We love our doom. The slower, the doomer, the more o's the better. But it's easy to get burned out. Much like the wave of guitars-against-amps drone outfits who seemed to come out of the woodwork on the heels of the sudden popularity of Earth, SUNNO))) and other dronelords, lately it seems like everyone and their brother has a "doom band". Lots of non-metal bands suddenly seem to be sprouting doomier appendages, side projects, home recorded one offs, in part, because it's a sound that's easy to emulate. Tune your guitar really low, play really slow, and that's it. You're a doom band. But as with any other musical movement, it's not what you do, it's how you do it, and the simpler something seems, the harder it is to actually do it in a way that stands out, that separates it from the hundreds of other bands doing the same thing.
So in the world of ultra doom, or many o'd doom, or whatever, it's obvious which bands are doing something special, Boris, SUNNO))), Moss, Bunkur, and of course Finland's Fleshpress. And as much as we love all of those bands, we have a special affinity for Fleshpress, not just because they're Finnish (although there is that), but that they throw all doomic convention to the wind, and do whatever the fuck they want. Even if it's distinctly not doomy. Play fast. No problem. Blast beats, near grindcore, sure. Play soft and pretty, explore post rock, absolutely. Which is what makes them such a refreshing doom outfit. Or conversely, makes them not a doom band at all, rather a weird band that incorporates doom into their all-over-the-map sound.
Either way, Fleshpress rule, they're heavy, weird, slow (when they want to be), fast and furious (when they don't), they deftly craft mysterious soundscapes, they can also unleash huge torrents of soul crushing megadoom. And they do all of that and more on Pillars. Every record, gets a little weirder, a littler more expansive, a little less traditionally doom, and Pillars is no exception.
The first track is almost like Fleshpress's far out sound encapsulated into a single track. Beginning with minutes of spare guitar strum, lots and lots of space, ambient whir, the guitar letting loose distorted riffs, and letting them drift into the darkness. The bass comes in, and does nothing but offers a spidery framework for the seemingly abstract riffs, then the drums come in, a single crash, every few seconds, there is no real rhythm to speak of yet, finally the band lurches into a doomy plod, somewhere between Monarch slow motion sludge and Harvey Milk glacial groove, complete with weird woozy melody and strange slippery riffage, harsh vocals, drifting fields of feedback, briefly we're trudging through a wasteland populated by like minded mavens of doom. Khanate, Burning Witch, Moss� But soon, the doom recedes� leaving just soft billows of sound, when suddenly the band launch into some full on crusty metallic grooves, eventually finishing off with two minutes of grinding hyperspeed buzz. Pretty all over the place, but the parts are all so deftly arranged that it doesn't sound like a bunch of random bits thrown together, it sounds like small varied pieces of the far out whole. That track is quickly followed by 5 minutes of soft flutter and whir, a detuned guitar plucking out a stumbling rhythm, all around, bits of hiss and hum, the sound of rain and wind maybe, all washed out and soft focus.
Then it's the record's massive two song one two punch, two tracks, both about twenty minutes, back to back, the first, begins all grim black metal buzz, furious fuzzed out riffage and harsh hellish vocals, before slipping into a brief mathy groove and then shifting into a midtempo Burzumic black trudge, which of course partway through gives way to more massive and epic and wide open dooooooooom, plodding drums, crushing sludgy dynamics, and a fluttering guitar melody droning along underneath, eventually building to an epic minor key psychedelic crescendo. The second track, is more of a post rocky drift, with clean guitar and a shuffling rhythm, the vocals still howled and harsh, but the main riff, warm and fuzzy, and subtly propulsive, the tempo a bit warbly and seasick, very hypnotic and repetitive, eventually slowing down, but not into a crushing doom plod, but instead, a sprawling space rock sludge, the drums slow and insistent, the guitars building into squalls of psychedelic freakout, like the outro to a Hawkwind track, before the band launches into a super metallic mathy jam, the FX getting thicker and more dense, the band playing harder and faster, the last 5 minutes or so sounding more like the Heads or White Hills, a gorgeous outer space trip through throbbing bass lines, clouds of spacepsych guitar, and killer chaotic drumming.
The final two tracks both clock in at about nine minutes each, and again, demonstrate some totally other side of Fleshpress' doomworld. The first, is a loping post rock dirge, the guitars ringing out, the rhythm more like the Slintish blackness of Ved Buens Ende, a head nodding mathy groove peppered with vocal howls and an awesome epic buzz drenched coda. The final track is all drone, a murky subterranean trawl, all slow building sludgy swells, dense metallic shimmer, strange bits of industrial sonic detritus and some mysterious backwards percussion right at the end.
Seriously mind blowing. It almost does it a disservice to call Fleshpress a doom band anymore, although those are the folks who will be most inclined to love this. But fans of weird black metal and freaky outsider heaviness might also have found one of their records of the year.
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We've heard a lot of strange black metal related discs, but this is among the strangest...On this album, metal is only one (important but small) component of the whole, which also involves free jazz and trip hop...Released on the same label that brought us the infamous Benighted Leams, and you can see how this truly fucked-up "so bad it's weird and so weird it's bad and so weird and bad that it's kind of amazing" band would appeal to the same minds that thought the Leams were genius. Formerly a medieval 'forest-is-my-throne' epic black metal band a la Ulver (and we think still sharing some members with that Norwegian Ulver/Ved Buens Ende/Dodheimsgard axis), now these guys are wearing suits, carrying automatic weapons, and programming beats. But they've gone beyond the Mr. Bungle tendencies of say, an Arcturus (who seem "ordinary" in comparison!), and created something that even we at AQ can't quite understand, or judge. Every time we put this on, our reactions vary from being blown away at how bizarre and great it is to being appalled at the (same!) dismally bad and wrong moments. Great packaging, with the lyrics in the form of a miniature intelligence "dossier". Essential for those compelled to always increase the utter weirdness quotient of their cd collections, and very definitely for fans of Arcturus, Solefald, and recent Dodheimsgard.
First thing you gotta do to truly enjoy Flight Of The Conchords, is to pretend you've never heard or seen Tenacious D, and if for some crazy reason you -haven't- seen Tenacious D, and we're talking about the HBO show not the movie, then for chrissakes go get it now. You will not see a funnier, more totally wacked show, or hear more amazing metal tinged acoustic rock songs EVER. So once you've seen, and enjoyed Tenacious D, and then immediately begun to pretend that you haven't, then it's okay to dig into Flight Of The Conchords, a similarly damaged acoustic comedy duo.
But FOTC are a lot more feel good than Tenacious D. The D had a serious sinister edge, with songs rooted in HEAVY METAL, swearing and screaming,� blood and chaos and mayhem, where as the Conchords are more friendly, more deadpan, like the TV show, a more sort of Napoleon Dynamite vibe, long pauses, non sequiturs, a sort of rumpled discomfort instead of the D's in your face full frontal comedic pummel. And while we love the D, there is definitely a place for the Conchords. And while they don't seem as inspired as the D, the show is pretty dang funny, and some of their songs are awesome, "Robots" being the most obvious, a tale of the distant future, the year 2000, complete with a kick ass 'binary solo', the band rapidly reciting ones and zeros over madly strummed guitars. "Business Time" is pretty funny too, sexy and silly, and more of that deadpan style.
The live tracks are the best, mostly cuz the duo have killer chemistry, and are able to riff endlessly on the stupidest and most minute things, but the upshot is it leaves you wanting to see a whole set of their stand up, or at least the show (which is peppered with homemade videos for all of their songs), but for now, until you get a chance to see them live, or finally get HBO, this little chunk of goofy toonage should hold you over nicely.
Flittermice Of Eld are another band that, if were we not actually listening to it right now and holding the disc in our hands, we would be tempted to think that this was just made up -- one of those 'amazing' ideas you have that is just too nuts to actually bring to fruition. It's too perfect. One of those records, that were someone to ask, we would have to say epitomizes the perfect AQ record. Killer band name, amazingly bizarre concept, fucked up sound. Hard to believe it wasn't just some fever dream. But nope, here it is. Flittermice Of Eld, according to the band, "both a musical tribute to and critique of black metal." Sonically this is not at all black metal, but it is infused with the spirit of black metal. There are no riffs or vocals, no pounding drums, instead it's a strange concoction of noise and texture, drone and ambience, but with all the basic pitches for the guitar and bass parts generated from a few specific collections of notes from the Darkthrone song "As Flittermice as Satan's Spys" from their classic Transilvanian Hunger album. Whatthefuck? So basically we have this bizarre ambient dronoise record based on a handful of notes from a Darkthrone song?! Fuck yeah!
The first few minutes are a dense clattery improvised skree, clanging and grinding and super chaotic, but this gives way to a dark, slow shifting reverberant drone, that pulses and throbs beneath a smattering of high end twinkles and streaks of glistening feedback. The final 'movement' is a wild atonal no-wave tangle of angular guitar riffing and stumbling bass, an abstract progscape of buzz and twang, a sort of damaged shredfest, loosed from its metal moorings.
Darkthrone would be proud.
Packaged in a hand screened fold over card stock cover, with handwritten liner notes on the back cover. ULTRA LIMITED OBVIOUSLY!
Obviously a $45, EIGHT cd set, comprising a band's entire recorded output, is most likely not for the dabbler, or the casually curious. But if you're anything like us, and have been obsessed with the band Floor, the band that turned into Torche, who managed to turn their downtuned sludge into a sort of insanely hooky, ultra heavy sludge pop, and if like us you were tempted to buy the outrageously over the top 8 cd AND 8 lp TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR box set, then this is for YOU. No vinyl, although it's packaged in a gatefold lp sleeve, this is eight cds, including the band's two proper releases, their s/t record and their Dove record as well as every single, compilation track, demo, live track, unreleased rarity, more Floor than most folks could possible need. But there are definitely some of you, like us, who will for sure need this. Need a Floor refresher? Here's what we had to say about the band's swansong Dove, included here:
Those of you who were into the whole punk/grind/crust scene in the nineties probably remember Floor, a ubiquitous presence at shows and on split 7"s, always confounding the punk rockers with their downtuned sludge and un-punk songwriting and two-guitar, drums, NO bass lineup. Imagine Nirvana's Bleach, but bury all the Beatles popishness so ubiquitous in those songs under even more layers of sludge. It's like Cavity covering Nirvana. Or a less purposefully annoying Melvins. Lots of pounding dynamics, hovering guitar sustain, and squealing feedback. And although the proceedings are almost always pinned down by a crushing slab of sonic sludge, that doesn't keep Floor from getting all poppy, like on the downright catchy "Figure It Out" complete with melodic vocals and catchy as fuck chorus. But it's always back to the hypnotic repetitive dirge, culminating in the 20 minute sixth track "Dove" (members of Floor would go on to be in a band called Dove), a slow motion, chugging juggernaut of muffled riffing and caveman drumming. But that's not all, there's a final blow, a fifteen minute minimal metal workout. Two chords, endless sustain and a simple pounding rhythm. File that track in your drone metal section right next your SUNNO))) and Earth. For fans of the Melvins, Gore, Corrupted, Boris, Nirvana and all things slow and sludgy!
And here's what we had to say about their debut full length:
One of our all time favorite sludge/metal/grind bands, who until now, had only released tracks on compilations and seven inches, finally unleashes a full length, and instead of wallowing in their underground-basement-split-seven-inch past and rehashing their slow motion grind (in the style of Cavity and Eyehategod), they've added LOTS of clean vocals and a surprising amount of melody, ending up with a sound somewhere between your favorite pop punk emo band, the Melvins, late period Fudge Tunnel, and Nirvana, but way, way heavier. Seriously. They've turned into a honest to goodness pop band, but a downtuned, amps-on-11, super-distorted, kick-in-the-guts pop band. Great production too with super distorted low end that makes their huge bursts of guitar sound like the end of the world!
And those constitute just TWO of the EIGHT discs. Phew!
The packaging is really cool too. A thick gatefold sleeve, inside one of the pockets is a massive 12" x 12" full color booklet, with extensive liner notes, track listings, photos, as well as reproductions of all the record covers, and in the middle, in the gatefold, the 8 cds are housed in little slots, affixed to the jacket, with the disc artwork matching the background artwork. Super sweet, and most definitely recommended. But mostly to the more obsessive amongst you!
