Love her or hate her, Lydia Lunch will make an impression on you. Given her venomous poems, constant invectives, and perpetual bad attitude, it's pretty obvious that Lydia wants you to hate her. While she's not an artist without her charms, she'll probably hate you for loving her. She began a career of transgression and teeth-gnashing in the mid-'70s when she was a runaway teenager slumming around the crappiest parts of NYC and pissing off more people than not. Yet, she managed to sequester enough people to support her in Teenage Jesus and The Jerks - one of the seminal bands who defined No Wave. They were also one of the four bands who appeared on the highly influential No New York compilation, alongside James Chance & The Contortionists, Mars, and DNA. Teenage Jesus only lasted for three years, probably due to the fact that no one could tolerate the musical dictator that was Lydia Lunch. But the music itself probably did a fair share of damage upon the participants as Teenage Jesus produced hyper-abrasive, hyper-condensed songs through militant rhythmic stomps, screechingly atonal slide guitars, and Lydia's sharply barked vocals. James Chance was in fact one of the early members of the band, offering his blood-splattering sax as a suitable duet for Lydia's caterwauling.
While Teenage Jesus never managed a full-album (well, they barely managed to clock in a 20 minute live set!), there have been a number of collections of Teenage Jesus tracks. The 2008 compilation, Shut Up And Bleed, is unique by including tunes from Lydia Lunch's other band at the time Beirut Slump. Some of these tracks had appeared on another Lunch compendium, Hysterie, released way back in 1988, but they've never been on cd. In Beirut Slump, Lydia played the part of the lead guitarist, leaving the vocal rants to Bobby Berkowitz, whose growling and grunts were uncannily similar to those of Michael Gira on the early Swans records. With the dissonant organ stabs, scraped guitar noise, and jackbooted stomping, Beirut Slump must have been one of the unsung templates for Gira and Swans. Even 30 years later, this stuff is damn impressive.
Temple of Tiermes is a side project of the Finnish noise/drone ensemble Tiermes (whose Jussi Saivo figures on old Circle and recent Ovalki material, but is not featured on this album). Far from sounding like the arctic hypno-rock of Circle, Temple of Tiermes generates a haunted swarm of overdriven guitar feedback and blustery noise crescendos that are filtered into statospheric shimmers. In the realm of "ambient industrial", not nearly as death obsessed as Brighter Death Now, but more malevolent than Maeror Tri.
A tremendous cassette only release from the Terrors, an unknown project presumably based out of Los Angeles who offers up some totally desolate, bedroom recordings for cheap synths, guitar, voice, and -- because it's on Monorail Trespassing - snippets of noise. The first track has this creepy, nocturnal repeating motif of minor key melody that is trying to be a Rhodes keyboard but is probably something much more disposable, but that melody could be something easily found on a Labradford album or even a Bohren and Der Club of Gore track, but run through William Basinski's tape machinations. Ghostly splashes of droning guitar ebb and flow around that melodic passage, furthering the darkened gloom which settles around the track. This alone is worth the price of admission! The next track and a few fragmented moments on the other side feature vocals from the Terrors. It's a painfully lonely voice singing into a crappy microphone, which accentuates the melancholy vocal melody wrapped with plenty of tape hiss and an occasional downer strum on an acoustic guitar. These songs appear as a cross between Devendra and Grouper, as these roughly hewn takes on whatever was at hand with the pure emotion coming through the songs, cast in a hue that is profoundly depressed for the Terrors. The last track on this cassette ends with a arcing wash of white noise, that almost sounds like Terrors set up his recording under the flight path of LAX, just to get the rush of a plane taking off to conclude this track. It's a C-30 tape, and limited to 125 copies. Really great!
"Some things have to be endured, and that makes the pleasures so much sweeter!" So spoke the villainous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's first Hellraiser movie. It is interesting to think back, and realize that Coil had their proposed soundtrack to that same movie rejected with some citing that Coil's themes were 'too frightening' or (more likely) 'not commercial enough' for a major studio motion picture. Anyone with ears who has listened to Coil's unreleased themes to Hellraiser will not find anything frightening or scary at all. In fact, Coil was quite reverential to somebody like David Shire, especially with his minimalist and maudlin score for The Conversation, with Coil composing everything on the Fairlight synthesizer, which itself had a distinct sound but one that didn't fall in line with the Goblin / Carpenter axis. Had Coil turned in to the film studio something like what they produced on their grand statement to the apocalypse in Horse Rotovator, it might have sounded close to where Theologian ended up on this death-synth industrial opus.
Here, Theologian - the project of a cold-hearted character simply given the name Leech - has employed the talents of a host of female vocalists from the darkwave and noise underground. The conceit has a similar feel to Lustmord's recent album The Word As Power; and thankfully, both albums transcend any notion of female tokenism. Furthermore, both albums do not suck. Far from it for Theologian; as this album triumphantly extends the M83-produces-Swans analogy that we posited regarding the 2012 epic The Chasms Of My Heart album. After a garbled, witchy cackle that introduces the album's first track "Black Cavern Myopia," Leech uncorks a dark-minded, power techno rhythm, crunched through distortion, echo and sinister atmospheres featuring the deep-in-the-catacomb vocalizations of Hecate's Rachael Kozak. A more familiar militantly bashed rhythm keeps with a Swans-styled corporal beatdown on "The Conjoined Deviant Procession" with the monotone chanting delivered by Kristen from Sewer Election. The vocals never really come to the foreground throughout the album, instead they swirl and commingle amidst the metalgaze hiss, powerdrone murk, and audio sickness from Leech's decomposing productions. Even when he employs the talents of opera singer Melissa Kelly (the only vocalist not hailing from noise culture), her voice is cacooned in billowing reverb as it flutters throughout the ghastly synth melodies and blackened industrially crushed doom plod on "Ectothermism." Aside from Sewer Election and Hecate, we've not encountered any of the other vocalists, but their legion is Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), and Shari Vari (Void Vision). Leech has crafted monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies - think the Cure's Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow. So good!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Once in a blue moon an absolutely perfect single drops from heaven onto us mere mortals. It's almost unheard of that this phenomenon would be realized by the same band twice. Yet Matt Elliot, Mr. Third Eye Foundation first gave us the brilliant "Semtex" single... and now "Fear Of A Wack Planet".
Majestic choral voices delicately float as haunting historical texts to a Baroque past with elegantly simple breakbeats forming the basic structure. Yes, this is the same alchemic formula that Enigma has been boring the world with for some time now, yet Third Eye Foundation's ability to manifest the sublime provides that elusive transcendental quality that makes this one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard.
It would be nice to think that These Records have only been releasing the reissues of "Deceit" -- This Heat's second and final proper album -- every ten years after the original release of the album in 1981. The first CD pressings arrived on 1991, and this
Almost all of the histories of UK avant-garde music have claim allegiances to This Heat, as Punk, New Wave, Industrial, Prog Rock, Jim O'Rourke, and even Electronica place the seminal outfit somewhere at the beginnings of their respective etymologies. To a certain extent all of these histories may be true, but then again the broad aesthetic and ideological contexts between all of those different styles may cross-each other out, leaving This Heat as one of the few artistic forces that truly exists all by itself.
Just a trio comprised of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen, and Gareth Williams, This Heat manifested an incredibly explosive sound that hybridized all of the countercultural fury of Punk and Situationism, within a sonic context informed by technological advances of musique concrete techniques and electro-acoustic synthesis. Musically speaking, This Heat did not espouse the three chord structures or the snarling postures of Punk, instead injecting the complex pop agendas of Brian Eno (which were purposefully seeking to conflict the archetypes of rock into a new aesthetic language) with nervous tension building up to dramatic cathartic releases. "Deceit" is a record that was so ahead of its time that it has taken twenty years for artists like Fennesz and Radiohead to articulate ideas with such intensity and attention to the play between musical creation and technological advances. So highly recommended.
Trying to explain why this record is so good is sort of like trying to explain why ice cream is so delicious. Or why Bush is such a terrible president.
Or maybe it's kind of like writing an introduction for the new Pynchon novel. Or telling a few jokes before Richard Pryor comes on stage. Or throwing a couple quick passes before Joe Montana comes on the field. It's that daunting, that overwhelming, that impossible.
The trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen, and Gareth Williams known collectively as This Heat were one of the few bands that literally changed people's lives. Changed the way folks thought about music. I (Andee) couldn't believe music like this actually existed. It was everything I wanted to listen to before I knew that THIS was exactly what I wanted to listen to. Hit It Or Quit It publisher / rock critic / indie scenstress Jessica Hopper once wrote that she literally pee'd her pants the first time she heard This Heat. And it's not hard to see why. Without This Heat, modern, alternative, avant garde music as we know it would be a whole different beast. Post rock, math rock, avant rock are hugely indebted to the genre shattering experimentalism of This Heat. Tortoise, You Fantastic, Yona Kit, Brise Glace, Psychic Paramount, Laddio Bollocko, Radian, Village Of Savoonga, Larsen, Starfuckers, Circle, Salvatore, I Am Spoonbender -- none of those bands would even exist if it weren't for This Heat, or if they still did you can bet they would sound a whole lot different. And that's just off the top of our heads, AND that's -just- bands whose sound directly reflects the influence of This Heat. Imagine how many performers and artists were influenced by This Heat but who let that influence manifest itself in not so obvious ways.
