All it took was about 30 seconds, and we knew this was probably gonna become out favorite new electronica record, heck, maybe just our favorite new record period. The best way we can think to describe Gold Panda is like a more lo-fi DIY version of The Field, if that makes any sense. Where The Field take samples, and loops and layers them, rendering them almost unrecognizable, and creating lush house-y soundscapes, Gold Panda does something quite similar, but without the goal of disguising the source or the samples, a vocal loop is chopped up and processed and woven into a stuttering melody, over a simple looped beat, and warm whirling melodies, that looped sample makes the whole thing sound so playful, and at least on the opener, "You", whose sample is the word 'you' chopped and looped, that melody ends up sounding strangely Indian, like some electro raga, although over the course of the track, the tone and timbre and pitch changes, so it slips from Oval like shimmer, to skittery faux Indian raga, to loping super melodic playful trip hop.
And the whole record is like that, the construction of the tracks is obvious, the glitch and static and crackle and pop of the source records, are all part of the sound, the samples assembled to create rhythms, to fashion melodies, draped over whirring skeletal beats, woven into Philip Jeck like cracklescapes, gamelan like melodies are layered into a lush tangle of melodies and placed atop a sea of hiss and a spare stripped down beat, soft melodic swells are truncated and left to rise and fall, creating a woozy rhythm, the whole thing wrapped in playful chimes and clipped minimal beats, every track is playful and lovely and dreamy in its own way, not so dependent on the beat, as much as the arrangement of samples, which is inevitably perfect, and conjures up the perfect mood and atmosphere.
There are some definitely oddballs, the two minutes of folky acoustic guitar on "Parents", that manages to be quite pretty and sweet on its own, and fit with the rest of the more sample heavy tracks pretty perfectly, there's also the buzzy sitar laced "India Lately", which does chop up Indian ragas, sitars and tablas, and weaves those parts into a gorgeously shoegazy stretch of pop ambience, and finally, the record finishes off by revisiting "You", this time with strings and chimes, and a less manic arrangement, instead opting for something much more subdued and dreamlike.
So great! All this amazing electronica coming out lately, we can't get enough, but this one just might take the cake!
We first heard Golden Void, via their debut single on local label Valley King, and were immediately blown away, so much so that we could pretty much only muster up a bunch of wild gushing to explain how much we loved it. It went like this:
"Golden Void's sound is SO kick ass and SO hits the spot, totally heavy, hooky, groovy stoner rock, big riffs, lots of organ, soaring vocals, and yeah, of course some seriously shredding leads, totally catchy, a modern take on some mix of all your teenage faves, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Skynrd, just totally rocking, laced with plenty of psychedelic swirl, and a distinctly laid back classic rock vibe. Also reminds us a LOT of aQ stoner rock faces Freedom Hawk, the A side of this here single, might be THEE rocking jam of the summer. And we're thinking that when these guys come out with a full length, we might just have us a new favorite record..."
Well, we pretty much called it, cuz these guys DO have a new record, and it most absolutely IS our new favorite, in fact, we got a copy a while back, even though it only just came out, and it has to be one of THEE most played records in the store, by pretty much everyone here, and almost every time we played it, customers in the store had to find out what it was, and more often than not, ordered themselves a copy.
So yeah, Golden Void is the new band from Earthless' Isaiah Mitchell, along with Camilla Saufley-Mitchell (his wife?) from Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, as well as few other locals, and they have come up with easily the best retro rock, heavy psych record of the year. In addition to the above mentioned outfits, we hear plenty of Captain Beyond, Ozzy era Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, even Witchcraft, the sound is heavy and hooky, the songs good enough to actually BE classic rock tunes, not just sounding like them, had this record come out in 1976, we'd be hearing this shit on classic rock radio non stop. Sun baked and blown out, more mellow than metallic, very California-esque in its vibe, a totally classic, vintage seventies sound, right down to the recording, and again, the songs. We can't tell you how many bands have the sound nailed but not the songs, but every track here is perfect, and impossibly catchy, the sort of songs you'll have stuck in your head forEVER.
"Art Of Invading" starts things off, organ driven proto metal psychedelic radness, wild drumming, the vocals bathed in reverb, the sound stone-y and heavy, super dynamic, and it is Mitchell's band after all, so plenty of super melodic, wildly shredding leads. "Virtue" cranks things up a notch, and weirdly reminds us of the sort of sound that aQ faves Malachai were conjuring up in the studio, super heavy, riffy, laid back vox, and hooks galore, and the drumming, holy shit, crazy busy, but perfect for the song, which leads directly into "Jetsun Dolma", the slow groover of the record, the psychedelic ballad, that has a bit of an Allman Brothers vibe, laced with woozy swirls of washed out organ, and killer wah guitar.
It's at this point that the record gets REALLY good. Even better than the first half. "Badlands" might be our most played song on the record, with its churning organ heavy groove, crazy catchy chorus, and killer proggy breakdown midsong. Then come the two tracks from the Valley King single, which along with "Badlands", are absolutely the perfect retro psych heavy rock one-two-three punch. "Shady Grove" is the band at their poppiest, and sort of Southern rockiest, such a goddamn great song, and the main melody, especially when Mitchell solos off of it, untouchable. And then there's "The Curve", which might be even poppier, but is also heavier, some of us hear Kiss like crazy, but a smarter, heavier, more psychedelic version of Kiss, more killer guitar harmonies, and probably the catchiest leads on the whole record. There's also the bluesy breakdown midsong, which is so seventies, Mitchell lacing it with all sorts of subtle guitar shreddery, and then the slow build back to the main riff, pretty much impossible to resist headbanging or air guitaring or BOTH.
Finally, the record finishes off with "Atlantis", which might be the most psychedelic of the bunch, with its slithery main melody, and washed out vocals, the whole thing hazy and tripped out, but still heavy and groovy, slipping from the dense drum heavy verses, to the soaring swoonsome chorus, the two separated by a super cool angular guitar break. The second half of the track adds extra guitar shred, and a bit of sonic heft, before the music drops out, leaving just the vocals to fade out in a druggy haze.
Holy shit. Even after maybe a hundred listens, we're still not tired of this. Anyone into any of the above mentioned outfits, as well as obviously Earthless, Assemble Head, Comets On Fire, etc. will definitely lose their shit over these guys, as will most folks into heavy, hooky retro rock heavy psych radness, which we're guessing is probably a whole lot of YOU.
Holy shit. GORE! Easily one of our favorite heavy bands EVER. We raved about the separate 2lp reissues last list, but we figured we'd wait for the cds to show up before bestowing Record Of The Week status upon them. Now combined as one massive double disc document collecting the first two albums and then some from this Dutch instru-metal group, who forged an incredible minimal metallic legacy that would go on to influence loads of our favorite bands. In fact, aQ would quite possibly be a whole different kind of store if it wasn't for Gore...
This is the sort of review that is so intimidating. Records we have loved for years and years, listened to hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, and then to finally have to put into words what it is that makes these so good, so special, whatever it is that makes these two of our favorite records EVER!!!! How much do we love these records? Well, whenever we would find one used, we would buy it just to give it to someone who needed to hear it, so much so that Andee at one point was even talking to the band about a comprehensive career spanning box set. But why you ask? Difficult to explain, hearing them is enough, even decades after they were originally released, folks who have never heard Gore, are usually sold after ONE song. Sometimes it doesn't even take that long. Just listen to "Mean Man's Dream" below, we'll wait....
See what we mean? So heavy, repetitive, mesmerizing, hypnotic, angular and abrasive, but impossibly catchy, groovy even. Listen to the other tracks, you won't be able to stop, you'll need to hear them all.
Gore fanatics will need these no matter what, and most heavy music fans have probably at least heard OF Gore, if not heard them once or twice, so they too might also want to pick these up. But we might as well start with who the heck this Gore band is anyway, and why should we care...
Gore were a Dutch instrumental power trio trafficking in ultra minimal heaviness, like an even more minimal Melvins, but sans vocals, their songs made up of one, maybe two riffs, pounded out over and over, a bit like a more metal, proto-Circle.
Hart Gore and Mean Man's Dream are the first two Gore records, but play like part one and part two of a single song cycle. Crushing, pummeling, heavy as hell, repetitive, motorik, but weirdly melodic and impossibly catchy, we can't stress enough how massive and seminal these records were and are. Gore created and mastered a sound that would go on to influence countless heavy bands, and yet, somehow, these two records decades after their initial release, still sound YEARS ahead of their time, masterpieces of heavy rock, of minimal metal, of proto-math metal, of hypno rock, this, as they say is THE SHIT.
For now, all we can say, is if you are at all into heavy music, these records are about as essential as it gets, your life will be changed, the way you look at music, what you consider heavy, how you hear other heavy bands, all of that will change, for the better. Trust us.
For Gore fanatics, like us, these are ESSENTIAL, the new designs are gorgeous, incorporating the timeless original album covers with new drawings and a beautiful super stylized layout. The cd includes a big booklet, packed with liner notes, the story of Gore, tons of rare photos, and most importantly, both discs come with a whole mess of live tracks from the same era! Unreleased and unheard until now!
BUY THIS NOW! YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY. THIS COULD BE YOUR NEW FAVORITE BAND! AND C'MON SOUTHERN LORD! KEEP THE GORE REISSUES COMING. WREDE! LIFELONG DEADLINE! MEST! SLOW DEATH! WE WANT, NAY -NEED- THEM ALL!!!!!!
We've been on a bit of a soundtrack kick lately here at aQ, getting a lot of cool ones in over the past little while. We just came across this disc and figured we should give it a shot, even though we hadn't seen the movie and weren't that familiar with the composer - but it's from an early '70s Italian "giallo" style thriller after all, and that's pretty compelling piece of cover art, ain't it? (Grasping hands, witchy woman, supine topless beauty; possibly promising a cinematic / soundtrack experience equally creepy and occult and sexy). As it turns out, this soundtrack turned out to be even better than we had hoped!! Much of the music here is soooooo beautifully sinister and slinky, exotic and noirishly jazzy - but that's not all, what we weren't expecting was how much fuzzed out psych-rock guitar action was going to be on here, too. WOW. Amidst the suitably spooky, sometimes quite lovely atmospheric interludes that primarily comprise the soundtrack, there's sudden heavy parts that sound not unlike the intro to a Black Sabbath song!! Maybe Tony Iommi happened to be visiting ancestral homeland and got hired to do these sessions while he was there - ok, unlikely, but that's almost what it sounds like. And certainly it's not impossible that the same guys who made that Blue Phantom library record could have been involved with this... definitely the occasional isolated slice of Sabbathy fuzzy doom riffage should attract any adventurous proto-metal fiends also into Italian library music, Goblin, & stuff like that too.
Mostly, this consists of dark, suspenseful, instrumental grooves, tracks variously arranged for ticking, agitated percussion, zinging strings, eerie woodwinds, springy Jew's harp, bongo drums, smokey jazz trumpet, wordless haunting female vocals, wavery electric organ, electronic effects... These incidental tracks are sinister, but romantic. Like the theme song for a lover you don't trust to not kill you when she's done with you, but you're still gonna take that chance.
And then, oh yeah, there's that aforementioned fuzz guitar, putting this over the top for us. Sometimes just a stab of it here or there, a single chord ringing out, cranking up the intensity level of this spinetingling music. Or, a couple times, leading into a full-on heavy psychrock jam. Weird how this album at moments reminds us of Black Sabbath or Randy Holden's Population II - and also, at other times, when that trumpet gets a-swinging, of Herb Alpert!
Now it seems lots of times when we list a soundtrack, we mention that we haven't actually seen the movie - in part 'cause yes we haven't seen the movie and thus can't say a lot about it, but also to indicate that you don't HAVE to have seen a movie in order to enjoy a soundtrack - but you all get that already, right? Of course. So for this review, we decided that we'd make an effort to try and watch La Morte Scende Leggera (aka Death Comes Lightly), the soundtrack made us curious after all... but alas we didn't manage to track it down in time. So once again, this is an example of how you can absolutely LOVE a soundtrack without any idea what the movie was all about - although the copious liner notes in the cd booklet, illustrated with stills from the film, do give us an idea - directed by Leopoldo Savona and released in 1972, it was apparently a movie with a confusing plot somehow involving drug smuggling, political corruption, quasi-supernatural elements, a series of mysterious murders, and erotic interludes - part psychological thriller, part ghost story, part softcore porn. The liner notes don't exactly give it two thumbs up, but it sounds kinda cool to us. And the appropriately psychedelic soundtrack for sure is cool.
From reading the liner notes, we also got some notion of how exactly it ended up sounding the way it does. Turns out track one, the movie's theme song, "Sunday In Neon Light", was actually not specifically written for the soundtrack. It had originally appeared on an obscure 1972 album (which now we'd love to find) called Peace On You by the Mak Sigis Porter Ensemble, lead by an expatriate singer/musician from Ghana. Part aching ballad, part heavy psych jam, "Sunday In Neon Light" has a bit of the vibe of some of the Afro-fuzz garage records we've had reissues of lately, with crunching guitar chords and vocals that remind us of Jimi Hendrix or Malcolm Mooney from early Can (hearing it was the first thing that clued us in that this wasn't the usual giallo soundtrack). Then, 'cause they'd decided to use this song in the movie, composer Lallo Gori wrote the rest of the score around it, his orchestrations in a similar psychedelic style using fuzz rock guitar, etc. And, in our opinion, the results are up there with some of our favorite soundtracks like Klute, Psychomania, and Possession - the latter of which we made a Record Of The Week not long ago, so we're gonna do the same for La Morte Scende Leggera too. Also note, it's a limited edition release, our supplier apparently having some of the last copies around, and at a bargain price since it's normally an expensive import.
Not many artists can lay claim to their very own musical genre, but Hollywood, Florida's The Goslings are among the elite few who most definitely can. On first listen their sound seems to fit pretty comfortably amongst the current crop of distorted deconstructed decaying blissed out dreamy dirge rock that seems to be all the rave (Nadja, Alcest, Hjarnidaudi, Procer Veneficus, etc.), after all they often get described as half SUNNO))) and half My Bloody Valentine, but that's really only half (again) true. And while their sound does share some of the elements of those other bands, The Goslings are their own perfect, synergetic sonic force, an organic, original soundworld that has absorbed and re-synthesized those influences entirely. In other words, on this latest record, they somehow manage to sound way, way heavier and much, much more lush, transforming any vestiges of other bands' sounds into something distinctly theirs. Formerly just a husband and wife duo, Max and Leslie Soren, Occasion finds the couple joined by two apparently full-time members which does nothing but help make their sound, thicker, and more dense, more intense, more distorted, and impossibly, more beautiful. It's not a huge departure from the sound of their previous outings, but that's not really a bad thing. Occasion just serves to demonstrate that their sound is now even more of a particularly refined and menacing chunk of skull crushingly gorgeous sound.
Each of The Goslings' records has been self-recorded straight onto tape in their $15 an hour rehearsal space. Before it was a 4-track, now it's a reel-to-reel 8-track tape, with any additional tracks being added at a friend's house in Pro Tools -- a slight upgrade, but again, one that merely serves to push their sound even further into some hellish sonic realm. Mastered by James Plotkin, their commitment to relatively lo-fi, analog recording a significant part of why each and every track is so totally ear-stabbingly, skull-fuckingly shit heavy. But beneath the obvious doom veneer, the crushing sludge, the washed out hiss and buzz, there are buried some lovely melodies and more of the Goslings' near perfect pop songs. Fear not though, it's not like Nadja or Jesu, where there is potentially enough of said pop to turn-off those more dedicated to the seriously heavy and/or utterly grim. Regardless of the surprising melodic structures lay hidden beneath the blown out bluster, or the prettiness of Leslie's vocals drifting ethereally throughout, the music, the sound, the Goslings' sheer power continually threatens to overwhelm, a bludgeoning slab of sonic destruction that's systematically destroying your entire life, note by note. Then out of nowhere, there's a weird little bluegrass number, a brief respite before the band lurch back into motion, unleashing another avalanche of village crushing, ultradistorted, stumbling, downtuned beautiful brutality.
A higher recommendation would be difficult to give. Essential!
It maybe took a little while, but folks around here finally started digging the Grails, A LOT. After their last record, their second release on Neurot, the band went through some personnel shifts, which often trigger the end of a band, but in this case, pushed the band in new directions and resulted in some of their best music to date. That Neurot record was cool, but at the time we had sort of reached our post rock, quiet-loud-quiet saturation point. It wasn't that the Grails weren't a great band, it was because we had raised our bar on moody epic post rock. It was no longer enough to just drift along post-rockily before exploding into epic metallic bombast and drifting back again. As pleasant as that is to listen to, there was SO MUCH of that going around, we just needed something more. Soon after the band released an ep of international psych covers and that was the beginning of a glorious new direction. We knew whatever was gonna come next would be a killer, and thankfully, The Black Tar Prophecies, are indeed just that.
