It's always a happy day here at Aquarius when we get new music from Finland's Skepticism. I mean, a depressing day. Soooooooo wonderfully depressing. Skepticism are our favorite funereal forest doom metal band, we've described them before as the Labradford of black metal. Almost ambient, droning, downer stuff, plodding along through a nighttime fog. Imagine the music of a suicidal church organist, teamed up with some longhaired Scandinavian death metal teens. Beautiful.
As with all their releases, more of the same yet with enough difference to be a significant, essential addition to their ouevre. This time, the 'what the fuck?' aspect is highlighted by the bizarre bubbling noises that join the gruff vocals and downtuned guitars on the title track, which sounds as if it was recorded on a ship slowing sinking on the River Styx. As is their wont, this two-song ep (18+ minutes) precedes a full-length due out sometime later this year, supposedly.
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Even some New Zealand music fanatics haven't heard (or heard of) the Skeptics, a band that featured one of the Gordons, and a member of Bailter Space (the same guy actually), but that's the sort of NZ pedigree that should have most Flying Nun / NZ underground rock nerds flipping their lids. But don't be expecting the murky thud of the Gordons, or the blown out shoegaze heaviness of Bailter Space, the Skeptics occupied a whole different sonic realm, fusing the NZ sound we all know and love to something much more avant grade and experimental, with programmed rhythms and samples, the vibe almost industrial at times, the resulting sound twisted, damaged, demented and totally genius.
Both III (1987) and Amalgam (1990) have been insanely hard to track down for years now, reissued briefly in 1992 in a 4cd box set, which quickly went out of print, and immediately surfaced on the collector's market, and was not surprisingly, outrageously expensive, so we were so psyched to discover that Captured Tracks was including these records in their ongoing Flying Nun reissue campaign (and here's hoping they reissue all the other Skeptics stuff too!). So for now, we can revel in the group's 3rd and 4th records, that 4th record released after the death of David D'Ath, and the group's subsequent dissolution, but what a sonic legacy, one that long deserved the sort of love heaped upon so much other NZ music of the time.
III begins with a twisted smear of looped samples and stuttering sonics, which soon blossom into a lurching creep, snarly crooned vocals over big booming drums, wound up in streaks of distorted guitar buzz, the vibe, gloomy and dark, a sort of post industrial downer rock, that lumbers ominously, and is peppered with weird fragmented samples, melodic shards, super heavy, ominous, and intense, but also weirdly catchy. And it doesn't get any less weird, the sound veering dramatically, from the piano driven post punk of "Agitator", again peppered with strange sound FX and distorted electronics, sounding almost cabaret, like some mutated balladic torch song. "Turnover" slips back into the woozy, murky creep of the opener, the guitars thick and viscous, the vox slithery and blackly sexy, all anchored by a looped rhythm, and again, laced with strange electronic squiggles and twisted blurry samples. And so it goes, "La Motta" almost sounds like Scott Walker via the Butthole Surfers, but with a damaged industrial makeover, "Notice" too is a sort of drugged out industrial noise rock dirge, with some jagged shards of guitar, over a muddy moody downer rock murk, with the rest of the record splitting the difference between home brewed industrial goth and grinding avant post punk crush.
While Amalgam has a similar sonic template, it's a bit more polished, the vocals more prominent, the drums more driving, the pop element more up front, there's even a bit of a new wave vibe, just check out opener "And We bake", which sounds like some lost new wave classic, fused to some girding metal buzz, and twisted mechanical rhythm. But the sound remains sonically sick, the second track, slipping right back into a woozy, warmly dirge, lurching detuned weirdness, clouds of FX and squiggly alien electronics wreath rubbery bass billows, melting riffs, and mush mouthed vocals, seriously trippy and gloriously fucked up.
Amalgam is a lot more varied than its predecessor, some tracks super electronics, others smeary buzzscapes of layered guitars, and super creeped out vocal samples, new wave electro pop and grim, noise drenched sprawls of grim, harrowing, psychedelic noise. It's that balance that makes the record so cool, twisted poppiness, colliding with speaker shredding weirdness, often the two bleeding into each other, creating some unholy hybrid of avant industrial post punk psych-noise, the sort of thing the should appeal equally to weird music obsessives, adventurous goths and fans of experimental twisted noise pop. Which really is pretty much most everybody we know!
Local folks may have seen these guys tearing up stages around town. Although maybe tearing up isn't precisely what these guys do. They're much more of a brooding behemoth. But they're much more than that. Almost confusingly so (but in a good way!) Anyway, Skin Horse are a trio who traffic in long stretches of plodding doom, mathy jangle, and epic post rock, laced with haunting atmospherics and deep black ambience.
This 3 song cd-r is their debut, and each of the three tracks is totally different, and in some cases almost sound like different bands, but somehow, the tracks do manage to fit together, a little disjointedly, but still strangely cohesive.
The opener begins with a sheet of guitar noise under static and strange voices, soaring harmonics, and rumbling drones, when the band do finally kick in, it's a sort of slowcore, dronedoom hybrid. Plodding and downtuned and heavy, but weirdly melodic, the guitars heavy and abstract, the drums a caveman pound, vocals a harsh shriek, Khanate fans will be all over this, as will all ultradoomlords.
But only maybe until the second track, which begins with dark minor key guitar jangle, which erupts into some awesomely nineties sounding mathrock, all clean guitars, and convoluted arrangements, before locking into a spiraling freakout, all tribal rhythms, and squealing feedback, a stuttering riff and swirls of FX, launching immediately into the final track, another blast of angular clean guitar mathrock, but structure like doom, so the chords ring out, the drums crash, but there's tons of space, some super abstract arrangements, killer dynamics, all wrapped around a super intense main minor key melody, the kind of stuff we could listen to forever, before again, locking into an extended outro, a cool woozy chugging groove, that eventually gives way to a brief stretch of moody Slintish drift to finish off.
We've been inundated with post rock metal bands, or post metal or whatever, but Skin Horse are as far as we can remember the first band to fuse math rock with serious doom metal, and we're definitely up for hearing more.
Packaged in hand sewn, hand screened red or black pouches, LIMITED TO 200 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
Even if we didn't make this Record of the Week, we'd probably still be selling quite a few of 'em, as we're sure we've got a lot of knowledgeable record-collector-type customers for whom adding this to cart will be but the work of a second, the second after their eyes bug out upon seeing the artist and title listed above. But since this reissue is not only of an incredible rarity but also of an incredible record, we wanted to make sure everybody heard about it, besides those for whom it's already a "holy grail". Yep, Joakim Skogberg's original 1972 Jola Rota LP definitely falls into the highly obscure "holy grail" category, a lost treasure for lovers of weird, wonderful acid-folk and underground psychedelia. The sort of thing that develops a legend that it can't possibly live up to... but then DOES, blowing minds when it's finally reissued. The sort of thing that's whispered about among connoisseurs of psych, written of in a few select fanzines and blogs, heard only by a lucky few who got an Nth generation cassette dub or cd-r burn from a friend, who got it from a friend, and so on. The sort of thing, that even a few years after a brief exposure to its wonders, will make you stop and think every once in a while, dang when is someone finally gonna reissue that amazing obscure album??? Some other recently excavated examples would include Moolah's Woe Ye Demons Possessed, Bobb Trimble's Harvest Of Dreams, and Gary Higgins's Red Hash... and before that, once upon a time Comus's First Utterance too would have fallen into that category. Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer as well, though originals of that were and are much MUCH easier to come by. Whereas *this* album was originally pressed in an edition of around just one thousand copies -- of which only a few hundred were ever sold back in the day, with the remainder of the pressing being, gasp, melted down to be recycled into other LPs!
So, here it is, artist Joakim Skogsberg's lone album Jola Rota finally, officially reissued for the very first time! Our hearts went pitter pat when we found out. We first heard this when our friend Loren Chasse (of Of/Thuja/Jewelled Antler/etc. fame) floated us a cd-r burn he had gotten from a pal overseas a couple years ago, as per the scenario outlined above. He figured we'd like it, and of course he was right. What's not to like? Swedish-forest-folk hippie ritual mixed with droned-out psych guitar. Truly strange, and captivating, vocal mumble. And, get this, it was actually mostly recorded out in a forest, on portable reel-to-reel gear!! Once out of the woods, the raw recordings were overdubbed (Skogsberg being responsible for all sounds on this album) in studio, but remain quite raw, the mystery and majesty of northern landscapes, dark shadowy places, placid lakes, tall trees and moss-covered rocks utterly alive in the music of the nature-loving Skogsberg.
Side One starts off with "Jola Fran Ingbo", which introduces Joakim's unusual "Jola" singing style derived from Swedish trad folk, also heavily influenced by Buddhist chant, accompanied by staccato bowings of ominous violin. Immediately this is waaaay darker than most other Swedish folk/psych we've heard! Seriously droney and austere. That's followed by the more freaked out, rockier "Offer Rota", which finds Skogsberg singing whilst pounding away on percussion and unfurling a thick layer of distorted guitar murk, with what sounds like a Jew's Harp warbling in the background. The next piece, "Fridens Lijor", on the other hand, is an unaccompanied vocal piece, close-miced and intimate, all about Skogsberg's fragile Jola babble...
Beginning side two, "Besvarjelse Rota" builds up a dubby, bassy electronic rhythmic whomp-whomp throb beneath its damaged psych guitar wail, that (in our warped imagination) foreshadows modern minimal techno a la Chain Reaction, "heroin house" beats.... could almost be Pole jamming with Algarnas Tradgard or something! Later, the lengthy "Jola Fran Stensate" harkens back to the solemnity of the album's first track, and then "Jola Fran Leksand" winds up this unique, amazing trip with something of a pagan campfire dance piece, for folky fiddle and rattling hand percussion.
Overall, though, Jola Rota's mood is solitary and ceremonial. Skogsberg not a guru leading his followers, but rather one man, inspired, singing devotional songs to nature, in personal communion with the ancient deities of Sweden and the universe... it IS universal, probably why it sounds simultaneously like krautrock and Tibetan worship and Native American prayer-songs. The universality of the drone, and the human voice in spiritual reverence regardless of language. At its droniest, many moments here recall Parson Sound or the aforementioned Moolah. Totally, magically mesmeric. Wow... EVERYONE who's heard this since we got it in has been entranced.
And we're extra happy that not only has this been reissued, but that the reissue was done by our pal Johan's Tokyo-based Tiliqua Records (along with EM Records, one of our absolute favorite reissue labels from that part of the world, or anywhere else). Which means, it's done up deluxe, packaged in a swank miniature gatefold LP-style sleeve, and it's been remastered from the original tapes with the help of Skogsberg himself. There's also new liner notes and previously unpublished photos of the long haired and bearded (of course) Skogsberg included. Nice! Sadly, this too is limited to a one-time pressing of only 1,000 copies... and unlike the original vinyl edition, we doubt the label will be left with any unsold copies to recycle!
FYI there will also be a super, super limited (and expensive) vinyl version of this coming on on Tiliqua in May, not sure if we'll be able to get any of those at all or if they'll be a label-direct preorder thing only...
Another new one from Swedish noisemakers Skull Defekts, who like much of the new breed of cd-r underground outfits, have gone from unknown to prolific in the blink of an eye. This latest comes courtesy of the Cut Hands label, and is crazy limited, only a hundred copies�
And while past Defekts records have been strongly rooted in rhythm, this two tracker is much more about texture and mood, timbre and ambience, with any rhythm merely a muted pulse, a submerged throb, or a bit of dizzying skipped looping. The opening track is 21 minutes of low end murk, soft shimmering drift, smeared pixilated glitch, moaning bass tones, a distant swirl of disembodied voices, croaks and creaks, blurred into another buzzy layer, the track building in intensity, the tones growing thicker and more corrosive, streaks of feedback draped over sonorous tones, all wrapped in a whirring cloud of soft insectoid buzz.
The second track, also 21 minutes, is much more chaotic and confusional, voices swirl dizzily, chunks of glitchy electronics suspended in a roiling sea of constant low end buzz, smears of malfunctioning effects, sine wave skree and crumbling distortion, all looped into some haunting post industrial collage, eventually smoothing out into a long stretch of layered rumble and whir, but still shot through with jagged shards of percussive clatter and sizzling electronic grind. Sort of Pan Sonic meets Wolf Eyes which is most definitely a good thing.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in cool oversized, textured paper, three color silkscreened gatefold sleeves, the disc attached to a nub on one of the panels, a printed black and white insert, each disc hand painted.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With the demise of Freek records, this may be the last we see of this amazing Skullflower record, with the outfit fully entrenched in the lithium haze of squalid feedback drone. Skullflower's Matthew Bower described the album as "the SF release that best prefigures the rich,rewarding sweep of Sunroof!. four long pieces, the last studio bound w/ Tim Hodgkinson really floats, undisciplined but strident, uplifting drone, shot through and augmented with wind and voices."
