Soror Dolorosa is a band that will confound many of those trolling the internet for any number of '80s deathrock / darkwave obscurities. You could easily slip Soror Dolorosa - with its Goth name, its monochromatic artwork, the theatrical vocals, the rhythmic savagery - next to the likes of Christian Death, Specimen, The March Violets, and The Virgin Prunes, and none would be the wiser. Of all the '80s references to make, Clair Obscure (while very well, obscure) is probably the closest, if that French band had been much better in grafting songs to match the ritualistic deathrock throb.
The biggest surprise here might not in fact be that this is new and not some archival eighties lost gem, but that it is in fact the project of Nuit Noire drummer Andy Julia, who has also played in Peste Noire, Mutiilation and other grim black combos. None of which would at all prepare you for the glorious cold wave miserablism found here, Julia has such a distinctive croon, and the band conjure up such an amazing batcave new wave gloom, it sounds like it has to be from the eighties.
The guitars shimmer and chime, the bass is thick and throbbing, the drums are simple and propulsive, the sounds is spacious, lots of reverb and delay, but it's all about the vocals, a mournful dramatic croon, somewhere between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch. In fact, this totally channels the spirit of the Sisters Of Mercy, as well as the Virgin Prunes, the Fields Of The Nephilim, the Cure all that awesomely epic gothic darkness we grew up on.
But as we know, it's easy to just emulate a sound, any band can sound like their favorite band of old, that phenomenon is responsible for at least several scenes and sounds. But that music, that classic sound, is as much about songs as it is about sounds. We often lament, that songwriting seems to have been supplanted by the mere act of being in a band, of making the right noises.
And it's in that way that Soror Dolorosa stand out from all the other cold wave wannabes, they write amazing songs, filled with incredible melodies, hooks galore, the basslines as memorable as the vocal lines, dramatic, intense, personal, emotional, the vocals oozing with pathos, the songs themselves rife with parts and pieces that are incredibly catchy, when the vocals drop out, you're still hearing them in your head, you find yourself humming along to the bass, or slipping away from the vocals and getting lost in the shimmering reverbed riffage.
The whole record is fantastic, but opener "Beau Suicide" is maybe one of our favorite cold wave jams ever, past or present, so dark and driving, with a main riff to die for (the sort of riff Interpol has spent their whole career trying to come up with), a cool jagged angular guitar freakout midway through, an incredible and impossibly melodic bassline, and one of the coolest, most intense, and unforgettable vocal lines, so good. Just this track gets played so much in the store it's beginning to feel like the aQ theme song. Then there's the nearly 12 minute closing track "American Chronicle", a lilting, super dramatic gloom pop epic, with long stretches of dour drift, the guitar unfurling gorgeous echoey melodies, the vocals more emotional and anguished than anywhere on the record, which is strange, since the music is perhaps the prettiest and most melodic.
Needless to say, absolutely required listening for folks who like their pop gloomy, their eighties revivalists depressive and dark, and who count any of the above mentioned bands in their personal pantheon. And while we love the current revival of lo-fi new wave goth garage pop, Cold Cave, Blank Dogs, Gary War, Zola Jesus, etc... Soror Dolorosa has supplanted them all and now seems to be the record we can NOT stop listening to.
RELEASED ON VINYL FOR RECORD STORE DAY! Just a few copies remaining. Here's what we said about the cd version of this when we made it a Record Of The Week in 2010:
We'll admit, we're a sucker for Sublime Frequencies, they've yet to release a record that didn't totally blow our minds. Which says as much about SF's curating as it does about the unheard music worldwide. Treasures everywhere, amazing and passionate and personal and far out sounds, being made in homes and yards, on street corners, in bars, at picnics and parties, not conceived for public consumption, meant for a small audience, and often for a specific purpose, getting a glimpse into these magical musical moments is what Sublime Frequencies is all about, and we feel lucky to get to experience these sounds.
This is the third record from Omar Souleyman on Sublime Frequencies, and just might be the best one yet, which is saying A LOT. A collection of live recordings culled from nearly 15 years worth of cassettes, these tracks are incredible, energetic, passionate, so full of life, effusive and emotional, funky and celebratory, and to Western ears, seriously far out. There's almost a wild Bollywood vibe (even though this is from the Middle East, not India), in the vocals, and the rhythms, and with the crazy tangled synthesizer melodies, the propulsive drumming, and Souleyman's distorted, wailed vocal delivery, it all sounds just so perfect, even listening to this music on record, it sounds sweaty and exhausting and cathartic, it's easy to imagine a big crowd of people dancing and bouncing along, freed from all cares and concerns letting the music just carry them away.
Like all Sublime Frequencies releases, the liner notes offer up so much information, on Souleyman, his life, the history of Syria, on Syrian folk music, etc, but even without all that info, if it's just about the music, these are some of the most amazing sounds you'll ever hear. Frantic Eastern melodies, frenetic percussion, analog synths wound around Souleyman's vocals, this is party music, dance music, but not like party or dance music the way we normally think about it. The music of Souleyman is transcendent, spiritual, psychedelic, transformative, a folk pop known as Dabke, rarely heard in the West, perhaps not at all if it wasn't for Sublime Frequencies, and we'd imagine these sounds might be overwhelming for casual world music listeners, it is after all wild and frantic and relentless, the melodies complex and twisted and tangled, there are some moments that verge on folky for sure, the final track is a gorgeous haunting lament, just vocals and buzzing synthesizers, but barring that track, even on the folkier jams, those strange synths, the unique melodies, the repetitive tranced out rhythms, those all transform Souleyman's folk into something much more, and in most cases, it's not long before the band explodes into yet another super intense sweat soaked psychedelic Syrian folk pop workout. So great!
We'll admit, we're a sucker for Sublime Frequencies, they've yet to release a record that didn't totally blow our minds. Which says as much about SF's curating as it does about the unheard music worldwide. Treasures everywhere, amazing and passionate and personal and far out sounds, being made in homes and yards, on street corners, in bars, at picnics and parties, not conceived for public consumption, meant for a small audience, and often for a specific purpose, getting a glimpse into these magical musical moments is what Sublime Frequencies is all about, and we feel lucky to get to experience these sounds.
This is the third record from Omar Souleyman on Sublime Frequencies, and just might be the best one yet, which is saying A LOT. A collection of live recordings culled from nearly 15 years worth of cassettes, these tracks are incredible, energetic, passionate, so full of life, effusive and emotional, funky and celebratory, and to Western ears, seriously far out. There's almost a wild Bollywood vibe (even though this is from the Middle East, not India), in the vocals, and the rhythms, and with the crazy tangled synthesizer melodies, the propulsive drumming, and Souleyman's distorted, wailed vocal delivery, it all sounds just so perfect, even listening to this music on record, it sounds sweaty and exhausting and cathartic, it's easy to imagine a big crowd of people dancing and bouncing along, freed from all cares and concerns letting the music just carry them away.
Like all Sublime Frequencies releases, the liner notes offer up so much information, on Souleyman, his life, the history of Syria, on Syrian folk music, etc, but even without all that info, if it's just about the music, these are some of the most amazing sounds you'll ever hear. Frantic Eastern melodies, frenetic percussion, analog synths wound around Souleyman's vocals, this is party music, dance music, but not like party or dance music the way we normally think about it. The music of Souleyman is transcendent, spiritual, psychedelic, transformative, a folk pop known as Dabke, rarely heard in the West, perhaps not at all if it wasn't for Sublime Frequencies, and we'd imagine these sounds might be overwhelming for casual world music listeners, it is after all wild and frantic and relentless, the melodies complex and twisted and tangled, there are some moments that verge on folky for sure, the final track is a gorgeous haunting lament, just vocals and buzzing synthesizers, but barring that track, even on the folkier jams, those strange synths, the unique melodies, the repetitive tranced out rhythms, those all transform Souleyman's folk into something much more, and in most cases, it's not long before the band explodes into yet another super intense sweat soaked psychedelic Syrian folk pop workout. So great!
Man, have I been waiting for something like this for years. A massive mega mix of classic drum and bass / jungle / dancehall. Takes me back quite a few years when jungle was brand new (to us at least). When finding jungle 12"s was a challenge and even finding clubs that played jungle was practically impossible. A bunch of us (often with AQ pal Lesser in tow) would go to local bars and just sit in the corner, luxuriating in the stuttery staccato beats, waiting for the bass to drop and huge swells of thunderous sub-bass synths to wash over us. And for me, even though jungle is supposedly 'played out', it remains as fierce and heavy and raw as it ever was. This mega mix has all the great 12"s from the early days of jungle, tracks by Cobra, Remarc, Cutty Ranks, Krome & Time, Shy FX, Tek 9, DJ Hype, Barrington Levy, Squarepusher, Ninjaman, Decoder, Plug and tons more!. No diva vocals, no syrupy melodic dance crap, just monstrous Amen breaks (the drum loop dujour of jungle) everywhere, skittery and frenetic, pitched up and down and all around, stuttering and hiccupping and pounding, with throbbing basslines and rib cage rattling synth stabs. And as a bonus for all of you dancehall heads, there's plenty of toasting and junglized reggae tunes. I remember most of my friends at the time, ESPECIALLY my drummer friends, being totally skeptical and dismissive, saying stuff like "It's just a drum machine" and "the beats are so repetitive". But that's the point. The rhythms -are- repetitive, I mean, they were made to dance to right? But they are SO complex, inhumanly so, and the buzz and stutter of beats swirling wildly from speaker to speaker makes the repetitive nature of the music all the more hypnotic and trance-y. And how could anyone obsessed with rhythm, especially drummers, not be totally mesmerised by these hyperspeed/convoluted beats? I've found myself driving around in my housemate's truck (which has a booming system) just blasting this comp, trying to replicate the feeling of the big bass bins pounding me into the corner of that dingy club years ago, and at the same time, have lulled myself to sleep with this comp buzzing and skittering in my ears. Even if you were on the scene and have a lot of these 12"s, there may be a bunch you don't have, and it's nice to have all this stuff on one convenient disc, although the tracks are split into three 20+ minute megamixes which makes finding particular songs a bit of a chore. But odds are, you'll just listen to this whole thing over and over and over. Folks who picked up the Bug cd from the last list should really check this out as should anyone into crazy fucked up elctronica/dancehall/digital hardcore. Fucking great!
MPEG Download: "Track 01" [/audio/soundmurderer01.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Track 01" [/audio/soundmurderer01.m3u]
It's hard to believe this is real. In fact, it took a lot to convince Andee, who was sure this was some Gregg Turkington prank.
But the thing that really puts CUT on the map for us is their way of conducting their religious services, and the fact that someone managed to tape it. The tapes of this service have been floating around for years already. Those of you familiar with Negativland's 1989 album "Escape From Noise" will already be familiar with an excerpt of one of the tracks on this album, as they used it for the track "Michael Jackson", and Steve Fisk has been using these tapes for years as well. This record features live recordings of Clare Prophet 'speaking' out against the evils of rock music. She sounds perfectly normal as she introduces her 'psalms' or 'songs' or 'speeches' or whatever they are. But when she gets going, it's amazing. And so goddamn funny. Her rapid fire high pitched testifying sounds a bit like an insane mix of an auctioneer, a yodeller, the guy who sings the directions at a square dance, Neil Hamburger huffing helium, variations of baseball's 'hey batter batter' chant only faster. It's like that sound you make when you sort of hum/breathe out and move your finger up and down between your lips making a sort of 'bebubebubebubebubebubebubebubebu' sound. It's one of the most amazing things we've ever heard! A must for all cult fanatics, new age withdrawal victims, seekers of the truly strange, and fans of extended vocal techniques. Ever so highly recommended!
First "The Conet Project", now this. Well, okay, this isn't spooky like those shortwave spy broadcasts, but the sounds these frogs make have some similar qualities to the morse code or "noise stations", and like The Conet Project is both bizarre and fascinating. The 92 tracks of the croaks, trills, screams, mating calls, and other forms of amphibian vocalisations were conceived, narrated, and documented by Charles M. Bogart. Travelling from the far reaches of Alaska to the deserts of Arizona to the foothills of Tennessee, Mr. Bogart presents a labor of love in selecting these field recordings and their descriptions. The dry delivery of Mr. Bogart's indexical texts is unnervingly and humorously dissimilar to these frogs calls. Just like The Conet Project's unintentional (?) aural terror, The Sound of North American Frogs features a wide variety of drones and clicks that could be from some RLW or Pierre Henry experiment with tape loops. So highly recommended that several unnamed staff members of AQ have been over heard "singing" along with the Pig Frog and the Carpenter Frog.
Originally released in 1998, and now available on vinyl again (and still available on cd), Good Morning Spider was record number 2 from the late Mark Linkous and band, following their debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. The interesting thing about GMS, is that it was a huge stylistic and sonic shift for the band, much more somber and introspective that its predecessor, in part, most assume, because just before the recording of GMS, Linkous overdosed in a London hotel room, collapsed and was clinically dead for several minutes, he also spent the next few months in a wheelchair after a surgery that threatened to keep him in that chair forever. But if that particular black cloud did indeed have a silver lining, it's the absolutely inspired, ultra personal, intimate and heart wrenching beauty that is Good Morning Spider. While the record still strikes a precarious balance between rambunctious rocking and more darkly balladic introspection, the scales seem to be tipping toward delicate crystalline beauty, dark, hushed, whispery, haunting and so lovely. But even the more rocking numbers are infused with some serious pathos, and of course plenty of melancholy and heartbreak.
The whole record is a marvel, gorgeously and idiosyncratically produced, lots of crackle, and buzz, and processed vocals, effected instrumentation, strings, lush twang flecked indie rock one second, dreamy about-to-collapse balladry the next, fragmented perfect pop the next. The record begins with the brief blast of "Pig", is a serious chunk of incendiary crunch, but so rife with impossibly hooky melodies, and some super dramatic layered vocals, not to mention plenty of twisted sounds and atmosphere. And then it's all dialed WAY down, "Painbirds" is a lilting bit of sweetly sorrowful shuffling slowcore, "Saint Mary" is a hushed bit of slo-mo Appalachian pop, Linkous' fragile vox drifting over a simple strum, but it is so much more than the sum of its parts. "Sick Of Goodbyes" is another more rocking track, but that rocking squall is brief, as the record shifts back into slow sorrowful drift.
One of our favorite tracks has to be "Chaos Of The Galaxy / Happy Man", which begins as a whirling FX flecked bit of organ warble, mysterious voices, ethereal and dreamlike, a brief intro to what sounds like bad radio reception, the song "Happy Man" struggling to be heard through the static and hiss, even cutting out completely at points, until finally kicking in, and it's such a perfect pop song, with an incredible hook, and some super intense vocals, and killer guitar playing, and then once again, the record slips back into darkness, and for the remainder of the record, slips seamlessly between angstful distorted jangly crunch and shimmery drifty introspection. So good.
Anyone who loves stuff like Vic Chestnut, Lambchop, Neutral Milk Hotel, Palace/Will Oldham/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Songs:Ohia and the like, who somehow missed out on Good Morning Spider, here's another chance...
Includes a digital download card!
