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German power metal that's just a little rougher, heavier, and ballsier than your general run of Helloween/Hammerfall clones. True, they've got catchy choruses and can write a great "pop" song, but they haven't forgotten that they're a heavy METAL band first and foremost. That said, just like on their previous album, they do a great Depeche Mode cover ("People Are People")! Like Iron Fire,

When we were teenagers, we pretty much listened to nothing but Billy Squier's Don't Say No and Emotions In Motion. You know that scene in Wayne's World, when they're all singing along and head banging to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"? Well, we were like that with Billy Squier's "The Stroke" and "My Kinda Lover" (which we always though was "My Candelabra"!) Also, as young rockers, we were totally into Billy Squier cuz supposedly he had a rider in his contract that said if they misspelled his name as Squire on the marquee he was then entitled to 100 percent of the door receipts!! How bad ass is that? All of that aside, those two records were practically perfect. Massive, super heavy power pop that managed to meld the heft of classic Led Zeppelin to perfect FM radio pop. Heavy and hooky as hell. It wasn't until way later though that we actually heard Squier's first record, the equally fantastic Tale Of The Tape, that just so happens to feature some of his best songs, as well as a couple classic drumlines (predating the ubiquitous drum part from "The Stroke") that have been heavily sampled over the years... Anyway, this record is a blast. This is the sound of the top down, driving around, blasting fucking super guitar rock, singing at the top of your lungs, Super Big Gulps in the cup holders, full of sugar and youthful exuberance, later this was also probably the sound hanging in the 7-11 parking lot, scamming on chicks and all that, but for us, it was just the coolest rock we had ever heard. "The Big Beat" is "The Stroke" a year earlier, big and dumb, super rocking, catchy as fuck, the perfect song to air guitar too, air drum to, whatever! Then there's the metallic stomp of "You Should Be High, Love" with its huge wall of backwards guitars. Total Zeppelin worship and it still sounds amazing. There's also the killer guitar pop of "Who's Your Boyfriend?", the minor key metallic pop angst of "Rich Kid", the organ heavy groove of "Calley Oh", the stadium sing along "The Music's All Right" and the album closer, the minor key dirge "Young Girls". Every song on here is packed with hooks, killer riffing, amazing drumming, Squier's soaring vocals. Should've been hits every one of 'em (and some of them were, rightfully so!) A lot of eighties rock doesn't really stand up so well after 20 or 25 years, but this record sounds as fresh and catchy, as heavy and totally rocking as the first time we listened to the cassette when we were 13 or 14.... This super deluxe reissue (from the same folks who brought us the Plasmatics reissue a while back, and the Armored Saint reissue elsewhere on this list) contains tons of liner notes, loads of photos, as well as two bonus tracks, acoustic demos of two of the album tracks, which are super cool! Andee sez ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED!!!

MPEG stream: You Should Be High, Love
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Ruleth is the debut full length from Austin (via LA) goth-gloom synthwrangler Jose Cota and comes courtesy of the always impressive Holodeck label, who in the past have brought us all manner of electronic and abstract weirdness from outfits like Silent Land Time Machine, Good Stuff House, Smokey Emery, Survive and Thousand Foot Whale Claw. Ssleeperhold's sound is definitely a good fit, falling more toward the witch house / grave rave side of the Holodeck spectrum, a sprawling, claustrophobic world of alien synth-wave and eighties style electro-goth synth pop. The opener is dark, and clattery, distorted and darkly heavy, reminding us quite a bit of Soft Moon, all churning gristling synth squiggle, and brittle rhythmic skitter, wreathed in layers of noise and crumbling effects, but then the follow up track, transforms the sound into something much more akin to eighties MTV, pulsing bass buzz, glimmering synth shimmer, poppy and dreamily washed out, and the whole record seems to be a fantastically tense push and pull between the two sides of Cota's musical personality, minimal dystopian dissonance, a sort of sci-fi cyborg dark synth dirgery, and more blissed out (but still weirdly eerie) electro pop. The two part "Timeghosts" deftly balances the two, draping some lilting melodies over a churning field of pulsing industrial buzz, an chopped up vox, the first part a tranced out minimal loopscape, the second a super tripped out score to some alternate universe planetarium show, atonal and fractured, a twisted bit of avant synthscapery, that leads us right into the darkly dreamy brooder "Ashes", which again pairs a percolating melody, to some weird hissy noise, and wraps it in clouds of grinding hiss and static, the glimmering warmth of main melody just barely keeping the ominous noisiness at bay. "F.I.S.T." is a fierce blast of Soft Moon style electro-goth synth buzz moodiness, the rhythms distorted and crunchy, draped over thick swells of buzzing bass, and peppered with FX drenched percussive splatter, less a song, than a chunk of tranced out sonic mesmer, eighties industrial by way of modern retro gloom punk. The record finishes with another two parter, "Dreamwaves", the first half all melancholy synth buzz and stuttery rhythmic skitter, loping and woozily washed out, distorted but sort of blissed out, the vibe super cinematic, evoking long brightly lit hallways, running endlessly through abandoned space stations, the galaxy sprawling endlessly outside the windows, a sort of spaced out witch house, that culminates in a more melodic, moody synth pop outro, sounding a bit like the soundtrack to the above mentioned lost in space, trapped in an abandoned space station art house flick, playing on as the credits crawl, wistful, and minor key, a little bit haunting, and darkly lovely. LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!!

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Out of nowhere comes this grimy slab of murky, sci-fi, synth kraut, cold wave, psych dub weirdness, that sounds a bit like former aQ ROTW-ers Fabulous Diamonds gone cold wave, or a way more blissed out and krautrocky Soft Moon, it's like some mutant strain of futuristic Euro disco, heavily dubbed, and then reimagined as the soundtrack for some dystopian post apocalyptic future age. A woozy, blurred landscape of pulsating squelches, arpeggiated melodies, lo-fi rhythms, lush space age synth swells, and hazy, washed out vox, dripping in echo and reverb and delay, gauzy and ethereal and almost dreampoppy one second, super dubbed out and near psychedelic the next. The songs here less verse-chorus-verse, that a single looped melody over a near static groove, locked into endless cylical sprawls, super tranced out and utterly mesmerizing. Stacian hails from Milwaukee, but could just as well be have been transmitting these sounds via tachyon beams from some mysterious planet, in an alternate universe, and from a wholly other timeline, it definitely fits sonically alongside outfits like the above mentioned Fabulous Diamonds, and it has a distinctly Carpenter / Goblin vibe, not to mention that whole modern retro Brooklyn cold wave thing, but Stacian adds a heaping dose of murky minimalism, with some of the tracks ditching the vocals completely, and oozing into a sort of zoned out space-kraut dirgey, while other tracks blossom into impossibly catchy near poppiness. Songs like "Almos Telos Tenoste", almost sound like something Joe Meek might have whipped up his mad scientist kitchen/recording studio/laboratory, while tracks like "Formida" anchor near weightless synth simmer, to a lurching robo-kraut rhythm, while vocals swirl and spin over the top, Stacian's throaty croon dubbed to high heaven and sent careening into the ether. And the whole record in fact splits the difference between the two, pulsing, pounding, percolating, motorik and mesmerizing, a sort of warped electro synth-pop run through a bank of malfunctioning electronics, and played back by a cyborg backing band. It's not hard to imagine Stacian, dressed in a strange metallic gown, hovering above an elevated dais, in front of the cosmos, spinning darkly behind her in the distance, while all around her, shadowy machine-like shapes churn and grind, gears spinning, lights blinking, a primitive futuristic symphony, unfurling wasted zoner kraut-pop gems and loosing them into space, left to glimmer and glisten in a sky full of dying stars. The cd version tacks on FIVE bonus tracks, which while retaining the same sort of cosmic kraut-murk energy, are way more lo-fi, and much more propulsive, the sound brittle and tinny, the synths buzzing over skittery robotic grooves, a brief songsuite of melancholic kraut-synth space pop, that while sonically not as lush and fully realized as the record proper, might just contain the catchiest jams of all, check out the closer "Micro-Trauma", which will get lodged in your mechanical brain after one listen, and gloriously gum up the works. WAY recommended.

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MPEG stream: Formida
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The first salvo of electronic vinyl madness from AQ pal Drucifer's new label comes in the form of four 12"s, beautifully packaged in distinctive orange sleeves (dance 12" style) and on nice thick vinyl, and sonically running the gamut from stuttery glitched out electronica to shimmery drones to speaker shredding digital rhythms to dreamy beatscapes. On probably our favorite of these first four Dielectric releases, Karen Stackpole employs an elaborate arsenal of percussion instruments: lots of gongs as well as cymbals, tibetan bowls, Thai tuned gongs, wind-up toys, music boxes, metal rods, dried bean pods and more. These are all played, rubbed, pounded, bowed, and struck to create a dense but spacious ambient soundscape of thunderous low end, rumbling ripples that wash lugubriously outward, as high-end shimmers and squeaks nestle alongside clatter and tinkle and splashes of percussive splatter. Gorgeous and thick, noisy and hypnotic, drony and transcendental, somewhere between 20th century classical, the stumbing free-rhythm workouts of No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand Of The Man, and the dreamy upper register Ur-drone of Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra. So nice! MPEG Download: "One" [/audio/stackpoleone.mp3] MPEG Stream: "One" [/audio/stackpoleone.m3u]

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There are very few bands we can think of who have so fully and utterly invented a sound for themselves, sounding like nothing else on earth before, and possibly since. Italy's Starfuckers are such a band. And it's a sound that fascinates us. Unique, true originals. One of our favorite bands (and by "our" we mean us, and anyone who belongs to the secret club of possibly demented Starfuckers lovers). Which goes a long way to explaining why we're making this Record Of The Week, a disc by a band with such incongruous and impolite name, and a perhaps problematic sound as well, for some. This disc consists of a reissue of their best / most definitive albums, 1994's Sinistri, and a never-before-on-cd mini-lp that preceded it, plus other, extra rare tracks. 16 tracks in total, almost 70 minutes of music. Or since it's the Starfuckers, should we say "music"? One definition of music is organized sound, and this stuff is organized in its seeming DIS-organization. Deconstructed music. Counter-intuitive rock n' roll. Genius. Here's what we've said about 'em before, in a review of their final album, 2002's Infinitive Sessions, currently out of print: "Starfuckers...play an abstract, sparse, and totally unique brand of what they term 'rock concrete', something that kind of sounds like This Heat falling down the stairs, but trying to be really quiet about it. Percussive and full of near-silences, their almost-randomly-improvised-sounding music uses guitar, drums, and electronics to take the 'glitch' aesthetic out of the laptop arena and into that of the live band. It's as if they played 'normal' songs, then removed about 70 percent of the music, and shuffled the remaining sounds around. It's counter-intuitive, disjointed stuff, yet every dissonant chord played on the guitar, every bassy electronic rumble, every drum hit seems to have meaning, unknowable meaning. Attentive listening will reveal compelling rhythms and structures." Yes, indeed, but that's only part of the story, and why this disc is THEE Starfuckers disc to get, if you're ever gonna get any Starfuckers, and you should. We said they established their own sound, but they built up to it from a more familiar basis. The earlier tracks here demonstrate that, while the Sinistri stuff is the best example of the special qualities of Starfuckers alluded to above. Those earliest tracks, the first 6 here, come from the band's 1991 mini-lp, Brodo Di Cagne Strategico. They're indicative of the band's roots in all things Stooges-y, being totally badass, driving, dark post-punkish numbers laced with shards of noisy, "out" guitar and free jazz saxophone squall... This is the sort of Starfuckers splooge that our pal JW, now head of the Holy Mountain label, once so succinctly dubbed "Funhausen" (i.e. the Stooges' Funhouse meets experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen). Spacemen 3 fans should dig as well. And that avant-garde, Stockhausen side of the equation comes more and more to the fore as this disc progresses... The Bordo Di Cagne Strategico tracks are followed by two compilation appearances, both "covers". You get their utterly unrecognizable (what did you expect?) version of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" from a cd that came with Bananafish magazine #11, and also their appropriately monomaniacal take on "Mechanical Man", from a Charles Manson tribute upon which they appeared alongside the likes of Skullflower, Controlled Bleeding, and Eugene Chadbourne, among others. We'd like to think that John Lennon would have dug the Starfuckers (if any Beatle would, Yoko Ono's husband would). Maybe Charlie would too, he's crazy enough. Then, tracks 9-15 are from Sinistri. The main course. The masterpiece. The Starfuckers aesthetic, fully realized, celebrates 'asynchrony' and minimalism, and that's what you get here. Are you ready? It's a mysterious, compelling soundworld, one that stokes the imagination and seems somehow unassailable in its avant garde gravitas. Serious stuff, but still somehow rock n' roll. In spirit, more than anything else. Anti-rock too (with the slogan printed here: "new music means destruction of ego"). These songs/sounds are quite curious, cryptic... Blats and bursts of chiming, chunking guitar. Blips and bloops of eerie electronics. Sudden percussion, sudden silence. Feedback. Suspenseful rhythmic passages. Much moody rumble and hiss. Bassy detonations, chaotic jumbles of piano. And, crucially, the calm, semi-spoken vocals, deadpan declamations in Italian, like we're being poetically lectured by one of the Starfuckers while the rest of 'em disassemble rock n' roll as we know it. How can we describe the Starfucker's Sinistri further? We don't even understand it. But we love it. Oh, towards the end, Sinistri's got the Starfuckers "hit single" (as far as we're concerned!), the song "Ordine Pubblico", also released on a Drunken Fish 7" back in the day... harking back to the Brodo Di Cagne material, "Ordine" is a sinister, cyclic, claustrophobic rock song, the brilliant last gasp of their Stooges-ness, hypnotic and handclap driven, with subversive lyrics that go something like this: "Criminale / Comunisti / Vagabondi / Terroristi / Prostitute / Extremisti / grazie / grazie..." You don't need to know Italian to know what he's saying. That's all followed by Sinistri's final track, "Macrofoneie Ia", which sounds like what might happen in the studio after the musicians had all gone home or passed out, if the machines then started "playing" themselves. Clicks and buzzings, as of patch cords being unplugged, or plugged in. Or, you could say it takes the Starfuckers "Eternal Soundcheck" (a song title of theirs on another album) notion to an extreme, as if you recorded not the soundcheck at a show, but the band just setting up beforehand, in near silence but for when electrical connections are being made. Then, the disc ends with a previously unreleased track from 1996 that certainly wouldn't have been out of place on the original issue of Sinistri. Hearing Starfuckers for the first time isn't just like hearing music you haven't heard before. It's also like hearing an IDEA of music that you've never had before. And, better yet, listening to Starfuckers for the 100th time, it remains fresh/strange, you still are piecing together the hidden structures of what's going on... While we said that they sound like no-one else, we HAVE referenced 'em in various reviews, to say that other bands maybe remind us a bit of them, usually due to their fractured and confusional compositional ways... Radian, US Maple, Supersilent, Sim+Otomo, even Tony Tears, have all garnered comparisons by us to Starfuckers for some reason or other, but still none of 'em (and nobody) really does what the Starfuckers do. Or ever will. If you've never heard Starfuckers, and are at all curious (you should be, if we're doing our job) this is the disc to get, as we said. And even if you are a fan, who already owns the long out of print Sinistri cd, you probably need this anyway for all the other rare tracks included. Record Of The Week? Reissue Of The Year! Well, maybe not for everyone, but those select few who 'get it' will really be grateful. And this, with the inclusion of their earliest, most rockin' material, is the most 'accessible' Starfuckers we could suggest. Italy's Sometimes Records (who were thrilled that we appreciate the Starfuckers as much as they do), have packaged this with a cd booklet containing everything we could expect in the way of photos, graphics, credits, lyrics, and liner notes... the latter in Italian, though we glean references to the Stooges and Demetrio Stratos of '70s Italian proggers Area, possibly another inspiration to them. FYI, btw, Holy Mountain will soon be doing a vinyl reissue of the Starfuckers rare 1990 debut lp Metallic Diseases, so watch out for that as well!