We had long been dreaming about a singles compilation from long running UK noise rock / psych dirge combo Skullflower, who are not a 'singles' band by any stretch, but somehow, peppered throughout their lengthy career, and a clutch of classic albums proper, lurk some of the most iconic singles ever, FOUR of which are gathered here, on cd for the first time ever. And the fact that those singles are essentially just the bonus tracks here, should give you an idea of exactly why this was a shoe in for Record Of The Week.
Two of our favorite, classic Skullflower jams, long out of print, now available again together along with the aforementioned singles: Carved Into Roses, originally released in 1994 on VHF, and Infinityland, released a year later on HeadDirt, with the classic SF lineup of Stuart Dennison and Russell Smith (of beloved nineties psychedelic scuzzdub heavies Terminal Cheesecake), two guitars and drums, no bass, both records featuring Simon Wickham Smith and Philip Best of Ramleh as guests. At first we were wondering why exactly these two records were being re-released together, similar lineup of course, and listening to them again, they are sonically very similar, marking the band's shift toward a somewhat different sound, shedding some of the pummel and thud of their earlier releases for something a bit more abstract and tripped out, still heavy and noisy of course, but edging a bit closer to the murky muddy psychedelic drift and gauzy blurred noise-psych drift of their sonic brethren in the Dead C, the sound here in many ways sounding very much like classic NZ noise rock of the era, the tracks lengthy headtrip blissouts, everything wreathed in feedback, the drums and vox buried in the mix, while the guitars writhe and swirl, droned out and raga like one second, fierce caustic squalls the next. SO already it makes sense to bundle these two records together, even more so though once we discovered that they were originally conceived of as one epic sprawling double disc set.
The opener of "Carved Into Roses" pretty much sets the scene, channeling vintage Dead C, and thus finding Skullflower at their very poppiest, reminding us a bit of Dead C offshoot Gate, a sort of meandering Velvets-y drift, lazy and laid back and lugubrious, the sound druggy and droney, a pop song swaddled in thick sheets of wild guitar and smeared psychedelic freakout, almost like some sort of super abstract and seriously drifty space rock, definite foreshadowing some of the sounds of today (White Hills, AMT, etc), the dirgey lope like one of those modern psych bands slooooowed waaaaay down, all swirling washed out guitar skree, ethereal buried-in-the-mix vox, it's downright meditative in its own heavy softly noisy way. The whole record isn't so blissed out and hazy, "The Rose Wallpaper" explodes into a tangle of free jazz freakout, the drums wild and octopoidal, what sounds like some sort of Middle Eastern horn bleats and skronks, the sound growing ever more noisy and chaotic, a seriously heady chunk of OUT-noise jazz if there ever was, which leads right into "Shiny Birds Of Doom", another dark dirge, this one laced with what sounds like organ, or maybe more horns, the lumbering industrial sounding drumming, pounding away through thick swirls of hum and buzz, some howled vocals drift in and out, surprisingly catchy melodies appearing now and again, but more often then not dissipating into the creeping abstract gloom, fans of Gnaw Their Tongues and similarly cinematic black doom will definitely dig.
"Silver Glove Puppet" is a hissy high end stretch of noise pop rendered in shades of grinding crunch, and fractured chaos, sounding a bit like a WAY noisier unhinged Swans, the song getting noisier and noisier, those tangled guitars unwinding thick barbed streaks of effects drenched buzz, but simultaneously becoming more and more song-like as impossible as that seems. Then there's "Metallurgical King", which brings back the horns, and lays them over a cool looped guitar, and some almost krautrock like drumming, super hypnotic, and cyclical, it's only 12 minutes, but you can totally picture this stretching out to fill up a whole live set, totally mesmerizing noisejazz krautdrone hypnorock bliss. And finally Carved Into Roses finishes the way it started, with a stretch of murky out-pop moodiness, the strangely titled "Ge4050" unfurls thick slabs of coruscating guitar buzz, warm washed out melody, never quite coalescing into a proper pop song, instead, seeming to blossom into some sort of psychedelic supernova, all blown out guitars and glimmering sonic blur. Another track that's way to short at seven minutes...
Which leads directly into Infinityland, which starts off with the epic nearly 13 minute long "The Idiotsburgh Address", which opens with a long stretch of layered guitar, blurred and buzzy, droned out and raga like, it's not until about 90 seconds in when the drums kick in, and those guitars coalesce into something again, almost poppy, dirgey, buzz drenched doom-pop creep, woozy and washed out, the guitars soaring and fierce, wrapped around a lilting minor key melody, some wailed wordless vocals, the drums occasionally explode into bursts of delirious drum damage, and of course the guitars are constantly splintering into wild blinding squalls of crunch and howl, but for long stretches, much of that heaviness peels back, again revealing a sort of dirgey industrial almost krautrock sounding meander, haunting and meditative, but still plenty heavy and noisy, and again, hard not to compare this to vintage Dead C. Which leads directly into "White Fang", which is one of the classic Skullflower jams, short by comparison, but the only track that really recalls the Skullflower of old, a pounding almost industrial rhythm, some chugging churning riffage, wild squiggly psychedelic leads, basically the freakout heart-of-the-sun space rock final finishing jam transformed into a whole song, one sounds like staring into the sun, blown out and gloriously blissfully heavy.
"Pixie Dust" is another favorite, darkly haunting, and creepy heavy, the opening riff seriously haunting and ominous, the sound immediately locking into a serious sprawl of noise drenched space-psych mesmer, the sort of thing that would have modern day psych rockers bowing down in reverence, as would follow up "Abraxas", which sounds a bit like Wooden Shjips with a heavy noise makeover, a tranced out groove pounding away within a constantly shifting cloud of psychedelic swirl. "False Magic Kingdom" offers up stretch of serious trip out, the 'free'-est track here for sure, a sort of psychedelic ambience, lots of random rhythmic skitter, pulsing looped buzz, streaks off feedback, clouds of cymbal shimmer, a total outrock freeform epic, before finally finishing off with the comparatively brief closer, "Blood Orange", a gorgeously noisy coda, which melds melancholic clean guitar melody to chaotic rhythms and blown out guitar buzz, yet another track which would have benefited from another 10 or 15 minutes...
And if that wasn't enough, there's a whole 'nother 50 minutes of glorious Skullflower skree, the aforementioned 7"s tracks, "Choady Foster" / "Spent Force" originally released in 1994 on Helter Skelter, "White Fang #2" / "Glassy Essence", also originally released in 1994, on Freek, the Village Sorting 7" originally released in 1995 on Self Abuse (featuring Tim Hodgkinson of Henry Cow), and finally The Art Of Skullflower, originally released in 1996 on Way Out Sounds, which features Bower solo as Total on the B side. Definitely some of our favorite SF jams, and we're so psyched to have them on cd finally. "White Fang #2" is a wild unhinged, super lo-fi, in-the-red, psychedelic dirge rock blow out, that is the most 'rock' SF has ever sounded, while "Glassy Essence" is a thick undulating sprawl of corrosive blackened drones, drifting on a muted chaos of drum stumble and cymbal sizzle. "Choady Foster" sounds like it could have come from the same sessions the produced Carved Into Roses", a murky, psychedelic space rock, motorik groove and thick gouts of frenzied guitars, over a totally mesmerizing stripped down hypnorock framework. "Spent Force" strips away the rhythm, and most of the low end leaving a strange stretch of minimal buzz and glitch and hiss, underpinned by minimal muted drumming and loads of tape hiss, not to mention the occasional super dramatic and cinematic sonic swell. The live version of "Metallurgical King" from the Art Of 7", finds SF in full on abstract trip out drift mode, the drums less a driving force and more another texture floating amidst billowing clouds of feed back and effects drenched sonic swirl. The Total track from the flipside, is similarly drifty, but somehow much darker and heavier, with more heft, and a more serious low end, but still all tangled up in feedback and crumbling distortion, although the main guitar unfurls a thick, SUNNO))) like thrum. And finally, the epic Village Sorting 7", which finds the track "Village Sorting" split into two halves and spread out over all 14 minutes available on that original slab of wax, a plodding drum beat, a fog of insectoid buzz and jagged shards of atonal melody, all blurred and smeared into what sounds like some sort of lo-fi slowcore dirge melting before your very ears, the song laced with some serious free jazz style skronk, the second half / flipside eventually sheds the drums and lets the grinding guitars and bleating horns freakout over a shimmering bed of rumble and buzz. SO GREAT! Here's hoping the rest of the SF singles find their way onto cd, but for now, we've been spinning this disc nonstop, at least when we weren't spinning the other two. Definite contender for reissue of the year, and absolutely essential for fans of all things heavy and psychedelic, abstract and spaced out, noisy and rhythmic.
The packaging is pretty gorgeous too, a super deluxe 6 panel digisleeve, all full color textured paper, with something we had never seen before, the abstract oil painting from the cover printed on the jacket and then the paper sleeves affixed over the top, so parts of the painting our visible around the edges, it's really striking, and inside the various records and 7"s are reproduced in miniature, with extensive track notes, all that and a Japanese style obi too!
Massive dose of divine Skullflower noisiness this time around, a brand new vinyl only release reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this right here, a long in the works, super limited, hand assembled TRIPLE cd (not cd-r) boxset featuring all new material, over three hours or buzzing noise, abstract riffing, and all manner of brilliant sonic fuckery.
Not sure which disc comes first, but we'll start with Circle Of Serpents, and right off the bat, we're greeted with a glorious looped riff, reminiscent of Exquisite Fucking Boredom or Orange Canyon Mind, locked and looped and played over and over and over, while in the background all manner of melodies and melodic fragments, swoop and swoon and howl and keen, a swirling abyss over which a fuzzy minimal metal loop is locked on repeat. But don't expect the whole disc to be riff based, the second track explodes in a wall of grinding crumbling blown out noise drenched chaos, and as if we weren't already mixing it up enough, track three offers up some full on ultra grim blasting murky black metal, Skullfower style! We knew Bower dug the black metal, and always hoped something would come of it, so here you go, raw and buzzy, a stuttering drum machine blast beat, riffs blurred and smeared into abstract streaks, vokills buried in the mix, all barreling though clouds of effects and crumbling noise. The rest of the disc slips from epic, sun dappled Sunroof! like effulgence, tortured Abruptum style black ambience, thick distorted classic Skullflower wall of rrrrooooaaaar, strange fractured bagpipe industrial rhythm noise jams, thick warm blissy shoegazey guitar drones, and more. Easily the most varied, the weirdest, the most listenable, and quite possibly the best Skullfower record we've heard in years, and that's just the first disc.
And thankfully, the other two discs hold up just as well, super varied, and noisy and heavy, rife with drones and riffs and ragas and blasts of black metal, strange rhythms, mysterious percussion, doomy dirges, layers of guitars everywhere, dense and thick and corrosive and abrasive and warm and pretty and fucked up and furious and dreamy, all over the map, somehow all held together by some nearly impossible to decipher masterplan, but why try to understand, it's not necessary to enjoy this, in fact it's better to just luxuriate in the massive soul swallowing sound, and simple give in as you drift further and further, deeper and deeper.
Matthew Bower who is Skullfower describes it like this:
"Leitmotivs and keys get twisted and mangled and return with the dread anticipation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence in a cycle of upheavals and lacerations, beginning and ending interwoven in an occult pantheistic tapestry that posits a gateway from the rational universe of gods creation into universe b, for spirits that can tune to the bleak, gorgeous vision SF has been channeling since tribulation.
Comes in a cardboard box with silver foil blocked slipcases featuring sigils/glyphs/runes that are both symbols and aspects of the working, and 15 visual fragments that can be arranged in conjunction with the sounds to make spells, koans, traps, resonances to help bring about the sacred alignments that the music aims toward.... indeed a valuable tool for dark meditation, and lefthand tantra".
That's right, 3 cds in silver embossed sleeves, in a hand painted cardboard box, each hand painted by Bower himself, also included a bunch of color inserts, as well as liner notes, the whole thing LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!!
First release in 7 YEARS from mighty UK heavy/drone/psych gods Skullfower. Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Total ) resurrects his slumbering free-noise behemoth with this gorgeous blast of hypnotic, pummeling, droning crush, equal parts shimmering skree, damaged motorik rhythms, murky and druggy psych-rock riffs and swirling fuzzed-out guitars.
