Along with the cd reissue of CoO's awesome Eleven Fingers album reviewed nearby on this week's list, comes this brand new, vinyl-only record from Finland's post black metal gloom pop weirdos Circle Of Ouroborus, whose sound really was barely ever actually all that black metal to begin with, but has continually been drifting further and further away, finally arriving here, at a sound that at this point is one distinctly their own, still subtly informed by black metal, but essentially pop music, a gloomy, occasionally buzzing, dour and darkly depressive pop music, but pop nonetheless. And with this record, that sound has mutated once again, taking their low fidelity a step further, and somehow wreathing it in a sonic murk, this new record impossible muffled, and muddied, womblike might be more accurate, the music is all soft focus, the sharp edges smoothed, the notes and chords, the various instruments, blurred and smeared into something more like an abstract chordal drift, the songs less songs, and more like impressions of songs. The only elements seemingly exempt are the vocals, still a haunting deep croon, and the drums, which occasionally stumble, occasionally pound, the combination is pretty stellar, and definitely bizarre, but it most certainly suits the group's dour blackened pop.
The vibe here extraordinarily woozy and warped, washed out and slurred, at times gauzy and nearly meditative, and when the band crank up the intensity, the hazy murk is dragged along as well, and instead of sounding heavy or rocking, it just sounds slightly heavier, but only really slightly. The songs tend toward the midtempo, and the dirge, but do occasionally erupt into some punky pound, but it's all behind a sheet of muffled murk, which again changes everything. The coolest moments are when the band introduce dueling vocals, clean and crooned, croaked and metallic, making for some strange harmonies, which are the perfect match for CoO's depressive blackened jangle pop, which throughout the record sounds alternately melty, detuned or oozing, often all three, a darkly and deliriously druggy songsuite that we're digging just as much as we did Eleven Fingers, which is a whole lot!
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! The lps pressed on super thick 180 gram vinyl. Housed in a super swank textured card stock jacket, with a 7" x 7" booklet, printed on nice heavy paper, with illustrations and lyrics!
We've always held a special place in our darkened hearts for Finnish black metal weirdos Circle Of Ouroborus. The duo churns out a very strange brand of metal that would appear to share just as much, or maybe even more, with melancholy gloom merchants like Joy Division (who they have covered) and Dead Can Dance, as it does with black metal. They definitely share some of the influences of groups like Lifelover and Amesoeurs - you know, a gothy 4AD shimmer, cleanly arpeggiated guitar melodies, and vocals that don't rely exclusively on shrieks or growls - but to compare Circle Of Ouroborus to those bands, or anyone else really, is to neglect just how unique these guys are. For one, an ever present murkiness permeates all COO recordings, giving their songs a weird dreamy quality that seems to exist completely out of any time or place. The vocals, which have garnered understandable comparisons to the off kilter approach of Mark E. Smith, are hardly what you would expect from a "black metal" band, but there is obviously an acute awareness of the bleak realities of life that is TOTALLY black metal. Maybe more than anything, Circle Of Ouroborus have completely sidestepped any expectations of what a black metal band is supposed to be, and redefined it for their own purposes. In doing so, they have carved out a unique place in the metal underground and never failed to blow our minds with their bizarre sound. Now, after the completion of their Shores/Streams/Islands trilogy of records (we're still trying to track down Islands for y'all!), COO have progressed way beyond the awesome but at times amateur practice space sonics of some of their earlier work and delivered Tree Of Knowledge, not only their most accomplished and well thought out work to date, but certainly one of the best and most interesting metal releases we have heard this year.
The album begins with "A Root Casket", and it pretty much sounds like a more beefed up (and better) version of the COO we originally lost our shit over. The band sounds full and spacious, but still raw and lo-fi, like a ninth generation cassette dub of a lost Factory Records band. A catchy keyboard melody carries the song majestically, while murky guitars spin a sustained droniness that works perfectly with the vocals. At the same time, it manages to give a glimpse into their weird folky side. The seasick queasiness of the band's past releases endures, it just seems like they've better grasped how to work with their limited recording technology. "Demon In Iron" is a slightly atonal piece that makes perfect use of the band's cyclical guitar riffs and shimmery keyboards. It's so melodic and sad, but just BEAUTIFUL and even a bit punky, and you'd be forgiven if you mistook this one for some gloomy as hell indie band from the early '90s. "Show Me The Way To The Wishing Wall" is a midtempo downer with more cool circular guitar and steady, midtempo drumming. The singer's croon goes perfectly with the hazed out nature of the songs, and the natural overdrive on the otherwise clean guitars definitely help to make COO sound unlike most metal bands. Of course, around the 4 minute mark a Xasthurian black metal croak reminds you that, yes, this is some evil shit and not just another shoegazey black metal band. "Dead Eyes, Dead Soul" (how's that for further Joy Division comparisons?) follows another beautifully sad melody with phased out guitars and a discordant chorus that offers a cool transition to the tunefulness of the rest of the song. Instrumental number "Summer Graves" features sustained synth strings and an exotic touch with guitars that, at moments, *almost* brought to mind Polvo... Weird, but not quite as weird as the addition of a trumpet on the closing song, "Through My Fingers". Slow picked guitars and a chorus that manages to throw in some metal as fuck pinch harmonics with the contemplative dreaminess are accompanied by the sustained trumpet melodies that seem almost hopeful. Of course, the lyrics prove otherwise...
Like all COO releases, Tree Of Knowledge features totally amazing artwork, with 8 unique icons (each corresponding to a different song, it would seem) wrapped in the roots of a broken tree. It's rare that a band is able to achieve such a unique and perfectly realized vision, especially within a genre known for its dogmatically orthodox bullshit. But Circle Of Ouroborus are hardly just another band, and with Tree Of Knowledge, they have made that abundantly clear.
Okay, so Circle Takes The Square may not be the best band name. In fact, it's pretty dumb. It also gives no clue as to what an intense and amazing record As The Roots Undo is. But as with monikers like the "Flaming Lips", or even the "Beatles", the name will grow on you, which is good, because you're gonna be telling everyone you know about this record. Trust us! From the cover, a gorgeous gold and silver metallic digipak that folds together IPR style, to the music, a bizarre hybrid of old school crusty hardcore complete with shouted boy/girl vocals, modern metalcore, indie/post rock, seriously complex and innovative prog, and even some weird ambient electronic bits, you won't know what hit you. Sounds like it could be a mess, but somehow it all falls together perfectly. Emotional and intense, alternately heavy and intense, melodic and melancholy. Massive Neurosis-style riffery gives way to weird clean guitar breakdowns, spoken word parts and blooping electronic programming. Buzzing grindcore splinters into jangly, rhythmic almost-pop. Definitely schizophrenic. But in a good way. The core of the record is a thrashy, complex grind metal, but the vocals are so distinctive and emotional and the arrangements are so creative that it turns what could have been a run of the mill punk rock record into one of our favorite new records, period.
First proper full length from this mysterious seventies outfit, who formed in Kentucky (some argue that Circle X were the first punk band from Louisville), the band eventually relocated to the Big Apple where they became a small part of the burgeoning no-wave underground, a scene at the time that consisted of bands like Mars and DNA, they would later graduate into the second wave of NYC noisemakers like Swans, Sonic Youth, Cop Shoot Cop, Live Skull and others.
Unlike the raw primal fury of their debut ep, Prehistory, originally released in 1983, is much more restrained and rhythmic, the drums tribal and trancelike, the arrangements less like songs and more like rituals, the guitar abstract and angular, the bass locked into mesmerizing loops, the vocals gloomy and emotive, the mood dark and depressing, the drums very reminiscent of Southern California tribalists Crash Worship, in fact, much of Prehistory references the ritualistic drum jams. But Circle X, due in no small part to the company they keep, injected plenty of moody miserablism into their decidedly gothic sprawl, a strange hybrid of chaotic post punk, junkyard crash and clatter, and dark depressing almost new wave. Jagged guitars are tossed about by frenzied percussion and buzzing low end synth drones, melodies are mostly angular and atonal, although here and there the band do inadvertently slip into something bordering on catchy and lovely, wild vocal caterwauls wrap themselves around, flurries of intense drumming, and long drawn out rhythms, Jandekian guitars surface and blurt out some strangled melody before sinking back into the mire, it's definitely a strange sonic miasma, a quick listen reveals mostly chaos, but beneath it all, the band had some strange twisted pop sense, which somehow holds the whole rickety thing together.
True '80s metal doesn't get much more cult than the late great Cirith Ungol, they're up there with Manilla Road and Brocas Helm in the realm of eccentric, epic-er-than-thou Swords n' Sorcery style metal mastery. With ripping guitars and rasping banshee wails, Cirith Ungol tore it up on four albums from 1980-1991, to little commercial avail. They weren't the mainstream of '80s metal that's for sure. If you're into traditional metal that is both hot rockin' (they were from LA after all) and also gloriously doomy, with a definite '70s vibe, and you haven't yet delved into the works of Cirith Ungol, then we'd recommend finding copies of their debut album Frost And Fire, and its 1984 follow-up, King Of The Dead... But, those are both sadly out of print at the moment. Which brings us to this, their rarities collection, an archival anthology entitled Servants Of Chaos. Originally released only in Europe, ten years ago, it's just been reissued domestically, in a digipack, now with an extra dvd disc of live video footage in addition to the two cds of unreleased demos, live tracks and other early ephemera dating back to 1978 that already comprised this set.
Obviously it's for fans. And if you're not (yet), well, maybe it's not the place to start - but then again, maybe it is! 'Cause we know there's a certain type of absurdity-loving AQ customer who will probably dig this MORE than Cirith Ungol's proper albums. Such as, those of you into the wackiness of the NWOFHM (Steel Mammoth, Pharaoh Overlord, Krypt Axeripper, etc.). And anyone who digs the somewhat trippy, outsider metallic stylings of such private-press gems as White Boy And The Average Rat Band or Dwarr, too... This will be right up your alley, 'cause a bunch of the tracks here, some of 'em songs that later did appear on later CU albums, are, in these demo versions, outrageously overloaded with psychedelic sci-fi synthesizer insanity! As the amusingly self-deprecating liner notes by original guitarist Greg Lindstrom put it, these date from "before [he] grew out of the 'I think this could use some more synthesizer' phase". Raw and ridiculous, these are. We played some of this stuff on Brian Turner's WFMU radio show a few years back, and we know that turned Brian, whose metal tastes run to the "weird" exclusively, into a rabid Cirith Ungol fan. Or at least, a fan of this collection!
Elsewhere, you'll find plenty of long lost tracks that were never again recorded, including several even synthier instrumentals, along with (on disc 2) lots of killer live cuts from the band in their heyday. Oh, and a couple quirky covers, including a version of "Secret Agent Man"! Though maybe the oddest track on this anthology is "Ferrari 308QV On Dyno At 8000 RPM", which is nothing but a 23 second recording of a revving Ferrari sports car engine. These guys loved Ferraris.
So, though some of this is a mite more bizarre than "real" Cirith Ungol, it'll give even the uninitiated a good idea of how and why these fantasy metal madmen ruled. Definitely check out their actual albums if you can, wherein they eliminated the silly synthesizer excess, but the songs themselves are rad either way, and always, in any case, pretty darn over the top. (As is the dvd footage, mostly from a show in '84, when metal was METAL!).
Record number three from this drug driven blurwave blackgaze Velvet Cacoon offshoot. Longtime readers of the aQ list are no doubt already familiar with that Northwestern horde, whose exploits, sonic and otherwise, included a ridiculous band backstory (eco-terrorists?), made up instrumentation (diesel harp?) some purportedly plagiarized sounds (a whole record supposedly stolen and redone as VC), not to mention a whole mess of angry, bitter and confused black metallers in their wake. And while we bought into it all, when the truth was revealed, that VC was in fact, just a guy and a gal, taking lots of drugs and making some blissed out black buzz, we actually thought it was funny. The for some strange reason, VC mainman Josh decided to disband Velvet Cacoon, and immediately created Clair Cassis, a band that was quite sonically similar, the same sort of washed out buzz, droney black mesmer, the biggest difference being that CC trafficked in WAY shorter songs, and those songs were WAY heavy on the bass (infamous for it's absence in almost all black metal) and traded in much of the drone and drift for something distinctly more poppy. And we were, and are, pretty into it. Dense thick whirling hazy black metal, formed into dark almost new wavy chunks of blackbuzzpop, sure still black and buzzy on the outside, but strap on some headphones, and the basslines become sinewy and serpentine, the melodies and buried hooks reveal themselves, step back and its a glorious blackened blur.
