For a lot of folks, the Plasmatics were a band that was more seen than actually heard. With Wendy O. Williams and her mohawk and duct tape covered nipples, nearly seven foot tall guitarist Richie Stotts, often clad in a mask and a French maid's outfit, the whole band was a motley crew of subversive imagery, punk, metal, bondage, sex and violence. When this record came out in 1983, a lot of us were just getting into metal, and the Plasmatics just seemed too PUNK. Sure, the young boys among us couldn't get enough of the near nude Williams destroying guitars with a chainsaw, or amps with a sledgehammer or even cars and buildings. But we just figured we wouldn't dig the music. When we finally did hear the band, this record specifically, we were blown away and kicking ourselves BIG TIME. This was indeed METAL. Sure it was punky in a lot of ways, but more than anything the Plasmatics were whipping up some serious heavy metal.
Described as "One part Grand Guignol, one part minimalist / kamikaze conceptual art and one part Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the Plasmatics also managed to be one part AC/DC, one part Motorhead, and one part New Wave Of American Heavy Metal (NWOAHM?). It was easy to forget that the Plasmatics were actually a band. A good one. Live shows were orgies of destruction, blowing up cars, smashing televisions, destroying instruments, in magazines and interviews, that's all anyone wanted to talk about. That and the nipples, but fuck if this isn't an absolutely killer metal record. Huge riffs, classic eighties metal hooks, and Williams' throaty growl/howl. Catchy and complex, head banging and fists in the air, like a female fronted AC/DC-Motorhead hybrid, with strange little bits of glistening pop here and there, where Williams would really sing, delicate and lovely, before launching back into a vitriolic face smashing metallic pummel. Awesome!
Totally remastered, with extensive liner notes, tons of photos, and FOUR bonus tracks: two demos, a work-in-progress recording and a hilarious radio ad! This is the first release we've reviewed from a new line of eighties hard rock and metal reissues on the Rock Candy label. Other releases include records by Armored Saint, Icon, Ted Nugent, Billy Squier, Coney Hatch, Ram Jam, Helix, Riot and more!!!
Interpol were always a little sleazy. Their slicked back hair and skinny moustaches and black suits. That whole vibe. But hell, it suited them, and it didn't matter all that much cuz the songs were so fucking great. Even though officially the identity of Julian Plenti is a big secret, only the truly dense won't have figured out that this is in fact Paul Banks from Interpol. There is after all a picture of him on the cover, and his voice is pretty unmistakable, and the songwriting too, definitely reminiscent of Interpol. This was supposedly his "sexy" and "sleazy" record, by his sexy sleazy alter ego, but disregard all the pretentious bullshit, what this is, is a pretty bad ass dark pop record, laced with plenty of electronics, nods galore to classic Interpol, and some awesome songs. The last Interpol record was a bit of a let down for a lot of folks, so while this is not necessarily a return to form, and not really an Interpol record, it does for us, function as something to tide us over until Interpol get their shit together and come up with another record to rival Turn On The Bright Lights.
Opener "Only If You Run" is total Interpol right out of the gate, with some extra electronic flourishes, but a loping gloomy bass line, Banks's recognizable croon, a killer hook, some weird production, some chiming guitars and big drums, synths too, and a little bit of skittery programming. Track two, "Fun That We Have" is even better", some crunchy guitar, a moe menacing vibe, yet another very Interpol sounding melody, some glitchy electronics, some weird lyrics, and some lush production. "Games For Days" is another killer, muted electronic percussion, brittle guitar chug, dense dark minor key chorus, some big crunchy guitars and yes, yet another Interpol sounding vocal line. Don't hold it against him, Banks is a huge part of Interpol, so Interpol is of course a big part of him, and thus informs his songwriting, which as we mentioned before doesn't bother us one bit. We're digging this a LOT.
Latest slab of grinding destruction from these bay area thrashers. Wicked and heavy, pummelling fastcore. Complex and amazing. With Max from Spazz/What Happens Next on the skins. Awesome.
The return of Lithuanian black metallers Poccolus! Well, not so much a return, as these guys split up a while back, but we're super psyched to hear more from these guys. Their Supernal label full length was a huge hit with the metalheads around here, gloriously thrashy keyboard drenched, post rock flecked Pagan blackness, originally released in 1996, but reissued a couple years ago. The tracks on Ragana date even further back than that, 1993 and 1994, with a couple live tracks tacked on as a bonus, originally released as a super limited cassette in 1997.
Here, Poccolus sound even more raw, and strangely more melodic. The guitars offering up classic metal sounding harmonies, locked in with the drums, pounding way down in the mix. Shades of Iron Maiden, and at least one of the tracks musically is a dead ringer for Slough Feg, that is until it slips into grim blackness, the bellowy reverb drenched croon, switching to harsh hellish shriek, but even then, the music continues to lope along all mournful and minor key, with plenty of keyboards, although here they're buried under the buzz and lo fidelity hiss. The opening track is so melancholy and catchy it's almost not even black metal. More like some gloomy gothy slightly blackened hard rock, but whatever it is, it's pretty excellent.
In fact, as we dig deeper, all the tracks here are barely black metal, although they're buzzy and heavy enough to keep metalheads' attention, the sound is much more raw and old school and classic sounding, the vocals are the blackest element, but even those shrieks and howls just as often revert to clean-ish croons. And it sound like this was mastered from a cassette, so it's all a little warped and warbly, giving it a haunting woozy off kilter vibe, which only adds to the band's unique sound. One track does actually get super grim and blasty, but that's after about 6 minutes of super minimal rumbling drones. The record closes with another strange only sort of black metal jam, lurching, mid tempo, the guitars warbly and minor key, the keyboard drifting like a haze in the background, the melodies getting more and more grand and epic, the band whipping their lo-fi stumble and buzz into something truly majestic sounding.
The live tracks are way more raw and fierce, lo-fi, but still plenty blown out and brutal, but even then, the weird melodicism of the proper tracks still creeps into the bands grim buzz. The Pagan element is also more present on these later tracks, the overall sound sitting somewhere right between the more polished Pagan crush of the full length, and the warped lo-fi classic metal of the demo tracks included here.
We were first turned on to Poison Ring by the guys in Sutekh Hexen, and managed to meet the man responsible on a recent trip to Seattle. We were initially not sure what to expect. The tape packaging, while beautiful, evokes something else entirely, something maybe more gothic, and Mr. Poison Ring himself is quite elven, in appearance and attire, but instead of some gothic renn faire flutter, we were treated to something much more intense, dark and atmospheric, a hazy, faded landscape of woozy soft focus murk and buried melodies, a sound that definitely had us thinking of Philip Jeck and The Caretaker and Tim Hecker. While it's impossible to tell exactly what's producing these ghostly sounds, it does sound like a handful of dusty old turntables, spinning lazily in some giant abandoned ballroom, a series of gauzy melodies, and slowed down samples, layered and woven into softly undulating blurs, melancholy and mournful, imbued with a introspective otherworldliness, the perfect haunting lullaby for nights beneath pitch black skies, devoid of stars, a gorgeously abject drift into some other/underworld, laced with moments both sinister and ominous, but those moments seem to always eventually unwind, the sound eventually and inevitably diffusing into another stretch of blessed out somnambulant ambience.
On some of the tracks, the source does seem to be obviously old records and broken down turntables, and yet, instead of taking away from the mystery, it simply adds more color and depth, often some sort of disembodied rhythm, reminding us again of Jeck, but also Strotter Inst, especially in the stretches anchored by electronic squelches and distorted pulses, like some alien, haunted house music, an industrial creep that manages to evoke a strange tension, while still remaining otherworldly and lovely. The flipside spends much of it's time lysergically loping through fields of murk and pitch shifted melody, an achingly wistful sprawl of dreamdirges and waking sonic feverdreams.
Housed in a beautiful handmade slipcover/sleeve, with a built in mini booklet, printed on vellum, each copy hand numbered, LIMITED TO 89 COPIES!!
Every once in a while, there's a record that is so good and makes me so happy, I find it virtually impossible to write a review of it. There's all this pressure to somehow convey in the space of a hundred or so words how goddamn good a record is. To convince YOU that this record will move you as much as it did me. So I hem and haw and write all my other reviews around it until I have no choice but to face my fear and go for it. So here it is. The new record by Florida's Poison The Well. Up until now, I've been a fan, and definitely enjoyed their records. But 'Tear From The Red' is such a colossal leap from their last record. Ostensibly a 'metalcore' record, it manages to encompass so much more: rock, emo, hardcore, death metal, even pop. The heavy parts, even when the vocals are howled, are somehow as catchy and heart wrenching as any Get Up Kids weeper, if not more so. And then when PtW -do- go for it, and break it down and get all mellow and sweet and emotional it's just devastating. And the playing on this record is so phenomenal. The riffs are so thick and huge they just smack you upside the head, but you just kind of bob along, oblivious, banging your head and spitting out teeth and letting this wave of furious emotion watch over you. The songs shift from crunching near-death metal, to wild free-metal, to stuttering stop-start rhythms, to spacy almost Voi Vod-ish melodies, and dreamy shoegazey bliss out parts. Halfway through the record they break out with just vocals and acoustic guitar, but the melody is so odd, and the voice is so impassioned and the chord progression is so unexpected that it ends up being just as intense as any of the heavy stuff, and not cheesy at all. And track three! What can I say? If you could wear out a track from playing a cd too much, I would definitely need a new one by now. Track three has the absolutely most punishing part of almost any song I have ever heard, where the kick drums, guitars, and bass all stutter then stop, over and over. Huge and unbelievably heavy. I was listening to it in my housemate's truck, and when that part came on I had to turn up the stereo so loud that I could SEE the beat making little waves in the rear view mirror. We have been getting a little worn out on this whole metalcore explosion, but Poison The Well have stepped up to the plate with not only one of the best metalcore records ever, not just one of the best emo records ever, but one of the best records I have heard in a long time. Period.
The last Poison The Well record was easily the best metalcore record, if not one of the best plain ol' METAL records, of last year. And this new one seems poised to repeat the feat! This is PtW's major label debut, taking the plunge, that years ago meant risking losing your core audience to cries of 'Sell out!' but now just means that we may be seeing Poison The Well on MTV and who can argue with that. It's getting tougher and tougher to describe metalcore, my thesaurus is worn away to the size of a matchbook. Yes, this is pummelling, crushing, brutal, punishing, the guitars are downtuned, thunderous riffs, and howled shrieks and furious double kick drumming and relentless rhythms and all that. So yeah, it's HEAVY. But Poison The Well write amazing songs. Every riff, every lyric, every melody, no matter how unlikely, is a part that you will find yourself humming to yourself days later. Incorporating the often problematic, clean vocals and melodic emo breakdowns more deftly than most into their overall sound, PtW drag you kicking and screaming on a rollar coaster of extreme dynamics, lush production and gorgeous catchy pop swathed in metallic brutality. The melodic parts, of which there seem to be a lot more this time around, owing more to their progress as songwriters methinks than their major label leap, are as soaring and captivating, as catchy and heart wrenching as anything the Get Up Kids or Reggie And The Full Effect could come up with on their best days. And so much less cloying, nestled the way they are, all snug and warm between a row of amps on 11 and a swirling, writhing moshpit. This definitely hits the metal spot, but pushes all our emo buttons and satisfies our pop sweet tooth at the same time. At first I didn't like this nearly as much as their last full length, but the more I listen, the more I am completely baffled and knocked out by how much more advanced this record is than its predecessor, so complex and varied, full of hooks, labyrinthine arrangements, beautiful melodies, sheer face-melting metal, gorgeous soulful vocals, lush, layered instrumentation, throat shredding demonic screeches and bizarre but subtle production. This definitely raises the bar impossibly high. It's about time!
Sometimes the world does indeed seem like a surprisingly small place. Years back, we were email penpals with a guy in England, who drummed for a killer mathy post rock band called Polaris. We exchanged records, and dug the shit out of the Polaris stuff we heard. Eventually we sort of lost touch, but would often wonder what happened to our friend, and wonder what had happened to the band, who as far as we were concerned should have been way more popular than they were.�
Well, years later, we get a random email from a label looking to get their records into the shop, and lo and behold, right there on the list is a record from a band called Polaris. It couldn't be. Could it? But indeed it was, recorded in 2004, this most recent release (their last?) from UK math rockers Polaris is like a modern take on nineties math rock. A little dreamier and more melodic and a little less raw then we remember, but still so good. Channeling the sound of Polvo, Pitchblende, Archers Of Loaf, Rodan and the like. Spidery minor key melodies, angular riffage, complex mathy drumming, lots of start stop arrangements, super dynamic, with long brooding stretches of loping melancholy groove, giving way to brief squalls of soft crunch, moody Tortoise like meandering, occasional bits of metallic buzz, gorgeous swells of dramatic Slint-isms, weary drawled vocals, all woven into long flowing post rock soundscapes. We sometimes forget how great stuff like this sounds. Hardly any bands make music like this anymore, and even the modern math rock and post rock bands who do have a totally different vibe than back in the day. The cool thing is, while Polaris definitely sound like they were transported here from 1995, they manage to update the sound, making it their own, somehow prettier and dronier, the vibe woozy and dreamy as well as propulsive and tightly (un)wound. So good. Several songs in, we were smitten, totally transported, captivated. It seems impossible but it doesn't sound dated at all, even though it's so reminiscent of the nineties, a testament to the bands skills and chops. Absolutely recommended, especially to folks who miss the math and the post in their rock.
