We planned on reviewing this for our last list, but got a little slammed and forgot, oops! But no matter, because in the meantime, we managed to catch an Aevangelist live set at the first incarnation of California Deathfest the other day! And boy, was it ridiculous. Already we were convinced that Aevangelist was one of thee most bizzare, psychotic bands we have heard recently, but seeing 'em live totally confirmed it! THREE guitarists, one looking like some lost member of Coal Chamber, a keyboardist, and a saxophonist (and, yeah, bass and drums too). It perfectly translated the songs on this record into a live experience, a huge warped wall of sound, sometimes totally metal, other times just a psychedelic mass of chaos.
So we come to the record itself: Enthrall To The Void Of Bliss is a twisted mass of psychotic riffage and insanity-inducing atmospherics, total musical madness and sonic depravity. Weird vocals that have no problem shifting between out-and-out slamz style gutturals, black metal shrieking, and operatic howls. Sometimes the songs have so much happening at once, it almost feels like two totally different songs playing simultaneously. Samples, organ, some sort of harp instrument, and saxophone combine with the already massive sounding guitars and drums and vocals to create an even bigger, grosser wall of sound. Take the dense and lysergic doom-laden death and black riffage of some of those recent Ajna Offensive bands like Saturnalia Temple and Aluk Todolo and combine them with the total WTF? weirdness of Sigh and throw in some seriously hateful riffing of Nuclear War Now! style war metal and you're sorta getting the idea here. You also get songs like "Alchemy" and "Meditation of Transcendental Evil" which totally come out of nowhere, being witch-housey, programmed-drum numbers that may not sound like the other tracks on here but somehow still completely fit in to the total carnival-like madness. Totally a must-listen for fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Mitochondrian, Saturnalia Temple, Sigh, and anything on Crucial Blast.
Akercocke has been touted as England's great black metal hope. A lot to live up to when you consider the UK has produced Venom, the fathers of black metal, and probably the most successful black metal band of all time, Cradle of Filth. Setting a course for
Local pro-tech, anti-poor people, hate-filled smut rag (and not in a good way) The Bold Italic recently posted an absolutely vomit-inducing "eulogy" to the "dead" Bay Area music scene. At best these business-casual mongoloids are unapologetic in their ignorance of anything interesting happening here (just read our newsletter, we review local bands on every list), and at worst they are, you know, the root fucking cause of the difficulties of being a creative person out here. There is one flippant statement of truth in that garbage heap, though, and that's that Oakland has rapidly become the epicenter of some of the best music being made in the Bay Area. Enter Oakland's Alaric, who perfectly channel all those anxieties and fears about life and its future, in the Bay Area or otherwise. Following a couple of releases for 20 Buck Spin over 5 years ago, and a (thankfully temporary) breakup, End of Mirrors is pitch-perfect master class in doomy, gloomy post-punk songwriting.
Featuring Russ Kent of Bay Area legends Noothgrush on guitar, Alaric certainly show off their metal pedigree, but End of Mirrors is a far cry from the overwhelming pummel of those East Bay doomsters. The Neurosis influence, too, is definitely noticeable - especially given this a release on Neurot - but any heavy band from the East Bay has a hard time NOT paying homage to the all-time masters of ritualistic heaviness. A more accurate point of reference here is the visceral, anthemic earworm metal-cum-pop of Killing Joke, fronted by the organic baritone of the Baron from Amebix. Like Neurosis, Alaric manage to let the tracks on End Of Mirrors breathe and grow organically, but like Killing Joke they do so without being overbearing - the fat has been cut in favor of razor sharp songwriting. A fantastic record, and a candidate for some of our year-end top ten lists!
Third album from French post black metal instrumental kraut-psych occult rock trio Aluk Todolo, and third time Record Of The Week! We've just resigned ourselves to the fact, that every record from these guys is gonna blow our minds, and by extension, we imagine, yours as well. In the musical math that makes up many of the bands we love, the convoluted equation that resulted in Aluk Todolo is tough to beat. Featuring members of black metal horde Diamatregon (whose last two records were released on Andee's tUMULt label) and psych rock outfit Gunslingers, AT takes some elements from both of those groups, but also This Heat, Faust, Can, the Necks, Circle, Hawkwind, and Taj Mahal Travellers... They are most definitely sonic alchemists, as we've described them in every review so far, distilling all of these disparate sounds and influences into something all their own, and something that obviously pushes all our buttons.
This latest double disc takes everything we dug about them before, and somehow makes those things more, and better, given the space to stretch out, the songs become MORE epic, MORE intense, MORE tranced out, MORE heavy. There's 8 songs over 2 discs/lps and 2+ hours. Imagine a super charged Necks or Circle fused to the blaring psychedelic heaviosity of Psychic Paramount, and the furious grim buzz of some obscure black metal horde, the sounds repetitive and cyclical, hypnotic and mesmerizing, the opener here displaying their black metal roots, and just how those roots can be sculpted into something trance-y and droned out, while remaining pretty goddamn grim and blackened. Launching immediately into a fierce frenzied blast, all tremelo picking and blast beats, a churning, roiling single riff, overlaid with soaring minor key melodies, slipping easily from classic black metal blast to dense static mesmer and back again, until almost 4 minutes in when everything is swallowed up in a blast of whit noise, before the frenetic riffing tapers off, leaving just the bass and drums to churn frantically, beneath thick swirls of effects, only to gradually build back up, and during the last three minutes, unleash the sort of dense, brutal, buzzing black metal, most proper BM bands can barely pull off.
If that opening track is sort of the shot across the bow, the second track is when things get serious, slowing things down to a super distorted post-rock lope, the drums driving and the guitars thick and distorted, keening melodies, the Slint vibe looms large, before the band dial it down, and lock into a totally mesmerizing, dizzyingly dense roiling 'groove', that sounds like amped up Circle, grinding away hypnotically, peppered with occasional bursts of metallic crunch, and near black metal blowouts, always slipping right back into that mesmeric churn, the guitars impossibly distorted and fuzzed out, the bass super melodic, the sort of track you never want to end, slipping easily from progged out psychedelic buzz drenched tangle to warped noise rock minimalism and back again.
The rest of disc one finds AT dialing back the buzz and crunch, and weaving lush landscapes of woozy melody, and darkly driving hypnorock, the songs wreathed in keening feedback, moaning melodies, lush layered guitars, swaths of melodic jangle, of shimmering chiming harmonics, the sound drifting from minimal chugging dirge to loping psych rock meander, and from wild krautpsych blowout to swoonsome Slintish slither.
Disc two offers up 4 more sonic invocations, heavy on the noise rock, but dipping into super minimal minor key mesmer, low slung almost gothic sounding dirgery, the seriously Circle-like seventh track, that takes the sound of our favorite Finns, and douses it in clouds of shimmering noise, and freaked out freeform psychedelic shimmer, and finally, the record finishes off with an epic doom jam, the band pounding away malevolently, the bass distorted and blown out, shards of feedback everywhere, noisy and psychedelic and a bit chaotic, but all anchored to the unwavering rhythm section, the song gradually losing momentum, slowing way down, getting doomier and doomier and dirgier and dirgier, transformed into a slo-mo tarpit crawl, the riffing bleeding into long droned out tones, the sort of doom-noise creep that folks into Bunkur and Monarch and the like will flip over, but here it's more atmospheric, a heady doomic coda, the sound seeming to decay naturally, shedding layers along the way, until finally the drums go too, the record continuing to fade away, to drift heavenward, eventually dissolving into a cloud of feedback.
Like past Aluk Todolo releases, the sounds and songs here are so intense and hypnotic, heavy and heady, it's the rare sort of record that somehow appeals to metalheads and post rockers as much as experimentalists and avant gardists, a sound transcendent and tranced out, dense and sinister and somehow still strangely beautiful, and obviously well worth Record Of The Week honors for sure. And then some.
The absolute hardest albums to write about are those we hold in the highest esteem and though we have an aversion to the general notion of a "desert island selection", this Amon Duul II disc is one of those albums that we could see as an definite inclusion on
With a name like Artificial Brain, and a record title like Labyrinth Constellation, when coupled with the crazy seventies van / alien war / D&D / Frazetta style cover art, you knew this was gonna be some sort of epic metal, but we were even more pleased to discover it was in fact a twisted strain of complex sci-fi death metal, gnarled and blackened, obtuse and avant, sorta like Nocturnus crossed with Portal, the sound shifting constantly from blasting, thrashing metallic crush, to grinding, confusional psychedelic metallic chaos, to tranced out black-drone-buzz, intricate and proggy, and furiously mathy. This NY horde features dudes from technical death metal outfit Revocation and and pre-Castevet death-grind combo Biolich (who we LOVE but never managed to review anything by), and really in a way, the band math adds up perfectly to Artificial Brain, a dizzying onslaught of death metal murk, and blackened math metal, sci-fi grind, laced with all sorts of subtle sonic flourishes, cool swirls of shimmering harmonics here, lush layered almost shoegazey moments there, but all settled amidst a blurred and smeared soundscape of impossibly frantic blasts, roiling clouds of monstrous Deathspell style black-buzz churn and furiously fluctuating fields of lumbering stop/start math metal lurch. Fucking fantastic. WAY recommended for fans of Portal, Wold, Dodecahedron, Timeghoul, Gorguts, diSEMBOWELMENT, Abyssal, Cremation, Mitochondrian and other purveyors of twisted, outsider, avant death metal murk.
