For past releases from this UK noise rock combo, we've employed descriptors like: head caving, throbbing, distorted, bad trip psychedelia, fuzz-distorted metallic, rhythmic heaviness, sheer nihilistic sludge, bludgeoning... you get the point, these guys are sonic crushers of the highest order. Or maybe WERE. Cuz this new lp displays a whole 'nother side to Hey Colossus, one that falls much closer to the psychedelic space rock side of the sonic spectrum.
The record opens with a super psychedelic groove, sorta space-kraut, chordal synth swirls wrapped in clouds of shimmer FX and laced with streaks of feedback, total hypno rock bliss out, that is until the vocals come in. Growly and demonic and raspy and intense, removed from HC's normally noisier sound, those voKILLS take on a much more sinister vibe, and make for a weird combo, mad man ranting over otherwise tranced out psychedelic mesmer, but it works. And those clouds of effects bleed right into the next track, all tribal drumming and spidery guitar melodies, and yup, those crazed vocals, the whole thing building to something much more noisy and rocking, but only briefly, before slipping back into a sort of proggy space kraut psychedelia. Minus those vocals (heck, even with 'em!), the sound falls somewhere closer to outfits like White hills, Mugstar and Carlton Melton, which is not a bad thing at al, just maybe a bit surprising.
The B side though is a bit sludgier and heavier, with thick, almost metallic riffing, but still, kinda space-y and proggy, those swirling FX from the A side still all over the places, the B side remaining pretty dark and heavy, at least until the weird, almost croony, countryish outro, which adds dusky twang, to the broody space-y drift, and of course those vox!
Cool weird stuff. Hey Colossus fans will probably still dig, but so might space/psych rock fans this time around.
Latest batch of noise rock pummel from these UK crushers, although the first few minutes had us thinking we might have stuck the wrong disc in the player, a cool droned out slithery expanse of dense layered shimmer, of mysterious ritualistic buzz, tribal percussion, disembodied vocals, all hazy and druggy and mesmerizing, but fear not, apparently that was just the intro, as track two comes stumbling in like some downtuned AmRep avalanche, all Melvins-y stomp and swagger, with knuckle dragging drum pound, bellowed processed vox, all beneath squalls of feedback and grinding FX, and let's not forget the guitars, there are after all THREE guitar players (four if you count the bass guitar, and we DO), a thick wall of crumbling blackened slo-mo tarpit riffage, churning and roiling, some sort of sonic mad scientist channeling the Butthole Surfers and Shit And Shine, and sort of like in the movie The Fly the two are fused in some horrible laboratory mishap, but in this case, the result is fantastic, a gloriously sludgy dirgey pound, heady and hypnotic, a looped sounding chunk of metallic mesmer, which is pretty much what these guys specialize in. The rest of the record offers up variations of that theme, "The Drang" slows things down to a swampy crawl, letting synths shimmer and feedback squall beneath a sea of swirling buzz and bellowing howls, while the title track blurs everything into a stretched out sprawl of FX drenched space rock bliss out, that gradually becomes more and more metallic, more and more pounding and propulsive as the track progresses, the last half sounding a bit like the Melvins covering Hawkwind, which is no way a bad thing at all.
"Almeria, Spain" is an epic bit of post-sludge, sounding all majestic and mighty, a bit like Harvey Milk at their most melodic and bombastic, while "Warmer The Belter" gets all sensitive, acoustic guitars, some shuffling drums, dreamy melodies, and the vocals a deep dreamy croon, the whole thing underpinned by a symphony of demonic sounding effects and sinister drones, which finally gives way to the final jam, "I Am Bunga Bunga", which far from the crushing closer we were expecting pairs weird garbled vox with shimmery shuffling almost krautrock sounding thrum, which really only briefly explodes, offering up a final glimpse of these guys' crush and pummel proclivities, before slipping right back into a final minute or two of swirling effects wreathed ambience.
As always incredible stuff, and a pretty awesome document of how these guys drag their noise rock kicking and not always screaming, far beyond the boundaries that define most of their similarly sonically inclined brethren...
The problem with a split lp featuring two bands who are somewhat unfamiliar, when there is no specific info on the record labels or cut into the grooves on the vinyl, is deciding which band is which, going on number of track (here both bands have three), instrumentation (HGP list no instruments, Zond have a guy credited with skateboard, which seemed like it would be a dead giveaway but sadly we could hear no skateboard), but then, usually we decide fuck it. It doesn't really matter until you decide you need more by either / both bands, which unfortunately (or fortunately!) you probably will after listening to this twisted slab of sonic weirdness.
We'll tackle the B side cuz that's what we threw on first, and we'll assume that this is actually Zond, who we have never heard before, but are digging BIG TIME. Super distorted and blown out, sludgey dirgey noise rock, howled vocals barely audible over the din of downtuned riffage and in-the-red psychrock squalls, the drums a buried muffled pound, the whole thing a churning, grinding, gloriously filthy trudge. Maybe imagine a more Dead C-ish Brainbombs and you'd be close. That is until the extended final track, the eschews all the damaged outrock that came before, and offers up a stretched out expanse of buzzing shimmering ambient drone, not really tranquil, still a bit noisy, a little off kilter, the sounds bathed in distortion, wrapped in feedback, but stretched out into a weirdly hypnotic noisescape.
So working under the assumption, that the B side is Zond, then the A side must be Hi-God People, who we have heard once before on a split with none other than the Dead C, but the sound here is dramatically different, which is probably what threw us off in the first place. The first and longest track, is a sort of fractured free folk, detuned acoustic guitar twang, sitar like buzz, crooned atonal vocals, wreathed in shimmery effects, swirling clouds of wah wah guitar, strange bleepy bloopy ambience, it almost sounds like some sixties hippy jam, but completely fried and fractured. A more spaced out, free folk, No Neck, or maybe a Sunburned Hand / Avarus musical summit. Until the track slips into something a little different, unleashing more of a krautrock vibe, a subtle pulsing propulsive jam, underneath all of the twisted twang and abstract strum.
The second track is much more abstract, a tripped out buzzy dronescape with random clattery percussion, wheezing organs, swooping melodies, fluttery woodwinds, all very creepy and somewhat cinematic, finally finishing off with the brief closer, a gorgeous, hazy, druggy buzz drenched psych jam, that begs for a whole 'nother side for it to drift and unwind.
Good stuff, from both bands, whichever is which. Super limited of course, and housed in super swank hand screened sleeves!
Daniel Higgs, of Lungfish and the Pupils, is one of the very few contemporary artists who we would absolutely consider a sort of modern day shaman. A musical alchemist, an artistic cypher, an abstract philosopher, a strangely charismatic, yet disarmingly humble master of any artistic endeavor he puts his mind to. A legendary (but now retired) tattoo artist, an incredible painter, whose paintings are at once hallucinatory and gorgeous (one painting adorns the cover of Leviathan's Tentacles Of Whorror record) and of course an incredible musician, whose sonic experiments range from the mesmeric riffrock of his band Lungfish, to an entire record of solo Jew's harp. But in addition to being an incredible lyricist, an amazing vocalist, and a master of the Jew's harp, Higgs is also a seriously mean guitar player, with a style and sound as familiar as it is totally alien. A gorgeous buzzing steel string drift through the cosmos. Lengthy droning ragas, that drift hypnotically from deconstructed Appalachia to John Cale like slow-shifting skree (joined on those tracks by violin), to moody melancholy crawls, to thick serpentine swirls of snake charmer melody and reverberating steel string shimmer. Raw and lo-fi for sure, but so darkly emotional, and dreamily hypnotic. We've been listening to this non stop since we got it and it continues to unfold more and more on each listen, we're thinking seriously about grabbing a boombox, taking a ton of peyote, blasting this tape and laying in the thick grass, sprawled naked on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, beneath a sparkling moonlit sky. In other words, WAY RECOMMENDED!
SUPER LIMITED of course. In spiffy, ultra cryptic packaging.
Daniel Higgs is a very strange man. Or maybe we should say, Daniel (Arcus Incus Ululat) Higgs, Interdimensional Song-Seamstress, is a very strange man. His artwork is amazing and bizarre, Spock ears and eye-balled Christmas trees, emaciated figures riding strange hellish beasts, an amazing personal mythology represented as a menagerie of impossible and impossibly beautiful figures and beasts. His music seems to somehow embody the same mystery, a world that Higgs inhabits simultaneously to his presence in our own. That must be the only thing that can truly explain the man and his music. That he walks around, one foot in our world, of people places and things, the other in some kaleidoscopic world where sounds are tasted and sights are smelled, a synesthetic wonderland, that when translated and brought over to our plain of existence, appears distorted, twisted, haunting and hard to fathom. But at the same time imbued with some otherworldly warmth and a beauty that while alien, represents a higher state, maybe unreachable here. That is Higgs' gift. He is a traveler and a troubadour. He allows us to see visions, to hear musical mysteries. Through paintings, drawings, tattoos and especially music. From the moment we first heard his 'rock' band Lungfish we were smitten. Actually, the very first time we heard Lungfish was in a record store in another town, years ago. Our first thought was "What the hell is this?" But after several more songs, we were compelled to sheepishly approach the counter and ask the clerk what was playing. We bought it, and loved it. And maybe that's the magic of Higgs' music. It's esoteric and not always approachable. It takes some trust, a leap of faith, some sonic daring. But that faith is always repaid many times over. Outside of Lungfish, Higgs also plays in the Pupils along with his Lungfish bandmate Asa, a more intimate stripped down version of his rock band. The same cyclical riffs and chant like vocals, but all acoustic, and sparsely arranged. There is also his amazing sort-of Appalachian solo guitar work, and his very very strange solo Jew's harp recordings.
This disc is Higgs' first proper solo release and manages to tie up all his disparate sonic threads into one big gorgeous Gordian knot.
Several tracks sound like they could have come straight off the Pupils record. Simple, haunting acoustic guitar riffs, repeated and repeated until they becomes totally hypnotic, mantra like, with Higgs' gorgeous vocals over the top, a mix of old timey sea shanty and folk standard. The rest drift dreamily from sound to sound, like a sonic journey through the soul of the man. Gorgeous tangles of banjo or some banjo-like instrument drift amidst field recordings of birds (knowing Higgs it may have been actually recorded right there in the woods, although he has been known to travel with a portable recorder to capture whatever strikes his fancy) a steel string buzz, that wanders from near traditional sounding Appalachian twang to some sort of jaunty Celtic melody to brief melodic flurries, impossibly buzzy and blurry. Thick swaths of buzzing guitar swirl and squirm, doomy, melancholy melodies spread out over a machine like whir, sounding like a guitar being played like a bagpipe. While over the top drifts tiny tangles of steel string picking all drenched in strange FX and allowed to twist and distort, sounding almost the way a Jew's harp does when you change the shape of your mouth. And as if pre-ordained (which it most likely was), out comes the Jew's harp, but it sounds like no Jew's harp you've ever heard. Super brittle and distorted, like some sort of metallic marimba, or a Konono outtake broadcast via shortwave and played through a crappy transistor radio. A gorgeous buzzy abstract hoedown. Finally, the record winds up (most definitely not down) with a thick swirl of super lo-fi psych guitar freakout, the chords and notes bent and twisted, pitches slipping back and forth, overtones subtly shifting, notes colliding and exploding into little bursts of jagged buzz before settling back into a droning hypnotic thrum. Like some alien jig, if aliens had a practice space full of strangely tuned guitars and really loud amps with blown speakers. And again, it sounds like somehow Higgs figured out a way to hold the guitar up to his mouth and play it like a Jew's harp, the sounds changing shape as much as tone, a warm and fuzzed out smear of distorted buzz that washes over you, as does this whole sonic scripture, like a shower of rich wet soil and sparkling uncut diamonds.