The reunion / reissue onslaught seems like it might never end. But when bands like Polvo decide to get back together, why would we ever want it to?
Easily one of our favorite math rock bands from the nineties, whose sound was truly unique, tangled Eastern sounding guitars, slippery riffs, complicated song structures, weary laid back vox, all wound tight into some of the catchiest, most unlikely indie rock songs ever.
We knew Polvo had gotten back together, and then we found out they were recording a brand new record, which could definitely have been a disappointment, but this is most definitely not a disappointment. Not at all. There are awesome reunion records for sure, but this isn't just an awesome *reunion* record, In Prism totally stands up to the rest of their catalog, Today's Active Lifestyles, Shapes, Exploded Drawing, only the pickiest of ears would be able to pick one of the In Prism songs out as not belonging, and only then it would probably be mostly because they didn't know it by heart like the rest of the catalog. Which is sort of the magic of Polvo, their music is so NOT typically catchy or poppy, it's obtuse, angular, off kilter, twisted, tangled, but somehow it IS both catchy and poppy. Those slithery woozy riffs get stuck in your head as hard as any radio hit pop song.
And yeah, In Prism carries on that tradition, another kick ass set of songs, hooky and heavy, warped and mathy, with a bit of a classic rock vibe going on, which we didn't really notice until someone pointed it out to us. But goddamn this stuff is awesome. Opener "Right The Relation" is perfect Polvo, with one of THOSE riffs, vocals and guitar lines getting all tangled up, and some incredible drumming. And then there's "Beggar's Bowl", the most classic Polvo track of all the jams here, with one of the best riffs ever, draped over shimmery high end guitar whir, super rad jagged start stop arrangements, hazy production, layered lush guitars, and a main hook that slays.
Anyone who loved Polvo back in the day, or who still loves Polvo (which we imagine must be everyone right?) will go nuts for In Prism, and folks into mathy, crunchy, indie post rock and have somehow never heard Polvo before, this might be an introduction to your new favorite band.
The last Pontiak record, 2012's Echo Ono, seriously threw us for a loop. Not only was it the group's seventh record (and yet the first one we'd heard), but it was also sonically, at the time at least, totally removed from what we normally expect from Thrill Jockey. Some seriously heavy, riffy, psychedelic, stoner rock, massive fuzzed out guitars, bombastic drumming, wild whooping vocals, but whatever it was, we dug it BIG TIME. So here's the follow up, and from track one, it's more of the glorious same. The first track a short sharp blast of crunchy riffage, spidery psychedelic leads, everything doused in fuzz and echo, a little bit mathy, seriously stonery, it's the sort of stuff that should appeal to underground heavy rock nerds as much as more mainstream folks into Queens Of The Stone Age and the White Stripes. In fact, spun correctly, it's not hard to imagine this being Pontiak's breakout record, and if some band like the Black Keys took them on tour, their big-rock-success fate would be sealed. But for now, they're still ours, and they're still plying their sweaty, bloody knuckled, hard rawking wares in tiny clubs and spitting out darkly psychedelic, eminently headbangable stoner groove, hard psych records like this one, and we seriously can't get enough. Fans of Golden Void, Dead Meadow, Comets On Fire, Bardo Pond, Burning Brides, will flip their lids. Swirling organs underpin some tracks, sounding straight up seventies psych prog ("It's The Greatest"), others like "Ghost", sound almost like Dutch instru-metallers Gore given a serious heavy fuzz makeover, the band locked into cyclical tranced out hypno-rock grooves. Other tracks are laid back, Southern rock slow jams, channeling the Allman Brothers or the Outlaws ("Noble Heads"), and still others are seriously slithery heavy rock dirges, with some of the fuzziest guitars since Kyuss (check out the chugging, churning "Surrounded By Diamonds") and a bunch are just awesomely noisy, psychedelic garage blowouts, swirling clouds of FX, the band kicking out the jams, swaggery, stomping hard rocking, hooky heaviness that just KILLS.
And while they last, which won't be long by the way, the copies we have will come with a bonus cd, featuring 44 minutes of exclusive material called "Heat Leisure", recorded on the band's farm in Virginia with Greg Fox from Guardian Alien and formerly of Liturgy, as well as a dude from Arbouretum and Beach House, and originally featured in a short film. The bonus cd is only available direct from Thrill Jockey, the band, and a tiny handful of stores, one of which is OURS!
Another rad new band to add to the legion of SF psychedelic garage rock outfits who have been kicking our asses. And if you need a hint as to what these guys sound like it, just notice that out of place 'y' in the title of the tape. Sorta like the 'j' in Wooden Shjips yeah? While Poor Sons don't really sound THAT much like WS, they definitely would be right at home on the same bill, the core of their sound a droned out garage psych, hypnotic and buzzy, the drums shuffling and propulsive, the big difference are the vocals, there seem to be two singers, both WAY up in the mix, their vocals doused in effects, echo and distortion, to the point that when both are singing, in cool unlikely harmony, they nearly drown out the band, and when the vocals fade, and the band ramp it up, like on the second half of opener "Cool Buzz", these guys let loose and tear it up, shredding and pounding, the bass driving, the guitars shooting sparks, while the rhythm section holds everything down, that lead break is the sort of part you want to go on for minutes instead of seconds.
The rest of the tape is just as ruling, the band definitely swimming in similar waters as their scenemates in Thee Oh Sees, a sort of distorted blown out ramshackle garage pop, swaggery and snarly, fuzzy and jangly, slipping from churning sweat soaked pound to moody psychedelic shamble and back again, with plenty of falsetto ooooh's and frantic drumming, meshing moody jangle pop with droney psych and making a sound that ends up their very own. Which is pretty tough in a field as crowded as the psychedelic garage rock scene, but these guys are positioned to give The Oh Sees a run for their money. We've yet to see these guys play out, but based just on the tape, we're guessing they kill live too. WAY recommended. Anyone into Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, Bare Wires, Mikal Cronin, Ty Segall and Blasted Canyons can now add Poor Sons to your list of favorite local bands.
Record number two from these mysterious Australian technical death metal weirdoes, whose sound, as we mentioned in our review of their debut, Seepia, is anything but traditional death metal, instead, the grunted vocals and crushing downtuned riffs and all the traditional death metal tropes are completely subverted, tangled and mangled into damaged and demented squalls of chaotic blackened noize, having plenty in common with a band like labelmates Wold, as well as old school DM legends like Gorguts, Suffocation or Immolation�
The sound on Outre is a murky buzz drenched sonic swamp, riffs buzz and blast, but are so doused in effects, so dripping with muddy distortion, they appear to be nothing but droning streaks of downtuned sound, until once in a while when they surface to chug briefly, offering up some brief dynamics before being swallowed up again by the band's relentless blur. The vocals are a subsonic demonic gurgle, barking, howling, growling and mewling, but again, so buried in fuzz and hiss, it just sounds like another layer of black buzz. The melodies are dark and twisted, like some vile black weed, the production is dense and thick, the sound druggy and seasick, warped and warbly, the whole thing sounding a little like some cross breeding experiment gone wrong. Gorguts, Wold, Black Flag, Faxed Head, all melted down and heated up and then poured into your cd player, a similarly noxious downtuned buzz oozes from your speakers, a distillation of Portal's convoluted and cracked take on death metal, a sound black enough to be black metal, noisy enough to be noise, and fucked up enough to be, well to be anything this fucked up sounding.
Strange swaths of synth, atonal detuned guitars, simple industrial plods, monstrous slow motion doom, blasts of speaker shredding ultranoise, billowing black ambience all pepper the proceedings, but at its heart, the sound of Outre is most definitely blasting brutal death metal, but the sort of death metal we always wanna hear, warped and twisted and damaged and filthy and crusty and noisy and buzzing and blackened and doomy and completely fucked.
Packaged in a super deluxe mini gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeve, and including super intense band photos, each band member (Aphotic Mote, The Curator and Horror Illogium) wearing a black hood (or what appears to be a mangled witches hat pulled all the way over the face), all standing in front of an old piano, each photo faded and sepia tone, one wielding a violin, the other clutching what appears to be the horn from a Victrola, the third empty handed, but with a noose hanging from his neck. Weird.
Gorgeous and long overdue reissue of this out of print death metal classic from Australia. But don't let the words death metal throw you. We're not huge fans of straight up death metal either. But this is anything but straight up. In fact this is most definitely one of the weirdest, most damaged death metal records we have ever heard. From the same label that brought us the truly bizarre WOLD record from a few lists back, this is sort of along the same lines as the no-wave death metal of Gorguts' classic Obscura record, Portal takes traditional death metal and douses it in chaotic noise, twisting the arrangements into serpentine blurs, so fast and furious that it almost becomes a buzzy blurry drone, any faster and it would be a full on noise record, like Total or Skullflower playing death metal maybe. But then on top of that, replace all the standard downtuned DM riffs with impossibly manic squiggly Black Flag like riffing, sounding quite a bit like little metal spiders running up and down the neck of the guitars. Riffs and squeals of feedback shooting out like bolts of lightning, the drumming impossibly complex and blasting away beneath the churning ocean of writhing riffs, the vocals just another squirming barely discernible presence amidst the super distorted tangle of metallic riffing and blasting drums. Sometimes all the disparate sounds lock into weird metallic stuttering loops, buzzing and repeating hypnotically. And every once in a while the metal dissipates into gorgeous, gauzy, ambient drones, whirring and shimmering, like old machinery and black and white films, backwards loops, strange pitch shifts and gritty industrial percussion, a dizzying swirl of abstract sound, very reminiscent of Jeck or Basinski, but those respites are brief and are soon swallowed up by further waves of Portal's confounding crush.
Packaged in a gorgeous gatefold mini lp sleeve, with striking glossy filigree on the front cover, a printed inner sleeve and booklet with lyrics / liner notes.
When we first got an earful of Aftertime, the debut solo release from Roly Porter, who was/is one half of the dubstep duo Vex'd, we were pretty surprised. We had been expecting something more along the lines of that duo's lush dark beatscapes and swirling skeletal stutters but instead were treated to something entirely different. The beats almost entirely jettisoned, bar the occasional squall of rhythmic splatter, or super spare muted pulsations. The vibe is much more abstract, and droned out, a sort of dark cosmic mimimal modern classical? But somehow filtered through the grim industrial crunch and crumble of groups like Wolf Eyes. The sounds at times caustic and grimly grinding, but more often then not, woven into a sprawl of sweeping musical melodrama, lush, soaring string like shimmers, underpinned by gristly buzz, and dubstep style bass warbles, but sans the 'step'. The dub vibe too, minimal, but still pervasive, imagine if you can, the lush, hushed, cinematic ambience of Stars Of The Lid crossed with the blackened industrial crush and sculpted noise of past Record Of The Weekers Cloaks, it's almost like the most dense, and bleak, sonically sinister intros to the darkest dubstep jams, expanded into whole tracks.
But these are not just glorified extended intros, Porter crafts roiling landscapes of abstract ambience, a series of sonically harrowing epics, the opener sets the stage, all moaning tones and extended drones, very symphonic, but again, rough around the edges, as if the sounds are slowly decaying, the soundtrack to some otherworldly post apocalyptic wasteland, which leads right into the first track proper, which sounds like an alternate soundtrack to The Conversation as imagined by Organum. Dense sprawls of metallic rumble, laced with buried electronic squiggles, sonar like pings, all wreathed in a layer of gauzy, crackly, washed out sonic grime, and the whole thing wrapped around a weirdly dreamlike melody, drifting hauntingly through this heaving cloud of soft black noise. Eventually, the sound blossoms into something even more intense, blasts of electronics, shards of noise, all somehow fashioned into a dizzying barrage of almost beat-like buzz.
The record gradually introduce more and more melody, Porter's dense electronic blurscapes balanced by lushly melodic stretches of layered string like shimmer, a definitely modern minimalist vibe, but then of course, those bits of melodic tranquility, seem to sink into Porter's crumbling distorted electronic morass, sometimes completely, leaving just roiling expanses of buzz and hiss, glitched out crunch and keening electronic bleat, but just as often, striking some seemingly impossible balance, lacing this heaving sonic hostility with something totally at odds, soaring strings, lush chordal swells, which transforms the sound into something else entirely. Later huge demonic foghorn like low end rumbles moan ominously, adding a weird almost demonic drama to otherwise near tranquil drift, that low end constantly expanding, into black, gristled drones, woven into the aforementioned string sweeps, but often drifting into the background, leaving gorgeous bits of hazy minimal drift, mournful piano, swaddled in soft swirls of lush thrum, even at one point bursting into what might be the most moving moment on the record, with a soaring minor key melody, achingly melancholic, driven by a strange super distorted, crumbling almost metallic sounding 'riff' that mostly adds texture and heft, and reminds us of another longtime aQ fave Tim Hecker, as well as the recent record from Seirom, a more blissed out offshoot of Gnaw Their Tongues.
An utterly gorgeous collection of minimal electronic soundscapes, grim buzz laden modern chamber music, and black drone ambience, a record we've been wanting to make our Record Of The Week for over a year now. So glad we finally can. Absolutely recommended, and of course, most definitely for fans of Ben Frost, Stars Of The Lid, Tim Hecker, Cloaks, etc...
Life Cycle Of A Massive Star is a pretty ambitious title for a record from post-dubstep beat junkie, but if Roly Porter's last record, Aftertime, which we made a Record Of The Week, was any indication, a lot has changed since Porter's time in the dubstep duo Vex'd. Not that we didn't love Vex'd, we definitely did, their brand of dubstep was way out on the fringe, dark and dour, warped and skeletal, washed out and hazy, but none of this is to imply that Porter's post Vex'd output would in anyway be classified as dubstep, BUT some of the soundscapery that made Vex'd so interesting is definitely in full effect, even more so on this new one.
