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You have to be pretty darn metal to get into this band, and that's as it should be: no poseurs allowed!! Metalucifer are Japanese metalheads (some from the cult black metal combo Sabbat) paying tribute to the glory days of '80s true metal, a la Maiden and

RealAudio clip: Warriors Ride On The Chariots
RealAudio clip: Heavy Metal Samurai

As you might guess after seeing 'em posing for pictures in front of a wall of vintage metal vinyl, these Japanese nutjobs are bigger metal maniacs than almost anyone else on the planet. And, they manage to do justice to their obssession with the music they make. This here disc is metal proof: the "ultimate US edition" of their debut album Heavy Metal Hunter, augmented by English language-tracks taken from their hard to find Heavy Metal Drill disc. Thus this includes 2 versions of title track "Heavy Metal Hunter pt.1" (one with extra solos) and a take of "Heavy Metal Hunter pt. 2" along with such songs as "Wolf Man" (both Japanese and English versions), "Bloody Countess" (likewise), "Headbanging" (ditto), and more. Totally old school, NWOBHM worship goin' on, delivered in a delightful tongue-in-cheek fashion -- we think. If you've ever seen local San Francisco metallers The Lord Weird Slough Feg end a live set with their raging cover of "Heavy Metal Hunter" you'll probably want this disc (and as it happens we have just enough copies to provide for the needs of all three of you).

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OMG! An awesome concept for a single. It helps if you already know this - there's a ridiculous but fun old school style cult metal band called Metalucifer, a side project of Japan's Sabbat. They are pretty much the most metal thing ever. Most of Metalucifer's album and song titles have the words "Heavy Metal" in them, like "Heavy Metal Bulldozer" and "Heavy Metal Hunter". If you're a true metalhead, to know them is to love them. So, uber-talented metalhead Chris Black, of Dawnbringer and High Spirits fame, decided to write and record a tribute 7" to Metalucifer, probably entirely because he had thought up a silly name for the project, MetalUSAfer. Get it? Chris is American, you see. And rather than simply do Metalucifer covers, Chris wrote two brand new meat-and-potatoes (as he describes them) metal songs in the style of Metalucifer: "Heavy Metal Hammer" and "Heavy Metal Saviour"! And they're a lot of fun. Really not too far off from the NWOBHM-worship of High Spirits, 'cause that's Metalucifer's big inspiration too, but taking the overt, absurd metal-isms to another level. High Spirits would never go there. These two tracks are all about simple riffage, catchy choruses, and intentionally cliched lyrics (using the words heavy & metal as much as possible). But it's a sincere tribute (with approval from Metalucifer to use their logo), and Chris Black's distinctive, honest voice and heartfelt delivery can't help but give this material more emotional depth than you might expect at first blush. We guess after doing that great Aktor 7" with Jussi from Circle (and btw, Chris tells us they ARE doing an Aktor full-length too), some of Jussi's trademark high-concept silliness rubbed off on Chris, and MetalUSAfer is the neat-o result. By the way, now Harry here has a great idea: what about a band called Meta-Lucifer, that only does songs ABOUT Metalucifer? Clearly their signature song would have to be called "Heavy Metal Metalucifer"! We mentioned this to Chris Black, and he suggested that to truly be Meta-Lucifer, the Meta-Lucifer release would have to be a recording of Harry simply TALKING about doing a band called Meta-Lucifer. We'll be announcing the Kickstarter soon...

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We know a lot of you, like us, are fans of the supreme sludge majesty of Portland, Oregon's mighty Yob. Over the course of four albums, Yob reigned as one of the heaviest, spaciest doom-prog outfits ever, sounding something like a tripped-out Rush on 16rpm, mixed with the riffs of Sabbath and Sleep, all super epic, doomy and psychedelic. What's not to love? Not only that, but they always stopped in to shop at Aquarius whenever in town. So, we were certainly sad when Yob broke up, a while ago. But now, we're very glad to report that Yob mastermind Mike Scheidt has bounced back with a new band, Middian, who have just made their debut on Yob's old label Metal Blade. And Middian pretty much take up where Yob left off. It's again a trio, it's again totally doom, and Mike's trademark combination of soaring, electronically effected clean singing and growling gutturalisms is still in place. But the five new tracks that comprise Age Eternal's 57 minutes are if anything darker and denser than anything Yob had yet achieved, yet also maybe more melodic. Middian is at times faster paced (not all doom, even with songs as long as these, has to be slow all the time) than Yob ever was, but Middian's songcraft embraces a wide array of emotions and dynamics. The aggro impetus of opener "Dreamless Eye" definitely reminds us that Mike was often looking for death metal records when visiting our shop, while elsewhere on this album the listener is enveloped by blissful swirling layers of slo-mo, melodic drone. If you liked Yob, if you like Mammatus, if you like Neurosis, if you like Lesbian, this should be right up your alley. However we're not sure if Metal Blade's marketing idea (as expressed on the cover sticker-blurb) that this is for fans of The Sword, High On Fire, and the Obsessed is quite correct... while fans of those bands could and should love Middian, this is still quite a bit more sonically and structurally "extreme" than any of those. Maybe add Boris and Ufomammut to that list, at least, to come closer to Middian's mean between psychedelic stoner metal and brutal doom. PS we noticed online that Middian is playing a record release party for this album in Portland tonight, Friday April 13th, with both Asunder and Slough Feg also on the bill -- damn, wish we could be there!

MPEG stream: Dreamless Eye
MPEG stream: The Blood Of Icons

Braggadocious San Francisco metallers Midnight Chaser unleash their album debut, brought to us by the same label that put out the Vektor album we highlighted last list. But while Vektor blew minds with their advanced thrash tech, Midnight Chaser are much more retro and rockin' than that. They play sleazy hard rock steeped in the sounds of the late '70s/early '80s New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a la Diamond Head, Blitzkrieg, Chateaux, and Tank. And we know they know their stuff, they covered Tank on the limited edition ep that preceded this, and are named after a song by obscure NWOBHMers White Spirit (the band that Iron Maiden third wheel Janick Gers got his start in). Combine that with their native Californian good time rock n' roll roots and you've got a party... in fact, the lead off track here, entitled "Awesome Party" (actually Midnight Chaser's original name before wiser heads prevailed) tells you pretty much all you need to know. Super catchy chugging riffiness, in support of the singer's spirited contention that he's "got nothing to lose", "really need(s) to cut loose" and is "looking for an awesome party tonight". And it would be an awesome party, if Midnight Chaser were playing... The whole rest of the record is similarly rockin' and fun, including their cover of "Dynamite" from Blackout by the Scorpions. Other things to like about 'em: the singer has short hair, wears aviator shades, and thus kinda has a Graham Bonnet thing going. The disc's cartoonish cover is pretty rad/ridiculous, depicting a sexy woman of indeterminate age (possibly the protagonist of track 5, "Cougar'd") riding a mechanical amplifier beast with electric guitars for legs, galloping across a hot pink landscape. Yeah they're not very grim and kvlt, are they? But take a break from the black metal and rock out for once! Seems we've got a little New Wave Of San Francisco Old School Awesome Partying Heavy Metal happening here, with the likes of Space Vacation, Hot Fog, and now these guys! Cool.

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Good grief, this is the second album AQ's reviewed by Pittsburgh's Midnite Snake and I've only just NOW gotten the terrible pun implicit in their band name. Snake, snack, geddit? Ugh, wish I hadn't! Oh well, let's not hold that pun against 'em, 'cause this is a damn fine disc of raw, in-the-red, motorpsycho, amp-fried garagey geetar heaviness in the tradition of bands like High Rise and The Heads. The cool/curious thing about Midnight Snake is that it's obvious that they're totally IN control of the out-of-control, if your know what we mean. It's weird in a way, for something that's supposed to sound so SCUZZY they're actually not that sloppy. So, what are this fright-masked trio up to this time 'round? They kick things off by kicking out the jams on the nine-minute "Cruise Control", effects swirling and burbling, bass throbbing, fuzzzzzzzzz baking yr ears to a crisp. Track two, "Sacred Mist" is an even longer jam, moodier at the beginning before building up to the requisite freakout. And then, with track three "Bigfoot '69" they REALLY go off but check out the drumming, tight! It's got all the "get down" energy of something by the late great Lubricated Goat. They follow that up with the mellow "In The Grass", it's all quiet and pretty for over four minutes... what happened??? Smoking grass instead of popping pills we guess, but it's nice. Soon enough, with track five "Shaving The Angel" they're back to the frazzed, fuzzed, frantic sort of stomp-splatter that Midnite Snake fans want to hear from Midnite Snake. Feedback squeal squalls and all. And then, holy crap, the final track number six "Supermodified" is a doozy. Nearly 26 minutes! Mantric noisy space rock mayhem. File with yr White Hills, Residual Echoes, Comets On Fire... and Japanese stuff like Mainliner, Musica Transonic and Acid Mothers Temple (this actually even LOOKS a helluva lot like an AMT album).