It's been ten years since the last full length from these sludge pop legends, but mainman Steve Brooks has most definitely been keeping that sludge pop legacy alive with his new band Torche, and really if you dig Torche, you're gonna dig Floor too, as they're both cut from the same sonic cloth, insanely downtuned riffage, crushing drum pounds, and soaring super melodic vocals. Killer pop hooks swaddled in doom/sludge churn, and it's a potent combination. The fact that Brooks has been writing Torche songs (haha, get it?) for so long, does mean, that while this is a whole different band, the jams here still essentially play out like new Torche songs (haha, again), and we're not complaining, it's a sound we can't get enough of, epic, crushing catchiness, impossibly hooky metallic crunch, the band slipping easily from tarpit dirge, to more hard rocking heaviness, check out the opening one-two punch of the title track and "Rocinante", the former, a gloriously skull caving slab of doom-pop creep, like Queen crossed with the Melvins at 16rpm, the latter, a furious blast of headbangable pop metal riffery, the melodies crazy catchy, but buried beneath some serious badass riffage. But then hold on to your fucking hats for "Trick Scene", which begs the question, how the fuck do these guys tune their guitars so low, and why does it sound so goddamn good?! Brooks popsmithery has never sounded better, OR heavier, there's always been a whiff of Nirvana's Bleach to Floor (and Torche), which is in no way a bad thing, and it's like Bleach, only louder and heavier and slower and sludgier, which is of course most definitely a good thing! Amidst all this chug and churn, there does lurk a few sonic surprises, some new waviness on one track, some pure pop dreaminess on another, but ultimately, this is just absolute sludge pop bliss, and maybe the best thing we've heard from Brooks with ANY of his projects. Which is saying a while heck of a lot...
One of our all time favorite sludge/metal/grind bands, who until now, had only released tracks on compilations and seven inches. Must be at least 7 or 8 years now that Floor have been contributing their downtuned dementia to the underground scene and they have managed to remain pretty unknown. Hopefully this full length will change that. And it really should, cause their sound has definitely changed with the times. Instead of wallowing in their underground-basement-split-seven-inch past and rehashing their slow motion grind (in the style of Cavity and Eyehategod), they've added LOTS of clean vocals and a surprising amount of melody, ending up with a sound somewhere between your favorite pop punk emo band, the Melvins, late period Fudge Tunnel, and Nirvana, but way, way heavier. Seriously. They've turned into a honest to goodness pop band, but a downtuned, amps-on-11, super-distorted, kick-in-the-guts pop band. Great production too with super distorted low end that makes their huge bursts of guitar sound like the end of the world! Way recommended.
This is one of those albums that's neither new, nor even a recent reissue, but that we here at Aquarius decided, heck, let's list, it deserves it! (While this disc already appears on our website, it was never actually *listed* in any of our newsletters.) So while many might already know this album backwards and forwards, it has most certainly slipped through the cracks for too many others out there. Being a Japan-only import can't help. Allan wisely reordered some copies recently (when a customer special ordered it for themselves on-line) and Byram, unwittingly playing it in the store, found himself getting progressively more obsessed with the album (and the band)! It wasn't long before Jim and Marcy were also finding themselves hooked. Now almost any day you come into the store, you'll hear the Flower Travellin' Band blaring.
This is an album (and a band) that are not celebrated nearly enough -- possibly out of misguided notions of their being another bad psych knock-off among the many crowding the record racks in the early seventies. But Japan's Flower Travellin' Band were no mere cheesy imitators of occidental rock 'n roll, they were in actual fact a full-fledged, pioneering tour de force of psychedelic progressive hard rock, equalling the krautrock heavies of the era. FTB can be compared favorably to Amon Duul's better efforts with their experimental meandering (think Yeti), and the best trancey spaceouts from Can. Yet there's never a sense that FTB lose track of their compositions no matter how far out they take a track. Perhaps because even more than these experimental Krautrockers, FTB's heavy (fucking ominously heavy) sound points to a major Sabbath, Purple, and Crimson influence. Released in 1971, Satori is the band's second and arguably best album (all but the first album Anywhere have now been reissued by Warner Japan). From the first screech/howl at the beginning of track one -- "Satori Part I" (the tracks on the album are all "Satori", parts I-V) -- from vocalist Joe, who inhabits a zone somewhere between Can's Damo Suzuki and Deep Purple's Ian Gillan, the album gets straight down to business. Joe's scream is followed by a foreboding bass, guitar and drum dirge that's straight up collision between Cream and Black Sabbath in which no one survives. It's got so much more teeth than either, it's not even funny, predating punk by a good many years. "Satori Part II" however is quintessential FTB Over a pounding tribal drumbeat, alternating between a buzzing sitar-esque guitar drone and a melody line that curls ripples and lilts like a plume of burning incense smoke, guitarist Hideki Ishima lays out one of the creepiest, coolest guitar leads ever. If that ain't enough, vocalist Joe's singing is like that of Axl Rose being channelled by the Sun City Girls! Even if the rest of the album were total shit -- which it ain't -- the cost of this cd would still be well worth it for this song alone! "Part III" -- an instrumental -- picks up where II leaves off but slows the tempo down to a deathly pace, which makes it even heavier. This is the Sabbath influence on FTB writ large. Replete with an improv freakout before returning to the original riff and building into a frenzied crescendo. Needless to say, if you weren't bobbing your head at the beginning of the song, you will be by its end. "Part IV" could be considered FTB's "blues" number, with Joe picking up the harmonica instead of singing. But instead of churning out the expected twelve bar formula, FTB truncate the form and construct a minimalist jam around a short riff instead. "Part V" shows yet another facet of FTB's seemingly infinite potential with Hideki (?) playing some kick ass, spooky koto-like guitar overdubbed on top of some heavy psych. Damn! They could have done ten fucking albums around this schtick alone and probably never lost our interest... sigh... but this (and the other two that are also available, look for reviews in future) will have to suffice for now. Absolutely, fucking recommended!!!!
MPEG Download: "Satori Part II" [/audio/flowersatori2.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Satori Part II" [/audio/flowersatori2.m3u]
We were all ready to hate this, not cuz we don't dig the players, we love Michael Flower (Vibracathedral, Sunroof!) and Chris Corsano is a ruling drummer, it's just that for some reason we thought this was gonna be some of that new fangled indie free jazz, which always leaves us a bit cold. Not sure why, maybe it was the 'duo' thing. But then it's on VHF, home to much of our favorite dronemusic and outrock, and the instrumentation definitely looked like anything but free jazz: Japan banjo, tanpura, organ, melodica, cello and drums. So we figured, okay, what the heck, let's give it a try, and BAM, this totally knocked out socks off and our teeth in, at once exactly what we had hoped for, but something we never would have imagined, some impossible hybrid of frenetic chaotic drumming, and strange super distorted looped melodic mantras, like some impossible sonic hybrid of Mick Barr and Dan Higgs, or Orthrelm covering Zomes, tripped out and psychedelic, wild as fuck, but weirdly hypnotic and totally mesmerizing.
The opener is a mad blowout of wild melodies super distorted and all tangled up, like some strange sped up bagpipe, wound around Corsano's non stop drum workout, the banjo here ends up sounding like the guitars on Amps For Christ records, unfurling intense abstract runs of notes and fragmented melodies, sometimes locking into little trills, other times getting all wavery and woozy, the drums somehow remaining totally free but staying locked in with Flower's wild psych freakouts. It's so inherently chaotic and raw and primal and by all rights should be difficult to listen, but after a few minutes, we find ourselves totally lost, and we never want it to end.
The follow up is more of a percussive free jam, reminding us of groups like Avarus and Anaksimandros and No Neck and Sunburned Hand, very free, but with the metallic shimmer spreading out over the warm low end whirs and the abstract gamelan like melodies. "The Drifter's Miracles" is the most obviously VHF of the batch, a long languorous slow burning ur-drone, all bowed stings and wheezing organ, very raga like, overtones shifting and beating against one another, bits or percussion clink and clank beneath the gloriously heaving sea of rich lustrous tones, this definitely could be a whole record, as it is, it's easily the most 'listenable' of the bunch.
"The Beginning Of The End" sounds like a field recording of some ritualistic musical performance, the sound muted and lo-fi, a sort of crazed dance, the drums a wild tribal patter, sometimes splatter, Flower again offering up dense tangles and billowing squiggles, there is definitely a free jazz element, but the duo manage to take the loose free drumming, and the manic looped sounding melodies and create a sort of abstract ultra free ur-drone, it's quite magical actually, the parts are so frenetic and tense and relentless, that it seems impossible that combining them would create something soothing and spiritual, but that's precisely what it does.
The closer, the nearly 18 minute "The Main Ingredient" is like a more jubilant, ebullient version of the record opener, the drums muter and minimal, still skittery and feral, but Flower's banjo weaving magical crystalline shapes in the air, melodies, notes, tones, harmonies, overtones, all shimmering and hovering and looping and stuttering and glistening, total Amps For Christ / Higgs / Orthrelm sun baked lysergic spiritual ur-drone free jazz out rock blowout. So completely heavy, and epic, and dreamlike, and tripped out, and intense and so so beautiful.
Oh man, do we love this band. Totally furious over the top necro blackness from this grim Dutch horde. This record is from way back in 2003, but we figured if some of us somehow missed it, some of you probably did too. Which is a shame cuz this stuff totally slays.
Besides having an amazing band name, a wicked logo, a killer album cover, and some of the coolest corpse paint we've seen in ages, these guys also sound completely amazing! So dense and black and heavy and grim and necro. A completely overwhelming onslaught of utter blackness, complimented by a vocalist that sounds like he has a mouthful of bloody nails and dead babies. Imagine a sky black with clouds, the earth splitting open as the devil unleashes his own plagues upon the world, but the plagues he sends are a rain of spiked gauntlets, a flood of corpsepaint, a swarm of corrosive blast beats, an attack of acidic buzzing riffs, blasting Burzumic buzz, throat shredding growls and a brutal black sound that will shroud the world in darkness and drag every one kicking and screaming down into the pits of hell.
This sounds a little like that. Raw, fast and so brutal. Imagine being strapped to some sort of medieval torture device and being pelted with thousands of Darkthrones, eventually ending up buried beneath layer after layer of corrosive, crusty, buzzing black grimness. Awesome.
We've been accused of being house music haters. And there's some truth to that. But is one certain obtuse branch of the house music family tree that had us the second we laid ears on it. A while back, the Chain Reaction label introduced a super stripped down, minimal house music, that was quickly dubbed "heroin house", for it's murky druggy laid back feel. It was like hearing house music through a drug induced haze. Or hearing the sound of throbbing four on the floor dance music seeping through the floor of your apartment from the late night dance club below. A super minimal throb. just a pulse really, a completely hypnotic, barely there rhythm, that just shifts and shimmers and works its way into your head, into your chest, into your soul. Hard to imagine people dancing to this music. It's a little like chillout music, but way more rigid and rhythmic. It sounds a little like the music that was created for those 3 o4 people still on their feet, after a night of serious imbibing, who are unwilling to stop dancing, but can't muster anything more than a druggy shuffle, or a barely visible shimmy. Playing on and on and on until the final one drops. For those of us who don't dabble in either drugs OR dancing, this music fulfills a function much like drone music, in fact, it is a sort of drone music, the beats and throbs and pulses are like a segmented drone, a completely hypnotic static sound that carries us into oblivion.
Fluxion's Vibrant Forms just might be our favorite of the Chain Reaction bunch, the most skeletal, the most monochrome, the most everything minimal, it's like techno music composed by Steve Reich. Slowly shifting subtleties and barely drifting overtones, over a framework of repetition. Loops that shift ever so slightly, creating the sensation of change, while keeping us suspended, drifting, in a state of dreamlike suspension. Maybe one of our favorite "techno" records ever. Fans of Gas and the more rhythmic end of the Pop Ambient spectrum NEED this. As might the more daring dronesters amongst you...
First in this label's "New American Ethnic Music" series. "Avant-garde hillbilly and blues music" by violinist (and Fluxus conceptual artist) Henry Flynt.
Each disc documents a live improv session, the first from 1981 and the second from 1980, and both are quite lovely indeed. I guess it's "hillbilly" 'cause he's playing a fiddle, and there's echoes of Appalachian trad music amidst the drone.
For one concert/disc he's joined by a tambura player, and on the other by a guitarist (both strangely uncredited). Definitely in a Tony Conrad / fake Indian raga mode, and good at it. Fans of the aforementioned, as well as those into (Flynt associate) LaMonte Young, Ashtray Navigations and even the Dirty Three (it's actually VERY Dirty Three sounding at moments, with Flynt's melancholy, almost psychedelic violin being the dominant voice). More specifically, these are (we're told) "extended extemporizations on extended alpha-state ascension through excessive application of overtone-series note relationships/harmonics over a single chord/form". Check out www.henryflynt.org for more info on the man's art and writing (there's some strange essays to be found there). A very cool archival release, can't wait to hear more in the series.