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We only have a handful of these, live double cd-r's, recorded at the record release party for that Starkey mix we reviewed a few lists back. A mix which KILLED by the way. And Starkey's live set is equally ferocious, packed with tons of unreleased jams and dubplates, some of the best dubstep we've heard EVER, crushing buzzing bass, swirling synths, jagged stuttering beats, the first track alone, a Starkey jam if we're not mistaken, is worth the price of admission alone, super intense and cinematic, about as heavy as dubstep gets. The only bummer about this collection, is that it's a live disc, so some of the tracks are interrupted by shout outs, but that's a minor complaint with a mix this strong. There's practically no information, no tracklisting, no artist names, just two printed discs in a clear jewel case. But that almost makes it better. One big ol' mysterious collection of low slung grooves and pounding rhythms, a few have vocals, one or two get all grime-y, but throughout, the sound is devastating, so much bass, plenty of rumbling buzzing low end, some wild synthy squiggles, chopped up loops, weird melodies and fractured samples, all woven into dense speaker shredding bass bin crushing jams, and the beats, holy shit, stuttering, shuffling, skittering, if we were more inclined to dancing, this would definitely have us destroying dancefloors like there was no tomorrow. As it is, even us wallflowers can dig Starkey's deep dark dubbed out din.

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It's always tough with DJ mixes, to figure out how much credit to give to the DJ, sure, we all have rad record collections, so why does this or that DJ get his mixtape pressed up and released as an actual cd and not us? Well, to be fair, some of those DJ's DO have way cooler record collections than any of us, and no matter how kick ass your mixtape skills are, there's something about actually having a job, that essentially IS making a mixtape every night for a living, that's gonna mean that person is probably gonna come up with some seriously kick ass mixes. That situation is made all the more reasonable when the DJ in question is also a music maker himself, which not only means he or she has a good ear for sounds and arrangements, but can link the mix with their own tracks, and assuming their tracks also kick ass, well then heck, we'll happily fork over our hard earned cash. And such is the case with this mix from dubstepper Starkey, who offers up a pretty wild and schizophrenic mix, that does indeed touch on dubstep and grind, but spends most of its time careening wildly between techno and house and hip hop and Miami bass, all tangled up with bits of dubstep and techno, some jungle, and some stuff that doesn't at all fit in any one genre. That said, fans of all the dubstep mixes we've been digging over the last little while, Mary Anne Hobbs, Box Of Dub, Science Faction, will for sure want to check this out, and folks into techno and electronica, will probably find this an easy way to ease into those offshoots. It's pretty solid all the way through, and from a mixing standpoint, the songs flow smoothy into each other, so much so that sometimes it's hard to tell when one stops and another starts, but there are some definite standouts, Drop The Lime's "Crazy Love" is an awesome chopped pop workout, very eighties, but all revved up and transformed into a lurching start stop stutter. DZ's "Oooh" is an awesomely heavy slab of woozy synth and dubstep skitter, fuzzy and new wavy, buzzy, almost like a grimier Justice, Zomby's "Aquafre5h" is a dizzying underwater bloopy groove, constructed almost entirely from eighties video game sounds, Pacheko offers seasickly ebb and flow of chopped synths and rumbling buzzing basslines, Food For Animals do their own 8-bit freakout, with skeletal drums over a constantly mutating wall of fractured electronics, and some weird murky rapping, and of course Starkey delivers 5 or 6 of his own tracks, ranging from dark harrowing dubbed out minimalism, to almost cheesy eighties disco, to pounding synth bangers, to a strange piano outro, all smoky and jazzy, laced with bits of intercepted radio transmissions and streaks of warm whirring hiss. KILLER mix. And thus, needless to say, WAY recommended. Packaged in an eye popping bright orange jewel case. Total dancefloor destruction, easily one of the best mixes of the year. So far...

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We've been huge fans of the Stars Of The Lid ever since their first record, Music For Nitrous Oxide, way back in 1995. And their last record, Tired Sounds Of... is a beloved favorite and all time AQ best seller. It's been fascinating to observe their sonic development, from murky guitar based 4-track bedroom guitar drones, all foggy and fuggy and murky and dreamlike, to their current sound, a more modern, almost classical sound, of rich reverberant swells, and lots and lots of space. The Stars' sound has obviously become much more clear and well defined, polished even, but everything we loved about Nitrous Oxide is still present, albeit in slightly altered form. The Stars' were always about swells, ebb and flow, melodies and compositions played out over expansive stretches of oceanic shimmer, and that at least hasn't changed on And Their Refinement Of The Decline. Notes aren't just played, they begin as tiny sparkles, little distant glimmers, and gradually grow into thick rich whirs, or massive rumbles, before just as quickly fading away again. Oceanic is definitely an apt descriptor, as the music here, as on the more recent records, does have that feel, like some epic dimly lit sonic sea swirling and churning, sometime tranquil and barely moving, other times heaving and tumultuous. It's the sound of a new dawn, an impending storm, or the birth of a galaxy, it's so completely epic while at the same time managing somehow to be pastoral and contemplative and breathtakingly beautiful. In the early days it was just 2 guitars and a four track, and the sound reflected that, much more gritty and fuzzy, the mood a lot darker, evoking the desert, the starry sky, a druggy dreamy innerspace of muted minimal shimmer. As the band grew, and added instruments, more players, recorded in real studios, the sound changed dramatically, and suddenly, instead of some indie bedroom project, the Stars were crafting pieces that could stand alongside any modern classical piece, while remaining dreamy and drone-y enough to tickle the ears of indie dronesters worldwide. Which is probably the most fascinating part of the Stars' sound. They were making music equally as expansive and epic and gorgeous 10 years ago, but those sounds were limited by the technology, by the band's meager recording set up. And only now it seems that the band is able to fully realize the sound they have been hearing, and essentially creating, all along. There are guitars here and there, it is after all still the root of their sound, but they seem to be overshadowed by the other instruments (although it is often difficult to pinpoint the instrument creating many of the sounds), heavy on the strings, three violincelles and a harp, as well as a surprising arsenal of horns, two trumpets, flugelhorn and clarinet, AND a children's choir!! But it's not just the players or the instruments, but how they interact and the music they create, and here the results are divine. Many of the tracks do sound like bits of modern classical stretched out into languorous stretches of muted drone and subtle shimmer, like watching the planets from outer space, observing the epic drifts of solar systems and an infinity of cosmic interactions, but others definitely reference more earthly sonic treasures, "Apreludes (In C Sharp Major)" has some serious Morricone going on, and "Don't Bother They're Here" references Scott Tuma's washed out guitar work in Souled American. But whatever subtle flavor is introduced into each track, the sound is definitely and distinctly Stars Of The Lid. Their shift to double disc releases also seems to suit them, allowing their slow burning soft swell compositions plenty of time to sprawl and spread and evolve into epic and soul stirring soundscapes. But even two discs is not nearly enough as far as we're concerned, so everyone buy this one, so next time, these guys can release a four disc set, or a ten disc set or a twenty disc set...

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Before there were a million 'drone' records, before every other person had their own cd-r drone music label, before anyone with a computer and a cd burner had their own 'drone project', and well before all it took was holding down a few keys on a keyboard or leaning a guitar against an amplifier to become an underground sensation, there was Stars Of The Lid. Armed with little more than a couple guitars, some effects and a four track, the duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie were capable of crafting incredibly lush and expansive dronescapes unlike anything we'd ever heard. Quietly channeling the druggy drift of Spacemen 3, the blissful ambience of Brian Eno and the processed guitar based landscapes of post-Loop project Main, the duo conjured up long sprawling expanses of near static guitar drift, crumbling distortion and shimmering feedback sculpted into billowing stretches of soft swirling sound. Sites set high, even their early works aspired to the modern minimalism they would eventually master, but well before the group enlisted extra players and string sections and incorporated flutes and pianos and began crafting multi movement minimal epics, equal parts Arvo Part and Morton Feldman, the band's sound was much more raw and immediate, much more lo-fi, but somehow managing to sound lush at the same time, music so perfectly crafted it seemed to transcend its source. A gorgeous, living organic world of sound, evocative and cinematic, dark and brooding, soft and utterly beautiful. Originally released way back in 1995, Music For Nitrous Oxide was the very first Stars Of The Lid release, and it's sound can be summed up by one of the song titles: "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy". Apparently, so did strange samples, bizarre snippets of dialogue, and most importantly, thick smears of distorted guitar. Total bedroom ambient bliss, but light on the 'ambient', the music on Nitrous Oxide is anything but ambient, it moves and flows and buzzes and howls, the sound is not smooth, it's raw and rough, distorted and warped, the production low on fidelity, but heavy on hazy, gauzy, washed out shimmer. This is almost like the sound of old SUNNO))) records, with all the distortion removed. Slow motion riffage, unfurling lazily into thick tendrils of dark melody, textures and timbres stretched and smeared and smoothed and blurred, tape hiss everywhere, but instead of an impediment, the hiss is alive, swirling and undulating, another layer of warm whir, giving the sounds more texture and more grit. There is percussion, but it sounds like someone tapping on the body of the guitar, then slathering it in reverb and delay. The sounds of trains and cars driving by surface here and there, as do bursts of radio and short wave interference, but the core of all these pieces is delicately and perfectly arranged bits of guitar, whether they be looped streaks of whispery high end, or deep rumbling slabs of crumbling low end, the guitars are looped and repeated and all tangled up with other complimentary loops, allowed to spread out, to expand, to fill up the speakers and overflow, or to trickle out like a summer stream. The sound shifts from hushed whisper to thick dense almost chaotic swirl, often in the same song. Deep bell like tones drift in wide open expanses of dreamily dramatic soft focus buzz, thick, super distorted guitar buzz is wound around a simple barely there drum beat, cymbals sizzle in a thick roiling black sea of disembodied and fragmented riffage, while elsewhere rubbery low end warbles beneath strange creaks and scrapes, swallowed whole by the occasional wash of blurred distorted buzz, and finally the sound of rainfall surrounds deep lush rumbling chords as they create an almost choral drone for perhaps one of the most moving pieces of drone music ever, certainly an impossibly perfect way to end the record. Captivating, mesmerizing, one minute soft and shimmery, the next dense and heavy, but always perfect, always personal and intimate, always mysterious and utterly magical. The name Stars Of The Lid comes from the strange images you see when you close your eyes, electrical impulses, mysterious shapes and textures, and never has a name so perfectly reflected the sound of the band so named, and rarely, has band so perfectly represented something so ineffable in sound. Practically perfect. And absolutely essential.

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Epic double cd masterpiece from Austin, Texas' kings of the lullaby drone. Stars of the Lid's sound, while similar to past efforts, has undergone some pretty dramatic changes. Their multi-layered 4-tracked guitars are still present in all their serene

RealAudio clip: Requiem For Dying Mothers part 1
RealAudio clip: Broken Harbors part 1
RealAudio clip: Austin Texas Mental Hospital part 1

A brand new record from the Starving Weirdos, two old old tracks, resurrected and pressed onto what we're pretty sure is the SW's very first 7". The group's sound changes so much, that these two archival tracks, while entirely different from anything we've heard from them, still sound very much at home in their constantly shifting body of work. And unlike the more recent material, is much more lo-fi and looped, giving the sound a very rough, lo-fi, sort of Jeck / Tim Hecker vibe, which obviously we love! The A side begins with a murky processed pulse, with propulsive krautrock drumming but before it gets more than 10 seconds in, there's a strange backwards swoop, and the track seems to skip back to the beginning, which takes up almost the whole side, a gorgeously fragmented tribal drone krauty loop, until right near the end, when the track shifts, the guitar builds to a chaotic squall, the drums blown out, the cymbals sizzling distortedly, a serious freaked out psych jam, with strange spoken word vocals, bits of feedback, and tons of distorted murk. The flipside is also loop based (or sounds like it), a militaristic snare, rat-a-tat-tat's out an insistent beat, over which a cool shimmery loop, cycles over and over, while in the background deep rumbles pulse and swell, until the drums drop out and the track finishes off with some moody washed out Jeckian ambience. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Pro printed black and white covers, with printed inserts.

