Chicago's Mako Sica have been a longtime favorite here at aQuarius, and with their second full length (third if you count their live vinyl debut), we figured it was about time more people took note of this amazing band. The trio whips up a heady and unique noise that goes way beyond simple classification and remains blissfully in its own world. The main ingredients � two guitars, drums, and evocative wordless vocals � are augmented here and there with trumpet, thumb piano, and various percussive flourishes, but it's the way the musicians interact with each other that makes this band so special. And while they certainly do rock as they ascend to higher levels of psychedelia, calling Mako Sica a "rock band" or a "psychedelic band" doesn't quite hit the mark. The noise addled skronk of hometown labels like Skin Graft is certainly evident as well as plenty of free jazz and world music influences, but the band never tries to be anything other than themselves, and with those influences guiding the way they have arrived at a stellar sound that will be instantly accessible to adventurous listeners. At the same time, a level of mysteriousness remains constant, demanding repeated listens. As distinctive as it all is, we know this will appeal to fans of legendary groups like Trad Gras Och Stenar, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Les Rallizes Denudes, not to mention the current crop of San Francisco bands blowing the minds of the world like Barn Owl, 3 Leafs, and Carlton Melton. How could we not make this a Record Of The Week?
Essence opens with the monolithic sidelong "Fate Deals A Hand". A slow, eerie buildup gives the impression of a rising sun as the sounds bubble to life. Sustained, cello-like drones and bells accompany a voice that is itself another layer of beautiful sound. The mood gradually shifts and an underlying harmonic fuzz on one of the guitars indicates that things are finally gonna take off. The heaviness and unease of the guitars grows as the percussion becomes more insistent, and six and a half minutes in the sounds begin to merge into a more distinct form before launching into an ominous psych jam that is almost metal if it weren't for the way the drums hold it all in place. Queasy, discordant sounds kaleidoscopically swirl about as the vocals (which at times sound almost like Nina Simone if she were wordlessly chanting) add an awesome, somewhat disorienting vibe that makes it difficult to guess when and where this music could be coming from. It's amazing how the vocals illustrate a story without words and create drama, even if you aren't quite sure what it all means. Eventually a delayed trumpet glides into the maelstrom, at which point the band somehow still holds back and lets an atmosphere of spaciousness build - spaciousness being one of the key elements separating this band from the rest of the pack, who often try to cram as much as possible into the proceedings. Of course, Mako Sica launches into another distorted freakout before reaching a final and total silence. Fucking awesome.
Side two offers up two more lengthy jams, beginning with "On Cracked Sea". Cosmic chanting and guitars operate in unison, trading melodies freely without confining themselves to any traditional structure. Instead, it's just TOTAL music, melodic, jagged, beautiful, and noisy, all at once, with the drums clattering about creating just as much mood as the guitars. More of that awesome harmonically rich fuzz guitar comes cascading in, bringing the song to a new level of intensity before winding down into a woozy blissful fadeout. The final track here, "Chain Leg", begins with some low ominous rumblings and more bad ass vocal chants, reminding us a bit of a less metallic version of UK space/psych/drone collective Bong. Eventually the proceedings get a little more abstract even as some discernible riffing takes center stage. Everything sounds perfectly in place and open to whatever adventures appear to be happening in real time. Musical freedom, pretty much.
For a band that has continuously surprised and inspired, Essence stands as Mako Sica's greatest achievement so far. Their somewhat shadowy existence may mean they might not the first band that comes to mind when pondering the international resurgence in explorative, free form psychedelic music, but it's hard to imagine that not changing with this amazing record. Get it now!
We never really ever dug Mammal that much. We wanted to, but it just never hit us. A sort of sub Wolf Eyes abject electronic brutality, not noise so much as noisy, very Midwestern, filthy, homebrewed... just typing that has us thinking, well why the fuck didn't we? That's the sort of stuff we'd write about a record we love. Well, now we are, writing that, about a record we love, and it's kind of weird that it's a Mammal record, but it definitely has us reconsidering our verdict on past Mammal releases because this one is an absolute killer. Some sort of electronic flecked nihilist loner doom. Or something. This is most definitely filthy, noisy, and homebrewed, a doomed abject outsider electronic folk record, but with crushing guitars and drum machine. If you're not sold already, there must be something very wrong with you, but what the heck, let's just keep going.
The opener "Repulsion" is utter minimal metallic brilliance. A simple, super processed rhythm, relentless and repetitive, beneath a similarly monochromatic downtuned guitar riff, that occasionally is joined by another even heavier, crumblingly distorted guitar. And that's it. It just loops endlessly, the riffs cycling through some barely there melody, it's more about texture and timbre and groove, it sounds like a super slow motion robotic instrumental My Dad Is Dead, or even a little like Big Black at 16 rpm. It's totally gorgeous in its spare simplicity, and it somehow manages to convey all sorts of emotion through a single riff and a single rhythm. And as we've said about other tracks in the past, as far as we're concerned, that track could have been an hour long and been the only track on the record.
But the record's not instrumental, in fact most of the songs have vocals, a sort of mumbled deadpan drawl, the lyrics, super personal and intimate, a sort of abstract downer folk, the guitar wrapped delicately around the vocals, except for the inevitable crumbling doom guitar that comes in to drape a little filth and misery on the proceedings.
The rest of the record is a slow sick crawl, the drum machine spitting out a simple somehow stumbling beat, over slow corrosive swells of guitar, the vocals more like shadows, some of the songs are so skeletal they almost seem like sketches, which only serves to make them seem that much more fragile and intimate. The misleadingly named "Incinerator Ballad" is a 4 minute burst of white noise wrapped around a churning industrial pulse, a wall of hiss and static and blown out distortion, followed by the whispered buzz of "Lower Depths", a stretched out soundscape of tinny distorted guitar, detuned chords, whooshing ambience, and more stoned crooning. The record closes with the 15+ minute "Cremation", a gorgeous and super intense, super creepy synthscape, the synth buzzing and warbling, minor key melodies spread out into slabs of murky buzz, while way off in the distance, bits of guitar streak and soar, a psychedelic light show, barely visible against the grey sky of dusk, the synth eventually locking into a loop, and suddenly the sound is some fucked up lo-fi Tangerine Dream, but performed on thrift store keyboards and recorded on a microcassette recorder, eventually fading out, leaving just the sounds of night, crickets, other insects, wind, distant trains, mysterious voices, and single guitar, still moaning way off in the distance...
Absolutely unexpected and totally gorgeous. Features amazing and super intense black and white pencilled artwork by the Mammal himself.
So so so utterly recommended. Definite contender for record of the year...
The Sahel Sounds label (responsible for Music From Saharan Cel Phones, Harafin So, and many more great lps of music from the Sahel region of Africa) strikes again with this amazing reissue of an uber-rare vintage cassette, the lone album circa 1978 by Nigerian "electronic music pioneer" Mammane Sani Abdullaye. We're told that if you live in West Africa, you'd likely be familiar with Mammane's instrumental music to some extent, as his tunes have apparently been used frequently in the background on radio and TV broadcasts over the past three decades. For us though, his sounds are an exciting discovery! Mammane plays the electric organ, in a fairly minimalistic and repetitive style, his music full of charming, simple melodies; it sounds very live and intimate, recorded with hardly any overdubs (it was done on a 2 track machine) and pleasingly lo-fi, with a little bit of tape hiss (just like we like it).
Some of the songs are woozy, sweetly dreamy sound paintings, others are more uptempo and percussive, with tick-tocking rhythm backing tracks, and Mammane joyously tickling the keys over top. Chiptune/skweee fans might enjoy the more video-game-y blip blip bleep of the calm yet jaunty "Bodo", while the laidback grooviness of the likes of "Tunan" should appeal to fans of the Ethiopiques series, even though this is from a completely different region of Africa.
Many of the melodies are based on traditional Nigerian folk music - as the label's notes say, "Mammane electrifies the nomadic drum of the tende, the polyphonic ballads of the Woddaabe, and the pastoral hymns of the Sahelian herders". Others are entirely original. And all are quite lovely indeed. Such a find.
Highly recommended in particular to fans of Francis Bebey and his African Electronic Music 1975-1982 collection that we also made a Record Of The Week a while back. An absolutely delightful record!
It's a limited vinyl-only edition of 500 (for now, but we can hope that they'll do a cd too).
Finally in stock, the long awaited solo acoustic live set by Neutral Milk Hotel's beloved Jeff Mangum, about whom I simply cannot be objective -- the two NMH records *still* make me cry everytime I listen to them, they're that lovely and touching and
This show is super lo-fi (the venue is a cofeehouse), but the performance is quite focused and heartfelt. Contains songs that will be familiar to NMH fans, plus a few others, a cover of Phil Spector's "I Love How You Love Me", and best of all, the entire concert is also playable as a 48 minute film on your computer! Comes with no liner notes to speak of but there is a nice foldout poster. On Orange Twin, the new label started by Mangum and Elf Power's Laura Carter.
Since there's no track listing, we'll provide that for ya here: Intro / A Baby for Pree / Glow Into You / 2 Headed Boy / I Will Bury You in Time / Gardenhead / 2 Headed Boy Part 2 / I Love How You Love Me / Engine / Naomi / Jesus Christ / Up and Over We Go / Oh Comely.
It's nice to know that no matter how many records are reissued, or rare gems discovered, or mysterious private press releases rescued from oblivion, there will always be more. And even though sometimes we feel like the bottom of the reissue barrel has been reached, based on some dubious reissues, all it takes is a record like this, to remind us that there are truly some mind benignly fantastic records that have yet to be unearthed. And yeah, this is some truly next level, mind bending stuff. EVERYBODY here digs it, so we knew we had to make it a Record Of The Week, even though a week ago, we'd never heard of Mar-Vista. Sounds like of like a motel or something.
Originally a private press record, released in a run of just 200 copies in 1976, and packaged in blank white sleeves, and sold locally in France, this deliriously trippy and over the top chunk of French psychedelic synth prog is so good, and so weird, it really is one of those rare records, that's makes it hard to believe it could've remained lost for so long. Cuz really, anyone hearing this, would immediately freak out. We most definitely did. Apparently this duo was heavily influenced by minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and krautrock combos like Ashra Tempel and Popol Vuh and while that's not actually bad band math when trying to describe Mar-Vista, the truth of the sound is so much stranger.
A single 41 minute song suite, separated into 6 movements, Visions Of Sodal Ye begins with primitive lo-fi drum machine (or drumming that sounds programmed), beneath whirring organs, fingerpicked acoustic guitars, droning synths and shimmering melodies, with laid back vox way down in the mix, not to mention some killer distorted psych guitar shred, the whole thing wrapped in warped sonic warble. There are plenty of weird production glitches, drop outs, and tape decay/damage from the original masters we would assume, but it only adds to the sound, a sound that soon blossoms into soaring kosmische synth swirls, anchored by more of those primitive drum machine like rhythms, and wreathed in what sounds like whipping winds, and jaw harp like spring melodies, more plink plonk, sing songy synths, and a fierce squall of psychedelic noise guitar. The movements merge into one sprawling epic, continuing with the coolest, creepiest track of the bunch, a dour, murky dirge, a tripped out sort of doom-kraut creep, with low buzzing synths, skittery rhythms, and multiple vocal lines, all wound up into a haunting, intense, organ and synth drenched lumber, that could be the weirdest heaviest French psych-prog jam EVER. That quickly (d)evolves into a cool, groovy sixties style psychedelic blow out, all cascading synth melodies, pulsing hip shaking rhythms, and super distorted theremin like squiggles over the top, before settling into some pulsating, cosmic shimmer, tinged with just a little bit new age, some serious synth prog that blossoms into awesome John Carpenter like soundtrackiness! The record/songsuite culminates in the final 21+ minute movement, a sprawling cinematic synth epic, a twisted dronescape of layered synths and extended tones, ominous and sinister, minor key and darkly malevolent, again, like it could be from the some lost Carpenter movie, all creepy slo-mo melodies, and crumbling textures, plenty of tension, haunting and shadowy and mysterious.
And generally bonus tracks are bonus tracks for a reason, cast offs, throw aways, songs that weren't good enough to make the cut, but not here, the two bonus tracks (found only on the cd!!) are crazy, and crazy cool, the first, "Synthetik Way", is a glistening, glimmering planetarium style cosmic synth workout, all lush, hushed and tranquil one second, then distorted and wildly psychedelic the next, while the second "Crash '73", is an impossibly trippy, surprisingly heavy psych rock jam, with in-the-red distorted guitar and skittery drumming, beneath a wild tangle of snake charmer synth shred, and a totally WTF twisted stuttery finale, which had us imagining a whole other record tucked away with more of this outsider synth-prog-psych weirdness�
So incredible, quite possibly the reissue of the year! Minimal liner notes, a reproduction of the original sleeve, but sadly somewhat flimsy packaging on the digipack cd...
The cd version is limited to 500 copies, the lp just 300.
Two living legends of avant-garde turntable manipulation join forces for this duo recording. Downtown NYC fixture Marclay, a true pioneer in using the turntable as an instrument, abusing it and the LPs themselves in ways that even the craziest hiphop DJs wouldn't imagine. Japan's Otomo Yoshihide, whose seminal Ground Zero band set the turntable loose in a free jazz improv context. Ask Zorn, ask Sonic Youth, ask DJ Spooky: they'll all tell you these guys are the masters. Anyway, chances are you already know all that and more...here these two have created a tapestry of scratching, snatches of music and noise: sometimes the musical sounds the needle is pulling from the vinyl and sometimes the non-musical sounds the vinyl is making on the needle. It's not a DJ Shadow style sample-soundtrack, but rather a beautifully rhythmic new-music, abstract and intriguing. It makes sense that this would be released on Asphodel, home to both recordings by hip hop turntablists The X-Ecutioners and 20th century avantgarde electronic composer Xenakis...
In the beginning, Swedish black metal horde Marduk were a special breed, a sonic panzer division onslaught, that mostly consisted of locking into a riff, dropping in an insanely fast blast beat, and then letting rip, rarely veering from their course. Fast and furious and heavy. Lots of folks thought they were boring, but for us, the sound of Marduk was transcendent, mesmerizing, hypnotic, cyclical, it was trancelike, and we loved it.
The something changed, and Marduk began to morph into something new, something much less one dimensional (even though it was a great dimension), their sound began to drift more toward the avant garde side of BM, becoming more gnarled and convoluted and fucked up, where was once old school classic Swedish blackness, aligned with the Scandinavian pantheon, was now some strange modern avant black weirdness, now more in line with groups like Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist and the like, which make sense considering Funeral Mist vocalist Mortuus joined the group right around this shift.
And while we still hold the old Marduk records near and dear to our hearts, it's hard to deny the twisted beast Marduk has become, especially considering how much the BM envelope has been pushed lately, Marduk may be old guard, but they've stepped up and put most of the new guard to shame.
2007's Rom 5:12 was a totally twisted game changer, bumming out lots of old time fans, but reinvigorating the group, and turning on a whole new legion of fans enmeshed in the more progressive side of BM, which has all lead to this, easily the best Marduk record yet. Certainly the weirdest, and catchiest, the same folks who hated Rom 5:12 will probably hate this one too, unless they've finally come to their senses, for the rest of us, it's a chance to dig in to an incredibly dense and bizarre record by a band at the top of their game.
There's plenty of furious blasting blackness on Wormwood, it's just that there's so much more, and even when the band is blasting blackly, they're still twisting it all up. After a creepy intro the band explode into a frenzy of super complex convoluted thrashing, the riffs are strange, atonal, warped, the arrangement is incredible, with the band stopping and starting, lurching wildly, slipping into a doomy creep, only to launch right back into it, the sound is MASSIVE, there's bass all over the place (in a notoriously bass-less genre), Mortuus' vocals are SICK, an inhuman gurgling rasp, and the riffs amazing, wild and tangled and melodic, it's 3 minutes for Marduk, but for other bands it would be a whole record. Which leads right into the seasick lumber of "Funeral Dawn", with an almost industrial martial vibe, soaring epic and melodic, the main melody impossibly catchy, while streaks of noise swirl around the riffs, there's even a breakdown where Mortuus's sick vox are laid over a thick undulating bassline, the resulting sound is like a blackened Laibach.
