Wow. We're so stoked on this, a gorgeous book of artwork from Boredoms bandleader Eye Yamantaka, whose eyepoppingly colorful collages and multimedia art, as represented on most Boredoms and related releases, we have always loved.
So this is total eyecandy for us Eye fans, a 24 page, 8" x 8" softcover, saddle stitched book featuring not covers for records Eye has released (which is what we thought it was going to be), but actually all artwork for dozens of insane IMAGINARY bands (and formats!) he made up just for this project! We love it.
Each page features 2 or 3 different "releases", with both sleeve art and the disc itself pictured. So for instance there's Sunarchy's "Volume" 12" picture disc, Satori Disco's "Groovy1" 10" water blue disc, and Crackederic's "Yellp", which claims to be a 22 inch "Balloon disc". Yeah, that's right, some of them get really unlikely or impossible. How about Armed LyF's "Junk", a 12" rasta color no centerhole disc? Or VhV's "Steamed Bun" release, a 4" bun on 12" black disc? Or Age "2", supposedly a 1 inch black disc? And then there's Googloom's "Gog In" googles shape disc (what looks like two 7"s melted together side by side) and Googloom's "Gog Out", a 2" broken disc! Those aren't even the craziest ones.
In addition to enjoying the visuals, this of course puts our imaginations into overdrive wishing we could HEAR these bands too, wondering what they sound like. Some of them provide clues, we know that Donoid's 12" contains a Wang Chung cover ("Everybody Dub Tonight"), while D.A.M.'s "Don't Ask Me" 7" is apparently "South Fla. Hardcore", hence the mohawked skater depicted on the sleeve.
This is Number 12 in a series of music-related art and design "journals", so we might have to get some of the earlier entries in as well, in fact there's a Daniel Higgs one that's pretty cool (of course) and we do have a couple of those in stock. All the journals in the series are packaged in 10" record sleeves, as well. Super cool. ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
This self released five-track ep by up and coming Brooklyn trio is going to give the comparatively more famous White Stripes a run for their money. When she's not absolutely screaming, the girl lead singer wails with a strong gravelly voice and that trembly
Reissued, remastered, bonus track'd...one of the best Yes albums ever, and yes that IS indeed a compliment. Yes destroy all math-rock/fusion/prog contenders with this monster album.
Dooming ever onward, Oregon's re-activated Yob are back with their 2nd Profound Lore release, the 6th full-length overall from this heavier-than-thou trio, and all Yob and/or doom fans (like us) should be well chuffed! After several years hiatus (during which singer/guitarist Mike Scheidt stayed doomy in his ill-fated Middian project), Yob's 2009 comeback album The Great Cessation emphasized the darker side of Yob, black metal influences to the fore, Yob still spacey and sludgey to be sure, but sounding way more EVIL and nihilistically negative than ever. They haven't brightened up much on Atma, either. There's something primal about these proceedings, Yob calling upon ancient powers with their heavy sonic rituals. It's serious business.
Scheidt still busts out his best, very metal, strangled shriek (a distorted blend of Ozzy, Geddy Lee, and the gargly Dan McCafferty of Nazareth) when he wants to soar (yay, that's what we came for!), but he also goes for a diversity of sore-throat wretched vokills as well; his melodic guitar leads likewise occasionally are heard, snaking out from the murky mire of rumbling riffage, the tarpit black hole in which Yob make their crusty cosmic home... the band's lumbering swing always buried beneath dirty piles of steel-wooly abused amp torture, Atma's production far from clean, instead filthy and cruel.
It's like some unholy combination of the Sabbathy sludge of Eyehategod, the brutal/beautiful bombast of Neurosis (whose Scott Kelly shows up as a guest on a couple of these songs), the most malevolent and monolithic of Melvins, and hint of the denim and leather of old school metal as well. The five loooooong songs here weave atmospheric gloom (the rainy forest field recordings found on the title track ferinstance), fist-in-the-air metallisms, post-rock dynamics, and angsty artiness into their sheer crushing DOOM, and do it all damn well. Make no mistake, this is hellishly heavy, including album-ender "Adrift In The Ocean", even with its semi-acoustic passages and whooshing ambience. Epic, awesome, utterly everything we expect from Yob and then some.
Ok, we've got one here for anyone into the sludgy, stoner sounds of the likes of Electric Wizard and Sleep!! Yob is perhaps your new favorite band. From Portland, Oregon, these psychedelic doom lords take their chosen genre's obligatory Black Sabbath worship to the extent of incorporating the swingin' jazzy/jammy aspects of the Sabbath sound that most doomsters tend to disregard. Nor do they skimp on the the meaner, rigidly metallic side of the Sabs, or on the mountains of the moon sized riffage doom fans require. Yob is slow motion, sweat leaf'd sludge to the max. Most notably, while their vocalist does dip into a demonic growl at times, mainly he soars like an insane, heavily effected hybrid of Ozzy and Geddy Lee. The result is a remarkably unique sound for a band that unquestionably wears their influences on their collective sleeve. The closest comparision would be to a spaced-out combination of Sleep and Dead Meadow. The three long tracks (18, 7, and 23 minutes) showcase a stoned style that even fuses funk with full-on dirge doom. There's a couple other fine doom metal releases on this weeks' list (Solitude Aeturnus, Well Of Souls). But while those bands' style is to build big castles, these guys tunnel through the earth, out the other side, and into outer space. Recommended.
Yay Yob! Ever since our doom-lovin' hearts here at AQ first went pitter-pat for the heavy sounds of Portland Oregon's Yob, we've been wanting to sell you this here record, their debut from 2002. But, until now, we were never able to get any. By the time we reviewed and raved about their second album of super-doomy space sludge, 2003's Catharsis, Elaborations Of Carbon had already gone out of print. They've done two more awesome albums since Catharsis (and we'd witnessed some great shows too), so we're bigger fans that ever and it's nice to finally be able to stock the entire Yob discog, now that this is back in print. So if you've been loving their latest, The Unreal Never Lived, as well as The Illusion Of Motion and Catharsis, and you don't have this one, here you go! Thank you 12th Records for finally getting off the couch and putting away the bong long enough to get this repressed.
This debut is definitely the Yob we know and love -- the Sabbathy riffery, the psychedelic drones, the unique, weirdly soaring vocal style, it's all here. If we were reviewing Yob for the first time, we'd probably say something about how this sorta sounds like stoner legends Sleep, but with even more creepy atmospheres and a unique vocal approach that sounds like Geddy Lee doing an Ozzy impersonation through a ton of effects (that's a good thing, really!). And being the band's first record, you know it's gonna have some of their best riffs on it. Compared to their subsequent releases, this one also is notable for having more, shorter songs in its 70 minutes... though there's still only six and most of 'em exceed ten minutes, with two over 15 each. Now they write, like, half-hour songs, but it's not like the head-nodding doom on this disc seems cramped for space. Recommended to Yob fans of course and anyone who hasn't yet checked them out but likes Ufomammut, Corrupted, Electric Wizard, Sleep, and the rest of the doom brigade of which Yob became definite members in good standing as soon as this album was originally released.
DOOoooooooOOOOM! We're not gonna stint on the O's in doom 'cuz this here's the third* album from the mighty Yob, who are Portland, Oregon's masters of massive doom-sludge. Think an unholy melding of Electric Wizard, Corrupted, Dead Meadow, and Ufomammut. Slow and low uber-heavy guitar and bass riffage, psychedelic space-out song structures, pummelling drums of doom, all perfectly topped by vocals that take to the skies like a heavily effected** hybrid of Ozzy and Geddy Lee, with the occasional descent into hellish death metal gutteralisms. Their previous album Catharsis was progtastically, trance-inducingly awesome, but The Illusion of Motion (their debut for unlikely new label Metal Blade!) may even be better. More dynamics, shifts of mood and tempo than before, and no slack on the heavosity scale. Yessir, they've become one of our favorite doom ensembles. And they're really nice guys too, as we discovered when we met them after the trio played in SF recently. Yes, we were lucky enough to witness Yob live for the first time at the 3 Days Of Darkness festival here in San Francisco last month. Despite some initial technical difficulties, once they got going they were unstoppable. And even the tech problems proved them to be true doom masters. Anyone with any doom/stoner rock cred knows about Orange amplification and how cool it is. And also the even rarer Green amps. But Yob not only was using Orange AND Green amps, but also Black. And when gremlims took out the Black amp, Yob then brought out... a White amp! Wow. But due to time constraints brought on by the aforementioned amp-switcheroo, they didn't get to play the new 26 minute epic that closes out this lengthy-but-only-four-song album (that's just one more than on Catharsis), so I hope they come back soon!