Aftertime was a sprawling experimental epic, more sound design than anything, abstract and ambient, like the score to some mysterious abstract art film, reminding us of another aQ fave, Ben Frost, and like Frost's albums, it was most definitely a record that had us wondering why this guy was not in Hollywood, crafting music for big budget sci-fi blockbusters and twisted art house flicks. So we were actually expecting more of the same, but Life Cycle Of A Massive Star threw us for a loop, the opener "Cloud" does actually sound like a Vex'd jam, a pulsing, pulsating Field like melodic stutter/loop, with some clipped vocal fragments, you can almost imagine the drop coming at any time, a barrage of rib cage rattling bass wobble, and percussive machine gun stutter, but it never does, instead, it locks into a super hypnotic cycle, that has a bit of a kosmische vibe, a sort of synth-age mesmer, but the main pulsating melody is surrounded by dark swirls of keening minor key shimmer, giving the whole thing a super tense, and intense vibe, at least until the last couple minutes, when the loop peels back, revealing an ominous, majestic symphonic score, that could have been lurking below the surface the whole time. And even then, slowly devolves into a creepy stretch of abstract ambience, and post industrial soundscapery.
The rest of the record tends toward the sound design of Aftertime, but with some of the newly revisited Vex'd audio of the past. Deep subsonic rumbles, buzzing Eastern melodies, groaning and creaking machine like clatter, clouds of crumbling static, soaring swirling strings, moaning cellos, operatic vocals, that track, sounds like a Vex'd opera, melancholic strings, deep dramatic vocals, peppered with little bursts of percussive skitter, and a 'beat' of sorts, that's more like the opening looped stutter, again a la the Field, but here, wed to the stately operatic majesty, the result is like some post modern electro-opera symphony, super ambitious, and absolutely epic. After a gorgeous track of hushed ambience, the final track gets seriously cinematic, opening with some ominous drones, some blurred barely there melodies, a little bit of orchestral shimmer, creepy chordal swells, distant clang and clatter, like the sounds of an abandoned space station, lovely and cosmic and subtly harrowing, a fantastic bit of sound design evoking images of being lost in space, trapped millions of light years from home, in a huge metal obelisk, floating in starless black, all complete with a gorgeously intense symphonic score.
It seems a bit strange to spend very much time writing about the new Portishead. Since by now, odds are you're probably sick to death of hearing about it. Sure we all loved Portishead back in the day, they were one of those rare 'electronic' bands whose appeal knew no boundaries, metalheads, moms, indie kids, the sound of Portishead was dark and sexy and mysterious, sinister and ominous, dark and rife with crackle and buzz. Perfect drugged out late night bliss out music, their strange way of creating sound and composing music, recording their own samples on to vinyl and then spinning and scratching those samples to create new textures, made for a totally unique sound.
So what does a band do after taking almost a decade off? Do they return with a record that sounds just like the last one, which is probably what most folks want, or do they return radically altered? With a sound bold and brash, reinventing the sound they themselves invented in the first place.
On first listen, Third definitely sounds like the latter, but with repeated listening, the record slowly and subtly begins to slip toward the former. Which most definitely speaks to the magic of Portishead, and the new record, which at once embraces the old sound, while turning it into something new. More than past outings, Third is dirty, out of tune, atonal, noisy, chaotic, urgent, sure past records had all that crackle and buzz and fuzz, but those elements were carefully placed, and kept well within line. Third sounds much more, well, loose for lack of a better word, like actual musicians, feeling each other out, maybe even improvising. Less like a studio concoction and more like a real live band. And the sound suits them. And makes for a record at once warm and familiar, but also alien, sort of 'rocking' and rife with WTF? moments.
Take the opener, "Silence", which begins with some sort of radio broadcast, which gives way to a killer loping breakbeat, immediately the fastest tempo Portishead have ever explored, strings swoop in, the sound raw and urgent, almost like the chase scene from some spy movie, gorgeous distorted chiming guitar harmonics ring out, until finally the track slows down, and slithers sexily, the vocals a sexy sultry croon, but it's not long before the track kicks back into the haunting and tense, string laden cinematic jam that opened the track.
Then there's "Hunter", which begins like classic Portishead, all smokey and late night sounding, soft muted reverbed guitars, a lush gauzy production, the vocals ethereal and ghostly, but even here, a few seconds in, the song is interrupted by a super distorted crumbling guitar chord that halts things in their tracks, before fading out, and allowing the song to resume. The a few minutes later, a strange noodly synth freakoutsurfaces, again derailing the song's slow motion groove, but It just sounds perfect. It doesn't at all sound like random weirdness for random weirdness' sake. The first time is jarring, the second time, you find yourself waiting for those parts, even humming along as if they were as crucial to the song as the main melody or the vocals, and the thing is, they are.
Near the end lurks the single, "Machine Gun", with its very machine gun like rhythm, herky jerky, stuttery and not at all fluid, reminiscent of Art Of Noise, the vocals sweetly soaring over this jagged rhythmscape below, which only really varies part way through when the original machine gun drums are replaced by BIGGER, more distorted drums, and wrapped in strange moaning horns (or maybe synths), only to shift once again moments later becoming more electronic, the beats awash in strange FX and metallic buzz. It's so unlikely, that it makes perfect sense as the first single. If you can embrace that strange rhythm, that relentless and very un-Portishead like sound, then the rest of the record will make perfect sense, unfolding in front of you, revealing both the warm familiar sounds missed, and the new, bizarre sonic elements never even imagined
All over the record, the band confounds and confuses, gloriously, the brooding whispery "Small" shifts gears partway through and transforms into a fuzzy organ drenched krautjam, "Deep Water" is a straight up old timey folk song, the vocals and strings soaked in fuzzy ambience (and reminding us a bit of vocalist Gibbons' post Portishead project Rustin Man), "We Carry On" is a sort of atonal Stereolab style jam, relentless percussion, thick swaths of synth, very repetitive and hypnotic, "The Rip" is part whispery folky flutter, part synthy electro buzz, every track here offers some sort of surprise, whether it's the song itself, or some little sonic strangeness lurking within, but never is the song or the sound sacrificed, each track is perfect in its own beautifully twisted way, catchy but never obviously so, groovy, but often convoluted and fractured, it's a difficult record to explain for sure, which is perhaps why so much ink has been spilled, and while we may be sick of reading about it, we sure are finding it nearly impossible to imagine ever getting sick of listening to it, which is precisely why it's one of our Records Of The Week.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With some of the most atrocious cover art ever (think: promotional giveaway at a kitchen cleaner convention with too many fonts and an unhealthy obsession with photoshop) and woeful lack of publicity we've seen in a while, the long awaited Posies box manages to shine and surprise. Four cds worth of outtakes and live tracks by most bands would be...um...unneccesary to say the least, but almost all the tracks in this box are great. From unreleased gems, to alternate versions, to different demos (ken's vs. jon's) of some of your favorite songs, it's amazing to trace the development of the Posies super polished super complex pop, as well as kind of shocking to hear how mature and almost 'finished' some of the early demos were. While, i'm sure only Posies completists will buy this, most fans of pop music (indie and otherwise) might discover a new favorite band.
We discovered Colin Potter many years ago, through his heady production and sound design in Nurse With Wound, Ora, and Monos; yet like so many pioneering electronic musicians in the '80s, he released a slew of cassettes overflowing with various sonic experiments and audio excursions. Ancient History collects four of Potter's tapes charting his output from 1979 to 1989, including A Gain, Two Nights, and Recent History Volumes 1 & 2. Back in this time period, Potter was working in a post-kosmische aesthetic with a small arsenal of synths, step sequencers, drum machines, guitars, and effects. He had yet to incorporate the heavy-lidded drone and field recording component which he's been associated with as of late; but those tapes positioned his sound not too far from the Moebius / Schnitzler / Schulze axis of progressive electronics with a healthy dose of Chris Carter's DIY aesthetic tossed in for good measure.
A Gain was released in 1982 through his ICR imprint and is a culmination of work dating back to 1979. The opening number to this album is a bright hypnotic piece for glockenspiel and synthesizer, which builds upon elliptical phrases on those instruments with greater and greater density and kaleidoscopic fervor, snugly situated between Terry Riley's A Rainbow In Curved Air and Cluster's percolating motorik electron-pop. Elsewhere on A Gain, Potter pulls out the guitar to augment the synth blorp and drive with some fine Manuel Gottsching-esque explorations. Two Nights from 1981 is probably the cream of the crop here, not to belittle anything else on the set; but this is a great piece of futuristic electronics that is a must have for anyone keen on John Carpenter and Goblin soundtracks! The two original side long pieces both extend from the cosmic swoosh into dynamic kraut-disco jams with incremental sequences accelerating through drum machine, neon-lit synth cascades, and more heavily phased guitar solos. Potter adds a third lengthy bonus track of similar material to round out this fantastic disc.
The Recent History discs compile various Potter projects from 1986-1989, and find him in more of a darker, somber mood with ritualized ambience drifting about his more earthen sounding sequences and sodden acoustic guitar melodies. While there's much of the same instrumentation, Potter's production also becomes far more complex with more of the shadowy, occluded techniques that he would later master during his tenure in Nurse With Wound. As such, these tracks tend to parallel some of the work of Coil and O Yuki Conjugate, and even predates some of the melodic aspects of the ambient side of IDM that would emerge five or six years later.
This is quite different from the song-based minimal wave album of early Colin Potter material released on Vinyl On Demand; but certainly showcases just how great all of those early tapes of his were and how well they hold up today!
Latest from these SF synth punks, and the opening track finds the band drifting into more straight up garage rock / pop territory, the synths are still present, but don't define the sound as much as add a gorgeous buzz to the proceedings, and give things a bit of a new wave vibe, otherwise, the jam is crunchy and fuzzy and poppy, makes sense that their most recent full length was on John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees' Castle Face label. And maybe not so weirdly, the title track here almost sounds like a more rocking version of a song from Dwyer's recent synth side project Damaged Bug. But when the synths do pop up, like on "The Punisher" and the rest of the single, they dominate, and add a twisted outsidery weirdness to the proceedings, wild and psychedelic and new wave-y and catchy like crazy. "Fight Fire" is a progged out chunk of synth swaddled Oh Sees worship, right down to the vocalist's echo drenched vocal 'whoo's, and finally, "Hangin' Out (At Home)" is a noisy, synthy blast of glorious noise pop / garage punk radness, that's reminding us just why we dig these guys so much!
Who would have thought that an Atari 2600 would be the instrument of choice in the new millennium, but as technology moves forward in leaps and bounds, seems like the most forward thinking sound makers are reaching back, WAY back. Souped up Gameboys, home soldered circuit boards, old school analog synths, even the recent Tristan Perich release which did the 8bit-ers one better (or more precisely seven better) by creating a suite of music assembled from ONE bit sounds, as low as we can go. For now.
But for our generation, there's just something about the sound of 8bit buzz and crunch, the video games of our childhood, the strange alien computer soundtracks, it may push lots of nostalgia buttons, but you didn't have to grow up in the early eighties to dig that sound.
So here we have the first release from Ken Fec, one of the folks responsible for the tripped out bubblegum electro pop dreaminess of Black Moth Super Rainbow, who for his alter ego as Power Pill Fist, seems to have gone back to his childhood home, pulled all the boxes out of the basement, and plugged every video game and antiquated game console from his youth into a 4-track, run it through his fractured pop sensibilities, a bank of damaged effects, and voila. The cool thing is this is not a 'noise' record. There are some seriously noisy moments for sure, but at its core Power Pill Fist definitely has a glowing pulsing energy crystal pop heart. Albeit a pop that is way more freaky crunchy fuzzy trippy and whatthefuck than most. And it's flecked with bits of skittery electronica, downtempo hip hop, and whatever else Fec had up his sleeve or in his head at the time.
Originally this was touted as a record that was almost a straight recording of Fec PLAYING an Atari 2600, which would probably have been amazing, but this is way more musical and composed. There do seem to be some guitars, and some extra percussion, lurking within and beneath all the crunchy fuzzy buzz, but it's that buzz and crunch that defines the record. Give this thing BIGGER beats and you can almost imagine Daft Punk or Justice rocking some of these tracks in a DJ set. The disc opens with a murky bleep filled jam, the warbly melody and scratchy rhythm buried beneath thick layers of hiss and whir, wrapped around a simple way-down-in-the-mix guitar strum. It somehow manages to be lo-fi and lush all at once, some weird krautrocky Nintendo jam. The follow up is all big lurching drums and warbling blown out synths, that sounds like something Beck would jump all over. Some of the other tracks are much noisier, but even then, soft melodies, and haunting song fragments lurk below the surface. Then there's songs like "Chuckanut Drive" that sound like they could have been, should have been, heck, maybe actually were the soundtrack to some super obscure video game, bits of �other games-, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, etc. cannibalized and recontextualized into some new old game, but liberally sprinkled with dizzying synth squiggles and an extra layer of stuttering buzz.
In between all of these blown out, almost-electro fuzz drenched 8bit jams, lurk subtly simple, bedroom recorded interludes, the strangely metallic minor key minimal strum of "Contours Gaining Shape" or the washed out low end droning whir of "R4eactor", and sometimes Fec will offer up a bit of abstract synth / 8bit experimentation or a more arcade-centric soundscapes like the straight video game field recording sound collage of "The Meat Tree" (sounding quite a bit like one of those Arcade Ambience discs), but it's always right back into another awesome grinding buzzy video game electro pop adventure.