"The Fleshy Void" is a 3 minute hyperblast of black intensity, still tangled and warped, but impossibly heavy and fast, giving way to the super creepy "Unclosing The Curse", all tolling bells and pulsing bass, abstract guitar chords, and hateful vokills, spare and spaced out and super ominous.
Wormwood is not inherently a 'weird record', it's not fucked up and freaky the way Furze or Necrofrost are - the weirdness here, the strange song structures, the freaked out non black parts, the fucked up samples, the drones, the doomy breakdowns, they're all seamlessly integrated into Marduk's sound, for every blast of Swedish blackness, there's some soaring melodic almost NWOBHM sounding melody, for every stretch of doomy pound, there's some gurgly bass heavy creep, the whole record is twisted, but subtly so, it's not about being weird or fucked up, it's about making a truly original piece of black art, which by its very nature IS both fucked up and weird. But the fact that's not the be all end all, keeps Wormwood from being gimmicky, instead it's a fierce and furious ultra heavy black metal record, with lots of twists and turns, which in a nutshell, means quite possible black metal record of the year for sure.
If you've been in search of some new and exciting sounds, you simply should not miss this introductory EP to The Mars Volta. Although this sextet will undoubtedly receive much attention for two of its members' past band (Omar and Cedric were the most recognizable members of At The Drive-In) not to mention the presence of Jon Theodore (of Golden and formerly of Royal Trux and Him) on drums, they fully deserve to be taken on their own ground.
The Mars Volta are determined *not* to take the path of least resistance by retracing the steps they've already trod. Instead, they're traversing a fresh, dynamic terrain. Crafting intricate, multi-layered songs with a definite *prog* angle. Shades of King Crimson and Yes (and U2 in the vocals, but it's not annoying at all). And they've got the chops to successfully execute their formidable mission. The vocals - so untethered, hoarse and fiery in ATDI - are here molded into an emotional falsetto that rings clear and strong with additional effected ones adding an air of alienation. The music is an amazing, intricate blend of ultra-tight drumming, deep bass, keyboards and guitar made even more potent and unsettling by carefully arranged, foreboding samples and electronics. Oh and in case I didn't make myself clear... They absolutely rock! If these three songs are any indication, they will be a force to be reckoned with. Blistering!
Please note: this is not to be confused with DeFacto (TMV members Omar, Cedric, Jeremy and Ikey's experimental dub side project).
Sometimes seeing a band play live in the flesh surpasses the experience on record, but other times, there's the danger of diminishing whatever mystique they've created for themselves, which remains safe when one listens at home with just the music (and record sleeve artwork) for one's imagination feed upon. Seeing a bunch of dudes in jeans and baseball hats up on stage making musician faces and fiddling with gear has bummed us out a bit about bands we've liked before, when we wanted gods and monsters and supermen.
And the ominously, exotically evocative music of the Master Musicians Of Bukkake, along with their colorful album cover imagery, provides a LOT of mystique to live up to (despite their irreverent/gross/jokey monicker). So when Allan here got the chance to see 'em recently at the Roadburn Festival in Holland, he was full of anticipation, but also a bit trepidatious about it. Turns out he had nothing to worry about. Do go see the Master Musicians Of Bukkake if you get the chance, their mystique will remain intact, never fear! Led by a dramatic robed figure wearing a wooden demon mask, the rest of the large ensemble wore white sombrero-like hats, their faces shrouded in black netting, and rocked out like dervishes, looking like they stepped out of scene in a Jodorowsky movie. One of most memorable performances at Roadburn for sure (and despite being, ah, so different from a lot of the other bands, they got a great response).
Witnessing that definitely got Allan excited about this impending new album, Totem Two. Plus we loved Totem One. The sequel raises the Master Musicians' mystic monolith still higher to the heavens. Once again to describe their sound, we could use the usual shorthand of the Sun City Girls meet latter-day Earth (which has some basis in this band's hybrid heavy drone exotica as well as their actual membership / friendship connections to those two legendary Seattle outfits). Other references: Ghost, Grails, Acid Mothers Temple, Secret Chiefs, Tangerine Dream! Thus, Totem Two has certainly been getting played a lot in the store, the MMoB's particular/pecuilar synthesis of sounds appealing to all of us here. Psychedelic, pretty, sinister, cinematic, steeped in ancient, Third World folk music and mythology... they're a mysterious moody mix of a lot of stuff we love, electronic drone filtered through faux-ethno ceremony, part SUNNO))), part Sublime Frequencies! Also, we're almost surprised this isn't on Ipecac, they ought to be Mike Patton's favorite band, in some ways bringing to life Mike Patton's Ennio Morricone compilation Crime & Dissonance (which was actually compiled by Alan Bishop, who of course is one of the Sun City Girls, and a mentor of / inspiration for / occasional collaborator with these guys).
The album begins with what sounds like a ghost train a-comin'... field recordings and tinkling percussion, hushed drone and the far-off foggy bellowings of Tibetan horns... you know you're in for a far ranging journey, off the beaten track. Gorgeous lonely flute dominates the second song, floating o'er a ritual processional, like Djivan Gasparyan sitting in on a sombre Amon Duul or International Harvester jam... the middle of the album brings in more buzzing synths, majestic and melancholic, getting spacey like Klaus Schulze, playing sentimental cinematic themes, dark and melodic.... The distortion ramps up briefly as a segue into the album's final eleven minute piece, a calm and psychedelic epic like Six Organs with extra synth squiggle... Beautiful! Almost makes us think of Japan's Far East Family Band from the '70s, that one. That's just a short surface summary, you could fall into this album's depths though, and come back changed, as if from a dream/drug quest...
Both cd and lp formats, like Totem One, feature feverish psychedelic jungle Seldon Hunt artwork, the vinyl version also comes wrapped in an obi.
It's been a really long wait, but it's finally here, the debut full length from SF one man black metal horde Mastery. After a collection of demos on Andee's tUMULt label, and splits with Palace of Worms and Skullflower, we now have Valis, which, if anything, has pushed an already confusional sound further into the realms of total WTF? unreality. That tUMULt demo collection was impossibly next level, and Valis is definitely a progression, into something twisted and cosmic, less songs as much as sprawling pieces, partially (perhaps wholly?) improvised, riff after riff after riff, the 18 minute opener boasting what has to be a hundred different riffs, some buzzy and black, others atonal and Greg Ginn-ish, all wound around each other in furious tangles, croaked vokills and wild drumming only adding to the cacophony, the end result almost like multiple black metal bands playing at once, but somehow orchestrated into something strangely cohesive, brutal and punishing, but also mesmerizing and trancelike, a prismatic sonic blur, undulating wildly, occasionally coalescing into proper blast and buzz, but more often splintering into wild gouts of blacknoize or arcing sheets of black psych freakout. It definitely might be too much for the meat and potatoes metalheads out there. This is most definitely AVANT, whether it's the sudden intrusion of acoustic guitar above simple snare roll, or the swirling kosmische interludes, the blasts of head spinning squiggly shred, or the slippery melodies, that sound like multiple slide guitars run through a battery of busted distortion pedals, the lurching, lumbering doom that oozes like the instruments are melting as they're being played, wild bursts of distorted crumble or the frantic Bernard Hermann like intro to the record, or just the sheer fury and velocity of some of the black buzz here, making other black metal bands sound like they're trudging through tar... Valis is less like black metal and more like a constellation of sonic smears and brutal blurs, all layered into one of the strangest, most challenging, and definitely one of the most deliriously demented outsider/experimental/avant black metal records EVER.
Killer cover art too.
As we mentioned in the review of the MSV 7" a while back, for a genre that seems to be the NEXT BIG THING, actual physical recordings are surprisingly difficult to come by. Which is maybe the point, much of the musical output comes in the form of tracks on SoundCloud, videos on YouTube, as super limited cd-r's or downloads, and most of the bands have names that are essentially un-Googlable, all symbols and shapes, A's become little black triangles, or three stylized crosses becomes 'Ritualz', etc, hard not to become intrigued, or obsessed, and we most definitely seem to be both.
Salem was the first glimpse the mainstream world got of this strange new genre, a sound that somehow melded blown out lo-fi synths, minimal electro, twisted samples, old school goth, minimal techno, slowed down Southern style chopped and screwed hip hop, choral vox, big beats, into something distorted and murky yet weirdly epic, a sound that the creators described as Witch House, but has also been dubbed grave rave, zombie rave, cave rave and is sometimes lumped in with nu-gaze and chill wave and other outsider electronic micro genres. And Salem is the shit, hell, we made it our Record Of The Week, how could we not, it was and IS one of the coolest record of the last few years. But if Salem are the young witch house upstarts, ramshackle punks legendary for their chaotic live performances, yet who somehow managed to make what is possibly THEE defining record of the genre, and if groups like oOoOO and Balam Acab are crafters of a witch house that is more melodic and dancefloor friendly, then Mater Suspiria Vision are like some mysterious bearded witch house council, the masters of the scene, black cloaked figures that live in a cave somewhere, never glimpsed in the flesh, only via their transmissions, mostly amazing, twisted, fantastically fucked up YouTube videos, mini horror epics, always accompanied by MSV's dirgey, haunting soundtracks, often releasing 3 or 4 in a single day. No idea where these guys are from (Kabul?), if it's one person or a group, male or female, the mystery only adds to the appeal, the imagery, the videos, and the music, which even in a genre defined by it's 'witchiness' manages to be seriously dark, and grim, creepy and scary.
Originally released as a super limited cassette tape, Crack Witch has now been resurrected on vinyl, by the newly launched Living Tapes label (run by the guy from outsider black metal weirdos Yoga by the way), and is probably the best witch house document since Salem's King Night. But MSV's witch house is something else all together, something all together more EVIL sounding, not sure if it's that they're conceived to accompany videos, but they also tend to be super cinematic, just check out the opener "Call Of The Witches", thick buzzing ominous synths, strange snippets of foreign language dialogue, strange spaced out stuttery beats, a stumbling groove, terrified shrieks, sobbing and weeping, everything reverby and echoey, and then an awesome dizzying blast of strange processed melodies, backward synths, almost like Teenage Filmstars style witch house, totally tripped out and seriously sonically scary.
"Evil House Of Forbidden Fruit" offers up big echoey beats, strange heavily effected vocals, the sound super distorted and crumbly, stuttery and rhythmic, underneath mysterious melodies swell, subtle synths pulse, all building to a crunchy corrosive climax. "House Of 7 Witches" is all swirly and shimmery by comparison, until the shimmer is buried beneath an avalanche of heavily delayed beats, and buzzing synth squelch, the beats getting louder and more distorted, careening back and forth, eventually totally obscuring all the other sounds. Finally, side one finishes of with the much more subdued "Wtxchs (A Suite Of Decay), with a low slung groove, wreathed in skitter and hiss, crackle and buzz, and some ominous reverbed female vocals courtesy of someone called Shazzula, the result a sort of warped witchy Portishead, downtempo and lo-fi, a grim ghostly ballad, that quickly splinters into a noise drenched cacophony, all thick synth buzz and glitched out electronics, buried vox, swirling effects, all draped over a skeletal beat, buried in the mix, a lurching dubnoise creep.
All of side 2 is taken up by the 24 minute epic "Trip 2012", a darkly cinematic epic, cobbled together from what sounds like bits of film music, as well as snippets of dialogue, but super reverby and echoey, like a sonic fun house mirror, it's not until about 3 minutes in that the synth drops, a thick, buzzing, snarly bit of wheezing chordal crunch, the various shards of delay and echo coalescing into a sort of beat, again weirdly reminding us of the most far out Teenage Filmstars jams, a sprawling, dubbed out dronescape, every single note, every melody, every voice, transformed by malfunctioning effects into streaks of otherworldly sound, like a way more dubbed out Wolf Eyes in places, a sort of heaving, crumbling industrial crunch, but way more spaced out, and ominous, more creepy and cinematic, and WAY more witchy.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Super striking eye popping full color covers.
"My Solo Project" is the nearly perfect debut album from the San Francisco duo of Kori Gardener and Jason Hammel. The Mates of State's super catchy arrangements for '70s organ, drums, and boy / girl vocal harmonies are a warm, almost groovy take on the bittersweet emo-pop championed by PEE, Rainer Maria, the Get Up Kids, The Anniversary, and Superchunk. Fans of those groups will be amazed at how strong and sure this record is. After only a handful of live shows, and absolutely no press support to speak of for Mates Of State, we've sold many many copies of this album -- an impressive feat in any respect! This is one of those records that customers ask about every single time we play it. You should expect more great things from Mates of State in the future!
The year is only just beginning but there have already been some amazing new records released that we're pretty sure will end up on our favorites of '08 list. This new outing by the enigmatic John Maus is one of them and it might just be the most engrossing and addicting albums we've been hooked on in a long time!
Best and barley known in the past as being loosely associated with the Paw Tracks family (Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink) Maus has made a record that will make his name definitely stand on its own. As he's created one of the most fantastical, bizarre and engaging pop records in recent memory. Warped bedroom pop with a flair for fantasy, wrapped in old fucked up synths, deep slowed down vocals, cosmic beats and a singular unique vision. Like OMD on codeine or early home demo recordings of The Cure captured on an answering machine tape that's been dubbed over way too many times. Or imagine a soundtrack to a lost early '80s movie made by both John Hughes and John Carpenter, as romantic teenage life intersects with magical apocalyptic doom! Love Is Real is as creepy and mystifying as it is heartfelt and endearing. As catchy as it is unpredictable. Out of nowhere the synths will rise to crazy loud levels or Maus will let out a haunting scream, and even after listening to this album hundreds of time as we have obsessively already, those parts still jump out, scare, startle and thrill us every time we listen.
Start to finish the album is impeccable. Songs lead into each other perfectly, the pacing is dead on, and every single track on the record belongs where it is and has a weight of its own. Whether it's sounding like the muddiest version of a Psychedelic Furs track or tapping into a bizarre drugged out cosmic disco excursion or having a freaked out panic attack, the record pulls from so many directions while always sounding like a completely other universe. This is what fantasy sounds like when the world around you is falling apart. Totally amazing!
When we listed the Maximo Park ep a few lists back, in the review we proclaimed that if only it had been a full length it would have been record of the week for sure. Well, here we are a few months later, and what do ya know? Maximo Park is record of the week. It wasn't a done deal though, not at all. That first four-song ep was so perfect, Interpol meets XTC, flawless angular pop, we listened to it non-stop. So much so that when we first threw this on, it didn't quite live up to our expectations. Those first four songs from the ep set the bar pretty high. Maybe too high. But like all great records, each subsequent listen offered us more, and revealed each song to be even catchier than the one before. A Certain Trigger has quickly become the pop record of the year for us. Hyperbole? Maybe, but we just can't stop listening to this record. As we've mentioned many times before, we fought tooth and nail against this whole new wave dance punk revival, but a good band is a good band. What can you do? And ya know, we dug Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, but hell if Maximo Park doesn't trounce them all. They do have "the sound", that sort of jagged off kilter post punk pop that will ensure that they get lumped in with the flavors of the month. But the songs here are so much more timeless sounding. Unlike the loads of bands just aping Gang Of Four, Maximo Park sound like their own band, sure they share some sonic elements, but they sound like they could have easily existed in 1980 as much as 2005. And they draw their inspiration not only from the obvious, Gang Of Four, XTC, Interpol, but also incorporate the moody dramatic electropop of Ultravox, the gloomy buzz and burn of Joy Division, and even bouncy eighties power pop, with super fuzzed out synths, kinetic new wave rhythms, and of course MP frontman Paul Smith's immediately engaging vocals. The songs are bouncy and poppy, but manage to be dark and minor key and edgy enough to give the whole record an intense emotional buzz. Two songs from the ep are present, our pop song of the year "Apply Some Pressure" and the XTC worshipping "The Coast Is Always Changing" (you can hear samples of both with the review of the "Apply Some Pressure" ep), but there are plenty of new classics that have been getting repeat play here like crazy. The massively catchy "Now I'm All Over The Shop" with its pounding piano and weirdly arpeggiated rhythm, and a vocal melody that literally gives us chills, like that one song on a mixtape that makes you want to either smash everything to bits or run across town to declare your true love. And then there's the bouncy XTC count-by-numbers pop of "The Night I Lost My Head" with its angelic background Oooo's and a weird stop start chorus, and the gloomy bass driven "Once, A Glimpse" with it's chiming guitars, tribal rhythms and guitar heavy refrain and the gorgeously languid "Acrobat" that sounds like an updated version of Ultravox's "Vienna". So pretty. All of A Certain Trigger is totally classic sounding, enough that it was tough to pick which songs to make sound samples for. So yeah, all you folks who froth at the mouth for every band that has any of that Killers / Franz Ferdinand / Bloc Party sound going on will probably love this record, but it's way more than just another one of -those- bands. Maximo Park are an amazing pop band, and this is an amazing pop record, with enough sonic precedents to make it feel familiar and classic, but enough new stuff going on and enough killer classic songs to make it one of our favorite new records. Period.
