It may seem like we've been dragging this out, as ALL the first four '70s albums by pioneering Japanese heavy metal popsters Bow Wow were reissued at the same time over a year ago, but we've just been reviewing 'em one at a time every few months it seems. Well that avoids Bow Wow overkill, right? As it happens, a lot of folks already bought all four together from us after we listed the first, but we still figure we should get around to reviewing 'em all individually. 'Cause we totally dig Bow Wow. Ripping, energetic hard rock action, from a young Japanese band that brought together psychedelic proto-metal (with a big Hendrix influence), glammy bubblegum pop elements (The Sweet must have been another inspiration), and a burgeoning heaviness that matched what was starting to happen in England and America, to forge some fun, frenzied boogie-metal with its own quirky charm, that on Charge also definitely expanded into bombastic, balladic power pomp rock territory, as on album-ender "Behind The Mask".
Once again, this disc is supercharged with the guitar heroics of shredder Kyoji Yamamoto, who solos most impressively, wailing away on such tracks as "Must Say 'Adieu'" like he's the Japanese counterpart to Uli Jon Roth of the Scorpions (another big Hendrix fan, and probably himself an influence on Yamamoto too). Melody is another strong aspect here, they even offer up a gentle acoustic ballad in "Fallen Leaves". But don't worry about 'em wimping out, that track is in fact followed by a song simply titled "Heavy"! And it is, in a lumbering yet soaring kind of way.
Charge originally came out in 1977, it was Bow Wow's third album, following the self-titled debut from '76 and Signal Fire from earlier in '77 (both previously reviewed by us). Like the others reissued by Rock Candy, it's been remastered and comes packaged with new liner notes in the cd booklet. Next up: 1978's Super Live...
Last list we had the Sabbathy Japanese proto-metal reissue from Blues Creation, circa '71. Now, moving a few years further into the Seventies, we present: Bow Wow! Ok, the name might not sound that heavy. But they are.
Much to Andee and Allan's excitement, the UK label Rock Candy has recently reissued the first four albums by '70s Japanese metal band Bow Wow (not to be confused with '80s new wavers Bow Wow Wow, or Bow Wow the rapper). We'd like to review 'em all eventually, but thought we'd start with this one, their 2nd, originally released in 1977. After all, it's got a song on it called "Rainbow Of Sabbath", so you know its gonna be good! Better be! And indeed, they are definitely influenced by Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Scorpions, and other classic contemporaries from the West.
The ten tracks here are packed with uptempo, flashy hard rockers. There's lumbering riffs ("Silver Lightning"), one affecting power ballad ("Still"), and plenty of ripping guitar pyrotechnics from axe hero Kyoji Yamamoto, particularly on the instrumental title track. Some of his solo six string freakouts are positively psychedelic (he was a big Hendrix fan), as are the effects that they use on the drums here! Bow Wow aren't from early enough in the '70s to be proto-metal, of course, but we could call 'em proto-NWOBHM, maybe. Though it's some young American bands of the day that they most remind us of, like Riot, Starz, and Van Halen (both Yamamoto and Eddie Van H. are known for their hammer-on technique).
This album is just bursting with electric energy, and it's not hard to believe what the liner notes here say about it being a big fave of Metallica in their formative days. Those liner notes, by the way, based on a recent interview with Yamamoto himself, are interesting and in depth, typical of Rock Candy's deluxe reissue treatment. Highly recommended rock from the land of the Rising Sun!
Get this, and if there's enough interest then we'd be stoked to also import and review their self-titled debut ('76), Charge ('77), and Super Live ('78), all also awesome.
If you're a regular reader of the AQ list, by now you know all about Bow Wow, those exuberant Japanese heavy metal rock 'n' rollers. Part poppy bubblegum boogie glam, part classic '70s hard rockin' (a la Rainbow, Sabbath, Scorpions, Aerosmith), part heavy Hendrix-inspired psych... and most of all, young, energetic, and talented; their newfangled metallisms corresponding to Western contemporaries Van Halen in foreshadowing the '80s metal explosion.
Previously, over the past year or so, we've reviewed three of the four '70s Bow Wow reissues done by the UK's Rock Candy label: 1976's self-titled debut, 1977's Signal Fire, and Charge, also from '77. Now at last we wrap up this Bow Wow series with number four, Super Live from 1978. As the title implies, it's a live album. And let's just say, Bow Wow were indeed a super live band, pulling out all the stops here in front of a rabid, screaming Japanese audience ("the cheering of the young girls you hear brings back very fond memories," Bow Wow's guitar whiz Kyoji Yamamoto is quoted as saying in the cd booklet). There's 10 tracks here, featuring mostly but not entirely songs from their studio efforts up to that point, good rockin' picks like "Jet Jive" and "Get On Our Train", often embellished upon and expanded a bit in the live context. Yes, there's a drum solo (about halfway through the lengthy wailin' instrumental "Explosion"). And for their big finale, they do a raucous cover of "Summertime Blues"!
We reviewed this last because it's chronologically the last of the reissues, also 'cause we figured folks would want the studio albums first... but, on the other hand, if you haven't yet picked up any of the Bow Wow reissues and wanted just ONE to get into the Bow Wow experience, this would be a good choice for sure, kind of a greatest hits that also highlights this band's forte, that being the sheer energy and excitement of 'em performance-wise, which is quite commanding.
Once again, a nicely done reissue, remastered, with detailed, illustrated liner notes in the cd booklet.
Here's hoping that Rock Candy will next get the rights to reissue some of Bow Wow's best stuff from the '80s, like Asian Volcano and Warning From Stardust...
If you recall, we highlighted this Japanese Seventies (proto-)metal band's second album, Signal Fire, sometime last fall, and promised more to come. Well it took a while, but here's a review of another remastered, reissue by Bow Wow! This time we're highlighting the band's self-titled debut, from 1976. We'd mentioned that shredding lead guitarist Kyoji Yamamoto was a big Jimi Hendrix fan, and you can hear that here, they even pay Jimi explicit tribute on the nearly ten minute "James In My Casket", part heavy riffing psych-out, part power ballad, and certainly one of this album's standout tracks, sounding almost like something that Far East Family Band or Far Out might have done, earlier in the '70s. Or Deep Purple, definitely. Early Scorpions are likely another inspiration.
There's also a song here called "Foxy Lady", which is NOT the Jimi Hendrix composition, oddly enough! That's one that displays the poppier, almost bubblegum side to the teenaged Bow Wow's initial sound (they weren't really metal yet, more of a rock n' roll rave up meets proto-metal, pop rockin' proposition). But even a lightweight boogie number like that is redeemed by Yamamoto's guitar prowess, and elsewhere they take the boogie to ultra energetic, metallized extremes, with speedy scorchers like "Hearts On Fire" and "Volume On".
Fun stuff, influenced by, besides Hendrix, we'd assume The Sweet! You want wailing vocals and even more wailing guitar? You got it! Yamamoto was on his way to becoming a Japanese Eddie Van Halen, or maybe Eddie was the American Yamamoto...
This has been given the typically enthusiastic Rock Candy reissue treatment (they've even added a rising sun motif to their logo on the spine), with extensive liner notes in the illustrated cd booklet - though we'd take issue with the writer's contention that Bow Wow was innovative, he doesn't give enough credit (any) to the likes of Flower Travellin' Band and Blues Creation as previous Japanese hard rock groups also on par with their Western contemporaries. But then again, maybe those bands never opened for Aerosmith like Bow Wow did.
And for the moment, we also have copies Signal Fire back in stock, as well as the yet to be reviewed Charge and Super Live, those being the other entertaining '70s Bow Wow albums reissued by Rock Candy... who we're hoping will get their hands on some of Bow Wow's '80s output as well.
We're really not sure how we managed to miss this one. Especially with us always dying for more grime. More blissed out dark and doomy dubstep. Well, this is IT!!! This 'it' actually came out almost a year ago! But so what! We just discovered it, and maybe you missed it as well. Boxcutter is everything we've been hankering for. And digging elsewhere. Milanese (a past AQ record of the week), Kode9, Virus Syndicate, that Mary Anne Hobbs comp, the Science Faction: Grime comp, Boxcutter fits right in amongst those killers. And is totally kicking our ass. Maybe more dubstep than grime (although it sounds pretty grimey to us, and we're not even really sure of the difference), this is dense and skittery, blown out dub drenched grimey and and filthy dark-as-fuck electronica. The rhythms throb and shuffle, a hiccuping stutter, that is not so much funky as fucked up and hypnotic, occasional beats get all gnarled up, glitching and buzzing before falling back into line. All around the beats, thick clouds of strange synths and spaced out FX hover and swirl, peppered with melodic fragments, and thick rib cage rattling bass lines.
Some of the tracks are WAY laid back, dubbed out to the extreme, a sort of late night / early morning chill out sound. All dark and druggy, heavy lidded and sort of shuffling drowsily. But other tracks are HUGE and bumping. Bursts of blown out synth fuzz, massive rolling bass lines, streaks of sizzling sound that careen from speaker to speaker, bits of fluttering flute suspended over dense rhythmic tangles, huge smears of undulating low end, kick drums that punch right through your sternum, sounding almost like some killer dancefloor destroying jungle dubplate played at 16 rpm.
Heavy and thick and dark and fuzzed out and spacey and groovy and so fucking great!!
Boxharp is the solo (with plenty of help) project of the Court And Spark's MC Taylor. So as you might expect, it shares a lot soundwise with the C+S. However, it's a bit more experimental, with much more emphasis on texture and ambience. Boxharp's muted
I, Andee, was shopping for a present for my soon to be father-in-law, who is a huge jazz head, just like me, and I thought it would be cool to get him some lps to go with his brand new turntable, but as we sat in my room listening to records trying to decide what he would or wouldn't like, it seemed my taste/collection was a bit on the way-out/free/abrasive side compared to his, especially many of my favorite ESP reissues. That is until we threw on this recently reissued Boykins disc. While retaining the free-skree-skronk that I love so much about ESP, "The Will Come, Is Now" reins it all in a bit, wrapping Boykins' freak-out tendencies in a warm rich blanket of almost traditional bop/post-bop and really accessible-without-being-cheesy melodies. As much as I am digging ALL the recent ESP reissues, this is the one I find myself throwing on more and more often!
Besides being just about the cutest band in the the Bay Area (although they've recently left SF for NY), Boyskout more importantly manage to meld elements of queer grrrl punk, new wave, pop and goth into super buzzy, catchy, hypnotic perfection.
