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MERCYFUL FATEDon't Break The Oath(Roadrunner)lp$ 29.00

Shambling from the darkness of Saint Petersburg's deepest wooded overgrowth into the even darker darkness of Saint Petersburg's dankest dampest cave (we presume), comes Mondsaal! An entirely new prospect to us, this bizarre disc of murky, woozy Russian cosmic hatefulness arrived seemingly out of nowhere, but we're finding ourselves pretty damn smitten by its lurching weirdness. The esteemed Encyclopaedia Metallum describes Mondsaal as "dark/black metal", and we have to say "dark metal" is a pretty great way to describe these weirdos. Aesthetically it's sort of black metal. There's Burzum-esque midpaced plodding, there's otherworldly synthesizer strings draped over almost everything, but there's also a thick murkiness to their sound that feels more reminiscent of Swedish crypt-dwelling death metal or the warm bloodletting anesthesia of funeral doom bands like Skepticism or Until Death Overtakes Me. Even the mid-range vocal growls lean more towards the death than the black, and the blast beats (on the rare occasion that they do decide to show up) are eerily slow and shambolic. It's a sound that's strange, sorrowful, damaged, ugly, but weirdly warm & enveloping all at the same time. The constant droning of soft synth pads and the squonking of dissonant horns (yes, that's right, there's horns) stand in stark contrast to the naked writhing ugliness of everything else that's happening, and the result is pretty psychedelic & spacey (in a bit of a similar way to the Dunnock/Intergalactic Holocaust split we reviewed on the last list!). The whole affair closes out with a hazy ritualistic rainy desertscape ambient piece, leaving the impression that you've just passed through some living slow motion morphine nightmare. It's a pretty entrancing experience - either hideously beautiful or beautifully hideous, we're not sure yet, but either way: very very recommended.

MPEG stream: Mysterious Drop
MPEG stream: Minutes Of Hell
MPEG stream: Crystal Song

We've actually been meaning to review this for a while now, the debut full length from Swedish death metal weirdoes Morbus Chron, who obviously, being from Sweden, and playing death metal, are following in a grand tradition, but rather than rehashing what came before, these guys take that classic sound and twist it all up. The garish psychedelic cover art is your first clue that this is not your dimwitted big brother's death metal. It's more like your deformed-evil-twin-that-you-keep-locked-up-in-the-attic-dosed-on-hallucinogens-to-keep-him-docile's death metal. Right from the get go, Morbus Chron spew an unholy concoction of tangled atonal psychedelic melodies, ominous cinematic ambience, churning downtuned heaviness, occasionally laced with wah wah guitars, and driven by bellowed gruff vokills, the riffs are fantastically slippery and loose, the drumming too, a punkish gallop that seems right on the edge of the drummer's ability, which is most definitely a good thing, the band tight as fuck, but sounding constantly on the verge of collapse, the sound more lurching and lumbering than blasting, the vibe murky and muddy, old school heaviness infused with some warped avant garde experimentation, and executed like a horde of knuckle dragging zombie metalheads. Plus who can argue with a band who names one of their songs "Creepy Creeping Creep"? Yet for all the weirdness and psychedelic-ness, Sleepers In the Rift is still death metal, and sorta classic sounding (to a degree) DM to boot, so all you dabblers who don't actually dig old school death metal, this might not be QUITE weird enough for you. They're no Portal after all, but what they are, is modern masters of some damaged DNA strain of classic Swedish death metal, beholden hugely to the greats, but all warped and twisted and fucked up, and transformed into something sorta new, but seriously ruling.

MPEG stream: Through The Gaping Gate / Coughing In A Coffin
MPEG stream: Creepy Creeping Creep
MPEG stream: Hymns To A Stiff

Holy shit is this amazing. Everything ever recorded by this eighties Brazilian blacknoize / thrashgrind / primitive death metal horde, whose sound was a sick hybrid of downtuned doom filth, blurts of caustic grinding noise, swaths of blackened buzz, and hyperspeed blackened grind, all of which is gloriously lo-fi, blown out, totally in the red, the production as warped as the sounds, plenty of tape drop outs, weird shifts in tone and timbre, the drums super loud, sounding like a primitive drum machine gone haywire one second, some strange industrial jackhammer the next, but always sounding as if they're being transmitted through a transistor radio, the bass is tangly and detuned, the guitars a smeary blur, a chugging droned out churn, everything wreathed in a thick gauze of crumbling distortion, the vocals for the most parts, almost white noise shrieks, staccato bleats that sound equal part demonic and animalistic. The whole sound stumbling and damaged, lurching from wild chaotic blasts, to drunken doomic lumber, peppered with blurts of trash can cymbal clatter and noise guitar freakouts, the sound often blurring into almost pure noise, but just as often coalescing into some raw primitivistic punk bashing, or knuckle dragging metallic crush. Most of the songs are less than a minute long, some a mere matter of seconds, although the band do lock into some serious riffing, and some kick ass head shearing blasts of black metal like noise, but it always seems to devolve into some sort of glorious, strangely psychedelic, ear shredding, Satanic metal noise chaos. Fans of outfits like Anal Cunt, Sore Throat and other noisecore killers will flip, as will metalheads who like their metal raw, and primitive, noise drenched and seriously fucking twisted and tweaked. If the late great Faxed Head were not a joke band (wait, what?!??!?), they might have ended up sounding a lot like this...

MPEG stream: Christ Psychic Butchery
MPEG stream: Hell
MPEG stream: Cerebral Disturbance
MPEG stream: Death To Posers
MPEG stream: Mrs. Death
MPEG stream: Bullshit Infestation
MPEG stream: Brutal Diarrhoea
MPEG stream: N.P.N.S.
MPEG stream: Schizophrenic Christianity

The shoegaze renaissance continues! This is the debut full length from this Philadelphia band after a string of singles and EPs, and alongside aQ faves True Widow, shows the typically metal-centric Relapse Records branching out further into the realms of atmospheric rock. Guilty Of Everything (a title that's leant an added weight by founder Dominic Polermo's two year jail stint prior to the band's formation) is an enormous monument of heavy shoegaze, loaded with bittersweet hooks and infectious melodies. What sets Nothing apart from most of their contemporaries, and even a lot of the first wave shoegaze bands, is how song oriented they are. Buried underneath an absolutely massive overwhelming production and what feels like a thousand layers of guitar, is an album full of genuinely moving nostalgic pop melodies and arena sized hooks that bring to mind the epic dreamy dirge of bands like Hum and Catherine Wheel. The contrast between these beautifully fragile yet addictive melodies and the wash of reverbed guitar, crunchy low end distortion and bombastic drumming is dramatic and totally perfect, and it plays a massive part in setting Nothing apart in a musical movement that's in constant danger of oversaturation. All the while the vocals hazily drift in and out, the lyrics just on the border of being indecipherable, fragments of sentences floating to the surface like half remembered afterthoughts. While the album is mostly pretty mid paced, there are also moments of driving groove and uptempo punk rock bop that help to momentarily break the hypnosis, but all the while the songs still drip with that same starry-eyed melancholic wonder. Catchy and immersive, rousing yet introspective and totally addictive. A no-brainer when it comes to your 2014 year end list. If you've lately found yourself smitten by the likes of Weekend, Alcest, Deafheaven and Whirr (with whom these guys will be releasing a split later this year) then this is absolutely essential.