Don't know much about this record. But boy we sure do like it. And part of the reason is it is so indescribable. Seriously. Rarely is a record free enough from referents that we are forced to describe the sound alone instead of comparing it to this person and that band. Which while daunting, is also incredibly exciting. It even inspired a spirited discussion with my lady friend (who also loved this record) on how to explain/describe just what the hell is going on here musically. Asa-Chang is a self-taught tabla/bongo guru and in-demand session percussionist and this is his first proper solo record. And it's not at all the record you might expect from a famous tabla player. The tabla, and percussion in general is used quite sparingly, usually strangely entagled with processed vocals, creating fucked up rhythms and otherworldly harmonies. The first track features lots of mournful strings, soaring and swelling with staccato tabla perfectly in sync with spoken male and female vocals. Strangely hypnotic and totally alien sounding. The next track is sort of calypso, with horns and steel drums pecking out a lo-fi, murky melody, sounding a bit like Indian street musicians jamming with some Elephant 6 band. And it continues, careening wildly (stylistically) all over the place, but somehow remains totally cohesive and utterly compelling. They even do a cover of Brigitte Fontaine & Art Ensemble's "Comme A La Radio"! With harmonica and sitars and electronics and crazy tablas triggering whispery Japanese vocals over lovely strings. Unlikely sounds and deliberately angular melodies, super affected vocals ranging from robotic sped up female voices to distorted, pitched down male voices, often harmonising (sort of), occasional almost-indie rock riffs plucked out on an acoustic guitar, bells and chimes, shimmering drones, electronic bleeps and blips, and amazing percussion all gel perfectly into one of the weirdest coolest records we've heard in a long time.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Atrax Morgue was the principle creative outlet of Marco Corbelli, the grim Italian industrialist who produced an obsessive catalogue of extreme, blackened noise and hellishly dark ambient music before taking his own life in 2007. The subject matter of much of the Atrax Morgue catalog (spanning close to 70 titles in 15 years) engaged unseemly and transgressive fascinations with death, mental illness, and sexual depravity, making the fact of his own suicide an uncomfortably close reality to the phantasmagoric excesses of these dark dark dark sounds. The Necro Box collects three albums from the Atrax Morgue early years - Necro-Sintesi (1993), Necrophiliac Experience (1994), and Basic Autopsy Procedure (1995) - all of which had been self-released through Corbelli's Slaughter Productions. Much of the work here dwells on thrumming low-end electronics, synth-noise degradation, and plenty of depressive drones, whose macabre overtures can easily be sublimated into an all-consuming hypnosis, only to be ruptured by a depth-charge of noise attack or a garbled tape-recording of sexual congress. Parallels to Anenzephalia and Morthond and Brighter Death Now certainly can be made, with Corbelli emblazoning his aesthetic and his proclivities on these recordings. Sick. Sick. Sick.
Oh, yeah, the cd in the box contains everything pressed on the vinyl!
Third album from these rain-soaked, Pacific Northwest doom freaks. On their last album, they started carving out their own unique little genre space, mixing all sorts of dark stuff together - doom, black metal, goth rock, and post-punk, to name a few - and we think it's fair to say they've fully carved it out now. The overall template is still huge, crushing doom similar to fellow Oregonians Hell or Merkstave (must be something in water up there), but this one gets even deeper into the hole, with an atmosphere of bleakness that could stand toe-to-toe with early Swans releases. The first two tracks, "Entropy" and "Collapse" immediately hit you with a psyched out, shrieking wall of doom with vocals that could have came straight off an Incantation record. "Bereavement" might be the highlight here, kicking off with some blackened blasts that dissolve into doom-soaked madness before building up again (in case you got used to it). Throughout the whole record, you get moments of psychedelic dirge, deathrock gloominess, and even old school death metal heaviness. It should go without saying that we are fully on board with this record and whatever unending pathways these guys decide to trudge down. Highly recommended.
Another release from the former Sun City Girl, and this one needs just a little context: While in Switzerland, Bishop came across a guitar that mesmerized him, so he bought it, took it to Morocco, and improvised some tunes on the rooftop of a Tangier apartment building. If you aren't listening carefully, this will be just as good as every other acoustic SRB recording: drifting passages of ragas, flamencos, and cosmic Americana all twisted together. What sets this recording apart is the simplicity: recorded outside, without a pick, and with absolutely stunning clarity makes Tangier Sessions perhaps the most beautiful recording by Bishop yet. There isn't a lot that needs to be said about this one. If you've never heard an SRB recording before, this is the PERFECT starting point, and if you're an SRB vet, this is just another must-have!
The latest from psychedelic folk troubadour Matthew Sweet, aka Boduf Songs, is a gorgeously intimate, stripped down and haunting songsuite, a collection of hushed, blackened torchsong and achingly melancholic minimalism, on the surface, a sound much more polished and mainstream than previous releases, but this more assured songsmithery, built from an impossibly lush sonic palette of muted organ thrum, electronic pulsations, layered chordal swells, and most importantly, Sweet's delicate, about to crack, whispery vocals, drifting atop a constantly shifting sprawl of starlit moodiness and crystalline shimmer.
And while much of Stench of Exist is still spent in the shadows, a drowsy, druggy, dreamy psych folk that unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree, and wreathed in occasional symphonic billows, some of the record truly surprises, shifting dramatically toward a sound that touches on other groups as disparate as Iron & Wine, the Editors or the National, just check out "Thwart By Thwart" which transforms the minimal into maximal, tribal drumming, wreathed in warm, lush guitar strum, reverbed piano, even handclaps, and warm, softly crooned vocals, a lush, brooding murk, that does in fact sound a bit like a darker, more propulsive Iron & Wine, but unlike I&W, the sound if flecked with mysterious samples, and field recordings, all building to a pretty epic, and almost Godspeed like coda, gloomy and gothic, and darkly dramatic.
Other mysterious moments in a record rife with them, is the strange glitched out electronica of "Head Of Hollow-Fill And Mountain Top Removal", a warped sprawl of industrial murk, peppered with swells of staticky electronic noise, buried melodies and dubbed out FX, a softly roiling noisescape wound around a robotic processed voice, sounding almost like a blackened industrial Radiohead. Or the ambient drone of "Grows In The Small World Of Nerve", a lowercase drift of distant, barely there dreaminess, beneath a skyful of rain, and snippets of conversation, all smeared into an indistinct blur of soft psych shimmer. Or even the swampy cosmic dirge of "Modern Orbita", that again, positions Boduf Songs for some long overdue commercial appreciation, but as if fully conscious of that potential, the otherwise beautifully brooding ballad, a darkly motorik downer psych gem, dusky and deserty, sounding a bit like Earth and Scenic and Sixteen Horsepower, is pocked with strange spaced out swirls, and more druggy dubbiness, which only serves to shine a woozy black light on the twisted loveliness of the rest of the track.
It's that balance that makes Stench Of Exist so stunning, the sound constantly shifting between hushed, harrowing, super personal, bedroom-folk psychedelia, and experimental electronic soundscapery, muted downer pop and drifting dronemusic, the record's finest moments occur when those various sounds bleed and blur into each other. Simple folk tunes are transformed by skeletal programmed rhythms, or swirls of spacey effects, and alternately, pure mad-scientist sonic experimentation is grounded by dour, delicate melodies, and hushed, introspective poppiness. Many of the tracks here begin life as dark, folk flecked, psych pop, but eventually are reimagined as something much more ominous and even malevolent, a whispery, cinematic soundworld of heaving strings and prismatic melody, stately and morose. While fields of effected guitars, unfurling into spiraling sprawls of alien ambience and rainswept atmospheres, all as a crystalline frame for Sweet's heartfelt croon and delicate star dusted balladry.
Fans of King Dude, Iron & Wine, Woven Hand, Townes Van Zandt (if he were raised on industrial music and psychedelia), Sixteen Horsepower, and even Magnetic Fields (check out "The Rotted Names"), will find much to love here for sure. As will anyone into dark, lysergic, gloom-folk melancholia, twisted drum-machine-driven threnodies, and gorgeously grim psychedelia.
NOW ON VINYL, VIA THE FLENSER!! Originally put out on cd a few months ago by Profound Lore, now this "dense, twisted, chaotic masterpiece" (to quote ourselves, see the next paragraph) is issued as a deluxe double lp with a large 12-page pamphlet-style booklet. What we said before:
Full-length number four from the Bay Area horde, and their most fully realized work to date, but what else did you expect? All Fours is a dense, twisted, chaotic masterpiece.
"At Night" wastes no time - a noisy squelch and then a dive right into frantic black metal madness. Like we've said in every Bosse-De-Nage record we've reviewed, the marriage of the Slint-ish/post-rock elements and the black metal fury gets better and better. That becomes especially apparent as the first track comes to an epic, crashing close, with a simple melancholy guitar line lead by ferocious blast beats (the drumming on this record, by the way, is seriously jaw-dropping!).
