Sure, let's call 'em a super group. Why not? Helen is fronted by Liz Harris. Yes, THAT Liz Harris, of Grouper fame; and she's joined by bassist Scott Simmons of Eat Skull, and Jed Bindeman, who seems to be the only drummer in Portland, Oregon given his ubiquity in so many great projects (Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Operative, The Greys). Also, the trio list an eponymous Helen as the backing vocalist, who sounds remarkably like Liz Harris herself.
They've also made claim that the band's first intentions were to be a thrash band. Now, that would have been quite amazing had Helen followed through on that concept; but that was not meant to be. Instead we have this lovely lovely lovely shoegazing noise-pop project. Liz Harris has long been able to craft drifting, pop-narcotic perfection through her slumbering songs as Grouper. Joined by a rhythm section, she's forced herself to step forward with her melodies - both vocally and on guitar, both of which are still buried in rainclouds full of reverb and sadness - and it's a gambit that pays off very nicely. Simmons tends to throttle the bass, which has him sounding more like D Boon than Deb Googe more often than not; and Bindeman take an understated, if upbeat approach to the kit. Actually, the whole rhythm section of Simmons and Bindeman can be pretty upbeat, with Harris adhering a jangly blur to the wintery grandeur that's long been her trademark. It's a nice mix. The atmosphere on The Original Faces is pretty damn captivating, reminiscent in all the right ways of Black Tambourine, The Aislers Set, The Lilys, and whatever your favorite Slumberland band is, past, present, or future. A wonderful release!
A few years ago we (Andee and his fiancee Heather) were travelling in Europe and spent some time in Switzerland. We had spent the afternoon wandering around some mountain top, and decided to take one of those gondola's back down (you know the kind, a cute little train-style car suspended from a steel cable, like at Disneyland or from that one James Bond movie). As we made our way slowly and silently down the mountain side, beneath us the landscape would rise and fall, undulating just enough to obscure what was directly ahead until the ground would again recede revealing more verdant fields and breathtaking vistas. But about halfway down, strange sounds would drift up to where we were sitting, each time we came over a hill, a distant lowing, livestock obviously, but also this haunting chiming, the sound of bells reverberating and drifting lazily across the fields. We suddenly realized that it was the cowbells, worn by the slow moving cattle that wandered lazily below. So beautiful. Tranquil. Familiar obviously but somehow so strange and wonderfully unlike anything we'd ever heard. We've all heard a cowbell, or too, but the sound of hundreds is truly unique. We managed to record a brief snippet, but far too brief to really do that sound justice or to even listen to. These were sounds languid and serene, meant to be listened to over the course of hours not seconds. And then what do ya know? From the same place we got the rutting red deer cd and the recent sounds of bats record of the week, we managed to get this Pastoral Bells cd, which strangely enough just so happens to be recordings of cowbells in the mountainous regions of the Mediterranean.
The sound here is not nearly as tranquil as the sounds we remember, the result seemingly of just way more bells. But it is still lovely and evocative. But not in the same way for everyone. Where Allan and Andee imagine lazily strolling through green fields and dipping our toes in cool streams, cows wandering all around, birds chirping, thunder in the distance, Pam envisioned cows milling around outside a slaughterhouse, or the strange sort-of-calm before a twister. But then we think that may just be Pam.
The bells clang and clatter, deep and resonant, sometimes the sound is super spare, the overtones ringing out into the sounds of a country afternoon, running water, chirping birds, lowing cattle. Sometimes there are so many bells the sound becomes super dense and smears into a smoothed out droney cacophony, almost like a performance for bells, or as if Organum or Phillip Jeck had taken the sounds of hundreds of bells and layered them one on top of the other, until they stopped sounding like bells at all, and instead become a swirl of bell-like tones. Really amazing when that happens too, a simple sound of nature disc quickly and almost imperceptably begins to sound like some avant cut up sound collage, before just as quickly fading back to the normal sounds of nature.
Probably the most striking tracks here are the sounds of the bells in a thunderstorm, the thunder cracks and rolls drone-like across the soundfield, the cows obviously become agitated, thus the bells get jostled and the ringing and clanging builds and builds into a chaotic fervor, the whole while underpinned by the booming rumble of the thunder and added low end of moo-ing cows. There's also a track where distant church bells from a local abbey begin to toll, as birds chirp and tweet wildly in the foreground. So lovely. This is the best kind of nature recording, none of that cheesy new age relaxation crap, this is deep listening. You can lay back and relax if you like, letting the sounds wash over you and carry you away, as the sounds are truly relaxing, or you can really listen closely, deeply, there's so much to hear, so many different elements, so many different sounds, all interacting in ultra complex, impossibly perfect ways. Nature always seems able to deliver all sorts of amazing new sounds or previously unheard sounds, that even after centuries of pushing the sonic envelope, creating new sounds and sound making techniques, inventing instruments and constantly discovering new ways to compose and perform and record, we will never begin to approach, in terms of complexity or purity or beauty. This record however is special because it actually demonstrates an impossible and seemingly unintended collaboration. Man made bells, cowbells, church bells, 'played' by cattle moving and going about their normal lives, set in a lush ambient soundscape completely of nature's design.
A weird thing happens when we're figuring out our end of year faves. Beyond the record nerd arguing about -exactly- when certain records came out, and the endless struggling of trying to whittle down our lists to a manageable amount, we also often end up with two dramatically different lists. There's the one that we post and share, which features mostly stuff we've reviewed on the New Arrivals list, lots of our Records Of The Week, etc. But there's always another one, packed with slightly stranger faves, guilty pleasures certainly, things we thought maybe aQ folks might not care so much about, records we weren't able to get for the store, or weren't able to get enough to review, but every once in a while, a record that belongs on the first, somehow ends up on the second. Which is almost what happened with this, the first we'd heard from these Ohio indie rock geniuses. It was another instance of a record that just showed up in the mail, and immediately blew us away. We were instantly hooked, even before we heard it, first off, there's the band name obviously, c'mon, how good a name is Herzog, and then the awesome album title and the cartoonishly ultraviolent cover art featuring horrified onlookers peering through the glass at what appears to be a blood splattered nursery, with two very self satisfied looking seals wielding bloody clubs! And then there's the music, the opening two track one-two punch is perhaps the catchiest, most kick ass blast of fuzzed out indie rock noise pop radness that we've heard in FOREVER. So the pop nerds around here began listening to the record like crazy, as in ALL the time, and for whatever reason, it just didn't occur to us that hell, we should try to get these for the store, until someone pointed out just how obsessed we'd become. So we finally did, and after a few attempts to get in touch with the band, here it is, and right off the bat, before we go any further, just know that this is hands down, a contender for pop record of the year. Maybe even top spot on the year end top ten list, regardless of genre, certainly if you base it on how much we've listened to it. Anyone out there in aQ land who's been digging other recent aQ faves like Mrs. Magician, the Ovens, Violent Change, Telekinesis, etc. But really, Herzog sound like a band out of time, think of your favorite indie rock bands from back in the day, Weezer, Pavement, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., the whole record oozes with that classic sound. And while ANY band can fake the sound, no bands can fake the songs, and the songs here are SO crazy catchy, fuzzy, crunchy, hook filled, with super funny lyrics, killer choruses, weird arrangements, all wound up into pretty much perfect jangle rock noise pop jams.
Just give a listen to opener "Fuck This Year", with its cool busy / frantic super dynamic stop/start verse, the awesome lyrics, the super catchy slithery guitar melody, the chorus that will stick in your head only slightly more than the verse, there's warm chiming harmonics, the sound lush and layered, hell, there's even some cowbell in there, and it rules! And as if the song wasn't catchy enough, near the end the band toss in a whole other part, that's somehow even catchier than the song proper. The second part of the aforementioned one-two punch is just as good, with it's slow build opening, and weirdly syncopated verses, wreathed in tangly spidery guitars, some cool crunchy riffage, and again, super memorable vocals, and impossibly hooky melodies, and then after some soaring falsetto vox, and some shredding noise guitar, they do the same thing here too, tossing in a part right near the end, two parts in fact, that are SO crazy catchy, any other band would have turned them into their own songs. But instead, it's just a barrage of constant catchiness that we can guarantee, doesn't lose anything, even after literally hundreds of listens.
And while we could go song by song, we'll just nerd out over one other one, the awesomely titled "Rich People Ballad", which sounds again like it was transported here from 1995, with its crunchy super distorted J Mascis style guitar shredding, its lilting moody indie rock brood, not to mention, yet another classic pop chorus, super heavy guitars, wild drumming, the sort of song you might have expected to hear from Weezer circa the blue record, and yeah, it's that good. And these three songs have gotten so much play, we barely made it to the rest of the record, but there's so much more good stuff lurking further in. "You Clean Up Nice" threatens to give those first three a run for their money, with its flanged riffage, and classic pop hook-age, then there's "Dreaming Man II" which slows things down, even adds harmonica (!!) for something a bit more swoonsome and twang flecked, heck there's even some shimmery slide guitar too, and then comes "Feedback", which is all quirky organ driven garage rock, but peppered with cool oddball pop moments, sounding almost baroque at times, and laced with some seriously heavy noise pop blowouts throughout. There a few more seriously rocking noise pop blowouts... plus throughout, Beach Boys like vocals, Beatle-esque harmonies, and on one track a little Camper Van Beethoven (!), all get woven into the mix... Every song here a gem, worth it alone already for those first four for sure, but really Cartoon Violence is truly one of those rare pop records that really is all killer and no filler, AT ALL.
So totally essential... Indie rock / noise pop nirvana! And for some of us here (Andee in particular), this has been almost the only thing that gets listened to literally every day, for going on six months now... Which is obviously about the highest recommendation we can give...
The jackets are really nice too, the aforementioned amazing artwork with some super cool (and subtle) metallic ink printing, and includes a download code too!
Daniel Higgs is a very strange man. Or maybe we should say, Daniel (Arcus Incus Ululat) Higgs, Interdimensional Song-Seamstress, is a very strange man. His artwork is amazing and bizarre, Spock ears and eye-balled Christmas trees, emaciated figures riding strange hellish beasts, an amazing personal mythology represented as a menagerie of impossible and impossibly beautiful figures and beasts. His music seems to somehow embody the same mystery, a world that Higgs inhabits simultaneously to his presence in our own. That must be the only thing that can truly explain the man and his music. That he walks around, one foot in our world, of people places and things, the other in some kaleidoscopic world where sounds are tasted and sights are smelled, a synesthetic wonderland, that when translated and brought over to our plain of existence, appears distorted, twisted, haunting and hard to fathom. But at the same time imbued with some otherworldly warmth and a beauty that while alien, represents a higher state, maybe unreachable here. That is Higgs' gift. He is a traveler and a troubadour. He allows us to see visions, to hear musical mysteries. Through paintings, drawings, tattoos and especially music. From the moment we first heard his 'rock' band Lungfish we were smitten. Actually, the very first time we heard Lungfish was in a record store in another town, years ago. Our first thought was "What the hell is this?" But after several more songs, we were compelled to sheepishly approach the counter and ask the clerk what was playing. We bought it, and loved it. And maybe that's the magic of Higgs' music. It's esoteric and not always approachable. It takes some trust, a leap of faith, some sonic daring. But that faith is always repaid many times over. Outside of Lungfish, Higgs also plays in the Pupils along with his Lungfish bandmate Asa, a more intimate stripped down version of his rock band. The same cyclical riffs and chant like vocals, but all acoustic, and sparsely arranged. There is also his amazing sort-of Appalachian solo guitar work, and his very very strange solo Jew's harp recordings.
This disc is Higgs' first proper solo release and manages to tie up all his disparate sonic threads into one big gorgeous Gordian knot.
Several tracks sound like they could have come straight off the Pupils record. Simple, haunting acoustic guitar riffs, repeated and repeated until they becomes totally hypnotic, mantra like, with Higgs' gorgeous vocals over the top, a mix of old timey sea shanty and folk standard. The rest drift dreamily from sound to sound, like a sonic journey through the soul of the man. Gorgeous tangles of banjo or some banjo-like instrument drift amidst field recordings of birds (knowing Higgs it may have been actually recorded right there in the woods, although he has been known to travel with a portable recorder to capture whatever strikes his fancy) a steel string buzz, that wanders from near traditional sounding Appalachian twang to some sort of jaunty Celtic melody to brief melodic flurries, impossibly buzzy and blurry. Thick swaths of buzzing guitar swirl and squirm, doomy, melancholy melodies spread out over a machine like whir, sounding like a guitar being played like a bagpipe. While over the top drifts tiny tangles of steel string picking all drenched in strange FX and allowed to twist and distort, sounding almost the way a Jew's harp does when you change the shape of your mouth. And as if pre-ordained (which it most likely was), out comes the Jew's harp, but it sounds like no Jew's harp you've ever heard. Super brittle and distorted, like some sort of metallic marimba, or a Konono outtake broadcast via shortwave and played through a crappy transistor radio. A gorgeous buzzy abstract hoedown. Finally, the record winds up (most definitely not down) with a thick swirl of super lo-fi psych guitar freakout, the chords and notes bent and twisted, pitches slipping back and forth, overtones subtly shifting, notes colliding and exploding into little bursts of jagged buzz before settling back into a droning hypnotic thrum. Like some alien jig, if aliens had a practice space full of strangely tuned guitars and really loud amps with blown speakers. And again, it sounds like somehow Higgs figured out a way to hold the guitar up to his mouth and play it like a Jew's harp, the sounds changing shape as much as tone, a warm and fuzzed out smear of distorted buzz that washes over you, as does this whole sonic scripture, like a shower of rich wet soil and sparkling uncut diamonds.
The return of our favorite modern day shamen, Mr. Daniel�Arcus Incus Ululat Higgs, maybe better known to some of you as Dan Higgs, the vocalist for the mighty Lungfish, or perhaps Higgs, the world renowned tattoo artist (now retired). A man who wears many hats: vocalist, painter, tattoo artist, poet, guitarist, master of the Jew's Harp, and who knows what else. We made Higgs' last full length�Ancestral Songs record of the week last year, and since this one is just as good, if not better, we figured it deserved the same honor.�
Truly one of the few modern day troubadours, Higgs is a mysterious traveling man, he'll occasionally show up at the store, looking as dapper and disheveled as ever, with tales of various explorations or experiences. The last time he stopped by, he had a little hand held tape recorder, and he had just returned from India, where he spent the whole time recording street musicians and crowds and animals and anything else that struck his fancy.�
His music has the same quality, a sort of restless rootlessness, that is at once warm and familiar, but strangely alien and indescribable. On�Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, Higgs manages to weave all of his disparate sonic interests together into one seamless whole. Buzzing raga guitars, strange lo-fi field recordings, Jew's harp, all in varying states of fidelity, but the recording, the sound quality, the location and the background noise are as much a part of the music as the music itself.�
Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot begins with a burst of static, like a strong wind on a microphone, before Higgs' guitar begins to buzz like some snake charming ritual, an Eastern tinged Appalachia, a rustic raga, the string buzzing, lots of distortion and shifting overtones creating all sorts of glorious tonal color. Ragged and ramshackle but completely mesmerizing. The second track is a dizzying seasick assemblage of wheezing harmonium and pounded chimes, atonal melodies and streaks of feedback, eventually fading out and leaving just Higgs' guitar to buzz and shimmer, a sprawling sun balked stretch of gorgeously pastoral Appalachia. "Spectral Hues" is a stuttering collage of manipulated tones, using just the record and stop buttons on a tape player, a primitive swirl of tones, transformed into a haunting melody, each note separated by the weird swoop and bbbzzzzt of the button being depressed. The title track is Higgs in full on electric guitar mode, or at least what sounds like an electric guitar, wailing and howling chaotically, unfurling some sort of old time jig, before again fading into a 'nother steel string workout, this one distinctly Indian sounding, a dense tangled raga, the notes overlapping and the strings' buzz smearing the sounds into thick swaths of sonic blur. "Creation Moan" is another tripped out psychguitar freakout. A buzzing overdriven squall of tangled upper register skree and low end rumble, what sounds like some traditional folk song transformed into snarling, squirming, grinding crumbling distorted buzz. And finally the nine minute final track, a swirling ambient� drift, running water, some finger picked guitar, that suddenly winks out, leaving a wavering buzzscape, above which Higgs' Jew's Harp weaves haunting alien melodies, sometimes buzzing and reverberating, other times, speaking in tongues as Higgs sings into it. So haunting and unlike anything we've ever heard. Yet at the same time so strangely soothing, meditative and dreamlike.
It's always such a joy to step into Higgs' world, like traveling through the looking glass, or falling down the rabbit hole, and on the other side, in the mysterious world Higgs calls home, a world which we can only visit, and even in visiting, only see what hovers on the surface, we wander wide eyed and open eared, trying to take in everything we can before the record ends and we are pulled back into home, where we wait patiently for our next visit...
As if that weren't enough, the cd version comes with a full color hardcover book of Higgs' paintings and 'poetry', a series of cryptic acrostics to be more accurate. The�Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot series of paintings are all, like most of Higgs' work, strange and wondrous, here the focus is on enigmatic amorphous shapes, vividly colored, with all manner of textures and designs, stripes, polka dots, some of the shapes look like whales or fish, others like mushrooms, eyeballs, amoebas, shapeless heads, each filled with symbols, colors and patterns. The accompanying acrostics are cryptic and it's difficult to determine if they are related to the paintings they are beside, MUSIC, BIRDS, MIND, EDEN, PEACE, EMBRYO, BELOVED, COITUS... all offering up mysterious pearls of wisdom like "Always braid your silver serpents" or "Existence manifests between ravenous yellow orbs".�
The perfect visual accompaniment to Higgs' raw and primitive musical rituals...
