Yay! Another old favorite finally reissued and back in stock. We first listed this back in 2000, and we still love it more than ever. First we had a Drone Syndicate edition, then a more expensive one on Walhalla, and now the DS version has been repressed, at the same cheaper price (though it lacks the liner notes, photos, and overall fancier packaging of the Wahalla one).
In the AQ canon of all time essential artists, of groups who have shaped all the music that followed in their wake, somewhere very near the top spot would be Japan's Taj Mahal Travellers. This sprawling seventies psych drone unit led by Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi, were crafting gorgeous abstract drone drenched ambience long before most of the current crop of dronesters were even born.
The Taj Mahal Travellers were masters of the organic, of vibration, texture, timbre, utilizing bowed cymbals, violins, loudspeakers, tape loops and all sorts of unique source material, this collective created some of the most enduring and unique psychedelic music ever recorded. Their music and performances were the physical embodiment of a philosophy, a way of life more than just simple 'playing music.'
It's hard to imagine the Skaters or Birchville Cat Motel or the Yellow Swans or even Wolf Eyes without the Taj Mahal Travellers. Often referred to by the press as "La Monte Young on acid", in a review of another, unfortunately out of print TMT album, we described their sound as "epic higher key improvised drone extravaganzas performed on beaches, deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated into the sound. Feedback, time-space lag, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound."
The music of the Taj Mahal Travellers thought is stubbornly indescribable. No words can possibly do justice to the spirits they were able to invoke, the atmosphere they were able to create, dark and dense and mysterious and ominous, but at the same time beautiful and brilliant and epic and spacious.
This double cd features nearly 100 minutes of improvised droning captured live in Stockholm, Sweden in 1971, the group (minus Kosugi for some reason) run stand-up bass, tuba, trumpet, select percussion, violin, flutes, mandolin, harmonica and synthesizer through primitive tape loops and delay effects for an awesome ritualistic performance, predating the likes of Zoviet France and about a million others by decades!
The live sound is just as amazing as their records, which makes sense since their albums were essentially documents of live aktions.
The first disc is a single nearly hour long low end ritual, strings buzz and reverberate, as do voices, and bits of bowed metals, all beating against each other and creating all manner of cosmic vibrations, all accompanied by simple bells, or a single plucked note repeated over and over. Near the end, the vocals are soaring, and the tones have become long buzzing streaks, with plenty of spacey echo and strange damaged FX, it's hard to hear this and not wonder where in the hell Sunburned Hand and No Neck get off, these guys were creating the same sort of primitive primeval sounds, nearly 4 decades earlier, and with so much more depth and emotion. The fact that a music so minimal and abstract can be so utterly moving is testament to the Travellers' unparalleled skill.
Disc two is much less low end rumble, and more a dizzying swirl of strange sonic events, here the horns are in full affect, sounding like a herd of alien elephants, moaning and bleating, the tones stretched out and draped across all manner of lower register rumbles and whirs. Percussion surfacing now and again like an angry rattlesnake roused from a midday nap, or a swirling cloud of tiny buzzing insects. Vocals drift in and out, shamanistic and chant like, moaning out strange melodies, mostly low and throaty but sometimes like curious feline mewling, all intertwined with the various other drawn out sounds. An incredibly intense organic ritual, purified by its intransitive nature, the improvisation guaranteeing that each performance belonged to the time and the place as much as the players. Absolutely and utterly breathtaking.
Absolutely essential, and probably more recommended than nearly any record we've ever reviewed!
In the AQ canon of all time essential artists, of groups who have shaped all the music that followed in their wake, somewhere very near the top spot would be Japan's Taj Mahal Travellers. This sprawling seventies psych drone unit led by Fluxus legend Takehisa Kosugi, were crafting gorgeous abstract drone drenched ambience long before most of the current crop of dronesters were even born.
The Taj Mahal Travellers were masters of the organic, of vibration, texture, timbre, utilizing bowed cymbals, violins, loudspeakers, tape loops and all sorts of unique source material, this collective created some of the most enduring and unique psychedelic music ever recorded. Their music and performances were the physical embodiment of a philosophy, a way of life more than just simple 'playing music.'
It's hard to imagine the Skaters or Birchville Cat Motel or the Yellow Swans or even Wolf Eyes without the Taj Mahal Travellers. Often referred to by the press as "La Monte Young on acid", in a review of another, unfortunately out of print TMT album, we described their sound as "epic higher key improvised drone extravaganzas performed on beaches, deserted hills in Sweden, India, Iran and England. Slow, complex, irregular throbbing waves of sound, broadcast through distant loudspeakers and recaptured and reincorporated into the sound. Feedback, time-space lag, echo machines, and primitive handmade electronic devices all contribute to the ever shifting clouds of sound."
The music of the Taj Mahal Travellers thought is stubbornly indescribable. No words can possibly do justice to the spirits they were able to invoke, the atmosphere they were able to create, dark and dense and mysterious and ominous, but at the same time beautiful and brilliant and epic and spacious.
This double cd features nearly 100 minutes of improvised droning captured live in Stockholm, Sweden in 1971, the group run stand-up bass, tuba, trumpet. select percussion, violin, flutes, mandolin, harmonica and synthesizer through primitive tape loops and delay effects for an awesome ritualistic performance, predating the likes of Zoviet France and about a million others by decades!
The live sound is just as amazing as their records, which makes sense since their albums were essentially documents of live aktions.
The first disc is a single nearly hour long low end ritual, strings buzz and reverberate, as do voices, and bits of bowed metals, all beating against each other and creating all manner of cosmic vibrations, all accompanied by simple bells, or a single plucked note repeated over and over. Near the end, the vocals are soaring, and the tones have become long buzzing streaks, with plenty of spacey echo and strange damaged FX, it's hard to hear this and not wonder where in the hell Sunburned Hand and No Neck get off, these guys were creating the same sort of primitive primeval sounds, nearly 4 decades earlier, and with so much more depth and emotion. The fact that a music so minimal and abstract can be so utterly moving is testament to the Travellers' unparalleled skill.
Disc two is much less low end rumble, and more a dizzying swirl of strange sonic events, here the horns are in full affect, sounding like a herd of alien elephants, moaning and bleating, the tones stretched out and draped across all manner of lower register rumbles and whirs. Percussion surfacing now and again like an angry rattlesnake roused from a midday nap, or a swirling cloud of tiny buzzing insects. Vocals drift in and out, shamanistic and chant like, moaning out strange melodies, mostly low and throaty but sometimes like curious feline mewling, all intertwined with the various other drawn out sounds. An incredibly intense organic ritual, purified by it's intransitive nature, the improvisation guaranteeing that each performance belonged to the time and the place as much as the players. Absolutely and utterly breathtaking.
A really nice reissue of this long out of print two disc set, with liner notes, a history of the band, the story of this recording as well as amazing photos. Not sure how long we'll be able to keep these in stock, so please be patient if we run out, and it takes us a while to track down more.
Absolutely essential, and probably more recommended that nearly any record we've ever reviewed!
Some of the heaviest "jazz" ever, recorded in 1970 amazingly enough. The drummer should be in a hardcore band, the guitar player (the legendary Masayuki Takayangi) makes Sonny Sharrock sound like a wimp, and the bass and sax are equally intense. Our fave Takayangi release. Noise guitar way ahead of its time. Beautiful, beautiful noise.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh man. Over the past year or so we've been lucky enough to get a hold of reissues of a bunch of rare albums by Japanese jazz legend Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi performing with his New Direction(s) unit: Axis Another Revolvable Thing Parts 1 and 2, Eclipse, La Grima. Lucky 'cause we LOVE way-out-there improv electric guitar, which Takayanagi provides in spades, 'specially when he and his group are off on one of his "mass projection" freakouts. Well this here cd reissue (a deluxe gatefold mini-LP sleeve styled import on the always interesting and well-packaged Tiliqua label) is another must have for any Takayanagi fan, documenting his first recording session in 1969 as leader of the initial incarnation of his New Directions group, a trio consisting of drummer Sabu Toyozumi and bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa along with Takayanagi. That's right, no saxophone for you sax haters out there! Just amped-up, feedback-filled guitar skree, brutally bowed bass and crashing drums on such lengthy mass projections as "The Galactic System" and "Piranha". There's also quieter, "gradually projection" pieces here too, some really beautiful, abstractly atmospheric ones including "Herdsman's Pipe Of Spain" (with Yoshizawa on folk-pipe) and the interludes "Deepnight...Swamp" and "Sick...Sick...Sickness...My Aunt". Wow what great titles!!
This Tiliqua reissue of this classic adds a bonus track, from the 1970 compilation LP Guitar Workshop, that in fact is maybe the most intense thing on here. There are also liner notes from the perceptive and well-informed Alan Cummings, who proceeds to really set the scene for this music with his evocative description of the seedy Tokyo jazz quarter of Shinjuku in the sixties and early seventies, a place where Takayanagi's revolutionary jazz explorations fit right in with experimental artists and acid rock radicals.
Last list we highlighted two somewhat unusual "surf music" reissues, by Farm and Peter Martin & Finch, both brought to us by our favorite Japanese reissue label, EM Records, as part of their Summer 2007 "EM Under Water Series"! Those were quite cool, and now we've got the remaining three discs in the series, all of 'em (like those first two) soundtracks to several now-legendary surfing movies from back in the sixties/seventies. With the exception of Farm (from the USA) all the bands in EM's series are Australian, and in all cases the movies they were doing soundtracks for were Australian productions and/or featured Australian surfers. And as before, this isn't your typical SoCal Jan & Dean, Beach Boys style surf music... it's *psychedelic* surf music. Well 2 out of 3 of these anyway (the Tim Gaze Band album being more of a yacht rock outing).
Now this one is a bonafide Australian garage psych rock classic! It's also the only disc in the "EM Under Water" series that we'd ever actually heard before, as there'd been at least one (possibly non-legit) cd reissue in the past, and so we already know it was a good 'un, which boded well for the series as a whole. Tamam Shud, who took their name from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (it's Persian for "The End"), were a heavy (for the era), fuzz-drenched psych pop combo who recorded two albums in their brief career. This was their first, from 1969, and it served as the soundtrack to a motion picture on the subject of surfing (natch) called Evolution. Which was appropriate 'cause these guys were indeed surfers, even if their music sounded a lot more like The Amboy Dukes, The Litter, and The Count Five than, say, The Ventures (though apparently earlier in the sixties they did, when they were called The Sunsets). It's total Nuggesty stuff (why "Mr. Strange" or one of the other 11 tracks on Evolution didn't appear on the Nuggets II box set is puzzling), with a "progressive", Sgt. Peppers bent, full of ripping wild FUZZ guitar soloing, stomping riffs, and catchy hooks. The Shud could do wigged out blues rock jamming, or they could do totally poppy vocal cuts...as long as there was plenty of freaky freeform fuzz action to go 'round, which, there was. Like we said, a classic, one any '60s psych lover will be happy to spin. This reish is of course presented with the usual deluxe-level of care and attention characteristic of EM Records, complete with lyrics, photos, graphics, movie stills, and extensive liner notes by both Aussie "surf music historian" Peter J. McParland and Evolution's director, Peter Witzig. And EM has also dug up three bonus tracks, from a 1972 ep called Bali Waters, material which appeared on the soundtrack to another surf move, Morning Of The Earth. Who knows, maybe there will be another "Under Water" series next year wherein EM will reissue The Shud's second album, 1970's Goolutionites And The Real People, which was a concept album against pollution... we can hope.
It's always nice when something we had NO knowledge or expectations about, never heard of before, with a odd name to boot, that we were simply sent a promo of in the mail, and eventually gave a blind listen to, turns out to be so much up our alley and in fact, in this case, totally Record Of The Week worthy! Ok, maybe this is not for absolutely everyone, but those of us into heavy-duty, hypnotically repetitive, distortion 'n' drone damaged jamming, then this obscure outfit on an obscure Danish label has indeed produced a Record Of The dang Week. Tandaapushi is an improvisatory, instrumental power trio of keyboards, bass and drums, formed in Brussels not long ago, and this is their debut album. Tokyo-based Leo Dupleix, who has a Master's degree in piano jazz from the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, would appear to be the band leader. He plays the keyboards and electronics - synth, electric piano, mixing board, etc. Meanwhile the two members of the rhythm section are active and accomplished in the Belgian free jazz scene. So yeah their music here is "mostly improvised" - but not, like, JAZZ, not unless your idea of jazz is the Dead C and Supersilent jamming together, having switched up instruments perhaps. Or you gotta imagine The Necks as produced by Pumice, something like that. Perhaps Circle or Cave running wild in the INA-GRM studio? It's a dense, energetic, experimental, extremely rhythmic mix of avant noise rock, experimental electronics, musique concrete, and free jazz improv. Weird and warped but definitely on point with what they're doing, which is hard to describe, but must require a certain level of musicianship (noisicianship?), tight communication, and a special shared aesthetic, sound-wise, devoted to making trance-inducing grooves with noisy, droney, unidentifiable textures.
