We listed the individual vinyl installments of Tarentel's Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun a while back (all now out of print so don't order!), each one a mind blowing blast of druggy, psychedelic free form rhythmic bliss out, and each one could well have been an AQ record of the week. But good thing we held off, cuz here we are a year or so later, and all four slabs of wax have been digitized and compiled as a massive double cd set, and needless to say, four -possible- records of the week, all piled on top of one another, can only mean one thing! Well, yeah, obviously, this absolutely had to be a record of the week. Quite possibly (and very probably) the best music we've heard from these guys, which is saying a lot considering how much we dig most everything Tarentel does...
When we first heard the title of Tarentel's 2cd (formerly FOUR lp) set, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, Ghetto Beats IS all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of most of these songs is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
We originally reviewed Ghetto Beats one lp at a time, and while they do work perfectly as one epic cohesive chunk of sound, they still sort of play out like the separate movements they started out as...
The first movement (lp #1) is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams.
Part two (lp #2) is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track so far, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss.
For part three (originally the third lp), the group start out by moving even further out into space (rock) on the ten minute "Stellar Envelope", blown out crumbling sheets of distorted psych guitar and dizzying FX wrapped around propulsive tribal beats, feedback everywhere, it almost sounds like Hawkwind with all the structure sucked out, leaving a huge swirling mass of psychedelic tribal ambience, while managing to still rock somehow. The rest of volume three area gorgeously obfuscated drift through a sonic landscape at once rough and lo-fi and blissfully lush, strange industrial clatter and clang is muted and smeared into mumbly ambience, guitars are looped into hypnotic stretches of throbbing drone, bits of dreamlike melody, simple spacious piano, are wreathed in fuzz and warped into gorgeous slabs of pop ambient fuzz, the whole thing is surprisingly tranquil and shimmery, especially after that opening salvo, and the dense rhythmic intensity of the first two movements, but within the context of Tarentel's seriously epic Ghetto Beat symphony, it couldn't sound more perfect.
The final movement (the 4th and last lp in the series) offers up Ghetto Beats' heaviest moment in the form of "Somebody Fucks With Everybody", a sidelong doom dirge blow out, referencing everyone from SUNNO))) to Growing to Nadja, a thick glacial swirl of downtuned guitars, wreathed in effulgent streaks of damaged outerspace FX and psychrock solar flares, all underpinned by Neurosis style tribal rhythms, constantly sounding as if any second the song will kick into the heaviest riff of all time, but instead, it stretches on and on, building and building, some sort of cosmic lo-fi krautrock ambience, massive and heavy, but strangely dreamy and blissful.
The rest of Ghetto Beats pretty much eschews the titular beats entirely, instead offering up several brief ambient drifts, the far away foresty folk hovering above slow moving slabs of glacial low end of "Where Time Forgot", the ultra brief scrape and shuffle of "Isalais Delay", the murky disembodied post rock of "You Do This. I'll Do That", a strange landscape of fuzzy melodies and indistinct song fragments, all woven into some sort of soft focus fever dream, and finally, "Lake Light", a two minute outro, the glorious final flurry of sound in this epic sonic travelogue spread out over 2cds, a gorgeously hopeful, sparkling glistening drift of shimmery harmonics, and misty minor key flutter...
Like we mentioned before, we've loved everything Tarentel has done in the past, but this is by far our favorite, and how could it not be after drifting dreamily through two plus glorious hours of Ghetto Beats, immersing ourselves in a dreamy, druggy, murky world of drifting space drones and propulsive beats, of fuzzed out shimmer and barely there ambience... So amazing!
Packaged in a super striking, full color, eight panel fold out sleeve, limited to 3000 copies, each with a numbered metallic sticker affixed to the front.
Most doom metal can be pretty easily classified, categorized or pigeonholed, whether it be stoner doom, funereal doom, sludge, epic doom, doom-folk, death-doom, psych-doom, dooooooooom or whatever other variant folks have cooked up. While plenty of bands do manage to transcend their classification, rare is the doomy beast that defies categorization all together, which is most definitely the case with Northwest duo Taurus, made up of Stevie Floyd (from psychedelic avant doom duo Dark Castle) and Ashley Spungin (of late great mystical metallic garage rockers Purple Rhinestone Eagle). Together they have conjured up a sound we could describe as impressionistic doom, or maybe abstract doom. Right from the outset, the various doomic elements, the usual sonic tropes are recast, filtered through the lives and experiences of these two woman, the result super dynamic, ultra heavy, extremely atmospheric, darkly ritualistic, hauntingly psychedelic, the opening track's main riff sounds like slo-mo Voivod played by Greg Ginn, all woozy and warbly, over churning drum pound, and laced with both deep witchy crooned vox, and more harsh vokills, all wound in a dizzying atonal sonic spiral that's harrowingly hypnotic and utterly mesmeric. But before that even happens, there's a gorgeously terrifying intro assembled from looped riffy churn, pounding percussive bombast, weird sample voices, and more howled shrieked vokills, a tense, and intense push and pull. The sound soon settles into something a bit more traditionally metallic, but only just, the vibe more like slowed down black metal than doom. It's like Deathspell Omega at 16rpm, barring the brief squalls of frenzied blackened freakout, but again, like that first track, the sound is warped and avant, even choice of notes, melody, rhythm, all seem obtuse and OTHER, which gives the whole record a sense of OTHERness, an outsider quality, that infuses even the most orthodox of moments with twisted pathos and deep emotion.
After those two relatively brief tracks, Taurus unfurl an epic psychedelic sprawl with "Set Forth On The Path Of The Infinite", setting the stage with swooping backwards melodies, simple ukulele (!) melody, reverbed samples, dense throbs of crumbling low end, a slow build bit of black ambience that sounds more like some lost arthouse soundtrack, and even when the drums come in, instead of exploding into a metallic onslaught, the track lopes and lumbers. And again, in swoop the guitars, and they're strange and alien, the melodies difficult, obtuse, accompanied by feral vocal howls, the song bursting into action in fits and starts, the sound ebbs and flows, eventually switching gears completely, with soaring angelic vox, over a backdrop of thick drum pound, and a slowly melting tangle of guitar keen and moan, before finishing off with another bit of haunting folkiness.
The tracks here are less riffscapes, and more a sort of ever shifting landscape of doom-ed sound, the riffs that do surface, are often indistinct, not so much riffs, as loose tangles of notes and chords that seem ghostly, and gauzy, occasionally indeed coalescing into proper riffage, but just as often drifting apart into something less distinct, more blurred and smeary, those sounds oozing and bleeding into each other, what in the hands of a more traditional doom outfit, would be more riffy and song-like all howl and pound, here becomes something ethereal and darkly psychedelic, abstract and ephemeral, and yeah, it's still heavy, but that heaviness is only loosely tethered, instead it's allowed to drift and dissipate, like on the other epic track here, "Increase Aloneness", which layers choral vocals over some roiling organ, a sort of blackened disembodied prog, by way of Arvo Part perhaps, here the build is slow, and distinctly non-metallic, samples only adding to the creepiness, to the twisted emotion, until finally, a MASSIVE riff comes cascading in, and the song is transformed into a churning, chugging behemoth, but that riff occasionally flickers and blinks out, leaving just Spungeon's double kick drum bombast, and that swirling psychedelic organ, building tension until the riff returns and so it goes, back and forth, light and shadow, love and hate, a tense/intense blackened majesty, an impossibly epic culmination of it's various constituent parts. The final track features Wrest from Leviathan adding vocals (he plays in a new group with Floyd called Devout), and we were expecting straight up some straight up black buzz brutality, but instead Wrest's croak drifts wraithlike atop a swirling morass of whirring organ, loose almost jazzy drumming, surrounded by dense billows of mysterious murk, and lush, decaying layers of drone and thrum, a sinister sprawl of grim psychedelic ambience, and textured cinematic moodiness, a Cold Meat Industry style sonic brood building to a bleak coda, suffocating and soul shearing, all by way of something infinitely more black and unknowable. No/Thing is harrowing and heavy, dense and demonic, but also spiritual and personal, intimate and introspective, and fucking fantastic.
We have both the lp version and the cd version, and for a very limited time, we also have just a tiny handful of the super limited, ultra deluxe BOXset version of No/Thing, which includes the colored vinyl version of of the lp, the cd version as well, a large silkscreened back patch / tapestry, a double sided lyric sheet / mandala, all housed in a hand screen printed, stained and shellacked wooden box, each one hand numbered and limited to 100 copies, and again, we only have a two or three...
Finally. Finally. FINALLY! If ever there was a more anticipated (around here at least) or a more criminally overdue reissue, it's this one right here. A mind blowing three-fer from should-have-been-massive blissed out fractured psych pop masters Teenage Filmstars, fronted by the inimitable Ed Ball, whom as we mentioned in our review of Star, TF's genius debut, was once described by My Bloody Valentine mainman Kevin Shields as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist". Shield also had this to say about Ball: "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Which coming from the man behind My Bloody Valentine means a lot. Especially when considering Teenage Filmstars, who employ a sonic palette not all that far removed from MBV's. BUT, and a very big but at that, minus the explosive bursts of caustic noise, MBV hewed more to a traditional pop sensibility than Teenage Filmstars. Where as Loveless, even for all its amazing wall of guitar heaviness, and effects drenched dreaminess, was still anchored to a verse chorus verse framework, with Teenage Filmstars, those conventions are tossed aside, or at the very least, flipped over, doused in effects, chopped up and played backwards. Which is why once again, we must proclaim, that in the landscape of (not so) popular music, TEENAGE FILMSTARS ARE BETTER THAN MY BLOODY VALENTINE. And don't get us wrong, we LOVE LOVE LOVE My Bloody Valentine, but imagine an alternate universe MBV, where for some reason, Shields' guitars played backwards, effects boxes grew sentient and demanded as much space as the instruments and voices, imagine viewing all of those sounds, already twisted and skewed, through a fractured funhouse mirror, and then, if you can, imagine some musical wizard, who is able to reign in all of those sounds, and somehow shape them into some of the most perfect UNpop you've ever heard.
Which brings us to Rocket Charms, record number two from Teenage Filmstars, which finds all the sounds on Star, pushed even farther out, the backwards sounds are more backwards (and there are more of them), the guitars are crunchier and more crumbly, the melodies are more catchy, the murk and shimmer are both murkier and shimmerier, and the production, is even more hazy and spaced out and lysergic and psychedelic and fucking head spinning. And yet somehow, Rocket Charms is a pop record, hooky and catchy, lilting and melodic. Opener "Pressure" is an immediate 'hit' if there ever was one, processed falsetto vox over swooping backwards rhythms and washed out guitar haze, a sort of druggy backwards Beach Boys pop ambience. And it just goes on from there, every song, a gorgeous slab of outsider twisted pop, on the surface a whirling sonic dervish, but within drift all manner of classic pop tropes, in the able hands of Ed Ball, subverted and turned inside out, wreathed in hiss and sparkle, and rendered, well, Teenage.
But then amidst all this deconstructed shoegazey noise pop (or pop noise), comes the track "Alone", quite possible our favorite jam on Rocket Charms, a slow brooding dirge, all skittery Stone Roses-y drums, thick distorted bass, disembodied voices, swirling ominous dark ambience, and a main melody that just might be the catchiest bit on the record, sounding like a slowed down twisted take on the Cure's "Close To You", but via Pop Will Eat Itself or some other warped UK grebo combo.
The crazy thing is, Rocket Charms for being as fantastic and over the top and incredible, isn't even our favorite Teenage Filmstars record. That honor belongs to the awesomely titled Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, which takes all of the songs and sounds from Rocket Charms and Star, and makes them WAY HEAVIER, WAY MORE FUCKED UP, the processed guitars and backwards guitars and vocals have gone haywire, the songs are less songs here and more fucked up fragmented pop experiments, but again, Ball has such a deft hand that he manages to take all these totally freaked out elements, and gets them to work, and sound like pop songs, albeit, totally dizzying and abstract, psychedelic and almost metallic at times. The record's defining moment is the opener "Physical Graffiti", not a Zeppelin cover, but hell, it sounds like it could be some sort of insane My Bloody Valentine / Led Zeppelin mash up maybe, but one that had been totally tweaked, chopped and screwed, then sped up and flipped reverse again, listening to it, it's hard to imagine how anyone could envision music like this, let alone actually make it. The guitars swoop all over the stereo field, stuttering, blurring into huge backwards swells, the drums are chaotic, the vocals sound backwards too, but not overtly, the melodies so memorable and catchy, at one point the whole track begins to stutter, almost as if your cd player is skipping, but it soon swoops back into the dreamlike psychedelic swirl.
Not all of Support Our Sickness is as heavy and crunchy, many of the tracks begin as classic sixties sounding pop, but as they progress, the effects seem to slowly take over, often one or more of the instruments flipping backwards and erupting into a squall of psychedelic freakout, but just as often, sprawling into a woozy almost balladic bit of slithery backwards slowcore. But even at its prettiest, the sounds are slightly tweaked, the vibe is subtly menacing, laced with bits of sunshiney jangle for sure, but this is some seriously drugged out dream pop damage, and remains to this day, one of the most amazing, and unlikely genius pop records EVER.
The first disc features 5 bonus tracks, two from the Support Our Sickness sessions, as well as three other unreleased jams, none quite as twisted, but still awesome, and in fact, they almost sound like they were rough drafts, just waiting to get the Ed Ball mad scientist backwards fucked up FX makeover. So that's it, BUY IT, you won't be sorry, this is easily some of the most forward thinking pop music ever, heavy and psychedelic, druggy and delirious, catchy and crazy and bafflingly brilliant.
But wait, what's this, a THIRD record? Teenage Filmstars final missive, and a pretty bizarre sonic sea change, in fact, it sounds like a totally different band. To be honest, we're not into it at all, Bring Back The Cartel found the band doing some sort of skittery smooth jazz electronic mood music, it makes very little sense that this one would get tacked on with the other two, when we first ordered this we actually thought it WAS just those other two, but maybe some folks will dig Bring Back The Cartel, there are some moments, here and there, but it doesn't at all approach the sheer brilliance of Rocket Charms or Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, so our advice would be probably to just give it a spin, and if you dig it, cool, if not, just ignore it, pretend it's not there, and immerse yourself in those first two, let the sounds twist you inside out and carry you off, play it over and over and over and over, forever and ever and ever and ever. Totally fucking incredible, and not just worthy of Record Of The Week honors, definitely something more, like how about Record of FOREVER!?!?
By now, pretty much everyone knows who Kevin Shields is. He of shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine. Who over the course of the last 20 years or so have released all of THREE records. But what about Ed Ball. A musical contemporary of Shields. A man Shields described as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist", going on to say "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Ball, over the last 20 years, has released close to 40 records, a whole mess of amazing discs with UK mod popsters The Times, a handful under his own name, and a bunch with power poppers the Boo Radleys, among others. But what Ball is most famous for, at least around these parts, is releasing three of the most perfect, and perfectly fractured genius shoegaze blisspop records EVER, as Teenage Filmstars: Star, Rocket Charms and Buy our Record Support Our Sickness. Each a kaleidoscopic blurred and blown out avant pop fantasia of sound, mixing in gorgeous melodies, with all manner of found sounds, backwards loops, ethereal vocals, studio fuckery, with very little regard for form or function, for the rules of pop. Instead, seemingly feeling their way through a totally tactile world of sound, everything bristly or buzzy or fuzzy, smeared or blurred, wah guitars wrapped around roaring motorcycles, Spectorish wall of guitars spread over, skittery almost Stone Roses-y rhythms. The most obvious reference is My Bloody Valentine. And at the risk of receiving an avalanche of hate mail, Teenage Filmstars are better. They may not have invented the sound, and they definitely didn't perfect it, instead, they fucked it all up, twisted it and chopped it and doused it in FX, and flipped it backwards, and let it sprawl and spin out of control, wrapped tightly into perfect pop gems one second, then let loose in unhinged squalls of sonic whatthefuck meltdowns the next. Each of the three records growing continually more abrasive, more intense, heavier, more backwards, more fractured and freaked out, and somehow only getting better and better and better.
Star is the first proper release from Teenage Filmstars, and was released a year or two after MBV's epochal Loveless. Opener "Kiss Me" is TOTALLY cribbed from Loveless, but it sounds like it was recorded on a busted 4-track, the rhythm track supplied by a fluttery backwards loop, the guitars super distorted but also brittle, woozy and wavery, all wrapped round the main hook, a guitar / vocal harmony that is just incredible, soaring and wistful but sort of super rocking, the whole thing dripping in effects, Loveless filtered through DIY bedroom pop, and then filtered through the twisted musical mind of visionary sonic alchemist Ball. The track crumbles near the end, the guitars disappear, motorcycles zoom by, the drums all distorted, snippets of classical piano, the twitter of birds, disembodied voices, one intoning "this just might be the finest composition I ever wrote", which it might have been, if it weren't for the follow up "Loving", which follows a similar template as "Kiss Me", with the main hook, a hushed wordless vocals crooning along to a slithery guitar line, all over a looped tribal rhythm, and tripped out wah guitar all over the place. If this was just a single, "Kiss Me" / "Loving", A side B side, it would be hands down one of the greatest singles ever! But we've barely just begun. And it only gets weirder and weirder.