MPEG stream: Hymn To The Pillory
MPEG stream: Dig
MPEG stream: Get Well

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

Soaring, heartbreaking, really heavy and *gasp* REALLY CATCHY. The treacherous "difficult second album" from Arkansas' epic doom dealers Pallbearer is one of those records that you kind of wish every doom album sounded like, yet so few seem to pull it off. A heavy metal record absolutely unashamed to wear its heart on its sleeve and to embrace shimmering melodic bliss, Foundations Of Burden joins such classics as Solstice's New Dark Age, While Heaven Wept's Of Empires Forlorn and Warning's Watching From A Distance as a towering testament to how beautiful, cathartic, honest and human doom metal can really be. (Although we're guessing this is the only one on that list that debuted in the Billboard Top 100 - Wha???). All pretenses are stripped away. There's no concern here with sounding evil, occult or clinically suicidal. Instead this is gut wrenching, soul baring stuff. As a band Pallbearer have improved immensely since their already highly acclaimed debut Sorrow And Extinction, and no element more so than Brett Campbell's vocals. While before they took a bit of a backseat to the immense riffery, here the vocals are much more in focus, no longer buried in the sludge, sounding like some shadow cast hybrid of Ozzy, Trouble's Eric Wagner and Patrick Walker from the aforementioned, much missed and deeply mourned Warning/40 Watt Sun. The balance of weariness and drama he's able to convey really elevates Pallbearer's songs, imbuing them with a sort of classic theatrical tragedy. The production on the record (courtesy of Billy Anderson) is also perfectly enormous. There seems to be space everywhere, but also a real warmth and cohesion between the instruments - overwhelming, crushing, but strangely comforting. And as for that catchiness we mentioned earlier� These songs have some serious hooks, and for 10+ minute songs that move approximately apace of a huge and heavily sedated prehistoric snail, that's no small feat. But there's a real ear for songwriting and harmony here, that manages never to sacrifice the heaviness or punishing plod of the music. And while heaviness, heartbreak and humongous riffs are all well and good, the album's true highlight might come in the form of the penultimate "Ashes" - clocking in at only three minutes and consisting mostly of electric piano and vocals, it sounds like it would be more at home on a Mogwai record. It's easily the album's least heavy and most sparse moment, but it's also the most devastating and beautiful, and a perfect offset to the slow motion crushing gravity of the rest of the album. Doom album of the year contender. Metal album of the year contender. Let's just say album of the year contender and leave it at that. FYI, the vinyl double lp version pretty much sold out already, but is being repressed...

MPEG stream: Worlds Apart
MPEG stream: The Ghost I Used To be
MPEG stream: Ashes

Warning: Emotional devastation alert! Planning For Burial is a one man project from New Jersey whose been toiling tirelessly (and gloomily) for a good few years now, and although this is only his second proper full length, Thom Wasluck has at least 12 releases to his name and with this latest monolith of gorgeously devastating post rock finally seems primed to reach the wider audience he so rightfully deserves. Coming courtesy of the ever-reliable Flenser Records, a local label fast gaining a Profound Lore-like reputation for its meticulous selection of dark fringe music free of genre constraints, Desideratum is an enthralling and mesmerizing blend of post rock, doom, shoegaze and ambient. It's at times pummeling but also beautifully melodic, undeniably sad but also lush and warm - a warmth that's offset by clinical programmed drums, all regimented and martial - which lend a really cool contrast. Contemplative piano rises over the plod of monotonous percussion and the heartbreak static wash of layers upon layers of guitar. The dusty fading light of drifting cinematic synths melts into freeform vocalizing and woozy guitar picking. Sparse riffing builds and builds to the point of breathless exhaustion. Then that dirge of sludgy downpicked guitar emerges again, draped over distant mournful singing and minimal synthetic drums. It's that perfectly irresistible crossroad between abrasive noise and gut wrenching bittersweet melody. At times bringing to mind Jesu and at other times Soundtracks For The Blind-era Swans, or even our recently reviewed (and raved about) Nothing and Have A Nice Life records. For fans of those bands and anything heavy & heartstring tugging this is a total must have, and a no brainer for an Album Of The Year contender.

MPEG stream: Where You Rest Your Head At Night
MPEG stream: 29 August 2012
MPEG stream: Golden

Hot on the heels of their much revered debut Court in the Act, fresh-faced youngsters Satan have returned from the foggy English North to deliver another razor sharp slice of very regal, very classic, very BRITISH heavy metal! Oh wait, did we mention that much revered debut actually came out 30 years ago?? That's right, it's been a LONG time coming, but Satan have reformed with their entire original line up intact (that never happens!) and have against all odds delivered one of the most potent and exhilarating heavy metal records of 2013. Life Sentence is buzzing with a youthful exuberance no one has any right to expect from a band well into its third decade - especially one that's been inactive for so long. The entire record is a blur of infectious riffs, confounding guitar leads and commanding vocals. Seeing as Satan originally emerged from the darker side of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, fans of bands like Angel Witch, Pagan Altar and Witchfynde are obviously going to find lots here to love. But there's something about the combination of Brian Ross' deep theatrical vocals layered over the band's unique brand of eccentric, dramatic heavy metal that also brings to mind Bay Area true metal stalwarts and long time aQ faves Brocas Helm, while some of the dizzying proto-thrash riffing and occasional piercing falsetto wails recall Mercyful Fate in their prime. Otherwise though, Life Sentence is a wholly British affair. Satan's approach to heavy metal feels historical and dignified with a sense of medieval dread running throughout (not unlike their also recently reformed NWOBHM peers Hell) with songs that might not sound out of place soundtracking a dreary English countryside besieged by plague, or perhaps a lively public execution by guillotine in the local town square! The production is appropriately understated and sparse to match, striking the perfect middle ground of a nice clean sound without ever sounding too modern or polished. Highly recommended for any traditional headbangers out there who prefer their metal a little bit dark and a little bit menacing, but still addictive and catchy as hell. Get this... lest ye be judged!

MPEG stream: Time To Die
MPEG stream: Siege Mentality
MPEG stream: Testimony

A full 11 years since their last masterpiece Illusion's Play (which is only about 6 months in funeral doom years), these Finnish aficionados of gorgeously mournful DOOM have finally risen once more from the fog below to deliver another massive missive of crushing beauty. Monotony Fields is funeral doom surely, but that term betrays the lush landscape of sound that this album wanders listlessly through, layered with numbing morphine drenched synths, ethereal female chanting, patient heart rending melodies, guttural growls and world demolishing plodding drums. The effect is almost like death-doom gone new age - all engulfing, all consuming, the perfect winter album to drown in! Highly recommended for fans of Skepticism, Bell Witch, Asunder, Mournful Congregation and a very serious contender for DOOOOM album of the year.

MPEG stream: Monotony Fields
MPEG stream: Descending Inner Night

Japan's best black metal band (along with Sabbat) are back with their first US domestic release, having just been signed by big metal label Century Media. We've always been fans of their fucked-up genre-mangling horror movie soundtrack metal, and this might

RealAudio clip: Ecstatic Transformation
RealAudio clip: Nietzschean Conspiracy
RealAudio clip: A Sunset Song

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. Only got one left of these. And it's incredible. Andee ordered a copy direct from the label the SECOND he heard about it. We managed to get just two for the shop, sold one, and now have just one left. It's now out of print too, so this could be your last chance. What is Spiderland? It's an iconic indie rock masterpiece, a record that if you haven't heard it before, well, it means you're missing out on what might be one of the best records ever made. Moody and mathy, brooding and epic, intense and introspective, catchy and melodic, noisy and abrasive, emotional and majestic. So many bands you love owe everything they do to this band, and this record. A $175 boxset might not be the place to start or the version for someone just discovering Spiderland, but we think maybe it IS. If there was ever a record deserving of this sort of lavish treatment, it's most definitely Spiderland. So you get the record proper, on both cd AND vinyl, the holy grail here being a BUNCH of unreleased tracks, rehearsals and stuff, all of which, are worth the price of admission alone. But you also get a huge book, packed with rare photos from the Spiderland era, as well as the dvd of the Slint documentary Breadcrumb trail. All housed in a big beautiful box. Needless to say, the HIGHEST recommendation. One of you lucky aQ customers is about to get even luckier...

