or Magnog. Metal for the drone set, perhaps? Plus you gotta love any band that merits a "fuck you" on Electric Wizard's special thanks list!
These guys are the ultimate doomlords, brutally uncommercial, with an unapologetically ultra-positive drug stance, and an apparent disinterest in allowing anyone to buy their music, at least in the early stages, but a band this uncompromisingly crushing and confusionally kick ass couldn't remain a secret forever. And if you still need a reason to pick up BOTH of these double discs, Epistemological Despondency and The Pernicious Enigma, which in our minds can be considered a sprawling single 4 part dooooooom epic, just have a gander at the liner notes to Epistemological Despondency:
"FUCK OFF AND DIE: Society, the monarchy, the pigs (fucking bastards), politicians, the government, all holy denominations and followers of the 'right-hand path'. Moralistic bastards, the legal system, all oppressors and authority. All of the ignorant, narrow-minded, stupid humans who follow authorities without questioning. Love. All 'pretend' Satanists, who give the ignorant lease to ridicule 'true' Satanism. All bands who are 'out to put what the people like'. All the sad cunts who have turned underground music into pop-music full of cliches. All psychic vampires and scrounging wankers. All perpetrators of censorship. Those that use drugs, Satanism or music as a scapegoat in order to hide the true cause of their actions--you are as weak as the christians, you cannot fight for yourselves, so you cower in renunciation. To those who would interfere with us, beware!".
FUCK YEAH!
Usually, when a friend of yours slowly begins to sink into a druggy oblivion, you do everything in your power to help them, and keep them from that fate. But when that druggy oblivion is musical and that friend is Greg Weeks, you wait anxiously for the descent to bear musical fruit. Thus we have the Espers. A modern classic of shimmery psychedelia and seventies inspired pagan folk (and the drugs are sonic, not narcotic, so fear not Mr. and Mrs. Weeks). Sweet and melodic, but with a subtly dark and utterly creepy underbelly. The sound is heavy on the Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and hippy folk of that era, but with elements of the sweet pop ballad and with a dash of Comus, that's right, Comus! And we don't invoke the name of Comus lightly. But don't let all this talk of folk and prog put you off. Espers beautifully tread paths of indie rock shimmer just as deftly, offering much to love for fans of Windy And Carl, Landing, and all things Ptolemaic Terrascope. Sweetly angelic female vocals float and hover alongside Weeks' warm sweet croon, over spare lilting folk, woven from delicately plucked steel string guitars, haunting violins and cellos, sweet swirling flutes, and the distinctive zing of dulcimers. Occasionally distorted guitar leaps wildly from the haze (two members are credited with "acid leads" after all!) lending the whole thing an acid soaked vibe. Weeks' last full length solo record was an AQ Record of the Week way back in 2001 with its mournful introspection, fuzzed out melodies and dreamy cloudy ambience. Espers follow a similar path, a lonely, meandering, path through the ancient forest, sunlight filtering faintly through the canopy. Travelling minstrels sing sadly, softly, offering sweet sounds to seek safety in those darkened, timeless glades.
Sometime in the late eighties, John McBain, member of mighty space rockers Monster Magnet, frontman of psychedelic groovers Wellwater Conspiracy, and (not so) secret weapon of local space-psych explorers Carlton Melton, birthed this brilliant, sonic abomination. A dizzyingly tripped out sprawl of oozing, churning, abstract drone-noise-psych, In The Name Of All That Is Unholy sounds like classic psych rock, slowly unravelling, revealing all manner of crumbling sonic detritus within. The multiple movements shifting from plodding doomy creep, to tranced out pulsating dronemusic, to wild, blurred space shred, with sounds in constant flux, pitch shifts and tonal warbles, everything off kilter but somehow hanging together as some sort of drug addled, heart-of-the-sun, damaged cosmic epic.
To us, the heavier moments sound a bit like Philip Jeck or John Oswald constructing a Greyfolded style collaged megamix from old Butthole Surfers records, all smeared into hazy indistinct lopes and lumbers, the melodies distorted and processed, almost like some sort of acid fueled fever dream, the music melting before your very ears. The opening track in particular is reminiscent of the Butthole's "Jimi" (from Hairway To Steven), albeit slowed way down and stretched out into even more twisted brainmelt dirgery. But the deeper you get into the record, the more abstract and weirdly blissed out it becomes. Moments of extremely mesmerizing tranquility coexist alongside murky power electronics, and full on kosmische shimmer, the whole middle section is basically some sort of WTF? soundtrack for an alien planetarium show. You can almost hear the bizarre shapes and prismatic colors warping and curdling, before blossoming into a hyper-delirious barrage of flickering, fluttering, fractured melodies, all tangled up into a thick, layered stretch of hypnotic, undulating sonic mesmer.
But those sounds eventually rupture, and splinter, and lock into stuttering looped hiccups, all wrapped in more of those super distorted psychedelic leads, and underpinned by what sounds like growling beasts, locked into a skipping-record style riffage, delivered as some sort of mind-control metallic mantra. A mantra that quickly (d)evolves into more Jeck-like repletion, albeit a distorto-psych variant, the chug and churn slipping beneath a murky industrial pulse, before exploding again even more blown out, growly and buzzy, before a blast of uber-distorted, FX drenched guitarnoise, and some robotic/alien/monster vocals dissolve into a final squall of crumbling crunch and decaying distortion.
Truly some next level outsider, sampler-damaged psychedelia, that should of course appeal to fans of McBain's other groups, as well as like minded psychedelic noise makers, but also folks into wilder strains of electronic psych-noise weirdness (Our Love Will Destroy The World, Astral Social Club, etc.) will find much to dig here as well.
Originally released on cassette, now the full Evil Acidhead experience is available again, thanks to Agitated, on both on cd and swank double lp. The vinyl version comes on colored wax and also includes both a cd copy of the record and an 'eye-searing' poster!
