Fans of local pop geniuses the Ovens, which are a whole lot of you, but should really be ALL of you, rejoice, and enjoy another incredible blast of noise pop songsmithery courtesy of Ovens mainman Tony Molina, whose solo sound is essentially, and really EXACTLY like the Ovens, fuzzed out pop, metallic chugging, soaring harmonized guitars, a dreamy croon, and ridiculous self deprecating lyrics, INCREDIBLE hooks, and the sort of poppiness that will get lodged in your head forEVER. SO yeah, anyone who bought and loved the Ovens cd Andee released on his tUMULt label, well, you're gonna want, nay, NEED this. As always, Molina's songs (and by extension, the Ovens' as well) are equal parts Weezer, Thin Lizzy, the Beatles, Guided By Voices, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, and pretty much every other fuzzy jangly pop band you ever loved, but all that boiled down and rendered into ultra brief, fragmented blasts of micro pop brevity, and we're talking boiled down as in thirteen songs in twelve minutes! One of those records you'll no doubt play over and over and over.
There are tracks like opener "Nowhere To Go", which sounds like it could have been plucked right off the Ovens cd proper, so much crammed into so little time, soaring harmonized guitars, the occasional metallic chug, the fuzzy main riff, the laid back vox, the melodies impossible to resist, and like many Ovens songs, blink and you'll miss it. None of that verse chorus verse shit, if you're lucky, you'll get verse chorus. Sometimes just verse! Like on tracks like "Sick As Riff", where you don't even get a riff, more like a dreamy little acoustic guitar interlude. Check out "Change My Ways", which should most definitely have J Mascis looking over his shoulder, the Dinosaur Jr vibe HUGE, right down to the guitar tone. And like we've said before, if Tony wasn't so brilliantly ADD, and could make a song longer than 90 seconds, he and the Ovens could/would/should be HUGE. But we're not complaining, it's part of their charm, the barrage of crazy hooks, perfect melodies, definitely pushing a lot of the same buttons Guided By Voices do.
So yeah, needless to say, these 12 minutes the probably gonna be our favorite 12 minutes of pop music this year, so grab one of these before they're gone, and leave a little space at the top of your 2013 year end lists, cuz even only two months in, and we're pretty sure, unless there's a new Ovens record that somehow pops up, this one's gonna be tough to beat.
Finally, the first proper full length from Ukrainian one man black metal horde Moloch. As we mentioned in our review of the split tape from a while back (the only thing we'd been able to get in sufficient numbers to list), we have been totally obsessed with Moloch, doing whatever we could to get a hold of everything and anything he's recorded. Which is quite a feat as he's released about 40 records, many of them box sets, and making it even more of a feat is the fact that most were limited to between 10 and 40 copies. Argghhh. Andee has even been emailing with Moloch about possibly releasing something on tUMULt, all in the interest of making these gorgeously grim sounds available to more than a handful of connected diehards.
So in steps the fine folks at BlackMetal.Com, who have released Depression Of Surtr, a best of compilation, gathering up various tracks from a handful or releases, as well as a bunch of unreleased tracks (although since barely anyone has heard most of this stuff, they're essentially ALL unreleased). So what has got us all in a tizzy about this Moloch character? Hard to explain, but with most black metal, it's as much about vibe as it is sound, and these tracks, besides sounding amazing, are so weirdly haunting and mysterious, the guitars so saturated and blown out, the drums buried in the mix, more of a pulse than a beat, and the vocals, somewhere between Weakling and Silencer, howled and wailed and utterly anguished. So tortured and over the top, again simultaneously adding to the vibe and mood as well as the sound. But besides the vibe, which is about as harrowing and haunting and GRIM as can be, the sound is fucking epic, Burzum by way of Abruptum, mostly midtempo, even the blasts are only slightly faster, the guitars are super distorted and droney, the sort of trance-y buzz that has us immediately entranced.
There are also some long stretches of black ambience, of shimmery drift and rumbling dronemusic, which makes sense, as Moloch has also released 10 or 15 entire discs full of ambient music, but here they nicely balance the blown out grimnity of the more buzzy blown out tracks. There's even a couple covers at the end, one a Burzum cover, all pianos and synths, lilting and minor key, the other a Darkthrone cover, which is totally bizarre, swooning synths over an awesomely cheesy drum machine (which sounds remarkably similar to the one built into the boom box in the back room). Not sure what to even make of it, so strange, and a little bit silly, but once you get immersed in it, it does seem to sound a bit more haunting. But only a bit. But then that's what we were talking about, the vibe, and the mood, and Moloch creates such a strange unpredictable vibe, with his skewed perspective on black metal, which is what makes his sound, and his records so amazing. And which is exactly why we're so obsessed...
These two most recent release from Ukrainian one man black metal band had us seriously confused. We originally reviewed the OTHER one that wasn't out yet, thinking it was this one, then did properly review that one, and are now finally reviewing THIS one, a 4 song, 20 minute ep that was originally released as a super limited lp on Prison Tatt records. Not surprising we'd be confused, as we mentioned in out other review of the OTHER new Moloch tape, these two come on the heels of over ONE HUNDRED releases! And yet, every time we hear something new, we immediately remember why we've always dug Moloch so much, and Depressive Black Metal Plague is no different, a loping, dirgey, depressive black metal that is thick with crumbling buzz, primitive stumbling drumming, sung/spoken vocals, the first track a slo-mo creep, that lumbers along before the sound grows gradually more and more noisy and buzzy, building to an almost psychedelic blackened squall before the guitars and drums drift away, leaving just the bass to wind down to the end. Somehow the second track cranks up the distortion even more, thick swirls of blown out crumbling buzz, the vocals too, and anguished wail way up in the mix, those two elements almost entirely obscuring the haphazard drumming below, harsh and lo-fi, grim and melancholically black, that sound oozing into the next track, droned out and trancey, the biggest sonic shift coming in the final track, which sounds almost freeform by comparison, the guitars cranked and in-the-red, the drums total free jazz freakout mode, a dense dizzying blast of black buzz dirgery, before everything drops out, leaving the final few minutes to just stately synths, and mournful melodies.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!
For a band who supposedly broke up, Monarch sure have managed to put out a whole bunch of music, post mortem. And while this is funeral doom and everything, we're not talking some Biggie Smalls / Tupac Shakur music from beyond the grave thing (although you never know!), it seems the announced breakup was premature, and lucky for all the doomongers among you, the Monarch is alive and (un)well.
Avid readers of the AQ list should need no introduction to French downtuned slow motion sludge doom trio Monarch. A band truly worthy of many multiples of 'o's (dooooooooooooooooooooom), whose plod and crawl is so slow it often veers near static drone territory, and who also manage to deftly mix in a bit of subtle loveliness into their harsh metallic trudge, AND whose peculiar sense of humor, and album art, and unlikely front woman, definitely make them stand out in an increasingly crowded field...
For those new to Monarch let's recap shall we?
Quite possibly the world's only female fronted deathdoomdronedirge outfit. An unholy mix of Khanate, Corrupted, Bunkur and Moss, but with a petite young French woman on lead vocals, usually clad in Converse hightops, a skirt and a sweater, hair in a pony tail, no tattoos or spikes or leather, but when she opens her mouth, out comes the foulest demonic shrieks and hellish gurgles you have EVER heard. Certainly from a woman, maybe from ANY one, man, woman or beast.
Then there are the record covers, always covered in grade school like doodles of cute big eyed skulls, puffy ghosts, burning churches, and hearts all over the place. They're like a Sanrio doom band. And not surprisingly are obsessed with Hello Kitty (their email address is sanriosabbath!!). But eyes closed, and these guys and gal can most definitely hold their own amongst the slow motion elite. With the added bonus of a singer who can actually sing and does occasionally, adding a definite creepy melodic moodiness to the music.
So this double disc collects two ultra limited lps (the band seem to lean toward lps, AND double cds, with songs clocking in at 10, 20, sometimes 30 minutes), one that we carried a while back and sold out in the blink of an eye, the massive and amazing Speak Of The Sea, and weirdly enough, another 2 song lp, that's not really out yet entitled appropriately enough Die Tonight.
So what has us so smitten with Monarch? Besides the above that is? Let's start with Speak Of The Sea, a massive pummeling wall of headsplitting ultra doom, an impossibly glacial plodding thud wrapped in ear shredding sheets of corrosive feedback that will tear your insides out and fill your ears with black tar. A gorgeously dense. ultra caustic and corrosive funereal doom that manages to be dreamy and darn near pretty while it's pummeling you to death. Easily one of the slowest heaviest dooooooooom records ever, three looooong tracks. Each so slow it's almost ambient. It's a bit like listening to SUNNO))) or Earth 2 when some caveman drummer decides to crash the party and start drumming slowly along. Riffs stretched out into huge droning smears of black rumble, ringing and reverberating, pulsing and wavering unsteadily before the next ten ton riff drops. Each track is a slow plodding ultradoomscape, like the ultimate doom metal intro stretched into actual songs, smeared across nearly an hour. The vocals don't even come in until the first song is almost over, a shrieking black coda, after twenty minutes of slow burning doom drone tension. The second track features some distant Ozzy-like crooning way off in the distance before the scowling growl kicks in. So slow and heavy. On the AQ doooooomscale, this ranks more O's than we could possibly include in this review!
And for the cd release, they've tacked on a whole 'nother song to the first disc (album), a creepy, pretty near ambient crawl, nothing but the sound of the surf crashing on the shore, a thick hissy staticky sound, slowly swelling and drifting, very meditative, with hushed urgently whispered vocals hovering above the crashing sea, very strange, but quite nice.
Then we get to Die Tonight, a record most of us (if not all of us) have not heard until now. And if anything it's everything Speak Of The Sea was and MORE. Heavier (as if that were even possible), slower (ditto) and more blurred out, buzzy and dronelike, with bits of the song so blissed out, the drum hits and chaotic crashes are so far apart, you can almost forget you're listening to a doom band, wallowing in the glorious shimmering drones of the drawn out chords, before a howled shriek and a massive crunch knocks you near out of your seat. There's also more singing, with gorgeous drifting vocals that hover alongside long stretches of buzzing guitar making for haunting harmonies, giving the proceedings brief moments of surprising tranquility. And the vocals continue to twist and turn, from hushed and whispery, to girlish and sing songy to inhuman demonic screech, all the while, the band trudging along dronelike, weaving impossibly pretty soundscapes from downtuned crunch and skull cracking thud.
This is absolutely essential doom. If you like Esoteric, Boris, Moss, Bunkur, SUNNO))), Earth, Esoteric, Skepticism, Eyehategod, Marzuraan, Atavist, Catacombs, Khanate, Pale Horse, Monument Of Urns and you NEED this! And the drifting drone element is in full effect, so those who have yet to dabble in the doom pool, might check this out, the long drawn out shimmers and Niblock like layers of guitar rumble might hit the spot and have you digging deeper for more and more dooooom.
Gorgeously packaged in a black gatefold, printed in silver ink, decorated with big eyed ghosts, a sailing ship with upside down crosses and a heart on the sail, lots of stars, some cute birdies, and an anchor with a heart on it. Inside are two silver on black printed inserts, with all the lyrics, the liner notes and a thanks list that says it all: Moss, Noothgrush, Otesanek, Corrupted, Bastard Noise, Rainbow Of Death, Nuit Noire and of course "our lucky stars"!
Back in March we made the double cd Dead Men Tell No Tales, by France's Monarch, our Record of the Week. A crushingly heavy, breathtakingly beautiful slab of ultramegadooooooooom divinity. That record just so happened to combine two lp releases,
Speak Of The Sea, that we listed a long time ago, well before the cd came out, now sadly out of print, the 12" that is, and this one, Die Tonight, that in some strange rupture in the space time continuum arrived months after the cd version. But regardless, if you had been holding out, waiting for Speak Of The Sea's vinyl companion, wait no further. And heck, if you're new to the whole Monarch thing, by all means, this is as good a place as any to start.
Here's an altered version of the cd review, focusing just on the Die Tonight half:
Avid readers of the AQ list should need no introduction to French downtuned slow motion sludge doom trio Monarch. A band truly worthy of many multiples of 'o's (dooooooooooooooooooooom), whose plod and crawl is so slow it often veers near static drone territory, and who also manage to deftly mix in a bit of subtle loveliness into their harsh metallic trudge, AND whose peculiar sense of humor, and album art, and unlikely front woman, definitely make them stand out in an increasingly crowded field...
For those new to Monarch let's recap shall we?
Quite possibly the world's only female fronted deathdoomdronedirge outfit. An unholy mix of Khanate, Corrupted, Bunkur and Moss, but with a petite young French woman on lead vocals, usually clad in Converse hightops, a skirt and a sweater, hair in a pony tail, no tattoos or spikes or leather, but when she opens her mouth, out comes the foulest demonic shrieks and hellish gurgles you have EVER heard. Certainly from a woman, maybe from ANY one, man, woman or beast.
