Long overdue reissue of the impossible to find early releases from Swiss extremist free jazz / outrock outfit 16-17! Because of using saxophone, 16-17 were always tagged as some kind of 'jazz' group, but if this was jazz, it was a kind of jazz no one had EVER imagined at the time, extreme and difficult listening for sure, like Borbetomagus filtered through the Swans or like a snake charmer high on PCP jamming with Prong's rhythm section. Or even a free jazz Whitehouse! 16-17 were a shrieking banshee, a pummeling behemoth, massive, ear shredding, primitive horn blasting freakout predating Zorn's extreme jazz (Painkiller et. al.) by at least seven years. This trio (saxophonist Alex Buess, drummer Knut Remond and guitarist Markus Kneubuhler) wove tight, tense grooves of pounding drums, pulsing thick ropy low end guitar throb, and atop it ,all Buess' wildly squealing, squirming, snarling sax. 16-17 sound was so intense and far out, and so much modern music can be heard in these tracks, Flying Luttenbachers, Laddio Bolocko, Aufgehoben No Process, Painkiller, a few years later and maybe Buess would be celebrating HIS 50th birthday with star studded NYC performances and multiple cd releases, but as it is, these guys remained a footnote, lurking on the periphery, making common cause with Kevin Martin's God and Alboth and the even the Digital Hardcore label, their legacy indisputable, modern music's debt unrepayable, so thanks to Savage Land we can all now genuflect before the Gods of ultra extreme hardcore free jazz post punk whatthefuck, hear where it all started, feel the same thrill folks must have felt stumbling into some dingy New York dive when 16-17 came over and toured with the Swans, and being fucking flattened by these guys.
Includes the first two albums, Self Titled (1986) and When All Else Fails (1989) as well as the ULTRA rare Hardkore & Buffbunker cassette (1984). Two discs wrapped in a cardboard slipcover. Transferred from the best available sources, digitally remastered by Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers) and this is the very first time ANY of this music has been available on cd!
WARNING: You -should- play this loud. But still, be careful! Make sure any of your easily-aggravated housemates aren't asleep. Move breakable objects out of the way. Take your heart medication. All reasonable precautions before subjecting yourself to the might of 16-17's newly reissued Gyatso.
The music of Switzerland's 16-17 has been called industrial free jazz. And it's certainly got the swarming, squealing saxophones of the most freaked out free jazz we've heard. But with its industrial/metallic elements, the BRUTAL trance-inducing grind of martial drumming and guitar chuggery, maybe "free" jazz isn't the word. How 'bout "totalitarian jazz"? When we previously highlighted the two-cd Early Recordings collection of 16-17's '80s output, we described the band as the "Gods of ultra extreme hardcore free jazz post punk whatthefuck". Ok, that's about right.
Well, Gyatso, originally released in 1994 on Kevin Martin's long gone Pathological imprint (home to Martin's projects like Techno Animal, God, and Ice, as well as crucial discs by Oxbow, Peter & Caspar Brotzmann, Terminal Cheesecake, Zeni Geva, etc.) was even more insane than the stuff on Early Recordings, being to us the pinnacle of 16-17's recorded existence. The thing is, this album takes their earlier excesses into a whole new realm, finally getting their music the heavy duty production treatment it deserved. It's about the heaviest "jazz" ever! Basically, imagine Godflesh teamed up with Peter Brotzmann and this is about what you'd get. The aggressive, constantly-escalating tension of machine-gunning opener "Attack-Impulse" pretty much wipes the floor with all other contenders, going beyond the likes of Zorn's Painkiller or fellow Swiss maniacs Alboth! It simply kills. Having done so, for the rest of the disc 16-17 make sure you stay good and dead with an expansive onslaught of repetitive, rigid rhythms and psychedelic skree-scapes, with brassy bass drone and high-end sax skronk swimming in an ominous electronic miasma. A couple extra-noisy remixes are included at the end to wrap things up in the most extreme manner possible. (These appeared on the original version too.)
The trio responsible for making this masterwork consisted of Alex Buess (screaming saxophones and bass clarinet), Markus Kneubuhler (guitar, electronics and tapes), and the relentless Knut Remond on drums. Also, this disc features a couple very special guests: on utterly sick, thuddering bass, there's Ben "G.C." Green of (indeed) Godflesh fame. And providing electronic samples, Pathological head honcho Kevin Martin.
This essential reissue has been digitally remastered by Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers), and comes with a thick booklet of extensive new liner notes based on interviews with Buess and Martin, discussing the history of the band. We were fascinated to learn that Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine was such a big fan of 16-17 that back in 1995, he actually invited Alex Buess to work with him on the (still unrealized) follow up to Loveless! Who would have guessed? Apparently Alex spent a month in the studio with MBV, without much to show for it unfortunately... though we'd be still interested to hear what they were up to..
But, it surely couldn't be anything like this, there's nothing better as far as "ultra extreme hardcore free jazz industrial" or whatever is concerned!!
Without even reading this review, you probably know already if you're the sort of person who'd be interested in purchasing an album with song titles like "Destroy The Orcs", "Crazy Nights", "Axes Of Evil" and "Wykydtron". And if you are, AQ sez you should definitely buy this one! But read on for the details.
Listening to this album, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a German power metal troupe from 1985...but this disc is brand spankin' new, and the kids in 3 Inches Of Blood are from Vancouver! And their thanks list includes the likes of Teen Cthulhu, Goatsblood, and Harkonen. Presumably they followed the unlikely but ultimately excellent path from punk and hardcore to metalcore to, now, full on balls-in-a-vice, galloping guitars, swords and sorcery M to the E to the T to the A to the L. The singer screams and shrieks with the best of 'em (reminding us of Lizzie Borden, Udo and Metal Church's David Wayne), the music is both punishing and melodic, and a lot of the lyrics are even ABOUT metal, a la Manowar. So, the metalheads here at AQ were instantly hooked (oh yeah, it IS hooky). Not bad for some Canadian kids! Sure, great bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Darkest Hour and Mastodon have already allowed strains of '80s true heavy metal to seep into their metalcore mosh-math but 3 Inches Of Blood go waaaay beyond that. You will hear the metalcore origins in how this is tougher and heavier and noisier than their '80s inspirations, but still, it's pretty darn D&D.
What's really fucked up is, how'd they get on Roadrunner? This ain't nu metal, this ain't rap metal, this ain't even death metal. Not only that, someone spent some big bucks on it: produced by Neil Kernon (who has twiddled knobs for everyone from Hall and Oates to Macabre), mixed by Colin Richardson (another big name, most famous around here for his work with Carcass)...the cover art is even by the guy who did Megadeth's signature Vic Rattlehead cover paintings. Well, apparently this band somehow wound up touring with The Darkness, and loads of good press in the UK ensued, followed by this Roadrunner deal, after one previous indie-release we haven't been able to get a hold of yet. And sure, these guys are a bit tongue in cheek like The Darkness, but the music they are inspired by (no, not parody) isn't nearly as commercial and pop as the '80 hair metal and '70s cock rock The Darkness favors. The bands these guys emulate were way more underground and fast and heavy, stuff like good, old Helloween fer instance. Or (not so underground but important) Judas Priest's Painkiller album. All right, 'nuff said. Basically, it comes down to: "Destroy The Orcs", yay or nay? We say yay, destroy those pesky orcs!!
Right from the majestic, martial instrumental intro of "Through The Horned Gate" that begins this album, it's clear that the return of 3 Inches Of Blood is also the return of true, speedy, spikes n' leather metal in an updated '80s vein, hypercharged with aggressive modern metalcore technology. It's all about relentless shrieking, Maidenesque guitar frenzies, and song titles like "Night Marauders" and "Demon's Blade". Total galloping speed metal mayhem, and then some. It's like Judas Priest's Painkiller as performed by Converge!
Of course, 3 Inches Of Blood aren't the only band these days looking back to the glory days of the '80s for (ironic?) metal inspiration. But this Vancouver sextet is one of the best, most wholehearted, and surprisingly successful sales-wise (among North American bands anyway -- and this is way cooler than Dragonforce) and also have their own unique approach to this sound, which can be ascribed both to their hardcore heritage and to the presence of two vocalists (that's all they do!) in the band, doubling up on the mics, one a long-haired, raspy-but-melodic high-end falsetto specialist, the other short-haired one dealing in growlier throat abuse. And they kinda need two singers/screamers to compete with all the dual guitar fireworks going off around them.
Fire Up The Blades is a fine follow up to their breakthrough second album Advance and Vanquish, and is also already a definite headbanging AQ fave. We're into what seems to be an extra dose of, uh, rock n' roll riffage here -- there's some cowbell happenin' too. But it's still all pretty much rockin' at 150mph, pedal to the metal. This is one fierce, energetic album! For fans of everything from Accept to Children Of Bodom to Laaz Rockit to Darkest Hour to Lizzie Borden to Mastodon to Metal Church... gotta highlight this, as the FUN, fist-in-the-air quotient compared to some of the grim black metal we're always recommending is extremely high.
Ready for another ripping, rousing session of state of the art, orc slaughtering, ultra-metal action?? That's right, Canada's remarkably popular (both at AQ and elsewhere - they have their own signature Nike sneaker now, we're told!) 3 Inches Of Blood are back, let the headbanging commence! Their entertaining, energetic brand of '80s influenced power metal (birthed, though, from the modern metalcore scene) is as thrillingly, thrashingly over the top and unabashedly METAL as ever. Un-ironically so, we think, though the song title "All Of Them Witches" sounds like something The Fucking Champs would have come up with. Other titles though, like "Rock In Hell", "Fierce Defender" and "Battles And Brotherhood", are definitely sincere, face-value, heavy metal to the death declarations.
Shredding and shrieking, the eleven tracks of Here Waits Thy Doom pretty much all traffic in triumphant galloping glory. "Preachers Daughter" is a bit of a departure, more of a mid paced, blues metal stomp, in which we realize that the high pitched, always on the verge of a gargle vocals of the appropriately named Cam Pipes remind us slightly of a power metal version of Eric Wagner from Trouble. There's also an all-acoustic instrumental interlude (penultimate track "12:34") before the album concludes. So there's some variety, but what you'll mainly find here is an enjoyable overdose of balls to the wall speed metal from a band who owe a lot to the '80s but are definitely modern metal extremists as well.
Oh, and this is the first album without their other vocalist (they used to have two), the lanky short-haired guy who did the more growly hardcore/death metal vox. He retired or something, so now it's all ragged high-end, long-haired singer Pipes' show, although one of the guitarists does chip in with some more guttural backing vocals now and then.
Fuckin' awesome. And yes, our gratuitous use of such fuckin' language is perfectly suited to this album and band!