MPEG stream: Cruise Control
MPEG stream: Bigfoot '69

Collected on cd for the first time, Norton unleases 75 minutes of classic R&B/soul/funk singles sides from turban-wearing singer, including such great cuts as "Big Chief Hug-Um An' Kiss-Um", "Jerkin' The Dog", "Fishin' Pole", "The Truth Shall Make You Free"

RealAudio clip: Motha Goose Breaks Loose
RealAudio clip: Hymn No. 5
RealAudio clip: The Truth Shall Make You Free

Some recommended, unusual improv here. We were quite surprised at what a pleasant and compelling listen this is, considering the definite weirdness and occasional wackiness of it, which comes mainly from the "Two Voices" referred to in the title. Those two voices - belonging to Phil Minton and Audrey Chen (who also have a duo-only all-voice disc out on Sub Rosa, released simultaneously with this, that we'll be listing soon too) - specialize in mostly nonverbal, nonsensical "singing" - not really what most folks would call singing, but freely improvised sound-making with lips, teeth, tongue, throat, lungs... And what they do is really taken to extremes here - quiet extremes as there's not really any screaming or shouting. Lots of moaning muttering mumbling whining wailing whispering whistling burbling babbling blubbering hissing and humming, however. Pretty much almost any noise you could imagine being able to make with your mouth and some others that you can't! And while without meaning linguistically, you can't say it's not meaningful on some other level, more primal and emotive. Sometimes there's a silliness to it, Minton and Chen sounding like Muppety monsters with gastric disorders, but sometimes it can be downright disturbing, harrowing stuff like a chorus of damned souls; either way we're enjoying it and we think fans of, like, Mike Patton's various vocal experiments and a lot of the singing of Eye from the Boredoms would really dig this too. Obviously that also goes for anyone already into UK voice improv vet Phil Minton - or similar "sound poet" Jaap Blonk of Holland. On the face of it what we've just described might seem to be outside of a lot of folks' usual musical comfort zone, but for those with open ears, we feel that this comes off as being intriguing and entrancing rather than in any way annoying, also in part perhaps because of the other elements on here, the "Four Instruments" portion of this quintet (as well as singing, Chen plays cello, Segers is on electric bass, Jacquemyn on double bass, and Verbruggen plays drums), which provide the perfect environment of gently improvised "chamber orchestra" music for these eccentric voices to inhabit. The instruments and voices really mesh well, the musicians laying down delicate drones, skittery percussion, scraping strings... all of which mimic or is mimicked at times by the human voices themselves, achieving an atmospheric synthesis, so you can't always tell what's voice and what's instrument, not to mention how many there are. It's soothingly bass-heavy, as you might imagine from the instrumentation, and also as we said rather gentle and oddly pleasant, with quiet blissed-out stretches, despite its textural density and potential disturbance factor. Even when Minton, on the fourth track, gets into some rapid fire glossolalic mumbo-jumbo like an auctioneer with Tourette's, it's actually somewhat hypnotic (or amusing). By the way, he's the only person on here with whom were were previously familiar (and we haven't reviewed much by him, just a couple albums he's been on with folks like Bob Ostertag and Tom Cora), most of the other folks are presumably from the Belgian improv scene since this was recorded in Brussels and released on Sub Rosa. Again, like we said, a bit of a surprise, but we've been listening to this A LOT, even when going to sleep at night. Strange dreams...

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It's been well over a decade since our ears have been assaulted by a -new- recording from intense Swiss industrial-jazz juggernaut 16-17, though thankfully in recent years there's been a couple crucial reissues via the Savage Land label, including one, of 1994's Gyatso, that we made a Record Of The Week not too long ago, in 2008. While 16-17 are long gone, now it's almost as if some of their extreme spirit has been reincarnated in the form of this new band, MIR, whose debut compact disc on Savage Land is in fact produced by 16-17 mastermind Alex Buess. MIR, it turns out, is the project of one-time 16-17 drummer Daniel Buess (who is apparently NOT related to Alex, oddly enough) in a trio with two others. Daniel is credited with drums, metal percussions, and electronics, while the other members of MIR play guitar, bass, organ, and synth, lots of synth. Heavily effected electronics and punishing percussive strikes are definitely the two key elements of MIR's all-instrumental "experimental rock music" sound. They traffic in droning noise, isolationist improv, sludge and skree filled soundscapery, and no wavish punk, MIR synthesizing something both avant garde and physically primal. Among the seven tracks on this not-quite-half-hour album, the most 16-17 sounding one here is probably "Animal Instinct", with the swingin' jackboot precision of its big rhythmic boom-thwap, floor-scraping distorted bass, and dense layers of abstract electronic groan and drone (however there's no sax attack though, which is one way that MIR differs from 16-17). To mention a few other songs, there's also the skittery grooves of "Jimbo", the sinister shimmering drones of "Organ Donor", the uptempo energetic guitar throttling of "Hit", and the sudden attacks and echoed decay of the darkly atmospheric "Terminal Reverb", which sounds like it's part Starfuckers, part Spectre. Also we could also compare MIR to a mix of Supersilent and Shit & Shine, perhaps... along with, of course, 16-17. Very cool, and best played LOUD, if you dare.

MPEG stream: Animal Instinct
MPEG stream: No Parts Inside
MPEG stream: Terminal Reverb

Surveys show that, like, 25 percent of Icelanders believe in elves. And we're pretty sure the other 75 percent fervently believe in post-rock. Actually, there's probably a lot of overlap there... Here's the first album from Miri, "four guys from the remote east fjords of Iceland" who play a mostly instrumental form of indie pop post-rock, with a knack for pretty melodies amidst their moody mathiness. What we weren't expecting - and what immediately grabbed us - was how the very first track is chock full of dubby attacks, everything suddenly all awesomely echo-effected out. Love that!! Other interesting production twists exist throughout the album, courtesy of Icelandic electronica artist Curver, who similarly also added a lot of cool glitch to a disc we liked long long ago by metalcore act Minus. And in addition to the electronic studio trickery of Curver, this is graced by guest musicians, among 'em members of Mum and Benni Hemm Hemm, who expand the group's instrumentation to include harmonica, vibraphone, flute, and marimba. Also, we noticed Brooklyn's Scotty Hard (of WordSound fame) namechecked in the credits, we don't know what he had to do with this exactly (since we're not fluent in Icelandic) but were were surprised to see him there, or maybe not, what with that aforementioned dubbiness!! Sometimes noisy yet sunshiney, mildly mathy yet melodic, often calming but also rhythmically compelling (do Icelandic elves dance to stuff like this?), Miri's Okkar is definitely a contender for post-rock record of the month. Heck, let's declare it post-rock album of the winter (it's not even winter yet, but they're from Iceland so it's appropriate... plus this will keep us warm then, with its bright, mesmeric grooves).

MPEG stream: Goda Konan
MPEG stream: Draugar
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It's strange how often instead of a proper album, a band's posthumous live/odd-n-ends release often ends up being my favorite (sez Allan), like A Minor Forest's "So, Were They In Some Sort of Fight", This Heat's "Made Available", Devo's "Hardcore Devo Vol. 1", "Last Clouds" collects a bunch of early and unreleased material from the now-defunct San Francisco space-rock / drone-core ensemble Mirza (which was Glenn Donaldson, Brian Lucas, Steven R. Smith, and Mark Williams). Specifically, the disc includes the four tracks from Mirza's debut 12" inch (orginally released by Autopia in 1996) and seven previously unreleased tracks recorded from 1995-98 -- live improvisations from shows and rehearsals we think. Glenn (who remains very active in the post-Mirza outfit Thuja, as well as other projects like The Knit Separates, Blithe Sons, Skygreen Leopards, etc.) describes these recordings as sounding like early Skullflower. And it's true that there's a psychedelic density of sound shared by both Mirza and Skullflower, but Mirza was prone to meander where Skullflower's structured moments were much more brutal and unrelenting than these sensitive boys could ever be -- although some of these tracks come mighty close! On these disc, Mirza plays around with various drugged-out psych-rock riffs that get incrementally heavier throughout each track, rhythmically emulating the best Krautrock grooves that doubtless occupied a lot of their listening. Inspired stuff, in all senses. This material will definitely come as a bit of a surprise to those who know Mirza from their more "ambient, bliss-out" styled stuff on the Darla label! Also fans of Thuja's gorgeous drone-jams, or Steven R. Smith's lovely solo releases, may be astonished at how noisy, loud, heavy and rocked-out some of this is, but we're sure they can dig it. More proof that Mirza and their whole extended musical family were/are something for us here in San Francisco to be quite proud of, in the realm of worldclass psychedelic drone improv rock. And look out for the brilliant new Thuja album "Ghost Plants" coming in January on the Emperor Jones label for further confirmation of this fact.

RealAudio clip: West
RealAudio clip: Acts/Volcano of Birds
RealAudio clip: Nostalgia

We listed this amazing black metal disc way back in July '99 (AQ-list #77) but somehow it never made it on to our website database! Also, it's been out of print for about a year now -- but just this week we got newly-repressed copies from the label. "Yes, that's plural Apocalpyses, how evil is that?! And only one key to those gates...anyway, this disc is perhaps Allan and Andee's favorite new black metal find. A one-man side project of Russian (!) Emperor-clones Nokturnal Mortum. While that band was merely ok, this project absolutely rules. One track only, an over-seventy minute long 'song' that begins with dark ambient rumblings, encounters growling wolves, delves into Burzum-like fuzz-trance, all that before erupting into truly epic black metal riffing...an hour later you'll be hiding under your bed trembling with fear (or perhaps slaking your thirst with blood and howling at the moon) but the song still isn't over! A very impressive piece of work. Triumphant evil!" Since I wrote that, pagan folk metallers Nokturnal Mortum (who are actually Ukrainian, really, not Russian -- a distinction important to them, I'm sure!) have released some newer albums that we really liked, notably their latest, "NeChrist", which many of you bought and presumably enjoyed. Anyone that applies to MUST get this disc too if you don't already have it. Likewise for fans of other avantgarde black metal like Caacrinolas or the aforementioned Burzum and Potentiam... Let me (Allan) quote myself again, this time from the pages of, uh, Cool Beans magazine: "...this disc is amazing! Not just for the novelty of a seventy-minute 'song' that incorporates both ambient forest-rumble (I swear, you'll smell the breath of the wolf) and straight-up black metal riffarama, but for the sheer quality of the music alone! ... Perfect for staring out of a train window into a darkened, rainy and unknown landscape of a foreign land." Obviously, recommended!

Yay, the '70s Japanese psych rock reissues continue! Years ago this one was available on cd as a fancy expensive Japanese import, but that's been gone for ages so it's nice to have this new reish. A Path Through Haze (great title, eh?) is the mostly instrumental 1971 solo album from acid guitarist Mizutani, a fixture of the scene as a session axe, you'll find him supplying the fuzzed out leads on such records as Love Live Life +1's Love Will Make A Better You and People's Ceremony - Buddha Meets Rock. With this, he stepped out on his own with what proved to be his only album as leader. It's an ambitious affair, employing not only an all-star cast of his heavy friends from the psych scene, but also both string quartet and woodwind quartets. Also prominent on this record is the Hammond organ, piano, and Moog synth of Masahiko Satoh, who did his own album also entitled A Path Through Haze somewhat later. Confusing, eh? "A Path Through Haze" is also a song on both albums, it seems it's a Satoh composition. Here that song starts off with gentle keyboard shimmer, before Mizutani gets his licks in about halfway through, amidst much spaceiness of effects. And that's sorta how it goes with this record, lots of pretty keyboards, yes, plenty of nice moody melody, but Mizutani (usually) eventually unleashes the fuzz, particularly on rockier/riffier numbers like the Hendrix-y "One For Janis". The "chamber rock" restraint characteristic of some of this record only lasts so long, the likes of "Tell Me What You Saw" being a bit of a freak-out, with mathy prog rock rippage galore. And its Satoh's synth that goes nuts some of the time too. This one didn't make the top 50 in Julian Cope's Japrocksampler, by the way... in fact, he actually bags on this one a bit, but WE like it, so there. Cope also didn't like Foodbrain either. While we'll agree that we'd have been happy to hear Mizutani wail away here even more than he does, it's still a beautiful album, and even its most stonery sit-com soundtrack fusion moments have a certain charm.

