Yet another awesome vinyl-only document from the mighty Sublime Frequencies, this one a continuation of sorts, again exploring the world of Tuareg guitar music from Agadez in Niger, first explored on the amazing Group Inerane release a while back. And strangely enough, both band share members, so folks who loved the Group Inerane will likely love this too.
The music scene in Agadez is unique in many ways, but perhaps the strangest element is the fact that none of the bands can afford to own their own instruments, there is one PA and one set of amps that get passed from show to show, and guitars are borrowed and lent out, as are band members, with musicians joining different groups as they are available. Remarkably, while the sounds are indeed similar, they are also quite unique.
Group Bombino is headed up by 28 year old Oumara Almoctar, aka Bombino, who was inspired by more well known Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen and Ali Farka Toure to create his own music and to continue to spread the sounds and spirit of Tuareg and Agadez.
So here we have the first proper worldwide release by Bombino and his group, and it's gorgeous. Two distinct sides, the A side features Bombino's "dry" guitar sound, sort of acoustic, the guitars, spidery and slinky, the percussion simple and spare, hand claps, hand drums, the vocals lilting and emotional, all very repetitive and hypnotic, the vocals chantlike over the propulsive rhythms and the almost looped sounding guitar parts.
The flip side features Group Bombino plugging in and letting loose, the root sound is quite similar, but the guitars buzz and wail, chugging out those hypnotic riffs, but also spiralling out into wild leads, tangled melodies, the drums a bit hard, the vocals sitting further back in the mix, ebullient and joyous, but not without tension and emotion and some subtle sorrow and anger, this is after all the sounds or rebellion and revolution, an outlet for the frustration at the unrest and upheaval in Niger and Agadez. So fantastic.
As with pretty much everything Sublime Frequencies, ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED, and for sure, anyone who dug the Group Inerane (a past Record Of The Week), will go crazy for Group Bombino as well!
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies! We're beginning to think with all this hidden music to be discovered and lost classics to be recovered, there's definitely no point in having so many new bands, we oughta just have some of them swap their gear in and just join the hunt for all this amazing music we miss out on...
But until then we've got the Sublime Frequencies fellas on the case, and this latest discovery has definitely got to bee one of the best yet. Group Inerane are spearheading the Tureg Guitar movement, inspired by the musicians who used this music as a political weapon in the Libyan refugee camps in the late eighties, early nineties. This is how the blues should sound. Groovy, intense, funky, emotional, dark, gorgeous, the guitars grinding and crunching and wailing, slithering and soaring, accompanied by chanted and sung vocals, that are perfectly woven into the lush fabric of the various guitar parts. The riffing is fluid, but also bit jagged and rough. The opening track is a killer. One of the most amazing and intense songs we've ever heard, worth the price of admission alone. Just guitar and vocals, chunky and propulsive, but also weirdly slippery and sinewy, the melody swaying back and forth from major key to minor key, an incredible hook and the riff, well, one of THE best riffs ever.
Most of the rest of the record is more a sort of African surf rock, fuzzy and twangy, with surfy guitar, soaring vocals, the whole thing wild and festive, jubilant and celebratory, but hold up, the final track on side one, "Nadan Al Kazawnin", is something else entirely, with its super distorted grimy guitars, a totally blown out in the red production, the riff looped and hypnotic, the vocals intense and heartfelt, the whole song howling and buzzing, sounding as gorgeously fucked up and raw as some experimental indie avant noise group, the guitar is indescribable, incendiary and white hot, all tangled up with the vocals, and bathed in distortion, wouldn't be out of place on some super limited cd-r... Totally amazing.
Pressed on super thick vinyl. Packaged in a heavy duty, full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and liner notes...
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 LPS!
It doesn't really seem possible that the music of Grouper could get any more beautiful, any more majestic and epic, or any more mysterious and dreamlike. No, but what it can do is change, and grow, expand, and subtly alter its shape and timbre, it's coloring and shading, which is what it has been doing, on every single outing, but never so much as on Cover The Windows And Walls. The core of Grouper's sound remains unchanged, dense bleary eyed fields of druggy reverb, thick swirls of blurred vocals, smeared into indistinct melodies, all abstract and shimmery, soft focus and billowy, the musical version of those soft fuzzy grey clouds that fill the sky at twilight. It's still an impossible blend of Arvo Part, Morton Feldman and Skullfower, but the new record sounds a little bit more, well, folky maybe, or perhaps slightly less tripped out. A lot of it has to do with the vocals, which have attained an until now unheard of clarity. Which in no way means you can actually hear the vocals, they are still another gauzy layer in Grouper's blown out soundscape, but, sometimes, they -are- a bit clearer, you can actually pick out words here and there, sometimes even whole lines. Before, if we hadn't been told, we wouldn't necessarily have even known that the main element of Grouper's sound was in fact vocals. They were that indistinct and that drenched in FX. But here, it actually sounds like a singer, singing songs, but just barely, it's almost like listening to some super lonesome stripped down folk, recorded onto a wax cylinder, and then broadcast through a huge speaker mounted at the very bottom of an elaborate cave system, the songs careening back and forth and picking up more and more reverb and echo with every bounce, until they become this blissed out beautiful blur. Thick buzzing single guitar notes spread out into wavery fields of murky muted twang, which wrap themselves serpent like around the equally disembodied vocals. Imagine a field recording of ghosts performing ancient folk songs, a whispery thrum, so barely audible, that it's nearly impossible to capture, but once it is, and the sound is turned up enough to be audible to the human ear, it becomes this gorgeously distorted smear of sound.
What else can we say about Liz Harris and her Grouper project? We've hardly heard anything this beautiful and mysterious ever. EVER!
Absolutely and emphatically recommended.
Limited to 300 copies! We got 30 copies, and once these are gone, it will be gone forever.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We unfortunately only -just- found out about this record and were of course informed upon ordering it there were only a handful of copies left. Arghh. Well, we managed to get the last 25 copies, so be aware, that obviously, these will not last long!
A super limited live cd (NOT a cd-r as we previously believed) from AQ faves Growing, whose mix of glacial Earth like heaviness and delicate foresty drones we just can't get enough of. Recorded live in 2004 and mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, Phantomsmasher, etc.), this live disc is almost eighty minutes of alternating drift and pummel, sludgy slow motion dirges that crystallize into sparkling sonic fields of glisten and glimmer. Even when they're heavy, Growing manage to be delicate and ethereal. The first track is a massive twenty minute swirl of translucent shimmers and warm guitar glow. Fragile and hovering weightless in front of your speakers.
While Growing continually return to that near-ambient tranquility, the record is a series of meandering excursions into MASSIVE slow motion, melted-riff soundscapes, notes and chords unfurl impossibly slowly, as if someone had doubled the gravity and the sound waves were actually visible, drizzling lazily to the floor like molasses or honey, rich golden globs of thick distorted throb. Like Earth and Skullflower meshed into one buzzing blurry soundfield, all muted melody and crunchy riffage, a pulsing swirl of feedback and guitarral grrrr! The sound is phenomenal. Rich and lustrous and LOUD. You wouldn't be able to tell this was a live recording at all if it weren't for the smattering of applause between songs. Which also begs the question, what the hell is wrong with the world when a sound this amazing, and a set this gorgeous and crushingly heavy is being performed before what sounds to be about 20 people? Seriously, when the sound abruptly ends, you expect an overwhelming roar, thousands of voices and clapping hands and stomping feet, the only possible and proper reaction to the sounds that came before...
Packaged in a beautiful six panel folder, a kaleidoscope of leaves on a stark white background on the outside, a blur of overlapping semi-opaque spheres on the inside. Two different designs, both similar but slightly different.
And once again, VERY VERY LIMITED!!
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For a band who existed so briefly, with only handful of live performances, and a single record to their name, San Francisco's late great black metal masterminds Weakling cast a mighty long shadow. Many consider their Dead As Dreams debut/swansong to be one of the best US black metal records EVER, and hell, who are we to argue. Andee's tUMULt label put it out, after all. It's also inspired at least three tributes/homages that we can think of, Jabladav's weirdo worshipful Dead As Duck album, then there's the band Dead As Dreams, and now there's this two song tape from Texas/Oregon black metal outfit Grst, entitled Fire Therein, on which the trio tackle two Weakling tracks, "Cut Their Grain And Place Fire Therein" and "Dead As Dreams". And on first listen, these guys do a pretty good Weakling, especially the anguished wailed shrieking vokills, the music itself is a lot more polished and less raw than the original, the organ/synth way higher in the mix, the drums too, it sounds like they've added some subtle twisted of their own, but it's obviously a pretty reverential homage, and for anyone who loves the original, which should be all of you, it's pretty cool to hear someone else's interpretation, and the fact that it still sounds so good, most definitely speaks to the power, the energy, and the uniqueness of the original. Same with "Dead As Dreams", a song we've loved so much for so long, that even hearing an entirely different version, the minute we hear that riff, that instantly recognizable melody, it gives us chills, and again, hearing a different version/interpretation, gives us new perspective, and makes us want to dig into the original all over again. Which is pretty much everything you want from a tribute/cover/homage...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. With cool pitch perfect Dead As Dreams styled cover art.
You know how much we like instrumental underground UK prog masters Guapo here, right? Andee even put out one of their albums (2001's Great Sage, Equal Of Heaven) on his label tUMULt. Subsequently they released the massive Five Suns opus on Cuneiform. And now, their new release Black Oni is unleashed by Mike Patton's Ipecac label. And they've been going from strength to strength.
Like Japan's Ruins, the Guapo trio take a lot of inspiration from '70s prog, in particular the "zeuhl" stylings of the amazing French band Magma. But where the Ruins generally concentrate the Magma sound into a hectic hyper-blast, Guapo tend to stretch things out, spreading their prog-frenzy across (in this case) a forty-three minute, five part epic composition, not unlike the five part, forty-six minute title suite of Five Suns... that's their specialty it seems. Crazed drumming and complex bass lines coexist with spaced-out keyboards (including '70s prog stalwart the Mellotron), making Black Oni a combination of energetic prog mayhem and droning electronic darkness. For fans of Yeti, Tarantula Hawk, Circle and even The Necks... and of course anyone already into Guapo will love this new one. Recommended!
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>>Sorry to say we won't physically have these until Monday or Tuesday. But go ahead and order it now!<<
After a stunning release on our own Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, the UK's finest noise-skree-experimental rock duo, Guapo return as a trio (!) and with a brand new album that...[review pauses here while Andee wildly air drums along with Guapo's one man octopoidal percussionist Dave Smith, although I suppose it's not technically air drumming if Andee's in fact hitting Allan in lieu of actual drums, but we digress...]