The album's core is the epic, expansive and never ending, four part suite "Celestial Highway", a sludgy sabbathy seventies rock riff, repeated adinfinitum, a dangerously unstable entropic jam wherein the riff slowly drifts apart, sinking into a churning tarpit of abstract whir and hum, gradually mutating into a drifting, throbbing pulse, as warbly synths, chirping birds, and thick washes of dreamy sonic turbulence overtake and subdue any traces of the original riff. Mesmeric and hypnotic and totally otherworldly. Like UK mantric rockers Loop, on repeat play, while your boombox runs out of batteries, or a sweeter, prettier version of Dutch minimal metal gods Gore, or imagine Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing for Black Sabbath. The remaining tracks retain their Krautrockish propulsion but drift closer to Sunroof! territory, loosening the psychedelic electronic riffscapes from their moorings, letting them float lazily through a gauzy soundscape of buzzing melodies, luminous shards of shimmering feedback and rumbling waves of drowsy, druggy drone. Like Neu! or Kraftwerk, doped up and drifting off, run through a bank of cheap effects, and broadcast out of an underwater leslie speaker, the lo-fi rhythms suffocating under a thick blanket of gossamer guitars and sonic detritus. Hypnotic and savage, dreamy and otherworldly, quixotic and godlike! Featuring sonic contributions from Vibracathedral Orchestra's Neil Campbell and produced by Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound, Ora. Monos, etc.).
Before Skullflower became a blissed out free drone, psychedelic raga outfit which would eventually morph into the ultra dreamy Sunroof!, they were trolling much darker, much harsher waters. When IIIrd Gatekeeper first came out way back in 1992, it fell right in alongside its sonic brethren, Swans, Godflesh, Pitchshifter, Terminal Cheesecake, Ramleh and all of those industrial dirge rockers. Originally released on Justin Broadrick's hEADdIRT label, IIIrd Gatekeeper is definitely one of Skullflower's finest moments (and quite possibly both Andee and Allan's favorite SF record EVER), a slow murky trudge through a blinding squall of psychedelic guitar freakout, dense swirls of which lurk behind a lurching slow motion bass dirge and pounding near industrial drumming. Each track picks a riff and pounds it into the ground, repeating and repeating until you can't help but be drawn in, while white hot streaks of guitar skree and low end rumble spin around the relentless plodding. SO much heavier and scarier than almost any other record. A bit like a heavy metal Whitehouse, or a more psychedelic Swans. A muddy, filthy, drug drenched metal club to the side of the head. So fucking awesome.
THIS WAS A WAREHOUSE FIND. THIS RECORD IS SOOOO OUT OF PRINT, BUT ONE OF OUR DISTRIBUTORS FOUND A BOX SO WE TOOK AS MANY AS THEY HAD. ONCE THESE ARE GONE IT'S BACK TO eBAY WITH YOU...
This long in the works reissue campaign has had aQ staff and aQ customer Skullflower nerds freaking the fuck out. Four, count, em FOUR reissued rarities! On the last list, we reviewed reissues of both Skullflower's very first 12"ep Birthdeath, and their first proper full length Form Destroyer, both absolute psychedelic noise rock crushers. But that was only the beginning. Since most Skullflower fans were already super familiar with those records anyway, it was more a chance to revisit, as well as preach the gospel of early Skullflower to the uninitiated. But it's the other two reissues that might be the most thrilling. Elsewhere on this week's list, you'll find a review of Xaman, Skullflower's 1990 second album, one that due to a manufacturing defect found most copies eventually rendered unplayable, and thus essentially unheard for decades. And then there's this one, a singles comp, hopefully the first of many, gathering up three different singles, originally released on Majora, Forced Exposure and Shock, and the crazy thing is, even the Skullflower freeks here, had only ever actually heard ONE of em! So that alone made this totally essential. But in addition to those singles, there are also SIX previously unreleased tracks, as well as Skullflower's three contributions to The Portable Altamont compilation (which also featured such noisy luminaries as Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, and Drunks With Guns), all of which add up to some of the filthiest, noisiest, most pummeling, tranced out, knuckle dragging, psychedelic krautrock-style dirgery you've every heard. Cuz really, for all the skree and crunch, all the noisy churn and caveman pummel, most early Skullflower jams are stretched out hypnorock sprawls, albeit constructed from crumbling superdistorted bass, wild tangles of angular melody and shards of noise guitar skree, and some surprisingly motorik drum bashing...
The only one of the three reissues that's sort of new, begins with the weird choice of starting not with any of the previously released 7" tracks, but instead, a double shot of unreleased rarities, the opener "Night Tripper" as good as anything SF was doing at the time, squalls of feedback, thick, blown out riffage, damaged drumming, yowled, buried in the mix vox, super murky and hypnotic, which leads right into "Kasso's Blues", which is loping and lumbering, a sort of detuned atonal main riff, and some garbled vox wrapped around tribal beats make it sound like some super obscure, super wasted Butthole Surfers jam. The aforementioned single, the only one we HAD heard, is the "Rift / Avalanche" single on Majora, and it's some of our favorite Skullflower, smoldering, brooding, dirgey, but sorta dreamy, a locked minimal rhythm, buried vocals, and then long arced tones, super mesmerizing and so epic, the 'flipside' though is a wild nois drenched heavy psych freakout that looks forward to groups like Rusted Shut. The Forced Exposure single delivers one part noisy Dead C style plod rock freakout, and one part billowing psychedelic space out, while the Shock single is super swaggery and dirgey, the recording muted and murky, total cave like rehearsal style sound, but it suits them, the second half getting downright rocking.
After that, there's the awesomely titled "Bo Diddley's Shitpump" , which might be the most bloozy of the bunch, as is hinted at by the title, but it's more like Pussy Galore style blues, tangled up with some Swans and some Hawkwind, and with a hint of mutated AmRep style bash and howl. "Against Everything (A Guide To Canine Foreskin Retraction)" sounds like a Crash Worship record on Shock, wild dense tribal drumming, wreathed in a cloud of flanged shimmer, wah wah splatter and spidery tendrils of tangled guitar melody, and girded by some strange industrial whirring buried in the mix. "March Of The Lemmings" is all garage blooz swagger, with echo drenched vocals and a thick chugging main riff, even some bleating horns, everything dubbed to high heaven, and then wrapped in a spider web of noise guitar skree, and finally closer "The Punk Rock Song" is about as punky OR poppy as SF get, but they manage to fuck it all up and douse it in just enough noise to keep it interesting...
Holy shit, so much amazing, twisted, noisy sonic genius. As far as we're concerned all four of these Skullflower reissues should have /could have been Records Of The Week, but forced to pick one, it had to be Black Sun Rising. But seriously, who are we fooling, you NEED all four!!!
Nice packaging too, mini gatefolds, printed inner sleeves, and a booklet with reproductions of the original 7" covers.
Over the last 20 Years, Matthew Bower and his ever mutating noise rock combo have gone through more sonic shifts than it would seem possible, each alteration like an artist's 'period', but instead of a BLUE period or RED period, SF shifted from a crushing proto industrial pummel period, to a blown out black noise period, to a metallic drone period, to the more recent psychedelic hypno-riff period, and a momentary dip back into the black noise, but now he/they seem to have launched into a whole new period that effectively combines that more recent riff-based sound with that pure noise the group has dabbled in and revisited over the years. And incorporated into that sound, eagle-eared listeners may be able to hear the fruits of Bower's ever growing interest in black metal as well. With the recent 3 cd boxset and Not Not Fun lp, Skullflower have again reinvented themselves and produced a series of recordings that are at once incendiary and noise drenched, and at the same time, textural and psychedelic. More than ever, headphones are required, as background music, La Noche will simply spread out into a uniform sheet of grey noise, but slap on the phones and it's like lathering your head in LSD flavored honey and sticking your head in a den of slumbering sonic bears.
Various blown out and distorted guitar lines squiggle and squirm, producing an ever expanding tangle of fractured psych rock sprawl, beautiful prismatic squalls, rife with fragmented melodies, inadvertent harmonies, woozy and tripped out and gorgeously noisy. Parts of La Noche almost sound like some alien guitarists shred tape, broadcast through millions of miles of space, picking up all manner of detritus before being captured on some deep-in-the-jungle SETI satellite, and it's now up to us to decrypt the message, salutations from a friendly word, warnings of our impending doom, or just some hundreds of years old kid going apeshit and capturing it on some deep space 4track. And Bower's guitars are drenched and doused in strange effects as well resulting in a sound that falls somewhere between malfunctioning bagpipes and the strange sonic wonder of another aQ favorite, Amps For Christ. In fact, this could be like a metallic noise version of AfC, if Amps For Christ weren't ALREADY a metallic noise version of AfC.
Some of the tracks here do lock into some serious, albeit buried under layers of processed effects and crumbling distortion, grooves, in fact, "Vinum Sabbati" has a bad ass riff grinding away, within a swirling cloud of high end insectoid shimmer, a gorgeous psych rock chug, lurching and lumbering beneath the surface, and the record finishes off with some total black metal worship, "Serene & Terrible Noontide Abyss" is a brittle buzzy Darkthrone-y riff, looped into a mesmerizing mantra, while underneath stripped down and spare percussive pound adds an abstract rhythmic element. Like pretty much every SF track lately, we'd love to hear this one expanded into a whole record!
Anyone who bought either the triple cd box on Turgid Animal or the Not Not Fun lp, or both, or heck NEITHER, is definitely going to want this. Heavy and blown out and hypnotic and metallic and brutal and pretty and buzzy and pretty much all we could hope for from Bower and company. And as always this is SUPER LIMITED. We did get a whole bunch of these, direct from Mr. Bower himself, but when we run out it may take us a while to get more, and at some point we most likely won't be able to get more, at all. And by now, you must know, that means get one NOW!
Everyone has their own particular favorite Skullflower era, the pummeling Swans-like crush of the early records, the blown out free drone guitar skree of Obsidian Shaking Codex, the tripped out druggy riffy space rock of Exquisite Fucking Boredom and Orange Canyon Mind, or the full on face melting guitarnoise assault of more recent releases, as far as we're concerned it ALL rules, whether heavy or noisy, pounding and pummeling or drifting and shimmering, Matthew Bower and whatever other noisemakers he manages to assemble, are responsible for some of the most amazing OUTrock records of the last twenty years, if not ever.
One of the best is no doubt Last Shot At Heaven, released in 1993, which features the band as a trio, and looks ahead to the dirgey riffage of Exquisite Fucking Boredom, but mixes in plenty of druggy shimmer (lots of Sunroof! foreshadowing), post industrial pound and psychedelic guitar freakout. This is WAY out of print, but the label discovered a box of 40 or so stashed away, so we took all they had left (25 copies), needless to say, these are the last copies EVER, the label has no plans to repress, and we took every remaining copy, so if you want one, be quick!
Last Shot explodes right off the bat with "Caligula" a dirgey riff heavy groove, all massive plodding pound, and squalls of wah guitar, howled vocals buried in the mix, streaks of feedback, tangled guitar melodies, very metallic and definitely heavy, but still plenty space-y and krauty. The follow up "Get The Horn" is all looped shimmer and pulsing thrum, peppered with growling distorted guitars, and spaced out drum pound, the growling guitars intensifying over the near static "Baba O'Reilly" like synth part. "Dufus" is an ultra distorted lo-fi garagedoom dirge, Dead C style free rock recorded at the bottom of a well, still thick with swirling guitars and simple plodding drums. "Bad Alchemy" is total proto metal, a killer main riff, wrapped in squiggly guitar freak out, the whole thing a woozy metallic groove, locked into an endless loop, the vocals a thick effected drawl off in the distance, "Elf Piercer" is a bit of Hawkwindy style space rock, again, locked into a relentless loop, effects everywhere, the guitars wild and tangled, "Rotten Sun II" is a super blown out doomic dirge, with howled vox and super jagged caustic riffage, and rhythms buried beneath the crumbling distortion, "Mystic Eye" is all tribal drumming, buzzing guitar, throbbing bass, soaring melodies, the most straight up rock of any of the tracks, but once it achieves maximum volume, it again gets looped into a seemingly endless jam, and finally "Blown Dukes", a hazy guitar drift, all warm whir and warble, thick buzz, disembodied riff, eventually joined by spare drumming, before devolving into a free rock freakout.
One of the more accessible Skullflower records for sure, but fear not, still plenty heavy and noisy and psychedelic, and unfortunately, almost for sure, your last chance to get your hands on one.