The disc is divided into four tracks, Parts 1-4. Part One hooked us immediately, with its eight minutes of thick throbbing feedback skree and droning hum and waver, a grimy, rhythmically-krauty plod. Part Two is a bit of a quirky interlude of electronic beep-boop, distortion and cryptic clatter, brief at just 2:45. Part Three gets back to the droned out intensity of part one, pounding and pulsing for over well over 15 minutes, the rhythms giving way to pure grinding drone-whoosh by the very end. That segues right into Part Four, which brings back the beat, a quietly crunchy rhythm laced with feedback, steadily squelching along for another eleven minutes which bring in all sorts of chitterings and other strange sounds of indeterminate origin. Percussive punctuation pushes through the decaying electronic haze, and we could zone out to this FOREVER. When it all wraps up you're wondering what the heck it was you were listening to, but ready to dive back in at the beginning again.
Another in Alchemy's new Inner Mind Music series of spacey delights -- "Live at Alpha Centauri" it says on the inside. The Tangerine Dream Syndicate wears its influences proudly -- the band is made up of Tommy Conrad (cello, violin), Johnny Conrad
First things first: yes, this album IS every bit as cool as the cover looks, the cover being a photo of a pink skull! There's no relation to Glenn Donaldson's Pink Skulls cd-r label, of course, these guys thought of it first, way back in 1971!
So yeah, here's another vintage '71 gem for all of you into hard progressive bluesy psych rockin' action. Last list we had Japan's Strawberry Path, this time around, from the fertile underground of Franco's Spain, we've got the power trio Tapiman, which features the burning electric guitar heroics of one Max Sunyer, later of Spanish jazz rock outfit Iceberg. He'll definitely make hard rock guitar fans happy, though -- Tapiman is riffy, heavy rock, full of psychedelic poppiness.
The main riff of storming opener "Wrong World" is sorta "Sunshine Of Your Love" mixed with "Lord Of This World", and the track is full of energetic, impressive guitar soloing and wild vocals. Some subsequent songs are more gentle and moody, though you're never far from some wailin', cranked-up amplifier worship on this disc. It's a groover, and a grower, too, from a classy band who knew what the heck they were doing. For all of you who dig the obscure '70s sounds of stuff like Blues Creation, Buffalo, Eduardo Bort, and other things along those lines we've recommended before...
Newly remastered for this reissue, with four bonus tracks and detailed liner notes in both English and Spanish.
San Diego's Tarantula Hawk create a heavy, epic rock soundscape, a bit like a metal version of Godspeed You Black Emperor, with a healthy dose of Hawkwind. The band is a four piece: with not one, but two bassists, a drummer, and a guitarist/keyboardist, and a couple of samplers amongst them. This, their debut recording, consists of one 40-or-so minute long track, all instrumental, that combines metallic math-rock (including the occasional blast-beat) with bombastic prog-rock keyboard sounds of the sort unheard since the early '70s! The keyboards make TH remind me (and perhaps only me) of a malevolent version of the organ-led seventies Italian prog cult-band Le Orme, but mixed with the majestic bass-heavy attack of Japanese prog-punk technicians the Ruins. All these sounds are then eventually subsumed into an experiment in drone science. Ominous stuff indeed! It's like the soundtrack to the military-occupation of a haunted house: martial drum beats, grandiose synth themes, eerie abstract electronics. For fans of Thrones, Neurosis, Magma, The Champs, Old Man Gloom, etc. No wonder they've toured with both California grindcore heroes Dystopia and Texas neo-psych spacerock act Yeti, drawing as they do from both genres. The cd version also includes a gritty cd-rom video of a live show, about the same length as the audio track on the cd, that's if anything heavier and scarier. Highly recommended!
What's this? Maybe the cover, all-black but for the name Tarkus, caught your eye? Holy grail time here, people. We've been wanting to get this album on cd FOREVER. There was a hard-to-find LP reissue some years ago, but we'd never yet found a cd version -- until now, at last, and it's a totally legit one from the master tapes! Released (barely, in an edition of just, like, 50 copies) in Tarkus' native Peru back in 1972, this is an album to go down in the annals of heavy rock, proudly belonging to the pantheon of proggy proto-metal!!! We'd definitely rank this with favorites of ours in that truly cult realm, other early '70s stuff like Necronomicon and Night Sun and Eduardo Bort and Steamhammer's Speech!
It may be that they're named after the ELP's 1971 album Tarkus (you know, the one with that freaky armadillo/tank on the cover), but they don't sound much like ELP in any event. While progressive rock is part of their sound, this Tarkus come across more like a bizarro hybrid of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and some of the more out-there and baroque Italian prog outfits of the era, rather than ELP. It's music that's dark and doomy and powerful and psychedelically dosed, sometimes with really weird operatic vocals -- and always with about a zillion cool, heavy guitar riffs. It's meant to be played LOUD. Shouldn't be hard to comply!
With some very pretty melodies and acoustic moments, Tarkus somehow seem like a '60s garage psych act (which they previously were, Tarkus being formed by members of Peruvian psych-pop group Telegraph Ave.) in possession of a crystal ball that enabled them to gaze into the future to be anachronistically inspired by Black Sabbath's Sabotage album, which was released three years later in 1975 (we'll have to assume that crystal ball had a place to plug in earphones).
This comes packaged in a gatefold, miniature LP styled sleeve. There's a folded color insert, another black and white lyric sheet, and also separate liner notes in both Spanish and English, which make mention of the band dressing like monks when they made one of their rare live appearances.
And by the way, we'd somehow suspect that Portland's Danava have heard this record. If not, they should -- we think they'd like it! And we think you will too, if any of the above raving and referencing strikes a chord!
The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future... I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!
Germans Ronald Lippok (of To Rococo Rot) and Bernd Jestram are Tarwater, and this is the follow-up to their fine 11/6 12/5 album which seemed to bridge Nick Cave and Portishead. Here's some of what Forced Exposure's email list has to say about the new disc: "DJing (loops, breakbeats, cut-ups, speeches), electronic experiments and classical song structures lay next to each other in Tarwater's music, which leads them in the direction of artists as DJ Shadow or Tricky...and one can find a long list of other references: early 90's East Coast Hip Hop, the Coil of the Horse Rotovator Phase, the Crooklyn Dub Consortium, the minimal electronic sets of DJ Kazi Lenka and Taschensound, and the compositions of Carl Wilson. Still: the intuition kicks out the strategy and gives this music a rather mysterious pop-appeal."
Finally. Finally. FINALLY! If ever there was a more anticipated (around here at least) or a more criminally overdue reissue, it's this one right here. A mind blowing three-fer from should-have-been-massive blissed out fractured psych pop masters Teenage Filmstars, fronted by the inimitable Ed Ball, whom as we mentioned in our review of Star, TF's genius debut, was once described by My Bloody Valentine mainman Kevin Shields as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist". Shield also had this to say about Ball: "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Which coming from the man behind My Bloody Valentine means a lot. Especially when considering Teenage Filmstars, who employ a sonic palette not all that far removed from MBV's. BUT, and a very big but at that, minus the explosive bursts of caustic noise, MBV hewed more to a traditional pop sensibility than Teenage Filmstars. Where as Loveless, even for all its amazing wall of guitar heaviness, and effects drenched dreaminess, was still anchored to a verse chorus verse framework, with Teenage Filmstars, those conventions are tossed aside, or at the very least, flipped over, doused in effects, chopped up and played backwards. Which is why once again, we must proclaim, that in the landscape of (not so) popular music, TEENAGE FILMSTARS ARE BETTER THAN MY BLOODY VALENTINE. And don't get us wrong, we LOVE LOVE LOVE My Bloody Valentine, but imagine an alternate universe MBV, where for some reason, Shields' guitars played backwards, effects boxes grew sentient and demanded as much space as the instruments and voices, imagine viewing all of those sounds, already twisted and skewed, through a fractured funhouse mirror, and then, if you can, imagine some musical wizard, who is able to reign in all of those sounds, and somehow shape them into some of the most perfect UNpop you've ever heard.
Which brings us to Rocket Charms, record number two from Teenage Filmstars, which finds all the sounds on Star, pushed even farther out, the backwards sounds are more backwards (and there are more of them), the guitars are crunchier and more crumbly, the melodies are more catchy, the murk and shimmer are both murkier and shimmerier, and the production, is even more hazy and spaced out and lysergic and psychedelic and fucking head spinning. And yet somehow, Rocket Charms is a pop record, hooky and catchy, lilting and melodic. Opener "Pressure" is an immediate 'hit' if there ever was one, processed falsetto vox over swooping backwards rhythms and washed out guitar haze, a sort of druggy backwards Beach Boys pop ambience. And it just goes on from there, every song, a gorgeous slab of outsider twisted pop, on the surface a whirling sonic dervish, but within drift all manner of classic pop tropes, in the able hands of Ed Ball, subverted and turned inside out, wreathed in hiss and sparkle, and rendered, well, Teenage.
But then amidst all this deconstructed shoegazey noise pop (or pop noise), comes the track "Alone", quite possible our favorite jam on Rocket Charms, a slow brooding dirge, all skittery Stone Roses-y drums, thick distorted bass, disembodied voices, swirling ominous dark ambience, and a main melody that just might be the catchiest bit on the record, sounding like a slowed down twisted take on the Cure's "Close To You", but via Pop Will Eat Itself or some other warped UK grebo combo.
The crazy thing is, Rocket Charms for being as fantastic and over the top and incredible, isn't even our favorite Teenage Filmstars record. That honor belongs to the awesomely titled Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, which takes all of the songs and sounds from Rocket Charms and Star, and makes them WAY HEAVIER, WAY MORE FUCKED UP, the processed guitars and backwards guitars and vocals have gone haywire, the songs are less songs here and more fucked up fragmented pop experiments, but again, Ball has such a deft hand that he manages to take all these totally freaked out elements, and gets them to work, and sound like pop songs, albeit, totally dizzying and abstract, psychedelic and almost metallic at times. The record's defining moment is the opener "Physical Graffiti", not a Zeppelin cover, but hell, it sounds like it could be some sort of insane My Bloody Valentine / Led Zeppelin mash up maybe, but one that had been totally tweaked, chopped and screwed, then sped up and flipped reverse again, listening to it, it's hard to imagine how anyone could envision music like this, let alone actually make it. The guitars swoop all over the stereo field, stuttering, blurring into huge backwards swells, the drums are chaotic, the vocals sound backwards too, but not overtly, the melodies so memorable and catchy, at one point the whole track begins to stutter, almost as if your cd player is skipping, but it soon swoops back into the dreamlike psychedelic swirl.
Not all of Support Our Sickness is as heavy and crunchy, many of the tracks begin as classic sixties sounding pop, but as they progress, the effects seem to slowly take over, often one or more of the instruments flipping backwards and erupting into a squall of psychedelic freakout, but just as often, sprawling into a woozy almost balladic bit of slithery backwards slowcore. But even at its prettiest, the sounds are slightly tweaked, the vibe is subtly menacing, laced with bits of sunshiney jangle for sure, but this is some seriously drugged out dream pop damage, and remains to this day, one of the most amazing, and unlikely genius pop records EVER.
The first disc features 5 bonus tracks, two from the Support Our Sickness sessions, as well as three other unreleased jams, none quite as twisted, but still awesome, and in fact, they almost sound like they were rough drafts, just waiting to get the Ed Ball mad scientist backwards fucked up FX makeover. So that's it, BUY IT, you won't be sorry, this is easily some of the most forward thinking pop music ever, heavy and psychedelic, druggy and delirious, catchy and crazy and bafflingly brilliant.
But wait, what's this, a THIRD record? Teenage Filmstars final missive, and a pretty bizarre sonic sea change, in fact, it sounds like a totally different band. To be honest, we're not into it at all, Bring Back The Cartel found the band doing some sort of skittery smooth jazz electronic mood music, it makes very little sense that this one would get tacked on with the other two, when we first ordered this we actually thought it WAS just those other two, but maybe some folks will dig Bring Back The Cartel, there are some moments, here and there, but it doesn't at all approach the sheer brilliance of Rocket Charms or Buy Our Record Support Our Sickness, so our advice would be probably to just give it a spin, and if you dig it, cool, if not, just ignore it, pretend it's not there, and immerse yourself in those first two, let the sounds twist you inside out and carry you off, play it over and over and over and over, forever and ever and ever and ever. Totally fucking incredible, and not just worthy of Record Of The Week honors, definitely something more, like how about Record of FOREVER!?!?
By now, pretty much everyone knows who Kevin Shields is. He of shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine. Who over the course of the last 20 years or so have released all of THREE records. But what about Ed Ball. A musical contemporary of Shields. A man Shields described as "A sensitive soul from another planet. A modernist musical alchemist", going on to say "Where other people struggle, Ed Ball plays what we're thinking." Ball, over the last 20 years, has released close to 40 records, a whole mess of amazing discs with UK mod popsters The Times, a handful under his own name, and a bunch with power poppers the Boo Radleys, among others. But what Ball is most famous for, at least around these parts, is releasing three of the most perfect, and perfectly fractured genius shoegaze blisspop records EVER, as Teenage Filmstars: Star, Rocket Charms and Buy our Record Support Our Sickness. Each a kaleidoscopic blurred and blown out avant pop fantasia of sound, mixing in gorgeous melodies, with all manner of found sounds, backwards loops, ethereal vocals, studio fuckery, with very little regard for form or function, for the rules of pop. Instead, seemingly feeling their way through a totally tactile world of sound, everything bristly or buzzy or fuzzy, smeared or blurred, wah guitars wrapped around roaring motorcycles, Spectorish wall of guitars spread over, skittery almost Stone Roses-y rhythms. The most obvious reference is My Bloody Valentine. And at the risk of receiving an avalanche of hate mail, Teenage Filmstars are better. They may not have invented the sound, and they definitely didn't perfect it, instead, they fucked it all up, twisted it and chopped it and doused it in FX, and flipped it backwards, and let it sprawl and spin out of control, wrapped tightly into perfect pop gems one second, then let loose in unhinged squalls of sonic whatthefuck meltdowns the next. Each of the three records growing continually more abrasive, more intense, heavier, more backwards, more fractured and freaked out, and somehow only getting better and better and better.
