It's always the records we love the most, and listen to the most, that are the hardest to describe. Hmmm. As we were writing that, we realized it sounded familiar and what do you know? That's almost exactly how we started our review of the last Nada Surf record. We've joked before, that instead of rambling on and and on and gushing like we often do, we should just write what we usually tell people in the store: "Just buy it. It's AWESOME!!!" But because some folks now do base their idea of a record's importance on the length of the review, we'll go ahead and try to explain exactly why Lucky is so awesome and why you should absolutely buy it, and most importantly why it's almost for sure our:
POP RECORD OF THE YEAR. Sure it's only February. But it was a done deal two songs in. And sure, we're hoping some record will be able to knock Lucky out of its top spot, but it seems very very unlikely.
And while even after probably 100 listens, Lucky doesn't seem quite as genius as it's predecessor The Weight Is A Gift, it gets a little closer every listen.
For those who somehow missed out on the whole Nada Surf phenomenon, they had a HUGE hit back in the nineties, "Popular", you'd know it if you heard it. And it got played enough to become one of THOSE songs you never wanted to hear again. But as with most one hit wonders, they ended up dropped and broke, another victim of the unforgiving major label machinery. They sort of just disappeared after that, almost completely, until years later they resurfaced with a brand new record, on a cool little indie label, and an almost entirely new sound. Lush and introspective, but super rocking at the same time, gorgeous vocal harmonies, amazing melodies, incredible hooks, and really funny, bittersweet lyrics. The next one was even better, another record of the week in fact. The Weight Is A Gift instantly became one of our favorite records of not just that year, but ever. Played to death, every song practically perfect. Heavy, dark, pretty, poppy, and so so so catchy.
A week or so ago, totally unexpected, Lucky showed up in the mail, and from the first song, we knew we'd end up loving this one too. But like almost all of our favorite pop records, it wasn't immediate. It took some listens for the songs to blossom, for the hooks to sink in, for the subtleties to reveal themselves. But as they did, and continue to do, the record just became that much deeper, the sound that much more complex. Instantly catchy throwaway pop has a very limited lifespan, but complicated, grown up pop music, deftly composed and executed, infused with soul and passion, humor and emotion, well, those are the kind of songs that stick. And this record is chock full of those sorts of songs. "Whose Authority" could have come straight off The Weight Is A Gift, with its incredible hook and chorus, then there's the churning minor key groove of "Weightless", dark and heavy, but shot through with pop sunlight, the sweet jangle of "I Like What You Say" with yet another impossibly catchy chorus, "The Fox" is the darkest and brooding of the bunch, but it too manages to remain catchy and pretty. It's hard to pick out songs, since like most great albums, it is an album, the songs working together as much as they work on their own. Fucking brilliant. Again. As much as we love all that crazy weird shit, sometimes nothing does it for us like perfect perfect pop.
You would think that the more you listen to a record, the easier it would be to write about, but for us sometimes the exact opposite seems to be true. The more a record seeps into your consciousness, the more it takes on all these ineffable qualities that are incredibly hard to describe in words. It's a rare record that can do that, but when it happens, it's all about feeling and emotion, the way the record affects you, makes you think, makes you feel, even if it just makes you want to jump around and sing along at the top of your lungs. Or drive with the stereo blasting, in a goosebumpy fume thinking sad thoughts. Or walk around in the fog and mist, just wandering aimlessly. Or just rock out and forget everything. And it's the record that can make you feel all of those things and then some that's even more rare. This is most definitely one of those records.
Being the sort of store we are, we get super obsessed with ultra weird records and bizarre niche genres, all of which we love to bits, be it drones or found sounds or sludge or power pop or black metal or whatever. But sometimes it takes a good ol' rock record to kick your ass and push all those buttons that without realizing it, have remained relatively un-pushed for years. 2003's Let Go, Nada Surf's first record since they were chewed up and spit out by the major label / MTV machine in the late nineties (after a huge hit in 1995) was a breath of fresh air at the time, a gorgeous indie rock record, full of impossibly catchy hooks, wry, bittersweet lyrics, perfect jangle guitar, just some of the best fucking songs we'd heard in ages. Songs that so far surpassed their former incarnation as a major label MTV rock band it was a little hard to believe it was the same band. A record so good in fact, that lots of metalheads and punk rockers we know even LOVED it. And around these parts it was one of the most listened to records of the last few years.
So we were super psyched when we heard there was a new Nada Surf on the horizon. On first listen though, it sounded just a bit too happy. But why wouldn't it, they had reinvented themselves, and were on a super hip indie label, and folks (the right folks this time) loved their band. Made sense that perhaps it would be a little less cynical and jaded, especially after the cathartic bile and vitriol of Let Go. But the more we listened, the more we realized, it was just as bitter and dark if not more so, just more self assured, better produced, songs that were even catchier, but in that way that classic songs are catchy, they take time to grow, and as they do, they become ultra personal, every song, and every favorite part having some direct correlation to your life, or some special meaning for everyone who listens. Each melody makes you want to sing along, or just close your eyes and think along in your head. We still thought the first record was better, until we went back and listened, and realized, that while the old record was still great, this new record took everything they were shooting for with the that one, and hit perfect bullseyes with every track on The Weight Is A Gift. Not a weak song anywhere, not a bit of filler. In fact some songs have so many killer parts, and so many hooks, any other band would more than likely turn every song here into two, or even three. All the parts are the stuff of classic indie rock, jangly guitars, sometimes roaring into a distorted big chorus fury, sometimes fading into a moody near ambient strum, simple basslines, drumming with fills as catchy as any of the songs' hooks (think Nirvana), gorgeous vocal harmonies, and really intense and clever and heartfelt lyrics, and most importantly, some of the catchiest songs ever. From dreamy, dreary slow building ballads, to full on rocking barnburners, to straight ahead sounding nineties style college rock, to more modern indie pop, Nada Surf while sounding totally unique, should definitely fit comfortably in your collections and in your ears, right alongside the Wrens, Yo La Tengo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sparklehorse, Interpol, Olivia Tremor Control, New Pornographers, Flaming Lips, Pavement, Now It's Overhead, and all the other modern indie 'classics'. But for us, there's something about Nada Surf that makes them stand out, even among such an elite indie crowd. Again, it's that impossible to describe something, so personal and intimate, even at their most rocking, that just hits us right in the heart. And the soul. The true test for us though as always, is how often you find yourself listening to something. Sure we've been loving all sorts of doom and drone and black metal, but we always find ourselves throwing this back on, again and again, all the time, every day. And loving it more and more every time.
Packaged with a cool die-cut cityscape sleeve with lyrics, and while supplies last a bonus disc including two unreleased tracks, a demo version of the opening track, and a Francoise Hardy cover!
While not a 'new' record per se, Touched, by AQ dreamdoom faves Nadja is in fact their newest release, a collection of older tracks, from a long out of print cd-r, reworked and retooled into arguably one of the prettiest, heaviest, most blissed out doom records of recent memory.
Which makes sense when you consider the fact that Nadja mastermind Aidan Baker, spends the rest of his time creating gorgeous, fuzzy dark ambient soundscapes, all of which end up informing his more metallic alter ego, turning what could have been a run of the mill funereal downtuned trudge, into a mind bending, ear melting psychedelic drift.
Quite possibly the heaviest Nadja record yet, this is a serious slab of spaced out, acid fried, FX drenched doom, all wrapped in thick swirls of soft fuzz, and dense clouds of blurry buzz, a monstrous caveman plod through a thick, smeary sonic storm. It's like Godflesh wrapped in My Bloody Valentine filtered through some Wolf Eyes, or the Swans covered by the Jesus And Mary Chain, remixed by Tim Hecker. Or even Mogwai's Young Team run through a bank of effects pedals and played back at 16rpm. Heavy and pretty, punishing but strangely serene.
And then there are the vocals, soft and lilting and dreamy, fluttering and floating amidst the crash and cacophony, like mysterious spectres, an amazing juxtaposition of industrial throb and glistening shimmer, which ends up sounding almost more Jesu than Jesu.
The guitars are massive, but instead of sounding like the black tar rumble of impossibly downtuned strings, or the jagged crunch and black buzz of other purveyors of metallic slowmotion, Nadja transform their guitars into thick washes of textured sound, constantly pulsing and throbbing, changing shape and color, thick and dense and suffocating, like being submerged in some strange viscous liquid, warm and syrupy, heard from inside this strange sonic cocoon, the outside world becomes a buzzy blur, all the beats and vocals, when they finally make it to your ears, are dull murky plods, or distant wisps of melody.
Each track, at its center, contains a perfect little pop core, some gorgeously melancholy melody, a seriously sublimated hook, which is summarily stretched and twisted into long black stretches of blown out sound, an impossibly heavy slowcore, the poppiness, all but totally obscured by the coruscating sheets of sonic rumble and whir, the pumelling pound, and the gauzy swaths of dreamy shimmer. A never ending (we wish) trudge through epic landscapes of black beauty and bleak mystery.
Doom was never meant to sound this pretty, but we're sure as hell not complaining!
Crashing waves of balls of yarn. That's one attempt to explain this band's sound... Along with bringing in the usual Earth, SUNNO))), and Boris comparisons. The Toronto based duo of Aidan Baker (guitars, vocals, flute, piano, drum machines) and Leah Buckareff (bass and vocals) are an "atmospheric doom" band whose slow moving, heavy and heavily distorted music definitely shares something with the likes of early Earth, but although they've done a split 3" with UK doom nasties Moss (among several previous underground releases) you can't really define them as being a "metal" band at all. Their gauzy, droney, doom-spelled-backwards music has a warm, melodic underpinning, somewhere within the billowing clouds of distortion that form the three long tracks found here. I guess it's something like the churchy, "funereal" doom of Finland's Skepticism, really, but even more calm, echoed and ambient. Melancholic but very pleasant, with both growled vocals and gentle singing hovering just beneath the surface, this music somehow suggests rays of pure white light shining down from on high to illuminate their low-end murk... and during the final third of the last track "Breakpoint" the heaviness drops away altogether for a quietly sung coda that could be from the most mellow and poetic of indie-pop albums. Nadja's music is definitely more abstract and altered than, say, Ocean (another sludge-dirge outfit reviewed elsewhere this list), and is so much more beautiful than the monochrome darkness dwelt in by many other doom bands. If you can imagine an ultra-distorted hybrid of Growing, Codeine and, uh, Ras Algethi you'd maybe come close to the sound of Nadja... Recommended!!
Covers records can definitely be a cop out. They're easy, and fun, and who doesn't want to just jam out to their favorite tunes. But some covers records do transcend, whether it's song choice, theme, or those particular versions and interpretation, the right covers, played the right way, can be as good if not better than a band's records proper. Which makes sense as you're typically covering songs that are, at least to you, if not everyone, 'classics.'
Which brings us to When I See The Sun Always Shines On TV, which is in fact, a collection of covers, many of which might seem like super obvious choices. Which is okay, it's as if Nadja wanted to acknowledge their influences loudly and proudly in the face of folks who accuse them of ripping off some of these very same bands. And at least half of these tracks are actually by bands that we've compared Nadja to in past reviews. So we were sort of psyched to see how instead of infusing their own music with the influences of other bands, they might approach it the other way around, taking these songs and bands they love, and filtering them through their own sound. Alongside those obvious choices though are some totally out of left field choices, that on the surface seem to make no sense, but in the context of this collection fit perfectly, and when heard all buzzy and blissy and Nadja'd up, sometimes sound better than the originals.
The album opens with My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow", and Nadja make it their own, which is no small feat considering how iconic that main riff is, but heck, in the past we'v talked about how everything sounds better slower, well imagine that jam, slowed way down, and beefed WAY up, so what was already THEE shoegaze anthem of all time, is transformed into a lurching, heaving, crumbling mass of glorious blurred and blown out soft focus heaviness. Then comes Codeine's "Pea", another obvious Nadja influence, we would have gone for "Cave In", some doom band needs to cover that one, but "Pea" suits them, they don't even rock it out that much, it's a bit heavier, but not much slower, and Aidan Baker's soft tentative croon is a dead ringer for Codeine's Stephen Immerwahr. The band also tackle the Swans, and the Cure, the latter's "Faith" stretched out to almost 13 minutes, and expansive glorious woozy gloomy sprawl.
But it's the unlikely choices that seal the deal. A-Ha? It's the track that gives this comp its title, and although we're not familiar with the original, the Nadja version is gorgeous, heavy and poppy and gloriously blown out.
Then there's the Slayer cover, "Dead Skin Mask" from Seasons In The Abyss, not as obvious a choice as "Raining Blood" or "Angel Of Death", but for Nadja a much more suitable choice, that main riff, sounds soooooo good, all sludgey and washed out, that main melody even more seasick and woozy sounding, the new version somehow even creepier than the original. However our favorite two tracks here are definitely the least likely, one you may have heard, one you most likely haven't.
First, Elliott Smith's "Needle In The Hay", which of course is a fantastic song, but in Nadja's capable hands, it becomes even more harrowing, much more minor key, the vocals worn and weary, the drums a trudging death march, all beneath a thick layer of droning buzz and keening keyboards, and then that main hook, so epic and mysterious and sorrowful. You can almost imagine this is what Smith was imagining when he wrote it. And as much as we love this whole disc, this is the one we keep returning to.
And then there's "Long Dark Twenties", which was previously releases as a super limited 7", and which just happens to be a cover of a song from the Kids In The Hall movie, and yeah, that makes no sense at all, but as far as we're concerned it's become a Nadja song, we actually reviewed that song in depth when we had the 7", so let's revisit that briefly:
Folks who managed to catch Nadja performing live at aQuarius not too long ago, were treated to quite possibly the heaviest, catchiest, grooviest Nadja track yet. An awesome hook filled seventies rock style ultra jam, wrapped in thick clouds of billowing distortion and anchored by the crunch and pound of programmed beats, Aidan Baker's vocals a whispered croon, Leah Buckareff's bass throbbing and rumbling, but the main riff, SHIT, unbelievable, even after our ears stopped ringing, we were all humming that riff for days...
Well the funny thing we learned later, was that there song was in fact a cover. And an incredibly unlikely cover at that. The only obvious link between the original and the band covering it? Canada. The song, some of you might remember, is in fact from the Kids In The Hall movie Brain Candy, and proves that Nadja can turn hooky pop into hooky sludge-y doom. The chorus is an absolute killer, and similar to how Torche transform pop into skullcrushing hook filled heaviness, Nadja take that pop and wrap it all up in some of their distinctive blissed out fuzz and we're talking HIT. Well, a hit if there were actually some sort of blissdoomdronesludgepop chart. Which there should be. And there sort of is, in our heads, but anyway...
So yeah, for folks who missed out on that single, or who just want to have it on cd instead of vinyl, well, it's worth the price of admission for just that jam. But thankfully, every song on here is a crushing doom drenched, pop infused, slow motion chunk of dreamy blissed out, ultra catchy heaviness. And even though it's not technically a proper Nadja record, it just may well be our favorite Nadja record yet.
Now reissued again on vinyl, this former AQ Record Of The Week from back in 2004. This time, instead of Eclipse, it's on Kemado's vinyl-only imprint Mexican Summer (which is named after a Nadler song?), and they've added a bonus 7" of unreleased songs. It's limited to 1000 copies. Here's what we said about it before:
This is a dark and languorous trip through a sonic world of bleak skies, neverending sorrow, lost love, death and dying and all sorts of somber miserablism. The music itself is lush and rich, a warm rainy soundscape of muted finger picked guitars, augmented by occasional banjo, eukele, and autoharp, all lashed together into a modern melding of classic Appalachia, psych folk and classic songcraft.
But it's Nadler's voice that is the most mesmerizing part of Ballads Of The Dying, rich, velvety and throaty, completely captivating, and surprisingly reminiscent of Neko Case, but instead of the country wildcat Case, here's she's a rainsoaked and bedraggled innocent, seemingly beaten down but emanating an inner strength, a hidden power, that comes through in her powerful voice.
This is one of those records that seems pleasant enough on first listen, but as you dig deeper, the songs and stories unfold and you quickly find your self living and loving and crying and dying right along with Nadler and the characters she has populated her musical world with.
For her first record for Sacred Bones, Marissa Nadler has put together a pretty heavy hitting band, one that features folks like Steve Moore of Zombi, and Eyvind Kang, but really, Nadler doesn't need anyone but her own bad self, her gorgeous, haunting vocals, and delicate guitar playing are practically perfect. Just check out opener "Drive (Fade Into)", the first two minutes of which are just Nadler singing and playing guitars, spare and sparse, ethereal and so lovely, lush, lustrous harmonies, the Mazzy Star vibe which was always present, is huge here, in the phrasing, the timbre of Nadler's voice, occasionally layered into gorgeous multi-tracked harmonies, and while we would have been happy with a solo acoustic record, the band deftly, and quite subtle, add perfect sonic colorations, soft streaks of feedback, shimmery swells of pedal steel, the final stretch all twang flecked and dusky.
From there on out, Nadler and her band deliver one gorgeous song after another, some funereal and somber, dark, dolorous torch songs, others dark slowcore dirges, others darkly dreamy psychedelic country. A few favorites include "1923", laced with Kang's lilting strings, the track peppered with bits of effects dusted guitar swirl, all driven by some gorgeously languid, muted percussion, gloomy downer pop bliss via classic old time songsmithery, or "Dead City Emily", with Nadler's vocals soaring over a tangle of steel string buzz, everything wreathed in echo and reverb, with some surprising bits of piano and synth, the song blossoming into something impossibly expansive and lush, or the haunting dark country of "Desire", which sounds like it could have been performed by Mark Lanegan or David Eugene Edwards from Woven Hand, but at the same time, it couldn't have been anyone but Nadler.