"Inner Space" predates the fuzzy gauzy drift of Fennesz and Jeck and Tim Hecker by 20 years, unfurling sweeping vistas of sound, intertwined with buried melancholy vocals, muted rhythmic skitter, and deep whirring strings. "Apple" is all sixties strum and whirling effects laden swoosh, simple pop stretched out and blurred and distorted into something slightly alien, a warm dreamlike missive from beyond the stars. "Flashes" is a strange sort of electronic calypso, with a subtle techno throb beneath divine female vocals, propulsive krauty drums, and of course loads of FX. "Kaleidoscope" returns to the more MBV style rocking of the openers, and does indeed sound like a shoegazing fuzzrock kaleidoscope, a swirling dizzying space pop jam, the sounds slipping from speaker to speaker, the drums relentless and hypnotic, the vocals buried, but the main guitar melody soaring over the wavery sonic swirl beneath.
Then comes a three song suite of tripped out avant weirdness, drifting fuzzy almost melodies, strange intercepted radio broadcasts, a super deconstructed version of "Kiss Me", looped and flipped backwards and transformed into something else entirely, deep whirling drones, weird voices, samples, deep black ambience, shot though with streaks of glimmering buzz, the sounds of engines, choir like vocals, damaged effects laden rhythmscapes, flange and chorus and delay and reverb all wrapped around little sonic events, laced into a delicate framework of tripped out sound. Until the closer, "Moon", a gorgeous explosion of distorted pop effulgence, thick warbly organs, epic melodies, the guitar so distorted they almost sound like white noise, almost proggy keyboards, the whole thing fracturing into a brief falling apart coda of drum freakout, and skipping lurching guitars. Holy Shit.
So maybe it's not that Teenage Filmstars are -better- than My Bloody Valentine. Just weirder, more fucked up, more spaced out, more fractured, more challenging, more out there, less like ANYTHING you've ever heard, more... oh fuck it, okay... BETTER!!! Bring on the hate mail!!
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, all good enough to have been on the record proper, but with way more of the backwards production that would come to define their sound on future records, blissed out fuzzy shoegazey power pop, but crumbling and often in reverse, and thus fantastic. Also included lengthy liner notes, as confusing and obfuscated as the music itself.
The other two Filmstars discs are getting reissued soon, and will definitely also be Records Of The Week, so immerse yourself in Star while you can, cuz it only gets better and weirder from here on out...
The first two records from this UK psychedelic space rock combo were primo examples of the current space/psych sound that we can't seem to get enough of - huge lumbering Hawkwind beholden sprawls of epic kosmische heaviness and tranced out kraut jams and blissful FX drenched atmospheric drifts. The band seemed to align themselves with the usual suspects: Carlton Melton, the Heads, White Hills, Mugstar, the Hills, etc. Those earlier Teeth Of The Sea records took that spaced out psychedelic sound and twisted it all up, adding near metallic heft in places, cheesy eighties soundtrack music, sci-fi electronics, swirling synths, raga like drones, heck even horns, so this new one came with lots of high expectations, but somehow, even as weird as those other records were, we weren't prepared for this.
After a weird bit of garbled vocals, the first proper track kicks in, with a pulsing, eighties sounding electro drum machine, then some percolating synths, reverbed percussion, weird electronics, processed horns, tinkling chime-like melodies, deep chordal drones, the band definitely dipping into the whole John Carpenter / Goblin sound, but making it totally their own. Immediately sounding like a WAY heavier version of our recent Record Of The Week from The Slasher Film Festival Strategy, and we were totally prepared for the whole record to unwind like some lost eighties soundtrack, but still in the first track, in come big, bombastic drums, some almost funky bass, the synths pulsing, a lumbering, loping cosmic soundtracky groove that's so good! All before the song EXPLODES into a wild, synth heavy, distorto guitar psych-prog blowout. Already worth the price of admission right there, and we're barely seven minutes in. Thankfully, it only gets cooler and weirder and WAY more far out.
Echo drenched horns are looped into a strange melodic cycle, sampled spoken vocals drift in and out, all over a skeletal electro groove, before the sound blossoms into some ultra creepy cinematic synthscapery, the synths buzzy and gristly, the vibe sinister and ominous, those looped, effected horns giving it a strange sort of almost Morricone gone Goblin vibe! From there, the sound devolves into a weird loose, super abstract almost-dub, reminding us of some old Adrian Sherwood record, via Muslimgauze or African Headcharge, but give a sort of heavy psych reworking, before in swoop swirling dizzying prog synth tangles and more spidery Morricone like guitars, the horns too, laying down a droned out brass backdrop, heady and hypnotic and really amazingly strange and original sounding. Pushing lots of our musical buttons, but turning those familiar sounds we love on their head.
At this point we're only halfway through, with the second part not letting up for a second, creepy atmospheric ambience, giving way to buzzing metallic crush, and blurred out slo-mo dooooom, laced with subtle synth and guitar filigree, shimmery outer space drift, ethereal and celestial that floats weightlessly, before some mariachi horns (!) bring it back to earth, gristly, grinding grey noise, and disembodied vocals, draped over a field of static, driven by buried pulsations, making for perhaps the most harrowing 2 minutes on the record, before launching into another psychedelic electro-dub excursion, all synth squelch and reverbed rhythms, which build to some seriously caustic crunch, before the record settles into the epic nearly 11 minute closer, a total eighties, soundtracky electro synth masterpiece, the perfect score for some lost horror art film, tribal rhythms, wheezing synths, tripped out vocodered vox, electronic beeps and trills, shimmery psych guitar, some driving propulsive grooves, and those horns, nearly driving the song at one point, and when matched to the grinding synth buzz, the swirling atmospheres, the fuzz guitar crunch, and the psych-kraut groove, make for something twisted and fantastically fucking far out. Masterful!
We made the first compilation of Telescopes singles a Record Of The Week late last year, so it would make sense, that the second volume might receive the same honors. As we mentioned back then, we've been pretty obsessed with that particular era in druggy space rock, be it the Telescopes, or Spacemen 3, or Loop, or Swervedriver. There seems to be a resurgence in interest, as more and more young bands discover that sound and attempt to make it their own.
We're not complaining of course, we love that blown out, druggy drone rock, looped riffage, and simple pounding krautrock rhythms, effects and drones, swirling and shimmering, and the recent spate of reissues drove that home, both Loop and Swervedriver getting the deluxe reissue treatment, and reminding us why they STILL rule, and why few bands could ever hope to create the same sort of druggy sonic space magick.
That said, this Telescopes singles collection offers up another side of the band, some of that old sound is still present, the pounding droning churning riffage, the swirling spaced out effects, the buried vox, the trancelike arrangements, but if anything the band have taken their sound even further out, ditching any semblance of proper rock arrangement, sometimes playing the same riff for 6 minutes, other times crafting a slow hushed drone-y crawl, dabbling in abstract slowcore, space-drone, and various other abstractions in sound we don't really have proper names for yet, and you know what? We love it. It's like everything we love about space rock and krautrock and slowcore but just smeared and blurred and pulled apart and reimagined as something way more psychedelic, way more minimal, and so much more compelling and arresting than another disc of fuzzy space-y rock jams (not that we wouldn't love that too), instead, these are explorations, experiments, but only to the degree that they digress from various space rock tropes, offering instead, something wholly other, a sound that is avant and challenging, but at the same time warm and enveloping and inviting. This is timeless trance music, even at it's heaviest, The Telescopes have created some sort of ur-rock, loosed from all the usual rock and roll strictures and allowed to ooze and sprawl and billow and shimmer and explode into ever expanding clouds of blinding glimmer and prismatic tonal shift, and it's ever so divine.
Even though this is technically a singles collection, none of these tracks sound like proper singles, instead, as mentioned above, they barely retain any rock or pop, instead existing as slow shifting fields of looped mysterious sound, infused with elements of the rock and pop that came before.
The opener "Winter #7" is absolutely stunning, a hushed bassy crawl, with ethereal barely audible boy girl vocals, distant horns, plenty of crumbling ambience and buzzing crackle, wheezing keyboards, fans of Crescent and Flying Saucer Attack and similarly abstract space rock will be smitten. Which leads directly and seamlessly into "The Perfect Needle #4" (a title that smacks of Spacemen 3, as does the track itself), a slow smoldering drift, all muted drones, mumbled vox, buried percussive thumps, a sort shimmering patina of glitch and crackle, totally space-y and meditative, which leads directly into the first 'rock' song, "Another Sky" which takes a woozy warbly Loop-ish riff, and then, yep, loops it, creating a totally mesmerizing riffdrone, while all around it effects swirl, voices hover, shards of squiggly guitar streak past sheets of blurred psychedelic supernovas, utterly entrancing and irresistible.
And so it goes, a trajectory set for the outer reaches of the galaxy, but it's not where we're headed, it's how we get there, and the soundtrack to the ride, from the murky muted jangle laced shimmer of "Household Objective #2", the pounding flute flecked effects drenched space garage groove of "Dsm-1v Axis", which gets almost industrial at one point, to the strange muted whirring dronescape of "Another Whip", to the buzzing guitar stasis of "The Blue Shroud Of Alkatraz", with its static charged sheets of crumbling high end, wrapped in tendrils of skree and softened crunch, underpinned by a deep moaning tangle of droneguitar, finally discharging in a warped burst of glitched out effects and fractured buzz. And there's still more to discover, with every listen. Headphones, while not required, will allow you to delve even deeper, allow you to escape your earthly bonds and get lost in the Telescopes world of bleary eyed fuzz, hushed minimal mystery, greyed out guitar grime, and looped outer space shimmer.
Here's an easy one, anyone who bought those Loop reissues we made Records Of The Week back on list 307, should probably pick this up too. If you dig Loop and Spacemen 3 and Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, then the Telescopes druggy dirgey spaced out garage rock will definitely find an honored spot alongside those aforementioned outfits.
Formed in 1987, the Telescopes first release was a split with Loop oddly enough, a flexi disc released with a fanzine, pretty auspicious beginning for sure, yet ever since, they have constantly and continually been overshadowed by their drone rock brothers in arms Spacemen 3 and Loop. Which is weird considering how similar their sounds are.
Similar they may have been, but the Telescopes always seemed much more rocking and heavy and WAY more noisy that either, but were definitely not averse to the occasional blissed out Spacemen style druggy drift, or some metallic Loop-ed pound. But those moments were scattered amidst a minefield of amp destroying ear drum splitting spaced out noise rock, with a definite grunge element. Re-listening to these tracks now, it definitely sounds like the seeds that spawned Mudhoney and some of the more raw and rocking early Sub Pop bands.
Pretty much every Telescopes record is worth owning, but this singles collection is especially transcendent, gathering up some of their earliest singles, which means raw and lo-fi, and fuzz drenched, and noisy as fuck and gloriously poppy, and HEAVY, always on the verge of total collapse. Killer hooks doused in distortion, verse chorus verse imploding into a squall of psychguitar freakout and total off-kilter drum damage. Every space filled up with wild streaks of lightning bold feedback, drums and guitar locked into killer stop start grooves, the vocals drenched in distortion, yowling and growling, some serious Stooges infused space rock garage mayhem.
But the band did mellow a bit as time went on, so the second half of the disc offers up another side of the band, groovy tripped out almost paisley sounding sixties jangle drift, pretty strummed soft pop, blissy shoegazey shuffle, lush Beatlesesque shimmer, but still plenty of warbly organ, some surprising banjo, fuzzy reverb, everything in a softly druggy haze.
We reviewed the Telescopes Altered Perception record a while back, another collection of sorts, and while the first two tracks are indeed the same, those are the only two tracks to be found on both. Which means not only is THIS essential, but odds are you're probably gonna want that one too. Cuz as far as we're concerned you can never have too much blurry and buzzy and druggy spaced out noisy garage-y psychedelic drone rock in your life. EVER.
For those you who have somehow managed to not become completely obsessed with the 'D', let us bring you up to speed. A few years back there was an amazing sketch comedy show on HBO called Mr. Show. Completely hilarious and more importantly, unfettered by the
So a few things have changed. Most noticeably, the D are no longer an acoustic duo. They are a full on rock band, with drums (courtesy of Dave Grohl of course) electric guitars and even strings! On first listen, it was kind of a bummer, since part of what made it so funny was that these two dorky fat guys were playing classic rock/metal on two acoustic guitars. But the flipside is that the D's unabashed love of seventies cheese metal and FM rock can be fully realised and becomes even more of a brilliant parody. Allan keeps telling us that if we lived in the dorms, we would hate this record. Probably true. It's stupid and silly and the songs are all about fucking and smoking and swearing. But we don't live in the dorms and hopefully we can appreciate this on a different level. Lots of the songs from the series are redone and revamped, and there's a handful of new songs as well as a lot of arguing and discussions about stuff like cock pushups. And the songs sound great. Super rocking, big riffs, stupidly catchy hooks, really heavy, great production, and the vocal harmonies are still intact and still perfect.
So of course you should buy the record, but if you get hooked, you can find the tapes of the HBO series on EBAY and definitely go check out their video for 'Fuck Her Gently'. It's offensive enough to guarantee you won't be seeing it on MTV anytime soon. It's by John K. (of Ren and Stimpy infamy) and it's pretty amazing. You can watch it at http://www.spumco.com.
Wow, 2011 is ruling so far, so much good stuff has come out this year already. Here's one we REALLY flipped for when we saw it was available - the third and apparently final album (bar the inevitable reunion tour!) from everyone's favorite all-elephant ensemble. That's right, the Thai Elephant Orchestra of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in the jungle locale of Lampang, Thailand. We're huge fans of their other two albums, made both of 'em Records Of The Week, and this one is just as good - or actually maybe even better, 'cause as they say it's a "purist" recording of the Elephant Orchestra, with no human guidance at all, edits, or overdubs. It's indeed all-elephant, with the exception of a Buddhist monk's chanted prayer for the elephant spirit heard on the very first track (also we're guessing a human came up with the song titles). All the music is entirely improvised by the elephants themselves, playing the special over-sized instruments built for them by conservationist Richard Lair and experimental composer David Soldier as part of their project to help preserve these amazing creatures and their ever-threatened habitat. Lair and Soldier just hit record and let the elephants go to it on these ten tracks. They really seem to enjoy expressing themselves, these tracks truly lovely and mesmeric, with all kinds of percussive textures, gently tinkling chimes, occasional crashing gongs or drums, gamelan-like tones, harmonica drones... and it's all remarkably rhythmic, at a stately pace. Beautiful! They definitely know what they're doing, they've got big ears after all, and it's incredible the feeling and careful restraint that they bring to the music they're making (for such large animals especially). We doubt humans could do better. NNCK, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Kemialliset Ystavat, et. al., you're no match for these elephants... as we've said before, if you didn't know dem wuz pachyderms, you'd think this was some new weird krautrock-inspired improv group, or a reissue of something by the likes of Amon Duul, the Taj Mahal Travellers, or Yahowah 13 perhaps.
For those unfamiliar with the Thai Elephant Orchestra, you're in for a treat! And anyone already a fan will be thrilled too. Previous albums contained a fair number of tracks with humans participating too, so it's nice to have one that's elephant-only, and it's sooooooo good. Utterly, utterly wonderful, both musically and conceptually. How can you not love these elephants?
FYI, a new documentary about the Thai Elephant Orchestra can be found on YouTube, part one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZHLPrYkpRc
First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!
The Thai Elephant Orchestra was dreamed up, and this disc produced, by David Soldier (New York musician and academic) and Richard Lair (American expatriate elephant expert, who advises the Thai Elephant Conservation Center where this project goes on). The two came up with the idea that elephants, being social animals, might enjoy playing music together, and proceeded to investigate... Happily, not only did the elephants enjoy playing, they were good at it, demonstrating that they were able to decide what sounded good (to them) and what didn't.
The booklet features photos and detailed, fascinating liner notes by both men. Here is what Soldier says the criteria was for the construction of the instruments, which were made by New York instrument builder Ken Butler (of "Gravikords, Whirligigs..." fame):
"1. The instruments must be suitable to the elephant's anatomy, which means large instruments operated by the trunk.
"2. The instruments must withstand jungle heat, humidity -- and the elephants.
"3. The instruments should require minimum upkeep.
"4. The instruments should have a Thai sound, because the regular daily audience is Thai, the mahouts would enjoy the music more, and the elephants have heard Thai music all their lives."
Some more great tid-bits from the notes: "The elephants took easily to the harmonica, which sparked the first elephant music fad: one morning I arrived to hear the sound of harmonicas from all over -- from the hills and from the river. The elephants were walking in from the forest playing harmonicas, which they hold easily in the tip of their trunks."
"The elephants didn't seem interested in the bells or theremin. At first they were spooked by the synthesizer keyboard, but later two animals were entranced by it. They disliked playing Ken's reed instruments with a large mouthpiece, or rather, trunkpiece. A mahout told me they were afraid that a snake might jump into their nostrils!"
As sort of bonus tracks, in addition to the forty-plus minutes of elephant improv, there's also some non-instrumental elephant field recordings, several tracks of humans and elephants playing together, and even a few traditional Thai songs played by humans, about elephants.
Sure there's a bit of simple amusement to be found here just from the concept alone, but in actual fact the music these elephants make is, to our ears at least, quite beautiful. We could go on and philosophize about how this project speaks to the relationship between man and animals in this world, but we'll leave those thoughts for you to explore if you chose to check out this album, which we highly recommend! Amazing and wonderful.