While their last full length Great Sage, Equal Of Heaven was a frenetic Ruins-esque, bass and drums (and sometimes sax) workout, Five Suns takes the obvious instrumental prowess and prog potential present on the first record, and turns Guapo into the only modern prog combo that could possibly threaten Christian Vander's Magma throne. Hyperbole? Hardly. The centerpiece of Five Suns is the five part, 46 minute title track. So gorgeously grand, so compositionally daunting, so fucking good, words fail us. The addition of a full time keyboardist, as well as the introduction of guitars, has helped Guapo's skeletal prog jams flower into expansive instrumental epics. The record begins with a huge swell, a swirling squall of wild drumming and thick instrumental chaos, that glitches out as if the stereo is malfunctioning, before setting you down gently, ready to embark on a daunting but inspiring musical journey. Droning ambience and repetitive hypnotic rhythms give way to ultra complex, ultra precise riffery. Melodies are subtle but infectious, slowling unfolding over the course of ten, sometimes twenty minutes. Minor key thrum underpins careening hyper complex arrangements, tense and intense, hypnotic and just breathtaking in its scope. The Ruins is still a definite reference, but all sort of other influences inform Guapo's unique take on prog, the cyclical hypno-rock of Circle (and beyond that the rhythmic propulsive psych/drone of classic Krautrock), the blissed out skree of Skullflower and Sunroof! as well as post rock, free folk, metal and all sorts of other disparate sounds. All woven smoothly and uniquely into a cohesive whole. A fifty minute track, even in the best hands, can veer into overindulgence and pointless jammery, but every second of Five Suns is perfectly placed, and perfectly played -- but without losing its organic, free feel. The two extra tracks are separated from the vast "Five Suns" by a minute long track of silence to clear your aural palate, and prepare you for two shorter bursts of rhythmic, hypnotic, droning modern prog. Originally the Five Suns album was going to be just that, the 46 minute title track, and we were a little disappointed to learn that extra 'short' tracks were being added to make the record more, ahem, radio friendly. But now listening to it as a whole, it seems like it couldn't have been any other way. The two final tracks let us slowly unwind from the dizzying sonic journey that came before. This record is fucking massive. If there was any sort of justice in the world, Guapo would be spoken of in the hushed tones reserved for bands like Magma or King Crimson. As far as we're concerned, starting right now, they will be.
Wow! UK noise-skree-experimental rock duo Guapo really take their prog-rock obessions to the limit on this new album, a joint release between France's Pandemonium label (home to AQ-faves Hint as well) and our own Andee's tUMULt label. Guapo have always
We really weren't sure what to expect from the oddly monikered Guardian Alien, knowing that two of the members also played in black metal outfit Liturgy, but that this was drummer Greg Fox's project, Fox also apparently recording as GDFX, whose tripped out experimental electronic tape on Ormolycka we reviewed a while back. We were even further confused when we got a look at the record cover, a weird painting of a Rasta alien in a tracksuit, in a field full of animals and campfires, and a sky full of deer with books in their mouths and exploding suns, and of course the tracksuited alien is holding a copy of the record, whose cover depicts the same alien holding a copy of the record and so on and on and on ad infinitum. The title too, "See The World Give To A One Love Entity" has a definite Rastafari bent, so we were definitely feeling some serious trepidation as we pushed play, which at first unfurled what sounded like field recordings, birds and insects, and then footsteps, maybe the footsteps of that alien on the record cover, then a brief bit of Eastern style drone, before BLAM, the song explodes in what we can only describe as Liturgy by way of Sunroof!, which you have to hear to believe.
It's a furious raga-blast, the drums relentless a splattery chaos of wild octopoidal drumming, the guitars following suit, sounding like a transcendental Mick Barr, it's frenzied and tangled but infused with a serious does of droned out tranciness, and then as the song lets up briefly, we were expecting that whole bit to just be the intro, but then the furious raga-blast starts up again, this time even more intense and explosive, and this time with vocals, a strange chanting buried in the mix, very ritualistic and meditative, and even though the band is pounding away frantically, the whole thing manages to be totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, and after three minutes, although it feels like much more, the sound settles down into something much more stripped down and meditative, the drums no less busy, but instead, weaving a dense percussive backdrop over which woozy guitars waver and buzz, the vocals become more distinct, the melodies stretched out into gorgeously buzzy ragas, we're reminded of Astral Social Club at time the same sort of noise-raga thing, but here blissed out, the sound like some wild ritualistic drum circle wedded to some serious free jazz raga exploration, the vocals doused in effects, sounding truly alien, in keeping with the cover and the concept, the sound swirly and tripped out and super psychedelic, until eventually the drums drift off, leaving just a sky full of layered undulating guitars, a blur of shifting overtones and wild sonic squalls, before the drums come back in, a dense mathy, driving percussive groove, wreathed in swirling effects, the song shifting constantly, arranged like an epic black metal song in some ways, it's dynamicism in no way taking away from the tracks overall mesmer, and it is a single track, nearly 40 minutes of blast beat driven raga ur-drone psychedelia, dipping into ultra minimal drones and chant like vocalization here and there, chiming Tibetan bowls elsewhere, the field recordings that opened the record returning occasionally, a gorgeous droned out slow build to a final movement, a gloriously cosmic free jazz psychedelic drum heavy raga drone blowout, that builds to a sort of Boadrum like rhythmic frenzy before finally fading out in a cloud of deep bell like tones and slow fading shimmer. Wow.
The first record from this strange outfit was a single sprawling, psychedelic raga, all spaced out and trance-y, and driven, as unlikely as it may seem, by the wild metallic drumming of Greg Fox, formerly of transcendental black metallers Liturgy. We described that record as sounding like Liturgy meets Sunroof!, a furious raga-blast, all droned out and ritualistic, it's a record that didn't seem like it should work, but maybe because of that, became a unanimous store fave (and Record Of The Week).
So we were pretty excited to hear this new one, and it does not disappoint, although it does definitely confound. We were expecting maybe raga-blast part two, but instead, the record opens with a twisted sprawl of faux world music, Fox's drumming here a tangled, and relentless skitter, all hand drums and tablas, and other percussion, all tangled up with some super busy melodic bass, some spidery guitars, and processed female vocals, go from ritualistic chant, to chopped up stuttery garble, the whole track very No Neck Blues Band-ish, albeit a bit more Eastern influenced. A little Boredoms too. But it only gets weirder from there on out. Two brief blasts of metallic drone, the first all weird vocal samples buried beneath buzzing guitars and pounding drums, a swirling psychedelic freakout that gives way to the second, a weird Dada-ist cut up of clipped vocals, peppered by cool syncopated exotic percussion, bummer it's only a minute long, would have loved to have that stretch out forever! That gives way to a heady droney sprawl of crumbling distortion, chanted vox, all blurred into heaving swells, a little bit spacey, and doomy, but all of this seems to be leading up to the 20+ minute title track, sampled spoken word which quickly disappears in a cloud of impossibly dense and octopoidal drumming, everything wreathed in a cloud of bleeping and blooping electronics, and drifting on a bed of sitar like buzz, gradually settling into a dense mathed out raga-rock groove, the drums relentlessly churning away, the sound building to a blasting almost black metal frenzy, before fading back into that tribal, rhythmic groove, only to gradually transform into some strange strain of psychedelic krautrock, motorik and mesmerizing, and again building slowly to the super intense finale, which sounds like multiple Boredoms playing at once, noisy and swirling, and dizzying, and wildly chaotic, electronics, and guitar buzz, and Fox's impossibly wild drumming, all whipped into a tranced out squall, which locks into a skipping digital stutter, before finally sputtering to a halt. Exhausting, inspiring, and truly, sonically transcendental!
What can we say? We LOVE Guided By Voices. we love the old records, and the new records too. And nearly all of the millions of side projects. GBV mainman Bob Pollard is a twisted pop genius, and somehow, manages, even after hundreds and hundreds of songs released, out of thousands and thousands written, to churn out GBV records that are crazy good. Great even. A dizzying collection of little blasts of crunchy, fuzzy, jangly perfect pop, equal parts British Invasion and US bedroom 4-track popsmithery, hooks galore, every song impossibly catchy, wry and goofy and often WTF? Never shying away from damaged sonic experimentation, but even at the most obtuse and experimental, the sounds somehow manage to STILL be infused with some sort of pop core. You can check our reviews of the last few records for more on the GBV story, there are maybe, 5 or 6 or 8 records at this point, who really knows, and that's just POST break up and reunion, go further back and dig into the true GBV classics, Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Vampire On Titus, etc. But really, that's the strange thing, is Bee Thousand THEE Guided By Voices classic? Is Alien Lanes? Or is Guided By Voices a never ending work in progress? And maybe those aren't even really albums, but simply songsuites, in Pollard's epic life-long GBV micro-pop symphony? And when you think about it like that, it's actually pretty fantastic to have such a massive body of work to dig through. And to trace the development of the band's sound, progressions, regressions, and yet through it all, multiple lineups, different productions, varying fidelity, the hit to miss ratio is astronomical. We can't really think of another songwriter with that kind of record. Cuz even the misses, in the context of whatever record they're a part of, are just that, a part of the whole, and in their own slightly off way, still 'work', and often reveal themselves, less as proper songs, and more as sonic coloration for the stone cold classics, of which there are MANY.
So yeah, you might be sick of GBV by now, and we'd definitely understand, but we're always happy for more. And while we might still love Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes the best, this recent batch of albums are pretty much nearly as good, and of all of those, this new one might be the best yet.
Unfortunately a split and not a collaboration, 'Assholes Of The World...' finds New Zealand's Campbell Kneale and Japan's Kohei 'The Fast' (aka Guilty Connector) joining forces in the elite brotherhood of noisy assholes! Kohei starts things off quite unlike the stuff we're used to hearing from him, a simple, static high register drone. But that doesn't last long. All sorts of speaker shredding intrusions pile up on what is now a howling air raid siren-like screech, and then immediately into a sort of Merzbow-ish rhythmic stutter. The second track is a 4 minute blast of hyperchaotic metallic noise. Like some sort of ACTUAL SONG buried under the rotting corpses of Merzbow and Masonna.
You might think Kneale would pull out the big guns and answer back with a mighty blast, but he instead shows some gentlemanly restraint, and offers up one of his most serene pieces yet. What sounds like a single strike of a bell, stretched out as far as it will go, slowly oscillating, sound waves spreading out forever. Subtle insect-like flutters and the SPAREST percussion imaginable, a tiny bit of clatter, a reverby thud every couple of minutes. Quite nice, and a surprisingly subtle rebutt to Guilty Connector's boot to the face.
We had never heard of these guys, which kinda makes sense seeing as up until now they've flown pretty far under the radar, having released a bunch of cd-r's and only one proper 7", but hell they're called the Guinea Worms, the record is brilliantly titled "Sorcererers Of Madness (4rd Year In A Row!), and yeah, you read that right, SORCERERERS, multiple 'er's, and 4RD, not 4th, plus they came highly recommended by a loyal longtime customer, who besides being a great guy with impeccable taste, also used to play in a certain band of spacelord motherfuckers, which makes any recommendation of his even more worthy of serious consideration. Plus c'mon, they're from Ohio and their first record is a massive 22 song double lp!! Did we mention they totally rule too???
But what do they sound like you're probably wondering by now? Well, sort of like a drunken and damaged, drugged out and demented, super noisy, stumbling, chaotic, metallic, garage rock combo, with awesomely ridiculous lyrics, delivered in a super distorted howl, over blown out fuzz drenched Stooges style riffery, pounding brickbat drumming and some wild psychedelic flourishes, but that's only part of their sound. These fuckers are seriously far out, goofy, ridiculous, and as likely to bust out with some heavy crunch and chug as some silly fuzzed out sing along, or some twisted drugged out blues dirge, the lyrics are totally and brilliantly dumb, reminding us just a bit of Breathilizor, but the sounds here are all over the map, every song totally different, "Drunk In Yr Uggs" is a "Hey Mickey" style call and response, but with a killer woozy bluesy main riff, and some awesome female vocal harmonies on the chorus, "Accidental Space Tourist" is all low slung drunken garage blues, "Lounge Waltz" is angular and twisted, as it lurches and lumbers, "Kick In The Door" is a fuzz drenched garage rockified country hoedown, "Come Here Baby" is a thick slab of psychedelic dirgery, "Afternoon Party" is total Hawkwind worship, but way more damaged and dumb, "Never Giving Up" is a killer slithery jam that gradually erupts into something much heavier and darker, the vocals definitely reminiscent of Nomeansno, but the music much more like some bastard mix of Liquorball and Warlock Pinchers (minus the hip hop), or Bunny Brains crossed with Brainbombs as reimagined by fellow Ohioans Guided By Voices? Tough to describe for sure, but then the coolest weirdest things usually are.