We've loved pretty much everything we've heard, and have raved about almost all of her records, but July definitely takes Nadler's sound, her voice, her songs, to the next level, and positions her as one of this generations most stunning songwriters. Certainly fans of Chelsea Wolfe and Zola Jesus will no doubt love Nadler, if they don't already, but Nadler's sound is much more pure, more classic, some of the songs here do of course have moments of gothiness, and gloominess, but it definitely transcends any micro genre classification, and manages to arrive at something truly timeless, and will definitely be vying for top spots on lots of folks best of 2014 year end lists, even though it's only February.
Fantastic!
Black metal by its very nature is fairly isolationist, especially considering that one of the mains strains consists of one man bands holed up in their bedroom / attic / shed / shack / cave, shunning humanity, sunlight, any sort of personal interaction, filtering all of that negative hateful energy into their grim black buzz. Even proper black metal groups, with more than one member, are often quite tribal, kvlt-like you might even say, performing sonic rituals in some dimly lit rehearsal space, channeling all manner of dark energy and creating music both bleak and brutal, evil and cathartic. That sound, created by a group, is still intensely personal and to a certain degree is created more out of a need to create, than a need for adoration or success.
But what if you turned that whole dynamic completely around. Removed all aspects of kvlt-ishness, of individualism, what if you created a black metal horde open to anyone, anyone with an amp and a guitar, or even just a computer, could record tracks, and contribute to what would eventually be woven into the first open source black metal record.
And here it is, masterminded by the guys behind gloomy bliss metal duo Have A Nice Life, Nahvalr is indeed, as far as we know the very first "open source" black metal band. Parts and songs were solicited online, contributed via email, handed off in person, donated anonymously, and eventually the HANL guys took all the various tracks and deftly assembled them into this buzzing black behemoth. And there is in fact, plenty of buzz obviously, layer upon layer of crushing downtuned insectoid buzz, but also loads of creepy ambience, weird warbly doomy bits, super lo-fi blasts of near white noise, insane grinding drum machine stutter, haunting black ambience, deep ominous rumbles and softly glowing shimmers, weird chanted vocals, industrial scrape and pound, blown out blissed out blackened drifts of crumbling soft noise, it's all very schizophrenic, but it doesn't at all sound like a hodge podge, it sounds more like a truly expansive sprawling chunk of demented abstract black metal weirdness. Which is precisely what it is. It just so happens that there's way more than 4 or 5 guys "in the band."
Some songs are so steeped in buzz it sounds like records by Ildjarn, Velvet Cacoon and Wrath Of The Weak all being played simultaneously, other tracks are loosed from their black metal moorings and sound like Skullflower, thick sheets of sound, spaced out noise drenched ur-drones, others are gloomy and darkly melodic, simple guitarlines unfurling over streaks of feedback, howled anguished vocals, and shimmering black drones, while still others are furious dense blasts of raw, noisy black metal, in the red, speaker destroying missives from hell, swirling and roiling and churning maniacally, but often splintering into creepy doomic crawls or fucked up abstract Abruptum like blackened soundscapes.
The record begins with a sample of conspiracy theorist and radio talk show host Art Bell, talking about digging a hole to hell in Siberia, before launching into blown out super saturated black metal blast, but the source material is so varied, that even the parts that sound like black metal on the surface, have so much going on just below, twisted warbly melodies, keening wails, disembodied voices, textures and layers, so immersive and expansive, headphones are like X-ray goggles, revealing a whole other world hidden to the casual listener. The record then swerves from warped slow motion ambient doom, to soundscapes of high end skree and garbled guitarnoise, to grinding blacknoize fury, to downright gorgeous blissy drones and all the other various sonic stops mentioned above. Not at all typical black metal, instead, more of a weird sound experiment, based around black metal tropes, and created with a core of buzzing blackness, but allowed to sprawl WELL past the usual boundaries that define the genre, creating something extraordinary yet still distinctly black in the process.
It's been ages since we've heard from Bellingham Washington's Narrows, whose last two (and only two) records, Alligator and The Skull At Life Size, were huge AQ favorites. Our Narrows obsession was solidified by a mindblowing show at the Hemlock where the band laid waste to all post rock past and present in a matter of 30 or 40 minutes, managing to rock so hard, even with the frontman / guitar player seated the whole time. A mix of lurching loping metallic bombast and lilting whispery post rock moodiness, not like the current crop of metallic post rockers though, no the Narrows were something much more unique... all the best parts of nineties mathrock, June Of 44, Slint, Rodan, but filtered through that weird Bellingham outsider vibe (also responsible for Reeks And The Wrecks) and lovingly wrapped in some serious skull crushing riffage. And of course songs. Killer songs. Moody and mournful, personal and emotional, and catchy as all get out.
We had sort of given up on the Narrows, we knew there was a record in the works, but they sort of seemed to drop off the musical map completely, until all of our fears were assuaged by the sudden appearance of this here brand new full length, that is somehow even better than their first two discs, heavier, prettier, weirder....
Beginning with the nine minute near perfect post rock epic "The Sasquatch", a sequence of big groaning downtuned riffage, huge pounding drums all wrapped around a strange insistent loping groove, with wailed super emo vocals, like a prettier Melvins almost, or a resurrected Engine Kid, some Unwound, a little bit of Sub Pop, a little Amrep. These super dynamic nine minutes might as well go on for 90 minutes as far as we're concerned.
The second track, the even longer "Last Of The Norsemen", is all slithery slowcore, with crooned sadboy vocals, spidery guitar melodies, shuffled drums, until the crashing chorus, a gorgeous minor key stop start lurch, along the same lines as Codeine's "Cave In", with burbling underwater bass added to the mix, and a convoluted mathy arrangement, before drifting back into the moody lope of the first few minutes, peppered with strange slippery guitar chords and unexpected dynamics, somehow totally off kilter and alien sounding, but super catchy and melodic and surprisingly pretty!
"Quellish" is up next with its serpentine distorted crunch and crashing blown out drumming, letting up here and there for some muted shuffle and croon, before the bombast is brought in again, a super emotional musical seesaw, that manages to subvert the tired loud-soft-loud-soft thing and turn it into something new and exciting sounding.
As if the deal wasn't already sealed for best post-math-whatever-rock / slowcore record ever already, they finish it off with the heartwrenching "Over and Out", a sort of damaged Pinback on horse tranquilizers mathy groove, with big booming Albini-ish drums, over blooping underwater bass, and slithery minor key distorted guitar melodies, and a super subtle hook to die for. The song has a wicked, super dramatic coda with crumbling distorted riffing, and super emotional leads, yeah LEADS, what self respecting post rock band can whip out the leads and bring you to your knees without sounding the least bit cheesy? Can't think of very many (or any really)... but The Narrows pull it off effortlessly. There's an "Over and Out" part two, but it's more sort of a coda, that now burned into your ears/heart/soul melody is pulled apart, wrapped in some twangy Morricone-ish guitar, some tinkling music box like keyboards, and allowed to unfurl lazily into the distance, becoming more and more abstract and indistinct, culminating in seven minutes of silence... Needless to say one of our favorite new records, pushing all our buttons, old math rock, new post rock, metal, pop, heavy, pretty, strange... Absolutely and utterly recommended (as is seeing these guys live if you get the chance)!
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
What happens when the two join forces, becoming Natural Snow Buildings? It would be way too easy to say that the sum equaled the parts, that if you took the sound of Isengrind and Twinsistermoon and combined them, it would equal the whole of NSB. There is certainly -some- truth to that, but it's not math, it's magic. Alchemy, musical sorcery, these are sounds not numbers, and thus are governed by forces far more magical and mysterious than physics or science. The two together join spirits, their natures become entwined, they draw from one another, each offering the other part of their soul, rendered in music. The results are truly divine. An assemblage of sounds, deftly woven into expansive shapes and hushed mystery, landscapes of drone and shimmer, of cinematic wonder and dark introspection. Some tracks are super abstract, layered near static drifts, longform movements that sonically evoke other lands, other times, the past long forgotten, the future not yet experienced, other tracks are wheezing sun dappled Appalachia, but turned inside out, the chords and notes seemingly drawn inward, toward the speakers, the vocals breathless and mournful, all laid atop a thick swirl of distorted riffage, other tracks are fragmented folk, all murky blurred piano, backwards guitars, heartsick melodies, wrapped in a thick gauzy production, smeared into snapshots glimpsed through eyes brimming with tears. Other tracks are space rock writ small, minimal dirges, drone jams, chanted vocals, strange stuttery percussion, and glorious buzzing guitars, culminating in the final track, which begins much like the others, all hazy and dreamlike, vocals ethereal, guitars spare and skeletal, until unexpectedly the band lock into some serious droned out space rock. A serious dark and druggy looped riff, a la Spacemen 3, Hawkwind, Loop, anchored by a simple pounding thudrock rhythm, driving intensely through swirling clouds of FX and warm whirring ambience, a seriously dense, propulsive krautjam, that just so happens to hide a soft drifting pop shimmer underneath, and while the track rocks with a surprising intensity, it's precisely what's underneath that turns the jam into something resplendent.
Here at Aquarius, you might say that 2003 could have been called The Year Of The Necks. Sure, that sounds a bit funny, but what we mean is that this year is when everybody here either discovered or re-discovered this amazing band. We gave rave reviews to four of their older records, after falling in love with a four-cd live box of theirs back in December of last year. And judging from sales, a lot of you have gotten acquainted with The Necks this year as well, and liked 'em. This Aussie trio of piano (and/or organ), bass, and drums can't be easily catagorized: they're not exactly jazz, not ambient, not rock, not post-rock, not electronica...but they are some of the above, and more. Less too, 'cause what they do is so understated, and so specifically Necks.
So, what better way is there to celebrate The Year Of The Necks 'round these parts than to revel in the release of this brand new Necks opus, Drive By? And it's definitely the equal of any of The Necks' prodigious output, doing all the things we now expect from them...creating a mesmerizing, hypnotic musical trance-state over a lengthy playing time (in this case, one track, 60 minutes and seventeen gorgeous seconds long). Drive By is a pulsating wonder, steadily building over an hour, the drums becoming more active and restless but always "on", underpinning the constant throb of the bass. Drive By is bejewelled with bright tinkling piano, electronic effects, and other sonic elements, including what sound like crickets joining in around the 11 minute mark. 45+ minutes later, The Necks are still in the groove, channelling ancient rhythm into their extremely modern format. I'm beginning to think that the compact disc is too limiting for these guys. They need a DVD-audio release, so we can hear 'em play for seven hours straight!
So, what comparisons can we stretch to make? Some sort of NPR-ized Circle? A prettified Bohren? Steve Reich meets Miles Davis? Ah, hell with that. It's The Year Of The Necks. No comparisons necessary. Just check 'em out.
Looking back on reviews of other Necks records, we find ourselves either struggling to describe the Necks' unique sound, or gushing uncontrollably about how goddamn great they are. More often than not, some mix of the two. And we realized that wasn't likely to change here, with the latest record from these Australian modern jazz minimalists, who do indeed have a sound that's difficult to describe, but that is precisely why they are one of our favorite bands EVER. Jazz or otherwise. And they are most definitely jazz, drums, upright bass and piano, and many jazz music tropes are present in their music, it's just that their music takes the idea of jazz, and stretches it way out, and turns it into something much more about tension (and no release), about timbre and mood... Their songs are generally 20-60 minutes long, most of their records are in fact a single track, and they slowly build a gorgeous lush jazzscape that on the surface appears jazzy, a quick glancing listen and an unsuspecting listener might think, "oh, nice, jazzy", but had they bothered to keep listening, that wasn't just a part in a song they were hearing, it WAS the song, and the Necks masterfully take that part and nurture it, from a hushed whispery skitter, occasionally to an all out roar, but just as often, just a much more dense and intense hushed whispery skitter. The three players impossibly and organically linked, sounding less like a band, and more like pure sound. Like we said, it's hard to explain. In some ways, their music sounds like it could be the result of some sort of audio manipulation, as if some audio alchemist took jazz samples and stretched and layered them into these droned out hypnotic jazz ragas, which in itself is a testament to these guys' skill.
On Mindset, the Necks offer up two 21+ minute tracks, the first might be their darkest yet, starting out immediately with some deep low end thrum, some minimal drum skitter, the band immediately locked into a dark almost dirgey groove, and when the piano comes in, it's noisy and surprisingly atonal, the pedals depressed, the tones all bleeding into each other in a thick swirling angular sonic cloud, while the bass and drums remain locked tight. The bass gradually grows more active, and more melodic, as does the piano, the sound impossibly lush and dense, sounding like a way heavier Lubomyr Melnyk, swirling flurries of notes over layered drones, the drums subtly propulsive, it almost sounds like a jazz Godspeed You Black Emperor, so epic and majestic, and darkly moving. Eventually the drums too begin to be more active, and deviate from the groove, the sound building to a cathartic climax, before jettisoning much of the jazz, and turning into a dark droned out abstract psychedelic dirge, with what sounds like effects everywhere, although we're pretty sure they don't use much in the way of effects, there even seems to be what sounds like a guitar, offering up fuzzy squalls of high end buzz, the second half doesn't sound like jazz at all, more like some heavy droney psychedelic post rock outfit. So good. One of our favorite Necks jams for sure. And definitely a good gateway for those aQ-ers who tend toward the jazz-phobic.
The second track is a lot more subdued, starting out super abstract and spacious, tinkling melodies, mysterious sound effects, minimal percussion, spacey little glitches, streaks of high end skree, it's not until 5 or 6 minutes in when the song really starts to coalesce, the bass bowed, unfurling lush slow-mo melodies, and then finally, the drums drift in, another motorik shuffle, the sound remaining ethereal and washed out, glimmery and shimmery, very cinematic too, the drums crazy busy, but still holding things down, the track growing more and more frantic, and frenzied, while on the surface, the piano remains languid and tranquil, while beneath it, the rest of the band grows more and more agitated, the sound so dark and tense, and growing ever darker, hints of funkiness are blurred into something more abstract, the groove nearly swallowed up by the bands swirling sonic churn. Maybe THIS one is one of our favorite Necks jams ever. Hell, who needs to pick? Another Necks record that will no doubt rank as one of our forever faves, and again, Mindset definitely seems like the kind of record that could very well convince some folks out there of what we already know, that the Necks are one of thee best bands out there!
Finally a new Necks record! And as usual, it's a single epic, slowly shifting jazzscape, shuffling and hypnotic, circular and completely gorgeous. Folks around here have been totally smitten by this Australian minimal jazz trio for years now. Every record another new 'song', most of their releases are one long piece, which makes sense once you understand the Necks.
If Circle are the masters of repetitive, motorik hypnorock, then the Necks are their jazz equivalent, unfurling endlessly looping, slow shifting Steve Reich-ian dark jazz epics, and like Circle, while there is a motorik element to the rhythm and the groove, it's much more fluid, almost like some strange living shape, and it seems like maybe these guys aren't playing it so much as trying to control the sound, pushing and pulling, stretching and shaping. And the songs are only limited by the length of a compact disc, they all sound like they could, nay should, go on forever (there was a rumor of a Necks 24 hour performance!!).
We sometimes joke about Necks records all sounding quite similar, and sure they sort of do, but only on the surface. Each record is a subtle and entirely unique collection of sounds. Much of it has to do with the compositions themselves, but also the fact that many of the recordings are live performances, which capture a piece, but only the way it was performed that one time. Some are more propulsive (Drive By), and some like this one, are more abstract and ambient.
On Townsville, a single 54 minute performance recorded live in Australia on February 15th 2007 (Andee's Birthday btw), the band reel in their rhythmic tendencies, instead opting to float and flutter, to drift and swirl, the drums are barely even present over the first half of the performance, offering up soft sizzles and billowing clouds of metallic shimmer, the bass too is merely support, offering up dark dense tendrils of low end sprawl and blurred low end whir. It's all about Chris Abrahams' piano, gorgeous glimmering flurries of notes, tossed in the air like confetti, or falling from the sky like snowflakes. It almost sounds like Lubomyr Melnyk is sitting in, offering up some of his swirling 'continuous music' piano. The whole track is one long slow build, the bass and the drums lurking in the background, offering a soft warm sonic bed over which the various notes and chords from the piano dance and drift, moody and melodic and so mesmerizing.
Further into the track, the bass and drums become much more animated, subtly sparring with the piano, the whole band engaged in a series of fluttery swells, but still with the piano leading the way.
Easily one of the jazziest of the Necks discs, but without losing its drone-y minimal psychedelic vibe, so much so that certain parts definitely remind us of the more ambient Circle records, like Tower, Empire or Miljard. Imagine Circle featuring Lubomyr Melnyk on the piano, performing a piece co-written by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from Townsville. As with all Necks records, totally divine and totally recommended.
We made the debut from the awesomely named Necro Deathmort our Record Of The Week way back in January of 2010. As we mentioned in that review it was pretty much a no brainer, the band name to begin with, the album title (The Beat Is Necrotonic), but then the sound, heaving walls of SUNOO))) like heaviness wedded to skittery beats, blackened drones wrapped around low slung rhythms, a sort of SUNNO)) meets Squarepusher electro-metal-blackened-dubstep, beat flecked slo-mo doom bliss wreathed in hazy spaciness, all drifty and mesmerizing, psychedelic, hypnotic and HEAVY.