Imagine Pan Sonic produced by J Dilla run through a Colecovision. Or think Donkey Kong meets Rastan, chopped up and reassembled by the Flaming Lips. Or Autchre recording a new record using only a busted up old acoustic guitars and the guts of a Sega Genesis, or some crazy psychpop jam session, but with Intellivision consoles instead of guitars. Weird and warped, fuzzy and fun, heavy and crunchy, poppy and druggy and just fucked up and freaky enough to keep our ears buzzing and ringing non stop.
We would be the last ones to deny the fact that we are easily swayed. Or at the very least, easily intrigued. Band names get us every time. A killer band name and we're halfway there. Album title, artwork, it all lures us in, has us already loving bands before we've ever heard them. Sure, once in a while we're disappointed, but for the most part, sometimes you can judge a band by their cover. Needless to say, we were pretty intrigued by a band called Prehistoric Fuckin' Moron(s), the optional plural added an extra bit of mystery to the whole thing as well, even more so when we realized it was indeed a single moron. And as if that weren't enough, all it took was a quick gander at the description of the music and we were well beyond sold: "Take one moron, feed him copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, throw him a bunch of old turntables with some effects and watch him smash the shit out of them. Totally weird, absolutely insane." Almost sounds like we wrote it. And heck, we would have, if they didn't already, cuz this is in fact totally weird and absolutely insane.
Imagine Christian Marclay and Philip Jeck, both dosed with LSD, having some sort of lo-fi DJ battle, the entire thing run through a bank of effects pedals and recorded on a busted 4-track. The weird thing is, this isn't as noisy as you might imagine, at least not all of it. The opener is dark and muddy, a super dubbed out spacey drift, reverb and delay wrapping everything in a thick coat of fuzzy blur, the sounds allowed to drift into oblivion. Very dreamlike and tranquil. But the second track is anything but. A cacophony of industrial clatter, and murky vocal snippets, huge ch-chunks from the needle skipping, but emerging from the cacophony are some strangely dreamy loops as well as some jagged shards of distorted noise. The rest of the tape is schizophrenic in that way, flitting from speaker shredding chaos, to strangely serene loopscapes, often times both simultaneously. It's all very chaotic and fucked up and freaked out and messy, but it's such a glorious mess. Fans of Jeck and Tetreault and Marclay and Strotter Inst and Bastien with an ultra lo-fi bent will be in skipping scratching scraping stuttering turntable heaven.
We had been complaining a lot lately about the dearth of amazing pop music, then out of nowhere, comes not one, but two contenders for pop record of the year. Elsewhere you can read about the lush Beach Boys / Zombies retro pop of the Rollo Treadway, a record that has been in a constant battle with this one right here for top spot. And it's one of those cases that whichever one we're listening to is at that moment, THE ONE. Until, that is, we throw on the other. What's a pop fanatic to do? Thankfully, there's more than enough space for multiple best pop records ever, in our brains, in our ears, in our collections, on our year end lists and in our hearts!
Pretty & Nice are an East Coast trio, who take the classic pop sounds of groups like XTC, Devo, Gang Of Four and folks like Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, supercharge it, then mash it all up with more modern pop masters like the Cardiacs, the New Pornographers, Maximo Park. Angular propulsive, kinetic, rambunctious, wild, energetic, SO SO SO SO catchy, with killer falsetto vocals, jagged guitars, wild frenetic drumming, and hooks galore, and the whole thing shot through with nods to classic pop of the past.
"Tora Tora Tora" has been on constant repeat play, with its weird synthy breakdown, new wave synths, wrapped around a killer power pop hook, with an amazing stuttery start stop bridge, where the vocals slip into a falsetto, before the song shifts gear into some almost metallic crunch. Hot on the heels of that one is "Pixies", that instead of aping the soft/loud/soft dynamic of the song's namesake, is a strange mathy angular new wave groove, and a chorus the Cardiacs would kill for, with soft strummed guitars, dreamy sweet vocal harmonies. And then there's "Peekaboo", that sounds so much like a lost New Pornographers jam it's uncanny, but P&N manage to take what in a Pornographers song might just be a single part, and stretch it out into something dreamlike and ethereal, moving and slightly melancholy, another possible pop song of the year! We're also pretty partial to "Nuts & Bolts", which sounds like it could be the latest dancefloor destroying post new wave jam from some UK band. But Maximo Park, the Killers, Arctic Monkeys, etc. ain't got nothing on these guys, especially here, with a weird electronic skitter woven into the crunch and bounce, the guitars heavy, the vocals swooping wildly from croon to hushed falsetto and back, and again, a hook most bands could base their whole career on.
Needless to say, the rest of the tracks stack up just as well, we literally have been blasting this over and over every day, with no end in site. There's just something so amazing about pop music like this, the sounds and the songs, the hooks and the vibe, the energy, it's pretty rare for all of those things to just fall perfectly into place, but when they do, it's total fucking magic.
Pop record of the year. One of 'em at least!
Hard to believe it's been five years since Pretty & Nice's twisted pop masterpiece Get Young. Not only was that hands down our pop record of that year, it's pretty much remained an all time favorite ever since, in our Pop Pantheon for sure. We were pretty geeked when we found out there was a new record on the way, we had sort of given up, assuming the band had called it quits, and even without hearing it, had prepared for an immediate top spot on our year end list. And these boys did not disappoint. Fans of the last record, and we know there are a lot of you out there in aQ land, you might was well just stop right here and toss this in your virtual cart, and count the days til it shows up in your mailbox, cuz it's everything Get Young was, but somehow even more. The band doing the impossible, and making a record that is somehow EVEN catchier, while being more weird and warped. Holy shit. We literally can barely stand to listen to anything else.
Check out the first sound sample, if that doesn't convince you nothing will, and we'll likely have to revoke whatever pop cred you've accumulated, cuz we have not heard a jam this fun and frenetic, hooky and twistedly catchy in ages (since the last P&N record??), not to mention plenty of WTF production, and an arrangement that borders on the downright prog, again, without losing an ounce of energy, or a teensy bit of its insane catchiness. Strummy and fuzzy one second, stuttery and wildly distorted the next, soaring falsetto vox, plenty of jangle and crunch, and hooks everywhere. And unlike most bands who save the big hook for the chorus, these guys spread it out over the whole song, so not only is it unclear which part IS the chorus, you end up getting stuck in your head, a part of the verse, or a bridge, or a weird little outro, it's almost like they came up with a killer chorus, and just blew it up, splattering the rest of the song with residual catchiness. So good. And it's not just that one song, but it's the one we're currently crushing on HARD.
Back to the beginning, opener, "Stallion & Mare" starts out some old timey baroque pop, before bursting into full on noise pop bliss, slippery, and slithery, groovy, bouncy, falling somewhere between Queen, and Sparks, and maybe Phoenix, with a hint of Ween at their catchiest, quirky and warped, stop start, strange squiggly melodies, it's like math rock transformed into pure pop, and when the bass drops, it's a thick distorted almost-sludge, when strapped to P&N's prismatic pop, it's the most headbangable slab of fuzz pop pretty much EVER.
Follow up "Mummy Jets" is no slouch either, a brilliant blast of new wave pogo-worthy stop start jangle pop, with handclaps, swirling psychedelic guitars, and more falsetto, and again, a twisty turny structure that has no place in a pop song, at least your run of the mill pop song, but these guys manage to make twisty and turny crazy catchy, and you'll find yourself humming these impossibly convoluted pop gems endlessly.
Years back when we reviewed Get Young, we described their sound as sounding like the "classic pop sounds of groups like XTC, Devo, Gang Of Four and folks like Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, supercharged, then mashed all up with more modern pop masters like the Cardiacs, the New Pornographers, Maximo Park. Angular propulsive, kinetic, rambunctious, wild, energetic, SO SO SO SO catchy!" And as far as all that's concerned, nothing has changed, the popisms are classic, with certain melodies and turns of phrase, reminding us of classic power pop groups, that Yellow Pills sound, early new wave, but here, it's all tangled up and twisted into crazy, but impossibly catchy sonic shapes. We also hear the Dickies, the Sweet, Jellyfish, all stripes of killer pop warped, wrangled and recontextualized into something impossibly weird and wonderful. If we were sold before even listening to Golden Rules For Golden People, now after about 50 listens in a matter of days, we are completely and ridiculously obsessed. And we can guarantee, that once this week's list is put to bed, reviews all done, posted and sent, some of us are going to listen to NOTHING ELSE but this record for the foreseeable future. So totally and utterly and wholeheartedly recommended. ANYbody into quirky catchy pop, will be in absolute heaven.
We're also sorta tickled that these guys found their way on to the Equal Vision label, who tend to specialize in emo/metalcore/Warped tour rock, but do historically have a thing for pop and melody, and as such, Pretty & Nice aren't such a bad fit after all, and heck, would love to see a crowd full of Falling In Reverse and Black Veil Brides fans get a load of these guys...
One of our pop records of 2008 was Get Young from Northwestern power poppers Pretty & Nice, who created a kinetic hybrid of classic pop like XTC, Sparks and Elvis Costello and the newer pop strains of the New Pornographers, Maximo Park and the Cardiacs, the resulting sound was at once insanely catchy, super off kilter and twisted as well as weirdly lush and pretty. Any pop kids out there who somehow missed out on P&N's Get Young, should go buy that one RIGHT NOW.
We were digging that record so much, that we practically flipped when we got an email from the band, who it seemed had two other releases, another full length as well as a remix ep. So we grabbed a bunch of each, and for this list we'll tackle the other full length, Pink & Blue.
All of the above mentioned references still apply, but if anything, the sound on Pink & Blue is way more raw and rocking, less programming, less keyboards, and more super rocking garage pop. The bass buzzes and rumbles, the guitars are sharp and jagged, sometimes distorted and crunchy, the vocals slipping from soaring croon to delicate falsetto, it's almost like a punk rock version of Get Young, more lo-fi and in the red, with an almost Nirvana like vibe at times, but still plenty of new wave buzz.
They also sound more Northwestern, like they could be sharing sweaty basement shows with groups like the Thermals or the Catheters, but unlike those bands, they infuse their pop with plenty of bounce and jitter, all caffeinated and wildly frenetic, the sort of band that would definitely turn a grungy backyard beer soaked house show, into a freaked out punk rock new wave dance party.
Fuck yeah.
I can tell you this about Priestess: they're one kick ass live rock n' roll band. I saw 'em on a bill not long ago with heavy metal revivalists The Sword -and- Early Man (both of those bands hotly tipped, and by us too!), and y'know what? Priestess simply DESTROYED both The Sword and Early Man, good as they were. Priestess were just the better live performers, working the crowd and wowing with musicianship and showmanship both. They had rock star swagger, and the skills to back it up -- guitar pyrotechnics, harmony vocals, and some darn catchy real riffy rock n' roll songs. Oh yeah, and a really frickin' good drummer, whose non-sucky *drum solo* definitely put Priestess over the top (in more ways than one) in competition with their tourmates that night.
I'd never heard of 'em before and was pretty darn impressed. Turns out they were from Montreal, and had an album out in Canada, not yet out in the States... well it's here now, this is it. I bought the Canadian version at the show, and didn't even listen to it for a long time 'cause I figured that they couldn't really live up to that live experience. And it's true to some extent, the album doesn't blow away Early Man's album, for instance, the way they did to the band in person. But it's definitely a good, honest-to-God hard rock album that you'd want to blare loudly from your (hypothetical, in all likelihood) Camaro as you put the pedal to the metal.
And having said that, get this: it's non-ironic too, near as we can tell, which also might explain why they had the advantage over those other two bands at that show (and by the way, it wasn't just that show, I saw 'em again opening for Dinosaur Jr. and Comets On Fire, and they were pretty good too, though suffering from the usual opener's lack of energetic crowd response, specifically due to the lack of a crowd at that early hour). Now how can a band like this be non-ironic, you ask? A band so partial to the cowbell, and clearly with visions of stadium-sized showmanship already hard-wired into their songwriting? Maybe 'cause they're Canadian? For whatever reason, their punchy and emotional three-minute pop hard rockin' songs are presented with more authentic feeling (to these ears) than, say, obvious comparison Wolfmother does it.
More about their sound: despite their name (which, unfortunately, conjures the image of an all-female Judas Priest cover band, doesn't it?) they're far from being an '80s retro metal band. More bluesy '70s, and less metal than that. The stoner/grunge thing is closer to the mark. Yeah, a bit White Stripesy at times like Wolfmother, also all AC/DC and QOTSA at others. Can't wait to see 'em again! In the meantime, we'll be spinning this...