Folks hankering for their seventies psychedelic biker doom fix need look no further than these Texas downer rock scuzzlords, who it seems took all the time and effort they DIDN'T put in to the cover art of this lp, and instead devoted it to maximizing the amount of FUZZ found on here. Fogg traffic in the same sort of drug fueled, garage-bound heaviness as outfits like Satan's Satyrs and Uncle Acid. The guitars appropriately fuzzy, the wailing Ozzyish vocals a perfect compliment, but unlike the punked out heaviness of the Satyrs, or the bell bottomed doominess of Uncle Acid, Fogg somehow sound more wasted and washed out, the sound less heavy, a bit brittle and tinny, extremely lo-fi, but it suits their mesmerizing heavy hippy psych punk swagger.
Opener "Time Ride" sets the scene, right down to the lurching stop start bridge, and some scuzzy guitar shred would around the murky main riff, that's as Sabbathy as can be, but decontextualized into something a bit more ramshackle and loose. And while seventies biker rock might be the core of their sound, they also get pretty sixties, "Rainbow" finds the guitar and bass playing strange harmonies, over a wildly groovy shuffle, laced with still more shred, lysergic and laid back, but on the verge of exploding into full on headbanging at any moment.
And yet for all that, when need be, these guys can conjure up the ghost of doom past, just check out the massive lumbering "Fried Cheer", which does actually sound like some especially acid fried take on Blue Cheer, the song lurching from swagger lumber to furious punky pound and back again. The more we listen to these guys, the more we hear outfits like Earthless and Hot Lunch, that sort of skate shred, woven into Fogg's Sabbathy swing.
They also stretch out (way out) on a handful of tracks, locking into almost krautrock-like stretches of hypnomesmer, as well as meandering space rock/jam rock, the song unfurling into waves of heady/heavy mesmer, tripped out and sinister, and downright sludgy, like on the appropriately titled "Sludgemother", that sounds like a downer Uncle Acid, a glorious slab of wasted skater doom, or witchy downtuned zoner psych, whatever you call it, it's heavy and tranced out and freaky as fuck (oh and there's a DRUM SOLO). Oh yeah, and of course stick around for the closer, another awesomely titled jam, "Womb To The Tomb", that sounds like a more poppy, way more brain damaged Electric Wizard, dirgey and droney and totally messed up and mesmeric, and just about the best thing we've heard in ages. This is a record that no doubt will be right at home right wedged between that played to death lp of Blood Lust, and that scratched up vinyl version of Die Screaming, or next to your copy of the Darkscorch Canticles compilation.
Vinyl-only, and sorry, no download.
We got a big ol' batch of tapes from the Land Of Decay label, run by none other than Andre Foisy, one half (or maybe now it's one third) of aQ beloved doomdronedirge outfit Locrian, the tapes include new jams from ITHI, Number None, Wraiths (all reviewed elsewhere on this week's list) and this, the latest solo release from the man himself. And while we were all prepared to say something about how this doesn't veer very far from the sound of Locrian, all it took was about ten seconds to realize it really does. Sure it's still droney and broody and dark and mysterious, but instead of the bleak minimalism and heaving low end thrum of Locrian, Foisy has conjured up two gorgeously heady slabs of folky looped string raga, mandolins and violins unfurl woozy layered loops, constantly shifting, hazy and fuzzy, definitely sounding like snippets of some lost Comus song blurred into a roiling bit of dense folk swirl, while the whole thing is wreathed in a thick churning fog of guitar buzz and rumble, a blackened halo of feedback and thrum, gorgeous stuff for sure.
The second track offers up another variation, a mesmerizing skeletal guitar loop, which is soon joined by droned out violins, sounding a bit like Tony Conrad, all underpinned by deep rumbling guitar swells, streaks of controlled feedback, the sound growing more and more dense, and dreamily blown out, clouds of FX drift in, some tabla like rhythms, the song exploding in slo-mo into a sort of Skullflower/Sunroof! style bliss out, but with a strange sense of raga folk at its core.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!
Another bad ass chunk of pounding post punk math rock heaviness from Virginia. We raved about Tigershark a while back, some seriously chugging riffery, then The Catalyst more recently, who knocked us on our asses with their weird post hardcore stoner grunge screamo (we still have a few of those left, check elsewhere on the aQ site), not sure if Food are related, but they might as well be, they're heavy as fuck, and offer up a similarly supercharged post punk, but while The Catalyst and Tigershark both channeled AmRep (The Catalyst mixing in plenty of Sub Pop), Food take that sound even farther, with their super thick distorted fuzzed out guitars, pounding caveman drums and thick ropy bass, they weave a pretty thick, almost dirgey at times, post punky metallic garage rock stomp, but it's the vocals that seal the deal, a wild feral howl, falling right between Rick Froberg of Drive Like Jehu / Hot Snakes and Mudhoney's Mark Arm, plenty of vitriol and swagger, and a paint peeling yowl that perfectly compliments Food, chug and churn.
Dense loping grooves give way to stripped down tribal workouts, give way to complex mathy jams, which give way to seriously murky, dirge-y, almost Brainbombs-ish sludge, slathered with plenty of squealing Eyehategod style feedback, and all locked into pounding metallic repetition. Some seriously killer garage-y metallic post punk for sure.
Incredible packaging, eye popping cover art, all recycled materials, heavy printed insert, and pressed on INSANELY thick vinyl. And probably pretty limited too.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Brian McMahon is becoming the indie-rock equal to Leonard Cohen - cool, measured, suave, and theatrical in his abbreviated deeply whispered delivery. In his first record in 4 years (due in part to spending over two years recording this album in six different studios), McMahan and the For Carnation still pack all the wallop of his former band Slint, but with much more grace and subtley. This was rumored to be the For Carnations 'soul' record, but don't expect Afghan Whigs style indie rock white boy soul. Sure this record has soul, but it's way more like the For Carnation's trip hop record. You can hear Massive Attack and Portishead and Mo Wax in their sound as much, if not more than Slint or any other indie rock references. Though the structures remain firmly rooted in rock, what was probably one of the most anticipated indie *rock* records of late, turns out to be a beautiful, dark and langorous accidental trip hop record. Nice
Ok, this is a black metal band, but non-metallers into the improv-drone sounds of the Jewelled Antler collective, Richard Youngs/Simon Wickham-Smith and the like should keep reading!
Not to be confused with the other Forest we've raved about (the psychedelic British folk band from thirty years ago), *this* Forest is a Russian black metal outfit, and a pretty good one belonging to the raw, primitive, corpse-painted end of the genre. The first four tracks on here consist of blasting, frozen Darkthrone worship, keeping alive the cult spirit that so few bands today still possess -- maybe because those tracks were actually recorded in 1996. Malevolent, majestic pagan metal full of Burzumic mayhem. Fans of this vein of true, trancey black metal darkness will be pleased. And if that was all that was on this disc we'd think it was cool. But then comes the fifth and final track, a surprise twenty-minute opus called "Winter Howl" taken from a 1994 rehearsal tape. Suddenly Forest isn't so obviously black metal at all, they've entered a psych-drone realm that's more akin to the aforementioned Jewelled Antler stuff (Thuja, The Birdtree, etc) or Taj Mahal Travellers or Reynols or Amon Duul's krautrock jams, still as forest-y and primitive as the preceding metal songs though. A wavering whispy wordless vocal winds over a bed of lost, primal percussion and haunting washes of mild feedback. Simple melody lines on guitar wander through the increasing haze, with deeper vocals providing additional layers of drone. If you really heard this in a forest you'd be mesmerized and scared, but it's really nice and pretty (in a damaged way) when heard at home...pretty to us anyway, dunno if Kaldrad and Dagorath meant it to be so! The vocals, until they get a little more metal-ly, totally remind us of the bliss-out singing by British folk experimentalist Richard Youngs or Jewelled Antler's pop soul Jason Honea. If Finnish avant-forest-folk folks like Avarus and Kemialliset Ystavat or the Jewelled Antler collective decided to make black metal, this is what's we'd imagine it would sound like! (Actually, there IS an upcoming black metal-inspired release from Jewelled Antler, a 3" cd-r by a group they call Tomes, but Tomes takes an even more subtle approach than "Winter Howl"...look for that here at AQ soon!) Meanwhile, on the black metal side, fans of Mistigo Varggoth Darkestra, Caacrinolas, Potentiam, and other weird ones should dig this track, along with Forest's other more typical black metal sounds. Recommended.
Apparently, this UK duo, Ben Moon and Richard Sides, aka Forest Creature, have dabbled in all manner of noisemaking in their brief existence, creating huge crushing walls of speaker shredding brutality, or super glitched out psychedelic beat heavy crunch, or howling, live, drum driven psychnoise freakouts, and while traces of those sounds are still present, we have to say, we're pretty partial to the twisted noise captured here, a seeming distillation of those disparate sounds, into something much more refined and focused, perhaps equally varied sonically, but somehow still strangely cohesive, and epic 'song' suite, due in no small part to the editing and sequencing as the actual music making itself.
The label drops names like Black Dice, Fuck Buttons, Animal Collective, Autechre, and those all do pretty much apply, but to our ears, there seems to be much more to Forest Creature than just aping their influences, we hear the ominous cinematic synthiness of Goblin, the intense late night noir buzz of recent aQ faves D.A., the murky swirl and shimmery out-of-time new age-y drift of the recent crop of pop hypnogogists, but here, those influences, as well as a handful of purloined sounds, are all reimagined, reinterpreted and all tangled up into constantly squirming and unraveling soundscapes, that skitter from almost kraut-like mesmer, to nineties style IDM, to looped woozy minimal synth wave, to gorgeous haunting murky heroin house, but no matter what the sound, or where the songs seem to be headed, Forest Creature mold all those elements into something truly original, lush, and deep, and dark, sometime super chaotic and hyper rhythmic, other times hushed and ominous. "Edit 4" begins as a foreboding minimal slow burning drone, but eventually builds to a warped synth loop, that gets more and more crunchy and buzz, the low end billowing out like a black cloud, the effects eating away at the original loop, super intense and totally mesmerizing. "Edit 5" is all rumbling low end whir, a distant beat, buried way down in the murk, looped and skittery, hovers below a black ambience that seems to swirl and shimmer in slow motion. "Edit 3" might be the prettiest of the bunch, beginning with a skeletal high end looped rhythm, which is soon joined by some warm warbly synths way off in the distance, the rhythm remains steady, but that low end grows thicker, and buzzier, creating thick warm slabs of chordal hum, playing out a gorgeous melancholy slowcore melody, a haunting depressive slow pop crawl, run through with that skeletal skitter, until both the buzz and the beat, begin to crumble, and intensify, until the song is transformed into a noise drenched psychedelic swirl.
So awesome. And a little bit surprising coming from Blackest Rainbow, whose past releases have tended more toward groups like Jazzfinger, Barn Owl, Bong, Starving Weirdos and the like. Frustrated Analogue is some fantastically twisted, blissed out, synth heavy electronic psychedelia, repetitive, hypnotic, spaced out, warped and glitchy, drone-y and rhythmic, moody and mysterious, a dizzying melding of This Heat, Goblin, John Carpenter, old Warp Records 12"s, early Chain Reaction, modern synthdrone, early analogue synth music, and the groups we mentioned up top (Fuck Buttons, Black Dice, Animal Collective, etc.). Way way recommended. Easily one of our new favorites...
It was only a matter of time. If Forest Swords hadn't done it, someone definitely would have, but hard to imagine it could have sounded as good as this. DRONESTEP. That's what they call it. A fusion of dark post-rock ambient drone music and skittery spaced out dubstep. Warm languid guitars, brooding atmospheres, and laid back downtempo grooves. In the wrong hands it definitely could have been lame, but Forest Swords nailed it, the result so organic and warm and mesmerizing, odds are the last thing you'll be thinking about is what to call it. Instead you can just sit back, and let these lush droned out grooves carry you off.