If anything, this new one, record number two, even more evocatively titled Music Of Bleak Origin, is exactly what you would hope for as a follow up. In some ways, the gimmick of the first record was almost enough, sludgey metal guitars AND beats, granted, those two elements, not usually good bedfellows, were deftly woven into something special, heavy enough for the metalheads, but atmospheric and rhythmic enough for everyone else, but here, it's like that first record reimagined, and re-engineered, sonically, compositionally, it's heavier, more melodic, the songs are more catchy, more actual proper songs, the beats are bigger too, with much of the record REALLY sounding like a metal dubstep record, with the sound shifting easily from doomy skitter, to lurching electronics laced lumber, at its heaviest, definitely worthy of any self respecting metalhead's attention (adventurous metalheads we might qualify), but those heavy moments are not JUST heavy, their tangled up with squelchy synths, spaced out effects, keening vocals way down in the mix, almost like they decided to add space rock to their already eclectic palette, and when they're more concerned with beats, that heaviness, and doominess, and bleak origin, seeps into every beat, every twisted loop, or fuzzy buzzy synth.
The brief opener is the perfect intro, a stuttery beat, pelted with squelches, laid over thick undulating bass, all wrapped in thick layers of buzz and long streaks of high metallic skree, a perfect chunk of electro metallic dirgery. It's not until the second track that NdM really get to let loose, starting out with a super skeletal beat, draped with fragmented melodies, hushed muted effects, a sort of spacerock Portishead, but then the big guitars come crashing in, and then the sound becomes a churning psychedelic doom, lumbering, lurching, the thick crumbling guitars wrapped in swirling synths, the vocals heavy with effects, a sort of metalgaze spacedoom that RULES.
Which makes the next track even more of a surprise, "Temple Of Juno" is straight up dubstep, like it could have been yanked off some Hyperdub 12", until the music swings in, changing the vibe to low slung and again sorta doomy, but riff with woozy synths, wordless vocals, another dirgey bit of psychedelic electro doom, that builds and builds until again, the guitars are massive, roiling and churning, now strapped to buzzy dubsteppy synths, and so it goes swinging from dubbed out metallic lumber to spacey synthy drift and back again.
"Uberlord" is total blackened guitardrone, wall of crumbling buzz, but again, liberally does with swirls of static, fractured FX, and shinnery synths, the result way more spaced out and psychedelic that heavy, which gives way to "For Your Own Good", which starts out all murky and muted and heroin house-y, gradually getting more and more dubbed out, the beats building in intensity, more buried vocals, it's not until about halfway through that the beat splinters into a way more propulsive rhythm, still motorik but more muscly, all wreathed in a synth spacey haze, hypnotic and dreamily blissed out.
"Devastating Vector", unwinds a stuttery techno beat, and some glitchy synths, and lays them out over a dense layered sprawl of ominous low end rumble and buzz, which transforms into some undulating buzzed out bass, the song a sort of dubbed out techno flecked dirge, until it gets SERIOUSLY electro, the sound wrapped in zig zagging synth melodies, dizzying and almost housey, but still the beat and the low end churns along relentlessly, it is actually sort of funky, but in a way that manages to kick ass, not what you would expect from 'funkiness' in this context at all. And of course it's Necro Deathmort, so halfway through, the song explodes in a burst of static, only to come out the other side all thick and buzzy and sludge, the bass blown out and blackened, the beat a lumbering lurch, the whole thing oozy and melty like the whole thing is some huge black mass pouring from your speakers. "Blizzard" sounds like part two of "Devastating Vector", less funky and more plodding, the synths set on swirl, lots of crunch and distortion, moody and murky and woozily washed out, the song rife with subtle melody, the vibe sort of melancholy.
"The Heat Death Of Everything" starts out all big booming beat, and keening high end drones, sounding like Jesu or Nadja or something, and then the hammer falls, and by hammer, we mean massive, thick, sludgey downtuned riffage, about as metal as these guys get, a death march trudge, all howled distorted vocals, pounding drum pummel, squealing feedback, almost industrial / mechanical, but with a Moss / Bunkur sort of ultradoom vibe as well, the sound eventually begins to glow, with subtle color, and buried melody, eventually transforming into a swirl of washed out shimmer and gauzy droned out drift, only to lead straight into the final track, "Moon", a haunting hushed outro, all muted moaning melody, and echo drenched skeletal rhythms, like a doomdronedirge Portishead, total druggy, late night chill out minimal electro-doom slowcore drift.
Fucking awesome, AGAIN. Anyone who bought the first one is DEFINITELY gonna want this one too, and anyone who somehow missed out on these guys the first time around, here's another chance. Absolutely contender for fave record of the year, metal, electronic, otherwise or BOTH.
Super swank packaging, a massive, gorgeously illustrated fold out poster sleeve, housed in a stickered PVC plastic sleeve.
This record seemed like it was custom made for aQ. They're called Necro Deathmort, the record is called This Beat Is Necrotronic, they've been described as SUNNO))) meets Squarepusher, it's heavy, it's skittery, it's dark, it's like a metal dubstep record, or a grim electronic laced doomdrone record, some of the tracks are stuttery and rhythmic, others are grim and ominous and intense, all of them are heavy, the sound veers from spaced out and downtuned, to skeletal and psychedelic, to thick and caustic, to big beated and bassy.
Thanks to aQ customer Mark for introducing us to these guys, we've been listening to it nonstop since we got it in. It's definitely a tough one to pin down, a little all over the map, but no matter what's going on, the various sounds and vibes and moods are definitely connected, joined by a thick grim black thread.
"Spilth (Spill Your Filth)" starts things off with a lumbering electro jam, all squiggles and squelches, glitches and buzzes, but underpinned by some serious speaker destroying bass, fuzzed out and thick and rumbling and very very prickly, like the heaviest dubstep bassline you've ever heard, cranked even higher. "Hurt Me I'm Bored" is where the band get serious, spreading out a serious chunk of smoldering electronic flecked doom, haunting and propulsive, the drums simple and stripped down, the main riff minor key and a little bit woozy, all around the main groove, clouds of static and hiss swirl and spark, the low end again thick as hell, the guitars gradually growing more and more metallic until, the track is full on doooooooom, but still peppered with little squiggles of distorted leads and various shards of electronic detritus.
"I Can See Through Time" is all washed out whir and hushed shimmer, looped and chopped sounds smoothed into a droney almost pop ambience, which quickly gives way to "Return To Planet Atlas", a sort of trip hopped slowcore jam, all big beats, and thick gnarled woofer shredding low-end, surrounded on all sides by streaks of high end, and all manner of swirling effects. The beats are definitely reminiscent of Scorn, even Bomb The Bass (remember them?), but a bit amped up and a lot heavier: "Necro Effigy" is another strange beat driven groove, with strange voices, croaking frogs, fractured glitched out crunch, and stuttery stop start beats, "Broadcast" is a dreamy interlude, sampled voices, looped bass notes and distant drone-y rumbles, dreamy and ethereal, which leads right into "I Fought The Law And The Law Won" which sounds like Portishead, all smoke-y and late night, or maybe a more beaty Bohren, creepy crawly, mysterious and weirdly pretty, "Technicolour Minstrel Show" begins with a SUNNO)))-y wall of crumbling blackened sound, only to give way to a whirring soft focus dreamscape, while "Origami Werewolf" is a dark loping jam, all throbbing beats, sheets of blown out guitar, keening feedback, and some serious industrial riffage, and finally, the record closes with the nearly 13 minute "Ultimate Testament", a gorgeous super minimal slowcore crawl, the beats skeletal and spaced out, the guitar raw and distorted, thick and noxious, but the melodies epic and majestic, it sounds like it might build to classic post rock crescendo, but instead, everything drops out except for the drums, and the last few minutes are a strange minimal beatscape, booming, pounding, crashing, but with tons of space, the beats echoing into the blackness before winking out, only to be replaced by another beat, until there's nothing left.
This shit is amazing, so dark and heavy and unlikely. Gorgeously packaged too, in a super swank fold out six panel sleeve, adorned with some garish woodcut style illustrations, and be sure and check out their Myspace page as well, tons of other music that didn't make it onto the cd, including a killer reinterpretation of an old Nirvana song, that gets all Necro'd. So Rad. And just for the record, January is in no way too soon to start picking records for your best of 2010 list... just so you know...
We made a huge deal out of the most recent Necrophagist, and rightly so, quite possibly the most insane ridiculous and of course great death metal record ever. But before that, came THIS. Onset Of Putrefaction, the entire thing recorded by the then one man band Muhammed Suicmez, playing all the instruments and programming the drum machine allowing for the ridiculously impossible, inhumanly fast and absurdly convoluted song structures. So finally Onset gets the reissue treatment. New artwork, remastered, two bonus tracks from the demo, but most importantly, NEW DRUM TRACKS, supposedly performed by a live drummer! Seems impossible, and many around here think it so, but who cares. This is absolutely one of the most dizzingly intense records ever. Here's what we had to say the first time around when it was a much harder record to track down. (Kudos to Willowtip for seeing exactly what we saw, twisted fucking genius!):
Putrefaction. I love that word, especially how it's spelled. Anyway, despite the generic death metal band name, album title, and lyrical content, Necrophagist is by no means your run of the mill generic death metal band!! No sir. First off, it's one guy playing the guitar, grunting the vocals, and programming the drums. Bedroom home studio metal. The main thing, tho: playing the guitar. This might be the ultimate crazy squiggly guitar lead album ever, outdoing even Morbid Angel and Krisiun in the extreme guitar soloing sweepstakes. It's insane, really. As brutal as the music gets, there's guitar shredding wedged into every available moment of music. As mentioned, this is one guy, probably recording at home. Well, I don't know about that for sure, but there must have been a long ProTools session involved in this!! 'Cause there's no way anybody could do this live. So, as a death metal record, pretty great indeed. Ignore the death metal aspect, and you've got an avant-garde guitar shred fest for John Zorn fans. It would make Buckethead weep. So just sit back and enjoy the onset of putrefaction.
Who would have thought that this little cd, an insane one-man Carcass/Morbid Angel hybrid, released on a tiny European label, would cause such a stir here at Aqaurius even among non-metalheads? And after running out of the 5 or 6 copies we were able to
Putrefaction. I love that word, especially how it's spelled. Anyway, despite the generic death metal band name, album title, and lyrical content, Necrophagist is by no means your run of the mill generic death metal band!! No sir. First off, it's one guy (German, I think) playing the guitar, grunting the vocals, and programming the drums. Bedroom home studio metal. The main thing, tho: playing the guitar. This might be the ultimate crazy squiggly guitar lead album ever, outdoing even Morbid Angel and Krisiun in the extreme guitar soloing sweepstakes. It's insane, really. As brutal as the music gets, there's guitar shredding wedged into every available moment of music. As mentioned, this is one guy, probably recording at home. Well, I don't know about that for sure, but there must have been a long ProTools session involved in this!! 'Cause there's no way anybody could do this live. So, as a death metal record, pretty great indeed. Ignore the death metal aspect (if only the dude who did this would have!) and you've got an avant-garde guitar shred fest for John Zorn fans. It would make Buckethead weep. And supposedly there IS a new record on the way, this time a FULL band, that's fully capable of pulling this stuff off live. Just hope they manage to make it over here. In the meantime, just sit back and enjoy the onset of putrefaction.
It's always been hard being a woman in a male dominated scene, but it must be doubly hard when you're driven to explore and expand and alienate the dance floor the way Riz Maslen is. But the scene's loss is our gain. This double cd (disc two is a cd-rom movie
Back in October, we wanted to make the reissue of Caravans To Empire Algol, the first album of blackened kosmische drone-synth drift from Neptune Towers our Record Of The Week, in fact we wanted to make both that AND this, a sort of dual ROTW. Both were records many of us here have loved for YEARS, so we were super excited for the chance to share them with all of you. Sadly, we were never able to get enough copies of that first one at the time to make it a proper ROTW, but we did manage to get a enough of the THIS one, so finally, Neptune Towers achieves aQ Record Of The Week status!! (And making it even more ROTW-worthy, this one, unlike the reissue of Caravans, includes previously unreleased bonus tracks from the never released third installment in the trilogy!)
Neptune Towers was in fact the alter ego of hilariously and hyper opinionated black metal mouthpiece Fenriz, one half of black metal legends Darkthrone, which is initially how we discovered Neptune Towers, Caravans To Empire Algol being the first in a planned high concept trilogy. But the music of Neptune Towers was about as far removed from the black buzz of Darkthrone as can be, instead, Fenriz in his NT guise trafficked in blissed out, kosmische, psychedelic synthscapery a la Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze, which considering the current onslaught of retro-synth outifts, proves Fenriz quite prescient back in the day. And thus, for ANYONE into all the modern day practitioners of sci-fi synthwave psychedelia. Zombi, Umberto, Majeure, Cloudland Canyon, M. Geddes Gengras, Gatekeeper, Xander Harris, Roll The Dice, Bitchin Bajas, etc., Neptune Towers is definitely worth checking out. But be warned, it's of a much darker strain than a lot of that stuff, gritty and low fidelity, but still impossibly spacious and epic. Black billows of spectral synth swirl around grinding cascades of low end buzz, everything swaddled in clouds of sci-fi squiggle and driven by dense echo drenched pulsations.
Like Caravans, the record is divided into two epic halves, the two lengthy tracks that make up Transmissions seeming to ooze from the darkest reaches of the galaxy, spectral sonic artifacts captured by arcane machinery in some abandoned bunker, the music pouring forth from the old dusty speakers, captured on those giant spinning tape reels, played back to a room full of baffled scientists, given this fleeting glimpse into some other world, in some far away galaxy, darkly cinematic, gritty and grimy, very rough around the edges, lush layers of grislty squelch, that suddenly explode into dizzying swirls of prismatic shimmer, all glistening and glimmering and downright new agey, before being sucked back down into the roiling blackened space-synth morass, only to emerge seconds later, transformed into a weirdly motorik pulsing groove, which again, soon dissipates leaving just shadows and ghostly melodic traces.
The sound throughout is in constant, glorious flux, hazy cosmic percolations, fractured, fragmented rhythms, swirling shimmering melodies, long droned out sprawls pocked with lazer beam blorp and space-sonar pings, the sound most definitely drifting into Goblin / John Carpenter terriroty here and there, with haunting little melodic refrains, that resurface, like the theme from some imaginary seventies sci-fi art film, or the perfect music for some blackened planetarium show.
This reissue tacks on four bonus tracks, excerpts from the aborted third part of the trilogy, 1994's Space Lab, four short sonic fragments that continue on right from where Transmissions fades out, continuing further into the reaches of the cosmos, lush, chordal swirs, arpeggiated melodies, all drifting through wide open expanses of deep black thrum, drifting somnambulently from swoonsome softly shimmering blackened cosmic-drone, to blissfully brooding synth-psych mesmer.
Comes in a swank slipcase too!
Three cheers for Jeff Mangum and the rest of the Elephant6 music & art collective that participated on this, Neutral Milk Hotel's second glorious album. That's right, Mangum's pulled it off TWICE. There's still the rough buzz and sweetly chiming chords of his first album, but this record features more interesting instrumentation (musical saw, flugelhorn, accordion, organ, trumpet) along with stretched out parts where said instrumentation can really have a go at it. It's an absolutely perfect, instantly likeable, deeply affecting album from the man who arguably brought singing back to indie rock.
Now in on LP!!! And it's about damn time! The first pressing of this glorious pop album was gone in such a flash we barely caught a glimpse of it, but now we've got the AQ ultra fave pop album in splendid vinyl abundance with lyric sheet to boot! So go on! Sing your lil' hearts out!
In case you somehow missed our gushing about the cd version (or your memory's a bit foggy), here's what we had to say:
Amazing pop maestro Carl Newman (Zumpano, Superconductor) heads the star-studded cast of what is, to AQ's collective ears, simply THE BEST POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2000. When was the last time the AQ staff and our wildly differing tastes happened to *unanimously* agree on a single album's brilliance? Maybe Neutral Milk's second record? The Soft Bulletin or Conet Project? Suffice to say that this happens very rarely, and that's how good this New Pornographers record is. "Mass Romantic" is absolutely shiningly great power pop, with influences as wide-ranging as Big Star, the Zombies, Eno, the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, and Built to Spill.
Not since, well, the last Zumpano record (or Silver Sun's debut) has a pop record emerged that's this powerful, kickass, well-crafted and totally complex. Really. Each of the twelve tracks is a fully realised pop creation unto itself. Intelligent, infectious, and uplifting, with truly flawless arrangements (the key to pop greatness).
In a sparkling non-country spin, the wonderful Neko Case lends her vocal gusto to complete the soaring FOUR-PART vocals on such gems as "Letter From An Occupant" not to mention the title track. And the four other members of the New Pornographers are super talents in their own right: Daniel Bejar (the enigmatic figure behind the very Nilsson-influenced combo known as Destroyer), John Collins (bassist/engineer for the Nardwuar the Human Serviette-lead freakos the Evaporators, garage-pop stalwarts Smugglers, and the rock army known as Superconductor), Kurt Dahle (drummer for Canadian college popsters Limblifter), and indie filmmaker Blaine Thurier.
Recommended for everyone -- even if you only buy one pop or rock record this year, this should be it.
Sound the trumpets (hey, there is one on this album!), the third album from Vancouver's New Pornographers has arrived and it's nothing short of glorious! If you're even remotely familiar with us here at AQ, you know that we've championed this pop wunderkind since the very beginning (and maybe it can be said, even before that if you count our affection for their predecessor Zumpano). We celebrate the fact that their debut album Mass Romantic was an instant unanimous hit around these parts long before practically anywhere else (even prior to much of their homeland catchin' on!). Of course these days everyone is more than familiar with these guys' pop songwriting mighty might. Heck, they can't help but know it themselves, however they haven't just rested on their laurels nor have they gotten too clever for their own good. They remain steadfastly earnest and humble in the ways only Canadians can truly be (just check out that dorkier-than-dorky guitar 'solo' on the album's opener and title track... it's a hoot!).
