Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Grave Is A Grim Horse, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like A Grave Is A Grim Horse, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNN))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combos�
So it took the rest of the world a while to catch on. Don't be too hard on them. Harvey Milk are one difficult proposition. Don't blame us though. We've been there all along trying to convince everybody just how brilliant this bafflingly bizarre sludge combo really was. Andee even reissued their seminal Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on his tUMULt label. And don't blame Henry at Chunklet, the man responsible for this here document. In fact he was right there every step of the way, a one man Harvey Milk archivist and booster club. And of course we don't blame you, loyal AQ list readers, cuz we know you feel the same way we do, you just can't get enough of Harvey Milk's pummeling, crushing, obtuse and confusional heaviness. Well for you, and for us, and for the heavy music lovers of the world who have yet to discover the difficult joy of Harvey Milk, life is is about to get a whole lot sweeter.
Courtesy And Good Will is getting reissued again, on Relapse, any day now, there's a BRAND NEW Harvey Milk record due sometime in the next month or so, there are rumors of a deluxe reissue of the long out of print Harvey Milk debut, a serious holy grail, My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, maybe with an extra disc, and then there's THIS. Four long years in the making, and it was worth every single second. Most of us who dig Harvey Milk, even those of us who might go so far as to say we are obsessed, never actually got to see the band play live. And this three and a half hour DVD collection of live shows spanning over 12 years is just as much a revelation as we knew it would be.
From super grainy early live footage, when the band was much more of a punk rock, Touch And Go / AmRep sort of beast, you can, out of the corner of your eye, see the sludginess and fuckedupness creep up through the music, slowly and subtly infusing every song and sound with some ineffable something, that helped turn Harvey Milk into a band that sounded unlike any other band, then or now. Theirs was a career trajectory based entirely on getting weirder and sludgier and more obtuse and WAY more difficult and fucked up, a bit like the Melvins, but without the unexpected mainstream success and major label deal. Harvey Milk also unexpectedly shifted gears for a while, letting their ZZ Top obsession take control, and becoming impossibly groovy and rocking, which only lasted a single record before the band returned EVEN MORE damaged and slow and brutal, as if that was even possible.
The band look so unassuming, frontman Creston Spiers just an every day Joe until he opens his mouth and unleashes that impossible low banshee-like howl, bass player Stephen Tanner, with his weird, fey, Doogie Howser look, goofy smile and even goofier sexy hip swivel. And the drums, the drummers... Harvey Milk's songs are so full of space, so slow and stretched out, the drums are often the only thing holding the songs together. Whether they are shuffling in the background, or pounding out a massive slow motion throb, it's the drums that allow the guitars to spin off into space and the songs to unfurl into confusing super spacious epics.
Probably the most amazing part of the disc is when Creston wields a sledgehammer, pounding an anvil in time with the downtuned bass and pounding drums, while howling in that anguished banshee wail of his. Normally it would be weird to see a band set-up like that -- bass, drums and sledgehammer -- but somehow, for Harvey Milk it seems perfect. Creston swaying back and forth, cradling the hammer like it was a guitar, while the band pounds out a sludgy dirge behind him. So good! Woven in to the older material are plenty of long slow drawn out moody post rockisms, with drifting simple mournful melodies, and mumbled crooned vocals that eventually build into the epic whirls of swirling sludge we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
The biggest surprise here is how much footage there is from the band's "ZZ Top period," a stretch that on record only lasted a single album, but live seemed to have spanned several years. A wild and hair twirling, head banging super groovy sort-of-Southern rock with howled and yelped superrock vocals, less obviously sludgy, but still ultra heavy. This was never really a favorite sound for lots of Milk fans (although it is Allan's favorite) but seeing these songs performed live is enough to convince us that maybe we were WAY off and this stuff is some of the best Harvey Milk EVER!!!
It sounds like southern rock filtered through the Melvins. Or Ram Jam played by the Corrupted. It's just so awesome to watch with drummer Kyle Spence's massive Boham-esque kit (complete with Bonham's logo on the bass drum head) a huge gong, just tearing it up Bill Ward style holding the whole thing together... And because of the film stock and the sound and the style, it's almost feels like watching some recently unearthed German television footage of some ultra heavy long lost proto metal band from the seventies, they even whip out a little "Pinball Wizard!" Someone needs to reissue The Pleaser now. C'mon!! Maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind when it first came out, but we're pretty sure that record would kick our asses now!
After that, the band sort of drifted off and disappeared, before resurfacing in 2005, as a much grungier, hairier looking Milk, all jeans and long hair and Voivod t-shirts, and they sound like it too. A return to the impossibly glacial dirge of Courtesy, but even heavier and somehow more even more fucked up sounding. Like Sabbath at 16rpm, massive lumbering, blown out sludgerock divinity. How many ways can we say it. WE LOVE HARVEY MILK!!! THEY ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT ONE OF THE GREATEST BANDS OF THE LAST 20 YEARS!!
There's also a DVD Easter egg (thanks Jace!): just go to the credits menu and push up until "40 Watt '93" is highlighted, for some footage from an April Fool's show where the band tackle three R.E.M. covers, taken from a show where the band covered R.E.M.'s Reckoning in its entirety. Seriously! (the also once did a whole set of Hank Williams covers, let's pray someone has a tape of that stashed!) It's pretty dang cool to see one generation of Athens rock take on another. And they don't really sludge it up all that much, playing 'em pretty straight, but managing to make them -almost- sound like Harvey Milk originals!
Also included is a four song 3"cd containing previously unreleased, super rare tracks, one of which is their version of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain"!!!
And of course the packaging is breathtaking. Designed by Stephen O'Malley and Henry Chunklet, it's a gorgeous oversized DVD style, fold over interlocking cardstock sleeve, greenish brown, with O'Malley's instantly recognizable graphic shards in dark brown, the title in embossed reflective silver, inside copious liner notes from Henry printed in metallic silver, the back has an angular H and M diecut, through which you can see the inside sleeve, a black folded cardstock gatefold with silver metallic ink which houses both the DVD and the 3" cd affixed to the inside on little nubs. So awesome!
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 COPIES!!!!!!!!
We love doom sludge dirgelords Harvey Milk. That should be painfully self evident by now. So you can imagine how thrilled we've been with the recent spate of HM action. A brand new record!! (reviewed elsewhere on this list) A mind blowing DVD documentary (last week's record of the week) and this, a deluxe reissue of perhaps Harvey Milk's finest moment, an all time doom dirge slowcore sludge classic, Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men. Until recently, Courtesy was available on our very own Andee's tUMULt label, in a super swank, hand assembled, die cut, letter pressed sleeve, designed to replicate the original vinyl release. But as the supply of those dwindled, and interest in the Milk began to soar, Relapse leapt into the fray and offered to re-issue it with a bonus disc! So here we have it. The packaging, while maybe not as cool as the handmade version, is still quite striking, but the real attraction here is the addition of a bonus disc, Live At TT The Bears, a previously cd-r only release, long out of print, that features HM at their Courtesy prime, completely laying waste, proving they could create the same malevolent beauty live, in front of a crowd that sounds like it couldn't number more than 20 people. But oh how we envy those lucky souls. So basically, if you're new to Harvey Milk, but are a fan of any sort of slow, heaviness, that for the love of all that is unholy, pick this up, it is your new favorite record. And if you already have a copy, well, if you're as obsessed with HM as we are, you'll just have to buy it again. The bonus disc is SO worth it. Here's us gushing about Courtesy way back when the tUMULt version first came out:
Crushing and pummeling majestic beauty, interspersed with delicate moments of hushed whispery strum. Lumbering downtuned hyper-rhythmic skull crack dropped delicately into suffocating expanses of near silence. Delicate pointillist piano mutates into a dirgey exercise in tension that sounds like a lost Dario Argento soundtrack performed by the Melvins. Lilting and melancholy near-ballads are disrupted by incessant and brutally heavy riffs. Amidst the pummel and beneath the negative space swirls a barely audible maelstrom of whispered vocals, warbling turntables and whirring vacuum cleaners, all adding to the confusional brilliance that is Harvey Milk. And their heart wrenching cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" features what has to be the most tortured and anguished vocal performance ever recorded.
Too heavy to be post rock. Too weird to be metal. Too everything to be anything, Harvey Milk are unconventional and wholly unique, both structurally and sonically, touching on territory mined by the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Codeine, Queen, Husker Du, Man Is The Bastard, the Melvins, and ZZ Top, but slowing it down, making it HEAVY, and fucking it up. Making it more beautiful, while making it difficult to listen to at all.
Hypnotic, repetitive and jarring. Unpredictable, exhausting and perplexing.
And although we do get carried away now and again, and declare certain records best ever, and weirdest ever, without any trace of hyperbole or irony, we can unequivocally proclaim that Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men is quite possibly, the greatest, heaviest, weirdest, saddest, most beautiful record ever made. Seriously.
The droning dirgelike beauty that is Harvey Milk's legendary Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men record, finally get's a deluxe digital reissue on our very own Andee's tUMULt label!
Crushing and pummeling majestic beauty, interspersed with delicate moments of hushed whispery strum. Lumbering down-tuned hyper-rhythmic skull crack dropped delicately into suffocating expanses of near silence. Delicate pointillist piano mutates into a dirgey exercise in tension that sounds like a lost Dario Argento soundtrack performed by the Melvins. Lilting and
melancholy near-ballads are disrupted by incessant and brutally heavy riffs. Amidst the pummel and beneath the negative space swirls a barely audible maelstrom of whispered vocals, warbling turntables and whirring vacuum cleaners, all adding to the confusional brilliance that was Harvey Milk. And their heart wrenching cover of Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" features what has to be the most tortured and anguished vocal performance ever recorded.
Too heavy to be post rock. Too weird to be metal. Too everything to be anything, Harvey Milk were unconventional and wholly unique, both structurally and sonically, touching on territory mined by the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Codeine, Queen, Husker Du, Man Is The Bastard, the Melvins, and ZZ Top, but slowing it down, making it HEAVY, and fucking it up. Making it more beautiful, while making it difficult to listen to at all.
Hypnotic, repetitive and jarring. Unpredictable, exhausting and perplexing.
Comes in a beautiful gatefold, letterpressed, silkscreened cover, replicating (in miniature) the LPs original cover.
2005 postscript: Harvey Milk freaks rejoice!! With the sudden surge in interest in all things sludge-y and doomy and drone-y, as well as loads of HM-specific attention, Harvey Milk have decided to reform, tour and record a brand new album!! FUCK YEAH!
It's weird to think that there was a time when it was practically impossible to get a Harvey Milk record. We spent ages trying to track down any information about these guys, looking for their Courtesy And Good Will lp, trying to decipher the mystery of the My Love Is Higher album cover. A random sequence of events led to Andee reissuing Courtesy on tUMULt, which was later snapped up by Relapse. And after that, things started to snowball, singles collections, reissues, and lo and behold a new album, the band back together again, and touring! Finally taking their rightful place at the head of the heavy rock table where they always belonged. Only now, they're the elder statesmen instead of the young upstarts. But hell, they still sound way heavier and more alive than any of the current crop of heavies. And this brand new disc just seals the deal.
And as if the band weren't heavy enough, they've added Mr. Joe Preston (Thrones/Melvins/Earth/High On Fire/etc.) to the group. And the results are pretty stellar. Not only do the band still crush and destroy (they couldn't really get any heavier, could they?) but they're even more melodic. In some strange twist, they seem to have melded the classic rock tendencies of Pleaser era Milk, with the infuriatingly and brilliantly repetitive dirge of Courtesy, creating something both epic and catchy, hooky and heavy, and insanely obtuse and difficult.
The opening track begins with Creston singing in a delicate falsetto, over simple strummed guitar, and then the bomb drops, and the band explode into some post-Melvins, post-Killdozer dirgey crawl, but even at their most sludgiest, they still manage to sound incredible. It's like some pop band got flayed alive and shoved in a bubbling tar pit. Only to emerge a stumbling lurching dripping beast. Epic grinding riffage and classic rock leads give way to an extended chugscape, over and over and over, the vocals suddenly sounding all Gibby-like, the guitar so distorted it crumbles and falls like sodden chunks through the grill of your speaker, until the very end when the vocals transform into a line from the Beatles' "A Day In The Life", and then they finish off with their own version of -that- famous chord. What the fuck?