Oooh. Breathtaking stuff here for those who like their music to have a hazy, vague, mysterious aura, and to combine delicate indie-rock "pop" elements (moody vocals, slow-motion melody) with more experimental, fragmented structures and textures... It's the work of a four-piece outfit from Italy, who immerse their murky, mostly instrumental post-rock electro-acoustic playing in droney field recordings, blurring the boundaries, with tree frogs or crickets, and what sounds like hissing, escaping gasses, and other noises that require some imagination to describe playing an important role alongside more obvious instruments like guitars and drums and turntables. There's a definite Jewelled Antler feel, that sort of organic, wandering-in-the-woods, letting-our-ears-find-the-way songmaking process, but with more palpable tension, bringing in a bit of the percussive skitteriness of fellow Italians and Hapna labelmates Sinistri/Starfuckers. We can compare this with lots of other things we love: Radian meets Richard Youngs? Kemialliset Ysatvat teamed up with Tape? Blithe Sons, Larsen, Sigur Ros, Village Of Savoogna, Dean Roberts... we're reminded in ways of all of 'em.
A truly gorgeous album that has the potential to appeal to a lot of different tastes, finding the wonderfully, naturally imperfect intersection of song and improv and field recording drone. This being their second release (first for Hapna, who've released this in the Swedish label's usual nice slim-sleeve packaging), we're going to have to track down their previous one... just as soon as A Year Of The Aural Gauge Operation's sheer dreaminess lets go its hold on our thoughts.
With this, their fourth album, these previous AQ Record Of The Week honorees, the oddly named Italian group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, have again given us a precious glimpse into their sonic dreamworld, and we say YAY to that. Kinda wish we could stay there forever, this music has such an engaging embrace, part abstract soundscape, part gentle melodiousness, part drone, part indie-pop, definitely not too far removed from some Jewelled Antler output, with a little This Heat or Village Of Savoonga mixed in. Our idea of blissful "oblivion" indeed, these mysterious and experimental lullabies of hum, hiss, buzz.
Various instruments, field recordings, electronics, turntables, percussion, the human voice, all are utilized to create the four tracks on this tightly crafted 39 minute disc. The very first piece, the longest at 17 minutes, introduces all the ingredients... gentle vinyl crackles, looping along with shimmering swells of strings and synth. Occasional hits of a snare. Hints of piano melody, amidst equally restrained electronic glitch. Environmental noises, tape manipulations. Bringing this somehow into an avant pop orbit, there's layers of vague vocals, or even simply sometimes just the breathy suggestion of vocals, that in this sonic setting recall to us Richard Youngs and Robert Wyatt, with their ghostly fragility.
Definitely a wonderful reminder of why we've always loved this band so much, highly recommended!
Quickly following up their fine The Curse Of The Longest Day ep with this excellent new full-length, Portland, Oregon's 31 Knots are satisfying all our abundant cravings for pop-smart, sonically rich indie rock gone prog. Prog as in Yes, to whom these guys have often been compared. And that's a good thing (if you aren't sure that's the case, you really should check out Fragile or Close To The Edge, to mention just two of the great Yes albums of the early '70s). As with such ye olde prog, the 31 Knots guys are top knotch instrumentalists... and no slouches at singing and writing songs either. Their Yessisms are more like hints of Yes (both their complexity and melodicism) informing and subverting songs that a less ambitious band might have crafted into more typical examples of the current "new wave" of white belted indie dance rock. And along with the pull of prog, this material is also shaped by the push of (arty) punk rock aggression as well. Fugazi, Yes, and I dunno, Elvis Costello might make strange bedfellows but 31 Knots make it seem like such a pajama party would be a good idea. Talk Like Blood's ten tracks bombastically blend heartfelt vocals, rubbery basslines, precise drumming, classical piano, electronic glitchscapes and lots more besides, always making moody and powerful and undeniably poppy music.
Polyvinyl offers up a 21 minute ep from new signings 31 Knots of Portland, OR. We were already fans of these guys after getting hip to them via their second album It Was High Time To Escape a couple of years ago. They haven't messed much with their prog-infused, hooky indie-pop formula with these new songs (thankfully!). Marked by the strong, emotive, confident voice of guitarist Joe Haege (not to mention his accomplished guitar playing and effective deployment on piano as well) and the powerful, precise rhythm section of Jay Pellicci on drums and Jay Winebrenner on bass, these four songs (and one shorter instrumental interlude of sampled strings/electronic loops/glitchy noises) are big and bold when they need to be, complex and textured too. Melody lines swoop about within song structures that are well fitted with stops and starts and sudden dynamic changes, that should appeal to fans of everybody from OK Computer era Radiohead to Deerhoof (whose Greg Saunier helped mix and master this ep) to Blonde Redhead to Shudder To Think to The Mars Volta -- though the well-written, compelling compositions of 31 Knots are, for our money, a better application of prog to indie rock than the sometimes overcooked brand practised by the latter. Our only complaint here is that it's just an ep! But there's a new full-length on the horizon, so that's cool.
Portland's 31 Knots are one of those bands that just keeps plugging away, making amazing albums, to the great pleasure of their loyal fans of course, but we wonder why they don't in the course of things also, you know, get BIG. More fans, more pleasure. They should, or would, be huge if rock n' roll was a meritocracy (which it obviously isn't). This is their sixth full-length release, since their debut about a decade ago, and once again it's a enjoyable example of their trademark "Fugazi-meet-Yes", indie rock gone no wave prog sound. Hmm, maybe that explains why they aren't BIG... that's too weird of a formula. But then again, Radiohead, Muse, Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, they're popular, so folks who like the likes of them, should check out 31 Knots for something maybe knottier (though in no way naughtier, they're not that sort of band). Out of the 31 Knots discography, Trump Harm is as good as any (though maybe the cover art isn't), it's assuredly poppy, yet complex and bombastic, offering up ten new tracks that satisfy all our 31 Knots expectations, of earworminess and angularity, mathiness and melody, electricity and emotion. It's thinking (and feeling) man's pop music, that kicks ass too, with arty post-punkish power and precision. If just one person reading this review who has never heard 31 Knot before, decides to check 'em out and becomes a fan, we'll be happy. 100 people, that'd be even better!
Gosh. We're just constantly amazed at the wealth of obscure psych/prog "buried treasure" from all over the world that's continually being unearthed by all the industrious reissue labels out there. Lion Productions in particular has a darn good track record, we'd say (they blew us away earlier this year with the Classical M disc, amongst other cool reissues). Here's a great example, as out of the blue they present us the lone album by a Greek band called The 4 Levels Of Existence, originally released as a (now very rare and expensive) private press LP in 1976. And while a few of our far-gone record collector geek friends knew about this already, we sure hadn't ever heard of it before, but we're glad to get introduced to it now! It's a real folk-flavored fuzz monster, full of wailing guitar leads, melancholic lyrics (sung in their native Greek), majestic melodies, acoustic interludes, and did we say FUZZ? With all the fuzz this is fairly hard and heavy, but in a '60s garage band sorta way (despite being from the mid-'70s, this sounds earlier). Pretty much exactly what you'd hope a bunch of young, basement dwelling longhairs from an Athens suburb would create if they spent all their time jamming, studying philosophy, and drinking ouzo, as we can pretty much assume was the case here. Prog-laced and imbued with traditional folk melody, in a lot of ways this has got a similar vibe to the many awesome '60s and '70s Turkish psych bands we dig, even though Turkey and Greece have been far from friendly neighbors historically.
This legendary record (as we now know it to be) certainly is one of the coolest things we've heard from Greece from back when, alongside Socrates Drank The Conium and Aphrodite's Child. And as we've come to expect from Lion, this reish is no shoddy package. It comes with a thick booklet of liner notes (scribed by 4 Levels' rhythm/acoustic guitarist Athanasios Alatas), lyrics (in both Greek and translated into English too), and photos. Recommended.
Detroit's 500 Ft. Of Pipe are another new band of hard-rockin' hopefuls in the crowded stoner rock arena, and they are better than most. What with their Motor City pedigree, they align more with Stooges-fans Monster Magnet than with Kyuss (Kyuss being the most
The cover photo on this digipack release shows placid waters, probably some sheltered harbor near Boston, from whence this guitar-drums two-piece hail. The photo on the interior gatefold also depicts relatively calm seas. But the sonic waves that 5ive stir up are something else, bigger and meaner! 5ive's relentless and riff-repetitive, mostly-instrumental music is HEAVY all right. And thus, floats our boat, even as it tosses said boat about upon its stormy waves.
We've been waiting for some new 5ive for quite some time. This is their first full-length of new material in forever. 2006's Versus ep, featuring a couple remixes by Justin Broadrick (Jesu), only left us hankering for more... so we're glad to report that this new 5ive is finally here and it's got what we want. Thick n' distorted stoner rock meets post rock jams, full of loud soft dynamics for maximum sludgecore beauty and power. Tracks like "Heel" and "Big Sea" have plenty of rollicking psychedelic swing to 'em, after the pretty parts that set you up for the heavier hitting... and while the likes of "News II" gets up into the 12 minute range, even the shorter tunes here manage some epic, hypnotic heft. Fans of 5ive won't be disappointed, and if you haven't heard 'em before check this out if stuff like Pelican, Kinski, godheadSILO, Isis, Old Man Gloom, etc. is on your personal playlist.
Previously the Die Schachtel label has brought us several very cool reissues of some very obscure '70s art/prog/avant music from Italy -- such as Luciano Cilio, Prima Materia and Insiememusicadiversa. Weird and wonderful stuff. Now, they've got a brand new band for us, not a reissue (though it totally seems to fit in with their "thing"). It's apparently the first in a new series called Zeit devoted to the current-day Italian underground, and comes from a trio calling themselves A (actually, an A with what looks a little circular diacritical mark above it, which we can't reproduce on our website easily. Maybe we should write Aa, that might be the correct way to do it. Furthermore, Wikipedia tells us that in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish it's a word meaning rivulet or stream.). They've got a lot in common with fellow Italians (and AQ faves) Larsen, 3/4hadbeeneliminated, and Sinistri/Starfuckers, playing a sort of mysterious, mostly instrumental, deconstructed, experimental post-rock music. No wonder in iTunes it comes up as genre = "unclassifiable". They're definitely carrying on the tradition established by those '70s artists Die Schachtel has documented.
The percussive beat-booming and crackling drone of the disc's longest track, the sixteen minute "Something A Long Time Ago. And There Are No Buttons Either, Because" brings to mind This Heat. There and elsewhere Aa also conjure suggestions of Village Of Savoonga, Richard Youngs, Dean Roberts, and even Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, among other good things. Additionally, we'll mention that this was mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, which isn't a bad reference point either if you've heard his music. We just can't resist this sort of semi-abstract, organic post-rock, with its rainy day piano, meandering guitar, tinkling clock-ticking textures, dreamy violin sawing, wordless (?) floaty vocals, glitchy electronics, and birdlike horn warble... all woven together gorgeously and with a sense of the dramatic. Very very nice. As is the packaging too!
By the way, the wordy song titles are all sentence fragments taken from a paragraph belonging to Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time.
