Fuck Buttons? Please just ignore the name for a moment. We're glad WE did, and actually gave this band a listen... 'cause, fuck if they don't push our buttons. The pleasure ones, big fat buttons labeled massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop damage. Really we were surprised, though maybe the colorful cover artwork that kinda makes this look like a Black Dice record should have been an indication that this Bristol UK duo was gonna be cool, despite their name. They're energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals, though this is mostly an instrumental, rhythmic throb. These six fairly lengthy songs wrap the listener's ears in a multihued steel wool blanket of abrasive warmth, made from such shimmering sonic elements as ambient piano, motorik machine beats, and thick spaced out synth. And just when you think it's already pretty darn fuzzed out, they flip a switch or step on a pedal or something and then the REAL fuzz kicks in.
Definitely for fans of Growing at their most SUNNO)))-y. Also we might say this sounds like Vulture Club doing the vacuuming over at Gang Gang Dance's house, playing Jesu and M83 albums real loud while they do so. A beautiful blend of noise and drone and bright shining eternal pop loveliness...
The very first track, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" might be our favorite though we're crushed out on the whole album. But this song really sums it up, it IS the album the way the first song on the Mammal's Lonesome Drifter WAS that Mammal album too. This track has got the pretty, ringing piano part to start with, gloriously building up into the choppy fuzzed out throb we soon learn is Fuck Button's modus operandi. Damn this is good -- and there's even vocals amidst this heavenly buzz that sound like they could come off some cvlt black metal album.
So yeah Fuck Buttons, cool band, dunno about the name. Seems like Fuck is the new Super or Jesus or Black, as bandnaming trends go. There's been The Fucking Champs, Fuck I'm Dead, and of course, Fuck. But more recently, bands named Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, and now Fuck Buttons have made the scene... always hilarious when they get popular enough to be played on the radio or mentioned in the mainstream press. Not so hilarious when spam filters prevent AQ list subscribers from getting emails with our reviews. But whatever, we swear a lot ourselves anyway, sorry about that. Anyway, fucking recommended.
This is the band that we all just assumed would be our all time favorite, simply based on the fact that they're called FUCK... I'M DEAD. Is that not the best band name ever? Don't answer that. It's a rhetorical question. And anyway, the answer is YES, it is the
We always wanted to like Fucked up. C'mon, their called Fucked up! Plus the band members have names like Pink Eyes, 10,000 Marbles, and Mustard Gas. But when we got down to listening to them, they just sounded like regular old punk rock. Definitely cool, but nothing enough to warrant all that hype. If we wanted punk rock, we'd take Pissed Jeans before Fucked Up (both bands that were reviewed in the NY Times, with neither name deemed fit for publication, and thus each band got written up without their band names EVER being mentioned!), the vocalist too, had a definitely sort of Scissorfight howl that put us off a bit, but that all changed when we heard "Year Of The Pig". A nearly twenty minute piano laced jam, that features angelic female vocals, that aforementioned howl, simple shuffling drums, the whole thing erupting into some serious almost Killdozer-y noiserock jams, the whole thing surprisingly proggy, with tons of weird dynamics, warbly organ, freaked out drumming, strange arrangements, a long stretch of almost krautrocky garage rock groove, culminating in another noise drenched chaotic psychrock blowout. We're definitely gonna have to revisit their Hidden World full length now.
Formerly vinyl only, "Year Of The Pig", the cd version is packed with extra tracks, b-sides, and alternate edits of "Year Of The Pig", one for each region: US, UK and Japan. The B sides / extra tracks are much more punk rock, sort of how we remember Fucked Up sounding, but we're actually digging it more now. The vocals especially, a bit Lee Ving from Fear, a bit Killdozer, perfectly suited to Fucked Up's ramshackle punk rock frenzy. The edits are cool too, the Japanese one tending toward a more murky blurry blissy sound, the US and the UK leaning heavily on the female vocals, but each ending with a blast and a rrrooooaaar. We may weigh in on the full length eventually, but for even doubters like us, Fucked Up absolutely destroy with "Year Of The Pig".
Chicagoan Robbie Fulks, here with his fourth full length album, makes the leap from the country troubadour's lonely road to much broader horizons, as many of the songs on this album remind me of non-country folks as diverse as Nick Lowe (Fulks' voice is
We were really excited about this match up, Hospital Productions head honcho Dominic Fernow's gothic industrial techno project Vatican Shadow, teamed up with David Sumner of Sandwell District's ominous minimal techno alter ego Function. We could only imagine what sorts of fantastically grim and murky sounds would emerge from this unholy union, would it be monolithic slabs of heartless black techno, or swirling rhythmic sprawls of pulsing murk? Our imaginations sort of ran wild, and yet somehow, we never imagined THIS.
The sound is definitely still plenty moody and dark, but instead of being harrowingly abject, or bleak and brutalist, it's actually sort of blissed out, and pretty dreamy much of the time, the vibe more hazy and soft focus, lots of atmospheric drift and Pop Ambient style swirl. There are beats too, but they're not so much beats as pulsations, often buried and barely there, almost always skeletal and ultra minimal, drifting amidst gauzy stretches of woozy, washed out nocturnal murk, soft focus atmospheres, and blurred dream-state ambience, the vibe ethereal and airy, almost like a blackened new age, but one that often drifts into fields of dark, swirling, chordal thrum, and softly tangled sheets of smeared melody, glistening and glimmering and prismatic. There are hints of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas, the Caretaker, the whole Pop Ambient series, Emeralds, lots of drift and shimmer for sure, but a few spots that get downright sinister and soundtracky, like on the "nemesis Flower", an ultra minimal John Carpenter style sprawl of murky throb, rumbling synth blurts, and distant melodic shimmer. It's not until the second to last track, "Red Opium" that we get any actual techno, and even then, it's a sort of laid back, blissed out mid-tempo house music groover, the tempo loping and hypnotic, the beat surrounded by soft billows of resonant overtones and blurred melody, which leads directly into the closer, "Bejewelled Body", which is about as close to a 'banger' as any track here, a churning, four-on-the-floor throb, wreathed in electronic squelches, keening fragmented melodies, and underpinned by some seriously droned out kosmische raga-like shimmer.
One of several new tapes on this week's list from local label Acephale Winter Productions, and another group new to us despite, as the title explains, having been around for a more than a decade, this tape being a sort of best of from this Canadian horde. And seeing as it's a best of, drawn from multiple releases, spread out over years, the sound, and sound quality varies greatly, but we have to say, we're digging pretty much all of it. The opener is furious drum machine driven slab of epic black metal, with a distinctly post-BM vibe, soaring and epic, with chiming guitars, the production lush and HEAVY, some cool weird breakdowns too with woozy, fretless sounding bass, and strange percussion, some foresty folk here and there, but for the most part, it's just epic and majestic, frosty, wintry black buzz. But the second track is totally different, way more lo-fi, and super symphonic, gnarled black buzz, and crumbling distortion wedded, to majestic orchestral pomp, with some classic metal chug, more weird bass, and some serious shreddery, we almost like this even more than the first track. And FF continues to confound, the third track sounding like a slightly more lo-fi Dimmu Borgir, retaining that symphonic sound, but adding dramatic spoken word, swirling synths, the results are pretty fantastic. From there on out, it seems like we're digging deep, with some tracks sounding like demos, super lo-fi, but with the same aspirations of metallic grandeur, which translates pretty well, even with the obvious recording limitations, the band also delving into blackened doom, as well as some sonic surprises like "Riding In The North", that seems to channel Borknagar, plenty of midtempo black buzz, but with dramatic piano, and some gothy crooned clean vocals, before the tape finishes off with two blasts of frosty black grimnity, one with some almost Queen sounding harmonized leads!! Killer stuff, that will definitely have us tracking down some of FF's full lengths!
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Guessing these won't be around for long...
This has to be one of the most anticipated black metal releases of the year, especially around here considering how much we LOVED the last Funeral Mist, Salvation, which managed to be blazing fast and technical but at the same time super heavy and well produced, none of the heft sacrificed for speed or buzz. Most definitely giving Deathspell Omega and Katharsis some serious competition. But Funeral Mist sort of dropped off the map, with mainman Arioch dedicating all his time to his other band, Marduk.
The with very little warning, word got out that there was a new Funeral Mist, and almost as quickly people started weighing in, most proclaiming Marantha to be shit, many bandying about words like 'nu-metal' to describe their sound, comparing them to Dimmu Borgir and Cradle Of Filth. Which more than anything had us dying to hear it.
We're happy to report, that while there's definitely a serious sea change in FM's sound, and they're definitely experimenting A LOT, they still destroy, and anyone who loved Salvation will most likely find much to dig here. Take record opener "Sword Of Faith": after some strange field recordings, a man screaming "It's the plague, it's the blood of Jesus!", tolling bells, strange beastly grunts, the band explodes into a burst of frenzied buzzing that to these ears sounds as good as anything on Salvation. Plenty of warped Deathspell style riffage, furious lightning fast drumming, some soaring Nordic style melody, the vocals seems to be the main difference, much louder in the mix, much gruntier and howly, less black metal shriek more guttural and almost hardcore sounding, the music around it sways and swells, slipping from doomy plod to insane lightspeed riffing, the band locked into intense mathmetal workouts, the whole sound dizzying and nearly overwhelming, the vocals getting a bit pirate-y here and there, but that just adds to the madness, if the whole record sounded like this, no one would be complaining, or at the very least they'd complain that the band hadn't progressed, but then comes "White Stone" and all bets are off.
Hard to even explain, the track begins with some tinny distorted riff, which gives way to a lurching dramatic doom, that sounds more Birthday Party or Swans than black metal, but then the guitars and the kick drum lock into a strange muted pulse, chugging away over near constant amp buzz, the vocals are WAY present, loud in the mix, backed up by weird chanting, the overall feel is gothic, almost industrial, but it's weird and twisted and black enough that it pretty much seals the deal for us. This record rules. Any black metal record that has the true grim hordes in an uproar must be doing something right.
But that bit of weirdness only lasts 4 minutes, and we're immediately thrust back into some seriously swirling sonic chaos called "Jesus Saves!", everything frantic and on the verge of total collapse, the vocals bizarre, almost Popeye-esque at times, growling over brief stretches of tranquility, sometimes slipping into hysterical howls, at one point the guitars actually get LOUDER, as in the sound of the whole record is suddenly bumped up making for some really strange dynamics, before the band slip back into some sort of brittle riffing, doomy drumming distant chanting and those monstrous growly vocals, and then inexplicably, the metal fades out, letting the last 3 minutes of the song play out as some strange almost looped sounding folk.
Minus that one track, it's really hard to see what people have been complaining about. This is some seriously twisted and heavy shit, the arrangements much more varied for sure, the vocals most definitely bizarre, but the music is just mindblowing, the riffs killer, with some awesomely fucked production, like during "A New Light" when the tape seems to melt leaving just the vocals, doused in some weird effects, making them sound like some sort of processed synth, before the song explodes again, only to slip into a weird plodding midtempo a few moments later, the drums beneath an angelic sounding choir while the vocals grunt and groan. Then there's "Blessed Curse", at nearly 12 minutes, all midtempo pound, and soaring minor key guitars, and trombone or trumpet part way through, making the band sound a bit like a blackened Beyond Dawn, the effect is awesome, haunting, ghostly, makes it seem less weird that Arioch's other band Marduk does a pretty killer Woven Hand cover. We can only imagine it sounds a little like this.
The last three songs offer up more of the same, that freaked out furious tangled blackness, rife with all sorts of what-the-fuck parts, some really bizarre almost Eastern pop sounding vocals dropped right into a swirl of black riffing, long stretches of gloomy almost new wave sounding trudge, Swans like riffing, tortured vocals, lots of creepy atmospherics, all culminating in a strange orchestral outro, timpani's and horns, dramatic and mysterious like some strange Bernard Hermann score.
Fuck the haters. The more we listen to this, the better it gets, and the weirder it gets, not just the riffs, but some of the fucked up parts and the weird effects have gotten stuck in out heads, this is some awesomely progressive, damaged and demented blackened genius, once we got into it, and sort of let it all sink in, we found ourselves practically unable to listen to anything else, so we're hereby declaring this as a contender for black metal record of the year. You have been warned.