The return of our favorite modern day shamen, Mr. Daniel�Arcus Incus Ululat Higgs, maybe better known to some of you as Dan Higgs, the vocalist for the mighty Lungfish, or perhaps Higgs, the world renowned tattoo artist (now retired). A man who wears many hats: vocalist, painter, tattoo artist, poet, guitarist, master of the Jew's Harp, and who knows what else. We made Higgs' last full length�Ancestral Songs record of the week last year, and since this one is just as good, if not better, we figured it deserved the same honor.�
Truly one of the few modern day troubadours, Higgs is a mysterious traveling man, he'll occasionally show up at the store, looking as dapper and disheveled as ever, with tales of various explorations or experiences. The last time he stopped by, he had a little hand held tape recorder, and he had just returned from India, where he spent the whole time recording street musicians and crowds and animals and anything else that struck his fancy.�
His music has the same quality, a sort of restless rootlessness, that is at once warm and familiar, but strangely alien and indescribable. On�Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, Higgs manages to weave all of his disparate sonic interests together into one seamless whole. Buzzing raga guitars, strange lo-fi field recordings, Jew's harp, all in varying states of fidelity, but the recording, the sound quality, the location and the background noise are as much a part of the music as the music itself.�
Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot begins with a burst of static, like a strong wind on a microphone, before Higgs' guitar begins to buzz like some snake charming ritual, an Eastern tinged Appalachia, a rustic raga, the string buzzing, lots of distortion and shifting overtones creating all sorts of glorious tonal color. Ragged and ramshackle but completely mesmerizing. The second track is a dizzying seasick assemblage of wheezing harmonium and pounded chimes, atonal melodies and streaks of feedback, eventually fading out and leaving just Higgs' guitar to buzz and shimmer, a sprawling sun balked stretch of gorgeously pastoral Appalachia. "Spectral Hues" is a stuttering collage of manipulated tones, using just the record and stop buttons on a tape player, a primitive swirl of tones, transformed into a haunting melody, each note separated by the weird swoop and bbbzzzzt of the button being depressed. The title track is Higgs in full on electric guitar mode, or at least what sounds like an electric guitar, wailing and howling chaotically, unfurling some sort of old time jig, before again fading into a 'nother steel string workout, this one distinctly Indian sounding, a dense tangled raga, the notes overlapping and the strings' buzz smearing the sounds into thick swaths of sonic blur. "Creation Moan" is another tripped out psychguitar freakout. A buzzing overdriven squall of tangled upper register skree and low end rumble, what sounds like some traditional folk song transformed into snarling, squirming, grinding crumbling distorted buzz. And finally the nine minute final track, a swirling ambient� drift, running water, some finger picked guitar, that suddenly winks out, leaving a wavering buzzscape, above which Higgs' Jew's Harp weaves haunting alien melodies, sometimes buzzing and reverberating, other times, speaking in tongues as Higgs sings into it. So haunting and unlike anything we've ever heard. Yet at the same time so strangely soothing, meditative and dreamlike.
It's always such a joy to step into Higgs' world, like traveling through the looking glass, or falling down the rabbit hole, and on the other side, in the mysterious world Higgs calls home, a world which we can only visit, and even in visiting, only see what hovers on the surface, we wander wide eyed and open eared, trying to take in everything we can before the record ends and we are pulled back into home, where we wait patiently for our next visit...
As if that weren't enough, the cd version comes with a full color hardcover book of Higgs' paintings and 'poetry', a series of cryptic acrostics to be more accurate. The�Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot series of paintings are all, like most of Higgs' work, strange and wondrous, here the focus is on enigmatic amorphous shapes, vividly colored, with all manner of textures and designs, stripes, polka dots, some of the shapes look like whales or fish, others like mushrooms, eyeballs, amoebas, shapeless heads, each filled with symbols, colors and patterns. The accompanying acrostics are cryptic and it's difficult to determine if they are related to the paintings they are beside, MUSIC, BIRDS, MIND, EDEN, PEACE, EMBRYO, BELOVED, COITUS... all offering up mysterious pearls of wisdom like "Always braid your silver serpents" or "Existence manifests between ravenous yellow orbs".�
The perfect visual accompaniment to Higgs' raw and primitive musical rituals...
Part three in the ongoing series of limited cd-r explorations from mysterious drone combo High Mountain Tempel, and like the two before it, the band continue to delve into some murky sonic underworld, again presenting loooong songs, each separated by brief sonic interludes, this disc seems feature more actual vocals, the opening track features a processed voice, that sounds a bit like throat singing, or a Speak And Spell, intoning some arcane message, interwoven with long drawn out tones, and a thick ropy buzz, super dark and intense and atmospheric. Elsewhere sampled voices surface, there are bits of chanting here and there, all peppered throughout the disc. But even with the extra voices, the focus here is still on dark, lugubrious, extended dronescapes.
The sound of High Mountain Tempel is probably closest to Expo '70, as their various permutations of dronemusic seem to have a definite krautrock vibe, that gives the sound a sort of spaced out quality, and a subtle propulsion, but unlike Expo '70, HMT seem to have a distinct Eastern influence, much of the music is meditative and subtly dramatic, a bit soundtracky, and some of it sounds like it could be Japanese. Especially the way field recordings are incorporated into the sounds. Giving everything a definite texture, some of it sounding like it was perhaps recorded live in some hilltop temple. Which we would imagine is the idea.
Not sure what else to say actually. This is indeed fantastic, brooding and malefic, but also shimmery and dreamy, sonically it has much in common with the first two installments, so definitely check out those reviews to read more about their 'sound'.
Needless to say, fans of the drone and folks into the current crop of cd-r soundscapers will for sure dig this, but like the other HTM discs, this is more than simple drone music, this is ritualistic alchemical soundwork, one can almost imagine stumbling across a group of cloaked figures huddled around a fire in a forest clearing, tossing various powders into the flames, causing the fire to change color and cast beastlike shadows on the branches above, and this is the sound filtering through the forest like a black moonlit fog...
SUPER LIMITED of course, packaged beautifully in a foldover silkscreened sleeve, gold metallic on red on the outside, black on red on the inside.
For those of you who miss the big ol' fuzzed out desert rock of the mighty Kyuss, or can't get enough of the throbbing blown out RAWK of Fu Manchu and Nebula, this here SF band will almost definitely hit the spot. High Tone Son Of A Bitch mix the above bands sounds with some Thin Lizzy melody, some Eyehategod sludge, and some quirky complex arrangements to come up with some first rate stoner/sludge/doom rock. This 4 song ep also features appearances from Dave Edwardson of Neurosis playing Moogs... and our very own Andee behind the drum kit (but just for this ep)!
MPEG Download: "Fortune's Crown" [/audio/highfortunes.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Fortune's Crown" [/audio/highfortunes.m3u]
Been meaning to get to this one for a while... and then we reviewed it and our supplier was out of stock... but now they've got 'em again and here you go: Japanese guitarist Hisato Higuchi's previous disc on the Family Vineyard label, Dialogue, was all about the almost motionless, mysterious spare strum, a lonely n' lovely abstract guitar meditation. This newer disc starts off that way, with the quietly beautiful "A Hundred Signs Of Light"... but then, when track two, "Grow", kicks in, Higuchi's guitar playing suddenly, surprisingly takes a thrilling turn into amped up electric skree territory. It still sounds lonely and lovely - just WAY more loud and distorted. "Blood And Leaves" follows in the same vein. But then "Melody In The Mud" takes us back to the hushed, minimal moodiness of the first track... though 'tis only a brief (1:39) interlude before the next track, "Electric Guitar Light", erupts in full speaker shredding glory. It's a bit like Loren Connors sharing an album with Keiji Haino (hmmm, actually, those two have done that, but it's been a while and we can't say for sure that's what this sounds like...).
This album continues like this, Higuchi's somnolent, near-ambient songs (with some breathy, barely-there vocals), abutting others that aren't nearly so mellow... one of those is album-ender "Cry Baby Flowers", which sounds something like Eddie Hazel's "Maggot Brain" with a Merzbow makeover. Actually these crinkly-cranked distorted guitar solos -are- still sorta mellow, or at least mesmeric, but only if you're used to enjoying noisier stuff. Certainly they share the same slo-mo suggestions of melody and melancholia with the quieter pieces on here...
Definitely for fans of Neil Youngish fuzz freakout feedback side of Nagisa Ni Te, or Hjiokaidan noise guitar maven Jojo Hiroshige's more "musical" solo efforts. We really, really like it.
We knew John Hill as producer of the stunning folk funk lps of Susan Christie and Margo Guryan, but this concept record is where his producing genius is on full display: an epic electronic space jazz composition featuring Susan Christie, Jimmy Valerio, Gerry Mulligan and Walter Sear. Based on a poem by Ian Michaels called "I Am The Storm of Dawn" that suggests life on Earth originated on one of the six moons of Jupiter, Europa (the only other place in the solar system with water and ice), the 6 Moons of Jupiter features Susan Christie reciting the poem with Moogy electronic drones, cellos,� delayed flutes, and percussion. While we're not always huge fans of spoken word, somehow it works here, adding some serious tripped out drugginess to the already pretty far out proceedings.�
According to the liner notes, this was the first part of a proposed 13 piece concept performance, with each piece written in a distinctly different style, somehow combining poetry, electronic technology, classical, jazz and of course 'space rock' (quotes required!) Not sure sure how that would have panned out had they stuck to the plan, especially since it seems that for this first volume they jammed all that stuff together, into one single awesomely mind melting sonic hodgepodge.�
The tracks range from shimmery free jazzscapes, all abstract percussion and buzzing raga like drones, haunting and mysterious, to full on groovy keyboard drenched space-y garage jams, complete with fluttering flute, wheezing organs, creepy chanted vocals, and wailing psych leads, to strange off kilter chamber music, heavy with reverb and long lonesome tones, to pounding sixties style stomp, but all twisted up around jazzy horns, and jaunty Springtime shuffles, to haunting solo strings, dour melancholic melodies over buried soft buzz, to total acid wah guitars, laced with creepy pizzicato strings and warbly rubbery funhouse melodies. Mix in Christie's deadpan spoken word and this becomes a serious jazzy groovy musical mindfuck. And you know what that means. BUY IT!
You don't even have to hear this to know this is another perfect Aquarius disc: A work for magnetic fields, weather satellites, custom built antennae and force fields. Whoo yeah! Force fields! Lucky for us, it sounds as good as we hoped it would. Very reminiscent of Stephen P. McGreevy's Auroral Chorus II: The Music of the Magnetosphere and Electric Enigma discs of VLF recordings of the Aurora Borealis and other atomospheric electronic phenomena. But Hinterding's recordings are even better, which is saying a lot, considering how much we LOVED those McGreevy discs! The elements are quite similar: staticky buzz, squeaks and whistles, rumbling whirs, clicking and chirping, buzzing hiss and warbly white noise, but on Spectral, those sounds drift and shift, causing all sorts of rhythmic variations and almost-melodies to emerge. There are moments where throbbing pulses and random clicks coalesce into minutely propulsive little micro-rhythms, that chug along until they slowly disipate into the ether. Also the overall sound is thicker, with a solid, warm, whirring drone, underpinning all of the various sonic activities, making this a little less harsh and a lot more dreamy and way more substantial. There's still lots of upper register skree, but it's nestled in a churning roiling bed of fuzzy, humming whir. Beautiful stuff. Proving once again, that no matter how hard we try to make strange and original music, nature was there first, doing it better.