MPEG stream: A Path Through Haze
MPEG stream: Turning Point
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All right! It's about time this legendary slice of South American psych got a not-inordinately-expensive cd reissue we could stock. We've been into this band/album ever since a REALLY expensive but beautiful (and now long-gone) vinyl reissue came out on Shadoks some years ago. Now World In Sound makes it available on cd in a fancy thick triple-fold sleeve that preserves the great psychedelic gatefold art from the original LP -- art that Acid Mothers Temple would die for! There's a 14-page booklet with notes and photos as well. This is definitely one for all you '70s heavy psych freaks! Super fuzz wah guitar and organ jamming stoner psych-prog from Brazil, circa 1970. Nine tracks packed with sinewy jams, trippy fx, weighty grooves... definitely appealing to the same head-space as contemporaries like Iron Butterfly, Dug Dug's, Captain Beyond, Speed Glue & Shinki, Hendrix, Flower Travellin' Band, etc. And we're pretty certain that current South American stoner rock faves Los Natas must be into this album too... Also, you may in fact have heard one track from this before, on the ever-recommended Love, Peace & Poetry: Latin American Psychedelic Music comp also on Shadoks, but that track only hints at how cool this album is. (They also have a track on the LP&P Brazilian volume too.) Here's a quote from one of the band members, the organist, that ought to give some flavor of what they were all about: "The music of Modulo 1000 had its own appeal to an audience that wanted a heavy, raw, experimental, psychedelic sound. Our kind of music did not make it to the radio stations. It was too wild. The distribution of the record was done in a very limited way. The record label directors, which probably didn't understand or even didn't like our music, did zero promotion for the LP." Thus, one darn heavy, weird, and utterly rare record! This reish also includes seven bonus tracks (from where/when is left unexplained) some of which are freaky enough to fit with the actual record itelf, but just aren't as heavy -- more Latin groovy.

MPEG stream: Nao Fale Com Paredes
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Not for the faint of heart. But pretty bad ass. If you can say that about an academic, avant-garde, micro-detailed, solo VIOLIN recording. Two discs worth to boot! Norwegian composer Ole-Henrik Moe (henceforth known as OHM as per the liner notes), who studied with extreme 20th c. classical dude Iannis Xenakis, offers up 43+40 minutes of stark, scary musick, all brilliantly performed by his wife, violinist Kari Ronnekleiv. Disc one, "Ciaccona", is a tour-de-force of scratching and sawing and scraping, tortured strings sculpting some kind of strange and terrible beauty out of the vast (yet intimate) soundspace that the resonant silences present here delineate. In fact, these recordings took place an a (presumably empty) church, that Ronnekleiv alone fills with menacing drones. It's pretty frickin' amazing that this is all played straight through by one person. She's got incredible stamina and such subtle, awesome control, her fingers commanding overtones, with no overdubs. More high end shriek and suspenseful shimmer is to be heard on disc two, "3 Persephone Perceptions". On both discs, at times it's like you're hearing the violin analog to a free jazz saxphonist's circular breathing freakout, or for that matter a demented little kid's frantic balloon-rubbing. But plenty of it is quiet and atmospheric as well, full of droning delicate waver, suggesting the weeping of a frightened child. Sudden bursts of sound are the whip hand coming down. With all these dynamics of hush and hysterics, this is a palate cleanser that puts other stuff in perspective... put on some, say, Wolf Eyes or Yellow Swans on after this and they'll sound like campfire singalongs. Heck try this back to back with some black metal, we swear the corpsepainted ones will seem just a little less intense than they previously did. Hmm...Orthrelm/Octis might be a match for it though. Maybe it's the association we make between stabbing violins and stabbing knives due to Bernard Herrmann's infamous score to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, but this is definitely "shower scene" music at times. And the whole thing could easily be running through the head of any self-respecting resident of your local Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Play it LOUD. And tremble. Perhaps how we're describing this isn't what OHM intended... but c'mon it's what any normal person's gonna hear. And also what any abnormal person (i.e. typical AQ customer) who digs the weirder, out-there edges of "20th Century Classical" (a la Xenakis), is gonna like. Comes in the usual nice Rune Grammofon packaging with a suitably evocative Kim Hiorthoy designed digipack sleeve.

MPEG stream: Ciaccona track 14
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Of all the various collaborations that krautrock maestro Moebius of Cluster fame has been involved in, we have to say this 1983 collaboration with Gerd Beerbohm might just be the most mind blowing of them all. Originally released on Sky, it's been out of print for ages, so we were so thrilled when we saw Bureau B was going to reissue it, as it's a record that foreshadowed so many sounds of the rhythmic underground that we would love for years to come. The record opens with "Minimotion" a totally menacing and suspenseful track that sets the mood perfectly for the rest of the record. Like the darkest side of Goblin, or what John Carpenter would want to base the tension of an entire film around. The next two tracks "Hydrogen" and "Narkose" are stunning in how ahead of their time they sound, even now. It's like an otherworldly version of minimal techno, practically the blueprint for what the Chain Reaction crew would be creating more then a decade later. Like the sounds of a steam engine filtered through the lens of a horror movie, so mesmerizing and menacing. The record's final track is the epic 21 minute "Doppelschnitt" and really should be played as loud as possible and made as required listening for anyone making minimal techno or any sort of electronica really, as this shows you the hypnotic possibilities of this sound. No doubt folks like Villalabos, Monoton, Moritz Von Oswald, and Carl Craig got their ears on this album early on, as this record really laid out the ingredients for what would go down in Berlin and Detroit in the years to follow. But what makes Double Cut so incredibly special is not just that it was ahead of its time, mastering a genre that hadn't even been invented yet, but that in its minimalism, they made a record that creates such a strong mood and has such a distinct overall sound. It's like being trapped in a completely distinctive outer dimension. It wouldn't surprise us if David Cronenberg was hip to this record while he was making Videodrome. It's not often you get to talk about records that completely set the stage for a whole movement of music making to come in its wake. This is one of those records, and we're so damn glad its back in the world where it belongs. A unanimous favorite for sure, as everyone here at the store is totally in love and in awe of Double Cut! Not yet reissued on vinyl but we're told that will be coming soon, hopefully.

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Krautrock fans are familiar with these guys: Dieter Moebius, who is one one-half of Cluster, and Conny Plank, the producer/engineer responsible for recording sooooo many amazing albums in the '70s and '80s. Both were also members of Liliental. In the early-mid '80s they teamed up for a series of albums together, of which 1980's Rastakraut Pasta was the first. Various instruments (and non-instruments too?) were played by the duo, then manipulated via Plank's mixing desk, with Moebius providing additional electronics. Can's Holger Czukay also dropped in to lay down bass on a few of the tracks. The results are all quite pleasant and playful, goofy even, tinged with a sunny Jamaican dub reggae influence (hence the Rastakraut title), most notable in the quirky percolating grooves of "Missi Cacadou". And it's quite obvious that this album has something to do with Cluster, nobody else really ever made music like this. Experimental and accessible, weird and wonderful, sorta surreal and not so serious, yet still quite affecting - and full of effects! From the chugging motorik distortion of "Feedback 66" to the looping lovely melodies of "Two Oldtimers" to the more abstract ambience of "Solar Plexus", Rastakraut Pasta is an airy delight. It's mostly instrumental, but when there are vocals, they are heavily treated and fragmentary, and with or without 'em you'll be humming and nodding along. This new Water label reissue includes new liner notes, providing quotes from Moebius or Plank about each track. Recommended, and we're looking forward to what we'll assume are upcoming Water reissues of the other M&P records, especially the darker, more rhythmically driven Zero Set from '82.

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Anadolu Pop, yeah! It's no secret that for the Aquarius staff and quite a few of our customers, the rock 'n' folk of hippie-era Turkey holds a BIG attraction. We're way into all the comps and reissues that have come out in recent years documenting how back in the late '60s and early '70s Turkish youth took the Western beat and psychedelic sounds that were current at the time and melded them to traditional Turkish folk forms, with fuzz guitars and ethnic instrumentation like saz and iklig combined into an energetic, 'exotic' and exceedingly infectious hybrid pop music. And perhaps the best example of this Middle Eastern psych-rock is the band Mogollar (aka Les Mogol). We've already freaked out about the one cd of their stuff we've previously been able to stock, the Danses et Rythmes de la Turquie album from 1971. Now, the same Korean reissue label brings us another, their rare self-titled second album (also it seems from '71), and it's just as good! The first track you might recognize from the Asian installment of the Love, Peace, & Poetry series. And one of the bonus tracks is on Hava Narghile compilation, while two are amped-up versions of songs from Danses et Rhythmes. Yep, there's eight utterly kick ass bonus tracks, all from 1970 or '71 singles releases, that are a bit more rocked (and tripped) out than the somewhat folkier instrumentals on the album proper. You can hear more of an Iron Butterfly influence on a few of these...and Byram hears hints of the Beefheart rhythm section circa Mirror Man on "Behind The Dark", one of the couple English-language tracks here. Awesome, essential. As is the whole album. Languid grooves, frenzied fretting, such great atmosphere, just wonderful stuff. The cd booklet includes photos and an informative English-language essay detailing the history of the band, which is great to have (even if it doesn't tell us in what year this was released). Definitely add this to your Turkish psych-pop collection, or start one with this!!