One of our ALL TIME favorite black metal records finally repressed and available again!
It originally took us a good long while to get enough copies of Salvation so we could review it on the AQ list, and while we were super psyched to finally be able to turn every one on to this amazing disc, we were also a little freaked out, since suddenly we were faced with the prospect of trying to put into words just what it is that is so amazing about this record. And what it is we decided, is EVERYTHING, from the art to the songs to the production, just everything. It's been forever since we saw a record this beautiful and frightening looking, and so weird but utterly heavy sounding.
This is definitely black metal. Appropriately buzzing and grim, with fuzzed out riffs and blasting rhythms and death rattle shrieks, but unlike most other black metal records, this is HEAVY. No, we mean H E A V Y. We often joke about the majority of metal records that speed does NOT necessarily equal heaviness. Never has. In fact it's almost always the opposite. The faster you go, the more brittle the sonic palette, and from a drumming standpoint the softer you hit the drums (until you're forced to compensate with triggers). That's why a massive downtuned riff and a pounding caveman drummer is so completely and utterly heavy. And that's why most black metal is washed out and buzzy and droney, but that's definitely part of the appeal, so fast that everything becomes a hypnotic blur. But when a band comes along and manages to be lightning fast but still crush, with ultra dense guitars and HUGE drums and ridiculously hellish howls, well, it's hard not to be blown away. And of course the record also manages to be catchy (not 'pop' catchy, but surprisingly memorable riffs and parts you'll actually find stuck in your head!) And if that wasn't enough, the whole record rife with ambient interludes and ends up being a complex and harrowing journey through some hellish musical wasteland, Sure, the metal is heavy and the playing is furious and intense, but the production is so weird and creative (especially for a black metal record) and the songs (and the whole record) are peppered with all sorts of unlikely flourishes, that add all sort of bleak weirdness, and quasi-religious creepiness, and make Salvation one of the most chillingly grim and darkly evocative records we've ever heard. From strange lilting choral pieces, to haunting drifting old-timey ambience, to quasi religious chanting. It's all woven seamlessly together and along with the artwork, evokes some Lovecraftian otherworld, all rainy and dark and washed out in miserable greys, and where everything is dead or dying, and every step could be your last. The cover depicts one of the band members crucified next to to eviscerated malformed babies, also crucified, in an alcove in some satanic church. The rest of the booklet is equally as striking (and fucked up) as if Stephen O'Malley and Joel Peter Witkin got together to try and design the most beautiful, most dementedly damaged and disturbing black metal artwork ever. Crowns of thorns, grim reapers, malnourished and emaciated dead bodies, hooded skulls and dark riders, multi limbed and Siamese babies and fetuses, all beautifully laid out amongst lyrics and text printed in ancient-scroll style almost illegible olde English script. The whole booklet is muted black and white, fuzzy and washed out, and again evocative of your innermost fears and a truly horrible place (and sound). In fact the whole package is like some dusty artifact of ancient evil, discovered buried a mile beneath the earth, and since being brought to the surface has caused unspeakable evil and the tragic deaths of everyone who comes near it. Certain damnation to anyone who gazes upon it or lets the hellish sounds within reach of their ears. Too bad we can't stop listening to it....
By now we probably don't need to tell you know nuts we are for Finland. For whatever reason, the music that comes from Finland pretty much always blows our mind. And when it comes to black metal, hell, it's tough to think of a region the produces more bafflingly brilliant blackness. Aanal Beehemoth, Ride For Revenge, Will Over Matter, W.A.I.L., Jumalhamara, Circle Of Ouroborus, Horna, Dead Reptile Shrine, Beherit... Well, you can add Funerary Bell to that list, their debut full length, The Coven, another twisted black missive from Finland, and like many of their Finnish black metal brethren, classifying these guys as black metal, is a bit of a stretch, sure they blast and buzz with the best of them, but they spend just as much time, creeping, jangling, whispering, strumming, they're sorta tough to pin down.
Check out opener "Vision Of The Undead (World)", which is all clean guitar strum, whispered almost melodic vox, simple loping drums, and when the metal does kick in, it's more like classic old school eighties metal, chugging riffs, almost stadium rock sounding, minus the WAY up in the mix blasts of double kick, the song lurching from doomy (yet still melodic) plod to seasick sort-of waltz, back to that double kick laced power metal riffery. Right near the end the band do explode into a brief bit of blackened blasting, but then it's right back into melodic lope. And did we mention the bass, an instrument most often missing from most black metal, but here it's busy, offering up bloopy melodies and add a whole other dimension.
"Detachment" starts out similarly, all melodic and post rocky, then in swoops some Maiden-ish riffing, the vocals a growly grunt, and then there's that double kick again, at least twice as loud as the rest of the drum kit, adding some serious low end oomph.
And so it goes. Folks looking for grim buzz and frenzied blackened blast will be left wanting, but if you like your black metal to flit from crusty d-beat pound to synth laden swirly stumble, from melodic classic metal (via twisted Finnish blackness) to woozy harmonized guitar doom, and from almost indie jangle to melancholia Katatonia-esque melodic blackness, then this might just be your cup of demented druggy blackened Finnish tea!!
The first thing you notice about Funereal Moon, a long running black metal horde from Mexico City, is main man Impure Ehiyeh's amazing corpsepaint, each eye in the center of a black upside down cross, a pentagram in the center of his forehead, his nostrils painted huge and animal like, the mouth outlined like a dripping bat, the whole face lined with cracks, making him appear as some 100 year old demonic black metal ghoul. Which suits the music, as their sound is totally unhinged, a raw, lo-fi, fucked up grim black metal that has more in common with a band like Necrofrost than any of the classic Scandinavian elite, which is most definitely a good thing. Murky, mysterious, stumbling, damaged, the guitars washed out and muted, the vocals a raspy croak, the drums solid and simple, the whole sound twisted and off kilter, the sounds panned dramatically from left to right, so sometimes the band swerves back and forth making the music totally dizzy and unhinged.
This collection gathers up 4 newish tracks from 2007, and 5 more tracks from a 1996 demo. The first four tracks are, as described above, woozy, and gloriously fucked up, long stretches of Abruptum-like ambience get all tangled up in blasting black weirdness, giving way to droning plodding black doom, finally turning into some strange sort of spaced out abstract psychedelia, growled vox over noodly reverbed guitars and swirling spaced out effects. Weird, and so cool.
It's the older stuff where it gets REALLY weird. The guitars impossibly processed and lo fidelity, pulsing like some strange electronic transmission, the vocals even more croak-like, doused in echo, it's an intro of sorts, but maybe our favorite track here. The next track is more straight ahead, but again the production is insane, the vocals louder than anything else, the drums and guitars tumbling and roiling way down in the mix only occasionally exploding to the surface. It's all very droney and hypnotic and textural. And somehow it only gets weirder, culminating in a seriously amazing and fucked up two song finish, first, the tripped out "The Lust", with its stumbling tribal drumming, its droning electronic buzz in place of guitars, and haunting female spoken words, while a voice growls and grunts demonically in the background, and another female moans in ecstasy! And finally the 11 minute "I Came From Darkness To Conquer", a woozy synth drone, with some troll like vocals over the top, what sounds like programmed drums and flute (?), the vocals get weirder and weirder, high pitched and alien one second, growled and cookie monster like the next, finally the drums drop out, and the record closes out with synthesized strings and an orchestra of growls and grunts and howls, easily one of the most seriously fucked up ambient black metal rituals ever.
If you read this far we shouldn't even have to say it, but yet another essential record to add to your collection of freaked out, far out, damaged and demented, confusional and inspired genius black metal what-the-fuck. Which means ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL!
After all the attention garnered by the Funkstorung 'Additional Production' it's weird that only now, is Funkstorung's actual debut being released. Still cursed with the same sonic palette (or just the same software) as Autechre, Funkstorung surprise everybody and sloooooow thiiiings doooown. Especially surprising after the spastic electro crunch of their remix record. This could be Funkstorung's slow jam record. Dark and deep and skittery and hiccuppy. Sounds sort of like a long lost Tricky record being broadcast on shortwave. Then there's the vocals. Several of the songs feature guest mc's and end up sounding remarkably like AQ fave Fever. One song even features breathy female vocals that sound remarkably like Martika, furthering the Tricky comparisons. So I give this one a big thumbs up, although my compatriots are not so sure.
We've been trying to track down music from this mysterious Norweigian black metal one man band for ages now and finally managed to get enough to list. We're constantly extolling the virtues of retarded / damaged / fucked / outsider black metal (see the Benighted Leams review elsewhere on this list) and we're always on the lookout for more. And Furze definitely fits the bill. In fact, we've been touting Benighted Leams as "perhaps the most retarded black metal band ever" for years now, but it seems like Furze might be just sneak in and steal that 'honor' for themselves. Let's talk about the packaging first. The cover is all black except for some weeds laid out next to each other. The back is all white (!) with a photo of what appears to be two young trick or treaters, one dressed like a witch, the other like a ghost. The Furze logo on the back is printed over three witches brooms. the back of the booklet has a very South Park-like painting of a white sign under a blood dripping sky, The sign reads: "Come, come sit listen to our cogent black metal necrosis". Inside the booklet, Mr Furze is carrying a lantern through a snowy forest.
While Necromanzee Cogent is black metal, sonically it sounds way more like a doom record, slow doomy riffs, one track even sounds exactly Black Sabbath, but played by a grade school music class. The whole record starts off with haunting Jandekian mumbling before erupting into clumsy, mid tempo doooooom. Totally random drumming, fuzzed out atonal organ melodies and anguished heavily reverbed moaning, not really metal so much as some strange Scott Walker / Jandek / Nick Cave caterwaul occasionally whispering ominously but more often gurgling and squealing and yelping. There are occasional blasts of -actual- black metal, but it's almost as if he can't manage to play that fast for that long and is forced to slow down and often abandon song structure all together, resulting in lots of creepy ambient bits, with scraping reverbed guitar strings and all sort of weird sounds. Most of the record is a sludgy doomy, plodding thud rock, almost like some long lost Amrep band, but filtered through the frosty blackened mind of some Norwegian black metal troll. Also, somewhat surprisingly there are some really gorgeous blissed out post-rocky guitar ambience, keening guitar melodies suspended in a massive blackened emptiness. Everything up until this point has only served to get you ready for the massive 20+ minute final track "Sathanas' Megalomania". From high end chiming shimmer, to slow building droning creepiness, to church-like organ and plodding drum with deep chanting and scary demonic screeches, to full on epic black metal with REALLY loud monster vocals, to haunting funereal doom until the end of the song where levels and song structure and vocals all seem to go haywire. As the metal maelstrom dissipates, the song becomes a chaotic swirl of weird sped up disembodied voices, snippets of crappy AM radio, snatches of distorted orchestra, squealing feedback and groaning downtuned guitars. Phew. Yikes. After listening to this record we feel like we've been dragged naked over rocks and thistles, through a snowy forest, into a fiery pit where we were quickly eaten by a huge demon, and promptly shat out. You know what we're talking about: tired, filthy, demoralized, violated, bruised and battered. But surprisingly really really good.
We've long loved Norwegian weirdo one man black metal horde Furze, aka Woe J. Reaper. In fact, in our love of and obsession with the most twisted, warped, fractured and fucked up black metal, we would rank Furze pretty damn close to the top. Three records in (Trident Autocrat, Necromanzee Cogent, and UTD) and few can reach the heights (depths?) of Furze's sonic dementia. Just have a look at past Furze reviews on the aQ site, to see just what sort of confusional brilliance this guy is capable of.
So when we discovered that the new, fourth Furze was meant to be an homage to seventies era Black Sabbath, a sonic tribute to the band that is, according to Woe J. Reaper himself, the reason Furze exists at all. The question really was, would the new record simply sound like a Furze record, and be dedicated to the spirit of Sabbath, or would it sound like Sabbath, with Reaper doing his best to evoke the same mood and might and majesty? Howabout a little of both?