Whereas Mass Romantic was a millennium freak of nature in its wall-to-wall power pop fireworks -- c'mon, the kind of spontaneous, unabashed puppy-dog romp bursting from songs like "Letter From An Occupant" can't be planned nor easily replicated -- 2003's Electric Version proved to be more of a grow-on-you kind of album. Slightly clouded by self-awareness and the pressure of elevated expectations, its hooks and charms weren't as immediate, but eventually that album put some solid roots down in our hearts too. So needless to say we were eagerly anticipating album number 3. And after just a couple of listens (who are we kidding? we've been playing it non-stop!), we can say that Twin Cinema nestles itself right in between. Having hurdled past the sophomore jinx obstacles and having numerous individual projects under their belts in the interim, the seven band members have once again reconvened with a remarkable effortlessness and consistency. We'd dare proclaim that the album even betters on both of its predecessors in certain aspects.
All the usual New Pornographers are present and accounted for. Tossing his delightful eccentricities into the mix, the elusive Dan Bejar surfaces for his sporadic appearances singing tales about his mysterious "Jackie" character once again. Carl Newman and Bejar can both be downright cryptic and non-sequitur-ish in the lyric department, but that certainly doesn't prevent you from gleefully singing along to lines like "Listenin' too long to one song, sing me Spanish Techno!" (wha'? huh?). If anything these peculiarities offer a neat contrast to their comparatively straight-forward guitar and piano leads. That said, they have stretched their creative limbs a little further adding nice touches like the dizzying vocal loops in "Falling Through Your Clothes", the cascading line from the abovementioned trumpet in "Stacked Crooked" and the even more effecting multi-part vocals that grace every song. Speaking of which, everyone's vocal performances are top notch with more full-on falsetto all around. Hurrah!
There's lots of fan-pleasing moments such as on the fourth song "The Bleeding Heart Show" which winds up with a big ol' chorus of "hey-la! hey-la!"s that's pushed over the top by an outtro counter-melody sung by noneother than Ms Neko Case. Definitely an album highlight, that tune has an air of sentimentality that feels like it was written specifically for a 'driving out of town' scene in a movie. Actually it was this song that was playing when our now-former co-worker (and major NP fanatic) Byram said his final farewell to the shop. Awww. Of course, if he hadn't left, it would rightfully be him writing this review, but we'll do our best in his absence. Anyways, we should let you know that this time around not all of the female vocal parts were sung by Neko Case, but don't get yourself in a panic! She does sing a whole bunch, but two other young ladies' sweet voices chime in as well -- one of them is Ms Nora O'Connor and the other is Carl Newman's long-lost niece Kathryn Calder (of their Mint Records labelmates The Immaculate Machine). And y'know what? You might have a hard time figuring out who's singing what 'cause despite each singer having distinct, seemingly recognizable voices, they all melt together into a single New Pornographers voice.
But back on the subject of Twin Cinema as a whole, it effectively strikes a balance of exuberantly vibrant hues and darker bittersweet shades. Indeed, there's an undercurrent of wistfulness (not quite heavy nor somber enough to be called melancholic) that runs throughout the fourteen songs, however it certainly doesn't dampen any spirits. Whereas Electric Version didn't have many instantly ass-kickin' pop anthems, Twin Cinema sure as hell does. They expertly cover the full palette of tempo and mood, serving up their trademark hooks all along the way. Whereas other band would/could muster one hook per song, Newman and Co. generously pack each song with numerous pop treats. Taking into consideration just how high they set the bar with their last two albums, not to mention how high fan and critic expectations probably are at this point, Twin Cinema is arguably the band's most polished and fully realized work to date. These Canucks have scored a hat trick!
Those who fancy a little didgeridoo in their doom, get ready for the latest from esoteric Italian doom-psych cult Nibiru, who have returned to visit our plane of existence again, bringing with them another intense new set of sonic rituals. The two previous albums, Caosgon and Netrayoni, from this trio of shamanic freaks were both throbbing slabs of trance-inducing, ceremonial stoner rhythm and riffage, and that heavy, and heavily rhythmic, aspect of earlier Nibiru is well represented here, for instance, by the repetitive, tumbling, bass heavy attack that kicks in about two thirds of the way through track 2, "Ashmadaeva", preceded however by an expanse of droned-out atmospherics. The pounding track 3, "Trikona", is another sludgey juggernaut, one positively slobbering with drug-gobbling madness. There's plenty of that, actually, all across all four of these lengthy, effects-laden invokations, but things also seem just a bit more sprawling and abstract, in all sorts of diverse, delirious directions. The vokills are taken to almost monstrous extremes, this time 'round almost black metallish, a rasping exhalation/exaltation of their godz, while all the hallucinogenic, hypnotic heaviness, seems borne on opium scented winds from outer space.
The nearly 29 minute finale, "Khem", is arguably the album's tour de force / piece de resistance, passing through many and varied episodes, from its monkish groaning-droning intro, veering into a blasting black metallish segment, from surprisingly catchy moments of lurching riff-rock to a sudden break into This Heat-ish drum-thwap and Fushitsusha-worthy feedback to shimmering spectral synthesis graced with some haunting, harrowing guest female vocals, and on to ambient-noise sequences morphing into glitchy quasi-techno industrial metal. Yeah, it's weird. All over the place.
Weird and warped, dense and distorted, sounding like drone-doom metal descendants of ESP-Disk's Cromagnon tribe at times... Also this Nibiriu is still for fans of Gnod, Bong, and fellow space traveling Italians UFOmammut, these these tracks suggestive of that band indulging in actual cult worship!!
Seems like Sacred Bones can do no wrong. The last year they've given us records from Gary War, Blank Dogs, Zola Jesus, Cultural Decay, 13th Chime, Moon Duo, Carl Simmons, and Vermillion Sands, and now Nice Face, aka Ian Magee, who definitely fits right in with the current movement of lo-fi garage pop weirdness, a la Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Blank Dogs, etc, but Nice Face is a much more twisted affair. Not sure how we missed out on this guy until now, this is in fact a collection of previously released jams, originally released on three different labels, including two on Sacred Bones, hardly matters, what matters is we have em now, and they have been totally kicking our asses.
Falling somewhere between former aQ Record Of The Weekers Night Control AND former aQ Record Of The Weekers Blank Dogs, it seemed sort of inevitable that we would fall in love with Nice Face as well, short sharp blasts of crunchy, synth laced, home brewed, cold wave flecked garage pop, super catchy, but plenty twisted, and beyond the more contemporary influences, we hear plenty of classic power pop, old new wave, old school punk rock, all tweaked and twisted into this right here. We could go song by song and describe every one, they all rule, but we'll just pick out a few of our favorites which should definitely give you a feel for the weirdo damaged pop world of Nice Face.
"Decipher" is a haunting synth heavy instrumental, with a KILLER hook, the whole track swirly and subtly warped, that sounds like one of the best songs Blank Dogs never released. "I Want Your Damage" is a spacey pop gem, with super delayed vocals, and a Tesltars main melody, lots of effects, weird synth melodies, imagine if Joe Meek were alive today, this is the sort of thing he'd be whipping up in his apartment home studio. "A Minor Altercation" is classic eighties power pop and sounds like it was yanked right off one of those Yellow Pills comps, "A Gaping Gash" is like a lo-fi reimagining of that Depeche Mode / Gary Numan collaboration that never really happened. "Beater" is a blasting garage rock blow out, that does Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall one better, with fuzzy synths, another killer hook, gothy and new wave-y, not to mention the retarded, freaked out synth solo WAY up in the mix. "Had To Let You Know" is another total eighties new wave jam, minor key and mysterious, super reverbed and groovy, sounds almost like the Stooges filtered through Joy Division and Gary Numan. And on and on it goes. How does this guy do it. Every song is insanely catchy, but totally different than the one that came before it, and even though the songs are all over the map, and this is a collection of tracks from different releases, it totally flows, and plays perfectly, like somehow, it was meant to be what it is, a single perfect fucked up outsider pop record. So rad.
A few months ago, a mysterious disc showed up in the mail. Or more accurately, discs. Four cd-r albums of fucked up fractured outsider pop. No information anywhere on the discs, or the packaging, other than the words Crystal Shards. Which seemed pretty perfect. That's exactly what that stuff sounded like. Jagged and fragmented and crystalline and shimmery and totally bizarre and beautiful. So of course, as is our way, we become a little obsessed, and decided we had to track more down, so we could share these sounds with the aQ faithful�
But searches for Crystal Shards revealed almost nothing, and the label was sold out, and there were at that time no plans to make more Crystal Shards. SO we hd all but given up, until the label got in touch, and mentioned plans to release a proper cd, collecting various tracks from the Crystal Shards cd-r's, and we were thrilled, anxiously waiting its arrival, knowing that it would have to be a Record Of The Week.
And so here it is, but strangely enough, the band is no longer called Crystal Shards. In fact, there is no mention anywhere of Crystal Shards, instead, the band (actually, the man) is now called Night Control, and this disc, Death Control, collects some of our favorite Shards from those previous discs, and weaves them into a perfectly imperfect album of minimal murkiness, moody shimmer and lo-fi pop, generously dappled with effects and feedback and distortion, hooks and jangle buried in buzz and hiss. Woozy, dizzy, druggy, tripped out, and catchy as fuck. Think Ariel Pink, Gary War, John Maus, Ty Segall, Wavves, Blank Dogs, Kurt Vile, Night Control definitely fits pretty comfortably amongst those lo-fi fractured pop denizens, but definitely brings his own vibe to the party, offering up something folkier and prettier, more classically poppy, even Beatles-esque at times, but still plenty murky and freaked out and fucked up, and deliriously off kilter. We also hear some Grifters in there as well, which is never a bad thing.
Where as a lot of those other bands seem willfully obscure, the weirdness in Night Control's music seems more like a natural byproduct. As if the creation of these hauntingly perfect little pop fragments, invariably resulted in the sonic cast offs that litter the record, be they sheets of gauzy buzz, or jagged slivers of feedback, the songs at their very core, are pure pop, but that core is protected by layer after layer of noise and hiss and shimmer. Yet unlike many artists who make their pop 'weird' by adding random crap on top, or record on the shittiest equipment possible, the two sides of Night Control's sound, the jangly pop, and the lo-fi buzz, seem to meld into something totally new, a sound that couldn't exist with both those elements. The guitars jangle and strum, but often explode into blow out leads, or super crunchy textures, the bas burbles below the surface, but it too can sometimes crumble into a cloud of swirling buzz, the drums are simple and spare, but hold the whole thing together, along with the lilting vocals, always wreathed in reverb and delay. Every song here is a gem. And every song manages to reference classic pop, while filtering it through the new fractured noisepop style. Sebadoh covering Tom Petty, Cheap Trick as envisioned by Strapping Fieldhands, or imagine the Beatles or Kinks, if they were growing up today, and released handmade cd-r's. There may be noise and distortion and grit and buzz and hiss, but this stuff is way too poppy to really appeal to the noiseniks, instead this takes the sort of lo-fi pop of early Pavement records and Shrimper cassettes, and re-imagines it as some sort of alternate reality top 40, not like the bizarre alien FM radio of Ariel Pink, but something much more earnest and heartfelt. Total sad boy, late night mix tape nirvana for sure.
Hard to pick favorites, as this is a sort of greatest hits, culled from a catalog that as far as we're concerned is ALL hits, but two of our favorites are "Two Hard", with its lilting jangle, rubbery underwater bass, and some incendiary lead guitars, weaving lush sun dappled textures over a sort of repetitive post rocky drift, and "No Making", a woozy, drifty torch song, the bass driving the song, the whole thing warped and warbly, the tape speed subtly shifting throughout, causing the whole song to subtly shift and twist and making it feel like your speakers are melting, and as if that weren't enough, then there's an awesome soaring bridge / chorus, with some incredible lush guitar harmonies that could go on forever (and you'll wish they would).
Hopefully some of the other Crystal Shards stuff will surface in one form or another, but for now, there's plenty here to get lost in, a fantastic and phantasmagorical document of blissed out hallucinatory outsider noise pop. ESSENTIAL!
The origin myth of Night Control is almost as fascinating as their music, it was explained in great detail in our review of the first Night Control record from a while back, but in a nutshell, Night Control was at one time called Crystal Shards, and that band released a whole mess of super limited cd-r's, all amazing and tripped out and weirdly poppy, but before we could get our hands on any of those cd-r's, the band resurfaced with a new name, Night Control, and a new record, Death Control, which cherry picked all the best songs from those impossible to find cd-r's and voila, and all time aQ favorite, twisted, fractured outsider lo-fi pop, that managed to infuse hook filled classic sounding pop music, with all manner of rhythmic aberrations and sonic inconsistencies, transforming NC's music into something truly original and transcendent.
So here we have what could be considered to be the first proper NEW Night Control record, and thankfully, all of the weirdness is fully intact, and the songwriting has seemingly grown by leaps and bounds, without sacrificing a bit of fuckedupness. So, just like Death Control was, it's gotta be a Record Of The Week! Night Control's sound is still firmly positioned amongst the current crop of warped lysergic lo-fi popsters: Ariel Pink, Gary War, John Maus, Ty Segall, Wavves, Blank Dogs, Kurt Vile, etc., but there's just something about Night Control, that makes this music different. And special. Not better necessarily, although in some ways it definitely is, but just special, the songs are ramshackly, but fully formed, catchy as all get out, but laced with all manner of clatter, and squealing feedback, the vocals are generally buried, so sometimes the melody is more suggested than anything, but somehow all the woozy warped parts fall (im)perfectly into place, and yet again, Night Control has created a songsuite, that is at once warm and familiar, but also alien and abstract.
There's no denying the fact that these songs are tighter, and more rocking, and it definitely sounds more like a real band, than a bedroom project, the opener "CS" is heartbreakingly good, warm and woozy and lush, drum machine, loping piano driven melody, big rich guitars, and a main vocal line that is so dreamy and melancholic and definitely harkens back to classic sixties pop a la The Zombies, but the record immediately changes gears, and "There's A Chance" begins as a stumbling chaotic lurching kitchen sink pop workout, very New Zealand sounding actually, the drums are distorted and tangled, the vocals are processed and all wrapped up with streaks of high end and feedback, all under a blown out haze, making the song's poppiness all the more subtle. "Take Apart" is super rocking, with actual burly guitar riffing, pounding drums, even some squirrely almost-leads, but it's interspersed with some wheezing atonal organ, some detuned guitar squiggle, some surprisingly active rubbery basslines, and the whole thing is wrapped in a cloud of hiss and crumbling distortion. It's like a Joe Meek track gone haywire.
And so it goes, the whole record veers from perfect pop to deconstructed lo-fi pop flecked weirdness, drums get blown out, vocals slip way up in the mix in a reverbed Lou Reed like sung spoken croon, guitars warble, chords jangle, rhythms are flipped backwards, fragments of songs are looped and layered, some tracks skip and skitter, you can hear someone push the stop button on the tape player, the 'ka-chunk' becoming part of the song, vocals pile on top of one another creating big lush, dense harmonies, long stretches of barely there sound drift and shimmer, like a pop song muted and melted into shimmery sonic strings, new wave collides with new age, classic rock stumbles into power pop, drum machine driven skitter explodes into druggy garage rock, hazy riffs coalesce into crystalline space rock, and on and on and on. The final track might just be the most beautiful, a nearly 8 minute stretch of processed guitars, all delicately intertwined, looped and layered, melodies and overtones surfacing and then fading into the background, notes pulse and throb, creating sort-of-rhythms, a little pop ambience, a little abstract Appalachia, warm and lush, the perfect rainy day dreamdrift, and a fitting way to finish off this perfectly imperfect record. One of our new favorites for sure.
We got turned on to the synth-heavy, cinematic post-rock of this Aussie outfit last year, when their previous album Back To Zero was released on vinyl. Their secret weapon, a virtuoso theremin player, who coaxes all manner of weepy, wavery giallo-worthy ooohs and aaahs from that electronic instrument, its lovely, lachrymose vocal-like-timbre soaring over some seriously intense sci-fi zip-zap synth sounds and the massive momentum of the heavy, propulsive rhythm section. So powerful, and melodic! We're excited that they're now back with a brand new album, albeit with a stripped-down lineup: they're just a duo now, not that you could tell, having shed a couple of synth players in the interim (and switching out drummers, too). Multi-instrumentalist Miles Brown, he who plays the theremin, as well synths, bass, and "noise", takes up any and all slack, however. This sounds BIG.
When we reviewed Back To Zero, we noted that they had opened for Goblin, and that their own brand of soundtrack-y, Goblin-y horror movie prog sounded like it should have been released as an lp on the Death Waltz label. Perhaps you should just go read that review elsewhere on our site ('cause for one thing, the compact disc version of this new record is actually a double disc set, also including a reissued cd of that album as well), but we'll quote ourselves a bit: "Sometimes gently atmospheric (someone mentioned Sigur Ros), sometimes noisy and distorted (someone mentioned MBV), always compelling and evocative, The Night Terrors almost seem specifically designed for aQ appreciation." Indeed they do. We love this stuff! The new record has perhaps less of the gentle moments, devoting even more of its considerable energy to the crunching keyboards and math-rock rhythms. Tracks like "Monster" even hint at some form of adrenalized Euro-disco techno. Taken in sum, this almost approaches overload. Spiral Vortex is the perfect title; the sheer buzz and bombast of it all becomes quite headspinning. And demands to be played LOUD!! In a car, driving fast, even better. Makes us think of, like, if Emeralds got hopped up on Red Bull and challenged the Trans Am guys to a synthesizer drag race (whatever that means, but you know what we mean). This could be the soundtrack to all manner of suspenseful, futuristic action noir scenarios. Melody, majestic melody, is effectively employed throughout, not just on moodier cuts like "Celeste". Always, the awesomely distorted, low-end tones from the synths and bass are perfectly balanced by the more ethereal, high-end "singing" of the theremin. Technically, though, this is mostly instrumental, but for some uber-distorted robot vox on the very last track, "Force Field".