Despite being a band that gets lumped in with the Alcest/Deafheaven school of blackgaze, All Fours doesn't rely on the typical "huge" shoegaze guitar sound - the atmosphere here comes from a crystal clear but layered and dense production. And honestly, a welcome departure from a lot of the overblown black metal records already out there.
"Washerwoman" is the clear opus on this record - a song we imagine they've been trying to write since their inception. The Slint comparisons are hard to deny here (song title and content alike), but this is far from a rip-off. Everything that made Slint such a powerful band, Bosse-de-Nage captures here - subtle instrumentation, raw intensity, and powerful dynamics.
By the time the record ends, you get the feeling you're watching a bands original vision and current talent coalesce perfectly - All Fours is the record Bosse-De-Nage has been working towards all these years. Highly recommended!
Debut full length from these Demlich obsessed death metalers, and damn, is it a good one! And, even though it seems as if these precocious Quebecois riffers take a little online umbrage at constantly being compared to those masters of warped Finnish space riffing, we don't think it's a bad thing to be held up amongst the absolute best-of-the-best death metal records of all time! It really is remarkable what a nasty, unholy, labyrinthine record these guys managed to crank out at such a young age - ugly, knuckle dragging riffs lock in with drumming that is equal parts furious hyper blasting and groovy, mid-tempo stomp, all drenched in a putrid atmosphere that actually does, at times, incorporate actual swamp sounds. Not to mention unpronounceable, quasi-Lovecraftian terminology & mythology they made up themselves. We think this will be an automatic new obsession for fans of the aforementioned Finns Demilich, but also fans of all manner of twisted death metal like Portal, Abyssal, Timeghoul, and Gorguts. Heck, Melt Banana fans might dig parts of this too. Tres magnifique!
The eagerly-anticipated second full-length (but the first since 2006) by the gutter-crawlers in Cretin sees an essentially brand new line-up since their last album, Freakery.
The brainchild of Marissa Martinez, former guitarist of Repulsion, Cretin crawls out of the same sewer as those grind/death pioneers. The overall atmosphere and structure is remarkably similar to Repulsion's opus Horrified and other early death/grind outfits like Carcass, Terrorizer, and maybe even fellow Bay Area masters Autopsy, but the riffs on Stranger are tighter, more technical, and perhaps even gnarlier. The lyrics, too, go above and beyond, telling intricate, albeit dark and twisted, stories.
On "Mr. Frye, the Janitor Guy," for example, Martinez really packs in the putridity, taking on the perspective of a lazy-eyed janitor who hangs himself in front of school children to get back at them for laughing at him. If you're looking for optimism, you'll not find it here.
Even given how composed and thought out this album feels, the songs never overstay their welcome. The focus is always on quick assaults and punishing riffs, never giving the listener a chance to breath. Believe us, Cretin wants you to suffocate. Recommended!
Around 2008, Thomas Ekelund ceased activities as Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, rechristening his activities as the work of Trepanerinsgritualen. While Ekelund's belicose theatrics and ritualized bloodletting comes through in his current practices, Dead Letters was a subtle operation of spooky electronics, occult provocation, and wintery orchestration, leading to very favorable comparisons to Deathprod and Deaf Center. No Words was originally a cassette-only release through Ekelund's When Skies Are Grey imprint, later fleshed out via Locrian's in-house label Land Of Decay with a bonus track on the B-side of their cassette version. Thi news 2016 reissue follows the Land Of Decay program, remastered beautifully for vinyl. The A-side contains the two originals from No Words, a slow smolder of dark ambient techniques amassing and coalescing sound into a darkly majestic crescendo akin to those epic brooding numbers that Machinefabriek championed about a decade ago, complete with lilting Slint-y guitars and black-hole noise. The B-side follows a similar strategy incorporating swollen guitar, buzzing drone, and ominous basslines, more akin to Tim Hecker if he were to dabble in the timbres of black metal.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Apparently, the dudes and lady in Dick Diver once facetiously referred to their band as "Dolewave," (a reference to the Clean track "The Doledrums") and unknowingly and probably unwantedly put a genre fence around a whole group of musicians in the modern New Zealand/Australia scene. The term, at least among forum posters and Aussie and Kiwi music journalists, stuck, and many bands, Dick Diver included, have tried to distance themselves from the constant comparisons to the Clean. Here at aQ, we refuse to make the lazy, easy comparison to the geographically close but stylistically different jangle-pop masters.
No, the only comparison that is worth making is that both the Clean and Dick Diver write clever and fun pop tunes. But in that case, you might as well compare them to David Bowie or something (the Bowie comparison is actually a little bit apt on the track "Percentage Points"). On "Beat Me Up (Talk To A Counsellor)" Al Montfort (also of aQ favs Total Control) sings over a piano-driven, funky, and sassy track that's as much goofy as it is catchy. "Private Number," too has a similar laid back, loungy feel, complete with a sultry sax solo. "Boomer Class" and "Blue Time" have beautiful vocal duets, horns, and synth all thrown about, all elements that distinguish them from the simplistic pop of the old Flying Nun scene.
These are smart, well-crafted, and forward-thinking pop tracks - perfect for dipping your toes into the Dunedin pop scene (if you haven't dove in yet). A must listen! And this vinyl version includes a download, fyi.
An opaque record for sure, Disappears' Irreal stakes out an alternate path for the band's hypnorock agenda, which has had more than a few epic riffs that would have made for a classic blast-off groove on your favorite Sonic Youth or Spacemen 3 album. It's even hard to tell if former Sonic Youth timekeeper Steve Shelley is still sitting behind the kit as he was on the previous couple of albums. His input for rhythmic dynamics and start-stop-start avant-pop propulsion really brought out the best in Disappears songwriting; and his knack for also sitting back in a metronomic pulse might be at play here on Irreal. Whoever this drummer may be lays down skeletal rhythms that accompany neck-throttled jittery guitar scratches even more reductive than those offered by Andy Gill from Gang Of Four and monophunk basslines as lifted from the revamped Swans without the bloodlust and ritualized violence. Diamond fractured drones and ghostly echoes slip between all of the spaces that Disappears design in their songs, bumping into the equally fragmented vocal recitations and gliding elsewhere, leaving behind the hint of what may have been a melody. The stark mood of Irreal is distinctly dystopian in nature, evacuating those moments of noise-pop pleasure seeking found earlier in their catalog and replacing them with the drained exasperation of any number of JG Ballard's anti-heroes caught within the feedback loops of a society collapsing upon itself.
A reissue of these long-defunct Swedish black/death metallers' debut long-player, recorded in 1993 at Dan Swano's studio. It's melodic, with majestic riffs and folky acoustic interludes, but also quite fast, heavy and brutal. Here Dissection established their "blackened" style of Swedish Melodic Death Metal, a sound that they perfected on their next album, the classic Storm Of The Light's Bane. That's the one to get first, and then when you're hooked on 'em, you'll want this one as well. Why is Storm Of The Light's Bane better? It's just the subjective choice of the AQ-staff. Superior songs, we feel. But this is a fine effort too. (By the way, unlike the Nuke Blast reish of Storm, there's no bonus tracks to be found here.)
(For some reason we never listed this before, so rather than just adding it quietly to the website we thought we'd put it on our email, timely since we're also listing the reissue of Earth's "Sunn Amps..." cd.)
Earth. The band that launched a thousand drones. The band that started it all. The heaviest band ever (maybe). Earth was the singular vision of only-permanent-member Dylan Carlson, the long haired guy pictured on the back cover wearing the Morbid Angel longsleeve (whom you might remember from the Kurt & Courtney movie). For 1993's Earth 2, Dylan's guitar was joined by the bass of Dave Harwell, who is pictured holding a cup of coffee on the back cover (and who would go on to disappear completely).
All you kids who thrive on an unhealthy diet of the Corrupted, Boris (who even borrowed the Earth 2 tagline "Special Low Frequency Version" for the Southern Lord version of their "Absolutego" album), the Melvins, Thrones, and sludge like that, as well as you avant-art rockers who enjoy 'dronology' and stuff like Mirror and Jonathan Coleclough and even those of you who sit at home in front of your dream machines and wallow in the historical drones of Angus Maclise and Tony Conrad, need look no further than Earth 2 to experience the drone the way it was meant to be heard: huge downtuned guitars playing riffs so slow that each one lasts forever, LOW END that slides and lurches like a blackened glacier of fuzz and hiss, slow motion notes stretched so far that they become a single note washing over you like a sticky wave of tar and molasses, melodies that are indistinguishable because the notes are pulled so far apart they threaten to come apart completely. When we tell someone that a record is heavy, Earth 2 is the barometer by which all other supposedly 'heavy' music is measured. Even recent AQ faves Sunn 0))) are an Earth tribute band (they will even say as much) named for Earth's amp of choice. There are very few records that are 'classics', that stand the test of time, that remain as vital now, as when they originally came out, ten, twenty, or even thirty years earlier, that have influenced so many bands so much, or that have been unequalled, even with so many people trying so hard to be the heaviest or most extreme. The drug addled, accidental brilliance that is Earth 2, to this day remains a complete and utter classic.