Way back in 2002 we listed a record by Norway's Hlidolf, who whipped up (or, er... down) a slow motion swirl of spacey, dark, drifty, deep, and droney doom sludge. Channelling Earth 2, SUNNO))), Lustmord, Klaus Schulze and the like. Obviously it was a huge AQ fave. Unfortunately that release seems to have faded and disappeared into the ether, but thankfully we now have this epic three track disc from Hjarnidaudi, who are the rightful sonic heirs to the space doom drone throne once occupied by Hlidolf (due in no small part to this being the new project of Hlidolf's Vidar Ermesjo). But where Hlidolf was all darkness and doom, winter and wastelands, Hjarnidaudi is white hot light and blinding bursts of fuzz and sparkle, like the impossible birth of a new universe. Sure it's still slow and doomy, but much like the recent Fleshpress III record, this is a doom band moving beyond the confines of pure doom. Huge expansive stretches of majestic slow moving melody, a sort of doom certainly, but instead of murky downtuned gurgling sludge, these doomscapes are constructed from jagged buzzy brittle slabs of crystalline guitars, brief explosive smears of almost ambient fuzz, held together by an impossibly glacial rhythm section. Sunroof! by way of Esoteric, a shoegazer SUNNO))), a WAY less propulsive Jesu, or Skepticism broadcast through the M83 soundsystem. A gloriously thick and rich, warm and shimmering expanse of stretched out buzzing guitars, dreamy melodies, minor key and melancholy, but with a strangely warm embrace. If most sludge-doom-death-drone is like dunking your head in a tarpit, the world a dripping black dirge, Hjarnidaudi is like falling into the Sunn, hot and blinding, the world splintering into a million tiny sparkling pieces.
Limited to 750 copies, packaged in a mini lp style sleeve wrapped in a hand stamped brown paper outer sleeve.
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Another out of left field record that just knocked our blocks off. Not sure what we were expecting, something super noisy and fucked up actually, but what we got was some totally irresistible sloppy chaotic garage power pop, that actually sort of ends up sounding a bit like noise rock guys unleashing their inner power pop demons. Before we go any further though, listen to the first sound sample, "Two Steps", we'll wait...
Man that song destroys, some of you have probably already added this to your cart, heck, that's what we would have done, there's no resisting that one, easily THE pop jam of the year, we've literally listened to that song about 50 times in the last week, so much that it wasn't until a couple days ago that we finally listened to that whole record, which thankfully revealed a whole 'nother bunch of killer pop chaos, not to mention some even more chaotic off kilter noisiness.
Let's talk about that song first, it's definitely the best song on the record, and we would gladly pay $14 for a one sided single with JUST that song, it's pretty much the most perfect pop song we've heard in forever, with wild almost cracking vocals, some incredible riffing, including a weird slippery almost slide part that gives us chills every time, sloppy drumming, and a killer tempo shift part way through that's just fucking perfect. And the hook, that song has been stuck in our head non stop since the first time we heard it.
But after you get it out of your system and listen to it 20 or 20 or 50 times, the rest of the record will reveal itself as a pretty much non stop kick ass punky power pop gem, like some eighties pop record transported through time. but on the way it got all tangled up in the slipstream with some random noise and garage rock records and emerged like, well, THIS.
"Other Side Of The Street" is a short sharp ultra distorted pop jam, with a punky frame but laced with all sorts of amazing hooky guitar melodies, "Route 18" (after the 3 minutes of near silence that is "Live Outside") is total bubblegum FM radio pop, but all twisted up and tweaked, and just like the other tracks, it's the extra guitar that turns it into something super special, adding some super rad melodic filigree. It's hard to not hear some Guided By Voices and other purveyors of lo-fi pop, but this isn't traditionally lo-fi, it doesn't sound muddy and 4-tracky and much as it just sound ramshackle and haphazard, and if there are hints of those other lo-fi rockers, these guys definitely make it their own, plus there's the weird extra noisy parts which manage to fit perfectly, not disrupting the flow at all, rather highlighting the subtle noisiness in the poppiest tracks, while hiding some serious poppery within the various layers of crunch and howl, the angular no-wave opener "Nest Of Vipers", with its sampled broken glass, fucked-with tape speed, mumbled vocals, super blown out drumming, and dreamy hushed detuned piano backward outro, "A Different Touch" is super in-the-red, the drums so distorted they sound like bursts of radio static, the guitars practically melting, but the whole thing wrapped around some killer hooks, with amazing guitar melodies, an impossibly noise drenched murk-pop blow out, and that's basically the magic of Home Blitz, the practically perfect pop is infused with noise and on the verge of total implosion, while the fucked up noise jams are infused with pop, threatening to shed the noise completely and explode into another burst of wild eyed power pop. If these guys went in a real studio and spent a fortune, it's almost possible to imagine them getting huge, but smooth out the rough edges and it just wouldn't be the same band.
Absolutely killer noisepop, and yet another record to add to our year end faves list...
On first listen, it's hard to believe that this is the legendary punk artifact that music geeks everywhere speak of in hushed, reverent tones. Not because it's not good, it is. It's great in fact. It's just not all that...weird...or avant garde, really. Recorded in 1978, this stuff sounds like it should've been at the top of the charts. And it probably would have been too were it not for their purposefully provocative monicker. And it seems that this, along with the Homosexuals' willful obscurity is what turned what is essentially an amazingly catchy pop punk band into collector snob fodder. But ultimately that is neither here nor there, we're just glad this got reissued because this record rules! Sonically well in line with their contemporaries, the Buzzocks, the Damned, the Undertones, the Adicts, the Jam and the like, the Homosexuals opted to infuse their bouncy angular punkish pop, with bizarre surreal lyrics, occasional creative production techiniques, some retarded sounding harmonica and wickedly sharp guitar riffing making them stand out, and perhaps causing them to remain on the fringe. But beyond that, the Homosexuals were simply a great band writing great songs, songs that were charged and intense, due in no small part to band tension, and with a wild vocalist with a voice part Feargal Sharkey, part Howard Devoto and part Olga from the Toy Dolls. Don't be intimidated by the hype/legend/collectability of the Homosexuals, or you might just miss out on a really amazing record.
Note to consumers: if you're a HUGE Homosexuals fans, be aware that in a few months (exact release date as yet uncertain) there will be a Homosexuals triple cd box set entitled Astral Glamour available, which should include ALL of the material found on this cd, plus plenty of other obscurities and unreleased stuff. However, most people will be perfectly happy with this disc alone, containing as it does all of the crucial Homosexuals tracks.
Pearl Mystic is the first we've heard from this UK psych rock outfit, and just describing them as 'psych rock' probably has most aQ psych-nerds frothing at the mouth, imagining long sprawling sheets of swirling guitar shimmer, and droned out, heart-of-the-sun mega space jams, and while that stuff is definitely part of Hookworms' sound, those are not the only parts, the band tending toward a sound much more song based and focused, sure fans of Carlton Melton and the Heads and White Hills and all the rest will no doubt dig, but so will folks more into outfits like Spiritualized and Psychic Ills. Imagine a strange fusion of Spiritualized's long-form tranced out psych soul mesmer, and the more blown out sonic explorations of those other above mentioned bands and you'll get a rough idea of what's in store for you from Hookworms.
Opener "Away/Towards" is the perfect opening blast, displaying both sides of the groups' sound in equal measure, the first few minutes, presumably the "Away" portion, finds Hookworms unfurling a slow, undulating dronescape of Spacemen 3 like guitar pulsations, over a bed of churning tribal rhythms, and a sky full of weird super FX heavy yowled vox, the sound a brooding slow build, that eventually explodes into full on space/psych pound, the guitars wild and fierce, everything wreathed in clouds of dense drugged out swirl, but that only last for less than a minute before the sound shifts gears again, moving into what can only be the "Towards" section, with the sound settling into something less crunchy and chaotic, and more woozy and washed out, pulsing and motorik, the guitars a bit muted, and now wrapped in whirring swaths of chordal organ, the vocals, still echo-ey, but much more 'sung', totally tranced out and hypnotically groovy, at one point getting kinda swaggery, with a soaring chorus, and some cool stretches of guitar buzz sixties style garage-drone psych groove, that we can not get enough of. And that's just the first song.
That swagger definitely informs much of the rest of the record, with the sound shifting easily from Stooges-y like stomp, to tripped out Moon Duo like mesmer, to explosive, blown out, noise drenched heavy psych crumble (check out the end of "Form And Function"!), to woozy, bongsmoke swirled, zoner psych drift, all dreamy and droney, often touching on all of those in a single track. The record is peppered with title-less interludes, which are cool abstract stretches of experimental guitar drift, and wild FX drenched freeform, backwards FX laced ambience, and murky, drug-drong dreamdrift mesmer. Those interludes alone could have easily been stretched out and expanded into their own record (also most likely an aQ ROTW!), but it's the songs here that drive Pearl Mystic, from the murky, psych ballad "In Our Time" that almost sounds like Sub Pop era Afghan Whigs recast as modern retro psych, with its crooned, reverby vocals, prickly distorted guitars, and gorgeous backdrop of lush psychedelic swirl, to the epic slow burn Spacemen 3 style drug-rock dirge, infused with lush, soaring, swirling shimmer, and driven by some super mesmerzing motorik rhythms, all the various parts swirled and smeared into what might be the dreamiest, druggiest jam here, to the wild, tribal pound of "Preservation" with its yowled vox, clouds of fierce blown out psych guitar, fierce drumming, and its crushing, speaker melting final blow out that would most definitely give any and all other aQ approved psychedelic space rockers a run for their money.
Hookworms deftly balance actual songs, with wild, free-form, heavy space-psych excursions, an experiment that could easily have blunted both, but instead ends up the best of both worlds, and might just coax drugged out psych nerds into the light, and drag the psychedelic dabblers just a little bit toward the dark side. Awesome.
We have a long history of obsession with strange sounds from Scandinavia, whether it's all the hypnorock weirdness from Finland, grim blackness from Norway and Sweden or music performed on instruments made from ice, there's something about that stuff that we find irresistible. Not just sonically, but also conceptually. Which makes the provenance of this disc's arrival at aQ all the more wonderful. One day in the mail, a cd with a moose, standing in front of an open refrigerator, set amidst a sunset lit landscape of snow. On the back, drawings of men all wearing white hooded body suits, and all seemingly holding deer skulls and antlers. We were already sold, but the deal was sealed with the legend: "Originals and traditionals performed on stringed reindeer antlers." Which is exactly what this is, a series of haunting soundscapes, performed primarily on stringed and contact mic'd reindeer antlers, the strings and antlers bowed and plucked and scraped, those mysterious sounds accompanied by all manner of sticks, logs, rocks, bones and various field recordings, those field recordings giving the proceedings the air of some surreptitiously captured ancient ritual. There are more traditional instruments as well, drums, flutes, fiddles, guitars, but those are employed judiciously, and most often merely to color the background over which the antler skulls hum and thrum, shimmer and moan.
It's no surprise that David Tibet of Current 93 is a fan, and maybe even less of a surprise that so is�Fenriz of Darkthrone (who even did a '90s acid techno remix of 'em which works surprisingly well! Not included here, sadly...), the sound of Hornorkesteret definitely plays into C93's ritualistic ambient folk, and Darkthrone's Norwegian pride, but beyond that, the sounds here are unlike anything you've heard. If we had to compare it to anything, we might mention Avarus, No Neck Blues Band, the aforementioned ice instruments of Terje Isungset, there's definitely a murky, primitive, tribal krautrock vibe, not to mention a certain hauntological bent, especially on the first track (more on that in a second), but ultimately, this is some fantastic raw sonic exploration, a mysterious songsuite, atmospheric, haunting and strangely psychedelic in its own way.
This disc collects the group's best recordings from the last ten years, and begins with what might be the weirdest one, "Elegi For Roald Amundsen", which begins with a staticky shortwave broadcast, a lost radio transmission of a voices speaking in Norwegian, beneath which, the stringed antlers rumble and hum, weaving a dark shimmery drift, driven by a low pulsing thrum, all the while wreathed in a warm crackle, totally mesmerizing and strangely evocative of some impossible melding of ancient tribal ritual and 'modern' technology. It had us imaging some ancient Norwegian tribe, who discovered an old transistor radio, which they assumed must have come from the gods, and every mysterious broadcast was a message from beyond, which they paid tribute by accompanying on their bowed skulls and stringed antlers. Elsewhere, the group weave darkly meditative and ominously rhythmic soundscapes of thrum and rumble, over beds of rushing water and birdsong, or pounding stretches of almost Dead C worthy abstract atmospheric psychedelia, or groaning surreal ambience that reminds us quite a bit of an even more abstract take on Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste. The tracks vary greatly, from spare and minimal, to dense and rhythmic, at one point detouring into pure Norwegian folk, and at another into something almost funky, a sort of super rhythmic kraut-groove, but for the most part, spends the majority of its time in some haunting sonic otherworld, a transmission from a lost time, delivered in a lost language of sound, the stories and lives and memories conveyed via this strange music, performed on skulls and bones, captured here for eternity.
A while back we reviewed a crazy limited tape from Horseback, aka Jenks Miller, called Stolen Fire, which was a crazy good collection of odds and ends, random demos, electronic experiments, weird warped pop songs, the sort of stuff that's slowly been finding its way on to more and more Horseback records proper. Sadly, we were only able to get ten copies of the tape, which disappeared in a flash. When we contacted Miller to get more, after informing us the tape was gone, he did let us know that it would be coming out cd eventually. And here it is, as part of a triple cd set! Including said tape, a whole disc of live recordings, and a disc of rarities, splits and singles, from splits with Voltigeurs, Pyramids, Locrian and other aQ faves. Might as well start with Stolen Fire since that's what got us all excited about this set in the first place.
The opening track is a super minimal, drum machine driven chunk of stripped down skeletal kraut-pop, woozy and laid back, spidery guitar melodies, a weary crooned vocal, darkly dreamy and subtly psychedelic. The follow up is a strange chunk of gristly industrial ambience, all hiss and crackle and high end skree, like an amp feeding back in the rain, with just a bit of those weird garbled vocals that were all over the last Horseback record, doused in FX and reverb. The rest of the side unfurls like the opener, looped rhythms, subtle shifting textures, a little bit tribal, sometimes sounding like recent aQ faves Silent Servant, a definite dark techno vibe to some of the proceedings, everything wreathed in a softly distorted haze, all kinda krauty and darkly hypnotic, with the occasional even poppier jams emerging from the murk, all Casio drum machine and shimmery eighties chords, one of those jams sounds a bit like the love theme from some mysterious B-movie, when the main melody comes in, it's almost like James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, which is not a bad thing at all, just unexpected. There's weirdly crooned vox popping up throughout, that suits the music to a T. There are brief bits of super distorted atmospheric heaviness, blissed out blackened, and in some cases quite dreamy.
The 'Destroyed Demo Version' of "North Star Struck", which we dug so much on the tape, is present, and still has us envisioning blown out crumble and in-the-red crunch, and while it's not quite that, it is pretty awesomely dirgey and fuzzy, a dark sprawl of tranced out hypno-rock, like Circle on downers, the whole thing wreathed in clouds of cosmic FX and wild sci-fi squiggles, woozy organ melodies, all around that churning kraut-drone groove, and it never lets up, the sound locks in and plays out until the rock begins to fade, leaving just pulsing electronics and a staticky cloud of gristly haze. So great! And "Transparency (Murdered Again)", another track from the tape we loved, is more of the same, a gauze-y, heady drift of psychedelic shimmer, wheezing chords and spidery twang, which is soon joined by a strangely looped rhythm, the sounds all coalescing into a strangely stuttering minimal zoner groove, another track that sounds like warped, zombified Circle, slowed way down, a seriously hypnotic sprawl of hypno kraut mesmer. In addition to the tracks from the tape, there are a bunch of extra unreleased tracks and previously unreleased versions, and even though they aren't proper Horseback songs, like we said in our review of the tape,they might be some of the coolest stuff we've heard from Horseback yet!