The next track begins all Led Zep, huge booming drums, until in swings the riff, and vocalist Creston Spiers wounded howl. Then there's "After All I've Done For You" a super dense tangled riffscape that recalls Don Caballero or Bastro, with it's furious mathiness, but it is Harvey Milk, so it of course mutates into a slow motion doomdirge complete with fucked up backwards production.
Our favorite track might be "Motown", with it's soaring melody, and super hooky main riff. A total pop classic albeit one bathed in guitar crunch, and delivered in a feral croon. Some killer leads seal the deal, and some almost Eagles like guitar harmonies. Then there's "Roses", which begins all gentle piano, and guitar harmonics, and Creston's plaintive warble, before slipping into something a little sludgier and sloooooooooooow. Very Courtesy sounding for sure. Near the end, "Barn Burner explodes into another frenzy of mathy riffage, proving again that HM are not a slow motion one trick pony. But it's not just a riff fest, there are some gorgeous harmonies, and some amazing guitar playing going on.
Finally the band finish off with a bang. The nearly nine minute "Good Bye Blues", an impossible slow trudge, peppered with little jagged chunks of riff, plenty of space, stop start weirdness, an almost classic rock sounding bridge, all tangled soaring leads and manic drumming, only to slip back into epic dirgery, and finishing off with a goofy little burst of 'Milked polka and a big Gong Show goooooong. Irreverent, goofy, funny, but somehow still deadly serious, musically merciless, creating epic skull crushing doomscapes one second, whispered balladry the next, and fucked up mathy what-the-fuck the very next, and thus remaining still, without a doubt, one of the best bands in the world.
This is the fancy Japanese double disc edition, which is the only one we're carrying right now, since we figured that most folks into Harvey Milk are WAY into Harvey Milk, and wouldn't mind paying a little extra for a whole extra disc, not to mention some fancy Japanese gatefold packaging. If you really want the cheaper domestic single disc version, just ask, we can order it for you, but heck? Why would you. Who can argue with MORE Harvey Milk? Not us. SO here we have a whole second disc of MORE. Basically, it's the whole record, in demo form, which means, that it's instrumental, and that the arrangements and recordings are dramatically different. Some songs are truncated, others are way stretched out, some changed dramatically between the demo and the album, some remained almost the same, but in both cases, these versions are fantastic. And you know it's something when a band's demos sound better than most other band's actual albums. But as if that weren't enough, there's also an unreleased Leonard Cohen cover! "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy" And HM fans will remember what these guys can do with a Cohen track, as is evidenced by "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" on Courtesy. This one is similar, not quite as anguished, but close, dark and strangely haunting, Creston's vocals more retrained, but still raw and raspy and deep, over a simple strummed guitar, a mournful lament, which in true HM fashion finishes off with some retarded super effected riffing that sort of grinds and noodles until a computer voice intones "This cellphone is a piece of shit."
How can you not love Harvey Milk?! You can't. You just can't. So buy this. It's probably the best record you'll buy this year, and for lots of you, it will immediately become the best record you own. All hail the Milk!
As mentioned above, this comes in a super swank full color Japanese style mini gatefold, with an obi, and multiple printed inserts, track listing, a bunch of Japanese text, and lyrics in English!
Around these parts, a new record from sludgelords Harvey Milk barely requires a review. They are the rulers of the slow and low, every record equally heavy and catchy, crushing and complex, glacial and epic. And this live set is no different. Their very first European performance EVER, recorded last year, jam packed with tons of our favorite HM jams, very little stage banter, or even crowd sounds, the band just plow through song after song, barely pausing to catch their breath, and as you might imagine, it's breathtaking, and the sound is as good as any of their records proper, the drums dense and chaotic, the guitars impossibly massive and downtuned, the bass a wall of rib cage rattling rumble, and the vocals, Creston Spiers and Joe Preston offer up some incredible harmonies, incredible mostly cuz the two of them have voices like molasses being poured out of a cement mixer, growly and raspy moaning bellows, but together, they sound practically angelic (if you're imagining filth encrusted fallen angels drowning in a tarpit, that is). The sound is ace, the band is tight as fuck, what more do you need to know? Well, probably that it's wicked limited, pressed on clear yellow vinyl, comes with a printed insert with photos and liner notes from both the label and the band, and if that all's not enough, they totally nail a crushing grinding blown out cover of Fear's "We Destroy The Family"! WAY RECOMMENDED, grab one while you can...
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. What an awesome title. And the record cover, a bull and a rooster and an ornate candle, the words Harvey Milk in tiny blue type over the rooster. On the cd, the text: "Harvey Milk is Cronos, Mantis, Abadon". Song titles like�"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I",�"The Anvil Will Fall" and "Merlin Is Magic". By now most avid AQ customers are very familiar with the mysterious sludge rock power trio Harvey Milk, but when we first laid hands on this disc, back in 1994, we had no idea what to think. As if�the artwork wasn't enough to have us scratching our heads, the music inside was even more willfully difficult. And still is. Obviously borne of some serious Melvins worship, Harvey Milk, took the already difficult sound of the Melvins to new heights, or depths, crafting lengthy sludge jams, packed with as much space as riffs, long expanses of spastic John Bonham like drumming, vocals a whiskey soaked gravelly bellow, guitars thick black sheets. This was without a doubt some of the strangest music we had ever heard. But at the same time, somehow the most beautiful. The sound�of Harvey Milk was some impossible blend of noise rock, math rock, post rock, punk rock, twentieth century composition and METAL. All tangled into one huge gnarled black hole of sound. A sound that crawls more than it rocks, but when it does rock, it blows away pretty much any other band in the land.�
Lots of you no doubt already own Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men, arguably one of the greatest records EVER, heavy, sludgy or otherwise. If you don't you need to stop reading for a second and go buy it right now. We'll wait...........
Okay, Courtesy was HM record number two, and found the band 'tightening' up their sound, taking the chaos of My Love, and crafting it into, well, more chaos. It's hard to say how they changed between these two records. My Love is a tiny bit faster. The best way to describe it is like this:�My Love is to Courtesy, the way Nirvana's Bleach is to Nevermind, more immediate and raw, but with some of the best songs the band ever wrote, and like Bleach, it's a record that tons of fans continue to insist is the best thing they've ever done. And while we are of the mind that Courtesy is in fact the best Harvey Milk record ever (unless you ask Allan, who would probably say The Pleaser, the -other- HM reissue this week, a killer disc of Harvey Milked ZZ Top worship) returning to My Love has us maybe reconsidering. We can't actually decide. There are so many amazing songs on My Love that we had forgotten about, as good as anything on Courtesy. It would probably be more realistic to proclaim�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be /�Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men as the ultimate math-sludge-slow-motion-dirge-doom-whatever one-two punch EVER. Maybe the greatest first and second record combo of all time. Needless to say, if you're at all into the current crop of slow motion doom mongers, and have somehow missed out on these records, you will lose your fucking mind (and odds are loads of you have never heard My Love as it's been out of print for ages). It's no exaggeration when we say every song on My Love is darn near perfect. But a few of our favorites:
"A Small Turn Of Human Kindness" was the absolute first peep we ever heard out of HM, and it's brutal and beautiful, so utterly confusing and unlike anything ever. A�frustratingly obtuse abstract jam, even calling it a jam is stretching the definition of the word jam, there's LOTS of space, the track begins with a minute of weird electronic noodling, a huge wash of cymbals and guitar scrape, a killer BIG drum fill, and then... nothing... a weird barely there buzz, some cymbal dings, a moaning cello.... How amazing is that?!?!? It isn't until halfway through the song before the riff finally kicks in, and even then, it's like pulling teeth to get these guys to let loose and rock. In fact, it's not until the last two minutes that the band really go for it. And it was worth the wait, but before you know it comes�"Women Dig it", slowing everything waaaaaaaaay back down. A super drawn out exercise in tension and release, with long stretches of just drums, big Zeppelin style drums, accompanied by mewled vocal, but which features one of the most awesome riffs EVER, so much so, that when it kicks in, it makes you want to rock the fuck out, which you could do if it wasn't just played once every couple minutes.... oh the glorious frustration!!! It's the sort of riff most bands would not only kill for, but that most bands would repeat over and over and over and base a whole song� around, whereas the Milk kick out that riff maybe twenty times, in the whole song, and all clumped together, with the rest of the song spent plodding and drifting and doing anything but locking into a killer groove. But that's what makes Harvey Milk so great, when that riff DOES drop, it's a ridiculous release, like an orgasm, this unbelievable rock-out relief, but like with most things it's the wait, the build up, that is the best part. Or at least the 'other' best part.
Another classic Milk track is�"The Anvil Will Fall", a moody drifting whispery ballad, peppered by huge bursts of downtuned pummel,�when out of nowhere, in come the strings, some patriotic hymn, an almost recognizable tune that Creston sings along too in his warbly raspy croon, even kicking it up into a wicked falsetto, before petering back out into the original hushed crawl, eventually launching into a super moving moody goddamned ANTHEM. The sort of song that should have sludge fans teary eyed with hat in hand, and hand over heart. And finally...
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", besides being the best song title maybe EVER, it's also one of the greatest songs ever, a really really�fucking weird song, howled tortured vocals over a relentless tribal drum fill with occasional bursts of Zeppelin like riffage,�before the guitar transforms into a static rumbling drone, and the drums just sort of do whatever the hell they want, for ever it feels like...�and then the band launches back into it and it's some relentless bastardized groovy Southern sludge jam, but like all HM songs, they stop not long after to just sort of wander, and plod and wait, and pause, before doing it all over again....
We could go one and on, and get all mushy and fanboy about every single song on�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be, but you get the drift. This record is magical. Majestic. Freaked out. Furious. Heavy as anything you've ever heard. Strangely pretty. Mind meltingly difficult. Crushing. Confusing. Baffling. Brutal. And pretty much one of our favorite records ever...
It's funny, for years, you couldn't find a Harvey Milk record to save your life. Reissues, cd-r's, rumors about the band all trickled out and were lapped up by all of us ravenous doomdrone hounds desperate for more music from this mysterious Southern dirge rock behemoth. Then suddenly, a few years back, things began to change, Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men got reissued on Andee's tUMULt label, a cd compilation of singles came out, and then the Kelly Sessions. We were loving it. But then it all stopped. Nothing. Until we started hearing rumors again about reissues and more excitingly, a reformed HM and a new record!! And you know what? The rumors were true, the band is back together, and just released this here brand new album. Hot on the heels of the amazing DVD we raved about last list, and alongside a double disc reissue of Courtesy (with a bonus live disc!) reviewed elsewhere on this list, Special Wishes makes us want to just lay down and weep. That's how much we love this band. And how long we have been dreaming about this day. Very few bands can inspire such ridiculous loyalty and utter fanboy obsession. But Harvey Milk are pretty much unlike any band ever. When ranking the weirdest heaviest, GREATEST bands of all time in our heads, Harvey Milk are ALWAYS there, and almost always in the top 5, and depending on our mood, often in the number one spot.
With most bands, we tend to recommend older albums, you know, the new one is for fans only, but if you don't already own any records start with this other one. But even if you've never heard Harvey Milk, Special Wishes will undoubtedly convert you to the way of the Milk. And you WILL have a new favorite band.
The record starts with "I've Got A Love" a crushing pounding slow motion jam, with howled anguished vocals (that Allan thought sounded like Eugene from Oxbow) and thick walls of downtuned guitar, and some weird grinding background drone. SO heavy and glacial it makes the Melvins sound like Blink 182. OK, maybe that's not entirely true, but you know what we're getting at. The next two tracks are equally dirgey, and brutal and impossibly, infuriatingly slow and heavy. But then comes "Once In A While" a groovy classic rock / Southern rock jam, that sounds like Paw on 16 rpm, pretty and melodic, but somehow still way too heavy and creepily ominous. Up next is the appropriately titled "Instrumental" which combines HM's pummeling sludge, with some seriously acrobatic prog rock arrangements, like a super heavy Don Cab. Two more tracks of crushing glacial beauty, plodding brutality, pop hooks buried beneath two tons of guitar sludge, completely and mesmerizingly pulverizing. Then it's The One. Our favorite song of the year. A song so completely unlike anything Harvey Milk has ever recorded, but somehow a song that couldn't have come from anyone else. "Old Glory", the tale of a flag, or THE flag, a strangely beautiful pop song, finger picked acoustic guitar, gorgeous melodic crooning, and a sudden burst of lush psychedelic guitar harmonies, eventually the band kicks in, with massive guitars and probably the most kick ass classic rock guitar lead to ever grace an underground rock record. Full on "Freebird" shit. Wow. One of those songs that we listen to over and over and over. A song that sounded so totally out of place on first listen (although we loved it immediately) but became sort of the heart of the record for us. The final track is almost even weirder. "Mother's Day" is a massive and majestic epic, warm warbly organs, dreamy violin playing a mournful melody, with "God Bless America" melodies all over the place, when the band finally kicks in, it's like the underground doomdirgesludge version of that last song all cock rock and classic rock bands play live, huge soaring chords, everyone swaying back and forth, lighters held high, it sounds like a pisstake, but at the same time it sounds so fucking good. Which is pretty much an apt description of Harvey Milk in general. Confusing and confounding, crushing and majestic. But totally fucked up and emotional and brilliant, and still as far as we're concerned quite possibly the greatest band EVER.