Finally, the new album from the fine introspective singer/songwriter formerly from the band Heatmiser. His songs will break your heart... seriously. One of his best.

Wow, now back in print on vinyl, all deluxe 180-gram style, for first time since it was originally released!! It's easy to forget that when Elliott Smith first hit the scene things were a lot different than they are now. There weren't that many sensitive singer songwriters roaming the underground and there was still a pretty huge divide between the 'indie' and the mainstream. Of course that has all changed so much, but when Elliott first started to get wider attention thanks to Gus Van Sant's use of his songs in Good Will Hunting and the Oscar nomination that followed, it was really an exceptionally strange occurrence in the indie music scene. It kind of marked the moment where much of what had been a big well kept secret would soon become a part of popular culture. We can still remember watching Smith on live TV performing at the Oscar's in his white tuxedo looking so sweet, nervous and humble. It truly felt like one of US was finally getting their deserved moment in the spotlight. Of course he lost to Celine Dion, but there was really no one you would rather get to represent so many of the underdogs than Elliott Smith. It was like finally getting to see someone honest and uncorrupted in a mainstream Hollywood setting. His music was so pure and beautiful, with this uncanny ability to make the bitter sound so sweet. XO was Smith's major label debut and he took full advantage of a bigger budget, and more time in he studio to explore and reach further, honing his amazing ability to construct and orchestrate grand yet never bloated pop songs. There was still lots of the more minimal moments, stark songsmithery and delicate fingerpicking, all hallmarks of his earlier work, but there was a new lush and and much fuller sound on XO. Without trying to sound too hyperbolic, XO is as close to a perfect pop record as you can get. We can't count the times that one of these songs was put on a mixtape we made, or was played over and over and over as it so closely corresponded to a relationship we were having or a moment in time we were going through. He never hid the fact that he was hugely influenced by The Kinks and The Beatles and while countless others made careers out of trying to rip off both of those bands, Smith managed to tap into the internal world of those bands, their amazing melodies and moods, like no one else has, carrying the torch for smart, sincere, heartfelt and truly timeless pop music. This is an album so full of warmth, like it was made just for you, the music flowing out of your speakers, filling your room or your headphones with glorious beautiful sound. Songs about lovers, friends, relationships and the human condition, that will ring with warm truth for decades to come.

MPEG stream: Waltz #2 (XO)
MPEG stream: I Didn't Understand
MPEG stream: Baby Britian

One of our favorite Heavy Metal bands from the '70s and '80s, the underrated British outfit Spinal Tap, were surprisingly enough the subject of a documentary film, or 'rockumentary' if you will, back in 1984, entitled This Is Spinal Tap, when their career was, let us say, not at its zenith. If you can find a VHS copy, and a VHS player, it's worth checking out. Kind of like the more recent Anvil: The Story Of Anvil documentary you may have seen. A little while ago, we discovered that the soundtrack to that Spinal Tap documentary had been reissued on vinyl, and ever since, it's been a steady seller in the shop - perhaps there's more Spinal Tap fans out there than we supposed. Also, the soundtrack, which serves as a 'best of' the band, is the ONLY way you can get any of Spinal Tap's music these days, as their actual albums are inexplicably out of print and seemingly impossible to find - even on the internets. Thankfully, this soundtrack lp contains the most essential of their greatest 'hits', as well as a smattering of rarities going back to the late sixties when they were more of a twee flower power psych rock band than the metal juggernaut they later became. This album goes to 11 - that's how many tracks are on it. You get such Tap classics as "Big Bottom", "Tonight I'm Gonna To Rock You Tonight", "Heavy Duty"," Sex Farm", and "Hell Hole", that originally appeared on, respectively, the albums Brainhammer (1970), Intravenus De Milo (1974), Bent For The Rent (1976), Shark Sandwich (1980), and Smell The Glove (1982). But then, for the deep cuts, this collection delves way back to 1967 to dig up the title track of the band's debut single, "(Listen To The) Flower People". And there's also a great garagey freakbeat nugget, "Gimme Some Money", too. Oh, and who can forget Spinal Tap's almost parodic prog rock epic "Stonehenge"? Yeah, for some strange reason, this band is often considered a joke. Ok, so some of their lyrics aren't exactly Shakespeare, and can even be construed as sexist (not to be confused with sexy!). And musically too, Spinal Tap sometimes stumbles across the fine line between clever and stupid. But we maintain that they're in fact good songwriters. These tracks, with all their heavier than thou bluster or portentous proggy synthiness, are also full of catchy hooks that will stick in your ear, big riffs and majestic melodies. They deserve recognition alongside some better known bands of their era, like Zeppelin and Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult and KISS� indeed, you can almost hear their influence on those acts and others. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Seriously - this not only is this one of our favorite soundtracks, to one of our favorite movies (and one of the funniest movies), of all time, but it really IS also one of our favorite heavy metal albums, of all time, too!! First time on vinyl since 1984, comes in deluxe gatefold package in black on black cover (echoing the "none more black" graphic design of Smell The Glove), with original liner notes from the authoritative Rocklopedia Brittanicus. (By the way, it's also still available on cd too, with their "Christmas With The Devil" single as a bonus.)

MPEG stream: Heavy Duty
MPEG stream: Rock And Roll Creation
MPEG stream: Gimme Some Money

Ahhh, the musty aroma of archaic heavy metal, like dried blood upon the brittle pages of Robert E. Howard pulp magazines... Sorry, halfway through the first sentence and we're already getting carried away, but it's hard not too when the metal's this epic! This is the vinyl pressing of the debut demo from Stone Dagger out of Massachusetts, who'll probably be most notable to perusers of this list for sharing literally every one of their members with big time aQ doom metal faves Magic Circle (who will soon be playing right down the street from us at the Elbo Room in San Francisco on October 25th, with Satan, Slough Feg and Space Vacation - aieee!!), but just a few seconds into the A-side, and it's clear they've traded in their Sabbathian Pagan Altarisms for a much hairier chested sound. Right off the bat "The Siege Of Jerusalem" slinks out of the gate with a windswept barbaric plod, a stone cold dead ringer for some lost Manowar track circa Into Glory Ride, Brendan Radigan's vocals an absolute perfect accompaniment to the torchlit din - rugged, timeless, world weary and wise, like a cross between Ian Gillan, Eric Adams, Mike Taylor from Quartz with maybe even a dirty hint of Blackie Lawless. And then two minutes in the song erupts into a driving NWOBHM stomper, all swirling guitar solos, fist pumping drums, and soaring vocals with just a hint of bittersweet lament, like early Iron Maiden soundtracking Conan The Barbarian. B-side "Black Clad Rider" keeps the high energy rock & roll heavy metal ride going, again sounding like equal parts early Manowar and '80s British metal as well as recalling Manilla Road & Cirith Ungol's hookier, more uptempo numbers. To say this demo is a promising start for this band feels like a pretty serious understatement. One of the most exciting pieces of true metal heroism we've heard in quite some time, and we absolutely can't wait to hear more!

MPEG stream: The Siege Of Jerusalem

Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992. Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting. We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away. For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!