And heck, that's just one of the three discs! The singles and rarities disc is pretty stellar as well, and includes a bunch of tracks from singles we never knew existed, as well as tracks from a few we've reviewed, not to mention a Stooges cover!! The two tracks from the split with Voltigeurs are some sort of alien black prog. The first all buzzing guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, and lots of ELP style organs (!), which transforms the sound into something way weirder, and frankly way cooler. The organs swirl and pulse and buzz over murky drum pound and those blackened shrieks, those blackened sounds slowed down, like some bizarre mash up of Burzum at 16rpm and ELP at 33, the keyboards make the sound more psychedelic and spacey, and fuse perfectly into a gloriously twisted hybrid, one that is peppered with squalls of freaked out psychedelic noise, and culminates in a gorgeous Burzumic outro, all blown out drone riffage and buried anguished howls, mesmerizing and mysterious. The second track is soaring and epic and a little blackened, but sounds more static, more like a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone, draped over blasting beats nearly lost in the churn and swirl, harsh vox here too, the overall sound extra distorted, glimmery and glistening and downtuned and crumbling, as if the signal is way too hot for the speakers, which makes it sound noisier for sure, but also mesmerizingly psychedelic. The HB track from the split with Pyramids is a feral blast of black metal, a frantic blast beat beneath buzzing guitars that almost sounds more like blackened gypsy folk than black metal proper, until the vokills come in, and the demonic shriek clears that all up, before changing gears half way through and transitioning into a gorgeously decayed crumbling distorted dronescape. Then there's the track from their split 7" with Locrian, a hazy droned out raga, centered around a glorious high end drone, all shimmer and reverberation, the sound sun dappled and gloriously effulgent, very much like Sunroof!, mesmerizing and dreamlike, to which HB adds, some twisted gnarled vocals, all hissy and demonic, wreathing the whole thing in little melodic tendrils, the sound blissed out and gauzy, the blackness seemingly held at bay by this shining sonic light, the sort of track that we could listen to forEVER. HB's track from the 4 way split tape on Handmade Birds with Njiqahdda, Venowl and Cara Neir is also included, sounding like it could have come right off of their Half Blood record. Rhythmic and hypnotic, bass and drum locked into a sort of hypnorock groove, laced with fluttering flutes, weird electronics, swirling shimmering melodies, when the guitar comes in, it's sort of washed out and droney, giving the track an almost Earth-like vibe, the overall sound is like a super cyclical krautrock styled minimalism, with an epic second half, replete with those shrieked black metal vox. And there's of course more more more!!
Finally, the third disc features two long tracks, the first a 20 minute live performance of the first HB record, "Impale Golden Horn", recorded in 2007 in North Carolina, and it's a dreamy sprawl of softly smoldering burnished thrum and rumble, laced with dreamike psychedelic filigree and soft chordal swells, which leads perfectly into the previously unreleased 40+ minute "A Plague Of Knowing", which is a gorgeous sprawling Sunroof-style ur-drone, a dreamy psychedelic soft noise haze that swirls and shimmers and blurs into billowing clouds of blissed out drift!
Comes in a fold out 8 panel digipak style sleeve, withe some seriously extensive liner notes!!!
We initially reviewed the first disc of this 2cd set way back in 2007 and proclaimed it "absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc", and lest we forget, Relapse has printed that right on the front of this reissue, which takes that record, and bundles it with a super limited cassette release from 2010 called Forbidden Planet, available on cd for the very first time, originally a tape that was so limited we never actually got ANY copies at all. So this reissue seemed destined to be a Record Of The Week, that classic Horseback debut available again, and what essentially amounts to a whole new full length that most folks never got their hands on either. Here's what we had to say about Impale Golden Horn when we first heard it way back in 2007:
Drone records are a dime a dozen. Not that we don't love drone records, we do. In fact, often we're way too easy on the purveyors of drone, since the very essence of that sound, is so simple, and yet so completely satisfying to listen to. A guitar against the amp, a handful of keys on a keyboard held down, a loop cycled over and over and over, almost any sound smeared into a near static drift, we could listen to that stuff forever, and often do. But it's the rare drone record that uses the drone as just the jumping off point, as a foundation upon which to build a fragile and ephemeral structure of minimal melody and movement, instead of the beginning AND end. Stars Of The Lid are a good example, as is William Basinski, Tim Hecker and a handful of others.
Horseback too. We were sent this disc out of the blue and immediately fell in love. Only later to discover that this was the work of a faithful AQ mailorder customer by the name of Jenks Miller! Small world. Horseback is most definitely a drone record, but manages to incorporate plenty of not specifically drone-like sounds. At once massive and dense, dark and distorted, but also ephemeral and airy, soaring and dreamlike. The root of the sound is a guitar, or guitars, allowed to reverberate and ring out, unfurling billowing clouds of distorted buzz and whir, that settles on the speaker like a thick blanket of snow, glistening and blinding, but at the same time warm and enveloping. The guitars pulse and swell, melodies drifting in and out, streaks of feedback, all wound up into a huge softly roiling glowing orb of sound.
It's almost unfair to call this a drone record, as it's so lush, and rich, and full of motion, sprawling out like some sort of sonic sunrise, the sounds gradually changing color, everything shifting and shimmering and transforming subtly as the record progresses. So much more than just a simple 'drone' record. In fact, it's easy to hear Galaxie 500, Spacemen 3, Loop, Flying Saucer Attack, that sort of spaced out doped up drift, all smeared into Horseback's haunting sun dappled world of slow burning sound.
Elsewhere piano drifts amidst the dense guitar swells, and rhythms are provided by pulsing guitars and various sounds beating against one another. Vocals hover way below the surface, barely audible, but adding another layer of lilting mystery, near the end, the guitars peel back gradually revealing a blurry expanse of swirling cymbals and splattery free jazz percussion, all spread out into a buzzy sizzling swirl, over which the final haunting piano notes drift and fade. So gorgeous. Absolutely one of our favorite new records, a practically perfect fade-out-drift-off-drone-dream-disc
Then there's Forbidden Planet. By now, the one thing we've learned about Horseback is that their sound seems to change dramatically with every record, gorgeous hazy drones on one release, buzzing blasting black metal on the next, so it's really impossible to predict what the next record will sound like. Which makes pairing two Horseback records together an interesting challenge. Forbidden Planet opens up with what might be the perfect balance of the two, buzzing layered guitars, wound into a heavy slice of dark metallic drone, but laced with hellishly growled black metal vokills, as if that weren't far out enough, there's also shards of glitchy electronics, a weird industrial component, which just adds a whole other vibe. Cuz minus those strange sounds, it begins to sound like black metal loosed from any rhythms and slowed way down, and thus transformed into a sort of buzzing black dronemusic, which does seems to be the theme of the whole record, blackened riffing pulled apart and stretched into sprawling expanses of majestic buzz, laced with weird vox, rumbling basslines, and streaks of feedback. In some ways it reminds us of Mick Barr's Ocrilim, which did something similar, taking just the riffs, that distinctly epic and majestic minor key black metal style riffery, and repeating, looping, layering, and transforming it into something much more abstract and minimal. Which is definitely what's going on here. But Horseback sounds more organic, the sounds more raw, bleeding into each other, the distinction between notes and riffs gradually blurring, until these tracks are transformed into something much more woozy and psychedelic, heavy and heady. Thankfully, the vocals are way down in the mix, so while their presence does indeed further the black metal vibe, they gradually blend into the background, becoming just another layer of sound, woven into Horseback's thick undulating blackened buzzscape. And it's not until the final track, a brief 3 minute outro, that the buzz and howl are peeled back, leaving a gorgeously hazy bit of soft focus shimmer to finish things off. Quite gorgeous, and in its own way, a pretty perfect companion to Impale Golden Horn. Needless to say, absolutely recommended...
Hot Snakes' second release on Swami Records is finger lickin' good! Yow! Rick and John (both ex-Drive Like Jehu) have enlisted a new drummer, Mario Rubalcaba (ex-pro-skateboarder and ex-Clickitat Ikatowi) since former drummer Jason left for the Burning Brides. Hot Snakes also now feature San Diego rock luminary Gar Wood (Beehive and the Barracudas) on bass. Man this band totally kicks ass!!! What else can we say? Imagine the Godlike Drive Like Jehu, but stripped down to its garage rock bare bones, but sacrificing none of the fury or intensity or musical chops. Raw and catchy and makes you want to just jump up and down and bang your head and wiggle like crazy. The recording of Audit In Progress awesomely captures their fired-up energy and offers an accurate taste of their live show. I saw them recently here in San Francisco -- all types of new HS fans and older Jehu fans were going totally bananas. This album and their live show will kick you in your face and you'll be begging for more! Plus it's always nice when bands actually produce their own artwork instead of just stealing someone else's, or hiring some crappy graphic designer. Rick Froberg, HS's singer/illustrator/animator is an incredibly talented and respected artist in addition to being a wicked rock frontman. The last Hot Snakes record was so perfect who would have thought the ante could be upped. But upped it has been...it's been upped...well, you know what we're saying. This record rules! And this band just keeps getting better and better. Buy this now!
This just might be the coolest, weirdest sort-of-soul record EVER. It took us a while to check this out though, because once again, we found ourselves being overly resistant to popular consensus, our first impulse when super hyped records are concerned, is to assume that for whatever reason, people have been fooled into digging something due to above mentioned extreme hype, hell we've definitely fallen for that before. Or at the very least, we sometimes think, whatever record it is, it's probably not nearly as good as people are making it out to be. Cuz really, how super original and interesting and fucked up and far out could something be and still manage to appeal to folks not normally into things fucked up and far out? Apparently plenty. And that said, we LOVE to proven wrong, and boy should we have checked this out sooner. This is a gloriously mysterious and murky collection of druggy, psychedelic, slow-mo soul, long expanses of crackly drones, and what sounds like R&B 45's spinning at 16rpm, wheezing synths, reverbed shimmer, deep sinister basslines, hazy ambience, crumbling distortion, stuttery loops, stripped down skeletal beats, and some gorgeously washed out soulful vox. All wrapped in thick swaths of gauzy hum and shimmer, blurred and smeared and washed out, totally ghostlike and spectral, but still so goddamn soulful.
Similar to the soul infused dubstep of Burial, HTDW create these gorgeous little chunks of soulful slow motion drift, those heavily effected and distorted falsetto vox hovering over warped and warbly bits of muted melody, female vox offer up plenty of oooh's and aaaah's, the voices choral and angelic, seeming to fade into a softly roiling swirl muted blackness in the background, swaths of mumbled low end throb and pulse and undulate dreamily, there are bits of piano, haunting and elegiac, the arrangements are delicate, the sound impossibly lush, alien and otherworldly, but so darkly familiar and emotional and intimate, the sound equal parts Antony And the Johnsons, Pop Ambience, the warped warble of witch house, the twisted popsmithery of folks like Ariel Pink, the deep stuttery soulfulness of Burial and other likeminded dubsteppers and of course classic old time soul, all melted down into a thick sonic morass, that oozes and flows, a glacial, sun dappled, moonlit, lysergic soulful psychedelic murk, that while indeed muted and muddy and blurry and bleary, still manages to glow, and pulse, emitting rays of sonic light, this is not miserable music, for all its ghostly abstraction and mysterious darkness, the music of How To Dress Well is gorgeous, and romantic, and full of life, and energy, and emotion.
There are always gonna be special bands, the ones that hold a unique place in your heart. That band you heard when you were on a trip. The band you have loved since the first time you heard them. The band whose songs featured heavily on that mix tape. And then any variation of the 'first' band, the band whose show you were at the first time you got drunk, laid, high, the night you met 'the one', then there's the band whose songs are always stuck in your head, the first -any genre here- band you ever liked, the band that helped you make it through that breakup / rehab / depression / that tough time in your life. But then there's the sort of band you have that weird protective proprietary selfish love for. The band only you like. The band you don't want everyone else listening to. The band you discovered and only you truly love. You know what we mean. It's a rare band that can inspire that sort of love and dedication. Well, we're a little embarrassed to admit it, but we sort of felt that way about Hwyl Nofio. A friend in the UK turned us on to them years back, and from the moment we first laid ears on them, we were smitten, obsessed even. This mysterious outfit crafting these dark and ominous worlds of strange and beautiful sound. It was hard to not keep it all to ourselves, this dark cave of sound that we could explore and call our own. But we like to think we've outgrown that sort of stuff, since we get as much satisfaction from turning other folks on to new music as we do discovering it for ourselves. More so in most cases. But it definitely speaks to the power of Hwyl Nofio, and the effect of their murky and mysterious music has on our ears, and brains, and hearts and souls.
Hounded By Fury is record number four from this UK drone outfit. The band is mostly the work of one man, Steve Parry, who handles the bulk of the sound making, utilizing all manner of guitars: strummed, plucked, bowed, adapted and otherwise, ukulele, piano, organs: church and otherwise, viola, bass and electronics, while a series of guests add their two cents with saxophone, Chinese guzheng, acoustic guitar processing, imagined banjo (?) and midi fractal image converter (!). Recorded at various locations including an old church Hounded By Fury is a definitely a drone record at its heart, but it's what the band do with those drones that makes Hwyl Nofio so special.
The sound this time around is a bit more ominous than on past outings. There's more scraping and scrabbling steel strings, a sort of grinding industrial screech that surfaces in some form or another on many of the tracks, sometimes right up front, a keening high end wail, sometimes just another element in a multilayered droneworld, subtly blended into a slow sleepy swirl with thee rest of the sounds.
The opening track is the former, with steel strings singing as they are scraped and scratched, a shrill screech stretched taut over a warm reverberant low end, strange tinkling wooden chimes and twinkling music box melodies, while in the background a moaning mournful melody, strummed softly so that the strums blend together. From that point on, it's a slow journey through a nighttime world of slow burn jazz minimalism a la Bohren, buzzing raga like rumble, and abstract ambient flutter. Layers of bowed strings sit atop minimal pulsing rhythms, a minimal throb usually constructed from one or two notes, long sustaining tones are stretched out side by side, the overtones shimmering and shifting, the resulting soundfield like drifting along some alien river, staring at a sky full of different stars, a head full of strange and unrecognizable sounds. Bizarre disembodied jangle is stripped of melody, until it's just a warm ridged texture, atonal Jandekian guitar figures warped and twisted, slowed down and sped up, sprinkled with cymbal sizzle and muted reverb ricochets, all stretched and twisted into various forms of drone.
One of the most intense tracks is "Child Woman", a choral sounding minor key lament, deep dark strings and mournful melodies, almost traditional settled as it is amidst an album of abstract experimental drone music., but very emotional and cinematic. It seems like a turning point for the record too as the next few tracks sound downright sunny, bright colors replace the dark, guitars twang, a trippy tangled slow motion free folk, the melodies not so dour, but the sunshine soon dims as black clouds fill the sky and timestretched metallic reverberations fill our ears like a million alarm clocks going off at once and then slowed down into a wall of alien trills, the mood shift is further enforced by some super sharp atonal guitars, swooping dizzily about, sounding a bit like the guitars on the Butthole Surfers' Hairway To Steven record, sort of damaged and deranged. But then the record's coda brings us back to Hwyl's soft shimmer, the delicate drone, a haunting ghostlike swoon, fuzzy and gauzey, obscured by falling rain, a dreamy drift into the void, a slow sad slide into the bright white, the pitch black left far behind.
Wow, we've been waiting for someone to tell the definitive story behind one of Korea's most influential but sadly obscure guitarists and bandleaders. How influential? Well, Fender Guitars has recently made the 72 year old psych-rock veteran his own Custom Shop Tribute Series Guitar - the sixth one ever, after Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. How obscure?
Well, every past review in which we've ever mentioned him, his name has had a slightly different spelling. We couldn't find much written about him except that he was considered the "Godfather of Korean Rock". His signature song, the 18 minute epic, "Beautiful Rivers And Mountains" has been featured on two other releases we reviewed but with different titles and lengths. An edited version closed the Asian installment of the Love, Peace and Poetry series under the title, "Korean Title A2" by Jung Hyun and The Men, and the Shin Jung Hyun and The Men cd we listed in the past, credits the song as "Beautiful Country", at least that one had the full length version.
The edited 10 minute version is featured here too, but it's understandable given that this is a compilation that highlights how multifaceted his career has been through this fertile 16-year period, often playing behind singers who got top billing (Kim Sun, Kim Jung Mi, Jang Hyun and Lee Jung Hwa) or in a variety of Ga-yo (pop-rock) groups (Golden Grapes. ADD4, Bloozetet, Club Date, The Donkeys, etc.), But Shin Joong Hyun's signature guitar style, moody and soulful, but with a fuzzy, distorted grooviness, is evident throughout. What's even more amazing is Hyun's arranging skills, often augmenting his guitar sound with trippy psych organ and big booming drum tones (check out the opening break on "The Man Who Must Leave" to see what we mean).
Hyun got his start in the late fifties when he found lucrative work playing on American army bases after the Korean War. The opening track "Moon Watching" is from that period. It also afforded him the opportunity to stretch out stylistically away from the Korean traditional pop sound, into more western influenced pop, R&B and psychedelic styles. But while Hyun's songwriting and arranging is often hook-inflected and groovy, there is a serious soulfulness to the songs that give them a powerful melancholic quality. For instance, Kim Jung Mi's "The Sun" sounds like a song Galaxie 500 might have ripped off and made their own (maybe they did?). Jang Hyun's "Sunset" could have easily been featured on that Forge Your Own Chains comp of Heavy Dirges we raved about recently too. As Hyun's career hit the seventies, he was more interested in expanding his guitar sound with his band and moving away from the shorter poppier numbers of his sixties past. "'J' Blues 72" is the longest track on here at 15 minutes and it's all just fuzzy acid-groove freakout.
But it's the title track here that takes the prize for most amazing song. One of our favorite Asian psych tracks ever, it's really interesting to hear the incredible story behind it, as it was sadly the song that led to Hyun's professional undoing and to the beginning of a seven year forced musical exile. It turns out a representative of the corrupt leader of South Korea, Park Jung-hee, called upon Hyun to write a song about him, but he refused. The leader than asked him to write a song about the government and Hyun refused again. So perplexed and understandably, a bit paranoid about the exchange, Hyun retreated and wrote his own song about his feelings toward his country and brought it to his band to record. Since it was an eighteen minute song recorded live, the process of recording was unusually grueling, because if any mistakes were made, the band had to start over. Getting it onto a release was difficult as well because of its length but was eventually added to the B side of the singer Jang Hyun's album, originally called Jang Hyun and The Men which Shin Hyun later renamed Shin Jung Hyun and The Men (which is why we figure there have been many different names of the song and credits). Finally having it recorded, Hyun had the opportunity to perform it on TV. The song, with its simple depictions of how Korea is made up of beautiful nature and people, angered the leader and led to a subsequent country-wide musical ban, and years of interrogation, probation and oppression, until the leader's eventual assassination in 1979. Shin Joong Hyun's return to music after this period has been slow and much more low-key.
