Finally! A new record from one of our favorite purveyors of kosmische kraut-psych and spaced out synthscapery, Expo '70! AND it's on one of our favorite labels, Essence (along with a new one from Japanese psych crew Up-Tight, elsewhere on this week's list). And while we'll have the standard version of this new Expo '70, this is in fact a PRE-ORDER for the super deluxe, super fancy, handmade BOX SET version, which comes not only with a bonus disc, but also housed in a crazy pyramid shaped box. It's limited to 99 copies and that's IT. We might be able to get 20, but we're only getting as many as we get pre-orders for, so if you want one, order it now, we'll get them in sometime in the next few weeks, and they can either ship with your current order, or on their own. You will be charged for the box now, but then the shipping will be sorted out when we actually send the box (and it'll ship by weight, not as 1 item). And if you're already a fan, you're definitely gonna want one of these, the pyramid box is super striking, psychedelic inks and textures, in a carefully constructed 'handmade cosmic pyramidal boxset', that unfolds revealing still more artwork, and along with the new record proper, it also includes an exclusive bonus album, a cd-r called All Hues From Beneath A Velvet Cloud, and is ONLY available in this box. So needless to say, Expo nerds grab one before they are gone.
As for Virtually From The Unknown, it's another gorgeously sprawling cosmic sonic missive, the opening track clocking in at 31 minutes, a smoldering slow burning epic, all swirling synths, cascading keyboard textures, minimum motorik drumming, layers and drones, the sound eventually building to a dark dolorous psych-kraut drift, and then exploding into some seriously muscular space rock, all deep rumbling drones, powerful drumming, thick almost SUNNO))) like riffage, eventually launching into a full on navy psych blowout, all wild drum damage and thick squalls of freakout guitar, tethered to a furious galloping groove. Worth it for that track alone for sure, but there's of course more. The stonery psych of "Closet Full Of Candles" is a loping space doom juggernaut, with some wild distort leads, and some sick, thick bass buzz, sorta like Kyuss via Hawkwind, slowly working its way up to another in-the-red crescendo. Finally, there's the 17 + minute closer, awesomely titled "Planet Ego, The Astral Return To Yourself", which lays down distant guitar rumbles, beneath swirls of alien FX and squiggly laser blast blort, the background guitar buzz gradually gaining momentum, a thick slow moving swell, eventually overtaking the sound effects, and finishing off as a blurred, downtuned space-drone, before gradually drifting off, and leaving shimmery contrails of fast fading FX. So good, of course. And as we mentioned above, we'll be able to get about 20 copies of this box, and that's IT. So if you want one, order it now. We'll charge you and let you know when it arrives. If you're after the normal version, let us know that too, and we can put you down for one of those, but this listing is specifically for folks who want to nab one of the boxes before they're gone for good.
What more can we say about these guys that we haven't already. Masters of divine sci-fi spacekraut dronemusic, sprawling epics that drift heavenward, guitars swirl and pulse, bass throbs and rumbles, rhythms don't pound or shuffle as much as pulse, a gloriously cosmic ur-rock that is not about rocking at all, but instead about sitting back and drifting off, letting the music lull you into a state of suspended animation, moving inward before moving outward, expanding like a new universe being born. All of the above imagery is especially apt to describe Mother Universe Has Birthed Her Last Cosmos, a one track, 20 minute space drone kraut jam from our beloved Expo 70. The main guitar part is surprisingly active, as is the bass, there's a definite groove here, the song has propulsion, and moves with purpose, the sound of a timelapse camera capturing the stars blinking out one at a time, viewed through a capsule full of bong smoke. Dreamy druggy and divine.
But it's not all drift here, about 8 or 9 minutes in, an old drum machine rears up and unfurls a looped beat, the guitars lock in, and suddenly this is some sort of transcendent drugged out hypnospace loop, which almost sounds like a skipping Hawkwind record, so completely mesmerizing and AWESOME. Eventually the drums drift off, and leave the throbbing bass and shimmering guitars to complete the journey on their own.
LIMITED TO 111 COPIES! We got 40 of those, and won't be able to get more. So get while the getting's good. And like all Universal Tongue releases, the packaging is super cool, full color inserts in little mini 5" high clear dvd sleeves, each one hand numbered.
Second of two new releases from Fedora Corpse, and one of THREE new jams from Expo 70, but we're sure as shit not complaining, we can't get enough of Expo's blissed out space rock kraut drone dreaminess.
Lately, it seems like Expo 70 has been leaning toward a heavier, darker sound, dabbling in SUNN-like walls of sound, letting guitars unwind in thick churning blackened swells, but for Night Flights (can't help but think of that bad ass late night video show of the almost same name), the sound is much more blissy and drifty and ambient, at least at first. The two looooong songs that make up side one, are hushed and delicate and crystalline, definitely evoking the sound of outer space, it's not hard to imagine drifting aimlessly and weightlessly through a black expanse of starless sky, the deep black turning almost blue, suffused with the burnished and nearly buried glow of eons old starlight. Tranquil, and contemplative, hypnotic, definitely new age-y, in the best possible sense, a soundtrack for astral projection.
But then the flipside is something completely different, introducing some drum machines, and crafting a swirling chaos of high end glitch and squelch, clouds of bloops and bleeps and swoops, looped and skittery, over spidery minor key guitars and soft warm melodic swells, sounding almost like a Sunroof! jam being slowly drifting into it's constituent parts, some sort of sonic super nova in slow motion. The second track on the B side finds Expo touching once again on the dark and the heavy, the blackened buzz of distorted guitars and thick looped dronescapes, slow burning, slow building, the guitars grow in intensity, until they're locked into a woozy mesmerizing loop, over which, strange atonal guitars tangle and drift, a sort of obtuse bit of lugubrious shredding, before those strangled leads drop out leaving just the initial buzzing swells, now laced with burning hot streaks of high end distorted shimmer. Gorgeous.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES! Pressed on thick blue/grey colored vinyl, with cool, super striking one color silk screened sleeves.
The only real downside to an Expo 70 single, is that it's ultimately frustrating in its brevity, as the music of Justin Wright, aka Expo 70 (or Expo '70, they seem to have lost the apostrophe on recent releases) is far better served by longer formats, lps, cds, and while both of these songs are indeed fantastic, it's almost criminal to cut them off after only 4 or 5 minutes, these are the sorts of sounds meant to sprawl and ooze and spread and extend for ages and ages. But as far as complaints got, it's a minor (and not entirely negative one), you'll just have to stick close by the turntable so you can lift the needle and set it right back at the beginning again.
No great surprises or strange sonic twists, just more of that thick dark gloriously heavy space kraut drone we've come to expect. The A side is some seriously deep and drone-y outer space exploration, warm languorous tones over a softly grinding and pulsing buzz, sweeping and epic and darkly mysterious, glistening melodies shifting from speaker to speaker, very new age-y for sure, but a sort of dense and blackened new age.
The B side begins all growling buzzing low end thickness, laced with space-y squiggles, long high end streaks and glimmering tones, beneath the blissy drift is a warm whirring and a softly corrosive crumble, all wound up into epic slow building swells of deeeeep deeeeep buzz. So nice.
Gorgeous full color covers, and of course LIMITED, it's already sold out from the label, so these will be the last copies we can get.
The last Extinction record, long sold out before we were able to get any copies for the store, was one of those bleak ambient non-metal metal records. Slow motion expanses of utter abject black dirgedrone doom. A tarpit sludge full of smears of black guitar and demonic shrieks. Think Abruptum, Stalaggh, Emit and other like minded black ambient artists.
So that's sort of what we were expecting when we managed to get this new Extinction. And the opening track had us convinced we were right. A chaotic stumbling storm of angular guitars, huge crumbling downtuned riffs, howled and moaned vocals, huge rhythmic pounds, super demented and damaged sounding. We were prepared to settle back for a whole record of similar sounding black bliss. But the second track knocked us flat, exploding into a lurching minor key stumble, with strange arpeggiated guitars, thrashing drums, raspy black vocals, but all of those typically black metal elements are set in a swirling black morass of blown out, super saturated black sonic clouds. So dense and blurry and fuzzed out it's sometimes impossible to pick out individual instruments, just a massive fiery be-spiked and bloodied blur. The rest of the record barrels along like that, some epic hooved black metal beast, huge bat wings flung behind it, teeth crusted with the blood of the vanquished, an ultra thick onslaught of pure demonic black energy. We haven't heard a black metal so distorted and so dangerously close to collapsing into utter and complete noise since Gorgoroth's The Destroyer. And that is mighty praise indeed.
The final track revisits the opener's sonic black pit of teeth gnashing and shrieking souls, another abstract swirl of deconstructed black chaos with collapsing riffs and slowly rotting melodies.
So fucking great.
UK white boy hip hop duo Sleaford Mods were an unlikely hit around here. When we first read about them on the Norman Records website, proclaiming them as they favorite band of the year, we were totally skeptical, but we ordered a few anyway, and then quickly found ourselves becoming obsessed, and suddenly, we got it, and we agreed, and then a second record came out, and we dug that one just as much. What the hell? Who can explain stuff like that, but it did have the effect of making us curious about this, the first proper release from Extnddntwrk, which just so happens to be one of the guys from the Sleaford Mods, a collection of all the random home recorded electronic weirdness he'd put together over the last few years, and we have to say, it's pretty goddamn great.