Ben Frost records are scary. And beautiful. They're the stuff of dreams. And nightmares. They're like soundtracks for films that can never be made, the music conjuring up images that can only exist in the imagination. It's musical magic, or sonic alchemy, whatever it is, it's something few have mastered, and even those that have, barely approach the mysterious mastery of Ben Frost, whose previous record, By The Throat, remains one of the most terrifying documents of electronic sound art we have ever heard, weaving the sounds of snarling wolves into thick swells of corrosive bass buzz, and brilliantly bleak, yet impossibly lush sound design, and balancing that sonic grimness, with glimmers of hushed beauty, in a way that makes the sound both mellifluous and malevolent in equal measure.
Aurora is another stunning sonic missive, and one that immediately conjures up yet another lost world, one that lurks in our collective imagination, but that has begun to bleed through, into our every day world. The shadows seem deeper and darker. The grey skies shout through with streaks of blood red, the nights interminable, the days, scorched expanses of endless time. All of this represented by strange sprawls of layered electronic drones, of gristled pulsations, of strange staticky rhythms, and mysterious buried melodies, the sounds this time around brittle and jagged, the loveliness sharp edged and flecked with rust and dried blood, the rhythms that surface are hauntological, reminding us of the dubbed out avant mesmer of groups like Demdike Stare, but here those rhythms seem to gradually splinter and fray, wreathed in thick swirls of soft noise, sculpted into weeping melodies, and darkly decaying textures, all hiding some glowing inner warmth, suffusing these sounds with an organic quality, that transforms a series of sounds into something alive, a crackling energy that is barely contained on the record, one can almost imagine the sound as colored sparks leaping from the speakers, bursting from the headphones, a cascade of brilliant sonic flares, raining down from above.
Lurching robotic percussion is shaped into strange skeletal shapes, lumbering behemoths trading through fields of groaning, creaking chordal thrum, pelted with prismatic streaks of sound, a beastly groove, that builds to a thick swath of soaring epic psychedelic electronic majesty, like a meaner, moodier, more metal M83, a brilliant blacknoise blur, that blots out the stars, painting the sky in shade and shadow, eventually morphing into burnished stretches of grey ambience, laced with dubby skitter, all of which blossom further into a flurry of blissed out electro flares, which fade into crackling seas of gristle and hum, undulating imperceptibly beneath hazy layers of grumblingly distorted shimmer and grinding sheets of druggy thrum. A heaving landscape of tense cinematic atmosphere, smeared fields of tangled melody, wildly colliding synth streaks, and jumbled beats and rhythms, all wound up into a tightly coiled swirl, flurry of frenzied electrons, gradually crumbling into the ether, leaving just a barely there cloud of sonic static discharge, until finally, nothing. And emptiness.
Simply stunning.
Back in 2010, G*Park performed in San Francisco for 23five's Activating The Medium festival, presenting the early sketches of his eviscerated musique concrete and disembodied field recordings, surging from vacuum-sucked voids through ice-cave drones into tumultously compacted rumblings whose frequencies were on the verge of tearing The Lab at the seams. It was an exhausting emptiness that G*Park constructed through all of his sounds, grimly alluding to a science-fictional apocalypse of an endless winter and relentless viral agents. For the next two years, G*Park (aka Marc Zeier) finessed the details of that work, tightening up the tension and further hollowing out the noises, resulting in Sub - easily the best release from his impeccable catalogue, and one of the finer outings from the Schimpfluch-Gruppe. Along with the likes of Sudden Infant, Rudolf Eb.Er, Raionbashi, and Dave Phillips, G*Park hails from the Swiss collective Schimpfluch, which extends the ideas and concepts of the Viennese Aktionists (i.e. Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler, Muehl, etc.) of aestheticized violence and abject transgression through the histories of punk, performance-art, industrial/noise, and DIY cassette culture. There is horror, dread, fear, and scorn in all of the work of Schimpfluch; and it manifests in many different ways. In Sudden Infant, you will find the Dada-prankster; in Phillips, you have the psycho-sexualized demon; in Eb.Er, you've got a scatological shaman, but in G*Park, you have the haunted existentialist. Easily the most introspective and mysterious of the lot, G*Park doesn't have the numerous world tours that the other members of Schimpfluch do, but his work is revered by those in the noise and sound-art communities as being a hidden gem of grizzled collage-based compositions. His work exists somewhere between the technical constructions of Luc Ferrari and the more vacant strategies of industrial culture (i.e. Thomas Koner, John Duncan, etc.); Sub is spacious album girded by darkly radiant drones and shadowy thrummings that ebb and flow as a strange subcutaneous current akin to blood streaming though veins or a toxic algae bloom fed by the strength of the sun; but that spaciousness is not one of calm pools of ambient bliss. No, this is a very tense album as he pricks, shatters, ruptures, and bleeds out those drones with agitated harsh snaps and slaps of acoustic debris - the suffocating last breath of oxygen extracted from a scuba regulator, the murderous caw of a crow, a whipcrack burst of unknown energy, a brutalist thud of a fist striking a ribcage, static errata from EMF detectors that may or may not be dialed into paranormal activities, or just the drippings of an ice cave whose entry way has just collapsed leaving you with no escape. An unsettlingly brilliant album.
Aquarius doesnt really sell a lot of death metal, not compared to black or doom metal, etc. Not sure why, but that means there's no point in gushing over a death metal record that most people won't buy - well, except that we care about the people who might buy it, hearing about a death metal band we love. But still, we'll keep it short. Do you dabble in the disgusting? Are you shin-deep in a swamp of sickness? Are you a partisan of the putrid? Are you currently in a cave? If you find yourself craving the muddy, recorded-underground riffs of the best Incantation records, if you thought the Cruciamentum record was GOOD but not quite mucky enough (they share members after all), and if you find the idea of a band NOT having branded sweatpants loathsome, you will want to hear Grave Miasma's latest entry into the death metal record books. Another atmospheric, heady, and bleak masterpiece from Profound Lore. Those who want this know who they are, we hope!
Piano and voice. That's what we encounter in the latest incantation from Liz Harris, once again recording as Grouper. Chillingly beautiful smears from dankly shoegazing guitars, loop-station electronics, mumbled vocals, and a near constant wash of stoned introspection were the common elements of those albums of hers that captured our imagination like Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and AIA: Dream Loss. She's eschewed pretty much all of the gauzy blur and the narcotic diffusion that runs through all of her previous albums; but the delicacy of these songs on Ruins and beguiling poetry of sadness makes this very much another fantastic Grouper album.
Harris wrote all of the material for Ruins during a residency in Portugal back in 2011. There, she made full use of an upright piano, recording these songs onto a four-track with occasional overdubs, just for an additional layer voice here and there in order to harmonize with herself. Without all of the fuzz and drone, Harris' lyrics enjoy a bit more clarity, though she has long been one to slur the syllables into a cooing gasp of pitch-perfect intoxication. Her songs arpeggiate on simple piano chords evolving the minor key repetition into secretive, plaintive lullabies, slowly tapped out to match the torpor of her voice. The album is starkly naked in the emotional fragility of these arrangements, but Harris is very much in control of the poetics calmly painting her songs in a sonic palette of rainy-day blues and greys. It's much closer to the under appreciated Mirroring collaboration that hopefully wasn't just a one-off with Tiny Vipers' Jesy Fortino. Yes, another gem from the wintery soul of Liz Harris.
Note: we're listing the Kranky cd and vinyl now, but we'll also soon have a handful of the special self-released vinyl edition direct from Liz, which includes a bonus cd of a thunderstorm field recording... if interested, please let us know now!
When we were putting together our vintage New Arrivals list a few weeks back, the one with super short reviews like we used to write back in the day, we had planned on reviewing this reissue of the debut from Florida avant-primitive noise-core duo Harry Pussy, with this super succinct description: "SKROWWWWWWW, EEEEEEEEEEEEEE CLANGBLAPCLANG, SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK, SKRONK, GRRHHHTTTTTRFFHHHDEEEWWW OOOOOOOW CHHRRRGGGFFFGGG FGGGGGRRRRRRHHHHHHOOOOOWWWWWW BOOOOOOONGCRAAAAAASHBLANG EEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWWEEEEEEE." What more is there to say really, the duo of Adris Hoyos and Bill Orcutt created some of the most visceral, most innovatively chaotic and confrontationally raw punk rock noise EVER. Whatever noise group you can think of - Hanatarash, Incapacitants, Borbetomagus - Harry Pussy could more than hold their own and deliver the equivalent audial destruction, as well as an amount of audience baiting that was nearly unprecedented, certainly in the experimental underground. Guitarist Bill Orcutt has more recently become a bit of an outsider solo guitar icon, with his primitive blues scrabble and deconstructed avant Appalachia, and if you're familiar with his solo stuff, imagine that plugged into a shitty amp, cranked to deafening volume, and then paired with some of the most frighteningly original drumming ever, courtesy of she-devil Adris Hoyos, her self-taught drum pummel the equivalent to laying at the bottom of an elevator shaft, while a dump truck unloads its payload of busted cymbals, warped drums, broken sticks, in a clattery, caustic cascade. AND then there's her banshee like vocals, fierce and feral.