MPEG stream: Elephant Stone
MPEG stream: Standing Here
MPEG stream: Simone
MPEG stream: Fools Gold

Forget Blur, Pulp and Oasis, The Stone Roses were the best britpop group ever! Well, maybe if we lived in a just world. Ultimately, their career fizzled early on, but their debut record and the array of singles they released around it still tower mightily to this day. Light in The Attic subsidiary, Modern Classics, just reissued both their superb 1989 self-titled debut and, for the first time on double vinyl, the singles collection Turned To Stone, originally released in 1992. Indebted to sixties British mod forms but evolving them into dreamy psych-pop bangers, The Stone Roses' sound seemed to float around burgeoning "Madchester", britpop and shoe-gaze tropes just as those genres were being coined and defined. Yet they didn't quite fit neatly into a single scene. They had jangle guitar pop hooks, coolly detached vocals, psychedelic club-ready grooves, and a sublime intuitive sense toward a kaleidoscopic sonic production (the backwards tracking on "Don't Stop" for example) that was druggy and at times beautifully ethereal and arresting. We recommend both wholeheartedly, the self-titled is no-brainer essential listening, but if you are looking for deep cuts definitely get the singles collection, which has the epic "Fool's Gold", a guaranteed dancefloor filler. The singles were where they really got to stretch out and experiment and collected together offers a deeper picture into their brilliantly ambitious brains, before it all vanished away. For a limited time, we have the 'stone' colored vinyl of both!

MPEG stream: I Wanna Be Adored
MPEG stream: She Bangs The Drums
MPEG stream: Bye Bye Bad Man
MPEG stream: Made Of Stone

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

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

Swans always wrote every song like it was going to be their last. Even so, the announcement that this was finally it, after some 15 years of honing word, gristle, rhythm and half-melody into some of the finest, most enduring, if (unsurprisingly) somewhat unfairly overlooked works in the whole rock cannon, comes as a shock. That they decided to submit to cold economic reality and call it a day rather than face another soul-destroying struggle with media indifference and a diminishing fan base is sensible enough. But what is truly sad about the whole Swans saga coming to an end is the fact that the music they've been making these past years is every bit as powerful as the extraordinary, torturously slow, delayed-drop gallows rock with which they announced themselves at the start of the '80s. These last Swansongs, spread over two cds (which, appropriately enough, last a lifetime) cap and conclude all the major Swans concerns. At the same time, the instrumental fragments and interludes that punctuate the fully developed pieces hint at all the Swansongs that now will never be, just as they provide tantalizing glimpses of the future directions that Swans motivating force Michael Gira, and longtime partner Jarboe, might take. The musical scope of Soundtracks is as breathtaking as it is thematically devastating. Along with its immediate predecessor, Die T�r Ist Zu, it constitutes the cement that binds all their preceding music into a single, formidable body of work. The subject of this body of work is the human body itself, and the daily toll taken on both body and soul by pointless, spiritually unsatisfying work. The tape collage "How They Suffer" underlines the physical frailty that permeates the set. It features two tape extracts, one of Jarboe talking to her mother, who is facing the onset of old age; the other is Gira's father talking about the detached retina that has left him blind. The piece is as moving as it is characteristically bleak, in that it offers no solace other than the sense of calm acceptance in the two voices. This admission of more directly autobiographical material is rare for a group which always spoke in the first person to articulate universal, and universally ugly, truths. Perhaps the sense of mortality the piece invokes accelerated The Swans' decision to call it a day. Where the younger, earlier Swans would subject the body to a vicious pummeling, simulating the cruelty of the exchange values that at base govern our lives, the latter day Swans will pile into a singular riff with the musical intention of providing a release. Monotonal guitar pieces like "The Sound" and "Helpless Child" combine the controlled frenzies of Glenn Branca's guitar orchestras with the emotional intensifications of Austrian blood-artist Herman Nitsch. Where before there seemed no end to The Swans' riffing, now the piling up of overtones finally bursts into the light that illuminates the earlier darkness. But the songs are scarcely less grim. "All Lined Up" is even more devastating in its updated version than it was in its original take on Gira's solo album Drainland. What was once a flesh parade is now a march of the dead�ghost shapes iridescent in the winter light and the narrative intoned in Gira's most weatherbeaten baritone. Time and again, Gira and Jarboe pick at the scabs of their past to see if they can still bleed. Empathy straddles the Greed/Holy Money and Children Of God eras with the narrator cursing a lapse into kindness as a betrayal of weakness, while the last song "The Final Sac", reprises the notion of love, divine or otherwise, as a form of dominance and submission. Right up to their dying moments The Swans have stayed true to their witheringly bleak vision. It has absolutely no comparison in rock. Indeed, if Gira's obsessive way of putting a small, yet complete vocabulary through endless permutations of the same, seemingly self-loathing theme can be compared to anything it should be to the novels of the late, great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Meanwhile, another Austrian, the satirist Karl Kraus, summed up why he and their like keep gnawing at the same corpse: "Because," he said, "I persist in believing there's life in it yet."

My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics ceratinly applies to Swans. Their first period centered around the butality of the "Cop" and "Filth" albums and had been described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira directing a muscular thud of clinically precise assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. "Children of God" and the World of Skin side project marked the middle period with Swans, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and throroughly ashen beauty. "The Great Annihilator" from 1995 stands at the pinnacle of that final period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass, and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. A handful of bands from black metal circles (especially Katatonia and Beyond Dawn) have drawn heavily from this period of Swans, with considerable success; but the original is quite a masterful work. Finally reissued, with a bonus live cut.

MPEG stream: Killing For Company
MPEG stream: Alcohol The Seed
MPEG stream: I Am The Sun

The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future... I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!

MPEG stream: The Watcher's Dream
MPEG stream: Street Lamps Calling
MPEG stream: Dying Daze

The aptly titled Post-Mortem comes to us sadly after the demise of this short-lived but highly volatile group of Floridian grindcore mercenaries. A collection of demos (although that term betrays how good these recordings sound), this complete discography collection must now act as an epitaph for a band that burned furiously bright for but a short time! Post-Mortem is a flurry of blast beats, unhinged vokills and frantic riffing, equal parts grindcore and old school hardcore, and absolutely bursting at the seams with pent up energy and aggression. Press play and watch as the world speeds into a fast-motion whirlwind blur. Pro-printed cd-r limited to just 50 copies!

MPEG stream: Culture Of Never Enough
MPEG stream: What Kind Of Terrorist?

Writhing forth once more from the most shadowy cracked wastelands of forsaken Brooklyn, Tombs returns with their third full length of glistening, gleaming extreme metal. And indeed extreme metal is the only genre tag that really works for this band, since they've made it their crusade to cherry pick the absolute best traits from a myriad of metal subgenres to mathematically create some of the most monolithic, ferocious and enormous metal being recorded today. A brief vaguely funereal dirge ushers in a flurry of pummeling helicopter double bass, wild eyed doom-laden heaving guitars, and a hurricane of rolling snare drum and hammering blast beats. There are hints of Souls At Zero-era Neurosis or even Deathspell Omega in the dissonant hypno-riffing. The circling, maddening guitar work and sickening Lovecraftian grooves sometimes recall early Morbid Angel. While elsewhere you might hear hints of the wasted urban scrawl of vintage Godflesh or the slithering futuro-insectoid crawl of latter day Celtic Frost / Triptykon. But there is not one moment of Savage Gold that sounds like homage. Instead, these influences are blended together seamlessly, creating a sound all encompassing, familiar and unique all at once. The vocals are a cold emotionless howl, which lends otherwise innocent lyrics like "life is a dream" a twisted rotten air. It's an extremely dense record. Guitars seem to avalanche upon one another, building a higher and higher wall of black glistening sludge, ready to collapse in on itself again at any moment. There are melodic moments as well. The regal grind of "Portraits" especially brings to mind Ludicra or Wolves In The Throne Room, but with a more obsidian metallic sheen. Compared to their insanely critically-acclaimed last album Path Of Totality, Savage Gold feels much more streamlined, smooth and clean (mostly thanks to a production job from Hate Eternal's Erik Rutan), but it's not at all a detriment to this record. Instead it gives the band the sound of some well oiled calculated killing machine. The spaciousness of the production really lends an extra sprawling quality to the band's more epic moments, while somehow magnifying the menace of the darker passages. And while there's still plenty of doom, sludge, groove and twisted death metal, Savage Gold has really upped the black metal influence. Labyrinthine tremolo whirlwind guitars seem to spiral upward like some Escher staircase, leading to realms shadowy, alien and obscured! A shining black monolith that shows metal can be forward-thinking, modern and unique without sacrificing any of the heaviness, ferocity or... well... metalness! Absolutely recommended, and sure to make more than a few metal best of the year lists come January 1st.