We raved about Ruthless Sperm, last year's full length from Italian gloom garage noise pop new wave outfit His Electro Blue Voice, who we originally discovered on a split 7" with another aQ fave 'faerical blasting punks' Nuit Noire. As much as we loved that single and whatever other tracks we could dig up from HEBV, Ruthless Sperm was a revelation, noisy and poppy, chaotic and catchy, anyone who's been digging Iceage or the Holograms or Beastmilk or the Grave Babies, His Electro Blue Voice were kind of a meaner, more feral version of all those bands, which is most definitely a good thing. So after listening to Ruthless Sperm pretty much constantly, we were thrilled to discover this 12" we had somehow missed, releases on Clay Ruby's (of Burial Hex) Brave Mysteries label, and needless to say, it's a good one. A three song blast of murky, gloomy noise pop, equal parts garage rock crunch, new wave slither, goth rock swagger, the guitars fuzzy and crunchy and angular, the basslines sinewy and Joy Divisiony, the vocals yelped and howled, and most importantly, the songs are catchy as hell, opener "Dead Mice" could have been plucked right off of Ruthless Sperm, with its fuzzed out bass, and furious punk rock energy, all droney and spacey, with a weird psychedelic breakdown midway through, the song collapsing into a weird free noise drift, all skipping records and looped voices, before transforming into a weird bit of psychedelic goth folk, right down to what sounds like a recorder solo(!), eventually working its way back up to something more rocking, but still blissed out and weirdly woozy. Definitely worth the price of admission for the first track alone, but follow up "Eat Sons" is cool too, a serious Interpol vibe, albeit WAY noisier, a crunch, murky main riff, pounding drums, total leather jacket, sunglasses, anthemic gloom punk radness. The song here we end up playing on repeat. The whole of the flipside is taken up by "Zum", a sprawling brooder, all laid back and washed out, fuzzy garage gloom murk, noisy and droned out, but muted and minimal, a sort of swaggery garage goth ballad, that like the opener, has a strange breakdown midway through, from which emerges a completely different song, wildly mathy for a minute, before locking into something much more rocking and swaggery, some fierce fuzz punk pound with some really weird falsetto vocal wails and wild squalls of spaced out psychedelic FX, all of which KILLS. This band is so great. Seems like only a matter of time before the rest of the world discovers these guys, and they end up getting the same love as all the above bands (Holograms, Iceage, etc.). Here's hoping...
LIMITED TO 250 COPIES!!
Reissue of early His Name Is Alive tape releases from 1985 to 1989. Tracks are taken from the first four tapes, earlier versions of tracks that would appear on "Livonia", plus lots of previously unreleased tracks. Totalling in at over 70 minutes, you really get your money's worth here of His Name Is Alive. This is totally great, a lot like the "Livonia" era cuts with more of a raw 4-track, tape experiment feel to them.
Without knowing why or how, the idea of the recently more soulful, perpetually Beach Boys obsessed pop group His Name Is Alive tackling a record of tracks by legendary jazz saxophonist Marion Brown, seems not just unlikely but maybe even ill advised.
So we were pretty surprised and thrilled when we finally wrapped our ears around this disc. A dark smoldering expansive ambient jazz sprawl, His Name Is Alive, seriously channeling the spirit of Marion Brown, in such a way that is at once totally faithful but also, quite modern and radical.
Most of the tracks are languorous and laid back, and sometimes sound like a jazzier No Neck Blues Band, a sort of fluttering free folk, the sounds drifting like smoke, the percussion sizzling and shuffling, the horns moaning softly, lots of tinkling chimes and little flurries of piano, gorgeously soft focus and hypnotic.
There are a few live tracks, which is where the band really cut loose, and embrace the noisier side of Brown's oeuvre, "Capricorn Moon" the first live track, is much boppier, the drums and bass locked into a sort of muted exotica, while the horns bleat wildly over the top, the sound very African, and dipping into some serious Ethiopiques territory here and there. The next few songs return to the blissy jazzy tranquility of the first few, until "Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim", which starts off all dreamlike, but by the end, is a squall of thick distorted guitars and skronky saxes, a serious free jazz duel.
The two part "Geechee Recollections" is another slow burning jam, all exotic percussion and thick rubbery basslines, wailing sax, shuffling skittery drum lines, moody meandering piano, the second half a super minimal late night jazzy sprawl, like a less repetitive Necks, but the same sort of mysterious murky swirl.
The record finishes off with a live version of the opening track, sticking close to that same smoky late night shimmer, but with the horns more active and up in the mix, the drums a bit more propulsive, some wah guitar, managing to sound just a bit more fierce, but without losing that blurry blissy sultriness...
This is so good. We used to love love love His Name Is Alive. They even played an instore here, which was a blast. They sort of lost us though lately with their ever intensifying soul leanings, but this record is absolutely gorgeous, and has definitely restored our faith in Warn Defever and company, plus anyone so into Marion Brown is aces in our book.
A portion of the proceeds of the sale of this cd goes to the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, which is also quite cool...
Longtime SF locals probably remember The Court And Spark, on of our favorite local bands back in the day, their debut album released originally on Andee's tUMULt label, they played shows with Souled American when they were in town way back when, the band slogged away, making amazing record after amazing record, only to have the sort of success they so richly deserved escape them again and again. And thus like bands often do, they called it a day, with the core of the Court And Spark, M.C. Taylor and Scott Hirsch, continuing on as Hiss Golden Messenger, a group that traded in the traditional country influences of their previous outfit for some stranger influences, the Grateful Dead, seventies FM radio, classic rock, and of course that classic Laurel Canyon country pop, all woven into a sound, that while reminiscent of the Court And Spark was something all together smoother, and while we dug this new group, it wasn't really until this new one that we really GOT it. Not entirely sure what it is about Poor Moon, but everything seems to have fallen perfectly into place. Those same influences loom large, but there definitely seems to be a return to a more classic country vibe, the opener sounds like it could have been plucked straight off a Court And Spark record, the only difference some whirring organ, some horns, but Taylor's voice sounds as great as ever, and the song is crazy catchy, rife with swoonsome strings, it's definitely a stunner. "Call Him Daylight" is another winner, a swaggery twang flecked groove, laced with slithery melodies, and even some handclaps, but goddamn if we can't stop listening to it. The rest of the record unfurls similarly, the sound slipping from slide guitar laced country rock, to brooding country folk ballads, campfire bluegrass back porch hoedowns, super warm, melodic country tinged classic rock groovers, all of the tracks here fantastic, not a bum note in the bunch, the sound too, lush and expansive and so gorgeous, mandolin, clavinet, electric piano, violin, viola, fiddle, saxophone, banjo, Rhodes piano, all woven into probably the coolest country rock record we've heard in forever.
Housed in a swank oversized old school tip on mini lp style gatefold sleeve.
We went crazy when we first heard The History Of Apple Pie, a UK combo who sounded like they had time traveled here direct from the mid-nineties, a clutch of kids seemingly channeling the sort of music made right around the time they were born (!), but like some of our other favorite retro-pop combos (Yuck, Best Coast, Real Estate, etc.), they have that sound dialed in. In the case of The History Of Apple Pie, that sound is a sugary sweet concoction equal parts shimmery dreampop jangle and crunchy shoegaze fuzz, every track rife with huge hooks, soaring harmonies, swirling synths, crazy catchy melodies, the vibe definitely a bit twee, but with the occasional bout of rocking swagger, usually in the form of some muscly guitar crunch or epic My Bloody Valentine style wall-of-guitarnoise cascades. Obvious references would be the Swirlies, Veruca Salt, The Pixies, Curve, My Bloody Valentine, Heavenly and the like, and you'd be totally forgiven for hearing this new record and thinking it was actually some obscure lost shoegaze gem from back in the day, but what can we say, we're a sucker for that stuff. For people of a certain age, this immediately takes you back, this is exactly the sort of thing that found its way on many a mixtape, and was the soundtrack for all sorts of roadtrips and adventures, romances and breakups. And even though the record oozes nostalgia (at least for those of us who were there the first time around), it still sounds pretty fantastic, fresh and alive, and if not wholly original, THOAP do take that nineties jangle fuzz formula and make it all their own, crafting some truly transcendent cotton candy billows of distorted dreaminess, gorgeous soft noise psychedelia and lilting jangly fuzz drenched pop bliss.
Does spacey, dark, drifty, deep, and droney sound good to you? Then pay attention: "Darkwave" (i.e. industrial, ambient) label Dragonflight Recordings (who last brought us the experimental black metal of Proscriptor) has just established a sub-label for, well, the sub-sonic specialty that can be described as 'doom' (metal or otherwise), and their first release is the debut cd from Hlidolf.
Not sure what the name means, or how you're supposed to say it, and actually we don't know much of anything else about Hlidolf except that it's the project of one fellow from Norway, Vidar Ermesjo. He recorded this in "Hlidolf Studios" (his home, we presume) in the dark and cold of last winter. It's one loooooong instrumental track (70min!), sorta somewhere betwixt Earth "2" and Maeror Tri or Lustmord. SUNNO))) and Skepticism also come to mind, and especially the obscure and defunct Neptune Towers project of Darkthrone's Fenriz, which this release pays tribute to in its liner notes ("Not for collective listening...recommended listening with headphones, or large, black stereos...").
Like Neptune Towers, this sounds like Krautrock electronics maestro Klause Schulze gone over to the dark side, all evil and ominous, yet soothing -- good late night, creepy going-to-sleep music, if you like that sort of thing (which I do, though unfortunately it's not the preference of my girlfriend...) Glacial, bass-heavy, beautiful. It's almost religious.
Been trying to review this for a while, but everyone kept selling out, the debut full length from these hardcore punks, their sound a furious, grinding frenzy of wild drumming, distorto rigging, and some seriously SICK vokills (and yeah, usually vokills are metal, but this guy could be doing time in a black/death metal band if he wanted), which make this sound seriously fucked up and frantic, the production massive, the guitars monstrous, and those vox, vitriolic and borderline disturbing. There's an intro here (penned by Phamakon!), which is all buzzing rumbles, and weird grinding industrial sounds, coughing and vocal grunts, all swirling and murky and extremely ominous, but once the record proper kicks in, it's a nonstop face melting crush. The sound's a bit sludge-y and crusty too, especially when they slow down into churning, lumbering tarpit dirgery, but i's never long before they explode into another frenzy of blasting pounding ferocity. And did we mention leads? Yep, the occasional burst of shredding lead guitars, angular and atonal, which are generally quickly swallowed up by another onslaught of hardcore pummel.
There are some weirdly melodic moments scattered throughout the record, and lots of surprisingly lush textures, some almost Godspeed-y slow builds, but those elements are less 'weird' and 'experimental', than just another facet of their sound, seamlessly woven into what is essentially some seriously crushing, classic metallic hardcore, that KILLS. Punk rock record of the year hands down. Even though it's from last year. But odds are you're not gonna hear a record this brutal and heavy and punk as fuck this year anyway, so there.
One of the most elaborately packaged punk rock records in recent memory too. A fold over full color jacket, with a super striking, dude-hanging-from-his-foot-from-a-tree cover image, and inside, SIX, that's right six, HUGE two sided posters!
Two things I could never quite get into: funk/soul compilations, and David Holmes. As far as the compilations, they always seemed either too familiar, or too "Whoo, let's dance and get funky". Ugh. Especially when there's so much seriously intense and dark funk and soul floating around. And as for Holmes, he always seemed on the right track, his 'film' music always just barely missed the mark, falling too much in the 'chill-out music for the Kruder and Dorfmeister set' when you could somehow tell he was capable of so much more. So imagine my surprise when one record proves me wrong on both counts. Holmes has picked out some ridiculously obscure soul gems, but more importantly, these tunes are amazing: dark and sultry and so catchy. Once in a while, he masterfully mixes beats and atmospheres into some of the soul jams turning them into modern, bumping, top-down, cruising classics. The interludes here are performed by Homes in his 'classic soul' guise as The Free Association. Occasionally these interludes kind of break the flow, with 'LSD' clips and stuttery samples and that sort of thing, but even more often, he manages to emulate the tunes found elsewhere, coming up with some dirty grimy neo-soul. Plus, this features what has to be the most amazing and intense flute tune ever, taking Roland Kirk's speaking/screaming/hyperventilating flute solos about as far out as you can. Been listening to this non stop!
