Search back into the Aquarius archives, and you'll come across reviews of records that we loved with just a phrase or a sentence, giving a few choice references and adjectives. Oh, how the times have changed. Way back when, we summed up Der Plan's classic weirdo kraut new wave record with the following pithy statement: "A head on collision between the Residents and Conny Plank." Still very true to this day, although an expansion of that description is most definitely in order. Der Plan hailed from Dusseldorf, and Geri Reig was their first record, emerging in 1980 as a particularly bizarre version of the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) sound. It seemed that every single German punk and NDW band would twist and mutate some sickly sweet ballad into something monstrous and perverse. Even Neubauten did a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'Aime" on their first record; but polkas, waltzes, and cabaret numbers seemed to the prime target for the venom, bile, and ill-thoughts of the youth from back in the day, and Der Plan had authored a good number of these cheeky tunes, with atonal blooping electronics, plinkety-plonk melodies, and disjointed scratchy vocalizations. As a result, the Residents are still an apt reference for most of Geri Reig, although perhaps the equally bizarre, although less known Die Todliche Doris should also be referenced as well. For all of Der Plan's weird disposition, they would also craft a percolatingly brilliant minimal wave track here and there, as heard in the man-machine sequencing on "Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimentale" and the future-shock arpeggiations of "Adrenalin Lasst Das Blut Kochen." A classic record from the NDW period, now available once again thanks to the fine folks at Medical Records!
We actually toyed with the idea of making this 'record of the week' (indie-rock cred be damned!) on the strength of their top-ten single 'Bills Bills Bills' alone (I saw the video for this at a friend's house and it was almost enough to make me want to sign up for cable! I mean the music, not just their outfits). That song, and a couple of others like it certainly make this a record that all those down with the the last, ex-cel-lent TLC disc will love. Indeed, the intro to TLC's 'No Scrubs' is all over this album. True, there's a few of those obligatory urban r&b slow jams that you'll probably want to fast forward past (unless you're in the right 'mood'), but the rest is well worth it. Guest appearance from Missy Elliott.
Every once in a while, we run across some obscure old school metal reissue that really, really makes us go "heck yeah, that's why we love obscure old school metal!!!" Max Planck, Drakar, Coven, Dark Quarterer, Wolfbane, the list goes on. The latest discovery we've been freaking out about is this one from Swedish band Detest, who released a five song mini-lp in 1990 with the very metal title of Thundersteel (a name already used by Riot for an album 2 years earlier, so don't be confused), now reissued with tons of bonus tracks from the band's demos (filling up two whole cds!) by the cult metal Stormspell label as part of their archival "Red White Heavy Arcane Collector Series For The Initiated", which previously brought us that Max Planck among others.
Maybe what first attracted us to Detest was the intriguing cover art, a cartoony black & white & red drawing of a (despondent? pensive?) man-creature with sword, crouching at the top of some steps, apparently on a mountainside, near an altar (?), with lightning in the background and a small lizard in the foreground. Very curious. On the back cover of the cd booklet, the scene is the same, but the humanoid is gone, his sword left stuck in the earth. Did he go back down the steps? Or climb further up the cliff? Or jump off?
While wondering about all that, we started listening to the music - and were blown away. The first disc opens with the title track, "Thundersteel", and immediately you'll be smitten like we were, if you're into heavy, epic, glorious metal in the style of Manowar, Candlemass, and Doomsword - with a 'deeper' lyrical twist, as it's about the hypocrisy and evil of Christian crusaders killing heathens. It's got classic stamped all over it. And Detest keep up the quality, galloping through the rest of the disc with quite a few more killer songs that vary from the doomy to the thrashy, always pretty dang catchy and HEAVY. There's more riff monsters like "Chains Of Hell", another epic romp; insidious Bay Area thrash influenced attacks like "Cold Steel Tears Your Flesh"; and even some dementedly WTF? heaviness in the form of the plodding, extra-sludgy "Steinhurst's Chainsaws". Detest kick out plenty of memorably melodic cuts too, like the powerful "Crossfire", "Zone Of Nowhere" and the singalong mead-hall folkmetal of "One Too Many"; there's even a pretty decent, heartfelt ballad with 12-string acoustic guitar, "Angel Of Mine", but elsewhere it's more or less all about chunky riffage, ripping twin leads, rough wailing vox...
Disc two has its share of gems on it too, but to be honest disc one is SO good that we keep playing it over and over and haven't yet really given the second disc enough spins to write much about it in this review! Nice to know it's there to get into when/if we ever tire of disc one, though. 28 tracks total on this anthology, and somehow, despite the DIY recording of most of this, the production quality is pretty excellent overall regardless if the tracks are from the mini-lp or from demos.
The very thick cd booklet includes a band bio, full lyrics, and detailed notes on each track from the band's vocalist/guitarist Micke Darth. There's also an interview with him, where he answers various questions including why the band was called Detest: "Slayer was taken". Plus there's more drawings by the guy that did the cover, of that guy on the cover, Detest's scrappy little red naked furry sword wielding mascot we suppose.
Definitely something special about this band, we're SO glad Stormspell dug this up 'cause we'd never have heard 'em otherwise. Clearly a talented, intelligent band (with kind of a weird sense of humor but also a serious, sincere vibe) that were making this music in their garage more for themselves than for any larger audience - which is insane since so much of this stuff is so much better than a lot of things released by other bands of the era who "made it", y'know? Highest recommendation to anyone into cult underground '80s heavy metal!
Ok, sometimes it's true: a cool name, cool logo, and cool cover art DO mean the music is gonna be cool too. At least that's case with Holy Mountain's latest release, the debut from Devil Worshipper, which is a throbbing pounding distorted beast of black-and-chrome motorpsycho bad trippage. Imploding with droning druggy vocal chant, wild unhinged psychedelic guitar soloing, doomy riffs and propulsive hynorock percussion, yeah, this is everything we could have hoped for based on the name & cover, a trance-inducing 'cycle ride into darkness and devil worship. But, there's more... it's not all pedal to the metal Mainliner mainlining, there are tracks like "Ash Brume" that get all liquid and moody, mesmeric in a more mellowed-out way; and also songs equipped with eerie synth and other instruments - including what sounds like pan flute (?), delicate and doodly amidst the mungy grind of the endlessly repetitive "Into Radiation Wave", ferinstance.
We suspect the mysterious Devil Worshipper to be a one-man-band (they're not the Devil Worshippers, plural, after all, plus pretty sure that's a drum machine set to trance-induction), a la the likes of King Blood and GR & Full-Blown Expansion, we could compare 'em to both, as well as such somewhat larger ensembles as Aqua Nebula Oscillator, Follakzoid and Monster Magnet - heck the track "Chemrails", with its uber-echoing groove and sheer distorto-plod, somehow sounds like the magical midway point between the latter two mentioned. Damn good for one guy, if that's the case, and another winner from the Holy Mountain label, who can be counted on for this kind of shit for sure. A solid slab of Satanic-psych blissout oblivion, just like we were hoping for!!
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Gonna try to keep this relatively short. 'Cause it would be easy to go on and on and on about what an amazing band Devo were back in the day and how absolutely ESSENTIAL these newly reissued collections of the earliest recorded Devo music are. Never before released on vinyl in the States, the original two volumes of Hardcore Devo came out on cd and cassette on Rykodisc in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and have been out of print (and sought after by fans) for many years. Now at last they've been reissued, as separate volumes on vinyl (one a single lp, the other double) and together as a double cd set.
Those of you already into Devo, who don't already have this, NEED this - and even if you do have it, you might want it again, either to get the vinyl versions, and/or for the 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks now included (on disc two / Volume Two). For others, well this is our opportunity to proselytize for the cult of Devo. Some folks out there who aren't that familiar with Devo might think of 'em as just some novelty new wave nerd-rock band doing goofy songs and wearing silly hats, one-hit wonders with 1980's "Whip It!". And while they did wear silly hats and were plenty goofy, they were also super subversive and bizarre, both sonically and ideologically, true pioneers in the realm of synth-punk and new wave, coming up with a sound that somehow grafted Kraftwerk to punk rock before either were popular, promoting their own anticapitalist, antiestablishment agenda couched in irony and Dadaism. These early recordings, demos and rarities recorded on a 4-track in Akron, Ohio circa 1974-1977, reveal Devo at their most underground, raw and stripped down, but already possessed of both catchy songwriting brilliance and conceptual originality. Definitely not the hippie boogie rock popular at the time!
It's worth noting that both future Devo members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh had been students at Kent State, SDS activists in fact, and Casale personally witnessed the shocking National Guard shooting of anti-war demonstrators there in 1970. In some ways, Devo was the direct result. It's just that their idea of "protest music" was a bit different that the norm up to that point.
These DIY recordings sound pretty darn good - Devo knew what they were doing, even before they hooked up with producer Brian Eno for their 1977 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Germany. In fact, these are the recordings that got Eno interested in working with them in the first place.
On Volume One there's early versions of such Devo classics as "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", and their brilliant cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", but otherwise it's a plenitude of (sub)genius tracks never re-recorded for any of their studio albums, though some were released as singles on their own Booji Boy label, or later as B sides. It's a treasure trove of prime Devo at their purest and most urgently devolved!!! It contains one of our all time favorite Devo toons: "Auto Modown", a simple slice of proto-no-wave funk with a stinging guitar riff and Mark Mothersbaugh crooning ghoulish lyrics about how "an acid head goon in a '55 Dodge didn't mean to do it / but a sidewalk run in the noonday sun ten to one he had to lose it". Similar traits are shared by most of the tracks on here - the distorted synth-ed out soundz, the trebly bug zapper guitar, the absurd lyrical content, the robotically rhythmic catchiness. If you're a spud who hasn't heard "Social Fools", "Buttered Beauties", "Mechanical Man", "I'm A Potato", or "Ono" (and the list goes on), you haven't lived. EVERYTHING on here is great, all 15 cuts. Like we said, we could go on and on, about such treats as the blissed out, moody "Golden Energy" or the perversely humorous "Midget", who has the body of a 2 and half year old baby but the brain of a man, and takes advantage of the situation - deviant, juvenile, and sometimes frustrated sexual humor being one foundation of Devo's aesthetic for sure, with an ironic misogyny certainly being a component of the band's radical and often misunderstood critique of American culture.