"Some things have to be endured, and that makes the pleasures so much sweeter!" So spoke the villainous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's first Hellraiser movie. It is interesting to think back, and realize that Coil had their proposed soundtrack to that same movie rejected with some citing that Coil's themes were 'too frightening' or (more likely) 'not commercial enough' for a major studio motion picture. Anyone with ears who has listened to Coil's unreleased themes to Hellraiser will not find anything frightening or scary at all. In fact, Coil was quite reverential to somebody like David Shire, especially with his minimalist and maudlin score for The Conversation, with Coil composing everything on the Fairlight synthesizer, which itself had a distinct sound but one that didn't fall in line with the Goblin / Carpenter axis. Had Coil turned in to the film studio something like what they produced on their grand statement to the apocalypse in Horse Rotovator, it might have sounded close to where Theologian ended up on this death-synth industrial opus.
Here, Theologian - the project of a cold-hearted character simply given the name Leech - has employed the talents of a host of female vocalists from the darkwave and noise underground. The conceit has a similar feel to Lustmord's recent album The Word As Power; and thankfully, both albums transcend any notion of female tokenism. Furthermore, both albums do not suck. Far from it for Theologian; as this album triumphantly extends the M83-produces-Swans analogy that we posited regarding the 2012 epic The Chasms Of My Heart album. After a garbled, witchy cackle that introduces the album's first track "Black Cavern Myopia," Leech uncorks a dark-minded, power techno rhythm, crunched through distortion, echo and sinister atmospheres featuring the deep-in-the-catacomb vocalizations of Hecate's Rachael Kozak. A more familiar militantly bashed rhythm keeps with a Swans-styled corporal beatdown on "The Conjoined Deviant Procession" with the monotone chanting delivered by Kristen from Sewer Election. The vocals never really come to the foreground throughout the album, instead they swirl and commingle amidst the metalgaze hiss, powerdrone murk, and audio sickness from Leech's decomposing productions. Even when he employs the talents of opera singer Melissa Kelly (the only vocalist not hailing from noise culture), her voice is cacooned in billowing reverb as it flutters throughout the ghastly synth melodies and blackened industrially crushed doom plod on "Ectothermism." Aside from Sewer Election and Hecate, we've not encountered any of the other vocalists, but their legion is Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), and Shari Vari (Void Vision). Leech has crafted monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies - think the Cure's Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow. So good!
It would be nice to think that These Records have only been releasing the reissues of "Deceit" -- This Heat's second and final proper album -- every ten years after the original release of the album in 1981. The first CD pressings arrived on 1991, and this
Almost all of the histories of UK avant-garde music have claim allegiances to This Heat, as Punk, New Wave, Industrial, Prog Rock, Jim O'Rourke, and even Electronica place the seminal outfit somewhere at the beginnings of their respective etymologies. To a certain extent all of these histories may be true, but then again the broad aesthetic and ideological contexts between all of those different styles may cross-each other out, leaving This Heat as one of the few artistic forces that truly exists all by itself.
Just a trio comprised of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen, and Gareth Williams, This Heat manifested an incredibly explosive sound that hybridized all of the countercultural fury of Punk and Situationism, within a sonic context informed by technological advances of musique concrete techniques and electro-acoustic synthesis. Musically speaking, This Heat did not espouse the three chord structures or the snarling postures of Punk, instead injecting the complex pop agendas of Brian Eno (which were purposefully seeking to conflict the archetypes of rock into a new aesthetic language) with nervous tension building up to dramatic cathartic releases. "Deceit" is a record that was so ahead of its time that it has taken twenty years for artists like Fennesz and Radiohead to articulate ideas with such intensity and attention to the play between musical creation and technological advances. So highly recommended.
It's tough to review the records of This Heat separately, knowing that there is a box set, a box set most of us had been waiting for for years! Like imagine if you heard about Christmas, and spent the next decade waking up and rushing out to the living room only to find nothing there. That's what it was like waiting for the long rumored This Heat box. It seems almost self evident that it is honestly one of the few box sets, that is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. But okay, $100 might be a bit much to drop on a band you're not all the familiar with. And probably some folks already have some of these discs, as they were briefly available in the nineties. But let's be upfront and warn you straight up, we know very few people, who on hearing any music from This Heat, even a single song, weren't immediately compelled to get their hands on every single bit of recorded material they could find. The music of This Heat is most definitely that powerful, that intense, having informed almost all of the music we've loved since. And sounding as fresh and forward thinking today as it did when it was first recorded.
Before we get to reviewing This Heat's second release, the Health And Efficiency ep from 1980, let's give you some background on (and no small amount of gushing over) one of our all time favorite bands.
Trying to explain why this band is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenestress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant-garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post-rock, math-rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background.
Their entire catalog has gone in and out of print over the years, mostly out, with all of their records pretty much completely unavailable for the last 7 or 8 years. Rumors of a complete box set and reissue campaign began to circulate a few years back and it has finally happened and it's everything we could have hoped for and more. Every single release, remastered and repackaged in swank digipaks. We're almost jealous of folks who have never even heard This Heat. The thought of entering into this music completely blind, is almost frightening, as the world of This Heat is so singular, so powerful, it will be difficult to ever listen to music the same way again. Trust us.
The Health And Efficiency ep followed This Heat's self titled debut and took their sound in a strangely pop (for them at least) direction, sounding like some tweaked and twisted version of Wire, the title track all angular new wave guitars, monotone vocals, driving drums, strange convoluted arrangements and creepy background sound effects before the whole thing splinters into super abstract rhythmic experimentalism, looped grooves, played over and over, while sounds float and careen in the background, so incredibly hypnotic and repetitive. The second track on Health And Efficiency (which runs a brief twenty minutes) is "Graphic/Varispeed (45rpm)", a lengthy drone, a warm synth whir that surfaces within other This Heat tracks, recontextualized and often chopped up and reassembled, but here, it's a slow shifting slow motion single tone soundscape, with the tone occasionally being pitched up or down, very simple but quite haunting, and a cool glimpse at how This Heat managed to mix and match, use and reuse, without ever treading water. Kinda pricey, as it's only 20 minutes long, and two songs, but it's still well worth it.
Trying to explain why this record is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen, and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenstress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post rock, math rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. This is their self titled debut, originally released in 1979 and reissued briefly in 1991, and manages over the course of about 50 minutes to redefine almost all music that had come before.
The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background. This record is such a totally immersive and strangely lovely musical environment. From the machinelike Krautrock of "Horizontal Hold" to the dreamy contemplative "Twilight Furniture" with its simple chiming guitars, muted tribal percussion and keening vocals, to the bizarre affected drum workout of "24 Track Loop", it's like wandering through some alien musical world. As sky full of greys and blues, smeary drones floating gently by, haunting quavering vocals drifting below, like tendrils of smoke, the barren landscape littered with all manner of rhythmic outcroppings, harsh jagged crashes and booms, as well as low rolling thumps and stutters, off in the distance simple spare melodies float and hover, each note a glowing spot on the horizon. Absolutely and utterly overwhelmingly brilliant.
There are plenty of places on the web and in magazines to read more about the history of the band, the band members, the various releases and reissues (see elsewhere on the AQ website for reviews of past editions of various TH recordings) but none of that ultimately matters as much as the sound. And oh the glorious sound. Just take a listen to the sound samples and no words will be necessary.
This is arguably This Heat's finest moment, their debut record, finally available again after almost 15 years of being out of print. Be aware that there will be a 5cd box coming out in the (near?) future, containing EVERY SINGLE ONE of the band's releases, as well as a bonus disc of unreleased material and a huge book of photos and liner notes. And we would have made (maybe will make) THAT record of the week, and while we do believe EVERY music lover we know owes it to themselves to buy the upcoming box, we figured a single disc was plenty for most people to get hooked and obsessed.
Holy moly, this is quite a discovery. A hitherto unknown album of wonderful Sgt. Peppery (flower) power pop, that ought to make fans of the Beatles, early Bee Gees, The Kinks, Big Star and so forth very, very happy indeed.
We admit were a bit skeptical when we first heard about it, 'cause there's so many reissues and whatnot these days that claim to be lost classics, but as soon as we put this on we were hooked! And more amazingly, while we'd certainly consider this a lost classic, it isn't even technically a reissue (despite the blurb saying "Original 1967 Release" on the back). Except for two songs here that appeared on a 7" single, this material was never actually released to the public, until now! Recorded in 1967, yes, but the tapes languished forgotten all these years, which is hard for us to understand - how could this gem stay unknown for 46 years?! These songs are so great! As always, makes you wonder what else is out there... And, at first, it also made us wonder if this was even really a group from the sixties - we suspected it could be a more modern-day band (a really good one!) emulating the sounds of yesteryear, a la The Dukes Of Stratosphear, The High Llamas, or Jellyfish. Especially since the production job, while vintage-sounding, is also so top notch (even though the liner notes tell us the whole thing was recorded and mixed in merely a weekend). Heck, a modern band trying to put one over could have added the analog tape hiss. But no, our skeptical conspiracy theories are all wrong, we have it from trusted sources that this is indeed for real, from 1967, the work of a bunch of talented, Anglophilic youngsters from Louisiana. But the vocals here are often (but not always) delivered in a lilting faux English accent, a common practice amongst the paisley-clad syke popsters of the day, wherever they were from, wanting to sound like they too were a part of the British Invasion. So, definitely Beatles-esque; as with Peru's We All Together, there's quite a few tunes here, like "Marigold", that sound like they were written by Paul McCartney - and the band name is an obvious homage to a certain Sgt.'s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Though this is sometimes more White Album than Sgt. Pepper's, really, the band even pushing into edgier sounds like the rather manic "Have You Been To The Light" - that's a weird one, and great. "Hope" is another of the album's harder, garage rockin' tunes.
But so much of this just delightfully sunshiney stuff, sometimes quite melancholic too. There's super melodic, energetic toe tappers and dreamy blissouts both, stuff that will get stuck in your head immediately, sounding so lovely and familiar right from the get go. There's the gentle, hushed intimacy of "Merlin", the lively, layered "Alexander Graham Bell", the heartfelt grandeur of the ELO-ish "Walk Out With Your Heart", the sweet & mellow soft pop of "Common Attitude" (which reminds us of Curt Boettcher's Millennium), and so many, many more highlights, that we can't possibly detail them all (and deciding which ones to make sound samples of was tough!). Oh, and the album's final track, a brief "outro" of druggy, tape-manipulated studio trickery, is titled "Dream Me Up Snotty"!!!
The only real complaint we have at all about this is that it's kind of too bad the prolific reissue label Gear Fab got to be the lucky ones to put this out, 'cause their attention to detail in terms of the physical product borders on shoddy. The crappy graphics they came up with for the cover of this digipack don't do justice to the music within; the quasi-informative liner notes (printed on the inside cover, there's no booklet) were written by someone who couldn't decide (or care to be consistent) between using all caps, bold face, or quotation marks to set off the various proper names mentioned; some proofreading could have helped in other areas too; and there's a strange one page, one sided insert with a thanks list on it that you don't really know what to do with once you've torn off the shrink wrap. Well, at least there ARE liner notes (from which we did learn, that the group's guitar prodigy Richard Orange went on to write music for the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Jane Wiedlin and even Terry Bozzio!). But there's many labels out there that would have done this a lot better, oh well.... perhaps someone else will eventually get to do a vinyl release...
We just hope this album isn't overlooked as a result of its Gear Fab-ness, it would be a shame if after 46 years it still went unnoticed. If people HEAR it, though, it won't - another reason we're doing our part by making it a Record Of The Week. So please grab this and get in on the ground floor with the first ever release of an unheard, utterly obscure '60s artifact that ought to be way up there in the psych power pop pantheon!!
Originally released way back in 1999, this strange split/collaboration was at the time, just about the coolest weirdest black metal (and otherwise) record we had ever heard, a record that really sounded like it was made just for aQ, unfortunately, that was long enough ago that the aQ list was still in its infancy, and thus, this amazing and baffling and brilliant record got short shrift. Just three sentences. But really those three sentences should be enough to convince you:
"Emperor covers Thorns songs, Thorns covers Emperor, although it's hard to tell which band is which, a good thing we think. Ends up sounding like a gothic, black metal soundtrack that's been given a John Oswald-style Plunderphonic treatment. The most evil use of Cubase we know of. Bizarre and amazing!!"
If there was ever a should-have-been-Record-Of-The-Week, this was most decidedly it. Thankfully, this just got reissued, and with bonus tracks to boot, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit, and give this record the aQ love it so very much deserves, and heck, odds are lots of current aQ customers might not have been getting our list back in the day, so this is for you, and for anyone who needs (or just wants) a little more than those three sentences...
Emperor should need no introduction, they are elite members of the black metal pantheon, alongside Burzum, Satyricon, Mayhem, Immortal, Ulver and Enslaved. Their sound epic and majestic, symphonic and super technical, easily still one of our favorite black metal bands EVER. Thorns however might need a bit more of an introduction. Folks who read Lords Of Chaos, might recognize Thorns mainman (only man!) Snorre W. Ruch as having played a part in the infamous murder of Euronymous, by Varg Vikernes of Burzum. Ruch was with Vikernes that fateful night and was sentenced to 8 years in prison as an accessory to murder. Thorns only ever released one proper full length, and that was not until 2001, well after this collaboration.
But this collaboration, wow, not sure where to start, and not even sure how it came to be. It seems it had been years since the very first Thorns demos (not to mention the pre-Thorns outfit Stigma Diabolicum), so this split was intended to introduce Thorns to the scene, in preparation for his upcoming full length, and featured various older Thorns tracks reinterpreted by Emperor, as well as Thorns covering some classic Emperor jams. It was Thorns first new material since 1992, and weirdly enough actually featured Satyr from Satyricon on vocals. So it sounds like a pretty bad ass black metal match up, but it doesn't necessarily explain how goddamn weird it turned out.
The opening Emperor track is some strange sample heavy orchestral industrial workout, all looped samples, field recordings, strange metallic clanks, martial snares, moaning horn like melodies, faux strings, bursts of glitchy distorted vocals, frenzied guitars, and a super intense cinematic orchestral outro that leads right into a new version of Thorns' "Aerie Descent" from his first demo, a buzzing midtempo bit of blackness, laced with soaring synths, programmed electronics, definitely that modern Moonfog black metal sound that came to define the label and the scene, there are some strange samples, but for the most part the song is a dirgey bit of black metal buzz, laced with various bits of strange sonic filigree, finishing off with a stretch of church organ, haunting and mysterious.
The next track is where it gets really strange, a new Emperor created from various bits of an old Thorns demo, and it begins as a strange collage of weird electronics, backwards rhythms, whispered vox, disembodied guitar buzz, again weirdly industrial, before the black buzz kicks in, but it's all wrapped around that electronic skitter, not to mention some bizarre industrial percussion, the sounds looped and chaotic, changing speeds, the voices processed, skittering and stuttering, laced with rhythmic bursts of static, circus calliope, and then finally a furious blast of looped black metal right at the end. Still one of the coolest and weirdest black metal jams EVER.
Next up Emperor tackles Thorns' "Aerie Descent" and it sounds like classic Emperor, epic and majestic, furious buzzing, super intricate and heavy, the drumming incredible, the production massive, the organ outro somehow even creepier here. Emperor go again with "Thus March The Night Spirit", a classical reworking of their classic "Thus Spake The Nightspirit" from their brilliant Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and the black buzz of the original is transformed into some Tim Burton-ish soundtrack, all soaring strings, darkly moody and tense, with flurries of rapid fire notes, and soaring strings, no wonder Emperor sounded so majestic.
Thorns takes control again, redoing yet another old demo track, a creepy almost industrial sounding crawl, the guitars liquid and warbly, the riff slippery and strange, while a mechanical rhythm plods and creaks, the guitars get buzzier, the song gradually growing more and more blasting and black, but the vocals are weirdly processed, and even at it's pounding heaviest, the song is peppered with strange programmed beats and subtle electronics, exactly the sort of stuff that would end up defining Thorns weird mechanized take on black metal. "The Discipline Of Earth" is a Thorns original, and is the perfect blend of orchestral bombast, technical black metal, and brooding black ambience, again laced with programmed rhythms, swirling FX and electronics, creepy vox, before finally erupting into full on black buzz mode, only occasionally slowing down, at which points the underlying electronics and programming come to the fore. And finally, Thorns finishes things off with a cover of Emperor's "Cosmic Keys To My Creation And Times", a plodding doomy dirge, with huge crumbling chords, strange sung/spoken vocals, thick swaths of buzz, muted Teutonic pounding, all strangely and fantastically mechanical and industrial.
In addition to the record proper, this new reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, two pre-production mixes of tracks from the record, and a previously unreleased track, the Thorns demo "You That Mingle May", featuring Satyr again, but also Fenriz from Darkthrone. So totally essential, black metalheads who have somehow made it this far without owning this, right that wrong RIGHT NOW. And the thing is, this record is so cool and weird and varied and textured, that even folks with only a passing interest in or curiosity about black metal, might just find themselves blown away...