For the longest time, when people into heavy music asked us who the best band in SF was, we would generally say Burmese (of course), maybe Slough Feg, sometimes the Fucking Champs, if they said EVER, then it would be Weakling hands down (or, well, we could argue for hours). But over the last few years, more and more amazing heavy bands have been giving those other bands a run for best-heavy-band-in-the-city money, none moreso than boy-girl-boy doom-crush psych-sludge trio Prizehog, who over the course of the last couple years have become the sort of band that should be HUGE. Every Melvins Nerd and Harvey Milk obsessive out there, should WORSHIP these guys (and gal). It's definitely only a matter of time, their records kill, but live they DESTROY, their set at our South By Southwest showcase was a stunner, and they sort of stole the show, and it's not hard to see why, especially here, on Prizehog record number two (number three if you count their long out of print debut cd-r), which finds the band further honing their sound, still present are of course massive skull caving drum pound, churning downtuned guitar chug, percolating sci-fi synths, the Melvins / Harvey Milk still huge, but Prizehog seem to want to be both a psychedelic space sludge band, and some sort of sludge pop band, and it's that split personality, that makes this shit rule, every song a push and pull between all out freakout, and hook heavy crunch, and somehow, instead of opting for one or the other, they simply figure out a way to do both at once, weaving impossibly catchy melodies, hooks galore into blackened doom sludge dirges, and then stretching that shit out into droned out psychedelic heaviness. The vocals a deep dramatic croon, the keyboard unleashing all manner of textures and psychedelic sounds, everything tangled up with the group's progged out downtuned crush.
All three songs here are great, but the 11 minute closer might be THEE jam here, a brooding slow build, all super textured and psychedelic, with some haunting harmony vocals, and twisted FX over a churning chug, and some doomic pound, the group allowing for lots of space, letting notes ring out, and gradually decay before the next hit, stretching it way out, before exploding into some serious mathed out noise rock pummel, only to then blossom into some weirdly progged out epic majestic bombast, before devolving into a closing coda of dirgey drum creep and blown out guitar moan, before a final blast of mathy crunch.
Released on the legendary Gravity Records label, which makes Prizehog labelmates with groups like Mohinder, Heroin, Clikatat Ikatowi, Angel Hair, The Locust, Man Is The Bastard, Universal Order Of Armageddon, Unwound and more! Fuck Yeah!
We were heartbroken when our pals, the local weirdo boy-girl-boy doom crush psych sludge trio Prizehog, decided to leave San Francisco, but we understood - hell, SF is a harsh place to live these days if you're not rich, and ultimately, we weren't surprised to see Prizehog settling in Portland, a city arguably much more hospitable to struggling musicians and artists, but listening to the sonic results of this move, you'd think they were transported to some alien planet, transmitting this new record via some sort of futuristic technology. Cuz holy fuck, if this band was one of our favorites already, they somehow still managed to up the musical ante, taking everything we loved about them before, and making it, well, more. More heavy, more noisy, more psychedelic, more warped, more twisted, more confusional, more proggy, more what-the-fuck, and really just more ridiculously, mindblowingly next level doom-sludge genius. We may be prone to hyperbole, but it still feels like we might be understating just how goddamn good Re-Unvent The Whool really is.
Imagine a warped doom-prog, like some alternate universe metal Magma, processed vocodered vox, tangled up in churning spaced out riffage, underpinned by droning rumbles, and laced with twisted fragmented melodies, launching occasionally into full on sludge-pop creep, like some killer Torche jam spinning in slow motion, a gloriously glacial single digit rpm onslaught, that definitely makes the usual the Harvey Milk comparisons still pretty apt, but imagine HM if they were somehow slower, druggier, proggier and more totally and confusionally WTF. Songs explode some furious grinding metal, squalls of chugging riffage, barraged by machine gun drumming, all wrapped around the bellowed alien vox. But this is doom or sludge, or some twisted avant version, so songs inevitably slow down to a tarpit crawl, swirls of sparkling sci-fi FX surround the proceedings like glittery clouds of malevolent sonic fairy dust. And that's just one song in! And it only gets more gloriously fucked up and next level from there. It's hard to describe what's even going on, cuz some of the music here is literally so unlike anything else out there. These hairy weirdos are channeling some twisted alternate universe sonic garble, and transmuting it into fucking blown out, twisted genius ultra doom, noise pop, prog-sludge nirvana.
The record seems to blackly blossom in stop motion, flitting from near stasis, to frenzied crush and back again, tribal drumming avalanches over thick, coruscating chords, synths spitting out symphonies of klaxons and alarms, the backdrop for the unfurling of an impossibly downtuned, droned out slab of multiple o'd doooooooooom dreaminess, that manages the impossible feat of being crushingly, punishingly heavy, but also, kinda pretty too. Some seriously lovely 'oooooohs' will surface in the midst of a wild chaotic squall of churning blacktar throb, or a cascade of harmonics will rain down like shooting stars over a field of grinding, corrosive crunch, it's goddamn musical alchemy, the sort of musical magic almost no bands are capable of. And then out of fucking nowhere, Prizehog will get all twangy, offering up some sort of country doom, that sounds like it should be ridiculous, and it sort of is, but it's also just about the goddamn greatest thing you'll ever hear, like Earth, Barn Owl, Morricone, Scenic, all melted down, and spit out as a creepy massively metallic Wall Of Voodoo sort of campfire crush, sounds bizarre, and it totally is, but it's a bizarre brilliance that once again, should convince pretty much any doom lover with a penchant for sonic weirdness, that these three are the sludge saviors we've been waiting for, written about in some forbidden text, a fragment from the lost metallic scriptures, and Re-Unvent The Whool, their second coming, signalling some musical rapture, where we're all engulfed in fields of musical flames, but fuck, if this is what the end sounds like, and we can only hope it is, then we say bring it on, and what a way to go.
It's hard to know what else to say, other than repeat what we've always said, Prizehog should be adored, they should be worshipped the way Harvey Milk and Boris and the Melvins are, cuz maybe at one point, Prizehog were simply kids aping their heroes, aspiring to the sludge-y genius and twisted outsider metal of those other groups, but as hard as it may be for some folks to believe, Prizehog, might have outheavied, and outweirded, and outgeniused those masters, and become masters themselves, masters of fucking alien prog-doom, long haired, psych sludge, dirge-drone, damaged art pop. Fuck yeah.
Super striking, full color, eye popping, Wildildlife-worthy cover art, swank spot varnish printed jackets, and includes a download too...
Folks outside of San Francisco are probably unaware of the bitchin' underground rock scene going on here, and we're not talking about the experimental / drone / cd-r scene, that scene is happening too but those folks get way more press. We're talking about the bands, the rock bands, that play basements, play at Thrillhouse Records, a killer performance space / shop in the Mission, who release cd-r's too, but whose sound is more metal and sludge and rock than drone and drift and shimmer.
Wildildlife when they were here were part of that scene. So are Ovens, THE best pop band in the city (with a record coming out on tUMULt any day now), then there's Robocop III, who we've yet to hear, but like based entirely on their name. And then there's Prizehog, who have probably played with all those bands, but whose sound is all their own.
Their cd-r is 5 long songs, each one a slow building, brooding chunk of slow motion heaviness. It's metallic, but not really metal, heavy and sludgey and dark, but with weird bits of epicness and majesty mixed in. There's definitely a Harvey Milk thing going on, and we'd be WAY surprised if fans of that band didn't dig these guys as well. Not so say they're aping HM, more like they're sort of orbiting the same sonic black hole.
Plus Prizehog have a lot more spaciness going on, lots of swirl and shimmer, long drawn out stretches of dark drift, rumbling low end and ominous dronescapes, often sprawling into moody abstract slowcore drifts, peppered with synths, skeletal rhythms and blooping bleeping effects, that slowcore sometimes sounding almost like a blackened doom metal, before returning to their glacial downtuned pound, impossibly slow crawls through near static metal riffage, and squalls of drum splatter, and a howled guttural voice that sounds like it's gargling glass and spitting blood, the whole band a lumbering beast, lurching from chord to chord, note to note, occasionally pausing to rest beneath the glimmering starlight, before rising again to continue on its path of utter destruction.
Heavy, fucked up, freaked out, distorted and brutal, space-y and sometimes sorta pretty, bet these guys destroy live, but for now this chunk of filthy heaviness and sludgey crush will do just fine.
TWO brand new releases from this Santa Cruz psychedelic black metal one man band, one a haunting slab of oceanic dark ambience, the other a mesmerizing collection of drone drenched buzzing blackness.
Over the course of 10+ full lengths, Night, the man who is PV, has explored both sides of his sonic personality, the buzz of raw depressive melancholic black metal, and the drifting shimmer of ambient and dronemusic, often blending the two, into hazy blurs of blackened soundscapes and moody buzz and blast.
On Convoy (Pt.2) (we're pretty sure there wasn't a part one), Night offers up one of the more metal and aggressive releases we've heard from PV, there are still definitely moments of drift and shimmer, but this is definitely black metal, right off the bat, first few seconds, a frenzied blur of buzzing guitars and pounding programmed beats, with some insane inhuman, so processed they just sound like creepy machine like scrapes and rasps, the music looped and mesmerizing, the drums relentless and motorik, a mournful melody lurking within, the recording strange, wreathed in effects, reminding us quite a bit of the various EEE un-black metal projects, where the textures and timbres and the production are as much a part of the sound as the music itself, the black and the buzz fade away, leaving the drums to pound on, gradually changing shape until they too disappear, leaving just a keening high end drone, draped over deep rumbling low end tones, and haunting ghostly voices, before the blackness erupts once again, and that hissing metallic snake voice returns, and we're plunged back into more of that harrowing blackness.
And so it goes over the course of Convoy, doomy and dirgey and black and depressive and warm and fuzzy and washed out, the vocals that alien metallic rasp, the melodies languorous the drums solid and unswerving, very circular and meditative and entrancing, the whole record droney and dark. Once we get further into the record, the sound definitely sprawls and expands, from deep shimmery drifts of reverbed clean guitar and lilting moodiness, two mechanized strum and almost jazzy drumming, to swirling woozy shoegazey metallic whir, to dense soaring waves of epic blackness, not necessarily metal, but strangely heavy and dramatic, to near static almost looped sounding blackened grooves, to thick caustic almost abrasive black soundscapes, riddled with ominous thrum, brittle crackle, and more of that reverby moonlit guitar, but those bits all set within a landscape of harsh howling blackness, roaring smeared minor key buzz, roiling rhythmic crush, and swoonsome sorrowful melodies.
On a European tour about ten years ago, a curious 7" was unearthed in a used record store. It had an amazing black and white cover, a painting of Golgotha, with the cross lost in a cloudy haze and surrounded by watercolored trees. The band was called Professor, their logo in splattery hand drawn Olde English. And the record was called The Academizer ep. One of the tracks was "Into The Auditorium". Suddenly thoughts of an evil black metal band made up entirely of doctoral scholars leapt to mind. Sort of the whole Carcass medical student thing, but with academia. This was just getting better and better. The record sat unplayed until returning to the States, where it finally made it onto the turntable. And holy shit! It was as good as the cover suggested it could be. A sloppy noisy blackened slab of Carcass worship. Blast beats and grinding guitars, howled gutteral vocals, and crushing heaviness. Over the course of the next decade, several more copies were discovered and hoarded like the treasure they were. Until a random series of circumstances led to tUMULt discovering the man behind Professor and the quest to make that amazing, out of print 7" available to a wider, turntable-less audience.
What happened, was that an unsolicited package was sent to tUMULt HQ, with some new music for the tUMULt overlord to check out, but the sender also included a cdr of his old bands. A cursory listen was blasted to an immediate halt, when the hauntingly familiar strains of Professor came screeching from the speakers. Oh shit. Is it possible? Could it be? And what do you know? The sender was none other than a real live living member of Professor. After much convincing and cajoling, he agreed to let tUMULt re-release the Academizer ep. And even now, a decade later, this shit is so good. Fierce and furious, stumbling and blasting drunkenly like a grinding blackened metallic juggernaut. Four tracks of crushing grind, pummelling crush and grinding pummel. Heavy and noisy and fucking great! Rumour was, that Professor was maybe a joke. But if that's true, this is some sick joke. Fans of Carcass, Drop Dead, grindcore, black metal, and all things heavy owe it to themselves to enter the auditorium, and bow before the Professor!! In the form of a 3" cd packaged in a mini jewel case.
A while back we made the record World, by Aussie noise rock / shoegaze outfit The Bunyip Moon, our Record Of the Week, a gloriously blown out, chaotic sonic gem, that even now we have trouble keeping in stock. So were were psyched to discover that one of the guys from The Bunyip Moon had a new solo record, a tape in fact, under the name Pronoun, and like World, it's weird and wonderful.
But UN-like World, Faux is not all bombastic noisiness and buried blown out melodies, instead, it's a darkly moody, lush, almost cinematic creep, right from the get-go, we're sucked into some mysterious soundworld, that to our eras exists right between the epic with house of Salem, and the soundtracky synth bombast of M83. So if that sounds good to you (and why the heck wouldn't it?!), then there's much to dig here.
The opener unfurls as a brooding plod, all primitive drum machine, over processed strum and thrum, before majestic synths swoop in, faux strings, the whole thing epic and stirring, but with just the right amount of distortion and noise, gristly, and staticky, and distorted and psychedelic, but even at it's most explosive, it's still lilting and lovely, it's a tough one to describe for sure, but it's pretty stirring stuff.
The whole record expands from that sound, with some of the tracks a bit more garbled and chaotic, darkly noisy and murky, sounding a bit like a way more abrasive Caretaker (which is most definitely a good thing), while others, slip into a more kosmische haze, all swirling chordal thrum and deep, lustrous sonic swells, and on at least one track, the sound slips into some strange, tripped out avant shoegaze new wave, although the best moments of course are when those disparate sides collide, which they do often, resulting in blissful noisiness, and noisy dreaminess in equal measure, culminating in the strangely gristly garble of crunched static and crumbling decaying distortion of the closer, which ditches pretty much all poppiness in favor of a strange sprawling field of grinding textures, and the sporadic sputter of alien transmissions from the ether.