Light In The Attic has done a tremendous job compiling these tracks and doing the research into Hyun's topsy-turvy life and career, even getting the man himself to annotate all the recordings with his own personal stories of how they came to be made. With a 40 page full color booklet with photos of record covers and all of the great pop acts Hyun worked with over the period. This is not just a great document of an amazing musician, but a great view into the sixties and seventies pop-world of a little documented region of Asian music. Fans of other old and new Asian psych we love like He 6, San Ul Lim, Korean Black Eyes, Mops, Acid Mothers Temple, Up-Tight, Onna, and Satoshi Sonoda will find much to love here. Highest Recommendation!
The second disc in Ice Cube's loftily titled "War & Peace" two volume opus, this could also be known as the 'party' disc of the two. I know that sounds like a bad thing, but man does this record kick ass. Cube's production has come a long way since the NWA days, sounding a lot more like Dr. Dre today (in fact, track one, 'Hello' is a Dre/Cube collaboration that sounds as good as anything on the recent Dre record). Still mean as shit, but with wickedly catchy hooks, the "Peace" disc is chock full of amazing stuff besides the ubiquitous radio staple 'You Can Do It' (everybody sing along: 'I can do it, put your ass in to it'), in fact, it's probably some of the best Cube since "Amerikkka's Most Wanted": 'You Ain't Gotta Lie (Ta Kick It), with some funny (for once) guest vocals from Chris Rock, 'The Gutter Shit', absolutely slammin; in fact with the exception of the Bone Thugs ballad collaboration, this whole record is all huge sick beats, Cube's intense in your face delivery, and way funny lyrics (I mean, when did you ever think you'd hear Ice Cube rap about Pokemon?) If you haven't seen Cube's hilarious Friday films, rent 'em. If you have, expect this disc to be the the aural equivalent (what Friday and Next Friday were to Boyz In The Hood, "Peace" is to NWA and "Amerikkka's Most Wanted").
Finally, a Chicago-style postrock band that doesn't traffic in the over-baked, quiet storming, Chuck Mangione meandering so prevalent these days. Instead, spartan and lovely instrumentals pay indirect homage to Steve Reich's phase patterns. So pleasant and yet so interesting, one of those few records that always sells when we play it and prompts customers to ask 'What is this?!' Highly recommended!!
We were recently visiting another store here in town, and were totally struck by whatever it was they were listening to. It was exactly the sort of thing we love here at aQ, it was creepy and dark and droney, sort of familiar, but totally strange and alien at the same time. Huge moaning horns, lots of incredibly low brass, emitting cacophonous groans, strange monk like chanting, it sounded a little like something we could have heard, maybe Hermann Nitsch, or Arvo Part, it was sort of choral, but also tribal, and those horns, it was like the sound they made was a physical entity, a brass wave filling the room, eventually we had to swallow our pride and ask just what the heck they were listening to. The answer was of course King Kong Vs. Godzilla. WTF?! KING KONG VS. GODZILLA? Now we love us our King Kong, and our cheesey, men-in-rubber-suits monster movies, but we certainly didn't remember the music being so... weird, and heavy, and haunting, and beautiful. Now that we've been listening to this soundtrack for a week or two, it's nearly impossible to imagine how this could be the music for a battle between those two classic movie monsters. And if we do, we can't help but imagine the typical clumsy rubber suited battles transformed into impossibly arty ballets, drenched in blacks and greys, gauzy and arty, like some hellish painting brought to life.
King Kong Vs. Godzilla, originally released in 1962, was the most maligned and misunderstood, as well as somehow the most successful of all the Godzilla movies. Unlike the films before it. KK Vs. G was a bit more light hearted (you would never know from the score!), the monster suits less scary, the whole film a subtle satire of Japanese commercialism. For it's American release it was tinkered with, chopped, edited and poorly dubbed. The result while obviously a far cry from the original's intent, resulted in a film that still appealed to the American market's love for cheesy monster movies and was thus a sucess here too.
Sadly though, when the film was re-edited for US release, the score was mostly replaced with music from The Creature From The Black Lagoon! Apparently that's not totally unheard of, since once a film is dramatically re-edited, the original music just doesn't sync up, but once you hear Ifukube's score it's impossible to imagine anyone wanting to replace it.
Since this is a soundtrack, there are definitely tracks that exist to support particular onscreen visuals, be it a melancholy bit of old timey jazz, some festive marching band music, a bit of playful calypso pop, some tribal drum / chant interludes, but for the most part, Ifukube's gives us a series of creepy, haunting orchestra driven chunks of dramatic moodiness, forboding and sinister, evoking not so much images of giant apes and lizards, but instead of human misery and terror, the frailty of human existence in the face of monsters and demons. Bleak and oppressive, funereal and somber, but with glimmers of hopefulness, and stretches of what sounds like resilliance in the face of doom, calls to arms, an amazingly emotional score for a monster movie, all conveyed via the aformentioned moaning horns swooping ominously above martial drumming and booming tympani's, balanced by bits of soaring strings and chanting vocals. We want to see this movie now so bad, but at the same time it almost seems like these sounds would be tainted, even though they were composed to accompany those specific images, having heard them on their own, the music has taken on it's own life, its own meaning, and exists fully realized simply as music, even (especially?) removed from it's visual counterpart.
We imagine that this was most likely re-released to coincide with the recent Peter Jackson King Kong remake, which is also probably why you won't find ANY images of King Kong anywhere in the booklet or on the sleeve. But don't let that keep you from discovering this amazing recording.
Extensive liner notes including the fascinating and convoluted history of the film as well as notes on each track.
Sidenote: Recognize the recurring theme? Check the sound sample for "Godzilla's Resurrection." We did the second we heard it, those low horns, that stacatto 'dun dun dundun'. It's the loop from Pharoahe Monch's 1999 hit "Simon Says" (which you might also remember as the song Sam Rockwell dances to in the first Charlie's Angels as he gets ready to torture Drew Barrymore)!
Ignatz II (or III if you count the recently reviewed I Will Soothe My Eye To Feast It With A Sight Of Beauty cd-r) heralds the return of our favorite alien Appalachian troubadour and another transmission of fuzzed out, obfuscated, FX laden, bedroom free folk outer space buzz and shimmer. Not too much has changed since I (a past AQ Record of the Week), but if anything, the sound of Ignatz has become even darker and more expansive, and somehow, impossibly more beautiful and mysterious. Another haunting and dreamily disorienting stopover in a musical journey to points unknown. While some of what you see or hear on II might sound familiar, it doesn't take too long before you realize that the sounds here are... well, different, off kilter, damaged, prettiness is present but summarily obfuscated. Bits of folks and blues surface here and there, but are slowly and methodically transformed into a whole new shapes and sounds. Every melody, at first warm and inviting, begins to twist and change, becoming some bastardized blues, sometimes broken down into jagged shards and stumbling cadences, other times splattered into glimmering glistening sonic sparkles.
The root of Ignatz's sound is still a wonderfully gnarled Appalachia, guitars and vocals mostly, drenched in filthy spacey FX most of the time, but even when delivered sans effects, they manage to sound alien and otherworldly. Ghostly abstract dirges, lengthy meanders through epic and ominous landscapes of blown out slow burn riffs and bits of delicate fingerpicking. Hovering above are wistful, abstract vocals, distorted and indistinct, wrapped around mournful melodies, the whole thing stumbling and slightly off kilter. Occasionally the guitars build into huge thick torrents of fuzzy riffing, dense and chaotic, before the riffs crumble and threaten to fall apart completely, until the vocals and guitars tangle up and become more and more indistinct, a slow shifting cloud of blues shimmer and folk swirl.
It almost sounds as if someone pulled apart some old blues 78's, piece by piece, note by note, and then, hundreds of years later, reassembled them without any instructions, utilizing some as yet undiscovered alien technology, only to discover that THIS is what music sounded like in 2007. What a strange world it must have been....
This warm and warbly, futuristic ancient folk is a masterfully mangled Delta blues transmitted from planet to planet, and with each million light year stretch, the sound becomes more tangled and less obviously blueslike. Alien musical transmissions intercepted using an old victrola and played back by some crazy old man, sitting on his porch, armed with just an acoustic guitar, a pile of busted old wax cylinders, and a huge bank of broken and rusty effects pedals...
So goddamn great!
We really wanted to think of some clever intro to this review referencing Ignatz the brick throwing mouse and Krazy Kat, but this record is hardly whimsical or cartoonish, instead it's a dark and mysterious exploration of the guitar, a disembodied ghostlike folk, simple melodic figures are fragmented and twisted and recontextualized. Ignatz is the ultimate modern outsider folk record. Blown out crumbling fuzzy distorted pulses of barely recognizable guitar, haunting fragments of dessicated melodies, burts of manic noodling that are quickly blown apart into their constituent sounds and re-absorbed into the ether, strange baroque sounding steel string guitars float below the murky throbbing surface. It's like some strange Alan Lomax style back porch hillbilly recording, an alien Smithsonian Folkways. Imagine Lomax wandering a dusty road on some other planet and discovering Ignatz sitting on the front stoop with a guitar plugged into some strange looking homemade contraption and recording this record right there on that alien porch. Simple blues numbers are twisted and swathed in layers of effects, the vocals pitched up or down into chirps and rumbles, the whole thing bathed in a reflective coat of glistening reverb and warm warbly distortion, stark, simple stretches of minor key guitar are disrupted by bursts of disembodied guitar grrzzzt, hovering above a framework of delicate barely there chimes. Huge slow shifting expanses of warm guitar shimmer, and crumbling slabs of distorted sound (not at all unlike Sunroof! or Birchville Cat Motel), strange footstomping campfire hoedowns buckle beneath the layers of sound and fury piled atop them, mysteriously broadcast from beyond through a tin can and twine. It's almost as if this were some long lost future edition of Harry Smith's Anthology of Alien Folk Music, with Ignatz simultaneously channelling Roscoe Holcomb and Fennesz. Alien Ambient Appalachia maybe. Future Folk? New Weird Belgium? Whatever this is, it's dark and dense and thick and warm and weird and lovely and one of the weirdest most wonderful things we've heard.
Well, this is a first for the aQ list, at least as far as we remember. We're hitting list #469 so forgive us our senility if it's happened before, but we do believe this is the very first 7" we have made Record Of The Week! And it's not just any 7" but a double 7", one that hasn't seen the light of day since it was first released in 1981 right here in San Francisco by Subterranean Records, containing the sole recordings (five songs) of legendary all female art punk eccentrics, Inflatable Boy Clams. Long sought after by collectors of bizarre music and fetching indecent prices online, it's amazing to have this left-field punk artifact available again.
Featuring Carol Detweiler and Judy Gittlesohn of local new wave heroes Pink Section (whose collected recordings were just released as well and reviewed on this list), Jo Jo Planteen and saxophonist Genevieve Boutet de Monvel of Longshoreman and Club Foot Orchestra, Inflatable Boy Clams were not so much a traditional band as they were a performance art collective, rotating instruments and vocal duties for each song. Barebones arrangements with minimal musicianship of carnival organ, saxophone, angular bass riffs and incredibly oft-kilter singing put them in a kinship with bands like Monitor, Flying Lizards, The Art Bears, and The Raincoats, and later with bands like The Double U, Thinking Fellers, and Smack Dab, but the Inflatable Boy Clams were even weirder, funnier and much more cooly deranged.
The first 7" features "Skeletons", a Halloweenish children's song made by what sounds like very unhinged children, with the B-side "Snoteleks" being, you guessed it, "Skeletons" played backward making a weird surreal song even more fun-house like and disorientating.
The second 7" has three songs, starting with the satirical "Marin", a sort of send-up of richness and comfort of the affluent county north of San Francisco, sung by Gittlesohn in an arch French accent. The next track, "I'm Sorry", was perhaps the Clams most well-known song, often getting airplay on Dr. Demento's radio show. A sort of cover of Walter Donaldson's 1926 hit "What Can I Say After I've Said I'm Sorry" (Donaldson gets a writing credit), a chorus of voices sing a slow refrain of the main lyrics, while Gittlesohn and Planteen trade confessional stories of mutual bad friendship to each other (stealing boyfriends - or maybe girlfriends, electrocuting pets, ruining a dress, destroying beloved cassette tapes), with very disingenuous apology. The final song on the B-side, "Boystown" is a curious martial dirge about boys going back to Boystown with their guns and knives as the gals sing with slow sinister "good-riddance" tra-la-la glee.
But really, words and descriptions can't quite quantify what a bizarre, hermetic and wholly contained piece of DIY musical art from content to packaging this is. One whose mystery and unexplainable attraction would likely have been diluted had the group attempted to continue and make more recordings. That shirk of commercial success brand identity and skewering of gender politics is in turn what makes San Francisco punk stand apart and sound so fucking great right now. Thanks to Superior Viaduct for making this and the Pink Section recordings available again! Highly Recommended!
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
Oh man, that just made us think of something insane, what if Daniel Higgs teamed up with Inquisition someday, a la one of our other Records Of The Week this list, by The Skull Defekts?! That would be awesome.
This former Record Of The Week, now issued for the 2nd time on vinyl via Hell's Headbangers, this edition being all super deluxe and stuff, more expensive too but you're getting laser etched artwork on side D, a poster insert, and custom trifold 'tome' style packaging, which features the original Antichrist Kramer artwork on an inner fold out, while the outside now is black, with a big metallic blue die-cut "I" affixed to the front cover. Neat-o. Here's our original review of the music portion of this release:
Time once more to touch the magic hoof! As we mentioned in our write up of Negative Plane's long awaited new one last list, we're also basking in the evil radiation of a new release from another cult back metal fave of ours as well, and finally have enough copies of 'em in to not only review, but make Record Of The Week, as our Lord Satan commands, and this incredible musick deserves, laced as it is with killer riffs and curious weirdness. That'd be the latest from the duo known as Inquisition, who, although they sound like they hail from some alien Hell, actually currently dwell in the grim fog of the Pacific Northwest, originating however from the jungles of Columbia.
Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (a great title, and one that makes this review itself perhaps not seem so verbose and purplish of prose) is again full of what we expect from Inquisition: blazing battery, buzzing guitars, and most crucially the bizarre croaking of the "robot frog" as the Invisible Oranges blog so pithily describes the vocal stylings of guitarist Dagon. His unique voice, unlike any else in black metal (though most closely akin to Abbath of Norwegian blizzard beasts Immortal, whom they remind us of in other respects as well) is one of the main things we like about the idiosyncratic Inquisition. In a way, his rasping ribbetting and our reaction to it is representative of the whole of what makes Inquisition so great. It's absurd, it's eccentric, it's evil, it's impossible to forget once you've heard it. Likewise with their eerie guitar tones and occult atmospherics, no one else sounds quite like them even within the highly formalized realm of black metal. Furthermore, the eccentric and otherworldly elements of their music are like 1000X more brilliant because Inquisition are simultaneously rooted in pure old school metal, meaning memorable riffs, indeed actual, quite catchy SONGS. Which has a lot to do with why we were so blown away when we finally got to seem them play live on tour last year. If you saw 'em too, you know it was one of the best 2 piece performances by a metal act ever. Very very metal, a churning maelstrom of axes and spikes and swords given musical form. Listening to this album, it's all here, the keening guitar soli that burrow into your brain, the riffs like the lashings of a whip, and the vokills such stern Satanic admonitions. And moments of majestic melody amidst the buzz and blurr, including one cheery passage we might have to play 'round Xmas time, hahaha.
So, another one to worship from Dagon and Incubus! And once again, adorned with excellent Antichrist Kramer artwork, more third eye skull psychedelia of morbid metalhead fantasies, something which we could also say of the music itself.
The Strokes, Andrew W.K., The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Liars, and now Interpol are part of a recent rash of New York punkish bands birthed from the music hype machine as the great salvation of rock 'n' roll. Strange that these bands would garner such praise, since none of them operate outside of the arena of the homage -- either as ironic hyperbole in Andrew W.K. or as The Strokes' downward mobility to blue collar rockisms. Of all the aforementioned bands, Interpol seem the most interesting as they've managed to successfully resurrect Ian Curtis, a task that hasn't really met with much success in other bands. I mention just Curtis, as his persona seems to resonate much more strongly with Interpol than Joy Division as a whole. Sure there are ghosts of Factory's post-punk jaggedness and mororsely bleak temperament; but Interpol's forceful minor keys offer other roadstops past The Strokes' take on brightly-colored, guitar jangle and the sublime washes of fuzzy feedback heard in the early '90s shoegazer bands (MBV, Ride, Slowdive, etc.). Musically, Interpol's debut "Turn On The Bright Lights" is an excellent marriage of those aforementioned styles; but like Joy Division, Interpol is driven by a charismatic singer with a flair for dramatic bombast and a predilection for angst. Paul Banks, Interpol's singer, is a rare breed in the contemporary world of depressed vocalists who have typically followed the emo-centric whimper and scream approach of Sunny Day Real Estate to infuse any lyrical content with immediacy and passion. Instead, Banks can actually really sing, his nervous vibrato echoing the musical accompaniment played between depressed weariness and urgent conviction.
