Finally available again, after several years! The disc that both saddens and entertains, kind of like a cross between Charles Bukowski and the Jerky Boys!
If you've seen the Simpsons episode with John Waters, you might recall Homer asking the guest star what camp means. Waters' answer: "The comically tragic...the tragically comic." To which Homer retorts "Oh, you mean, like when a clown dies." This classic recording of San Franciscan drunks Raymond Huffmann & Peter Haskett certainly fits this Homeric definition of camp. These two aging roommates spent their days drinking heavily in their Lower Haight apartment and verbally assaulted each other. The slurring barrage of obscenities muddles the difference between the two men. This is one of those documents that had to be (re)released, capturing the torment these two unwittingly inflicted upon their enraged neighbors who in turn recorded their every conversation. Worthy of its status as a late-twentieth century underground "comedy" phenomenon.
Been eagerly awaiting this!! The 2nd coming of this strange band and their rather outsider-y epic true metal. The hermetic duo of JH Halberd and Czar, have indeed built upon their realm, expanded their empire, brought forth further examples of their special sound, one that's triumphant (heck they even use trumpet!) and weird and raw and curiously poppy. Realmbuilder, while certainly under the sway of such cult '80s fantasy metal acts as Manilla Road, Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol (along with sharing the same literary inspirations like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith), aspire to actualize a unique vision of their own. And for us, their stirring striving is quite effective, as well as eccentric!
The album begins with an anthem to a mythic highwayman, wherein the basic building blocks of Realmbuilder's sound are made apparent: catchy old school heavy metal riffing, accompanying somewhat amateurish but expressive clean vocals that are far from the usual sort of polished power metal wail (and become quite glorious when both band members harmonize together). The oddity of the vocals will be the most make or break thing regarding your reaction to this band; we love 'em. And the choruses are quickly skull-lodged, with lyrics that usually contain commands: "Yield or perish!" "Swing your pick axe!" "Pull the wagon!"...
Another significant Realmbuilder trait: psychedelic soloing (courtesy session guitarist Brian Koenig) that adds to the emotional impact of these songs rather than being mere shred.
Realmbuilder's compositions tend to be filled with an energetic choppiness, but just as often possess a more solemn, droned out vibe... as, especially, on the album's spacey, dreamy final epic, with the suitably lengthy title "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods". It's a strange sort of pop indeed.
Again, probably to be appreciated by fans of the likes of early Manilla Road, Max Planck, the long forgotten but utterly genius Coven, and the lordliest weirdest of Slough Feg. Also you could certainly consider this to be the even more DIY cousin of Dawnbringer, whose new one is reviewed elsewhere this list.
Oh, and once again, we love the Crystal Logic of the cover painting, by Czar...
Everything about this screams "Cult!!". Cult in the "epic true metal" style of Manilla Road, that is. But even doomier than those eccentric '80s metal masters, who are most definitely one of Realmbuilder's major influences. This band has that obscure, underground vibe for sure, as it should 'cause that's what it is, just two guys obsessed with a certain sort of metal and the imaginative realms of fantasy and history that that sort of metal evokes, those guys being one Czar (also of weird black metallers Charnel Valley), who sings and plays drums, and one J.H. Halberd, who takes care of rhythm guitar, bass, and keyboards, as well as harmony backing vocals, and on one track, trumpet! (Lead guitars are handled by a session axeman from the prog metal band Luna Mortis).
Now released by I Hate Records on compact disc after a limited edition vinyl issuance last year, Realmbuilder's debut album Summon The Stone Throwers really creates an unusual, ancient atmosphere, quite convincingly as if they're relating warriors' tales of long-lost ages. From the primitively painted album cover (featuring a mystic castle, wind-blown adventurer, and malevolently skulking wolf-creature all garishly rendered in sunset purples, yellows, and greens) which gives us a flashback to the cover to Manilla Road's Crystal Logic, it's obvious that Realmbuilder are for a select audience only, those with an innate feeling for the raw, doomy, almost psychedelic heavy metal on offer here. Melancholic, melodic, and above all majestic, the seven tracks here comprise chunky spiralling guitar riffs, expressive/depressive vocals, glorious guitar soloing, wordless oh-oh-oh choruses, effective chant-like repetition of the evocative lyrics (we love hearing the words "silver ziggurat" and "colossal glaciers" being sung over and over in the respective songs of those same names). The clean vocals are somewhat nasal and really not-so-metal, comparable maybe to Snake from Voivod and the guy from super obscure '80s Detroit doomsters Coven. And that really helps set this apart, and add to its strangeness and sense of sincerity.
There's much lumbering riffage and galloping rhythms and clashing of swords... with, also, weird quasi-poppy parts that sneak in amidst the grim bombast, which we think might actually cause this to appeal to fans of Steel Mammoth and other "NWOFHM" acts! Though, as we said, this comes across as serious and sincere. So most likely for fans of the aforementioned Manilla Road, and Coven if you've ever heard 'em... Other bands whose fans might dig this, for various reasons, include fellow I Hate recording artists The Wounded Kings, Doomsword, Dark Quarterer, Reverend Bizarre, The Gates Of Slumber, Slough Feg, Cirith Ungol, Manowar, Hyborian Steel, Ironsword, Ophthalamia, Cloven Hoof, Helvetes Port, even Dwarr and some moments of the more recent Darkthrones, just to throw a few names out there that may or may not be helpful without further explanation... Really, though, despite their obvious inspirations (they cite several bands, some of the above among them, before whom they "genuflect") Realmbuilder is ultimately its own unique thing.
Bottom line: the esoteric metallurgists here at AQ can't stop listening to this! As far as Allan is concerned, his favorite metal cd of the year, quite possibly. And although this is quite new, it still almost seems as if a relic from another time and place, like it should come with a papyrus scroll or better yet carved stone tablets, instead of a cd booklet (though the cd booklet it has, with thick, purple-printed paper, is quite nice). Join the cult and bow down before Realmbuilder!
Not only does this mix come from our favorite 'techno' label, Kompakt, but it was compiled by a Mexican DJ/producer, Rebolledo, who's got a thing for Filipino '70s psych rock guitarist Wally Gonzalez (of Juan De La Cruz fame, down & dirty Filipino proto-metallers par excellance). aQuarius customers might remember, we even reviewed cd reissues of Wally's two late '70s solo albums some years ago, one of which, 1978's Wally On The Road, provides the intro and outro tracks on this disc, via Rebo's edits of "Wally's Blues" from that album. Perhaps surprisingly, Wally's space-ily effected soloing totally works in the context of all the propulsive and powerful electronic music elsewhere on here. Not only that, but the cover photo has been done as an homage to Wally On The Road, as well - Rebolledo has carefully recreated that album's cover scene, posing identically to Wally, seated on a dirtbike in front of a Porsche, with a pair of fancy cowboy boots on the ground nearby.
So that's pretty cool, and odd, as is this disc, really one of the most captivating, hypnotic, groovy techno mixes we've heard in a while, with lots of interesting standout tracks. 'Bangers' if you will. Among 'em, several exclusive cuts, including Rebo's own studio contribution, the amazing "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", an intensely, relentlessly mesmeric track with bizarrely accented/inflected vocals repeating the title phrase over and over with fierce emotion. The duo Rebo's in with Superpitcher, Pachanga Boys, is here too, and they and he both do some remixes as well. Other artists appearing: Wolfgang Voigt, Red Axes, The Love Supreme, Justus Kohncke, The Twins, C.A.R., Christian S., Sebastian Bouchet, Gebr. Teichmann, Barnt, Slove, and Vox Low. An excellent, idiosyncratic mix we just kinda can't stop playing!
Cd-only, but in June Kompakt will be releasing a 12" vinyl ep featuring an extended 'raw' mix of "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar" as well as two more cuts taken from this album also previously not on vinyl, so any discerning DJ's out there ought to look for that when we have it.
Last list we highlighted the Kompakt mix cd from Mexican DJ/producer Rebolledo, Momento Drive. This 12" ep with the same name features three of the rarest trax from that mix, released on vinyl for the first time, including probably our favorite from that mix, Rebolledo's own "Windsurf, Sunburn and Dollar", here presented in an 'extended raw version'. Again, totally mesmeric and relentless, and a bit bizarre as well due to the vocal part (the title, repeated over an over in a weird, intense accent and manner). The other two selections have Rebolledo's hand in 'em too, one's the Pachango Boys (Rebo's duo with Superpitcher) doing a remix of "Flash" by Stove, the other a Rebo remix of a track by Red Axes. DJs, in particular, ought to think about grabbing this.
NOW ALSO HERE ON CD, with bonus trax!
Awesome obscure late sixties/early seventies British blues rock outfit's only album, originally released in 1970, newly reissued! Some of it's melodic acoustic folk psych with mellow, rustic vocals, while other tracks are more like lumbering, proto-metal blues, with heavy guitar riffs and really raw, rough vocals, kinda like Captain Beefheart singing for early Black Sabbath. There's some harmonica blowin' too along with the grungy guitars. Other reference points: Edgar Broughton Band, High Tide, The Doors, Fraction, Josephus...
This compact disc edition includes five bonus tracks, getting more Tull-soundin' but with violin instead of flute!
How is it that these long overdue A.R. & Machines reissues just keep making us fall in love with Ol' Achim Reichel over and over again? 'Cause it's some of the best krautrock EVER that's how. Die Grune Reise is a re-release of the first official A.R. & Machines LP from 1970 and, while slightly less epic and grand than the blissful Echo (part of the double disc reissue we raved about a few months ago), it's no less mesmerizing, exploratory and exciting. Reichel's trademark meandering, repetitive guitar and percussion are in full effect -- spacey and grooving, but instead of totally transporting the listener into the realm of ether, there's something more rockin' and also sometimes ridiculous that keeps it in the realm of the studio. Well it had to be since EVERYTHING on here was performed and recorded by Achim Reichel himself, a total one-man-jam! Sounds like a whole hairy freak-troupe though. Die Grune Reise is like watching a preview of the even more awesome journey that Reichel eventually takes you on with Echo (which, by the way, is finally back in stock!). It's entirely possible that all the weird, sometimes goofy-hippy vocals on this album maybe make us a little self-conscious... Yes, there's a lot of the madhouse 'digga-digga-aahh-waaahhh!??" type vocals on here that at turns challenge and delight us, but they're tempered with a more than generous helping of signature chug-jams to keep us totally boogeying (dig the ZZ Top guitar riffery on track 2!) and lilting interludes to help us come down gently. When absorbing this album, it's hard to shake the very specific image of a naked, twirling free-spirited German longhair in the desert at night alone with his arms wide open holding a hand rolled cigarette/joint in one hand and doing graceful hand maneuvers with the other...and that's fine by us. We grok that dude and these albums. There's actually two of them (albums) here, as this disc also includes A.R. VI, Echolung, originally released by Brain in 1975. Compared to Die Grune Reise it's a bit more mellowed out, if anything more cosmic and spacey... real nice! Total krautrock essentials, both of these. Fans of both Can and Circle need to hear 'em...