We mentioned Zombi in our other review - and basically these guys sound a lot like an over-the-top Zombi, if Clara Rockmore (you know, the famous classical thereminist) joined that band. Other obvious "recommended-if-you-like" references include: Umberto, The Oscillation, Maserati, Majeure, Nightsatan, and even the likes of Fuck Buttons and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
As mentioned, the cd edition, is a double with Spiral Vortex on one disc and Back To Zero on the other. Whatta deal! Meanwhile, Spiral Vortex is also available by itself on limited edition 180 gram red vinyl w/ download code.
We got turned on to the synth-heavy, cinematic post-rock of this Aussie outfit last year, when their previous album Back To Zero was released on vinyl. Their secret weapon, a virtuoso theremin player, who coaxes all manner of weepy, wavery giallo-worthy ooohs and aaahs from that electronic instrument, its lovely, lachrymose vocal-like-timbre soaring over some seriously intense sci-fi zip-zap synth sounds and the massive momentum of the heavy, propulsive rhythm section. So powerful, and melodic! We're excited that they're now back with a brand new album, albeit with a stripped-down lineup: they're just a duo now, not that you could tell, having shed a couple of synth players in the interim (and switching out drummers, too). Multi-instrumentalist Miles Brown, he who plays the theremin, as well synths, bass, and "noise", takes up any and all slack, however. This sounds BIG.
When we reviewed Back To Zero, we noted that they had opened for Goblin, and that their own brand of soundtrack-y, Goblin-y horror movie prog sounded like it should have been released as an lp on the Death Waltz label. Perhaps you should just go read that review elsewhere on our site ('cause for one thing, the compact disc version of this new record is actually a double disc set, also including a reissued cd of that album as well), but we'll quote ourselves a bit: "Sometimes gently atmospheric (someone mentioned Sigur Ros), sometimes noisy and distorted (someone mentioned MBV), always compelling and evocative, The Night Terrors almost seem specifically designed for aQ appreciation." Indeed they do. We love this stuff! The new record has perhaps less of the gentle moments, devoting even more of its considerable energy to the crunching keyboards and math-rock rhythms. Tracks like "Monster" even hint at some form of adrenalized Euro-disco techno. Taken in sum, this almost approaches overload. Spiral Vortex is the perfect title; the sheer buzz and bombast of it all becomes quite headspinning. And demands to be played LOUD!! In a car, driving fast, even better. Makes us think of, like, if Emeralds got hopped up on Red Bull and challenged the Trans Am guys to a synthesizer drag race (whatever that means, but you know what we mean). This could be the soundtrack to all manner of suspenseful, futuristic action noir scenarios. Melody, majestic melody, is effectively employed throughout, not just on moodier cuts like "Celeste". Always, the awesomely distorted, low-end tones from the synths and bass are perfectly balanced by the more ethereal, high-end "singing" of the theremin. Technically, though, this is mostly instrumental, but for some uber-distorted robot vox on the very last track, "Force Field".
We mentioned Zombi in our other review - and basically these guys sound a lot like an over-the-top Zombi, if Clara Rockmore (you know, the famous classical thereminist) joined that band. Other obvious "recommended-if-you-like" references include: Umberto, The Oscillation, Maserati, Majeure, Nightsatan, and even the likes of Fuck Buttons and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
As mentioned, the cd edition, is a double with Spiral Vortex on one disc and Back To Zero on the other. Whatta deal! Meanwhile, Spiral Vortex is also available by itself on limited edition 180 gram red vinyl w/ download code.
They're from Finland. They're called Nightsatan. Their record is called Midnight Laser Warrior and features on its cover some helmeted ghoul with a knife, and a sawblade, and a bullet belt, and tons of spikes and studs on the leather jacket that barely obscures his rotting zombie flesh. They have song titles like "Four Eyed Cyclops", "Death Chess 2000", "Karelian Stairmaster (Evil Lucifer)". The record was mastered by two members of aQ faves Finnish hypnorockers Circle. We saw a YouTube clip of Nightsatan performing, where a certain member of the crowd got so worked up he decided to sing along, that person was none other than Albert Witchfinder of the mighty Reverend Bizarre (and The Puritan, among others). Their drummer is credited with player "Laserdrums". And most importantly, they play "LAZERMETAL". Which is in fact, not metal at all, nor even "NWOFHM", instead it's some sort of crazy, futuristic, electro prog, like Goblin or John Carpenter, or any of the current crop of Carpenter worshipping retro futurists (Majeure, Umberto, Zombi, Blizaro) but filtered through some ELP, or Yes, or even more obscure prog faves like Il Balleto Di Bronzo or the New Trolls. Sure the sound is synthy, and retro and electro and will no doubt appeal to those folks, but it's also twisted and proggy and FINNISH, which makes this something else entirely.
The cool thing about these guys, ONE of the cool things, is that they're a proper band, this isn't just a studio project, assembled at a desk with a computer, no these guys are a BAND, and there's tons of footage of them playing live, and most notably, they have a DRUMMER, who plays drums, electronic drums sure, but they give the sound a sweaty, urgent, human element missing from lots of similar stuff, not to mention, these songs are epic and complex and again PROGGY.
Opener "Four Eyed Cyclops" begins with a bit of Tangerine Dreamy synthiness, accompanied by some growled cookie monster vox, but it doesn't take long for the track to get going, with some awesome syncopated rumming, locked tight with the synths, then another buzzing bit of low end synth swoops in, and while it's not metal, we can definitely feel the same sort of power and energy and intensity. All the synths drop out, leaving just the buzzing low end one to unfurl a serious slithery riff, the drums come back in, and it's like some weird electronic electro-doom, the metal vibe, more in the vibe than the sound, but it's definitely weird and heavy and electronic, with lots of bent notes wound into electro leads. Awesome.
"Death Chess 2000" starts off with more buzzing low end synth riffage, some "Iron Man" style kick drum, before slipping into another bit of electro-doom, only to have everything suddenly speed up, and transform into a car chase Autobahn soundtrack that returns briefly to that opening electro doom, before stripping down to just minimal synth and a skeletal rhythm, and more of those weird raspy vox, finishing off in a blaze of swirl and buzz.
"Karelian Stairmaster (Evil Lucifer)" might be the proggiest of the bunch, another swirly Logan's Run sounding intro, all arpeggiated melodies underpinned by thick wheezing synth buzz, while the snare drum drives the rhythm, before blossoming into a hazy, futuristic soundscape (which more than one customer mistook for the Tron soundtrack! If only!), that warbles woozily, and eventually switches tempo and becomes the perfect score for some lost eighties VHS tape horror movie futuristic dystopian city montage. Throughout, the song offers up some strange detours, intense super dynamic stop/starts, with pounding drums, and some gorgeous woozy video game soundtrack balladry (which again has us thinking how much better these guys would have been for scoring Tron).
"Ninja Apocalypse" is creepy, and haunting, with the sound of fake rainfall, deep bass swells, and a main keyboard melody that would most definitely not be out of place in a Halloween or Friday The 13th movie, but like all the songs, the track continually shifts and transforms, minimal and hauntingly creepy one second, supper progged out and propulsive the next, soaring and majestic the next, and druggy and psychedelic the next. "Steel Diamond Part 4" (parts 1 and 2 are on the 7" reviewed elsewhere on this list, not sure where part 3 is though), is another electro prog workout, that features a super soundtracky main melody wreathed in layer after layer of synth buzz, the drums dense and intricate, the sound swirling and shimmering, evoking images of alien planets, of crashed starships, of subterranean lairs, of strange creatures chained up and walking into the depths, of the blackness of space, which leads right into the final track "Stars, Our Destination", which takes that space synth sci-fi sound even further out, pulsing and throbbing, the melodies tangled and intricate, hypnotic and totally mesmerizing, the sound dramatic and emotional and epic, and so totally cinematic, every track in fact here plays out like the music to some climactic scene from some lost eighties sci-fi adventure epic, with "Stars, Our Destination" being the perfect culmination, the drums less rhythmic, and more dynamic, pounding alongside the synths, the vocals more breathy exhalations, soon joined by thick rubbery low end pulses, everything growing more and more intense before fading into a swirling drift of warbly synths, swirling FX and whispered urgent voices. There's a short hidden track, another sort of Halloween gone electro synthwave, with a pulsing house-y beat, creepy raspy vocals, and a main melody that sounds like it had to be created for some horror movie, tense and intense, this final coda brooding and moody, but also propulsive and weirdly motorik, the perfect sci-fi, electro house, futuristic synth wave hypno krautrock finish to a pretty much perfect sci-fi, electro house, futuristic synth wave hypno krautrock record!
And all this talk of soundtrack and cinema is not just us, the artwork on the back cover, which features a modular synth, with the various patch bays altered to read as song titles, also includes various inputs for things like "Doom & Gloom", "Heavy Pounding" and maybe most tellingly "Extra Giallo". So good. Easily our favorite of this new batch of synthy soundtracky sci-fi sounds. There is vinyl, but it's not out yet, a few weeks still. And if you dig this, be sure and grab one of those 7"s too!!
We've long been fans of this mysterious NY outfit, whose past records found these guys brewing up a dizzying concoction of warped electro wave, haunting witch house-y minimalist creep, fuzzed out shoegazey ambience, and home brewed big beat crunch, all blurred and smeared into something way more abstract and psychedelic that its constituent parts. But here on their third and most recent, the band dial things way back, and craft a dark, gorgeous slab of introspective, electronic soundscapery, opening the proceedings with thick swaths of gristled, pixelated Tim Hecker like sonic haze. All washed out and dreamy and woozily lysergic, perfectly leading into a stunning Marissa Nadler cover, the already dark original transformed into an even darker lament, all swirling churns of mumblecore drift, heaving swells of black blurred fuzz, over skeletal rhythms, and moaned barely there vox, smeared and subtly processed, a plaintive whispery croon becomes a lush landscape of layered drones drifting dreamily and druggily, a ghostly and spectral electro-ambient threnody, that builds to a near squall of roiling riffs and tangled black melodies, the result still somehow warm and soft and utterly trancelike.
Elsewhere, the group unfurl smoldering cinematic soundscapes, strange slivers of shadowy sound, moaning fragmented melodies, all over a haunting heartbeat like pulse, a sort of slo-mo electronica, laced with strange hummed/sung vocals that remind us a bit of country weirdos the Reveries, who sing with cell phone speakers in their mouths, the same effect here, a wordless warble that ebbs and flows, slipping from near insectoid buzz to deep softly dramatic, barely there croon, and back again, all over slow swooping backwards guitars, and disembodied fragments of guitar melody.
Some tracks, like "Eisenbahnstrasse, January 1st 1946" shed some of the darkness, and blossom into dreamily prismatic swirls, all tinkling chimes, clean guitar jangle, soft psychedelic shimmer, all interwoven with random samples and brief blurts of FX heavy skree, but the sound always seems to drift back into the darkness.
As the record progresses, heavy machine like industrial beat, lumber through fields of clang and clatter and thump, all constructed into a dense driving blast of junkyard groove, the whole thing swaddled in a distant buzz, and slowly building swells of layered static drones, a sort of ultra minimal hypno-hop, like something you migh have heard on an old DHR record, or on one of those Electric Ladyland comps alongside Techno Animal, Spectre and the like. Eventually, the sound slows to a crawl, still beat heavy, but this time a tar pit drag, a lurching, looped lumber, all downtuned thrum, and disembodied voices, and some buried shuffling skitter.
"Sun Shatterer" is a heady sprawl of minimal gloom pop, minor key guitars, chiming through a cloud of woozy sonic warble, weird clipped whispers, tense strings, keening high end tones, what sounds like Hermann Nitsch like brass, which resolve into soft whorls of crumbling distortion and lush waves of fuzzed out feedback, before unexpectedly exploding into something much more in keeping with their old sound, big beats, a sort of post industrial electro wave downer dirge, with clean, dramatic new wave vocals, big melodies, buzzing synths, but all still wreathed in the weird droned out sounds that started the track off, like a noiser, more abstact Interpol maybe...
After a couple brief tracks of creepy, psychedelic ambience, the 30 second "Campfire Ashes" way too short, sounding like it could have blossomed into some dark Demdike Stare style epic, which thankfully is in a way what happens, as that track leads directly into the closer, a nearly nine minute sprawl called "Hymn Division". that lays down a simple pulsing beat, over which Nihiti lay thick swaths of black buzz, dense swirls of ribcage rattling low end reverberations, and finally deep, dramatic minor key melodies, that infuse the song with serious pathos, it's not hard to imagine this as the sound track to the denouement of some twisted, modern, avant indie film, a dizzying expanse of moving, emotional, electronic minimalism, but here drifting towrd maximalism, the tones expanding and exploding in slow motion, the melodies, bright, and eventually blinding, the tones strecthed way out, tense and intense, the coda a sort of Hecker / Nadja dreamdronedrift, but more soft focus here, heady and heavenly.
Been trying to figure out what to write about this for a while now. Every time I sit down to write it, I feel like I'm trying to write a euology for an old friend. Which should speak volumes. We knew this was coming. And man, were we excited. And it is not a disappointment in any way. If anything, it's more than we could have hoped for. See, everyone loves Nirvana. Everyone. Those of you who say you don't are just trying to be c'ool'. Sort of like the people who talk about how the Beatles suck. The Beatles did not suck. They wrote more perfect pop songs than any band in the history of rock and roll. Nirvana also don't suck. And are also responsible for some of the best songs ever. It's not cool to pretend you don't like Nirvana. Not at all. In fact, it's unbelievably UNCOOL. Why deny yourself some of the most important, visceral music of the last 15 years? Because it gets played on MTV? Because jocks blast "Smells Like Teen Spirit" after the big game? Nope, sorry. Not good enough.
Nirvana were one of those bands we could all love. Heavy enough to appeal to headbangers, raucous enough to still be punk, but equipped with a pop sense unrivalled, and thus able to whip out the most beautifu pop song in the world without a second thought -- usually sandwiched between two swirling snarling blasts of stage destroying chaotic rrroooaaaar. But that's part of what was so charming about Nirvana. Even when they were huge, they acted like you or me. Stupid jokes, smashing guitars, unlikely covers, ripped jeans and t-shirts and greasy long hair. It was like your pal or your older brother was snatched out of your suburban hellhole of a life and made a rock star. And how could you not love that (once you got over wishing it was you)? Which also goes to why it was such a blow when Kurt Cobain died. I literally cried. At the time I remember thinking "Why the fuck am I crying." I mean, it's not like he was a friend of mine or something. But he was something special. To me. To everyone I know. And Nirvana was something special. Our generation's Beatles? Maybe. But definitely the most important band of the nineties. Responsible for reshaping popular music, killing off hair metal, and giving us music that would be the soundtrack to our lives: breakups, mixtapes, road trips, broken hearts, life and death, fucking and fighting. Sounds like hyperbole but it's really not. This band was and is really important to me, and millions of other folks. Which is pretty remarkable. After the death of Cobain, and after getting over the sheer sadness and loss, one could not help but think about all the amazing music and the songs that would now never be written. Callous maybe, but the music is what made us love him/them. Their recent greatest hits disc offered us the unreleased "You Know You're Right", which was at the time the greatest thing we could've heard, a song as good as any of their others, seemingly pulled from the ether. And now we have this. A collection of what is supposedly everything. or at least everything worth releasing. And it is absolutely fantastic. I literally got all teary listeing to this, and the DVD had me all choked up as well. Can't remember the last time a record did that to me.
So, what's on it? If you're like me, it hardly matters. Just knowing that it's stuffed to the gills with rare and unreleased Nirvana songs and I'm sold. If you need more than that, here goes. Don't sell back your greatest hits though, "You Know You're Right" only appears here as a solo acoustic recording from 1994. This version may not rock as hard, but it is a lot more intense and personal. The box is basically in chronological order, so disc one is definitely gonna hit the spot for those of us (like Allan) who loved Bleach the best. Demos and acoustic tracks and live on the radio, this is all Holy Grail sort of stuff. Live versions of Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and "Moby Dick" done in suitably ramshackle chaotic Nirvana style. Live versions and demos of tracks that would show up on Bleach. But by far the most exciting tracks are the unreleased songs. "White Lace And Strange", "Help Me I'm Hungry", "Mrs. Butterworth", "Grey Goose", "Token Eastern Song" and more. Disc two has less unreleased tracks but lots of alternate versions of tracks from future records, as well as loads of b-sides (their split with the Jesus Lizard, maybe one of the best Nirvana songs ever) and covers (Wipers!) and a big ol' chunk of solo acoustic versions of classic tracks that sound even more intense and harrowing performed sans band. Disc three brings us close to the end. A handful of demos and more solo acoustic versions of songs you already know and love. Highlights include the track "Sappy" which was a secret track on a benefit compliation and was originally titled "Verse Chorus Verse" and is another of their best curiously relegated to being hidden uncredited at the end of a random comp ("Train In Vain" anyone?). Also "Marigold", the only Nirvana song sung by Dave Grohl, an obscure b-side, that hints at Grohl's Foo Fighter future. A sweet and jangly Vaselines cover and more. The set ends with a solo acoustic version of "All Apologies" and if you hadn't gotten all emotional yet, this one will definitely do it to you.
The DVD is pretty amazing as well and adds to the whole feeling of Kurt being an old friend who passed away. Mostly home movies, the first chunk is a party / rehearsal in Krist's mom's house and features the band rocking out in a panelled, carpeted basement, while various rockers sit around drinking beer. Cute and sad, and funny and sort of remarkable how amazing they were as a band even so early on. The rest of the DVD is made up of various tracks filmed live in various locations, from small clubs to huge arenas. Lots of hilarious onstage banter, lots of drum kit destroying, and lots of powerfully off kilter versions of all of the best Nirvana songs.