Meanwhile disc two / Volume Two is even more packed with tracks, 25 of 'em, including the rather un-PC "Bamboo Bimbo", the anthemic "Be Stiff", the raunchy "I Need A Chick", and the electronically spazzed "U Got Me Bugged" (sung by Booji Boy himself), among many other weirdass classics. Overall Volume Two tends towards the slightly hit-and-miss in comparison to the totally solid start-to-finish Volume One, the Volume Two material not always as tightly on target, but after all there's more here, and even the lesser tracks are still worth absorbing repeatedly. Again, there's only a few songs that surfaced again later on their studio albums, like "Clockout" and their cover of "Working In A Coal Mine", otherwise it's mostly stuff only dedicated Devo-tees have heard before. And maybe hardly anyone has ever heard the four bonus tracks now tacked on to the end of Volume Two, but they're a worthy, weird bunch, including a couple of that sound like twisted, tweaked blues, in particular the the electronics-invaded and lyrically crude "Hubert House".
If you couldn't tell, we're so thrilled this is back in print, what can we say: BUY IT!! It might not change your life, but it could. It should. Kudos to the Superior Viaduct label, they've been putting out all kinds of cool reissues lately, but for us, this is the biggest deal yet, even if these albums aren't the rarest that they've reissued. They're nicely done, of course, including amusingly enthused liner notes by Henry Rollins, someone who has quite obviously drunk deeply of Devo's Kool-Aid. Heed his words: "Spud, prepare to be amazed!"
Impressive and all-encompassing anthology of Devo (only the best band of the late 20th century!!) spanning their inception in Akron, Ohio in the mid '70s all the way through "Smoothnoodlemaps" and then some (sigh... yeah, I know, they probably could have stopped after "Oh No! It's Devo"). All in all this is a nice set though, and includes plenty of "unreleased" tracks and rare songs recorded for soundtracks throughout the years (including a song that Mark Mothersbaugh recorded for the game Interstate '82). Comes with a 50 page color booklet with a history of Devo and lots of wonderful pictures. Cool 3-D cover effect as well.
We've reviewed a bunch of fine DVD releases over these last few lists, but out of 'em all, my pick for the raddest has gotta be this Devo DVD. Of course, they're probably in my (Allan's) top five bands of all time list, so I'm somewhat biased already.
Lots of Devo fans may have seen much of this already on video tape or even laserdisc (there's several clips included here of the Devo boys explaining the virtues of the futuristic laserdisc format) but now you can see that stuff again, and more besides, on this DVD. You get the original Kent State post-graduate student film In The Beginning Was The End: The Truth About De-Evolution, that started it all and introduced the world to such characters as Booji Boy and General Boy and some mighty odd and awesome pop tuneage. Then there's pretty much all of Devo's pioneering, wigged-out music videos, from Come Back Jonee and Satisfaction through Whip It and Girl U Want to Through Being Cool, Love Without Anger, and Peek-A-Boo. And more. All amazing, fairly low-budget (rubber masks galore), and completely cracked. A couple of the songs from the tail end of their recording career aren't so hot but that's a small fraction of the mostly-genius-stuff on here. Then there's the special features, which include an historic b&w video clip from the first ever Devo gig (1972!), a bonus video (Bruce Connor's Mongoloid), an interview with Devo video collaborator/instigator Chuck Statler, still photo galleries of Devo memorabilia that are so extensive you have to watch 'em in slow motion, and -- perhaps best of all -- a bonus audio commentary track for the majority of the disc done by chief Devo spuds Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh! That alone makes this pretty much essential to all true Devo fans, even if you already have the original stuff on video cassette. Hours of de-evolved fascination and fun await, an incredible dose of Devo philosophy, history, music and visuals.
Oooh. A real sharp reissue (deluxe, all-white slipcase packaging!) of this seminal NWOBHM classic. If you recognize that acronym, then you should know this album. That's New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, and this album by Diamond Head is in our NWOBHM top ten with the best of Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Venom, Angel Witch, etc. Just TRY not to bang your head to this heavy, rockin' tunage!! The seven songs on this, their ultra catchy and energetic 1981 debut, proved that the vocals of Sean Harris and the guitar riffs of Brian Tatler were a dynamite combo. "Am I Evil", "It's Electric", "Sucking My Love", "Helpless", "The Prince"...all their best stuff is right here. (Plus this disc also includes seven more tracks from early singles, etc.)
Yup, they shoulda-coulda-woulda been "the next Zeppelin", but they never fulfilled their early promise... still this album is an all-time metal essential, and also Diamond Head should get a LOT of the credit for a band plenty more folks have heard of, by the name of Metallica. Big big Diamond Head influence there. As Metallica acknowledged by covering quite a few DH songs over the years, the originals all found here. What about Diamond Head's influences? Well, Zeppelin, and definitely Thin Lizzy -- but they sound quite different to those other Thin Lizzy influenced NWOBHM giants, Iron Maiden.
Basically, if you like metal(lica) and you don't have this album... get it! This is also the best cd edition we've seen to date. Nice packaging simulating the original autographed white sleeve, remastered sound, bonus tracks, with liner notes explaining the whole DH saga...
Damn, this has been in stock for a little while now -- some months now, in fact! -- but for some reason we didn't get around to checking it out 'til just the other day (even though we liked this band's previous ep, Once We Were Diamonds, reviewed here last year). Like we've said before, it's hard to keep up with everything... But better late than never. Everything that was cool about that ep is even cooler here on the full-length, which actually includes the two best songs from the ep, would-be/should-be hits "That Girl's Attractive" and "Destination Diamonds". If the latter track were the only thing you ever heard by Diamond Nghts you'd think they were fully trying to emulate both The Fucking Champs (and/or Thin Lizzy) and The Darkness. But DN have more tricks up their sleeves than just that -- the rest of Popsicle isn't all (ironic?) metal like that... though the adrenalized "It's A Shokka" definitely demonstrates a maybe tongue-in-cheek Judas Priest influence, and also sounds a heckuva lot like Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy". But other tracks here show that besides the Thin Lizzy and Queen albums that these guys undoubtedly love (there's no denying it), they have other influences too that aren't classic rock/metal. On tracks like "Drip Drip" (not the Comus song!) they've got a dancey '80s new wavey thing (hmm, also like Queen got into) going on. And at other moments the hooks and the vocals remind us of the White Stripes, and the chops underlying the pop make us think of 31 Knots... So while Diamond Nights can't lay claim to being the most original band ever, they're definitely talented and have managed to meld their collective influences together in some unexpected ways. Basically, this is everything that we wished the second, disappointing Darkness album would have been.
Imagine the soundtrack to some strange, and apocalyptic planetarium show, all celestial and cosmic, but exploding in a supernova of looped mesmer and cyclical psychedelia, or picture Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing for minimal electronic trance music, or even the music of doomdronelords SUNNO))), transcribed for processed guitars and synths, and reduced to their rhythmic essence. Record number three from composer / guitarist Mario Diaz De Leon, is a little bit all of those, a dizzying collection of processed synths, and looped abstract guitars, all woven into sheets of blurred crystalline power electronics, smoldering slow build looped minimal majesty, and abstract epic heaviness.
Not metal precisely, but still quite metallic in places, and most definitely HEAVY. Too dense and noisy and chaotic to be strictly minimal, but in composition and arrangement, it has more in common with modern minimalism than anything else really. It's as much about texture and tone, as it is about melody and rhythm, the sound is at once atmospheric and cinematic, cosmic and abstract, pieces drifting through space only to explode into churning thrum, and alternately grinding away like some blurred tarpit spacedoom only to blossom into a kaleidoscopic series of dizzying synth swells.
Opener "Oneirogen" starts off with a flurry of layered synths, a dizzying big of melodic swirl, that immediately begins to gain momentum, blossoming in slow motion like some sort of sonic supernova, before exploding in a soft cacophony of prismatic melody, the synth sounds more distorted and frenetic, managing to strike a fine balance between hypnotic and intense, the sound pulsing and throbbing and buzzing before blurring into a soft focus cloud of gloriously blissed out dreamdrone shimmer, only to build right back up again to something much more caustic and corrosive, yet still somehow ethereal and spacey. "Consumed" displays Diaz De Leon's other more metal side. unfurling thick grinding downtuned gouts of guitar rumble and keening high end melody, all over streaks of pulsating synth, the result sounding a bit like Jesu as performed by Steve Reich, that sort of thick, blissed out, warm whirling guitar heaviness, but arranged in layers and loops, a heaving heaviness that blossoms into some sort of blackened minimal shoegaze drone-psych doom, that will have Nadja fans losing their minds.
The rest of the record finds Diaz De Leon flitting from churning downtuned crush to flurries of celestial synth, in most cases combining them to great affect, "Hypnocaust" fills the sky with wild tangles of sci-fi synth melodies and stuttering chips and chitters, while beneath, a strangely processed guitar rumbles and thrums, unfurling a crunchy bit of oozing disembodied riff-borne dronedoom, while "Cinerum" is something else all together, a hushed bit of hiss and hum wreathed drift, the shards of synth left to float weightless, over a warm woozy swath of lush chordal thrum. "Kukulkan" begins life as a noisier take on the current crop of psychedelic space synth retro futurism, but quickly (d)evolves into almost like an abstract black metal, with fast picked riffage blurred into clouds of droned out drift, before exploding into a kaleidoscopic squall of thick low end swells and pulsing synth swirls, and "Dissolution" revisits the sound of the opening track, again sounding like that planetarium show gone haywire, perhaps signaling the end of Diaz De Leon's dizzying sonic journey. But our favorite track might just be the 8 minute "Faithless", with its hazy, washed out intro, all lush blurred shimmer, and more stuttering synth throb, but here it's much more dreamlike and serene, laced with ghostly voices, definitely reminding us of Zombi, Majeure and the like, super cinematic, but then gradually, those sounds begin to transform, the sound intensifying, and then at about three minutes in, in a squall of high end skree, a thick ribcage rattling slab of low end surfaces, heaving and softly roiling, while the synths continue to churn over the top, it's the abstract minimalism equivalent to THE DROP in electronic music, it raises the hairs on the back of our neck, a sudden burst of energy and emotion and sonic power, which dissipates as quickly as it began, disappearing in a swirl of hushed shimmer, before splintering into a blast of caustic chaotic noise, processed vokills, low end synth buzz, all tangled up into a blackened squall, before finally fading out in a static wreathed drift of soft focus synth and almost Caretaker like melancholia.
Utterly fantastic.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Here's a disc for fans of the cult pulp horror master H. P. Lovecraft. Composer Stephen Dickman's specialty is to "set" texts (poems, prayers, prose) by various authors into musical structures of his own design. In this case, the major work here is a performance of Lovecraft's short story "The Music Of Eric Zann" by baritone Thomas Bruckner (known for his work in Robert Ashley's operas). The avant-classical vocalist reads Lovecraft's tale of cosmic terror (about a musician opening a portal to another dimension) in a semi-sung, semi-spoken sort of hypnotic chant. It, at first, seems more comic than cosmic sounding, but eventually the mesmerizing rhythms of Bruckner's narration begin to have a more disturbing effect. At over twenty minutes, and with no instrumental accompaniment, it really starts to sound like Bruckner is losing his mind--the typical fate of all Lovecraft protagonists! Bizarre and ludicrous, perhaps, but pretty cool. The rest of the disc is great too, with one text-less piano piece of great beauty, as well as more singing by both Bruckner and soprano Elizabeth Farnum, of texts by Rumi, Milarepa, and Rabbi Nathan of Bratslav. These tracks feature either piano or violin accompaniment.