We once described This Heat as "Krautrock-ish hyper rhythmic tape-looped prog." Which comes close to succinctly describing the magical musical alchemy of This Heat, but still only scratches the surface. This is their self titled debut, originally released in 1979 and reissued briefly in 1991, and manages over the course of about 50 minutes to redefine almost all music that had come before.
The sound of This Heat is rhythm and texture and dynamics. The recording studio as instrument. Every sound and every song is based on rhythm and texture. There are hooks, and melodies, but they exist to serve the rhythm and are often born from the deft manipulation of sound and tempo. Even the most static and repetitive parts manage to sound -musical-. There are vocals, but they are minimal and otherworldly, weary and sing songy and completely mesmerizing. A droning musical accompaniment to the haunting whirs and clanging percussion in the background. This record is such a totally immersive and strangely lovely musical environment. From the machinelike Krautrock of "Horizontal Hold" to the dreamy contemplative "Twilight Furniture" with its simple chiming guitars, muted tribal percussion and keening vocals, to the bizarre affected drum workout of "24 Track Loop", it's like wandering through some alien musical world. As sky full of greys and blues, smeary drones floating gently by, haunting quavering vocals drifting below, like tendrils of smoke, the barren landscape littered with all manner of rhythmic outcroppings, harsh jagged crashes and booms, as well as low rolling thumps and stutters, off in the distance simple spare melodies float and hover, each note a glowing spot on the horizon. Absolutely and utterly overwhelmingly brilliant.
There are plenty of places on the web and in magazines to read more about the history of the band, the band members, the various releases and reissues (see elsewhere on the AQ website for reviews of past editions of various TH recordings) but none of that ultimately matters as much as the sound. And oh the glorious sound. Just take a listen to the sound samples and no words will be necessary.
This is arguably This Heat's finest moment, their debut record, finally available again after almost 15 years of being out of print. Be aware that there will be a 5cd box coming out in the (near?) future, containing EVERY SINGLE ONE of the band's releases, as well as a bonus disc of unreleased material and a huge book of photos and liner notes. And we would have made (maybe will make) THAT record of the week, and while we do believe EVERY music lover we know owes it to themselves to buy the upcoming box, we figured a single disc was plenty for most people to get hooked and obsessed.
The schizophonic erasing and minimalist-dub-industrial aktions of Thought Broadcast are strategies directly replicated from very obscure sources from a very specific time frame. One admitted source is the unheard catalogue of Vanity Records flexidiscs from Japan circa 1981. In positing the work as an outright forgery, Thought Broadcast's copies of copies of copies of copies engender a punk-situationist zenith of radically free appropriation as artform. Where Through Broadcast is taking its cues from Vanity; Vanity was obfuscating the work of Maurizio Bianchi (amongst others), who in turn took after Conrad Schnitzler (amongst others), who leapt into sound upon his tutelage from Joseph Beuys. The network of influences and detours and rhizomes through both time and space is never a linear one, always convoluted and morphing; and Thought Broadcast is very clearly aware that the simulacra of signifiers can be an exhausting, unending cycling of ideas. In the replication and variations on stolen, damaged goods, Thought Broadcast re-ignites an obsessive, psychological tension which speaks of VHS video nasties, conspiracy theories of subliminal messages coded in television static, and the liminal horror of sound being used a control mechanism. Yes, these were the ideas that were spawned out of the Industrial Culture Handbook (e.g. Burroughs, TG/PTV, Z'ev, etc.); and Throught Broadcast's distillation of synth-punk ideas and aesthetics through the variation upon the most minimal of means -- a flanging, noisy-as-fuck synth droning above a grittily-phased drum machine -- is undeniably perfect in it's reminiscence for a time when everything else was fucking boring and fucking horrible. Yeah, one of the best electronic records of year. 1981? 2014? It matters not.
Quite the student of the obscure & forgotten histories of synth punk and industrial culture, Ravi Binning's Thought Broadcast firmly embraces the primitive technology and the vacated zeitgeist from 1979-1983. For Binning, the musical universe may have ceased to exist after SPK's major label dalliance on the unforgivably bad "Metal Dance," but he still carves out plenty of room to operate alongside The Units, Factrix, and Club Moral. As we heard last on the super limited Phaserprone 7" released earlier in 2012, Binning has at his disposal a collection of primitive monosynths and drum machines, possibly of vintage origin, possibly reverse engineered through modern technology, possibly new circuits designed to sound old. No matter what the means of production might be, his sound is decidedly primitive, with the simplest of minor-chord melodies, the most zombified of arpeggiations, and the tinniest of mechanical rhythms filtered from Conrad Schnitzler through TG and MB, all of it swamped with tape hiss and scabrous noise errors. How could Binning not record this on the shittiest of 4-tracks? Highly compressed, garbled vocals bark in distant monotone at erratic intervals, with crude tape-delay manipulation further obfuscating whatever apocalyptic, anti-social, damaged epithets Binning may be uttering. It's brilliant in its bleakness and its re-animatation of that peculiar hollowed-out industrial sound.
The cover for Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is a marvelous piece of subversive design. The four members of Throbbing Gristle look quite dapper, Genesis dolled up in a tailored white suit jacket, Cosey smiling happily in her pert miniskirt, and Chris & Sleazy both wearing rather conservative sweaters, but they had situated themselves on the cliffs of Beachy Head (a notorious suicide spot on the south coast of England) with a rented Range Rover in the distance and in a variation of this scene, a nude male body lies at their feet in the grass, presumably dead. This design (executed by Sleazy through his day job at Hipgnosis Design) was a sneering act of contempt for British society that failed to see the horrors and injustice which boiled just under the surfaces of congeniality and civility.
Both Second Annual Report and D.o.A. were ostensibly compilations of recontextualized material both from the studio and extracts from live recordings, but 20 Jazz Funk Greats - the third proper album from Throbbing Gristle - feels like a conceived album from beginning to end, even with all of its dead-ends and contradictions. The album opens with the title track, where a slow-motion drum machine and synthesized bass tones strut with a mechanical swagger with Cosey's discordant cornet blurts in the distance and predatorily whispered vocal extracts of what could be some smooth jazz DJ trying to set the mood - with that mood being a sickening, menacing threat. Such is also the case, with the lugubrious "Tanith" whose atonal rolling basslines churn against strange electronic blorp and tinkling chimes, which leads into "Convincing People" - whose metronomic synth sequencing became the signature for nearly every 'industrial' band that claimed TG as an influence. The detuned and distorted guitar from Cosey smears the mechanical edges while Genesis wailed through the lyrical repetitiveness which articulated to the effect that if you say it enough, people will start believing you. A hammer might help too. The minimalist club hit "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is one of the most memorable TG songs, and for very good reason as TG offered a much-imitated disco frugality through their insistent drum machine, squiggling sequencing, and Cosey's whispered vocals. Immediately following this is a nightmarish narration of the aftermath of a night of partying too much in "Persuasion", as disembodied female yelps of sexualized horror sporadically punctuate a slithering Genesis donning the role of a low-rent pornographer. "What A Day" is another 'industrial' template with a corrosive loop of cybernetic thumps forming the only backdrop to Genesis barking as loud as he can in a diabolical take on a footballer's chant. The finale "Six Six Sixties" finds Cosey's monochord guitar awfully prescient of Sonic Youth and Bailter Space in the drone intensity through distortion and rhythm, with Genesis reciting a suitably bleak monologue above, rounding out what is arguably the best of the Throbbing Gristle albums.
The cd version contains a bonus disc with live material extracted from the numerous live cassettes (and some of these versions apparently appear on the 24cd boxset of live TG material, although we've not cross referenced these facts yet). The two versions of "Discipline" (which were released as a 12" on Fetish Records in 1981) suitably conclude this disc, as that was the track that TG also performed at the end of their sets, with the heavy drum machines whipping the crowd into a frenzy and Genesis barking hysterically for some order. Such were the wonderful contradictions of Throbbing Gristle. About as a high a recommendation as we can give.