Beautifully packaged in an oversized hardcover book, on the front an embossed metal plate featuring the band in their Sunday best, as if they were at a funeral. Or a wake. Because as sad as this is, and as much as this makes us miss someone we felt we knew as well as our best friend, and a band who meant more to us than almost any in our memory, under the circumstances, we couldn't be happier.
What?! Aquarius picked a No Doubt release as a Record Of The Week? And it's a best-of type thing? What gives?
We're sure that's what a lot of you out there are thinking. Others, maybe, already are aware of what most 14-year old girls know -- No Doubt actually are pretty great. Some songs of theirs anyway. Heck, even some of my 34 year old friends into psych-folk and minimal electronic improv and black metal or whatnot will admit that No Doubt have some good songs. Which of course you'll find here, this being a singles collection after all! But it's the non-believers to whom this review is dedicated, those of you know don't know Gwen Stefani from ____________ [insert name of tennis pro or microorganism or something], and/or think that a 'best of' No Doubt is a concept not unlike a serious book devoted to the wit and wisdom of George W. Bush. So that's why we're recommending this brand new greatest hits type disc for you all. See, we're not trying to make you buy an actual No Doubt album, with all the filler that such top 40 products usually contain -- I don't have one of those either. But, after being around for like 17 years, they've got enough great singles to make one hell of an album, and this is it right here. You get the goodies from their last elpee Rock Steady (the irresistable "Hey Baby" produced by reggae legends Sly And Robbie, featuring the amazing Bounty Killer toasting over the break! and the just as catchy "Hella Good" produced by Nellee Hooper), plus of course their anthem "Just A Girl" from their star-making 1995 album Tragic Kingdom, Andee's favorite No Doubt song "Spiderwebs" with it's loping almost ballady verse and bouncing rollicking double time chorus, and their latest hit "It's My Life" (a Talk Talk cover! but re-done with fuzzed out bassbin rattling low end synth lines that make the song sound even better). And more, 15 tracks in all, many of them #1 hits. And for good reason. These songs fucking rule. If you can get past the aversion we all have to MTV fodder and Entertainment Weekly gossip and focus on just the music, No Doubt are pretty kick ass. So, even if you never thought you'd own a No Doubt album, or even an album by *any* band with a ska-punk background, just stop pretending and admit you like 'em and get this. You'll feel better (we did). And yes, there's the total teen heartache emotional button-pushing and an abundance of sleek candy apple pouts, but beneath the high gloss finish they've retained plenty of personality and a will of their own to make some damn infectious, well-crafted, smartly detailed pop songs. At the root of it all though, one of the best things about them is that they still burst with youthful exuberance, and this is more than evident in each of these singles. So c'mon, stop being snotty, you know you were secretly psyched when "Hey Baby" would come on in the supermarket, And if you were alone in the car, you know you cranked up "Hella Good" and sang along until the dude in the next car caught you. Oh. You didn't? Well you should! We do!
These days noise pop bands are a dime a dozen. And we could count the number of shoegaze bands popping up on one hand, if that hand had about thousands fingers, and to be fair, it's a sound we love, and so in many cases, we can be less than discerning, we just love hearing those thick coruscating guitars, the soaring melodies, the lush walls of sound, spaced out and dreamy and fuzzy and buzzy and blissy. So what is it exactly that makes a band stand out from the pack? Songs, sure, you can't be a pop band of any stripe without songs. But it's more than that. Something ineffable. Songs sure, and the sound, of course, but just as importantly there are a handful of intangibles that all have to fall into place perfectly. Or at least perfectly IMperfectly. And more often than not, it's not something that can be created consciously. All a band can really do, is to follow their hearts, create the sound they hear in their heads, and try their best to realize that sound, to render that sound in all the glorious shades and colors and textures it needs to become more than just music, to transcend and become something magical, something special.
And that happens more than one might think, or expect, enough monkeys with typewriters as the saying goes, or in this case enough punk rock kids with guitars and a 4 track. Most recently it was the amazing record by Bay Area outfit Weekend, whose record captured everything we love about this sound, and now there's this, the debut full length from female fronted shoegaze noisepoppers No Joy, which moniker be damned, is about the most gloriously joyful record we've heard in ages.
In some ways, No Joy's Ghost Blonde is the perfect compliment to that Weekend record, a distinctly feminine variation of the same formula, the overall sound is more dreampoppy and hazy, the vocals ethereal and ephemeral and is the perfect counterpoint to the bands thick wall of sound, infusing clean guitar jangle, a distinctly nineties indie rock vibe, all wound into a pretty perfect chunk of pure pop JOY.
If you're anything like us, it should only take about the first 60 seconds of album opener "Mediumship" thick crunchy jangle guitar wrapped in a field of wild tangled feedback, the vocals drifty and pretty, and then when the song kicks in, we're totally transported, crunchy, fuzzy, hooky, heavy, shoegazey-y, plenty of ooooh's and aaaaah's, the sort of song you never want to end, and that you'll find yourself playing over and over and over. Which pretty much applies to every track here.
There are definitely some broodier moments, and some abstract psychedelic ambient drift, even some slightly atonal Sonic Youth inspired guitar tangle, but those elements are smoothly woven into the group's hazy, softly noisy, girl groupish, crunchy, jangly shoegazey dream pop bliss.
Definite contender for pop record of the year, and a record which will no doubt send lots of folks scrambling to redo their prematurely finished year end lists! Rightfully so!
Yet another freaky transmission from whatever otherworldly outpost these mysterious NY free jazz / drone rock / outsider avant hippy tribalists call home, and lordy, is it a gloriously moody creep! A series of slithering, warbling, shimmering, stumbling psychedelic jams deftly constructed from grinding electric guitars, pounding krautrock rhythms, haunting quavering organs, alien little pizzicato melodies, all swirling and swaying in a dense murky haze. However, unlike the delicate ambience and unstructured abstraction of past NNCK efforts, Qvaris is downright rocking, with at least half the tracks held together by shuffling, stomping, swinging drum beats. Those tracks are especially reminiscent of krautrock legends German Oak, with their strangely claustrophobic vibe and dense unfunky funk. The less structured bits scattered throughout are sparkly kaleidoscopic flares, free floating stretches of smeary ambience and glistening radiance. The combination of the two, surprisingly lush and lustrous. All of Qvaris sounds much more composed and less improvised than most NNCK material, which makes the whole record sound less 'New Weird America' and more like some weird psych rock / post rock band whose propulsive rocking manages to get sort of twisted and tangled, into a deliriously druggy moonlit tumble through the looking glass.
Judging from the cryptic liner notes, the album artwork, and the video on the NNCK website (http://www.theserth.com), the new record seems to somehow concern a certain sacred object, that appears (at least to our untrained eyes) to be a sequined eggplant, which in some strange way makes perfect sense when you're dealing with the cracked vision of the No Neck Blues Band. But don't let the addition of sparkling vegetables to the mix throw you off, this is some of the most gorgeously dreamy and drone-y and drugged out psychedelic free folk noise rock you'll ever hear!
After years of desperately tracking down bootlegs, of ordering low quality cd-r's on eBay, of watching grainy YouTube clips and lamenting the ridiculous dearth of proper recordings, we're so happy that Bear Family has finally stepped up to give this country shoulda-been-superstar his due. But before we get into it, and before all you country haters skip to the next review, give the samples below a listen, specifically "Psycho", which gives this collection its title, easily one of the best country songs EVER. Certainly the most twisted and misanthropic. The story of the song's singer, singing to his mama, about how he killed his ex, her new beau, the dog, their son, the little girl next door (with a wrench by the way!), the song culminating in the realization that the singer was singing the whole time to his dead mother, who we can only assume he also killed. WTF?? But beyond being creepy and a little bit demented, it's also a gorgeous song, the guitar playing understated and perfect, the vocals heartfelt and dramatic, the song laced with all manner of little sonic filigree, it's hard for us to envision a more perfect country song. Sure there were plenty of murder ballads before, but this one takes the cake. But then there's the follow up, "Dolores", which finds the singer crooning to his wife, suggesting that she stay in the house, because there's a killer wandering the streets murdering women, and apparently Dolores is just the sort of woman he preys on, and again, at the end of the song, the singer is called to identify the body, not realizing that he killed his wife, and ending with him chastising his deceased wife, if only she had stayed inside. Crazy stuff, even now, but back in the day, this stuff was even more shocking. And while the majority of Eddie Noack's music wasn't nearly so demented, those two songs, "Psycho" especially, ended up being the songs he was mostly remembered for.
Which is a shame too, cuz he could have / should have been a country superstar, he wrote hits for Hank Snow (whose Omni reissue we reviewed a while back), all sorts of big country names recorded his songs, Lefty Frizell, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, his songs are AMAZING, and heck, he didn't even actually write "Psycho", but his is most definitely THEE definitive version, sadly, like many of the country greats, Noack's story is a sad one, and one that is explored in great detail in the liner notes (like all Bear Family reissues, the booklet is massive, like reading a mini book!), besides the usual hard luck story of general bad luck, constantly being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and success so close he could taste it, constantly just outside his grasp, there was of course problems with alcohol, which eventually led to him drinking himself to death, not to mention that BOTH his fourth wife and his mother committed suicide by shooting themselves in the heart. Wow, heavy stuff. And yet, he persevered, working in the song-poem industry (can you imagine having had Eddie Noack turn your poem into a song?!?!), eventually recording tons of tracks for a succession of tiny labels, and amongst those in the know, becoming a country / honky tonk icon. There is another Bear Family collection released recently, that focuses on his early tracks (which we can order for you if you like, it's a triple cd so it's kinda extra pricey), but this is the one that collects our favorite songs, the ones he recorded for K-Ark and Allstar in the mid to late sixties, and which of course include both "Psycho" and "Dolores". Yet as much as we love those songs, and those two tracks are ABSOLUTELY worth the price of admission alone, there's so much other great stuff here. Folks who collect Omni reissues, this easily could have been one of the best Omni reissues, in fact, we meant to email Omni, and try to get them to do a Noack compilation, cuz again, this is some of the best country music EVER. Besides "Psycho" and "Dolores", there's "Invisible Stripes" which is a fantastic song, but was the B-side to "Psycho" and thus got a little overshadowed. There's "Barbara Joy" which is another gem, and another track with morbid lyrics, sung, we can only assume from a man on death row, accused of rape, asking his mistress to admit that she was a willing participant in their tryst, to save him from death. Wow. But on the surface, it's pure classic country. And so it goes, the Johnny Cash like "Cotton Mill", the mournful ballad "The End Of The Line", plus lots of drinking songs of course, "Sleeping Like A Baby (With A Bottle In My Mouth)", "Beer Drinkin' Blues", not to mention some early tracks that feature Noack's song poem work, and even the songs the liner notes admit to not being so good, are in fact pretty great. But really, come for the "Psycho", the "Dolores", the "Barbara Joy", and stay for the rest. We were SO excited that there was finally a proper Eddie Noack collection, and we've been listening to nothing but. And even if country's not your thing, know that over the years, "Psycho" has been covered by all sorts of folks, including Elvis Costello and the Cramps! Noack's songs (and his cover of "Psycho" especially) almost transcending genre, classic twisted songsmithery, that has made some of these songs obsessions of ours for years!
The Bear Family packaging is fantastic, housed in a full color digipak, with a huge booklet affixed to the inside, tons of rare photos, interviews, lyrics, and creepy new artwork by artist Reinhard Kleist, on the cover, and inside, illustrating both "Psycho" and "Dolores". So totally and utterly recommended. Reissue of the year hands down!!!
Oh, and if you're a vinyl only type, well, this just on cd, but we do also have a tiny, tiny handful of the Eddie Noack 7" single that Bear Family put out along with this, featuring "Psycho" on the A side and "Dolores" on the flip, just FYI.
When reviewing a record you've had and treasured and loved for years, or decades, the pressure to do it justice is immense, so much so, that it seems almost impossible. But once in a while you gotta try. So here we go. Two of the MOST essential punk rock / post punk records ever, recently remastered and reissued, which gives us the opportunity to not only gush about records that have been on constant rotation since we were in our early twenties, records that totally changed the way we listened to music, but to also hopefully turn on the few folks who may have missed out, or who may not have even been alive when these records came out.
Nomeansno, from Canada, most folks know the name, but not everyone has actually heard these guys, but almost every single person we know who has, was never the same. The sound is super rhythmic and mathy, punk rock, but totally proggy as well, the focal point is on the bass and drums, manned by two brothers, Rob and John Wright, one of, if not THEE, tightest rhythm sections ever, the bass lines thick and throbbing and distorted, the drums chaotic but so tight and precise, the guitar, handled by a member who always remained unnamed - "Someone (but we're not sure who)" credited with "other things" on one record, or "none of your fucking business" on another - which is ironic cuz the guitar playing besides being BAD ASS was also so integral to the sound, they were a punk rock band after all. And the vocals, super high in the mix, dramatic, howled, crooned and yelped, melodic but raw and rough, sometimes sort of spoken, but always sharp tongued, spewing some of the best and funniest and intense lyrics. And as always, none of that would mean shit if the songs weren't great, and these songs are GREAT, so hooky and heavy and weird, a testament to these guys is that even the most obtuse tangled whatthefuck jam will stay lodged in your head forever.
Then there's the funky aspect, which we had planned to discuss at length, but listening to this again, the funkiness is implied, subtle, based entirely on the fact that almost all the songs are bass driven, and some are weirdly stripped down to just bass and drums and vocals, but this is not bullshit funky, this is elements of funk used the way they were meant to be, mixed into a churning, super complex, angular, jagged set of songs that manage to be both heavy and crushing and confusionally complex while still being poppy and hook filled and so goddamn catchy.
We tried to pick just one of these reissues to focus on, but eventually could only get it down to two, so both seemed like ideal candidates for Record Of The Week, especially considering that at least half of the folks here freaked the fuck out when we got these back in. We'll talk about each separately, but we have to suggest just buying both, you won't regret it, they're equally classic and timeless and heavy and catchy and far out and freaking awesome!
The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed is a compilation of sorts, collecting the album Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed from 1988 and The Day Everything Became Nothing 12" from that same year, but for most of us, these two have always been bundled together so The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed plays like one long, surprisingly cohesive record. And right out of the gate it's a killer, with the manic bass heavy groove of "The Day Everything Became Nothing", with crunchy guitar and over the top vocals, and a dense super tangled arrangement, and seconds after hearing it for the first time, we knew these guys were gonna be our new favorite band, and other punk rock bands were gonna have to step it up a notch. We could seriously go track by track, it's been long enough now that every single track here is seared into our brains, the kind of record where even the spaces between songs are part of the flow of the album, but we can definitely pick out a few highlights.
"Dark Ages" might just be one of our favorite songs ever, from its super mathy freaked out intro, to the loping hooky bass groove, the minimal guitar flourishes, the killer chorus, the super weird drum part, it's like some insane progged out punk rock opera crammed down into 5 minutes, just listen to the sound sample, if you're not smitten after this one, we might just have to give up on you! "And That's Sad" is a looping super complex rhythmic workout, with some cool, moody minor key breaks, that all gradually build right back up to the frenetic freakout that opened the track. If you slowed down "Small Parts Isolated And Destroyed", it would probably sound like Harvey Milk, a super spare, sludge-y stop start work out, that sounds like no other band at the time, or hell even now. "Victory" is a brooding drift of low slung bass, and muted tribal drumming, but as with all NMN, these long passages are separated by unbearably catchy choruses and here too, some tangled mathiness, that never seems showy or flashy or unreasonably complex, it's how these songs needed to sound, every part, no matter how weird or superfluous seeming, is perfectly places, and a few listens in no one could disagree. "Teresa, Give Me That Knife" is about as punk as these guys get, furious, frenetic, blasting drums, frantic guitars, with an insanely technical chorus, and a haunting creeped out prechorus, that is just as catchy as any other part of the track. And then there's "Real Love", most folks' favorite, a weird sort of heavy punk rock doom ballad, big crunchy guitars, long sprawling breakdowns, some crushing drumming, the chorus a lumbering almost waltz, with dramatic howled vox, which switch to a spoken croon in the 'verses', finishing off with a massive blown out super heavy sprawling outro, and again, the song, as unlikely as it maybe sounds on the surface, or with a glancing listen, is impossibly catchy, and somehow having heard it maybe hundreds of times, we're still not anywhere close to being sick of it.
Easily an all time, lifetime, desert island top 10 favorite for sure. And thus, just about as recommended as a record can be!
When reviewing a record you've had and treasured and loved for years, or decades, the pressure to do it justice is immense, so much so, that it seems almost impossible. But once in a while you gotta try. So here we go. Two of the MOST essential punk rock / post punk records ever, recently remastered and reissued, which gives us the opportunity to not only gush about records that have been on constant rotation since we were in our early twenties, records that totally changed the way we listened to music, but to also hopefully turn on the few folks who may have missed out, or who may not have even been alive when these records came out.
Nomeansno, from Canada, most folks know the name, but not everyone has actually heard these guys, but almost every single person we know who has, was never the same. The sound is super rhythmic and mathy, punk rock, but totally proggy as well, the focal point is on the bass and drums, manned by two brothers, Rob and John Wright, one of, if not THEE, tightest rhythm sections ever, the bass lines thick and throbbing and distorted, the drums chaotic but so tight and precise, the guitar, handled by a member who always remained unnamed - "Someone (but we're not sure who)" credited with "other things" on one record, or "none of your fucking business" on another - which is ironic cuz the guitar playing besides being BAD ASS was also so integral to the sound, they were a punk rock band after all. And the vocals, super high in the mix, dramatic, howled, crooned and yelped, melodic but raw and rough, sometimes sort of spoken, but always sharp tongued, spewing some of the best and funniest and intense lyrics. And as always, none of that would mean shit if the songs weren't great, and these songs are GREAT, so hooky and heavy and weird, a testament to these guys is that even the most obtuse tangled whatthefuck jam will stay lodged in your head forever.