Three distinct vocalists keep things really interesting: one a petulant pout of a voice, another closely resembles Siouxsie's dark, throaty sultriness, and the third is all Kim Gordon-ish whispery, and almost spoken. So varied and cool. The music has the propulsive new wave simplicity of Interpol, the playful purr of the Cure, and the buzzy intensity of classic punk rock, with claustrophobic minor key melodies, crunchy punchy guitars, thick circus-y Gary Numan-ish synths, and super catchy hooks EVERYWHERE. The more we listen to this the more we love it! Includes one of the songs from their febut 7". The cd also contains a video for the track "Back To Bed", a spicy, saucy romp, reflecting the song's sexy lyrics, with the band making out with each other, and rolling around in their underwear!
A NEW FUCKING BRAINBOMBS RECORD!! And it rules. Heavy and droney and hypnotic and dirgey and AMAZING. Too bad it was limited to 630 copies, of which we only got 8 copies the first time around, when we tried to order 50. Somehow, it's available again, not sure if they found a bunch or pressed up some more, but this time we managed to get a whole TWENTY copies, and again, if we had our way we would have gotten at least twice that many, so needless to say, Brainbombs freaks, and we know there are more than 20 of you out there, you're gonna have to be quick on the trigger, as these might be the last copies we can get, and most likely if they're not gone already, they will be by the time you finish this sentence.
(We can only hope there will be a cd version soon...)
Don't let the jaunty little Lawrence Welk ditty that opens Obey lull you into any sort of peaceful state, you'd best be prepared for the hateful murderous mayhem that Obey has in store for you. Then again, that's probably precisely what the Brainbombs had in mind. A gentle voice luring you into a dark alley, a shiny trinket distracting you while the burlap sack goes over your head and you're dragged kicking and screaming into the woods, a sweet piece of candy draws you just close enough so you can be knocked unconscious, tied up, and stuffed in the trunk. Those of you familiar with the brutal musical world of Brainbombs will know exactly what we're going on about. The rest of you, be very very careful. They traffic in a sludgey, jazzy garage rock scuzz stomp, repeated riffs, simple pounding drums, a lurching leering fuzzed out psychedelic dirge underpinning tales of murder and mayhem, murder and rape, death and dismemberment. This is probably their most overtly harsh record. Mostly because unlike the rest of their releases you can actually hear what these Swedes are singing about. All delivered in a sort of fey, heavily accented English. As if the song titles weren't enough,"Kill Them All", "Die You Fuck", "Anal Desire", "Lipstick On My Dick", "Fuckmeat", the lyrics are misogynistic, misanthropic and just plain messed up. The sound is like Melvins meets Whitehouse filtered through the fuzzy garage stomp of the Stooges but with a maniacally repetitive looped quality, that cranks up the tension, while the vocalist slowly unravels and gets meaner and meaner, more and more insane. And let's not forget the occasional warbly warped trumpet (!). What can we say? We love Brainbombs.
We've never listed this one before, as it has been seemingly out of print for ages. Thankfully a distributor managed to scrape up a bunch, but we can't be sure how long we'll have these.
Who would have thought that the joyous occasion of the first tUMULt 7" vinyl release would also bring such sadness and despair. But sadly it's true, the Brainbombs are no more. But thankfully, they've gone out with a bang. The bang being this grungy, scuzzy, pummelling 45 rpm, two song farewell kick in the face. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sweden's Brainbombs, think prime Stooges, recorded in a smelly sweaty basement, on a boom box, amidst scattered porno mags, corpses, weapons and human excrement. While a whining vocalist spits up mysogynistic and misanthropic tales of hyper violence. Then add in the occasional bleat of a demented-jazz trumpet and some fucked up fuzzy blown-tweeter bass. So good. And these two tracks are some of the best Brianbombs material ever. The A side starts with a stuttery, super distorted beat before the sky collapses and you're buried in a pile of violently squirming barbed wire guitars, while a ghostly, sort-of-Eastern melody weaves surreptitiously through the melee. Track two trawls similarly dark territory, a 'Fun House'-ish dirge with a warbley trumpet melody desperately trying to keep from being sucked under by the muck and grime. While the Brainbombs may be dead, they have not entirely ruled out the possibility of more mayhem in the future. But for now, this is a suitably brutal and brilliant epitaph. On thick white vinyl. And we mean THICK. Maybe the thickest vinyl we've ever seen!! Seriously, it's like a ceramic salad plate or something! ----* ----* Selected New Arrivals : ----*
I only ever knew Glenn Branca as "the guitar orchestra guy" responsible for assembling huge groups of guitarists (often well known rock guitarists), to perform huge, throbbing, hypnotic and repetitive compositions -- some for ten guitarists, fifty guitarists, even one hundred guitarists. The recent Rhys Chatham box, reviewed a few lists back, suggested that perhaps Branca's guitar orchestra concept was 'borrowed' from Chatham, as Branca had performed in many of Chatham's multiple guitar ensembles. But in much the same way that we were surprised by the rock-ness of the early Chatham material, this early recording from Branca and his four guitar/bass/drums outfit has much more in common with noisy post punk/post rock: Bastro, Bitch Magnet, Slint and the like, than Ligeti, Penderecki, Messiaen or any of the other names dropped in Lee Ranaldo's liner notes. Extended drony, atonal rhythmic explorations stretch on and on, building horror-movie-minor-key tension, building and building and building, before bursting into unrelenting rock rhythm/riffs. Lots of the more rock parts sound like an instrumental version of North Western punk rockers The Wipers, but with lots of odd dynamics ala Bastro or Slint and with the extended riff repetition of modern minimalism stretching the songs into droning, hypnotic master works. Throbbing and relentless, pounding and intricate, weaving back and forth between ferocious, unrelenting rock-action, and epic, complex geometric stop/start, hypno-minimalism.
We recently discovered this little label in Germany called Gruenrekorder, who specialize in "Phonography and Audio Art" which translates to field recordings, turntablism and audio installations, which definitely sounded right up our alley. We then discovered that they had 60 or 70 releases, probably more by the time of this review, most cd-r's and all incredibly limited, usually to 50 or less. Yikes. Had to do some quick thinking, so we picked two of the most promising sounding and got a bunch of those (a bunch meaning 25 copies, which is half of the pressing). So elsewhere on this list you'll find the other Gruenrekorder release, a field recording of bats (and you know our love of bats is second only to our love of frogs!), which somehow seems to perfectly balance this one right here, a live recording of a sound installation for turntables, records and... plastic angels.
The set up goes like this, a bunch of turntables, all set up on a small dais, each with a plastic angel spinning in the middle of the lp, and each angel with a weight hung between its wings, which shifts with each rotation, and causes various loops to alter, drift, shift, change duration, overlap, all the while, Brandstifter, the man responsible, crawls around moving the angels, replacing the records, changing speeds, the result is pretty magnificent, a looped hypnotic soundscape of operatic voices, fluttering flutes and fiddles, droning whirs, hiccupping song snippets, skipping stuttering rhythms, the vibe very festive, as most of the discs are choral, the voices locked into hypnotic mantras, the various cracks and skips adding percussive filigree. Some passages are epic and triumphant, voices soaring, while others are murky and mumbled, sounding like they could have been yanked from some mysterious Finnish free folk record or from some blurred Philip Jeck turntable landscape.
Haunting and eerie, like some damaged funhouse mirror holiday soundscape, Christmas carols twisted and gnarled, holiday favorites scratched up and looped, bits of opera looped into fuzzy repetitive seasick mantras, you can almost imagine some Tim Burton-ish mad scientist armed with a bunch of dusty scratched up records and weird old fashioned turntables and all those painted angels, hovering in a dark cobwebby corner of some old seventies mall, families and children steering clear of the crazy man in the corner and his murky muddy choral din. SO AWESOME!!!
Beautifully packaged, printed cd-r, full color sleeve, but again, LIMITED TO ONLY 50 COPIES!!! So once these are gone, that's it...
Imagine Neil Hamburger backed up by a drunk Albert Ayler. Imagine the worst comedian you've ever seen competing for your attention with an avant jazz musician in the same room. Imagine a 10 minute comedy sketch based on the assumption that DVD stands for
I mean, we're well aware that there's a healthy chunk of Aquarius customers that scan our lists specifically for things we describe as 'fucked' or 'ridiculous' or 'bizarre' or even just 'stupid'. Well, you're in for it now. You have been warned.
Anthony Braxton, much revered performer/composer/improviser, in yet another incomprehensible collaborative epiphany, has finally teamed up with...a stand up comedian. It's true. And of course, it wouldn't be true improvisation if the comedian weren't improvising as well, so what we're left with, is a series of skronks and squeals, and a series of witty (read: fucking stupid) riffs on newspaper headlines that are NOT FUNNY. REALLY NOT FUNNY.
I don't mean Neil Hamburger not funny, I mean plain old bad not funny...unbearably painful. So painful in fact that our own Andee qualifies this as a must own!!
Man, it's been a while since we heard the name Brick Layer Cake. Ten, twelve years maybe? Brick Layer Cake is Todd Trainer, drummer for Shellac, and while he is definitely partially responsible for the huge racket that Shellac kicks up, BLC is a much
By now, most metalheads know all bout Encyclopedia Metallum, pretty much the ultimate online resource for all things metal. Need to know what member of some band is in another band, what year some demo was released, what a band's particular lyrical themes are, it really is pretty amazing. Like a heavy metal Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, bands and entries have to be approved by the moderators before they make it onto Encyclopedia Metallum, and there are some rules. Which ends up producing some pretty heated and amusing flame wars, mostly by bands who were rejected for one reason or another, usually for not being metal enough!
We stumbled on one such exchange regarding this record right here, but the strangely named Brobdingnagian. Who according to the Metallum head honchos were just not metal enough. Too noisy, too droney, to be honest, it all seems a bit arbitrary, cuz to our ears, this is pretty fucking black, and pretty goddamn heavy, and most definitely metal.
That said, much of this ep is pent not blasting or buzzing, but droning, and rumbling, and crashing industrially, which as far as we're concerned is pretty excellent. Think Abruptum, Emit, that sort of thing, but injected with the occasional blast of furiously blasting blackness. The opening track begins with soft sheets of feedback, rumbling downtuned doom guitar, mysterious voices buried in the mix, the feedback creating truly creepy textures over the lumbering plod, before the band launch into a frenzied blown out super raw black metal freakout, buzzing guitars, harsh vox, blasting drums, eventually petering out leaving another long stretch of deep droning ambience. The second track is way more abstract, and a bit industrial, a harsher Wolf Eyes, tons of feedback and high end buzzing, a crunchy machine like rhythm, that sounds like trucks being dropped from a crane, clouds of hiss and glitch, almost like a lo-fi noise rock Khanate. The title track offers up another sprawling expanse of doomy minimalism, buried beneath a sea of glistening crackles and campfire buzz, thick corrosive rumbles, and more harsh hellish vocals, until the track stumbles back into another raw blast of super primitive black metal fury, and the closer is almost all lasting buzz, off kilter and freaked out, heavy and black, and be sure to stick around for the hidden bonus track, where the band take on a cover that should for sure prove their metal meddle.