Fantastic, and so so so recommended. The packaging is pretty ace too, totally over the top. The tape housed in a sleeve, housed in a second embossed outer sleeve, then housed in yet ANOTHER sleeve, hand silkscreened and ink splattered, a weighty arts/sound object, LIMITED TO 50 COPIES!!! Each one hand numbered. Includes a download code too...
NOW ON LP TOO!
The latest collection (after two previous) chronicling the work of Australian outsider artist / primitive folk songsmith Pip Proud, comes courtesy of Japanese label EM, who gather up some of his best tracks from the late sixties and early seventies, selected by Proud's biographer David Nichols, who also provides the booklet's extensive liner notes. Fans of early Flying Nun, Xpressway and Homestead Records, will be immediately smitten. Proud, whose primitive folksmithery falls somewhere between the Tall Dwarfs, the Frogs and Sebadoh, was like a proto Syd Barrett, with a voice that's a dead ringer for Jimmy Flemion of the Frogs (R.I.P.), and his music for all its amateur primitivism, was geniusly crafted, perfect little introspective folk pop gems, the sound, the lyrics, the guitar playing, even the recordings themselves... We're also reminded of Bill Direen, the sung/spoken vocals, the raw guitar style, the lo-fi recordings, almost every track here impossibly catchy, with the oddest bits getting stuck in your head like crazy. Some tracks are haunting and otherworldly, with truly unique and bizarre guitar parts (or are those synths), the guitar playing sometimes folk, but other times percussive and more rhythmic, and still other times, weirdly psychedelic. There's one track with a full band, that is killer, all Velvets-y murky, tense kraut-psych garage pop, with truly twisted vox, and some weirdly atonal melodies, but the rest of the record is made up entirely of home recorded bedroom jams, with only the most minimal and primitively achieved overdubs, sometimes it's strange gamelan like percussion, sometimes noisy fuzz distortion, sometimes weird tangles of multiple guitar lines, all deftly woven into some of the most endearing, and mysteriously mesmerizing music you might never have heard.
There are a handful of bonus tracks, as well as a huge booklet, with liner notes, rare photos and lyrics.
As most of you well know by now, we're not that into straight up NOISE music. Thus we never really got into Prurient, until the Black Vase record. There was just something about that disc that spun our heads around, and had us yearning for more noise. Other than a few splits we haven't heard too much from Prurient (aka Dominick Fernow, who runs Hospital Productions as well as playing in Ash Pool and the Vegas Martyrs) since then, but this here brand new 7" ep just showed up and it's seriously damaged and brilliant, but maybe not in the way you might think.
The A side begins just how you'd expect, a caustic vitriolic wall of sound, mostly vocals, which immediately sounds like just another dense slab of speaker shredding ultranoise, that is until the vocals drop out, and reveal what is lurking underneath. The vocals are so in the red and blown out that they swallow everything within earshot, so when they pull back, they reveal a crumbling soundscape of smeared melodies and blurred ambience, still noisy for sure, but also haunting and abstract, with fucked samples a bits of dialogue, and the occasional brief blast of white noise fury.
The flipside is even weirder. Some sort of distorted synthpop, like Depeche Mode through a set of blown speakers, then some super creepy processed vocals come in, and the track devolves into another hazy and distorted stretch of obscured beauty, with a fucked up lopped low end outro. Maybe the 'nicest' thing we've heard from Prurient. Probably not noisy enough for the noise crowd, but definitely weird enough that it might just appeal to the Hecker / Fennesz blurred sound crowd, if they can handle a bit of brutality with their beauty...
You might think that the results of a collaboration between Prurient and Kevin Drumm would be nothing but a seriously noisy and speaker destroying affair, but then you'd be underestimating these guys, and the extent to which they've pushed the noise music envelope.
The last few Prurient records have been less about caustic abrasion and more about dark soundscaping, more about drones and darkness less about shrieks and blinding fury, and well, Drumm has always been capable of a soft touch, and often tempers his brutality with gorgeous melodicism.
With that said, both of these guys are perfectly capable of whipping up serious squalls of crumbling chaos, and do so here and there on All Are Guests, but the key in noise music, at least for us, is dynamics, and these bursts and blasts of sonic fury that pepper the landscape are perfectly balanced by long stretches of subtle drones, field recordings, whirring atmospheric buzzscapes and creepy vocals.
The opening track sets the stage and is a strange one, a dark, lugubrious crawl, with slowed down ominous vocals, reminds us quite a bit of AQ faves Burial in fact! But with a bit more Whitehouse mixed in. A lurching low end slither underpinning haunting disembodied vocals, you can't help but expect some stuttery dubstep beat to drop, although it never does of course.
"On This Slab" is more a proper noise track, with howled distorted vocals, crunchy blown out electronics and glitched out malfunctioning buzz, but all chopped up and arranged into a strangely melodic noisescape, laced with little bits of melody, and dense grinding chunks of almost-melodic buzz, not to mention some spare tranquil stretches. The there's "There Died Venus", a washed out super distorted slab of crumbling blissdrone, gorgeous melodies buried beneath a roiling sea of ultra blown out crunch and buzz, strange rhythms surfacing amidst the constantly shifting layers of whirring sound, in the background a near constant upper register shimmer, wouldn't be all that out of place on a Tim Hecker disc. "Though The Apple Is Rotten" sounds almost like a straight field recording, the sounds of children playing, footsteps, wind random clatter, but in the background there's a lot of other sonic stuff going on, hard to tell if it's just tape hiss, or if the band has woven a delicate backdrop, either way, it's quite cool.
"In Long Rows" is a 10+ minute chunk of minimal dark ambience, think Lustmord, Coleclough, Chalk, but with a bit more grit, a bit more hiss, maybe slightly more lo-fi, and with a brief resurgence of those murky pitchshifted vocals from the first track.
Finally, the last track finishes things off with, well, not a bang, but a burst of grinding whirring, mechanical chaos, like several Wolf Eyes jamming at once, a rumbling rusty metal beast, busted gears and blown speakers, a giant unholy machine designed to do nothing but make this glorious noise, a deep resonant distorted voice, speaking beneath the din, buried below ground in some ancient hellish oratory, the sound seeping up through black cracks in the ancient soil. And even then, as the duo expel a cloud of noxious drone and buzz, they still manage to make it sound almost dreamlike and dangerously close to pretty.
You gotta love Psychedelic Horseshit. First off, the name. And of all the new breed of 'shitgaze' bands, the super lo-fi noisy pop outfits that seem to be popping up with remarkable regularity, PH are the only ones who continually manage to sound more fucked up and lo-fi while managing to at the same time sound tripped out and impossibly lush. Some jangly out of tune guitar will wrap itself around some deadpan vocals, some stumbling almost tribal drumming, lots of tape hiss, even some dropouts that sound like maybe they recorded on an old cassette tape they found in the back seat of the tour van, until suddenly they'll bust out with a blown out glimmering wall of progged out arena keyboard bliss, all wozzy and warbly but soaring and totally retardedly majestic. And then they slip right back to their Pavementy lo-fi lurch and stumble, before whipping out another insanely catchy hook, or burst of musical nirvana.
As much as we love the SOUND, and lots of the bands who now practice it, Psychedelic Horseshit still manage to sparkle like a dirty diamond in a sea of even dirtier diamonds. According to the sleeve, these are B sides from the forthcoming full length, and hell, if these are the album rejects, we can't wait to hear the jams that made the cut! WAY recommended.
Not sure how we managed to miss these guys up until now. They're from right here in SF, and this is their third full length (we've heard exactly ONE of their 7"s), they totally kill, and they have maybe the fiercest female vocalist we've ever heard. All this talk about Perfect Pussy, fuck that, Meghan from Punch might have the greatest punk rock voice we've heard in forever, a serious paint peeling caterwaul, and the band back her up with a potent mix of classic hardcore, old school punk rock, furious grind and some seriously metallic heft. A relentless chaotic frenzy that occasionally slips into straight forward punk rock pound, but just as often explodes into grinding metallic fury that is seriously some of the fiercest and most furious shit EVER. The production by Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Joyce Manor, Whirr, etc.) only makes it that much meaner and HUGE sounding. It's 15 songs in about 18 minutes, the longest is 2:33, the shortest (the title track) a mere :05, but every track, even that brief sonic blip totally destroys, and the crazy thing, is it's catchy as fuck, with super melodic basslines, some seriously killer riffs, and some goddamn great songs. And when they slow it down, it's SO heavy, which is only further magnified when they explode into a part as fast and furious as the previous part was slow. Holy shit. We're gonna make it a point to track down all the other Punch records, and not miss a single show, cuz as good as these songs sound on record, we can only imagine how brutal and badass this stuff sounds live.
The demise of legendary doomlords Reverend Bizarre had two strange but positive after effects, first, there seemed to be a flood of posthumous RB releases, more we think than when they were actually a band, a from-beyond-the-grave release schedule to rival Biggie or Tupac, as is further demonstrated by yet another new Reverend Bizarre release reviewed elsewhere on this week's list! The second outcome was the more inevitable one, a whole slew of new projects from RB mainman S.A.Hynninen (aka Albert Witchfinder), whose voracious need to rock would obviously need a new outlet, and thus we have The Puritan and Opium Warlords. Both born of Hynninen's newfound obsession with ultra doom, with sludge, especially of the Japanese variety, Boris, Corrupted, Solar Anus, Hynninen set forth on a mission to create some serious Japanese style ultra doom sludge. We'll have the Opium Warlords disc for next list, but for now, we shall celebrate The Puritan, and Lithium Gates, which compiles two previously released, now out of print vinyl lps, one of which we never had, the other which we had in extremely limited numbers.
We've become convinced, that Hynninen must be somehow related to Circle's Jussi Lehtisalo. They're both Finnish, they both front or fronted kick ass heavy rock bands, and both have totally twisted senses of humor, which finds its way, however subtly (or not) into their music. So while the Puritan was originally inspired by Japanese doom and sludge, by the time it worked its way through Hynninen's cracked Finnish filter, it had been transformed into something else entirely. Something heavy and brutal, but warped and far out and brilliant.
This is no ordinary doom. And is far removed from the doom of Reverend Bizarre. Although on first listen, maybe not so far removed after all, beginning with the first Puritan lp, The Untitled, the sound is ultra heavy, downtuned, spaced out, melodic, with a distinctly classic strain of classic doom running through it, the opening intro could indeed be the opening salvo from some doom classic, and the follow up too does not sound that far our, awesomely epic and troo vocals over a lumbering slow motion dirge, but then the record shifts gears, and "The Sulphur - Coloured Clouds Are Hurrying Through the Lithium Gates" explodes like some nineties noise rock juggernaut, loping bass, crumbling guitars, jagged riffing, only to gradually slow to a nearly complete halt, before slipping back into slow motion ultra doom dirgery. "The Sepulchral God Holding a Speech for the Moribund" sounds almost like some extra heavy slowcore, with some dramatically crooned Slough Feg like vox, before a strangely haunting outro, with clean guitars, whirling ambience, mysterious sampled voices, including a classic Charles Manson rant, all hovering beneath thick washed out guitars and lilting sweetly sorrowful melodies. Then it begins to get even weirder.
The second half of Lithium Gates contains the entirety of The Black Law, the second Puritan lp, which begins with some old timey organ, wheezy and lo-fi, some lost in time parlor music, lilting and melancholy, until everything is flattened by a massive wall of downtuned guitars, exploding into a plodding doomic dirge, which is not really funereal, or even all that slow, a plodding lurching doom that reminds us of Midwestern pigfuckers Killdozer more than anything, which as far as we're concerned is good news for sure. The chuggy midtempo crunch pounds and churns while the vocals howl and bellow, there's a distinctly AmRep / Touch And Go vibe to the doom on display, the main riff locked into a loop that seems to go on and on and on, giving the proceedings a sort of Gore vibe as well. The riff eventually gives up the ghost leaving a tranquil, almost ambient fade out, all soft streaks of feedback, delicate melodies, distant slabs of slow moving sludge, all smeared into a weirdly dreamy drift.
From there on out, the record continues to devolve gloriously with some bizarre gnarled super distorted guitar weirdness, completely panned so it careens from speaker to speaker, ear to ear, until the riff finally kicks in, a big ol' filthy doomy dirgey riff, the drums and guitar locked tight, while in the background, the WHOLE time, the moans and groans of a lady seemingly in the throes of violent passion(!), the whole track endlessly looped and cyclical, the only variation being the woman's voice, here the Gore vibe is undeniable, a killer riff, just pounding away, over and over, very hypnotic and strangely minimal, but that's only the first track. The second revolves around a muted chug, spread out over a layer of seemingly constant buzz, with more deep crooned dramatic vocals, the production reverby and very new wave sounding, a little like Joy Division or the Cure but way heavier and dripping with doooooom, the wind-down at the end laced with bursts of super epic and melodic drama, turning the outro into some sort of doomic Godspeed.
Needless to say, fucking awesome! And essential listening for any one into sounds slow and low, doomy and heavy, fucked up and far out.
The return of bedroom psych rockers Purling Hiss, who we've long been sorta obsessed with, in fact we made PH's Public Service Announcement lp our Record Of the Week back in 2010. And really it's not so much a return, since this is not a new record, but is in fact a vinyl reissue of a super limited cd-r, released in an edition of 50 copies way back in 2006 (and reissued on tape in 2011 with some extra tracks). The interesting thing is that for some reason, we thought the other Purling Hiss records, including our favorite, Public Service Announcement, were more recent, but Public Service Announcement was recorded just a year after this one, so if you dug that record or any of the Purling Hiss records, as much as us, then you're gonna want this one too.