You definitely need to have a pretty high tolerance for goofball dumbshittery, cuz there's lots of that, all over the place, and yeah, normally that stuff might drive us nuts, but it just suits these guys, they're funny as fuck, and can thankfully back up their goofy puerile sense of humor with some serious chops. Our favorite jams are the fuzzy distorted psychedelic numbers, which do make up a pretty good chunk of the tracks here, but somehow, if you took those tracks on their own, it wouldn't be the same, the dumb songs would be more dumb, and the killer songs would be way less killer, but together, it's pretty goddamn perfect. Absolutely recommended. Especially if you dig stuff like Liquorball, Breathilizor, Bunny Brains, Faxed Head, Half Japanese, Happy Flowers and other purveyors of ridiculous and brilliant whatthefuck weirdness.
We're pretty sure we've got the last few copies they had a the label, so when they're gone, they're gone.
Brand new single with what might be our favorite track from the most recent Gum Takes Tooth record, Mirrors Fold, which we recently made our Record Of The Week. The A side is the version from the full length, a wild, percussive, tribal workout, a churning sprawl of tranced out rhythms, wreathed in hazy vocal harmonies, the sound falling somewhere between Animal Collective at their most abstract and rhythmic, and William Bennett's post Whitehouse one man Afro-Noise project Cut Hands. So it makes perfect sense that GTT would recruit Cut Hands to remix that track, especially since it already sorta sounded a little like Cut Hands anyway.
But Bennett takes the original, slows it way down, adds tons of distortion, and transforms it into something meaner, and darker and more industrial sounding, still groovy and tribal, but fierce and pounding, those background vocals turned into strange spectral smears, swirling around a monstrous rib cage rattling beat, flecked with stuttery percussive filigree, a whirling psychedelic sprawl of roiling rhythmic crunch, that kills! And has us super excited for the forthcoming Cut Hands full length, and kind wishing Gum Takes Tooth would get Bennett to remix their whole record!
We made the first record from this awesomely monikered UK outfit, Silent Cenotaph, our Record Of The Week, way back in 2011, and at the time described them with some band math that looked a little like this: Shit And Shine + Butthole Surfers + Lightning Bolt. The sound was a dizzyingly psychedelic barrage of grinding, rhythmic, electronics doused in druggy tribal freakout, like a super charged This Heat, the drummers kit wired to a mad scientist array of machinery and noise making devices, turning the kit into some giant rhythmic noise machine, and enabling a duo to kick up a din that sounds like it couldn't possibly be made by just two people, and while that first record generally hewed toward a sound that was more chaotic and bombastic, this new one seems to be a bit more melodic and dare we say mellow, there's still plenty of sonic ferocity, and rhythmic bombast for sure, but it sounds more measured, more deftly assembled, maybe less 'punk', but only in the way that bands get better at what they do, and in theory, take what was great about their previous records, and add to it, creating something, even more forward reaching, and ultimately perhaps even better.
Such is the case with Mirrors Fold. We still do LOVE Silent Cenotaph, and it routinely gets play on the iPod even still, but this new one is more subtle, more textural, whereas that first one was the sort of music you wanted to rock out to, jump around and go crazy, this new one, manages to harness that feral energy into something much more focused. The opener begins all swirly and serene, with hushed ambient shimmer, chant-like vocals, be before long the drums explode, adding a churning rhythmic component, without detracting from the melodic component or the vocals, it's not really until a brief bit of hushed shimmer, a barely there ambient interlude, that the song truly launches into crazed sonic chaos, a dizzying blurry flurry of drum madness, a wild octopoidal tangle of tangled jumbled rhythms, that eventually give away to a skeletal bit of rhythmic drift, before one final push, where the drums, the vocals, and swirls of FX are all wound into a dense propulsive tribal spacey noise rock blowout. Phew!
And so it goes, the band laying down mesmerizing hypno-rhythms, while all around strange effects swoop in and out, extra percussion, echoey vox floating above, thick rumbling bass below, sitar like buzz slithers throughout, the sound and arrangement super dynamic, a bit proggy, certainly psychedelic, a sort mutant psych-prog, Afro-space groove. Some moments are like some outer space version of Afro-fuzz Swedes Goat, others sound like a super charged, space rock Necks, a few tracks get downright heavy, and sound like some tripped out psychedelic space outfit, a few tracks sound like a crazy demonic alter ego of This Heat, a few others remind us of the twisted afro-noise of William Bennett's Cut Hands, there are moments of Muslimgauze like Eastern rhythmatism, there are even moments that remind us of Animal Collective at their very weirdest, but really most of this just sounds Gum Takes Tooth, and absolutely nobody else, a totally twisted genius amalgam of all the above mentioned references, deftly shaped into something at once warped and weird, wild and experimental, but also totally hypnotic, and melodic, strangely lovely and in its own way, extremely catchy. A new favorite for sure. And a total shoe-in not just for Record Of The Week, but for our year end best of's too...
Imagine a band that sounded like a bastard mix of UK-via-Texas, multiple drummered noise rockers Shit And Shine, grinding bass and drum duo Lightning Bolt and legendary weirdo drug rock combo Butthole Surfers. Then imagine the sort of din such a band could and would kick up and mix in all manner of mangled and freaked out electronics. Finally, imagine all of that noise being conjured up essentially by a single drum kit. And thus you have UK duo Gum Takes Tooth, which is essentially a drummer, whose drums are wired up to a dizzying array of home brewed electronics and tone bent circuit boards, with a second member tweaking and fucking with the sound in real time. 43 minutes of electronic-ed drumming might not sound that appealing to some folks, but don't make the call until you get an earful of the sounds these two whip up. Sure at times it's raw and rhythmic, noisy and chaotic, but the sounds here are all over the map, from super charged This Heat style rhythmic workouts, to blasting almost grind metal like blow outs, minimal FX fueled ambient drifts, to tripped out sci-fi psychedelia, murky, meandering distorto slow-core to frenzied noise drenched prog and pretty much every conceivable stop inbetween. Add in some Merzbow style noise, a little Psychic Paramount drum heavy post rock heaviness, some world music like tribalism, and stir it all up, and voila.
Opener "Young Mustard" is a pretty good sampling of what these guys are capable of, offering up a wild frenzy of tribal drum pound, weird processed vox, swirling electronics and FX, which eventually explode into some seriously aggro Lightning Bolt style, blast beat driven, downtuned grind, only to blossom into some Six Finer Satellite like synth-drum craziness, before the whole thing devolves into a abstract stretch of minimal clatter, random bloops and bleeps, swirling electronics, all beginning a slow build, the tribal drums swooping back in, slowly goring more distorted and intense, until finally fracturing into what sounds a bit like the Ruins crossed with Man Is The Bastard, thick blown out buzz low tones, pounding drums, howled processed vox, all woven into a seriously crushing electro-dirge.
"Tankjott" is another good one, starting out with some rapid fire kick drums, some gurgly vox, some squiggly electronics, building to a lurching, stuttery groove, soon more electronics, and more of that heavy bass buzz swoop in, and it's some sort of metallic krautpsych groove, with all manner of buzzes, strange twisted vocals, electronic pulses, before exploding into another fried and buzz drenched rhythmic workout, sounding to us like a way more chaotic / noisy / electronic version of MITB offshoot Geronimo, definitely the heaviest track here, sounding almost metal, but via Hawkwind and This Heat and Melt Banana and all blurred into some impossibly mesmerizing electrometal krautgroove, WAY too short at 7+ minutes.
And in between those two tracks, plenty of hypnotic, cyclical, rhythmic noise, progged out heaviness, stuttery drum heavy buzz and psychedelic noise rock, usually all at the same time, "Strychnine Motive" probably the most traditionally song sounding, but it's really relative, while "The Earth's Mantle Colonised" takes that same sort of sound and trips it WAY out into some sort of psychedelic space rock, the vocals chopped and processed, plenty of spacey squiggles and weird chanted vocals, the whole thing still drum driven big time, "Nomad/Monad" sounds like some bastardized gamelan orchestra, or a punk rock electronic noise version of Konono No.1, all looped thumb piano like melodies, tangled up and barraged by all manner of strange sounds, and then finally, record closer "Hermaphrodite And Nourishment" which does in fact feature a member of Shit And Shine on second drum kit, and while we were expecting a super frenzied drum heavy blowout, instead, it might be the pretties song on the record, all moody and loping and melodic, laced with ringing Tibetan bowls, crooned softly distorted vocals, squalls of feedback, and the cool thing is it never really explodes or freaks out, instead, it's just gorgeously mesmerizing and hypnotic, droned out and tribal, the perfect sort of sonic come down at a record that spends much of its time at a serious musical fever pitch.
Probably one of our most exciting recent musical discoveries (thanks Jason P.!), and with every listen this record continues to confound and delight and reveal more of the weird shit that seems to constantly be going on just below the surface, and odds are if you like any/some/all of the above mentioned bands, imagine them all mashed together and distilled into some wildly and gloriously twisted hybrid, and we imagine you'll probably be as knocked out as we were.
Oh boy! This is another one of those releases that pushes all of our overwhelming music obsessive buttons, like the Conet Project, The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv 1900-2000 box, the Yahowa 13cd box, the 50 cd Merzbox, the Ayler Holy Ghost box...
Compiled and produced by Gert-Jan Blom of the Beau Hunks, Harmonic Development brings to light the long lost harmonium performances of the fascinating Georg Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) whom some of you will know much better as a thinker and philosopher than a musician. This release consists of a beautifully designed 140 page softbound book filled with tons of photos and historical and personal minutae, accompanied by two compact discs of music in a digipack AND an additional disc of mp3's (that brings the total amount of music to over 19 hours!!) as well as a cool MPEG video of Gurdjieff home movies. Holy crap! So first, who was G.I. Gurdjieff? Well, the simple version is that Gurdjieff was an early twentieth century Russian mystic (and retired hypnotist), who drew inspiration from Sufism, and was fascinated with music. Gurdjieff had composed for piano for some years, but late in life he acquired first a wire recorder, and then a tape recorder, to document his improvisations (his "moosic") on the harmonium, a sort of pump organ, that produces a sound that is rich and full, a sort of lush, wheezing melodious moan, haunting and otherworldly. This collection gathers up recordings from the forties, from the last few years of Gurdjieff's life, and feature loads of intimate performances, several talks, and lots of ambient chit chat. It seems that Gurdjieff would perform a piece, slow and sad and gorgeously dreamy, enveloping all of his listeners in the mood, and when he was finished, he would then crack jokes and make small talk. Many of these performances feature this strange juxtaposition of almost religious intensity, and breezy lighthearted banter, which was somehow another part of his unique world view. We've yet to delve completely into the book, but even on their own, the discs are wonderful and completely mesmerizing, offering up hours of droney, mysterious harmonium music, but all sorts of ambient sounds and snippets of conversations as well, giving these recordings almost the same sort of vibe as the Conet Project, a distant dark mystery, as if these sounds were pulled from the ether, captured from another world and another time. At once recognizable, but at the same time totally alien.
And as you enjoy the hours of recordings, you can peruse the book which contains a preface by Robert Fripp, information on the unearthing and restoration of the recordings, track notes, transcriptions of the talks, as well as recollections of Gurdjieff's final year from a host of friends and students, among them the daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright.
There had been rumors circulating about this record for ages. Either that, or it just -seemed- inevitable, these two grunge icons who both went on to redefine themselves long after the bands that made them were long gone, and the scene that spawned them was long dead, finally together. It seemed like a no brainer. Two of the most distinctive voices in rock, both able to conjure up some seriously dark and volatile sounds, emotional, personal, intense, we couldn't actually imagine what this pairing would sound like. Who are we talking about? Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees) and Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs).