It's been a weird wild ride for Cave In. But admittedly a ride all of their own making. They began life as a crushing post-metalcore behemoth, easily holding their own alongside such other sonically likeminded bruisers as Cavity, Coalesce and Deadguy. Then the band morphed into a strange arena pop band, ditching much of the heaviness for hooks, much of the downtuned pummel for radio friendly bombast. Metalheads were stunned and seemed to have written off the band completely, but some of us actually dug the new direction. And it really wasn't that big a surprise as the band was often described as Slayer meets Radiohead, so they were just leaning toward the latter, a part of their sound that was present anyway. Sure we missed the Cave-In of old, but heck, who were we to argue with another kick ass pop band? Then after dabbling with a major label, the band returned to their old label with a sound, which while retaining some of their new found poppiness, was definitely a return to form in terms of heaviness.
Now while all this was going on, Cave In frontman Stephen Brodsky was constantly recording on his own, forming side projects, releasing all sorts of distinctly unheavy records, solo and acoustic, poppy and pretty, ostensibly all the stuff he wasn't able to explore in Cave In. And just like with Cave In, we pretty much dug most of what we heard (minus a misstep here and there) so we were pretty excited to hear this disc from Brodsky's new band Stephen Brodsky's Octave Museum. But we weren't prepared for THIS, or to be as totally blown away as we were.
Brodsky's sound here with his Octave Museum is definitely pop, an ultra catchy mix of understated Beatles-esque poppiness and big heavy catchy power pop. Like some strange mix of Radiohead / Muse / Queen / Jellyfish / Big Star / Redd Kross / the Posies... Bombastic and orchestral, epic and expansive at one moment, stripped down and jangly the next. Every song is a pop gem. Brodsky's voice often slips up into a gorgeous falsetto soaring above glorious tangles of crunchy riffs, dense complicated drumming, little flurries of new wave-y FX, wild keening leads, the vocals and the lead guitar often getting all wrapped up in amazing harmonies. There's definitely a sixties vibe, and more specifically some serious Beatles worship, but it seems to be filtered through the brainy quirkiness of XTC, and then sometimes supercharged, the guy was responsible for Until Your Heart Stops after all!
That said, this is NOT metal at all, not really ever HEAVY, it's pure, nearly perfect pop. At it's heaviest, it's a hefty chunk of kick ass power pop, but this record's not really about heavy, it's all about mood and melodies, hooks and harmony...
Fans of old school jangle pop as well as lovers of more modern metallic poppy crush will for sure freak out for this, and any one who digs any of above mentioned bands as well as groups like Sloan, Silver Sun, Ryan Adams, the Jayhawks and other AQ pop faves should definitely check this out... it took us a while to get around to reviewing it but we're so glad we did, it's awesome!
By now you've no doubt heard these guys. Or at the very least, you've probably been sent the video for their song "Freaxxx" by a friend (or enemy). It's been viewed on YouTube about eight hundred gazillion times. And at least a gazillion of those times was US!
If we were really honest with ourselves, and based our love of a band entirely on these criteria: how many times have we listened to a specific song by this band, how many times have we watched a video by this band, how many hundreds of people have we sent a video by this band to, and how much time have we spent talking about this band, be it positive or negative? Well in that case these retarded Crunk-core goofs would be our favorite band EVER.
Ever since we first discovered these guys on YouTube, we, as well as many of our friends have been totally obsessed. A bunch of slacker girl jean spikey hair indie dorks playing a totally fucked up and dipshitty hybrid of Southern style crunk with all its low slung hip hop beats and buzzy synths, and screamo... the emo offshoot that involved, well, as far as these guys are concerned, lots and lots of screaming. So if you can imagine some white indie rockers rapping about Bentleys and Cristal and bitches and ho's while one of the guys screams dramatically every few seconds, while the band pout and preen, with a bunch of slutty looking indie chicks and a huge pink pig, well, you're either totally disgusted, totally mesmerized, or most likely BOTH.
It's like a trainwreck, both audial and visual, but at the same time, we CAN'T STOP WATCHING. Plenty of our friends have expressed a similar dilemma, an utter and extreme hatred for these guys, but the seeming inability to stop listening to it, watching the videos, or even buying their records. Yeah it's stupid, puerile, dumb as fuck, and a waste of brain cells and airwaves, but in some weird way, it's kind of clever, definitely fun, and to be totally honest, some of the sounds and songs do sorta rule. "Freaxxx" is the obvious jam, watch the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8F5YSA1Oz0
You just can't look away. And it's a little bit catchy. What the fuck?! We've dug way stupider and way more annoying stuff than this in the past, so why not just embrace it. Both Allan and Andee ordered their old ep, which also features the other jam "Bree Bree", the chorus of which is a screamed 'Breeeee Breee' meant to sound like an oinking pig. We shit you not.
So there you go, you can't fight it. You might as well buy it, you may not listen to it on your own, but we guarantee you'll play it for everyone you know. The ultimate "you WILL not believe this shit" disc. Which means in some insanely backhanded way, this is indeed recommended.
When we reviewed the debut full length from The Bronx way back in 2003, we described them as alternately sounding like a metalcore Strokes, a poppier Coalesce, or some bastard offspring of Rocket From The Crypt, Quicksand, and the Hives. And come record number two, not too much has changed. This is supercharged, sweat soaked, furious, foot stomping wild and wooly, heavy and groovy rock and roll. The only real difference is that their sonic palette has definitely expanded a bit. Some tracks are full on blown out near grind metalcore, others are all slithery swagger like some Aerosmith / Stooges mashup. Still others are some sort of stadium ready Southern rock all big choruses and plenty of distorted twang. A couple tracks actually remind us of long gone aggro rock faves Barkmarket, and once in a while we hear some At The Drive In, and the fact is, that the Bronx are a little bit of all of those things. But they take all of those bands, whip the various parts into a serious frenzy and go fucking nuts. And it's pretty damn irresistible. The songs are catchy and fun, heavy and fucked up, but like all the bands they borrow from, they're probably even more lethal live. But for now, if you're in need of some seriously freaked out RAWK, this should definitely hit the spot.
Full length number three from this mysterious Texan one man band, whose blend of Burzumic black metal and blown out distortion drenched shoegaze has made this a longtime favorite around here. And even though the record opens with the most overtly metal track we've heard from this guy in ages, with its bellowed demonic vox and angular riffage, it still manages to be super warm and lush and in-the-red, with the guitars SO distorted they seem on the verge of crumbling.
And that feel and vibe becomes even more pronounced as the record proceeds, slow, pounding, woozy weeping expanses of mournful melody, washed out guitar fuzz, loping basslines, with some seriously gorgeous poppy moments, like the strange looping bridge on "Ashes In Her Mouth", with its spidery little repeating motif, or the almost Alcest / Amesoeurs sounding main riff of "Lifetaker", the whole record is weirdly pretty, and melancholy, it's the black metal equivalent of looking at the world on a rainy day through a window streaked with water, the rivulets, distorting everything, making shapes twist and blur, smearing forms into one another, adding a surreal quality to everything, gauzy, fuzzy, indistinct, the tone of the guitars, so dripping with distortion, evokes the same sort of soft focus feel, even though the notes and vocals and songs are still plenty black and quite METAL.
The mood is mournful, but not despondent, more like the sun struggling to shine trough pitch black clouds, the minor key melodies so intense and emotional, draped over simple driving rhythms, not blast beats here, and those guitars, to a certain degree, the defining sound of Brown Jenkins, even at its grimmest and meanest and most brutal, those guitars can't help but sound warm, washing over you, dragging you into whatever lurks below. So good. Definitely one of those rare BM records that manages to be simultaneously intense and heavy and seriously grim, but also dreamlike, mesmerizing and so so hypnotic. For the buzz obsessed, this makes some serious transcendent late night drifting off music...
If we had to pick a single grindcore record, as our all time favorite, it would most likely have to be this one right here, the second record from NY weed fueled grinders Brutal Truth, 1994's Need To Control, but this is no ordinary grind record, instead this is a sprawling, epic, convoluted, complicated, ambitious masterpiece. By the time Need To Control was released, the band were already pretty legendary, masters of gnarled grinding heaviness, but Need To Control was the band's first record with a serious budget behind it, their label Earache had just inked a distribution deal with Columbia, which meant the band had time, and money, which translated into a chance to stretch the boundaries of grindcore, and stretch they did, infusing their chaotic fury with lumbering downtuned doom, super complex arrangements, even didgeridoo(!)...
The record opens with the very UNgrind "Collapse", a lurching, churning slab of doomic crush, laced with the sounds of bubbling bongs, all manner of industrial clatter, laced over the mesmerizing almost looped sounding riffage, and then to top it off, a ridiculously catchy, almost poppy chorus, the soaring melody, and shrieked vokills unable to disguise the crazy hookiness. A bold way to begin a record for sure, but Brutal Truth never really shied away from the unexpected, especially here. Hot on the heels of that sludgey sprawl comes the furious freakout of "Black Door Mine", a blast of super intense, ultra complex avant grind a la Discordance Axis, impossibly tangled riffage, insane drumming, all wound into buzzing blasting impossibly dense and mathy grind metal workouts. "Turn Face" is more of the same, after a low slung gloomy bass buzz intro, the track explodes into another flurry of face melting freakage, but somehow this one manages to be crazy catchy as well, winding in weird little hooks, turning it into one of the rare blasts of grind that you'll find permanently stuck in your head, not to mention more ridiculously frantic drumming.
Then comes "Godplayer", notable for its didgeridoo, which more often than not is a BIG didgeri-DON'T, but for these guys it's the perfect sound, a low buzzing rumble, that not only compliments their already low buzzing sound, but also sounds a little bit like the musical version of a bong (which we can't imagine was lost on these guys). And from there on out, the band continue to craft a seriously twisted bit of avant grind, mixing in long stretches of strange industrial noise, effects drenched drones, bits of doomy plod, often slipping in whole tracks of lurch and lumber, like the opener, and the equally crushing, slow and heavy "Ordinary Madness", which on most grind record would stick out, but here, manage to merge seamlessly with the blaze and buzz that comes before and after, they even do a killer Germs cover, clocking in at less than a minute, but fitting into rest of the record pretty much perfectly, and the whole record is just fucking genius, heavy, complex, catchy, proggy, mathy, metal, we mentioned it might be our favorite grind record ever, well, it's also one of our favorite metal records ever, PERIOD.