*if you're wondering, Yob's first album is out of print but soon due for a repress, we'll get 'em in when that happens of course.
**they don't sound anything like Jane's Addiction of course, but those vocals seem to use the Perry Farrell effect if you know what I mean.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
An obscure late-sixties ahead-of-his-time visionary gets his due with this LP reissue. A while back, the Get Hip label released two songs by Michael Yonkers on a 7" and a compilation and that started the buzz. Yonker's stuff was like nothing anyone had heard back then (or even now, really): fucked up garage psych with dementedly genius lyrics and crazy acid-fried guitar. Now Destijl has released the whole LP, that was originally recorded in 1968 but then quickly shelved almost before it had a chance to be heard. Yonkers, a legendary Minneapolis-area figure, built his own effects pedals, cut his Fender Telecaster down to a plank, and played like no one else ever. I'm at a loss of words on how to describe this. It's sort of like a fusion of stripped down Black Sabbath, The Troggs, Pere Ubu, and The Cramps?? Or something like that. Definitely something to check out. Vinyl only.
Underground Minneapolis psych guitar legend Michael Yonkers has been a huge AQ fave ever since his long-lost 1969 album Microminiature Love was rescued from obscurity by the De Stijl and Sub Pop labels. In fact we were very happy to get to meet him when he stopped by the store to say hello one time when he was in town a few years ago. Super nice guy. And it's not just Microminature Love that we love -- the recordings he's released since the (re)discovery of Microminiature Love demonstrate that he's still got it -- IT being a uniquely twisted take on what garage rock should sound like. Utter timeless visionary genius.
Actually, the last thing we listed by Mr. Yonkers, just a few weeks back, was a reissue of another 1969 recording of his, the surprisingly folky Grimwood. Well this cd couldn't be much more different. First of all it's brand new (it came out first on vinyl a few months ago, we've maybe still got one of those LPs but they're otherwise gone), it's a full band recording (Yonkers having hooked up with some hard-hitting youngsters called The Blind Shake), and it's ROCK. Urgent and heavy and distorted. Totally stompin' outsider punk/psych, garage rock from a way fucked up garage. Definitely in the style of Microminiature Love.
Yonkers and The Blind Shake dole out their throbbing, reverb-laden rock in 14 brief blasts (mostly under three minutes, many under two), with song titles to match, often truncated, unfinished queries or statements: "Why Don't", "When Will We", "Don't I Get", "Here's What I'm"... what, what, what, what??? Yonkers' unhinged Iggyish vocals and sinuous squalls of guitar are ultimately the answer. Way cool.
Also look out for Circling The Drain, *another* new Yonkers album, cd version coming soon, vinyl perhaps still around to be found...
AQ fave, garage rock outsider singer/guitarist Michael Yonkers is baaaaack, with another whomping, stomping blast of his uniquely eccentric heavy duty distortodelic grunge, again in the company of relative youngsters, The Blind Shake, a quite suitable backing band for Yonkers at his most electric and energetic. Yonkers himself, as you probably know, is, like, in his 60s. And his magnum opus, Microminiature Love (so recommended!!! plz read our review if you haven't) dates from over 40 years ago. But you'd think it was just yesterday, the way the man kicks out the jams here. No surprise, he's wowed us on several other records in recent years, with The Blind Shake and Plastic Crimewave and GR and solo. So now, wow again. With his homemade geetar howl landing square on your skull, and his elder Iggyish yodel singing strong o'er it all, Yonkers RULES and so does this record, raw and direct, the Blind Shake shakin' it up with gusto behind him, the whole thing a throbbing good time, catchy and noisy and gnarly and blown out, with pounding drums and whooshing wind tunnel guitars n' effects... these songs n' sonics are the stuff that freeks for such bands as The Heads, High Rise, White Hills, and The Stooges should dig. Best punk-psych outing on our list this week fer sure, and would probably qualify as such almost any other week as well!
Includes a killer, updated take on their signature tune, the title track from a few albums back, "Carbohydrate Hydrocarbons", here called "Carbo Hydro".
Ruins drummer Yoshida's third very strange solo album -- and when he does a solo album, it's really just him, drums, guitar, keyboard, voices, etc. (AND, he can play it all live, by himself.) This one starts off maybe kind of like This Heat trying to play the Simpsons theme, and just gets weirder.
Cool! A reissue of the long-out-of-print 1991 solo cd debut from Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, "Magaibutsu" (also the name of his own record label). Yoshida remixed it in 2001, and now there's six bonus tracks appended as well. And when Yoshida makes a solo album, it sure is: he's a one-man-band (literally, he can do most of this stuff live -- with headset microphone, drum kit, keyboard, and a guitar in his lap!) doing crazed compositions that are similar to Ruins fare but even more maniacal. Really. I (Allan) remember buying the original cd when it came out -- at the time I only had one Ruins cd, the magnificent "Stonehenge", and was eager to hear more from that (then) mysterious Japanese avant-rock bass and drums duo. I found "Magaibutsu" somewhere and bought it on the chance that it had something to do with the Ruins (nobody at the place where I bought it knew what it was, but the cover photo collage of, well, ruins, plus the cryptic song titles and Yoshida's at-the-time-unfamiliar-but-definitely-Japanese name made me think it might). When I got it home and put it on, the drums/keys/vocal onslaught of opening track "Joneoik" happily confirmed that it indeed had to be the work of the same crazed musical mastermind behind the Ruins. I was very pleased. And it remains probably one of the most weird and wonderful discs in my collection. Absolutely essential to all Ruins fans, if you don't have this already (or maybe even if you do, 'cause of the bonus tracks, which fit in well but maybe aren't essential in and of themselves), get this! Quirky and hectic songwriting a la Ruins, with of course Yoshida's incredible drumming and nonsensical vocal stylings. Despite the solo format, Yoshida uses a wider variety of instrumental textures than usually appear in Ruins songs -- there's quite a lot of his hockey-rink-sounding organ plinking out maddeningly repetitive and catchy riffs, plus astonishing multitracked vocals, scratchy guitar, and piano ivory tickling. So at points it's sparse and minimal, but at others super-dense and heavy. Magma was still a major influence (and Charles Hayward as well), along with what sounds like some faux-ethnic explorations in the vein of the Sun City Girls (especially notable on "Kasinuc"). Compared to Ruins, this is also more percussive and carnival-esque.
Ok, we figured it was about time we made YOU the Record Of The Week, after all, you've been such a loyal customer for such a long time, haven't you, so it seems like it would be a nice gesture...hahaha. No, the band is called You, and they're our latest krautrock love affair. When we got an advance copy of this disc a few weeks ago, we were immediately intrigued, just by the awesome cover art (is that a cosmic tuning fork?), brilliant basic band name, and also by the band photo (long haired guy in shades, new wavey dude in even bigger shades, stoned looking guy with 'stache) that struck us as looking so much like a hip new band from here and now (like, say, the Jonas Reinhardt fellas, with a Ripley from Wooden Shjips clone in there too) but upon closer inspection, we found it was indeed a reissue, brought to us by the excellent German label Bureau-B, known for their krautrock archaeology (Cluster/Moebius/Roedelius stuff especially) as well as for putting out newer albums from the scene, including the latest Kreidler.
Originally released in 1979, Electric Day was the first album from You (their other one, 1983's Time Code, has also been reissued, and is really just about as great, you'll find it highlighted elsewhere on this list - we came close to making 'em both Records Of The Week). On Electric Day, You consisted of synth mavens Udo Hanten and Albin Meskes along with guitarist Uli Weber and, on drums, under the alias Lhan Gopal for some reason, Harald Grosskopf (a name you might know if only 'cause his own, concurrently recorded Synthesist album was recently reissued on vinyl and highlighted here not long ago). Grosskopf had played drums with Klaus Schulze, and was in Manuel Gottsching's Ashra band at the time. Producer Conny Plank hooked him up with Hanten and Meskes, and we can hear here that they all got along famously, being "Berlin School" mates as it were.
Together on You's debut, this cosmic quartet unleashed much glorious spaced out, spooked out, futuro-zone synth shiver, with psych guitar tripping, electronic pulsations, and Grosskopf's tight percussion, no pussyfooting about it! Seriously, they really do sound quite a bit like Jonas Reinhardt (or rather, the other way around), and could also easily have been the template for a lot of other current bands we love doing the kosmic kraut/John Carpenter-y electronic rock thing, like Zombi, Majeure and Maserati, most definitely! So it's not just for completist krautrock collector types that we recommend this album, nope. And did you catch our Fripp/Eno reference? Others to cite in the "recommended if you like" realm: Heldon, Cloudland Canyon, Michael Rother, Sensations Fix, Moebius & Beerbohm, the previously mentioned Ashra, etc.