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This is it! The one. The record that launched a MILLION other records. Half the bands we love and freak out about wouldn't even exist if it weren't for THIS RECORD. Or if they did, they sure as heck wouldn't sound the way they do. Sure there was Spiderland. And the theory that everyone who heard Spiderland started a band. And the Pixies. Same thing. And let's not forget Nirvana. Between Slint, Nirvana and the Pixies, the template for angsty loud/soft indie rock was pretty much defined FOREVER. Until Young Team that is. Mogwai most definitely owed a huge debt to the above mentioned big three, but there was just something special about Young Team. The ultimate brooding post rock stumble into massive epic metallic crush record we had ever heard. This is heavy, but oh so pretty, dark and romantic, but also creepy and seriously ominous sounding. SoftÔsuper blissed-out meandering almost-ambient soundscapes, dark brooding passages of near silence, eventually shattered into a million pieces by bursts of frenzied, rhythmic noise a la Godflesh, crushing and metallic and machinelike, but always ready to drift and fade back into soft swooning tranquility. But even the loud heavy parts areÔstrangely melodic and ridiculously catchy. This record is so fucking great. Even now, a decade after it was first released, and after we've heard about a million bands do their own versions of Young Team. Maybe the best way to really drive home how massive and amazing and incredibly influential this record is, would be to list a handful of bands who would probably not exist, at least not in their present forms, if it weren't for this record. No disrespect to any of these groups AT ALL (we love them every single one of them) but you gotta give credit where credit is due... the sons of Mogwai include Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Isis, Timeout Drawer, Snowblood, the Ocean, Magyar Posse, Gregor Samsa, Aereogramme, This Is Your Captain Speaking, Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Ros, Pelican, Mono, Grails, Tarentel, Jimmy Cake, Switchblade, Minsk, Conifer, Tides, Eden Maine, Rosetta, Red Sparrowes, Indian, Baroness, Cult Of Luna, Mouth Of The Architect and we could go on and on. So if you love any or all of the above mentioned bands, and how could you not, and you've somehow never heard Young Team, you are in for it in a big beautiful way! Now's your chance. Don't blow it. You will not be sorry. As for the rest of you, who for one reason or another just haven't listened to Young Team in years, lent it lost it or whatever, now is the time to revisit one of indie rock's most epochal releases, you just may very well have forgotten how devastatingly fantastic this record is! Finally available again (as an import), after being out of print in the State for years and years!!!

MPEG stream: Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home
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We joked in some past reviews that Dutch experimental world music label Terp must be paying our salaries considering how much love we give their releases, but c'mon, you've heard them! You've bought them! LOTS of them! And like us you've played them all to death. Every single one is amazing, so exciting musically, so emotionally resonant, some of the most unique and moving music we've EVER heard. And as if to drive the point home, we have not one, but TWO new releases from Terp on this week's list, one, a live disc from legendary Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria, jamming with The Ex and friends, and this, a sadly posthumous live release from blind�Ethiopian vocalist Mohammed 'Jimmy' Mohammed.� We raved about Mohammed's other release on Terp, the completely mind blowing�Takkabel! And as we mentioned before, his life story is just as dramatic and intense and emotional as his music. He became blind as a child, an apparent curse after his parents had him baptized against the warnings of a local fortune teller (God wanted him to be Muslim), spent years homeless on the streets, eventually rescued and cared for, enrolled in a school for the blind, where money was raised to help restore his sight, but the money was stolen, and his eyesight never restored, eventually becoming a nightclub singer renowned for his interpretations of songs by legendary vocalist�Tlahoun Gessesse (who you probably remember from several volumes of the Ethiopiques series). But whereas much of�Takkabel! was tangled and angular and complex, recalling Aavikko weirdly enough, with guest drumming from improv legend Han Bennink, this live disc is much more laid back and dark, a very personal sounding and intimate recording, the band spreading out a lush tapestry of sound over which Mohammed weaves his magical moods. His voice is divine and as powerful as it is subtle,�distincitive and expressive, soaring and dancing nimbly across impossible melodies, the interplay between the vocals and the instruments is divine. The guitar like krar unfurling simple melodic fragments, the percussion simple and propulsive, a simple spare framework for Mohammed to explore as he sees fit, his vocals wild and acrobatic, intense and passionate, so mysterious sounding, but also utterly warm and inviting.� The last two lengthy tracks are the most reminiscent of�Takkabel!, with the addition of sax, the rhythms a bit more off kilter and danceable, the whole sound a bit more funky and groovy, VERY Ethiopiques sounding. Hard to imagine the crowd in attendance not dancing wildly in the aisles... The proceeds from sales of this cd will go toward a just-founded Jimmy Fund, created to care for his wife and his children, one of whom was born right after his death.

MPEG stream: Sethed Seketelat
MPEG stream: Mela Mela
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It must seem like we're on the Terp payroll or something by now, this being the second record they've put out that's received record of the week honors here at aQ. And the fourth or fifth that we've raved about. And to be totally honest, the Terp releases that ended up -not- being records of the week, could very well have under different circumstances, as they are equally as amazing. What can we say, everything Terp has put out so far has totally and completely blown us away! The live Konono record, the gorgeous Lanaya record and this newest release from blind Ethiopian vocalist Mohammed 'Jimmy' Mohammed. His story is just as amazing as his voice and the music he makes. After becoming blind as a child, supposedly as a curse for his parents' decision to ignore the warnings of a fortune teller and baptize him, as God had willed him to be a Muslim, Mohammed ran away and spent several years on the streets, homeless, begging for food, finding solace in the songs of legendary vocalist Tlahoun Gessesse (immortalized in several volumes of the amazing Ethiopiques series) who not only sang beautifully, but whose songs addressed the plight of the poor and suffering. Mohammed was eventually discovered and cared for, enrolled in a school for the blind and raised by a kind hearted surrogate father. After money was raised to help restore his sight, he was heartbroken to discover the funds were stolen and his eyesight was never to be restored. Mohammed spent a brief stint in the national theater before becoming a nightclub singer, where he became more and more popular. Mohammed mostly sings Tlahoun Gessesse's pop songs from the '60s / '70s, being as those are the songs that most affected him throughout his life, but it's his voice and the unique arrangements that make him so special. He appeared briefly on Ethiopiques 2 but this is his first proper full length. The first track here is a mindblower. The music is so squiggly and complex, so dense and tangled, angular but so lovely, our first thought was that it sort of sounded sort of like the maniacal casio exotica of Aavikko. Part of it might be the fact that Mohammed's band is augmented on that track by legendary European free jazz drummer Han Bennink, and Massimo Pupillo from Italian drone jazz combo Zu. SO amazing. There are plenty of immediately recognizable melodies and distinctly Ethiopian elements, but the way it is played is so strange and lovely. But it's Jimmy's vocals, high and clear, swooping into an impossible falsetto and back again, warm and rich and so gorgeous, that makes this so magical. Bennink drums on a handful of the other tracks as well (he apparently told Jimmy that the reason they clicked so perfectly was because, he said "I'm blind as well when I play with them") but even when it's just Jimmy and his band, the sound is still totally unique and so very special. Little delicate curlicues of electric krar (5 string harp), shuffling skittery drumming, smooth slithery riffs, warm smooth sax from Ethiopian legend Getatchew Mekurya, all weaving a rich intricate tangle of classic Ethiopian melody and irresistibly groovy rhythms, above which Jimmy just soars, so totally emotional and intense, so passionate and absolutely breathtaking.

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The classic proto-punk record made by these weirdo American GI's in Germany circa '66, now reissued on vinyl. Not too many in stock...

"It's A Satanic Drug Thing ...You Wouldn't Understand". Monster Magnet's motto, emblazoned on the back of the cd booklet, is something that they really did live up to, sonically and otherwise, back in the day. Maybe not the healthiest lifestyle choice (frontman Dave Wyndorf actually almost died recently from, yes, a drug overdose), but it sums up Monster Magnet, musically speaking. If you want to hear some "stoner rock" that's both spacier and scarier and Stoogier than most, early Monster Magnet (before they got big) is the way to go. We reviewed their droniest bad trip masterpiece, the reissued 25...Tab ep a couple lists back, and now follow-up with a review of another favorite, their debut full-length entitled Spine Of God, originally released by Caroline in 1992 and now reissued by SPV with snazzier graphics and bonus track (a demo version of "Ozium"). This came out at the height of the grunge era, but sounds just as Stonehenge (a la Hawkwind) as it does Seattle (a la Mudhoney). It includes their Grand Funk cover, "Sin's A Good Man's Brother", alongside such downer, druggy hits from some parallel just-say-yes universe as "Pill Shovel", "Nod Scene", and "Zodiac Lung". A wasted, burn-out classic, laid-back and leaden, dazed and phased.

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We've had this before, but it's not always that easy to find. So while we have a few in stock we thought we'd list it. It's the very first aluminum slab of Satanic Drug psych-metal to come from the demented minds of Dave Wyndorf and Co., released on

YESS!!! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Those are direct quotes from Allan the day he discovered, totally out of the blue, that this album had been reissued on cd by the Japanese label EM Records (same folks who put out the Symphony of the Birds reish reviewed elsewhere this list). Kerry and Andee were both in the office that day and can attest that Allan just about jumped out of his skin, his voice positively yelping with excitement. And now we're ALL going ohmigod, ohmigod too since the box from Japan that Allan ordered arrived and Moolah is among us. Ok, so what the heck is Moolah?? Well we're talking a super-obscure psychedelic/experimental Holy Grail album here. Allan only knew about it 'cause he'd heard some of it on a cd-r burn that our pal Loren Chasse had gotten from Jan Anderzen of Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat. Totally weird, damaged, krautrocky cosmic psych with electronic drones, haunting classical piano, and fucked up rhythms! According to Anderzen, it was an ultra rare LP from the '70s by a band called Moolah, entitled Woe Ye Demons Possessed. Wow. Allan found it hard to believe that was really true, and that it wasn't just something recorded by some genius Finnish forest freak friend of Anderzen's directly for the cd-r. But some diligent research revealed that the mysterious Moolah was indeed a band from New York who released an album on what was probably their own label, Druidstone (!), in 1974. But it was still pretty much unknown and almost utterly unobtainable. It didn't seem to have ever been reissued. And even our most '70s knowledgable psych-rock reissue supplier in Sweden hadn't heard of it at all. But we never lost hope. And now, thanks to the extremely strange and cool Japanese label EM Records, here at last we present to you Moolah on cd! We're still left in the dark about a lot of the details of this mysterious record's history (EM's sales info is mostly in Japanese) but from the album cover notes reproduced in the cd package we can tell you that the men behind Moolah were a duo named Walter Burns and Maurice Roberson, who recorded this, "their paranormal concertwork ...a cosmic rock relaxation creation" at a "secret studio in New York's Greenwich Village". There's also some amazing pagan poetry on the sleeve, here's a few lines: "Licking BLOOD Drinking TEARS Sacrificing LOVE on the Altar of Tomorrow Eating FRUITS of Stolen Vineyards With Withered Young Mouthes That Sing The OLD SONGS WHICH WERE FORBID". And the music is as amazing as what Allan remembered. Dreamy, beautiful ambience -and- disturbingly chaotic, claustrophobic sounds. Shimmery, murky, distorted, primitive... is it even rock music? For the day, about as far out as you could get. Indeed, ahead of its time. Such tracks as "Crystal Waters", "Terror Is Real" and "The Hatd Hit" are lo-fi jams full of dubby echo effects, indistinct voices intoning New Age ideas, crazy backwards percussion, and insectoid squiggles of electronics. And we think we heard a purring cat in there too. The question is: did the Moolah duo simply inhabit their own, messed-up, mystical little world (which seems likely, judging by those sleeve notes of theirs), or had these guys heard records by early Kraftwerk, Amon Duul, Kluster, and Neu!? We wonder. But either way, the krautrock scene's freakiest had nothing on Moolah. File with such rare, eccentric, outsider psych artifacts as the Cromagnon's Orgasm, Yahowha 13's Penetration, and Comus' First Utterance. What a find. If you like weird, lost, lovely, maybe a bit frightening music THIS IS FOR YOU.

