CIRCLE Tyrant (Latitudes 0:10) (Southern) cd 14.98
BRAND NEW CIRCLE ALBUM!!! TYRANT!! INCREDIBLY LIMITED LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE LATITUDES SERIES!!! IT'S HERE!!!!
Okay, just wanted to get your attention. We've been waiting for this for a long, long time. As have many of you, we imagine. We've all been loving the Latitudes series of ultra limited releases from bands like Ginnungagap, Shit And Shine, the Grails, Ariel Pink, Sir Richard Bishop... so when we heard that Finland's gods of metallic hypno drone rock were going to do one, we were so psyched, and so we waited anxiously, but patiently, until finally, after months of waiting, they arrived, just a few days ago, and as if we even have to tell you, IT'S AWESOME!!!
But this declaration of awesomeness does require a bit more elaboration, as Circle have a wide variety of awesome sounds: murky propulsive modern day krautrock, wild guitar heavy NWOFHM proto-metal, extended ambient drones, loping mesmeric jazzy shuffle, it's really hard to know where the band will head next. As if it were too much to wish for, Tyrant, somehow manages to combine all of their disparate sounds into one practically perfect whole, and some of us are declaring this our favorite Circle record in ages (no mean feat, since their last one, Miljard, was fantastic, a Record Of The Week too). Three 15 minute tracks, each one a slow building epic, droning, dense, dark, hypnotic, but each with its own unique elements.
The opener, "Screaming Luovutus", is an endlessly looping space rock drone mantra, a relentlessly throbbing bassline, haunting little swirls of fluttering keyboard melody, little bits of guitar filigree, simple propulsive rhythmic shuffle, all woven into a endlessly throbbing krautrocky swirl, when suddenly over the top strange whispery demonic growls surface, super distorted, another layer of fuzzy sound, howling and whispering all ragged and harsh, almost like Circle covering Abruptum or a black metal Necks, if that makes any sense. Dizzying and weirdly heavy, a black ambient krautrock drone groove, if such a thing were possible. And if it were, you know Circle would be the ones, ahem, ARE the ones to make it happen.
The second track, with the very metal title "Steel Torment Warrior", is maybe the least metal of the batch. A super creepy, almost jazzy, soundscape, of muted rumble, bursts of super effected dubbed out drums, flurries of spaced out FX, hushed hissed vocals, splattery free jazz skitter, warbly, seasick guitar tangles all wrapped in a druggy blissy ambience. It's like a less propulsive Necks, a damaged jazzy shuffle looping into infinity, but twisted into a uniquely Circular shape.
The closer, with the even MORE metal title of "Amputation Crusade", is the grooviest and space rockiest of the three, a simple darkly melodic guitar figure, loops lazily above a slow slithery bassline and a super laid back, barely there rhythmic shuffle, like Can or Faust in extreme slow motion... you can hear the Necks again, but the band add some extra druggy fuzz guitar, and the laid back riffing is pregnant with the possibility of imminent explosion. Strange vocals lurk below the surface, the whole thing an epic trawl through some jazzy black space rock soundscape. Near the end, things build to a bit of a subdued climax, the guitars ringing and chiming, the drums pounding a bit more, very epic and majestic, but still somehow muted and laid back, petering out into a creepy little coda of guitar FX and gurgling monster vocals...
Wow. Seriously, we love Circle and everything, more than most folks, but this disc is an absolute killer!! Heavy and droney, groovy and jazzy and completely epic and mesmerizing and amazing!!
Comes packaged in a super intricate hand screened die cut fold over sleeve with a full color insert (featuring the band posing with spiked gauntlets in front of Stonehenge!!! Well, actually, in front of the chainlink fence in front of Stonehenge, which somehow makes more sense). The cover has two strange NWOFHM / Tyrant (the 't's in tyrant are battle axes of course) hooded knights silkscreened on the front and each copy is hand stamped and numbered. Limited to 1000 copies worldwide, 500 of which made it to the United States, about 250 of which made it HERE. That's right, we got an entire quarter of the pressing. And we're pretty sure that still won't be enough, we guarantee these will not be around for long...
MPEG Stream: "Screaming Luovutus"
MPEG Stream: "Steel Torment Warrior"

MAKES NICE, THE Candy Wrapper And Twelve Other Songs (Frenetic) cd 14.98
All right, before we go naming the debut album from San Francisco's The Makes Nice the #1 Pop Album Of The Summer Even Though It's Barely February Already, full disclosure: we do happen to know these guys. An especially good friend of ours is guitarist/vocalist Josh Smith, whom you too probably know from some other bands of his in the past -- he used to play lead guitar in the The Fucking Champs, and also was integral to the legendary SF black metal band Weakling! So after Josh quit the Champs a few years ago, you can imagine our reaction when, eventually, he told us that his next band project was gonna be a power pop, power trio -- with him singing as well as playing guitar! That's pretty far from the instrumental metal of The Champs, or the epic evil of Weakling, eh?? But damn if he didn't pull it off!
Teamed up with Aaron Burnham (of The Mothballs) on bass and vocals, and Jack Matthew (of Harold Ray Live In Concert) on drums, Josh's new band has not only only blown us away with their live shows but now present their killer debut album, the cryptically-titled Candy Wrapper And Twelve Other Songs. The thirteen tracks here run about 31 and a half minutes -- most of 'em not even hitting the 2 minute mark. But each is crammed with so much blazing pop energy in the vein of freakbeat, psych-pop heroes of yesteryear who populate compilations like the Nuggets 2 box set (they'll tell you themselves) that it's got enough head-nodding, foot-tapping hooks for an album twice its length, and could power a full on ballroom blitz to boot.
Hopping on a White Striped bandwagon? No, not at all. What sets The Makes Nice apart from a lot of the current crop of garage rock outfits is their emphasis on Beach Boys/Beatles styled vocal harmonies and sheer songcraft. Yeah, most of these songs are totally raw and rockin' and full of high energy sonics, but also carefully arranged with vocal sweetness that would do Brian Wilson proud. Furthermore, the album is woven throughout with memorable guitar solos. Peeling off licks with tasteful abandon and doses of thick fuzz, Josh's virtuosic playing really gives The Makes Nice their unique signature and vitality. Fucking Champs fans who pick this up just 'cause Josh is on it won't find any metal, but they will hear plenty o' great guitar playing -- and in fact, Josh really lets loose with more soloing here than he ever did in the Champs! So rad guitar + sweet harmonies + utter catchiness = why The Makes Nice totally rule, basically.
And they didn't got to all that work with the vocals without giving some thought to the lyrics as well, so this thing has just got about all the angles covered, top of the pops as far as we're concerned. Definitely this disc should have a lot of appeal to fans of sixties Brits like The Who, Pretty Things, Creation, and Tomorrow up through '70s, '80s, and '90s North American acts like The Raspberries, Cheap Trick, Redd Kross and Sloan! Seriously, the toughest thing about writing this is that we still have to write a bunch of other reviews before this week's New Arrivals list goes out, but from working on this, we've got pretty much this entire record stuck in our heads right now -- and we don't want to make it stop!
MPEG Stream: "Candy Wrapper"
MPEG Stream: "Enough Is Enough"
MPEG Stream: "November Girls"

WOLD Screech Owl (Profound Lore) cd 14.98
Seems kind of foolish to continue to proclaim different black metal bands the "weirdest ever" or "the most fucked up we've ever heard". We're quite tempted to take that route again with this bizarre Canadian horde, but the truth is, they were barely black metal to begin with, more a sort of Jeckish, Basinskian ambient blackness that bordered on the downright dreamy. Well, if anything the band has moved even further away from traditional black metal and into a distinctly, more damaged and significantly noisier world of sound.
Fortress Crookedjaw, Obey and Opex, the trio who make up this ensemble, have taken the strange scratched, looped sepia toned smear of their first record, and torn it apart, doused it in white hot sheets of crumbling guitar and damaged feedback, offering up an even more obscured black metal, a metal turned inside out so we can see the squirming guts inside, malfunctioning electronics everywhere, coating every single riff, every growled lyric, every snatch of barely audible drums, in a crackling sparking field of sonic solar flares. Like listening to Jeck's Surf on a busted car radio, where it's mostly static, but you can -almost- hear bits of melody in there somewhere. Or more accurately, listening to some old skipping 78's on Masami Akita's custom sound system, while Malefic from Xasthur sings along.
Some tracks are almost pure noise, the riffs and drums and anything else discernible as actual music, buried beneath an avalanche of Merzbowian skree, usually the vocals hovering atop, like another harsh jagged layer of sound. But occasionally, the noise abates, and we get a glimpse of some melancholy melodic murk inside, or a brief blast of black riffing, but more often than not, those bits are quickly subsumed and the record becomes a roiling chaotic black swirl once more.
A few tracks, like "The Field Hag", harken back to the first record, with the noise reeled in, and a haunting muddy soundscape allowed to drift and shimmer ghostlike, beneath a thick layer of fuzz and grit and a glass gargling demonic screech, and theoretically, every track on Screech Owl is like that, just some are more obscured and obfuscated than others. Tracks like "Windmill" and "A Sword Becomes Red With Fury" are so distorted and blown out, that they become Pan Sonic style glitch and buzz scapes, pulsing short circuited rhythms, spare and skeletal, with almost no trace of melody, metal or otherwise. Like that busted car radio when you go through a tunnel, all distorted and choppy with only little bits and snippets able to surface through the distortion and static.
Screech Owl weaves chaotically from blown out dreamscapes doused in furious fuzz, to crumbling damaged black loopscapes, to Whitehouse style noise, to soft focus looped ambience to ultra lo-fi black metal buzz, often in the same song. Distortion, noise, processed feedback, every track a delicate balance between huge pulsing flows of fuzzed out electronics, buzzing black metal madness and dreamy fuzzy drone and whir. Baffling and fucking brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Ray Of Gold"
MPEG Stream: "So That No Sword May Strike Him Down"
MPEG Stream: "The Field Hag"
MPEG Stream: "A Sword Becomes Red With Fury"

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BENIGHTED LEAMS Obombrid Welkins (Supernal) cd 15.98
Way back in 1999, the first time we ever heard them, we referred to Benighted Leams as "possibly the most retarded black metal band ever"! A level of dementedness and fucked up-ness by which all others would be measured. Leams mainman A.K. took umbrage, wondering why we would possibly describe his band that way, and how such a review could be expected to sell records?
Funny thing is, we sold tons and tons, Benighted Leams becoming THE sort of AQ black metal band. Gloriously damaged and demented, fucked up and oh so weird. Perhaps 'retarded' was not the ideal word choice, but we were trying to capture the essence of BL's then-sound, a sort of stumbling, struggling WTF black metal buzz. The drums were programmed and off time, often too loud, the guitars and vocals were alternately buried in the mix, and ear shreddingly loud. BUT! It was one of those perfect moments, where all of those various accidents and musical mistakes combined to create something vastly superior to its constituent parts. Still to this day, one of the greatest, weirdest, most inspired outsider bands EVER.
So here we are, almost 8 years, and a few Leams discs later, when we got word of a brand new Benighted Leams!!! Holy Shit were we excited!! A new Leams on the way. We had been hovering around the front door waiting for the mailman like kids at Christmas, when the day suddenly came and there was a big ol' package for us (and you!) from the UK, and inside we knew, lurked the new Leams!!
A lot has changed in the Benighted Leams camp -- no struggling damaged fucked up black metal stumble anymore, nope, the new Leams is thick and heavy, relentless, and HUGE sounding, like maybe it was recorded in a real studio, the guitars are massive and crunchy, the riffs killer and grim, the drums could still be programmed, but they sound much more organic, settled perfectly in the mix, a swirling, mostly midtempo blackness, with brief bursts of glorious blasting buzz. The vocals are buried, alternating with bits of found sound and purloined speeches. On first listen the untrained ear might not necessarily realize that this was Benighted Leams, but we know! There's no disguising the gloriously bizarre blackness that is Benighted leams. From the album title, Obombrid Welkins, to the song titles, "Kevin Macdonald's Theory Of Eurocentralism As A Group Evolution Strategy", "There Descends A Nauseating Dampness", "Alopaecia", to the strange but gorgeous design and layout, complete with a photo to accompany each track's lyrics (including a shot of a head obviously afflicted with "Alopaecia"), to the murky band photos (one half of BL is female apparently!), to the music! Drone drenched black metal, relentless and hypnotic, single riffs repeated over and over, simple and mournful and mesmerizing, minor key melodies tangled up in fuzzed out buzz, the vocals and samples making the songs sound ghostly and haunting.
Definitely not the weirdest Benighted Leams record, but possibly the best! As with all things Leams, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
MPEG Stream: "Kevin Macdonald's Theory Of Eurocentralism As A Group Evolution Strategy"
MPEG Stream: "Obombrid Welkins"
MPEG Stream: "The Fame Of Dead Mens Deeds"

BIRDFLESH / HATEBEAK Happy Death / The Thing That Should Not Beak (Relapse) 7" 3.50
Finally! The return of our favorite parrot fronted grind metal outfit, Hatebeak! And as if realizing that a bird squawking along to death metal might be a one trick pony, the band has gone and mixed things up, turning their jokey avian death metal into something way more weird and damaged and in the long run, an even better (and more musically complex) joke.
It's still high concept: Waldo the parrot is lead vocalist for the band Hatebeak, a play on the band Hatebreed we can only assume. This time, the cover is some horrible creature (Cthulhu we presume) with a parrot perched on its shoulder. Titled "The Thing That Should Not Beak" coupled with the track "Hellbent For Feathers" (Metallica and Judas Priest jokes respectively for the metallically dim out there) and the Hatebeak logo is done in the style of the Relapse Records logo... it's all very funny, metal nerd inside jokes, but the thing is, as a band, Hatebeak totally shred!
The two tracks are bookended by what ends up being a parrot prank call, but in between it's raging, complex, super technical grinding death metal. Another one of those bands that had they ditched the whole bird on vocals angle, could probably be huge! And this time it's not just regular old bird squawks and squeaks, Waldo's 'vocals' are bizarre, obviously overdubbed, they go from strange almost talking, to screeches, to weird guttural almost death metal vocals, all tangled up amidst insanely brutal, super stop start grinding metal mayhem. Awesome!
On the B side are Swedish goof grinders Birdflesh, chosen for their monicker as much as their sound we'd assume, but sonically, they are the perfect match, a whole bunch of songs crammed onto their side, fast and furious, technical and brutal, and just a little bit goofy, like their bizarre, costumed band photos on the cover.
Pressed on swirled lime green vinyl and as with most things like this, extremely limited!

BISHOP, SIR RICHARD Fingering The Devil (Latitudes 0:07V) (Latitudes) lp 21.00
We've all been going nuts for Southern's Latitudes series, super limited releases from Ginnungagap, Shit And Shine, Ariel Pink, Grails, Paradise Island, and elsewhere on this list, new ones from Magik Markers and Circle! Well the fine folks at Southern have decided to press a few of those Latitudes discs on vinyl! The first of which is Fingering The Devil from the Sun City Girls' Sir Richard Bishop, in his solo guitar Improvika mode. Very much in the spirit of the current American Primitive / neo Appalachia sound, exploring similar territory as Jack Rose, Stephen Basho-Jungans, Charlie Schmidt and of course John Fahey, but on these improvised tracks, Bishop injects a healthy dose of flamenco which is sort of surprising. Not that Bishop isn't well versed in various musics of the world, he most definitely is as any number of SCG records will attest to, but it still sounds a little surprising in this context, but the result is truly gorgeous. Moody and emotional, dark and dense, dreamy and lyrical. Just Bishop and a steel string guitar unfurling dense tangles of intricate fingerpicking, as well as slow contemplative melodies, all rich with Spanish flavor. Occasionally Bishop goes for an Eastern raga like vibe instead, and ends up sounding closer to UK guitarist James Blackshaw or Rose at his most drone-y. So so lovely indeed!
Comes packaged in a cool diecut sleeve, a variation on the immediately recognizable Latitudes cd packaging, although this time, white on black instead of white on brown. Includes the same insert as the cd. Pressed on cool grey splatter vinyl. And of course, SUPER SUPER LIMITED!!!
MPEG Stream: "Abydos"
MPEG Stream: "Dream Of The Lotus Eaters"
MPEG Stream: "Romany Trail"

BOREDOMS Super Roots 3 (Vice) cd 12.98
Vice magazine may be most (in)famous for their magazine, especially the always enjoyable Do's & Don't's, but you've also got to hand it to their record label arm for championing the one and only Boredoms on this side of the Pacific. First they brought us the US edition of the Boredom's latest album Seadrum/House Of Sun, now they're reissuing the semi-legendary Super Roots series! So far, installments 1, 3 and 5. Eventually 6 and beyond (we hear tell that SR 9 is currently in the works, over in Japan). Er, what about 2 and 4 you're wondering? Well, Super Roots 2 was a limited edition promotional 3" cd ep only available with purchase of the Japanese release of Chocolate Synthesizer, and for the life of us we can't recall what the deal was (or wasn't) with Super Roots 4, actually we don't think it ever existed!
Confused? Well if you're not a hardcore Bore-fan, you might not even know what the heck the Super Roots discs are all about. Well, they were (are) sort of a series of between-album experiments wherein the Bore-crew goes off to explore some weird tangents... as hard as it is to imagine anything MORE experimental and weird than "regular" Boredoms albums themselves!!
And only Super Roots 1 and 6 were ever previously released in the USA, back when the Boredoms were still, in some Lollapalooza related hangover, seen by major label Reprise as being a reasonable investment! So 3 and 5, having only been available before as expensive Japanese imports, are going to be new to a lot of folks... and it's about time you heard 'em!! Seriously, if you're into any sort of psychedelic drone excess from the underground bands that we're constantly freaking on and on about some limited edition cd-r by, or love love love you some Boris, not to mention the likes of the Boredom's own kraut-drone masterpiece Super Ae and subsequent albums, you're gonna NEED to hear Super Roots 3 and Super Roots 5, they'll make you feel GOOD.
Super Roots 3, specifically: some, uh, "hard bore", um, "bore core" here from 1994!! It's just one track, that might be titled "Hard Trance Away (Karaoke Of Cosmos)". Or maybe that's just a random slogan on the sleeve, it's hard to tell. In any case, the track is a doozy! Slightly over a half hour of raging, relentless, rhythmic chug, followed by a few minutes of silence. It's pretty amazing, the monomaniacal, minimalist, thrashing energy of this all-instrumental punk-metal gallop, you can imagine that the floor of the studio was shin-deep in sweat by the time they were done recording. Ultimately psychedelic in its repetitiousness, this piece seems always to be striving to attain some higher level, that eventually you realize they (and you, the listener) have reached long ago. Definitely the sort of thing (in a similar but different way as Super Roots 5 as well) that fans of Boris at their most extreme would dig... and thus quite recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "Hard Trance Away [excerpt 1]"
MPEG Stream: "Hard Trance Away [excerpt 2]"

BOREDOMS Super Roots 5 (Vice) cd 15.98
Vice magazine may be most (in)famous for their magazine, especially the always enjoyable Do's & Don't's, but you've also got to hand it to their record label arm for championing the one and only Boredoms on this side of the Pacific. First they brought us the US edition of the Boredom's latest album Seadrum/House Of Sun, now they're reissuing the semi-legendary Super Roots series! So far, installments 1, 3 and 5. Eventually 6 and beyond (we hear tell that SR 9 is currently in the works, over in Japan). Er, what about 2 and 4 you're wondering? Well, Super Roots 2 was a limited edition promotional 3" cd ep only available with purchase of the Japanese release of Chocolate Synthesizer, and for the life of us we can't recall what the deal was (or wasn't) with Super Roots 4, actually we don't think it ever existed!
Confused? Well if you're not a hardcore Bore-fan, you might not even know what the heck the Super Roots discs are all about. Well, they were (are) sort of a series of between-album experiments wherein the Bore-crew goes off to explore some weird tangents... as hard as it is to imagine anything MORE experimental and weird than "regular" Boredoms albums themselves!!
And only Super Roots 1 and 6 were ever previously released in the USA, back when the Boredoms were still, in some Lollapalooza related hangover, seen by major label Reprise as being a reasonable investment! So 3 and 5, having only been available before as expensive Japanese imports, are going to be new to a lot of folks... and it's about time you heard 'em!! Seriously, if you're into any sort of psychedelic drone excess from the underground bands that we're constantly freaking on and on about some limited edition cd-r by, or love love love you some Boris, not to mention the likes of the Boredom's own kraut-drone masterpiece Super Ae and subsequent albums, you're gonna NEED to hear Super Roots 3 and Super Roots 5, they'll make you feel GOOD.
Here's the lowdown on Super Roots 5... Like Super Roots 3, this is also just one track. But it's about twice as long -- over an hour! Originally released in 1995, Super Roots 5 begins with one of those soft-loud potential heart attacks (at about five minutes in, when Eye shouts "Go!" and the volume EXPLODES) that Boris and Corrupted have also utilized to good effect. From then on, it's a MASSIVE sea of sonic waves, crashing and crossing, surging and rarely slacking. Foreshadowing the heavily percussive attack of later "Voordoms" efforts, a big part of this seems to be cymbals, excited into a constant, shifting, shimmering drone... It's GORGEOUS. And mesmerizing. Something to surrender to, something that if it lasted hours, rather than "just" an hour, would elicit no complaints from us at all! Y'know how some of the Boredoms' recent output, and particularly their "Voordoms" live shows, have drawn comparisons to some sort of "extreme" drum circle? Well how 'bout with Super Roots 5, it's not a circle, but an infinitely heavy and dense dot?
Pretty much a Boredoms ESSENTIAL, this one, 'specially now that it's more affordable/available!
MPEG Stream: "Super Roots 5 [excerpt 1]"
MPEG Stream: "Super Roots 5 [excerpt 2]"

CHATHAM, RHYS A Crimson Grail (Table Of The Elements) cd 16.98
In 2005 the city of Paris commissioned avant-composer and no-wave legend Rhys Chatham to orchestrate and conduct a piece to be played in the basilica of Sacre-Coeur, the largest church in France. Chatham took this amazing opportunity to have his piece A Crimson Grail performed for this first time. The piece calls for 400 electric guitars!!! In a Basilica!! Holy Shit!! Rhys Chatham and 400 electric guitars = get ready to be blasted by unrelenting noise, right? WRONG! Somehow Chatham manages to use this army of guitars to make one of his most beautiful and celestial pieces to date. The guitars come together to create a glistening wall of sound that had to make those 10,000 in attendance simply melt into their seats. Exciting to hear what could have been overblown bombast, and a flexing of too much guitar muscle turned into a subtle and shimmering work that creates space and tension and emotion and seeps right into your soul. Last year was chock full of great Chatham reissues, we couldn't get enough, so it's thrilling to start the new year not with a reissue, but a brand new piece as thrilling as anything Chatham has ever done. So totally stunning!
MPEG Stream: "A Crimson Grail: Part One"
MPEG Stream: "A Crimson Grail: Part Three"

CROW, ROB Living Well (Temporary Residence) cd 14.98
Mr. Rob Crow is one very swell, very talented, very varied and very prolific chap. His awesome projects past and present include Pinback, The Ladies, Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Optiganally Yours, and oh yes, Goblin Cock too! All of them bear the unmistakable crafty clever catchy stamp of Mr. Crow. His latest solo outing is no exception. All the good stuff that we love about this songsmith is here in spades -- time signature twists, endearing dreamy boy vocals, noodle-oodly guitar lines, and the catchiest hooks. He keeps a lot of the tunes short and sweet, getting right to the heart of the matter and movin' on. Most of the fourteen songs stroll along at a drowsy pace. It's like taking a wonderfully leisurely stroll or bike ride in the warm afternoon sun. As prolific as he is, it could be easy to take Mr. Crow for granted but how could we when he's for sure one of the best songwriters around! Need we say more? Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Over Your Heart"
MPEG Stream: "No Sun"

DOIRON, JULIE Woke Myself Up (Jagjaguwar) cd 14.98
We've always been fans of Julie Doiron and her wonderfully sweet voice. From all the way back to the '90s when she was in Sub Pop lo-fi pop combo Eric's Trip, to her many solo outings. However, none of her solo records captured her essence, they were good but not great. But with Woke Myself Up, it sounds like she finally got it right! Oh so right! The sound is so immediate, so bare and achingly intimate. So much presence. With honest heartfelt lyrics and a vocal delivery that recall some of our favorites, Edith Frost and Cat Power. Much like Frost's last outing, It's A Game, this is born of heart break and heart ache. The instrumentation is the perfect combination of sparse and chilling, allowing Doiron's voice to get right to the core of it all. So totally beautiful!
MPEG Stream: "Me And My Friend"
MPEG Stream: "You Look So Alive"

FEAR FALLS BURNING The Rainbow Mirrors A Burning Heart (Aufabwegen) lp 21.00
Another gorgeous installment in Dirk Serries' exploration of the electric guitar, the amplifier, and just how far both can be taken with as little interference from human hands. As we've mentioned before, a quick listen might have you lumping Serries and his Fear Falls Burning in with his sludgier compatriots, Earth, SUNNO))), etc... but FFB is not about sludge and pummel, it's about drift and shimmer, finding much more in common with outfits like Nadja or the Angelic Process or Hjarnidaudi. But unlike those groups, FFB is just guitar and amp, allowed to feed off each other and slowly unfurl, huge sonic tapestries, lush with subtle overtones and muted melodies, a massive massive minimalism, that continues to rub us exactly the right way.
These two tracks, recorded live, demonstrate again the breadth of Serries' delicate mastery of the amplified guitar. Soft sonic shimmers slowly fluctuate, sounding more like Niblock than anything, overtones shifting and intertwining, steel strings reverberating and stirring up microscopic whirs which all smear together into one living breathing sonic drift. The overtones become more pronounced, taking on melodic shapes, and sounding almost choral, little angelic events, subtly reminding us of Arvo Part. So lovely.
Side two seems to continue on from the very same point side one left off, a delicate serene shimmer, that slowly transforms into an undulating low end crumble, but far from sounding sludgey or even doomy, this is some sort of mystical glistening and sparkling Ur-drone, taking the thuggish caveman throb of the more well know sludgelords, and transforming it into absolute beauty, powerful, physical and surprisingly musical. Awesome.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each copy hand numbered.