When we first heard this in the store, Harry was upfront manning the stereo, and we were actually convinced he was spinning some old glam rock record, so we were pretty surprised to discover it was actually Mary Timony from Helium's new band (named after a solo album of hers from a while back), and as much as we love(d) Helium, we never would have expected Timony to make a record that sounds so much like The Sweet. But she did, and it's awesome! At this point, we imagine most reviews will riff on the record title, but how can you resist, this record rips for sure, the sound super retro, but somehow modern and supercharged, the guitars fuzzy and reverbed, the songs swaggery and glammy, power pop stomps overflowing with crazy catchy hooks and amazing guitar melodies, and Timony's vocals seal the deal, the whole package sounding like some obscure seventies glam pop combo. We're immediately reminded of Matthew Melton's Bare Wires - Melton and Timony are most definitely kindred sonic souls, both mining a similar vein of retro psych/garage/glam rock, and both nailing it. We definitely hear hints of Timony's ex-Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte's nineties indie rock outfits Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic too, and of course the Runaways. Really though, Timony has always been a master, with Helium, and solo too, but this might be our favorite record of hers since Helium's 1997 masterpiece The Magic City, but imagine that sound reworked and recast as something way more retro and glam poppy, and you'll get an idea of what this sounds like. A new unanimous store fave, and one that will likely end up on more than one year end top ten...
It's frustrating sometimes that lots of our all time favorite records came out well before the aQuarius list was established. We occasionally pick old favorites, like Rein Sanction, Archers Of Loaf, Hardship Post, Green River, stuff that's still available, and review them on the list. Cuz as far as we're concerned, released dates and the concept of 'new music' are pretty much useless. All records are new and exciting to someone who has never heard them. But often times those old favorites are long gone and out of print. So when one of those records does finally get reissued, we jump at the chance to be able celebrate and share that amazing music via the list. Which brings us to this double disc reissue from weirdo eco-radical doom drug grinders Exit-13.
A band we have loved for EVER (so much so, Allan even interviewed them for the first issue of his old fanzine, years and years ago), Exit-13 were only loosely a grind band, sure they were fast and furious, guitars buzzed, songs were short and complex, the vocals a monstrous gurgle, the lyrics way political, all about the environment, vegetarianism, etc.� But for a grind band, they sure spent a lot of time spewing huge gory gouts of buzzing doomic plod, as well as incorporating convoluted jazz weirdness, freaked out psychedelic leads, thrashing punk rock, bizarre interludes with croony vocals, skittery rhythms, and noodly guitar jams, bits of angular retard-funk, Black Flag-ish gnarled riffing as well as confusional cut ups, dizzying collages of chopped and recontextualized vocals, Jello Biafra, bits of Jeopardy music, the theme from Underdog, Led Zep pastiche and whatever else they felt like tossing in there.
The best way we can describe it is John Zorn meets diSEMBOWELMENT meets Brutal Truth.
The original discs came with stickers that summed up the Exit-13 sound pretty succinctly:
"Mind warping philosophically contemplative environmental brain food from Pennsylvania's unique smoking grind rock extremists" (from Don't Spare The Green Love) and "An 80 minute head explosion of absolutely unique sonic intelligence from Pennsylvania's environmental grind rock hedonists. This band smokes, bud!" (from Ethos Musick)
Hard to argue with that�
So, High Life collects almost everything the band has ever recorded (minus the ep of '20s and '30s cover songs, all about reefer, sung by the Pain Teens' Bliss Blood): their one proper full length, as well as all of their various singles, eps and splits (previously released as Don't Spare The Green Love). And by now, you've probably realized these guys were all about the pot. The songs buzz by in dense clouds of bong smoke, lots of samples about marijuana, lyrics about legalizing hemp and pot. The back of the booklet even features a huge pot leaf and the "Stop the madness - Legalize Marijuana" legend. But that's only one of their causes, a quick look through the lyrics, reveals a seriously 'green' agenda, environmentalism, vegetarianism, there's even a whole track that's just a snippet of the Phil Donahue show, on which he interviews members of Earth First!
But none of that would mean anything if this band didn't completely slay. And thankfully they do. Heavy and fucked, weird, but weirdly catchy, buzzing and blasting, then pounding and chugging. Furious blasts of blown out lightning fast grind are butted up against lurching doom sludge, peppered with super fucked up free jazz breakdowns. Guitars are serpentine, jagged and angular, the drums go from pound to blast beat and back
the vocals harsh and gurgly, there are bits of weirdly classic rock sounding jams, over sound samples, electronics and Goblin-like keyboards...
"Anthropocentric Ecocidal Conundrum" begins with an insistent folky strum over chirping birds and burbling brook, until the guttural death metal vocals kick in and the drums, then it's some sort of metallic death metal folk freakout, finally morphing into some gnarled convoluted math grind jam. Elsewhere, cool creepy acoustic guitars drift over moaning synths, and splattery drums, super cinematic and haunting on "Only Protest Gives A Hope Of Life". There is plenty of weirdness. Damaged is a descriptor that constantly springs to mind, as does demented, and most certainly fucked. Silly too. But at it's core, this is heavy, heady stuff. Brutal but musical, fierce and fractured, forward thinking and seriously far out.
The second disc is the older stuff, and is at once more furious and thrashing, much more grind, but also has lots more sound samples, songs dotted with all sorts of film snippets, voices, bits of dialogue all tangled up with the growling harsh vocals. "Spare The Wrench Surrender The Earth" is half funeral doom, before launching into a more grinding blast of punk rock. The stuff from the first 7" is almost like old school goregrind, with impossible gurgling loooooow vocals, the guitars a furious blur, the drums a furious splatter. Then there's "Fingernails" hinting at the weirdness to come, with its fake horns, and frog-like croaking super effected vocals, and that classic funeral march melody mixed into the chaotic rrroooaaar.
Any fan of heavy music, be it black, thrash, grind, doom, or sludge should be able to get into these guys. And they're just weird enough to maybe also appeal to the less metal inclined looking for something freaked out and heavy.