Then there are the record covers, always covered in grade school like doodles of cute big eyed skulls, puffy ghosts, burning churches, and hearts all over the place. They're like a Sanrio doom band. And not surprisingly are obsessed with Hello Kitty (their email address is sanriosabbath!!). But eyes closed, and these guys and gal can most definitely hold their own amongst the slow motion elite. With the added bonus of a singer who can actually sing and does occasionally, adding a definite creepy melodic moodiness to the music.
So what has us so smitten with Monarch? Besides the above that is? Well just lend an ear to Die Tonight, a heavier and slower (if that were even possible) partner to Speak Of The Sea. It's somehow also more blurred out, buzzy and dronelike, with bits of the music so blissed out, the drum hits and chaotic crashes are so far apart, you can almost forget you're listening to a doom band, wallowing in the glorious shimmering drones of the drawn out chords, before a howled shriek and a massive crunch knocks you near out of your seat. There's also more singing, with gorgeous drifting vocals that hover alongside long stretches of buzzing guitar making for haunting harmonies, giving the proceedings brief moments of surprising tranquility. And the vocals continue to twist and turn, from hushed and whispery, to girlish and sing songy to inhuman demonic screech, all the while, the band trudging along dronelike, weaving impossibly pretty soundscapes from downtuned crunch and skull cracking thud.
This is absolutely essential doom. If you like Esoteric, Boris, Moss, Bunkur, SUNNO))), Earth, Esoteric, Skepticism, Eyehategod, Marzuraan, Atavist, Catacombs, Khanate, Pale Horse, Monument Of Urns and you NEED this! And the drifting drone element is in full effect, so those who have yet to dabble in the doom pool, might check this out, the long drawn out shimmers and Niblock like layers of guitar rumble might hit the spot and have you digging deeper for more and more dooooom.
Gorgeously packaged in a off white matte sleeve, a simple illustration in black, and little cartoon stars in metallic silver. Also includes a big fold out poster of the record cover. And as always. EXTREMELY LIMITED. Once these are gone we probably can't get more.
We've worshipped at the altar of Hello Kitty obsessed French ultradoom trio (now quartet) Monarch for years and years now, harboring a secret crush on Monarch frontwoman Emilie and a not so secret crush on their absolutely pummeling black cloud of sound.
Originally released as a super limited lp on Spanish label Throne Records back in 2008, this two part doom drone dirge epic, is now available on cd, the separate sides, "Mer" and Morte" now reunited into one single sprawling nearly 35 minute opus, a glacial expanse of creeping crawling detuned drift, of psychedelic black ambience, of tarpit doomic dirge, of extreme abstract heaviness, of near static pummel. As gorgeous as it is harsh, as heavy as it is atmospheric, the drums so spare, the drummer has time to go outside for a smoke between snare hits, riffage so lugubrious that SUNNO))) sound like speed metal in comparison.
Think Flood era Boris, Corrupted, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, Orthodox, Catacombs, but then slow it down even more, take those sounds and smear them into washed out blurs, the vocals a distant mewl, an occasional shriek, the cymbals unleashed in hazy clouds of sizzling shimmer. The guitars heavy for sure, but the riffs allowed to ring out and fade to near silence, before the next one hits, more than any of the other Monarch records, Mer Morte finds the band exploring ambience as heaviness, allowing long stretches of guitar rumble to drift unaccompanied except for some hushed wordless crooning.
The second half, formerly just "Morte", cranks up the tempo to a blasting (well, for Monarch at least) 10 or 12 bpm, the vocals way more intense, and in the mix the Khanate vibe is much more obvious, a pounding hellish dirge, utterly intense and cathartic and emotional and brutal, but after a few minutes, the drums drop out, and the guitars are left to drone and undulate and pulse, streaked with feedback, a gorgeous blackened dronescape, peppered with occasional drum pound, but any semblance of 'beat' has been jettisoned, the record plays out, a trancelike stretch of downtuned doomic minimalism, laced with more of those ethereal ghostlike vox, haunting and mysterious and otherworldly, and grimly beautiful.
Gorgeous packaging too, a four panel gatefold Stumptown sleeve, with gold metallic ink on black matte. So cool.
Finally! Been waiting for the vinyl version of this for a while now. Taking the slow boat all the way from Spain, but it was well worth it, sounds awesome, looks amazing. Metallic gold and black on shimmery silver matte finish, all new artwork. SUPER LIMITED, we got a bunch, but we won't be able to get more. Here's more about the music inside:
A while ago we were informed that French ultradoom combo Monarch had called it a day. We were crushed. One of our favorite purveyors of filthy slow motion doooooooooom, fronted by a woman, a rarity in doom for sure, and with a penchant for smiley skulls and Hello Kitty. A band that seemed tailor made for the very bizarre tastes of the AQ faithful, seemed to be no more.�
But before we could begin our campaign of mourning, black clothes spray painted with cute skulls, black Hello Kitty armbands, we discovered that in fact we were misinformed, or maybe the band had taken a break, or something, but we cared not, for whatever reason, Monarch was still alive, and would live to doom another day. And doom they did. Gracing us with more and more glorious downtuned heaviness, including their bad ass cover of Turbonegro's "I Got Erection"!
So now that we're pretty comfortable with the continued existence of our favorite cute doomsters, we can wait patiently for each new, massive slab of harsh slow motion glacial dooooooooooooooooooooom. And for folks new to Monarch, don't go expecting this to actually -sound- cute. They may be fronted by an adorable French girl, who spins playfully on the beach in their videos, but when she opens her mouth to sing, it's the sound of blackness and misery, a demonic caterwaul, unrivaled by most male metal vocalists. And sure the art on their records may be cute cartoon burning churches and big eyed ghosts, but the sounds inside are slow and black as tar, guitars tuned so low they rumble instead of roar, drum beats so far apart, the drummer can probably smoke a cigarette between beats.�And we're happy to report that this 16+ minute chunk of doom is all that and more. The more being the haunting ethereal female vocals partway through... Crushingly heavy, weirdly beautiful. A plodding symphony in slow motion. Essential Monarch beautiful brutality.
The surprise here is the Grey Daturas track, also a 16 minute epic, that on first listen sounds surprisingly doomy, and a lot like the Monarch track. The Daturas are often heavy, but rarely doomy like this, but it suits them. And they pepper their doom with all sorts of sonic weirdness, bits of electronic fuckery, strange modulated feedback, subtle FX, until about 13 minutes in, when the song suddenly morphs into a muted wall of smeared and crumbling white noise, a blast of blurred sound that eventually fades into nothingness.�
Pretty amazing stuff, from both bands. Doom hounds will be well pleased.
Shambling from the darkness of Saint Petersburg's deepest wooded overgrowth into the even darker darkness of Saint Petersburg's dankest dampest cave (we presume), comes Mondsaal! An entirely new prospect to us, this bizarre disc of murky, woozy Russian cosmic hatefulness arrived seemingly out of nowhere, but we're finding ourselves pretty damn smitten by its lurching weirdness. The esteemed Encyclopaedia Metallum describes Mondsaal as "dark/black metal", and we have to say "dark metal" is a pretty great way to describe these weirdos. Aesthetically it's sort of black metal. There's Burzum-esque midpaced plodding, there's otherworldly synthesizer strings draped over almost everything, but there's also a thick murkiness to their sound that feels more reminiscent of Swedish crypt-dwelling death metal or the warm bloodletting anesthesia of funeral doom bands like Skepticism or Until Death Overtakes Me. Even the mid-range vocal growls lean more towards the death than the black, and the blast beats (on the rare occasion that they do decide to show up) are eerily slow and shambolic. It's a sound that's strange, sorrowful, damaged, ugly, but weirdly warm & enveloping all at the same time. The constant droning of soft synth pads and the squonking of dissonant horns (yes, that's right, there's horns) stand in stark contrast to the naked writhing ugliness of everything else that's happening, and the result is pretty psychedelic & spacey (in a bit of a similar way to the Dunnock/Intergalactic Holocaust split we reviewed on the last list!). The whole affair closes out with a hazy ritualistic rainy desertscape ambient piece, leaving the impression that you've just passed through some living slow motion morphine nightmare. It's a pretty entrancing experience - either hideously beautiful or beautifully hideous, we're not sure yet, but either way: very very recommended.
Finally, another full length from The Monkeywrench, Mark and Steve from Mudhoney, Tom from Gas Huffer, the infamous Tim Kerr and some guy named Martin. And it's on Estrus, where they belonged all along.
Drunken and garagey and surprisingly not all that unlike Mudhoney. A definite fix for those of us who miss Mudhoney (who aren't breaking up like they were intending to). Awesome.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
There was perhaps a time, when Japanese post rockers Mono were just that, a post rock group, but that time is long gone, now, they are anything but, or more accurately, so much more.
Mono take the soaring sweeping epics of groups like Godspeed into an entirely different dimension. Their sound is so grandiose, so emotional, so absolutley and stunningly epic, that it almost ceases to be rock. Sure there's plenty of rock like bombast, many of the songs culminate in a huge flurry of crashing drums and soaring guitars, but in the grand scheme of Mono's sound, those moments are fleeting. Like the old adage that it's more about the journey than the destination, the sound of Mono is all about the journey, the band weave elaborate soundscapes, that smolder and glow, rhythms pulse and throb, guitars are blurred into lush sonic backdrops, melodies are delicate and crystalline, the sound while instrumental, manages to sound choral, a sky full of weeping strings and angelic hymns. We can only assume that if Arvo Part, or Morton Feldman started a rock band, it would sound something like Mono. Hymn is like some post rock score to a massive role playing game, Final Fantasy 100 or something.... How can you not envision sweeping vistas, endless seas, crumbling cities, heaving seas beneath blackened skies, these sounds evoke so much emotion (this is REAL emo!) and passion, it does seem almost too reductive to call them a post rock band, or to call this 'rock', to us it sounds more like a symphony played by a rock band, or better yet a symphony attempting to play rock music, the result is grand, majestic, moving, stirring, something more momentous than a mere record, or a rock concert, Mono manage to conjure up a sound that seems to be alive, living, something capable of adapting and growing, every song sounding like a collection of sounds blossoming into still greater sounds, eventually a field of blossoming sound becoming Mono. It sometimes sounds like the most dramatic moments from every film you've ever seen distilled and converted into sound, then arranged into music... hyperbole? Probably. But the more we listen to Hymn To The Immortal, the more we're convinced that there's something truly magical going on here. And somehow, without even realizing it, we've listened to this record about 20 times in the last few days, which is most definitely saying something...
The name Monopoly Child Star Searchers might not be all that familiar to you, but the man behind the music probably is, it's Spencer from long time AQ faves the Skaters, with a brand new solo tape, under yet another new and obtuse monicker.
But as weird as the band name is, it probably won't prepare you for what lurks inside. Sonically, it's definitely reminiscent of the Skaters, but where the Skaters dabbled in murky tribal jams, and stumbling free folk rituals, the sound here is much more chaotic and playful, almost circusy at times, sounding like some cracked pop record rolled in tape his, and played back at the wrong speed, all bass and no treble, so even the high end sounds like a buzzy blur. Super hypnotic, a looped landscape of hiccupping stuttering melodies, dizzying and dense, while in the background, long drawn out tones drift in the background, synths or vocals, hard to tell, but they sound angelic and haunting. The tape is all variations on this strange looped alchemy, sometimes stripped down to just percussion, but even then it's a mumbled barrage of thumps and skitters, all jumbled up into a chaotic little tangle of rhythms.
Not sure if you can tell from the above, but this just might be our the best thing we've heard from the Skaters camp EVER!
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THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Hands down, Monster Magnet are Andee's favorite stoner metal / cock rock band. Huge riffs, catchy songs, and the most brilliantly inane lyrics about the universe, sponge baths, asteroids, volcanoes, muscle cars, love slaves, Satan, pot, death, and of course, penises! Really.
Now available domestically, for those who sweated out their Monster Magnet addictions and held off buying the expensive import version that we've had for a few months. The same reveiw applies: the newest record from the reigning kings of drugged out
Monster Magnet might just be one of our favorite bands ever. Pretty much every incarnation too. From the early days, the "satanic drug thing you wouldn't understand" era, all Hawkwind channeling heavy psychedelic drugged out stoner rock megajams, to the Kiss worshipping, over the top, cockrock ridiculousness of Dopes To Infinity and Powertrip. The crazy videos, the insane lyrics, the impossibly catchy songs, the choruses to die for, if we were doing a Weird Science sort of scenario, but instead of building the perfect dream girl, we were conjuring up the perfect band, it very well might end up sounding just like Monster Magnet.