While a plethora of bands have emerged from San Francisco's so-called Jewelled Antler Collective (e.g. Thuja, Blithe Sons, Knit Separates, The Birdtree, Skygreen Leopards, etc.), the number of individuals in this gaggle of Californian psychedelic improvisers is actually rather small, with the majority of 'em participating in Jewelled Antler's flagship project Thuja. Comprised of Rob Reger, Loren Chasse, and former Mirza members Glenn Donaldson and Steven R. Smith, Thuja base all of their recordings on extended improv sessions recorded in Reger's expansive warehouse space. They then edit these to extract specific atmospheres and musical quotations. Like all of their releases, "Suns" implies that these improvised actions are rituals that not only mimic the rustlings of arboreal environments but also attempt to magically invoke the forest to crack through the concrete walls of Reger's warehouse. Such metaphors of urban reclamation through natural means are far from fruity idealism, for Thuja's atmospheres speak with unspecified sadness and beauty, as anyone who has heard their previous Emperor Jones cd "Ghost Plants" knows (...or their tUMULt debut, or any of their limited edition cd-r releases on their own Jewelled Antler label, or the recent Last Visible Dog cd-r "Hills"...).
While their closest musical neighbors may be such farflung (in time and space) bands as the Taj Mahal Travellers, No Neck Blues Band, and Kemialliset Ystavat, Thuja has developed an aesthetic that is wholly unique, by adding tons of natural textural details (i.e. contact microphones scraping over rusted surfaces, shells banging against chunks of metal, twigs quietly snapping, etc.) on top of traditional instruments (guitars, harmonium, organ, and drums) in their non-traditional pursuit of the almighty drone. As yet another essential document of this pursuit, "Suns" shines brightly through the trees of Thuja's metaphorical forest. Quite amazing.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
The newest release on our Andee's tUMULt label takes a trip to the sonic opium den of San Francisco's Thuja, a new band that consists of two former members of the hazy psychedelic outfit Mirza (Stephen R. Smith and Glenn Donaldson), pianist Rob Reger, and noted sound artist Loren Chasse (of Id Battery). Their debut release, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones," drifts through passages of improvisations for washed out guitars, tinkling piano, drums, and a pile of stones & branches. Thuja's lovely sound embraces the same freely meandering lack of structure as the No Neck Blues Band but with the dark shimmering colors of Eyeless in Gaza or Dif Juz, harking back also to gentle krautrock a la Popul Vuh or something. As beautiful as the piece of marbled wood veneer that serves as the cover to this unique and gorgeous package. By the way, please don't suspect (if you do) that a form of nepotism or favoritism has anything to do with us selecting yet another tUMULt release for Album of the Week honors--honestly, it's rather the case that Andee's taste mirrors that of the store enough that we don't think he would release something on his label that wouldn't at least be considered for the AQ-List top spot! Really.
In an interview for The Wire not long ago, Thuja's Loren Chasse joked that he wanted the upcoming Thuja album to just be a log with some lichen on it. Well... Chasse's wish almost comes true with this, the first volume of what they call "Thuja Museum", as the band has enclosed a small lichen encrusted stick in the cardboard box with each of these incredibly limited 3" CD-Rs. While all of the rest of the Jewelled Antler catalogue is available as made-to-order CD-Rs, "Thuja Museum #1" is strictly limited to 50 numbered copies. In addition to the disc and the twig, each tiny "Thuja Museum #1" box also includes a woodcut print by Thuja's Steven R. Smith, a leaf rubbing by Chasse, and a small square of wood. Thus, each of these boxes is a unique item of artwork.
As for the actual music found on the 20 minute long, green spraypainted cd-r, it's a sprawling piece of psychedelic drone improvisation, their least structured recording to date. The quartet of Chasse, Glenn Donaldson, Stephen R. Smith, and Rob Reger playfully meanders through scraped violin passages, melancholic organ drones, mandolin pluckery, sustained oud bowing, and non-specific textural clatter that could just be a pile of metal and branches dragged across the floor. Hazy and beautiful, this is a very nice mini-album both in its wonderful packaging and in its sound.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
To be blunt, Asmus Tietchens is one of the many prolific experimentalists whose long career (begun in the '70s) hasn't really amounted to much of any great merit. Fortunately, there's at least one disc like "A-Menge" which makes up for all of those other inconsequential albums full of cheap beatboxes and out of key analogue knob twiddling. After so many failed attempts at mimicking the aural plasticity of composers like Vladimir Ussachevsky or Morton Subotnik, Tietchens finally got it right. On the three lengthy pieces, Tietchens slowly phases together layers of processed sine-waves and crystalline bleeps of granular synthesis. The trebly hypnosis spins in syncronicity with the inorganic whir of a mainframe computer's cooling fan or perhaps with the motion of tiny nanotechnic machines. The success of his debut for the Mille Plateaux sub-label is in the subtlety and delicacy in each of the gradual shifts of sound, that relates this work much closer to Bernhard Gunter than the clinical rigidity of the Raster kids. [/cat/experimental178.html]
First album by Amon Tobin after shedding the Cujo moniker. Excellent drum & bass with hand-lifted beats from jazz to old bachelor pad lps to soundtracks. All impeccably reworked, recomposed and produced by Mr Tobin. Everything this guy has released is crucial. Very highly recommended!
Praise be! Steve Austin and co. are back, delivering another dose of their unique brand of Satanic math-metallic noise. Sprawling over two discs (labelled X and Y), these tracks are less like songs proper than sonic symptoms of Today Is The Day's aesthetic and philosophical ideas -- and, especially, their darkest emotions.
With wretched rasping vokills, crushing doom riffs, maniac outbursts, and scary, atmospheric sample-littered soundscapes (normally we frown on samples we can recognize, but it *was* neat to hear the bit from Coven, y'know, from American Movie), Today Is The Day convey some dark feelings indeed. The metal parts are quite devastating, but it's perhaps the moodier elements that make this album so striking and creepy. Bass rumble and glitchy electronic synth noise are paired with sad piano tinklings, acoustic guitars are strummed in a backwoods night-time ritual, and there's even some honest-to-god melodic singing (as on the deathly-piano-ballad "Death Requiem" or the great Alice Cooper/Devil Doll styled track "Invincible", reprised from TITD's split cd with 16).
Several of us here at AQ have been TITD fans for a long time, all the way back to their sadly out-of-print "Supernova" debut on the Amphetamine Reptile label. Their rebirth on Relapse (three albums ago) moved them in a decidedly heavier, brutal direction, but, as made plain on "Sadness Will Prevail", their experimental, artistic impulses remain strong.
In some ways, the closest thing we can compare this to is the mighty Oxbow, colliding with the likes of Coalesce and Old Man Gloom perhaps. Easily a contender for "metal" (but not at all entirely metal) record of the year. There's certainly a lot here to like. Some of the production is more lo-fi than we'd expect from Mr. Austin (a well-known producer outside of this TITD career) but still manages to dangle us dangerously at the gaping mouth of hell! And wait for the hidden track at the end of disc two, wherein Austin fucks with some brutal black metal, which just happens to be from the upcoming Leviathan album on Andee's tUMULt label!
Been meaning to get to this one for a while, it's something we absolutely *had* to highlight eventually, the long-overdue reissue of the crucial first album by this now veteran, always visionary noise rock/metal outfit. Mainman Steve Austin (vocals/guitars) has led a vast variety of TITD lineups over the years, having made eight studio albums to date, and Supernova is where it all started. When this first came out back in 1993 on the now-defunct Amphetamine Reptile label, we were immediately entranced and in fact almost frightened by this band's (at the time) fairly unique blend of atmospheric/ambient weirdness (via surreal sampling), melody, and heavy/hard rock action. Surely the most Satanic thing AmRep ever released, next to the God Bullies. Also, at the time, we'd have compared it to the likes of Steel Pole Bathtub, Oxbow, Engine Kid, Neurosis, Pain Teens... more recently, Old Man Gloom maybe.
Supernova's dozen tracks are full of both sheer beauty and terror; cruel, cryptic, compelling. It's a genius avant-metal mutation, ultimately more metallic than we knew back then (perhaps pioneering the "noisecore" genre), the band's violent hardcore/postrock riffage and distorted, angry vokills being moodily morphed with all manner of psychedelic sound FX fuckery and chaotic layers of vocal mumble and chatter, buried in the mix like crossed wires or intercepted transmissions... there's also stretches of proggily Frippish guitar, synth bleep, unidentifiable field recordings, including even some barnyard animal noises heard on one track. Today Is The Day keeps all this under control though, these are truly *songs*, mysterious and mayhemic but never too messy. The line between dreaminess, and nightmarishness, is often erased... they were definitely on to something here, as later output proved, Today Is The Day getting more overtly metal in later incarnations, maybe even more experimentally extreme, but never any more uniquely "Today Is The Day" than on Supernova.
This digitally remastered reissue now comes in a digipack, and the artwork is slightly altered from the original, and there's two bonus tracks too (from the '93 AmRep 7" single, "I Bent Scared"), but otherwise it's the same Supernova we know and love. In a word: Recommended!
Ok, now that that's finally out of the way (hey, it's always hardest to review the albums that you like the most, anxiously wanting to do 'em justice) we'll hopefully get to the *new* TITD album, Axis of Eden, soon. And also the same label's reissue of another TDID AmRep classic, Willpower, the ultra-intense follow-up to Supernova...