An old fave, in fact a former Record Of The Week, at last reissued and available again, previously it was part of a 2-on-1 cd with another A.R. album, Echolung, but here it's by itself (with bonus dvd, more on that later). Nice packaging, great sound, so glad to have this back in the store! Here's more or less what we said before:
How is it that these long overdue A.R. & Machines reissues just keep making us fall in love with Ol' Achim Reichel over and over again? 'Cause it's some of the best krautrock EVER that's how. Die Grune Reise is a re-release of the first official A.R. & Machines LP from 1970 and, while slightly less epic and grand than the blissful Echo (one we raved about a few months ago), it's no less mesmerizing, exploratory and exciting. Reichel's trademark meandering, repetitive guitar and percussion are in full effect - spacey and grooving, but instead of totally transporting the listener into the realm of ether, there's something more rockin' and also sometimes ridiculous that keeps it in the realm of the studio. Well it had to be since EVERYTHING on here was performed and recorded by Achim Reichel himself, a total one-man-jam! Sounds like a whole hairy freak-troupe though. Die Grune Reise is like watching a preview of the even more awesome journey that Reichel eventually takes you on with Echo (which, by the way, is finally back in stock!). It's entirely possible that all the weird, sometimes goofy-hippy vocals on this album maybe make us a little self-conscious... Yes, there's a lot of the madhouse 'digga-digga-aahh-waaahhh!??" type vocals on here that at turns challenge and delight us, but they're tempered with a more than generous helping of signature chug-jams to keep us totally boogeying (dig the ZZ Top guitar riffery on track 2!) and lilting interludes to help us come down gently. When absorbing this album, it's hard to shake the very specific image of a naked, twirling free-spirited German longhair in the desert at night alone with his arms wide open holding a hand rolled cigarette/joint in one hand and doing graceful hand maneuvers with the other...and that's fine by us. A total krautrock essentials. Fans of both Can and Circle need to hear it.
This new, artist approved "Achim Reichel Edition" of Die Grune Reise is digitally remastered, and comes packaged with an extra, dvd disc (PAL, region 0, so it'll work in your computer but maybe not your dvd player) that contains an album length 42 minute video interpretation of the whole record ("Grune Reise - Der Film") that looks to be made fairly recently, with lots of trippy computer graphics going on, it's maybe better than the watching the "visualizer" on your iTunes but not much. Chances are, the pictures A.R.'s music will make in your mind are better than this, so use your imagination instead. The dvd also includes a 10 minute "Making Of" feature, but we don't know if that's a making of the album or a making of the video, 'cause the dvd menu/interface is just about the most confusing thing ever and we weren't able to figure out how to access that segment. So, the dvd is a bit of a bust, though again we didn't actually watch everything... and maybe the surround sound feature is a cool. Regardless, the album itself is highly, highly recommended!
Oh boy. A red-letter day at AQ when we got this in. You see, several years ago, we'd stocked an amazing "best of" collection called Echoes Aus Zeiten Der Grunen Reise by this krautrock artist, A.R. & Machines (turns out the A.R. stands for Achim Reichel) that in itself was a far out minimalist psychedelic electronic masterpiece years ahead of its time -- and it was just a "best of"! Everybody here loved it. It's been out of print for years, though, and we'd never come across any other reissues, until now! Hence our excitement about this, a double cd containing TWO of Reichel's albums in their entirety, Echo and A.R. IV.
If you're familiar with that "best of" cd, you'll recognize a few of the songs, but transformed, extended and built upon -- like you're finally experiencing the entire complex film, not just the titillating preview. If you're not familiar with that "best of," then expect a hypnotic, meandering cream dream that any lover of Eno, Cluster, Can, Neu, Bo Hansson, Kraftwerk, and even Wendy Carlos Williams shouldn't miss. Completely groovy.
1972's Echo, which takes up the largest portion of the two cds, is the highlight here. Long before the re-issue, Julian Cope made it a record of the month on his website and it's not hard to see why. It's a meandering four part -- well, we wouldn't even say "piece," it's more like a realized world -- made up of journeying guitars and plodding percussion with the occasional wailing vocals in English that take it well into the stratosphere. At times low-key, at other times frenzied, but always with an intensity that moves it along steadily. By the time you get to the freakout vocal jam of that acts as the come down of Echo, you've been led through so many emotions and states of mind, that you're spent.
Take a break between the two albums since A.R. IV (1973) is another, separate adventure -- still groovy and rhythmic, but a little funkier, a little louder and more focused -- like he's revisiting the territory he covered in Echo but he's more familiar with the place & can take you directly to all the cool places.
Actually, this re-issue would have been a shoo-in for Record Of The Week if only we thought we could get more. But according to our supplier, the forty or so copies we have now might be the last we'll get, as this is apparently an all-too-limited reissue. Ah well. Get it while you can!
A few years ago, they surveyed a drowned, underwater village in a dammed up valley, and on the album before that, they lowered a microphone deep into a hole in the ground, making some unusual discoveries... well, not REALLY, but in their musical imaginations. Now, enter with Reigns into the 'house on the causeway'. That's right, it's the return of our favorite moody, mysteriously conceptual site-based post rockish indie gloom pop electronica act from England! Again they're exploring/evoking an imaginary locale, and what creepy things may or may not have happened there, through their mostly dreamy, little bit nightmarish music... They've got something in common with a lot of the artists on Miasmah and Type labels, though less soundscapey, more actually song oriented. They also are reminding us a lot of Tarwater this time around. Maybe that's accentuated by the inclusion of more in the way of vocals (usually quite processed, however) on some of the tracks here, while in the past they'd been primarily instrumental, with textual information (or disinformation) presented in the cd or 7" booklet...
The House On The Causeway seems to feature two (related) modes of song - the purely instrumental, slowly unfolding ones; and the slightly more uptempo ones with singing/rhyming and skittering drum beats... It's all quite lovely as always with Reigns, their looping piano notes and ambient electronics a blissful reverie, but also as always an eerily lurking menace persists, both sonically (minor key ominousness that emotionally suggests horrors but shocks only sparingly, as with the distorted noisy outburst at the end of "Crex, Crex, Crex") and intellectually via the accumulation of sinister signifiers in the cryptic lyrics, songtitles ("Everything Beyond These Walls Has Been Razed", "Mirrors At Night", "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen") and artwork that the listener can't quite square with the seemingly sweet music, music that seems to conceal whispers and weepings.
From the same UK label that brought us that great Hey Colossus album listed recently, here's something also really cool but VERY very different.... where Hey Colossus was brutally heavy and rhythmic, this band, Reigns, is so pleasantly pretty and placid. Utterly gorgeous, really, and mysterious. We're reminded of such artists as Stafraenn Hakon, Eluvium, Sonna, and Sigur Ros. It's that sort of gauzy, mellow, melodic post-rock, with songs constructed from gentle guitar and piano figures, operating in a zone of beautiful ambience, infused with indistinct electronic detritus. Swells of live percussion or electronic beats sometimes appear, too, but the mood remains blissful, if almost somber. But not really somber since there's a strange, very subtle sense of humor afoot, part of the weird conceptual framework that Reigns have invented for this album. Yes, it's a concept album! And a mostly-instrumental one at that, with no real singing to speak of, though you will occasionally hear voices drifting in the mix, including a computer voice (a la Radiohead) on the fourth track, "Translating".
The concept? It's intentionally vague and sort of surreal, but first off we're told that this was supposedly "recorded on location by Reigns operatives A & B". The title We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground, taken literally, provides an imaginary scheme for the album. Each track is assigned a depth, ranging from 23 meters to 1 mile. Thus, track 2: "Corners & The Straights (102 metres)". Or track 9: "The Fattest Goose Shall Be The Soonest To The Spit (1460 metres)". Inside the handsome digipack you'll find the "Original Site Transcript" giving notes on what was encountered at each depth by the two Reigns operatives. Some examples:
"(102 metres) First subterranean voice. Operative B suffers small breakout of hives on ungloved hand."
"(416 metres) Foul smelling miasma rises from hole. Surrounding grass visibly pales."
"(1001 metres) Sudden rise in static. Recording levels unchanged. Operative B demands that A stop pinching at nape of B's neck. A denies any such activity."
More events and phenomena, both mundane and peculiar, are documented. But this is all in the liner notes -- you'll hear the voices mentioned but otherwise this isn't at all meant to -sound- like any sort of static-y, subterranean field recording...it's just very lovely music. Pretty nifty, as most more ordinary post-rock efforts don't exhibit such imagination! We like.
Funny name, Renderizors. But it makes sense when you know that this New Zealand outfit is actually a conglomeration/collaboration of two AQ faves: The Renderers (NZ underground downer pop) and the Sandoz Lab Technicians (NZ underground freeform drone)!!
To quote from a previous review of ours, "Sandoz Lab Technicians may be the most fucked-up and most freeform out of all of the mind-expanding, free noise New Zealanders that we have championed in the past (i.e. Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Omit, Anthony Milton, etc.)." Meanwhile, The Renderers are much more in the indie-pop, song-oriented camp, combining post-punk dissonance with bleak depressive melody. Together, you get something that's a very very lovely best of both worlds. Haunted howling winds of gentle feedback quietly accompany the so sweet and so weary female singing from The Renderers' chanteuse Maryrose Crook. Spooky drones both threaten and cajole. Lethargic balladry struggles stoically amidst storms of psychedelic electric distortion, with nihilistic, nasal male mumbling also sharing the mic with the more breathy vox of Ms. Crook. At times we're reminded, maybe mysteriously, of everything from the Velvet Underground to Bardo Pond, Slap Happy Humphrey to Richard Youngs, Pumice to Doodles... and even the echoey '60s dark psych pop of obscure AQ faves Gandalf... though really we'd hope that saying "imagine a mix of The Renderers and Sandoz Lab Technicans" would do the trick! Recommended.
If you ever thought Comets On Fire sounded chaotic and possibly drug-addled (which they do), and liked that and wanted even more chaos and drugs in the mix, then you've got to check out these seriously fucked Santa Cruz cousins of theirs, a band called Residual Echoes -- actually the brainchild, it seems, of one Adam Payne, recording mostly solo (though there's a live band now). His friends help out on the record -- Adam and Co. variously credited with "unseasoned drumming", "shirtless drumming", "manhands", "air", "flutophone", "shitty bass", "fuzz", "computer din", "broken alto" and other instruments (or not).
Blending krautrock, '80s SST style experimentation, and the wiggiest of the Japanese destructo-psych underground into one potent pot-brownie of a record, this is fucked up and will fuck you up too if you let it. First released in a limited vinyl edition, but this cd sounds better though. And you need all the help you can get.
Lotsa squawking squonk, but always with drive, goin' someplace good. Long songs, many moods, hard to grasp in it's entirety, entirely. We seriously dug it though. Again, it's easiest to describe this for/sell this to Comets fans -- just imagine Comets at their craziest and go from there. Heavy psych action with few if any boundaries and lots of arty energy. Oh yeah, remember that Leaf Yard cd-r? If so, that means you want this too.
FYI, it's a Record of the Month on Julian Cope's Head Heritage website at www.headheritage.co.uk (which we recommend you check out for the music reviews!), who also recently bestowed similar honors on another recent Holy Mountain release, Om's Variations On A Theme. And we know Holy Mountain ain't payin' payola to Mr. Cope... nor to us for that matter though we wouldn't be opposed...
Along with the post-Reverend Bizarre project we just got in and made our Record Of The Week (Sami "Sir Albert Witchfinder" Hynninen's ultra-doomy The Puritan, you already read about it above, right?), we also were finally able to get some copies of this, a MUST HAVE for all fans of these now defunct Finnish true doom metal legends. In fact, it's so good we would not hesitate to recommend it to any curious persons who have yet to hear ANY Reverend Bizarre. It's not an official "best of", actually this posthumous collection consists of uber rarities from various vinyl split ep's and other obscure sources, but it does still have some of their best stuff on it. And, since Rev. B. had fashioned themselves into one of the best "traditional" doom metal bands around (in part by not being TOO traditional) that means this is one of the best double discs of doom we've heard since, well, the LAST Reverend Bizarre album, the 2cd swansong that was III: So Long Suckers.
There's 15 tracks here, leading off with "Demons Annoying Me" from a long vanished split 12" with Orodruin, which happens to be a NON-boring nearly 18 minute epic, a true masterwork of heedless heaviness, built from raging riffs, distorted noise, and cathartic screams, one of the tracks that transcends this band's obvious influences and definitely deserves pride of place as the first track on this altogether awesome double disc. Other standouts abound, from the anthemic "Blood On Satan's Claw" (boasting some King Diamond-y falsetto in the vocal dep't.), to the brief and bludgeoning "Odinn's Men", to the seemingly Current 93 influenced "Apocalyptic Riders", to the also pretty darn epic eleven and a half minute "From The Void II", complete with slo-mo drum solo...