We were warned that this new one was something different altogether again, that it was darker and moodier, and not nearly as bombastic or heavy, all of which is true, but even so, we're digging this like crazy, the core sound still pure Monster Magnet, the brooding, dramatic majesty, the crushing metallic heft, the psychedelic space rock shredding, and while songs like the opener are sort of moody and minimal, there are just as many tracks, like the title track for example, that are just primo MM, pounding drumming, space lord motherfucker riffage, Dave Wyndorf's distinctive dramatic rock god vox, and again, hooks galore, the band able to take crazy poppiness, and disguise it as spaced out heaviness. And yeah, lots of Last Patrol is dark and folky, lots of acoustic guitars, the vibe actually sort of MM via Spacemen 3 which as you might imagine is not a bad thing AT ALL. In fact, we'd say maybe 50 percent of the record is sort of dark, acoustic, psychedelic, druggy space folk, the vibe very classic seventies, think all that classic acid folk, but done MM style, and for every bit of bongo laced, string laden acoustic guitar cosmic broodery, there's some classic heavy psych drug rock heavy metal stomp to balance it out.
Another classic from these space lord motherfuckers, and thus, needless to say (but we'll say it anyway), WAY recommended. And while they last, we have the digipack version with bonus tracks.
Fancy Black Friday Record Store Day version of this latest slab of hook filled stoner space rock heaviness from these long time aQ faves, comes as a deluxe digibook, with two bonus tracks, housed in a fancy box with a little window through which you can peep the USB drive, which contains the whole record in MP3 form, bonus tracks and all, as well as ringtones, an interview with MM mastermind Dave Wyndorf, desktop wallpapers and a Napalm Records sampler...
We're gonna just come out and say it. Monster Magnet have NEVER made a bad record. Ever. They've come close for sure. And there have definitely been some bad songs, but every record has had at least a handful of MM classics. Sure maybe once they made the shift to a more pop oriented sound, there was no hope of them ever making another Spine Of God. But that was just fine with us, we love Dopes To Infinity or Powertrip as much as we love Spine Of God. To be fair, being superfans, we're probably not the most objective when it comes to MM, but we will say, the last couple of records, Monolithic Baby and 4-Way Diablo, were probably the weakest of all the MM records. That said, there was plenty on both to dig, just in comparison to some of the other stone cold classics, those two maybe paled. So we were maybe expecting more of the same, another Monster Magnet record, that maybe didn't rule, but that was pretty great, and had at least a few killer jams, but then BLAM. First song in, and we're digging the heaviest, fiercest MM record in ages. "Hallucination Bomb" is low slung and sinister, swaggering epic stoner space rock bliss, fat fuzzy bass, a killer main riff, wild loose leads, and ridiculous over the top lyrics, what more could we ask for? How about a whole record that good! That's right, you got it, solid top to bottom, with another clutch of ridiculously genius song titles too: "Bored With Sorcery", "The Titan Who Cried Like A Baby", insanely inspired lyrics like "I'm a pumped out freak on a big wheel..." and some of the sickest riffs since God Says No.
We could go song by song, but why bother, if you're like us, you'd buy a new Monster Magnet no matter what, and the fact that it totally rules, only makes it that much better. And if you've somehow made it this far without hearing MM, holy shit man, what's wrong with you, total epic over the top stoner space rock genius of the highest order, buy this one, then go get Spine Of God, Superjudge, Dopes To Infinity, hell, you're gonna want them all. And odds are you'll have a new favorite band. It's a Satanic drug thing, you wouldn't understand. Trust us.
Absolutely recommended.
A mysterious package showed up on our doorstep one day a few weeks ago. An oversized brown paper sleeve printed with all sorts of geometric figures, atop them a drawing of a curled up skeleton, and beneath the skeleton were printed the words Monument Of Urns. And along with it came a note, printed on the same paper and in the same manner, which said simply "Free doom for all". We were more than halfway to digging this before we even slapped it in the cd player. And moments later, free-doom was indeed ours! (But it'll cost you five bucks.)
Included was a three inch cd-r, packed with 16 minutes of some of the most massive glacial super distorted, soul crushing doooooom we'd ever heard. Riffs that could flatten a city, given ample time to drift into nothingness before the next comes crashing down, a rhythm so slow and spare, it sounds like the drummer could smoke a cigarette between each snare hit, vocals, distant and hazy, as if being shouted from the bottom of a blackened pit, that sometimes roar ferociously before drifting back southward. Essential for fans of all things Skepticism, Bunkur, Esoteric, Corrupted, Earth, SUNNO))), Boris and the like!
THE URNS RETURNS!! We all went mad for the first release from mysterious outerspace underworld doom outfit Monument Of Urns, a massive glacial slab of black as tar, slow motion doom. A brief quarter of an hour, a mere three inches of utter doom and devastation. Beautifully packaged in an oversized cardstock sleeve. So fucking good but at the same time so cruel. It's the kind of track, the sort of sound that you want to go on forever and ever, an endless smear of blackened buzz. Of which we were blessed (cursed is maybe more appropriate) with only a tiny glimpse of the mighty beast. So we were psyched to discover a new, but similarly brief blast of that dismally delightful Urns ultradoom. This time it's in the form of a single 17 minute track entitled "The Destroyer Of All". Upping the drone / drift / ambient ante, "TDOA" begins with a long stretch of slow swirling metal guitars, drifting and droning, before even more guitars are piled on top, and then the drums hit, like someone dropping anvils from a seventh story window. A plodding, trudging stretch of 16rpm riffage and vocals so raw and distorted and distant they just sound like another layer of demonic buzz. So slow and heavy, so impossibly crushing, it's doom metal verging on ambience, sludge metal stretched dangerously close to complete drone-age. And we fucking love it. Someone has got to get these guys to take all of their 15 and 17 minute tracks and string them together into the ultimate doom symphony. A double disc, a triple disc even, we can hardly imagine it.
ESSENTIAL for fans of all things Skepticism, Bunkur, Esoteric, Corrupted, Earth, SUNNO))), Boris and the like! Packaged in a cool oversized cardstock sleeve, with a mini 3" cd sleeve inside.
We weren't entirely sure what to expect from a band called Moon Pool & Dead Band, we were even less sure when we saw the super bizarre cover, a striking painting of a family, standing in some sort of sewer, looking out at a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the mother holding what appears to be a dead child, the father consoling her with one hand, clutching a bat in the other, the sky choked with factory smog. What we do know, is we weren't expecting THIS. It's definitely space rock and definitely psychedelic, which puts it at least marginally in Agitated's wheelhouse, there are no guitars, at all, and the sound seems to be entirely synthesizers, and the occasional drums, but we're not disappointed at all! It's definitely not like anything we've heard before, which made even more sense when we discovered that Moon Pool & Dead Band is in fact a 'techno' offshoot of Wolf Eyes, although we're not hearing much actual techno here, instead, it's a sprawling sea of synths swirling and buzzing, occasionally coalescing around minimal motorik beats (hence the techno?), the background rife with glitches and squelches, the band locking onto long stretches of super druggy, synthy drift, getting loopy here and there and sounding a bit like a space rock High Wolf, there are a few moments of goofy almost Perrey and Kingsley style bloop and bleep, the opener on the B side woozy and playful, and a bit of a strange standout moment, but on both sides there's plenty of blurred ambient shimmer, and pulsing mesmerizing psych-synth drift, sort of the perfect mix between psychedelic space rock, and that new wave of Carpenter / Goblin influenced cinematic synthscapery. Recommended to both camps, but probably more so to folks with a foot in each!
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!
We rarely get hate mail, but when we do, it's usually pretty good. And our positive review of Morbid Angel's most recent record, Illud Divinum Insanus, elicited some of the best hate mail ever. We were accused, among other things, of being poseurs, of being the whole problem with San Francisco, and why no one wants to live here, and of liking that Morbid Angel record ironically (all somehow connected). We'd like to believe none of that is true, especially the part about our ironic love of that Morbid Angel album. As long time readers of the aQ list must certainly know by now, we tend to love lots of ridiculous, crazy, stupid, demented shit, and if anything qualified as all of those, it was Illud Divinum Insanus. Have a look at that review if you missed it the first time, and you can see what all the hubbub was about. Sure that record had some classic death metal, but it also had some weird nineties style industrialisms, and some (sort of) rapping. Even the folks here that hated that record, were perversely obsessed with it. And the folks who loved it were also perversely obsessed with it, and even THOSE folks found at least one of the tracks nearly impossible to like. So really, it came as no surprise that the whole record was due for a double disc remix, with all the tracks redone, remixed, reimagined and reworked by all manner of industrial / techno musicians / producers. And again, the haters were appalled, but strangely intrigued, and the rest of us, well, we were pushing it for Record Of The Week, cuz really, this is some Judgement Night style shit, a maybe bad idea pushed about as far as it could go, and in the process, becoming something strangely cool, and surprisingly listenable (for some of us, at least).
So yeah, the vestiges of the originals are nearly wiped completely away on most of these tracks, and what's left is usually just a riff, or only the vocals, the originals totally transformed into pounding gabber, or martial industrial, or creepy electronica, or glitched out weirdness, the sound definitely heavily nineties, hard to avoid when the core of the sound is electronica/industrial crossed with metal guitars, the Ministry vibe looms large, but somehow, these songs work better as nineties industrial metal jams than death metal, especially the more problematic tracks like "Too Extreme". No matter what, or how much, we write, most haters will not be swayed, which is totally fine, but for folks into the WAY weirder/demented side of metal, or who dig nineties industrial metal, or even folks just into the whole traffic accident can't look away vibe of this ridiculous release, this is pretty fucking cool/weird. And if it wasn't actually a Morbid Angel record, and was instead just some super fucked up comp of metal industrial, we imagine lots of folks might be a little obsessed. Cuz lots of this is really fucking cool.
Igorrr (1/2 of aQ faves Whourkr) turn their track into a dizzying chopped up, head spinning collage of stuttering guitars and processed riffs, the sound blenderized and junglized and blasted into a squall of fractured melodies and skittery beats, a track then sounds like it could have come off the Igorrr record proper. The Laibach remix is incredible, adding harpsichord, flutes, swooping backwards guitars, and the vox from the original into a dizzying psychedelic Teutonic pound that KILLS. cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy takes his track and adds a tolling bell, chanted vox, squiggly sci-fi effects, and transforms it into a weirdly cinematic string laden dirge. Tek-One adds thick rib cage rattling bass warble for a bad ass death metaldubstep mash-up, DJ Ruffneck goes full on gabber, pounding and relentless, laced with shards of guitar solos from the original, Black Lung takes the original and blurs it into a murky smear, and spreads that out beneath a heavy house music churn, while Mondkopf buries the original in squelches and low end buzz, turning it into a lurching low end creep, Scott Brown turns his track into full on HI-NRG rave, which is hilarious, but kind of awesome, Fixhead offers up another crazy head spinning heavy dubstep workout, we could go on and on, but they're all pretty great, and weird, and while some are dumb and fun, others are dark and fucked up and fierce, others still tripped out and confusional. Folks who hated the original, and who were offended by our UN-ironic love of that record (we're not poseurs dude - we're TOO EXTREME!!) will most definitely want to steer WELL clear of this monstrosity, but for everyone else, we have to say, we've been listening to this like crazy, nonstop, and that shows no sign of changing any time soon, which always the real measure of a record. In fact, folks who hated Illud Divinum Insanus for being a mockery of a Morbid Angel album, might be able to like this, since it's not even pretending to be death metal.
Includes a download coupon for even MORE remixes, not included on the discs proper.
We're happy to report that the internet has not (entirely) killed the 'zine. Blogs and websites are great, but can't really replace a good old fashioned b&w stapled xeroxed 'zine! They do seem old fashioned, though. And that vintage quality is fully embraced by this metal 'zine out of Canada, Morbid Tales, since the subject matter covered is pretty old school too. Some of the bands here are new, but they carry the torch of '80s underground metal (thrash, doom, death and NWOBHM) high. '90s cult black metal and '70s psych and prog is also not outside Morbid Tales' purview. While all 'zines are labors of love, editor Annick "Satannick" Grioux REALLY is a maniac for this music. Her enthusiasm really captures the spirit of 'zines back in the old pre-internet tape-trading days.
Interviewees, among others, include Darkthrone, Portrait, Master's Hammer, Voivod, Pagan Altar, Cauldron, The Lamp Of Thoth, Elixir, Soothsayer, and, get this, Flower Travellin' Band (who get asked about the naked chopper riding cover photo of their debut LP)!! Plus there's reviews of obscure releases and demos, metal tourist shopping guides to London, Paris, Montreal, and Prague, show reports, and other interesting tidbits, including a brief guide to "Purple Metal" aka Italian Horror Metal like Black Hole and Paul Chain.