An interesting note: like any self-respecting grind band, Exit-13 made a regular practice of releasing records with different versions of the same songs, so the song "Disemboweling Party" appears three different times, while seven other tracks appear twice. But in most cases, the various versions, while not totally different, are varied enough to keep it interesting, even if it's just that one is super hot and in the red, and one is super muddy and lo-fi, or even just that different samples were used.
Our only complaint, is that this is only sort of the complete Exit-13, 'cause they left off the extended, potentially-speaker-damaging noisedrone jams that closed out both their records, the 28 minute "An Electronic Fugue For The Imminent Demise of Planet Earth" from Ethos Musick and the 21 minute "Snakes And Alligators" from the Just A Few More Hits ep. Most of us wouldn't have minded paying a few extra bucks for a third disc, and ruined speakers, but what can you do?
Killer packaging, all the original photos, images, lyrics, quotes and propaganda reproduced in a huge booklet.
We've always been fans of Explosions In The Sky. One of the post Mogwai, post Godspeed outfits so adept at crafting super epic and emotional instrumental soundscapes -- post rock, math rock, jangly pop, chamber music, all sort of whipped into grandiose cinematic swells. But past records, while sounding amazing, with the right balance of mood and metal, hush and heaviness, still stuck a little too close to the template of their forbears. EITS were like the perfect mix of Godspeed and old more bombastic Mogwai. And not much more. Nothing wrong with that really, it just never totally blew us away.
But All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone is different. And it does blow us away. In a big way. It still sounds like EITS, and thus still sounds a bit like Godspeed and Mogwai, but like any great band in the last 20 years, it's not who you steal from, or what you steal, it's how you make what you steal your own. And EITS have made epic instrumental post rock all their own. The opener is everything this sort of music could and should be. Super dense and dramatic, spacious and emotional, opening with keening high end melodies over big jangly guitar strum and huge percussive For Those About To Rock blasts, the guitars slowly intertwining and drifting off, fading to a moody minor key post rock drift, underpinned by layer after layer of fuzzy blissy guitar and a motorik rhythmic shuffle before the completely perfect bridge, a spaced out melody, all dynamic and epic, that will definitely give you goosebumps, before launching into a full on heavy math rock groove, incorporating that same hair raising melody, with some killer drumming and a veritable orchestra of guitars.
The rest of the record plays out in similar, albeit slightly less bombastic fashion. Each track perfectly leading into the next, an expansive post rock epic, separated into movements, chiming guitars, thick riffs, each track gloriously tangled and emotional, with long stretches of cinematic ambience, some shimmering strings, glistening melodies, lush harmonies, bits of piano, and some amazingly expressive drumming.
All Of A Sudden also includes a bonus disc, an entire remix of the album, each track reworked by a different artist. Jesu turns the epic opener into a fuzzier, blissier, and toward the end a MUCH heavier beast. Adem's remix is all low key and abstract, acoustic guitars, simple percussion and glistening chimes, a whispery shadow of the original. The Paper Chase wraps the original track in a glorious swirl of murky ambience, adding a stuttery drum machine rhythm and all sorts of strange sonic filigree. Mountains gives their track a serious Pop Ambient makeover, stretched out and languorous, swirling and shimmery, ending with a long expanse of solo piano. Four Tet's reimagination is the most dramatic, a blissed out shuffling electronic workout, all processed drums, shuffling and skittering, with the original track nestled beneath layers of synth fuzz and strange subtle FX. Finally, labelmates Eluvium transform the album closer into a fuzzy smear of pixelated ambience, that builds and builds, much like the original, but in this version, into a blown out, super distorted fuzzy dreamscape.
Two version of the same record, both stunning! So recommended.
Now available on vinyl! And the lp version also includes the bonus remix cd...
We've always been fans of Explosions In The Sky. One of the post Mogwai, post Godspeed outfits so adept at crafting super epic and emotional instrumental soundscapes -- post rock, math rock, jangly pop, chamber music, all sort of whipped into grandiose cinematic swells. But past records, while sounding amazing, with the right balance of mood and metal, hush and heaviness, still stuck a little too close to the template of their forbears. EITS were like the perfect mix of Godspeed and old more bombastic Mogwai. And not much more. Nothing wrong with that really, it just never totally blew us away.
But All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone is different. And it does blow us away. In a big way. It still sounds like EITS, and thus still sounds a bit like Godspeed and Mogwai, but like any great band in the last 20 years, it's not who you steal from, or what you steal, it's how you make what you steal your own. And EITS have made epic instrumental post rock all their own. The opener is everything this sort of music could and should be. Super dense and dramatic, spacious and emotional, opening with keening high end melodies over big jangly guitar strum and huge percussive For Those About To Rock blasts, the guitars slowly intertwining and drifting off, fading to a moody minor key post rock drift, underpinned by layer after layer of fuzzy blissy guitar and a motorik rhythmic shuffle before the completely perfect bridge, a spaced out melody, all dynamic and epic, that will definitely give you goosebumps, before launching into a full on heavy math rock groove, incorporating that same hair raising melody, with some killer drumming and a veritable orchestra of guitars.
The rest of the record plays out in similar, albeit slightly less bombastic fashion. Each track perfectly leading into the next, an expansive post rock epic, separated into movements, chiming guitars, thick riffs, each track gloriously tangled and emotional, with long stretches of cinematic ambience, some shimmering strings, glistening melodies, lush harmonies, bits of piano, and some amazingly expressive drumming.
The All Of A Sudden lp also includes a cd, which contains an entire remix of the album, each track reworked by a different artist. Jesu turns the epic opener into a fuzzier, blissier, and toward the end a MUCH heavier beast. Adem's remix is all low key and abstract, acoustic guitars, simple percussion and glistening chimes, a whispery shadow of the original. The Paper Chase wraps the original track in a glorious swirl of murky ambience, adding a stuttery drum machine rhythm and all sorts of strange sonic filigree. Mountains gives their track a serious Pop Ambient makeover, stretched out and languorous, swirling and shimmery, ending with a long expanse of solo piano. Four Tet's reimagination is the most dramatic, a blissed out shuffling electronic workout, all processed drums, shuffling and skittering, with the original track nestled beneath layers of synth fuzz and strange subtle FX. Finally, labelmates Eluvium transform the album closer into a fuzzy smear of pixelated ambience, that builds and builds, much like the original, but in this version, into a blown out, super distorted fuzzy dreamscape.