Matthew Bower's growing obsession with black metal has gradually infiltrated the blown out guitar skree of his earlier recordings and continues to push the sound of modern Skullflower into realms blacker and more grim and gristly than ever. Much like the recently reviewed (but sadly now out of print) Vile Veil lp, word on the street was that Malediction was to be the "Skullflower black metal" record, which it could very well be, but you have to realize that no matter how much Darkthrone or Pyha or Old Wainds or Arckanum Bower listens too, those sounds get filtered through that mysterious mind, eventually coming out via his guitar as a sound not terribly removed from something recognizably Skullflower, but with enough blackness, enough buzzing riffage, enough cello (here transformed into howling moans and caustic shards of scrape and skree) and enough chaotic drum splatter, courtesy of original Skullflower drummer Stuart Dennison, to make this more than just another Skullflower record, and more than just another guitarnoise record, it transforms this wild cacophony into some transcendent blacknoise hybrid, equal parts ur-drone and black buzz, psychedelic freakout and free-noise experiment, a pulsing, throbbing swirl of abstract heaviness and in-the-red speaker damaging crunch, a sound that slips fluidly from total abstract atom scatter to lurching almost riffy mesmer, remaining always wreathed in a thick, corrosive field of upper register sonic static, only the drums, ever really leaping from the fray, to hurl some thunderous beats before being quickly sucked back under.
Not sure if it was that brief foray into almost seventies sounding riffiness, back circa the records Exquisite Fucking Boredom and Orange Canyon Mind, but ever since then, Bower and company have been making noise with a vengeance, the sound of Skullflower and fierce and fucked up and heavy and noisy as it's ever been, Bower's black metal interests only adding to the bands hellish sonic trajectory. That's not all to say black metallers would dig this, cuz odds are, only the most extreme music obsessives among the black legions would find this particular brand of psych-skree to their liking, but heck, those of you who do fit that profile, go for it, immerse yourself, and discover just what it is about Skullflower, just what sort of black ritualistic magic lurks within the caustic black sonic sun that is Malediction.
Noiseniks will no doubt flip their lids, appropriately so, but there's so much more to this 'noise', what seems like a wall of sound, crumbles into pieces revealing so much texture within, every heaving wave of punishing crunch, gradually parts revealing a delicate network of strange melodies, the sounds while on the surface seem easily defined, are in fact more complex then they might appear, guitars and drums and voices and cellos all careening chaotically into a roiling churning black sea, a bottomless sonic expanse that takes metal and sludge and doom and noise and punk rock and minimal drone music and melts it down, shaping it into something new and mysterious, a baffling, deafening sound that defies any sort of classification, as the title of an old SF record so boldly proclaimed. This is Skullflower. And THIS, is Skullflower NOW.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Packaged in a six panel full color digipak with cool tripped out watercolor artwork by Bower himself.
Skullflower's Exquisite Fucking Boredom, released last year on Andee's tUMULt label, welcomed back the seemingly retired Skullflower from a SEVEN YEAR hiatus. Skullflower mainman Matthew Bower was anything but MIA, keeping quite busy with his more blissed out Sunroof! project, as well as his equally blissed out but slightly noisier Hototogisu project. So after seven years, what was it that reanimated the slumbering corpse of Skullflower and sent the reawakened behemoth on a new path of sonic destruction. Well, it most definitely had something to do with THE RIFF. Exquisite Fucking Boredom was a throbbing pulsing ROCK record, a fucked up one for sure, but rock nonetheless. It was that relentless riffing eventually imploding on itself that convinced us that Skullflower was indeed back, to do unspeakable things with THE RIFF and offer up their own seriously skewed take on SPACE RAWK. So it seems now, with a new Skullflower record only a year later, we can rest assured that last year's return was for good.
All that talk of riffs, and a last record wholly centered around a single riff, and what does Bower do? Opens the new record with a dense splattery swirl of freaked out high end skree and throbbing drone, sounding not all that unlike his old group Total. There may be riffs in there somewhere, but you'd be hard pressed to find 'em. Sounds almost like he threw all of Hawkwind in the bathtub and then tossed in a plugged in hair dryer and recorded the results. Super freaked out spaced out free noise insanity! Fear not though, track two is where the riff returns, and once again we have to think Hawkwind, or maybe Circle, or even Can, that propulsive throbbing rhythm, that endless riffing, even some almost-leads, totally hypnotic and endlessly mesmerizing, a rock band rocking out until the end of the world as the earth opens up and the sky darkens with ash, although in this instance Bower takes that apocalyptic rock business and douses it in jagged sheets of white noise and huge slabs of acid fried feedback, swirling swells of amp buzz and chaotic guitar freakout, turning a rock song into a perilous journey through a sonic shitstorm. Makes sense that Crucial Blast has adorned this with a black metal styled Skullflower logo! And so it goes for the rest of the record. A musical tug of war, riffing is subsumed by squalls of white noise, massive waves of throbbing dissonance part allowing a riff to push its way through briefly, only to be eventually swallowed up again, eventually to resurface and push relentlessly forward into a looming musical darkness only toe be obliterated again into a beautiful cloud of swirling whirling noise. Not sure if this is the best rock record we've heard all year, or the best noise record. But it's damn sure one of 'em. Heck, it just might well be both!
First vinyl in ages from the mighty Skullflower, and much like the triple cd box reviewed elsewhere on this list, the new SF sound finds Skullflower mastermind mixing the two distinct sides of his sound, the looped hypnotic riffy side, and the free abstract noise side, and the results are pretty fantastic, forging a new sort of noise drenched, proto metal abstract free drone psychedelia, and of course incorporating all kinds of other sounds, like black metal buzz, and minimal industrial percussion. The lp is the perfect addendum to that massive triple album box, serving almost like a 4th disc in the set, covering similar ground, but with its own particular twist.
Side one opens with that distinctive abstract-krautrock, metallic-psychedelic riff that only Skullfower seems to be able to pull off, looped and repetitive, but slowly shifting, almost imperceptibly, over a swirling morass of distorted buzz and feedback drenched howl, noisy and heavy but strangely meditative. The follow up shifts gears and offers up a buzzing wall of sound with soaring high end melodic streaks over the top, and what sounds like vocals buried WAY down in the mix. Hot on the heels of that one comes an awesomely droning psych rock dirge, this time with drums, and an incredibly catchy and surprisingly melodic main riff, woozy and druggy, but sounding like some classic eighties metal riff, just Skullflower-ed. And so it goes, the tracks shifting from chiming ritualistic dronemusic to buzzing abstract ambience to noisy almost-industrial plod and back again. And we're digging it big time. These two most recent releases might just be our favorite Skullflower records since Exquisite Fucking Boredom on tUMULt!
Latest burst of glorious guitar noise from Matthew Bower and his ever evolving Skullflower, not sure who plays on this one, pretty sure they're back up to a full band, 3 piece? 4 piece? What we do know, is on Vile Veil, you can finally hear Bower's burgeoning interest in black metal seeping into the Skullflower sound. The title track sounds like it could have been listed from some lost nineties Nordic demo, all tinny buzzy riffage, buried howls, drums? Maybe, but if they're there, they're well buried under the muted murk and buzz drenched skree. Weirdly propulsive and frenetic, Bower and Co. kick out the grim frostbitten jam, infusing it with their own particular brand of blown out sheen, layered with sheets of feedback, and more noise than any self respecting black metal horde has ever had to contend with, the result though it pretty stellar, the sort of buzzing black noise that should hit the spot for metalheads and noiseniks alike.
The second track is more of the same, but a bit less brittle, subtly more melodic, with the vocals creeping up in the mix, but not sounding like vocals so much as like hissy bursts of white noise static, draped over the moaning deconstructed riffage and layered high end dronescape.
The final track, a side long crusher called "Vinum Sabbati", harkens back to Bower's noisier Total project, all high end and hiss and skree and screech, soaring upper register tones and loads of feedback, but the sound is sculpted into something almost orchestral sounding, strangely listenable (it's all relative!), even a bit melodic, but all wrapped in a constantly swirling cloud of caustic sonic abrasion, intense, and dense, thick and nearly overwhelming, fantastically and punishingly epic and brutal.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES. We got a bunch, but odds are these will be gone before you know it.
Holy shit is this an incredible match up. Legendary industrial/noise/power electronics/experimental guitar/drone outfit Skullflower teamed up with local gnarled avant headfuck sci-fi blast-buzz one man black metal horde Mastery for this super limited 12", with each band delivering some of their best material yet. This is extremely limited too, once we run out, it might take us a while to get more, assuming we can even get more...
Skullflower's Matthew Bower has made no secret of his love for / fascination with black metal, and it's been seeping into the SF sound for a while now, but strangely, on a record where he's paired with an actual black metal band, when you might expect Bower and Co. to deliver some kvlt black buzz grimnity, blasting and howling and hellish, this is something entirely different. While it is in fact blackened and buzzy, it's much more atmospheric and droned out, weirdly hypnotic and majestic, keening arcs of blown out distortion, buried melodies, and lush crumbling textures, atmospheric, haunting and hypnotic and yeah heavy too, with a super intense in-the-red production, that gives the sound a feral ferocity, and makes every note feel on the verge of collapse, even though it's all actually, in its own fractured and fucked up way, quite lovely.
Mastery of course is in his own gloriously demented and ultra damaged sound world, delivering the sort of lightning speed, dizzying blackened sonic fury that few others can touch, so much so, that we continue to wonder how this guy isn't utterly worshipped by the grim hordes. Could be cuz it's just too goddamn weird, cuz it really is. We're talking far out freaky WTF beyond black metal outsider genius. The sound twisted and tangled, a buzzing blur, wild sonic smears constantly colliding, the vocals rasping and croaking over squalls of blacknoise, and impossibly furious riffing, not to mention inhuman drumming. The guitar playing in particular is totally next level avant insanity, Mick Barr better be looking over his shoulder, cuz at times this sounds like multiple Ocrilim records playing at the same time, all spinning at 78rpm. Beyond that there's all kinds of weird noisiness too, industrial churn, wildly sputtering drum machines, total black metal bliss out head fuck radness. If you've yet to discover just how fucking mind blowing the music of Mastery is, here's another chance...
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES! Cool colored vinyl, and super striking sleeves, with space wolf artwork similar to the double cd on tUMULt!
As we've mentioned in our reviews of the last clutch of Skullflower releases, Matthew Bower's long running industrial/noise/power electronics/experimental guitar/drone outfit seems to be gradually growing blacker and blacker, with Bower's love of black metal transforming Skullflower's distortion drenched skree into some sort of avant black buzz. Now that blackness has manifested in a series of splits with 'actual' black metal bands, a forthcoming split with local one man band Mastery, and this one, with weirdo experimental Norwegian blackened doomlords Utarm, whose twisted Apocryphal Stories on Handmade Birds was a huge hit around here, and whose fractured and fucked up take on black buzz seems especially appropriate alongside Skullflower's own idiosyncratic noisemaking. That said, the SF tracks here might be the prettiest stuff we've heard from them/him in a while, the opener super melodic, ultra textural, distorted and crumbly, multiple layers buzz and undulate, buried melodies are looped and tangled into soft squalls of lushly textured crunch, and warped cascades of soft focus noise, even at ten minutes, it's the sort of dense, swirling psychedelia, that we could get lost in for a whole record. The second track, again, on the surface, a wild, noisy, washed out dronescape, but the crackling buzz and fractured FX seem to be draped over something much lovelier, a droned out thrum, a smoldering landscape of minor key shimmer, it's a heady concoction, a sort of pretty ambience in blacknoise clothing, but the prettiness seems to be the victor, infusing the caustic noisiness with a warm melodic glow, and again, we would have happily dug a whole record long version. So we were expecting the final track to be explosive and buzzy, but instead, it's even prettier, gentle guitar strum, pulsing electronics, a sky full of psychedelic squiggles, the pulsing building and intensifying throughout, eventually becoming the dominant presence, but even then, the sound is more moody and haunting than anything, the guitars doused in woozy effects, the overall sound almost jazzy, albeit some sort of black noise power electronics devil jazz.
Utarm keep the weird quotient pretty high with their two tracks, the first, a massive near 18 minute epic, all squiggly synths, and weird processed falsetto vocals, distorted spidery guitar melodies, almost like some sort of demonic lullaby, warped and damaged, until about 5 minutes in when an avalanche of crumblingly distorted downtuned riffage comes crashing in, the sound a black ooze, a sort of SUNNO))) like dirge, but wreathed in howled FX drenched vokills and wild squalls of high end guitar noise, super psychedelic drone-dirge weirdness that KILLS, and so it goes, for the duration of the track, a blown out, heady, heavy psychedelic noise dirge dronescape, that's weirdly hypnotic and melodic, while being darkly corrosive and caustic, some serious black beauty for sure, finally exploding into a closing burst of melody infused blacknoise howl.