This is Morbid Tales' biggest issue yet, 117 full size pages, plus flip it over and then there's another 13 page bonus zine all about heavy metal cooking tips entitled Hell Bent For Cooking (soon to be expanded into a book to be published by Bazillion Points we're told)! Recipes contributed by members of Anvil, Exciter, Cauldron, Trouble, The Gates Of Slumber, Countess, Ogre, Piledriver, and others. Such delicious dishes as: The Stew Of True Doom. Tomato-Garlic Hellfire Chicken. Black Pudding And Squid In It's Own Ink, With A Hashish Garnish. And then by the last few pages, the recipes have turned into drink mixes, these being metalheads after all...
Morbid Tales #6 (+ Hell Bent For Cooking) is an impressively thick tome of metal obsessiveness all in all. We only got a handful of copies (8) and won't be able to get any more, as it's SOLD OUT, so act fast if you want one.
We've actually been meaning to review this for a while now, the debut full length from Swedish death metal weirdoes Morbus Chron, who obviously, being from Sweden, and playing death metal, are following in a grand tradition, but rather than rehashing what came before, these guys take that classic sound and twist it all up. The garish psychedelic cover art is your first clue that this is not your dimwitted big brother's death metal. It's more like your deformed-evil-twin-that-you-keep-locked-up-in-the-attic-dosed-on-hallucinogens-to-keep-him-docile's death metal. Right from the get go, Morbus Chron spew an unholy concoction of tangled atonal psychedelic melodies, ominous cinematic ambience, churning downtuned heaviness, occasionally laced with wah wah guitars, and driven by bellowed gruff vokills, the riffs are fantastically slippery and loose, the drumming too, a punkish gallop that seems right on the edge of the drummer's ability, which is most definitely a good thing, the band tight as fuck, but sounding constantly on the verge of collapse, the sound more lurching and lumbering than blasting, the vibe murky and muddy, old school heaviness infused with some warped avant garde experimentation, and executed like a horde of knuckle dragging zombie metalheads. Plus who can argue with a band who names one of their songs "Creepy Creeping Creep"? Yet for all the weirdness and psychedelic-ness, Sleepers In the Rift is still death metal, and sorta classic sounding (to a degree) DM to boot, so all you dabblers who don't actually dig old school death metal, this might not be QUITE weird enough for you. They're no Portal after all, but what they are, is modern masters of some damaged DNA strain of classic Swedish death metal, beholden hugely to the greats, but all warped and twisted and fucked up, and transformed into something sorta new, but seriously ruling.
Sleepers In The Rift, the full length debut from Swedish death metallers Morbus Chron, was a fantastically gnarled collection of murky, muddy, old school, with a decidedly outsider/avant bent, one that seemed barely kept in check throughout that record. But on Sweven, it seems like those avant tendencies have taken over, and it's clear from the very first few seconds, that what's in store is most definitely not more of the same. Backwards effected guitar swoops, give way to a loping, clean guitar figure, mildly melancholic and simplisitc, which is soon joined by some shimmery filigree, and when the song kicks in proper, it's not a blast of thrashing blackness, instead, it's some almost Godspeed sounding flourishes, all haunting shimmer, and slow build smolder, and even when again, it seems like the song will explode into death metal pound, it just sort of blossoms further into some sort of post metal epicry. Now to be fair, it is essentially an intro, but even the first 'proper' song starts out similarly, all shuffle and strum and shimmer, sort of mathy and proggy; and even when it does explode into metal, it's more Voivod than death metal, the vibe and sound sort of sci-fi prog, technical, but super melodic, the only real nod to proper death metal are the raspy anguished vokills, which sound even stranger, when paired with the group's new more polished sound. But it's a pretty excellent combination, one that gives the sound a more psychedelic and prog metal cast. It's not really until the third track, that anything resembling proper death metal comes into play, but then, as another reviewer stated, it seems these guys just don't give a fuck, cuz here, and really every time the sound nears death metal, they do something to subvert it, and they transform it into something else entirely. For a death metal record, there are lots of mellow parts, tons of clean guitars, and again, even the 'death metal' parts, sound to these ears not much like the death metal that came before, or even the death metal these guys used to play! Instead, Sweven is a twisted, futuristic, next level post-death, sci-fi-prog metal masterpiece, that should have fans of avant psychedelic metal, math metal, and future-tech, progged out metallic weirdness wondering just how high in their year end top ten to put this record. We're guessing pretty close to the top...
Not sure of what the connection is between aQ faves Shackleton, the Skull Disco label, and Mordant music really, they seem somehow interconnected, Shackleton having been a part of Mordant Music at some point maybe, doesn't really matter, all you need to know is that this disc collects all the Shackleton related releases from this era (the Mordant era?), all WAY out of print, and all seriously kick ass. In fact we've been trying to get these for ages, the first time we heard it we freaked out, proclaiming it the electronic music record of the year, or weirdo dubstap jam of the year, or some similar rave, and thus, needless to say, this disc blows us away. It has been out for a while, but we only just now managed to get enough to list. Which also means when we run out, we very ell may not be able to get more, so consider yourself warned.
So yeah, these tracks are dark and spacey, and dense and weirdly funky and groovy, the core of most of these tracks is definitely dubstep, moreso on the Shackleton tracks proper than the others. "Stalker" is spare and skeletal, with woozy synths, plenty of skittery rhythms, and some awesome rubbery squlechy bass wobble, easily a classic dubstep jam if there ever was one. "I Want To Eat You" takes the same sound and blisses it out a bit, adding a Middle Eastern tinge, channeling Muslimgauze through effects laden abstract dub. "El Din" and "El Din 2" offer up more of the same, exotic and mysterious, moody and minimal, shifting from Eastern shuffle to dark Chain Reactiony pulse and back again.
Then there are the Mordant Music tracks, which are way more techno sounding, more beat-y with chopped up melodies and soaring synths, some with thick throbbing bass warble, one with creepy electronic buzz woven into the sklittery shuffle, and then there's the record closer, "Marston Moor", a super noisy noise drenched creepfest, complete with shriekd black metal vocals buried in the mix, swirling and chaotic, with what sound like processed horns, would kill to hear a whole record of this stuff.
Finally there's two tracks from Vindicatrix, one a tripped out druggy FX-fest, vocals doused in delay and sent spinning into the ether, super minimal beats and rumbling low end buzz, a weird sort of post industrial glitchscape, while the second is a murky chunk of minimal techno dub, with haunting processed female vocals, creepy Goblin-y synths, all draped in a blurred grime-y eighties haze.
Require listening for fans of tripped out electronica, weird abstract dub(step) and damaged glitch beat minimalism.
ATTENTION TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG faithful. Trollmann maybe e dead and gone but fear not...
Avid AQ list readers and doomlords worldwide should be well aware of our love of mysterious doom duo Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. Four full lengths, a live record and a live dvd-r, each a sprawling lugubrious brew of fuzzy spacey keyboards, Skepticism-like slow-crawl riffs, rumbling demon vocal gurgles, as blessed out and darkly ambient, as they are heavy and crushingly ominous. For those new to Trollmann, it's not just the amazing and mysterious music, it's the whole world Trollmann have created, or the world they call home. The records are called Forest Of Doom, Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice, Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity, the band members are depicted on their record covers, drawn, never photographed, one a little hairy elf on a toadstool, the other a huge bruiser of an ancient caveman, armed with a massive axe, the instruments used to make this music: "Cosmic keys to gates unknown," and "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." Hell yeah!
Just bass and keyboards, the duo managed to weave lush and truly haunting soundscapes, doomy drones and slow motion heaviness, like a black metal Tangerine Dream crossed with a much more ambient Thergothon. So we were pretty heartbroken when we discovered earlier this year that the band had called it quits. Their mysterious partnership dissolved, and our portal to that alien sonic dimension sealed forever. Or maybe not!
We arrived to work to discover a huge fissure in the floor of the store, some sort of fog or smoke drifting from below, an unearthly glow emanating from the murky abyss, the bravest among us braved the unknown and reached into the crevice, feeling around, it was warm, and moist, and gritty, the air a completely different quality, until they grasped something, a cloth sack, tied with rough twine, when pulled from the dark, spilled open just as the fissure miraculously closed up. What was in this sack? Some bits of ancient treasure, a handful of bones, some dirty cloth stained with something resembling blood, and THIS! The debut disc from Mordraaneth, aka Belegur from Trollmann, who over the course of these two discs, has thankfully taken up his cosmic keys to gates unknown, and opened up a new gateway, allowing us to return, at least aurally, to the glorious sonic landscapes of Trollmann, drones and dirges, smears of murk and shimmer, dark ambience and black doom. The sound familiar enough that anyone into Trollmann will find this essential, but different enough to remain mysterious and magical.
The opening track is a long meditative keyboard suite, layers of throbbing whir and pulsing chordal washes, the notes and overtones beating against one another, subtle rhythms and textures beneath the tranquil dreamlike drift. Definitely reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, but with a vibe at atmosphere much more ancient, and timeless, the music of crumbling castles, of blackened underground passages...
The second track introduces vocals, a buried in the mix demonic rasp, and a thick layer of buzz, some subtle percussion, a strange slow motion martial fantasy fanfare, wreathed in hiss and static, the distortion crumbling, the track peppered with bits of grinding growl and blown out fuzz, but somehow still hypnotic and dream like, the keyboard running through it, it's melody entrancing and so pretty. The rest of disc one drifts along lazily, like floating down some black river that runs beneath the Earth's crust, winding through lost civilizations and abandoned villages, eye glimmering in the darkness here and there, a permanent midnight. Haunting and ominous and soporific.
The second disc is two looooong tracks, beginning with what sounds like harpsichord, once again transporting us back to some ancient court, you can almost imagine Lords and Ladies, doing some strange dance, beneath a huge stone edifice, lit by firelight and the stars above, the whole disc, all 58 minutes of it, is a weirdly festive medieval folk, like a much more haunting and fucked up Renaissance Faire music, or some sort of ancient new age, imagine Kitaro and Brian Eno in full corpse paint, scoring a film about knights and dragons. Medieval fantasy ambience. Playful and lilting, glimmering and glittering, a gauzy sun dappled cloud of music box melodies, slightly smeared and blurred into a dreamy drift.
Can't wait for Thundarr, the other half of Trollmann, to return with his Rumblings Of Doom and Prophecies Of Times To Come, but for now, we're perfectly happy to revel in the blissy ambient dreamusic of Mordraaneth!
Spit is the debut full length from Ron Morelli, probably best know as the man who runs the L.I.E.S. label, whose American Noise / Volume One 2cd comp was a big hit around here, but instead of doing the record himself, Morelli found his way to Dom Fernow's Hospital label, and it's a really good fit, Morelli's murky electronic minimalism definitely in keeping with the music Fernow makes and releases, fans of Vatican Shadow, Christian Cosmos, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Silent Servant will find much to dig here. The opening track "Radar Version", in fact sounds like it could be Fernow, all gothed out industrial gloom, skeletal pulsations over woozy buried melodies, everything dubbed out and doused in effects, and swathed in a grey ambience, which by the end of the track is also buried beneath soft synth shimmers and blasts of electronic noise. The tempo is cranked up a bit for the second track, "Modern Paranoia", a sort of lo-fi, ultra minimal electro, but even then, it's soon joined by some garbled bass warble, like a a dubstep wobble, all melting and oozing and slowed way down, soon there are handclaps and weird percussion, and that rhythm reveals itself as some super cheesy Casio style beat, still beneath that woozy bass. And from there on out, it only gets better, the crunchy acid-y electronic squelch and motorik pulsations of "Crack Microbes", the churning looped industrial noisescapery of "Sledgehammer II", the abstract electro dub weirdness of "Fake Rush", the blooping, bleeping, sample laced primitive early electronics worship of "Director Of...", the gritty, gristly, night-kraut, goth-groove of "No Real Reason", and finally, the blurred, grey-noise drone-drift ambience of "Slow Drown." So good. Totally recommended for Hospital label obsessives, fans of Fernow's various projects, and anyone into grim, gothic industrial minimalism, or if you're like us, all three!
Furious and epic black metal a la Dimmu Borgir but with more dynamics and less cheesy keyboards/atmosphere. Strange groovy breakdowns, and super catchy riffs as well as weirdly melodic parts and some really inventive out of the ordinary guitar playing.
Dunno how we missed it when the Sundazed label put out this sweet reissue last year, but better late than never to list the early '70s heavy psych awesomeness of Morly Grey - any psychedelic rock freaks out there who didn't know about it should be super stoked!