FLOATING FLOWER 1st + 2nd (Feathered Spirit Of Mother) cd 13.98
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE ALERT!!!! Wait maybe we should rephrase that. Totally blissed out and stoned to beautiful perfection ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE alert!!!
Floating Flower are a trio composed of AMT leader Kawabata Makoto on electric and acoustic guitars, Yuki on violin, electric sitar and textural vocals and Kaneko Tetsuya on tabla and electric guitar. This is spaced out acid folk at its most trance inducing. Yuki and Tetsuya are said to have been living and traveling around India for many years leading up to these recordings which were originally released as two discs on Acid Mothers Temple's label. We love how space soaked and sundrenched these songs sound. Always drifting, droning, and shimmering with feathers of tripped out voyages into endless days. It's so easy to get lost in the drugged out sonic clouds these folks conjure up. Kind of like the best slow hazy moments of Bardo Pond taken to another planet and planted in alien soil, allowing solar winds to carry beautiful flower petals into deep space, where they will drift weightless forever and ever, never coming down. So good.
MPEG Stream: "Shizuku No Youni"
MPEG Stream: "Fuwa Fuwa"
MPEG Stream: "Desert"

GHOST In Stormy Nights (Drag City) cd 14.98
The follow-up to 2004's magnificent Hypnotic Underworld from Japanese communal psych vets Ghost is finally here! The heavy-prog moves of that album are still in evidence, as well as their perpetual penchant for otherworldly folk -- and, as well, on the nearly half-hour "Hemicyclic Anthelion", Ghost venture into the realm of what goes beyond mere prog to sound remarkably like avant-garde 20th century classical! Ghost are certainly an ambitious band, with talent to match. With the dark, abstract, droning vibes of "Hemicyclic Anthelion" hanging over the proceedings, In Stormy Nights proves to be, well, a dark and stormy album. Downright aggressive, even, are the trio of tracks that follow it in the middle of this disc.
True, In Stormy Nights starts placidly enough with "Motherly Bluster", classic Ghost style acid folk, Batoh's calm voice singing from some mystic plane of crosslegged bliss. But then, the aforementioned "Hemicyclic Anthelion" takes the stage -- literally, as this piece is apparently constructed from excerpts of live in-concert improvs, an electro-acoustic, slow-mo freakout that represents Ghost at their most out-there and experimental. Following that, it seems that Ghost have fallen to the Dark Side of the Force. Indeed, the ominous "Water Door Yellow Gate" actually reminds us a bit of the music from Star Wars (!), with martial drumming and majestic chant. "Gareki No Toshi" is noisier, with distorted vocals and suspense-film urgency. What's next? Something even more frightening -- a stirring cover of the song "Caledonia" by none other than cult ESP-label sixties psych-rock "tribe" Cromagnon!! Wow. Of all of Batoh & Co.'s various cover versions over the years (they've done songs by Syd Barrett, Pearls Before Swine, The Rolling Stones, and Earth & Fire, just to name ones we can think of right now) this has to be our favorite. Partially 'cause we'd never thought we'd hear a Cromagnon cover, partially 'cause it's such a great song, and partially 'cause Ghost do it so well, complete with bleating Celtic horn, black metallish vocal rasping, and swirling, droning, bellicose ambiance. For us, this penultimate track is the climax to the album, but Ghost provide a coda, "Grisaille" coming full circle back to the gentle balladry of "Motherly Bluster", the dark side having perhaps been vanquished... for now.
MPEG Stream: "Water Door Yellow Gate"
MPEG Stream: "Hemicyclic Anthelion"
MPEG Stream: "Caledonia"

GHOST In Stormy Nights (Drag City) lp 15.98
The follow-up to 2004's magnificent Hypnotic Underworld from Japanese communal psych vets Ghost is finally here! The heavy-prog moves of that album are still in evidence, as well as their perpetual penchant for otherworldly folk -- and, as well, on the nearly half-hour "Hemicyclic Anthelion", Ghost venture into the realm of what goes beyond mere prog to sound remarkably like avant-garde 20th century classical! Ghost are certainly an ambitious band, with talent to match. With the dark, abstract, droning vibes of "Hemicyclic Anthelion" hanging over the proceedings, In Stormy Nights proves to be, well, a dark and stormy album. Downright aggressive, even, are the trio of tracks that follow it in the middle of this disc.
True, In Stormy Nights starts placidly enough with "Motherly Bluster", classic Ghost style acid folk, Batoh's calm voice singing from some mystic plane of crosslegged bliss. But then, the aforementioned "Hemicyclic Anthelion" takes the stage -- literally, as this piece is apparently constructed from excerpts of live in-concert improvs, an electro-acoustic, slow-mo freakout that represents Ghost at their most out-there and experimental. Following that, it seems that Ghost have fallen to the Dark Side of the Force. Indeed, the ominous "Water Door Yellow Gate" actually reminds us a bit of the music from Star Wars (!), with martial drumming and majestic chant. "Gareki No Toshi" is noisier, with distorted vocals and suspense-film urgency. What's next? Something even more frightening -- a stirring cover of the song "Caledonia" by none other than cult ESP-label sixties psych-rock "tribe" Cromagnon!! Wow. Of all of Batoh & Co.'s various cover versions over the years (they've done songs by Syd Barrett, Pearls Before Swine, The Rolling Stones, and Earth & Fire, just to name ones we can think of right now) this has to be our favorite. Partially 'cause we'd never thought we'd hear a Cromagnon cover, partially 'cause it's such a great song, and partially 'cause Ghost do it so well, complete with bleating Celtic horn, black metallish vocal rasping, and swirling, droning, bellicose ambiance. For us, this penultimate track is the climax to the album, but Ghost provide a coda, "Grisaille" coming full circle back to the gentle balladry of "Motherly Bluster", the dark side having perhaps been vanquished... for now.
MPEG Stream: "Water Door Yellow Gate"
MPEG Stream: "Hemicyclic Anthelion"
MPEG Stream: "Caledonia"

GOSTA BERLINGS SAGA Tid Dr Ljud (Transubstans) cd 16.98
ATTENTION PROG ROCKERS! You know who you are. We are too. And while sure there's plenty of old faves and obscure '70s reissues to occupy your/our time, it's nice once in a while to get a hold of something new, something current, that still gives you that '70s prog-rock kick, right? We do our best to find stuff like that, and when we do we want to let you know. One recent example that hopefully you've already picked up was the new album from San Francisco's Crime In Choir. Well here's something else along those lines -- the cd debut from this really cool prog/jazz/psych band from Stockholm, Sweden. Recorded mid-2006, yet chock full of Mellotron, and even flute!! Yeah! And like CIC, GBS is also an all-instrumental proposition.
Gosta Berlings Saga -- we don't know why they chose it, but their name comes from the title of a 1891 Swedish novel, later (in 1924) made into a silent film that featured Greta Garbo in her first first starring role -- are definitely sorta retro, but still seem youthful and hip (a la Dungen, perhaps). They are definitely heavy on the keys, from Mellotron to synth to Fender Rhodes, but guitar and bass aren't neglected in the lineup. The drummer also has a crucial role to play, propelling these songs through their mostly 8-minutes-and-upwards lengths... In addition, they bring in that flute for one song, and also guests playing violins on a couple other cuts. Oh, and we've got to mention that there's somebody credited with "Buddha Machine" on another track!! All of this is woven together into a delightfully proggy, jazzy sound, reminding us of bits of Yes and Univers Zero as well as (fellow Swedes) Hansson & Karlsson and Kebnekajse. The seven tracks here encompass moods both bright and cheery, or (to a lesser extent, though) dim and dark, being by turns melancholic and sentimental, or dramatic and urgent. Apparently this is a concept album of sorts, something about the interaction of the forest and the city, with detours into outer space -- and ancient Egypt?? Well, of course, since it's instrumental (and furthermore the song titles are in Swedish), we can't really tell all that from just listening, as evocative as their music is, though the cool cd booklet artwork holds some clues (as does the band's website, from whence we got our information). Add some more prog rock points then for the concept album concept! And GBS gets even more points for definitely being about the MUSIC, not the playing. While it's obvious that these guys are good, they're not showing off, they're writing and performing some marvelous, melodic music without pretense that's still wonderfully PROG.
MPEG Stream: "Ljud Fran Stan"
MPEG Stream: "Knolsvanen"

HASEGAWA-SHIZUO Songs Of An Umbilical Cord (Tiliqua) lp 26.00
Album number two from this Japanese improv drone duo, featuring Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizu Uchida, who weave their wonderfully abstract soundworld from bass, vocals, single string koto and a double-reed wind instrument called the "hichiriki". Much like their debut cd on PSF, record number two is epic and sparse, dark and mysteriously haunting. Two side long tracks, culled from live improvisations with no overdubs, two sides of the record, two sides of this band's split personality.
Side one is a barely there creep through wide open space, space space and more space. Peppered with occasional bits of reedy skronk and low end flutter, these little sonic disturbances drift in a black expanse. The first half of the side in fact is almost nothing. So minimal it requires seriously deep listening to take it in. Soon however the bass surfaces offering a distant abstract drone, that sort of weaves in and out of the audible world, giving the reed and the spare vocals something to orbit, however tenuously.
Side two finds the band in a much more psychedelic Ur-drone state of mind, channeling the spirit of the Taj Mahal Travellers. The sound is still spacious, just not so empty, the skronk toned down to a reedy Eastern melody, sprawled out over a slowly shifting back drop of churning, roiling low end rumble and throb. A living sound like the universe slowly folding in on itself. Reverb wrapped around slow low melodies, all tangled up in the snake charmer sound of the hichiriki, a sound that seems to unfurl as if it might go on forever. So gorgeous.
Vinyl only. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES! We have a handful but will NOT be able to get more. Pressed on nice thick vinyl, packaged in a super thick, gorgeously printed sleeve, with a Japanese style obi!

HYPOTHERMIA Veins (Insikt) cd 13.98
Finally after years of demos and splits and cassette tape releases, the first proper full length from Swedish suicidal black metallers Hypothermia. You might remember Hypothermia from their split with Dimhymn, in the review of which we described their sound as "Epic fuzzed out glacial dirge, with thick riffs spread out in a black smear, the drums a caveman plod, and some of the most fucked vocals ever: weird, something-caught-in-the-throat sort of strangulated grunts and mewls, guttural growls and strange falsetto-y squeaks." And not too much has changed. In fact, Hypothermia's final track on that split was an "epic 16 minute midtempo buzzscape, [with] looped riffs, totally repetitive and hypnotic..." and dang if Veins isn't three of those, each a massive buzzing midtempo black dirge, slowly pounding drums, simple raw hypnotic riffing, repeated and repeated, into a mesmerizing musical mantra, the relentless buzz blurring into near drones, and anguished, cries of utter agony, over swirls of dismal black buzz.
Definitely for fans of Burzum, Nortt, Make A Change... Kill Yourself, Silencer, Xasthur and other purveyors of doomic black hate.
And if the music weren't depressed and dismal enough, the sleeve sports some seriously horrific and blood drenched images, bloody slit wrists, the word failure carved into an arm, a bathtub splattered with blood, and all the lyrics written in blood on blood soaked paper towels...
MPEG Stream: "Isolation"
MPEG Stream: "Failure"

ISIS In The Absence Of Truth (Japanese Version) (Daymare) 2lp 45.00
OK, now Isis are getting in on the confusing multiple version thing, but, c'mon, you know you love it!! This is the fancy imported Japanese version, on Daymare Recordings, of the most recent Isis record In The Absence Of Truth. Not to be confused with the domestic version on Robotic Empire. This is of course incredibly limited, the ones we have are on either clear, or red vinyl, and which color you get will be COMPLETELY RANDOM, so please DO NOT request a particular color. Nice thick gatefold jackets, printed inner sleeves. These are super expensive, they're imports, they have almost the exact same artwork as the domestic version, except for a Japanese style obi, and obviously the colored vinyl. But knowing you Isis fans, you'll probably want both this one AND the Robotic Empire one, and why the heck not, it's a fucking kick ass record:
What can we say about Isis that we haven't already said at this point. They are the masters. The Lords of epic, brooding, slow burn, metallic post rock majesty. And rightfully so. Every record has managed to push forward, exploring new territory, without losing what it is that makes us like them so much. Which is tough to do. But Isis make it seem effortless.
Sure, you can blame them for the recent glut of mediocre moody epic math rock. But it's really not their fault. Everytime a band happens upon a 'new' sound, a sound that is dramatic, and exciting, a sound that captures the ears of jaded music fans, well, undoubtedly in the wake of that band will follow an army of wannabees.
But Isis remain unfazed. They sit within their castle, atop a mountain of mighty riffs, and sharp craggy melodies, gazing down from the heavens. Free to do whatever they want with their sound, even if it pisses off the masses, especially if it pisses off the masses.
So with In The Absence Of Truth, Isis have again redefined and reassessed, resulting in a new record that is distinctly less metal, and much more moody and expansive. Lots of tribal drumming, crooning vocals, the metallic chugs aren't huge back-breaking riffs, instead they are part of the sonic landscape, contributing to the texture almost more than the overall heaviness. Where Isis were once worshippers at the altar of Neurosis, they have now pretty much entirely shed their Neurotic trappings and emerged butterfly like to display their new shape and blindingly resplendent colors. Rare is the heavy band that is as adept at crafting epic soundscapes, creating tension and weaving elaborate sonic tapestries as they are at crushing and pounding and pummeling, but Isis are definitely that rare band.
However, don't be misled by all this talk of mood and ambience, a lot of In The Absence Of Truth is very heavy, and is quite metal, vocals howl and downtuned riffs crush, drums pound and the bass throbs, the band transforming into a swaying lurching metallic behemoth. BUT, these huge bursts of metallic might are placed with care, used sparingly, the way a writer judiciously doles out his exclamation points, each blast nestled between lengthy sonic explorations and slow meandering moody mathiness, resulting in a super dynamic and entirely captivating slab of subtle heaviness.
MPEG Stream: "Wrists Of Kings"
MPEG Stream: "Dulcinea"

ISIS In The Absence Of Truth (Robotic Empire) 2lp 16.98
OK, now Isis are getting in on the confusing multiple version thing, but, c'mon, you know you love it!! This is the domestic vinyl version of the most recent Isis record In The Absence Of Truth. It's on Robotic Empire, it's of course incredibly limited, the ones we have are on black vinyl, maybe not as collectable as the colored versions, but everyone knows black vinyl sounds better... Nice thick gatefold jackets, printed inner sleeves. Anyway, there is another version reviewed elsewhere on this list, it's the Japanese import version, almost the same artwork, except it has an obi and is on colored vinyl. Oh, and it's insanely expensive. But knowing you Isis fans, you'll probably want both this one AND the pricey Japanese version, and why the heck not, it's a fucking kick ass record:
What can we say about Isis that we haven't already said at this point. They are the masters. The Lords of epic, brooding, slow burn, metallic post rock majesty. And rightfully so. Every record has managed to push forward, exploring new territory, without losing what it is that makes us like them so much. Which is tough to do. But Isis make it seem effortless.
Sure, you can blame them for the recent glut of mediocre moody epic math rock. But it's really not their fault. Everytime a band happens upon a 'new' sound, a sound that is dramatic, and exciting, a sound that captures the ears of jaded music fans, well, undoubtedly in the wake of that band will follow an army of wannabees.
But Isis remain unfazed. They sit within their castle, atop a mountain of mighty riffs, and sharp craggy melodies, gazing down from the heavens. Free to do whatever they want with their sound, even if it pisses off the masses, especially if it pisses off the masses.
So with In The Absence Of Truth, Isis have again redefined and reassessed, resulting in a new record that is distinctly less metal, and much more moody and expansive. Lots of tribal drumming, crooning vocals, the metallic chugs aren't huge back-breaking riffs, instead they are part of the sonic landscape, contributing to the texture almost more than the overall heaviness. Where Isis were once worshippers at the altar of Neurosis, they have now pretty much entirely shed their Neurotic trappings and emerged butterfly like to display their new shape and blindingly resplendent colors. Rare is the heavy band that is as adept at crafting epic soundscapes, creating tension and weaving elaborate sonic tapestries as they are at crushing and pounding and pummeling, but Isis are definitely that rare band.
However, don't be misled by all this talk of mood and ambience, a lot of In The Absence Of Truth is very heavy, and is quite metal, vocals howl and downtuned riffs crush, drums pound and the bass throbs, the band transforming into a swaying lurching metallic behemoth. BUT, these huge bursts of metallic might are placed with care, used sparingly, the way a writer judiciously doles out his exclamation points, each blast nestled between lengthy sonic explorations and slow meandering moody mathiness, resulting in a super dynamic and entirely captivating slab of subtle heaviness.
MPEG Stream: "Wrists Of Kings"
MPEG Stream: "Dulcinea"

LERMAN, RICHARD Music Of Richard Lerman 1964-1987 - Featuring Travelon Gamelon (Music For Bicycles) (EM Records) cd 29.00
Japan's EM records strikes again. Without a doubt, the coolest, weirdest, most amazing re-issue label EVER!! We could list again all the killer reissues we've carried and reviewed and raved about over the past year or two, but we've done that in pretty much every other EM review, so do a label search for EM Records on the AQ website, and prepare to have your mind blown!
Another long lost, long sought after holy grail of sorts, dug up and dusted off and beautifully presented by EM, Travelon Gamelon, a piece by Richard Lerman for amplified bicycles! Performed on stage with upturned bikes, but also, performed on the streets, the bikes mic'ed and each with it's own tiny amplifier broadcasting the various sounds of the bike rolling along streets, the metallic flutter of spokes, the sounds of passing cars, squeaking brakes, whipping wind, all woven into the organic whole. A piece of moving music, constantly shifting, obviously improvised and random, and so totally wonderful.
There are two versions of the piece, which has been performed for years all over the world, one is the concert version, which features musicians on stage, with upside down bikes, using various implements with which to strike, rub and bow the different parts of the bicycles, these are the versions that are the most gamelan like, a gorgeous assemblage of metallic clangs and percussive clamor. From dreamy and spare, to cacophonous and wildly chaotic. A sort of junkyard gamelan, definitely clattery but also strangely melodic.
But it's the other versions, the Promenade versions, that are the most exciting. These pieces are basically field recordings of cyclists on mic'ed and amplified bicycles, every sound their riding creates being broadcast through little speakers affixed to the bikes, and recorded by Lerman! So not only is this group of bikes creating this gorgeous whirring mechanical ambience, that sound is also travelling through city streets, a self contained performance of sorts, a strange little cloud of metallic shimmer and buzzing mechanical ambience performed for all passersby. It's also cool to hear the organizers' instructions, children laughing and playing, running alongside, ringing their own bike bells, you can hear Lerman giving orders to the cyclists as they prepare to begin the piece, and various warnings like "Watch out for the metal!" Street cleaners, random cars, voices and footsteps, all a sort of organic backdrop to the divine slow shifting whir the bicycles produce. Constantly shifting, and changing, depending on the speed of the bikes, the direction of the amplifiers the placement of the mics, the people or cars, amazing. It reminds us a bit of the Taj Mahal Travellers in fact, TMT's method of broadcasting their sounds out of loudspeakers, and then recapturing them with microphones placed at various distances, well, Travelon Gamelon is almost like a mobile Taj Mahal Travellers. So cool!
This collection would be well worth it for disc one alone, 5 lengthy excerpts from various performances of Travelon Gamelon, but also included is a second disc, of various other pieces Lerman composed and performed over the years spanning 1964-1986.
"For Two Of Them" is a soundscape of old records, a spring reverb, and manipulated tapes, very dark and dreamy, a fuzzy, multilayered drone shot through with streaks of metallic shimmer and sounding not all that different than contemporary noismakers like the Starving Weirdos, the Skaters and the like. In fact, most of the pieces on disc two, could just as easily come from some super limited cd-r we just managed to track down. "Sections For Screen, Performers And Audience" features the score presented as a film projected on a screen, the performers face the screen with their backs to the audience, and their improvisations are electronically modified into a gorgeous bit of twisted Twentieth Century. "End Of The Line" is a very dramatic tape piece based on the deaths of close friends, and is another piece that sounds presciently modern, huge dramatic swells, very melancholic and resonant, huge fields of drone and buzz. Even tracks like "Soundspot", a piece for amplified 40 foot Slinky, with its gorgeously resonant creaking and moaning and whistling metallic buzz, and "Music For Plinky And Straw", a piece for bendy straw and reverb, creating a dense field of abstract melodies, crystalline shimmer and percussive chimes, sound less Twentieth Century and more like any number of modern free noise abstract drone releases! This is the sort of collection we wish had been expanded to 4 discs, or 8 discs!! We want more.
But even with two discs there is plenty here to keep you busy and your ears full and happy for sure. Two hours plus of remarkable sound, a massive booklet, with tons of photos, liner notes in both English and Japanese, as well as notes on each individual piece, but also included are a rare video of Lerman performing his piece for bendy straw, as well as scores for several pieces, and a killer photo guide to building a tape delay out of two walkmans!! SO SO SO RECOMMENDED!
The perfect record to bring music nerds and bike nerds together (most of us here are both!)...
MPEG Stream: "Promenade Version [Boston, MA, July 2, 1979]"
MPEG Stream: "Concert Version [Pittsburg, PA, June 6, 1981]"
MPEG Stream: "For Two Of Them [1964]"
MPEG Stream: "Sections For Screen, Performers And Audience [1975]"

MAGIK MARKERS The Voldoror Dance (Latitudes 0:09) (Southern) cd 14.98
Another release in Southern Records' series of ultra limited Latitudes releases, past installments have included the Grails, Ginnungagap, Ariel Pink, Shit And Shine, Sir Richard Bishop, and others. A wildly disparate group for sure, but one that seems to suit this band just fine...
The Magik Markers are definitely one of those love 'em or hate 'em kind of bands. Sloppy and chaotic, noisy and psychedelic, free and seriously fucked up. Live they can be an explosive revelation, or an absolute mess. One show found the drummer blasting away on stage, while the quite comely guitarist clambered through the audience, climbing over audience members, dragging her guitar behind her, stirring up a seriously chaotic skree. Great to see, but not the best thing to listen to. And the band seem to know that, at least on The Voldoror Dance, not relying on any sort of unorthodox antics or wildly destructive staging the band simply unleash some seriously drug addled, psychedelic space rock bliss. Free and blown out, actually VERY free, this is like a band hurling their equipment into the abyss, and capturing every second on tape, the drums a constant splattery free jazz web, the bass (or is it another guitar) buzzing and warbling, throbbing and pulsing, wrapped in dense little tangles around the relentless drumming, while over the top, vocals drift and hover, ghostlike, barely audible over the din of the main guitar, a squirming, squealing sonic supernova, spewing wild peals of shrieking feedback, dense sheets of corrosive skree, walls of fuzzy riffs, smeared into almost-white-noise, tons of FX, wah wah, delay, a relentless free rock, space psych blow out. Tripping wildly though free jazz, free rock, drone rock and drug rock territory, sometimes all at the same time. An ultra noisy, dizzy, stumbling, crumbling, explosive mind melting musical trip.
Comes packaged in a super intricate hand screened die cut fold over sleeve with a full color insert. The cover has a sticker affixed to the front and each copy is hand stamped and numbered. Limited to 1000 copies worldwide, 500 of which made it to the United States, about 25 of which made it here. So you know what that means!
MPEG Stream: "The Scream Of The Horses Glowing White"
MPEG Stream: "Ab'R-AChad-Ab"