The whole three volumes thing was a bit confusing, and still is. We never actually carried volume one, a super limited split 12" with the Red Sparowes, which went out of print before we could get any, we sold tons of volume two, a limited colored vinyl lp on Aurora Borealis, and as far as we can tell, volume three exists only as the two unreleased tracks on this here cd. Regardless, this is some, dark and amazing, absolutely beautiful music. With the Black Tar Prophecies, the Grails finally shrugged off their influences and forged their own sound, never hesitating to experiment, explore, or fuck around with songs and sound. These musical 'Prophecies just might just be the weirdest, most subtle, least rock set of songs they've ever produced. We were definitely always fans, but when we heard that psych covers ep, on which they covered psychedelic songs from around the world, including AQ faves Flower Travellin Band, well, we were suddenly WAY more than fans. They had us as Flower Travellin Band. Anyway, Black Tar Prophecies takes their obsession with psych rock, and their deft mastery of all things post rock, and turns them inward, into a darker, doomier, moodier place. And we love it. Super gloomy rhythmscapes, jazzy piano, totally dubbed out drums, everything bathed in smoky atmospheric swirl. Reminds us a little of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore at times. Songs that wander down dark alleys, streetlights barely illuminating the murky streets, sonic ghost towns, haunting cinematic postrockscapes, like a more rock DJ Shadow, all low slung bass and shuffling rhythms, very smoky and dreamlike. Elsewhere, dreamy psychedelic guitarscapes, strummed acoustic guitars, beneath fuzzed out moody psych leads, really seventies sounding, like a more abstract post rock Hendrix / Santana thing. But the doom inclined among you will find much to love too, here and there, thick slabs of glacial that will have dronedirgedoom nerds frothing at the mouth, as if to prove they can throw down with the big boys (Boris, Corrupted, Isis, Pelican, Moss, etc...) the band unleash massive downtuned dirges, thick washes of slow sludge guitars woven into tarpit riffs of gargantuan proportion, distortion so blown out it crumbles like dirt clods stuffed in your ears, the recording strangely lo-fi, giving the proceedings a dreary droney, Hawkwind meets Gore sort of dirgedoom vibe. Epic and amazing.
This cd collects both the previously released 12"s and adds two exclusive and previously unreleased tracks!
Album number two finds Modesto's
Grandaddy stretching out and sprawling on the porch, sipping lemonade and lazily strumming a guitar, and absentmindedly twiddling knobs on an old synthesizer.
Grandaddy have taken an unexpected turn, almost entirely forgoing the 'rock' in favor of lazy hazy menadering pop scapes sprinkled with all sorts of electronic tweet and beep and buzz.
Taking plenty of cues from Radiohead (who Allan insists they are trying to sound like) and the Beta Band, as well as the ubiquitous Pavement (having always been cursed with the 'Pavement clone' tag), Grandaddy have crafted an exceptionally lush and catchy pop record. Fusing elements of Elephant 6's sixties psych, the Flaming Lips' surrealist pop, and Sparklehorse's whispery twang into a totally catchy and pretty original indie pop record.
All it takes is about 30 seconds of the opening track, the awesomely titled "Temple Lurker", on this debut full length from Chicago psych rockers The Great Society Mind Destroyers, to realize these guys are serious psych freeks and are here to drag us into a drugged out sonic stupor of unparalleled proportions. Their initial squall of White Heaven like freak-out had us expecting a nonstop barrage of wild shred and drum chaos, but instead, the band settle into something much more trancey and hypnotic, thick undulating basslines, wah wah guitars, and dense busy drumming, all blurred into a thick cloud of propulsive psychedelic mesmer, the sort of motorik spaced out psych that should have fans of Wooden Shjips, Comets On Fire, and the like losing their shit. And while TGSMD share much with those groups, their sound is also much more poppy, definitely reminding us of Bardo Pond too in that sort hazy washed out dreaminess, but the band do have some freak-out in them, after lulling you into a dreamy drugged out state, they'll blast you with another blown out burst of psych-noise chaos, only to slip right back into the groove. And it's only the first track!
"Divinorum" offers up more of the same, but this time more rocking, reminding us of Loop, or a heavier Spacemen 3, the band locked tight, the drums a force to be reckoned with, somehow as psychedelic as the guitars, the groop getting lost in endless jams, we're talking White Hills, Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, Burnt Hills, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound, 3 Leafs, The Heads, in a perfect world, these guys would be just as well know, as it is we can only imagine it's just a matter of time.
"Samsara Drag" is the shortest track here, and also maybe the poppiest, but even this brief blast of popsyke displays much of what makes these guys so good, soaring swirling guitars, shuffling propulsive drumming, those hazy dreamlike vox, the only difference is, the song never explodes into a heart of the sun psychedelic freak-out, but then, that's what the rest of the record is for. "Equation Of Time" is another short(ish) one, at nearly six minutes, and the band meld a woozy almost droney dirge, and a delicate washed out intro, to wicked gouts of wild distorted psych, evolving into a fierce blown out jam, that sounds like it could have gone on forever. "Now Riot!" finds the band doing what they do best, seemingly continuing on from the album opener, before slipping into "Mystic Warriors", which sounds remarkably like aQ faves Cave, which makes sense, as there is definitely a Cave / TGSMD connection, but where Cave take their sound, lock it in, and get lost in a sort of krautbliss, these guys add hazy vocals, wrap everything in dense wah guitar, let the sounds slowly ooze and spread, everything seeming the bleed and blur, the drums the main constant, pounding and anchoring and keeping everything else from just floating away.
And then finally, there's the nearly 10 minute closer "Higher Bodies", which starts out a slow abstract brooder, then gradually evolves into a field of distorted guitar skree, before finally blossoming into a gorgeous expanse of dreamy, gauzy psych pop, woozy and laid back, sun dappled and drug drenched, and while this might be THE JAM, drawn out and droney, the sort of set ender that depending on the crowd could extend into the wee hours, but the band gets to stretch out big time, the effects are everywhere, the vocals loose and dreamily chaotic, the song splintering midway through, into what sounds like a symphony of malfunctioning tape players, but the band plays on, that loping psychedelic groove, swaddled in a tripped out cloud of shimmer and glitch and that gloriously twisted tape manipulation, heady and hypnotic, and again, the sort of sound you never want to end.
Super sweet packaging, nice full color psychedelic matte jackets, with a printed lyric sheet / poster inside, and if you're lucky, mixed in with the black wax are a few copies on tripped out gold and red splatter wax! Don't ask for colored vinyl, it's random, just cross your fingers (or don't worry about it since black wax sounds better anyway!!)...
We've never seen this movie but if it's anything like the soundtrack, boy do we want to see it. It must be INSANE. And very, very groovy. 'Cause this is one trippy record, guitarist/composer Billy Green's psychedelic soundtrack to the 1974 biker flick Stone, today a cult classic (we hear it's out now on dvd, gotta find it!). It's from Australia, one of the early precursors to Mad Max in the so-called "Ozpolitation" genre (about which there's been a recent documentary that we also have to see!), doubtless full of violence, stunts, bikes, and girls.
We don't know much about the plot except that it involves the badass Gravediggers motorcycle gang (who, while as shaggy and dirty as any Hell's Angels, ride fancy new Japanese pocket rockets instead of the Harleys you might expect), characters with names like Dr. Death, Stone, Toad, Undertaker, Captain Midnight, most of whom get their own distinctive cues on the soundtrack. Beyond that, the liner notes mention acid trips and something about a political assassination, and well if you know what happens don't tell us 'cause we don't want to spoil anything for when/if we do see the film, we'll just enjoy the music for now!
Track one, the six minute, 35 second long "Eco Blue/Toadstrip" really dumps listeners in at the deep end, being a dark and unsettling musique concrete composition consisting of noisy electronic Moog synth bbrrzapp, and didgeridoo drone (ordinarily we detest the didge, but this IS an Australian movie), like a drug fuelled jam between aliens and aborigines. If you survive that (rather than report to the tent for those who ate the bad acid), the next track shifts mood considerably, being a funky freaky instrumental called "Race", full of wah-wah guitar and more electronic embellishments. Yep, just two tracks in and it's already totally awesome! As the disc continues, you'll get to hear all sorts of other strange and groovy sounds, including short interludes of sound effects and chanting ("Pigs"), lush, melancholic orchestration ("Cosmic Funeral"), bluegrass pickin' ("Septic"), classical strings and splashing cymbals ("Amanda"), Hendrix-y fuzzed fusion ("Stone"), mellow hippie blues-bliss ("Smoke"), heavy prog plus free jazz freakout ("Gravediggers"), and loads more that's either super groovy or super wacked, or both. Sometimes it sounds like a 'proper' film soundtrack, with the usual sort of suspenseful or sentimental cinematic stylings, but mostly it's all about sleazy, krautrocky chaos!
It's mostly instrumental, except for the bonus tracks, one which consists of dialogue from the film ("Hip's Rap"), one being a kinda cheesy soul-fuzz number ("Cosmic Flash"), and also two portentous versions of "Do Not Go Gentle (Rage)", a song based on the Dylan Thomas poem, set to music by Billy Green - we prefer the second one, sung by Jeannie Lewis, which was probably very important to the emotional impact of some crucial scene in the movie but here just seems awesomely over the top and incongruous.
The final bonus track is the audio from the original theatrical trailer for the movie, which starts off with someone screaming "SATAN!!!!!" followed by a dead pan voiceover intoning "Stone is a trip", and reciting further selling points, backed by a collage of sound effects and funky hard rock vamping, all snippets from the soundtrack. Again, it makes us want to see it... except, in a way, maybe we're realizing it's better to have the film exist (for us) only in our imaginations, 'cause the soundtrack is so far out it seems likely that the actual film couldn't possibly live up to it, could it? In any event, the soundtrack certainly stands by itself as a sizzlingly lysergic slice of '70s rock/electronic weirdness, part Bobby Beausoleil, part Amon Duul, a little bit Sly Stone, a little bit Sir Lord Baltimore... and altogether Stone(d).
Now, if you search on such keywords as "motorcycle gang", "fuzz", and "soundtrack" on our website, besides this you'll find our rave review of another Satanic motorcycle gang movie soundtrack that we ALSO made a Record Of The Week once upon a time, that'd be the music by John Cameron and session band Frog from the 1972 zombie biker flick Psychomania, reissued by Trunk some years back, and now sadly out of print again. Billy Green's Stone soundtrack is obviously the only thing that comes close. You could definitely file 'em together, Stone being a worthy successor (with a song called "Toad" instead of one called "The Frog"). It'd be a great double feature.
Also, remember that unusual series of Aussie psychedelic sixties/seventies surf movie soundtracks from the Japanese label EM, we listed a while back? The ones by Farm, Peter Martin & Finch, Tamam Shud, etc.? Though this is inspired by wheels rather than waves, and ain't so sunshiney, still fits in with the best of those.
As usual with B-Music / Finders Keepers productions, this is a labor of love, and the cd booklet reflects that, its many pages stuffed full of full-color film stills and poster artwork, along with a lengthy and knowledgeable essay by DJ Andy Votel. Before delving into the story of Stone, Votel talks a bit about the history of '60s / '70s B-movie biker cinema, citing the aforementioned Psychomania as an important forerunner to this film and its soundtrack.
Like we said, we've never seen Stone, though we want to. However, we've been fans of this soundtrack for some time. There was a previous, Australia-only compact disc reissue of this back in 1999, on the occasion of the film's 25th anniversary (which was celebrated with a 35,000 strong biker rally!). We were never really able to get any to stock though, so it's awesome to have this now, and it's been further expanded with additional bonus tracks, as well as nicely packaged, including a slipcover. When we heard it was coming out again, we immediately thought, Record Of The Week. Finally folks everywhere will get a chance to hear this, and ride with Stone and the Gravediggers!
It's weird to think about the world before the Internet. Little pockets of bands in out of the way places, producing wild and wonderful music, that outside of a few tape traders and cool record stores just didn't get heard. In some ways the advent of immediate world wide communication has been a wellspring of amazing music, since now, some kid who records in his bedroom in Finland, can now be heard by anyone in the world. Anywhere. Any time. The downside is of course the proliferation of bands whose material maybe didn't need worldwide exposure, music that was just fine where it was, in the bedroom or the basement. Thankfully this particular release is a definite example of the former. Australia has produced some killer rock over the years, from AC/DC to Radio Birdman to Lubricated Goat (one of Allan and Andee's favorites) to the Dirty Three to more obscure noiserock bands like Budd or the Dumb And The Ugly or Primitive Calculators. A few lists back we reviewed an awesome disc by the band Whitehorse, whose epic sludge-y, drone-y dirge definitely hit the Sunn 0))) / Earth / Corrupted / Khanate spot. The guys in Whitehorse suggested we check out another Aussie outift (also from Melbourne) a two guys and a gal trio called the Grey Daturas, who only a few weeks later just showed up in our store with a box full of cds, about to embark on their first US tour (some of the dates with Sunn 0))), see elsewhere on this list for tour dates). And while the Daturas are indeed heavy and droney, their sound is less slow motion sludge and more blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. The Daturas' sound is all over the map, from churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah. When they kick out the jams, it's fierce and mesmerizing, pounding and relentless, with simple propulsive percussion and spaced out swirl. Often stretching out into head nodding Krautrock jams, spacious and hypnotic. When the storms calm and the band drifts off and just sort of meanders, we're reminded of Codeine and other like minded practitioners of drowsy, druggy slow core. Still noisy, but mellow and intense, brooding and subtly aggressive.
The Grey Daturas are all instrumental which as you probably know we tend to dig, since there's nothing like a bad singer to ruin a perfectly good band, but there's always the risk of bands with no vocalists to be really really boring. But because a lot of the Daturas' tunes are improvised, and the band is willing to take all kinds of musical chances (they often switch instruments, sometimes perform as a duo with no drummer, etc...) it never gets boring, instead it becomes the perfect mix of droning free rock, kick ass instrumental post rock, buzzing druggy psych and even occasional blasts of full on metal. Mix in some cool song titles: "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock", "Force Is A Weapon Of The Weak", as well as some oddly political song titles (but more sort of Sixties politics): "For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale", "Night Of The Barricade: Paris 1968", a gorgeous washed out black, brown and grey cardboard sleeve, and a totally kick ass live show (they performed admirably with a handful of fill-in drummers here, even teaming up with art noise outfit the Yellow Swans for one show), and you've got one of our favorite new bands / releases. AND they're recording a new record right here in SF when they get back from tour...yay!
Full length number three from this amazing outfit, whose debut, Guitar Music From The Western Sahara, we made our Record Of The Week back in 2008, and whose second record, Treeg Salaam, we probably should have, both of those albums brimming with, as we mentioned in past reviews: "dizzying blasts of lo-fi electric guitar driven rhythmic African folk, clattery homemade percussion, jubilant vocalizing, repetitive and melodic and hypnotic, and super rocking."
This latest lp offers up a different side of the band's sound, songs that adhere to the roots of Saharoui music, the roots of Group Doueh's sound, played mostly on traditional Moorish instruments: the tinidit (a three string lute), the ardin (a kora-like harp), the tbal (a clay drum) and the kass (tea glasses), but this is Group Doueh after all so those traditional instruments are augmented by synths and GUITARS!
The opening track is sooooo gorgeous and sets the tone of the record, darkly rhythmic, lush and layered, sweet tangles of intricate melody, the arrangements emotional and propulsive and jubilant, laced with subtle drones and flurries of rapid fire notes, minimal but still so rich and dense and deep. Not all of the record is so tied to the past, after all the Group Doueh sound we know and love was born of this music, and is not really that far removed, so many of the other songs drift into more familiar territory, although the arrangements and instrumentation remain subtly closer to traditional Saharoui music, but again, since our exposure to that music has mostly been via Group Doueh records... well, you get the picture. Every song here is a fantastic celebration of sound, from sublime desert blues buzz to soaring vocal driven high life, to droned out psychedelia to super stripped down vocal/rhythm jams, and those vocals, again so incredible, so emotional and passionate, the perfect match for the music underneath which exudes the same sort of passion. The final track on side one slips back into a sound more minimal, a sprawl of hypnotic buzz and skitter, totally trancelike and hypnotic before exploding into a noisy psychedelic blowout, perfectly bookending the tracks in between.
The offers up still more fantastic desert blues folk bliss, singing strings, propulsive rhythms, vocal harmonies, some wild serious steel string wrangling guitar action of course, peppered with bits of that more minimal rhythmic traditional music, but all woven into the lush living colorful fabric of GD's gorgeous timeless sound.
As with all Sublime Frequencies vinyl releases, EXTREMELY LIMITED, this will most likely be sold out and out of print in the next week or two, pressed as always on thick vinyl and housed in a super swank, heavy full color gatefold sleeve. ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Wow! The first vinyl-only (that's right, no plans for a cd we're told) Sublime Frequencies release focuses on a single group rather than an anthology of regional folk and pop or collaged radio broadcasts. Struck by an ecstatically squealing lo-fi blast of electric guitar from a song heard on Moroccan radio, the Sub Freq's main man, Alan Bishop went on a quest for the regional origins of that particular electric sound. Canvassing numerous cassette dealers, he was only able to identify the music as Sahwari and to pinpoint the region as the Western Sahara, a disputed territory nestled on the Atlantic Coast of North Africa between Morocco and Mauritania where frequent political struggles have caused the massive displacement of the region's indigenous people. A few months later, Bishop's colleague, Hisham Mayet, armed with Bishop's recording travelled back to Morocco to continue the search, ending up in the last outpost of the Western Sahara, Daklha, where through the help of the Sahwari shopkeepers was finally led to the creator of the strange music himself, Baamar Salmou, or as he is known in Sahwari, Doueh. Born in 1964. Doueh learned guitar on a homemade instrument fashioned from pieces of wood and steel strings. In 1981, influenced by Mauritanian music as well as Spanish cassettes imported from Europe and America of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, he formed Group Doueh, fast becoming one of the definitive groups in the region, playing in festivals all over Northern Africa and even in France and Portugal. His wife Halima later joined as a vocalist and percussionist and in later incarnations, Doueh's son Jamal joined on keyboards. The tracks on this release are all taken from Doueh's personal archive except for two recordings made by Mayet, early last year. This is definitely some of the strangest and twisted ethnic music we've heard in awhile with its buzzing lo-fi circular guitar hooks and exhuberant vocalising and infectious rhythms, reminding us of aspects of Konono No1's DIY tinkering, Tartit's desert trance-jams and a bit of the Shaggs self-taught charm (not so much in sound, but how a lot of the guitar parts follow the vocals). Limited to 1000 copies, this is so awesome and highly recommended!!