Much of Interpol's aesthetic choices and lyrical content (love / hate relationships, urban isolationism, and sexual dependency) have already been done to death, but few have been able to do them as well. "Turn On The Bright Lights" is a fantastic record and actually lives up to all of the hype that has surrounded it.
A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED debut album from this Olympia Trio! Lo-fi drum & bass whose ethos of live instrumentation at all costs lends comparisons to a quirkier, more lively Red Snapper or at times Can (like what the 'Sacrilege' remix album was supposed to sound like)! This is one of the few groups who can carry off their sound live, including theremin, turntables, standup bass, and keyboards (and NOT ONE preprogrammed tape) into the mix.
So here we go again! Iron And Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle was an AQ record of the week last year, was a unanimous staff favorite, and made most of our top ten lists for the year. Rightfully so we might add. A more beautiful and perfect record we hadn't heard in forever. And a lot of times we try not to make another record by the same band a record of the week, since usually it's hard for a band to deliver another record as good as THAT record, the one that blew us away and convinced us it had to be record of the week. But of course sometimes we do, and sometimes a band does, and this new Iron And Wine just happens to be that record. Sam Beam, who pretty much IS Iron And Wine has upped the ante, somehow navigating the precarious course of trying to progress and grow and explore, without ruining what was already basically perfect. And somehow he's done it. All of the things we loved so much about the first record are still present: gently fingerpicked guitar, sweetly breathy vocals, gorgeous harmonies, melancholy melodies, twangy banjo, slippery slide guitar, wistful and cryptic lyrics amd songs. The songs! So perfectly sweet and instantly classic. Songs that you find yourself humming to yourself even after only one listen. So what is it about this new record that makes it worthy of record of the week status? Hard to say. In fact we weren't sure if this record was actually better, or if we were just so excited to have more Iron And Wine! Because on first listen, Our Endless Numbered Days sounds like the perfect part two of The Creek Drank The Cradle. Which is a good thing. A very good thing in fact. We were all wishing The Creek was twice as long or even ten times as long. One of those records you want to never end. But the more we listened to Our Endless Numbered Days, the more it revealed itself as an entirely new record. But subtly so. It's a little more aggressive, and propulsive, the drums play a bigger part, and there are some distinctly intense bits, where the guitars are rough and the drums kind of rock. But only kind of. The core of the record is still Beam's perfect pop songs, twangy and folky, but sweet and lush, with melodies that while totally memorable and unforgettable, are so unique and fresh to your ears that you just have to sit and listen and let the sounds and songs envelop you. Some obvious reference points are Elliott Smith, America, Bread, Palace, Songs:Ohia, but the more you listen, and the more we hear from Iron And Wine, the more we realise that Beam occupies a singular place in popular music, referencing all sort of other musics, but existing totally and completely in his own sonic space. It's a rare performer who can pull that off, especially nowdays drawing from a century of recorded music.
There was a time where we would buy ANYTHING that came out on Sub Pop. ANYTHING. And we still kind of miss those days once in a while. Where you didn't say "I like, ya know... Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Nirvana", you just said "Yeah, I like Sub Pop". Where there was a label 'sound': you know, grunge or whatever, you knew that if you liked Tad and the Thrown Ups and Mudhoney, you were probably gonna dig the Afghan Whigs and Soundgarden. And we were the first to balk when Sub Pop started deviating from their 'sound'. A sound so comfortable and familiar. But whether it was a desperate attempt to battle the massive grunge backlash or just label heads Jon and Bruce showing their age, or an attempt to actually do something really new and exciting, the end result is a catalogue at once brilliant, and totally confounding, perfect, but not right at all. Sure there were some real stinkers, and some records that were definitely 'friend rock' (you know, the only reason we put this out is because they're our friends), but nonetheless some of the most essential and under appreciated gems of the last decade exist -because- of this varied and eclectic take on indie/underground music. The two Zumpano records are all time unanimous aQ favorites, and there's the twangy rootsy country rock/pop of Beachwood Sparks and Chapaquidick Skyline, the gorgeous stripped down pop of Damien Jurado, as well as Mark Kozelek, Mark Lanegan, the Pernice Brothers and this one, the debut from Florida's Iron And Wine, a one-man-and-his-4-track, stripped down, Southern, country/folk/mope rock wash of dirgey back woods ballads sung in a plaintive whisper accompanied by banjo and acoustic guitar. SOOOOOOO NICE. So nice in fact, that this would definitely have been our record of the year if it wasn't for the near simultaneous release of the equally brilliant, but infinitely darker, Woven Hand record. And that said, it's definitely threatening to overtake the 'Hand as one of our most listened to records. You've all heard the lonely boy with a guitar, dreamy twangy heartbroken singer songwriter. It's been done to death (but what hasn't? Don't get us started!) But once in a while it's just -done right-. So right in fact, that it transcends its meager aspirations and becomes a volatile and intense emotional piece of art. Such is the case with Iron And Wine. Simple songs are strummed and plucked, the vocals are sort of whispered/sung, melodies surface occasionally to embed themselves permanently in your brain, banjos and acoustic guitars gently lift the vocals above the fuzzy dreamy ambience with a recording quality that makes everything sound like it's dappled with morning sunlight. Think a less damaged Elliott Smith. Think America or Bread (but think it in a nice way, c'mon). Think early Sebadoh without the jokes. Think Sentridoh recording for Folkways 50 years ago. Think Bread recording for K records and playing basements in Olympia. If there was any justice in the world, this would be the record all the little grrrls would put on their mix tapes, this would be the hapless singer songwriter that gets co-opted by the man and inexplicably records soundtracks and ends up playing a song on the Grammies and this would be the next big thing (which since this was first released, actually sort of is/did!!). But at the time, it seemed like it never would be, so that just leaves us with Iron And Wine, a twangy, shimmery, dreamy missive full of aching heartbreak, unrequited love, wistful hope, bitter resentment, untapped faith and inevitable diappointment, and a soul soothing contentment with the ways of the world. The perfect record to wile away breezy summer afternoons, to drive aimlessly through the rain, music keeping time with the windshield wipers, to fall asleep to, or to break the heart that keeps yours from breaking. One of the nicest records this year.
So here we go again! Iron And Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle was an AQ record of the week last year, was a unanimous staff favorite, and made most of our top ten lists for the year. Rightfully so we might add. A more beautiful and perfect record we hadn't heard in forever. And a lot of times we try not to make another record by the same band a record of the week, since usually it's hard for a band to deliver another record as good as THAT record, the one that blew us away and convinced us it had to be record of the week. But of course sometimes we do, and sometimes a band does, and this new Iron And Wine just happens to be that record. Sam Beam, who pretty much IS Iron And Wine has upped the ante, somehow navigating the precarious course of trying to progress and grow and explore, without ruining what was already basically perfect. And somehow he's done it. All of the things we loved so much about the first record are still present: gently fingerpicked guitar, sweetly breathy vocals, gorgeous harmonies, melancholy melodies, twangy banjo, slippery slide guitar, wistful and cryptic lyrics amd songs. The songs! So perfectly sweet and instantly classic. Songs that you find yourself humming to yourself even after only one listen. So what is it about this new record that makes it worthy of record of the week status? Hard to say. In fact we weren't sure if this record was actually better, or if we were just so excited to have more Iron And Wine! Because on first listen, Our Endless Numbered Days sounds like the perfect part two of The Creek Drank The Cradle. Which is a good thing. A very good thing in fact. We were all wishing The Creek was twice as long or even ten times as long. One of those records you want to never end. But the more we listened to Our Endless Numbered Days, the more it revealed itself as an entirely new record. But subtly so. It's a little more aggressive, and propulsive, the drums play a bigger part, and there are some distinctly intense bits, where the guitars are rough and the drums kind of rock. But only kind of. The core of the record is still Beam's perfect pop songs, twangy and folky, but sweet and lush, with melodies that while totally memorable and unforgettable, are so unique and fresh to your ears that you just have to sit and listen and let the sounds and songs envelop you. Some obvious reference points are Elliott Smith, America, Bread, Palace, Songs:Ohia, but the more you listen, and the more we hear from Iron And Wine, the more we realise that Beam occupies a singular place in popular music, referencing all sort of other musics, but existing totally and completely in his own sonic space. It's a rare performer who can pull that off, especially nowdays drawing from a century of recorded music.
There was a time where we would buy ANYTHING that came out on Sub Pop. ANYTHING. And we still kind of miss those days once in a while. Where you didn't say "I like, ya know... Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Nirvana", you just said "Yeah, I like Sub Pop". Where there was a label 'sound': you know, grunge or whatever, you knew that if you liked Tad and the Thrown Ups and Mudhoney, you were probably gonna dig the Afghan Whigs and Soundgarden. And we were the first to balk when Sub Pop started deviating from their 'sound'. A sound so comfortable and familiar. But whether it was a desperate attempt to battle the massive grunge backlash or just label heads Jon and Bruce showing their age, or an attempt to actually do something really new and exciting, the end result is a catalogue at once brilliant, and totally confounding, perfect, but not right at all. Sure there were some real stinkers, and some records that were definitely 'friend rock' (you know, the only reason we put this out is because they're our friends), but nonetheless some of the most essential and under appreciated gems of the last decade exist -because- of this varied and eclectic take on indie/underground music. The two Zumpano records are all time unanimous aQ favorites, and there's the twangy rootsy country rock/pop of Beachwood Sparks and Chapaquidick Skyline, the gorgeous stripped down pop of Damien Jurado, as well as Mark Kozelek, Mark Lanegan, the Pernice Brothers and this one, the debut from Florida's Iron And Wine, a one-man-and-his-4-track, stripped down, Southern, country/folk/mope rock wash of dirgey back woods ballads sung in a plaintive whisper accompanied by banjo and acoustic guitar. SOOOOOOO NICE. So nice in fact, that this would definitely have been our record of the year if it wasn't for the near simultaneous release of the equally brilliant, but infinitely darker, Woven Hand record. And that said, it's definitely threatening to overtake the 'Hand as one of our most listened to records. You've all heard the lonely boy with a guitar, dreamy twangy heartbroken singer songwriter. It's been done to death (but what hasn't? Don't get us started!) But once in a while it's just -done right-. So right in fact, that it transcends its meager aspirations and becomes a volatile and intense emotional piece of art. Such is the case with Iron And Wine. Simple songs are strummed and plucked, the vocals are sort of whispered/sung, melodies surface occasionally to embed themselves permanently in your brain, banjos and acoustic guitars gently lift the vocals above the fuzzy dreamy ambience with a recording quality that makes everything sound like it's dappled with morning sunlight. Think a less damaged Elliott Smith. Think America or Bread (but think it in a nice way, c'mon). Think early Sebadoh without the jokes. Think Sentridoh recording for Folkways 50 years ago. Think Bread recording for K records and playing basements in Olympia. If there was any justice in the world, this would be the record all the little grrrls would put on their mix tapes, this would be the hapless singer songwriter that gets co-opted by the man and inexplicably records soundtracks and ends up playing a song on the Grammies and this would be the next big thing (which since this was first released, actually sort of is/did!!). But at the time, it seemed like it never would be, so that just leaves us with Iron And Wine, a twangy, shimmery, dreamy missive full of aching heartbreak, unrequited love, wistful hope, bitter resentment, untapped faith and inevitable diappointment, and a soul soothing contentment with the ways of the world. The perfect record to wile away breezy summer afternoons, to drive aimlessly through the rain, music keeping time with the windshield wipers, to fall asleep to, or to break the heart that keeps yours from breaking. One of the nicest records this year.
As promised, these brilliant Canadian metalpunks are now back with their second full-length album. Like their debut Cold Bitch, it's another "single-coil assault" of rollicking, punked-out, '80s influenced speed metal that's absolutely unfuckwithable. No, not in the sense that it's the most technically advanced musically, or super high in fidelity, no, we're talking about the sheer spirit of it. And it's the sort of thing that's just kind of perfect in its DIY imperfection. Not by any means a tired, unimaginative exercise in emulating the past that we hear from so many retro thrash bands, instead the Iron Dogs fashion inspiration from their '80s faves - the likes of early Iron Maiden, English Dogs, Exciter, Cirith Ungol, and Tank - into something newly vibrant and alive. Proudly old school while still sounding 'young'. Delightfully loose and exuberant, ready to rock right off the rails, but not careless or half-assed, despite the raw garaginess of it all.
As hopefully you well remember, we freakin' raved about Cold Bitch last year, likening it to a cross between Speedwolf and Slough Feg, and this new one takes the sound of that album and runs with it, delivering the goods with another batch of songs just as good or better than the first, if anything. So while Free & Wild isn't super different than Cold Bitch, that's just fine with us! Some bands are about 'progression', you want 'em exploring new sounds and ideas from record to record; others, you don't want anything to change, you just want MORE, new killer songs in the same style, which is what you get here. And since we loved Cold Bitch so much and spun it so often, we HAD to make Free & Wild a Record Of The Week. Free & Wild even sports a similar cover concept - a photo of a sword wielding, blood-drenched naked lady. She's being "Free & Wild" we guess, taking men's heads and putting them on stakes (or perhaps this tableau is inspired by track six here, "Cannibal Death Cult"). Cold Bitch's cover was a bit more clever but this one is no less striking.
One change with this album, not that you would notice it, is that Iron Dogs are no longer a trio, but a duo, with Dan Lee on on drums and Jo Capitalicide on vocals, guitar, bass, and even some synth. And as a two piece, Jo and Dan are now our favorite metal duo since Fenriz and Nocturno Culto - and we'd imagine that those two Darkthrone dudes would highly approve of what the Iron Dogs are up to, the mix of NWOBHM gallop and crusty punk fervor is right up their alley.
Now, some other, less enlightened people might find fault with the production (solid but certainly not slick), or not be on board with Capitalicide's untrained rough-and-tumble vocal holler (with Dan Lee's backing vox adding even more jubilance). But those folks are obviously not punk rock enough - and/or cult metal enough - to 'get it'. To us what makes this so special comes through loud and clear in each of this album's eight tracks, all of 'em exploding with energy, catchy hooks and epic feel, crammed full of delicious bits of metallic goodness. Opener "Firebird" (for which they've made an entertaining low-budget video, perhaps inspired by Benny Hill as much as the videos of Canadian antecedent Thor, see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWZsD2kFeSo) is a melodic, motivational speedy anthem to get things going. From there, the half-hour run time of this album rips by with highlight after highlight, Jo singing of fighting, freedom, and fantasy. We love every bit of this. The heartracing riffage. The majestic Moog moments. The up-and-down cascade of wordless vocal woah-oh-oh-ohs in the middle of "Island Of The Dead". The way Jo's voice cracks on that one verse in "Storm Warning". The folky fast picked guitar motif on "Adversity" - indeed all the melodic guitar licks bursting out everywhere. This rousing Iron Dogs album, non-ironic but not over-serious, epitomizes the positive power of metal in a shitty world.
Ok, so we're hopeless Iron Dogs fanboys... but there's a reason for that! Listen and learn. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. We won't call you a poseur. But we'll still feel sorry for you. 'Cause Iron Dogs RULE!
(Note: this is the handsome cd digipack edition - but if you act fast and ask, you could possibly snag one of the few "vinyls" we have left, or even a cassette, neither of which we're actually listing 'cause we have so few.)
With the triumphant return of vocalist Bruce "the Human Air Raid Siren" Dickinson, as well as guitarist Adrian Smith (so now there's three guitarists in the band!), the reunited, rejuvenated Iron Maiden 2000 is all set to kick ass, and redeem themselves for their last few painfully bad outings (for which you can't entirely blame Bruce stand-in Blaze Bayley, although he really did suck). "Brave New World" is of course no "Piece of Mind" or "The Number of the Beast" but it's waayyy better than anything the band did in the '90s (with Bruce or without), and certainly has many moments of "Maiden-esque" glory as only Maiden themselves can deliver. Actually, it's refreshing that they didn't entirely try to go the retro-route and copy themselves wholesale, 'cause in addition to the several very satisfying numbers on here that timewarped in from '84 (like the storming "The Fallen Angel") there's also pieces that explore bassist/mastermind Steve Harris' obsession with '70s progressive rock a la Genesis and Nektar. Certainly metallic but not exactly super-heavy, much of "Brave New World" is mid-tempo and quite catchy, almost a prog-pop record in fact (not like Radiohead, though!). The mostly seven-minute-or-so long songs do take some bad turns upon occasion but also venture into areas new for Maiden, so no one can accuse them of playing it safe. Basically, this is a record that will definitely please Maiden and melodic metal fans. If your record collection does not already include "Killers" or "The Number of the Beast" then maybe you should pick those up first (although for some this new album would actually be a more accessible starting point), but everyone else can get this and enjoy not only Eddie-nostalgia but some fine new tunes, which I for one have found stuck in my head after only a few listens. Recommended. Up the Irons!
A couple of years ago, Aquarius enjoyed a brief moonlight gig as an art space (which we hope to make happen again someday), proposing the same curious aesthetic on the visual front as we continue to do on the musical. One of the more intriguing exhibitions we hosted was from an ambitious, if under-recognized artist by the name of Matthew Waldron. His meticulously eccentric drawings, paintings, and assemblages depicted mutated beings conducting psychic surgery upon each other with all sorts of psychosexual overtones. These provocative and compelling images held their own with the classic Surrealist works of Hans Bellmer and early Salvador Dali. At the same time, Waldron introduced us to the equally ambitious catalogue of sound constructions that he had been quietly making in the Santa Cruz mountains under the moniker irr. app. (ext.). These albums followed in the deconstructed / abstracted sound collage traditions of Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, and HNAS, often times surpassing the quality of those which came before. Sadly, very few people had heard of irr. app. (ext.) because of Waldron's unfortunate round of luck with record labels and general low profile.