After two self titled eps, comes this, Luxury Absolute, another short (ish) collection of CC's unique brand of black and buzzy, midtempo dronegaze doompop, the sound here though even more tripped out and psychedelic than on past releases, with the bass MASSIVE, even moreso than usual, with the sound so blown out and in the red, that the sound continually peaks, and clips, the sounds distorting and crumbling, adding a strange sort of bleary, blurry decay vibe to the already woozy minor key proceedings. Just check out opener "Antique Sea Smoke", a warped lumbering almost dirger, with the guitar melodies swirling amidst grey clouds of whir and thrum, the bass thick, and driving, the drums distorting like crazy, all of that overblown sound pushing CC even further into shoegaze territory.
The rest of the record follows suit, barring a few creepy stretches of haunting rumbling black ambience, the rest of Luxury Absolute unfolds as a series of brief dreamlike black blurs, melancholic and mesmerizing, the drums a lurching programmed pound, the vokills a demonic croak, but the guitars, so warm and whirling, thick and layered, the doom vibe is huge here too, partially because of the tendency toward dirgery, but also cuz the sound is so thick and viscous, imagine diSEMBOWELMENT or Skepticism trying their hand and shoegaze cold wave, and you might be getting close. Either way, this is some awesome stuff. Occasionally frustrating, cuz the songs are so short (longest 3:31, shortest 1:51, 19 minutes total), and we would love to hear these jams stretched out into tranced out dronepop blackbuzz drifts, but the brevity seems to reinforce than in their own twisted and fucked up way, these really are just pop songs, albeit, buzzy, and sludgey, and dirgey and BLACK. Might be our favorite CC yet. Hope it's not their last.
Packaged in a super swank DVD sized digipak. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
BACK IN STOCK!!
When we first discovered mysterious Northwestern black metal outfit Velvet Cacoon, it wasn't just their blown out buzz that had us enraptured, it was all the rumors and weird stories about the band itself, that they were some sort of eco-fascists, who had built a huge gasoline-driven HARP which was responsible for their massive buzz. We later discovered that the whole eco-fascist / droneharp thing was a ruse, a put on, the band intentionally fucking with what they considered to be a contemptible black metal scene. It was then revealed that Velvet Cacoon were in fact a couple of drug obsessed dandies, who when they weren't crafting some of the most stunning black metal weirdness, were waxing about the various drugs they took, and their decadent lifestyle. But all that stuff only made them more interesting, and gave the sound a certain twisted cachet, coming as it did from these unlikely creators.
As it happened, the band got fed up with the drama and the internet message board bullshit, and decided to scrap Velvet Cacoon entirely and start fresh. A new band, a new name and a new sound. Thus we have Clair Cassis, whose sound really is not all that far removed from the washed out black buzz of VC, but does distinguish itself in some important ways. The first being the song length. The band described CC in an interview as being a more pop Velvet Cacoon, and so it is, the shortest song is under 3 minutes, the longest just less than 7, the band forcing themselves to be more succinct, to move through their musical ideas in a more structured and less unhindered way, instead of letting songs and parts drone on and on. Not that we minded before, in fact, we like it when our black metal drones and buzzes endlessly, but there's something to be said for the opposite approach, which tends to force the write to craft SONGS more than SOUNDS. The other big difference is the bass. And with that the above mentioned pop element. The lack of bass in black metal is practically a running joke, the brittle buzz and furious blasting of most black metal generally relegating bass to a barely there buzz, so when a black metal band takes the bass, and makes it as much a part of the sound as the guitar, it changes the whole shape of the sound, in the case of Clair Cassis, gives it a sort of woozy, gothic, cold wave vibe, black metal is dour and depressive by its very nature, but here it's gloomy and haunting, an emotional sort of darkness and depression.
This new sound/direction is immediately noticeable on opener "Ambercandle" which begins all warped and woozy, the riffs twisted and seemingly melting over the pounding doomy drums, when the track finally kicks into gear, the bass drives the songs, thick and dense, the notes slippery, haunting gloomy low end swells that add some pathos to the already loping minor key dirge, besides that it makes the sound so much heavier. Even on the next track, "The Feathered Fog" which begins with a somewhat standard burst of blackness, droney and relentless, still the bass is there adding heft, and a melodic counterpoint to the frenzied riffage, and then when the song switches gear, lurches into halftime, the bass swoops right to the front and the song transforms into a woozy seasick dirge.
And as you listen, the record definitely reveals itself as more than buzzing black metal, and knowing what we do about the folks behind it, it's not hard to imagine them creating this otherworldly pop music, and simply choosing to cloak it in black metal finery, which definitely explains the catchiness, the heavy bass and buried grooves, but it's probably best to not analyze it too much. A casual glancing listen will definitely provide plenty of black metal pleasure, the guitars are thick and gnarled, the drumming (real this time it sounds like) heavy and blasting, the arrangements trancelike and hypnotic, with long stretches of deep shimmering drone music, as well as plenty of pounding doomic dirgery, Velvet Cacoon fans won't be disappointed, but digging deeper reveals all the other subtle sonic alterations that make Clair Cassis simultaneously much more accessible, but also even weirder than VC. The songs may be shorter, but they're no less complex and convoluted, in fact in some ways, they're even more, considering parts don't drone on, the band flits from part to part, from blast to plod to drift to blast again.
"Pearls & Pinesmoke" is another standout, a soaring blasting droner, thick with bass rumble and throb, grim enough, the drums a little loose and chaotic, the vocals a creepy croak, and then the breakdown comes, and it's total melodic black nirvana, half tempo, the guitar still buzzy, but the bass unfurling an insanely melodic and ridiculously catchy part, that totally transforms the song, and then the sound shifts again back to blasting buzz, somehow the bass remains, adding unlikely melody to even the blackest bits, and fear not, a part that good comes back again, fans of Alcest and Amesoeurs will be in heaven. And after a strange interlude, the track shifts again, into another woozy, differently melodic dirge, laced with more melodic bass, but this time wrapped around spidery acoustic guitars, all still wreathed in crumbling buzz.
Finally the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Hazelhearted In The Seaparlour", which explodes immediately into a dense churning blast, heavy and harsh and layered, with a strange midtempo bridge/chorus, that features a strangely bouncy, and again surprisingly melodic bassline, way up in the mix, changing the focus of the song, before dropping out again and letting the guitars take over, before the track finally fades out, leaving nothing but the wheezing strains of what almost sounds like elevator music, or the music they play in the middle of the night at outside malls, the sound here replete with random bits of found sound, footsteps and other curious ambience.
And just leave it to the fickle folks who disbanded Velvet Cacoon at the height of their popularity to nip their new band in the bud as well, which apparently is exactly what happened. Clair Cassis is no more. But what a way to go. There is a second record floating around, who knows if it will ever get properly released, but for now, this one is not surprisingly shaping up to be a serious contender for black metal record of the year!
New on Warp, and fuck if this isn't the only glimmer of hope in the overcrowded and under-inspired world of electronica. The glitches and pops and Pole fallout are kept to a minimum here and instead, Clark uses actual sounds, unrecognizable as they may
A fine return for Clark, "Empty the Bones of You" will certainly be a relief to fans who loved Clark's first full-length "Clarence Park" and who were maybe a little disappointed by his interim EP. And no doubt it will win over some new converts as well. The tracks on "Empty" harken to a time, not too long ago, when Aphex Twin and Autechre ruled supreme; smart, playful and yet infinitely musical electronica. Smart and playful, the way Autechre could wrassle up some crunchy rhythms and construct eminently catchy melodies out of fairly unmelodic glitch and buzz, and musical in the way that Richard James' could turn jagged, stuttering freakouts into hooks that would stick in your head forever. Imagine the melodic elements of Boards of Canada or Bola, but with a harder rhythmic edge and a more organic sound palette. Really nice!
This record is Radiohead. I mean I think it's Radiohead. I mean, it must be. I wonder what Radiohead would think if they knew that some guy was single handedly making Radiohead records on the sly. That being said, this record is pretty fucking cool, all majesty and breathy falsettos. Along with the Muse record (see elsewhere in the list, this is the perfect hold-you-over until the next Radiohead. If the Muse record is all Paranoid Android, Justin Clayton is all Karma Police. Nice.
The history of the legendary New Zealand indie label Flying Run quite literally begins with The Clean. Impressed by a slew of The Clean's live performances in their home town of Dunedin, New Zealand back in 1980, Roger Shephard began Flying Nun, simply in order to release the band's first single "Tally Ho." That song, an upbeat but simple post-punk number that crashed together jangling guitars and persistant organ melodies, surprised everybody with a considerable amount of commercial success in New Zealand, and became one of many songs by The Clean that found enthusiastic audiences in the US during the college rock days of the '80s, offering a quirky, exotic alternative to staples like REM, the Replacements, Robyn Hitchcock, and Elvis Costello.
Formed in 1978 by the Kilgour brothers David and Hamish, The Clean never stooped to the depths of the Gallagher brother's public fisticuffs; but the band -- which flushed out its membership with Robert Scott and (in the early days) Peter Gutteridge -- spent more time broken up than together. Yet, their eternally catchy pop songs became the blueprint for almost all of the other Flying Nun bands (in part due to the numerous Clean related projects on Flying Nun, including The Bats, The Great Unwashed, Bailter Space, Snapper, Stephen, and others). The Clean's self-explanatory "Anthology" runs through their numerous albums, offering a good chunk of their fantastic early work (the aforementioned "Tally Ho," the "Boodle Boodle Boodle" ep, the "Great Sounds..." ep, and a couple of oddities) on one disc. Edgy yet unswervingly optimistic, these songs were sloppy four-track recordings of monomaniacally simple rhythms, cacophonously jangly guitar melodies, and happy-go-lucky vocals. Disc two contains excerpts from the '90s albums "Vehicle," "Modern Rock," and "Unknown Country," which marked a considerable polishing of The Clean's sound, in part because they recorded that material in well established studios like Blackwing studios in London, but also as the songs, while still simple in their own right, were slightly more restrained.
Highly recommended!
We're a sucker for pretty much anything Finnish. The weirder the better. So when we discovered Cleaning Women, a trio of Finns, who dressed up like ladies, housecoats, stockings, the whole nine yards, and who performed on an assemblage of customized kitchen appliances and household items, stoves, ironing boards. drying racks, clothes horses, we were sold before we even heard a note.
Luckily they had the music to back up their eccentric presentation, a strange chaos of wild percussion, blown out fuzz bass, and crooned vocals. Their second record was a soundtrack of sorts, and ended up being way more varied and schizophrenic than their debut, and once again, for record number three, the simply titled U, they've shifted gears again, and really hit their stride. Where as before, it seemed like the music was secondary to the concept, here, the music is dark and brooding and hypnotic, poppy and melodic, minimal and mesmerizing, they even seemed to have ditched the drag, if the band photo is any indication, they're still glamorous, and odd looking, but in a sort of Euro vampire glam rock way. But the music. Wow. Everything we loved about the first two records distilled and compressed into something magical.
The opening track is like a super minimal junkyard Circle, with its endlessly repeating main riff, the clanky percussion, the woozy seasick rhythm, there's even a creepy interlude partway through, with tolling bells, booming metallic rumbles and mysterious reverbed whistles, before the band launch back into it, this time adding vocals, the Circle comparison becoming even more apt, like an industrial Circle covering Morricone or something? However you slice it, it's amazing.
The second track almost sounds like an analog Kraftwerk, with it's blooping bassline, and motorik melody, mix in a little twangy guitar, swirling synths, super cinematic and dramatic. The third track is a pop gem, with it's dreamy vocal melody, and softly propulsive rhythm, and pizzicato strings, it almost reminds us of Uz Jsme Doma, but way more mellow and shimmery.
"The Miners' Song" sounds like a warped Pink Floyd outtake, until the main riff kicks in, fuzzy and fierce and downright heavy, and suddenly we're back in hypnorock territory, but with a distinctly playful pop edge.