Got a few more copies of this final Harvey Milk album from '97. It's very different from their tUMULt release (the cd reissue of the '95 "Goodwill And Courtesy..." LP) which was super-heavy dronemetal to outdo the Melvins, but "The Pleaser" is still a great
Who would've though this would ever come to pass?! Those of you who love things slow and sludgy and heavy, should be on your knees, thanking whatever god you pray to, for allowing this divine musical covenant to be placed in your dirty, filthy unworthy hands!
Harvey Milk were Atlanta's answer to the Melvins, but slowed waaaaaaaay down and spaced waaaaaay out. Songs so spare but somehow so impossibly heavy, riffs so thick that they threaten to clog your speakers and rhythms so stretched out that they can barely be called rhythms. Add in a serious free jazz + ZZ Top obsession and you've got the recipe for one of the greatest, heaviest bands EVER. They recorded two brilliant full lengths (with their original lineup), one of which was re-issued on Andee's tUMULt label a couple years ago. And we thought then, sadly that we had heard the end of HM forever. But along comes Relapse to save the day, collecting all of Harvey Milk's impossibly rare 7"s and compilation tracks onto one black-hole-heavy chunk of aluminum. Most singles collections allow you to trace the development of a band, watching them slowly turn into the band you already know and love, but this collection proves that HM spontaneously combusted, emerging from their tarpit womb a fully formed, lumbering, molten, sludge rock colossus. From plodding, 3 mph sludgy, dirgy Melvins's worship, to chaotic noisy caveman thud, to Codeine-ish slow motion mood rock, to spare, rhythmic bass and drums space-scapes with demonic, anguished howls and Hendrix like riffs dipped in tar and sprinkled with wild peals of head-shearing feedback, to semi-acoustic tear jerkers, with warbly barely-in-key vocals, I mean, they even do a fucking Peter Criss solo song! How brilliant is that! Harvey Milk confounds as much as they just flat out destroy. How the fuck does a three piece rock band actually sound like they're playing on the wrong speed?! It's as if the entire band had a pitch control knob, and they keep turning it down and down and dooooown. And playing drums for this band must be utter hell. Massive expanses of space, demarcated by pounding beats, spread so far apart they just barely make up a rhythm, with enough space between beats for the drummer to get up, go to the bar, have a cigarette, and make it back in plenty of time for the next beat. So minimal and hypnotic and difficult and heavy, it just blows all other sludge rock hopefuls back to the stoneage. And even in the context of a 'singles collection', songs that were never meant to be together on a record, this stuff falls so perfectlyinto place, you would never know this wasn't conceived as a proper record. Yet another testimony to the under-appreciated genius of the mighty Harvey Milk. Liner notes from AQ pal and Chunklet head honcho Henry Owings. Essential for those of you who love Boris, Corrupted, Earth, Sunn 0))) and the like, as well as their massively head crushing opus Courtesy And Goodwill Towards Men!
It's kind of a no brainer around here, a new Harvey Milk is cause for much rejoicing, and often means shoo-in for Record Of The Week. What can we say? We LOVE these guys. Perhaps one of our favorite heavy weirdo sludge bands ever. Andee even released their legendary Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men on his tUMULt label, before Relapse swooped in and snatched it up. NO ONE sounds like Harvey Milk, NO ONE, and it's ironic that pretty much every band these days wants to, cuz they've sounded the same for years and years and remained patently unpopular almost the whole time.
As if to drive that fact home (not the unpopular fact, the 'always sounded like this' fact), here's the Harvey Milk holy grail, the original debut record, recorded by Bob Weston in the early nineties, after which the band took it home and promptly lost it. And lost it remained, barring a few dubious and crap sounding bootlegs, and more recently some posted downloads of the same crappy recordings. Since folks were gonna listen to it anyway, the band figured what the fuck, they oughta take the best sounding tape they had, and get it all remastered and gussied up and released properly. And voila, the long lost self titled Harvey Milk record, featuring on its cover, perhaps THE tape where it all started.
Fair warning to the uninitiated, lots of these songs were reworked and re-recorded for other albums, this record was lost after all, so a bunch of these, in altered forms, made it onto My Love, Courtesy, the Kelly Sessions, but it's a gas to hear them here, rough and raw, in some cases dramatically different than their later versions, but that probably only matters to HM newbies, the cult of HM (ourselves included) are a dedicated and obsessed bunch, and even though we have most of these songs, we HAD to have it, and odds are a lot of you will feel the same. Plus, we have to say, the rough and raw recording definitely suits these jams. And the sound, so heavy and punishing, it's hard to imagine what folks thought of these guys back in the day, not very much we'd imagine. This crushing difficult heaviness, exactly what made them our immediate favorite band from first listen is precisely what turns off most other folks.
But if you've made it this far, we'll assume you, like us, have a think for Harvey Milk. And thus, you NEED this, everything about HM that you love is already fully formed even nearly 20 years ago, the crushing glacial pummel, the killer drum pound, the impossibly slow and yet ultra complex arrangements, the insanely emotive howled vocals, it's like these guys emerged fully formed from the band womb.
But a quick whip through the tracks should sway any nonbeliever, "Merlin Is Magic" is an epic melodic sludge prog masterpiece, with weirdly melodic vocals, and lurching hypnotic arrangement, "Dating Pressures" is total classic noiserock, laced with downtuned chug, pounding drum damage, but all Milked up with a howling vocal, and some lurching convoluted progginess, "Plastic Eggs" is the quintessential Milk slow motion doomjam, so slow, so anguished, so heavy, "Anthem" is downright jangly, but still a crushing bruiser, fuck it, you should know by now that this is essential, if you already dig the band, you're gonna go nuts for this, if you've never heard HM before, we might recommend Courtesy or My Love first, but at the same time, we can't imagine anyone listening to this, and not losing their shit and becoming immediately obsessed, and if for some reason, a person did hear this and was not utterly blown away, well, then we think the problem must be you!
Cool mini, lp style sleeve, with a simple photo of a (THE?) Harvey Milk cassette on the cover, the inside sleeve with liner notes on one side and a picture of the Milk van on the other, and last but not least, a mini reproduction of what looks like a promotional HM photo, complete with 'For booking call:' info, which is hilarious whether it's a joke or not.
We realized a list or two back, that we had somehow managed to make it to list 200-and-something without ever listing any records by Ukrainian black metal horde Hate Forest. Which obviously needed to be rectified since pretty much all the metal inclined folks we know LOVE Hate Forest. So we listed Nietzscheism, a sort of greatest hits, with the intention of digging in to their catalog, and giving all the AQ list metalheads a chance to pick up some of these amazing discs.
So here we have Purity, recorded back in 2002, another perfectly frosty, relentlessly buzzing slab of intense and furious black metal. Just like all of their other records, the sound of Hate Forest here is not fancy or fucked or convoluted or complex, just simple, ultra aggressive, ultra fast, grim and chilly, the perfect sonic representation of the snow cloaked Ukrainian forest. A blast of blurry black metal that over the course of the album spreads out into a thick black drone, a bleak mesmerizing whir, thick with buried melodies and growled demonic howls. A thick squirming blackness that swallows you whole and leaves you shivering and alone, praying for death, as the oppressive black hole heaviness crushes you into the frozen ground.
We realized a list or two back, that we had somehow managed to make it to list 200-and-something without ever listing any records by Ukrainian black metal horde Hate Forest. Which obviously needed to be rectified since pretty much all the metal inclined folks we know LOVE Hate Forest. So we listed Nietzscheism, a sort of greatest hits, with the intention of digging in to their catalog, and giving all the AQ list metalheads a chance to pick up some of these amazing discs.
So here we have Sorrow, Hate Forest's most recent and final full length, and besides being a seriously dense and buzz drenched slab of blackness, it has one of the most amazing covers ever, a barren mountainside covered in leafless dead trees, the sort of photo you can stare at and get lost in, which is exactly the sort of black web these guys weave.
Sharing members with Drudkh, Dark Ages, Astrofaes, Nokturnal Mortum and probably every black metal band in the Ukraine, the now defunct Hate Forest offered up a relentless buzzsaw blast of white hot lightning fast black metal, blast beats all over the place, a near static wall of fuzz, riffs so serpentine and furiously fast, they almost become a solid black buzz. Melodies surface here and there but only briefly, quickly swallowed up by the churning downtuned whirl of whirring furious brutality.
Nothing subtle, or even that weird, no intricate tempos or convoluted song structures, this is pure cult grim blackness, a million miles an hour, a buzzing black bullet aimed straight for the depths of hell. So fast and relentless, that it becomes so hypnotic and dronelike that you almost can't help but drift into a glorious black dreamstate. Awesome.
Includes a big booklet with more breathtaking photos of snow covered mountains, rushing rivers, forests and fjords.
What a difference a name makes, oh ok, and an extra member. The UK's Abandon, formerly a tortured suicidal black metal one man outfit, has changed their name to Hateful Abandon, added a fella called Swine to the lineup, and the result is really strange and unexpected.
Abandon, before the name change, trafficked in a super harsh and hateful black metal along the lines of Xasthur or Leviathan, buzzing riffs, deep depressive blackness, laced with hysterical shrieking vocals. But on Famine, gone is ALL of the buzz, and much of the vocal hysteria, in its place, something equally depressive, but sonically completely removed from the black metal of its former incarnation. The sound here is all clean guitars and simple loping drums, deep moody basslines, more gloom and goth than blast and buzz. Joy Division is the obvious reference. The occasional blackened shriek being the only reminder that this band was once grim and harsh. But hell, c'mon, the sound doesn't need to be grim and harsh for the vibe to be. and the vibe here is definitely grim and bleak, and sorrowful and depressive. Much like the recently reviewed Frail cassette, that matched up black metal vox with Cure-ish eighties new wave, Hateful Abandon subtly infuse a bit of blackness into what would otherwise be just a slab of gloomy miserablist gothic slowcore. Which would be fine with us of course, but the mix is pretty bizarre, and the result is pretty excellent. Guitars chime and ring out, melodies unfurl lugubriously, the bass is serpentine and soporific, the drums more keeping time than driving the songs, the vocals, lazily drawled, from soft sad boy croon, to deep gothy bellow, to demonic shriek, often in the same song, but the shrieking is in fact kept to a minimum, relying much more on the gloomier less harsh vocals, which definitely makes this something dark and brooding and moody and melancholic, not even remotely heavy, which means this is only for truly adventurous and open minded metalheads, or for the rest of you, who like it dark and creepy and haunting and hypnotic, and might not mind the occasional hellish howl with your doomy dreary dirges...
The latest in killing technology from our very own Andee's tUMULt label! This is the first (and last) release from Chicago's metal mercenaries Hatewave. Completely crushing math/speed/avant/noise/metal/grind.
Hatewave's musical bloodbath is equal parts death metal, free jazz, grindcore, no-wave and pure noise. Furiously brutal, two guitar and drums (no bass!) attack, whirling riffs, bursts of white noise, calculus-style time changes, frantic blast beats, and a barely-under-the-surface free-jazz obsession all coalesce into some of the most insane, lightning speed, technical black metal/grind bombast ever. Featuring ex-Chicago / current SF scene fixture and metal/jazz obsessive, drummer Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers, Lake of Dracula, To Live and Shave in L.A.). Originally this was a limited LP-only release -- this cd version adds 3 bonus tracks from their 1997 demo! The LP (and at the time, soon to be released cd) was banned by some squeamish distributors for its somewhat gory cover art and controversial lyrics, all of which are still present in their throat hacked, head smashed, blood soaked glory!