NIGHTLY GALE Illusion Of Evil (Foreshadow) cd 14.98
We've been trying to list this for ages, but our first batch was destroyed in the post, and our second batch took its own sweet time getting here from Poland, but here we are, almost a year after we initially ordered 'em, and we can finally unleash the bizarre tech prog metal of Poland's Nightly Gale on the masses.
So yeah, this is definitely doom. Maybe even toss in a few extra 'o's, cause this is damn doomy. But it's also pretty freaking weird. Four massive lengthy epics, each with its own strange vibe.
The opener is a slow plod, epic guitars, soaring over downtuned chug, a glacial trudge but with super dramatic prog rock crooning over the top, sometimes almost slipping into a sort of yodel. Then suddenly, the rhythm lurches into a strangely technical start stop stutter, with gurgling keyboards and space rock FX, and some harsh black metal vocals. The second track is more of that strange tech-prog-doom, with fuzzy synthesizers, programmed drums, at times it almost sounds like Meshuggah slowed waaaaaaaay down, strangely technical, but as if played in slow motion, with weird processed underwater prog vocals, and some almost Viking growls. Some delicate dreamlike piano, gently placed amidst super harsh screams and massive downtuned crunch. It's like prog Cradle Of Filth at 16 rpm. Actually, we have no idea what this is like...
It's at this point that one is forced to think, WHAT THE FUCK?!? How have we not heard this band? Why aren't more people completely obsessed with these guys? WE DON'T KNOW.
Tracks 3 and 4 continue on in the same sort of schizophrenic, prog doom direction. With long expanses of swooshing ambience, moody melancholy acoustic passages, epic emotional guitar harmonies, huge cinematic synths, track three almost sounds like a doom metal Genesis, if such a thing were possible, and we're beginning to think it is! The track ends with a groovy little shuffling Nine Inch Nails sort of murky electronic dirge with hissed whispery vocals, before launching into the 15 minute closer, which initially sounds like it might be the most straight ahead doom track on the record, until about halfway through, where the band breaks down into a creepy nursery rhyme sort of interlude with bizarre production, freaky sound effects and haunting vocals, before launching back into a killer mathy jam, lurching and stuttering hypnotically before fading out into some dreamy dirgey melancholy dream doom, complete with strangely Alice In Chains-like vocals (a good thing btw) and a repeating minor key piano figure. So freaking heavy, and weird and goddamn great!
We only have about 20 copies, and we're pretty sure that since it took us so long to get these that it's probably out of print, so odds are once these are gone, we won't be able to get more...
MPEG Stream: "At Your Command"
MPEG Stream: "Illusion Of Evil"

PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE / TONY CONRAD An Aural Symbiotic Mystery (Subrosa) cd 14.98
We think the mystery suggested in the title is why this is the first ever recorded collaboration between these two giants of improvised left-field minimalist drone. Both Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, key figures in early American minimalism and the New York avant-garde of the early seventies had only performed three times together previously and since reuniting in Belgium in 2001, hadn't even seen each other in three decades. What's equally amazing is that neither one fully dominates this extended performance. Palestine's multiple crystalline organ drones graft neatly with Conrad's bowed pulsations from his modified 5 string violin, eventually intensifying with blistering shimmers and burning organic keyboard crescendos before falling into subdued space and void. There the two sweep the dust off and begin to spar with each other all over again, getting into some heated free-music territory culminating in Palestine's delayed vocal drones and Conrad's blissful undulating vibrations. Gorgeous!
MPEG Stream: "An Aural Symbiotic Mystery 1"
MPEG Stream: "An Aural Symbiotic Mystery 2"

ROY, DILIP Namaskaar (Cloud Forest) cd 16.98
In our utopian dreams of what it would be like to get off the plane and arrive in India this is what our would immediately fill our ears! It makes so much sense that the title of this album is Namaskaar, as it's an age-old traditional greeting in India. An expression used as a warm welcome to visitors and honored guests. It also makes sense that this record was supposedly produced originally as a promotional item for Air India!
Dilip Roy is an Indian composer who creates deeply inviting and warm sounds that make you feel like you've been lifted off your feet and taken to some majestic land filled with color, melody and elegance. While this record was recorded in 1983, we would have guessed it was from the late '60s or early '70s as it has that slightly tripped out sound and lush arrangement that might have been the result had R.D. Burman and David Axelrod joined forces. We can just imagine Four Tet's Kieren Hebden and DJ Shadow drooling over these sounds and wishing they had gotten their hands on them to sample and steal. Imagine the tracks those two could come up with working with this stuff!! It's was no surprise when we learned that Roy sometimes collaborated with Ananda Shankar, such amazing grooves, but what we love so much about this record is how it has echoes of Bollywood in its sound yet it's way more calm and tranquil while somehow still managing to be just as much of a bright and colorful trip. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Nattu Padangal"
MPEG Stream: "Yaman"
MPEG Stream: "Priyatama"

RUINS OF BEVERAST, THE Rain Upon The Impure (Van) cd 13.98
We were heartbroken after the dissolution of German black metal outfit Nagelfar (not to be confused with the Swedish e-less Naglfar). Their all time black metal masterpiece Virus West, has been a huge favorite of all the metal heads around these parts (and has just been reissued, and will be reviewed on the list soon!) but a few years after the death of Nagelfar, a new band was born out off the ashes, a strangely monickered beast called the Ruins Of Beverast. Purveyors of, in their own words, "oppressive black metal", and indeed, the sound of RoB was totally unlike the blazing Scandinavian style of buzzing black metal, instead, they offered up a sprawl of midtempo misery, as doom as much as black.
And this, their second album continues on a similar sonic path. There is of course plenty of buzz, this is grim black metal after all, but RoB have a much more expansive vision. Out of the seven tracks, five clock in at around 15 minutes (the other two are brief ambient interludes of cavernous whir and crumbling subterranean drones) and find a grim black buzz stretched waaaaaaay out into long stretches of Burzumic doom. The guitars are thick and spacious, not just buzzy and compressed, the production is massive, each song is like a journey through some massive underworld, drifting through firelit caverns, along some viscous black river. The rhythms are loping, seasick waltzes, sometimes slowing down to glacial dirges, with arpeggiated chords spread out over thick backdrops of warm blurry buzz, howled vocals, simple pounding drums, all wrapped in huge swaths of reverb, making all the edges bleed together, turning buzzy black metal into fuzzed out doomdrone metal. The oppressive blackened crush lets up once in a while, allowing brief bits of shimmer to shine through, a weird post rocky slowcore crawl, some minor key jangly clean guitar, slow building Godspeed like ambience, bits of epic synth, always returning to the relentless buzzing dirge, allowing off course for brief flurries of furious blasting black metal, but those always seem to give way to still more slow and sorrowful blackdoom beauty.
MPEG Stream: "50 Forts Along The Rhine"
MPEG Stream: "Soliloquy Of The Stigmatized Shepherd"

SHOEMAKER, MATT Spots In The Sun (Limited Edition) ( The Helen Scarsdale Agency) cd 16.98
The music found within Matt Shoemaker's Spots In the Sun certainly makes for one of our favorite records in recent memory, unfortunately this ultra limited version is already out of print and will most likely not be around for long (but fear not, the regular version will follow soon after).
Shoemaker's exquisite manifestations of abstracted field recordings pushed to the point of grotesque minimalism is some of the finest that we've heard (comparable to the likes of BJ Nilsen, Machinefabriek, Loren Chasse, Philip Jeck's Surf, and mnortham), but what makes this "special edition" so unique is the packaging. You may remember many moons ago that The Helen Scarsdale Agency issued an edition of the BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa release with a copper foil cover mounted within a jewel case as the artwork. Well, Matt Shoemaker's Spots in the Sun sports similarly dazzling packaging, a corroded sheet of brass upon which the album text has been silkscreened, only to be slightly distressed in order to give it a beautiful worried quality. How limited is this edition? Fifty, of which we only got less than a dozen. So act fast, or bide your time until the regular version comes out in a month or so...
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STARVING WEIRDOS Harry Smith (Root Strata) 12" 9.98
Latest in the slow flow of dreamy sounds from this Humboldt County duo, who not counting their 20 or so unreleased full lengths, have gradually built up an amazing body of work, most unfortunately super limited, this new lp no exception.
Released on Tarentel's Root Strata label, Harry Smith is a single side long track, a slow burning cinematic wonder, a huge buzzing field of charged particles, run through old beat up guitars and a table full of FX pedals and broken toy instruments, alchemically changed from lead into a gold.
A sitar-like buzz, submerged in reverb and wrapped in dense overtones, spreads out like a melting glacier, constantly shifting and changing shape, above that drift huge washes of metallic shimmer, effulgent yet muted and murky, a subdued sonic glare, warm and wistful. These dreamlike expanses are punctuated by ghostlike pulses, bells or chimes smeared into indistinct tones, let loose and allowed to fade into the subtly churning sonic backdrop. Very dark and dramatic. And oh so lovely.
This is a one sided lp. The flip side has black and white artwork pasted right on the vinyl, housed in a clear plastic sleeve. And of course super limited...
ONLY 300 COPIES PRESSED!!!

THRONE OF BLOOD I Hope You Fail Miserably And Never Accomplish Anything Ever Again (Corleone) cd-r 13.98
We may indulge in some hyperbole now and then, but it's usually just because we're so excited by some new record. That's why there can be so many 'best ever's and 'greatest of all time's. But we're serious now. This is, without a doubt, and with nary a trace of hyperbole, the greatest and weirdest packaging we have ever seen. Really.
So before we get to the music (whatever... music... pshhh) let's talk about the case this disc is housed in. It was at one time, a regular old DVD case, but it has been coated in molded rubber, looking like the Necronomicon from Evil Dead, only the cover is a unicorn, all molded in 3-D complete with an actual glass eye, with various vines and flowers molded in along side the unicorn head and EYE!!! The back has the band name and more vines molded in. It smells like old tires and feels all soft and rubbery. It's got a little Gwar to it. But holy shit!!! It's so amazing to look at and to hold and to smell. Inside is an oversized screen printed booklet, with glittery eye animals, typewriter style liner notes affixed to the inside. Wow! It almost wouldn't matter what the music sounded like but the music is just as amazing. A freaked out furious grinding metallic onslaught, most songs clocking in around 30 seconds with one or two coming in around 9 minutes. 32 songs in 38 minutes. Buzzing guitars, blasting drum splatter and some seriously awesome fucked up vocals, squealing impossibly high, doused in FX, it sounds like a woman, or a guy with an impossibly high falsetto, it's almost like a grind metal Melt Banana, but with super fuzzy lo-fi fucked up production and some seriously damaged sounding guitars. Actually the vocals sort of sound like the little girl from Kiss' "God Of Thunder" all grown up and seriously hysterical. But that's not all, there's the album, a series of fucked up blasts of brilliant black metal grind fury, then a a few noise tracks, a live set, and then THE WHOLE RECORD IN REVERSE, as in backwards, fucking awesome! Everything sounds better backwards and Throne Of Blood is no exception. Then there's a few more noise tracks, then the second to last track, the record's nine minute epic, one riff repeated over and over and over and over and over. Minimal math metal genius. And then the final four minute number which sounds like it could be a whole 'nother record, with about a million tracks compressed into one 4 minute chunk, with more outrageously over the top insane vocals. Actually, it's a whole live set!!!
What more to say? The record is completely nuts, the packaging even more so. It's just too bad it's so limited. This cloud has a distinctly black lining.
LIMITED TO 125 COPIES!!! We tried to order lots more than we got, which ended up being about 20 copies, and once these are gone, this is gone for good...
MPEG Stream: "Mayham"
MPEG Stream: "New Kings"
MPEG Stream: "Flesh Quest"
MPEG Stream: "Miles"

TITAN A Raining Sun Of Light & Love For You & You & You (Tee Pee) cd 15.98
Our favorite Brooklyn-based stoner space rockers are back, with their first proper studio album (the limited Paradigms cd, and the self-released cd-r we've had before were both live recordings, apparently). If you liked those, you'll like this -- though they get up to some new tricks here as well. In fact, we weren't sure we were even listening to Titan when we first put this on, as the first of the four tracks found here starts off all folky for a minute, with strumming and singing that could be Comus or Devendra... before blasting into loud, distorted, truly TITANIC heavy instrumental psych rock powered in part by some extremely proggy keyboard action. It's like ELP jamming with Comets On Fire, or Tarantula Hawk gone '70s, or a much heavier, blow-out n' drugged-up Crime In Choir! A wild torrent of amp-ed up, cosmic crunch, spiralling energetically.
The following tracks have their blissed out interludes, and droning FX, and mantric rhythmic pulses, and other bits of weirdness (field recordings of what might be crickets chirping, and a fan blowing, are mixed in at one point), but that heavy space prog riffola isn't lacking either. Definitely there's plenty here to appeal to fans of the abovementioned bands, as well as, oh, AMT, Circle, Zombi, Ufomammut, Boris, Mammatus, and MoRkObOt among others... in a word, recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "track 1"
MPEG Stream: "track 3"

TITAN A Raining Sun Of Light & Love For You & You & You (Tee Pee) lp 15.98
Our favorite Brooklyn-based stoner space rockers are back, with their first proper studio album (the limited Paradigms cd, and the self-released cd-r we've had before were both live recordings, apparently). If you liked those, you'll like this -- though they get up to some new tricks here as well. In fact, we weren't sure we were even listening to Titan when we first put this on, as the first of the four tracks found here starts off all folky for a minute, with strumming and singing that could be Comus or Devendra... before blasting into loud, distorted, truly TITANIC heavy instrumental psych rock powered in part by some extremely proggy keyboard action. It's like ELP jamming with Comets On Fire, or Tarantula Hawk gone '70s, or a much heavier, blow-out n' drugged-up Crime In Choir! A wild torrent of amp-ed up, cosmic crunch, spiralling energetically.
The following tracks have their blissed out interludes, and droning FX, and mantric rhythmic pulses, and other bits of weirdness (field recordings of what might be crickets chirping, and a fan blowing, are mixed in at one point), but that heavy space prog riffola isn't lacking either. Definitely there's plenty here to appeal to fans of the abovementioned bands, as well as, oh, AMT, Circle, Zombi, Ufomammut, Boris, Mammatus, and MoRkObOt among others... in a word, recommended!!
MPEG Stream: "track 1"
MPEG Stream: "track 3"

TROLLMANN AV ILDTOPPBERG Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice (Monolith) cd-r 10.98
Not sure what else to say about these guys that we haven't already said. If you've somehow managed to miss our reviews of their first couple records, Forest Of Doom and Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars, as well as the Trollmann side project Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch, for chrissakes, do yourself a favor and just order all three. And this one while you're at it. Check out the other reviews for a more in depth history of what has to be our all time favorite caveman doom duo, but to briefly recap:
Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg. C'mon, they're called Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg!! They have record titles like Arcane Runes Adorn The Ice-Veiled Monoliths Of The Ancient Cavern Of The Stars and Dark Clouds Blacken The Sky On The Eve Of The Thousandth Sacrifice and Tolling Beyond The Tombs Of Ancient Grimnity and Forest Of Doom. They have a similar sounding side project called Ungl'Unl'rrlh'Chchch! The band members are pictured in drawings on the back of the cd, one as a strange little bearded gnome/elf sitting on a huge toadstool, the other a bearded furclad mountain man leaning on a mighty axe. The gnome is named Belegur and is credited with "Cosmic keys to gates unknown." The mountain man is Thundarr, and is credited with "Rumblings Of Doom, Prophecies Of Times To Come." For those of you well versed in that sort of thing, you'll realize that this duo is just bass and keyboards, which is remarkable in its own right. But the fact that Trollmann play a sort of medieval Skepticism style slow motion doom sludge with just bass and keyboards it seems even more amazing.
Phew, there's more of course, but that's it in a nutshell. Not only are they mysterious, and weird, and possessing a what-the-fuck quotient that's through the roof, the music is fucking amazing! This is not that so weird it's good, or so retarded it's amazing kind of thing, this is absolute genius. Dark and creepy, heavy and sloooooooooooooooow, minimal sludge soaked abstract ambient doom. Or something. Just bass and keyboards, spewing an unholy flow of low end throb, and grinding downtuned slither. The keyboard drones and spreads out in a fuzzy blur, only occasionally offering up some sort of melodic counterpoint to the bass, as it trudges sluggishly onward.
Of all the Trollmann records, Dark Clouds is probably the heaviest, the meanest, the least melodic and the most intense. The first two tracks, both shockingly under 3 minutes, set the tone, the first, is some sort of slow motion post rock drift, a thick wash of grinding low end sludge beneath garbled demonic whispers while above drift absolutely dreamy slow drifting harmonics. The second track is a stunner, almost 'rocking', at least by Trollmann standards, some sort of primitive caveman hardcore, huge throbbing, ultra distorted downtuned buzz, with fuzzed out Butthole Surfers-ish guitar leads, and super distorted death metal grunts a stumbling hyper aggressive pummel. But after that, it's back to business as usual. Long slow extended doomy drifts. Average track length hovering at about 15 minutes, the bass a throbbing, glacial presence, the riff stretched out into eons, each note reverberating and pulsing into oblivion before the next kicks in. The keyboard just adding another layer of buzzing sludge. The bass sometimes starts to stutter and pulse, creating some sort of super blown out low end rhythm, stumbling over a thick wash of keyboard buzz, before settling back down into its glacial groove.
Epic and massive and bewildering, hypnotic and bizarre and fucking brilliant!
MPEG Stream: "Descent From The Mountains Of Madness"
MPEG Stream: "Kuu Paistaa Lapi Saatanan Puut"
MPEG Stream: "Sa Jord Bloter Svarten Stjerne Av Satan Oppgangen Triumpherend In Himmel"

TUK Proud Princess Of A Brand New City ((K-RAA-K)3) cd 15.98
We were WAY over glitchy laptronica when Tuk's Shallow Water Blackout knocked us upside the head a few lists back and demonstrated that just cuz some sound was played to death, didn't mean that amazing things couldn't still be done with it.
That Diskont itch that seemingly only Oval could scratch, had been getting itchier without us even knowing it, who would have realized we had been secretly hankering for a gitched up stuttery underseascape of burble and skitter, of muted rhythm and haunted melody. Well we were and Shallow Water Blackout hit she spot, and good! So much so that we figured we oughta track down Tuk's previous record, Proud Princess Of A Brand New City, and dang if it ain't just as purty!
In fact, it might even actually be a little bit prettier, definitely more serene and subdued, a little bit more musical. The rapid fire chop and splice and reassemble of Shallow Water Blackout is still present but in smaller measures. There's a bit more of a minimal angle, it's much more melodic and dreamy, rife with low drones and mumbled melody, and more actual instrumentation. It's got a fuzzy sort of sheen that has us thinking even more of groups like Jasper TX and Machinefabriek than the new one did.
Our favorite track might just be "German Holidays", beginning with a simple sad, guitar line, it's quickly surrounded by bits of glitchy ambience, clouds of record crackle and weird disembodied buzz, but it's about halfway through where it gets really good, suddenly, in comes some distorted guitar, eighties cop show, made for TV movie music, looped into a super Circular rhythm with breathy background vocals and streaks of glistening feedback, it sort of krautrocks along before it begins to deteriorate, the riff getting more and more distorted, the melodies beginning to crumble, beautiful and haunting, and surprisingly super catchy.
Those sorts of unlikely musical moments continue to surface throughout the record, suspended in Tuk's wide open fields of blissy glitch and whirring warble, making us want to just curl up and drift off...
MPEG Stream: "Sensational Soft"
MPEG Stream: "John Carpenter"
MPEG Stream: "German Holidays"

VELOSO, CAETANO CE (Universal) cd 17.98
Last year was a pretty great year for Tropicalia. With a reunited Os Mutantes touring all over the world, a killer Soul Jazz compilation that helped more ears fall in love with the thrilling sounds coming from Brazil in the oh so turbulent late '60s / early '70s. So it makes so much cosmic sense that one of the founders of Tropicalia, Caetano Veloso, starts off this year releasing one of his best and most rocking records in years. While his last few outings have veered towards the easy listening schmaltz side of the sonic spectrum with far too many ballads, Ce finds him all stripped down and exuding a youthful energy that we haven't seen or heard for years. Such vibrancy and color! It's so hard to believe he's 64 years old, and we'd be hard pressed to think of many other people his age still making music as compelling as the sounds on Ce, as this blows away anything folks like Bowie, McCartney or Young have made in recent years. Worth it alone for the opening track "Outro", a scorching almost indie-rock sounding anthem, which has our vote for one of the best songs of the year. The album as a whole is so solid and listen after listen we keep falling in love again and again with Veloso's song writing prowess. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Outro"
MPEG Stream: "Rocks"

VELVET CACOON Dextronaut (Full Moon Productions) 2cd 14.98
Very few bands have as convoluted and controversial a back story as Portland's black metal weirdos Velvet Cacoon. First the name, Velvet Cacoon. Spelled C A C O O N. According to the band "The name originated back in 1996 when we formed the band. Velvet is one of many names applied to the chemical dextromethorphan, and CACOON are the initials of a catacomb just outside Portland city limits where we usually go to write music." It also happens to be the seed from some tropical vine. But let's continue. There was also the band's political alignment, supposedly they were some sort of super reclusive, "eco-fascist" collective. Okay, sure. Then there's the sound. And it's the sound that really matters. And oh what a sound, an impossibly lush orchestra of black buzz, thick and mesmerizing and blurry, the fuzziest buzz we had ever heard. But how does a band achieve that sort of impossibly glorious buzz? Well, by inventing and playing an instrument called a "dieselharp", a sort of diesel fuel powered pick up driven fuzz-drone-guitar thing. So okay, how could we not love them, the sound was black buzz nirvana, and they were some weird eco forest freaks. Supposedly.
A little time passes, and it comes to light that it was all a scam, not the music obviously, but everything else, the politics, the dieselharp, all designed to fuck with the black metal community. The band is revealed to be one guy and his girlfriend. He's got short hair, they listen to Nina Simone and drink tea, and black metalheads are pissed. We of course think it's hilarious, and while we were duped as well, so what, it's a great joke, and fuck, the music still totally destroys. At one point if you went to the VC website, all you got was a link to an Air MP3?!? And still the only photos are of a woman in candlelight (presumably the girlfriend). And there were various reports that some of the songs were stolen from another artist who was uncredited and not compensated.
Phew! It's the sort of story that would ALWAYS be on the cover of the black metal version of US magazine!! If there was such a thing (oh why oh why is there not?!?!)
So here we are a few years down the line, the band is working on a new record, sans dieselharp of course, and while we wait, we have this massive double disc document of the band's early years, the music that started it all.
The first disc begins with a dreamy bit of pastoral ambience, before bursting into some ultra fast, blown out black buzz drenched black metal. Melancholy and moody, but swathed in super thick swirls of BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ. If anything, the stuff on Dextronaut sounds a bit more traditional than either of the other two releases, but a more traditional VC is still leagues weirder than most other BM outfits. Most of the tracks are blurry smeary buzzscapes, the melodies and drums and vocals, smothered under gloriously suffocating layers of, yep, still even more BUZZ!!! The best track, and also the weirdest, is the loping midtempo "Perched On A Neverending Peak". A blast of Burzum-worthy buzz, the guitars dense squalls of blown out fuzz, and all of this buzz and fuzz wrapped around an impossibly sad melody, but with a series of strange drop outs, where all the fuzz abates, only briefly, giving us a brief glimpse behind the veil of buzz, before it's quickly swallowed up again by the black wall of fuzz.
The second disc is three loooooong tracks, epic black ambience, gorgeous and darkly mysterious. The first a lazy looped low end gurgle, very Marclay or Strotter, an hypnotic muted underwater Oval sort of drift. The second is a cavernous drone, rife with distant buzz and some weird Trollmann like melodies. the final track is a slow burning expanse of soft focus shimmer, warbling and warm, soft and serene, and it wouldn't be VC if they didn't subtly interject some strange guttural demonic vocalizations right near the end...
Our only complaint is the ultra ghetto packaging. A single square of paper in lieu of a booklet, the tray card beneath the hinged double disc tray is blank, the artwork all over is pixelated and blurry, but knowing the band it could be part of the concept, either way, for a record as massive and weird and fucking amazing, the packaging is a bit of a let down. Regardless, once these discs are in your stereo, you'll be in a buzz drenched nacoticized black haze so deep and deadly, shoddy packaging will be the least of your concerns...
MPEG Stream: "Nest Of Hate"
MPEG Stream: "Perched On A Neverending Peak"
MPEG Stream: "Setting Off The Twilights"
MPEG Stream: "Velorum"

VOMIT ORCHESTRA Bridges Burnt (Autumn Wind Productions) cd 11.98
It seems like only yesterday... well, hell it was actually on the last list, when we listed the first proper full length release from strangely named East Coast audio ambient terrorists Vomit Orchestra, and here we are not two weeks later with a BRAND NEW full length.
It's sort of unclear why VO gets lumped in with the metal crowd, or even the black ambient crowd, the name maybe? The misanthropic intent? The blackened past? Whatever it is, it's a bit misleading, because the sound of the Vomit Orchestra couldn't be further removed from metal. And it's not really all that mean or frightening. It's dark, sure, mysterious and ominous maybe, but hardly overtly evil sounding. If anything, it's more of some sort of fuzzy abstract ambience, there are guitars here and there, but they mostly pick out simple sad melodies or are smeared into blurry streaks. For the most part, the world of VO is a dark deliriously dreamy, electronic organic hybrid, haunting soundscapes that veer from whispery drone and whir, to caustic abrasive crunch, but spending most of its time in the former.
The record opens with a maniacal mechanical toy orchestra intro, that quickly gives way to a dreamy looped ambience not unlike Jeck or Basinski, with a distinctly fuzzy sepia toned old timey feel. The rest of the record plays like a midnight wander through some strange funhouse, room after room of bizarre sights and strange sounds, disembodied female vocals drift and hover over snippets of a man speaking, her voice like a Theremin, weaving minor key melodies in a wide open black space, stabs of atonal organ, warble and whir amidst a fluctuating field of reverb and damaged delay, a downtuned guitar and what sounds like a harp play some sort of angular funereal duet, lovely but slightly off sounding, fuzzy guitars are looped into odd harmonies and hypnotic rhythms, the record finally closes with an epic 23 minute trawl though a dark tunnel, surrounded on all sides by creepy sounds, obscured melodies, buzzing noise, jagged shards of crumbling drone, mysterious fragmented riffing, with occasional stretches of simple strummed tranquility, lasting only seconds before some other ghastly sound or soul stirring sonic spirit wraps its bony fingers around your neck...
So great!
MPEG Stream: "Dying"
MPEG Stream: "Scraping The Pipe"
MPEG Stream: "A Dirty Glass Ceiling"