The second half of the record is more of the same, from super minimal bowed string dronescapes, rife with surfy twang and delicate shimmer, to strange otherworldly cabaret pop, with xylophone like percussion, and cool Eastern melodies, to clattery math pop workouts that sound like some mad mix of Nomeansno and Sparks, to the eight minute closer "Scythians", which again veers into Circle territory, spidery looped melodies over simple motorik rhythms, reverbed and softly woozy, before shifting gears, introducing chanted vocals and slipping into a super dramatic slow build, culminating in a cool hauntingly harmonized choral outro.
Absolutely WAY recommended.
While the rest of the world is freaking out over Death Grips' drum driven aggro noise drenched hip hop, especially with the recent release of a downloadable new collaboration with Bjork called Niggas On The Moon, it might be a good time to also dig into the brand new Sub Pop debut from LA noise-hop trio Clipping. (and yeah, the period is part of the name). Their sound, like Death Grips, finds its roots in classic hip hop, but both diverge in interesting ways. In the case of Death Grips, it's a live drummer (Zach Hill from Hella), and some seriously bombastic noise, not to mention the confrontational flow of rapper Stefan Burnett. It's a sound we love for sure, but the sound of Clipping. we love even more. Imagine that instead of that drum driven noisiness, you replaced the music with super minimal abstract noise, the sort of stuff you might hear on an RRR comp, think Bastard Noise or Sissy Spacek making a hip hop record and you'd be close. Even more interesting though, is that the two guys responsible for the music in Clipping. are Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, whom avid readers of the aQ list, and film nerds too, might know more from their stunning score to the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy documentary Room 237, the soundtrack which was released on Death Waltz.
But this is no retro soundtrackery, this is twisted noisy weirdness, wild feedback drenched analog skree, squelch drenched gristle, hiss and hum and screech and howl and thrum and buzz, blasts of digital noise wound around low slung beats. Check out the intro, which features rapper Daveed Diggs, spitting rapid fire flow a cappella over an ear piercing sine wave tone, eventually delivering the closer "It's Clipping bitch", before launching into the record proper, which gets no less weird, and no less noisy. "body & Blood" rides a grinding industrial beat, with a creepy processed voice 'chorus', but then "Work Work" surprises (as does much of the record), with its almost dreamy looped glitchy gamelan, that transforms into some low slung low rider booming bass throb. And while at first blush, some of the lyrics sound typically hip hop sexist, dig deeper, and there's way more going on, which is again balanced when Cocc Pistol Cree delivers her bad ass verse. And there are other guests too, King T, Gangsta Boo, Guce and more, but it's the core three who have their sound down. King T's guest verse on "Summertime" is a crusher, especially when the background sound swells into a cloud of alien laser blasts, deep bass thrum, and woozy sonic squiggles. Then there's tracks like "Taking Off", which sounds like it was made from damaged cd's, all skipping rhythms, looped and layered into a weirdly lurching beat, the perfectly wasted stuttery backdrop for Diggs' rapid fire flow. Gangsta Boo delivers a killer verse as well, over a weird bed of creaks and gristly moans, again a weirdly perfect match for her toasting flow, not to mention the strangely Kanye-ish chorus croon, with a rumbling thick low end swell underneath, the sort of track that would be all over the radio, if there was any justice. And let's not forget the insanely infuriatingly brilliant "Get Up", where the music is essentially JUST the sound of an alarm clock, maddening for sure, but then so satisfying when they modulate the sound into a weirdly radio pop chorus. And so it goes, Digg's flow world class, the background sounds a continually shifting landscape of fractured loops, woozy synths, clanging pipe fight rhythms, digital glitchery, weird damaged turntable rewinds, and dizzying noise collages, so unlikely, but so impossibly catchy, the magic of Clipping. in that it can be so obtuse and difficult, but still so groovy, so hooky, so funky, and so goddamn, catchy, this is exactly the sort of shit we'd be blasting through our booming system, no doubt shattering glass and bursting eardrums as we passed.
On both cd, and vinyl, both of which are slightly different (the aforementioned "Intro" is not included on the lp, but the version of "Body & Blood" is longer for example) but vinyl nerds are still in luck, cuz the lp comes in a super swank spot varnish printed triple gatefold, with an extra lp side, loaded with ONE HUNDRED locked grooves, noisy, distorted, blown out, abstract, dubby, clicky, funky, bloopy, bleepy and pretty much every variation in between. Both versions feature a bad ass blinded out Sub Pop logo too...
Some of you might remember Gargotheron, whose cd-r we reviewed a while back, a blurred baffling black metal horde from Arizona, whose sound was grim and raw, primitive and pummeling, spastic and hyper kinetic, octopoidal drumming, insectoid riffing, we described it as "Bone Awl meets Lightning Bolt", so what might we expect from Cloak Of Displacement, a strange ritualistic avant doom offshoot of the mighty Gargotheron? How about long expanses of processed downtuned guitar drone, gurgled distorted vocals, abstract riffage and clouds of glitch and buzz and electronic interference, brief bursts of in-the-red ultra distorted noise drenched black metal. And more fucked up weirdness. We're tempted to describe it as a black metal Faxed Head, but it's not quite so purposefully damaged, although it's plenty demented. There are stretches of almost prettiness, in the guise of sprawling low end buzz, a little Earth (circa 2), a little Khanate, a pinch of SUNNO))), but filtered though some sort of sick Abruptum like sonic ritual, in fact ritual is an apt description, as the performance was literally part of a REAL ritual, with a real live witch performing incantations and spells, at one point snipping locks of hair from the various band members while they recorded, even the packaging, sealed with wax, have been cursed, so open at your own peril!
Grim and fucked up, mysterious and abstract, definitely essential listening for ambient noise metal freeks into stuff like Abruptum, Emit and the like, but also might hit the spot for the slow and low obsessed, Khanate, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Vulture Club and other purveyors of minimal blackened filth.
Packaged in a hand stamped black envelope, sealed with wax, hand numbered, LIMITED TO ONLY 45 COPIES! We took most of those, inside a hand written missive from Cloak Of Displacement, to YOU.
Those guys in the Starving Weirdos have been kicking our asses with one amazing release after another. And as if that weren't enough, now they've started signing other like minded noisemakers to their Atheists Are Gods label.
The first release comes from Cloaks, aka Spencer Doran, who for his first readily available domestic full length release, offers up two gorgeous lengthy pieces, one for piano, tapes, zither and bells, the other for electric guitar and piano with harmonium and electronics. The result is lush and spellbinding. The closest comparison that even begins to come close is Lubomyr Melnyk, with his dense flurries of notes, creating dizzyingly intricate swirls of melodic fragments that while ultra complex are so intricate they seem to melt into long dreamlike drifts.
Such is the case with Cloaks. And then some. The opening track begins with a strange jumble of chaotic percussion, weird boings, effects drenched squiggles, sounding like something that could be a bit goofy for our liking, but after a burst of record crackle and needle on vinyl static, the track settles into a gorgeously sun baked, glistening shimmer, a fine mist of notes enveloping the listener like a warm fog, multiple abstract melodies drifting into one another becoming gloriously intertwined, hovering ghostlike over soft drifts of smeared piano in the background. It almost sounds like Oval's Diskont, but with soft shimmery piano instead of skipping cds. Fluid and organic, softly swelling, so many notes... you know how you can sort of blur your eyes and make everything look all fuzzy, well imagine you could blur your EARS, it's like listening to Reich or Riley or Palestine with blurred ears. Soft focus and indistinct, every once in a while bits of melody coming into view but quickly fading into the sounds around it. So pretty. One of those rare tracks that we wish went on forever and ever...
The second track is a subtly different beast but with a similar vibe. Beginning with spare spidery electric guitar, suspended in a wide open expanse of near silence, a sort of skeletal post rock, which quickly slips under a gradually building wave of dense Wave-Lox like piano. Thick roiling low end squalls of reverberating rumble and rich overtones, very lush and intense. Near the final few minutes little bits of electronic glitch and grrr begin to surface, slowly wrapping themselves around the piano flurries, eventually surrounding it completely, becoming a dense buzzing electronic drone with almost no trace of the piano remaining...
Packaged in super striking silkscreened digipaks with pasted on textured paper, full color art, and with a hand screened insert.
We raved about Cloaks' 2009 release Versus Grain, a caustic collection of crushing beats and sculpted noise, with sounds sourced from recordings of breaking glass and clanging metal, and live shows reported to rival the craziest rock bands in terms of blood, sweat and destruction of gear. It was in fact a record that we ended up listening to so much and for so long, we realized in retrospect that we really should have made it a Record Of The Week. So here we are 2 years later, and Cloaks return, but VERSIONS Grain is not a new record, instead, it's their own twisted idea of a remix record, with Cloaks contributing a couple new tracks, but with the bulk of the record made up of reinterpretations of jams from Versus Grain, by an eclectic crew of "remixers", including Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, Pale Sketcher, etc.) and former Record Of The Week-ers Legion Of Two, as well as Dead Fader, Ancient Methods, Devilman, Volt Music and Oyaarss, who all manage to retain the originals' beat heavy brutality and almost avant dancefloor destroying noise, while adding whole new dimensions, that make this easily as worthwhile as the original.
The record opens with Cloaks own reworking of Versus Grain's closer, and like the original, it's a lurching sprawl of super distorted crunch, weird industrial robotic whirs and buzz, lots of gristly static and blurred muted white noise, like the sound of some alien factory set to some dubbed out crumbling slowed down DHR beat. Which leads directly into Legion Of Two's version of "Against" which ends up sounding like it could have been plucked right off LO2's own Record Of The Week, with live drumming, wild dubbed out snares careening all over the place, thick undulating almost dubsteppy basslines, lots of super blown out synths, cascading decaying electronics, way groovier than the original, but totally spaced out and psychedelic at the same time, another heady chunk of industrial machine funk that kills. Broadrick takes on "Rust On Metal", and actually cleans it up a little, the original was claustrophobic, the sounds bleak and blackened, and while there is still a bit of a grim vibe, the beats are more skeletal, the melodies more synthy and swirly, and then about 2 minutes in, it explodes into something way more metal, churning industrial beats and chugging distorted riffing, not to mention howled dub drenched vox, total Godflesh territory for sure, peppered with bouts of skitter and droned out mesmer and finally finishing off in a blaze of white hot buzz.
Ancient Methods also dial back the crunch and robotic churn on their version of "R.F.I.D.", wreathing everything in a cloud of gristly static, strange processed vox, woozy low end rumbles, and then some pulsing dubby minimal techno beats, lots of clipped samples, truncated melodies, stuttery and staggery, weirdly hypnotic and off kilter, that over the course of its 9+ minutes is barraged by twisted sci-fi electronics, warm warped distorted guitar melodies, lush swirls of fuzzed out synth, more strange voices, that beat slipping from muted and minimal to speaker destroying block rocking crunch. "Sixmenace One" finds Cloaks imagining a first part to accompany the second that showed up on Versus Grain, and it gets a serious working over, even more damaged and noisy, super filthy and crusty and distorted, weirdly creepy and soundtracky, while ultimately just a gnarled ever shifting tangle of crumbling pulsing synths and swirling swaths of electronic hiss and some seriously brutal almost-beat heavy buzz. Oyaarss follows up with their version of "Sixmenace Two", which is drastically different, adding a weird ethereal almost shoegazey sheen to the proceedings, a super thick, slithery big beat fat bass dubstep, with some of the filthiest most distorted bass wobble ever, but melded to some dreamlike melodic shimmer not to mention some drifty harplike melody, for dubstep headz, this might be THEE jam here, we can't help but imagine this as a 12", and the sort of rib cage rattling dancefloor destroying damaged that would result. "Dead Fader" keep the spirit of the original "#00148", which opened Versus Grain, if anything, they just stretch it out, brighten it up a bit, strip away some of the murk, but add their own extra ingredients, which includes some twisted beats, some strange wailing synth melodies, not to mention all manner of synth squiggles, and grinding glitch. Devilman's "Against" again reinvents the original as something much more abstract, at least in the beginning, and buzzing, hissing, fuzzed out industrial creep, until the beat proper lurches into motion, and the track becomes a weirdly mesmerizing noise-dub groove, that lumbers and swaggers menacingly, until the last minute or so, where it seems to transform into some strange sort of post Bollywood whatthefuck, with all sorts of weird 'rewinds', chaotic drum programming, and cloying melodies, which go surprisingly well with the extremely dense and brutal buzz.