We were definitely expecting what would essentially amount to instrumental 'Mods backing tracks, and some sound like they could be just that, and you might find yourself imagining those guys rapping along, but really, this stuff is pretty mesmerizing, and hypnotic, just check out the first track "Care Less", a low slung looped groover, that's plenty dark, a little moody and minimal, in a way it sounds like a more electro Boards Of Canada, but a bit darker and more skeletal, and that actually does describe a bunch of these tracks, but since it's a collection of odds and sods, it is a bit all over the map. "Dirty Soup" is a weird gloomy creep, pocked with synth blurt and distorted guitar chug, but still driven by a primitive Casio style beat. "Foul Play" is definitely one of those tracks that sounds destined to be a Sleaford Mods track proper, but then it butts up right against "Crystal Ball", which is spare and weirdly lovely, all shimmery melodies and pizzicato string plucks, melancholy and moody. And so it goes, from sort of calypso exotica, to Meat Beat Manifesto style industrial electro, to crackly, murky slow-soul groove, to cool start/stop stuttery avant soul weirdness, to what sounds amazingly like skweee. There's also an unlisted 18 minute secret track at the end of disc 1, that is essentially a wild plunderphonic free-for-all that sounds like some mad scientist flipping from channel to channel, but it's pretty fun.
The second disc is more of the same, with the exception of a killer/weirdo cover of Big Black's "Bad Penny", which slows it down, recasts it as a sort of woozy, synth dirge, the sounds heavily panned, swooping from speaker to speaker, this one with vocals, a whispery croon, way up on the mic, as if he was whispering ominously right in your ear, occasionally becoming weirdly vocodered, it all makes for a pretty awesome, and awesomely creepy version of an already extremely creepy classic.
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anyone heavy and feedback laden, like Moss, Bunkur, Boris, Dot [.], Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief, Wellington, Acid Bath, Garadama, etc.
So we were so psyched to discover that EHG's first three discs were getting the deluxe reissue treatment. Elsewhere on this list we review In The Name Of Suffering, most people's fave EHG record, their third, Take As Needed For Pain, Andee's favorite, and this, Dopesick, their third, and part three of final EHG's godlike sludge trilogy. They would continue to make records, great records in fact, but the first three remain untouchable to this day.
In The Name Of Suffering was a hateful, feedback drenched trawl through a world of sludge, creeping and slithering, uncompromisingly brutal and crushingly heavy. Pretty much defining the sound of ALL sludge to come. With record number 2, Take As Needed For Pain, they added a little bit of that NOLA groove (you know, Down, Superjoint Ritual, Acid Bath, Crowbar, Soilent Green, Goatwhore, etc.) to their sound, making their plodding shrieking sludge a tiny bit more melodic and dare we say, catchy at moments. But take that with a grain of salt, melodic and catchy for a band like Eyehategod is still about a million times more caustic and corrosive than almost any other -heavy- band.
So with Dopesick, the groove factor is cranked up a little bit more, making Eyehategod here sound like the scariest, heaviest, druggiest, sludgiest stoner rock band EVER. But again, EHG in stoner rock mode, still outsludges them all, a groove flecked avalanche of slow motion ultradoom, screeching feedback, shrieking throat ripping vocals, blackhole downtuned guitars, all churning in a black sea of sludgemetal tar, lurching, and trudging and so fucking awesome!
Three bonus tracks: two alternate versions and one the appropriately titled "Dopesick Jam", an epic, lengthy freaked out psychedelic slab of glorious drugsludgedoom! Includes revised artwork and new liner notes from EHG frontman Mike Williams.
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anything heavy and feedback laden, like Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief,
So it's about time we listed our favorite EHG album, their dark and dirgey debut "In The Name Of Suffering", first released in 1990 on the French Intellectual Convulsion label, later re-issued domestically by Century Media, with the original's gross medical cover pictures prudently tucked inside. When this came out, EHG immediately joined the Melvins, Skullflower, and Hellhammer in the pantheon of the heaviest, most fucked up bands ever. Misanthropic metallic misery, complete with samples of Charles Manson's wisdom. Later EHG albums are good too, but this one was never surpassed. If you are one of Aquarius' "doom" customers and you don't have this disc, we urge you, in the name of suffering, get it!
New Orleans' sultans of sludge come back with this compilation of singles and alternate takes. Rumors of their demise are highly exaggerated, it turns out, and EYEHATEGOD fans can rejoice that this is no swansong from these pioneers of super slow, ugly, dopesick dirge. And boy do these tracks sound better on cd than they did on the old vinyl!
We've referenced these drugged and ugly New Orleans masters of sludge-core in tons of reviews, as they're one of the ur-bands that established the rituals practiced by anyone heavy and feedback laden, like Moss, Bunkur, Boris, Dot [.], Cavity, Corrupted, Khanate, Iron Monkey, Grief, Wellington, Acid Bath, Garadama, etc.
So we were so psyched to discover that EHG's first three discs were getting the deluxe reissue treatment. Elsewhere on this list we review In The Name Of Suffering, most people's fave EHG record, their third, Dopesick, and this one, Andee's favorite Eyehategod record, Take As Needed For Pain.
Their debut was a hateful, feedback drenched trawl through a world of sludge, creeping and slithering, uncompromisingly brutal and crushingly heavy. Pretty much defining the sound of ALL sludge to come. With Take As Needed For Pain, they added a little bit of that NOLA groove (you know, Down, Superjoint Ritual, Acid Bath, Crowbar, Soilent Green, Goatwhore, etc.) to their sound, making their plodding shrieking sludge, a tiny bit more melodic and dare we say, catchy at moments. But take that with a grain of salt, melodic and catchy for a band like Eyehategod is still about a million times more caustic and corrosive than almost any other -heavy- band. It's really strange to revisit these EHG records and realize how many bands these days sound EXACTLY LIKE EYEHATEGOD!!! It's almost criminal. Sort of similar to the way SUNNO))) were basically an Earth tribute band, it's almost like EVERY one of the new breed of sludge bands is in fact an Eyehategod tribute band. But hey, who's complaining, it's a dark and disturbing sound we can never seem to get enough of. And as long as EHG are getting the props they deserve, then hell, bring on the sludge!!! Fans of ANY of the above mentioned bands who do not own this, are required by ALL THAT IS UNHOLY to pick this up immediately!!!!!!
As far as bonus tracks, Take As Needed For Pain is probably the best of bunch, 3 tracks from the long out of print Ruptured Heart Theory 7", a track from the also long OOP split 7" with 13, and two tracks from another long gone 7", another split with fellow sludge mavens 13.
Includes revised artwork and new liner notes from EHG frontman Mike Williams.
Maybe the most anxiously awaited release in Lexicon Devil's comprehensive series of F/i reissues. Paradise Out Here, originally released in 1989, might just be the heaviest, most freaked out, most spaced out of all the F/i records. All it takes is about one minute of opener "From Poppy With Love", an acid fried, ultra freaked out, swirling psychrock blowout to understand why. A chugging scuzzy garage rock riff scratches out a relentless spacey stomp beneath a massive roiling cloud of FX that make Acid Mothers Temple's arsenal look like a broken down collection of Casio distortion boxes and Fisher-Price keyboards. So heavy and so spacey. Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, AMT, Colour Haze, UFOmammut, White Hills, Comets On Fire, the Heads, the Telescopes, Atomic Bitchwax, Loop. If those are the kind of bands that get your blood boiling and your bong bubbling then this record is definitely for you. Extended excursions into the outer reaches of deep deep deep space, where the stars blink and twinkle in dizzyingly psychedelic colors, everywhere you look guitars are all twisted and distorted, thick slabs of rumbling bass plow through reverbed swirls of shimmer, melodies explode and splinter into jagged bits in gloriously incendiary bursts, everything is blurry and swathed in a thick drug rock haze, and everywhere you look huge slabs of blown out wah guitar drift past, like fluffy prismatic clouds, underneath it all, drums pound a never ending rhythm, while being endlessly pelted with synth squiggles and a veritable hail storm of bleeps and bloops and beeps. Woah. This record is so relentless and about as tripped out and psychedelic as a record can get without completely collapsing in on itself.
If there was ever a record that made us want to get super high, turn off all the lights, rock the fuck out and drift WAY WAY WAY OUT.... it's this one.
Yet another grimy blast of drugged out psychedelia from unheralded underground psych gods F/i. This is the third or fourth F/i reissue in the last several months (and definitely Andee's favorite), finally restoring their epic and long out of print back catalog. Why Not Now?...Alan! was originally released on lp way back in 1987 on RRR and suffered sonically from poor mastering, as well as cohesively from the fact that several of the tracks were chopped to fit on a single lp. This cd reissue finds the chopped songs restored to their original extended versions, and the sound remastered and beefed up significantly! F/i around this period were a noisy, abstract, psychedelic juggernaut, equal parts Hawkwind, Lustmord, Skullflower, Amon Duul and a healthy dose of free noise gleeearghhh like some of their RRR labelmates. Glitchy, sputtering, malfunctioning instruments, amp buzz, and crackly bursts of short wave radio whirl chaotically into a sonic supernova, until a propulsive rhythm struggles and emerges from the chaos, a krautrock behemoth, lumbering through a landscape of swirling wah guitars, squalls of shrieking, space-y bleeping swoosh, clattery 'pipe fights', rumbling subsonic drones, super distorted drum / car horn industrial crunch and all manner of drugged out grit, but throughout it all, the hypnotic riff powers on, head down, chugging into oblivion. Think a massively damaged Neu! Or maybe Hawkwind on a really, really bad trip, or Circle, drugged and forced at gunpoint to do their best Agitation Free until their fingers bleed, or Amon Duul II, if instead of German hippies, their commune consisted mostly of American noise rockers from the eighties. As the record progresses, some of the extraneous noise is shed in favor of a more sleek psych/kraut rock, relentless and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerising, but even streamlined, it still sounds seriously damaged and dangerous. Fucking awesome.