When Need To Control was originally released, there was also a 5 record vinyl boxset, that contained the whole record spread out over 5 pieces of wax, a 5", 6", 7", 8" and a 9", besides the cool concept, that vinyl version also included a bunch of bonus tracks, including some killer covers, most of which are included here (sorry completists, there are still a couple tracks on the vinyl box that got left off the reissue, grrr). They do Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as "Wish You Were Here... Wish You'd Go Away", starting it off almost straight, in fact, covering almost the whole track, complete with clean vocals and everything, before turning it inside out for the second half, a garbled lo-fi grind freakout mess. They also do a pretty bad ass cover of Celtic Frost's "Dethroned Emperor", plus there's a couple jams that sound like they could have been part of the record proper, before finishing off with the twisted deconstructed grind noise freakout of "Head Cheese". Which again, really hammers home what it is that makes these guys, and this record in particular, so special, sure they were grind masters, but they also obviously loved classic metal, and doom, and noise, and punk rock, and avant garde weirdness, all of which found their way into the Brutal Truth sound, not just in the specifically bizarre and UNgrind tracks, but in their blasting grinding heaviness as well, the riffs, and arrangements, and vocals, and everything, infused with some twisted idea of what their music should sound like, which is why it sounds like nothing else. A classic... if you, say, are a fan of avant-heavy faves The Body or other similarly boundary-pushing metal acts today, and you don't already have this, get it!!
NYC grindcore kings newest full-length. Features a Sun Ra cover (!) plus 20 so more blasts of metallic mayhem.
We LOVE this band. You should love this band. How can you not, that is if you're lookin' for some proto-metal, psychedelic stoner '70s rawk action?? Buffalo is 100 percent the Real Deal. These Aussie rockers were basically what Monster Magnet (and all the other bands in the modern "stoner rock" scene) would have liked to be, doing it first and best back in the day. Once upon a time, we used to stock a 2-on-1 reissue of Buffalo's Volcanic Rock and Want You For Your Body albums (from '73 and '74, respectively) but that's been out of print for ages now. So we're super thrilled that the Aztec label from Down Under has brought Buffalo back into circulation, as part of a '70s reissue campaign featuring a bunch of other Aussie acts we're eager to check out, like Coloured Balls (reviews pending). Both of these Buffalo discs are authentically heavy '70s cock-rock from the band we've judged to be Australia's answer to, if not Black Sabbath, at least Grand Funk... no, better n' heavier than that. Sir Lord Baltimore, for sure. Did we say cock-rock? Hell, there's even a penis on the cover of Volcanic Rock! The lyrics are of the sort that amusingly confuse being sexist with being sexy (a la Spinal Tap), as in Want You's lead off track "I'm A Skirt Lifter, Not A Shirt Raiser", and they're delivered with much gusto and backed by some powerful guitar riffing that blows those stoner rock bands of today out of the (bong)water.
Volcanic Rock is unstoppable, definitely an aptly titled album. Music for rolling Mad Max style on the highways across the Australian outback. Bonus tracks include the single versions of crucial cuts "Sunrise (Come My Way)" and "Shylock". Want You For You Body is equally awesome, and features the powerful "Dune Messiah". Killer vocals on that one and you can't get much more '70s than a song about Frank Herbert's popular sci-fi classic, short of writing songs about Tolkien! Bonus tracks include a live version of "United Nations". And the fact that you can't get both albums on one disc anymore is made up for by the presence of the aforementioned bonus tracks on each cd, digital remastering, thick booklets, and generally nice presentation in digipacks.
So if you're a patron of our "proto-metal" section, into Blue Cheer and Bang and Leaf Hound and the like, you've gotta get Buffalo!!! Same deal if you're a fan of Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Heavy Rocks style Boris, etc... Highly recommended.
[Also available, is the Aztec reish of Buffalo's debut Dead Forever, which we'll list next time!]
We LOVE this band. You should love this band. How can you not, that is if you're lookin' for some proto-metal, psychedelic stoner '70s rawk action?? Buffalo is 100 percent the Real Deal. These Aussie rockers were basically what Monster Magnet (and all the other bands in the modern "stoner rock" scene) would have liked to be, doing it first and best back in the day. Once upon a time, we used to stock a 2-on-1 reissue of Buffalo's Volcanic Rock and Want You For Your Body albums (from '73 and '74, respectively) but that's been out of print for ages now. So we're super thrilled that the Aztec label from Down Under has brought Buffalo back into circulation, as part of a '70s reissue campaign featuring a bunch of other Aussie acts we're eager to check out, like Coloured Balls (reviews pending). Both of these Buffalo discs are authentically heavy '70s cock-rock from the band we've judged to be Australia's answer to, if not Black Sabbath, at least Grand Funk... no, better n' heavier than that. Sir Lord Baltimore, for sure. Did we say cock-rock? Hell, there's even a penis on the cover of Volcanic Rock! The lyrics are of the sort that amusingly confuse being sexist with being sexy (a la Spinal Tap), as in Want You's lead off track "I'm A Skirt Lifter, Not A Shirt Raiser", and they're delivered with much gusto and backed by some powerful guitar riffing that blows those stoner rock bands of today out of the (bong)water.
Volcanic Rock is unstoppable, definitely an aptly titled album. Music for rolling Mad Max style on the highways across the Australian outback. Bonus tracks include the single versions of crucial cuts "Sunrise (Come My Way)" and "Shylock". Want You For You Body is equally awesome, and features the powerful "Dune Messiah". Killer vocals on that one and you can't get much more '70s than a song about Frank Herbert's popular sci-fi classic, short of writing songs about Tolkien! Bonus tracks include a live version of "United Nations". And the fact that you can't get both albums on one disc anymore is made up for by the presence of the aforementioned bonus tracks on each cd, digital remastering, thick booklets, and generally nice presentation in digipacks.
So if you're a patron of our "proto-metal" section, into Blue Cheer and Bang and Leaf Hound and the like, you've gotta get Buffalo!!! Same deal if you're a fan of Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Heavy Rocks style Boris, etc... Highly recommended.
[Also available, is the Aztec reish of Buffalo's debut Dead Forever, which we'll list next time!]
Never really imagined we'd hear Grouper's Liz Harris toasting on a ragga / dancehall record, and sadly, we still haven't, but she does lend her voice to the opening track on this, the first record from The Bug, aka Kevin Martin, since 2008's London Zoo (not counting a handful of singles). While we were envisioning Liz getting all Lady Saw, instead, it probably is more like you might imagine, the vocals still ethereal and gauzey, over a surprisingly subdued Martin production, that makes this sound more like Portishead, although a bit more brooding and tense, with some sinister synths, some tightly coiled rhythms, and some bleak atmospheres, and somehow, it works, really well, enough that we wouldn't mind hearing a whole record of Bug / Grouper collabs.
The second track is actually sonically quite similar, a dark sort of trip hoppy vibe, but with some seriously thick, rib cage rattling bass, the vibe though still sort of nocturnal and smoldering, a lot like "Ascension" another low slung brooder, big beats, and lots of hiss and crunch and static, but still pretty subdued and slithery. "Mi Lost" cranks the volume a bit, but again, it's much less bombastic than London Zoo, and with way more of a focus on female vocalists, Miss Red doing the honors on "Mi Lost", a tangled ragga dub groover, with wild hi-hat skitter, and spacey drifty synths behind a seriously funky groove. "Pandi" is almost all organ, a dense, tense sprawl of throbbing drones, and lush layered thrum, the beats, when they do surface, more sort of pulsing and crackling and textural. And so it goes. The sound veering toward a late night somnambulence, Gonjasufi guests on the creepy slo-mo-soul dub of "Save Me" replete with super dramatic strings, and billowy clouds of soft focus static.
It's not really until "The One", that things get bangin', with Flowdan joining in for a fucked up fierce grime workout, a crunching big beat, some Twilight Zone melodic stabs, machine gun rhythms (literally) and plenty of noisy chaos, culminating in a dense, distorted finale. The follow up "Function", is another grime-y blowout, with some awesome rapping from Manga, over a bed of gristly, ultra-distorted bass buzz, and suddenly it occurred to us, that okay, we must be in the 'Devils' half of Angels & Devils, duh.
Anyway, the rest of the record plays out sonically devilishly as intended, maybe the only misstep is the collab with Death Grips, which has its moments, but is ultimately mostly annoying, especially when you hear "Fat Mac" which comes right afterward. That track's a crushing chunk of doom-dubstep, if there is such a thing (there is now), thick, lumbering beats, insane, distorted guitar buzz, maybe riffage, or maybe just blown out synths molded into something totally metallic. Wow. Couple more ragga / dubstep / grime bangers to finish things off, the first with longtime Bug collaborator, Warrior Queen, and one more with Flowdan, who kind of ends up being the surprise star of Angels & Devils...
Hard to believe it's been 5 years since the last Bug full length. We were so obsessed with Pressure, it was exactly what we had been dreaming of, a disc of dancehall, but supercharged, the beats bigger, the toasting more tongue twisting and agile, the flows sick sick sick, the loops and music darker and more fucked up. Makes sense when you have a look at Kevin "The Bug" Martin's resume, having recorded as God, Ice, Techno Animal and Curse Of The Golden Vampire, so imagine classic dancehall filtered through all that cracked and noisy business. Fucking mind blowing. And it's not like Martin has been doing nothing since Pressure. There's been a steady flow of ep's and 12"s, singles and one-offs, but we were long overdue for another batch of damaged fractured fucked up and funky dancehall, and finally, here it is!
And it's so so good. Not quite as hard as Pressure, much more musical, but somehow all the better for it. The beats are still bangin', and the vocalists Martin has gathered are pretty top shelf: Tippa Irie, Ricky Ranking, Flowdan, Killa P, Warrior Queen, Spaceape and Roger Robinson. All of 'em on fire, and the tracks, total dancefloor destroyers, groovy, funky, a wild dancehall mashup, that stuttery beat in all its various permutations, simple looped Double Dutch repetition, skittery almost jungle, murky stripped down dubstep, pounding buzzing gabbery crunch, rubbery woozy shuffle, groovy late night minimal throb and several other variations.�
It's hard to pick favorites, all the tracks are pretty amazing, although we're pretty partial to the songs featuring Ricky Ranking, the super hooky "Murder We", with it's growled buzzing verses, but then an insanely catchy chorus, with gorgeous vocals and lazer gun style FX, then there's the closer "Judgement" a sort of slow jam, but so washed out and fuzzy, menacing and sinister, complete with soulful breakdowns, which shift effortlessly into the growly buzz drenched verses (stick around too, after a few minutes of silence, there's a really beautiful outro). The Warrior Queen tracks are awesome too, especially "Poison Dart" with its school yard flow and rib cage rattling synth buzz, unfurling a weirdly catchy melody beneath pounding simple rhythms and WQ's wicked flow. "Fuckaz" with Spaceape is a pulsing throbbing groove, the vocals a sing songy flow, not nearly as murky and mean sounding as his collabs with Kode 9, and the opener "Angry" with Tippa Irie, is a super bouncy ragga jam, the beat so simple but so infectious, and the vocals again raspy and raw, perfectly balancing the wild bounce beneath. Hard to know what else to say. We're such suckers for dancehall, especially when it gets revved up a bit. Here's hoping we don't have to wait another 5 years.