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies! We're beginning to think with all this hidden music to be discovered and lost classics to be recovered, there's definitely no point in having so many new bands, we oughta just have some of them swap their gear in and just join the hunt for all this amazing music we miss out on...
But until then we've got the Sublime Frequencies fellas on the case, and this latest discovery has definitely got to bee one of the best yet. Group Inerane are spearheading the Tureg Guitar movement, inspired by the musicians who used this music as a political weapon in the Libyan refugee camps in the late eighties, early nineties. This is how the blues should sound. Groovy, intense, funky, emotional, dark, gorgeous, the guitars grinding and crunching and wailing, slithering and soaring, accompanied by chanted and sung vocals, that are perfectly woven into the lush fabric of the various guitar parts. The riffing is fluid, but also bit jagged and rough. The opening track is a killer. One of the most amazing and intense songs we've ever heard, worth the price of admission alone. Just guitar and vocals, chunky and propulsive, but also weirdly slippery and sinewy, the melody swaying back and forth from major key to minor key, an incredible hook and the riff, well, one of THE best riffs ever.
Most of the rest of the record is more a sort of African surf rock, fuzzy and twangy, with surfy guitar, soaring vocals, the whole thing wild and festive, jubilant and celebratory, but hold up, the final track on side one, "Nadan Al Kazawnin", is something else entirely, with its super distorted grimy guitars, a totally blown out in the red production, the riff looped and hypnotic, the vocals intense and heartfelt, the whole song howling and buzzing, sounding as gorgeously fucked up and raw as some experimental indie avant noise group, the guitar is indescribable, incendiary and white hot, all tangled up with the vocals, and bathed in distortion, wouldn't be out of place on some super limited cd-r... Totally amazing.
Pressed on super thick vinyl. Packaged in a heavy duty, full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and liner notes...
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 LPS!
It's always exciting to get something new on Sublime Frequencies, and in this case even MORE exciting, the third in the Guitars From Agadez series, and the second from the mighty Group Inerane, leading lights of the Tureg Guitar Revolution, and in this case, revolution might be an apt description. For with the joy of new music from Group Inerane also comes sadness, as the guitarist of the group, has been shot and killed in the ongoing rebellion battles, and Inerane mainman Bibi Ahmed barely escaped with his life from the very same battle.
Hard to imagine a group like this continuing to play music, and tour and perform, in the face of such constant dangers, but for Group Inerane, Group Bombino, and other Tureg Guitar groups, this music is their rebellion, their statement, how they speak out against the senseless loss of life and oppression, and it's that emotion and energy that seeps into every not, every chord, every vocal. Extremely powerful and intense, which is also what imbues the music of Group Inerane with an ineffable magic, that had us utterly entranced at first listen, and this record follows suit.
To replace their fallen comrade, they recruited Koudede, aka Absoulahi Maman, a legendary Tureg Guitarist in his own right, the resulting chemistry is indeed potent, the sound not much changed, but the energy and interactions of course subtly different.
For those new to Group Inerane and Tureg Guitar music in general, just check out the cover, a guitar player in a super fancy satiny robe, holding his guitar up over and behind his head as he presumably SHREDS! Inside, blurred photos of the band rocking out, and that's precisely what Group Inerane traffics in, high energy desert blues, psychedelic and cyclical, hypnotic and in its own way HEAVY.
The sound is warm and sun dappled, celebratory and effusive, plenty of twang and buzz and jangle, simple motorik drumming, intensely emotional and powerful vocals, with lots of whooping and cheering and call and response, emblematic of the hope and joy in the face of the grim realities all around them. The guitar playing is of course incredible, super buzzy and mesmerizing, cool little melodic tangles, locked in tight with vocal counterpoint, or a skittery rhythm, the sound manages to be both loose and free, but also tight and locked in, the recording here is live in a room, so the sound is raw and immediate and intimate, the vocals wreathed in natural reverb, the guitars ringing out, fleck of traditional folks music woven int the groups psychedelic hypnotic desert blues, and while every track is gorgeous, and mesmerizing, like all great guitar bands, it's when they let loose, stretching out the end of a song space rock style, and let the guitars howl and sing and get all tangled up in each other, jams that could, and should go on forever, and these guys definitely have that in them, and when it happens, it's like some glorious Tinariwen / Hawkwind collision.
As always, so so good, and like much of the music we hear from Sublime Frequencies, it's so much more than just the music, we lose sight of that sometimes, but these sounds, and songs, these are people's lives, and hopes, and dreams, and it's their way to be strong and never give in. And listening to this, beyond the sheer joy and exuberance of the music, it's humbling to share in those emotions, and in this music.
Gorgeous deluxe full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and plenty of liner notes. EXTREMELY LIMITED, and vinyl only (for now)...
Imagine Arvo Part if he was a punk rock woman from Oakland. Or imagine an ultra lo-fi Morton Feldman jamming with Matthew Bower of Skullflower, backed up by a ghostly choir. This is one of those records that is so perfectly aQuarius it sounds like it was composed and recorded just for us. And you. A perfect blend of warm textured ambience and thick corrosive drones, delicate melodies wrapped in a gorgeously crunchy gritty hissy production. The whole record is a ghostly shimmer, warm washes of otherworldly vibrations swirling in a thick morass of processed vocals, murky keyboards and guitars rendered so unguitarlike they more resemble warm wiggles of sound, like slinky's stretched as far as they will go, slightly vibrating, barely disturbing the air around them, small waves of sound like ripples in a pond building and building and piled atop one another until it's a massive, thick blanket of sound. Imagine the saddest slowest band you've ever heard playing at absolutely deafening volume, then imagine stuffing your ears full of cotton, and listening from behind a closed door, through a wall of mud and straw, warm wispy tendrils of sound creeping and crawling through the cracks, wrapping themselves in thick coils around your arms and legs, the whole room slowly filling with sound, until soon you're totally ensconced, submerged, surrounded by thick billows of slow shifting sound. Melodies become indistinct whispers stretched across minutes instead of seconds, guitars and keyboards become blissed out blurs, like floating weightless in a warm dark mysterious place made entirely of soft sound. Wow. Totally haunting and captivating.
Yay! The debut album from this Olympia trio may be one of the Kranky label's best in a long while. It's almost completely instrumental and melds gorgeous post-rock with ambient electronics and thick, satisfying drones. In the space of an hour, four lengthy tracks develop. Serene arpeggiated guitar notes give way to shimmering cymbals. Silence unfolds into emotive ambient atmospherics, which devolve into simply strummed acoustic guitar. Warbly electronics ebb and flow over the natural buzz and hum of insects on a warm summer night. Notes are held forever until they fade naturally, reminding us of Earth or SunnO))) only without the overt metal/doom element, just the heavy, weighty sombreness... and with Growing this gravity always evolves to an epic hope-imbued sort of flight toward a blissful horizon. The dynamics are carefully controlled yet effortless, and not at all "hard" to listen to. (In fact, one of the pieces uses the chord progression from "Norwegian Wood", odd choice but a welcome bit of familiarity amidst the drone.) A gorgeous, calming record. Highly recommended for fans of Windy & Carl, Earth, The Necks, Jonathan Coleclough, Sunroof, and even Boris. But even if you don't know those artists from Adam, you should give the soundclips a listen because the operative word here is "accessible" -- whether or not the genres Growing touches on are your cup of tea, they do it so well that this record may open your ears to stuff you've previously written off as too difficult. This is soooo pretty. Windy loves this. So does Allan.
We really weren't sure what to expect from the oddly monikered Guardian Alien, knowing that two of the members also played in black metal outfit Liturgy, but that this was drummer Greg Fox's project, Fox also apparently recording as GDFX, whose tripped out experimental electronic tape on Ormolycka we reviewed a while back. We were even further confused when we got a look at the record cover, a weird painting of a Rasta alien in a tracksuit, in a field full of animals and campfires, and a sky full of deer with books in their mouths and exploding suns, and of course the tracksuited alien is holding a copy of the record, whose cover depicts the same alien holding a copy of the record and so on and on and on ad infinitum. The title too, "See The World Give To A One Love Entity" has a definite Rastafari bent, so we were definitely feeling some serious trepidation as we pushed play, which at first unfurled what sounded like field recordings, birds and insects, and then footsteps, maybe the footsteps of that alien on the record cover, then a brief bit of Eastern style drone, before BLAM, the song explodes in what we can only describe as Liturgy by way of Sunroof!, which you have to hear to believe.
It's a furious raga-blast, the drums relentless a splattery chaos of wild octopoidal drumming, the guitars following suit, sounding like a transcendental Mick Barr, it's frenzied and tangled but infused with a serious does of droned out tranciness, and then as the song lets up briefly, we were expecting that whole bit to just be the intro, but then the furious raga-blast starts up again, this time even more intense and explosive, and this time with vocals, a strange chanting buried in the mix, very ritualistic and meditative, and even though the band is pounding away frantically, the whole thing manages to be totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, and after three minutes, although it feels like much more, the sound settles down into something much more stripped down and meditative, the drums no less busy, but instead, weaving a dense percussive backdrop over which woozy guitars waver and buzz, the vocals become more distinct, the melodies stretched out into gorgeously buzzy ragas, we're reminded of Astral Social Club at time the same sort of noise-raga thing, but here blissed out, the sound like some wild ritualistic drum circle wedded to some serious free jazz raga exploration, the vocals doused in effects, sounding truly alien, in keeping with the cover and the concept, the sound swirly and tripped out and super psychedelic, until eventually the drums drift off, leaving just a sky full of layered undulating guitars, a blur of shifting overtones and wild sonic squalls, before the drums come back in, a dense mathy, driving percussive groove, wreathed in swirling effects, the song shifting constantly, arranged like an epic black metal song in some ways, it's dynamicism in no way taking away from the tracks overall mesmer, and it is a single track, nearly 40 minutes of blast beat driven raga ur-drone psychedelia, dipping into ultra minimal drones and chant like vocalization here and there, chiming Tibetan bowls elsewhere, the field recordings that opened the record returning occasionally, a gorgeous droned out slow build to a final movement, a gloriously cosmic free jazz psychedelic drum heavy raga drone blowout, that builds to a sort of Boadrum like rhythmic frenzy before finally fading out in a cloud of deep bell like tones and slow fading shimmer. Wow.
Squelches and whirrs nestle in rolling hills of fuzzy dreamy drones as clicks and pops struggle for air beneath a downy blanket of suffocatingly gorgeous billowy clouds of synth wash. Sound good? It does.
It's German electronica artist Markus Guentner's debut cd for the Kompakt label. For those of you who don't know, the Kompakt label has developed an almost timeless aesthetic, not unlike the 'heroin house' sound of Chain Reaction. The Kompakt sound is an application of the often invoked but rarely successful working model of 'ambient techno'. A good example of this sort of thing that AQ-customers probably know about ('cause we sell so many of 'em) is the Wolfgang Voigt project Gas. His minimalist techno releases (in particular the Gas album "Konigsforst") are some of the few electronica albums that all Aquarians can agree on and strongly endorse.
In creating "In Moll," Markus Guentner has done more than his part to fill the void created by Voigt's unusual absence, with a disc that captures much of the feel we liked so much about the Gas records, a sort of dreamy melancholy that manages to be both wistful and hopeful, lonely and warm. Jeff thinks it has a real "change of seasons" vibe, that harkens, again, to Gas. And while the Gas comparison is surely accurate (if you haven't caught our drift already, let's state: fans of Gas should pick this up without a second thought!), Guenter does add his own flair to Voigt's signature sound though, creating a more varied and more dynamic soundscape than Voigt's pastoral hum and thump.
We made the first record from this awesomely monikered UK outfit, Silent Cenotaph, our Record Of The Week, way back in 2011, and at the time described them with some band math that looked a little like this: Shit And Shine + Butthole Surfers + Lightning Bolt. The sound was a dizzyingly psychedelic barrage of grinding, rhythmic, electronics doused in druggy tribal freakout, like a super charged This Heat, the drummers kit wired to a mad scientist array of machinery and noise making devices, turning the kit into some giant rhythmic noise machine, and enabling a duo to kick up a din that sounds like it couldn't possibly be made by just two people, and while that first record generally hewed toward a sound that was more chaotic and bombastic, this new one seems to be a bit more melodic and dare we say mellow, there's still plenty of sonic ferocity, and rhythmic bombast for sure, but it sounds more measured, more deftly assembled, maybe less 'punk', but only in the way that bands get better at what they do, and in theory, take what was great about their previous records, and add to it, creating something, even more forward reaching, and ultimately perhaps even better.
Such is the case with Mirrors Fold. We still do LOVE Silent Cenotaph, and it routinely gets play on the iPod even still, but this new one is more subtle, more textural, whereas that first one was the sort of music you wanted to rock out to, jump around and go crazy, this new one, manages to harness that feral energy into something much more focused. The opener begins all swirly and serene, with hushed ambient shimmer, chant-like vocals, be before long the drums explode, adding a churning rhythmic component, without detracting from the melodic component or the vocals, it's not really until a brief bit of hushed shimmer, a barely there ambient interlude, that the song truly launches into crazed sonic chaos, a dizzying blurry flurry of drum madness, a wild octopoidal tangle of tangled jumbled rhythms, that eventually give away to a skeletal bit of rhythmic drift, before one final push, where the drums, the vocals, and swirls of FX are all wound into a dense propulsive tribal spacey noise rock blowout. Phew!
And so it goes, the band laying down mesmerizing hypno-rhythms, while all around strange effects swoop in and out, extra percussion, echoey vox floating above, thick rumbling bass below, sitar like buzz slithers throughout, the sound and arrangement super dynamic, a bit proggy, certainly psychedelic, a sort mutant psych-prog, Afro-space groove. Some moments are like some outer space version of Afro-fuzz Swedes Goat, others sound like a super charged, space rock Necks, a few tracks get downright heavy, and sound like some tripped out psychedelic space outfit, a few tracks sound like a crazy demonic alter ego of This Heat, a few others remind us of the twisted afro-noise of William Bennett's Cut Hands, there are moments of Muslimgauze like Eastern rhythmatism, there are even moments that remind us of Animal Collective at their very weirdest, but really most of this just sounds Gum Takes Tooth, and absolutely nobody else, a totally twisted genius amalgam of all the above mentioned references, deftly shaped into something at once warped and weird, wild and experimental, but also totally hypnotic, and melodic, strangely lovely and in its own way, extremely catchy. A new favorite for sure. And a total shoe-in not just for Record Of The Week, but for our year end best of's too...
Imagine a band that sounded like a bastard mix of UK-via-Texas, multiple drummered noise rockers Shit And Shine, grinding bass and drum duo Lightning Bolt and legendary weirdo drug rock combo Butthole Surfers. Then imagine the sort of din such a band could and would kick up and mix in all manner of mangled and freaked out electronics. Finally, imagine all of that noise being conjured up essentially by a single drum kit. And thus you have UK duo Gum Takes Tooth, which is essentially a drummer, whose drums are wired up to a dizzying array of home brewed electronics and tone bent circuit boards, with a second member tweaking and fucking with the sound in real time. 43 minutes of electronic-ed drumming might not sound that appealing to some folks, but don't make the call until you get an earful of the sounds these two whip up. Sure at times it's raw and rhythmic, noisy and chaotic, but the sounds here are all over the map, from super charged This Heat style rhythmic workouts, to blasting almost grind metal like blow outs, minimal FX fueled ambient drifts, to tripped out sci-fi psychedelia, murky, meandering distorto slow-core to frenzied noise drenched prog and pretty much every conceivable stop inbetween. Add in some Merzbow style noise, a little Psychic Paramount drum heavy post rock heaviness, some world music like tribalism, and stir it all up, and voila.
Opener "Young Mustard" is a pretty good sampling of what these guys are capable of, offering up a wild frenzy of tribal drum pound, weird processed vox, swirling electronics and FX, which eventually explode into some seriously aggro Lightning Bolt style, blast beat driven, downtuned grind, only to blossom into some Six Finer Satellite like synth-drum craziness, before the whole thing devolves into a abstract stretch of minimal clatter, random bloops and bleeps, swirling electronics, all beginning a slow build, the tribal drums swooping back in, slowly goring more distorted and intense, until finally fracturing into what sounds a bit like the Ruins crossed with Man Is The Bastard, thick blown out buzz low tones, pounding drums, howled processed vox, all woven into a seriously crushing electro-dirge.