All instrumental ('cause in space no one can hear you scream), You's Electric Day begins with the title track, a busy burbling rhythm soon washed over with waves and waves of electronics, while remaining upbeat and snazzily sizzling. The 2nd track, the moodier "Magooba", gets darker and more intense, letting rip with zips and zaps and plenty of freaky guitar. Then the focus shifts back to the shuffling machine rhythms on "Son Of A True Star". That's followed by the two-part "Sequential Spectrums" which sees You setting the controls for deep dark outer space, drifting in shimmering, fizzing electronic ambience, having a bit of a Tangerine Dream, before the almost twelve minute long "Slow Go", the original album's penultimate track, kinda sums up all that came before into one epic journey, the beats tingling propulsively, waves of synth-sound building and building, in one big ecstatic celebration of "this kind of thing" for sure. But don't get too smiley and relaxed, 'cause You have a nervous-making finale in store, the jumpy, uber-distorted "Zero-Eighty-Four" being an active, sinister, suspenseful closer to the album proper...nice! And then, if you get the cd, that's followed by 4 bonus tracks (not on the vinyl, which is 180 gram however), totalling another 33 minutes of music! "E-Night" is blissful, but ultimately pretty heavy. "H.Rays Identity" features some strange sampled chanting amidst its electronic excess, while "Hallucination Engine" is sorta proto-ambient techno. And then "Yousless" sounds like it was written by/for R2D2 the Star Wars droid! All are quite worthwhile, and the whole disc is super solid stuff, making us wonder why we'd never heard about You before (that's why we love this job, the buried treasure out there seems endless, wow). This has gotta be the best unknown-to-us krautrock reissue since Riechmann's Wunderbar (also from Bureau B), at least.
There's really no other way for us to wind up this review other than saying, You rule!!
Bureau B reissued the first two albums by Berlin School synth groop You a couple years ago - 1979's Electric Day and 1983's Time Code - amazing artifacts of late period electronic krautrock, previously unknown to us, that we, and a lot of you, loved. We made Electric Day a Record Of The Week, in fact. Now Bureau B has gotten around to reissuing You's fourth album, Laserscape, from 1986 (skipping over 1984's Wonders From The Genetic Factory, but maybe they'll eventually do that one too).
The title doesn't lie - this music was in fact all recorded as the soundtrack to the large-scale, open air "laser performances" of an artist named Horst Baumann, events that we can only imagine were like a bigger version (with better music) of one of those trippy planetarium laser light shows - like the late lamented Laserium shows once held at the California Academy Of Sciences here in SF's Golden Gate Park (http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-Planetarium-Laser-Show-To-Fade-Into-2742326.php).
You's music for Baumann's Laserscape is suitably spectacular, spacey, dark, and droney. There's a lot of variety, though, in mood and flavor. There's synthetic beats on "Can You Tell Where I Am", a propulsive track that's totally something Emeralds or Umberto or Life Coach or Jonas Reinhardt or Steve Moore would be very happy with if they'd recorded. Elsewhere, You's cosmic electronics are accompanied by chamber string sounds, and even beautifully shredding classical guitar. There's Eastern-sounding moments, powerful cinematic build-ups, eerie drifty passages, and on "Travelling Hologram" a recurring choral "Ah-ah-ah" part that combines with the increasingly hectic and quirky rhythmic construction of the track to kinda remind us of, like, a computerized Magma, in a weird way. Very cool. Other tracks, more blissed out and melodic, remind us of the non-lame New Age music of Iasos. Man, we wish we could experience this with the laser visuals. But still it's good listening on its own, and you can close your eyes and try to imagine...
Perhaps needless to say, if you are already into those first two You albums, you'll dig this. It's decidedly darker, though, than Time Code, it feels to us. More of an ominous, Blade Runner vibe, as others have noted. Once again, thanks, Bureau B! (And please note, the cd version includes a 21+ minute live bonus track not on the vinyl.)
Ok, we'll assume you already just read our Record Of The Week review of You's newly reissued Electric Day album. That was this instrumental "Berlin School" of krautrock band's 1979 debut, followed up further into the Eighties by Time Code from '83. Great stuff, we like this one a lot too, you should get 'em both. And we're not just excited about these 'cause we're keen on obscure krautrock reissues (though we are). If You were a new band we'd be all over 'em too! And they really could be mistaken for a new, current band, as we alluded to in our Electric Day review. Where that one really really sounded like local fave SF synth groovers (and krautrock enthusiasts, of course) Jonas Reinhardt in their propulsive live formation, this one is even more electronic and atmospheric, some moments more like Oneothrix Point Never, Emeralds, and Arp, to cite some other modern comparisons. That's 'cause by '83, You had parted ways with guitarist Uli Weber and drummer Harald Grosskopf, and slimmed down to the founding synths and sequencers core duo of Udo Hanten and Albin Meskes. So it's even a bit more retro-futuristically Eighties computery/mechanical, with percolating robot rhythms and shimmering synths and some extra sci-fi bleepage... but, it's really not all THAT different than their earlier incarnation, Hanten and Meske's machines doing a fine job of filling in for the humans no longer in the band. There's nine tracks here (or 11 if you get the compact disc, it's got two excellent bonus cuts, about an extra 10 minutes), nicely varied, some songs more pretty and placid, others droning further into deep space than before. They can be quite melodic, for instance "Future/Past" is one of those lovely lovelies that makes us think of our favorite Cluster jams (with sequencer patterns calculated to send you into a blissed out trance, getting into proto-Aphex Twin territory). And then they also bring the John Carpenter style suspense film disco grooves on the likes of "Live Line", too. So, like Electric Day, super recommended!
You will like You, if you are at all like us.
In our book, any Richard Youngs you don't have is Richard Youngs you SHOULD have. But this one especially is a crucial Youngs document: it's a reissue of Youngs' first ever LP, originally released in a vinyl-only edition of 300 copies on his own No Fans record label. This is actually the second time this has been reissued on cd -- Table Of The Elements did it before, but let it go out of print. So Jagjaguwar gets kudos for bringing it back, as it's an important and amazing release in the body of work of someone we at AQ consider a bit of a genius. You NEED it. Especially if you've already fallen in love with Youngs unique brand of experimental, folkish improv music. Here it's almost a religious rite, a 3-part droning minimalist mantra that incorporates (in a gradually additive fashion) piano, voice, oboe and electric guitar. Its repetitive beauty put it in Alan Licht's "Minimalist Top Ten" article in Halana magazine some ways back... and it is a primal example of what we find always so compelling about Richard Youngs' records. Although it doesn't emulate the raga form, Advent does seem like it might be perhaps meant for a specific time of day, and has that special spiritual/contemplative quality -- though some listeners might not be able to meditate so well with Youngs' bagpipe-like oboe keening away! Slow, simple (and simply gorgeous), and most of all so very sincere-sounding, Advent was the wonderful beginning to what has been an uncommon career.
It might be unfair (though easy) to lump Richard Youngs' recent output into the trendy category that lately has been swallowing all music that includes singing and acoustic instruments, namely "freak folk" (or "acid folk" or whatever you want to call it, you know what we mean). On Autumn Response Youngs is hardly singing the music of "the people", nor is he making conscious efforts to associate his music with that of past artists and traditions of his native British Isles. Instead, the lyrics suggest a solitary imagination, isolated and introspectively afoot in a landscape (the further journeys of a 'summer wanderer'?). His song structures are simple and atmospheric...mantra-like..built around emotive, hypnotic, doubled vocal tracks that become vertiginous at times with repeating riffs on acoustic guitar. The affecting, pastoral melodicism and minimalist structuring of these songs gives the impression that Youngs has combined the talents of the great Roy Harper with the methodologies of folk guitar experimentalist Steffen Basho-Junghans, perhaps.
Like most of Youngs' recent records on Jagjaguwar, this one is constructed with a limited set of 'rules' (instruments, production effects, etc.) which makes the record less a collection of songs and more a cohesive single work evolving through its various parts until arriving at the 16+ minute closer, "Something Like Air". It's something all right, and it's breathtaking, as is so much of this lovely, lovely album.
We've always been huge fans of the prolific, idiosyncratic Scottish experimental folk troubadour Richard Youngs, and endeavor to review all of his many releases, though there's a few we've missed. Couldn't miss this though. First, due to the fact that it's on the reliable Root Strata label, and also, 'cause some have called this Richard Youngs' "metal" album. Hmm. We wouldn't go that far, no (though we of course would love to hear such an album from Mr. Youngs!).