To be totally honest, when we first heard the name Starving Weirdos, we definitely weren't expecting to like it. It was a strange name, that didn't seem to suit their strange abstract sound. The name seemed goofy, while the music was dark, and ominous, and fucked up. But then something strange happened, like it has so many times in the past, the Flaming Lips is a prime example, something just clicked and suddenly they couldn't bee called anything BUT the Starving Weirdos. And that music, could not have been made by anyone BUT those same Weirdos. We never had any sort of qualms about the music though. From the very first note, we realized these guys were on to something. Something pretty, and something really strange and unique. This latest missive comes to us from the Sound & Fury label in Australia and demonstrates the Weirdos' continual quest to explore and get lost in their music. It's hard to sound totally unique, especially when you're trafficking in the overpopulated world of abstract free noise or whatever, but the more we listen to these guys, the more distinctive their sound becomes and the more fascinating their approach to making it seems. These three lengthy tracks show three distinct sides of the band, each one drastically different, but still inexorably linked to the others. The first track sounds a bit like the Dead C setting up and tuning up in some giant airplane hanger. Clatter and clanks, crashes and thumps, reverberate into the ether, every sound wrapped in thick layers of natural reverb, while floating delicately around these strange percussive occurrences are keening streaks of high end, that just sort of shift an shimmer, while all around chimes and bells ring out. Like walking though some big empty building made entirely of metal, while all around you the bits and pieces of the building spontaneously ring and chime and resound. The second track is less clattery and abstract, instead, thick thread of warm vibration runs through the track, some sort of buzzing bombinating string, that stretches into forever, while all around it, various other instruments vibrate sympathetically, building to a frenzied ur-drone, before the vibrations begin to taper off until it's a barely there afterimage, hovering in some nether world before blinking out completely. The final track is a return to the metallic land of the first track, but now that huge metal structure is crumbling all around you, like the sound of metal raindrops, clang and clatter, a percussive free for all, while beneath, a gentle lilting minor key melody is stretched into a longform drone, that continues to drift dreamlike even after the metallic clatter has died down, eventually becoming shimmering sheets of singing metal, ringing out brightly and then slowly fading away. Packaged in a red textured paper sleeve, held shut with a black wax seal. The cd is housed in a printed inner sleeve, each disc with an individual piece of band made art. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, each disc is hand numbered.

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MPEG stream: Seance At Luffenhulz

A brand new full length from Humboldt County's masters of dark droning cinematic ambience, and another gorgeous chunk of masterful dark mystery. In the beginning, their sound, while still quite beautiful, seemed much more haphazard, much more improvised, the vibe decidedly NNCK or SHOTM, a bit chaotic and druggy, the sound of guys just sort of jamming and seeing what happened. Obviously we dug that stuff, a LOT, but the band have continued to hone their craft, their music becoming much more assured, much more dense and varied, more expressive and emotional, and weirdly enough much darker and scarier. Their last disc was a new score for their chopped up version of the classic film Sudden Fear, but Summon With Electronic Sorcery, sounds just like the title would lead you to believe, some ancient ritual performed in a cave below the Earth's surface, surrounded by demons and shadows dancing in the firelight, like it could be the soundtrack to some lost Argento film, a truly creepy and intense sonic sprawl� Four long tracks, each one a self contained soundscape of billowing blackness, layers of muted buzz swirl and shift, various steel strings reverberate and shimmer, melodic fragments drift through the ether, doomful melodies chime and ring out and are then sucked under, strange creaks and moans are blurred into a constantly evolving backdrop. Eventually, the sounds coalesce into huge black sonic swells, an ultra slow motion ambient doom, lurching glacially through flurries of percussive clatter, like some huge demon rolling hollowed out skulls like dice. Later, we wander through some old boiler room in an abandoned building. The clank of old pipes, the hiss of escaping steam, all woven into a hissy whirring drone, underlaid with droning guitars and streaks of shimmering melody, barely discernible. Chant-like vocals drift up from the abyss, haunting loops overlap and blur into each other, a murk that seems to glow from within, building to an intense staring-into-the-sun buzz. Finally, a field of high end sound, thick streaks of feedback, simple clattery percussion, distorted melodies, moaning horns, all doused in reverb and allowed to drift and intermingle in gloriously washed out slow motion. Like watching a decaying filmstrip of and old noise rock band frame by frame, the sound flickering in the dim light, the heat of the bulb causing the film to bubble and melt. So gorgeous. As always. Packaged in a crazy, glue sealed multiple folded envelope style silk screened package. You have to unseal it, unfold it, and then the cd is revealed inside held in place by a diecut slot. And of course, it's super limited. A ONE TIME pressing of only 250 copies. We got 40, but judging from past SW releases these will go pretty quick.

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How can you go wrong when the stickered quotes on the front of these reissues are from Poison's Ricki Rocket and Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx? Don't let that scare you off though, this is not some cheesy eighties hair metal band, although ALL of those bands owed a huge debt to Starz. When I (Andee) was growing up and first getting into hard rock, discovering Aerosmith, Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick and newer bands at the time who channelled that same sound, Hanoi Rocks, Smack, Kix etc... this would have been in the early eighties, folks kept telling me to check out some band from the seventies called Starz. And of course I totally recognized the ubiquitous Starz logo, an immediately recognizable hybrid of a neon diner sign, Big Star's logo and Van Halen's winged VH. A few of my hipper / older friends had the logo doodled here and there, some even had posters, but it took a few more years before I actually heard any of their music. And when I did it totally kicked my ass. Not metal, but definitely hard rock, big chunky riffs, wailing leads, pounding drumming, but the thing is, Starz were a pop band, more Cheap Trick and Kiss than anything overtly metal. Crazy catchy songs, arena rock ready for sure, but weird enough to be cool and just outside the mainstream, at least to those of us just discovering them in the eighties. The band toured with and hovered around the periphery of the seventies hard rock axis of Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Rush and Kiss and sounded like it. Some members of Starz even played on some of the Kiss solo albums. All four of these records are brilliant, although it's easy to hear the prevailing winds of change in their sound as the band grew and developed from record to record trying to keep up with modern music and the fickle tastes of the public and the charts. Their self titled debut released in 1976 is quite possibly their finest moment, definitely the heaviest, huge crunchy riffs, amazing vocals, top 40 worthy choruses, total fist pumping, denim and leather rock and roll. Listening to this record it's hard to imagine that they aren't spoken in the same breath as other seventies hard rock legends. Starz totally stands up to the first four Blue Oyster Cult records, the first couple Aerosmith records, the first few Cheap Trick records. A perfect fit, and it's totally obvious that your Poisons and Hanoi Rocks owe as much To Starz as they do Kiss or the New York Dolls or Aerosmith. Fans of seventies hard rock and proto-metal who don't already own this, NEED TO. Absolutely essential. And most definitely for fans of Kiss, Aerosmith, BOC, Cheap Trick, Aldo Nova, Thin Lizzy, Hanoi Rocks, Kix, as well as folks who dig power pop and even glam metal! SO FUCKING GREAT! Features five bonus tracks (demos) and extensive liner notes!

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Holy shit, does this RULE. This is the sort of stuff we LOVE, and miss, and wish more bands could still pull off. And these guys at least, most definitely can. Heavy, heady, intricate, proggy, instrumental old school style math rock, the bass thick and distorted and low slung and massive, the drums wild and pounding and octopoidal, the guitars crunchy and chuggy one second slithery and spidery the next, the songs constantly shifting gears, from gnarled and frenetic to spacious and epic, locking into super propulsive post rock churn, before slipping into weird tangles of melody and then back again. The band compare themselves to Keelhaul, Mahavishnu Orchestra and ALL, that last one seeming out of place until you actually hear these guys, they lace their chuggy churn and dense mathiness with super catchy little melodies that do in fact sound a little like ALL (or maybe the Descendents), although if we had to come up with some sonic references, it would probably look more like this: Don Caballero, June Of 44, Rodan, A Minor Forest, Bastro, Dazzling Killmen, Breadwinner, Crain, Rumah Sakit, yeah, you probably get an idea of what this stuff sounds like, but maybe just not how goddamn good it sounds, or how good these guys really are, check the sound samples, if it was 1995, these guys would be THEE band, catchy and heavy and hooky, with a massive Albini style production, it takes a lot to keep instrumental rock from being boring, but there's NOTHING boring about the 3 long songs on this disc, so tense and intense, intricate and complex, but not simply for complexity's sake, all the instruments busy as fuck, but not overplaying, instead, just a relentless and dizzying blast of hooky heaviness and majestic mathiness, another record we have been listening to nonstop since we got it in, and one we're probably gonna regret not making Record Of The Week... So totally great!

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The '60s/'70s psych reissue label Akarma comes through once again with this gem! England's Steamhammer had a heavy name and lotsa chops, but never really made the big time. Their first three albums were British blues rock incarnate, real good at that but not our cup of tea really. THEN came "Speech", their swansong. Something happened (lots of drugs, maybe?) -- it was real different. This is an unusual album for sure. Probably not what Steamhammer fans at the time were expecting: Psychedelic doomy prog-tastic epic instrumental slaying, with fuzz fx, jazzy percussion, and emotive vox. It's not metal but it's got a lot of what we like about metal that's for sure, and kicks ass on most of what came out in '72. Fans of some of the real heavy underground bands from the era like the Groundhogs, Lucifer's Friend, Socrates Drank The Conium, even Il Balleto Di Bronzo ought to check this out for sure! Unfamiliar with those obscurites? Well just imagine Led Zep gone off the rails. Creative, deftly timed/structured songs full of psychedelic atmosphere. From quasi-religious 20th century avantgarde interludes to manic guitar rippage, from gorgeous vocal lamentations to jammy improv spaciness, this is AQ-approved prog weirdness for sure. The 22 minute "Penumbra" that opens the record erupts from a spooky three minute intro into sheer pulse-pounding rock trio shred, then dives into a bass-heavy dirge from which a vocal chorus emerges...and on they go. Everytime we play this for someone who we think *might* like it, boy, they *really* like it. This gets a big thumbs up from all the heavy/psych/prog heads here at AQ!!!

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This is easily the best pop record we've heard in a while. Super commercial and catchy, but still crunchy and a little punk rock. When I was in Europe a few months ago, I kept hearing this band over and over again played randomly in punk rock mixtapes and over club P.A.s and couldn't for the life of me understand why all these punk rockers were digging this ultra commercial pop. Maybe it's because they're on the punk rock label Feuled By Ramen? Not that I'm complaining, it just seems a bit strange. Allan and Jeff both think it sounds like Journey, but they both listen to it incessantly. I think it sounds like Y&T, but that probably doesn't mean much to anyone but me. Imagine super glossy production (courtesy of Jawbox's J. Robbins) and unbearably catchy songs. The slow(ish) ones sound like Weezer or Sloan. The fast ones sound like pop punk, but without most of the punk. The new record No Traffic is a lot more glossy and FM radio, VERY Weezer, but I think the one right before it, Three Hundred is better, a little more raw and really rocking. Just buy them both.

RealAudio clip: New Tokyo Is Calling
RealAudio clip: Get Set For Sound
RealAudio clip: You've Got Some Nerve (from 'Three Hundred')
RealAudio clip: She Would Never (from 'Three Hundred')

We sold a bunch of these in the store before anyone really knew what it was, mostly to folks who were from Michigan, as it's an entire suite of songs about Michigan. Thanks to our pal Barbara Duffield who turned us on to this (she's from Michigan too!). But trust us, there's plenty to love here, even if you're not from Michigan (although if you are, stop reading here and just buy it. It's great. There's even a map inside so you can follow along and know which song goes with which place). Sufjan Stevens is a new discovery for us, and maybe for you too, but judging from how great this record is, he probably won't stay unknown for long. Dark and dreamy, sad and lonely, drifting and soulful, shimmery and sun dappled, gently strummed acoustic guitars, dark muted horns and lots of banjo, along with Stevens' delicate crackle of a voice, sounding not unlike a more depressed Archer Prewitt, with occasional female background vocals on a handful of the tracks making for wonderful harmonies! This record is chock full of warm and warbly, melancholic melodies, pastoral folk-pop soundscapes, and some of the best songwriting we've heard in a while. Fans of Palace, Songs:Ohia, Arab Strap, Sixteen Horsepower, Woven Hand, the Decemberists and that sort of mopey melancholia will love this! This just might be the best twangy indie-folk-pop record since Iron And Wine!

MPEG stream: For The Widows In Paradise, For the Fatherless In Ypsilanti
MPEG stream: The Upper Peninsula
MPEG stream: Flint (For The Unemployed And The Underpaid)

Killer reissue of the collected recordings of the -OTHER- legendary-drug-addled-shirtless-drunk-stumbling-rocking-LOUD-punk-as-fuck-Texas-combo (other than the Buttholes that is). And while the Stickmen have a lot in common with the Butthole Surfers (see above) their sound tends towards the noisy rocky end of the spectrum, rather than the tripped out space jam the Surfers were so fond of. And you may recognise the name as the Stickmen were one of the standout bands on the recently reissued Texas punk comp. Cottage Cheese From The Lips Of Death. Been listening to this like crazy. So great! Fans of the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid, punk rock and early Homestead records, should really check this out.

RealAudio clip: Christian Rat Attack
RealAudio clip: Gave City
RealAudio clip: What Am I?

Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. This picturesque hamlet is situated on the south end of that remote island, but there's not really a whole lot going on in town. Well, probably not much until recently - we are extremely curious about the Museum of Old and New Art that opened there up not too long ago, a real head-scratcher with its radically adventurous programming (seriously, lo-fi black metal weirdo Striborg is scheduled to perform there sometime this year, under the shadows of works by such figures as Chris Olffi, Anselm Keifer, and plenty of decay-oriented Australian artists... and yes, The Stickmen played the 'Dark Mofo' festival at MONA in 2013). So, the creative kids from Hobart back in the '80s and '90s were much more likely to flee to the much larger metropolises of Melbourne or Sydney over in mainland Australia. The Stickmen were the rare band from Hobart who persevered in their hometown long enough to develop into an amazing antipodean amalgam of Flying Nun / Xpressway NZ fuzz-pop, post-Birthday Party scum rock, and dour American math-rock, but probably not that many people ever heard about them. In fact, WE had never heard of them, until this album showed up in the shop; and yeah, they are pretty goddamn great. Their eponymous debut album originally came out in 1998 as a mutant, garage punk blast of sharp guitar riffs, driving rhythms, cheap-ass transistor radio vocals, and weird sounds transmitted from a turntablist who spun drones and noises on his decks. The photo on the inner-sleeve is worth a thousand words with the microphone taped to a broom (complete with bristles) and suspended from the ceiling via a thick piece of rope for the guitarist to sing into (or not), while one of the band members fiddles with a mess of pedals and reaches up to backspin a record. The sound broadcast from such a Rube Goldberg contraption is brilliantly intense, somewhere between the Swell Maps avant-punk melodies, The Oh Sees' jubilant mania, and the scientific aggression of Pitchblende. Tracks (like the emphatic "No!" or the belligerent "Wired Wrong") accelerate from a Tracy Pew swagger up to wah-wah freakout guitar explosions that wouldn't be out of place in a Comets On Fire jam, albeit much more punk and violent. It was around this time in The Stickmen's career that they played at the Risdon Medium Security Prison; and you gotta wonder if the energy these guys could muster should have started a riot... if it didn't happen, why the fuck not? A great, great find! We're all totally stoked on this!! Fancy tip-on sleeve with super high gloss printing in a pretty limited edition. Download code? You bet!