Finally, Volt Music finish things off with another version of "R.F.I.D.", which starts out all murky and staccato, before the song stumbles into motion, and unwinds like some super slow-motion gabber track, sped up this would be a pounding acid anthem, but here it's a maniacally mesmerizing rhythmic churn, laced with little bits of jungle-y filigree, not to mention all sorts of distorted and decaying FX.
Awesome stuff. And the sort of electronic music that should appeal to heavy music folks as well, dark, distorted, loud as fuck and so good.
This is another one of those records, that's almost too good, and too weird, to be true. Especially coming as it does from the Dead-Cert label, run by weirdo music obsessive Andy Votel. In fact, based on the description, AND the sound, we were pretty much convinced that this had to be Votel himself conjuring up some imaginary lost sonic artifact. How could it not be? Son Of Octabred is/was apparently a 'birthing' record, as in an album to assist/instruct with giving birth (?), recorded on primitive analog synths and 'originally broadcast' on a radio show in Anchorage, Alaska - its sound a strange hybrid of kosmische synthscapery, spaced out kraut-psych, minimal dronemusic, and percolating early electronica. But once again, whether it's all true or not, almost doesn't matter: if it IS true, what a ridiculous and impossibly WTF find, and if it's NOT, well, goddamn, total brilliant art prank / fictional sound conjuration.
The record begins with a female voice instructing the listener to breath and push, with some strangely poetic descriptions of having a baby, then a man's voice talks weirdly about 'his pregnancy', before in swoop some space synths, and we're off, on a cosmic journey, some alien planetarium show, swirling percolations, swooping FX, shifting textures, playful melodies, there's definitely a sort of John Carpenter / Klaus Schulze vibe, pulsing kraut-psych gives way to weird vocodered vocals, not singing so much as just humming/crooning more textures, and again if this is real, it's hard to imagine just flipping on the radio in the middle of the night and hearing THIS. Or, being born, and hearing it! Crazy.
The sound soon erupts into something much more sinister, thick swells of swirling shadowy rumbles, and staticky clouds of hiss, all over buried voices and keening melodies, some serious black ambience for sure, that sounds like birthing music for Rosemary's Baby. The flipside returns to the playful percolation of the opening, sounding a bit like Perrey & Kingsley, before devolving into a weird sprawl of dubby gamelan like percussion, and strangely processed abstract rhythms, all floating in the ether, before a Close Encounter synth melody surfaces, swopping wildly from speaker to speaker, the whole thing dizzying and seriously trippy, before once again drifting into darker sonic territory, some ominous shadowy drift, that eventually returns to the light, for a final bout of bouncy bloopy synthiness and one final burst of wild tangled psych-synth freakout. So cool, and so weird. Real or not, we love it! ----* ----* Highlights : ----*
Cleveland's Cloud Nothings began life as fuzzy jangle poppers, but even in those early days, the group displayed a knack for not just crafting killer hooks, but also for being pretty adept and serious psychedelic noisiness and blown out bombast, which all came to a head with their most recent full length, Attack On Memory, which was way darker and noisier than anything that came before. If anything, this new one splits the difference, still heavily indebted to that classic nineties indie/college rock sound, Cloud Nothings make it their own, crafting noisy, poppy gems that slip easily from hooky, fuzzy crunch, to wild, blown out shoegaze noise rock pound. Opener "Now Hear In" sounds like something you could have heard on the radio back in the day, roughed up a bit and doused in distortion. Which when we think about it pretty much describes the whole record. If you love that sound, and as we've established by now, most of us do, then Here And Nowhere Else is about as good as it gets, a perfect approximation of that sound, but cranked to high heaven, rife with impossible hooks, raspy vocal howl, wild tangled of buzzy guitars, sheets of noisy distortion, wild chaotic drumming, some tracks slowing it down a bit, but even those seem to always eventually explode into full on frantic and frenetic noise rock blowouts, that like on Attack On Memory, often verge on total emo/screamo, and all with a bit of gothy, gloominess running throughout, which means fans of Interpol, Ceremony, Holograms, Iceage and the like will dig this too.
Closing track "I'm Not Part Of Me" might be the catchiest jam here - which is weird, cuz what band tucks their catchiest potential hit way at the end of a record? A band like Cloud Nothings with hooks and potential hits to spare!
We loved this the very first time we played it, but with every listen we dig this record more and more, and for the noise pop nerds around aQ, this is fast becoming a contender for our favorite record of the year! Definitely a Record Of The Week.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
During a humid trip to Nashville in the summer of 1998, Jim had the fortune to catch a 30 minute garage-rock-dirge made earlier that day in a basement by the The Legendary Dave Cloud. With just a simple request for information / recordings posted here on the AQL and some patience, we gleefully present the debut album from Mr. Cloud. Calling him a drunken poet may situate Dave Cloud on too high of a pedestal, but drunk would certainly suffice. Nearly delusional songs of true love found during drinking binges and of the profound abjection from the hangovers & lonliness the morning after are crooned by Cloud with his hoarse cigarette damaged voice. Musically, Cloud pens grimy garage songs that wouldn't have been out of the repetoire of the V-3, the Velvet Underground, early Dead C, and most certainly The Shaggs. While the purposefully lo-fi qualities from Siltbreeze bands may be interpretted as an avant-garde disregard for acceptible production techniques, Cloud's aesthetic couldn't really be regarded as such due to the drunken naivete that seeps through the songs like spilt beer seeping through polyester. Cloud's backing band features members of Lambchop though you won't find any of the sugary dixie pop here. Sadly the 30 minute drone-dirge mentioned earlier is not one of the songs he will always sing, but the album is a worthy meditation on alcohol.
This record totally knocked us for a loop. And the thing is, I'm not entirely sure we can explain why. This is one of those rare records that is darn near indescribable. The label suggest Cloudland Canyon would appeal to fans of Boards of Canada, Animal Collective, The Dead C., Ash Ra Tempel, This Heat, Gong, most of which we can definitely see (maybe not the Boards Of Canada), there is a definitely a far out krautrock vibe, some classic long lost, extra damaged super freaked out sixties or seventies psychedelia, but filtered through modern technology. It's almost like some super computer a million years in the future began picking up these strange transmissions from the old Earth, German Oak, Faust, Amon Duul, but after traveling billions of miles and being interpreted by some alien machinery, those songs and sounds came out sounding, well, completely fucking nuts!!!
It's like some sort of laptopped Dead C / Ash Ra mash up. Rich clouds of metallic shimmer surround looped guitars, creepy chanted vocals are submerged in demented spacey FX, dense deconstructed pop songs emerge from the chaos, rife with swirling vocals, and layer after layer of drone and processed harmonies, fuzzy shopping mall synth warbles beneath straining lo-fi vocals, the whole thing run through some intense stereo panning. Suddenly the band burst into some stomping propulsive psych rock jangle before the whole thing splinters into a gorgeous expanse of tranquil ambience, beneath delicately finger picked guitars, everything always within a cloud of mysterious sonic events. Dense cinematic soundscapes of keening high end and minor key pizzicato strings melt into super fuzzed out classic rock jams, with horns and pulsing basslines, but buried in a dense swirl of My Bloody Valentine haze, with relentlessly squiggly riffing, buried vocals, a dizzying array of chaotic sound, tinkling chimes and little bits of percussion. Strange collages of warped warbly sound drift into weird seventies circusy prog with calliope like organ, moody riffing, and awesome male / female vocals, like some totally drug drenched unhinged Fleetwood Mac. Nearing the end of the sonic journey, the record devolves into huge stretches of squiggly analog synth, tangled and intertwined into fuzzy warped low end drones, squirming and buzzing with the different layers constantly shifting and slipping in and out and around each other. Woah. Gorgeously and incredibly fucked. And thus completely recommended!!
Two fantastic new releases from the Khrysanthoney label, elsewhere on this week's list, you'll find the latest from UK dreamo / screamo blackened bliss-pop combo Sleeping Peonies, and then there's this, the first full length from Pennsylvania one man shoegaze / blackgaze / blackbuzz bliss metal outfit Clouds Collide, and holy cow, the opener is maybe the blissiest black metal we've maybe ever heard, wintry winds over spidery minor key guitars, haunting and melancholic, warm shimmery chordal strum, and then suddenly, the song explodes in a gloriously prismatic blast of blown out beats, and blurred snowstorm riffs, all wreathed in a fuzzy cloud of crumbling shimmer, thick swaths of swirling sonic glimmer, and hazy smears of fragmented melodies, all tangled up into a softly having blackened dream pop psychedelia, before switching gears and slowing down to a darkly moody post rock lope, still wrapped in sheets of soft focus shimmer, harsh vokills surface at this point, but do nothing to distract from the pure buzzing blissiness of the sound. Fans of outfits like Alcest, Fen, and other post BM shoegazers will be in heaven.
Elsewhere it does get more metal, and more black, but even on tracks like "Endless Silence", with its shrieked vokills and brittle insectoid guitar buzz, the sound is still doused in FX, pushed WAY into the red, and blurred into indistinct black-gaze smears, and when things slow down, it gets all echo drenched and drifty, the guitars weightless and ethereal, the drums, booming and reverby way off in the distance. The record flits easily between pure dream pop shoegaze shimmer and wintry black buzz bliss outs, with most tracks settling somewhere perfectly right in between!
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES, housed in a blue parchment envelope, with a printed cardstock Japanese style obi, an 11" x 17" poster, an 8 page 5.5" x 8.5" booklet, the envelope hand decorated with metallic ink!
CLP is probably a new name to most everybody, but the group's pedigree might ring some bells, as one half of the duo used to do time in Funkstorung. The sound of CLP has very little on common with the IDM funk of Funkstorung, instead, the sound of CLP is a wild and kick ass mix of old school hip hop, Miami bass, crunk, electro, ghetto-tech and the sounds of the Dirty South. The result musically, is kinda nuts, the ultimate dance party, and quite possibly one of the coolest, and maybe best hip hop records we've heard in forever, equal parts Missy Elliott, Timbaland, 2 Live Crew, Hyphy, and fuck knows who else. The duo used Myspace to track down obscure and unknown rappers from all over the world, primarily in the US and South Africa, which just pushes it over the top.
Every track is different, but they all share some sonic similarities, beats that slip from skittery to block rockin, fuzzy basslines, blown out distorted synths, soaring strings, stuttery grooves, off kilter loops, and some hooks that kill, if this wasn't some obscure hip hop record on Shitkatapult, this would and SHOULD be all over the radio. And the rapping is all over the place too, from sultry and sinister to goofy and over the top, from robotic bark to woozy laidback druggy drawl, but it all works, perfectly. Instead of skits, there are some musical interludes, that end up sounding just as off kilter as the songs themselves.
Not sure what else to say, other than hip hop record of the year. Last year? This year? Probably both...
One of two discs vying for our personal dubstep disc of the year. The other is the recent Mordant Music disc, which we'll try to review next time, an unlikely collaboration between Mordant and the Skull Disco crew, and this, the first full length from mysterious atmospheric dubstep soundscaper Clubroot.
We know nothing about this guy (or these guys?), other than he takes that dubbed out skitter we love so much and sets it in expansive fields of swirling ambience, creeped out dronescapes and all manner of super evocative and gorgeously textural soundworlds. Where as most dubstep is super spare and stripped down, skeletal even, the sound here is lush and sprawling. Thick layers of synths whir and shimmer and buzz, deep swells throbbing and pulsing, everything hazy and gauzy and washed out, every song some sort of otherworldy dreamscape, shot through with some super bad ass bit of pounding churning dubstep stutter. The massive basslines and fluctuating synth buzz that usually adds texture to typical dubstep, here just becomes another element in Clubroot's mysterious mist shrouded sonic landscape.
The cover features a lonely tree, set atop a rocky outcropping, the sky dense with clouds, the picture all misty and hauntingly lonely seeming, which perfectly reflects the mood of the music here. Strip away the beats, and you'd still be left with an incredible bit of blackened new age swirl, of abstract kosmiche krautdrone, but add the beats, and these sounds become something entirely other. This is definitely not dancemusic, this is mind expansion music. Late night, lights off, starting at the stars drifting off, other dimension, spaced out, dream dub music.