Then there's the two killer cover songs included here, both from a long out of print 7" we once stocked: Judas Priest's "Deceiver" and Saint Vitus' "Dark World". As the liner notes put it, it's as if Saint Vitus wrote that song for RB to cover. And while Albert's vocals are quite impressive throughout this entire collection, it's really amazing how well his wildly over the top "impersonation" of Rob Halford comes off on "Deciever", and with Vitus such a huge influence on RB to begin with, it's no surprise that Albert channels Scott Reagers perfectly on "Dark World" (heck he channels Reagers perfectly all the time, check out the track "The Tree Of Suffering" for another very good example). Wow.
RB's music can get pretty trancey, doing a dirgey drone at a creepy crawl, with the likes of the gloomy "Bend" (an unlikely "cover" of a track by Finnish electro artist Mr. Velcro Fastener, by the way, from a split they did!) and a bunch of others bringing in hints of black metal grimnity. But also some tracks are fairly uptempo and succinct, like the '70s Sabbatheque rockin' of "Broken Vows", which any Witchcraft fan is gonna love. And if you get at all bothered the Devil in your music (why are you reading this then?), beware the backwards shit going down on "The Gate Of Nanna" at the end of disc 2, that's Satan worship if we've ever heard it. So cool.
The cd booklet deserves mention as well, they didn't neglect the liner notes that's for sure. There's many pages of text in tiny tiny type discussing the what/when/where/why of each track in great depth.
R.I.P. Reverend Bizarre... and doom on brothers, Doom On!!
The end is nigh! Heck here it is, at long last. The final tolling of the bell for Finnish apocalyptic doomsters Reverend Bizarre. Thus this album is titled So Long Suckers, and there's a sticker on the front that says: "Doom Metal Is Dead". What could be doomier than that? Funny how these guys, who started off as not much more than an enthusiastic fanboy tribute to their favorite doom metal acts, have now become almost one with the genre itself. Or at least their own, admittedly redundantly denoted, subgenre of "Apocalyptic Doom".
When we heard they were breaking up, that was a bummer, but we were eager to hear this promised swansong release. So, sad to see them go... but what a way TO go. A sprawling double cd, six slo-mo (like swimming in a moat filled with molasses) songs of super heavy repetitive riffage and lyrical lethargy, lasting over two hours total. Everything that we love about the bizarre Reverend sorta summed up right there. Spirited, eccentric and extreme, the sort of band that thinks nothing of writing 25+ minute long songs, like some sort of oppressive, epic, plodding prog, giving them all the more space to display their guitar blunt force trauma and deep voiced vocal drama... so massive and monotonous. Disc one starts off with the twenty nine minutes of "They Used Dark Forces / Teutonic Witch". Track two, "Sorrow", is a 25 minutes. Track three, "Funeral Summer", a mere 11:41... and that's the whole of disc one. There's a few shorter numbers on disc two (like the fuzz ripping instrumental "Kundalini Arisen"), but also another 25 minute bruiser (the majestic and martial "Anywhere Out Of This World"), which becomes psychedelically trance-inducing by the end, for us, almost like Om.
Of course, song length doesn't put the o's in yr dooooooooooom alone. Reverend Bizarre take their final shot here at the classic crush of heroes like Saint Vitus (also a big influence on their cleanly-crooning vocalist), Cathedral and of course Black Sabbath. The riffs they repeat forever and ever are forged from the heaviest of distorted tones, the overall atmosphere is one of weighty, weary, weirdness. This is one monolithic tombstone all right, an end to this band's 13-year career that itself seems rather endless while you're listening to it. Endless and eternal. Reverend Bizarre, R.I.P... and doom on!!
In keeping true to the uncanny laws of nature in the Reynolsian universe, No-Reynols came into creation because the world had slipped out of balance due to the invincible musical force that is Reynols. This is not to say that No-Reynols is the evil
Nice 180 gram Rhino vinyl reish of this 1978 poppy punky new wavey classic from Glaswegian rockers the Rezillos, which includes such energetic "hits" (in an alternate, much cooler universe, at any rate) as "Flying Saucer Attack", "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures", "Bad Guy Reaction", "Top Of The Pops", and their hard hitting cover of early Fleetwood Mac garage stomper "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight". Though the Rezillos were one of Scotland's first Pistols-era punk bands, they liked their '60s stuff, doing some other '60s covers besides the Mac, also suitably punked up. Faye Fife's vocals provide some melodic balance to the more sneering-sounding, tougher male ones. Not that she doesn't sound tuff too. Super good tunes, good times, yeah!!
Don't just take it from us, J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. has been quoted as saying that Can't Stand The Rezillos is the best album Sire ever put out. And that's saying a lot, since in just '78 alone Sire released albums by the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, and the Flamin' Groovies, among many others...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
So, sure, "experimental/improv/psych" bands based outta Brooklyn are probably a dime a dozen these days, so what makes the debut from this new Thrill Jockey signing worthy of glorious Record Of The Week status here at aQ? Well, for one thing, Thrill Jockey have had a pretty good track record in that area lately, with aQ fave bands like White Hills and Barn Owl, and fans of either ought to check out Rhyton. At least, we had to give it a listen, and when we did, WOW! Totally tripped out and hypnotic, stonery psych explorations embraced our ears - and we think gently tingled any mystic sixth or seventh senses we may possess. Their jamming has a fuzzed-out edge, and a definite exotic, Eastern vibe, buzzing with electric saz for one thing... as if they're not from Brooklyn, they're from Brooklynistan!
The mesmeric music of Rhyton is a mind-melting mind-meld involving three well-matched musicians, a supergroop of sorts, the trio consisting of D. Charles Speer from the No Neck Blues Band, Jimmy SeiTang of Psychic Ills, and Spencer Herbst from some bands we confess we've not heard of before. Speer is on the strings, playing electric saz, electric mandolin, and baritone guitar. SeiTang is on bass and tape delay. Herbst is on drums and percussion (and videocassettes, we read somewhere?). A good set up for playing something that's rock, but not.
Over the course of the five, mostly long, mainly instrumental tracks here, Rhyton easily convinced us to make this Record Of The Week, or maybe hypnotized us into doing so! We just couldn't say no to their repetitive, reverby bath of shuddering soundwaves, sub-bass pulsations, meandering raga-like "split stereo, dual amped" leads, and loads of oscillators, loops, n' effects.
Relatively mellow opening track "Stone Colored" eases us in, giving us a sense of, if not where Rhyton is going, at least how they're gonna get there. And, as the cliche says, the journey is the destination. That's before the 12+ minute "Pontian Grave" heavies things up even more, and the raw side of Rhyton's experimentation is revealed. And so it goes, Rhyton getting into outre modes of instrumental psychedelic possession, centerpiece "Teke" being the perhaps the most druggily dubbed-out of the album's varied transmissions...and then, on the fantastic final cut, "Shank Raids", we REALLY hear the Middle Eastern influence come to the fore. It's not just the electric saz they've been making use of, on this one the rhythms n' melodies sound straight out of the Turkish psych songbook, stately and spacey, but also gnarly, warped and distortion-damaged, almost what it would be like to Greg Ginn's Gone, or Black Flag circa The Process Of Weeding Out, attempting a Mogollar or 3 Hur-el cover, yeah! There's a whiff of Sun City Girls to this as well.
Eastern aspects aside (or not), Rhyton's unique vibrations are on roughly the same wavelength as those of such outfits as Carlton Melton, Davis Redford Triad, White Hills, Titan, Bardo Pond, etc., and thus this should appeal to quite a few of you. So we say, get it! And get it quick, as the compact disc edition, packaged in a slim handmade sleeve (abstract art glued on front, hand-stamped text on back), is ultra limited to only 200 hand-numbered copies!! We got a bunch, but that bunch is probably all we'll get. Meanwhile, the similarly-appointed vinyl version is just a bit less limited, 500 copies made, and it comes with a postcard insert and free download code.
Huzzah! These two amazing early seventies records by the obscure French prog-folk outfit Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes have turned up *unofficially*, and won't be around for long so you know what that means: Don't Sleep!
Ame Debout (1971) and Paix (1972) were the second and third records by the group which lasted about a decade over seven lps. Ribeiro's commanding and unusual voice, stemming from her Portuguese origins, was the perfect vehicle for multi-instrumentalist and instrument creator, Patrice Moullet, who wrote all of the music and was the constant mainstay as principal member of Alpes. Moullet and Ribeiro first met on the set of Jean-Luc Goddard's film, Les Carabiniers, and soon after Moullet wrote music to accompany Ribeiro's poetry and later formed a full band. Ribeiro has often been called the French Nico, but her voice has far more range and power, like Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention or Judy Henske. But what really set the group apart was Moullet's artistry with innovative instrumentation, creating unique instruments such as the percuphone, cosmophone & orgolia, which gave the group a spacey almost mystical vibe.
Indeed they are like a proggier version of Fairport Convention or Pentangle but much more psychedelic and strange and less rooted in folk traditions. However you cut it, this is French progressive folk at it's best. Both albums come highly recommended!
Finnish experimental black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, might be one of our favorite groups going right now. We've raved wildly about every one of their records so far, and then there's RfR electronic offshoot Will Over Matter, who we dig just as much. And it's not surprising, Ride For Revenge don't traffic in grim black buzz, they're not sonically similar to classic Norwegian black metal, or Swedish, or French - if anything, they're much more in the tradition of all the WTF? music we love from Finland, from Circle to Keukhot, Dead Reptile Shrine to Circle Of Ouroborus, their music is murky and dirgey, mathy and rhythmic, repetitive and hypnotic, and if you thought their records proper were fucked up and far out, this new double cd of singles and comp tracks and live jams will blow your mind.
The first track alone is worth the price of admission, RfR getting all Will Over Matter, and unfurling a 21 minute electronic/black buzz hybrid, the first 6 minutes of which, is just weird squelches and bleeps and bloops, with some creepy voice intoning over the top. And when the riffing finally comes in, the song doesn't explode into metallic gallop, or burst into furious blasting, instead, that riff, just sort of buzzes in the background, while the bleeping and squelchy blooping continue, the whole thing a sort of damaged black buzz kosmische or something. And then at about 9 minutes in, another guitar (or is that a synth?) comes in, all thick and crumbling and corrosive, drums too, plodding and spare, and again, no blasting or galloping, now it's just a woozy, murky creep, still spaced out and cosmic, but now buzzy and blurry lumbering, and then vocals come in, raspy and sinister, over a bed of what is essentially blackened power electronics, the vocals mutating gradually, until they sound robotic and alien, a little like Cylons from the old Battlestar Galactica!!! What the fuck? And that's just part one. Part two of the 32+ opening jam, finds the band slipping back into a field of blooping FX and electronics, that again, are eventually subsumed by some damaged drumming, and crumbling distorted guitar buzz, noisy and chaotic and fucking demented. This time, the sound does get fast and buzzy, but it's a loping, stumbling blackened mess, that eventually resolves in a tangle of buzzing, glitched out electronics. Phew! Only two other tracks on the first disc, but they're lengthy WTF? workouts. One's an old track from 2009, that is freaked out NOISE, sounding very Japanese, or Japanoise. Total skree and screech, howl and throb, feedback, and gristly grinding crunch, howled vokills, some seriously brutal blacknoise. The other's a 20 minute epic, recorded in 2013, the same time as those first two tracks, this one ditching the electronics, and unfurling a murky rumbling ambience, which soon turns into some weirdly dubbed out black dirge murk, sounding a bit like Aluk Todolo, a sort of black-kraut hypno-rock, totally mesmerizing, and if those first two tracks didn't make it worth it for you, this one definitely will...