This Youngstown, Ohio band's sole, privately pressed lp came out in 1972 and has long been considered a desirable underground artifact of hippiness and heaviness, the sort of thing that actually lives up to the collectors' hype, with original copies being relatively rare and expensive (and bootlegs prevalent). It's a blend of fuzzy acid rock guitars, mellow West Coast-y folkiness, and proggy ambition (the trippy title track, which incorporates an instrumental arrangement of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", takes up a whole album side, at over 17 minutes in length). Plus a healthy dose of flowers and beads bedecked pop that harks back to the '60s sounds of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Jefferson Airplane, all acts no doubt influential upon the Morly Grey guys, even as they display nascent headbanging riff rock inclinations as well. So while a song like "Who Can I Say You Are" may mostly be all delicate and melodic (with vocals worthy of Bobb Trimble), it also kicks in with the heaviness at times too. That song, by the way, you may have heard already on that great Forge Your Own Chains: Heavy Psychedelic Ballads and Dirges compilation that came out a couple years ago.
Elsewhere, there's parts that remind us of krautrockers Agitation Free, and spacerockers Hawkwind... while lead-off cut "Peace Officer" could almost be early Blue Oyster Cult at their most psychedelic and proto-metallic.
We remember a long time ago, this was available as a compact disc reissue via Italy's Akarma label, but this nicely digipacked Sundazed reish is much superior, being totally legit and more than complete, as it includes a bunch of rare (and excellent) bonus tracks, totalling an additional 28+ minutes of music! There's also enlightening liner notes, based on interviews with surviving band members, by Doug Sheppard of Ugly Things magazine.
One of the early filmworks from Mario Bava (best known for his horror flicks), Danger: Diabolik is a spectacular, unusual and campy romp of a movie. From 1967, it's an Italian comic book come to life complete with wonderfully mad leaps of logic, a bevy of
I have become completely obsessed with Chris Morris. He makes me sad. Sad that we don't have anyone nearly as funny in the United States.
He's been a staple of British radio / television for years now. And it seems like since day one, he's been trying to get himself blackballed. Or killed. His BBC program The Day Today, was a Today Show parody. Complete with a washed up, neurotic weatherman (the also amazing Steve Coogan), a narcissistic and completely cruel host (Morris), and a gorgeous and ice cold business reporting babe that spoke in complete gibberish. After The Day Today was cancelled, came Brass Eye, one of the funniest shows I have ever seen. This time a parody of evening news programs like 48 Hours or 60 Minutes, taking things even further. The goal of this show seemed to be to publically humiliate trusted government officials and public figures (quite successfully we should add) and contributed to Brass Eye's rather brief run. Then came Blue Jam, a totally surreal and unstructured radio show. featuring bizarre (and often offensive) free association / high (low) concept skits over music from a who's who of modern electronica / trip hop (Later turned into an even more unstructured television program called Jam. loosely adapted from the radio show). The Blue Jam cd is basically the best bits from the Blue Jam radio show, featuring Chris Morris and a few other folks, eating and killing and arguing and shitting off their limbs (?) over music from Labradford, Propellerheads, Amon Tobin, Funki Porcini, Herbaliser, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Fila Brazillia, 9lazy9, Clifford Gilberto, Jimi Tenor, and more. Until we can get Brass Eye over here, Chris Morris comes to you only via Blue Jam, quite possibly the funniest headphone mindfuck ever.
Abject, miserable, mournful, agonized, anguished, tortured and tormented ultra mega doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom! That's right. We've officially reached an all time high in o's (40 in case you were counting), and an all time loooooow in DOOM. Every time we hear from these crushing creeps they've pushed it even further into the deep dark damnable depths, forcing us to add more and more o's. That's right, it's the return of Moss, the UK's heaviest, slowest, sludgiest slow motion downtuned doom metal behemoth. Moss take the paint peeling acidic abrasiveness of Khanate and combine it with the warm suffocating murk of bands like Skepticism or Thergothon, or even aQ faves Nadja (who did a split with Moss a while back). Ultra minimal and nearly static in its sludginess, with the simple caveman plod of the drums the only thing keeping this from turning into a full on drone, this is like one HUGE riff, pulled and stretched into two epic streaks of fuzz and pound, with vocals that might even give Alan Dubin from Khanate a bit of a fright, like a demon howling through a mouthful of broken glass and rusty bottlecaps, teeth black with the blood of a thousand vanquished souls, the sound that finally comes out is a noxious black cloud that causes everything it touches to wither and die, totally blown out and so harsh it makes our throats sore just listening to it.
But like the best sludge / doom, there is some sort of subtle melodic undercurrent going on, maybe it's deliberate and these guys are on some whole other musical level or maybe it's just some chance occurance, some strange alignment of overtones or some lucky bit of abstract composition, it hardly matters, the end result is somehow both hauntingly beautiful and horrifically harsh, there's definitely some dark beauty hidden beneath Moss' black sludge exterior, but the joy of music like this is the fact that the music's beauty is buried and bruised, battered and brutalized, the sonic search for the beauty within is like wading waist deep through boiling hot pitch, ears plugged with hot tar, all the while being showered from above by the tears of angels.
It's been a while since we've had to employ multiple 'o's in a review. A bit of a death of doom it seems. Or at least the sort of doom that requires all those extra 'o's. A loyal customer of ours even whipped up this [http://www.aquariusrecords.org/doomchart.html] "doom chart" based on our usage of multiple 'o'd doom in reviews!
And if memory serves, Moss was one of the bands that routinely got described as doooom, or doooooooooom, and sometimes even doooooooooooooooooooooooom. So we were all ready to put finger to key and just let the 'o's roll out, one after the other after the other, until we felt we had conveyed the crushing doom of Moss. That is until we pressed play, and were treated to "Ritus", a five and a half minute soundscape of whirring synths and washed out ambience, of cymbal sizzle and proggy keyboard drones, of whispered voices and buzzing shimmer. Hmmm. The liner notes say it's inspired by Doris Norton, an electronic musician who's also a member of AQ faves Jacula!! An interesting start from one of the sludgiest, crustiest bands around. Doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. Ahh. That's better. The second track returns us to that dank dark sloooooooooow place Moss call home. Twenty three minutes of downtuned crush, the tempo only slightly faster than the growth of actual moss. But even all gnarled and sludge-y, something has definitely changed. It's not nearly as filthy, and harsh, it's actually weirdly pretty. Almost like it's some more melodic metal record being spun manually with one finger at 3 or 4 rpm. The distortion is still dense, the long drawn out chords seeming to crumble, the drums spaced way out, but somehow still more buys than you're average ultradoom drummer, the vocals are still harsh and howling, but somehow, they too seem to be a bit more smooth, further down in the mix, like another layer of sound, the howls allowed to unfurl into another layer of buzz. It's strange, but we definitely dig. And we're not saying this is NOTHING like old Moss, or folks into Bunkur and Esoteric and the like won't love it, you will, the differences are subtle, and the sound is just a little bit, well, prettier, if you can imagine something bleak and black and harsh and hateful being pretty. Which we can!
The next track, a nine minute dirge, is a bit more raw and rough, most of that prettiness we were blathering on about above is GONE. Shrieking feedback, the drums even slower and more spare, the guitars even more distorted and the vocals throat shreddingly harsh, the tempo slightly accelerated, bordering on Eyehategod territory.
But it's all bout the closer, "Gate III: Devils From The Outer Dark". Clocking in at 35 minutes + and beginning with a churning sea of downtuned rumble and buzz, before the drums finally kick in, and f course by kick in we mean pound sporadically. This track is WAY more than a dirge. It makes the track before it sound like thrash metal. This is slooooooow and so so so so dooooooooooooooooooomy. The guitars thick and corrosive, the chords allowed to ring way out and fade away before the next one drops in to take its place, but weirdly enough, this one too sounds sort of pretty, not like the opening track, but still very dreamlike and mesmerizing. Long streaks of feedback spread out over wide open expanses of minimal thud and warm warped slow motion buzz, when the vocals drop out, it becomes something entirely different, finishing off with several minutes of thick low end drone, the guitars rumbling and wrapped into a thick nearly static pulse, something truly hypnotic and almost spacey, but without sacrificing a single one of those extra 'o's.
Definitely a progression, a band can only pound and plod for so long, but so subtle that the casual listener might not even notice. "Oh yeah, heavy, slow, dooooooom", but as with most music, deep listening reveals a whole lot more going on beneath the surface, and once your ears lock on to that stuff, even the sounds on the surface begin to sound different.
WAY RECOMMENDED for the doom-ed amongst you. And just cuz we knew you were waiting for it, Sub Templum could very well be doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom disc of the year!!
Besides being one of the filthiest, sludgiest doom bands EVER, Moss also hold the uniquely AQ distinction of being the first band to get 40 'o's in an AQ review. That's right. Moss are most definitely the supreme masters of D-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-M. Only that many 'o's in doom can truly represent the sort of twisted anguished glacial drone drenched doom these guys are capable of unleashing. Every thing they touch turns to murky, dirgey mayhem. A blackened, hateful soundscape of slow motion thud and growl, a hellish trudge through a black sonic pit. But we're sure we already had you at 40 'o's!
So what could be more appropriate than a single ninety minute epic lo-fi doom dirge, captured on three microphones and recorded on a fourtrack, then pressed on to a cassette, the grimmest and most cult of formats? Well how about if each cassette was housed in an mindblowingly elaborate, and highly dangerous, welded iron, industrial sculpture-like case? And how about if each cassette 'case' was welded together from nails, and strange rusty hinges, and huge links of chain, stuffed with burnt parchment and actual moss? Doesn't get much more doomy than that.
Seriously though, when we cracked open the two HUGE boxes these tapes came shipped in, and began to unwrap these sharp and jagged works of art, everyone in the store gathered around to see what the next one would look like. Some were like Venus Flytraps made out of nails, others were huge bear trap things wrapped in chains, and spiked with nails. It was like discovering some long buried ancient armory. A dizzying array of sharp edges and hinged nails, weird greased axles that allow pieces of metal to slide open revealing the tape inside, or dense tangles of bent nails melted into tiny cassette coffins. So intense. And amazing looking. And so appropriate to the massive downtuned sludge inside. It's almost like these tapes occurred in nature, and the protective welded iron coating is a warning to wildlife to beware of what poisonous brutality lurks inside. Each case has the band's name welded or soldered on the side, and each contains a parchment like insert with the liner notes. And plenty of moss as well. So awesome.
So here's the complicated part. They're all totally different. Some are huge, and weigh close to 5 pounds, a massive chunk of metal, some are quite not so big, but still equally spikey and dangerously sharp. So the postage will vary depending on which one you get, and due to the intensely spikey and sharp nature of these beasts, if you order them along with anything else, they MUST be shipped separately. And thus will incur an extra shipping charge. Unless you don't mind all your other records having huge nail holes in them and everything ripped to shreds. But let's assume you do mind, and so we'll just figure on separate shipping. But hell, it's so worth it. These are amazing and creepy pieces of art. It's almost just a bonus that inside is a tape of some seriously damaged, harsh and crumbling lo-fi doom.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! WE GOT HALF OF THEM! When these are gone, they are gone forever.
If we had to come up with a four-letter word for doom, that wasn't d-o-o-m, it would be m-o-s-s. MOSS! These UK sludgelords, whose previous full-length Sub Templum was a record of The Week last year, are about as heavy as it gets, Moss sinking to the bottom of the black tarpit of doom below almost all others. Of course, playing so slow, the mere three songs here manage to stretch this way beyond ordinary ep length, each of 'em upwards of ten minutes... and then there's a fourth, hidden bonus track that gets this up to about 40 minutes total, so it's actually almost a full album really. And it's the usual grief we get from Moss: these tracks all anguished and distorted, with distended guitar and bass strings hanging loose and low, vokillizations of sheer misery and madness torn from the singer's throat like a still beating bloody heart ripped from the sacrifice, and bits of bent and battered drum kit scattered across the rancid tundra that is Moss's metallic soundspace... sometimes it eventually all congeals into one massive, melancholic drone, a true thing of beauty, heard for instance towards the end of the title track, upon which Moss employ Hammond organ. What else would you expect from something titled Tombs Of The Blind Drugged?? Tombs to which Moss have the "Skeletal Keys" and plan an "Eternal Return"...
We mentioned a bonus track, it's the Discharge cover Moss did that originally appeared on their split 7" with Monarch. "Maimed And Slaughtered" is slowed from a 45rpm blitz to an unrecognizable 16rpm bludgeon... Here's what we said about it in our review of that now out-of-print 7": Moss transform Discharge's punky stomp into a barely moving morass of sludgy pound. Sounding very much like Eyehategod, with simple pummeling drums, howled vocals, and of course guitars tuned as low as they can go before the strings drop off like wet noodles. On top of all the murk, drift weird high end streaks of surprisingly melodic feedback, giving the whole track a haunting and ominous vibe.