MPEG stream: Without A Clue
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MPEG stream: Who Said It Should Be Good?

Man do we love Russian black metal, Old Wainds, Nav, Ithdabquth Qliphoth, Meti Bhuvah, Blackdeath, Forest... A few years back we discovered this one man band and lost our shit, it definitely sounded Russian, but at the same time it sounded like none of those other bands, we were so blown away. That record, Vadrer, from 2007, became our unequivocal black metal record of the year. In the last three years, all we've heard from Stielas Storhett was a couple tracks on a three way split, that if anything just made us more anxious for a new full length, and while this is not it, it IS two new songs, two new long songs, two parts of a single longer song, and it RULES, if anything, Stielas Storhett have only gotten better since we last heard from them. So what's the big deal? Haunting cinematic strings, soaring and dramatic, give way to dense, blasting, sorrowful black metal buzz, thick and gnarled and utterly frosty and epic, the main melody totally majestic, trancelike and mesmerizing, we could listen to 10 seconds of this on a loop FOREVER. Not sure what it is about it that makes it so special, but it's definitely magical, the usual black buzz blast is laced with woozy arpeggiated melodies, the vocals are appropriately harsh and hellish, but seem infused with extra pathos, super emotional and intense, and the song itself, the arrangement, loping, midtempo, depressive and melancholic, lurching and lumbering with a cool little stuttery chug, and a washed out seasick breakdown that sends the guitar into high end ur-drone skree, before slipping back, before it begins to slow down, the vocals getting more and more intense and hysterical, the guitar soaring, cool harmonics and melodies drifting above the now doomy crawl, finally fading out. The second 'movement' begins with weird high end guitar filigree, and some mysterious voices speaking in Russian, and then the song lurches into action, a weary depressive plod, with more gorgeous soaring harmonies, almost like a way blacker Opeth or Katatonia, the song stays moody and moving until about 5 minutes in and the song bursts into full on blast mode, frenzied and frantic, quickly slipping back into a more melodic chug, with some amazing harmonized guitar leads, total classic metal, so epic, finishing off with more of the cinematic strings from the beginning. Holy shit. This guy is amazing, this record is incredible, it may be only 17 minutes long, but it accomplishes more in that time than most other BM bands can pull off in a career. Let's just call it BLACK METAL EP OF THE YEAR!

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Instead of leaving it for the end of the review like we usually do, we'll come right out and say it right at the beginning. BLACK METAL RECORD OF THE YEAR. Without a doubt, the debut release from Russian one man band Stielas Storhett, has stormed past all the other black hordes, and secured the number one spot on our best metal records of the year list. Even though technically it came out last year, we only just discovered it a few weeks ago, so as far as we're concerned this is IT. List rules be damned! And it seems very unlikely that any record will be able to top it. What is it exactly, that makes Vandrer... so amazing then? At first, we thought it was one of those BM records AQ seems to love so much, you know, the sort of damaged and demented, stumbling and fucked up, weirdo outsider black metal. But the more we listened, the less 'weird' it sounded, and the more it seemed to transcend the usual descriptors. In many ways it is fucked up and demented, but instead of being blatantly weird or experimental, the weirdness was part and parcel of a super personal, carefully crafted sound. A blown out wintry buzz, furious and fuzzy, relentless and over the top, but infused with mournful melodies and strange sonic layers. Lots of killer guitar harmonies, but buried in seas of sizzling cymbals, in the red drums, and some of the most gloriously distorted guitars EVER. The opener is a majestic epic, as sorrowful and melancholy as it is frosty and grim, with sweeping guitar melodies, and a loping, sort of stumbling rhythm, complete with long stretches of gorgeously bleak clean guitars over simple shuffling drumming. The second track counters with some of the most intense and furiously fuzzed out blackness ever set to tape. A killer riff that is immediately swallowed up by a swirling cloud of black buzz and chaotic drum damage. But even within this dense squall of mayhemic fury, lurk all sorts of haunting melodies and unlikely sounds, an army of ghostly shapes and sonic spectres, the musical version of wandering through bleak landscapes and fog enshrouded graveyards... The rest of the record veers between those two sonic sides, the blown out buzz, and the lilting depressive moodiness, from the weird depressive Katatonia like dirge of the instrumental "Nymane" (instrumental that is, except for some strange buried-in-the-mix, moaning and heavy breathing) that reminds us of a super tense emotional scene from some Dario Argento film, to the closing number "Dieses Eis Wird Niemals Schmelzen", which begins like some SUNNO))) style downtuned guitar buzzscape, before the drums kick in and the guitar splinters into strange syncopated chugging, while over the top drifts a gorgeous creepy guitar melody, eventually coalescing into a midtempo Burzumic trawl through some miserable sonic world of lost souls and damned spirits, to the epic seasick lurch of "Stille Weisse Wildnis", with its swords being unsheathed sound (a la Satyricon), its strange Fripp-like guitar interlude, and its stumbling stop start arrangement, and all blackened points in between. There are even a couple of covers, Darkthrone's "Unholy Black Metal", which is pretty true to the original but supercharged and doused with even more grim buzz than the original, and Burzum's "Erblicket Die Tochter Des Firmaments" which is an all time classic, but given Stielas Storhett's sonic makeover, insanely distorted and heavily affected vocals, and a million more layers of buzz, and a production that noises it up so much that minus the drums, it could be some killer Merzbow black metal track.

MPEG stream: Der Letzte November
MPEG stream: Vandrer...
MPEG stream: Grafin Dammerlicht
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We went pretty crazy for Stielas Storhett's Vandrer... record, reviewed way back in 2007, unabashedly proclaiming it BLACK METAL RECORD OF THE YEAR. We recently revisited it, and fuck, it still destroys, so much so that it's hard to imagine it wouldn't be black metal of the record of the year no matter what year it came out and no matter what records it was up against. We've been hankering for more ever since. And finally, the Dark Lord has answered out prayers. Two tracks, both unreleased, both completely amazing and like the full length before, pretty fucked up and freaky. The weirdness here though is more the strange almost major key melodies that swirl around the loping blackened dirge. The guitars are angular, buzzy, the drums pounding, the vocals more a sort of drawled howl, but here they're set amidst some strangely poppy and melodic guitar leads, the two parts mesh seamlessly. but still it's hard to wrap our ears around it. Like a Stielas Storhett pop jam, a Khold like groove, still black, but damn is it catchy and poppy. Later the track gets a little darker, and chuggier, but still the sound is strangely epic and majestic, and black hearts be damned, weirdly happy sounding. Which in itself is bizarre, but beyond that, it's a pretty stellar slab of melodic blackness. The other Stielas track is more buzzy and frenetic, but still strangely major key, even some bad ass almost Iron Maiden sounding guitar harmonies. The track veers back and forth between more traditionally grim blasts, and as if SS mainman Damian T.G. is struggling sonically, a musical battle between good and evil, pop and metal, depression and misery, effusive positivity and happiness, who knows, maybe he got a girlfriend since last time we heard from SS. Either way, it's a strange development but, man do we like it. Been listening to these two tracks nonstop! While two new tracks from Stielas Storhett is more than enough reason to pick this up, this three way split does actually feature two other Russian bands we had never heard before. Liholesie, whose sound is a sort of Pagan folk, percussive and dramatic and a bit Renn Faire sounding, but pretty intense and emotional nonetheless, and Mor, whose sound is a strange blend of melodic post rock, and abstract black metal, leaning more toward the former most of the time, we hear bits of Katatonia's epic doom pop. maybe a little Lifelover (although nowhere near as strange), heavy, super well produced, darkly dramatic, even at it's blastiest and buzziest, their sound is still rife with pop and gloom and a gloriously dark tension, although their final track manages to be pretty black metal indeed. A truly weird comp, but a winner for sure, more Stielas Storhett obviously, and two more cool obscure Russian bands to quite possibly obsess over....

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Besides having one of the best band names ever (inspired by A Confederacy Of Dunces, strangely enough), back in the '80s Sweden's Stomachmouths were their nation's undisputed masters of snotty sixties-style surf-psych garage, leading a revival that would last for most of that decade and predated the current Swedish garage mania (Hives et. al.) by almost twenty years! This compilation encompasses the Stomachmouths' short sharp burst of creative, manic rock and roll that lasted a brief three and a half years. Raw and noisy, catchy and rocking, the Stomachmouths sound like the perfect mix of twangy, reverby Dick Dale riffs, the fuzzy and crunchy garage-y buzz of the Sonics, and the cranky, spazzy brattiness of the Electric Eeels or the Styrenes. Sounds like a pretty amazing collection and it is! This has been playing in the store non-stop since we got it in last week. Awesome, super detailed liner notes too!

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MPEG stream: Dr. Syn
MPEG stream: Eegah!

Before we had actually heard Andy Stott, we had a procession of folks come into the store and tell us how incredible his stuff was, and how we should definitely get whatever we could, and yet, with every 12" release, they disappeared before we could get any copies at all, and before we knew it they were gone. We did manage to hear bits and pieces, enough that when we discovered that two of the records were being reissued together as a double cd, we could barely wait, and once it arrived, well, pretty much everyone here has been playing it nonstop. UK producer Stott seems to have taken the minimal downtempo soul of Burial as a jumping off point, taking that same sound and slowing it down even further, adding more grit and grime, creating a sound now twice removed from the dancefloor, a soporific, somnolent techno that fuses murky dirgey slo-mo soul with abstract house music creep, conjuring up a music that is both haunting and sinister, mesmeric and minimal, an array of looped melodies, melded to skeletal thumps and heartbeat like pulses, fragmented samples woven into the mix mostly to provide texture and melody, but for the most part all of the various elements are recruited to either become rhythms themselves, or to be blurred and smeared into a grim washed out backdrop, over which the rhythms slither and skitter. The dub element is huge, but it's a muted sublimated dub, only really showing itself, when a voice escapes the gravitational pull of Stott's black hole dub, the swirl of effects dragging it right back down into the murk, quickly disappearing into the inky blackness, leaving just the churn and lurch, and it's that balance, a delicate one to be sure, that makes Stott's sound so special. Too much rhythmic murk, and it's monochromatic and dull, too much melody, and sonic filigree and suddenly it's not nearly so dark and mysterious. Stott deftly negotiates the middle ground, dragging the more melodic elements into the dark and repurposing them, using them to infuse his sonic black energy with life. The bonus tracks on Passed Me By, are much more active, the pulsing house-y "Stitch House" sounds like Stott covering The Field, still all fuzzy and washed out and Pop Ambient, but much more rhythmic, and less murky, while "Love Nothing" lets the rhythms come front and center, skittering and shuffling over a rubbery low end melody, and swirling synthy chordal swells, not to mention a deep dramatic croon. It almost sounds like a sketch for a future song that would find the various elements dipped in pitch, slowed down and blackened. The second disc does dial back the murk a bit, instead focusing on the rhythmic component, wrapping everything in a Pop Ambient haze, but letting the beats break free of the whir and thrum, opener "Submission" is all hazy swirls, the only rhythm a sort of echo drenched dubbed out ripple, very dreamlike and abstract, before slipping into "Posers" which at first sounds very much like something off Passed Me By sampled water gurgles beneath a muted techno thump, but soon, fog horn like melodies drift in, and the beat blossoms into something much more active, a shuffling crunch anchored to a house-like pulse, processed vocals drifting over the top, the vibe groovy, but still washed out and druggily abstract. Which is how the first half of We Stay Together plays out, but then about half way through, the sounds begins to veer back toward the murk, "Cherry Eye" being a fantastic bit of muddied minimalism, even at its most propulsive, it's still a muted creep, as is "Cracked", although it does crank the beat a bit, conjuring up a sort of slow motion shimmy, that remains looped and mesmerizingly motorik. The bonus tracks on We Stay Together, in some ways mirror those on Passed Me By, in that they actually sound more like their opposite, "Work Gate" is super minimal and sketch-like, a little dubby and darkly Portishead-y, while "We Stay Together (Part Two)" begins life as a hushed blur, but gradually blossoms into another Field like chunk of looped techno mesmer. Released on the same label that gave us all the Demdike Stare records, which should give you an idea that while this might technically be techno, it's some murky dubbed out hauntology that transcends any sort of genre classification. A brand new unanimous store fave, and definite contender for Record Of the Year! Packed in a super striking oversized gatefold sleeve, with a different cover for each album depending on which way you're holding it, both stunning black and white photos culled from the pages of National Geographic.

MPEG stream: North To South
MPEG stream: Intermittent
MPEG stream: Dark Details
MPEG stream: Submission
MPEG stream: Posers

This one seemed so unlikely, we figured that it couldn't be right. That maybe "Batillus" was the name of the track. Or that the Batillus in question here, being remixed by minimal electronic mastermind Andy Stott, was just another beatmaker/soundscaper with the same name as the Batillus we knew, but in fact, the Batillus here IS none other than the NY metal crew whose records Concrete Sustain and Furnace we've raved about on the aQ list in the past. Apparently, Stott and Batillus shared a bill, Batillus professed their love for Stott, and a collaboration was born. And it's a doozy. The opening few minutes sound like a slightly darker version of what we're used to from Stott, all hushed staticscapes, buried pulsations, slow shifting textures, warbly minimal thrum, a sculpted landscape of hiss and hum, but soon the buzz grows more sinister, the rhythmic pulse, more ominous and caustic, the sound growing more industrial and metallic, and then the vocals come in, super processed and slowed down, a raspy, mechanical demon bellow, doused in reverb and delay and FX, dubbed out hard, and draped over a blurry tangle of tones, and a slow motion stutter step rhythm. So goddamn good. And as always, with a remix like this, it mostly leaves us wishing there was actually a proper band, that just sounded EXACTLY LIKE THIS. Who knows, maybe Stott and Batillus will join forces and make a full length together. Here's hoping...