Star is the first proper release from Teenage Filmstars, and was released a year or two after MBV's epochal Loveless. Opener "Kiss Me" is TOTALLY cribbed from Loveless, but it sounds like it was recorded on a busted 4-track, the rhythm track supplied by a fluttery backwards loop, the guitars super distorted but also brittle, woozy and wavery, all wrapped round the main hook, a guitar / vocal harmony that is just incredible, soaring and wistful but sort of super rocking, the whole thing dripping in effects, Loveless filtered through DIY bedroom pop, and then filtered through the twisted musical mind of visionary sonic alchemist Ball. The track crumbles near the end, the guitars disappear, motorcycles zoom by, the drums all distorted, snippets of classical piano, the twitter of birds, disembodied voices, one intoning "this just might be the finest composition I ever wrote", which it might have been, if it weren't for the follow up "Loving", which follows a similar template as "Kiss Me", with the main hook, a hushed wordless vocals crooning along to a slithery guitar line, all over a looped tribal rhythm, and tripped out wah guitar all over the place. If this was just a single, "Kiss Me" / "Loving", A side B side, it would be hands down one of the greatest singles ever! But we've barely just begun. And it only gets weirder and weirder.
"Inner Space" predates the fuzzy gauzy drift of Fennesz and Jeck and Tim Hecker by 20 years, unfurling sweeping vistas of sound, intertwined with buried melancholy vocals, muted rhythmic skitter, and deep whirring strings. "Apple" is all sixties strum and whirling effects laden swoosh, simple pop stretched out and blurred and distorted into something slightly alien, a warm dreamlike missive from beyond the stars. "Flashes" is a strange sort of electronic calypso, with a subtle techno throb beneath divine female vocals, propulsive krauty drums, and of course loads of FX. "Kaleidoscope" returns to the more MBV style rocking of the openers, and does indeed sound like a shoegazing fuzzrock kaleidoscope, a swirling dizzying space pop jam, the sounds slipping from speaker to speaker, the drums relentless and hypnotic, the vocals buried, but the main guitar melody soaring over the wavery sonic swirl beneath.
Then comes a three song suite of tripped out avant weirdness, drifting fuzzy almost melodies, strange intercepted radio broadcasts, a super deconstructed version of "Kiss Me", looped and flipped backwards and transformed into something else entirely, deep whirling drones, weird voices, samples, deep black ambience, shot though with streaks of glimmering buzz, the sounds of engines, choir like vocals, damaged effects laden rhythmscapes, flange and chorus and delay and reverb all wrapped around little sonic events, laced into a delicate framework of tripped out sound. Until the closer, "Moon", a gorgeous explosion of distorted pop effulgence, thick warbly organs, epic melodies, the guitar so distorted they almost sound like white noise, almost proggy keyboards, the whole thing fracturing into a brief falling apart coda of drum freakout, and skipping lurching guitars. Holy Shit.
So maybe it's not that Teenage Filmstars are -better- than My Bloody Valentine. Just weirder, more fucked up, more spaced out, more fractured, more challenging, more out there, less like ANYTHING you've ever heard, more... oh fuck it, okay... BETTER!!! Bring on the hate mail!!
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, all good enough to have been on the record proper, but with way more of the backwards production that would come to define their sound on future records, blissed out fuzzy shoegazey power pop, but crumbling and often in reverse, and thus fantastic. Also included lengthy liner notes, as confusing and obfuscated as the music itself.
The other two Filmstars discs are getting reissued soon, and will definitely also be Records Of The Week, so immerse yourself in Star while you can, cuz it only gets better and weirder from here on out...
Brand new cd ep from this Spanish black metal duo, which pairs the single track from their one sided Purging Tongues 12" (which was so limited we only got 1 copy), along with a new unreleased track, just two songs, but they're long ones, the shorter just shy of 12 minutes, the longer 15+. And these guys waste no time, after a few seconds of creepy intro music, the band EXPLODE into a dense wall of pulverizing blacknoize, the riffs so frenzied and distorted they blur into thick streaks of filthy buzz, the drumming fast and furious, but also weirdly recorded, with the toms sounding like a drum machine, drifting to the surface amidst the group's blackened squalls, sounding like some weird eighties programmed rhythms, everything tangled up into a churning, roiling black hole of sound, dense and noisy and chaotic, freeform and seriously psychedelic. Without headphones, this might almost sound like some blackened Merzbow, or more metallic Masonna, but close listening reveals all sorts of crazy stuff going on beneath the surface, intricate arrangements, bellowed vokills, tripped out FX, the aforementioned drumming, it's not until nearly 5 minutes into the first track, that the blown out blacknoise abates, and the band switch gears, launching into a doomy, but equally noisy, death dirge, a chugging blast of doomnoise heaviness, that soon erupts right back into the frantic blackened noisiness of the first few minutes. And then the leads come in, it just adds a whole 'nother layer of psychedelic chaos to the proceedings.
The second track lets its intro stretch out a bit more, strange Spanish voices over haunting ominous cinematic drones, and when the band kicks in, they seem to just play over the intro, the result a super tripped out swirl of collaged noisiness, until the song coalesces into some of the densest black buzz we've heard in ages, the sort of furious blasting, that seems constantly on the verge of total collapse, a barely restrained chaos, channeled into fierce black energy, and somehow, midway through, the band crank it up even more, the sound growing MORE psychedelic, MORE noisy, almost like multiple songs playing at once, a swirling tangle of black buzz that devolves into another sprawl of chugging dirgey heaviness, accompanied by that mysterious voice from the beginning of the song, resulting in what sounds like the scariest, noisiest obscure horror movie soundtrack EVER, right down to the tolling bells and grimly cinematic outro.
Tectonic, Teutonic, yeah Tekhton is a good name for this heavy dirge/doom metal plus post rock (?) band from the Netherlands. This is their second opus, and it's a doozy of FUZZ laden riffage slamming repeatedly into your head, alternating now and again with much quieter, prettier parts, even acoustic strum and spacey synth. There's gruff, emotive singing, sometimes verging on melody, that works with both sides of the loud/soft equation. Tekhton make some allusions to geologic processes, and while a lot of this is subterreanean and slow-mo (and thus massively heavy) they speed up too for the occasional earthquake... their songwriting full of interesting complexities that keep the listener's ear engaged, along with one's emotions, that are already probably firmly in the grip of this intensely doomful music.
We mentioned pretty parts, well the prettiest here might be the indeed glorious "All Is Glory", that track being a mostly gentle, sorta spaced out psychedelic ramble, that's mesmerically mathy too, repetitive in a nicely Circle-ular way. Didn't Om and Six Organs do a record together? Did it sound like this song? Probably not but maybe it should have! (Oh, right, that was a split not a collaboration.)
Call it post-rock or not (maybe doom-prog would work as well?) this does remind us of post-rock stuff, but keeps it doooooooooom too, old school even, with any tendencies towards fancypants artsy-fartsiness utterly bludgeoned by the likes of, ferinstance, the crushing creepycrawl that is the appropriately titled "Tectonic Mass".
Super recommended, in particular to fans of a specific variety of AQ-beloved bands from Harvey Milk to Khanate to Pharoah Overlord to The Body to Boris. And we're detecting a definite Melvins influence on tracks like "Tooth And Nail", also a good thing.
Here's an easy one, anyone who bought those Loop reissues we made Records Of The Week back on list 307, should probably pick this up too. If you dig Loop and Spacemen 3 and Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, then the Telescopes druggy dirgey spaced out garage rock will definitely find an honored spot alongside those aforementioned outfits.
Formed in 1987, the Telescopes first release was a split with Loop oddly enough, a flexi disc released with a fanzine, pretty auspicious beginning for sure, yet ever since, they have constantly and continually been overshadowed by their drone rock brothers in arms Spacemen 3 and Loop. Which is weird considering how similar their sounds are.
Similar they may have been, but the Telescopes always seemed much more rocking and heavy and WAY more noisy that either, but were definitely not averse to the occasional blissed out Spacemen style druggy drift, or some metallic Loop-ed pound. But those moments were scattered amidst a minefield of amp destroying ear drum splitting spaced out noise rock, with a definite grunge element. Re-listening to these tracks now, it definitely sounds like the seeds that spawned Mudhoney and some of the more raw and rocking early Sub Pop bands.
Pretty much every Telescopes record is worth owning, but this singles collection is especially transcendent, gathering up some of their earliest singles, which means raw and lo-fi, and fuzz drenched, and noisy as fuck and gloriously poppy, and HEAVY, always on the verge of total collapse. Killer hooks doused in distortion, verse chorus verse imploding into a squall of psychguitar freakout and total off-kilter drum damage. Every space filled up with wild streaks of lightning bold feedback, drums and guitar locked into killer stop start grooves, the vocals drenched in distortion, yowling and growling, some serious Stooges infused space rock garage mayhem.
But the band did mellow a bit as time went on, so the second half of the disc offers up another side of the band, groovy tripped out almost paisley sounding sixties jangle drift, pretty strummed soft pop, blissy shoegazey shuffle, lush Beatlesesque shimmer, but still plenty of warbly organ, some surprising banjo, fuzzy reverb, everything in a softly druggy haze.
We reviewed the Telescopes Altered Perception record a while back, another collection of sorts, and while the first two tracks are indeed the same, those are the only two tracks to be found on both. Which means not only is THIS essential, but odds are you're probably gonna want that one too. Cuz as far as we're concerned you can never have too much blurry and buzzy and druggy spaced out noisy garage-y psychedelic drone rock in your life. EVER.
Nice title! And, oooh. It's a very nice recording too. This debut album by electro-acoustic glitchtronica artist Mark Templeton should appeal to fans of Paul Wirkus, Mitchell Akiyama, Guiseppi Ielasi and others working in the experimental-but-beautiful, lowercase field of painterly abstraction, processed instruments, delicate drone, and (last but not least) ambient melodies. Mark Templeton's use of guitar, accordion, vibraphone, cymbals and especially banjo have us most closely comparing this to Geoff Mullen's wonderful thrtysxtrllnmnfstns, as Templeton is similarly submersing the notes played acoustically into a warm, electric bath of creaking staticky stuff, accompanied by murmuring field recordings and chirping digital glitch, like the pleasant but disintegrated soundtrack to some grainy super 8 footage, barely heard beneath the whirr of the film projector itself. Sweet swells of sound throb and drift, fracture and coalesce. It's all very lovely and mysterious, gentle caresses for curious ears.
This ain't that new of a release - it came out in 2011 - but we hadn't yet reviewed it, and when we got some copies back in the other day, wondered, why the heck not? Haven't been able to stop listening to it lately, it's so dang electrifying and infectious. What we have here is a killer collection some of the best tracks recorded by one Takeshi Terauchi, who in the mid-'60s was known as Japan's "King Of The Electric Guitar". In fact, he may still be.
We all know what instrumental surf music guitar sounds like, give it a Japanese twist and you have "Eleki" (what they called electric guitar music). The "Tsugaru" of the subtitle refers to traditional Japanese folk songs, which were also adapted to the '60s rock n' roll invasion. Badass guitarist Terauchi was a pioneer of the Eleki craze, building his own gear, playing to crowds of screaming young girls with his bands The Blue Jeans and The Bunnys. So just imagine a Japanese version of Link Wray and/or Dick Dale, all exciting, exotic surf twang and groovy fuzz. There's some achingly romantic, folk based melodic moments, and we like that, but the best parts are when Terauchi is ripping it up on his fretboard to surfy, psychedelic excess!
FYI, they fit 25 tracks on the cd, and 14 on the vinyl.
Achtung! Here's another kool krautrock reissue brought to us by the Lion label, continuing their noble efforts in that area recently represented by reissues of Sergius Golowin, Guru Guru, and Emtidi. This is one that some of us here (well, Allan) had been looking forward to for a while - he'd been trying to find a copy of a previous, out of print, import only reissue of this album ever since hearing part of it on his own kraut/psych/prog radio show Klaus To The Edge (co-DJ Alison had played a track), so it's nice to have this new domestic reissue! The deal with Tetragon is that they performed a wonderfully proggy, mostly instrumental, technically accomplished style of krautrock, very much inspired by classical keyboards of British proto-prog act The Nice (Keith Emerson's band before ELP, dontcha know), as well as by Soft Machine, the electric jazz experiments of Miles Davis, and the heavier sort of psychedelic blues rock a la Cream.