FYI, Tomb Of The Blind Drugged is also coming out on vinyl, as a limited double 10" record, minus the Discharge cover we think. Also minus track three, "Eternal Return", which apparently appears on a separate 12" we've yet to track down. We DO have a bunch of the 10" preordered, but the ltd. digipack cd version got here first.
Temporary Residence does it again, after the recent Record Of The Week reissue of the complete works from nineties math rock gods Bitch Magnet, comes yet another amazing archival release, this one digging back even a little further, from the same sonic pool that so obviously informs TRL's taste in contemporary sounds - it's the complete recorded works of the late great Moss Icon, who in the mid/late eighties were crafting a super unique strain of post punk / hardcore / math rock / emo / gloom pop, that while definitely sonically tied to other groups in the underground at the time, drew from super disparate influences, and created a sound most definitely all their own, a sound that would eventually influence a whole slew of bands to follow.
Imagine a mix of eighties hardcore and nineties post rock, a dizzying hybrid of the the Wipers, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Slint, Fugazi, Joy Division, all thick slithery low slung bass lines, jagged slashes of angular guitar, chiming chords and churning riffage, spidery melodies, the songs super intricate, and often nearly prog in their arrangements, super dynamic with soaring swell of near metallic heft, and long stretches of brooding mesmer, over which the usually howled vox slip into more of a spoken word, sometimes delivered in a haunting deadpan intonation, other times a fervent rant, the sound super tranced out, the band locking into long stretches of hypnotic almost looped riffing, driven by darkly propulsive rhythms, a sprawling moody psychedelia that's the perfect backdrop for vocalist Jonathan Vance's socio-political sonic shamanism. There are moments of surprising poppiness throughout, but usually tucked away amidst long stretches of droned out mesmer, fierce blasts of emotionally wounded heaviness and a relentless barrage of driving melodic crush and controlled sonic chaos. One of the great unsung bands from that era, and an incredible collection of sonically and emotionally powerful music that deserves to be (re)discovered.
PS: Guitarist Tonie Joy would go on to play in Born Against, the Great Unraveling, Universal Order Of Armageddon, The Convocation Of and others, and ALL of those bands were definitely a product of the sounds and songs here.
We're really gonna have to reassess our stance (that means, Andee's stance) on 'blues rock', cuz this is the THIRD record from these Ohio hard rocking blooze blasters, and the third of their records that we're CRAZY into, even though it seems like we really shouldn't be. It's not super psychedelic, not crazy weird, not experimental, not very metal, not avant, not even noisy or lo-fi or anything, it's really just seriously kick ass, hook heavy, hard blues rock, and it kills. Imagine a way more hard rocking Black Crowes, or modern Southern rockers Antler, or all time aQ faves Raging Slab, these guys definitely fit somewhere in there, we're hearing a lot of psychedelic hard rock and proto-metal too, but they kind of fall closer to straight up blues rock, but still, there's just something about these guys, that even the most blues rock phobic here at aQ, i.e. Andee, maybe even especially, ends up flipping out over every record. And this new one is no different. Shit kicking hard rocking psychedelic blooze, with big killer riffs, muscly drumming, a killer production, raspy whiskey and cigarettes, Chris Robinson like vocals, hooks like crazy, and some kick ass shredding leads, it's hard to resist, but it's also easy to see these guys being the perfect match for groups like Howlin' Rain and the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, the kind of thing fans of those bands would and should be losing their shit for. But by the same token, there's still plenty here for folks into the current crop of retro psych heaviness, all those Rise Above bands, Sir Admiral Cloudsley Shovell, Uncle Acid, etc.
So yeah, if you like hard rocking psychedelic blues, and count bands like Jerusalem, Blue Cheer, Budgie, Captain Beyond, Leaf Hound, Ten Years After, Humble Pie, Zeppelin and cream among your faves, might as well add Mount Carmel to the list. If you haven't already!
If there's one thing musicians, and heck, even fans of music hate, it's a dabbler. Someone well established in one arena who decides to dabble in some other sound or scene, often 'slumming', experimenting with a sound or style that they would never integrate into their actual sound. And no one hates dabblers more than metalheads, who came up with a new name for those dabblers, POSERS.
But without a little dabbling, music would remain stagnant, genres would go on forever unchanged, or more likely would die out because everything would have been done. The key is two fold, to dabble, or experiment respectfully, and to then incorporate those borrowed sounds into something new, and original, that while heavily indebted to the new sounds, is also firmly rooted in the original sound. It would make no sense for some punk band to just switch gears and come out with a country record (although it has happened), one would question that band's integrity for sure, how serious could they have been about punk if they could just chuck it for something else without a thought? It makes more sense for that band to infuse their punk with some twang, or add some slide guitar to the thrashing howl, and already, even just describing, it sounds way more interesting.
Needless to say, we were WAY skeptical when we heard that there was a Mount Eerie 'black metal' record in the works. We were never that into Mount Eerie, or the Microphones, it took the recent collaboration with Julie Dorion to win us over, and that record remains one of our favorites. But we had been reading about Mount Eerie mainman Phil Elverum discovering Xasthur and getting the black metal bug. Which is fine, that's sort of what this store is all about after all, but there's a difference between just digging black metal, and suddenly adding black metal to your dark bedroom folk. In theory it sounds like an intriguing combination, but we remained skeptical...
Which proved to be unnecessary, cuz wow, this is a strange and beautiful beast of a record. Right from the start, the title track explodes in a squall of thick corrosive buzz, where does a folky learn to kick up a sound like that? And since BM is not his first musical language, the result is truly unique and strange, there are some lurching strange arrangements, and then of course the black metal is peeled back to reveal some soulful crooning, and the hybrid is just as cool as we hoped it might be, a mournful sad boy Sebadoh like croon, buried amidst heaving walls of crumbling buzz, that explode into furious clouds of caustic crunch, only to recede once again, revealing those sad boy vocals again, and some strange plodding drums alongside a moaning minor key main melody, and the cool thing is, Elverum's distinct melodic style, immediately recognizable since we listened to Lost Wisdom so much, is perfectly fused with the buzzy blasts and blackened atmosphere. Really really cool. And that's only the first track.
As mentioned above, the key to successful dabbling is not abandoning your original sound, since theoretically, the music you make, you make because that's the sound you hear in your head, and your heart, and Elverum continues to craft gorgeous brooding dark folk, the second track, is a wheezing organ driven drone, with hushed angelic vocals, and a haunting deeeeep drone outro, which leads right into a gorgeous reverb drenched bit of mist shrouded drift, all spidery guitars, and warm whirring distant keyboards, and more crooned vocals, all subtly sinister and harrowing, but quite beautiful.
Fear not, that opener was not just a one shot. "The Hidden Stone" is another super distorted blast of blackened heaviness, and again, the magic here is that the buzz and fuzz is wrapped around distinctly UN-black metal melodies and song structures, the result sounds like a blackened Mount Eerie, lilting and sorrowful, but simultaneously distorted and blown out. And the record continues to strike the perfect balance between drifting, droney melodiousness and blackened buzzy crush, the best moments being when the two are fused, which thankfully is most of the time.
"The Mouth Of Sky" unleashes some incredibly cool, over saturated hyper distorted guitars and what sounds like processed cymbals, weaving them into a loping dark melody, the result is a super heavy, noise drenched, metallic shoegaze-y psychedelic blow out, the sort of track we wish was about 10 times longer. "(Something)" clocks in at a little over two minutes, and is obviously an experiment, but is one of our favorite tracks, a super strange, heavily panned, crunchy, distorted rhythmic, looped dronescape which gives way to a soft, shimmery, glistening dreamscape. "Lost Wisdom Pt. 2" is another killer blast of black folk buzz, about as frenzied as any of the blackness here gets, but divided into a strange lumbering tempo, which gives the whole song a sort of seasick vibe, lurching and lumbering and so EPIC, before all the distortion is stripped away, leaving just hushed vocals, a warm distant buzz, and some muted distortion, and the immediately recognizable melody from the original "Lost Wisdom", and finally the record finishes off with a long sprawling slow motion drone-folk drift, the bed of which is all warm organ and softly strummed acoustic guitar, interrupted only briefly before a slow motion explosion of super processed cymbal shimmer, leads into a gorgeous, outro of dark dreamy Neil Young-ness, finishing off like a Mount Eerie record should, haunting, resonant, mournful and melancholy.
Not sure what else to say. It should speak volumes that we were so skeptical and so cynical, and were actually not even all that interested in hearing this, and now here we are proclaiming it our Record Of The Week. We stand before you humbled, but happy, with ears full of this strange confusional sound. Which makes sense really, as lots of our favorite metal these days is some sort of hybrid, some strange mix, or twisted take, and while we will always love the primitive blasting raw buzz of true black metal, we'll never get tired of people pushing that sound, one of our FAVORITE sounds, in new, exciting and unlikely directions. And we definitely can't think of anything less likely than indie folk and black metal...
Incredible packaging, the cd a fold out full color oversized accordion style matte finish booklet, with frosty forest images on one side, lyrics and liner notes on the other, the band name and album title in reflective gold metallic ink. The lp similarly deluxe but a fancy gatfold jacket instead.
Mount Eerie has always been a bit hit or miss for us, same with the Microphones, both musical projects of the quite prolific Phil Elverum. The sound tends towards a hushed downer bedroom folk, simple instrumentation, heartfelt lyrics, vocals almost whispered, but various record have twisted that sound into different shapes, especially in the Microphones, where Elverum would add bursts of distorted psychedelic rock, jagged guitars, or horns, or Stereolab style Moog buzz, but the thing with the Microphones was that the sound was always better than the songs it was wrapped around. With Mount Eerie, it seemed Elverum was exploring a more intimate side to his sound, his Sentridoh to the Microphones' Sebadoh. But even then, we were never totally taken with any of the Mount Eerie releases. At least until now.
Lost Wisdom is absolutely gorgeous. We're tempted to credit the addition of Eric's Trip's Julie Doiron, but while that's a HUGE part of it, the songs here are fantastic. Recorded beautifully, wonderfully arranged. At times it sounds like an acoustic Built To Spill covering the first Iron & Wine record, if that makes any sense. Acoustic guitars, some subtle distorted crunch, simple barely there percussion, it's mostly about the vocals, Elverum and Doiron creating amazing harmonies, each wandering off on their own here and there, before returning once again only to get all wrapped up in each others' melodies. Sweet and sorrowful and sad, dreamy and melancholy, Elverum slips from warm soft croon to fluttery falsetto, Doiron's voice is fantastic as always, so melodic and rich, but also raw and rough around the edges, passionate and the perfect foil to Elverum's sad boy swoon. And the songs are gorgeous. Minor key and strangely lush for being so stripped down. The opening title track is worth the price of admission alone, just listen to the sound sample, so dark and beautiful, so wistful and haunting, a strange arrangement, full of tension and release, and some gorgeously obtuse melodies, even some strange room clatter in the background that ends up sounding like as much a part of the song as any of the instruments. We've been playing this whole record like crazy, but that first track, wow, just might be one of our favorite songs of the year.
WAY recommended.
Last year we reviewed a disc by the evocatively named Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, who we described as "equal parts DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, seventies horror movie soundtracks, late night jazz and super sluggish blown out trip hop" which is exactly what it sounded like. Long languid musical excursions through some dark rainy late night film noir wasteland, ghostly moaning horns, skittering minimal percussion, haunting strings, all tangled into super cinematic musical drama. Another band, who if there was any justice, would be the ones scoring big Hollywood thrillers instead of Danny Elfman...
Anyway, we recently learned that the�Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble had an alter ego, a more metallic dark side, called, appropriately enough The�Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, we were pretty much sold after just hearing the name, so evocative of some mysterious 'star chamber', holed up in a secret underground bunker, tucked in some cave in the mountains, where mysterious hooded figures work alchemical magic creating mysterious and monstrous 'doomjazz'...
Supposedly, this Kilimanjaro offshoot was meant to sound a bit like SUNNO))) or Earth, albeit run through with bits of jazziness and smoke-y ambience. Well, it's not quite that heavy, but it is a bit, definitely heavier and darker and more ominous than the KDJE mothership, a sort of drone-y dark ambient drift, long stretches of low tones and distant horns, of rumbling guitars and thick washes of swirling low end. Actually it sounds more like�Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble with all the jazz sucked out, leaving nothing but a blackened husk, a skeletal landscape of bleak blissed out shimmer, and slow creeping nightmare melodies. In some ways it sounds like a jazzier, more ambient, less primitive and ritualistic version of the Taj Mahal Travellers... A couple tracks do rev up to a full on SUNNO)))-y dirge, with the guitars threatening to engulf the dark ambience beneath it, but they never truly explode into actual sludge drenched doom, instead, they sort of drift darkly, roiling like a sky full of thick black clouds... It is most definitely doomy though, just not in the traditional sense, the sounds here are more Lustmord, Nordvargr, Bohren und Der Club Of Gore, Cold Meat Industries, with some more melancholy melody mixed in, disembodied reverbed guitar, the occasional almost-jazzy creep, it's more a sort of ambient slow core, wait a minute, "slowcore ambient doom" might be exactly the descriptor we were searching for.�
Definitely recommended for fans of any of the above mentioned bands, or anyone into�slowcore ambient doom!