Right off the bat, Reaper Subconscious Guide finds Furze doing his best Sabbath, but unlike the legions of Sabbath worshipping wannabes, Reaper is capable of capturing that seventies sound, the vibe, and the first track, while not sounding like Sabbath per se, it definitely sounds like it could be some demented lost seventies private press metal artifact. The riffing old school and Sabbathy, but everything else pure Furze, the drumming is super strange, mathy and stuttery and busy, the vocals, even weirder, a crooned mewl, no screeching or voKILLS, but proper (sort of proper) singing. The track is all over the map too, gongs, clean guitar strum, and finally, some black metal, but only sort of, instead, it sounds more like galloping classic metal, pounding and relentless, before the track shifts back to that Sabbath styled chug and croon, but this time lacing the sound with glockenspiel. Yep, glockenspiel. We can't think of a Furze record that would appeal to classic metal purists, and while this one might not either, it's about as close as Reaper will ever get.
The rest of the record follows a similar path, old school seventies hard rock guitar parts, wild chaotic drumming, the strange doomy croon vocals, some seriously killer riffs, twisted squiggly leads here and there, and it's Furze, so there's lots of random weird shit going on, not the least of which is the chiming bell like glockenspiel which surfaces at the oddest times.
The thing is, without the black metal baggage, if this was some recently unearthed lost doom artifact, people might be freaking out, the perfect balance of classic metal, damaged naivety, and freaked out psychedelic weirdness, makes this a twisted classic. Definitely the least black metal of all the Furze records, but just as awesomely weird and brilliantly baffling!
Lots of strange liner notes, and super swank sparkly reflective cover art/logo that ought to appeal to little girls everywhere.
We haven't had these in ages, but since Furze is some of our favorite far out black metal EVER, we figured we oughta relist it since we just now managed to get some more copies (and we might not be able to get any more after this as the label is pretty much sold out!). Here's how much we love this stuff (from when we listed it the first time a few years back):
Everybody went so nuts for the newest Furze record we listed recently we figured we oughta track down the first one as well. And it's just as freaked out and damaged and totally brilliant. Unlike the weird droning doom of Necromanzee Cogent, Trident Autocrat is all black metal. But that doesn't mean it's not as bizarre, because it most definitely is. The song titles again are totally perplexing: "Zaredoo Knives Endows Thy Sight", "Devacamo Possessed Black", "Witchboundator", "Scolopendraarise" and the lyrics and imagery are quite ridiculous as well. The logo, which features three witches brooms and the slogan: "Trident Black Metal Feast", the back of the record that features a long exposure swirl of light in a spooky hallway, and lines like "The overall vibration of the preacher, The way of sneaking teeth and hypocrisy, It's the destruction ritual of the holy trinity" all combine to form the perfect framework for one of the coolest weirdest black metal records ever. All the BM hallmarks are present, buzzing riffs, growled vocals, chaotic lightning speed bast beats, but the black metal of Furze turns these seemingly typical elements into completely insane musical madness. The growling vocals squirm and morph from demonic growl, to howled distant anguish, heavily reverbed as if they were being recorded at the bottom of a well, to maniacal gremlin like chatter, and creepy cartoony chanting. The riffs, are super affected and sometimes sound totally heavy, sometimes completely brittle, lo-fi and tinny one minute, buzzing and snarling the next. The most surprising thing is how damn catchy some of these riffs are. The first song has been stuck in my head like crazy, and unlike most black metal, you'll no doubt find yourself humming along. Only a half hour long, but so much wonderful weirdness is crammed into those 30 minutes you definitely won't be left wanting.
We kinda forgot how much we love NZ noise rockers The Futurians, but within seconds of throwing this on, their latest, and first for Last Visible Dog (also LVD's first vinyl, and vinyl-only, release), we most definitely remembered. The band clobbering us with their buzzing lo-fi psychedelic minimal garage noiserock dronedirge crush, the guitars crusty and fuzzy and drenched in distortion and buzz, the vocals a buried yelp, the drums so distorted that they sometimes sound electronic, and the production, totally fried and in the red, with the sound seeming to continually shift from brittle and tinny, to murky and muddy, to fully blown out. So weirdly produced in fact, that much of this ends up sounding more avant and experimental than noisy and rocky. The sound is motorik and repetitive, tripped out and mesmeric, NZ style, like a krautrock Dead C or a noiserock Faust, tribal and trancelike, a few tracks are just wild tangles of psychedelic guitar noise, but others, like the final nearly sidelong track, are just total low fidelity outsider spacerock krautgarage bliss. Noisy, heavy, in the red, fucked up and so kick ass.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. Pressed on 80 gram vinyl, with super heavy jackets.
At first blush, the debut full length from local trio Fuzz, sounds a lot like a Ty Segall record, as it should, since Fuzz is actually Segall's new band, which was originally described to us as sounding like Ty Segall crossed with Black Sabbath. Needless to say we were pretty skeptical at first, but their preceding 7"s proved the point, and now that the highly anticipated full-length is here, goddamn if this isn't some seriously heavy garage-psych proto-metal retro-rock radness! In fact, you'd most certainly be forgiven for thinking this was in fact some genuine lost proto metal artifact, the songs, the sound, the guitar tone, all harken back to the classics, that sound we here at aQ obsess over, in fact, if we were trying to describe Fuzz with some succinct rock band math, we might replace Sabbath above with groups like Power Of Zeus, or Dust, or the Groundhogs, cuz it definitely has that old school hard rocking vibe BIG TIME.
The interesting thing about Fuzz, is that while Segall is still singing, he's now behind the kit, and is actually a seriously kick ass drummer, very much in the style of say Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell, busy and loose, slipping from wild octopoidal freakouts to locked in hard rocking grooves and back again, while guitarist Charlie Moothart (who also plays in Segall's band, as well as the Moonhearts) proves himself to be a serious shredder, who should be getting the same sort of love that dudes like Isaiah Mitchell does, in fact fans of Earthless will find much of the jamming here right up their alley, with Moothart unfurling, crumbling, blown out heavy rock riffs, alongside wild blasts of mega shred psychedelic freakout. And while most of the songs her are loose and jammy, with much of the record sounding like different parts of the same mega-jam, rife with lots of space, and stop/starts, stretches of amp hum, lurching abstract almost doomy breakdowns, even some almost-drum solo bits, a few pop gems surface here and there, like "What's In My Head", which would have sounded right at home on any of the Segall record proper, so catchy, with a hook to die for, but still somehow fitting into Fuzz's retro fuzz-rock soundworld. That sound in full effect on "Loose Sutures" which is about as loose as these guys get, the midsong breakdown total heavy seventies psych-prog radness, complete with fuzzed out bass solo, killer drumming, and when the main riff comes back in, SO HEAVY. The record finishes of with three more blasts of blown out riff heavy psych rock that kills, lurching from fuzzy lope, to full on near metallic crunch, to total classic old school heavy psych, and as much as we love pretty much everything Segall has done, this Fuzz record is fast becoming our favorite.
Killer psychedelic space dragon cover art, the lp includes a download code as well!
The second release from Jan Jelinek's Faitiche imprint. The first being the too-good-to-be-true, past Record Of The Week, Ursula Bogner collection, a supposed archival compilation of various recordings made by a 40 something housewife who dabbled in electronic music in her spare time. We like to believe it was all real, and not some meticulously assembled hoax, but hell, even if it was in fact Jelinek, it was so well done, it almost makes it better. Almost.
For release number two, Jelinek has convened an imaginary body called the Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples, or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples, more an idea than an acting body (although it seems like Jelinek imagines it eventually being real, or maybe he's just messing with us again), the Society would exist to address the idea of environmental recording, when that recording contains copyrighted sounds. For example, a field recording of a state fair, where one of the rides just so happens to be blasting ZZ Top. Is ZZ Top then entitled to royalties from your recording of the fair? So Circulations is a sonic experiment of sorts, setting up similar situations, where various bits of recordings and samples are broadcast, projected or played in public spaces, which are then recorded, capturing not only those sampled sounds, but also the ambience, voices, footsteps, the sample becoming simply another found sound in a world of sounds waiting to be found. All very interesting for sure, thankfully the actual recordings are pretty fantastic as well. Not sure how much light they shed on the problem/issue, but from a purely listening standpoint they are super cool. Much of the sampled sound seems to be from exotica records, but they are broadcast in various locations which affect the sounds differently, sometimes it's a looped cartoon sounding oboe, wrapped in hiss, with a conversation taking place in the background, other times, there are the sound of footsteps, hidden behind what sounds like a blur of birdcalls and strange malfunctioning computers. Crackling lullaby like melodies wrap around machine like rhythms, the room sound adding all sorts of natural reverb, moody minimal dub loops wreathed in buzz and static drifting through what sounds like a big empty hallway, glitchy electronics and dramatic strings being broadcast amidst the clinks and clanks of a kitchen or restaurant or supermarket, minimal classical music underpins wandering couples, swooping backwards calliope music ringing out in what sounds like a mall or department store, regardless of place, or technique, the sounds and songs here are gorgeous, playful sometimes, haunting other times, the various sounds as important to the pieces and the overall sound as the samples, both elements blurred into one truly fantastic listening experience.
Beautifully packaged in a mini digibook, with extensive liner notes, in multiple languages, a few illustrations and even some footnotes.
Ok, hopefully all of you into dooooooooooooooooom have heeded our recommendations in the past ("best band EVER" we may have said, in a moment of infatuation) and are already well acquainted with this cult Japanese band who exude a magnificently miserable mixture of slow, atmospheric doominess and crusty black metal thrashing, inspired by the likes of Celtic Frost/Hellhammer (natch), Amebix, and Corrupted. This is their 2nd full-length studio album, following 2004's Gloomy Lights debut and last year's The Dawn Of Gallhammer demos n' live cd+dvd collection. That's the one where we busted out the Simpsons Comic Book Guy impersonation in our review, but it's this album that really seals the deal, when it comes to Gallhammer's position in the pantheon of most depressive doom bands ever, anyway. They're up there, no doubt about it, as is proved by this collection of ten tracks, each one of 'em often (but not always) a slow-motion trudge through the depths of emotional bleakness in the form of monotonously massive low-end guitar riffage, wretched cookie monster screams, and simple, gloomy melodies. Several of the song titles are quite indicative of their sound: "Long Scary Dream", "SLOG", "Ripper In The Gloom"... Many of these varied tracks feature a dynamic combination of knock-you-over-with-a-feather soft n' sad prettiness setting you up for some smash-you-with-a-hammer heaviness, or even manage both at the same time. It's the former element, this band's almost post-rock instrumental mesmeric moodiness, for which we think Gallhammer should be best noted. Not that it has any of post-rock's usual complexity, this is raw and primal and ritualistic, perfectly encapsulated by the way the stark, repetitive slowcore acoustic guitar part at the start of "Ripper In The Gloom" suddenly, shockingly gives way to a full-on punk rock assault.
It also seems possible that Gallhammer, along with their interest in underground '80s doom-crust, also shares some of the Velvet Underground fixation displayed by their contemporaries from the Japanese psych-rock scene, like LSD-march and Doodles. Heck, track one, the nearly eight minute "At The Onset Of The Age Of Despair" seems to have echoes of VU's "Venus In Furs"... If one of Gallhammer's songs wound up on a PSF Tokyo Flashback comp someday we'd be surprised, yes, but only a little. Though it sure wouldn't be a track like "Killed By The Queen" or "Blind My Eyes", two of the punked out, filthy metal blitzes on here, the latter of which throws in some uncharacteristic Melt-Banana style yelping, dogwhistle vocals along with the usual guttural grunting and growling.
Hey, we made it all the way to the end of this review without mentioning Gallhammer's major non-musical selling point... we said they're a "cult" band above, but were tempted to say "cute", as this trio just happen to all be attractive young Japanese ladies, their looks further enhanced by the tasteful application of gothy corpsepaint makeup. No this fact doesn't make Gallhammer's music sound any better (or worse) but it's, um, interesting. Happily, though, Peaceville isn't using Gallhammer's sex appeal to sell this album, there's not even any pictures of the band at all included in the classy-lookin' white-and-silver digipack. Recommended nonetheless!
In the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons: "Best band EVER."