Clubroot taps into the same darkside as Burial, and Kode9, and the more atmospheric beatmakers, but where those guys pull back before the fog grows to thick, Clubroot pushes forward, traveling through the dark forest, into some forbidden zone, some land lost in time, lost from time, a massive emptiness, as beautiful as it is lonely and ominous, and this is the soundtrack to that lost world. So intense and haunting and unlike any other dubstep, or electronic music even, that we've heard before. The rare sort of record that lets even the most jaded and heard-it-all listener get totally, and fantastically lost.
And if you need more than our effusive gushing praise, look no further than Fenriz, 1/2 of legendary black metal duo Darkthrone, a long time lover of techno and electronic music, who has this to say about Clubroot:
"This is the sort of soaring dubstep I'd never expect to come out of the US! I just transferred the adorable "Embryo" track to my MP3 player FAVES 09 list, as I am going tenting and swimming in a forest lake tomorrow with some connoiceur-friends [sic]. It's sleek and not nasty, the melodic kind and not the grimy. But wait a minute, it seems like the newest tracks are on first, as the last songs drift into some de-tranced balearic style, even with vocals stabs and 90s synths! Blimey."
And if you can't trust Fenriz on matters of dubstep, then who can you trust? WAY recommended. And quite possibly dubstep record of the year!
Final record from this totally devastating metal hardcore band from Kansas city. Ultra complex, crushing riffs, unbelievable guttural howls, just fucking amazing. Easily one of the best heavy bands of the last few years, and this record proves it once again. R.I.P.
Who would have thought we'd ever see a new Coalesce album, ever again? After a spate of unbelievable records, and a fairly acrimonious breakup, we figured we'd have to make do with Give Them Rope and Revolution In Just Listening and Functioning on Impatience, which hell, is the sort of 'making do' most bands would kill to be able to offer their faithful. But this new Coalesce pretty much picks up right where the last one left off, after a 10 year break, the sound is immediately recognizable, churning chugging super complex mathy post hardcore metal fury, stop start arrangements, lurching mosh worthy blowouts, the guitars massive, the drumming relentless, and the vocals, how can Sean Ingram still sound like this ten years later? Actually how can he even speak after a decade of vitriolic bellowing. But for all that stayed the same, a lot has changed in the decade since Revolution. On "The Comedian In Question", the band break down into a sort of droned out lope, and the vocals slip into some clear crooning, the sound is definitely sort of Alice In Chains, but on Coalesce it sounds so good. Great in fact.
Then there's the beginning of "Wild Ox Moan", a total lo-fi distorted blues jam, again with clean vox, the guitar clangy and clean, some slippery slide slipped in as well, before the band erupts into another furious pounding anvil to the skull. Long stretches of reverbed nylon string guitar butt up against some of the heaviest punishment these guys have ever doled out, which is saying something considering they're old enough to be the parents of most of the kids in the crowd (not counting us old guys), cool angular Drive Like Jehu high end guitar melodies wind around bizarre vocals and spill over into a weirdly groovy churn that sounds as much like Pantera as it does Coalesce, some stripped down jazzy moodiness, and at least one track that is so awesomely off kilter and slippery and dizzy, the whirling woozy guitars constantly causing the listener's head to spin, and while all the weird shit sticks out the most, it's really not the most prevalent stuff going on here, although the weirdness does seep into most of the more classic Coalesce sounding riffage, even so, the majority of this record IS in fact classic sounding Coalesce, just a bit more twisted, still heavy as fuck, and still weirdly catchy, maybe more so then ever, the weird stuff only makes it cooler and more fun.
Killer packaging too, beautiful silver and black-on-black digipak, with one of the most elaborate die cut booklets we've ever seen.
We sort of forgot how much we loved indie rock, but recently, there've been a handful of re-issues that definitely remind us what was so fucking great about that whole early nineties / college rock / DIY / indie rock scene. Most importantly the bands were just amazing. And they actually wrote amazing songs. Pavement, Guided By Voices and of course the Coctails. The Coctails had all the makings of a joke band, goofy instrumentation, a definite love of all things kitsch, they even performed in the beginning in cheesy yellow tuxedos as if they were the house band in some Catskills resort. The sound was sort of jazz, sort of lounge, a little bit pop. But the Coctails were unbelievably talented songwriters AND players. So whatever type of music they tackled, it sounded great, and eventually sounded like the Coctails and nobody else. Their 'sound' definitely leaned heavily in the jazz direction, but as they progressed, they became quite the pop songsmiths, and not the sort of pop you would always expect from a goofy bunch of dudes in a band called the Coctails, no, more a moody, brooding, dark and warm pop. Not that they couldn't goof it up and whip out some of the funniest silliest stuff you've ever heard, but they were capable of bringing a room of jaded indie rockers to their emotional knees if the mood suited them. Those of you who have never heard the Coctails, might remember a handful of amazing records by a guy named Archer Prewitt. Well Mr. Prewitt just so happened to spend his formative years in those very same Coctails. His sweetly melancholic sunny pop definitely had its roots in the Coctails later years. This box set is really well done. Collecting loads of tracks from their out of print albums, as well as ALL of their singles, compliation tracks (of which there were many) and even their contribution to They Might Be Giants's monthly cd club from way back when. The Coctails tended to experiment more when they weren't making albums, so the singles tracks tend toward the more goofy and fun and flat out silly, but the album cuts balance those out perfectly, with their dark melancholia and sunny jazzy hopefulness. Plus the booklet is immense, with all sorts of amazing art and Coctails ephemera (they had to be one of the best merchandised bands ever, they even had cloth dolls of each band member! And purchasers of this here box are offered the chance to order the whole set!!) including extensive notes on each track from the band. Comes in a cool popcorn box like slip-cover.
Once known simply as "the rust record", this is the debut recorded collaboration between AQ-fave sound artist Loren Chasse (id battery, Thuja, himself, etc.) and AQ-fave staffer Jim Haynes! Jim, known for his decay-oriented visual art, provided the
Of all the glitch guys, as I like to call them -- Noto, Komet, Byetone, and the entire Raster-Noton raster -- Coh's Ivan Pavlov, has always been the one to take the glitch into uncharted territory. See Coh's bizarre 'Love Uncut' record from a while back and his bizarre 'metal tribute' record 'Iron' which was decidedly non-metallic. So while this latest record is not necessarily a surprise, it is surprisingly beautiful and once again shows Coh to be truly original. The glitch takes a back seat on these 4 seasonal recordings. Instead the computer is used Oval-style, to take organic sounds and transform them. 'The Colour Of Beauty, Summer Is Red' is by far the most beautiful track Pavlov has ever recorded, with creaking swells of violin, warm and thick, with a definite 20th century classical vibe, lots of space and dynamics. Dreamy but also ominous. Quite reminiscent of Oval's 'Diskont', but chopped up and spread out into a glacial rhythm of throbs and pulses, dramatic swells and vaccuum like silences. So nice. 'Winter Brooding Underneath' is another winner, a massive drone sculpted from slowly bowed cello, huge, rumbling, slowly-shifting low end, with the timbre of the cello stretched as far as (in)humanly possible into an oscillating sea of lower register vibrations. Breathtaking. 'As Ripe As Autumn's Tears' is a totally spare pleak-scape of single reverb drenched piano notes ringing out into space, bookended by field recordings of rain. Skeletal and lovely. Finally, 'Springs Come Shooting: Make Love, Make War', is a Pavlov guitar solo, clattery and scratchy and noodly, but chopped and recontextualized into some decidedly non-guitar-like sounds. This track is as close as this record gets to actual 'electronica' or 'techno', with a steady, gradually mutating, electronic rhythm sounding a bit like a super lo-fi Kraftwerk.
Comes on MASSIVE 180 gram vinyl in a gorgeous, super thick gatefold sleeve, with a painting for each track.
As we've mentioned in the past, the music of Coh, aka Ivan Pavlov, is quite difficult to describe. Which is probably why he tends to be one of our favorites of the many modern electronic minimalists. He releases records on Raster-Noton, yet his sound manages to both embrace R-N's signature minimal glitch and click, while at the same time subverting it, creating something simultaneously warm and familiar, alien and totally original. Every record is thematically and sonically unique, whether he's collaborating with other musicians, or simply creating a song suite based on some random idea, even a whim, once it works its way through Pavlov's brain into the computer onto disc and into our stereo, the resulting sound is more often then not transcendent, minimal in sound sure, but with maximum impact, his music emotional and personal where others creating similar sounds are cold and clinical.
For Strings, Pavlov has decided to take the sounds of certain stringed instruments, which played some part in his musical upbringing, and in some way to enrich and expand those sounds, to twist and transform, allowing the instruments to be recognizable, and sound like they sound, but to create a whole new setting for those instruments. The focus here is on the 4 instruments that Pavlov played throughout his life: piano, guitar, saz and oud.
The opener is all piano, and sounds the most at home on Raster-Noton, simple melancholy melodies are suspended in smeared shimmers of reverb, the notes stretching, stuttering, blurring into washed out whirs of dreamy chords and long drawn out tones. Sounds bent and stretched, layered and allowed to hover in long expanses of distant high end flutter. Hushed and gorgeous, the digital manipulation deftly applied so as not to distract from the gorgeous hushed drift. Really quite lovely. The piano continues on into the second track, where the sounds are much more manipulated, looped and layered, but this time into a swirl of Melnyk-like flurries, which are augmented by a stuttery techno like pulse, the whole thing skittery and hypnotic, peppered with streaks of buzzy squelch, until the final few minutes when the beat drops out and the various notes are allowed to swirl like sonic snowflakes.
The next few tracks are like a suite, beginning with what is either a saz or a lute (sorry we can't tell for sure), locked into s super rhythmic strum, and processed into a propulsive minimal almost-techno, which is soon wrapped in thick sheets of low end buzz and glitch, almost synthy sounding fuzz, eventually building to an almost metal riff, all blown out and wreathed in crumbling distorted buzz, finally erupting into a confusional tangle of crunchy riff, processed hum and rumble, and Middle Eastern sounding melodies. This leads directly into a lumbering doomy digitized metal workout, the main riff grinding its way through clouds of swirling effects and smears of squelch and buzz, distant soaring sort-of-strings, all very dramatic, until the guitars fade, leaving just a skeletal rhythm, and super dramatic slow burning electronic swell and skitter.
The next track is all Middle Eastern melody, laced with bits of glitch, a muted electronic throb, a bit like a slightly more techno Muslimgauze, but as the track develops, the sound becomes more digital, the original melody chopped up and wrapped around a propulsive beat before fading out into a shimmer of pixilated piano, which gives way to the record closer, beginning again, with moody, simply strummed strings, before being swallowed whole by a massive buzzing electronic drone, gorgeous and layered and so thick, while the strings below continue to unfurl. The track gets all old school techno briefly, skittery and stuttery, clipped notes, until again, near the end, that howling buzz drenched drone returns, this time all chopped up and even more corrosive and blown out.
It sounds all over the map, and it is, but all the tracks, as disparate sounding as they are, slip in and out of each other so perfectly, a definitely sonic suite, with more in common than just the stringed source material. The second disc features a single 17 minute track, that starts out sounding like Machinefabriek, all dark bell like tones and deep blackened shimmers, soft whirs, stretched out almost-melodies, some strings do pop up part way through, sounding again quite Middle Eastern, and again wreathed in a brittle techno stutter, before a long drawn out stretch of near silence, and a brief coda of soft strings over distant drone. So awesome. Maybe the best thing we've heard from Coh, which is saying a whole lot.
And the packaging. Holy moly! Super elaborate, die cut fold out multi panel printed sleeve, the cds held in place by various slots and slits, revealing the curved silver edges of the discs as part of the design!
Never heard of Charles Cohen? Neither had we. Which is really not surprising, considering this composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer (he's one of the few Buchla masters in the world), managed to remain largely unknown outside of Philadelphia, where he spent the late seventies and eighties composing for dance performances and art installations, famously refusing to record, concerned with the 'ephemerality' of his music, and being somewhat of a recluse outside of his music making. But oh the music he made! In a world and time where pretty much any unheard record is considered reissue-able, very little of it truly is, and yet Cohen's music is so well deserving of a wider audience, especially considering how sonically prescient his music truly was.