Hooray! AQ all-time fave Mark Linkous returns at last with a brand new Sparklehorse album and we are happy to report that he, once again, does not disappoint. Mr. Linkous has that innate ability to write incredibly infectious pop songs with teeth -- never
For those of you who aren't familiar with Sparklehorse, Linkous' aesthetic weaves delicate, about-to-crack vocals, gently strummed guitars, and all sorts of bizarre studio trickery (a wonderful amalgamation of lo-fi home recording and ultra-lush top dollar multi-track wizardry) to make his records SOUND so great. But it's the songs that make the biggest impression. Whether it's a super distorted rollicking rocker, a barely-there ghost of a melody, or a heart wrenching country ballad, every song, at its core, is a perfect, perfect pop song. Catchy as hell, but not immediately -- more a sort of insidious, slowly spreading, like a virus beautiful, but beautifully miserable as well. And the lyrics too are practically perfect. Simple but astonishing in their depth. Clever and brutally soulful, without being melodramatic or overwrought.
It's been five years since we last heard from these French outsider industrial black metal weirdos, with their last record Mescalyne, which was as freaky and as fucked as the two preceding albums, all three of which we consider to be pantheon-worthy examples of confusional twisted blackness. We weren't sure what to expect from this new one though, a lot can happen in five years, but we've certainly seen other bands change a lot, and sadly, there does seem to be a tendency for bands' sounds to grow less weird with time, which who knows might be an inevitable side effect of getting better at recording, or playing, or just wanting more from music than making seriously twisted sonic shit.
Well, we should have know better than to worry about these guys, cuz it seems they're just as warped and damaged as before. In fact it took us a few minutes into the second track to truly be sure, the opener is all thick low end throbs, keening drones, tripped out effects, static and crumbling distortion, creepy samples, so we expected the second track to explode right out of the gate, but instead, it was more ambience, a creepy music box, lots of crackle and more static, and way down in the mix, what sounds like drums way off in the distance, shards of feedback, then the drums kick in, and it almost sounds like DJ Shadow or something, all distorted skitter over woozy samples, but then finally, BAM, the song splinters into twisted, inhuman industrial black buzz, lightning fast drumming that if it isn't a machine, the drummer is some sort of cyborg, the guitars warped and melty and psychedelic, the structure fractured and constantly shifting, not smoothly either, guitars cut out, stutter and burst back in, the sound swings wildly from lightning fast blast to stumbling doomy tangle, and back, the riffs, as in the past, are mangled and slippery, but here, the metal drops out again, and we're returned to that weird DJ Shadow music box thing, before again, bursting into more detuned black savagery, and so it goes, it's a ten minute track, and they cram a lot into it, lots of drones, and weird industrial breakdowns, there are hardly any vocals, but when there are, they seem to be just a wordless bellow, and that could be some weird guitar thing too, it's hard to tell, everything is chaotic and woozy, warbly and seemingly in constant collapse.
And while there's SO much going on, that we could pick each and every track apart, and describe all the twisted fuckery these guys conjure up, that first track definitely sets the template, with the long tracks super progged out experiments in avant blackness, that once again, set these guys SOOO far apart from the pack, this stuff is SO fucking tripped out and bizarre, and gloriously and fantastically idiosyncratic, it's hard to believe a regular band of dudes could conjure up something this bafflingly brilliant. The whole record is super glitchy, almost like the player is malfunctioning, but really it's all part of their warped master plan, that creepy crackly music box effect employed throughout, often the main black buzz riff, rendered as some disembodied old time melody, often under some sort of disembodied chugging, but somehow, always seeming to lurch back into twisted black aktion. More than half of the record seems to be spent exploring specifically non black metal weirdness, in fact five of the nine tracks are more sort of ambient explorations, textural experiments, and the songs proper are constantly in flux, again spending much of the time drifting, droning or creeping, but when they do launch into their black buzz, it's an alien strain that is pretty difficult to parse, so it's probably best to just let yourself get lost in Spektr's confusional black soundworld. Black metal record of the year so far for SURE.
There's a certain strain of black metal, that concerns itself more with black than metal, more with texture than heaviness, more with mood than any sort of musical rules. Those are precisely the sorts of black metal bands that send us spinning. Bands that transcend their genre, or are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they might belong to any genre at all. Such is the case with mysterious black metal outift Spektr. We discovered their debut a couple years back and proudly proclaimed it THE WEIRDEST BLACK METAL RECORD EVER. Since then it's been practically raining bizarre black metal, Furze, Rehtaf Ruo, Dead Reptile Shrine, Hidden, Urfaust, Circle Of Ouroborus, all most definitely black, but each with their own take on what black metal means. And sounds like.
This new Spektr record, however, takes up right where the last one left off, and effortlessly outweirds them all. But their mission is not to be weird. This is not calculated, purposeful, ironic, or in any way untrue to their vision. And it's not that sort of damaged inept weirdness. The music is too dense, and complex and varied and lush and just too impossibly and truly weird to be anything but the musical expression of someone's twisted vision. It's like how truly insane people are the ones who don't realize they're insane. And Spektr are most definitely insane.
The cool thing about Spektr, is that they seem to be some sort of experimental ambient project, with occasional bursts of black metal, as opposed to the other way around. More than half the record seems to be made up of drones, and static and white noise and intercepted transmissions, short wave radio, found sounds, soft subtle rumbles and strange rhythmic interference. When the metal does kick in, it tends towards a seasick lurching midtempo buzz, a lumbering blackened beast, that sort of stumbles and careens wildly out of control, occasionally slipping into a galloping blast, but quickly settling back into a slow sort of lope. Their metal is just off kilter enough to balance their experimental tendencies, and Spektr don't shy away from busting out with a black blast for only a few second before getting back to the drone at hand. And oh the drones! The gloriously twisted ambience. So dense and multilayered. Creaking and crackling, swelling and slithering, often punctuated by industrial pounding, strange rhythms, glitchy hiccups and stutters, but just as often a smoldering warble, a low end dirge of glacial hum and creepy crawly gurgle and whir, voices drift up from the murk, as do strange song fragments and bits of malfunctioning electronics, it's like walking through some black skied wasteland, the ground strewn with all manner of debris, the air thick with smoke and ash, The view fuzzy and indistinct, distant tolling bells, cymbal sizzle that sounds like sprinklers in a moonlit field, all these bits of sound, these ambient fragments, woven together into a truly ominous world of dark sound, the background to a truly bleak and buzzy black metal framework. The more we listen to this, the less -weird- it seems, scary maybe, haunting, harrowing, dark, dreary, creepy, ominous, ghostly, unnerving, and mysterious most certainly, oh okay, and quite a little bit weird too.
A definite contender for our favorite new black metal record!
The disc also includes a video, playable on your computer, for a track not on the cd. And it's a strange one as you might expect. The music is all dark drones, with weirdly jazzy drums way up in the mix, shuffling over a fuzzed out Burzumic riff that sort of ebbs and flows, a fuzzy distorted wave. It never fully kicks in, but it never completely blisses out. It sort of teeters back and forth between dark jazz and glacial black fuzz. It's a little like a black metal post-bop Bohren, sort of. The track shifts partway through and becomes a strange sonic kaleidoscope of creepy orchestra music, garbled ambience and a haunting martial rhythm played on tympani's. The accompanying video is gorgeously grainy, all darkness and shadows, like some rare damaged print of a lost silent horror film, the film stock so degraded that various chunks of light and dark take on ominous shapes, the end result, the visual equivalent of an old crackly record. Totally mesmerizing.
Okay, you're all probably just as anxious about this release as we are here. And you're probably wondering, as we were here, "just how the fuck are they going to top Girls Can Tell?"It's a tough thing for any band to take that next step after releasing a -- dare I fucking say -- perfect record. It's twice as hard since everyone is expecting to be blown away from the first beat. So is it as good as the last? Hmmm... Well, it didn't punch anyone's lights out on the first, or second, beats. But after listening through a couple times, 4 out of 6 lovers of the last album feel that this album kicks ass. And while it doesn't have as much immediate impact, or as many sure-fire "hits" on it, that doesn't seem as important. It feels like they're trying something new and completely different. Well, as different as they can be while still retaining their Spoon-isms. A customer new to Spoon described this as the record that Elton John would've made if he had the White Stripes and the Strokes as his backup band. Which is to say it's got a lot of swagger and incandescent hooks, but it's not trendy or prefab in any way -- more like Squeeze with their sparkling, precise, stripped down pop songs. Fucking fantastic. Kill The Moonlight seems like a much more introspective record than Girls Can Tell, rife with a greater amount of studio experimentation and instrumentation. Daniels and crew tinker around with piano, mellotron, *human beat box*, and a great multitude of effects. Which isn't to say that this is an "experimental" record at all. Nor is it all unstructured "jams". No, it's a lean machine with nary an ounce of fat on its almost brief 38 minute run time.
It seems like there are a million bands these days doing their best Spoon impressions. And who can blame then? Spoon are awesome. It's no surprise bands want to sound like them. And who can complain really? We love their dour moody groove and propulsive indie jangle. So the more the merrier. As long as it is in some way acknowledged that they were the first, and remain probably the best at being, well, Spoon! But there was a time, when that dynamic was reversed, when Spoon were the ones cribbing their sound from another band. They weren't alone though. In fact some of your past and current faves were right there along with them. Crafting hauntingly oblique angular indie jangle, whispery loping verses and huge crunchy choruses. Sound familiar? You're thinking Nirvana maybe? Nope, but Nirvana were one of the those bands who also borrowed a critical element of their sound from one of the most influential indie rock bands of the nineties. We're of course talking about everyone's favorite outsider indie, loud/soft rockers the Pixies. The band who singlehandedly launched a million bands. And then of course tons of THOSE bands launched a million more.
Back in 1996/97, Spoon were offering up their own take on the Pixies sound. Sometimes it's uncanny actually, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel's crackly croon a dead ringer for Frank Black, the band's loping, muted guitar shuffle and bombastic choruses sounding like they could be some elusive Pixies B-side. In fact the Pixies worship on display here is almost too much for some. Even around here, a bastion of massive Spoon love, a few Spoon fans just can't handle how Pixie-ish these records sound. But heck, every band borrows, the key being to infuse the borrowed sounds with ideas and music that are distinctly your own. And in that respect these two discs are completely brilliant. The seeds of what would blossom into the Spoon we know and love, planted in the rich soil of all the Pixies bombast that came before. Personally, we didn't really notice the Pixies thing until it was pointed out to us. Instead, we dug these records, mostly because they happen to feature Spoon at their most rocking. Imagine Girls Can Tell or Kill The Moonlight supercharged, a little more chaotic and scrabbly, a bit more, dare we say, punk sounding. The guitars are more raw, Daniel's voice is a bit more scratchy and less croony, the arrangements are much more ROCK and a lot more dynamic. It's still Spoon, so there are hooks everywhere, but they're wrapped in big jagged guitars, the drums pound and the production is definitely a hint at Spoon's studio experimentation/mastery to come. On one of our favorite tracks, "All The Negatives Have Been Destroyed," voices and weird sounds careen all over the place in the background, while the band kick out the jams on a track with one of the catchiest choruses ever.
This double set collects the 1996 Telephono full length and the 1997 ep Soft Effects, which features one of our other favorite Spoon tracks "Waiting For The Kid To Come Out", a classic Spoon track for sure, but like the rest of the tunes here, much harder edged and just way more rocking. In fact a few of us here, if forced to pick, might just claim these discs as our favorite Spoon records ever.
Fans of Spoon who have yet to hear these discs will flip. And if there are somehow, inexplicably, some indie rockers out there who have yet to discover the glorious joy of Spoon's dark moody pop world, or for some reason, wish that Spoon would let loose a little more, well then, this here set should pretty much set you straight!
Packaged in cardboard gatefold, housed in a cool two sided slipcover.
Out of nowhere comes this grimy slab of murky, sci-fi, synth kraut, cold wave, psych dub weirdness, that sounds a bit like former aQ ROTW-ers Fabulous Diamonds gone cold wave, or a way more blissed out and krautrocky Soft Moon, it's like some mutant strain of futuristic Euro disco, heavily dubbed, and then reimagined as the soundtrack for some dystopian post apocalyptic future age. A woozy, blurred landscape of pulsating squelches, arpeggiated melodies, lo-fi rhythms, lush space age synth swells, and hazy, washed out vox, dripping in echo and reverb and delay, gauzy and ethereal and almost dreampoppy one second, super dubbed out and near psychedelic the next.
The songs here less verse-chorus-verse, that a single looped melody over a near static groove, locked into endless cylical sprawls, super tranced out and utterly mesmerizing.
Stacian hails from Milwaukee, but could just as well be have been transmitting these sounds via tachyon beams from some mysterious planet, in an alternate universe, and from a wholly other timeline, it definitely fits sonically alongside outfits like the above mentioned Fabulous Diamonds, and it has a distinctly Carpenter / Goblin vibe, not to mention that whole modern retro Brooklyn cold wave thing, but Stacian adds a heaping dose of murky minimalism, with some of the tracks ditching the vocals completely, and oozing into a sort of zoned out space-kraut dirgey, while other tracks blossom into impossibly catchy near poppiness. Songs like "Almos Telos Tenoste", almost sound like something Joe Meek might have whipped up his mad scientist kitchen/recording studio/laboratory, while tracks like "Formida" anchor near weightless synth simmer, to a lurching robo-kraut rhythm, while vocals swirl and spin over the top, Stacian's throaty croon dubbed to high heaven and sent careening into the ether.
And the whole record in fact splits the difference between the two, pulsing, pounding, percolating, motorik and mesmerizing, a sort of warped electro synth-pop run through a bank of malfunctioning electronics, and played back by a cyborg backing band. It's not hard to imagine Stacian, dressed in a strange metallic gown, hovering above an elevated dais, in front of the cosmos, spinning darkly behind her in the distance, while all around her, shadowy machine-like shapes churn and grind, gears spinning, lights blinking, a primitive futuristic symphony, unfurling wasted zoner kraut-pop gems and loosing them into space, left to glimmer and glisten in a sky full of dying stars.
The cd version tacks on FIVE bonus tracks, which while retaining the same sort of cosmic kraut-murk energy, are way more lo-fi, and much more propulsive, the sound brittle and tinny, the synths buzzing over skittery robotic grooves, a brief songsuite of melancholic kraut-synth space pop, that while sonically not as lush and fully realized as the record proper, might just contain the catchiest jams of all, check out the closer "Micro-Trauma", which will get lodged in your mechanical brain after one listen, and gloriously gum up the works. WAY recommended.