No, we're not actually implying an endorsement of Gallhammer by Comic Book Guy. But, IF Comic Book Guy was into old school death/black/doom metal and crusty punk (which, we'd imagine he probably isn't) -and- was really into cute Japanese girls (which, chances are, he is), then, well, Gallhammer would be one of his favorite bands. We can't help but like 'em lot ourselves. We reviewed their debut cd Gloomy Lights back on list 235, and pointed out then that while a trio of cute, Japanese girls with raccoon eyes playing in the style of '80s doom pioneers Hellhammer was an obvious high-concept selling point, from -listening- to it you sure couldn't tell they were cute or even female. But you could tell that their music was utterly grim and wretched and heavy as hell, which for us was enough to recommend it. Glacial riffs, pounding drums, atmospheric breaks, deathly croaks... raw and primitive and very effective!
We also reported that they'd gotten signed to Peaceville, who have cleverly determined that the best way to introduce Gallhammer to the masses isn't with a new album (still upcoming) but with this, a collection of demos and rehearsal tracks. Oh, and with a DVD disc of live performances. That's the clever part. Once you see vocalist/bassist Vivian Slaughter in her Celtic Frost t-shirt, staring blankly into space and grunting inhumanly into the microphone, you'll be smitten. Or watch drummer Risa Reaper thrash her kit, providing back-up screams too. Or witness guitarist Mika Penetrator (Amebix t-shirt for her) crank out the riffage whilst contributing blood-curdling vokills as well... it's all over. Is there a fan club? Where do we sign up? Seriously, though, the live footage is convincing. They're a killer band. And have a great sense of theatrics, looking so much like those spooky girls you always see in Japanese horror films with their long black hair and hollow eyes.
The DVD features 24 songs from six shows filmed at various venues in Japan between 2005 and 2006. Some are pro shot (the show at Okayama Pepper Land which is presented in its entirety) and others are more bootleggy lookin' but still perfectly acceptable. And there's also a photo gallery of stills to stimulate more fanboy drool.
Meanwhile, on the audio disc, you get twelve tracks including two exclusive demos of (brutal) brand new songs, along with rarities going back to before the Gloomy Lights album. If you've heard Gallhammer before, you know this is gonna be crushing. Far from cartoonish. If you haven't heard 'em, this a good place to enter their haunted world of misanthropic moody metal. Imagine if Unsane, Corrupted and Zeni Geva got together in a cave to make the soundtrack to some freaky J-horror flick, after listening to nothing but Tom G. Warrior's earliest output and the occasional Velvet Underground album for inspiration. Cool, eh?
We first discovered Lee Gamble via his Diversions lp, an entire record crafted from an old box of jungle mix tapes, but made even more compelling by the fact that it wasn't even the actual jungle bits he used, but instead, the between song ambience, the tape hiss and buzz, all woven into something way more abstract. Dutch Tvashar Plumes was his next record and found Gamble actually crafting his own beats, and very much like Diversions, wrapping them in dense sonic collages, lushly layered, noisy, gritty, still rooted in classic jungle, and Kompakt style beatscapery, but doused in grit and grime.
Koch seems to take up right where that one left off, although the opener is a bit misleading, and had us expecting something else all together, airy swaths of synth shimmer, pocked with impossibly deep low end pulses, a gorgeous crystalline drift, but before you know it, the sound transforms into something much more aggressive and beat driven, a pounding dancefloor banger, but again, still rife with Gamble's idiosyncratic to beat making, a churning, heavy house throb, beneath a gurgling, pitch shifted sampled vocal, groovy and funky, but also sort of sinister. The sound soon slips back into that opening ambient dreaminess, before another beat swoops in, this one more loping, and laid back, headphones reveal a whole world of sound beneath the beat, a beat that eventually grows warped and woozily misshapen, as those background sounds creep to the fore.
We'd like to say that's pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, but it really doesn't, Gamble is a sonic mad scientist, and while there is definitely some sort of musical thread holding it all together, it's difficult to put your finger on just what that thread is. From the spare skitter of "Oneiric Contur", to the gauzy almost Heroin House sounding digi-dub abstraction of "Head Model", to the washed out blur-bliss sprawl of "Frame Drag", to the nocturnal beat-murk thrum of "Voxel City Spirals", to the churning blackened throb of "Jove Layup", to the skeletal avant-house groove of "Gillsman". to the warped, and woozily melty dreaminess of "Flatland"...
And so it goes, constantly shifting in tone and tempo, vibe and texture, all the tracks here part of some impossibly cohesive, fantastically far out, abstract-electronic, alien dancefloor, psychedelic songsuite. Cool!
The first in a series of reissues from '80s power pop legends Game Theory, fronted by singer/songwriter Scott Miller, who passed away unexpectedly last year (2013), and, as is on glorious display here, was some kind of pop visionary mad scientist. We had sort of forgotten how great (and how weird), the group's 1982 debut Blaze Of Glory really was. From the strange arrangements, the weird mix, the production and the songs themselves, it's a dizzying masterwork, impossibly catchy, and super experimental, starting from the very first few seconds, with a spoken intro, cut off mid sentence, and disappearing in a cloud of tinkling bells and weird stuttering static, distant drones, it's almost as if it was an intro for an entirely different kind of record, but then in come some dreamy acoustic guitars, hazy, whispery vocals, and then POW, the song explodes into a frenetic, almost new wave power pop, with thick buzzing bass, pulsing synths, then some big drums and the chorus swoops in, and it's all over. Even after all these years, we were immediately smitten all over again. Emotional, introspective, but still rocking and a little swaggery, and that's just the first song. There's literally not a dud here, the record flows perfectly, some tracks slithery and groovy, others frantic, caffeinated new wave, and still others, fuzzy, jangly and dreamy. It's easy to hear all the pop bands that would follow in Game Theory's wake, power and otherwise, that owe much of their sounds to these guys, who were so far ahead of their time. Plenty psychedelic, a little bit proggy in places, angular guitars wound up in shimmery dream pop jangle, the drums too, chaotic and intricate, and weirdly mixed, giving the tracks still more of an oddball pop vibe. Just check out the sound samples, if you're at all a pop person, and you've yet to discover the joy of this genius pop groop, be prepared to have your mind blown for sure.
And as if the record proper wasn't enough, there are 15 bonus tracks, including some hilarious "Scott Miller Testing Laboratories" interludes, where you can hear the band members, along with aQ pal Dan Vallor (who might be best know to aQ-ers as the man behind avant experimental noise outfit Clarinette, but who was Game Theory's tour manager and sound engineer for much of the eighties, and who had a hand in assembling the reissue, as well as penning some of the liner notes) defacing the record in various ways, scratching it with a compass needle, lighting the record on fire, stabbing it with a knife, smashing it against a desk, but in between, are some amazing songs, some live, some demos, and the best of the bunch might be the tracks from Miller's pre- Game Theory outfit Alternate Learning.
Fantastically packaged with lots of rare photos and extensive liner notes, we're already looking forward to the next reissue in the series!
It's been almost two years since we last heard from these Sacramento fuzz poppers, and we're happy to report that very little has changed. The last record, Monster Head Room, arrived right at the beginning of summer '09, and we reveled in its Beach Boys harmonies, surf rock jangle, and psychedelic garage hooks, but we also pointed out their tendency for experimentation, and their occasional hints of gothic brood. But this time around it's all pop all the time, their sound even more sunshiney and summery, we're hearing way more of groups like the Drums and Soft Pack that the usual garage rock fuzz poppers we compared them to before.
As we've seen pointed out in other reviews, the sound definitely touches on classic NZ Flying Nun pop, and that classic nineties shoegaze slowcore, but where past records felt ramshackle and a little home brewed, this time around, they sound like a real band, with real songs, poised for something bigger than just playing the local dive every Friday night. And while some folks will find that disappointing, we can't help but love the new songs, and the new more polished sound, we actually hear a lot of Fresh & Onlys, that same sort of classic pop songsmithery, songs like "California Cousins" are total sunshine summer beach jams, right down to the chiming melodies and VERY Beach Boys arrangements, while tracks like "Faster" are snarly and swaggery, with fuzzed out guitars and pounding drums, with a nod to the Ganglians of old, but most of the songs here fall somewhere right in between. Which as far as we're concerned is perfect. Hooky, and fuzzy, dreamy and jangly, poppy and pretty dang perfect, maybe their best yet, and quickly becoming our new favorite summer record, even in these waning days of the season.
A little while back we reviewed a reissued of the debut from NZ noise pop combo The Garbage & The Flowers, which for many was the first time hearing this amazing outfit, but for those already well versed in the woozy ways of TG&TF there's this vinyl only collection of a rare rehearsal session, which is like an even rougher and rawer version of the group's already rough and raw sound, the detuned warble is even more woozy and druggy, the vocals echo drenched and buried in the mix, the drums a drunken stumble, the melodies angular and atonal, but strangely mesmerizing and hypnotic, slipping easily from lush warp-pop jangle to damage deconstructed art rock, and right back again. Minimal, and moody, and with lots of random studio chatter left in. It's pretty cool to hear the band talking to each other mid song, offering suggestions or directions, before effortlessly slipping right back into the song, or even more remarkable changing direction completely, as if the group just happened to be recording the actual genesis of the song(s).
Boy / girl vocals over sparkling fields of guitar glimmer, plenty of amp buzz and tape hum, extremely lo-fi, but that fidelity is the perfect fit for this band's damaged, slo-mo, Velvet Underground meets The Clean outsider jangle pop. Fans of classic NZ outfits, and all those amazing Flying Nun records, will dig this immensely. Includes a 'sing-along' lyric sheet as well.
The last couple years have been pretty great when it comes to outsider, DIY pop delights. John Maus, Ariel Pink and Night Control have made brilliant records as fucked up as they are catchy and hooky. You can add Gary War to the list of those twisted popsmiths and eccentric songwriters. This lp is filled with haunting and mysterious pop songs that are as melty and tripped out and fucked up as they are catchy and hummable. There's some serious Syd Barrett worship going on too all over New Raytheonport, but wow is it channeled so totally right on. Pop songs drenched in cough syrup that take you on a blurry and hallucinogenic voyage, the fractured sound become the perfect soundtrack for warped daydreams and drifting off into a million different dimensions. But while others groups that are influenced by folks like Syd Barret and Roky Erickson end up sounding like nostalgia acts wishing they were born decades earlier, Gary War's sound is quite timeless, and weirdly futuristic sometimes. Ariel Pink actually gets a mastering credit on the record and for sure much of the sonic scope of the album would sound right at home on any of the Haunted Graffiti albums, but there is also something so rainbow hued and prismatic and kaleidoscopically damaged about these songs that gives Gary War a unique and far out sound of his own. And it was just a matter of time before someone gave the Alan Parsons Project track "Eye In The Sky" a good outsider facelift!
We heard that Gary War is going to collaborate with Blank Dogs on a new project called Roman Soldiers and we're pretty much already signed up to join the Roman Soldiers fanclub, without even hearing a note! And we might as well proclaim ourselves charter members of the Gary War fanclub too now, can't wait to see the band rock our SXSW showcase next week! Highly recommended!
We've been hearing all sorts of great things about the mysterious Gary War. We always hear him mentioned in the same breath as Ariel Pink and John Maus, who just so happened to produce the Gary War full length. And for sure those brilliant outsiders are a good reference point for the kind of warped bedroom pop that Gary War conjures up. Lo-fi and warbly, these songs almost sound like several great bizarre pop songs playing at once. If you've been digging folks like the aforementioned Ariel Pink, John Maus and Night Control then we're pretty sure Gary War will be your next favorite. This 7" is the perfect taster for the also kick ass full length reviewed elsewhere on this list. You definitely need BOTH!