The closer, clocking in at a conservative 10 minutes, starts out sounding like it could be Skullflower, noisy swirly and psychedelic, until the sound splinters into a weird sort of industrial creep, all processed vocal samples, churning dirgey basslines, anguished wails, heaving swell of crumbling low end, what sounds like dense collages samples, almost symphonic, all blurred into a wild but weirdly pretty din/skree, super tripped out, free form WTF psychedelic noisy weirdness.
Killer stuff from both groups and obviously WAY recommended!
We've been in intrigued (and a bit obsessed) with these Norwegian black metal weirdos for a while now. Frontman Aatselgribb, always sporting a white magistrate's powdered wig, usually a hat, and some sort of old fashioned garment, big wide cuffs, flowing coats, very striking, but pretty what the fuck as well. The covers and band photos are routinely super dramatic staged shots with the band members preceding over some sort of tribunal, or standing with arms outstretched batlike in the orchestra pit at an opera. On top of all that, Aatselgribb's sidekicks in Slagmaur are called General Gribbsphilser and Lt. Warder.
There are two other proper full lengths, neither of which we've been able to track down to list, both packed with buzzing blackness, haunting industrial stomp, soaring symphonic pomp, and all manner of gothic ambience. Domfeldt is the band's demo from 2007, reissued on cd for the first time, and as most people's entree into the sick soundworld of Slagmaur, it's a pretty great one.
After a dense swirling drone intro, like a symphony of swarming insects over a tuning up orchestra, the band launch into a sound that hovers somewhere between a depressive lurching black metal dirge, a Godflesh like industrial stomp, and woozy tripped out blackened doom. The guitars buzz and soar, not way up in the mix, sort of muted and off in the distance, the drums, machinelike and motorik, everything wreathed in a haunting murky oppressive ambience, the melodies ascending and descending maniacally, the whole sound very seasick and warped sounding, in the distance, strings sing, the vocals a harsh raspy croak, atonal piano pounds somewhere down in the mix, the rhythms sounding almost martial at times, elsewhere horns moan ominously, random bits of percussive clunk and clatter drift on heaving seas of twisted muted riffage, guitars unfurl prickly detuned sort-of-leads, the sound shifts from hellish circus, to stripped down new wave-y doom, to gothic crush, to 16rpm black metal, to fucked up SST inflected doom. It's pretty tough to describe. It's too slow and fucked up to really be pure black metal, but it's too black and twisted to be doom or anything else. At times it sounds a bit like The Cure if they were raised on Abruptum and Burzum, and fed loads and loads of bad acid and PCP. Some moments sound like a more specifically metal Gnaw Their Tongues, but for the most part Slagmaur do their own thing, a fucked up, sick and twisted, and gloriously damaged and demented thing. Yet another new name to add to the ever expanding aQ canon of super fucked outsider blackness. Needless to say (but we will anyway), absolutely essential.
Not sure how we managed to miss this one, with a name like that. Well, making up for last time, this one got sent to us a while back, and we finally gave it a listen and we were thoroughly blown away. And what's not to dig? The work of just one man, Christopher Ashley, aka The Slasher Film Festival Strategy, Crimson Throne is a stunner, trafficking in a sound similar to the current crop of retro synth wranglers, conjuring up lost scores to never-existed seventies horror flicks and lost art house giallos, and while that sound has been done to death recently, A) it's a sound we never get tired of, and B) this guy does it way better than most. The synth sounds are thick and gristly, the melodies sinister and ominous, the tracks laced with skeletal drum machines, and sweeping epic backdrops, as far as Carpenter / Goblin worship goes, it doesn't get much better than this. The opener sets the scene, a smoldering sprawl of gristly synth buzz, anchored by a low end bassline, a melody soon creeps in, it's not hard to imagine the credits rolling, a lonely figure walking through an abandoned town, strange shadows behind the darkened windows, is the figure a potential victim, or the person everyone fears? A pulsing throb surfaces, ominous synth swells add some emotional tension, and soon the song blossoms into a full on moody minor key synth dirge, the drums pounding, the various synths swirling, so sinister and creepy and so obviously sonic portent of impending doom!
And so it goes, every track here the potential soundtrack for some lost B movie classic, from the almost disco drums and groovy synth pulse of the title track, wreathed in sweeping swaths of keyboard shimmer, to the creeping kosmische swirl of "Weightless", which would no doubt score some 2001 A Space Odyssey type sentient computer / alien on board seventies sci-fi thriller, to the drum machine driven new wave-y grooviness of "Solar Winds", which sounds like the weirdly and creepily jaunty music that plays beneath the closing credits, over the last image freeze-framed, alternately, it also sounds like some lost cold wave gem that could be a Dark Entries reissue! And there's so much more. Rad synthscapery of every stripe, total retro, creep out, imaginary soundtrack, kosmische, new age, space drift bliss, peppered with blasts of disco-y grooviness, woozy psychedelic synth drift, and haunting woozy vocodered minimal wave (check out closer "Day Eighteen"). The whole thing dedicated to the Space Shuttle Ambition!? So good.
Essential listening for fans of Expo 70, Umberto, Blizaro, Zombi, Majeure, Xander Harris, Gatekeeper, Nightsatan, etc...
Despite the name, don't think parkas and scooters. Think, well, white rap. White rap by a pair of clever & cranky British blokes, who kinda sound like if Mark E. Smith from the Fall listened to a lot of Sensational or Kool Keith and decided to make a really WTF? electronic rap album of his own. Except there's two of him (seems to be one main guy, and a kind of a sidekick).
We got turned on to the Sleaford Mods thanks to a really cool record shop over in England, Norman Records, who put this album at the top of their Best of 2013 list, an apparently controversial choice even among the shop's own staffers. Some unconventional, outside of the box thinking there! So we figured we ought to check it out. And guess what? We can see why they picked it, though we can also see why it was a bold choice. Had we heard it last year, we might have been tempted too. It's addictive! And we don't always even understand half of what these geezers are on about, that's part of the charm - the thick accents (lots of "fookin'") and the British slang, only makes more wonderfully confusional their own weird brand of free-association wordplay, resulting in plenty of cryptic non-sequiturs that may or may not be intentional, though there's plenty of obvious witticisms too. The lyrics, near as we can tell, are mainly complaints about life and society and shitty music business stuff, full of references to wankers and "donkeys".
Here's some lines from the track "Shit Streets Runny" (that is, if we managed to transcribe it correctly): "Attention to detail / attention to detail / fookin' email / wap! mp3 / I need a fookin' bath / you ain't no roadrunner / you ain't no shoot shoot the runner / shit take on it / meanwhile back in the crap cave / I trod on my cape by mistake / and fell into the fridge mate / I fookin' hate Northern Soul / it's like Motown on the dole". Then the sidekick guy gets some good bits in too, like the one about "Brain Eno / what the 'ell does 'e know?"
And all that, their ranting and rhyming, and even a little bit of singing, sort of, comes on top of quite catchy minimalist hiphop backing tracks, with ticktocking drum machines and laid back grooves, simple and hypnotic, making for an oddly humorous and headnodding listen indeed, full of sing-song bits that will get stuck in your head, catchphrases too - we're all going "Wobble wobble wobble" ferinstance. Maybe it's even more amusing to us since we're American, and whatever we're lacking in context is made up for in sheer absurdity. Anyway, diggin' this a lot!
What more needs to be said about this stoner doom classic from 1992? Heavy, hooky, groovy, Sabbathy, a classic slab of metallic drugginess that launched a million pale imitators (not that Sleep were all-original either, being Sabbathy as we said!). Reissued now with, natch, a bonus Black Sabbath cover ("Snowblind" from the Masters Of Misery tribute comp) and the video for "Dragonaut", so completists might just have to buy it again, but even without those extras, anyone who somehow managed make it this far without hearing Sleep's Holy Mountain, well, now's the time to remedy that for sure...
Needless to say, this shit is HEAVY! Dirge-y, cannabis fueled excursions into the dark realm, swinging Sabbathy riffs, pounding devil drum percussion, and a wailing howl over it all. Fans of Corrupted, Boris, stoner rock, sludge, doom, and all that sort of stuff, catch the hell up!! Sleep's Holy Mountain was this so-Sabbathy bands MOST Sabbath-like release, almost too close for comfort - we're not convinced that Tony and Geezer didn't actually write this stuff!! Which in it's own twisted way is a very very good thing indeed. Wow. ESSENTIAL!
We listed this last week on our all-vinyl in-betweener. Been selling fast, but we do still have a few left, so here's probably your last chance if you haven't already pulled the trigger...
The very unexpected return of stoner doom heroes Sleep, their first new music in more than a decade. It's a single side long sprawl, originally released as part of the Adult Swim monthly series of digital downloads, now available as a super limited 12", and while they last, we have the even MORE limited green vinyl version, housed in a plain brown sleeve, and sporting a bad ass spaceman etching on the B side!
And as much as it can be, "The Clarity" is vintage/classic Sleep, starting out with a weird, almost electronic pulse, that soon supernova's into crushing, slithery, swaggery, stoner doom bliss, a massive main riff, the drums appropriately caveman crushing, the vocals the strangest part, seemingly beholden to post Sleep vehicle OM, sort of sung/spoken, doused in echo/reverb, but really, it's not all that different that the druggily chanted vox of the old days, and it all bleed and oozes into a perfect slab of druggy, downtuned heaviness, with plenty of tempo shifts, long stretches of doomy lumber, some seriously Sabbathy leads, the sort of head nodding crush few do better than these guys, the track bookended by a tranced out, spacey outro, where the drums gradually drop out, leaving just arcing streaks of guitar buzz, and droned out fragmented riffs, all tangled up into a mesmeric, pulsing, doom-buzz, minimal-drone coda that ends way too soon. Here's hoping this means there's a full length imminent...
As mentioned above, it's a limited edition green vinyl version, with etched art on the B side, brown cardstock sleeves, and no info except the label on the A side with the logo, the song title, minimal credits, and what could be Sleep's mantra or motto: "Praise Iommi"...
Finally, a new record from this UK black-bliss / screamo / dreamo / blackgaze outfit, who take the post black metal of groups like Alcest and Amesouers to the next level, transforming buzzing, blasting blackness into bleary, beautiful blissed out heaviness, less black metal and more black tinged dream pop. The last Sleeping Peonies was so limited we sold out in a heartbeat, and even though we are the exclusive distributor for this new one, we're expecting the same thing to happen again, as it's limited to just 130 copies, of which we got less than half!!!
It's a short record, less than 20 minutes, but it's more than enough, six tracks of gorgeously, melancholic and blissfully blown out heaviness, by turns poppy and prismatic, somber and haunting, the only real black metal elements remaining, are some insectoid guitar buzz, and some anguished vokills, cuz otherwise, sonically, it's much more aligned with classic 4AD goth, nineties shoegaze, modern bliss pop, and the production reminds us to folks like TIm Hecker or Leyland Kirby, all gristly and washed out, woozy and warbly, home brewed and super distorted, the sounds melting and crumbling, all wound up in gorgeous heart wrenching melancholy melodies.
The opener, with the very emo title "A Timid Eyelash Flutter", sets the scene, with dark piano chords, wreathed in reverb and echo, slowly enveloped by huge billowy squalls of blacknoise, swirling soft focus static, the sound super psychedelic, and totally mesmerizing. "Dreamrrz" adds some raspy vokills to what would otherwise be straight up fuzzy new wave goth pop, and sans those vocals could be some Brooklyn band on Captured Tracks. "Cemetery Kisses" too is all Cure and Kate Bush, tangled up into something fuzzier and blacker, but only just, a slow build to an epic softly psychedelic coda, replete with dramatic deep vox and wild swaths of distorted guitar. The title track takes buzzing black metal guitar, and wreathed it in prismatic shimmer, and recasts it as something totally dreamlike and blissed out, with a soaring sonic climax, that would give Godspeed a run for their money, but the sound here is pushed way into the red, crumbling and blurring into gorgeous abstract smears, while buried beneath all this swirl and shimmer, drums pound and piano plinks, leading into the hypnotically cosmic "Snowbound In Hazel And Furs", which begins all hazy and poppy, before the sound darkens a bit, burying the poppiness beneath some wintry buzz, heavy, but softly, and woozily heavy, settling into something much more gloom-gaze goth-pop than metal, but it's that metal underpinning that gives this bliss pop teeth. Finally, the record winds down with a gorgeous ambient closer, all looped and layered, and wreathed in soft FX, man, would we kill for a whole record of that mesmerizing dreaminess!