MPEG Stream: "My Memory Is Like A Film. That Is Why" [/audio/aamemory.m3u]
MPEG Stream: "I Am Really Good At Remembering Things, Like The Conversation I Have Written Down In This Book, And What People Are Wearing, And What They Smelled Like, Because My Memory Has" [/audio/aaremembering.m3u]
We ran out of the special Record Store Day limited tote bag version of the AMF reissues, but we just got the last remaining copies of the vinyl reissues (sans tote bag) direct from the band. Both lps are again sadly out of print. But while they last, we have a handful of the nice priced 4lp set which includes both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence... Here's our review of both when we listed this back around Record Store Day...
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule (now sadly out of print), and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork!!
In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (!), our very own Andee was asked about what Record Store Day Releases we were most excited about. He mentioned a bunch, but the two they actually included in the magazine, were the utterly hilarious music nerd classic Rock, Rot And Rule, which you'll find reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and these two vinyl reissues, from recently reunited / reactivated nineties post/math/noise rock combo A Minor Forest, which as many of you know, is in fact Andee's band! He was kind of joking, and a bit embarrassed when THAT was one of the ones they picked to print, but really, we WERE pretty excited. These two records have been out of print on vinyl for a decade, and have been remastered, now come with digital downloads, and one has all new artwork! But instead of making Andee further toot his own horn, we figured we'd try to be more objective, and let some other folks weigh in. A couple reviews from the past, and a couple from the present. So when we first reviewed these back in the day, for AMF's debut, Flemish Altruism, we asked beloved aQ-pal Douglas Mosurak to say a few words about that record, here's that original review from years and years ago:
"October 22, 1996: Bay Area rock trio A Minor Forest stop indie rock dead. Their new double LP on Thrill Jockey is so incredible, and subsequently so complete, that no other records of its kind need to be produced anymore. Lesser bands of their stripe are currently being petitioned to break up immediately to save embarrassment. And while some people will miss, like, June of 44 or the Archers of Loaf for a little while, with the proper exposure to Flemish Altruism, they'll forget all about it. AMF manage to piece together everything good about every post-Big Black and every post-Heroin outfit into a seamless, epic sound; fairly dense, deeply emotional and thoroughly human. They have the sense of humor required to lift it off, too. Some of their songs prefer to hide in the corner; some lunge for your throat. Their style is such that their original ideas fill in with ones borrowed from their rich lineage in such a manner that pays tribute without disrespect. It's a thoroughly engaging sound that I'd rank up there with the Bitch Magnet discography, with the Bastro LPs, with the Gore records, with the cream of the Gravity crop, even with the Shellac album. Best rock record of 1996, and currently outweighing all proposed rock concepts until the close of the millennium. Buy two. Wow."
Then, the follow up Inindependence was reviewed thusly by us upon its original release (when aQ reviews were still concise and impossibly brief):
"Simply put, this may be the last bastion of rock on Thrill Jockey, before they devolve into a purely electronic/jazz label. Sure we may be boasting a little, because A Minor Forest is our very own Andee Connors' band. But this truly is a great record of delicate math rock instrumentations executed with violent precision!"
So here were are 15+ years later, and both records, now reissued and available as a swank 4lp / tote bag set, in honor of the just passed 2014 iteration of Record Store Day, are ripe for reassessment, a new listen to some old sounds, with fresh ears, a bit of distance, and years of subsequent music making in their wake. So, here's what the illustrious Pitchfork site had to say this week about both AMF records:
According to legend, the A Minor Forest song "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck" - a high point of the post-rock group's 1996 debut album, Flemish Altruism - was swiped from an inside joke that had circulated for years among the punk kids of Rapid City, South Dakota. A Minor Forest wasn't from Rapid City; they hailed from far-off San Francisco. But the band toured extensively throughout the country during its 90s-spanning existence, playing many of the same DIY venues that hosted the burgeoning post-hardcore and emo bands of that decade. If there's one thing that brings people together, it's cruel humor - and A Minor Forest, brooding and abrasive as well as downright delicate, knew a good joke when they heard it.
Flemish Altruism was reissued on vinyl for this year's Record Store Day, alongside A Minor Forest's other studio album, 1998's Inindependence. The rollout has been humble one, and it can't help but be compared to Slint's deservedly lavish Spiderland box set this month. Slint blazed trails with its dour, eerie ominousness; A Minor Forest, on the other hand, neither innovated nor intimidated. That doesn't make Flemish Altruism any less tense. The shadow of Slint - as well of Slint's slower, icier cousin, Codeine - loom large over A Minor Forest's distended syllables and dangling chords. The group had been honing that sound on singles and EPs since 1994, but Flemish Altruism tracks like "...But the Pants Stay On" and "Jacking Off George Lucas" groped for a new vocabulary out of the fragments laying around after post-rock's early-'90s Big Bang. What resulted was pidgin Slint-but in that process of restructuring, A Minor Forest came damn close to inventing post-post-rock, where the subgenre's self-seriousness was wrestled with until it laughed, gasped, and collapsed.
Steve Albini and Bob Weston produced Flemish Altruism, and the nerve-tightening cello they'd previously captured on Nirvana's In Utero feels almost deliberately evoked on the album's most arresting song, "Perform the Critical Straw Transfer". Singer/guitarist Erik Hoversten opens it with a deadpan punch line: "Guess you really lucked out�" he begins, his numb voice trailing off as bassist John Trevor Benson screams bestially yet faintly in the background, "�on this one." Sarcasm never sounded so black. Beneath them, cellist Dominique Davison saws with quiet strength, as if mocking and apologizing at the same time. The screaming gets pushed to the fore on thoroughly non-dainty "Dainty Jack and His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket", an erratic spasm of dissonance that shows an affinity for San Diego screamo (A Minor Forest had previously recorded with Matt Anderson of Heroin), only broken up here and there with squibs of pinpoint jazziness. The balance is struck almost perfectly on "Bill's Mom Likes to Fuck", a 10-minute noise-cycle of mood swings, red herrings, and curdled blood.
The wiseass, scattershot racket of Flemish Altruism settles into a more predictable groove onInindependence. Concise and controlled by comparison, A Minor Forest's second and final album (not including their 1999 singles-and-EPs collection, ...So, Were They in Some Sort of Fight?) drags more algebra into the rhythm and more calculation into the off-kilter melody. It wouldn't be fair to say the band had begun to take itself either more or less seriously - but the music is more serious, and even the song titles are less crass. If "Erik's Budding Romance" is to be taken at face value, that relationship flip-flopped randomly and often between coy, candlelit dinners and table-flipping eruptions of lust. Drummer Andee Connors, an unsung hero of his instrument and era, is in top form, coaxing every shade of texture, dynamic, and emotion out of the kit. There are honest, unabashed hooks on the deliciously brief (that is, under four minutes) centerpiece, "�It's Salmon!!!", as well as in "Michael Anthony", which skips a sweet melody across a minefield of disjointed changes and chords. At the same time, the album's 18-minute monster "The Smell of Hot" never fully jells; as A Minor Forest's recording career drew to a halt, patience-testing jams occupied one extreme of their spectrum, while a hint of pleasing pop teased at the other.
A Minor Forest's legacy is not a towering one. Most notably, Hoversten went on to play with Pinback, where he was able to indulge his love of angular melody much more avidly. The band never seemed to want to make bold statements, and it always punctured whatever atmosphere it crafted with wiry self-deprecation and perverse wit. When A Minor Forest reunited in 2013 after a 15-year hiatus, Hoversten said in a radio interview, "[This reunion is] sort of like, take an outfit you wore 15 years ago, then put it on today. Clearly you liked it at one point, but it's not exactly the outfit you would have chosen today. That being said, it's not like I'm being asked to put on a clown suit." Despite their crank titles and in-jokes, A Minor Forest was never a funny band. But they had fun, and that fun seeped into their music. And that makes Flemish Altruism and Inindependence two of the most endlessly rewarding albums of the 90s post-rock boom, if never the most monolithic.
And finally, here's a review of both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence from the always awesome Pop Matters:
The bare truth behind two classic albums from the 1990s.
I remember it clearly: the road was a hazy sequence of distant glares kept together by a dense, hazy lull immersed in the purest of mists. My friend, the proud owner of the CD, was holding the music artifact with one hand, while the other occasionally found its way up and down the wheel, now on this side; now on the other. I never knew how both hands also managed to offer such an accurate interpretation of the drumming, but his abilities ceased to amaze me when my side of the car hit a guardrail that seemed to have popped out from nowhere. My friend carefully placed the CD case in the glove compartment and met me outside the vehicle, where we assessed the damage. "That drumming! Oh boy, that drumming!", was all he had to say.
Not much has happened in the 16 years that followed that day. My friend got married, paid his way to a divorce and when we meet, I drive, so he can be Andee Connors and I can take good care of our lives. In the real world, the influence of a band like A Minor Forest - a scruffy bunch of lads from San Francisco - still echoes on both sides of the Atlantic. Inheritors of the legacy initiated by bands like Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol and Shellac, A Minor Forest's name appears, rightly or wrongly, almost invariably as part of the American post-rock scene, as if their own legacy could not be singled out and stand on its own two feet. But while most people blame them, together with a whole bunch of Midwestern acts loosely located in the "Corn Belt", for the explosion of the math-rock plague, the impact this short-lived ensemble has had on indie rock is probably still far from being recognised.
Their two classic albums, Flemish Altruism and Inindependence, reissued on vinyl by Thrill Jockey for Record Store Day on 19 April, are both presented with an array of previously unpublished pictures in a special four-LP set that includes download cards. However, what matters the most is that these albums, which have been out of print for a decade, have been remastered from the original tapes. The sensuality of the naked, raw sound that was the core of that scene (and I hereby use this term in the artistic, rather than in the geographic sense) is therefore faithfully represented in all its purity and ingenuity. "The Dutch Fist", "So Jesus Was At the Last Supper" and "...But the Pants Stay On" are some of the finest representations imaginable of noise as the most spontaneous by-product of the deconstruction of rock grammar. This primary necessity regulated by tradition - Erik Hoversten (guitars and vocals) and John Trevor Benson (bass) had both studied music at Berkeley - found its champions in Steve Albini (who else?) and Bob Weston (he too of Shellac fame), whose uncompromised affection for stripped-down sounds and total lack of artificiality constituted the perfect match for the band.
Flemish Altruism is the result of this formula, and tunes like "Jacking Off George Lucas" or "Ed Is 50" betray an improvisational approach which heavily relies on the dichotomy between the extreme unpredictability of noise and the discipline usually behind melodic patterns. The almost mandatory (at least back then) tour of most of the US would lead, two years later, to the recording of Inindependence: an album that followed the path traced by its predecessor, perpetuating the angularity and eclecticism that would make A Minor Forest easily recognizable years after their dissolution.
Flemish Altruism and Inindependence are the band's only full-lengths and it could not be otherwise. Although a collection of much of their out of print material, plus a couple of new tracks made it onto the Were They in Some Sort of Fight? CD on My Pal God Records in 1999, these two albums vouch for an incredibly inspired band which disbanded once they realized that the traditional rock instrumentation was starting to restrict their enormous potential and creativity. Does this awareness affect these two records? Not at all. A Minor Forest didn't live long enough to see their craft surpass their inspiration, and for this reason their legacy is definitely safer now than it was 20 years ago!