Originally a teenage three-piece (keys/bass/drums) named Trikolon, formed in 1967, in 1971 they added a guitarist and thus became Tetragon. Their keyboard dominated sound (Hammond organ, clavinet, piano) now had distorted wah wah guitar to increase its heft and complexity. That same year saw the release of Tetragon's sole album on their own label Soma, in an edition of just 400 copies, housed in a lovely green cover to match the ecologically "green" nature theme of the title. It's a virtuoso performance, particularly considering each track was recorded in just a few takes, with no overdubs! While some krautrock music we dig is all about drugged out primitivism, this is the sort of thing that benefits from the players' tasteful musicianship. The first track, "Fugue" sorta sets the tone for this melodically moody, yet grooving, album. It's 16 minutes long, and based on a piece by J.S. Bach (though we don't think Bach ever envisioned an electronically-effected drum solo, or wild acid rock guitar soloing!). Elsewhere on the album, Tetragon also adapt some of Gershwin's music from West Side Story (via jazz drummer Buddy Rich's arrangement, apparently) on the 13+ minute "A Short Story". But not every track here is long - there's the mere 19 second bizarre electronic outburst of "Jokus" to balance things out.
This is another album to feed our fantasy of someday opening another store called "1971" that ONLY sells reissues of records originally released in 1971! Whaddya think? It could happen. Maybe we will change Aquarius to that format.
As we've come to expect from Lion, this reissue is quite nicely done, with lengthy, informative liner notes and photos in the cd booklet, plus on the disc itself a significant bonus track, the live 14+ minute mega-jam "Doors In Between" from '72.
The latest batch from Utech is all excellent stuff (as usual), we're reviewing three this list, including the Locrian double disc (one of our Records Of The Week), the new Gog, and this, from Japan's Tetragrammaton.
The first thing one of the AQ Overlords here said when he heard this one is, if not entirely accurate, a good starting point for a description: "Sounds like a black metal Taj Mahal Travellers!" While it's NOT black metal, there's a menacing, mesmeric vibe here that some black metallers might appreciate. Possibly also some Buddhist monks, too. Part freeform psychedelic rock exploration, part dronological soundscapery, Tetragrammaton's Points Of Convergence is a beautiful and frightening trip into the void-dark expanses... that this trio is Tokyo-based is no surprise, seems like if Utech hadn't put this out, PSF should have. Band members TOMO, Cal Lyall, and Nobunaga Ken utilize a wide array of instruments to conjure up intense music that's both detailed and active, and droningly atmospheric: hurdy-gurdy, guitar, saxophone, crystal bowls, percussion, voices, Rhodes piano, hydrophone, gongs, drums, bells, bowls, taisho-koto...
Track one, "Disjecta Membra", begins as if recorded inside of a giant cauldron; echoing, haunting, with mysterious scrapings and billowing distortion, it builds up and up, over the course of 14+ minutes, spiralling into dense hypnotic drones, before a climax that takes the form of a free improv freakout, an electric tangle of guitar, sax, percussion... As quick as that erupts, it subsides, and track two, "Portrait Of Turab (Part I)" starts in with sustained bell tones, shimmering in the cauldron-blackness. Later still, the textural drones of "Sol de Paula" evoke all the awe of the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith! And elsewhere watery textures and strange pipe-fighting percussion take center stage.
This unit's previous release, a double disc, was one of Julian Cope's Records Of The Month some time ago (btw, whatever happened to his Record Of The Month? the Head Heritage site hasn't been updated with one since the summer). If there's enough interest in this (which there should be!), perhaps we can import some of those, too.
The usual Utech packaging, nicely designed, slim sleeve, oversized. Lots of black.
Wow, 2011 is ruling so far, so much good stuff has come out this year already. Here's one we REALLY flipped for when we saw it was available - the third and apparently final album (bar the inevitable reunion tour!) from everyone's favorite all-elephant ensemble. That's right, the Thai Elephant Orchestra of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in the jungle locale of Lampang, Thailand. We're huge fans of their other two albums, made both of 'em Records Of The Week, and this one is just as good - or actually maybe even better, 'cause as they say it's a "purist" recording of the Elephant Orchestra, with no human guidance at all, edits, or overdubs. It's indeed all-elephant, with the exception of a Buddhist monk's chanted prayer for the elephant spirit heard on the very first track (also we're guessing a human came up with the song titles). All the music is entirely improvised by the elephants themselves, playing the special over-sized instruments built for them by conservationist Richard Lair and experimental composer David Soldier as part of their project to help preserve these amazing creatures and their ever-threatened habitat. Lair and Soldier just hit record and let the elephants go to it on these ten tracks. They really seem to enjoy expressing themselves, these tracks truly lovely and mesmeric, with all kinds of percussive textures, gently tinkling chimes, occasional crashing gongs or drums, gamelan-like tones, harmonica drones... and it's all remarkably rhythmic, at a stately pace. Beautiful! They definitely know what they're doing, they've got big ears after all, and it's incredible the feeling and careful restraint that they bring to the music they're making (for such large animals especially). We doubt humans could do better. NNCK, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Kemialliset Ystavat, et. al., you're no match for these elephants... as we've said before, if you didn't know dem wuz pachyderms, you'd think this was some new weird krautrock-inspired improv group, or a reissue of something by the likes of Amon Duul, the Taj Mahal Travellers, or Yahowah 13 perhaps.
For those unfamiliar with the Thai Elephant Orchestra, you're in for a treat! And anyone already a fan will be thrilled too. Previous albums contained a fair number of tracks with humans participating too, so it's nice to have one that's elephant-only, and it's sooooooo good. Utterly, utterly wonderful, both musically and conceptually. How can you not love these elephants?
FYI, a new documentary about the Thai Elephant Orchestra can be found on YouTube, part one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZHLPrYkpRc
First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!
The Thai Elephant Orchestra was dreamed up, and this disc produced, by David Soldier (New York musician and academic) and Richard Lair (American expatriate elephant expert, who advises the Thai Elephant Conservation Center where this project goes on). The two came up with the idea that elephants, being social animals, might enjoy playing music together, and proceeded to investigate... Happily, not only did the elephants enjoy playing, they were good at it, demonstrating that they were able to decide what sounded good (to them) and what didn't.
The booklet features photos and detailed, fascinating liner notes by both men. Here is what Soldier says the criteria was for the construction of the instruments, which were made by New York instrument builder Ken Butler (of "Gravikords, Whirligigs..." fame):
"1. The instruments must be suitable to the elephant's anatomy, which means large instruments operated by the trunk.
"2. The instruments must withstand jungle heat, humidity -- and the elephants.
"3. The instruments should require minimum upkeep.
"4. The instruments should have a Thai sound, because the regular daily audience is Thai, the mahouts would enjoy the music more, and the elephants have heard Thai music all their lives."
Some more great tid-bits from the notes: "The elephants took easily to the harmonica, which sparked the first elephant music fad: one morning I arrived to hear the sound of harmonicas from all over -- from the hills and from the river. The elephants were walking in from the forest playing harmonicas, which they hold easily in the tip of their trunks."
"The elephants didn't seem interested in the bells or theremin. At first they were spooked by the synthesizer keyboard, but later two animals were entranced by it. They disliked playing Ken's reed instruments with a large mouthpiece, or rather, trunkpiece. A mahout told me they were afraid that a snake might jump into their nostrils!"
As sort of bonus tracks, in addition to the forty-plus minutes of elephant improv, there's also some non-instrumental elephant field recordings, several tracks of humans and elephants playing together, and even a few traditional Thai songs played by humans, about elephants.
Sure there's a bit of simple amusement to be found here just from the concept alone, but in actual fact the music these elephants make is, to our ears at least, quite beautiful. We could go on and philosophize about how this project speaks to the relationship between man and animals in this world, but we'll leave those thoughts for you to explore if you chose to check out this album, which we highly recommend! Amazing and wonderful.
Super technical death metal. For fans of Meshuggah and late Death. No jazz fusionisms, tho, just mindboggling speed and changes and general all-around instrumental rippin'. Very very good.
We were pleasantly surprised a few years ago when Light In The Attic reissued the first (self-titled) Thin Lizzy album on vinyl, not really LITA's usual sort of jam, but of course cool. At the time, we remember talking to one of our pals who runs the label about it, and asking if they planned to reissue any other albums by the seminal '70s Irish hard rockers, like, maybe, Vagabonds Of The Western World (one of our favorites). Turns out, he hadn't really even ever heard any other Thin Lizzy albums beside the debut, but he said he'd check 'em out! Clearly, now, that's happened, and Light In The Attic has just brought us swank (180 gram, gatefold, tip-on jacket, 24bit/96kHz remaster, 'book-deep' liner notes) first-time vinyl reissues of Lizzy's 2nd and 3rd albums, Shades Of A Blue Orphanage from 1972 (not reviewed yet, but in stock, also cool), and this one, 1973's Vagabonds. Both from the early, oft-underappreciated era of Thin Lizzy, before "The Boys Are Back In Town", before the famed dual-guitar lineup, back when things were slightly more hippy-dippy, sometimes folky, sometimes bluesy, sometimes proggy. But with brilliant guitar work in its own right, courtesy of original Lizzy axeman Eric Bell. And of course, with the charismatic vocals and storytelling songwriting of frontman/bassist/rock and roll legend Phil Lynott, in full effect. Since we reference Thin Lizzy in a lot of heavy music reviews these days, hopefully we don't have to tell you how great they were. But if we do have to tell you, or tell you that they were great even before the Gorham/Robertson dual guitar era, let it be via Vagabonds. Just get it. It's got some killer rockers (including "The Rocker"!), it's got some more mellow, pretty tunes ("A Song For While I'm Away"), it's got the freaky epics ("The Hero And the Madman"), and their traditional Irish folk factor too. Heck, any album with both "Little Girl In Bloom" and "Gonna Creep Up On You" is a GREAT album. And we didn't even mention all the other great songs. A stone classic any way you cut it.
Sweet! A deluxe double cd reish of one of our faves by Irish greats Thin Lizzy, who are one of those influential bands that posthumously just seems to be getting more and more popular, heck they're probably bigger now than they ever were before, in the States anyway. More influential on the current rock/metal community too. Vagabonds Of The Western World, from 1973, belongs to the earliest era of the band when Eric Bell was their guitarist. Note we said guitarist, singular. That's right, the twin guitar harmonies thing that Lizzy is famous for came later, originally they were a power trio with only one guy on guitar. But he's awesome, and the first three Lizzy albums (of which this is the 3rd) are definitely cool, though different (often a bit mellower, folkier, psychier) than the more famous later stuff with the Gorham / Robertson duo. Vagabonds is pretty rockin', though, heck it even includes the song "The Rocker" among other classics like "Gonna Creep Up On You", "Little Girl In Bloom", and the storytelling epic "The Hero And The Madman", which is one of this sometimes odd album's weirdest, quasi-prog entries. Plus of course, most crucially, the talents of Thin Lizzy's charismatic singer/bassist/songwriter, and resident tragic genius, Phil Lynott, are fully in effect here, his distinctive voice always a delight...
In addition to the digitally remastered original album, you get ten bonus tracks (including a radio promo edit of early hit "Whiskey In The Jar", and one called "Cruising In The Lizzymobile"!) on the first disc in the set, while the second disc features 13 cuts from various BBC radio sessions, for John Peel and others. In addition to songs from Vagabonds, you'll hear renditions of other Lizzy gems from the era like "Suicide" (different from the later album version done with the double guitar lineup) and "Black Boys On The Corner". The double digi cd package includes liner notes and vintage photos too. Deluxe indeed, and deserving of the treatment.
It's tough to review the records of This Heat separately, knowing that there is a box set, a box set most of us had been waiting for for years! Like imagine if you heard about Christmas, and spent the next decade waking up and rushing out to the living room only to find nothing there. That's what it was like waiting for the long rumored This Heat box. It seems almost self evident that it is honestly one of the few box sets, that is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. But okay, $100 might be a bit much to drop on a band you're not all the familiar with. And probably some folks already have some of these discs, as they were briefly available in the nineties. But let's be upfront and warn you straight up, we know very few people, who on hearing any music from This Heat, even a single song, weren't immediately compelled to get their hands on every single bit of recorded material they could find. The music of This Heat is most definitely that powerful, that intense, having informed almost all of the music we've loved since. And sounding as fresh and forward thinking today as it did when it was first recorded.
Before we get to reviewing Made Available, a posthumous release of This Heat's Peel Sessions, let's give you some background on (and no small amount of gushing over) one of our all time favorite bands.
Trying to explain why this band is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenestress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant-garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post-rock, math-rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background.
Their entire catalog has gone in and out of print over the years, mostly out, with all of their records pretty much completely unavailable for the last 7 or 8 years. Rumors of a complete box set and reissue campaign began to circulate a few years back and it has finally happened and it's everything we could have hoped for and more. Every single release, remastered and repackaged in swank digipaks. We're almost jealous of folks who have never even heard This Heat. The thought of entering into this music completely blind, is almost frightening, as the world of This Heat is so singular, so powerful, it will be difficult to ever listen to music the same way again. Trust us.
In 1996, This Heat's 1977 Peel Sessions were finally released and demonstrated once again that This Heat were untouchable, effortlessly unfurling a sound equal parts avant pop, krautrock, progrock, musique concrete and a handful of parts that defied easy classification. Every track here a jaw dropping, mind blowing performance. Especially the new version of "Horizontal Hold", one of This Heat's finest moments already, played here with much more verve and vigor and with a sound quality so much clearer, a recording so incredibly hot, that the song is reborn and completely confounds and amazes. The whole session is rhythmically dense, rife with bastardized pop, incredibly complex arrangements all rendered again in such a way that they are emotional and moving, instead of just intellectual musical exercises. And the sound is so crystal clear, that you can hear a band at the top of their game, taking over the BBC studio and using it like they would a second guitar or another drummer. The Peel Sessions also include a handful of songs that never made it onto records proper. All as good as anything on their official releases.