Then there's the funky aspect, which we had planned to discuss at length, but listening to this again, the funkiness is implied, subtle, based entirely on the fact that almost all the songs are bass driven, and some are weirdly stripped down to just bass and drums and vocals, but this is not bullshit funky, this is elements of funk used the way they were meant to be, mixed into a churning, super complex, angular, jagged set of songs that manage to be both heavy and crushing and confusionally complex while still being poppy and hook filled and so goddamn catchy.
We tried to pick just one of these reissues to focus on, but eventually could only get it down to two, so both seemed like ideal candidates for Record Of The Week, especially considering that at least half of the folks here freaked the fuck out when we got these back in. We'll talk about each separately, but we have to suggest just buying both, you won't regret it, they're equally classic and timeless and heavy and catchy and far out and freaking awesome!
Wrong, from 1989, was the follow up to the life changing Small Parts album and The Day Everything 12" from the year before, and guess what, it too was life changing, managing to take the sounds and songs from the records before and make them heavier, more complex, more intense. The opener "It's Catching Up" is just so heavy and intense and brutal, the bass about as thick and distorted as it can get and still nail the flurry of rapid fire notes, the drums are devastating, not sure why this guy wasn't a drum god to all the aspiring drummers out there (although he was to Andee, who did get his autograph way back in the day), the guitars sharp and jagged, all wrapped around an insanely catchy hook, and somehow they manage to make it sound punk as fuck at the same time. "The Tower" might be our favorite here (amongst a record full of favorites), with its dirgey Black Flag vibe, more impossibly thick and distorted bass, and a weird staccato chorus, with one of the strangest and most anguished vocal parts ever, but so hooky, which leads right into a killer tangle of head spinning mathiness. Another favorite (like we said, they ALL rule), is "Rags And Bones", with easily one of the best bass lines ever, and some tangled complex drumming to go with it, some bizarre lyrics and a total pure pop chorus, of course doused in distortion and punked up a bit. "Brainless Wonder" is impossibly dense and heavy, like a skipping Black Flag record, before it slips into something a bit more groovy. "Two Lips, Two Lungs And One Tongue" is a short sharp blast of weird vocal / instrumental tangle, with the band locked into the repeated titular phrase. And then there's "All Lies" which is sort of the "Real Love" of Wrong, an epic punk rock prog rock sort-of-ballad, long sprawling moody breakdowns set between dense tribal math rock workouts, moving and emotional and dramatic, all building slowly to a killer super catchy stop start chorus.
Phew, we're just about gushed out. If you can't tell, we love this record A LOT, and The Day Everything Became Isolated And Destroyed, both are easily all time favorites, desert island discs for you list making nerds, essential listening for anyone into punk rock, post punk, pop punk, heaviness, hookiness, great music... as we were listening to this again, Allan asked me why bands weren't good anymore, and I couldn't really think of an answer. Absolutely and totally and utterly recommended.
This remastered reissued has two bonus tracks from a 7" released by Mr Wrong, aka NMN bassist Rob Wright, which sound a whole lot like the record proper!
Land is the first full length from this all female British psychedelic noise pop crew, who have previously shared a split with another aQ fave, nineties shoegaze revivalists The History Of Apple Pie, and while their sounds aren't all that familiar, they're definitely complimentary.
And fans of that sort of dreamy jangly retro-indie rock sound will definitely find much to love here, a sound reminiscent of groups like Stereolab, Electrelane, Lush, Curve, and the like, but these ladies give the psychedelic space rock boy's club a serious run for their money as well, fusing those super melodic pop elements to seriously heady stretches of droned out, motorik mesmer, dense hypno-rock grooves wrapped in distorted spidery guitars, the group slipping effortlessly from straight psychedelic indie pop, to explosive heart-of-the-sun, out-jams that, minus the vocals, would likely elicit comparisons to heavier psych/space/neo-kraut rockers like Wooden Ships, White Hills, Carlton Melton or even Loop. In fact there are plenty of moments on Land that sound like total Loop worship, channeling the taking-drugs-to-make-music-to-take-drugs-by grooviness of Spacemen 3 and cranking it way up and looping (yup) those supercharged sounds into a druggier, more driving sprawl.
But at their heart, Novella are definitely a pop group, with a handful of hooks to die for, with pretty much every track here boasting some earwormy melody, some fantastic vocals, lovely harmonies, which just happen to be often paired with some groovy, fuzzy, jammy psychedelic trip out. It's a pretty stunning combo, and one that will likely have pop kids, space nerds and psych freeks equally smitten. Slipcased cd or vinyl with 'bonus' 7" featuring two tracks also on the cd.
Before I get into any critique of this, I have to say that Salt Marie Celeste is easily the best Nurse With Wound record in years!
Throughout the 25 years of Nurse With Wound recordings, Steven Stapleton has actively pursued audio manifestations of Surrealism, often hypothesizing on what Surrealists like Andre Breton or Tristan Tzara might do if they had access to contemporary recording technology but still maintaining their bastardizations of Victorian aesthetics. Recently on recordings like Man with the Woman Face or Alice the Goon, NWW embraced obtuse free associations to build dense sound puzzles of dead-end jokes, absurd parataxis, and general confusion. However, Salt Marie Celeste is far simpler an application of Surrealism, as Stapleton renders NWW a vehicle for psychological horror. For this album, Stapleton and studio wizard Colin Potter (who has been the only other collaborator with NWW for the past couple of releases) have drawn from Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic" for inspiration; however, NWW never dwells in the lulling pathos which characterizes Bryars' composition. Instead, Salt Marie Celeste is a relentless album which imagines the tidal currents around the Titanic's demise as an inhumanly cold force steadily bringing the doomed ship to the bottom of the ocean. Through a series of looping mechanisms, Stapleton and Potter build a massive orchestration of fluctuations which swell and dissipate with an unnerving regularity. The central element to the compostition is an ominous wave of electronic sound which constantly tumbles forward. Fans of NWW will recognize this from the super limited edition Music from the Horse Hospital 2cd, yet done much more effectively here. Wooden creaks and moans emerge from this gravity well of sound, before breaking up and disappearing amidst the tidal wave of intensity. For the references to the Titanic (or at least in Bryars' composition), Salt Marie Celeste conjures suffocating and bleak images of ghost ships mysteriously appearing on the horizon.
Regardless, this is clearly one of Nurse With Wound's best and should not be missed!
There was an old Nurse With Wound LP which Steve Stapleton (the madman behind NWW) sold to the old Rough Trade distribution in the UK for $99.99 simply because he knew of glitch in the accounting system that would cause the whole system to crash when anyone bought his record. Not quite as maddening a prospect here, but still he has released all of the unused tracks from the Rock 'n' Roll Station sessions across a double cd and a single piece of vinyl... Yes, there are different tracks on the vinyl and the cd (the 2nd disc is the complete Rock 'n' Roll Station album), making the consumer decisions of which to buy (if not both) somewhat problematic. Musically, it is 'rock' as NWW probably will ever get, with a solid recognizable pulse that punctuates the dadaist noises that is oddly similar to a Joe Meek with a drum machine. Easily one of the best releases from NWW in a very long time... and if it matters... of the AQ staff, Byram and Marc took home the CDs and Jim got the vinyl.
Around here at aQ we live for the moments of musical discovery that seem to appear out of nowhere. On a rare occasion those moments are created by an artifact dropped off in the store by the creator himself. In our age of internet buzz and blogosphere strip mining, it's exciting and refreshing to be floored by a piece of proper wax passed on in person, without us knowing a damn thing about it beforehand. This record represents one of these moments, and Laws, the brand new lp from LA's William Marshall, aka Octavius, is really blowing our minds right now, so much so that we absolutely had to jump on the chance to make it record of the week! A dizzying assemblage of fucked up outsider post witch house, damaged and deranged avant industrial and whispered, hiss-wreathed melancholic brooding downer experi-techno-pop!
Laws is a multidimensional excursion through the depths of urban isolationism. The dead dreams of metropolis living and lifelong plans falling apart seem to be woven into the sonic fabric. You're all alone in this burned out city, and it's a dark, dark time. The sound is grinding, buzzing, thumping and industrial. The beats are constructed with rusted rebar shards, rattling about the charnel house floor, like some subwoofer-shook bones long forgotten. Octavius' caustic and restrained sound world creates an intensely claustrophobic mood. On tracks like "Apartments" and "Of Mask and Money", the sounds of sharpening knives and blistering white noise blasts commingle with a tense, gasping for breath vocal delivery. As the songs flow onward, layer upon layer of noisy mechanical skree stack up against beautifully stark and forlorn melodies. Haunting, discordant synth stabs add subtle harmonic depth to the tunes, as the vocals, seemingly hacked to bits, syllables left out or cut short, writhe to the beat. The sounds are abrasive and damaged and robotic, but there is never too much going on at one time and everything sits in the mix in such a way that the songs really breathe. It's got that hypnotic sonic subtlety of Berlin era Bowie mixed with the pulsating noisy gnash of Throbbing Gristle. Speaking of Bowie, one of the raddest moments on Laws comes in the form of a "cover" of "Breaking Glass". The low slung, heroin sheen funk of the original is replaced by a fiercely mechanical drum machine stomp, some heavy as fuck JK Flesh-like digitally distorted guitar chugs bashing with the beat, while cascading doppler blips and scraping synths swirl around the stereo field. The only recognizable element are the lyrics, although delivered in the by now signature manner in which Octavius uses his voice, and that is to say fractured and corrosive, hissing hypnosis. Totally bent and completely AMAZING!
There are moments of dark meditation, such as "CCC CCC" and "331 155". Moody, drifting soundscapes of splintered metallic klang, ping-ponging singing bowls, bolstered with aphotic, creepy crawly Carpenter-like synth drones. Beautifully oscillating cinematic ambience laid over what sounds like a far off string section unfurling some somber, elegiac melody. Psychic TV's "Silver and Gold" comes to mind, except with a mechanical bass drum throb twisting beneath the surface. These hazy, murky moments of sonic darkness serve as tension builders. Haunting and anxious and mesmerizing respites from the churning corrosive elements that make up the bulk of Laws.
"Liars & Thieves" is definitely the centerpiece of Laws. Abusive electro-psychosis, uncomfortable and polluted with an industrialized cacophony, and scrap metal pounding rhythms, Octavius allows his reflections on failure and anonymity to unravel in a harrowing, stream of conscious cypher. Imagine Tricky rapping over Coil's "Fire Of The Green Dragon". Paranoid and demented, the noise and words melding to create a bleak miasma of isolation. Moody and tense and wholly original.
Laws pushes all the right buttons for us. It references the WAVES (minimal/NO/cold/synth), without getting mired in any particular sub-genre. It's noisy and abrasive and grim, reminding us of the gnarlier moments of Coil and TG, but produced in such a subtle manner that new layers of sound present themselves with each listen. It's got enough Suicide like swagger as not to get totally bogged down in its mechanized, vitriol pummel. Hypnotic and tensely mesmerizing, the album as a whole is so consistent in its vibe, we find ourselves listening to it over and over and over again, just to get lost, deeper and deeper, in its seedy sonic underbelly.
Packaged lovingly in a minimalist, silver embossed white card stock sleeve, with a beautiful 16 page book of lyrics as well as some killer collage work by Brooklyn based artist Justin Sloane. Do yourself a favor and snatch this twisted gem up quick, really some of the most mind fuckingly special and original music we've heard around here in a long time!
Listening to Help, it's almost impossible to hear anything but mere traces of the chaotic noise rock path John Dwyer followed to make it to Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS, and Ohsees), but it's that noisy past, and penchant for musical shit stirring, that informs the jangly garage pop on Help, and transforms the band's jangle and shuffle and pound into near perfect buzzy fuzzy catchy retro pop, and makes it easily the best Oh Sees record yet. And a definite contended for (garage) pop record of the year.
Most of us were introduced to Dwyer via his two piece noise rock costume rock combo Pink And Brown (after brief stints in some well known Providence outfits), but unlike most of the costumed joke bands at the time, P&B offered some serious songsmithery along with the unhinged live shows and audience baiting. A brief stint drumming for SF grindlords Burmese led directly into the band that brought Dwyer to worldwide attention, the Coachwhips. Arguably one of the best live bands around, the Coachwhips made up for what they lacked in actual songs with sweat and alcohol soaked performances, utter chaos, and sometimes literally, ultra destructive houseshows. Coachwhips shows were all about the energy, the vibe, jumping around, flailing wildly, getting wrecked and having a blast. Sometimes though, that energy was difficult to translate to home listening. Take away the sweaty throng and the deafening volume and, well why would you want to do that?
And so came the Oh Sees, originally called OCS, and a double cd release on Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, essentially a solo record, one disc of folky fluttery lo-fi twang flecked pop, another of corrosive textured noise experiments, which ended up being, for many of us, one of our favorite post Pink And Brown Dwyer documents. OCS transformed into The Oh Sees and became a real band, and seemed poised to follow in the sonic footsteps of the Coachwhips, stripped down garage rock, super lo-fi, lost of brittle high end, yelped distorted vocals, tribal drumming, but there was definitely something more, more refined, more catchy, more timeless sounding, something much more than garage rock, a sound that reminded us of sixties girl groups, of Phil Spector productions, raw and primal, but lush and expansive and catchy. But that catchy lush side of the Oh Sees remained hidden beneath squalls of tweeter abuse and fractured effects, a wall of fuzz and buzz more than an actual wall of sound. Until now.
Help finds the band making their first record for garage rock stalwarts In The Red, which is ironic as this is Thee Oh Sees' least typically garage rock record yet. Instead, the sound is total pop, plucked fresh from a time capsule buried in the sixties, the guitars jangle as much as crunch, lots of reverb, the vocals wreathed in a haze of delay, lots of female vox, the choruses are lush, the drums are still tribal, but much more measured, often quite spare, the arrangements though are anything but classic, sometimes getting super abstract, but never losing their catchiness, sometimes adding all sorts of extra distorted overload, but just as quickly slipping into something smooth and groovy. Minus the weird moments and the fucked up productions, some of these songs do really sound like they were just transported forward four decades.
"Meat Step Lively" starts off all Cramps-y, with a fuzzy grinding main riff, simple pounding rhythm, but adds some awesome female vocals and background 'ooooohs', some spidery lead guitars, and coolest of all breaks it down with about a minute to go into a swinging sixties smoke-y jazzy flute flecked groove. "The Turn Around" is a minute of blown out drum damage and fractured effects, but wrapped around a sing songy main riff, and some cool distorted and reverbed vox, in total Guided By Voices fashion, they truncate what could have been the jam of the record, and launch into "Can You See", which is all slithery and washed out, with angelic background vocals, shuffling drums, and a cool dreamy bridge, but the whole thing still manages to sound ominous and intense and weirdly sexy.
The record closes with "Peanut Butter Oven", which we first heard on the recent (and sadly now out of print) Awesome Vistas 12", and it's obvious why this was the single, it definitely is THE jam of the record, with it's simple stripped down jangle, workmanlike drum beat, and soaring minor key strings, and let's not forget the gorgeous harmony vocals draped over the singing strings and that irresistible main riff.
And so it goes, every track here is a gem, each one offers up something new, some twisted take on that classic sixties garage rock sound, but it's that sound revved up and filtered through Dwyer's gloriously cracked pop sensibilities, bathed in buzz and fuzz or stripped way down and left shimmery and crystalline, sometimes wrapped in HUGE hooks or allowed to simmer and slither, the catchiness subtle yet so irresistible, and unlike past efforts, even at its noisiest, the noise element seems more an organic part of the sound, and is often shaped into something barely recognizable as noisy.
We knew Dwyer and company had it in them, and now they've proven it, BIG TIME. Dying to see what they come up with next, if they could possibly one up this here disc, but hell, for now, Help has us way satisfied. And records like these are exactly why they invented that repeat button on your cd player. Folks with turntable will just have to get up and flip the record over and over and over, again and again and again.
WAY recommended.
This one shouldn't need to much of a description, these have been flying off the shelves since we first got them in. Originally intended to be a Record Store Day release, this double lp collects essentially ALL of the Oh Sees singles: The Carol Anne 7", Peanut Butter Oven 12", the split 7" with Paul Cary, the split 7" with The Intelligence, the Grave Blockers ep, the Tidal Wave single, the Blood In Your Ear single, the Sub Pop single, the tour split 7" with Jay Reatard, as well as a few previously unreleased surprises. The first lp is actually the same stuff that was on the bonus cd that came with the Zork's Tape Bruise lp released on Kill Shamen, while the second lp is newly compiled. It's a pretty bad ass collection, Thee Oh Sees were and are definitely one of those bands who seem to do their best rocking in the short format, and these are definitely some of our favorite Oh Sees jams. Absolutely essential for fans of course, and newbies, well, we can't really think of a better place to start.
Need more? Here are several excerpts from reviews of a few of the singles included in this collection:
Blood In Your Ear: Some fuzzy, distorted lo-fi sixties pop infused garage rock that totally rocks. Crunchy, distorted, fuzzy, groovy, doused in reverb and delay, the vocals a distorted yelp, the guitars all jangly, this time around there's even some harmonica, stomping and hooky and kick ass. That's just the A side. The flipside just might be one of our favorite Oh Sees jams yet, all brooding and power poppy, reminding us of the Wipers, but with strange bloopy keyboards, and a weary washed out minor key vibe, so super catchy, we find ourselves humming it through the days, and running to the front of the store when it gets played. Awesome.