But that's not to say HP traffic purely in unfettered, unstructured noise (although there is plenty of that too) - within these swirling squalls of sound, Hoyos and Orcutt continually lock into impossibly dense, mathed out anti-grooves, or spar maniacally with each other, a back and forth, tangled sonic wrestling match as swarms of skree and crape wind around octopoidal drum pound, the sounds occasionally winding down into distorted blues crawls, sometimes exploding into barrages of frazzled noise-jazz squiggles, and often just splintering into total face melting amp-destroying noise-fuck.
The strange thing is, as much as we remember this record being brutal and unrelenting and punishingly noisy listening to it again recently, it's revealed itself as truly and strangely lovely, textural and nuanced, a balance between melody and mayhem that might not be obvious on first listen, but there's a lot more going on here than first meets the ear. And for all the attitude, and legendarily violent performances, the actual music here is stunning, and weirdly magical, it's a rare sort of abstract, absurdist, psychedelic noise that manages to transcend the strictures of 'noise music', attaining the sort of beauty that would rarely be ascribed to such a fucked up slab of sound. Also contains one of the best Kraftwerk covers EVER.
Three long out of print cassettes conveniently collected and remastered onto one cd. Greh Holger (aka Hive Mind, and head honcho of the always impressive Chondritic Sound label) is a master of heavy tone oppression, leaden industrial swarm, and synth-noise miserablism, oozing out of Greh's malignant electronics. Gritty pulses, septic oscillations, and death-throe drones coagulate around the structural spines of rudimentary panzer rhythm and haunted melody as if their were genetically re-engineered macrophages attacking the human body from the inside out. In these brilliantly crude recordings, Hive Mind strikes a balance between the funereal primitivism of the best MB releases and the crumbled organ dirges that Gate sprawled forth on Dew Line.
Hot Snakes' second release on Swami Records is finger lickin' good! Yow! Rick and John (both ex-Drive Like Jehu) have enlisted a new drummer, Mario Rubalcaba (ex-pro-skateboarder and ex-Clickitat Ikatowi) since former drummer Jason left for the Burning Brides. Hot Snakes also now feature San Diego rock luminary Gar Wood (Beehive and the Barracudas) on bass. Man this band totally kicks ass!!! What else can we say? Imagine the Godlike Drive Like Jehu, but stripped down to its garage rock bare bones, but sacrificing none of the fury or intensity or musical chops. Raw and catchy and makes you want to just jump up and down and bang your head and wiggle like crazy. The recording of Audit In Progress awesomely captures their fired-up energy and offers an accurate taste of their live show. I saw them recently here in San Francisco -- all types of new HS fans and older Jehu fans were going totally bananas. This album and their live show will kick you in your face and you'll be begging for more! Plus it's always nice when bands actually produce their own artwork instead of just stealing someone else's, or hiring some crappy graphic designer. Rick Froberg, HS's singer/illustrator/animator is an incredibly talented and respected artist in addition to being a wicked rock frontman. The last Hot Snakes record was so perfect who would have thought the ante could be upped. But upped it has been...it's been upped...well, you know what we're saying. This record rules! And this band just keeps getting better and better. Buy this now!
In early 2015, B. Moloch stated that he would be closing the book on Anenzephalia - a project that has authored a handful of thoroughly terrifying albums of death-industrial theatrics over the past two decades. Fortunately, he has turned his attention on another venture, Ke/Hil, with his occasional comrade in arms Wilhelm Herich, the principal agitator of Genocide Organ; and here, the two transmit an equally insidious black energy. Zone 0 marks their second outing under this moniker, and it cracks open with an urgent / anxious throb of clinically machined rhythms, analogue synth-noise, and woozy electro-drone hums serving to buttress the alternating vocals between Moloch and Herich - with the former barking through the sonic rumble of megaphone distortion and the latter demonstrating stentorian clarity delivered in his German. The dialetics of state control and personal freedom seem to be addressed within the electroshock sermons, as these play out through the social constructions of work, religion, governance, and poverty. For all of the dogmatic themes that Ke/Hil have brought to the table, they are more interested in exposing and highlighting the horrors that persist within these arenas, all of which fall under the larger banner of mankind's cruelty towards itself. These poetics of misery and brutality manifest throughout the album's bleak score of suffocating drone construction, industrial-clad shadow, septic atmospherics, and jabs of metal-on-metal percussion. So good to hear B. Moloch is back at work again.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Kranium was a short-lived project of Marco Corbelli (aka Atrax Morgue) from 1993 to 1995, with all three Kranium cassettes originally self-released via his Slaughter Productions. These recordings took a more restrained approach to Corbelli's obsessive aesthetics for sexual depravity, psychological disturbances, and ultra-violence. The three albums paralleled the dark ambient pursuits of contemporaries in Lustmord, Brighter Death Now, and Raison D'Etre. It's an album dripping with cavernous reverberations, lumbering synth pulsations of keening low-end oscillations and dead-eyed drones. Throughout, Corbelli plunks slow-motion rhythms in deep resonant pools of echo and reverb, buttressed by liturgical chants, sepulchral ambient passages, subterranean atmospheres, and snippets of horror movie dialogue. Corbelli's compositions and strategies are simple yet thoroughly effective in crafting this hypnotic yet terrifying album of gothic darkness. We did stock a few of the Urashima lp reissues in the recent past; but with all of those sold out, we're now very pleased to have the full Kranium catalog available in this triple cassette boxset, if only for a limited time. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!
Along with the likes of Captain Beyond, Bang, Dust, and Sir Lord Baltimore, the UK's Leaf Hound are one of the obscure '70s proto-metal acts often cited in the annals of stoner rock history. Heck they're called Leaf Hound and their (only) album is titled Growers Of Mushroom! Can't get much more stoner rock than that. Originally released in (you guessed it) 1971, Leaf Hound's album was a showcase for the powerful pipes of vocalist Pete French (who later spent stints at the mic for both Atomic Rooster and Cactus) and the heavy-duty hard rock riffage of guitarist Mick Halls (who, along with French, previously was a member of the Brunning Sunflower Blues Band and Black Cat Bones). And really Growers Of Mushroom is worth it to all '70s metal fans for the fierce "Freelance Fiend" that leads off the album. That track's a screamin' classic. If the whole album rocked as hard it'd be hard to beat as the heaviest thing from '71. But, while some other cuts on here approach a "Freelance Fiend" level of metal mania, such as "Stagnant Pool" (which sounds like anything but), there's some mellower material to be found as well, wherein French shows off his soulful side. But Led Zeppelin fans won't mind such bluesy workouts as "Drowned My Life In Fear", either. And Zep fans were probably just who Leaf Hound were hoping to hook when they recorded this record way back when. Too bad this was pretty much it for Leaf Hound (more on that in a sec), but their legacy lives on. A lot of AQ customers probably know that there's even a doom/stoner rock label in Japan named after this band! So, we're happy to have this swank 2005 Repertoire cd reish, remastered and complete with lyrics and liner notes in a nice digipack. And it's got three bonus tracks. Two non-album cuts (one wimpy, one pretty good) from back in the day, and a brand NEW track as well. Yep, that's right. Pete French has hooked up with some young 'uns to form a new, revitalized Leaf Hound, who've been gigging anew -- they even played a show with spiritual descendents Witchcraft! Normally we'd cringe at the thought of sullying the reissue of a cult album from 30+ years ago with a "bonus" track recorded recently, but the new Leaf Hound's "Too Many Rock 'n Roll Times" ain't that bad. The guy can still sing and it sounds like Leaf Hound, so why not?
Back in 2011 when we reviewed Leviathan's last full length, True Traitor, True Whore, we called it one of the meanest, darkest, heaviest Leviathan albums yet. We don't want to get lazy with our reviews but we'll just go ahead and repeat that line for Scar Sighted: THIS is one of the meanest, darkest, heaviest Leviathan records yet. Anyone who reads our lists or follows extreme metal in any way is surely familiar with most of the Jef Whitehead discography, right? Tons of demos, EPs, and splits, a few full lengths, some controversy, but always dedicated to making some of the most heavy, crushing, bleak, twisted black metal in the U.S. and perhaps the world. Scar Sighted is a absolutely massive record - both in sound and atmosphere. When it's not crushing you with absolute freight-train force from the riffs, its somber, bleak atmosphere takes over, reminding us of our favorite Whitehead side project, Lurker of Chalice. The first track, "The Smoke of Their Torment", is maybe the most death metal sounding Leviathan track ever recorded. Pitch-shifted growls over chunky, chuggy riffs, but still an atmosphere and twisted approach that makes it so uniquely Leviathan. Like Deathspell Omega covering Incantation (or the other way around?). From there, the album, somehow, only gets better, twisting and turning through labyrinthian riffs, rain-soaked doom trudges, and industrial wastelands. The climax of the album is surely the title track; nearly seven minutes of slow, wall of sound madness before the blast beats come back and the song falls apart into a somber outro. Seriously, going through these tracks one-by-one won't even do it justice!