Not sure where to even start with this one. Everyone here at aQ, heck almost everyone we know loves Gas, the blissed out minimal ambient techno project of Mr. Wolfgang Voigt. But don't let the word 'techno' scare you off, as the music of Gas can easily win over the most ardent techno-phobes. The techno element in the sound of Gas is only a tiny part of Voigt's magical soundworld, often just a shadow, a distant heartbeat like pulse, sometimes more pronounced, but usually just a murky throb or a rhythmic murmur, the music of Gas is Gauzy and shimmery, blurred and softly buzzy, it's like an even more dreamlike Oval, or perhaps Porter Ricks crossed with Labradford, or Tim Hecker recording a record for Chain Reaction. When we talk about Kompakt's Pop Ambient sound, Gas is the template, that which we measure all other 'pop ambience' by. The sound is at once ethereal and intimate, haunting and mysterious, lush and expansive, the beatless tracks drift endlessly, each a divine blur of soft chordal whir and looped effervescence, the more beat heavy tracks, retain that same washed out otherworldliness, but manage to infuse them with a subtle, barely-there groove, sometimes adding gritty crackle, or subtle dubbed out delay, but always sounding light and airy, weightless and darkly blissful. We once described Gas as sounding like being adrift in a sea of electronics, in a fog so deep, the pulsating beats that would guide you back to shore are murky at best, muffled by distance and the unending push of the droning wind. And we're not sure if we could describe it better. But we'll try.
Nah Und Fern collects all four Gas albums, all of which have been out of print for ages: Gas, Zauberberg, Konigforst and Pop. And when we were first preparing to review this set, we were all ready to describe Gas' sonic arc, from the more overtly techno debut, to the much more ambient and ethereal final album. But on returning to the s/t debut, we discovered that the sound of Gas changed very little over the course of 4 albums, instead, each is like a movement in a massive symphony of gloriously murky minimalism.
The self titled debut deftly balances pure ambience with some of the most propulsive Gas tracks, including a 14 minute epic that seems to be assembled from a Chariots Of Fire loop, but in the hands of Voigt, it's transformed into something otherworldly. It is techno, but not for dancing, for many of us Gas serves the same purpose as dronemusic, sounds to lull you to sleep, to allow you to drift off, to disengage and let your mind float freely, led by your ears, entranced as they are by the beautiful shimmer and motorik soft focus propulsion of Gas.
As much as we love all of these records, the two middle records Zauberberg and Konigforst make up the heart of this Gas box. Both luminous and exuberant, yet subdued and melancholic. Sedate technotic pulses beneath wind swept drones, expansive orchestral sprawls burnished to an exquisite golden luster. Voigt's subtle dub techniques on these two discs coax the polytonal swells of deep sustained horns into lush rhythmic repetitions. These are heroic if gloomy electronica epics, realizing a fantasy fusion of Wagner's teutonic vigor and a disembodied dancefloor drone.
The final disc, Pop, is in fact the poppiest, or so we always believed, but in context with the other three discs, we are once again surprised by how consistent the Gas sound remained, while still managing to subtly expand on the sound Voigt virtually created and perfected over the course of the first three full lengths. Much like the original cover art, Pop is the metaphorical sound of the intrusion of the forest onto the dance floor, with all of its mysteries, mythologies, and wonders being ordered by the insistency of Voigt's monophunk beats. Where the earlier works were dark haunts wherein deep fluid ambience topped the nonstop pulsating rhythms, Pop is a shimmering sunfilled excursion that is mostly beatless, forming its structures out of repetitive sequences of trilling ambience swelling in and out of each other within Voigt's surreal soundworld of hypnodub washes. The lost beat resurfaces finally on the last track which is a beautiful looped repetition of the previous ambient modulations, but subtly and gracefully merged with a muted, insistent underwater dancefloor throb. Breathtaking.
A modern minimalist electronic masterpiece, four stunning parts of one majestic whole, finally united into one magnum opus, spanning years, yet sounding to our ears, utterly timeless.
Each disc is packaged in a full color sleeve, along with four inserts, all adorned with blue and green tinted forestscapes, and all housed in a gorgeous matte finished cardboard box, also adorned with a similar image, and the letters G A S embossed across the top of the box.
Maybe even more anticipated that the recent Nah Und Fern box set from Gas, compiling all of the previously released Gas records, is this, a book of art from the man behind gas Wolfgang Voigt, which beside being beautiful and packed with variations on the foresty images that graced all the Gas records, also comes with a 5 track disc featuring rare, old, unreleased Gas tracks, which have the Gas faithful in a frenzy. More on the music in a second.
The book itself is quite striking. A slightly blurred shot of a forest, tinted deep red, it could be the cover of a lost Gas album (which in some ways it is), the band name embossed in a deep red metallic ink, Voigt's name on the back. Inside is a selection of photos, which seem to be from the same shots that produced the record covers, all shot of trees and branches and leaves, close up, from afar, they would look amazing all blown up on a gallery wall, but manage to be pretty dang striking here too.
Even sans cd, this would make a pretty excellent coffee table art book. But there is a cd, and as we mentioned before, it does in fact include nearly an hour of unreleased Gas, so�
Five tracks, all ten minutes or longer, each a deep dark gritty drift, almost completely eschewing the beats that would find their way into later Gas albums, these tracks explore deep billowy black ambience. A few have some glitch and crackle, but never does it evolve into that murky thump Gas does so well, instead, it sounds like water dripping, or ice melting, while the leaves and branches sway in the background, one track is super lo-fi and raw, with an industrial machinelike loop beneath the glistening musical mumble, underpinned by deep string swells, and haunting melodies, but that track is quickly followed by something much darker and elegiac, a brooding longform shimmer, like a string quartet slowed waaaaaay down, and blurred into soft shifting shapes. The closer is the most pastoral of the bunch, almost like it could be the music for some sort of nature show, slow panning shots of glaciers glistening in the sun, leaves falling in slow motion, time lapse films of wildflowers blooming then withering, clouds drifting across a deep blue sky, the only thing keeping it from going to far in that direction, is the soft patina of fuzz, the buried buzz, the looped mesmer, the barely audible glitch, all the things that make it distinctly GAS.
Before we delve into a detailed discussion of Gate's latest release, let me just say that this album is gorgeous, droney and dreamy and about as un-noisy as noise gets, with chirping electronic whale-call blips and bleeps and luscious gossamer washes of
Michael Morley's output in the New Zealand free-noise / avant-rock ensembles Gate and AQ-faves The Dead C has always been purposefully unsettling. He's primarily armed with gritty, somnambulent guitar noise and a half mumbled voice, yet "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart" offers a drastic shift in his aesthetic focus, as he has recently put down the guitar in favor of electronics. This double CD features reworkings of two previously recorded pieces, with a condensed and vastly different remix of Gate's 1999 vinyl only double album "The Lavender Head" and a recapitulation of his 1996 soundtrack to the cacophonous sound installation "My Dear Sweet Reluctant Sweetheart."
For Morley, the use of electronics is not just about the technological filters and modulations offered by drum machines and synthesizers, but also the ability to recontextualize and deconstruct the sampled fragment. Morley's use of the quotation may not seem anything new in comparison to, say, Amon Tobin, until he brings the woozy melancholia and troubled combativeness of his earlier guitar-based work to these electronic compositions.
"My Dear Sweet..." is a series of electronic dirges made by collaging together various samples of contemporary electronica onto a really noisy 4-track with lots of tape hiss. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works 2," Panacea's "Twisted Designs" and something resembling Biosphere or Orbital are some of Morely's sources. These are pretty simple overlappings of rhythmically synchronized loops with elements of his guitar noise phasing in and out of the mix. And on "The Lavender Head" Morley loops his patented guitar grit into abstract slow-motion warbles, forming downtempo rhythms that appear lost in a sea of lo-fi tape hiss -- something *NEVER* heard in any other electronica. Really nice!
Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again a few years back, Gate's The Dew Line always seemed to disappear before we could get enough copies to list. Which was a shame as it still ranks as one of our favorite discs. A mesmerizing noise-pop-drone jem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw�
Gate's Golden record was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden noise in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blownout bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of shirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Much of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy. Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happy...
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscape of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a chunk of dark moodiness.
Way recommended. This disc is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but if you missed out on this, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablism.
And be warned, while we finally managed to get a bunch of these, it took forever, so if or when we do run out, please be prepared to be patient, since it could take a while to get more.
Killer split from two aQ faves. Gate is Michael Morley of NZ noise rockers the Dead C, and his side here sounds like it could have been plucked right off his classic The Dew Line record, a creepy, lurching noise rock dirge, all billowing clouds of distorted guitar, and a lumbering motorik rhythm, all wrapped around plaintive, softly effected sad boy vox, everything gorgeously crumbling and decaying, hissy, washed out, mournful and melancholic. Tom Carter (of Charalambides) counters with a beautiful bit of gristled, glitchy raga-drone guitarscapery, if that even is a guitar. It actually sounds more like electronic bagpipes, an alien bleating that gets stretched into a heady hypnotic field of raga-drone mesmer. Dreamily distorted, and very reminiscent of all time aQ faves Amps For Christ which is a very good thing indeed!
LIMITED TO 313 COPIES!!! Pressed on random different colored vinyl, the packaging super deluxe, a cool origami style Stumptown Arigato cardstock silkscreened sleeve, with a digital download as well.
Not to be confused with the German Geist, whose record we reviewed here a few years back, this Geist is from Israel, and this record, their full length debut, is a furious, tortured, sickening blast of hateful buzz drenched brutality, in fact the sheer blown out, super distorted buzziness ranks up there with groups like Wrath Of The Weak, who at one point we proclaimed as "THEE buzziest black metal band around". The guitar tone here is prickly and crunchy and wreathed in hiss, insectoid and gristly, the sort of guitar sound we can't ever get enough of, that swirling black buzz wrapped around buried blasting beats, harsh howling vox, and some soaring epic melodies, the band blasting along at light speed, only to slip into a woozy seasick dirge, the buzz seeming to ooze and expand, wrapping its inky tendrils around the warbly minor key melodies and the super creepy echoey ambience. And hell, that's just the first song.
Apparently these tracks were recorded live, and left mostly unaltered, to capture the raw fury and unrelenting abject misery of their sound, and it definitely worked. A cascade of in-the-red heaviness, that definitely headphones to truly appreciate it, impossibly lush buzzscapes, doomy swirling almost psychedelic dirges, all manner of haunting spectral sounds, voices, chordal swells, all woven into the bands super distorted blackbuzz crush. And sans those headphones, via just speakers, the sound borders on the Merzbow-ian, each song a swirling squall of face melting heaviness and hellish soul shearing buzz. But it's not all noisemetal punishment, these guys infuse their hellish howl with some gorgeous atmospherics, and some twisted downright catchiness, soaring and majestic one second, haunting and melancholic the next, not to mention some cool proggy almost Voivod-y angularity, and some dense washes of smeary shimmer. At times the sound does veer into something more lurching and lumbering, like the punishing death march of the final track, but the majority of Der Ungeist is spent blasting and buzzing through thick clouds of dense, black hole buzz. So awesome.
A while back we reviewed the reissue of General Surgery's Necrology, which we joked was our favorite Carcass record, that Carcass never made, but it was only sort of a joke, cuz as nuts as the aQ metalheads are about Carcass, at least one of us (ok, it's Andee) likes Necrology as much as ANY of the Carcass records. Partially, because, as we mentioned in that review, as those Swedes attempted to make their very own Carcass record, they managed to create something that was both a ridiculous homage/rip off, and at the same time a slightly more twisted version of what they were shooting for, which in some weird way made Necrology sort of a more fucked up Carcass, which is not a bad thing at all. For all you Carcass loving metalheads who haven't checked out Necrology, do yourself a favor. For those of you, like us, who've already worn out your copy of Necrology, maybe more than once, this one is for you, a massive collection of B sides and compilation tracks, demos and unreleased jams and various songs from long out of print splits, not to mention a Carcass cover from a Carcass tribute, the ultimate irony, or is it? Regardless, this is some gut grinding metallic mayhem, total gorge grind bliss, utter Carcass worship, grinding metallic heaviness that kills.
Now this is the one we've been waiting for!! The final installment in the 5 part Genghis Tron remix 12" series. For some reason we only ever reviewed the Temporary Residence 12" (each was on a different label), but there were other volumes on Lovepump United, Relapse and Anticon. We're predicting (hoping for) an eventual cd compilation release, but for now, this is the GT remix record not to miss. Nadja. Tim Hecker. Not sure who Dudes You Can Trust are, but they had us at Nadja and Tim Hecker.