As we mentioned in our review of the teaser ep that preceded this full length, unless you are seriously disconnected, you no doubt have seen or heard Die Antwoord (which means THE ANSWER), who are one of the most baffling, brilliant, raddest, silliest, goofiest, most exciting rap trios we've heard in ages. South African rednecks, one a tall gangly track suit wearing rapper called Ninja, covered in homemade tattoos and prone to performing in just boxers and sneakers, his 'hypeman', an ultra cute diminutive helium voiced elfin pixie called Yo-Landi, and finally DJ Hi-Tek, whose inclusion in the group was based on the fact that he "owned a PC computer" and made "next level" beats. And the best part about DJ Hi-Tek, a chubby baby faced dude, is that if you see them now, DJ Hi-Tek is inexplicably a tall skinny good looking guy, which is the first clue that everything is maybe not on the up and up.
When we first saw one of their videos, besides being totally blown away, and immediately crushed out on Yo-Landi, all we could think was "please be real, please be real" cuz, c'mon, it seemed way too weird and awesomely fucked up to be genuine. Some research revealed that Ninja and Yo-Landi are long time partners, who supposedly have a kid together, but more importantly, have been performing for years, in various permutations, different groups, on TV shows, art collectives, there are some amazing videos you can dig up if you know what to look for, but the bottom line was sadly, that Die Antwoord was all an elaborate prank, but which somehow really actually just made them that much cooler.
There was only two ways it could go after all, it was impossibly real, or it was the most perfectly executed art project / prank ever. And to be honest, either way, we were gonna be totally into it. But really, none of it would work if the music didn't rule, they are a band after all, and $O$ seals the deal, regardless of who they are, and where they come from, these jams slay, "Enter The Ninja" is the video that launched their career, having been viewed about a gazillion times, and with bands like this, the videos are so good, and so over the top, and they're such characters, that sometimes none of that translates to the music, but that definitely is NOT the case here, and the "Enter The Ninja" song sans visuals still slays, and yet it's not even the best jam here.
And actually, to pick the best jam would be a tough one, so much good stuff here, there's the Diplo produced "Evil Boy", which also has a head spinning over the top video, but the song itself is all over the place, featuring a young South African guest rapper and Ninja and Yo-Landi on fire, rapping about penises and underpants and whatever other weirdness they can whip up, and besides Yo-Landi's chorus refrain, her closing rap is KILLER, sexy and sinister, all delivered in her strange squeaky chirp.
There's also "Rich B***h", an awesomely stripped down synth driven groover, woozy and low slung, "Beat Boy", most notable for the 'swinging Dark Side Of The Moon boxers' video, but which features an awesomely twisted off kilter production, some robotic electro shimmer, and another killer Yo-Landi chorus, or the heavy synth raver "Wat Kyk Jy?" with a crazy anthemic chorus and cool brooding minimal verses, fuck, they're all so good. The closer, is some sort of wheezing accordion driven chunk of sea shanty cabaret, which leads into a few minutes of silence, which hides a secret bonus track that's killer and sounds like Zombi, all super sci-fi Carpenter / Goblin synth disco.
Believe the hype. Overdose on the videos, and play this record to death.
BTW: Allan and Andee saw them play an instore at another record store in SF, and they DESTROYED, whipping a crowd of hundreds into a near riot-ready frenzy, A + A included!!
We must have mentioned before that we're suckers for electric pink on an album cover. Dunno why, it's just a thing with us. Especially when it's a METAL album. How did Boris know? And now Diskord. The shocking pink hues on the cover of this album are part of a garish, trippy painting that's deliberately indicative of the unusual, lysergic-sounding technical death metal these Norwegian guys play. Spaced out, definitely Voivod influenced, grinding weirdness... they're an alien metal machine with lots of cold, sharp edges and many moving parts. And though they're crazy technical and blasting a lot of the time, let's not forget the album is aptly titled Doomscapes, which means they can break it down from the hyperactive heaviness to sheer crushing slabs of sludge, and ooze ambient atmospheric interludes too. Definitely for fans of fellow demented deathsters like Cephalic Carnage and Canvas Solaris, and older bands running the extreme death metal spectrum from Autopsy to Pestilence to Disharmonic Orchestra...
Long overdue, super deluxe double disc reissue of this long-time Aquarius favorite / black metal classic. After a not-so-great past few years for Dissection, including a lengthy jail sentence for frontman Jon Nodtveidt, and a recent disappointing 'comeback/reunion' record (not yet reviewed here), this black classic returns to remind us just how mindblowingly kick ass Dissection really were. And while of course this is a fave of all the metalheads around here, and our metal-lovin' customers, it's also loved by the less metal inclined -- for instance, former AQ staffer Byram, not normally a big metal consumer, ranks this as one of his favorites amongst the Nordic hordes. In fact, it's one of the few metal cds in his collection. It's that great. It came out originally in '94, reissued as a digipak a few years back, and now sees a super duper double disc re-release with a whole disc of bonus tracks (more on those later).
With Storm of the Light's Bane, Dissection perfected their melodic, blackened Swedish death metal approach -- that means TRUE, original metal, with elements of everything from Morbid Angel to Mayhem to Iron Maiden, suped-up and super-grim, with raspy vocals, wicked drumming (the guy is AMAZING), truly memorable, majestic melodies, and tons of cold winter atmosphere. They take long breaks to let their acoustic guitars gently weep, then tear back into the brutal, razor-edged rifferama. Serious stuff, seriously great. This was to be their last album, a mighty swan song, as Dissection called it quits soon after when their frontman ended up in jail as accessory to murder -- but their -very- tangential role in any of that over-sensationalized Scandinavian black metal true crime stuff has nothing to do with why you should be interested in this band. Like we said, the band reformed last year when Nodtveidt got out of jail, and just recently released a mediocre new record, but it couldn't hold a candle to Storm Of The Light's Bane, nor could most metal records actually. Dissection was a brilliant band, and Storm of the Light's Bane is an all time classic that belongs in every metal collection. If you haven't already gotten this album, here's your chance. And even if you already have one of the previous versions, the extra disc might make it a necessary repeat purchase.
The second disc is crammed with bonus tracks and unreleased material. First up, the Storm Of The Light's Bane unreleased alternative mix '95, which might have been for completist nerds only, but a closer look reveals an extra track not on the album proper. Then there's two tracks from an unreleased 1994 demo. And finally the Where Dead Angels Lie ep, also remastered. Lots of liner notes and packaged in a spiffy slipcover. SO RECOMMENDED!
Reissue of a long-time Aquarius favorite. Not just of AQ metalheads Andee and Allan, or our metal-lovin' customers, but others on the staff here too -- for instance, Byram, not normally a big metal consumer, ranks this as one of his favorites amongst the Nordic hordes. In fact, it's one of the few metal cds in his collection -- it's that good (he was a music student y'know). It came out originally in '94, and now sees a digipacified re-release with bonus tracks from their out of print Where Dead Angels Lie cdep. With Storm of the Light's Bane, Dissection perfected their melodic, blackened Swedish death metal approach -- that means TRUE, original metal, with elements of everything from Morbid Angel to Mayhem to Iron Maiden, suped-up and super-grim, with raspy vocals, wicked drumming (the guy is AMAZING), truly memorable, majestic melodies, and tons of cold winter atmosphere. They take long breaks to let their acoustic guitars gently weep, then tear back into the brutal, razor-edged rifferama. Serious stuff, seriously great. This was to be their last album, and Dissection is no more -- front man John Nodtveidt ended up in jail as accessory to murder -- but their tangential role in any of that over-sensationalized Scandinavian black metal true crime stuff has nothing to do with why you should be interested in this band. No, regardless of their unfortunate history, Dissection was a brilliant band, and Storm of the Light's Bane is a classic that belongs in every metal collection. If you haven't already gotten this album, here's your chance.
All right! Esoteric Black Hair was originally cd-r sampler release put together for this great Japanese band's US West Coast tour this past summer. We were stoked to carry it, but a bit bummed it was just a cd-r. Now, it's being properly pressed on cd, and the label is being super awesome and has arranged for anyone who got the cd-r version to get a free cd replacement. Cool, eh? More details on that are to be found at the end of this review, but first let's recap what we said about the original release, for all of you who didn't get it yet ('cause you should!):
From Japan...DMBQ!! (Formerly known as the Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet.) Damn, did you see these guys (and gal) play last year?? If not, don't miss 'em this time... If you DID see 'em last time, of course you'll be at their shows again this time too. One of the ultimate over-the-top rock experiences... a spectacle of backbends, stagedives, sweat, awesome polyester outfits, and let's not forget heavy psych-rock chops!! An AWESOME live band -- they had rock moves I've never seen before. Are DMBQ tongue in cheek fantasy? Or totally sincere love of rock n' roll overload? Probably both. It's a blend of Hendrix and Blue Cheer played with the attitude of Guitar Wolf or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. What The Darkness would be if they were Japanese and inspired by '70s acid riff-rock instead of '80s hair metal, perhaps. I've been a BIG fan of this band for a long time, and was always super frustrated not to be able to get any of their recent cd output to sell here at Aquarius. They're on a major label in Japan, and it's just impossible to get their discs for any reasonable price. But now, we've got this, their first and only domestic US release, a thirty minute selection of choice cuts from some of their Japanese albums. There's seven songs here, each crazier and heavier and more rockin' than the last. If you liked Boris' Heavy Rocks or Akuma No Uta albums, you'll like this!! (And Acid Mothers Temple, you'd better get out of the way.) It's too bad we can't get their 'actual' albums, but for now this will have to do, and it makes for a nice, budget priced sampler/intro to the band's brand of bellbottomed insanity. I bet some smart label will pick 'em up and we'll have more domestically released DMBQ to look forward to soon [recent news flash: expect an album in March 2005 on Estrus!]. So get this, and don't miss their shows, if you've got a rock bone in your body. They have a new drummer (China-Mana from Shonen Knife) and tell us in an email about playing with her: "It is VERY fun! We can show you more crazy show surely. I feel we could get more EVIL musical power through her...! We are very excited." So are we!