We gotta hand it to Tigerbeat6 head honcho Miguel for giving this disc a domestic release and price. Released in the U.K. by Rephlex, "Pressure" is the second outing by Kevin Martin under the moniker of The Bug. While this guise may be a recent one for Mr. Martin, he's not a newcomer to the scene. You may already be familiar with his previous projects Techno Animal, Curse of the Golden Vampire, God and Ice (certainly not a curriculum vitae to be sneezed at). With The Bug though, Kevin attacks our lower intestinal tracts with some of the best hardcore dancehall we've heard in a long time. Residing somewhere between DJ Scud's pummelling gabber style Ambush! material and Timeblind's Three-Foot-Long Bong-Hit of a track "Rastabomba". It's exactly the dancehall cuts that what we here at Aquarius have been thirsting for. Whereas Scud's tracks, being instrumental, were totally insane over-the-top panacea style gabber, "Pressure" is primarily a true dancehall record, with toasting on every track. As such, Martin's rhythms tend to be stripped down more than Scud's. Which isn't to say they ain't hard. Under Wayne Lonesome's damaged toasting for "Fuck Y~Self" for instance is some busy as hell, noisy-assed rhythm that battles 10 rounds with Lonesome's growling. Along with Lonesome, toasters on this record include Daddy Freddy, Roger Robinson, Paul St. Hilaire, The Rootsman and more. A definite must for fans of Ward 21 and sundry other demented dancehall. Absolutely sick, absolutely essential!
Forget anything you have maybe heard or read about this record. If it doesn't say how great, how supercharged, or how monumental it is, then whoever wrote it or said it doesn't know what the hell they're talking about! 5 years in the making and Doug Martsch and crew are back and better then ever. Starting with an 8-minute plus fist in the air opus that makes your heart start racing and your whole body bolt wide awake. While so many of their indie rock contemporaries have either broken up, burnt out, or become static recorders of nostalgic nothingness, Built to Spill prove that you can get older and better and wiser. Listening to this record over and over and over as I (Irwin) have, I've realized how wise Doug Marstch actually is about life and living. This is someone as in touch with his present moment as he was when he was 21. That's something that seems to be so lacking in most rock music. It's not rare for people to be really insightful and interesting and living in the moment when they are 22 and just coming of age but all so often as they get older they seem so out of touch and disconnected with what growing and learning and changing is all about. Martsch seems to have embraced all of that so well and this record is like the masterpiece of that maturity. Not the kind of "maturity" we talk about when people start making softer, safer records. This is the real kind of maturity. A group growing into themselves so perfectly. Guitars twisting and twirling and ringing so true. Melodies that build and bloom and take such nice form. While so many of the bands they helped influence (Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, etc.) have gone on to reach greater commercial success, you get the feeling that they could care less. It doesn't seem too far fetched to start thinking about Martsch as his generation's Neil Young. Timeless, iconoclastic, always stretching and exploring, even at the risk of failure. Martsch is someone who with their words and guitar makes you feel like you are being given the kind of jangly indie rock hug that you never want to end. Highly recommended!
We first discovered this band on our favorite radio show, Radiolab (like a way nerdier, science focused, Negativland produced This American Life), Buke and Gass being a boy/girl duo who made a sort of chaotic ramshackle folk flecked noise pop on homemade instruments, pretty sure Buke was shorthand for a baritone ukulele and Gass is a weird guitar bass hybrid, but regardless, these two make a seriously big noise, crunchy jagged riffage, over simple percussion, usually just a bass drum boom, or a tambourine jangle, a sort of two man (woman) version of a one man band, each handling their stringed instruments, while pounding out the rhythm with their feet, then there's the homemade speakers and amplifiers, it all makes for a curious sight, and an even curiouser sound, a sort of wild and loose folky swampy blues / indie rock hybrid, the vocals powerful, the instruments surprisingly lush, the rhythms simple and hypnotic, the melodies all over the place, some weird Thinking Fellers / PJ Harvey / Sixteen Horsepower / Decemberists hybrid, a bit of a backwoods steampunk vibe too, but all filtered through a killer indie pop sense that makes every song here a dark unforgettable gem.
What is wrong with the world today? The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, babies are coo-ing, breezes are blowing, waves are lapping, clouds are drifting happily across a bright blue sky, but all everybody wants to listen to is hateful evil grim brutal downtuned miserable soul crushing anguished slow motion funereal death drone ultra doom. Not that we're complaining, but it is curious. There's been recent renewed interest in slow motion metal masters Earth, as well as a growing obsession with self-admitted Earth worshippers Sunn 0))), the massive ambient-metal explorations of Japan's Corrupted, the stomping garage psych meets doom drone of the mighty Boris, and a constantly growing roster of similar sonic sickos: Esoteric, Khanate, Asva, Fleshpress, Dot [.], Marzuraan, Ox, Rigor Sardonicus, Sons Of Otis, UFOmammut, Skepticism, Whitehorse, Planet Aids and now Bunkur. We've been trying to track down this cd for ages, and somehow ended up listing and reviewing the Planet Aids cd, a Bunkur side project, before we had even received the Bunkur discs. Well, now they're here and you won't be sorry. This Dutch outfit traffics in massive, miserable, impossibly lugubrious doom metal. This is a single 65 minute track, drenched in reverb and crackling amp buzz, crumbling distorted guitars howled vocals, very loose and spread out, the riffs exist in huge expanses of SPACE, a blackened vacuum of buzz and echo and the occasional trailing off of a vocal growl or a slowly dissipating feedback vapor trial. The kicker here though, and the thing that makes Bunkur so weird (and cool) is the drumming, stumbling lo-fi tripped out rhythms, that drift from plodding caveman pound, to spacious barely there accents, but most surprisingly hover in some strange alternate world of dub. Yep, you heard us, DUB. The drums often demarcate wide open spaces with a strange dubbed out, instantly recognizable: BAP BAP Bap bap bap bp bp bp bp .... a single snare hit that repeats, stuttering into oblivion. Giving the whole thing a weird hellish doom-dub vibe. Like Khanate recording with Lee Perry maybe? Okay, maybe not quite as extreme as that, but the dub is definitely there, whether purposeful or not. And it's really cool. Fans of dismal doom death drone and all things slow and sick will find this absolutely essential. Packaged in super cryptic metallic grey and black packaging with extensive liner notes in a completely unreadable rune font!
It's been 5 years since the last Bunkur record, the appropriately titled Bludgeon, possibly one of the slowest, heaviest sickest doomdronedirge discs EVER. Corrupted, Esoteric, Khanate, Asva, Rigor Sardonicous, Skepticism, Fleshpress, all heavy and slow, but it always seemed like Bunkur managed to push that sound a little further. And if anything, record number 2 from these guys, titled Nullify, might have thrown down the gauntlet, creating a single, sprawling, 77 minute cloud of oozing slow motion black hate. Until Corrupted come through with their rumored triple disc single song, Nullify might just rank as the one to beat. That is if by beat, you meant create a doom record, that was impossibly slow, with instruments tuned insanely low, a sprawling skeletal song structure that is so spare and sparse it seems essentially structureless, with vocals that sound like you're vomiting up your internal organs, drums that sound like they're playing to some subterranean deathmarch, and basslines that aren't really lines at all, more like subsonic tones emanating from some bottomless pit. Cuz that's what it would take to out-doom these Dutch destroyers. But hell, why bother, better to just sit back, and let Bunkur's filthy black tide wash over you.
Slow, and epic, not really 'heavy' as much as dense, dark, deep and dismal, in fact Nullify almost sounds more ritualistic and abstract than doomy, like a heavier blacker Abruptum, lots of rumbling and groaning and howling and creeping and oozing, here and there the band do lock into something more propulsive, and by that we mean like 4 or 5 bpm, the drums offering up some chaotic fills, the bass swelling and undulating, but just as quickly whatever forward momentum is generated is dispelled and the band grinds back to a near static rumble. In a weird way, this is almost a drone record, strangely soothing in fact, a blurred smeared expanse of rumbling buzzing low end, the vocals and grinding riffage, so low and filthy and downtuned, that they just sound like more layers sound, but strap on some headphones, and it's like being sucked into hell, a harrowing sonic journey through the deepest pits of the underworld, every crushing thrum like the soul shattering footstep of some massive demon, every streak of hiss like a fiery blast of hellbreath, intense and brutal, massive and mysterious, punishing and pummeling, a gorgeously grim expanse of ultra, mega, multiple o'd, beyond funereal, kvltish hell doooooooooooom. And thus, gets our highest, or perhaps lowest, recommendation.
First heard on the seminal Killing Capitalism With Kindness compilation 7", this musical misanthrope from New Zealand unleashed his first proper album some 10 years later! Beautiful guitar plucks and muted trumpets amidst waves of buzz and hypnotic swirl, with occasional processed warbles of wisdom. Odd yet highly recommended by all the AQ-staff.
We can only listen to so much music in our lifetimes. That's a sad fact, one we all have to come to terms with. Or not. But if you're like us, and if you're reading this, you probably are, then much of your life is spent trying to do just that. Listen to as much amazing music as possible. And at some point, like us, you realize that your biggest fear about dying, is that there will be so much music you won't get to hear, well then, that's when you up your game, and decide to make every moment count, and listen to music ALL THE TIME. But even then, there's only so much time in the day, and the night, and you have to eat, and work, and maybe watch TV, hang out with your significant other, and yeah, most of that stuff you can do WHILE you listen to music, but odds are some music is gonna slip by you, no matter how insanely obsessive you are. So now, take the music you already own and want to listen to, and add to that a constant influx of new music to check out, which is what happens here, and while we LOVE that, so much amazing new music and so many fantastic discoveries, it really can end up being too much. We get overwhelmed, and well, we miss out on some stuff, which is exactly what happened with World, by Aussie shoegaze noise rockers the Bunyip Moon. We were cleaning up, and organizing, and going through boxes and drawers, and discovered this cd, and threw it on, and were immediately blown the fuck away. Struck by all sorts of feelings, feeling bad for taking so long to give it a listen, feeling like we COULD have been listening to this already for ages, but mostly feeling like we had to get this reviewed so all you folks out there could add one more amazing record to the stack of music already waiting to be listened to. But here's where we suggest you bump the Bunyip Moon to the front of the queue, cuz holy shit is this great.