There are very few bands we can think of who have so fully and utterly invented a sound for themselves, sounding like nothing else on earth before, and possibly since. Italy's Starfuckers are such a band. And it's a sound that fascinates us. Unique, true originals. One of our favorite bands (and by "our" we mean us, and anyone who belongs to the secret club of possibly demented Starfuckers lovers). Which goes a long way to explaining why we're making this Record Of The Week, a disc by a band with such incongruous and impolite name, and a perhaps problematic sound as well, for some. This disc consists of a reissue of their best / most definitive albums, 1994's Sinistri, and a never-before-on-cd mini-lp that preceded it, plus other, extra rare tracks. 16 tracks in total, almost 70 minutes of music. Or since it's the Starfuckers, should we say "music"? One definition of music is organized sound, and this stuff is organized in its seeming DIS-organization. Deconstructed music. Counter-intuitive rock n' roll. Genius. Here's what we've said about 'em before, in a review of their final album, 2002's Infinitive Sessions, currently out of print:
"Starfuckers...play an abstract, sparse, and totally unique brand of what they term 'rock concrete', something that kind of sounds like This Heat falling down the stairs, but trying to be really quiet about it. Percussive and full of near-silences, their almost-randomly-improvised-sounding music uses guitar, drums, and electronics to take the 'glitch' aesthetic out of the laptop arena and into that of the live band. It's as if they played 'normal' songs, then removed about 70 percent of the music, and shuffled the remaining sounds around. It's counter-intuitive, disjointed stuff, yet every dissonant chord played on the guitar, every bassy electronic rumble, every drum hit seems to have meaning, unknowable meaning. Attentive listening will reveal compelling rhythms and structures."
Yes, indeed, but that's only part of the story, and why this disc is THEE Starfuckers disc to get, if you're ever gonna get any Starfuckers, and you should. We said they established their own sound, but they built up to it from a more familiar basis. The earlier tracks here demonstrate that, while the Sinistri stuff is the best example of the special qualities of Starfuckers alluded to above.
Those earliest tracks, the first 6 here, come from the band's 1991 mini-lp, Brodo Di Cagne Strategico. They're indicative of the band's roots in all things Stooges-y, being totally badass, driving, dark post-punkish numbers laced with shards of noisy, "out" guitar and free jazz saxophone squall... This is the sort of Starfuckers splooge that our pal JW, now head of the Holy Mountain label, once so succinctly dubbed "Funhausen" (i.e. the Stooges' Funhouse meets experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen). Spacemen 3 fans should dig as well. And that avant-garde, Stockhausen side of the equation comes more and more to the fore as this disc progresses...
The Bordo Di Cagne Strategico tracks are followed by two compilation appearances, both "covers". You get their utterly unrecognizable (what did you expect?) version of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" from a cd that came with Bananafish magazine #11, and also their appropriately monomaniacal take on "Mechanical Man", from a Charles Manson tribute upon which they appeared alongside the likes of Skullflower, Controlled Bleeding, and Eugene Chadbourne, among others. We'd like to think that John Lennon would have dug the Starfuckers (if any Beatle would, Yoko Ono's husband would). Maybe Charlie would too, he's crazy enough.
Then, tracks 9-15 are from Sinistri. The main course. The masterpiece. The Starfuckers aesthetic, fully realized, celebrates 'asynchrony' and minimalism, and that's what you get here. Are you ready? It's a mysterious, compelling soundworld, one that stokes the imagination and seems somehow unassailable in its avant garde gravitas. Serious stuff, but still somehow rock n' roll. In spirit, more than anything else. Anti-rock too (with the slogan printed here: "new music means destruction of ego"). These songs/sounds are quite curious, cryptic... Blats and bursts of chiming, chunking guitar. Blips and bloops of eerie electronics. Sudden percussion, sudden silence. Feedback. Suspenseful rhythmic passages. Much moody rumble and hiss. Bassy detonations, chaotic jumbles of piano. And, crucially, the calm, semi-spoken vocals, deadpan declamations in Italian, like we're being poetically lectured by one of the Starfuckers while the rest of 'em disassemble rock n' roll as we know it. How can we describe the Starfucker's Sinistri further? We don't even understand it. But we love it.
Oh, towards the end, Sinistri's got the Starfuckers "hit single" (as far as we're concerned!), the song "Ordine Pubblico", also released on a Drunken Fish 7" back in the day... harking back to the Brodo Di Cagne material, "Ordine" is a sinister, cyclic, claustrophobic rock song, the brilliant last gasp of their Stooges-ness, hypnotic and handclap driven, with subversive lyrics that go something like this: "Criminale / Comunisti / Vagabondi / Terroristi / Prostitute / Extremisti / grazie / grazie..." You don't need to know Italian to know what he's saying.
That's all followed by Sinistri's final track, "Macrofoneie Ia", which sounds like what might happen in the studio after the musicians had all gone home or passed out, if the machines then started "playing" themselves. Clicks and buzzings, as of patch cords being unplugged, or plugged in. Or, you could say it takes the Starfuckers "Eternal Soundcheck" (a song title of theirs on another album) notion to an extreme, as if you recorded not the soundcheck at a show, but the band just setting up beforehand, in near silence but for when electrical connections are being made. Then, the disc ends with a previously unreleased track from 1996 that certainly wouldn't have been out of place on the original issue of Sinistri.
Hearing Starfuckers for the first time isn't just like hearing music you haven't heard before. It's also like hearing an IDEA of music that you've never had before. And, better yet, listening to Starfuckers for the 100th time, it remains fresh/strange, you still are piecing together the hidden structures of what's going on...
While we said that they sound like no-one else, we HAVE referenced 'em in various reviews, to say that other bands maybe remind us a bit of them, usually due to their fractured and confusional compositional ways... Radian, US Maple, Supersilent, Sim+Otomo, even Tony Tears, have all garnered comparisons by us to Starfuckers for some reason or other, but still none of 'em (and nobody) really does what the Starfuckers do. Or ever will.
If you've never heard Starfuckers, and are at all curious (you should be, if we're doing our job) this is the disc to get, as we said. And even if you are a fan, who already owns the long out of print Sinistri cd, you probably need this anyway for all the other rare tracks included. Record Of The Week? Reissue Of The Year! Well, maybe not for everyone, but those select few who 'get it' will really be grateful. And this, with the inclusion of their earliest, most rockin' material, is the most 'accessible' Starfuckers we could suggest.
Italy's Sometimes Records (who were thrilled that we appreciate the Starfuckers as much as they do), have packaged this with a cd booklet containing everything we could expect in the way of photos, graphics, credits, lyrics, and liner notes... the latter in Italian, though we glean references to the Stooges and Demetrio Stratos of '70s Italian proggers Area, possibly another inspiration to them.
FYI, btw, Holy Mountain will soon be doing a vinyl reissue of the Starfuckers rare 1990 debut lp Metallic Diseases, so watch out for that as well!
We've been huge fans of the Stars Of The Lid ever since their first record, Music For Nitrous Oxide, way back in 1995. And their last record, Tired Sounds Of... is a beloved favorite and all time AQ best seller. It's been fascinating to observe their sonic development, from murky guitar based 4-track bedroom guitar drones, all foggy and fuggy and murky and dreamlike, to their current sound, a more modern, almost classical sound, of rich reverberant swells, and lots and lots of space.
The Stars' sound has obviously become much more clear and well defined, polished even, but everything we loved about Nitrous Oxide is still present, albeit in slightly altered form. The Stars' were always about swells, ebb and flow, melodies and compositions played out over expansive stretches of oceanic shimmer, and that at least hasn't changed on And Their Refinement Of The Decline. Notes aren't just played, they begin as tiny sparkles, little distant glimmers, and gradually grow into thick rich whirs, or massive rumbles, before just as quickly fading away again. Oceanic is definitely an apt descriptor, as the music here, as on the more recent records, does have that feel, like some epic dimly lit sonic sea swirling and churning, sometime tranquil and barely moving, other times heaving and tumultuous. It's the sound of a new dawn, an impending storm, or the birth of a galaxy, it's so completely epic while at the same time managing somehow to be pastoral and contemplative and breathtakingly beautiful.
In the early days it was just 2 guitars and a four track, and the sound reflected that, much more gritty and fuzzy, the mood a lot darker, evoking the desert, the starry sky, a druggy dreamy innerspace of muted minimal shimmer. As the band grew, and added instruments, more players, recorded in real studios, the sound changed dramatically, and suddenly, instead of some indie bedroom project, the Stars were crafting pieces that could stand alongside any modern classical piece, while remaining dreamy and drone-y enough to tickle the ears of indie dronesters worldwide. Which is probably the most fascinating part of the Stars' sound. They were making music equally as expansive and epic and gorgeous 10 years ago, but those sounds were limited by the technology, by the band's meager recording set up. And only now it seems that the band is able to fully realize the sound they have been hearing, and essentially creating, all along.
There are guitars here and there, it is after all still the root of their sound, but they seem to be overshadowed by the other instruments (although it is often difficult to pinpoint the instrument creating many of the sounds), heavy on the strings, three violincelles and a harp, as well as a surprising arsenal of horns, two trumpets, flugelhorn and clarinet, AND a children's choir!! But it's not just the players or the instruments, but how they interact and the music they create, and here the results are divine. Many of the tracks do sound like bits of modern classical stretched out into languorous stretches of muted drone and subtle shimmer, like watching the planets from outer space, observing the epic drifts of solar systems and an infinity of cosmic interactions, but others definitely reference more earthly sonic treasures, "Apreludes (In C Sharp Major)" has some serious Morricone going on, and "Don't Bother They're Here" references Scott Tuma's washed out guitar work in Souled American. But whatever subtle flavor is introduced into each track, the sound is definitely and distinctly Stars Of The Lid. Their shift to double disc releases also seems to suit them, allowing their slow burning soft swell compositions plenty of time to sprawl and spread and evolve into epic and soul stirring soundscapes. But even two discs is not nearly enough as far as we're concerned, so everyone buy this one, so next time, these guys can release a four disc set, or a ten disc set or a twenty disc set...
Before there were a million 'drone' records, before every other person had their own cd-r drone music label, before anyone with a computer and a cd burner had their own 'drone project', and well before all it took was holding down a few keys on a keyboard or leaning a guitar against an amplifier to become an underground sensation, there was Stars Of The Lid. Armed with little more than a couple guitars, some effects and a four track, the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie were capable of crafting incredibly lush and expansive dronescapes unlike anything we'd ever heard. Quietly channeling the druggy drift of Spacemen 3, the blissful ambience of Brian Eno and the processed guitar based landscapes of post-Loop project Main, the duo conjured up long sprawling expanses of near static guitar drift, crumbling distortion and shimmering feedback sculpted into billowing stretches of soft swirling sound. Sites set high, even their early works aspired to the modern minimalism they would eventually master, but well before the group enlisted extra players and string sections and incorporated flutes and pianos and began crafting multi movement minimal epics, equal parts Arvo Part and Morton Feldman, the band's sound was much more raw and immediate, much more lo-fi, but somehow managing to sound lush at the same time, music so perfectly crafted it seemed to transcend its source. A gorgeous, living organic world of sound, evocative and cinematic, dark and brooding, soft and utterly beautiful.
Originally released way back in 1995, Music For Nitrous Oxide was the very first Stars Of The Lid release, and it's sound can be summed up by one of the song titles: "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy". Apparently, so did strange samples, bizarre snippets of dialogue, and most importantly, thick smears of distorted guitar. Total bedroom ambient bliss, but light on the 'ambient', the music on Nitrous Oxide is anything but ambient, it moves and flows and buzzes and howls, the sound is not smooth, it's raw and rough, distorted and warped, the production low on fidelity, but heavy on hazy, gauzy, washed out shimmer. This is almost like the sound of old SUNNO))) records, with all the distortion removed. Slow motion riffage, unfurling lazily into thick tendrils of dark melody, textures and timbres stretched and smeared and smoothed and blurred, tape hiss everywhere, but instead of an impediment, the hiss is alive, swirling and undulating, another layer of warm whir, giving the sounds more texture and more grit. There is percussion, but it sounds like someone tapping on the body of the guitar, then slathering it in reverb and delay. The sounds of trains and cars driving by surface here and there, as do bursts of radio and short wave interference, but the core of all these pieces is delicately and perfectly arranged bits of guitar, whether they be looped streaks of whispery high end, or deep rumbling slabs of crumbling low end, the guitars are looped and repeated and all tangled up with other complimentary loops, allowed to spread out, to expand, to fill up the speakers and overflow, or to trickle out like a summer stream.
The sound shifts from hushed whisper to thick dense almost chaotic swirl, often in the same song. Deep bell like tones drift in wide open expanses of dreamily dramatic soft focus buzz, thick, super distorted guitar buzz is wound around a simple barely there drum beat, cymbals sizzle in a thick roiling black sea of disembodied and fragmented riffage, while elsewhere rubbery low end warbles beneath strange creaks and scrapes, swallowed whole by the occasional wash of blurred distorted buzz, and finally the sound of rainfall surrounds deep lush rumbling chords as they create an almost choral drone for perhaps one of the most moving pieces of drone music ever, certainly an impossibly perfect way to end the record.
Captivating, mesmerizing, one minute soft and shimmery, the next dense and heavy, but always perfect, always personal and intimate, always mysterious and utterly magical. The name Stars Of The Lid comes from the strange images you see when you close your eyes, electrical impulses, mysterious shapes and textures, and never has a name so perfectly reflected the sound of the band so named, and rarely, has band so perfectly represented something so ineffable in sound. Practically perfect. And absolutely essential.
Epic double cd masterpiece from Austin, Texas' kings of the lullaby drone. Stars of the Lid's sound, while similar to past efforts, has undergone some pretty dramatic changes. Their multi-layered 4-tracked guitars are still present in all their serene
YAY! At last, reissued on vinyl again! Here's our original review when it first came out, circa 2001 (and was a Record Of The Week then, too)...
Epic double cd (make that triple lp) masterpiece from Austin, Texas' kings of the lullaby drone. Stars of the Lid's sound, while similar to past efforts, has undergone some pretty dramatic changes. Their multi-layered 4-tracked guitars are still present in all their serene beauty and dark tranquility, but the sound is more lush and more detailed, with treated strings, organs, backwards tubular bells and field recordings adding even more depth to this already layered and impossible-to-grasp-in-one-listen recording. 'Tired Sounds...' is easily the Stars' most obviously melodic record, thanks in no small part to the addition of strings, horns and piano. Dreamy nocturnal slow motion drones are the glorious backdrop to the ebb and flow of dark sonic swells and soaring strings. While lots of 'drone' music sounds sinister and threatening, and often clinical and cold, the Stars manage to imbue their minimal soundscapes with warmth and humanity, and a sort of hope and joy. When the mood does change, it's more melancholic, lost, maybe lonely, never evil. Really human, organic emotions brilliantly conveyed through sound. So much avant / experimental music is technical and electronic, but the shimmering ambience of the guitars and the grit and grime of the recording, as well as the perfect arrangements make this music transcend its contemporaries, filling your ears with thick slow sound, until it slowly spreads through your whole body. Think Angus Maclise, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Low, Alan Lamb's wire recordings, Pauline Oliveros' deep listening recordings, a more pastoral Skullflower, a more idyllic Total, John Cale, Godspeed You Black Emperor, the harmonium works of Hermann Nitsch, or Tony Conrad. But mix in those magic (non-academic) ingredients (rock background, songs, melodies) and you have probably one of the most beautiful recordings we have ever heard.
"You were hired by a bitch to find scum!!" That striking dialogue taken from a '60s private eye thriller (Harper) begins the song "Misty Mountain Blowtorch" here, deep into side two, before the track launches into an especially distorted & catchy riff, and that combo somehow sums up the attitude/aesthetic of this album and this band. Heavy, noisy, grungy rock action laced with lots of cool/weird samples, it's an hallucinatory and head caving mix for sure!! As the label that did this necessary reissue put it, Tulip is a "twisted noir detective story on a bad acid trip". Damn right. Psychedelic, metallic, chaotic, freaked out, heavy as heck, full of surprises, and strangely hooky and melodic too, as it explosively lurches through a delirious daze of surfy, sludgy sounds and strange non-sequitur samples.