So does it live up to the hype? Most of the press has been about the personalities, the debauchery, the drugs and alcohol, they did name themselves The Gutter Twins after all, so we would imagine some folks doubted the record would ever get made at all. But here it is, and it's a dark beauty. A lot more lush and heavy than we expected, and thankfully it manages to bring out the best in both Lanegan and Dulli. The songs Dulli sings definitely sound like later era Afghan Whigs, which is no bad thing at all, Lanegan adding some gravity with his whiskey soaked gravely growl. And Lanegan gets to lead the slow smoky crawls, the guitars unwinding all serpentine, organs buzzing and warbling, he just always sounds more at home in a cloud of smoke, barely lit by the corner of a stage, bottle in one hand, microphone in the other.
But there are surprisingly few slow brooders, the drums play a big part, the guitars load and soaring, there are strings everywhere, a few tracks even have programmed drums, but the duo manage to imbue each song with some serious pathos, wrapping them in dark clouds and wreathing them in stale smoke. The production helping make the songs epic, evoking wide open spaces and rain swept highways as much as dark bars and shuttered rooms.
"Circle The Fringes" is all swirling strings, and shimmery FX flecked ambience, beneath strummed minor key steel string guitar and moaning cellos, eventually launching into a sweeping groove, complete with staccato dynamics, wailing guitars, the whole thing ultra intense and pretty dang heavy. "Seven Stories Underground" gets all Tom Waits, haunting abstract percussion, the duo's vocals tangling up in strange harmonies, a slithery brooding drift, that builds to a super dramatic climax, before drifting off darkly. "Front Street" begins with the sounds of birds, a pastoral background for a simple folk fingerpicked guitar, again the two vocalists, their different voices, blending in perfectly unlikely ways, unfurling in tense, moody slow motion, peppered with swells of timpani, and warm whirring organ, and eventually soaring strings.
It's hard to be objective, considering how much we loved the Afghan Whigs and the Screaming Trees, how much we dig the Twilight Singers, and treasure Lanegan's solo records, and fans of any and all of those will most likely love this, but like all great collaborations, it's not merely the sum of its parts, the two obviously draw from each other, discovering things that they don't on their own, the resulting music a sort of sonic push and pull, but it's subtle, the sound cohesive and assured, seemingly the essence of the two personalities, both dark and troubled, and with a certain loner vibe, but together, they manage to create a sort of hopeful sadness, a melancholy warmth, the gorgeous sound of dark rainy nights, but with the promise of a new day to come.
Another gorgeous release from Mystery Sea, whose sonic focus is on "night-ocean drones", and more than anything we've heard on MS, Umbilicus Maris by New Zealand one man drone outfit Gydja perfectly embodies that focus.
Umbilicus Maris is very oceanic, aquatic, even sub-aquatic. The rhythm is tidal, a subtle pulse, a gradual swell, the sounds shift and shimmer like light through water, and of the handful of Mystery Sea releases we've heard, Umbilicus Maris is the loudest and most active. That's in no way to infer that this is anything but drifting blissy ambience. It most certainly is, but the sounds are not lowercase. Not barely audible. Abby Helasdottir, the sole soul behind Gydja, brings the sounds to the fore, they are dark and mysterious, droning and drifting, but they are loud, the listener can hear them, FEEL them, peer inside and around, can experience the sound physically, get lost inside the sound. A pair of headphones is all you need to get sucked under, floating weightless in a strange sun dappled undersea world of sound.
Field recordings (tides, oceans, streams?) are mixed with performances, all processed into some otherworldly soundscape, or seascape. Burbling, shimmering, glistening, glimmering, everything slightly blurry, warped and warbled, multiple layers, shifting and drifting, low end rumbles slowly drift to the surface, where strange sonic skitters and burbles float on the surface, everything drenched in echo and reverb, like some massive undersea cavern, lit only by a single shaft of sunlight, the sounds of dripping water magnified into swirls of sound, distant percussive pings, an ultra abstract undersea dub. So completely warm and dreamlike, headphones like a diving bell, eyes closed, no need to breathe, letting the sound wash over you, slowly sinking to the bottom of some warm sonic sea. Absolutely gorgeous.
And like all Mystery Sea releases, LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each disc numbered, and gorgeously packaged in striking full color artwork.
Can you imagine if "Music To Moog By" maestro Gershon Kingsley had dropped acid, joined a commune, got religion, and jammed with the Silver Apples and Lothar And The Hand People? That might approximate what the unique, wondrous psych-pop "Mooglove" of 1970's The Electric Lucifer sounds like!
YES!!! It's about time. We've always wanted this album to come out on cd. This HAD to be our Record Of The Week. Heck, years and years ago, Allan (long before he worked at Aquarius) became a bit obsessed with this record. He'd found a beat-up old LP of it at a yard sale, bought it mainly 'cause of the title and the freaky colorful cover graphics, and then was blown away by the weird music within. It's what we've described as being "perhaps the most awesomely bizarre psychedelic pre-Kraftwerk electronica album ever to be released on a major label (Columbia) or elsewhere." Allan actually went so far as to try to track down Bruce Haack for an interview, but without any luck (turns out Haack had already passed away back in 1988, a couple years before Allan discovered the record). And Allan's not the only one here at AQ to have a longtime soft spot for this record... so we're all so happy that it's finally, FINALLY been given the cd reissue treatment. It's absurd, really, that this wasn't reissued sooner. The legend of eccentric electronica pioneer Bruce Haack has only grown in recent years. There's been several compilations of his work (Hush Little Robot was the best, since it featured a couple tantalizing cuts from this album), expensive imported Japanese reissues of several of his Moog music albums for kids, a posthumous Electric Lucifer sequel from the vaults, and even a documentary released on DVD, entitled Haack - The King Of Techno! But Haack's crowning glory, his masterpiece The Electric Lucifer, wasn't available at all. Until now. And The Omni Recording Corporation (a label new to us) have done it right, even down to the very welcome notion of including a 5-minute track of silence to separate the 13 tracks of the album proper from the over thirty minutes of additional bonus material that they've added on -- which consists of a 1970 Canadian radio interview with Haack on the subject of Electric Lucifer and an alternate take of "Electric To Me Turn". The packaging is top notch as well, reproducing the amazing artwork and Haack's trippy sleevenotes from the original LP (wherein he discusses his concept of "Powerlove"), plus cramming tons of additional stuff into the thick cd booklet. There's loving liner notes by several of Haack's friends and colleagues and lots of vintage photos and graphics. Nicely done.
How can we explain the utter charm of this album? Well it's about as psychedelic as you can get, a concept album that's futuristic and Biblically ancient at the same time. Haack used an electronic "computer voice" (long before it was cliche) that he named FARAD, as well as regular human vocals, to convey deep Age of Aquarius astrological/philosophical concepts, sometimes in the form of sinister liturgies, at others like playful rhyming lullabies. These Moogy, moody and groovy compositions feature churchy organ sounds, bleeps and bloops, and rhythmic percolations that wouldn't sound out of place in the Star Wars cantina. There's lugubrious droney passages, mechanical beats, switched-on classical flourishes, and musique concrete style sound collage. Very weird *and* oh-so-catchy. It's definitely every bit as wonderful and essential as the Silver Apples albums, which we know so many AQ patrons love dearly. Again, we're so happy this has been reissued. Highest recommendation. Listen to the love angel, people!
Almost before we even heard this, we knew it had to be an aQ Record Of The Week. A double dose of Finnish sonic insanity in the form of this insanely limited one sided 12", which finds Finnish one-man psychedelic noise project Haare, aka Ilkka Vekka, creating his new record, a single sprawling twenty minute soundscape, from various sounds, much of which is sourced from the 2004 album Forest by fellow Finns and all-time AQ faves, Circle!
Here Haare transforms what was already an atmospheric, sort of acoustic sinister spookiness, into something even more abstract, an arcane sonic ritual, all deep resonant rumbles, keening distant tones, rumbling thrums, haunting chimes, murky melodies, clouds of blurred metallic shimmer drifting over softly undulating sprawls of moody murk, a swirling smear of all manner of gauzy melodies, and ever-shifting texture. The sound barely obscuring creepy monstrous low end rumbles, that sound like some sort of demonic crooning. The upper register tones, sounding a bit like bowed metals, muted and muddied into sonorous tones, but that metallic buzz gradually breaking free from the murk and the mire, intensifying like some swarm of metal insects, way off in the distance, a sort of blurry buzz that billows ominously around the softly roiling ambience at the track's core. The sound obviously moving in a noisier direction, but finding a sort of swirling almost serene stasis just on this side of that ambience/noise barrier, the sounds gristly and crackling with energy, infused with a haunting dark mystery, that seems to imbue all the buzz and crunch with something much more soft focus and abstract, which somehow gradually attains a strange sort of next level dreamlike ambience, all the sounds blurring into a bleary bit of washed out thrum, a thick layered wall of super active sound, but with all the edges worn away, resulting in a slow pulsing stream of warm whir and dense warm dreamnoise, which reaches a sort of bliss out near-raga equillibrium in the last few minutes, and definitely has the listener in a total trance, and had us really wishing there was a second side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, each one hand numbered!!
NEW ON tUMULt!!!!
It's starting to get seriously tUMULtuous around here. One killer disc just out and still fresh, The Memories Attack, (one of ,if not THE pop record of last year, this year and any year, in Andee's humble opinion), THREE new releases about to drop (Diamatregon, Amocoma and the Ovens) and this, the first full length record from French ultra-mega-abstract-doom trio Habsyll, which just so happens to feature one member of the mighty Fantastikol Hole, as well as the former drummer of faerical punk blasters Nuit Noire!
But nothing, and we mean nothing will prepare you for Habsyll's particularly virulent strain of ultradoom. Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!
This is a split label release, tUMULt of course, along with 5 other kick ass labels: At War With False Noise, Obscure Sombre, PsycheDOOMelic, Skyr and Odio Sonoro.
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We first heard about these guys via the awesome Hammer Smashed Sound blog, described as "black rituals for the vastness-appreciative", the band listing their influences as "Movement of woods, rocks, plants & nature as such - plus the vastness of it all. Abyssal fear, fire, wholeness, monolithic things, megaliths, human insignificance, occult systems of cosmology & meaning, open systems of cosmology & meaning, clean violence, swift violence, enlightenment..." PLUS there's the fact that this, their debut record, came housed in a hand crafted leaf encrusted wooden sleeve, so we were pretty much already sold. Thankfully, their blackened sonic rituals more than live up to those obtuse and abstract descriptors, and the stunning packaging.
Black ambience might be too reductive when trying to describe Hadewych's mysterious soundworld, but it's a start. Occultic, ritualistic, grim, mysterious, haunting, all of the tracks here exist in some sort of moonlit nether region, the whole record some sort of fantastic journey, rendered in abstract sound, huge heaving swells of dense drone, muted pits of abstract percussion, softly crumbling bits of ambient whir, the sounds clipped and layered and assembled into lumbering skeletal rhythms, deep processed vocals, intoning some strange prayer, while a bleak black melody plays out in the background, and some super freaky demonic vocals surface, belch out some wordless filth, before splintering and collapsing back into the swirling blackness below.
Dense walls of SUNNO)))-ish rumble dissolve into some skittery almost-electronica, wrapped around more of those freaky belchy vocals, and some shimmery choral vocals overhead, before the record switches gears, and sprawls into some softly glitched pop ambience, all shimmer and drift and hover, laced with haunting strings and whispered vox buried in the mix, chimes ring out, voices are stretched out into warm whirling sun dappled streaks of sound, layered acoustic guitars explode into squalls of blown out psychedelia, infused with intercepted radio broadcasts, a woozy washed out cloud of lumbering crunch and majestic soft noise, only to dissipate into another sprawling bit of rhythmic ambience, with warm soft focus guitars drifting over skittery electronics, and more hushed vox, giving way to a blown out, muffled in-the-red black folk drone, the notes and chords so saturated they sound almost percussive, and the more you listen, the more the various sounds ooze and blend and bleed into one.