Trying to explain why this band is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenestress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant-garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post-rock, math-rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background.
Their entire catalog has gone in and out of print over the years, mostly out, with all of these records pretty much completely unavailable for the last 7 or 8 years. Rumors of a complete box set began to circulate a few years back and it has finally surfaced and it's everything we could have hoped for and more. Every single release, remastered, repackaged in swank digipaks, including a bonus live disc, a huge booklet, amazing archival photos, extensive liner notes, all packed in a gorgeous box. It's a testament to the power this band holds over their fans that pretty much everyone who owns all of these records already will buy the box without a second thought. We're almost jealous of folks who have never even heard This Heat. The thought of entering into this box set completely blind, is almost frightening, as the world of This Heat is so singular, so powerful, it will be difficult to ever listen to music the same way again.
This Heat's self titled debut, originally released in 1978 (which is almost impossible to believe, that people were making music this progressive, this intense, this fucked up and forward thinking) is such a totally immersive and strangely lovely musical environment. From the machinelike krautrock of "Horizontal Hold" to the dreamy contemplative "Twilight Furniture" with its simple chiming guitars, muted tribal percussion and keening vocals, to the bizarre affected drum workout of "24 Track Loop", it's like wandering through some alien musical world. A sky full of greys and blues, smeary drones floating gently by, haunting quavering vocals drifting below, like tendrils of smoke, the barren landscape littered with all manner of rhythmic outcroppings, harsh jagged crashes and booms, as well as low rolling thumps and stutters, off in the distance simple spare melodies float and hover, each note a glowing spot on the horizon. Absolutely and utterly overwhelmingly brilliant.
The Health And Efficiency ep followed in early 1981 and took their sound in a strangely pop (for them at least) direction, sounding like some tweaked and twisted version of Wire, the title track all angular new wave guitars, monotone vocals, driving drums, strange convoluted arrangements and creepy background sound effects before the whole thing splinters into super abstract rhythmic experimentalism, looped grooves, played over and over, while sounds float and careen in the background, so incredibly hypnotic and repetitive. The second track on Health And Efficiency (which runs a brief twenty minutes) is "Graphic/Varispeed (45rpm)", a lengthy drone, a warm synth whir that surfaces within other This Heat tracks, recontextualized and often chopped up and reassembled, but here, it's a slow shifting slow motion single tone soundscape, with the tone occasionally being pitched up or down, very simple but quite haunting, and a cool glimpse at how This Heat managed to mix and match, use and reuse, without ever treading water.
Later that same year came Deceit, with the band continuing to expand and explore. Deceit consisted of shorter songs, but that didn't mean their process, or disdain for convention was altered. If anything, they managed to subvert pop music in a way never thought possible. Imagine Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain, but filter that through some avant industrialism, angular new wave and hyper rhythmic krautrock and you'll begin to get the picture. The songs on Deceit are impossibly catchy, especially when examined closely. Abstract, obtuse, angular, convoluted, tangled up but without ever losing that thread, that melodic sensibility that grounded the songs, kept them from falling apart completely, instead, the perilous arrangements only added tension and emotion. An incredibly explosive sound that somehow hybridized all of the countercultural fury of punk and situationism, within a sonic context informed by the technological advances of musique concrete and electro-acoustic experimentation. The sound was definitely punk in its own way, but certainly wasn't expressed through three chord song structures or snarling postures, instead This Heat injected their own complex pop agendas with a jittery nervous tension always building to a dramatic and cathartic release. Deceit was sadly the band's final release disbanding soon after.
In 1993, a disc of unearthed This Heat recordings was released and consisted of three lengthy tracks of tape loop experiments and random rhythmic explorations. Repeat has come to be This Heat's defining work even though it is essentially a record of outtakes and pieces meant to be incorporated into other songs. But it's hard to argue with the 20 minute title track, and endless, almost funky groove, punctuated by weird electronic swells, sprinkles of woodblock percussion and occasional handclaps but held together by one of the most amazing drum parts ever. A relentless pound and shuffle, drenched in effects, sound very dubby, but also very krautrock, a tripped out blissed out drone drenched rhythmic space jam never matched to this day. Every time this is played for a friend, musician or not, the listener is inevitably confused, perplexed and then quickly obsessed with hearing more. The second track, appropriately titled "Metal" is an abstract soundscape of, well, metal, clanging, clinking, like some ancient junkyard gamelan, almost like the previous piece transcribed for sheet metal, garbage can, metal pipe and dumpster. The metallic symphony shifts and sways, melodies surface, rhythms twist and turn, all very hypnotic and quite lovely. The final track revisits a song on Health and Efficiency, but slows it down a bit to become "Graphic/Varispeed (45rpm)", the same sort of slow, murky drone, just made even slower, so more tonal colors surface, and the subtle shit is much more noticeable, a gloriously dreamlike warm warbly whir.
In 1996, This Heat's 1977 Peel Sessions were finally released and demonstrated once again that This Heat were untouchable, effortlessly unfurling a sound equal parts avant pop, krautrock, progrock, musique concrete and a handful of parts that defied easy classification. Every track here a jaw dropping, mind blowing performance. Especially the new version of "Horizontal Hold", one of This Heat's finest moments already, played here with much more verve and vigor and with a sound quality so much clearer, a recording so incredibly hot, that the song is reborn and completely confounds and amazes. The whole session is rhythmically dense, rife with bastardized pop, incredibly complex arrangements all rendered again in such a way that they are emotional and moving, instead of just intellectual musical exercises. And the sound is so crystal clear, that you can hear a band at the top of their game, taking over the BBC studio and using it like they would a second guitar or another drummer. The Peel Sessions also include a handful of songs that never made it onto records proper. All as good as anything on their official releases.
The bonus disc included in the box is a compilation of live tracks recorded between 1980 and 1981 all over Europe and sequenced to resemble the set list the band used on tour in the eighties. Recorded using a single stereo mic, the sound is less that crystal clear, but captures the band in their element at the top of their game. The songs are amazing, it's awesome to hear the band recreate pieces that on record relied so heavily on the studio, more evidence as to the genius of This Heat.
Our only complaint about this box was that there is definitely more This Heat material out there, and anyone picking up this box, would have gladly paid a few bucks more for one or two more discs of lost rare material. But then we spied this in the liner notes of the live cd: "Further CD's from other stages in This Heat's music to follow, including collaborations, improvisations and site-specific work as well as other live cds."
We can hardly wait!
There are plenty of places on the web and in magazines to read more about the history of the band, the band members, various versions, releases and re-releases and past reissues, but none of that ultimately matters as much as the sound. And oh the glorious sound. Just take a listen to the sound samples and no words will be necessary.
Trying to explain why this record is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen, and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenstress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post rock, math rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. This is their self titled debut, originally released in 1979 and reissued briefly in 1991, and manages over the course of about 50 minutes to redefine almost all music that had come before.
The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background. This record is such a totally immersive and strangely lovely musical environment. From the machinelike Krautrock of "Horizontal Hold" to the dreamy contemplative "Twilight Furniture" with its simple chiming guitars, muted tribal percussion and keening vocals, to the bizarre affected drum workout of "24 Track Loop", it's like wandering through some alien musical world. As sky full of greys and blues, smeary drones floating gently by, haunting quavering vocals drifting below, like tendrils of smoke, the barren landscape littered with all manner of rhythmic outcroppings, harsh jagged crashes and booms, as well as low rolling thumps and stutters, off in the distance simple spare melodies float and hover, each note a glowing spot on the horizon. Absolutely and utterly overwhelmingly brilliant.
There are plenty of places on the web and in magazines to read more about the history of the band, the band members, the various releases and reissues (see elsewhere on the AQ website for reviews of past editions of various TH recordings) but none of that ultimately matters as much as the sound. And oh the glorious sound. Just take a listen to the sound samples and no words will be necessary.
This is arguably This Heat's finest moment, their debut record, finally available again after almost 15 years of being out of print. Be aware that there will be a 5cd box coming out in the (near?) future, containing EVERY SINGLE ONE of the band's releases, as well as a bonus disc of unreleased material and a huge book of photos and liner notes. And we would have made (maybe will make) THAT record of the week, and while we do believe EVERY music lover we know owes it to themselves to buy the upcoming box, we figured a single disc was plenty for most people to get hooked and obsessed.
Holy moly, this is quite a discovery. A hitherto unknown album of wonderful Sgt. Peppery (flower) power pop, that ought to make fans of the Beatles, early Bee Gees, The Kinks, Big Star and so forth very, very happy indeed.
We admit were a bit skeptical when we first heard about it, 'cause there's so many reissues and whatnot these days that claim to be lost classics, but as soon as we put this on we were hooked! And more amazingly, while we'd certainly consider this a lost classic, it isn't even technically a reissue (despite the blurb saying "Original 1967 Release" on the back). Except for two songs here that appeared on a 7" single, this material was never actually released to the public, until now! Recorded in 1967, yes, but the tapes languished forgotten all these years, which is hard for us to understand - how could this gem stay unknown for 46 years?! These songs are so great! As always, makes you wonder what else is out there... And, at first, it also made us wonder if this was even really a group from the sixties - we suspected it could be a more modern-day band (a really good one!) emulating the sounds of yesteryear, a la The Dukes Of Stratosphear, The High Llamas, or Jellyfish. Especially since the production job, while vintage-sounding, is also so top notch (even though the liner notes tell us the whole thing was recorded and mixed in merely a weekend). Heck, a modern band trying to put one over could have added the analog tape hiss. But no, our skeptical conspiracy theories are all wrong, we have it from trusted sources that this is indeed for real, from 1967, the work of a bunch of talented, Anglophilic youngsters from Louisiana. But the vocals here are often (but not always) delivered in a lilting faux English accent, a common practice amongst the paisley-clad syke popsters of the day, wherever they were from, wanting to sound like they too were a part of the British Invasion. So, definitely Beatles-esque; as with Peru's We All Together, there's quite a few tunes here, like "Marigold", that sound like they were written by Paul McCartney - and the band name is an obvious homage to a certain Sgt.'s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Though this is sometimes more White Album than Sgt. Pepper's, really, the band even pushing into edgier sounds like the rather manic "Have You Been To The Light" - that's a weird one, and great. "Hope" is another of the album's harder, garage rockin' tunes.
But so much of this just delightfully sunshiney stuff, sometimes quite melancholic too. There's super melodic, energetic toe tappers and dreamy blissouts both, stuff that will get stuck in your head immediately, sounding so lovely and familiar right from the get go. There's the gentle, hushed intimacy of "Merlin", the lively, layered "Alexander Graham Bell", the heartfelt grandeur of the ELO-ish "Walk Out With Your Heart", the sweet & mellow soft pop of "Common Attitude" (which reminds us of Curt Boettcher's Millennium), and so many, many more highlights, that we can't possibly detail them all (and deciding which ones to make sound samples of was tough!). Oh, and the album's final track, a brief "outro" of druggy, tape-manipulated studio trickery, is titled "Dream Me Up Snotty"!!!
The only real complaint we have at all about this is that it's kind of too bad the prolific reissue label Gear Fab got to be the lucky ones to put this out, 'cause their attention to detail in terms of the physical product borders on shoddy. The crappy graphics they came up with for the cover of this digipack don't do justice to the music within; the quasi-informative liner notes (printed on the inside cover, there's no booklet) were written by someone who couldn't decide (or care to be consistent) between using all caps, bold face, or quotation marks to set off the various proper names mentioned; some proofreading could have helped in other areas too; and there's a strange one page, one sided insert with a thanks list on it that you don't really know what to do with once you've torn off the shrink wrap. Well, at least there ARE liner notes (from which we did learn, that the group's guitar prodigy Richard Orange went on to write music for the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Jane Wiedlin and even Terry Bozzio!). But there's many labels out there that would have done this a lot better, oh well.... perhaps someone else will eventually get to do a vinyl release...
We just hope this album isn't overlooked as a result of its Gear Fab-ness, it would be a shame if after 46 years it still went unnoticed. If people HEAR it, though, it won't - another reason we're doing our part by making it a Record Of The Week. So please grab this and get in on the ground floor with the first ever release of an unheard, utterly obscure '60s artifact that ought to be way up there in the psych power pop pantheon!!
Start small? Heck no, not our man Jon Mikl Thor! His debut album from back in 1977, reissued here on cd for the first time ever, finds him quite big in all his massive, muscle-bound glory (that's him on the cover). The burly, bodybuilding singer had been Mr. Canada 1973, after all. But, on the other hand, this is NOT the heavy metal album you might expect from exposure to his later musical output and overdeveloped, barbarian physique. Let The Dogs Out is much more eclectically new wave in its approach to hard rock than the '80s metal Thor with which we were familiar. Which was a pleasant surprise, if you don't take it too seriously. Is it a good album? Well... is the Rocky Horror Picture Show a good movie? Like that midnite fave, this album is kinda '70s glammy, and definitely quite campy at times. But it's also undeniably poppy. Pretty cool, on its own terms.