Peanut Butter Oven: Full of that sixties big beat cavernous murky wall of feedback pop that we love. "Kingsmeat" is all melancholy Farfisa over upbeat rhythms and ringing feedback tones before turning up the Bo Diddley pace for "The Freak Was Clean", before the almost shoe-gazy "Kids In Cars" winds us down quite nicely.
Tidal Wave: Totally perfect, ultra catchy blasts of pure garage pop genius!
Split with The Intelligence: The two Ohsees songs end before you know it but they're so good and infectious that we've just been playing them over and over and over.
You get the picture. Super limited too, of course. Pressed on red and green vinyl, and housed in a topless magic marker fake tattoo Oh Sees fan boy sleeve. Nice! We have a bunch, but it's sold out, and the label is in the process of making more, so if you order one, and we've already run out, might take a week or two to get them back in.
Another very affordable, but limited, 2-fer cassette from Thee Oh Sees, this time with both 2008's full band debut The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In, and 2009's Help (an AQ Record Of The Week!). Limited to 250 copies, act fast!!!
Here's our massive original reviews of those two records...
Master's Bedroom: The Oh Sees have changed a lot since they were the OCS. Back then, Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer had his Coachwhips, a wild sweat soaked, garage stomp party, furious and frenzied, throbbing and in-the-red, so OCS was the outlet for Dwyer to explore the other sides of his multiple musical personality. The debut OCS record (released on tUMULt) was two discs, one of mostly solo acoustic guitar, a super intimate bedroom folk, all dusty and crackly, warm and super intimate, bits of damaged Casio, warbly old vinyl, damaged FX, lovingly crafted into some sort of heartfelt lo-fi sonic loveletter. The other disc was more noisy, super abstract, blown out blasts of free jazz weirdness, drones and rumbles, howling feedback, white noise, pink noise, and every color in between. OCS 2, 3 and 4 followed a similar pattern, a sort of lonely lo-fi homebrewed indie folk, off kilter and melancholy, wistful, damaged and dreamy.
But with the dissolution of the Coachwhips, came a name change for OCS, now The Ohsees, or sometimes The Oh Sees, a change in sound, and a transformation into a full band.
While not as freaked out and furious as the Coachwhips, the Oh Sees new record sounds more like the long lost CW's than any of Dwyer's records since. Garage-y jangle, shuffling drums, the vocals distorted, the songs simple and stripped down, but the big difference is that here Dwyer splits the vocals with bandmate Brigid Dawson, the result is truly endearing harmonies, with Dwyer often the wailing counterpoint to Dawson's sweet angelic croon. And songs that sometimes sound like alien versions of that classic Phil Spector girl group sound. But at its heart, the sound is still fuzzy and buzzy and skeletal, groovy and garage rocky, wouldn't be hard to imagine this disc on In The Red, or see these guys on tour with the Dirtbombs or the Country Teasers or the Husbands. (Bonus points for having a song about aQ pal and local artist extraordinaire Maria Forde!)
Help: Listening to Help, it's almost impossible to hear anything but mere traces of the chaotic noise rock path John Dwyer followed to make it to Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS, and Ohsees), but it's that noisy past, and penchant for musical shit stirring, that informs the jangly garage pop on Help, and transforms the band's jangle and shuffle and pound into near perfect buzzy fuzzy catchy retro pop, and makes it easily the best Oh Sees record yet. And a definite contended for (garage) pop record of the year.
Most of us were introduced to Dwyer via his two piece noise rock costume rock combo Pink And Brown (after brief stints in some well known Providence outfits), but unlike most of the costumed joke bands at the time, P&B offered some serious songsmithery along with the unhinged live shows and audience baiting. A brief stint drumming for SF grindlords Burmese led directly into the band that brought Dwyer to worldwide attention, the Coachwhips. Arguably one of the best live bands around, the Coachwhips made up for what they lacked in actual songs with sweat and alcohol soaked performances, utter chaos, and sometimes literally, ultra destructive houseshows. Coachwhips shows were all about the energy, the vibe, jumping around, flailing wildly, getting wrecked and having a blast. Sometimes though, that energy was difficult to translate to home listening. Take away the sweaty throng and the deafening volume and, well why would you want to do that?
And so came the Oh Sees, originally called OCS, and a double cd release on Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, essentially a solo record, one disc of folky fluttery lo-fi twang flecked pop, another of corrosive textured noise experiments, which ended up being, for many of us, one of our favorite post Pink And Brown Dwyer documents. OCS transformed into The Oh Sees and became a real band, and seemed poised to follow in the sonic footsteps of the Coachwhips, stripped down garage rock, super lo-fi, lost of brittle high end, yelped distorted vocals, tribal drumming, but there was definitely something more, more refined, more catchy, more timeless sounding, something much more than garage rock, a sound that reminded us of sixties girl groups, of Phil Spector productions, raw and primal, but lush and expansive and catchy. But that catchy lush side of the Oh Sees remained hidden beneath squalls of tweeter abuse and fractured effects, a wall of fuzz and buzz more than an actual wall of sound. Until now.
Help finds the band making their first record for garage rock stalwarts In The Red, which is ironic as this is Thee Oh Sees' least typically garage rock record yet. Instead, the sound is total pop, plucked fresh from a time capsule buried in the sixties, the guitars jangle as much as crunch, lots of reverb, the vocals wreathed in a haze of delay, lots of female vox, the choruses are lush, the drums are still tribal, but much more measured, often quite spare, the arrangements though are anything but classic, sometimes getting super abstract, but never losing their catchiness, sometimes adding all sorts of extra distorted overload, but just as quickly slipping into something smooth and groovy. Minus the weird moments and the fucked up productions, some of these songs do really sound like they were just transported forward four decades.
"Meat Step Lively" starts off all Cramps-y, with a fuzzy grinding main riff, simple pounding rhythm, but adds some awesome female vocals and background 'ooooohs', some spidery lead guitars, and coolest of all breaks it down with about a minute to go into a swinging sixties smoke-y jazzy flute flecked groove. "The Turn Around" is a minute of blown out drum damage and fractured effects, but wrapped around a sing songy main riff, and some cool distorted and reverbed vox, in total Guided By Voices fashion, they truncate what could have been the jam of the record, and launch into "Can You See", which is all slithery and washed out, with angelic background vocals, shuffling drums, and a cool dreamy bridge, but the whole thing still manages to sound ominous and intense and weirdly sexy.
The record closes with "Peanut Butter Oven", which we first heard on the recent (and sadly now out of print) Awesome Vistas 12", and it's obvious why this was the single, it definitely is THE jam of the record, with it's simple stripped down jangle, workmanlike drum beat, and soaring minor key strings, and let's not forget the gorgeous harmony vocals draped over the singing strings and that irresistible main riff.
And so it goes, every track here is a gem, each one offers up something new, some twisted take on that classic sixties garage rock sound, but it's that sound revved up and filtered through Dwyer's gloriously cracked pop sensibilities, bathed in buzz and fuzz or stripped way down and left shimmery and crystalline, sometimes wrapped in HUGE hooks or allowed to simmer and slither, the catchiness subtle yet so irresistible, and unlike past efforts, even at its noisiest, the noise element seems more an organic part of the sound, and is often shaped into something barely recognizable as noisy.
We knew Dwyer and company had it in them, and now they've proven it, BIG TIME. Dying to see what they come up with next, if they could possibly one up this here disc, but hell, for now, Help has us way satisfied. And records like these are exactly why they invented that repeat button on your cd player. Folks with turntable will just have to get up and flip the record over and over and over, again and again and again.
WAY recommended.
The long overdue reissue of the Rifts anthology, which was originally released on cd by No Fun in 2009 as a collection of the first three vinyl releases from Oneohtrix Point Never (Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), and now also sports a half dozen or so tracks from OPN's constant stream of cassette and cd-r releases, many of which never made their way to aQuarius. That was a double CD, which now gets expanded to FIVE pieces of vinyl, with even MORE unreleased material!
Here's a bit of a rehash of what we've said about those earlier records (and which would apply to the bonus material as well): Oneohtrix Point Never is a curious resuscitation of progressive electronics by Daniel Lopatin who so far has not strayed into the dodgy waters of vapid ambient-lite found in so so many New Age records from the late '70s and '80s. His vision is a conscious nostalgic trip into the cosmic drones of Klaus Schulze and the lazer-ping melodies of John Carpenter. The seven tracks from Betrayed In The Octagon ripple with densely layered electronic swoosh and sweep, with more of a sci-fi sound design feel than anything else. It's not entirely ominous in these emanations of analog synths, but a gloominess persists just beneath these tumbling oscillations of electric drone. A few tracks bubble and percolate with clunky, geometric arpeggiations and major chord melodies which have all of the charm of an '80s John Carpenter filmscore, or for that matter a Zombi album of today (although admittedly not as well produced).
Above a solar-powered electric hum, the tracks from Zones Without People interweave poly-synth pulses which insistently push up against each other, collapsing into the electronic sunrise which is the next track of slowly building arpeggiations and sequences situated on top of cybernetically pastoral ambience. When Lopatin gets to the title track of Zones Without People, his laser beam pings have calmed into a sublimely sad offering, easily the best thing that he's produced to date. This isn't to say that the rest of these tracks are duds. Far from it, as a wigged-out squiggling collage splatters into cosmic arpeggiations and stargazing drones to amazing effect.
A set of gaseous ambient chords opens Russian Mind and could have been lifted from an early Boards Of Canada release, although the lack of IDM-rhythms to the Oneohtrix Point Never's electronics steer this work in an entirely different direction. His bright chimes of arpeggio poly-synth tones build asymmetrical waves that are as compelling as they are cheesy. But that's always been the point, to terminally obliterate the lines between a high-brow piece of Terry Riley minimalism and a lowest common denominator of sub-Eno ambient drivel. Here, Lopatin tends to be a bit more stratospheric in nature, with these sublime arcs of vapor trails passing through moonlit nightscapes, all redrawn in neon hyperdelic colors.
Beautifully packaged in a stunning heavy box, with eye popping new artwork, each one hand numbered, and LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!!
Certainly one of the best things about working at a record store is coming across new bands that give you that undefinable, but very real feeling in your stomach where you can't imagine having ever gone on without THIS band. Even better is discovering something from the distant past (not too distant in this case), something whose existence could have eluded you forever had good fortune not smiled down in the form of a reissue.
Onna were the Japanese duo of Keizou Miyanishi and Mafuyu Hiroki, whose 1983 7" has thankfully been rescued from obscurity by the mighty Holy Mountain label, and has been blowing minds left and right here at aQ. One of the coolest things about this record is just how surprising and unexpected it all was, the whole "1983" part in particular. With a nod to the past but no doubt out of place in the early 80s, Onna were without question inhabiting a world of their own. The most obvious point of reference soundwise would be legendary psych/noise enigma Les Rallizes Denudes, especially in the vocal department. This is a very good thing for anyone who loves those somewhat lazy, partially detached, Japanese sung vocals of groups like LRD and LSD-March.
The use of a drum machine keeps these two songs pulsing like a mechanical heartbeat, which when combined with the fairly free form guitars, definitely gives this record its own vibe. Side 1 begins with a meditative two chord lament before noisy, white hot guitar squalls begin creeping about in the distance as simple and repetitive bass lines keep the foundation strong and focused. The second track introduces catchy psych guitar chords with a machine modified quasi-girl group drumbeat, the bass again holding things down nice and steady. The heavily reverberated strummed guitars bubble about as fake cymbal explosions recede and return over and over again, until a prolonged fadeout is replaced by a locked groove note that keeps this record spinning endlessly, just as it should.
The lack of information on Onna only adds to the mystery (and just a note, they are not affiliated with those other Japanese psych monsters Christine 23 Onna). PSF has issued an album by the group called Katawa, which we will definitely be paying close attention to after this 7". Until then, the only things we have to judge the duo by are the perplexing ugly/beautiful cover featuring an androgynous female figure lying naked on a bed (is she sick and decaying? is she just hanging out in bed? waiting for a lover?), and more importantly, their music, which we cannot recommend highly enough. Seriously, how many 7" singles would receive this much of a write up? You know this one is a winner.
PS for the non-turntable-havin' folks, apparently these tracks are also to appear on an upcoming cd collection Holy Mountain's putting out with other Onna stuff...
The first thing you notice is the amazing die-cut artwork. Orange and red overlapping circles each with target like concentric inner circles, cut to resemble a fuzzy washed out mountainscape of orbs and spheres, with the tray card cut so the cd nestles perfectly into one of the valleys. So nice. The second thing you notice, or the first thing you notice once you throw this in the player, is how compltely KICK ASS this record is. This is literally all we've been listening to the last few weeks! We always talk about Queens Of The Stone Age as being this guilty pleasure we all seem to have. But what's so guilty about liking them? They rock, have great catchy songs, the remnants of that huge sun baked Kyuss fuzz guitar. What's not to love? Well, it could be our aversion to the whole MTV / VH1, dating or not dating Brody Dalle?, People Magazine / US Magazine, Dave Grohl killing time, supergroup, more crooning than rocking, not really about the music anymore?, corporate rock element. Yeah, could be.
So what if there was a band of young guys, who put out a record on punk / metalcore label Trustkill, and who took all of the stuff that made QOTSA so great, but turned that stuff inside out, and added all sorts of other disparate elements, turning what could have been just a decent QOTSA rip off into one of the coolest, catchiest rock records of the year?! Well, we'd probably make it record of the week and gush like giddy music nerds. So let us commence gushing, shall we?
Imagine huge fuzz guitars, unfurling super rocking Kyuss / Rocket From The Crypt / Burning Brides sort of stoner garage pop riffs, sometimes langorous and lysergic, sometimes so heavy and intense it's almost impossible to not air guitar! One track in particular, "The Kaleidoscope" has perhaps one of the best riffs EVER (sez Andee and Jason) an impossibly God-like Kyuss / Sabbath fusion, that gets everyone in the store nodding along like Wayne And Garth in Wayne's World. So we've got the riffs, now we go to the vocals, which go from breathy falsetto, to growly indie whine, to howled rock wail, with plenty of occasional female vocals, sometimes employed in surprisingly unorthadox ways giving a couple of the songs a really bizarre edge. Hard to describe, you just have to hear it.
But this is not just about rocking, as much as we wouldn't mind that at all. No, there's lots of weird wonderful pop experimentation all over, from loping bass driven Pinback-ish lullabies, droning brooding minor key dirges reminiscent of the Deftones or maybe Tool, some Sonic Youth-y skree and textural weirdness, even some moody electronic miserablism that has Depeche Mode worship written all over it. It all works so well together somehow, heavy and head banging, dreamy and blissed out. Can't believe this band isn't HUGE. But we're secretly a little glad they aren't. For now at least. The sticker on the front insists that You And Me "obliterates the boundaries between indie rock, stoner rock, metal, emo and garage." Before we heard it we were pretty sure that was some serious label hyperbole, but now we're not so sure. Open Hand take all that stuff and more, wrapping everything around some of the best pop songs we've heard in ages and comes up with a record that hasn't stopped kicking our ass since we got it. Record of the week is always a tricky proposition, we try to make it something out of the ordinary, something mysterious and weird, maybe something hard to find or impossible to get or maybe just overlooked, but once in a while, those things don't seem to matter as much as the simple fact that a record gets played over and over and over over, every day, all day, here AND at home, on our computers, in our iPod's, with no end in sight, that speaks volumes. And sure, maybe you can catch their video on MTV once in a while, or maybe hear them on the radio, but that's not a bad thing at all. If only everything on the radio or on MTV was this good. The world would be a much better (and most likely much stranger) place!
People have been waiting for this record like it was the new Star Wars movie or something. And, why not? After all, their last record, 'My Arms, Your Hearse', was a masterpiece. Probably the best mix of black metal, '70s progrock, and just plain awesome songwriting; riffs, melodies, power, that record had it all. Now the new album is finally here, and it too seems destined for similar acclaim. The basic formula remains, a complex, oh-so-skilled mixture of might and beauty. Like all Opeth releases to date, this one will take a little time to digest! Impressive. And, needless to say, definitely better than that lame Star Wars movie!
So on our last list, we were blown away by the arrival of new Aluk Todolo material, in the form of their Voix cd, which was an obvious, immediate, no shit Record Of The Week. But the Gods of cosmic hypnometal smile upon us, as we get the newest transmission from Oranssi Pazuzu, the Finnish space metallers, only a couple weeks after that disc of krauty French blackness! It is without question that Oranssi Pazuzu's Varahtelija rockets right out of the atmosphere and into our Record Of The Week spot as well.
We've gushed over these guys before, for good reason. Along with the aforementioned Aluk Todolo, Oranssi Pazuzu have set the bar incredibly high for their brand of tripped out, intergalactic lysergic black metal. Oranssi's take on black metal has been refined and perfected - organic, dizzying, and crushing black metal that stands toe-to-toe with any of the greats, progressive but not overly technical. The psychedelia is similarly elevated, heady, cosmic, and heavy, like Ash Ra Tempel played through My Bloody Valentine's amp stacks. Blended together, both elements amplify each other and create a pitch-perfect take on psychedelic black metal that other bands have attempted with not-quite-as-great results.
Have we dropped enough superlatives on you yet? Varahtelija is Oranssi Pazuzu at their peak, simultaneously cosmic and organic, cohesive yet chaotic, precise and catchy. It goes without saying that everyone who bought a copy of Voix NEEDS to hear this disc as well - most non-metalheads will also find this album necessary. Totally essential and a easy early contender for our favorite metal record of the year.