Two versions of the same record, both stunning! So recommended.
It's amazing how quickly Expo '70 went from being a group we had never heard of, whose cd-r we got randomly sent to us in the mail, to a dronerock juggernaut, releasing disc after disc of amazing ambient kraut-flecked drift, what is beginning to seem remarkably like a monthly installment of outerspace sonic exploration. But heck, we'd much rather get a new 'issue' of far out Expo '70 dronebliss every month than say, Star Magazine (well, actually, okay, maybe Star was a bad example, but definitely more than say Spin or Rolling Stone or pretty much any other monthly installment sort of thing, anyway...).
Animism just so happens to be Expo '70's first actual cd as well, the first release that's not a limited edition cd-r, which is one of the reasons we decided to make it record of the week. 'Cuz to be totally honest, every single one of the Expo '70 releases could have been, and heck, maybe should have been Records of the Week. Certainly if we based it on how much they get played in the store, and the reaction of the folks hearing it, and the fact that the cds have been impossible to keep in stock. But that's only one of the reasons. The other, is that Animism, in it's own subtly space-y and psychedelic way, is quite possibly the 'heaviest' Expo '70 release yet.
The record begins much in the same way as most of the others. A huge drifting rumbling soundscape. Spare and wide open. Across this warm expanse drift disembodied guitar squiggles, reverbed scrapes, bits of fragmented melodies, post rock snippets, tinkling percussive shimmer,
all drifting over soft swells of undulating low end. There are tons of FX, but it's not Acid Mothers style freakout, instead, these sonic aktions are muted and smeared into dreamy streaks. Never has a music sounded so much like what it must feel like to drift weightless through space. Cloaked in inky blackness, but with the sparkle of a million stars illuminating the seemingly endless emptiness. And so it goes on, each track, a slow lugubrious crawl through the galaxies, strange shapes drift by, colored lights, every bit of melody like some barely visible shooting star, soft billow clouds of FX enveloping you before dissipating and leaving you to once again drift wide-eyed into infinity.
Track three, though, is where things start to get a little scary. In come the guitars, and this time it's not the little glimmers and twinkles, these are thick sheets of crumbling rumbling distorted buzz. Relentlessly trudging beast like across the same barren soundscapes, but leaving a trail of blown speakers in its wake. The effects here are much more blown out, melodies slip and slither amidst the coruscating heaviness, sounding almost like someone transported SUNNO))) back to the seventies, where they ended up jamming with Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel. Granted the Expo '70 cd-r Center Of The Earth, was also pretty heavy, but on Animism, the heaviness seems to be more deftly integrated with the lovelier psych-drone-drift parts, an organic space kraut doom, as dark and dense as it is dreamy and effervescent. The record effortlessly drifts back and forth, from black drone to space-y drift, as if one couldn't possibly exist in this universe without the other.
There are some subtle sonic surprises too, like the way-up-in-the-mix, tripped out harmonized guitars on "Entering The Night On A Highway Of Astral Projection", the folky acoustic strum on "Missing Sun", and the swirling SUNNO)))-y murk of "Shape-Shifting Mountain Mover", sounding a bit like the Angelic Process with the treble turned all the way down and the bass all the way up! Blissy and muddy, an epic blown out glistening dirge, suffocated under layer after layer of FX drenched detritus.
If there was ever an ultimate soundtrack for blowing the hatch and floating free, doomed to a languorous eternity of drug fueled drift and buzzing rumbling psychedelic space rock torpor, this is most certainly it.
So recommended.
As regular readers of the aQ list can no doubt attest to, we sure do love droning guitars. Whether downtuned and mostly motionless, or frenzied and buzzing, or blown out and shimmery, there's just something about the sound of those steel strings vibrating projected through massive walls of amplification. There's the primal primeval sound itself, the actual drone, a sound found everywhere in nature, then there's the power, the amplification, this transformed sound. The drone is most certainly linked to the machinations of life and the universe, we can only imagine, the Big Bang resulted in an aeons-long drone that hung over the nascent Earth, the sound of insects, the growls of beasts, the rumble of thunder, the white noise of the surf, all harnessed and sculpted into a more modern, more human experience of sound, into actual music. But the best drone music, with the most resonance, is the music that conflates the two. That creates a listening experience, wherein we find ourselves drifting off, sometimes to some man made universe, of songs and sounds and music, sometimes to someplace wholly other, where the music looses itself from the strictures of composition and arrangement, and is allowed to float freely, to drift. It's then, that the music maker becomes more than a musician, more than a rock band, almost more like and esoteric, ethereal wrangler of sound. The magic is creating music, that sounds like it wasn't 'created' at all, but instead, was discovered, unearthed, or if created, not from guitars and 4-tracks and drums, but from some strange energy, or some alternate universe, the sounds become glimpses into other worlds, or peeks into the music maker's soul. In creating these sorts of sounds, the listener is inexorably drawn in, and pulled quite willingly into a whole new dimension, where unlike the creator, who may have meticulously assembled the various elements, they are allowed to wander, and wonder, to float and drift and get lost, to allow the sounds to unleash emotions, to open up their mind, their hear, maybe in some cases even their soul.
As you might imagine, and we've mentioned it before, the drone is a mercurial beast, and one not wrangled easily. There are plenty of comers, who feel like once you've conjured the drone, it does the work for you, but such is not the case, as is proven time and time again, by sonic alchemists like Expo '70, whose take on the drone is less monochromatic, less one dimensional, whose dronemusic is infused with elements of krautrock, spacerock, postrock, but all woven into vast black expanses of sound.