As mentioned above, both Flemish Altruism and Inindependence have been remastered, both include digital downloads, and are housed in swank full color gatefold jackets, Flemish Altruism has all new artwork, and while they last, available ONLY at aQ (or from the band on their upcoming tour, which begins a few days after this week's list!), both records are bundled together (4lps!), for a special low price, and housed in a silkscreened tote bag, with a killer new AMF logo by none other than Christoph Szpadjel, the Lord Of The Logos!
Black metal bands often usually make a big deal about worshipping Satan, of course, but c'mon, at this point, while we still really enjoy the music, we're kind of over the ooooh, Satan part of it all. But, some bands can still make the Satan stuff seem interesting and seriously potent, like maybe this band really DOES believe in Satan and maybe that's actually kind of scary. Such is the case with Canadian two-man horde A.M.S.G. (not a food additive, the acronym stands for the Latin phrase Ad Majorem Satanae Gloriam, you can probably figure out what that means), featuring members of Rites Of The Degringolade and Gloria Diaboli. A.M.S.G.'s debut full-length for Profound Lore conjures an incredibly convincing and intriguingly original Satanic atmosphere, being in the grand Nordic church-burning black metal tradition (including one of the members having done a stint in jail for selling drugs and guns to finance his band activities) with plenty of cold freezing riff-blurr and rasping croaking vox that remind us of Inquisition, but also bringing in truly extreme blacknoize distortion (the opening moments of the album crackling like Merzbow's electronics) and also, the big surprise, saxophone! Not all the time - but on a couple tracks, probably our favorites here, you'll hear mopey, smokey, noirish sax improv emerge amidst the miasmatic skitter and plod and fuzz, resulting in gorgeously dark and moody but melodic creepy-crawl vibes and making A.M.S.G. the sort of black metal that fans of Bohren & Der Club Of Gore (that band themselves hugely into black metal) ought to check out.
And as strange as the Satanic Sax ritual is, that "jazz" element isn't the only surprise here, 'cuz A.M.S.G. worship Satan as much through sound as through song, so while they do standard black metal minor key blasting (and string together some effective hit-you-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach-from-the-pits-of-hell riff sequences), it's often the sheer sounds, and some strange juxtapositions thereof, they conjure with that really gets to us - the way they mix in not just the sax but all sorts of sound FX, noise, varied percussive patterns, mysterious sinister samples, and extreme vokill approaches. It makes for a disturbing headphone listen with the whispered / chanted vocal incantations - if you read the lyrics, its clear that each song is intended as some occult ritual, torn from the pages of the Necronomicon or some other forbidden tome. Their songs will take whatever twists and turns (well, left hand ones only, presumably) that lead to the greater glory of Satan. We might not worship Satan ourselves, but we'll consider worshiping A.M.S.G., at least for the duration of the disc's run time. Unique and compelling.
Comes in slipcased jewel case packaging.
The basic "band math" of this new project on Editions Mego is also, unsurprisingly, kind of what it sounds like, Aanipaa consisting of 1/2 of arty American doomdrone outfit SUNNO))), teamed up with 1/2 of Finnish electronic experimentalists Pan Sonic! Specifically, it's a collaboration between the ubiquitous Stephen O'Malley and Mika Vainio, with help from some friends, recorded in Berlin (at Einsturzende Neubauten's studio) and mixed in Seattle by Randall Dunn. Talk about a "stupor" group. Ambient and ominous, Aanipaa on their debut Through A Pre-Memory conjure a desolate sprawl of slo-mo glitchery and drone, with sparse distorted strum interspersed over the skeletal rhythm of disembodied machine beats. A string section, which features Eyvind Kang on viola, brings in additional otherworldly textures, upping the drone-dirge density. There's also unsettling vocal samples, and tape manipulations. Speaking of unsettling, if this wasn't already scary sounding enough, O'Malley's former Khanate bandmate Alan Dubin (ex-OLD as well, and also of Gnaw, who have a new disc out we'll be reviewing soon) occasionally provides some of his unique, anguished vocal stylings, "singing" the words of Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova on the first and last of the four loooooong tracks here - the album clocks in at over 75 minutes. Imagine a glitch-ridden remix of a Khanate track, stretched out so that it's even slower and sparser, more encompassing of the void... but also stretched out so far that some welcome light shines through. For despite the mood of morose menace - and downright terror - channelled through some of these tracks, this album can be quite beautiful as well, grindingly glorious, especially when those strings come into play. Not that we would expect anything less than impressive, and intense, from these talents.
Part modern avant classical, part minimal (very minimal) techno, part multi-o'd industrial dooooooooooooom, Aanipaa is utterly abject, electronically abstract, possibly alienating. And most excellent.
Comes in a lovely three-panel digipack cd or gatefold double lp package.
Electronic. Muysic. Finland. When we see those three words, which appear in small type on the top right corner of the cover to this album, we get pretty excited. Even when Music is spelled Muysic. ESPECIALLY when it's spelled like that. 'Cause that's means it's an Aavikko album. The mostly instrumental Finnish synthesizer/synthesizer/drums trio's new disc, Novo Atlantis, is finally here! Now, each album of theirs has always been a little bit different, but we've always loved Aavikko, from their early "maniacal monkey jazz" days as a lo-fi Casiocore band circa 1997's Derek to their more recent and polished productions of space age bachelor pad exotica like 2005's Back From The Futer.
So what's in store for listeners on Novo Atlantis? Initially we were struck by this album's even MORE electronic sound, taking Aavikko into techno-disco territory, more computery, less live band sounding. Though human metronome Tomi Leppanen (also the drummer for AQ faves Circle) is still behind the drum kit, there's plenty of purely electronic beats and rhythms on here it seems. Yet at the same time, this album also features French horn, trombone, trumpet, tuba, and even church pipe organ!! So while on one had it's all very futuristic (in a spaced out cosmic disco way), this also takes inspiration from way way back, the pre-electronic, classical music era in fact. You could call Novo Atlantis the "switched-on Bach" version of Aavikko, or more precisely, "switched-on Hoppel", Egil Hoppel allegedly being an obscure Finnish composer of the baroque period, discussed in the sleeve notes of Novo Atlantis. Supposedly he was some sort of child prodigy (he only lived 1722-1737!), an organist whose music has apparently become a major influence on Aavikko's new direction. We say allegedly and supposedly since we halfway suspect they made him him up, that he's a hoax much like those "funerary violin" fellows. Probably some quick Googling would resolve the question, but we prefer not to know for sure. If Aavikko invented him, they certainly were thorough about it - there are two purported Hoppel compositions included on the cd format as a hidden bonus track (we won't tell you how to find it, but check out our review of the most recent Agoraphobic Nosebleed disc for a clue!). And having heard those, it does seem like you can hear Hoppel's purported influence right in this disc's very first track, "Syntaksis", which definitely has an Aavikko goes classical feel, like a lot of the stuff here having shades of the "classically trained" approach of all those Moog-laden '70s prog keyboard bands a la ELP and krautrockers Novalis... But don't let that make you think this is somehow stuffy, over-serious or highbrow or whatever, nope not at all, far from it as any Aavikko fan would guess. While it's got its moody moments, most of Novo Atlantis is percolating, infectious electronic fun. Super groovy, quirky, krauty - in the Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder sense of krauty.
The album ends with what must be Aavikko's longest track ever, the 15 minutes of "Novo Atlantis II". Wow, quite an epic, with echoes of Joe Meek's "Telstar" in its melodies, and long mesmeric burbling sequencer trance-outs, something like early '80s Tangerine Dream, Wolfgang Duren, or Zombi's "Sapphire". A Lindstrom remix seems to be in order, where is it? Certainly Aavikko's new album fits nicely into the current disco craze. It also goes well with our obsession with skweee, too. Electronic muysic Finland, hooray!
Time-tested, probably not mother-approved: veterans Abigor are the definition of true cult black metal. Hailing from Austria, one of the few non-Scandinavian European countries to really boast an "infamous" black metal scene, Abigor have now released umpteen
Ah Abruptum, how we've missed you. Nary a peep since 2004's killer black ambient masterpiece Casus Luciferi, which while an amazing gorgeously bleak slab of droning mystery, really barely scratched the surface, only hinting at the harsh, hateful, bizarre black metal beast Abruptum once was.
That's where Evil Genius comes in. And evil Genius is exactly what it is. A collection of old demos, it was originally released with an actual razor blade inside and a sticker instructing the listener to kill themselves. There were also loads of strange rumors surrounding the band, including the one about mainman It being a dwarf, who tortured himself in the studio, in order to capture true anguish. After all, Abruptum were, according to their own edict, "the pure audial essence of evil"... Who knows how much of that stuff was true (we like to think ALL of it), and ultimately it doesn't really matter, the proof is in the pudding, and in this case the pudding is a sludgy, filthy, crusty, primitive chunk of harsh, stumbling, lurching, distorted psychedelic black metal. Or maybe black doom would be more appropriate. There are no blast beats or blazing buzzing riffs, instead, Evil Genius is a confusional garbled outsider mess, but a glorious one, keyboards lurch in and out of the mix, usually atonal and off kilter, the drums plod and pound, tortured and strangled vocals howl and grunt, belching out strange black growls, tons of thick black ambience surround everything, seeping into every bit of music like some strange black mold, weird squeaks and groans, and all sorts of random sounds pepper the entire record, hard to say if they are footsteps or the cracks of a whip or creaking hinges, but they all sort of get sucked into Abruptum's dizzying blurry and buzzy soundworld. And guitars of course, lots of them, tuned way down, sometimes not tuned at all, occasionally spewing out some strange black shaped riff, but other times just buzzing or droning, roaring or squealing, often sounding less like a guitar than some sort of hellish demon speaking in tongues.
But as fucked up and bizarre as Evil Genius is, it's still eminently listenable, even catchy at times, almost pretty at others, but always, a totally baffling, fucked up and completely damaged way out black metal what-the-fuck blast of, well, EVIL GENIUS!!
All new artwork, with brand new liner notes from It, and while it's hard to tell for sure, we're led to believe that there is at least one extra track, as EG compiles the first two Abruptum demos ("s/t" and "The Satanist Tunes") as well as the "Evil" 7" and their track from the long out of print Tribute To Euronymous compilation cd (which we think is the bonus track).
So absolutely and utterly RECOMMENDED!!
"The Gold Torques Of Ulaid", "Immortal Sorcery", "The Great Battle Moving From Ideal To Actual"? Are these chapters from a sanity-blasting tome of arcane magicks? Or lectures on mythic history or philosophy? Well, perhaps. But they're also song titles from this decade-spanning double cd collection of Absu tracks. Absu being one of our all time favorite black metal bands... if that's even an accurate description for them, 'cause there's a depth to what they do that seems like so much more than playing corpse-painted dress-up like so many black metal bands get away with. Absu, on the other hand, have definitely done their research. This Texan trio combines the evil old school speed/thrash attack of Slayer with Norwegian-style black metal mystery, adding a immense dose of magickal and mythical erudition and then taking things to a whole 'nother, never-breaking-character, Manowar-esque, Olde English speaking, are they serious or not?? level... They're a whole mindboggling package, a display of "total attention to detail" showmanship (or is it belief?) that utterly wows us, along with their raging musickal assault.