For a limited time, a bonus disc is included featuring 7 tracks recorded live in Japan!
You ever have that problem where you're in an internet sex chat room, and you make a date with some pervy girl for a phone sex session, and then when you call her up it's actually some jerk with a sampler loaded with a sexy female voice telling you things
A few of the callers figure it out, and then it gets even more pathetic as they continue to masturbate, being such geeks that they're turned on by the technical details of the joke (one guy asks, excitedly, about if the sampler is triggered by keyboard or mouse). But most of the guys are so clueless and horny that they're completely unfazed by Kathy's bizarre comments ("I think you might be racist", "I want to have your retarded babies", "I've got a pickle in my ass") and limited vocabulary (she says "Yesssss!" the same way every time), or her deafeningly noisy, Merzbow-level obviously-looped screams of orgasmic ecstasy. We could go on, but we don't want to reveal too much. Just get this, it's the best crank call disc we've heard in a long time. You'll be playing it for everyone you know, except maybe your mom. Absurdly funny.
Everybody's favorite sleeptalker is back and we're really fucking excited! Dreams Again, the previous release on Tzadik, is one of our most loved and consistently selling "spoken word" CDs, and with reason. Most of us who talk in our sleep tend to say maybe a couple words or phrases at best, often mumbled so quietly that it's hard to even catch the words they're saying -- if you even happen to be awake and close enough to hear it. Well imagine someone that regularly, throughout his entire life, recited entire dreams in a clear voice. And imagine every one of those dreams being the most ridiculous and surreal dreams imaginable. That's Dion McGregor. The story goes that in 1961 Dion McGregor -- a born again freeloader, chronic couch-surfer and quasi-successful song writer -- was discovered to be a verbose sleeptalker by the friend whose house he was currently crashing at. The friend, a director of porn films, attempted to jot down the dreams, but McGregor's speech was just too fast. With some mild coercion (free rent must have been involved) a mutual friend and song writer, Michael Barr, agreed to allow McGregor to sleep at his apartment in return for being allowed to record his dreams. Barr set up a microphone at the head of Dion's bed and for seven years recorded everything he could. Apparently Dion's vocalizations tended to begin just before waking in the morning, so there was a bit of predictability they could count on. Playing the tapes to the right people at the right time eventually resulted in an LP released on Decca in 1964 entitled the Dream World of Dion McGregor (and in 1999 Tzadik released a cd of additional material also recorded by Barr). While there must be enough tapes of McGregor's ramblings to cover several more volumes (Barr claims to have recorded upwards of 500 dreams), we'll have to settle for these 80 more minutes for the time being. Listening to these bizarre tales it's hard to believe that these are coming from a man who's genuinely asleep. The way McGregor recites them sounds almost conversational, describing the events he's undergoing. At the same time Mcgregor is both the director of his dreams: telling us to all get ready for the scavenger hunt (reciting off a myriad of strange objects that must be located), but also a participant: confessing to us that he'll never be able to locate said objects in such short time. And, it must be added, he almost invariably ends each transmission with horrified screaming. No matter how mild or whimsical a dream may be when it starts, it always seems to end in either tragedy or just plain shrieking madness. But the theory that McGregor made up and performed these monologues, fully conscious, is even harder to imagine. He would have had to have been quite a writer and a performer to achieve such results, and to allow it to remain archived in obscuity for eternity. No matter, even if these were faked they still add up to an impressive collection of the most fucked up, hilarious and down right amazing monologues this side of Kenneth Patchen. An absolute must for all lovers of the more disturbing aspects of the human psyche!
We made this Record of the Week a couple months ago, then promptly ran out of 'em -- as did their label in England, who have now pressed more copies. So here it is again, in case you missed it before. The UK's amazing, eccentric Meads Of Asphodel are back with their second, long-awaited full-length. From the get-go, this had an inside line on becoming an AQ Record of the Week -- indeed, we were so excited about its impending release that even before any of our wholesale suppliers had imports of this in stock, Andee went ahead and mail-ordered two copies from England, one for himself and one as a Christmas gift for Allan! Now, we've managed to get copies for the store to share with all of you. What's so special about the Meads Of Asphodel, besides their unusual name? Well, if you've been a long-time AQ list reader/customer maybe you'll remember how much we liked their debut, The Excommunication of Christ. Well as good as that crackpot example of medieval metal was, this new one is even more esoteric and ridiculous and incredible. As AQ's coverage of the genre has demonstrated, black metal can be a lot of different things. In the Meads of Asphodel's case, it IS many different things, all at the same time! First off, apparently nobody told them that an ostensibly black metal band shouldn't write pop songs. Sure, they are really really heavy and decidedly grim, but Meads have a pop sensibility that can't be denied. The album's second track, "God Is Rome", will have you staring at your stereo as its gruff-voiced chugging brutality gives way to an acoustic guitar lick and subsequent pop hook that is more Nirvana than necro. Not to suggest that this isn't a massively metal album. It is. Their brand of metal is like Venom mixed with Bal-Sagoth: sparkling keyboards strewn over rough-hewn riffage and pounding drums. They're also quite psychedelic (drugs involved for sure), with weird changes and spacey synths. Landing rocketships in the Middle Ages, Meads make for a creditable space rock band. Indeed, these Hawkwind obsessives do a killer Hawkwind cover ("Utopia") with two actual Hawkwind members sitting in! Other guests on this album include Mirai from another AQ fave, Japan's Sigh, one of the only other "black metal" bands on the planet as far-out as the Meads, and Vincent Crowley, somewhat infamous as an underground death metal Satanist. His presence, however cartoonish, illustrates another important point about this record. As random and spicy a goulash their music is, Meads remain a steadfastly black metal band where it most counts: in their opposition to God and religion. Indeed, unlike the majority of black metal acts whose anti-Christian, anti-clerical, pro-Satan stance is indeed just that, a stance or pose, just to conform to the standard black metal aesthetic of being "evil", Meads of Asphodel seem to take this issue more seriously. What we mean is that their lyrics are more about WHY they don't believe in God, than about how cool that makes them. So it turns out that as tongue-in-cheek as so much about them seems (from the cover pics of the band in the guise of armored knights looking rather more hapless than intimidating, to such song titles as "On Graven Images I Glide Beyond The Monstrous Gates Of Pandemonium To Face The Baptised Warriors Of Yahweh In The Skull-littered Plain Of Esdraelon") they actually have a message, if you will. Delivered quite bizarrely and confusingly of course. And that's what we like best, the confounding mixture of the serious and the silly where irony is left in the dust, replaced by question marks and half-smiles, and gleeful enjoyment of some remarkable music. This album is definitely the sort of thing that we at AQ think will both satisfy open-minded metal fans and provide a varied enough dish for folks seeking something weird on the pop/spacerock/electronic side of things. Indeed, did we mention that the aforementioned lengthy song title belongs to a ten minute epick of When-like eclecticism, that brings in techno electronica, Middle Eastern music, and even some acid-jazz organ jamming -- utterly instrumental except for samples of an utterly blasphemous nature? This is indicative in many ways of their bizarro modus operandi. Appealing in so many ways to the extremes of what we might call the AQ-aesthetic, it would have been hard *not* to make this a Record Of The Week.
Few records in recent memory have had us so excited in anticipation for their release, but this outsider visionary gem is so unquantifiably unique that it has worked its magical charm on us in such an intense way that we knew we had to make it Record Of The Week. Even before we heard a lick of music, the album cover, title and artist had us asking so many questions. That simple but puzzling orange cover with a vintage stock photo of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the mysterious and oddly misspelled title, Liter Thru Dorker Vibes, by an even more mysterious and misspelled artist name, Medico Doktor Vibes. Dorker Vibes??? What on earth could this be? Only a small text in the bottom right corner that said, 1979 Compton, CA and the record label Bi-Russell Records offered any clues to its origins. But the music inside, even stranger still is a primitive bedroom concoction of Caribbean-inflected outsider rock made with electric guitar, kalimba, synthesizer and drum machine that is an equally woozy, weird and introspective set of spell-casting witch-doctor psych groove.
Folks who bought Johan Kugelberg's excellent book on Private Press records, Enjoy The Experience, may recognize the cover as it was featured in that book as well as the opening song, "Diska Limba Man" which was included on the companion musical compilation, but its curious lack of back story in the book only give the record a more mysterious aura as if beamed into our world from another dimension. And it's almost like it was, as this record was just discovered at an Oakland Colosseum flea market only a few years back and made its way to the ever-curious vanity record enthusiasts at Companion Records. Companion, who has brought us some incredible private press reissues from Stan Hubbs, Michael Farneti, The New Creation (whose Troubled just got a vinyl release, reviewed elsewhere on this list), Marc Mundy and Luie Luie, did the legwork (with help from Rob Sevier of Numero Group) to track down the artist, who it turns out is a Guyanese man named Bill Russell, and worked with him to see this unique release resurrected. True to Companion's mission, they have reissued the record in the same form as the original with an old style tip-on sleeve, blank back cover and no liner notes, so as to experience the record as it is, unfettered from preconceptions. However, we did press the label for a little context and we'll get into some of the record's back-story a little later.
Each of the seven songs here vary in tone, but they are united by the instrumentation mentioned above in different combinations and Russell's accented softly mumbled delivery, as well as a seemingly urgent determination to get each song recorded as envisioned. As primitive as the recording and performances are, every song seems to have a deliberate focus, with moodier songs on side one and more rocking songs on side two. The record doesn't seem to have been made to promote himself as a professional or as a demo to make better produced recordings. In that, it is a perfect one-off record, its only obvious influential musical touchstones apart from some Caribbean musical rhythms, might be a bit of Santana and Hendrix perhaps (though this doesn't quite reach their heights, quite the opposite), but we're hearing a bit of Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Otis G. Johnson and even some Suicide in there too. It really just sounds like Russell plugged all his instruments directly into a 4-track, hit record and worked around the mistakes, never letting them curtail his vision.
The opener, "Diska Limba Man" sets the tone with an off-kilter synth sequencer and wonky slow-disco rhythm, the tempo slowing down and speeding up in an elliptical groove while an electric guitar and a tinny kalimba add melody and texture respectively. Russell's voice thickly accented but emerging from an introspective murmer sings of a small musical instrument and the man who plays it, embarking on a hypnotic repetition as the song progresses into a sort of subdued dark disco trance. The second track, "Kalimba Tune", is just that, the kalimba alone in a beautifully played magical weaving instrumental that borders on the minimalist composition of Philip Glass. The third track, "Take A Closer Look" ends the first side with a slow looping organ dirge with a loping martial rhythm, inflected with a simmering guitar melody that adds a mystical resonance. The song urging the listener to "take a closer look at the life you are living" points to the lighter ("liter") and darker ("dorker") vibes the album title implies.
Side two has more of a heavier rock feel. "Givers of Affection" opens with a motorcycle blues guitar riff and what sound like harmonica blasts and rudimentary drum machine in a Canned Heat style, Russell's voice double tracked in a driving falsetto. "Lonely No More" has a more laid back sunbaked Zam-rock vibe, with funky Caribbean rhythms and freaked out synth leads, filtered through homegrown distortion and double tracked vocals layered incongruously into a strange psychedelic brew. "Dig This Calypso" is a stoned sunny and breezy take on the origins of the calypso beat, and we're usually not that big on calypso, but as with all the songs on the second side, this one layered with warm distortion and gritty guitar squalls all filtered back in a lo-fi Caribbean funk groove, makes it one of the better calypso inspired songs we've heard. The final track, "Water Late" is an instrumental with a medium-fast shuffled martial rhythm, and some seriously wonky exploratory guitar leads as if Doug Blunt was fronting some primitive cave rock band like Cromagnon. It ends the record on a slightly open ended note as we're left to wonder what in the hell did we just listen to? But that is exactly the kind of naive quality in this record that makes us want to put it back on and listen to it again, figure out the words and try and put together what it all means, and why for all of its outsider artistry, these songs remain so hopelessly and wonderfully implanted in our brains. And most importantly, who or what is Medico Doktor Vibes?
The folks at Companion filled us in a bit. Bill Russell is an immigrant from Guyana who came to the United States and served in the U.S. military in the seventies. He came from a musical family and after serving, settled in the LA suburb of Compton and decided to make a record. He bought the recording equipment and instruments he used on the record all at once and set about making this one and only LP. He chose the cover image carefully by color because he thought it matched the mood of the record and thought it would appeal to people, even though he oddly didn't notice the Golden Gate Bridge, or at least it didn't register any additional symbolic meaning for him and he didn't have any Bay Area connection. The title though intentional is logically vague. The story goes that Russell saw the recording as a bridge between "light" and "dark" people, but felt that just calling it Lighter Through Darker Vibes was too politically charged and so he twisted the words to "Liter" and "Dorker" in avoidance (this must have been before the word "dork" came into a more common parlance). His hopes were that both Light and Dark people would come together and groove out to his music , though it was distributed modestly with only 100 original copies and went absolutely nowhere. Perhaps now with this reissue, Russell's original vision will finally come to pass. We certainly hope so.
Limited to 500 copies! Sorry no download code.
It's hard to know what to expect from a band with a name like Megaton Leviathan. You might guess heavy. Probably loud. And you'd be right on both counts, but you probably wouldn't guess that these guys play some sort of super melodic, poppy, and very pretty doom. Or sort of doom. Soft doom? We sure as heck didn't.
But that's pretty much what ML are all about. Even categorizing them as doom doesn't do them justice. The tempos are slow, the mood is doomy, but unlike the typical downtuned sludgery and lumbering slo-mo pummel of most doom combos, these guys infuse their dirges with soaring shimmering clean guitars, the vocals are clean, not howled or grunted, but crooned, bathed in reverb, and draped over the almost ethereal sounding heaviness.
The drums are strange, big and boomy, but they perfectly suit the Nadja-like doom-gaze, the washed out blissy reverbed doom pop, the hazy, gauze-y, space-y doom flecked psychedelia these guys so effortlessly conjure up.
The 19 minute opener is split into two parts, the first half, is a gorgeous dirgey creep, with a melancholy main melody, swirling synth textures, and those moody crooned vox, all stretched out into a glorious bit of space doom dream pop haze, the effects swallowing the instruments up and sending them spinning into the cosmos, woozy, and dreamy and mesmerizing and strangely emotional with some of the best most beautiful hooks you'll ever hear in a 'doom' band.
The second half almost sounds like a dub version of the first, the riffs are stripped away, leaving a glistening filed of layered vocal mantras and electronic effects, the drums spare and abstract, the sound thick and lush and distorted, but blurred and free and swirly and psychedelic, some sort of alien spacedoom ur-drone, the perfect balance for the more riffy bliss of the first half.