The second disc is much more 'metal', the first few tracks live, the band sounding a bit more conventional, but only a bit, the sound distorted and blown out and lo-fi, but still tranced out and minimal, very much in the vein of Aluk Todolo, some dirge-y occult rock, with some sick, howled vox, loping, lumbering, minimal black murk, that veers from churning almost-doom, to stumbling metallic frenzy and back again, with at least one guitar doing nothing but spraying thick crumbling black drones over the proceedings, either that or the riffs, just blur into blackened smears, either way, it's plenty tripped out and hypnotic. There's a few awesome demo tracks, super brittle and muddy, with weirdly clean guitar riffing, distant drumming, rumbling vokill rasps, all smeared into some minimal black metal murk. There are some other rarities, a fantastic 10 minute ambient creepfest, all grinding low end, mumbled vox, pipe fight percussion, spare and SUPER creepy, laced with some electronic flecked guitar buzz, and some seriously tripped out production, and a second track, that's cut from the same cloth, but then adds a shit ton of furious blackened guitar-noise to the proceedings, not to mention some super fucking creepy vocals, making it sound like some blackened bastard offspring of Whitehouse and Suicide! Then finally, more old demos, these the most metal of the bunch, epic riffing, simple drumming, the first of the three almost sounding like 'true' metal, old school lo-fi crusty filthy blackness, raw and fierce and pretty fucking rad.
We talk a lot about how weird Finland is, so before we go any further, let us apologize to the majority of Finland who to be fair are probably not weird at all. Now that we've got that out of the way, HOLY SHIT! Is there no end to the amazing and damaged and demented music coming out of Finland. We're beginning to think not.
The latest evidence comes in the form of the brand new full length from Ride For Revenge, who we first heard a while back on a split with fellow countrymen Torturium, their half of the split a downtuned black trudge, like Winter or diSEMBOWELMENT but with that impossible to describe Finnish something that transforms everything into some special sort of what-the-fuck. Creepy synths, plodding drums, grinding guitar and harsh vocals, not exactly black metal, not in the traditional sense at least, but most definitely metal.
On King Of Snakes however, the band have gotten even weirder, and distinctly less metal, but no less heavy. Supposedly there are guitars, but to our ears it just sounds like just drums and lots and lots of bass. Each song a plodding doomic lurch, the drums pounding out a simple rhythm, the riff repeating over and over, most songs with just a single part, very mesmerizing and hypnotic. Like a caveman Circle or a guitarless Gore, these guys just bash out endlessly cycling looped low end and killer crushing doom drum pound. The vocals are a super affected gurgling growl, not in the death metal sense, instead, super dramatic, intoning unspeakable evils, a rumbling demonic baritone, peppered with the occasional super delay drenched goat metal grunt.
Some tracks also have cool creepy keyboards as well, that add all sort of mood and texture, and it's not cheesy metal synth either, it's all strange analog buzz, a sort of krautrocky blur draped over the endlessly pounding groove.
Ride For Revenge are another one of those black metal bands, who seem to be black metal more out of pedigree than sound, but even though this doesn't sound like metal, it is most definitely black. It sounds a bit like Godheadsilo jamming with Finnish alchemical dronelords Tiermes, with the occasional injection of Hawkwinded FX and SUNN-drenched rumble, mysterious and murky swaths of throbbing low end thrum wrapped around the drums like some evil warlock's cloak.
Imagine if Amphetamine Reptile was a black metal label... then these guys would be Halo Of Flies... Most definitely one of our new favorite 'black metal' records...
The long awaited return of Finnish black metal weirdos Ride For Revenge, and when we say weird, we do in fact mean WEIRD. We sort of forget about these guys when we're going on about the most fucked and damaged black metal ever, and maybe that's because their sound ends up being SO fucked up and freaky that it almost ceases being black metal entirely, instead, they seem to traffic in some sort of bass and drums, downtuned doom dirge, a series of hypnotic loops, locked riffs, all completely fractured and crumbling and confusional.
In the review of the last RfR record, King Of Snakes, we mentioned Amphetamine Reptile, and Halo Of Flies, Winter and diSEMBOWLEMENT, Gore and Circle. On Wisdom Of The Few, they continue on in that same baffling blackened trajectory resulting in a sound that off the top of our heads sounds a little like Om and Faxed Head. Right. Most metalheads we'd imagine will not be pleased, as this is seriously wacked, more textural and rhythmic than riffy and buzzy, it again sounds mostly like just bass and drums, but that's once you make it past the lurching, stumbling, guitar intro, streaks of feedback are all tangled up with a strangled reverb drenched guitar, playing out some sort of fractured atonal riff, the entire thing peppered with bits of hiss and glitch, before finally exploding into the lo-fi dirgery of the title track. A super murky muddy looped riff, pounding drums, rumbling low end, and some croaked demonic gurgles, the sound is super in the red, the drum fills peg the needles, but it still manages to sound muddy and subterranean. The drums and bass (or extremely downtuned guitar) locked into a mantra-like loop, the cymbals super hot, a relentless crash and sizzle, again reminding us of a blackened super minimal Gore. But things get even weirder. The clouds of hiss and glitch from the opening track return, and suddenly the sound is not metal so much as some sort of abstract doomy drone. A bass riff pounded out over and over and over, while around it, static crumbles and buzzes, sheets of feedback drift off in the distance, the 'groove' is peppered with little squalls of scrape and crunch, all underpinning a creepy spoken vocal.
The next track is even weirder (or perhaps just as weird), the drums wrapped in weird warped FX, pounding out a simple propulsive beat, wrapped in flanger and phaser, sounding super space-y while all around it, the gurgling demonic vocalist grunts and gurgles, over another totally mesmerizing black groove. Let's not describe the next track as weirder than the one before, cuz it's gonna seem ridiculous after a while, needless to say, it's weird in a different, equally twisted way. A deep whirring rumbling low end, a skittery almost funky krautrock beat, a heavily accented voice speaking ominously and dramatically, the voice switching from speaker to speaker, the drums shifting and subtly speeding up and slowing down, the rumbling drone-y buzz, occasionally revving up, then revving back down. Fucked up for sure, but so creepy and cool.
"Morning Won't Bring A Twinkling Star" is the longest track here, and manages to merge many of RfR's disparate elements into one epic sprawling blackened rhythmscape, a loping drum beat, a woozy seasick bassline, the drums distorted and motorik, the vocals reverbed and haunting, before slipping into a long stretch of warped low end warble and high end sine wave shimmer, before lurching back into blackened action. The record finishes off with a brief soundscape, equal parts distorted crunch, moaning feedback, downtuned flutter, minimal whirring synth, thick doomy buzz and FX drenched warble.
Woah. It's like dipping your head into a garbage disposal grinding up muddy murky chunks of Darkthrone, Aluk Todolo, Gore, Faxed Head, Circle, Urfaust, Geronimo and Lightning Bolt at 16rpm, a utterly demented and genius mix of freaked out, lobotomized black sound, a total mind melting, speaker shredding, ear punishing, minimal post black metal mind fuck. SO FUCKING AWESOME!
As always, we were way ahead of the curve. You were too, right there with us. Going all the way back to Acid Bath, that seminal NOLA rock band, that somehow combined Eyehategod style sludge, and groovy dramatic emotional rock a la Alice In Chains or Katatonia or Jeff Buckley, we were proclaiming that not only should Acid Bath have been HUGE, but AB frontman Dax Riggs should be a rock star. So here we are over ten years later, and all that time, Riggs has continued on, first with Agents Of Oblivion, then Deadboy And The Elephantmen, all groups and records we LOVED, and played incessantly, but still, Dax and co. lurked way underground, barely even making a ripple in the mainstream music world.
But come last year, Riggs resurfaced, performing live and releasing a pretty decent disc (that we've yet to review), and suddenly being pushed hard, his sound, not all that different from Agents Of Oblivion, but now with some promotional real label muscle behind him. Unfortunately, not much happened with his solo record, so it was time for plan B, the first Deadboy And The Elephantmen record, re-released as a Riggs sort-of-solo record. Fair enough. We proclaimed it genius way way back when, and time has done nothing but demonstrate what a killer slab of dark grooviness and intensely emotional heaviness this record is, was and continues to be. So since lots of folks may not have been around when we first gushed about this disc, figured this was the perfect time to gush again.
Years and years ago, the big rock n' roll sleeper hit here at Aquarius had to be the awesome Agents Of Oblivion album, featuring two crucial ex-members of the late lamented cult band Acid Bath. Heavy, poppy, psychedelic rock with vocalist Dax Riggs crooning beautifully over it all. We shoulda made it record of the week, we all thought in retrospect. It became one of our favorite records EVER. We were really bummed then to hear that the Agents, like Acid Bath before 'em, broke up not long after the album's release. But, rumors filtered in that Dax and a new crew of New Orleans n'er-do-wells had formed a new band with the unlikely name of Deadboy and the Elephantmen to carry on where the Agents left off. Allan confirmed this when he happened to visit N.O. and was lucky enough to catch a live performance from this new band. They had a demo out then, and we anticipated a full album release on some big label to appear soon...we waited...and waited... and eventually a Deadboy record did come out, but the band had to release it themselves, since once again, the big labels had no idea and dropped the ball big time. Mystifiying, 'cause Dax is a rock star if ever there was one, and these guys should have been HUGE. This record is epic and darkly dramatic, heavy and groovy and weird as fuck, but also catchy and beautiful. Totally accessible yet morbidly underground, we hear everything from some voodoo Alice Cooper darkness and drama, to a little Aerosmith swagger, to the heaviness and angst of Alice In Chains of course -- Acid Bath was always an AIC meets EHG (Eyehategod) hybrid, in a really good way. Radiohead's "Ok Computer" is hinted at too, and Jeff Buckley, as the music combines weirdly sensitive melodicism and dark atmosphere inspired by their hometown's swamps and cemeteries. Dax is as impressive as ever, he really *sings*, drawing out vowels over a dozen notes. His vocals are oddly warm and comforting but also anguished and intense. While the songwriting on this album does not quite match the relatively flowery yet heavy tunesmithery of the Agents of Oblivion album, and neither does the instrumentation call attention to itself, that's not necessarily a bad thing here as it lets Dax' voice take center stage and he... just... wails. He's like a sludge metal Bowie, flamboyant, and dramatic, his vocals impossibly emotive and intense. Sometimes despairing, sometimes incantatory. Oh the angst! And the music is a perfect match, going from brooding and minor key, to explosive and space-y. For fans of Alice in Chains, Acid Bath/Agents of Oblivion (of course), Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, and Woven Hand. It may have taken a decade, but finally the rest of the world can discover what some of us knew all along�
Acid Bath, Deadboy And The Elephant Men, Agents Of Oblivion, we love them all, due in no small part to frontman Dax Riggs. As we've mentioned before, in numerous reviews of the above mentioned bands, Riggs was and is a rockstar, even in the druggy sludge combo Acid Bath, his soaring super dramatic vocals, and twisted surreal lyrics helped transform that band into something much more than just another NOLA sludgerock outfit. With every new band, came progression, away from the heavy, the dirgey, the druggy, toward a sound much more bluesy, glammy, poppy, but always the focal part was Riggs brooding moody croon.
We recently made the reissued Deadboy And The Elephant Men record If This Is Hell Then I'm Lucky record of the week, reissued under Riggs' name, in a bid by the label, we're guessing, to finally push him toward the mainstream, which makes perfect sense. Even more sense once we heard this, Riggs' first proper solo record, from last year. Fans into stuff like the White Stripes, Wolfmother, the Black Keys, no reason they shouldn't be digging this just as much. The sound on We Sing Of Only Blood And Love is a weird slithery Southern bluesy drugrock, incorporating bits of glam pop, gospel, AC/DC groove, but most of all, lots and lots of blues. Makes sense that this came out on Fat Possum, same label as the Black Keys. In lots of ways, this actually sounds quite a bit like the Black Keys, only if they were raised on Eyehategod instead of Howlin Wolf. Supercharged metallic blues, with pounding drums and some awesome churning riffage. But like with everything Riggs does, it's all about THAT voice. As rich and lustrous and over the top as ever, so much so, that at times, it almost sounds like Jimmy from the Frogs, full of trills and soaring almost operatic drama. Which is not at all a bad thing, and that voice all tangled up with these sludgey blues riffs, it's tough to beat.