Giancarlo Toniutti has certainly increased his activity around the turn of 2009, having released two new compositions after going almost a decade between records; and now, he's authorized a hefty overview of his early work, with a forthcoming boxset on Vinyl-On-Demand and this cd reissue of La Mutazione, originally released on Broken Flag back in 1985. Toniutti is earnestly long-winded in his academic defense of his work, speaking in highly technical terms and with willfully obscure references (i.e. the semio-cosmologist Rene Thom and the idiosyncrasies of the Athabascan dialect, seriously); and cd booklet of La Mutazione comes with a signature essay from the man on how this work came to be and what theoretical ideas revolve around these sounds.
The three tracks on this disc (the two original cuts on the LP and a unreleased bonus track) harken to
the early '80s as Toniutti darkened of cosmic electronics from the likes of Cluster, Tangerine Dream, and Conrad Schnitzler through the lens of Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, and Throbbing Gristle. At the time, Toniutti had just matriculated from the Conservatory of Venice with a heady amount of education in Stockhausen, Schaefer, etc. These three musical poles come together in this dark, dark, dark construction of layered static, analog synth explorations, and even some field recording. The totemically named track "The Tree" situates upon an oppressive drone of low frequencies scraped by waves of radio static, which parallels the early work of John Duncan in many ways. Throughout "The Tree," Toniutti injects a lugubrious bubbling of synthetic notes with similarities to the untrained atonalism that Maurizio Bianchi had grafted to the cancerous power electronics of Regel and Das Testament from the early '80s. Those same synth notes snap into a morose two note melody on the aptly named "Nekrose," which is even darker in atmosphere and creepy intensity than the first. The bonus track "Apoplettica" is a darkened delay exploration with clanking loops and unsettled harmonic drones that foreshadows the guttural psychedelic blackening that Mark McGuire alludes to in Emeralds.
A triumph back then, and a triumph now.
Well, it's about fucking time! During the past two and half decades, this uncompromising Italian sound artist released only two solo records and a handful of noteworthy collaborations, all of which had earned him a reputation for incredible compositions nestled within an intellectual framework dealing with semiotics, esoteric languages, psychogeography, cosmology, and plenty of other topics that are way above the heads of 99% of everybody else. For all of Toniutti's high-falutin' ideas, his sound design isn't nearly as obtuse as you might think. There is an expressionism to Toniutti's work that you might also find in Xenakis' electronic works or Chris Watson's high quality field recordings, although Toniutti's idiosyncrasies make it difficult to draw apt comparisons. So with the release of Qwalsamtimutkw?italuc'ik, Toniutti has finally issued something new. Almost 19 years after the last proper full length album, and 11 years since the last major collaborative project. There have been entire careers that have risen and then fallen during that span of time, and Giancarlo quietly toiled away with his research into dying languages and an occasional flurry of recording which only now has been resolved. The title itself translates from Nuxalk, an indigenous Canadian language, if you must know.
As for music, Toniutti built an instrument which he calls a 'rattle-harp' out of a large piece of found metal, several long thin pieces of wire, and some bones. The sounds that emanate from this instrument are haunted drones and rattles which create an unsettled ground of activity that is anything but static. Sure, the surfaces of these shadowy subharmonic thumbs and oceanic tone bursts could fall into the darkened ambient catageory that we love so much; but as Toniutti slips the layers against each other, unnerving ruptures in frequency provide a woozy feel to these occluded drones. Even at low volumes, these tectonic rumblings can be very potent.
At the time of this writing, Toniutti has announced a slew of archival recordings including his bleak electronic album La Mutazione which Broken Flag released back in 1985, as well as a 3lp set for Vinyl On Demand; and yes, there might even be another new record. So, Giancarlo Toniutti does not appear to be the Kevin Shields of noise culture, rather just a highly exceptional composer with a pretty sizeable time gap in his discography.
No one will ever accuse Giancarlo Toniutti of releasing too much music into the world. It has literally been ten years since Toniutti has released any recordings outside of a very rare compilation track here or there. That said, Toniutti is an undeniably intriguing sound artist, who has deeply immersed himself into obscure forms of ethnomusicology and linguistic study, all the while keeping a finely tuned ear to the habits of vangarde composition. His earliest recordings emerged out of the Italian power electronics community of the early '80s whose most well known practitioner was Maurizio Bianchi. Like Bianchi, Toniutti put out a handful of recordings on the seminal British noise label Broken Flag. While bracing, complex, and adventurous in its crunched tape manipulations and sinister synthesis, Toniutti's work stood apart from the signature Broken Flag arc of transgressive noise, due to Toniutti's intellectual rigor. It was this rigor that brought Toniutti to pursue his collaborations with Andrew Chalk and Conrad Schnitzler, and it was probably this rigor that caused the prolonged length between recordings over the past decade.
So, the 20 minute composition that Toniutti produced for Ferns impressive series of 3" discs has been granted a Hopi Indian title based on an ancient song dealing with cunnilingus and bedbugs. I'm sure that Giancarlo has a very particular reason for placing such a text alongside this warbling set of mutated field recordings; but as of yet, it remains something of a mystery. This composition does enjoy a hermetic quality, in spite of Toniutti's explanation that he derived all of the sounds from a field recording he made in Italy involving a mountain, a 10ft tall cross, a metal pylon, and a temple bell. Out of that environment and those objects, Toniutti arrives at a record that might appear somewhat meditative at first, with its constant wash of low frequencies; but upon deeper investigations into the piece, he reveals queasy, off-kilter tonalities which gently vibrate against each other, bristling with quiet textures. His is a pretty unique sound, somewhat like the early electronic work of Xenakis with the diminutive sensibilities of early Bernhard Gunter. Highly recommended!
Even if this wasn't some terminally obscure project out of Japan circa 1988 (we're guessing on the date and PSF isn't telling), we would still be freaking out over this mind blowing drone-plus-noise album. But as it stands, Toukaseibunshi is a project that's about as mysterious as they come, and that intrigues us all the more. Toukaseibunshi was the pseudonym for one Hironari Iwata, who used to run a cassette label in the late '80s called Angakok. Through that imprint he curated a compilation that featured HNAS, Asmus Tietchens, Merzbow, Conrad Schnitzler, SBOTHI, Human Flesh, and a bunch of other artists we're not all that familiar with. As Toukaseibunshi, Iwata fluctuates between all of these aesthetic poles, pulling a blistering (if more restrained) use of squalid noise from Merzbow, the sustained electronic clusters from Tietchens and Schnitzler, and an unsettled weirdness from HNAS. Yet the same time, Iwata's distorted drone pieces foreshadow the same types of digital overblown pieces from Fennesz or Belong some 20 years later.
The album begins with a sprawling twenty minute piece "Glace" whose arches of softened feedback take on the hue of a post-MBV glide guitar grafted onto a static field of electricity and billowing ambient swathes that sort of have a Stars Of The Lid vibe, but with a lot more teeth in the mix. Mesmerizingly beautiful stuff. The rest of the album is split between five other tracks of variable length but are considerably nastier than the opening number. Iwata's crunched tape loops, actionist metal bashing thrust into the background, and squawking electronics have the feeling of the sounds of a construction site being tossed around the high rises of Tokyo. The reverb dislocated the sound amidst the din of the city; and despite the turmoil, Iwata seems intent on making these industrialized sounds meditative. That doesn't imply a lack of noise, cuz these tracks got plenty of bloodcurdling white noise buzzing about.
This album has been released in PSF's Japanese Avant-Garde Cassette Reissue Series. So, we can only assume this came out on cassette sometime in the late '80s and early '90s when Iwata was active; however, there's no information whatsoever. It's great to have this available, even as it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Throughout the '90s, Cedric Peyronnet would boldy announce that none of his Toy Bizarre recordings were made with synthesizers or samplers, instead with field recordings and collage techniques as his twin media. It has been speculated that this notion comes from a punk attitude against France's institutional avant-garde which evolved out of the work of Pierre Schaefer and Pierre Henri; but at the same time, Peyronnet's recordings focus on the specificity of sound locations, and the technology of samplers and synthesizers didn't have the ability to reflect the unpredictability that Peyronnet witnessed in environmental sound. While Peyronnet doesn't mentioned his aversion to technology on this 3" from Ferns, he's retained the same adventurous sensibility for dynamic edits coupled with nocturnal, slippery ambience. From the jump-start opening of crackling twigs and grasses with an airplane's Doppler-effected engine roaring in the distance, Peyronnet's 20 minute composition dissolves into elegantly fluid timbres weaving out of tactile sounds from sand, grit, gravel, and other bits of detritus. Once all of the sounds have all settled into a drift of stasis, a quick jump to another set of textures and abrasions begins with a corresponding set of sympathetic drones. Fans of Loren Chasse's field recording work, Tarab, and Steve Roden should all take note of this exceptional release.