Gorgeous stuff for sure. Maybe too blissy and poppy for some metalheads, but their loss, and popkids might find this the perfect gateway to darker sonic climes, and really, anyone into all strains of shoegaze-y dream pop, who doesn't mind a bit of black and buzz in their jangle and shimmer, this is pure black-pop perfection...
LIMITED TO 130 COPIES, housed in a purple parchment envelope, with a cardstock Japanese style obi, an 11" x 17" poster, an 8 page 5.5" x 8.5" booklet, album notes printed on gray parchment, the envelope hand decorated and adorned with faeries!
As we mentioned before, Man Is The Bastard, one of our favorite bands ever, are not very well represented on the aQ website, mostly due to the fact that their records, and in fact almost their whole career predates the list, which we will address one of these days, maybe as their back catalog slowly gets reissued. But their musical legacy lives on, most notably in recent Record Of The Week honorees Geronimo, as well as a whole mess of other post MITB combos: Bastard Noise, Unicorn, and this here, maybe our favorite of the bunch, Sleestak.
We recently listed a triple cd set called No Skull Left Unturned, which collected a bunch of rare and unreleased tracks from various Man Is The Bastard related groups, and if you remember, we raved about Sleestak there too, and now we finally managed to track down a source for the Sleestak full lengths (the band themselves in fact!) so here you go, the last Sleestak record before the various members went on to play in Drunk On Blood, Monte Carlo 76, Slowrider, Bastard Noise, Spastic Colon, Trogotronic, Unicorn and of course Geronimo.
And listening to this Sleestak stuff, it's easy to hear the roots of what would become Geronimo, in some places the sound is uncanny, it's like a more raw, lo-fi Geronimo, which means this stuff is fucking awesome. Might as well just quote a bit from the No Skull review, since it sums up Sleestak pretty well:
What a more mellow MITB might have sounded like, an ominous low slung brutality, bass heavy dirges, moody malevolence, more a sort of beautiful brutal post rock. A loping bass line wanders through a field of hiss and hum and buzz, spacious and spare, almost like a meaner more malevolent Low or Bohren. Slowcore peppered with bursts of twisted noise freakouts, and distant bits of shortwave squiggle, a very Slint-like vibe, with the guitar locking into super hypnotic loops, over lurching downtuned bass, drifting detuned melodic fragments, if someone didn't know better, they could definitely mistake this stuff for some super obscure Touch And Go or AmRep noiserock band, indeed!
"Atomic Clock" is a slow brooder, a low slung drums and bass drift, with distorted vocals, garbled and buried in the mix, streaked with fractured electronics, interrupted by brief bursts of chaotic crunch. "Faster Than A Sleeping Bullet" is total Geronimo, a grinding metallic riff, and a super minimal bit of percussion looped and locked for nearly 5 minutes. "When In Rome..." is bass heavy riffy noise rock, howled vocals over slithery post rockisms and angular riffage. "Dumb Luck" is another track that sounds like it was lifted and re-done as Geronimo, a simple drum line, beneath a hypnotic chunk of twisted electronics. "Dumb Luck Part Two" stretches it out into something much more post rocky, with plonked and plinked piano, the drums a bit more up in the mix, still flecked with insectoid buzz. Every track here is amazing. And at least half of 'em will have you thinking Geronimo, EVERYONE who bought that Geronimo record, or who dug that No Skull comp NEEDS this. But even those of you new to the whole MITB world, and who missed out on Geronimo, Sleestak stand up pretty well on their own, a dark and fucked up mysteriously brooding, ultra heavy and sludgey, rhythmic dronerock, and while we described Geronimo as Man Is The Bastard meets This Heat, that would also pretty much apply to Sleestak, but take that equation and mix in more MITB and a whole mess of noise rock.
WAY WAY WAY recommended.
Beautifully packaged in silkscreened matchbook style packaging, with a printed insert, all housed in a thick plastic sleeve.
We still can't figure out how the hell we missed this band when they were still a going concern. Ex-members of the mighty Man Is The Bastard, a sound that is so aQ at times it sounds like they made this record just for us. Super rhythmic, hypnotic, krautrocky, heavy, noisy, squalls of analog noise, walls of feedback, buried distorted vocals, heavy and mesmerizing, like a power violence This Heat for sure. Sound familiar? It should. We described former aQ record of the Week honorees Geronimo similarly, which makes sense since basically, Sleestak eventually morphed into Geronimo shedding some of the grit and noise, but not all of it, tightening up their sound into something almost machinelike. Sleestak also sonically predated/predicted another aQ Record of the Week outfit, French post kraut noise rockers Aluk Todolo. So anyone who went nuts for either of those discs, or loved the Sleestak disc we listed a few lists back, you're probably gonna need this one too. Another mind blowing collection of mangled avant krauty noise rock, that is both brutal and abrasive, as well as weirdly repetitive and seriously heavy.
The drums are the core, and the heart of the sound, locked into seemingly simple grooves, the belie surprisingly complex arrangements, the drums are dense, hard hitting, the recording lo-fi but still thick and crunchy, swinging from doomy plod, to tripped out and space rocky, to totally abstract and spacious. While the drums pound away, the rest of the band wrap the rhythms in thick clouds of buzzing analog crunch, all manner of glitch and grit, squealing synths, rumbling downtuned bass, streaks of malfunctioning electronics, strange sound bites and snippets, and vocals, that range from howling guttural roar, to hysterical shrike, to hushed whisper. The band lets the drums drop out, sometimes for long stretches, the electronics and synths spread out swirling and churning, changing shape and sound, building all sorts of tension so when the drums do crash back in, it's super intense.
The Power Of Gemini(a was the first Sleestak record, originally released in 1997, and as such, it's definitely much more raw, more noisy, more lo-fi, the connection to MITB and various other post Bastard projects much more pronounced, but even back then, the band were already forging a super fucked up and gloriously idiosyncratic path, creating a sound, that managed to fuse the crushing heaviness and DIY roots of the members' previous bands, with a near maniacal future vision of some twisted, off kilter, and rhythmically obtuse post-everything sound.
Gorgeously packaged in a silkscreened letter pressed fold up origami style cardstock sleeve.
Pretty genuine sounding country twang from these Denver boys. Former punk rockers (we think, but aren't they all) kicking out gorgeous twangy classic sounding country rock complete with yodelling, spoken word breakdowns mid song, awesome pedal steel and
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Only got one left of these. And it's incredible. Andee ordered a copy direct from the label the SECOND he heard about it. We managed to get just two for the shop, sold one, and now have just one left. It's now out of print too, so this could be your last chance.
What is Spiderland? It's an iconic indie rock masterpiece, a record that if you haven't heard it before, well, it means you're missing out on what might be one of the best records ever made. Moody and mathy, brooding and epic, intense and introspective, catchy and melodic, noisy and abrasive, emotional and majestic. So many bands you love owe everything they do to this band, and this record. A $175 boxset might not be the place to start or the version for someone just discovering Spiderland, but we think maybe it IS. If there was ever a record deserving of this sort of lavish treatment, it's most definitely Spiderland.
So you get the record proper, on both cd AND vinyl, the holy grail here being a BUNCH of unreleased tracks, rehearsals and stuff, all of which, are worth the price of admission alone. But you also get a huge book, packed with rare photos from the Spiderland era, as well as the dvd of the Slint documentary Breadcrumb trail. All housed in a big beautiful box. Needless to say, the HIGHEST recommendation. One of you lucky aQ customers is about to get even luckier...
It happens to me every time. I can't wait to get the new Sloan record. I excitedly throw it on when it finally arrives and... I hate it. Seriously, every time. Myabe hate is too strong a word. But I am definitely disappointed and seriously bummed. So I
It's really crazy how many little scenes there are all over the world, scenes that could very well remain hidden forever, so many bands, some insanely amazing bands, who are perfectly happy to just play shows locally, release cd-r's now and again, never to be heard outside their little circle. Some scenes are particularly rich, bursting at the scenes with kick ass groups that deserve to be heard by folks all over. One such scene that we've been particularly smitten with, is over in the UK, Leeds we think. Their most famous export, at least around aQ, is Like A Kind Of Matdor, who released their first, and only record posthumously on Andee's tUMULt label. A crushing slab of flute flecked accordion laced doom prog. Which leads us to the Slomatics, another incredibly heavy, crushing and pummeling doom behemoth, hailing from the very same scene, and due to have a split 12" with LAKOM come out someday. Their sound is slooooow and doooomy and heavy, but unlike the prog tendencies of their LAKOM scenemates, the Slomatics traffic in a sound more Melvins-y, more sludgey, think Grief, Eyehategod, Bongzilla, Harvey Milk, Electric Wizard at 16rpm, that sort of thing, but a bit more abstract, a little more spaced out, repetitive, the sound layered and dense, a bit psychedelic, but still at its core, heavy, brutal, slow and sludgy. There are some brief moments of off kilter mellowness, clean guitars, loping drums, but those moments don't last long, quickly obliterated by another wall of lurching, lumbering crush. Some of the heavy parts are laced with almost buried wailing leads, and the vocals are howled and heavily reverbed, but not of that really matters as much as the riffs, and the riffs here are amazing, downtuned, blown out crumbling and MASSIVE.
Our favorite thing about the Slomatics besides their crushing heaviosity? The line in the liner notes that reads: "Middle-aged professionals by day, aggro-sludge losers by night"!
Heavy, heavy, heavy, and so very recommended.
Striking another blow for true metal, which as we all know belongs on vinyl, collectable vinyl at that (says Allan, who does not own a record player), our favorite San Francisco heavy metallers (featuring members of Hammers of Misfortune, don't forget)
San Francisco's epic metal geniuses unleash their third opus. Sheer heavy metal mastery. Damn! If you like some real, melodic heavy metal once and while (instead of the "brutality" and "evil" of that ol' black metal/death metal stuff we love too) the way they used to do it back in the '70s and '80s, with all the crazy fantasy lyrics and shredding dual lead guitar solos you can handle, then you need to hear these guys. This is their best yet, really, with better production than their previous disc, "Twilight Of The Idols", but with equally wicked songs. This band is usually described as a mixture of Maiden, Lizzy, and Sabbath... That's true, they're all that, and not in just a wanna-be, "those are our influences" kinda way either -- 'cause after listening to "Down Among The Deadmen" you could imagine Slough Feg getting in the wayback machine and sharing the stage with any of 'em at Castle Donnington and holding their own just fine! This is one of the only bands I know of where the musicians started as punk/rockers but realized that instrumental virtuosity and compositional craft characteristic of their childhood/teenage metal heroes WERE valuable and could be put to non-ironic, non-lame use. And were talented enough to do it. So, inspired by the past they are, but they're also their own weird thing, a cult act if there ever was one. With songs about Roger Corman movies ("Death Machine" is based on motorcycles-in-the-future David Carridine flick "Death Sport"), fantasy Celtic mythology (the "Heavy Metal Monk/Fergus Mac Roich/Cauldron Of Blood" tryptych) and the classic science fiction roleplaying game Traveller ("Traders & Gunboats"), with Mike's decidely unordinary (but great) deepvoiced vocal majesty, and the plethora of amazing RIFFS, these guys rule!
For those who need an obscure indie/metal reference, it's kind of like The Champs meet Cirith Ungol or something; bizarre, epic, baroque, proud, a bit silly, masterful, very metal. So worthy of the delightful cover painting by cult D&D illustrator Erol Otus. The true heavy metal record of the year. Unbelievable!
If angels started a pop band, they wouldn't sound like Built To Spill. They wouldn't sound like the Polyphonic Spree. They wouldn't sound like Grandaddy. They wouldn't sound like Elliott Smith. They would sound like Slow Reader. Although they would have to be angels that had broken hearts and who didn't know how to talk to that one girl, and who remember that one summer, and who are lonely and misunderstood, and whosit at home on their cloud writing perfect little pop songs, who even thogh they are angels sound sort of 'emo', who sing in perfect falsettos in perfect harmony and who sing about amputees and lost loves and drugs and stuff.