A little while back, you may recall, we we listed a warehouse find, the first lp by Milk Cult, Milk Cult being the sample-based side project of one of San Francisco's best ever bands (by way of Bozeman, Montana), Steel Pole Bath Tub, back in the late '80s / early '90s. Hopefully that piqued your interest if you weren't already into these noiserock madmen, the trio of Dale Flattum, Darren Mor-X, and Mike Morasky. They were sort of a surreal, soundtracky, noise-noir version of their pals The Melvins, in a way, also using and abusing samples as alluded to above. The kind of band that would do both Black Sabbath and Sonic Youth covers (they have - not found here though). Certainly a band that anybody into the Melvins back then would also have liked, and did, a lot. Stuff on Trance (like Pain Teens) and AmRep also comes to mind. SPBT even managed to eventually wind up, albeit briefly, on a major label (like so many unlikely, underground bands during the '90s alt-rock boom). Their bulk of their career more or less predated our "list", so we never wrote a review of this great album when it was originally issued back in 1990, their sophomore release. Thus it's especially exciting that this has been reissued on vinyl, at long last, and we can list it, finally. Probably our favorite record by these guys - though they made a bunch of good ones. There's just something about this one that's the complete package, the perfect witches brew of their unique sound, immediately compelling and highly entertaining.
Gatefold sleeve, with new jacket art, and an 8-page booklet with photos, art, and new liner notes by Henry "Chunklet" Owings, Noah Landis, and Tom Flynn, plus stuff from the members of the SPTB as well. Nice!
A lot of the soundtracks we review, are for movies we haven't actually seen. This one though, we had been hearing about forever, and saw the minute it came out. The sci-fi nerds around here were already familiar with the story of the failed attempt by demented genius / cinematic auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) to adapt and film Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel Dune. And sure, some of us dig the version by David Lynch that eventually did get made, but it couldn't hold a candle to Jodorowsky's vision, one that was to include art design by H.R. Giger and Moebius, music by Magma and Pink Floyd, special effects by Dan O'Banon (Heavy Metal, Lifeforce, C.H.U.D., Return Of The Living Dead, Total Recall), and stars Mick Jagger, David Carradine, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali!! Why oh why did that not happen?! In the realm of things that should absolutely exist, Jodorowsky's Dune most definitely is high up on the list. And thus, what a fantastic story, and minus having the actual Dune movie, this documentary is about the closest we'll ever get.
And enlisted to score this tale of what could have been, is none other than aQ pal Kurt Stenzel, one half of local synth duo Spacekraft, who has conjured up a spectacular accompaniment, one that perfectly suits the documentary, but in fact could easily have been the actual score to Jodorowsky's Dune, had it ever come to fruition. It's super evocative, definitely retro, a burbling cauldron of synth tones and mysterious melodies, moody music cues and abstract fragments of sound. In many cases, snippets of Jodorowsky's dialogue from the film are set atop these synthscapes, which only adds a surreal quality to the already far out proceedings, Jodorowsky's voice and delivery are so unique, like some shaman or cult leader sermonizing, even more so with the amazing kosmische backdrop. Stenzel masterfully conjures up classic scores of that era, anyone who's been obsessing on all the various soundtrack reissues on Death Waltz and Mondo, could easily believe that this was in fact some lost score to a crazy eighties B movie. Squelchy analog synths burble and pulse and pulsate, oozing into atmospheric ambience, or coalescing into dramatic chase scene tension, swirling clouds of sound shimmer and glisten, slow shifting fields of texture drift like alien fog, conjuring visions of futuristic cities, of post apocalyptic wastelands, of futures undreamed of, and futures dreamed of only in the past. It's utterly mesmerizing, dreamily psychedelic, and totally fantastic.
So lovely! This is a reissue of a '60s Indonesian guitar pop record that Warren Defever of His Name is Alive stumbled upon at the Salvation Army. Attempts to locate the members of The Steps proved unsuccessful, so he reissued it himself on the Time Stereo label (for folks who care, it�s a cd-r). Pastoral instrumentals with a classic, rounded 60s guitar tone. Everytime we play this in the store, someone buys it! -- Yes, it�s that pretty and that unusual. Highly recommended!
Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. This picturesque hamlet is situated on the south end of that remote island, but there's not really a whole lot going on in town. Well, probably not much until recently - we are extremely curious about the Museum of Old and New Art that opened there up not too long ago, a real head-scratcher with its radically adventurous programming (seriously, lo-fi black metal weirdo Striborg is scheduled to perform there sometime this year, under the shadows of works by such figures as Chris Olffi, Anselm Keifer, and plenty of decay-oriented Australian artists... and yes, The Stickmen played the 'Dark Mofo' festival at MONA in 2013). So, the creative kids from Hobart back in the '80s and '90s were much more likely to flee to the much larger metropolises of Melbourne or Sydney over in mainland Australia. The Stickmen were the rare band from Hobart who persevered in their hometown long enough to develop into an amazing antipodean amalgam of Flying Nun / Xpressway NZ fuzz-pop, post-Birthday Party scum rock, and dour American math-rock, but probably not that many people ever heard about them. In fact, WE had never heard of them, until this album showed up in the shop; and yeah, they are pretty goddamn great.
Their eponymous debut album originally came out in 1998 as a mutant, garage punk blast of sharp guitar riffs, driving rhythms, cheap-ass transistor radio vocals, and weird sounds transmitted from a turntablist who spun drones and noises on his decks. The photo on the inner-sleeve is worth a thousand words with the microphone taped to a broom (complete with bristles) and suspended from the ceiling via a thick piece of rope for the guitarist to sing into (or not), while one of the band members fiddles with a mess of pedals and reaches up to backspin a record. The sound broadcast from such a Rube Goldberg contraption is brilliantly intense, somewhere between the Swell Maps avant-punk melodies, The Oh Sees' jubilant mania, and the scientific aggression of Pitchblende. Tracks (like the emphatic "No!" or the belligerent "Wired Wrong") accelerate from a Tracy Pew swagger up to wah-wah freakout guitar explosions that wouldn't be out of place in a Comets On Fire jam, albeit much more punk and violent. It was around this time in The Stickmen's career that they played at the Risdon Medium Security Prison; and you gotta wonder if the energy these guys could muster should have started a riot... if it didn't happen, why the fuck not? A great, great find! We're all totally stoked on this!!
Fancy tip-on sleeve with super high gloss printing in a pretty limited edition. Download code? You bet!
Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened.
The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik.
The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer.
Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year!
Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.
We've been waiting for this reissue for 16 years. In fact, we briefly entertained the idea of trying to release it ourselves. It's a record we have been obsessed with since it came out in 1994, a super limited self released lp, a record we taped for everyone we knew, played for everyone we knew, the kind of record that inspired that sort of undying dedication, a totally unsung, indie pop gem from the early nineties, that attained a degree of infamy with a handful of weirdo music obsessives, but remained well removed from the spotlight it so richly deserved. Spin magazine even declared it one of the "Ten Best Records You've Never Heard", which probably sadly still applies, 15+ years later, but maybe not for long. Not if we have anything to say about it.
Those of you who are in your thirties or forties, no doubt remember the era that spawned the Strapping Fieldhands, think Trumans Water, Thinking Fellers, Sun City Girls, Pavement, the Grifters, Guided By Voices... The Strapping Fieldhands would go on to make a bunch more records, but Discus is where it all started, and is STILL the group's masterwork, a chaotic and confusional jumble of nineties indie noise rock and British Invasion pop, and as the liner notes point out, there's also a definite pre-British Invasion skiffle feel to many of the songs, skiffle being the sound that inspired the sound of the Beatles and the Kinks and all the other British bands of the era. The record itself is a hodge podge, a stumbling, glorious ramshackle jumble, slipping from gorgeous perfect pop, to angular free noise drift, to dirgey balladry, to rollicking rocking, to super experimental sound collage, most of those elements and sounds blending and mixing, into a sound, and a collection of songs, that sounded like nothing else then, and nothing since. Folks into Elephant 6 might be surprised to discover there was a band doing something similar, and arguably better already, and everyone who digs the new wave of noise rock / garage pop, a la Sic Alps, Oh Sees, it would be hard to imagine that those guys hadn't heard and dug heavily the Fieldhands.
The opening of "Boo Hoo Hoo" still gives us chills, the jaunty whistle, the woozy jangle, the faux British vocals, the immediately irresistible hook, the chorus with it's cloying melody and random cowbell, still one of the greatest pop songs ever. In fact, the opening three tracks, are another one of those timeless classic opening sonic salvos that remains pretty much untouchable. "Boo Hoo Hoo" is followed by "Sad Lament Of The American Indian", which begins all dirgey and druggy, totally reminiscent of Thinking Fellers / Sun City Girls and Polvo too, the chords warped and off kilter, the drums stumbly and chaotic, before slipping right back into another incredible pop jam, wrapped in streaks of feedback, hooky and jangly, and so catchy, but still so warped and just slightly twisted. "When You Came" rounds out the opening trio, with its dramatic slow build, and heartfelt sort-of-chorus, at which point the record begins its decent into (even more) madness, skipping gleefully from perfect pop to whatthefuck and back again. "Coffin Cello" is all splattery percussion, detuned twang, twisted vocals, moaning and groaning, if anything it sounds a bit like Cromagnon, total caveman psychedelia, which leads right into "Battle Down The Quarter Mile", a total classic pop gem, with strange looped basslines, descending crystalline guitar melodies, distorted vocals, and another KILLER chorus, which again slips back into an organ drenched, ultra lo-fi, droned out bit of weirdo outrock, before returning to poppier climes, "Mysterious Girl" is another impossibly perfect and hooky chunk of jangle pop, this time laced with cello, and other strings, which leads directly into "Luminous Bodies", a weirdo track that starts out almost punk rock, muted and murky, before blossoming into a meandery bit of poppy dirge, laced with synths and crunchy guitars, and those amazing, sort of British vocals, and so it goes. Push and pull, back and forth, tease you with a bit of sonic confection, only to bludgeon you with a flurry of chaotic crunch, and then nurse you back with still more pop prettiness, sometimes the demarcation between the Fieldhands' two distinct sides, not so distinct at all, which is precisely what makes them, and this record in particular so magical.
Imagine the Sun City Girls, but if instead of being obsessed with Southeast Asian music, they were obsessed with the Kinks and the Bee Gees, Discus would have been their Torch Of The Mystics. Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand, another pop classic from the same era, is considered by many to be essential listening a classic of the era, while Discus often slips through the cracks, which is odd when you consider that both groups, and both records, are essentially products of the same sonic obsessions, but Bee Thousand, for all its quirkiness and brevity of song, still goes down a whole lot easier than Discus, which is perhaps one of the main reasons Discus remained an acquired taste, but as we all know, the easiest listening is not necessarily the most satisfying, so if you like a little grit and grime with your jangle, some whatthefuck with your timeless hooks, some noise with your pop, then this will undoubtedly be your new favorite record. And all the kids who have been digging the new wave of home brewed retro lo-fi garage pop, are gonna be in for a shock when they realize their favorite bands are basically doing what the Fieldhands were doing 15 years ago, and if anything Discus is WAY weirder, WAY poppier, and WAY BETTER!
We LOVE Street Trash, one of the silliest, goriest, goofiest movies ever, and easily one of our favorite good 'bad' movies. The label describes the 1987 horror flick as the ultimate "melt movie", which is definitely true, although we never realized that was an actual genre. And for lots of you, that probably makes no sense at all. But it will. Street Trash begins when a liquor store owner finds an old case of 'Tenafly Viper' in his basement, some kind of cheap wine, and decides to sell it cheap. It's of course snapped up by the city's homeless population, who begin to, yep, you guessed it, MELT!! THEY MELT!!!
There's also a subplot about a mean Vietnam Vet who rules the junkyard, but really it's all about the glorious gore, and again, it's not bloody gore as much as it's a sort of over the top Technicolor gore, with the hapless victims of the tainted malt liquor dissolving into greasy pools of rainbow hued goop, most notably one guy who sits on a toilet to drink in peace, and who begins to melt and drip and ooze and eventually becomes a mushy prismatic pool in (and around) the toilet bowl...
And really all the rest is just window dressing, you know, there's some story and a little plot and all that, but it's all about the melting, a grossout hobo holocaust that is like that head melting scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark stretched out into a feature length film!
And like a lot of these films, we didn't necessarily remember the music, but revisiting now, we were pretty blown away. The score by Rick Ulfik is pretty cool, creepy and synthy, some tracks all weird echoey percussion, moody, haunting atmospheres, really cool stuff, but it was the eighties, so there's also plenty of goofy synthy drum machine dorkiness, and some geniusly cringeworthy, ultra cheesy sax driven groovers, what one aQ staffer described as 'trashjams', but to our ears sounds like the retro-futuristic schmaltzy VHS mall music of ex-Skater James Ferraro. One of those tracks is so good (bad?) that it gets lodged in our head like crazy, and we find ourselves not just digging it, but humming it to ourselves at odd times during the day, LONG after having actually listened to it.
But the bulk of the record is made up of grim, ominous creepscapes, the whole thing in fact reminiscent of another aQ fave soundtrack, The New York Ripper, a similarly weird mix of cheesy eighties funkiness and seriously scary soundtrackery, the difference here being that most of the sound FX are left in, we're guessing because no real masters exist, so perhaps this was all mastered direct from someone's original VHS copy, and it sounds like it, as it's sort of tinny, and lo-fi, but it suits the sounds, and the movie if you've seen it, perfectly. And that's also a part of the score's charm, that most of the cheesiest tracks are bookended by the anguished FX drenched howls of some hapless soul melting, screaming in anguish, those screams turning into wordless gurgles, and usually leading right into another long stretch of creepy, synthy ambience.
Then there's the final song, what we remember as the end credits track, a sort of bastardized version of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" kind of jam, with some of THEE most ridiculous and hilariously over the top lyrics EVER. In fact, we had forgotten about that track completely, and the first time it played in the store, had we all been drinking, it would have induced some seriously comedic spit takes, as it is, we were in stitches, lines like:
"Shut your face, you little scumbag", "You can stop the bullshit cuz this is the end", "Oh what's this?? I'm startin' to ooze! you little creep! What's this fuckin' shit??" and of course "Your face I'm gonna reshape - I'm gonna eat your fucking eyeballs like grapes", all delivered in a dramatic croon, one that becomes increasingly more unhinged as the track progresses, and as the singer presumably begins to melt himself!
So great! Easily one of our favorites in this recent spate of horror movie reissues (obviously, as it's our Record Of The Week). And the Lunaris label, the latest to throw their bloody hat in the horror movie vinyl reissue ring, did a great job, killer new artwork, extensive liner notes, the whole shebang. And like all the best soundtracks, it has us wanting to watch Street Trash again SO BAD!!