Had anyone else found it strangely lurid / alluring that Beach House titled one their two 2015 albums Thank Your Lucky Stars, when Whitehouse screeched out their power electronic classic of that same name some twenty-five years earlier? Probably not. After all, we are all sick in the head here at Aquarius. But if the sultry Beach House chanteuse Victoria Legrand were to adopt some unseemly industrial alter-ego clad in black leather trenchcoats, what might that sound like? We'll offer Troller as our answer, with the caveat that Troller is probably more worthy than what our fantasy may have conjured up. Graphic is the epic second album from this Texan quartet of gloom-synth portent fronted by the steel throated Amber Goers.
As much as we raved about Troller's eponymous debut five years ago, this one is even better. The band posted a video for the albums' "Storm Maker" which is a beautiful swoon of an synth ballad harking to those emotive tracks that OMD sculpted early in their career. A lovely track to say the least, but the Siouxsie / Kate Bush allusions may be the siren call to draw unwitting listeners into the dark pit at the soul of this album. Snarled electronic death rock and synthetic industrial catharsis is found throughout the rest of Graphic, highlighted by the title track's Cranes-ish pummel of heaven and hell, "Sundowner" (a track of a Diamanda Galas theatricality affixed to what the whole witch house scene aspired to but failed in delivering while busy coming up with ascii symbol nomenclature), and the diabolically death-disco anthem "Torch" with its ice queen vocal crescendos and tense drum-machined inventions for the dungeon. Luridly alluring indeed, and recommended.
To dedicated readers of the New Arrival list, there can be no doubt that goth and industrial sounds from the eighties are back in a huge way. But rather than riding the nostalgia train, most of the groups we love who are mining this sound and putting their own spin on it, adding unique elements to distinguish a sense of honest and progressive devotion from a mere genre exercise. Case in point is this debut tape from Austin-based heavy gloomers, Troller. Coming out of the same fervent scene that was birthed from the ashes of Silver Pines: Pure X, Survive, Sleep Over, and Thousand Foot Whale Claw (for a good overview of this scene, check out the Brain Club Vol. #000001 LP compilation), Troller mine classic death rock, but slow it down with a heavy shoe-gazing doominess. You can tell the female singer has a voice as big as Zola Jesus, or Siouxie, but what we like most about it is that she restrains her delivery from overwrought passion up front in the mix, instead letting it moulder at times in a dour misanthropic mire with the chilly synths and the booming plod of the drum machine patterns. In between each proper song is an untitled instrumental that shows the band's knack for sculpting dark ambient soundscapes that are alien, pensive and luridly bleak.
To check it out: http://troller.bandcamp.com/releases
The band dropped these off while on tour, so we have about ten. We probably can get more, but be prepared to wait for a restock until the band return home.
There's the amphetamine fueled goth of the Sisters Of Mercy and Bauhaus with all of their wastoid glam-punk vamping and sexually nihilistic anthems; and then there's the soporific romanticism that is equally as bleak, but softened by a couple bottles of blood red wine and a tear stained visage. This latter vantage point eschews any wild-mood-swing mania in favor of a maudlin introspection captured in the empty spaces of the latter halves of Joy Division's Closer and The Cure's Seventeen Seconds (or Faith, your choice). Here lies the aesthetic of Camella Lobo's Tropic Of Cancer. Over the past few years, Lobo has earned a cult following through her affiliations with the Sandwell District's Karl O'Connor (who produced this album) and Juan "Silent Servant" Mendez (who partnered with Lobo in writing much of the early material), although her work shares little of the brutalist architectural modes of Sandwell's techno thump. Instead, it is all ghostly whisps and a gloomy weightlessness suspended over skeletal melodies and the sparest of rhythms.
Restless Idylls is her debut album and holds a very steady course set forth by those singles and EPs she crafted with Mendez. Highly spatialized, the songs push her haunted croon into dusty corners bumping up against spider webs and black lace. behind the foregrounded one-two-one-FOUR slow-motion drum programming that she uses almost exclusively. Between these two bookends, guitars, bass, and synths glide with an elegant ease, even as the moods she is crafting are ponderous and melancholy. "More Alone" is the closest thing that could be qualified as a single, with a considerably more uptempo variation on her heartbeat rhythms and death-disco synth lines. The uniform emotional torpor of the album becomes rather hypnotic once you get locked inside the album with its slow pulsing rhythms and tremulant wash of melting, sad-girl echo. Dejected and blighted, nice!
Dreaming Muzak was the very first release from Troum, not long after the two members of Troum had disbanded their previous project Maeror Tri in 1998. Originally released as a cassette housed in a tiny pillow in an edition numbering a scant 100 copies, Dreaming Muzak is now available as a cd-r edition, although its long term availability remains unknown. That said, Dreaming Muzak does what Troum and Maeror Tri have always done so very well: drone-on with gritty, psychological undercurrents. If the intent for Troum was to put the listener to sleep, the lulling vibrating patterns certainly have the capacity; but the overall darkness of these sounds will never inspire the most pleasant of dreams. These are shadowy, bleak, and cold sounds which permeate the album, and lend themselves to images of desolate factories spewing a constant stream of black soot in some wintery post-Soviet country. A very nice document from one of our favorite drone acts.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Troum is the dronological duo that was born out of the dissolution of Maeror Tri - easily one of the most emotive drone ensembles ever. Troum's "Framapeis" is a lengthy two track 12" that picks up where Maeror Tri left off, with lumbering dark ambient passages built out of layered guitar washes that slyly provide a semblance of simple melodies and tenative rhythmic structure. These shimmering apparitons of basic song structure gently pass through the thick sonic haze as if they have been sent down from the heavens and filtered through the sediments suspended in the atmosphere. Beautiful, majestic, and haunting, Troum (and the preceeding Maeror Tri) have set the bar very high for drone artists in the future... "Framapeis" is limited to 500 copies.
It goes to show how prolific Troum can be, if we missed the first two entries in the 'power romance' series, which were granted ocean/sea titles and based (in part) on samples from J.S. Bach. This 52 minute piece features multiple movements that ebb and flow into each other. The opening phrases ascend from pastoral orchestral samples (presumably those aforementioned Bach samples) into a soaring crescendo of swirling, emotionally bright tones and loops from trilling strings, girded by those luminously flanged guitars that Troum has mustered for years. Then comes the anthemic surge of a big back-beat from programmed rhythms that sound more like a live drum kit than they've previously produced, giving this movement a feel more like those grand early tracks by Sigur Ros or even Godspeed! You Black Emperor. A subdued melancholic passage of lugubrious murk follows before the duo reprises their classic Troum / Maeror Tri sound of deep, doom-paced basslines and goth-drone melodies which churn through the guitars. The bass climbs to the foreground some 30 minutes into the album with those weeping guitars settling into the distance before another fantastically mesmeric rhythmic blast kicks in. Admittedly, we've been critical of Troum and Maeror Tri for some of their programming choices in the past; but this is a high caliber set of sampling here, with a mid-tempo breakbeat laced with overblown cymbal crashes that has more in common with the complex patterns of Squarepusher than the earlier tribal-industrial rhythms. The finale pools into those saturated drones of evanescent bass and guitar, scraped with just the right amount of distortion. Another great album from these perennial aQ faves...
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Troum (Traum is "dream" in the duo's native German, but Troum is ?) mines the nether regions of the subconscious to create waking replications of their nightly visions. Their recordings are far from mere transcriptions of dreams to tape; they are the gossamer residues of once vivid memories, passed through mesmeric filters to slowly dissolve present reality into soft focus fragments of thought. Musically, these translations fall both on the sublime and, at times, on the malevolent side of the ambient divide.
"Sen" -- Troum's contribution to Staalplaat's luminary-laced live-radio-recordings "Mort Aux Vaches" series -- seems fixated on the North Sea, where sheets of black ice creak under the tidal currents that roll onto a rocky beach. Troum sees no need to make any direct references to that imagined metaphor, rather it's implied behind a bleak drone haze of guitars, bells, voice, and keyboards treated with a heavy dose of synthetic cathedral reverb. Troum's post-industrial background is revealed with a churning drum machine which rumbles underneath their complex tonal patterns like an antiquated seaside factory.
Troum, more so than in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, has the potential to invoke awe through their hypnogogic expanses of droning sound. Here they push beyond their potential. Also, please note that this only their second cd, and the first is out of print (this is limited as well!), so get it while you can.