MPEG stream: Thanatos
MPEG stream: Portraits
MPEG stream: Seance

Tony Tears, you've come a long way, baby. When we first discovered psychedelic doom outsider Tony Tears a few years ago, he was an eerie, despondent Italian fellow with very few friends/fans, judging by his MySpace page (see below). Nowadays, he still is eerie and despondent (and Italian) but he's got some fans now, maybe even a cult. Cult enough to now have a handsome lil' box set release, containing three cds, collecting all of his significant public recordings to date, including Voci Dal Passato, the weird Goblinesque DIY doom masterpiece that we made an aQuarius Record Of The Week when we first got it on cd back in 2009. That cd quickly sold out, but fortunately there then was a cassette version released, which also soon went out of print, but then after that, it was released on vinyl. So it wasn't just us that had become obsessed with Tony Tears, it seems. We know some of you are too, and this box of music from Tony's Astral Worlds is for you! We'd managed to track down only one other Tony Tears release, a cd-r we listed two years ago, and which is also long gone too of course. But, having begun his career as Tony Tears back in 1988, the man has got a bunch of other releases, all of them incredibly hard to find, most of 'em limited run cd-rs and even more obscure demo tapes. Fans should be very thankful, then, for this box set put together by, naturally Minotauro Records (what with that label being home to another cult Italian psychedelic doom genius, Paul Chain). Besides Voci Dal Passato, the box includes Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror from the year 2000 (the cd-r we did get before), along with The Reality Before All (a cd-r from 2004), Tony's half of a split 7" with Abysmal Grief from 2004, the All My Black ep from 2007, and perhaps best of all, the more of less brand new 2014 Tony Tears full-length album, Vortice, previously issued on cd-r and very difficult to obtain. Vortice is pretty great, something we'd have considered making a Record Of The Week by itself, though definitely different from Voci Dal Passato, being rather more spacey and spooky than heavy, though parts are quite heavy too. On it, Tony is no longer alone, he has recruited a new member into what's now we guess the Tony Tears band, a vocalist, named David Krieg, who also must be Italian though. At first we we apprehensive, 'cause we like Tony's semi-spoken vocals. But this new singer has a haunting, almost operatic style that gives Vortice's heavily synthesizer laden, abstract ambient drone doom sound a touch of Early Music or 20th century classical avantgarde. 'Nuff said, perhaps, 'cause we're about to tack on our original reviews of Voci Dal Passato and Fears And Sensations, so this is gonna get loooong. We figure if you read about those and don't have 'em already, you can figure out if you want this box; if you DO have 'em, you probably already know you want this box for everything else, anyway. The final two sound samples below are from Vortice, though, fyi. And a word about the box itself - in addition to the three cds in cardboard sleeves with credits and tracklistings, there's also a separate set of cards with the original cover art for each release on 'em, and a fold-out insert with photos and liner notes from Tony himself, in both Italian and English. In a nice touch, the inside surfaces of the box feature full-color occult artwork by Tony, too. So, here are the two Tony Tears reviews we've previously published, for those who need to find out more... Voci Dal Passato: We first got a couple of these in a few weeks back ('cause we were curious) and it didn't take long before we realized we had a Record Of The Week on our hands. It was obvious, really, since some of us here ending up getting so obsessed with this that it was just about ALL they'd listen to, for days, getting home after work and throwing it on, listening to it going to sleep at night, and when they'd get up in the morning, playing it at the store too... At first, though, we thought well heck maybe that's just us, maybe we're weird to like Tony Tears that much. But of course, we ARE weird, and so are a lot of AQ customers, and that's why this is definitely a good choice for Record Of The Week. Anything this hypnotic and dirgey and doomy and last but not least weird, has got AQ (and possibly you) written all over it. We had to go to some trouble to acquire enough of these to list, contacting Tony Tears via MySpace, importing copies from Italy, getting all the cds we could lay our hands on. Which means we may or may not be able to get more when we run out, and if we can, it will certainly take a while, so be forewarned... Tony Tears? So what IS that, you ask? Actually when we first saw the name, we thought it said Ebony Tears, which is the name of another band. But no, it's Tony Tears, as in a guy named Tony, last name Tears. And the "band" is indeed just the work of one man, whose (we presume) stage name gives this its monicker. How perfect is that, a mournful Italian doom metaller named Tony Tears? Already you feel sorry for him. Awww, Tony Tears... Tony Tears' MySpace page is also perfect for this sort of depressed, lonely sounding music. It's really stark and plain, with a sort of electric purple/pink background color. He's got, like, only 66 friends (one of 'em us), and in his "top friends" listing he still has Tom. You know, Tom the founder of MySpace, who is automatically your first and only friend when you first sign up, but then of course you remove Tom 'cause he's not actually someone you know or care about... But lonely Tony, grateful for Tom's friendship, keeps him around. So, anyway, to answer your question, this is some sort of underground doom metal, but also Italian in that spooky proggy soundtracky way, so it's kind of like Goblin crossed with St. Vitus, or Umberto teamed up with Trollman Av Ildtoppberg. Or, our early '70s proto-doom prog faves Jacula, channelled through someone's (Striborg's?) basement 4-track today. Tony wrote the lyrics and the music, sings, and plays all the instruments... there's layers of fuzzy, foggy bass, gorgeously melancholic psychedelic electric guitar leads, eerie Goblin-y synths tinkling and droning, and a rhythmic foundation of slightly stumbling drum machine programming. Along with enough echo effects to give parts of this a bit of a dubby, or druggy, vibe. Perhaps most crucial to our enjoyment of this are the vocals, which are spoken rather more than sung, and are all in Italian. Which works great, it's a language which even when simply spoken still sounds rather musical, we LOVE hearing Italian in this manner (we're reminded of old fave "Ordine Pubblico" by Starfuckers, especially by the track "Antichi Messagi" here), and we feel Tony's echoing, emotional chant-like recitations further enhance the hypnotic aspect of this lugubrious music. We can imagine Om fans zoning out to this quite easily! Speaking of hypnotic, one of the times recently we had this playing in the store, a customer asked if it was some sort of new Circle side project... we can see why he thought it might be. The overall atmosphere of this record is sooooooooo sad, yet somehow comforting. Even though we don't understand the Italian, this comes across as being very intimate & personal, and not just because of a certain sparseness to the mix that speaks to this being a one-man effort. Tony Tears' repetitive lumbering heavy riffs and dark keyboard coloration, punctuated with mechanical, but not entirely predictable drum beats, awash with flangey, spacey effects and further embellished with his poetically mannered, incantatory Italian, has had quite an effect on the psyches of those here who can't help but keep this in heavy rotation. While rather raw and ragged in a charming DIY home-recorded way, the results are sheer beauty, weird weeping dreamlike beauty. Definitely in the tradition of such strange Italian dark underground metal/prog/psych as Death S.S., Paul Chain, and Black Hole. But quite something else besides, with no prior interest in that tradition being necessary for appreciation of this. Being into doom metal isn't a prerequisite, as long as you like unusual music. Being into Goblin though might help. Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror: This is first official release of TT's debut demo from 2000, Fears And Sensations In The Claustrophobic Mirror, consisting of six tracks (the last an extended, 4 part suite lasting 15 minutes). Just like the Tony Tears album we made ROTW, it's a lo-fi morass of mesmeric doomed-out psychedelia, inspired by Paul Chain, Goblin, Black Hole, and other esoteric Italians, with wobbly keyboards, crude drum programming, chant-like and sometimes extremely distorted Italian-language vox, and of course heavy fuzzed out doom guitar riffage, the whole thing giving off uniquely eerie, eccentric vibes galore as each track slowly plods forth through a haze of hiss and murk. We mentioned Umberto with Striborg-level production and performance in our review of Voci Dal Passato, and guess what, these earlier recordings are even MORE like that. It's a beautiful thing. Tracks like "The Return To The Underground Temple", mostly echo effected keyboards and weeping guitars over simple steady rhythms, have so much weird psychedelic atmosphere that Tony Tears should not be limited to a 'cult doom metal only' audience. Devoted dronologists should hear the quietly ominous "Forze Invisibli Bussano Al Cuore", the aforementioned four-part suite - it's pulsating electronic cosmic mystery that could be from some lost '70s krautrock lp or sinister soundtrack, at least until the super slowed down sludge part kicks in, with vocals and guitar sounding like they're recorded at quarter-speed or something, as if you're listening to it on a device with dying batteries.