And great in that way that makes what it sounds like actually pretty tough to describe. The vibe is sorts of nineties, shoegaze-y for sure, but with a bit of a gloomy feel, deep dramatic vocals buried in the mix to the point of being nearly inaudible, everything buried beneath super distorted and blown out, crumbling and hiss drenched fuzz and buzz and thrum, total blissed out heart-of-the-sun noise-gaze dreaminess, and the drums, wow, the drums are super distorted too, bursts of wild tribal rhythms that almost sounds like swarms of bees, each song a churning jangle flecked squall of noise drenched indie rock / noise rock, at times we hear Crystal Stilts, at times Loop, at others Bailter Space, even a little Dinosaur Jr., lots of NZ Flying Nun, at least the weirder, heavier stuff, and of course all the Australian bands we love, Celibate Rifles, the Scientists, Lubricated Goat, etc, but here those influences are blurred into something fuzzy and washed out and gloriously and blissfully noisy, this IS one of those records, where we're tempted to just have a single sentence review that says "BUY THIS! It's so great, it's all we want to listen to, it's fuzzy and poppy and noisy and psychedelic, and it's one of the best things we've heard in ages, and we've been listening to it non-stop to make up for all the time it languished unlistened to." And we definitely traffic in hyperbole in our reviews, but believe us that nothing in this review is hyperbolic, this band, and this record is so goddamn good, their sound is exactly what we want to listen to, it's the sort of band we wish we played in, it's damn near perfect, warm and fuzzy, noisy and dreamy, the production is bizarre, but bizarrely perfect, it's druggy and psychedelic, and seriously heavy, twisted and experimental, laced with loops and bizarre effects, for every bit of distorto crunch, there's some super melodic jangle, more often then not, the two mashed together, there are long stretches of brooding moodiness, extended hypno-rock epics, short bursts of furious noise pop, and sprawling near-Godspeed slow builds, and even some gloomy almost new wave, and it all sounds so goddamn good. If these guys had popped up on Slumberland they'd be HUGE right now. They should be, and if all is right in the universe, WILL be, cuz really, this is easily some of the best jangle pop / noise rock / shoegaze we've ever heard.
Like the title suggests, this is the cd version of Burial's last two 12"s. 6 tracks, almost an hour long, complete with obi 'cause it's a Japanese import. Both 12"s are pretty much out of print, so if you missed them, you gotta get this!
Street Halo was the first new music we had heard from Burial in 4+ years, and hardly needed a review at all (then or now), needless to say, the master of dark moody soul inflected minimal dubstep does it again, just check out the murky melancholy "Street Halo", which ditches some of the more overt dubsteppiness of past records, for something a bit more techno flecked, the beat a muted four on the floor pulse, while the surrounding sounds remain appropriately washed out and dreamlike, some spectral soulful female vox just add to the vibe. We actually spun the vinyl version of this at 33 the first few times, and holy shit, not sure if it's just us, but might sound even better that way, syrupy and witch house-y, total slomo cough syrup blackened dub electro drag. Too bad you can't easily slow down a cd, but even at the right speed of 45, it's pretty dang perfect, only a slight swerve from the dubbed out soul of Untrue.
"NYC" slows things way down, lacing some electro skitter and shuffling techno with a seriously dubbed out production and some sped up soul samples, still spare and skeletal, wreathed in a late night, winding down, chill out haze. And finally "Stolen Dog" is a dubby downtempo electro soul ballad, with a super hooky main melody, warm swirling low end swells, a skittery beat buried in the mix, and still more vocal soul. So good!
Beautifully sad and heavy, "Kindred" is laid out like a dystopic symphonic requiem that morphs through a slow-motion roughshodden landscape. Lonely remote vocals spliced and polished into barely discernible words pitter-patter over record crackle, and far-off doomy atmospheres as clanging minimal garage rhythms propel forward and then drop out at irregular intervals. "Loner" steps it up with arpeggiated synths and an anxious pace with a cinematic car chase theme feel and RnB-ish vocal shadows buried underneath a layer of sonic grit and asphalt that freefalls into a strange haunted ambiance. "Ashtray Wasp" show a bit more light and hope at first. The vocals culled from cell phone recordings give a broader sense of actual song structure with sped up minimalist Phillip Glass-like orchestrations wrapping the song in a dramatically understated fury, eventually disintegrating into an extended oceanic womb of crackling unease. The final salvo turning into a lyrical filigree of piano, cascading vocal swatches and waves of radio static that fades like the night into the stratosphere. Chilling!
This record has totally knocked us for a loop. An impossible mix of grimy dubstep, murky triphop, and minimal spaced out dub. When we first threw this on we were immediately transported back to when we first heard Massive Attack, or Portishead, and a whole new world suddenly opened up to us. A creepy, muted world of barebones beats and haunting atmospheres that would go on to inform our musical tastes forever.
This is the first release on Hyperdub, a label run by grime/dubstep DJ Kode9, and we expected a blasting barrage of grimy beats, but instead, were sucked into a swirling vortex of late night groove and midnight stutter. Think those Rhythm And Sound Burial Mix eps, mixed with some Pole-like glitched out dub, and some slow burning Portishead smolder. Creepy and crawly, mysterious and moody. Beats suspended in a black shimmering fog, snippets of vocals, crooning, toasting, drenched in reverb, chopped up and let loose to drift over super dark, muffled dubscapes. Huge rumbling bass lines, like distant foghorns, dreamy ambience sort of drifting and ethereal but so so ominous. Tiny sonic sparkles glimmer like some alien sonar, drifting dreamily through fuzzy darkness. Drowned and submerged grooves, all muffled muted melody and shuffling minimal beats. Suffocating atmospheres of low end thrum, record crackle and shortwave interference. Some sort of slithering slinky dubstep shuffle slowed waaaaaaaaay down, into a blackened glacial dub jam. So fucking awesome. Our newest every night late night listen. A record of perfect dark and damaged dubbed out lullabies.
Second vinyl only offering from this low end subsonic super group, made up of Greg Anderson (SUNNO))), Southern Lord head honcho), Oren Ambarchi, and legendary black metal vocalist Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Tormentor, Aborym)�
For this outing, Ambarchi and Anderson are credited with sub bass death throb, while Attila is responsible for undead voices. And that's pretty much what it sounds like, sub bass throbs with haunting undead vocals woven into the heaving roiling mass. There seem to be some guitars in there too, maybe some electronics, but it's hard to tell, it's all smeared into a single swirling blackened mass. When we first listened to it, we played it at 33 (which we're assuming now is NOT the right speed, so hard to tell sometimes), and we thought, wow, this is even slower and sludgier than ever, but once we figured out it was meant to be 45, the sound reverted back, closer to the sound of SUNNO))) or the older records of their forbears Earth. Slow motion riffage, glacial and thick, massive and blown out and super distorted, muffled and murky, a sluggish sprawl of caustic crumbling guitars, the vocals barely audible, a haunting raspy growl way down in the mix, often just sounding like another buzzing bassline, hum and fuzz, dense and intense, all melted down into a viscous black crawl. Occasionally, the random bits of riffage and low end rumble coalesce into truly gorgeous harmonies, lovely and chordal, like some blackened church organ, but for the most part, this is the sound of guitar tones allowed to ring out forever and beat against each other, the air filled with oscillating overtones and strange tonal colorations, all beneath a patina of thick black buzz.
Amazing cover art as well, a gross out gutted worm picture disc, with a transparent skull and bugs insert on one side, and another sick silkscreened artwork overlay on the thick plastic sleeve, all courtesy of Mr. Seldon Hunt.
Recorded live, in January of this year, in Holland. And of course, you had to know this part was coming:
LIMITED TO 3000 COPIES!! And if it's anything like the other Burial Chamber record, it will sell out FAST.
A new installment of "oppressive necro electronics" from Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby, who when not whipping up these abject clouds of filthy black ambience, spends his time rocking out psychedelically in Jex Thoth, getting filthy metal in Wormsblood, and creating all manner of folky weirdness in Davenport (besides running the kick ass Skulls Of Heaven label).
But Burial Hex is so far removed from Ruby's other combos, they barely warrant mentioning. Burial Hex is the sound of some ancient black ritual, some sick sonik sorcery, where, guitars wind around electronics, and are all smeared into thick heaving slabs of doomdronedirge. The first of two tracks here however sounds bit different that what we're used to, introducing vocals, a howled feral wail, that ends up making this sound like some post industrial blackened Oxbow, minimal guitar strum, bursts of static, fragments of electronic skitter, creepy and atmospheric but super ethereal and hauntingly tense.
The second track returns to more familiar territory, a long sprawling slow motion doomscape, downtuned guitars draped over fractured electronics, bits of shuffling minimal percussion, warm whirring church organs, samples and found sounds, all very mysterious, subtly folky, damaged and abstract, and very very cinematic.
Never heard of Zola Jesus before, but they're a good match for Burial Hex, countering with their own sort of blackened soundscapery. A softly whirling cloud of glitched out electronics, disembodied vocals, almost choral sounding, swirling swooping effects, shards of new wave-y synth, eventually transforming into a nightmarish industrial creep, doused in more effects, all wrapped in thick billowy sheets of downtuned rumble, slipping from spaced out otherworldliness to grim, blackened, doom drenched dronemusick.
Pressed on super thick vinyl and housed in gorgeous matte sleeves, all the text printed in clear reflective ink.
Here's a heavy AQ fave, finally repressed after more than a few months MIA, and back in stock! From our New Arrivals list #184 last year:
Buried At Sea are a bulldozer, shovelling clods of earth down your earcanal. Clods of toxic corrosive landfill, to be precise. And if you love heaviness and doom like we do, you'll understand that we mean that's a good thing, and you'll definitely want to pick up this, the first release from a quartet of Chicago doom-mongers who possibly named their band after the Saint Vitus song "Burial At Sea" (and are not to be confused with fellow doomsters Graves At Sea!). Slow, sludgy sickness for doom-heads. Crushing. Feedback. Disturbed vocals (or indeciperable samples?) buried in the mix. And once in a while, the Buried At Sea guys strip the mastodon they're riding down to a skeleton of bones and bask in the beauty of its terrible form (i.e. quiet parts, occasional interludes of even doomier loneliness and despair). Three untitled songs, 39 minutes! Thus it's closer to a full-length than an ep, although ep priced. The nastiness of Khanate meets the post-rockiness of Pelican, with the heaviness of both. The hole they're digging has also previously been excavated by the likes of Electric Wizard, Eyehategod, Warhorse, the aforementioned Saint Vitus, and all the other bands who operate heavy machinery under the influence of drugs and alcohol in hopes of unearthing the long-buried lich-corpse whose Satanic shadow Black Sabbath was but the first to glimpse...sorry...getting a little carried away there! But with their relentless grinding riffage and use of space and dynamics Buried At Sea are worthy newcomers whose Migration is an excellent debut.