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Subtitled: Musical Saw And Hawaiian Guitar Soli Recorded In Early 1920s. That's what it is, and it's SO GOOD! We're in love with this sepia-toned collection of old time tunes, some of them lively rags, others sad slowed-down ballads made even sadder by the unique sound of the saw. If Japan's EM Records (the same label responsible for reissuing both the "Symphony of the Birds" and the Moolah records we raved about last list) has anything to do with it, pretty soon we'll have a whole little "musical saw" section here at Aquarius! It's one of their several weird, wonderful obsessions (along with thrift-store exotica LPs, obscure '70s New Age psych, pioneering electronic experiments, etc.) and so there's a slew of releases on EM featuring the gorgeous, if sometimes gimmicky (but not here!) sound of the musical saw. We're gonna start you out with this, music by Sam Moore, an early 20th century master of the musical saw ... who also plays a mean guitar too, and who is accompanied on most of these tracks by another talent of the era, Horace Davis. (Roy Smeck and Frank Banta also make appearances.) You'll get to hear Moore's "Octo-chord" (an 8-string steel guitar) alongside the "harp-guitar" (a guitar outfitted with extra, resonating strings) of Davis on their hit, the "Laughing Rag". But it's the tracks with the musical saw that grab us the most. Listening to those, you'll understand why this instrument, steel bent and bowed, is also often called the "singing saw". It's got a definite vocal timbre, maybe also a bit like the electronic Theremin in that regard. Wavering, wordlessly moaning, haunting and eerie. MOOOHIEEE! (Man, we'd love to hear John Jacob Niles accompanied by a singing saw, if such a recording were to exist. That would be perfect.) Some background: Sam Moore (1887-1959), was a child musical prodigy who, having quickly mastered the violin, guitar and banjo, soon developed an interest in playing more eccentric, unconventional "instruments" as well. He'd been doing so from a young age -- Moore's father once claimed that Sam, as a child, had been able to "get music out of a pitchfork" (!) although sadly, no recordings exist to prove it... But we do know that at one point Sam Moore was part of a vaudeville act called "Spooning And Ballooning" in which he played an inflated rubber balloon, dueting with another fellow who played the spoons (of course). Another of his unusual instrumental specialties was (as documented on much of this fantastic cd) the carpenter's steel hand saw, which is something of a Southern folk music-making tradition. 'Round about 1918 Moore had taken to playing the saw, and was able to capitalize on the fad for the instrument in the early '20s, bringing his sawing skills to New York City's famed Ziegfeld's Follies for a successful stint on stage circa 1920-21. Although that fad soon faded, Sam Moore never abandoned the saw, keeping it in his instrumental repertoire as his career stretched into the '40s and '50s. All the recordings found here date from Sam's sawing heyday in the Twenties... 13 tracks all taken from rare old 78 rpm records treasured by collectors. That these vintage recordings, warm and crackly, are so burnished with the patina of the past only makes sound all the better to our ears. EM has fitted this out in handsome digipack, the only disappointment being that the extensive liner notes are pretty much all in Japanese...

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MPEG stream: My Old Hawaiian Home
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The short, one sentence review: it's the debut solo album from keyboard player from AQ fave Goblinesque math rock duo Zombi, and if you like Zombi, you'll probably really like this! More details, if necessary... Well, a little tizzy of controversy got started here at Aquarius when we scoped the sticker that Relapse stuck on the front of these cds. To quote, "The Henge is a huge, psychedelic, symphonic affair with Moore's patented cinematic brand of keyboard driven horror score virtuosity. For fans of Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Black Ice, Brian Eno, Ash Ra Tempel, Robert Fripp's 'Frippertronics', Heldon". No denying that this sounds quite a bit like all of that, it describes this pretty well. But we must take exception to the use of the word "patented"! Did Heldon, Goblin, John Carpenter et.al. all forget to contact the government, and then wily Steve Moore slipped in and got the patent!? Huh. Poor choice of words, "patented". But we know what they meant. It's the sound that Zombi is known for (being infuenced by) and they do it really well, and that's what this sounds like, basically Zombi without the drummer, if anything more '70s and cinematic sounding, also really sci-fi cosmic. To his credit, Moore doesn't overtly pull out the ol' "imaginary soundtrack" concept, but he sure could have. In fact some of the more bombastic moments it seems like he's just waiting for Hollywood to come knockin', to score their next horror blockbuster. Elsewhere, at the very least this could be the most sinister soundtrack to a PBS documentary ever! Alternatively, we might describe this as New Age nightmare music. Moore's minimal-wave soundscapes, full of nervous rhythms, ominous drones, & electronic symphonics, are tense yet often deceptively pleasant. It's paranoid, menacing Muzak that hypnotizes like an unholy mix of A.R.& Machines and Dave Borden's Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co., plus all the other names dropped in the blurb quoted above. A fine follow up to Surface To Air, even thought it's not technically a Zombi album!

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MPEG stream: The Henge/Ascension

We're happy to report that the internet has not (entirely) killed the 'zine. Blogs and websites are great, but can't really replace a good old fashioned b&w stapled xeroxed 'zine! They do seem old fashioned, though. And that vintage quality is fully embraced by this metal 'zine out of Canada, Morbid Tales, since the subject matter covered is pretty old school too. Some of the bands here are new, but they carry the torch of '80s underground metal (thrash, doom, death and NWOBHM) high. '90s cult black metal and '70s psych and prog is also not outside Morbid Tales' purview. While all 'zines are labors of love, editor Annick "Satannick" Grioux REALLY is a maniac for this music. Her enthusiasm really captures the spirit of 'zines back in the old pre-internet tape-trading days. Interviewees, among others, include Darkthrone, Portrait, Master's Hammer, Voivod, Pagan Altar, Cauldron, The Lamp Of Thoth, Elixir, Soothsayer, and, get this, Flower Travellin' Band (who get asked about the naked chopper riding cover photo of their debut LP)!! Plus there's reviews of obscure releases and demos, metal tourist shopping guides to London, Paris, Montreal, and Prague, show reports, and other interesting tidbits, including a brief guide to "Purple Metal" aka Italian Horror Metal like Black Hole and Paul Chain. This is Morbid Tales' biggest issue yet, 117 full size pages, plus flip it over and then there's another 13 page bonus zine all about heavy metal cooking tips entitled Hell Bent For Cooking (soon to be expanded into a book to be published by Bazillion Points we're told)! Recipes contributed by members of Anvil, Exciter, Cauldron, Trouble, The Gates Of Slumber, Countess, Ogre, Piledriver, and others. Such delicious dishes as: The Stew Of True Doom. Tomato-Garlic Hellfire Chicken. Black Pudding And Squid In It's Own Ink, With A Hashish Garnish. And then by the last few pages, the recipes have turned into drink mixes, these being metalheads after all... Morbid Tales #6 (+ Hell Bent For Cooking) is an impressively thick tome of metal obsessiveness all in all. We only got a handful of copies (8) and won't be able to get any more, as it's SOLD OUT, so act fast if you want one.

We've actually been meaning to review this for a while now, the debut full length from Swedish death metal weirdoes Morbus Chron, who obviously, being from Sweden, and playing death metal, are following in a grand tradition, but rather than rehashing what came before, these guys take that classic sound and twist it all up. The garish psychedelic cover art is your first clue that this is not your dimwitted big brother's death metal. It's more like your deformed-evil-twin-that-you-keep-locked-up-in-the-attic-dosed-on-hallucinogens-to-keep-him-docile's death metal. Right from the get go, Morbus Chron spew an unholy concoction of tangled atonal psychedelic melodies, ominous cinematic ambience, churning downtuned heaviness, occasionally laced with wah wah guitars, and driven by bellowed gruff vokills, the riffs are fantastically slippery and loose, the drumming too, a punkish gallop that seems right on the edge of the drummer's ability, which is most definitely a good thing, the band tight as fuck, but sounding constantly on the verge of collapse, the sound more lurching and lumbering than blasting, the vibe murky and muddy, old school heaviness infused with some warped avant garde experimentation, and executed like a horde of knuckle dragging zombie metalheads. Plus who can argue with a band who names one of their songs "Creepy Creeping Creep"? Yet for all the weirdness and psychedelic-ness, Sleepers In the Rift is still death metal, and sorta classic sounding (to a degree) DM to boot, so all you dabblers who don't actually dig old school death metal, this might not be QUITE weird enough for you. They're no Portal after all, but what they are, is modern masters of some damaged DNA strain of classic Swedish death metal, beholden hugely to the greats, but all warped and twisted and fucked up, and transformed into something sorta new, but seriously ruling.