MPEG stream: Concrete (Andy Stott Remix)

Over the last few years, we, and most readers of the aQ list have become a bit obsessed with the Caretaker, as well as the man behind the curtain, Leyland James Kirby, who as the Caretaker, and also nder his own name, has created a body of work at once moody and mysterious, murky and out of time, a series of releases that sound like the musical version of faded photographs, old 78's spinning in ghostly parlors, that ethereal, ephemeral sound a glimpse into some lost era, or some alternate otherworld, needless to say, pretty much everyone at aQ is utterly smitten. Apparently, The Stranger is yet another moniker Kirby has employed in the past, although this is our first exposure to him as The Stranger, and maybe not surprisingly, this iteration of Kirby's The Stranger has ended up on Modern Love, home to lots of other aQ faves, including most notably perhaps Demdike Stare and Andy Stott. Which makes sense considering the sound of The Stranger, which seems to be a darkly minimal, hushed and hauntological, slo-mo electronic creep, positioning itself somewhere between the skeletal electronic minimalism of Stott, and the ritualistic psychedelic hauntology of Demdike Stare. With plenty of Kirby's washed out, faded sound, buried melody mystery lurking just below the surface. And really, below the surface is where most everything is going on here. The sound is extremely minimal, hushed and at times barely there, a few cursory listens in the store, has us thinking this was a bit boring, like nothing was going on, barring some hissy static, and buried rhythms, with all of the tracks bleeding into a single monochromatic whole. But what a difference some headphones make, and we do recommend headphone listening for this, cuz once the volume is cranked, and the rest of the world is shut out, The Stranger reveals itself as something warped and wonderful, some twisted deep listening, heavy on the rhythm and texture, in fact, it's essentially a deftly crafted landscape of slow shifting rhythms and textures, straddling some sort of avant ultra-minimal techno, and something much more atmospheric, the 'beats' are barely there, often fragmented shards of percussion, buried pulsations, clouds of static that just seem to have haphazardly formed sort-of-rhythms, on some tracks they do drive the proceedings, but on others, they simply bleed into the background, with a few tracks sounding like pure ambient field recordings of subterranean pipe fights, "We Scarcely See Sunlight" sounds like Kirby recording himself in the sewers, playing the iron ladders, creating primitive rhythms from metal on metal, while all around him the sounds of the city filtered from above add deep moans and distant rumbles, while "Spiral Of Decline", sounds almost like the gothic industrial of Vatican Shadow, albeit with Kirby's strange idiosyncratic sound design (the cool main rhythmic component that sounds like marbles rolling around in a plastic tube!). "Providence Or Fate" comes about as close to the Caretaker as anything here, with it's crackle wreathed orchestral shimmers, the faded melodies and washed out ambience, the whole thing hushed and darkly lovely, reminding us of Tim Hecker and Philip Jeck as well, but here those dreamy swatch of sound are tethered to a primitive tribal rhythm. And so it goes, from clattery crunch to blurred thrum, tinkling chimes wreathed in rainfall like static, to glitchy avant drone dub minimalism, barely there downtempo slowcore electro drift, to groaning gothic dirge. As always, super striking Modern Love packaging, the cd in an oversized multi-panel sleeve, both the cd and lp adorned with mysterious, dripping, grey scale images of an old abandoned building.

MPEG stream: We Are Enemies But Not Here
MPEG stream: So Pale It Shone In The Night
MPEG stream: Spiral Of Decline
MPEG stream: We Scarcely See Sunlight
MPEG stream: Providence Or Fate

Featuring ex-members of Drunks With Guns and White Suburban Youth although you would never know it from the sound. Besides having the best band name ever, the Beatoffs take simple stolen sounds and loop and distort them until they become incessant and

We've been waiting for this reissue for 16 years. In fact, we briefly entertained the idea of trying to release it ourselves. It's a record we have been obsessed with since it came out in 1994, a super limited self released lp, a record we taped for everyone we knew, played for everyone we knew, the kind of record that inspired that sort of undying dedication, a totally unsung, indie pop gem from the early nineties, that attained a degree of infamy with a handful of weirdo music obsessives, but remained well removed from the spotlight it so richly deserved. Spin magazine even declared it one of the "Ten Best Records You've Never Heard", which probably sadly still applies, 15+ years later, but maybe not for long. Not if we have anything to say about it. Those of you who are in your thirties or forties, no doubt remember the era that spawned the Strapping Fieldhands, think Trumans Water, Thinking Fellers, Sun City Girls, Pavement, the Grifters, Guided By Voices... The Strapping Fieldhands would go on to make a bunch more records, but Discus is where it all started, and is STILL the group's masterwork, a chaotic and confusional jumble of nineties indie noise rock and British Invasion pop, and as the liner notes point out, there's also a definite pre-British Invasion skiffle feel to many of the songs, skiffle being the sound that inspired the sound of the Beatles and the Kinks and all the other British bands of the era. The record itself is a hodge podge, a stumbling, glorious ramshackle jumble, slipping from gorgeous perfect pop, to angular free noise drift, to dirgey balladry, to rollicking rocking, to super experimental sound collage, most of those elements and sounds blending and mixing, into a sound, and a collection of songs, that sounded like nothing else then, and nothing since. Folks into Elephant 6 might be surprised to discover there was a band doing something similar, and arguably better already, and everyone who digs the new wave of noise rock / garage pop, a la Sic Alps, Oh Sees, it would be hard to imagine that those guys hadn't heard and dug heavily the Fieldhands. The opening of "Boo Hoo Hoo" still gives us chills, the jaunty whistle, the woozy jangle, the faux British vocals, the immediately irresistible hook, the chorus with it's cloying melody and random cowbell, still one of the greatest pop songs ever. In fact, the opening three tracks, are another one of those timeless classic opening sonic salvos that remains pretty much untouchable. "Boo Hoo Hoo" is followed by "Sad Lament Of The American Indian", which begins all dirgey and druggy, totally reminiscent of Thinking Fellers / Sun City Girls and Polvo too, the chords warped and off kilter, the drums stumbly and chaotic, before slipping right back into another incredible pop jam, wrapped in streaks of feedback, hooky and jangly, and so catchy, but still so warped and just slightly twisted. "When You Came" rounds out the opening trio, with its dramatic slow build, and heartfelt sort-of-chorus, at which point the record begins its decent into (even more) madness, skipping gleefully from perfect pop to whatthefuck and back again. "Coffin Cello" is all splattery percussion, detuned twang, twisted vocals, moaning and groaning, if anything it sounds a bit like Cromagnon, total caveman psychedelia, which leads right into "Battle Down The Quarter Mile", a total classic pop gem, with strange looped basslines, descending crystalline guitar melodies, distorted vocals, and another KILLER chorus, which again slips back into an organ drenched, ultra lo-fi, droned out bit of weirdo outrock, before returning to poppier climes, "Mysterious Girl" is another impossibly perfect and hooky chunk of jangle pop, this time laced with cello, and other strings, which leads directly into "Luminous Bodies", a weirdo track that starts out almost punk rock, muted and murky, before blossoming into a meandery bit of poppy dirge, laced with synths and crunchy guitars, and those amazing, sort of British vocals, and so it goes. Push and pull, back and forth, tease you with a bit of sonic confection, only to bludgeon you with a flurry of chaotic crunch, and then nurse you back with still more pop prettiness, sometimes the demarcation between the Fieldhands' two distinct sides, not so distinct at all, which is precisely what makes them, and this record in particular so magical. Imagine the Sun City Girls, but if instead of being obsessed with Southeast Asian music, they were obsessed with the Kinks and the Bee Gees, Discus would have been their Torch Of The Mystics. Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand, another pop classic from the same era, is considered by many to be essential listening a classic of the era, while Discus often slips through the cracks, which is odd when you consider that both groups, and both records, are essentially products of the same sonic obsessions, but Bee Thousand, for all its quirkiness and brevity of song, still goes down a whole lot easier than Discus, which is perhaps one of the main reasons Discus remained an acquired taste, but as we all know, the easiest listening is not necessarily the most satisfying, so if you like a little grit and grime with your jangle, some whatthefuck with your timeless hooks, some noise with your pop, then this will undoubtedly be your new favorite record. And all the kids who have been digging the new wave of home brewed retro lo-fi garage pop, are gonna be in for a shock when they realize their favorite bands are basically doing what the Fieldhands were doing 15 years ago, and if anything Discus is WAY weirder, WAY poppier, and WAY BETTER!

MPEG stream: Boo Hoo Hoo
MPEG stream: Sad Lament Of The American Indian
MPEG stream: When You Came
MPEG stream: Battle Down The Quarter Mile
MPEG stream: Mysterious Girl

What is it about New Zealand? And the ease in which New Zealand bands seem to be able to transfrom 'noise' into something more. Much more. Street+X is a duo, employing violins, microphones, organs and REALLY BIG AMPS in a tiny room. Totally mesmerising, hypnotic, dreamy, shimmery, noisy, dirgy, lo-fi, high-end, spaced out DRONE ala Sunroof!, Total, Skullflower, Birchville Cat Motel, Dead C, Gate, Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc. I never get sick of this stuff and this is some of the best I've heard, Fans of the above mentioned bands NEED this.

RealAudio clip: Wherever You Shall Tread

We LOVE Street Trash, one of the silliest, goriest, goofiest movies ever, and easily one of our favorite good 'bad' movies. The label describes the 1987 horror flick as the ultimate "melt movie", which is definitely true, although we never realized that was an actual genre. And for lots of you, that probably makes no sense at all. But it will. Street Trash begins when a liquor store owner finds an old case of 'Tenafly Viper' in his basement, some kind of cheap wine, and decides to sell it cheap. It's of course snapped up by the city's homeless population, who begin to, yep, you guessed it, MELT!! THEY MELT!!! There's also a subplot about a mean Vietnam Vet who rules the junkyard, but really it's all about the glorious gore, and again, it's not bloody gore as much as it's a sort of over the top Technicolor gore, with the hapless victims of the tainted malt liquor dissolving into greasy pools of rainbow hued goop, most notably one guy who sits on a toilet to drink in peace, and who begins to melt and drip and ooze and eventually becomes a mushy prismatic pool in (and around) the toilet bowl... And really all the rest is just window dressing, you know, there's some story and a little plot and all that, but it's all about the melting, a grossout hobo holocaust that is like that head melting scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark stretched out into a feature length film! And like a lot of these films, we didn't necessarily remember the music, but revisiting now, we were pretty blown away. The score by Rick Ulfik is pretty cool, creepy and synthy, some tracks all weird echoey percussion, moody, haunting atmospheres, really cool stuff, but it was the eighties, so there's also plenty of goofy synthy drum machine dorkiness, and some geniusly cringeworthy, ultra cheesy sax driven groovers, what one aQ staffer described as 'trashjams', but to our ears sounds like the retro-futuristic schmaltzy VHS mall music of ex-Skater James Ferraro. One of those tracks is so good (bad?) that it gets lodged in our head like crazy, and we find ourselves not just digging it, but humming it to ourselves at odd times during the day, LONG after having actually listened to it. But the bulk of the record is made up of grim, ominous creepscapes, the whole thing in fact reminiscent of another aQ fave soundtrack, The New York Ripper, a similarly weird mix of cheesy eighties funkiness and seriously scary soundtrackery, the difference here being that most of the sound FX are left in, we're guessing because no real masters exist, so perhaps this was all mastered direct from someone's original VHS copy, and it sounds like it, as it's sort of tinny, and lo-fi, but it suits the sounds, and the movie if you've seen it, perfectly. And that's also a part of the score's charm, that most of the cheesiest tracks are bookended by the anguished FX drenched howls of some hapless soul melting, screaming in anguish, those screams turning into wordless gurgles, and usually leading right into another long stretch of creepy, synthy ambience. Then there's the final song, what we remember as the end credits track, a sort of bastardized version of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" kind of jam, with some of THEE most ridiculous and hilariously over the top lyrics EVER. In fact, we had forgotten about that track completely, and the first time it played in the store, had we all been drinking, it would have induced some seriously comedic spit takes, as it is, we were in stitches, lines like: "Shut your face, you little scumbag", "You can stop the bullshit cuz this is the end", "Oh what's this?? I'm startin' to ooze! you little creep! What's this fuckin' shit??" and of course "Your face I'm gonna reshape - I'm gonna eat your fucking eyeballs like grapes", all delivered in a dramatic croon, one that becomes increasingly more unhinged as the track progresses, and as the singer presumably begins to melt himself! So great! Easily one of our favorites in this recent spate of horror movie reissues (obviously, as it's our Record Of The Week). And the Lunaris label, the latest to throw their bloody hat in the horror movie vinyl reissue ring, did a great job, killer new artwork, extensive liner notes, the whole shebang. And like all the best soundtracks, it has us wanting to watch Street Trash again SO BAD!!