It should be noted that this new double cd is not a "best of". If it was, we'd say that even if you've never heard Absu before, you should check it out, 'cause they're one of the best "extreme" metal bands out there (and we mean "out there") and a "best of" would, therefore, be exceedingly good. Actually we'll say that anyway. But this is really a release for folks who are already fans of the band, 'cause it's a collection of rare tracks taken from various compilations and 7" eps. It also includes some live and otherwise previously unreleased material. So even if you have every Absu album, you don't have some of this. And you need it.
Disc one contains all the tracks from three hard-to-find (we don't have 'em!) 7" vinyl records -- Temples Of Offal, And Shineth Unto The Cold Cometh, and Hallstattian Swords -- plus their song from the the Gummo movie soundtrack, and more. It's all great stuff, from the solo soundtracky synth-scapes of the Hallstattian Swords tracks to the killer Mercyful Fateness of the alternate take of "Stone Of Destiny" from their most recent album, Tara.
Disc two is devoted to covers, live, and unreleased material. You get to hear Absuized versions of tracks by Mayhem (and krautrock's Conrad Schnitzler, since Absu's cover of "Deathcrush" includes the Schnitzler intro that Mayhem sampled on the original!), Possessed, Iron Maiden, and Destruction, most of which originally appeared on tribute comps to those respective artists. There's also four live cuts (worth it for the song intros alone!) and a couple unreleased rehearsal tracks. Again, all stuff any Absu fan can't live without. Just try, you'll die (someday, anyway). And you won't die as happy as you would if you'd had this.
"Exhibit V" in the Absu discography of blackened occultic Texan thrash supremacy! This disc was a long time coming and well worth the wait. The trio of Sir Proscriptor McGovern (drums, vocals), Shaftiel (guitars), and Equitant Ifernain (bass) again assault
Getting a new album from Absu is like being handed a bunch of scrolls from ancient Sumer bearing esoteric magickal wisdom - at a raging kegger hosted by some Slayer-blasting heshers! And since this is the thrashing Texas "mythological occult metal" band's first album in about eight years, AND they're one of the acts we arranged to play the Aquarius/WMFU showcase gig at the South By Southwest music fest in Austin this year (their first show in seven years!!!), you KNOW we're really excited about this self-titled album's nearly concurrent manifestation. Of course, we were equally (and foolishly, it turns out) worried that this long-overdue new Absu would somehow be a disappointment, seeing as how Shaftiel and Equitant have left the band, leaving remaining founding member drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern (also of Melechesh, Equimanthorn, and his solo project Proscriptor) to assemble a completely new lineup, finding fresh blood to dust off the band's old spellbooks for this new conjuration. Of course it's a bit different than before - a tad slower maybe (though still freakin' frenzied!), adorned with more atmospheric keyboards (synths and prog fave Mellotron!). But compared to anything else, it's still ABSU. Insane and arcane. The two new members are up to their awesome responsibilities, ripping fiercely through these complex but headbanging songs, leaving shredding solos in their wake. And of course, Proscriptor is still one of extreme metal's most incredible, exacting, accomplished drummers. Not to mention black metal/magickal conceptualists. So there's still weird occultic song titles to make Bal-Sagoth weep. Gotta love "In the Name of Auebothiabathabaithobeuee"!!! The eccentrick, eldritch spirit (part Celtic, part Mesopotamian) of Absu lives. Paying tribute, a bunch of guests make cameo contributions, including members of Melechesh and Mayhem, as well as former Absu bassist Equitant (giving this his stamp of approval). So call it a comeback.
2001's Tara may still be our favorite Absu album, but this sure is a worthy follow up. Hail Absu! We can't wait to see 'em. It's gonna kill!!
(FYI we should have copies of this on vinyl too next week!)
**SALE **SALE* *SALE**
Everybody knows 'Balls To The Wall', Accept's early 80's hit that almost made the 'You Shook Me All Night Long' leap from Headbangers Ball to FM radio, but their 1982 release 'Restless and Wild' (reissued here, digitally remastered and in a spiffy digipack) is the only truly essential Accept record. And essential it is. Equal parts catchy eighties hard rock and proto-thrash-metal and featuring the unique balls-in-a-vice/tracheotomy vocals of sort-of-dwarf Udo Dirkschneider, 'Restless and Wild' is easily one of my favorite metal records of the eighties, and it holds up surprisingly well, almost 20 years later.
Not sure what we think about their name, could go either way on it. But sweet Acid Baby Jesus, the MUSIC of this modern-day garage psych combo from Athens, Greece we're totally sold on, for sure. With lots of Hammond organ, fuzz guitar, and distorted, sometimes chant-like vocals, plus a mix of other instruments old and new (synths, gong, tampura...), this Greek groop kicks out the jams with both the "heavy" and "jangle" meters nicely cranked up and throbbing. It's the sort of headnoddingly catchy, ceremonial-sounding, droned-out psych stomp that can trace its DNA back through "We Will Fall" by The Stooges, and maybe further even to ancient times, sounds like. Woozy, druggy, grooving stuff that reminds us of everything from Spacemen 3 to Lungfish to the Psychic Ills to The Fall to Wooden Shjips to King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard to the Sun City Girls... so yeah, recommended! Their Canadian pals Demon's Claws would also be a good reference point.
And if their own songs weren't cool enough, they also do a killer cover here of Afro-fuzz monster "Troublemaker" by Zambian '70s rockers Chrissy Zebby Tembo & The Ngozi Family, and if that means anything to you, it means Acid Baby Jesus probably are a band you'll really dig!
Man, does this record rule! Not entirely sure how we all managed to miss this one when it came out a few years back. It was actually (re)discovered on the recommendation of a not-so-entirely-trustworthy source. Go figure! But now that we know, so must you...Imagine the sheer brutality of Eyehategod, the bluesy grind of fellow bayou residents Soilent Green, the stoned sabbathy swing of Trouble, and the melodic flair of late era Corrosion of Conformity or Alice In Chains, all forced onto one cd. Sound confusing? It is. But somehow, it gels perfectly, striking a pefect balance between catchy and heavy. This has become an absolute favorite of Andee, Allan, Elisabeth, and a handful of customers who have seen the light. Interesting non-music related facts: amazing cover art by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, one band member dead, one in jail...HIGHLY recommended!
When we think about it, we really should have made Acid Eater's debut, the awesomely titled Virulent Fuzz Punk A.C.I.D., a Record Of The Week, the most overdriven slab of in-the-red noise drenched hyperdistorted drug fueled punked out garage rock EVER. That is, until now.
So we can right that wrong, by bestowing the honor on record number two, the equally bad assedly (and aptly) titled Black Fuzz On Wheels, another amp destroying psychedelic garage punk blowout, fronted by none other than Yamazaki Maso, aka MASONNA, on vocals and sound effects, and ably backed up by a classic garage rock lineup, fuzz guitar, organ, bass keyboard, drums and chorus, okay, well, maybe not totally classic, but then this is not your classic garage rock. Imagine fuzzed out sixties garage rock, but with a fucked up freaked out Merzbow production, the guitars so distorted the riffs seem to be on the verge of totally falling to pieces, the drums, a blown out pound, the vocals, a sneering yowl, also doused in effects, all held in place by thick whirring Farfisa, everything rollicking and rocking, loose and wild, heavy and psychedelic, and all wrapped up in a bristly, incendiary sheen of white hot buzz and skree.
Thankfully these guys (and gal) have the fuzzed out garage pop songs to back up this sort of speaker shredding sonic onslaught, not to mention a little clutch of kick ass covers, songs by Crime, The Miracle Workers, and a band we'd never heard of before called The Tidal Wave, but whose composition here actually sounds like a sped up "TV Eye" by The Stooges! Weirdest of all, there's a cover of one of the tracks from those Schulmadchen Report soundtracks, y'know, music from saucy '60s German 'documentaries' about school girls making it with older men! Crazy, but it suits them, that cover is a cool surfy instrumental jam, with a bad ass main riff, and a cool breakdown with just drums and distorted hiss. The Miracle Workers cover is awesome too, maybe the noisiest of the bunch, and such a great song ("Love Has No Time"), the vocals especially effected, so snarly and snotty, as well as a tripped out psychedelic ambient effects drenched outro, all motorik pulses and swirling space age bleeps and bloops.
But if you didn't know, you'd probably just figure those covers were originals too, every song on here sounds like some classic sixties garage jam, dipped in a vat of liquid LSD, set afire and sent careening from your speakers. We can only imagine how mind blowing Acid Eater must be live.
Total psychnoise surfpunk distorto garage pop bliss. With super sexy naked lady motorcycle cover art to boot!!
This is the new album from Japan's Acid Mothers Temple, that AMT leader Kawabata Makoto contends is heavier than the average heavy AMT release, going so far as to say it's in the league of something like SUNNO))). Well, is it really?? Would he bet his beard on it? (We all ask, salivatin'.)
The answer: holy shit, yes. It's like indeed kinda like SUNNO))) jamming with Amon Duul, in a relentless riff orgy. That heavy. That droney. That creepy. That kosmic. A slow screaming blackened drone-groan vomiting forth from bad trippin' hippy minds, third eyes staring dull and glassy into the spinning vortex of the void. There's about ten minutes of pure bliss-out at the end of the disc, but before that, what you get is psychedelic guitar gunk out the wazoo. Riff after plodding riff, adorned with alien electronics. Dirge, splurge and more dirge. A roar to end all roars. A space-sludge feedback fantasy.
Each clocking in at about 36 and a half minutes, there's two long tracks (with long track names) here: "Eternal Incantation Of Perpetual Nightmare" and "Recurring Dream & Apocalypse Of Darkness". Sound kinda black metal don't they? Actually they do. This is an EXTREME Acid Mothers Temple experience let me tell you. Boris, beware! Ufommamut, watch your backs! Electric Wizard, better take another hit!!
Definitely worthy of the nifty, unmistakable Seldon Hunt cover art. Also, FYI we have this in both digital and analog formats. The vinyl version, a heavy gatefold double LP affair, is limited to 1000 copies, and it includes two bonus tracks!!! So act fast...
Now on cd with extra tracks! "La Novia" is a dark and droning take on the usual Acid Mothers Temple mix of hippie freak rock and experimental psych weirdness, with lots of faux-throat singing! Apparently this is based on traditional "Occitanian" folk music,
It's taken 6 years, but finally, one of our favorite Acid Mothers Temple records is available again, with fancy new artwork and lots of extra music!
Originally released as the first (and only) installment in tUMULt's aborted picture disc series, 41st Century Splendid Man still ranks as one of AMT's finest moments as far as we're concerned. This stuff comes from WAY before these Japanese avant-hippy heroes began pumping out a brand new release every few weeks. When this psychbomb dropped, these guys were still cloaked in mystery, some fucked up weirdo psychrock commune whose sound was as mysterious and indescribable as whatever strange corner of the universe these guys and gals called home.