Smashed drum kits, blown bass amps, band and audience, drums and guitars, mic cords and stands, tables and chairs, all in a bloody, sweaty, writhing pit in the middle of the club. The return of the four headed hydra, Burmese, San Francisco's grind/noise/sludge behemoth. Cutting a swath of mayhemic brutality and entropic dissonance through the stale SF scene, Burmese make their table-tossing, audience-baiting, tantrum-throwing peers look like charm school graduates. Punk rock Gallants to Burmese's skull crushing, soul poisoning, ear shredding Goofus.
Now with an extra drummer and a renewed, dangerously unhealthy obsession with Whitehouse, Burmese have slowed things down a bit. Gone are the hyperspeed blast beats and in their place are midtempo dirges, stumbling drunkenly through nihilistic, grinding sludge, spewing bile and ultraviolence. Pounding militaristic beats demarcate vast expanses of throbbing feedback, guttural growls, tarpit washes of bowel loosening low-end and 16 rpm grindcore. Things do speed up occasionally into blurry bursts of static and skree, but even then, they eventually devolve back into some sort of primordial and glacial caveman stomp, all murky thud and swampy roar, thick and suffocating and massively heavy. This is some seriously scary shit. Grinding and pounding. Punishing and pummelling. Relentless and brutal.
MPEG Stream: "Ladykiller" [/audio/burmeseladykiller.m3u]
Finally! A new Burmese record. We've said it before, but it definitely bears repeating. Burmese might just be the best band in San Francisco, and one that not nearly enough folks have heard, or heck even heard OF. And Colony Collapse Disorder might just be their heaviest, tightest, grindiest, most expansive, and weirdly enough catchiest record yet. It's also the first to feature the new lineup, which still includes the two Mikes on bass and vocals, and one of the original Marks on drums, but now adds Weasel Walter and a guy called Tissue to the mix, and HOLEE SHIT. This is pummeling heaviness, grinding chaos, dense crushing metallic brutality, free form noise rock chaos. Hard to know what to call it really, all we know is it rules.
The sound seems to be less Whitehouse and more Crossed Out these days. The long stretches of high end drone and shrieking feedback have now seemingly been all tangled up with blasts of wild octopoidal (literally this time, not literally as in octopus, but literally as in 8 limbed!) drum damage, super distorted bass riffage, layer after layer of grit and grime and crust and filth and buzz, definitely harkening back to their first two tUMULt records, but just WAY, MORE.
Epic abstract sludge grind, blown out blasts of lightning fast crush, lurching stop start arrangements, insane throat shredding vocals that go from shriek to growl to gurgle even stopping briefly at weird croon. Burmese are just the thing for folks into stuff like Discordance Axis, Drop Dead, Melt Banana, the Locust and that sort of sound, who are up for something way more harsh and heavy and fucked up frightening. Baffling and brilliant and noisy and heavy as fuck. WAY recommended as always.
And as always, incredible packaging, released on Rock Is Hell, this is a beautiful full color picture disc, bees and flowers and honeycomb, housed in a spare printed thick sleeve, with a small envelope containing two very mysterious and obtuse inserts. And of course LIMITED TO ONLY 300 COPIES!!!!
Originally released on tUMULt way back in 2000, this primal slab of dual bassed downtuned sonic mayhem, may still rank as one of the heaviest, most vitriolic chunks of sound this city ever produced. A prime slab of chaotic grind, laced with Whitehouse like noise, and bursts of metallic fury, not to mention a black hole entropy that found most songs falling apart into long stretches of broken amp feedback or crushed drum kit clatter.
So this record is finally available on vinyl, BUT, these are not the same recordings. The same songs yes, but recorded in their practice space just before the album proper was recorded, so while it's still heavy and furious and freaked out, it's also even more raw and blown out and most definitely damaged. Also included is a killer cover of Black Flag's "I've Heard It Before', even fiercer and more fucked up than the original (we sacrilegiously proclaim!) originally released on the band's now long out of print Treaties Of Greed And Filth 7".
As with all things Enterruption, the packaging is gorgeous and over the top. The sleeve is silkscreened, with all of the visual elements from the cd packaging represented (the dead elephant, the leafless etc.) The inside of the sleeve is printed with various live band shots, the vinyl is THICK and pressed on red wax, housed in a thick inner sleeve, printed with song titles and liner notes, also included are various show flyers from back in the day, reproduced on nice thick heavy cardstock. LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES!!! Here's our (slightly altered) review of the cd when it first came out in 2000. And while these are different recordings, this description is still pretty apt, just add your own "harsher"s and "noisier"s and "more blown out"s here and there and it'll be perfect.
If you lived in San Francisco, circa 2000 you may have seen these local ne'er do wells playing live (this incarnation at least), with set times ranging from 30 seconds to 15 minutes, often covered in blood, writhing on the floor in a heap of destroyed instruments, charging wildly through the crowd, smashing tables and chairs (and playing with other club destroyers the Black Dice and Arab on Radar). So you'd be forgiven for expecting a messy sloppy record that is nothing without the live show. But boy, would you be wrong. Burmese's debut is a dense, ultra heavy, super low end (they have 2 basses and no guitar after all) crushing and pummeling onslaught.
The opening track is an intense free noise explosion of rumbles, feedback, and spastic drumming. The next 20 tracks take the grind of Drop Dead, drop it a few octaves, and add some seriously fucked arrangements. The last track is an epic drone ala EARTH: waves of subsonics weave in and out of malfunctioning electronics until the whole thing dissolves into a wash of turntables and instrument hum. Somewhere between DROP DEAD and EARTH circa Earth 2, this is some of the craziest, heaviest, noisiest low end grind/sludge we've heard in forever.
Again, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!! So get it while you can...
We'd be hard pressed to think of ANY band that could hold their own on a split record with our very own local noiseniks Burmese. But if anyone can, it's Israeli noise combo Cadaver Eyes.
But first off, holy shit are we psyched to have new music from Burmese. These guys are seriously sloooooow workers. Other than a handful of shows, we've heard nary a peep from these guys, there was the reissue of the tUMULt release on vinyl, but it's literally been years we've been waiting for a new record. Multiple lineup changes, disastrous tours, scrapped recordings, the sort of luck that has plagued these guys forever. But finally, they've beat the curse, and gotten us 11 new blasts of brutal, speaker shredding ultraviolence. Some confusion mix of Whitehouse style abstract noise, pummeling grind, damaged metal, freaked out power violence. They may be down to one drummer, but they still have two bass players, and now THREE vocalists.
They sound as good as ever, still furious and freaked out, sometimes offering up sprawling electronic dronescapes, sometimes, frantic flurries of lightning fast grind, sometimes convoluted lurching metallic crunch, and often all of the above at the same time. Hypnotic and heavy and seriously fucked up. Just another reminder, since they're loath to do it themselves outside of their sporadic releases, that these guys are quite possibly the best band in SF.
But then there's Cadaver Eyes, recorded live on WFMU, using just drums, vocals and no-input mixing board. And listening to this, it seems impossible that there's not two guitarists and multiple drummers and synths and who knows what else. The sound is dense and freaked out. Spastic spurts of strangled grind, long stretches of speaker shredding electronic buzz and skree, long drawn out abstract dronescapes of howling vox and pounding drum plods spaced WAY out, culminating in the nearly eight minute closer, beginning with the strangely titled "Ba Yom Yom" and finishing off with an absolutely unrecognizable cover of "Sweet Home Alabama", a convoluted blow out of maniacally howling vocals, sputtering percussive crunch, LOTS of feedback, and thick walls of rumbling crumbling distortion.
Awesome. And about as UN-easy listening as we can imagine.
It's been a little while since we've heard from Burmese, SF's favorite noise/grind sons. And this new split is actually a blast from the not so distant past, recorded back in 2006, when they were still a three piece, 2 basses and drums, and while as a group, their sound is tough to pin down, sometimes they're thick and dense, sometimes brittle and high end, sometimes they sound like the bastard sons of Drop Dead, other times like the mutant offspring of Whitehouse, but here, they sound like the glorious Burmese of old, a furious off kilter, bass heavy spazzed out grinding three headed speaker shredding club destroying behemoth.
This is chaotic bass heavy grind, with the basses so distorted they often sound like metal guitars, the vocals (all three 'sing') slip from monstrous low end growl to wild feral shriek to punk rock yowl. There's feedback squealing all over the place, and there's even some demented sounding, ultra blown out bass "leads" draped over the top. And holy shit, the drumming, as always, relentless and mathy and complex and fucked up and flailing wildly but still somehow so goddamn tight. There's even a long stretch in the middle of doomy rhythmic minimalism that sounds almost like they're channeling This Heat or Aluk Todolo or both.
We've definitely said it before, but it bears repeating, these guys just might well be the best band in SF.
The flipside features two looooong tracks from new-to-us outfit Potop, who as far as we can tell are Russian (all of their liner notes are in Russian), and counter the short sharp all bass attack of Burmese with their sludge-y slowcore doom, big loud chords ringing out and allowed to slowly decay, long stretches of feedback, throat shredding howls, super spare skeletal drum pound, minor key and creepy, but surprisingly lush and full. Where a lot of bands emulate Sunn 0))) and offer up sludgey amorphous murkscapes, Potop definitely let the chords sing, and let the sunshine in, even if it's quickly swallowed up by shadow. The band do launch into a double time dirge, which if course is still slooooow, piledriving drums beneath guitars all tangled up in sheets of high end squeals. The second track follow suit, another midtempo grinder, with strange strangled vox a la Khanate, and crumbling super distorted guitars and more kick ass and totally pummeling drum crush.
Killer stuff from both outfits. Nice packaging too, thick cardstock sleeves, printed on both sides and held shut with a Japanese style obi, each one hand numbered, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. And be warned, the lps had a rough trip overseas, so none of the sleeves are absolutely perfect, so if you're a crazy anal collector in it for the condition more than the sounds within, you are hereby warned.