There's also a bunch of stripped down, more acoustic numbers, sprawling and skeletal. The vibe very Mark Lanegan, sinister and languorous, but where Lanegan's voice is a whiskey soaked baritone, ominous and haunting, Riggs voice again, is intense and almost over the top.
If you're fans of any of Riggs' other outfits, and lord knows you sure as shit should be, you'll definitely need this. But for the uninitiated, this just might be the Riggs record that's accessible enough to turn him into the rockstar he's always should have been.
Live, recorded for French radio in 1978, this archival album from minimalist composer Terry Riley is a gorgeous solo meditation for specially modified organ and plenty of delay, running about 54 minutes in length. It's not unlike Riley's classic Shri Camel record from around the same time - he says, "the musical materials of The Last Camel In Paris are second generational belonging to the family of Shri Camel while manifesting their own distinct shape and flavor". On Last Camel, Riley's gently piping organ tones and tinklings ceaselessly unfurl, slowly modulating, truly a lovely late night listen for anyone with an ear for Riley's special brand of New Agey, neo-classical, psychedelic minimalism. It's one long, continuous performance but has been conveniently broken into ten seamless tracks on this cd release "as a guide to compositional changes" in the piece, which does move into more and more intense, ever-repetitive realms as the disc progresses.
A most essential archival release for all Riley fans, despite the uninspiring album cover artwork (is that a solarized picture of a dream-catcher?). Inside the digipack, things look better, the foldout cd booklet having a black and white photo of the bald, bearded Riley in concert on one side, and liner notes (mostly in French, drat, though there is some text in English from Riley himself) on the other. Now, there's another Terry Riley reissue on this list, our Record Of The Week in fact, but don't fret, getting this along with Church Of Anthrax won't be too much of a good thing, just plenty of it!
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The unanimous AQ staff favorite of the week. Disc one is totally stuck in our cd player...it's only about 20 minutes long, but it may as well be infinite, 'cause we just keep playing it over and over. Appropriate, because, as with much of the late '60s work of American minimalist composer Terry Riley's work, repetition (with subtle changes) is the modus operandi here. The original source song "You're No Good", a pop-latin-boogaloo number released by Harvey Averne in 1968 (he's not credited in the liner notes to this, strangely) is a great tune in its own right. But soon after the original song's release. Terry Riley got his hands on it and created what oughta become one of his all time classic tracks. Riley used pedal-driven tape-loops and the Moog to take the infectious "You're No Good" chorus to extreme, abstract, mesmerizing lengths. It's looped over and under itself, at first sounding completely normal and then imperceptibly gets weirder and weirder until it's so odd that the customers in the store start looking concerned and asking if the cd player is skipping. It stutters wonderfully! Sometimes the left and right channels are playing different parts of the song simultaneously, to eerily beautiful effect.
That the original song is so insanely catchy and hook-filled (it's a "Dancing in the Streets"-style pop number) definitely contributes to the accessibility and fun of the piece. Disco minimalism? Hell yeah. Apparently it was commissioned as theme song for what must have been a very avant-garde Philly dance club, the operator of which was a Terry Riley fan present at the concert documented on disc one... Brilliant.
By the way, the original Averne song can be found on the compilation Dusty Fingers Vol. 2, and we've added a clip of the original below for you to compare.
Disc 2 of this archival set is live material from one of Terry's Poppy Nogood All Night Concerts held in Philadelphia in the fall of 1967. The lovely drones produced by his soprano sax and "time-lag accumulator" must have kept the attendees happy and hypnotized in their sleeping bags 'til dawn, and now we can experience a cd's worth of it now at whatever time of day or night we choose. Nice.
Reissue of this 1981 American metal / hard rock all-time classic...you like classic metal? you don't have this? Buy it! Hooky and energetic with amazing vocals and guitarwork. The USA's answer to the best of the NWOBHM. One of those 'I envy you for getting to hear this for the first time just now' albums sez Allan.
Holy grail second album from one of the best American metal bands EVER (who never get their due). While we'd say 1981's Fire Down Under (their third) is THE one to get, if you were to get only one, once you've heard that you're gonna want to hear more. And so mucho kudos to Rock Candy for at long last providing the world with a cd reish of Narita, originally released on LP by Capitol in 1979. New York's Riot were what the NWOBHM would have sounded like if it would have happened in the USA instead of the UK. A supercharged, metallized step up from the American '70s hard rock of the mid-seventies (bands like Starz, KISS, Ted Nugent, ZZ Top), definitely melodic, but much more rippin'. And also way more ass-kicking and streetwise than most of the Sunset Strip style hair metal that the US offered up a few years later, though Riot surely were an influence on the best of that bunch. They still exist today, by the way, releasing records (big in Japan!) but lots different from back when, in part due to the fact that their original lead singer, the amazing Guy Speranza, RIP, is long gone from the lineup. That guy shoulda been a famous rock star, just listen to him here.
The black and white photo on the cover, of a taxidermed but still quite alarming bat, wings spread, fangs bared, malevolent and mummified, looking like some decaying Victorian museum exhibit, perfectly heralds the organic, psychedelic, and somewhat disturbing dronology to be heard on the disc within. Sometimes creepy, but fascinating and atmospheric. And, in a way, beautiful, like the delicate membrane of the bat's wings.
Look, we don't rave about EVERYTHING on Utech. Just most things on Utech. In fact, we haven't even yet reviewed several the label's previous batch of releases (among them Architeuthis Rex, The Skull Defekts/The Sons Of God, and Ural Umbo), but had to rave about this one (and a couple other cool new titles as well, you'll find highlighted elsewhere on this list: Bassett/Graf and Arcn Templ). RM74 is the solo project of Swiss soundmeister Reto Mader, who also plays in Ural Umbo, Sum of R, and Pendulum Nisum (of which we've only heard the former). And while that Ural Umbo disc Utech recently released was interesting, this solo effort from Mader REALLY caught our ears. Not that it's easy to describe. Abstract and ominous soundscapery, "music" bathed in glowing shimmer and shuddering suspenseful drone. It's all instrumental electro-acoustic experimentation, Mader playing guitars, strings, percussion, piano, electronics, kalimba, organ, synthesizer, and effects... the disc divided up into 11 individual tracks that are different enough to really stand out as "pieces", each one its own mysterious transmission from Mader's outsider imagination, and the spirits that move him. For instance, the opener, appropriately titled "Early Morning Fog", begins with swelling, buzzing drone and hum, mesmerically undulating, eventually adorned with what sounds like the gentle plinking of a fragmented music-box melody... already we're entranced.
Most of the tracks operate upon a basis of electronics, effects, radio static, buzzes, and morse code clicks, the instrumentation not so easily recognizable, though for instance you can definitely hear steel strings of a guitar twanging reverberantly on track three, "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea", amidst creaking sounds suggestive of a wooden ship at sea, perhaps...
As well as being a great release for Utech, Reflex we think would sound equally at home on the Miasmah label, although it would fall on the "grinding-est" side of their catalog. Other "Recommended If You Like" comparison candidates for this might be the Guillaume Gargaud discs we've reviewed recently, or Gregory Mullen, or the murky microscopic textures of certain Jewelled Antler recordings... Recommended at any rate, regardless of whether we can find adequate analogies for it!
The packaging, unlike most Utech releases, this isn't in a slim sleeve, but in a thicker, all-cardboard digipack style package, with a pocket (a little tight, we must say) inside for the cd, another for a folded insert which depicts that bat in fuller detail. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, also!
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Swedish 'Southern' groovy stoner metal. Who would've thought that something this southern fried and stoned sounding could come out of Scandinavia? Huge crushing riffs, ultra catchy hooks, and an amazing Phil Anselmo (Pantera/Down) sound-alike vocalist (that is, like Phil when he's actually singing, not when he's sounding stupid). Incredible.
The proto-metal lovin' legions who read the AQ list should be quite pleased with this reissue - take a trip down this particular Road and it's heavy riffing all the way, early '70s style! A power trio put together by former Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding in 1972, Road only made this one record for a rock-oriented Motown sub-label (the eco-friendly Natural Resources) before they broke up, and it quickly became lost to the mists of time, though we'd have thought Hendrix fans, if they'd heard it, would have been chuffed... anyone who likes stoned hard psych, with loads of wah wah wailing will dig this, it's total hippie heaviness (well, "I'm Going Down The Country" isn't so heavy, it's an acoustic jam, natch). There's some sixties sike-pop to it as well. But tracks like "Mushroom Man" and "Spaceship Earth" are spaced out and heavy all right, these three long hairs dishing out quite the din, with the 9+ minute album closer, title track "Road" gettin' almost DOOMY riff-wise.
Certainly deserving of recognition in the proto-metal realm, Road goes with Toad, Cactus, Moses, Tiger B. Smith, etc., and is probably the best thing that Redding did post-Hendrix, though we haven't heard his whole discography, to be sure. But it beats Fat Mattress, in volume and heft for sure, despite that earlier outfit's name (the drummer here was also in Fat Mattress, by the way, while the guitarist hailed from Rare Earth).
This is one of several new reissues from the new Relics label (Churchills, Aguaturbia are some other, more internationally-oriented titles that just came out, we'll be listing soon too). Nice to have, though the booklet's a bit skimpy, the cover reproduction looks kinda washed out and blurry. It does include something in the way of liner notes, though, from which we learn that Redding fell down some stairs at Frank Zappa's place prior to the formation of Road. Hmm, that almost sounds like the description of a band, but not this one! Thankfully he recovered from the accident and added Road to the list of awesome proto-metal obscurities.
Soundway Records strikes again with another groovy reissue, this one from Ghana. (Actually there's two killer new Soundway titles of African extraction that just came out, the other one, by Edzayawa, we plan on reviewing next time.) You might know Rob already from the title track of this record, which appeared on Soundway's great Ghana Soundz compilation a few years back. Apparently they got a lot of requests for a full Rob reissue from folks entranced by "Make It Fast, Make It Slow", so here it is, yay! And it's full of more awesome Afro-funk tunes besides that one from the comp.
This was Rob's 2nd album, originally released in 1977, rare and collectable ever since, this being its first reissue outside of Ghana. Soundway calls the one-named Rob "enigmatic" and says that this record offers up a "stranger, slower" form of Afro-funk than is the norm, and we'd agree. Make It Fast, Make It Slow tends towards the latter half of that title commandment, and is possessed of a unique, odd feel, having a spiritual vibe to it, with Rob providing the sort of spaced out gospel funk preaching on songs like "I've Got To See You Again, Lord" and "He Shall Live In You" that reminds us of some soulful early Parliament/Funkadelic stuff along those lines. His slightly gruff voice is compelling, and stands in nice contrast to the sweet, soft backing chorus. And though while this is not "just" dance music, this IS super funky, with irresistible rhythms and magnificent horns that both groove and warble. When Rob sings "Loose Up Yourself" on the opening track, you will!
Of the many great Afro-funk reissues we've seen lately, this one is a definite standout, up there with Danger by the Lijadu Sisters, ferinstance. Packaged with the usual Soundway care (the cd in mini-lp style sleeve), and the vinyl version comes with download code.