Let's just get it right out in the open, first thing. This should have been record of the week. It's beautiful, weird as fuck, mysterious, it's two whole discs of far out sounds, it comes with a massive photocopied book, filled with lyrics and text from some mysterious professor, and they're called Have A Nice Life...
BUT, the band decided to not make any more copies, and let us have their last 40. It will probably be available as a download or something in the future, but for now, these are the last 40 physical copies available EVER. And the only way, as far as we know, to get the book as well.
So what's the deal with Have A Nice Life? People are always emailing us about the new wave of shoegaze bands, nu-gaze as some folks like to call it (the same ones who now have us using the term metalgaze), and someone recommended Have A Nice Life, telling us the band was some sort of doom, metal, black metal, gothic, new wave, shoe gaze outfit, so obviously we were pretty curious. So we emailed the band. No response. Emailed the label. No response. Then we just happened to be going through piles of records, and found this one just sitting on the desk, where it must have been for weeks, a cool creepy cover, a color painting of a man's arm, bleeding, the words "the plow that broke the plains" on a black field above it. And it was bundled with a book. Hmmm. With the word Deathconsciousness printed on the front. And wham. It clicked. Those guys had already sent us a copy, which had somehow slipped through the cracks. So we quickly threw it on, and it was everything we had expected, everything we had hoped for, and more. We finally got in touch with the band, who told us they were not going to make any more, but would make one final batch for us.
So here they are.
Two discs, jam packed with dark blissed out shoegazey, new wave-y, slightly metallic nearly perfect pop. The songs insanely varied, but impossible cohesive. Some sort of sprawling bliss rock opera. Each track, perfect on its own, but even more perfect as part of the bigger whole.
The first disc is the prettier and poppier of the two. The opening track is a creepy stretch of Goblin like synth ambience, peppered with simple minor key acoustic guitar, haunting and lovely, which quickly gives way to thick ropy basslines, and reverbed electronic drums, a definitely Joy Division vibe, swirls of thick guitar, gorgeous melodies and heartfelt vocals, it's dirgey and doomy and depressive, but so catchy and poppy. The next track is a big blown out pop epic, all effected vocal harmonies and washed out watercolor guitars, reminding us quite a bit of M83. The rest of the first disc slips easily from gloomy goth pop, to minimal drone, to shimmery shoegaze, often all at once. The disc finishes off with a gloomy dirge, all downtuned grindguitar and pointillist piano. Softly crooned vocals, and a surprisingly catchy melody.
Which perfect leads into the second, darker and heavier disc, which begins with a track the boasts probably the greatest song title EVER: "Waiting For Black Metal Records In The Mail". But don't be expecting any black metal, instead it's a killer slab of eighties style indie doom pop, jangly guitar, propulsive drumming, and killer vocals, all wound into an awesome blast of hooky retro gloom, very reminiscent of the Comsat Angels. Hot on the heels comes another awesomely named song: "Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000", but again the title gives no clue that the song is a lilting mostly acoustic jam, with more piano, sad vocals, minor key melodies, a super reverby eighties production, all set to that Casio keyboard preset metronome rhythm. But about half way through, the track shifts and becomes a pounding rocker, the guitars thick and distorted, the drums pounding, but then all around synths buzz, vocals croon, the heaviness transformed into something much more dreamy and blissy. "The Future" is an aggro, almost no wave workout, all jagged guitars and shouted vocals, and more of that thick throbbing bass, but just like the rest of the tracks, it gets totally twisted around, his time by the addition of fake strings, and yet another killer and totally irresistible hook.
"Earthmover" finishes things off, but instead of being some dirgey doom epic, it's another blissed out popscape, lots and lots of fuzz and buzz, glistening melodies, minimal rhythms, all buried beneath layers of woozy whir and sun dappled sparkle. Almost like a much prettier and poppier Nadja.
And the thing about this record and these songs, is that, they all manage to be outrageously catchy, but not obviously so, and while they straddle about a million different genres, they manage to weave them all seamlessly into each other, making Deathconsciousness feel less like a rock band's collection of songs, and more like one massive organic mass of blackened dronepop jangle-goth bliss. Which as far as we're concerned it actually is.
The packaging is amazing. A slimline dvd case, two cd-r's each hand spray painted, full color cover, super spare and striking, and then there's the book. A dvd sized 80 page book, filled with lyrics, liner notes, woodcuts, engravings, illustrations, and a massive amount of text on the soul, spirituality, death, sorcery, Medieval heresy and more, all supposedly penned by an East Coast professor and scholar.
So awesome!
The first release from this twisted avant shoegaze, black-doom, new wave, industrial psych pop duo, Deathconsciousness, was a sprawling double disc, complete with a huge book filled with lyrics and obscure text, strange illustrations, sonically and conceptually it was utterly stunning, we had been getting emails about that band and record for months before we got our hands on copies, and in our review of that record, we proclaimed that it really SHOULD have been a Record Of The Week, but the band decided to stop making copies, and we had the last copies ever. We were so obsessed with the record that at one point it was even slated to be reissued on Andee's tUMULt label too, but sadly, that never came to fruition either, and we hadn't heard much from Have A Nice Life since, a tape, a cd-r of outtakes, a few live performances, we began fearing the worst, that Deathconsciousness was the first and final proper record we'd hear from these guys.
But now, six years later, local label The Flenser continues their shift from black metal to twisted dark pop and avant heaviness, and reveal a brand new Have A Nice Life record, and we get to right that old wrong, and finally make Have A Nice Life our Record Of The Week, cuz the new record is really damn near as good as the first. And sonically a good fit for The Flenser too, their new even less metal sound settling somewhere right between outfits like Aussie black-jangle noise poppers Loss Of Self and math-doom electro-sludge goth rockers Wreck And Reference. And yeah, HANL were really never metal, and now, they seem to have settled into a sound that's equal part gloomy death rock, noisy jangle pop and nineties style shoegaze, with a weird lo-fi production, almost entirely clean vocals, lots of angular guitars, reverb heavy goth rock drumming, and huge thick swirls of crumbling distortion and psychedelic freakout guitars. The record opens with "Guggenheim Wax Museum", a heady blast of fuzzy, super distorted dirge pop, blown out and shoegazey, with deep, dramatic vocals, and wild squalls of swirling psychedelic noise, like a slo-mo Godspeed fused to a blackened My Bloody Valentine, which bleeds right into "Defenestration Song" a super melodic, gloomy, goth pop gem, all thick fuzzy bass, a little Joy Division, molded into a sort of post industrial doom-gaze death rock with some super dramatic, almost emo vox.
"Burial Society" sets moody pianos amidst a slowly skittering drum machine, beneath crooned hushed vocals, buzzing guitars, sounding almost like a darker, meaner, more underground Deftones (which is a VERY good thing by the way), the same sort of goth informed, dramatic metallic pop, but filtered through a much more fractured and fucked up sonic filter, laced with some surprising vocal oooh's and aaah's that add even more poppiness. "Music Will Untune The Sky" unfurls as a creepy raga like drone, keening, wailing vox, heaving low end swells, lush and layered, slowly blossoming into something darkly melodic and prismatic, before slipping into the confusionally chaotic opening to "Cropsey", a tangle of overlapping samples, buried muted rhythms, chiming barely there melodies, before the song finally explodes in a frenzy of tribal drumming, swirling strings, and more strident death rock vox. "Unholy Life" is some serious, total eighties style goth pop, a little bit new wavey, echo drenched drums, minor key melodies, but with some cool angular metallic guitars, and a wild noisy, psychedelic shoegaze second half, which gets gloriously blown out and blissed out. "Dan And Tim" cranks up the mathy post punk, sinewy and slithery, before transforming into more hazy gloom pop shimmer, the mathiness of the opener continually churning away beneath ethereal swaths of fuzzy guitar and heavily reverbed vocals, blurry and bleary. And finally, closer "Emptiness Will Eat The Witch" is all hushed and dreamlike, buried melodies and muted shimmer, all beneath a hypnotic drone, that shifts subtly, changing timbre and tone, vocals surfacing, the sound coalescing into some dour pop dreaminess, but still darkly droney, it's not until 5 minutes in that the song truly takes off, but instead of exploding into something heavy, the vocals soar and swirl, thick clouds of dreamy, droney vocal harmonies, pulsing and pulsating, peppered with strange abstract percussion, before settling into one final drift, haunting, and hypnotic, and darkly and dreamily mysterious.
So goddamn great, and while it was totally worth the six year wait, let's hope we don't have to wait that long for more...
Oh yeah! Finally, a full length from the best worst rap group EVER. God Albino, Duke Crapmore and Flybot Van Damn are three skinny white guys who absolutely destroy on the mic. Fuck Paul Barman and his wacky 'college guy' shtick, this is the shit. Stupid and funky and juvenile and offensive and so so funny. HGRMWG are like the Geto Boys, if the Geto Boys were immature, whiny, skinny white art-school drop outs. We've been following these guys for a while -- they've contributed standout tracks to all three of the WordSound comps as well as cameos on the Spectre records. Primitive loops, lo-fi recording, ridiculous fake voices, and lots and lots of skits! And ANYONE who bought a Steven Schultz record off the last list, HAS to buy this. In fact, I'm just gonna go through the files and send out copies to those people. You know who you are...
I've been going Hawkwind crazy lately. I [Andee] pretty much missed out on Hawkwind completely the first time around. I was only 2 years old when this record came out. Later, I missed out again, having opted out of the whole high school, pot smoking, parking
This reissue contains the original album plus 5 bonus tracks!
More Hawkwind. And more and more and more. Lately all I [Andee] want to listen to is Hawkwind. Somehow I manged to make it to 32 without hearing Hawkwind ever. And man, did I miss out. "Hall Of The Mountain Grill" seems to be the poppiest of these 4 Hawkwind
If you need a little background on my [Andee's] current Hawkwind obsession see the review for "Doremi Fasol Latido" elsewhere on the list. Needless to say, these records are killing me. How did I mange to miss Hawkwind for all this time. All the stuff I love,
Originally released in 1971. This reissue contains the whole original album plus 3 bonus tracks.
Two discs of sonic mayhem beamed from space through a hazy cloud of pot smoke. Hawkwind are seriously kicking my [Andee's] ass. This is a double live disc of Hawkwind at their best (that would be Lemmy-era). Taking the studio cuts and stretching them out,
The easiest way to describe Hayaino Daisuki is like this: they're the band we always wished existed. Imagine classic eighties metal but about 100 times as fast and furious, or maybe a blasting grind version of power metal, or Iron Maiden crossed with Discordance Axis. That last one being particularly appropriate, seeing as Hayaino Daisuki is the new band of former DA screamer Jon Chang, even though the band do everything in their power to disguise who is in fact in the band, the first record purported to be a bunch of teenage metal girls, this one has a huge booklet with comics and interviews and lyrics, but very little actually band info.
But it hardly matters, once you lay ears on this stuff, you'll be totally and utterly obsessed, it may be only 12 minutes, but if you play it ten times in a row it's 120 minutes, and we DARE you to try to just listen to this once. Music this heavy and fast and furious and brutal should not be this catchy. The riffs are incredible, the drumming insane, the vocals of course are untouchable, and the wild leads and constant shredding harmonies is what pushes this over the top. What more do you need to know than 'Iron Maiden meets Discordance Axis'? Absolutely nothing. But if you're looking for something that totally shred and slays, is crazy catchy, you'd be hard pressed to find something more perfect than this. It's either the most melodic and hook filled shredding grind record ever, or the most blasting brutal grinding power metal record ever. Either way, this totally destroys, and is quickly becoming our favorite 12 minutes of music this year. Now 24 minutes. Now 36 minutes. Now 48 minutes...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Just buy this record. If you've never heard it, then by all means you must. And if you liked them before, I know you've been dying for the definitive cd reissue of what is quite possibly one of the coolest records of the eighties.
Originally released in 1983, Haysi Fantayzee were a boy/girl duo (with a behind the scenes 3rd member), sort of a mix between Toto Coelo ('I Eat Cannibal') and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Super catchy and super stupid. Plus I'm sure you all remember that song 'Shiny Shiny' which was their big hit.