Even more than past Expo '70 releases, Black Ohms manages to create some impossible world of sound, that is at once dark and sinister and foreboding, yet somehow dreamlike and serene, a collection of tracks woven into a seemingly continuous sonic drift, beginning with a deep, almost corrosive buzz, pulsing and undulating, shot through with streaks of melody, layered and textured, looped and hypnotic, heavy and dense and in its own minimal way, quite brutal, before giving way to something much more tranquil, a sea of glimmering, harmonics, and deep drifting tones, here the guitar is revealed as just that, a guitar, its abstract chords and minimal riffage, clipped and effected, draped in reverb and delay, and allowed to unfurl into softly propulsive rhythms, and spider web-like textures, again, infused with subtle melody, and blurred, burnished shadings.
The record wanders through miniature otherworlds of atonal melody, of machine like click and chitter, fifties computer bleeps and bloops, soft chiming jammy summer sun guitars, before returning to the deep, dark drone for a nearly 35 minute two part finale. The first part, a fifteen minute return to the sound of the album opener, the guitar again distorted and dark, not so much riffing as buzzing, a Niblockian soundscape of overtones and harmonics, a warm blackened bed for the ethereal melodic drift above, streaks of glimmering melody, soft stretches of wispy ambience, laced with an almost buried, looped guitar figure, all subtly rhythmic, a distant throb, like the pulse of some buried giant, muted and mysterious, but supporting the whole delicate structure.
The second, a 20 minute slow burn, a crystalline assemblage of barely there rhythms, deep layers of shimmering drone, this is the sound of a million dronemusic cd-r's fully realized, a smoldering chunk of minimal propulsion, rife with strange, tape speeds shift, but instead of jarring, it only manages to make the sound woozy, slightly alien, underwater, glimmering melodies, sparkling like black diamonds, fields of soft static like clouds of tiny insects, deep soft swells like the ebb and flow of some otherworldy tide.
Imagine the most minimal krautrock record you own, dubbed over and over and over onto the shittiest tapes possible, left in the sun, then played back on a car stereo, with only one woofer, but then render that in ear popping hi fi. The sound may seem murky and muted, but it is most definitely by design, there is nothing low fidelity about the sound of Expo '70, because within the meticulously and deftly obscured sound world, lurk all manner of sonic mysteries, each suspended in an impossibly beautiful blurred constellation of sound, which in turn is left to drift across a vast expanse of Black Ohms.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!
We made the last record from this Australian drum and organ duo Record Of The Week back in 2010, a glorious concoction equal parts simple stripped down krautrock rhythms, swirling psychedelic organ mantras and ethereal vocal incantations. That Fabulous Diamonds album was a bit like some psychedelic zoner pop melted down into something much more primal and abstract, a sound at once alien and mysterious, but that somehow retained ghostly vestiges of the pop songs that somehow spawned it, the sound slipping woozily from looped lunar hypnorock to mesmerizingly motorik minimalism and back again.
This new record takes the same sound, and reimagines it as something even MORE abstract, even MORE psychedelic and sprawling, each song a single idea, looped and layered and strung into a dizzying stretch of tranced out rhythmic mesmer, the vocals this time around seemingly more of an afterthought, with several songs foregoing vocals entirely. The first half of the record seems to inhabit a sonic orbit slightly closer to conventional pop, but only slightly. Opener "Inverted Vamp" unfurls a warm, murky rhythmic churn, as if it were simply the intro to some dark retro psych pop jam, but instead, the sound loops, cyclical and repetitive, in fact, for the first two minutes, the band lock tight into a tranced out slo-mo groove that as far as we're concerned could have continued that way for the entirety of the record, and it STILL would have been Record Of The Week. Instead, the vocals drift in, all dreamy and hazy, a plink plonk melody drifts beneath the undulating layers of buzz and whir, the whole thing sounding like a Stereolab or Broadcast record produced by King Tubby, and perhaps also spinning at the wrong speed. Woozy and washed out and so gloriously blissed out and hypnotic.
"John Song" is another drum driven chunk of dirgey murk-pop, that again, sans vox, sounds like some sort of slowcore This Heat, but it's the vocals that transform the sound into something much more distinctive, in this case drifting in and out, alongside some strange dubbed out synths, in fact, the dub vibe looms large throughout. Where Peaking Lights take dub and make it all dreamy and sunshiney, Fabulous Diamonds, drag dub into the dark, wrap it in shadows, and douse it in soft focus noise, letting it careen lazily in a field of warm swirling thrum.
About midway through, the record begins to remind us of African Head Charge, or even Muslimgauze, that same sort of rhythmic tranceout, still heavily dubby, but dark and drifty and spacey and all about the texture, and atmosphere, and of course the rhythms. "Lothario" becomes a total AHC style groover as the track coalesces into something darkly driving, and laced with warm whirring ominously minor key synths, it's probably our second favorite track here.
After a few more shorter tracks, again heavier on the vocals, the sound drifts back toward that mysterious murky pop that defined the first few tracks, but even at its poppiest, the sound constantly shifts and transforms, slipping easily into something distinctly unpop, looped and layered, pulsing and pulsating. The sound laced with Reich/Riley like organ arrangements, swirls of fragmented melodies, those divine vocals, and of course the unwavering rhythms.
Closer "Downhill" though is definitely our favorite, and it feels like the whole record was working up to this nearly 11 minute slow burner, beginning with a super spare skeletal tribal beat, beneath pulsing synth squelch, it's nearly 4 minutes (4 gloriously mesmerizing minutes!) before the sound shifts noticeably, a second organ part gradually surfacing, the sound growing more and more dense, then a third, laying down a sinister bassline, and finally, the sound slips into a creepy cinematic swirl, worthy of Carpenter or Goblin for sure, and fans of all that retro synth soundtrackery, this track will knock you on your ass, somehow growing more and more melodic, and more and more intense, a sprawling swirling psychedelic kosmische blissout of the highest order. So great! (Vinyl version upcoming, by the way.)