In the past it's been quite difficult to get stuff on the Opal Tapes label, so we've been pretty excited to get our hands on the last couple releases. The first, reviewed on last week's list, was the latest from Siobhan (we have a few copies left, just ask) and now this, the previously unknown to us Holovr, aka Jimmy Billingham, whose sound is appropriately murky and moody, some strange hybrid of the Caretaker and Boards Of Canada, all grey and hazy, gauzy and washed out, evoking a moodiness similar to BoC, but instead of pastoral and sun dappled, here it's damp and overcast, cloudy and full of shadows, the sound itself, a bleak skitterscape, shot through with burnished guitar skree, in wiry tangles beneath the surface, while over the top, strange kosmische synths drift in and out, the sound seemingly enveloped in blurred billows of hiss and haze, even at it's most propulsive and beat driven, the music is buried beneath a gauze of low fidelity thrum and sonic detritus, making for something ethereal and hauntological. Throughout the record, mysterious voices surface, sampled vocals weave in and out, the beats fragment and grow more jagged and distorted, before slipping back into some sort of somnambulant house music, before once again blossoming into prismatic ambient bliss out, the beats routinely wreathed in a backdrop remains of swirlingly serene, mesmeric and dreamlike, lo-fi bleary eared drift.
Another out of left field record that just knocked our blocks off. Not sure what we were expecting, something super noisy and fucked up actually, but what we got was some totally irresistible sloppy chaotic garage power pop, that actually sort of ends up sounding a bit like noise rock guys unleashing their inner power pop demons. Before we go any further though, listen to the first sound sample, "Two Steps", we'll wait...
Man that song destroys, some of you have probably already added this to your cart, heck, that's what we would have done, there's no resisting that one, easily THE pop jam of the year, we've literally listened to that song about 50 times in the last week, so much that it wasn't until a couple days ago that we finally listened to that whole record, which thankfully revealed a whole 'nother bunch of killer pop chaos, not to mention some even more chaotic off kilter noisiness.
Let's talk about that song first, it's definitely the best song on the record, and we would gladly pay $14 for a one sided single with JUST that song, it's pretty much the most perfect pop song we've heard in forever, with wild almost cracking vocals, some incredible riffing, including a weird slippery almost slide part that gives us chills every time, sloppy drumming, and a killer tempo shift part way through that's just fucking perfect. And the hook, that song has been stuck in our head non stop since the first time we heard it.
But after you get it out of your system and listen to it 20 or 20 or 50 times, the rest of the record will reveal itself as a pretty much non stop kick ass punky power pop gem, like some eighties pop record transported through time. but on the way it got all tangled up in the slipstream with some random noise and garage rock records and emerged like, well, THIS.
"Other Side Of The Street" is a short sharp ultra distorted pop jam, with a punky frame but laced with all sorts of amazing hooky guitar melodies, "Route 18" (after the 3 minutes of near silence that is "Live Outside") is total bubblegum FM radio pop, but all twisted up and tweaked, and just like the other tracks, it's the extra guitar that turns it into something super special, adding some super rad melodic filigree. It's hard to not hear some Guided By Voices and other purveyors of lo-fi pop, but this isn't traditionally lo-fi, it doesn't sound muddy and 4-tracky and much as it just sound ramshackle and haphazard, and if there are hints of those other lo-fi rockers, these guys definitely make it their own, plus there's the weird extra noisy parts which manage to fit perfectly, not disrupting the flow at all, rather highlighting the subtle noisiness in the poppiest tracks, while hiding some serious poppery within the various layers of crunch and howl, the angular no-wave opener "Nest Of Vipers", with its sampled broken glass, fucked-with tape speed, mumbled vocals, super blown out drumming, and dreamy hushed detuned piano backward outro, "A Different Touch" is super in-the-red, the drums so distorted they sound like bursts of radio static, the guitars practically melting, but the whole thing wrapped around some killer hooks, with amazing guitar melodies, an impossibly noise drenched murk-pop blow out, and that's basically the magic of Home Blitz, the practically perfect pop is infused with noise and on the verge of total implosion, while the fucked up noise jams are infused with pop, threatening to shed the noise completely and explode into another burst of wild eyed power pop. If these guys went in a real studio and spent a fortune, it's almost possible to imagine them getting huge, but smooth out the rough edges and it just wouldn't be the same band.
Absolutely killer noisepop, and yet another record to add to our year end faves list...
We'd been meaning to review this for a while. After HB's unanimous fave and aQ Record Of The Week, O.ut O.f P.hase, and a kick ass, and way too short set at our South By Southwest showcase this year, we know we needed more more more. This comp collects all the early out of print material from these short sharp snotty noise poppers, their first two 7"s, a split cassette, a super limited 12", not to mention a couple unreleased track, and while this stuff is WAY more raw and lo-fi, it's easy to hear the ramshackle perfect pop juggernaut these guys would be come. And considering how noisy and unhinged and loose and on the verge of collapse these guys were on their newest record, you can imagine what a looser more fucked up version of THAT might sound like.
All the stuff we love about Home Blitz is already firmly in place, sharp angular riffage, jangly guitars, wild drumming, killer hooks and classic melodies, and that voice, an about to crack warbly yelp, that occasionally slips into a falsetto, the recording definitely low fidelity, but super bright and weirdly lush at the same time. And the songs, like total classic power pop / punk pop, but more homebrewed, most 1-2 minutes, rollicking and wild and super rocking, slipping from total chaotic freeforall, to crunchy jangle, to lo-fi bedroom pop, to faux arena rock out, to blasting garage punk, to woozy druggy Velvetsy drone rock, and back to full on blistering trash pop again, sounding like a band that would sound right at home on Siltbreeze, but with many of the songs sounding like they could have been plucked right off one of those lost pop comps like Yellow Pills.
There are a few tracks where the band gets more far out, "Bored" is a reverb drenched dirge, clouds of cymbal sizzle float over muted trashcan percussion, big clanging guitar chords, howled vox, or the 9+ minute "Yard", which almost sounds like some sort of Dead C ballad, all splattery percussion, detuned guitar, swaths of crumbling distortion and static, a stumbling chunk of free rock that gives way to a weird piano driven vamp, that sounds almost like Elton John via Sentridoh or something, eventually crumbling into some sort of abstract field recording driven noise rock workout. But then it's back to more loose unhinged noisy power pop bliss, including a killer glammy Slade cover! We love these guys!
Pearl Mystic is the first we've heard from this UK psych rock outfit, and just describing them as 'psych rock' probably has most aQ psych-nerds frothing at the mouth, imagining long sprawling sheets of swirling guitar shimmer, and droned out, heart-of-the-sun mega space jams, and while that stuff is definitely part of Hookworms' sound, those are not the only parts, the band tending toward a sound much more song based and focused, sure fans of Carlton Melton and the Heads and White Hills and all the rest will no doubt dig, but so will folks more into outfits like Spiritualized and Psychic Ills. Imagine a strange fusion of Spiritualized's long-form tranced out psych soul mesmer, and the more blown out sonic explorations of those other above mentioned bands and you'll get a rough idea of what's in store for you from Hookworms.
Opener "Away/Towards" is the perfect opening blast, displaying both sides of the groups' sound in equal measure, the first few minutes, presumably the "Away" portion, finds Hookworms unfurling a slow, undulating dronescape of Spacemen 3 like guitar pulsations, over a bed of churning tribal rhythms, and a sky full of weird super FX heavy yowled vox, the sound a brooding slow build, that eventually explodes into full on space/psych pound, the guitars wild and fierce, everything wreathed in clouds of dense drugged out swirl, but that only last for less than a minute before the sound shifts gears again, moving into what can only be the "Towards" section, with the sound settling into something less crunchy and chaotic, and more woozy and washed out, pulsing and motorik, the guitars a bit muted, and now wrapped in whirring swaths of chordal organ, the vocals, still echo-ey, but much more 'sung', totally tranced out and hypnotically groovy, at one point getting kinda swaggery, with a soaring chorus, and some cool stretches of guitar buzz sixties style garage-drone psych groove, that we can not get enough of. And that's just the first song.
That swagger definitely informs much of the rest of the record, with the sound shifting easily from Stooges-y like stomp, to tripped out Moon Duo like mesmer, to explosive, blown out, noise drenched heavy psych crumble (check out the end of "Form And Function"!), to woozy, bongsmoke swirled, zoner psych drift, all dreamy and droney, often touching on all of those in a single track. The record is peppered with title-less interludes, which are cool abstract stretches of experimental guitar drift, and wild FX drenched freeform, backwards FX laced ambience, and murky, drug-drong dreamdrift mesmer. Those interludes alone could have easily been stretched out and expanded into their own record (also most likely an aQ ROTW!), but it's the songs here that drive Pearl Mystic, from the murky, psych ballad "In Our Time" that almost sounds like Sub Pop era Afghan Whigs recast as modern retro psych, with its crooned, reverby vocals, prickly distorted guitars, and gorgeous backdrop of lush psychedelic swirl, to the epic slow burn Spacemen 3 style drug-rock dirge, infused with lush, soaring, swirling shimmer, and driven by some super mesmerzing motorik rhythms, all the various parts swirled and smeared into what might be the dreamiest, druggiest jam here, to the wild, tribal pound of "Preservation" with its yowled vox, clouds of fierce blown out psych guitar, fierce drumming, and its crushing, speaker melting final blow out that would most definitely give any and all other aQ approved psychedelic space rockers a run for their money.
Hookworms deftly balance actual songs, with wild, free-form, heavy space-psych excursions, an experiment that could easily have blunted both, but instead ends up the best of both worlds, and might just coax drugged out psych nerds into the light, and drag the psychedelic dabblers just a little bit toward the dark side. Awesome.
Not technically a new release, but the first time on cd for some grim black rituals captured way back in 2004 by one of our favorite Finnish black metal hordes, Horna. And right out of the gate, it's everything we love about Horna, raw and grim and black, filthy and primitive, but also weirdly melodic and catchy, the opener "Piina" initially sounds like classic old school BM, but then Horna inject a woozy melancholy melody, which changes the tenor of the song big time, as it swings back and forth from pounding black filth, to moody lumbering depressive blackness, at some points it almost sounds like a muted muddied lo-fi Iron Maiden, which in the context of Horna's blackened sound is pretty excellent. And that song pretty much sets the template for the rest of the record, a blackened concoction equal parts grim black blast, and strange loping melodicism, the band never blast, but do get to some fairly punkish tempos, but also slip into weird waltzes and stumbling doomic pounds, the lilting melody of "Unohdetut Kasvot, Unohdettu Aani" is deftly wrapped around some furious black buzz, the result is dangerously lovely, and then there's "Oi Kallis Kotimaa", that's almost a sea shanty, with its jaunty tempo, epic soaring melodies and weird grunted sing songy vox, but the band quickly shift back into something much less melodic and way more grim in the form of the churning blackness of "Pohjanportti".
The final three tracks offer up more of that strange blend of buzz and howl, and moody melodic drift, dipping into Katatonia or Lifelover territory here and there, which is well balanced by bursts of serious blackness and gnarled UNmelodic riffs, like the one that bookends the impossibly lovely main melody of album closer "Menneiden Kaiku". Awesome.
It's hard to say exactly why, but Horna might just be our favorite black metal band EVER. No matter what we're listening to, no matter how heavy or dark or grim or fucked up or mind blowing that whatever is, the minute we throw some Horna on it's like all that listening never happened. We're suddenly in thrall to Horna's timeless black buzz. Ensorcelled, enraptured, smitten even. Horna are heavier than anything else, buzzier and more black. There's just something magical and mysterious about Horna, they're Finnish, that could be part of it. But their sound is totally unique, even though that sound is assembled from all the bits that make up all black metal. It's a sound simultaneously frenzied and furious and heavy as fuck, but also simple and punky, even a little groovy here and there, the songs swing wildly from impossibly blazing black blasts to lurching chug and back again. The guitars are massive and thick, and while Shatraug's vocals were always amazing, there's now a new second vocalist Corvus, the two mix it up big time, hellish shrieks, punk rock barks, death metal growls, all adding a weirdly emotional element to their grim blackness. And like most of our favorite bands, there's a definite pop element buried beneath, hooks all tangled up with the lurching, thrashing, head banging buzz, drifting just below the surface, making these songs not only brutal and black, but crazy fucking catchy as well. It's almost as if someone took Iron Maiden, dragged them into the forest, where they were forced fight and then mate with Darkthrone, then the offspring were fed human flesh and blast beats, slathered in corpsepaint and doused in black buzz, until they emerged feral and fucked up, demented and delirious, but ghostlike vestiges of their more traditional lineage continue to linger on. Fuck it. We could make up cool little stories and spend the next several paragraphs exhausting our black metal thesaurus, but basically, none of that really matters. This review could have been two words long. HORNA RULE. If you're into black metal, and you don't love Horna, then you're not. Not really. And if you're new to the genre and want to hear traditional black metal done about as well as humanly, or inhumanly possible, then Horna is the band to start with, and this double disc is as good a place as any to dive in...