We're big ol' Thrones fans here, and so the arrival of a third Thrones opus the other day was pretty darn exciting! It's been five years since the magnificent Sperm Whale, after all! And we're happy to report that Day Late, Dollar Short, despite its title, does not disappoint in any way (though, it's not exactly an entirely new album, more on that in a sec). Now, you know that the double necked guitart/bass wielding Joe Preston -- for he is Thrones and Thrones is he -- has quite the heaviness pedigree. He's played in the unholy heavy trinity of Earth, the Melvins, and SUNNO))), and he's currently the bassist for stoner metal lords High On Fire. Thus, from his one-man-band project Thrones you'd expect nothing less than H-E-A-V-Y, and you'd be right. But it's more than merely heavy. Thrones ain't just rubbery, head-caving bass, lotsa feedback nastiness, machine beats, and throat-rasped vox. Thrones is also really, really weird. As you'd expect from Joe, who used to be in the Melvins after all. There's certainly plenty of Melvins style fuckery going on here!
I mean, after the sheer noxious pummel (we like!) of track one, "The Suckling", you'll wonder what's going on with track two, "Young Savage". Punky and uptempo, with a gang-vocal chorus, it threw us for a bit of a loop until we figured out it was an Ultravox cover. That's then followed by the disarmingly gentle (but disturbingly child-voiced) "Algol". What's going on? Whatever the heck Joe wants, basically. And that's okay 'cause what he wants is to unleash a torrent of creativity that encompasses such things as utter sludge drone dirge, Buttholes Surfers-ish mania, indie rock pop (with some non-effected, clean singing even), drum machines kickin' old school hip hop beats, crazy prog structures, all-out rawk, thrashy riffs, electronic filtering, etc... almost all of which you'll hear in, say, track fifteen, "Obolus", which starts off doing the Melvinsy doom thing but with Bruce Haack/Electric Lucifer robot singing before segueing into a soundscape of bird twitters, bells and chimes, and waves of white noise (this from the "soundtrack" to La Foresta Della Norte). Then there's all the crazy covers that Joe tries his hand at: along with the Ultravox, this includes a Residents cover, a Blue Oyster Cult cover, and yes, unreleased track "A Quick One" is indeed a cover of a portion of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away". Wow. Not afraid of a challenge, this guy.
And we do mean "unleash a torrent" -- there's 19 tracks here, almost 80 minutes of Thrones insanity, much of it compiled from rare, out-of-print singles, cassettes and comps, with some previously unreleased tracks as well, spanning the years 1994-2001. The lovely, bunny-adorned packaging (Mr. Stephen O'Malley, take a bow) also features personal notes on each track by Joe hizzelf. Here's hoping that he'll find time away from his regular gig in High On Fire to do a real *brand new* Thrones album... but in the meantime we're happy to have this "incomplete collection of smaller projects" all on one handy cd.
We're super-happy to herald the arrival of "Ghost Plants", the brand-new second album from San Francisco's Thuja! (That's pronounced "thoo-zhuh," by the way, and it's the genus name of the North American cedar tree.) We loved their debut cd "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones" (released on our own Andee's tUMULt label, in fact) and try not to miss their rare live performances, which in addition to their transcendental music also often incorporate video projections of trees, piles of branches, and other atmospheric, extra-musical additions. With "Ghost Plants", the four members of Thuja -- AQ-fave experimental sound artist Loren Chasse, pianist Rob Reger, and former members of ambient-psych rockers Mirza Stephen R. Smith and Glenn Donaldson -- have crafted another utterly lovely, improv instrumental masterpiece! In comparision to their first album, this disc seems darker and heavier, somehow more "rock" production-wise although Thuja are hardly a rock band. Thuja's music is very organic and "natural" sounding, with their quietly meandering, melodic guitar and piano explorations seeming set amidst wood, wind and water -- you can imagine a Thuja concert taking place on a darkened forest floor, with Chasse's crackling branches and stone rubbings.
At their most "rock" Thuja goes "kraut" with Chasse's drum-kit rhythms, and at their most "experimental ambient" the tinklings of percussion blend with ominous (yet pleasant) humming dronesc(r)apes of organ and bass and other things quite blissfully.
Whilst not exactly 'folky' you can still draw a connection between the woodland vistas of Thuja and the fractured folkpsych of Tower Recordings, or Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat (Thuja being more abstract than KY, who are more abstract than TR). We'd also cite the likes of Labradford, Richard Youngs/Simon Wickham-Smith, the
No Neck Blues Band, the Taj Mahal Travellers, Popol Vuh, Gunter Schickert, and :Zoviet*France: as fellow travellers in the psychedelic realms that Thuja carefully tread. This disc offers 13 untitled tracks in just under 40 minutes -- a very nice length indeed for an afternoon's reverie, perhaps one of the few improv-drone discs you'll find yourself hitting the "repeat" button on frequently. If you enjoy the solo work of Stephen R. Smith or L. Chasse (also of id battery and Coelacanth), or liked Mirza's drifting atmospheres, and haven't listened to Thuja yet, what are you waiting for? Everyone else, check ALL these guys stuff out, starting with this disc! So beautiful.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The newest release on our Andee's tUMULt label takes a trip to the sonic opium den of San Francisco's Thuja, a new band that consists of two former members of the hazy psychedelic outfit Mirza (Stephen R. Smith and Glenn Donaldson), pianist Rob Reger, and noted sound artist Loren Chasse (of Id Battery). Their debut release, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones," drifts through passages of improvisations for washed out guitars, tinkling piano, drums, and a pile of stones & branches. Thuja's lovely sound embraces the same freely meandering lack of structure as the No Neck Blues Band but with the dark shimmering colors of Eyeless in Gaza or Dif Juz, harking back also to gentle krautrock a la Popul Vuh or something. As beautiful as the piece of marbled wood veneer that serves as the cover to this unique and gorgeous package. By the way, please don't suspect (if you do) that a form of nepotism or favoritism has anything to do with us selecting yet another tUMULt release for Album of the Week honors--honestly, it's rather the case that Andee's taste mirrors that of the store enough that we don't think he would release something on his label that wouldn't at least be considered for the AQ-List top spot! Really.
If there was ever going to be a band to FINALLY steal the slow-building-atmospheric-cinematic-post-rock-soundscape crown from Godspeed! You Black Emperor it would definitely have to be The Timeout Drawer. Sure there's Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, the Grails, Mono, Silver Mt Zion and about a million Godspeed! side projects, but as good as those bands are, and as much as we love them, we'd definitely be hard pressed to pass a blind listening test. Sure, they all do their own thing, with subtle differences, but there's plenty of times we couldn't tell you if a certain track was a Mogwai song or an Explosions In The Sky track, even with a gun to our head (okay, -maybe- with a gun to our head). Which brings us to Nowonmai by The Timeout Drawer. A quick listen will reveal all the stuff we love about post rock, pulsing hypnotic rhythms, languorous soundscapes, moody melancholia, intricate arrangements, no vocals, slow building epics. What can we say? We love that stuff. But listen a little closer and you'll begin to understand how the Timeout Drawer manage to avoid sounding like just another post rock band. We haven't actually been this blown away by an instrumental rock band since we discovered German post rockers Fuehler (no longer available sad to say) way back when.
Drifting dreamy atmospheric bliss builds and builds beneath fuzzy synthesizer melodies and throbbing propulsive rhythms, before super blown out distorted guitars explode the whole thing into a dense wall of white hot fuzz, a thick slab of rumbling buzzing guitar drone, that then crumbles to pieces and from the wreckage emerges a groovy jazzy shuffle, meandering lazily through a gauzy soundfield of throbbing low-end and barely-there synthesizer chirps. And that's just the first track! Phew. Not every track runs the sonic gamut like that, some just sort of drift along, dreamy and shimmering, some explode with feverish intensity and never let up, but they all manage to be dense and complex and make every part seem totally essential to the whole, no matter how convoluted or how simple they seem on the surface.
Sonically it's the synthesizer really that is the most noticeable addition to the Timeout Drawer's post rock pallet, not that most bands don't use a synthesizer, it's just that the Timeout Drawer use it for everything. Weird warbly melodies, rumbling drones, wild wigged out space rock swoops, every track is laced with that warm synth fuzz, sometimes replacing the guitar or the bass, sometimes just adding more and more layers of sound. Add to that a penchant for unlikely stretches of Calexico-ish deserty twang, pounding metal guitar crunch, bursts of manic angular riffing, lonely moaning horns and even shuffling programmed beats. Programmed beats? Well, that sort of makes sense when you realize the band started out on hip hop label Chocolate Industries when they were more of a post rock / IDM hybrid, and that skittery shuffling IDM sensibility translates strangely well to these brooding epic instrumentals.
Plus how can you not love a band with song titles like: "What Looked Like Morning Was The Beginning Of Endless Night", "Bursting With Tears I Commit To Destroying You", "I Fall So Far And I Fall So High" and "Blue Eyed And FIlled With Horror"!
Tobacco would definitely be a strange name for a group. But it's an even stranger name for a -person-, except when you realize, that person is in fact the twisted mastermind behind the cracked electro pop of aQ faves Black Moth Super Rainbow. In our review of the most recent BMSR record, we compared their sound to Air covering Daft Punk, but with a bunch of junky old equipment, busted up amps and rickety swap meet synths. What's not to love?!?!
For Mr. Tobacco's first solo foray, he actually sticks pretty close to the Black Moth template he created, but does manage to give that sound a little twist. The instantly recognizable fuzzed out gritty synths, the stuttery crunchy crumbling beats, the chopped up vocodered vocals, the blissy eighties sheen, all in full effect, but up the hip hop vibe a bit, mix in some ethereal female vocals, some borderline cheesy (but still kick ass) cop show theme song groove, handclaps, fluttering flutes, soaring cinematic faux strings, even some rapping at one point (courtesy of Aesop Rock, who took BMSR on tour earlier this year), and we're slipping into Fucked Up Friends territory. A few of the tracks are instant classics, sounding sometimes like a more sunshine-y hip-hop flecked Goblin, other times like a more lo-fi synth heavy Boards Of Canada, and once in a while like an LSD dosed Daft Punk doing the soundtrack for a nature special on Yo MTV Raps all about jellyfish or mountain goats or those weird fish that glow in the dark. WTF?! But par for the course with Tobacco and his Black Moth Super Rainbow. And while there does seem to be a bit more hip hop happening here, it's essentially another gloriously fractured and fucked up BMSR record, which is just fine with us!
"Supermodified" is the fourth album from Amon Tobin (including the one album recorded as Cujo). Still one of the best sampler technicians in electronica (and by far the most interesting for drum & bass), Amon Tobin brings a few more big beat breaks to the rich collages of filmic orchestral tension, Brazilian jazz grooviness, and monstrous drum & bass rhythmic diversity. Never, ever boringly repetitive or predictable, Tobin weaves in his source material with a masterful sophistication that heavy-handed Moby only wishes he could do so smoothly. Fans of Tobin already know the high musical standards he sets himself, and won't be disappointed, but may we also recommend this album to people who haven't yet found anything appealing in electronica. You can't do much better than starting with what so far seems like Electronica Record of the Year.
Tony Tears, you've come a long way, baby. When we first discovered psychedelic doom outsider Tony Tears a few years ago, he was an eerie, despondent Italian fellow with very few friends/fans, judging by his MySpace page (see below). Nowadays, he still is eerie and despondent (and Italian) but he's got some fans now, maybe even a cult. Cult enough to now have a handsome lil' box set release, containing three cds, collecting all of his significant public recordings to date, including Voci Dal Passato, the weird Goblinesque DIY doom masterpiece that we made an aQuarius Record Of The Week when we first got it on cd back in 2009. That cd quickly sold out, but fortunately there then was a cassette version released, which also soon went out of print, but then after that, it was released on vinyl. So it wasn't just us that had become obsessed with Tony Tears, it seems. We know some of you are too, and this box of music from Tony's Astral Worlds is for you!
We'd managed to track down only one other Tony Tears release, a cd-r we listed two years ago, and which is also long gone too of course. But, having begun his career as Tony Tears back in 1988, the man has got a bunch of other releases, all of them incredibly hard to find, most of 'em limited run cd-rs and even more obscure demo tapes. Fans should be very thankful, then, for this box set put together by, naturally Minotauro Records (what with that label being home to another cult Italian psychedelic doom genius, Paul Chain). Besides Voci Dal Passato, the box includes Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror from the year 2000 (the cd-r we did get before), along with The Reality Before All (a cd-r from 2004), Tony's half of a split 7" with Abysmal Grief from 2004, the All My Black ep from 2007, and perhaps best of all, the more of less brand new 2014 Tony Tears full-length album, Vortice, previously issued on cd-r and very difficult to obtain. Vortice is pretty great, something we'd have considered making a Record Of The Week by itself, though definitely different from Voci Dal Passato, being rather more spacey and spooky than heavy, though parts are quite heavy too. On it, Tony is no longer alone, he has recruited a new member into what's now we guess the Tony Tears band, a vocalist, named David Krieg, who also must be Italian though. At first we we apprehensive, 'cause we like Tony's semi-spoken vocals. But this new singer has a haunting, almost operatic style that gives Vortice's heavily synthesizer laden, abstract ambient drone doom sound a touch of Early Music or 20th century classical avantgarde. 'Nuff said, perhaps, 'cause we're about to tack on our original reviews of Voci Dal Passato and Fears And Sensations, so this is gonna get loooong. We figure if you read about those and don't have 'em already, you can figure out if you want this box; if you DO have 'em, you probably already know you want this box for everything else, anyway.
The final two sound samples below are from Vortice, though, fyi.
And a word about the box itself - in addition to the three cds in cardboard sleeves with credits and tracklistings, there's also a separate set of cards with the original cover art for each release on 'em, and a fold-out insert with photos and liner notes from Tony himself, in both Italian and English. In a nice touch, the inside surfaces of the box feature full-color occult artwork by Tony, too.
So, here are the two Tony Tears reviews we've previously published, for those who need to find out more...
Voci Dal Passato:
We first got a couple of these in a few weeks back ('cause we were curious) and it didn't take long before we realized we had a Record Of The Week on our hands. It was obvious, really, since some of us here ending up getting so obsessed with this that it was just about ALL they'd listen to, for days, getting home after work and throwing it on, listening to it going to sleep at night, and when they'd get up in the morning, playing it at the store too... At first, though, we thought well heck maybe that's just us, maybe we're weird to like Tony Tears that much. But of course, we ARE weird, and so are a lot of AQ customers, and that's why this is definitely a good choice for Record Of The Week. Anything this hypnotic and dirgey and doomy and last but not least weird, has got AQ (and possibly you) written all over it.
We had to go to some trouble to acquire enough of these to list, contacting Tony Tears via MySpace, importing copies from Italy, getting all the cds we could lay our hands on. Which means we may or may not be able to get more when we run out, and if we can, it will certainly take a while, so be forewarned...
Tony Tears? So what IS that, you ask? Actually when we first saw the name, we thought it said Ebony Tears, which is the name of another band. But no, it's Tony Tears, as in a guy named Tony, last name Tears. And the "band" is indeed just the work of one man, whose (we presume) stage name gives this its monicker. How perfect is that, a mournful Italian doom metaller named Tony Tears? Already you feel sorry for him. Awww, Tony Tears...
Tony Tears' MySpace page is also perfect for this sort of depressed, lonely sounding music. It's really stark and plain, with a sort of electric purple/pink background color. He's got, like, only 66 friends (one of 'em us), and in his "top friends" listing he still has Tom. You know, Tom the founder of MySpace, who is automatically your first and only friend when you first sign up, but then of course you remove Tom 'cause he's not actually someone you know or care about... But lonely Tony, grateful for Tom's friendship, keeps him around.
So, anyway, to answer your question, this is some sort of underground doom metal, but also Italian in that spooky proggy soundtracky way, so it's kind of like Goblin crossed with St. Vitus, or Umberto teamed up with Trollman Av Ildtoppberg. Or, our early '70s proto-doom prog faves Jacula, channelled through someone's (Striborg's?) basement 4-track today.
Tony wrote the lyrics and the music, sings, and plays all the instruments... there's layers of fuzzy, foggy bass, gorgeously melancholic psychedelic electric guitar leads, eerie Goblin-y synths tinkling and droning, and a rhythmic foundation of slightly stumbling drum machine programming. Along with enough echo effects to give parts of this a bit of a dubby, or druggy, vibe.
Perhaps most crucial to our enjoyment of this are the vocals, which are spoken rather more than sung, and are all in Italian. Which works great, it's a language which even when simply spoken still sounds rather musical, we LOVE hearing Italian in this manner (we're reminded of old fave "Ordine Pubblico" by Starfuckers, especially by the track "Antichi Messagi" here), and we feel Tony's echoing, emotional chant-like recitations further enhance the hypnotic aspect of this lugubrious music. We can imagine Om fans zoning out to this quite easily!
Speaking of hypnotic, one of the times recently we had this playing in the store, a customer asked if it was some sort of new Circle side project... we can see why he thought it might be.
The overall atmosphere of this record is sooooooooo sad, yet somehow comforting. Even though we don't understand the Italian, this comes across as being very intimate & personal, and not just because of a certain sparseness to the mix that speaks to this being a one-man effort.
Tony Tears' repetitive lumbering heavy riffs and dark keyboard coloration, punctuated with mechanical, but not entirely predictable drum beats, awash with flangey, spacey effects and further embellished with his poetically mannered, incantatory Italian, has had quite an effect on the psyches of those here who can't help but keep this in heavy rotation. While rather raw and ragged in a charming DIY home-recorded way, the results are sheer beauty, weird weeping dreamlike beauty.
Definitely in the tradition of such strange Italian dark underground metal/prog/psych as Death S.S., Paul Chain, and Black Hole. But quite something else besides, with no prior interest in that tradition being necessary for appreciation of this. Being into doom metal isn't a prerequisite, as long as you like unusual music. Being into Goblin though might help.
Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror:
This is first official release of TT's debut demo from 2000, Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror, consisting of six tracks (the last an extended, 4 part suite lasting 15 minutes). Just like the Tony Tears album we made ROTW, it's a lo-fi morass of mesmeric doomed-out psychedelia, inspired by Paul Chain, Goblin, Black Hole, and other esoteric Italians, with wobbly keyboards, crude drum programming, chant-like and sometimes extremely distorted Italian-language vox, and of course heavy fuzzed out doom guitar riffage, the whole thing giving off uniquely eerie, eccentric vibes galore as each track slowly plods forth through a haze of hiss and murk.
We mentioned Umberto with Striborg-level production and performance in our review of Voci Dal Passato, and guess what, these earlier recordings are even MORE like that. It's a beautiful thing. Tracks like "The Return To The Underground Temple", mostly echo effected keyboards and weeping guitars over simple steady rhythms, have so much weird psychedelic atmosphere that Tony Tears should not be limited to a 'cult doom metal only' audience. Devoted dronologists should hear the quietly ominous "Forze Invisibli Bussano Al Cuore", the aforementioned four-part suite - it's pulsating electronic cosmic mystery that could be from some lost '70s krautrock lp or sinister soundtrack, at least until the super slowed down sludge part kicks in, with vocals and guitar sounding like they're recorded at quarter-speed or something, as if you're listening to it on a device with dying batteries.
We first got a couple of these in a few weeks back ('cause we were curious) and it didn't take long before we realized we had a Record Of The Week on our hands. It was obvious, really, since some of us here ending up getting so obsessed with this that it was just about ALL they'd listen to, for days, getting home after work and throwing it on, listening to it going to sleep at night, and when they'd get up in the morning, playing it at the store too... At first, though, we thought well heck maybe that's just us, maybe we're weird to like Tony Tears that much. But of course, we ARE weird, and so are a lot of AQ customers, and that's why this is definitely a good choice for Record Of The Week. Anything this hypnotic and dirgey and doomy and last but not least weird, has got AQ (and possibly you) written all over it.
We had to go to some trouble to acquire enough of these to list, contacting Tony Tears via MySpace, importing copies from Italy, getting all the cds we could lay our hands on. Which means we may or may not be able to get more when we run out, and if we can, it will certainly take a while, so be forewarned...
Tony Tears? So what IS that, you ask? Actually when we first saw the name, we thought it said Ebony Tears, which is the name of another band. But no, it's Tony Tears, as in a guy named Tony, last name Tears. And the "band" is indeed just the work of one man, whose (we presume) stage name gives this its monicker. How perfect is that, a mournful Italian doom metaller named Tony Tears? Already you feel sorry for him. Awww, Tony Tears...
Tony Tears' MySpace page is also perfect for this sort of depressed, lonely sounding music. It's really stark and plain, with a sort of electric purple/pink background color. He's got, like, only 66 friends (one of 'em us), and in his "top friends" listing he still has Tom. You know, Tom the founder of MySpace, who is automatically your first and only friend when you first sign up, but then of course you remove Tom 'cause he's not actually someone you know or care about... But lonely Tony, grateful for Tom's friendship, keeps him around.
So, anyway, to answer your question, this is some sort of underground doom metal, but also Italian in that spooky proggy soundtracky way, so it's kind of like Goblin crossed with St. Vitus, or Umberto teamed up with Trollman Av Ildtoppberg. Or, our early '70s proto-doom prog faves Jacula, channelled through someone's (Striborg's?) basement 4-track today.
Tony wrote the lyrics and the music, sings, and plays all the instruments... there's layers of fuzzy, foggy bass, gorgeously melancholic psychedelic electric guitar leads, eerie Goblin-y synths tinkling and droning, and a rhythmic foundation of slightly stumbling drum machine programming. Along with enough echo effects to give parts of this a bit of a dubby, or druggy, vibe.
Perhaps most crucial to our enjoyment of this are the vocals, which are spoken rather more than sung, and are all in Italian. Which works great, it's a language which even when simply spoken still sounds rather musical, we LOVE hearing Italian in this manner (we're reminded of old fave "Ordine Pubblico" by Starfuckers, especially by the track "Antichi Messagi" here), and we feel Tony's echoing, emotional chant-like recitations further enhance the hypnotic aspect of this lugubrious music. We can imagine Om fans zoning out to this quite easily!
Speaking of hypnotic, one of the times recently we had this playing in the store, a customer asked if it was some sort of new Circle side project... we can see why he thought it might be.
The overall atmosphere of this record is sooooooooo sad, yet somehow comforting. Even though we don't understand the Italian, this comes across as being very intimate & personal, and not just because of a certain sparseness to the mix that speaks to this being a one-man effort.
Tony Tears' repetitive lumbering heavy riffs and dark keyboard coloration, punctuated with mechanical, but not entirely predictable drum beats, awash with flangey, spacey effects and further embellished with his poetically mannered, incantatory Italian, has had quite an effect on the psyches of those here who can't help but keep this in heavy rotation. While rather raw and ragged in a charming DIY home-recorded way, the results are sheer beauty, weird weeping dreamlike beauty.
Definitely in the tradition of such strange Italian dark underground metal/prog/psych as Death S.S., Paul Chain, and Black Hole. But quite something else besides, with no prior interest in that tradition being necessary for appreciation of this. Even moreso maybe than The Puritan album we ROTW'd last time, being into doom metal isn't a prerequisite, as long as you like unusual music. Being into Goblin though might help.
If we can persuade a ton of folks to buy this, hopefully that won't make Tony Tears any -less- unhappy, because we're looking forward to more from this miserable, mesmerizing, and altogether unique act... stay doomed Mr. Tears!
Unfortunately, we can't really discuss how fucking unbelievable this record is (and it is!) without first addressing the skeptics and the naysayers. I have long been a champion of Tool and urged people to check them out, regardless of their preconceived
Lateralus is dark and brooding, rhythmic and atonal. Beautifully complex, with insane time signatures, bizarre tunings and huge riffs. A doom rock epic, skillfully forced into some completely alien prog/metal/ambient shape. Tense and droning tribal workouts, pummelling double bass, chugging power chords, whispered feathery stretches of ambience, and great fucking songs. Misanthropic lyrics and amazing (sometimes shrieked, but more often sung) vocals. Ultra dynamic and staggeringly technical. Great parts are stretched to their breaking point, where they cease to be just great parts, and instead become torturously tense. And so satisfying.
Obviously, you already know whether you -think- you like or dislike Tool. But if you think you dislike Tool, maybe it's time to think again.
We have loved Torche from the very first time we heard them. Rare is the band who seem to effortlessly create a sound, that whether we all realized it or not, was exactly what we had always wanted to hear. We haven't met a single person who wasn't immediately smitten with Torche, their sound, the one we had all been hungering for, some kind of perfect pop, made impossibly, and irresistibly heavy. A dizzying collision of incredible hooks and downtuned pummel. And Torche were, and are, the undisputed masters of that very unique heavy catchiness, or catchy heaviness. Their debut sounded like a super charged heavier than Heaven Nirvana, or maybe the Foo Fighters crossed with the Melvins. That was the sort of shit we should be hearing on the radio. And seeing on MTV.
Torche's recent ep, In Return, while still awesome, found the band ditching much of the pop in favor of a much heavier sound, embracing their inner Melvins, yet thankfully never completely losing that pop side, just obscuring it beneath riff after riff and furious skull splitting drumming.
So here comes the long and anxiously awaited second full length, and while maybe after In Return, we were expecting them to move even further away from the pop, we really needn't have worried. Somehow they managed to make a record that falls somehere right in between. Easily as catchy and hook filled as their debut, but even heavier than In Return. The riffs are massive, the guitar sound HUGE, the vocals keep getting better and better, still way down in the mix, but perfectly complimenting the sound, not too melodic, but none of that pointless caterwauling. The drums too, are LOUD and incredible. And the songs, shit, strip away some of the distortion, and we're talking top 40. Sort of.
The opener is an instrumental blast, that sounds like the late great Karp, super dense churning hyper riffage, and super complex drumming, dizzying guitar harmonies, almost like some Fucking Champs / Melvins mashup. But the second is all pop, right out of the gate, an awesome melody, big thick riffs, soaring vocals, over the kind of drumming that is as catchy as any of the other instruments, not since Nirvana would we find ourselves humming the fucking drum fills, but this is Torche, what do you expect? It's like pop punk given a sludge doom makeover.
The whole record is an exercise in extremes, coexisting impossibles. No record this poppy and this catchy could possibly be this dense and distorted and downtuned and heavy, but it is. And no metal record, or sludge record, should be able to be so hook filled and catchy and still retain it's sheer fury and intensity, but again, the proof is right here.
"Across The Shields" sounds like a primo slab of nineties college indie rock, a main vocal melody that sticks in your head the second you hear it, a killer bassline that on its own is as catchy as anything any of the other instruments are doing, but here it's wrapped around super metallic harmonies, dense squalls of tribal drumming, and some chest rattling downtuned chug. "Without A Sound" begins like some sort of early SST jam mixed with dirgey Melvins jam, but deftly transforms into a crazy catchy pop song, "Amnesian" seems to take the obtuse melodic sludgery of Harvey Milk, and turns it inside out, offering up soaring harmonies and a totally majestic main riff, but separated by atonal slabs of slow motion dynamics and pounding percussion, as well as wild FX drenched psychedelic leads. We could probably go song by song, and talk about how heavy and/or catchy each one is, because they are. ALL of them. Some tracks do veer in one direction or the other, but even then, the band seem incapable of sounding anything but both heavy AND poppy. There are certainly worse problems.
But like any band worth their salt, they do delight in confounding, so the record finishes off with the 4 minute, VERY un-poppy title track, incredible sludgey and dirgey title track, beginning with a roiling miasma of guitar buzz and hum, eventually a riff kicks in, the drums stuttering and staccato, the riff a churning start stop, lurching and hypnotic, a dark slithery groove, the guitars crumbling and wet with FX, in the background clouds of glimmering whir and twinkling reverb drenched guitar squiggles, a primo classic Melvins era trudge, and while not overtly catchy, Torche still seem unable to commit to full on pummel, so even in this climax of primal riffage, lurk some unexpected, very subtle hooks. Whether you realize it or not, hours, days, weeks later, you'll find yourself humming along to what ostensibly is the least catchy song here. And if that's not a sign of pop genius, well then we don't know what is...
INCREDIBLE packaging, borrowing its main concept from that Open Hand record from a few years back, the booklet cut into overlapping layers, the tray card, covering only half of the jewel case revealing the art on the inside, the booklet folding out into a massive sprawling, garishly cartoon horrorscape, but beware, if you take the booklet out, it's a bitch to get back in!
We've long been fans of New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery, his guitar sound so distinctive, able to conjure up whole other worlds with his music, having cut his teeth in legendary groups like Dadamah and Dissolve, it was really as a solo artist where Montgomery finally unleashed his full potential. A sort of reverbed minimalism writ large, Montgomery takes simple melodic phrases, fragments, riffs, even just a few notes, and transforms them into mesmerizing landscapes of sound, hazy and spacey, multitracked expanses of melodic mesmer, his playing fluid and lyrical, all of the edges smoothed out by a battery of deftly employed effects, transforming the guitar into some sort of alien psychedelic sound generator, able to fashion strangely inviting sonic worlds for the listener to explore, and get lost in.
So we were curious to hear this, the oddly named Torlesse Super Group (a reference to some NZ geology apparently), which is (or was, this was actually recorded back in 2004-2007), Montgomery's new group, or duo to be more precise, and finds Montgomery teaming up with Nick Guy, who we had never heard of before, for a strangely haunting, and surprisingly rhythmic bit of hazy, psychedelic, post industrial, dreamlike guitarscapery.
The record opens with the three part, 16 plus minute "Erewhon Sentinel", the first part of which is a super abstract stretch of looped skeletal rhythm, a barely there bit of staggered static, distant melodic swells, twisted flecks of glitchy electronics, eventually a deep low end thrum surfaces, as well as some creepy soundtracky chimes, not to mention some ven creepier bits of distorted crunch, the low end beginning to pulse, all cinematic and a little bit ominous, honestly we would have been happy if this was ALL the record did, but then we would have missed out on part two, which might be our favorite new jam, beginning with more rumbling low end, laced with some cool super distorted melody, the result is very ghostly and otherworldly, and then a beat comes in, a slow, slithery, downtempo skitter, and suddenly this sounds like some post Portishead, post Bowery Electric sort of electronic ambient creep, now THIS definitely could have continued for the rest of the record, hypnotic and low slung, woozy and warped, a sort of subterranean underwater lope, very soundtracky, evokes all sorts of super striking images, rain slicked streets, dark abandoned cities, low lit late night speakeasies. The sound continues to develop, additional melodies, more layers, harmonies, distant lo fi chimes, looped electronic high end squiggles, all drifting on that low thrum and hypnotic shuffle. Part three is something else entirely, sounding like a lo-fi melding of Autechre and Seefeel, a little bit glitchy, but warm and organic, swoonsome and woozy and dreamily looped, wound around some serpentine melodies, and plenty of fuzz and thrum.
Definitely a surprise, if Montgomery is playing guitar over all this, then he's even more of an alchemist than we already thought, cuz nothing here sounds distinctly guitar-like, at least in this opening salvo, all textural and ever shifting timbres, and layered loops, and swirling atmospheres, and propulsive rhythms and dark sonic swirl. It's not until the fourth track, where the guitar finally makes its presence obvious, with Montgomery unfurling a looped bit of repetitive riffage, eventually joined by a super skeletal beat, and then an avalanche of guitars, all buzzy and psychedelic, warm and washed out, creating a heady, hazy sprawl of mesmerizing drone rock shimmer, definitely more reminiscent of past recordings.
The rest of the record plays out in a similar fashion, with Montgomery laying down some spare, sparse guitar, sometimes lacing it with muted feedback, or woozy folky strum, while his partner (we presume) wraps these delicate bits of melody with streaks of glitch, fragmented rhythms, even seeming to add some dub to the sound, letting various elements careen and drift before settling back into their original druggy drift, the sound is super hypnotic, fantastically lysergic and dreamy, the sounds tapping into a psychedelia akin to Spacemen 3, repetitive, cyclical, a core droned out loop, but surrounded by crumbling distortion, sonar like pings, but with Montgomery's melodic reverby strum at its core.
The final track in fact begins with that reverby strum, hear letting a single strum repeat, ring out into the ether, before gradually, various other sounds creep in from the periphery, streaks of pulsing buzz, hushed shimmery swells, it's almost like the dreamiest, prettiest, softest doom ever, which weirdly enough is more like the Montgomery of old than anything else here, it's late night drift off dreamdrone psychedelia, strummy and shimmery, it's not really until about 9 minutes in that some crunch and heft are added to the mix, but subtly, so they don't overwhelm, instead, they just add density, and Montgomery's strummy grows more urgent as well, and added layers of melodic counterpoint and guitar harmonies, only make the sound blossom into something both lush and lovely, crunchy and a little bit dark, before finally fading out into a sweetly melancholic softly psychedelic haze. Gorgeous!
This is not a normal Record Of The Week. It's not new. It's not even a newly released reissue. But what it is, is one of our favorite records EVER. And it just so happened Andee was in Olympia this last weekend, and got to visit K Records, where they discovered a little box of these stashed away in the warehouse. And since most of the records by this band predate the current version of the list, we were psyched to suddenly be presented with the opportunity to gush like crazy over the debut album from the late great Treepeople. And really, as far as we're concerned, if any band deserved a comprehensive reissue campaign, it's the Treepeople, but until then, dig this...
For those unfamiliar with the Treepeople, it's essentially pre Built To Spill, with BTS mastermind Doug Martsch honing his chops in a much wilder, more punky, noisy, but no less catchy context. In fact, if you've heard the first Built To Spill record, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, that record essentially sounds like a slightly more polished Treepeople Record. Imagine the glorious hooks and super catchy melodies of BTS, but wrapped in spidery intertwined guitars, swirls of feedback, wild chaotic drumming, the whole vibe more noisy, and loose, definitely more punk, aggressive and heavy, but still impossibly poppy. With every track here, on the group's 1991 debut, a stone cold killer, the opener "No Doubt" lays out the template, multiple guitar lines in constant motion, as if there were multiple solos being played at once, a dizzying backdrop of distort melodies, wound around sinewy basslines, and frenetic drumming, all beneath Martsch's distinctive vocals, oh and feedback, EVERYwhere, but somehow these guys make it sound as much a part of the sound/song as any other instrument. When people talk about noise pop, this is the sort of thing we imagine, equal parts jangle pop and urgent post punk, with some hints of proginess and psychedelia. And since we're all friends here, we'll fess up to the fact, that one of us here (ahem, Andee) had no idea that track two, "Andy Warhol" was a Bowie cover. Which also helps to give you an idea of the sound happening here. The opener bleeds right into the Bowie cover, almost as if they were conceived and composed together, with the Treepeople's version extra fierce and fuzzy (they'd do something similar to the Smiths' "Big Mouth Strikes Again" a year later).