Much has been made about the Dual 7"+ cd set that Fabulous Diamonds released a few years back through Nervous Jerk, a small Australian imprint which had the good fortune of also releasing an Animal Collective single. Dual did make an appearance here at Aquarius, although it arrived rather mysteriously (perhaps from the band, perhaps not) and vanished after just a single play of the disc on a busy Saturday afternoon. Yes, that's always a good sign when we don't have to ballyhoo the merits of a record, and the strength of the tunes speak for themselves. Woozy hypnosis from organ, sax, drums, monotone female vocals, and lots of delay patterning is what we can remember from back in 2007. The arrival of Fabulous Diamonds' II (whoops, somehow we missed their self-titled Siltbreeze LP in '08) jogged that memory to the forefront of our collective mind, and we're happy that at least we got hear those early tracks at least once. BUT, damn if Fabulous Diamonds haven't made a stellar album here with II.
This Melbourne duo - Nisa Venerosa (drums, voice) and Jarrod Zlatic (organ, effects) - channels a quasi-mystical hybrid of post-Terry Riley time-lag accumulation and the proto-electronica riffs of the Silver Apples through deliriously simple means. Venerosa lays down a slinky percussive groove without much in the way of variation what so ever, much like finest of motorik krautrock drummers (e.g. Jaki Liebezeit, Zappi Diermaier, etc.), and pairs it with Zlatic's spellbinding layers of interwoven phases, loops and moire patterns snatched from his arpeggiating mantras on organ and synthesizer. Venerosa's stoned lullabies are well suited in their simplicity and echoplex ooze to the Diamonds' hypnotic arrangements. On this album, three short tracks about three and half minutes each are bracketed by two lengthy hypno-zoner jams. Those untitled shorts are great on their own, with curiously catchy phrases of repetitive pop minimalism, but Fabulous Diamonds are clearly at their best when sprawling their rhythms and sounds over longer durations, when Zlatic's organs, electronics, and loops have plenty of time for a lunar trajectory around the dark side and back. Anyone with a passing fancy for the likes of Stereolab, Can, Pocahaunted, Aavikko, Shogun Kunitoki, and of course The Silver Apples would be well served with these Fabulous Diamonds. Excellent!
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After months of digging, we were finally able to track some of these down. For those of you not in the know, Factrix just happen to be AQ faves Wolf Eyes favorite band, so much so that not only do they try to sound like them, but to this day they continue to send their industrial-doom heroes letters of gratitutde and worship! Factrix originally manufactured their proto-Wolf Eyes sound in San Francisco some 20+ years ago. The history of underground music on the West Coast in the late '70s is not an easy one to trace. Unlike the punk explosion in England or New York, the influences and disturbances of the musical circuits manifested collusions of ideas that never really fit into the marketable ideas of punk or new wave. Even before those terms were commonplace, California was home to such anomalies in artrock as the Residents and the Los Angeles Free Music Society, who both experimented freely with technology, dadaism, culture jamming, and the detritus of post-psychedelia and bad acid trips. This was the environment that also spawned such genre unfriendly projects as The Screamers, Savage Republic, Non, Survival Reseach Laboratories, Nervous Gender, Negativland, and -- Factrix.
In truth, SF's Factrix belonged to the original Industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and Cabaret Voltaire, although their take on trangressive themes and their grim abuse of technology never reached as wide an audience as those icons of Industrial Records. In their short lifespan from 1978 - 1982, Factrix developed a language that clearly rivalled that of their European comrades; but in many ways, Factrix owed their sound to their San Francisco roots, as they inverted the paisley pretenses of psychedelia into a grim seance of sound in which free love became sexual taboos, universal peace became soul-crushing dread, and transcendence became morbidity. This inversion of psychedelia used many of the same tools of Haight-Ashbury in composing through non-structured improvisations as well as through a steady diet of psilocybin mushrooms; but the sound came out all wrong. Factrix devolved '70s pop banalities into dissonant slabs of noise with squiggling guitar feedback and all-encompassing dirges from over-distorted basslines, with a continuous, tinny pulse from an abused drum machine. The process of free association carried over in the vocal duties, which were typically shared amongst the chief protagonists Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph Jacobs, although industrial culture celeb Monte Cazzaza was also known to offer his demented lisp to Factrix.
While not presented as a 'best-of' collection, "Artifact" features the best material that Factrix had produced, including all of the tracks from their seminal "Schentot" LP on Adolescent Records and a ton of live material, which has been digitally salvaged so as to sound great. "Artifact" is an essential artifact, in fact and a great surprise!
"Red Cross, Disciple of Christ Today, by John Fahey, Guitar Evangelist." This is the last album by John Fahey before his death in 2001, and "guitar evangelist" seems like the perfect description of his legacy. With his acoustic guitar drenched in reverb, "Red Cross" sees Fahey traversing all his signature territory, condensing the entirety of American folk-blues tradition into a uniquely emotional and present instrumental language that also touches on eastern modalities and droning psychedelia. His talent for arranging classic compositions is represented by a version of Irving Berlin's "Remember" and a truly moving, beautiful take on the Gershwins' "Summertime" (I'm always a sucker for that song, but this version really blows me away). It's hard not to read into these tracks, knowing they were recorded so soon before Fahey's passing. The last, "hidden" track especially reverbrates with a kind of somber, distant contemplation, while many of the other tracks possess the joyful but calm exhuberance that comes with being at peace with fate. If there's anything to be learned from the touching liner notes by Cul De Sac's Glenn Jones, however, it's that Fahey was a man who truly lived for today, and if the album can be read as a reflection on the past or acceptance of the future it might just be by chance. But it doesn't seem to be by chance that the last album recorded by a guitar genius decades along in his career stands alongside his very best. Simultaneously uplifting in its gorgeousness and heartbreaking in its unitintended function as a final farewell.