"Tankjott" is another good one, starting out with some rapid fire kick drums, some gurgly vox, some squiggly electronics, building to a lurching, stuttery groove, soon more electronics, and more of that heavy bass buzz swoop in, and it's some sort of metallic krautpsych groove, with all manner of buzzes, strange twisted vocals, electronic pulses, before exploding into another fried and buzz drenched rhythmic workout, sounding to us like a way more chaotic / noisy / electronic version of MITB offshoot Geronimo, definitely the heaviest track here, sounding almost metal, but via Hawkwind and This Heat and Melt Banana and all blurred into some impossibly mesmerizing electrometal krautgroove, WAY too short at 7+ minutes.
And in between those two tracks, plenty of hypnotic, cyclical, rhythmic noise, progged out heaviness, stuttery drum heavy buzz and psychedelic noise rock, usually all at the same time, "Strychnine Motive" probably the most traditionally song sounding, but it's really relative, while "The Earth's Mantle Colonised" takes that same sort of sound and trips it WAY out into some sort of psychedelic space rock, the vocals chopped and processed, plenty of spacey squiggles and weird chanted vocals, the whole thing still drum driven big time, "Nomad/Monad" sounds like some bastardized gamelan orchestra, or a punk rock electronic noise version of Konono No.1, all looped thumb piano like melodies, tangled up and barraged by all manner of strange sounds, and then finally, record closer "Hermaphrodite And Nourishment" which does in fact feature a member of Shit And Shine on second drum kit, and while we were expecting a super frenzied drum heavy blowout, instead, it might be the pretties song on the record, all moody and loping and melodic, laced with ringing Tibetan bowls, crooned softly distorted vocals, squalls of feedback, and the cool thing is it never really explodes or freaks out, instead, it's just gorgeously mesmerizing and hypnotic, droned out and tribal, the perfect sort of sonic come down at a record that spends much of its time at a serious musical fever pitch.
Probably one of our most exciting recent musical discoveries (thanks Jason P.!), and with every listen this record continues to confound and delight and reveal more of the weird shit that seems to constantly be going on just below the surface, and odds are if you like any/some/all of the above mentioned bands, imagine them all mashed together and distilled into some wildly and gloriously twisted hybrid, and we imagine you'll probably be as knocked out as we were.
Superior Viaduct does it again, bringing us much needed reissues of not only one but two classic LA underground records from 1981: The Flesh Eaters' amazing A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die, and The Gun Club's incredible debut, Fire of Love. We're gonna (gotta!) make 'em both Records Of The Week!
Death, drugs, sex, voodoo, evil blues, macabre horror and a sublimely detached southern gothic sensibility pervade the music of these two bands who sat somewhere between the margins of the "death rock" and "cowpunk" or "gothabilly" genres of the LA punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties without fitting neatly into either.
The commanding vocal prowess of Jeffrey Lee Pierce leads the scorched delta blues of The Gun Club, a darkened mixture of Johnny Cash, Charley Patton and Elvis recycled through a furious yowling intensity. The band rotated line-ups often and has featured throughout their existence key players of the LA punk scene such as Kid Congo Powers (The Cramps, The Bad Seeds), Patricia Morrison (Sisters of Mercy, The Damned, The Bags) and Terry Graham and Rob Ritter (The Bags). While the band had a run of great albums, Fire of Love is largely regarded as their most influential, containing an impressive string of punk hits: "Sex Beat", She's Like Heroin To Me", "Fire Spirit" "For The Love of Ivy", "Ghost on The Highway", and "Jack On Fire", many of them produced by Chris D. of The Flesh Eaters.
Such a great album and without it bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys simply wouldn't exist.
Note: Unlike The Flesh Eaters, Superior Viaduct didn't do a vinyl version of this reissue - but it turns out there was a vinyl reish on Spain's Munster records a few years back that has been recently repressed, so we'll probably get copies in sometime soon...
We made the Superior Viaduct cd reissue of The Gun Club's Fire Of Love one our Records Of The Week last time, and now have the 2014 repress of the Munster lp reissue too! Here is what we said about the cd:
Death, drugs, sex, voodoo, evil blues, macabre horror and a sublimely detached southern gothic sensibility pervade the music of The Gun Club who sat somewhere between the margins of the "death rock" and "cowpunk" or "gothabilly" genres of the LA punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties without fitting neatly into either.
The commanding vocal prowess of Jeffrey Lee Pierce leads the band's scorched delta blues, a darkened mixture of Johnny Cash, Charley Patton and Elvis recycled through a furious yowling intensity. The band rotated line-ups often and has featured throughout their existence key players of the LA punk scene such as Kid Congo Powers (The Cramps, The Bad Seeds), Patricia Morrison (Sisters of Mercy, The Damned, The Bags) and Terry Graham and Rob Ritter (The Bags). While the band had a run of great albums, Fire of Love is largely regarded as their most influential, containing an impressive string of punk hits: "Sex Beat", She's Like Heroin To Me", "Fire Spirit" "For The Love of Ivy", "Ghost on The Highway", and "Jack On Fire", many of them produced by Chris D. of The Flesh Eaters.
Such a great album and without it bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys simply wouldn't exist.
Can you imagine if "Music To Moog By" maestro Gershon Kingsley had dropped acid, joined a commune, got religion, and jammed with the Silver Apples and Lothar And The Hand People? That might approximate what the unique, wondrous psych-pop "Mooglove" of 1970's The Electric Lucifer sounds like!
YES!!! It's about time. We've always wanted this album to come out on cd. This HAD to be our Record Of The Week. Heck, years and years ago, Allan (long before he worked at Aquarius) became a bit obsessed with this record. He'd found a beat-up old LP of it at a yard sale, bought it mainly 'cause of the title and the freaky colorful cover graphics, and then was blown away by the weird music within. It's what we've described as being "perhaps the most awesomely bizarre psychedelic pre-Kraftwerk electronica album ever to be released on a major label (Columbia) or elsewhere." Allan actually went so far as to try to track down Bruce Haack for an interview, but without any luck (turns out Haack had already passed away back in 1988, a couple years before Allan discovered the record). And Allan's not the only one here at AQ to have a longtime soft spot for this record... so we're all so happy that it's finally, FINALLY been given the cd reissue treatment. It's absurd, really, that this wasn't reissued sooner. The legend of eccentric electronica pioneer Bruce Haack has only grown in recent years. There's been several compilations of his work (Hush Little Robot was the best, since it featured a couple tantalizing cuts from this album), expensive imported Japanese reissues of several of his Moog music albums for kids, a posthumous Electric Lucifer sequel from the vaults, and even a documentary released on DVD, entitled Haack - The King Of Techno! But Haack's crowning glory, his masterpiece The Electric Lucifer, wasn't available at all. Until now. And The Omni Recording Corporation (a label new to us) have done it right, even down to the very welcome notion of including a 5-minute track of silence to separate the 13 tracks of the album proper from the over thirty minutes of additional bonus material that they've added on -- which consists of a 1970 Canadian radio interview with Haack on the subject of Electric Lucifer and an alternate take of "Electric To Me Turn". The packaging is top notch as well, reproducing the amazing artwork and Haack's trippy sleevenotes from the original LP (wherein he discusses his concept of "Powerlove"), plus cramming tons of additional stuff into the thick cd booklet. There's loving liner notes by several of Haack's friends and colleagues and lots of vintage photos and graphics. Nicely done.
How can we explain the utter charm of this album? Well it's about as psychedelic as you can get, a concept album that's futuristic and Biblically ancient at the same time. Haack used an electronic "computer voice" (long before it was cliche) that he named FARAD, as well as regular human vocals, to convey deep Age of Aquarius astrological/philosophical concepts, sometimes in the form of sinister liturgies, at others like playful rhyming lullabies. These Moogy, moody and groovy compositions feature churchy organ sounds, bleeps and bloops, and rhythmic percolations that wouldn't sound out of place in the Star Wars cantina. There's lugubrious droney passages, mechanical beats, switched-on classical flourishes, and musique concrete style sound collage. Very weird *and* oh-so-catchy. It's definitely every bit as wonderful and essential as the Silver Apples albums, which we know so many AQ patrons love dearly. Again, we're so happy this has been reissued. Highest recommendation. Listen to the love angel, people!
Almost before we even heard this, we knew it had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. A double dose of Finnish sonic insanity in the form of this insanely limited one sided 12", which finds Finnish one-man psychedelic noise project Haare, aka Ilkka Vekka, creating his new record, a single sprawling twenty minute soundscape, from various sounds, much of which is sourced from the 2004 album Forest by fellow Finns and all-time AQ faves, Circle!
Here Haare transforms what was already an atmospheric, sort of acoustic sinister spookiness, into something even more abstract, an arcane sonic ritual, all deep resonant rumbles, keening distant tones, rumbling thrums, haunting chimes, murky melodies, clouds of blurred metallic shimmer drifting over softly undulating sprawls of moody murk, a swirling smear of all manner of gauzy melodies, and ever-shifting texture. The sound barely obscuring creepy monstrous low end rumbles, that sound like some sort of demonic crooning. The upper register tones, sounding a bit like bowed metals, muted and muddied into sonorous tones, but that metallic buzz gradually breaking free from the murk and the mire, intensifying like some swarm of metal insects, way off in the distance, a sort of blurry buzz that billows ominously around the softly roiling ambience at the track's core. The sound obviously moving in a noisier direction, but finding a sort of swirling almost serene stasis just on this side of that ambience/noise barrier, the sounds gristly and crackling with energy, infused with a haunting dark mystery, that seems to imbue all the buzz and crunch with something much more soft focus and abstract, which somehow gradually attains a strange sort of next level dreamlike ambience, all the sounds blurring into a bleary bit of washed out thrum, a thick layered wall of super active sound, but with all the edges worn away, resulting in a slow pulsing stream of warm whir and dense warm dreamnoise, which reaches a sort of bliss out near-raga equillibrium in the last few minutes, and definitely has the listener in a total trance, and had us really wishing there was a second side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered!!
We first heard about these guys via the awesome Hammer Smashed Sound blog, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", the band listing their influences as "Movement of woods, rocks, plants & nature as such - plus the vastness of it all. Abyssal fear, fire, wholeness, monolithic things, megaliths, human insignificance, occult systems of cosmology & meaning, open systems of cosmology & meaning, clean violence, swift violence, enlightenment..." PLUS there's the fact that this, their debut record, came housed in a hand crafted leaf encrusted wooden sleeve, so we were pretty much already sold. Thankfully, their blackened sonic rituals more than live up to those obtuse and abstract descriptors, and the stunning packaging.
Black ambience might be too reductive when trying to describe Hadewych's mysterious soundworld, but it's a start. Occultic, ritualistic, grim, mysterious, haunting, all of the tracks here exist in some sort of moonlit nether region, the whole record some sort of fantastic journey, rendered in abstract sound, huge heaving swells of dense drone, muted pits of abstract percussion, softly crumbling bits of ambient whir, the sounds clipped and layered and assembled into lumbering skeletal rhythms, deep processed vocals, intoning some strange prayer, while a bleak black melody plays out in the background, and some super freaky demonic vocals surface, belch out some wordless filth, before splintering and collapsing back into the swirling blackness below.
Dense walls of SUNNO)))-ish rumble dissolve into some skittery almost-electronica, wrapped around more of those freaky belchy vocals, and some shimmery choral vocals overhead, before the record switches gears, and sprawls into some softly glitched pop ambience, all shimmer and drift and hover, laced with haunting strings and whispered vox buried in the mix, chimes ring out, voices are stretched out into warm whirling sun dappled streaks of sound, layered acoustic guitars explode into squalls of blown out psychedelia, infused with intercepted radio broadcasts, a woozy washed out cloud of lumbering crunch and majestic soft noise, only to dissipate into another sprawling bit of rhythmic ambience, with warm soft focus guitars drifting over skittery electronics, and more hushed vox, giving way to a blown out, muffled in-the-red black folk drone, the notes and chords so saturated they sound almost percussive, and the more you listen, the more the various sounds ooze and blend and bleed into one.
Lilting echo drenched folk leads us toward the end of our journey, atonal and buzzy, the steel strings soon fade out, leaving a gorgeous low end stretch of looped and layered tones, a sort of murky minimal pulse, haunting and ominous, and totally hypnotic, a quick burst of clatter and crunch leads us into a field of dense harmonium drone, hissing and wheezing, a gloriously textured expanse of warm whirs, peppered with strange field recordings, the crunch of footsteps, the panting of panicked breathing, which finally leads us to the black path, leading to an emptiness in the center of the black forest, the sound emanating from that void a deep rib cage rattling rumble, shot through with bits of glitch and hiss, and long streaks of some mysterious reverbed rasp, tendrils of feedback, fragments of melody, the shimmer of vibrating steel strings, tolling bells, all gradually blurred into blackness. So intense. Epic and cinematic, like the score to a life lived beneath the looming shadows of the great black oaks, or the soundtrack to a doomed expedition to the underworld, mysterious and evocative, and so so hauntingly beautiful.
LIMITED TO ONLY 165 COPIES, housed in a red felt lined handmade wooden case, with four double-sided cards, the whole thing packed in incense-dried Norway maple leaves. Wow.
OMG! Automatic Record Of The Week. Hands down. Such a nice surprise, that Ipecac has just reissued this all-time aQ fave on vinyl, originally released back in 1992. Great Phone Calls lives up to its title, it's one of the funniest prank call albums ever made, up there with Kathy McGinty and the best of Longmont Potion Castle. Heck, it's one of the funniest records we've EVER heard, period. Then again, maybe something is wrong with us. In any case, stuff from this album has entered our personal lexicon, catch phrases, you know, like they way people pick up on stuff from SNL.
When Great Phone Calls came out so many years ago (1992) it quietly marked the first appearance on record of the now-infamous Neil Hamburger, sad sack comic who has since gone on to great heights of "humor" (or perhaps the term is anti-humor) recording for the Drag City label.
The collection of calls here ranges from the aggro bass player who answers a musicians-wanted ad (and insists, "I'm in your band!"), to a fat guy who went to college at "Yaoo" (not Yale) trying to order a low-fat pizza, to a computer giving away tickets to a Bette Midler movie called Hijinx (and its sequel, Hijinx II: Sodom). Some of the calls are borderline offensive, and some jump right over that line, so be forewarned, but it's so worth it anyway. The Hamburger-as-Hamburger tracks are among his best stuff, 'cause unlike later recordings of his live paying-gig performances, here on Great Phone Calls he's trying so desperately just to get a gig, calling comedy clubs and harassing the bookers with his "jokes". The unique brand of comedy on display here really takes things to a demented, ridiculous level, Hamburger essentially delivering extemporaneous monologues to the poor saps on the phone more akin to performance art than anything else. The shaggy dog story of a joke Hamburger tells on the track "A Nationally-Known Comedian" goes on for, like, six minutes. Why his victims don't hang up sooner, we'll never know. He's brilliant, if you've ever doubted it, this is the proof.
Originally out on Amarillo, this was reissued on cd - and now on lp - by Mike Patton's Ipecac label, and he makes an uncredited sneak appearance on the record too.
Record covers like this one just aren't fair. Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius hiply dressed on a platform in an abandoned train station with their backs turned to the audience playing all manner of amazing looking analog electrical equipment: synths, farfisas, banks of tone generators, oscillators, patch bays, stacks of amps, leaning guitars, and cords everywhere, amongst racks of machines with all sorts of knobs and levels. It just makes us soooo jealous. Not only for such beautiful equipment, but also nostalgic for this period of time in Germany in the early seventies when so much thoughtful and incredibly inventive music was being produced. First Amon Duul II, Can and Faust then Kraftwerk, Cluster, and, Neu!, with Harmonia being the perfect synthesis of the latter three bands both in sound and personnel. Especially when you see the back cover and you get a closer look at the band and you can tell the trio just have this alchemical connection with each other and the sounds they make. Each member is focused but self-assuredly calm. Not exactly what you would expect from a band whom Brian Eno once called "the world's most important rock band". Not that much of the world had ever heard of them. Nor is it what most folks consider rock music to be.
So this is it! We've been reading about this for months, and it's finally here: a live document of a now legendary show on March 23rd, 1974 at Penny Station in Griessem, Germany. Not that it really matters that this is live, as their is no applause or chatter to clue you in, just bits of mumbled talking as the songs wind down at the very end. Harmonia members attribute this to there being only 50 or so people in the audience most of which were either too stoned to clap or too unsure at what points the songs begin and end. Doesn't seem to matter to the band anyway as we've already seen their backs were to the audience the entire time. But for a live document the sound quality is impeccable and what's even better all of the tracks performed weren't on any of their recordings, giving us, thirty-three years later, 5 new vintage Harmonia tracks to pore over. Most of which are over 9 minutes long.
Recorded between Harmonia's woozy debut, Musik Von Harmonia, and its more rock-leaning follow-up, Deluxe, Live 1974 is the logical conglomeration of both sounds, sort of like the merging of Terry Riley-ish repetitions with Robert Fripp's or Heldon's spacey and searing guitar extrapolations. But unlike conventional rock bands, Harmonia's music doesn't climax or necessarily change all that much, making their deceptively simple musical structures more akin to trance, electronica and slow disco. Beginning with the slow burn of "Schaumberg", an 11 minute epic of Rother's sinewy guitar lines that build and loop over gentle pulses of Moebius's programmed percussion and Roedelius' repetitive tonal keyboard patterns merging into a more sped-up and hypnotic version with bass rhythms on "Veteranissimo", an extended 17 minute meditation on "Veterano" from Musik Von Harmonia that breaks down to quiet heartbeats before slowly building again. "Arabesque", the shortest track at five minutes, does away with the percussive elements altogether, instead focussing on overlapping patterns of melodic synth and guitar before slamming into the loping quarter-hour stoner lurch of "Holta-Polta", then finally culminating in the blissful pastoralism of "Ueber Ottenstein".