Kitschy fun that might merely have been a one-off, 'incredibly strange music' entry from a beefcake wannabe rock star but for two things - Thor actually went on to have something of a successful career (as tongue-in-cheek as it might be), AND it's got some cool songs on it, or at least a bunch with a certain clumsy charm. You get the full quota of cowbell, Thor's over the top vocal stylings of course, and once in a while something more, where you're like, hey that was pretty good... and now it's stuck in my head!
The title track is a quasi-classic of not quite metal, not all that heavy, but still quite rockin' good time music. "I'm So Proud" ("...to be the man I am") could be a more macho Jobraith with a goofy hint of Devo. And "Sleeping Giant" seriously sounds like a bubblegum BRIAN ENO! Yep, not exactly what we thought the He-Man of Heavy Metal would have done for a debut. Maybe this album is not for everyone (like the humor impaired), but as with all Thor's stuff we've heard, and shows we've seen (yes, we've seen him play more than once!), entertainment is job one, from square one.
This 30th anniversary special edition reissue's got seven bonus tracks added to the album's original 10 cuts, among 'em the super corny "I'm Thor". While that one is a mite embarrassing (except we're pretty sure Mr. Thor is quite capable of laughing at himself too) there's other stuff here that makes us wonder, however briefly, if this album isn't in fact totally brilliant.
Ok, you wanna know where the NWOFHM (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal) gets all their ideas? Our pal Jussi (of noted NWOFHM purveyors Circle/Pharaoah Overlord/Steel Mammoth/Krypt Axeripper/etc.) kind of gives it away by reissuing on his Ektro imprint this classic 1985 live album by metal/bodybuilding legend THOR!!
Yes it's a live album (the band rockin' Detroit rock city, with appropriate album cover artwork) but don't worry, it's an AWESOME live album. The recording is great, the band's performance is killer, the crowd is raucous, of course it's got almost ALL the hits ("Thunder On The Tundra", "Knock 'Em Down", "Keep The Dogs Away" among them), AND Thor's between-song stage raps are worth the price of admission all by themselves. Love it when he asks if the crowd reads Kerrang! magazine, gets no response, and is like, "anyhow..." and goes on with his story (about the remarkable size of his back up singer's breasts). Or when he introduces a song as being "a big hit in Alaska". Yes, he-man of metal Jon Mikl Thor is hilarious (he'd happily agree we're sure) but he also rocks, as anyone who's seen him play even recently knows, and heck this was laid to tape back in his heyday! At the time, his heavy metal superheroics were probably only matched by the combined might of Manowar.
If you're gonna buy just one Thor album, you won't go to wrong to make it this one. It includes three bonus tracks also from '85, live recorded in England, New York City, and Thor's native Canada. One of them is a song that was lost for 23 years and has never been heard on any other Thor recording!! The cd booklet is stuffed with rad old photos of the band playing and posing, with glimpses of the feats-of-strength that, along with his cool tunes, made this campy metal muscleman famous. For a few seconds back in the '80s anyway. But not forgotten!!
Yet more proof that Ektro is one of the best record labels ever. Not only did Ektro just reissue this live Thor album but at the same time they've released a live album by krautrock legends Faust! Thor -and- Faust. Damn. That's our kind of label. After all, we had Thor do an in-store album signing here a couple years ago, and still have the autographed hot water bottles to prove it!
Yes, this week we do have releases on our list by both Conan, and Thor! How 'bout that. In "real life" we imagine that Thor, being a god, could beat up Conan, tough as Conan is. In fact, we think that Marvel once issued a comic book about that very match-up. And in even more real real life, we're also pretty sure that Jon Mikl Thor, former bodybuilding champion and cult '80s heavy metal icon, could probably wallop the three guys in the doom band called Conan reviewed above. Or at least bend their big ol' horseback battle hammer into a pretzel with his bare hands. Sonically, however, Conan's sub-bass SUNNO)))-like sludge riffage is definitely heavier than the more traditional heavy metal rockin' of Thor and band. Yet, if you're into '80s metal, you'll agree, Thor kicks ass. Certainly Jussi from our fave Finnish band Circle thinks so - this is the third Thor reissue he's put out on his Ektro label so far! And we think so too. Especially when it comes to this album, 1985's Only The Strong, generally considered to be Thor's best. It contains his biggest "hits", and a lot of 'em, beefy kitsch metal classics like "Knock 'Em Down", "When Gods Collide", "Let The Blood Run Red", "Ride Of The Chariots", and best of all, "Thunder On The Tundra". Songs that Thor definitely still sings even today, heck they're likely encore material.
We said Ektro's reissue of Live In Detroit, also from '85, was the one Thor to get if you were to only get one. Well, that's perhaps been superseded by this release. If you're ready to rock, and want do it to in the company of a musclebound he-man, this album should definitely get you pumped up. Bombastic, catchy, straight up very very metal!
Nicely done reissue, with slickly designed booklet, complete with a back cover photo of a vintage Thor logo patch, and the slogan "Beware The Fury Of The Ice Viking", which sounds like something one of Jussi's NWOFHM bands like Steel Mammoth would use as a song title. The disc also includes a bonus bonus live track, "Warriors Of The Universe", boasting impressive crowd sing-along action only possible in Europe, recorded at Sweden Rock Festival we think in 2009, with original Only The Strong guitarist Steve "Lightning Lord" Price in the band!
What just-released reissue on Circle's Ektro label do you think the Circle guys are most excited about right now? No, not their own Taantumus (one of our Records Of The Week). It's more likely this, the 1983 ep from Jon-Mikl Thor, Canadian bodybuilding champion and tongue-in-cheek (???) he-man heavy metaller extraordinaire. It's been slickly repackaged with bonus tracks, for a total of eleven songs in all. The first six are from the original 12" ep, followed by four additional tracks taken from a 1986 soundtrack album Thor did called Recruits - Wild In the Streets (though these, for some reason, aren't noted as such), plus there's one more bonus cut, "Muscle Rock (The Vulcans Arrive)".
Right from thunderous opener "Lightning Strikes", this disc is a triumphant (and, we'll certainly admit, goofy) '80s metal assault, of course... but also essentially POP music. Which part of what's cool about Thor, is the idea that back in the day, you could make music like this with hopes of becoming an actual pop star. So he's somehow simultaneously the most metal thing ever, we mean, he could kick sand in Manowar's collective faces and get away with it, but also totally, totally poppy. Thor wasn't doing this stuff to be a cult metal icon, not originally, he was trying to "make it" in the world of commercial rock/pop music. Let's not forget he performed on the Merv Griffin show! It just so happened that back then, metal (and sci-fi / fantasy too) was on the rise, and a guy with Thor's barbarian physique was ideally suited to exploit those new pop culture phenomena to the max, whether through music or in the movies. Although Thor never did get that huge (other than in terms of muscle, of course!) he did well enough to still have a career today, one now that survives more on irony and nostalgia, of course, but is still all about entertainment.
As is Unchained, throughout which you'll find catchy choruses, heavy riffage, brawny vocals, and flashy guitar work. But also lots of new wavey synths, laid on thick on the likes of "Lazer Eyes" and "Anger", the latter being probably the least actually angry sounding song about anger we've ever heard, though it does rock nicely. Rock is what Thor does, for sure, from the swinging chug of "Rock The City" to the galloping "When Gods Collide".
We figure this combo of utter absurd over the top metal-ness AND the not-so-brutal pop elements are why our favorite Finns are so into Thor. The silliness of their self-proclaimed subgenre "NWOFHM" (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal), which is as much pop it is metal, definitely had a precursor in the heavy metal vaudeville of Thor. Also, of course, Thor is quite literally one of their gods, right? (His use of Nordic mythological references done in a much more upbeat fashion that most Viking black metal does it today.)
Definitely for fans of Steel Mammoth, Krypt Axeripper, another other NWOFHM favorites. Also for fans of Manowar (duh), old Cirith Ungol (have you ever heard their demos with the excess synth??), and we'd recommend this to anyone who was into that '80s Joe Hasselvander disc we highlighted not long ago, too.
Originally released way back in 1999, this strange split/collaboration was at the time, just about the coolest weirdest black metal (and otherwise) record we had ever heard, a record that really sounded like it was made just for aQ, unfortunately, that was long enough ago that the aQ list was still in its infancy, and thus, this amazing and baffling and brilliant record got short shrift. Just three sentences. But really those three sentences should be enough to convince you:
"Emperor covers Thorns songs, Thorns covers Emperor, although it's hard to tell which band is which, a good thing we think. Ends up sounding like a gothic, black metal soundtrack that's been given a John Oswald-style Plunderphonic treatment. The most evil use of Cubase we know of. Bizarre and amazing!!"
If there was ever a should-have-been-Record-Of-The-Week, this was most decidedly it. Thankfully, this just got reissued, and with bonus tracks to boot, so it seemed like the perfect time to revisit, and give this record the aQ love it so very much deserves, and heck, odds are lots of current aQ customers might not have been getting our list back in the day, so this is for you, and for anyone who needs (or just wants) a little more than those three sentences...
Emperor should need no introduction, they are elite members of the black metal pantheon, alongside Burzum, Satyricon, Mayhem, Immortal, Ulver and Enslaved. Their sound epic and majestic, symphonic and super technical, easily still one of our favorite black metal bands EVER. Thorns however might need a bit more of an introduction. Folks who read Lords Of Chaos, might recognize Thorns mainman (only man!) Snorre W. Ruch as having played a part in the infamous murder of Euronymous, by Varg Vikernes of Burzum. Ruch was with Vikernes that fateful night and was sentenced to 8 years in prison as an accessory to murder. Thorns only ever released one proper full length, and that was not until 2001, well after this collaboration.
But this collaboration, wow, not sure where to start, and not even sure how it came to be. It seems it had been years since the very first Thorns demos (not to mention the pre-Thorns outfit Stigma Diabolicum), so this split was intended to introduce Thorns to the scene, in preparation for his upcoming full length, and featured various older Thorns tracks reinterpreted by Emperor, as well as Thorns covering some classic Emperor jams. It was Thorns first new material since 1992, and weirdly enough actually featured Satyr from Satyricon on vocals. So it sounds like a pretty bad ass black metal match up, but it doesn't necessarily explain how goddamn weird it turned out.
The opening Emperor track is some strange sample heavy orchestral industrial workout, all looped samples, field recordings, strange metallic clanks, martial snares, moaning horn like melodies, faux strings, bursts of glitchy distorted vocals, frenzied guitars, and a super intense cinematic orchestral outro that leads right into a new version of Thorns' "Aerie Descent" from his first demo, a buzzing midtempo bit of blackness, laced with soaring synths, programmed electronics, definitely that modern Moonfog black metal sound that came to define the label and the scene, there are some strange samples, but for the most part the song is a dirgey bit of black metal buzz, laced with various bits of strange sonic filigree, finishing off with a stretch of church organ, haunting and mysterious.
The next track is where it gets really strange, a new Emperor created from various bits of an old Thorns demo, and it begins as a strange collage of weird electronics, backwards rhythms, whispered vox, disembodied guitar buzz, again weirdly industrial, before the black buzz kicks in, but it's all wrapped around that electronic skitter, not to mention some bizarre industrial percussion, the sounds looped and chaotic, changing speeds, the voices processed, skittering and stuttering, laced with rhythmic bursts of static, circus calliope, and then finally a furious blast of looped black metal right at the end. Still one of the coolest and weirdest black metal jams EVER.
Next up Emperor tackles Thorns' "Aerie Descent" and it sounds like classic Emperor, epic and majestic, furious buzzing, super intricate and heavy, the drumming incredible, the production massive, the organ outro somehow even creepier here. Emperor go again with "Thus March The Night Spirit", a classical reworking of their classic "Thus Spake The Nightspirit" from their brilliant Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and the black buzz of the original is transformed into some Tim Burton-ish soundtrack, all soaring strings, darkly moody and tense, with flurries of rapid fire notes, and soaring strings, no wonder Emperor sounded so majestic.
Thorns takes control again, redoing yet another old demo track, a creepy almost industrial sounding crawl, the guitars liquid and warbly, the riff slippery and strange, while a mechanical rhythm plods and creaks, the guitars get buzzier, the song gradually growing more and more blasting and black, but the vocals are weirdly processed, and even at it's pounding heaviest, the song is peppered with strange programmed beats and subtle electronics, exactly the sort of stuff that would end up defining Thorns weird mechanized take on black metal. "The Discipline Of Earth" is a Thorns original, and is the perfect blend of orchestral bombast, technical black metal, and brooding black ambience, again laced with programmed rhythms, swirling FX and electronics, creepy vox, before finally erupting into full on black buzz mode, only occasionally slowing down, at which points the underlying electronics and programming come to the fore. And finally, Thorns finishes things off with a cover of Emperor's "Cosmic Keys To My Creation And Times", a plodding doomy dirge, with huge crumbling chords, strange sung/spoken vocals, thick swaths of buzz, muted Teutonic pounding, all strangely and fantastically mechanical and industrial.
In addition to the record proper, this new reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, two pre-production mixes of tracks from the record, and a previously unreleased track, the Thorns demo "You That Mingle May", featuring Satyr again, but also Fenriz from Darkthrone. So totally essential, black metalheads who have somehow made it this far without owning this, right that wrong RIGHT NOW. And the thing is, this record is so cool and weird and varied and textured, that even folks with only a passing interest in or curiosity about black metal, might just find themselves blown away...