Slow Reader take elements of all of the above bands and mix them into a perfect, dreamy sweetpop confection. Not to intimate that this is light in any way. This is just as melancholy and dark as anything, it's just that the darkness is wrapped up all snug and tight in a radiant, delicate pure white cloud of rapturous sound, all pure and angelic, etherial and heavenly (to stretch this allusion to its breaking point). Heavily strummed acoustic guitars, pianos that tinkle and drop notes around your ears like spring showers, warm and rich organs that wrap everything in a dreamy haze, peculiar rhythms that range from super processed, heavily affected drums that sound almost electronic to "We Will Rock You" style handclap/footstomp percussion. But it's the vocals that really get me. Gorgeous and drenched in reverb, with a whispery urgency like Elliott Smith, capable of turning misanthropic tales of amputees into daydreamy lullabies. Outside of the Goldcard record reviewed elsewhere on this list, this is almost all I've been listening to. Fans of any of the bands mentioned NEED this.
Random note: Not sure what it is, but Slow Reader are the second brilliant pop band in recent memory to be born from weird punk/ska band roots (the first being The Stereo, who we've repeatedly raved about in the past). Not sure if it means anything, but it just seemed interesting.
With a name like Slug Guts, you might expect some ugly ultradoooooom from this band, but they express their misanthropy and disgust in another genre, as these punks Slug Guts are in fact Aussie underground garage rock wranglers, swampy and sinister in the grand tradition of Nick Cave & The Birthday Party, also sharing deviant DNA with the likes of Bird Blobs, King Snake Roost, Lubricated Goat, The Scientists, and other degenerate Down Under gutter crawlers of that ilk, from over the years...
We'd first heard 'em on their import-only debut Down On The Meat a couple years back, and are stoked that Sacred Bones have added them to their fine roster for this sophomore outing. Even if we hadn't heard of 'em before, the SB seal of approval (and the band name!) would have gotten us onboard.
Plus we love this sort of thing, being big fans of the bands mentioned above, so we're primed for Slug Guts' insidiously catchy caterwauling and late night, whiskey soaked dirgery. Perhaps not quite so noisy/nasty as Down On The Meat was, here Slug Guts show off their pop side, such as is, the record being a rollin' and tumblin', slow drunkard's stagger consisting of eerie guitar jangle, low-slung bass, and deep, drawled vocals, all bathed in loads of reverb, and menace. Opener "Howlin'" has a bit of a sinuous "Painted Black" vibe and indeed the entire album is cloaked in damnation and darkness.
Another fantastic lost score rescued from obscurity by Trunk Records, this one a fantastic batch of flute driven jazziness, the score to The Small World Of Sammy Lee, a British classic we're told, but also one that's fairly racy, receiving an 'X Certificate', which is maybe similar to an X rating in the US, we haven't seen the movie, but the liner notes tell us it involves lots of pimps and strippers and thugs. Although the music is actually anything but racy, instead, it's dreamy and melodic, soft focus and serene. We had reviewed another Kenny Graham release on Trunk, which we described as sounding like Moondog recorded by Joe Meek, but this is much more traditional. Playful at times, lilting and lovely at others, occasionally tense and brooding, once in a while with a bit of an exotica vibe, those moments rife with wild percussion, tangled guitars, wild drumming (check out "Four O'Clock Hop"), definitely the most overtly soundtracky number here, one track has some melancholic violin, which gives that song a sort of gypsy folk vibe, but the bulk of the record is slow and smokey, lots of flute, and vibes, skittery percussion, understated bass lines, plenty of horns, subtle strings, all woven into some dreamy, sixties jazziness, that besides getting played on repeat quite a bit, has us really wanting to check out the film!
Another fantastic lost score rescued from obscurity by Trunk Records, this one a fantastic batch of flute driven jazziness, the score to The Small World Of Sammy Lee, a British classic we're told, but also one that's fairly racy, receiving an 'X Certificate', which is maybe similar to an X rating in the US, we haven't seen the movie, but the liner notes tell us it involves lots of pimps and strippers and thugs. Although the music is actually anything but racy, instead, it's dreamy and melodic, soft focus and serene. We had reviewed another Kenny Graham release on Trunk, which we described as sounding like Moondog recorded by Joe Meek, but this is much more traditional. Playful at times, lilting and lovely at others, occasionally tense and brooding, once in a while with a bit of an exotica vibe, those moments rife with wild percussion, tangled guitars, wild drumming (check out "Four O'Clock Hop"), definitely the most overtly soundtracky number here, one track has some melancholic violin, which gives that song a sort of gypsy folk vibe, but the bulk of the record is slow and smokey, lots of flute, and vibes, skittery percussion, understated bass lines, plenty of horns, subtle strings, all woven into some dreamy, sixties jazziness, that besides getting played on repeat quite a bit, has us really wanting to check out the film!
Another album of alienation from Mr Loneliness himself, Bill Callahan. Callahan's never been a proper songwriter, so much as a lonely old soul who wraps his starkest depression in almost-melodies and minor key urgency. Beautiful and exhausting in its utter despondance. This time he enlists the assistance of Tortoise's John McEntire and Isotope 217's guitarist Jeff Parker. Some moments of breathtaking beauty here, definitely much better than last year's Knock Knock.
From the same label that brought us the damaged depressive blackened genius of Happy Days, and the melancholic doom-ed black metal of Leaden, comes this, the first release from Swiss outfit Smorzando, who craft a strange and haunting world of melancholy black metal, mixing the creepy drone-y miserablism of Burzum, with strange abstract post rock, and super blown out in the red production, creating something both black and brutal, fucked up and mysterious, with a super unique sound that is as much noise rock or post rock as it is black metal.
The drums are simple, the guitars go from distant minimal jangle, to blown out crumbling distortion, the melody is a simple keyboard suspended in a sea of black buzz, the vocals go from guttural growl to hysterical shriek, but are buried under swells of super distorted �in-the-red, shoegazey blackness. Occasionally, the songs lurch into furious blasts, but for the most part just lurch and lumber, lonely and forlorn, the deep bass and strange melodies sound like foghorns, the production wrapping everything in a grey fuzzy fog, the guitars effected and warbly, sometimes sounding almost electronic, other times sounding like a black avalanche of sound, always underpinned by a lilting melancholy melody or some ghostly ambience, so gorgeous and sad and heavy and absolutely beautiful. One of our new favorite slabs of depressive doom drenched black metal misery for sure.
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Each packaged in a super cool plastic clamshell cassette case, with haunting black and white artwork, and printed black and white fold out insert.
Not sure why, but it's been SO impossible to get enough of these to list, which is a huge bummer, cuz it's definitely turned into one of our favorite records of the year (and yeah, we know it didn't come out this year, but so what!). Our distros never have it, emails to the label never get returned, so fuck it, we decided to just list it with the 10 or so copies we have. So at least a few of you can check this out.
The weird thing is we were expecting something much more generic and garagey and run of the mill, but from the first song (a definite contender for jam of the year) we knew this was something WAY more. Fuzzy, and buzzy, and stoney and groovy and spaced out, crunchy guitars busy burbling basslines, some bad ass drumming, and some super wicked scowly vox, somewhere between the Lyres, Monster Magnet and the White Stripes.
"Flight Of The Navigator", the aforementioned jam, encapsulates pretty much everything we love about these guys and gal. A sharp jagged jangly main riff, with a killer stop start descending verse, a woozy soaring chorus, and then a total Monster Magnet bridge with weird processed vocals, and the guitars all space-y and stretched out. Some wild leads here and there, and HOOKS THAT KILL. We literally listened to this first track so many times, that it was weeks before we got any further into the record, but when we did, we discovered that the rest of the record was pretty much just as bad ass. The Lyres vibe can't be underestimated, but Monster Magnet is all over these tracks, as is Hawkwind, plenty of fuzzy poppiness too, classic garage infuses everything here, but it's way more poppy, and space-y and heavy and hooky. We could go on and on and on and on, but since the availability of this record is a bit up in the air, we'll just sum it up by saying this kicks ass big time, and if favorite records were indeed judged entirely and soley on how many times and how often it gets listened to, then we're pretty sure there's no other record this year that would even come close (if you ask Andee).
Snackpit, the magazine of tasty treats! No, wait, that's not it. SNAKEpit. Also a magazine of tasty treats - that is, if you consider obscure, old school '80s metal a treat!! Dunno why we've never listed an issue of Snakepit before, this "Heavy Metal Magazine" has long been a must read for the most metal of us here. Each issue, like this one, featuring a plethora of ultra in depth interviews with (mostly) long-defunct, cult '80s metal bands, or rather, the former members thereof, many of whom probably haven't done an interview in decades. The interviewer's questions are loaded with such obsessive minutiae, it makes most magazines, with the exception of Ugly Things, look vague and cursory in comparison. Usually the Snakepit writers seem to know more about the history of band in question than the ex-band members could possibly even remember! (They'll throw questions at 'em like, "On April 9th 1982, ACID played live at the Beurshalle in your hometown, Bruges, with SOGGY. What do you remember from that occasion?", stuff like that.)
So, which denim 'n leather clad cults get the Snakepit treatment this time 'round? A bunch of our faves: Acid, Raven, Griffin, Watchtower, Obsession, and (early, Neil Turbin era) Anthrax, among others. And then lots more we maybe, barely had even ever heard of before, such as Blackkout, Voor, Sexist, Excalibur, Existance, Messiaxx, Witch Cross, Baron Steele... All gripping stuff for us metal geeks!
Not everything is '80s, it just sounds '80s. One of the more recent bands interviewed is the late, potentially great Powervice. We'd been wondering what happened to them, they had a great, Iron Maiden circa Killers sounding cut on the Earache comp Heavy Metal Killers a few years ago, then (we learn here) broke up, bummer.
Plus, this issue's densely packed 116 pages are also graced with a section of reviews (reissues, new stuff, demos) which are, interestingly, often quite harsh and negative. And there's plenty of ads for stuff we're gonna want to hunt down as well. Oddly, though, 'cause Snakepit, while its editorial offices are over in France, is published Stateside by the Nuclear War Now label, there's ads for current black metal stuff that they'd never ever cover in the magazine. The closest they'd come are things like early thrash / death metal crossover, like the feature on Chuck Schuldiner's pre-Death demo band Mantas in this ish.
And, as a bonus, this comes packaged with the limited edition vinyl 7" with rare tracks by the Bay Area's own awesome Griffin, live in '82, including their classic "Flight Of The Griffin" and a cover of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".
This one came out of nowhere and kicked our asses. And to be totally honest, as is often the case, we ordered it almost entirely because the band had an awesome name, heck, they're called the Snivelling Shits. Fingers crossed we threw it on, and what do you know? The sound was as snotty and snarly and snarky and catchy and punk as fuck as the name implied.
The 'Shits were a joke band, formed by music journalist Giovanni Dadamo in 1977, designed to take the piss, but they ended up whipping up a batch of songs as good as if not better than any other groups at the time. Some impossible blend of the Buzzcocks, the Undertones, the Modern Lovers, The Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Velvets. Propulsive drumming, looped hypnotic riffing, and Dadamo's high pitched invective over the top. Take "I Can't Come", a bawdy sex tale about bedroom misadventure, with an insanely long list of other luminaries who couldn't come, culminating in the classic "Jesus Of Nazareth, heeeeeee can't come!" delivered in a snotty nasal whine. The rest of the tracks are just as funny: "Only 13", "Terminal Stupid", "I Wanna Be Your Biro", the all in French "Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi" and the impossibly catchy "Bring Me The Head Of Yukio Mishima". Every song here is a stone cold classic. Why these guys weren't huge it's hard to say. Might be because they didn't take it all that seriously, or the fact that they only ever recorded EIGHT tracks in their whole brief career, all collected here, along with some demos as well as the holiday chestnut "There Ain't No Sanity Claus" with the Damned (Dadamo also wrote a couple songs for those guys) and the previously released "isgodaman?" which was included on a comp under the pseudonym Arthur Comix because the record label didn't want the word Shits on their record cover.
Bottom line is this stuff is amazing. Hooky and haughty, frenetic and so bad ass. If you dig ANY of the above mentioned bands or have been digging on the current crop of snotty punk rock: the Catheters, the Thermals, Times New Viking, and the like, this will DESTROY YOU!!