After another short track (and by short we mean almost 6 minutes), which is another dirgey crawl, through fields of cloudy effects and smeared electronics, sounding like a modern space doom Codeine, all pretty and melancholy but still dark and heavy, comes the 33+ minute closer, "A Slow Death In D Minor", the whole first half of which sounds like SUNNO))) covering Tangerine Dream, thick downtuned glacial thrum, underpinning, swirling kosmische synths and jangly shimmering clean guitar chords. This could go on forever, and practically does, until about 18 minutes later, the drums come in, and pound out a strange skeletal beat, atop the still drifting buzz and shimmer, buried vocals and muted melodies churn just below the surface, until finally, the sound grows more and more melodic, and what sound like strings surface, and the track is transformed into some sort of chamber doom, until eventually, just the strings are left, to soar dramatically over a barely there layer of crackle and hum, before slipping into silence.
This could definitely be our new favorite doom record, if it didn't feel so wrong to and reductive to call Megaton Leviathan doom. But it's definitely a new favorite, for fans of all things dark and heavy and dreamy and melodic, droney and drifty and pretty and poppy and trance inducing.
Lubomyr Melnyk is one of our favorite modern composers. The inventor and master of the Continuous Music technique, which has made him the Guinness-recognized fastest piano player in the world. But was we mentioned in other reviews, this speed and mastery is deftly employed, to create lush clouds of billowing chordal shimmer, the sort of dreamlike divine sound that should have Melnyk spoken about in the same sort or reverential tones reserved for legends like Reich and Riley and Palestine. Melnyk's method involves keeping the pedals on the piano depressed, allowing notes to ring out, bleed into each other, creating lush expanses of constantly shifting overtones, sounds layered and bleeding into one another, creating huge swaths of organic sound, a sound that seems to be alive, full of energy and emotion, not just Melnyk's technique, but his compositions as well, a true master who has created some of the most amazing modern piano music we've ever heard. The sad thing is that his records are quite difficult to find, and the fact that he has composed so many pieces, and his interest is in allowing people to hear as much of his music as possible, most of those records exist only as cd-r's. But gradually, it seems, interest in Melnyk has been growing, we've certainly been doing everything we can, constantly proselytizing, telling everyone we know about Melnyk and his music, reviewing them on our list, and getting as much of his music as we can into the ears of folks we think need to hear it, which we think is many of you.
So we're super excited whenever one of his records gets a proper worldwide release, and thus, we were thrilled when we first heard about Corollaries. Which besides being one of the few non-cd-r Melnyk releases, is also of note as it's the first collaboration we've heard from him. Even on past records where multiple pianos were used, Melnyk played all the parts. But here, Melnyk is joined by Peter Broderick and Martin Heyne, who give Melnyk's music an interesting, sort of washed out gauzy production, which really suits the sound, but beyond that, also contribute synthesizer, violin and vocals! We weren't at all sure what to expect, but were actually quite pleasantly surprised.
The opener here "Pockets Of Light" finds us in familiar territory, with Melnyk laying down a lush landscape of swirling notes, and lush chordal shimmer, and as we (and many of you) know by now, that's all we really need, Melnyk and his Continuous Music method are more than enough to fill the speakers, and your headphones and your ears with a wild field of sound, one that is so easy to get lost in, but here, the addition of violin, adds a fantastic element, a bit of a drone, and a melodic counterpoint, also complimented by the dreamlike production, we were pretty skeptical about the vocals, but when they come in, the sound is transformed into a gorgeous, shimmery sort of slowcore, Broderick's vocals high and clear, warm and emotional, drifting atop, Melnyk's lush landscape of chordal swirl, the more we listen, the more we realize we actually might have liked more of the songs to have vocals. Imagine Low with clouds of piano shimmer and you might be close. Divine and dreamlike and utterly mesmerizingly lovely.
"The Six Day Moment" is Melnyk solo, and is a delight of course, a dense, intricate classical music, that almost sounds like multiple players, but it's never too busy, or too chaotic, it's instead lush and lovely, melodic and moving, lyrical and haunting, we could listen to Melnyk play forever, and listening to this, we begin to wonder why someone hasn't asked him to score their film, the sound so evocative and cinematic, epic and intense. "A Warmer Place" finds Broderick returning again, this time playing violin, Melnyk's playing spare and minimal, demonstrating, that it's not just about speed or notes, lots of space, ambient and ethereal, Broderick's minimal melodies perfectly underpinning Melnyk's delicate crystalline arrangements, wintery and wonderfully melancholy.
"Nightrail From The Sun" might be the biggest surprise here, with its casual conversation laced false start, to the hypnotic piano/guitar interplay, some serious Reich/Riley style melodic mesmer going on here, Broderick adding some heft and background color via synth, but for the most part, it's the interplay between Melnyk's piano and Martyn Heyne's guitar that makes this so stunning, and like the other tracks, we find ourselves wishing for a whole record of this. And when Broderick amps up the synth, the sound becomes super dramatic, almost Godspeed-like in its brooding intensity. In many ways, it's like an even more intricate avant version of the recent collaboration between Melnyk and James Blackshaw. And finally, the record finishes off with another Melnyk / Broderick duet, this one with a distinctly mournful almost country feel, the violin unfurling an aching minor key melody, while Melnyk underpins Broderick's violin, with sweetly understated piano, the sound building to something extremely emotional and moving, again, evoking all sorts of images and emotions, and again making us wonder why Melnyk and Broderick aren't scoring films, the closer so cinematic, and expressively cinematic, lush and so so lovely.
Like everything we've heard from Melnyk, and absolute treasure, and a fantastic collaboration, that we hope will inspire many more, and will finally get the rest of the world to discover what we already know, that Melnyk is a genius. This record is simply more proof of that.
We love Melt-Banana. And really, we kind of always have. From the early days when they were a furious frenzied punk band, to their current incarnation of blissed out, glitchy electro-punk noise pop. And while sometimes we forget just how much we love MxBx, it generally only takes about ten seconds to remind us just why we love them so much (and boy, can Melt-Banana pack a LOT into ten seconds!), and to get us listening to them obsessively all over again.
We flipped over their most recent full length Fetch, in 2013, which found the group paired down to a duo, but the tracks collected here on this singles collection, represents the band arguably at their zenith, gathering up some of our favorite MxBx jams EVER, all the tracks from comps, EPs and split singles, from the years 2000-2009, including their 8" split with Three Studies For A Crucifixion, their split 7" with Dynamite Anna And The Bone Machine, their split 7" with Big D And The Kids Table, their 666 6", their split 7" with The Locust, their split single with Daemien Frost, their Initial T 7", their split 7" with Narcosis, their split 10" with Chung, their split 5" with Fantomas, their split mini CD with Fatday, their split single with Young Widows and finally, their Ai No Uta 5" single. Whew! And amongst those twenty nine tracks lurk a few covers, including Melt-Banana taking on the Damned's "Love Song", Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge", and even more strangely, "Monkey Man", originally by Toots & The Maytals!
And while Melt-Banana don't need to resort to covers to impress us, those covers are pretty fucking mind blowing. They don't really fuck with "Love Song", other than speeding it up to a dizzying blur, and replacing Dave Vanian's gothic croon with Yasuko Onuki's distinctive hyper active high pitched chirp as well as adding some cool electronic glitchery, and the Toots & The Maytals song is a blast, hearing Melt-Banana's hyperactive take on reggae, and the way they fuse it to their own frenzied punk pop buzz. The Devo track, of course you know MxBx will do it right.
The rest of the comp is sonically all over the map, the band mixing totally freaked out experimental weirdness to lightning speed J-Pop turned noise punk, and engaging in some extended WTF noisescaping, as well as coming up with short sharp blasts of perfect chipmunk punk, some of the tracks are murky and blown out, others are glistening and transcendent, the sound lurching wildly and veering constantly from sound to sound, total head spinning ADD radness, that in other hands might be unbearably schizophrenic, but MxBx have such an effortless mastery of melody and texture, that even the most furious and blasting chunk of noisiness will get its hooks into you and never let go. We're reminded a little of the Toy Dolls too, who basically took super catchy poppy punk, cranked it way up, added helium vox, and blasted out jittery, caffeinated, pogo punk that we still love like crazy to this day. So imagine a what-the-fuck, avant garde, Japanese psychedelic noise punk Toy Dolls, and you might be getting close. But really, NOBODY sounds like Melt-Banana, and no one ever will. And no one ever could.
We've been fans of this local dream-gaze band since their first ep a few years ago. Then besides a split 45, we heard little from them. We were psyched to see them open for Italian synth-prog cult Sensations Fix this past September, because we had heard they had a new full length out on Underwater Peoples, we knew we needed to stock. But then something unexpected happened. The band imploded, cancelled their appearance at that gig and broke up. Not sure what happened, band drama no doubt, we were bummed for sure. But as it turns out, we then discovered that our new and cool next door neighbor Ole was actually in the band (or until recently, had been) and had copies of their first full length - and final - recording in hand to consign to us, probably because it won't likely get promoted too much since the band is done. Which is super too bad, because this record is so amazing! But at least, we finally get to hear it and share it with you.
Burnt out dreamy hazy pop jangle, pastoral and romantic, melancholy and bittersweet, but kind of druggy too in a sun damaged LA way. Foggy daydream break-up songs that carry a worn and faded sadness of distant memories and unrealized dreams. Reminds of our favorite bands on Creation or Sarah Records, The Field Mice, Weekend or House of Love, even bands like the Great Unwashed or The Three O'Clock, super catchy, compelling and crushing heartbreak pop perfect for rainy day or really any day listening. Our current autumn soundtrack for sure. Limited stock!
Brand new full length from this Brooklyn postpunk / noiserock quartet, who take the whole gloomy, gothicky dour eighties pop sound that is so popular with the kids these days, and twist it all up, supercharging it, dousing it in noise and transforming an overfamiliar sound into something super exciting and fresh, blown out and psychedelic, wild and chaotic, a collection of crashing, bombastic pop songs, tripped out droney instrumentals, and furious super saturated noiserock blowouts, that while in fact do occasionally hint at the aforementioned sound, seem to shed bits of that sound as the record progresses, and even moreso with every play, ultimately revealing the twisted, noisy, and wholly original sound at The Men's gloriously distorted core.
The opener starts with a misleadingly tranquil stretch of softly swirling psychedelic guitars, warbly ambience, and effects laced shimmer, it's over three minutes before the song proper kicks in, but when it does, holy shit, a blinding, head spinning kaleidoscopic blast of thick shoegazey guitars, super distorted drum pound, all tangled melodies and swirling harmonies, the main riff sounding strangely like Big Country, albeit more warped and woozy and noisy, and then the vocals swoop in and it's pure pop, all supercharged dreamy hazy multitracked vocals, everything wreathed in a crumbling almost Elephant Six style production, it's like a dirgey noiserock Neutral Milk Hotel record, melting in the sun, and blasted through some hood mounted loudspeakers as you do doughnuts in the middle of a busy intersection on a hundred degree summer afternoon, fantastically fuzzy and blissed out, but still crunchy and heavy and dreamily noisy.
The rest of the record follows suit, mixing in healthy heapings of pop soaked punkish pound, but even then the sounds are warm and in-the-red, and the sounds seem to ooze and warble, the riffs slippery and the songs laced with loads of subtle (and not so subtle) subtle harmonies. Much of the record is actually instrumental, which in the hands of most bands would bore big time, but these guys kitchen sink every song, often sounding like multiple Polvo's playing at once, thick and dense and gnarled and gloriously twisted, the songs constantly switching gears, whether it's feedback doused almost-sludge, wrapped in wild squiggly guitar leads, or dirgey near Brainbombs sounding cacophony, or even strummy psych pop blowouts that seem to explode into swirling squalls of free-psych shreddery, the sounds all merge into one glorious noise pop blur.
"Bataille" is the hit here, and it's obvious why, all of the above mentioned sonics, harnessed to a low slung chunk of Sonic Youth worthy post punk, all angular guitars, dense layered melodies, howled throat shredding vox, and dense propulsive drumming, the song rife with crazy hooks, droney-cyclical riffage but also some seriously killer gloomy new wave-isms. And while we love that track, our favorite (besides the opener), might just be "Shittin' With The Shah", a smoldering, sun baked, wide eyed bit of hazy psychedelia, all simple skeletal drumming, and chiming echo drenched guitars, woozy and dreamily druggy, a soft slow build to a final one minute blast of gloriously blown out in-the-red, sweetly melodic, but speaker shreddingly noisy shoegazekrautpopnoiserock swirl.
Needless to say, quite a surprise, even from a label we dearly love and who rarely disappoints. Most definitely a new noise pop / psych rock / post punk favorite, that we can't seem to stop listening to!
This is hands down our favorite new grime / dubstep / what-the-fuck big beat sort-of-dance record. It's so heavy and fucked up and groovy and weird. Some impossibly tangled up mess of Jungle and grime, hip hop and dub step, IDM and full on dub, all pulled apart and reassembled into this fucking super tripped out, big beat, Frankensteinian dancefloor destroyer.
Every track is some sort of super stripped down grimey dubbed out slab of skitter and stutter. HUGE crunchy beats stretched into lazy loping hiccupping grooves, almost like some killer jungle 12" played at 16 rpm. But with all the guts and organs yanked out leaving massive skeletal rhythmic beasts. There are all sorts of strange sound effects and random sonic flares all over the place. But judiciously applied, leaving the overall sound still spacious and spare. That instantly recognizable Star Trek warning klaxon gets chopped into weird melodies, bits of bleep and bloop, swoosh and shimmer, drift and hover between the pummeling thump and skitter.
Beneath it all, some unbelievably MASSIVE, fuzzed out super-dense low end crunch, supporting occasional disembodied ragga toasting that gets all tangled up in the crunchy grinding beats. At one point a sweet lilting female vocal drifts into the picture but is soon crushed under some black hole heavy bass fuzz and spears of digital speaker shred, all the while a killer loping beat keeping heads nodding and toes tapping. Milanese is like some DJ cast into the pit, damned to an eternity of spinning nothing but demented demonic slow motion jungle dub for all of the other cursed souls writhing spastically on blackened dancefloors all over hell. You know what they say about Hell and Satan and all the best bands and tunes and all that, well, we can only imagine the same applies to DJ's and electronic music, and if you ever needed absolute proof, Milanese rises from a black breach in the ocean floor spewing broken beats and belching black fire, all to a killer freaked out funky stuttery apocalyptic soundtrack. So recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Wow -- one of the rare AQ Unanimous Staff Favorites. Ex-members of ye olde local band Steelpole Bathtub have put together this AMAZING Milk Cult record. Sounding nothing like Steelpole whatsoever, this is an experimental melange of dance, rock, and lounge music that's so f***ing accessible and so kickass serious fun that we sell a copy almost every time we play this in the store. It features everything from throaty French singers to earth-trembling bass to random noises and disco, plus lovely wailing guitar soloes, exotica, bird calls, you name it. The recipients of a French arts grant, Milk Cult spent a month recording "traditional Corsican singers; Buddhist chanters; Algerian folk improvisors; French folkies; industrial noisicians; rockers; jazzbos; hip hop artists; spoken word artists; electronics experimenters; a thirty-piece African orchestra; a Conch player; all of whom played along with backing tracks prepared by Milk Cult but never with each other..." The entire thing is put together so well it is seamless, and we predict you will love it. Highest recommendations for a record that really shouldn't be overlooked.
We first heard Lloyd Miller on that amazing Spiritual Jazz compilation we reviewed recently, and while pretty much every track was a killer, Miller's "Gol-E Gandom" definitely stood out, beginning with a santur solo, that sounded like a sea of buzzing sitars, until the jazz kicked in, bopping bass, fluid piano, shuffling rhythms, somehow following the melody laid out by the opening santur solo. So magical. We were smitten and were dying to hear more. Luckily, Jazzman endeavored to put together this amazing collection of Miller's various recordings, which was no small feat, considering that even after a lifetime playing jazz, most of these songs were only available on super limited self released records, which made it into fewer hands, and ears, that would seem right considering the power and originality of Miller's music.