Had this not been on Olde English Spelling Bee, it certainly wouldn't have been out of place on some upstart dubstep 12" label, it definitely has the same sort of lugubrious soporific feel as Burial or Kode9, murky, washed out, muted, muddy and bass heavy, but instead of being sample based, guitars unwind, spidery melodies all tangled up in clouds of hazy reverb, vocals drift in and out all spectral and ethereal, in fact if anything, it's like some awesome, nineties slowcore jam, Codeine, or Seam, or someone like that, remixed by Portishead, transformed into a different kind of slowcore, a bleak, moonlit, forest dancefloor slowcore, everything bathed in dark blues and soft blacks, smokey and gauzy, the beats skeletal and minimal, the guitars chiming, glistening and glimmering, the bass, rumbling and throbbing, a rib cage rattling hum, samples woven into the mix, but doused in effects, so vocals becomes little swirling clouds of truncated melody, and melodies drift heavenward like wisps of grey smoke. Every track here is a smoldering late night blur, a bleary ear-ed slither and skitter through some soft focus soundscape, dreamlike and hypnotic.
Gorgeously dark, otherworldly, warmly mysterious, and darn close to being our favorite new record this year...
Comes with a download coupon as well...
We made the first record from Forest Swords, Dagger Paths, a Record of The Week, way back in 2010. And like we said in that review, how could we not? Music that was originally described to us as "drone-step", and did in fact live up to that descriptor. That record definitely had a Burial / Kode9 vibe, and since then groups like oOoOO and Vessel have definitely channeled some of the same sound, but Dagger Paths sounded like outsider dubstep, created in a vacuum, and home recorded, the sounds raw and rough around the edges, as if someone who had never heard dubstep, and had been raised on experimental 4 trackery and abstract minimal noise music, figured 'what the heck? I'll give it a try.' So it was, lots of guitars, blurred into droning swaths, lots of reverb and hazy vocals, huge bass rumbles and murky beats, everything spectral and ethereal, sorta Codeine crossed with Portishead. So we were definitely taken aback a little by the new record, which at first blush, is way more polished, and lush, and high fidelity, and as much as we try not to be like THOSE people, who don't want bands to change, and just want the band to make the same record we love already over and over, it was hard to not miss the grit and the grime of the old record. But honestly, that knee jerk reaction lasted all of about 30 seconds, cuz holy shit, the new sound is equally awesome, woozy, and dark, and druggy, and lush, and layered, the beats hypnotic, the whole sound mesmerizingly tripped out, guitars are still in the mix, but they're more deftly woven into the sound, so they sound almost like orchestral swells, the vocals too, here garbled and distorted, becoming yet another part of the bigger picture, that picture being the sort of murky tarpit slo-mo soul we can't seem to get enough of. And yeah, if you already love Burial, oOoOO, Vessel, the most recent Haxan Cloak, Holy Other, etc., we're guessing a few seconds of the first sound sample below and you'll be sold BIG TIME.
Everything we loved about that first record is still present, but just a bit more polished and recontextualized, the vibe is still a sort of darkly psychedelic electronic slow-core, the sonic palette is much expanded though, giving the songs here a seriously prismatic sprawl, total wasted, zoner, late night come down chill out club jamz, with occasional forays into slightly more upbeat climes, a little jungle-y skitter here, a bit of dubsteppy throb there, dub looms large everywhere, in the liquid basslines, in the reverbed and echo drenched beats, and fear not, it's still occasionally weird as fuck, with songs splintering into chaotic drifts, or crumbling into warped noise, twisted samples and Morricone-esque guitar twang, all before lumbering back into another fantastically tranced out stuttery, skittery, electro-dub drone-soul lope. So good!
Oh how we love the mighty Forgotten Woods, supreme Norwegian black metal weirdos! Their new record, Race Of Cain, reviewed recently, was a mind blower, and their three cd collection of older stuff is an all time AQ best seller. For those of you vinyl freaks who have been holding off, well you are finally in luck, Forgotten Woods'�As The Wolves Gather, their 1994 full length, and disc one in the�Baklengs Mot Stupet triple cd set, has finally been reissued as an lp! It's super limited of course, we got a handful but they won't last long. Here's a slightly altered version of our review of�As The Wolves Gather from the triple cd set:
So...what's the big deal you ask, why are these Forgotten Woods so unforgettable? Well, first off, and at first listen, this will definitely appeal to the whole raw, old-school, Nordic forest black metal necrocrowd. Really good grim stuff in the unholy spirit of classic Darkthrone and Burzum, but with that extra kinda inept, Benighted Leamsish fuckedupedness to it that of course makes us love it all the more. And, additionally and importantly, there's also always a strange, unexpected sort of poppiness underlying everything.
As a friend (who also likes this band, and is a member of Thuja, the Blithe Sons, Buried Civilizations, the Skygreen Leopards and a bunch of other Jewelled Antler acts) put it, "man it's good...completely inept, like they're barely pulling it off, total 13-year-old-metal-kid-in-the-basement drums."
A classic, but a 'damaged' outsider BM classic as far as we're concerned, this is definitely raw and necro and kvlt and grim, buzzing and black, but it also struggles and stumbles, is blown out, lo-fi and weird as fuck. As with all Forgotten Woods, WAY recommended.��
Never thought we'd be able to list this. Everytime we got it in, it would go too quickly, just flying out the door by word of mouth we guess. Clearly this '90s Norwegian black metal band has a cult following! Then we thought that this triple cd box had gone out of print. But thankfully No Colours just pressed up some more, and we think we scored enough copies to dare list it, even though the label may be out of it already. So...what's the big deal you ask, why are these Forgotten Woods so unforgettable? Well, first off, and at first listen, this will definitely appeal to the whole raw, old-school, Nordic forest black metal necrocrowd. Really good grim stuff in the unholy spirit of classic Darkthrone and Burzum, but with that extra kinda inept, Benighted Leamsish fuckedupedness to it that of course makes us love it all the more. And, additionally and importantly, there's also always a strange, unexpected sort of poppiness underlying everything, despite song titles like "Grip Of Frost" and "Dimension Of The Blackest Dark". As a friend (who also likes this band, and is a member of Thuja, the Blithe Sons, Buried Civilizations, the Skygreen Leopards and a bunch of other Jewelled Antler acts) put it, "man it's good...completely inept, like they're barely pulling it off, total 13-year-old-metal-kid-in-the-basement drums." That by itself would be enough to explain this band's appeal. But our sensibilities here at AQ are further stoked by the fact that the more you delve into these discs, the more you find yourself wondering just what the hell you're listening to...as Forgotten Woods mysteriously morphs by the third cd into something that sounds like jazz-inflected, naive indie-rock mopery, with clean jangly guitars that starts to sound like Felt or The Church or even Maher Shalal Hash Baz! Other tracks seem to echo The Cure, all slow and post-punkish... what a weird band! We can only wonder at what they thought they were doing, and wonder even more so at why they're so accepted by the grim black metal underground. So, even though this is a $25 import triple-disc set, it's the kind of black metal (like Benighted Leams, Xasthur, Lugubrum, Leviathan, Abruptum, Meads of Asphodel, Ved Buens Ende, and Sigh for example) that we have to recommend to all of our customers who are into (not-necessarily metal) weirdness. And in case you're wondering, this does collect the entirety of Forgotten Woods' output (three albums, plus one recorded under the name Joyless) from the years indicated in the title...
For a band we had thought at one point to be dead and buried, Norway's legendary black metal weirdos Forgotten Woods have been pretty high profile lately, with an unexpected (and unexpectedly amazing) new album, a bunch of reissues, the ever popular 3cd box set�Baklengs Mot Stupet, and now this, the first time on cd for both FW's 1993 demos, the self titled Forgotten Woods and the follow up Through The Woods, both primo slabs of ultra grim and kvlt lo fidelity buzz.�
It's easy to see, even in the early stages of the band, that they were one seriously cracked bunch, the sound not just lo-fi, but damaged and bizarre, the riffing is simple and old school, but super low in the mix, with the crashing thrashing pounding drums way more prominent, but not nearly as much as the croaked blackened growls, the strange Gollum-like growls, some seriously harsh and alien vocals, perfectly suited to the crumbling blackness in the background. Going from stumbling chaotic buzz, to lurching doomy pound, Forgotten Woods conjure up some seriously fucked up and freaked out black atmospheres...
The self titled demo is the more brittle of the two, all high end hiss and soul shearing buzz, whereas Through The Woods ups the production values just a bit, and the sound is definitely heavier, but also murkier and muddier, which again suits their skewed vision. Also things seem to get way weirder (if that were even possible), hinting once again at the bizarre blackened beast they were soon to become, with angular atonal melodies, damaged off kilter leads and even weirder vocals, from shrieks to shouts, all tangled up into dense black squalls of sound.
Before all you Forgotten Woods fanatics freak out the way we did when we first saw this, let us say that most of this disc IS included in the still available Baklengs Mot Stupet 1992-1996 triple cd set. But don't stop reading, there is definitely still a good reason to pick this up, even if you have the 3cd set. There are basically two possibilities for wanting to own this, a brand new reissue of Sjel Av Natten. Either you're a newbie, who wants to check out FW, but doesn't want to drop $25. Although we can pretty much guarantee, that once you wrap your ears around this you WILL want everything you can get your hands on. Or, you already own the set, but desperately need every bit of Forgotten Woods there ever was, and the fact that this disc contains two exclusive, unreleased FW jams is enough to send you scooting toward the buy button.
For the newbie, let's explain the wonder and allure that is Forgotten Woods (we'll get to the extra tracks in a second):
So...what's the big deal you ask, why are these Forgotten Woods so unforgettable? Well, first off, and at first listen, this will definitely appeal to the whole raw, old-school, Nordic forest black metal necrocrowd. Really good grim stuff in the unholy spirit of classic Darkthrone and Burzum, but with that extra kinda inept, Benighted Leamsish fuckedupedness to it that of course makes us love it all the more. And, additionally and importantly, there's also always a strange, unexpected sort of poppiness underlying everything. As a friend (who also likes this band, and is a member of Thuja, the Blithe Sons, Buried Civilizations, the Skygreen Leopards and a bunch of other Jewelled Antler acts) put it, "man it's good...completely inept, like they're barely pulling it off, total 13-year-old-metal-kid-in-the-basement drums." So, this is most definitely the kind of black metal (like Benighted Leams, Xasthur, Lugubrum, Leviathan, Abruptum, Meads of Asphodel, Ved Buens Ende, and Sigh for example) that we have to recommend to all of our customers who are into (not-necessarily metal) weirdness.
So for the rest of you, the ones who already love and cherish their Forgotten Woods discs, there are indeed two unreleased tracks (three, if you count the weird 10 second spoken word outro), both incredibly raw, some sort of rehearsal or practice space recordings, but even in that form, maybe especially, they completely kick ass, heavy and stumblingly brutal, but with an incredible pop sensibility buried right below the surface. The second track has a definite Slinty Ved Buens Ende vibe, but both are amazing, proving that besides being grim and true, these guys, whether they realized it or not, were incredible songwriters as well. So recommended, as is the triple cd set (maybe even more so!).
A brand new blast of grim frostbitten Canadian blackness from the masters of Metal Noir Quebecois, Forteresse. We were first struck by these guys when we saw the cover of their first record, an old yellowed photo of a young man cradling a violin, then once we threw the record on, it began with a crackly old recording of some sort of folky fiddle music. Whatthefuck, we were thinking, until the band launched into the first track, exploding in a frenzy of classic sounding nineties styled black metal buzz. That record was a tribute to the folk music and culture of the French part of North America apparently, but as we mentioned in the review of that disc, we never would have known it but for those brief bits of scratchy violin.
This latest disc seems to be also steeped in some sort of mythology, the record cover, a very Burzum like black and grey drawing of some old farm house, of leafless winter trees and thick drifts of snow, they are Canadian after all. The songs separated into movements. The music inside is appropriately frosty and grim, barren and wintry, a distinct departure from the thick black buzz of their debut. Here, the sound is super brittle and high end, the tracks are super washed out, the buzzing guitars so smeared and blurred and mixed down that they sound almost like long static streaks of upper register drone, the drums way down in the mix, surfacing here and there in brief flurries of percussive mayhem, but just as often rendered a relentless muted throb, the vocals a harsh howl sprawled over the top.
The result is amazing and totally mesmerizing, an intense blown out blackness, that is rife with soaring keening high end tones, shards of feedback, the riffs cyclical and repetitive. Our favorite track would have to be "Tenebras", where all of the above elements are made even more extreme, the riffing becomes some soaring looped ur-drone, super emotional majestic streaks of sound are woven into an almost static wall of throbbing high end, the drums more a distant splatter of subtle pulses, the vocals even more anguished, tangled up in the shimmering strands of sound, the result is something truly original and unlike any black metal we've heard. There must be some sort of keyboards happening too, the sound is thick and layered but it just sounds like long drawn out drones arranged into an alien orchestral black drift. WOW.