Fabolous follows in the footseps of Nelly, taking the big New York gangster commercial sound and flavoring it with a bit of the dirty south and striking gold. You can hear a bit of Jay-Z, Puffy and the like, but Fabolous just has that special something that
Brand new batch of twisted noise pop malfunction from Steve Peffer, the mastermind behind fucked up noisemakers Homostupids. Fans of the 'Stupids stumbling lo-fi Neanderthal crush will find much to love here, but Factorymen takes the demented buzz and crunch of Homostupids, and fashions it into something a bit poppier, and weirdly enough, more electronic, creating some sort of knuckle dragging buzz drenched electro-pop, that takes the warped pop of folks like Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, and adds some Stooges-y swagger and some dirge rock guitar buzz, not to mention the whole thing sounds like it was recorded on a cassette that's been sitting the dashboard of a car for the last decade, all hiss and warble and plenty of Faxed Head like sonic drop outs, but all that only adds to the deliriously demented sound.
Tape speeds shift, the fidelity slips from muffled and murky to brittle and blown out, the songs are all over the map from garage-y pound to blurred hypnotic thump, to total eighties style FM radio cheese, to blurred blissy strangely sunshiney Breakfast Club pop, to rhythmic Butthole Surfers like mesmer, to downtuned synth laced space doom dirge, al woven into a druggy and lo-fi, synthy, outsider, electronic, psychedelic warped pop that almost sounds like a drug addled Stephin Merritt record on Not Not Fun or Olde English Spelling Bee, but with just enough crunch to keep the sound at least tangentially noise rocky. Bizarre and sorta brilliant, should most definitely appeal to fans of James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, Rusted Shut, Rangers, Pink Noise and other similarly twisted pop deconstructionists.
Includes a download of the whole record, as well as the previous Factorymen record, 25 tracks in all! The first FM record another batch of even more murky minimalist drug pop...
BACK IN STOCK!!
Badlands is the debut from this New York duo who traffic in wild, blown out, free form, noisy avant psychedelia, a relentless blistering sonic freakout spread over three tracks and thirty minutes. It might help (or maybe it won't, but it's still cool) to list the instruments used to conjure up this skree: one guy handles: "Machete Harmonic, Octave Shaking, Psycho Slide and Echo Disaster Lead Guitars, Feedback Vox, Tape Manipulation", the other is in charge of "Feral Wah, Astral Echo, and Feedback Lead Guitars, Amp Manipulation, Drums", which in a way says it all. After a brief bit of droniness, the sound splinters, and explodes into a five minute onslaught of frenzied guitar abuse, spluttery drum damage, all wreathed in thick swirling clouds of twisted FX and layered noise, but this is not straight up noise (although there's plenty of that), there are lots of dynamics going on, with stretches of scrabbly guitar, tranced out hypno-rock churn, tangled swirls of guitar psych, dense walls of crumbling, grinding, in-the-red, feedback doused dirgery, extended sprawls of effects heavy drift, and twisted droney ambience, but for all that, the sound is most definitely rooted in face melting psych-noise freakouts, which most definitely dominates the proceedings. But stick around for the 15 minute closer, the sound slowed down to a droney crawl, all grinding guitars, skittery drums, dense swirls of feedback and noise, the sound almost more psychedelic space rock than anything, but WAY on the noisiest side of that spectrum, imagine multiple Hawkwinds playing at once, each one trying to play louder and heavier than the other, the result some sort of ultra heavy, noise psych dirge, that is equal parts doom, spacey, tripped out and heavy as fuck. Where have these guys been all our lives. Fans of freaky noisy psych, line starts here. Fans of Fushitsusha, Mainliner, Burnt Hills, Heavy Winged, etc. check this shit out. NOW.
Super deluxe handmade packaging, maniacally ADD line drawing cover art (a la Nick Blinko), with a heavy cardboard insert, hand taped, with more line drawings, a picture taped to one side, housed in a stickered plastic sleeve, hand numbered, LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!!
The one thing we sometimes really miss after having worked in record stores for years, is that momentary thrill of walking into a store and discovering some band you love has a new record! Hardly ever happens anymore. It's our job to know what's coming out and when, so most of the time we know weeks or months before any record comes out. However, I (Andee) recently had that experience with this very record. That little adrenaline thrill that we were missing so much! If you're an avid reader of the AQ list you may have noticed my massive and gushing review of the last Fallout Boy record, and it's constant presence on my top 10 lists, since the last Fallout Boy record, Take This To Your Grave, holds the distinction of being my most listened to record for the last two years. Seriously, we're talking EVERY DAY. No matter what I was obsessing about that week, some black metal record, or some weird drone thing, I'd always go back to FB at some point. So you can imagine how geeked I was to discover they had a new record. The other surprising thing about this record, is that it debuted at number 9 on the Billboard chart. Holy crap! I can't remember the last time one of my favorite new records was on the Billboard chart AT ALL, let alone in the top 10! But hell, as we've said many times before, we definitely can't complain when songs and bands we like start infiltrating the mainstream. That said, this IS a pretty mainstream sounding record. Big indie emo metallic power pop. But the thing is it's great! Heavy and catchy and immediately memorable, but weird enough that it doesn't get old, even after listening to it multiple times every day, like I've been doing for the last two weeks! Even Jason, who works right across from me and who doesn't necessarily like this kind of stuff, has been forced to hear this record every day as well, and decided he dug it almost immediately. Which is definitely saying something. The first FB record was power-pop-punk in metal clothing. Huge chugging guitars wrapped around perfect pop hooks. Hardcore kids into metal but with hearts of pop and top notch songwriting, fun and funny and complex and practically perfect. This new one tones back the metal guitars just a bit, but makes up for it with much more varied songwriting and even catchier songs. Yep. I didn't think it was possible, but the songs on From Under The Cork Tree are indeed even better and catchier than the songs on Take This To Your Grave, which, had you asked me a few months ago I would have declared, in the voice of Ralph Wiggum, to be UN-POSSIBLE! Totally kick ass, melodically complicated heavy power pop, with complex parts, amazing hooks, weird lyrics and funny song titles ("Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued", "Champagne For My Real Friends, Real Pain For My Sham Friends", "I Slept With Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me"). It's always hard for me to describe a record I like this much. I just want to shake people and yell "Buy this record! Don't ask why! These songs are stuck in my head constantly! It's so good! I don't know why exactly, but I have to listen to this ALL the time! You will LOVE this record!" So, that's it I guess. Consider yourself shook!
Here Andee gushes about his favorite record of the last couple years, one that he put on his top ten list the last two years (much to Allan's chagrin) even though it came out in 2003, and a record that we have somehow never gotten around to reviewing, until now, which is perfect, since it's just been re-released with bonus tracks and some other crap:
I have no idea how to review this record. I absolutely love it. It is the only record that I have consistantly listened to almost every day, for the last two years. I never get sick of it. I always defend it as a guilty pleasure, sort of sheepsihly admitting to my obsessive love of this record, but the more and more I listen to it, the more I'm not so sure it's a guily pleasure after all. But before you go any further, answer this question: do you love the Posies, the Get Up Kids, Sloan, Weezer, The Stereo, Reggie And The Full Effect? If the answer is yes, continue on, and let me tell you about another record you ABSOLUTELY MUST OWN. If the answer is no, then what the heck is wrong with you??? Seriously... um, no, sorry, in that case, well, there's plenty of other stuff you could be checking out, so you are hereby dismissed. But those of you who did indeed answer yes, and who like your pop of the power variety, and love complex harmonies and unforgettable hooks and kick ass guitars, well, then let me tell you about Fallout Boy.
To my ears, this is the perfect mix of metal and pop. Like a metalcore pop record. The guitars are HUGE and crunchy and super metallic, but they are playing totally catchy melodies, intricate harmonies all over super dynamic start stop arrangements. And the vocals are totally perfect, high and clean and soaring, lots of harmonies there too, very emo sure, but the whole thing is just totally massive, heavy, emotional perfect pop. Easily my favorite 'pop' record since the Stereo. One of our 'pop' customers thought this sounded too "boy", but that's part of the appeal, if by "too boy" he meant TOO METAL. Then maybe it is. It is kind of metal, you can totally tell these guys grew up on metal as well as pop. It's heavy and relentless, and epic and CATCHY AS FUCK. We went and saw Coheed And Cambria a while back, and the whole crowd bounced along and sang along to EVERY song. It was insane. And C&C are pretty proggy and weird, so I can only imagine how nuts kids must go at a Fallout Boy show. And like C&C, Fallout Boy are about our age which makes us love them even more, for only -kind of- making us feel old. Anyway, if you're not sold by now, not sure what else I can do. Listen to the three sound samples. The ultimate metal-pop one-two-three punch. The most perfect three song opening to a record I can remember.
Ahhhh. Ok. I feel a whole lot better. No more guilt at all. I LOVE this record. And I'm gonna go home and listen to it again. And again. And again.
The reissue comes in a spiffy slipcover, includes a bonus disc label sampler, has two bonus tracks, a Police cover, which is pretty cool, and a completely pointless 'dance remix'. It also has a sort-of director's commentary where the band discuss and dissect their songs / lyrics piece by piece. Pretty funny. Also includes a video for the track 'Saturday.'
Yet another blast of FX heavy, gloomy, psych rock stomp and swagger from these Philly bruisers, and this time around they sound even more droned out and depressive, that whole gloom pop thing they dabbled in on the last record now pretty much defines their sound, and it totally works, and has them sounding like a way heavier, way druggier, and way more dirgey and distorted Crystal Stilts, which is most definitely a good thing. Sounding a bit like classic Aussie post punk via more modern heavy psych rock, these guys kick things off with "Bow Your Head", all swirling squalls of wah guitar, and tribal drum pound, the vocals a snarling yowl, hooks galore, buried in the mire, some cool harmony vocals, but for the most part, low slung and swaggery, noisy, swampy psych blooze of the highest order. Some of the other tracks get a bit krautrocky, but even then, the sound remains gloomy and gothy, dour and darkly depressive and woozily psychedelic, like the wasted zoner krautdrift of "Mother Nature Fetish", or the hazy, druggy dirge of "Beyond Your Bones". There's also plenty of garage rock crunch, not to mention some seriously wasted gothic post punk miserablism, a sound that has us imagining this band playing the Scream club in LA alongside Kommunity FK or the Abecedarians back in the day, in fact maybe our favorite track here "Admit It" is one of those, the perfect mix of old school post punk, and swirly psychedelic goth rock. So great! Includes a download code too...