VULTURE CLUB, THE Live Young, Die Fast And Leave An Exquisite Corpse (Utech) cd 14.98
The first Vulture Club cd-r was the ultimate man vs. machine battle royale, with the machine winning. A record where the instruments called the shots, an army of guitars and amplifiers, marching across a blackened bloody battlefield littered with the corpses of musicians, the masters now bone and blood, the guitars and amps allowed to ring out, reverberate, to unfurl epic swaths of rumbling, crumbling feedback flecked drone. And we loved it!
The ultimate doomdrone sound, no riffs, no rhythms, just the sound of steel strings vibrating, amplified, played back at incredible volume, in turn causing the strings to vibrate, and the cycle continued... Another one of those sounds that is practically perfect unadorned, we could listen to an E chord ringing out through a wall of Marshall stacks FOREVER. But at some point, the amps and guitars that make up Vulture Club, decided more could be done with their buzz and drone, so they did the unthinkable, they recruited players, musicians, they chose not to give up their freedom, but to work together with their former masters, to create a new world of sound, a world where the guitars and the amplifiers were still in control, but the musicians were able to coax certain sounds from the guitars, to gently bend necks, stretch strings, fret certain notes, and thus, we have Live Young, Die Fast And Leave An Exquisite Corpse. The sound is still dronedirgedoomsludge but just like the debut, that sound is stretched to its absolute limit, a soundworld where notes and chords mean less than timbre and tone, melody is supplanted by power, you can feel the sound more than hear it. BUT, for this new disc (a real cd this time), the action ante has been upped just a bit. Instead of letting the guitars just buzz endlessly, the droning distortion is more dynamic, with percussive attacks, and extended decays, notes and chords barely visible in their flatlined form, the sound pulsates and throbs, creating unintentional rhythms, guitars unleash simple tones which are wrapped in layer after layer of distortion, and allowed to slowly crumble to bits, revealing all the secret tonal color inside. It's all very subtle, this still sounds like a room full of amps cranked to ten, with guitars run through distortion pedals and leaned up against the amps, the sound a glorious low end cacophony, but repeated listening, deep listening, reveals an amazing amount of subtle sonic variation beneath the glacial whirs and buzzing blur. Vulture Club is the sound of SUNNO)))'s and Earth's colliding, the music of black holes, the sound of guitar and amplifier joined in the unholiest of unions, an absolutely glorious sound indeed!
MPEG Stream: "Ancient Nun Stripped Bare Her Head Exploding Foreign Deserts Even"
MPEG Stream: "Intro To Ghost In A Foxhole"
MPEG Stream: "Live Young, Die Fast And Leave An Exquisite Corpse"

YUKIKO, KUWABARA Kuwabara Yukiko to Anata (Tiliqua) cd 24.00
Yet another release in Tiliqua's Erotic Oriental Sunshine series of Japanese erotic music from the sixties and seventies. We reviewed Kokotsu No Sekai from Japanese sexy action heroine Ike Reiko a few lists back, as well as a long lost release from seventies bondage / S&M queen Naomi Tani, whose record was issued to commemorate her withdrawal (ahem) from the world of porn.
Now we have another gem, this time from Japanese "Play Girl" Kuwabara Yukio, who in addition to starring in a handful of films, and posing for various fashion and nudie magazines, made her mark most notably as the star of the erotic action series "Play Girl" which ran for 5 years and nearly 300 episodes! Yowza! That's a lot of erotic action for sure.
Yukio only released a single album, this one, in 1971, another titillating example of Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular Asian music of the time, sexed up with chanteuse like crooning, and most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion.
On Kuwabara Yukiko to Anata, Yukio coos and purrs over a lush bed of Lawrence Welk strings, sexy smokey sax, playful vibraphone melodies, and flamenco melodies. Soft and easy, swinging from big band jazz ballads, to spaghetti western twang, to champagne bubble waltzes, with soaring strings and shuffling percussion, muted Wes Montgomery-like guitar and that slow moaning sax.
Much like the Tani disc, Yukio, lays way back, spending as much time lounging quietly as she does whispery sexily in our ears. Only occasionally does her kitten-like purr escalate into downright moaning and groaning, instead, she spends most of the time, doing her best Birkin or Bardot, sing speaking what can only be sexy tales and subtle come-ons.. Oh la la!!!
Wonderfully wild and kitschy, and oh so sexy!
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, saucy nude photos of Yukio on the cover, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 1300 copies pressed. Already almost sold out, these will most likely be our last copies...
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"
MPEG Stream: "Three"

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AMORT Weird Tales (Orobas) cassette 4.00
This cassette just showed up in the mail one day, with a short note asking us if we wanted to sell it in the store. Hard to tell what it would sound like: band called Amort, two songs, cover image an oil painting of wild horses, very striking, but still no clear sonic picture. The tape came wrapped in a flyer, with the words "Slow end sonic destruction" printed in thick black letters across the top. Our first clue...
So we threw it on, and were first greeted with the sound of lilting piano, notes hanging suspended in wide open expanses of near silence, but soon that piano was joined by a slow lava like flow of glacial riffing, a downtuned low end thob, a la SUNNO))), Earth, Corrupted, but draped over a delicate slowcore background, then in came some incredibly low, gurgling vocals, and suddenly all was revealed to us, gloriously hauntingly beautiful slowcore sludge. The massive riffing and monstrous vocals, drift in and out, often leaving just a lilting minor key guitar, to gently pick out the melody, hushed and minimal, like some sort of super abstract post rock, before the guitars pour back in and the vocals croak forth, but even at its heaviest and sludgiest, it's strangely pretty, the melody a minor key lament, the sound more murky and muddy than pummeling and heavy, like Corrupted covering Low maybe... The tempo gets upped a notch or two, sounding like the band might lurch into full on rocking, but instead, the riff just loops over and over, becoming more of a rhythmic drone than an any sort of actual rock riff, eventually fading to black.
Side two creeps along similar ground, beginning with abstract minor key guitar figures, allowed to unfurl and drift through an empty space, joined by simple piano, before launching into a slow motion ambient doom, all burnt out guitar and reverb drenched vocals. Very reminiscent of the Tomb Of... cassette, a strange melding of abstract ambient piano and dirgey doom drenched sludge. The interesting thing about Amort is there are no drums, this is all just huge walls of guitar, harsh demonic vocals, and tinkling piano, on the second track, the guitar becomes weirdly harmonized, creating super tense harmonic melodies, like some displaced Iron Maiden lick, slowed down to 2 or 3 rpm. This track two sort of wanders back and forth between forlorn slow motion cabaret, just piano and undistorted guitar, and pummeling drone doom crush. But in the hands of Amort, they sound so perfect together. The ultimate post rock downer doom...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!!

DEAD REPTILE SHRINE Sabbat (Skulls Of Heaven) cassette 5.98
We talk quite a bit about our favorite weirdest black metal bands here: Furze, Necrofrost, Spektr, Striborg, Circle Of Ouroborus, Benighted Leams. Urfaust, Rehtaf Ruo, Wold, the weirder the better. But one of the weirdest, and most amazing, hails from Finland, the home to most of our favorite weird music, black metal or otherwise, and goes by the curious monicker Dead Reptile Shrine.
With only one full length (now sadly out of print, with no plans to repress) and one split (with fellow Finnish BM weirdoes Torturium), and a bunch of impossible to find cd-r's, this might just be the year of the Dead Reptile Shrine. A new cd coming on Skulls Of Heaven (the label run by the guys in Davenport) as well as a new DOUBLE cd coming out on our own Andee's tUMULt label, but until then, we've got this super limited tape to tide us over.
Sabbat is not so much a proper DRS album as it is some sort of black pagan ritual, a sonic incantation to the dark spirits, incorporating feedback, samples, bits of metal bowed and struck, percussion, as well as random bits of electronic interference and damaged tape manipulation.
On first listen, this could be lumped in with other noiserockers, Merzbow, Wolf Eyes and the like. But this is Dead Reptile Shrine, their approach to noise is unlike the others', this is black, but not black metal, this is some pagan ritual performed in a forest clearing, beneath a sky rife with falling stars, the moonlight painting the trees silver, the sound coming out of busted amps and rusted speakers, glowing like some portal to hell. Thick squalls of detuned guitar and amp buzz, blown out fuzz and murky low end rumble, twisted into strange and haunting shapes, beneath it all, a gentle stream of plinking plonking FX, whispery whirs and outer space warble, rhythms surface and drift apart, drones explode into jagged shards of white noise before settling back into a cavernous throb. Strange incantations, snippets of schoolyard song, intercepted radio broadcasts, all tangled up into super distorted riffing, and bursts of abstract guitar growl. Freaked out and FUCKING AWESOME!!!
LIMITED TO 166 COPIES. Not sure if we'll be able to get more once these are gone....

MUINAINEN RUHTINAS Tuskanvuorten Valtaistuin (Tour De Garde) cassette 5.98
Once again, further evidence that the Finnish underground is populated by more than freak forest gnomes and droney hypno psych-rockers...
There is a whole black underworld, a land of evil underground forests swathed in clouds of buzzing riffs, beneath the snowy peaks, and wide expanses of undisturbed woodland, there is a mysterious black cavern, peopled by corpsepainted metal warriors, spikes and leather everywhere, the trees are black with soot, and the sky is lit by firelight, where blurry blasts of black metal wreath this lost world in a hazy hellish glow.
Amidst these black warriors, lurk this particular horde, the tongue twistingly monickered Muinainen Ruhtinas, who spew a gloriously murky and midtempo, raw and primitive black metal. Raw, Finnish, black metal, that should be enough for most of you, Beherit, Uncreation's Dawn, Clandestine Blaze, Pest, that glorious raw buzzing sound, but Muinainen Ruhtinas infuse that raw buzz, with a strange forlorn melodic melancholy. As sad sounding and despondent as it is buzzing and black, minor key and mournful, strangely haunting with deep chantlike vocals buried in the mix, and a warm fuzzy moodiness that seems to wrap every bit of black buzz in thick dreamlike murk.
LIMITED TO 666 COPIES!!!!

TOMB OF... ...The Rotting Break (Tour De Garde) cassette 5.98
Finally back in stock!!
Of all the weird black metal tapes we've gotten recently, this just may be our absolute favorite. So much so, that Andee already emailed the the band to see if they wanted to do a record for tUMULt.
The best way we can think of to describe Tomb Of... is maybe something like a black metal George Winston. Or Nortt making a record for Windham Hill. That's right. This is ambient funeral doom music, death, depression, misery, sorrow, but the instrumentation is mostly just piano and vocals! Seriously. And it still manages to sound bleak and miserable. Ominous and a little bit scary. Mournful minor key piano melodies beneath harsh hellish black metal vocals and rumbling guttural growls. Way in the distance soft swirls of faux strings or thick swells of sound, occasional guitar leads. It almost sounds like a mash up, the sound is at first so incongruous. But the more you listen, the more it sounds perfect. It makes all other singer songwriters, perched at their piano, seem totally pointless and inconsequential. This is so bleak and black and emotional. A super personal miserable missive from some dark lonely place.
Fucking awesome.
SUPER LIMITED! ONLY 300 COPIES!!!

UNO ACTU Inexistence (Tour De Garde) cassette 5.98
We love us some black ambience, whether it's the self flagellating soundscaping of Abruptum, the strange piano based minimalism of Tomb Of..., the cinematic creeepiness of the Vomit Orchestra, it's bracing to discover a world of ambient music, of spare and sparse soundscapes, that are as ominous and dark, as brutal and as black as any of the more riff based musicks.
Thus we have this tape from the very mysterious Uno Actu, so mysterious in fact we haven't really been able to find out much about them other than the fact that they are Canadian. Uno Actu offer up a dense and varied occult alchemical ambient ritual. Bits of black metal surface here and there, with growled guttural vocals, and downtuned rumble, but the core of Inexistence is a drifting shimmer, slightly metallic, a deep resonant reverberation, that slowly slithers through some dark sonic underworld, disrupted by bursts of speaker shredding low end buzz, creaking industrial percussion, thick swaths of crumbling low end drone, strange looped rhythms, it's ominous, and dark, and creepy, but also strangely pretty, even at its most abrasive, the sound is very dreamlike and abstract, muted and murky, mysterious melodies drift amidst thick peals of feedback, disembodied voices float and flutter before sinking into the morass, tribal drums beat out a pattern over a fuzzy cinematic backdrop, huge moaning foghorns spin thick murky webs of sound over the muted crash of some imaginary surf...
Very intense and lovely, dark and dreamlike, black and blissful. A new black ambient favorite for sure...
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!

WORK/DEATH Teenage Heavy Metal Revisionism (I Just Live Here) cassette 4.98
There's some sort of competition going on in the cassette tape underground. There's nothing new about elaborate packaging, the weirder and wilder and more extravagant the better, but things are getting, well... dangerous.
Recently we reviewed a tape by UK doomlords Moss, each one packaged in a huge metal sculpture, most adorned with nails and chains and gears and all manner of sharp metal bits (don't ask, those are LONG GONE). Somehow though, the packaging fit the music perfectly.
Now we have the latest from the strangely monickered Work/Death, the brilliantly titled Teenage Heavy Metal Revisionism, and the packaging, well, it manages to outdo the Moss in one important way, it's MUCH SHARPER. We mean it, the first time we picked one of these up, we sort of started and dropped it, unprepared were we for the strange sensation of nails on the soft skin of our hands. It's a regular old tape, in a plain old tape case, but each side has a little mini-bed of nails, really sharp nails, tied up tight with twine. Very imposing and threatening looking. And again, somehow, the sharp and twine-y outer shell suits the music within.
A dark, rumbling, scraping and creaking cavernous journey through some post industrial low end wasteland. Sort of ambient, but also brutal, and aggressive, harsh and harrowing. Metallic percussion peppers a snarling swirling black soundscape, streaked with shards of feedback and crumbling black melodies. Thick blown out fuzz churns and roils, as if Wolf Eyes and Black Boned Angel were boiled down and placed in a huge black iron pot to simmer. Or like some sort of caveman Einsturzende... a million black suns slowly dying and spreading out, coating everything in thick, viscous blackness...
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!! We got about 15, and be warned, it's VERY SHARP, so if you do damage to yourself, we are not responsible, and if you order this with other stuff, it will have to be properly padded and secured to keep it from damaging any of the other items in your order, and in some cases that might bump up you shipping a tiny bit, but it's so worth it!

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ADORED, THE A New Language (V2) cd 14.98
Who has a giant ol' soft spot for really good power pop? We sure do!! And this LA band are definitely speaking our language. Influenced by the Brit excellence of The Buzzcocks and The Jam, The Adored follow in the punchy footsteps of mighty aQ fave popsters Silver Sun, Fallout Boy and Seattle's sadly defunct Pure Joy. We particularly were suckers for the vocals which bore a striking resemblance to the latter band's lead singer Rusty Willoughby. Anyways, if a heapin' serving of buoyant harmonies, snappy hooks and crunchy electric guitars are what you crave, this band has 'em all in abundant supply. Absolute fun!
MPEG Stream: "We Don't Want You Around"
MPEG Stream: "Hold-up!"

ALLEN, LILY Alright, Still... (Capitol) cd 10.98
Hurrah! Now released domestically for a fraction of the import price!
At the crossroads of Kylie Minogue, Bebel Gilberto, Puffy Ami Yumi and Lady Sovereign sits this lady Ms Lily Allen. What does that mean? Sleek girlish fun, of course! Have to say though that the cover art made us a bit wary. With all the bling, lightning bolts and boomboxes it looks like it fell out of the pages of Vice Magazine. This is a candy-colored, gleeful tilt-a-whirl of an album! One weird listening moment came during the intro to the eighth song. We actually were expecting her to break into a little Cat Stevens, but she didn't. The tune "Littlest Things" does seem suspiciously infused with "Wild Life"-ness. It's almost as though she removed Stevens' vocals and lyrics and dropped her own over top. That oddness aside, ya gotta stick with her 'cause the flouncin' final track "Alfie" just might be the best! Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!
MPEG Stream: "Alfie"
MPEG Stream: "Littlest Things"

ATOMIC ROOSTER Death Walks Behind You... Plus (Akarma) cd 16.98
OK, last list we dealt with the Frijid Pink, now here's another important example of early proto-heaviness for us to *finally* list on our site. And they too have a funny name -- Atomic Rooster! This album, from 1971 (natch), is probably their best and most significant (though their next LP In Hearing Of is also up there too). Death Walks Behind You was the band's second album, but their first with new drummer Paul Hammond and new guitarist John DuCann (aka John Cann), who had previously played in psych outfits Andromeda, The Attack, and others. He's best known though for his stint in Atomic Rooster -- though we really wish there were decent reissues available of his and Hammond's post-AR band Hard Stuff for us to list, they're one of proto-metal's best kept secrets! But while DuCann brings a lot to this album with his guitar playing and singing, the real star of the show remains organist and main songwriter Vincent Crane, who had founded the band originally in 1969 with his former Crazy World Of Arthur Brown bandmate Carl Palmer (who split from Atomic Rooster after their debut to join up with Emerson and Lake, y'know). Vincent Crane's Hammer horror Hammond organ and piano playing has a lot to do with this record's doomy quality. Though they never took it to the extreme that Black Sabbath did, Atomic Rooster -- and this album in particular, from its title and creepy William Blake cover painting to the gloomy, yet groovy music itself -- certainly made good use of the spooky/dark/evil/occult vibe that later became a staple of the heavy metal genre. Eight bleak and bombastic tracks here, laced with lots of that good ol' "hairy funk" as DJ Andy Votel would put it. As far as heavy duty organ-based prog/psych goes, you've got to give it up to Atomic Rooster!!
NB. this new digipack reissue is called Death Walks Behind You... PLUS on account of featuring four extra bonus tracks, BBC sessions most of 'em. So, twelve tracks total. Cool!
MPEG Stream: "Death Walks Behind You"
MPEG Stream: "Tomorrow Night"

BATHTUB SHITTER Shitter At Salzgitter (Live In Germany 2004) (Power It Up) cd 12.98
What else to say about Bathtub Shitter at this point? We've gushed and gushed in review after review. If you're a loyal AQ list reader, you probably know all there is to know about these guys. But for those of you who have somehow missed out on the goofy grind glory that is Bathtub Shitter, check the AQ website to read all about Japan's masters of shitgrind! But in a nutshell, BS are a whirling blast of super technical downtuned metallic grind, with plenty of groove and surf rock (!) and any other weird musical bits they choose to incorporate. Fast and furious and sometimes funny. A buzzing blasting metallic maelstrom, topped with some of the coolest, weirdest vocals EVER! A grunting guttural death metal growl, gurgling and demonic, but that in the blink of an eye, can suddenly switch into hysterical falsetto, like a screeching cheerleader, or a yapping lap dog. So weird, but somehow so goddamn perfect too. They are Japanese after all, and seemingly any idea that sounds too ridiculous or dumb, can be pulled off by a Japanese band without even breaking a sweat.
Shitter At Salzgitter was recorded in Germany back in 2004 and features tons of BS 'hits': "War Of World Is Words", "Bathtub Shitter", "Fuck Hip Raper" and the brilliantly titled "Everybody Has The Wet"!
Nothing dramatically different, just some alternate versions of your Shitter faves as well as a handful of killer tunes you probably haven't heard. Between song banter is always the best part of a live record, and while BS keep it to a minimum, it's cool to hear the songs introduced in either haltingly polite English or raspy monster growls, sometimes both!! Rumor is these guys will make it over here this year so we can experience this stuff LIVE!! We can't wait.
ALL HAIL THE 'SHITTER!!!
MPEG Stream: "Holy Song For You"
MPEG Stream: "Wall Of World Is Words"
MPEG Stream: "Bathtub Shitter"
MPEG Stream: "Everybody Has The Wet"

BEIRUT Lon Gisland (Ba Da Bing) cd ep 6.98
Here's a new five song ep from Balkan gypsy music revisionists Beirut! Mainman Zach Condon has picked right up from where his luminous debut album Gulag Orkestar left off... and he's assembled a full band in the process! You might recall that A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trosk provided musical support on the album. This ep is comprised of four new songs and an alternate full band version of "Scenic World" (which originally appeared on the album). If you dig the abovementioned A Hawk And A Hacksaw, you're probably already familiar with their pals and collaborators Beirut (and vice versa). If not, what're you waiting for? Wonderful stuff!
MPEG Stream: "Elephant Gun"
MPEG Stream: "Carousels"

BIANCHI, MAURIZIO & TH26 Arkaeo Planum (Small Voices) cd 16.98
It seems that Maurizio Bianchi will collaborate with anybody these days. We can recall the Italian Industrial pioneer working with the likes of Aube, Telepherique, Land Use, Telepherique, Hitoshi Kojo (whose M.B. collaboration Epidemic Symphony was definitely one the forgotten gems of 2006), and now TH26, an Italian project with only a handful of obscure recordings dating back to the mid-'90s. Many of Bianchi's contemporary collaborations have resulted in teeth-gnashing drones reflecting the existentially torn metaphors of Bianchi's work from the early '80s (which for our money is miles above the work of Whitehouse, Merzbow, and Ramleh back in the day). But in working with TH26, Bianchi appears to be expressing an entirely new facet of his musical vocabulary, that of rhythm. Arkaeo Planum begins with a skittering post-Autechre breakbeat augmented with fragments of smoldering noise strewn about its rhythmic underbelly. Bianchi and TH26 slowly dive into subterranean depths on the next track which features a much more lugubrious crawl for rhythm, drenched in a reverb that expands into an eerie network of Schniztler drones, thudding piano, and fizzing pixilations channelled into focused beams of searing noise. If anything, the tracks on Arkaeo Planum might parallel the final works of Coil with their synthetic sourced sidereal, dark overtures...
MPEG Stream: "Aereo Planum"
MPEG Stream: "Arkaeo Planum"

BOATS, THE Tomorrow Time (Moteer) cd 15.98
The Boats come sailing back with their third full length, and their music is as lovely as ever. Tomorrow Time commences with an unfurling of soft droning veils embroidered with delicate glitch. Drowsy processed vocals slow drift along stepping gracefully around the raindrop chimes and piano keys. In stark contrast to all of this aural dreaminess are the surprisingly negative toned song titles. Geez, they're so downright harsh and jarring when taken in combination with the sweet sweet music that you might want to avert your eyes, and simply let your ears soak in the sounds.
MPEG Stream: "May Our Enemies Never Find Happiness"
MPEG Stream: "You're An Idiot"

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY Lay & Love (Drag City) cd ep 5.98
Another 'enhanced single' to add to your ever-mushrooming Bonnie Prince Billy library! Who came up with that term anyways?! Enhanced!? Its dictionary definition is "to increase or improve in value, quality, desirability, or attractiveness". Sounds appealing, if somewhat subjective, doesn't it? Here it simply means "includes a video".
Anyways, the title track "Lay & Love" comes from BPB's most recent full length The Letting Go. It features lovely guest vocals by Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy. That tune is accompanied by two non-album tracks "Senor" and "Going To Acapulco". No big bells and whistles nor surprises, just ol' reliable Oldham goodness that needs no 'enhancing'.
MPEG Stream: "Senor"
MPEG Stream: "Going To Acapulco"

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY Lay & Love (Drag City) 12" 6.98
Another little single to add to your ever-mushrooming Bonnie Prince Billy library! Includes the title track "Lay & Love" which comes from BPB's most recent full length The Letting Go and features lovely guest vocals by Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy. That tune is accompanied by two non-album tracks "Senor" and "Going To Acapulco". No big bells and whistles nor surprises, just ol' reliable Oldham goodness.
MPEG Stream: "Senor"
MPEG Stream: "Going To Acapulco"

BOREDOMS Super Roots (Vice) cd 12.98
Vice magazine may be most (in)famous for their magazine, especially the always enjoyable Do's & Don't's, but you've also got to hand it to their record label arm for championing the one and only Boredoms on this side of the Pacific. First they brought us the US edition of the Boredom's latest album Seadrum/House Of Sun, now they're reissuing the semi-legendary Super Roots series! So far, installments 1, 3 and 5. Eventually 6 and beyond (we hear tell that SR 9 is currently in the works, over in Japan). Er, what about 2 and 4 you're wondering? Well, Super Roots 2 was a limited edition promotional 3" cd ep only available with purchase of the Japanese release of Chocolate Synthesizer, and for the life of us we can't recall what the deal was (or wasn't) with Super Roots 4, actually we don't think it ever existed!
Confused? Well if you're not a hardcore Bore-fan, you might not even know what the heck the Super Roots discs are all about. Well, they were (are) sort of a series of between-album experiments wherein the Bore-crew goes off to explore some weird tangents... as hard as it is to imagine anything MORE experimental and weird than "regular" Boredoms albums themselves!!
And only Super Roots 1 and 6 were ever previously released in the USA, back when the Boredoms were still, in some Lollapalooza related hangover, seen by major label Reprise as being a reasonable investment! So 3 and 5, having only been available before as expensive Japanese imports, are going to be new to a lot of folks... and it's about time you heard 'em!! Seriously, if you're into any sort of psychedelic drone excess from the underground bands that we're constantly freaking on and on about some limited edition cd-r by, or love love love you some Boris, not to mention the likes of the Boredom's own kraut-drone masterpiece Super Ae and subsequent albums, you're gonna NEED to hear Super Roots 3 and Super Roots 5, they'll make you feel GOOD.
Oh and what about Super Roots 1? SR1 first came out in 1993. It's pretty short, just over 19 minutes, and features 14 brief tracks, in the spastic, chaotic style of "old" Boredoms, before they got all tranced-out and cosmic (a change we feel the Super Roots series was the catalyst for). But this was at the beginning (Super Roots wasn't a series yet, this is actually titled Super Roots, without the 1), and it really did sound like their "roots" -- lots of percussive bashing, fits of screaming and yelping, ridiculous horn tooting, and suchlike craziness. The Boredoms we knew and loved, but had heard plenty at the time. So listening to it now, without Soul Discharge, Pop Tatari, or Chocolate Synthesizer as fresh in our minds, it's sounding pretty nifty! A nice reminder of the variety of wacky pleasures the Boredoms used to bring in their "youth".
MPEG Stream: "Budokan Tape Try (500 Tapes High)"
MPEG Stream: "Monster Rex & S*und 'A' R*undus"

BRAINBOMBS Stinking Memory (Anthem) 7" 5.98
We thought we had heard the last of these Swedish musical miscreants with their Stigma Of The Ripper 7" on tUMULt a while back, but according to the band, these two tracks here are actually their last will and testament, the band have finally officially called it quits, with various members continuing on in their own perverse musical pursuits.
And a fitting way to end it. Nothing new or spectacularly different, just more of that murk, filthy, jazzy garage sludge we have come to know and love. A simple riff, doused in distortion and played through some beat up old amp, repeated over and over and over, mantra like, hypnotic and disturbing, the drums propulsive and motorik, a horn bleating and skronking within the murk and mire, while the vocals, delivered in a totally detached deadpan drawl, recount tales of fucking and sucking, rape and incest, and all manner of sexual depravity and ultra violence.
"Stinking Memory" is perfect Brainbombs, a simple riff, ultra fucked up lyrics, some damaged jazz skronk, all wrapped in a thick production of murky muddiness, and pounded out relentlessly, a damaged demented scuzzy filthy garage rock stomp. "Insects" is even better, taking the stomp of side 1 and blowing out the guitar even more, sounding impossible catchy while getting even filthier, every spare bit of space filled up with tangled scrabbling angular guitar solos, so convoluted and dense, they seem to just add another layer of noisy buzz to the proceedings.
God, we're gonna miss these guys...
LIMITED TO 377 COPIES!