The sound might have changed, but Forteresse have managed to somehow get both better and weirder, and thus remain still, one of our favorite of the current crop of buzzing black hordes.
We were pretty much already sold before hearing a single note from this new Bay Area metal horde, based almost entirely on the record cover, a super bad ass D&D style drawing of a compliment of orcs (we presume, nerds feel free to correct us), wielding axes, shrunken heads on pikes, weird bird dragon things, not to mention a hot naked human female, no doubt the spoils of whatever metal war these guys were waging, and they're called Fortress, the band logo like some stone hewn castle, and of course there's the description of the band on their website: "Fortress are ancient battle sorcerers, who, for one thousand sun cycles, have cheated death and dealt blistering heavy metal thunder upon the known and unknown worlds. They are also nerds." Both of which are true, they most certainly do rain down heavy metal thunder, the sounds classic metal riffery, harmonized guitar leads, the sound epic and supremely majestic! And they are also most definitely nerds, check out the song titles: "Goblin III", "Rad Racer", "Kevin Bacon", "Huxtability Verified" and of course opener "Jumanji", complete with the bellowed chorus: "Robin Williams, you're full of shit!". So yeah, already you can tell, these guys have tongue firmly in cheek, but their metal is no joke. With a slightly different cast these guys could find themselves sonically aligned with Slough Feg instead of Hot Fog, but hell, we digging this, inside jokes and all. The vocals might be the one thing that keep Fortress from being true metal masters, unlike the majestic metal croon of someone like Slough Feg's Mike Scalzi, the vocals in Fortress are more of a raspy punk rock bellow, which had us thinking of bands like Karp or Godheadsilo, but for folks who dig both classic metal and metallic punk, these guys definitely kill it, lacing their sonic epicry with the appropriate sound effects (thunder, rain, etc.), and mood music, and interludes, and even with the punkish bellow, and some straight up joke tracks, the second their sound soars into some majestic metal moments, all fist pumping, head banging, harmony guitars, or power metallized pummel, your metal heart would have to be dead for you not to dig it.
180 gram black vinyl with blood red splatter, the aforementioned killer cover art, and includes a digital download too!
Oh man. If you are a faithful Aquarius list reader and lover of musical oddities, just stop right here, and push the buy button because you need this record. Judson Fountain was born in 1952 and was obsessed with radio dramas since he was old enough to talk. In fact as soon as he was able to talk he began doing impressions of cackling hags, wicked witches and all sorts of animals. All of which would come to play a big part in these radio dramas right here. Recorded between the ages of 17 and 22, these eight dramas are only a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of radio plays Judson wrote and performed. All of them primitive and simple, but amazingly creative and entertaining, and all featuring Judson's unique vocalisations along with his partner/foil Sandor Weisberger. But there's no way to describe them, you just have to hear them. Judson has a crazy East Coast accent, and he talks like a hyper school boy who thinks faster than he can get the words out, which you can hear in a handful of interviews preceding some of the radio dramas. Using crude sound effects and sometimes painfully deliberate plot exposition, these dramas all rely on Judson and Sandor's crazy array of voices, from Irish Brogue, to old Thai man, to teenage gangster to tuneless singing grandma, to British detective to various witches and demonic women, all with distinctly hysterical and completely bizarre cackles. The plots are all very simple, good vs. Evil, haunted houses and witches and stuff. But they are all done so sort-of-professionally and so earnestly that they're just completely irresistable. Listen to "Garbage Can From Thailand" and you'll immediately know what we mean. Judson is just so cute. And so is Sandor who introduces each drama (which he pronounces drahmmer) and also reads the credits afterwards. I've had a Judson Fountain cassette for years now thanks to AQ pal Jay Lesser so you can imagine how excited we were that some of this stuff was actually finally getting released. Our only complaint is why did Innova make it a cd-r??! It's got a professionally printed booklet and everything, so how hard would it have been to press up real cds?! It costs as much as a real cd after all. Cd-r or not, this is so good, and so funny, and so cute, and so weirdly brilliant, that it definitely needs to be in your collection!
Holy cow!!! A whole second collection of radio dramas from the amazing Judson Fountain and his faithful sidekick and loyal announcer Sandor Weisberger. The aQ faithful will no doubt remember Completely In The Dark, a mind blowing compilation of funny, goofy, clever, way over the top dramas, performed by the two men, each taking on various characters, voicing men and women, even monsters, stealing the various incidental sounds and background noises from old sound effects records. Totally lo-fi and DIY and so so so genius. Not sure we could describe Judson and his oeuvre any better than we did in that first review, so for those who missed that first Judson Fountain collection (if you did, you NEED that one too!) or just need a refresher, here it is:
Judson Fountain was born in 1952 and was obsessed with radio dramas since he was old enough to talk. In fact as soon as he was able to talk he began doing impressions of cackling hags, wicked witches and all sorts of animals. All of which would come to play a big part in these radio dramas right here. Recorded between the ages of 17 and 22, these dramas are only a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of radio plays Judson wrote and performed. All of them primitive and simple, but amazingly creative and entertaining, and all featuring Judson's unique vocalizations along with his partner/foil Sandor Weisberger. But there's no way to describe them, you just have to hear them. Judson has a crazy East Coast accent, and he talks like a hyper schoolboy who thinks faster than he can get the words out. Using crude sound effects and sometimes painfully deliberate plot exposition, these dramas all rely on Judson and Sandor's crazy array of voices, from Irish Brogue, to old 'foreign' man, to various witches and demonic women, all with distinctly hysterical and completely bizarre cackles. The plots are all very simple, good vs. Evil, haunted houses and witches and demons and stuff. But they are all done so sort-of-professionally and so earnestly that they're just completely irresistible. Judson is just so cute. And so is Sandor who introduces each drama (which he pronounces drahmmer) and also reads the credits afterwards.
Sold yet, you should be, as every single one of these drahmmers, as well as the ones collected on the first compilation are a total hoot. The scary ones are only barely frightening, instead, they're fun and funny and kitschy, there's always a moral, the bad guys usually get their comeuppance, the good guys prevail, or if they don't it's because they foolishly failed to heed repeated warnings and sage advice. All of these radio plays are from the early seventies, and are GENIUS!!! But there is a bonus track as well, a radio play called "The Nasty Roomer!" written in the style of Judson Fountain, by one of Judson's biggest fans, and performed by Judson and Sandor, reunited in 1995 and broadcast live on WFMU! The crazy thing is, the two of them sound exactly the same, and sound like they're having a blast, often slipping into giggles, performing the play after only having seen it for the first time a few minutes earlier. So fantastic and fun and joyous and still so goofy and silly and practically perfect.
Unlike the first collection, this one is an actual cd (not a cd-r) and comes with a huge booklet packed with photos, and the transcript of an interview that took place at the same time as the performance of "The Nasty Roomer!", and there's even a mention of a possible volume THREE! Bring it on!!!
Not to be confused with the legendary krautrock band (notice the spelling, and the punctuation), Foust! is in fact Scott Foust, member of experimental soundmaking combo Idea Fire Company, who share a label and an aesthetic to a certain degree with the Shadow Ring.
For Foust's first solo record, he's conjured up a nearly 80 minute soundscape of lo-fi loped rhythms and drones. The first 35+ minutes are slowly shifting, barely changing bit of stutter and thump, wreathed in hiss and set atop a soft bed of static, super mesmerizing and hypnotic, while the rhythm remains virtually unchanged, the sounds around it, softly and slowly shift, growing more and more murky, the tone and timbre gradually transforming until finally the rhythms drops out, leaving long shimmering tones, stretched out over what sounds like field recordings, the various tones are layered into almost-harmonies, the low tones thick and undulating in slow motion way up in the mix, higher tones way off in the distance, a soft tangle of warm languid dronemusic, until with about twenty minutes left, the drones fade out leaving mostly just ambient sounds, birdcalls, rainfall, running water, the crackle of leaves and branches, while way off in the distance, remnants of the first half of the record hang on until they too finally disappear, the sound building to a hiss until the track ends with the storm disappearing in a little swirl of effects.
So nice. An awesome combination of soundscaping, dronemusic and field recordings, definitely for fans of all three!
We listed another record by this French one man band a few lists back, sold out of them in a flash, so when we restocked, we managed to get the remaining copies of this second release, Towards The Surface, we got less than a dozen though, and once they're gone they are GONE for good, as it's out of print.
We mentioned in that other review that Fragment. (the period IS part of the name) was mining a sound not all that removed from Jesu and Nadja, but listening to this now, it's really driving home just how much this stuff sounds EXACTLY like Jesu, it's almost criminal actually, but hell, if you're hankering for some heavy blissed out dreamy chugging shoegazey post metal, and can't wait for the next Jesu record, then heck, grab one of these.
The sound is of course fantastic, epic and majestic and bleary eyed, a little bit more mellow and laid back than Jesu proper, but quite similar in most other respects, the industrial pound, the layered warm guitar shimmer, the muted metallic chug, the mumbled sad boy vocals, all woven into a gorgeously blown out drone drenched epic dream metal drift. Listening to it again right now, and it sounds so fantastic, it just also happens to sound so fantastically like Jesu.
Cool packaging too, a cd sized dvd case with the full color artwork on a narrow strip along the center of the case, leaving the rest of the case transparent and the disc revealed.
A friend of ours was telling us all about Frail, and the way he described it, we knew it was something we had to hear. Imagine a band that sounded exactly like the Cure, but with harsh black metal vokills!! Listening to it now he wasn't that far off the mark. This is some seriously strange stuff. Not heavy at all really, jangly, poppy, a little gothy and depressive, minor key, the drums simple and solid, soaring synths, guitar and bass locked into moody grooves, a little bit eighties new wave, all the while the vocalist howls his harsh demonic screech over the top, which turns it into something completely, well, fucked up really. But kind of genius. The music at times reminds us of Alcest or Amesoeurs but with all the metal removed, pretty and lilting and melancholy, drifting and jangling beneath those hellish howls. Not sure what else to say, if you're anything like us, you already added this to your cart, and it's going to fast become one of your favorite new records. Definitely an acquired taste, but then all the best tastes are...
Absolutely one of Andee's new favorite black metal recordings!!
In light of recent events, we figured that this reissue of "Hard Rock From the Middle East" would make a great choice for record of the week...no, we don't mean 'cause of the current war, we mean because of the popularity of the "Turkish Delights" and "Hava
The cover art shows the band hangin' in the desert in front of the pyramids of Egypt -- but don't be fooled, they were actually mostly Arab-Americans, based in New York City. Still, their rock n' roll was as authentically "Middle Eastern" as their Turkish contemporaries. They could have held their own with the likes of Erkin Koray and Mogollar.
Ok, now we'd better explain about this particular cd (pay attention, it gets kinda confusing): Sony's Collectables has reissued two long-out-of-print 1967 albums by two totally different bands on *one* disc. The bands are tenuously connected through the friendship of The Freak Scene's Rusty Evans and Felix Pappalardi of The Devil's Anvil, as the two had played together four years previous. Okay, so maybe it's a bit of a stretch putting these two albums together on one disc. Whatever. The real treasure here is The Devil's Anvil album.
The Devil's Anvil got together in the happenin' mid sixties Greenwich Village scene, playing their Middle Eastern influenced music at folk cafes and rock clubs. Eventually they hooked up with classical musician-turned-rocker Felix Pappalardi (producer of Cream's "Disraeli Gears", later to play alongside Leslie West in Mountain). He began playing bass with the band and eventually scored the group a record deal. The resulting album was truly one-of-a-kind and would certainly made greater impact had it not been released on the very eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Thus, no New York radio stations would play it and unfortunately the album has remained an expensive collector's find until now.
The rock contained herein is absolutely kick ass, with bluesy and impassioned Arabic vocals, electric (or at least amplified) oud, bouzouki, tamboura, durbeki as well as the usual rock suspects of (fuzz!) guitar, bass and drums. The majority of the tracks here are either rock arrangements of traditional Middle Eastern and Greek numbers or original compositions, but a couple are actually straight traditional numbers with no western instruments at all. Plus there's an excellent Middle Eastern-esque rock arangement of "Misirlou" that's perhaps the best version ever recorded, IMHO. And the record ends with a Devil's Anvil original that kinda reminds us of one of the Beatles' more Eastern-influenced tunes. This is about as good as it gets. Even if the Freak Scene album doesn't interest you at all, this cd is still worth buying for The Devil's Anvil alone. Very, very highly recommended! Nay, ESSENTIAL.