A mix of musique concrete, kosmische new age, electronic krautrock, alien exotica and layered dronemusic, the sounds collected here are at once all over the map and unpredictable, but also all somehow also sonically linked. It's impossible to describe two discs' worth of Cohen's music in shorthand, but too daunting two go through each of the 22 tracks, one by one, but imagine, a fluid soundscape in constant flux: murky, lo-fi flurries of percussion wreathed in swirling electronics, almost like some alien gamelan - weird abstract dub, all glitchy and spaced out, almost industrial, but also sort of dreamy and ambient - very Kraftwerk sounding propulsive electro grooves, squelchy and shimmery, but hazy and psychedelically cosmic - Les Baxter like electro-exotica, maybe as envisioned by Nurse With Wound, and that's just the first four tracks. From there on out, it just gets cooler and weirder, more mysterious and even more abstractly beautiful.
"Sonomama" sounds almost like Asian folk music, again as re-envisioned by someone like the Residents, especially the second half when the sounds become more frantic and chaotic. Some tracks almost sound like eighties Carpenter soundtracks, check out the "Velcro Dance", which totally sounds like it could be playing as the credits roll on some old VHS tape, but then seconds later, there's the darkly delicate "Sunrise Women-Men", which almost sounds like Morricone, a wistful, cinematic sprawl, laced with muted melody and occasional percussion, before transforming surprisingly into something way more futuristic! At this point, we essentially are going track by track through the whole collection, but it's hard not to. Every track here is a mysterious gem, sonic surprises lurk around every corner, some short bursts, others, long, slow building epics, some playful and almost goofy, others somber and haunting, even sinister, but again, every second of sound here is utterly stunning.
There's tons more info in the liner notes, lots of rare photos and different writers and fellow composers offering their impressions of Cohen and his music, much of it truly fascinating, but like all great music, even knowing nothing about its provenance, doesn't take away from the magic and power of the sounds here. A truly fantastic discovery, and no doubt a contender for reissue of the year!
On one end of the Cold Cave spectrum, there is the blistering terror of low-fi electronics with sparse hints of new wave flecked through a sound better suited to Wolf Eyes; and on the other, Cold Cave can effortlessly toss out a darkly pop-eyed, minimal wave gem that wouldn't out of place next to Depeche Mode or Gary Numan. So far, Cold Cave (aka Wes Eisold) has not done us wrong no matter what he ends up producing. The hyper limited Etsel And Ruby 12" is of the latter, poppier sensibility, in the footsteps of the terminally catchy single The Trees Grew Emotions And Died from 2008. The production values here are a little higher than the gutter-punk scratchiness found on the Cremations collection; and while punchier drum machines and upfront vocals give Cold Cave a gloss with a broader appeal, we seriously hope that he doesn't leave the nastier sound behind.
The A side "Love Comes Close" is a jangly, jaunty number that could very well be a lost track from The Cure's The Head On The Door, with Eisold's croon almost sounding like Stephin Merritt. The first of two B sides finds Eisold handing over the vocal duties to an unknown female singer, whose detached, cold vocals fit perfectly with the Cure / Joy Division basslines laced around the darkened electronics. The cut is like the best Fad Gadget song you've never heard before, with an insistent electroid melody that builds and builds throughout the track. Great stuff. Limited to 300 copies!!! Available only from the label and right here at aQ!
Cold Cave have really been making the rounds as of late, but unless you were one of the lucky few to obtain some of their super limited vinyl only platters or their recent Cremations collection (which is still available), you may have been left out in the... cold. HAHA! But anyway, Love Comes Close is the first official Cold Cave record, though it does include the three songs (re-recorded?) off the band's disgustingly limited Etsel and Ruby 12" which we had for about 5 minutes, as well as the song "The Trees Grew Emotions And Died" from the ep of the same name, all of them winners. We are happy to report that this baby more than ably lives up to all the hype. It's not that the sound of Cold Cave is revolutionary or progressive... nay, in far less skilled hands, this could easily be filed under the "derivative shit" category, but Cold Cave's remarkable melodic sense and keen understanding of songcraft are so expertly handled that their tunes come off more like lost synth pop classics. It's actually a bit unbelievable just how darkly catchy these songs are, and how they will just pop into your head at random moments like they've been there for ages. Cold Cave's music is the perfect combination of everything that is great about '80s synth based music with none of the dated cheesiness, or maybe more appropriately, just the right amount of dated cheesiness. OMD styled melodies and uber dramatic vocals from the school of Ian Curtis meld with throbbing rhythms, awesome life denying lyrics, and a pronounced gothic element, but goth as interpreted by hardcore kids. All of these combined are enough to make Cold Cave stand out from the rest of the pack. Plus, you know it's gotta be good when various folks may *want* to dislike something but can't muster the hate in their hearts simply because it's so great.
The album kicks off with "Cebe And Me", with super minimal percussion and murky, distorted female vocals that weave around a repetitive synth buzz. This sets things up perfectly for the next track, "Love Comes Close," with CC mainman Wes Eisold's deadpan vocals and music that manages to be both upbeat and melancholy as hell. The real kicker with this one, however, is the fact that it is a DEAD RINGER for the melody in the infamous mirror dance scene in Silence Of The Lambs. So now all you dudes can fashion a mangina and prance naked in front of your mirror within the comfort of your own home, just like Buffalo Bill. "Life Magazine" utilizes a blown out buzzy keyboard to hold the foundation while more down to earth programming and amazing female vocals courtesy of one time Xiu Xiu collaborator Caralee McElroy help to make this maybe our favorite track on the album. A reedy little synth melody sits atop everything else, and the dreaminess of it all sends things way off into the clouds... Goddamn, it's so good.
Naming a song "Heaven Was Full" definitely sets the bar pretty high, you're pretty much obligated to make it awesome, and that's just what Cold Cave did with this one. Subsonic oscillations swirl below what sounds like wispy winds made by a synthesizer, accompanied by Eisold's low croon and some of the catchiest and most beautiful melodies on the album. The slow movement of this piece really strikes an emotional chord, it's a real downer, but it's so irresistible it hurts. "The Tree Grew Emotions And Died" features some cool clanky drum machines with staccato boy/girl vocals and an ever present layer of super blown out guitars (we think), with a nice, slightly bouncy keyboard melody carrying the song forward. Album closer "I.C.D.K." is a quirky yet slightly ominous dance number that will certainly keep many an ass shaking all night long, and when it's all over, you first instinct will be to put Love Comes Close on for another round.
Undoubtedly Cold Cave will have trouble escaping comparisons to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, and even the Magnetic Fields at times, and not without good reason. But the band's greatest strength is its ability to go beyond their influences and deliver music that is too amazing and well written to be ignored. If you don't dig it, it doesn't mean people will respect your supposed impeccable taste and appreciation for groundbreaking music... it means you're missing out.
Seven inches of awesomely depressive distortion drenched new wave downer pop. Imagine a couple of old school synth pop classics, dipped in a vat of white noise, then rolled around in shards of fractured synth buzz and crumbling distortion, a morose and melodic blast of blown out noise-wave, a corrosive chunk of Cure-meets-Whitehouse or New Order-meets-Wolf Eyes. The surface is a prickly wall of in-the-red lo-fi fuzz, a curtain of soft focus blacknoise, but just below that surface lurks a secret heart of classic eighties new wave, the programmed rhythms, the swirling synths, the deep dramatic vocals, but taken together, this is everything we always wanted new wave to be, harsh and heavy and dark and deliriously catchy, buzzy and brutal and abrasive but still fuzzy and hooky and weirdly melodic. The B side takes CC's noisy new wave even further out, the sound generously doused with heaps of that blissy Tim Hecker-ish blur of which we can never get enough.
We've been so focused on the Paysage D'Hiver reissues lately, that we've barely had time to dig into the other releases on Cold Dimensions and Kunsthall, but there are at least two that we definitely need to highlight, the latest Trist, which we'll review soon, and this one right here. Melancholie2, from German one man band Coldworld, quite possibly, one of the best depressive black metal records we've ever heard. Although defining Melancholie2 as a depressive BM record might be a bit reductive. It will make more sense, read on...
A dizzying mix of lilting melancholia, furious blackened blasts, epic morose arrangements, awesome drumming (a definite shortcoming in most bands), kick ass and ridiculously catchy riffing, and most importantly, incredibly evocative atmosphere and ambience, even when a song is buzzing along frantically, beneath the surface there is always some sort of drifting crystalline melody, or whirring drone, or chant like vocal line, it sounds a bit confusing, but the mix is magical.
The sound on Melancholie2 is so dynamic, so majestic and heavy, no lo-fi boom box recording here, the guitars are massive, thick and crunchy and buzzy, the vocals raw and primal, the keyboards and synths lush and shimmery, the drums somehow perfectly audible amidst all the buzz. And as with most black metal records, buzz is a key component, and here that buzz is all encompassing, warm and expansive, coating everything in its warm embrace.
The slower tracks are definitely Burzumic, the lumbering riff, the plodding rhythm, underpinned by a gorgeous keyboard melody, the midtempo tracks are like a less weird Lifelover, the music hooky, and weirdly poppy, but still grim and black, slipping from melodic lilt to intense speaker shredding blowout, rare that a band, or man as the case may be is equally adept and crafting doomy dismal blackness AND intense blasting black metal. The ambient tracks are surprisingly effective, moving and lovely, most black metal bands use cheesy synth sounds, but here, those parts sound like antique music boxes, or the soundtrack to a soft snowfall in some forgotten forest, dark, and haunting, but definitely beautiful and breathtaking, only moreso when they lead directly into another intense burst of blackness.
Some of the tracks are dangerously poppy, but the band manages to pull it off, channelling the sweeping sound of Katatonia, but adds some truly bizarre, almost robotic sounding vocals, which definitely sounds goofy, but in fact, the effect is anything but. It's more some sort of abstract alien doom, that is truly creepy and otherworldly. A few of the tracks are gorgeous sprawls of washed out sorrowful doom, but at least one shifts part way through into a strange pounding bit of minor key midtempo black metal, before slipping back into that depressive plod.
It's really hard to do this music justice. It's at once so familiar, embodying so much of what we already love about this sort of music, at the same time, it manages to sound unlike anything we've heard before, every song manages to be both heavy and wistful, depressive, but weirdly rocking, as a whole it's an incredible, expansive song suite, culminating in the final track, a skittery glitched out ambient landscape, bits of static and hiss drift between simpler percussion, and a shuffling rhythm, moody minimal guitar, slightly twangy, all draped over a swoonsome bit of minor key drone, with a crunchy metallic middle, before slipping back into more skittery melancholic drift. So goddamn good.
Quite possibly one of our new favorite records, black metal or otherwise!
Another gorgeous release, both visually and sonically, from Idea records, this time from one of our favorite composers, Jonathan Coleclough. Coleclough has been responsible for some of the most beautiful drone records we have ever heard, and along with occasional partner Andrew Chalk produced one of Aquarius' all time favorite recordings, the breathtaking Sumac. Casino is the second entry in Idea Records series of unaltered field recordings and features two sidelong recordings, presented in their raw, unedited, and unprocessed form. Side one is a recording of a casino in Las Vegas and is a woozy, hypnotic wash of overlapping melodies swirled into a dense polyphony, the clicking and clattering of coins, the whir of slot machines and the rumble of muted conversations. While not necessarily soothing by themselves, all of those disparate elements blend into a dreamy, shimmery soporific whole. Side two is a recording of tree frogs in Antigua and displays a similar, albeit much simpler pattern as the Casino recordings, with a litany of high end squeaks over warbly lower pitched chirps all over a dense bed of shimmery distant scree. The accompanying cd further demonstrates the sonic similarities between the two recordings, by gradually mixing and crossfading the pleasing din of the casino into the latenight clamour of chirping and croaking frogs, and then eventually into the sound of crashing surf. The lp is on audiophile 220 gram vinyl, and the lp and cd are housed in a nice, thick gorgeously designed sleeve!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Released a few years back as a one-sided piece of vinyl, Jonathan Coleclough and Andrew Chalk's "Sumac" has been one of those hidden gems within the deep listening realms of music that has continuously amazing us. Fortunately, "Sumac" has re-emerged from obscurity with this lengthy 70 minute cd version. Andrew Chalk is a veteran of the noise / drone scene who has recorded with Organum, Ora, and Feral Confine. Working with upstart dronologist Jonathan Coleclough, Chalk has conjured a breathtaking memser of bowed metal wires, cymbals, and other pieces of metal with shifting chunks of backward masked slow aerated sound. "Sumac," shrouded in a glistening darkness, is one of the all-time great drone records.