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Long awaited debut from Nashville doomlords Mourner (featuring members of long time aQ faves Loss), their first for the mighty Paradigms label (who also released this week's ROTW from Murmuure), and while we were all ready to haul out the extra 'o's (as in doooooooooooooooom), seeing as this is indeed a seriously epic and sludgey collection of extreme slow motion heaviness, multiple 'o's just don't quite do this stuff justice. Sure it's slow, and low, and sick and sinister, and blackened and brutal, but it's also weirdly pretty, and strangely melodic, surprisingly lush, just check out the list of instrumentation for your first clue: harmonium, Echoplex, noise, drones, tape loops, field recordings, all wound into the more typical guitar, and drums doom metal arsenal. The record starts out seriously doom-ed, a harsh cackling wicked witch vokill rasp, over murky rumbling bass, crushing spare drum pound, distant haunting shimmer and epic downtuned slowcore chordal crush, sounding almost like a prettier Khanate, the sound creeping and crawling, about as close as anyone has come to channeling slowcore legends Codeine though pure doom, but it doesn't take long for Mourner to distance themselves even further from the doom hordes, the vocals suddenly slipping into a super dramatic King Diamond like falsetto, giving the sound an even more melodic (and hauntingly dramatic vibe), and then the heaviness is peeled back entirely, leaving just some gorgeous skeletal clean guitar, draped over minimal super sparse drumming, the vocals a reverbed growl, the result is something doomy, but more just lovely and mysterious. The track slips back into heaviness, those KD vocals returning too, the song a woozy lumbering dirge that eventually fades out, leaving a bizarre slowed down voice, over a warm softly whirring choral outro.
The comes the 28 minute, two part "Still", a sprawling ambient doom epic, the band laying out a hazy, softdrone backdrop, over which, the guitars occasionally crash, vocals growl and mumble and gurgle and groan, the sounds occasionally coalescing into some sort of impossibly glacial doom death march, but just as often blissing out into something much more ethereal and washed out, clouds of cymbal sizzle, SUNNO)))-like riffscapery, plenty of tripped out effects-drenched drift, whispery clean guitar laced shimmer, some surprisingly pretty almost post rocky bits of melodic meander, hazy layered drones, with the second half being the more traditionally doomy, eventually locking into some seriously devastating lumber and pummel, still atmospheric, and subtly melodic, but heavy as fuck, until finally, the band slips back into something abstract and avant, a slowly unfurling soundscape of muted crunch and rumble, of hushed vocals, clean tendril like guitar lines, all manner of soft focus murk, peppered with the sounds of birds way off in the distance.
Most definitely recommended for the usual slow and low obsessives into Moss, Bunkur, Monarch, The Body, Khanate, Fleshpress, Celestiial, Nadja, Skepticism, Trees, Wicked King Wicker and the like, but Mourner is just weird and melodic enough to maybe reach beyond the doom metal loyal, and open up a whole new world of sound to folks who might not have dared in the past.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Packaged in a cool printed brown paper sleeve, with a printed 4 panel insert.
It's getting harder and harder to know what to write about Mouth Of The Architect and the handful of like-minded bands that we love so much. With MOTA we kinda just want to write "THIS BAND RULES!! SO HEAVY AND CATCHY AND COOL. JUST BUY THIS!!! NOW!!!" But since for some reason not everyone does exactly as we say, and often need a little persuasion, we'll dig a little deeper.
Ever since the first metal band started incorporating math rock into their sound, or ever since the first post rock band went all metal (hard to say how it happened, chicken and egg and all that) we have been hooked, BIG TIME! Impossible for us to resist such a perfect chocolate/peanut butter scenario, such bands as Isis, Indian, Conifer, Tides, Pelican, Minsk, Rosetta, who mix all the bludgeoning brutality, the down tuned riffage, the pounding skull splitting drums, the howled throat shredding demonic growl, with all the intricate rhythms, dreamy drones, melancholy melodies, loping dreaminess, krautrocky grooves and meandering moodiness we could ever want.
It sort of makes sense, when you think about it, all of these bands aren't consciously combining two disparate genres, they are just incorporating all of the things we always wanted in a heavy rock band. Post rock bands were often just not heavy enough, metal bands were often not interesting or pretty enough. These bands are both. Everything. Mouth Of The Architect are probably one of our favorites, their sound leaning a lot more toward the massive, heavy, riffy, doom sludge side of the equation, which just makes the pretty parts all that much more special. And the thing about MOTA, is that even at their heaviest, their crushing downtuned riffs are sort of just supercharged mathrock parts, which gives the whole thing a much more moody emotional vibe, gives it a little more groove, makes it a lot more catchy, even subtly so. Not sure what else to say, other than "THIS BAND RULES!! SO HEAVY AND CATCHY AND COOL. JUST BUY THIS!!! NOW!!!"
The Holy Trinity of underground hip hop, Company Flow / Def Jux / Anticon, can seemingly do no wrong. And here they strike again. This time it's Mr. Len of Company Flow, with a record of dark and sinister gloom-funk, all staticky a.m. radio wah wah and crunchy
A few weeks back, we got an unsolicited email from someone called Mr. Peter Hayden. Not being someone we had ever heard of, we might have just deleted it, if it weren't for the subject line, which read: "Finnish music trying to impress you." Hmmm. Still skeptical, we opened the email, only to discover that Mr. Peter Hayden was not in fact a person, but a five piece psychedelic combo from Finland, who had recently got some serious love on Julian Cope's Head Heritage website. The email also ended with the line: "I know every word I write here is a waste of our time until You take an hour off and dive deep in to the worlds the album will take You." We were pretty much sold. After all, Finland. Check. Psychedelic. Check. Cope. Check.
And once we threw it one, we were not disappointed, in fact, we were wondering, being the weirdo Finnish music obsessives we are, and being super obsessed with all strains of psychedelic space rock heaviness, how the hell we had missed out on these guys? Well, better late than never, and really all it took was about a minute and we knew this probably had to be a Record Of The Week. Heavy, atmospheric, druggy, dynamic, psychedelic, pounding drums, soaring guitars, streaks of feedback, wailing melodies, long stretches of swirling spaciness between bursts of chugging heaviness, and that's only a couple minutes in, total trip out heavy head music for sure. A single seventy minute jam, that builds and builds and builds, from that first blast of psychedelic heaviness, chugging, and churning, the sound gradually grows less and less spares, more propulsive, more metallic, by about six minutes in, the song has transformed into a roiling sprawl of psychedelic doom, but sort of freeform, and a little bit jazzy, the guitars riffing, but also splintering into wild squalls of tangled melodies, and unfurling lush swirling textures, the sort of rare sonic beast that immediately entrances, first time we listened to this, we listened to the whole thing all the way through, totally mesmerized, and in a druggy, hypno-rock trance. And speaking of hypno-rock, just wait a few more minutes and the band locks into a seriously cyclical groove, seemingly channeling vintage Circle, but augmenting the minimal riffage of Circle with clouds of psychguitar shimmer, and what sounds like a phalanx of buzzing humming synths (maybe just more guitars), wild dense tangles of thick corrosive guitar buzz, chordal swells, all wrapped around a main riff that just chugs along all hypnotic and motorik.
The sound shifts constantly, without ever losing momentum, slipping at one point into a sort of doomy dirge, only to blossom into what might be the poppiest part of the record, all major key melody and soaring majesty, and then seconds later, to dial everything back, and unfurl a brooding stretch of ultra minimal meander, all super spare drumming, guitar buzzing like sitars off in the distance, the sound laced with fragmented riffs, strange FX, bits of squiggly melody, and all manner of slow shifting textures, woozy and washed out and dreamily druggy, all of this dreaminess eventually interrupted by some seriously metallic heft, a crushing drum heavy distorted riff churn, but still surrounded by a swirl of psychedelic shimmer, that somehow keeps it from being just heavy, and makes it both heavy, and blissfully psychedelic.
The heaviness seems to ooze and expand, the various guitars switching from riffing to spiraling soaring melodies, a lurching lumbering groove that as far as we're concerned continue to the end of the record, but Mr. Peter Hayden have other things in mind, slipping into some soaring near Godspeed like post rock epic-ness, not to mention a weirdly mathy almost metallic breakdown, and throughout, more stretches of hushed minimal drift, softly psychedelic, drowsily dreamy, a continual push/pull between blown out psych and space rock crush, and blissed out mesmer and shimmery lysergic ambience, but like any great record of its stripe, Born A Trip ends with a serious blast of psychedelic heaviness, sounding like Neurosis almost, epic and crushing, blown out and metallic, a heavy psych coda that eventually fades into a final stretch of droned out slo-mo minimalism. Wow. So great.
obviously so very recommended for fans of Carlton Melton, White Hills, 3 Leafs, Gnod, Sylvester Anfang, and other interstellar psychedelic space rock explorers, as well as all of you who dig motorik Circle style hypnorock, Finnish freakiness, and just trippy spacey heaviness in general. Definitely a Record Of The Week, but a serious contender for Record Of The YEAR as well...
A while back we made the most recent record from these Finnish spaced out psych-kraut drone-rockers our Record Of The Week, a single song, spread out over a whole record, rife with pretty much everything we love, crumbling distortion, swirling FX, motorik rhythms, lush swirling textures, heavy, heady, hypnotic, the kind of sound that should never end, even one record length song is not enough, total kosmische hypno-rock heaviness that we, and most of you, can't seem to get enough of. Sadly it seems like that record is no longer available, and word is, the band is working on a new record, a new SONG actually, that will fill up TWO whole cds, but until then, we got this new 7" to tide us over, and as is there want, it's just one song, about 13 minutes long, and another epic psychedelic space rock sprawl, one that sort of ups the sonic ante, taking the sound of that last full length, and pushing it even further out, a dark distorted field of slo-mo riffing, shimmering billows of blurred FX, and then the sound explodes into some seriously heavy, spaced out dirgery, echo drenched vox, simple Teutonic drum pound, everything hazy and prismatic, the sound shot through with swirls of synth buzz and spidery guitar melodies, gloriously epic and majestic, fans of Godspeed style bombast will flip for sure. Totally tranced out, transcendent, psychedelic, space-drone, hypno-rock bliss. Not sure how limited these are, but guessing they won't be around for too long...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Before we relay the weird way in which we fell in love with this record, let us just say right up front, this is our new favorite garage pop record, hands down!
So as you probably know, the increasing habit of listening to music on our computers has changed the way we listen to music so much. Lots of folks listen to everything on shuffle, others just play their favorite tracks, the idea of full, programmed albums is almost a thing of the past for some folks. And while in some ways those changes enhance the listening experience, in others, it definitely feels like something has been lost. But for whatever reason, at least in this one case, the quirkiness of said computer listening was the key to our obsession with Mrs. Magician.
We had been listening to this new record from the weirdly named Mrs. Magician, a garage rock combo who we had only really heard of cuz they were on tour with the Hot Snakes. And we definitely liked what we heard but were not yet totally blown away. Then for some weird reason, we accidentally sorted our music library by 'date added' and ended up listening to Strange Heaven IN REVERSE ORDER, from back to front, and holy shit, suddenly it all clicked, our socks were knocked totally off, and ever since, we can't stop listening to this (and yeah, we dig it in the proper order now too!).
Not sure if the record is just weirdly back loaded, or we just needed this little twist to unlock the magic of Mrs. Magician, but we're just grateful it happened. To help simulate our listening experience, the first two sound samples we've provided are of course the double shot (in reverse order) that sealed the deal, the sort of one-two punch you find yourself listening to over and over and over (just ask the other aQ-ers how many times Andee has played these two tracks over and over the last few weeks), and then once you can convince yourself to move on, the third and fourth sound samples, are the album's proper opening two tracks.