"Gre" comes next, and might be one of our favorite Treepeople songs ever, frantic and fuzzy, noisy and punky, but again, super catchy, with drums and guitars in a seemingly constant squall, and yet molded into something most proper pop bands would kill for, if they could even figure out what to do with it. And from there on out, it just keeps getting better, some songs jangly and woozy, others straight up punk pound, more often than not a little of both, and almost as often, with even more sonic weirdness swirled into the equation. The Treepeople are one of those rare groups whose sound is actually totally and truly unique, there are definitely moments and parts and sounds and hooks that touch on other strains of indie rock, but much like Polvo, they seem to have taken the parts of a proper sound, pulled them apart and then reassembled them with no regard for the instruction manual, the resulting musical monstrosity emerging far more twistedly beautiful than it was ever meant to be, and the sort of sound that has stood the test of time like little else, this record (along with the group's entire catalog) on constant heavy rotation pretty much nonstop for that past 20+ years. And as much as we love Built To Spill, we find ourselves, almost without thinking, replying to almost every BTS related query with something like "yeah, but have you heard Treepeople?!?", cuz really, they're like a much crazier, noisier, heavier, more experimental version, which obviously for us, means even BETTER. A gloriously noisy concoction that should be essential listening for all indie rockers, young and old, and which should eventually, hopefully one day, get these guys, and all their records, the sort of love and accolades they so totally deserve. For now, we'll just do our part. And you should do yours, you won't be sorry, you might just have a new (old) favorite band!
Non musical note: this was the record that first introduced us to the stunning and horrifyingly beautiful pencil art of Mike Scheer!
Maybe you don't know it yet, but (IF you buy these Bobb Trimble albums) you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you... these two albums are reissues of exceedingly rare, DIY pop-psych-prog holy grails from the unlikely time and place of early '80s suburban New England. Bobb Trimble is singer-songwriter and would be (shoulda been) rock star from Worcester, Massachusetts. Born in 1958, he was in his early 20s when he recorded the two self-released albums that constitute his obscure discography, and which over the years have developed a small but devoted cult following among those lucky enough to have encountered these gems. There's been bootlegs of one of them (Harvest Of Dreams), and a hard-to-find anthology that came out 12 years ago drawing material from both Bobb LPs, but now Secretly Canadian, bless 'em, have at long last brought out legit reissues of both amazing Trimble records, on compact disc and vinyl (unfortunately, the vinyl went pretty quick, we only have a couple copies of each LP left in stock at the moment, though we're told there will be a second pressing sometime soon, hopefully). As far as we're concerned, this is one of the most significant musical events of 2007!
Influenced by the Beatles (on the back of his debut LP, he politely asks if he can someday become the 5th Beatle), Bowie, Pink Floyd and other psych and prog rock of the '60s and '70s, Bobb boldly brought that sound into "a world he never made", the malaise days of the late '70s and the new wave Reagan '80s, creating homemade timeless tracks that could just as easily have been recorded today, or tomorrow, too. We're reminded of those artists, yes, and also the disparate likes of Ariel Pink, Antony & The Johnsons, Richard Youngs, Ed Askew, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Roy Harper... but Bobb Trimble's music is also like nothing else we've ever heard.
Both albums are highly recommended... though weird enough to perhaps not be for everyone, we'll admit. If you like 'em at all though, chances are you'll LOVE them. It's about time they were reissued, we expect that they'll do MUCH better today than they did when they were first (barely) released. The world, or at least the indie-rock scene, is finally ready for Bobb's unsung outsider genius, and it's nice he's getting a second shot at recognition now. And also especially nice for the new audience that's gonna flip out over this music (we predict).
This record, 1982's Harvest Of Dreams, is the one with a grainy photo of Bobb pondering what appears to be a unicorn-goat on the cover, apparently found at some RennFaire petting zoo. Looks a bit like a Jandek album cover, doesn't it? It certainly is a wonderful indication of the magical mysteries and sheer oddity of the album's musical content. Of Trimble's two LPs, Harvest is where his dreamy visionary aesthetic reached its absolute pinnacle (at age 23!). Bobb has his helpers on various tracks here, several of 'em recorded with The Kidds -- a bunch of 12-year-olds from his neighborhood he befriended and taught to play! So maybe he felt there was more hope for the future. The mood here isn't quite so dark as side one of Iron Curtain Innocence, though certainly a continuation of that style, and just as emotional and moving, moreso even... Bobb, his high fragile pixie voice (one reason for the Ariel Pink comparison) caressing like fairytale kisses, takes you by the hand and leads you into his heart, on this masterpiece of bedroom recorded lovelorn proggy psychedelic weird gentle beauty. Track two, "If Words Were All I Had" is likely to be one of the best songs you'll hear all year. One of the most aching, affecting love songs ever, actually. It could make you cry. "Armour Of The Shroud" is another highlight. A nearly 8 minute epic woven from Bobb's angelic voice, chiming bells, guitar strum, a bed of electronic swirls, and such droning "environmental" sonic textures as a beeping disconnected dial tone and falling rain. It's not all as mellow as that -- for instance an outburst of distortion and swearing at the end of the otherwise lovely "Selling Me Short While Stringing Me Long" leads into the backwards-effected intro of this album's biggest anomaly, "Oh Baby", a primitive garage-punk number sung by one of the Kidds, with lyrics that seem to reference the Saturday Night Live character Mr. Bill. Backwards effects and children's voices are in fact all over the place here on this densely-layered disc, along with swirling psych guitar, distorted electronics, and Bobb's heartfelt lyrics and melodies. Yep, definitely there's an Ariel Pink vibe, also we're even reminded of the folky pagan weirdness of Comus at times, & also the damaged new wave psych of the Happy Dragon-Band, if you've ever heard them.
Urgh it's hard to do this justice in a mere review. Words are all we have... This is the sort of album that it really seems that someone (a better writer than any of us here) could, should write a whole book about. Like one of those 33 1/3 volumes. It's that deep, that unique, that compelling.
This reissue again includes enthusiastic, enlightening liner notes, this time from Florent Mazzoleni. And more vintage photos, including another one of Bobb sitting with the spooky unicorn-goat from the cover, this time serenading it with an acoustic guitar. And on this cd there's also another three bonus tracks of unreleased songs!! Nicely put together, way better than any bootleg version of course! So, again, both albums are highly recommended (obviously, as we made 'em both Records Of The Week) but if you're gonna buy just one, maybe start with Harvest Of Dreams... but we'd say get both!
Maybe you don't know it yet, but (IF you buy these Bobb Trimble albums) you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you... these two albums are reissues of exceedingly rare, DIY pop-psych-prog holy grails from the unlikely time and place of early '80s suburban New England. Bobb Trimble is singer-songwriter and would be (shoulda been) rock star from Worcester, Massachusetts. Born in 1958, he was in his early 20s when he recorded the two self-released albums that constitute his obscure discography, and which over the years have developed a small but devoted cult following among those lucky enough to have encountered these gems. There's been bootlegs of one of them (Harvest Of Dreams), and a hard-to-find anthology that came out 12 years ago drawing material from both Bobb LPs, but now Secretly Canadian, bless 'em, have at long last brought out legit reissues of both amazing Trimble records, on compact disc and vinyl (unfortunately, the vinyl went pretty quick, we only have a couple copies of each LP left in stock at the moment, though we're told there will be a second pressing sometime soon, hopefully). As far as we're concerned, this is one of the most significant musical events of 2007!
Influenced by the Beatles (on the back of his debut LP, he politely asks if he can someday become the 5th Beatle), Bowie, Pink Floyd and other psych and prog rock of the '60s and '70s, Bobb boldly brought that sound into "a world he never made", the malaise days of the late '70s and the new wave Reagan '80s, creating homemade timeless tracks that could just as easily have been recorded today, or tomorrow, too. We're reminded of those artists, yes, and also the disparate likes of Ariel Pink, Antony & The Johnsons, Richard Youngs, Ed Askew, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Roy Harper... but Bobb Trimble's music is also like nothing else we've ever heard.
Both albums are highly recommended... though weird enough to perhaps not be for everyone, we'll admit. If you like 'em at all though, chances are you'll LOVE them. It's about time they were reissued, we expect that they'll do MUCH better today than they did when they were first (barely) released. The world, or at least the indie-rock scene, is finally ready for Bobb's unsung outsider genius, and it's nice he's getting a second shot at recognition now. And also especially nice for the new audience that's gonna flip out over this music (we predict).
This one, Iron Curtain Innocence, with a striking photo-studio shot on the cover of Bobb armed with both an electric guitar and a Tommy gun, was his debut, a private pressing in an edition of just 300 copies! Side one, credited to Bobb Trimble with The Violent Reactions, was recorded in 1980 and represents the darker, more apocalyptic material on the album, the songs dramatic, melancholic, and laced with much mysterious sound FX. The very first track, "Glass Menagerie Fantasies", starting off with some shortwave static, establishes Bobb's special talent for fragile and melodic otherworldliness, utilizing weird "glitch" textures long before electronica made that a rock-crit term. His multitracked vocals, ranging high, are of translucent beauty throughout this record, yet so much of the musical mood is one of dread and psychosis, lyrics touching on fears of WWIII, the gothic likes of "When The Raven Calls" heavier with sizzling synth drones and volume-cranked psych guitar.
Side two, designated Soliloquize, was recorded two years earlier, in 1978, and features what Bobb considers the more "straight" songs on the record, simpler perhaps, but with Bobb's vocals just as delicate and the mood just as melancholic... and definitely of psychedelic bent, note ferinstance the backwards guitar on "Through My Eyes (Hopeless as Hell: D.O.A.)". On side one Bobb is accompanied by a drummer and bassist, on side two just a drummer, Bobb handling vocals, guitar, and all other instruments, credited also with "interference patterns" and "hope".
Hope? Maybe. Bobb dedicates this album "to a children of a dynasty destined to ruins who build their dreams on the darkness they buy... and steal." You can see where he's coming from, his despairing musical mood. It's fairly certain that back in 1980 he could have never imagined that his music would be being re-released in 2007, not just because such lasting "success" seemed elusive but also 'cause it seemed doubtful, in those days preceding the Ronald Reagan vs. "Evil Empire" face-off at the height of the Cold War, that world would survive this long. Thankfully, it has, but sadly, though, times haven't really changed that much regarding this civilization's and this planet's long-term prognosis, Mutual Assured Destruction replaced with global warming and WMD and another Evil Empire (ours, or Islamofascism, take your pick), so Bobb's sentiments on Iron Curtain Innocence still seem unhappily relevant as ever... but this reissue is also a token of hope, since we, Bobb and this music are are still here.
This reissue also includes three bonus tracks, reverb-drenched solo demo versions of songs from side one, recorded by Bobb in his parents' basement. The cd booklet contains extensive liner notes by Eric Weddle, as well as lots of photos and a newspaper clipping of a review in the local newspaper at the time.
When we discovered the debut full length from Texas slowcore doomgaze trio True Widow, it was a revelation. How could a band like that exist and not be HUGE? Why were they not everyone's favorite band? No one we knew had heard of them, in fact, a few random folks claimed to not even like them. But we were smitten. More than smitten. OBSESSED. It had been years since a record, or a band, had blown us away like that. We contacted the label, ordered the record, made it our Record Of The Week, and sold HUNDREDS. Just at aQ! We had them play our showcase at South By Southwest, where they blew everyone away (even after SXSW asking us why we wanted them to play at all?!). We got them to play Noise Pop out here, and again, everyone was mesmerized, watching slackjawed, utterly entranced� That record, it made us zealots, we felt like we were spreading the good word, the True Widow sonic scriptures, trying to convert everyone we could. Playing that record incessantly, for everyone, all the time. And guess what? It seems like maybe all that proselytizing paid off. Oh and maybe it was the relentless touring those guys did, but c'mon, all we wanted was the rest of the world to catch on, and these guys (and gal) to be adored, and worshipped, their music to move people the way it moved us.
So here we are, a couple years later, and lo and behold, True Widow find themselves on ultrahip label Kemado, and getting showered with the praise we knew they so deserved all along. And more important that any and all of that, it this here is a BRAND NEW True Widow record! Which we've essentially been waiting for since we first got the last record, and we're happy to report, it RULES.
Not as immediately as catchy as the first one, although it's hard to be objective after hundreds of listens, but it hasn't take long for this one to sink it's claws in. The sound remains essentially the same, the guitars thick and liquid, super distorted, almost crumbling, the bass, dense and buzzy, the drums solid and motorik, all wreathed in a druggy haze, a psychedelic soft focus gauze, the boy / girl vocals laid back and languid, a sound like Beach House on Thorazine, or a doom metal Low, or some sort of impossible Codeine / My Bloody Valentine / 4AD hybrid, pressed onto a 7" and spinning at 16rpm, this is total cough syrup slo-mo jangle pop doom drift bliss. Warm and whirling, hushed and minimal, mesmerizing and enthralling and totally hypnotic.
Opener "Jackyl" is a super distorted dream pop craw, the vocals sultry and witchy, the guitars pouring from the speakers like black tar, the song lit by streaks of sunlight through the slats of an old barn, blurred droney chugs spread out over swirls of low end thrum and lush reverbed shimmer. And then "Blooden Horse" begins, with some chiming minor key guitar, and when the band come in together, it's magical, super melodic, impossibly catchy, the vocals perfect, weary, but emotional, the various chiming melodies, the heaving downtuned doomic crush at one point, all woven into a perfect slab of slowcore doom jangle bliss. Our tendency is to go song by song by song, and we most definitely could here, but we'll just mention two more, "Skull Eyes" another perfect pop song, here cast in black, and wreathed in crumble and crunch, the female vocals so warm and enveloping, the melody so impossibly catchy, the boy/girl harmonies make this sound almost like like a slowed down drowsy Heavy Vegetable, the same perfect interplay, it's like it must be a cover of some classic pop song, but it's not, which is what makes it so good. And finally, the epic closer, "Doomseer", 9+ minutes of brooding slo-mo twang, the guitar not so much riffing as unfurling thick layers of rumble and whir, a sort of minimal dronerock ballad, laced with ethereal angelic background vox, a killer high end squall of psychedelic feedback near the end, and a groove that sounds like it's gradually melting before your ears, the whole thing somehow sounding impossibly too short at 9 minutes. So goddamn good. We want to go on, and describe every song in exquisite detail, but by now, it should be abundantly clear how we feel about True Widow, and about this record, and odds are, all it'll take is a few minutes of the below sound samples for you to be as utterly and completely under their spell as we are. Record of the year contender for sure...
The vinyl version is limited to 2000 and hand numbered.
Records like this come along so rarely. The sort of record that immediately reveals itself as something so more then just another disc to add to your collection, or the sort of record you play once or twice and then file. The second we heard this, we knew we had to hear more, and hear it over and over and over again. We discovered these guys online, heard a few songs and immediately bought a copy, and then set out to order them for the store (one of us was so obsessed, he even ordered all the records by the True Widow mainman's OLD band).
Not sure what it is exactly about True Widow, it could be that after hundreds of records of rumbling dronemusic and blasting grim buzz and hushed ambient shimmer, that a band that writes songs, incredibly catchy and melodic and heavy songs, is exactly what our ears craved. Not to take anything away from the band, even if we were immersed in straight up pop and heavy rock (which we sort of are also), these guys (and gal) would most definitely shine. This is the sort of music we rarely hear anymore. We originally expected this to be metal, maybe some sort of heavy post rock metal hybrid, and while it is heavy, it's way more indie rock, or maybe slowcore, more like some haunting mix of the two, the guitars are thick and distorted, but not metallic, and they drift into slow drifting creeps as easily as they do pounding majestic roars. Other reviewers have described True Widow as 'sonic noir' and 'stonegaze', both of which are fairly appropriate, it's definitely dark and moody, certainly shoegazey, and a little bit stonery, but it's really just some sort of perfect gloomy heavy postrock. We hear Codeine, Low, Seam, the vibe is laid back and disaffected, weary and washed out, but still somehow completely rocking.
Every song here is practically perfect, and each one segues seamlessly into the next, the sort of record where you don't just remember the melody or the lyrics, but which songs comes next, and how long the pause between songs is, the sound just so hypnotic and mesmerizing, a sort of lyseric doom pop, a druggy post rock, but the thing is, none of that really explains how addictive these songs seem to be. Literally, from the moment we first heard this record, we have not been able to stop listening to it. We've found other reviewers elsewhere who had the same reaction. Which speaks to the power of the songs, so well crafted, brooding, yet incredibly catchy. Just check out opener "Aka", with its strange mesmerizing main riff, the mysterious pause, and then when the band kicks in, it give you chills, and it's 40 seconds into the record.
The second track, "Duelist", is one of the few tracks that features vocals from bassist Nicole Estill, her warm purr draped over big drums and a simple minimal bass throb, before the band launches into a slow burning minor key lope, only to crank up that opening part, infusing it with just a bit more muscle, and peppering the proceedings with a cool woozy chorus. Then there's "Sunday Driver", a gorgeous hazy reverby almost ballad, skeletal guitars, the drums still solid and loud, the vocals laid back and drugged out, the main melody so catchy, and a chorus that kills. Just writing this now, we've skipped back to the beginning of that song 3 times!
This isn't really new, it came out last year, but we only just discovered it, and it had such an impact on us, we figured it was worth sharing with the rest of you. Cuz even if only a fraction of you have the same sort of response to True Widow that we did, it was well worth it. This has immediately leapt to the top of our year end best of list, even though it didn't come out this year, and hell, for some of us, True Widow immediately made it onto our best EVER list. And yeah we know, we traffic in hyperbole a lot around here, we can't help it cuz we love music so much and are excited to turn people on to the music we love, but there's no denying the empirical evidence, we can't seem to listen to anything else but this record. And that doesn't look like it will be changing anytime soon.