It's been a boom in outsider music these last few weeks at AQ, first it was the random rediscovery of Doug Hream Blunt's Gentle Persuasion, a fantastic and fantastically strange disc of breezy lo-fi outsider funk, that was dropped off by the man himself and required quite a bit of reconnoitering to track him down to get more (a continuing saga). And now there's this. A mysterious disc by a one man band known simply as Fastest, a cd-r that just showed up here one day, and none of us can remember how or when. In the mail? Dropped off? Spontaneous generation? It was just here one day, and we were mesmerized from the second we laid eyes on it. The cover is a huge blue owl against a blue background. The band name Fastest is written in big green letters, in a sort of cartoonish metal font, and superimposed right on the cover is a big barcode. The whole thing printed out on a home laser printer. The tray card folds all the way up around the side so there's an extra panel visible through the clear tray that boldly proclaims: "digital audio compact disc - state of the art phonorecord." The tray card features the ASCAP logo (ASCAP is the company that determines musician royalties) no less than three times, the logo is superimposed again on the back in a little white square, and at the top, blue text explains that the record was "Produced by Daemaeen Hephaestus Chastical". We were almost afraid to throw it on, because we were convinced that there was no way the music could live up to the cryptic promise of the packaging. We were wrong.
The title track starts things off, and immediately you know this is like nothing you've ever heard... a flurry of lo-fi distorted programmed beats, that sound like they could have been lifted straight off that Vijaya Anand Dance Raja Dance Bollywood compilation on Luaka Bop from years back, but any resemblance to Bollywood ends there, as some strange atonal midi synth guitars swoop in, along with some woozy warbly bass, the strangely syncopated programmed beats sputtering wildly in the background, the song slipping into a moody drift, the vocals a strange ominously hushed whisper, that even remind us a bit of the slowed down mush mouthed rapping of Sensational, eventually there's a sort of chorus, the midi guitars buzzing, while a strange synth unfurls a twisted melody, and then there's the most brilliantly baffling break, a stop/start flurry of stuttering beats, and some more warped woozy melodies, eventually joined by a sort of midi guitar least, atonal and detuned, the whole thing sounding like it's melting before your ears, before finally returning to the 'chorus'. Holy shit. What just happened? What is this? How had we not heard this before? Very reminiscent in fact of those absurd midi guitar releases we raved about on lists past, all of them work of a single man, released under different names: Shevelreq, Xynfonica, Gluttony, Thursar. If you were as into those as we were, stop reading and buy this now. Everyone else, read on, and sink deeper into the glorious musical madness that is Fastest...
The first song is so perfect, and perfectly demented, we dared not go on. We just kept listening to that one song over and over and over. Heck we wanted it to be OUR theme song. But eventually we knew we had to go on, and somehow, Fastest managed to confuse us again. And again.
After some simulated jet engine sounds, "Jet Sound II" begins, but it's super melodic and all 8 bit sounding, and reminds us of music from The Legend Of Zelda, but those vocals, dark and ominous, weirdly offset the cheerful melodies and loping programmed rhythms. "Televise" begins with sample bells, and immediately returns us to The Legend Of Zelda, until the vocals come in, locked in tight with the main melody, making for some strange electronic lo-fi midi-pop mystery.
"While You're Here" might be our other favorite (if we were forced to pick), with it's haunting melody, over minor key distorted finger picked guitar, tinkling chimes, very cinematic, again like some dramatic moment in a video game, but definitely dark and haunting, but of course, the song slips right back into some Zelda-y minimal 8 bit balladry, replete with those slightly ominous gruff vocals.
"Million Lies" begins with some dramatic syncopated start/stop dynamics, before slipping into some pulsing electronic groove, but this time, the vocals are super distorted, and even more creepy, and the drums erupt into little flurries of rhythmic tangle.
And so it goes, the sound drifting from Bollywood flecked 8 bit video game soundtrack songsmithery, to eighties style midi driven synthwave, and some hard to describe stops in between, culminating in the final three tracks, maybe the darkest and heaviest of the bunch.
"Seasons Change" is all distorted bass, stereo panned so the buzz flits from ear to ear, the drums spastic and skittery, the vocals as grim and ominous as at any point, the melodies creepy and minor key, which leads right into "Alter Fate" all swirling synths and stuttery almost IDM sounding beats, the whole thing blurry and smeary, before slipping back into the dirgey synthy creep of the previous track, a sort of second movement, laced with more strange disembodied high end melodies over the tumbling drum fills and more gruff whispery vox, finally culminating in "The Wind", which begins with appropriately enough, swirling wind, distorted acoustic guitar, a gauzy patina of lo-fi buzz, before finally launching into a tense stretch of buzzing swirling electronic weirdness, the various chunks of low end fuzz and warped melodies, adding some serious pathos, growing ever more distorted and finally finishing in a blaze of super distorted programmed beats, chaotic and noisy and psychedelic, before winding down with more acoustic guitar.
Absolutely baffling and disturbing brilliantly, total genius outsider mystery music, this is the sort of thing groups like Gary War and Ariel Pink are striving for, but just can't ever quite reach. Fantastically idiosyncratic, highly personal, and completely warped and cracked and demented and literally unlike anything you've heard. It's not hard to imagine this finding its way onto one of those incredible strange music comps or one of those Songs In The Key Of Z collection, it's certainly divisive, it's definitely too much for some folks, so be warned, this is strange strange stuff. But folks around here have become a bit obsessed, and can't seem to get enough. Which is good, cuz there are at least THREE other cd-r's. If you decide you need those too, just ask...
We get sent a ton of stuff to check out. And it's awesome, truly, So much amazing music to discover, but at the same time it's so overwhelming. But every once in a while a record pops up that makes it all worth while. Such is the case with this disc from these Italian weirdos Father Murphy. What makes it even cooler is that this record, and this band, are SO hard to describe.
It's a bit like folk, a little bit like post punk math rock, a little avant noise, but stripped way down into something skeletal, they definitely sound a little bit like one of the new breed of freak folk psych folk cd-r outfits, but at the same time, they sound like NOTHING you've ever heard. Detuned guitar plod, spaced out rhythmic thump, lots of deep shimmery ambience and FX drenched drifts, wavery falsetto crooning, warbly organs, and the occasional bursts of feral yowling, wow. Unhinged, fractured, freaky, passionate, super intense and awesome.
In discussing Father Murphy, other reviewers have mentioned Robert Wyatt, This Heat, Samla Mamas Manna, we also hear plenty of Marc Ribot in the guitars, all angular and off kilter, there's also some mysterious female vocals that surface here and there, field recordings, crickets, birds, all beneath weepy mournful Morricone-ish twang, a sound both woozy and ominous, dreamy and dense, a glorious deathlike dirge, part Dirty Three, part fluttery forest folk, a little wheezy organ dirge pop, some slooooooowed down Blonde Redhead, like we said this is super hard to describe. but what we do know is we love it. And you will do, if your tastes run toward the dark, the dolorous, the mysterious, the haunting, the dirgey and the deathlike.
Incredible packaging. The cd housed in a die cut multi layered fold over sleeve, that housed in a thick outer vellum jacket so the images on the inner sleeve are just visible through the blurred finish of the outer sleeve.
VERY LIMITED!
What really needs to be said about Fear? One of the greatest punk bands ever. Have you ever seen the Decline of Western Civilization? Fear definitely stole the show with their fierce and frenzied audience baiting set. And then there's the time they played on Saturday Night Live at the behest of none other than John Belushi, where they were introduced by Donald Pleasance, and eventually caused over $20,000 in damage. But all that rabble rousing would be nothing but bullshit posturing if they didn't have the music to back it up. And Fear's The Record, released in 1982, said it all, a pretty much perfect punk rock record all the way through, fierce and fucked up, weirdly proggy, frantic and frenzied, politicized and irreverent, vocalist Lee Ving's over the top growled vocals leading the charge.
"Let's Have A War" is a punk rock anthem if there ever was one, with its "there's so many of us" repeated bridge and its woozy tribal verse that almost sounds like the Butthole Surfers. Then there's the goofy and tasteless "Beef Bologna", with its crooned bluesy intro, the song itself a minute of pounding punk anthem. "Camarillo" is an unsung classic, as powerful as any of the tracks on The Record, with some weird angular guitaring, some very metal riffage, not to mention some seriously Jello-like vocals. But it has to be "I Don't Care About You" that steals the show, heavy and hooky and punk as fuck with a chorus that kills, and c'mon "I Don't Care About You FUCK YOU!!" Doesn't get more punk than that, does it?
The rest of the record is overflowing with classics, the ridiculous but impossibly catchy (and very Dead Kennedys sounding) "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones", which of course is rife with actual saxophones, and the lyrics are hilarious. "We Destroy The Family" is fierce and furious and peppered with weird metal percussion, "I Love Livin' In The City" is somehow WAY poppier than it has any right to be
Fear were one of those rare punk bands that infused their punk with plenty of pop hooks, and had serious song writing chops, all without losing any of their punkness, yet somehow making their music eminently more listenable, and making them way more accessible to folks outside the punk scene, think the Dickies, Bad Religion, The Descendents
Available on vinyl again, but whatever format, this is an essential document of West Coast punk rock, and one of our favorite punk rock records EVER.
Drums are maybe the last thing you might expect to hear on a Fear Falls Burning record, which makes the opening of the new FFB, Frenzy Of The Absolute, all the more fascinating, since it opens with JUST drums, a huge crash, a doomy drum plod all spread out, spacious and spare. But eventually guitars enter the mix, and slowly take over.