Lilting echo drenched folk leads us toward the end of our journey, atonal and buzzy, the steel strings soon fade out, leaving a gorgeous low end stretch of looped and layered tones, a sort of murky minimal pulse, haunting and ominous, and totally hypnotic, a quick burst of clatter and crunch leads us into a field of dense harmonium drone, hissing and wheezing, a gloriously textured expanse of warm whirs, peppered with strange field recordings, the crunch of footsteps, the panting of panicked breathing, which finally leads us to the black path, leading to an emptiness in the center of the black forest, the sound emanating from that void a deep rib cage rattling rumble, shot through with bits of glitch and hiss, and long streaks of some mysterious reverbed rasp, tendrils of feedback, fragments of melody, the shimmer of vibrating steel strings, tolling bells, all gradually blurred into blackness. So intense. Epic and cinematic, like the score to a life lived beneath the looming shadows of the great black oaks, or the soundtrack to a doomed expedition to the underworld, mysterious and evocative, and so so hauntingly beautiful.
LIMITED TO ONLY 165 COPIES, housed in a red felt lined handmade wooden case, with four double-sided cards, the whole thing packed in incense-dried Norway maple leaves. Wow.
For fans of freaky psych and wild heavy noisiness, an album title like Ultra High Dimensionality should definitely conjure up images of long haired Japanese bands from the seventies, of huge amps, bell bottoms, trippy light shows and extreme volume. It's the sort of title you might expect to find on a Mainliner or White Heaven record, which we're guessing was probably the idea, since this band is not in fact Japanese, but British, and are fronted by Mike Vest, he of psychedelic doomlords Bong! But this IS meant to be an homage of sorts to that classic Japanese sound, especially Les Rallizes Denudes, coupled with the downtuned crush of the Bong mothership of course, and if that sounds good to you (and why the hell wouldn't it?!), you're likely ready for some serious Ultra High Dimensionality.
Forty minutes of epic heavy psych, still a bit doomy, and spacey, after all, as the saying (sort of) goes, you can take the man out of Bong, but odds are he'll likely drag some of that doominess with him, but it makes for a killer mix, just check out the opener, which sounds, as you might have surmised, like Les Rallizes Denudes by way of Bong, a loping, slow burner, all blown out psychedelic balladry wreathed in dense swirls of distorto guitar, and anchored by some hard hitting drumming, the sort of brooding slow build heaviness we could get lost in forever, total seventies style psychedelic smolder, in fact, most of Ultra High Dimensionality sounds like some alternate dimension version of Les Rallizes Denudes, which is most definitely not a bad thing, the tempos generally slow, lumbering, but seriously tripped out, equal parts doomy and psychedelic, if you ever wished those Les Rallizes records weren't so lo-fi (although, why would you?), this will definitely hit the spot. And while this is most definitely far enough removed from the doooooom of Bong, to maybe disappoint some doomlords, folks into The Heads, White Hills, Carlton Melton, and all that psychedelic space rock stuff, as well as all the aforementioned Japanese psych combos, this comes HIGHLY recommended.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, housed in a swank sleeve, screen printed on grey recycled cardstock in metallic ink. Includes a download code too.
Pretty much every Hala Strana release has been a unanimous AQ favorite, most finding their way on to many of our year end top ten lists, and this new one looks to follow suit. Hala Strana is the work of Steven R. Smith, who many of you might recognize as a member of AQ faves Thuja as well as from a handful of solo records that have been heaped with praise on this here very list. Hala Strana is a vehicle for Smith to explore, cover, rework and reinterpret Eastern European folk music. Each record contains a handful of cover songs, some straight, some completely reinvented, and originals informed by Smith's love of that musical tradition.
The originals on Heave The Gambrel Roof are dark and drone-y, plenty of steel string buzz, all stretched out into moody psychedelic free folk drone drift divinity. Subtle melodies, simple strumming, over lush backdrops of shimmery ambience, woven together from all manner of traditional and homemade instruments. A dark moody Appalachia with an Eastern sensibility, folky for sure, but with a definite raga component. One in particular, "Marl", introduces drums and sounds almost like country rock, albeit with a decidedly lo-fi production and a distinctively un-poppy vibe, but it's propulsive with mandolin and acoustic guitars, simple shuffling drumming, moaning distant ambience, it's maybe the most out of place song on the record, but it's a testament to Smith's skill that somehow it fits just fine amidst all the drone and buzz and drift.
The covers here, of which there are a handful, Smith makes his own, gorgeous bits of traditional strummy folk become mesmerizing and hypnotic, figures and melodies looped and repeated, sympathetic notes allowed to buzz and wash into one another. A few of the covers sound pretty straight, with just a tiny bit more buzz or drone, but a few are completely transformed, becoming extended atmospheric dreamscapes, like on "Wedding Of The Blind" which sounds like seventies Japanese psych drone ensemble Taj Mahal Travellers jamming with Jack Rose. Absolutely gorgeous.
While they last, we have the super limited deluxe version that comes wrapped in black felt, packaged alongside a thick piece of LP sized wood, with the cover art and the liner notes silkscreened directly onto the wood (and it smells amazing too, fresh wood, all foresty and outdoorsy). LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!! Each one is hand numbered with the number hand carved / branded into the wood! Once these are gone, we will have the less expensive regular vinyl version, which is probably a good thing as we imagine these will go pretty damn quick.
As much as we love downtuned sludge and the whole dronedoomdirge static guitar buzz thing, and we do, believe us, we do, we love it even more when bands take that sound and warp it into something completely new. Such is the case with Aphotic Leech, a 35 minute single track from the duo known as Half Makeshift. Well, not sure if it's a duo as one guy is credited with piano, guitar, organ, glitch work and manipulation, while the other guy apparently "unknowningly provided all [the] percussion". Strange...
As is this disc. It begins with a sudden flurry of glitchy static that quickly gives way to dark dolorous piano, picking out a mournful, funereal melody, the notes drifting over simple chiming percussion, while beneath hover stretched out marimba melodies and a low distant thunderous rumbling. This dour march is occasionally enveloped in dense clouds of crumbling distortion and thick swaths of damaged electronics, always returning to it's spacious dark lilt. It's all very dynamic as well, with dark clusters of notes punching through the shimmery moodiness every once in a while, always retreating to a glacial drift. The notes on the piano gradually change form, wreathed in glitch, turned inside out, flipped backwards, often just subtly altered to flicker like some old projector, eventually erupting in a thick, grinding low end drone, the notes completely obscured, wrapped in thick swaths of crackle and glitch, the whole thing threatening to split apart, like watching the sky blacken and crumble above you, not long after the piano is swallowed up by a thick molten flow of black downtuned guitar drone, and you may think SUNNO))) is heavy? But this is more than heavy, caustic and black, a dense sludge so thick it barely makes it out of the speakers, but this low-end assault is peppered with strange production glitches, malfunctioning electronics, the notes, the sounds, all damaged and decaying, as if they might fall to the ground and break into a million pieces, but as long as they retain their shape, they are capable of crushing everything in their path.
Eventually the piano returns, but the notes are chopped into strange skipping rhythms, the rumbling, guitar crumble relegated to a swirling black backdrop, and finally, after one brief blast of black hole guitar grime, the track reverts to it's blissed out black ramble, culminating in a dark stuttering piano fade out....
Absolutely essential for the drone-doom-death-dirge inclined, fans of all things SUNNO))), Nadja, Fear Falls Burning, Trollmann, Boris, Marzuraan... Packaged in a super striking fold over sleeve, with a black on gold jellyfish on one side, and a truly revolting, but gorgeous penis-head-mask thing on the other, an amazing photograph by Max Aguilera-Hellweg, who was also responsible for the amazing photos on the sleeve of Fantomas' Delerium Cordia.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
We mention elsewhere on this list, about the strange viral spread of underground bands via cd-r labels. One super hyped release is all it takes, suddenly more releases begin popping up on all the other usual cd-r labels. Thankfully this usually happens to bands who deserve it, and who we can't get enough of, so more releases in that instance is definitely good news.
Such is the case with Half Makeshift, who actually started out with some proper full length cd releases, before they began dabbling in limited cd-r releases. We've listed two of their discs so far, both fantastic, dark and heavy, dense and thick, ominous and intense. Much heavier and more aggressive than your typical cd-r floorcore fare.
And 'they' is actually a 'he', he being Nathan Michael, who takes sounds low and slow, and assembles them into strangely propulsive downtuned dirges, hovering sonically somewhere between the glacial sludge of SUNNO))) and the muted minimal shimmer of folks like Aidan Baker or Jonathan Coleclough.
On Final, Michael explores a bit of both. The opener is a fierce plodding lurch, slowed way down to an almost crawl, the beats are big and effected, but they are buried in the mix, and pitched down, above the beats, guitars grind woozily and swirl weightlessly, it almost sounds like a Nadja 45 spinning at 33, or Jesu slowed way dooooooooown. A blissed out post industrial shoegazey doom, more pretty than heavy, but still shot through with bits of sharp riffage and thick crunch, but by the end, the track has transformed into a muted minor key drift, soft and serene. The second track takes the end of the first and stretches it out into a whole track of whispered whir and warm chordal swells.
The third track of four begins with piano, processed and spun backwards, a dreamily dizzy bit of swell and swoop, that continues throughout the whole track, at one point passing through thick black clouds of low end rumble, before emerging on the other side spare and sparse and hovering in an austere wide open space.
The final track, the title track, appropriately called "Final", is another piano driven jam, more moody and murky, a funereal dirge, a somber musical death march, the sounds changing timbre and tone subtly, the various notes wrapped in effects and slipped back into the melodies, gorgeously forlorn and sweetly sinister.
Like all Small Doses discs, incredible packaging, two different colored and textured paper rectangles, glued together and then folded to create a super striking two tone layered sleeve, printed with gorgeous austere photos, each copy hand numbered. LIMITED TO 151 COPIES!
Arizona's Half Visconte channel all the good things about indie/post rock (Drive Like Jehu, Rodan, Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth) into something really great, especially considering the glut of 'post rock' bands. The first three songs are complex mathy workouts, along the same lines as Rodan, A Minor Forest and Sweep the Leg Johhny. But track four is where they really come into their own. A twenty minute epic combining post rock rhythms, hypnotic krautrock drones, ambient industrial soundscapes, and experimental click and clatter. If this strange musique concret/post-rock hybrid is where HV are headed, they will be unbeatable.
Halo are easily one of the heaviest, creepiest, most intense bands we have heard in a long time. This Australian two piece (bass and drums, voice and electronics) spit out such a massive sound it's hard to get your head around. Lurching, pummelling, sludgy, slow-motion doom versus squealing, speaker shredding, super distorted power electronics. Think Godflesh and Neurosis and Earth and Whitehouse and Cop Shoot Cop, and Gore and Noisegate and the Melvins, with the treble turned to zero, the bass turned to ten, and about 1000 extra amps, turned on, buzzing and squealing and rumbling, as Halo channel all of this unbridled energy into huge molten riffs that stretch out into near ambient dirges. Static, hum and hiss swarm wildly in and out of the mix, and occasionally everything drops out until all that's left is blurry static ambience and stray rattles and rumbles, until the two-headed beast struggles free and lurches madly forward again. Fucking amazing.
America's (Australia's?) Funnyman is back with another painful session of not-too-funny standup "comedy". And that, of course, is the joke. Brilliant as usual.