I believe it was 1997 when a small posting came my way stating that Maeror Tri had dissolved. At the time, this German trio had become one of my (Jim's) favorite ensembles alongside the likes of Organum, Skullflower, and :zoviet*france:. Maeror Tri's dedication to grimly focused atmospheric music harbored all of the things that succeeded in the campaigns of industrial and ambient music; and the Maeror Tri anonymity (or at least a mysteriousness about the group that lead to such a reading of their collective persona) certainly enhanced their charm. Albums such as Emotional Engramm and Multiple Personality Disorder had achieved heavy rotation status on my stereo (and still get pulled from the shelves quite often in this day and age); so the news that Maeror Tri was no more was met with sadness. Fortunately, two thirds of the Maeror Tri ensemble had decided to continue on but under the moniker Troum. While the name of this duo was an archaic German word for dream, Troum's pursuit of unconscious symbolism through their heavily processed guitar drones still maintained the ashen darkness that Maeror Tri perpetuated, as was evident on their first CD release Ryna, which originally came out in 1998 on the Belgian label Myotis. It should be noted that Ryna is not the first Troum recording; that honor is held by a cassette called Dreaming Muzak that came housed in a tiny pillow. Ryna quickly went out of print, along with much of the Maeror Tri back catalogue; but thankfully, Troum have repressed this early gem through their own Transgredient imprint. An album of constantly billowing black clouds, Ryna achieves the same dark ambient / dronescape signature that had marked so many great Maeror Tri / Troum releases. On occasion, cracked / decayed loops of rhythmic surging emerged from beyond the horizon of Troum's guitar suites, alluding to a Norse mythological bellow of impending doom and apocalyptic battle. While I've not done the side-by-side taste test of the two albums, the 2007 redux of Ryna appears to much louder and cleaner. Regardless, it's a pleasure to hear this record once again!
Wow, is this a doozy of a reissue. The long out of print Sen record, from guitar drone outfit Troum, originally released as their entry in the Mort Aux Vaches, gets an ULTRA deluxe double vinyl reissue courtesy of the always amazing Equation label.
Before we get into the record itself, we have to talk about the packaging. Especially because the version we got is limited to 97 copies, and except for copies to the band, and a handful of Equation mailorder customers is EXCLUSIVE to aQuarius!! Two lps, both pressed on heavy vinyl, the vinyl is clear with a sepia haze emanating from the center. The lps are housed in a SUPER thick clear PVC gatefold that is sealed with a little velcro button. Inside the gatefold, a thick 7" pouch, which houses three 7" circular 2-sided satin-finish heavy-card inserts along with a sticker and all sealed with a hand-numbered oval sepia sticker. Phew! It really is one of the most breath taking chunks of vinyl we have ever seen. So gorgeous and it weighs a ton. And if that weren't enough, the music inside is equally fantastic.
Troum (Traum is "dream" in the duo's native German, but Troum is ?) mines the nether regions of the subconscious to create waking replications of their nightly visions. Their recordings are far from mere transcriptions of dreams to tape; they are the gossamer residues of once vivid memories, passed through mesmeric filters to slowly dissolve present reality into soft focus fragments of thought. Musically, these translations fall both on the sublime and, at times, on the malevolent side of the ambient divide.
Sen, originally released as part of Staalplaat's luminary-laced live-radio-recordings "Mort Aux Vaches" series, seems fixated on the North Sea, where sheets of black ice creak under the tidal currents that roll onto a rocky beach. Troum sees no need to make any direct references to that imagined metaphor, rather it's implied behind a bleak drone haze of guitars, bells, voice, and keyboards treated with a heavy dose of synthetic cathedral reverb. Troum's post-industrial background is revealed with a churning drum machine which rumbles underneath their complex tonal patterns like an antiquated seaside factory.
Troum, more so than in their previous incarnation as Maeror Tri, has the potential to invoke awe through their hypnogogic expanses of droning sound. Here they push far beyond their potential.
And again LIMITED TO 97 COPIES!!! So get it while you can.
No sound clips, but check out this gorgeous promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1BhFZM6MM
Finally, the first Troum record to be widely available in the United States, released through Relapse subsidiary Desolation House, and we're pleased to say it's maybe their best yet. Troum are the ambient-drone ensemble that emerged from the dissolution of proto-industrial dronesters Maeror Tri. Unlike the primarily guitar based whir and rumble of Maeror Tri, Troum obfuscate their sound sources, laptops, found sounds, accordians, guitars too maybe, and the results are timeless, mysterious, haunting, ethereal and utterly breathtaking dronescapes. Sigqan is a lengthy three part epic, beginning with rich sonorous foghorn like swells, that ebb and flow, separated by near silence, and slowly building in intensity from warm crescendos to huge doomy pulses. Eventually, these roaring rumbles joined by complementary shimmers of high end, that sound out, and then dissipate like sonic ripples, fading into blackness. The swells slowly grow closer and closer until the edges begin to blur and a subtly more continuous melodic framework begins to emerge and so begins the second movement, a creepy and slightly ominous, slowly fluctuating slow-motion-melody, whose lazily shifting notes keep the sonic landscape dense and rich, and keeps the sounds from flatlining into monochromatic drones. As the piece winds down, the dynamics and melody start to smear together into a warm, diffused fuzzy hum, with the subtle traces of melody sinking deeper and deeper into the dark warmth. The third and final movement was a sonic afterthought, added/recorded later than the first two, but is a pleasantly dreamy coda, with a slightly sunnier tone, a keening upper register melody, stretched out into subtly slithering iridescence with a shuffling, staticky rhythm just below the surface. So nice.
Stefan Knappe of Troum has started the Transgredient label as an outlet for CD releases, thus preserving the vinyl-only purity of his Drone Records label and its ongoing series of seven inch singles. Troum is the extention of the Maeror Tri project which was an incredibly prolific isolationist / post-industrial group throughout the '90s. Armed with a barrage of guitars, miasmic loops, and tricked out reverb / echo / delay effects, Maeror Tri undertook a bleak and at times nightmarish route in search of the drone supreme. While culling from Maeror Tri's extensive drone production techniques, Troum's sound is far lighter -- but still never sounds as gentle (or space-rock-y) as something like Windy & Carl or Roy Montgomery. Repetitive and subtly beautiful melodies rise out of the waters of Troum's cold swirling ambience, which grow in intensity throughout each of the seven lengthy pieces on this disc. While the members of Troum have been recording for well over a decade, it is still a wonder to hear new material as they continue to challenge themselves to improve on the what they seemingly have already perfected: the task of creating the ultimate drone.
Troum's second installment in their "Tjukurrpa" trilogy is self-evidently subtitled "Drones" (and makes us ask, the first one wasn't?). Since their days in the prolific isolationist ensemble Maeror Tri, the two members of Troum continue to masterfully
Few who conjure the dark ambient arts have the credentials of Troum and Raison D'Etre - the former being the longstanding German bass/guitar/fx industrial drone duo with an exceptional track record and the latter being a staple of Cold Meat Industries always seeming to score the soundtracks for crumbled cathedrals wrecked by European decline and weather. Emotional portent is what both of these artists have mustered through their sculpted echo and reverberation flecked with spectral atmospheric melody; and that is exactly what these two produce in their first collaboration. An oppressive misery hangs on these expansive cloaking drones and ghostly ephemera, and De Aeris In Sublunaria Influxu is all the better for it!
The German drone ensemble Troum and its predecessor Maeror Tri have been long-time favorites of Aquarius, never failing to deliver powerful recordings of bleak atmospheres densely folded upon fragile melodies. We are pleased to announce that Troum's collaboration with the American dark ambient duo Yen Pox is no exception. Both Troum and Yen Pox rely upon the metaphoric characteristics of the drone to evoke dream like states. Within their prediliction for gossamer melodies from guitars, lutes, accordion, and flutes all buried under many layers of reverb, delay, and other blurring effects, Troum's work fixates upon the language of dreams and hypnogogic states (even their name is an archaic German translation for dream), as something of a semiotic / transcendental escape route from the confines of earthbound reality. On the otherhand, Yen Pox relies upon the hauntings of nightmares to shape the contexts of their drones, often referencing the sci-fi paranoia of black holes or the Gothic invocations of unknown horrors found in the best Lustmord recordings.
On "Mnemonic Induction," the two outfits seemlessly merge their respective sounds into a sublime droning hybrid that thrives on billowing oxygenated washes and delicate melodies floating up from a continuously thundering low-end rumble. Consequently, this album is far darker than anything that Troum / MT has ever done, but provides a greater focus beyond the scope of death-obsessed imagery common within the Yen Pox dark ambience.
This album should not be missed.
This is the third entry from the exceptional, if self-explanatory archives of Japanese field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda, concentrating here on "solid vibrations" as the follow up to the second volume which dealt with the microphonic properties of air within hollow objects. In his liner notes, Tsunoda explains that most of the interesting properties of solid vibrations are too faint to be heard under normal listening circumstances; yet with the aid of a piezo-ceramic contact microphone (a simple device which translates immediate vibrations into electrical currents), these vibrations can be made audible. Tsunoda concentrates his recordings around distinctly urban environments -- construction sites, wharfs, highways, wire net fences, metal plate fences, and industrial detritus -- due to the presence of large motors and engines which can activate the vibrations he seeks out. These tend to be very-low frequency rumbles and drones dappled with fluctuations from any number of environmental changes and human interactions. As in all of his other recordings, Tsunoda studiously documents all of the details from each recording, providing interesting tidbits about the sources for these vibrations (i.e. that a swinging element from one his recordings is the sway of an anchor deep in the ocean). Tsunoda is careful to point out that his recordings are "for the purpose of being heard. It is for improving the occurrence which one encounters every day. Therefore, pure scientific detection is not being carried out here." This is a really wonderful document, and may be the best yet from Tsunoda!