The sound is epic and tripped out and druggy, blown out and blissfully psychedelic, AMT at their absolute prime, and one of the tracks features special guest star Tatsuya Yoshida of the Ruins! The original was three extended tracks (35 + minutes) of ultra divine transcendental psych-drone. "41st Century Splendid Man" has to be the most beautiful track AMT have ever recorded. Uncharacteristically tranquil and captivatingly beautiful. Droning, shimmering chimes coalesce into some sort of cosmic Ur-drone, punctuated by simple caveman thuds and epic swooshes, resulting in a grand and gorgeous ambience! The other two tracks from the original 12", "Genesis Of Humanity" and "Dalai Gama", are almost like a single track separated into two movements. The first sees AMT back on more familiar ground, with swooping synths and freak out guitar. A stumbling kosmic krautrock, with motorik rhythms and free guitar, amidst a swampy wash of rumbling low end and squealing synths. The track erupts into bubbling atonal out-rock exploration splattered with mad scientist synthesisers as the whole thing slowly mutates into 'cosmic slop' of the nth degree, becoming gradually free-er and free-er. The second 'movement' is all slithery free jazz with bubbling cauldrons of synth sputter, wild keyboards and Can-like rhythms until the whole thing gets all dreamy, eventually blissing out completely.
For this cd reissue, from Brazilian label Essence, there are two extra tracks tacked on that perfectly compliment the three originals. The cd opener, "Ruck Zuck", is an unhinged Hawkwind style heart of the sun, black hole freaked out space jam, a motorik krautrock groove, buried in FX and clouds of shimmer and skree, strange squealing vocals, streaks of feedback and dense swaths of whir and bloop and bleep.
The disc closes with the bizarrely titled "Hell Eskimo Or Polyhedral Mu", a 14 plus minute abstract ambient epic, that twists and contorts, slithers and creeps, beginning as a full on brain melting drug jam eventually transforming into a blissy jazzy post rocky slither that floats hypnotically through glistening clouds of glimmer and shimmer and sparkle, a super nova dappled interstellar drift that sounds a bit like a more damaged psychedelic Necks. Fuck yeah.
Super gorgeous deluxe packaging, a full color Stoughton style paste on gatefold, with the original cover art subtly altered on the cover (sorry, no naked ladies) and some awesome psychedelic liner notes on the inside. And just to avoid any collector confusion, the notes mention the original 41st AMT being a 10", but as mentioned above it was in fact a picture disc 12"! This cd reissue, while not nearly as limited as the 12", is still limited, this time to only 1000 COPIES!
WAY WAY WAY recommended!!
Previously released as an LP on the Eclipse label long ago in 2000, then on cd by Swordfish in 2001 with 2 bonus tracks, this album has been out of print for some time now, which is a shame 'cause we always want to recommend it to folks looking for the AMT essentials. Thankfully now at last Swordfish has repressed it!
La Novia is a dark and droning take on the usual Acid Mothers Temple mix of hippie freak rock and experimental psych weirdness, with lots of faux-throat singing! Apparently this is based on traditional "Occitanian" folk music, which from the album graphics would appear to be a region of France. Hmm? (Later AMT projects have continued to make this particular, peculiar ethnic connection.) In any event, it's a heavy, forty-minute trip-out mixing everything from distorted guitar and spacey synth to violin and bouzouki. Plus another twenty haunting minutes, via the bonus tracks. Really great, heavy duty stuff. One of our all-time-favorite AMT discs -- and that's saying something, since there are now so many, and most are so good. On La Novia, Makoto Kawabata and Co. (this album including erstwhile member Cotton Casino) certainly furthered their quest for ultimate psychedelic world domination!
This long out of print slab of heavy Japanese psych from aQ faves Acid Mothers Temple (or more accurately, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.), originally released on vinyl, via the Detector label, WAY back in 2000, is one of a handful of new reissues from Brazilian label Essence (along with two Circle cds, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), and is presented in a super swank mini-lp style gatefold sleeve, with the original sound of the lp, totally remastered, and revved up, heard for the first time the way it was meant to be heard. 'Cause according to the band, the guy who originally mastered the vinyl said the sound was "too heavy" to be mastered for vinyl, hence the sub par sound. And while the cd version definitely does sound better, it's still plenty murky and muddy and lo-fi, raw and in the red, with the band a wild chaotic squall of psychedelic sound, with lots of buzz and feedback, you can hear people in the audience talking here and there, the band offers up some funny between song banter, all of that non musical stuff woven into some of the band's fiercest rocking ever.
The record starts off all drifty and shimmery, the band unfurling lush layers of whirling sound, wreathed in clouds of sci-fi swoops and bleeps, it doesn't take long for them to launch into it, and they never let up. Channeling High Rise and White Heaven and all the Japanese psych greats that came before, Kawabata Makoto and company tear it up, the guitars a constant barrage of wild Hendrixian blow outs, and tangled sprays of furious shred, the drums pound desperately in the background, the bass is nothing more than a low end thrum, and EVERYTHING is doused in effects, rendering all the sounds washed out and woozy and druggy. Occasionally the band do lock into some more krautrock like grooves, and its then that the bass comes to the fore and definitely drives the group, but most of Live In Occident is spent in full of freaked out psych-noise blow out mode, sounding like a modern version of the avant Japanese jazz noise of folks like Takayanagi, albeit run through a million fuzz pedals and transmitted from the furthest reaches of the galaxy.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
Once again Japan's Acid Mothers Temple return (as they do it seems with almost the regularity of the sunrise/sunset), delivering another spaced out opus of psychedelic splurge, wowing us again with -both- the quantity, and quality, of their output.
And yet, Makoto Kawabata & Co. manage to surprise us with this one, at least when opening track "Chinese Flying Saucer" first kicks in. Check it out, AMT sound a heck of lot like early Led Zeppelin here, or more precisely, like Zep meets Hawkwind, as the 12 minute long track - bound to be a live favorite - rocks onwards up into Flying Saucer land.
That out of their system, the rest of the disc keeps the electronic Hawkwindy FX a-swirl, but mellows out away from the heavy rock riffage towards more of a hazy, shimmering, backporch-of-the-commune folky vibe. "Back Door Man Of Ghost Rails Inn" in fact reminds us a lot of those other Japanese hippies, Ghost, especially in the acid jabbering vocal dep't. The tracks "Chakra 24" (short) and "Shine On You Crazy Dynamite" (long) are similarly trippy and blissful.
But then, there's the album-closing cut "Electric Death Mantra" which pretty much describes itself with its title, except that title won't tell you that, by the end of the track, AMT work themselves into a very much Middle Eastern sounding frenzy, like they've been listening to a lot of vintage Turkish psych, a la Mogollar and Erkin Koray.
So, from its pastiche of Zep beginning to its dervish-like ending, and all the trippiness in-between, another fine addition to anyone's AMT collection.
*Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert* *Acid Mothers Temple alert*
Heck, Acid Mothers Temple overload! Essence Music of Brazil has brought us not one but TWO Acid Mothers Temple discs this week: the expanded reissue of 41st Century Splendid Man originally released as a picture disc on Andee's tUMULt label, and also this brand new album. Well AMT fans are always ready for more product, aren't they? Better be! 'Cause the cosmic vibes of which Makoto Kawabata and friends are but the earthly vessels for are not waiting for you to pay off those student loans or get that raise... No, they mean to be heard NOW and probably again next week, even if their devotees need to start selling their plasma to keep up with AMT's releases. If you have to choose between paying the rent and picking up another AMT cd like this one, we're confident you'll make the right choice. And if it makes you feel any better, this IS a pretty great AMT album! Great song titles too, and we're not being sarcastic: "Na Na Hey Hey From The Cosmic Inferno", "Nipples In The Dream Woods", and "Golem Rock" are but three of 'em. These Japanese neo-kraut psychedelic voyagers offer up the jams to go with such titles, that's for sure. If AMT's Electric Heavyland is one of your faves, this ought to be right up your acid rock alley.
The disc opens with the wild, wah-wahed guitar excess of "Ecstasy In Hell" and really never lets up, pounding on through the nearly 19-minute "Nipples...", spacey fx in full effect. A darkly droned-out detour is however taken on the next 17 minute track, "Omen Amen", kind of a ceremonial-sounding, folky trance ritual, followed for the next 13 minutes by the riff-repetition of "Dark Side Of The Apocalypse", sounding something like a hypothetical Hawkwind / Les Rallizes Denudes summit. That brings us to "Golem Rock", a garagey number that cranks up the FUZZ big time. And then "Na Na Hey Hey..." provides a surprisingly quiet, spaced-out, and sorta silly coda to the whole thing, with electronically effected voices chanting you know what...
And this gets extra bonus points for the awesome packaging, the miniature LP-styled gatefold sleeve opening up to reveal a rad pop-up book style gimmick inside!
Hails to Hells Headbangers, the label is on a roll lately, bringing us long-awaited new releases by two of the most outre of AQ metal faves: Ominous Doctrines Of The Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm by black metal aberrations Inquisition (Record Of The Week last list) and this, the more simply titled Stoned, from psychedelic doomsters Acid Witch! It's their 2nd full-length, after the now out of print debut Witchtanic Hellucinations we cackled over a couple of years back. Once more, Shagrat and Slasher Dave (minus Finnish friend Lasse Pyykko, who wasn't actually the main guy in the band as it turns out) have stirred up a bubbling cauldron of tripped out, horror-loving metal that draws upon their love of old school death metal, doom, fright flicks, and drugs! They say it best themselves: "Metal, punk, comic books, and horror vhs / Nothing else to live for so you might as well obsess / Discovering books of power on the arcane and occult / Eating psilocybin leaves you feeling quite possessed" (lyrics from their song "Stoned To The Grave"). Now, we're not gonna say if we condone that lifestyle or not, but we sure do like the sick, slightly tongue in cheek music that results!! And if you can appreciate a song title like "Metal Movie Marijuana Massacre Meltdown", then you'll probably like this album and band. THAT song features another verse we've just got to quote: "Seen these movies so many times / Turn off the volume cause I know all the lines / So fucking high, just let the stereo play / But only if it's Lizzy Borden or Fastway." Sheer poetry to our ears. However, Acid Witch themselves sound a lot more underground than those '80s metal bands they mention, the Hellhammer poster and Bulldozer t-shirt in the band photo represent more likely '80s inspirations.
So, if you've heard their debut, you what to expect. After an intro of Goblin-y keyboards and looped samples, the album kicks into metallic gear with track two, "Witchfynder Finder", a song about turning the tables on Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General. It's a catchy juggernaut, sounding not unlike Cathedral or Electric Wizard (or Pykko's band Hooded Menace) riding Hawkwind's "Silver Machine". One of the many killer cuts here with skull caving riffery and fuzzed out guitars. Those Goblin-y keys return later on the eerie "Whispers In The Dark" and elsewhere... while in "Live Forever" the keyboards take on more of a Deep Purplish hue! All in all, a heavy, rockin', horror show of guttural vokills, '70s Sabbathry, and spooky-ooky atmospheres.