MPEG stream: Opening Sequence
MPEG stream: Viper Theme
MPEG stream: Paulie Melt
MPEG stream: Mournful Theme
MPEG stream: Flashback
MPEG stream: Junkyard Hop
MPEG stream: Wizzy Death
MPEG stream: We Do Things My Way

On my visit to Finland a few years back, I (Andee) was lucky enough to have Jussi from Circle as a host and guide. Which meant our three priorities were: recording/jamming, eating Finnish pizza (the BEST pizza IN THE WORLD), and of course record shopping (when Jussi was visiting HERE recently, he insisted on record shopping every single day!!). The record shopping was a blast, as it always is in a new city, especially in a new country, but it wasn't all just browsing, there were a bunch of Finnish records I was dying to get my hands on, and would probably never be able to find outside of Finland. But there were also a bunch of bands that I had never heard, but that Jussi insisted I NEEDED to hear, bands that informed his music, and most of the underground Finnish music we were into. One was a band called Mano Mano, a killer classic Finnish rock band, another was Motelli Skronkle, a totally twisted sort-of-pop/folk band (whose records will hopefully be reissued soon on Jussi's Ektro label), and the other was Pekka Streng, in fact Jussi insisted I buy ANYTHING on Love Records, a legendary underground Finnish label, but especially Pekka Streng. We did eventually manage to track it down, and it was just as good as promised, but somehow even weirder and more idiosyncratic, especially for a record that came out in 1970. Love Records seems to have been reactivated recently, having released those Arctic Hysteria compilations, as well as the super rad Psychedelic Phinland collection, and now, Streng's only two releases, from the early seventies, both released in the years before he died tragically at 26. Magneettimiehen Kuolema was his debut, and finds him with famous Finnish prog rockers Tasavallan Presidenttii as his back up band. But don't be expecting full on prog, no this is way more folky, tinged with psychedelic rock, and yeah, a little prog. While the sounds on Magneettimiehen Kuolema are not that overly strange, you have to remember this was 1970, and much of the sounds here were WAY ahead of their time. At its core, this is a dreamy folk rock record, a bit of twang, fluttery flutes, acoustic guitar, some spidery psych guitar, a little whistling and of course Streng's soft dreamy vocals. Think Nick Drake or Pugh Rogefeldt or Joakim Skogsberg, but then mix in field recordings, lush piano, dramatic crooning, skittery Indian sounding percussion, buzzy sitar like guitar drones, some wild psychedelia, strange glitchy electronics and analog synths and some seriously strange arrangements, but ultimately, all wrapped around Streng's simple heartfelt folky pop. So good. And it's easy to see how influenced ALL your various Finnish faves were and are by Streng... Es, Circle, Avarus, Kemialliset Ystavat, Anaksimadros, Kiila, Islaja... Reissued with three bonus tracks, and new liner notes, which are unfortunately (for us at least) all in Finnish.

MPEG stream: Gilgames
MPEG stream: Kylma Kaupunki
MPEG stream: Olen Erilainen
MPEG stream: Pitka Kieli

A lot has changed since we first hear Striborg, and his truly idiosyncratic Tasmanian rain forest black metal. Since then he's released about a million records, some on Southern Lord, and frontman Sin Nanna has performed and recorded with SUNNO))), so it would seem he's not nearly as kult as he once was (but much better known). But the weird thing about Striborg, is no matter how popular he gets, or how many records he puts out, NO ONE will be more kult. Hell, he lives in Tasmania, in a shack, and records record after record of some of the bleakest, depressive and totally fucked black metal we've ever heard. A big part of Striborg's sound is the production, which fluctuates wildly from record to record, and sometimes even song to song, and while we love EVERYTHING he's done, we're particularly partial to the older stuff, as if is so completely wacked and so impossibly lo-fi, someone here once described it like listening to a boombox in the shower, but that's exactly how a black metal record should sound, or at least THIS kind of black metal record. We got a bunch of these double lps, figuring that we had reviewed the cd at some point, when in fact, this was one of the many that slipped through the cracks. We do have this on cd, both the original version and the recently reissued Displeased version, if you want either, or both, but this is about the vinyl version of these two bleak black grim classics. Seems weird to take two records and lump them together on a single disc, but Striborg has been doing it since the beginning, usually a new-ISH record, with an older demo tacked on, and since his sound remains pretty consistent, typically the two record work well together, but what's different here is that Black Desolate Winter and Depressive Hibernation were both recorded in 2005 and released together, and thus feel like two parts of a single whole. Each record is all about the title track, "Black Desolate Winter", the song, is 30 minutes long! Surrounded by shorted blasts and bits of drone and black ambience, "Depressive Hibernation" is nearly 15 minutes, it too, surrounded by shorter tracks, the whole disc finishing off with the nearly 11 minute "In The Gloom Of The Foreboding Night." Striborg initiates already know what to expect, stumbling off kilter drumming, brittle buzzing guitars that sounds like swarms of insects, mournful melodies, the production very much like a boom box in the shower, the drums more of a pt pt pt pt than a blast or a pound, the vocals a wail buried in the mix, the guitars, sometimes all spidery and arpeggiated, but more often than not lost in clouds of furious buzz and crumbling distortion. "Black Desolate Winter" is a depressive buzzing black epic, that slips from lurching blast to woozy midtempo plod and back again over the course of its half hour, with ambient outros, appropriately creepy and warped sounding before and after. Depressive Hibernation is more of a proper record, "Entangled In The Black Roots Of The Forest" is another chunk of frenetic buzz, doused in sheets of white noise distortion, but with some of the most tweaked vocals ever, raspy and demonic, but super effected so they seem to go spinning off into distance. "Depressive Hibernation" the track, begins all pretty and melancholy, but when the guitars kick in, they're barely riffs at all, it's like someone turned on a white noise generator. A shriek and then some simple drumming turn the track into a creepy Burzumic plod, the super processed shrieks continue on, making for another of the weirdest BM tracks ever. The rest of the disc plays out equal parts deep black drones, and fucked up and freaked out buzz drenched blurs, peppered with bizarre vocals, buried drums and maybe even a riff or two. Needless to say, there is a reason, Striborg was always the barometer by which we measured all other 'fucked up' or 'damaged' black metal, and listening to these records again, it seems to us that Striborg might still reign supreme! Striborg on vinyl is rare, so we were super psyched to get these, heavy vinyl, deluxe heavy weight gatefold sleeves, and of course limited limited limited!!!

MPEG stream: Black Desolate Winter
MPEG stream: Depressive Hibernation

Lovers of damaged demented bizarre baffling freaked out and fucked up black metal rejoice!! We couldn't be more excited if there was a brand new Benighted Leams record. FINALLY, we're able to review and list a record from one of our all time favorite outsider one man black metal bands, Striborg. Most folks have probably never actually heard Striborg, even though this will mark release #15 or thereabouts. But it wasn't for lack of trying on our part. We have been completely obsessed with Striborg since we first heard him a few years back and have been trying to get enough copies of ANY of his releases to list. Everytime we found someone who carried Striborg records, we would order 30 or 40 or 50, and would get 1 or 2. Or more likely none. We even resorted to writing letters to the band (he apparently lives in a shack in the woods with no phone and no computer!) And while most folks have never -heard- Striborg, you've probably at least heard OF him. Whether it was in an aQuarius review, we've referenced Striborg as the ultimate outsider black metal band in reviews of records by black metal weirdos Dead Reptile Shrine, Lugubrum, Draugar, Detsorgsekalf, Hidden and more, or on the recent black metallized SUNNO))) record Black One, which even had a track named for the dark mastermind behind Striborg Sin-Nanna. But what is it exactly about Striborg that has everyone freaking out? Five words for you: Tasmanian rain forest black metal! And it's just as grim and weird and as amazing as that might lead you to believe. We have Southern Lord to thank for this, the first readily available Striborg release, which continues his tradition of combining multiple releases on single cds, this one includes the brand new 2006 recording. Embittered Darkness, as well as the super rare Isle De Morts release recorded almost a decade ago, way back in 1997. So what exactly does Tasmanian rain forest black metal sound like? Definitely grim, and lo-fi, ultra personal, demented and damaged, Benighted Leams, Abruptum, Dead Reptile Shrine, Necrofrost, Emit, Furze, Urfaust and all the rest of the baffling black metal hierarchy should give you a rough idea, but Striborg, is even further out, way more fucked up, more strangely psychedelic and freaked out, a doomy drone drenched black buzz, a growling fuzzy missive from the depths of some dark netherworld. Haunting washes of gauzy synthesizer, mournful minor key acoustic guitars, dreary overcast swaths of depressive melancholia, and you think other black metal bands are buzzy?! Striborg take that black buzz and whip it into a furious freaked out frenzy, a guitar buzz like a million bumble bees, but sped WAY up, a prickly, fuzzy swirl, even at it's most doomy and plodding, Striborg drenches everything in that overblown buzz, a thick sandpapery ambience, that is the metal equivalent of walking through the pouring rain, under a full moon, through a graveyard at the edge of the world. Sin-Nanna growls and gurgles his obtuse black ravings in an impossibly creepy animalistic voice, somewhere between a rabid dog, a tiny demon, and a wicked old witch, often everything will drop out and all that will be left is a buzzing tangle of hissing harsh vocal and fuzzed out black riffing. Buried in the murk and mire are weird, rehearsal space drums, really flat and dry sounding, erupting in spastic and chaotic burts, not just blast beats, but instead bizarre blasts of percussive tangle amidst stretches of almost punk rock drumming, although most of Embittered Darkness is spent at a crawl, a buzzing midtempo dirge, as doomy as it is black, if not more so. Imagine an ultra lo-fi doom metal Xasthur, slow motion misery dotted with occasional barrages of black metal buzz and once in a while surges of slithering black ambience. So totally creepy and beautiful, fucked up and gorgeous, a massive soul crushing slab of doom drenched black metal brilliance. Isle De Morts, from 1997, is a lot more traditional, and a lot faster, almost every track a frenetic and frenzied burst of blackened and buzzing brutality, lo-fi but completely blown out and in the red, channeling Transylvanian Hunger era Darkthrone, but filtered through Striborg's cracked sonic kaleidoscope, rendering what might have been just some classic Norwegian BM worship, as a creepy and cracked world of ultrabuzz and overblown acidfried blackness, blast beats so fast they sound like radio static, guitars so buzzy and blurry they turn into thick washes of crumbling prickly sound, and croaking toadlike vocals so high in the mix it sounds like the band is in a different room. So gloriously fucked up and freaked out. One listen is all it takes to see why Striborg towers above all his bizarre black metal contemporaries, ruling the doomed and damaged kingdom of ultrapersonal black metal dementia with an iron fist, a busted 4-track and a growing legion of buzz hungry minions!

MPEG stream: Wrapped In A Cacoon Out Of Harm's Way
MPEG stream: Race Of Apathy
MPEG stream: Through The Veils Of Darkness
MPEG stream: Descending From A Black Sky

Deep in the damp backwoods of Tasmania (yes, Tasmania!), one of our very favorite one-man black metal bands lurks. Sin-nanna is that man, Striborg is that band. The eagerly awaited Ghostwoodlands is the latest manifestation of Striborg's musical misanthropy, another extreme and extremely "outsider" statement of black metal idiosyncrasy and fucked up brilliance. Starting with track one, "Bete Noirs", every other track on Ghostwoodlands is an ambient episode of beautifully droning, isolationist electronics, psychedelic blackness that's not overtly metal at all (and could give some additional weight to the ridiculous rumor we once heard that Sin-nanna is actually Australian dronologist Oren Ambarchi). The longer, even-numbered songs, though, are indeed recognizable as a species of black metal, wherein Sin-nanna's guitar (and voice, and keyboards, and much else) still sounds like some noxious gas escaping under pressure. This aerosol mist of grim musik is, as always, accompanied by his own primitive "timekeeping", percussive thump and clatter full of many confusional fills, blasts and beats. This drumming is seemingly (and sometimes startlingly) one of Sin-nanna's primary expressive outlets, having more active physicality than the spectral presences of his other instrumentation -- and its artistic effectiveness proves that desire trumps ability in his realm. With woozy alien synths wandering over from the "ambient" tracks, Striborg's steam clouds of croak-encrusted, broken-down black metal require hails all around. Indeed, the next time someone asks, "what's so great? -- and what's so fucked up?" about Striborg, track two here is one we'll immediately want to play 'em. The slowly paced, 19 and a half minute "Wandering The Wilderness Of Eternal Misery" is a monument to Sin-nanna's unique genius, as we're sure you'll agree after just a few minutes into it, when you're fully enveloped in his hissing, buzzing, chuddering world, and the ambient Aphex synth droplets start falling amidst his percussive extemporaneity. So good! Like a brain-damaged Burzum, and we mean that in the best possible way. And these abnormal atmospheres continue throughout the rest of the disc, furthering our love of Striborg. A great followup to the taster offered by the Striborg / Xasthur split single we listed just last week! PS. God what we wouldn't give for a Striborg / Keiji Haino collaboration!!!

MPEG stream: Wandering The Wilderness Of Eternal Misery
MPEG stream: Light Anomalies In The Phantom Woods
MPEG stream: Ghostwoodlands

The return of our favorite one man Tasmanian rain forest black metal horde, the mighty Striborg, whose damaged outsider lo-fi black buzz has held us in its thrall since the very first time we heard it years ago. Even though this is only the second Striborg release we've managed to get enough of to review and list, there have actually probably been more like a dozen full lengths from Striborg so far... And lord knows we've tried to track down enough copies of those old releases to list, but as they are all self released on Striborg mainman Sin Nanna's own label, they've been mighty tough to get a hold of. Thankfully, he's taken to tacking on old out of print records at the tail end of new records. So here we've got the brand new full length Nefaria, coupled with his '95 demo A Tragic Journey Towards The Light. And the amazing thing is that even after all that time, and all those releases, the sound is just as lo-fi, fucked up and damaged as ever. The atmosphere is creepy and gloomy, the vocals a strangled croak swathed in reverb, the drums a stumbling thrashing mess, a dank black buzz that writhes and squirms, filthy and mysterious and so fucking awesome. There are some haunting ambient tracks too, whirring warbly synths drifting wraith like, sometimes with a lurching subtle beat buried way down in the mix, but for the most part, it's all damaged buzzing blackness, wrapped around bizarre arrangements and loads of lo-fi hiss and whir. Amidst the weirdness there are some breathtaking moments, moody and emotional and strangely haunting, like the first half of closer "Black Apparitional Void" a slowcore midtemo Burzumy buzz replete with distant keyboard melody and gorgeous minor key melodies, as lovely and sorrowful as it is buzzy and black, with bizarre muddy swells that briefly swallow up the entire song before quickly receding back into the murk, before the song lurches into a dizzying squall of buzzing guitars, processed vocals, and bizarrely recorded drums, the rest of the track going from lo-fi to even more lo-fi and back again. But then we're only scratching the surface as far as lo-fi is concerned, cuz up next is Striborg's very first recording, A Tragic Journey Towards The Light, which is so lo-fi and so liberally sprinkled with effects, that at times it stops being black metal and becomes some weird swirling morass of black sound. The drum machine is doused in reverb, doubling and blurring, almost like some hyperspeed dub, during the super dynamic start and stop parts, the vocals and the drums are so caked in FX, that they sound like some sort of children's TV show special effects sounds, and the vocals, a garbled tongue twisting whatthefuck stream of growls and guttural yelps, the guitar a squiggly distorted streak over the churning blur beneath, so completely over the top and confusing to listen to, but so completely and impossibly catchy. This is the Striborg that ensorcelled us back in the day, and it sounds just as amazingly fucked as ever!