Jump forward to the contemporary era, and things look entirely different. Today, you will find Waldron a mainstay in the Nurse With Wound performance entourage, being whisked away to play in all sorts of unlikely European festivals; and irr. app. (ext.) has consistently released albums that build upon the successes of those which we had heard before. So for us here at Aquarius, it's very satisfying to see an artist we once supported have their career take off...
And that leads us to Cosmic Superimposition, the second in a proposed trilogy from irr. app. (ext.) of releases based upon the writings of Wilhelm Reich. Cosmic Superimposition was a book that Reich had written in 1951; and in that book, he argued how the superimposition of multiple energies is the common functioning principle throughout the natural world. It was through these ideas that Reich arrived at the ideas of Orgone, cloudbursting, etc. On the single 45-minute track that comprises Cosmis Superimposition, irr. app. (ext.) presents a revolving set of organic fluctuations that wax and wane in accordance with a well-tuned internal logic. Glassine ambient passages of processed environmental noise slide into the sustained harmonics of bowed metals which in turn couples with the off-kilter phase pattern of an exhaust fan whose motor is not quite properly aligned. All the while gurgles from streams, clatter from subterranean actions, singing bowl reverberations, and dark elliptical cycles of blackened electronics pock the stately progressions of Cosmic Superimposition's dronemusik foundation. As is stated in the liner notes, Waldron repurposed the source material from the first stage of the trilogy Ozeanische Gefuhle; but Cosmis Superimposition is hardly a replicant remix of the first. Rather, the ghosts, shadows, and ripples of his earlier album emerge in the fluid ambience of the second as bridge that points to Waldron's ambitious and highly successful undertaking. One of the best records of 2007, for sure.
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psych with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
The Isengrind record begins with some deep dark ambience, huge shimmering streaks of ominous sound, like an orchestra tuning up in a cave, drawn out into warm washes of dronelike sound, processed choral vocals, and wheezing accordions. That intro gives way to a buzzing Eastern style raga, lots of percussion, shakers, bells, hand drums, buried beneath a shimmery smear of thick coruscating buzz, a sea of sitars, with Solange's vocals soaring ghostlike over the top. The next track is a dark folky drift, a simple melody, fluttering flute, more abstract percussion, definitely reminiscent of Avarus and other Finnish forest folk, but somehow more ethereal, and genuinely folky. The rest of the Isengrind tracks drift from spectre like folk, simple strums soaked in reverb and wrapped around ethereal vocals, to more raga jams, Indian style buzz filtered through a fractured folk sensibility, to haunting cinematic ambience, abstract soundscapes rife with streaks of feedback and wheezing chordal whir, disembodied strum, mysterious vocals and sporadic percussion, tribal, primal, primitive and raw, but still dreamlike and lovely.
As we commented in our review of the now out of print Laurie Bird cd-r from French bedroom drone-psych-folk duo Natural Snow Buildings, it always surprises us how bands with nothing but a MySpace page and a cd-r or two, can generate so much hype and excitement. It seems to be a common occurrence these days, with some bands even getting real live major label record deals purely on the strength of the handful of tracks on their MySpace page.
To be fair to Natural Snow Buildings, they have been a band since 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last 9 years, have only released 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! How does a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, possibly generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. But thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in this case, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Natural Snow Buildings is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be flooding the scene, this boy girl duo write songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
So here we have the very first proper cd release (others on the way, reissues of several of their various way-too limited cd-r's) from Natural Snow Buildings, bundled with an extra disc, featuring a whole record from both NSB members' solo projects, Twinsistermoon, whose last disc we reviewed recently, and Isengrind, the project of Solange, the female half of NSB.
Isengrind's half of disc one begins with some deep dark ambience, huge shimmering streaks of ominous sound, like an orchestra tuning up in a cave, drawn out into warm washes of dronelike sound, processed choral vocals, and wheezing accordions. That intro gives way to a buzzing Eastern style raga, lots of percussion, shakers, bells, hand drums, buried beneath a shimmery smear of thick coruscating buzz, a sea of sitars, with Solange's vocals soaring ghostlike over the top. The next track is a dark folky drift, a simple melody, fluttering flute, more abstract percussion, definitely reminiscent of Avarus and other Finnish forest folk, but somehow more ethereal, and genuinely folky. The rest of the Isengrind tracks drift from spectre like folk, simple strums soaked in reverb and wrapped around ethereal vocals, to more raga jams, Indian style buzz filtered through a fractured folk sensibility, to haunting cinematic ambience, abstract soundscapes rife with streaks of feedback and wheezing chordal whir, disembodied strum, mysterious vocals and sporadic percussion, tribal, primal, primitive and raw, but still dreamlike and lovely.
Mehdi begins his side of the disc, with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's (and make it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
So what happens when the two join forces, becoming Natural Snow Buildings? It would be way too easy to say that the sum equaled the parts, that if you took the sound of the two halves of the first disc, it would equal the whole of the second. There is certainly �some- truth to that, but it's not math, it's magic. Alchemy, musical sorcery, these are sounds not numbers, and thus are governed by forces far more magical and mysterious than physics or science. The two together join spirits, their natures become entwined, they draw from one another, each offering the other part of their soul, rendered in music. The results are truly divine. An assemblage of sounds, deftly woven into expansive shapes and hushed mystery, landscapes of drone and shimmer, of cinematic wonder and dark introspection. Some tracks are super abstract, layered near static drifts, longform movements that sonically evoke other lands, other times, the past long forgotten, the future not yet experienced, other tracks are wheezing sun dappled Appalachia, but turned inside out, the chords and notes seemingly drawn inward, toward the speakers, the vocals breathless and mournful, all laid atop a thick swirl of distorted riffage, other tracks are fragmented folk, all murky blurred piano, backwards guitars, heartsick melodies, wrapped in a thick gauzy production, smeared into snapshots glimpsed through eyes brimming with tears. Other tracks are space rock writ small, minimal dirges, drone jams, chanted vocals, strange stuttery percussion, and glorious buzzing guitars, culminating in the final track, which begins much like the others, all hazy and dreamlike, vocals ethereal, guitars spare and skeletal, until unexpectedly the band lock into some serious droned out space rock. A serious dark and druggy looped riff, a la Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, Loop, anchored by a simple pounding thudrock rhythm, driving intensely through swirling clouds of FX and warm whirring ambience, a seriously dense, propulsive krautjam, that just so happens to hide a soft drifting pop shimmer underneath, and while the track rocks with a surprising intensity, it's precisely what's underneath that turns the jam into something resplendent.
Gorgeous packaging, a fancy 4 panel gatefold digisleeve, with super striking original artwork and liner notes all drawn by Solange.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!!
We sold so many of these when we made it Record Of The Week a while back, and everyone we know who bought a copy freaked out and declared it one of their new all time favorites, and for good reason it's an amazing, mind blowing, tripped out chunk of pure sonic inspiration. It's strange and beautiful and weirdly heavy, and proggy and tribal and it's funky as all get out. Well, we managed to get a final batch from the label, it's now sold out NEVER to be repressed, so if you missed out on this the first time around, you got yourself one more chance, don't blow it.
It's no longer out of the ordinary for a rock band to look beyond rock for inspiration. Or a jazz band, looking to expand their sound. It definitely makes sense as musicians are generally constantly striving to explore, to open their minds, their music, searching for unique instruments, new ideas, new sounds, even looking for something much more ineffable, something more spiritual. Psychedelic rock bands have typically looked East, The Beatles are probably the prime example of a rock band looking to India for musical AND spiritual inspiration. But on a much smaller scale, modern music develops and expands by incorporating new influences, the more 'exotic' the better. So for years, we could watch bands do just that, incorporate new instruments, sitars, tablas, whatever, alternate tunings, Eastern scales. Jazz musicians on the other hand, tended to look to Africa for inspiration, the tribal drumming, the vocal chants, all found their way onto tons of amazing records, amazing in part because of what they borrowed from the African music that was their genesis, as with many many discs by the Art Ensemble, Coltrane, Don Cherry, etc., etc.�
So if all this borrowing and influence is so commonplace, what's the big deal with this disc, a deluxe reissue of a rare 1972 LP entitled Uganda, by Japan's strangely named Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo? Well to begin with, imagine a Japanese jazz drummer in the early seventies, so obsessed with African music, that not only are his records already rife with African influences, but he eventually travels there, and proceeds to play with local musicians, collects indigenous instruments, and returns, driven to realize the record he knows he must make, Uganda, a record that manages to sound like African music, jazz and psychedelic rock, while sounding like nothing else. Ishikawa teamed up with fellow percussionist Larry Sunaga, a bassist and guitarist, and a saxophonist, who instead of playing sax, composed all four lengthy pieces here, the results are amazing. Dense, dizzying, abstract and tribal, fuzzy and tripped out, long stretches of solo hand drum percussion, furious acid fuzz freakouts (courtesy of guitarist Kimio Mizutani, from Love Live Life+1, People, and other freaky Japanese '70s psych units), chanting and handclaps, all woven into an expansive, sprawling divine chunk of out there Afro-fuzz-psych-jazz-rock divinity.
Take the first track "Animals and Dawn", nearly 12 minutes long, and over those 12 minutes, the song veers and drifts through about ten distinctly different sounds and styles, all held together by the relentless African drum jam that runs through all four tracks. Beginning with what sounds like some strange low end synth buzz, those drums kick in, intense and hyper rhythmic, amazingly recorded, so on headphones it sounds like drums are all around you. That buzz, pulses and undulates beneath the frenzied drumming, and this goes on for almost 3 minutes, which is when some wild super distorted acid psych guitar swoops in, jagged and freaked out, spitting out soaring wah wah drenched buzz, before the bass joins in and the drums coalesce into a more recognizable groove, and the band nails it, heavy, slithery proto-metal, churning and pounding, eventually locking into a super technical prog workout, and then dropping out completely, again leaving just the drums, which are soon joined by hand clapping, and chanted African style vocals. Finally, for the last four minutes or so, the band unwinds a groovy jazzy prog workout, still underpinned by those same rhythms, but now the bass carries the groove, letting the guitar go wild, wild psychedelic leads all tangled up in great strange shapes over the groovy rhythm below. Eventually, the song is swallowed up by effects, reverb, delay, echo, as if the band were playing on some huge elevator, as we sit on the surface, listening as the band slips further and further into darkness. Holy shit. If this were a $30 single, that track alone would make this essential for folks into psychrock, proto-metal, free jazz, avant African music or really anyone into strange and fantastical sounds.
The second track, "Asking For Love", once again begins with African drums, the two percussionists, offering up wild tangled beats for nearly two minutes, until in swoops a weird synthy buzz, which quickly transforms into a seriously Led Zep worthy riff, the drums a strange counterpoint to the distinctly rock and roll riffage, and the vocals soaring and shouting, but this kick ass riff fades out only after a minute, and we're back to more dense drumming, Mesmerizing and hypnotic, locking into incredible grooves, veering off into off kilter time signatures here and there, but always returning to that groove. This continues until about one minute from the end, when the bass and guitars explode in a buzzing psychedelic freakout, the drums mirroring the intensity of the axes, locked into an ever expanding supernova of blown out sound, until the furious explosive finish. Whew.
Track three (on the original, the start of side 2) "Battle", begins with some straight up jazz prog, angular and complex, the drums and guitars locked tight, the whole thing convoluted and intricate, stopping suddenly after 30 seconds, at which point an African thumb piano plucks out a delicate music box melody, while in the background, other strange instruments scrape and thump and honk, eventually blossoming into a full on Afro-jam, the drums pounding away, male and female vocals, call and response over the mesmeric beats below, but again, this only lasts a few minutes before switching gears and launching right back into the angular prog that opened the track. This happens a couple more times. Long stretches of abstract percussion, plenty of buzz, and rattle, melodies played out on mysterious African instruments, separated by brief blasts of that �buzzing tangled prog, which is exactly how the track finishes off.
The closer, "Pygmy" begins with a groovy walking bass line, a cowbell heavy almost-funk rhythm, eventually some acidic wah wah guitar, and suddenly we're in some serious seventies, Blaxploitation soundtrack style jazz funk, the bass a constant presence, that groove irresistible, the vocals soulful, the percussion still busy and intense, beneath the more static rhythm driving the songs. The guitar and vocals get all tangled up, the vocals more sort of scatting, the guitar offering up jagged shards of high end, or unfurling soaring psychrock leads, the bass and guitar locking into step right at the end, for one final super tight psychprog finish.
It almost seems ridiculous to describe each song in detail, as that's only part of the story. All four tracks work together, leading into one another, offering up bits from pervious songs, giving up little sonic hints as to what might come later, and it's not just the arrangements, it's the feel, the mood, the vibe, and while mere description might make some of the songs sound schizophrenic, flipping back and forth from part to part, some parts lasting only a few seconds, nothing could be further from the truth. The composition here is as deft as the performance, the arrangement is simultaneously free and abstract, yet, tight and composed. The songs breathe and open up, drift and wander, but never seem to lose their direction, and the grooves ever present, even if on the surface the band seem to be drifting though inner space.
Uganda is truly unique, freaky and far out for sure, but most definitely an essential chunk of jazzy, proggy African Japanese psych rock bliss, organic, expansive, epic, rhythmic, space-y, proggy, heavy and funky!! If you've got Julian Cope's Japrocksampler book, you'll find it in his Top 50 list of Japanese psych essentials, right above the debut from Flower Travellin' Band.
As with all Tiliqua releases, gorgeously packaged. This one is housed in a full color miniature box, printed front and back, with a Japanese style obi of course, and inside extensive liner notes in both Japanese and English, with tons of photos. And it is limited of course, not sure how limited, but judging from how quick past Tiliqua releases fly out of here, better to be safe than sorry. And this is actually the first in a new Tiliqua series called Distorted Oriental Sensory Perceptions 1969-1978 focusing on "Obscure Japanese Psychedelic rock artifacts." We can hardly wait to see what they dig up next... there's a lot of others on that Japrocksampler list we'd love to hear...
First new record in six years from Toshiaki Ishizuka, a veritable underground drum legend in Japan. Having founded Japan's first radical political punk combo Zuno Keisatsu, as well as having played and recorded with Kan Mikami, Keiji Haino, Masayoshi Urabe and many others, you might be expecting some sort of super intense deconstructed psychrock drum damage rhythmic workout, but Ishizuka's solo percussion recordings are of an entirely different stripe. No blown out psychedelia, no punk rock pound, no splattery free jazz freakouts, instead, Drum Drama, Ishizuka's third record of solo percussion, is just that, dramatic, a dark and dreamy series of slow shimmering soundscapes, as much, if not more, about texture and mood than rhythm. The drum kit here is only a part of Ishizuka's palette, spread out in a very un-drum kit like manner between wide open expanses of huge gong swells, chiming bells, bowed metal, wood blocks and tinkling chimes. Incredibly deep and physical sounding, a slow burning series of drones and shimmers. Drum Drama contains three brand new tracks, as well as two redone pieces from his long out of print debut, but they flow perfectly. An organic drift of midnight ambience, punctuated by strange bits of percussive filigree, but spending most of its almost 40 minutes drifting through deep dark cavernous expanses of sound.
Huge low end reverberations underpin delicate drifting bells, all the sounds given ample time to spread out and flutter into the ether. All woven into moaning minimal melodies constructed from dense overtones and subtle shimmer. Here and there twinkling high end sparkles surface, super percussive skitter wraps around super melodic tom fills, occasionally sounding kind of like a super slow abstract free jazz "Wipeout", but played by the Starfuckers... just drums, spread way out across the soundfield, with some serious stereo panning, the fills swerving from one speaker to the other, a dizzying dreamy soundscape of percussive melody and strange rhythmic texture.
Elsewhere, the drones morph subtlely into super affected free jazz splatter, over a dense cacophony of clanging metal and industrial clatter, very kitchen sink with bits of cutlery, tea kettle scraping and all manner of shuffling and clinking and rumbling amidst smooth resonant muted drum fills.
The second half of the record is an even more subtle wash of undersea shimmer, thick rumblings build to propulsive percussive overload, just about as psychedelic as a room full of drums and pieces of metal can get. The record fades into a barely there drone, the hiss of the tape and the analog recording almost as loud as the simple subtle rhythmic shadings....
Hard to believe a record like this is the work of a drummer. And that there is even a drum kit involved at all. Shimmery percussive dronescapes, bowed metals, reverberating gongs, rolling metallic balls, little squalls of splattery free jazz shuffle, bits of martial drumming all woven into a lovely and zen like exploration of a dark and mysterious world of rhythm and sound. So good.