He grew up in America, but his father was transferred to Iran, so his family moved there when Miller was 19, and they lived there for 5 years. Then Miller finally moved to Europe, to pursue jazz, after all, Europe was where it was happening, he landed in Germany, later heading to Switzerland, all the while creating these amazing, and mostly unheard pieces, incorporating an incredible array of ethnic instruments with some seriously intense and inspired jazz.
While some of the tracks here sound like straight up jazz, flecked with bits of ethnic instrumentation, others are totally far out. "Le Grand Bidou" finds his group riffing on a single chord, while Miller inserts an Indian style tonic drone played on the micro organ, and the result is bizarre, the whole track twists and squirms and heaves, it's an odd fit, but fit it does, we can only imagine how freaked out purists must have been. and frustrated, considering the caliber of playing, but it's these twisted takes on standard jazz that makes this stuff so magical, and the fact that this was the late fifties / early sixties, it's a wonder Miller didn't become a sensation. This stuff is radical, revolutionary, considering how important the incorporation of African music and instruments into jazz became (Don Cherry, Art Ensemble), how is it that this wasn't equally if not more radical? A white kid from Utah, with impeccable jazz chops, playing all sorts of Turkish and Persian instruments, wrapping standard jazz tropes around Indian arrangements, kind of mindblowing even now.
The liner notes are super detailed, and Miller's life is fascinating, but it's really about the music, and as much as we dig jazz, and fancy ourselves, if not experts, at least super fans, we had NEVER heard Miller before that comp, and this stuff is so cool, and so unlike ANYTHING we've ever heard, from the instrumentation, to the arrangements, to modal systems, some of the tracks are Indian ragas transformed, others seem to eschew the jazz completely and sound like some mysterious magical world music, but it's where the two elements mesh where things get truly magical, tablas underpinning pianos, strange horns droning over upright bass and shuffling percussion, all woven deftly into a strain of jazz that is wholly unique and original. So fantastic, and so utterly and wholeheartedly recommended. Easily THE jazz reissue of the year, if not the decade!
For some reason, we always thought Mind Spiders were from Australia. They definitely have that Aussie post punk vibe, but they are in fact from Denton, Texas, and our description in our review of their last record, still pretty much applies:
"Imagine Thee Oh Sees via Gary Numan, or the Ramones if they were on Captured Tracks, or maybe even Bare Wires covering Snowy Red..."
If anything, this new one is more stripped down, more old school power pop, with swirling synths, and drum machines augmenting the group's kinetic garage pop crunch. Just check out "Suicide", which doesn't sound so much like Suicide as it does Cheap Trick or the Cars. And in fact, those two bands are pretty good reference points, although some of the record gets more buzzy and fuzzy and punk, but even at its most revved up, the songs here are still CRAZY catchy, hooks galore, these guys tossing off timeless popisms that most bands would kill for.
But the record IS kinda all over the map. "City Stuff" sounds like it was plucked from a different record, even down to the production (and volume!), with its Casio-core rhythm, wheezing synth swirl, and Wall Of Voodoo guitar, but then it slips right back into almost Ramones sounding punk stomp, still shot through with plenty of Yellow Pills power popisms, but then a song or two later, and the sound blossoms into a sort of FX heavy psychedelic space garage, a little bit Moon Duo, a little bit T-Rex, a killer slice of kraut-glam, garage-synth, fuzz pop that KILLS. And then like the last record, the band deliver the coup de grace, another record defining jam, this time around sounding like a modern fuzzed out garage rock Gary Numan, swirling and sci-fi and psychedelic and swaggery and crazy catchy to boot. Goddamn we wish we hadn't already finished our 2013 top tens, cuz had we known, you can bet this would have definitely made it, and probably been right near the top!
We kinda went nuts for the recent Echospace record, The Coldest Season. So much so that we made it our record of the week. And judging by the response, most aQ customers dug it just as much as we did. Which makes sense really. A modern take on that old Chain Reaction sound we all love so much. Heroin House, or whatever you want to call it, muddy murky atmospheres wrapped around deep throbbing four on the floor pulses, smeared and blurred, the sound gloriously washed out and dreamlike. Super spaced out abstract dub, beats drifting in wide open expanses of FX and electronic glitch and shimmer. Dance music for those of us who loathe the dancefloor and instead lurk in the shadows. The rhythm is probably still gonna get you, but it's going to creep up on you slowly and wrap you in its inky black embrace, and pull you into the swirling fuzzy abyss.
Incense & Black Light is the new record from Rod Modell, one half of Echospace, and while everything we loved about the Echospace record is here in full effect, it's even noisier and buzzier and grittier, which can only mean we might even like it more�
The opening track is super dense and heavy, a swirling cloud of crumbling distortion, a bassline that almost sounds like some muted metal riff, but completely abstracted and disembodied, a rhythm buried beneath layers of grit and grime, the track peppered with jagged blasts of glitch and hiss, the whole thing looped into something, that despite all of it's harshness and density, is almost groovy.
The second track begins with some Pole like dub throb, drifting on a layer of gristly hiss, those big echoey crunches pulsing and fading into the mist, beneath it all a throbbing bassline and some muted percussion, sounding like a rougher more raw Echospace. After that the record drifts into much less noisy territory, dipping its toes into some Kompakt like minimalism, still dubby and dreamy, but a bit more skittery, and not nearly as dark and dense. After three songs of gauzy late night Kompakt style minimal techno, the record dips back into the darkness, a slowly shifting smear of pixilated digital crunch, long blurred waves of prickly buzz, all woven into a gorgeously gauzy sheet of sound, that seems to billow in some midnight breeze, laced with crackles and hiss, almost completely devoid of any rhythm. Almost.
The next two tracks crank the dub factor, dialing back the noise a bit, but keeping the effects distorted and the beats crunchy, a sort of Kraftwerk groove pulled apart into some alien dub, hovering over a sea of whirring hum and buried buzz, the melody clipped and bouncing from beat to beat before fading into the roiling ambient murk.
Finally, the last two tracks finish things off, the way they started, with some sort of damaged dub, via Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, the second to last a gorgeous dubby driftscape, the beats barely holding together, the sound of lapping waves another layer of hiss and buzz, the whole dub drifting into its constituent parts, so druggy and dreamy and blissed out, while the last is glimmering shimmering effulgence, sun dappled sparkles stretched into slow whirring slabs of soft fuzzy thrum, like someone took a single measure of the blissiest Orb song, and stretched it out to 5 minutes, the chords pulled apart exposing the notes within, the notes pulled apart, crumbling to pieces, just blurry shadows, all woven into some slow slippery sonic stream, gauzy, buzzy, warm and dreamlike.
If you loved that Echospace record, but wondered what it would have sounded like if it was mixed by Fennesz, or recorded by Tim Hecker, or spun in a DJ set by Philip Jeck (and who among us didn't?), then this just might be exactly what you're looking for.
Of all the various collaborations that krautrock maestro Moebius of Cluster fame has been involved in, we have to say this 1983 collaboration with Gerd Beerbohm might just be the most mind blowing of them all. Originally released on Sky, it's been out of print for ages, so we were so thrilled when we saw Bureau B was going to reissue it, as it's a record that foreshadowed so many sounds of the rhythmic underground that we would love for years to come.
The record opens with "Minimotion" a totally menacing and suspenseful track that sets the mood perfectly for the rest of the record. Like the darkest side of Goblin, or what John Carpenter would want to base the tension of an entire film around. The next two tracks "Hydrogen" and "Narkose" are stunning in how ahead of their time they sound, even now. It's like an otherworldly version of minimal techno, practically the blueprint for what the Chain Reaction crew would be creating more then a decade later. Like the sounds of a steam engine filtered through the lens of a horror movie, so mesmerizing and menacing. The record's final track is the epic 21 minute "Doppelschnitt" and really should be played as loud as possible and made as required listening for anyone making minimal techno or any sort of electronica really, as this shows you the hypnotic possibilities of this sound. No doubt folks like Villalabos, Monoton, Moritz Von Oswald, and Carl Craig got their ears on this album early on, as this record really laid out the ingredients for what would go down in Berlin and Detroit in the years to follow.
But what makes Double Cut so incredibly special is not just that it was ahead of its time, mastering a genre that hadn't even been invented yet, but that in its minimalism, they made a record that creates such a strong mood and has such a distinct overall sound. It's like being trapped in a completely distinctive outer dimension. It wouldn't surprise us if David Cronenberg was hip to this record while he was making Videodrome. It's not often you get to talk about records that completely set the stage for a whole movement of music making to come in its wake. This is one of those records, and we're so damn glad its back in the world where it belongs. A unanimous favorite for sure, as everyone here at the store is totally in love and in awe of Double Cut!
Not yet reissued on vinyl but we're told that will be coming soon, hopefully.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We at AQ all agree that the last Mogwai album, Young Team is one of the best things we've come across in a while; they take the slow build, dynamics, and instrumental intensity of Slint and add crashing guitar lyricism. Reason to celebrate: My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, contributes a stunning sixteen-minute distortion-heavy brainmelter (so that's what he's been doing instead of giving us patiently drooling fans another MBV record). And if that isn't enough, there are also remixes by Mu-ziq, Alec Empire, Arab Strap (the Scottish duo whose murkiness calls to mind the Tindersticks more than anyone else), Third Eye Foundation, Kid Loco, and others. Very colorful vinyl.
It must seem like we're on the Terp payroll or something by now, this being the second record they've put out that's received record of the week honors here at aQ. And the fourth or fifth that we've raved about. And to be totally honest, the Terp releases that ended up -not- being records of the week, could very well have under different circumstances, as they are equally as amazing. What can we say, everything Terp has put out so far has totally and completely blown us away! The live Konono record, the gorgeous Lanaya record and this newest release from blind Ethiopian vocalist Mohammed 'Jimmy' Mohammed. His story is just as amazing as his voice and the music he makes. After becoming blind as a child, supposedly as a curse for his parents' decision to ignore the warnings of a fortune teller and baptize him, as God had willed him to be a Muslim, Mohammed ran away and spent several years on the streets, homeless, begging for food, finding solace in the songs of legendary vocalist Tlahoun Gessesse (immortalized in several volumes of the amazing Ethiopiques series) who not only sang beautifully, but whose songs addressed the plight of the poor and suffering. Mohammed was eventually discovered and cared for, enrolled in a school for the blind and raised by a kind hearted surrogate father. After money was raised to help restore his sight, he was heartbroken to discover the funds were stolen and his eyesight was never to be restored. Mohammed spent a brief stint in the national theater before becoming a nightclub singer, where he became more and more popular. Mohammed mostly sings Tlahoun Gessesse's pop songs from the '60s / '70s, being as those are the songs that most affected him throughout his life, but it's his voice and the unique arrangements that make him so special.
He appeared briefly on Ethiopiques 2 but this is his first proper full length. The first track here is a mindblower. The music is so squiggly and complex, so dense and tangled, angular but so lovely, our first thought was that it sort of sounded sort of like the maniacal casio exotica of Aavikko. Part of it might be the fact that Mohammed's band is augmented on that track by legendary European free jazz drummer Han Bennink, and Massimo Pupillo from Italian drone jazz combo Zu. SO amazing. There are plenty of immediately recognizable melodies and distinctly Ethiopian elements, but the way it is played is so strange and lovely. But it's Jimmy's vocals, high and clear, swooping into an impossible falsetto and back again, warm and rich and so gorgeous, that makes this so magical. Bennink drums on a handful of the other tracks as well (he apparently told Jimmy that the reason they clicked so perfectly was because, he said "I'm blind as well when I play with them") but even when it's just Jimmy and his band, the sound is still totally unique and so very special. Little delicate curlicues of electric krar (5 string harp), shuffling skittery drumming, smooth slithery riffs, warm smooth sax from Ethiopian legend Getatchew Mekurya, all weaving a rich intricate tangle of classic Ethiopian melody and irresistibly groovy rhythms, above which Jimmy just soars, so totally emotional and intense, so passionate and absolutely breathtaking.
We're a bit crazy about Wolfgang Voigt around here, especially in his guise as Gas, whose small body of work perfectly embodies what we now have come to know as Pop Ambient, the four Gas records ranking as most aQ-ers FAVORITE electronic records ever, records which also managed to make almost every one we know, whether they liked 'techno' or not, OBSESSIVE about techno music, albeit a very specific, very un-techno sounding variant. And in fact the Kompakt label, which Voigt runs, has pretty much redefined minimal techno, and like Gas, helped convince techno haters, that they didn't in fact hate techno, they just hadn't heard the right techno.
Mohn is a new duo consisting of Voigt, and his long time collaborator Jorg Burger (The Modernist), who have recorded together in the past as Burger/Ink and Burger/Voigt, but where those records were more beat driven, and yeah, more techno, this Mohn record is something else altogether, a swirling heady mix of cinematic drones, of soundtracky ambience and haunting beat driven atmospheres, the beats here less dancefloor driven and more part of the duo's sonic palette, as they strive to conjure up some other futuristic soundworld that to our ears sounds like a mix of the dystopian future worlds of Blade Runner and Escape From New York, with the more clinical alternate futures of Logan's Run and Gattica, the record's opener setting the scene with a dense sprawling drone, woven together from deep pulsations, and crumbling distorted buzz, a blurred chordal shimmer smeared into a hazy ambience, that is at once darkly mysterious and hauntingly ominous,. The track is flecked with strange swooping electronics, and hushed barely there beats, slowly building to something majestic and sinister and downright menacing.
The vibe switches dramatically though as the second track introduces strange looped and layered almost operatic vocal snippets, over a skittery skeletal shuffle, and woozy blooping melodies, the first half nearly ambient, the second a twisted bit of super abstract ping ponging digidub, that again, is less about propulsion and groove that texture and timbre, and like that first track, it's evocative of some otherworld and similarly strangely cinematic. "Ambientot" begins as a sort of electronic slowcore, creeping and slithering, the main 'groove' wreathed in lush swirls of faux strings and swoonsome synths, that to these ears make this sound like it could be "Love Theme from Mohn", a hauntingly romantic shuffling drift, rife with strange melodies and mesmerizing (often backwards) effects. "Saturn" finds the duo drifting into Carpenter / Goblin territory, a sort of pulsing eighties VHS synthscape, which the duo quickly and deftly transform into something much more mysterious, deep doomy pulses, swirling swaths of fluttery effects, softly shimmery synths, the whole thing gradually transforming, sounding in fact a bit like an electronic/synth take on the brooding slowbuild jazz of the Necks.
The rest of the record continues to paint a sonic picture of this imaginary future, taking much more recognizable minimal electro-dub, and wreathing it in a woozy shuffling rhythm, and a thick fog of smeared synth and blurred FX, or unfurling lush gaseous expanses of hiss and hum, billowing dreamily over muted melodies, and ever shifting textures, wedding crackly buzz to Tangerine Dream like synthscapery, and wrapping it in a prismatic haze of softly roiling electronic percussion and sublimated effects. "Mohn" strangely enough might be the most 'techno' of the bunch, but even here, the sound is smeared into an almost aqueous dronescape, the beats seeming to hang weightless, drifting to and fro, as if driven by some strange tidal influence, all the while the background blossoming like a time lapse filmstrip, growing ever so much more washed out and ethereal, before finally finishing off with a dreamy, but strangely convoluted chunk of Pop Ambience, the sounds all hushed and hazy, dreamy and drifty, but the arrangement, stuttery and glitchy, the lurching stop/starts, giving the amorphous soundscape a strange sort of non-rhythm, which makes it all the more compelling, and strangely mesmerizing.
So gorgeous. Absolutely recommended for fans of all the Pop Ambient collections, as well as the Gas records, but really, anyone into dark electronic soundscapes and mysterious cinematic minimalism will easily fall under Mohn's spell.