And Kate Garner, the irrestable chanteuse from Haysi Fantayzee, was my first punk rock crush: I mean, a half shirt, leg warmers, fishnet body stocking, leather codpiece, dreadlocks, and an upside down cross on her forehead(!), what was a 13 year old boy to do?! Except maybe masturbate furiously.
This reissue has two bonus tracks and five remixes and is of course, highly recommended by Andee.
Originally released way back in 2000 on Sweet Nothing, UK space psych stompers The Heads' second record, Everybody Knows We Got Nowhere, gets the deluxe reissue treatment it so totally deserves. Cuz listening to this again now, it's crazy how much this foreshadows so much of the psych rock and space rock that's all the rage these days, and still even 14 years on, manages to put loads of those new groops to shame. While there's plenty of spaciness all over Everybody Knows We Got Nowhere, it's a much heavier proposition than most psych/space rock, sounding at times like a supercharged Loop, tranced out psychedelic hypnorock that expands into wild, swirling sprawls of endless jammage, and more often then not loops back into some sort of swaggery garage-psych stomp. But there's plenty of weirdness too, the looped twanginess of "Wobble", the groovy jazziness of "Kraut Byrds", the tripped out deliriously druggy backwards guitarscape "My My", the lo-fi kraut-psych pound of "Chrome Plated", the almost Brit-poppy "Barcoded", which almost sounds like Swervedriver, and of course there are plenty of samples throughout, it's a way weirder record than their debut, Relaxing With The Heads, but somehow, it all manages to coalesce into some tripped out, psychedelic sonic odyssey. It helps that the record is anchored by a handful of monolithic jams that will have fans of White Hills, Carlton Melton, Burnt Hills, Monster Magnet and all the rest, freaking the fuck out. Opener "Legavaan Satellite" sounds like the Stooges covering Spacemen 3 (or the other way around), the guitars so distorted and blown out, the production impossibly in the red, the sound loud as fuck. In between all of the above mentioned weird bits, there's the groovy heavy psych churn of "Could Be...", the extended super distorted low fidelity trip out of "#'75", the hazy, pulsating "Stab Railroad", all dirgey and droned out, the wah wah drenched super psychedelic freakout of "Motorjam" and the nearly 13 minute closer "Long Gone", which fuses almost jazzy drumming, with churning bass buzz, wild squalls of guitars, and dense clouds of FX, all stretched out into a heady drift, that first explodes into some seriously heady psych rock pound, before finishing off with two minutes of druggy, damaged trip out, and then some buzzing sitar like mesmer.
Lots of aQ list readers likely already have this record (though maybe not, we remember it wasn't that easy to find back then), but this new version, in THREE different versions, definitely makes it worth buying again. Except maybe for the vinyl folks not willing to shell out for the 5lp set. Apparently, the 2lp version has only the original record proper. The new cd version, however, tacks on a whole extra disc of rarities and singles and B sides (including the long out of print Man's Ruin 10")!
But really, this record is so good, why not just go for it, go all out and nab the massive FIVE LP box set version (limited to 1000 copies), which comes in a hardcover jacket, wrapped in a specially printed tote bag, with a poster and printed insert, and includes, in addition to the record, AND all those rare tracks you get with the cd version on vinyl, a bonus compact disc ONLY available with the 5lp set, featuring 70 minutes of unreleased material culled from the band's rehearsal tapes and cd-r archives!!
In a world of way too many bands, it seems as if every other group just wants to just plug in, turn on, and turn it up, and somehow sound like some impossible hybrid of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, the Stooges, Monster Magnet and Loop, the result unfortunately but not surprisingly is a lot of pointless psychedelic noise. Sure there are a handful of bands who do manage to pull it off, like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Burnt Hills, Gnod, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, and Heavy Winged, and as much as we do love ALL of those bands, it's safe to say, the Heads still reign supreme. These long running UK spaced out psychedelic riff rockers effortlessly transform a dingy basement packed with amps and a beat up old drum kit, a floor littered with distortion pedals and empty beer bottles into some sort of interdimensional sonic starship, a crushing, blown out, distortion drenched, riff heavy, psychedelic space rock TRIP. And while all the various elements are present, it's what they do with them that counts, and listening to the Heads, and this record again, even years and years later, it really does sound like maybe they're still the only ones who know what do with them.
Relaxing is the band's debut album, originally released in 1996, and even then the band sounded like the heaviest, druggiest, most psychedelic, freaked out band in the land. From the first the very track, now going on 15 years old, this still sounds more fresh, and more heavy than practically any modern psychedelic space rock record we can think of. After a brief sample, and a swirling squall of feedback and distorted effects, the band explode into one of THEE most bad ass riffs ever, and it doesn't let up for the next 70 minutes. Strange distorted processed vocals, layer upon layer of wild psychedelic leads and churning riffage, like an amphetamine fueled Loop jam, or Spacemen 3 if they were into speed instead of acid, the song just spirals into the stratosphere, heavy and hypnotic and totally trancelike, it's somehow totally groove, utterly headbangable, and absolutely transcendent. The band pack more pure heavy space rock energy into the first 4 minutes of their first record, than most bands can hope for over entire careers. But then what to say about what they cram into the next hour, more roiling riffage, wild distorted harmonica (has a harmonica ever sounded so bad ass?), pounding motorik drumming, thick clouds of tangled freaked out psych guitar, thick swaths of effects drenched heaving crush, twisted vocals, the first three songs are like 12 minutes of staring straight into the sun, blinding and incendiary and so intense, it's not until track four that the band dials it down, locking into a sort of Velvets meets Loop groove over the next few songs, but even then, the guitars smoke, the tracks bursting into some dense downtuned chugging throughout, but always returning to a lowslung lumber, "U33" splintering into some heaven born heaviness, which leads into the second batch of relentless space psych howl, the garagey stomp of "Television", the swings from woozy jangle to super mathy almost proggy freak out, while "Woke Up" is another drugged out post Stooges, Monster Magnetized chunk of churn and chug, with a slow build to a heart-of-the-sun climax, "Widowmaker" is more of the same, before "Taken Too Much" gets all slinky and bluesy, a stripped down psychblues creep, which builds to another amp melting lysergic space psych freakout, which leads right into the dizzying, sprawling "Coogan's Bluff", a 45 minute multi part psychedelic garage space rock epic trip, which would be a whole record for any other band, but for the Heads, it's just another song. A fucking insane song, but still. Swinging from droned out fuzz drenched psychedelic krautdirge, with a super intense supernova outro, to echo drenched tribal drummed ambient drift, to woozy midtempo post space rock lope, to almost jangly drug pop, to a furious chugging, effects drenched final freak out, that sounds like all the best parts of Loop and Spacemen 3 piled on top of one another.
As if that weren't enough, the reissue of Relaxing includes a whole BONUS disc which includes their 1991 demo, a mess of singles and B sides, as well as some radio performances, culminating in their very first Peel Session. And if you though the record proper sounded heavy and freaked out, wait til you get a load of the old stuff. Even more raw and damaged and distorted, the 9 minute "Spliff Riff" starts things off with some tweaked clipped effected guitar crunch, some swirling in-the-red FX fug, before finally kicking in, a weird mix of clean guitar jangle, super blown out distortion and almost mechanical sounding drummage, the lo-fi vibe making the Spacemen 3 comparison even more apt, but even in '91, the Heads were a meaner heavier louder take on that same drugged out sound. Totally relentlessly repetitive and hypnotic and trancelike, the nine minutes feeling like forever, but still forever is not nearly long enough. And from there on out, it's another whole disc of head tripping heaviness, lots of raw early versions of tracks from the album proper, but a handful of unreleased jams as well.
All in all, a totally head spinning collection of chaotic lysergic psychedelia and crushing droned out space riff raw power rock, that remains pretty untouchable. This new version, besides including that bad ass bonus disc, is also remastered, cranked way up, with a huge booklet packed with tons of new artwork, loads of photos, old flyers and record covers, as well as extensive new liner notes. Record Of The Week, easy.
AWESOME, REPRESSED!!!! Originally released in 2009, out of print for years. If you missed it, at last here it is again - for a little while anyway. What we said originally...
As much as we dig the new breed of psychedelic space rockers, none of them can touch the Heads, whose sound is some impossible union of Hawkwind, the Stooges and Monster Magnet, able to whip off a 3 minute pounding garage psych jam one minute, and a 30+ minute free form metallic space drone the next, usually choosing to meld the two into super rocking, ur-psych blowouts, sprawling and heavy and blown out and EPIC.
This 2lp live set, recorded while the band were on tour with SF's own Wooden Shjips, finds the Heads in fine form, effortlessly kicking out the jams live, BIG TIME, and in the process offering up a primer for all those young psych rock whipper snappers.
Brooding slow burn space-out to full on supernova lysergic psych meltdown, effects everywhere, swirling clouds of hazy blurred distortion, drums, heavy and pounding and rock solid, but occasionally getting all skittery and abstract, the songs slip from dirgey and doomy to hypnotic and heavy to super rocking and chaotic, the vox (when they do surface) are distorted and howled and buried in the mix, and the riffs, oh the riffs, for all the atmosphere and the vibe and the effects, the riffs slay, the melodies are insanely catchy, the leads stick in your head as if they were the chorus from a pop song, hooks buried everywhere beneath the roiling incendiary space rocking and free form psychedelia.
So goddamn good, the band's already heavy and unhinged sound gets even more far out live, the songs and sounds let loose, the unfurling into super spacious drone drenched spaced out psychedelic heaviness. Fuck yeah.
SUPER LIMITED, once again. Gorgeous Day Of The Dead sixties style psychedelic cover art, thick stock, nice heavy vinyl, killer sound, essential...
This band kicks out raw, spacey, psychedelic acid jams that any psych rock freak who likes it hard and heavy (you! c'mon, stand up!) will spazz over. We've been fans of England's The Heads for years. They put out a few records on the now-defunct Man's Ruin label a while back, and they sure stood out from the general run of the usual stoner rock and punk on that label's roster. But its been much more recently -- in the last year, really, after being exposed to their harder-to-find, post-Man's Ruin output -- that we've realized just how great a band The Heads really are. Really f**kin' great! Carrying the swirling smoke spewing torch of fuzz wah wah fx freak rock handed down from The Stooges and Hawkwind, adding a post-punk edge, The Heads here serve up a sonic maelstrom that makes their Japanese contemporaries like Mainliner and Acid Mothers Temple sound like wimps and poseurs. No US bands come close either, really, but if you dig Comets On Fire and Monster Magnet's garage groove and stoner trance, you'll dig The Head's Under Sided, from three minute riffers like "Dissonaut" to the 29+ minute album closer "Heavy Sea". At long last we've got some import (but inexpensive!) copies of this, their most recent studio album, released last year, recorded in '01. Supply is limited, so act fast or be patient... And we've also got some copies of their brand new live disc, At Last, that we'll review on our next list. The Heads are right on. Super freakin' recommended!
Health, the band, are an entirely unHEALTHY, and thus utterly appealing concoction of manic rhythms, jagged guitars, yowled vocals, all wound into exploding bursts of freaked out noise drenched new wave tribalism. Chaotic, spastic, freaked out, manic, mathy, grindy. It's like the musical version of a diet rich in Pixie Sticks, Lik-M-Aid, licorice whips and Mountain Dew, and it's that imaginary diet that seemingly fuels Health's sound. What else could explain the boundless energy, the intense spazziness, the fractured heaviness, the blown out total rock action?
But as we mentioned in our review of their self-titled debut, as much as we love pretty much everything they do, we like them best when they're drone-y and synthy and drifty and hypnotic, and that is the side that seems to shine through on Disco, a collection of remixes and reinterpretations from a bunch of artists, none of which we recognize except for Crystal Castles, who shared a split with Health a while back.