It's been a stellar year or two for krautrock reissues as most of the Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Harmonia, Popol Vuh and Michael Rother catalogs have been reissued, re-introducing to the world the proto-new age realms of seventies German kosmiche music at a time when we can easily see its influence weaving through so many new bands like Arp, The Alps, White Rainbow, Lichens and Sylvain Chaveau. Always timeless, and never dated, Harmonia, like most of their German contemporaries mentioned above, were the most important rock band in the world simply because they cared about what they did, kept it simple, never indulged, and always left us wanting more.
When we were putting together our vintage New Arrivals list a few weeks back, the one with super short reviews like we used to write back in the day, we had planned on reviewing this reissue of the debut from Florida avant-primitive noise-core duo Harry Pussy, with this super succinct description: "SKROWWWWWWW, EEEEEEEEEEEEEE CLANGBLAPCLANG, SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK, SKRONK, GRRHHHTTTTTRFFHHHDEEEWWW OOOOOOOW CHHRRRGGGFFFGGG FGGGGGRRRRRRHHHHHHOOOOOWWWWWW BOOOOOOONGCRAAAAAASHBLANG EEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWWEEEEEEE." What more is there to say really, the duo of Adris Hoyos and Bill Orcutt created some of the most visceral, most innovatively chaotic and confrontationally raw punk rock noise EVER. Whatever noise group you can think of - Hanatarash, Incapacitants, Borbetomagus - Harry Pussy could more than hold their own and deliver the equivalent audial destruction, as well as an amount of audience baiting that was nearly unprecedented, certainly in the experimental underground. Guitarist Bill Orcutt has more recently become a bit of an outsider solo guitar icon, with his primitive blues scrabble and deconstructed avant Appalachia, and if you're familiar with his solo stuff, imagine that plugged into a shitty amp, cranked to deafening volume, and then paired with some of the most frighteningly original drumming ever, courtesy of she-devil Adris Hoyos, her self-taught drum pummel the equivalent to laying at the bottom of an elevator shaft, while a dump truck unloads its payload of busted cymbals, warped drums, broken sticks, in a clattery, caustic cascade. AND then there's her banshee like vocals, fierce and feral.
But that's not to say HP traffic purely in unfettered, unstructured noise (although there is plenty of that too) - within these swirling squalls of sound, Hoyos and Orcutt continually lock into impossibly dense, mathed out anti-grooves, or spar maniacally with each other, a back and forth, tangled sonic wrestling match as swarms of skree and crape wind around octopoidal drum pound, the sounds occasionally winding down into distorted blues crawls, sometimes exploding into barrages of frazzled noise-jazz squiggles, and often just splintering into total face melting amp-destroying noise-fuck.
The strange thing is, as much as we remember this record being brutal and unrelenting and punishingly noisy listening to it again recently, it's revealed itself as truly and strangely lovely, textural and nuanced, a balance between melody and mayhem that might not be obvious on first listen, but there's a lot more going on here than first meets the ear. And for all the attitude, and legendarily violent performances, the actual music here is stunning, and weirdly magical, it's a rare sort of abstract, absurdist, psychedelic noise that manages to transcend the strictures of 'noise music', attaining the sort of beauty that would rarely be ascribed to such a fucked up slab of sound. Also contains one of the best Kraftwerk covers EVER.
Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Grave Is A Grim Horse, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like A Grave Is A Grim Horse, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNN))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combos�
When faced with a new Harvey Milk record, we're flooded with various feelings and emotions. The first being pure exultant joy, seeing as these guys are quite possibly one of our all time favorite bands EVER. Heavy, melodic, so weird, willfully difficult listening that seems to be impossibly listenable as if to spite itself. Another being a sort of incredulousness, that for all intents and purposes this band ceased to exist, a handful of old records, all that was left of their substantial but unsung legacy, hard to imagine now, but not that long ago, it took a LOT of digging to track down HM records. And finally, we're faced with the sort of feeling we get more and more often, "how the hell are we supposed to review this?", or "what the hell can we say about these guys that we haven't already said?" Well, the practical answer is not much. You can go back and read all of our expansive, wordy, gushing reviews of every Harvey Milk record, and all of that stuff still applies, but the band have obviously grown and changed, their sound while still similar enough, that every new record is worth celebrating and obsessing over, each one is still just different enough to avoid being nothing more than just a Courtesy And Good Will Part 3 or 4...
The untitled opener here is crazy melodic, and instrumental, with a super catchy main riff, minimal drumming, the song sort of swings, eventually the riff is joined by a shimmering layer of buzz, and the song gets just a little bit shoegazey, before returning to the sort of slow doomy, melodic mathy meander. But "I Just Want To Go Home" is more recognizable HM territory, beginning with some super low slung bass creep, before the drums begin to pound, the guitars start to soar and howl, and then those vocals, folks who have yet to hear Creston Spiers vocalize, are in for a treat, or at least a surprise, a gruff howl, weirdly melodic, but so tortured and gloriously emotional, one of the few voices that is totally and utterly unique, here draped over that skeletal rhythm and that rumbling bass, a ghostly sort of abstract doom ballad that creeps and crawls and manages to be both heavy and haunting.
"I'm Sick Of All This Too" is classic HM, super mathy, but impossibly abstract, little squalls of gnarled riffage and drum pound, unfurling bursts of short sharp mathy heaviness, only to ring out, and leave huge spaces, repeated, but seemingly never in the same way twice, finally shifting gears during the last few seconds and turning gorgeously melodic and intense. Only 2 minutes, but the sort of song that could take up a whole side and we'd be psyched.
We could definitely go track by track, minute by minute, but in some ways that sort of reductive description takes away from the magic of Harvey Milk, it's not really what they do, more how they do it. The constituent parts are the same as a million other bands, but there's no mistaking these guys for anyone else. Whatever they decide to do with those parts, their songs, it always turns out sounding ONLY like them. From super melodic slowcore doom pop ("I Know This Is No Place For You" might be their prettiest song yet), to churning, chugging lumbering post doom dirgery, to twisted synth driven dronerock, that gives way to hushed, super intimate, piano driven barely there balladry, to epic, 'classic' rock majesty, sounding a bit like a Queen record left out in the sun, all harmonies, and huge choruses, and big guitars, but all sort of blurred and oozy and melted, into something gloriously warped, and like the rest of the tracks here, something that could only be Harvey Milk.
So it took the rest of the world a while to catch on. Don't be too hard on them. Harvey Milk are one difficult proposition. Don't blame us though. We've been there all along trying to convince everybody just how brilliant this bafflingly bizarre sludge combo really was. Andee even reissued their seminal Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on his tUMULt label. And don't blame Henry at Chunklet, the man responsible for this here document. In fact he was right there every step of the way, a one man Harvey Milk archivist and booster club. And of course we don't blame you, loyal AQ list readers, cuz we know you feel the same way we do, you just can't get enough of Harvey Milk's pummeling, crushing, obtuse and confusional heaviness. Well for you, and for us, and for the heavy music lovers of the world who have yet to discover the difficult joy of Harvey Milk, life is is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Courtesy And Good Will is getting reissued again, on Relapse, any day now, there's a BRAND NEW Harvey Milk record due sometime in the next month or so, there are rumors of a deluxe reissue of the long out of print Harvey Milk debut, a serious holy grail, My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, maybe with an extra disc, and then there's THIS. Four long years in the making, and it was worth every single second. Most of us who dig Harvey Milk, even those of us who might go so far as to say we are obsessed, never actually got to see the band play live. And this three and a half hour DVD collection of live shows spanning over 12 years is just as much a revelation as we knew it would be.
From super grainy early live footage, when the band was much more of a punk rock, Touch And Go / AmRep sort of beast, you can, out of the corner of your eye, see the sludginess and fuckedupness creep up through the music, slowly and subtly infusing every song and sound with some ineffable something, that helped turn Harvey Milk into a band that sounded unlike any other band, then or now. Theirs was a career trajectory based entirely on getting weirder and sludgier and more obtuse and WAY more difficult and fucked up, a bit like the Melvins, but without the unexpected mainstream success and major label deal. Harvey Milk also unexpectedly shifted gears for a while, letting their ZZ Top obsession take control, and becoming impossibly groovy and rocking, which only lasted a single record before the band returned EVEN MORE damaged and slow and brutal, as if that was even possible.
The band look so unassuming, frontman Creston Spiers just an every day Joe until he opens his mouth and unleashes that impossible low banshee-like howl, bass player Stephen Tanner, with his weird, fey, Doogie Howser look, goofy smile and even goofier sexy hip swivel. And the drums, the drummers... Harvey Milk's songs are so full of space, so slow and stretched out, the drums are often the only thing holding the songs together. Whether they are shuffling in the background, or pounding out a massive slow motion throb, it's the drums that allow the guitars to spin off into space and the songs to unfurl into confusing super spacious epics.
Probably the most amazing part of the disc is when Creston wields a sledgehammer, pounding an anvil in time with the downtuned bass and pounding drums, while howling in that anguished banshee wail of his. Normally it would be weird to see a band set-up like that -- bass, drums and sledgehammer -- but somehow, for Harvey Milk it seems perfect. Creston swaying back and forth, cradling the hammer like it was a guitar, while the band pounds out a sludgy dirge behind him. So good! Woven in to the older material are plenty of long slow drawn out moody post rockisms, with drifting simple mournful melodies, and mumbled crooned vocals that eventually build into the epic whirls of swirling sludge we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
The biggest surprise here is how much footage there is from the band's "ZZ Top period," a stretch that on record only lasted a single album, but live seemed to have spanned several years. A wild and hair twirling, head banging super groovy sort-of-Southern rock with howled and yelped superrock vocals, less obviously sludgy, but still ultra heavy. This was never really a favorite sound for lots of Milk fans (although it is Allan's favorite) but seeing these songs performed live is enough to convince us that maybe we were WAY off and this stuff is some of the best Harvey Milk EVER!!!
It sounds like southern rock filtered through the Melvins. Or Ram Jam played by the Corrupted. It's just so awesome to watch with drummer Kyle Spence's massive Boham-esque kit (complete with Bonham's logo on the bass drum head) a huge gong, just tearing it up Bill Ward style holding the whole thing together... And because of the film stock and the sound and the style, it's almost feels like watching some recently unearthed German television footage of some ultra heavy long lost proto metal band from the seventies, they even whip out a little "Pinball Wizard!" Someone needs to reissue The Pleaser now. C'mon!! Maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind when it first came out, but we're pretty sure that record would kick our asses now!
After that, the band sort of drifted off and disappeared, before resurfacing in 2005, as a much grungier, hairier looking Milk, all jeans and long hair and Voivod t-shirts, and they sound like it too. A return to the impossibly glacial dirge of Courtesy, but even heavier and somehow more even more fucked up sounding. Like Sabbath at 16rpm, massive lumbering, blown out sludgerock divinity. How many ways can we say it. WE LOVE HARVEY MILK!!! THEY ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE GREATEST BANDS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS!!
There's also a DVD Easter egg (thanks Jace!): just go to the credits menu and push up until "40 Watt '93" is highlighted, for some footage from an April Fool's show where the band tackle three R.E.M. covers, taken from a show where the band covered R.E.M.'s Reckoning in its entirety. Seriously! (the also once did a whole set of Hank Williams covers, let's pray someone has a tape of that stashed!) It's pretty dang cool to see one generation of Athens rock take on another. And they don't really sludge it up all that much, playing 'em pretty straight, but managing to make them -almost- sound like Harvey Milk originals!
Also included is a four song 3"cd containing previously unreleased, super rare tracks, one of which is their version of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain"!!!
And of course the packaging is breathtaking. Designed by Stephen O'Malley and Henry Chunklet, it's a gorgeous oversized DVD style, fold over interlocking cardstock sleeve, greenish brown, with O'Malley's instantly recognizable graphic shards in dark brown, the title in embossed reflective silver, inside copious liner notes from Henry printed in metallic silver, the back has an angular H and M diecut, through which you can see the inside sleeve, a black folded cardstock gatefold with silver metallic ink which houses both the DVD and the 3" cd affixed to the inside on little nubs. So awesome!
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 COPIES!!!!!!!!
The droning dirgelike beauty that is Harvey Milk's legendary Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men record, finally get's a deluxe digital reissue on our very own Andee's tUMULt label!
Crushing and pummeling majestic beauty, interspersed with delicate moments of hushed whispery strum. Lumbering down-tuned hyper-rhythmic skull crack dropped delicately into suffocating expanses of near silence. Delicate pointillist piano mutates into a dirgey exercise in tension that sounds like a lost Dario Argento soundtrack performed by the Melvins. Lilting and
melancholy near-ballads are disrupted by incessant and brutally heavy riffs. Amidst the pummel and beneath the negative space swirls a barely audible maelstrom of whispered vocals, warbling turntables and whirring vacuum cleaners, all adding to the confusional brilliance that was Harvey Milk. And their heart wrenching cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" features what has to be the most tortured and anguished vocal performance ever recorded.
Too heavy to be post rock. Too weird to be metal. Too everything to be anything, Harvey Milk were unconventional and wholly unique, both structurally and sonically, touching on territory mined by the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Codeine, Queen, Husker Du, Man Is The Bastard, the Melvins, and ZZ Top, but slowing it down, making it HEAVY, and fucking it up. Making it more beautiful, while making it difficult to listen to at all.
Hypnotic, repetitive and jarring. Unpredictable, exhausting and perplexing.
Comes in a beautiful gatefold, letterpressed, silkscreened cover, replicating (in miniature) the LPs original cover.
2005 postscript: Harvey Milk freaks rejoice!! With the sudden surge in interest in all things sludge-y and doomy and drone-y, as well as loads of HM-specific attention, Harvey Milk have decided to reform, tour and record a brand new album!! FUCK YEAH!
It's weird to think that there was a time when it was practically impossible to get a Harvey Milk record. We spent ages trying to track down any information about these guys, looking for their Courtesy And Good Will lp, trying to decipher the mystery of the My Love Is Higher album cover. A random sequence of events led to Andee reissuing Courtesy on tUMULt, which was later snapped up by Relapse. And after that, things started to snowball, singles collections, reissues, and lo and behold a new album, the band back together again, and touring! Finally taking their rightful place at the head of the heavy rock table where they always belonged. Only now, they're the elder statesmen instead of the young upstarts. But hell, they still sound way heavier and more alive than any of the current crop of heavies. And this brand new disc just seals the deal.
And as if the band weren't heavy enough, they've added Mr. Joe Preston (Thrones/Melvins/Earth/High On Fire/etc.) to the group. And the results are pretty stellar. Not only do the band still crush and destroy (they couldn't really get any heavier, could they?) but they're even more melodic. In some strange twist, they seem to have melded the classic rock tendencies of Pleaser era Milk, with the infuriatingly and brilliantly repetitive dirge of Courtesy, creating something both epic and catchy, hooky and heavy, and insanely obtuse and difficult.
The opening track begins with Creston singing in a delicate falsetto, over simple strummed guitar, and then the bomb drops, and the band explode into some post-Melvins, post-Killdozer dirgey crawl, but even at their most sludgiest, they still manage to sound incredible. It's like some pop band got flayed alive and shoved in a bubbling tar pit. Only to emerge a stumbling lurching dripping beast. Epic grinding riffage and classic rock leads give way to an extended chugscape, over and over and over, the vocals suddenly sounding all Gibby-like, the guitar so distorted it crumbles and falls like sodden chunks through the grill of your speaker, until the very end when the vocals transform into a line from the Beatles' "A Day In The Life", and then they finish off with their own version of -that- famous chord. What the fuck?
The next track begins all Led Zep, huge booming drums, until in swings the riff, and vocalist Creston Spiers wounded howl. Then there's "After All I've Done For You" a super dense tangled riffscape that recalls Don Caballero or Bastro, with it's furious mathiness, but it is Harvey Milk, so it of course mutates into a slow motion doomdirge complete with fucked up backwards production.
Our favorite track might be "Motown", with it's soaring melody, and super hooky main riff. A total pop classic albeit one bathed in guitar crunch, and delivered in a feral croon. Some killer leads seal the deal, and some almost Eagles like guitar harmonies. Then there's "Roses", which begins all gentle piano, and guitar harmonics, and Creston's plaintive warble, before slipping into something a little sludgier and sloooooooooooow. Very Courtesy sounding for sure. Near the end, "Barn Burner explodes into another frenzy of mathy riffage, proving again that HM are not a slow motion one trick pony. But it's not just a riff fest, there are some gorgeous harmonies, and some amazing guitar playing going on.
Finally the band finish off with a bang. The nearly nine minute "Good Bye Blues", an impossible slow trudge, peppered with little jagged chunks of riff, plenty of space, stop start weirdness, an almost classic rock sounding bridge, all tangled soaring leads and manic drumming, only to slip back into epic dirgery, and finishing off with a goofy little burst of 'Milked polka and a big Gong Show goooooong. Irreverent, goofy, funny, but somehow still deadly serious, musically merciless, creating epic skull crushing doomscapes one second, whispered balladry the next, and fucked up mathy what-the-fuck the very next, and thus remaining still, without a doubt, one of the best bands in the world.