If you missed 'em, they will be back...and yes they DID get more EVIL musical power by the way. So keep an eye out for them to return. Ok, now here's more about what do if you already purchased the previous cd-r of Esoteric Black Hair and want to upgrade to the cd. Fake Chapter sez: "Earlier this year, Japan's DBMQ toured the West Coast bringing with them a tour souvenir EP Esoteric Black Hair. Now due to their enormous success, Fake Chapter Records (who partnered with them for the tour) has commercially released the EP. For those of you bought the original CD-R, don't feel ripped off! Fake Chapter and Aquarius Records have made a special arrangement for you. Simply leave your information with Aquarius or email your mailing address directly to dmbq@fakechapter.com and we'll send you a copy of the new version for FREE. That's right, no sending the old EP back, no paying for postage, no being forced to buy the same thing twice, just let us know who you are and it will be in your mailbox! Please note: Both versions include the SAME track listing and artwork. The only difference is CD-R vs. CD duplication quality. Please email dmbq@fakechapter.com for any questions."
These guys and gal from Japan should need no introduction, eh? I mean, I think we've done our best to already familiarize AQ customers with the rock n' roll awesomeness of the Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet, right? We've certainly sold a ton of their Esoteric Black Hair ep, that's for sure! Plus, they've been on a stateside touring assault recently that is clearly pulling more and more fans into their orbit. In our review of EBH, we predicted that sooner rather than later some clever American label would pick this band up...and lo, Estrus has done the deed. They're a label perhaps known for a retro sound more garagey than these guys, but it's definitely a good fit with DMBQ's brand of wild rock n' roll abandon.
On The Essential Sounds From the Far East (terrible title, although no falsehood), DMBQ's Boredoms-playing-Blue Cheer attack continues unabated. Tons and tons of guitar with tons and tons of effects. Swooshing sizzling wah-wah mayhem. Howling, raucous vox. Groovy drumming. Exuberant energetic explosions of sound. Sonic starbursts and brightly coloured visuals absolutely must accompany rock that's kicking out the jams this hard. Imagine the most in-your-face elements of Hendrix and Led Zep I taken to absurd extremes by some extroverted Japanese freaks, right now, today, in your town if you're lucky. Anyone who likes Acid Mothers Temple when they pay a visit to "electric heavyland", or digs the psychedelic, '70s rawk side of Boris, will love cranking this up.
As mentioned, they've been touring more in the US. DO NOT MISS SEEING THEM. Their showmanship has to be seen to be believed. They're always upping the ante. They were just here last month, and the crowd at the Hemlock got to witness frontman Shinji pass the drum kit into the audience, piece by piece, assemble it there, then grab DMBQ's new drummer China (ex-Shonen Knife) and hand *her* into the crowd, from where she picked up the beat and finished the song, drumming in the midst of the sweaty multitude. Wow. But as good live as they are, they don't slack in the studio either.
You can tell they mean to impress with this, their first-ever US album release (EBH being both an ep and a collection of previously released tunage). This does include a version of "Are You Satisfied?", a song that's also on EBH... but everything else is new. It's one loud pounding, swirling, throbbing psych-out after another, with only the spaced out six and a half minute "Dm" providing a bit of relaxation. Damn we love this band. Now if only all their other, also-excellent previous Japanese releases would get reissued over here...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
From Japan...DMBQ!! (Formerly known as the Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet.) Damn, did you see these guys (and gal) play last year?? If not, don't miss 'em this time, they're gonna be touring the West Coast this month (June '04). If you DID see 'em last time, of course you'll be at their shows again this time too. One of the ultimate over-the-top rock experiences... a spectacle of backbends, stagedives, sweat, awesome polyester outfits, and let's not forget heavy psych-rock chops!! An AWESOME live band -- they had rock moves I've never seen before. Are DMBQ tongue in cheek fantasy? Or totally sincere love of rock n' roll overload? Probably both. It's a blend of Hendrix and Blue Cheer played with the attitude of Guitar Wolf or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. What The Darkness would be if they were Japanese and inspired by '70s acid riff-rock instead of '80s hair metal, perhaps. I've been a BIG fan of this band for a long time, and was always super frustrated not to be able to get any of their recent cd output to sell here at Aquarius. They're on a major label in Japan, and it's just impossible to get their discs for any reasonable price. But now, we've got this, their first and only domestic US release, a thirty minute cd-r compiling a selection of choice cuts from some of their Japanese albums. There's seven songs here, each crazier and heavier and more rockin' than the last. If you liked Boris' Heavy Rocks or Akuma No Uta albums, you'll like this!! (And Acid Mothers Temple, you'd better get out of the way.) It's too bad we can't get their 'actual' albums, but for now this will have to do, and it makes for a nice, budget priced sampler/intro to the band's brand of bellbottomed insanity. I bet some smart label will pick 'em up and we'll have more domestically released DMBQ to look forward to soon. So get this, and don't miss their shows, if you've got a rock bone in your body. They'll be debuting a new drummer on this tour (China-Mana from Shonen Knife) and tell us in an email about playing with her: "It is VERY fun! We can show you more crazy show surely. I feel we could get more EVIL musical power through her...! We are very excited." So are we!
NB. if you got the cd-r 'bootleg' that DMBQ was selling at their shows last year, be aware that Esoteric Black Hair is an *entirely* different disc.
French heavy psychedelic acid rock proto-metal. Yes we said French. Last year, via the interweb, we got clued in to the existence of some way rare and obscure late '60s / early '70s heaviness from the land of baguettes and berets. Rotomagus, Les Variations, Chico Magnetic Band, Quo Vadis, Zoo... Francais Metal de Proto!! We'd had no idea. So we're happy now we've tracked down a few import cds bearing proof of this hitherto unknown phenomenon. This one's by a band from Paris called Docdail. Housed in a cardboard sleeve, this cd features just four tracks -- the A and B sides of Docdail's first two singles, from 1969 and 1970, which might be their entire recorded output as far as we know. In fact we don't know much about these guys at all -- except that at they wrote at least one song, found here, that is mindblowingly heavy for 1969!!!
This disc starts off with "Sad Harold", an electric blues number that while decent enough probably won't get anybody too excited. It definitely betrays nothing of the utterly ahead-of-its-time onslaught of psychedelic instro-sludge found on the flip, track two here, "Aere Perennius". A way HEAVY acid jam, man. Doubtless this one was influenced by Jimi Hendrix, but to us sounds more like freakin' Steel Pole Bathtub! If we were told this was a band from the early '90s on AmRep, we'd have believed it, except maybe during a breakdown halfway through when some vocals come in, briefly shouting in Latin and French. Simply astonishing, and worth the price of this disc to those of you obsessed, like us, with the early daze of the heavy. Following that, third up on the disc, is the not-quite-as-heavy "Stone Me", a song as groovy and stonery as you'd hope from the title. Reminds us maybe of Steppenwolf. The B-side to that wraps things up, a much mellower track called "Why Do You Cry" that is slow, sad and sweet, which Docdail manages quite nicely. Leaving us puzzled though... it would seem that Docdail didn't really "get it" (or their management/audiences didn't), 'cause otherwise why the heck wouldn't they have taken the incredible, extreme sound of "Aere Perennius" and run with it?? Maybe they scared themselves, who knows!
Many of you will recall that a few years back, we had the pleasure of reviewing six (6) different limited edition cd-r releases by this murky and mysterious improvised instrumental free rock ensemble from Finland, which features members (we eventually determined for sure) of mega AQ faves Circle! In those reviews, which taxed our powers of description, we said things like:
"A Finnish drug thing you wouldn't understand."
"Lo-fi, low-key freakout."
"Imagine a cross between Circle and Thuja."
"Imagine Hawkwind or Acid Mothers Temple locked in a cave with broken instruments."
"Installments from some massive on-going jam still happening right now... outdoors under the ever-dark winter sky."
"Slow, meandering, very stoned ambient psych jamming to the max."
"Imagine if you had neighbors who lived below you in a WWII bunker and all they did all day was listen to certain Fushitsusha albums, this is what you might hear through the floor."
Now, all six of those cd-r's have been out of print for some time now. But Doktor Kettu's spacey jamming is indeed on-going, and now they're back with a brand new disc, Soft Delirium, and ALL our lines quoted above could easily apply, again. This time it's a real cd, not a cd-r, from Super-Metsa, a division of our friend Jussi's Ektro label that brings us so much stuff by his band Circle and other strange treats. In the typical Doktor Kettu tradition, there's but three long tracks on this disc, each of them an extended, wandering journey through darkness and light. The twelve minute, 44 second "Wulff" which opens the disc, billows forth, amplifier hum and droning chords riding abstract waves of percussive tinkerings to eventually unleash some seriously dense, distorted muzz. Someone's having a Tokyo Flashback, even though these guys are from Finland! Track two, "Triggeri" (9:56) is a bit gentler. Rather pretty, reminding us a bit of Circle's exquisite Miljard. Quiet music you'll want to play loud. And then the disc's third and final track "Kosmonaut", provides even more brooding ambience, exhibiting the ominous, twilight moodiness of another AQ fave, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. It's over seventeen minutes long, but for us that's barely long enough. These pale rumblings, with surges of percussive texture and slow, slow hints of melody, could flow on endlessly and we'd be forever entranced...
Math rock / post rock / noise rock nerds, celebrate! Henry Owings and Chunklet once again deliver a sonic holy grail that we didn't even know existed. Most recently it was a killer collection from late great unsung Chicago noise rock minimalists Tar, and now comes a whole unreleased record from nineties math rock legends Don Caballero!! And holy shit is it a doozy, recorded in 1991 at Carnegie Mellon as a three piece, the sound is super raw, ultra fierce, crazy heavy, and mathy as fuck, a furious frenzy of wild octopoidal drumming, chugging distorted guitars, fuzzed out low slung bass, the songs already twisted and tangled, and weirdly catchy, the sort of head nodding matched out heaviness few bands then or now could match, and the recording only makes it sound that much better, blown out and in the red, fierce and in your face, relentlessly rocking. A bunch (but not all) of the tracks would show up in different forms later, on early singles and their debut full-length For Respect, but they almost sound even better here, more raw and intense for sure. Fans of this group, this era and this sound, grab one of these before they're gone, cuz odds are these are the only ones we'll be able to get.
Housed in a full color gatefold sleeve, includes a download of the whole record, as well as the band's second ever live show as a bonus (and that's even more raw and blown out!!)...