Their favorite holiday is obviously Halloween. October is a long way off but if you like Halloween too, Acid Witch have a treat for you right now. Buy this along with that Wooden Stake / Blizaro split also highlighted this week, and your inner psych doom freak monster will be well fed.
Despite all the Acid- suffix and -Witch prefix bands out there (and vice versa for that matter), it appears that this is the very first band ever to use the name Acid Witch! And it really would have sucked if the name had already been taken, 'cause these guys are the PERFECT Acid Witch. Nobody could possibly do better justice to a moniker like that than this, um, coven.
Are they psychedelic? Yes. Are they metal? Yes. Are they creepy? Yes. Are they deathly? Yes. Are they doomy? Yes, yes, yes! Psychedelic drug doom death horror metal that cackles, wears a pointy hat, and flies on a broomstick. And, they have a sense of humor about it (hence song titles like "Witches Tits"), the same sense of humor -and- horror that gets us all into those cult '70s and '80s Italian fright flicks. Speaking of which, this album is amply laced with sinister, proggy Goblin-esque keyboards, draped over fuzzy chugging heaviness worthy of early Cathedral. Heavy, heavy doom riffs indeed abound, along with guttural grunting deeper-than-thou vokills, both of which manage to be fairly catchy as well, this album casting a spell of instant headbanging most definitely. Acid Witch's songs are furthermore infested with droning psych guitar soloing, weird electronics, witchy laughter, and spooky-ooky sound FX (is that a bubbling, boiling cauldron in there?) which makes this sound something like a "haunted Hawkwind" version of death/doom metal! Or let's say, take Acid Mothers Temple and Witchfinder General and mix them together (including the band names), then get 'em to play old school death a la Hellhammer. It's a bewitching, if totally gonzo, sound.
Further coolness: did we mention the main guy in the band is from Finland? And did you see the freaky EC Horror comics meets Cracked Magazine cover art? Which was done by Acid Witch member Shagrat (doubtless an Amon Duul II fan), who also provides a b&w portrait of the band done in the style of one of Witchfinder General's singles covers. Also, Witchtanic Hellucinations? Heck that's our review right there. These guys are brilliant (at least as much so as Electric Wizard and their "Satanic Rites Of Drugula" on Witchcult Today - hey maybe those two bands should go on tour and make black magic together!). Other bands that if you might like, probably means you should listen to this, include: Solar Anus, Coffins, Sigh (circa Imaginary Sonicscape), Moss, and Pan-Thy-Monium.
As soon as we heard 'em, we knew this was a definite AQ highlight. It took us a while to get more, our suppliers never had enough, but finally we contacted the label directly and got some, so here they are! Get 'em before they turn us all into (lysergic) toads.
Oooh. So utterly blissful, beautiful, and contemplative. In The White Silence is a musical evocation of the endless white Arctic tundra. John Luther Adams lives in Alaska and this piece, like much of his work, is inspired by the remote Alaskan wilderness, in all its vastness and stillness, what he considers exploration in "sonic geography". We thought at first that sounded like it might be a bit too New Agey or something but as soon as we heard this we couldn't help but fall in love with it!
This was recommended to us by one of our customers who said that it was basically the closest any modern composer had come to making "Pop Ambient" music (as in, the Pop Ambient compilations released by the Kompakt label, stuff like Gas, Markus Guentner, and Klimek). But it's not electronic, it's chamber music, performed by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble. That means lots of sweet strings -- violins, violas, cellos, bass, harp. Also some additional coloration (and this is colorful, in the way that white is all colors) from vibraphone, celesta and orchestra bells. Although of course this composition has a beginning and an end, it seems like something that could go on forever, though it really only lasts about 75 minutes -- slowly unfolding, built from layers of cloud-like tone clusters and barely-shifting rhythms. The musically learned liner notes (which will tell you a lot more about the musical theory behind the construction of this piece than I could ever hope to do) speak of "static textures of densely layered sound, sustained tones, short repetitive patterns, and long rising and falling lines." All true, but you have to hear it to understand how NICE that can be. If the Arctic really sounds like this, we're all set to fly up there and strap on the snowshoes... A gorgeous, extended, and immersive piece of minimalist, "pop ambient" chamber music indeed!!
We've kind of had writer's block about doing this here review of the new album by British heavy retro-rockers Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovell, just cuz we loved their first one so much, and anticipation for this new one was so high, it was hard to come up with anything to say, other than YEAH!! But that wouldn't really constitute a review, would it? So we put it off, hoping we'd come up with something better, but maybe that's good enough - so we finally took the advice of the opening track here, "Do It Now". Basically, if you like high energy hard rockin', the Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell are kickin' out the jams for you, once again, on this their second record. Another batch of rad tunes from 'em. Heck, if this was another band's first album it'd be easy to rave about it for paragraphs, but since it's this band's 2nd album, and we already raved about their debut, it seems so much easier just to say, hey it's their 2nd album! Right on!! YEAH!!
Er, however, for those that don't know, "The Shovell" are a power trio from England, featuring, we now realize, at least one of the guys from the stoner rock outfit Gorilla, whose two albums we reviewed back in the day. They play riffy, groovy, kickass heavy rawk'n'roll, often very much in the epic fuzz mode of their '70s forefathers with the sorta-similar name, Sir Lord Baltimore. Also, Budgie, Dust, Buffalo, Toad, James Gang, Leaf Hound, et. al., and of course ye olde Black Sabbath!! Plus, sometimes, due to a gruffness to the vocals and/or some quasi-punk speediness, these guys crank up some Motorhead vibes too, on a rave-up like "Happiness Begins" ferinstance. Motorhead meets Sabbath, yep, coulda just said YEAH!
We're digging all the tracks, but there are a couple stand-out song TITLES to mention: "2 Tonne Fuckboot" and "Late Night Mornings" (the later, this album's lengthy, surprisingly melodic finale, part ballad, part badass jam). Also, there's a song named after their previous album, kind of a classic move there.
Whew! Did it! Now, get it!!
First of all, now that's a name! To which your reaction might be, okay, this band must really be into 17th and 18th century British military history, to name themselves after a heroic naval officer who perished in a shipwreck in 1707. Or, if you're like us, you might think, hmmm, seems a bit like the moniker of Sir Lord Baltimore, the fuzzed out early '70s proto-metal greats. And that's definitely relevant to Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's also very much fuzzed out sound, all right. Like Witchcraft, Gentlemans Pistols, and the elusive Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats, these guys are another band on Rise Above (licensed to Metal Blade in the USA), who kick out the Sabbathy jams and sound like they actually -really- belong on Rise Above Relics, that UK label's imprint for reissues of swaggering '70s heavy rock obscurities. Yeah, the Shovell (as they like to be called, for short) deliver the goods, a ramalamajama of high energy brutal boogie with distorted to heck vocals, and noisy psych geetar explosions all over the place. 'Tis total guitar heavy, FX laden, rifftastic kickass rock n' roll. Extreme enough that while they've got one foot firmly in '70s rockarolla, they've almost got the other in, like, '90s noiserock� We say that 'cause sometimes the guitars break out stuff that's so sinewy and mathy, and the vocals get even more gruff and gnarly, that suddenly we start thinking the Melvins (meet Blue Cheer). It's just that they're waaay more freaked out and crazier than, y'know, mere Led Zep copyists. Much more like, The Heads, if they were all proto-metal about it. In fact, we'd say that this is definitely recommended to both fans of The Heads -and- Sir Lord Baltimore, of which we'd imagine there'd be plenty. Also if you like Danava, the aforementioned Gentlemans Pistols, Harvey Milk circa The Pleaser, Dzjenghis Khan, plus oldies like High Tide, Budgie, Toad, Dust, Buffalo, the Groundhogs (whose Tony McPhee gets in a guest guitar solo on one track here!), Captain Beyond, etc.
In a word, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell SLAY. And do so in style. Which includes, slipcase packaging. Oh, and there's a hidden bonus track, a cover of "Bean Stew" from Buffalo's Dead Forever, so stay tuned at the end�
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hopefully you've delved into the metallic weirdness of the Max Planck compact disc reissue Kill The Pain we highlighted a few weeks back. Eccentric true cult heavy metal from the depths of the eighties. It was one of the first three releases in the Stormspell label's new archival "Red White Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated" (and if you read our list, consider yourself initiated), dedicated to rescuing obscure '80s metal demos that they consider hidden gems.
Now we've got the other two they've done so far, Cry Of The Warrior by Battlecry from Belgium, and this one, Fist Of Steel from SoCal's unfortunately named Aerian Rage. We've already had to explain to a few customers that no, this isn't a Nazi black metal band!! Instead, they were young Orange County hair metallers with an aggro edge, who were clueless enough to just thing the name sounded cool. Their lead guitarist also thought the name Johnny Roxx sound cool, too, so there you go.
As a friend of ours who really likes this a lot observed, "I can't think of a better band that wanted to be Motley Crue but also picked up on what early Metallica was up to." And that's true. Formed in 1981, Aerian Rage were influenced by thrash bands like Slayer (who they opened for) as well as the likes of WASP and Lizzy Borden (with whom they also played). So you get explosive spandex clad rockin' here, with a bit of a nasty vibe. Catchy songs, high pitched screams, guitar shred, tons of energy, the works. Even a full on noisy freakout at the end of theme song "On The Rage". Fans of certain other LA area bands of the era like Omen, Savage Grace, Leatherwolf, Armored Saint, and even Cirith Ungol, should love this.
And you get a lot of bang for your buck, with 3 demos crammed onto this compact disc, tapes from 1983, '84, and '85, twenty tracks total. (Note: the tracklisting doesn't always seem to quite match up with the order of the songs, but you'll figure it out.) They're raw and rough garage demos but that's just part of the charm, they sure sound good to us, and beg to be cranked loud. Comes with a 12 page booklet, full of photos and lyrics and liner notes, including nostalgic reminiscences from each band member. Limited to 500 hand-numbered copies.
A while back we remember running across a bootleg-looking vinyl reissue of an LP called Get Stoned Ezy by some British band from the early '80s called High Speed and The Afflicted Man. This obscurity was supposed to be an unknown precursor to the blown-out psychedelic speed freaks sound of Japan's High Rise -- in other words, a holy grail of wah and fuzz. Tom Lax wrote a review of it on his Siltblog [http://www.inblogs.net/siltblog/2006/03/superfuzz-bigmuffmudhoney-is_06.html] that said it sounded like Saint Vitus covering Les Rallizes Denudes! Can anything live up to that? Heck, if Get Stoned Ezy even just remotely came close to living up to its excellent title we'd be curious. Are you curious too?
Well that LP is long gone, but all the tracks from that and more are to be found on this new double cd collection of everything ever recorded by guitarist Steve Hall's DIY punk-psych outfit Afflicted Man (aka Afflicted, aka High Speed and The Afflicted Man). Ramshackle, lo-fi, outsider guitar blurt that reminds us of everything from The Heads to the Stooges to Human Instinct to Michael Yonkers to Zippo Zetterlink to Baby Grandmothers to Acid Mothers Temple and the Pink Ladies Blues. It's psychedelic hard rock done "Messthetics" style.