Slowly and oh so surely, more sludge oozes out... A couple weeks ago, we highlighted an album, Peasant, by this slow and low (and yet sometimes lovely) sludge-metal outfit from the swamps of Louisiana. Well, we had gotten THIS Thou in first, though, and after leapfrogging it to list the more recent Peasant we want to highlight Tyrant too. That's right, if you liked Peasant, you'll love Tyrant. Gilead Media is responsible for this cd, handsomely packaged in one of those miniature LP style gatefold sleeves, containing music originally released on (now out of print) vinyl last year by One Eye Records, plus two tracks that came as a tour-only bonus cd-r with that LP.
What we said about Peasant goes for its predecessor, too. Thou is ultra-doomic, super-gloomic all right, with crawling distorted riffage and wretched vokillz... they definitely share some DNA with neighboring NOLA sludgefathers Eyehategod, but there's also something warm and fuzzy about 'em too. Maybe that's not the intention (you wouldn't get that idea from their despairing, downer lyrics) but somehow their slabs of crunching, feedbacking heaviosity are infused with enough melody and softness and ambient quietude that the blanket of post-apocalyptic ash spewed by Thou is sorta snuggly, their brand of nuclear winter almost a cozy one. And that's what makes it such great doom, 'cause after all, what we're looking for in doom metal is the means to feel good about feeling bad. A pleasant fixin'-to-die dirge. Sharing the depression, rather than bottling it up, getting some kind of release even if it's the aural equivalent of slicing one's wrists and slowly bleeding away, or swallowing a bottle of pills and falling forever into deep deep sleep... doom metal is comfort metal, is one way of looking at it. Doom metal goes there so that you don't have to. Not that we're saying all doom metal fans are suicidally depressed, far from it. But we all have bummer days, and doom metal can take those feelings and turn 'em into something paradoxically positive. And that's what Thou do here, at least for us, with "life extinguishing elegance" as one of their songs puts it.
It's not just their sound, it's their songs. There's seven of 'em here, long ones, ranging from six and a half minutes to twice that long, lots of room for lots of interestin' twists and turns, albeit at a slow and steady pace. They fit plenty of post rock prettiness amidst their plodding and droning, along with faster parts and unexpectedly, trippingly melodic guitar lines. This is for fans of Jesu as much as Khanate, is what we're saying. Pelican and Isis too, but also Moss and Trees. And of course for all those who picked up Peasant from us already.
Best song title award of this list goes to track three here, "Fucking Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean", by the way. And the song DOES live up to its title.
Timed almost perfectly with the release of the third Thrones cd Day Late, Dollar Short (one of our Records of the Week last week, for those with short memories), we also just got a few copies of Thrones' 1996 debut disc Alraune back in stock. Sheer luck, 'cause it's out of print -- but one of our distributors managed to find a box of 'em lurking in the depths of their warehouse, so we grabbed 'em all while the grabbing was good. As you too should do, if you don't have this already and are a fan of all that is heavy! A quick background briefing: Thrones is Joe Preston, who has done time in both seminal dirge-masters Earth and the Melvins (he's also played in The Whip and SUNNO))) and is current the bassist for High On Fire). You probably know all that already, and this too: back when Joe was in the Melvins, each member put out a solo album (inspired by the same stunt KISS pulled way back when). Joe's was perhaps the best. Carrying on from that, he "formed" Thrones and set out to prove to the world that a one-man-band could be as heavy as any "normal" band (not that the Melvins are all that normal, ahem). Not only did he offer that proof with this Thrones debut, but also took it to the stage. A drum machine, double necked guitar bass, vocal effects and samples were (and still are) put to shudderingly heavy use by Joe in kicking out his weirdly prog and sometimes oddly pop Thrones drone anthems. The tracks on Alarune range from aggro Melvinsy metal to underwater drone to drifting New Age synth melody...a sinister combustion of sound that bridges Earth with Goblin! So, we're happy to have these again (for however long they last), allowing us to review it for the very first time (back in '96 we just weren't as on the ball as we are now I guess)! So, if you've still got an empty space on your cd shelf next to Sperm Whale and Day Late, Dollar Short now's the time to fill it.
We're big ol' Thrones fans here, and so the arrival of a third Thrones opus the other day was pretty darn exciting! It's been five years since the magnificent Sperm Whale, after all! And we're happy to report that Day Late, Dollar Short, despite its title, does not disappoint in any way (though, it's not exactly an entirely new album, more on that in a sec). Now, you know that the double necked guitart/bass wielding Joe Preston -- for he is Thrones and Thrones is he -- has quite the heaviness pedigree. He's played in the unholy heavy trinity of Earth, the Melvins, and SUNNO))), and he's currently the bassist for stoner metal lords High On Fire. Thus, from his one-man-band project Thrones you'd expect nothing less than H-E-A-V-Y, and you'd be right. But it's more than merely heavy. Thrones ain't just rubbery, head-caving bass, lotsa feedback nastiness, machine beats, and throat-rasped vox. Thrones is also really, really weird. As you'd expect from Joe, who used to be in the Melvins after all. There's certainly plenty of Melvins style fuckery going on here!
I mean, after the sheer noxious pummel (we like!) of track one, "The Suckling", you'll wonder what's going on with track two, "Young Savage". Punky and uptempo, with a gang-vocal chorus, it threw us for a bit of a loop until we figured out it was an Ultravox cover. That's then followed by the disarmingly gentle (but disturbingly child-voiced) "Algol". What's going on? Whatever the heck Joe wants, basically. And that's okay 'cause what he wants is to unleash a torrent of creativity that encompasses such things as utter sludge drone dirge, Buttholes Surfers-ish mania, indie rock pop (with some non-effected, clean singing even), drum machines kickin' old school hip hop beats, crazy prog structures, all-out rawk, thrashy riffs, electronic filtering, etc... almost all of which you'll hear in, say, track fifteen, "Obolus", which starts off doing the Melvinsy doom thing but with Bruce Haack/Electric Lucifer robot singing before segueing into a soundscape of bird twitters, bells and chimes, and waves of white noise (this from the "soundtrack" to La Foresta Della Norte). Then there's all the crazy covers that Joe tries his hand at: along with the Ultravox, this includes a Residents cover, a Blue Oyster Cult cover, and yes, unreleased track "A Quick One" is indeed a cover of a portion of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away". Wow. Not afraid of a challenge, this guy.
And we do mean "unleash a torrent" -- there's 19 tracks here, almost 80 minutes of Thrones insanity, much of it compiled from rare, out-of-print singles, cassettes and comps, with some previously unreleased tracks as well, spanning the years 1994-2001. The lovely, bunny-adorned packaging (Mr. Stephen O'Malley, take a bow) also features personal notes on each track by Joe hizzelf. Here's hoping that he'll find time away from his regular gig in High On Fire to do a real *brand new* Thrones album... but in the meantime we're happy to have this "incomplete collection of smaller projects" all on one handy cd.
The long-awaited new Thrones album has finally sailed into port. Former Melvins & Earth member Joe Preston's fully weird solo project is a one-man-band (you've gotta see him live! He even pulls off a cover of Rush's "The Trees", sadly not found on this record) thud-metal art-rock backwoods behemoth. A direct influence on The Need, an inspiration to The Champs, and a joy to all who can enjoy thunderously loud, heavy, fucked up sounds: weird drum programming, electronically-altered pitch-flux vocals, incongrous keyboards and samples, devastating twin-neck guitar/bass riffage, chaotic song structures, more. The cd version includes the tracks from Thrones' previous 12" only release on KRS (which actually makes this less an album than a compilation of two 12"s). Oh, and as if he knew exactly what really floats our boat here at AQ, the cd also includes a lengthy hidden track of nighttime forest noises! Recommended.
We're super-happy to herald the arrival of "Ghost Plants", the brand-new second album from San Francisco's Thuja! (That's pronounced "thoo-zhuh," by the way, and it's the genus name of the North American cedar tree.) We loved their debut cd "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones" (released on our own Andee's tUMULt label, in fact) and try not to miss their rare live performances, which in addition to their transcendental music also often incorporate video projections of trees, piles of branches, and other atmospheric, extra-musical additions. With "Ghost Plants", the four members of Thuja -- AQ-fave experimental sound artist Loren Chasse, pianist Rob Reger, and former members of ambient-psych rockers Mirza Stephen R. Smith and Glenn Donaldson -- have crafted another utterly lovely, improv instrumental masterpiece! In comparision to their first album, this disc seems darker and heavier, somehow more "rock" production-wise although Thuja are hardly a rock band. Thuja's music is very organic and "natural" sounding, with their quietly meandering, melodic guitar and piano explorations seeming set amidst wood, wind and water -- you can imagine a Thuja concert taking place on a darkened forest floor, with Chasse's crackling branches and stone rubbings.
At their most "rock" Thuja goes "kraut" with Chasse's drum-kit rhythms, and at their most "experimental ambient" the tinklings of percussion blend with ominous (yet pleasant) humming dronesc(r)apes of organ and bass and other things quite blissfully.
Whilst not exactly 'folky' you can still draw a connection between the woodland vistas of Thuja and the fractured folkpsych of Tower Recordings, or Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat (Thuja being more abstract than KY, who are more abstract than TR). We'd also cite the likes of Labradford, Richard Youngs/Simon Wickham-Smith, the
No Neck Blues Band, the Taj Mahal Travellers, Popol Vuh, Gunter Schickert, and :Zoviet*France: as fellow travellers in the psychedelic realms that Thuja carefully tread. This disc offers 13 untitled tracks in just under 40 minutes -- a very nice length indeed for an afternoon's reverie, perhaps one of the few improv-drone discs you'll find yourself hitting the "repeat" button on frequently. If you enjoy the solo work of Stephen R. Smith or L. Chasse (also of id battery and Coelacanth), or liked Mirza's drifting atmospheres, and haven't listened to Thuja yet, what are you waiting for? Everyone else, check ALL these guys stuff out, starting with this disc! So beautiful.
Most of the underwater environmental recordings we're familiar with are of whale songs and Antarctic seals and penguins, but this one takes us to an even more unusual locale: the moat of a medieval castle! How cool is that? The ten tracks on this 55 minute disc consist of material selected by French sound artist Thomas Tilly from about five hours of hydrophonic field recordings he made in the murky green waters of the moat of Sanzay Castle in the west of France. These excerpts represent what Tilly, in his careful listening, found most interesting, a dense buzzing micro-sound world created by the aquatic insects and plants, apparently reacting to the intensity of the summer sunlight on the surface of the water. Aside from some "slight equalisation", he made no electronic treatments or altering edits of the raw recordings; weird as it is, this is what you'd hear if you dunked your head in the moat and gave a long listen! Yet, it SOUNDS quite electronic (something that other nature recordings have prepared us for). They certainly don't sound of organic origin. Buzzing, pulsing, chattering drones. Rhythmic, intriguing. Steady mechanical whirr. Sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Constant clicking, like the ticks of a Geiger counter. Sudden sharp whines... decay... Even Morse Code like BLEEPS! (Is that a robot rusting away at the bottom of the moat, still emitting sounds? Did a mad scientist once inhabit this castle?).
It makes us think, Raster-Noton meets Sounds Of North American Frogs. Almost makes you wonder why the likes of Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Nerve Net Noise, all the experimental electronica, digital glitch, clinical clicks and cuts types even bother, when instead of investing in a laptop computer and software, it seems you merely need to submerge a microphone in a suitable stagnant moat. Of course we're kidding. But the thought does occur.
The varied ambient textures of these tracks are mesmeric for sure, and surprising. The most fascinating Found Sounds / Field Recordings find we've run across in recent weeks (unless you count the new Thai Elephant Orchestra, but those elephants are playing instruments).
If there was ever going to be a band to FINALLY steal the slow-building-atmospheric-cinematic-post-rock-soundscape crown from Godspeed! You Black Emperor it would definitely have to be The Timeout Drawer. Sure there's Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, the Grails, Mono, Silver Mt Zion and about a million Godspeed! side projects, but as good as those bands are, and as much as we love them, we'd definitely be hard pressed to pass a blind listening test. Sure, they all do their own thing, with subtle differences, but there's plenty of times we couldn't tell you if a certain track was a Mogwai song or an Explosions In The Sky track, even with a gun to our head (okay, -maybe- with a gun to our head). Which brings us to Nowonmai by The Timeout Drawer. A quick listen will reveal all the stuff we love about post rock, pulsing hypnotic rhythms, languorous soundscapes, moody melancholia, intricate arrangements, no vocals, slow building epics. What can we say? We love that stuff. But listen a little closer and you'll begin to understand how the Timeout Drawer manage to avoid sounding like just another post rock band. We haven't actually been this blown away by an instrumental rock band since we discovered German post rockers Fuehler (no longer available sad to say) way back when.
Drifting dreamy atmospheric bliss builds and builds beneath fuzzy synthesizer melodies and throbbing propulsive rhythms, before super blown out distorted guitars explode the whole thing into a dense wall of white hot fuzz, a thick slab of rumbling buzzing guitar drone, that then crumbles to pieces and from the wreckage emerges a groovy jazzy shuffle, meandering lazily through a gauzy soundfield of throbbing low-end and barely-there synthesizer chirps. And that's just the first track! Phew. Not every track runs the sonic gamut like that, some just sort of drift along, dreamy and shimmering, some explode with feverish intensity and never let up, but they all manage to be dense and complex and make every part seem totally essential to the whole, no matter how convoluted or how simple they seem on the surface.