Cult Cult Cult. Doom Doom Doom. It's thee fourth album of HEAVY and EPIC war metal anthems from this (metaphorical) sword and axe wielding bunch, and maybe their best yet. Italy's pagan doomsters Doomsword (that's doom-sword not dooms-word, just to be clear) are a true metal outfit, with clean, manly vocals. The Viking tales of Bathory are the closest they come in comparison to the black metal realm...but they're NOT a bit like the fruity and fantastical power metal of countrymen Rhapsody either. No, this is for fans of underground olden metal acts like Solstice, Wotan, Candlemass, and former labelmates Slough Feg. Doom done heavy metal style, not sludgy-droney or stoner-Sabbathy, but epic.
Sure, with songs like "Days Of High Adventure", "Steel Of My Axe", and "Thundercult" you might expect some kind of D&D metal here. Well sorta, but as we've said before there's a serious slant to Doomsword's stuff, even if you'd be prone to thinking 'em silly. And their hymns to myth and might will stick with you, thanks to their morose melodies and sheer metallic chug. Mostly midtempo, sluggishly so, but with some storming numbers too. There's acoustic intros, catchy choruses, and (most importantly) many massive RIFFS. Stuff to awaken ancestral memories! Listeners will be unconsciously be girding their loins and preparing for battle. The unironic metal of Doomsword is "keeping it real" about stuff that went down over 1000 years ago, and doing so with much passion, intensity and skill. Classy and damn good. Cult Cult Cult. Doom Doom Doom.
With a name like Dope Body, at first we kinda expected this Baltimore band to be some kind of sludge metal thing. But as we learned a while back from their split lp with NYC's Orphan, they're something else entirely. A very hard to define, WTF?, but totally enjoyable, something else indeed, that reminds us of everything from the mathy spazzcore of Lightning Bolt and USAisamonster to the DIY electronic ethno grooves of freakin' Konono No.1, wow. While some of this, their debut studio full-length, is stoner rock heavy (and one song is called "The Shape Of Grunge To Come"), it's more of a crazy melange of all sorts of wild, loud, uber-distorted, rhythmic good times! Quite catchy too.
One thing that we can't help but notice is that part of the Dope Body equation, beneath the noise-rock chaos, is a good dose of punk-funk. We get a whiff, in a good way, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, somehow (the rubbery bassline of "Bangers & Yos", c'mon). And heck, the band in fact claim Rage Against The Machine as an influence... but we think that Dope Body themselves would appeal more to fans of Cave, Melt Banana, Health, old Boredoms, Geronimo, Shit & Shine, and Rusted Shut. Not that any of those bands sound like Dope Body either exactly, but they might if they all jammed together. Though, that would be a mess, while Nupping isn't actually as messy as it might initially sound, 'cause what Dope Body manage to do is turn all their crunching looping riffs, damaged breakbeats, skronky guitar noise, R-rollin' vocal holler, and weird dude energy, into songs - songs you could dance to! Songs you WILL dance to, furniture and small breakable objects be damned.
Bringing a sweaty warehouse party to your stereo, Dope Body deliver. We loved 'em on that split, and this full-length does not disappoint. Crank it!!
FYI, we were shorted on our order of cds, so we're listing just the vinyl now, the cd hopefully next time, though we might have a couple cds in stock now.
The best of '80s Oxnard metalli-punks Dr. Know collected on one handy disc. Maybe you've heard Slayer's version of "Mr. Freeze"?
So, maybe you're like us, we get curious when we learn about a reissue of some obscure metal band we'd never heard of before, especially if they're from, say, Eastern Europe, and have a cool album cover/motto like this one does ("Dragon music of Prague / Mystic metal" it says on the cover, below a painting of a bug-eyed Oriental dragon). But, even then, we don't expect it to be anything THAT great, just, well, a curiosity. But, turns out that late '80s/early '90s Czechoslovakian band Drakar are more than a mere Iron Curtain metal novelty, they're actually pretty good, this is a legit contender, on par with much better-known Western metal classics, seriously. Ask anyone (who has heard it). And yeah it's a bit weird, too!
This release is a reissue of their debut album from 1990, two versions of it actually (hence the two discs), one in Czech, the other an English-language version. Despite the year, this isn't generic thrash or speed metal, though it is often speedy - and it's certainly not death metal or black metal, either, though fans of Root and Master's Hammer might well enjoy it. Drakar have obviously got '80s (and '70s) classic, melodic heavy metal roots, sounding even a bit like Thin Lizzy at times, but also incorporate unexpected usage of sampling; collages of commercial radio broadcasts and snatches of classical music and the like are woven in here and there. Also especially of note are the whining, wailing guitars. The guitar work is awesome, though they don't let the shred get in the way of the songs, it's just one element, likewise with the chunky riffs and gruff, sneering, sometimes soaring, vocals.
Speaking of vocals, the stand out song might be the one where they seem the silliest, on "Crazy Boy", the title/chorus being in English, in both versions. Can't get the way he sings "crazeee boohoy" out of our heads. It's a bit funny, yes, of course we like it 'cause of that, and even the mostly-non-metal-inclined among us here at AQ found this interesting/amusing as well. But that song, and the rest of the record, are also worthy 'cause the melodies are strong, and the harmonies are plentiful and lovely.
Ok, probably that's enough, we've made it clear this is quite recommended, and also it's limited to 500 copies, and our suppliers are all out already... when we contacted the label in Sweden to get some to list, they were down to their last 25! We got a bunch of those from them, but this handful will be gone soon, and then it doesn't look like we'll be able to get any more, so be warned.
Lovingly packaged by I Hate Records, the thick cd booklet including lyrics, liner notes about the band, and old photos. Also the cd contains a video clip for one of the songs, that you can watch on your komputoor.
As you well know, we're really into that special Scandinavian subgenre of electronica known as skweee. In part, 'cause we were already into a lot of the sounds that inspired skweee, such as '80s electro, video game music, and funky old school hiphop. So, we were excited to see this disc recently repressed/reissued, Detroit electro act Drexciya's first full-length compact disc, originally released by German label Tresor in 1999. Also excited, 'cause we completely missed out on listing it back then, somehow! The rather idiosyncratic Drexciya can definitely be considered as precursors to the skweee phenomenon (skweee-cursors?). And indeed also as important, if eccentric, artists in the Detroit techno pantheon.
There's 21 tracks on this basically instrumental disc, most of 'em bearing some bizarre title that relates somehow to Drexciya's strange, sub-aquatic sci-fi concepts (the comic bookish artwork features squid shaped spaceships, and spacemen (spacefish?) that look a lot like Lovecraft's Deep Ones, or the Creature From The Black Lagoon, but in spacesuits. Sonically, these tracks range from the droning chant and mysterious voices heard in the introductory incantation "Temple Of Dos De Agua" to moody 4/4 techno atmospheres to synthesized future funk ("Funk Release Valve") to textural rhythmscapes to body-jerking fusion grooves ("Jazzy Fluids")... there's melodic keyboard soloing over jittery beats... squelching bass and lush synths... And dig the Kraftwerkian echoes on "Polymono Plexusgel" (and elsewhere). Pre-skweee or whatever, it's all awesome. This Drexciya disc is a bit of a classic, as far as catchy cosmic electro with fishy sci-fi fantasy elements, Detroit style, goes. And the connection with fellow Detroit space-travellers Dopplereffekt should be obvious. Check it!
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes) The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released -- with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
Earlier this past year we reviewed (and Record Of The Week'd) a crushing slab of druggy psychedelic space doom sludge called Ghost In The Fire, from a band with the VERY unlikely moniker Drug Honkey. Initially we sorta assumed they must be a joke band, but there was nothing funny about the head spinning din these guys whipped up on that record. And as much as we loved Ghost In The Fire, for us it all started with this disc, Death Dub, which we had hoped would be some sort of impossible dub / death metal hybrid, and while it wasn't quite that, it was still seriously warped and fucked up, like a sludgier more metallic Butthole Surfers, sort of. Dirgey, and noisy, and crusty, sludgey and actually in fact, kinda dubbed out. We managed to get a handful of these finally (as well as DH's Hail Satan cd-r, if you want one of those too, just ask!), and now everyone can revel in Drug Honkey's glorious sonic filth, a constantly shifting metallic sound world, that's all churning riffage one second ("The Devil Lasts Forever"), tripped out dubby doom the next ("Death Threats"). The Butthole Surfers comparison is pretty apt, these guys just unfurl these sprawling epics, low slung bass throb, tribal caveman drumming, weird FX heavy vox, bellowed demonic howls that can easily transform into hysterical shrieks, everything wrapped in sheets of crumbling distortion, clouds of swirling effects, total tripped out heaviness, that as the title promises does get dubby, check out the vox on "Death Threats", throat shredding vokills disappear in a field of echo and delay, and go spinning into the blackness, while underneath the band continue to pound out a spacey psychedelic dirge. Or there's "Communion", the vocals sick and hellish, but seemingly being real time processed, so each bellow, launches little flurries of sped up shrieks or garbled grunts, all tether to the bands lumbering, monstrous, downtuned crush.
The sound constantly gets super psychedelic, and sort of krautrocky and motorik, spacey and heavily tripped out, like some weird mutated hybrid of the Psychic Paramount, Terminal Cheesecake and Painkiller, some tracks almost sound like hip hop, albeit some sick, distortion drenched industrial strain (Techno Animal, Ice, God, etc.). In fact the Pathological Records vibe looms large over pretty much all of Death Dub, the whole record an electronic flecked, FX heavy, metallic mindfuck of the highest order. Which obviously means ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL!!!
Here's a pretty cool, jazz-damaged, percussion-heavy Krautrock obscurity that we just got hip to, thanks to this recent cd reissue on Garden Of Delights. As you might expect from something called Drum Circus from 1971, this has a definite hippy attitude, full of Om-drones and space-jazz piano and cosmic Eastern raga moves. It's a bit like Alice Coltrane meets Lothar And The Hand People meets early (pre-robotic) Kraftwerk. On the 21+ minute title track you'll groove to martial drums, unison chanting of mystical slogans, ominous organs...what's not to like? I mean, this has got both free-jazz freakouts and ranting incantations -- with lotsa lyrics by none other than Timothy Leary! And Drum Circus then get into some '70s Miles Davis styled funk on the aptly titled "Groove Rock". There's even some nice melodic elements too -- Andee thinks the male singer on "All Things" sounds like Roger Daltrey. But overall though, this will probably appeal more to say, folks partial to recent Boredoms output than to fans of The Who...