It's been a boom in outsider music these last few weeks at AQ, first it was the random rediscovery of Doug Hream Blunt's Gentle Persuasion, a fantastic and fantastically strange disc of breezy lo-fi outsider funk, that was dropped off by the man himself and required quite a bit of reconnoitering to track him down to get more (a continuing saga). And now there's this. A mysterious disc by a one man band known simply as Fastest, a cd-r that just showed up here one day, and none of us can remember how or when. In the mail? Dropped off? Spontaneous generation? It was just here one day, and we were mesmerized from the second we laid eyes on it. The cover is a huge blue owl against a blue background. The band name Fastest is written in big green letters, in a sort of cartoonish metal font, and superimposed right on the cover is a big barcode. The whole thing printed out on a home laser printer. The tray card folds all the way up around the side so there's an extra panel visible through the clear tray that boldly proclaims: "digital audio compact disc - state of the art phonorecord." The tray card features the ASCAP logo (ASCAP is the company that determines musician royalties) no less than three times, the logo is superimposed again on the back in a little white square, and at the top, blue text explains that the record was "Produced by Daemaeen Hephaestus Chastical". We were almost afraid to throw it on, because we were convinced that there was no way the music could live up to the cryptic promise of the packaging. We were wrong.
The title track starts things off, and immediately you know this is like nothing you've ever heard... a flurry of lo-fi distorted programmed beats, that sound like they could have been lifted straight off that Vijaya Anand Dance Raja Dance Bollywood compilation on Luaka Bop from years back, but any resemblance to Bollywood ends there, as some strange atonal midi synth guitars swoop in, along with some woozy warbly bass, the strangely syncopated programmed beats sputtering wildly in the background, the song slipping into a moody drift, the vocals a strange ominously hushed whisper, that even remind us a bit of the slowed down mush mouthed rapping of Sensational, eventually there's a sort of chorus, the midi guitars buzzing, while a strange synth unfurls a twisted melody, and then there's the most brilliantly baffling break, a stop/start flurry of stuttering beats, and some more warped woozy melodies, eventually joined by a sort of midi guitar least, atonal and detuned, the whole thing sounding like it's melting before your ears, before finally returning to the 'chorus'. Holy shit. What just happened? What is this? How had we not heard this before? Very reminiscent in fact of those absurd midi guitar releases we raved about on lists past, all of them work of a single man, released under different names: Shevelreq, Xynfonica, Gluttony, Thursar. If you were as into those as we were, stop reading and buy this now. Everyone else, read on, and sink deeper into the glorious musical madness that is Fastest...
The first song is so perfect, and perfectly demented, we dared not go on. We just kept listening to that one song over and over and over. Heck we wanted it to be OUR theme song. But eventually we knew we had to go on, and somehow, Fastest managed to confuse us again. And again.
After some simulated jet engine sounds, "Jet Sound II" begins, but it's super melodic and all 8 bit sounding, and reminds us of music from The Legend Of Zelda, but those vocals, dark and ominous, weirdly offset the cheerful melodies and loping programmed rhythms. "Televise" begins with sample bells, and immediately returns us to The Legend Of Zelda, until the vocals come in, locked in tight with the main melody, making for some strange electronic lo-fi midi-pop mystery.
"While You're Here" might be our other favorite (if we were forced to pick), with it's haunting melody, over minor key distorted finger picked guitar, tinkling chimes, very cinematic, again like some dramatic moment in a video game, but definitely dark and haunting, but of course, the song slips right back into some Zelda-y minimal 8 bit balladry, replete with those slightly ominous gruff vocals.
"Million Lies" begins with some dramatic syncopated start/stop dynamics, before slipping into some pulsing electronic groove, but this time, the vocals are super distorted, and even more creepy, and the drums erupt into little flurries of rhythmic tangle.
And so it goes, the sound drifting from Bollywood flecked 8 bit video game soundtrack songsmithery, to eighties style midi driven synthwave, and some hard to describe stops in between, culminating in the final three tracks, maybe the darkest and heaviest of the bunch.
"Seasons Change" is all distorted bass, stereo panned so the buzz flits from ear to ear, the drums spastic and skittery, the vocals as grim and ominous as at any point, the melodies creepy and minor key, which leads right into "Alter Fate" all swirling synths and stuttery almost IDM sounding beats, the whole thing blurry and smeary, before slipping back into the dirgey synthy creep of the previous track, a sort of second movement, laced with more strange disembodied high end melodies over the tumbling drum fills and more gruff whispery vox, finally culminating in "The Wind", which begins with appropriately enough, swirling wind, distorted acoustic guitar, a gauzy patina of lo-fi buzz, before finally launching into a tense stretch of buzzing swirling electronic weirdness, the various chunks of low end fuzz and warped melodies, adding some serious pathos, growing ever more distorted and finally finishing in a blaze of super distorted programmed beats, chaotic and noisy and psychedelic, before winding down with more acoustic guitar.
Absolutely baffling and disturbing brilliantly, total genius outsider mystery music, this is the sort of thing groups like Gary War and Ariel Pink are striving for, but just can't ever quite reach. Fantastically idiosyncratic, highly personal, and completely warped and cracked and demented and literally unlike anything you've heard. It's not hard to imagine this finding its way onto one of those incredible strange music comps or one of those Songs In The Key Of Z collection, it's certainly divisive, it's definitely too much for some folks, so be warned, this is strange strange stuff. But folks around here have become a bit obsessed, and can't seem to get enough. Which is good, cuz there are at least THREE other cd-r's. If you decide you need those too, just ask...
Croce is the newest collection of distorted, dark psychedelic, industrial cabaret from this Italian boy/girl duo, who, after a series of ever darkening releases, have arrived at this, a concept record about the cross, and yeah, it's THAT cross (Croce in Italian), with one side of the record sonically representing the suffering and sacrifice, the flipside reflecting what comes after, the end of said suffering, resurrection, or perhaps oblivion.