A few years ago, Markus Popp, in the guise of Oval, gave us something completely new and different, original and stunning. A gorgeous, fluid soundscape that betrayed its source material: scratched and skipping cds. A dreamy, droney, slippery, stuttery chunk of shimmery, underwater electronica. This was well before the laptop replaced the guitar as the instrument du jour with the now all too regrettable "anyone can play..." mantra that supposedly so liberated music. Just like with the glut of shitty punk rock bands years ago, so too came an endless series of kids with more sound programs than good ideas. But that Oval record, Diskont, remains to this day a milestone in experimental electronic music. So it was a little bit disappointing that Popp began to tread water creatively, re-hashing the sounds and ideas that on Diskont sounded so inspired, but that on subsequent releases just sounded, sort of familiar. And now, eight years later, Popp finally moves on, progresses and offers up a whole new side of his Oval sound. The key difference, and probably the most appealing new element is the addition of vocalist Eriko Toyada, whose vocals are all whispery and breathless and intimate, recorded so closely that you can hear every breath, every lip smack, every nuance. All adding to Popp's gritty, fuzzy, glitchy backdrop. Think: your favorite Bjork record dropped in the shredder, and then left to soak in a warm, tranquil pool , before being reassembled, all smeary and indistinct. So completely mesmerisingly beautiful!
Don't know too much about these guys (this guy?) other than the fact that they create the sort of hazy mechanical looped soundscape we can't seem to get enough of. Imagine the music of Philip Jeck, Wolf Eyes, Tim Hecker, Starving Weirdos and This Heat but all stripped down and reassembled into some abstract collage of post industrial loops, gritty lo-fi dronemusic and abstract motorik krautrock abstraction.
Hard to say what exactly these guys are using as sound sources, there is some sort of metallic percussion, super processed vocals, tons of FX, layer upon layer of fuzzy grit, grimy blurs and deeprumbles, there's a drumkit in there too, lurking below the woozy fug above, but occasionally exploding in a little burst of sizzling cymbals. There's a definite grim gothic vibe too, when the noise occasionally peels back, it reveals a moody meandering sort of doom drift, cold wave, gloom pop, all tribal and haunting and hypnotic. With warm warbly organ, weird swirling production, before the record explodes again in a sprawl of clank and clatter and crunch.
The record shifts and transforms constantly, but often finds a gorgeous washed out hypnotic sound and settles in, sticking with it for long stretches, lulling the listener into an altered state, and then yanking them out and hurling them into an avalanche of crumbling distortion and fractured truncated beats, streaks of feedback and heaving swells of muted distortion.
Even at its noisiest, Born Into It manages to be weirdly pretty and super mesmerizing, but more often than not, the noise is tamped down by thick swaths of thick whirring dreamdronedrift, and wrapped around abstract skeletal rhythms.
Super cool stuff.
Hey, it's *yet another* glitch-alicious release from hyper-prolific label Tigerbeat 6, and it's better than most! Dwayne Sodahberk works in, around and through various dance, glitch and indie conventions, rocking lo-fi beats and bringing elements of electronic experimentalism to the party while not totally rejecting listenability, even occasionally flirting with four on the floor romps . Fun!
Not sure what it is exactly about this band, but there's something special that has sort of captured our hearts. It might have been seeing their amazing video on YouTube for the track "Heart Made Of Sound", where every word in the song is written out visually, in yarn, or food, or piss on concrete or whatever. Even the parts of the song without singing are represented visually with strange colored shapes moving and rearranging themselves in time to the music. And somehow, that video does sort of explain what it is about this band. It's fun and colorful, catchy and playful, but sort of strange, and a little bit unexpected.
This is pure, wide eyes indie pop for sure, simple jangly guitars, shuffling drumming, keyboards wheezing and bouncing melodically atop the rest of the song, and of course a winsome sad boy singer, lots of acoustic strum, and swooshy ambience. The closest comparison would have to be Death Cab For Cutie or maybe the Postal Service, Modest Mouse too, and fans of those bands will absolutely LOVE Softlightes. But those of us who wouldn't normally give this the time of day, have been playing it like crazy. The sound is just so glistening and gossamer, lush and weirdly spacey, lots of reverb and ambient swirl, some strange bits of electronic buzz, some drum machine, some power pop guitar crunch, some vocoder, it's all mixed in there, but none of that stuff would mean anything if this record weren't chock full of perfect little pop songs, which it is. Later on, the record gets lighter and lighter, almost to the point of seventies soft rock, but even then it's strangely lilting and lovely, almost precious, but never so much that it bugs, just enough to sort of wrap your head and fill you ears with soft poppy goodness.
"Heart Made Of Sound" is definitely the star here though, the one that gets the most repeats, and is definitely a possible contender for pop song of the year, and well worth the price of admission, but the rest of the record is right there behind it, blissy and jangly and dreamy and sucking us right in and wrapping us up tight in a perfect crystalline dream pop cocoon.
Intense melodic death metal from this Swedish band, this album (their third) having being eagerly anticipated at Aquarius since previous Soilwork records have become favorites of ours. At The Gates and Carcass are the key comparisions here, although this band also professes an influence from Accept and MSG! As with their other releases, great guitarwork and catchy songwriting together with brutal velocities and vocals, and just a little bit of keyboard atmosphere make this new disc another winner for Soilwork. Allan and Andee both give this a very metal recommendation.
Sophomore effort from this excellent Swedish death metal outfit, in the vein of classic "Heartwork" era Carcass. Totally raging melodic machinegun metal, so to speak.
Finally, time to clear away the dirt, drag that huge concrete slab to the side, reach way down into the ancient gloom and haul that old wooden crate up from the depths, pry open that rusted padlock, unwind the heavy chains, and pull out the nails, one by one, until we can remove the lid, and unleash the many many 'o's stashed there long ago. Confused? Well, it's been a while since we needed a bunch of extra o's for a doom review, but now that we finally have enough copies of Sol's Let There Be A Massacre to review, all of these o's are most definitely going to come in handy.
And yes, this is most definitely doooooooooooooom, but not of the slow motion near static sludge variety, no the doom of Sol is much more classic, and epic, melodic and majestic, almost like a Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride record slowed down, fucked up, and turned into something at once, totally familiar, but also strangely twisted and bizarre. The work of one man, a Danish dude called Emil Sol Brahe, and while he definitely has his fundamentals in place. Lumbering tempos, mournful melodies, thick buzzing guitars, howled demonic vox, the sound of Sol is anything but typical doom. It's another one of those instances where if you stripped away the distortion, it would almost be some gorgeously lilting slowcore post rock. The main guitar soars and sings, over a swirling wash of droning buzz, pounding drum plod. And the rumbling guttural vocals. The first track almost sounds like some strange mix of Skepticism and Godspeed, You Black Emperor. Very cinematic, and emotional, not evil or brutal as much as melancholy and haunting.
Check out the third track "Boginki", with its strange martial drum intro, the sound of the drums weirdly effected, the cymbals a distorted sizzle, the guitar comes in, a warped downtuned looped churning almost static riff, and then the vocals, super distorted and anguished, all wrapped up by a strange almost jig like synthesizer melody. In some weird way it almost sounds like Laibach. Which is definitely not a bad thing. There are occasional stretches of folky acoustic guitar, murky drones, and roiling buzz, but for the most part, Brahe and his Sol unfurl thick heaving slabs of that gorgeous epic doom majesty they just don't seem to make that much anymore. The final track is a weary woozy lament, all muted rhythmic thump and wheezing minor key accordion, finishing off with creepy minimal backporch banjo, folky and somber, mysterious and quite lovely, but in some strange way just as crushingly sad and funereally heavy as the rest of the disc.
Definitely essential for doomlords and doomaidens, and for anyone who has been lamenting the recent lack of multiple o'd reviews, but also, just melodic and pretty enough to possibly appeal to fans of apocalyptic doomfolk like Kiss The Anus, Ignatz, Woven Hand, Svarte Greiner, as long as they can handle their doom folk, HEAVY on the DOOOOOOOM...
It's hard to believe, but it's true. SOLAR ANUS IS HERE! It took almost 5 years, but it was well worth it! But what exactly is Solar Anus? An essay by French writer/philosopher Georges Bataille... a burst of plodding pummel from UK freedrone outfit Skullflower... but also, and as far as we're concerned more importantly, a band whose music conjures up a mysterious land of legendary monsters, ancient customs, cult beliefs and ritualized incest, all hidden just below the surface of our everyday world, a place only accessible through Matsuri, a group trance during which music and sound, lights and pictures help transport participants back to those mysterious other worlds and ancient times.
Such is the strange world of Japan's mighty tranced-out psychedelic doomlords Solar Anus, whose sound most definitely exists as Matsuri, a music designed to lull us into a trance and carry us off...Ô mesmeric, hypnotic and HEAVY.
Here, for the first time ever readily available outside of Japan, is the entire recorded output of the legendary Solar Anus, all collected into one massive head crushing, mind melting double cd.
Skull Alcoholic chronicles the band's dizzying trajectory, from stumbling, buzzing, bloody-stumped, sludge doom behemoths to druggy, tranced out psychedelic outer space visionaries, swinging wildly toward both extremes the whole time. An impossible blend of Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and the Boredoms, Flower Travellin' band, Pink Floyd, Boris and the Melvins.
Beginning life as a dizzy and druggy, slow motion stoner doom outfit, with their 1997 album On, Solar Anus channeled both the garagey spacestomp of old Monster Magnet, the epic miserablist doomscapes of Candlemass, and the purposefully obtuse sludge riffery of the Melvins, taking all of these disparate but distinctly heavy sounds and incorporating all manner of primitive percussive rituals, drifting dronescapes, 16 rpm Krautrock groove, dreamy angelic female vocals, massive fuzzed out guitars, huge in-the-red monster drums and swirls of creepy crawly dirge into a truly epic dronedriftdoomgroove sound.
The band's blend of propulsive tripped out krautrock, dizzying drum jams and glacial stoner sludge is at once ominous and swoonsome, crushing and psychedelic, lurching wildly from tripped out tribal Can worship to massive bulldozing metal grooves to super abstract druggy dreamscapes, often within the same song.
Album number two, 1999's Trance!! found the band trudging even more resolutely into a bleak and blown out world of dark doom, sounding more and more like classic doomsters, My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost and Cathedral, but completely tweaked of course, and confusingly blended with epic stretches of lurching lo-fi psychedelic Krautrock blow outs a la Amon Duul II.
By the release of their final album, 2000's Next World News, the band had stretched out yet again, dragging their druggy doom into a head spinning world of cracked skull outerspace trance, spinning even further into the void, not so much heavy as blissed out and psychedelic. Lots of abstract rhythmic workouts, like a more demented, damaged version of Finnish dronerockers Circle, a swirl of confusionally dense and relentless FX drenched Krautrock spacejams rife with belching foghorn brass, squawking birds, dizzyingly dense tangles of hippy drum freakouts, chanted vocals, as well as all sorts of studio fuckery, chopped up tape loops, warbly pitch shifts and layer after layer of fuzz and buzz and psychdrone blur.
Each languorous stretch of fuzzed out metallic groove is swathed in blown out clouds of Hawkwind bongsmoke, but broken up by bleary expanses of chilled out 4am trancemusic, but instead of a post-rave laid back Ecstasy come down, it's like crashing and burning in some dirty back alley from an all night PCP binge, silvery streaks of electronic glitch laid over a pulsing techno throb, surrounded by thick washes of processed tribal drums, the whole thing a very Boredoms like primitive percussive ritual, hypnotic and heavy, sprinkled with all kinds of sparkling sonic twinkles and drifting chimes, and underpinned by a wasted moody muted sixties psychedelia.
A quick look at the band's convoluted thanks/inspiration list gives another glimpse into their twisted musical world: German Oak, Crash Worship, Twink, The Electric Prunes, Stooges, Nebula, Pungent Stench, Timothy Leary, Monster Magnet, Ash Ra Tempel, Sodom, Sleep, Amon Duul II, Exit-13, Cathedral, Joel Peter Witkin, Saint Vitus, Church Of Misery, Corrosion Of Conformity, Romain Slocombe, Jimi Hendrix, Gong, Funkadelic, Budgie, Guru Guru, Electric Wizard, Brutal Truth, the Beatles and more. Phew.
And for all you Asian psychrock obsessives: The Solar Anus track "Dear Mother Coral" is actually a cover of a classic tune by Japanese psych legends JA Ceasar!
One of the weirdest, wildest, heaviest collections of druggy, dreamy, dirge-drone-doom-kraut-space-noise-sludge rock EVER!
Mind blowing psychedelic collage cover art, housed in a super deluxe die-cut 'solar anus' slip cover. Includes a massive 12 page booklet, with the original album art and liner notes. These two discs contain every single bit of Solar Anus ever, including their final recording, the previously unreleased nine minute title track, "Skull Alcoholic"!
2006 truly is the year of the anus! SOLAR ANUS!!!!
ONE TIME PRESSING OF 2000 COPIES!!!