At first we thought the title Disco was ironic, a pisstake, especially considering the first track. The opener, remixed by Acid Girls, doesn't do much to the original, except loop certain parts, add some noise, some bursts of electronics, none of which would have been that out of place in the original. There is definitely much more of a dance-y groove, but it's almost more New Wave-y than dance-y, and again, if you told us this was a non-remixed Health track and we hadn't heard the original, we wouldn't even blink. The second track, had us maybe reconsidering, while not disco by any stretch, it begins with tribal drums and reverbed vocals, which soon gives way to a dance-y groove, some noodly synths, but again, not all that far removed from the original, at least in our admittedly fuzzy memory. But then the next track drops, another Acid Girls remix, and everything changes. The Disco title makes way more sense. Suddenly the record is in full on modern electro disco, fuzzy synth, groovy Ed Banger style jam mode. From gloomy new wave skittery disco pop, to full on ultra distorted synth heavy Justice style dancefloor destroying jams, to skittery After Dark new wave, to minimal housey style Kompakt-ed grooves, to eighties Japanese video game style 8-bit worship, to Fischerspooner-esque Theme From Beverly Hills Cop retro, and pretty much every awesomely cheesy groovy stop in between. Pretty schizophrenic and all over the place, but somehow, all the various versions remain sort of true to the original sound. Anyone who dug the Health debut, and are not afraid to explore the dancefloor, will dig this big time. And folks who have never heard Health, but love shit like Crystal Castles, MGMT, Justice, Daft Punk, Alter Ego, Digitalism, Cut Copy and the like, this might just be your gateway drug, to things more noisy and punk rock.
Health just keep getting weirder and weirder, and thus better and better. This is record number three, and all the elements that made us fall in love with these guys are still present, feral jittery rhythms, sharp angular guitars, wild chaotic drumming, spaced out effects, a sort of fractured no wave new wave dancefloor destroying post punk, and here, on Get Color, they've reigned in their propensity for freakouts, and expanded their sound dramatically, whereas before, they were more about energy and sound and mood and texture, about beats and cool effects, and while there were pop songs buried in there, or at least fragments of pop songs, they were often pretty hard to separate from the chaos around them.
Get Color is indeed still plenty chaotic and frantic, but there definitely seems to be more of a focus on songs. Opener "In Health" is a sub two minute introductory blast, but even then the song opens up revealing some dreamy vocals and some subtle hooks. But "Die Slow" is a killer rhythmic psych pop dance jam, equal parts the Boredoms, Fischerspooner and Gang Gang Dance, super melodic, and in some alternate universe this would be as big as LCD Soundsystem. "Nice Girls", is all drum driven, with more ethereal vocals, burst of jagged crunch and squalls of effected percussion, the whole thing woozy and dreamy and super hypnotic. Some of the tracks get all new wave, with low slung Joy Division basslines jacked up and distorted, with angular post punk guitars, but still all wrapped around those frenetic beats, while others are just totally far out, like record closer "In Violet" a strange soundscape of looped, chopped, clipped synth tones, swirling shimmering high end streaks, more hushed wispy vocals, the rhythm, and the whole song really constructed from digital skips and strange glitches. So awesome, dance music for only those with a super abstract idea of what dance music is, for the rest of us, total head spinning headphone bliss!
The cd (not the vinyl, sorry) might just include one of 66 handmade tickets, each redeemable for some sort of prize, the grand prize is a three night trip to LA to hang with Health, but other prizes include care packages, posters, baby photos, crank calls, knitted scarfs, astrological readings, test pressings and who knows what else. A regular post punk new wave Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Good luck!
You would never in a million years guess that this band wasn't Swedish. And you would never guess they weren't a real metal band. I mean, they -are- a real metal band, but listening to this record, you imagine long haired Swedes banging their heads with one
You know how much I love flutes, so it would only stand to reason that I would also love tubas. What!? Makes perfect sense to me. Two of the most maligned instruments, the instruments that even band geeks made fun of. Well not any more!!! Flutes have already proven themselves (check out Osanna and a million other kick ass prog bands), now it's the tuba's turn to shine. And shine it does, although not in nearly as ostentatious a manner as the flute. Partially because tonally, the tuba is more well designed to rumble and drone than freak out. So Tom Heasly, who, we sadly know little about, takes his tuba, mixes in some throat singing, loops and digital processing, and comes up with this dreamy, willowy record of gentle swells and warm drones. Bordering occasionally on new age, Heasly manages to just barely steer clear of Windham Hill, adding some grit to the gentle soundscapes, making notes ring endlessly, as other notes join in and gently pulse along side. Washes of gauzy major key hum whirl in lazy rings around rumbling swells. Kind of like Stars Of The Lid without the guitars, or Gas without the beats or a Coleclough record with lots of tuba!!
I was in Japan, in a record store and they were playing the most amazing record. I went to the counter to find out what amazing Japanese band I had discovered, and after some struggling with my poor (read: non-existent) Japanese, the clerk handed me a cd, and it ends up we were listening to a German metalcore band called Heaven Shall Burn. It's a bit silly to call this metalcore
The Last Heaven Shall Burn record was one of my favorites of last year. A metalcore band that wasn't just a bunch of punk kids trying to play metal, they kicked out the metal jams better than most 'actual' metal bands. And we wouldn't have known about them
Totally essential.
Two more sidelong tracks from these masters of metallic psychedelic and blown out krautnoise bliss. And as always it's a glorious earful.
The first side starts out all woozy and contemplative, spaced out, but somehow already epic, doused in distortion and feedback, the band build the sound into a dense tangle of muted riffs, murky and washed out, bleary and buzzy, they stretch it out, total trancerock for sure, before eventually blissing out into deep swells of smeared and streaked feedback and warm crystalline shimmer, finally exploding into some full on chaotic supernova psychnoise. But even at it's most freaked out, the sound is still warm and enveloping, all the jagged edges smoothed off, creating a mysterious cloud of sound that manages to be both heavy and intense, laid back and serene.
The second side offers up more of the same, but with the introduction of some dizzying machinelike chugging, draped over long strands of drifty cinematic whir, peppered with bits of spare percussive skitter, all very looped and hypnotic and very very krautrocky. Gradually, the sound expands into a fiery ball of chaotic drummage, wild steaks of psychedelic guitar skywriting and a thick, drone-y, sprawling looped churn that unfurls gradually to the end of the side.
Impossibly both heavy and dreamlike, as if the band we're playing full bore, amps to 11, but we're listening from the room next door, our ear pressed to the wall, or the sound being projected through loudspeakers inside a massive fogbank. Similar to how Skepticism turned doom into something more murky and choral then downtuned and depressive, Heavy Winged continue to drag their psychedelic krautrock through some underwater otherworld, the result something still psychedelic and heavy, but also truly transcendent.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Pressed on heavy transparent grey vinyl, in super thick full color sleeves.
Less a split, than a sort of adjustable collaboration, Monolith: Earth is the first in a series of single sided lps, where two bands are paired together, and each contributes a single mono track, one track stereo left, the other stereo right, so depending on how the listener dials it in, he or she can listen to just one of the bands' tracks, or some easily adjusted blend of the two. Thankfully, the lp comes with a cd featuring stereo version of both the tracks, as well as an extra track or two.
For the first volume, the to bands are pretty stellar choices, dreamdrone duo Windy & Carl, and distorto psych rock trio Heavy Winged. For this experiment to really work, without turning into a sonic clusterfuck, one or both of the bands has to be the ambient half, and Windy & Carl are more than happy to take on that role, their track being a slow burning shimmer, all processed and effected guitars, smeared and blurred into long smeary streaks, layered and woven into subtle soft melodies and warm gauzy expanses, there's some buzz buried way down in the mix, but for the most part it's all glorious drone and drift.
Heavy Winged take on the other role, which is not that different from their usual sound, super blown out distorted guitars, pounding drums, super lo-fi and high end, the guitars not riffing so much as offering up thick sheets of sound and dense squalls of feedback and psychdrone freakout. Which suits the concept perfectly, as it's basically like two drones wrapped around each other, leaving the drums to meander and skitter and do what they will. Perfectly happy to listen to each track on its own, but they do sound pretty badass together, and the picture disc image spinning round and round is quite mesmerizing.
The extra track on the cd is an actual collaboration, or seems to be as far as we can tell, but ends up sounding more like a Heavy Winged track with some extra texture and ambience, as HW's super blown out distorted heaviness overwhelms the Windy & Carl's shimmery sounds, but with the picture disc, you can control the levels, creating quite possibly one of the few instances where Windy & Carl sonically overwhelm Heavy Winged!
We only have a dozen of these, the label was sold out, we got all the copies the band had too, so once these are gone, that's probably it...
It's been almost two years since the last proper full length from Canadian soundscaper Tim Hecker, and while tons of other artists have spewed out cd-r after cd-r after limited cassette in that same time, one listen to An Imaginary Country is all it takes to illustrate the difference. Why it took so long, why it was worth the wait, how the 'noise' and 'drones' and 'sounds' Hecker produces are so much more then just the words that describe them, it's all evident in every single second of this record, in fact, 10 seconds in, it's already obvious that this is indeed something special.
As demonstrated on numerous past recordings, Hecker is a master sonic alchemist, who with a handful of effects, a computer and a guitar and who knows what else, is able to construct this, a time machine of sound, a set of recordings that while simply pleasing to the ear, are also transcendent, they soothe, they entrance, they mesmerize, but more importantly, and more magically, they transport. Hecker and headphones is pretty much a ticket to some otherworld, not of sights but sounds, and not just sounds, but streaks and blurs and buzzes, soft layers and blinding crystalline shimmers, thick whirring textures and barely there delicate melodies, a sound that slips from breathless whisper to caustic roar, but each end of that spectrum fully infused with elements of the other, at its heaviest, the sound still manages to be darkly delicate, dreamy and ghostly, and at its most minimal and abstract, the sound is still imbued with some weight, a sense of import, of sounds and perhaps worlds hidden behind and within the actual music.
If anything, the sound of An Imaginary Country is heavier, and thicker, more lush, and with more heft, altogether more powerful, the sort of sound that performed live, through a massive P.A., could summon angels, or perhaps demons. But for all this added sonic weight, nothing is lost, the sounds are not just loud, they are multihued, every note, every chord, every bit of sound is alive with energy, it's as if Hecker has created a living breathing sound sculpture, made of transparent spheres, from afar, it's a gorgeous assemblage, the spheres shifting and dancing, playing out some elaborate composition, but pick one sphere, get up close and look inside, and there is a whole 'nother constellation of smaller glass spheres, engaged in a similarly beautiful and elaborate dance, and so on and so on. The magic is that every single set of movements, whether consciously or not, is visible and audible even with the slightest glance, which is what makes Hecker's sound so dense and deep and emotional and lush and utterly breathtaking.
A closer examination of each song reveals the presence of thick warm whirring organs, or some instruments and sounds transformed into organs, thus much of the record sound choral, the music of some crumbling empty church, left to play on into eternity, long long tones, blurred into slow motion epics, other tracks play out like watching some old filmstrip come to life, the newly living things still surrounded by grit and hiss and buzz, but that distorted haze that surrounds them seem to have come alive as well, moving like some organic living thing, the lives and actions of the newly living things inexorably tangled up with the movements of this other newly living things, a blurry ballet of soft sound and of mysterious sonic events. There are a few moments of relative tranquility, where the sounds are tamped down, wrangled into manageable shapes, allowed to shimmer and rippled and billow, held in check by an atmosphere of reverb and delay, but even then, off in the distance, a storm seems to be coming, and the closer it gets, the more our ears want it, and as the next song swallows the song before it, we can't help but close our eyes, open our ears, and let ourselves drift off into some other place, like walking into a warm waterfall and emerging on the other side, in a world made up entirely of warm waterfalls, our whole existence there, wreathed in torrents of sweet buzz and washed out soft focus sound, the headphone cord a tether, the only way home, if we ever felt the need to return home at all.
Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet.
We often reference Hecker when reviewing records by other practitioners of a similar soundmaking process, but there's something so pure and organic about the way Hecker composes and creates, how he deftly assembles and degrades his sounds and songs and melodies. Managing to sound modern but antiquated at the same time, viewing the world through sleep filled eyes, everything soft and fuzzy, sometimes intense and ominous, sometimes even dark and downright scary, but always suffused with a shimmering radiant warmth, making all of his sounds glow from within. Each song a weather worn snapshot, frayed and dusty, comfortable and lived in sounding. It's a music that requires close listening, a subtly immersive sound, but once inside it, once the sound is all around you, only then can you pick out all of the details, hear the hidden melodies, only then can you let go, and get completely lost in Hecker's gorgeous world of mysterious sound. Some of the most beautiful music in the world indeed.