But, the idiosyncratic Scottish experimental folk troubadour does allow his distinctive voice here to wander melodically, in his usual questing, fragile fashion, o'er a backing soundscape that DOES have its unexpectedly heavy elements... composed of churning industrial loops, distorted guitar chords (coming closest to an actual, plodding doom metal riff on "We Are The Messengers"), and dense, skittering, sped-up rhythmics that actually remind us a lot more of jungle, a la DJ Zinc, or Ed Rush or Dillinja or something, than metal, though we suppose there's folks who might think compressed "death metal drumming" when they hear it. Those parts sound something like Speedranch producing a Richard Youngs record, maybe. Yet, these seven songs, even with all their dark and difficult textures, still resemble true hymns and prayers, Richard Youngs blessing us always with his gorgeous, glowing vision.
While writing this review, we realized that we've never yet made a Richard Youngs album a Record Of The Week. How can that be??! Looking back, there's quite a few that shoulda been. And we were tempted to so designate this one, but worried that as it's a bit "edgier" than some of the Youngs albums (with placid piano, or acoustic strum, or even delicate electronic drone) that we've recommended in the past, it might not be the perfect one to pick... but then again, nothing wrong with edgy. Nor is this nearly as noisy as some of RY's more extreme early experiments, 'specially his collabs with Simon Wickham-Smith, either. We're just talking repetitive claustrophobic loops, clangorous but mesmeric factory ambience, and atonal electric guitar - the track "Forever Hills Of Everyday" in particular has got some out there guitar soloing that could be off a very warped late '70s/early '80s King Crimson effort... So while not "metal" this is at least "rock". Indeed, "The Healing Of Everyone", at the end of side two, is a throbbing fuzz epic over 11 minutes long, making for a grand finale indeed, a dose of psychedelic drone space rock hypnosis worthy of any of our faves in that realm. Moon Duo fans should dig it. So, yes, a good one. Highly recommended. And LIMITED TO JUST 500 COPIES, vinyl-only!
This review comes courtesy of AQ pal Loren Chasse (whom you know as a Blithe Son and Thujan), who wanted to make sure we told y'all just how amazing this record is. We would have done so, of course, but we knew Loren could maybe do it better. So here's Loren's lil' love-letter to Mr. Youngs, whom we've got a crush on too:
You may not have ever seen Richard Youngs' face on the cover of The Wire or read anything of great length on him in any of the magazines, but let this only be a testament to his persistence at being truly "experimental"Ì in his craft. In a climate of Experimental Music where most artists' so-called experiments take place on their first record and become schtick from there on out, the music of Richard Youngs remains truly exciting with each release because we never know what to expect. And it's not that we really get the feeling that Youngs is trying too hard to come up with something NEW each time, each record seeming more like an attempt at translating his musical voice in some fresh way and keeping things interesting for his own enjoyment. Lately, Youngs' records on Jagjaguar have been distinguished by his lovely voice (much in the British folk tradition) but with an ever-evolving and seemingly playful take on instrumentation. Mostly, what these latest records give us are challengingly beautiful songs, often built on simple and crushing melodic phrases, lyrics sparse and mysterious, and fleshed out with incessant and often hypnotic atmospheres. This latest record, like most, is one that requires a few listens to really get inside the songs, as they are spread out over long and spacious durations. Youngs' approach on River Through Howling Sky is a bit bluesy, using mostly electric and some acoustic guitar, several drum tones, electronic effects and a constant sounding of chimes and bells that imbues these four songs with a haunting continuity, giving the record the feel of a suite, beginning on jagged edges and, fifty minutes later, ending in a somnabulic daze. We are reminded in style and a bit in sound of Keiji Haino's own jagged take on the blues, implying the genre with a particular kind of soulfulness in which the guitar wastes no time on the standard 6/8 rhythm but rather plays the role of the Delta shaman out invoking apparitions in sweltering moonlight with purposeful and sensitive eruptions. Recommended!
The duo of Simon Wickham-Smith and Richard Youngs self-released this double album ten years ago to little acclaim until a Forced Exposure review enlightened the world (or well, at least the 300 people who bought out the only pressing). Reissued in cd format, this should enlighten the rest of us to the brilliance of these lauded British backcountry improv noisicians who have gone on to record amazing droneological experiments in recent years. Lake contains glockenspiel, handdrums, clocks, "scraper things", penny whistles, out of tune clock chimes, sampled collages, tons of fuzzed out guitar, and heaping doses of droning noises to please those who've learned to hear the lush textural beauty behind what others might call chaos.
Geeze, will you look at that cover?? A gory painting of a severed, hairy hand, dripping blood with hanging sinews and jutting bone, clawing at a wall. For 1978, when this album was first released, that had to be considered pretty extreme! It would be at least another ten years before the likes of Cannibal Corpse would make such "shocking" images commonplace on album covers. So perhaps it will come as no surprise that apparently this band went on to become an important part of the '80s heavy metal scene in their native Spain. But this debut album of theirs, recorded when the guys in the band were in their mid-teens (!), actually harks back more to the proto-metal heaviness of the early '70s and even '60s, to which we say, right on! It's fuzzed-out, garagey psych, tons of fierce, heavy acid rock guitar, sounding something like Stray or Sir Lord Baltimore, or seventies Spanish older-brethren Tapiman and The Storm.
The first three tracks are all vicious stormers. Really raw and riffy!! Tracks four and five mellow out just a bit, balancing the heaviness with more melody. They've got a balladic '60s psych pop element to 'em, but they definitely don't wimp out in the end. We've gotta say, wow. Apparently the original of this is an expensive, rare-ass record (some collectors, we're told, even doubted its existence) but thanks to this cd reissue it's alive and well and and bloody and clawing at the walls. Recommended to all proto-metal freaks.
Massive Minneapolis instru-metal discovered (for us) by our friends in Hammers Of Misfortune a few years back in 2004. We instantly became fans upon hearing their first album. As did many of you. They followed that with an equally powerful second album in 2006. Now, another 2 years later, they're up to album number three, and we're proud to have such a burgeoning Zebulon Pike section in our metal bin!
If you haven't heard ZP before, just imagine a mathy yet melodic, all-instrumental, and even more epick version of doomsters The Sword... Or, as we have said before, a mix of old Pelican and The Fucking Champs, with immense twin guitar harmonies and stonery heaviness. There's always been a "post-rock" side to 'em along with the metal, the post-rock coming on strongest on this third effort, with the the 2nd part of their loud-soft dynamics dialing up the atmospheric prettiness over significant stretches of these extended, and otherwise utterly heavy compositions.
They're named after American 1800's explorer Zebulon Pike, but to our ears Zebulon sounds like some sort of science fictional, metallic element found on the extreme edge of the periodic table. As in, "the asteriod is composed almost entirely of solid zebulon." Or, "this chunk of zebulon possesses strange radioactive properties!" So connoting something both heavy and, um, technically advanced. But the being named after the pioneer who lent his name also to Pike's Peak makes sense too, in that ZP's music is not unlike a craggy mountain range, full of peaks and valleys, tall granite spires and bottomless chasms. This is mountainous metal. Their riffs are of avalanche proportions, their long songs (three on this disc, the shortest a mere 10:55, the longest 16:25) move with the inexorable power of giant glaciers, having slow but majestic momentum, though they pick up speed now and then for a sudden rockslide or volcanic eruption. The vast heavens above and beyond those peaks are also visited by ZP, especially on track two, "Star-Ocean", dusted with spacey, Zombi-esque synths in an cosmic interlude at about the 10 minute mark.
It's a mystery to us why this band isn't better known. Why they're still putting out their records themselves on their own label, why they haven't gotten the sort of attention awarded bands like Baroness and Pelican and Mastodon and Om and Hammers... Why aren't they signed to Southern Lord or Hydra Head? Where's the limited picture disc vinyl and diehard boxsets and stuff? What about tours? But they're too good to stay our little secret forever! Anyone into metallic post-rock and/or stonery sludge ought to enjoy exposure to that Zebulon radiation we mentioned...
All kinds of awesomeness here on this new Zebulon Pike album, their fourth, and the Minnesota instrumental math metal stoner doom post-rock space-rock (whew!) combo's first full-length in like three years. It's also their first ever to be released on (double lp gatefold) VINYL as well as compact disc. If you're already a big ZP fan like us, and we know lots of AQ customers are, then you're automatically super stoked at this news and we should just get outta the way and let you "add to cart" without further ado. But, we realize that (for some strange reason) not everybody in the whole world knows who ZP is or just why they're so great. So unfair (for them) and unfortunate (for all their potential fans), 'cause as we've said before, they should be HUGE... at least signed to Hydra Head (instead of their own label) and touring with bands like Baroness, hyped by all the cool magazines and blogs and whatnot. Not sure why that hasn't really happened yet, but if we have anything to say about it, someday it will.