A miasma is defined as a heavy, vaporous emanation or atmosphere, also used to describe a corrupting influence (thank you, dictionary dot com!). So obviously, Chicagoan Kevin Drumm has been hanging around miscreants Peter Rehberg and Masami Akita and has decided to drop a nasty, pungent aural fart on all of us. Normally, guitarist Drumm crafts near inaudible soundscapes which leave much to be imagined. But "Sheer Hellish Miasma", his first recording for the stalwart experimental electronic jetset label Mego, is just FUCKING LOUD!!!! As to be expected from Mego, there's an abundance of clicks and whirrs, digital chirps and skitters, but I repeat, it is FUCKING LOUD!!!! (!) This'll probably be up for Prix Ars Electronica against Whitehouse. Or not. Who knows what those Ars Electronica people are thinking? The closing "Cloudy", in contrast, builds a simplistic, yet wonderful shimmering drone that ends the disc quite gorgeously. Well done. A necessity for all you pure noise freaks out there. Epic and apocalyptic, much like the work of Zbigniew Karkowski, Boyd Rice as NON, the overdriven sonic capacities of Whitehouse or the more hellish punishments of Merzbow (it's a bit like "Hard Lovin' Man" in its trance-inducing aspects).
Sheer rawk powah. Just tune into the first cut "Strange Trangressors" from this, the third and best album yet from Oakland-based hard rock throwbacks Drunk Horse, and get blown away by the power of riff and sweaty rhythm section action (and some tasty slide work courtesy of our pal Josh who used to play in Drunk Horse, after leaving The Champs). It's sophisticated riff rock, a bit more clever and complex than you might realize, when you're busy hoisting beers to their boogie as you should be.
Though titled In Tongues, this album certainly seems less overtly tongue-in-cheek than Drunk Horse has in the past... The jokey element is here pretty much limited to slightly humorous song titles like "Reformed Asshole" and "Nice Hooves". Drunk Horse have always taken themselves and their music seriously, but now they're letting us know it too. For sure Drunk Horse have grown, and gotten even better. One major area of improvement would be the vocals, Eli took a lot more care with his singing this time around and it shows. The band has always had a lot of chops in other areas, so now they're even closer to becoming the new millenium's answer to the classic likes of ZZ Top, Humble Pie and Thin Lizzy. In Tongues is bursting with clever arrangements, wicked leads, gorgeous twin guitar harmonies (there's the Thin Lizzy...), and pop hooks. And that aforementioned sheer rawk powah. Unbeatable.
And as promised last list, when we made the reissue of seventies Mexican psych legends Los Dug Dug's 1971 self-titled debut a Record Of The Week, here's their equally Record Of The Week worthy second album, 1972's Smog, now also reissued on both cd and, for the first time, vinyl! And as we said then, we love this band! Why? 'Cause Los Dug Dug's kick out jams that are part garage rock grooviness, part Beatlesy bliss, part power pop, part proto-metal, and part prog (with flute!!). What's not to love? And we haven't even mentioned the heavy dosage of FUZZ they supply, either!
Unlike the debut, which was Mexico's first rock record sung all in English, Smog is sung in Spanish, and sees Los Dug Dug's stripped down to an amped up power trio format, led as always by guitarist/vocalist Armando Nava (he's on the right in the cover picture, with the dyed grey long hair and beard, looking like some pensive psychedelic wise man or wizard). Pretty sure he's also the one playing the flute here, pumping up the progginess in a hard rock context that could kinda be likened to Jethro Tull meets the MC5, yeah, and reminds us of Italian prog faves Osanna, too.
Smog is one smokin' album, it's hard to pick favorite tracks, as they're all so good, but we'd have to mention both the lovely ballad "Voy Hacia El Cielo (Voy Hacia El Sol)" and the motorcycle revving, ecological protest rocker "Smog". Yep, just like their self-titled debut, this one's got plenty of both the heavy rockers and the gentler, poppier stuff, but leans towards the former, and seems more '70s than their first album, which had more of a '60s feel to it.
Air pollution is certainly a '70s theme, also something that any band based in Mexico City would be concerned about, and the title Smog gives this a heavier vibe than if they'd called it something like Flowers & Incense, eh? In keeping with their new style and attitude, they do a Spanish-language remake / update of the debut's frantic garage beat number "Let's Make It Now", stretching it to almost 12 minutes, as a totally progged out, flute-fortified five part suite, now titled "Hagamasolo Ahora (2a. Parte)", while retaining all the energetic excitement of the original. The energy level of this entire album is exhilarating, there's a couple pleasant acoustic numbers but otherwise it's quite rough, rhythmic, and riffy.
As we said when we reviewed the reissue of the debut, we've listed this album (and several others by the band) before, but it was always tough to keep enough of 'em in stock, they were Mexican imports and never reliably available, seemingly going in and out of print in quite random fashion. Hopefully these new editions will be around longer, and remain easy to stock. Also, these reissues are the very first time we've seen any Dug Dug's reissued on VINYL, yay!!!
As with the self-titled debut, the new cd version of this comes packaged in a handsome plastic-protected miniature lp style sleeve, complete with obi strip. Other than the text on the obi, there's no liner notes for this reissue, which we're told is a result of the difficulties inherent in licensing a release like this from a major label (it's owned by Sony BMG). In any case, we're glad it got reissued again, at all, and it's nice enough! Sooo recommended, equally up there with the debut, maybe even better, especially for folks who dig the cowbell-knockin', fuzz rockin' action.
This nice new reissue - and first time reish on vinyl - just HAD to be Record Of The Week. Boy oh boy do we love this band. An old, old favorite - in more ways that one, since these guys hail from the '70s. When we first discovered them some years ago, via their track on the Love Peace & Poetry: Latin America compilation, and then got their reissued albums on import cd, we were like, why aren't they famous?? Well, perhaps they are, or at least were, in Mexico where they're from (they're called Los Dug Dug's on account of being from the city of Durango, in the Mexican state of Durango).
Los Dug Dug's are, for us, a perfect blend of rock n' roll things we love: garage rock, psych-pop, power-prog. Lotsa cowbell, fuzz guitar, and flute, yes flute (especially on their second album, Smog). Part Tull, part Beatles, part Kinks, part Kiss...pretty darn kick ass really.
This self-titled album was their first, from the magic musical year of 1971, though sounding very sixties, and features English language vocals. It includes some of our favorite Dug Dug's songs, including the brilliant "Lost In My World" (also heard on the Mexican installment of the Love Peace & Poetry compilation series). There's also the frantic fuzzfest "Let's Make It Now" (which also boasts a drum solo), the groovy jangle of "I Got The Feeling", the equally groovy "It's Over" (with a nice JB's style intro), the very Beatlesy "Going Home", the lovely, spaced out "Sometimes", and the flutey, fanciful "Who Would Look At Me?", among other great flower POWER tunes. And when we say great, we mean really great. As in, this album is all-time favorite stuff for those lucky enough be clued in. Sure there's lots of wonderful obscurities out there, but Los Dug Dug's are one of those bands, like Q65, or Flower Travellin' Band, who you'd be hearing all the time on classic rock radio if they'd come from Detroit instead of Durango.
Now, we love ALL the Dug Dug's albums, and are happy to tell you that Smog (1972) will soon be getting the same reissue treatment by Lion/Get On Down soon, we should have it in a few weeks, and it'll probably have to be a ROTW too. Hopefully they'll also be reissuing Los Dug Dug's other albums Cambia, Cambia (1974) and El Loco (1975) eventually as well, one of these days.
Like we said, we've listed this album (and those others by Los Dug Dug's) before, but it was always tough to keep enough of 'em in stock, they were Mexican imports and never reliably available, seemingly going in and out of print in quite random fashion. Hopefully this new version will be around longer, and remain easy to stock! Also, this is the very first time we've seen any Dug Dug's reissued on VINYL, yay, and they've done a fine job of it.
Meanwhile, the new compact disc edition comes packaged in a nice, plastic protected miniature lp style sleeve, complete with obi strip... unfortunately beyond the brief blurb on the obi, there's no liner notes for this reissue, which is too bad 'cause we'd like to know more about this band who should be much better known north of the border. The obi alludes to the band's "failed trip to NYC" where they were hoping for their big break, that didn't work out but then they went back to Mexico and recorded this album, starting a sterling career regardless. We'd like to know more... according to Wikipedia, apparently they had some problems with the musician's union in New York, but upon their return to Mexico, bringing with them the music of the Beatles, they became one of the country's biggest rock acts, leaders in the new youth culture there. So it's unfortunate that some knowledgeable liner notes couldn't have been arranged, we're sure the Dug Dug's story is a fascinating one, but at least in all other respects the packaging is top-notch (though it would have been nice to have the tracklist someplace other than just on the obi, like on the back cover the way it is with the vinyl). In any case, it's the music that matters, and regarding that the obi has all the facts: "must have"... "essential".
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
'70s Mexican rockers Los Dug Dug's have been a big fave here at AQ for years and years, but for many of those years now we've had a hard time finding copies of the cd reissues of their albums to stock. Well, FINALLY just the other day we were lucky enough to get a batch of Dug Dug's discs back in, including (hopefully) enough of this one to list, which we'd never been able to do before! We also got a smaller handful of each of their other albums, already on our website.
El Loco originally came out in 1975, and was to be final Dug Dug's album. As you might guess from the cover, to an extent it emphasizes the power trio fuzzed out hard rock side of the band, but definitely not to the exclusion of the other elements that make Dug Dug's so great: the flutey prog, the funky grooves, the Beatlesy pop-psych... That cover photo, depicting the band jamming exuberantly amidst a cloud of dry ice fog, wearing glammy gear that in the case of the guitarist looks like it was borrowed from Ace Frehley's closet, is so cool though. How can you not dig the Dug Dug's looking like that? One thing you don't see in that picture though is the synthesizer, that makes its presence known in quite a trippy manner throughout the album, in particular on the appropriately crazy title track, all buzzing synth, choppy rhythms, and maniacal laughter!
There's a dozen tracks here in total, ranging from riffy rockers (like "Show Me", which might be what they're playing in that cover picture - or it could be "Stupid People" but where's the horn section?) to more gentle mellowness (such as "Quiero Verte"), some songs sung in English, others in Spanish. You get a flute-led instrumental, plenty of urgently uptempo acid rock grooviness, a bit of bubblegum pop, and dreamy psych... basically, like all Dug Dug's albums, El Loco is guaranteed to put a smile on your face one way or another!
Be warned, we don't really have a lot of these, and it might be a while before we can restock...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Although it's definitely NOT what's on their minds, these rutting deer could make great death metal vocalists, with their astonishingly lower-than-low utterances. I mean, a band with a rutting red deer on the mic would really give such animal-fronted bands as Caninus and Hatebeak a run for their money! One of my housemates certainly thought so (as he demonstrated by "lip-synching" along to these loud, belching cries while crouching with an imaginary microphone and making death metal singer faces). But no, these braying bucks are less interested in lending their talents to the service of brutal death metal than they are in attracting the ladies. Speaking of ladies, my girlfriend found this to be so disturbing she made me turn it off... it was giving her a headache. I guess she's lucky that she's not a female red deer!! Meanwhile, I actually find this rather entrancing...hmm I wonder what that means? Well, the misty, desolate background ambience of the forest is definitely nice, with birds twittering and hooves tromping through the underbrush. And despite her reaction, I knew instantly that we definitely needed these for Aquarius (she, knowing the sort of stuff AQ folks dig, like the Thai Elephant Orchestra and the Sounds Of North American Frogs, agreed).