Lovers of damaged demented bizarre baffling freaked out and fucked up black metal rejoice!! We couldn't be more excited if there was a brand new Benighted Leams record. FINALLY, we're able to review and list a record from one of our all time favorite outsider one man black metal bands, Striborg. Most folks have probably never actually heard Striborg, even though this will mark release #15 or thereabouts. But it wasn't for lack of trying on our part. We have been completely obsessed with Striborg since we first heard him a few years back and have been trying to get enough copies of ANY of his releases to list. Everytime we found someone who carried Striborg records, we would order 30 or 40 or 50, and would get 1 or 2. Or more likely none. We even resorted to writing letters to the band (he apparently lives in a shack in the woods with no phone and no computer!) And while most folks have never -heard- Striborg, you've probably at least heard OF him. Whether it was in an aQuarius review, we've referenced Striborg as the ultimate outsider black metal band in reviews of records by black metal weirdos Dead Reptile Shrine, Lugubrum, Draugar, Detsorgsekalf, Hidden and more, or on the recent black metallized SUNNO))) record Black One, which even had a track named for the dark mastermind behind Striborg Sin-Nanna.
But what is it exactly about Striborg that has everyone freaking out?
Five words for you: Tasmanian rain forest black metal! And it's just as grim and weird and as amazing as that might lead you to believe. We have Southern Lord to thank for this, the first readily available Striborg release, which continues his tradition of combining multiple releases on single cds, this one includes the brand new 2006 recording. Embittered Darkness, as well as the super rare Isle De Morts release recorded almost a decade ago, way back in 1997.
So what exactly does Tasmanian rain forest black metal sound like? Definitely grim, and lo-fi, ultra personal, demented and damaged, Benighted Leams, Abruptum, Dead Reptile Shrine, Necrofrost, Emit, Furze, Urfaust and all the rest of the baffling black metal hierarchy should give you a rough idea, but Striborg, is even further out, way more fucked up, more strangely psychedelic and freaked out, a doomy drone drenched black buzz, a growling fuzzy missive from the depths of some dark netherworld.
Haunting washes of gauzy synthesizer, mournful minor key acoustic guitars, dreary overcast swaths of depressive melancholia, and you think other black metal bands are buzzy?! Striborg take that black buzz and whip it into a furious freaked out frenzy, a guitar buzz like a million bumble bees, but sped WAY up, a prickly, fuzzy swirl, even at it's most doomy and plodding, Striborg drenches everything in that overblown buzz, a thick sandpapery ambience, that is the metal equivalent of walking through the pouring rain, under a full moon, through a graveyard at the edge of the world. Sin-Nanna growls and gurgles his obtuse black ravings in an impossibly creepy animalistic voice, somewhere between a rabid dog, a tiny demon, and a wicked old witch, often everything will drop out and all that will be left is a buzzing tangle of hissing harsh vocal and fuzzed out black riffing. Buried in the murk and mire are weird, rehearsal space drums, really flat and dry sounding, erupting in spastic and chaotic burts, not just blast beats, but instead bizarre blasts of percussive tangle amidst stretches of almost punk rock drumming, although most of Embittered Darkness is spent at a crawl, a buzzing midtempo dirge, as doomy as it is black, if not more so. Imagine an ultra lo-fi doom metal Xasthur, slow motion misery dotted with occasional barrages of black metal buzz and once in a while surges of slithering black ambience.
So totally creepy and beautiful, fucked up and gorgeous, a massive soul crushing slab of doom drenched black metal brilliance.
Isle De Morts, from 1997, is a lot more traditional, and a lot faster, almost every track a frenetic and frenzied burst of blackened and buzzing brutality, lo-fi but completely blown out and in the red, channeling Transylvanian Hunger era Darkthrone, but filtered through Striborg's cracked sonic kaleidoscope, rendering what might have been just some classic Norwegian BM worship, as a creepy and cracked world of ultrabuzz and overblown acidfried blackness, blast beats so fast they sound like radio static, guitars so buzzy and blurry they turn into thick washes of crumbling prickly sound, and croaking toadlike vocals so high in the mix it sounds like the band is in a different room. So gloriously fucked up and freaked out. One listen is all it takes to see why Striborg towers above all his bizarre black metal contemporaries, ruling the doomed and damaged kingdom of ultrapersonal black metal dementia with an iron fist, a busted 4-track and a growing legion of buzz hungry minions!
The turntable has to be the greatest instrument ever invented. At least the greatest instrument that was never actually intended to -be- an instrument, or to be -played- at all. What was a revolutionary breakthrough in the playback of popular music, eventually became the ultimate plunderphonic device, with a sonic palette only as limited as your record collection, and then not even limited by that. Broken records, shards of different records glued together, discs made out of wax, or sand paper, or stone, or plastic, or even no records at all, just the sounds of the turntable and the needle. We're not talking DJ's playing records either. Sure we dig that stuff too, but we're talking about people MAKING music out of bits and pieces, scraps and shards, creating whole new worlds of sound. Hard to say what it is exactly about the sound of a needle on vinyl that moves us so, it's warm, and fuzzy, and imperfect, maybe it's the sound of our childhoods, our early musical discoveries, but whatever it is, we love that sound, the whir and hiss, the pop and crackle, for all the striving for pristine perfect digital sound, we can't help but lean in the exact opposite direction, loving our music to be rough and murky, thick with warm warble and rain like static, a hiss that is all age and character and texture.
A small group of like minded artists have been exploring the possibilities of the turntable for years, the early experiments of Milan Knizak and his broken music, the grand and gorgeous soundscapes of Phillip Jeck, the vinyl sculptures of Christian Marclay and Martin Tetreault, the rhythmic playfulness of Pierre Bastien, Otomo Yoshihide's turntable explorations in Ground Zero, the minimal compositions of Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, utilizing the runoff grooves, and between song ambience to construct their pieces, and on and on.
For over a decade Swiss sound artist Christoph Hess had been experimenting with turntables, tape loops, skipping records, before deciding to jettison any and all music made by other musicians, and instead using just the turntable itself to create sound. Thus was born Strotter Inst. Five customized turntables, each rigged up with pieces of metal, strings and wires, elastic bands, allowed to spin at different RPMs, each turntable contributing a subtle element, creating dense tangled soundscapes of rhythm and texture. Loping and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerizing. Low rumbling reverberations, slow stuttering twangs, these modified turntables sound remarkably like some sort of long stringed instrument with strings tightened just enough to stay on, but loose enough that they sort of buzz and rumble, pulse and throb. The framework for each track is a sort of lowend turntable riff, the wires and bands and cords are struck and plucked by the revolving turntable, creating slow slithery rhythms, within each a very subtle muted melody, everything slowly morphs and shifts as the various turntables sync up and then drift apart. Imagine the sound of five bass players, all playing simple slow melodies on primitive one string basses, and imagine them playing similar parts, but at slightly different tempos. A slow moving, motorik soundscape of thump and thrum. And around these loping rhythms are soft fuzzy clouds of crackle and hiss, the sound of the needles scraping the surface of the turntables, or skidding across pieces of metal, these contrasting sounds are dense and rich, sounding almost like super distorted vocals at one moment, thick washes of feedback the next. The sound may be simple and subtle, but it's also intense and overwhelming, like Jeck spinning Skullflower, or Marclay armed with only some Mingus bass solo dubplates, or a Tiermes / Bastien soundclash. So dark and mysterious and totally pure and primal sounding. This is SOUND as much as it is music. This is the turntable as musical instrument. This is rhythm and rhythms, this is machine music, but a machine freed from it's shackles, a new instrument, born, loosed, unleashed. Amazing.
Amazingly packaged in a die cut cardstock digipak, a large circular hole cut in the front, a smaller hole in the back, so you can see straight through. The front cover has imbedded in it an actual piece of plastic with record grooves etched into it, playable on your turntable! In fact when you listen to the cd you'll notice the first track is all silence, that's because the first track is actually on the sleeve, while the final track is only downloadable from the Strotter website, managing to subtly connect our history of recorded music, a release that is only complete as a record, a cd and an mp3.
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Wow!!! A few years ago, we were totally blown away by a compilation put out by Smithsonian Folkways called Indonesian Guitars, which among many amazing tracks happened to feature a song called "Fajar Di Atas Awan" by Irwansyah Harahap. It was of that disc's highlights, with haunting female and male vocal harmonies, lilting acoustic guitar, sruti box drones and cymbals. What we didn't know was that Harahap and singer Rithaony Hutajulu, both ethnomusicology professors at the University of North Sumatra, were the main composers and singers for a larger group of musicians and performers called Suarasama, and that song was the title track of THIS incredibly beautiful, blissful record by Suarasama, a 1997 live recording, now released for the first time in the U.S. by the fine folks at Drag City. We are so stoked, what a wonderful surprise this is.
Formed in 1995, Suarasama's musical influences are widely diverse, creating contemporary music based on vartious aesthetic and conceptual aspects of Middle Eastern, Indian, Sufi Pakistani, Eastern European, Southeast Asian as well as North Sumatra Batak and Malay traditional music. But the results are very far from academic. Instead the music is infused with a hermetic introspective devotional quality that seduces the listener with its soft trance-like rhythms and haunting vocal mantras. Persian and Indian percussion of tablas and defs meld with deft finger-picked guitar and gambus improvisations and dueling vocal harmonies that propel circularly forward in hypnotically beautiful interweavings. Meditative and organic, full of levitation-inducing majesty. For any devotee of raga folk, Masaki Batoh, Six Organs, Daniel Higgs, L, Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, Congregacion, The Habibiyya, Malachi, Pandit Pran Nath, The Trees Community, or Bruce Palmer, this is absolutely essential!!
We had long heard rumors that the Sun City Girls had been working on a cinematic album as something of a follow-up to Torch Of The Mystics and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, two of our all-time favorite, classic albums from the Girls' idiosyncratic catalogue of punky psychedelia dissolved through Southeast Asian pop, free jazz, and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But with the tragic death of drummer, poet, and polyglot savant Charles Goucher in 2007, it seemed that the Girls would end their career with the grand tease of an album of this sort never to be released. Fortunately, those recordings were not the stuff of urban legend or of unfounded fantasy, and the Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop has finally completed the album with the help of long time SCG cohort Scott Colburn! So here it is, the final SCGs album, and it's a worthy (and really quite accessible) capstone to their idiosyncratic discography.
Morricone has long been an influence and inspiration for the Sun City Girls, and especially Alan Bishop. In fact, he's been responsible for some of the best Morricone compilations issued over the years (i.e. Morricone 2000 and the Crime & Dissonance 2cd on Ipecac). As much as Bishop had been infatuated with Morricone, the homages to Morricone had been heavily disfigured and mutilated within the playfully murderous aesthetic of the Sun City Girls, where nothing is sacred and everything is fair game with the Girls' crosscultural appropriation. But for Funeral Mariachi, the Morricone riffs are situated in beguiling songs wholly devoid of the Sun City Girls' curmudgeonly fuck-you stances. In other words, Funeral Marachi is a damn good record. So good that it will probably invite a lot more people to investigate the wonderfully frustrating and woefully inaccessible back catalogue of the Sun City Girls.
Introspective, haunting, and at times beautiful, Funeral Mariachi opens with "Ben's Radio" where the Bishop brothers breakthrough a mid-tempo spy thriller number with a staccato duet of call and response avant-weirdness coupled with blurting atonal horns. Unmistakably Sun City Girls. In "Black Orchid", the group turns in the first of many Morricone references, where the Girls' are equally enamored by the incidental vocal melodies that worked throughout all of his scores. Here the Girls' offer a sad ballad for Richard Bishop's always stunning acoustic guitar and Alan's falsetto vocals bellowing his polyglot language. "Blue West," with its high-lonesome chorales, bad-ass guitar licks, and a mournful arrangements, could have been straight out of a John Ford movie. "Holy Ground" might as well be the Girls' answer to Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls to the Heart of the Sun" with Alan's caterwauling voice droning behind the diabolically chanted vocals, beautiful guitar leads, shadowy atmospherics, and weirdly playful calliope melodies. "Mineral Wells" and "El Solo" turn towards the more saccharine moments of the Morricone oeuvre with loungy piano, reverb whistled melodies, and actual female vocals (and not Alan mimicking a woman's voice). "Come Maddalena" is in fact a Morricone cover, from the 1971 Italian film Maddalena, perhaps known only for its soundtrack. Again, a rather moody atmosphere is set for plaintive, yet fuzzed out guitar melody. So fucking good!
The vinyl of Funeral Mariachi is undoubtedly limited, but a cd is scheduled for release later in October, we're told.
So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised...
So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.
It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.
In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.
An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.
Any one lucky enough to visit hypnorockers Circle in Finland, besides being showered with hospitality and crazy adventures, hockey games, private concerts, lots of record shopping, reindeer dinners and Finnish pizza, also is quite likely to be invited to record with the band, as they seem to be in a constant state of ready-to-record-ness, as our very own Andee can attest to: just check http://www.tUMULt.net to hear Jaappollot, the results of several sessions he shared with the boys in Circle!
Seems a similar thing happened to abstract free rock collective Sunburned Hand Of The Man when they were in Finland, and it's hard to imagine a better match. Sunburned seems to have lured Circle back into the murky woods, for long languorous stretches of slow burning psychedelia. The metallic sheen of recent releases has been rusted and caked with mud and old dried branches, the result a trancelike folk flecked tribal krautrock, the perfect mix of what we like best about both bands.�
The sound on first listen is like some sort of�alien world music, with dense, but laid back�tribal drumming, swirling serpentine guitar lines,�whispered chanted vocals, all wrapped in a cavernous production, making the tracks sound warm and wide open, expansive and endless, there is clatter and clang, but for the most part it's smeared and blurred, buried in sonic murk, wrapped around abstract krautrock rhythms and chunks of angular guitar riffage. Some of the tracks get wild and chaotic, but even then, the sound is still restrained, not jagged or harsh, more swirling and washed out.�
One of our favorite tracks ever, by maybe either band, is the super hypnotic�"Heinavelho", another growling ambient sprawl, but strangely rhythmic and musical, still�murky and muddy and super hypnotic, but with ultra subtle�repetitively strummed guitars, held in check by martial drum rolls and little squalls of brushed snares, eventually building to an FX drenched gothy cabaret crawl, all moody and drunken, lurching and downtuned, staggering through a thick cloud of chirping bleeps and bloops and dense swells of rumble and shimmer.�
Fans of either band will definitely dig, and a good gateway for anyone into one, but not yet so into the other...
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 5000 copies come with a bonus disc titled SatanOscillateMyMetallicSonatas (a nod to Soundgarden, there?) that features a single 28 minute track called "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fools? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
Packaged beautifully in a mini cd style gatefold, with AMAZING cover art, black on black with weird muted color and text printed in glossy varnish and metallic gold, both bands be-robed and standing in a cornfield, a full color booklet attached to the inside, a metallic sticker on the front, each copy individually numbered.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Okay, it's that time again, you know, when we tell you about a new, slightly different version of a Boris record you already have. And then you decide just how much of a Boris (and in this case, SUNNO))) as well) freak you really are.