Just listen to the sound samples, the first two tracks alone should do the trick. So goddamn good.
On both cd and 2lp, the vinyl version is super deluxe (hence the price, sorry), 180 gram vinyl, full color ultra thick gatefold sleeve, two printed color inserts, pretty fancy, and very limited.
You know how you can go on at length about this and that, but when you prepare to talk about that one thing you totally love, you find yourself completely tongue tied. I, Andee, kind of feel like that about this record. The minute we put this on, I knew this
Scott Tuma is probably not a household name to most of you, except those of you, who like me, were obsessed with Souled American, since that's where he spent most of the eighties, helping create those molasses slow, rickety bluegrass song-skeletons that we here at AQ love so much. And his time spent in Souled American shows here, on his first 'solo' record. But unlike the stoned and unsteady lurch of SA, 'Hard Again' is all crystalline shimmer, with Tuma's guitar, guiding us unsteadily through soundscapes of tape hiss and skittering snares, moaning chords and weeping melodies.
Take a little John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing, Souled American, maybe some spacy Brian Eno, play it back on a ancient tape machine, and listen to these understated and completely gorgeous guitarscapes, warbling notes, shimmering harmonics and tape hiss and ambient noise all over. Some of the tracks take the Souled American sound and stretch it to its breaking point. Notes versus space, and the space always wins. But the space is never complete, each note rings out, reverberating into the next, creating a delicate latticework of notes and overtones. On one of the tracks a drummer chimes in, but takes a completely new direction with his kit, sounding as if pebbles and sand were being scattered on the snare, with rattles and sizzles scattered between the notes of the lush guitar. Probably the closest 'Hard Again' gets to an actual song is song 5. Wintery and glistening, with carnival melodies played unsteadily and gently, evoking late afternoon strolls through abandoned carnival midways, light blanket of snow on the ground, while the entire scene is hazy seen through the veil of snowflakes filling the sky. This record is just one long lush walk through a cloudy landscape of foggy daydreams and wistful memories. Similar to the way Philip Jeck takes turntables and crafts old fashioned film strip flashbacks of days gone by, Tuma, takes the guitar, and paints vivid images, faded by the passing of time, the snow on the ground, the water in the basement and the rays of the sun, and evidence by clicks and whirrs and hum, which only add another layer to this already rich document. SO so beautiful.
The first time we heard Scott Tuma play guitar, was with skeletal slowcore country legends Souled American. His washed out dreamlike atmospheric guitar parts helped define their sound, but more importantly, introduced Tuma as a truly idiosyncratic guitar player, with a haunting and mysteriously unique sound. Tuma's music was like an acoustic version of Tim Hecker or Fennesz, but whereas those guys use electronics and computers and effects to transform their guitars into blurred dronescapes, Tuma's approach is much more organic, unfurling skeletal guitar lines, a slowed down Appalachia deftly woven into a sprawl of slow motion, washed out, sepia toned countrified ambience. Tuma's two proper solo records, Hard Again and The River 1 2 3 4, are both HUGE all time aQ favorites, so we were pretty excited to hear about a brand new release, especially since we've been waiting patiently for almost 5 years!
Not For Nobody begins quite strangely, a super spare, lo-fi recording of barely there guitar, stretched out beneath reverb drenched childlike vocals, cooing and purring, a bit like a countrified Bjork, the sibilance stretched out into glistening shimmers, the melody, mournful and dreamy, bits of tinkling chimes, and muted ambient clatter, the whole thing sun dappled and soft focus, so strange and haunting, but so lovely and sublime.
The next track finds us on much more familiar ground, a loose tangle of steel string guitar, sounding like it could have come off one of the later Souled American records, but sans vocals, the melodies lyrical and lilting, couched in a thick layered backdrop of warm whir, sprinkled with tinkling bells and chimes, laced with bits of piano, somehow sparse and skeletal, but impossibly lush. Which is sort of Tuma's specialty, turning minimalism into maximalism, but without losing any of the former's hushed urgency or whispered intimacy.
The whole record is quite varied, but each track manages to sound like it couldn't be anywhere else, every one seamlessly leading into the next, a song suite, an album of cohesive musical pieces, not just a collection of songs. The third track, "Eloper", introduces what sounds like horns, for a haunting funereal march, a woozy fanfare that seems to slowly spread out, a simple pulse like rhythm beneath hazy streaks and deliberate minor key strum. The next track begins as a jaunty upper register steel string lullaby, giving way, part way through, to a languorous late afternoon sun dappled sprawl, slightly atonal, gorgeous and bleary eared. "New Joy" buries the guitar in a haze of whirring buzz and warm swirls of lush chords and muted feedback, very liturgical sounding, a dark ambient drift through some ancient crumbling cathedral, while "Rakes" begins as a simple stripped down halfspeed Appalachian hoedown, before transforming into a sea of sawing strings, of layered buzz and extended steel string drones.
The record finishes the way it began, with that ghostly childlike voice, the bits of spare guitar, the massive clouds of delay and reverb, that voice a wraith hovering above the web of subtle minor key guitar, the floorboards creaking, motes of dust tinkling like chimes in a soft evening breeze, creepy, sorrowful, and so completely gorgeous.
Tuma conjures a timeless magical mystery with his guitar. He plays the mysterious traveler, a wandering audio alchemist, turning notes and chords into gold, or rather, golden streaks of dusty memory and soft golden glimpses of some hidden and blurred otherworld. His are sounds to get lost in, to wrap around yourself like some cloak spun from gold thread, to hide under with a flashlight like a child, creating worlds of light and shadow, a sound at once mystical and enigmatic, warm and familiar, and truly truly sublime.
ATTENTION!! The first 100 copies come packaged in a gold on black, cardstock gatefold sleeve, housed in a special oversized handscreened 7" style outersleeve, black ink on metallic gold paper, each one hand numbered. We managed to get nearly 3/4 of that first 100, but the way things have been going these will probably not last long, so once we run out, you'll get the normal, slightly cheaper version (the innersleeve white on brown instead of gold and black, and without the oversized hand numbered outer sleeve).
Vocals? Who needs 'em? Not Turing Machine. This exceptional instrumental mathrock band with members of Pitchblende and Vineland gives nods to Shellac, Phil Manley (Trans Am, Golden) and Unwound. A big store favorite. Don't miss it.
The last record from Alexander Turnquist, the lovely and exquisite As The Twilight Crane Dreams In Color, was a fantastic surprise from this fairly new to us (but quite prolific) composer/guitarist. That record was a lush landscape of glimmering harmonics, and crystalline ambience, all woven around Turnquist's strange and inventive guitar playing. This new record seems to follow suit, with Turnquist again setting the foundation with impossibly dense little soft squalls of steel string tangle, lush with overtones and unlikely harmonics, it's like some avant Appalachia, a sound we wish would go on much longer than its way too brief 2 minutes. But then that feeling is washed away by the equally lovely title track which follows, a swirling, sweetly melodic guitarscape, again, a looped set of steel string tangles providing the anchor, creating a billowing cloud of washed out melody, not unlike pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, a rapid succession of notes somehow transformed into something tranquil and serene, the tangled melodies further tangled by vibes and violin, those two elements providing the melodic counterpoint, and some extra sonic pathos, adding a dark bit of tension, and a sweet melancholia. The sound is dense, while remaining ethereal and dreamlike, the repetition adding a drone element, that makes everything hypnotic and totally mesmerizing.
On "Spherical Aberrations" the trio apply the same methodology to chamber music, the vibes almost jazzy, the violin achingly melodic, all the while the guitar spinning impossible webs of melody and texture underneath.
The record's centerpiece would have to be the sprawling "Waiting At The Departure Gate", which take Turnquist's Reich/Riley compositional style and lets it spread out into a gorgeous layered epic, the guitars impossibly intricate and dense, eventually sounding nothing like guitars at all, instead like some sort of sound generator, while the vibes and violin weave magical melodies over the top, the sound stately and darkly romantic, Turnquist's guitarscapes constantly slipping from background texture to main melody and back again, before finishing off with a bit of minimal Appalachian folk drift. The record is bookended with another brief bit of harmonics heavy steel string tangle, that sounds like a way more avant experimental Michael Hedges. So fantastic. Turnquist is fast becoming one of our favorite modern composers/guitarists!
Along with the revamped Conet Project, here's another no-brainer for a Record Of The Week� We've listed it before, years and years ago, when there was a cd version on Akarma, but this is a much nicer, expanded, official reissue and it's good to give it a proper review for the first time (back then, we merely quoted The Seth Man from Julian Cope's Head Heritage website, waxing rhapsodic about this record, now we'll do it ourselves).
Oh boy. Do you like psychedelia? DO YOU HAVE THIS ALBUM? If not, you're in for a treat, a mindblowing treat. Think Pink was the brilliant solo effort from former Pretty Things drummer John "Twink" Alder, and it's an all-time aQ fave, an all-time underground psychedelic masterpiece, right up there with the essentials from the likes of Amon Duul II, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Sam Gopal, Kaleidoscope, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it's just been properly reissued on cd by the UK's Sunbeam label, with a whole bunch of bonus freakery added on. Not that this album NEEDS any bonus freakery, it's about as freaky as you can get to begin with, packed with droning chant, druidic prophecy, spaced-out psych jams, weird twisted pop, and acid-folk ramble. But, too much is never enough, right? So heck, we're happy to have the eight bonus tracks too. More on those later. First, let's discuss the original album itself. As we said, Twink played drums for The Pretty Things, but before that had his own sixties R&B outfit the Fairies. After that band, he was in Tomorrow ("My White Bicycle") with future Yes guitarist Steve Howe, around 1967. Twink then briefly formed a duo called The Aquarian Age, before joining up with The Pretty Things and appearing on their concept-album classic S.F. Sorrow in '68, another aQ fave. At that point, for some crazy reason (things were different/better back then) Twink was offered a deal by Sire to do a solo album, and Think Pink was the glorious, if at the time somewhat unheralded, result, recorded in 1969 with Mick Farren of The Deviants producing. Released in 1970 in the US & Europe, but not 'til '71 in the UK, it's been called the first Pink Fairies album, and in a way it is, as soon after making it, Twink did team up with several ex-members of The Deviants, most of whom played on this, to form that infamous proto-punk outfit. And several tracks here feature contributions from what's credited as "The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Club & All Star Rock & Roll Band".
Also participating are several of Twink's Pretty Things bandmates, his girlfriend Silver Darling, and Steve Peregrin Took, Marc Bolan's partner in Tyrannosaurus Rex and early T-Rex, who plays, among other things, "pixie horn". And one of the most crucial contributors to Think Pink, besides Twink himself, has to be guitarist Paul "Blackie" Rudolph, who really lets loose, earning a hallowed place in the annals of distortodelic guitar wrangling for his work on this album alone (though in the course of his career before and after, he also played with The Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Robert Calvert, and Brian Eno).
Eastern-tinged opener "The Coming Of The Other One" sets the scene, pulling us deep into its trippy Aquarian Age fantasy zone, with a solemn voice reciting Nostradamic verses ("In the year 1999 and seven months, from the skies shall come an alarming powerful king...") accompanied by tablas and sitar. Then comes Think Pink's biggest "hit" as far as we're concerned, an utterly perfect slice of stonery psych called "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", just listen to it! That's followed by "Dawn Of Magic" with its raga-like vocal ahhhaaaaahh sounds as if Pandit Pran Nath were on the mic, which suddenly segues into the space-out sike-pop of "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill", a lovely pastoral song that eventually builds into a howling guitar blow-out of the highest order. Then the trippy "Fluid" chimes into being, with its sexy heavy breathing and slinky, springy grooves, making us think of the acid-fried hippy orgasms of krautrockers Brainticket's classic Cottonwood Hill (released later on, in '71, we should also note).
Side two (track six here) opens with the martial fuzz-freakout of "Mexican Grass War", all chanting freaks and wild FX like early Amon Duul and Edgar Broughton Band. The freaky vibes continue, quite weird and wonderful, with the glammed up jam of "Rock An'Roll The Joint", the mellow morbid acoustic strum of "Suicide" and the maniacal "Three Little Piggies", before the album ends with the intense edgy psych pop of "The Sparrow Is A Sign", a song with a malevolent, sinister side to it that reminds us a little bit of Comus - and strangely too of the Sun City Girls, perhaps due to the vocals, provided by Steve Took.
Then, there's all those bonus tracks, the first two of which are actually from the lone 7" single released in '68 by The Aquarian Age, the immediate precursor to the Think Pink project. There's the A side, being the original version of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", and the B side, an amusing number called "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard", which displays just the sort of twee, hippie British humor the title suggests. It's great to hear both of those, and the bonus tracks proliferate further with unreleased, alternate versions of more Think Pink material, somewhat heavier or rawer or definitely different, including two takes of "Fluid" and another version of "10,000 Words...", which we can't get enough of anyway.
All in all, a nicely done reissue, as this deserves, with pages and pages of newly-written, informative liner notes, plus lyrics, credits, vintage photos & graphics. Plus, unlike that previous Akarma version, this is a fully-legit release, done with the participation of Twink himself ("issued under exclusive license from Mohammed Abdullah John Alder, February 2013" it says here, and there's even a picture of him today too - apparently he's become a Muslim, and looks quite happy).
By the way... Nobody here at aQ can think about Think Pink, though, and not also think about our "customer" whom we call The Twink Think Pink Guy. We don't believe he's ever actually bought anything, but he's this older guy that comes in once in a while (and has for years) and always, always, ONLY asks about Think Pink, whether we have it in stock or not, and then talks at great length to anyone who will listen about how great it is. It's his favorite record apparently, but don't let that dissuade you, if you get this you probably won't end up like him. Probably.
Message for The Twink Think Pink Guy, if you're reading this: we expect to see you soon!
The Snowbringer Cult was a double cd originally released way back in 2008 on the Students of Decay label, and was the first proper cd release from French bedroom drone-psych-folk epic from Natural Snow Buildings, the boy/girl duo of Mehdi Amaziane and Solange Gularte, that double cd included a NSB full length, as well as an album from each of their solo projects, those being Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. That double cd is finally available again, but has also been reissued on vinyl for the first time, with each of the three parts being released separately as its own record.
Natural Snow Buildings have been a band since WAY back in 1999, toiling quietly WAY underground, and over the course of the last decade plus, have only really released a handful of records, and in the first 6 or 7 years, they only managed 4 cd-r's and two tapes, the total number of copies of all 6 of those releases hovering at about 250. That's insane! At the time we couldn't help wonder how a band with such a small catalog, that has reached so few ears, could generate so much fanboy freakout?! But that's precisely what happened. And thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly, in the case of NSB, and the two solo offshoots, the hype does not seem unwarranted. The freaking out more than merited. The music of Amaziane and Gularte is definitely something special, much more than the usual generic fx laden droned out abstract cd-r floor-core that seems to be constantly flooding the scene, this duo write actual songs, and create gorgeous soundscapes, they mix raga-like psyche with fluttery folk, deep drones with pristine pop, weaving it all together into something spectacular.
Mehdi begins the Twinsistermoon record with a sound that perfectly compliments Solange's Isengrind record (and makes it obvious why the two work so well together in NSB), long drawn out glimmering high end tones, draped over a dark minor key folky strum, and simple percussion, while Mehdi's feminine sounding falsetto soars over the top, all infused with some sort of freaky folky Wickerman vibe. Gorgeous and haunting. That track is followed up by a short chunk of perfect dreamfolk, simple folky strum, and Mehdi's crystal clear vocals, ringing out, pure and impossibly high, if you didn't know better you might think this was some rare track by some lost seventies female folkie.
And so it goes, tracks weaving back and forth, from warm washed out blissy dreamy dronescapes, to simple stripped down folk, often the two sounds drifting into each other, cross pollinating, the folk songs short and seemingly serving to separate the longer sprawling expanses of drone and shimmer, the two sounds dramatically different, but somehow complimenting one another perfectly.
William Tyler has spent the last decade plus as a touring guitar player for both Nashville indie country combo Lambchop, and indie rockers the Silver Jews, but here on Impossible Truth he strikes out on his own, and comes up with something that harkens back to a different age, several different ages in fact, the obvious reference is the guitar soli / early Appalachia of folks like John Fahey, Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho, but imagine that sound filtered through something more Laurel Canyon-y, for a sort of seventies psychedelia, the sound evoking wide open expanses, big sky country, the soundtrack to a meandering drive in a big old car, top down, on single lane roads winding through rolling green hills, no destination, endless possibilities. Opener "Country Of Illusion" adds a bit of raga to the mix, giving the sound an exotic droney vibe, with a little bit of an Eastern tinge, but soon, a subtly rhythmic pulse, some slippery slide, a little bit of twang, and it's a whole different world, we're hearing Morricone, Pell Mell, James Blackshaw, all woven into a heady bit of sun dappled psychedelic folk, that is pretty divine. Steve Reich and Terry Riley may also be influences.