(As for The Freak Scene -- you might guess from that band's name and album title, The Freak Scene were a bit of a psychedelic-era novelty, a studio project put together by producer/songwriter Evans for CBS Records. The record exploits all of the trippy tropes of the times, from Eastern-raga modes to LSD-inspired lyrics. It's no classic, but does include at least one truly great psych-pop track, the Nuggets-worthy "A Million Grains of Sand". The Freak Scene also indulges in dated but amusing free-form sound-collage experiments like "...When In The Course of Human Events (Draft Beer, Not Students)" which tries to make a statement about the whole sixties counterculture vibe. It's a mix of Pete Seeger, Laugh-In, an LSD party -- Vietnam-era pop culture hippie kitsch -- consider it a free bonus that comes with The Devil's Anvil album.)
All right! Just in time for summer, some hot rockin' action outta Sweden! This is an aptly titled debut of catchy, classic hard rock / metal in the grand tradition of AC/DC, with a dash of Van Halen - updated with a bit of a heavier sound. Free Fall was formed by the ex-guitarist from popular garage psych act The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, in cahoots with a few other hotshot musicians (in Sweden, there's lots), including the drummer from International Noise Conspiracy, and, crucially, a previously unknown vocalist named Kim Fransson whose sandpapered pipes convincingly conjure positive comparisons to the likes of AC/DC's Bon Scott and Humble Pie's Steve Marriott - when Fransson sings "I'm the king of rock and roll" on the album's title track, his voice sells it, despite the fact that we've never heard him or them before.
There's a wild abandon to this, the guitar solos in particular, and in addition we dig how Free Fall have a formula and do it well - but also stick to that formula only as much as they wanna, allowing for some originality and surprises. The track "Attila" ferinstance, slows things down and establishes an interestingly moody vibe, still appropriately within the context of this band's '70s inspired hard rock concept, being a heartfelt semi-ballad with lashings of sinister riffery.
They cite The Who as a big influence and that's heard here, on eponymous track "Free Fall" for sure, along with the aforementioned AC/DC, VH, UFO, Montrose, Nazareth, etc. Unlike some other bands trying to capture the same sort of retro rock magic, Free Fall really do deliver - possibly the secret to their success is that these are garage/punk dudes, not metallers, so they're kinda coming at these sounds on the same trajectory as musicians back in the day.
In a just, rockin' world, these guys would be huge. Heck maybe they will be, and Fransson's line will be proved no idle boast. Recommended if you're ready to rock.
The return of maybe our favorite modern Southern stoner rockers, Freedom Hawk of Virginia, whose previous three records have effortlessly pushed all our drugged out stoner/zoner metal buttons, and not just 'cause of their rad name. The riffs are massive, buzzy and fuzzy, the rhythm section is tight as fuck, but still SWINGS with the best of 'em, there's some moody psych stuff on here too amidst all that massive riffola, and the vocals are a dead ringer for Ozzy, which would be more of a problem if Freedom Hawk's sound was more Sabbathy, but instead, these guys seem to be fusing the sun baked desert rock of Kyuss (and later QOTSA), not to mention maybe a little Monster Magnet and Soundgarden, and hell some actually proper Southern Rock. Plenty of the jams here sound like they could be covers of Black Oak Arkansas, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, the Marshall Tucker Band, just cranked WAY WAY up, and then those Ozzy-ish vocals, shit, at times it's almost like Ozzy singing for Raging Slab, which to be honest, is about the coolest thing we could think of.
You can go back and read our reviews of the other Freedom Hawk records, but by know you should know if this is your kinda Southern hard rocking riffiness, which if you're anything like us, it most goddamn certainly is. And like every Freedom Hawk record, we're gonna play this nonstop until there's another one to take its place!
By the time we had finally heard the Fresh & Onlys, there was already some sort of mania for them going on, that we found ourselves in the midst of, all their records were sold out, we couldn't get more, out of print 7"s were popping up on eBay, the sort of thing that we might expect to happen with super popular ultra hip bands, but this local band who only had a couple 7"s?? We were skeptical, until we heard 'em, then it all made sense. These guys rule. And rock. They have sort of fallen in with the new breed of noise pop lo-fi tweakers, but the Fresh & Onlys are way more about classic pop songs, their sound channeling vintage sixties pop, the early eighties LA sound, classic power pop, garage rock. The production is most definitely not lo-fi, the guitars are thick and loud and ring out, the bass throbs, the drums are simple and understated, the vocals are down in the mix, but not buried, there are plenty of harmonies, falsettos, cool little spidery guitar leads, the overall sound is just a tiny bit fuzzed out. We never noticed it before, but the band that we're most reminded of is the Leaving Trains, easily one of our favorite bands ever, criminally under appreciated for sure (Kill Tunes and Fuck are two all time stone cold classics). Tim Cohen's vocals are a dead ringer for the Leaving Trains' Falling James, and the sound too has that sort of punk rock morphed into fuzz pop sound. They also share lots of sonic elements with local pals Thee Oh Sees, that sort of washed out wall of sound classic Spector sound, plenty of fuzzy organs, strummed steel string guitars, reverby girl group back up vox, as well as some seriously garage guitar crunch all over the place. We dig BIGTIME!
Yes! The cd debut of this fantastic Finnish four-track project... We actually meant to list this, like, a month ago, but unfortunately the original review we wrote of it was lost in one of our several recent arggh-inducing komputoor crashes, but actually that's a good thing, 'cause it gave everybody here at AQ more time to listen to this, over and over, at home and in the store, and have us all decide that this HAD to be a Record Of The Week. So we ordered more copies from Finland, and re-wrote the review (which, in our memory, was actually probably better written the first time, so trust us on this) and here we go!
Ah, Finland. We've said it before, we'll say it again. So many of our favorite bands hail from Finland, from the hypnotic NWOFHM space rock of Circle to the the funereral doom of Skepticism, with all the freaky forest folk of Kemialliset Ystavat, et. al. in between. And now Fricara Pacchu, solo project from a member of such underground Finnish acts as Avarus, Anaksimandros, Maniacs Dream, and yes Kemialliset Ystavat.
Hopefully you remember our review of the Fricara Pacchu 7" and accompanying art/collage booklet that the Fonal label put out not too long ago (we may still have a few of those babies in stock, if you act fast). Both Allan and Andee accidentally wrote separate gushing reviews of it, that's how much we all liked it! That 7" left us eager to hear a full-length, and now here it is, courtesy of Lal Lal Lal. 12 wigged out instrumental tracks of Fricara Pacchu's undefinable, eccentric, psychedelic weirdness. We had compared the 7" to everything from the Boredoms to Oliva Tremor Control, and that goes too for the all-instrumental music on this cd, to which we can add such other disparate references as Neu! and When and Fuck Buttons. Fricara Pacchu's music is part techno, part noise, part pop... all awesome.
Recording at home on a four-track, Pacchu creates a woozy, rhythmic soundworld filled with distortion and delight. A world of magical gnomes with chugging machines spewing colorful clouds... clouds of mysterious, maybe illegal substances that coalesce in pretty patterns you can hear, as well as kaleidoscopically see. There's dense, druggy layers of guitar feedback with electro beats; lo-fi fuzzy loops, gurgly computer bleeps and sci-fi sound FX swooshes; throbbing pound and gentle ambience. Fricara Pacchu produces fragile music box melodies that exist amidst exploding minefields of noise, like the detonations of distortion that rhythmically obliterate parts of "Four Seasons Of Violins". Noise that is taken to an extreme with the utter, surging distorto-destruction of "Sky Helicopter"...
Whew! Wow. Maybe if the glorious synthscapes of fellow Finns Shogun Kunitoki were way grittier and guitar-ier, done more D.I.Y., and wrapped in steel wool and played backwards on a cheap cassette, that would sound something like the quirky and compelling music of Fricara Pacchu. By which we mean, this is great!
Horror nerds have long (and frequently) argued about what is the best horror/slasher movie ever. Contenders for the title would have to include Halloween, Phantasm and of course Friday The 13th. More than any other horror movie, Friday The 13th essentially created the template for all horror movies that would follow in its wake, a bunch of kids, in the middle of nowhere, drinking and fucking, and being picked off one by one, by some maniac or monster. And while there have been plenty of great slasher flicks, Friday The 13th still reigns supreme as the first, and maybe the best. We had sort of forgotten what the score sounded like, but the minute this began to play, we were transported back to the first time we saw the movie, the score even now is terrifying, tense and dramatic, Manfredini's arrangements are very beholden to Bernard Hermann for sure, but they're so dense and dynamic, long stretches of droned out minimalism, wild tangles of excited strings and jarring symphonic stabs, the main title music alone is practically perfect, and then when you mix in that super distinctive "ch ch ch ch, hu hu hu hu" vocalization, a sound that's as recognizable to horror freaks as the theme from Halloween, and apparently, according to Harry Manfredini in the record's liner notes, that vocalization was inspired by Penderecki! Also according to the liner notes, Dolly Parton was another big inspiration! What? Apparently, the music playing in the diner, was inspired by a Dolly Parton Sound, and that music resurfaces later on (spolier alert) at the very end of the movie, when the heroine and sole survivor is floating alone on the lake, in a boat, when suddenly Jason explodes from the water and drags her under! The music following suit, going from lilting and melodic to wild and atonal and all 20th century. So cool! The whole soundtrack rules, sinister strings all over the place, the vibe seriously harrowing and horrifying, with brief moments of respite, and of course with weird little bits of ambient music, that make (a little) more sense in the actual movie, like the very surprising second track, "Banjo Travelin'".
Listening to this again, and even as much as we LOVE LOVE LOVE the movie, we can objectively say, this is one of the best horror scores EVER. And even removed from the visuals, makes for an extremely compelling listen!
Fantastic over the top packaging too as always from Waxwork. A heavy gatefold full color jacket with all new artwork (an eyeball image that harkens back to the new art for the recently reissued Halloween soundtrack too, coincidence?), new liner notes from Manfredini and director Sean Cunningham, as well as a cool creepy full color printed insert. And while it looks like black vinyl, hold it up to the light, and discover it's actually swirled black and green Crystal Lake colored vinyl!!
Fridge have been an all time aQ fave for more than a decade now, every record a joy to behold, their sound constantly evolving, but still so unique and all their own. But as much as we love pretty much everything we've heard, for some of us, the old stuff will always hold a special place in our hearts. The record Eph remains one of our favorites, an endlessly classic collection of post rocky electronica, but before Eph, the band released a clutch of killer singles and eps, which were even more raw and innovative and home brewed than Eph. This disc collects all those tracks, a glorious assemblage of infectious jams, of wild experiments, of dark brooding grooves, from fuzzy brooding wah wah flecked post rock jangle, to Funky Tortoise-y grooviness, from crunchy super distorted math rock rife with odd samples, to smoldering Stereolab-like modern krautrock, from abstract folky shimmer, to warbly lo-fi electro, from almost-jungle to blissed out late night smoke-y jazziness, it's all warm and smooth and raw and groovy and spacey and super catchy, and be sure to check your iTunes, the last handful of strange sonic fragments spell out the band name phonetically. Cool!
We were immediately blown way by this twisted slab of primsatic psychedelia, all lo-fi rhythms, bagpipe like synth squelch, and spidery snakecharmer melodies. It's crunchy and fuzzy, feedback drenched, droned out and totally hypnotic, like a dizzying mix of the shamanistic mesmer of Dan Higgs, the minimal zoner kraut-psych of Zomes, and the warped rainbow rhythm-ed distorto-hop of Black Moth Super Rainbow (and BMSR offshoot Tobacco too)! And really, this record totally came from out of left field, we had no expectations, in fact at first we had no idea who Dan Friel even was, being mostly unacquainted with his band Parts & Labor, and what little we did know had us thinking maybe we wouldn't really even be all that into P&L anyway. But Total Folklore definitely has us rethinking everything.