Soooo... this album, being to our ears arguably their best yet, would be a great one to get into for the first time, for those who haven't yet been exposed to that special "Zebulon Pike radiation" we've referred to in the past. Not sure we can out-do any of our previous reviews in the hyperbole dep't., we've raved about 'em before for sure, and it will be hard for us to come up with anything better to say here, of course we'll pull out the old standby that they're kinda like Pelican meets The Fucking Champs, combining lumbering sub-bass heaviosity, surging melodicism, and stunning dual guitar harmonies - definitely a band playing music for music's sake ("Hats Off To Music" as the Champs would say, paraphrasing Led Zep's feelings about Roy Harper).
With spiralling leads and chugging riffage, ZP is definitely into metal, but also 20th century classical (Steve Reich?), and prog, that's more from whence their extended song structures arise - the five tracks here are mostly long, all the double digits except one. Crucial for an instrumental band, they not only come up with good riffs, but also concentrate on interesting, extreme sonic textures, getting into avant garde areas at times. Like, what's up with the crazy chorus of "wheee wheee wheee" sounds (somehow produced by the guitars, we assume) cacophonously closing track one, "Spectrum Threshold"? We don't know, but we like it. The drummer gets into the avant-action too, there's stretches of percussive soundscapes, dense drum storms and spacious skitter. You definitely don't miss there being a vocalist, this definitely keeps your attention, as long as the songs are, with twists and turns, first hypnotizing with crushing riff repetition, then plunging into a droning abstract celestial otherworld or a quiet jazzy pretty passage, like the tinkling music box midsection dropped into "Echoic Worlds" that sets you up for the heavy angular riffage set to surge forth immediately afterwards. And this album never bogs down, there's always a sense of strong, propulsive forward motion, even with the ambient detours.
Compared to earlier albums by these guys, we sense even more emphasis here on the '90s post rock part of the ZP equation. Lots of that loud/soft stuff a la Slint and Mogwai, but way more metal... some other bands that come to mind while listening to this, from moment to moment, include Don Caballero, Yob, Iceburn (circa Hephaestus, an underrated classic we'd love review someday, if it ever comes back into print!), Megaton Leviathan, forgotten AQ faves Fuehler, early Pharaoh Overlord, Isis, Boris, Conifer, Sardonis, and more... but they sound like ZP and only ZP at the end of the day.
One sign of a good album is that it immediately compels repeated plays from the sometimes jaded, overwhelmed listeners here at AQ, this one sure did and that's why we made it Record Of The Week. Space Is The Corpse Of Time is pushing our buttons for what we like in "this sort of thing" while also springing plenty of surprises.
So if you like your post rock to be heavy and sludgey, and you like your sludgey heavy rock to be instrumental, and you like your sludgey heavy instrumental post rock to be both super melodic and sonically adventurous, almost scientifically advanced, well heck then you sound like our sort of customer and we highly recommend this Zebulon Pike album to you! It's an epic feast of might and majesty and MUSIC.
FYI, if you get the vinyl, it comes with an mp3 download card. Obviously if you get the cd, you don't need that.
Not sure how we managed to sleep on this record when it came out last year. Had we heard it then, it doubtless would have made it into the year-end top tens of many of the metalheads here for sure. Fortunately, we did eventually get a clue - we realized we had to check out this Greek one-man-band after reading the interview with Zemial in the latest issue of Chips & Beer, 'cause any supposedly 'black metal' outfit that name checks Karlheinz Stockhausen*, John Cage, and Magma drummer Christian Vander, amongst others, sure sounds like something we'd dig here at aQ! And dig we do.
So, here's Zemial's 2013 opus, Nykta. Majestic, propulsive, spacey, epic, catchy, hella weird, yeah, Nykta is right up our alley. Zemial has actually been around since 1989, but this is still only the band's third full-length album - and it's a doozy if you like extremely original 'extreme' metal music. The guy behind Zemial, multi instrumentalist Archon Vorskaath, is into modern composers and prog/jazz fusion drummers, but he's also big into Bathory. So this has got to be one of the only 'progressive metal' albums we've heard that's chock full of raw, dirty riffing and gruff vocals that sound right off a Venom album. But there's also out-there spacey synthscapes, Eastern-sounding exoticism, esoteric lyrics, suddenly prominent prog rock keyboard parts, and tons of uber talented and effective percussion from Vorskaath (that's his specialty, having played percussion professionally in an orchestra). And, he's pretty impressive in the vocal department, too, doing some semi-melodic, 'clean' but not too clean singing, with heaps of gusto and strangely effected weirdness.
Zemial really manage thee perfect, hithero unattempted synthesis of savage, driving riffage and tripped out experimentation here. We don't think we've ever heard a metal band that sounds so 'old school' and yet so avant-garde and original at the same time. We fear we can't do this album justice in this review, it's one of those that we just gotta say, trust us, it's brilliant and weird and kickass and totally recommended to open-minded metallers (and non-metallers too), especially fans of Absu, latter-day Darkthrone, and Enslaved (circa Mardraum). Blizaro too - the moody, bombastic synth instrumental "The Small", at least, sounds a lot like something they would do.
By the way, there's nothing wrong with your stereo - the final track here is an homage to Cage's famous composition 4'33", and has thrown a lot of unknowing metal reviewers for a loop, being of course (almost?) totally silent. Hey, it could have been on that Sounds Of Silence lp we made Record Of The Week a while back! (Note to Vorskaath, however: placing the silent track at the end of your album is less effective than if you'd put it right in the middle!)
*In that Chips & Beer interview, Vorskaath talks about how he's played with Stockhausen's jazz musician son Markus, in a piece that involved the musicians fasting and meditating for, like, two straight days before getting on stage to improvise - now that's extreme!
Here's one to play loud! The first new album from Japanese heavyweights Zeni Geva in six years (their last being 1995's "Freedom Bondage" on Alternative Tentacles), their ninth-ish disc overall (more if you count tapes and splits etc.), is out now on Neurosis' Neurot label. Zeni Geva mastermind KK Null takes a break from his solo ambient/electronics projects to return to his
Swans. Godflesh. Big Black. Melvins. Eyehategod. Unsane. Zeni Geva. We're concerned here with the latter, who maybe aren't as well known as the first half dozen bands mentioned, but sure as heck belong in that illustrious company... and sound VERY much like some unholy, heavier-than-thou hybrid of all of 'em!! It's been a long time since we've had a new Zeni Geva album to write about... and no this isn't actually a new album. But we're still pretty excited. Every once in a while, we have the opportunity to list and review an old favorite. Something that's been out of print for longer even than we've been doing the Aquarius website and New Arrivals emails, that we'd never had the chance to stock and recommend before, that finally at long last gets a well-deserved reissue and is cause for much celebration 'round here. For instance, to name a couple of recent examples, Harvey Milk's My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. And Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper. You'll note the examples we just cited are all on the "heavy" side... well that's 'cause what we're about to recommend here also pretty darn heavy. To say the least.
You may already be familiar with Japan's Zeni Geva, as they've been around for years and years. This cult "progressive hardcore" trio is the brainchild of guitarist Kazuyuki Kishino Null, also well-known for his "nullsonic" solo recordings. Definitely influenced by early Swans, KK Null started up the doomy and noisy ZG in about 1987. Previously he'd done time in Tokyo underground industrial noise-terrorists Absolut Null Punkt, and with prog act YBO2, which also featured drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, who of course later went on to lead the incredible Magmoid duo Ruins. Meanwhile, post-YBO2, Null formed the far more metallic* Zeni Geva. Null did draft Yoshida in to play drums on some early ZG material (wouldn't you?), and you'll here him here on about half of this disc's tracks, contributing his distinctive vocals as well to a couple songs. Ikuro Taketani (ex-Hanatarashi) plays drums on the other half. The lineup also includes Tabata Mitsuru (ex-Boredoms and Leningrad Blues Machine) on guitar. That's right, there's no bassist in Zeni Geva which is pretty incredible considering how hellishly heavy they are! And it's clear that ZG are something of a underground Japanese rock supergroup.