This is the fancy Japanese double disc edition, which is the only one we're carrying right now, since we figured that most folks into Harvey Milk are WAY into Harvey Milk, and wouldn't mind paying a little extra for a whole extra disc, not to mention some fancy Japanese gatefold packaging. If you really want the cheaper domestic single disc version, just ask, we can order it for you, but heck? Why would you. Who can argue with MORE Harvey Milk? Not us. SO here we have a whole second disc of MORE. Basically, it's the whole record, in demo form, which means, that it's instrumental, and that the arrangements and recordings are dramatically different. Some songs are truncated, others are way stretched out, some changed dramatically between the demo and the album, some remained almost the same, but in both cases, these versions are fantastic. And you know it's something when a band's demos sound better than most other band's actual albums. But as if that weren't enough, there's also an unreleased Leonard Cohen cover! "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" And HM fans will remember what these guys can do with a Cohen track, as is evidenced by "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" on Courtesy. This one is similar, not quite as anguished, but close, dark and strangely haunting, Creston's vocals more retrained, but still raw and raspy and deep, over a simple strummed guitar, a mournful lament, which in true HM fashion finishes off with some retarded super effected riffing that sort of grinds and noodles until a computer voice intones "This cellphone is a piece of shit."
How can you not love Harvey Milk?! You can't. You just can't. So buy this. It's probably the best record you'll buy this year, and for lots of you, it will immediately become the best record you own. All hail the Milk!
As mentioned above, this comes in a super swank full color Japanese style mini gatefold, with an obi, and multiple printed inserts, track listing, a bunch of Japanese text, and lyrics in English!
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. What an awesome title. And the record cover, a bull and a rooster and an ornate candle, the words Harvey Milk in tiny blue type over the rooster. On the cd, the text: "Harvey Milk is Cronos, Mantis, Abadon". Song titles like�"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I",�"The Anvil Will Fall" and "Merlin Is Magic". By now most avid AQ customers are very familiar with the mysterious sludge rock power trio Harvey Milk, but when we first laid hands on this disc, back in 1994, we had no idea what to think. As if�the artwork wasn't enough to have us scratching our heads, the music inside was even more willfully difficult. And still is. Obviously borne of some serious Melvins worship, Harvey Milk, took the already difficult sound of the Melvins to new heights, or depths, crafting lengthy sludge jams, packed with as much space as riffs, long expanses of spastic John Bonham like drumming, vocals a whiskey soaked gravelly bellow, guitars thick black sheets. This was without a doubt some of the strangest music we had ever heard. But at the same time, somehow the most beautiful. The sound�of Harvey Milk was some impossible blend of noise rock, math rock, post rock, punk rock, twentieth century composition and METAL. All tangled into one huge gnarled black hole of sound. A sound that crawls more than it rocks, but when it does rock, it blows away pretty much any other band in the land.�
Lots of you no doubt already own Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men, arguably one of the greatest records EVER, heavy, sludgy or otherwise. If you don't you need to stop reading for a second and go buy it right now. We'll wait...........
Okay, Courtesy was HM record number two, and found the band 'tightening' up their sound, taking the chaos of My Love, and crafting it into, well, more chaos. It's hard to say how they changed between these two records. My Love is a tiny bit faster. The best way to describe it is like this:�My Love is to Courtesy, the way Nirvana's Bleach is to Nevermind, more immediate and raw, but with some of the best songs the band ever wrote, and like Bleach, it's a record that tons of fans continue to insist is the best thing they've ever done. And while we are of the mind that Courtesy is in fact the best Harvey Milk record ever (unless you ask Allan, who would probably say The Pleaser, the -other- HM reissue this week, a killer disc of Harvey Milked ZZ Top worship) returning to My Love has us maybe reconsidering. We can't actually decide. There are so many amazing songs on My Love that we had forgotten about, as good as anything on Courtesy. It would probably be more realistic to proclaim�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be /�Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men as the ultimate math-sludge-slow-motion-dirge-doom-whatever one-two punch EVER. Maybe the greatest first and second record combo of all time. Needless to say, if you're at all into the current crop of slow motion doom mongers, and have somehow missed out on these records, you will lose your fucking mind (and odds are loads of you have never heard My Love as it's been out of print for ages). It's no exaggeration when we say every song on My Love is darn near perfect. But a few of our favorites:
"A Small Turn Of Human Kindness" was the absolute first peep we ever heard out of HM, and it's brutal and beautiful, so utterly confusing and unlike anything ever. A�frustratingly obtuse abstract jam, even calling it a jam is stretching the definition of the word jam, there's LOTS of space, the track begins with a minute of weird electronic noodling, a huge wash of cymbals and guitar scrape, a killer BIG drum fill, and then... nothing... a weird barely there buzz, some cymbal dings, a moaning cello.... How amazing is that?!?!? It isn't until halfway through the song before the riff finally kicks in, and even then, it's like pulling teeth to get these guys to let loose and rock. In fact, it's not until the last two minutes that the band really go for it. And it was worth the wait, but before you know it comes�"Women Dig it", slowing everything waaaaaaaaay back down. A super drawn out exercise in tension and release, with long stretches of just drums, big Zeppelin style drums, accompanied by mewled vocal, but which features one of the most awesome riffs EVER, so much so, that when it kicks in, it makes you want to rock the fuck out, which you could do if it wasn't just played once every couple minutes.... oh the glorious frustration!!! It's the sort of riff most bands would not only kill for, but that most bands would repeat over and over and over and base a whole song� around, whereas the Milk kick out that riff maybe twenty times, in the whole song, and all clumped together, with the rest of the song spent plodding and drifting and doing anything but locking into a killer groove. But that's what makes Harvey Milk so great, when that riff DOES drop, it's a ridiculous release, like an orgasm, this unbelievable rock-out relief, but like with most things it's the wait, the build up, that is the best part. Or at least the 'other' best part.
Another classic Milk track is�"The Anvil Will Fall", a moody drifting whispery ballad, peppered by huge bursts of downtuned pummel,�when out of nowhere, in come the strings, some patriotic hymn, an almost recognizable tune that Creston sings along too in his warbly raspy croon, even kicking it up into a wicked falsetto, before petering back out into the original hushed crawl, eventually launching into a super moving moody goddamned ANTHEM. The sort of song that should have sludge fans teary eyed with hat in hand, and hand over heart. And finally...
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", besides being the best song title maybe EVER, it's also one of the greatest songs ever, a really really�fucking weird song, howled tortured vocals over a relentless tribal drum fill with occasional bursts of Zeppelin like riffage,�before the guitar transforms into a static rumbling drone, and the drums just sort of do whatever the hell they want, for ever it feels like...�and then the band launches back into it and it's some relentless bastardized groovy Southern sludge jam, but like all HM songs, they stop not long after to just sort of wander, and plod and wait, and pause, before doing it all over again....
We could go one and on, and get all mushy and fanboy about every single song on�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be, but you get the drift. This record is magical. Majestic. Freaked out. Furious. Heavy as anything you've ever heard. Strangely pretty. Mind meltingly difficult. Crushing. Confusing. Baffling. Brutal. And pretty much one of our favorite records ever...
It's funny, for years, you couldn't find a Harvey Milk record to save your life. Reissues, cd-r's, rumors about the band all trickled out and were lapped up by all of us ravenous doomdrone hounds desperate for more music from this mysterious Southern dirge rock behemoth. Then suddenly, a few years back, things began to change, Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men got reissued on Andee's tUMULt label, a cd compilation of singles came out, and then the Kelly Sessions. We were loving it. But then it all stopped. Nothing. Until we started hearing rumors again about reissues and more excitingly, a reformed HM and a new record!! And you know what? The rumors were true, the band is back together, and just released this here brand new album. Hot on the heels of the amazing DVD we raved about last list, and alongside a double disc reissue of Courtesy (with a bonus live disc!) reviewed elsewhere on this list, Special Wishes makes us want to just lay down and weep. That's how much we love this band. And how long we have been dreaming about this day. Very few bands can inspire such ridiculous loyalty and utter fanboy obsession. But Harvey Milk are pretty much unlike any band ever. When ranking the weirdest heaviest, GREATEST bands of all time in our heads, Harvey Milk are ALWAYS there, and almost always in the top 5, and depending on our mood, often in the number one spot.
With most bands, we tend to recommend older albums, you know, the new one is for fans only, but if you don't already own any records start with this other one. But even if you've never heard Harvey Milk, Special Wishes will undoubtedly convert you to the way of the Milk. And you WILL have a new favorite band.
The record starts with "I've Got A Love" a crushing pounding slow motion jam, with howled anguished vocals (that Allan thought sounded like Eugene from Oxbow) and thick walls of downtuned guitar, and some weird grinding background drone. SO heavy and glacial it makes the Melvins sound like Blink 182. OK, maybe that's not entirely true, but you know what we're getting at. The next two tracks are equally dirgey, and brutal and impossibly, infuriatingly slow and heavy. But then comes "Once In A While" a groovy classic rock / Southern rock jam, that sounds like Paw on 16 rpm, pretty and melodic, but somehow still way too heavy and creepily ominous. Up next is the appropriately titled "Instrumental" which combines HM's pummeling sludge, with some seriously acrobatic prog rock arrangements, like a super heavy Don Cab. Two more tracks of crushing glacial beauty, plodding brutality, pop hooks buried beneath two tons of guitar sludge, completely and mesmerizingly pulverizing. Then it's The One. Our favorite song of the year. A song so completely unlike anything Harvey Milk has ever recorded, but somehow a song that couldn't have come from anyone else. "Old Glory", the tale of a flag, or THE flag, a strangely beautiful pop song, finger picked acoustic guitar, gorgeous melodic crooning, and a sudden burst of lush psychedelic guitar harmonies, eventually the band kicks in, with massive guitars and probably the most kick ass classic rock guitar lead to ever grace an underground rock record. Full on "Freebird" shit. Wow. One of those songs that we listen to over and over and over. A song that sounded so totally out of place on first listen (although we loved it immediately) but became sort of the heart of the record for us. The final track is almost even weirder. "Mother's Day" is a massive and majestic epic, warm warbly organs, dreamy violin playing a mournful melody, with "God Bless America" melodies all over the place, when the band finally kicks in, it's like the underground doomdirgesludge version of that last song all cock rock and classic rock bands play live, huge soaring chords, everyone swaying back and forth, lighters held high, it sounds like a pisstake, but at the same time it sounds so fucking good. Which is pretty much an apt description of Harvey Milk in general. Confusing and confounding, crushing and majestic. But totally fucked up and emotional and brilliant, and still as far as we're concerned quite possibly the greatest band EVER.
Got a few more copies of this final Harvey Milk album from '97. It's very different from their tUMULt release (the cd reissue of the '95 "Goodwill And Courtesy..." LP) which was super-heavy dronemetal to outdo the Melvins, but "The Pleaser" is still a great
Who would've though this would ever come to pass?! Those of you who love things slow and sludgy and heavy, should be on your knees, thanking whatever god you pray to, for allowing this divine musical covenant to be placed in your dirty, filthy unworthy hands!
Harvey Milk were Atlanta's answer to the Melvins, but slowed waaaaaaaay down and spaced waaaaaay out. Songs so spare but somehow so impossibly heavy, riffs so thick that they threaten to clog your speakers and rhythms so stretched out that they can barely be called rhythms. Add in a serious free jazz + ZZ Top obsession and you've got the recipe for one of the greatest, heaviest bands EVER. They recorded two brilliant full lengths (with their original lineup), one of which was re-issued on Andee's tUMULt label a couple years ago. And we thought then, sadly that we had heard the end of HM forever. But along comes Relapse to save the day, collecting all of Harvey Milk's impossibly rare 7"s and compilation tracks onto one black-hole-heavy chunk of aluminum. Most singles collections allow you to trace the development of a band, watching them slowly turn into the band you already know and love, but this collection proves that HM spontaneously combusted, emerging from their tarpit womb a fully formed, lumbering, molten, sludge rock colossus. From plodding, 3 mph sludgy, dirgy Melvins's worship, to chaotic noisy caveman thud, to Codeine-ish slow motion mood rock, to spare, rhythmic bass and drums space-scapes with demonic, anguished howls and Hendrix like riffs dipped in tar and sprinkled with wild peals of head-shearing feedback, to semi-acoustic tear jerkers, with warbly barely-in-key vocals, I mean, they even do a fucking Peter Criss solo song! How brilliant is that! Harvey Milk confounds as much as they just flat out destroy. How the fuck does a three piece rock band actually sound like they're playing on the wrong speed?! It's as if the entire band had a pitch control knob, and they keep turning it down and down and dooooown. And playing drums for this band must be utter hell. Massive expanses of space, demarcated by pounding beats, spread so far apart they just barely make up a rhythm, with enough space between beats for the drummer to get up, go to the bar, have a cigarette, and make it back in plenty of time for the next beat. So minimal and hypnotic and difficult and heavy, it just blows all other sludge rock hopefuls back to the stoneage. And even in the context of a 'singles collection', songs that were never meant to be together on a record, this stuff falls so perfectlyinto place, you would never know this wasn't conceived as a proper record. Yet another testimony to the under-appreciated genius of the mighty Harvey Milk. Liner notes from AQ pal and Chunklet head honcho Henry Owings. Essential for those of you who love Boris, Corrupted, Earth, Sunn 0))) and the like, as well as their massively head crushing opus Courtesy And Goodwill Towards Men!
It's kind of a no brainer around here, a new Harvey Milk is cause for much rejoicing, and often means shoo-in for Record Of The Week. What can we say? We LOVE these guys. Perhaps one of our favorite heavy weirdo sludge bands ever. Andee even released their legendary Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men on his tUMULt label, before Relapse swooped in and snatched it up. NO ONE sounds like Harvey Milk, NO ONE, and it's ironic that pretty much every band these days wants to, cuz they've sounded the same for years and years and remained patently unpopular almost the whole time.
As if to drive that fact home (not the unpopular fact, the 'always sounded like this' fact), here's the Harvey Milk holy grail, the original debut record, recorded by Bob Weston in the early nineties, after which the band took it home and promptly lost it. And lost it remained, barring a few dubious and crap sounding bootlegs, and more recently some posted downloads of the same crappy recordings. Since folks were gonna listen to it anyway, the band figured what the fuck, they oughta take the best sounding tape they had, and get it all remastered and gussied up and released properly. And voila, the long lost self titled Harvey Milk record, featuring on its cover, perhaps THE tape where it all started.
Fair warning to the uninitiated, lots of these songs were reworked and re-recorded for other albums, this record was lost after all, so a bunch of these, in altered forms, made it onto My Love, Courtesy, the Kelly Sessions, but it's a gas to hear them here, rough and raw, in some cases dramatically different than their later versions, but that probably only matters to HM newbies, the cult of HM (ourselves included) are a dedicated and obsessed bunch, and even though we have most of these songs, we HAD to have it, and odds are a lot of you will feel the same. Plus, we have to say, the rough and raw recording definitely suits these jams. And the sound, so heavy and punishing, it's hard to imagine what folks thought of these guys back in the day, not very much we'd imagine. This crushing difficult heaviness, exactly what made them our immediate favorite band from first listen is precisely what turns off most other folks.
But if you've made it this far, we'll assume you, like us, have a think for Harvey Milk. And thus, you NEED this, everything about HM that you love is already fully formed even nearly 20 years ago, the crushing glacial pummel, the killer drum pound, the impossibly slow and yet ultra complex arrangements, the insanely emotive howled vocals, it's like these guys emerged fully formed from the band womb.
But a quick whip through the tracks should sway any nonbeliever, "Merlin Is Magic" is an epic melodic sludge prog masterpiece, with weirdly melodic vocals, and lurching hypnotic arrangement, "Dating Pressures" is total classic noiserock, laced with downtuned chug, pounding drum damage, but all Milked up with a howling vocal, and some lurching convoluted progginess, "Plastic Eggs" is the quintessential Milk slow motion doomjam, so slow, so anguished, so heavy, "Anthem" is downright jangly, but still a crushing bruiser, fuck it, you should know by now that this is essential, if you already dig the band, you're gonna go nuts for this, if you've never heard HM before, we might recommend Courtesy or My Love first, but at the same time, we can't imagine anyone listening to this, and not losing their shit and becoming immediately obsessed, and if for some reason, a person did hear this and was not utterly blown away, well, then we think the problem must be you!
Cool mini, lp style sleeve, with a simple photo of a (THE?) Harvey Milk cassette on the cover, the inside sleeve with liner notes on one side and a picture of the Milk van on the other, and last but not least, a mini reproduction of what looks like a promotional HM photo, complete with 'For booking call:' info, which is hilarious whether it's a joke or not.
Reissued and remastered for the first time on vinyl since its initial 1980 release, and previously long out of print on cd too, this beautiful collaboration between minimalist composer / experimental trumpeter Jon Hassell and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno has never sounded better! Such a gorgeous classic. Made between Eno's production work on Larajji's Ambient 3: Days of Radiance and the David Byrne collaboration, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Possible Musics was an early investigation into world music influences tempered through modern, Western studio techniques (synth treatments, tape delay, echo effects) resulting in a music of a borderless hybrid world of geographical intrigue. It greatly influenced the future-primitive recordings of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts made only ten days after the Fourth World sessions finished, though really they are different sides of the same coin.