MPEG stream: Through The Gaping Gate / Coughing In A Coffin
MPEG stream: Creepy Creeping Creep
MPEG stream: Hymns To A Stiff

Necrolucas and the band he plays drums in, Mord, are back!! Dude not only boasts one of our favorite black metal monikers but his band smokes as well. If you've heard Mord's debut disc Christendom Perished, released on Southern Lord a few years ago, you know what to expect from these none-more-necro Norwegian speed demons. Fast, faster, and fasterer! Furious too. With occasional headbanging breakdowns to catch a breath. Necrosodomic Abyss is a thrill ride propelled by Necrolucas's blasting blizzard of drumbeats, but Mord founder guitarist/vocalist Nordra is crucial too, unleashing an abundance of remarkably rockin' riffs (remarkable for something this grim and raw, that is) as well as a suitably guttural growl. (The band here is rounded out by session bassist named Necrosodom, by the way.) To reference a couple other Aquarius faves, imagine if you will a cross between 1349 and Khold. This disc's eight tracks are simply titled "Opus I" through "Opus VIII" and are of course different from the identically titled Opuses (Opi) found on their previous album. Doesn't that get confusing for Mord when they make a set list? Maybe they don't play live anyway, many black metal bands don't... which would be a shame in this case, if a sweaty crowd never ever moshed to Mord! Listening at home, maybe you'll get some moshing in too.

MPEG stream: Opus I
MPEG stream: Opus II

Hard rock and metal reissue label Rock Candy is one we always keep our eye on... While a lot of the stuff they reissue is of perhaps marginal interest to most AQ shoppers we'd imagine, often being on the obscure AOR, pomp rock, and hair metal side of things (although a lot of that has found its way into Andee and Allan's personal collections, ahem), once in a while they bring us something truly killer that we know our discerning, headbanging customers will be into. Like, for instance, the '70s albums from jammin' Japanese metal pioneers Bow Wow that we've reviewed recently. Well, here's a new reish from Rock Candy that we deemed worthy of review here too. NWOBHM act More (as in, "more! more!" we'd assume, thereby making it even easier for 'em to come out for an encore when fans at the show are chanting their name) is a semi-forgotten fave, one of the few of the NWOBHM hordes to gain major label backing (they were on Atlantic) but still only chalking up two albums in their career, both of which benefit from that major-label production budget. This one, from 1982, is their second and best. (Though their '81 debut, Warhead, is good too, and has also been reissued by Rock Candy, we'll review it too eventually). One listen to opening track "Killer On The Prowl" pretty much oughtta convince you, it's old school metallic badassery that simultaneously evokes classic acts like Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and early Iron Maiden. (By the way, what is it with the idea of "prowling" that is so totally metal?) And the rest of the disc pretty much keeps it up at that level, totally rollicking n' ripping, both melodic and energetic, with an aggressive street-level vibe that at times even reminds us of early Metallica (by way of Budgie). They also successfully venture into more atmospheric, epic territory on the likes of album-ender "Nightmare", and make a cursory attempt at radio-ready rockin' with the Zeppish "Rock And Roll". Replacing More's original vocalist Paul Mario Day, one Mick Stratton takes a star turn at the mic, his vox at the edge and over (the top), capable of both a triumphant soar, and fists-clenched snarl, that kinda reminds us of the great Ian Gillan circa his stint with Black Sabbath on Born Again, and that's a damn good thing. Not to be outdone, More's six stringer Kenny "Mad Axeman" Cox kicks ass as well, supplying the heavy riffs and guitar heroics left, right, and center. He also gets pictured on the cover - not sure what they were thinking there, was he really the best looking guy in the band? Although possibly the most beefy and bearded and biker-y, it would seem. But who cares what he looks like, his guitar tone is what it's all about... However, as you can see, Rock Candy decided to provide this with a new cover featuring the More logo on a blood-splattered background, though the original Cox cover is still to be found inside the booklet. Quality, solid stuff, and we're saying that as people who collect a lot of obscure metal from the era - this one stands out. If this hadn't been their last album and they'd stuck around, they might be better known now, like say Saxon or Raven, to name a couple of their comparable NWOBHM contemporaries... But despite having had their chance on a big label, More didn't "make it" for reasons expounded upon in the detailed liner notes found in the cd booklet (which is packed with photos too, this whole reissue being quite nicely done, as per the usual with Rock Candy's releases).

MPEG stream: Killer On The Prowl
MPEG stream: Blood And Thunder
MPEG stream: I Just Can't Believe It

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

Dunno how we missed it when the Sundazed label put out this sweet reissue last year, but better late than never to list the early '70s heavy psych awesomeness of Morly Grey - any psychedelic rock freaks out there who didn't know about it should be super stoked! This Youngstown, Ohio band's sole, privately pressed lp came out in 1972 and has long been considered a desirable underground artifact of hippiness and heaviness, the sort of thing that actually lives up to the collectors' hype, with original copies being relatively rare and expensive (and bootlegs prevalent). It's a blend of fuzzy acid rock guitars, mellow West Coast-y folkiness, and proggy ambition (the trippy title track, which incorporates an instrumental arrangement of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", takes up a whole album side, at over 17 minutes in length). Plus a healthy dose of flowers and beads bedecked pop that harks back to the '60s sounds of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Jefferson Airplane, all acts no doubt influential upon the Morly Grey guys, even as they display nascent headbanging riff rock inclinations as well. So while a song like "Who Can I Say You Are" may mostly be all delicate and melodic (with vocals worthy of Bobb Trimble), it also kicks in with the heaviness at times too. That song, by the way, you may have heard already on that great Forge Your Own Chains: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges compilation that came out a couple years ago. Elsewhere, there's parts that remind us of krautrockers Agitation Free, and spacerockers Hawkwind... while lead-off cut "Peace Officer" could almost be early Blue Oyster Cult at their most psychedelic and proto-metallic. We remember a long time ago, this was available as a compact disc reissue via Italy's Akarma label, but this nicely digipacked Sundazed reish is much superior, being totally legit and more than complete, as it includes a bunch of rare (and excellent) bonus tracks, totalling an additional 28+ minutes of music! There's also enlightening liner notes, based on interviews with surviving band members, by Doug Sheppard of Ugly Things magazine.

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MPEG stream: You Came To Me
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Il Maestro Morricone's score to a 1972 French/Italian political thriller movie starring Roy Scheider and Jean Seberg, although not having seen the film I would have thought it was some sort of Dario Argento horror/occult flick, based on the music. True, there's some typically cinematic/romantic interludes between the "suspense" parts, but many of the tracks employ a scary Tony Conrad-worthy string drone, which on track five ("Sinfonia Per L'Attentato") acts as a backdrop to ominous, syncopated Goblin-style minimal "funk" vamping, resulting in something that sounds almost like AQ-fave post/krautrockers Kammerflimmer Kollektief playing music from "Psycho".... Dramatic and intense, indeed. LP is 180 gram vinyl, gatefold cover.

RealAudio clip: Sinfonia Per L'Attentato

While so many of his big name '80s peers have either vanished or started churning out sub-par sounds in recent years (The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, etc.) Morrissey has kept great quality control and has been aging so so gracefully. Years of Refusal might be his most punchy, rocking and self assured solo outing to date. With his golden voice still so warm and rich and powerful and his brutish band offering some muscular back up, this is a set of songs that rely not only on Morrissey's always clever and dramatic word play but the rockin' music backing it up as well! His last album Ringleaders Of The Tormentors, though filled with some great songs, tripped up a bit on its over-ambition and pretension. Years Of Refusal gets it all right, with a sound palette very similar to one of his great recent outings You Are The Quarry. These songs bristle with such natural force and those magical melodies that Morrissey has been creating for over twenty-five years now are in full effect. Even folks here at AQ who are far from being devoted Morrissey fanatics have been digging this big time! And those of us who do have that special place in our hearts for Morrissey are finding this to be such an infectious album that only reaffirms that despite what one might think of his persona or mystique, this is truly one of the greatest songwriters and singers of our generation!

MPEG stream: Something Is Squeezing My Skull
MPEG stream: All You Need Is Me
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This Swedish progrock supergroup got together to interpret great horror film soundtracks, like Komeda's theme to "Rosemary's Baby" and Frizzi's music from "City Of The Living Dead" and "The Beyond". This should definitely appeal to fans of Goblin (who get covered here too, of course). Includes an amazing, epic 20-minute piece that will even satisfy Godspeed You Black Emperor fans looking for their filmic music fix.

1971 strikes again! Proto-metal freaks, rejoice! Connoisseurs of the "early heavy" have reason to be excited about this, the lone album from this raw n' heavy psychedelic blues rock power trio from Denmark, originally released in '71, finally available as a legit cd reissue complete with liner notes and vintage photos in the cd booklet. Recalling Vincebus Eruptum era Blue Cheer (big time!!) and early, bluesy Black Sabbath a bit too, Moses deliver blown-out, fuzz-bombed, acid-laced, hairy hippy proto-metal of Biblical proportions. Full of stoned vocals, loping riffs, and lots of wailing, wasted acid rock guitar soloing (worthy of Blue Cheer's Leigh Stephens and/or Randy Holden), Changes is highly recommended to anyone whose interest has been piqued by anything we've just mentioned or referenced. There's six songs here, nothing complex, certainly catchy though, what more to say? Each one provides the good vibes of ye olde primitive proto-metal, starting with the thudding blues brutality of title track "Changes" (which has nothing to do with the Black Sabbath piano ballad of the same name, by the way). Later on, "Beginning" gives the drummer some, ready for some DJ to mine for a crude breakbeat. "Skaev" is the only one here sung in Danish, but the lurching, surging riffage requires no translation. We're glad the final track, 7 minute track "Warning" is in English, though, 'cause we're getting a kick out of the lyrics, a story of a "straight" falling in with a turned-on crowd, which include lines like: "...and suddenly the girl gives him two feeling good pills, eat them if you can, a little after in a big discussion, forgotten everything about his wife, moving with the others in a big procession, he shouts out, this is life!" Awesome. So, anyone into early Blue Cheer, Randy Holden's Population II, and the recently reissued Speed Glue & Shinki from Japan, stuff like that, will dig Moses for sure. Also, having just reviewed a bunch of '70s garage fuzz monsters from Africa, like Ngozi Family and Witch, we're hearing a lot of similarities here (minus the African thing, of course, but not the fuzz and groove). We bet if we said this was from Zambia or Nigeria, people would be freaking! Denmark is less "exotic", but that's not what's important when banging your head to these 1971 sounds.