MMM was ZG's first cd release, coming out originally in 1990 on the UK's now long-gone Pathological label. It's a lumbering juggernaut fully blessed and bloated with everything we LOVE about Zeni Geva that would also be heard on later, Albini-produced releases like Total Castration and Desire For Agony: Utter headbanging, slo-mo, dirt-plowing destruction. Molasses thick riffs dripping from electric axes. Frenzied, technical bashing. Mathy post rock song structures. High-end guitar solo skree. Mean misanthropic attitude. Pounding repetition. Pounding repetition. Pounding repetition.... adorned with the aforementioned guitar soloing, providing a crashing, crushing soundscape to underscore the throaty proclamations of "Sweetheart!" or "War Pig!" or "Blackout!" from gruff vocalist/guitarist Null -- the lyrics to these tracks being little more than the song title shouted over and over with fervent anguish. Glorious stuff, massive and mesmeric.
From the first track, the 16 minute harrowing dirge-stomp "Slam King" that ends terrifyingly with waves of unaccompanied, effected vocals, to the last, the rhythmic and witchy "On Suicide", featuring lyrics borrowed from Bertold Brecht, this is scary, monolithic, artistic heaviness of the highest order.
Let's give a big thanks to Cold Spring for making this classic available once again (as part of a wave of Japanese releases including a new disc from noise legends CCCC). Though we don't see why Cold Spring felt the need to replace the original, much more colorful, and in our opinion, superior artwork, we are happy to note that they did make one major improvement. While the eight songs on the original disc were inexplicably presented as one loooong track with no separate-song indexing (annoying!) they're thankfully corrected that. Now you can skip right to "Guystick Bodie", or put "Skullfuck" on repeat. And in addition to the eight original tracks, they've added three previously unreleased bonus cuts as well! Devastating live versions of album cuts "War Pig" (a Zeni Geva song, not Sabbath's "War Pigs" plural) and "Skullfuck", along with "Dead Car, Sun Crash" (an early ZG number not included on the album proper), recorded in Tokyo circa 1988-89. Whee! Like we said, we're so stoked to get to list/review/recommend this!
*Though not metallic enough to be accepted by the online metal authority Encyclopedia Metallum it must be noted...
Two weeks ago, we highlighted the reissue of Zeni Geva's Maximum Money Monster, which was the first cd from this ultra-heavy Japanese noise-rock-prog behemoth. In the process of reviewing Maximum Money Monster, we realized we'd never written up anything about this band's killer 1991 album Total Castration, the Albini-produced follow-up to MMM. It's our favorite ZG album, one that we always try to stock, it just predates the AQ list so it never got its due herein. It hasn't been reissued or anything, but we checked with our supplier and they said they still had about 150 copies of the original pressing still sitting and gathering dust in their warehouse, even though the Public Bath label is long defunct. Quite possibly a lot of the folks who snapped up the MMM reissue after reading about it last list don't actually also have this one either, so we figure it's our civic duty to highlight this old fave as well, while we can still get our hands on 'em!
Basically everything we said in the review of MMM applies to Total Castration as well, starting with the litany of crucial bands that ZG must be mentioned alongside: Swans. Godflesh. Big Black. Melvins. Eyehategod. Unsane... i.e. HEAVY (but not necessarily metal) and scary sounds. What else would you expect from an album with a title like Total Castration?! That's also the name of one of the songs, as are these: "Shoot Me With Your Blood", "Bloodsex", "I Hate You", and "Bigman Death". Cheery stuff, eh? Lyrics pretty much consist of these happy concepts being throatily chanted over and over. Oh and there's also "Godflesh", maybe a nod to sonic contemporaries Justin Broadrick and crew.
On each of these thunderous songs, the trio of trio of Null (guitar/vo), Tabata (guitar), and Eito (drums/metals) crash, smash, and bash, Null's guttural, nihilistic exclamations backed up by the iron fist of Zeni Geva's heavier than thou noise rockin'. The guitars chug and squall, the drums hammer down relentlessly. Screams and shrieks wail from the pounding shitstorm of metallic distortion that Zeni Geva have crafted into a throbbing, hypnotic riff-fest -- damn good riffs, with stretches of relatively restrained but still scary atmosphere now and then to heighten the impact when they eventually (as they always do) come down heavy. Meanwhile the high end guitar wielded by Tabata often unfurls intricate, catchy licks and squiggly solos over the top of all this mayhem, to make these songs even more brain-invading and body-shaking. And Steve Albini's production is killer, natch. (He would later play guitar with these guys on a live album, All Right, You Little Bastards!, that's now next to impossible to find.)
Super, super recommended to anyone into heaviness, metal or otherwise. As crucial as the Melvins' Bullhead, Neurosis' Enemy Of The Sun, Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper, Ruins' Stonehenge, Isis's Oceanic, Corrupted's Paso Inferior, Fudge Tunnel's Hate Songs In E Minor, Boris's Amplifier Worship... In other words, essential. If you missed this back in the early '90s, grab it. (By the way, Allan says the time he saw 'em on their US tour for this album was perhaps the best show he's ever been to.)
The Ty Segall produced debut full-length from LA trio Zig Zags is all about owning the term "kick ass punk/metal hybrid"! They hit the ground running, come out swinging, whatever metaphor you wanna use for rulin' from the get-go, the first few cuts compelling you to crank the volume up, up, up! "Brainded Warrior" (also available on a 7" single with cool cover art) is the leadoff jam, and quite a jam it its. Sorta like NWOFHMers Steel Mammoth mixing it up with SoCal stoner skaterockers The Shrine. Next, "The Fog" takes over, its crunchy neckbreaking riffage suggestive of Black Flag covering Sabbath's "Symptom Of The Universe", but with a catchy pop punk chorus, and an awesomely doomed-out finale. And so it goes from there, many of those elements remaining in play, Zig Zags bringin' the party to ya with tons of fuzzed out heavy guitar and high energy rock action galore. Part Sabbath, part Ramones, what's not to love?
This album is way more metal than we had expected, yet Zig Zags are totally punk too, their songs often over before they've barely begun, the tempos frantic, the singing sorta melodic but nicely gnarly. Lyrically, they revel in all sorts of cool hesher shit, singing about girls, partying, magic, and biker movies (one song's about Psychomania). Trashy, thrashy good times. An instant favorite!!!
Some records make you feel cooler for listening to 'em, this is one. Play this loud (in your car, if possible) and it's like you're suddenly the Fonz.
Awesome garagey/glammy '70s hard rock that sounds like a demented Led Zeppelin some of the time, featuring frontman Fred Cole, future co-founder of the legendary Pacific NW punks Dead Moon! For as big of proto-metal, '70s rock nerds as we are here at aQuarius, we don't understand how we'd somehow NEVER heard of this band until quite recently. And it's not like this is a new cd reissue, in fact, it apparently dates from 1994! When we got clued in to Zipper, we tracked it down, thankfully one of our distributors still had a supply in stock, so here it is, gotta share it with those of you who haven't heard Zipper either. Well, it's nice to know there's always some new but old gem out there we haven't yet heard.
So, Zipper's sole album, originally released as a private pressing (by the Cole's own "Whizeagle Records") in 1975, features nine cuts of high energy ramalama and bluesy grunge. The album opens with a bang, the song "Bullets" being the one that immediately made us think Led Zeppelin, with extremely lewd & lascivious lyrics delivered in what sounds like an exaggerated parody of a lemon-squeezin' Robert Plant. The sexual innuendo here is pretty outrageous / hilarious if you pay attention ("wanna stuff my face in your swimming hole, stroke it so hard I'm gonna break my pole", for example) and the guitars riff it up with wild abandon.
Cole's over the top vocals are big part of Zipper's sound, for sure, and at first (before we realized it was Fred Cole singing) we were kind of taken aback by his style, sneering and screeching, part Percy, part Mick Jagger, often doing a scrappy, campy falsetto that makes us think of Wayne Kramer warbling "Rambing Rose" on the MC5's Kick Out The Jams! Overwrought and ridiculous, but damn it works, with the downer epic "Face Of Stone" ferinstance being truly emotional wrenching. Some big influences are probably late '60s Stones, Zeppelin of course, perhaps early Detroit-era Alice Cooper, and maybe a bit of Black Sabbath. There's some sweet aching ballads, some lumbering blues rawk blasters, some glammed-up punkers, and even a '50s style raver. Good stuff - for raunchy, kickass, low-budget heavy jams from the garage circa '75, look no further!
(Sometime soon, we'll also have to review the reissue of the excellent album by Fred Cole's even earlier band from the sixties, The Lollipop Shoppe, a band whose cutesy name belies their seriously gloomy vibes.)