MPEG stream: Le Ossa E Il Fuoco
MPEG stream: Voci Dal Profondo
MPEG stream: Antichi Messagi
MPEG stream: Mondo Parallelo
MPEG stream: Coniurationes Mundi
MPEG stream: The Return Of The Underground Temple
MPEG stream: Forze Invisibli Bussano Al Cuore
MPEG stream: Gli Anni Del Tempo Veloce
MPEG stream: Il Sole Nella Casa Dell'acquario

Ough!!! Let's get that out of the way right off the bat. It only takes 30 seconds into the first track to get that trademark verbal expulsion, courtesy of metal's most uncompromising (and often misunderstood) artisan Tom G. Warrior. And that's worth the price of admission alone! But luckily there's plenty more bleak metal greatness to be found here as well. After already cementing himself a Metal Legend status with his early works in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost (not to mention 2006's superb CF reunion record Monotheist), Tommy G is back with the second full length of his most recent passion project Triptykon, and man oh man it does not disappoint. Sickening, slithering grooves are bent to their breaking point. Riffs seem to go in and out of tune even in the middle of a single note. The riffing is simple yet compelling - hypnotic and enveloping, like some musty lightless cocoon. Tom Warrior's vocals are as commanding as ever. He seems to be hurtling dogma from a pulpit with the passion of a mad zealot - his influence on vocalists like Satyricon's Satyr or Immortal's Abbath never more apparent. The drumming, freeform and almost jazzy at times, nicely offsets the vocals and the guitars, bringing something a bit more organic and human into the fold, but they still get very tribal and seriously heavy when they need to be. It's a rotting alien obelisk of an album. Even the brooding gothic balladry of "Boleskine House" with its ethereal female vocals, or "Aurorae" with its drifting reverbed guitar and lazy drum shuffle, seem to lurch and twist on a nauseous alien wave. And although occasionally we'll be assaulted with a thrashy downbeat pummel, Melana Chasmata is almost entirely a downtrodden affair - wallowing in the pits of mid-paced despair and dreadfully doomy inevitability. But for all its forlorn pallid squalor and slimy dissonance, it's still a bewilderingly catchy record - the chorus from opener "Tree Of Suffocating Souls" almost guaranteed to earworm its way into your psyche, whether you want it there or not! At over an hour, it's an exhausting, all encompassing experience, more akin to something like Swans' The Seer than your average metal record. And like that album, while it may not always be the easiest listen, it's more than worth the effort if you're willing to follow the dark corridors and shadowy labyrinthine passages of Melana Chasmata.

MPEG stream: Tree Of Suffocating Souls
MPEG stream: Boleskine House
MPEG stream: Aurorae

A midsummer's night motorcycle ride through the dystopic streets of Akira's cyberpunk Tokyo? Check. A steamy make out session beneath the glaring neon lights of Blade Runner's perpetually rainy Los Angeles? Check. A romantic slow dance with Snake Pliskin in one of New York's seedier abandoned warehouses? Check! If this plethora of strange images are what's springing to mind it can mean only one thing... Another After Dark compilation is upon us! It's been a full six years since Italians Do It Better last graced us with the first After Dark installment and, like any great sequel, the second volume is more than worth the wait. Anyone familiar with this excellent record label knows what to expect - and knows that these guys are the best at what they do. And what they do is beautiful nocturnal synth pop heavily indebted to classic Italo-disco. For the uninitiated, imagine vintage Giorgio Moroder, slinky Euro club music, maybe a bit of John Carpenter... Or look no further than the inescapable Drive soundtrack, which features a couple of the artists featured here. What's so great about this compilation is actually how unlike a compilation it feels. There's an international roster of musicians on display here (Canada, France, England, US are all represented), but there's also a serious feeling of unity and cohesion. If you didn't know better, this could easily be one artist's full length lp with a series of guest vocalists (and seeing as Italians Do It Better head honcho Johnny Jewel is in approximately 95 percent of the bands featured here, it kind of is.) That's not to say there's not plenty of variety on display though! Glass Candy's tracks recall '80s Siouxsie & The Banshees at their poppiest (the vocals in "Warm In The Winter" especially seem to be a bit of an homage to "Peek A Boo") but with a glorious, life affirming, coming of age hope to them. Mirage and Desire are both a bit more melancholy and bittersweet in comparison - the sparse minimal thud of Mirage coming off a bit like a supremely forlorn Chromeo (complete with robot vocals and everything), while the soothing synth pads and romantic vocals of Desire tug at your heartstrings even while you're still working the dance floor in the same way Sally Shapiro does. Meanwhile, Twisted Wires sounds like Ian Curtis singing over jazzy lounge piano, while Appaloosa's charmingly monotone vocals sound a bit like Nico singing electropop. There are some darker moments too, like the eerie quasi-religious spoken word of Farah or the minimal throb of Mike Simonetti's "The Magician" which might not sound out of place on NIN's Pretty Hate Machine! And then there's the sexy digital strut of Chromatics to round things out. But despite these myriad influences there's a real concrete mood throughout - nocturnal yet vibrant, sparse yet alluring, neon yet noir. But still never in danger of clearing the dance floor.

MPEG stream: Tears From Heaven
MPEG stream: Heart Of Darkness
MPEG stream: Half Lives

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY.