We definitely don't give enough love to the mighty Horna. Finnish masters of raw and primitive, grim buzzing blackness. They're HUGE favorites with the metalheads around here and yet as of the writing of this here review, we've only ever listed ONE record by these guys, the recent split with Peste Noire, and while normally we would laugh in your face if you told us any band could beat the pants off of Peste Noire on a split, Horna damn near pulled it off.
So here's one of two new-ish Horna releases, this one was recorded in 2004, which, according to the liner notes was "before the Master's journey from here to eternity." Which master are they referring to? Well, as Sotahunto is a tribute to Swedish black metal masters Bathory, the master in question is Quorthon, the mastermind behind Bathory, who inspired a legion of blackened followers before passing away in June of 2004. And of course, as this is a tribute, the songs were composed in a style more similar to Bathory than Horna in some ways, although Horna always owned a sonic debt to their Swedish forbears, old school, raw blasting, almost punkish sounding black metal, pounding beats, relentless riffing, that unmistakable Horna shriek, fast and furious but with a definite groove. Not blasting so much as just relentlessly churning, midtempo dirges building to bursts of intense blackness. Lots of this still sounds like classic Horna, but they definitely honor their master with a suite of songs that sound like they could have come straight out of Sweden circa 1988. Awesome.
A while back we reviewed a crazy limited tape from Horseback, aka Jenks Miller, called Stolen Fire, which was a crazy good collection of odds and ends, random demos, electronic experiments, weird warped pop songs, the sort of stuff that's slowly been finding its way on to more and more Horseback records proper. Sadly, we were only able to get ten copies of the tape, which disappeared in a flash. When we contacted Miller to get more, after informing us the tape was gone, he did let us know that it would be coming out cd eventually. And here it is, as part of a triple cd set! Including said tape, a whole disc of live recordings, and a disc of rarities, splits and singles, from splits with Voltigeurs, Pyramids, Locrian and other aQ faves. Might as well start with Stolen Fire since that's what got us all excited about this set in the first place.
The opening track is a super minimal, drum machine driven chunk of stripped down skeletal kraut-pop, woozy and laid back, spidery guitar melodies, a weary crooned vocal, darkly dreamy and subtly psychedelic. The follow up is a strange chunk of gristly industrial ambience, all hiss and crackle and high end skree, like an amp feeding back in the rain, with just a bit of those weird garbled vocals that were all over the last Horseback record, doused in FX and reverb. The rest of the side unfurls like the opener, looped rhythms, subtle shifting textures, a little bit tribal, sometimes sounding like recent aQ faves Silent Servant, a definite dark techno vibe to some of the proceedings, everything wreathed in a softly distorted haze, all kinda krauty and darkly hypnotic, with the occasional even poppier jams emerging from the murk, all Casio drum machine and shimmery eighties chords, one of those jams sounds a bit like the love theme from some mysterious B-movie, when the main melody comes in, it's almost like James Ferraro or Ariel Pink, which is not a bad thing at all, just unexpected. There's weirdly crooned vox popping up throughout, that suits the music to a T. There are brief bits of super distorted atmospheric heaviness, blissed out blackened, and in some cases quite dreamy.
The 'Destroyed Demo Version' of "North Star Struck", which we dug so much on the tape, is present, and still has us envisioning blown out crumble and in-the-red crunch, and while it's not quite that, it is pretty awesomely dirgey and fuzzy, a dark sprawl of tranced out hypno-rock, like Circle on downers, the whole thing wreathed in clouds of cosmic FX and wild sci-fi squiggles, woozy organ melodies, all around that churning kraut-drone groove, and it never lets up, the sound locks in and plays out until the rock begins to fade, leaving just pulsing electronics and a staticky cloud of gristly haze. So great! And "Transparency (Murdered Again)", another track from the tape we loved, is more of the same, a gauze-y, heady drift of psychedelic shimmer, wheezing chords and spidery twang, which is soon joined by a strangely looped rhythm, the sounds all coalescing into a strangely stuttering minimal zoner groove, another track that sounds like warped, zombified Circle, slowed way down, a seriously hypnotic sprawl of hypno kraut mesmer. In addition to the tracks from the tape, there are a bunch of extra unreleased tracks and previously unreleased versions, and even though they aren't proper Horseback songs, like we said in our review of the tape,they might be some of the coolest stuff we've heard from Horseback yet!
And heck, that's just one of the three discs! The singles and rarities disc is pretty stellar as well, and includes a bunch of tracks from singles we never knew existed, as well as tracks from a few we've reviewed, not to mention a Stooges cover!! The two tracks from the split with Voltigeurs are some sort of alien black prog. The first all buzzing guitars, pounding drums, harsh hellish vokills, and lots of ELP style organs (!), which transforms the sound into something way weirder, and frankly way cooler. The organs swirl and pulse and buzz over murky drum pound and those blackened shrieks, those blackened sounds slowed down, like some bizarre mash up of Burzum at 16rpm and ELP at 33, the keyboards make the sound more psychedelic and spacey, and fuse perfectly into a gloriously twisted hybrid, one that is peppered with squalls of freaked out psychedelic noise, and culminates in a gorgeous Burzumic outro, all blown out drone riffage and buried anguished howls, mesmerizing and mysterious. The second track is soaring and epic and a little blackened, but sounds more static, more like a sort of Sunroof!-style ur-drone, draped over blasting beats nearly lost in the churn and swirl, harsh vox here too, the overall sound extra distorted, glimmery and glistening and downtuned and crumbling, as if the signal is way too hot for the speakers, which makes it sound noisier for sure, but also mesmerizingly psychedelic. The HB track from the split with Pyramids is a feral blast of black metal, a frantic blast beat beneath buzzing guitars that almost sounds more like blackened gypsy folk than black metal proper, until the vokills come in, and the demonic shriek clears that all up, before changing gears half way through and transitioning into a gorgeously decayed crumbling distorted dronescape. Then there's the track from their split 7" with Locrian, a hazy droned out raga, centered around a glorious high end drone, all shimmer and reverberation, the sound sun dappled and gloriously effulgent, very much like Sunroof!, mesmerizing and dreamlike, to which HB adds, some twisted gnarled vocals, all hissy and demonic, wreathing the whole thing in little melodic tendrils, the sound blissed out and gauzy, the blackness seemingly held at bay by this shining sonic light, the sort of track that we could listen to forEVER. HB's track from the 4 way split tape on Handmade Birds with Njiqahdda, Venowl and Cara Neir is also included, sounding like it could have come right off of their Half Blood record. Rhythmic and hypnotic, bass and drum locked into a sort of hypnorock groove, laced with fluttering flutes, weird electronics, swirling shimmering melodies, when the guitar comes in, it's sort of washed out and droney, giving the track an almost Earth-like vibe, the overall sound is like a super cyclical krautrock styled minimalism, with an epic second half, replete with those shrieked black metal vox. And there's of course more more more!!
Finally, the third disc features two long tracks, the first a 20 minute live performance of the first HB record, "Impale Golden Horn", recorded in 2007 in North Carolina, and it's a dreamy sprawl of softly smoldering burnished thrum and rumble, laced with dreamike psychedelic filigree and soft chordal swells, which leads perfectly into the previously unreleased 40+ minute "A Plague Of Knowing", which is a gorgeous sprawling Sunroof-style ur-drone, a dreamy psychedelic soft noise haze that swirls and shimmers and blurs into billowing clouds of blissed out drift!
Comes in a fold out 8 panel digipak style sleeve, withe some seriously extensive liner notes!!!
It's not just us that thought Horseback's latest album was so awesome. A blurb taken from the following review of ours does appear on this Relapse-reissued and repackaged top obi, alongside similarly enthusiastic quotes from both The Wire magazine and Invisible Oranges blog.
Originally released by the amazing Utech label, this album garnered the attention of the corporate metal overlords (just kidding) at Relapse, who obviously thought it could, and should, find a wider audience. Good for Horseback! Definitely pick this one up if you missed the Utech edition. Here's what we said about it before:
Something very strange must have transpired since the last Horseback disc. Something traumatic maybe? Some spiritual crisis of sonic faith? Where that record was a glistening, glimmering, dreamy, drifty drone record, this one is, well, much heavier, and more rocking, and WAY more intense and EVIL sounding. So much so that it almost sounds like a different band. That said, we dig it. A LOT.
Super intense, and super heavy psychedelic twang flecked metallic post rock. The guitars buzz, and drone, and occasionally twang, the drums are powerful, tight, the instruments locked into slow burning build ups, some strange hybrid of newer Earth, Godspeed, Circle, the Necks and maybe a little Scenic. There's a sort of krautrock vibe going on too. Sun baked, a little lysergic, space-y hypnotic, repetitive, the tracks looooooong, with mostly a single part, that gradually builds and builds. The cool thing is it never explodes into a metal coda, a la Isis or Neurosis or a million other bands, it's all about the journey not the destination, and the journey is riveting enough without tacking on an explosive blow out.
But then there's the vocals, a harsh demonic rasp totally at odds with the music beneath, which in some ways makes the combination sound that much more intense and evil. Especially when the rasps are locked in a sort of call and response with the guitars, really strange but definitely compelling.
The first three tracks are variations on a theme, each an incredible slab of brooding, mesmerizing hypno-rock, lush and layered, with tons of cool little extra guitar flourishes, the drums busy enough to be interesting, but still locked tight into the groove, those vocals, adding menace for sure, but also a strange element that as mentioned above changes the whole feel. A track will be moody and woozy and will suddenly sound a bit evil, or at least a little ominous, before slipping back into the loping, pounding crush of the main riffs.
The strangest thing about this record is that the track with the most overtly evil title, the closer "Hatecloud Dissolving Into Nothing", is the least heavy or evil of the bunch, and the only track that sounds like the first Horseback record. A 16+ minute drift of soft focus new age-y ambience, of dreamy drift, sun dappled guitars draped over long stretches of gauzy whir, the sound delicate and crystalline, definitely dreamy and blissed out, the only remnant of the tracks that came before, are some barely audible harsh vokills, way way way down in the mix, that almost sound like a slow shifting layer of hiss or buzz, beneath the kaleidoscopic shimmer of blurred guitar hum and melancholic melody, another strange combination, but similar to the vocals on the first three tracks, they lend a very subtle hint of menace to the otherwise tranquil proceedings.
The new jewelcase packaging is still quite nice, though not as gorgeous as the original Utech sleeve.
On the last list, we reviewed an lp from Hot & Cold, a Chinese group who somehow found their way to Chicago label Moniker, and as we mentioned in that review it was a perfect fit, as H&C's twisted brand of lo-fi noise pop / minimal psych kraut / psychedelic noise rock was pretty well removed from much of the other Chinese stuff we've been reviewing lately, which tends more toward the jangly/fuzzy end of nineties style American indie rock. But we (and lots of you) dug that lp, and wanted more, so here's another blast of FX drenched weirdo pop noisiness, and if anything, it's equal to the Moniker lp, right from the get-go, opening with a feral blast of distortion drenched, feedback slathered, bass heavy crunch. Siren like melodies swirl atop a bed of tangled high end squiggles, some fierce distorto bass buzz, yowled Mark E. Smith style vox, all wreathed in a weird cloud of sculpted industrial feedback, and driven by a clipped minimal electro beat, and it's so good! One of those opening tracks we had to listen to 5 or 6 times before we could make ourselves listen to the rest of the record. Which is equal to that opener, albeit not all nearly as noisy and chaotic. "Simon's Angry Song" doesn't sound nearly as angry as that opener, but does deliver a tense sprawl of loping noise rock mesmer, with some crunchy guitar buzz, another drum machine beat, the vocals buried in the mix this time, but as we've come to expect, it doesn't take long for the song to splinter into full on WTF freakout, a twisted squall of wild psychedelic noise, and glitched out weirdness, all still draped over that original hypnotic groove. "Knife Fight" sounds like a more wasted, WAY more abstract Stooges, a single riff looped and layered into something super tranced out, like the other tracks, gradually getting more and more twisted and trippy. We could probably go through the whole record track by track, cuz every song here is a twisted weirdo gem, hazy zoner-psych krautrock style kosmiche, to loping, stuttering electro-murk grooviness, that explodes into damaged outsider rhythmic meltdown, to super blown out, noise rock damage, to druggy dirgey mesmer, that sounds a bit like Spacemen 3 and the Velvets, melted down and doused in hallucinogens, to crunchy, robotic new wave noise-pop...