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Aaron Turner has had his hand in many of AQ's favorite metalcore albums, whether releasing them through his Hydrahead imprint (Neurosis, Sunn, Cave In, Coalesce, Atomsmasher / Phantomsmasher, etc.) or doing artwork for them (Agoraphobic Nosebleed) or making the music himself on 'em through his continuously impressive projects Isis and Old Man Gloom. Isis' second album "Oceanic" is quite possibly the strongest work to date for Turner. That is quite a feat considering how great those Old Man Gloom albums were. Where Turner shaped Old Man Gloom into an uncompromising drone 'n' grind outfit that speculated upon the sci-fi themes of alien-monkey hybrids, Isis is a bit more straightforward in tightening up the complex orchestrations of Neurosis with a whip-smart pop sensibility. Don't let the 'pop' of Isis fool you; "Oceanic" is a brutal album of dynamic metalcore that sculpts its propulsion by intertwining huge chugging riffs and counterpointed rhythms into the band's already massive percussive pummel. Isis' use of those grinding riffs is so hypnotic through its monochromatic distortion that when the band works up to a chord change (which can take 3 or 4 minutes to get to), it becomes a catastrophic pop hook as the New Pornographers, Get Up Kids, or Pinback but just super fuckin' heavy and aggressively dramatic. As the album unfolds, an emo vein to Isis becomes apparant, in part due to the reliance upon urgent minor keys and Turner's scream-against-the-void-or-maybe-just-my-parents vocals filled with rage and angst. Isis have also employed the talents of Maria Christopher of the Relapse post-rock band 27 on one the album's later tracks "Weight", where her breathtaking vocal mantra is the perfect harmonious complement to Isis' crushing dissonance. This track matches the only other well-executed arrangement we've heard for female vocals in a metalcore song found on From Autumn To Ashes' "Too Bad You're Beautiful." Yeah, this one totally rules.
Every year, in a remote part of Sweden, a group or artists and architects build a massive structure out of ice and snow, walls and arches and doorways and windows, a gorgeous glowing edifice that once completed becomes the famed Ice Hotel. A small complex of delicately crafted rooms, a bar, a chapel, every bit of which is made from ice. In some places the ice is extra thin, so light from the outside bursts through warm and brilliant, while elsewhere, the thick walls glow a burnished blue from the filtered sunlight or the soft pale moonlight. The beds are blocks of ice covered with animal pelts and arctic sleeping bags. The bar is ice, the glasses also ice, the only libations served are hard alcohol (vodka, etc.) due to the fact that they won't freeze. A totally amazing and overwhelming bit of adventurous lodging as well as being a piece of gorgeous conceptual art. In fact Andee and Heather had planned to have their wedding at the Ice Hotel, until both sides of the family refused, citing the idea of sleeping in a below zero room on a block of ice as a definite deal breaker.
Well, it gets even better: at the same time as the hotel is being planned and constructed, several of the same planners and ice artists are also designing and building musical instruments made entirely out of ice. Percussion, harps, and horns, all made from frozen water and little else. The sounds are muted and soft, strange and organic, haunting but imbued with a strange warmth totally unlike the cold and clinical sounds you might expect. All deftly intertwined with human voices, soft coos and trills, hushed and whispery, sounding not unlike a ghostlike gathering of disembodied, deconstructed Bjorks.
On Igloo, Isungset and and an assortment of performers, coax all manner of sounds from a strange phalanx of icy sound makers, ice harp, ice percussion, ice bass drum (!), iceofon, icehorn, all soft focused and dreamlike, all recorded live in the frosty interior of an igloo like ice-recording studio. From the icy scrape and shuffle of melted ice, to the deep resonant tones of the various frozen percussion instruments, sounding like vibes or chimes, sometimes even gongs, the overtones drifting and slowly fading. Dark dolorous melodies, warm and subdued, but impossibly resonant. After all, these are just chunks of ice! But obviously crafted with such care and precision to render them capable of making rich sonorous sound. Like some giant frosty thumb piano, a warm tumble of ghostlike notes, beneath the flittering flute-like sound of the icehorn, soft, delicate reedy melodies that sometimes morph into thick wheezes before dissipating back into gentle flutter. Beneath it all, thick and cavernous rumbles and whirs, deep and dense, layered with sonic subtleties, rich with tonal color, as if played on some giant cello made from ice (which we think is not far from the truth actually). Also present are a wide array of unobtrusive sonic events in and around each track, a tiny army of icicle percussion, clinking and clattering, chittering and scrabbling, a delicate crystalline backdrop for the warm wash and warble of the main ice instruments. And finally the vocals -- on first listen, at low volume, we almost didn't realize there were vocals at all, they tend toward the extremely abstract, strange little vocalizations as much about texture and timbre as tone and pitch, the sound perfectly blending into the icy landscape around them. Hints of Sigur Ros, Joan La Barbara, Sainkho Namchylak, but each voice unmoored, loosed from any sort of corporeal existence, left to flit and flicker ghostlike, almost like tiny droplets of water dripping delicately onto the already frozen landscape, allowed to seep into each and every melody, freezing into new and wonderful shapes.
At its most percussive, the music on Igloo sounds a bit like that breed of underground minimal free folk, sort of minimal and tribal, dreamy and slightly clattery, Finnish free folk ensembles Avarus and Anaksimandros definitely come to mind, while the strange underwater thumb piano sound reminds us of a much more minimal and abstract Konono No.1. For the most part though, Igloo is a dark dreamy drift, soft and meditative, warm and warbly, shimmering and sparkling and completely captivating.
And, it's mastered by AQ fave dronelord Deathprod!
Igloo also boasts some of the most amazing packaging we have ever seen. The booklet and tray card are semi-transparent vellum, printed images of ice in gorgeous deep blues, the whole thing wrapped in a thick slip cover made from a thick foggy semi transparent textured plastic, the front with strips cut out like icicles, the edge cut away to reveal the cd's spine, which is filled with water, with tiny bubbles drifting back and forth, and yes, we mean ACTUAL water, in a little custom made vial, so perfect it does indeed look like the cd tray is full of water, just waiting to be frozen and played! WOW!
Norwegian label Miasmah has long been home to a stable of artists creating the sorts of sounds we can't ever seem to get enough of: dark, brooding, electronic flecked hauntological cinematic soundscapes, and late night mysterious classical infused dronemusic, artists like Elegi, Macus Fjellstrom, Gultskra Artikler, FNS, Kreng, Jasper TX, and of course Jacaszek, aka Polish electro-acoustic composer and soundscaper Michal Jacaszek, and while Jacaszek only made one record for Miasmah, it was such a perfect fit, that it was easy to imagine Jacaszek as emblematic of the label's sound. But here we are a few years later, and Jacaszek has already moved on to a new label, but thankfully taken that 'Miasmah' sound with him. And if anything, this new one is even more fully realized than Treny, which was already a unanimous aQ fave. And really how could it not be? Like Treny before it, Glimmer unfurls a ghostly world of blur and shadow, of hum and thrum and glitch and crackle. Operating in a darkened world not that far removed from the Caretaker or Philip Jeck or Demdike Stare, albeit with a bit more of a classical bent, Jacaszek conjures up haunting brooding soundworlds of lush shimmering strings, of echo drenched harpsichord, of woozy loops and hazy staticky record crackle, soft slow swells, that grow so distorted and intense, they slip easily into the red, transforming into something much more harrowing than the music of many of his sonic brethren. The sound threatening to collapse or explode, an urgent pulsing, nearly grinding buzz, that as quickly as it blossomed, seems to slip right back into languid expanses of soft focus drift. Horns and strings, acoustic guitars, all layered delicately into creaking faded stretched of hushed mesmer, an old timey chamber music, transmitted from the other side, much of the sound damaged and decayed as it crossed over, resulting in some darkly alien dronescaping, that slips easily from warped, looped murky moody ooze, to lush, almost pop flecked cinematic post classical drift, the sound at either end of that sonic spectrum flecked with bits of glitch, and audio detritus, the sound seeming to gradually fade and flake as the record spins, almost as if on the next play, it would sound even more washed out and hazy.
There are moments where the sound coalesce into something much more polished, and more traditionally musical, but even then, the music is underpinned by an ominous foreboding, wreathed in strange muted loops, and mysterious sonic fragments, as if being listened to through some sort of dusty old sonic veil, loveliness gradually darkening, shadows lengthening, melodies unwinding and growing subtly more menacing, the recording revealing more and more crackle, swirls of hiss like little dustdevils, all woven into some sort of otherworldly funereal threnody, dreamlike and lovely, but always on the verge of drawing the listener into the mysterious dark place from which these haunting sounds emanate...
Finally available on cd, the one-two punch that proves Jackie O Motherfucker just may well edge out their more hyped contemporaries, the No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand Of The Man, in the bid to rule the world of US-underground-free-psych-folk-weirdness.
There certainly is a rustic Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn aspect to this Portland ensemble's sound, but there is much less of the expected jazz element. Instead, Jackie-O Motherfucker have carved out a sound that is emotively quite similar to the post-rock melancholia of Godspeed / Sigur Ros but with none of their overly dramatic orchestrations.
The album opens with a buried collage of heterodyning shortwave radio and disconnected voices, but emphatically steps forward with a guitar duet between a sad David Pajo-esque riff and an intertwining effects-laden chimed tone. After the clunky twang of Jew's harps on "Bone Saw," Jackie-O returns to the evocative, spacious, and cinematically Western riffs (especially on the breathtakingly melancholy "The Cage"), as an effective means of transcribing sound into a psychic landscape that is strangely similar to the aforementioned Godspeed. While Godspeed bracket their tight orchestrations around a social pessimism that eventually leads to cathartic enlightenment about how shitty the world is around us, Jackie-O Motherfucker shrug their shoulders and settle back into a drugged out, dreamy drawly musical stupor of oddly psychedelic grooves which somehow seems way more appealing.
What's the scariest and creepiest of instruments? Could it be the downtuned electric guitar, that sound that marks all things dark and heavy and brutal and grim? Or could it be the cello with its soaring keening deep throated moan? Well we might posit, especially in light of this Jacula record, that the creepiest of all instruments is most certainly the church organ. Surprising that an instrument used chiefly to inspire and praise can illicit such utter unease and create such a pervasively creepy ambience. And that's pretty much what Jacula is all about, creepy ambience. Thick and haunting washes of warm rich church organ drone, resonant and reverberant, sometimes accompanied by simple pounding drums or mournful folky guitar melodies or wild psychedelic freakouts or soaring female operatic vocals or even occasional lyrics spoken ominously in Italian, but more often than not it's just the massive and ominous swells of a church organ. So effectively and utterly evil sounding. Jacula are sort of like a doom metal soundtrack to a Dario Argento movie. Goblin meets Skepticism! A Krautrock Thergothon? But is's not all mellow murky moodiness, tracks three and four, "Triumpratus Sad" and "Veneficium", both feature seriously fuzzed out, almost punk rock riffs, that sound about a decade before their time, insistent and completely heavy, even more so when they're eventually joined by a pounding one-drum beat or strident atonal piano or wild swirling progrock keyboards. Amazing! It's no wonder we sold the first couple of copies we got in of this to members of local black metal bands Ludicra and Leviathan!
In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum (literally "The Poison Is Always At The End"), which was supposedly recorded in an English castle, was originally released in an edition of only 300 copies in the late sixties and has been completely unavailable until just recently (this reissue cd is not entirely new, but it took us until now to get enough copies to list). Formed in 1968, Jacula even counted a medium as a member of their band who we assume was critical to the process of creating this record, considering that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was "Composed By Spiritualist Seance (1966-1969)" Woah! And for those of you well versed in sixties and seventies prog, be aware that this reissue is NOT the same as the Jacula record released in the early seventies (1972's Tardo Pede In Magiam Versus), even though for some strange reason Black Widow has given it pretty much the exact same cover.
For every band the hype machine catapults into the stratosphere of underground indie rock next big thing-ness, a hundred others get pushed aside, forgotten or ignored, many of those WAY more deserving of the accolades, and the praise, and more importantly, the ears of the listener, but for whatever reason, wrong label, no hyped tours, bad business sense, no blogosphere freakouts, no connections to other even cooler bands, those bands can only do so much, which often means simply making an incredible record, that practically nobody hears. Some bands tough it out, make more records, eventually getting noticed, and then everyone can return to that old record and finally proclaim it a masterpiece, and lament the fact that it was so overlooked, but many bands put everything they have into that record, energy, creativity, money, time, and when nothing happens, they just give it up, which is always a sad sad thing.
So what does that have to do with Wisconsin psych pop combo Jaill? Nothing really, other than the fact, that these guys have been around since 2002, have released a bunch of other records, but with That's How We Burn, have made probably the best, catchiest psychedelic indie pop record of the year, maybe the last several years, yet they rarely pop up on blogs, we rarely hear tastemakers shouting from the mountaintops about Jaill, or about That's How We Burn. Compare that to, say, Best Coast, who we also love, but whose every move, every sound is covered by every blog in the world. It's weird, cuz this Jaill record, holy shit, for folks who hear hundreds of new records every month, many of them amazing, for ONE SINGLE record to get played over and over, as in 5, 6 even 10 times a day, well as far as recommendations go, it's pretty tough to beat. But as with most pop records, it starts with one song, that one song that sinks it's hooks into you, and won't let go, and no matter how good the rest of the record is, you just can't stop yourself from listening to that same song over and over and over. And on That's How We Burn, that song is "Thank Us Later", from the first few seconds, you'll be hooked, the slithery melody, the weird drum fill, the echoey guitar jangle, and then when the vocals come in, all weary, slipping from croon to almost falsetto, and then the chorus, a fucking KILLER, the sort of chorus that some bands build a whole career on, and then there's an equally catchy bridge, the whole song pretty much perfect, a little bit surf rock, a little bit Brit rock, a little bit modern garage pop, but the song itself, it's the kind of jam any of the current crop of lo-fi garage poppers would KILL for, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Sic Alps, Male Bonding, we could go on and on, but the songs on Jaill stand up to anything any of those bands can come up with, and then some.
And where as lots of records we love have one of those opening one-two-three punches, an opening salvo that slays, and makes the whole record super front loaded, but on That's How We Burn, those one-two-three punches are everywhere, in fact, pick a song, and it's the first in one of those kick ass salvos, and yeah, sure, the opening three tracks are tough to beat, "The Stroller" is dark and hypnotic and a little bit gloomy, mixing in some Interpol and Rapture to their more slacker surfy sound, and weirdly it suits them big time, and it has a wicked crunchy chorus, the whole thing driven by some serious bad ass riffing, and some cool harmony vocals, which leads right into "Everyone's Hip" which sounds more slackery, a little bit like the Soft Pack or the Strokes, mixed with a bit of pavement, with a weird angular verse, and totally insanely hooky bridge and a cool doo wop-y chorus. Finally, "On The Beat" finishes off that opening salvo with something a little bit more laid back and laconic, the guitars droney and hypnotic, and another irresistible chorus, lots of crunch and thump and chug, and some cool vocal harmonies.
Which leads us right into "Thank Us Later", 1-2-3 salvo number two, and of course we STILL aren't tired of listening to it, but after another time through, we're led right into "Summer Mess" an awesome stripped down acoustic jam, with some snarky lyrics, but with the heartfelt delivery, and the amazing melody, it's pretty tough to fight, and finally, another guitar comes in, and some simple percussion, making the last 30 seconds lush and sunshiney and summery. And finally part 3, "She's My Baby", a driving groover, with another cool chugging guitar part, clanging chiming chords, and yet ANOTHER amazing chorus, which by now should lead you to the conclusion that these guys know their way around a hook, and aren't afraid to jam a whole mess of them into a single song.
We could keep going, another three-fer, starting with "Snake Shakes", which begins with the bassline from Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants you", before the vocals transform the song into something much more lilting and jangly... But you get the drift, pretty much every song here is awesome, catchy and crunchy and jangly and hooky, and unlike the horde of bands today who think enough reverb and weird lo-fi production techniques will disguise the fact that there's nothing going on underneath, Jaill, don't bother, cuz they don't need to, maybe that's why they're not getting the hype the so deserve, not noisy enough, not weird enough, not lo-fi enough, not hazy sixties girl group enough, but fuck it, who cares, this rules, we love it, and we think you will too, and we can't offer up any more hype than making this an aQ Record Of The Week and the thousand or so words you just finished reading...
It's funny that after years of everybody striving for better sound quality, better recording equipment, higher fidelity, a sound closer and closer to pristine perfection, wax cylinder to 78 to lp to cassette to compact disc.... that we here at AQ tend to lean in the exact opposite direction. Sure that record's great, we'll think, but imagine if it was swathed in murky distortion, or drenched in a dense swirl of tape hiss! Record crackle? Yes, please. This constant quest for sonic perfection seems like a reflection of exactly what is wrong with society in general, a constant striving for some unattainable ideal, the march of progress, sacrificing character and feeling and emotion for faceless smooth 'perfection' in the process. But those imperfections are exactly what make things interesting and unique and totally unlike anything else. But as much as we love lesser than pristine sound quality, it's worth pointing out that when, for example, we hear a compilation of old blues 78's often cleaned up, obviously the scratches and pops and hiss were not at all intended, and thus realistically have no place in the music, at least from the musician's point of view, but as a byproduct of degradation and the passing of time and the fragility of primitive recordings, the sound of that decay becomes representative of the time passed, and the history within the music. So when we hear old 78's or long lost wax cylinder recordings, we don't want them cleaned up and digitally restored, the sound of the music wrapped in warm scratchiness and murky lo fidelity, gives the music a special kind of character, like the lines on our faces, or metal oxidizing into cool greens and blues. And I guess that's what appeals to us about the music of Philip Jeck and Tim Hecker and William Basinski and the like. Musicians who create modern music, but who take that music and affect it in a way that makes it sound antique or otherworldly, damaged and decayed, sometimes by utilizing modern techniques, but just as often by employing old turntables and antiquated recording techniques, the music on its own is of course beautiful, but even more so with a rough patina of age and weariness, of whir and hiss, the musical equivalent of an old sepia tone photograph, edges all creased and folded, the images blurry and indistinct. It's more romantic, and way more mysterious.