The first track alone is worth the price of admission, and even if the record had consisted of nothing but that lumbering, 12+ minute chunk of deliriously distorted, noise drenched, outsider grooviness, we'd still have made it Record Of The Week. After a short squall of tangled buzz and swirling tones, the sounds coalesce into a buzzing raga like melody, draped over a super crunchy, crumbling rhythm, a sort of hip hop / industrial lumber, each beat a burst of staticky buzz, sculpted into a dense, driving, motorik caveman groove, while over the top, those melodies are constantly shifting and swirling, stretching out into layered drones, streaks of feedback doused shimmer, and when the melodies to abate, leaving just the beat, to pound and stutter, when they do swoop back in, the result is a sort of chaotic noise-raga, that manages to be loose and freeform, but simultaneously tranced out and hypnotic. Eventually, the sound slips back into that opening groove, this time, all the synths and buzzing melodies even more distorted and blown out, making for a heady chunk of multi-hued noise industrial drone-pop zoner-psych that will have you setting it on repeat for sure.
The rest of the record is divided into way shorter fragments, none of the remaining tracks clocking in at more than 3:45, with a handful of ultra short 'intermissions', but all of those tracks, intermissions and songs proper, displaying the same sort of blown out psychedelia. "Windmills" sounds like Sunroof! and Our Love Will Destroy The World mashed up and transformed into something a bit more playful and groovy, while "Valedictorian" drapes ethereal shimmer over what sounds like stuttering fuzz pop riffage, a swirling super catchy melody, and it's about as close as this comes to some mutant strain of ultra hook heavy noise pop. It's not hard to imagine this as some warped remix of a classic early era Flaming Lips jam. "Velocipede" is all woozy crumbling distortion, tweaked electronics, in-the-red synth buzz, a noisy blur that somehow ends up sounding more dreamy and psychedelic than chaotic.
The rest of the tracks split the difference between tripped out experimental electronic groovescapes, dense noisy psychedelic swirls, pulsing pulsating komische freakouts and crazy catchy pop in electronic mad scientist's clothing, with each and every variation displaying an impossible knack for dense, heavily layered, ultra distorted productions that are pure headphone blossouts, but also even the most obtuse fractured bit of noisiness is somehow hooky as hell, whether it's the chugging blurred out crunch of "Landslide", or the crumbling feedback drenched electro-kraut churn of "Badlands". AWESOME!
What more could be said about these two Fripp & Eno records than we've already written in countless Expo '70, Growing and Aidan Baker reviews? That's because these records are pretty much ground zero for all of the dark dreamy drifty processed guitar / tape / synth drone that we can't ever seem to get enough of. Perhaps there are other earlier influential touchstones such as Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, perhaps Stockhausen and Terry Riley as well, but none seemed to have come so totally out of nowhere from two relatively mainstream players as these two records. Manuel Gottsching, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music all came a little later.
After every other Eno solo album and collaboration (from Cluster to David Byrne) has been reissued, we are lucky enough to finally see both of these classic releases newly 24-bit remastered by Fripp himself reissued on his DGM imprint. These have never sounded better! No Pussyfooting even contains an extra disc featuring both tracks in reverse and a 40 minute bonus track of "The Heavenly Music Corporation" recorded at half speed that we know all our customers into glacial doomy drone will want, nay, need to own! Even if you own this record already, you may just need to buy it again for the stellar extra material!
It's easy to take for granted nowadays the influence of Brian Eno as the "godfather of ambient music", but in 1973 before he had even released his first solo record, Here Come The Warm Jets, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno were mainly known for their previous roles in King Crimson and Roxy Music respectively. Then this mysterious record parenthetically titled (No Pussyfooting) appears with its cryptic cover, a sort of ultra-modernized take on a hermetic alchemical engraving depicting the two artists (Eno at his most androgynous) looking in opposite directions, sitting in a small mirrored room with no doors reading tarot cards on a mirrored table with what sort of looks like a line of coke (?), next to a mirrored guitar in a mirrored case in the corner, a translucent mannequin and an antique silver radiator behind them under glass shelves filled with old books. The back cover showing the same scene with both artists and tarot cards missing. With its two side-long awesomely titled tracks "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls", what kind of music would this be? Rock? Prog? Glam? No one probably would realize until they purchased it and brought it home, that it would be this organically cerebral deep listening experience of the highest order. It's kind of a downer that we have such easy access to information nowadays, because when this came out, it was a true mystery object, which added to its esoteric appeal. But it still is to an extent, as numerous listens over the years still never fail to captivate, or confound how exactly the sounds are being made. Apparently,utilizing a system later dubbed, Frippertronics, two reel to reel tape decks were used to allow audio elements to be added onto a continuing tape loop building up dense layers of sound that would slowly decay as it turned around the decks' playback head. On "The Heavenly Music Corporation" layers of deep synth drones are layered in phased washes with Fripp's unique bowed guitar sound ringing ascending solo lines on top that sometimes loop and sometimes don't. Eno wrings out what sounds like synth lines in counterpoint to Fripp's part in similar tones so that at times it gets harder to tell who is making what sound as the piece intensifies. "Swastika Girls" starts with high pitched cascades of processed piano like tones with scraping synth squelches looping in counterpoint, before low rising bass notes and Riley-ish piano repetitions appear. Then Fripp's searing guitar crash-lands into the mix almost disrupting the whole process, but somehow it all works. Much more distorted and dissonant than "The Heavenly Music Corporation", it doesn't take the process for granted that everything will sound harmonious but remains still somehow cohesive, though far from easy listening.
While the backward tracks are equally amazing, they highlight a different kind of listening experience altogether. The seams show a bit more, the entrance and exit of new sounds more abrupt, but still strangely alien. Their inclusion here came from out of the listening experience of their first (and probably only) complete UK radio broadcast in 1973 courtesy of the late John Peel. Because the tapes were stored "tail out" but played as though they were stored "front out", the broadcast played the music in reverse. When Eno called in to say the music was being played backwards, he was met with a "that's what they all say" response.
But the real bonus of this deluxe package is the 40 minute "half-speed version" of "The Heavenly Music Corporation". When there were 16 2/3 rpm options on early record players, a lot of young guitarists would use the speed to slow down 33 1/3 rpm records to learn and practice their favorite guitar lines. Here it makes the drones so deep and heavy, Fripp's guitar lines more crushing, the layers creep and slither sounding like it could be one of the weird drone cd-r's we sell tons of. If it was in a black sleeve with skulls on it, and was called Skulled Space Outrosphere or Radiant Black Blood, and sealed with wax or wrapped in twine,�and was limited to 100 copies,�we'd sell a million of em (well, okay... 100!!). Sooooooooooooo Recommended and Essential!
Rev. Dwight Frizzell has been a very prolific yet wholly overlooked multi-media artist based in Kansas City. His previously reissued art-damaged album with Anal Magic explored alot of the hallucinatory realms later mined by the likes of The Sun City Girls. "Natural Selection" is an anthology of seven of Frizzell's filmscores documenting expansive film events, performative actions, and dense experimental audio collages for Tesla coils, field recordings, shortwave radio, sax, guitar, and anything else that could possibly be coaxed into making noise. The standout track is the telephone & oscillator piece "First Painting" in which Frizzell calls people up on the phone and asks them to pick a number between 20 and 15,000 then shifts the oscillator frequencies accordingly. Funny and creepy.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The soundtrack to one of my favorite movies of all time, Fulci's gross out masterpiece 'The Beyond'. And Frizzi's score is up to the mighty task of musically keeping up. Dark and a bit Goblin-esque and truly creepy. And surprisingly, it never stumbles into cheesy jazz-fusion territory (ala the occasional Goblin soundtrack). Essential, but not nearly as essential as running out and seeing it (again)!
We first discovered the oddly monikered Frkse (pronounced 'forks' we think?) via aQ pal Matt, one half of industrial doomdirgedrone duo Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, who was raving about this lp, and got some from the 'band' to pass on to aQ. It was suggested to us, that anyone who loved the weirdo power electronic abstract industrial weirdness of former Record Of The Week-ers Will Over Matter, would also dig Frkse, which was definitely enough for us, but barely prepared us for what Frkse was really all about. A one man band / mad scientist / audio alchemist, who takes loops and rhythms, weird murky samples, and all manner of noise, hiss and whir and hum, and deftly arranges them into strangely robotic grooves, android symphonies of rhythm and textures, sounding at times like some impossible hybrid of Pierre Bastien, Philip Jeck, Thomas Brinkmann, and Strotter Inst. There's the warped warble of experimental turntablism, the lush hazy washed out textures of that sort of blurred ambience, and the rhythms and grooves all sound very machinelike, as if Frkse simply built an army of machines to do his bidding, that bidding just so happening to be creating these stripped down minimal loopscapes and tripped out abstract constructs.
Each track here seems cobbled together from building block like sonic elements, a loping beat, a strange detuned strum, a disembodied melody, a whirring buzz, all strung together into an ingenious series arrangement that manages to be impossible catchy and mesmerizing, even at its most minimal.
Robotic loops churning through clouds of hiss and buzz, a woozy rhythmic drag, like some strange melted tape 33 rpm jams spinning at 16rpm, the sounds saturated and warm, lush in the way only 4 track tape hiss and old busted analog machinery can be, it's hard not to imagine Frkse's strange underground lair, dusty piles of corroded equipment, nothing grounded or properly shielded, arcs of electricity leaping between various hand built implements, the vast array of buzzes and strains of hiss, carefully cataloged to be used later, and to perhaps be mixed with other separate strains, creating whole new breeds of low fidelity noise. And for all its raw primitivism, each track tends to reveal gorgeous expanses of hissy, buzz drenched minimal mesmer, like a steam punk android Steve Reich, tracks peppered with sudden bursts of almost jungle like drumming, which upon closer examination reveals themselves to be simply endless rhythmic loops piled atop one another, in such a way, that they create glorious cascades of kinetic rhythms.
At times it's like a home brewed, post industrial minimal techno, at others, it's a thick caustic almost shoegazey blacknoise blur, and still others a noise drenched abstract electronica. The sound constantly shifting, a burst of gristled crumbling industrial churn will transform into a stretch of mournful almost Slint like minimalism, gradually expanding into a loping post rock drift, all skitter and stutter, unwinding hypnotically like a super stripped down lo-fi This Heat, everything caked in a dusty patina of chordal hum, a glorious maddeningly mesmerizing collection of robo-rhythms and psych-kraut dirgery, of hazy soft focus loop-grooves and tranced out motorik mesmer. And yeah, fans of Will Over Matter will flip, fans of M Ax Noi Mach too, but even more so, folks into haunting low fidelity experimental loopscapery: Jeck, Strotter, Caretaker, Bastien, Tim Hecker, Belong and the like.
SUPER LIMITED!!! Housed in hand silk screeened / hand stamped covers with a photocopied insert.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is a tough one to describe. If you hate the Frogs already, stop right here, this record will not change your mind. In fact, it might even stoke the fires of your Frogs-hatred. But, musically, this is easily the best Frogs record. And I imagine some of you are scoffing, 'no mean feat, huh?' But their second, and best record, "It's Only Right and Natural", was a brilliant and catchy, completely improvised in the studio, folk pop masterpiece. Not only that, their queer obsessed, absurdist lyrics, had everyone asking, "Are they gay?" and/or, "Are they homophobic?", and especially, "Are they insane?" You either loved them and thought their peurile and juvenile humor was drop dead funny, or you hated them and were probably offended. Well.....
This is the legendary "Racially Yours" record, a record so steeped in controversy, that it is only now being released after 10 years. Although like past Frogs efforts, I'm not so sure the controversy is entirely justified. Musically, this record is amazingly lush and complex (for being recorded on a 4-track), bizarre arrangements, swirling organs, rollicking guitars, keening vocals and melodies that stick in your head like glue. But it's the lyrics...
This is the Frogs' labor of love, a record they worked on for years, a skewed but bizarrely passionate look at slavery and race relations in the United States. While "It's Only Right and Natural" their 'gay' record, was kind of silly and irreverent (which is what convinced people they were homophobes), "Racially Yours" is definitely an indictment of racism, with the Frogs frontman, singing from different perspectives: a slave, a slave trader, a paranoid racist, and so on. And the lyrics, paired with the amazing music, often results in some really intense moments. Now, I'm sure people will cry foul, since the Frogs' irreverence and lyrical absurdity are still present (and that is of course, unwelcome in any discussion of subjects this volatile). So if you like the Frogs, you will love this record, if you don't like the Frogs, and this all sounds like a recipe for pissing you off, you should definitely pass.
There's been lots of talk about heartbreak around these parts, and the best break up records, and that sort of thing. Windy thinks the new Built To Spill record is the perfect break up record, all bittersweet and caustic, but light and hopeful at the same time.