Really excellent Czech prog rock from 1973. Collegium Musicum were an instrumental organ-bass-drums trio in the best classically-influenced tradition. In other words, E.L.P.!!! This live album (their best release) is full of extended, virtuoso soloing from all three members. Energetic, kinda heavy, sometimes happy, sometimes dark, great music. Full-on '70s prog with a nice Eastern-European vibe. And we love the cover shot! (Not new, but we got a couple and wanted to list it, along with the equally awesome Fermata disc, for the Iron Curtain prog freaks we know populate our mailing list!)
Comparing a band no one has ever heard of to Neutral Milk Hotel, right out of the gate, is usually the kiss of death. NMH are such an untouchable entity at this point, that they barely qualify as indie rock, or whatever you want to call them. They are Neutral Milk Hotel, and nothing else. And in their wake of course have come a million wannabes, very few of them coming anywhere close.
So while The Comas don't necessarily sound like NMH, they do share some common sonic characteristics, especially the weird crunchy harmonic soaked electric guitars, that sound acoustic half the time, and drive the songs ALL of the time. The second we threw this on, first thing we thought was NMH, but only for a second, as the record soon sprawled into all sorts of other sonic avenues. We also hear plenty of Flaming Lips, as well as a ton of the Swirlies. And if you're anything like us, Neutral Milk Hotel + the Flaming Lips + Swirlies = our new favorite pop record! But not super new, this came out last year, but we only just discovered it recently and have been listening to it nonstop.
The aforementioned crunchy guitars, super distorted processed leads, wild blown out drumming, scratchy raspy emo boy vocals, soaring angelic female vocals, cool off kilter arrangements, swooshing effects, and HOOKS galore. And while we may have been listening to this record over and over endlessly, more often than not, it's the opening track "Red Microphones", that gets locked on repeat, sounding like a super charged fuzzy Elephant 6 power pop freakout, easily one of the catchiest jams of the year. Of any year.
WAY recommended for all pop kids, or any one needing to feed their jones for smart rambunctious crunchy fuzzy pop.
A brand new, short, sharp blast of rhythmic punk rock weirdness from these Florida miscreants. Four songs, fifteen minutes, and more brutality than you can shake a stick at. The first track is a stretched out hardcore/krautrock collision. Like a super heavy Laddio Bollocko or Born Against covering This Heat, all stuttering rhythms and jagged guitars. Then two minute-or-so long tracks that scrape your earhole clean, before the finale, a damaged electronic 'song' that ends the whole thing on a severely tweaked note! Nice. Nice gory colorful comic book artwork too.
Remember the old days, when if you sang about suicide, or even hinted at suicide in your songs, dipshit kids all over the world would listen to your records and kill themselves, and then their parents would sue you and ultimately lose since it's absurd to blame anyone but the kids or their parents. We always joked about having songs called 'You Suck, Give Up And Kill Yourself' or 'Nobody Likes You, You Might As Well Die' and stuff like that. But a lot sure has changed since the old days. Movies are more violent, TV is more nasty, music and especially lyrics are way more extreme. You have to go soooo much further to even seem the least bit shocking or offensive. This band just reminded me of how cool it would have been 'back then' to have a band called Commit Suicide. No beating around the bush, no backward masking, no subtle lyrics, just a big 'kill yourself' sort of band name! And in keeping with the misanthropic band name, Commit Suicide spew ugly gobs of grinding death metal, or metallic grindcore with lots of blazing guitars, chugging downtuned riffs, insane blast beats, stop start ultra complex songs and glass-gargling cookie monster vocals. Good stuff.
We got a very small handful of these, the last copies in fact, released as an exclusive for the Stella Natura festival, which took place a few weeks back in the woods up near Lake Tahoe, and featured a crazy collection of bands performing on stages set up in the forest. Some of the performers included Esoteric, Stargazer, Sutekh Hexen, Saturnalia Temple, Ash Borer, Hell, Aldebaran, Dispirit, Hexvessel, Kinit Her, Loss, Knelt Rote and a bunch more.
This document of local experimental ambient doom-drone outfit Common Eider (which now boasts our very own Andee on drums), features four lengthy tracks, and documents CEKE's shift into darker realms, featuring Andy Way from Sutekh Hexen on vocals, CEKE's usual haunting arrangements of ritualistic chorales, and swoonsome viola drones, are augmented by harsh, whispered vokills, that occasionally erupt into near demonic shrieks.
The opener, "Uksur" is a dark ritualistic incantation, that fuses black ambience to Arvo Part like sweeping epic-ry, infusing that hybrid with a blackened malevolence, the whole thing blurred into a darkly dreamy, ashen sonic sprawl. "As The Soil Rises Up Past Our Bodies" continues the descent into darkness, layered vocals drift atop a bed of tape hiss and distant rumbles, meditative and liturgical, a harrowing and haunting soundscape that evokes barren wastelands, crumbling cathedrals and black skies casting entire civilizations in shadow, the vocals slipping into a higher register for the final movement, adding a dramatic pathos to the proceedings. Also included is an excerpt of the fantastic "Sense Of Place", which was released via aQ as a super deluxe book/cd/dvd combo (later as a stripped down bookless version), chronicling the building of a cabin in Alaska, the music split into two parts meant to be played simultaneously. And finally there's "Caribou People", which is anchored by a dreamy, softly reverbed guitar loops, and gradually blossoms into a beautifully brooding dirge, laced with clouds of buzz drenched noise guitar, woozy Spacemen 3 like basslines, and minimal percussion, all whipped up into a wildly psychedelic squall, that fades into a hazy druggy drift. Fantastic.
And, fantastic packaging - the tape is housed in a multi panel, pocketed mini sleeve, hand silkscreened, bundled with a charred block of wood, the wood silkscreened with the CEKE sigil, the tape, the sleeve, and the wood, wrapped in a silkscreened oversized slipcover, held shut with a printed sticker. SUPER LIMITED. Last copies ever. So act fast if you want one... Mailorder folks, be aware that 'cause of the size and weight of the charred wood block, this will count as more than one item (which will probably only matter if it's all you were to order), so media mail or UPS will be your best domestic shipping options.
It's tough to resist a black metal record that is, according to the label: "an ambitious and profound concept album about the "spleen", the suffering of everyday life". Hmmm. Do they really mean the spleen? Does the spleen represent the suffering of everyday life? Weird. Guess they must be archaically referencing the melancholy humor, not the internal organ. But what do you expect? These Italian miserablists have crafted a single massive 64 minute epic, divided into eight movements, each flowing smoothly into the next, a sprawling doomic depressive emotional black metal, that spends as much time soaring majestically, or drifting melodically as it does blasting grimly.
The perfect mix of classic old school doom, a la My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost, and the more modern depressive folk infused black metal like Drudkh as well as plenty of darkened suicidal buzz (think Shining, Forgotten Tomb). Bleak and austere, the guitars seem to weep and moan, the melodies mournful and emotional, the vocals an anguished wail, a deep bellowing howl more than a black shriek, the drums relentless, even the midtempo parts underpinned by frenetic double kicks, all very moody and evocative, sweeping long stretches of epic blackened doom, separated by lilting clean guitar folk interludes as well and bursts of furious blackness, even some gnarled bits of mathy Deathspell style weirdness, but through it all runs a weary black sonic stream, a melodic thread that turns these songs into one epic songsuite, a gorgeous sprawling expanse of doom-ed melodic blackness.
Finally back in print, 'Little Johnny' is the only Company Flow record that counts. Their first, 'Funcrusher', hinted at what was to come but didn't really stand the test of time, weak beats with silly samples and an overall lightweight sound. 'Little Johhny' is ALL instrumental and features some of the best hip hop production EVER (courtesy of DEF JUX main man El-P!). All the stuff we love about Cannibal Ox records and Mr. Lif records comes down to one thing, El-P's crazy ass production. Timbaland for the backpacker set. Big stuttering beats, distorted haunted house basslines, fucked up samples and a wicked ear for arranging them all into, brutal, funky, sinister futuristic hip hop. All you who flipped over the Cannibal Ox record NEED this.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Our first experience with the Comsat Angels was on an old old Silkworm record. Silkworm covered the Angels' brilliant "Our Secret" and it immediately became out favorite song on the record. And of course hearing that cover sent us on a mad quest to find some actual Comsat Angels records. Ended up that records by these Sheffield, England post-punks were pretty damn hard to come by. Managed to find some later era stuff but it just wasn't the same. So we were super excited by this 4 cd collection that compiles their first 3 albums, Waiting For A Miracle (1980), Sleep No More (1981), and Fiction (1982) all with extra tracks and B sides, as well as a fourth disc of unreleased rarities! So what do they sound like you ask? Well, think early eighties post punk / new wave, with lots of jangly guitar, chiming harmonics, super effected drums, fuzzy fafisa organs, reverbed vocals, but with lots of Factory records gloom and doom. Dark and bass heavy, minor key and melancholy, grey and overcast and so goddamn good. The songs sort of meander and build, with vocals over simple bass and drum passages, flecked with fuzzed out keyboards and punctuated by occasional guitar skronk and spacy swoosh. Repetitive and hypnotic and ultra moody. The vocals are rich and full reminding us of bands like the Fixx or Modern English, but they take on a whole different cast when nestled in the Angels' depressive and dark-skied sonic world. Sometimes they sound like a suicidal Elvis Costello on quaaludes or maybe the Jam if they recorded for Factory. Or a slightly more upbeat / punk rock Joy Division. All you folks who have been getting way into this resurgence of eighties musical culture: industrial, electro, death disco, Factory, DFA, whatever, should definitely check these guys out. You can hear so much of that stuff in these guys, but it's so much darker and grittier and genuine, and the songs are so depressing and intense and catchy. Been listening to this non-stop since we got it in!
Packaged in a weird (but kind of cool) plastic DVD style case, and pressed on black cds (which we originally assumed to be cd-r's but have been assured that they are indeed cds) and limited to 2000 copies worldwide, so we're not sure how long we'll have these and how many more we'll be able to get!
What has to be our favorite British pagan folk psychedelic prog rock album ever (in other words, quite possibly our favorite album ever, period!) is finally available again on cd, and in a gorgeous Japanese mini-lp gatefold sleeve to boot, with the disc itself all state-of-the-art remastered, sounding great.
THIS RECORD SCARES US. Hearing it is like stumbling upon some forbidden ancient ritual that scares you to death. You stand paralyzed, too afraid to look away. Comus's singular, frightening sound and violently poetic lyrics have kept them from taking their rightful place alongside Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, and the rest of Britain's psychedelic folk royalty.
And we don't write the words psychedelic folk royalty without a certain amount of trepidation. At first glance Comus would seem to fit squarely in the Ren-Faire camp: bongos, flute, oboe, 12-string guitar, and no drummer. But never has the whole of a band so completely defied its parts; their sound is as mesmerizing as it is repulsive. Upon the record's initial release, one British music journalist wrote that she "didn't get past the first track, which sounded like a cross between a frenzied version of the witches chorus from Macbeth, and Marc Bolan being squeezed to death." Funny thing is, that's a fairly apt description. Tales of murder, rape, insanity, and witchcraft unfold amid a swirling abyss of seething acid folk. Squalls of shamanistic wailing jut uncomfortably from serene, tranquil melodies; guttural growls battle a delicate angelic chorus, echoing the violent struggle of the lyrics. Flutes, hand drums, acoustic guitars, and a violin clamber atop one another in a chaotic melee, creating a pagan folk not unlike that of The Wicker Man soundtrack gone totally bonkers.
Although the band has been resolutely ignored by mainstream music fans, the press, and the majority of the underground, a small rabid following has kept a reverential vigil beside the corpse of Comus.