But it takes more than just slapping on some fuzz, or recording on a broken old reel to reel machine. There was a glut recently of electronica pop hybrids, where a band would sprinkle some bloops and bleeps over some generic strummy pop, and suddenly what was once a crappy pop band became some sort of experimental avant post pop group. Bullshit. Just like anything, it's more than the process, more than the technique, it's some ineffable combination that creates magic. Magic like Jasper TX.
The work of one man, Dag Rosenqvist, and recorded at home in Sweden, Jasper TX sounds like so much more. A fuzzy travelogue, soft smeared images from lost lives and faded memories. A gentle lilting post rock, transmitted through time, picking up all sort of sonic detritus on the way, a message from another world, faded like an old postcard. A futuristic version of the unearthed 78. Imagine music nerds in 2066, discovering a mysterious compact disc, "rarely see those anymore...", unearthed in a trunk in some old abandoned house, marveling and the murky mystery of this record, and the beautifully fuzzy and foggy melodies, the droney timeless beauty. Jasper TX manages to evoke all sorts of feeling and emotions, some of the sounds, the methods, are clearly modern, but the whole record, every sound, every melody, is steeped in warm warbly mystery, even the title, I'll Be Long Gone Before My Light Reaches You, hints at the emotional disconnect, that faded photo, undelivered postcard, translated into music. Each track is a snapshot, a sonic glimpse into the past, or a future that was never meant to be, a melancholy soundtrack full of shadows and whispers, a slow shuffling shimmer, a loping lazy rhythm, drifting beneath a warm swirly wash of thick guitar fuzz and what sounds distinctly like the sound of surf crashing on the shore, a thick wash of My Bloody Valentine guitar and M83 buzzy shimmer over a lilting minor key guitar and delicate piano, long stretches of lustrous, sun dappled drones, over slow shifting chordal washes, and a creeping morose melodic crawl, soaring strings and gentle fingerpicked guitars, all muted and mumbled, as if heard from underwater, the light bending and wavering hypnotically, tinkling music box melodies drenched in reverb and broadcast from tin speakers hung from trees, the fog thick and the moonlight dull and grey, soft strummy guitars smeared into whisps of dreamlike whir, each track thick with sorrow, or regret, or hopelessness, not overt, but conveyed through the subtle soft light each track is cast in, warm overcast evening glow, the pale spill of the crescent moon, the diffuse flush of predawn light, glimmering and glistening soft and bittersweet. The heart of the record is the appropriately titled "My Heart Is Broken, I've Lost My Way", a nine minute slow build, warm wheezing layers of organ, over ambient clatter, mic sounds, footsteps, a weary, woozy wanderingly soft soundscape, gentle swells, each hovering and gliding dreamlike, an angelic theremin-like skree way in the background, while an alien melody is played out on top, crafted from glitched out crackling instrument buzz, an abrasive squelch, cutting in and out, easily the 'hardest' sounds on the record, like someone trying to get a message through from another dimension, a groaning distorted guitar, broadcast intermittently through the ether, creepy and strangely haunting. The record closes with the just as eerie "All Those Broken Birds Singing Winter Into Spring", a final look back, before fading into nothing, soft lilting guitar, over a whisper soft drift of minor key shimmer and minimally morose melody. So totally and absolutely perfect.
We love it when something unexpected, unknown, and essentially totally off our radar shows up and then completely blows us away! Which is exactly what happened with this chunk of epic cosmic psychedelic space-out by French artist Etienne Jaumet. By the looks of his photo on the cover we first thought this was going to be some sort of smarty pants singer songwriter, Jarvis Cocker sort of thing, but talk about about how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover! Instead, Night Music is one of the most satisfying and fully realized analog synth driven discs we've heard in ages. Imagine Goblin and Kraftwerk gliding through cosmic space, as the record's opening 20+ minute track really does evoke some sort of interstellar autobahn, the listener whirling through the stars and sky, Night Music a deep rich and nuanced soundtrack for that late night cosmic excursion. We also think about some of our fave modern psych-space rockers, like try to imagine Expo 70 remixed by Jonas Reinhardt, or Arp channeling Franco Battiato or Subway stretched way out into a sonic stratosphere pioneered by Conrad Schnitzler and Klaus Schulze. Folks who dug the Altres record we listed last time should definitely dig this too. We'd also bet the Black Devil Disco folks and both Zombi and Zomby lovers will find loads to love on Night Music. Oddly enough when we starting doing some digging to find out more about Jaumet we discovered he was in a group called Zombie Zombie (not however, related to the above Zomby/i's).
You can tell that Jaumet also has a deep love of cosmic free-jazz as he introduces subtle saxophone on parts of the record with perfectly understated results, bringing to mind Herbie Hancock's Sextant album for sure, and also Sun Ra as reimagined by Four Tet, particularly on that epic opener "For Falling Asleep" - the very next track sure says "wake up", though, bringing in more of a techno thump to the proceedings, but still staying wonderfully spaced out. Pretty much every time we play this in the store either a customer or one of us who works here asks if this is a reissue of some long lost kosmiche gem, maybe from Germany in the 1970s. In fact we found out that Jaumet based the sequencing of the record on many of those same amazing cosmic psych records from the '70s, where first side of the vinyl is one long track and the other side is filled with shorter tracks. Jaumet also has such an obvious understanding of composition, especially how to stretch tracks out without letting them overstay their welcome, and thus Night Music is just long enough to totally transport us to another dimension, yet focused enough to stay listenable and sonically complex the entire time.
Something which only makes us love this record even more was the discovery that long time AQ favorite, '70s French folk-psychstress Emmanuelle Parrenin adds her voice as texture on a couple tracks (sounding very Yoko Ono, at times) as well as playing harp and hurdy gurdy. Furthermore, the mix was "directed and imagined" by none other than Carl Craig and you can totally tell, as the whole record flows with such a lush layered sound and driving pulse that is both immediately satisfying and utterly hypnotic!
This stunning slab of outsider electro krautpsych coldwave gloom pop came out of nowhere (well, San Francisco actually!), but is quickly becoming a new obsession around here. Dark and mechanoid, dense and noisy, skeletal and mesmerizing, shoegazey and totally warped in equal measure. While there's been no shortage of weirdo/outsider pop in the last couple years, it's starting to become a way too crowded field for sure, and more and more it feels like lots of these weirdo pop groups aren't truly weird. That seems like a strange distinction, but think about the Shaggs, truly inspired, creating music within limited means, out of a pure desire to be creative, the results totally bafflingly brilliant. Now think about all the bands who cite the Shaggs as an influence, how many of those bands just simply suck, but for some reason consider sucking somehow analogous to the naivete and primitivism of the Shaggs. Such seems to be the case with 'weirdness' these days, it's not as if any pedestrian boring group can just slop on effects, or record their record poorly, or sing in a crazzzeee voice, and suddenly it's art. That stuff, the real thing at least, true outsider sonic art, is absolutely inspired, it comes from the heart, and the soul, you can fake weirdness, but you can't fake genius. Which brings us back to Jealousy, who are most definitely weird. In the most wonderfully and organic way, and who are totally brilliant, pushing all of our buttons, sounding alternatingly like an even more cracked lo-fi Suicide, or a more industrial cold wave Moon Duo, the vibe paranoid and druggy, the music warped and woozy, mesmerizing and motorik. After a wild squall of echo drenched reverbed garbled vox, the record kicks into gear, all low slung, frigid basslines, shimmery echoey guitars, creepy sung/spoken vocals, lots of space, very spare and skeletal, the krautrock vibe is huge, but only surfaces here and there, in between jealousy offer up bursts of chaotic softly noisy murk, heavy drifts of distorted shoegaze, abstract arrhythmic grooves, from weirdo coldwave pop, to clinical industrial creep, to tripped out krautpsych mesmer, our favorite jam might be the super spare spacekraut workout of "Night Stalking", which takes up most of the B side, sounding like a seriously stripped down Moon Duo, mixed with some This Heat, and a little Throbbing Gristle, spidery and psychedelic, one of those tracks you wish would go on forever, totally tranced out rhythmic bliss. The record closes with another favorite, the evocatively titled "Drug Sores", which wraps weirdly distorted speaking-in-tongues Buttholes-like vocals over Spacemen 3 style droney heavily effected space psych guitars, creating something both darkly mesmerizing, and ominously disturbing, which pretty much captures the vibe of the whole record. TOTALLY recommended.
'Tis the season for Philip Jeck, it seems! This UK sonic experimentalist is a big fave 'round these parts, so it's been a festive month indeed with the recent release of a live recording (reviewed 2 lists ago) and now this brand new 'studio' album, AND a reissue of Jeck's seminal, long out of print album Surf, reviewed nearby. Hallelujah.
Jeck is simply a wizard with the turntables, not in a hip hop DJ sense but as a sound sculptor, making ghostly slow motion looping drones and beats with crackly old vinyl and the phonograph mechanism itself. Listening to his music is to submerge oneself into a mysterious, evocative realm of sound that capitalizes on the claustrophobia of the locked groove, that dwells on the dusty textures of vinyl as if examined by a field recordist, rather than the usual needle, tone-arm, pre-amp, speaker method of sound extraction.
7 is certainly a strong Jeck showing, lacking naught for crackling, glacial drone and ominous background melodies stolen from another time and place. It's really amazing that it's a turntable (or turntables) making possible Jeck's music, which ranges from the very physical sounding action of a track like "Museum" to the simple haunting whoosh of "Wipe". Track four, "Bush Hum" deserves special mention as it's constructed soley from the "amplified hum of a Bush record-player and delay-pedal". With those tools -- no records -- Jeck creates a totally electronic sounding track of buzzing rapid rhythmic noise, loud, grinding like a swarm of robot insects. The very next track, "Now You Can Let Go" takes the opposite approach, where there are indeed LPs on Jeck's turntables, and you can actually catch traces of actual music being "sampled". Squawks of big band jazz, a bluesy lick, warped exotica -- but usually nothing really recognizable. It's almost like modern electronic dance music at moments, but worshipping the skipping LP not the digital glitch. But it's really Jeck's compositions with even less overt 'musical' content that we prefer, and 7's final track "Veil" delivers on that score with ten minutes of wonderfully droned-out sombre beauty, with no skips or scratches to interrupt its windswept trance... Of course, recommended!
Of all the sound manipulators, soundscapers and dronologists out there, few can touch Philip Jeck. A master 'turntablist', able to create whole new worlds out of sound, to transport the listener to another place, real or imaginary, with just a clutch of record players, a handful of dusty old vinyl, some cheap Casio keyboards, a couple minidisc recorders, a few mixers, a bass guitar and some effects pedals, the musical equivalent of some mad scientist, creating a time machine, or some temporal shift manipulator, out of odds and ends from the kitchen or the garage. The magic is in the process as much as the result, that result being at least partially beholden to the process, not to discount the sheer creativity and ingenuity of the artist. Because that's exactly what Jeck is, an artist, painting impressionistic landscapes with sound. Instead of colors, he deftly manipulates textures and rhythms, layers and melody, subtly mixing various elements to create something other, the various constituent parts irrelevant to the final piece, like staring at a painting up close, it's not until you step back, that the various elements coalesce into something magical, and beautiful.
An Ark For The Listener is a sonic mediation on a poem about the drowning of five exile nuns in the 1800's, and was performed in various locations throughout 2010, this recorded version incorporates bits of the live performances into the final recorded piece, a gorgeously somber soundscape of deep drones and of mysterious sonic swells, the opener "Pilot/Dark Blue Night", is a hushed drift of stretched out tones and muted sonic garble, a chorus of croaking frogs beneath moaning low end melodies, a slowly unfurling minor key drama wreathed in hiss, truncated rhythms, and clouds of click and chitter, deep bell like tones, and swirling soft focus ambience, culminating in the final few minutes with a super emotional bit of looped strings and epic almost choral swells, strangely skipping, uncharacteristically revealing their vinyl source, but it's precisely what makes it so intense and mysterious.
"Ark" is a tinkling driftscape of chiming tones, and distant melodies which gradually transforms into a weird bit of droney wah wah-ed bass flutter, "Twentyninth" is a perfect slab of Jeckian dreamdrift haze, shot through with moving minor key melodies, and cinematic like tension, a few of the tracks grow dense and turbulent, the sounds thickening, becoming almost caustic and corrosive, while others seems to grow more and more fragile, diaphanous stretches of crystalline shimmer, the record proper finishing off with the surprisingly rhythmic "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)", with its soft avalanche of looped beats, its tangled flurries of pizzicato strings, a soft focus frenzy of dizzing turntable swirl, which gives way to a lovely outro of hushed barely there drift and breathless low end murmur.
The cd tacks on two bonus tracks, reworked versions from the Suite: Live In Liverpool record, one previously released, the other unreleased, both working surprisingly well with the record proper, "All That's Allowed (Released)" a shimmering expanse of blurred strings and disembodied melody, of softly staticky crackle, and hazy hushed drift, and "Chime, Chime (Rerung)", a crunchy and tactile stretch of tolling bells, reverberating metal, booming gongs and tinkling chimes, all wrapped in a gauze of crackle and pop, buzz and warble, the whole thing lit with some glimmering shimmering otherworldly light. So great.
It should be frighteningly obvious by now, to everyone, that we love the sound of record crackle. Pops and clicks, buzz and fuzz. Just have a look at the last 8 or 9 years of reviews, and you'll see that we are grade-A suckers when it comes to that unmistakable sound. In fact, more than once, we posited that if we had a way, some simple system or an effects pedal even, that would render EVERY record we had, more fuzzy, turn every super clear crystal clean recording into something that sounded like it had been sitting in the garage for 50 years and was being played back on a rusty Victrola, well, you know we'd do it in a second.
And if there was one single artist, responsible for cementing that love of crackle and pop, of twisting our tastes all around, of taking a love, and turning it into an obsession, it would very likely be Mr. Philip Jeck. Ever since his Surf record, we have been smitten, no, obsessed is more like it. Desperately waiting for another missive of dreamlike murk, of looped chunks of vinyl, of pastoral bliss rendered in disembodied melodies and all manner of distortion and grit. We would later becomes similarly obsessed with soundmakers exploring similar territory, Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Eric Cordier, but our fuzzy crackly little hearts will always belong to Philip Jeck.
Which is all the more ironic considering Sand, his brand new record, is perhaps the least fuzzy, the least murky, the most crystalline and clear recording we've heard from him yet. Recorded live over the last couple years and later edited into a series of slow developing soundscapes, Sand finds Jeck moving beyond the crackle and static of turntables, allowing his deft hand at arranging, at collaging various sounds, heck COMPOSING, take the center stage. That element was always present, but was often overshadowed by the sound, by the ambience, whereas here, in these SONGS, the fuzz and crackles is just one more compositional element. Fear not, there are still plenty of old fuzzy recordings, re-envisioned sonic snippets, haunting blurred loops, but here, it seems as if Jeck has chosen the parts and pieces more for their melodic content than their texture, and the results are quite surprising.
The opener is a mysterious creep, muted crackle woven into a warm whir, in the background, deep melodic swells drift in and out, soon to fade out completely, leaving just crackle like the sound of gentle rainfall. Over the track's 9+ minutes, sound shifts and changes, timbre and tone are altered dramatically, often unexpectedly, but it manages to work, finishing off with a gentle fade out peppered with intense squelchy squalls of white noise.
From then on out, the sound is surprisingly epic and majestic, the loops and snippets stretched out and tangled up into long form pulsing fanfares, some sort of sun dappled ur-drone, underpinned by strange subtle rhythms, and a constantly churning melodic undercurrent.
The end of "Residue" almost sounds like Nadja at points, with short sharp bursts of heavily delayed and effected samples, but spends much more time whispering along, delicately traversing seas of soft static. "Shining" is all low end rumble and whir, shimmer and sway, pulsing and throbbing, a churning blackened sea of sound, this time peppered with strange almost-rhythms crafted from sonic snippets, giving it an almost Chain Reaction minimal techno vibe.
The disc finished off with the 11 minute "Fanfares Over", the third and final part of Jeck's Fanfare song trilogy on sand, and begins with a splatter of crackly percussion, a woozy warbly loop, all slowly overtaken by a soft skipping record, slowly becoming a sort of ghostlike lullaby, that strange persistent percussion, making the track sound like, at times, like it could be from some forest folk or free drone cd-r. Jeck sets up a calliope like loop, wraps it in flanger, occasionally spreads a little distortion and record buzz over the top, and lets it weave and say and sprawl until it explodes near the end into a flurry of bleary eared distortion, the melody blown out, the sound jagged and intense, a subtly chaotic, in-the-red climax, that doesn't fade out, instead just blinks out, leaving the strange vacuum of silence.
At first we were a little disappointed that Sand wasn't more fuzzy, more murky and washed out, more distorted and damaged sounding, but the more we listened, the more we realized, that all of those elements WERE still present, just in ways that might not be so obvious, Sand is still fuzzy and murky and dreamlike and distorted, and it's a testament to Jeck's skill as a composer and a turntablist, that he's able to make it seem otherwise. And judging from how often this gets played in the store, we're all just as smitten as ever.