Hecker's mix obliterates the original, in fact, if we didn't already know it was a remix, we probably would assume it was a proper new TH track. All warm and washed out and glistening and gauzy and sun dappled and woozy and blissy and dreamy, organic and shimmery, it's the sound that everyone shoots for, but only Tim Hecker seems to have perfected. The fact that there's a Genghis Tron track in there somewhere only makes it even cooler.
Dudes You Can Trust, which we just learned is actually one of the Genghis Tron guys, most definitely have a Nadja / Jesu vibe happening, the original track is stripped down and then bathed in dense shimmer, until most of the extraneous sounds peel back, leaving just a super minimal rumbly buzz, over a looped drum fill, before slipping into a brief stretch of lo-fi Ariel Pink like FM radio drift, and then finally a bit of glitchy minimal electro (!). Weird, but cool.
Nadja's remix takes up the whole of side 2, the first half of which is all minimal and drifty, with muted electronic bloops and bleeps, subtle effects, all very abstract and ambient, barring some barely there glitchy skitter.
Eventually, bits of the original jam burst through, a pounding howling metallic crunch, that sounds like it could have been looped or processed, but there's no time to figure it out for sure, as it quickly blisses out again into a haunting swirling whoosh of blissed out almost new wave shimmer, draped delicately over the remnants of the original track. So cool.
Needless to say, essential. LIMITED as all of the volumes are, this one is pressed on wicked red and green splatter vinyl!
We're always amazed that so much awesome and little known music from the sixties and seventies continues to be resurrected, and remain very worthy of its cult status. Case in point, this anachronistic synth-heavy psych gem from 1977 by the George-Edwards Group. While punk, disco, glam, bland FM radio, and heavy metal ruled the musical zeitgeist of the era, two multi-instrumentalist friends with a love of synthesizers, home-taping and melancholic spacey folk-pop made a mini-masterpiece in their Detroit, Michigan basement. Briefly mentioned in the Acid Archives book, it doesn't feel so much a late hippie-psych artifact, as it does a sublime and moody soft-rock epic that would have been huge on '70s AM radio in a parallel universe of our fantasies. Where instead of Bread, Chicago, and Seals & Croft, being played ad nauseum, music by Dreamies, Shuggie Otis, Fresh Maggots, Roger Rodier, Emmanuelle Parrenin, Collie Ryan, Biff Rose, Big Star, Scott Walker, Warlus, and of course, the George-Edwards Group would have scored our parallel universe childhood. Yet even that said though, 38:38 is much stranger than we can describe. Often the tracks with their multilayered Arp, Moog, and Mellotron drones and harmonies often sung in falsetto, sound like the less musically-damaged touchstones of what Ariel Pink recorded on his Doldrums album. And though the synthesizers are most prevalent, especially in sci-fi themed instrumental tracks like "Solar Flare" and "Magnetic Variation", other instrumentation like xylophones, autoharps, bells, piano and acoustic guitar play a big part in the compositions. One of our favorite tracks is "Floating Away", a druggy ballad with just acoustic guitar and what is purported to be recordings of ocean sounds, but sound like huge sheets of metal crashing in the background. Even the longest track, the instrumental "Hypertrain" is a kraut-y fuzzed electric guitar raga over drums that reminds a bit of Circle and Cave, while the second to the last track called "Some Fun" features maniacal laughter over a repetitive groove that adds an element of bad trip creepiness to the proceedings. One of the headiest records from the seventies we've heard in a while; those into druggy cyber-space folk-pop weirdness will be very satisfied with this. Solid!
Vinyl only, not sure if there's plans for a cd reissue too.
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
Last Language is not all that removed from their record on Skrot up, drawing from a similar sonic palette, opening with a bristlingly brutalist bit of electro-dirge pop, a glitchy skeletal rhythm, over haunting swirls of low end thrum, the vocals a mumbled whisper, wreathed in gristly buzz, the whole thing blurred and smeared into an abstract electronic creep, a slow stuttery skitter that almost sounds like it could be a backing track for some lost Sensational album, blunted and wasted and washed out, but also prickly and staticky, some seriously heady sonic miserablism. Not all of the record is so bleak and blasted, but it is all hauntingly spare and blissfully tripped out, the band's MO seemingly unfurling crystalline sprawls of rhythm and texture, with lots of space, the vocals almost like an afterthought, delivered in a sort of couldn't-be-bothered drawl, the sound slipping easily from twang flecked, woozy shimmer, to grinding industrial churn, and back again. The vibe definitely seems to fall somewhere near classic cold wave, but this is cold wave from some terrifying other dimension, fractured and freaky, this is some band from the eighties, the sort of band you might have seen at the Scream club, playing with Kommunity FK or the Abecedarians, but transported to some alien world, and then whisked right back, their music mutated and damaged in the process, the resulting sounds, a twisted outsider gloom-wave dream pop, some of the tracks downright lovely, like "Rebuild The Story", which is all hazy, casting some spidery almost Durutti Column sounding guitars amidst soft synthy swells, and some swooping, backwards effected rhythms, and some echo drenched vocal warblings, but others, like that aforementioned opener, are caustic and intense, and still others, elsewhere, drift from twisted new wave, to post-krautrock avant pop, to blown out industrial clatter, to mumbly Residents like art rock whatthefuck weirdness, to almost DHR like electro-crunch, to trippy, drifty, dreamy murk-wave shimmer, with most tracks somehow mashing all of those together.
Fantastic stuff. And like we said, we'd recommend grabbing both of the German Army lps on this week's list, and then tracking down anything and everything else you can find! you won't be sorry. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!! Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a download code!
There was a bit of confusion on the last list, when we finally got around to reviewing a record from LA minimalist murk pop duo German Army, we mentioned in the review that the band had lots of records, and as if to prove that point, we ourselves got confused and, uh, reviewed the wrong record. This week, all is put right, we're finally reviewing the 'right' record, the one we meant to review in the first place, and we got the other one in, the one we actually DID review. So double dose of German Army on this week's list, and odds are, if you're anything like us, you're probably gonna want both.
This self titled lp is on Skrot Up, a label who in the past has given us records by the Grave Babies, Water Borders, Psychic Ills, and they released the recent lp from long time aQ fave and former Net Shaker Ernest Gibson. German Army's distinctive sound is in full effect here, a gloriously dour post punk murkiness, hauntingly rhythmic, ominous drones, creepy sung/spoken crooned vox, opener "Guinea Strong Arm" almost sounds like This Heat at their poppiest, but slowed way down, and filtered through a cracked cold wave filter, a minimal pulsing beat, throbs beneath long moaning tones, and buzzing spidery guitar melodies way off in the distance, all of the sounds gradually growing more and more intense, all except the vocals, which remain perfectly cool and detached, wreathed in occasional swaths of dubbed out echo and reverb, all eventually crumbling to a bleary blackened halt.
And that pretty much lays out GA's sonic template, and it's a good one, all six tracks here sounding like they could be lost eighties industrial post-punk rarities, from the arrangements, to the sound, to the recordings themselves. Lo-fi and raw, darkly primitive, murky and muddy and mesmeric, woozily psychedelic, the vocals in constant flux throughout, way up in the mix, strident and dramatic, then suddenly slowed down to a monstrous gurgle, before being quickly sped up a la Butthole Surfers, but all the while, the music remains a blurred, tarpit miasma, of loping, lumbering bass, primitive programmed tribal rhythms, and swirling old school FX.
Sadly, in the long journey to the US from overseas, the package was a little bit brutalized by the US postal service, so most of the jackets are a little worse for wear, some bumped corners, some slight bends, the usual, so if you're super anal and a collector who needs to have his records be pristine, then you might wanna pass on these, but for everyone else, come get a taste of one of our favorite weirdo outsider dirge-murk post-punk creep-wave combos.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES! Includes a digital download too!
BEFORE YOUR READ THIS REVIEW, BE AWARE WE ONLY HAVE TWO COPIES. WE WILL NEVER GET MORE. BUT I REALLY LIKE IT AND WANTED TO GIVE MAILORDERS CUSTOMERS A CHANCE. SO FIRST TWO CUSTOMERS THAT ORDER IT GET IT. SORRY. AND ODDLY ENOUGH, I ALREADY HAVE A FEELING I
Anyway, album number 132 (or something close to that) from Japanese noise musician / sound artist / professional masturbator Juntaro Yamanouchi. Gerogerigegege (loosely translated as vomit, diarhhea, ha ha ha) has gone through all sorts of sonic incarnations, noisy splatter punk, bombastic japanoise, experimental musique concrete, with some of those incarnations featuring the added bonus of Juntaro's trademark live and mic-ed masturbating. On 'None Friendly' (actually recorded in 1987), he tackles THE DRONE and it's quite a listen. Deep and sonorous, lush and mesmerising. I was convinced it was a synthesizer until I noticed on the sleeve, that it specifically points out that there was 'No synthesizer used.' So what the sound source actually is remains a mystery. Maybe it -is- processed masturbating. I mean, I hope it is. But either way, this is a fantastic record. One extended buzzing and humming, slowly developing hypnotic drone. Really great.
The first thing you notice is that this record does -not- rock. Not at all. So already you're a little disappointed, because after all, the Get Up Kids did rock. The second thing you notice is how 'indie rock' this record sounds. And I mean like R.E.M-eighties-college-radio-indie-rock. And most of us kind of got tired of that sound years ago. Still with me? Good. 'Cause even after all that, this record manages to be really really good. But not at first. At first we were all sort of horrified. What happened. This is so...mellow. But the more I listen to it, the more I find these songs stuck in my head ALL the time. A whole different scenario than The Get Up Kids' last record, which was instantly catchy, so catchy in fact that we all played it incessantly until we were darn near sick of it. But this record didn't stick until listen #10 or #11. And by that time it was too late. This will definitely lose them some fans, I imagine. But maybe what we hear as 'indie rock' (the negative connotation) is just a band growing out of their underground rock ghetto. Or maybe they just suck now. But if you're like us and LOVED the last record, odds are you'll end up loving this one too.
We were all prepared to write this review thinking that this Ghast, from Wales, was in fact, the same as the Ghast whose last two split albums we had reviewed recently. The sound was quite different, but hey, bands do that all the time. Thankfully, we dug a little deeper and discovered that indeed there are two different Ghasts, one French Canadian, one Welsh!
This Ghast is the one from Wales, and since they are in fact not the Ghast we already knew and loved, they are totally new to us, but there's plenty of room in our shrivelled black hearts for two different Ghasts, which is a good thing as we're starting to think we love these guys too. Where the -other- Ghast traffic in a crumbling lo-fi slow motion blackened doom, the Welsh Ghast, on So May The Curse Bind, their first proper full length, up the black quotient quite a bit. Right out of the gate, opening track "Crawl, Blighted And Afraid" explodes in a flurry of punkish blast beats, harsh vokills and buzzing frenzied riffage, raw and primal and a bit lo-fi, this is definitely frosty and grim sounding, but before too long the band can no longer resist the black hole pull of doom, and the tempo slows to a lurch, the blast beat transforms into a pound, the riff churns and chugs, occasionally, spinning out into little squalls of furious buzz, the melodies minor key and epic, a relentless black doom dirge, that shifts back to blasting buzz to finish off in a blaze of blackened fury.
The rest of the tracks follow a similar path, veering back and forth between stumbling chaotic frenzy and lumbering doomic crush, buried within the murk and the mire though are haunting hook filled melodies and surprising guitar harmonies, which add a bit of texture and color to the blurred blackness. A few of the tracks slip into a D-beat pound, others stretch out into woozy seasick almost-waltzes, while "Pale Robe" slows everything waaaaay down for a weary depressive crawl through clouds of Burzumic buzz and spidery minor key guitar melodies, a sort of black doom ballad, melancholy, miserable, and weirdly beautiful.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Some seriously grim blacknoise weirdness here...
We first heard from Ghast on their split with Yoga, we were pretty obsessed with both bands and have been on the hunt for more from both ever since.