Nurse with Wound cronies Current 93 modeled their '90s sound after '70s British folk, Comus especially. They even went so far as to cover "Diana," Comus's only single, on their album Horsey. Swedish progressive black metallers Opeth have always been outspoken about their love of Comus. Their acclaimed 1998 album was called My Arms, Your Hearse, after the lyrics of "Drip Drip" (on First Utterance). And it's not surprising. This record is so powerful and frightening and totally devastating even 30 years later.
And never would I have thought that a record as old as me, with flutes and bongos fer chrissakes, could be so absolutely malevolent, both sonically and lyrically! But like I said, this record scares us. And we know you like to be scared too!
We were hoping that this new cd edition would include the two bonus tracks from from an early single that the Italian vinyl reissue included as a bonus 12", but such is not the case. Oh well. Still ranks as one of our all time favorites.
We're not sure which is more exciting, the first new music from legendary UK seventies acid folk legends Comus in FORTY YEARS, or a lost track, from back in the day, a song from the never released (or recorded) follow up to the godlike First Utterance, a song never heard by anyone outside of the band before NOW. Thankfully, this new record from this aQ revered combo gives us both, three brand new songs, and one, that aforementioned legendary lost recording. Our very own Andee actually wrote some of the liner notes for this release (alongside some by Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth), specifically talking about that long lost track, so we figured we might as well just reprint that part here (more on the new tracks afterwards):
"For those of us who consider Comus' debut album First Utterance the pinnacle of psychedelic seventies demonic acid folk (and we are quite suspicious of anyone who doesn't), the prospect of a lost second record is nearly too much to even imagine. And the idea that such a record was written, and performed, yet never recorded, is nearly heartbreaking. While subsequent recordings from the band veered into much poppier and more commercial territory, the Comus faithful continued to believe in the existence of an elusive song suite, forever convinced that there had to have been more, an untapped reservoir of dark sonic energy, the unleashing of which was held at bay by unscrupulous record label executives and their profit driven machinations, or even more ominously, those songs were in fact actually recorded and hidden away in some sort of dusty vault. And while the truth may be less sensational and conspiratorial than we perhaps imagined, the Comus faithful have indeed finally been rewarded, with this, a sprawling almost classical sounding psychedelic folk epic, unearthed after nearly 40 years, a fragment of the never completed follow up to First Utterance, the Malgard Suite, which offers a glimpse of what might have been, a fork in time's path untaken, an alternate timeline in which the band continued along that selfsame dark path, the sinister sound of First Utterance expanded upon, less immediately maniacal and harrowing, more expansive and lush, the vocals intricate and intertwined over swirling strings, and delicate crystalline guitars, fluttering flutes and the moaning melodies of the bassoon (played by Lindsay Cooper, who would go on to join art rockers Henry Cow post Comus). And while there's plenty going on here that foreshadows the sound of Henry Cow, there is also a darkly classical vibe, with much of the Malgard Suite sounding a bit like a more diabolical Prokofiev. Those elements are woven deftly into that classic Comus sound, frenzied and fraught with drama one second, soaring and majestic the next, always lush and lovely and dreamily psychedelic. And even in this, which is quite possibly the only existing recording of the Malgard Suite, a rough raw live performance captured on a handheld cassette player, it's impossible to deny the power and emotion in the music, a lyrical sonic fever dream, delivered in this mysterious missive from another time, lost for decades and resurfacing only now, and convincing us, the Comus faithful, that it was worth the wait."
So yeah, Comus fanatics will pretty much need this for just that track. There's also a spoken word intro from band leader Roger Wooten, describing the providence of that track, when and how it was recorded, and how it came to be rediscovered. And it's well worth the price of admission on its own. Which brings us to the new material, and while we have to admit we were a little wary of new songs, especially after FORTY years, our fears were definitely unfounded, cuz for the most part, these new songs sound like they could have come straight from the First Utterance sessions. Sure, some things are different, the vocals are maybe not quite as frenzied and maniacal, but they still sound pretty incredible, and the female backup vox still sound as harrowing and haunting as before. And the music, still so lush and layered and dense, and yeah, a bit demonic, incredible guitar playing, intricate finger picking, wild hand drumming, mournful violin, fluttering flute, the songs drifting into the same sort of dark psychedelic jam territory as those old classics, the lyrics appropriately morbid, the production lush and lovely, the sax being perhaps the only real difference, adding a different dimension to the sound, but it still sounds like Comus, classic Comus at that, and no one sounds like Comus, now or then, and we have to say, these new tracks were worth the wait as well!
Let's get this out of the way first: most folks around these parts consider Comus' First Utterance to be the greatest seventies pagan tribal folk prog psych freakout record ever. Hard to debate that. But among those folks, about 99 percent also consider First Utterance to be one of the greatest records ever, regardless of genre! One listen and you'll be convinced. Or you'll run away screaming in terror. Either way, it's hard to not be totally blown away and / or thrillingly confused by the mad musical world of Comus.
First Utterance has now been reissued a total of six times now (by our count, with maybe yet another edition on the way!) but this UK import double cd version marks the very first time that the three tracks from the pre-First Utterance maxi-single (i.e. the bonus 12" ep included with the lp reissue) has been released on cd as well. AND this also includes another totally unreleased bonus track from the First Utterance sessions! Holy crap! Every time a new cd reissue would be announced, we'd be thinking to ourselves "please please please include the extra tracks..." but somehow it never happened. Until now! That should be enough to have you Comus obsessives and seventies psych prog freeks all in a tizzy, but that's not all. Also included is their second album released a few years later after the band reformed, as well as a final solo single from Comus frontman Roger Wooten. But we'll talk about that stuff in a moment. First, let's explain just what it is about First Utterance that has us so excited!
THIS RECORD SCARES US. Hearing it is like stumbling upon some forbidden ancient ritual that scares you to death. You stand paralyzed, too afraid to look away. Comus's singular, frightening sound and violently poetic lyrics have kept them from taking their rightful place alongside Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, and the rest of Britain's psychedelic folk royalty.
And we don't write the words psychedelic folk royalty without a certain amount of trepidation. At first glance Comus would seem to fit squarely in the Ren-Faire camp: bongos, flute, oboe, 12-string guitar, and no drummer. But never has the whole of a band so completely defied its parts; their sound is as mesmerizing as it is repulsive. Upon the record's initial release, one British music journalist wrote that she "didn't get past the first track, which sounded like a cross between a frenzied version of the witches chorus from Macbeth, and Marc Bolan being squeezed to death." Funny thing is, that's a fairly apt description. Tales of murder, rape, insanity, and witchcraft unfold amid a swirling abyss of seething acid folk. Squalls of shamanistic wailing jut uncomfortably from serene, tranquil melodies; guttural growls battle a delicate angelic chorus, echoing the violent struggle of the lyrics. Flutes, hand drums, acoustic guitars, and a violin clamber atop one another in a chaotic melee, creating a pagan folk not unlike that of The Wicker Man soundtrack gone totally bonkers.
Although the band has been resolutely ignored by mainstream music fans, the press, and the majority of the underground, a small rabid following has kept a reverential vigil beside the corpse of Comus. Nurse with Wound cronies Current 93 modeled their '90s sound after '70s British folk, Comus especially. They even went so far as to cover "Diana," Comus's only single, on their album Horsey. Swedish progressive black metallers Opeth have always been outspoken about their love of Comus. Their acclaimed 1998 album was called My Arms, Your Hearse, after the lyrics of "Drip Drip". And it's not surprising. This record is so powerful and frightening and totally devastating even 30 years later.
And never would we have thought that a record as old as us, with flutes and bongos fer chrissakes, could be so absolutely malevolent, both sonically and lyrically! But like we said, this record scares us. And we know you like to be scared too! One of our ALL TIME FAVORITE RECORDS EVER!!!
So yeah, there it is. Well worth it for First Utterance alone, and the First Utterance era bonus tracks (especially when you consider this version is a buck cheaper than the single disc, non-bonus-track havin' Japanese import version). But you also get, for the first time on cd, Comus' second album To Keep From Crying (1973), as well as the post-Comus "Fiesta Fandango" solo single from Wooten. Pretty exciting stuff for Comus fanatics indeed, but be warned, the Comus found on To Keep From Crying bears very little resemblance to the Comus of First Utterance. Some would go so far as to say that where FU is one of the best records ever, TKFC is perhaps one of the worst...yet not without its charms. Not sure if it was a bid to find pop success, or just a case of lightning already having struck once, but TKFC is not malevolent or really all that intense, instead it's a very light, very jaunty, lush seventies UK pop record, a little glam, a little Beach Boys, a little Free Design, a little Eno, not bad (well, some of it isn't), but not really all that good. It's as if the original Comus were given entirely different drugs (not bad trip acid but something more "happy") and were forced to attempt to make a Top 40 hit. You can still tell it's them, though (the vocals are just as tweaked as before) so it's pretty darn strange. A few of the songs are quite nice acid folk numbers, just not as dark as the nightmarish folk found on FU. But some of the other tracks, well, they're at least amusing in a so bad it's good kind of way. Even the band members themselves in the liner notes talk about how much they dislike that record now. Andee even bought the original LP a few years back on eBay, even though the description warned "Not as good as First Utterance." Who cares? he thought, it was ANOTHER RECORD BY COMUS!! But alas he too soon discovered for himself that it was no First Utterance. While almost any record would pale when set up against First Utterance, TKFC was a particularly watered down follow up, and outside of that equally weak solo single, that was the end of the band.
Song To Comus' booklet contains lots of photos and amazing liner notes, which include this tantalizing and totally frustrating tidbit: before TKFC, there was actually a Lord Of The Rings inspired suite of songs (a proper follow up to First Utterance) already written called Malgaard, that the band had begun performing live but never got around to recording! We flipped when we read about that. Can you imagine? Sadly, it just wasn't meant to be. And they also never recorded their live version of "Venus In Furs", either (apparently Comus started out doing lots of VU covers!). Ah well. But still, we're more than happy with the amazing musical malevolence Comus left as their legacy.
So those of you who haven't discovered Comus, what else can we do to convince you that you NEED this record? Folkies will love it, but it's plenty dark and creepy and sinister enough for all you metalheads, and way weird enough for all you experimental music lovers. And of course Comus obsessives (like Andee and Allan) who already have multiple versions of First Utterance will for sure need this one as well, probably for the curiousity factor of the second album, just to satisfy your all consuming love of Comus, but certainly to finally have the bonus 12" on cd and DEFINITELY for the unreleased First Utterance outtake "All The Colours Of Darkness"! Let your pagan prog rock psych folk freek flag fly!
Someone at aQ commented recently, when they discovered there was a stoner doom / sludge outfit called Conan, that it was just too easy, too obvious. But we're not sure they realized this horde of UK stoner sludgelords play "caveman battle doom", and thus, what else could you call your, band really? Especially when it sounds exactly like what Conan evokes. Shirtless warriors, painted up for battle, marching in formations to destroy and decimate, personally, we add a sort of futuristic twist, so they're actually cyborg warriors, trudging across the scorched surfaces of alien planets, onward into battle, but onward very very very very slowly.
The sound of these battles, or at least the music these cyborg warriors march into battle to, is all downtuned riffery, knuckle dragging caveman drum plod, churning tarpit death march creep, lumbering, stumbling heaviness, slow and low that is most definitely the tempo, tranced out and droney, psychedelic for sure, like an even more zoned out Electric Wizard, the vocals though are a bit surprising, not metallic shrieking, or cookie monster gurgles, instead it's bellowed and a little operatic, a sort of epic croon, that reminds us a lot of Harvey Milk, and gives Conan a whole different vibe than their doom/sludge brethren, more musical in a way, but also just more strange, and strangely more epic. Some of the tracks crank up the tempo a bit, others get sort of mathy and noisy, some get sort of Sabbathy, adding a bit of stonery swing, and still others get super psychedelic, adding swirls of FX, but ultimately, and inevitably, the sound always settles back into a gloriously head nodding, gut churning, rib cage rattling, riffy plod. The song titles ("Gravity Chasm", "Altar Of Grief", "Horns For Teeth", "Crown Of Talons", "Foehammer", "Total Conquest") and the smoke shrouded demon warrior cover art just seals the deal.