With a couple of recordings under his belt as Jetone on Force Inc, Tim Hecker has temporarily shelved his Chain Reactive, techno-minimalist pseudonym to experiment with sonic abstraction. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" is easily Hecker's best album
This album collects two long out of print releases that the beloved Tim Hecker produced for Room 40 quite a while ago - Norberg was a 20 minute EP from 2007, and Apondalifa was a 7" dating to 2010. These being Tim Hecker releases, we had much to say about these gauzy, blurry, buzzy expanses of muted digital glitch, disembodied melodies, sepia toned ambience, organic and electronic woven into swirling shimmering soundscapes. So here's a synopsis of the two reviews we penned a while back about about the two recordings that constitute this, yet another exquisite Tim Hecker production!
Norberg begins with an Oval like sweep of glimmering chimes and washed out whir, but quickly develops into something much more weighty, the chimes swallowed up by a warm whirring blur, a softly churning, slowly crumbling wall of blissed out guitar buzz, the buzz very gradually dissipating, leaving just the hiss and the whir, to drift like gossamer clouds in a deep blue sky. The sounds become softer and softer, muted and murky, underwater sounding, allowed to pulse and ebb and flow and sway softly back and forth, under a delicate patina of electronic crackle, an ultra distorted guitar way down in the mix unfurling ribbons of gnarled prismatic crunch, spread out over the hushed shimmer below, like the icy crust on a dying sun. Finally the hiss takes on a life of it's own, pushing all of the other sounds under the surface, the hiss made up of all manner of skipping static and layered white noise, impossible musical in its own right, the perfect climax to a surprisingly bracing expanse of buzzing blissful ambient sound.
Apondalfia is a gloriously washed out sprawl of warm fuzz and softly swirling melodic squalls, all of the edges smoothed out, but leaving plenty of grit, the guitars way more obvious than in the past, but it's hard to tell exactly what they're doing, they seem to be unfurling strange little woozy warped melodies, that seem to loop and layer and shift constantly, ringing out and bleeding into the various sounds around them, all beneath the thick sonic swells and a glacially churning shimmery sonic gauze. So beautiful and deliriously hypnotic!
Unlike the majority of other soundmakers, Canadian Tim Hecker takes his sweet time with releases, a 10" here, a full length there, rarely more than a single release a year, which makes the appearance of a new Hecker record a huge deal, even if it's just a live ep, like this one.
Recorded in Sweden, this ep covers more ground in 20 minutes than most other artists cover over several records, in fact, much of these parts, in lesser hands would be milked and stretched out to fill up a whole album. But Hecker lets the sounds dictate the direction. Almost as if the sounds were alive, growing, blossoming, dying, changing shape transforming, endlessly shifting with Hecker there simply to nurture and guide.
The sound is one that has become familiar to us, gauzy, blurry, buzzy expanses of muted digital glitch, disembodied melodies, sepia toned ambience, organic and electronic woven into swirling shimmering soundscapes.
Here what begins as an Oval like sweep of glimmering chimes and washed out whir, quickly develops into something much more weighty, the chimes swallowed up by a warm whirring blur, a softly churning, slowly crumbling wall of blissed out guitar buzz, the buzz very gradually dissipating, leaving just the hiss and the whir, to drift like gossamer clouds in a deep blue sky. The sounds become softer and softer, muted and murky, underwater sounding, allowed to pulse and ebb and flow and sway softly back and forth, under a delicate patina of electronic crackle, an ultra distorted guitar way down in the mix unfurling ribbons of gnarled prismatic crunch, spread out over the hushed shimmer below, like the icy crust on a dying sun. Finally the hiss takes on a life of it's own, pushing all of the other sounds under the surface, the hiss made up of all manner of skipping static and layered white noise, impossible musical in its own right, the perfect climax to a surprisingly bracing expanse of buzzing blissful ambient sound.
As commonplace as glitched electronica is these days (even rock bands are now 'glitching things up' to sound more avant garde), a handful of these abstractionists have dedicated themselves to understanding the parameters of their tools and attempting to improve upon that which has come before. For several years now, this elite has included Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, with Ekkehard Ehlers often exhibiting glimmers of similar electronic brilliance; however, Canadian electron wrangler Tim Hecker has come into his own with an equally strong aesthetic and a series of amazing releases. Outside his microhouse moniker Jetone, Hecker has released three records to date under his own name, beginning with the exceptional Fennesz worship of "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" and the shellshocked obliteration of Van Halen (quite literally!) on "My Love Is Rotten To The Core", however, "Radio Amor," Hecker's third album, may be even his best yet. Through an immensely rich set of reverb and granular synthesis patches, Tim Hecker has rendered the digital blip into a blissed out field of electric drones and warm, white noise. Throughout "Radio Amor," Hecker has ripped apart clustered notes from a piano and suspended them in the ether of an electricity, and occasionally the warm buzzings of analogue distortion emerge from the rippling, digitized vibrations. Half melodies, algorithmic ping-pong tones, and hard disc skips are all bathed with a radiant luster of electrified golds and coppers. Totally gorgeous.
MPEG Download: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.m3u]
MPEG Download: "I'm Transmitting Tonight" [/audio/timheckerimtrans.mp3]
Canadian soundscaper and noise sculptor Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced musicians on the aQ list. Whenever we try to describe something that's gristly and pixelated, blown out and noisy, yet somehow still impossibly lovely and lilting and warm and lush, Hecker is the man we point to. And why not, record after record, Hecker performs impossible sonic alchemy, harnessing often harsh noise, and somehow transforming it into lush, layered dreaminess, weaving all manner of textures and fractured drones, warped samples and manipulated recordings, into something stunning and fantastical - including at one point a whole record using nothing but Van Halen records as source material! That in particular sounds like one of those instances where the process is more interesting than the music itself, but nothing could be further from the truth, that disc was in fact utterly and heartbreakingly gorgeous, and even with no knowledge of the music's provenance, you'd have to be dead inside to not be totally blown away.
With every record, we found ourselves more and more in awe of Hecker's ability to create these impossibly pretty dronescapes, to constantly conjure up worlds of sound that evoke truly deep emotion in the listener, a rarity in music for sure. And then even beyond that, every record is quite different. Sure some of the sounds and processes remain the same, but each album, most definitely stands alone, even after a dramatic sonic shift. That said, Virgins might be the most dramatic shift so far in Hecker's catalog, utilizing what seems to be an entirely new sonic palette, which includes live, intimate recordings of woodwinds, pianos, synthesizers and electronics, and working together with other musicians, including another aQ fave, Ben Frost. The results are dramatically different, so much so, that on multiple occasions, someone would be playing this in the store, and we'd have to go see what was playing. Which not only speaks to the uniqueness of the sound, but also to the fact that whatever it was playing, was so good we felt compelled to find out what it was. And every time, once we discovered it was Tim Hecker, we were somehow simultaneously surprised, and not really all that surprised. So after all that, what exactly does Virgins sound like? Like all great records, it's really difficult to describe, it still sounds like a Tim Hecker record, sort of, but this time around, much of the music has a modern minimalist vibe, the influence of both Terry Riley and Steve Reich loom large, especially in the opening salvo, the brief almost psychedelic sounding loopscape of "Prism", which sounds like a strange Philip Jeck / Steve Reich mash up. Repetitive and hypnotic, with subtle (and not so subtle) pitch shifts, making the whole thing woozy and slightly off kilter, but still lush and prismatic, and that sonic template set up in the first song, is elaborated in "Virginal I", which brings the piano to the fore, reminding us of Melnyk and Batagov and the Necks, all our favorite modern minimal pianists, but here, the piano is layered and looped and accretes into a seriously dizzying jumble, which is soon joined by what sounds like cello, and then the tape speed begins fluctuating, and it gets noisier and noisier, and soon, it's not that far removed from past Hecker efforts as we thought, a swirling, dense squall of sound, that manages to be both impossibly tangled and intricate, and at the same time totally mesmerizing and dreamlike.
Some tracks here, like "Radiance", definitely harken back to the Hecker sound of old, airy and ethereal, warm and lush, a dreamy bit of manipulated sound, a smeary sonic blur that's softly psychedelic and utterly mesmerising, but others, like the two part "Live Room" suite, deviate dramatically from what we're used to. The title obviously referring to the room in which the piece was recorded, the sounds wreathed in natural reverb, a haunting melody pecked out on a prepared piano, over a lush swirl of strings and synths, the sounds gristly and distorted, even some seemingly inadvertent feedback, the sound here reminiscent of Ben Frost's more harrowing sound design for sure, but again, Hecker and his cohorts manage to wrangle the disparate and often caustic sounds into something that sounds strangely composed, atmospheric, haunting, moving, emotional, it seems impossible that these sounds could be harnessed into something so lovely, but the sound ends up being truly, and impossibly lovely. A sort of fractured chamber music, that for the second part of the 'suite' slips into something much more hushed and heavenly, symphonic sounds wreathed in tape hiss and static, with seemingly no effort to remove the various non musical sounds, voices, conversations, the effect is quite intimate, and again, strangely moving.
The rest of the record unfolds in an equally unorthodox manner, slow somber piano pieces are flecked with scrapes and shuffles, the notes slightly detuned, plenty of pitch warble, and subtle sonic tweaks, while elsewhere the previous plinked piano sounds are piled atop one another, along with bleating horns and woozy synths, resulting in a warped chamber kosmische that really sounds unlike anything we've heard. The record closes with a dreamlike sequence, that begins with fluttering flutes blurred into an ethereal drone-like shimmer, before splintering into what sounds like a Steve Reich piece broadcast through a malfunctioning transmitter, accompanied by pointillist piano and wrapped in gauze-y hiss and hum, only to shed the hiss and hum, and unfurl a dreamily hypnotic sprawl of slowly cascading pulsations, and finally, one last abstract blowout, all moaning strings, metallic buzz, keening high end, buried melodies, sitar like shimmer, all gradually blurred into an abstract smear of prismatic sound. Stunning!
Longtime aQ favorite Tim Hecker, who might be one of THEE most referenced performers on the aQ list, who for us has set the bar for all things fuzzy and gauzy and dreamily washed out, teams up here with another aQ fave, Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the psychedelic space-synth outfit Oneohtrix Point Never, for a fantastic songsuite of smoldering cinematic ambience, and heavily textured psychedelia, the resulting collaboration one of those rare occurrences where it's nearly impossible to tell who contributed what, where Hecker's sounds end and Lopatin's begin, and vice versa. The resulting sounds seem to land more toward Hecker's side of the sonic spectrum, everything ghostly and spectral, laced with squalls of glitch and squelch, underpinned by warm swirls of chordal thrum and swoonsome stringlike shimmer, the one/two punch of the opening tracks "Uptown Psychedelia" and "Scene From A French Zoo" set the stage for the rest of the record perfectly. Opening with a swirling field of zig zagging melodies, zipping from speaker to speaker, draped over mysterious Eastern melodies, everything wreathed in a fuzzy layered haze, and peppered with constantly shifting blasts of synth buzz and fragments of strange stringed instruments, the whole thing gorgeously bleary, and seeming to slowly ooze into one pulsating and prismatic whole. It's another case, where had that opening track been 60 minutes long and filled up the whole record, we definitely would have been perfectly happy. But there's much more to discover here, as "Scene From A French Zoo" reveals, ditching much of the distorted glitchery of the opener, for something much more lush and serene, a tranquil landscape of long smooth, soft tones, undulating over a bed of crackling static, struggling to break through, but inevitably sinking back below the softly swirling surface. Much of the record plays out like variations of those two tracks, slipping easily from dark brooding moodiness, soaring, swoonsome and melodic, almost choral and symphonic in places, to blurts of gristly static, and sculpted short wave interference, noise deftly transformed into melody, often swaddled in soft focus squalls of blurred buzz, just as often nestled in a bed of dreamlike melodies, and smeared shimmer.
We do hear hints of Oneohtrix on tracks like "GRM Blue II", with Lopatin unfurling a mysterious sprawl of kosmische synth melody, but if that is indeed the work of Lopatin, Hecker seems to be crafting an alien aura in which to place Lopatin's more melodic sensibilities.