The sounds are shadowy, the atmospheres muddy and murky, from which spring unexpected blurts of impossibly catchy noise pop, approaching at times something almost operatic, like some twisted psychedelic musical detailing the trials and tribulation of the crucifixion, with male and female vox intertwined over distorted blasts of guitar crunch, anchored by stuttering homebuilt percussion, a sound both textural and nuanced, but also noisy and chaotic, that chaos carefully sculpted into jagged shards of fragmented pop, and that pop oven into a dramatic, almost theatrical songsuite.
At points, the songs can seem to gradually lose cohesion, the lumbering and loping angular grooves (d)evolving into wild psychedelic squalls, or alternately stripped down to just the skeletal essence of the song, while the duo proceed to add layer upon layer, rhythm upon rhythm, working their way up to another blast of glorious cacophony. That percussion is a driving force throughout, whether it's swirling billows or rubberband twang and big booted thump, or sinewy pulses, wound up into tense, and intense low slung swaggers, all beneath cascades of wild junkyard crumble and soaring devotional vox, sung/spoken intonations over bell-like clang and the almost tuned sounding metallic sproings of reverberating springs.
The first side finishes up with "In Solitude", an appropriately dour slab of murky miserablism that sounds like a slow sonic death, the hazy, nocturnal sound gradually fading, retreating further into the shadows, loping, lumbering creeps, soft chordal swirls beneath strange metallic rhythms, too slow to be motorik, but a similarly hypnotic vibe, albeit more sort of druggy and slo-mo, a haunting moody dirge that dissolves into that ineffable space that exists between the record's second side, the netherworld, the afterlife, Purgatory even, an endless expanse of nothingness, from which few return. But Father Murphy erupt from this Stygian blackness, with the second half of Croce, meant to be the light, to the A side's dark, and yet the opener is still somehow strangely doomy, a field of metallic shimmer, and more junkyard percussion, strung together into a spare framework, over which dramatic male vocals soar, the female vocals responding like some demonic Greek chorus, but true to the theme, the vibe grows strangely warm, an otherworldly glow, nearly sundappled in places, you can almost hear the rays of light breaking through the grey cloud filled skies.
But really, these two have a strange idea of 'light', with "All The People Yelling Fire" seemingly still cloaked in shadow, a lumbering cacophony of rhythmic crashes and metallic pounds, not to mention some elephant like bleats, moaning horns suspended in a field of distant drones, very ominous and sinister, but before you know it, it's right back to the clatter and clang, leading directly into the penultimate "We Walk By Faith", a harrowing hymn, both droney and almost liturgical, with throat singing like vocalizations, wound around long, softly undulating tones, modern minimalism by way of some ancient ritual, the music evoking flickering firelight, dancing shadows, primitive worship to the cosmos, driven by muted thumps and buried beats, another one of those rickety rhythms surfacing from beneath the murk, a swampy, apocalyptic psychedelia, melted down into a viscous sonic crawl.
The finale, "They Won't Hurt You", is all majestic pipe organ, a stirring and stately court music, lush and lovely and epic, the sound of rebirth, redemptive and ultimately restorative, a return from the beyond, arisen from the grave, ascended into the heavens, the sounds drifting upwards, beyond the galaxy, the universe, into the unknowable infinity.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
More so than Aphex Twin's score to a Bank of America commercial or Oval's contribution to one for Calvin Klein, Faust's appearance on a commercial for Nike has clearly been the oddest commodification of experimental music. Fortunately, the "success" of the venture has not gone to Faust's collective head... Their highly-anticipated new album Ravvivando succeeds where previous '90s ventures You Know Faust and Rien (which could be argued was more of a Jim O'Rourke album) perhaps did not. On this album, the hypnosis induced by the constant churning of percussive blasts and springy basslines is complemented by washed out drones dissolving to reveal their construction from swells of organ and guitar.
It should be noted that the resurrection of Faust about five years ago did bring a drastic change to their Krautrock mutations of pop, noise, carnival music, jazz, and general experimentation which characterized their seminal '70s records such as Faust IV or So Far. One cannot expect that a musical hibernation of 20 years would not affect the artistic process. But rather than making contextual comparisons to Faust's work from the '70s, we proclaim that Ravvivando is their best record of the '90s. So there. The new Faust is a great band, on their own merits.
Aside from a couple of respectable collaborations and some soundtrack work, Christian Fennesz hasn't released a proper solo album since the album Black Sea, which came out on Touch WAY back in 2008. On Becs, Fennesz returns to the label that introduced him to the world, in Editions Mego; and he pretty much continues along the same path that he set for himself on that last album he recorded for them, the much lauded Endless Summer from 2001. That was a fracturous record of polygonal melodies bathed in a candy-crush fuzz of pixelated, shoegazing blur, always alluding to the sunkissed glow of the California Dream, whatever that may be. Becs may not have the advantage of following up one hell of a single by Fennesz (in the very late '90s, he covered The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, the latter of which was originally commissioned for tUMULt's Painted Black anthology!), whereby he contextualized his sonic dislocation within the lineage of rock'n'roll and all of its mythologies of dissent, rebellion, sex, and whatnot. Yeah, it's a tough act to follow; but Becs is a wildly adventurous album with a substantial parity when it comes to the risk/reward equation. A heavily flanged, blindingly bright corona of digital treatments surrounds the Fennesz' guitar sound at the album's introduction, with all of the soft melodies buried in twinkling electronics and mirrored refractions. Fennesz follows this with a detuned alarm-call pulse that forms an insistently crawling rhythmic structure blasted with a malleable distortion, which in turn he counterpoints with a gorgeous, cathedral drone of sustained harmonics. An incremental retinal burn of guitar distortion shapes the brilliant track "Liminality" built upon a beautifully bittersweet, slowcore guitar chord whose roots lie in Slint, Codeine, or maybe even the Durutti Column. Sparkling ambient passages beget discordant piano treatments akin to a computer-cracked Angelo Badalamenti which in turn beget more blossoming noise. Fucking brilliant.