MPEG stream: Nefaria
MPEG stream: Somnambulistic Nightmares
MPEG stream: Garmonbozia
MPEG stream: Beyond The Shadow Of Silence ('95)

If black metal has a "Jandek" then Striborg might be it. Certainly, an argument can be made that black metal itself is already "outsider art" and then if that's the case, where to put Striborg? Outside the outside. So much of Striborg's eccentrically intimate, idiosyncratic output (this disc holding many fine examples, for instance at one point when it sounds like he's playing the violin in the shower) is so exquisitely wrong it's right, so inadvertently avant-garde and very much trance-inducing that of course Striborg is a big AQ fave. Until recently, though, it was easier for us to get Jandek cds than those of Striborg. But at long last the gates to Striborg's lair have swung open, and the many previously hard-to-find recordings by this Tasmanian black metal savant (as you may know, Striborg is a "band" staffed solely by the mysterious Sin-Nanna) are now readily available to us... and to you, the discriminating consumer of fucked-up black metal. Among the many Striborg discs that we for so long wanted but were unable to stock, is this one. Another essential in Striborg's damaged discography for sure. This cd combines two demos from 2002 and 2003, so it's material from pretty early on in Sin-Nanna's career of evil, though his demo-days go back as far as 1997, and these are in fact the final two (4th and 5th) demos released before he started making "proper albums" instead, although production-wise we can detect no great differences! This cd compilation of those two demos was originally released in 2003 by Striborg's own Finsternis Productions in a limited edition of 500 copies, and has now been resurrected by Displeased (along with, as we said, several other desirable Striborg artifacts). Nocturnal Emissions consists of the title track, followed by "Despondent Cries", "Son Of The Moon", and "The Freezing Northland". The latter is interesting 'cause you'd think in Striborg's case it would be "The Freezing Southland", being so nearby to Antarctica, but it turns out that this track is a tribute to another one-man black metal cult, Norway's Ildjarn. We should also note that "The Son Of The Moon" is dedicated to Sin Nanna's baby boy, Zachariah aka Sin-Nanna junior (the name Sin-Nanna that of the god of the crescent moon in ancient Sumer, btw). This might be the first and only black metal song written by a proud father to his newborn son! In welcoming his child to "this world of tragedy, magic and sorrow", he tells him, "the stars of Aquarius is [sic] on your side". Otherwise, Striborg's lyrical themes are entirely depressive and misanthropic, all mope-tropes matched of course by his music, the ever-present droning black buzz, a fuzzed-out spray of monochrome guitar distortion, through thick fields of which wander Striborg's special, utterly non-metroymic drum-stumble and over which he rasps his despondent cries. The four tracks of Nyctophobia are next, "Under Black Rain", "Through The Dark Fog", "Across Thornfields", and "Into Night Moor". We'll single out "Under Black Rain" for mention, as it's composed entirely of what sounds like woozy violin improv, his jittering string-scrape punctuated by a resonating gong-blows, mixed with field recordings of drizzling rain and ominous thunderclaps... we'd be happy with just a whole disc of just that! But each track here has its unique charms, "Through Dark Fog" in particular notable for Sin-Nanna's excessively distorted vocal turn. And "Into Night Moor" is a beautiful outro of isolationist electronic ambience. It seems everything he touches turns, not to gold, but to blackened weirdness. Weird enough we assure you that you'll be giving your stereo strange looks and often rewinding to hear some choice bit of bizarreness again and again, if you share our taste in outsider black metal oddity! None more sublime than Striborg. We'll have reviews of a couple more Striborg reissues soon (Trepidation and Spiritual Catharsis) and also look forward to a new release, the Journey Of A Misanthrope DVD...

MPEG stream: Nocturnal Emissions
MPEG stream: Despondent Cries
MPEG stream: Under Black Rain
MPEG stream: Through The Dark Fog

What more can we say about Tasmanian black metal one man band Striborg that we haven't already? This is the 15th or 16th record we've reviewed by the mysterious and prolific Sin-Nanna, whose tortured doomic black buzz has remained relatively unchanged for the last 12 years. But hell why fix what ain't broke right? And nothing's broke here, or maybe EVERYTHING is broke, but that's precisely why we're still so smitten with Striborg's creepy underproduced outsider black metal. Guitars that seem to buzz, without ever actually coalescing into riffs, more often a sheet of white noise, a wall of hiss, the sound of a rainstorm or a thousand showers, the near constant buzz is one of the hallmarks of Striborg's sound, and it's what turns stumbling depressive black metal into tranced out almost blissy black dronemusic. Then there's the entropic, seemingly abstract drumming, the rhythms simply skeletal frameworks around which to erect huge undulating clouds of buzz, Sin-Nanna's beastly croak, adding a certain bit of pathos to the slow motion monochromatic crawl that is most Striborg. This stuff is most definitely an acquired taste, but once it's acquired, it takes over, you find yourself needing more, wanting more, and wanting it to be more raw, more feral, more lo-fi, and Striborg is more than happy to oblige. Every record another fragmented yet strangely beautiful black missive, that in its own way does seem to evoke the rainforest he calls home, the sound is expansive and thick, humid even, the all encompassing buzz the sonic equivalent of unceasing rainfall, the sad organs and mournful synths like thick black clouds blotting out the sky, the tangled branches of the forest an abstract skeleton huddling beneath the whirling winds, but with every record, Sin-Nanna is still capable of surprising us, of taking his sound someplace new, but equally perplexing and fascinating. Here, it's "When The Moon And The Earth Collide Into The Sun", a caustic burst of corrosive blacknoise, blown out and abrasive, which is quickly followed by one of the prettiest and most mysterious Striborg tracks ever, the 10+ minute title track, whose background is a warm hissy bed of lo-fi buss and sizzling cymbals, the guitars mere hints of melodies, the drums, loping clumsily but dramatically though the hazy soundfield, the vocals metallic, as if sung from the bottom of a well, the music weirdly warm and melodic, sans vocals, it's almost like some insanely lo-fi slab of pop ambient short wave interference, or perhaps like listening to some moody doom pop, but with the radio station between stations. Strange, but truly wonderful, as only Striborg can be. As we mentioned before, you either already love Striborg, in which case odds are you're probably a bit obsessed and will most definitely want this, or you can't stand it, and this will in no way change your mind, or this is your very first exposure to Striborg's mad musical genius, in which case, you might just have found lo-fi outsider black buzz nirvana. We're sort of jealous too, we can remember how exciting it is to discover something this fucked up, this gloriously idiosyncratic, this gorgeously damaged for the first time. You just might have to overhaul completely your understanding of black metal. Of metal. Of music. It's magical. And mysterious. And utterly confounding. Enjoy! Housed in a DVD case, printed covers inside and out, with a nice oversized, full color insert filled with photos and drawings of the Tasmanian rainforest.

Black metal bands come in many varieties, and we have our favorites among everything from blackened thrash drunkards to grandiose symphonic keyboard-laden festival headliners to grim trance-y one-man-band eccentrics... particularly the latter, though, especially when we're trying to find black metal to recommend to AQ customers who aren't necessarily metalheads but who like weird weird music whatever the genre. Droning fucked up stuff that's almost more experimental than it is metal. And this (one-man) band Striborg is precisely what we like to have on hand when the subject of, "if I were to buy just one weird black metal record, what should it be?" comes up. For the longest time, it was next to impossible to find cds by this still-obscure artist from far-off Tasmania (that's right, Tasmania!). Fortunately others besides us have recognized his peculiar genius and now the releases are (somewhat) more readily available. Which brings us to this brand new album, Solitude, and it to us, hot on the heels of Striborg's other recent full-length release, Ghostwoodlands. As with that album, here Striborg has uncapped his usual aerosol spray of buzzing guitars and wretched effected vokills. The fuzzed out, bleak black metal clatter is interspersed with long stretches of what approaches D.I.Y. 20th Century Classical electronic music spookiness! The ambient, isolationist tracks that cropped up on Ghostwoodlands are again to the fore, as is an even more droney, doomy, droomy mood. There are several exclusively "black metal" tracks (two of 'em quarter hour epics!), some of them powered by blazing drum machine beats, but even so the overall vibe of Solitude is so slooooow and doooooomy. Drum machine? Don't worry, it sounds good, and at times, we think he really IS playing the drums. Striborg's less-than-tight timekeeping and fucked up fills have always been paradoxical highlights of his albums in our perverse estimation, but Solitude finds many ways to provide those idiosyncratic so-wrong-its-right pleasures. Tracks like "Ektoplasmic Dreams", "Doppelganger" and "The Untouched Land" are purely electronic-sounding, ominous abstract dronescapes, piercing with high-end synth-shards and soothing with somnolent textures. Elsewhere, his blurred guitars do the same, reminding us of dreamy gloom dronesters Angelic Process, a hushed guitar tone... not even a tone, more like a pure wave, a solid mass. We mentioned that Striborg hails from pretty far south -- Tasmania. The rainforests of his island are not that distant from the icy wastes of Antarctica. But this album, Solitude, is the sound of Striborg's one-man, one-way journey even further south, falling right off the edge of this world...

MPEG stream: Ektoplasmic Dreams
MPEG stream: Solitude
MPEG stream: The Grandeur of Melancholy

Once again, we head back into the grim black rainforests of Tasmania, to unearth more of one-man-black-metal-misanthrope Striborg's amazing back catalog, a constantly evolving and devolving soundworld of washed out buzz, chaotic black blur, and haunting dreamlike ambience. If you're already a fan, and have made it this far in Displeased's reissue campaign, odds are you're probably gonna want this one too, and if you've yet to experience the gloriously grim what-the-fuck brilliance of Striborg, then this is as good a place to start as any, in fact it might be one of the best ones to begin with as it's the most varied, and thus the most freaked out and bizarre. Beginning with a surprisingly melodic almost poppy guitar part, 2004's Spiritual Catharsis quickly unravels into the buzzing stumbling confusional blackness that's so near and dear to our withered hearts. The core of Striborg's sound, is the ever present sheet of white noise guitars, that still sounds like a microphone placed on the floor of a shower, a constant and nearly overwhelming shhhhhooooosshhh. While behind this wash of hissy sibilance, lurk creaking shrieked vocals, and simple stumbling drums, and of course thick epic washes of grandiose keyboard. The drums flipping between punk rock pound and doomic plod, while that wall of blown out buzz remains fairly static. Totally hypnotic. At it's most straight ahead, it sounds like a way more blissy Burzum, loping and midtempo, with those haunting keyboards offering up creepy minor key melodies, but where Burzum buries those keys in the mix, Striborg shoves them right to the front, where they warble and whir and threaten to swallow up the rest of the sounds around it. But as we mentioned before, Spiritual Catharsis is all over the map. "Glorification Of Mother Nature" is a gorgeously minimal expanse of ambient creep, sci fi synths swirling and shimmering, soft focus layers of sound shifting subtly like fog in an old crumbling graveyard, but then there's the title track, thirteen minutes long, probably the harshest and most chaotic of the bunch, the guitars whipped into a nearly Merzbowian frenzy, the effects so dense it's almost like black metal dub, the vocals careening and rippling out in all directions, the drums like a landslide of snares, the whole thing enveloped in a rippling cloak of black ambience, until part way through when the track shifts into some cinematic doom, the hiss and buzz pushed back a bit, allowing low end rumbles and whirs to play out a super intense melody, while the drums lurch and stutter, other keyboards joining the fray, drifting like soft glowing orbs against the jagged buzzy backdrop, before finally building back up into the fierce fury of the track's opening. The rest of the record constantly shifts between buzz and bliss, blast and crawl, from the minimal rumbling drone of "The Haunted Gum Trees", to the relentlessly blasting black chaos of "Misanthropic Necroforest", to the echo drenched plodding doom of "Dicksonia Antarctica" (replete with more of those dubbed out FX), to the tripped out funereal dreaminess of "Eternal Blackness Surrounds The Bushland", to the full on pounding in-the-red crush of "Black Metal Is The Forest Calling...", Spiritual Catharsis, is indeed just that, a spiritually cathartic, beautifully bizarre, darkly droning musical journey through a black forest of sound, and into the even blacker musical mind of Striborg Re-mastered, with all new artwork, including a swank metallic silver front cover, and drawings and lyrics inside.