Much of the sound here is downright soundtracky. "Racist Drone" sounds like some classic Hollywood score mangled and mutated, while "Grey Geisha", sounds like it was plucked straight off some old VHS tape, and run through Hecker's mysterious bank of alien FX. The record plays out like some perfect hybrid of Lopatin's psychedelic synth melodies and Hecker's master of moody texturalism, the title track sounding almost like a Oneohtrix jam remixed by Hecker, while "Ritual For Consumption" takes some mad scientist exotica, and melds it to some heartbreakingly lovely and lilting melodic drift, and then finally, "Vaccination No. 2" finishes things off with a slow building buzz, a dreamy drift that gradually grows more and more dense and distorted, culminating in a gorgeously blown out sprawl of dreamdrone shimmer.
Another mysterious black metal horde, this time from the Netherlands, brought to our attention by the seemingly infallible Total Holocaust, who in the past have brought us discs by Heresi, Sortsind, Malcuidant, Hell Militia, Make A Change... Kill Yourself, Blodulv, The One and of course Nortt and Xasthur. That is one seriously brilliant black elite for sure. Hekel have no problem measuring up though. They too traffic in that Burzumic buzz punctuated by EXTREMELY tortured vocals, a la Weakling, Sortsind, Bethlehem, Silencer and the like. And like those bands, we're talking -seriously- tortured. Total Holocaust's website describes the singing here as "painfully performed vocals" and that pretty much nails it. Utterly anguished, damned and tormented, howling demonic screeches, like the sound of flesh being flayed, or of being burned alive. That tortured. All sprawled bruised and bloodied over a haunting sound world of minor key buzz. Mostly midtempo, everything wreathed in suffocating doom, lots of that mournful arpeggiated guitar, huge layers of fuzz and buzz, a loping, lurching depressive blackness. And those vocals. So intense and emotional. If there was some sort of designation for 'emo' black metal, this might qualify. You hear old stories about Rites of Spring rocking out, and getting so into it, that the band members actually broke down and cried. You can almost imagine Hekel doing the same. Blasting and buzzing in utter darkness, tears streaming down their faces, corpsepaint smeared into streaks of black and grey, guitars and drums drenched in blood.
The disc starts off strangely, with simple martial drumming, haunting forest sounds, wolves, owls, wind, while a raspy voiced demonic invocation is spewed out over the top. From then on, it's a super expansive seasick swirl swinging from buzzing blasts of black blur to plodding mournful doom drenched buzz.
A harsh and harrowing, super emotional, ultra depressive exploration of a truly tortured black metal soul.
Black metal grunge. And yeah, it's as good and weird as it sounds.
We reviewed a record from local garage pop indie rockers the Herms way back in 2006, and if memory serves, we did dig it, but Castle Face head honcho and Oh Sees mainman John Dwyer insisted we forget all about that old record, and revel in this new one, which is not actually a proper record so much as a collection of demos and outtakes and unreleased rarities, but all the songs were hand picked by Dwyer, and definitely demonstrate the sort of lo-fi outsider pop what-the-fuck weirdness these guys were capable of, which wasn't really even hinted at on that way more polished record proper from back in the day. In fact, all it should take is a quick listen to the first track, the awesomely titled "Power Joystick", which sounds like some alternate universe Kinks, with way more bass buzz, some trippy psychedelic keyboard noodling, everything just a bit detuned, maybe recorded on a boombox, and with a totally unexpected midsong burst of blown out super distorted baroque pop majesty, before lurching right back into more of their noisy, jangly, wobbly Velvets-y groove. Fuck, so good. We had to listen to that track 5 or 6 times before letting it play any further. And if you dig that first one, pretty much all of Drop Out Vol. 1 is gonna push all the same buttons. "The Organisation" sounds like some weird archival track from the sixties, replete with dramatic spoken word vox, over warbly whirring organ, crunchy trebly jangle and simple drum pound. "Volleyball" ups the fidelity a bit, hinting at the band's more polished potential, but it all still sounds just a bit off kilter, the mix kind of just slightly wrong, the vox down in the mix, the keyboard melodies WAY up front. Hooky, and fuzzy, and jangly, and pretty much a perfect fit on Castle Face. Fans of Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, the Mallard, Bare Wires, and of course Thee Oh Sees will definitely dig. We're also reminded a bit of the idiosyncratic home brewed poppiness of Cleaners Of Venus, albeit the Herms are a bit more ramshackle and garage-y. For every moment of classic garage pop jangle, or fuzzy hooky indie pop crunch, there's some twisted, almost avant sounding blast of fractured art rock to balance it out, or sometimes completely cancel it out, often in the same song. A new (old) aQ fave for sure!
We made the last record from these Ohio noise poppers our Record Of The Week, and that one, Cartoon Violence, was the perfect mix of classic nineties indie rock, and the sort of hook heavy noise pop we can't even seem to get enough of, and seems like lots of you agreed cuz we could barely keep that one in stock. So we were of course super psyched to discover there was in fact a brand new record, and this is it, Boys. While it does have loads in common with Cartoon Violence, it's also different enough, and enough of a progression to make it both familiar, and super exciting and adventurous. The sound is noisier, and grittier, the production too, the whole thing sounds heavier, a bit more punk, but not in any way that disguises the pop geniuses these guys are, and with every listen we're more and more convinced that that's just what they are. Opener "Full Stick" is 100 seconds of impossibly catchy fuzz drenched bash and pound, with a sing along chorus that any other pop band would kill for. And from there on out, it never lets up. Every track here crazy catchy, lurching from fuzzy jangle, to blown out noise pop heaviness and back again, the guitars are thick and distorted, just listen to "Alcoholics", dig the jangly verses, and then let that super guitar heavy chorus get your pop head banging. It's tough to balance poppiness and heaviness so deftly, but these guys do it like it's nothing, the songs sound just loose enough to feel like that band that plays at the bar down the street from your house, the one you're convinced would be huge if just the right people heard them, and that's pretty much how we feel about these guys, why the fuck are they not MASSIVE. Like the Ovens, another pop fave, this band is so much better than so many of the other groups that get hyped to high heaven, so all we can do is hype the shit out of it ourselves and hope it gets into the right ears. Although really, the right ears are YOURS, cuz if you dig noisy, catchy, heavy pop, fuzzed out jangle, silly, sardonic lyrics, and sing along choruses that should be all over the radio (speaking of which, check out the Weezer like synth solo on "Publishing"!), this is so up your alley. But for now, like so many other amazing insanely talented bands we love, these guys will just remain our little secret, but it's one of those secrets we'd be so happy to NOT keep. Here's hoping this record is THE ONE, that finally gets the rest of the world to wake up and become as obsessed with these guys as we are, cuz goddamn, this stuff is so good. For now though, they're all ours. And yours...
A weird thing happens when we're figuring out our end of year faves. Beyond the record nerd arguing about -exactly- when certain records came out, and the endless struggling of trying to whittle down our lists to a manageable amount, we also often end up with two dramatically different lists. There's the one that we post and share, which features mostly stuff we've reviewed on the New Arrivals list, lots of our Records Of The Week, etc. But there's always another one, packed with slightly stranger faves, guilty pleasures certainly, things we thought maybe aQ folks might not care so much about, records we weren't able to get for the store, or weren't able to get enough to review, but every once in a while, a record that belongs on the first, somehow ends up on the second. Which is almost what happened with this, the first we'd heard from these Ohio indie rock geniuses. It was another instance of a record that just showed up in the mail, and immediately blew us away. We were instantly hooked, even before we heard it, first off, there's the band name obviously, c'mon, how good a name is Herzog, and then the awesome album title and the cartoonishly ultraviolent cover art featuring horrified onlookers peering through the glass at what appears to be a blood splattered nursery, with two very self satisfied looking seals wielding bloody clubs! And then there's the music, the opening two track one-two punch is perhaps the catchiest, most kick ass blast of fuzzed out indie rock noise pop radness that we've heard in FOREVER. So the pop nerds around here began listening to the record like crazy, as in ALL the time, and for whatever reason, it just didn't occur to us that hell, we should try to get these for the store, until someone pointed out just how obsessed we'd become. So we finally did, and after a few attempts to get in touch with the band, here it is, and right off the bat, before we go any further, just know that this is hands down, a contender for pop record of the year. Maybe even top spot on the year end top ten list, regardless of genre, certainly if you base it on how much we've listened to it. Anyone out there in aQ land who's been digging other recent aQ faves like Mrs. Magician, the Ovens, Violent Change, Telekinesis, etc. But really, Herzog sound like a band out of time, think of your favorite indie rock bands from back in the day, Weezer, Pavement, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., the whole record oozes with that classic sound. And while ANY band can fake the sound, no bands can fake the songs, and the songs here are SO crazy catchy, fuzzy, crunchy, hook filled, with super funny lyrics, killer choruses, weird arrangements, all wound up into pretty much perfect jangle rock noise pop jams.
Just give a listen to opener "Fuck This Year", with its cool busy / frantic super dynamic stop/start verse, the awesome lyrics, the super catchy slithery guitar melody, the chorus that will stick in your head only slightly more than the verse, there's warm chiming harmonics, the sound lush and layered, hell, there's even some cowbell in there, and it rules! And as if the song wasn't catchy enough, near the end the band toss in a whole other part, that's somehow even catchier than the song proper. The second part of the aforementioned one-two punch is just as good, with it's slow build opening, and weirdly syncopated verses, wreathed in tangly spidery guitars, some cool crunchy riffage, and again, super memorable vocals, and impossibly hooky melodies, and then after some soaring falsetto vox, and some shredding noise guitar, they do the same thing here too, tossing in a part right near the end, two parts in fact, that are SO crazy catchy, any other band would have turned them into their own songs. But instead, it's just a barrage of constant catchiness that we can guarantee, doesn't lose anything, even after literally hundreds of listens.
And while we could go song by song, we'll just nerd out over one other one, the awesomely titled "Rich People Ballad", which sounds again like it was transported here from 1995, with its crunchy super distorted J Mascis style guitar shredding, its lilting moody indie rock brood, not to mention, yet another classic pop chorus, super heavy guitars, wild drumming, the sort of song you might have expected to hear from Weezer circa the blue record, and yeah, it's that good. And these three songs have gotten so much play, we barely made it to the rest of the record, but there's so much more good stuff lurking further in. "You Clean Up Nice" threatens to give those first three a run for their money, with its flanged riffage, and classic pop hook-age, then there's "Dreaming Man II" which slows things down, even adds harmonica (!!) for something a bit more swoonsome and twang flecked, heck there's even some shimmery slide guitar too, and then comes "Feedback", which is all quirky organ driven garage rock, but peppered with cool oddball pop moments, sounding almost baroque at times, and laced with some seriously heavy noise pop blowouts throughout. There a few more seriously rocking noise pop blowouts... plus throughout, Beach Boys like vocals, Beatle-esque harmonies, and on one track a little Camper Van Beethoven (!), all get woven into the mix... Every song here a gem, worth it alone already for those first four for sure, but really Cartoon Violence is truly one of those rare pop records that really is all killer and no filler, AT ALL.
So totally essential... Indie rock / noise pop nirvana! And for some of us here (Andee in particular), this has been almost the only thing that gets listened to literally every day, for going on six months now... Which is obviously about the highest recommendation we can give...
The jackets are really nice too, the aforementioned amazing artwork with some super cool (and subtle) metallic ink printing, and includes a download code too!
What's not to love? They're called Hessian. The record cover features a dagger wielding, be-robed, tongue waggling, skeleton, presumably performing some sort of arcane ritual, one that most certainly utilizes his Bachelor Of Black Arts degree, plus there are song titles like "Eyebite", "Cloven Lady", "Funeral Disco", "Iron Baby" and "Homonculator". Definitely one of those cases where we were ready to love these guys (and gal) no matter what. Thankfully, sonically, they do not disappoint, delivering a classic, witchy old school psychedelic hard rock, sure it's a teensy bit doomy, but it's actually more like seventies proto metal, groovy, a little proggy, super rocking, and the boy/girl vocals RULE, giving it a cool kind of punky/poppy vibe as well. Beyond all that, the songs kill, the sound is heavy and hooky, and again, way more psychedelic and groovy than doomy and dirgey. In fact, fans of Deep Purple and Captain Beyond and those sorts of bands are likely to dig this way more than folks into Electric Wizard or Saint Vitus, although as you'd imagine, there's enough overlap that psych-onauts and doom-lords both should find lots of love here. Basically, if you like it heavy and psychedelic, groovy and hard rocking, you'll dig Hessian. A LOT.