Fear Falls Burning is the one man guitardrone project of axeman Dirk Serries, and over the last year has released numerous cds and lps, each filled with his unique take on the otherwise played out doomdronedirge sound. Fear Falls Burning is a much more musical take, no less thick or corrosive or caustic or heavy, but Serries makes his walls of downtuned drone, and whirring buzz, glisten and shimmer, shot through with melody and unlikely texture, about as poppy as a music this un-poppy can get. And it's no different here. Well minus the HUGE difference of having a drummer. Or should we say drummerS! Serries is joined by a series of guests on Frenzy, most notable the drummers from Swedish post-metallers Switchblade and Cult Of Luna.
At first we were worried that adding drums would just turn FFB's ethereal doomic drift into something much more generic and run of the mill, but just the opposite is true. Serries and his guests subtly transform the sound of FFB into something wholly different, the opening track says it all. That sprawling simple, spread out drumming, continues on throughout the first three quarters of the track, pounding away, not pummeling, but pounding, almost delicately if that were even possible, while Serries introduces soft shimmery delicate melodies, that drift dreamily in the background, the whole thing underpinned by a thick, gradually building Niblock like static guitar drone. But that little lullaby like melody, keeps the track from becoming pure dirge. There's way too much space. It's almost like a seriously metallicized and doomed up slowcore band. This is Low covering SUNNO))), a dreamy droney soporific downtuned dreamlike creep.
The guitars thicken, the ambience grows ever more woozy and buzzy, the various swells of distorted buzz, wash in and out, various melodies surface and then drift off, the song slowly transforming into something much blackened and sinister. Until with about 5 minutes left, the track switches gears and becomes a roiling blur of washed out industrial buzz, muted picked apart riffage, processed percussion, the drums slowly surfacing from below, creeping into earshot, like some black beast clawing its way up from the abyss, creating a dirgey sort of Godflesh / Jesu jam, but way more muddy and murky blown out, blurred and soft focused, and somehow still weirdly pretty.
The second track is way more in line with past FFB recordings, huge heaving slabs of buzzing low end, a vast expanse of fluttering, reverberating guitar growl, slow motion swells of whir, peppered with clouds of cymbal shimmer, shooting star streaks of high end, all blearily blurred into one fluid, constantly shifting dronescape. This track too grows in intensity, becoming more cacophonous, more ominous and atonal, a deep black hole of swirling black melody and thick textured guitarscapery. Like a dreamier, blissier Wolf Eyes.
The final track begins like some super charged Spacemen 3 jam, a crumbling distorted space rock riff, doused in delay, the last note allowed to pulse and skitter off into the ether, before the riff re-engages. Over the top, in swoop more layers of guitar buzz, synth sounding whir and warble, all very trancelike and mesmerizing, the drums don't even kick in until near the end, and even then, they just offer up a huge pulse like pound, a skeletal framework for the swirling buzzing blissy blackness above, the drums finally exploding into an actual rhythm with about 2 minutes to go, the guitars soaring into a serious frenzy, suddenly it sounds like the climax of an Explosions In The Sky song AND the finale of a Godspeed song all woven together into one explosive blown out finish.
As much as we love pretty much everything Fear Falls Burning, this record has us hoping this drum thing is not just a one off, but even if it is, we'll dig it while we can.
Here's another matchup that had to happen eventually. And it's the rare one of those that actually sounds as good as one might hope. Like all great collaborations, it's not just so much jamming together, as it is getting each contributor to not only give their all but to push the other collaborator to do the same. It's not a competition, but the spirit is similar, with both parties trying to get into the head of their counterpart, a push and pull, that can sometimes result in the players going places they don't normally on their own.
The long drawn out guitarscapes of Fear Falls Burning are the perfect foil to the more incendiary ambience of Campbell Kneale and his Birchville Cat Motel. Both are capable of face melting heaviness, but both are also quite comfortable crafting intimate worlds of soft sound and distant shimmer. This 49 minute single piece tends to fall more toward the latter at least in the beginning, with the incipient heaviness relegated to smoldering in the distance, while the foreground is a deliriously drifting set of abstract strums, folky fragments allowed to ring out and float freely amidst an almost Wolf Eyesian backdrop of keening feedback, grinding black whirs, and huge resonant swells. The sound is intense, humid, and very cinematic. Eventually the sounds build, layers upon layers, erupting into a blinding heart-of-the-sun nearly static raga, what sounds like a million guitars all left to drone endlessly amidst a cloud of tinkling glimmering sparkles.
The last twenty minutes or so, finds all the high end swallowed by the low, the guitars begin to grind and rumble, pulse and throb, until the sound becomes a dark viscous river of crumbling distortion, growing less and less distorted, until finally, all that's left is a warm, minimal whir, that gently shifts and drifts until it fades out completely.
Most folks (like us) see FFB and BCM and already know this is a must buy, but this is indeed pretty fantastic, even amidst the seemingly neverending (let's hope!) avalanche of amazing releases by both of these prolific noisemakers.
Hee's an absolutely stunning recording of Feldman's most often played durational chamber piece, Crippled Symmetry. Recorded in 2000 for the 25th anniversary of "June in Buffalo", an annual series of concerts at the University of Buffalo begun by Feldman after he took over the post of Edgar Varese Professor there. Crippled Symmetry was written in 1983, four years before the composer's death, for a trio consisting of flute/alto flute/bass flute; glockenspiel/vibraphone; and piano/celesta. Commissioned by the remaining members of a collective ensemble called The Feldman Soloists that the composer worked with over the years as a writer and pianist, this new recording is performed by all three of the original players, and is hailed by them to be the definitive performance of the piece.
Spanning ninety minutes over two disks, this interlocking minimalist composition was not scored so much as it was instructed. Taking its influence from the handmade process of weaving oriental rugs where slight imperfections are regarded with high importance to the overall effect of the piece, hence the title, Crippled Symmetry. The musicians operate in their own tiny clusters of sound creating dappled circular patterns against the other players causing an undulating and slowly twisting tapestry of sound forms. Not quite melodic, but not at all dissonant, the sonic field of the trio becomes a singular vibrational unit and the effect of attempting to stay wholly aware as a listener is akin to attempting deep meditative contemplation. A great place to start for those unsure where to begin in the Morton Feldman catalog!
While ostensibly a black metal band, the UK's Fen, are so much more than that. In fact, take away the vocals, and in a blind taste test we would have been hard pressed to describe them as black metal at all.
The sound is all loping rhythms, soaring chords, the sound majestic and epic, minor key and mathy. The first track sounds more like Isis or Pelican than it does Darkthrone or Deathspell. Well, actually, it does remind us a bit of Deathspell's most postrock moment, the genius Kenose. The band are described as 'atmospheric black metal / post rock' which would be a tad more accurate if you swapped the two descriptors. Even the riffs sound more like something off a Polvo or Pitchblende record, which is not a bad thing at all. In fact, we're a little bit obsessed with Fen. Another band whose sound is one we had always sort of wished for. Nineties math rock black metal! It's really uncanny listening to these three songs how often our ears catch a little Archers Of Loaf or Rodan or Don Cab or Bitch Magnet. And the thing is, the sound may be a bit heavier and more distorted, it's really only the vocals that turn this into black metal. If Fen were an instrumental band, they wouldn't sound all that out of place on Touch And Go. But they are heavy, and they are a bit black, and as if to prove it, the closer is the heaviest, and the least overtly mathy of the bunch. A plodding churning doomy chunk of loping blackened crush. And near the end of the 12+ minute track, the band even actually explode for the very first time into a furious blast beat, and finish off the track thrashing blackly, but even that brief burst is not enough to hide their true sonic soul, the whole track is rife with mathiness, with soaring majestic post rock-ness, just wrapped in a bit of blackness.
None of this is meant to sound apologetic, not in the least, this is absolutely one of our favorite new records, metal, mathy or otherwise. We just wanted to give fair warning to the troo grim hordes out there, who might have been put off a bit by the dearth of true blackness. But for the rest of you, this comes highly recommended. If you ever dreamed about a black metal Polvo (and who didn't) or wished Deathspell had continued on their more post rock path, or if you just can't get enough of that metallic post rock, and maybe wouldn't mind if it sometimes got a bit blacker, well then this is definitely for you...
First proper full length from these UK black metallers, who we once described as a black metal Polvo! There are definitely still hints of that here, but the metal this time around is also more furious. With the ep, we stressed that maybe troo grim metalheads might not find a lot to like, as much of that record sounded more like Pelican or Isis than Darkthrone or Deathspell, and even here, the first track begins with some post rocky clean guitar, but almost immediately launches into a seriously blown out squall of blasting buzz. But then a few seconds later, the band slip back into that loping post rock, only to again, explode into epic blackness. The track flits back and forth, and part way through there's even some Katatonia like clean vocals, which adds a definite pop element, and hints at what's to come. So, it's at once heavier and more black than the ep, but still manages to incorporate plenty of post rock rhythms and math rock arrangements, which basically makes this a massive favorite around here, but also means this is probably not black or brootal enough for some metalheads.
And since the opening track might just be the heaviest of the bunch, barring brief bursts here and there, this is the perfect record for the aQ metalhead, who when not enjoying true grimness, likes their black metal fucked up or freaked out or all shoegazey or all post rocky, which means odds are you'll dig this like crazy.
Much of the record follows the same pattern as the opener, long loping instrumental passages with simple drumming and clean crystalline guitars, peppered with bursts of frenetic riffing and wild blasting beats, but there's also plenty of strange haunting folkiness, bits of rainy day sad boy indie jangle, subtly complex math rock rhythms, all perfectly blended with chunks of intense riffery and buzzing black metal fury. And the thing is, the metal this time around IS way more furious, if you stripped out all the clean guitars and croony vocals, this would be some seriously paint peeling blackness, but those parts sound even MORE aggressive and heavy when butted up to some shimmery drift, or some jangly poppiness.