Comes in a beautiful oversized cardboard cd box with tons of Whitehead's twisted artwork, as if you needed another reason to buy this. Whether you buy one metal album or hundred this year, this one is not to be missed. No-shit contender for black metal album of the year.
Of all the Italian industrialists, Moreno Daldosso may be the most extreme through his Murder Corporation project, which has its origins dating back to 1993. Disturbance is an early work from 1995, first released as a double cassette through Slaughter Productions. These four extended tracks telescope as horrific ruminations upon the abjection of violent death, as the sonic equivalent to Jorg Buttgereit's unsettling slasher films. The morose, distended fugues are amassed from harsh analog synthesizers, gated noise demolition, and blown out tape loops all intent on imagining the gruesome and brutal psychic rupture from the violence of a homicide. Murder Corporation's recordings are never easy to digest, with the title to this mammoth double lp set being quite an understatement regarding the sonic torment found within. Limited to 199 copies.
If Indiana Jones was a metalhead, this would be his favorite band! State-of-the-art death metal brutality/technicality with a Great Pyramid-sized fixation on Ancient Egypt. Here are some song titles: "Invocation of the Gate of Aat-Ankh-Es-En-Amenti", "Nas Akhu Khan She En Absiu", "Masturbating The War God", "Libation Unto The Shades Who Lurk In The Shadows Of The Temple of Anhur"! The liner notes even include detailed essays giving the historical background for each song's lyrics. Our resident Egyptologist, Elisabeth, is currently studying these for accuracy (she thinks that they are relatively well-researched, if not based on the most up-to-date sources...)! The archeological aggression of Nile combines the fast and furious, yet subtly melodic approach of Morbid Angel (who also share an interest in things occult and middle-eastern) with ethnic musical trappings (not always Egyptian either: there's even some Tibetan monks chanting on here). Live, these non-metal elements are brought in via PowerBook sampling, unusual for the genre. On record, such departures are even more effective and atmospheric. This, Nile's 2nd full-length for Relapse, is a dark, sinewy, complex, demonic masterpiece!
Debut full length from Olympia rockers Nudity, and boy is this a hell of a record. A supergroup of sorts, featuring members of Tight Bro's From Way Back When, The Need, Sex/Vid, and Broken Water. You might think this maybe sounds like some noisy Olympia punk, but somehow the result is totally different, and totally awesome!
Think of some punked up combo of Ty Segall's riff-centric Fuzz project, Love Gun-era Kiss, and the pulsating synth-rock of Moon Duo, and you're sorta on the right track with Nudity - total '70s worship of the highest caliber.
On the absolutely boisterous opener "White Hot Gold," you get what might be the rock n' roll single of the YEAR, an absolutely riffed out jammer that seriously could have come out in 1975. "(I've Got The) Death Energy" and "Carnal Heart" follow this template of high-energy no-nonsense rock n' roll, but on "Death Energy," Nudity get downright kraut in the middle, playing an extended spacey build up jam complete with vocoders and Thin Lizzy-esque dueling guitars. "Light & Grace" has a '70s blues-rock/proto-metal boogie that could easily have been an unearthed gem from some private press release (or maybe an released Satan's Satyrs track?). Then you get tracks like "Myrna Loy/Leatrice Joy" and "Here Comes the Light," pulsating, synthy, krauty jams that are equal parts spacey and heavy, along with some seriously ripping solos (sax, synth, and guitar).
We recommend that you start now with Nudity and say you were listening to them from the beginning. Not to be missed! This release is lp only, however, it does come with a digital download.
FINALLY REISSUED!!! Of all of the Nurse With Wound records (and we like a bunch of them!), this is our favorite. Perhaps because this makes the least 'sense,' with a textbook definition of how Surrealism can be accurately applied in an aural context. Within Homotopy To Marie, Steven Stapleton (the proprietor of Nurse With Wound) addresses most of Andre Breton's qualifications of Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by the reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In many respects, John Cage took Breton's theories to one possible logical end; but Stapleton wanted to bridge contemporary musical production techniques (musique concrete informed by Industrial culture) with the original Surrealist fascination with Victorian imagery applied to Freudian definitions of fetishism, thus offering a version of Surrealism that fits better with how Breton may have thought Surrealism would sound. References to culture and the world as we know it abound in this record, but in such a convoluted way as to appear perfectly normal next to something that would normally be aurally incongruous. The title itself certainly refers to this. Often utilized within the highly specialized vocabularies of genetics and chemical engineering (you think that *we* get verbose!), a homotopy (as best as I could determine) is the relationship between a specific object and the fundamental characteristics that define the family in which that object belongs. Who Marie could be is perhaps best left between Stapleton and Marie.
Homotopy To Marie is Stapleton's finest audio collage, culled from various studio sessions, found sounds, and unknown media samples. Proceeding along at a stately pace, this album is certainly not a quiet affair, yet each sound within the album is given plenty to hold its unique place with the collage at large. It opens with "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind" -- a close investigation of shards of glass with a gated volume filter on it to accentuate the brittleness and fragmentation of the sound, followed by a period of snoring (presumably from Stapleton) which shifts to various screams, maniacal laughs, and hysterical utterances as if from an asylum. The title track is an amazing collage of a multiple gongs with the tonal rings augmented by occasional backwards masking and manipulated attack. Stapleton's use of the vocal sample is at it's best here with two characters (a shy little girl and a confident woman) intermittently reciting ambiguous phrases "When I woke up I didn't know where I was" answered by "Don't be naive, darling!". The rest of the album is a clutter of non-descript distortion, feedback from guitar buzz, microphones overloaded by megaphones screaming into them, broken by backwards dialogues in Spanish, rag time pianos, and clattering horns finally explode into a whimsical polka but have a weird aura surrounding them like when Hermann Nitsch uses polkas as punctuations to his orchestral drones.
Homotopy To Marie is a confounding album that matches its psychological instability with its dexterity in its composition, that leaves you not with a recognition of sound within an organized context, but the feeling of unidentifiable unease. An absolute masterpiece.
NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! This is one hell of a great album of wastoid electronics thumping with bad-ass techno and mired in noise fetish miserablism. Gloomy metallic synth chords ooze into leaden marches of frightening intensity thanks to the relentless drum machine pound and big-muff overdrive that crunches all of the electronics into a blinding rage. The sporadic use of throat-mulching vocal delivery is one that owes considerable debt to Godflesh, furthering along all of any and all references to crushing nihilism. Such is the case for the eponymous lead track "The Beginning" and "Dirt & Humbug" whose dark techno workouts thunder with roiling noise of obliterated surfaces compounded with teeth chattering tremolo patterns. Then there are tracks such as "Death Sieve" and "Dead Finks Don't Listen" offer a suitably ominously droned-out design for blackened ambience and industrialized abstractions that serve to augment all of this barking punk drama for Wagnerian portent. Remarkable in more ways than one.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
So on our last list, we were blown away by the arrival of new Aluk Todolo material, in the form of their Voix cd, which was an obvious, immediate, no shit Record Of The Week. But the Gods of cosmic hypnometal smile upon us, as we get the newest transmission from Oranssi Pazuzu, the Finnish space metallers, only a couple weeks after that disc of krauty French blackness! It is without question that Oranssi Pazuzu's Varahtelija rockets right out of the atmosphere and into our Record Of The Week spot as well.
We've gushed over these guys before, for good reason. Along with the aforementioned Aluk Todolo, Oranssi Pazuzu have set the bar incredibly high for their brand of tripped out, intergalactic lysergic black metal. Oranssi's take on black metal has been refined and perfected - organic, dizzying, and crushing black metal that stands toe-to-toe with any of the greats, progressive but not overly technical. The psychedelia is similarly elevated, heady, cosmic, and heavy, like Ash Ra Tempel played through My Bloody Valentine's amp stacks. Blended together, both elements amplify each other and create a pitch-perfect take on psychedelic black metal that other bands have attempted with not-quite-as-great results.
Have we dropped enough superlatives on you yet? Varahtelija is Oranssi Pazuzu at their peak, simultaneously cosmic and organic, cohesive yet chaotic, precise and catchy. It goes without saying that everyone who bought a copy of Voix NEEDS to hear this disc as well - most non-metalheads will also find this album necessary. Totally essential and a easy early contender for our favorite metal record of the year.
Where to even start? Within seconds of first hearing these guys, they pretty much became our favorite local band, fuck it, favorite band period (sez Andee). Shredding hook jammed pop blasts, most less than a minute long, many of those 30 seconds and under, but each one packed with some of the catchiest most timeless sounding pop you've ever heard. Weezer meets the Beatles meets the Beach Boys meets old Bee Gees meets Guided By Voices meets the Fucking Champs, super rocking, punky here and there, metal once in a while, but always total pure pop genius, with lyrics about doing drugs, getting fired, falling down the stairs, getting hurt, how much they suck and how their songs all sound the same, doing more drugs, all delivered by a vocalist that sounds uncannily like the skinny John from They Might Be Giants! Acoustic guitars, wild shredding leads, buzzing distorted chug, warm wheezing keyboards, fluttery flutes, incredible harmonies, and HOOKS like you wouldn't believe. These guys accomplish more in 30 seconds than most pop bands can pull off over the course of a full album. And they accomplish more in these 44 songs than most bands manage in their whole careers.