Anyway, as you can see, I've been playing this for a lot of people. It's impossible not to. You'll be like, "Check this out!! Yes, that's a deer!" A real deer, not some monstrous behemoth, or a creaking door, or a sick cow stuck in a well, or a Wookie, or something sampled from a Fflint Central cd-r... Though their deep, echoing, weirdly stretched-out-sounding mating calls really sound like they have some sort of electronic effect on them! Nope, these are just pure, unadulterated field recordings from a forest in France of some lonely deer looking for love.
This 70+ minute disc has 16 tracks, acquainting the listener with all manner of roars, belches, barks, coughs, and other sounds produced by these stags during the rutting season (roughly September/October, as the weather cools). Some are solo performances, others feature choruses of other deer roaring in response...there are the bellows of a stag asserting dominance over his "harem", and there are recordings of male deer in competition -- including one track of clashing antlers (which is kinda their version of the infamous AQ "pipe-fight", a term we like to use to refer to the sounds of certain experimental recordings).
This cd comes with liner notes in both English and French that are extremely detailed, telling you everything you'd care to know and more about the sexual behavior of these deer and the noises they make, including a glossary and even sound spectrographic analysis of individual rutting calls. Such throughness is typical of the Sittelle label, the same folks that also brought us this week's Record Of The Week, The Inaudible World - A Sound Guide Of The French Bats. As you might guess, there's a lot of other cool environmental recordings on this label, and now that we've gotten into the swing of importing 'em from France we'll be listing more in the near future!
In our experience a lot of the best (and, of course, worst) cds released end up languishing in a forgotten corner of some distributor's warehouse, or under the label owner's bed... It's quite possible for something great but obscure to get released in an edition of 1,000 and then ten years later there's still 700+ copies gathering dust in a closet somewhere. We suspect that this Dumb And The Ugly cd is an example of this (though that's just a guess, maybe it sold well and has been re-pressed). What we do know is that this came out in 1992 in Australia and we liked it then and it's still great and we somehow just got a hold of a few copies. Despite the title, this isn't a "metal" album per se. It IS quite atmospheric, its eight tracks almost alternating between sheer sinister ambience (shortwave sounds, distorted operatic singing, underwatery drones) and heavy-duty guitar riffage a la Helmet or Circle. It's lumbering thud-rock with definite weird arty dark psychedelic pretensions, successfully so. We've only got a few but presumably there's more where these came from...
Ready to space out and drift off into a Swedish psychedelic never-never land?? Well if you are, Dungen is back and will take you there. The sixth album from these Scandinavian faves delivers the usual Dungen goodies. 10 new tracks, some proggier, some soft-rockier, some straight-up poppier than others, all quite nice! Oh and let's not forget the searing psych guitar freakouts like the one that erupts in track 5, "Hogdalstoppen". So fans of Dungen will be pleased - and at this point we'd like to assume you all are already familiar with Dungen, and thus most likely fans... which means we can reduce redundancy review-wise by simply saying, yeah, get this, you'd like it! Dungen don't go in any strange new directions here, it's just more of what we dig about 'em, though perhaps compared to their previous album 4 (which was their fifth, oddly enough) they return a bit to "the rock" from where they were on that one. Certainly Dungen can make the loveliest of lovely music when they wanna, or indulge in urgent rhythms and bursts of distorted guitar jangle. And all of it is carefully arranged, everything in its place, even when they're doing the freakout thing. Somehow they have the ability, in the all-instrumental first track for example, to be both blissed out and kick up a garagey ruckus at the same time. Elsewhere, the bliss out is nothin' but, with gentle female vocals, strings, and handclaps keeping the beat.
Listening to this, for the first time we realized that Dungen reminds us a bit of XTC side project The Dukes Of Stratosphear; it's partly mainman Gustav Ejstes' voice (even in Swedish), partly his pop smarts, and of course partly Dungen's fantastical, effortless retroishness... but at this point maybe we can say that Dungen have moved from "retro" category into the one designated "timeless"!
NB. domestic vinyl out 10.5.10, cheaper than the import vinyl on Subliminal Sounds...
Dungen's "Stadsvandringar" is Allan's new favorite cd (favorite new cd?). After a couple listens, he was well and truly hooked. Dungen is a Swedish band and what they play is Swedish retro psych-pop. Really really good Swedish retro psych-pop! This disc is, apparently, Dungen's second album after a vinyl-only effort that started a buzz. It looks and sounds perfectly '60s (or early '70s) with a front cover photo-collage in which wunderkind bandleader/singer/guitarist/songwriter Gustav Ejstes could be a dead ringer for a long-haired Owen Wilson. Musically, it sure casts a spell that that's definitely not-of-our-era... with sugary vocal refrains, wild fuzz guitars, Hammond B-3 organ riffing, lush arrangements, and some quite lovely flute bits (gettin' a bit proggy there, nothing wrong with that). Hints of trad Swedish folk music show up as well, not unlike that Arbete Och Fritid reissue we reviewed not long ago, one of Dungen's Svenska psych-prog-folk forefathers. The vocals are all in Swedish, and are sorta nasal, but good. Overall, this disc is just magical, convincingly retro yet standing on its own songwriting-wise. Melodically it's just as irresistable as the latest from Dungen's pal Bjorn Olsson, also reviewed here recently, but of course Dungen is more of a psychedelic rock thing. Imagine, maybe, if you can, something somewhere between the Kinks and Caravan, circa '69, with Swedish singing... Or just take Allan's word for it, this is great! We can only wonder why Dungen's retro-inclined Swedish labelmates like the Caesars and the Soundtrack Of Our Lives have gotten domestic US release and lots of attention, while this even better band is still only an import. Ah well, at least it's worth the higher import price!
NB. we should warn you that there's that annoying copy control technology on this cd (which means that 2 of the 11 songs aren't on Allan's iPod, boo hoo).
Rather surprisingly, vinyl of this was one of this year's Record Store Day releases. Wish we still had 'em but we sold all the copies we could get already. However, they also reissued it, as a two-for-one disc, on cd, and not being a RSD release we were able to get some of those to list. We've had reissues of both Dust albums before, most recently as rather expensive Repertoire imports, so here's the reviews of both of these proto-metal essentials.
For those who need to know: the American hard rock trio known as Dust are another of those legendary early '70s bands that get mentioned in the same breath with heavies like Captain Beyond, Sir Lord Baltimore, The James Gang, Bang, Stray, Leafhound, Highway Robbery, and the like. They cut two excellent lps of late-psychedelic-era proto-metal back in '71 and '72. Of their two albums, the first, self-titled one is swampier, with a lot of slide and country/southern rock moves on tracks like "Stone Woman" and "Chasin' Ladies". But then there's the lugubrious and weighty 10-minute epic "From A Dry Camel", and conversely, the gentle acoustic dreaminess of "Often Shadows Felt". Mostly, though, the album kicks ass with uptempo hard rockers, including the ripping, rollicking instrumental "Loose Goose" that closes the album quite frenetically.
Following that is 1972's Hard Attack, generally considered the harder of Dust's two albums, the more metal. Though that may be in part 'cause of the awesome Frank Frazetta cover painting, and album title! But perhaps it is somewhat more Sabbathian. "Downer rock" they called it back then (we're told). Their song "Suicide" (the penultimate track on side 2 of the original vinyl) - whooah, that could be Pentagram! That song alone makes this an essential purchase for any true doom/psych fan. It's an all time classic.
But it's not all doom n' gloom n' barbarians - Hard Attack has its lighter side, but unlike a lot of their peers, the poppier and/or less rockin' stuff Dust do here is actually really great. Sure, a song like "Thusly Spoken" features strings and a Beatlesy melody, but the lyrics still name-check Satan and speak of dancing demons. Lush, gorgeous downer-pop that sets you up to be crushed by the following, urgently hard-rockin' track "Learning To Die". They do that throughout the album, alternating gentle - even acoustic - numbers with the proggy proto-metal workouts that the headbangers of 1972 must have loved.
It's hard to understand why Dust didn't "make" it, as this stuff is certainly the equal of big sellers from their era by Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Great singing, riffs, melodies, and that "feel" - it's all here.
We mentioned Pentagram above - if you've got that Relapse anthology of Pentagram's original seventies recordings, First Daze Here, you should definitely check out the work of Dust, who were both contemporaries of, and an influence on, the Ram's Head boys. Yes, Dust are an important name on the list of forgotten but godlike '70s hard rock bands that make today's so-called stoner rockers sound like punk/grunge wanna-bes. In a word (again): classic. Too bad you'll never hear 'em on your local "classic rock" radio station...
Oh, and Dust featured the future Marky Ramone on drums, by the way, before he decided punk was the way to go (or even had that option).
This remastered reissue sports its own new cover design, but inside the thick cd booklet there's smaller versions of the original album art, plus lots of vintage photos, and plenty of liner notes (including some from Marky), etc.
Of Dust's two albums, this 1972 LP is considered the harder of the two, the more metal, the somewhat more Sabbathian. "Downer rock" they called it back then (we're told). Their song "Suicide" (track 9) -- whooah, that could be Pentagram! This track alone makes this an essential purchase for any true doom/psych fan. It's an all time classic. Between that and the awesome Frank Frazetta cover painting, what more could you want?
But it's not all doom n' gloom n' barbarians -- "Hard Attack" has its lighter side, but unlike a lot of their peers, the poppier and/or less rockin' stuff Dust do is actually really great. Sure, a song like "Thusly Spoken" features strings and a Beatlesy melody, but the lyrics still name-check Satan and speak of dancing demons. Lush, gorgeous downer-pop that sets you up to be crushed by the following, urgently hard-rockin' track "Learning To Die". They do that throughout the album, alternating gentle -- even acoustic -- numbers with the proto-metal workouts that the headbangers of 1972 must have loved.
It's hard to understand why Dust didn't "make" it, as this stuff is certainly the equal of big sellers from their era by Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Great singing, riffs, melodies, and that "feel" -- it's all here.