Hassell, studied under Pandit Pran Nath and learned to transcribe Indian classical vocal techniques to the sound of the trumpet. Through various effects, he is able to conjure a vast array of sounds and textures, animalistic and mystical, sometimes flute-ish and even didgeridoo-ish. It never once sounds like a trumpet. There are definitely influences of Aboriginal, African, island and tribal music, but the aim feels more topographical than ethnological. The slow and deep attention to detail like the timbre of strings, the deep pulse of water drums and the loping liquid rhythms suggest big expanses of weather and terrain, movement and landscape. Hassell's trumpet treatments processed through Frippertronic-like tape loops and reverse echo effects are like deep rain clouds slowly moving across sparse tundra but seen and heard at a far distance. And indeed the whole album has this remote field recording quality like one is witness to something far-off, slightly foreboding, perhaps mystical, but also magnetic and alien, especially felt on the final side-long track "Charm (Over 'Burundi Cloud')". One of our favorites of the whole Eno/Ambient catalog!! Vinyl version comes with a copy of the cd.
Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life...
BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well.
So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us.
So here they are.
Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole.
The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody.
Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook.
"Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja.
And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is.
The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar.
So awesome!
The first release from this twisted avant shoegaze, black-doom, new wave, industrial psych pop duo, Deathconsciousness, was a sprawling double disc, complete with a huge book filled with lyrics and obscure text, strange illustrations, sonically and conceptually it was utterly stunning, we had been getting emails about that band and record for months before we got our hands on copies, and in our review of that record, we proclaimed that it really SHOULD have been a Record Of The Week, but the band decided to stop making copies, and we had the last copies ever. We were so obsessed with the record that at one point it was even slated to be reissued on Andee's tUMULt label too, but sadly, that never came to fruition either, and we hadn't heard much from Have A Nice Life since, a tape, a cd-r of outtakes, a few live performances, we began fearing the worst, that Deathconsciousness was the first and final proper record we'd hear from these guys.
But now, six years later, local label The Flenser continues their shift from black metal to twisted dark pop and avant heaviness, and reveal a brand new Have A Nice Life record, and we get to right that old wrong, and finally make Have A Nice Life our Record Of The Week, cuz the new record is really damn near as good as the first. And sonically a good fit for The Flenser too, their new even less metal sound settling somewhere right between outfits like Aussie black-jangle noise poppers Loss Of Self and math-doom electro-sludge goth rockers Wreck And Reference. And yeah, HANL were really never metal, and now, they seem to have settled into a sound that's equal part gloomy death rock, noisy jangle pop and nineties style shoegaze, with a weird lo-fi production, almost entirely clean vocals, lots of angular guitars, reverb heavy goth rock drumming, and huge thick swirls of crumbling distortion and psychedelic freakout guitars. The record opens with "Guggenheim Wax Museum", a heady blast of fuzzy, super distorted dirge pop, blown out and shoegazey, with deep, dramatic vocals, and wild squalls of swirling psychedelic noise, like a slo-mo Godspeed fused to a blackened My Bloody Valentine, which bleeds right into "Defenestration Song" a super melodic, gloomy, goth pop gem, all thick fuzzy bass, a little Joy Division, molded into a sort of post industrial doom-gaze death rock with some super dramatic, almost emo vox.
"Burial Society" sets moody pianos amidst a slowly skittering drum machine, beneath crooned hushed vocals, buzzing guitars, sounding almost like a darker, meaner, more underground Deftones (which is a VERY good thing by the way), the same sort of goth informed, dramatic metallic pop, but filtered through a much more fractured and fucked up sonic filter, laced with some surprising vocal oooh's and aaah's that add even more poppiness. "Music Will Untune The Sky" unfurls as a creepy raga like drone, keening, wailing vox, heaving low end swells, lush and layered, slowly blossoming into something darkly melodic and prismatic, before slipping into the confusionally chaotic opening to "Cropsey", a tangle of overlapping samples, buried muted rhythms, chiming barely there melodies, before the song finally explodes in a frenzy of tribal drumming, swirling strings, and more strident death rock vox. "Unholy Life" is some serious, total eighties style goth pop, a little bit new wavey, echo drenched drums, minor key melodies, but with some cool angular metallic guitars, and a wild noisy, psychedelic shoegaze second half, which gets gloriously blown out and blissed out. "Dan And Tim" cranks up the mathy post punk, sinewy and slithery, before transforming into more hazy gloom pop shimmer, the mathiness of the opener continually churning away beneath ethereal swaths of fuzzy guitar and heavily reverbed vocals, blurry and bleary. And finally, closer "Emptiness Will Eat The Witch" is all hushed and dreamlike, buried melodies and muted shimmer, all beneath a hypnotic drone, that shifts subtly, changing timbre and tone, vocals surfacing, the sound coalescing into some dour pop dreaminess, but still darkly droney, it's not until 5 minutes in that the song truly takes off, but instead of exploding into something heavy, the vocals soar and swirl, thick clouds of dreamy, droney vocal harmonies, pulsing and pulsating, peppered with strange abstract percussion, before settling into one final drift, haunting, and hypnotic, and darkly and dreamily mysterious.
So goddamn great, and while it was totally worth the six year wait, let's hope we don't have to wait that long for more...
In a world of way too many bands, it seems as if every other group just wants to just plug in, turn on, and turn it up, and somehow sound like some impossible hybrid of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, the Stooges, Monster Magnet and Loop, the result unfortunately but not surprisingly is a lot of pointless psychedelic noise. Sure there are a handful of bands who do manage to pull it off, like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Burnt Hills, Gnod, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, and Heavy Winged, and as much as we do love ALL of those bands, it's safe to say, the Heads still reign supreme. These long running UK spaced out psychedelic riff rockers effortlessly transform a dingy basement packed with amps and a beat up old drum kit, a floor littered with distortion pedals and empty beer bottles into some sort of interdimensional sonic starship, a crushing, blown out, distortion drenched, riff heavy, psychedelic space rock TRIP. And while all the various elements are present, it's what they do with them that counts, and listening to the Heads, and this record again, even years and years later, it really does sound like maybe they're still the only ones who know what do with them.
Relaxing is the band's debut album, originally released in 1996, and even then the band sounded like the heaviest, druggiest, most psychedelic, freaked out band in the land. From the first the very track, now going on 15 years old, this still sounds more fresh, and more heavy than practically any modern psychedelic space rock record we can think of. After a brief sample, and a swirling squall of feedback and distorted effects, the band explode into one of THEE most bad ass riffs ever, and it doesn't let up for the next 70 minutes. Strange distorted processed vocals, layer upon layer of wild psychedelic leads and churning riffage, like an amphetamine fueled Loop jam, or Spacemen 3 if they were into speed instead of acid, the song just spirals into the stratosphere, heavy and hypnotic and totally trancelike, it's somehow totally groove, utterly headbangable, and absolutely transcendent. The band pack more pure heavy space rock energy into the first 4 minutes of their first record, than most bands can hope for over entire careers. But then what to say about what they cram into the next hour, more roiling riffage, wild distorted harmonica (has a harmonica ever sounded so bad ass?), pounding motorik drumming, thick clouds of tangled freaked out psych guitar, thick swaths of effects drenched heaving crush, twisted vocals, the first three songs are like 12 minutes of staring straight into the sun, blinding and incendiary and so intense, it's not until track four that the band dials it down, locking into a sort of Velvets meets Loop groove over the next few songs, but even then, the guitars smoke, the tracks bursting into some dense downtuned chugging throughout, but always returning to a lowslung lumber, "U33" splintering into some heaven born heaviness, which leads into the second batch of relentless space psych howl, the garagey stomp of "Television", the swings from woozy jangle to super mathy almost proggy freak out, while "Woke Up" is another drugged out post Stooges, Monster Magnetized chunk of churn and chug, with a slow build to a heart-of-the-sun climax, "Widowmaker" is more of the same, before "Taken Too Much" gets all slinky and bluesy, a stripped down psychblues creep, which builds to another amp melting lysergic space psych freakout, which leads right into the dizzying, sprawling "Coogan's Bluff", a 45 minute multi part psychedelic garage space rock epic trip, which would be a whole record for any other band, but for the Heads, it's just another song. A fucking insane song, but still. Swinging from droned out fuzz drenched psychedelic krautdirge, with a super intense supernova outro, to echo drenched tribal drummed ambient drift, to woozy midtempo post space rock lope, to almost jangly drug pop, to a furious chugging, effects drenched final freak out, that sounds like all the best parts of Loop and Spacemen 3 piled on top of one another.
As if that weren't enough, the reissue of Relaxing includes a whole BONUS disc which includes their 1991 demo, a mess of singles and B sides, as well as some radio performances, culminating in their very first Peel Session. And if you though the record proper sounded heavy and freaked out, wait til you get a load of the old stuff. Even more raw and damaged and distorted, the 9 minute "Spliff Riff" starts things off with some tweaked clipped effected guitar crunch, some swirling in-the-red FX fug, before finally kicking in, a weird mix of clean guitar jangle, super blown out distortion and almost mechanical sounding drummage, the lo-fi vibe making the Spacemen 3 comparison even more apt, but even in '91, the Heads were a meaner heavier louder take on that same drugged out sound. Totally relentlessly repetitive and hypnotic and trancelike, the nine minutes feeling like forever, but still forever is not nearly long enough. And from there on out, it's another whole disc of head tripping heaviness, lots of raw early versions of tracks from the album proper, but a handful of unreleased jams as well.
All in all, a totally head spinning collection of chaotic lysergic psychedelia and crushing droned out space riff raw power rock, that remains pretty untouchable. This new version, besides including that bad ass bonus disc, is also remastered, cranked way up, with a huge booklet packed with tons of new artwork, loads of photos, old flyers and record covers, as well as extensive new liner notes. Record Of The Week, easy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hey Vinyl Fanatics & Psych Freeks! This killer album, reissued on cd a couple years ago, which we made a Record Of The Week at the time, has now at last been remastered and reissued on lp too - and 'cause it and The Heads are such aQ faves, we're making it Record Of The Week once again. This vinyl version doesn't include all the extras found on the cd's bonus disc, but it does come with an mp3 download card (that we assume might provide access to those bonus tracks, though we don't know). Here's what we said about this before:
In a world of way too many bands, it seems as if every other group just wants to just plug in, turn on, and turn it up, and somehow sound like some impossible hybrid of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, the Stooges, Monster Magnet and Loop, the result unfortunately but not surprisingly is a lot of pointless psychedelic noise. Sure there are a handful of bands who do manage to pull it off, like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Burnt Hills, Gnod, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, and Heavy Winged, and as much as we do love ALL of those bands, it's safe to say, the Heads still reign supreme. These long running UK spaced out psychedelic riff rockers effortlessly transform a dingy basement packed with amps and a beat up old drum kit, a floor littered with distortion pedals and empty beer bottles into some sort of interdimensional sonic starship, a crushing, blown out, distortion drenched, riff heavy, psychedelic space rock TRIP. And while all the various elements are present, it's what they do with them that counts, and listening to the Heads, and this record again, even years and years later, it really does sound like maybe they're still the only ones who know what do with them.
Relaxing is the band's debut album, originally released in 1996, and even then the band sounded like the heaviest, druggiest, most psychedelic, freaked out band in the land. From the first the very track, now going on 15 years old, this still sounds more fresh, and more heavy than practically any modern psychedelic space rock record we can think of. After a brief sample, and a swirling squall of feedback and distorted effects, the band explode into one of THEE most bad ass riffs ever, and it doesn't let up for the next 70 minutes. Strange distorted processed vocals, layer upon layer of wild psychedelic leads and churning riffage, like an amphetamine fueled Loop jam, or Spacemen 3 if they were into speed instead of acid, the song just spirals into the stratosphere, heavy and hypnotic and totally trancelike, it's somehow totally groove, utterly headbangable, and absolutely transcendent. The band pack more pure heavy space rock energy into the first 4 minutes of their first record, than most bands can hope for over entire careers. But then what to say about what they cram into the next hour, more roiling riffage, wild distorted harmonica (has a harmonica ever sounded so bad ass?), pounding motorik drumming, thick clouds of tangled freaked out psych guitar, thick swaths of effects drenched heaving crush, twisted vocals, the first three songs are like 12 minutes of staring straight into the sun, blinding and incendiary and so intense, it's not until track four that the band dials it down, locking into a sort of Velvets meets Loop groove over the next few songs, but even then, the guitars smoke, the tracks bursting into some dense downtuned chugging throughout, but always returning to a lowslung lumber, "U33" splintering into some heaven born heaviness, which leads into the second batch of relentless space psych howl, the garagey stomp of "Television", the swings from woozy jangle to super mathy almost proggy freak out, while "Woke Up" is another drugged out post Stooges, Monster Magnetized chunk of churn and chug, with a slow build to a heart-of-the-sun climax, "Widowmaker" is more of the same, before "Taken Too Much" gets all slinky and bluesy, a stripped down psychblues creep, which builds to another amp melting lysergic space psych freakout, which leads right into the dizzying, sprawling "Coogan's Bluff", a 45 minute multi part psychedelic garage space rock epic trip, which would be a whole record for any other band, but for the Heads, it's just another song. A fucking insane song, but still. Swinging from droned out fuzz drenched psychedelic krautdirge, with a super intense supernova outro, to echo drenched tribal drummed ambient drift, to woozy midtempo post space rock lope, to almost jangly drug pop, to a furious chugging, effects drenched final freak out, that sounds like all the best parts of Loop and Spacemen 3 piled on top of one another.
All in all, a totally head spinning collection of chaotic lysergic psychedelia and crushing droned out space riff raw power rock, that remains pretty untouchable. Record Of The Week, easy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hey Vinyl Fanatics & Psych Freeks! This killer album, reissued on cd a couple years ago, which we made a Record Of The Week at the time, has now at last been remastered and reissued on lp too - and 'cause it and The Heads are such aQ faves, we're making it Record Of The Week once again. This vinyl version doesn't include all the extras found on the cd's bonus disc, but it does come with an mp3 download card (that we assume might provide access to those bonus tracks, though we don't know). And, we're one of the only places anywhere that has the RED vinyl version, limited to 300 copies, while they last... Here's what we said about this before:
In a world of way too many bands, it seems as if every other group just wants to just plug in, turn on, and turn it up, and somehow sound like some impossible hybrid of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, the Stooges, Monster Magnet and Loop, the result unfortunately but not surprisingly is a lot of pointless psychedelic noise. Sure there are a handful of bands who do manage to pull it off, like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Burnt Hills, Gnod, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, and Heavy Winged, and as much as we do love ALL of those bands, it's safe to say, the Heads still reign supreme. These long running UK spaced out psychedelic riff rockers effortlessly transform a dingy basement packed with amps and a beat up old drum kit, a floor littered with distortion pedals and empty beer bottles into some sort of interdimensional sonic starship, a crushing, blown out, distortion drenched, riff heavy, psychedelic space rock TRIP. And while all the various elements are present, it's what they do with them that counts, and listening to the Heads, and this record again, even years and years later, it really does sound like maybe they're still the only ones who know what do with them.
Relaxing is the band's debut album, originally released in 1996, and even then the band sounded like the heaviest, druggiest, most psychedelic, freaked out band in the land. From the first the very track, now going on 15 years old, this still sounds more fresh, and more heavy than practically any modern psychedelic space rock record we can think of. After a brief sample, and a swirling squall of feedback and distorted effects, the band explode into one of THEE most bad ass riffs ever, and it doesn't let up for the next 70 minutes. Strange distorted processed vocals, layer upon layer of wild psychedelic leads and churning riffage, like an amphetamine fueled Loop jam, or Spacemen 3 if they were into speed instead of acid, the song just spirals into the stratosphere, heavy and hypnotic and totally trancelike, it's somehow totally groove, utterly headbangable, and absolutely transcendent. The band pack more pure heavy space rock energy into the first 4 minutes of their first record, than most bands can hope for over entire careers. But then what to say about what they cram into the next hour, more roiling riffage, wild distorted harmonica (has a harmonica ever sounded so bad ass?), pounding motorik drumming, thick clouds of tangled freaked out psych guitar, thick swaths of effects drenched heaving crush, twisted vocals, the first three songs are like 12 minutes of staring straight into the sun, blinding and incendiary and so intense, it's not until track four that the band dials it down, locking into a sort of Velvets meets Loop groove over the next few songs, but even then, the guitars smoke, the tracks bursting into some dense downtuned chugging throughout, but always returning to a lowslung lumber, "U33" splintering into some heaven born heaviness, which leads into the second batch of relentless space psych howl, the garagey stomp of "Television", the swings from woozy jangle to super mathy almost proggy freak out, while "Woke Up" is another drugged out post Stooges, Monster Magnetized chunk of churn and chug, with a slow build to a heart-of-the-sun climax, "Widowmaker" is more of the same, before "Taken Too Much" gets all slinky and bluesy, a stripped down psychblues creep, which builds to another amp melting lysergic space psych freakout, which leads right into the dizzying, sprawling "Coogan's Bluff", a 45 minute multi part psychedelic garage space rock epic trip, which would be a whole record for any other band, but for the Heads, it's just another song. A fucking insane song, but still. Swinging from droned out fuzz drenched psychedelic krautdirge, with a super intense supernova outro, to echo drenched tribal drummed ambient drift, to woozy midtempo post space rock lope, to almost jangly drug pop, to a furious chugging, effects drenched final freak out, that sounds like all the best parts of Loop and Spacemen 3 piled on top of one another.