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MPEG stream: I'm Coming Home
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Abject, miserable, mournful, agonized, anguished, tortured and tormented ultra mega doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom! That's right. We've officially reached an all time high in o's (40 in case you were counting), and an all time loooooow in DOOM. Every time we hear from these crushing creeps they've pushed it even further into the deep dark damnable depths, forcing us to add more and more o's. That's right, it's the return of Moss, the UK's heaviest, slowest, sludgiest slow motion downtuned doom metal behemoth. Moss take the paint peeling acidic abrasiveness of Khanate and combine it with the warm suffocating murk of bands like Skepticism or Thergothon, or even aQ faves Nadja (who did a split with Moss a while back). Ultra minimal and nearly static in its sludginess, with the simple caveman plod of the drums the only thing keeping this from turning into a full on drone, this is like one HUGE riff, pulled and stretched into two epic streaks of fuzz and pound, with vocals that might even give Alan Dubin from Khanate a bit of a fright, like a demon howling through a mouthful of broken glass and rusty bottlecaps, teeth black with the blood of a thousand vanquished souls, the sound that finally comes out is a noxious black cloud that causes everything it touches to wither and die, totally blown out and so harsh it makes our throats sore just listening to it. But like the best sludge / doom, there is some sort of subtle melodic undercurrent going on, maybe it's deliberate and these guys are on some whole other musical level or maybe it's just some chance occurance, some strange alignment of overtones or some lucky bit of abstract composition, it hardly matters, the end result is somehow both hauntingly beautiful and horrifically harsh, there's definitely some dark beauty hidden beneath Moss' black sludge exterior, but the joy of music like this is the fact that the music's beauty is buried and bruised, battered and brutalized, the sonic search for the beauty within is like wading waist deep through boiling hot pitch, ears plugged with hot tar, all the while being showered from above by the tears of angels.

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It's been a while since we've had to employ multiple 'o's in a review. A bit of a death of doom it seems. Or at least the sort of doom that requires all those extra 'o's. A loyal customer of ours even whipped up this [http://www.aquariusrecords.org/doomchart.html] "doom chart" based on our usage of multiple 'o'd doom in reviews! And if memory serves, Moss was one of the bands that routinely got described as doooom, or doooooooooom, and sometimes even doooooooooooooooooooooooom. So we were all ready to put finger to key and just let the 'o's roll out, one after the other after the other, until we felt we had conveyed the crushing doom of Moss. That is until we pressed play, and were treated to "Ritus", a five and a half minute soundscape of whirring synths and washed out ambience, of cymbal sizzle and proggy keyboard drones, of whispered voices and buzzing shimmer. Hmmm. The liner notes say it's inspired by Doris Norton, an electronic musician who's also a member of AQ faves Jacula!! An interesting start from one of the sludgiest, crustiest bands around. Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. Ahh. That's better. The second track returns us to that dank dark sloooooooooow place Moss call home. Twenty three minutes of downtuned crush, the tempo only slightly faster than the growth of actual moss. But even all gnarled and sludge-y, something has definitely changed. It's not nearly as filthy, and harsh, it's actually weirdly pretty. Almost like it's some more melodic metal record being spun manually with one finger at 3 or 4 rpm. The distortion is still dense, the long drawn out chords seeming to crumble, the drums spaced way out, but somehow still more buys than you're average ultradoom drummer, the vocals are still harsh and howling, but somehow, they too seem to be a bit more smooth, further down in the mix, like another layer of sound, the howls allowed to unfurl into another layer of buzz. It's strange, but we definitely dig. And we're not saying this is NOTHING like old Moss, or folks into Bunkur and Esoteric and the like won't love it, you will, the differences are subtle, and the sound is just a little bit, well, prettier, if you can imagine something bleak and black and harsh and hateful being pretty. Which we can! The next track, a nine minute dirge, is a bit more raw and rough, most of that prettiness we were blathering on about above is GONE. Shrieking feedback, the drums even slower and more spare, the guitars even more distorted and the vocals throat shreddingly harsh, the tempo slightly accelerated, bordering on Eyehategod territory. But it's all bout the closer, "Gate III: Devils From The Outer Dark". Clocking in at 35 minutes + and beginning with a churning sea of downtuned rumble and buzz, before the drums finally kick in, and f course by kick in we mean pound sporadically. This track is WAY more than a dirge. It makes the track before it sound like thrash metal. This is slooooooow and so so so so dooooooooooooooooooomy. The guitars thick and corrosive, the chords allowed to ring way out and fade away before the next one drops in to take its place, but weirdly enough, this one too sounds sort of pretty, not like the opening track, but still very dreamlike and mesmerizing. Long streaks of feedback spread out over wide open expanses of minimal thud and warm warped slow motion buzz, when the vocals drop out, it becomes something entirely different, finishing off with several minutes of thick low end drone, the guitars rumbling and wrapped into a thick nearly static pulse, something truly hypnotic and almost spacey, but without sacrificing a single one of those extra 'o's. Definitely a progression, a band can only pound and plod for so long, but so subtle that the casual listener might not even notice. "Oh yeah, heavy, slow, dooooooom", but as with most music, deep listening reveals a whole lot more going on beneath the surface, and once your ears lock on to that stuff, even the sounds on the surface begin to sound different. WAY RECOMMENDED for the doom-ed amongst you. And just cuz we knew you were waiting for it, Sub Templum could very well be doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom disc of the year!!

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Billed as the world's first all-synthesizer band, the trio of Dave Borden, Judy Borsher and Steve Drews were obscure '70s "electronica" pioneers. This cd reissues their second (and last) album, originally released in 1976. Influenced by repetitive

RealAudio clip: C-A-G-E Part II
RealAudio clip: All Set
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Normally the way to get me (Allan) to listen to, let alone like, a record *isn't* to tell me that it's got elements of techno, acid house, and/or Hi-NRG dance music to it. Comparisons to various '80s industrial/club culture icons like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb are also not terribly enticing, either. Yet this album, with its stark, stylish black and white (and red) graphics and suggestively Kraftwerkian name and title somehow drew me in, and guess what? I ended up really digging it! (No, not dancing to it, though I'm sure people will.) The dozen, almost entirely instrumental tracks on Motor's full-length debut may be a species of techno/house music, but they're sufficiently raw and ominously droning to appeal to me as a pure listening experience... the relentless 4/4 energy here is simply brutal, and this disc is thick and heavy with machine beats and super-distorted synths, the kind that sound like dive-bombing Stukkas! Sure, it's Sprocketsy but ballsy too, this trans-Atlantic duo (one guy from Minneapolis, another from Paris) making the perfect in-my-imagination Euro techno ideal of computer-jerked motorik electro grooves, tranced-out tones, and video game gibbering... OK, gotta cut this review short as everyone else here is making fun of what I'm listening to, doing robotic dance moves and making raver glow stick comments, but I know they're all secretly enjoying this as well -- AND I think they're getting their work done faster and more efficiently, too! (Note: this isn't to be confused with another, different electronic outfit also named Motor who hail from Russia.)

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Klunk, the debut from the Sprocketsy electronic duo Motor, was the unexpected dancefloor hit last year here -- that is if AQ had a dancefloor and if you asked Allan what the hit was. Unexpected especially since Allan's not known for his love of club music. Now Motor are back with a new album, Unhuman, and it's got the same distorted techno beat buzz and bleep goin' on, from the jittering funk that is "Bleep #1" to the sinister, more song-y "Night Drive" to the power tool robotics of "Flashback" (other evocative titles include "Drug Punk", "20 Volts Of Steel", and "Sikk"). There's obvious Detroit and Kraftwerk influences, and certainly lots of folks have regurgitated sounds like these since the '80s, but Motor have a special knack for this all right. It's the rigid, relentless, crunching beats, and the synth sizzle... going and going and going... in fact it's hard to write this review as I'm trancing out as I type thisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisisis.... Fresh off tour (including a stint opening for industrial icons Nitzer Ebb), these guys are proud of their live, "punk" energy. It's stressed that Motor are a real band not purely the product of a computer or a DJ spinning stuff. As a result they've perhaps incorporated more melody (and vocals, sometimes scarily processed) into the mix this time 'round, but the more machine-like, brutal aspects of the debut haven't been disposed of either, so Allan says thumbs up on this one as well. Definitely get this if you liked their debut as much as he did.

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Norwegian indie rock band Motorpsycho certainly have their fans. For years and years, several of our friends have been singing their praises, telling us to check 'em out. And some of what we've heard, we've liked. Poppy, psychy, sometimes sorta heavy, also rather quirky. But still, they never quite "clicked" with us. Until now. This new Motorpsycho album we're totally digging. (And no, it's not just 'cause it was released by Rune Grammofon, a label we usually like.) Sparklingly melodic and super energetic and full of guitar guitar guitar... Motorpsycho really get pretty wild with the acid rock guitar soloing here, almost to Kawabata Makoto levels, whom we recall liked to say he played 'motorpsycho' guitar. Hmm. There's plenty of room for them to stretch out with the guitars and FX as this disc consists of four long songs (longest, 21:05, shortest 11:26). But they *are* ultimately pop songs, with vocals (in English) and hooks and all. With that pop element going full bore too, they've (at last?) hit the sweet spot of successfully mixing '70s bombast with '90s college radio / indie rock. As long as you realize we mean this in a really good way, we'll go ahead and describe Little Lucid Moments as sounding sorta like the Foo Fighters gone prog. They've definitely got some little lucid Pink Floyd moments in there too, via Voivod perhaps, who themselves dabbled in the pop punk thing too... As long as we're confusing things with seemingly random references to other artists, let's also cite Sloan -and- Circle as two more disparate bands this reminds us of, at times! Sloan for all the ambitious rockin' pop stuff here, while the spaced out guitars and motorik chuggery of "The Alchemyst" could easily be Circle or Motorpsycho's countryfolk Salvatore. And then in the track "She Left On The Sun Ship" it sounds like they're getting into the twisty, sinuous vein of rockin' post rockers Drive Like Jehu, with some little Champs-y licks thrown in too. Who else should we mention? 31Knots? Ok, another good prog-pop-indie blend. The Beach Boys? Yep, in the vocals sometimes. But all this successfully adds up to something cool that's uniquely Motorpsycho (and nothing like the gearhead garagabilly rock their name might imply). So, it's taken a looong time but we're finally convinced. We're Motorpsycho fans. We know a guy in Holland (hi Frankco!) who will be very pleased. Now we'll have to go back and reconsider all the umpteen Motorpsycho records we'd been ignoring all this time...argh! No, that's a good thing. Always nice to have a not-so-new band to newly like... Highly, surprisingly recommended.