Three new 12"s in Table Of The Elements' ongoing series of limited single sided lps, each with 'Guitar' as the theme, ostensibly exploring the sonic possibilities of the instrument, one from long time aQ fave Fennez, another from San Augustin's David Daniell (both reviewed elsewhere on this list), and this one by a fella named Andrew Burnes, who until a few minutes ago, remained a total mystery to us. But apparently, he too is a member of San Augustin alongside Daniell, as well as playing in Haunted House with Loren Mazzacane Connors and performing with Thurston Moore and Ken Vandermark among others.
Here, Burnes, credited with just lap steel guitar, totally reinvents the instrument, subverting any idea of Appalachia or traditional steel string guitar music, instead creating a warm sidelong soundscape of muted buzz and slowly shimmering soft focus drift. The main component here is most definitely the drone, a whirring buzzy, shimmering metallic whir, that is by no means static, instead shifting colors and subtly changing shape, almost like holding your ear against an excited string as its overtones take on a life of their own. But in and around the buzz, little flecks of melody surface, almost like sparks being produced by the constant incessant vibrating steel, but these sparks are soft and sweet, like the surviving fragments of what was once some sort of Appalachia, drifting to the surface, and fluttering to the ground through Burnes' ever expanding cloud of warm metallic shimmer.
Super subtle and minimal and gorgeous. Drone music fanatics will definitely need to keep an eye on Burnes, and folks who like their country disembodied and blurred into warm fuzzy blissy drones, well then Telescope seems like it was custom created just for you!
Pressed on super thick, swirled milky green black and white vinyl. One sided, the other side with a beautiful etching courtesy of the mighty Savage Pencil, housed in a thick PVC sleeve, and again like most good things in life, or so it seems, VERY VERY LIMITED!
Gritty and unkempt garage/sludge from Philadelphia. Noisey and sloppy and super great. Sounding quite a bit like the Stooges or the MC5 (and not the way the Hellacopters turn Stooges/MC5 worship into catchy cock rock) all drunken swagger and snotty attitude.
The violin is probably the last instrument you think of when you think of underground cd-r noise drone music. Okay, maybe not the last, but it's pretty far down the list for sure. Yet Mr. C. Spencer Yeh has forged a career with his trusty violin, creating a sizable body of work, ranging from full on blown out noise assault, to breathless delicate beauty, to propulsive krautrock infused space rock, and various mixes of all three. We even Record Of The Week-ed his Operator Dead album a while back. But where that record was more of a group effort, this latest disc, Challenger, finds Yeh returning to his solo roots, getting a minimal amount of assistance on just a couple of tracks, but handling the bulk of the soundmaking himself. And while there is no list of instrumentation, we have to assume that violin is not the only instrument present. NOBODY is that good. But even so, Yeh is really really good, and with a violin and whatever else he has in his soundmaking arsenal, he has once again conceived something of great beauty and import, a collection of sounds, of SONGS, an album that is cohesive yet varied, personal and introspective, yet somehow epic and expansive. If anything, this new disc finds Yeh moving his BSC into the rarefied world of spaced out Krautrock. Neu!, Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, A.R. & The Machines, Brian Eno. Much in the same way aQ faves Expo '70, channel seventies space kraut, so does Yeh, but where Expo '70 create thick heavy spaced out dronescapes, the sounds on Challenger are much more melodic, and drifty, dreamy and mesmerizing. There is plenty of noise to be found, but it's doled out sparingly, melodies are sometimes halo-ed in buzz, or delicate rhythms wreathed in feedback, but it's always muted and minimal, allowing the melody and arrangement to shine, and shine they do, each track, a gorgeously repetitive stretch of space-y abstract groove, looped, but slowly shifting and changing shape, propulsive but subtly so.
The opening two track salvo is some of the most blissfully beautiful soft noise we've heard. In fact, even calling it noise might be doing it a disservice. The opener is a slow burning slab of minimal murmur, laced with soft tinkling chimes, an abstract ghostly melody over a softly pulsing drone, eventually augmented by some shimmery hiss and random sampled ambience, but instead of distracting, these sonic events, cars driving past, wind, tape hiss, they only add texture to the glimmering drift beneath.
The second track begins with a riff (played on a violin?) that is quickly wrapped up in corrosive swaths of warbly effected buzz, the two elements twisting around one another, creating a strange churning soundscape of stretched out space rock riffage and crumbling distorted drone, that manages to be absolutely riveting.
The next few tracks offer up some more experimental fare, brief chunks of ambient weirdness, one of plastic cup percussion, heavily reverbed, in a wide open stretch of distant whir and tangled electronics, another a symphony of processed vocals, looped and chopped into a hiccupping stuttering soundscape, eventually joined by soft shimmery chords and warm chordal buzz, yet another a collection of crinkles and crackles, like someone stepping on bubble wrap, balling up wrapping paper and a campfire, all draped over the sounds of children laughing and playing.
All before returning to the blissed out dronedrift of the opening few tracks. Reverbed jaw harp floats in a field of static hum and twinkling fragmented melody, deep tones are woven into gentle lilting melodies, symphonic snippets are looped and assembled into a slow building drone, underpinned by fuzzy droney melodies, totally stirring and epic, haunting and mysterious, a bit of Jeck mixed in with BSC's usual glorious buzz, maybe one of the most moving (and possibly one of the best) tracks we've ever heard from Yeh and his 'Core. The final track is an Avarus like coda, sheets of hiss like rainfall (might very well be), bits of percussive chime and clank, plenty of hiss and whir, over the top, a shimmering high end electric melody, that drifts and stutters dreamily, like some alien lullaby.
Absolutely stunning. And thus, entirely and unequivocally recommended.
Normally the solo project of 'noise violinist' C. Spencer Yeh, on Operator Dead... Post Abandoned, Burning Star Core has been expanded to a four piece, with Yeh on violin, voice, electronics, junkbox and trumpet, Trevor Tremaine on drums, percussion and objects, AQ fave Mike Shiflet on computer, electronics and voice, and Robert Beatty on electronics, who is also credited with being "acoustic appraiser."
As much as we've dug past BSC records, this one is definitely shaping up to be our favorite. This Burning Star Core Quartet thing really suits them. The opening track alone, "When The Tripods Came" is a serious contender for best 'noise rock' track of the year. Maybe ever. Calling it noise rock is hardly fair though. It's a rambling sprawling slow moving driftscape of buzz and distortion. It's almost how you might imagine a modern, noisier Taj Mahal Travellers to sound. In fact the whole record sort of has that same sort of spiritual organic vibe. Taking bits and pieces from other purveyors of longform drone noise, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Total, Sunroof!, mixing in some ultra-free jazz, some raga like buzz, some old school improvised ambience, then running it all through a battery of modern effects and unleashing this thick viscous, incredibly heavy, yet impossibly beautiful (especially for a 'noise' record) sound.
A lot of it has to do with the drums, a relentless chaotic octopoidal rhythmic frenzy, skittering as often as pounding, giving the thick snarling ambience direction and propulsion. Turning a record of drifts and shimmers, into something aggressive, something fierce... but the drums are just the framework, supporting the massive sonic weight of the swirling, churning lush noisiness above, beneath and around them.
The first two tracks, nearly 40 minutes, are some of the finest drone-dirge-space-improv EVER. Some impossible dream jam, The Taj Mahal Travellers vs. Crystal Fist vs. Wolf Eyes, mix in some strange disembodied horns, some Tim Hecker like blurred melancholia, add copious amounts of extra buzz and distorted crumble, wrap everything in a bleary eyed crystalline shimmer, and let the whole thing just ooze out of the speakers.
The third and fourth tracks are much more brief and less dense, balancing the bristling buzz of the first two, in the third, a muted warble underpins shimmering high end harmonics, strange muted mechanical whirs and creaks underneath, as well as burbling underwater bass, random bits of percussion, metallic thrum and long streaks of feedback, eventually building into a sort of an abstract tribal space drift, like the members of No Neck and Sunburned Hand jettisoned from the airlock into deep space mid-jam. The fourth is a rhythmic free for all, the drums a constant splatter and shimmer, spreading out like percussive ripples, the cymbals sizzling out a thick layer of constant buzzing whir to compliment the groaning blown out shimmer and reverb drenched washes of sound, everything growing gradually more distorted until it reaches a fever pitch, a lumbering swirl of crumbling low end and pounding drum damage.
Man, there sure are more and more amazing grind bands these days. It's like all kids do these days is practice blast beats instead of doing their homework. But who's complaining? This is a split from two of grinds brightest pupils. Both are fast and furious, the production is top notch, and the songs from both bands are completely fucking brutal.
Finally! A new full length from these psychedelic sixties style garage murk masters, the first in fact we've actually managed to get (it's their third apparently), and it's a doozy, washed out and warped, drowsy and druggy, but super catchy, and impossibly lush and psychedelic. The opener "Pulse" sounds like the Kinks, albeit a way more wasted version, the sound fabulously muddy and murky, melodic and catchy as all get out.
We first discovered these guys on the second Group Flex flexi-book on Castle Face, then on the Castle Face Velvet Underground tribute, and most recently, on the I Need You Bad comp on Polyvinyl. In each case, we inevitably found ourselves going straight to the Burnt Ones' tracks, and then playing them over and over. So, Gift is totally hitting the spot, a gloriously prismatic and cracked collection of paisley pop doused in LSD and sent sprawling through fields of slow motion motorik marches, hazy organ wheeze whirls, and blurred guitar shimmer, the sound super amorphous and abstract, and then without warning, the sound will suddenly come together into a blast of practically perfect baroque pop, albeit still swaddled in fuzz and buzz and hiss, in fact "Money Man" does just that, spending its first two minutes in a sort of bleary suspended animation, before erupting into a riffy, psychedelic stomp, equal parts Kinks, Beatles and Bee Gees, but then roughed up and sent careening wildly into the fray, replete with a final burst of falsetto crooning. And so it goes, the whole record lurching druggily from woozy psychedelic gem to warped dirge pop ditty, every song blossoming like some prismatic sonic flower, revealing more and more as the sounds unfurl and unwind, melodies swoop in from nowhere, hooks hover, fade out, and then suddenly pop up minutes later, lilting, chiming loveliness wrapped in grunge and gristle, there's some crazy primitive drum machine weirdness, some glammy swagger, some 8-bit bleep bloop, plenty of fuzzy synth swirl, FX all over the place, but none of the noisiness or damaged sonic weirdness can disguise the perfect poppiness lurking within pretty much every single of of these twisted psych-garage gems.
Super heavy, surprisingly melodic metallic hardcore from Sweden, mixing the thrash and roar of Coalesce and Converge with the anthemic melodies of fellow countrymen the Refused. Moody and intense, heavy but totally catchy. Swirling guitar melodies and