Check out the first sound sample, the ultimate one-two-three-four-five power pop punch, pretty much the absolutely perfect opening salvo, five songs in less than five minutes, we've listened to that 5 song chunk about a million times. It destroys. Check it out. We'll wait.....
But don't stop there, the rest of the record is pretty much just as kick ass. Some songs are hushed and dreamy, others are pounding and super rocking, some soar majestically, others are wildly metallic freakouts, Iron Maiden-y guitar harmonies wrap around weird Melvins like falsetto vocals, summery folky strums drift over calliope like keyboards, crunchy guitars unfurl jangly jams, while the vocals drawl lazily over the top. So many different sounds and styles but all totally perfectly fused into the Ovens' weirdly perfect pop world.
The band have been recording for years, full length after full length, and minus a super short run release a few years back, the songs just sat there, until the band had a backlog of 5 full albums. Former aQ-er Matt from Wildildlife was always talking them up and when we finally managed to get some music from those guys, well shit, we were bowled over. And Andee especially, knew the world needed to hear this stuff. So this debut cd features 3 of the 5 albums jammed onto one disc. 44 Songs, every one a total hook filled gem. Live the band are as likely to kick out a cover of the Bee Gee's "Holiday" as they are some old Melvins jam. They manage to sound heavy and crunchy, but also delicate and folky, often those two sides colliding in a burst of total freaking mad genius popsmithery. If there was any justice in the world these guys would be HUGE. Every song here is as good if not better than any Weezer song, and they pull it off in half the time. The lyrics are hilarious, deadpan, self deprecating, clever and snarky, the musicianship is totally stellar, especially the guitars, the arrangements are unique, sometimes super unexpected but somehow they never take way from the song or the hook, and every curveball they throw manages to sound more catchy than off kilter. We could gush and gush, and go on and on about how pop bands like this are such a rarity, but man, how these guys went so long without blowing up, still boggles the mind. So now's the time. These guys rule. They have a new record. They're going on tour. And we're so psyched to see these guys kick out the jams at our SXSW showcase this year. They're loud and fun, and funny and catchy and heavy and super rocking, and these are some of the catchiest most kick ass songs you will ever hear. EVER!
THE FIRST 50 COPIES COME WITH A BONUS TAPE, ONLY AVAILABLE FROM AQ, featuring Ovens mainman Tony's solo stuff, not all that far removed from the Ovens, if anything, the songs are even shorter, more esoteric, sometimes heavier, a couple of the jams are full on metal or grind, but last all of 20 or 30 seconds, lots of covers, just as impossibly catchy and hooky and irresistible. 12 songs in just under 13 minutes, including cover versions of tunes by Roy Wood, Dead Milkmen, Camper Van Beethoven and Telly Savalas (!!). Comes with a cool printed insert.
MPEG Stream: "Fired From The Vogue Pt. 1 / Fired From The Vogue Pt. 2 / Same Shit Different Day / PCP Song / Everything's The Same" [/audio/ovensmedley.m3u]
The Danish composer Else Marie Pade's compositions of scintillating electronic minimalism and sprawled musique concrete were born nearly sixty years ago, but it wasn't until 2000 or so, when she reached the age of 74 that any of her work was actually published. Her history is an intriguing one, as she was an active participant in the Danish resistance during WWII, was arrested for her acts of sedition, and began composing in her head during her imprisonment. After the war and upon her early career as a radio producer, she discovered Pierre Schaeffer's ideas for musique concrete; and in 1952, she travelled to Paris to study with him. By the mid '60s, she had spent several summers at Darmstadt studying with Stockhausen. Her first compositions began in the early '50s and she continued to work up until the '70s when her personal life dictated that she put music aside. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Pade had all but disappeared from the public eye, with Denmark holding little regard for avantgarde composition even if were by a pioneering Dane; but by the turn of century, the academic imprint Dacapo collected Pade's work for the first time. Slowly, her work was being rediscovered, eventually leading to her breakthrough album Svaevninger with Jakob Kirkegaard.
This anthology mostly centers on the earliest works of Pade's career, though the vocabulary she has developed over the decades is remarkably consistent - sinewy lines of electronic tone, perpetually fluctuating granular synthesis, and eerie clusters of melody. The "Faust Suite" from 1962 is a suitably brooding piece of electric miasma dotted sporadically with echo-delay patterned snippets of narration from the Goethe classic. Pade was not interested in creating a radio-play out of the text, instead focusing on an impressionist mood engineering of internal friction, angst, and emptiness. "Syv Cirkler" from 1958 marks the earliest work from this anthology, as a commission from the 1958 Expo whereby she crafted a celestial work of ringing tone colors and satellite-chirp sequencing that's very ahead of its time. The 1995 piece "Illustrationer" is remarkably similar to all of the work she had done earlier on, though she does layer prepared piano and aqueous field recordings into the digitally rendered work. The anthology concludes with "Glasperlespil" - a composition of stately loops and monochromatic passage with enough poetic austerity that inspired Stockhausen to include the piece in his lectures about electronic music from the '70s onward. A fantastic, enterprising collection! (NB. also available as a rather more expensive triple vinyl lp set, we'll have those back in next week.)
Local gutter dwellers Pig DNA are only one full-length deep and already they're a no-brainer for Record Of The Week. It was precisely 34 seconds into Mob Shity that we knew this one was special, a drum fill that queues an almighty wall of blown out fury, a cathartic release of energy that does not let up for one second on the rest of the record. While Pig DNA's aesthetic has obvious nods to Japanese hardcore legends like G.I.S.M. and first-wavers like Discharge, the sound on here has much more in common with the fucked up anti-music of infamous Japanese noise group The Gerogerigegege than Randy Uchida's lobotomized take on hardcore and metal in G.I.S.M. Despite the franticness of Mob Shity, these 14 minutes or so of music are surprisingly rhythmic and calculated, also calling to mind the overblown pounding of early Whitehouse material, done without the aid of electronics.
This is punk music stripped down to its most pure musical form, primal, furious, relentless, and totally out-of-control. Easily one of the best punk records to come out on this side of the Pacific Ocean last year.
Latest slab of pummeling, punishing industrial power violence from this local one man band, who also just so happens to be 1/2 of another band we love, Iron Lung, but unlike Iron Lung, BHT, aka Jon Kortland, creates twisted blurts of caustic noise, grinding, distorted power electronics, and brutal metallic churn. This latest is split into 28 tracks, each 44 seconds long, each a sonic stunner, from skull cleaving blown out crush to sculpted static over stuttering jack hammer rhythms, it's a hard sound to swallow, difficult listening for sure, and it's likely most metalheads might find this a bit too brutal, and too abrasive, and probably not metal enough, which is saying a lot, but for folks into twisted avant noise, industrial and power electronics, outfits like Ramleh and Skullflower, Whitehouse and Swans, Brighter Death Now and Bastard Noise, PHT definitely fits somewhere amongst all their equally sonically twisted brethren!
Some tracks are strangely atmospheric, others purely rhythmic, the sounds themselves blown out and in-the-red, plenty of sonic gristle, crumbling feedback, hiss and hum and skree and squalls of feedback, metallic clang and clatter, with sounds often exploding into wild gouts of white noise, but just as often evolving into murky pulsations. Heady, heavy and hypnotic, the vocals a wild bellow, the only really link to the group's punk/metal roots, otherwise, the sounds is more experimental, and avant, and even with the vocals, the vibe is more like some lost industrial outfit from the eighties or nineties. There are plenty of surprise too though, moments of unlikely melody and beauty ("1970"), gorgeous bits of grey ambient drift ("Scum"), and a bunch of tracks that almost play out more like some warped variant of minimal techno, all skeletal crunch, and stuttery throb, and yet, it all somehow works together as this bizarre, noise drenched hydra-headed, 28 part psychedelic, power electronic noise-crust epic. And it KILLS.
Awesome orange and black minimal cover art too.
With a name like Pissgrave, you might already have an idea of what you're likely in for. But even then, you might not be prepared for the all out ferocity of these Philly death metallers' debut, a furious, frenzied aural assault that takes pretty dense technical death metal and douses it in noise and utter sonic chaos. The recording is not lo-fi, but somehow the sound is filthy, and grimy, and gritty, and at times borders on full on, blown-out white noise. The vocals too - unlike the guttural cookie monster vox of most death metal outfits, here they're super-distorted, a caustic caterwaul, that not only sounds inhuman, they're also somehow beyond demonic, almost alien, like the band have some weird Man Is The Bastard style noise-ician, injecting bristling gouts of crumbling, garbled FX into (or, out of) Pissgrave's sick sonic maw instead of actual vokills.