MPEG stream: Suite: Little Lucid Moments
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First ever legit vinyl reissue of the only record, circa 1973, from this fairly obscure '70s British rock band, best known 'cause their lead guitar player was none other than Ray Russell, the cult free jazz/fusion/psych rock guitarist who did session work as well as a few albums of his own, his fans include Alan Licht and Jim O'Rourke, who put out a double cd Russell anthology on his own Mokai label a while back. In Mouse, Russell definitely goes more rock than jazz, in fact venturing pretty heavy territory at one point. The record is really all over the place, with stuff we love about '70s rock - from groovy, glammy honky tonk to poppy Beatles-y soft rock balladry to full on proto-doom riffery. The festivities begin with a jolly good time of a song called "Going Out Tonight", a glam rockin' number with campy lyrics, that nicely transitions into an extended, spaced-out psych section which features Russell coaxing some strange sounds from his guitar, fading out eventually, making way for "You Don't Know", a quite pretty & melancholic pop ditty with wistful vocals. Following that, "Electric Lady" finds Mouse cranking up their amps for more of a riff rocker, but one that still has a pop sensibility to it. Next, "All The Fallen Teen Angels" is a cover, and good one, of a song by Medicine Head. Then the side closes out with the mostly instrumental and suprisingly doom-ridden "Asher Besher", the song's lengthy intro of heavy guitar chords and plodding drums being shockingly Sabbathy, what vocals there are closer to croaking crow-cries, before an urgent, burbling bass line kicks in and the track takes off into gnarled psychedelic guitar soloing - followed by a brief acoustic coda. Nice one, that, especially for proto-metal obsessives. And if you thought that somehow side one had covered all the bases, not quite. Side two starts off with another excellent pop rocker, "We Can Make It", but that's followed by the spooked-out "East Of The Sun", a droning string-laden psych track that mostly sounds like 20th century avant-garde classical music! And then they start in with fuzzy proto-metal riffery again, with "Its Happening To Me And You", with wailing acid rock guitars and lyrics like these: "Waiting for the candy man / wondering who I really am / do you really need to care / if you're here or if you're there / why why why / why don't you try / gotta get high / it's happening to me and you / changes that you're going through / doing what you wanna do / moving like a movie queen / drifting through a purple dream". Druggy, eh? And so it goes, Mouse mixing lovely orchestrated pop with drug addled hippy trippiness and lashings of distorted guitar. This record is the kind of thing that we'd imagine John Peel would have played a lot, but even if so, probably nobody else did and thus it was Mouse's only release. Still, a bit of a gem nice to have reissued, not just for fans of Ray Russell but also proto-metallers Steel Mill (whose ex-bass player was a member of Mouse), and early '70s UK prog, glam, and pop rock in general. Remastered, 180 gram vinyl, gatefold sleeve, includes liner note insert, etc.

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MPEG stream: It's Happening To Me And You

We first heard the oddly named Mudboy on Last Visible Dog's recent mammoth six-cd Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box. Curiousity thus piqued, we're pleased to now find a Mudboy full-length cd has now also just been released by LVD (actually, this is a reissue of a recording previously put out by an even smaller label). This Rhode Island feller's woozy music, performed with home-built electronics and modified vintage keyboards (a circuit-bent church organ we're told), would be the perfect soundtrack to a creepy, sleepy sort of imaginary movie... this cd's full of ominous drones and sinister synth but it's also soothingly repetitive and goshdarn lovely. Whooshing interludes bridge the spaced out explorations of minor-key organ melodies that permeate the disc, occasionally infiltrated by field recordings and broken rhythmic glitch. It's an atmosphere of menace that's strangely warm and inviting. If Bo Hansson's ghost made Halloween music, or down on his luck Eric Malmberg (keyboardist of Sagor & Swing) was hired to play a lullabies for a monster baby...they'd sound a bit like Mudboy, perhaps. And if "this is folk music", then Cluster and John Carpenter are folk music too, 'cause Mudboy seems to be inspired by both kraut-tronics and analog fright flick scores. And we're ready to snuggle up with that monster baby...

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From the same label that brought us the amazing electro-metal / glitch-grind of Whourkr (whose debut is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and whose newest records we made our Record Of The Week a while back), comes this equally baffling and brilliant chunk of glitched out electro deathgrind hypermetal from the oddly monikered Mulk, a one man band who basically makes some of the most twisted, complex and convoluted metal ever. With head spinning drum programming, wild gouts of lightspeed blasts and inhuman flurries of beats, chopped up and sliced and diced and reassembled into furious bursts of outsider deathmetal weirdness, laced heavily with strange effects and electronics, the sound constantly stuttering and skittering and transforming, the beats splintering into weird blasts of buzz, the sound glitching out almost as if your cd player were melting, or imagine playing a Morbid Angel record and an Immolation record at 78rpm on two tapes that were recorded on a busted up boombox on old tapes that had been left on the dash in the sun. It's like a futuristic cybergrind Faxed Head! Theres definitely a big drill and bass electronic component, but instead of mixing beats and riffs, this guy mashes them together into a single raging sound. It almost sounds like a death metal record made by Venetian Snares. It's hard to describe, if you dig Whourkr, you definitely need this, and if you're after the heaviest, weirdest most fucked up death metal / deathgrind record EVER, this is most definitely it.

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Want to hear a wonderful "glitch-banjo-drone" recording? This is it! New Englander Geoff Mullen's impressive debut album thrtysxtrllnmnfstns is a homemade electro-acoustic soundscape of steel strings and swarms of lovely abstract drones, made with guitar, banjo, electronics and amplification. Geoff plays broken-down, Takoma-esque American Primitive fingerpicking style, rambling over a bed of insectlike buzz and stuttering static. Melodic figures drift in and out, his old tyme instrumentation often receding fully into the misty fascination of the crackly drone-zone he's created... warm and fuzzy and alien and really pleasant! Back porch folk electronic textures, both soothing and mysterious. Recommended, 'specially to fans of Fennesz, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Loren Chasse, Tim Hecker -- and John Fahey at his most experimental. (Probably P. Jeck and Wm. Basinski too, though this isn't as looped-sounding.) Cool packaging, including in lieu of regular cd booklet, a hand-sewn fabric pouch containing a few random photos.

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What could be cooler than a French guy in the '70s, hanging out with naked chicks and teetering stacks of analog synths, making underground DIY futuristic psychedelic new wave punk drone proto-industrial music??? Uh, not much. Particularly when said French guy (Thierry Muller) is so good at it. Longtime AQ list readers might recall us raving some time ago about something called Ilitch and something else called Ruth, both bands/projects of Muller reissued on the Fractal label. Now, those discs are all out of print (why? they should repress!), but the label has just presented us with a collection of mostly previously unreleased material from the man's various projects over the period indicated in the subtitle... and even the stuff that has been available is super rare. None of it included on those previous Fractal cds of Ilitch and Ruth. For the uninitiated, let us say, Thierry Muller was a French pioneer in the realm of electronic/prog/punk weirdness, an "early Industrial" genius indeed! This disc is all the proof you need. There's material from five different Muller led projects: Arcane (1974), Ilitch (1975), Breaking Point (1978), Ruth (1978), and Crash (1984). The progression, if we can generalize, from "band" to "band" is from the more abstract, lo-fi distorted homebaked soundscape-psych displayed by Arcane all the way to the robotic sci-fi FX pop of Crash. But it's all got a kind of tense krautrock meets the new wave vibe, and if you like the likeminded work of Muller's countryman Richard Pinhas (Heldon) you should check this out! You could buy it just for the blissful 28 minutes of Ilitch's 1975 "Un Jour Come Tant d'Autres" and get your money's worth. Highly recommended!!

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We really like this album, but went through a few phases in appreciating it. First off, when we heard about it, we were like, cool! This first-time-on-cd reissue of an extremely obscure, self-released 1971 LP checks out pretty well, on paper: it was a one-off record of tragic love songs done in late '60s psych pop style written and recorded by a teenager from Cyprus recently relocated to New York City. Heck, Middle Eastern psych, we can't get enough! But when we actually heard it, at first it was a little hard to get past how odd it sounded -- it wasn't quite what we were expecting. Marc Mundy's voice and lyrics eventually charmed us, but it's easy to see why he never make it big on the pop charts in the USA, with his foreign accent and amateur (but decent) singing skills. Then there's his lyrics, written in English, which perhaps explains how awkward his turns of phrase can be -- though again, in the end we found ourselves marveling at his heartfelt, heartbreak poetry. Such lyrics as "baby I love your lips / when they're wet with wine and desire / I love your hair / when it is messed up in the wind / baby I love your arms / when your soft, warm flesh touches mine / I love your eyes / when the lovelight lies / not for me the cold, calm kiss of a virgin / not for me / the bless of a saint..." might at first seem like typical love song stuff, but not really... coupled with his so-sincere delivery, Marc's words will find their way closer to your soul than most pop music lyrics ever do. Maybe it's the atypical metaphors, situations and stories that crop up in his songs, some of which must be inspired by the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern folk songs he'd heard in his youth. For example, "How Can I Marry This Language" is about a father refusing to allow his daughter to marry the song's narrator, in language that he (the frustrated narrator/suitor) can't even understand. It's actually (intentionally, we think) humorous, which isn't the case with most of the sad, melancholic material on this album! Another track, "The Tragic House", is about an empty, abandoned house where the narrator's love used to live, before she vanished to who knows where, or why. Yup, super sad and melancholic. There's definitely lots of stuff on here if you ever need material for a breakup mix tape!! "Our Love Can Never Be", "Give Up Your Pride", "I'm Crying Your Name", "Don't Love Me Anymore", and others... Yet despite the sadness, these songs percolate along, Marc taking the melodic lead on vocals and guitar, accompanied by a now-anonymous band of musicians, sounding vaguely exotic while also of its time and place (the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk-rock scene, also home to The Devil's Anvil you'll recall). Ethereal female backing vocals also add to the lovely moodiness... This reissue is one of those wonderful finds you've got to thank some obsessed collector for, and comes complete with lyric sheet and new liner notes. And it's fully authorized by Marc, whom we're told gave up on music as a career soon after this album was originally released and now lives back on Cyprus, teaching school (and hopefully not still pining for lost loves!).

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