Seriously twisted, WTF avant pop electro noise radness, an oddball sonic outlier amidst all the killer Chinese indie rock and noise pop that we've been reviewing recently, but one that's quickly revealing itself to maybe be one of our favorites so far!
Hot Snakes is the long awaited reunion of John Reis (Rocket from the Crypt) and Rick Farr, who made some of the most amazing and kick ass post punk guitar rock as Drive Like Jehu. While John's one man band, the Back Off Cupids (recently released on Drunken Fish), is more of a lo-fi home recording instrumental experiment, the Hot Snakes is definitely carrying the Jehu torch. Heavy and rocking and bristling with energy, it's almost like a weird mix of both Rocket and Jehu; the voice and the sound is unmistakenly Jehu, but the songs aren't nearly as complex and ultra-precise. Instead they opt for a looser, noisier, wilder sound. People have been referencing the Wipers, and Black Flag, but basically, it just sounds like a dumbed down Drive Like Jehu (which is essentially what Rocket From the Crypt is too), which is not a bad thing at all.
Brand new double cd-r release from The Hototogisu, the occasional project of Sunroof!/Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower. Unlike previous Bower efforts (and the last Hototogisu cd-r) 'Floating Japanese Oof!' plays out like one massive 140 minute piece (regardless of how it's tracked). This is bliss out, drone music the way it was meant to be experienced, in massive mind expanding chunks. Shimmery clouds of ambient high end guitar drone and squiggly brain tickling twinkles, with pulsing low end, and distant clatter. Gorgeous, otherworldly and totally essential.
We had never heard of House Of Lightning, but who can resist a sticker that says: Members of Floor, Cavity & Dove? Not us that's for sure. And we're guessing plenty of you as well. And it only took about 30 seconds to convince us that we were right to not resist. The Sound is immediately recognizable as that sort of Torche style sludge/pop heaviness, but if anything, HoL is way weird, simultaneously more punk, and MORE METAL. It's strange but the first song explodes into a punk rock gallop, before devolving into some classic metal riffery, plenty of chugs, and pick squeals, and double kick drumming, it's not hard to imagine some wailing air raid siren vocals, but instead, it gets all math metal, a churning, roiling sonic swirl. The second track too, is a weird mix of ethereal wispy vocals, draped over wild progged out drumming, and furious helicopter riffing, the song so intricate and mathy, at times it almost sounds like a wild chaotic jumble, that is until it all manages to fall perfectly into place, and those dreamy drifty vocals swoop back in, for some shoegazey metalpop, before once again, fracturing into some proggy tech-metal. Imagine Breadwinner or Don Caballero mixed with a little Cynic and a lot of Torche, sounds like a weird mix, and it is definitely pretty weird, but it sorta works. In fact as much as we love Torche, from what we've heard of the new one, House Of Lightning is WAY weirder and trippier and more experimental, and is pushing lots of our math metal and weirdo prog buttons, while remaining just poppy enough to be impossibly catchy, even amidst all this tangled weird time signatured freak out. And as you get deeper into the record, the sound get even more varied and twisted, at one point the sound gets all super melodic, the bass CRANKED so much so, that it's like the lead instrument, all the while, the rest of the band is spitting out metallic mathiness just beneath the surface, that bass resurfaces on the B side, as the sound gets briefly super doomy, before erupting into more noisepop-techmetal mayhem, catchy and crunchy, shredding and soaring.
Comes in a full color jacket, with a heavy printed inner sleeve. Pressed on clear green vinyl, but sadly no download, and thus, no sound samples.
The Howling Wind is the duo of Tim Call and Ryan Lipynsky, whose combined black metal CV is kinda ridiculous/amazing: Aldebaran, Serpentine Path, Saturnalia Temple, Villains Mournful Congregation, Hail, Thralldom, Unearthly Trance and loads more. Needless to say, these two make a potent pairing, and this one is a cassette version of their 2012 release Of Babalon (there's a new one one since called Vortex), which sounds a bit like you might imagine from the above list, sure there's dense, buzzing furious blackness, but there's also churning, downtuned doomi-ic sludge, most of the tracks are laced with psychedelic leads, or wild metal shredding, and the sound itself, while plenty grim, offurs much in the way of ambience and atmosphere, with even the blurriest of blasts infused with plenty of haunting moodiness, and the guitars layered into epic swaths of sonic fury, soaring majestically, and becoming almost psychedelic at times. There's also a seriously proggy vibe as well, the tracks lurching from tangled chaos to looped harmonic wooziness and back again. Definitely a good balance between classic black metal and the new wave of modern avant/post USBM, and some of the tracks definitely remind us of other likeminded outfits, like Yellow Eyes or Ash Borer or Krallice (Colin Marston from Krallice did produce this record after all), one even reminds of Norwegian BM groovers Khold! But Howling Wind situate themselves somewhere closer to the classic sound of orthodox black metal, albeit, reworked for the modern age...
There's been so much amazing, dark minimal techno lately we can barely keep up, and so much good stuff, that even the techno haters here have come around. Recently we've been inundated with killer records from Shed, Terrence Dixon, Chasing Voices, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Kowton, Miles, Function, Silent Servant, and even techno influenced outliers like Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, etc.
You can add Huerco S. to the list. And while we know, a quick Google search, and we could tell you all about Huerco S., his real name, where he's from, what other group's he's played in, all that jazz, but sometimes not knowing anything is way better, especially when it comes to music like this. Colonial Patterns sounds so mysterious, it's murky, and moody, washed out, minimal and abstract, the sounds are crumbly and faded, the beats are barely there, more like buried pulsations, hushed rhythmic swells, a rumbling throb, wreathed in all manner of sonic detritus, so much so, that we're loathe to even really qualify this as techno. It has techno elements for sure, but to these ears it has much more in common with folks like Tim Hecker or the Caretaker, atmospheric ambience, everything wasted and decayed, even the melodies sound half formed, and ancient, as if over the course of the record, they've gradually been eroded, existing now more as sonic shadows, as audio imprints of sounds lost and faded away, some tracks are formed from fragmented vocals, looped into maddeningly tranced out soft focus stutters, which gradually blur into pure sound, the 'vocals' absorbed into something greater, like a way more arcane, abstract version of the Field, the beats are barely ever actually beats, more like skeletal arrangements of rhythmic elements, on some tracks, the beats consist of nothing more than fractured fields of static, possibly the result of gunked up tape heads, yet somehow, the results are magical, and yeah, mysterious. The tracks that do exist closer to proper techno, even those display all manner of warped sonic anomalies, swirling and psychedelic, on the verge of collapse, held together by the most skeletal of rhythmic support, while others are purely abstract arrangements of sound and rhythm, rhythm and sound, dubby, droney, drowsy, dirgey, strange samples surfacing throughout, only to be re-engineered into something wholly other, stumbling, skittering, stuttering, lurching, lumbering, woozy, meditative, hypnotic and mesmerizing, totally alien, yet strangely warm and soothing, tranquil and totally and utterly entrancing. Definitely a contender for year end lists, electronic / techno or otherwise, and a new unanimous aQ fave!!!
Tomorrow is the first ever solo record from Carl Hultgren, aka Carl of psychedelic bliss pop drifters Windy & Carl, and we're happy to report, that even on his own, the sound doesn't fall to far from the dreamy psychedelia of W&C.
Lush, layered guitars capes, that shimmer and glimmer, soft strums are blurred into heaving billows of chordal thrum, notes chime, and harmonics ring out, distortion if muted and smeary, and gives everything a druggy, dreamy vibe, all sun dappled and blissed out. There are some subtle bits of processing, electronics here and there, even some buried rhythms, but for the most part, Tomorrow is all glistening guitars, softly soaring, sonic streaks across the heavens, that blur into hazy, prismatic driftscapes, with some tracks reminding us of the Durutti Column for sure, the same sort of soft focus melancholia, but others getting downright noisy, a bit darker, even then though, the sound has a heavenly glow, a warm, enveloping sonic center that bathes everything in a blissful soft afternoon light. Others are strummy and melodic, with spidery guitars wrapped around a skeletal Appalachia, again all softly smeared into something a bit more otherworldly, and ethereal, a wonderfully wistful collection of soft-psych, dream-drift blissout.
The cd version is limited to 350 copies and comes in a nice, hand letterpressed sleeve, with full color pasted on front cover artwork, the 2lp version is limited to 500 copies, comes in a heavy gatefold sleeve and is pressed on one black lp, and one orange. Both come with a download code, with 6 bonus tracks available only via the download!
Record number two from the strangely named Human Quena Orchestra, whose first record, Means Without Ends, was one of the most devastating slabs of blackened post industrial ultra doom ever, an abject crawl through layer upon layer of impossibly thick downtuned buzz, massive walls of crumbling distortion, pounding percussion, we mentioned groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter and Swans, as well as Moss and Bunkur, but even on that record, HQO were going somewhere darker, and deeper, heavier and way more extreme. Take those same bands and mix in some Whitehouse, some Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Thergothon, Lustmord, HQO is the soundtrack to a descent into hell, or at least sounds exactly how we imagine that must sound. Pants shittingly terrifying.
For the follow up, HQO mainman (and only man) Ryan Unks, was joined by his former Creation Is Crucifixion bandmate Nathan Berlinguette, and the two spent months and months meticulously crafting this slab of bleak aural terror. Sampling drums, recording guitars and basses, creating loops and samples, layering and assembling and arranging, recording and rerecording and mixing and remixing, two sonic alchemists poised above their slumbering golem, waiting for the perfect moment to bring it to life.
The Politics Of The Irredeemable is absolutely epic, monstrous, stunning in its scope, if the first record was the soundtrack to an earth stripped bare, of death and destruction and pestilence, then this record is the sound of the end of all life in the universe, of planets hurtling into suns, of stars collapsing into black holes, but the thing is, the music here is much more personal and emotional, it carries the weight of a universal apocalypse, but is more the sound of sadness, personal hell, not a literal trip down the rabbit hole, gnashing teeth and eternal hellfire, this is much more tactile and REAL, it's easy to describe music like this abstractly, but this is some seriously intense and brutal, and stunningly introspective heaviness.
Unlike most of the sludge and doom, where the bands play as low as they can, tune down until the stings are hanging loose on the fretboard, playing as loud as they possibly can, and as slow and they are able, the elements that make up Human Quena Orchestra's sound world are deliberate, are crafted to evoke specific emotions, to conjure up images, to help your mind relate to the message within the music. Four long long tracks, two split into distinct parts, the opener "Progress" plays out like most bands' entire records. A heaving crush of downtuned crunch, the vocals wild and hysterical, wrapped in reverb and often left to wail in the wide open, only occasionally joined by the pound of a drum, or the slow motion avalanche of the next chord. All the while the sky is streaked with feedback and long buzzing tones, all woven into undulating smears, lit from below by buried melodies and a patina of cymbal sizzle. For 13 minutes, the darkness becomes sound, and that sound swallows the listener whole, preparing him for the harrowing musical journey to come.