Documenting the sound of Middle American hippie rockers heavying it up and heading to Middle Earth, singing songs about wizards, sorcerers, Sauron, and Satan, this is just so up our alley. Heck, there are several of us here, who by virtue of our particular, peculiar subcultural enthusiasms, were primed to flip out HARD over this. So if anything was ever meant to be a Record Of The Week, this sure was! Man, those nerds over at Numero have outdone themselves. It's not like Numero hasn't brought us some great compilations of long lost gems before - heck that's what they DO - they've got a well deserved rep for digging up truly obscure vintage soul music that's also totally top notch stuff. But as you've surmised, this ain't no soul. In the past, Numero have unearthed some wonderful rarities in other genres, from folky female singer-songwriters to Southern rock to power pop. But now, with this latest entry in their Wayfaring Strangers, er, WARfaring Strangers, series of comps, entitled Darkscorch Canticles, they've entered another dimension entirely, a dark and mystical hard rockin' realm of fuzzed-out, bellbottomed, pot-scented, proggy proto-metal basement jams!! There are 16 tracks of fantastical garage rock from the depths of the '70s to be savored here, rescued from one-off, privately pressed 45 singles done by sub-sub-sub-Sabbath acts that seriously nobody has ever heard of before. That's kind of what's most amazing about this, that these tracks are so great, and yet also so unknown. We've talked to a few friends who consider themselves proto-metal experts, some of whom were rather incredulous about this, halfway suspecting it must somehow be a fake just cuz they didn't already know of ANY of these bands! By the way, we're convinced it's not a hoax - though if it were, that would actually be even more amazing - especially considering there's a densely-packed cd booklet / lp insert filled with vintage band photos, original 45 label graphics, and in-depth, highly detailed liner notes provided about each artist in tiny, tiny print (backgrounded by graph-paper dungeon drawings). Last year Numero put out a vinyl-only archival collection of tracks by one of the bands found here, Chicago's Medusa, that we thought was pretty cool, and really should have reviewed but for some reason never did (we do still have a copy in stock, in all its black velvet glory!). At the time, Numero told us that release was a teaser for an entire compilation of obscure "D&D" rock of the same ilk that they planned to do, and they spoke the truth. Through the mastery of the dark arts, presumably, they somehow assembled this, digging up an outrageous assortment of over-the-top tunes from all these forgotten bands, whose names alone conjure vibes of myth and magic, sword and sorcery: Wrath, Triton Warrior, Stone Axe, Stonehenge, Dark Star, Stoned Mace, Hellstorm, Wizard, Arrogance, and more - including not just the aforementioned Medusa but also another band from Chicago called Gorgon Medusa. The earliest entry is from 1970, the latest from 1980, but they're all equally ancient-sounding. More like rickety sixties-ish heavy psych really, than anything metallic from the '80s or beyond, the stress here being on the "proto" side of the proto-metal tag. Stuff in the vein of Iron Butterfly and Bloodrock and Bubble Puppy and Captain Beyond. You get low-budget occult organ prog epicry, and uber-distorted riff-rockin', and spaced out downer rock balladry, and badass boogie in Satan's service. We won't go track-by-track, though we're tempted, but a few of the standout faves for us include Wrath's "Warlord", especially due to the zombified vocals from someone who sounds like a brainwashed adolescent girl / cult victim (the guitarist's wife, apparently) intoning the scary lyrics about "living in lust as Satan must"; Inside's "Wizzard King", a blown-out, lo-fi rocker that asks the musical question: "Don't you wanna be a wizzard king, don't you wanna be free? / Don't you wanna be a wizzard king, don't you wanna be me?"; and Stone Axe's "Slave Of Fear", which sounds like Arthur Brown fronting a very early Black Sabbath or Blues Creation. But there's so much good stuff on here, enough to require a saving throw vs. acid rock or else become completely addicted, spinning this repeatedly. The art and design deserve a mention as well. Both formats come in slipcased cover art consisting of newly-rendered stylized logos (embossed, in metallic ink!) for each band on the comp, like some artistically-inclined burnout teen doodling on a school binder. In terms of packaging, this really couldn't be any cooler - oh, wait, well, maybe it could - we should tell you, that if you wait a couple months, Numero will be selling (direct mailorder only, not in stores, grrrr!) a special edition of this consisting of the lp, the cd, AND a vaguely D&D-esque BOARDGAME, where the players take on the roles of these rock bands competing with each other in the fantastic realm of Darkscorch. Even if you never actually play the game we're pretty sure it will be an amazing artifact just to look at. It's gonna be, like, $100 though. Ok, to wrap up: trying to explain why this comp is so rad is kind of like trying to explain the appeal of The Lord Of The Rings to someone who hasn't read it. Or D&D to someone who hasn't played. So just trust us, and we recommend trying those two things as well if you haven't!

MPEG stream: Warlord
MPEG stream: Sorcerer
MPEG stream: Slave Of Fear
MPEG stream: Wizzard King

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. The other one, also great!!

Record number two from local retro garage power pop geniuses Warm Soda, fronted by none other than Mr. Matthew Melton, who avid readers of the aQ list no doubt remember from his previous outfits, the equally genius Bare Wires and Snake Flower 2. But with Warm Soda, Melton and crew continue to hone a practically perfect strain of Yellow Pills style power pop, that sounds, right down to the production, and the songwriting, straight out of the seventies. In fact, if this was 1978, we can only imagine these guys would be HUGE, playing with Dwight Twilley and Cheap Trick, and heck, it's not hard to imagine a Warm Soda Live At Budokan record, cuz holy shit, if we dug the first Warm Soda record, this one is even better. In fact, EVERY time we play this in the store, someone comes up to see what we're playing, and often ends up surprised that it's in fact actually a NEW band. But it's easy to see why, Warm Soda's sound is pitch perfect, jangly fuzzy guitars, woozy super melodic basslines, simple propulsive drumming, and Melton's whispery croon, and of course the SONGS, which are amazing, so catchy, the sort of songs, that even on first listen, sound like you've heard them before, and get immediately lodged in your head, and even after only hearing them a couple times, you'll find yourself humming them days later. Assuming it was something you might have just heard on the radio. The production too, somehow manages to sound modern, while still sounding exactly like some classic vintage recording from back in the day. And the way the choruses are all fuzzy and washed out and reverb drenched, it's hard to explain, but they seem to just soar. We could go on and on and on, as we like to do, and describe this record song by song, but why bother, if you dug the first record, or any of Melton's other projects, you NEED this, and if you've never heard anything, all it should take is a couple of the samples below to convince you, that like us, you might have just found your new favorite retro-garage power pop record!!!

MPEG stream: Going In Circles
MPEG stream: Postcards
MPEG stream: Someday You Will Understand

Chances are you either love to hate him or you hate to love him, but whichever camp you fall in, one thing is for certain... there's no escaping Kanye! One more thing that's for certain? Yeezus is as abrasive, genre-bending and challenging as any record you'll hear this year, mainstream or otherwise. It explodes with the kind of schizophrenic disregard for convention that only the most obsessive and confrontational albums achieve. From the jarring industrial assault of opening track "On Sight" to the sparsely bittersweet soul loop of closer "Bound 2", 'Yeezus' constantly surprises and consistently refuses to compromise. Single "Black Skinhead" is an exhilarating tribal whirlwind built around a '70s glam rock drum stomp. "I Am A God" doesn't sound too far from something the Swans might have come up with circa The Great Annihilator while the menacing dub of "New Slaves" wouldn't sound out of place on a Scorn record. Elsewhere the album flutters between grimy harsh synths, dusty soul, monolithic cinematic orchestral blasts, ethereal ambiance - seemingly all in the span of one song! Vocally the album finds Kanye at his most unrestrained and unrefined, sometimes recalling the guttural stream of consciousness outbursts of Death Grips. Lyrically it's by far his angriest record, pulsing with frustration and rage, tackling everything from race to excess to (very, very graphic) sex. It's not an easy listen but an immensely rewarding one and sure to be one of the more divisive albums of the year. And in our opinion one of the best!