The closer is the other heavyweight here, nearly 12 minutes of roiling ultra heavy black metal, intense and frenzied, but still with plenty of loping midtempo grooves, occasional doom-ed out interludes, a brief flutteryfolky break, and a minor key string-ed outro, that manages to be super dramatic, and the perfect way for this strangely varied and super kick ass record to wind down.
Packaged in a super striking 8 panel digipak, and damn if Fen don't have one of the coolest logos...
Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Latest in Table Of The Elements' series of 'Guitar' 12"s, and this is the one everyone has been waiting for, Christian Fennesz' June. Hot on the heels of Black Sea, which was a recent aQ Record Of The Week, comes this single sidelong drift of gnarled guitars and pixelated soundscapes. But unlike the blurred beauty of Black Sea, June is something else entirely, a creaking, clanging, chiming post industrial landscape of processed guitars, rendered here in the shape of distant pulsing buzz, in shards of jagged chords ringing out and dissipating into the ether, and deep groaning waves of blackened Wolf Eye-d rumble, imagine even a super softened Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, this is less blissed out shoegazey dreamscapery, and more carving dark sonic figures from deep shadow, ominous, sinister, haunting, all words that most definitely apply to past Fennesz recordings, but usually those elements were lurking beneath a shimmery sun dappled exterior, a soft patina of whirling muted buzz draped over a roiling black sea of sound below, but here, those sounds are allowed to creep to the fore, creating a seriously dystopian chunk of cinematic black ambience, the guitars unleashing a murky black fog, that while lovely cloaks all the other sounds in a mysterious blackened grit, but it is Fennesz after all, so the corrosive crumbling darkness does eventually get smoothed out, transformed into into a soft, rolling, burnished shimmer, deep tones dreamily undulating and floating weightless in an expanse of hushed thrum, but by then, the track is winding to a close. Dark stuff from Fennesz, and we like it. A lot!
Pressed on super thick, swirled milky brown vinyl. One sided, the other side with an awesome etching by Savage Pencil, housed in a thick PVC sleeve, and of course, as always, VERY LIMITED!
Live record from everybody's favorite laptopping guitarist (or guitar playing laptopper) Christian Fennesz, released on the new (to us at least) Japanese label Headz, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Touch's Jon Wozencroft. A little over 40 minutes of gorgeous, squelching, hazy shimmer. The disc starts off with a burst of scratchy barbed wire static, before the submerged melodies and summery warmth slowly rise to the surface. As the disc progresses Fennesz's guitar surfaces more and more, as lazily strummed acoustic guitars dodge digital crunch, and fingerpicked notes are captured and sent careening wildly through the thick wash of digital whir, crackly sputter, and gritty fuzz. Moments of melodic tranquility bob weightlessly on a sea of crackling glitches and resonant flickers of crumbling distortion, as the melodies struggle to stay afloat. So completely lovely and at the same time so ferocious and harsh, a dichotomy of sound that seems to define the glorious sonic explorations of Fennesz.
Don't be confused, it may look the same, but in fact, it's the second of two lp reissues from James Ferraro, one half of floor core legends the Skaters. We reviewed his Clear lp on our last list, this time it's Discovery, almost the exact same cover, the alien pyramids floating in some strange sea, only the name of the record is different (and don't trust the sticker, on about half of the lps we got the stickers were all switched up), although really it barely matters, as the sounds on Discovery, sound very much like the ones on Clear, which make sense as they are archival recordings from about the same time period.
Two side long jams, exploring that alien new age only those Skaters guys seem capable of, this one sounds like two parts of the same jam, equal parts new age swoosh, staticky old AM radio and alien soap opera theme music, all blurred and smeared into a weirdly organic warped and warbly drift. Bleary and blown out, glistening and glimmery, a buried krautrock groove, that seems to fade out and return at random, all imbued with a cool psychedelic eighties B-movie Goblin vibe.
The flipside is more of the same, only a bit more rocking, more feedback and distortion, but just barely, the guitars a tad more noodly and spidery, but all the sounds still washed out and sun dappled and hypnotic. Like Clear before it, Discovery is a fantastic chunk of blissed out Baywatch new age, and here's hoping Holy Mountain keeps digging up and reissuing these tripped out artifacts.
Comes with a download card too, so you can get iPod-able versions of these tracks as well!!
More 'hypnogogic pop' from ex-Skaters soundscaper James Ferraro, whose latest album remains rooted in the off kilter whatthefuck (heavy on the lost late night eighties vibe), visually, with a bizarre Best Buy / pick up truck / parking lot / alien robot / Fox Sports graphic collaged cover art, and a lyric sheet / manifesto packed with references to Judge Judy, Costco, Beverly Hills, energy drinks, lost highways, tongue rings, gladiators, batteries, 'no fear', etc, as well as sonically, continuing to mine a fantastically bastardized John Carpenter soundtrack / late night cable sort of warped dronepop melodicism.
The A side here is definitely and immediately recognizable as Ferraro, but unlike past jams which occasionally tended toward the dense and layered, this sidelong track is stripped way down and laid way back, a simple pulsing rhythm, skeletal and minimal, laid out under a glimmery smear of sun dappled synth, over which, still more synths add haunting melodies, would around warm guitar figures, all hazy and washed out and lysergic, the loops warped but subtly so, woven into the perfect fusion of new age shimmer, and retro futurist kosmiche drift, and hell it still sounds like it could have been lifted straight from some lost Argento or Carpenter flick, which is in no way a bad thing.
The flipside is another warbly dreamjam, new age-y and soft focus, gentle tangles of melody tumble frame by frame over a motorik synth pulse, wreathed in hiss, and glistening streaks of reverb and delay, notes ring out, chiming, synths soar and sing, total sun dappled free energy divine sonic bliss for sure. Halfway through, the track shifts gears, and suddenly it's a full on raga, with warped sitar buzz, loping tarpit synth basslines, and lots and lots of space, a sound like looking at the sun, through some glowing alien crystalline structure, reflective and prismatic, with strange bursts of organ warble, swirling clouds of barely there tape hiss, all blurred and smeared into a meditative drift, that gradually gains momentum, transforming into a weirdly propulsive, but still totally laid back new age groove, peppered with cool/weird drop outs, and skipping samples, which only add to the track's mysterious home brewed charm.
Another gorgeous inner space excursion from Ferraro, comes with a download code, and is most likely very limited.
The Field's 2007 album From Here We Go Sublime caught many people by surprise, and we were happy to find ourselves included in that crowd of Field supporters. This was a minimal techno record playing the part of a pop album, through sleights of hand that extracted the sappiest moments of the '80s without appearing the part of the ironist. In pixel-painted blurs of entrancing melodies and soothing ambient warmth, The Field offered nostalgia without having a damn Lionel Richie song stuck in your head. Yup, one of the more memorable samples from From Here We Go Sublime was a wistful guitar lead from Richie's "Hello." In a lot of ways, The Field reached a pinnacle for Kompakt's Pop Ambient strategies, easily surpassing perhaps the album that started it all: Gas' Pop.
Jump two years down the line and several trips around the world, The Field returns with a second album that shouldn't disappoint those who were held rapt by the debut. Yesterday and Today has much of the restrained crescendos of velvety hypnosis grafted onto the steel girds of German engineered techno. Yes, we do know that The Field's Axel Willner is from Sweden, but the heart and soul of the motorik pulse is firmly rooted in Germany. Neu!, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Basic Channel, and of course, Kompakt are the obvious references in the formal structures of The Field, with his source material being those misty-eyed remembrances of music's past. If there are specific samples to be recognized in Yesterday and Today, they are not overt and obvious; but the sentiment is still the same. Nice.
The vinyl version includes a cd of the album as well!
Brand new full length album from Justin Broadrick's (Jesu, Godflesh, etc.) Final project, which in the past was a sort of solo guitar thing, or so we thought. On Afar, the eight numbered tracks are arrangements of processed loops, with nary a guitar in site. Which becomes harder to believe the further we get into the record.
The sound here is dark and mesmerizing, each track a slow cycling soundscape, rife with shifting textures and pulsing almost-rhythms, the sounds super varied, but all woven together into one cohesive songsuite. Fans of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck will dig bigtime, as well as guitar drone aficionados into stuff like Fear Falls Burning.
Layers of crunch and buzz are locked into swelling, swaying hypnotic rhythms, the textures and timbre shifting gradually, the looped aspect not always immediately noticeable. Deep rumbles beneath softly processed whirs are woven into stretches of haunting cinematic shimmer, fading into swooping backwards melodies peppered with bits of glitch and crackle. Elsewhere slow burning 'guitar' sounds buzz explosively into epic and majestic sheets of buzzing woozy blur, before being scattered by dense tangles of reverberating metallic hum and rumbling low end way off in the distance. A few tracks definitely dip into Jeck territory with stuttery looped vocals and clipped samples and muted skitter, before finishing off with a hushed bit of whispery murmur.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. We get these direct from Broadrick's Avalanche label in the UK, so when we run out it might take a couple weeks to get more, assuming there are still some left. Nice thick picture disc in a thick PVC plastic sleeve.
A brand new record from Mr. Justin Broadrick, formerly of Godflesh, presently of Jesu, as well the sole member of this, his long running project Final. Originally an experimental solo guitar project, and actually maybe STILL an experimental solo guitar project, Final has definitely changed over the years, lately sharing more in common with Jesu than anything, the same sort of blissy drift, washed out drone drenched shimmer, but in Final, those elements are blurred into something more ambient and less propulsive, more soundscape-y and less post metal.