We've had these for a while now, but are only getting around to listing it now. And unfortunately it's been so long we can't remember any of the details about who these guys are. Web searches have revealed very little as well, but as usual, it hardly matters once we get down to the sounds, which are awesome. A stumbling noiserock, light on the noise, a sort of loping, meandering postrock, the drums simple and spare, while all over the place electronics swoop and buzz, guitars clang and chime, a sort of slowcore crossed with some abstract electronic noise... Imagine a more post rock less machinelike Geronimo, or a prettier, WAY less chaotic Dead C, woozy and weary, and washed out, slow motion math rock dipped in glitch and skree and left to wander aimlessly. Really weird and atonal but pretty and subtly tripped out. There's definitely some Godspeed moments, and some distinctly Dead C sounds (or at least NZ noise rock sounds), but the way that they're arranged, it almost sounds like a normal everyday post rock band gradually and gloriously going haywire. Hard to explain, but this dusty little back room find is suddenly a new fave!
SUPER LIMITED and now discontinued and out of print. We only have a handful, so grab 'em while you can...
Emit were never really a proper black metal band, so much so that it often seemed quite curious that they were so embraced by that scene, when there sound was something much more abstract and ambient, ritualistic and distinctly not heavy, at least in the traditional sense. This UK horde trafficked in a sort of abstract ambient doom, there were riffs, to be certain, but they were not strung together into long buzzing progressions, instead they were banged out one at a time, often left to decay and sprawl into shimmering black ripples, and just as often there were no riffs at all, instead opting for some effects drenched dubbed out free blackness. Once in a while, the sounds and atmospheres would coalesce into something definitely black metal, but even then, the blast beats and buzzing riffs were stumbly and chaotic and doused in reverb and sent lurching though heaving seas of crunch and crumble, everything moaning and creaking and squealing and seeming to gradually implode. Emit were indeed one of a kind, and it's unclear what exactly caused them to hang it up, but a few of those Emitters went on to create this entity right here, now called Hammemit, a somewhat logical extension of Emit's more abstract ritualistic side, forgoing riffs and metal and buzz almost completely, opting instead for something much more primitive and minimal, haunting and spiritual.
Spires Over The Burial Womb unveils a mysterious black form of liturgical music, drawing heavily on traditional religious musics throughout the ages, wheezing church organs, chanted monklike vocals, choral voices, lots of echo and reverb as if these pieces were indeed performed in some sort of temple or church, some of the songs thick and swirling, dense and intense, others spare and spidery, with simple spidery melodies hovering in wide open expanses of shimmering reverb and deep cavernous echo. All of the sounds here are dark, haunting, creepy, mysterious, deep distant drones twist and turn like monstrous black shapes hidden in the shadows, the voices chant and invocate, offering up prayer perhaps to some other gods, the voices and the drones beneath inexorably interwoven. There is guitar, but it's often detuned, fractured, effected, smeared and blurred into another layer of creeping blackness. The most traditionally musical movements, sound a bit like Skepticism, but with all the distortion stripped away, the drums removed, slowed way down, and performed in some massive stone cathedral, every note slathered in natural reverb and dusty delay, allowed to drift ethereally until the next note emerges to follow along in it's ghostly black wake. While the rest of the tracks play out like ancient masses conducted by reanimated specters risen from the grave, primitive rituals performed in the black of night, in the dead of winter, in a church full of empty pews, with broken stained glass windows, and drifts of snow moving like a white sea across the cut stone floor, a swirling white abyss that swallows the black sounds drifting above.
A truly beautiful and haunting collection of blackened rites and rituals and mysterious nokturnal sonic ceremonies.
Our own Andee proves himself, and his tUMULt label, to be truly dedicated to the Heaviest of Metal with this new release! Following on from prior tUMULt metal-oriented releases (the grim and trancelike black metal genius of Weakling, the blackened
Formerly known as Unholy Cadaver, Hammers of Misfortune is the demented brainchild of local metal master John Cobbett, who also plays guitar in the cult SF "celtic epic metal" outfit The Lord Weird Slough Feg. Mike from Slough Feg is also in Hammers, playing guitar and providing the "clean" male vox. And we must mention the contribution of Janis Tanaka (ex-Stone Fox) on bass and the exellent female vocals. "The Bastard" comes across like a mixture of Cradle of Filth and Blind Guardian, or Slough Feg and Opeth, or Satyricon and Mercyful Fate: it's that eclectic, that classic, that amazing.
We're always up for some twisted black metal. The more twisted the better. The more fucked up and damaged the better. So on first listen this disc from Hamsoken pretty much hit the spot, beginning with some crumbling sci-fi synths, some growled demonic vox, weird throbbing Goblin like bass, all sprawling bleak industrial blackened synthscape, before lurching into some full on filthy raw blackened pound, all buzzy guitars, and buried vokills, twisted melodic leads, atonal and angular, but then a track later, the fidelity is cranked up a notch, and the band erupt in a frenzy of blasting tremolo guitared black buzz, gnarled and furious and blurry and washed out and so goddamn good.
We were so lost in Hamsoken's buzzy blasting blur that it took us a while before we even realized Hamsoken was in fact Nick Forte, who some of you might remember from hardcore legends Rorschach!! (Who reunited for a few East Coast tours recently, and if all goes well, just might make it out West!).
Even on repeated listens, we don't necessarily hear any Rorschach in the sound of Hamsoken, but like much of our favorite black metal, the fact that Forte is approaching BM from a whole different background, brings so much new to the table, the synths all over the place, the tracks that seem to crumble into slow crawls, the lurching almost SST vibe of some of the guitar parts, the vocals, going from murky garble to super distorted hissy howl, even at its blackest, the sound is weirdly melodic and hypnotic, doomy dirges give way to blazing blasts which in turn dissipate into slow blackened drifts. Unlike most black metal, the bass is huge, and melodic, way up in the mix, sometimes carrying the whole song, and those synths, makes everything sound all creepy and soundtracky and Goblin-y, the best moments are when the metal component is ditched completely in favor of some synth heavy crawl, all processed drum machine, moody moaning guitar melody, and those incredibly harsh vox, moody and melancholy and industrial and heavy, even when it's not heavy in the traditional sense. Those synth heavy tracks play out like some blackened coldwave band, a sound we had sort of been fantasizing about actually, a sort of black metal Cold Cave maybe, in fact, very little of the record is anywhere close to traditionally blasting black metal, those moments do exist, but tend to separate drastically different sonic environments, be they fuzzy and droney and spacey or murky and blown out and abstract, or punky and thrashing and pounding (like a couple tracks, the only real nods to Forte's punk past).
Definitely for folks into the strains of black metal that tend toward the avant, the drone-y, the gloomy, the fucked up, and especially the weird and melodic and new wave-y... wait, is there a strain like that? New wave-y and melodic and fucked up and industrial? Yeah, there is now.
Killer reissue of two long out of print full lengths from this long running New Zealand free noise duo, consisting of Bruce Campbell, he of the mighty Dead C, and longtime aQ fave Alastair Galbraith, shedding his usual songsmithery for something a lot more abstract and noisy.
The two have been performing on and off together since the early nineties, these two discs collect The Philosophick Mercury from 1994, and Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards, from 1995. Both recorded live, utilizing guitars, violin, electronics and voice, with the occasional bit of drumming from yet another NZ noise luminary, Peter Stapleton, who's played in pretty much every NZ band of note, from Dadamah to Pin Group to Flies Inside The Sun to The Terminals.
The template for A Handful Of Dust seems to be long drawn out tones, plenty of space, loads of feedback, letting the amp and the body of the guitar and the room shape the sounds as much as the player. Later groups like Sunroof! would harness this same sort of free music energy, this primal ur-drone, but there's something about A Handful Of Dust, that makes the sounds seem more alive, more feral, dangerous and dense. There's plenty of scrape and skree, mostly high end, layers upon layers, overtones shifting and drifting and billowing up in huge clouds of static buzz and shimmering squiggles of violin. The pace is glacial, but this music is not about movement or momentum so much as space and time, when there are drums, they don't really propel the song, instead they offer up a sort of loose framework, a crumbling skeleton around which the various buzzing strings and howling amps hang their shimmering sheets of sound. It's hard not to hear some Dead C in the be-drummed tunes (there are only two), but the drums here are WAY more loose, almost free jazz in feel, lending a psychedelic vibe to a music already pretty fucking psychedelic.
A few of the tracks offer up some low end rumbles and deep drone, but those sounds are soon infused with streaks of jagged shriek and sharp hissy high end, the two sides not so much battling as swirling warily around each other eventually becoming one, and on rare occasions, melding into something almost rifflike. The closing track on No Gods begins as a total guitar destroying free for all, before transforming into some super tripped out buzz drenched psychedelic warped krautdrone, but only briefly, before it slips back into fractured deconstructed free noise once again.
No Gods is definitely the more refined of the two (but only just barely). Philosophick is way more brittle and bizarre, two 30 minute jams, the first features lots of amp buzz, and stuttery shards of feedback, plenty of Derek Bailey like scrabbling, strange processed vocals, some sort-of-chanting, very minimal and textureal considering how noisy it is. The second track is total chaos, a band going all out in a huge room, all the instruments rendered blurs and smears by the distorted amps and the room reverb, the long stretches of feedback and the low low low fidelity recording only add more hiss and blur and texture. The guitars sounding alternately like accordions or bagpipes, sometimes like lowing cattle, the pound of the drums a buried muffled pulse, the cymbals glazing the cacophony with another sizzly layer of sibilance.
Beautiful oversized Japanese style mini lp gatefold style packaging with new liner notes from Marc Masters.
I'm beginning to feel like the guy at AQ that tries to convince you it's okay to like those bands that for some reason you are embarassed to like. But if that is my position, then so be it. We had a Hanoi Rocks greatest hits collection a while back, but
Hanoi Rocks, while inadvertently helping to spawn an entire generation of MTV glam rock, managed to create an amazing and varied body of work, from trashy garage stomps to perfect little pop songs. And even with a lot of high profile attention (their drummer was killed by Motley Crue's Vince Neil in a drunk driving accident, a hit with their cover of CCR's 'Up Around The Bend, having their entire catalog reissued on Guns and Roses' label at the height of G&R's popularity) they somehow managed to stay just enough underground to miss the superstardom they so deserved. Their sound was a mix of Stooges style garage rock, good old Beatle-esque pop, and a weird reggae/dub influence most obvious in their rhythm guitar parts and dubby drum lines (like the Clash, who supplied Hanoi Rocks with their replacement bass player when Sam Yaffa moved to America to play in Jetboy). But the bottom line is always the songs, and the songs are catchy as fuck. Trust me, Hanoi Rocks are so good -- don't be swayed by their tenuous connection to the eighties hair bands (even though singer Mike Monroe was way hotter than any of his glam rock contemporaries). And mark my words, I will have Allan singing their praises in no time, even if it kills me, or him.
This is Hanoi Rocks' third and maybe best record and things get decidedly weirder, with the bizarre (and aptly titled) intro 'Strange Boys Play Weird Openings', the rollicking and insane 'Mental Beat', the stumbling chaos of 'Tooting Bec Wreck', the ultra catchy Stooges-like 'Back To Mystery City' and just a non stop barrage of fucking great songs: 'Malibu Beach Nightmare', 'Until I Get You', 'Lick Summer Love', 'Sailing Down The Tears' and more.