For a band who supposedly broke up, Monarch sure have managed to put out a whole bunch of music, post mortem. And while this is funeral doom and everything, we're not talking some Biggie Smalls / Tupac Shakur music from beyond the grave thing (although you never know!), it seems the announced breakup was premature, and lucky for all the doomongers among you, the Monarch is alive and (un)well.
Avid readers of the AQ list should need no introduction to French downtuned slow motion sludge doom trio Monarch. A band truly worthy of many multiples of 'o's (dooooooooooooooooooooom), whose plod and crawl is so slow it often veers near static drone territory, and who also manage to deftly mix in a bit of subtle loveliness into their harsh metallic trudge, AND whose peculiar sense of humor, and album art, and unlikely front woman, definitely make them stand out in an increasingly crowded field...
For those new to Monarch let's recap shall we?
Quite possibly the world's only female fronted deathdoomdronedirge outfit. An unholy mix of Khanate, Corrupted, Bunkur and Moss, but with a petite young French woman on lead vocals, usually clad in Converse hightops, a skirt and a sweater, hair in a pony tail, no tattoos or spikes or leather, but when she opens her mouth, out comes the foulest demonic shrieks and hellish gurgles you have EVER heard. Certainly from a woman, maybe from ANY one, man, woman or beast.
Then there are the record covers, always covered in grade school like doodles of cute big eyed skulls, puffy ghosts, burning churches, and hearts all over the place. They're like a Sanrio doom band. And not surprisingly are obsessed with Hello Kitty (their email address is sanriosabbath!!). But eyes closed, and these guys and gal can most definitely hold their own amongst the slow motion elite. With the added bonus of a singer who can actually sing and does occasionally, adding a definite creepy melodic moodiness to the music.
So this double disc collects two ultra limited lps (the band seem to lean toward lps, AND double cds, with songs clocking in at 10, 20, sometimes 30 minutes), one that we carried a while back and sold out in the blink of an eye, the massive and amazing Speak Of The Sea, and weirdly enough, another 2 song lp, that's not really out yet entitled appropriately enough Die Tonight.
So what has us so smitten with Monarch? Besides the above that is? Let's start with Speak Of The Sea, a massive pummeling wall of headsplitting ultra doom, an impossibly glacial plodding thud wrapped in ear shredding sheets of corrosive feedback that will tear your insides out and fill your ears with black tar. A gorgeously dense. ultra caustic and corrosive funereal doom that manages to be dreamy and darn near pretty while it's pummeling you to death. Easily one of the slowest heaviest dooooooooom records ever, three looooong tracks. Each so slow it's almost ambient. It's a bit like listening to SUNNO))) or Earth 2 when some caveman drummer decides to crash the party and start drumming slowly along. Riffs stretched out into huge droning smears of black rumble, ringing and reverberating, pulsing and wavering unsteadily before the next ten ton riff drops. Each track is a slow plodding ultradoomscape, like the ultimate doom metal intro stretched into actual songs, smeared across nearly an hour. The vocals don't even come in until the first song is almost over, a shrieking black coda, after twenty minutes of slow burning doom drone tension. The second track features some distant Ozzy-like crooning way off in the distance before the scowling growl kicks in. So slow and heavy. On the AQ doooooomscale, this ranks more O's than we could possibly include in this review!
And for the cd release, they've tacked on a whole 'nother song to the first disc (album), a creepy, pretty near ambient crawl, nothing but the sound of the surf crashing on the shore, a thick hissy staticky sound, slowly swelling and drifting, very meditative, with hushed urgently whispered vocals hovering above the crashing sea, very strange, but quite nice.
Then we get to Die Tonight, a record most of us (if not all of us) have not heard until now. And if anything it's everything Speak Of The Sea was and MORE. Heavier (as if that were even possible), slower (ditto) and more blurred out, buzzy and dronelike, with bits of the song so blissed out, the drum hits and chaotic crashes are so far apart, you can almost forget you're listening to a doom band, wallowing in the glorious shimmering drones of the drawn out chords, before a howled shriek and a massive crunch knocks you near out of your seat. There's also more singing, with gorgeous drifting vocals that hover alongside long stretches of buzzing guitar making for haunting harmonies, giving the proceedings brief moments of surprising tranquility. And the vocals continue to twist and turn, from hushed and whispery, to girlish and sing songy to inhuman demonic screech, all the while, the band trudging along dronelike, weaving impossibly pretty soundscapes from downtuned crunch and skull cracking thud.
This is absolutely essential doom. If you like Esoteric, Boris, Moss, Bunkur, SUNNO))), Earth, Esoteric, Skepticism, Eyehategod, Marzuraan, Atavist, Catacombs, Khanate, Pale Horse, Monument Of Urns and you NEED this! And the drifting drone element is in full effect, so those who have yet to dabble in the doom pool, might check this out, the long drawn out shimmers and Niblock like layers of guitar rumble might hit the spot and have you digging deeper for more and more dooooom.
Gorgeously packaged in a black gatefold, printed in silver ink, decorated with big eyed ghosts, a sailing ship with upside down crosses and a heart on the sail, lots of stars, some cute birdies, and an anchor with a heart on it. Inside are two silver on black printed inserts, with all the lyrics, the liner notes and a thanks list that says it all: Moss, Noothgrush, Otesanek, Corrupted, Bastard Noise, Rainbow Of Death, Nuit Noire and of course "our lucky stars"!
We've worshipped at the altar of Hello Kitty obsessed French ultradoom trio (now quartet) Monarch for years and years now, harboring a secret crush on Monarch frontwoman Emilie and a not so secret crush on their absolutely pummeling black cloud of sound.
Originally released as a super limited lp on Spanish label Throne Records back in 2008, this two part doom drone dirge epic, is now available on cd, the separate sides, "Mer" and Morte" now reunited into one single sprawling nearly 35 minute opus, a glacial expanse of creeping crawling detuned drift, of psychedelic black ambience, of tarpit doomic dirge, of extreme abstract heaviness, of near static pummel. As gorgeous as it is harsh, as heavy as it is atmospheric, the drums so spare, the drummer has time to go outside for a smoke between snare hits, riffage so lugubrious that SUNNO))) sound like speed metal in comparison.
Think Flood era Boris, Corrupted, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, Orthodox, Catacombs, but then slow it down even more, take those sounds and smear them into washed out blurs, the vocals a distant mewl, an occasional shriek, the cymbals unleashed in hazy clouds of sizzling shimmer. The guitars heavy for sure, but the riffs allowed to ring out and fade to near silence, before the next one hits, more than any of the other Monarch records, Mer Morte finds the band exploring ambience as heaviness, allowing long stretches of guitar rumble to drift unaccompanied except for some hushed wordless crooning.
The second half, formerly just "Morte", cranks up the tempo to a blasting (well, for Monarch at least) 10 or 12 bpm, the vocals way more intense, and in the mix the Khanate vibe is much more obvious, a pounding hellish dirge, utterly intense and cathartic and emotional and brutal, but after a few minutes, the drums drop out, and the guitars are left to drone and undulate and pulse, streaked with feedback, a gorgeous blackened dronescape, peppered with occasional drum pound, but any semblance of 'beat' has been jettisoned, the record plays out, a trancelike stretch of downtuned doomic minimalism, laced with more of those ethereal ghostlike vox, haunting and mysterious and otherworldly, and grimly beautiful.
Gorgeous packaging too, a four panel gatefold Stumptown sleeve, with gold metallic ink on black matte. So cool.
Shambling from the darkness of Saint Petersburg's deepest wooded overgrowth into the even darker darkness of Saint Petersburg's dankest dampest cave (we presume), comes Mondsaal! An entirely new prospect to us, this bizarre disc of murky, woozy Russian cosmic hatefulness arrived seemingly out of nowhere, but we're finding ourselves pretty damn smitten by its lurching weirdness. The esteemed Encyclopaedia Metallum describes Mondsaal as "dark/black metal", and we have to say "dark metal" is a pretty great way to describe these weirdos. Aesthetically it's sort of black metal. There's Burzum-esque midpaced plodding, there's otherworldly synthesizer strings draped over almost everything, but there's also a thick murkiness to their sound that feels more reminiscent of Swedish crypt-dwelling death metal or the warm bloodletting anesthesia of funeral doom bands like Skepticism or Until Death Overtakes Me. Even the mid-range vocal growls lean more towards the death than the black, and the blast beats (on the rare occasion that they do decide to show up) are eerily slow and shambolic. It's a sound that's strange, sorrowful, damaged, ugly, but weirdly warm & enveloping all at the same time. The constant droning of soft synth pads and the squonking of dissonant horns (yes, that's right, there's horns) stand in stark contrast to the naked writhing ugliness of everything else that's happening, and the result is pretty psychedelic & spacey (in a bit of a similar way to the Dunnock/Intergalactic Holocaust split we reviewed on the last list!). The whole affair closes out with a hazy ritualistic rainy desertscape ambient piece, leaving the impression that you've just passed through some living slow motion morphine nightmare. It's a pretty entrancing experience - either hideously beautiful or beautifully hideous, we're not sure yet, but either way: very very recommended.
OOOHHH!!! NOW ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN OVER THREE DECADES!!!
Konrad Becker released only a couple of albums in the early '80s under his moniker Monoton. The modest editions of his recordings relegated him to inevitable obscurity back then, but thankfully through the magic of reissue technology more folks now have had a chance to enjoy his genius work, a hyper-bleak precursor of electronica, that bridged the kosmische sounds of Cluster and Conrad Schnitzler with the more contemporary sounds of Pan Sonic and Coh to come.
We're sure that there are more than a few modern music nerds out there who hang on every word printed in The Wire, so the reissue of anything by Monoton will no doubt thrill those avid Wire readers. Of course, not everyone keeps one eye on The Wire; so allow us to reiterate what that fine British music magazine penned about this album in 1996, The Wire did a cover story entitled "100 Records that set the world on fire (when no one was listening)," and which featured plenty of favorites already heralded in their pages (Derek Bailey, Faust, Fushitsusha, Nurse With Wound, Bernhard Gunter, etc.) as well as a handful of brilliant records which apparently nobody else had ever heard. Monoton's 2nd album, Monotoprodukt 07, from 1982, found its way onto that list of 100 seminal albums, despite the fact that barely anyone actually owned copies of this self-released album of Germanic proto-electronica. Wire scribe Biba Kopf was one of those lucky few, and certainly said it better than we could have: "[This album] is so alive with the pulses that triggered many electronicas to come, from techno through trance to Mego's creeping static, you could make a case for Konrad Becker's guruhood. Yet for all its prescient washed out tones, threadbare textures and minimalist rigour, it has the edge on much that followed. Adopting an imperious art stance towards mainstreams and margins alike, Becker cast a cold analytic eye over electronica's urfathers, picking up on Suicide's jittertronic urgency, if not their melodrama, and DAF's throbbing sequencers, but with the sex threat removed, which he patched into his own crackling circuits, hissing vistas and tumbling beatstreams."
Lo and behold, the good people at Oral in Canada were kind enough to reissue Monotonprodukt 07 first on cd back in 2003 (long since out of print) and now at last on vinyl, complete with a beefed-up re-mastered sound complements of the best in the business, Rashad Becker (no relation?), making for a very cool and highly recommended listen! We concur with The Wire about this album's importance. This really is one of aQ's experimental electronica essentials.
Moon Duo return with their second proper full length, and if you needed any further proof of their masterful grasp of fuzzed out hypnotic grooves, well, look no further. It's almost as if Moon Duo set out to link every one of their records together as one gigantic pulsating trip into your mind, and Mazes takes you further in. Mazes. Hmm. Like the magic eye cover for their Catch As Catch Can single, the eyeball warping artwork seems to be a perfect visual accompaniment to the awesome brain-melting confusion of the music itself.
Kicking off with "Seer", the duo conjure the hazy underwater sound they've utilized before with a rhythm that walks the line between spaced out acid rock and minimal electro grooves with some of the clearest Moon Duo vocals to date. "Mazes" offers a slight departure from the usual murk, sounding poppy and jangly in the vein of other San Francisco popsmiths like the Fresh And Onlys or the Mantles. It rides out with a sort of pre-1965 surf rock feel that makes this a perfect jam for your next sun baked road trip. "Scars" shifts the mood into darker terrain like some fractured Suicide / Doors hybrid. The heavy vibrato keeps things percolating while the organ occasionally shifts into a spooky little interlude recalling Kraftwerk's "The Model". The song also strangely makes us think of Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild", an association which is taken to the next logical step with the aggressive "Fallout". The album concludes with "Goners", a midtempo jam that makes it feel like you are walking into the perfect fadeout to an album which will remain playing in your head nonstop for quite some time. Moon Duo have never let us down, and it doesn't seem that'll change anytime soon...
We weren't entirely sure what to expect from a band called Moon Pool & Dead Band, we were even less sure when we saw the super bizarre cover, a striking painting of a family, standing in some sort of sewer, looking out at a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the mother holding what appears to be a dead child, the father consoling her with one hand, clutching a bat in the other, the sky choked with factory smog. What we do know, is we weren't expecting THIS. It's definitely space rock and definitely psychedelic, which puts it at least marginally in Agitated's wheelhouse, there are no guitars, at all, and the sound seems to be entirely synthesizers, and the occasional drums, but we're not disappointed at all! It's definitely not like anything we've heard before, which made even more sense when we discovered that Moon Pool & Dead Band is in fact a 'techno' offshoot of Wolf Eyes, although we're not hearing much actual techno here, instead, it's a sprawling sea of synths swirling and buzzing, occasionally coalescing around minimal motorik beats (hence the techno?), the background rife with glitches and squelches, the band locking onto long stretches of super druggy, synthy drift, getting loopy here and there and sounding a bit like a space rock High Wolf, there are a few moments of goofy almost Perrey and Kingsley style bloop and bleep, the opener on the B side woozy and playful, and a bit of a strange standout moment, but on both sides there's plenty of blurred ambient shimmer, and pulsing mesmerizing psych-synth drift, sort of the perfect mix between psychedelic space rock, and that new wave of Carpenter / Goblin influenced cinematic synthscapery. Recommended to both camps, but probably more so to folks with a foot in each!
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!
Moonrises are the latest in a long line of psychedelic revivalists, many of whom we revere here at aQ, whether it's White Hills, or Carlton Melton, The Heads or Wooden Shjips, but these guys (and gal) have a leg up on lots of their psychedelic brethren in that they're led by none other than Plastic Crimewave, who oughta have a PhD in psychedelia at this point, and here, he puts that knowledge to work, crafting a gorgeous, intense, druggy and heavy modern psych rock that manages to channel jammed out space rock, with witchy occultic seventies acid folk, organ heavy prog and tranced out krautrock into some seriously heavy musical mayhem.
The opening one-two punch of the first two tracks definitely sets the stage, buzzing synths, dramatic female vocals, minimal drumming, soft swirls of guitar shimmer, woozy organ melodies, the vibe very witchy and demonic, keyboardist Libby Ramer's vocals a force of nature, slipping from whispery croon, to deep ominous drone to banshee like wail, the first track starting off all minimal and moody, but gradually building to a fierce psych rock blow out, the organ and guitar all tangled up in thick gouts of wah wah whirl, the drums wild and chaotic, the whole thing droned out and trancey, a fierce opener for sure, but it only get more fierce from there.
The second track, "Lorelei's Grasp" begins as a rumbling drone, which is soon joined by more of the creepy organ, some crumbling guitar noise, bursts of drum splatter, a free form space noise drift, that coalesces into some dense dark progginess, the organ letting loose a super intense minor key melody, the drums following with along, Ramer's vocals going crazy, a maniacal trill, a woman possessed, the whole thing so tense and intense, and unlike any of the so called space/psych rock we've been hearing. This could totally be some lost rare psych artifact, not just the sound, but the spirit, and the energy, the song settles down, and drones out, but soon, erupts into a final squall that sounds almost triumphant. Wow.