Four long tracks, each slow building and slow burning, the first all soft ethereal melodies over a grinding crunching minimal drone, those two elements all tangled up, with the melodies eventually blossoming into epic atonal harmonies, sheets of sound like a symphony of car horns, smoothed into something much more listenable but no less clamorous and chaotic, definitely reminds us of Sunroof! near the end.
The second track starts out all SUNN-y, a crumbling distorted downtuned dirge, although within that dirge lurks some surprising melody, and this track too builds to a blissed out high end shimmer, overlapping tones, washes of synthy warmth, bits of buzz and glitch, lovely, but still softly abrasive.
The flipside begins with some sort of abstract doom, thick, jagged chords, ringing out, and allowed to nearly fade out completely, before the next one comes crashing down, lots and lots of space, in the background a strangely active swirl of skree, streaks of feedback, shards of feedback, sine waves and upper register whir, roiling and churning beneath the lumbering riffage.
And finally, the record finishes off with something altogether different. Something pretty and strummy and yes, shoegaze-y, but weirdly looped and hypnotic sounding, as if they took a chunk from a Jesu track, a pretty undistorted bit, then doused it in effects and set it on repeat, allowing it to slowly shift, but to lock into a mantra like loop, so gorgeous, could have used a whole 'nother side of this stuff for sure.
VINYL ONLY (At least for now, cd coming someday)! LIMITED TO 1500 COPIES!!!
A Finnish black metal band, all of whose music is about trolls. Hence the name! This is their sophomore release, their first disc was a concept album apparently about the war between the trolls and the Christians (!) and it was a big favorite of both of AQ's
The first disc from these Finnish troll-metallers... Black metal polka at its best. Yup, polka. So great. This album tells the story of the (hitherto obscure) war between the Christians and the trolls.
Second 12" of weirdo minimal electronica from this New Zealand producer, and it might be even stranger/cooler than the first (Preparations, which we reviewed back on list #441). In our review of Preparations we describe FiS as sounding like a Tri Angle band, but totally deconstructed, and pulled apart, into something super abstract and slo-mo, but on Iterations, the sound is strangely lush and expansive - check out the title track, which pairs a fractured, super noisy beat, with soaring swoon some strings, the whole thing wrapped in gristle and static, but the end result is somehow epic and majestic, darkly groovy, but almost cinematic and symphonic. That beat does just gets more and more twisted and jumbled as it goes, the perfect foil for that melancholic backdrop. The rest of the record is not too shabby either, "Womb Dreams" is all skeletal dubstep, more hiss and static sculpted into slowly undulating waves and anchored by a dubbed out pulse, and some buried melodies, murky but darkly lovely. "Fever Sweats" cranks up the distortion, sounding a bit like a Burial B-side gone haywire, all blown out and in the red, grindingly rhythmic, with distant angelic voices, and swirling synths, beneath the crumbling latticework of decaying beats. And finally "Her Third Eye (Drum Rain)" lays down a flurry of wild percussion beneath softly stuttering melodies, all smeared into a prismatic haze, shot through with pulses of bass-synth, and strange percussion, a total come-down, minimal electro-dub trip out, that has us hankering for more more more!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Subtitled: Into The Pandemonium Of Celtic Frost. And that's what this is, cult '80s metal band Celtic Frost frontman Tom G. Warrior's tell-all autobiography. An unexpected book, to be sure! But it's a fascinating story, telling the whole strange saga from Tom's youthful metal fantasies as a teenage Swiss headbanger in the Venom-inspired (and since acclaimed as seminal) black metal band Hellhammer, to the heyday of subsequent band Celtic Frost touring America, and on to their major label glam rock disaster "Cold Lake", and beyond. The book reminds us a lot of Klaus Kinski's infamous autobiography, the same wealth of embarrassing personal information, the same obsession with sex (although in the case of the decidely nerdy Tom G., it's more often than not that he recounts tales of NOT having sex with groupies). Frost were the sort of band (despite their "evil" image) that wouldn't make it on stage on time not 'cause they were all blasted on drugs, but because their bassist was still at the comic book store! Anyway, this is a very entertaining book, with a lot to say about the absurdity of the record industry as well as the absurdity of Tom's 'avant-garde' metal band! Celtic Frost fans will of course find much of interest (did you know that their unreleased final record was going to be produced by Jesse Johnson of Prince proteges The Time?? or that Ken Russell asked them to do the soundtrack to "Lair of the White Worm" but they didn't have time? Or that Tom liked to record raps busting on his record label, unfortunately not released on their rarities compilation?) and other readers might well become fans as well, just because Tom is so smart and strange... Recommended!
We managed to get, like, 5 copies of this mysterious cd reissue someplace. So act fast if you want one, as we won't be getting any more. Wish we could though, 'cause this is thee best doomy DIY black metal album recorded in 1987 in the basement of a YMCA building in Iceland we've EVER heard!!
So lo-fi and raw and fucked up it's amazing, with tons of cult '80s atmosphere (a la Hellhammer) and truly bizarre vocal stylings, as on the chugging, erupting "Evil". What strange wretched howlings and absurd rasping shrieks! Like, Tim Baker of Cirith Ungol with more than one frog in his throat. Musically this both shreds and sludges, in both cases clogged with lo-fi production (not helped by this reissue's dodgy mastering from what sounds like a crackly vinyl original) and off kilter outsider aesthetics. But that's all part of the charm. It has to be heard to be believed.
If you liked, say, some of the other eccentric '80s metal artifacts like Black Hole or Dark Quarterer that we've reviewed, and want to hear the "Venom" version of a band like that, this is for you.
I think it's kinda funny that people have been buying/playing this collection incessantly. Why you ask? Well, you'll find none of the off kilter grandiose baroque pop of the Soft Bulletin, none of the surreal noise-pop epics of Clouds Taste Metallic, in fact if they weren't told this was the Flaming Lips, I'm guessing the majority of folks would have no idea. And I can see a lot of Soft Bulletin fans being WAY not into this. Not to say this is bad, because it's not. It's amazing! But it's also sloppy and ramshackle and noisy and chaotic and occasionally tuneless with EXTENDED freak out jams and yelped and howled vocals. This stuff is the very earliest Lips material, some of it from before Wayne even started singing (and the vocals were handled (rather poorly) by his little brother) and it shows. Definite eighties / college radio / Homestead records / Butthole Surfers / Scratch Acid vibe, which makes sense, since that's the scene that spawned the 'Lips. There are hints of what was to come, perfect little melodies, super catchy hooks, but most of the time they're buried under drug addled, spaced out RAWK, with squealing guitars and splattery drumming. Reminiscent of the Replacements in the way that something so messy and noisy and chaotic can manage to be so catchy and practically perfect at the same time. This three disc set compiles the first Flaming Lips ep, the Hear It Is album, the Oh MY Gawd!!! album, the Telepathic Surgery album and TONS of bonus tracks!! Features some of their earliest classics: Jesus Shootin' Heroin, One Million Billionth Of A Millisecond On A Sunday Morning, Drug Machine In Heaven and lots more. Andee says completely essential!!! But not if you're only Lips experience is The Soft Bulletin. Fans of freaked out, fucked up, spaced out psychedelic drug rock, will find LOTS to like here.
We never really stopped digging the Flaming Lips. We'll always probably be partial to the early days, the chaotic, drug addled noise rock psych pop era of course, but even more so that transitional three album arc that marked the band's transition from fucked up underground legends to weirdo stadium rock popstars, Hit To Death In The Future Head, Transmissions From The Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic. With The Soft Bulletin, the band embraced their pop side, and it paid off, and we have to say we're pretty thrilled, that a band this weird, could end up being one of the most popular bands in the world. And it's pretty heartening, that even while they were crafting these crazy commercial records, they continued to be willfully difficult, and extremely experimental and unconventional. From crazy elaborate performances to bizarre limited releases (thumb drive in a human sized gummy skull!), they're essentially one of the only bands who never seemed to be corrupted by success, and who never let that success go to their heads, or really affect their music. In fact, if anything, the Lips seem to have peaked pop wise with the trilogy of The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and At War With The Mystics, and ever since, they seem to have been getting less and less commercial, like some sort of musical Benjamin Buttons. 2009's Embryonic was pretty weird, but The Terror trumps it big time.
Originally rumored to be a return to the band's old sound, The Terror instead finds the band slipping into a sort of abstract experimental almost krautrock sounding psychedelia. The sounds are lush and layered, fantastically atmospheric, the vocals sparse and minimal, no proper pop songs to be found anywhere, instead, The Terror delivers long sprawling dream-psych jams that are some of the best songs we've heard from these guys in ages. The opening tracks set the scene, pulsing electronics, woozy looped synth melodies, skittery drums, hazy vocals, the opener "Look... The Sun Is Rising" maybe the closest to modern Flaming Lips, and actual pop song structure, but even here, there's lots of jagged angular crunch, droned out synths, shimmering layers, everything washed out and hazy, the song leading directly into "Be Free, A Way", which is like an even more abstract extension of the opener, with a woozy soporific hook that will stick in your head forEVER, all over a lush landscape of synths and electronics, and murky pulsing rhythms. "Try To Explain" continues on in that drifting ethereal ephemeral psychedelic dream pop style, laying vocals over a lush bed of electronic pulsations, soaring symphonic arrangements and weird sound effects.
It's on "Your Lust" where the band seem to slough off the vestiges of pop that defined the opening few tracks, unfurling a heady sprawl of hypno rock electro-kraut grooviness, all sun dappled and woozy, eventually fading out into a lush and lovely coda of warble organ, and distorted chiming melodies.