I'm beginning to feel like the guy at AQ that tries to convince you it's okay to like those bands that for some reason you are embarassed to like. But if that is my position, then so be it. We had a Hanoi Rocks greatest hits collection a while back, but
Hanoi Rocks, while inadvertently helping to spawn an entire generation of MTV glam rock, managed to create an amazing and varied body of work, from trashy garage stomps to perfect little pop songs. And even with a lot of high profile attention (their drummer was killed by Motley Crue's Vince Neil in a drunk driving accident, a hit with their cover of CCR's 'Up Around The Bend, having their entire catalog reissued on Guns and Roses' label at the height of G&R's popularity) they somehow managed to stay just enough underground to miss the superstardom they so deserved. Their sound was a mix of Stooges style garage rock, good old Beatle-esque pop, and a weird reggae/dub influence most obvious in their rhythm guitar parts and dubby drum lines (like the Clash, who supplied Hanoi Rocks with their replacement bass player when Sam Yaffa moved to America to play in Jetboy). But the bottom line is always the songs, and the songs are catchy as fuck. Trust me, Hanoi Rocks are so good, don't be swayed by their tenuous connection to the eighties hair bands (even though singer Mike Monroe was way hotter than any of his glam rock contemporaries). And mark my words, I will have Allan singing their praises in no time, even if it kills me, or him. These reissues are remastered, have tons of photos and really great and extensive liner notes.
'Bangkok Shocks' was Hanoi Rocks debut and starts off with possibly two of their best songs, 'Tragedy', all chunky guitars and falsetto backup vocals, and 'Village Girl', probably my favorite Hanoi Rocks songs. A perfect pop song, ultra catchy chorus, unforgettable riff, and a weird dubby rhythm.
"File under Sleaze/Junk." If you buy this you will make a very sad man very very happy. This purports to be a collection of "The Best of" Hanoi Rocks--but it's only 2 cds? How's that possible...?
Now that Allan is finished (for now) being a sarcastic bastard, i will once again defend one of my all time favorite bands.
Hanoi Rocks, while inadvertently helping to spawn an entire generation of MTV glam rock, managed to create an amazing and varied body of work, from trashy garage stomps to perfect little pop songs. And even with a lot of high profile attention (their drummer was killed by Motley Crue's Vince Neil in a drunk driving accident, a hit with their cover of CCR's 'Up Around The Bend, having their entire catalog reissued on Guns and Roses' label at the height of G&R's popularity) they somehow managed to stay just enough underground to miss the superstardom they so deserved. Their sound was a mix of Stooges style garage rock, good old Beatle-esque pop, and a weird reggae/dub influence most obvious in their rhythm guitar parts and dubby drum lines (like the Clash, who supplied Hanoi Rocks with their replacement bass player when Sam Yaffa moved to America to play in Jetboy). But the bottom line is always the songs, and the songs here are catchy as fuck, from the mournful piano driven 'Dead by Christmas', to the rollicking 'Problem Child', to the impossibly catchy 'Village Girl'. Trust me, this is so good, don't be swayed by their tenuous connection to the eighties hair bands. Although singer Mike Monroe was way hotter than any of his contemporaries. And mark my words, I will have Allan singing their praises in no time, even if it kills me, or him.
I'm beginning to feel like the guy at AQ that tries to convince you it's okay to like those bands that for some reason you are embarassed to like. But if that is my position, then so be it. We had a Hanoi Rocks greatest hits collection a while back, but
Hanoi Rocks, while inadvertently helping to spawn an entire generation of MTV glam rock, managed to create an amazing and varied body of work, from trashy garage stomps to perfect little pop songs. And even with a lot of high profile attention (their drummer was killed by Motley Crue's Vince Neil in a drunk driving accident, a hit with their cover of CCR's 'Up Around The Bend, having their entire catalog reissued on Guns and Roses' label at the height of G&R's popularity) they somehow managed to stay just enough underground to miss the superstardom they so deserved. Their sound was a mix of Stooges style garage rock, good old Beatle-esque pop, and a weird reggae/dub influence most obvious in their rhythm guitar parts and dubby drum lines (like the Clash, who supplied Hanoi Rocks with their replacement bass player when Sam Yaffa moved to America to play in Jetboy). But the bottom line is always the songs, and the songs are catchy as fuck. Trust me, Hanoi Rocks are so good, don't be swayed by their tenuous connection to the eighties hair bands (even though singer Mike Monroe was way hotter than any of his glam rock contemporaries). And mark my words, I will have Allan singing their praises in no time, even if it kills me, or him.
'Self Destruction Blues' was a compilation of unreleased material released to give the band time to rehearse/write with new drummer Razzle. But even as an odds and ends collection, this is an amazingly tight collection. Features possibly their most famous song (and everyone's favorite live tune) 'Taxi Driver' as well as another unbeatable batch of trashy, catchy songs, including the hauntingly beautiful and mildly creepy 'Dead By Xmas' which seemd to hint at Razzle's premature death.
We had no idea what to expect from this record. It's on Sub Pop, the band's called Happy Birthday, the cover art is a sort of super DIY, bent musical note motif, like some weird eighties power pop demo, the back of the record is all scrawled pen and ink binder art, but what the heck, so we threw it on, and BLAAOW! Holy crap, total lo-fi nineties style power pop bliss out. Jangly guitar, lo-fi production, warbly boy vox and angelic female crooning, hooks galore, reminding us a lot of Nova Scotia pop, think Eric's Trip, Sloan, Super Friendz, Thrush Hermit, Hardship Post, the same sort of earnest, slightly melancholic, ramshackle pop that we never get tired of, and hardly anyone makes anymore (thank goodness for The Memories Attack!).
Every song is a cracked bit of peppy, bouncy, effervescent pop, with some angular guitar, some practice space drumming, warbly basslines, everything super distorted and fuzzed out, slipping from rollicking rocking, to in-the-red on-the-verge-of-collapse chaos, to woozy meandering minimal new wave (one track sounds like Ultravox via the more modern lo fi warped garage rock of the moment), lots of the songs have a distinctly eighties vibe, the vocals are sweet and always about to crack, slipping into a falsetto at every possible opportunity, keyboards wheeze and warble, the melodies are playful and serpentine, the production is hazy and reverby, but the band are constantly slipping in weird bursts of distorted crunch, or stretches of hushed crystalline drift, but always stumbling back into their irresistible fuzz pop. Record opener "Girls FM" is a total hit, a chorus that kills, not to mention an equally catchy verse/bridge combo, super sweet harmonies, a main riff that manages to crunch and jangle at the same time, weird fuzz bass that drops in and out, as well as all sorts of subtly twisted recording weirdness, only adding to the fun fucked up vibe.
The weird thing is that Happy Birthday is the project of Kyle Thomas, whose previous groups we've raved about in the past, Feathers, Witch, and King Tuff, but never did we expect that he might be capable of this kind of kick ass ultra catchy pure pop bliss out. But we're so pleasantly surprised, and damn if Happy Birthday didn't just leap into the running for pop record of the year!!
The return of one of our favorite depressive black metal bands, a band we loved before we even heard them, almost entirely because of their bad ass band name, Happy Days. Yep, Happy Days. Black Metal. It does make sense, trust us. So these guys call the sunny state of Florida home, but you'd never know it from the very unhappy racket they stir up, stumbling practice space drums, dreary minor key riffage, vocals both harsh and howled, and mopey and moaned, and some truly unlikely sound samples. But these guys are WAY more than the sum of their parts, they manage to evoke so much with so little, their sound seems simple, and is to a degree, but they manage to take simple riffs, and weave mesmerizing soundscapes of moody miserablism, the repetition lending a definite gravitas to the already intense and emotional melodies and riffs, the vocals are of course anguished and tortured, but there are so many bands who do this sort of thing, that it really is something special and ineffable that makes these guys stand out so dramatically.
Whereas they sampled Fight Club (!) on the first record (and granted, we normally hate when bands use WAY too obvious samples, but there's something about the ones these guys choose and how they come across removed from the film, more on that in a second), and it was definitely funny hearing Brad Pitt on a black metal record, but also, his words recontextualized, sounded more sinister, and similarly here, Happy Days chose to sample Breakfast Club, again a weird choice, the bit where Judd Nelson is acting out a typically abusive holiday with his father, and another where the asshole principal is lecturing the students in detention, well first, what was more depressing that high school really, so in that way, it was a pretty good choice, but those two soliloquies, taken out of the context of the film, sound SO much more hateful and harsh, like scary and brutal and seriously sinister, it's really strange, and it does suit the music, and then the segue into the music, it's really dramatic, but forget about the samples, it's all about the music, and the music here is really fucked up and dark and powerful. The opening track is the same riffy lament, over and over and over for 4+ minutes, laced with a drifting minor key melody over the top, so totally mesmerizing and hypnotic, maybe our favorite part of Happy Days, when they forego proper BM tropes and just unfurl some sort of lo-fi slowcore looped dirge. The second track is another simple, gorgeously melancholic riff, this time supported by a simple plodding drum beat, the sound of thunder and pouring rain, and some super harsh bellowed vocals, but the arrangement, and the sound, makes it anything but harsh, more sort of washed out, soft edged, and miserable sounding. A lot of the songs sound a little like slowed down Katatonia songs as played by the guy in Varghkoghargasmal, a sort of epic doomy dreaminess, but all stumbly and off kilter, more about raw emotion and passion and the dark spirit than the actual execution or recording quality.
The 14+ minute title track is maybe our favorite, yet another impossibly catchy main riff, a descending melody, so depressive and mournful, the vocals a strange spoken diatribe on misery and loneliness and death, the drums again and simple plod, the guitars occasionally offering up strange little squeaks or squiggles, but for the most part locked into a never ending loop, until about halfway through, when everything shifts, leaving just some simple jangly Hypothermia-like clean guitar, over equally simple and stripped down drums, lilting and sad, before the distorted guitar kicks back in along with some harsh growled demonic vox, that just seems to up the intensity.
The final track is another brooding slow lumber through atonal misery and angular minor key miserablism, but here the vocals are unhinged and unleashed, the guitars seem slightly out of tune, the vocals following suit, slipping from screech to Muppet-y gurgle to wild whoop to raspy yowl, but still managing to evoke some sort of mysterious sorrow.
These guys are definitely far out, and their sound is an acquired taste, even for the depressive black metal inclined, and on some level, it's hard not to think maybe they're taking the piss, but it hardly matters, once you let this weirdly warped chunk of sonic misery wash over you, you sort of have to give in, it's at once soothing and enthralling, buzzy and bizarre, fractured and fucked, and is quickly becoming one of our new favorites. We might like it even more than the first Happy Days, which is saying a lot.
Definite recommended listening for the black hearted and frozen souled, released on one of our new favorite labels, Self Mutilation Services in Mexico, hopefully more depressive weirdness from them to come (and when we run out it might take a little while to get more as they're being shipped up from Mexico, so please be patient)...
The return of possibly our favorite depressive black metal band going these days, the awesomely (and ironically, obviously) monickered Happy Days, who seem to keep getting better and better, and weirder and weirder with every release, and with Happiness Stops Here... we can add poppier and poppier.
Their MO remains the same, but then why fix what ain't broke? Clean minor key guitars, simple drumming, those two elements wound into a loping post rock meander, before the buzzy blackness erupts and takes over, as well as the WAY up in the mix, harsh howled vokills. It's that weird dichotomy that makes Happy Days so compelling, the music is so pretty, so darkly melodic and weirdly poppy, and those vocals, a harsh sinister croak, constantly pulling and pushing against each other. On this record more than either of the others, the melodic component is front and center, remove the vocals, and we'd be talking some seriously dreamy buzz pop, or tweak it just a bit and we'd be in Lifelover territory, as it is, it's more like a revved up Hypothermia, or a slowed down, much more raw and ragged Katatonia, when the second clean guitar comes in, and offers a super emotional melodic counterpoint, it's some seriously intense stuff.