The mood darkens a bit on the "Geography Of Nowhere", the tones wreathed in reverb and delay, the sound looped and layered, minor key and melancholy, but then like the first track, the sound opens up, the mood shifts, as of the clouds parted revealing nothing but blue skies. The record tends toward dense melodic tangles and mesmerizingly repetitive arrangements, with the tone and timbre constantly changing between songs, some lush and warm, rich and lustrous, others more crystalline and high end, more shimmer and glimmer, all culminating in the closer, which might be the weirdest track of all, it starts out a sort of loping Western style Americana, looped melodic figures drifting over swoonsome slide and lush chordal swells, but then in creep what sound like horns, and maybe fiddles? The melodies get more playful, the slide more slippery, the sounds soar and swoop, the horns moaning and bleating, before finally exploding into a full on heavy psych drum heavy noise drenched freakout, the drums driving and motorik, beneath a cloud of roiling psych guitar tangle, that eventually fades out, into a shimmery sprawl of pulsing, echo drenched abstract guitar drift.
And everyone who buys a copy of Impossible Truth, cd OR vinyl, will be entered into a raffle to win a VERY RARE test pressing of the record!!
William Tyler has spent the last decade plus as a touring guitar player for both Nashville indie country combo Lambchop, and indie rockers the Silver Jews, but here on Impossible Truth he strikes out on his own, and comes up with something that harkens back to a different age, several different ages in fact, the obvious reference is the guitar soli / early Appalachia of folks like John Fahey, Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho, but imagine that sound filtered through something more Laurel Canyon-y, for a sort of seventies psychedelia, the sound evoking wide open expanses, big sky country, the soundtrack to a meandering drive in a big old car, top down, on single lane roads winding through rolling green hills, no destination, endless possibilities. Opener "Country Of Illusion" adds a bit of raga to the mix, giving the sound an exotic droney vibe, with a little bit of an Eastern tinge, but soon, a subtly rhythmic pulse, some slippery slide, a little bit of twang, and it's a whole different world, we're hearing Morricone, Pell Mell, James Blackshaw, all woven into a heady bit of sun dappled psychedelic folk, that is pretty divine. Steve Reich and Terry Riley may also be influences.
The mood darkens a bit on the "Geography Of Nowhere", the tones wreathed in reverb and delay, the sound looped and layered, minor key and melancholy, but then like the first track, the sound opens up, the mood shifts, as of the clouds parted revealing nothing but blue skies. The record tends toward dense melodic tangles and mesmerizingly repetitive arrangements, with the tone and timbre constantly changing between songs, some lush and warm, rich and lustrous, others more crystalline and high end, more shimmer and glimmer, all culminating in the closer, which might be the weirdest track of all, it starts out a sort of loping Western style Americana, looped melodic figures drifting over swoonsome slide and lush chordal swells, but then in creep what sound like horns, and maybe fiddles? The melodies get more playful, the slide more slippery, the sounds soar and swoop, the horns moaning and bleating, before finally exploding into a full on heavy psych drum heavy noise drenched freakout, the drums driving and motorik, beneath a cloud of roiling psych guitar tangle, that eventually fades out, into a shimmery sprawl of pulsing, echo drenched abstract guitar drift.
And everyone who buys a copy of Impossible Truth, cd OR vinyl, will be entered into a raffle to win a VERY RARE test pressing of the record!!
Having your head dipped in some sort of molten hallucinogenic liquid...or steamrollered by a flying saucer.... or headbanging with Lovecraftian gods somewhere far out in the ocean of space... that's our meagre attempt to colorfully describe the experience of enjoying this slab of psychedelic stoner doom rock, the 1999 debut disc from Italy's UFOmammut! Chances are, though, that you have some idea already about this might sound like, 'cause UFOmammut's other album, the mighty Snailking, was immediately crowned as an Aquarius Record of the Week when it came out last year, and is still a steady seller hereabouts. Hopefully you already got one of those. This too, we've had before, but it's been out of print for quite a long time and only just got reissued. We figured that since folks liked Snailking so much, and Godlike Snake was just as good, and could easily have been missed out upon the first time around, we shouldn't pass up the opportunity to relist this and make it a Record of the Week as well now that it's back in print. After all, the whole reason we were so instantly amped on Snailking when it came out was in part 'cause we'd been waiting for it for, literally, years, after being blown away by the band's first album, this one. Our review of Godlike Snake ran something like this: "...this stoner rock band is a good 'un, taking a way spacier route to the Dopethrone than most. Wonderfully heavy and mesmerizing, with loads of effects, Moog, and (pardon the expression) "fat" churning drone-grind-groove... A new fave for us in the stoner/doom realm... Especially recommended for those that miss the old Monster Magnet sound, or relish the idea of a heavier Hawkwind." Listening to it now (which a bunch of us have been doing *every day* in the store), we're if anything EVEN MORE into it. Something we hadn't noticed before was how some tracks come across like Godflesh or early Killing Joke melded to Hawkwind. Crushing and enveloping and sooooooo good. It's like Electric Wizard gone spacerock, or an industrialized Dead Meadow.
As with its original incarnation, this includes a trippy video track for the song "Where?" for those with computers. It's now packaged in a standard jewelbox, instead of a cardboard digipack, but the artwork remains pretty much the same. If you like heaviness like we do, don't miss it this time!! Definitely to be considered an AQ doom/sludge/psych ESSENTIAL.
We've been waiting for, like, five years for this! The Italian stoner-prog band Ufomammut's debut Godlike Snake sure was a 'heaviness' hit here at AQ a few years back. A real SLEEP-er. Sadly, it's been out of print for quite a while now, and we've been waiting even longer for 'em to release their long-rumored follow-up, Snailking. But at loooong last, it's finally here! And it lives up to the promise of its predecessor while being sufficently different from it as well to really have made this worth the wait. For starters, though, here's the easiest description of Ufomammut, simply put: Electric Wizard meets Hawkwind. Space rock really doesn't get any heavier (though Tarantula Hawk is up there too). And this new one sure is heavy too. But it's also weirder, darker. Eerie. Sinister. Lots of tripped out frightmare quietude, spacious expanses of fx and ominous drum thwap for your drug-addled imagination to fill with visions cosmic. There's a free jazzish electronics freakout in track five ("God") worthy of Comets on Fire. It's doomed out, bad-trip psychedelia with mumbling, repetitious voice-in-your head samples. You know they must like Sabbath, but their favorite songs may have been perhaps "Planet Caravan" and "Solitude" and "Fx"... Not that they neglect the RIFF, the kind that goes beyond headbanging, that makes you just want to throw yourself against the wall or onto the floor and then curl up in a ball, eyes closed, rocking back and forth. So heavy it's almost mellow. And does manage to be melodic, even when the singer sounds like he's coming down a mountain glowing green...what's he seen? One song seems to be about an atomic blast, with sampled test-site announcements. And whatever the final 28-minute track "Demontain" is about, it *could* be about the aftermath...a spacey dire droning dirge for the nuclear winter, with riffing returning as the rise of the mutants begins, building into a full-on gamma world...? If you've been into any recent AQ 'heaviness' recommendations (Boris, Buried At Sea, Yob...) you NEED this. 'Nuff said.
It may be odd to single out one component of a series for Record Of The Week, especially when it's the second of a proposed three record trilogy. It's not that we didn't love the first installment, we did very much! And it's not like the Academy Awards where we're belatedly acknowledging the first installment by rewarding the second. It might be just that we didn't realize at the time the magnificent depth and far reaching direction in which Steven R. Smith would take his latest project. And as we have heaped tons of praise on his past work, we wanted to single out this project and particularly this installment as something utterly amazing and wholly breathtaking.
Despite the tons of killer music that goes in and out of the aQ doors, it's not everyday we get an album that really lifts us out of our seats and straight into an alternate dimension. The latest release under the Ulaan Khol moniker is a celestial trip into desolate plains where the water rises and the skies are ripped open.
A prominent member of the Jeweled Antler family, Steven R. Smith has been seriously influential in defining the California psych/drone sound for over a decade. We've mentioned it in plenty of reviews, so folks gotta be by now pretty aware of Smith's extensive discography, ranging from countless solo records to his releases as the Eastern European-tinged Hala Strana or with the famed JA flagship act Thuja.
The first Ulaan Khol record, though made up of nine untitled tracks, felt like one spacious drifting piece of big fuzzy distortion and fragile drone bliss. Something like the gorgeous feedback-laden free music of Les Rallizes Denudes or others from the Japanese Underground scene. We loved it a lot, but didn't go into extensive detail about it, probably because we had also just reviewed his Owl record (released under his own name) around the same time.
On II, we hear a lot more range. There are still the big swaths of massively distorted psych heaviness, but the eight untitled tracks feel more distinct and structured. Some tracks have faster Spacemen 3-like tempos and fuller driving progressions with pummeling drums mired way deep in the mix, while others feature more calm, drifty drones made up of intimate guitar, electric violin and organ passages that conjure up gorgeous swells of luminous sound. The pieces are more varied and layered, dense yet melodic and at times more rock-ish. The majestic guitar radiance Smith manages to create is not unlike the solo work of Kawabata Makoto or Tom Carter, but here we also hear shades of Roy Montgomery, Flying Saucer Attack and even Asa Osbourne from Zomes and Lungfish (Zomes being a recent Record Of The Week too).
As with the first disc, there are no liner notes, just an abstract painted cover, this time in bleak blue-grey winter tones. And inside the sleeve is an awesome painting of a lamp-holding monk (perhaps the same skull contemplating monk from the first disc) at the mouth of a giant cave! Yes!
We LOVED the previous Umberto album, From The Grave, and are stoked that he/they/it have finally returned with another full length packed with oodles of Goblin-y goodness, just in time for Halloween!!
But the sound of the Expo 70-associated Umberto is not strictly that scary, at least not all the time, in fact, like Goblin and other '80s Italian fright-film soundtrackers, most of the scary stuff here is really just an *underlying* un-ease, a sinister suspenseful undercurrent over which more "groovy" stuff gets down. And way more groovy this one most definitely is, some serious haunted dancefloor action, or horror movie disco, or whatever you want to call it, but Umberto has for sure upped the funk/groove quotient, lacing the usual cocktail of thick, tense, pulsing synth throb, minimal motorik rhythms and heavy ominous drones with plenty of funky basslines, crunchy modulated keyboard buzz, soaring synths, chanted voices and propulsive grooves... Here and there, the sound gets all stripped down leaving just gurgly, crumbly distorted low end peppered with spaced out booming rhythms, or creepy ambient atmospheres, but the songs tend to slip quickly back into haunted shuffly rhythms, woozy horror movie atmospherics, ominous strings laced funky grooves and dark descending bass blarp.
The second side begins with one of those tracks that sounds like the music that always introduces us to the main character in all those seventies thrillers, the little girl playing with her dollies, the old woman in the garden, the sound is tranquil but subtly sinister, here it's a music box like melody, plinking dreamily beneath haunting strings, and soft swirls of creepy voice like synth, total horror movie soundtrack shivers for sure.
After that it's back to wah guitars, chiming bells, groovy Italo funk haunted dancefloor grooviness, but this time with some cool washed out M83 style female vocal textures, a shoegazey gauze over that propulsive Goblin-y groove.
If we had to pick a single song that was THE ONE here, it would probably be "Someone Chasing Someone Through A House" which sounds exactly LIKE THAT, pulsing throbbing synths, electronic squelches, deep ominous drones, dark swells, foreboding and creepy and tense and SCARY!
The album ends with an upbeat track entitled "Everything Is Going To Be Ok", all sun-coming-up, yay we survived the zombie onslaught good cheer & cheesiness. The sort of music that plays over the closing credits, or even better, over the final shot which lulls you into a sense of false security, before a decaying hand bursts through the ground, or a beast explodes from the water and drag our heroine out of the boar, some sort of shock to let you know that evil won't stay buried... which of course usually leads to a sequel, and we are definitely looking forward to the next installment of groovy Gobliny sonic scares from Umberto!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Sometimes it's hard to keep up with the output of Italian '60s/'70s groovedelica reissue label Easy Tempo. Fortunately this release didn't escape our notice, 'cause it's super great. Italian composer Piero Umiliani has been the subject of numerous reissues and compilations as his "space age bachelor pad" music is finding a newer audience 30 years after it was created. And while the sticker on the cd reminds you that Umiliani's experimental synthesizer (moog, mostly) pop material can favorably be compared to the exotica of Martin Denny, the '60s rock of Jefferson Airplane, and jazz a la Ellington, we're here to tell you that at times the music sounds utterly contemporary, as modern and fresh and full of original ideas as any new "electronica" artist out there. In fact, the electronic material is so clean and avant sounding that we are instantly reminded of Krautrock pioneers Cluster and Neu. You heard me--Cluster. Yeah, it's that good! Not that it's all super serious or anything -- there's a great version of "Caravan" on here worthy of Perrey & Kingsley. Highly recommended!
Holy shit, this is so fucked up, but in all the right ways. And thus, becomes our first ever CASSETTE Record Of The Week! One of those records that had EVERYone here sorta freaking out. And on it's first spin in the store, had all the folks in the back rushing up front to see what the heck was playing!
Un Festin Sagital are an occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra out of Santiago, Chile that can strip down to the touring essentials of just flute, acoustic guitar, and voice, when need be, in bellowing their complex tales of a forthcoming lysergic apocalypse. But here, it's the full sonic onslaught of Satanic chanting, frenzied tribal rhythms, heavy anthemic riffs, acid-crazed arrangements, and witch/warlock vocals that sound as if they were recorded at the wrong speed, all dotted with some rather pretty moments of psychedelic impressionism. Diabolically strummed flamenco guitar riffs erupt into blisteringly rhythmic assaults of start/stop rhythms that are equal parts King Crimson, Comus, and Uz Jsme Doma. Or imagine Dutch punks the Ex crossed with aQ Record Of The Weekers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan!! A sound that somehow simultaneously reminds us of bedeviled Eastern European peasant folk songs that could very well be possessed gypsy curses from some remote old world village in a muddled sonic palette that also evokes the Art Bears mixed with ritualistic Hindustani vocal modulations, or the Vietnamese girls on Holgar Czukay's "Boat Woman Song". The sound washed out under layers of tape decay and warble, the music seemingly patched together and reassembled in beautiful, yet twisted psych-folk interludes which meander between the volatile rhythmic outbursts with wah-wah inflected, acidic guitar lines and long dizzying sprawls of cinematic creep and kosmische electronics, creating spellbinding atmospheres and gorgeously stunning modern avant heaviness. Strange, fucked-up stuff. Supposedly a full length is in the works for Beta-Lactum Ring. C40. Limited to 100 copies! And so totally recommended!!
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Now available on domestic PICTURE DISC vinyl!
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
United States Of America is quite a politically charged monicker these days, what with the whole country / world divided over the war in Iraq and our President and gay marriage and everything else under the sun. Probably wasn't a whole lot less volatile 36 years ago, in the midst of the Vietnam War, when this record was first released. Which was precisely the point.
USoA mastermind Joseph Byrd was a long time devotee of twentieth century composition and minimalism, studying and/or studying with LaMonte Young, John Cage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Charles Ives and the rest. While at UCLA, Byrd helped organise the New Music Workshop and eventually arranged an elaborate set of concerts which culminated in a Lamonte Young piece that involved the inflation of a giant hot air balloon. Fearful that the less sophisticated members of the audience would get bored and leave, Byrd formed a blues band to play during that part of the performance and convinced his pal Linda Rondstadt to sing. Thus came the realisation that a rock band would give Byrd access to a much bigger audience, and so began his quest to start a psychedelic rock band, which would eventually be realized as United States Of America. Made up of Byrd's friends from academia and ethnomusicology and his ex-girlfriend, and born from his frustration with the war and his leaving UCLA, USoA became a politically charged experimental psychedelic rock combo unlike any that had come before. Utilising a not exactly standard bass /drums /guitar /violin lineup, their sound was further augmented by ring modulators, organ, harpsichord, and calliope. The end result was a sixties rock band, drenched in psychedelic filligree, swooping electronic trippiness, all sorts of circus-y weirdness, bizarre editing and song structures, but never losing sight of great songs.
And a lot of these songs are indeed great. Probably the best track on the record is "The Garden Of Earthly Delights", a super rocking Stereolab meets Jefferson Airplane number, that would not sound at all out of place on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, if it weren't for the gritty sixties rock chorus (with a hook to die for) and the storm of buzzing and bleeping, overloaded affects and tripped out swooping and soaring bleeps and bloops. And then there's the final track, a three part experimental montage / coda, all ambient jangle and ethereal ambience, with snippets and samples from the rest of the tracks on the record, resulting in a super damaged art-rock musical acid trip. And the rest of the record veers from countryish campfire stomps, to smoke-y sultry ballads, to freaked out psych jams and everything in between. All blessed by the absolutely gorgeous vocals of Dorothy Moskowitz.This record may be a psychedelic country pop rock record, but boy is it more than that. Reminds us quite a bit of recent AQ record of the week Euphoria, with it's complicated and bizarre arrangements and its unlikely melding of country rock, lush baroque pop and acid fried guitar leads. Imagine a Frankensteinian sonic monster constructed from Euphoria, Stereolab, Fifty Foot Hose, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds...then make said monster do some coursework in twentieth century compostion and experimental minimalism, and let it experiment with a suitcase full of homemade sound generators and you'd still have trouble imagining how great this record is. As always Sundazed does the reissue right, with extensive liner notes from Joseph Byrd, and interview with Dorothy Moskowitz and TEN bonus tracks, almost all of them unreleased, and most of them as good as anything on the album proper!