MPEG stream: Within The Depths Of Darkness And Sorrow
MPEG stream: Beneath The Fields Of Rapacious Blood
MPEG stream: Spiritual Catharsis

For once being a grim cult mystery, whose records were practically impossible to find, Striborg has turned into an actual 'band', releasing a record every year, sometimes more than one, guesting on other folks' records, touring with SUNNO))).... you think the glare of the spotlight would have gone to his head, but thankfully, the music of Striborg, aka Sin-Nanna, is as bleak and twisted and fucked up as ever. So fucked up in fact that we are well aware that Striborg is not every metalhead's cup of tea, a quick look at the reviews on the Encyclopedia Metallum website reveals that a whole lot of people don't dig it, or more accurately probably, don't get it. But as far as we're concerned, what's not to get?! Striborg create truly evocative, lo-fi black metal, that is as idiosyncratic as it is true and grim. The production has remained the same for over a decade, if anything it's gotten progressively more low fidelity and damaged sounding, the music instead of getting tighter and more polished has wandered further and further from traditional black metal tropes, which is precisely why we love it so much. For those new to Striborg, there are 15 or so other reviews on the aQ site that go into great depth, but in brief, Striborg is Sin-Nanna, who lives in the middle of a rainforest in Tasmania, and who crafts some of the most damaged and demented and freaky black metal we've ever heard. Bands like Furze, or Necrofrost, sound like Metallica next to the madness that is Striborg. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much, and this latest, newest Striborg might even, as impossible as it might seem, manage to outweird the preceding 15 or so releases. Some things have remained the same, the artwork is appropriately abstract, nothing but pictures and drawings of forests, pictures and drawings of Sin-Nanna himself (including a random glamour shot on the back cover where he sort of looks like a high school goth or New Romantic!), pictures of caves, rivers, the sky and the moon, and not a whole lot else, minimal liner notes, but it's the music� Sin-Nanna implements a new arrangement this time, still leaning toward the loooong songs, but this time they are preceded by or separated by intros and intervals, most a minute or less, haunting keyboard ambience, bird calls and the sounds of the night forest, a strange sample from some film, laughing voices, male and female, melancholy marimba melodies, Bernard Hermann style strings, a child and a woman intoning some sort of incantation, reverb soaked piano, whirring shimmering cinematic drones, mournful horns, tinkling chimes, but as creepy and abstract as those are, they don't even hold a candle to the songs. And the first proper song on The Foreboding Silence, "A Lonely Walk In A Desolate Cold Pine Forest", really might be the best (and most fucked) Striborg song EVER. Eleven minutes long, the track begins with an impossibly buzzy riff, that literally sounds like a swarm of insects, or a million kazoos, unfurling a chromatic wall of nearly static buzz, that shifts from note to note, creating a lurching jagged melody, over which totally dizzying atonal marimbas pulse and loop, sending the whole thing into a woozy sea sick spiral, the various melodies, far from complimentary, the whole thing sounding like it's gradually growing more dissonant, more out of tune, the drums stumbling in the background, the vocal a harsh shriek, it's so off kilter that with headphones on it will make your head spin. Eventually, the marimbas drop out, leaving the track to plod along doomily, the buzzing riff like the sound of a rainstorm on a tin roof, the song shifts tempos, slipping from plod to pound and back again, eventually locking into a repetitive outro, the drums simple, the guitars locked into a two note loop, punctuated by what sounds like thunder off in the distance, which gives the effect even more of the buzzing guitars becoming the sound of rainfall. The title track is another tweaked masterpiece, the drums locked into an almost-groove, the guitar still in full insectoid buzz mode, underpinning the spewed demonic vox, and a strange gnarled almost Greg Ginn-ish guitar overdub. The drums are LOUD, way up in the mix, shifting from stumbling blast to relentless double kick, while the guitar buzz swirls and sways and slips back and forth right along with it. The biggest surprise here, besides the opener, is the closer, "Somnambulistic Nightmares Return", a lurching chunk of slow motion doom, with some serious guitar chug, and some simple drum pound, while beneath some sort of super intense reverberating low end drone surfaces and envelops the song, while over the top, some woozy clean guitar drifts in, offering up a mournful, mildly atonal counterpoint, resulting in one of the weirdest and strangely pretty Striborg songs yet. What else needs to be said? If you have all of the other Striborg records, odds are you're a bit obsessed like us and probably need this one too, if you've yet to take the plunge, The Foreboding Silence is definitely a great place to start, and if you get hooked, or are feeling particularly daring, we have a bunch of other Striborg releases in stock, all twisted genius, all fucked and grim and fantastic, just ask...

MPEG stream: A Lonely Walk In A Desolate Cold Pine Forest
MPEG stream: The Foreboding Silence
MPEG stream: Somnambulistic Nightmares Return

In addition to crafting utterly gorgeous breathtaking minimal pop ambience as Gas, Wolfgang Voigt was also responsible for some of the most influential minimal techno of the last twenty years, as Mike Ink, M:I:5 and a handful of other monickers. It's hard for us sometimes to describe techno music, and to define just what it is that makes us love one techno record and hate another, but this comp is wall to wall genius. Out of print since 2000, this comp is finally available again, collecting some of the best 12"s Voigt released in the nineties, as well as tacking on a handful of bonus tracks, every one a spare skeletal dubbed out groovescape of simple bubbly beats, minimal percussive thumps and beeps, everything tight and clipped, hypnotic and mesmerizing, futuristic dancefloor perfection, managing to swing, within fairly rigid arrangements. Pretty much every band on Kompakt, whether they know it or not, owe everything to this man, and these tracks right here. Each track is named for a color, although it's unclear how those tracks reflect the colors they're named for, or if it's just a simple way of codifying the various grooves, either way, it does reflect the simple spare and minimal vibe of the sounds, the layout, the whole concept. It's hard to imagine people dancing to this, although we know they do, for us though, this is perfect chill out music, the beats bouncy but muted, the basslines barely there, usually just a streak or a brief thrum, the tracks hardly shift over the course of their 7-10 minutes, the timbre subtly changing, maybe another little skitter gets tossed into the mix, it hardly matters, as these songs start out pretty much perfect, and only get more perfect as they go on. Every track here could get locked into an endless loop, and we'd happily nod off, drift off, forever, letting the beats and austere ambience just wash over us. Some of these tracks are almost 20 years old and still sound totally fresh, and even a bit futuristic, and the perfect soundtrack for some space age dinner party or some late night chill out sesh in a bad ass satellite bachelor pad slowly orbiting the Earth.

MPEG stream: Green
MPEG stream: Yellow
MPEG stream: Red

We sure do love Finland. And boy do we love slow motion sludgy doom. So it makes perfect sense that this here disc would find its way into our grubby gloomy doom loving mitts. Stumm are a glacial power trio that traffic in that sort of harsh ugly crusty death doom dirge sludge we've come to dig so heavily. We just can't seem to get enough. It's metal sure, heavy and downtuned, but a lot of the appeal, very much like the blurry buzz of black metal, is it's proximity to pure drone! As the guitars get lower, and the songs get slower (or conversely faster and blurrier) riffs become stretches of slow shifting sound, hypnotic and dare we say soothing. Not entierely like a doom metal Steve Reich or a sludge Terry Riley. Most of us would just as likely fall asleep listening to the most recent Moss record as we would a Coleclough or Chalk record. And Stumm are carrying on that fine tradition. A harsh raw nihilistic doom metal that drones and buzzes and pulses, slithers and lurches more than it rocks. There's got to be a way to designate sheer impossible dooominess. In the past we've just added more 'o's to the word doom, 20 'o's, 40 'o's, but where does it end. Eventually there will be a band so slow and sludgy, the whole review will be a single word, doom, but with 11,342 'o's. We're tempted to give Stumm a rating based on the multiple 'o' doom scale, but this this disc is not just a single sludgy smear of sound, it's definitely doooooooooom (let's stick with 10 'o's for now), with most of the record, stumbling and staggering, all druggy and dizzy, a 16rpm creep through a thick forest of buzzing E strings and drumming that sounds like it's being dumped out of the back of a cement mixer. But here and there, the clouds part, revealing a bit of sky through the dense canopy of oppressive heaviness, be it a bit of clean guitar or some warm warbly bass... hell, who are we kidding, those moments are so brief and fleeting they're only there to lure you in and set you up for a massive pumelling, frozen like a deer in the headlights, looking skyward, eyes reflecting that tiny glimmer of sunlight, before moments later Stumm take your head clean off with a spiked and sludgy iron bar, as a million 'o's begin to rain down from the sky, like metallic black hail, burying you beneath a crushing, suffocating mound of doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo............. 4 songs. 35 minutes. Mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, Phantomsmasher / Atomsmasher, Flux, OLD, etc.)

MPEG stream: Chokehold Narcosis
MPEG stream: Biting The Hand That Feeds

This is the debut full length from Italian psychedelic garage pop combo Sultan Bathery, and if you can disregard the punny band name (that some of us didn't even notice), you'll be treated to a heaping helping of everything we love about that 'sound', a lot of fuzz, a little bit of jangle, a loy of poppiness, a little surf rock, some tripped out Spacemen 3 drugginess, all wound up into some seriously addictive, crazy catchy surf garage fuzz pop pound, that falls sonically somewhere between local garage rock heroes Thee Oh Sees, and the now sadly defunct San Diego surf pop geniuses Mrs. Magician, there's even a bit of swampy swagger that reminds us of another more obscure aQ fave, the late great Railroad Jerk, which for us is high praise indeed! And to be honest, on first listen, we weren't totally blown away, SB sounded great, but sounded a lot like so many other bands, but repeated listens has revealed this to be a serious garage rock gem, with some fucking great songs, and we find ourselves listening to this like crazy, which as always, is about the best recommendation we can give... WAY recommended for fans of the above mentioned bands, as well as other aQ faves like the Liminanas, Lorelle And The Obsolete, Davila 666, etc.

MPEG stream: Satellite
MPEG stream: Mirror
MPEG stream: Purple Moon

So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised... So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly. It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once. In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around. An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.

MPEG stream: Blue Mambo
MPEG stream: Esoterica Of Abyssynia
MPEG stream: Space Prophet Dogon
MPEG stream: The Vinegar Stroke

Yeah, you know us, record store weirdos who love us the latest batch of blurry black metal, the newest glitched out electro noise, the fresh sound of gut rumbling, tectonic, cosmic dronemusic, BUT, we also love songs, and we love pop, and we love rock, and we particularly love a strain of said rock and pop that they don't really make so much anymore. We're all children of the nineties, so our later formative years were spent listening to Pavement and Polvo, Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine, Superchunk and Silver Jews and Soul Asylum (when they were great, and they WERE great), the Afghan Whigs and Uncle Tupelo, Codeine and Archers Of Loaf, we could go on, but you get the picture. So if any of that strikes a chord, you just might find yourself falling for Sun Valley Gun Club, who hail from right here right now in the Bay but sound like they could be from 1995 Chapel Hill, or 1998 Seattle, or Athens in 1992, but we definitely don't wanna push the retro angle to the exclusion of everything else, cuz while these guys are definitely rooted in that era, and owe a lot to the above bands, they also manage to craft some of the best songs we've heard in ages. In fact it only took one listen to the song "Hey Collapser", before we were hooked, which then lead to about a hundred more listens, and as seems to be our process, we literally listened to nothing else but that song, until once, when we weren't quick enough to cue it up again, and the record went right into "Nebraska", and goddamn if we didn't then become obsessed with THAT song. And you can guess where it went from there. But seriously, "Hey Collapser" is a total stunner, with its smoldering slow build, the laconic, laid back vox, the chorus that kills, the bridge that kills EVEN MORE, big build ups, plenty of bombast, a little bit of broodiness, it sounds like Built To Spill crossed with Uncle Tupelo, and maybe a little Radar Bros., some Pavement too, but really just a sort of classic songsmithery, that for us never gets old. And the aforementioned "Nebraska", which takes all the same elements, and crafts them into a super dark, tense, brooder, that explodes into some epic math rockiness, getting totally anthemic throughout, with some killer guitar parts, and with some of the most irresistible hooks EVER. Goddamn, if this was a seven inch with just those two songs, we'd be talking potential pantheon placement for sure. But lucky for us, and you, there's about three more double A-sided singles' worth on here of classic sounding indie rock crunch and twang flecked, noise pop brilliance. Fans of aQ faves like Herzog, Weed, Ovens, Swearin', Telekinesis, Iran, the Wrens and other modern indie rock revivalists will definitely lose their ever loving shit. Expect this to show up on some year end top ten lists for sure!! (Andee's already got a space reserved!)

MPEG stream: Even Before I Learned To Write
MPEG stream: Hey Collapser
MPEG stream: Nebraska

Any one lucky enough to visit hypnorockers Circle in Finland, besides being showered with hospitality and crazy adventures, hockey games, private concerts, lots of record shopping, reindeer dinners and Finnish pizza, also is quite likely to be invited to record with the band, as they seem to be in a constant state of ready-to-record-ness, as our very own Andee can attest to: just check http://www.tUMULt.net to hear Jaappollot, the results of several sessions he shared with the boys in Circle! Seems a similar thing happened to abstract free rock collective Sunburned Hand Of The Man when they were in Finland, and it's hard to imagine a better match. Sunburned seems to have lured Circle back into the murky woods, for long languorous stretches of slow burning psychedelia. The metallic sheen of recent releases has been rusted and caked with mud and old dried branches, the result a trancelike folk flecked tribal krautrock, the perfect mix of what we like best about both bands.� The sound on first listen is like some sort of�alien world music, with dense, but laid back�tribal drumming, swirling serpentine guitar lines,�whispered chanted vocals, all wrapped in a cavernous production, making the tracks sound warm and wide open, expansive and endless, there is clatter and clang, but for the most part it's smeared and blurred, buried in sonic murk, wrapped around abstract krautrock rhythms and chunks of angular guitar riffage. Some of the tracks get wild and chaotic, but even then, the sound is still restrained, not jagged or harsh, more swirling and washed out.� One of our favorite tracks ever, by maybe either band, is the super hypnotic�"Heinavelho", another growling ambient sprawl, but strangely rhythmic and musical, still�murky and muddy and super hypnotic, but with ultra subtle�repetitively strummed guitars, held in check by martial drum rolls and little squalls of brushed snares, eventually building to an FX drenched gothy cabaret crawl, all moody and drunken, lurching and downtuned, staggering through a thick cloud of chirping bleeps and bloops and dense swells of rumble and shimmer.� Fans of either band will definitely dig, and a good gateway for anyone into one, but not yet so into the other...

MPEG stream: Majava
MPEG stream: Heinavelho
MPEG stream: Vuoren Valloitus

Finally! Some new music from our favorite space-drone-free-rock-hippy-drum-circle-caveman-stomp-folk-clatter ensemble Sunburned Hand Of The Man. And once again, these are extremely limted and we don't know how long we'll be able to keep these in stock. Probably not very long at all. This double cd-r is volumes 9 and 10 in SHotM's proposed series of 50 and some of their best so far. As a whole, these two discs are much quiter and ambient than any of the other releases, focusing on space and the sound AROUND the sounds. Disc one is a spare creaky framework of mumbly, lo-fi space jams, distant melodies, ghostly and ethereal, reverbed vocals, minimal wah guitar, rhythms all clattery and loose, stumbling and barely there, almost marking out the beat like the occasional stone thrown into a still pool. All wrapped in spidery cobwebs of murk and mire and hiss and stutter. Truly gorgeous. Disc two continues on in the same vein with shuffling rhythms and vaguely Eastern melodies, chanting and mumbly vocalising. There are moments on disc two that change things up a bit, most notably a strange bastard funk jam that sounds like Starfuckers chanelling James Brown, and then as the disc progresses some No Neck Blues Band meets Sun Ra free jazz clatter with saxophone bleats, space-y rhytmic abstracts, and splattery percussion.

MPEG stream: Skulled
MPEG stream: Last Ash Of Bone