This is the Japanese version of the recent collaborative effort between Japanese sludgelords Boris and their American counterparts, glacial doom merchants SUNNO))). Arguably the best release from either band in years, it's alternately achingly lovely, and crushingly brutal. But what's the deal with the Japanese version, and do you need it? Well, if you're as Boris obsessed as most of us are, the answer is yes. First off, it's got amazing new artwork. A gold and black slipcover with shimmering spot varnish text over a subtly altered booklet, on nice paper and with a fold-out Japanese insert. But it's the five minute bonus track that may have most of you shelling out another $20. A five minute alternate version of the track "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)". Already the record's strangest and most haunting track, female vocals hover over slow shifting slabs of glistening sound. Like doom metal gone slowcore. But on the alternate extra track, the "Black Sheep" version, the doomy moody slowcore is transformed into a string quartet, all warm soaring strings over swirling shimmers, drifting sun dappled melodies over swoonsome melodies and long drawn out chords. Quite pretty, and very much a strange addition. But is it worth buying all over again. Well, it is missing the bonus disc that came with the first pressing of the American version, but if you missed out on that completely, this is obviously essential. If you have that one already, well, it just might be worth it to have both. Up to you.
Here's what we had to say about the original disc:
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
It's a strange musical time lately, with pretty much every cool band we loved in the eighties and nineties reforming, many of them recording brand new albums, lots of them performing classic albums in their entirety, and while we're usually not all that psyched on the reunion thing, we have to say, we were pretty thrilled to get to see Slint, and some of us are going to see the Get Up Kids next week, and who could possibly complain about seeing the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer or Jesus Lizard? Sure, they were better back in the day, the energy is different, back then they were young and hungry and had something to prove, now they're moms and dads with jobs and many are probably doing it for the money, considering they're probably gonna make more reuniting for a few months now than they ever did in years of recording and touring.
Plus there's a whole new generation of music fanatics, who missed out on arguably some of the best music ever, many of whom love bands who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for all those bands that came before.
One reunion that folks have been clamoring for since mere moments after breaking up, is for emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate, and while it only took a decade, it looks like the band will in fact finally reunite, and tour, and yeah, we'll probably all be there, freaking out when they play the hits, and speaking of the hits, maybe more exciting than the reunion, is the deluxe reissue of SDRE's first two albums, Diary, and LP2, both absolute classics, redefining the template for modern day indie rock / emo, and like Slint, SDRE were most definitely a band that launched a million other bands. Odds are most folks have these discs already, but if for some reason you don't holy shit are you in for a treat. Heavy, mathy, emotional, catchy, totally rocking, and just absolutely incredible.
Diary, originally released back in 1994, is another one of those records that is so front loaded, you could be forgiven for owning this record and nor making it to the end. Even now, we have to fight the urge to play the first few tracks over and over and over. But fight on, cuz the second half is just as kick ass.
"Seven" and "In Circles" are probably SDRE's best known songs and for good reason, two of THEE most perfect indie rock jams ever. The guitars lines are tangled melodic, the riffs crunchy, the drums complex and pounding, the arrangements complex, with plenty of starts and stops, little bursts of manic chug, streaks of chiming shimmer, the vocals so anguished and passionate, high and reedy, but still a little rough and ragged, keening and on the verge of breaking, slipping from whisper to howl and back again, really, if you've never heard these guys, just listen to the sound samples, and if you're not immediately smitten / obsessed, then heck, we're not sure what else to do for you.
"In Circles" is the prettier half of the opening one-two punch, with that immediately recognizable looped guitar intro, before slipping into some shimmery stripped down almost slowcore, but with a fantastically soaring, epic, majestic, hands in the air, heartbreak chorus, which ranks up there as one of those all time goosebumps, hair on the back of your neck, tearjerker, air guitar, indie rock musical moments, and a testament to its power is that it has that affect EVERY time, and still does 15 years later.
So after listening to those two songs 20 or 30 times, force yourself to continue on, you won't be disappointed. "Song About An Angel" is another slow brooding drift, that has one of the coolest stop start staccato bridges ever, as catchy as any other song's chorus. "47" had it been pushed forward a little in the playing order, might have been part of that irresistible replay opening salvo, with an incredible main melody, and verses that somehow manage to be even catchier than the catchy chorus. And don't let all this poppiness and catchiness ward off you heavy music folks, all that pop is tangled up and intertwined with some serious heaviness, plenty of heft and crunch, some incredible guitar playing, wild mathy, almost metallic drumming, and again, all wound up into highly unconventional song structures.
We could go on and on and on, the rest of the record is just as awesome, there are a handful of brooding slow burners, but even those are peppered with some seriously emo blowouts, not a bad one in the bunch, it's not hard to see why we all freaked out about this band when this record first appeared, and none of its power or emotion or energy has been blunted by the passing of time. Not in the least.
The reissue features two bonus tracks, from the awesome and long gone Thief, Steal Me A Peach 7", which predated Diary by about a year, and if anything is even heavier and more dense, the perfect sort of bonus track, melding seamlessly with the album proper (and one thing we notice listening to the 7"s tracks is how much SDRE sometimes sounded like a WAY heavier, way more rocking Decemberists!). New fancy gatefold digipak packaging, with that iconic Fisher Price Little People parody artwork, featuring those conical people shaped toys, set in depressing environments, like in a kitchen with the toast burning, amidst a not so happy family, a couple sleeping far apart in their bed, in surgery, at the scene of a car accident, etc. Also includes all new liner notes and interviews with the various band members.
One complaint about the cd packaging though, the digipak comes in a slipcover, which is always cool, but the slipcover has the record title, band name, and some random text about bonus tracks and the producer, stuff that should obviously have been on a sticker but is printed over that super cool artwork, and unfortunately, you can't toss the slipcover, cuz it's the ONLY place where the track listing is printed, thankfully, the lp version does not make the same mistake...
It's a strange musical time lately, with pretty much every cool band we loved in the eighties and nineties reforming, many of them recording brand new albums, lots of them performing classic albums in their entirety, and while we're usually not all that psyched on the reunion thing, we have to say, we were pretty thrilled to get to see Slint, and some of us are going to see the Get Up Kids next week, and who could possibly complain about seeing the Butthole Surfers or Killdozer or Jesus Lizard? Sure, they were better back in the day, the energy is different, back then they were young and hungry and had something to prove, now they're moms and dads with jobs and many are probably doing it for the money, considering they're probably gonna make more reuniting for a few months now than they ever did in years of recording and touring.
Plus there's a whole new generation of music fanatics, who missed out on arguably some of the best music ever, many of whom love bands who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for all those bands that came before.
One reunion that folks have been clamoring for since mere moments after breaking up, is for emo legends Sunny Day Real Estate, and while it only took a decade, it looks like the band will in fact finally reunite, and tour, and yeah, we'll probably all be there, freaking out when they play the hits, and speaking of the hits, maybe more exciting than the reunion, is the deluxe reissue of SDRE's first two albums, Diary, and LP2, both absolute classics, redefining the template for modern day indie rock / emo, and like Slint, SDRE were most definitely a band that launched a million other bands. Odds are most folks have these discs already, but if for some reason you don't holy shit are you in for a treat. Heavy, mathy, emotional, catchy, totally rocking, and just absolutely incredible.
Sunny Day Real Estate's second record, self titled, often referred to as 'the pink album' due to its simple all pink cover, as well as being known now as LP2, was released in 1995, mere months before the band broke up (for the first time), and it's easy to hear in the music, the sound is much less immediately catchy than Diary, a bit darker, a grower for sure, all the sonic elements are still present, the same spidery chiming guitars, dense complex arrangements, soaring chug heavy choruses, Jeremy Enigk's plaintive emotional wail, and hooks, they're there all right, but they sink in slowly, over repeated listens. Over the years, LP2 has become just as powerful as Diary, in some ways even more so, with its overall sound more wrought with tension and emotion, the songs more minor key and somehow more sad sounding. And thus even, maybe a bit more emo.
There are some 'hits' here too. "Theo B" is frantic, with a cool lurching tempo, weirdly angular guitars, and some seriously intense vocals. "Red Elephant", is a slow burning post rocker, with a soaring chorus, rife with chiming guitars and dense drum pound, but with a weary, worn vibe, like much of the record, a strange undercurrent of impending doom. Definitely darker than Diary, but instead of that being a weakness, it's most definitely the record's strength. "Waffle" might be our favorite track here, a meandering low end slither, all woozy bass and Slint-y guitars, a sing songy tempo, a gorgeous main melody, and some truly beautiful voice-about-to-crack vocals. Then there's "8", which sounds like it could have been plucked right off of Diary, and like the single bonus tracks on Diary, reminds us again how much SDRE sometimes sound like a super heavy emo Decemberists. The strange thing about LP2, is that it's really back heavy, with some of the best SDRE songs EVER, tucked way near the end of the record, which makes sense in a way if you consider LP2 to be a sort of continuation of Diary...
The thing is, as long as we've had these records, they seemed more like 2 halves of the same record, a sprawling concept record, one side lighter, one darker, perfectly complimenting each other, both on their own practically perfect, but combined, pretty much one of the greatest song suites in second wave emo for sure, but maybe even in indie rock history all together.
After this record, frontman Jeremy Enigk would discover Jesus and go on to record some awesome solo records, 1/2 the band would go on to play in the Foo Fighters, and the band would get back together 4 or 5 years later, and record two more SDRE records, both pretty great, but nothing really compared to the magic of this one, and Diary.
LP2 features two bonus tracks, each single B-sides, and both again, pretty kick ass, and both surprisingly dark and heavy and EPIC.
All new deluxe packaging, gatefold digipak, printed inner sleeve, and a massive booklet with all new liner notes, and an interview with the band members.
These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out."
Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks.
The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance.
Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for.
Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful.
Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades.
This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is!
And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.
These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out."
Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks.
The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance.
Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for.
Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful.
Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades.
This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is!
And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.
These are always the hardest ones to write. The bands we've loved for years, the songs we've been listening to for decades, with no need to think beyond the pure visceral enjoyment of the sounds, just years of getting lost inside the music, and with music like this, going deeper and deeper with every listen, never a need to put that sonic magic into words, but still championing these sounds for all we were worth, but instead of a lengthy essay or diatribe, it was an insistent "YOU NEED THIS!" Or "You've never heard anything quite like this." Or even still "This is probably one of our all time favorite bands, and if you haven't heard this music, you have been missing out."
Years of finding copies of these long out of print gems in used bins and bargain bins and even dollar bins, because this was not popular music. As much as we loved it, and obsessed over it and played it for everyone we knew (and not everyone felt the same unbridled passion for these sounds that we did) and as much as often as we gave those occasionally discovered used copies to anyone we thought might love it as much as we did, there was no real hope for this band to reach the heights as a Sebadoh or a Pavement, even though they swam in the same sonic waters, for the Supreme Dicks were their own peculiar musical beast, one whose pop was subtle, whose noise was chaotic, whose vocals warbled and cracked, whose recordings were of extremely low fidelity, whose performances were loose and ramshackle, but whose magic would not have existed, certainly not in the same way it did, had all of those random elements fallen (im)perfectly into place. Thankfully they did, and we have this, years later, a lovingly compiled collection of the complete recorded works of Massachusetts indie folk outsider rock weirdos the Supreme Dicks.
The Dicks experienced a brief bit of popularity in the mid-nineties, finally seeing their debut record released, especially notable having formed all the way back in 1982, and during the years 1992-1996, the band released two albums, one ep, one single, one split single and a collection compiling the early works that predated their proper debut, it's all included here, and is darn near overwhelming all gathered up in one place, especially considering that ONE song in, and we already had chills. Such is the power of the Dicks, who sonically seemed to situate themselves somewhere between the Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, Pavement and Sebadoh (Lou Barlow even pops up on a Dicks jam or two), their sound an eerie psychedelic folk, a stumbling abstract primitivism, raw, and a bit warped, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse, that tension, that inevitable doom, rendered in sound and somehow woven into the fabric of their unique sound. Later, that sound would evolve to include sonic elements that would seem to be drawn from krautrock groups like Ash Ra Templ or Popol Vuh, but it's hard to say whether that was intentional or happenstance.
Their first album, The Unexamined Life, is probably the Dicks material that would be the least alienating to the casual listener, rooted in indie folk, the arrangements simple and spare, the instrumentation standard, but that's where the familiarity ends, as the Dicks forge their own path, and one song into their debut, seal the deal and establish themselves as masters of this arcane and unique to them musical form. "In A Sweet Song" gently tumbles into motion, all spidery acoustic guitar, delicate and crystalline, the vocals a sung/spoken warble, frought with emotion and tension, the drums stumbling, a lo -fi pound, in swoop more guitars, a brief bit of psychedelia, all druggy slippery melodies, and the clang and jangle of loud guitars, slowly building, a wild tangle of competing melodies that give us chills every time. The lyrics haunting and heartfelt, building again to a seriously rad jam that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a classic Pavement jam, pressed onto a 7", left in the sun, and then played back on an old Sears turntable, all warped and woozy and so so so wonderful. Even nearly 20 years later, nothing can touch this. And so goes The Unexamined Life, a bizarre collection of fractured folk music, fragmented and abstract, multiple vocalists, keening high about to crack warbles, and deep croons, fluttering flutes, hazy soft focus psychedelia, lilting and gently pastoral one second, weirdly chaotic the next, sawed strings, total super catchy jangle pop nestled amongst twisted Jandekian slowburn outsider folk, blown out super distorted psychpop melting into what sounds like some sort of bastardized classic rock, like the Grateful Dead via Faxed head, the tape crumbling, the sounds seeming to decay, even though the music itself is fairly straight ahead, finally finishing off with the appropriately titled "Strange Song", a sprawl of slow building tripped out psychedelic free noise freakout most modern bands would KILL for.
Workingman's Dick was originally released on Freek Records in 1994, and collected all of the early Dicks recordings, and is a glorious hodgepodge hinting at what was to come, not that far removed from their debut, if anything a bit more experimental, the timbre of the sound and the quality of the recordings varying from track to track, the sounds slipping from freakfolk to murky dirgery, and from haunting skeletal folk to Sentridoh like experimental fuckery. It's maybe the most difficult listen of the various releases, but also contains some of the band's dreamiest gems. This Is Not A Dick, was recorded around the same time as their final record, but was a lot like Workingman's Dick in that it was cobbled together from recordings made between 1987 and 1994, and much like Workingman's Dick, is sonically varied, opening with some abstract psychedelic drift, all grinding guitars and chiming melodies, a freaky lo-fi basement jam that is surprisingly and fantastically (although subtly) unhinged, and from there on out, the band slips from dreamy strummy shimmer to garbled crumbling experimentation, one of our favorites being "Marks Phonecall From Orgoneland", which is a dreamy little Avarus like microjam that's all whistling and tinkling chimes, skittery rhythms and hushed percussion, all accompanied by the phone call in question, a strange spoken word rant over a clattery No Neck Blues Band like clamor, the other being "Harmonic Convergence (Live At L'Oasis 1987)" which is a cool collection of recordings of the what sounds like various clubs between songs, lots of silence, clinking glasses, a recited poem with plenty of jeers from a sparse crowd and the band requesting someone to come up and play drums for them. Weird and wonderful.