Ben Frost records are scary. And beautiful. They're the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. They're like soundtracks for films that can never be made, the music conjuring up images that can only exist in the imagination. It's musical magic, or sonic alchemy, whatever it is, it's something few have mastered, and even those that have, barely approach the mysterious mastery of Ben Frost, whose previous record, By The Throat, remains one of the most terrifying documents of electronic sound art we have ever heard, weaving the sounds of snarling wolves into thick swells of corrosive bass buzz, and brilliantly bleak, yet impossibly lush sound design, and balancing that sonic grimness, with glimmers of hushed beauty, in a way that makes the sound both mellifluous and malevolent in equal measure.
Aurora is another stunning sonic missive, and one that immediately conjures up yet another lost world, one that lurks in our collective imagination, but that has begun to bleed through, into our every day world. The shadows seem deeper and darker. The grey skies shout through with streaks of blood red, the nights interminable, the days, scorched expanses of endless time. All of this represented by strange sprawls of layered electronic drones, of gristled pulsations, of strange staticky rhythms, and mysterious buried melodies, the sounds this time around brittle and jagged, the loveliness sharp edged and flecked with rust and dried blood, the rhythms that surface are hauntological, reminding us of the dubbed out avant mesmer of groups like Demdike Stare, but here those rhythms seem to gradually splinter and fray, wreathed in thick swirls of soft noise, sculpted into weeping melodies, and darkly decaying textures, all hiding some glowing inner warmth, suffusing these sounds with an organic quality, that transforms a series of sounds into something alive, a crackling energy that is barely contained on the record, one can almost imagine the sound as colored sparks leaping from the speakers, bursting from the headphones, a cascade of brilliant sonic flares, raining down from above.
Lurching robotic percussion is shaped into strange skeletal shapes, lumbering behemoths trading through fields of groaning, creaking chordal thrum, pelted with prismatic streaks of sound, a beastly groove, that builds to a thick swath of soaring epic psychedelic electronic majesty, like a meaner, moodier, more metal M83, a brilliant blacknoise blur, that blots out the stars, painting the sky in shade and shadow, eventually morphing into burnished stretches of grey ambience, laced with dubby skitter, all of which blossom further into a flurry of blissed out electro flares, which fade into crackling seas of gristle and hum, undulating imperceptibly beneath hazy layers of grumblingly distorted shimmer and grinding sheets of druggy thrum. A heaving landscape of tense cinematic atmosphere, smeared fields of tangled melody, wildly colliding synth streaks, and jumbled beats and rhythms, all wound up into a tightly coiled swirl, flurry of frenzied electrons, gradually crumbling into the ether, leaving just a barely there cloud of sonic static discharge, until finally, nothing. And emptiness.
Simply stunning.
We first discovered Ben Frost on, of all places, a dubstep comp. It definitely worked, this long brooding chunk of creeped out electronic dronemusic plopped down right between to stuttery stripped down dubbed out jams. It quickly became our favorite track on that disc, and got us to hunt down his full length, Theory Of Machines, which was just as good as that track. A strange assemblage of mysterious psych jams and minimal techno, drones and glitchy electronica, but all shot through with a mysterious darkness, that seemed to infuse every track with a bit of malevolence.
But if that record was dark and mysterious, then his new one, By The Throat, is downright terrifying. Who knew electronic music could be this harrowing, this epic and intense?! Mixing organic instruments, field recordings (lots of wolf howls and growls) and fucked up glitched out electronics, Frost has conjured up an incredible cinematic electronic dronemusic masterpiece. Sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. This record is amazing, playing out like a soundtrack to some lost-in-the-woods Italian horror film, pianos and strings, dense swells of static, the aforementioned wolves, all wound into tense soundscaped vignettes, each one rife with tension, and emotion, and a sprawling darkness.
The opening track is worth the price of admission alone, a series of slow building sonic swells, each a wall of crumbling distorted hiss, throbbing over a minimal stretch of subtle glitch and muted melody, the tones are jagged and sharp, the melodies are fragmented and minor key, bits of acoustic guitar drift over the squalls, ghostlike, while beneath, thick ominous low end rumbles and whirs. It's like a more electronic, more minimal, and much darker Godspeed.
That track segues right into "The Carpathians", where the wolves make their first appearance, howling over Bernard Hermann like strings, their growls providing seriously scary low end, the baying matched by the mournful melodies, it's easy to imagine being lost in the snow, miles away from civilization, wandering through the dark, the night filled with the howling of wolves.
The whole record really does play out like a soundtrack, each track evoking a certain mood, "O God Protect Me" is all clipped abstract rhythms and muted crystalline melody, soft glitches and distant beeps, pretty and melancholy and subtly ominous, while "Hibakusja", which starts out with a simple guitar melody and what sounds like the moan of horns, becomes the scariest track on the record, the wolves growling processed into fucked up glitched low end stutters, that original opening guitar remains, but beneath those fucked up grinding glitchy growls, totally intense, before becoming more and more staticky and abstract.
If there's not a movie, someone needs to make it NOW. The rest of the record evokes still more strange territory, skipped Jeck-like loopscapes, all glitchy and tense, the skipping records offering up snippets that on their own would be fairly haunting and mysterious, but recontextualized become something even more, thick swells of buzzing cellos and harmonized voices transformed into massive crumbling walls of sound, various melodies and elements resurfacing throughout, especially a main theme that seems to define the record, and sounds like a simple melody, but here is infused with the terror and fear of the surrounding sounds, long stretches of layered high end shimmer, more glitched out electronic minimalism, again, all rife with tension, with a cinematic weight, that makes this record sound like so much more than just a collection of songs and sounds.
Gorgeous cover art too, all reflective inks on a matte background, all images of snow and wolves and empty landscapes, the spare frostbitten white wasteland, where the seemingly imaginary events described by the sounds on By The Throat could have taken place. Intense and amazing.
Ben Frost was a total unknown to us until just a few months ago, when we heard his track on the recent Mary Anne Hobbs Evangeline mix cd, which was soooooo good, a huge surprise, a totally left field electronic drone jam stuck in the middle of a dubstep mix. Some of us were definitely thinking jam of the year, even though the record it was taken from had come out the year before, but holy crap, it totally stole the show, and we knew we had to hear more. So we tracked down the full length, but then, to be honest, became a little nervous before digging in, worried that we might discover that THAT track, the one we were already obsessed with and already had, might be the only good one on the record. Thankfully nothing could be further from the truth. And in fact, a few of the other tracks are now vying to knock that one out of the top spot.�
Theory Of Machines is a tough one to describe. It's electronic, but rife with strange glitches, with deep buzzing drones, blown out psych jams, mysterious murky minimal techno, all somehow woven into something totally cohesive, ultra dark and ominous, and so fucking kick ass. The record begins with the title track, the one from the Hobbs mix, but for those of you who might have missed that one, here's how we described it:
An extended slab of slow burning blurred dronemusic, that over the course of its 9 minutes builds from soft shimmer to dense crumbling Tim Hecker style smeared gauzy beauty, to thick caustic blown out soft noise, to an super distorted almost-trip-hop. The sound is immense and epic, and so gorgeous, wreathed in crackle and underpinned by buzzing downtuned lowend, streaked with soaring synths, the track's climax, all skittery beats beneath clouds of hiss and whir and crackle and fuzz is totally intense and gorgeous.�
Indeed! If lots of folks didn't already own the Hobbs mix, we would be declaring this worth owning for that track alone. But the follow up, "Stomp" is just as good. A shimmery minimal glitchscape, tons of space, swells of hissy buzz, and off kilter fractured beats, drifting in and then out, leaving long expanses of whispery hush, a blown out electric guitar, super processed, is smothered and muted into a stuttered decayed riff, struggling to let loose, the drums begin to pound, the guitar grinds out a noisy crunch, before retreating again, leaving just that soft almost techno skitter finally culminating in a super fuzz drenched industrial pound, a looped rhythm beneath that same damaged riff filtered through all sorts of static and short wave interference. It's so intense and weirdly ominous and sort of exhausting to listen to. So cinematic and fraught with tension. When the song ends you almost feel like you just crawled up from the sewers after being chased over rooftops, having the shit kicked out of you, leaping from a helicopter, saving the damsel in distress, and discovering that the city before you lay in ruins. So evocative and dramatic.�
The next track, while still dark and haunting, is a bit of a respite, a moody trawl through a glitched out low end drift, peppered with a mysterious sonar like single note high end pulse, a subtle shuffling beat hovering just below the surface, the hiss and static swirling and crunching while a distant melody floats in an expanse of soft shimmer. A quick two minute arrangement of big beats, grinding electric guitar, whirling ambient buzz offers up the record's most 'rock' moment before slipping into the final jam, which is not so much a jam as it is an extended drift, deep resonant tones, ring out, decaying ever so slowly, the various sonic ripples blending into one another, creating soft, shimmery minor key melodies, underpinned by deep pulsing bass, that you almost feel more than you hear, very tranquil and serene, eventually jazzy drums come in, melodies coalesce into something much more tight and arranged, becoming a sort of dreamy jazzy slowcore, softly dramatic, with what sounds like swoonsome strings and warm organ warble, a surprisingly dreamy and sun dappled finish to a record that is otherwise pretty caustic and dark. Which is precisely why it's so good. Totally unpredictable, a jarring mash up of rock elements all fucked up and processed, glitched out electronics, of dark brooding drone and cinematic ambience, all woven into a creepy, menacing, beautiful batch of sound.
When we first heard about Frozen Cloak, the way they were described to us, was: some of the guys from Reeks And The Wrecks doing black metal! WOAH! We knew we had to hear that. Well, we finally did, and guess what? That description was pretty much entirely NOT accurate, but the good news was, that the actual sound ended up being way more weird and warped and super cool.
Frozen Cloak are definitely buzzy, and dark, and heavy, but in some ways the sound's not all that removed from the weird and wonderful world of the Reeks. The guitars (two of em) are WAY blown out, thick and crunchy and dripping with buzz, the opening track takes that guitar and some cool chaotic drumming and locks it into a sort of loop, repetitive and circular and hypnotic and a bit like a heavier, buzzier Lungfish, a single glorious groovy riff, pounded out, over and over and over, a little bit doomy, definitely stonery, but lurching and groovy and metallic. The song after that is way more out there and abstract, the guitar reverbed and heavily effected, distortion so thick it's crumbling out of the speakers, murky, lo-fi, on the verge of collapsing into a total black hole, a sort of blackened folk flecked downtuned free drone freakout, but shot through with warbly melodies and buried rhythms, the record sort of balances between those two extremes, fuzzy, buzzy, repetitive metallic hypnorock groove, and woozy warped abstract chaotic free for all, the best moments of course being when the two collide.
There are horns too, that add a whole 'nother element, a completely different kind of buzz and drone, all tangled up with the already blurred buzz and stutter of the guitars and drums, the sound is really tough to describe, wish we could make sound samples, but you can check out their MySpace. Regardless, this is most definitely some gloriously off kilter outsider abstract heaviness, groovy and a little bit metal, super hypnotic and so fucking good. And anyone who loved the Reeks And The Wrecks will probably end up digging this bigtime too.
Pressed on milky clear vinyl, shot through here and there with little tendrils of color, housed in a thick full color jacked, with super cool images and very little actual info. WAY RECOMMENDED!
These guys are tough to pin down, in the past they've been described as "Gram Parsons meets Pavement" or "The Shins meets Califone", both applicable to the albums they were describing, we were of course first interested in these guys because of their pedigree, featuring as they do members of long time faves like Califone, Red Red Meat and Loftus, and their sound tended to feel like an extension of all those bands that came before.
As they've progressed, they've gotten more and more lush and sprawling, their sound still identifiable by the above shorthand comparisons, but more and more distinctly the Fruit Bats. The vocals are clear and crystalline, reminding us of Death Cab and the Shins, the music though remains rooted in country, plenty of jangle, little curlicues of twang, smooth slippery slide, but also infused with plenty of vintage pop as well, the sound a strange hybrid of old time bluegrass, modern downer country, classic FM radio pop (we're hearing Supertramp a bit on the title track!) and hushed minimal folk. Some songs are delicate and quiet and heartfelt, others are playful and rambunctious, frontman Eric Johnson has such a stunning voice, haunting and intense, delicate but still powerful, and the songwriting is classic sounding, plenty of nods to the Wings, Emmit Rhodes, Nick Drake, the Beatles (of course), the Jayhawks... Fantastic classic sounding ultra lush countrified pop! The Ruminant Band, just like with Spelled In Bones, the last FB record, has us once again trying to figure out why these guys aren't WAY more popular than they are!