And so it goes, Moonrises effortlessly channeling the lost psychedelic seventies, the sonic spirits revealed through distorted organ buzz, and wild tangles psych guitar, deep chant like vocals, and skittering motorik rhythms, druggy clouds of hazy soft noise shimmer, but it's not all straight retro revival. The band are capable of seriously fucking shit up, check out "Eyelid Chamber", which sounds less like old psych folk, and more like some modern freakout avant noise rock, dizzying drumming, wrapped in thick organ drones, and peppered with swirling shards of jagged guitar crunch, before finally coalescing into a song proper, but even then it sounds like something more more modern, dirgey and grungey and heavy. Elsewhere they get into some tripped out rhythmic experimentalism, droney and woozy and looped, other descriptions we've seen mention This Heat and the Dead C, and yeah, there's a little of that going on, but to our ears, it's simply an extension of their tranced out psych, which already contains elements of both. Incredible stuff! Fans of all the current crop of psych/space revivalists, this is for YOU. And fans of the old stuff, who only dig the REAL thing, this could be the band that flips your lid and changes your mind.
At long last, this rather legendary soundtrack album shows up on cd in our racks. Morricone appreciators, "kosmigroov" junkies, and experimental improv fans have all been salivating over rumors of this re-issue, and all that eager anticipation is quite justified. Genius Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone is best known for both his lounge-style pop music for Italian sex kitten comedies and other flicks, and also of course for his stunning, atmospheric (and archetypal) soundtracks to Westerns such as For a Few Dollars More. Here at AQ, we worship Morricone.
So what a pleasant thrill discover that this soundtrack to a 1971 erotic thriller called The Cold Eyes of Fear does indeed live up to its reputation, and instead of those usual expected Morricone sounds, we're treated to complex, sinister jazz strikingly similar to '70s electric-era Miles Davis circa "Live/Evil" and "Get Up With It". We can't imagine what must be going on in the film while this deliciously avant garde material is playing. There's simmering trumpet (blown by Morricone himself!), catwalking bass, pell mell drumming and other weird atmospheric percussive effects. It makes sense that the soundtrack was performed by Morricone's own outfit of musical innovators, the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza who've themselves been the subject of two recent and highly-regarded reissues. This soundtrack takes the Gruppo's 20th century chamber-improv and adds some definite grooves, although there's plenty of totally free sounding moments as well. Highly recommended!
It's been a while since we've had to employ multiple 'o's in a review. A bit of a death of doom it seems. Or at least the sort of doom that requires all those extra 'o's. A loyal customer of ours even whipped up this [http://www.aquariusrecords.org/doomchart.html] "doom chart" based on our usage of multiple 'o'd doom in reviews!
And if memory serves, Moss was one of the bands that routinely got described as doooom, or doooooooooom, and sometimes even doooooooooooooooooooooooom. So we were all ready to put finger to key and just let the 'o's roll out, one after the other after the other, until we felt we had conveyed the crushing doom of Moss. That is until we pressed play, and were treated to "Ritus", a five and a half minute soundscape of whirring synths and washed out ambience, of cymbal sizzle and proggy keyboard drones, of whispered voices and buzzing shimmer. Hmmm. The liner notes say it's inspired by Doris Norton, an electronic musician who's also a member of AQ faves Jacula!! An interesting start from one of the sludgiest, crustiest bands around. Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. Ahh. That's better. The second track returns us to that dank dark sloooooooooow place Moss call home. Twenty three minutes of downtuned crush, the tempo only slightly faster than the growth of actual moss. But even all gnarled and sludge-y, something has definitely changed. It's not nearly as filthy, and harsh, it's actually weirdly pretty. Almost like it's some more melodic metal record being spun manually with one finger at 3 or 4 rpm. The distortion is still dense, the long drawn out chords seeming to crumble, the drums spaced way out, but somehow still more buys than you're average ultradoom drummer, the vocals are still harsh and howling, but somehow, they too seem to be a bit more smooth, further down in the mix, like another layer of sound, the howls allowed to unfurl into another layer of buzz. It's strange, but we definitely dig. And we're not saying this is NOTHING like old Moss, or folks into Bunkur and Esoteric and the like won't love it, you will, the differences are subtle, and the sound is just a little bit, well, prettier, if you can imagine something bleak and black and harsh and hateful being pretty. Which we can!
The next track, a nine minute dirge, is a bit more raw and rough, most of that prettiness we were blathering on about above is GONE. Shrieking feedback, the drums even slower and more spare, the guitars even more distorted and the vocals throat shreddingly harsh, the tempo slightly accelerated, bordering on Eyehategod territory.
But it's all bout the closer, "Gate III: Devils From The Outer Dark". Clocking in at 35 minutes + and beginning with a churning sea of downtuned rumble and buzz, before the drums finally kick in, and f course by kick in we mean pound sporadically. This track is WAY more than a dirge. It makes the track before it sound like thrash metal. This is slooooooow and so so so so dooooooooooooooooooomy. The guitars thick and corrosive, the chords allowed to ring way out and fade away before the next one drops in to take its place, but weirdly enough, this one too sounds sort of pretty, not like the opening track, but still very dreamlike and mesmerizing. Long streaks of feedback spread out over wide open expanses of minimal thud and warm warped slow motion buzz, when the vocals drop out, it becomes something entirely different, finishing off with several minutes of thick low end drone, the guitars rumbling and wrapped into a thick nearly static pulse, something truly hypnotic and almost spacey, but without sacrificing a single one of those extra 'o's.
Definitely a progression, a band can only pound and plod for so long, but so subtle that the casual listener might not even notice. "Oh yeah, heavy, slow, dooooooom", but as with most music, deep listening reveals a whole lot more going on beneath the surface, and once your ears lock on to that stuff, even the sounds on the surface begin to sound different.
WAY RECOMMENDED for the doom-ed amongst you. And just cuz we knew you were waiting for it, Sub Templum could very well be doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom disc of the year!!
If there's one thing musicians, and heck, even fans of music hate, it's a dabbler. Someone well established in one arena who decides to dabble in some other sound or scene, often 'slumming', experimenting with a sound or style that they would never integrate into their actual sound. And no one hates dabblers more than metalheads, who came up with a new name for those dabblers, POSERS.
But without a little dabbling, music would remain stagnant, genres would go on forever unchanged, or more likely would die out because everything would have been done. The key is two fold, to dabble, or experiment respectfully, and to then incorporate those borrowed sounds into something new, and original, that while heavily indebted to the new sounds, is also firmly rooted in the original sound. It would make no sense for some punk band to just switch gears and come out with a country record (although it has happened), one would question that band's integrity for sure, how serious could they have been about punk if they could just chuck it for something else without a thought? It makes more sense for that band to infuse their punk with some twang, or add some slide guitar to the thrashing howl, and already, even just describing, it sounds way more interesting.
Needless to say, we were WAY skeptical when we heard that there was a Mount Eerie 'black metal' record in the works. We were never that into Mount Eerie, or the Microphones, it took the recent collaboration with Julie Dorion to win us over, and that record remains one of our favorites. But we had been reading about Mount Eerie mainman Phil Elverum discovering Xasthur and getting the black metal bug. Which is fine, that's sort of what this store is all about after all, but there's a difference between just digging black metal, and suddenly adding black metal to your dark bedroom folk. In theory it sounds like an intriguing combination, but we remained skeptical...
Which proved to be unnecessary, cuz wow, this is a strange and beautiful beast of a record. Right from the start, the title track explodes in a squall of thick corrosive buzz, where does a folky learn to kick up a sound like that? And since BM is not his first musical language, the result is truly unique and strange, there are some lurching strange arrangements, and then of course the black metal is peeled back to reveal some soulful crooning, and the hybrid is just as cool as we hoped it might be, a mournful sad boy Sebadoh like croon, buried amidst heaving walls of crumbling buzz, that explode into furious clouds of caustic crunch, only to recede once again, revealing those sad boy vocals again, and some strange plodding drums alongside a moaning minor key main melody, and the cool thing is, Elverum's distinct melodic style, immediately recognizable since we listened to Lost Wisdom so much, is perfectly fused with the buzzy blasts and blackened atmosphere. Really really cool. And that's only the first track.
As mentioned above, the key to successful dabbling is not abandoning your original sound, since theoretically, the music you make, you make because that's the sound you hear in your head, and your heart, and Elverum continues to craft gorgeous brooding dark folk, the second track, is a wheezing organ driven drone, with hushed angelic vocals, and a haunting deeeeep drone outro, which leads right into a gorgeous reverb drenched bit of mist shrouded drift, all spidery guitars, and warm whirring distant keyboards, and more crooned vocals, all subtly sinister and harrowing, but quite beautiful.
Fear not, that opener was not just a one shot. "The Hidden Stone" is another super distorted blast of blackened heaviness, and again, the magic here is that the buzz and fuzz is wrapped around distinctly UN-black metal melodies and song structures, the result sounds like a blackened Mount Eerie, lilting and sorrowful, but simultaneously distorted and blown out. And the record continues to strike the perfect balance between drifting, droney melodiousness and blackened buzzy crush, the best moments being when the two are fused, which thankfully is most of the time.
"The Mouth Of Sky" unleashes some incredibly cool, over saturated hyper distorted guitars and what sounds like processed cymbals, weaving them into a loping dark melody, the result is a super heavy, noise drenched, metallic shoegaze-y psychedelic blow out, the sort of track we wish was about 10 times longer. "(Something)" clocks in at a little over two minutes, and is obviously an experiment, but is one of our favorite tracks, a super strange, heavily panned, crunchy, distorted rhythmic, looped dronescape which gives way to a soft, shimmery, glistening dreamscape. "Lost Wisdom Pt. 2" is another killer blast of black folk buzz, about as frenzied as any of the blackness here gets, but divided into a strange lumbering tempo, which gives the whole song a sort of seasick vibe, lurching and lumbering and so EPIC, before all the distortion is stripped away, leaving just hushed vocals, a warm distant buzz, and some muted distortion, and the immediately recognizable melody from the original "Lost Wisdom", and finally the record finishes off with a long sprawling slow motion drone-folk drift, the bed of which is all warm organ and softly strummed acoustic guitar, interrupted only briefly before a slow motion explosion of super processed cymbal shimmer, leads into a gorgeous, outro of dark dreamy Neil Young-ness, finishing off like a Mount Eerie record should, haunting, resonant, mournful and melancholy.
Not sure what else to say. It should speak volumes that we were so skeptical and so cynical, and were actually not even all that interested in hearing this, and now here we are proclaiming it our Record Of The Week. We stand before you humbled, but happy, with ears full of this strange confusional sound. Which makes sense really, as lots of our favorite metal these days is some sort of hybrid, some strange mix, or twisted take, and while we will always love the primitive blasting raw buzz of true black metal, we'll never get tired of people pushing that sound, one of our FAVORITE sounds, in new, exciting and unlikely directions. And we definitely can't think of anything less likely than indie folk and black metal...
Incredible packaging, the cd a fold out full color oversized accordion style matte finish booklet, with frosty forest images on one side, lyrics and liner notes on the other, the band name and album title in reflective gold metallic ink. The lp similarly deluxe but a fancy gatfold jacket instead.
Same ol' dependable John Darnielle making some of the most witty yet heartfelt singer songwriter material to tickle our fancy here at AQ. While he has forged a completely unique style all his own that is consistently evident here, this album is also a slight departure of sorts. It's on respected British label 4AD which means Vaughan Oliver (that M Oliver has designed one of his album covers sends Darnielle into paroxysms of ecstasy). Being on 4AD also afforded John the opportunity to go to England to record the album with Tony Doogan, who has worked with Belle & Sebastian. Thus the album has a more produced feel, but that's not bad. It's simply a long way from Darnielle's singing into a boombox days. There are unusual, for Mountain Goats, touches such as shimmering cymbals and (what sound like) occasional doubletracked vocals. I wasn't disappointed, however, and neither will you be. Very nice.
Long awaited debut from Nashville doomlords Mourner (featuring members of long time aQ faves Loss), their first for the mighty Paradigms label (who also released this week's ROTW from Murmuure), and while we were all ready to haul out the extra 'o's (as in doooooooooooooooom), seeing as this is indeed a seriously epic and sludgey collection of extreme slow motion heaviness, multiple 'o's just don't quite do this stuff justice. Sure it's slow, and low, and sick and sinister, and blackened and brutal, but it's also weirdly pretty, and strangely melodic, surprisingly lush, just check out the list of instrumentation for your first clue: harmonium, Echoplex, noise, drones, tape loops, field recordings, all wound into the more typical guitar, and drums doom metal arsenal. The record starts out seriously doom-ed, a harsh cackling wicked witch vokill rasp, over murky rumbling bass, crushing spare drum pound, distant haunting shimmer and epic downtuned slowcore chordal crush, sounding almost like a prettier Khanate, the sound creeping and crawling, about as close as anyone has come to channeling slowcore legends Codeine though pure doom, but it doesn't take long for Mourner to distance themselves even further from the doom hordes, the vocals suddenly slipping into a super dramatic King Diamond like falsetto, giving the sound an even more melodic (and hauntingly dramatic vibe), and then the heaviness is peeled back entirely, leaving just some gorgeous skeletal clean guitar, draped over minimal super sparse drumming, the vocals a reverbed growl, the result is something doomy, but more just lovely and mysterious. The track slips back into heaviness, those KD vocals returning too, the song a woozy lumbering dirge that eventually fades out, leaving a bizarre slowed down voice, over a warm softly whirring choral outro.
The comes the 28 minute, two part "Still", a sprawling ambient doom epic, the band laying out a hazy, softdrone backdrop, over which, the guitars occasionally crash, vocals growl and mumble and gurgle and groan, the sounds occasionally coalescing into some sort of impossibly glacial doom death march, but just as often blissing out into something much more ethereal and washed out, clouds of cymbal sizzle, SUNNO)))-like riffscapery, plenty of tripped out effects-drenched drift, whispery clean guitar laced shimmer, some surprisingly pretty almost post rocky bits of melodic meander, hazy layered drones, with the second half being the more traditionally doomy, eventually locking into some seriously devastating lumber and pummel, still atmospheric, and subtly melodic, but heavy as fuck, until finally, the band slips back into something abstract and avant, a slowly unfurling soundscape of muted crunch and rumble, of hushed vocals, clean tendril like guitar lines, all manner of soft focus murk, peppered with the sounds of birds way off in the distance.
Most definitely recommended for the usual slow and low obsessives into Moss, Bunkur, Monarch, The Body, Khanate, Fleshpress, Celestiial, Nadja, Skepticism, Trees, Wicked King Wicker and the like, but Mourner is just weird and melodic enough to maybe reach beyond the doom metal loyal, and open up a whole new world of sound to folks who might not have dared in the past.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Packaged in a cool printed brown paper sleeve, with a printed 4 panel insert.
A few weeks back, we got an unsolicited email from someone called Mr. Peter Hayden. Not being someone we had ever heard of, we might have just deleted it, if it weren't for the subject line, which read: "Finnish music trying to impress you." Hmmm. Still skeptical, we opened the email, only to discover that Mr. Peter Hayden was not in fact a person, but a five piece psychedelic combo from Finland, who had recently got some serious love on Julian Cope's Head Heritage website. The email also ended with the line: "I know every word I write here is a waste of our time until You take an hour off and dive deep in to the worlds the album will take You." We were pretty much sold. After all, Finland. Check. Psychedelic. Check. Cope. Check.