It's a dizzying, and dizzyingly dense onslaught, not that far removed from the likes of Portal or Wold, but somehow, Pissgrave take the noisy experimentation of those groups and fuse it to a more classic metal sound. Roiling swaths of death-noise occasionally part, revealing a frantic bit of riffing, or some progged out burst of tech-death, or a wild splatter of octopoidal drumming, inevitably collapsing again into a blurred black maelstrom. And did we mention the shredding leads? They don't pop up often, but when they do, they're wild, freaked out tangles that sound totally unhinged. The band do slow things down here and there, unfurling massive walls of deathmarch doom, but those moments too are fleeting, quickly erupting into another barrage of deathlike brutality.
We're total suckers for classic, old school death metal. And even moreso for fucked up, weirdo, avant death metal, and somehow, Pissgrave satisfies our love of both. Big time!
THE VINYL VERSION IS HERE! The ever-prolific Dom Fernow is back with another Prurient release (the 23rd we've reviewed, actually!!), and it seems the days of nonstop releases of pure harsh noise are long in his past. There was a time not too far back when 30 minutes of mic-against-amp feedback squall on limited release cassette was all you needed to be a noise all-star, but luckily for everyone it looks like we've moved past that. Fernow, in addition to the "whatever I'm listening to right now" vibe of Prurient, has been busy with, let's see, Vatican Shadow, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Exploring Jezebel, and Cold Cave (probably a bunch more too).
On Frozen Niagara Falls, Fernow has THREE slabs of vinyl to explore everything he's been busy with for the past ten plus years of work, and it shows. He drifts and darts between bleak industrial soundscapes, the overblown amp-shattering noise of early Prurient, cheesy coldwave sawtooth synth leads, and pounding, overtly sexual Whitehouse worship. There's moments when Fernow lets a track or an idea really breathe and envelop, and there's some actual tranquility. In the liner notes, in fact, Fernow recommends you listen "at night while snow falls silently under street lights". But, this is still a Prurient album, and what kind of Prurient album would it be if it didn't have the occasional outburst of pent up hypersexual rage? Channeling the distorted, fucked up rhythms and lyrical themes of classic power electronics, Fernow makes you look up and listen, to forget the snow falling under the street lights and pay attention. Those moments quickly disappear into the albums frozen landscape, though, as this album is more brood then bludgeon. A huge fucking statement of an album, easily the best Prurient record thus far, and highly recommended for old fans and new.
LIMITED PRESSING. We have what we have, not sure we'll be able to get more anytime soon.
So, we already put this on our special all-Torch Of The Mystics in-between list last week, because we just couldn't wait to list it, and here it is again, a no-shit, straight to the top Record Of The Week. An absolute must-buy, a record that DESPERATELY needed to be reissued (along with almost all 10,000 other Sun City Girls records, certain crazy people would argue). So here it is on both cd and vinyl! And here's the expanded, in-depth review we promised...
So what to say about this fuckin' record? Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.
It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba", it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik", "The Flower", "Papa Legba", and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23", improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.
In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.
An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.
Woah! The boys at Melters continue to absolutely amaze by releasing the most catchy, heavy, trippy pop music being made in the Bay Area. In addition to the Tony Molina (of Ovens notoriety) solo lp, they've brought us the fucked up bedroom pop of Violent Change, whose full-length we made a Record Of The Week last year. So, when Mr. Eli Melter himself came in with a stack of the new Swiftumz album, we knew we were in for a treat. Well, we kind knew it also 'cause we're Swiftumz fans. We've gushed over Swiftumz releases before (the last one being a two-song 7" released back in 2013 that we still have a couple copies of), but on Everybody Loves Chris, the titular Chris McVicker has stepped up his game on every possible level, crafting a stoned mix of stuck-in-your-head pop hooks, saccharine love songs that you want to play over and over again, and Ariel Pinkish bedroom lo-fi weirdness. Did we mention wanting to play them over and over again? This record is seriously difficult to not start right up again after it ends.
By the time we finished track three on the first listen, this was pretty much automatically a Record Of The Week, bringing to mind Teenage Fanclub power pop, Guided By Voices, and maybe even the more sunshine-y Sparklehorse tracks out there. Then you get a track like "Come My Way", just blown out synth and harmonized vocals, but it totally works, adding to the spaced out stoner vibe of the record. "Taste the Gray", too, gets spaced out towards the end, heavy and repetitive, but still totally catchy. "Walter's Song" and "Ladybird" have a drugged-out, childish Ariel Pink vibe that still manage to be total hook-centric pop tunes.
Another stunner from McVicker, and Melters, a totally unexpected masterpiece. Everybody Loves Chris, or at least, Everybody Should!! If there was any musical justice in the world, Swiftumz will blow up and McVicker will get famous for this, but, at least those of us "in the know" will be able to spin this record again and again.
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.
It's tough to review the records of This Heat separately, knowing that there is a box set, a box set most of us had been waiting for for years! Like imagine if you heard about Christmas, and spent the next decade waking up and rushing out to the living room only to find nothing there. That's what it was like waiting for the long rumored This Heat box. It seems almost self evident that it is honestly one of the few box sets, that is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. But okay, $100 might be a bit much to drop on a band you're not all the familiar with. And probably some folks already have some of these discs, as they were briefly available in the nineties. But let's be upfront and warn you straight up, we know very few people, who on hearing any music from This Heat, even a single song, weren't immediately compelled to get their hands on every single bit of recorded material they could find. The music of This Heat is most definitely that powerful, that intense, having informed almost all of the music we've loved since. And sounding as fresh and forward thinking today as it did when it was first recorded.
Before we get to reviewing This Heat's second release, the Health And Efficiency ep from 1980, let's give you some background on (and no small amount of gushing over) one of our all time favorite bands.
Trying to explain why this band 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 scenestress 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. 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.
Their entire catalog has gone in and out of print over the years, mostly out, with all of their records pretty much completely unavailable for the last 7 or 8 years. Rumors of a complete box set and reissue campaign began to circulate a few years back and it has finally happened and it's everything we could have hoped for and more. Every single release, remastered and repackaged in swank digipaks. We're almost jealous of folks who have never even heard This Heat. The thought of entering into this music completely blind, is almost frightening, as the world of This Heat is so singular, so powerful, it will be difficult to ever listen to music the same way again. Trust us.
The Health And Efficiency ep followed This Heat's self titled debut and took their sound in a strangely pop (for them at least) direction, sounding like some tweaked and twisted version of Wire, the title track all angular new wave guitars, monotone vocals, driving drums, strange convoluted arrangements and creepy background sound effects before the whole thing splinters into super abstract rhythmic experimentalism, looped grooves, played over and over, while sounds float and careen in the background, so incredibly hypnotic and repetitive. The second track on Health And Efficiency (which runs a brief twenty minutes) is "Graphic/Varispeed (45rpm)", a lengthy drone, a warm synth whir that surfaces within other This Heat tracks, recontextualized and often chopped up and reassembled, but here, it's a slow shifting slow motion single tone soundscape, with the tone occasionally being pitched up or down, very simple but quite haunting, and a cool glimpse at how This Heat managed to mix and match, use and reuse, without ever treading water. Kinda pricey, as it's only 20 minutes long, and two songs, but it's still well worth it.
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 first track on this new record from Aussie new wave garage punks Total Control had us thinking for a second that they had ditched their garage side completely, in favor of going all 'wave all the time, just check out the first sample below. Sure the last record, Henge Beats, was laced with little bits of new waviness, but "Glass" is straight up new wave, sounding remarkably like New Order, all programmed beats, swirling eighties synths, moody, swoonsome melodies, and deep, crooned vox, it almost sounds like it could be some lost gem reissued on Medical or Dark Entries, but fear not, the next track, "Expensive Dog", is all knuckle dragging old school punk rock, a chugging, churning main riff, the vibe swaggery and sloppy, the vocals a mush mouthed bellow, way down in the mix, it's hard to believe it's the same band even, but then in swoops "Flesh War", which somehow melds the two, channeling some synthy post punk via a serious John Hughes soundtrack flashback vibe, a fuzzy riff, a pounding beat, but then over the top, swirling synths, ethereal textures, and the vocals reverting to that new wave-y croon. And so it goes, the band seemingly a little sonically schizophrenic, leap frogging from synth pop, to garage punk, and back again, with plenty of stops in the nebulous region right in between, which for us is really the sweet spot here. Although the more we listen, the more we're smitten by the even weirder, harder to pin down tracks. Like "Liberal Party", which sounds a lot like some actual obscure post punk/pop rarity, replete with angular guitar, kazoo-like buzz and horns! Or the murky electro-pop dirgery of "The Ferryman", which sounds like some lost Flying Nun B-side. Or "Hunter", which is a fantastic blast of swirling-synth, electro-wave bliss out. And while we were prepared for the record to finish with one final burst of bristly punkiness, these guys instead deliver what might be the poppiest jam here, hook heavy, synths galore, a soaring chorus, another nod to the sound of classic John Hughes movie music, and the sort of track that would be all over MTV if it was 1985...