Vocals? Who needs 'em? Not Turing Machine. This exceptional instrumental mathrock band with members of Pitchblende and Vineland gives nods to Shellac, Phil Manley (Trans Am, Golden) and Unwound. A big store favorite. Don't miss it.
Beyond Painting displays another facet of the enigmatic Robert Turman. Way back in the late '70s, he founded the seminal noise project NON with Boyd Rice, who soon adopted the name for his own work, with Turman seemingly disappearing from the public realm for well over three decades. There were just a smattering of self-released cassettes which emerged in the '80s, but it wasn't until John Elliott unearthed the beautifully hypnotic patter of Turman's 1981 cassette Flux on Spectrum Spools, that people began to really pay attention to Turman's work. Then the slew of Turman 'reissues' began to emerge, although it's really hard to call them reissues as the original editions were utterly minuscule. Beyond Painting dates back to 1990, but wasn't released for another 20 years as a self-released cd-r in an edition of just 100 copies; and thankfully gets a proper 2lp reissue via Fabrica. While Turman is often associated with noise culture, all of the work we've been able to hear (outside the early Non recordings) has steered clear of an aggressive tone with Flux adopting an introspective minimalism and with Beyond Painting taking a somber approach to ambient music with a distinctly postindustrial touch (e.g. Zoviet France, Cranioclast, etc.).
Spectral hues and back-masked synth notes interlock for the introductory "Soft Self Portrait" which ends up being austere, bleak, and self-negating if in fact it is a self portrait. A slow-motion, post-punk dubby bass line girds the stalker atmosphere of "Al Qa'ida" with its buzzing, harmonic synth lines. The name of this track in 1990 wouldn't have had the cultural weight that it does now, but there is a desperation and abjection to the desolate melodies that pushes through the lens of 9/11 right on through today. Another masterfully done piece is found in "Relux" whose eerily sci-fi / narcoleptic melodies predating what Aphex did on Selected Ambient Works II, but way creepier, or even what Burzum did on the ambient half of Filosofem. Yeah, it's that good! The second LP holds more of a Zeit era Tangerine Dream vibe with deep cosmic swells and hypnotic patterning through resonant tones and melancholy coloring. Who knows what other hidden recordings may emerge from the vaults of Robert Turman? Please keep 'em coming!
The conception for Spirals Of Everlasting Change began in 1982 for Robert Turman - best known as the founder of NON with Boyd Rice and to a lesser extent within the obscurant noise project Z.O. Voider. He envisioned two separate cassettes to be played simultaneously on two decks with the languid ambient tones of one cassette lashed across the harsher industrial-klank rhythms of the other. By 1987, he reworked all of the material into a single mix again sprawled across two cassettes, with the dreamy, zoner tracks corralled onto one tape and the more dissonant pieces on the other. He released Spirals Of Everlasting Change in two formats in the late '80s, once as a cassette inside a 5" reel-to-reel tape box and again as part of the Chapter Eleven anthology comprised of eight cassettes that documented all of the recorded output up to 1988. So far, only the seminal Flux album (which got reissued on Spectrum Spools a couple years ago) and Spirals Of Everlasting Change have been resuscitated from the dustbin of terminal obscurity, as Chapter Eleven is downright impossible to find. We can hope that a reissue campaign of all of those recordings will eventually materialize; but until that happens, we'll definitely jump at the chance for another archival Turman recording.
The titular tracks are the more abrasive pieces, with the ready-made loops sounding very similar to what Boyd Rice delivered on his infamous Black Album of delirious repetitions for tape-gyrating dervishes and maddeningly insistent phrases that may have been culled from thrift store belly-dancing records. "Lonesome Echo" and "Lower World" are eerily prescient of the work that William Basinski became famous for - lilting melodic passages generated from simple overlapping loops that have a ghostly recollection of a forgotten past, smudged in a kirlian glow of distressed chromium oxide and industrial dub debris. This double lp set of Spirals Of Everlasting Change is super limited, coming out of Luxembourg in an edition of 289 copies, of which we only have a few!
'Mystical goat dancer' is an apt describer of Otha Turner, an ageless creation of the Mississippi earth whose musical mastery is over a simple fife carved out of a bamboo cane fishing pole. Together with his Rising Star Fife & Drum band, Turner has for years fashioned shrill whistles around the militant snare march of the drum core, reconstituting the rhythmic hypnotism of lost slave songs. This album is a much more sedate outing for Turner as he has been joined by a handful of Senegalese musicians, beautifully linking the two divergant African sounds. Turner's domineering presence is neccessary for the success of these fusions, but at times, he seems to wander off (to feed the chickens? after all this was recorded at his farm) on two tracks which snap back to traditional Senegalese rhythms. Regardless, an excellent document.
Along with the revamped Conet Project, here's another no-brainer for a Record Of The Week� We've listed it before, years and years ago, when there was a cd version on Akarma, but this is a much nicer, expanded, official reissue and it's good to give it a proper review for the first time (back then, we merely quoted The Seth Man from Julian Cope's Head Heritage website, waxing rhapsodic about this record, now we'll do it ourselves).
Oh boy. Do you like psychedelia? DO YOU HAVE THIS ALBUM? If not, you're in for a treat, a mindblowing treat. Think Pink was the brilliant solo effort from former Pretty Things drummer John "Twink" Alder, and it's an all-time aQ fave, an all-time underground psychedelic masterpiece, right up there with the essentials from the likes of Amon Duul II, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Sam Gopal, Kaleidoscope, and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it's just been properly reissued on cd by the UK's Sunbeam label, with a whole bunch of bonus freakery added on. Not that this album NEEDS any bonus freakery, it's about as freaky as you can get to begin with, packed with droning chant, druidic prophecy, spaced-out psych jams, weird twisted pop, and acid-folk ramble. But, too much is never enough, right? So heck, we're happy to have the eight bonus tracks too. More on those later. First, let's discuss the original album itself. As we said, Twink played drums for The Pretty Things, but before that had his own sixties R&B outfit the Fairies. After that band, he was in Tomorrow ("My White Bicycle") with future Yes guitarist Steve Howe, around 1967. Twink then briefly formed a duo called The Aquarian Age, before joining up with The Pretty Things and appearing on their concept-album classic S.F. Sorrow in '68, another aQ fave. At that point, for some crazy reason (things were different/better back then) Twink was offered a deal by Sire to do a solo album, and Think Pink was the glorious, if at the time somewhat unheralded, result, recorded in 1969 with Mick Farren of The Deviants producing. Released in 1970 in the US & Europe, but not 'til '71 in the UK, it's been called the first Pink Fairies album, and in a way it is, as soon after making it, Twink did team up with several ex-members of The Deviants, most of whom played on this, to form that infamous proto-punk outfit. And several tracks here feature contributions from what's credited as "The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Club & All Star Rock & Roll Band".
Also participating are several of Twink's Pretty Things bandmates, his girlfriend Silver Darling, and Steve Peregrin Took, Marc Bolan's partner in Tyrannosaurus Rex and early T-Rex, who plays, among other things, "pixie horn". And one of the most crucial contributors to Think Pink, besides Twink himself, has to be guitarist Paul "Blackie" Rudolph, who really lets loose, earning a hallowed place in the annals of distortodelic guitar wrangling for his work on this album alone (though in the course of his career before and after, he also played with The Deviants, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Robert Calvert, and Brian Eno).
Eastern-tinged opener "The Coming Of The Other One" sets the scene, pulling us deep into its trippy Aquarian Age fantasy zone, with a solemn voice reciting Nostradamic verses ("In the year 1999 and seven months, from the skies shall come an alarming powerful king...") accompanied by tablas and sitar. Then comes Think Pink's biggest "hit" as far as we're concerned, an utterly perfect slice of stonery psych called "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", just listen to it! That's followed by "Dawn Of Magic" with its raga-like vocal ahhhaaaaahh sounds as if Pandit Pran Nath were on the mic, which suddenly segues into the space-out sike-pop of "Tiptoe On The Highest Hill", a lovely pastoral song that eventually builds into a howling guitar blow-out of the highest order. Then the trippy "Fluid" chimes into being, with its sexy heavy breathing and slinky, springy grooves, making us think of the acid-fried hippy orgasms of krautrockers Brainticket's classic Cottonwood Hill (released later on, in '71, we should also note).
Side two (track six here) opens with the martial fuzz-freakout of "Mexican Grass War", all chanting freaks and wild FX like early Amon Duul and Edgar Broughton Band. The freaky vibes continue, quite weird and wonderful, with the glammed up jam of "Rock An'Roll The Joint", the mellow morbid acoustic strum of "Suicide" and the maniacal "Three Little Piggies", before the album ends with the intense edgy psych pop of "The Sparrow Is A Sign", a song with a malevolent, sinister side to it that reminds us a little bit of Comus - and strangely too of the Sun City Girls, perhaps due to the vocals, provided by Steve Took.