And once we threw it one, we were not disappointed, in fact, we were wondering, being the weirdo Finnish music obsessives we are, and being super obsessed with all strains of psychedelic space rock heaviness, how the hell we had missed out on these guys? Well, better late than never, and really all it took was about a minute and we knew this probably had to be a Record Of The Week. Heavy, atmospheric, druggy, dynamic, psychedelic, pounding drums, soaring guitars, streaks of feedback, wailing melodies, long stretches of swirling spaciness between bursts of chugging heaviness, and that's only a couple minutes in, total trip out heavy head music for sure. A single seventy minute jam, that builds and builds and builds, from that first blast of psychedelic heaviness, chugging, and churning, the sound gradually grows less and less spares, more propulsive, more metallic, by about six minutes in, the song has transformed into a roiling sprawl of psychedelic doom, but sort of freeform, and a little bit jazzy, the guitars riffing, but also splintering into wild squalls of tangled melodies, and unfurling lush swirling textures, the sort of rare sonic beast that immediately entrances, first time we listened to this, we listened to the whole thing all the way through, totally mesmerized, and in a druggy, hypno-rock trance. And speaking of hypno-rock, just wait a few more minutes and the band locks into a seriously cyclical groove, seemingly channeling vintage Circle, but augmenting the minimal riffage of Circle with clouds of psychguitar shimmer, and what sounds like a phalanx of buzzing humming synths (maybe just more guitars), wild dense tangles of thick corrosive guitar buzz, chordal swells, all wrapped around a main riff that just chugs along all hypnotic and motorik.
The sound shifts constantly, without ever losing momentum, slipping at one point into a sort of doomy dirge, only to blossom into what might be the poppiest part of the record, all major key melody and soaring majesty, and then seconds later, to dial everything back, and unfurl a brooding stretch of ultra minimal meander, all super spare drumming, guitar buzzing like sitars off in the distance, the sound laced with fragmented riffs, strange FX, bits of squiggly melody, and all manner of slow shifting textures, woozy and washed out and dreamily druggy, all of this dreaminess eventually interrupted by some seriously metallic heft, a crushing drum heavy distorted riff churn, but still surrounded by a swirl of psychedelic shimmer, that somehow keeps it from being just heavy, and makes it both heavy, and blissfully psychedelic.
The heaviness seems to ooze and expand, the various guitars switching from riffing to spiraling soaring melodies, a lurching lumbering groove that as far as we're concerned continue to the end of the record, but Mr. Peter Hayden have other things in mind, slipping into some soaring near Godspeed like post rock epic-ness, not to mention a weirdly mathy almost metallic breakdown, and throughout, more stretches of hushed minimal drift, softly psychedelic, drowsily dreamy, a continual push/pull between blown out psych and space rock crush, and blissed out mesmer and shimmery lysergic ambience, but like any great record of its stripe, Born A Trip ends with a serious blast of psychedelic heaviness, sounding like Neurosis almost, epic and crushing, blown out and metallic, a heavy psych coda that eventually fades into a final stretch of droned out slo-mo minimalism. Wow. So great.
obviously so very recommended for fans of Carlton Melton, White Hills, 3 Leafs, Gnod, Sylvester Anfang, and other interstellar psychedelic space rock explorers, as well as all of you who dig motorik Circle style hypnorock, Finnish freakiness, and just trippy spacey heaviness in general. Definitely a Record Of The Week, but a serious contender for Record Of The YEAR as well...
Before we relay the weird way in which we fell in love with this record, let us just say right up front, this is our new favorite garage pop record, hands down!
So as you probably know, the increasing habit of listening to music on our computers has changed the way we listen to music so much. Lots of folks listen to everything on shuffle, others just play their favorite tracks, the idea of full, programmed albums is almost a thing of the past for some folks. And while in some ways those changes enhance the listening experience, in others, it definitely feels like something has been lost. But for whatever reason, at least in this one case, the quirkiness of said computer listening was the key to our obsession with Mrs. Magician.
We had been listening to this new record from the weirdly named Mrs. Magician, a garage rock combo who we had only really heard of cuz they were on tour with the Hot Snakes. And we definitely liked what we heard but were not yet totally blown away. Then for some weird reason, we accidentally sorted our music library by 'date added' and ended up listening to Strange Heaven IN REVERSE ORDER, from back to front, and holy shit, suddenly it all clicked, our socks were knocked totally off, and ever since, we can't stop listening to this (and yeah, we dig it in the proper order now too!).
Not sure if the record is just weirdly back loaded, or we just needed this little twist to unlock the magic of Mrs. Magician, but we're just grateful it happened. To help simulate our listening experience, the first two sound samples we've provided are of course the double shot (in reverse order) that sealed the deal, the sort of one-two punch you find yourself listening to over and over and over (just ask the other aQ-ers how many times Andee has played these two tracks over and over the last few weeks), and then once you can convince yourself to move on, the third and fourth sound samples, are the album's proper opening two tracks.
But c'mon, "Dead 80's" has to be the jam of the year, crunchy, jangly, fuzzy, with a chorus that KILLS, all dreamy oooooh's, some falsetto crooning, warbly organs, ramshackle riffing, and the sort of gleefully profane chorus you'll find yourself singing along too even after just one time through ("Oooooooh, Fuck the world, Oooooooh, Fuck the law, Ooooooooh, Fuck the kids!"). And if "Dead 80's" wasn't already THEE jam here, then "Hours Of The Night" sure as shit would be, a dead ringer for late great post grunge Nova Scotian pop group the Hardship Post, all post Nirvana strum, but with hooks galore, a shuffling rhythm, and snarky heart broken lyrics, not to mention plenty of reverby dreaminess, and so it goes, those two songs are the key, that unlock a whole record of crazy catchy garage pop bliss, that to be honest, is really all we want to listen to. Can't remember being as excited about a pop record since Jaill's That's How We Burn, which trust us, is huge praise indeed. Definite contender for record of the year, pop or otherwise.
FYI vinyl version forthcoming next month...
We said it before, and we might as well say it again, these guys should really be WAY more popular than they are, everything we've heard from them has totally ruled, a few singles, two full lengths, one of which we made our Record Of The Week, and let's not forget their bad ass Hawkwind cover in the Sonic Attack 7" series (reissued on cd, one of THIS week's Records Of The Week!), so it should come as no surprise that full length number three is just as good, if not better than all the stuff that came before. Not as blown out and super rocking as Sun Broken, Lime is 4 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes, and is a bit more subdued than past efforts. That's not to say there isn't some seriously psychedelic ferocity on display here, it's just judiciously doled out, and set amidst some more minimal psychedelia. Although opener "Sunburnt Impedance Machine" might have you convinced otherwise, exploding right out of the gate with a killer fuzzed out Hawkwindy riff, chanted vocals, some soaring spidery leads, some killer staccato mathy breakdowns, huge squalls of spacepsych freakout, until finally at about the halfway mark, the track shifts gears and locks into a churning chugging krautrock groove, the instruments locked in tight, only the organ let loose, to whir and warble and buzz, laying thick undulating swaths of chordal buzz over everything, intense and hypnotic, and definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to Circle obsessives.
Which becomes even more obvious on the second track, the 13 minute "Serra", which is a dead ringer for our Finnish hypnorock pals, a sprawling motorik groove, you sort of almost keep expecting Mika Ratto to start singing over the top, but instead, synths swirl and shimmer, horns bleat and skronk, effects swoop and sway, organs get all proggy adding melodic counterpoint, but the main groove never wavers, mesmerizingly epic and relentless, 13 minutes is not nearly enough, could/should go on for hours...
"Radar King" returns Mugstar to the realm of the rocking, locked into another hypnokraut groove, this one minor key and mathy, before breaking down into some spaced out psychdrone drift, all clouds of cymbal shimmer, little melodic squiggles, swirling effects and hushed synths, barely there guitar jangle, eventually the build begins, pulsing, throbbing, growing louder, and more intense, the effects more frantic, the drums heavier, finally exploding in a climax of tangled guitar freakout, and splattery drum pound, all wreathed in dense spaced out FX.
Finally, the band finish off with a gorgeously hazy psychedelic dronedrift, that lays a woozy bassline, under a thick droning organ, the drums minimal, skeletal, like the tracks before, the organ takes control, adding all sorts of rhythmic texture to the proceedings, a total drugpsych tripout, all anchored to the seriously solid groove at its core.
Some seriously epic and proggy psychedelic spacekraut to the max, fans of Circle especially should dig these guys if they don't already, and like the last record, absolutely recommended for anyone even remotely into Salvatore, Magyar Posse, White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan and the rest of the current crop of modern psych rockers...
It was inevitable really. After a handful of 7"s, and a single mostly overlooked and way under appreciated full length that we raved about way back when, these guys are finally getting their due. This new full length on Important should finally position these guys at the head of the class, in the pantheon of modern spacerockers. White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan, we love em all, but they're all gonna have to step up their games, cuz Mugstar has definitely thrown down the drug rock heart of the sun gauntlet. Sun, Broken is a colossal slab of speaker shredding, in-the-red, druggy, psychedelic, hypnotic Hawkwind channeling space rock bliss. Heavy, lush, dense, mesmerizing, sprawling and expansive, epic and majestic, incredible drumming, tangled guitars, warm whirring organs, complex mathy almost proggy arrangements, songs that lock into looped stretches of near static throb and pulse, before splintering into convoluted freakouts only to explode moments later into black hole supernova psychspace blowouts.
"Technical Knowledge As A Weapon" pretty much sets the stage, a swirling cloud of effects gives way to a tribal chunk of primal hypnorock pound, which lurches into a killer stop start Hammond organ stutter, before launching right back into the fray, the track growing ever more urgent and explosive, peppered with organ breaks, the whole thing dense and repetitive, and so so epic. "Ouroboros" starts out all tangled and mathy, a churning hypnotic almost looped sounding sprawl of metallic prog, which slowly transforms into a sort of muted pulsing minimal space rock, swirling effects surround a static guitar melody, and dense drum flurries, and tripped out vox, before the inevitable psych-skree outro, all tangled and jagged fucking FIERCE.
"Labrador Hatchet" is the record's first breather, a two and a half minute space-y trip out, all thum and throb, through a billowing cloud of heavily effected scrapes and clicks and glitches, which gives way to "Today Is The Wrong Shape", a dead ringer for Finnish hypnorockers Circle at their leanest and meanest, the main riff and the pounding krautrock rhythm, like a super charged way revved up Circle, with a cool, angular proggy breakdown, before yet another crushing bout of extreme spaced out damaged FX heaviness.
Another brief bit of swirly psychedelic effects weirdness leads into the nearly 14 minute closer, "Furklausundbo", which begins with warm melodic swells, before the bassline slips in, then the simple stripped down rhythm, and from there it's a totally mesmerizing slow build, locked and looped, riff and rhythm in perfect sync, while all around, streaks of sound swirl and swoop, unlike the other tracks, there's no explosive climax, no freaked out space rock free for all, instead the songs twists and transforms, slipping into a doomy plod at one point, getting downright twangy at another, the main groove getting doused in clouds of reverbed high end guitar at another, but all the while, the pulse, the beat, stays solid, and unfailing, total mind trancelike hypnotic dronerock mesmer, that eventually dissipates in a blurred smear of layered organ and washed out drones.
Easily the space rock, kraut drone, buzz drug, psych swirl jam of the year!
Munly, better known as Jay to his family and friends, is a member in good standing of Slim Cessna's Auto Club, one of our favorite sort of punk, sort of country, sort of creepy folk outfits, who hail from the fine state of Colorado. But as they say, there's something rotten in Colorado. Well, maybe they don't say that now, but they soon will. A beautiful state full of forests and snow and wildlife and mountains, has somehow become the home to the droning confrontational misanthropy of Boyd Rice, the swampy downer folk of Sixteen Horsepower, the crushing, biblical damnation of the Woven Hand, the snake oil selling country punk revival of Slim Cessna and now Munly, a bastard musical mutt incorporating bits and pieces of all the above mentioned misanthropes and miscreants. And we couldn't be more pleased. Munly definitely sounds like a head on collision between Slim Cessna and the Woven Hand. Dark and swoonsome, seasickly swampy dirges, with shuffling graveyard percussion, strummed acoustic guitars, minor key strings, fiery fiddles and banjoes. But unlike the rollicking punkiness of Cessna's Autoclub, Munly is a much darker proposition. Lurching like a strangely hideous beast, only ever glimpsed at dusk and only out of the corner of your eye, and always sending shivers down your spine. And while occasionally, the tempo does pick up, it's only the tempo that does, the mood remains one of hopelessness, bitterness and broken heartedness. And while Munly mostly sings in an ominous tenor, hovering somewhere between 16HP's David Eugene Edwards and Nick Cave, often the vocals go completely nuts: yodelling, falsetto trills, soulful female background vocals and even throat singing. And unlike the Woven Hand's stonefaced fire and brimstone proclamations from the pulpit, Munly is most definitely having fun, still warning you about the coming rapture, but at the same time planning to live it up right until the end. He also seems to be taking the piss once in a while. Which is actually pretty satisfying. Singing along, this could almost be the Woven Hand's more rambunctious less headed-for-doom little brother, but on closer inspection, the lyrics are pretty amazingly funny and absurd, tales of vampires, enemas (in the same song!) and various other seemingly unlikely topics. Enough to even make us laugh out loud a couple times. And all of these bizarre elements coalesce perfectly into perfect songs: beautiful and moving, funny and almost rocking, groovy and hypnotic, emotional and dark dark dark, but at the same time super dramatic (almost ridiculously so), campy and flat out WEIRD.
Comes with a bonus disc: a surround sound DVD audio version of the whole record!
Believe it or not, it's been a while since we've been this excited about a black metal band, but this French horde sound like they could have been cooked up in a lab just for aQ. Heavy and fuzzed out, psychedelic and weird as fuck, melodic and sorrowful, abstract and all over the map, within the first minute you'll know exactly what we mean, starting out with this strange little snippet of exotica, that sounds a bit like that cursed idol theme from the Brady Bunch Hawaii movie, the intro becomes this warped soundtrack, all fluttery flutes and strange glitches, we would have been perfectly happy to have a whole record of that, but instead, Murmuure launch into some sort of twisted abstract avant black metal, that is pretty difficult to describe. The sound is echoey and blown out, the riffs aren't traditionally buzzy and black, they're more gnarled and warped and woozy, layered into heaving swells of blackened sound, and shot through with streaks of twisted melody, the drums totally chaotic, slipping from totally free, to stumbling dirge, the vocals are buried and barely there, there also seems to be all sorts of synth stuff happening, wheezing swatch of washed out chordal whir, as well as crunchy buzzing low end thrum. After a brief melodic interlude, the tape seems to crumble into a woozy circusy dronescape, all stuttering looped sounds, melancholy melodies, lots of hiss and crackle, and then those drums come in again, super loud, and weirdly produced, adding some structure to the whirling black cloud of twisted sound. Like some demented synth driven lo-fi black metal take on Godspeed but run through a whole bank of malfunctioning effects, not to mention the twisted mind(s) that conjured up these alien sounds.
Some of the tracks get downright shoegazey, all washed out and shimmery, the delicate melodies drifting through clouds of muted crunch, laced with an M83 style retro electronic haze, the drums driving this weird black pop into even further reaches of the know black metal universe, one moment it sounds like blackened Cocteau Twins, the next like some post rock band covering Abruptum as covered by Alcest, there are field recordings, long stretches of spaced out collaged soundscapes, but everything is woven together into a single multi movement gloriously blissed out, post black metal psychedelic drone drenched drift, and is just about the weirdest and coolest black metal record we've heard in FOREVER.
Here's one possible reason that this record sounds nothing like most black metal, according to the band:
"All the Murmuure material is based on a one hour guitar improvisation from November 2006. The selected parts were then further edited to fit a rhythmic structure, and merged with additional layers of sound. The percussions are a mixture of the original programmed drums, and some (extremely re-edited) additional live drumming. Vocals were recorded during a cathartic trance at a sacred place in the forest, with a mini-disc recorder. Being almost inaudible in the music, they're strictly conceived as a vocal sigil technique, a vehicle for intent."
Awesome. The sound is dizzying and confusional and so original, hell, if this were not a cassette, and not already out of print, this would be some serious Record Of The Week material for sure. But it is just a tape, and these are the LAST COPIES, saved just for us, and you, but fear not, we got a whole bunch, but considering how awesome, and awesomely fucked up this is, you still oughtta grab one of these quick, cuz without a doubt, this is our black metal record of the year!
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. ALREADY OUT OF PRINT. WE HAVE THE VERY LAST OF THESE TAPES!!!