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE Feel Good Lost (Arts & Crafts / Noise Factory) 2lp 21.00
NOW ON VINYL!
Here is the much anticipated reissue of Broken Social Scene's debut album. It's a much more stylistically even-keeled work than their highly acclaimed You Forgot It In People. More moody and post-rocky than its shimmery and poppy follow up. The atmosphere is mysterious and vaporous with interwoven electronic down tempo grooviness, shimmering guitar string plucking, and slinking basslines. A perfect late night drive album if your vehicle just happens to be a hovercraft that can handle the freeways as well as the ocean.
MPEG Stream: "I Slept With Bonhome At The CBC"
MPEG Stream: "Love And Mathematics"

BUNYAN, VASHTI Lookaftering (DiCristina Stair Builders) lp 14.98
NOW ON VINYL!
The new album from an absolutely timeless ageless folk music beauty!
If you fell in love with Ms Bunyan's Just Another Day album from 1970 (reissued recently on cd and lp!) as we did, you've probably been tingling with anticipation over the news that over three decades later she'd returned to the recording studio. Really, it's almost as though she never left. It's almost spooky! We caught a brief, but oh-so-pleasing glimpse of the present-day Vashti when she did an unexpected collaboration with Animal Collective (the resulting recordings were released as a cdep titled "Prospect Hummer"). Now we get a full album's worth of her wonderfulness and she's joined by some youngsters named Joanna and Devendra. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Lately"
MPEG Stream: "Feet Of Clay"

CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH Some Loud Thunder (self-released) cd 14.98
When talk of this band comes up in conversation, some folks around here do indeed clap their hands and say "Yeah!" Others cross their arms and say "Meh." Some make a fist and say "Fuck no!" And still others simply scratch their heads and wonder what the fuss is all about. Sooo, with whom will you be sharing your Valentine's sweets this year? Not sure? Well, perhaps the new self-released album from these exclamatory tweaked popsters will help you decide. A sizable deciding factor definitely seems to be band leader Alec Ounsworth's winsome vocals which might be endearingly nasal in a David Byrne sort of way to some, and shrilly whining to others. Produced by Dave Fridmann, Some Loud Thunder is the sophomore release by this Brooklyn, NY quintet.
MPEG Stream: "Satan Said Dance"
MPEG Stream: "Underwater (You And Me)"

CLINIC Visitations (Domino) cd 14.98
Clinic will never be accused of drastically changing their sound. In fact their last few records kind of turn into a blur as it's hard to distinguish one from the other. That said they have their sound down to a science and do it very well. Visitations is another album of short concise songs that blast their way into that driving, foot stomping territory that they've become known for. Kind of like if Can were still around and had to make records for the A.D.D. generation, requiring all the songs to be around 3 minutes, catchy and to the point. We still think Clinic are a really good band, and this is by no means a bad record, it's actually pretty great, we just wish they would push themselves a bit and explore some new territory.
MPEG Stream: "Harvest (Within You)"
MPEG Stream: "Family"

DEEP WOUND Almost Complete (Baked Goods) cd 15.98
Hard to believe that before the blown out, guitar hero, indie psych jangle of Dinosaur Jr, J Mascis was actually a drummer, who spent most of his time drumming in Satanic punk metal combo Upsidedown Cross, and legendary punk rockers Deep Wound!
But it wasn't just Mascis, Sebadoh mainman Lou Barlow was there too, both kicking up a shitstorm in this short lived, but kick ass outfit.
This is furious old skool punk rock, but with those two you know things would still be, well, a bit melodic. And it is, Catchy and heavy, fast and furious, the seeds of things to come...
Killer songs, tight musicianship, and yeah, we're still talking about punk rock here. While Deep Wound obviously have a bit of that classic Boston HC sound, falling somewhere between fellow Beantown brethren Siege & DC stalwarts Void, their sound wasn't quite as chaotic or over the top, but definitely just as full of conviction.
Sure, Deep Wound featured some soon-to-be indie superstars, but it wouldn't matter anyway, cuz Deep Wound stand completely on their own -- underrated though they may be -- in the first-wave-of-American-Hardcore. An essential release for sure. Better than the old cd version with new artwork and a bunch of extra songs!
Now somebody sort out a super deluxe Upsidedown Cross reissue and we'll be happy!
And also, we should note that Mascis HAS been back behind the drumkit recently, in AQ fave doomsters Witch!
MPEG Stream: "I Saw It "
MPEG Stream: "Sisters"
MPEG Stream: "Pressure"
MPEG Stream: "Training Ground"

DEERHUNTER Cryptograms (Kranky) cd 14.98
This band from Atlanta is sure to create quite a stir this year with their sophomore release and their first outing for Kranky. Don't be expecting the usual Kranky fare with this one, as Deerhunter posses a distinct flair for taking their music in all sorts of directions. As influenced by blissed out and spacey drones as they are rocking momentum and pop sensibility, it's kind of like an early Factory band doing covers of songs from the first couple U2 records. We could see this creating the same kind of refreshing splash that Broken Social Scene did a few years back as this is a record with enough texture to reel in more experimental minded folks but with enough pizzaz and sleek rock moments to win over the indie-rock crowd. Really good!
MPEG Stream: "Cryptograms"
MPEG Stream: "Red Ink"

DER TPK (TEENAGE PANZERKORPS) Harmful Emotions (Siltbreeze) lp 13.98
What's the connection between the seemingly defunct Jewelled Antler collective and the legendary Siltbreeze label? What do Teenage Panzer Corps and Der TPK have in common? More than you might think. Some might remember a couple killer cd-r's released on the Pink Skulls label, the sort of weirdo subsidiary of Jewelled Antler, by a band called Teenage Panzer Corps, featuring Bunker Wolf, Catholic Pat, Edmund Xavier and Boy True -- AKA various members of The Birdtree, The Knit Separates, Blithe Sons, Skygreen Leopards, Thuja and more...
The sound was distinctly unlike any of the Jewelled Antler stuff, raucous, droney, arty garagey punk rawk. Loud (or at least distorted), not too fast, and Teutonically snotty, referencing '80s downer artpunk (The Fall, Factory Records stuff I guess or maybe some of Savage Republic's tracks), and '60s garage with fuzz organ, as well as noise rock and krautrock. Noisy breaks, abrupt edits, and poppy grooves all tangled up into short sharp stabs aggro art punk, with clangy angular guitars, stumbling drums, lo-fi production and German vocals.
Well Der TPK is what the Panzer Corps are now calling themselves, and somehow they've wound up on Siltbreeze, which ends up being a pretty good fit. Some of the tracks are a little more drone-y and krauty, a bit more dubbed out, but still wild and noisy and punk as fuck. Not sure how much of this is actually new stuff, but at least a handful of tracks are taken from the now out of print cd-r's. Either way, this is essential stuff, fans of any of the aforementioned bands will definitely want to pick this up.
Packaged in plain white sleeves, with purposefully crappy paste on art, and probably pretty damn limited...

EARL SHILTON Two Rooms (Full Of Insects) (Invisible Spies) cd 11.98
BACK IN STOCK ONCE AGAIN!!! This all time AQ fave and former record of the week continues to be super difficult to restock for some reason. But it's here once again, and any one who has yet to discover this disc, for chrissakes, pick it up. Definite contender for our lifetime top ten!! Also, there's a new Earl Shilton expected in the next little while so be prepared! Here's what we had to say about Earl Shilton when it was Record of the Week a long time back:
We somehow knew this was an Aquarius Record of the Week the minute we first laid eyes on it. Well, okay, maybe that's not entirely true. But it had the potential, that much we knew for sure, just from the cover: a huge double bass drumkit, set up in the middle of the forest with the name 'Earl' scrawled on one of the bass drums. A very evocative image, combining our love of heavy rock (the kit), with my personal thing for drums (the kit again) and our love of all things forest-y: nature sounds, field recordings, animal sounds and all that. My mind was reeling. Was it a drummer just playing solos out in the woods? Was it some sort of Jewelled Antler style rock band / field recording hybrid? Or something else entirely? Stranger yet, the song titles were all in German while the label was British. Intriguing. Better give it a listen... Well, the first track revealed very little. A weird minimal rhythmic workout composed entirely of backwards drums and cymbals. Thhwwp....thhhwwwwip...sssssssp.... Very cool, but was that the gist of it? After a minute or so of that, the record exploded into something entirely unexpected -- a crushing metal riff, with weird syncopated drumming, a sort of chunky Pantera / Prong meets the Fucking Champs vibe, with whispered vocals. Then it shifted gears again and entered into a super melodic Carcass-style death metal breakdown with howled black metal vocals before it shifted back to the machine-like opening riff. And then I knew for sure. Record of the Week!
Only later, with some Internet research, did we figure out what the heck was going on. The dedication on the inside to UK death metal crusties Bolt Thrower should have been our first clue, as it turns out that Earl Shilton is a pseudonym for Alex Thomas, former drummer for those very same metalheads. For some unknown reason, Earl Shilton is the name he has assumed for this project "of crushing death metal brutality and total corpse raping necro-blast carnage" as his website puts it. Indeed!
Furthermore, that website tells us that on tour, the band features a quite young, brother and sister rhythm section! Live, Earl steps from behind the kit to handle the guitars and vocals, while the brother plays bass, and the 16 year old sister mans the drums!!! Fuck yeah! This is getting more Record of the Week by the minute, we're thinking! And the music is well worthy too, lest we forget -- Two Rooms (Full Of Insects) is a blasting, hyper complex, super varied blast of metallic mayhem. From motorik, ultra-precise technical riffery, to stop/start math-metal complexity, from grooving, galloping death metal fury, to screeching blasting black metal, from eighties Earache style thrash to modern metallic fury, with all sorts of tripped out breakdowns, fucked up production and some really really weird parts, like the breakdown a little more than halfway through the album where everything drops out except for a simple, quietly played hypnotic tom tom rhythm, joined by backwards, super creepy Orcish vocals, and the hissing backwards drumming that started the record, before the whole thing bursts back into motion, in an explosion of grandioise Maiden-ish metal. Whew, so good. And while it may not be the best (or truest) metal record on this list, it certainly is the weirdest. And the coolest. And certainly the one most suited to being Record of the Week!
MPEG Stream: "Infrarot / European Kanone"
MPEG Stream: "Zwei Raume (Voller Insekten)"
MPEG Stream: "Schlachthaus Rock"
MPEG Stream: "Tu Es.../Entscheidungskampf"

EARLY YEARS, THE s/t (Beggars Banquet) 2cd 13.98
In rapid succession this new British band The Early Years tear more than a few pages out of the mighty textbooks of Neu!, CAN, Bauhaus, Jesus And Mary Chain, Spiritualized, Slowdive, Coldplay and The Doves -- meaning their sound draws hungrily from the krautrock, post-punk, psych/space-rock, shoegazer and more modern Brit rock of yesteryear. Each taken on its own would probably suggest an unforgivable derivativeness -- and occasionally guilty charges do definitely apply here -- but somehow this U.K. band have melted it all together into their own shimmering sound which is clearly nostalgia-stirring yet quite engaging in its own right. Much like their current Beggars Banquet labelmates Film School, this music that they're making is, if not sparkling with originality, at least quite an enjoyable, exceptionally well executed incarnation of their musical forefathers and heroes. Yup, we have to admit we're total suckers for it!
MPEG Stream: "So Far Gone"
MPEG Stream: "Brown Hearts"

EARLY YEARS, THE s/t (Beggars Banquet) lp 11.98
In rapid succession this new British band The Early Years tear more than a few pages out of the mighty textbooks of Neu!, CAN, Bauhaus, Jesus And Mary Chain, Spiritualized, Slowdive, Coldplay and The Doves -- meaning their sound draws hungrily from the krautrock, post-punk, psych/space-rock, shoegazer and more modern Brit rock of yesteryear. Each taken on its own would probably suggest an unforgivable derivativeness -- and occasionally guilty charges do definitely apply here -- but somehow this U.K. band have melted it all together into their own shimmering sound which is clearly nostalgia-stirring yet quite engaging in its own right. Much like their current Beggars Banquet labelmates Film School, this music that they're making is, if not sparkling with originality, at least quite an enjoyable, exceptionally well executed incarnation of their musical forefathers and heroes. Yup, we have to admit we're total suckers for it!
MPEG Stream: "So Far Gone"
MPEG Stream: "Brown Hearts"

FEU THERESE s/t (Constellation) cd 14.98
Yet another somber (mostly) instrumental ensemble from the Godspeed You Black Emperor collective! This new group's sound is distinguished by layers of rich tremoloed guitar, organ drones and jazz inflected horns. Their closest kin in that Montreal music community is easily the heady improv jam driven Fly Pan Am, and their sonic resemblance is no coincidence. Feu Therese is the project of FPA guitarist Jonathan Parant, and as with most every branch of the mighty GYBE tree, folks from the other groups join in. Their self titled debut is a brooding dedication to Luc Ferrari. Five stormy disparate tracks ranging from six to twelve minutes.
MPEG Stream: "Ferrari En Feu"
MPEG Stream: "Tu N'Avais Qu'Une Oreille"

FINCHES, THE Human Like A House (Dulc-i-Tone) cd 14.98
The Finches' Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs and Aaron Morgan follow us their self released debut 6-song ep with this full length. Human Like A House is comprised of some of the gentlest folk pop imaginable. It's a bit more polished and fleshed out with the addition of cello, pedal steel and percussion joining their Spartan vocals, guitar and bass. As charming as their previous release, the dozen tunes are dewy skinned and doe eyed, sort of like the aural equivalent of a Margaret Keane painting.
MPEG Stream: "Human Like A House"
MPEG Stream: "Two Ghosts"

FUNERAL PROCESSION s/t (Van) cd 13.98
By now, avid readers of the AQ list should be well aware of German black metal horde Ruins of Beverast, responsible for one of our favorite black metal records EVER. Then of course there's Nagelfar, the band that came before RoB, who were responsible for another of the greatest black metal records of all time, Virus West. If that weren't enough, these guys also run an amazing record label, responsible for the RoB record, the Nagelfar reissue, the deluxe double lp version of the only release from SF's very own doomlords the Gault, and two brand new releases, the very Ruins Of Beverast-like debut from fellow Germans Kermania, a gorgeously epic chunk of moody melancholy black metal, and this: a soul shearing blast of super blazing Nordic style blackness from another German horde, Funeral Procession.
A fairly long running black metal institution at this point, having formed almost 12 years ago, this is strangely Funeral Procession's first full length, after a clutch of eps and demos, but it was well worth the wait. Fuzzy and blown out, mostly blasting, but with plenty of moody midtempo doomy breakdowns, killer shards of angular guitar, and loud distorted drums all making for strange interludes -- but when whipped into furious blasts, it's tough to beat. Epic and majestic, fast and buzzy, grim and black. It's easy to hear some Mayhem, some Emperor, some Immortal... the elite. And FP are channelling the frosty might of the BM elite through their own uniquely skewed German black filter, bits of creepy militaristic ambience, haunting keyboards, distorted vocals and crumbling soundscapes, moaning chantlike voices, but none of that stuff defines the sound, it's all merely moody window dressing for FP's relentlessly buzzing blast, each track a frosty forlorn squall of black buzz and jagged riffery, blasting beats and howled hellish vocals. Broken up by some depressive doomic plod, but for the most part fast and furious, and fucking great!
MPEG Stream: "Heavenlie Aeons Grimlie Torne Apart"
MPEG Stream: "When Moonshine Is The Only Light"

GAULT, THE Even As All Before Us (Van) 2lp 21.00
Now available on vinyl! Deluxe, double lp in a gatefold sleeve with a patch!!!
Here's what we had to say about this AQ fave:
By now everyone should be familiar with SF black metal legends Weakling. A brief existence, a handful of shows, and a single amazing record (released on Andee's tUMULt label, we should mention). Members of Weakling played in and/or went on to play in Amber Asylum, the Champs, Drunk Horse, Asunder, Sangre Amado, Saros and the short lived but now totally cult blackened gothic doom outfit The Gault. Recorded way back in 1999 by Tim Green, The Gault's Even As All Before Us languished for years before the band finally agreed on a mix and a label, and now five years later this mighty slab of depressive doom finally sees the light of day.
Imagine those Weakling riffs, slowed down and wrapped in dense '80s-ish reverb, smeared and stretched into serpentine minor key melodies, throbbing and pulsing and slithering through midtempo dronescapes of shimmering guitar buzz, creeping basslines, ghostlike female vocals, crashing steady drumming all cloaked in a rich blackened haze, suffocating and claustrophobic, but somehow completely epic at the same time. Think a black metal Joy Division and you might be close, due in no small part to vocalist Ed Kunakemakorn's distinctive wail. Equal parts Ian Curtis, Interpol's Paul Banks and weirdly enough, Dutch weirdo black metallers Urfaust, a soaring mournful croon, rich and velvety and quite haunting. Each track is a twisting complex doomscape of fuzzed out drones, pounding downtuned riffage, swirling psychedelic ambience, slow motion crawl and creep, building and building into massive black swells. A gorgeously creepy collection of heaving, lurching, dark and delicate, doomy and dense epics. So emotional and so totally and completely intense!
MPEG Stream: "Obliscence"
MPEG Stream: "Bright White Blind"

GHOSTS BRAMES OF THE CERF'S MAGICKAL For Every Hang Thy Dreamy Spell, Round Mountain Star And Heather Bell (Ruralfaune) 3" cd-r 8.98
Wow, is that a mouthful. The band is called Ghosts Brames Of The Cerf's Magickal and the record's called For Every Hang Thy Dreamy Spell, Round Mountain Star And Heather Bell. WTF? Nothing there could possibly prepare you for he dreamy drift contained within. GBOTCM is another project of French outfit the Reggaee, who have teamed up with some like minded musical alchemists for a late night ritual of simple guitar strum and strange disembodied percussion. Minor key buzz and twang, stretched out over a murky low end throb, with bits of fluttery flute, a bit of dark and drifting campfire forestfolk, ominous and melancholy, laid back and shadow lit. Eventually, this flickering folks is joined by soft swells of subterranean drone and brief burbles of spacey FX, adding to the dreamy drift but never disrupting the tranquil ambience.
LIMITED TO 49 COPIES!!! Already out of print so act fast...
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 1 "
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 2"

HOLD STEADY, THE Boys & Girls In America (Sabot) lp 12.98
Now available on vinyl!
If you read any rock magazines, Rolling Stone, Spin, whatever, or watch MTV or whatever channel they have now that shows videos, you've probably heard of the Hold Steady by now. This is their second or third record already, but they're only now being touted as the next big thing. But with a weird angle. They've been really pushing the 'bar band' or 'club band' angle. As if every young band didn't spend all their time rocking little clubs all over. But in this case it seems to be more that they 'sound' like a classic American rock band, heartland, beers, and after work parties, old pickups and Pabst Blue Ribbon. That sort of thing. We weren't really sure what to expect, it is on Vagrant after all, so maybe we were feeling a little Get Up Kids or something, but holy shit! This really is modern American roots rock bar rock bandanna rock and roll. Lots of piano and organ, simple drumming, big crashing guitars, and a vocalist who has a weird lazy drawl, and who sort of slurs more than sings. And while that combo is totally infectious, and the songs are hooky as all get out, we don't hear the Replacements and Soul Asylum (Dave Pirner guests on a few tracks!) and other classic Midwest rockers that often get mentioned. Nope. We hear lots of Springsteen, and as hard as it may be to believe, a whole lot of Eddie And The Cruisers!!! Sounds funny but it's true, and in no way is that a bad thing. Bad ass working class rock and roll, every song a tale of workdays and weekends, cars and chicks, life and love, but given a modern day, Vagrant Records, big guitar emorock spit shine, but without losing the rootsy goodness and working man shit kicking get drunk and rock hard vibe. Definitely makes us want to head down to the local watering hole, sidle up to the bar, and spend the night getting sweaty to loud wild rock and roll, and hopefully not going home alone...
MPEG Stream: "Stuck Between Stations"
MPEG Stream: "Chips Ahoy!"
MPEG Stream: "Hot Soft Light"

KERMANIA Ahnenwerk (Van) cd 13.98
By now, avid readers of the AQ list should be well aware of German black metal horde Ruins of Beverast, responsible for one of our favorite black metal records EVER. Then of course there's Nagelfar, the band that came before RoB, who were responsible for another of the greatest black metal records of all time, Virus West. If that weren't enough, these guys also run an amazing record label, responsible for the RoB record, the Nagelfar reissue, the deluxe double lp version of the only release from SF's very own doomlords the Gault, and two brand new releases, the super blazing blackness of Funeral Procession, and this, the very Ruins Of Beverast-like debut from fellow countrymen Kermania!
Much like RoB, Kermania, are as much about atmosphere and mood, ambience and melody, as they are about blackness and buzz. This is massive, epic, sorrowful, melodic black metal. The opening track is almost 25 minutes long, an expansive journey that touches on all sorts of moods and sounds. From the lilting midtempo intro, with swoonsome clean vocals buried way down in the mix and dark, doleful minor key melodies, to some super harsh hateful suicidal black metal buzz, to drone drenched dream folk, to strange militaristic ambience, to full on and furious black thrash, and back again, culminating in a glorious droning, dreamy chantlike blasting black soundscape. And that's just the first song. Most bands would have called it a record after that... but Ahnenwerk still has more than a half hour left to go.
The second track is brief, but just as epic and majestic sounding, a perfect blend of black buzz and mournful melancholia, this time with killer fuzzed out riffing beneath loud, clear vocals, bookended by blasts of utterly harsh grimness. The whole thing suffused with haunting mournful melodicism. The final track is a seasick waltz, a Viking style folky black metal shanty, with clean vocals and acoustic guitars beneath the black buzz.
But before we get to that, there's another 20 minute plus epic to wade through, beginning with simple strummed guitars, the sounds of horses and footsteps, an hypnotic loping drawn out melody, weird processed vocals, a midtempo trawl through dark nights and long forgotten dreams. Dark and dreary and gorgeously miserable. About halfway through the sorrowful trudge suddenly explodes into a hellishly blasting buzz, all fuzzy riffs and lightning fast blast beats, howled demonic vocals, stopping only briefly to shimmer dreamily, before bursting into black action again. Dizzyingly epic and gloriously despondent. Folks who like their metal harsh and hateful, sad and sorrowful, murky and miserable, will feel right at home...
MPEG Stream: "Schwertes Schaerfe Beichtgesang"
MPEG Stream: "Veitersberg 1487"