Finally, the band released their last record, The Emotional Plague, in 1996, and this is where the band's warble folk and psychedelic crumble becomes a bit more expansive and far reaching, the above mentioned perceived influence of Ash Ra Tempel and other like minded outfits, transforming the group's sound into something more lush and lovely, and marginally less difficult. Marginally. Opener "Synaesthesia" is a haunting bit of droned out psychedelic drift, thick low end rumbles, chiming melodies, distant skeletal guitar melodies, the song starting out dark and powerfully minimal, but seeming to gradually fall apart as the track progresses, which leads right into the first proper song, the production notably more polished, the guitars ringing out, the drums not buried in the mix, but the sound still a little off kilter, slightly atonal, a little off key, the song a gorgeous lilting almost ballad, that builds to a full on psychrock freakout, and then peters out, leading directly into a nightmarish stretch of ominous FX drenched psychdrone creep, atonal and warped and warbly, eventually morphing into what almost sounds like some lost Neil Young outtake, unexpected for sure, but quite cool. And The Emotional Plague is where this already hard to describe band gets even more difficult to understand, let alone describe, most of the elements were present on past recordings, but here sound reimagined, and reinvented, repurposed even, the band seemingly able to reel of some perfect, delicate folk music like they could have been making music like that all along, but as if to say "why the hell would we?!" they immediately take the sound and pull it apart into a stumbling alternate dimension Pink Floydian dirge that manages to be psychedelic, but also some sort of twisted indie pop, all fused together into something that is both and neither. The tracks on The Emotional Plague are longer, some nearly 10 minutes long, which let the Dicks explore and ramble and stretch out, weaving tranced out sprawls of repetition, of looped mesmer, of smoldering psychedelia, of hushed delicate dreampop drift, of haunting backporch alien Appalachia and of brooding, almost orchestral majesty, replete with horns and haunting spoken word, and a twisted deconstructed coda, "Green Wings Fly Adventure (Showered Reprise) an elegiac final movement, the perfect way to end such a mysterious and strange record, and an even more perfect way to lay to rest one of the strangest, most incredible, and under appreciated bands of the last two decades.
This deluxe reissue includes most of the original artwork, new liner notes, tons of rare photos, and tacks on a couple B-sides and a handful of unreleased jams, but even without those extras, this collection gathers up one of the most beautifully baffling and bafflingly brilliant bodies of work from one of our favorite groups of the last 20 years. And while we did our best with the above review, it's hard to stress just how utterly recommended and essential this really is!
And vinyl folks, while the whole set was not pressed on vinyl, the two proper albums were, so both The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague are available on vinyl (deluxe double lps to boot!) for the first time EVER.
Svarte Greiner is doom. Well, sort of. Maybe acoustic doom is more like it. And this very well may be the first time we've heard a record, or an artist that perfectly captures the sound and mood of the hitherto unexplored world of acoustic doom. Svarte Greiner is the solo guise of Norwegian soundmaker Erik Skodvin, who, when he is NOT Svarte Greiner, channels his less doomy musical emotions into an outfit called Deaf Center. But the dark and doomy loveliness of Svarte Greiner is what we're most concerned with here.
And the reason for that is that the music of SG is practically perfect. It's like that sound in our heads we've been imagining for ages but had never actually heard. Until now. The sticker on the cd namedrops Earth, Angelo Badalamenti and Volcano The Bear, which sounds interesting for sure, but doesn't nearly capture how beautiful and wonderfully creepy this stuff is. Imagine the music of past AQ faves like Jasper TX, Machinefabriek, Xela, Part Timer, that crumbling, hiss drenched loveliness, but then filter it through some dreary drowsy slowcore, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore or Low, but then loop it and process it and pull it apart until it becomes even more fuzzy and hypnotic, a Basinski or Tim Hecker produced bedroom dark ambient doomfolk record from Bohren perhaps? Sounds impossible, but Knive is all that and still somehow more.
From the first track, we were totally hooked. It's like the soundtrack to some ultra abstract black and white film, unearthed and projected in all its decayed and degraded glory. Everything is shrouded in shadow, shades of black and grey, back lit and rendered soft and indistinct. The mood is minor key and ominous. Very epic and cinematic, but somehow still understated and subtle. But definitely scary. And evil. But not overtly so. The record is bathed in tape hiss and record crackle and all sorts of gorgeously textured recording inconsistencies. It's some impossible tangle of mournful slowcore, twentieth century minimalism, and creeping doomy dirge, all deconstructed into abstract and skeletal, Basinski like soundscapes. Strings scrape and squeak, in the distance drift muted percussive thumps. Each track is a droning smear of sound, peppered with bits of random sonic clatter, everything wreathed in smokey cello swells, and soft swoonsome strings. Guitars drenched in reverb offer up the slightest of melodies, riffs are unfurled and left suspended in in clouds of dreamy fuzz, allowed to slowly fade to nothingness. There are melodies, but they develop at a snail's pace, notes stretched to their breaking point, becoming miniature drones of their own, but when viewed from afar, are actually gorgeously rendered, and evoke dark feelings of despair and further define Svarte Greiner's sonic world of wonder.
Elsewhere, gristled guitar distortion is dripped onto spare expanses of late night percussion, bells and chimes reverberate over a dense sea of swirling tape hiss, ambient backdrops sometimes surface briefly, rising up through the murk, wind, footsteps, the call of crows soaring far overhead, and amidst it all, haunting female vocals that drift amidst the decayed ruins, small glimmers of light in a world of utter black, giving Knive even more of an emotional intensity. So goddamn good.
The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans.
That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records.
There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there.
The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play.
Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.
FINALLY HERE ON VINYL AND BACK IN STOCK ON CD TOO!! This Record Of The Week (and Allan's #1 of the year), went completely AWOL from distribution shortly after we first listed it last summer, d'oh. Now at last the label sorted out a new distro, and so we have the cd back from limbo, and also the vinyl version now available too for the first time!!! Here's our original review...
Not to be confused with a few other Sweat Lodges out there (we reviewed a tape by a screamo punk band called Sweat Lodge a few years back), this Sweat Lodge is a heavy psych stoner rock band outta Austin, Texas, and they are AWESOME. Seriously, all the stoner rock digging peeps here at AQ immediately fell in love at first listen, they're that good. Actually we meant to list it a few weeks ago, but our supplier was out of stock - but now we've 'em are not only listing it, but making it Record Of The Week, just 'cause everybody here (not just the stoner rock digging peeps) has been digging it so much and we're still spinning it a LOT.
There's a big Black Sabbath influence evident here, you know, jamming grooves, powerful riffage, and Ozzy-ish (but not too Ozzy-ish) vocals... Sure, lots of bands play that game these days, but these guys are winners. Just super solid, with catchy songs, a dark and trippy vibe, and maybe most crucially, those vocals - the guy is good! Also the sound and mix is just right, clean but not too polished or produced, just a very satisfying, listenable sound, heavy but accessible and melodic. Along with the Sabbath, what we're hearing reminds us of the likes of Uncle Acid, Freedom Hawk, (fellow Austinites) Fogg, maybe even some Golden Void, and other heavy, rockin' faves so if you're into stuff like that, do yourself a favor and check out Sweat Lodge!!!
Weirdly, this band started out as a three piece, of just bass, drums, and vocals - no guitar! They performed and even put out a 7" and demo tape with that lineup, and that stuff WAS cool (lotsa heavy fuzz bass and those killer vocals, yeah why not?) but really they made the right decision recently to expand the band to its current five-piece format, as documented on this debut full-length, bringing in not just one but two guitarists for not just a fuller, even heavier sound but a lot more interesting psychedelic interplay and texture. Sabbath with twin guitars, nice idea. Just listen. Everybody we've played it for so far has gotten hooked!
There definitely seems to be a pattern developing with recent Records Of The Week. The Loop reissues a few lists back, The Telescopes last time, and now Swervedriver. We hadn't really noticed at first, we were just so damn excited that so many of our favorite records were getting reissued. And while it might seem a bit strange to be looking back instead of forward, most of the music we love now wouldn't even exist if it weren't for these bands, or if they did they'd sound WAY different. And the thing is, the aQuarius list is in no way comprehensive and complete, as we only started doing it about 12 or 13 years ago, which means everything pre-1995 or '96 is not represented, which is a huge bummer since the late eighties and early nineties are the very times that defined most of us musically. Thus we've done our best to review reissues of lost classics, or even not lost classics, from those eras, eighties metal, shoegaze, grunge, nineties college rock, the list of records we discovered during that time, that STILL resonate and kick ass could fill up a hundred aQ lists. So instead of dwelling on the fact that these are not actually new, let's just consider then records we loved, and still love, and records we're convinced folks out there who are too young to remember, or may have just missed out the first time around, will probably also love, records that had they been released later, would have no doubt been showered with adoration on the aQ list. Which brings us to a unanimous aQ fave, UK heavy shoegazers Swervedriver.
Calling Swervedriver shoegaze is a bit misleading, they were tangentially part of that scene, and their sound definitely had a bit of drift and shimmer to it, but unlike the rest of the shoegazers, Swervedriver were HEAVY. Super rocking, their wall of guitars was not ethereal and ephemeral, it was crunchy and distorted and thick, and besides all that, they wrote some of the catchiest songs ever. EVER. The sort of songs that explode into frenzied psychedelic shoegaze freakouts, but just as quickly slip into a dark chugging grooves with hooks that stick in your head like crazy, and parts the still to this day illicit shivers, even after a hundred listens. Rare is the band who can define a sound, and a scene and then totally transcend it.
For those new to Swervedriver, they definitely share much in common with their shoegaze scene compatriots My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Catherine Wheel, Chapterhouse, and the like, but as mentioned above, that shoegazey haze was just one element in their arsenal, and not at all the main one, that would be the dueling guitars, heavy and crunchy, melodic and lush, soaring one second grinding and chugging the next, often tangled into gorgeous harmonies, or layered to create thick walls of sound, those formed the basis of their sonic blueprint, over which they crafted incredible hook filled songs, some washed out and swoonsome, others hard and jagged and HEAVY. The vocals melodic but still plenty rough and raw, perfectly complimenting the heavy guitars and pounding drums, an impossibly perfect balance between heavy and pretty, hooky and hard, which is precisely what makes Swervedriver, one of our favorite bands ever.
Mezcal Head was Swervedriver record number two, released in 1993, and featured a slightly altered lineup, that if anything made the band sound even heavier. Almost like Raise part two, with the hooks dialed back again, and the heavy guitars cranked, but again, like on Raise, it's hard to pick any losers, every track here is catchy and heavy, and sounds like Swervedriver and nobody else. And as if to balance the heaviness, there are a handful of tracks more dark and drifting and almost mellow, interspersed between the bursts of shoegazey heaviness.
"Duel" is definitely the one here, the band's biggest hit, and it's easy to see why, with an incredibly heavy main riff, and swirling effects all over the place, the vocals a lazy drawled afterthought, and the hook, totally destroys, and still gives us chills, the second half is much poppier, with the song growing gradually more mellow and washed out, a sort of low key space rock outro.
Then there's "Last Train To Satansville", with another killer main riff / hook, and some truly haunting vocals, lots of effects too, in fact this record found the band's obsession with pedals becoming even more evident, with various elements wreathed in delay and reverb and flange and phaser, and impossible combinations of all four, creating swirling clouds of psychedelic shoegaze space rock, a sound even more expansive than on Raise. The rest of the songs, while maybe not as immediately catchy, are still fantastic, the sort of songs that become later favorites, one at a time. Whatever song was least listened to, gets rediscovered and blossoms before your very ears, making you wonder why the heck you weren't obsessed with THAT one in the first place. That's the magic of this record, and of this band. Both Mezcal Head and Raise are essential, two parts of a larger ever evolving whole, so buy one at your peril, because no doubt you'll eventually find yourself needing the other.
Like Raise, totally essential, WAY recommended, and absolutely required listening.
For the reissue of Raise, they tacked on 4 extra tracks, B-sides, outtakes, which includes is one of the best Swervedriver songs ever, "Planes Over The Skyline", a Japanese bonus track on the original release, a B-side we think, but holy shit, if the band was kicking out B-sides of this caliber, it's no wonder their records proper were so mind blowing.
New packaging, a deluxe 6 panel digipak with a thick booklet packed with photos and new liner notes from the band.
There definitely seems to be a pattern developing with recent Records Of The Week. The Loop reissues a few lists back, The Telescopes last time, and now Swervedriver. We hadn't really noticed at first, we were just so damn excited that so many of our favorite records were getting reissued. And while it might seem a bit strange to be looking back instead of forward, most of the music we love now wouldn't even exist if it weren't for these bands, or if they did they'd sound WAY different. And the thing is, the aQuarius list is in no way comprehensive and complete, as we only started doing it about 12 or 13 years ago, which means everything pre-1995 or '96 is not represented, which is a huge bummer since the late eighties and early nineties are the very times that defined most of us musically. Thus we've done our best to review reissues of lost classics, or even not lost classics, from those eras, eighties metal, shoegaze, grunge, nineties college rock, the list of records we discovered during that time, that STILL resonate and kick ass could fill up a hundred aQ lists. So instead of dwelling on the fact that these are not actually new, let's just consider then records we loved, and still love, and records we're convinced folks out there who are too young to remember, or may have just missed out the first time around, will probably also love, records that had they been released later, would have no doubt been showered with adoration on the aQ list. Which brings us to a unanimous aQ fave, UK heavy shoegazers Swervedriver.
Calling Swervedriver shoegaze is a bit misleading, they were tangentially part of that scene, and their sound definitely had a bit of drift and shimmer to it, but unlike the rest of the shoegazers, Swervedriver were HEAVY. Super rocking, their wall of guitars was not ethereal and ephemeral, it was crunchy and distorted and thick, and besides all that, they wrote some of the catchiest songs ever. EVER. The sort of songs that explode into frenzied psychedelic shoegaze freakouts, but just as quickly slip into a dark chugging grooves with hooks that stick in your head like crazy, and parts the still to this day illicit shivers, even after a hundred listens. Rare is the band who can define a sound, and a scene and then totally transcend it.
For those new to Swervedriver, they definitely share much in common with their shoegaze scene compatriots My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Catherine Wheel, Chapterhouse, and the like, but as mentioned above, that shoegazey haze was just one element in their arsenal, and not at all the main one, that would be the dueling guitars, heavy and crunchy, melodic and lush, soaring one second grinding and chugging the next, often tangled into gorgeous harmonies, or layered to create thick walls of sound, those formed the basis of their sonic blueprint, over which they crafted incredible hook filled songs, some washed out and swoonsome, others hard and jagged and HEAVY. The vocals melodic but still plenty rough and raw, perfectly complimenting the heavy guitars and pounding drums, an impossibly perfect balance between heavy and pretty, hooky and hard, which is precisely what makes Swervedriver, one of our favorite bands ever.
And Raise one of our favorite -records- ever. Released in 1991, for anyone our age, or thereabouts, it was pretty difficult to not see Swervedriver everywhere, MTV, 120 Minutes, college radio, when Raise came out it was like nothing we had ever heard before, incredibly catchy and hooky but so rocking. And the songs, shit, most bands would give anything to have written "Son Of Mustang Ford" or "Rave Down", or heck, anything on Raise. But yeah, let's take "Son Of Mustang Ford". Plenty of folks will recognize it within seconds, that pounding rhythm, the thick layered guitars, and that main guitar hook, immediately exploding into an almost Treepeople (pre-Built To Spill) guitar tangle beneath killer vocals, before returning to that opening groove. Furious, and dark, and minor key, but so epic and kick ass, total head banging air guitar shoegaze nirvana. Then there's "Rave Down", their other big hit, that displays Swervedriver's other sonic side, guitars that a languorous and sunbaked, but still distorted and heavy, the song woozy and lilting without losing any of its power, and a change that still gives us goosebumps almost two decades later.