So Ghast have returned, on yet another split, offering up two more loooong tracks of their unique not-quite-doom, a dirgey crawl, that spends as much time shimmering and buzzing as it does pounding and lumbering. The opener here is 21 minutes of grinding corrosive soft buzz, think Tunnels, Wolf Eyes, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, that sort of thing, deep whirring low end, drifting beneath clouds of metallic buzz, plenty of fuzz and hiss, beneath it all, there does seem to be some sort of thick tarpit like riffing, but it's WAY down, more like a distant drone than anything overtly metal, but it does lend the track a serious sense of dread and foreboding, as if any second the track might splinter into pieces and explode into crushing doom, but it never does, instead ratcheting up the tension, like the soundtrack to some super abstract foreign horror film. An actual rhythm dose seem to develop, but it's cobbled together using hissy white noise, ominous whirring synths, buried and blurred vocals, and a super drawn out low end melody, creeping and creeping before the low end drops out leaving just a sea of high end electrical buzz, and weirdly enough the sound of sheep (!). The second track clocks in at nearly 12 minutes, and again, is more ambient than anything, bits of crackle, melted tape loops, field recordings, processed electronics, all blurred into a strange undulating drone, peppered with fragments of melody, some buried riffing, which finally crawls up from the murk, and the band, for the first time in nearly half an hour, launch into some lurching lumbering doom. But the sound is not massive or crushing, instead, it remains murky and muted, more bass heavy than anything, if there is guitar it's tuned WAY down and is locked in with the rumbling bass, the rhythm mechanical and machinelike, with a definite industrial vibe, the track slipping into brief stretches of ambient drone-like shimmer, before the band lurches back into action, pounding away, stripped down, but still heavy and doomy and mysteriously grim.
Rape-X existed until now, as an MP3 file someone sent us a looong time ago, a half hour slab of blown out metalnoise, industrial drone weirdness. We'd notice it on the computer every once in a while and fire it up, and always think, "wow, this is pretty great, I wonder when they'll have a record". Well here it is. And Rape-X is a pretty good match for Ghast, seeing as they traffic in a similarly abstract doomy ambience, falling closer to Wolf Eyes or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer than any classic sort of doom. The vocals are huge part of the sound, and are harsh and super processed, demonic and maniacal sounding, giving the track a bit of a Whitehouse feel, ranting and proselytizing over a constantly shifting backdrop of blackened noise and droning harsh ambience. A glorious metallic cacophony, wreathed in hiss and skree, a bit like a way more static Sunroof!, the sound roiling and churning below the surface like some rough black sea, while that hellish voice continues to testify, the unholy scripture from some lost black gospel.
Caveat Emptor, though: these have a pressing defect, it's minor, but it's definitely noticeable. The band was contacted about it, but apparently there's some bad blood with the label, so there will never be a new, corrected version, so we figured we would list it anyway, since otherwise it's pretty amazing, and the defect is so slight. Basically, the problem is, there's a digitial click at the beginning of each track. Annoying, distracting, yes, but it doesn't affect the songs themselves, so if you can handle that (you can also edit out the clicks yourself on your computer when you import it into your iTunes or whatever), then by all means pick this up, some seriously abject and harrowing doom-ed blacknoize.
Yoga is a pretty unlikely name for a black metal band. But then Yoga from Portland, Oregon are a pretty unlikely sounding black metal band. So much so that we're not even sure they really are black metal. Or metal. But they are. Sort of.
The sound of Yoga takes the lo-fi practice space recordings of grimmest of the BM outfits, and combines it with the murky muddy noise drenched blur of bands like Wold. But then take it even further rendering their sound so muted and lo fidelity that even when they're blasting furiously, it still sounds like a busted music box or an old black metal 78. And then there's the fact that Yoga spend a good amount of their time not blasting blackly, but instead, crafting synth heavy Goblin style film music, all throbbing bass and buzzing synths, creepy minor key melodies and tons of haunting ambience. Those songs too are wreathed in a foggy night-on-the-moors sort of murk, which ties those songs closely to the more blackened ones.
The strange combination of grim and Goblin, the tripped out fucked up recording quality, the damaged arrangements, the looped hypnotic quality, turn Yoga into something totally out there, most likely way to abstract and psychedelic and deliriously lo-fi to appeal to folks �looking for grim buzzing blackness, but for the rest of you, if you can try to imagine some impossible mix of Philip Jeck, Wold, Goblin, the Skaters and some of the super weird EEE unblack bands, all produced by John Maus and Ariel Pink, then you will flip for this.
The other band on this split, Ghast, are also not at all typical black metal, although they are much more distinctly metal than Yoga. Their sound is a super spare, slow motion blackened doom, still plenty lo-fi, the drums murky and down in the mix, the guitars more of a distant moan, sometimes soaring to the forefront, before drifting off again, the vocals super distorted and effected and harsh. All around this plodding blackness, creepy drones soar and shimmer, wail and keen, offering up a mournful abstract backdrop for Ghast's miserablist blackdoom. There's also a live track, where Ghast's sound is transformed into a crumbling blown out blackened drone, sounding almost like a metal band playing from behind a brick wall, the whole thing captured using a mic in a bucket of dirty water. The result is pretty fantastic, only the drums are at all identifiable, and then just barely, all the other instruments have been transformed into a mesmerizingly damaged, murky, muddy, sludgey pulsing drone. Awesome.
We got these direct from the band, and got the last copies, so once we run out, we might not be able to get more...
Finally back in stock, one of the AQ-staff's all time favorite drone recordings! This came out in '95, but we thought we'd list it anyway, after ordering a batch directly from the label 'cause we like it so much. Electronic instrument inventor Q.R. Ghazala (you may remember him from the instrument-inventor compilation "Gravikords, Whirligigs...") presents his "first insect symphony", performed on his "Vox Insecta" -- a synthesizer than specializes in simulating insect voices! The beautiful instrument (depicted on the cover, it looks like some sort of Art Deco stenographer's machine) may or may not always sound like a swarm of insects, but it certainly produces some gorgeous drones... Dark stuff, with keening higher-end tones supported by bass-y undulations. Creepy and beautiful. For fans of Tony Conrad and Lustmord and that sort of thing. So totally recommended!
NOW ON LP!! Pressed on red vinyl, includes a download code too...
Like most of you, we kinda flipped for the 2010 debut record from mysterious Swedish hard rockers / retro metallers Ghost. And some of our pals / customers went absolutely apeshit about 'em - going to every show, buying every possible permutation of the record, picture disc, import cd, along with shirts, hats, whatever. And while we were perhaps not as over the top nuts for Ghost as that, we definitely loved that record, a lot, and played it like crazy. The sound being a strange hybrid of Mercyful Fate like metal, and Blue Oyster Cult like classic heavy rock. The band fronted by a ghoulish Pope-like figure, wearing corpsepaint, and wearing papal robes, often carrying some sort of staff, while the rest of the group were a mystery, their identities hidden by robes and masks. A silly gimmick maybe, but it definitely kept everyone talking about these guys, trying to figure out who they were, which famous metal guys from other Swedish bands were actually involved. And plus, let's admit it, watching some super theatrical performance with costumes and characters, is way more satisfying than a bunch of dorky long haired dudes in jeans rocking out.
So anticipation was high for record number two. The band were rumored to have been given $750,000 to record. They flew to the US, and got a high profile producer, and the results are here, and well, the response has been divisive to say the least. Now re-christened Ghost B.C. due to to some legal difficulties, the new record finds the band almost completely ditching the metal, their sound even more firmly entrenched on the seventies hard rock side of their sound. Some of us were thrilled, as we dug that side of the band WAY more, while others, not so much. In fact one of the above mentioned superfans, hated the two songs he heard so much, he didn't even buy the record, and had no plans to do so. While that seems a bit dramatic, considering, minus the less metal, the sound is ultimately not that far removed from the first record, and in fact, the songs are way better, and way catchier, and the production, while to some ears sounded too slick and polished, ultimately sounds perfect for the songs, and with every listen, we become more and more obsessed. In fact two aQ staffers were really, really keen on making this a Record Of The Week. Certainly those two aQ-ers have listened to virtually nothing else since this came in. But there was some dissent, so we'll leave it up to you. The samples below say more than we ever could, but we'll try anyway.
While the first record was definitely a metal record, the most you could say about Infestissumam is that it's hard rock, but really it's almost more like hard pop. The songs are crazy catchy, the guitars are distorted, and a little bit buzzy, but the production is such that they don't sound heavy exactly, and the organs from the first record are all over the place here, giving some songs a very carnivalesque, circusy feel, and others a weirdly Partridge Family vibe. The songs so hook heavy, with huge choruses, and equally catchy bridges, the solos are simple, the sort that mirror the main melody, and stick in your head like the vocals, the vibe is actually kind of mellow, slightly ominous, a little bit sinister, but only a little bit. It's bouncy, almost power poppy, epic and lush and super detailed, headphone listening reveals so much sonic detail, that at times it's not hard to believe this record could have cost almost a million dollars. When we were all arguing about whether to make this a Record Of The Week, one aQ-er sent this text to another aQ-er: "Ghost is Satanic bubble gum. Total genius. I've listened to it like fifty times already!" And the aQ-er writing this review wouldn't deign to argue. Cuz it is like Satanic bubblegum. Catchy and bombastic and almost orchestral in places, pure pop in others, hard rock in others, but so far removed from the metal that popped up throughout the first record, it seems insane to call them a metal band at this point. But whatever you call them, and however you feel about their sonic progression from their debut to this new one, have a listen to those sound samples, and see if you can resist. We're guessing you won't be able to. And why fight it?? A glorious slab of Satanic bubblegum hard pop genius!
Like most of you, we kinda flipped for the 2010 debut record from mysterious Swedish hard rockers / retro metallers Ghost. And some of our pals / customers went absolutely apeshit about 'em - going to every show, buying every possible permutation of the record, picture disc, import cd, along with shirts, hats, whatever. And while we were perhaps not as over the top nuts for Ghost as that, we definitely loved that record, a lot, and played it like crazy. The sound being a strange hybrid of Mercyful Fate like metal, and Blue Oyster Cult like classic heavy rock. The band fronted by a ghoulish Pope-like figure, wearing corpsepaint, and wearing papal robes, often carrying some sort of staff, while the rest of the group were a mystery, their identities hidden by robes and masks. A silly gimmick maybe, but it definitely kept everyone talking about these guys, trying to figure out who they were, which famous metal guys from other Swedish bands were actually involved. And plus, let's admit it, watching some super theatrical performance with costumes and characters, is way more satisfying than a bunch of dorky long haired dudes in jeans rocking out.
So anticipation was high for record number two. The band were rumored to have been given $750,000 to record. They flew to the US, and got a high profile producer, and the results are here, and well, the response has been divisive to say the least. Now re-christened Ghost B.C. due to to some legal difficulties, the new record finds the band almost completely ditching the metal, their sound even more firmly entrenched on the seventies hard rock side of their sound. Some of us were thrilled, as we dug that side of the band WAY more, while others, not so much. In fact one of the above mentioned superfans, hated the two songs he heard so much, he didn't even buy the record, and had no plans to do so. While that seems a bit dramatic, considering, minus the less metal, the sound is ultimately not that far removed from the first record, and in fact, the songs are way better, and way catchier, and the production, while to some ears sounded too slick and polished, ultimately sounds perfect for the songs, and with every listen, we become more and more obsessed. In fact two aQ staffers were really, really keen on making this a Record Of The Week. Certainly those two aQ-ers have listened to virtually nothing else since this came in. But there was some dissent, so we'll leave it up to you. The samples below say more than we ever could, but we'll try anyway.
While the first record was definitely a metal record, the most you could say about Infestissumam is that it's hard rock, but really it's almost more like hard pop. The songs are crazy catchy, the guitars are distorted, and a little bit buzzy, but the production is such that they don't sound heavy exactly, and the organs from the first record are all over the place here, giving some songs a very carnivalesque, circusy feel, and others a weirdly Partridge Family vibe. The songs so hook heavy, with huge choruses, and equally catchy bridges, the solos are simple, the sort that mirror the main melody, and stick in your head like the vocals, the vibe is actually kind of mellow, slightly ominous, a little bit sinister, but only a little bit. It's bouncy, almost power poppy, epic and lush and super detailed, headphone listening reveals so much sonic detail, that at times it's not hard to believe this record could have cost almost a million dollars. When we were all arguing about whether to make this a Record Of The Week, one aQ-er sent this text to another aQ-er: "Ghost is Satanic bubble gum. Total genius. I've listened to it like fifty times already!" And the aQ-er writing this review wouldn't deign to argue. Cuz it is like Satanic bubblegum. Catchy and bombastic and almost orchestral in places, pure pop in others, hard rock in others, but so far removed from the metal that popped up throughout the first record, it seems insane to call them a metal band at this point. But whatever you call them, and however you feel about their sonic progression from their debut to this new one, have a listen to those sound samples, and see if you can resist. We're guessing you won't be able to. And why fight it??