KHANATE s/t (Daymare) 2cd 27.00
AQ's favorite (and sadly now defunct) purveyors of ultra-doom black sludge get the super deluxe Japanese reissue treatment, this their debut, packaged in a super swank gatefold mini lp-style sleeve, gorgeously printed, with inserts, a Japanese obi, and most importantly a whole extra disc, and we're not talking just an extra track or two, we're talking 47 minutes, a whole 'nother album fer chrissakes, recorded live on WFMU, four looooooong tracks including a killer cover of the Earth classic "German Dental Work". Makes it worth buying all over again!!!
Here's what we had to say about this brutal masterpiece when it first came out way back when:
Khanate = slow, plodding, dark, distortion-filled, droney, dissonant DOOM, in the (sliced and bleeding) vein of Esoteric, Burning Witch, Corrupted, Earth, Boris, Eyehategod...5 looong tracks (56+ minutes total). And if you haven't heard, this doom-metal band is a veritable supergroup of underground dirge-warriors. To start with, Khanate boasts the bass guitar and production of James Plotkin and the "vokills" of Alan Dubin (both former members of Earache avant-metal geniuses OLD, who happen to be one of Allan's all-time favorite bands!). Post-OLD, Plotkin of course went on to become a celebrated experimental-ambient guitarist (recently making a return to "metal" with his great glitch-grind Atomsmasher project), but this is the first we've heard from Dubin since Old's final "Formula" album back in '95. And in addition to these OLD dudes, also in Khanate: guitarist Stephen O'Malley, who you know from his bands SUNNO))) and Burning Witch (as well as for his album art/design for the likes of Emperor, Cathedral, Sigh, Warhorse, Solstice, and many others). Drummer Tim Wyskida is the only unknown (to us) but we're told was at one time a member of Blind Idiot God. Ok, so it's established that Khanate's membership ought to known what they're doing, but do they deliver? Indeed they do! They sound closer to O'Malley's bands than OLD, but Plotkin's presence highlights what we all know: doom-metal can be the HEAVIEST form of ambient music!
RealAudio clip: "Skin Coat"
RealAudio clip: "Under Rotting Sky"

KHANATE Things Viral (Daymare) 2cd 27.00
AQ's favorite (and sadly now defunct) purveyors of ultra-doom black sludge get the super deluxe Japanese reissue treatment, this their pummeling second album, Things Viral, packaged in a super swank gatefold mini lp-style sleeve, gorgeously printed, with inserts, a Japanese obi, and most importantly a whole extra disc, and we're not talking just an extra track or two, we're talking nearly a half hour of gloriously dismal and bleak, doomic sludge, a whole 'nother album (or at least mini album) fer chrissakes! These tracks seem to be culled from the same TV sessions, a brief improv, that gives way to two massive epics, the "No Joy (Remix)" previously only available on a super limited 12", and "Commuted (coda)", a strangely serene, well... coda, to the album's opening track. Awesome! Definitely makes it well worth buying all over again!!!
Here's what we had to say about this brutal masterpiece when it first came out way back when:
Extreme doom here folks. I mean, these four tracks (two of 'em approaching twenty minutes each) are slower and lower and uglier even than the tunes on Khanate's immense self-titled debut from a while back! We're not saying this tops the debut (that would be difficult) but Things Viral takes the Khanate sound into a seldom-explored realm where signs of life and hope are few and far between. This is some sparse, slow, intensely creepy metal for sure. The plod of a drum, some glitchy amplifier feedback, a crushing guitar riff, bass drone...all the perfect accompaniment to the anguished rasp of vocalist Alan Dubin, who turns this record into his own personal let-it-all-out psycho-drama session. As soon as the first track "Commuted" starts, you can imagine the band, broken, bleeding, crawling across the floor of the studio, scrabbling at their instruments, Dubin clutching the microphone like it's his last link to a world of human emotion. It's harrowing, simply put. The ravings of a disturbed man put to music by Earth would be a decent description. Downer metal was never so down, and the clarity with which this was recorded belies the term sludge. Only for the brave -- leave the lights on when you listen to this, and make sure you have the suicide hotline number handy. Includes the track "Dead" previously released on vinyl only as the b-side to the "No Joy [remix]" 12".
MPEG Stream: "Commuted"
MPEG Stream: "Too Close Enough To Touch"

KHANATE Capture & Release / Dead & Live Aktions DVD 2005 (Daymare) cd + dvd 29.00
We figured that since we just got both of the Japanese deluxe Khanate reissues ("s/t" and "Things Viral", both with extra discs!) we oughta get a few of these back in, so in one fell swoop you can pretty much complete your Khanate collection. Still pricey, but cheaper than we had it before, and a great deal when you consider that at one point just the DVD portion (a DVD-R in fact) had been selling on eBay for close to $100!! Here's our earlier review of this massive slab of audio visual dooooom:
Wow, is this exciting! A killer Japanese import, that combines the most recent Khanate release, the lengthy two song Capture and Release, as well as the long out of print and going-for-way-too-much-on-eBay Dead & Live Aktions DVD 2005!! Woo Haa!!! If you missed out, now's your chance. Plus it's in an all new super swanky Japanese style mini gatefold sleeve with an obi and everything!
Here's what we had to say about the cd:
A new Khanate! 'Nuff said perhaps, as all you AQ doom customers surely know what that means! Ultra-depressive dirge metal from some of the best in the biz. Capture & Release, a two-song, 43 minute "ep" (maxi-ep? mini-lp? heck, it's a full-length, really!) is the third cd release from this NYC-based band, featuring Stephen O'Malley from SUNNO))) on guitar and graphics, bassist James Plotkin of OLD, singer Alan Dubin (also from OLD), and drummer Tim Wyskida. By now, Khanate have really established a distinct style of extreme, slow, scary, art-metal. To the point that we're always citing them as a comparison when describing other bands. They're the standard by which anyone indulging in feedback-filled heaviness, anguished/evil vocalizations, creepy atmosphere, double digit song-lengths, and rumbling sub-sonics is judged -- like when we say Bunkur or Graves At Sea (reviewed on this list) are bands in the style of Khanate. So if would be easy to review Capture & Release if it were by *another* band -- we'd say it was a lot like Khanate and that'd be enough to recommend it to many of you! Of course, Khanate themselves can be compared to predecessors Corrupted and especially Eyehategod, godfathers of feedback sludge brutality. But Khanate's compositions are way more extended, dramatically ambitious, and clinically produced than EHG, and utilize "experimental" sonic textures and loud/soft dynamics in the manner of a post-rock band as well. This new disc really exemplified this approach, with the second, 25-minute track "Release" featuring lots of really quiet parts that make us think a hypothetical Khanate / Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore tour would be PERFECT. (We can dream, can't we?) Vocalist Alan Dubin makes the most of these "vulnerabilities" in the band's otherwise crushing sound barrage, with dark, cryptic, and psychologically suggestive rather than explicit lyrics wherein he seems to be inhabiting the role of the deviant antagonist from a Thomas Harris novel...but poetically enough that perhaps we can all relate, and indeed find release in their music.
And here's what we had to say about the DVD:
This captures (and limitedly releases, ha) angsty doom merchants Khanate in the live realm, sometime last year. If you've ever seen this band, you know that they don't exactly 'rock out', having a somewhat static stage presence, though vocalist Alan Dubin always puts on an impassioned performance. Fortunately for those of you who'll be lucky enough to watch this at home, this is a very 'arty' visual document -- the live video footage has been processed to be all the more grim and psychedelic. Cool to look at, while of course the music is murder-by-decibels, feedback-filled, downtuned DOOOOOOOM like you expect.
MPEG Stream: "Capture"

KILGOUR, DAVID The Far Now (Merge) cd 13.98
So good to hear New Zealand's David Kilgour continuing to keep things nice 'n' simple. His sixth full length The Far Now contains more of his high calibre, straightforward singer/songwriter pop tunes in league with The Go-Betweens, Mountain Goats and Robyn Hitchcock. Y'know, that cardigan sweater and argyle sock wearin' intellectual pop songs filled with jangly guitars, wide-eyed innocence and poetic sweetheart hooks that get you... right... there! Ever so gently nails your heartstrings every time.
MPEG Stream: "Sun Of God"
MPEG Stream: "I Cut My Heart Out Once"

KING KHAN AND BBQ What's For Dinner (In The Red) cd 13.98
If you're cravin' retro garage rawk stylings that're a little campy, cheeky, kitschy, trashy... all of the above?! Well, the In The Red label has long been a headquarters for top notch wildly good rockin' sounds, and they just keep 'em comin' with this new album from King Khan And BBQ! The oddly named Canadian band might be the ticket! In our opinion, the second half of the album is where the band really kicks the party up a boozy notch. Includes a cover of Circle Jerks' "Operation". Super fun!
MPEG Stream: "What's For Dinner?"
MPEG Stream: "Operation"

LA PLANETE SAUVAGE (OST) (Fanclub) lp 16.98
Super limited, lovingly presented fan club edition of this legendary record. Long out of print (minus the briefly available reissue on DC / Intoxica, now also out of print) and heavily sought after soundtrack to Rene Laloux's 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winning animated feature "La Planete Sauvage." If the film itself is a hallucinatory masterpiece, the soundtrack -- composed by Alain Goraguer (long time arranger for Serge Gainsbourg) -- is as fitting as it is brilliant. Like an LSD dosed Isaac Hayes score, the music herein is at the same time both reminiscent of classic early seventies drama soundtracks and completely surreal and strange. Lots of recurring leit motifs recast in ever building and changing arrangements, including marimba, theremin and bird whistles as well as the standard orchestral elements, guitars and funky organs. So great!

LAVENDER DIAMOND The Cavalry Of Light (Matador) cd 4.98
This out of print self-released folk pop gem, originally reviewed way back in 2005, has been picked up, gussied up and re-released by the kind folks at Matador and is finally available again!
Each time we hear that AQ pal Jeff Rosenberg has a new music project we secretly fantasize that it'll continue to push the 'out-there' dissonant envelope as many of his past outfits have (the ever-expansive Tarentel, spazz-rock duo Pink & Brown, hypnotic art-folk trio Young People, and earthy instrumental duo Lumen to name a few), and shine the spotlight more on his considerable guitar talents. But even though each of his subsequent groups have definitely kept us on our toes, each one taking a new unpredictable Rosenberg direction, quite often the unassuming gent opts to humbly play the solid, no-frills support role. Such is the case with Lavender Diamond, a timorous folk pop combo who present themselves in Lawrence Welk-worthy attire, black suits and taffeta gowns, and in which Becky Stark's gentle'n'mild vocals take centerstage while Rosenberg, Steve Gregoropoulos and well known visual artist Ron Rege Jr back her up on guitar, piano and drums respectively. Maybe this is what all those jaded hipsters need these days... some wide-eyed, earnest songs of unabashed innocence. Sure seems so, 'cause folks have been gobbling this up like crazy already. You can even easily imagine the quartet doing a great cover of Coven's "One Tin Soldier" or perhaps something by The Carpenters! As for Jeff's guitar magic, alas, we'll just have to continue crossing our fingers that he'll unfurl it again someday. But for now we can happily soak in the sunny subdued country folk of The Cavalry Of Light.
MPEG Stream: "You Broke My Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Please"

LAVENDER DIAMOND The Cavalry Of Light (Matador) 12" 9.98
This out of print self-released folk pop gem, originally reviewed way back in 2005, has been picked up, gussied up and re-released by the kind folks at Matador and is finally available again!
Each time we hear that AQ pal Jeff Rosenberg has a new music project we secretly fantasize that it'll continue to push the 'out-there' dissonant envelope as many of his past outfits have (the ever-expansive Tarentel, spazz-rock duo Pink & Brown, hypnotic art-folk trio Young People, and earthy instrumental duo Lumen to name a few), and shine the spotlight more on his considerable guitar talents. But even though each of his subsequent groups have definitely kept us on our toes, each one taking a new unpredictable Rosenberg direction, quite often the unassuming gent opts to humbly play the solid, no-frills support role. Such is the case with Lavender Diamond, a timorous folk pop combo who present themselves in Lawrence Welk-worthy attire, black suits and taffeta gowns, and in which Becky Stark's gentle'n'mild vocals take centerstage while Rosenberg, Steve Gregoropoulos and well known visual artist Ron Rege Jr back her up on guitar, piano and drums respectively. Maybe this is what all those jaded hipsters need these days... some wide-eyed, earnest songs of unabashed innocence. Sure seems so, 'cause folks have been gobbling this up like crazy already. You can even easily imagine the quartet doing a great cover of Coven's "One Tin Soldier" or perhaps something by The Carpenters! As for Jeff's guitar magic, alas, we'll just have to continue crossing our fingers that he'll unfurl it again someday. But for now we can happily soak in the sunny subdued country folk of The Cavalry Of Light.
MPEG Stream: "You Broke My Heart"
MPEG Stream: "Please"

MACROMANTICS Moments In Movement (Kill Rock Stars) cd 14.98
Listen up! We heart Macromantics (aka Australian hip hop gal Romy Hoffman). She rocks! We've carried her releases (Four Facets / Conspiracy Remix 7" and Hyperbolic Logic cd) for a few years now, and we're really happy to hear that more folks stateside have been gettin' hip to her hop. Case in point, the Kill Rock Stars label have jumped aboard and released her first domestic cd. Yay! Yay! Admittedly what initially charmed us about Ms Romy was her distinct vocal delivery, but there's acres more to her than an Aussie accent. She crafts tight, infectious tracks with an overriding super posi vibe. Lotsa punchy energy! On Moments In Movements though we've noticed a step or two towards considerably darker, edgier territory than that which she's traversed on her previous releases. it's an effective direction to take, broadening her scope while sharpening her attack. Guests include Ground Components and Sage Francis.
MPEG Stream: "Eerily Spookily"
MPEG Stream: "Love Thyself"

MENOMENA Friend And Foe (Barsuk) cd 11.98
Whoa, now that Menomena are on Barsuk Records are they gettin' all suitably indie rock on us?! Sure seems to be the case. They make their move with what is their most straightforward album to date. Menomena fans may be slightly disappointed to find the new sound to be less distinctly or recognizably sprawlingly expansively 'Menomena', but the group might gain a new flourish of fans of their new dreamy wintry pop. Really, this fits quite perfectly alongside labelmates Death Cab, Mates Of State, Jim Noir et al. Fans of those bands please take note!
And by the way, this disc has some of the coolest jewel case packaging we have ever seen. Super elaborate, hyper detailed cartoon drawings, with little shapes cut out to reveal still more patterns on the disc face, while on the back, little circles are punched out to allow the silver cd face to shine though the tray card. WOW!
MPEG Stream: "The Pelican"
MPEG Stream: "Ghostship"

NEGATOR Old Black (Remedy) cd 15.98
This isn't new really, but we've been dying to review this blast of black frost for ages, and we were only recently able to get enough to list.
This German horde are not fucked, or bizarre, or damaged, they're really not all that weird actually, but man does not live by weird alone, sometimes, all it takes is a huge heaping dose of ultra blazing, super intense, grim and frosty black metal. And Negator are indeed that.
This is blurry, buzzy, dizzying and epic, majestic and mournful melodies, insane technical riffing, incredible blast beats, and a killer production that does away with the lo-fi buzz of bedroom black metal and replaces it with HUGE heaviness, a swirling black cloud of blizzard like brutality. Speaking of blizzards, Old Black is probably the frostiest, fastest, grimmest slab of icy blackness to come our way since Immortal's legendary Blizzard Beasts record. Which is saying a lot, but damn if this hasn't become one of our most listened to BM discs of late.
In fact, we hear so much ultra personal bedroom black metal, and damaged stumbling outsider black metal, and don't get us wrong, we LOVE that stuff, but it's sort of refreshing to hear some real, true, fierce and furious, classic sounding black metal. Think Immortal, Emperor, Mayhem, Dissection, Dimmu Borgir, 1349, if these weren't young guys from Germany, you'd definitely be forgiven for thinking this was some slab of blackness from Norway circa 1995. And that's a very good thing.
All bow before the new Blizzard Beasts....
MPEG Stream: "Science Of Nihil"
MPEG Stream: "Free Bird"

NO NECK BLUES BAND Nine For Victor (Victo) cd 16.98
Of all the bands we reference in other bands' reviews, the No Neck Blues Band has to be the most frequently mentioned. For a while there, this ever mutating collective had such a distinct sound, that whenever another band tried to do some sort of free, tribal, pagan, ritualistic, percussion based free jam, we couldn't help but compare them to the godfathers of the tribal drum circle Ur-drone space jam, the mighty No Neck.
Even today after countless releases, tons of tours and a whole bunch of worshippers at the altar of NNCK (Sunburned Hand, Avarus, etc...), No Neck still effortlessly outdo most of their contemporaries, a free noise, what-the-fuck folk, tribal improv juggernaut, able to spin delicate webs of soft sound as easily as a Crash Worship worthy drumjam free for all.
Nine For Victor is a live set recorded back in 2005, and wanders wantonly through all of the various sounds No Neck dabble in, deftly making them all flow seamlessly. Throbbing underwater bass, wheezing spaghetti western harmonica, electronic bleeps and bloops, fuzzed out synths, long stretches of Terry Riley like high end piano flutter, underpinned by barely there percussive shuffle and muted guitar strum, spaced out cinematic drones with keening high end melodies, weird creaking percussive clatter, angular jazz piano, dense clouds of shakers and drums, cricket like percussion, a clattery rattling near-drone, krautrocky slowjams with wild lead guitar and buzzing basslines, all tangled up and interwoven, overlapping, creating a ramshackle but surprisingly cohesive whole.
MPEG Stream: "The Cacao Grinder"
MPEG Stream: "Lady Vengeance"

NURSE WITH WOUND Rock 'N' Roll Station (Beta-Lactam) cd 14.98
Slowly. Very slowly, the entire Nurse With Wound back catalogue is getting the reissue treatment; and in the absurdist spirit of Nurse With Wound, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the order in which these titles are making an appearance. Originally, Rock 'N' Roll Station appeared back in 1994, as an homage to one of Steven Stapleton's heroes Jac Berrocal, the French avant-jazz musician with a occasional taste for obtuse pop. The title track on this Nurse With Wound album is in fact a cover of Berrocal's most well known song, although by now, more people probably know of the song through Stapleton's remake rather than the other way around. Similar to the way that Stapleton / Thirlwell reconstructed Brainticket's lysergic funk and how Stapleton remade Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, the NWW version of Rock 'N' Roll station is pretty faithful to the original, even if the original was pretty weird to begin with. There's a steady metronomic pulse (which Beta-Lactam have qualified as 'proto-hip-hop,' c'mon... it's a drum machine replicating the same drum pattern that Berrocal scripted back in the '70s) grounding warbled tones and Stapleton's repeating monologue about the infinite possibilities to be found within a Rock 'N' Roll Station, even if he is still "waiting for Michael." All of the other tracks on Rock 'N' Roll Station are essentially variations on the theme of the title track with a similarly laid-back rhythm acting as a foundation upon which Stapleton splatters the stereo field with distorted squigglings, gurgling vocalizations, looping snippets from Perez Prado's mambos, fingernails on the chalk board scrapes, and ghastly drones extracted from the ether. The pronounced use of rhythm on Rock 'N' Roll Station has rubbed some of the die-hard NWW fans the wrong way, but when has Nurse With Wound ever been easy to digest, even when it just might be one of the grooviest and most ecstatic albums he's ever produced? Oh yeah, there's a 'bonus' track (the "1.35 pm Remix") on this version of Rock 'N' Roll Station which was originally released as part of the Second Pirate Sessions of reworkings of the material from Rock 'N' Roll Station. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Rock'n'Roll Station"
MPEG Stream: "2 Golden Microphones"

OF MONTREAL Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl) cd 16.98
If you've followed the evolution of ex-Elephant 6-ers Of Montreal it won't come as a total surprise when you hear the spazzed out sugar-pop songs that make up this new outing. Over the years they've slowly shed their Elephant 6 roots and dipped their feet into more dramatic and charismatic waters. Their last outing Sunlandic Twins was chalk full of instantly catchy dance floor gems. And with Hissing Fauna they've sort of turned into Sparks playing at a teenage dance party! And this is sure to be a hit with all the kids, and for good reason, it took a while but the indie rockers finally learned how to shake their asses and make music that demanded such movement.
MPEG Stream: "Suffer For Fashion"
MPEG Stream: "Gronlandic Edit"

OF MONTREAL Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl) 2lp 19.98
If you've followed the evolution of ex-Elephant 6-ers Of Montreal it won't come as a total surprise when you hear the spazzed out sugar-pop songs that make up this new outing. Over the years they've slowly shed their Elephant 6 roots and dipped their feet into more dramatic and charismatic waters. Their last outing Sunlandic Twins was chalk full of instantly catchy dance floor gems. And with Hissing Fauna they've sort of turned into Sparks playing at a teenage dance party! And this is sure to be a hit with all the kids, and for good reason, it took a while but the indie rockers finally learned how to shake their asses and make music that demanded such movement.
MPEG Stream: "Suffer For Fashion"
MPEG Stream: "Gronlandic Edit"

ORENDA Back In The Grave (No Colours) cd 15.98
According to Metal Archives, one of our favorite go to sites for metal info, there are at least 150 metal bands from Bulgaria!! Which is pretty amazing considering that Orenda are, as far as we know, the first Bulgarian metal band we've ever heard.
Anyway, they may be from Bulgaria, but they sound Norwegian, or maybe Polish. On the surface this is furious buzzing black metal, not midtempo, but not really blasting either, just a super fast sort of harsh buzz. Relentlessly pounding drums, droning buzzy riffs, harsh vocals, but beneath the layers of buzz in each song, lurk all manner of strange melody and fucked up sonic weirdness.
It's hard to explain exactly what it is that makes these songs stand out, it's pretty subtle, whether it's some cool seasick guitar melodies weaving back and forth beneath the surface, or some sort of bell chiming in the distance, or a stretch of feedback that sounds like the warning beep of a backing up truck, or mewing cat-like vocals, but more often than not it's just the structure of the song, the interaction between the main riff and the second guitar part, that allow unlikely harmonies to surface, giving the songs a strange emotional resonance that isn't immediately noticeable.
Plus it helps that the riffs are killer, wrapped in a thick buzzy production, the relentless buzzing blackness peppered with blazing bursts of double kick drum, some super sludgy stretches of black doom, even some unlikely poppiness. Definitely recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Kargan Devastation"
MPEG Stream: "The Shrine"

ORTHODOX Gran Poder (Southern Lord) cd 14.98
We listed the import of this last year, and now Southern Lord has put it out domestically -- with an exclusive added bonus track, for you slackers who didn't get it already...geeze! The bonus track is a cover of Venom's "Genocide", by the way!
DOOM. As per AQ tradition, we should throw some extra 'O's in there just to indicate just how doomy this is -- DOOOOOOooooooooOOOM! Not to get sidetracked, but Doom might be the only musical genre that you can deliberately misspell to indicate extra enthusiasm for whatever example of said genre you're describing. RRRRap doesn't work. Nor would you say Woooorld Music. And adding extra 'o's to Pop is a just bad idea, unless you're talking about pop you don't like. But doom, being all about being slow and low, just gets doomier when you exaggerate the spelling into doooooooooooom. The point of all this? That the debut disc from Spanish doom band Orthodox, needs, like, exponential 'o's to really get at its doominess.
Recently and rightly hailed as an Album Of The Month on Julian Cope's psychedelic drone/doom/druid rock lovin' website Head Heritage, Orthodox's Gran Poder ("Great Power") consists of three looong tracks of gloomy, glacial heaviness mixed with more chaotically rockin' parts, with one brief piano-laced interlude separating tracks two and three. These crushing compositions are almost symphonically grand, an often exceedingly slow grind of eternally doomed drone like Earth or SUNNO))), sometimes speeding up to rock out psychedelically in the style of Argentina's Los Natas, graced with heavily tremelo-laden vocals or utterly spaced out ambience that make us think of Thrones and Yob.
Throughout this sludgey stoner soundscape, you'll hear feedback wailing like lamenting lost souls, the rumbling drum battery either nervously dodging the lugubrious riffs as they fall from the sky, or pounding in unison with the guitar and bass, sounding like the gates of an abandoned ancient cavernous cathedral slamming shut... over and over again.
Before this Southern Lord version appeared, we had imported a whole bunch of these direct from the label in Spain because we were pretty sure that fans of the likes of Corrupted (who also sing in Spanish, after all) and Yob and Sleep and UFOmammut and all the other extra-o's deservin' dooooooOOOOoom bands that we love would want this! It seems we were correct. But if for some reason you need further convincing, please look up Julian Cope's review on his site, where he references Flower Travellin' Band's Satori and the Mediterranean paganistic roots of Catholic ritual and "Rumble" by Link Wray and much much more, his incredibly enthusiastic review almost a call to arms for doom fanatics... and he also includes cool pictures of the black-robed band members he took on a trip to their land!
MPEG Stream: "Geryon's Throne [excerpt 1]"
MPEG Stream: "Geryon's Throne [excerpt 2]"
MPEG Stream: "El Lamento Del Cabron"