Ultra obscure, freaky French '70s underground psychedelic proto punk reissued, oui!! Crazy how there's still stuff like this out there ready to be (re)discovered. The Rob Jo Star band originally put this out in 1975, probably under the influence of the Velvets and the Stooges, kinda like cult Canadian contemporaries Simply Saucer. Like SS, the Rob Jo Star Band packs these tracks with all kinds of ridiculous synth blurt, electronics swooshing and bleeping and farting all throughout this album, other key elements of which include jangling distorted guitars and heavily accented vocals... Pretty darn cool if you ask us! There's moments that sound like a French version of The Cramps, inside a spaceship; others where the singer gets kinda Damo, and basically it's a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) dose of throbbing fuzz, chugging rock n' roll rhythms, handclaps, wild vox, with song titles like "Acid Revolution" and "Blood Flower". File with the likes of Soggy, Angel Face, and Metal Urbain...
Limited edition, import.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
New Zealander Dean Roberts made quite a name for himself with a handful of freeform Sonic Youth-esque albums in Thela and White-Winged Moth. Yet, he has shifted to the powerbook as his instrument of choice, turning guitars, piano, and viola into delicate crackling flows. Working with New York percussionist Tim Barnes, Roberts has created a fine album of eletro-acoustic abstraction not far from Fennesz or Oval. There's also a cover of Brian Eno's "Cindy Tells Me."
Dean Roberts, he's one of those 'regular name' guys, y'know, like David Grubbs, Alan Licht, Jim O'Rourke... Like them, his output is eclectic, you might hear him singing a song or doing out-guitar drone, as in his old band Thela. Experimental, electro-acoustic indie-rock I guess is his genre? Anyway, he's usually doing something cool, and this disc is no exception. Although Roberts hails from New Zealand (which always seems to be a good thing!), this was recorded in Italy, with several of his Italian friends joining on guitars and drums, while Roberts played acoustic and electric guitars, piano, bass, harmonium, glass harmonica and percussion. His hushed vocals are also present, but these tracks are soft and slow and sad and more about sound than songcraft. Be Mine Tonight is good driving through the woods at night music -- I know 'cause I did just that this past weekend on the way up to Mendocino. This low-key album is really less likely to spark a mood than it is to perhaps simply capture *your* mood, if listened to at the right time (like, driving through the woods in darkness). Roberts and his comrades 'rock out' for brief moments, but overall it's got a sleepy, fragile feel. Editing and processing are key to these results, along with the performances, with this having some of the same live-instruments-meet-glitchy-drone vibes as Roberts' amazing (and sadly out of print) Ritornelle release And The Black Moths Play The Grand Cinema from a few years back. Quite nice.
We've been stoked on the series of 2-on-1 remastered cd reissues of classics from the vaults of avant-jazz label Impulse!, among 'em discs we've reviewed by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Gabor Szabo, with more to come.
Among the latest batch of Impulse! twofers, we discovered this one, featuring two albums, Antelope Freeway (1971) and Equinox Express Elevator (1975), by jazz guitarist Howard Roberts. No, we hadn't heard of him before, perhaps you have, apparently he did a lot of session work, and cut a number of records for Capitol as a bandleader in the '60s. We're now curious to hear those (1963's H.R. Is A Dirty Guitar Player is supposed to be really good) to see how "straight" they were, 'cause while Howard Roberts might be a bland sort of name, turns out these two Impulse! albums of his are some darn freaky records!
Well, it WAS 1971, and Roberts and his session cat colleagues were obviously turned on to the psychedelic rock scene... and drugs... so they made Antelope Freeway, a "jazz" record with tracks seamlessly flowing from one to another, interspersed and layered with field recordings of highway traffic noise on account of the album's loose 'on the road' concept. There's song titles like "The Ballad Of Fazzio Needlepoint" and "Five Gallons Of Astral Flash Could Keep You Awake For Thirteen Weeks", plenty of experimental ambience, electronic effects, and, most importantly, tasty playing. There's surreal stoner humor to it for sure, but the actual emphasis is on groovy, beautiful instrumental sounds. Lots of funky jazz-rock jamming AND wacked out weirdness...
Even a boogie track like "De Blooze", which starts out quite cliched, intentionally so (the title is a tip off), by its fifth minute has gotten quite warped...
To give you an idea where Roberts was coming from, Antelope Freeway's original sleeve includes shout outs to the Firesign Theatre (whose comedy records may have inspired the subversive, quasi-narrative sound collage elements of this album) and guitarist Joe Walsh of the James Gang. Walsh is specifically credited with "Optimization of space-time energy transformations" here, which likely has something to do with his immortal quip, "The smoker you drink, the player you get!"...
Recorded at sessions in '72 and '74, Equinox Express Elevator is just as freaky, similar to Antelope Freeway but with extra Moog synth added to the mix. Tracks range from the delicate, droney "Unfolding In", to the abstract burble and textural drift of "Real Freak Of Nature Historical Monument", to the herky-jerky "Harold J. Ostly, The County Tax Assessor".
Across the two albums, there's 19 tracks in all, each one uniquely lovely and/or strange. The cd booklet considerately contains the original artwork (front, back, gatefold interiors) for both albums. Definitely a recommended reissue twofer fer sure - much thanks to Impulse! for bringing back, and bringing to our attention, these trippy '70s jazz gems.
There always seems to be labels vying for the coveted position of coolest record label in the world. EM in Japan of course, with their insane array of amazing, and amazingly packaged reissues. aRCHIVE is a contender, with outrageously deluxe packaging and some of the coolest weirdest music out there. There's PseudoArcana, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, and let's not forget Andee's tUMULt label. But France's Sittelle label constantly blow us away, and are inching ever closer to being the one.
C'mon, there was the rutting red deer disc, a whole record of deers mating, that sounds as amazing as you might imagine. Then there was the insane Bats record, two whole discs, one of normal recordings, the other of slowed down bat sounds, coupled with a massive book! Cicadas and Crickets was another great one, transporting us to some filed in the middle of nowhere. Bizarre Birds? Indeed, an outrageous collection of, well, bizarre bird sounds. And finally, Pastoral Bells, one of our all time favorites, the sounds of cowbells, drifting over the hills as cows wander and graze, so gorgeous and tranquil.
And as if it couldn't get any better, they bring us MONKEYS!!! You may not know how obsessed we are with monkeys, but WE ARE!!! (Andee even got to hand feed monkeys when he was in Japan!!) WE LOVE MONKEYS!!! But this is no ordinary collection of monkey sounds, these sounds are amazing, and amazingly varied, some do in fact sound like monkeys, but some sound like sirens, some like strange electronics, some even like black metal.
And like most of the stuff on Sittelle, it's not just the sounds, but the surroundings, the sonic bed in which the sounds exist. Here, it's the sound of the jungle, a lush, living thing, crickets and insets, a nearly constant buzz, birds chirping, the sound of wind, leaves, branches, that would almost be enough even without the monkeys, and come to think of it pretty sure there's at least one or two discs on Sittelle specifically of jungle sounds...
But monkeys is why we're here and the monkeys represented here are remarkable. There's the hooting Siamangs, engaged in an intricate call and response, multiple monkey calls piling up into confusional squalls. Then there's the Lar Gibbons, who alternately whistle, trill like birds, or scream like a frightened hysterical woman. How about the Male Orangutans who sound nothing like Clyde from Every Which Way But Loose, and instead sound a little like strange electronic whooshes and bleeps. Almost like a human making video game sounds. There are the chimps, whose calls are the most recognizable of the bunch, but who also have a call that sounds like a screaming woman or a mewing kitten. Then there are mountain gorillas, who grunt and pant, and growl a little like wild dogs. Then it gets strange. The Black Colobus, who groans like a wizened old man, or croaks like some giant frog, and sometimes sounds like Popeye, the calls separated by what sound like a very human grunts and coughs. Then there are the howlers, whose tracks, complete with the haunting forest backdrop, sound almost like Abruptum, some haunting black metal ambience, distant groans and growls, a drawn out demonic rasp, whispering like the wind, a growling monstrous rumble, very intense and ominous sounding.
And there's more. WAY more. Far too much to describe here. But all of it fascinating and bizarre and funny and completely amazing. And the most remarkable thing about these discs, is they are somehow not just "nature recordings", they are recorded, and sequenced, and presented in a way that makes them eminently listenable. It is more than the sounds of nature, it is a strange form of natural music, the music of nature. It can transport us to some far away jungle, some lost world, or it can just fill our ears with strange and wonderful sounds. Either way, this is a fantastic listen. Surprisingly musical, totally mysterious and so great!
As with all Sittelle releases, included is a big booklet with extensive liner notes in both English and French, which includes detailed notes on each track and on each type of monkey!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Chirp chirp chirp chirp... those of us who grew up somewhere outside of the city where you get to hear the sounds of nature at night are familiar with the wonderful, pulsating background drone provided by crickets and cicadas in warmer weather. These particular "singing" insects (60 different species!) were recorded all over the world (in France, China, Boreno, Cameroon, Australia, Venezuela, Sengal, and many, many other locales), but some of them could just as easily been in my parents' wooded backyard in Pennsylvania. OK, well maybe if I was an expert I could tell otherwise. But the buzzing chirping sounds still sound familiar, comfortingly so. Yet alien too, when you think about it... as with the somewhat similar Sublime Frequencies volume Broken Hearted Dragonflies, this could just as easily be the work of an experimental electronic musician! Ryoji Ikeda, Noto, or Nerve Net Noise perhaps...and the examples of "buzzers" on the Conet Project also come to mind.
With sixty tracks here, it's hard to pick faves. They all have their individual charms, each group of insects its own rhythmic and timbral signature, plus the different background ambience (frogs, bumble bees, woodpeckers) found from track to track, some recorded at "nightfall in a banana plantation" others at "twilight in a plam grove", or "during the day from a tree" etc. Also, these bugs' high pitched whines and massed chattering vary in intensity levels from the soothing to the downright frightening...
Definitely recommended to all you fans of the likes of Sounds of North American Frogs and Chris Watson's field recordings. And, as further recommendation, this comes from the from the same label that brought us Rutting Red Deers, The Inaudible World of Bats, and this week's Record Of The Week, Pastoral Bells!
As we've mentioned in a bunch of other reviews, lots of our favorite bands are woefully under-represented on the aQ list, generally, it's because those records predated the list, so when a record gets reissued, it's often a chance to finally lavish praise on a record that's been a favorite for years (or decades). In this case, it's not a reissue, but instead a live record from Georgia garage punks the Rock*A*Teens, who are currently are covered on the aQ site by just a couple sentences about one of their records, which is really a shame, cuz we LOVE these guys. So until someone mounts the lavish, deluxe reissue campaign these guys and their incredible records deserve, we can revel in this sweat soaked high energy live set cobbled together from an extended residency at the Star Community Bar in Atlanta, between 1998 and 1999, courtesy of aQ pal and Chunklet mastermind Henry Owings, who continues to dig up incredible rarities (we're still loving the recent Don Caballero record, and are hoping he'll do a Bar-B-Q- Killers reissue, another legendary and underappreciated Georgia outfit), and incredible this is.
If you've yet to discover the Rock*A*Teens, imagine a swampy, reverb drenched, fifties style, garage rock rockabilly, filtered through something more modern, swaggery and dramatic, the same sort of gospel tinged swampiness of Woven Hand, but more rocking, feverish, loose limbed and wild. Brooding, sweat soaked, bloody knuckled, broken bottled, booze soaked, psychedelic blooze stomps and echo drenched slow burn ballads in equal measure, all whirring organs, reverb galore, buzzing distortion, wild tribal drumming, and stunning, timeless songwriting, all wound up into something gloriously gritty, grimy, ecstatic, cathartic, murky and emotionally charged. Just check out the samples and you'll be sold. "Black Ice" might be one of our favorite songs EVER, in a body of work that has an impossible number of potential all time faves. Every record a stone cold gem, and this live set manages to transcend the limitations of the 'live record' and transports the listener to a dive bar in Georgia, lit with Christmas lights, packed with punks, this band crammed onto a little stage in the corner, conjuring up musical demons, and angels, and creating a gorgeous, noisy, heart breaking din. AWESOME. Includes a download too.