Sonically it's the synthesizer really that is the most noticeable addition to the Timeout Drawer's post rock pallet, not that most bands don't use a synthesizer, it's just that the Timeout Drawer use it for everything. Weird warbly melodies, rumbling drones, wild wigged out space rock swoops, every track is laced with that warm synth fuzz, sometimes replacing the guitar or the bass, sometimes just adding more and more layers of sound. Add to that a penchant for unlikely stretches of Calexico-ish deserty twang, pounding metal guitar crunch, bursts of manic angular riffing, lonely moaning horns and even shuffling programmed beats. Programmed beats? Well, that sort of makes sense when you realize the band started out on hip hop label Chocolate Industries when they were more of a post rock / IDM hybrid, and that skittery shuffling IDM sensibility translates strangely well to these brooding epic instrumentals.
Plus how can you not love a band with song titles like: "What Looked Like Morning Was The Beginning Of Endless Night", "Bursting With Tears I Commit To Destroying You", "I Fall So Far And I Fall So High" and "Blue Eyed And FIlled With Horror"!
Two new reissues of badass obscure African '70s garage fuzz rock on this list, hot damn! One from Witch (whose album Lazy Bones!! we were already big fans of) and this record from Nigeria's Tirogo, one of the bands who appeared on that rad Lagos Disco Inferno comp. Tirogo were labelmates with the band Blo, and ought to appeal to folks into Blo, Ofege, Sjob, and others from the Nigerian scene, as well as "Zam Rockers" like Witch, Amanaz, and the Ngozi Family from down in Zambia. Originally released in 1977, Tirogo's Float, their debut, is a stoned masterpiece of psychedelic garage groove with authentic African vibes. Seriously, at this point, can't we just say, if you like those others, you'll like this? 'Cause you will. Stinging fuzz guitar leads swirl and sizzle over seriously funky, energetic rhythms, as the vocalists chant about girls and the devil... yeah! The sort of thing that when you're listening to it, you can't help but think, "this is the best shit ever!"... and it's kinda true!!
Dunno how many more records like this they can dig up, it's hard to imagine, but we're grateful for what's been reissued thus far, winners like Tirogo and Witch, wow. And they do it right, the cd booklet includes an extensive, interesting interview with original Tirogo lead vocalist and bassist Wilfred Ekanem, conducted by African music collector and Now-Again head honcho Egon, who coordinated these reissues.
Our favorite Brooklyn-based stoner space rockers are back, with their first proper studio album (the limited Paradigms cd, and the self-released cd-r we've had before were both live recordings, apparently). If you liked those, you'll like this -- though they get up to some new tricks here as well. In fact, we weren't sure we were even listening to Titan when we first put this on, as the first of the four tracks found here starts off all folky for a minute, with strumming and singing that could be Comus or Devendra... before blasting into loud, distorted, truly TITANIC heavy instrumental psych rock powered in part by some extremely proggy keyboard action. It's like ELP jamming with Comets On Fire, or Tarantula Hawk gone '70s, or a much heavier, blow-out n' drugged-up Crime In Choir! A wild torrent of amp-ed up, cosmic crunch, spiralling energetically.
The following tracks have their blissed out interludes, and droning FX, and mantric rhythmic pulses, and other bits of weirdness (field recordings of what might be crickets chirping, and a fan blowing, are mixed in at one point), but that heavy space prog riffola isn't lacking either. Definitely there's plenty here to appeal to fans of the abovementioned bands, as well as, oh, AMT, Circle, Zombi, Ufomammut, Boris, Mammatus, and MoRkObOt among others... in a word, recommended!!
The world needs another SUNNO))) or Earth like it needs� well, it doesn't. Nor does it need another Slint, or a Mogwai, or a Justice, or an Animal Collective. Every time a band blows up, suddenly a million bands are there to get sucked along in their wake. But never was this phenomenon more egregious than with the new wave of doom/drone/dirge outfits. At the risk of repeating ourselves again, it seems like every band, heavy or otherwise, that features at least one member with a "drone side project" or a "minimal doom side project", barely keeping ahead of the various people dabbling in back metal, but we digress.
Like most things, it probably seems easy, but isn't. The whole leaning your guitar against the amp and letting it go, sure we joke about that in reviews, but it's way harder than that. Compare the millions of ho-hum guitardrone cd-r's to something like the last amazing record by Vulture Club (we still have some, if you haven't bought one, you should, really). It's like night and day. So we're always pretty cautious when we hear about a new guitar drone group or some doomdirge record we oughtta dig.
But once in a while, a group comes along, who only just barely fit into that whole genre, skirting it, creating something totally their own, with just the merest hints of sounds more familiar, like all great bands, borrowing and stealing freely, but not just regurgitating those sounds right back at us, instead, spreading them out in some underground lab, pulling them apart, exploring how they tick, dissecting them, then attempting to put them back together again, with some of their own parts, some sounds and songs that have been fermenting in a dusty corner of said lab, the results then something new, a patchwork of sounds, that in the right hands, can be deftly woven into something beautiful, something dark and mysterious, something like this.
A Semblance Of Something Appertaining to Destruction is the latest from the mysteriously monickered To Blacken The Pages, part four of an ongoing series in sound, a sprawling dirgescape that owes much to meandering post rock, downtuned slow motion sludge, drifty abstract doom, and the sort of heavy doomic countrified sludge that Earth has been exploring over the last few records.
Three tracks, the shortest 11 minutes, the longest nearly 18, each a dusty, moonlit drift, simple minor key twang, slowed down space rock riffage, streaks of feedback and buzzing distant drones, swirling FX, layers of guitar fuzzy and druggy. The opener, more than Earth or SUNNO))) or any of those, sounds much more in line with Loop or Spacemen 3, a drugged out soporific riff, that lumbers a little too slow to rock, even a little too slow to constitute any sort of groove. Instead, it's a dreamy droney drift, heavy and mutedly chuggy, churning onward through a sky of whirls and swirls and rumbles, underpinned by plenty of buzz and fuzz and blur. It's like a super slowed down way more abstract Loop, which we probably don't need to explain to you is in fact a very good thing.
The second track introduces drums, which do little to up the propulsion, this is still weary, dreary and delightfully spaced out. A super spare, abstract doomy lope, the sky above criss crossed with high end guitar skree, the drums supporting another blown out slow motion space rock riff, the whole track trudging across an endless expanse of shimmery buzz and swirling space-y effects. Everything muted and mumbly and lazily mesmerizing.
The final, longest track, ditches the drums, returning to the lazy smoky sprawl of the opener, but this time even more abstract, the central guitar part, drifting well below the constantly shifting layers of sound, coruscating high end, over billowing deep rumbles, a glacial, stately, almost funereal anti-groove, perfect late night, drift off, trip out slow motion space rock krautdrone. Fans of Earth and Expo '70 will dig especially, as in some ways, this does sound like a strange hybrid of the two, although all of you into the slow dreamy droney heavy minimalism would do well to check this out.
Highlighted last list, we had A Semblance Of Something Appertaining To Destruction, the most recent disc from Dublin, Ireland's To Blacken The Pages. Now we've got their prior release, None, released just a month or two earlier in 2008, which is essentially the part I to A Semblance's part II. Don't get 'em confused (and we'll try not to, too), 'cause they do look virtually identical, the same almost-black-on-black no-color scheme for the cover photo and logo. The black-on-black music is similar too, of course, but different and equally essential for anyone who loved the minimal doomdrone instrumental ambience of that other disc. And again, there's three tracks. 13:45, 16:10, and 8:06. Each stately, somnolent, fuzzed out and, this time, drumless... heavy in a restrained, spacey, spacious way.
Track one, "Alien", tiptoes in, super slow, individually suspended guitar notes one at a time connecting the dots of melancholic melody over a void of silence. Then, suddenly, the needle jumps. DISTORTION. An electric crackle and buzz. The song is still super sloooooow and sparse, but each note is now planetarily weighted with rumbling vibratory effect, surely speaker shredding if it all happened at once, and at volume. An underlying howling hum begins, buried beneath but gradually filling all that empty space with its own not so silent emptiness. The next piece, "None", starts with an eerie electric wind, and some sparse Earth-style guitar strum over it, reverberant and lonely, before sheer fuzzdrone kicks in, fuzzdrone nirvana to our ears, that continues in like manner on final track of the disc, "As If Forever"... Ah, yes, so glacially good. For fans of Earth, SUNNO))), Expo '70, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, Slomo, Boris, Skullflower, Nadja, etc. All at their darkest yet dreamiest.
To Blacken The Pages is actually a solo project, the work of one guitar wielding, amp abusing man, Paul McAree. We're told he has a non-solo side project coming up, a band called Slaves Of War Orphan Farm (!) that is supposed to be a worthy offering of Les Rallizes Denudes worship! Can't wait to check it out...
Why does anyone bother with the current crop of "stoner rock" when there's so much better stuff made back in the original stoner age (the '70s) now being reissued?? If you're into the Man's Ruin roster, and prone to buying albums by the latest Swedish Kyuss
Yay! Put on your favorite monster mask and pour a big bowl of sugary breakfast cereal, Black Moth Super Rainbow's possibly groovier, more "hip-hop" alterego is back! Tobacco in the house!! And when we say possibly groovier, what we mean is that this is VERY groovy, about as groovy as it is distorted, and 'delic. Thick, fuzzy, flangey synths colorfully pulsate everywhere, amidst handclap-laced "Unholy Demon Rhythms" (as one song title here puts it)... and it seemingly never ends, hypnotic, head nodding, foot tapping, one track after the next, grooving out with laidback sunshiney good vibes and DayGlo exploding weird noize-energy, all at the same time. A lot of it's instrumental, and when vocals do appear, they're dreamily delivered, heavily treated with spacey electronic effects, the stoned flow far more like blissed out chant than regular "rap", although Tobacco's debut Fucked Up Friends did feature a cameo from rapper Aesop Rock, and this new one boasts guest rhyming on a couple cuts by none other than Beck, who is the godfather of druggy indie-tronic hiphop, right?
The lyrics, when there are lyrics, are usually brief (if not to-the-point), containing cryptic poetry and good advice (?), for instance from "Constellation Dirtbike Head", the lead-off track: "Feel the day, the hottest day / Don't eat the berries around you / Don't eat the berries around you / Burn all your things". Them's all the words. Tobacco returns to the themes of burning and eating later in the disc, but you'll grok just as much sense from the song titles (several of which sound like they'd fit nicely on a NWOFHM album by Steel Mammoth or somebody, e.g. "Lick The Witch", "Motorlicker", "Nuclear Waste Aerobics", etc.).
Basically, if you liked Fucked Up Friends (and why wouldn't you?), you'll like Tobacco's sophomore effort too, it's cut from the same cloth, another sixteen tracks of his friendly, freaky soundz. And same thing goes, if you like BMSR, Tobacco's for you too, but we explained that already when we reviewed the first one (which we made a Record Of The Week by the way, and maybe shoulda done the same this time too). Compared to BMSR, this is pretty similar, Tobacco just steps a little harder, funkier, totally rockin' the bells, with the ever-present, almost skweee-ish synths being even woozier and soooooo wonderfully distorted! Along w/ BMSR, this makes us think of what it might sound like if Fuck Buttons got Daft Punk'd...
One last thing to say, obvious, but we're on a deadline: Tobacco IS addictive! But that's ok, while this might get a Surgeon General's warning, it gets our recommendation!
And fyi, for the next two weeks, we've got this on a special $2 off sale deal, so it's $11.98 instead of the regular $13.98, until 7/4/10!
Praise be! Steve Austin and co. are back, delivering another dose of their unique brand of Satanic math-metallic noise. Sprawling over two discs (labelled X and Y), these tracks are less like songs proper than sonic symptoms of Today Is The Day's aesthetic and philosophical ideas -- and, especially, their darkest emotions.
With wretched rasping vokills, crushing doom riffs, maniac outbursts, and scary, atmospheric sample-littered soundscapes (normally we frown on samples we can recognize, but it *was* neat to hear the bit from Coven, y'know, from American Movie), Today Is The Day convey some dark feelings indeed. The metal parts are quite devastating, but it's perhaps the moodier elements that make this album so striking and creepy. Bass rumble and glitchy electronic synth noise are paired with sad piano tinklings, acoustic guitars are strummed in a backwoods night-time ritual, and there's even some honest-to-god melodic singing (as on the deathly-piano-ballad "Death Requiem" or the great Alice Cooper/Devil Doll styled track "Invincible", reprised from TITD's split cd with 16).
Several of us here at AQ have been TITD fans for a long time, all the way back to their sadly out-of-print "Supernova" debut on the Amphetamine Reptile label. Their rebirth on Relapse (three albums ago) moved them in a decidedly heavier, brutal direction, but, as made plain on "Sadness Will Prevail", their experimental, artistic impulses remain strong.
In some ways, the closest thing we can compare this to is the mighty Oxbow, colliding with the likes of Coalesce and Old Man Gloom perhaps. Easily a contender for "metal" (but not at all entirely metal) record of the year. There's certainly a lot here to like. Some of the production is more lo-fi than we'd expect from Mr. Austin (a well-known producer outside of this TITD career) but still manages to dangle us dangerously at the gaping mouth of hell! And wait for the hidden track at the end of disc two, wherein Austin fucks with some brutal black metal, which just happens to be from the upcoming Leviathan album on Andee's tUMULt label!