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Smokelessfire
MPEG stream: Untitled 2

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Shamed

You know we love the fucked up black metal here at aQ. This is sooooo up our alley in that regard. DIY, lo-fi, totally outsider WTF? stuff. Makes Striborg and Abruptum and Ildjarn and the rest sound like the Tonight Show band. Twisted, raw, black primitivism, only for the true klvt worshippers of blacknoize ritualism and caveman blackbuzz. We first encountered Wikkid - and seriously, "encounter" is the word, we know we talk about outsider this and that, but this guy is legitimately strange, we know we've met him, and really when he comes in the store, we get a little bit starstruck, you might say, more so than we would for a "real" black metal celebrity. Heck, he invented his own religion called The Black Ism (?!?), more on that later on. As we were saying, we first encountered Wikkid when he brought us a release called The Intro, and we wrote up a big review of it, but he never ending up bringing us more, so we couldn't list it even though we really wanted to - though we did get to eventually list a disc by Wikkid's ambient alter-ego Alturaz, and a Wikkid/Alturaz split too. But now The Intro has at last been repressed (though mysteriously minus two tracks), in the form of a double cd, paired with another, new Wikkid recording entitled Chapter 1. And, on top of that, there are now also TWO MORE double cds of other Wikkid material. We suggest you get them all. You have to get them all. Particularly since they're so cheap (and by the way, we might have accidentally sold some at a higher price, if you're one of those people, please get in touch). So, here's the review we originally wrote for The Intro disc: We were sold on this one before we heard a single note. Based entirely on the cover art. Which is essentially a crude cut and paste, black and white Xerox, of the band name, which is Wikkid by the way, on there twice, along with the title, The Intro, also in two different places, a white smudge and some sort of cut out grid, and most telling of all, a ready made description of Wikkid: 1 Man Black Metal Band, Bay Area California. At first we weren't sure if that was maybe part of the title or what. We're still not sure. But we were psyched. We had been missing home brewed DIY black metal, and this is most definitely that, primo outsider one man BM, raw and primitive, super lo-fi, abstract and trippy and seriously goddamn grim and kvlt. The guitars are sharp and angular, brittle and buzzy, the vocals a monstrous bellow, black shadowy exhalations, the drums stumbling sort-of-blast beats, the music a dense, noisy, chaotic black tangle, lurching and lumbering, collapsing into dense swirls of nearly free blackness, before the second track lurches in, a creeping slo-mo black doom, the drums WAY up in the mix, the vocals too, the guitars a brittle insectoid buzz that's barely audible, minus the occasional shredding squall. And so it goes, the next track ramps it back up to buzzing blast, again, lumbering and on the verge of collapse, the vokills here a garbled, grunted speaking in tongues, the guitars murky and blurry black smears, the tempo fluctuating constantly, the sound woozy and washed out, pure underground blackness, that's so underground, it's seemingly from a DIFFERENT underground than the rest of the stuff we hear. So, we wrote all that about what's now the first disc of the The Intro/Chapter 1 2cd release. We won't delve so fully into the other Wikkids, except to say, they're equally insane and amazing. More stumbling drums, more distorted vox, more disturbing thoughts, more murky guitar drone. If you get one Wikkid, you need 'em all, they're definitely a set, all of 'em basically having that same crude cover design, slightly altered from The Intro's template in ways that almost don't even make sense. Again, sheer WTF? genius. And super duper confusing. Then, one realizes that each disc in each double cd set is really short. Really, really short. Like, five or six minutes! (And the last track on one of 'em even ends with almost a minute of silence!) All six discs probably could have fit on a single cd. (But, they ARE cheap.) And again, in part, that's kind of what's so brilliant, there's just so much WTF? to Wikkid, it's astonishing. Wikkid is almost the black metal Fastest, if you know what we mean. Oh, to give you a little bit more of an idea about what Wikkid is all about, on his website, there's a page of "definitions", here are two particularly helpful ones: THE BLACK ISM - A new religion of black/dark musics & money for laws & guidance. Realism, Naturalism, Shamanism, Selfism & Wikkism as core beliefs. WIKKIDISM - Playing a wicked black metal track on repeat at highest volume until you reach "ISM". Aha, maybe that's why these discs are so short - you're supposed to play each track on repeat, anyway!!

MPEG stream: Killing Your Whole Family To Make Your Last Name Extinct

Much better than Zola Jesus' recent rebranding of old songs with a string quartet, is Chelsea Wolfe's Pain Is Beauty. These two records have emerged at about the same time, at summer's end of 2013, and these two personalities seem to share the headlines of whatever glossy blogspottumblffeedtweeterbirdpitchfulking thing you might frequent. Yeah, the goth subcultures have long enabled their ice queens to emerge as fashion icons of a cold hedonism and sexually charged detachment, all the while looking fantastic in smeared coal-eyed make-up and frost-white skin. For now, it's these two ladies who are holding court in the land of the gloomy; but when it comes to delivering the art, Chelsea Wolfe has stepped up her game on Pain Is Beauty, easily bettering Zola Jesus' tepid stringed album and producing what is probably the best album of her young career. Her last album of acoustically driven songs - Unknown Rooms - showcased her songwriting chops and an elegant quivering falsetto that wrapped around her plaintive death-folk ballads. In fleshing out these songs with drums, bass, electronics, and yes some strings, Wolfe's songs all amass into a delicious album of moody witchiness and haughty debauchery, while retaining the magickal aura of her unhinged apocalyptic howl that manifested out of some arcane blood ritual. The use of electronics on the album is particularly striking, to the point where we have begun to hope for a full album with just purely electronic minimal wave arrangements. The opening number "Feral Love" is engineered upon a hammering blastbeat although the volume is dialed down beneath the infernal guitar noises and her bleak siren song. "The Warden" is another electronic track that hypnotically cycles through chorale vocals, a taut dulcimer riff, and sparkle-clad rhythms. Yeah, it's brighter than anything else she's done, but there's plenty of doomified plod, bad-ass villain vibes, and ravenously empty folk tunes that haunt the rest of the album. Time to break out the black nail polish again.

MPEG stream: Feral Love
MPEG stream: The Warden
MPEG stream: They'll Clap When You're Gone

Hark! Courtesy of the ever reliable Flenser Records comes the gravely unsettling return of this boldly unclassifiable unit, hazily haunting the very outermost fringes of metal, goth, noise rock and industrial, and most certainly on our shortlist of bands that everyone should be listening to that not nearly enough people are (although a current stint opening for Deafheaven will hopefully change that!). For those uninitiated, W&R are a two piece loosely based in Los Angeles comprised solely of a live drummer and a man with a sample pad (live it looks like he's playing a giant light up calculator!), both gifted with a talent for terrifying screams, howls and yelps, who manage to sound as dense and textural as any full band. Want assaults you immediately with a burst of disorienting percussive soundscapes, the vocals an exhausted world-weary yell, the music (if it can be called that) a collage of white noise, Hawkwind style cosmic swirling dust, and a synthesized monolithic chanting that is either coming from a human or a machine, it is almost impossible to say. And that's just the first couple minutes of a wildly dense, emotionally ravaged technological avalanche of a record. There are moments of relative restraint, but these are perhaps even more emotionally intense. Funereal piano lilts under stream-of-consciousness spoken word, clattering cymbals and agonized screams. Sparse robotic percussion hammers cold and steadfast under unnerving atonal singing and a shrieking digital cacophony, like musical notes malfunctioning, rotten with cancerous programming. Lonely nocturnal melodies drift above spidery rhythms eerily offset by freeform howling. The songs can be lush, almost beautiful in their own oily alien way, but never without a sense of foreboding, a constant dissonant creep leaking into the foliage. They can be contemplative and desolate, like some sort of future wasteland, all barren metals and burned out circuitry. At other times the record is almost operatic and martial, sounding like some warped Soviet anthem infested with insectoid parasites, pulsating like an anxious transparent heart - an orchestra sucked of all its triumph and hope, sometimes even recalling something from Burzum's Filosofem, but completely rewired - sparking and glistening in a damp windowless room. Want is like a collage - some tracks feeling like snippets or fragments of ideas and memories, the kind we do our best to keep buried. It is a lonesome technological assault, the black oil of crackling urban despair seeping into the pores of every moment. The ominous hungry march of progress that will consume us all! Very highly recommended for fans of Pinkish Black and other recent Flenser faves like Have A Nice Life and Planning For Burial...

MPEG stream: Corpse Museum
MPEG stream: Apollo Beneath The Whip
MPEG stream: Machine Of Confusion