We mentioned Pentagram above -- if you bought that awesome Relapse label anthology of Pentagram's original seventies recordings that we recommended a few lists back, you should definitely check out the work of Dust, who were both contemporaries of and an influence on the Ram's Head boys. Dust are an important name on the list of forgotten but godlike '70s hard rock bands that make today's so-called stoner rockers sound like punk wanna-bes (bands like Lucifer's Friend, Highway Robbery, Orang-utan, Toad, Budgie, Sir Lord Baltimore, Captain Beyond, Leafhound, etc.). In a word (again): classic. Too bad you'll never hear 'em on your local "classic rock" radio station...
Not a new release, but listed for the first time 'cause we love it: The American hard rock trio known as Dust are another of those legendary early '70s bands that get mentioned in the same breath with heavies like Captain Beyond, Sir Lord Baltimore, The James Gang, Bang, and the like. They cut two excellent LPs of late-psychedelic-era proto-metal back in '71 and '72. This the first, self-titled one, and of their two albums, this one's swampier, with a lot of slide and country/southern rock moves on tracks like "Stone Woman" and "Chasin' Ladies". But then there's the lugubrious and weighty 10-minute epic "From A Dry Camel" and the gentle acoustic dreaminess of "Often Shadows Felt". Mostly, though, the album kicks ass with uptempo hard rockers. Maybe they could be considered the American version of Nazareth (with vocals somewhat less soaked in whiskey). What we're saying is: pretty great!
Dust features the future Marky Ramone on drums, by the way, before he decided punk was the way to go.
Eccentric outsider doom metal from the '80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words "doom" or "metal" make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn't like any metal you've ever heard, really. More like spaced out '60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song's called "Heavy Vibrations", man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects... That's where the "outsider" tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It's so DIY that the cds have his phone number on 'em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double cd anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an '80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it's hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.
Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that's a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we're guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other "metal" albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.
Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you'd almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr's for real, something we'd vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother's bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the '80s, two from the '00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and "heaviest". A Record Of The Week, easy.
There's 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There's nothing that's NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track "Animals") are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock/metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of "Chocolate Mescalyne", a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.
And then there's the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it's not "normal" doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. "Ghost Lover", for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs' "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", and Duane's vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy "Evil Lures" too... Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks "to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments". We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin' like that. It's pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above...
Gotta give it up to the folks at Drag City, they're (weird) music lovers after our own hearts, all right. Not only did they reissue the eccentric 1986 outsider "doom" "metal" "masterpiece", Animals, by one-man-band Duane Warr aka Dwarr (an album that we at aQuarius had previously made a Record Of The Week, back when we were ordering an earlier, self-released cd version directly from Dwarr himself, we might add), they have now reissued that album's predecessor, 1984's privately pressed Starting Over - which, despite its title, was in fact Dwarr's debut. Thereby proving that they didn't just put out Animals for a lark! They're serious about their love for Dwarr, and really think people should hear his stuff - and people should, we agree. Maybe not all people, but certainly people who appreciate the finer things in, well, wacked out, downer DIY psychedelia, occasionally dosed with Eddie Van Halen style guitar shred. It's the '60s in the '80s, the dark sides of both decades distilled down to a unique, entertainingly demented essence. And not just entertaining, but truly affecting.
Now, we hope you already have Animals (go read our rave review of that right now, if you haven't!). If you do have it, we probably only need say you want this too. If you don't, well, while we would have to say Animals is the #1 best Dwarr, this one comes close, certainly possessing a similar vibe, and since it was the man's first album, there's no reason not to start with it if you wish to delve into the weird world of Dwarr. In fact, depending on your inclinations, this one might just be a bit more accessible, as it's not so overtly metallic, but perhaps even more sparse and psychedelic (if possible). Super slow but for the soloing. Black Sabbath is perhaps less of an influence on this one, than Pink Floyd... Or at least, rather than riff monsters like "Iron Man" and "Electric Funeral", this one takes its cues from the mellower, pot-wreathed Sabbath numbers like "Solitude" and "Planet Caravan". This is a gentler, folkier Dwarr, sort of. But definitely druggy and proggy (like Captain Beyond, circa Sufficiently Breathless), very odd and home-brewed, and certainly sometimes heavy too. Well, always "heavy", maaaann.
The songs are moody and melancholic, with hushed, woeful vocals. The production is lo-fi, of course, with tinny, trebly guitars indulging in widdly, effect-drenched soloing. Heck, there's a gnarly two-minute instrumental called "Christmas Shopping" that sounds like something Mick Barr might do, overdosed on cough syrup! Or anyone remember the '90s Mexican prog/psych band Humus? Probably not, but it totally could be them. And is that a genius song title or what? We also like "Lonely Ecstasy" as a title, that's another one here. Well, he's got a lot of interesting ideas, that Dwarr. And, as with Animals, this has an amazing piece of album cover artwork, to match the music in outsidery strangeness.
Along with Sabbath and Floyd, another "ordinary" comparison we could make would be to, maybe, solo Steve Hillage in the '70s. And Hendrix is a likely influence (Dwarr's vocals on "I've Been Thinking" kinda remind us of Jimi). Uli Jon Roth's solo stuff, too?? But given an even more eccentric, living-in-his-mother's-basement makeover. Then there's the pantheon of other outsiders we love, with whom Dwarr totally belongs... Michael Yonkers, Bobb Trimble, Todd Tamanend Clark, and more recently, and possibly more precisely too due to the doom metal element, Tony Tears.
Ok, enough said really. Either we've piqued your interest, or your life will stay sadly Dwarr-free. And again, if you're already a fan, you'll want this for sure!
Hmmm. Maybe 25 years from now Drag City will be reissuing Fastest albums too...
We don't always get everything that stoner rock specialists Small Stone put out, but the stuff that we do, is always really good. Case in point, this new disc from a trio we'd never heard of before, Dwellers. We're guessing there's some sort of Lovecraftian connotation to their name, though the ropy intestines / psychedelic tentacles in the portrait painting of the band on the cover are presumably referencing the album title too, but not in a gross way. Anyway, Dwellers are a heavy duty stoner metal band from Salt Lake City, with some grunge going on, the vocals in particular definitely giving it a bit of that old school Seattle vibe.
Actually, after getting this Dwellers in, and digging it, we realized that while we hadn't known who they were, we HAD reviewed, and really liked, an album by the singer/guitarist's previous band, Iota, also on Small Stone. These lines from our review of Iota's Tales pretty much also apply to Dwellers' debut: "A mixture of trippy Hawkwindiness and more aggressive blues based hard rockin', sorta like (early) Soundgarden or Skin Yard meets the heavier, more spaced out sounds of Sons Of Otis or UFOmammut. One reason we mention Soundgarden and Skin Yard is 'cause of the grungy melodic vocals, which bear a certain resemblance to that of those bands, but otherwise this is HEAVIER and SPACIER than any Seattle grunge for sure."
So, sweet. Dwellers definitely continue to a large degree in that Iota tradition, these six tracks being damn heavy, fuzzed-out, and graced with the gruff, drawling, grunge-worthy vox of Iota's Joey Toscano (the rhythm section here having their own pedigree, being from the band Subrosa). Maybe in comparison to Iota there's something a little bit earthier, and even bluesier, to these jams, which while they can get lengthy (up to ten minutes), don't orbit quite as far out in space as some of Iota's more extended, alien assaults. Instead, there's a greater focus on, say, Southern-fried slide guitar in service of Dwellers' gritty rockin'. There's slowburn builds ("Old Honey") and catchy groovers ("Lightening Ritual"), Good Morning Harakiri sometimes stompin', and sometimes spaced out, with lots of loping riffage and raspy holler. Maybe imagine a much more succinct Earthless, gone grunge? Dead Meadow channelling some Alice In Chains? CoC circa Blind, playing the blues?? Ah, we're not quite getting it right. But anyway, if you're into the stoner rock stuff and want a good dose (of something a bit different, but still familiar), give this a listen! Recommended.
By the way, we like how this album, despite being on cd, is obviously sequenced with a Side One / Side Two concept in mind, the tracklist on the back cover making this obvious with a gap between tracks 3 and 4.
Stellar 2nd album from Salt Lake City psychedelic stoners Dwellers - whom our Andee just got to see play live when they opened for A Minor Forest's tour stop in their town. He says they were GREAT, which we'd have expected since we liked their first album, and this one too. Compared to the debut, this new one seems a bit more mellowed out, at first anyway, but really it runs the gamut, from dusky balladry to heavy jams (often delivering both at the same time), getting especially epic on numbers like "Rare Eagle" and album-closer "Call Of The Hallowed Horn". Loping and bluesy, with a bit of a down home, Southern feel, this pure good heavy, hazy music from a trio that knows what they're doin', employing (besides guitars, bass and drums) such additional instruments as cello, organ, and Rhodes piano, along with "real" singing for sure... previously we'd mentioned how the vocals made us think of some good old Seattle grunge, now that comparison could resolve into a more specific Mark Lanegan reference. Recommended! FYI, vinyl version due in July.
Hey all right!! We hadn't heard much from these local, long haired, lost-in-time rockers for far too long, 'cause their singing drummer moved away for a while, but is back in town, and now they have a new album out, however only released on limited edition vinyl, a European import (which by the way comes with a cd-r burn of the album as well). We just got some of the last few copies there are direct from the band. If we weren't already familiar with 'em, and didn't deal with these guys in person, though, we'd coulda been fooled into thinking it was a reissue of something from the early '70s proto-metal era, or ever earlier, as they so convincingly channel the likes of Sir Lord Baltimore, Blue Cheer, Highway Robbery, Speed Glue & Shinki, James Gang, Dust, and other inspirations of that ilk in their badass heavy psych groove, totally authentic circa 1969-'72 sounding (well, except that we think we hear 'em head 'em make an anachronistic reference to Beyonce in the lyrics to "Nasty Girl"). And amidst the lumbering riff-rock, they also get into what's simply fuzzed-up '60s garage, Nuggets style, so bands like The Seeds are probably big influences too. Plus, most of the lyrics pertain to girl trouble, a traditional, very garagey subject.
So if you're into heavy fuzz rockin', this is quite recommended. Furthermore, we were delighted to discover that side one contains a Rodriguez cover!! They do "Only Good For Conversation", the fuzziest one from the Detroit Dylan's cult classic 1970 debut Cold Fact, a track we described in our review of the Cold Fact reissue as a "stone(d) cold classic when it comes to heavy duty fuzz guitar crunch" so it's a natural for the Dzjenghis Khan boys. Very cool. Also very cool is that side two starts off with a recording of Dzjenghis Khan's best song ever, or at least our favorite, called "God Damn", we remember it from probably the first time we ever saw 'em play, always a show stopper, encapsulating everything rad about this band.
By the way, we still have a couple (literally, two) copies of their self-titled cd debut from a few years back, on the the now defunct Japanese stoner metal label Leaf Hound, otherwise totally out of print.