Then, there's all those bonus tracks, the first two of which are actually from the lone 7" single released in '68 by The Aquarian Age, the immediate precursor to the Think Pink project. There's the A side, being the original version of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", and the B side, an amusing number called "Good Wizard Meets Naughty Wizard", which displays just the sort of twee, hippie British humor the title suggests. It's great to hear both of those, and the bonus tracks proliferate further with unreleased, alternate versions of more Think Pink material, somewhat heavier or rawer or definitely different, including two takes of "Fluid" and another version of "10,000 Words...", which we can't get enough of anyway.
All in all, a nicely done reissue, as this deserves, with pages and pages of newly-written, informative liner notes, plus lyrics, credits, vintage photos & graphics. Plus, unlike that previous Akarma version, this is a fully-legit release, done with the participation of Twink himself ("issued under exclusive license from Mohammed Abdullah John Alder, February 2013" it says here, and there's even a picture of him today too - apparently he's become a Muslim, and looks quite happy).
By the way... Nobody here at aQ can think about Think Pink, though, and not also think about our "customer" whom we call The Twink Think Pink Guy. We don't believe he's ever actually bought anything, but he's this older guy that comes in once in a while (and has for years) and always, always, ONLY asks about Think Pink, whether we have it in stock or not, and then talks at great length to anyone who will listen about how great it is. It's his favorite record apparently, but don't let that dissuade you, if you get this you probably won't end up like him. Probably.
Message for The Twink Think Pink Guy, if you're reading this: we expect to see you soon!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Along with two reissues on cassette of quickly sold-out cdrs over the past few years, we have a new album from the enigmatic Russian collective Uhushuhu. These are drones to sink into - deep, thrumming tones, nocturnal field recordings, accreted electronic vibration, and wind-swept aeration that appear to emit from the depth of the Russian forest, all embued with a transcendent, mystically dark quality that immediately makes us think back to those early Andrew Chalk albums, especially his beloved Sumac disc with Jonathan Coleclough. As with the other cassettes, this too is limited to 55 copies; but unlike the others, the plastic casing is swaddled in an O-card.
"Ego : Echo" is certainly one of the mightiest, ahem, 'post-rock' records of the year, simply because every other post-rock band has unfortunately followed the Thrill Jockey (Tortoise, Isotope) path to jazz fusion. Ulan Bator is a French trio who employed the talents of the Swans' Michael Gira to produce this, their latest album. Gira -- who also released this through his Young God label -- makes his presence known with a majestic yet depressed sound that permeates the strangled grooves of Ulan Bator. If you take both the mellowest and most thunderous extremes of the best Mogwai and filter it through Circle's patented rhythm hypnosis and the Swans' bleakness, and factor in the Frenchness aspect, you'll get close to what Ulan Bator sounds like. Pretty great. Their previous records didn't get much notice over here in the States, but perhaps things will change with this release. And you might also recall seeing a favorable review of their recent remixes disc on AQ-L #97 -- if you were wondering just what this band was that Carl Stone, Otomo Yoshihide, et.al. were messing with, then "Ego : Echo" is the thing to check out.
Holy shit, this is so fucked up, but in all the right ways. And thus, becomes our first ever CASSETTE Record Of The Week! One of those records that had EVERYone here sorta freaking out. And on it's first spin in the store, had all the folks in the back rushing up front to see what the heck was playing!
Un Festin Sagital are an occult prog-metal / angular post-punk / psychedelic free noise / black ambient orchestra out of Santiago, Chile that can strip down to the touring essentials of just flute, acoustic guitar, and voice, when need be, in bellowing their complex tales of a forthcoming lysergic apocalypse. But here, it's the full sonic onslaught of Satanic chanting, frenzied tribal rhythms, heavy anthemic riffs, acid-crazed arrangements, and witch/warlock vocals that sound as if they were recorded at the wrong speed, all dotted with some rather pretty moments of psychedelic impressionism. Diabolically strummed flamenco guitar riffs erupt into blisteringly rhythmic assaults of start/stop rhythms that are equal parts King Crimson, Comus, and Uz Jsme Doma. Or imagine Dutch punks the Ex crossed with aQ Record Of The Weekers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan!! A sound that somehow simultaneously reminds us of bedeviled Eastern European peasant folk songs that could very well be possessed gypsy curses from some remote old world village in a muddled sonic palette that also evokes the Art Bears mixed with ritualistic Hindustani vocal modulations, or the Vietnamese girls on Holgar Czukay's "Boat Woman Song". The sound washed out under layers of tape decay and warble, the music seemingly patched together and reassembled in beautiful, yet twisted psych-folk interludes which meander between the volatile rhythmic outbursts with wah-wah inflected, acidic guitar lines and long dizzying sprawls of cinematic creep and kosmische electronics, creating spellbinding atmospheres and gorgeously stunning modern avant heaviness. Strange, fucked-up stuff. Supposedly a full length is in the works for Beta-Lactum Ring. C40. Limited to 100 copies! And so totally recommended!!
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Now available on domestic PICTURE DISC vinyl!
Hell yeah, at last! When this now-semi-legendary album was first released by UK heavy psych doom metal specialists Rise Above in 2011, it came out in an ultra limited edition of just three hundred vinyl-only copies, which proved almost impossible to come by. That first edition sold out instantly and those lps started trading for seriously ridiculous amounts of money on eBay and elsewhere. Even though, really, who the heck were Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats? Well it wasn't just the cool band name generating a buzz, the music was awesome, as we later were able to ascertain. Eventually Rise Above did a repress, of which we were able to get a few, though those were expensive too and we were never able to get enough of 'em to actually list. But, we did figure out why this record was in such demand (as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment). We also learned that Blood Lust had also come out on compact disc, but oddly enough via a small Finnish label instead of Rise Above, and again we never were able to get enough of those to list, either. But we had hope that someday, somehow, we'd be able to review this for you, 'cause eventually most Rise Above stuff gets released in the USA by licensees Metal Blade, and while its been a damn long time, we're now pleased to, ta da, finally have Blood Lust on cd at a domestic price. Record Of The Week? You bet!
So, what we thought we were in for, way back when all we knew about band was their name & label, was some lysergic sludgey doomy jamming, like maybe Electric Wizard (another Rise Above band) or UFOmammut. Which we would have been perfectly happy with, of course. But, instead, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats proved to be a lot more song-oriented and more melodic than we expected, with a kind of poppy '60s garage psych rock side to 'em, amidst their heavy fuzz-filled riffage. The singer (that's ol' Uncle Acid himself, natch, also on guitar in this power trio, and mellotron and synths too) croons his twisted tales of witchburning, black magic, and murder, in a languid whine, his voice nasally pinched and reverb effected, reminding us a bit of Kyle Thomas of aQ faves Witch (and King Tuff and Happy Birthday too by the way). His delivery lends a delicate, decadent touch to the band's brand of both despondent plod and swinging catchiness, able to render lines like "I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams / I get my kicks from torturing and screams / I lust for womens blood, and their evil ways / I twist my words to what the good book says" with sick sincerity -and- showmanship, in a way that is surprisingly not very much metallic, instead staying (despite the music's undeniable heaviness) more in the pop realm, though one obsessed with vintage horror films.
These rollicking, but dread-infused tunes are further full of ripping fuzz guitar leads, and lumbering downer riffs. Without a doubt, doom originators Black Sabbath are a major factor in this band's sound, but they're doing something rather different with that particular inspiration than most do. And we're also reminded of some other British '60s/'70s proto-metallers like Stray, High Tide, T2, and May Blitz, who were quite heavy but psych-pop catchy as well. Perhaps very early, very psychedelic Alice Cooper could be added to Uncle Acid's roster of influences too, we're thinking of the way the song "Ritual Knife" marries a pounding tribal beat and urgently chugging ominous riffery with glorious bursts of shining melody come chorus time.
One much more recent band that these guys also remind us of, is Swedish occult rock sensations Ghost, another act whose "pop side" is so effective as to possibly threaten their "metal cred" among the more closeminded. We'd also recommend Uncle Acid to fans of that other recent, equally retro stunner from Rise Above, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. And, like last week's Record Of The Week by Golden Void, this has that laidback classic sounding '70s psychrock vibe, immediately familiar, though Uncle Acid comes across as much more dark and sinister to be sure. And lastly, fans of Witchcraft should pay attention - we'd rank this up there with that band's celebrated Rise Above debut, we're pretty sure this is gonna be considered a classic too. We're sooooooo glad they didn't just press only those 300 vinyl copies and leave it at that!! You will be too.
This cd reissue includes a bonus track not on vinyl, which provides a nice coda to the record proper, relinquishing the fuzz guitar for acoustic strum and hand percussion, Uncle Acid doing their doom-pop-psych in a more folky style a la, say, Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex.