But c'mon, "Dead 80's" has to be the jam of the year, crunchy, jangly, fuzzy, with a chorus that KILLS, all dreamy oooooh's, some falsetto crooning, warbly organs, ramshackle riffing, and the sort of gleefully profane chorus you'll find yourself singing along too even after just one time through ("Oooooooh, Fuck the world, Oooooooh, Fuck the law, Ooooooooh, Fuck the kids!"). And if "Dead 80's" wasn't already THEE jam here, then "Hours Of The Night" sure as shit would be, a dead ringer for late great post grunge Nova Scotian pop group the Hardship Post, all post Nirvana strum, but with hooks galore, a shuffling rhythm, and snarky heart broken lyrics, not to mention plenty of reverby dreaminess, and so it goes, those two songs are the key, that unlock a whole record of crazy catchy garage pop bliss, that to be honest, is really all we want to listen to. Can't remember being as excited about a pop record since Jaill's That's How We Burn, which trust us, is huge praise indeed. Definite contender for record of the year, pop or otherwise.
Latest bit of obscure musical alchemism from the mysterious cave dwelling horde known simply as Mrtyu, but around here, also known as Antony Milton, head honcho of the Pseudo Arcana label, and the man behind numerous musical endeavors we dig BIG time: Street, Nether Dawn, Claypipe, With Throats As Fine As Needles, The Stumps, we could go on and on...
Mrtyu was always Milton's outlet for his darker side, a sort of blackened drone metal behemoth, never full committing the the black buzz, always sort of skirting the grim true BM sound, taking elements of that sound and fusing it to his more abstract, folky dronemusic, the results invariably kick ass. On this latest slab, the Mrtyu sound is markedly different, for all the noise and skree and buzz and general heaviness, it's also probably the prettiest Mrtyu yet. As if the ever raging battle between his folkier dronier 'good' side and his buzzier sludgier 'bad' side, has finally tipped to the side of good. But not too good, fear not.
Unlike some of the more grim noise drenched rituals of the past, the first side could almost be one of Milton's other projects. Sure there's plenty of guitar skree, sheets of feedback, and dense layers of soft chaos, but beneath it all lurk gorgeous lilting melodies, each avalanche of crumbling distortion can barely disguise the weirdly pretty, woozy, spidery, dreamy melodies within. Swirled smears of muted buzz wrap around delicate jangle and simple strum, dense cacophonous walls of sound tumble beneath crystalline chordal streaks.
It's not until the B side that things get seriously heavy. A gorgeous little Middle Eastern sounding tangle of melodies drifts over a soft layer of muted feedback, the strings sawed intensely, then suddenly, a buzzy blown out riff comes in, locked and looped, a mesmerizing lurching groove beneath the ever intensifying tangle of melodies, a twisted metallic Easter drone raga (or something) that could have taken up the whole record and we would have been psyched. Thankfully it takes up half of the second side.
The record finishes off with more abstract blackened folkiness, vocals enter the fray, a weird effected mewl, over rumbling distortion and shards of feedback, more squiggly little melodies, and some warm almost tranquil sounding guitar shimmer underneath.
Perhaps not so much for the weirdo metal obsessives anymore, this Mrtyu record will probably find a home with the more avant folk / abstract drone / free noise freaks, although truly adventurous metalheads should definitely not be dissuaded.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES. Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Housed in hand screened linen paper sleeves. NICE!
In looking at the two publicity photos which mark the beginning and end of the timeframe of this collection (their singles and rarities from 1988 to the present), you'd never think the photos were of the same band! Bad-ass smug heroin rockers in the first, giggly indie awkwardness in the latest. Don't get us wrong, Mudhoney is good people, and a great band. Doubters need only to pick up this anthology to be set straight. 52 tracks, a decade of rock n' roll genius from the old classics (i.e. "Touch Me I'm Sick", "Hate The Police") to obscure b-sides. One disc is the "best of", the other all rarities. Recommended.
This is another one of those records that is almost beyond reviewing. A record that if we found out someone we knew didn't own it, we would simply insist they buy it immediately. No questions asked. Of questions were asked, we would respond with something like "Because it's awesome!" or "It's one of the best collections of songs EVER" or more likely "JUST BUY IT! IT RULES!".
But since that doesn't work on everyone, we'll do our best to describe what is one of our favorite records EVER, and arguably the best Mudhoney release EVER. Partially because it's not a proper album, but rather a collection of single tracks. Pretty much every one a perfect chunk of slithery filthy grungy punk rock genius.
When we first discovered Mudhoney, it was because we were super obsessed with Green River, the band that vocalist/guitarist Mark Arm and guitarist Steve Turner called home before Mudhoney. Both quitting as that band leaned more and more toward glam rock and late eighties Sunset Strip rock. But to our ears, Mudhoney didn't sound all that different from Green River. Maybe a little punkier, definitely less bluesy, but from the second we first heard Mudhoney, we were in punk rock love.
A lot of it has to do with Arm's raspy croon, so raw and primal, but managing to be super melodic and versatile. He's a bit like a mop topped grunge rock Iggy Pop, wiry and writhing while spitting out insane punk rock bon mots, wailing away on his axe, bouncing maniacally around the stage. His voice is definitely the defining feature of Mudhoney, but that wouldn't mean shit if the songs weren't amazing, and they are. Punk as fuck, but way poppy, hooks galore, but all wound up in super tight riffs, wiry melodies and wild drumming, the band careening wildly one second, pounding away through some doomy dirge the next.
No amount of flowery description, no review, no matter how well written, can possibly compare to just hearing this stuff. We're so jealous of anyone who gets to hear "Touch Me I'm Sick" for the first time, or their cover of the Dicks' "Hate The Police", or the slithery "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More". When we first heard these songs, our minds were BLOWN. Literally, we had no idea what the heck we were hearing. Punk rock. Grunge. Pop. But it was more than that. The energy, the spirit, the groove, the vibe, and holy shit THE SONGS. So with all of that to chew on, I think we're finally at a stage where we can unleash the "JUST BUY IT. IT TOTALLY RULES!!"
We get a little bummed out on reissues sometimes, thinking we have to buy a record all over again, for maybe a few extra tracks, or a dvd, or whatever, but then you have to realize, stuff like this is not necessarily for fans who already have the record, but for folks who might have somehow missed out, many of whom were maybe not even alive, or still toddlers when it first came out. So for you folks, this is absolutely a must have. Whether you're a metalhead, an emo kid, a punk rocker. Mudhoney are one of the few bands whose appeal transcends genre, and rightfully so.
For those of us who already have one or more copies of Superfuzz Bigmuff, well, the new version has three demo tracks, as well as an entire disc of live tracks, one live show, one live on the radio, new fancy pants packaging, deluxe six panel digipak, housed in a slipcase, huge booklet with tons of photos, liner notes, all the original single covers, so yeah, we're all gonna buy one, you might as well too, replace the old worn disc with this new remastered version, support a bunch of cool dudes who are still making kick ass records (in fact, a new one to be reviewed here real soon). But really, all that extra stuff is just icing, on a cake that already tastes better than any other sonic confection we can think of...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Where to even start... HAWKWIND. The mighty lords of drugged out space rock, without whom, most of the bands we love might not even exist. These four Hawkwind records: Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall Of The Mountain Grill, In Search Of Space, and Space Ritual, are pretty much all anyone needs to know about space rock. Or whatever it is that Hawkwind do, long sprawling jams, extended psychedelic workouts, heavy and trippy, totally drugged out and divine, while at the same time, surprisingly catchy. But yeah, aQ folks probably already know how much we love Hawkwind.
So if we were to pick six bands to cover classic Hawkwind tunes, we might not have picked these six, but then again, we very well might have: Mudhoney, Mugstar, Acid Mothers Tempo And The Cosmic Inferno, White Hills, Kinski, Bardo Pond. Holy hell! If this were just a comp with those bands, we'd be all over it, but the fact that they're covering Hawkwind seems like it was made just for the aQ faithful, and who knows, maybe it was. Spread out over three 7"s, we almost didn't list these separately, but as a set, 'cause to our minds, who the heck would only want one or two of these? But you never know, so for those of you who didn't already freak out and toss all three into your cart, here's a brief bit about each specific 7":
The first of the three, subtitled "Motorheads", features two aQ favorites (as do they all), Mudhoney and Mugstar. Mudhoney tackle "Urban Guerilla" and totally make it their own, so much so, that minus a little chunk of extended droney space rocking in the middle, those not well versed in Hawkwind would certainly be forgiven for thinking it was a Mudhoney original. Mugstar on the other hand are a DEAD ringer for Hawkwind, their sound murky and muddy, squalls of psych guitar, clouds of swirling spaced out FX, droned out jams, all tangled up and slowly unwinding into a long sprawling space rock jamscape. Hawkwind would be proud.
The packaging is brilliant, perfectly tripped out psychedelic acid flashback, with naked lady, geometric design, cribbed from the original Hawkwind artwork (or at the very least, an incredible simulation), the sleeves are printed complete with shelf wear and corner creases (so don't complain, they're meant to look like they've been on your shelf for decades), each one SUPER LIMITED, and already sold out at the label, we have a bunch, but these will be the only copies we'll ever have!!
We said it before, and we might as well say it again, these guys should really be WAY more popular than they are, everything we've heard from them has totally ruled, a few singles, two full lengths, one of which we made our Record Of The Week, and let's not forget their bad ass Hawkwind cover in the Sonic Attack 7" series (reissued on cd, one of THIS week's Records Of The Week!), so it should come as no surprise that full length number three is just as good, if not better than all the stuff that came before. Not as blown out and super rocking as Sun Broken, Lime is 4 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes, and is a bit more subdued than past efforts. That's not to say there isn't some seriously psychedelic ferocity on display here, it's just judiciously doled out, and set amidst some more minimal psychedelia. Although opener "Sunburnt Impedance Machine" might have you convinced otherwise, exploding right out of the gate with a killer fuzzed out Hawkwindy riff, chanted vocals, some soaring spidery leads, some killer staccato mathy breakdowns, huge squalls of spacepsych freakout, until finally at about the halfway mark, the track shifts gears and locks into a churning chugging krautrock groove, the instruments locked in tight, only the organ let loose, to whir and warble and buzz, laying thick undulating swaths of chordal buzz over everything, intense and hypnotic, and definitely the sort of thing that should appeal to Circle obsessives.
Which becomes even more obvious on the second track, the 13 minute "Serra", which is a dead ringer for our Finnish hypnorock pals, a sprawling motorik groove, you sort of almost keep expecting Mika Ratto to start singing over the top, but instead, synths swirl and shimmer, horns bleat and skronk, effects swoop and sway, organs get all proggy adding melodic counterpoint, but the main groove never wavers, mesmerizingly epic and relentless, 13 minutes is not nearly enough, could/should go on for hours...
"Radar King" returns Mugstar to the realm of the rocking, locked into another hypnokraut groove, this one minor key and mathy, before breaking down into some spaced out psychdrone drift, all clouds of cymbal shimmer, little melodic squiggles, swirling effects and hushed synths, barely there guitar jangle, eventually the build begins, pulsing, throbbing, growing louder, and more intense, the effects more frantic, the drums heavier, finally exploding in a climax of tangled guitar freakout, and splattery drum pound, all wreathed in dense spaced out FX.
Finally, the band finish off with a gorgeously hazy psychedelic dronedrift, that lays a woozy bassline, under a thick droning organ, the drums minimal, skeletal, like the tracks before, the organ takes control, adding all sorts of rhythmic texture to the proceedings, a total drugpsych tripout, all anchored to the seriously solid groove at its core.
Some seriously epic and proggy psychedelic spacekraut to the max, fans of Circle especially should dig these guys if they don't already, and like the last record, absolutely recommended for anyone even remotely into Salvatore, Magyar Posse, White Hills, The Heads, Burnt Hills, Gnod, 3 Leafs, Bardo Pond, Gunslingers, Eternal Tapestry, Heavy Winged, Sleepy Sun, Plastic Crimewave, Titan and the rest of the current crop of modern psych rockers...
Killer new record from this Israeli trio, who traffic in a sort of bass-heavy, gothed out post punk / punk dub, that sounds like some twisted mix of Joy Division, Suicide and Pan Sonic. Thick, super distorted pig-fuck bass drives the proceedings, each track centered around a grinding bass riff, but anchored by programmed drums, all supporting echo drenched vox, a dark dramatic croon, that is what gives the sound such a gothic vibe. The opener sounds somewhere between Interpol and Iceage or the Holograms, albeit a bit more electronic, but then things get super twisted on the second track, a lurching, stuttering, start-stop, gothic industrial churn, with some cool sampled Queen-like harmonies, and bursts of psychedelic guitar noise, and the vocals locked into dubbed out spirals. As the record progresses, it seems like the effects are gradually cranked, with tracks like "A Path" devolving into near chaos as the rhythms get all dubby as well, careening wildly in all directions while the riffs hammer away, and the vocals slip into almost rage like drones. Some tracks sound super electronic, others almost straight post punk, but usually, those two sides of the band merge and bleed into one twistedly unique whole.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