And while there are moments of poppiness popping up throughout the record's remaining five tracks, those tracks seem to bleed together into one gorgeously lysergic sprawling songsuite. The rhythms minimal and motorik, the vocals wispy and ethereal, the sound often bursting into weirdly corrosive crumbles, or densely swirling buzz, blossoming into blown out shoegaze heaviness, before settling back into a twisted bit of swirling sci-fi kraut-pop drift, or some stripped down Can like minimal mesmer, but all wreathed in a constantly shifting cloud of effects and textures and disembodied voices, at one point the band slip into some hushed electronic creep, with falsetto vox, and lots of glitch and buzz, sounding a bit like Thom Yorke's solo record The Eraser, but things here are much weirder, the sound exploding into a noise drenched buzz pop, before devolving into the gorgeously abstract weirdo noise-pop prog of the closer "Always There In Our Hearts", which manages to be both poppy and impossibly catchy, as well as dense and claustrophobic, intense and super dramatic.
The whole record bleeds into one fantastic and lysergic whole, it's hard to pick out a single song, or even a single part. in fact we've yet to NOT listen to the whole record in a single sitting, the only thing that separates the songs for us is hearing a phrase, or part of a title, the record in many ways feels like one huge piece, an interconnected songsuite, and while with every listen, certain parts stick in our heads, certain melodies, specific sounds, even textures, or rhythms, we still just can't bring ourselves to not listen to the whole thing, all the way through, over and over and over.
(By the way, we're still waiting for the vinyl version of this to arrive, we're now told next week, supposedly.)
Listening to old Flaming Lips, it's nearly impossible to imagine them as the stadium rock, Miley & Ke$ha collaborating mainstream musical superstars they've become, cosidering they started life as a drugged out, cacophonous mess, on par with fellow psychedelic noise makers the Butthole Surfers. But even on those early records, there were hints of what was to come, and what the Lips were capable of. Over the years, the band got less noisy, less druggy, less fucked up, and popper, their songcraft developing by leaps and bounds, and somewhere right in the middle was the absolute sweet spot. Actually not somewhere, RIGHT HERE. Clouds Taste Metallic is the Lips finest moment, and that's in a career of mostly fine moments. It perfectly balances the unhinged noisemaking, with the impossibly catchy pop, wound up into quirky, psych pop perfection that unfurls and unravels fantastically. It's also a record swaddled in crazy, FX drenched guitar noise, and marks the final appearance of the man responsible for that noise, twisted axe wrangler Ronald Jones.
How could a perfect record get any more perfect? Add two whole discs (Due To High Expectations...The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles For Your Balloons/The King Bug Laughs, and Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles: Live In Seattle 1996), collecting pretty much every EP, every demo, live track, radio session and random recording from the era, a collection brimming with tons of unlikely gems. So worth it for the bonus stuff for fans, but if you've somehow never ever even heard Clouds Taste Metallic, you are about to have your mind, and eardrums BLOWN.
Finally one of the legendary lost This Heat related recordings gets its first proper release! Originally released as a tape in 1985, recorded by This Heat's Gareth Williams and Mary Currie and friends, shortly after Williams left This Heat, Flaming Tunes is a gorgeous, quirky collection of lo-fi experimental moody textural avant pop, originally conceived as something totally removed from the much more abrasive and rhythmic music he made in This Heat. Unavailable ever since its original cassette release, minus a bootleg which included the tape in its entirety but described it as This Heat's final demo recordings, Flaming Tunes in some ways reminds us of Charles Hayward's Camberwell Now project, in that some of the sounds are familiar and still somewhat This Heat sounding, but the record is much more vocal based, and song oriented, resulting in a sound, that while appealing to This Heat obsessives, offered a whole new window into Williams' approach to sound and songwriting, and in that, a once removed glimpse of some of the elements that helped make This Heat what it was.
The record opens with a looped piano wrapped in sizzling electronic buzz, peppered with strange bursts of sonic crunch, stuttery fragmented rhythms, not hard to see why folks believed this could be a blueprint for new This Heat material. But the second song is more of what Flaming Tunes is all about. Tunes. Sing songy weary vocals over plonked piano, squeaking horns, skittery percussion, lots of drones, plenty of tape hiss and amp buzz, definitely lo-fi, some cool synth melodies, the sound definitely reminiscent of the first two Brian Eno records or that classic Flying Nun sound, bands like the Tall Dwarfs or the Pin Group or This Kind Of Punishment or The Children's Hour or even the Dead C at their most poppy. And that's the sound that makes up most of Flaming Tunes, a hazy, gauzy, low fidelity (but strangely lush) bedroom pop, lots of piano, wreathed in reverb, warm warbly bass, occasional strings, programmed rhythms, detuned tangles of minor key guitar, plenty of jangle and chime, with intermittent forays into cool abstract experimentation, but even then, those tracks still sound a little song-y and don't at all disrupt the flow of the record. "Raindrops From Heaven", with a field recording of rainfall, insects, beneath some clattery, muted parlor skitter, or the brooding muddy piano drone of "It's Madness" with its disembodied vox and haunting creepy creaking Victorian vibe, with sampled strings and mysterious textures, before the record closes with a surprisingly Beatles-esque ballad called "Generous Moon", that sort of classic pop, rendered a little bit warped and woozy, the guitars twangy, and the background melodies a sea of whirring keyboards, locking into a looped dreamlike dirge before finally fading out.
So nice. This Heat fanatics will flip for sure, and no doubt some have tapes or bootlegs of this already, but it sounds so much better now, and comes in a super deluxe digipak, with tons of photos, artwork and liner notes. And even if you've never heard This Heat (what the hell is wrong with you?), this will still appeal to folks into twisted dark lo-fi pop.
Super raw, lo-fi black metal
brutal, buzzing US un-BM....
It's take a couple years and about a million cd-r's, but here it is, the first proper actual cd (not cd-r) release from both of these groups, two of our favorite UN-black metal bands. And for those out of the loop, un-black is another name for white metal, which is another name for Christian black metal, which does indeed seem like an oxymoron, but avid readers of the list by now are well familiar with the sound, and the groups, Glaciial, Agathothodion, Drommer, Elgibbor, Offerblod, Njiqahdda, and of course Flaskavsae and Light Shall Prevail.
LSP is the work of EEE records head honcho W.S. and prolificacy is so extreme, he fronts or is a member of at least 5 different outfits. LSP seems to be his main one and is definitely one of our favorites. Like on past releases, the sound here is a mix of classic grim black metal, and all sorts of fucked up lo-fi production, the core being a relentless buzzing riff, and furious blasting beats, but the sound is wrapped in strange sheets of hiss, and layers of murk and mire, the drum machine is strangely processed, the cymbals unleashing sprawling clouds of hiss, the guitars always buried in varying degrees of fucked up buzz or fuzz, turning riffs into streaks of blurred sound. The first LSP track here offers up a super strange, arpeggiated melody, very sing songy and major key, right in the middle of a roiling sea of blast and buzz. Ends up sounding quite mysterious and haunting. The big change this time around are the vocals, that are a dead ringer for Wrest from Leviathan's hellish corrosive howl, but within LSP, those vokills are simply another layer in the droning hypnotic buzzscapes, and that weird sing songy melodic element resurfaces throughout the other three tracks as well, culminating in the 15 minute closer, a sprawling, woozy and warped black metal, the guitars super blown out and washed out, the sound more of a blurred drone than black metal, even the drums are so static and relentless that they evoke a sense of mesmer as well.
Flaskavsae (a one man band, whose one man plays in Glaciial with Mr. LSP) are a perfect match, a similarly twisted take on (un-)black metal, but instead of speed and aggression, offer up something more depressive and midtempo, the guitars warbly and the distortion crumbling, the drums buried in the mix, except for the cymbals, that like LSP offer up sizzling streaks of hissy sibilance. Even when the songs launch into more furious tempos, something about the sound still manages to remain lugubrious and druggy, the riffs, less insectoid, and more blackened melting psychedelic. The final Flaskavsae track, begins with a creepy almost classical sounding circusy melody, over a lurching almost industrial sounding rhythm, before the blackness and buzz seeps up from below, transforming the track into a weird droned out black buzzscape.
Packaged in a super glossy full color digipak.
We weren't all that into Fleet Foxes when we heard this record the first time. Not sure if it was us reacting to the usual way-too-much-hype that seems to surround so many debut releases these days. Or if the music just didn't move us. So we had sort of written them off as another 'whatever' band, decent enough to carry, but not special enough for us to worry about reviewing. But then we saw them perform live, and something changed. It was a revelation. It's difficult to pinpoint what it was exactly, but they sounded amazing, lush, timeless, sort of rocking, the vocals impossibly beautiful, harmonies to die for. It might have been hearing them LOUD, it could have been the fact that they were performing in a sun dappled glade, surrounded by tress and green grassy hills, probably a little of both. Whatever it was, it opened our ears, and the beauty of Fleet Foxes was revealed to us. A lush seventies Laurel Canyon sort of countryish pop folk. Crosby, Stills and Nash are the obvious reference, maybe the Eagles too. But also mix in some Beach Boys, some Big Star, the pop element is undeniable, the sound fuzzy and sun dappled, the percussion orchestral, the arrangements grand and epic, but somehow, it all sounds so intimate and personal. Sunshiney, melancholy, dreamy, intricate steel string guitars, shuffling drums, hand claps, all just a background for the lovely vocals, a high crystal clear croon, that easily slips into a falsetto, before swooping back down again, and the harmonies, oh the harmonies, absolutely divine. So much so we sometimes find ourselves just waiting for the parts where the band pulls back leaving just the vocals, perhaps an acoustic guitar, those are the moments that make this band so fantastic. Thus returning to the record, we have a whole different take. All of the above describes the sounds within, pretty perfectly, not sure why it took seeing them play live, but for whatever reason, we're glad we did. Otherwise we would have missed out on Fleet Foxes' lush loveliness. Just listen to "White WInter Hymnal" and if you're not sold, well then, figure out a way to get these guys to set up and play for you in some field or forest, it will be well worth it.