The thing with Swervedriver was that even though they had actual hits, the record was packed with could have been should have also been hits. Pretty much every song is hooky and heavy and catchy, not a weak track in the bunch. "Sandblasted", "Sci Flyer", both heavy blissed out rockers, "Feel So Real" sounds almost like a tougher heavier Lemonheads, with it's sweet little main melody and total pop main hook.
Totally and absolutely essential.
For the reissue of Raise, they tacked on 4 extra tracks, B-sides, outtakes, and damn if they don't sound just as kick ass as the album tracks proper. New packaging, deluxe 6 panel digipak with a thick booklet packed with photos and new liner notes from the band.
Woah! The boys at Melters continue to absolutely amaze by releasing the most catchy, heavy, trippy pop music being made in the Bay Area. In addition to the Tony Molina (of Ovens notoriety) solo lp, they've brought us the fucked up bedroom pop of Violent Change, whose full-length we made a Record Of The Week last year. So, when Mr. Eli Melter himself came in with a stack of the new Swiftumz album, we knew we were in for a treat. Well, we kind knew it also 'cause we're Swiftumz fans. We've gushed over Swiftumz releases before (the last one being a two-song 7" released back in 2013 that we still have a couple copies of), but on Everybody Loves Chris, the titular Chris McVicker has stepped up his game on every possible level, crafting a stoned mix of stuck-in-your-head pop hooks, saccharine love songs that you want to play over and over again, and Ariel Pinkish bedroom lo-fi weirdness. Did we mention wanting to play them over and over again? This record is seriously difficult to not start right up again after it ends.
By the time we finished track three on the first listen, this was pretty much automatically a Record Of The Week, bringing to mind Teenage Fanclub power pop, Guided By Voices, and maybe even the more sunshine-y Sparklehorse tracks out there. Then you get a track like "Come My Way", just blown out synth and harmonized vocals, but it totally works, adding to the spaced out stoner vibe of the record. "Taste the Gray", too, gets spaced out towards the end, heavy and repetitive, but still totally catchy. "Walter's Song" and "Ladybird" have a drugged-out, childish Ariel Pink vibe that still manage to be total hook-centric pop tunes.
Another stunner from McVicker, and Melters, a totally unexpected masterpiece. Everybody Loves Chris, or at least, Everybody Should!! If there was any musical justice in the world, Swiftumz will blow up and McVicker will get famous for this, but, at least those of us "in the know" will be able to spin this record again and again.
Brand new album of electronic flecked tribal spaced out druggy free folk krautrocky weirdness from the Belgian "Funeral Folk"collective known as Sylvester Anfang (now spelled with a 'Y' instead of an 'I' for some mysterious reason) who have continued to evolve with every record.
The now out of print Satanische Vrede lp introduced us to these guys, with a garish lp sleeve featuring the band shirtless, wearing white hoods, holding goats on leashes, an image that somehow reflected the music inside disturbingly accurately. A primitive, ritualistic, orgy of abstract percussion, tripped out psychedelia, wandering free folk, some serious space rock, and a hint of something blacker and much more sinister.
This is only technically the second proper full length, but things have somehow gotten even more space-y, more druggy, more krautrocky, and thus more ROCKING. The record does start off with a strange sonic ritual, all mysterious spoken word, squiggly electronics, chaotic noise guitar backdrop, tons of effects, streaks of feedback, long swirling tendrils of whirring shimmer, but then BANG, the record launches right into "Na Regen Komt Sondvlred" mid-jam, as if someone just walked in on the band and pushed record without the band even noticing, locked as they were in full on transcendental space psych jam mode, relentless motorik skeletal beat, warm warbly low end pulse, and guitar, LOTS of guitar, distorted and wah wah'd the fuck out, flitting from moaning croonsome melodies to dense tangles of freaked out chaos, the whole sound and vibe so druggy and trippy and divine. The first band we thought of was German Oak, as this also sounds like it could have been recorded in some massive underground stone bunker, then Hawkwind, then some mix of the two, a seemingly endless mind expanding, speaker melting ur-jam, and we're only two songs in!
The two part "The Devil Always Shits In The Same Graves" is a massive twenty minute songsuite, that seriously smolders, the guitars twangy and Morricone-esque, the vocals a distorted scowly growl, the guitars spidery and sitar like, buzzing lazily, the melodies Eastern sounding, the drums laid waaaaay back, like listening to the Wooden Shjips at 16 rpm, but turned way down, for some late night bliss out. The second half is almost like a mirror of the first, but doused (dosed?) in noise and delay and distortion, a blurred lysergic Hawkwind outro rendered in effulgent streaks of buzz and fuzz, even more abstract and drone-y and space-y than the first part.
The four tracks in between cover a lot of ground, although never straying too far from that psychedelic buzz drenched krautrock that forms their core, from warm languid muted dronescapes, a thick smear of undulating effects laden warble over what sounds like a buried pop song, to still more white hot (outer) space rock dirge-ery, thick ropy basslines supporting swirling garage fuzz organs and tangles of psychguitar as well as dense clouds of malfunctioning electronics and haywire effects, to dense swells of super intense spacekrautdronegroove that could/should go on forever, to long stretches of glistening high end guitar shimmer and moaned sorrowful vocals, all wrapped in soft billows of dreamlike delay, to woozy garage kraut dirges, all detuned riffage, and pounding machinelike pulse, blurred buzz and otherworldly effects.
The whole record seems to melt together into one oozing organic meta-sound, a glorious extended space jam with a trajectory set somewhere in the distant future, a dizzying journey through innerspace, a slow burning series of sounds, fragments of the whole, sent spinning into the ether, streaked with starlight and glimmering reflectively in the muted glow of distant suns, a glorious bit of space rock, beamed to earth, into a clearing, in the middle of a forest, lit by firelight, channeled through the figures gathered there, surrounded by a stone circle that on closer inspection is revealed to be a haphazard assemblage of amplifiers, the cords running along the dirt of the clearing like black vines, the various figures hunched over, each wielding some sort of implement, their movements downright demonic in the firelight, and the sounds that come drifting out of the clearing even moreso....
Try as we might (and see above, we are obviously trying!), words hardly do these sounds justice. One of the best records of the year so far for sure...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Very Strange and Unpredictable, and Fun. As if Holger Czukay put out a Digital Hardcore album! Samples from Eastern European marching anthems and various other strange sources, Szeki Kurva make short attention span techno-folk music suitable for an surreal James Bond film. This Hungarian (we think) band is an exciting new discovery for us (though reportedly they are huge in their homeland), so odd that even The Wire might miss it, upping the ante on the exotic and bizzare everywhere.
Sweet! This is the sort of thing that makes for a good Record Of The Week both 'cause of how it sounds (always the biggest consideration of course!!) and also 'cause the back story is pretty cool, too. We'll start with that. T.R.A.S.E. stands for Tape Recorder And Synthesizer Ensemble, a name that, if used by a band nowadays might seem just a bit unimaginatively straightforward & blandly self-explanatory, or perhaps meant ironically academic-sounding somehow. But when you learn that T.R.A.S.E. were a DIY "ensemble" masterminded by a precocious British schoolboy back in 1981, making experimental electronic home recordings that sound not too far from stuff such modern-day outfits as Emeralds and Umberto and Soft Moon would be doing years later, then the name becomes fairly endearing, eh? Just take a look at the cover photo, two skinny teenagers, one looking kinda cool in T-shirt and shades, standing with electric guitar in hand, the other kid in sweater and jeans, looking a bit dorkier as he sits amidst a cluttered array of electronic keyboards, amplifiers, reel-to-reel tape machines and other assorted audio gear. The latter teen is T.R.A.S.E. founder Andy Popplewell, most definitely an A/V geek at his school, who put together his own six-channel audio mixer at age 16 following plans in a issue of Practical Electronics magazine. Being into both sci-fi soundtracks and new wave music like The Human League, Ultravox and Gary Numan (one of the tracks here is a Tubeway Army cover) it wasn't long before that mixer, and other gear he built, like an "Elektor Chorosynth", was put to use to record his own music. Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Giorgio Moroder where among his other inspirations. T.R.A.S.E. recorded one unreleased cassette lp called Electronic Rock, and the deep diggers at B-Music/Finders Keepers have compiled tracks from that tape here along with other home studio / real studio / demo tracks by Popplewell and T.R.A.S.E., 14 total cuts of adolescent outsider synthsplorations, all tick-tocking drum machines and swells of droning synth, adorned with phaser and fuzz FX, replete with gentle melodies and warped "cosmic" soundz. These tracks are mostly instrumental, though a few have vocals, like the Messethetics-ish downer electro pop of "Talk To Me" and the sad, fuzzy "Unrequited Love". So much primitive shimmering synth beauty, the more abstract of the tracks glistening rhythmically, the more song-like coming across like lo-fi coldwave cuts.
Perhaps the best recommendation we can give this, is that playing it in the store, generally results in customers asking about it and buying a copy. Probably the best "long lost tapes" release of vintage unknown electronica since that Rodion G.A. record!! One of those serendipitous discoveries, occasioned by a fortuitous meeting between Andy Popplewell and Andy Votel of Finders Keepers.
The cd booklet includes color photos and vintage synth kit adverts, alongside detailed and very revealing liner notes penned by Popplewell himself, who in the wake of T.R.A.S.E. later became a BBC radio engineer, now works in audio media restoration, and who currently studies conspiracy theories and other esoteric knowledge in his spare time.
Fyi, we momentarily had an import vinyl version of this a while back, but it took 'til now for the cd to materialize, glad it finally did, though it's too bad we don't have the vinyl anymore (maybe again, someday?).
FINALLY BACK IN STOCK. THE ULTIMATE DRONE RECORD.
We love this record so much. The Taj Majal Travellers are so utterly mind blowing. This is a double cd reissue of this legendary Japanese psych ensemble's second lp which has been unavailable for several years now, but when we did have it in stock, if anyone asked about drones, this is the record we would always suggest. One of the most hallowed artifacts of the psych-rock collector scum scene (originals on vinyl could set you back more than $1000!), this album is an epic higher key improvised drone extravaganza, all performed live on beaches and deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated. Feedback, time-space lag, horns, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound. So unbearably awesome. And this is not electronic music, or studio based carefully constructed drone music, this is massive and organic, dreamy and natural, waves of sound drifting through sun and sky, rain and fog, trees and electrical wires, the shape of the earth, the temperature, the wind, all affecting the sound, changing the timbre ever so slightly, band members spaced out over hundreds of yards, improvising on an impossible grand scale, the earth as their stage, nature as their recording studio, a deliriously abstract sound world of subtle drones and drifting ambience. Imagine some long hairded seventies Japanese psych rock combo, but filtered through the Jewelled Antler Collective, jamming with Chris Watson, set up on sandy dunes, grassy knolls, forest glades, each not necessarily -playing- their instruments, but instead coaxing sounds from within the instruments, setting those sounds free and sending them skyward, watching it drift downwind, where a bandmate snatches the sounds and coaxes complimentary sounds from his instrument, sending a sonic respone, until these messages, these sounds weave into and around each other, the sky full of warm warbly mysterious sound. Psychedelic for sure, but more a sort of eyes closed, mind open dream drift drone psychedelia. ONE OF OUR ALL TIME FAVORITE RECORDS!!
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It's always nice when something we had NO knowledge or expectations about, never heard of before, with a odd name to boot, that we were simply sent a promo of in the mail, and eventually gave a blind listen to, turns out to be so much up our alley and in fact, in this case, totally Record Of The Week worthy! Ok, maybe this is not for absolutely everyone, but those of us into heavy-duty, hypnotically repetitive, distortion 'n' drone damaged jamming, then this obscure outfit on an obscure Danish label has indeed produced a Record Of The dang Week. Tandaapushi is an improvisatory, instrumental power trio of keyboards, bass and drums, formed in Brussels not long ago, and this is their debut album. Tokyo-based Leo Dupleix, who has a Master's degree in piano jazz from the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, would appear to be the band leader. He plays the keyboards and electronics - synth, electric piano, mixing board, etc. Meanwhile the two members of the rhythm section are active and accomplished in the Belgian free jazz scene. So yeah their music here is "mostly improvised" - but not, like, JAZZ, not unless your idea of jazz is the Dead C and Supersilent jamming together, having switched up instruments perhaps. Or you gotta imagine The Necks as produced by Pumice, something like that. Perhaps Circle or Cave running wild in the INA-GRM studio? It's a dense, energetic, experimental, extremely rhythmic mix of avant noise rock, experimental electronics, musique concrete, and free jazz improv. Weird and warped but definitely on point with what they're doing, which is hard to describe, but must require a certain level of musicianship (noisicianship?), tight communication, and a special shared aesthetic, sound-wise, devoted to making trance-inducing grooves with noisy, droney, unidentifiable textures.
The disc is divided into four tracks, Parts 1-4. Part One hooked us immediately, with its eight minutes of thick throbbing feedback skree and droning hum and waver, a grimy, rhythmically-krauty plod. Part Two is a bit of a quirky interlude of electronic beep-boop, distortion and cryptic clatter, brief at just 2:45. Part Three gets back to the droned out intensity of part one, pounding and pulsing for over well over 15 minutes, the rhythms giving way to pure grinding drone-whoosh by the very end. That segues right into Part Four, which brings back the beat, a quietly crunchy rhythm laced with feedback, steadily squelching along for another eleven minutes which bring in all sorts of chitterings and other strange sounds of indeterminate origin. Percussive punctuation pushes through the decaying electronic haze, and we could zone out to this FOREVER. When it all wraps up you're wondering what the heck it was you were listening to, but ready to dive back in at the beginning again.
San Diego's Tarantula Hawk create a heavy, epic rock soundscape, a bit like a metal version of Godspeed You Black Emperor, with a healthy dose of Hawkwind. The band is a four piece: with not one, but two bassists, a drummer, and a guitarist/keyboardist, and a couple of samplers amongst them. This, their debut recording, consists of one 40-or-so minute long track, all instrumental, that combines metallic math-rock (including the occasional blast-beat) with bombastic prog-rock keyboard sounds of the sort unheard since the early '70s! The keyboards make TH remind me (and perhaps only me) of a malevolent version of the organ-led seventies Italian prog cult-band Le Orme, but mixed with the majestic bass-heavy attack of Japanese prog-punk technicians the Ruins. All these sounds are then eventually subsumed into an experiment in drone science. Ominous stuff indeed! It's like the soundtrack to the military-occupation of a haunted house: martial drum beats, grandiose synth themes, eerie abstract electronics. For fans of Thrones, Neurosis, Magma, The Champs, Old Man Gloom, etc. No wonder they've toured with both California grindcore heroes Dystopia and Texas neo-psych spacerock act Yeti, drawing as they do from both genres. The cd version also includes a gritty cd-rom video of a live show, about the same length as the audio track on the cd, that's if anything heavier and scarier. Highly recommended!