All in all, a totally head spinning collection of chaotic lysergic psychedelia and crushing droned out space riff raw power rock, that remains pretty untouchable. Record Of The Week, easy.
It's been almost two years since the last proper full length from Canadian soundscaper Tim Hecker, and while tons of other artists have spewed out cd-r after cd-r after limited cassette in that same time, one listen to An Imaginary Country is all it takes to illustrate the difference. Why it took so long, why it was worth the wait, how the 'noise' and 'drones' and 'sounds' Hecker produces are so much more then just the words that describe them, it's all evident in every single second of this record, in fact, 10 seconds in, it's already obvious that this is indeed something special.
As demonstrated on numerous past recordings, Hecker is a master sonic alchemist, who with a handful of effects, a computer and a guitar and who knows what else, is able to construct this, a time machine of sound, a set of recordings that while simply pleasing to the ear, are also transcendent, they soothe, they entrance, they mesmerize, but more importantly, and more magically, they transport. Hecker and headphones is pretty much a ticket to some otherworld, not of sights but sounds, and not just sounds, but streaks and blurs and buzzes, soft layers and blinding crystalline shimmers, thick whirring textures and barely there delicate melodies, a sound that slips from breathless whisper to caustic roar, but each end of that spectrum fully infused with elements of the other, at its heaviest, the sound still manages to be darkly delicate, dreamy and ghostly, and at its most minimal and abstract, the sound is still imbued with some weight, a sense of import, of sounds and perhaps worlds hidden behind and within the actual music.
If anything, the sound of An Imaginary Country is heavier, and thicker, more lush, and with more heft, altogether more powerful, the sort of sound that performed live, through a massive P.A., could summon angels, or perhaps demons. But for all this added sonic weight, nothing is lost, the sounds are not just loud, they are multihued, every note, every chord, every bit of sound is alive with energy, it's as if Hecker has created a living breathing sound sculpture, made of transparent spheres, from afar, it's a gorgeous assemblage, the spheres shifting and dancing, playing out some elaborate composition, but pick one sphere, get up close and look inside, and there is a whole 'nother constellation of smaller glass spheres, engaged in a similarly beautiful and elaborate dance, and so on and so on. The magic is that every single set of movements, whether consciously or not, is visible and audible even with the slightest glance, which is what makes Hecker's sound so dense and deep and emotional and lush and utterly breathtaking.
A closer examination of each song reveals the presence of thick warm whirring organs, or some instruments and sounds transformed into organs, thus much of the record sound choral, the music of some crumbling empty church, left to play on into eternity, long long tones, blurred into slow motion epics, other tracks play out like watching some old filmstrip come to life, the newly living things still surrounded by grit and hiss and buzz, but that distorted haze that surrounds them seem to have come alive as well, moving like some organic living thing, the lives and actions of the newly living things inexorably tangled up with the movements of this other newly living things, a blurry ballet of soft sound and of mysterious sonic events. There are a few moments of relative tranquility, where the sounds are tamped down, wrangled into manageable shapes, allowed to shimmer and rippled and billow, held in check by an atmosphere of reverb and delay, but even then, off in the distance, a storm seems to be coming, and the closer it gets, the more our ears want it, and as the next song swallows the song before it, we can't help but close our eyes, open our ears, and let ourselves drift off into some other place, like walking into a warm waterfall and emerging on the other side, in a world made up entirely of warm waterfalls, our whole existence there, wreathed in torrents of sweet buzz and washed out soft focus sound, the headphone cord a tether, the only way home, if we ever felt the need to return home at all.
Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet.
We often reference Hecker when reviewing records by other practitioners of a similar soundmaking process, but there's something so pure and organic about the way Hecker composes and creates, how he deftly assembles and degrades his sounds and songs and melodies. Managing to sound modern but antiquated at the same time, viewing the world through sleep filled eyes, everything soft and fuzzy, sometimes intense and ominous, sometimes even dark and downright scary, but always suffused with a shimmering radiant warmth, making all of his sounds glow from within. Each song a weather worn snapshot, frayed and dusty, comfortable and lived in sounding. It's a music that requires close listening, a subtly immersive sound, but once inside it, once the sound is all around you, only then can you pick out all of the details, hear the hidden melodies, only then can you let go, and get completely lost in Hecker's gorgeous world of mysterious sound. Some of the most beautiful music in the world indeed.
As commonplace as glitched electronica is these days (even rock bands are now 'glitching things up' to sound more avant garde), a handful of these abstractionists have dedicated themselves to understanding the parameters of their tools and attempting to improve upon that which has come before. For several years now, this elite has included Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, with Ekkehard Ehlers often exhibiting glimmers of similar electronic brilliance; however, Canadian electron wrangler Tim Hecker has come into his own with an equally strong aesthetic and a series of amazing releases. Outside his microhouse moniker Jetone, Hecker has released three records to date under his own name, beginning with the exceptional Fennesz worship of "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" and the shellshocked obliteration of Van Halen (quite literally!) on "My Love Is Rotten To The Core", however, "Radio Amor," Hecker's third album, may be even his best yet. Through an immensely rich set of reverb and granular synthesis patches, Tim Hecker has rendered the digital blip into a blissed out field of electric drones and warm, white noise. Throughout "Radio Amor," Hecker has ripped apart clustered notes from a piano and suspended them in the ether of an electricity, and occasionally the warm buzzings of analogue distortion emerge from the rippling, digitized vibrations. Half melodies, algorithmic ping-pong tones, and hard disc skips are all bathed with a radiant luster of electrified golds and coppers. Totally gorgeous.
MPEG Download: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.m3u]
MPEG Download: "I'm Transmitting Tonight" [/audio/timheckerimtrans.mp3]
Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced artists on the aQ website. Whenever we need to describe something fuzzy and gauzy and washed out and blurred and bleary, smeared and shimmery, woozy and mesmerizingly dreamlike, we tend to always look to Hecker, whose gorgeous crumbling otherworldly soundscapes manages to transcend their constituent parts. When listening to Tim Hecker, it's practically impossible to hear samples, or instruments, or anything really, other than the amazing organic soundworld that Hecker has created, the constituent parts rendered wholly unrecognizable, instead, they are layers, or colors, or pieces of the new whole, a sound that's transformative and transcendent, evocative as always of other times, and other places, lost worlds, lost loves and forgotten memories, conjuring up many of the same emotions as folks like Leyland Kirby and Indignant Senility. But whereas those folks' sounds are distinctly old fashioned, the sound of Hecker's music is timeless. It does of course have elements of a forgotten past, in its crumbling decayed sound quality, and washed out ethereal ambience, but it also manages to be melodic, and active, and alive it its own way. It has energy, and vitality, as if some bit of glowing modern sound, was left in a corner to collect dust, and fade a bit, before being rediscovered, brushed off, only to find it's glow, while not diminished, has definitely been altered by the passage of time. Like the most magical of musics, Hecker's is hard to describe, and even harder to imagine how it was created, even if we know the instrumentation, whatever arcane sonic alchemy Hecker employs makes even that knowledge useless in trying to understand how his music works. But then, like magic, not knowing how it works is part of the joy of experiencing these sounds, it's as if they were created from the elements, conjured up from the spirit world, beamed in from another dimension, it's not knowing, or understanding, but feeling, and experiencing, and enjoying, letting the music work its magic, and transport you to whatever imaginary other world they were intended to invoke.
With every Hecker record, we seem to proclaim, 'best one yet!' and it looks like we'll have to again with Ravedeath, 1972, recorded in a church in Iceland, and with a pipe organ as its main instrument, augmented by synthesizer, piano, microphone and feedback, this is the richest and most lush Hecker record yet, not just atmospheric, but emotional and infused with a definite pathos, even moreso, than on past records.
The record opens with a super corrosive bit of blurred ambience, the sound decaying and crumbling, the melodies pulsing and undulating just below the surface, a gorgeous balance between warm melodic drift, and caustic psychedelic haze, but woven together, they create something impossibly gorgeous.
From there on out, the sound and the songs sprawl and shimmer, epic expanses of warm whirring melodies, of lush layered ever shifting textures, the organ, while not always distinctly organ like, does lend the sound a certain choral gravitas, that makes all the sounds here darkly cinematic, the score for some lost art film, all deep shadows and strange shapes, of empty streets and abandoned cities, it's almost like the sound of Super 8 film if that film had 'a sound', all the lens flares, and warm distorted flutter, the fuzzy out of focus over saturated colors, all translated into sound, a sound that slips deftly from murky and moody and muted to blown out and sun blasted, from under water woozy melodic thrum, to super crunchy distorted buzz, to music box like tinkle to epic almost liturgical majesty, the whole record, so perfectly and uniquely Tim Hecker, again the reason we refer to him so often, when describing the often futile attempts of others trying to evoke sounds this powerful and moving, fuzzy, gauzy, washed out, blurred, bleary, smeared, shimmery, woozy, mesmerizing, dreamlike, crumbling, otherworldly, and so utterly and breathtakingly gorgeous.
We dug up an old review we wrote for another Hecker record, where we managed to describe Hecker's sound about as perfectly as we'll probably ever be able to, and reading it over again now, it applies to Ravedeath as much as any of Hecker's other records:
"Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique Victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be the music of Tim Hecker."
Easily his best yet, and one of our new favorite records, and for sure, a contender for record of the year, even just a little over a month in...
Canadian soundscaper and noise sculptor Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced musicians on the aQ list. Whenever we try to describe something that's gristly and pixelated, blown out and noisy, yet somehow still impossibly lovely and lilting and warm and lush, Hecker is the man we point to. And why not, record after record, Hecker performs impossible sonic alchemy, harnessing often harsh noise, and somehow transforming it into lush, layered dreaminess, weaving all manner of textures and fractured drones, warped samples and manipulated recordings, into something stunning and fantastical - including at one point a whole record using nothing but Van Halen records as source material! That in particular sounds like one of those instances where the process is more interesting than the music itself, but nothing could be further from the truth, that disc was in fact utterly and heartbreakingly gorgeous, and even with no knowledge of the music's provenance, you'd have to be dead inside to not be totally blown away.
With every record, we found ourselves more and more in awe of Hecker's ability to create these impossibly pretty dronescapes, to constantly conjure up worlds of sound that evoke truly deep emotion in the listener, a rarity in music for sure. And then even beyond that, every record is quite different. Sure some of the sounds and processes remain the same, but each album, most definitely stands alone, even after a dramatic sonic shift. That said, Virgins might be the most dramatic shift so far in Hecker's catalog, utilizing what seems to be an entirely new sonic palette, which includes live, intimate recordings of woodwinds, pianos, synthesizers and electronics, and working together with other musicians, including another aQ fave, Ben Frost. The results are dramatically different, so much so, that on multiple occasions, someone would be playing this in the store, and we'd have to go see what was playing. Which not only speaks to the uniqueness of the sound, but also to the fact that whatever it was playing, was so good we felt compelled to find out what it was. And every time, once we discovered it was Tim Hecker, we were somehow simultaneously surprised, and not really all that surprised. So after all that, what exactly does Virgins sound like? Like all great records, it's really difficult to describe, it still sounds like a Tim Hecker record, sort of, but this time around, much of the music has a modern minimalist vibe, the influence of both Terry Riley and Steve Reich loom large, especially in the opening salvo, the brief almost psychedelic sounding loopscape of "Prism", which sounds like a strange Philip Jeck / Steve Reich mash up. Repetitive and hypnotic, with subtle (and not so subtle) pitch shifts, making the whole thing woozy and slightly off kilter, but still lush and prismatic, and that sonic template set up in the first song, is elaborated in "Virginal I", which brings the piano to the fore, reminding us of Melnyk and Batagov and the Necks, all our favorite modern minimal pianists, but here, the piano is layered and looped and accretes into a seriously dizzying jumble, which is soon joined by what sounds like cello, and then the tape speed begins fluctuating, and it gets noisier and noisier, and soon, it's not that far removed from past Hecker efforts as we thought, a swirling, dense squall of sound, that manages to be both impossibly tangled and intricate, and at the same time totally mesmerizing and dreamlike.
Some tracks here, like "Radiance", definitely harken back to the Hecker sound of old, airy and ethereal, warm and lush, a dreamy bit of manipulated sound, a smeary sonic blur that's softly psychedelic and utterly mesmerising, but others, like the two part "Live Room" suite, deviate dramatically from what we're used to. The title obviously referring to the room in which the piece was recorded, the sounds wreathed in natural reverb, a haunting melody pecked out on a prepared piano, over a lush swirl of strings and synths, the sounds gristly and distorted, even some seemingly inadvertent feedback, the sound here reminiscent of Ben Frost's more harrowing sound design for sure, but again, Hecker and his cohorts manage to wrangle the disparate and often caustic sounds into something that sounds strangely composed, atmospheric, haunting, moving, emotional, it seems impossible that these sounds could be harnessed into something so lovely, but the sound ends up being truly, and impossibly lovely. A sort of fractured chamber music, that for the second part of the 'suite' slips into something much more hushed and heavenly, symphonic sounds wreathed in tape hiss and static, with seemingly no effort to remove the various non musical sounds, voices, conversations, the effect is quite intimate, and again, strangely moving.
The rest of the record unfolds in an equally unorthodox manner, slow somber piano pieces are flecked with scrapes and shuffles, the notes slightly detuned, plenty of pitch warble, and subtle sonic tweaks, while elsewhere the previous plinked piano sounds are piled atop one another, along with bleating horns and woozy synths, resulting in a warped chamber kosmische that really sounds unlike anything we've heard. The record closes with a dreamlike sequence, that begins with fluttering flutes blurred into an ethereal drone-like shimmer, before splintering into what sounds like a Steve Reich piece broadcast through a malfunctioning transmitter, accompanied by pointillist piano and wrapped in gauze-y hiss and hum, only to shed the hiss and hum, and unfurl a dreamily hypnotic sprawl of slowly cascading pulsations, and finally, one last abstract blowout, all moaning strings, metallic buzz, keening high end, buried melodies, sitar like shimmer, all gradually blurred into an abstract smear of prismatic sound. Stunning!
Longtime aQ favorite Tim Hecker, who might be one of THEE most referenced performers on the aQ list, who for us has set the bar for all things fuzzy and gauzy and dreamily washed out, teams up here with another aQ fave, Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the psychedelic space-synth outfit Oneohtrix Point Never, for a fantastic songsuite of smoldering cinematic ambience, and heavily textured psychedelia, the resulting collaboration one of those rare occurrences where it's nearly impossible to tell who contributed what, where Hecker's sounds end and Lopatin's begin, and vice versa. The resulting sounds seem to land more toward Hecker's side of the sonic spectrum, everything ghostly and spectral, laced with squalls of glitch and squelch, underpinned by warm swirls of chordal thrum and swoonsome stringlike shimmer, the one/two punch of the opening tracks "Uptown Psychedelia" and "Scene From A French Zoo" set the stage for the rest of the record perfectly. Opening with a swirling field of zig zagging melodies, zipping from speaker to speaker, draped over mysterious Eastern melodies, everything wreathed in a fuzzy layered haze, and peppered with constantly shifting blasts of synth buzz and fragments of strange stringed instruments, the whole thing gorgeously bleary, and seeming to slowly ooze into one pulsating and prismatic whole. It's another case, where had that opening track been 60 minutes long and filled up the whole record, we definitely would have been perfectly happy. But there's much more to discover here, as "Scene From A French Zoo" reveals, ditching much of the distorted glitchery of the opener, for something much more lush and serene, a tranquil landscape of long smooth, soft tones, undulating over a bed of crackling static, struggling to break through, but inevitably sinking back below the softly swirling surface. Much of the record plays out like variations of those two tracks, slipping easily from dark brooding moodiness, soaring, swoonsome and melodic, almost choral and symphonic in places, to blurts of gristly static, and sculpted short wave interference, noise deftly transformed into melody, often swaddled in soft focus squalls of blurred buzz, just as often nestled in a bed of dreamlike melodies, and smeared shimmer.
We do hear hints of Oneohtrix on tracks like "GRM Blue II", with Lopatin unfurling a mysterious sprawl of kosmische synth melody, but if that is indeed the work of Lopatin, Hecker seems to be crafting an alien aura in which to place Lopatin's more melodic sensibilities.
Much of the sound here is downright soundtracky. "Racist Drone" sounds like some classic Hollywood score mangled and mutated, while "Grey Geisha", sounds like it was plucked straight off some old VHS tape, and run through Hecker's mysterious bank of alien FX. The record plays out like some perfect hybrid of Lopatin's psychedelic synth melodies and Hecker's master of moody texturalism, the title track sounding almost like a Oneohtrix jam remixed by Hecker, while "Ritual For Consumption" takes some mad scientist exotica, and melds it to some heartbreakingly lovely and lilting melodic drift, and then finally, "Vaccination No. 2" finishes things off with a slow building buzz, a dreamy drift that gradually grows more and more dense and distorted, culminating in a gorgeously blown out sprawl of dreamdrone shimmer.