Blast off! Have a close encounter here with some spaced out, switched-on analog synthesizer overload from the early '80s, total DIY Moog madness for fans of Bruce Haack, Gershon Kingsley and Dick Hyman. Amazing how there ALWAYS seem to be totally, totally obscure records out there still to be reissued, Rocket Robert's eponymous 1982 album (142 copies pressed, originally, on his own label) being the latest discovery we think you'll flip over, if you're into swooshing, whooshing, throbulating electronics and hyperkinetic video game soundtracks! It lives up to the sci-fi name and sleeve artwork for sure, and ranges in mood from totally playful to darkly sinister. First time reissue from master tapes, includes liner notes and 2 previously unreleased bonus tracks of quirky, new wave synthpop w/ vocals.
With the first track on this anthology being a recording of wind from a 1935 sound effects record, AQ beloved sound artist Steve Roden makes a very literal introduction to I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces. Released by Dust-To-Digital, this beautifully constructed hardback book filled with images both from and ephemeral to Roden's collection of 78s, as well as two discs worth of sounds from that antique vinyl. Yeah, the idea is pretty much the same as what the Climax Golden Twins presented via Dust-To-Digital on their also-awesome Victrola Favorites anthology a few years back; but Roden's collection trends more to the mid-part of the 20th Century and is focused on Americana (including a couple of Hawaiian tracks made before the islands were granted statehood). Following that crackled recording of the wailing wind from that sound effects record, is the unmistakable voice of John Jacob Niles, the 'mountain tenor' whose spooky falsetto and maudlin melodic wanderings predated Devendra Banhart by a good 60 years... Afterwards, there's plenty of bluesmen, blueswomen, gospel belters, Appalachian balladeers, and barbershop crooners, many of which seem quite world-weary in singing their tales of lust, money, and liquor (or the lack thereof). Some of the names are familiar to us (e.g. Clara Smith, Roy Smeck, Sol Hoopii), but there are plenty of anonymous recordings from home-cut discs as well. The arrangements for many of the songs tend to be very sparse, just voice and guitar is pretty much all you get on every track; and the album is dotted with tracks from antique sound effects records of birds, ice, and even "night noises!" For those of you aware of Roden's own compositions of understated field recordings, quiet ruminations on found objects, and soft looping techniques, this shouldn't be a big surprise.
The vintage photos inside this 184 page book are completely lovely, with all of their rumpled edges, ruddy patinas, and cracked surfaces, with some far more poignant - such as the shot of a bunch of violas suspended outside in the sun perhaps to allow a coat of shellac to dry. There's the silhouette of G.J. Jessup decked out in his one-man drum and bugle corps regalia, and the glum looking fellow with the unkempt mustache leaning against his Funnygraph contraption (sadly, there's no corresponding recording for either photograph). Pages and pages of interesting images to provoke curiosity and evoke reverie. Altogether, Roden has compiled over 150 photos and 51 tracks for this stunning document of sonic obsession from Dust-To-Digital! Hard to imagine NOT wanting this.
Steve Roden's Speak No more About The Leaves has been Allan's favorite going-to-sleep record of the past little while, its whispery drones reminding him distantly of everything from a deconstructed Richard Youngs to a dessicated Bohren & Der Club of Gore. There's a bunch of academic concepts and references that went into the making of this record (discussed below) but that's less important than the fact that it sounds so nice. This lovely record deserved a lovely review, so we asked our pal Loren Chasse, friend and fan of LA experimentalist Steve Roden, to take a stab at it, as follows:
Steve Roden has been given shit by the soundart world for being "experimentally incorrect". Perhaps this is because the concepts behind Roden's work are never so "conceptual"Ì or self-important that they become the reason why the music is supposed to be interesting, good or enjoyable. Roden's conceptual practice seems to be more of a private strategy for going about his creative work -- for providing the compositional process with specific possibilities and limitiations -- than it is a purposeful means for earning validation from the experimental art/music world.
Take Speak No More About The Leaves...a sort of threeway meta-collaboration with composer Arnold Schoenberg and poet Stefan George in which Roden happens upon Schoenberg's use of George's verse for some lyrics to a piece of music titled "The book of the Hanging Gardens", transplants a cutting from this and cultivates a whole new life from it in his own work. The life of this record, indeed, comes so much from Roden's own mouth as he sings syllables taken from the original text and creates not so much a work of high fallutin' conceptual art as he does a beautiful song that might leave us wondering if Mr. Roden hasn't also been listening to Eyeless in Gaza somewhere along the way?
If you like the title of the record and appreciate the poetic impulses at its origins you're already on your way to liking the music. Roden's voice is extremely intimate as it sits in the edge of the speakers (seeming as if it might be coming out of the phone you forgot to hang up), chanting into the room as shining slivers of sound effervesce, chime and fall around it. It's a world you can't quite place, probably because you haven't been so small that you could ever fit inside the terrarium that contains it, yet you will intuit something comforting and familiar as you use this record as a sort of stethoscope for listening in on the processes of tiny lives taking root as old ones decay and all but disappear.
Wow! Ok, this is pretty darn amazing. We ordered a copy of this based on a brief description we read, something along the lines of: "long lost futuristic funky proggy electronic music from behind the Iron Curtain". That was enough for us. And maybe for you too, though we're gonna go on and on about this anyway. But yeah, if that description piques your interest, let us just say that you will NOT be disappointed. However incredibly weird and cool you might imagine this could be from that short synopsis, it is probably even better!
And we were listening to it, and loving it, before we delved into the detailed liner notes and found out what it was all about - or when exactly it was from. So that's another recommendation, the music stands on its own without prior awareness of its quite interesting historical aspects.
What you get here are ten killer tracks drenched in echo effects, dense with percolating beats, uber-distorted analog synths, and eerily ear-catching melodies, a sound utterly full of "flanged, phased, and fuzzed electricity". They're previously unreleased reel-to-reel recordings, circa 1978-1984, from the vaults of this pioneering Romanian DIY electro-prog-pop groop who only released two tracks officially during their career, on a state-sanctioned compilation lp in 1981, before fading into obscurity. Rodion G.A. was founded in 1975 by a fellow named Rodion Ladislau Rosca, who had been collecting prog records and experimenting with homebuilt electronic gear since the dawn of the '70s. The G.A. comes from the names of the other two founding members of the band, but it's really composer Rodion Rosca's show, the material here recorded in Rodion's home studio in Cluj, most instruments played and programmed by Rodion himself, with occasional 'real' drumming contributed by one of the other guys.
Despite the deprivations of living in an oppressive Communist dictatorship, Rodion's creativity flourished, and this music still sounds super fresh and ahead of its time, venturing even into full-on proto-techno with the likes of "Diagonala", though always in its own unique hybrid form, on that track ferinstance mixing in what sounds like Eastern European folk motifs and Goblin-y giallo soundtrack spookiness. Krautrock influences shine through too, Kraftwerk and Cluster for sure, plus we can't help but think of odd outsider aQ faves Bruce Haack and Wicked Witch - cool company to be in!
Rodion's bombastic "hairy funk" prog grooves are melded to melodic pop hooks, always cloaked with a wonderfully miasmic layer of lo-fi grime. Everything here has its unique charms, ranging from the sinister, grittily distorted bunkurfunk of "Citadela", to the motorik delightfulness of "Salt 83", so strangely warped and sunshiney, to "In Linistea Noptii", wherein lovely piano playing mixes it up with the electronic elements. Some tracks are instrumentals, some have catchy vocal choruses - and some are visited by what sound like the echoing cries of a prehistoric pterodactyl, presumably another synth effect, sizzling stabs of which are always swooshing around.
So THIS was the sound of underground Romania back in the day, who knew? We are so thankful this freaky music didn't stay a secret forever. Yep, these "lost tapes" are quite the discovery, minds have been blown for sure. Automatic Record Of The Week.
Packaged with extensive liner notes by Andy Thomas, illustrated with vintage photos, telling the whole fascinating story of Rodion's stunted career, and recent reemergence as the "Godfather of Romanian electronic music". Oh, and the vinyl version also comes with a cd!
Pop quiz! Quick: who's the "street poet" singer with no first name*, son of Mexican immigrants, born and raised in Detroit Michigan, whose debut album from 1970 sounded like a fuzz-soul-psych version of Bob Dylan and/or Donovan, and was an underground hit in South Africa of all places?? Duh, Rodriguez of course. It's about time his inexplicably obscure Cold Fact got the deluxe reissue treatment it deserves. Seriously, after listening to this for the first time, you'll feel like you just heard a bona fide '60s classic, and be amazed you had never heard these songs before. They ought to be all over "oldies" rock radio. It's ridiculous like that. Songs like "Sugar Man" and "I Wonder" seem like they should be fixtures of the baby boomer memory lane hit parade. It's so very of its era, "This Is Not A Song, It's An Outburst: Or, The Establishment Blues" is certainly a sixties song title, isn't it? Likewise "Rich Folks Hoax", "Hate Street Dialogue", and "Crucify Your Mind"... But, maybe he was just a little too freaky and right on, and (crucially) never got the right sort of record label support to become well known to the Woodstock Nation, though this album had some rather random, surprising success so far off in the Southern Hemisphere, in South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, which Rodriguez himself was unaware of for many years!
If left to his own devices, perhaps Rodriguez would have come off sounding a bit too much like Dylan. But Cold Fact was a "Theo-Coff" production, from the badass Motor City team of Mike Theodore and funk guitarist Dennis Coffey, and they helped accentuate the more underground and urban aspects of Rodriguez's sound. With his hip, Dylanesque poetry set amidst lush orchestration and gritty grooves, Rodriguez's Cold Fact is a super catchy, tripped out slice of street-level, soulful psychedelia, full of drug references and radical political critique. We alluded to "fuzz" above, but on the track "Only Good For Conversation" we mean FUZZ. That track's a stone(d) cold classic when it comes to heavy duty fuzz guitar crunch.
This reish comes in a nice digipack, with cover embossing and a big ol' cd booklet stuffed with text (liner notes, lyrics) and photos. One of the several cd booklet essays explains in part Rodriguez's unexpected appeal in South Africa - apparently, in that repressive society, it was due to the edgy, uncensored nature of his lyrics. "I Wonder", for instance, with its lines about "I wonder how many times you had sex / And I wonder do you know who'll be next" was considered so risque that if you were a teenager and wanted to be cool, you HAD to have this record. Apparently, many folks in South Africa thought of Rodriguez as being a star up there with the Beatles, and when they didn't hear more from him, all sorts of wild rumors spread that he'd died, been accidentally electrocuted, OD'd, or even committed suicide on stage! When, in fact, he simply had no idea how "big" he was in South Africa, and his recording career had stalled out elsewhere after his sophomore album, 1971's Coming From Reality (also soon to be reissued). Turns out he's still alive and well, today, and has actually gone to South African to pay arena (?!) shows in recent years.
In fact, when we've had album in the store before, it was only available on cd as an expensive import - from South Africa! So we're, again, super stoked that Light In The Attic put the effort in to do this long overdue, definitive domestic reissue.
*actually, his first name was Sixto, but he usually just went by Rodriguez.
Those of you who exhibited the good taste to purchase the cd reissue of Rogue Male's debut album, the 1985 NWOBHM classic First Visit, highlighted here recently, are all probably wondering when the reissue of the band's second and last album, 1986's Animal Man, would arrive, right? And you might also be wondering, just how well does Animal Man stack up against First Visit anyway? Well good news all around. It's finally here, and damn right Animal Man is just as good as First Visit, maybe even better. Which means: tough, hard rockin' '80s British metal, catchy, somewhat speedy, and still semi-futuristic (as far as their Mad Maxish costuming goes anyway... also note the computer voices at the start of side one).
Motorhead is still an obvious influence, some Thin Lizzy too. We're hearing both in the vocal dep't., which are sorta gruff and yobbish... kinda punk really. "The Real Me" reminds us of some Di'Anno era Maiden, specifically "Running Free" from Killers. Love the harmonica blowin' coda on that one too! There's definitely a punk, streetwise element to this band's metallic stylings, lots of take-no-shit attitude certainly. In fact, anyone in the market for an uplifting personal anthem might try out track three, "Take No Shit"!