"My Brutus" features those dueling guitars, over some cool busy drumming, and some almost melodic vocals (still harsh and raspy), the guitars chiming, the vibe almost new wavey, the main riff looped endlessly, the whole track totally hypnotic. "Letting Go" might be our favorite though. The drums and guitar locked into a woozy downtuned lumbering groove, the vocals echo-y and reverbed, deep and near spoken, until again, a second guitar swoops in and offers up an arpeggiated minor key melody that wraps itself around that original riff, before the harsh vocals explode in a frenzy of tortured misery, until the drums bust out double time, and the guitars lock into a dizzying rapid fire harmony, which is easily the high point of the record, both emotionally and musically. Super intense and so goddamn catchy.
The thing with Happy Days, was that in the beginning, their ineptness and half assedness was a huge part of their appeal, total on the verge of falling apart chaos, strange and obvious samples, lots of drum struggle, all of which -would- occasionally coalesce into some seriously dark depressive buzz, but would inevitably splinter into chaos once again. The band now are so much tighter, which generally would turn us off, we like our fucked up black metal as inept and as damaged as possible, but it suits these guys, they're still plenty loose and rough and raw, but locked into these darkly depressive pop grooves, these guys are in their element, and seemingly have no equal. Depressive black metal record of the year? Most definitely? Buzzing blackened gloom pop record of the year, maybe that too...
Gorgeous new album of sprawling abstract ambience from this mysterious trio, featuring one member of Pan American and also Necks drummer Tony Buck, and it's on Flingco which in the past has brought us lps by outsider black metal horde Wrnlrd and buzz heavy dronesters Cristal (plus the guy who runs Flingco used to run Kranky!). Phew, pretty bad ass and we haven't even gotten to the music yet!
And the music here is truly strange, delicate, spacious, spare, minimal, but lush and expansive, The Necks is not a bad jumping off point, there is a sort of cyclical feel to the dronemusic here, Bucks drumming is similarly restrained and abstract, offering up a steady stream of snare skitter, or softly billowing clouds of cymbal shimmer, using percussion to create more layers of drone, while the rest of the band coax warm, soft focus swells from their instruments, the players creating a moody ebb and flow, chiming notes and bits of melody drift along the slow moving sonic currents, the whole side unfurling in gorgeous hazy slow motion.
The flip side is even more dark and minimal, again, the focus is on deep bell like tones, the subtle interactions of the notes, the incidental melodies, a warm bleary eyed murk, that grows deeper and deeper, until it's more felt than heard, which is when the percussion becomes the focal point again, a muted cacophony of thumps, a flurry of chimes, the click and clatter of wood on wood, eventually fading out, leaving just a smear of ultra low drift. So nice.
And while they last, we have the SUPER LIMITED version, only 100 copies made, that come with a dvd-r, featuring a live video mix recorded at the Empty Bottle in Chicago in 2007, a cool video that accompanied the band, sourced from manipulated found footage with a live analog VHS loop mix.
Oh yeah, each lp comes with a download card, so you can get a digital version for your computer!
Another gloriously noxious dose of grim, raw blackness form LA trio Harassor, the group's newest proper full length. Like their recent split lp with Glass Coffin, and another recent split with Author & Punisher, this recent barrage of new material is some of the best stuff we've heard from these guys. And even removed from their dramatic live shows, the music here is pretty compelling, fusing the sort of raw Venomish black metal churn with something more tranced out and droney, not to mention a fair bit of melody in the mix, that makes some of this stuff surprisingly catchy. But it's all relative, and the catchiness here is subtle when compared to the groups grim black din, frenzied, furious riffing, and lose limbed rapid fire drumming, no bass, but really, you generally can't here the bass in black metal anyway, and it's not really missed here. And the vocals are a killer mix of guttural demonic grunts and hysterical shrieks, all wound up into furious, hellish heaviness, the sort of blurred blackness that's almost more trancelike than metallic, that is when not devolving into more punk metal pound, which the band do often and well, but even then, they'll lock into a looped sounding riff/blast that often into a totally mesmerizing blackblastdrone, before eventually devolving right back into that blackened punkiness. And like that split with Glass Coffin, some tracks are crazy catchy, sounding almost post rocky / shoegazey (check out "Winter's Triumph", which sounds like some sort of blackened post punk), hinting at the kind of band these guys could so easily be, but that element only adds to the groups twisted blackness, which in turn is only further enhanced by their blood soaked ritualistic live performances, which you should check out if you ever get the chance...
Includes a download code too.
Here Be Monsters sounds not unlike a dreamy meeting of Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake and Rufus Wainwright. Harcourt's hoarse, weary vocals - often a frail whisper - coupled with pretty darn fine songwriting and lush instrumentation make for quite
Scotty Hard (producer of New Kingdom, De La Soul, Wu Tang, Ice, etc.) makes his solo debut. Brutal, damaged, slo-mo, dubbed-out hip hop that sometimes ventures into druggy spacerock territory! With cameos from Sensational, Mr Dead and a bunch of other messed up rappers. Another totally superior WordSound release. We love this.
Another lost gem from an almost entirely forgotten band who existed briefly during the just-post grunge glory years of Sub Pop. A band that never would have fit all that comfortably amidst it's heavier labelmates (Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Tad, etc.), and seemd to be signed with the hopes of finding a new Nirvana, The Hardship Post (from the same poppy little province of Canada that gave us Sloan, Eric's Trip, Jale, etc.), were a full on pop band, a bit grungy maybe, with plenty of mumbly Nirvana-isms, but most decidedly not -grunge-. In fact, they sounded more like some weird twisted mix of that rainsoaked Northwestern rock sound, the repetitive riffing of Lungfish, a little Nirvana loud / quiet, and a whole lot of Elvis Costello! Crunchy, bouncy, stripped down riffy pop songs with straight ahead drumming, jangly riffs, and the vocalists's warbly Costello like wail WAY up in the mix, constantly struggling to hit the high notes, cracking and straining, making every song sound totally urgent and emotional and most of all FUN. Simple and super catchy, all of the songs on Somebody Spoke are hooky as hell, with lots of indie jangle, shakers and tambourines, handclaps, lots of oooo-ing and la-la-la-ing background vocals, big dumb riffs, all wrapped up into a perfect batch of irresistable (but somehow still dark and moody) pogo pop perfection. Except for the the two slow sort-of-ballads, that for our money are as just as good as any of the classic Nirvana brooders, dark and slowly unfolding, mumbly and rumbly expanses of downtuned strum and sweetly crooned moodiness (that found their way onto plenty of Andee's mid-nineties mixtapes!). So good!
Full length number two from Chicago grind thrashers Harpoon, which just so happens to feature Toney Vast-Binder, vocalist for the late great legendary weirdo grind combo 7000 Dying Rats, but don't be expecting any metalhead baiting skits or grindmetal versions of TV themes (although we do love that stuff), Harpoon is a much more serious beast, and a beast it is, describing it as grind or thrash really doesn't do these guys justice, sure there are definitely elements of both, and they're pretty punk to boot, but Harpoon's sound is epic and heavy, intricate and pretty complex, even a bit proggy at times. Opener "To The Tall Trees" is a perfect example, with its grinding tempos, and woozy slippery guitar riff, not to mention the moment about 2 minutes in when the band lock into this killer repetitive mathmetal groove, that almost sounds looped, and it's so hypnotic and so good, it's almost a disappointment when they finally pull out of it. At which point they lay down some creeping dirgey doom, only to shift into something hushed and atmospheric, and we're barely three minutes in, the sound builds and slowly grows more and more vicious and heavy, churning and chugging and finally finishing off in a squall of tangled feedback.
Which is pretty much how the whole record plays out, the songs super complex, the riffing gnarled and convoluted, but rife with melody, the second track in fact, almost sounds like it's borrowed a bit from the Fucking Champs, the same sort of Thin Lizzy meets Carcass metal hookiness, the band mix it up once again, exploding into a blasting punkish pound, the guitar doing all sorts of weird shit along the way, soaring into little melodic trills, weaving woozily into seasick lopes, the sound blossoming unexpectedly into Torche style pop-sludge, complete with clean vocals, and shit, it suits these guys, so much so, that if they ditched all the warped grinding heaviness, wouldn't be hard to see them getting big, but then where's the fun in that, and the poppiness here is so great cuz it's so unexpected, and it's unexpected that these guys would be so good at it. But fear not, it's not long before the band shifts gears and unfurls some metal that sounds strangely like late period Carcass, or At The Gates, their knack for melody infusing whatever heaviness they conjure up with a ridiculous hookiness, and those clean vocals keep popping up, revealing the record to be a whole lot poppier than we first expected.
In fact we were sort of digging this, but after a handful of listens, we're becoming pretty goddamn obsessed. One of our new favorites for sure!
Who doesn't love Harry Pussy? Actually probably a lot of folks, but don't count us among them. One of the finest noise rock bands ever, with a strange flair for infusing their racket with something special, not melody necessarily, or musicality, something more ineffable, and something much more abrasive and harsh. But heck, female fronted noise rock was a rarity back then (and still is sadly), and Adris Hoyos, was a whirling dervish of damaged drumming and freaked out vocalizations, and their sound was totally unique, a stumbling super distorted acid fried feedback drenched blow out, and this here disc captures the band at their best, live and out of control, on their last tour, live in Texas in 1998.
The music is amazing of course. Fucking heavy as shit, a maelstrom of drum chaos and super distorted guitars, the recording SO in the red, but the best part is probably Adris' crowd baiting, so much shit talking, calling the crowd a bunch of assholes who dress like jocks, but in the same breath trying to pimp shirts and records, usually met with a chorus of "FUCK YOU"s, before launching back into an explosion of fucked up glorious pounding noise rock.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, but beautifully packaged in a full color sleeve, with a cool printed insert.
We love Harry Pussy, and we take every opportunity to tell the world. Unfortunately we don't get that many chances as the noise rock trio known as Harry Pussy has been broken up for years now, only the occasional live bootleg or video surfacing now and again. And as much as we love Harry Pussy, and their amazing studio albums, live is where they really shined, and by shined we mean fell totally apart, erupted into utter chaos, started fights with audience members, punished all within earshot, caused every indie rock noiserocker in the world to fall in love with drummer / vocalist Adris and generally annoyed and brutalized every club owner, promoter or opening band they ever crossed paths with.
But holy shit, did HP pack a wallop. The recent live cd-r we listed, for what it lacked in fidelity, it made up for in spunk, and sheer speaker shredding brutality. So here we have yet another live document. Well, pretty much live. Half the record was recorded in a rehearsal space, the rest live at various locations. And needless to say it all rules. Heavy and noisy and off kilter and unhinged and spastic and wild and chaotic and freaked out and funny and fun and fucked up and GENIUS. HP were like the scarier, more lo-fidelity, less technical, noise obsessed Melt-Banana. Short sharp bursts of frenzied fury, all shrieking and thrashing and pounding, it's a little surprised the grindcore crowd didn't go nuts for HP as they share much sonically, but the sound of HP is so much weirder and unhinged. Some songs fly by in a matter of seconds, others pound away hypnotically for a few minutes. The guitars are gnarled and tangled and atonal, the drums a what-the-fuck splatter, and Adris' vocals a wild banshee wail that switches from hysterical shriek to guttural growl in the blink of an eye.
This collection is awesome, the sound is excellent, the songs destroy, they even do some covers, a Nip Drivers tune, a Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, and they even tackle Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies", and it sounds pretty bad ass. Also included is a single 18 minute live recording, we originally thought it was a live show, but it sounds like ONE LONG TRACK, lots of chiming high end guitars and clouds of cymbal sizzle, moaning vocals, a bit like a stumbling off kilter Sunroof! The disc finishes off with 10 more live tracks, the sound super hot and in the red, the band totally on fire, sounding like quite possibly the raddest live band ever, which for that 14 minutes they almost definitely were. and we get a good dose of Adris' goofy cute stage banter to boot!