OSANNA Milano Calibro 9 (Vinyl Magic / Warner Fonit) cd 26.00
A few years ago, we were all excited to review the first and best three albums (reissued on cd) by "possibly Allan and Andee's all time favorite prog band" Osanna. As we said then, even limiting our discussion to the realm of Italian prog, it would be difficult to claim that Osanna are objectively better than the also amazing likes of Il Balleto, Le Orme, Area, New Trolls, Franco Battiato, Goblin, I Teoremi, RDM, Museo Rosenbach, etc. But, Osanna do somehow combine the key elements of what we like about those bands and prog in general into their first three crazy, colorful records, and thus deserve our hype. Ripping flute and sax solos, heavy psych guitar, powerful vocal choruses, hard rockin' prog drumming, weird musical changes and juxtapositions, electronic synth experimentation... Catchy, fun, fucked up prog from five nutty Italians, who want to rock out as much as be arty and display their adept musicianship. We went on to say that self-proclaimed "prog" dedication is not necessary for enjoyment of Osanna, as we think that these discs are good and weird and silly enough for AQ-customers into whatever sort of musical extremity (experimental, krautrock, psych, metal, classic rock) to dig.
Anyway, those cd reissues eventually went out of print, sadly enough, and we haven't had any Osanna for a while... until now, when one of our distributors happened to track down some copies of this different cd edition of Osanna's second album from 1972, which comes packaged not in a jewel case like the ones we had previously, but in a slightly oversized, miniature gatefold LP styled sleeve, complete with a Japanese obi. Very nice. So of course we want to list it again for those who missed out... and hopefully someday we'll also be able to relist the other two Osanna albums we recommend as well!
This record was a soundtrack to a film called "Milano Calibro 9". Working in collaboration with arranger Luis Bacalov, who is also known for his work with the New Trolls' symphonic efforts, on this album Osanna incorporates strings, piano, and classical motifs. And, as befits a film soundtrack, many moods are touched upon... We don't know what the movie was all about, but it must have featured a fair amount of action, and trippy scenes. Osanna come up with super bombastic themes, high-energy instrumental freak-outs, suspenseful bits of jazziness, pretty vocal interludes, bleepy-bloopy synth fx, heavy electronic organ riff-drone, and the most heavy metal flute soloing you've ever heard. Totally kick ass. Osanna, you rock. Goblin was never this heavy.
MPEG Stream: "Preludio"
MPEG Stream: "Tema"

PAPERCUTS, THE Can't Go Back (Gnomonsong) cd 13.98
Musing about the name of this dandy SF one man band, we can't help but feel that he must be referring to the pretty delicate scissor craft and not the annoyingly painful stationery-inflicted wound. The Papercuts' retro-tinged pop is a honey sweet, wistful confection. Released on Devendra Banhart's Gnomonsong label, this new album moves upwards and onwards from 2004's Mockingbird. It's decidedly more mid-fi and more psych folk leaning than those previous lower-fi chamber pop styled recordings. Perhaps a little earthiness has rubbed off on him from the folks with whom he's recently collaborated such as Skygreen Leopards and Vetiver? Or perhaps he's been spending more time out in the wondrous wilderness? Whatever it may be, the results are splendid. Can't Go Back caught us daydreaming about paddling a lil' rowboat down a gentle stream, and peering dreamily over the edge into the sundappled depths. As we gaze at a fallen leaf drifting by, the sparkly glint from an orange-gold carp catches our eye. Aaaah. This album will surely appeal equally to fans of Yo La Tengo, Low, Olivia Tremor Control and the abovementioned Skygreen Leopards. Recommended!
MPEG Stream: "Dear Employee"
MPEG Stream: "Just Another Thing To Dust"

QUETZOLCOATL Triumphant Rock Shards Rise From The Sea, Awaken My Giddy Child Heart (Ruralfaune) cd-r 10.98
We have been going a bit nuts for this drone murk ensemble, an offshoot of another group we're pretty gaga about, Irish drone collective Bonecloud, so we grabbed as many of this super limited release as we could get.
These guys travel a similar sonic path as legendary Japanese drone improv outfit Taj Mahal Travellers, as well as sharing sonic similarities with some of their modern noiserock brethren like the Skaters, Birchville Cat Motel and the like.
Each track is some super obfuscated smear of sound, as if inside the tangle of fuzz and grit and whir and tape hiss and reverb and distortion was a little perfect pop song, or some dreamy vocal snippet, but we're peering at these sparkling gems through layer after layer of sonic murk, colors are muted and dull, like looking at a night time cityscape through an old broken and dirty window, a cracked prismatic swirl of constantly shifting sounds. Melodies or fragments of melodies surface and disappear, drift briefly into earshot then fade away. There seem to be vocals all over Triumphant, but they are so wreathed in fuzzy FX they become nothing more than disembodied melodic streaks, brief flitting blurs of sound. Reminds us a bit of Grouper, but less lush and organic and more raw and lo-fi and buzzy. Dreamy, fuzzy and lovely.
Packaged in cool hand watercolored sleeves and of course LIMITED TO 74 COPIES!!! Don't blink or they'll be gone...
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"
MPEG Stream: "3"

REIGNS The Blank Tape / Frozen Acid (Jonson Family) 7" 5.50
Er, when it Reigns it pours... as you should remember, last list we reviewed the new full-length cd from one of our favorite UK post rock acts, Reigns. We're waiting for a restock of those now, but in the meantime we've got *another* new Reigns release, a limited edition 2-song 7" single. Two new tracks of their lovely, so lovely and evocative instrumental music. Shimmering and mesmeric. That would be reason enough to pick this up, but, there's more: this comes packaged with a twelve-page booklet full of text in a tiny tiny font, detailing more of the adventures of Reigns Operative B, a diary of a field recording investigation into the English countryside. Of course things get a bit fantastical and weird, and in the end it's a bit like something by Thomas Ligotti. This is totally what we think makes Reigns extra-special, that added dash of imagination and mystery, presented in a confusional, supposedly scientific yet tongue-in-cheek manner. Neat!

REIGNS We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground (Jonson Family Records) cd 14.98
Along with the new cd (reviewed last list) and the new 7" (reviewed this list), we also got restocked on this first Reigns cd... Originally reviewed on AQ list #239 thusly, for those who missed it then:
From the same UK label that brought us that great Hey Colossus album listed recently, here's something also really cool but VERY very different.... where Hey Colossus was brutally heavy and rhythmic, this band, Reigns, is so pleasantly pretty and placid. Utterly gorgeous, really, and mysterious. We're reminded of such artists as Stafraenn Hakon, Eluvium, Sonna, and Sigur Ros. It's that sort of gauzy, mellow, melodic post-rock, with songs constructed from gentle guitar and piano figures, operating in a zone of beautiful ambience, infused with indistinct electronic detritus. Swells of live percussion or electronic beats sometimes appear, too, but the mood remains blissful, if almost somber. But not really somber since there's a strange, very subtle sense of humor afoot, part of the weird conceptual framework that Reigns have invented for this album. Yes, it's a concept album! And a mostly-instrumental one at that, with no real singing to speak of, though you will occasionally hear voices drifting in the mix, including a computer voice (a la Radiohead) on the fourth track, "Translating".
The concept? It's intentionally vague and sort of surreal, but first off we're told that this was supposedly "recorded on location by Reigns operatives A & B". The title We Lowered A Microphone Into The Ground, taken literally, provides an imaginary scheme for the album. Each track is assigned a depth, ranging from 23 meters to 1 mile. Thus, track 2: "Corners & The Straights (102 metres)". Or track 9: "The Fattest Goose Shall Be The Soonest To The Spit (1460 metres)". Inside the handsome digipack you'll find the "Original Site Transcript" giving notes on what was encountered at each depth by the two Reigns operatives. Some examples:
"(102 metres) First subterranean voice. Operative B suffers small breakout of hives on ungloved hand."
"(416 metres) Foul smelling miasma rises from hole. Surrounding grass visibly pales."
"(1001 metres) Sudden rise in static. Recording levels unchanged. Operative B demands that A stop pinching at nape of B's neck. A denies any such activity."
More events and phenomena, both mundane and peculiar, are documented. But this is all in the liner notes -- you'll hear the voices mentioned but otherwise this isn't at all meant to -sound- like any sort of static-y, subterranean field recording...it's just very lovely music. Pretty nifty, as most more ordinary post-rock efforts don't exhibit such imagination! We like.
MPEG Stream: "Buried Chandelier (416 metres)"
MPEG Stream: "Pentecost (1001 metres)"

ROBEDOOR Hidden Ascension (Ruralfaune) cd-r 10.98
We're a bit embarrassed to admit we had never heard Robedoor before, heck, we'd never even heard OF them. Which is saying something as a quick internet search reveals about a MILLION cd-r's and cassette releases. Although the same search reveals very little else. All we can glean is that they are a duo, one half credited with slime, knives and distortion, the other with fire, howls and cloaks, and that they are part of the Notnotfun noise axis. The rest is a mystery. Which befits their gorgeously mysterious sound. Huge growling, glowing slabs of slow shifting low end. Slowed down riffs and long dark streaks of moaning sound, some sort of improbable mix of SUNNO))) and Skullflower. Or the gloomiest doomiest Wolf Eyes record played manually, pulling it around with your finger, a constantly fluctuating low end rumble, laced with haunting distant melodies and high end guitar buried in the murk. Fans of all thing slow and low AND heavy will definitely want one of these. We need to hear more from these guys for sure!!
Packaged in a plastic bag with a black and white insert and some sort of weird plastic hair. LIMITED TO 78 COPIES!!! These will be gone in a flash...
MPEG Stream: "Fog Of God"
MPEG Stream: "Sleep Halo"

ROBERTS, ALASDAIR The Amber Gatherers (Drag City) cd 14.98
On The Amber Gatherers, Scotsman Alasdair Roberts sounds much less like a (not so distant) cousin of Will Oldham and much more like one whose been taken under the wing of Sybille Baier or Vashti Bunyan. The renaissance folk found on this his fourth full length both lyrically and instrumentally conveys much more of a period piece evoking a time long past than his previous works. Songs such as "Let Me Lie And Bleed A While" and "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand" conjured visions of fair maidens and jesters in courtyards, armored knights on horseback or dapper fellows taking their paces in a gentlemen's duel. Enchanting and picturesque.
MPEG Stream: "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand"
MPEG Stream: "Let Me Lie And Bleed A While"

ROBERTS, ALASDAIR The Amber Gatherers (Drag City) lp 14.98
On The Amber Gatherers, Scotsman Alasdair Roberts sounds much less like a (not so distant) cousin of Will Oldham and much more like one whose been taken under the wing of Sybille Baier or Vashti Bunyan. The renaissance folk found on this his fourth full length both lyrically and instrumentally conveys much more of a period piece evoking a time long past than his previous works. Songs such as "Let Me Lie And Bleed A While" and "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand" conjured visions of fair maidens and jesters in courtyards, armored knights on horseback or dapper fellows taking their paces in a gentlemen's duel. Enchanting and picturesque.
MPEG Stream: "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand"
MPEG Stream: "Let Me Lie And Bleed A While"

SMOLEN, DAVE Malleable Laminates (Sprout And Flora) cd-r 8.98
A while back we reviewed a disc by a group called Flittermice Of Eld, a sort of abstract ambient drone homage to Darkthrone, in particular their classic track "As Flittermice as Satan's Spys", which of course ended up sounding nothing like Darkthrone at all, but kicked our asses nonetheless (and rest assured, we should be getting more of those soon!).
So what do these Flittermice do when they're not pulling apart black metal institutions and reshaping the bits into their own twisted little soundscapes?
Well, actually, sort of the same thing, just without the Darkthrone bits (although we can't say for sure there are no Darkthrone bits here). But Mr. Dave Smolen, he of the aforementioned Flittermice, here strikes out on his own, and the result is very similar to the sound on Flittermice, albeit a bit more minimal and electronic, a slow burning lowercase trawl through a soundworld of electronic crackle and minimal glitch and buzz, twenty minutes of drifting static discharge, bursts of high end shimmer and shift, layers of metallic reverberation drift through spacious expanses of whir and rumble, clouds of spacey FX swirl around disembodied shards of percussion and muted rhythms. Serene and ambient, but also dense and intense, like slithering through a lightning storm, or crawling through a field of electrically charged vibrating steel strings...
Weird and quite cool...
SUPER LIMITED!!! Of course, packaged in hand screened cardstock jackets housed in thick vinyl sleeves.
MPEG Stream: "Malleable Laminates"

SPACE MACHINE 2 (MIDI Creative) cd 27.00
You're out in space, at the bridge of a pod-shaped starship, blinking lights and cosmic sights on the viewscreen. THIS is the soundtrack. Or, you're exploring deep into inner space, in a isolation tank, or a drugged trance, watching colors play inside your closed eyelids. Again, THIS is the soundtrack. Assuming in either case you're got headphones on, hooked up to Space Machine 2!
Total kosmiche electronics action here, vintage analog synths doing their spaced-out bleepage and bloopage thing under the long-haired guidance of Maso Yamazuki, a Japanese psychedelic noisician extraordinare. This disc was released back in 2002, as part of Space Machine mastermind Maso Yamazaki's special "15th Anniversary Freakout Triplex" series, which also featured cds by two of his other acts, Masonna and Christine 23 Onna. We reviewed Christine 23 Onna's Acid Eater a few weeks ago and promised we'd get to the others in the Triplex soon, now that we're finally able to get a hold of 'em, expensive imports that they are. Space Machine, Maso's tribute to the likes of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, has always been a favorite 'round here, and right now this particular Space Machine album is the only one that seems to be in print! If you're a fan already, you know what to expect. This features four tracks, several of them quite lengthy, of wonderfully indulgent synthesizer knob-twiddling, soothing oscillations and droning textures... headphones, please!
MPEG Stream: "track 2"
MPEG Stream: "track 3"

SYKES, JESSE & THE SWEET HEREAFTER Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls Of The Soul (Barsuk) cd 13.98
Jesse Sykes' been making music for some time now, but most recently she's garnered additional attention for her striking vocal turn on the track "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)" from Boris and SUNNO)))'s Altar album! 'Twas a wonderfully timed appearance to coincide with the release of Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls Of The Soul, her third album. Sykes' voice is soft yet potent with a subtle rasp roughened by cigarette smoke. She's joined by guests Wayne Horvitz, Eyvind Kang and Nicolai Dunger. Painted in shades that suggest bruises and red wine, her rustic melancholia is so bleak and despairing that it begs to be enshrouded in the night. Best listened to after dusk.
MPEG Stream: "Eisenhower Moon"
MPEG Stream: "How Will We Know?"

T.I.T.S. / LEOPARD LEGS split (Upset The Rhythm) lp 16.98
Intercontinental all girl noise rock tag team match up. From right here in SF come T.I.T.S. (no idea what it stands for) an all-female troupe spewing their own skewed and venomous version of damaged psychedelic fuzzy garage rock stomp. Lo-fi brittle metallic riffing butts up against simple pounding caveman drums, haunting chant-like vocals, all with a seriously pagan primal, tribal vibe. Two whole sides of furiously fuzzed out chant and buzz, psych rock garage grrrrrrrrr....
The other disc features the UK's mysterious Leopard Leg, who are a bit like a witchier, soundtrackier No Neck Blues Band. Abstract soundscapes of bells and chimes nestled amidst prickly seas of record / campfire crackle, buzzing snarls of malfunctioning electronics, clattery tribal percussion, haunting abstract vocals, a slow drift through a dark forest, folk picked apart by hungry scavengers, leaving weird skeletal shapes and fuzzy fragments of sound, until about halfway through the second side when the band drop everything, and go all out with their haunted forest drum line, spitting out a huge cacophonous wall of Crash Worship drum damage. Woah.
Incredible packaging, super thick, glossy gatefold sleeve, colored vinyl, one white, one green, so nice...

TIME FLYS Rebels Of Babylon (Birdman) cd 14.98
Sophomore album from Oakland '70s style punkers The Time Flys, which leads off with the title track of their 'tween albums single, "Reality (Is A Rock Band)". Like their debut, this retro-rockin' disc is appropriately snotty and undoubtedly well-schooled in their chosen genre, with lotsa energy, not a lotta chords, and some handclaps, but this time 'round we're not feeling it as much... something here (the lyrics, maybe) just seems a bit forced. It's like, they're trying too hard. If you're gonna emulate the likes of the Ramones, you've gotta make it seem easy, c'mon! On the other hand, maybe we just weren't in the mood for the 'tude when we first put this on, and it's just gonna take a few more spins (and a few more PBRs?) for us to 'get'... we'll see.
MPEG Stream: "Reality (Is A Rock Band)"
MPEG Stream: "Bronzo's A Bruiser"

TIME FLYS Rebels Of Babylon (Birdman) lp 10.98
Sophomore album from Oakland '70s style punkers The Time Flys, which leads off with the title track of their 'tween albums single, "Reality (Is A Rock Band)". Like their debut, this retro-rockin' disc is appropriately snotty and undoubtedly well-schooled in their chosen genre, with lotsa energy, not a lotta chords, and some handclaps, but this time 'round we're not feeling it as much... something here (the lyrics, maybe) just seems a bit forced. It's like, they're trying too hard. If you're gonna emulate the likes of the Ramones, you've gotta make it seem easy, c'mon! On the other hand, maybe we just weren't in the mood for the 'tude when we first put this on, and it's just gonna take a few more spins (and a few more PBRs?) for us to 'get'... we'll see.
MPEG Stream: "Reality (Is A Rock Band)"
MPEG Stream: "Bronzo's A Bruiser"

TRAGEDY Nerve Damage (Tragedy Records) cd 14.98
Tragedy are the reigning kings of (underground) U.S. hardcore. Without even a website or a label behind them, they have managed to become an infamous live proposition, a band whose records sell in the thousands, with no publicity other than their devastating live shows, and with a die-hard cult of followers who are absolutely rabid about the band.
Nerve Damage is the third release from this Portland-via-Memphis outfit, whose members have formerly done time in such legendary acts as Deathreat, His Hero Is Gone, Union of Uranus & Copout so you know this is gonna be punishing stuff.
While Tragedy is known for its powerful "D-Beat" (think Discharge via Motorhead) approach to hardcore, on this record they infuse their fat chugging riffs with plenty of melody, but don't think for a second that means they've gotten soft.
The ever present feeling of despair and their furious "will to fight back" is still in full effect, in fact, it's like they've finally learned the art of "the dynamic" and are proving it over and over and over. While in the past their songs relentlessly bludgeoned the listener square in the face with a scream and a riff, Tragedy have mastered the art of subtlety, with sweeping guitars, gorgeous harmonics, and even a bit of piano here and there.
Now if only all punk rock circa 2006 was this good...
MPEG Stream: "Force Of Law"
MPEG Stream: "Deaf And Disbelieving"
MPEG Stream: "Under The Radar"

UNAGI It Came From Beneath The SFC (442) cd 10.98
It's just a matter of time before one of SF's best kept hip-hop secrets becomes a household name. Unagi has proven to be one of the most consistent and challenging producers of forward-minded hip-hop, replete with nods to the old skool. His latest offering split pretty evenly between warm instrumentals and guest MC tracks that all fit together perfectly as a totally coherent album with NO filler. If you found yourself a little underwhelmed with the latest offerings from Blackalicious and DJ Shadow this might be exactly the record you've been waiting for.
MPEG Stream: "Shoulda Known Better"
MPEG Stream: "Expanded and Up To Date"

UNIVERSAL INDIANS Monster Approach (Killertree) lp 14.98
Universal Indians are a long lost noise rock behemoth, from way back in the nineties, featuring Mr. John Olson of the Wolf Eyes on the drums, these guys whipped up a serious blast of blown out super distorted garagey psychedelic noise rock. The opening track is heavy and thick, pulverizingly aggressive, drums totally in the red, guitars crumbling and white hot, the whole recording doing much damage to the speakers, vocals that are sort of sung/spoken, the whole thing sounds very Brainbombs actually, which is a VERY good thing. Come track two though, and the production drops about a hundred notches and suddenly we're in old school noise rock, tin can and twine blow out territory, which is still good, just different, and a surprise after the ultra hot opener. But the rest of the record proceeds along with some serious Dead C worship, mumbled vocals, angular guitars, barely audible drums, recorded in an airplane hangar or a cave somewhere, with some damaged Dylan-y strum and warble mixed in, everything wreathed in lo-fi hiss and tape recorded warble. Gloriously ramshackle... Side two is a single sidelong epic, a sparse, outrock jam, simple strummed guitars, spacious stumbling drums, almost sounds like some long lost old Sebadoh practice tape, albeit run through with some extra noisy ambience and fucked up weirdness. Cool stuff, almost like some sort of super poppy Wolf Eyes... a stumbling, damaged, noise drenched spaced out psych pop...

VAINIO, MIKA Revitty (Torn) (Wavetrap) cd 17.98
Revitty? Might that have something to do with Martin Rev? It's hard to say if the word means anything other than simple being a title for this solo project from Mika Vainio, one of the two shockheaded Finns behind Pan Sonic. As the electron wrangler for Suicide, Martin Rev has clearly been a major influence on Vainio's work, especially in how to extend electronic sounds through dynamic usage of pattern, repetition, and variation. Both Pan Sonic and Suicide have always been known for the rhythmic pounding of their scalding electric minimalism; yet in most of Vainio's solo work, the rhythmic structures are merely hinted at through nuanced implications or entirely done away with in the spirit of grand abstractions. What's left for Vainio's sound sculpting is raw energy often recklessly unleashed in radioactive bursts with only ghostly hints at a pulsing electricity within. So maybe we're grasping at straws to add some context to this work, but it's still a mighty fine piece of Finnish electronic abstraction, chock full of bleakness and aggression.
MPEG Stream: "Hampaat I"
MPEG Stream: "Raatelu"

WIRE, THE #276 magazine 8.98
It's that time again, more Adventures In Modern Music from UK music mag the wire. This month, Seismic Performances, 60 concerts that shook the world, including Faust, Nico, Merzbow, Sun Ra, Swans, Royal Trux, Stooges, Stars, Jandek, Laibach, Nina Simone, My Bloody Valentine, The Roots, Sonic Youth, The Fall, Birthday Party, Tony Conrad, Ascension, Big Black and a bunch more. Also in this issue: Infinite Livez, Richard Skelton, artist and Puzzle Punk Shinro Ohtake, invisible jukebox with Bert Jansch, an Adrian Sherwood primer, as well as the usual batch of record, book, performance, book and DVD reviews and so much more...

WOLF EYES / FAILING LIGHTS / SPYKES / NATE YOUNG Dead Hills (Troubleman Unlimited) 2lp 24.00
Killer picture disc reissue of a long out of print double cassette, on which each member of Wolf Eyes does a whole side solo, and then the band does a whole side together. Hard to tell whose side is whose, which sort of makes sense really, all four sides sound distinctly Wolf Eyes-ish, and all are pretty dang great, it hardly matters.
Four massive expanses of growling gloomy synthscapes, murky doom, damaged deconstructed space rock, wild cacophonies of high end skree and upper register scrape and squeal, long stretches of near orchestral noise, tranquil and ghostly ambience, moaning crumbling tape damage, humming streaks of monotone buzz and crackle, barely there swirls of surface noise and low end rumble, bits of metallic clang, creaking moaning strings, muted percussive rhythms buried in thick swaths of black ambience, a litany of mysterious ambience and post industrial experimentation. Noisy and murky and creepy and exactly what you might expect from a Wolf Eyes free for all.
Plain black gatefold sleeves, gorgeous picture discs pressed on super thick vinyl. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!! We got a handful and WILL NOT be able to get more....

WOLFMANGLER Hungry Hungry Wolves (Short Forest) 7" 6.98
Yet another mysterious missive from the dark forests of Poland (via Texas of course) courtesy of doom folk trio Wolfmangler, featuring the one and only Smolken, aka Dead Raven Choir.
While Wolfmangler have been know to lay down some serious doom (c'mon, they shared a split with Moss!!) albeit in their own uniquely skewed fashion, these two tracks are not so much doom as they are doomy, the band embracing their foresty folk side, but shot through with a healthy dose of mourn and misery.
The sound here is some sort of funereal campfire folk, simple plodding percussion, moaning violin, fluttering flute, very tribal, and primitive, almost old timey, like some strange pirate sea shanty. Growled ghostly vocals crawl menacingly over what at times sounds like a very gnarled and twisted version of Peter And The Wolf.
The second side is a bit slower and creepier, even darker and more lugubrious, the flute, instead of flitting and fluttering is stretched into long drawn out melancholy melodies, the vocals a ragged whisper, the strings now weaving a surprisingly lush minor key backdrop.
A nice little slab of creepy crawly doom folk for sure.
Packaged in super swank silkscreened sleeves. he cover image, a wolf and what appears to be a river of blood, and a drowning body. Nice!