The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between sprawling expanses of windswept ambience, distant moaning whir and barely audible subterranean drones, deep bell like tones drifting along slow swirls of muted melodies, and lurching crushing slow motion sludge, but sludge seems too dismissive in the case of HQO, this is not filthy or crusty or lo-fi, it's definitely dark and harsh, but hauntingly beautiful, the crush and crunch are strangely lush and rich, layered and textured, the sound becoming almost orchestral at points, often receding into the background, an ominous backdrop to the slow slither of sounds up front, at its harshest, the sounds gather up into a squall of white noise, but even then the edges are dull and rounded, the noise is muted so instead of being brutal or painful, it manages to throb and pulse like the beating of a dying heart, that beating echoed by the reverbed crash of a lone drum, pounding out a simple rhythm, nearly obfuscated by the haze of rumble and buzz, the record finally coalescing into something resembling hopefulness, the last minute or so, a warm glowing ember of drone, drifting, drifting and then slowly fading out. It seems impossible that something this heavy and harsh and brutal and blackened could be so beautiful...
These Northwestern heavies came highly recommended by aQ faves Megaton Leviathan, but don't be expecting a similarly spaced out psychedelic doom, instead Hungers deliver a super dense, blackened heaviness, that actually reminds us of the newest Satyricon, but these guys have more up their sleeve for sure. After blasting out of the gate with a mid tempo black metal / heavy rock churn, they switch gears into something more melodic and post metal, only to then explode into a dense progged out squall, only to return to that opening blackness. The sound is epic and thick, almost like Pelican crossed with Satyricon if that makes any sense, the raspy vokills definitely contributing much of the blackness, the music itself, lush and layered, dense tangled melodies, thick, distortion drenched chug, veering from blasting buzz, to woozy lope, to smoldering epic slow build, to mathy metallic crush, to churning Neur-Isis style majesty, super epic, and crushingly heavy, but still super melodic and nuanced. Not at all what we were expecting. These guys sonically are well beyond self releasing their own tapes, they sound like they should be on Relapse or Century Media, or back in the day, even Moonfog. Check out the sound samples, it's kind of a tough sound to describe, other than they kind of mash a bunch of stuff we love together, which shouldn't work, but does, big time. Epic, blackened, melodic, post metal, math-prog heaviness that we can't stop listening to, and we're guessing means big things to come for these guys.
Limited of course, and includes a download code as well.
Here we go again. Another record that I am totally obsessed with, that I listen to like mad, that I try to get all my friends to buy, but that when it comes time to review, I can't figure out how to describe in words that do justice to just how great this record is. Since we first got this in, the second release from strangely named Hwyl Nofio, a UK collective fronted by AQ pal Steve Parry, I would just fumble with superlatives and end up spitiing out something like "I don't know. It's just great. Buy it!!!" But I figure I would try to do a little better than that for the list. While the mood is similar to the first record, there seems to be a more sort of 'rock' influence. Not rock like Van Halen, but rock in the sense that there are guitars (lots of em) and really identifiable instruments. Where the first album blurred the instrumentation into a dark and dreamy wash of subterranean rumble, Hymnal achieves the same basic effect but by keeping the edges a little more distinct. Not to say this won't appeal to your droning side becaue it certainly will. But it also just might appeal to your slow motion, instrumental slow-core side as well! A very dark and sinister record. Dreamy and hypnotic, but sort of aggressive and threatening at the same time. The entire record is a nightmarescape set on a foundation of rumbling, swelling, washes of thick warm low end shimmer. Basses, and guitars and organs and horns all settle into a cloying fog of glacial downtuned thrum, slowly shifting, melodic flourishes barely visible below the surface. While pianos and guitars supply abstract melodies, their notes dropped delicately one by one, creating a pointillist map of some haunting afterlife/ghost world. Equal parts Stars Of The Lid, Sunn 0))), Jonathan Coleclough, Maeor Tri, Starfuckers, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Labradford, Morton Feldman and all the music that frightens us when we're awake, and soothes us when we're not. Definitely one of the most beautiful, haunting and original records of the year!
MPEG Download: "A Brutality Of Fact" [/audio/hwylbrutality.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "A Brutality Of Fact" [/audio/hwylbrutality.m3u]
MPEG Download: "All You Knew Were Doomed" [/audio/hwyldoomed.mp3]
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We heard about Hwyl-Nofio from AQ pal Kevin who does the amazing UK zine Salt (see elsewhere in this list) and finally managed to get our hands on a bunch. It's kind of a hard record to explain. But I've been listening to this almost every night when I go to bed, if that tells you anything. Dark and dreamy and cinematic. Somewhere between musique concrete, Stars Of The Lid, David Darling (solo cello) and drone ala Jonathan Coleclough, Troum or Mirror. Hwyl-Nofio is Steve Parry, and the records sound centers around his restrained, haunting piano, some times prepared, sometimes effected, but always simple and gorgeous. Dark slowly building somber bass swells cycle endlessly as melancholy piano hesitantly joins in. Warm washes of whispery rumble spread like thick rich fog, spilling from the speakers as distant high end notes twinkle and sparkle. Wheezing dissonance is laid beneath whirring church organs and keening guitars. Rumbling and bubbling low end floods your ears like molasses, while in the background, subtle clatter, plucked guitar and throbbing pulses. This has become my absolute favorite bliss out, late night, chill out record ever! So gorgeous and so good.
Yet ANOTHER amazing slab of extreme, gnarled grim blackness from the seemingly bottomless depths of the French underground, this time from a horde known as Hyadningar. The Weak Creation is the second full length from these evil wicked warriors, and finds the band whipping up serious storm of grim, technical, melodic black metal, a strange mix of Deathspell-ish complexity, epic soaring melodicism, dour depressive miserablism, and even a hint of Viking metal hear and there.
That's a lot to cram into one sound, or one record, or even one band, but these guys pull it off, twisting those various sounds into something all their own, and then weaving them all together into some strange blackened patchwork. The first song veers from woozy clean guitars and soaring chantlike vocals, to lurching Burzum-y trudge, to haunting almost martial sounding breakdowns with tangled guitar harmonies, military snares, and haunting spoken word, but it all somehow flows, an expansive, complex bit of black metal chaos.
The vocals are frenzied and frayed, maniacal and feral, slipping from shriek to croak to howl, courtesy of Marquis, whose vokills might sound familiar from his time spent in Bethlehem, Funeralium and Ataraxie, and they perfectly compliment the twists and turns and ever shifting arrangements that make up these convoluted epics. Most of the songs here spend the majority of their time blasting along furiously, the guitars dense and jagged, the drumming impossibly mathy and complex, the melodies mournful and intricate, but the band continually mix things up, whether it's a sudden shift into a soaring melodic crooned breakdown, or a warped bit of folky flutter, or exploding into a totally epic almost psychedelic blast of heart-of-the-sun black majesty.
There couldn't be a more appropriate name for this Swedish duo, as it's unlikely you'll ever hear anything colder or frostier. This is harsh and frostbitten, depressive and miserable black metal. Full length number two, after last year's Veins, Kold takes their monochromatic miserablism a step further, two tracks, two riffs, okay, maybe four at the most, one track twenty seven minutes long, the other nineteen, each one a loping midtempo buzz, the drums a relentless plod, the guitar a buzz so blurry and indistinct it almost sounds like a drone, and the vocals, well, you thought they were weird on Veins, they're even more strangled and bizarre here, somewhere between an Orcish death rattle and some sort of beast vomiting up its last meal, sometimes mumbling in a strange mewling grunt, other times a leather lunged glass throated growl, you can almost feel the blood and spittle. But it's the perfect compliment to the music. Hateful, sorrowful, suicidal, depressive, the sound of Kold is just that, so cold and lonely, emotional and intense. About three quarters of the way through the first track, the distorted guitar drops out leaving just a jangly clean guitar, drums and vocals, which is unexpected for sure, but ends up sounding strangely emotionally charged. Soon the vocals drop out too and it's just drums and clean guitar and it almost sounds like some outsider bedroom indie rock, before the buzz kicks back in and the track unwinds in a Burzumic blaze of frosty buzz.
The second track may be even weirder, a blown out buzzy riff, and even doomier rhythmic plod, and the vocals are completely unhinged, falsetto screams, what sounds like that weird breathing-in-backwards singing, growling and grunting and shrieking and wailing hysterically, all over a surprisingly lilting minor key dirge, buzzing and droning, epic yet surprisingly melodic, with another surprise right at the end, a three minute clean-guitar and drum coda, simple garage-y drumming, sort of shuffling and crashing beneath some truly moody jangly strum.
The latest from Illinois one man black metal band I Shalt Become bears the strange title Louisiana Voodoo, not sure if this some sort of bizarre concept record, but sonically, it does pretty much start up right where 2010's Poison left off, the muddy, Burzumic, Xasthur-like murk of the earlier releases, transformed into something twisted and symphonic, the sound more strings and orchestra than black buzz, but fear not, ISB's finest moments, are when the two collide, creating a sort of symphonic black doom creep that fuses washed out murky guitar buzz, and buried barely there drum plod, to swirling symphonic strings, dramatic piano, even some Carpenter like synths, all topped with raspy, demonically croaked vokills. It's strange stuff for sure, but as much as we loved Poison, we're digging Louisiana Voodoo even more, all of the twisted symphonic elements, and the newly expanded sound palette, are even more expansive and wonderfully warped this time around, Louisiana Voodoo sounding like some sort of Broadway black metal production of Phantom Of The Opera, all bombastic and dramatic, creepy chamber music wrapped in swaths of grim black buzz, it's almost like a more lo-fi home brewed version of Dimmu Borgir or Fleshgod Apocalypse, but somehow even less metal, or at least less buzzing and blasting, instead more creepy and loping, lumbering and muddy, sweeping and soundtracky, it's not difficult to imagine these sounds accompanying some twisted big budget art film, the arrangements are intricate and epic, the sounds majestic and soaring - think Xasthur via Arvo Part, or Make A Change Kill Yourself performing with a symphony. Although it's obvious that ISB is not just cramming some fake orchestra sounds into a black metal template, this stuff is meticulously crafted, and the results are stunning, and while there's still plenty of metal going on, metal references definitely don't do this justice, instead, think of some blackened hybrid that's equal parts Devil Doll, Death SS, Jacula, Gnaw Their Tongues, Xasthur, Seirom and Dimmu Borgir. Awesome.
Newest disc from this long running depressive funereal black metal outfit. Originally formed in 1995, This Midwestern one man band has averaged about one record every four and a half years, although it seems that the band actually spent a good long stretch inactive, since the other two ISB records we reviewed were both recorded before the turn of the century, one under a different monicker.�
So, in fact, this is the first full length in almost a decade, and it sounds fantastic, even better than the other two discs, the sound beefed up and much more produced, but without losing any of the sound's miserable grimnity, a record of swirling murky buzzy slow motion doomscapes, distinctly USBM, very reminiscent of Xasthur actually, but ISB is even more blurred and indistinct, most songs having only one or two parts, locked into a mesmerizing looped crawl, the guitars buzzy, but blurred into soft waves of low end, churning and throbbing, everything bathed in a warm gauzy patina, a sea of shimmering keyboards, all very epic and majestic, but so layered and washed out, that it barely sounds metal at times. Instead sounding like some drone drenched super distorted Godspeed, huge crashing waves of sound, everything bleary eyed and smeared into shadows and shapes, even when the metal components drop out, leaving a simple keyboard line to repeat hypnotically or a minor key guitar melody to loop over and over, the sound is more akin to Philip Jeck or Tim Hecker than any sort of black metal, and when the guitars and drums and buzz do return, that doesn't really change. It's still some sort of hazy smoky impressionistic ambient black metal, washing over you like dreamy soft black waves of buzz and whir. Sometimes this feels like the sort of black metal band those guys would actually start. Imagine Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz and William Basinski, all in corpsepaint, lurking in a wintry forest, hunched over their instruments on a dimly lit stage, unfurling these roiling waves of gauzy blackness and looped blur. So intense and hypnotic and beautiful. If you ever wanted to get someone into black metal, this could very well be the record to do it with. WAY recommended.