Battle Of The Peak is the crushing epic debut release from this Tolkien-esque psychedelic prog-doom noiserock from Portland, whose debut is in fact fucking amazing, not just sonically, but visually as well, more on the over the top ridiculous packaging in a second, cuz musically, it's hard to imagine an aQ metalhead who wouldn't freak out over there guys, epic, sprawling 15+ minute songs, classic metal riffing, big pounding drums, yowled bellowed vocals, the whole thing straddling the lines between classic metal, doom, noise rock, and black metal buzz, which makes sense as the mastermind of Zirakzagil is also the man behind two Northern BM bands of note, whose most recent records were both reviewed on the aQ list not too long ago, but Zirakzagil is a whole different beats, the band unfurling long stretches of tranced out riffing, surprisingly melodic, super dynamic, lurching stop/starts, some seriously soaring leads, at times it sounds a bit like the Fucking Champs, slowed down and stretched out into some psychedelic noise rock doom, at other times it's full on metallic prog, intricate, tangled arrangements slow builds, dense, and intense, the drumming super wild and chaotic, the songs will chug and churn, before slipping into some super melodic passage, and some of the leads, super emotive old school classic shreddery, and while there are vocals, bellowed bearded noise rock howls, most of the record is instrumental, the instruments doing all the heavy lifting, whether it's heaving swells of churning riffage on opener "The Birth Of The White Wizard", the woozy psychedelic shuffle of "Durin's Bane", or the weird mathy psychedelic breakdown near the end of "The Endless Stair", which ends up sounding like a more metal, and more mathed out Don Caballero!
This rules! And it's DEFINITELY not black metal, heck it's really not even that doomy, it IS sludgey, heavy, mathy, proggy and totally epic!
And speaking of epic, the packaging is ultra epic, and NERDY! The title and the cover art are of course beholden to Lord Of The Rings (where would metal be without Tolkien?), but then that stuff is designed into a faux Nintendo game cartridge, the fonts, the label log, the layout, the oversized clamshell case, it looks just like a Nintendo game, and open it up, and the liner notes are deftly worked into the game's instructions, even including a picture of the game controller, adorned with the Zirakzagil logo! Includes a patch and a sticker too. And of curse, EXTREMELY LIMITED! ONLY 98 COPIES, and we have about a dozen...
Wow. A while back a friend of ours at Alternative Tentacles told us that Jello Biafra was all keen on reissuing some ultra-obscure '70s LA punk/glam band who apparently dressed up like space aliens and pretended they were from another planet (it helped that all the band members happened to be fairly short). Sounds, uh, interesting we said, we'll be curious to hear it... Well now we've heard that band -- this band, Zolar X -- and we've gotta say, Jello, thank you! This is freakin' awesome!
Brimming with extra-terrestrial energy, this collection compiles twenty tracks (fewer on the LP version) from three different recording sessions and Zolar X line-ups. Memphis 1976, LA 1979 and San Francisco 1980. All are great. Jello considers Zolar X to be "the missing link between Chrome and the Stooges"...and indeed some of this has that vibe, sorta like Simply Saucer. But the '60s pop background and Bowie-worship of Zolar X's prime movers Zory Zenith and Ygarr Ygarrist Lazor really results in something that was both more bubblegum and yet more metal too. Zolar X's collision of punk and glam, though totally underground, had definite classic, commerical rock pretensions...the vocals sound just a little bit like Geddy Lee of Rush, and the arena-rock guitars and epic songwriting remind us of Thin Lizzy, Queen, and Blue Oyster Cult as well. You'll even hear a little "Cat Scratch Fever" in their song "Moonbeams" we think...and the Beatles in "Blues On Blue".
Now, tongue in cheek it all may be: what to make of a song (a great song!) entitled "I Pulled My Helmet Off (I'm Going To Love Her)"? The lyrics are worthy of Jack Black/Tenacious D! Or a 19-minute rock opera called "Plutonian Elf Story" (this disc's final, amazing track)?? Well you gotta stop thinking like an Earthling and get with the Zolar X program! Yeah, costume-rock bands normally invite skepticism as to their musical worth -- I mean, would you wear spacesuits and Martian antennae if you had *songs*? KISS may or may not be a good counter example, but Zolar X sure is. Silly haircuts, outfits and names aside, they ROCKED. I think the secret is, that they seemed to take themselves seriously. This was no joke band. At least, not outwardly. Reportedly, they even stayed in character when off-stage. Seeing them live must have been incredible, if the color photos in the cd booklet -- and the stories told in the lengthy liner notes -- are anything to go by. It's hard to tell why they never "made it". You'd have thought that the old "take me to your leader" routine would have worked. Oh well. They picked the wrong planet I guess.
And as a side note, we're proud that our record store actually played some small, entirely random part in getting this reissued, as Jello mentions in his liner notes that he bought his first copy of the Zolar X LP out of the bargain bin here at Aquarius, doubtless years and years ago. Maybe we weren't recommending it then, but we sure are now! Timeless indeed. Shoulda been huge. It's time now though...get this!!
Now available on lp! Ultra thick vinyl, super heavy weight gatefold sleeve, and most importantly, AN EXCLUSIVE BONUS TRACK!!!! Limited to 1000 copies, so these probably won't be around for long. Here's our review of the cd from when we first reviewed it a few years back:
If there was ever a band more "AQ" than Zombi I'd be hard pressed to think of it. Take two guys, both obsessed with horror movies, particularly those by director Dario Argento, and even more specifically the Argento soundtracks by Italian prog outfit Goblin. Give these two guys a drumkit and a massive arsenal of synthesizers, and sign them to Relapse. And what do you get? Basically, a record we just can't stop listening to. And songs that are just BEGGING to accompany some gruesome footage of disemboweled corpses, dark stormy nights, windows covered in flies, and screaming barefoot girls in nighties running through graveyards in the pouring rain. Not that the music of Zombi is THAT scary, it's just so evocative, and SO reminiscent of Goblin, it's hard not to try to envision what kitschy eighties European horror movie these tracks might have come from. Sonically, the simplest description and the one that should have most of you rushing out to pick this up straight away, would be Goblin meets Tortoise. Yep, post rock horror movie soundtrack music swathed in ominous synthesizer buzz and electronic drone. Maybe a more accurate description though might be: long lost Goblin tracks performed by AQ faves Heldon, with all the requisite swooshing spaciness, haunting minor key melodies, propulsive krautrock rhythms and thick fuzzy synths. The synth soundtrack music of John Carpenter is also an obvious influence, but again, put to use in a post rock context. Whichever way, you NEED this!
Longtime aQ faves from George Romero's home town of Pittsburgh, PA, the synthed-out, soundtrack-obsessed instrumental post-rock duo of Steve Moore (bass & synth) & A.E. Paterra (drums) are back with their sixth album, and it sounds as fresh & frightening as their first. Muscular drumming and sinister synthesizers lock into dark, propulsive grooves with a John Carpenter/Goblin vibe, and we do mean grooves - as Zombi records go, this one seems to us particularly groovy, almost funky, in fact. Although, the big finale, "Siberia II", is decidedly un-funky (but awesome) - 14+ endless-seeming minutes of repetitive clank & pulsating fuzz mesmerization!
While we're quite taken by the groovy Italo-disco direction displayed on Zombi's new "Sapphire" 12" on The Rapture's Throne Of Blood label (reviewed nearby this list), that doesn't mean we don't also want to hear the Pittsburgh duo doing their good ol' ordinary Zombi schtick, which is what we get on the also brand new Spirit Animal. Heck we love Zombi, 'cause we love the same stuff that the guys in Zombi so obviously are into: Goblin, George Romero's Living Dead series, the works of John Carpenter (movies and soundtracks), spaced out '70s kosmische krautrock stuff... add in some more modern mathrock/postrock elements, and you've got Zombi, and you've got Spirit Animal.
As usual, an all-instrumental affair, one that could easily serve as the soundtrack for something suspenseful (have these guys hooked up with Hollywood yet? If only it was still 1985, they'd be making a second income, easy). The album starts off with the majestic melodies of title track "Spirit Animal", a proggy piece that reminds of ELO's "Fire On High". Could be a big hit if New Age radio would ever play a band called Zombi (IS there New Age radio?). The Tangerine Dreaminess of this sends us wonderful late '70s mellow kraut vibes. While not as spacey as, say Arp, or Alps, or Expo '70, we're sure they'd geek out about the same vintage analog synths. The thing with Zombi, though, compared to the likes of Arp (and Arp et.al.'s inspirations like Harmonia) is that that Zombi tend towards the tense, the tight. Less open. Not quite noodly but busier anyway with math rock chops. That's not so much in evidence on "Spirit Animal" but when track two kicks in, "Spirit Warrior", the repetitive urgent keyboard motif and relentless rhythms certainly provide some proof of that assertion. This piece reminds us of something we said in a review a long time ago about an avantgarde academic electronic act from the '70s, Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co., that one of their minimalist compositions was a lot like a TV nightly news theme... this is too, but harder, more intense, one that seems to be saying: "You'd better tune into the news! The economy's fucked up! Don't change the channel!". A good example of Zombi's trademark hectic/hypnotic duality.