It's the same mix of 4-track home brewed loner psych folk, and fuzzed out psychedelic power pop, with most of the tracks landing somewhere right in between. "She Don't Mind" is all hushed strummy loner pop, but then the sound blossoms into the hard rocking psych fuzz of "Icelator", which barring the low fidelity, sounds like it could be some lost seventies power pop lost classic, replete with groovy leads, aching vocals, and a killer main hook and bad ass chorus. From there on out, the sound shifts constantly, from the blown out noise drenched lilting dirge pop of "Digh High" to the strummy, lo-fi Yellow Pills fuzz and crunch of "Sifting Through My Hands". And so it goes, the B side is chockablock with buzz and jangle, warped noisiness, soaring melodies, lilting psych folk ballads, groovy garage rock, and some seriously and impossibly classic sounding songsmithery.
Sadly, no download code, and thus, no sound samples. But trust us, if you dig any/all of the other Purling Hiss records, you're gonna LOVE this one too!
WOW, did this record pretty much immediately blow us away! We had never actually heard these guys (this guy actually, he also plays in Birds Of Maya), but had always thought Purling Hiss was a pretty awesome name, so not expecting too much, we threw this on and then BAM, we were sold, smitten, obsessed even, finding ourselves playing this to death, getting these songs stuck in our heads, and not just the songs proper, but even the weird little recording anomalies and random bits of musical glitchery. For a record that sounds, and is maybe meant to sound, so lo-fi and tossed off and just sort of half assed, a druggy murky muddy home brewed pop record, it's impossibly catchy and well crafted and AMAZING.
A heady mix of classic pop songsmithery, blown out psychedelic drift, abstract tape experiment fuckery and fragmented bedroom 4 track alchemy, Public Service Announcement plays at times like some classic rock record that's been dubbed a million times and then played back in your crappy car stereo, the one with only one speaker and no bass knob, and at other times like some inspired Guided By Voices mini pop epic, and occasionally like some super baked, basement psych jam blowout, wasted and lazy and drifty and divine.
The record opens with "Run From The City", which within 5 seconds establishes itself as some impossible instant classic, with a totally killer guitar lick that IS the song's hook, the track sounding like some lost punky pop gem from the seventies or eighties that somehow got left off of every compilation since, the verses crunchy and muddy and melodic, those guitar leads just sealing the deal. In fact, we could barely get to the rest of the record cuz we just wanted to keep playing the first track.
"Porch Dude/Slight Return" offers up our first glimpse of Purling Hiss as wasted and stoned psych jam drifters, shuffling drums, swirling flanged guitars, everything hazy and wreathed in pot smoke, little spidery leads surfacing here and there, bit otherwise a blurred and bleary drift, the slight return of the title being the revisited melody from the album opener.
And then there's "Don't Even Try It", the other song we can't seem to keep from just playing on repeat, with it's folky guitar and vocal intro, the tape speed constantly shifting, the sound warped and warbly, like someone with their finger on the record as it spins, and then the chorus comes in, with it's "woo ooo ooo" refrain, and the song suddenly reveals itself as some pretty perfect pop. Lo-fi yet lush, vocal harmonies, guitar melodies, a hook to die for, all hazy and sun dappled and catchy as all get out.
After a brief (but AWESOME) minute long Van Halen loop, that manages to be totally twisted yet totally catchy, the record slips right back into fuzzy lo-fi pop, more oooh's and aaah's, summery steel string strum, dreamy harmonies, and sweet pop hooks, before unfurling some serious psychedelia in the form of "Gypsy", a sprawling droned out chunk of druggy spaciness, and at that point if you're not already under the record's spell, you bliss out and drift off and let the record carry you wherever it will, whether it be to "Zor" a thick buzzing, swirling, yet still dreamily melodic bit of dark drone, or to "Beautiful Earth Creature" which is another perfect chunk of jangly pop, replete with those warped speed fluctuations that end up becoming irrevocably part of the song, or to the heady spacepsychjam freakout of "Malice In Wonderland" or to the twisted Ariel Pink-ish warbly fuzzy FM radio pop of album close "1976".
Warped and wonderful and definitely one of our new favorite records.
Latest batch of lo-fi '60s style retro-psych paisley-jangle garage-fuzz from these Philly phreaks, although this time around, the sound is actually a lot less lo-fi, and while we thought up until now, Purling Hiss was a one man band, this time around, they sound more like a proper group (which according to the liner notes they indeed now are). In fact, where past records often sounded like super stoned bedroom 4-track jams, or wasted zoner-psych via old school power pop, the new record almost sounds more like a weird mix of early Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, some mutant version of the British Invasion via the early American indie rock underground. But there's still plenty of seventies style Yellow Pills-y power popisms, loads of fuzz and buzz, jangle and crunch, hooks galore, but the sprawling jammage of past records is definitely dialed back a bunch, minus the occasional slow psych smolder or wild shreddy blowout, shifting into something more like some druggy strain of downer power pop, or maybe some outsider indie-psych gem that could have come out on Homestead back in the day, although these guys occasionally let loose and do some hard rocking, peppering their fuzzy jangle and psych garage thrum with bursts of swaggery, garage pop crunch.
Some will miss the murk, we do a little, but with all that noisiness, all that hiss and hum, stripped away, these guys reveal themselves as an indie rock force to be reckoned with, maybe a group out of time, who could be beaming these sonic transmissions from some alternate universe, where it's always 1992, or heck, maybe even 1978, and all the bands come from the Midwest, armed with 4-track recorders, big amps, beat up old vans, long hair, lots of weed and a clutch of killer jams, and until someone can actually find that glorious place, Weirdon might just be about as close as you can get...
We got a handful of these when the band were in town, but they disappeared before we could even hear it. We managed to get more finally, and HOLY SHIT, it's not hard to hear why we couldn't keep these in stock, some seriously fuzzy, Sabbathy, mystical metal garage rock, or something. The women from Portland, kicking out the jams, warm, languid, buzzy, doomy jams, super psychedelic, the guitars muddy and fuzzed out, the bass deep and throbbing, the drums pounding and a bit chaotic, the vocals wild and emotional and intense, reminding us quite a bit of Christina Billotte, in fact Purple Rhinestone Eagle sounds a bit like some weird mix of Quix*O*Tic and Pentagram. Which is a very very good thing. The vocals go from woozy deepish croon to wild punkish wail, perfectly balancing the warbly wandering mesmerizing basslines and the warped minor key leads. The sound is sometimes epic and frenzied and very metal, sometimes brooding and murky and garage-y, often the two elements blurring into something else entirely.
Anyone who has been digging Jex Thoth or The Devil's Blood will definitely dig this, and White Magic fans who might enjoy a more mystical and metal Ms. Billotte, might just dig this as well.
Eye popping hand silkscreened sleeves, full color insert with lyrics and lots of rad psychedelic photos, pressed on opaque green vinyl, and yeah, probably pretty limited.
From the same label that gave us records from Alkerdeel, Aidan Baker, Bongripper, Expo 70, Caina, Gorgontongue and Persistence In Mourning, comes this, the debut ep from UK sludgelords Pus, whose sound is a lurching, lumbering downtuned heaviness, that owes as much to Electric Wizard as it does Moss. The guitars are thick and oozy and blackened, downtuned and tarpit groovy, the drums simple and solid, the vocals a reverb drenched bellow that sounds a bit like Mike Williams from Eyehategod crossed with Justin Broadrick circa the good ol' Godflesh days, each song mostly a single riff, pounded at relentlessly, laced with occasional gouts of wah drenched psychedelic leads, the songs once in a while oozing into something more blackened and dirgey, or something more propulsive and downright rocking, but for the most part, it's a relentlessly tranced out black dirge, doomy and psychedelic, mesmerizing and hypnotic, culminating in the extra noisy title track, which substitutes the bellowing vox for a weird droned out monk like chant, the guitars a big muddier and murkier, the result something weirdly dreamy and trippy.
Definitely recommended for fans of all things slow and low, doomy and sludgey. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
A brand new single-track of sprawling blackness from this mysterious Idaho duo, offering up their own version of the template laid down by Earth way back around their album 2. Which as you probably already know means, metal riffs slowed down to tarpit tempo, the various notes struggling to move forward through a field of crumbling distortion and near static buzz, the riffs allowed to ring out and fade away almost completely, before the next one comes lumbering up behind it.
The strange thing is that live, Pussygutt are a full on band, much more traditionally heavy, with a drummer and everything, even on their last record the epic double lp Sea Of Sand, the band was a lurching doomic behemoth, bordering on the industrial at times, but here, their sound is stripped way way down, and it suits them. They're able to evoke all sorts of moods with their carefully constructed downtuned ambience. This is some seriously sinister shit for sure, sweeping and darkly cinematic, the soundtrack to the eventual collapse of the universe, the sound of dying stars, or of some long slumbering beat awakening after millennia, or maybe Goblin at 16rpm, some haunted house music way too scary for any haunted house you'd ever want to visit.
It's not all heaviness though. Long stretches of sound dip into hushed shimmer here and there, while elsewhere the low end slips away leaving a creepy string section do drift spectrally, like some secret Satanic classical music, but even these moments are always tense with the knowledge that right around the corner, could be lurking another churning black wave of slow motion doomdrone crush. Really fantastic, and more than most of this stuff, infused with a deep otherworldly beauty.
Definitely require listening for folks whose cd racks/record crates/iPods' are packed with Earth, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, To Blacken The Pages, Hum Of The Druid, Expo '70, Nadja, Vulture Club, Hjarnidaudi, Monument Of Urns, Fear Falls Burning, Half Makeshift, Tunnels, Seconds In Formaldehyde, KTL, Light Of Shipwreck...
It is a red letter day for us here at aQ, in that we finally actually get to write about and sell you a Pye Corner Audio release instead of lamenting the fact that our supplier for PCA recordings only sent us a fraction of what we had initially wanted - or is more often the case, that it sold out completely before we could get our hands on ANY. To be sure, over the past couple of years, a few of Pye Corner's releases have slipped in and out of the shop, leaving just an ectoplasmic stain of picture-perfect electronic retro-futurism on our collective minds; and it also seems fitting that Pye Corner Audio released an album of his hauntological disco on the Ghost Box label, which again we've never gotten enough of to list. But now, hurrah, we have this!! As the title specifies, this triple cd set collects the first four volumes of Pye Corner Audio's Black Mill Tapes, which were originally released on vinyl as a couple of double lp sets which are (as noted) long gone.
Pye Corner Audio is the work of audio wizard Martin Jenkins, who is one of the in-house engineers at Miloco Studios in London where he works alongside the likes of Alan Moulder, Flood, and Trevor Jackson - yeah, top flight producers for sure. It's obvious that the work of Pye Corner Audio did not develop in a bubble, as there are very clear ideas and a fully formed sound language that is very savvy in its references to Delia Derbyshire's sci-fi electronics, the autobahn precision of Kraftwerk's songwriting, John Carpenter's bold synth melodies, and the bad-ass swagger of Detroit techno. In a rare interview, Jenkins described the working methods of PCA as being quickly sketched-out variations onto quarter inch tape and even four-track cassettes with a couple of no-name Japanese monosynths and a drum machine. He continues that "I definitely embrace imperfection. In my days as an engineer, I spent so much time polishing performances and correcting mistakes that I realised it made for pretty sterile recordings. I also felt extremely liberated after coming to the realisation that there is no absolute final version of a song. There are just alternative interpretations. Once I stopped chasing that elusive perfection, things eased massively."
Through those monosynths and simple step sequencers, Jenkins builds a unique, forgotten sound of alien ambient passages made foggy through an almost Basinski-like approach to tape disintegration punctuated with crackingly good Italo-disco jams. These rhythms are where Pye Corner Audio really shines, presenting a whipcrack / leather-glove seduction that comes straight out of the Throbbing Gristle playbook for "Hot On The Heels Of Love", but if those four somehow had an imagined electronic music summit with John Carpenter at the other side of the table trying to score a soundtrack for Cronenberg with none of those super-egos getting in the way of each other. Yeah, this stuff is timeless. Just fucking timeless.
Avid readers of the list will no doubt be familiar with Pyha, the Korean one man black metal band, and his record, The Haunted House, which was recorded when he was just a teenager, and eventually, after much digging and emailing and tracking down, released on Andee's tUMULt label. Still ranks as one of our favorite black metal records ever. And as we proclaimed in the review of that record: "The essence of pure inspired ultra personal musical expression. Powerful and intense, blown out and buzz drenched, depressive and melancholic. Totally in the red, digital distortion, crumbling and furious. The vocals anguished wails and tortured howls, the drums simple programmed beats, weirdly clipped and processed, also wreathed in distortion, keyboards offering up more buzz and shimmer. Total bedroom lo-fi production, but completely idiosyncratic and inspired." We sold tons, and it inspired much worship from the aQ grim black hordes and rightfully so. The ultimate slab of genius outsider blackness, created with little knowledge of the genre, relying more on passion and creativity and ingenuity, and the results were more inspired and more inspirING than 90 percent of the black metal out there. If you've yet to experience that record, check out the review, listen to the sound samples, and GET ONE! You will NOT be sorry. But if you're already a fan, and perhaps, like us, listen to that record like crazy still, and wish you had more, well then this is your lucky day. Ours too! We had no idea this was even happening. There ARE several other actual Pyha records, but according to Pyha himself, this is actually a collection of sketches, rough drafts recorded between 2006 and 2007 for a new album that never materialized, originally intended to just be given out to friends, but then Korean label Misanthropic Art heard it and decided to release it, which makes sense cuz this stuff is KILLER.