There's over two hours of music here. Disc one features Afflicted Man's three Bonk label 7" singles, and their The Afflicted Man's Musical Bag LP (which dates from "probably 1979"). The songs from the 7"s are all fairly rockin' punkers, while the Musical Bag LP is weirder and more damaged, with tracks like "Hippy Punk" and "Hippy Skin" (that's what these guys were?), the downer blues of "Glue Sniffing", and the krautrockish "Musically Insane", a track that's really a reinterpretation of their first single "I'm Afflicted", extended to eight minutes and buried amidst shimmering piano and freeform FX. It's what that song would sound like if it was covered by Moolah!
Disc two is where the really fuzz really hits the fan, comprising both the I'm Off Me 'ead LP (1981) and the aforementioned Get Stoned Ezy (1982). On both records, Hendrix and Hawkwind are obvious references, playfully roughed up by these punks n' skins. The three long tracks of Get Stoned Ezy, especially, take that hippy psych sound into a back alley and fuck it up, but all in good weird fun.
While this reish features interesting liner notes from an Aussie fan, we're not really told what happened to the Afflicted Mr. Hall after Get Stoned Ezy. At least he went out at the end of his highest and heaviest half-hour ever!
Dax Riggs and Mike Sanchez of the criminally overlooked Acid Bath (RIP) continue to rock with the metal of their former (and much loved) outfit tempered with Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie and slithery Iggy production. Plus the emotional intensity and murky melodicism of Jeff Buckley. Excellent! A runner-up for album of the week, actually. This proves that "classic rock" wasn't only made in the '70s. Music to drive your Camaro to.
Here's two long time AQ Krautrock favorites - the first and second albums by Berlin band Agitation Free - that have been previously available as cds on the Spalax, and then on Garden Of Delights labels. But now krautrock reissuers Revisited have done even newer reissues, which is great 'cause we LOVE these records and we're glad of an excuse to list 'em again, especially since the previous edition has been unavailable for some time now. Also, Revisited has found some bonus tracks to include on each!!
The ethnic influence that so defined Agitation Free's debut is not as much a factor on 1973's Second - but both the West Coast style guitar jamming AND the way-out-there electronics experimentation really come to the fore. Again, mostly instrumental (one exception being the ominous, electronically treated reading of an Edgar Allen Poe poem that forms the last track, backed by gloomy Mellotron-led prog rock), psychedelic, trippy stuff, utterly gorgeous. Electronically created environmental sounds, wild and spacey synths, and relaxed, melodic guitar are all to be found here in abundance. Second was the second great album from this brilliant, often overlooked, Krautrock band. After Second they departed the scene with their excellent swansong live album, Last (not yet reissued by Revisited), though some other posthumous live/archival documents have subsequently been released as well.
The bonus track included here is "Laila '74", a nearly 8 minute live version of the album track(s).
They got their start as a hippie commune band, with ties to Guru Guru, Tangerine Dream, and Amon Duul. Their debut, "Malesch" (Arabic for "it doesn't matter, take it easy"), is a true cosmic Krautrock classic, blending the spacey psych of Pink Floyd and fellow krautrockers Ash Ra Tempel and Popul Vuh with a flair for Eastern "exoticism". Plus, in the intertwining guitars, you'll find some hints of the American West Coast psych sound (yes, even a little Grateful Dead -- but don't let that scare you off). The album was recorded in 1972 not long after the band was sent on a tour of the Middle East by the Goethe Institute, and incorporates field recordings (decades before the likes of Godspeed You Black Emperor!) from their trip: the bustle of Cairo streets, desert winds, calls to prayer, friendly airline pilots... These tapes are a key element of this record's appeal (along with their sheer talent for jamming and their synth and electronic experimentation). Oh, and some great Hammond organ sounds too. Basically, this is a fantastic album of mostly instrumental psych / drone / ethnic rock, that's generally mellow but powerful too. Whether to the Great Pyramids of Egypt (where the album cover was shot) or to inner space, "Malesch" portrays a true trip indeed. So recommended.
Much like when the Butthole Surfers signed to a major label, who would have thought that a band with a name like Agoraphobic Nosebleed (and a sound like theirs for that matter!), would reach the point they're at now. For the longest time, Scott Hull kept Agoraphobic Nosebleed a dirty little secret, like the deformed child you keep locked in the basement, while focusing on his 'real' band Pig Destroyer (another bad ass band name), Agoraphobic Nosebleed a much spazzier and more drum machined grind proposition, which Pig Destroyer kept drifting more and more toward a somewhat more mainstream metal sound.
As much as we love PD (see the Natasha review elsewhere on this list) our bleeding blackened hearts always belonged to Agoraphobic Nosebleed, every record packed with 30 second long tracks, amazing artwork, insane song titled, a fully fucked and warped sense of humor, killer artwork, and let's not forget that amazing 100 song 3", what wasn't to love? They were just so twisted and heavy and brutal, their sound a lightning speed burst of grinding ultraviolence, 1000 mile an hour hyperspeed fury, complex, convoluted, stuttering, blown out sonic insanity.
So we've been waiting patiently for a new AnB record, it's been almost 3 years since the PCP Torpedo / ANBRX comp / remix record 2cd, and finally, lo and behold, the band resurface, with a new member (a lady no less, and not just ANY lady, the vocalist from ultra doom outfit Salome) and a new sound. We of course expected 30 or 40 songs, but there are only 13, and the sound is not so fast, not so unhinged, definitely still grind, but more a sort of fast core / power violence variant. At first we were a little disappointed with that, but the more we listen to this, the more the songs sink in, with slower tempos and longer track lengths, comes more melodies, more hooks, it's now a bit more about the songs, and THE RIFF, than just a twisted blown out blast of tangled grind. Not that we don't love us a twisted blown out blast of tangled grind, but between all the AnB records we already own, we have about 300 tracks of that, so this new record is pretty exciting. Still a drum machine, but the programming is wicked, it sounds almost like a real drummer (there's even a sort of drum!!), the guitars are still amazing, jagged and corrosive, the riffs much more like riffs instead of shards of guitar grind, lots of chug, and super almost technical squiggles, a bit of groove too, and some definite Greg Ginn-ish worship, the whole sound is still plenty gnarled and harsh and brutal, it's just that now you have time to get into the songs. There's some bits of plodding doominess, some long stretches of churning crunch, but for the most part this is a gloriously grinding chunk of damaged metallic chaos.
And be sure to check the negative track, that's right, rewind past the beginning, and there's a whole other secret track (well not secret, it's listed on the disc and there are lyrics in the booklet), and speaking of the booklet, it's jam packed with fucked up cartoony drawings of death and cocks and naked women and sex acts and drugs and snakes and gore (it is a grind record after all) as well as the band's twisted non-PC lyrics.
And while they last, the jewel-cased cds come packaged inside old school long boxes, the amazing cover art spread out over one of those big cardboard boxes cds used to come in back when they had to fit in bins stores previously were using for vinyl, but the extra dough is not just for the box, it also comes with pins, a poster and a bad ass embroidered patch. The vinyl has none of that stuff, but does have a huge full color booklet, and is housed in a sweet deluxe jacket.
One of the best in an amazing series!!! This reissue of Ere Mela Mela (previously on Crammed I think) is an essential purchase if you dig the grooves of the James Brown of Ethiopia, the amazing Mahmoud Ahmed.
"Lunatic avant-free-rock, honed in guerrilla street performance" we're told. Hmm, we know the streets of Tokyo are crowded, but we bet Ahousen cleared the block they were rockin'. Of course, had we been there to see 'em, we'd have stayed put in the street, digging Ahousen big time. This is some serious psychedelic guitar grit, drum tumble, distorto-bass trudge, avant-sax blat, and angsty-screamy vocal burble, from a Japanese band we first heard on PSF's Tokyo Flashback vol. 6 comp. The guitarist, Katsu, played in a band called Lizard back in the '70s, the drummer is Tail from Suishou No Fune. The quartet is rounded out by Suu on sax and vocals, and Akira on bass. Dunno what other bands they may be from, but being part of Ahousen seems cool enuff! Wild and wooly but also sometimes achingly melodic and melancholic, Ahousen (aka Ship Of Fools in English) is part free jazz, part psych rock, and part Japanese folk. It's like Albert Ayler meets Blue Cheer. Or Musica Transonic with sax and a hint of Enka.
Beginning auspiciously enough with the energetic onslaught of "All Creatures", Ahousen's self-titled debut consists of four tracks in total, ranging in length from 7 minutes to an epic 28 ("Ophelia", which occupies the 2nd half of the album, certainly is a dramatic performance, compelling throughout, moving from moments of delicate frolic to heavy duty freakdom). Speaking of drama, even in the album's less fierce, more folky moments (like on the relatively lovely "A Leaf"), Suu's nervous breakdown, primal scream vocals up the emotional ante on everything else, his extreme outbursts being a major element of Ahousen's sound, and impact. Compared to other Tokyo Flashback style acts we like from the Tokyo psych scene, such as LSD-march and Up-Tight, these guys somehow sound more '70s underground, and more OUT there - in part due to the free jazz factor, in part due to those vocals... Radical. Fans of Fushitsusha and Kaoru Abe now have a dream date. And let's not limit ourselves merely to Japanese references, anyone into intense underground noisemaking from like likes of, I dunno, Raccoo-oo-oon, might want to sail into the maelstrom with this Ship Of Fools too. Pretty fantastic.
This is the second and possibly last document of Keiji Haino's cover band, which mutates Japanese rock classics (as well as the Ronettes' "Be My Baby", and "Satisfaction" by the Stones) into free-floating garage. This Haino record is certainly the worst of his career... It's so bad that
you might be seeing my large collection of Fushitshusha / Haino records showing up in the used bin here at Aquarius really soon. Okay, I know that it's live and there is some "improvisation" that is going on here, but these are simplest blues based chords to ever be written, and Haino's band can't even figure out when to change chords. It's not hard to figure it out; the shittiest fraternity cover band could figure how to play a garage song - even after a few beers. And furthermore, Haino's voice is meant for the caterwaul and siren scream to accompany a furious guitar solo, not to limpwristedly sputter monosyllabic grunting over a blues band that would get booed off the stage anywhere else in America, but in San Francisco or New York, where a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals will be scratching their chins, chain-smoking Bebes, and sipping sludgy double espressos that have been cold for well over an hour and lost any flavor what-so-ever. When you listen to rock'n'roll, you should drink beer. Preferably, Pabst Blue Ribbon, but Schlitz or Olympia will do. Where was I... yeah this record sucks. I'm mad and Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska! [Note: Jim wrote this, not Allan or Jeff, who actually have big Keiji Haino collections, and beg to differ with Jim -- far from being the worst record of Haino's career, this in fact one of his best!! The cover of "Satisfaction" alone makes this worth the 21 bucks. Totally amazing, awesome album. Really. Or so WE think. And we drink PBR.]