Spirit Animal navigates these waters - dark churning rapids and placid calms and the undertow of spiralling whirlpools - with prog precision and no lack of big melodic magnificence. All six tracks do the job of eating our brains, Zombi-style, and making us like it. Highlights to cite would be "Cosmic Powers", which starts off as another one of Zombi's John Carpenter style suspense steppers but eventually, before fading out, drops into a percussion-only otherworld, going down a drum tunnel of layered echoing beats, begging for a DJ 12" remix deal... Also we'll mention "Through Time", the disc's final statement, and its heaviest. Zombi don't let us off easy, the blissful stuff happening earlier in the album while this track is dense with distorted throbbing, percussion pounding amidst the wonderful waves of synth. Maybe this is where the Jesu/Isis comparisons on this disc's obi come from.
Yep, another good one for fans of Zombi (or Circle, or John Carpenter, or '70s krautronica, or...). And since we'd actually been hearing rumors that the band had split up, we're extra extra pleased to have all these new Zombi releases! (Including, besides the Throne Of Blood 12" and Spirit Animal, a few copies of another new 12", a split with Maserati that we weren't able to get enough of yet to list...)
Ok, lately it seems like we're ALWAYS saying stuff reminds us of the suspenseful soundtrack synth music of film director John Carpenter - who, along with collaborator Alan Howarth, is known for composing the propulsive, sinister scores for his own movies. Music that's become a big influence on a lot of our favorite artists today. How many recent releases have we tagged with a Carpenter comparison? Umberto, D.A., Gatekeeper, Zombi, Xander Harris, Majeure, Roll The Dice, Steve Moore, Twins, Dylan Ettinger, Blizaro, Jonas Reinhart, Hyetal, Arrow Kleeman, Lazer Crystal, Maserati, Nightsatan, and more... Of course many of those are overt imitations of the master. Goblin is the other influence we usually cite for a lot of these too, but the future-disco, fright flick, sci-fi SYNTH sound is more about Carpenter.
So, this release makes perfect sense, the obvious next step in the current wave of Carpenter worship. Zombie Zombie is a French synth duo, 1/2 of which is in fact former AQ Record Of The Week honoree Etienne Jaumet (for his album Night Music), and they have decided to pay tribute to John Carpenter in the most direct way possible: a disc of all Carpenter covers! This 5 track, 28 minute mini-album includes their takes on the main themes from JC classics Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape From LA, and The Thing. Hmm, the latter of which was actually composed by Ennio Morricone, right? Though that's cool too. You also get ZZ's version of the music from the bank robbery scene in Escape From New York.
When we learned Jaumet was part of this, we knew ZZ would know their stuff and do JC right, and they sure do. All the skittery machine beats and eerie melodies, urgent shuffling chase-scene rhythms and ominous thick bass heavy synth burble, moody atmospheric drone and creepy tick-tock-ery of the JC originals is lovingly recreated via ZZ's not-far-removed but definitely updated, dancefloor/DJ friendly versions, which come across as somewhat heavier and a bit more tweaked than actual soundtrack recordings, also more "band-like" and less soundtrack slick. We haven't heard ZZ's other album, but we bet these sound like their own songs, y'know. Basically, if you like John Carpenter, or any of the stuff we're always mentioning JC in conjunction with, you will dig this! The only thing that would have made this better is if they'd made it a longer disc and also included cues from The Fog, They Live, and a few other of our JC faves. But these themes are pretty much the best of the best. And we'd LOVE to see 'em play this stuff live, which we hear they're doing. Come to think of it, we'd love to see Carpenter himself perform live, we wonder if he's ever even considered the idea, he'd probably be surprised at how many people would come out to see that, don't you think?
Reissue of the reissue. Previously an actual black box, with 2 cds, now everything fitted onto one disc. When these two Naked City records originally came out, it was before aQuarius had started doing our "list". But then Tzadik reissued 'em in The Black Box back in 1996, and we had a chance to review them... but all we said was: "Stars John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Frith, Joey Baron & Yamantaka Eye. For their re-issue, Zorn has packaged these two albums in a black box, presenting all of the original, controversial artwork in the liner notes. Zorn gives a bit of history behind the graphics for Naked City releases. The albums, one fast and furious, the other slow and brutal, are without equal. They demonstrate the most aggressive sides of these incredible musicians."
True that, but there's more that could be said! Perhaps we figured, at the time, that everyone must already know all about Zorn and Naked City and there was no point in any extensive description. But, nowadays, there's gotta be people reading this who haven't yet experienced the mindboggling, genre-jumping musical mastery of Naked City, especially as intensely expressed on Torture Garden, originally released as a 45rpm 12" on the Shimmy Disc label in 1989, and if you're one of those folks, you're in for a treat - as long as you dig the idea of a "jazz" band playing almost every style of music imaginable, from lounge to country to surf to grindcore, in jarringly short, sharp stop on dime bursts, with Eye from the Boredoms vocalizing over top like a gibbering demon, screaming along with Zorn's saxophone, performing songs with titles like "Thrash Jazz Assassin", "Speedball", "Jazz Snob Eat Shit", "New Jersey Scum Swamp", and "S&M Sniper"! It's like the cartoon music of Carl Stalling meets Napalm Death meets, well just about everything else in the realm of music. Utterly insane and influential (though it must be said, Napalm Death was a HUGE influence on this). It's how we first heard about the Boredoms, too!
Blew us all away the first time we heard it. 12, 17, 28, 43 second songs that had more and better riffs in 'em than some ten minute Metallica epics. Well maybe that's exaggerating. But you get the idea. Amazing. And definitely Naked City's most "metal", grindcore-iest moment. Utter mayhem, with Zorn and Co. cramming a crazy number of changes into each track. Videos of them performing reveal a reliance on sheet music, but we don't blame 'em. That almost makes it more insane.
On this disc, the 42 tracks of Torture Garden (the longest of which clocks in at 1'19", but most don't come anywhere near the minute-mark) are followed by the single, 31'38" track that comprised the entirety of the 1992 Naked City album Leng Tch'e, long out of print, the yin to Torture Garden's yang for sure. Leng Tch'e is like the Naked City version of Earth or the Melvins, one long sludge trudge, super heavy and doomic and nightmarish. Again, Eye's vocals vie with Zorn's saxophone in emulating the screams of the damned.
If we had to choose our favorite Zorn album from amid his VAST discography (The Big Gundown? Spy Vs. Spy? Spillane? Bar Kokhba? Absinthe? Execution Ground?) Torture Garden would get a lot of our votes... it's certainly one of the most "extreme", though an argument could be made for Leng Tch'e too. No wonder they both belong together here (which also has something to do with the original, controversial cover art, necessitating the "black box" treatment). Nice to have 'em back in print, for the uninitiated, and also for old fans like us who had almost forgotten how incredible this shit is.
FYI some of the Torture Garden tracks also appeared on cd on the self-titled Naked City disc on Nonesuch (1989) and the Avant-label release Grand Guignol (1992).
So by now everyone knows how great the New Pornographers record is. I mean, the label sold out of 'em in a matter of months, it got written up in the New York Times, and we've sold tons of it. And while some of the credit goes to Neko Case's sublime vocals, the songs, and the vocals of lead pornographer Carl Newman, remind us of a band we were raving about 3 or 4 years ago, and that coincidentally featured one Carl Newman on vocals and keyboards. Zumpano put out two records of absolutely perfect pop, with enough musical bite and lyrical savagery to keep it interesting, even after all this time. Unlike all the pop groups that stole liberally from the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Supertramp, Zumpano, while obviously indebted to the above, dug much deeper and/or much farther back finding influences in the Zombies, Kinks, Chicago, Redd Kross, Jimmy Webb and even Neil Diamond. Amazing musicianship, crystalline production, beautiful harmonies, and some of the catchiest kick ass songs we've ever heard. Here's what we had to say about 'Goin Through Changes' way back on AQ list 38:
"THE pop record of the year. An amalgamation of all those AM radio anthems you heard day in and day out as a child yet it's somehow still wholly original. A pinch of Jimmy Webb, a dash of Chicago, a little Kinks, a little Zombies. Horns!... Piano!... Harmonies!... Somehow it still rocks!... Andee and Byram swear by this record & even Windy loves it. Allan loves it too but Andee refuses to believe him."
All of you that love the New Pornographers record should definitely give Zumpano a try, if you haven't already!