Definitely well removed from the sound of the Haunted House, obviously since it was recorded years later. But in many ways it has the same vibe, the same energy, the guitars still buzz, and we're talking BUZZZZZ, but this time the bass is a driving force, thick and heavy, the tempos mid to plodding and doomy, the sound is last black metal and more dark blackened buzz drenched dirgery, the actual playing is definitely improved, the sound more melodic and less textural, at least on the opening track. But then the follow up, titled in Korean, is way more blasting and buzzy and black, the sound in the red and totally and fantastically blown out, but the bass here too, adds a cool melodic component, that makes the song sound more poppy than it is, but also more melancholy. The vocals are processed and seriously sick, but all woven together, it's darkly depressive and strangely pretty.
The next track is even more drenched in buzz, a white hot wall of white noise buzz, the vocals still harsh and demonic, but here the drums are weirdly loping, and the main melody manages to come through, again giving the song a distinctly lilting feel.
The further into the record you get, the more strange and experimental it gets. The next track is some sort of gloom pop, a thick crunchy guitar melody draped over a sea of static buzz, and some strange dueling vocals, clean and chantlike vs metallic shriek, it's almost like a blackened sea shanty, or some traditional folk number transformed into black metal. The following song is more of the same, more distinctly black metal, but again, crooned clean vocals, woozy bass and mournful melodies all woven in, and finally, the last track, the sound is much more murky and muddy, the sound blurred and warm, with some really cool guitar melodies wound into the otherwise droned out blackness. It's actually almost shoegazey at times, like M83 or MBV, the guitars washed out and hazy, and a main melody that's all spidery and wistful, transforming the buzz into some sort of blackened dream pop.
The bonus track is a nearly 14 minute stretch of black ambience, all deep drones, and whirling abstract shimmer, laced with bits of glitch and shards of electronics, the song is peppered with woozy synths, processed demonic vox, more a growly whisper, some disembodied piano, the sound shifting from tranquil to ominous to intense and finally back to tranquil again, eventually drifting off all meditative and understated. Incredible.
Sad to think that Pyha no longer makes black metal, but it's quite a blackened sonic legacy he's left behind, with more hopefully to be unearthed and released in the future...
Unbelievably grim and blown out Burzumic black metal buzz from a Korean eighth grader! Recorded over a couple years and finally released when he was 14 years old! It's true. tUMULt has been trying to get this out for ages, and it's finally here. Black metal record of the week? The year more likely. Perhaps maybe EVER.
It took almost two years to track Pyha down, and then almost four more to sort out the eventual release of this grim depressive black masterpiece. Here's how it started:
Longtime aQ pal Steven Schultz (he of Puny Humans and Stalin Claus Superstar infamy) was studying in Korea and bought a bunch of records. None of them really impressed him that much, except for one mysterious disc, by a 'group' called Pyha, which in Korean means 'ruins'. He later discovered that Pyha was the work of one man, er, kid actually, a 14 year old eighth grade black metaller! Needless to say, WOW. Anyway, on returning, Steven passed the cd on to Andee who was BLOWN AWAY. Completely floored, so much so that he knew he had to release it. More people HAD to hear this. So the hunt was on. How to track down a 14 year old kid in Korea. Pre-internet it would have been impossible. But another aQ pal, Jason, was actually living part time in Korea, weirdly enough he's a minor television star there, and offered to try and track down Pyha. Which miraculously he did, and we then discovered that there were in fact 4 albums, all recorded when Pyha was between the ages of 14 and 17! All of which are amazing, and all of which should eventually be released on tUMULt.
But this is THE ONE. The essence of pure inspired ultra personal musical expression. Powerful and intense, blown out and buzz drenched, depressive and melancholic. Andee sent a cd-r of the record to a writer at Terrorizer, who was so impressed, he reviewed the sans-art home burned cd-r in that magazine and gave it a TEN. It's that fucking mind blowing. We mentioned in our recent review of the Wrath Of The Weak record that it was maybe the buzziest black metal record ever. Well, it has nothing on Pyha. Totally in the red, digital distortion, crumbling and furious. The vocals anguished wails and tortured howls, the drums simple programmed beats, weirdly clipped and processed, also wreathed in distortion, keyboards offering up more buzz and shimmer. Long stretches of creepy ambience, samples of speeches and warfare, of wailing weeping mothers and children, all woven into Pyha's buzzing black tapestry. Total bedroom lo-fi production, but completely idiosyncratic and inspired. No blast beats or furious thrashing, instead, the tracks are either midtempo, or no-tempo, with some tracks eschewing drums all together, just a wall of ultra distorted riffage all tangled up with demonic howls. But it's not just howling and screeching, the vocals sometimes emerge as a weird wailing croon, other times as a hushed whisper, while other times a mumbled moan. In fact, a few of the tracks almost sound like some weird black metal Sebadoh, super lo-fi and dripping with distortion, the vocals weary and worn, buried beneath swirling squalls of blacknoise. Others have a distinct shoegaze quality too, that is if you can imagine a shoegaze Abruptum, the drums loping and laid back, the guitars washed out and blurred, the vocals SO distorted they swallow up all the other sounds and become another layer of super saturated sound. Sometimes they even morph into fucked up harmonies, so loud and lo-fi they crackle and splinter, without losing any of their alien beauty. There are long stretches of ambience too. Crackling campfires, crickets, warm whirring synths way off in the distance, ghostly gurgled disembodied voices, whipping wind, all interwoven with tape hiss and buzzing synths, creepy noises, and all manner of sonic detritus.
Three of the tracks here are bonus tracks, recorded later, and manage to fit perfectly with the original disc. One is especially of not, as it's maybe the most melodic of the bunch, thick keyboards drift over a sea of pulsing cymbal sizzle, and barely audible guitar, the drums buried way down in the mix, the vocals growling and hissing and howling, the whole thing very dreamy and drifty and otherworldly. Until the end, when everything drops out leaving just shimmering synths, and the sounds of war, speeches, soldiers, sirens, weeping mothers, crying children, so intense and anguished and moving. Which brings us to the lyrical content. Pyha is staunchly anti-government, anti-war, anti-military, he's a pacifist and an anarchist, and has chosen black metal as the medium to express his message. The packaging is covered in images of Korean wartime atrocities, all of which is even more ironic and sad, when you learn that Pyha (now that he's old enough) is currently in the Korean Army, as military service there is compulsory.
The record closes with one of the most powerful tracks on the record. A seven+ minute blow out, as black as anything else on the disc, and definitely the fastest, as close to a blast as Pyha gets. But it's still loping and woozy. The drums and cymbals are recorded super hot and lay a gauzy layer of hiss over the proceedings, keyboards pick out a delicate minor key melody, hovering weightless like ghosts over the roiling blackened churn below. It almost sounds like Wold at times, as if there was some old 78 playing beneath the wash of black buzz. The track gets heavier and heavier, the vocals more and more demonic and monstrous, the intensity building and building, the main riff, remaining impossibly haunting and majestic as it sinks deeper and deeper into the sea of noise drenched blackness, leaving more and more of that mysterious underlying melody, to drift off and eventually fade away.
Rare is the record, black metal or otherwise, that evokes such intense emotion, that gives the listener chills. Beyond the blackness and the buzz, lies a record of impossible depth, full of emotion and passion. So much so, that it's easy to forget that it was conceived, composed and recorded entirely by a little middle school kid!
Gorgeously packaged in a 6 panel gatefold digipak. Brown and gold sepia toned, with metallic ink, the outside a tranquil Korean landscape, inside a garish gallery depicting the human cost of warfare.
After all that, it might seem like overkill, but this is, without a doubt, THE BLACK METAL RECORD OF THE YEAR. And for some of us, one of the best black metal records ever. What the fuck were you doing when you were 14 years old?!
Besides having an awesome logo, and killer creepy elephant cover art, these filthy Swedes have conjured up a seriously brutal, and weirdly groovy slab of sludge-y doom. Exploding out of a swirling storm of whipping winds that open the disc, these guys waste no time in getting down to it. IT being some gut punching, ear destroying heaviness. We were actually expecting something much less musical, much more abstract and slooooow, Moss, Bunkur, Khanate, that sort of thing, and while it does get downright glacial now and again, Pyramido mostly traffic in something much more groovy and stonery, think Electric Wizard, Church Of Misery, Cough, Eyehategod, Bongzilla, Green Machine...
In fact, Pyramido totally sound like they came straight out of New Orleans, that distinctly NOLA groove, but here that sounds is twisted up a bit, given a little blackness, a little crustiness, the songs stretched out a bit more, the groove not so much the focus as simply part of the sound, a sound that is a HUGE, churning, pounding, downtuned beastly thing. The guitars thick and corrosive, the drums a Cro-Magnon pound, vocals buried in the mix, always on the verge of cracking, a throat shredding howl, and within these blackly groovy, crust laden jams, lurk not only some serious hooks, but some fucking KILLER riffs, and although it doesn't make sense, music like this is often bereft of actual great riffage.
Slow, low, sludgy and brutal as fuck, by now it should be obvious if this is your cup of muck, it most definitely is ours...
As much as we love that Hydra Head sound, huge churning riffage, pummeling drums, crushing metallic dirges and all things heavy heavy heavy, we're becoming more and more obsessed with the releases that don't fit so comfortably on HH, don't necessarily embody that classic Hydra Head sound. Although that's not necessarily fair, as the more bands HH sign that sound different, the more diffuse and varied that HH 'sound' becomes, which renders this whole theory moot. But whatever, stick with us for a second, there is a point. It's sort of how we were with Sub Pop, sure we loved Green River and Soundgarden and Mudhoney, THAT sound, but we got crazy obsessed with stuff like Rein Sanction and Hardship Post, the stuff that stuck out, that sounded WEIRD, maybe almost more than the regular Sub Pop stuff.
It might be just that for a band to kick someone's ass SO much, that they're willing to release a record by them, even though sonically it's a whole different ball of wax, means that the record in question is that good, that fucked up, that unique, or could be that we just like to be contrary. Either way�
Whatever. We love Isis and Cavity and Pelican, but lately, we, like a lot of you, have been obsessing over Jesu, Hayaino Diasuke, Austerity Program, Torche, Pet Genius and now Pyramids, who hail from Denton Texas, and who sound like nothing on Hydra Head. If we had to pick one band, it might be Jesu, but even then, the similarities are minimal. Pyramids are blissy and fuzzy and gauzy and pretty, almost ambient at times, drifting dreamily, their sounds shimmering and glistening, everything blurred and washed out and totally fucking gorgeous, BUT, they do have some surprises up their sleeves. And it's those surprises that make this record such a mind blower.
But let's start at the beginning. The first three tracks here are totally lovely, guitars are wisps, vocals are fluttery shadows, melodies are delicate and fragile, the production is warm and sun dappled, rhythms are muted shuffles, effects swirl and sway, here and there, the sound thickens into something almost heavy, but never quite gets there, remains on the pretty drifty side of heavy. It's like a more avant freaky version of Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, that same sort of windblown washed out blissy vibe. Until the fourth track.
Beginning with some minimal guitar buzz, amidst a whirl of chiming harmonics, shortwave interference, and blown out buzz, the drums kick in, and the riff locks into an insectoid buzz, and suddenly the Pyramids are some sort of black metal band, still bleary and blissy, but with pounding drums and buzzing guitars, eventually vocals come in and it's like a metalgaze Sigur Ros, which is most definitely awesome.
The next track too offers more of the same, a sort of swirling chaotic shoe gaze-y black metal, and in fact the rest of the record continues on in that vein, each track a twisted convoluted take on blissed out black metal, sometimes grinding and furious, but even then swathed in a warm sonic glow, sometimes more poppy and swirly, like a more abstract Swervedriver. As you can tell, it's pretty hard to describe. Not sure it's really black enough to appeal to black metallers, it's more like some shoegaze ambient metal pop band just borrowed some black metal tropes and wove them into their gorgeous blown out soundworld.
There's a second disc too, of remixes, by the likes of Jesu, James Plotkin, Loveliescrushing, Birchville Cat Motel, Blut Aus Nord and more, and we would have assumed that remixes by those folks, of this sort of music, would just render them more blissed out, but instead, at least the first two, transform the songs into furious blown out black jams. The first, remixed by Toby Driver of Kay Dot, Ted Parsons of Prong and Swans and Colin Marston of Behold the Arctopus, begins all soft and swirly, but by the end has added super distorted drums, and all manner of fried buzz. The Plotkin remix up next, strips away most of the bliss, and leaves a seriously fucked sounding lo-fi in-the-red black metal blast. The Jesu remix sounds just like you might imagine, a gauzy slowcore drift, with the vocals jacked way up, soaring through the ether, a fluttery falsetto. The two Loveliescrushing mixes bring out the soft blurred ambience of the originals, making them even more tranquil and serene. Birchville turns his mix into a virtual BCM track, using bits and pieces of the original, creating a thick slow growing drone, that builds to a buzzing crescendo before fading back into a dark moody drift. Blut Aus Nord is the most fucked up remix. Not sure if they added tons of stuff, or just did some crazy mix, but the guitars groan all dizzy and woozy and angular, the drums, pounding and machinelike, the vocals a hissy evil howl, the whole track a lurching black lope. All the mixes here are amazing, utterly transforming the originals, but in doing so hewing to the spirit of the original record, which was already pretty schizophrenic and all over the amp as it was.
Way way way recommended. A new aQ favorite for sure...