A new disc from one man black metal outfit I Shalt Become is always welcome around these parts. The washed out weary blackened blurscapes are for us, the black metal equivalent of Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, a sort of black metal Pop Ambience, the various sounds distinctly black metal, but in ISB's strange otherworldly drift, rendered in shades of grey instead of black, the guitars warm whirring smears, the drums murky pulses, the vocals a croak barely audible over the heaving swells of soft buzz. The melodies mournful and miserable, the tempos lugubrious, the vibe grim and forsaken, depressive black metal nirvana for sure.
Sonically, ISB probably has the most in common with Xasthur, but where Xasthur's sound is distinctly lo-fi, almost stumbling at times, the music of ISB manages to be both lo-fi and incredible lush, the sheets of dreamlike buzz spun into lush expanses of warm shimmer, traditional blast and buzz has no place in ISB's windswept sonic wasteland, instead, the buzz is worn smooth, and spread out like gauzy low hanging clouds, there is no blast, only plod and pound, lope and lumber, there are keyboards everywhere, but they are at one with the guitars, adding dense texture, creating soft shadows, occasionally manifesting as super dramatic streaks of sonic melancholia.
The songs tend toward one, maybe two parts, hypnotic and so mesmerizing, almost looped sounding, repeating over and over, totally trancelike, blackly blissful and dismally dreamy.
Near the end of the record, several of the tracks grow fairly aggressive and get about as heavy as any ISB gets, but even then, the sound is infused with the strange choral sounding atmosphere, the instruments wreathed in delay and reverb, everything slowly melting together into one gorgeously bleary and blown slow motion sprawl, culminating in the two chord, storm drenched bliss drone outro.
Some seriously gorgeous depressive black metal for sure, that like past releases, is so blurred and blissy, that it might possibly appeal to folks into stuff like Nadja, Jesu, Fear Falls Burning and other dronedirgedoom outfits as well.
Originally released in 1996, this slab of suicidal blackness finally gets unearthed and resurrected by the doomed souls at Moribund. I shalt Become inhabit a completely bleak and barren world of abject misery. A doomy minor key slow motion black metal miserabilism. There's Burzum worship, and then there's taking your Burzum worship to an even more anguished and desolate, wretched and forlorn extreme. Think Xasthur, Burzum, Krohm, Make A Change... Kill Yourself, but then imagine those bands even more despondent, more hopeless, recording with razor blade inches from exposed wrist. A gorgeously bleak and buzzy expanse of minor key arpeggiated guitars, draped like black cloth over thick swirls of monochrome buzz. Riffs are looped and repeated, melodies become murky mantras and the vocals are so distorted and buried in the mix they just sound like whispery squalls of static. So mournful and melancholy. Wanderings is often so slow and fuzzy, so dreamlike that it almost ceases being metal, and becomes some abstract experimental drone music, an ambient soundscape of reverb drenched guitars, a loping black doom waltz, so goddamn sad sounding and so so beautiful.
This reissue tacks on three bonus tracks, not quite as murky and lo-fi but just as tortured and tormented: Two Judas Iscariot covers and of course, an even more morose (is that were even possible?) version of Burzum's "En Ring Til AA Herske".
First thing you'll notice about this 'new' record from LA psych punks the Icarus Line, is that the title is very similar to their last full length Slave Vows, and apparently, that's cuz this ep is a companion of sorts, a five track addendum to that record's furious swagger, and if anything, these extra jams are even darker and more sinister, sounding like the Stooges fused to Einsturzende, with wild, blown out psychedelic freakouts bookended by some almost industrial sounding creep.
Opener "Leeches And Seeds" almost sounds like Woven Hand, with 'testifying' vox over distorted bass throb, wreathed in tripped out FX, a brooding sprawl of sonic tension, peppered with wild bursts of wild psychedelic swagger, those blowouts wrapped in wild squalls of dense psych guitar shred and shards of screeching feedback. Fierce as fuck for sure. And the rest of the ep follows suit, the band adding tons of space, and dynamics to their sound, "Junkadelic" is almost glammy, swagger and brooding in equal measure, while "Raise Your Crown" is all loping psychedelic blooze, sound like the bastard offspring of the Rock*A*Teens and the Swans. But it's "Salem Slims", an apparent live favorite, that blows the roof off, a heavy guitar wild psych blow-out, again heavy on the glammy swagger, the guitar blown out and in-the-red, a furious, freaky glam-psych garage punk stomp that KILLS. Finally, things finish off with "The Father / The Priest", a sprawling 13+ minute epic, a smoldering slow burn that spends the first ten minutes grooving ominously, swampy and slithery, before the finale, a heavy as fuck blow out, that sounds like what Jack White must be trying for, heavy, psychedelic blooze, that's fierce and furious, noisy and twisted and the sort of damaged psych weirdness that we could imagine stretching out long enough to transform this ep into a full length. If only...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
BOREDOMS!! BOREDOMS SIDE PROJECT! LIMITED. JAPANESE IMPORT!! WON'T BE AROUND FOR LONG!!
Okay, just wanted to get that out of the way so those of you who NEED everything Boredoms, and don't really care what it sounds like, can stop right here and order this before they're all gone. In fact, you've probably already ordered this from us. For those of you who are less well versed in all things BOREDOM, let's delve a little deeper.
First, it's a soundtrack for Takashi Miike's Ichi The Killer, an unbelievably tasteless, disgusting, ultraviolent, hilarious Manga cartoon come to life (it's actually based on a popular Japanese Manga) with lots of blood, cum, killing, torture, and violence. Some of you may recognise Miike's name as another of his films, the horrific The Audition, recently got a lot of attention in the US. Anyway, who better to score the ridiculous mayhemic bloodbath that is Ichi The Killer than the purveyors of ridiculous musical mayhem, Boredoms. So what you have here is a group calling itself Karera Musication, featuring Yoshimi p-we, ATR, Hilah, and Seiichi Yamamoto, which basically amounts to Boredoms without Eye. But what does it sound like you ask? Let's put it this way, if someone played this for you and told you it was the new Boredoms record, you wouldn't bat an eye. Lots of spaced out, percussive jamming, trippy sound effects, chimes, chopped up / processed electronic squiggles, weird seventies porn funk, full on Japanoise, blissed out Krautrock (sounding a lot like old Kraftwerk), little vocal bleats from Yoshimi, drum vocal raveups ala old Boredoms, thick distorted guitar rock, dreamy tranced out spirituals and everything in between. Andee says go rent the movie or buy a copy on eBay, but even if you're not up for an ultra-violent movie about a nerdy guy in a leather superhero suit (equipped with razor sharp boot-blades) who jacks off while he watches pimps beat up prostitutes and then loses control whenever he is teased and dismembers everyone within arms reach, you can still enjoy this! And you Boredoms fanatics will get the fix you need until the next proper release.
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Originally released in 1975, this is one serious slab of mind blowing Japanese improvised kosmiche drone music, featuring legendary composer / performer Toshi Ichiyanagi (a student of John Cage who was once married to Yoko Ono!), Takehisa Kosugi, the mastermind behind one of our favorite bands ever, the Taj Mahal Travellers, here teamed up with Stockhausen percussionist Michael Ranta, for two extended free drone workouts.
The trio employ reverbed ring modulators, threaded vocals, melodicas, pianos, violins, gongs and Japanese biwas and shamisens, and weave an elaborate and lush tapestry of sound, one that is really not that far removed from Taj Mahal Travellers. Brooding, shimmering expanses of muted tones, of layered rumbles, dreamlike melodies, peppered with strange electronics, haunting and otherworldly, with a distinctly krautrock vibe, or krautdrone, all of the current practitioners of spaced out kraut inspired dronemusic, as good as they may be, can't even touch this.
The music is alive, a living thing, that the players breathe life into and guide, letting the sounds love and drift and fluctuate, creating something organic and expansive and breathtaking. The percussion adds a unique element, not really adding any propulsion, but instead, contributing texture, and a framework that the players often let collapse, before bringing it right back. The second track begins with a cool skeletal groove, all clank and clatter and thump, the space around the sounds as much a part of the overall sound, eventually slipping back into something more murky and subterranean sounding, the percussion switching to something more tabla-like, draped over an oozing sea of rumbles and growls, scrapes and whirrs.
This is one of those rare pieces of music that manages to be two things at once, a gorgeously dreamlike, relaxing bit of sonic ambience, but also something elaborate and dense, opening up the listener to dual experiences, drifting off on the surface, or strapping on the headphones, letting that extra weight carry you down into the swirling blackness at the heart of this recording.
Incredible. And essential. About the closest we'll ever get to a lost Taj Mahal Travellers record...
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When I first moved to San Francisco in the early nineties, I kept hearing about a band called the Icky Boyfriends. Can't remember exactly what I heard about them, but it did seem like, judging from how often people mentioned them, that they must be THE San Francisco band. And they kind of were, but in a way I wouldn't be able to properly appreciate for years. The Icky Boyfriends were a three piece, guitar drums and vocals, sloppy, sweaty, shitty, noisy, punk as fuck, but not PUNK ROCK punk, more sort of some chaotic dirge-y freaked out what the fuck kind of punk rock. They were an unholy collision of nerd rock and noise rock, fronted by Icky Jon, with his unruly white guy 'fro and thick black glasses, and his histrionic stage presence and that wailing caterwaul. Each song a two or three minute burst of simple slow sludgy riffing, fuzzed out garage rock crunch, pounding drums and that wild sort of sung, sort of spoken nasal wail, expounding on the public transit system, Mexican food, cops, flea baths, sex, meat, crappy jobs, the mission, Frank's Mom and all sorts of other bizarre randomness. Like some pop band that got confused, ended up in the Mission, got super wasted, then beaten up and left for dead, and then somehow ended up putting a record out on Siltbreeze. Damaged and demented and so fucked up. The whole thing culminating with the independent film I'm Not Fascinating, starring the Boyfriends, as well as loads of other Mission rock luminaries, in a demented, super low budget, slice of Super 8 weirdness. This double disc collects every little bit of recorded Boyfriends there ever was, lp, cassette, seven inches, compilation tracks, live recordings and even a bunch of unreleased stuff! Lots of liner notes too, photos, a history of the band from drummer Anthony Bedard, as well as a bizarre drug addled song by song play by play from Icky Jon.
Most of the metalheads we know, especially ones with a soft spot for classic eighties metal, are unanimous in their love of Phoenix hard rockers Icon. Their first disc was an all time classic, super rocking, crazy catchy, hooks galore and a raspy vocalist with a voice that sounded quite a bit like Blackie Lawless from W.A.S.P., in fact the whole band was sort of a dead ringer for W.A.S.P., or early Great White even. One of those records we NEVER get tired of listening to. Both Allan and Andee rank it as one of their all time favorites.
Icon's follow up was this disc right here, finally given a super deluxe reissue treatment, by Rock Candy, the UK label that gave us killer reissues from the Sea Hags, Zodiac Mindwarp, the Plasmatics, Billy Squier, and now this, Night Of The Crime.
The liner notes call this "without doubt one of the greatest melodic hard rock records ever made," and while we might not go quite that far, it is pretty awesome. But be warned, it's way more AOR than hard rock a lot of the time, plenty of keyboards, some ballad-y bits. But the songs are all crazy catchy, and the hardest rockers, like "Raise The Hammer" and "The Whites Of Their Eyes" could easily have been outtakes from their first record.
The sound hovers somewhere between Whitesnake, Autograph that sort of poppy hard rocking eighties sound and more commercial fare like John Parr. But it's the hooks and the killer voice that makes this stand out. The songs stick in your head like crazy, and it's difficult to imagine why these guys weren't huge. The liner notes are packed with photos and stories, the band had some serious Behind The Music drama going on, it makes for a good read. But again, if you don't dig the sound of the eighties, poppy melodic radio ready hard rock, big hair, all that, you might not be able to get into this. Allan and Andee both love the first Icon desperately, but only Andee is willing to stand up for this one, but he stands proud, hair teased, spandex pants, bullet belt, Chuck Taylors, lots and lots of scarves, head banging to his heart's content.