At their most pogoish punk, the poppy unemployment protest rocker "Job Center" could be a Rezillos track. And at times, particularly when they work in the quasi-industrial "sci-fi" effects, this sounds a bit Killing Joke, actually. But their influences go further back - "You're On Fire" includes a nod to the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.
As with the First Visit reissue, this too is limited (2000 copies) and comes in a digipack. One bonus track this time, the non-album cut "Rough Tough (Pretty Too)" from the "Belfast" 12" ep that preceded Animal Man's release. The cd booklet includes lyrics, and biographical liner notes that yet again misspell Rogue Male as Rouge Male. Whoops.
Remember, if Andee and Allan here at AQ had gotten their as-yet-unnamed and still utterly hypothetical '80s metal reissue label off the ground already, THEY might have reissued the two Rogue Male albums themselves, if they could have. Rogue Male was top of their list - get this (and First Visit) to really understand why, maybe.
So, as you probably aren't aware, Aquarius co-owners Andee and Allan have been thinkin' about doing a heavy metal reissue label for a while now. For obscure stuff they love from the '80s that's never ever been legitimately reissued on cd. They even each came up with a short list of things they'd want to try and put out on their (as yet hypothetical) label. Why are we telling you this? Well, on both their lists, you'd find this band, England's Rogue Male.
Now it turns out that they can take Rogue Male off the list - 'cause their album First Visit HAS just in fact been reissued! Yay! Metal Mind just saved Andee and Allan a lot of trouble, and thousands of dollars!
Rogue Male only made two albums, of which this, from 1985, is the first. It's speedy, fist-pumping metal with a definite, catchy rock n' roll edge to it. In combination with the singer's gruff, Lemmy-like voice, this garnered a lot of comparisons to the mighty Motorhead, especially with regard to this disc's lead-off track "Crazy Motorcycle".
But also, they were known for their "futuristic", "sci-fi" image, because of their Mad Max style stage gear and the cover of this album, which depicts what appears to be a Terminator cyborg with a mullet! For a few brief moments there in '85, Rogue Male were the heavy metal equivalent of William "Neuromancer" Gibson or something. Or thought they were. After all, the British heavy metal magazine of record Kerrang! named them "the next big thing", which unfortunately was probably the kiss of death (how many next big things ever are?). After just one more album (1986's Animal Man, also a good 'un and hopefully soon to be in stock here too) they called it quits.
Really, Rogue Male weren't as advanced as their whole "cyberpunk" image seems to suggest. They were maybe more punk than cyber, doing songs more streetwise than science-fictional, about such topics as motorcycles, sex, and unemployment. Though we suppose, if Mad Max is the model, then at least motorcycles and unemployment are indeed "futuristic".
Despite Rogue Male's lack of success back in the day, anyone into a gritty, melodic mix of heaviness and poppiness '80s style should enjoy this overlooked album, one that from start to finish is a simple headbanging pleasure! Definitely one of the best from the latter days of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, that reminds us not only of Motorhead but also some of the more "hot rockin'" Judas Priest tracks of the era, and also of Thin Lizzy just a bit as well. There's just such a raw charm to the urgent, chunky, repetitive riffing of a song like "Look Out" that we gotta love. It doesn't matter that Rogue Male weren't actually innovating anything, they still managed to have a distinct identity and make some basic, quality NWOBHM tunes that have stood the test of time and well deserve reissue.
This limited edition digipack cd includes two worthy bonus tracks, and a cd booklet with new liner notes (which unfortunately contain a couple of typos, misspelling the band's name as "Rouge Male", whoops) and a couple of pretty funny band photos. Recommended! Remember, we were gonna put this out if we could!
Why haven't Andee and Allan gotten their reissue label off the ground yet? Well aside from being way busy with Aquarius (and in Andee's case, tUMULt) they haven't had too much luck contacting the bands they were interested in, so far... and also (and most importantly) they can't seem to agree on a NAME for the label. Andee wants to call it Heavy Rescue Records. Allan's keen on Hair Sprain Records. Anybody have any better ideas? ...Or, know how to get a hold of any former members of a band called Lords Of The Crimson Alliance (from New York, circa '86)??
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Root is Czech black metal band, led by vocalist/visionary Big Boss. They've been around for a long time now, developing from rather primitive and fucked up black metal to the likes of this album: classical-leaning heavy metal opera weirdness. As fucked up as their earlier stuff but so much more advanced. Really amazing and strange, with Big Boss' sub-baritone vocal stylings being only the first of the many eccentricities on display here. Recommended.
This new vinyl (+cd) release from the consistently winning experimental label Utech comes from an artist we weren't previously familiar with, by the name of Frank Rosaly. We think he's based in Chicago, but aren't even sure about that. And it's a little hard to describe his music, as documented here, but we'll try, 'cause as soon as we heard this record, we could tell it was right up our alley. There's two long tracks here, about 15 minutes per side, apparently created/composed using a highly conceptual process, yet the results are much more than of academic interest, they're quite compelling and original, we think any adventurous listener will agree. Utech somewhat drily describes the genesis of Centering And Displacement thusly: "A body of improvised source material was collected, segmented and organized by a simple chance operation. These segments were then orchestrated into a sound program and arranged by order of the strict composed form. At times, the score also regulated post-recorded effects to manipulate the original material. As the material was edited, it was divided into six separate channels (three stereo tracks). Each pair of channels was transferred to a cd and each was played on three cd players simultaneously, creating a simple six-channel sound installation� the dense six-channel score was revised and reduced to two channels (one stereo track), which is now the final, preferred version."
Ok, but what does it sound like? How about a gamelan (or a recording of one) that's been all crumpled up, then unfolded and stretched out? Or, less fancifully, like a one-man electro-acoustic improv session on drums, percussion, and electronics (which IS what this is), subjected to the operations described above, in such a way as to strike a balance between abrasive, abstract textures and more hypnotic, if unusual and damaged, quasi-rhythmic soundscapes. Like we said, right up our alley!
It begins, on side one, with a low thunderous rumbling, like a magnified burst of record crackle. And such startling, ominous blown-out barrages of distortion continue intermittently throughout this first track, sounding like the breath of an expiring monster, sighing heavily amidst tinkling percussive jumble and crash, with pauses for silence� these tumbling spasms then steady and flow into what sound like masses of clattering chimes, a soundscape above which a recurring three-note motif (on synth? vibraphone?) is heard. That, in fact, reminded us of the incredible soundtrack to the 1971 movie Klute, sinister and suspenseful. There's electronics that sound like bird-twitter here too, and it's all very atmospheric, far from a mere experimental compositional exercise.
The second side/track continues with that atmospheric vibe, being a twilight soundscape of distant airplane engine drones, with more up-front textural scraping and bell ringing tones, that eventually coalesces into a softly thrumming humming pulse, over which a very gentle clitter-clatter of percussion drifts. Quite lovely and mesmeric, it is. The clank and rattle builds towards the end, as does the pulsation, becoming more insistent and dramatic, but still relatively mild as such things could be imagined, before a sudden whistling finale.
Inspired (we're merely guessing) equally by '60s/'70s out-there free improv (stuff on FMP, BYG) and also Industrial music's infamous "pipe-fighting" techniques, Rosaly's music has moments that may remind you of No Neck Blues Band, of Will Over Matter, of Supersilent, of Pierre-Yves Mace, of Aufgehoben, and other disparate and unusual and sometimes counter-intuitive but fascinating music-and-noise-makers. This is really pretty great. And, LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Note, the lp comes packaged with a compact disc version of the album as well, which is always a nice touch (much preferable to a mere download card, we think).
Along with the Harmonia Live 1974 cd that we're making Record Of The Week, the Water label has reissued the first four solo records of Harmonia, Kraftwerk, and Neu! veteran, Michael Rother. We're reviewing our two favorites here, the others we should get to on a later list.
We'd assume that the majority of AQ regulars are largely familiar with at least one of Michael Rother's projects. Whether it be his his work with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Cluster, or Harmonia, Rother's contributions to the last 30 plus years of music are innumerable. Still, his solo work that has been conspicuously absent from most write-ups and record shelves. Perhaps that's because the early '80s saw Rother in a bit of transition period from his Krautrock glory days to a point where he embraced New Age with arms wide open. Despite naysayers, New Age isn't necessarily a four letter word. Not necessarily. But fear not, while embracing New Age, Rother didn't -- or perhaps couldn't -- completely abandon his musical past. Thankfully, the fine people at Water have made the first four Rother albums available once again, lovingly remastered and repackaged with original art and new liner notes.
Like the three preceding releases, 1981's Fernwarme finds Rother accompanied by drummer Jaki Leibezeit of fellow uber-famous Krautrockerers Can. Unlike the first three solo albums, this one shows Rother returning much closer to his days with Harmonia than attempting to incorporate elements from anything like, say, Kitaro. In fact, despite the lead guitar of opening number "Silberstreif" relying heavily upon the "Do-Re-Mi" tune taught in grade school music class, Fernwarme is an excellent contribution to an incredibly impressive career, full of simple beauty, a warm embrace of blissed-out pop melodies. Jaki's lightly propulsive motorik shuffle is the heartbeat pulse that underpins the harmonized guitar lines spun by Rother, his harmonies at times making us think of Citay's most exquisite moments... elsewhere Rother delves into darkly droning keyboards, and Fernwarme starts to sound not unlike a much mellower Zombi. Very very nice, a highly recommended early '80s spacey prog kraut classic!!
A few weeks back, we made the newly unearthed and amazing Harmonia Live 1974 album our Record Of The Week, and also highlighted two of the four solo albums by Harmonia's Michael Rother that were also reissued at the same time. That's a lot of krautrock goodness to absorb at once, so we are just now getting around to listing those other two Rother solo discs, Flammende Herzen (1976) and Katzenmusik (1979), chronologically his first and third solo efforts. On both of these, as with the previous pair, Rother's beautifully harmonized, multitracked guitars and synths are joined by the incomparable, propulsive drumming of fellow krautrock hero Jaki Liebzeit of Can. And another legendary figure in the scene, Conny Plank, produces.
Flammende Herzen, which means Flaming Hearts in English, is a blissful concoction of motorik beats beneath Rother's trademark shimmering, soaring melodies. It's easy to see why it was a big hit when it was first released (apparently outselling all of Rother's albums with Neu! combined!). Truly gorgeous instrumental compositions that will brighten your day, being sources of both relaxation and energy... ok, that sounds a bit New Agey, doesn't it? But fans of the kosmische krautrock stuff should be comfortable with that, after all, there's a definite overlap, with Ashra, Tangerine Dream, Deuter, and Popol Vuh among others being krautrockers later to cross over to careers in the New Age field... and it's not like you have to get into a yoga pose to enjoy this album (though you could). Such nice music for a drive in the country, or lazing at home on a rainy afternoon, as well. Definitely a fine follow up to his work in Harmonia, tracks like "Feuerland" certainly not ignoring the r-o-c-k part of the krautrock equation in the process of being all spacey and hypnotic.
While we can solidly recommend Rother's solo debut, the other one under review here, Katzenmusik, is a bit iffier (though some folks actually consider it his masterpiece, cf. allmusic.com). On it, Rother moves more and more in that much-maligned New Age direction, mellowing out even further. The blue sky, fluffy white clouds, and arcing jet-trail of the cover photo are well-evoked by the music inside. Twelve untitled, again all-instrumental tracks, all very airy-fairy. Gently uplifting guitar confections ride along on the tick-tock of Jaki's drumming... It's quite nice all right, just without any edginess. If you love Rother, you'll probably want it, but get the others first.
These are both, again, nicely done reissues from the Water label, with the original art and new liner notes.