WOLFSKULL Tannasg (Ruralfaune) cd-r 10.98
The last we heard from Wolfskull was a super limited cd-r on Campbell Kneale's avant metal label Battlecruiser, a stumbling slab of Jandekian doom metal drone. Since then, there's been a split with Polish (by way of Texas) black folk ensemble Wolfmangler, and not much else... until now.
Tannasg is the latest installment from this New Zealand based outfit (we're thinking there's a distinct possibility that Wolfskull is in fact either PseudoArcana's Anthony Milton, or BCM's Campbell Kneale...) and begins like a page out of SUNN)))'s doomdrone playbook. A very Black Boned slow motion downtuned riff-fuck, glacial and thick, huge moaning notes and chords crumbling into black rumbles...
Track two though harkens back to the Battlecruiser release, with shuffling abstract percussion, wide open reverby room sound, simple acoustic guitar strum, a sort of super super mellow Dead C jangle jam, that never really goes anywhere, just sort of drifts and eventually fades out.
But that's the only calm in this storm, the rest of the tracks are variations on a crushing minimal sludge theme. From muted throbbing pulses, to hissy lo-fi Skullfower guitarscapes over practice space drums, to the 16 minute sludge pummel of "Shred Your Axe", with pounding drums, shrieking feedback, all over a fuzzy rumbling riff so distorted it almost sounds like a streak of blacknoise, to the final 4 minute finale, a blown out guitar drone, muter feedback, twisted into stuttering rhythms and throbbing pulses. Some seriously heavy shit for sure. Essential listening for the doomdronedeathdirge obsessive among you...
LIMITED TO 79 COPIES!!!
MPEG Stream: "1"
MPEG Stream: "2"

WRIGHT, FRANK Unity (ESP) cd 14.98
The current incarnation of sixties-spawned free jazz & acid folk label ESP has been doing more than just reissuing their old n' obscure classics. They've also been signing up some new bands from the NYC jazz underground (which we have yet to really check out), and, perhaps better yet, have also dug up some hitherto *unreleased* vintage recordings from artists in the ESP orbit. Such as the music on this disc, which barely contains the energetic maelstrom stirred up by tenor saxophonist "the Reverend" Frank Wright and his band, live at Germany's Moers Jazz Festival in 1974. There's two long (almost half-hour tracks) here, full of frenzied blowing from Wright, who after all was inspired by Albert Ayler to take up the sax in the first place, and was discovered by ESP boss Bernard Stollman while sitting in with John Coltrane's band in '64! The other cats on here are certainly up to the challenge of expressing themselves alongside Wright -- you've got Alan Silva on bass, Bobby Few on piano, and Rashied Ali's brother Muhammad on drums! Together they made some truly vital, exciting music that night, and you can hear the crowd at Moers really getting into it!
MPEG Stream: "Unity Part I"
MPEG Stream: "Unity Part II"

YOUTH GROUP Casino Twilight Dogs (Anti) cd 13.98
The band known as Youth Group makes for a surprising indie pop addition to the eclectic Anti Records stable of artists (who include Tom Waits, Neko Case, Daniel Lanois, Jolie Holland and The Coup). They bring with them no big bells or whistles, just willowy, touching melancholia. Although we do have mixed feelings about their cover of Alphaville's "Forever Young" (which has already surfaced on the TV show The O.C.), the rest of the album is oh-so-comforting goodness like a cup o' cocoa on a drizzly day. Nice!
MPEG Stream: "Sorry"
MPEG Stream: "Forever Young"




----*
----* Compilations :
----*

V/A Attack Gold Vol. 1 (Attack) cd 17.98
A really nice collection of vintage roots, dub and reggae produced by the oh so smooth Bunny 'Striker' Lee. With his studio band, The Aggrovators at his beck and call, he recorded some of the best and brightest artists in the 70's reggae scene at King Tubby's legendary studio. With folks like Horace Andy, Linval Thompson, Cornell Campbell, Johnny Clarke, etc, you can be assured this is a really solid collection with a cohesive sound and mood thanks to Lee's stellar production. Most of these tracks had only ever been available on 10" vinyl before finally making it to cd (and lp!)...
MPEG Stream: HORACE ANDY "This World"
MPEG Stream: LINVAL THOMPSON "Wicked Babylon"
MPEG Stream: JOHNNY CLARKE "Ride On"

V/A Attack Gold Vol. 1 (Attack) 2lp 17.98
A really nice collection of vintage roots, dub and reggae produced by the oh so smooth Bunny 'Striker' Lee. With his studio band, The Aggrovators at his beck and call, he recorded some of the best and brightest artists in the 70's reggae scene at King Tubby's legendary studio. With folks like Horace Andy, Linval Thompson, Cornell Campbell, Johnny Clarke, etc, you can be assured this is a really solid collection with a cohesive sound and mood thanks to Lee's stellar production. Most of these tracks had only ever been available on 10" vinyl before finally making it to cd (and lp!)...
MPEG Stream: HORACE ANDY "This World"
MPEG Stream: LINVAL THOMPSON "Wicked Babylon"
MPEG Stream: JOHNNY CLARKE "Ride On"



----*
----* New DVD's :
----*

CASH, JOHNNY Live From Austin (New West) dvd 21.00
DVD of the live television performance on the great Austin City Limits series. While the '80s were a hard time for Cash, bouncing from one label to another and never getting the freedom and respect he so deserved, he still shined in the live setting.

PIXIES, THE Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About The Pixies (MVD Visual) dvd 19.98
In the past couple months, we've gotten a pair of dvds documenting two venerable bands' recent resurrections: 'Mission Of Burma: Not A Photograph' and this one 'Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About The Pixies'. Filmmakers Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin followed the four original members Frank Black (ahem, Black Francis), Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering on their sold-out 2004 reunion trek across North America and Europe eleven years after their split. Lots of live and backstage footage reveal that despite their audiences' rabid adoration, the band members aren't exactly having a bonding experience. At times the atmosphere of interpersonal tension and alienation could be cut with a knife. Bringing the viewer into this air of uneasy distance is the fact that oddly enough it's not the band's music that furnishes the documentary's incidental soundtrack but that of Daniel Lanois! Loud Quiet Loud features some fan-thrilling live footage, but it's not a good time ride by any means.




----*
----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed :
----*

If you want to order one of these, just search for the item you're looking for, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart!

AFRIKA BAMBAATA, DJ "Death Mix "2"" (Paul Winley) cd 13.98
AN ALBATROSS "Freedom Summer Live" (Kitty Play) 12" 10.98
ANGER, KENNETH "The Films Of Kenneth Anger, Volume One" (Fantoma) dvd 22.00
ANKERSMIT, THOMAS / JIM O'ROURKE "split" (Tochnit Aleph) 12" 17.98
ARBOURETUM "Rites Of Uncovering" (Thrill Jockey) cd 15.98
AZRAEL "Act III: Self & Act IV: Goat" (Moribund) 2cd 14.98
BEE GEES "1st" (Reprise) 2cd 23.00
BEE GEES "Horizontal" (Reprise) cd 23.00
BEE GEES "Idea" (Reprise) 2cd 23.00
BLACK FOREST / BLACK SEA "s/t" (Music Fellowship) cd 15.98
BRANCA, GLENN "Indeterminate Activity Of Resultant Masses" (Atavistic) cd 14.98
BUCKLEY, TIM "Lorca" (4 Men With Beards) lp 15.98
CAINA "I, Mountain" (God Is Myth) 3" cd-r 6.98
CASH, JOHNNY "At San Quentin - Legacy Edition Box Set" (Columbia) 2cd+1dvd 45.00
CAUSTIC WINDOW "Compilation" (Rephlex) cd 15.98
CLOUDS "Legendary Demo" (Hydra Head) cd 14.98
DAYGLO ABORTIONS "Feed Us A Fetus" (God Records, Inc.) cd 16.98
DAYGLO ABORTIONS "Here Today, Guano Tomorrow" (God Records, Inc.) cd 16.98
DESPERATE MAN BLUES "Discovering The Roots Of American Music" (Cube Media) dvd 24.00
DESPERATE MAN BLUES (OST) (Dust To Digital) cd 15.98
DEUPREE, TAYLOR "1am" (12k) cd ep 11.98
DIELECTRIC FIELD RECORDING ALL-STARS "Re: Record" (Dielectric) cd 10.98
DILLOWAY, AARON "Beggar Master" (Hanson) cd 14.98
DR. DELAY "Rajaz Meter" (Funk Weapons) cd 15.98
EARLIES, THE "The Enemy Chorus" (Secretly Canadian) cd 14.98
EARTHLESS "Sonic Prayer Live" (Gravity) 10" 8.98
ETERNAL MAJESTY "Wounds of Hatred & Slavery" (Candlelight) cd 16.98
EXCEPTER / PANDA BEAR "Split" (Paw Tracks) 12" 9.98
EXMAGMA "3" (Daily Records) cd 30.00
EXTRADITION "Hush" (Vicious Sloth Collectibles) cd 24.00
FATHER BEARD "The Voyage Out" (Yen Agat) cd-r 9.98
FAUST "In Autumn" (Dirtier Promotions) 3cd+dvd 60.00
GREENLEE, SHAWN "Nysa" (Utech) cd 14.98
GURDJIEFF, G.I. & THOMAS DE HARTMAN "Oriental Suite" (Basta) 4cd+book 113.00
HARMONIA "Deluxe" (Lilith) lp 16.98
HIGH MOUNTAIN TEMPEL "Pacific Sky Burial (Axaxaxas Mlo)" (Lotus House) cd-r 7.98
HUNTSVILLE "For The Middle Class" (Rune Grammofon) cd 16.98
HUSH ARBORS "Under Bent Limb Trees" (Digitalis) cd 11.98
I'M FROM BARCELONA "Let Me Introduce My Friends" (Virgin) cd 19.98
JAN DUKES DE GREY "Sorcerers" (Wounded Nurse) cd 17.98
JONES, NORAH "Not Too Late" (Blue Note) cd 16.98
JR. AND HIS SOULETTES "Psychodelic Sounds" cd 17.98
KEIJO "Palla, Blown From Here" (Digitalis) cd 14.98
KOHOUTEK "Hair On The Sidewalk" (Sockets CDR) dvd 14.98
KRAFTWERK "Radio-Activity" (Capitol) lp 12.98
KRAFTWERK "The Man Machine" (Capitol) lp 12.98
KRAFTWERK "Trans-Europe Express" (Capitol) lp 12.98
LOEFAH "Voodoo" (six6six) 12" 11.98
M'LUMBO "Sacrifices To The Neon Gods" (Mulatta Records) cd 16.98
MAD DOG "Dawn Of The Seventh Sun" (RD) cd 19.98
MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ "L'Autre Cap" (K) cd/lp 14.98/13.98
MOONDOG "Rare Material" (Roof Music) 2cd 30.00
MRK1 "Copyright Laws" (Planet Mu) cd 17.98
MULLEN, GEOFF "A Rip In The Fabric" (Rare Youth) 7" 4.50
MV & EE WITH THE BUMMER ROAD "Green Blues" (Ecstatic Peace) cd 10.98
MY CAT IS AN ALIEN "Il Suono Venuto Dallo Spazio" (Victo) cd 16.98
MZ.412 "Infernal Affairs" (Cold Meat Industry) cd 14.98
NEGATIVA "s/t" (Prodisk) cd 14.98
NITSCH, HERMANN "Requiem Fuer Meine Frau Beate, Musik Der 56.Aktion" (Alga Marghen) 2cd 45.00
OBSCURUS ADVOCAM "Verbia Daemonicus" (Battle Kommand) cd 14.98
OMFO "We Are The Shepherds" (Essay Recordings) cd 16.98
ORAM, DAPHNE "Oramics" (Paradigm) cd 28.00
PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE "A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies" (Cold Blue) cd 14.98
PETRONELLA, ANGELO "Sintesi Da Un Diario" (Die Schachtel) cd 18.98
PFANGEN, CHRISTA "Watch Me Getting Back The End" (Die Schachtel) cd 18.98
PILIA, STEFANO "The Suncrows Fall and Tree" (Sedimental) cd 14.98
PINEBENDER "Working Nine To Wolf" (Lovitt) cd 12.98
PINK FAIRIES "Never Neverland" (Tapestry) lp 35.00
PROFUNDI "The Omega Rising" (Profound Lore) cd 15.98
PROSCRIPTOR "Thoth Music(k)" (Tarot Productions) 7" 6.50
RAAIJMAKERS, DICK "Complete Tape Music Of Dick Raaijmakers" (Basta) 3cd 33.00
RAM JAM "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Ram" (Rock Candy) cd 17.98
RAMESES III "Matanuska" (Music Fellowship) cd 15.98
REID, TERRY "River" (Water) cd 16.98
RICHTER, MAX "Songs From Before" (130701) cd 14.98
SACRED STEEL "Hammer Of Destruction" (Massacre) cd 17.98
SCHNITZLER, CONRAD "Klavierhelm" (Important) cd 14.98
SCHNITZLER, CONRAD "Trigger Trilogy" (Important) 3cd 28.00
SCHULZE, KLAUS "Timewind" (Revisited) 2cd 21.00
SCOTT, JILL "Collaborations" (Hidden Beach) cd 17.98
SHITMAT "Hang The DJ" (Wrong) cd/lp 15.98/22.00
SILL, JUDEE "Heart Food" (Water) cd 16.98
SILL, JUDEE "s/t" (Water) cd 16.98
SKINNY PUPPY "Mythmaker" (Synthetic Symphony) cd 16.98
SOIL SING THROUGH ME MEETS KOHOUTEK "New Milk" (Wabana) cd-r 13.98
SOLITUDE AETERNUS "Alone" (Soul Food) cd 17.98
SPRENGER, KONRAD "Miniaturen" (Choose) cd 18.98
SPRIGUNS "Revel, Weird and Wild" (Acme) cd 21.00
SPRIGUNS "Time Will Pass" (Acme) cd 21.00
TEXT OF LIGHT "Rotterdam 1" (Room 40) cd 16.98
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE QUEEN "S/T" (Virgin) cd 13.98
THERMALS, THE "The Body, The Blood, The Machine" (Sub Pop) cd 13.98
THIRSTY MOON "Blitz" (Long Hair) cd 24.00
THIRSTY MOON "I'll Be Back - Live '75" cd 24.00
THIRSTY MOON "s/t" (Long Hair) cd 24.00
THIRSTY MOON "You'll Never Come Back" (Long Hair) cd 24.00
TIN HAT "The Sad Machinery Of Spring" (Ryko) cd 16.98
TREES COMMUNITY, THE "The Christ Tree" (Hand Eye) 4cd 42.00
TWILIGHT SINGERS, THE "A Stitch In Time" (One Little Indian) cd 6.98
V/A "Bay Area Funk 2" (Ubiquty) cd 16.98
V/A "Bombay Connection Vol. 1, Funk From Bollywood Action Thrillers 1977-1984" (Bombay Connection) cd/2lp 16.98/32.00
V/A "Bombay Connection Vol. 2, Bouncin' Grooves From Bollywood Films 1959-1972" (Bombay Connection) cd/2lp 16.98/32.00
V/A "Electric Gypsyland 2" (Ryko) cd 16.98
V/A "Getting Off! The Seductive Sounds Of 70's Adult Cinema" (Lucky Monkey) cd 11.98
V/A "I, Mute Hummings" (Ex Ovo) cd 21.00
V/A "Improvised Music From Japan Extra 2006 Special Issue Berlin" (IMJ) magazine + 2cd 28.00
V/A "Reactions To Raaijmakers" (Basta) cd 21.00
V/A "Tribute To Robert Moog" (Creme Records) cd 17.98
V/A "Trojan Motor City Reggae Box Set" (Trojan) 3cd 19.98
VOLCANO THE BEAR "Birth" (No-Fi) 7" 8.98
WARPIG "s/t" (Relapse) cd 14.98
WAZOO "S/T" (World In Sound) cd 21.00
WITCH "Local Band Nitemare" (Blueberry Honey) dvd-r 10.98
WITH THROATS AS FINE AS NEEDLES + NEW FAIRFIELD PARKS AND RECREATION "Hong Kong" (Pseudo Arcana) 3" cd-r 9.98
XELA "For Frosty Mornings And Summer Nights" (Type) cd 15.89
YOUNG, NEIL & CRAZY HORSE "Live At The Fillmore East March 6 & 7, 1970" (Reprise) cd 16.98
Z'EV / FRANCISCO LOPEZ "Buzzin' Fly / Dormant Spores" (Lapilli / Black Rose) cd 16.98
ZELIENOPLE "Mary Celeste" (Pseudo Arcana) cd-r 12.98

_______________________________________________________________________

ABOUT MAILORDER


Please place your order via our website.

[1] We will contact you to verify your order and let you know when it will be shipped. Please note that occasionally it may take a day or two for us to reply. We are not a faceless bunch of computers replying to your order -- we are human beings!

[2] If we are out of some of your items and we think we will get them within the same week, we can wait to ship. Or... If it's going to be more than a few days to complete your order, we will ship what we have and then will contact you as the remainders arrive.

[ note ] Due to the everchanging nature of the independent record business, we are not responsible for listed price changes (due to supplier price changes) and often cannot update our site fast enough to reflect these changes, but we will always try to let you know of any differences.


DOMESTIC SHIPPING :
--------------------------------
1-2 items $4.50 USPS Priority Mail
3+ items $6.50 UPS Ground

Further Explanation (Please Read!):
Within the USA, an order of 3 or more items will be shipped via UPS ground for a flat fee of $6.50. These packages are automatically insured and trackable.

However, if your package contains just 1 or 2 items, we will ship your order via USPS Priority Mail, and charge you $4.50 for shipping. These packages are NOT insured or trackable, sorry. So if you desire those safeguards, please request UPS delivery at the $6.50 rate. You must mention this in the comments field of our online order form.

Also, please note that UPS will not ship to PO Boxes. If you only have a PO Box, we can ship packages of 3+ items via US Postal Service and charge you by weight according to their rates. Special shipping needs (e.g. UPS Next Day) are also do-able, just ask.

Another important note: box sets DON'T (usually) count as one item. Sorry. A box set will generally bump you up into the "three or more items" category. Y'know, they're big. Boxes.


INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING :
-------------------------------- For foreign customers we ship via US AIRMAIL ("Letterpost"). Your price is based on the actual cost of shipping plus $1. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package, No Correspondence" category and see the price for "Letterpost". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound.)


We highly recommend insurance for your international package, but it is very expensive! You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package, No Correspondence" category and see the price for "Parcel Post". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound.)


INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE :
-------------------------------- You are hereby forewarned that Aquarius is not responsible if your international package gets lost in the mail. Insurance is your only recourse if your records never show up. Since the terrible events of 9/11, mail service has been slow and undependable... and while we haven't experienced any *confirmed* permanently lost mail, insurance might provide some additional piece of mind in this time of upheaval. We strongly recommend it. But yes, it is very expensive. It's your choice. Again: Aquarius is not responsible for lost mail, so if you aren't willing to take a (slight but real) risk, please buy the insurance.

International insurance is very expensive! In fact often the insurance costs more than the value of your package, in which case it obviously does not make sense to insure it. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package, No Correspondence" category and see the price for "Parcel Post", which is the way insured packages are sent. 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound.)

For example: for a one-pound package worth $18 going to England, shipping without insurance is about $8. But with insurance, the shipping / insurance total is over $16!

It is your reponsibility to check the international rate calculator in order to determine whether or not you want international insurance. If you tell us you want international insurance, we will add it to your order no matter how much it costs!


PAYMENT :
-------------------------------- Payment is via credit card: Visa, MC, Discover, and Amex. Money orders are accepted only from customers within the USA. If you must pay by money order, you have to confirm the order with us through email or phone BEFORE you send any payment. We cannot take personal checks for mailorder, sorry!


QUESTION?
-------------------------------- Email the mailorder department: mailorder@aquariusrecords.org

______________________________________________________________________

SOME SELECTED UPCOMING RELEASES

----} real soon
Striborg "Nefaria" cd/2lp on Displeased/Southern Lord
The Hidden Hand "The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote" 2cd on Southern Lord
v/a"Ain't It Hard! Garage & Psych from Viva Records" cd/lp on Sundazed
Faine Jade "Introspection: A Faine Jade Recital" cd/lp reissue on Sundazed
Gandalf "2" cd on Sundazed

----} also soon or sooner
SUNNO))) / Boris "Altar" 3lp version on Southern Lord

----} February 6th or sooner
Peter, Bjorn & John "Writers Block" cd+bonus disc domestic release on Almost Gold
Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders OST cd on B-music
Aereogramme "My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go" cd on Sonic Unyon
Apples In Stereo "New Magnetic Wonder" cd on Yep Roc
Arab Strab "Ten Years Of Tears" cd on Chemikal Underground
v/a "8-Bit Operators" cd on Astralwerks
Car Bomb "Centralia" cd on Relapse
Biomechanical "Empires Of The World" cd on Earache
Cable "Last Call" cd+dvd on Translation Loss
Bloc Party "Weekend In The City" cd on Vice
Fall Out Boy "Infinity On High" cd on Island
Kool Keith "Ultra-Octa-Doom" cd
Yoko Ono "Yes I'm A Witch" cd on Astralwerks
John Waters "A Date With John Waters" cd on New Line

----} February 13th or sooner
Terry Riley "Reed Streams" cd reissue on Elision Fields
Times New Viking "The Paisley Reich" cd/lp on Siltbreeze
Papercuts "Can't Go Back" cd/lp on Gnomonsong
Rio En Medio "Bride Of Dynamite" cd on Gnomonsong
Pink Reason "Cleaning The Mirror" cd/lp on Siltbreeze
Jay Munly "Galvanized Yankee" cd on Smooch
Vocokesh "All This And Hieronymous Bosch" cd on Strange Attractors Audio House

----} February 20th
Gallhammer "Dawn Of The Gallhammer" cd+dvd on Peaceville
Eluvium "Copia" cd on Temporary Residence Ltd.
Arkansaw Man "s/t" cd reissue on Table Of The Elements
Zu & Nobukazu Takemura "Identification With The Enemy: A Key To The Underworld" cd on Atavistic

----} February 27th
Kemialliset Ystavat "Alkuharka" LP version on Beta-Lactam Ring Records
Tomutonttu "s/t" LP n Beta-Lactam Ring Records
Zodiacs "Gone" cd on Holy Mountain
Sonic Youth "The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities" LP edition on Goofin'

----} January/February
Inquisition "Nefarious Dismal Oration" cd on No Colours

----} March 6th
Furze "UTD: Beneath The Odd-Edge Sounds Of The Twilight Contract Of The Black Fascist / The Wealth Of The Penetration In The Abstract Paradigms Of Satan" cd on Candlelight

----} March 13th
Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction For The Arts "La Grima (August 14, 1971)" cd on doubtmusic
v/a "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation" 2cd on Numero

----} March 20th
Swallow The Sun "Hope" cd on Candlelight

----} March 27th
Lesbian "Power Hor" cd on Holy Mountain

----} April 4th
Pole "Steingarten" cd/2lp on Scape
Throne Of Katharsis "An Eternal Dark Horizon" cd on Candlelight

----} April 24th
Destroy All Monsters "Grow Live Monsters" DVD on MVD Visual

----} May 15th
Boris w/ Kurihara "Rainbow" domestic cd version on Drag City

----} also upcoming sooner or later
Neurosis "Given To The Rising" cd on Neurot
Explosions In The Sky "All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone" cd/lp on Temporary Residence Ltd.
Camberwell Now "All's Well" deluxe, newly remastered cd reissue on Recommended
Dennis Duck "Dennis Duck Goes Disco" cd/lp reissue on Poobah
Chubby Checker "s/t" cd reissue on Underground Masters <---yes, the psychedelic C.C. album!!
Bernard Parmegiani "Chants Magnetiques" cd on Fractal
Acid Mothers Temple & The Pink Ladies Blues "The Soul of a Mountain Wolf" cd on Fractal
Ilitch "Lena's Life & Others Stories" cd on Fractal
Zu/Nobukazu Takemura "Identification With CD" cd on Atavistic
William Parker & Hamid Drake "First Communion/Piercing the Veil: Vol. 1 Complete" 2cd on Aum Fidelity
Boris w/ Kurihara "Rainbow" LP version on Inoxia
Velvet Cacoon "Genevive" 2LP version
Velvet Cacoon "Northsuite" 2LP version
Earth "Hibernaculam" cd+dvd/lp on Southern Lord
Abruptum "Evil Genius" cd on Southern Lord
Asbestosdeath "Unclean/Dejection" cd/lp on Southern Lord
v/a "Cherrystones Word" cd on Tlon Uqbor
v/a "Portland" 3lp on RRR
v/a "Texas" 3lp on RRR
v/a "D-I-Y" cd/2lp on Soul Jazz
v/a "Studio One Rub-A-Dub" cd/2lp on Soul Jazz
v/a "Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word 2" cd on Delay 68
Sonic Youth "Daydream Nation" 4lp reissue on Goofin'
Vibracathedral Orchestra "Thunderbold Wisdom" cd on VHF
Richard Youngs / Alex Neilson "Electric Lotus / Lotus Edition" cd on VHF

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23FIVE INCORPORATED PRESENTS:
TENTH ANNUAL ACTIVATING THE MEDIUM FESTIVAL
Chapter Three

With performances by:
Jeph Jerman (Arizona)
Seth Nehil (Portland)
Antimatter (San Francisco)
Jim Haynes (San Francisco)

WHEN: Friday, February 16, 2007, 8 PM
WHERE: San Francisco Art Institute, Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut Street
COST: $5 - 10 sliding scale, free to current SFAI students and faculty

23five will conclude it's three part Tenth Annual Activating The Medium festival at the San Francisco Art Institute. As with the other performances in the festival, the central thesis is the art of field recording, especially when documenting the enigmatic boundary between the natural and the artificial. For the final installment, performances will include an acoustic performance by Jeph Jerman (AZ) sounding only objects found in nature, evocative sonic landscapes from Portland's Seth Nihil, and sonic offerings from local sound artist Xopher Davidson (aka Antimatter) and sonic alchemist Jim Haynes.

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Andee Cup Jim AllanLaurenAshleyPamJasonChristineIrwinMattScott and Sally