While they last, we have the deluxe version, which tacks on to bonus tracks, one of which is a hazy, strummy, psychedelic sixties sounding ballad, the other their kick ass cover of ABBA's "I'm A Marionette", which weirdly enough sounds more metal than ANYthing on the record proper, which should tell you all you need to know about this glorious slab of Satanic bubblegum hard pop genius!
FYI, vinyl should be showing up here soon too, next week we're told...
We've long been fans of weirdo murk merchants Net Shaker, a duo who traffic in twisted Starfuckers style abstractions and echo drenched downtempo 'electronica', but of a sort you've likely never heard. Warped, and woozy, fractured, and gloriously fucked up. Well, Ernest Gibson, one half of Net Shaker struck out on his own, and delivered two cd-r's, both equaling the balls out weirdness of the Net Shaker mothership, but definitely digging a little deeper, although as we mentioned in our review of the most recent cd-r, the sound is not that far removed from Net Shaker, so much so, that at one point it had us mistakenly assuming Net Shaker was in fact just Gibson anyway. Apologies to the other half of Net Shaker! But fans of Net Shaker, and either of those two cd-r's will not be disappointed with Island Records, which begins with probably the most 'rocking' jam we've heard from Gibson or Net Shaker, all churning loping rhythm, detuned swamp guitar, mumbled FX drenched vox, and reverby twang, it sort of sounds like a more minimalist Woven Hand, it's got a similar swagger, a creepy apocalyptic vibe, but it's way more smeared and blurry and indistinct, the krautrock vibe is huge, super motorik and mesmerizing, it's the sort of thing we could listen to forever. It actually also reminds us of that Tony Conrad / Faust collaboration, but again, a bit more druggy and warped.
And while we'd like to say the rest of the record follows suit, it really doesn't, the sound does remain echo-y and swampy, reverby and darkly psychedelic, but the songs themselves seem to deconstruct before our very ears, sprawling into oozing expanses of jittery skitter, and moaning guitar thrum, bleary, baffling, slo-mo blooze-y stomp. There's lost of abstract drift, like disembodied pop songs via Nurse With Wound, all creaking and shimmering, crystalline sonic structures seemingly melting and crumbling in slow motion, the songs like time lapse recordings of these psychedelic implosions.
That krautrock vibe does surface throughout, "Groupwork" is like Moon Duo on thorazine, and "All Of Us Together" is like a slightly souped up Suicide, but in-between, rubbery basslines billow into clouds of slo-mo thrum, thick, twang guitar hovers over garbled vox and dense textural swirls and chordal swells, with some tracks delving into full on dub territory, but then it's like some sort of Spacemen 3 via the Scientist as re-envisioned by the Climax Golden Twins, warped and woozy and seriously sonically wonderful.
Includes a download code!
Finally!!! More skull cracking, mind bending, feelings hurting, shin kicking, hair pulling, back stabbing, ass kicking, ribcage rattling, ear piercing, eye gouging, bowel loosening electronic mayhem from our favorite lovable miscreants FFlint Central! This time from the mysterious entity known as The Gideon Leeches. We heard a little bit from the Leeches on the amazing Unholy Trinity compilation reviewed a few lists back and could hardly wait for the full length. And we are not disappointed. In fact I might go so far as to proclaim this one of the best releases on Fflint so far. And that's saying a lot, knowing, as you do, how much we LOVE Berkowitz, Lake and Dahmer, Pendro, Cavendish Sanguine, and the whole lot. But the proof's in the pudding. And the pudding here is a thick, miasmic pool of shimmers and rumbles, buzzing and tinkling, howling and keening. We are suckers for this stuff, at least when it's done right. And believe me, this is done so right. Huge expanses of static sound, with swirling, ever-shifting layers of feedback, buzzing electronic drones, throbbing low end pulses, warbly melodies, creaking machinery and what sounds like swarms of sitars, careening madly above a warm and tranquil blanket of gauzy dreaminess. But with a dark and ominous edge. This has AQ favorite written all over it. Think Sunroof!, Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Birchville Cat Motel, Pelt, Peter Wright, and all of those other folks who traffic in deep, dark, organic' free-drone. Fans of the above will definitely LOVE this! And again, our pals at Fflint continue to impress, and we're beginning to think that Fflint just may be one of the only labels we know of with a perfect record (except for tUMULt of course!! - Andee). Can't wait to hear what they come up with next. But in the meantime, BUY THIS!
MPEG Download: "The Freezing Point Of Sound" [/audio/gideonfreezing.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "The Freezing Point Of Sound" [/audio/gideonfreezing.m3u]
MPEG Download: "Scowring And Flux" [/audio/gideonscowring.mp3]
Of all the 2014 Record Store Day releases, this might have been one of the most exciting. The vinyl version is already gone, but we still have some of the cds set, which is cheaper anyway. French pianist Jef Gilson, whose 'best of' comp on Jazzman we raved about a while back, spent the end of the '60s traveling to Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, studying the indigenous music, and spreading his love of jazz, and in the process, recording with some of the locals, playing a bunch of shows, all of which resulted in three albums, all of those are included here, along with two more collections of previously released material from the same era, and needless to say, if you're a fan of ethno and spiritual jazz, this is some sort of crazy sonic holy grail. As always there's plenty in the liner notes about the history of Madagascar, and the life of Gilson, but even without the backstories, the music here is incredible, a little bit Ethiopiques, a little bit European free jazz, a little classic bop, dark and sultry and groovy, one of the records here doesn't even feature Gilson, and is a record he produced for some of the guys he played with in Madagascar, and that one is a doozy, the most distinctly African sounding, extended Afro jazz jams that are so heady and hypnotic, often more world music in fact than jazz, but the fusion is otherworldly, and had us wanting more more more. The final record features Byard Lancaster (Magma's Christian Vander was played with Gilson too, pre Magma), and might be the wildest, and freest of the bunch, a handful of the tracks untitled, discovered on old unlabeled tapes, but some of those are the best here, super inspired spiritual jazz that totally transcends, lots of flute (!!!!), some of the tracks blissed out and super spacey, others wild and chaotic, the live tracks on the final disc especially fiery and intense. The whole set is pretty stunning. Three and a half hours, all of it fantastic.
The discs are housed in a little box, each cd in its own sleeve, and accompanied by a big booklet with liner notes (in English and French) and loads of rare photos.
The lucky few who managed to snag a copy of Canadian metal mag Morbid Tales #6, also got a glimpse of something pretty spectacular, strange and unexpected: a heavy metal cookbook, recipes from famous rockers, their own peculiar and particular metal food faves, compiled by Morbid Tales editrix Annick "Morbid Chef" Giroux, who has now taken her love of metal, and food, and that little cookbook supplement, and expanded it to a full on, honest to goodness cookbook.
And it's awesome. We really can't imagine a metalhead who wouldn't want this, even if they never planned on actually making all the recipes. Pretty much the perfect gift for the metaller in your life, and who knows, maybe this cookbook will be the catalyst for some homemade meals. Although some of these recipes might have you thinking twice. Some sound delicious for sure, and the pictures are appropriately appealing, but others maybe not so much, and some seem to be purposefully disgusting, something only a very drunk metalhead would eat. But that's part of the fun of the book. We wanted to make a bunch of these before we reviewed it but ran out of time. We will though, already have a few bookmarked.
For all her troo metal cred, editor Giroux is just too cute, on the cover in her metal patch-ed apron and huge knife, or on the dust cover chowing down on a sausage, heck the book is even dedicated to her grandmother, but let's get to the meat of this here cookbook. Every recipe features a full color photo (which at first glance seem like standard cookbook photos, until you begin to notice various metal items in the background, leather jackets, spikes, album covers, beer cans, wine bottles, etc.), the band logo and bio, the ingredients and instructions from the chef, as well as a little note from the Morbid Chef, her own take on each recipe. Some highlights include: Mummified Jalapeno Bacon Bombs from Chris Reifert of Autopsy/Abcess, Candied Sweetbreads On A Bed Of Sacred Heart from Balsac The Jaws Of Death from Gwar, Fried Egg Rigor Mortis Cure from Ustumallagam Of Denial Of God, Devil's Porridge from Montalo of Witchfynde, Welfare Nachos from Jason Decay of Cauldron/Goathorn, Bull Testicle Surprise from Tomas 'Necrocock' Kohout of Master's Hammer (and while many of the recipes have funny metal names and in fact are something else entirely, this one is in fact bull testicles!), The Stew Of True Doom from Karl Simon of Gates Of Slumber, Thundering Beef Brisket from Lips of Anvil, Doro's Black Forest Cake from Doro of Warlock, Beer Pizza Crust from Olaf Zissel of Tankard, New Orleans Blood Red Beans And Rice from Mike IX Williams of Eyehategod, Shellfish Crossfire from King Ov Hell of God Seed/Gorgoroth, and we could go on and on...
More than 100 recipes from more than 30 countries, other bands contributing their favorite delectables include: Abigail, Accept, Amebix, Anthrax, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Uriah Heep, Thin Lizzy, Trouble, Electric Wizard, Destruction, Mayhem, Melechesh, Death SS, Judas Priest, Budgie, Impaler, Brutal Truth, Mutiilation, Lord Vicar, The Lord Weird Slough Feg, Piledriver, Pentagram, Rigor Mortis, The Rods, S.O.D, Stiny Plamenu, Warpig, Kreator and more more more.
Separated into sections for: appetizers and side dishes, beef, pork, lamb, poultry, seafood, vegetarian, desserts, even drinks (of course - and many of the food recipes include instructions to drink beer WHILE MAKING the food, not just when eating it), with lots of awesome illustrations, photographs, record covers, it's pretty epic, and totally metal, and we really can't recommend this enough. As Giroux says in her intro, making a meal is a great excuse for drinking and listening to metal! INDEED!!!
Brand new split from these two purveyors of black filth, LA black metal trio Harassor, and Kentucky one man black metal outfit Glass Coffin. Harrassor start things off with a surprising bit of poppiness, the opening of "Promise Of Fire" is crazy catchy, sounding like it could explode into some sort of M83 / Weekend sort of noisepoppiness, but instead, the vocals swoop in, an inhuman shriek, and the sound splinters into some seriously grim blackness, but without ever really losing the vibe of that first riff, in fact, whenever that riff is present, it sounds like some sort of blackened shoegaze, but the song is in constant movement, lurching from chaotic thrashing black blast to churning death march doom, to Venom-ous black metal stomp, but eventually returning to THAT riff. Has us wondering what kind of noisy beauty these guys could whip up if they set their minds to it. But metal heads fear not, the rest of the Harassor half is furious, chugging black metal pound and thrashing, shrieking griminity, although we prefer their sound when it slows down, into a sort of black doom, which it does often, and these guys conjure up some seriously intense doomic ruminations, the sound perfectly murky and blown out. And we just had a chance to see these guys play a couple weeks back, and they were SOOO good.
Glass Coffin start their side off with some classic sounding metal, a little lo-fi, some majestic leads, gruff vokills, before the sound splinters into something more raw and grim and urgent, buzzing insectoid riffing, weird brittle band room production, leads WAY up in the mix, twisted outsider lo-fi primitive blackness that definitely pushes all our raw BM buttons, but then the second track is TOTALLY different, a murky, muddy, frantic blast of black buzz, the drums buried in the mix, growled throat shredding vox, the sound still loose and chaotic and stumbly, the third track too, dramatically different production, but similarly buzzy and grim and hellish, but stick around for the final GC track, the weirdest of the bunch, black ambience beneath a buzzing riff, suspended in space, weird harmonics, a little bit cant post rocky, but also sort of damaged and abstract, a trippy droned out soft noise blackness, that had us wishing for WAY more of that!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Includes a download code too.
