MAUSOLEUMS, THE I Am The Mausoleum (Chinese Workers Labor Union) cd-r 8.98
A customer turned us on to the Mausoleums, a super distorted buzz drenched experimental 'black metal' combo, which we later discovered was in fact an aQuarius mailorder customer! Small world for sure. But even if we had no idea who the heck this was, we would still be suitably blown away. 
You think Wold and Velvet Cacoon know a thing or two about buzz and distortion, well, those guys have nothing on the Mausoleums...
It's hard to even quantify how blown out and buzzy the sound is here, it might make more sense to reference Japanese noise music cuz this almost sounds like straight up super distorted speaker melting N.O.I.S.E., on the surface at least. Until you notice a roiling whirlpool of blackened riffing and howled vocalizing, just beneath all that harsh hiss and brutal buzz. It's almost like Ildjarn or Beherit recorded by Masonna and produced by Merzbow. Blasting and relentless, face melting fury, guitars so distorted they sound like they might crumble into jagged shards, drums that sound like bursts of white noise, but all deftly shaped into riffs and songs and chunks of seriously scalding blackened metal. 
But then the band will unleash something like "Cicada", a gorgeous loping slowcore jam, again doused with delay and buried under a layer of distorted grit, but strangely lovely, with a bit of melancholy twang mixed in. 
Or the freaked out blackpsych blast of "Joan Of Arc" a track that sounds like a dense slab of pure black buzz and howl, until suddenly a gorgeous chunk of indie jangle surfaces, still dripping with distorted buzz, but so goddamn dreamy and melodic, like an even more distorted damaged My Bloody Valentine, the drums and cymbals so corroded and decayed, they balance out the dreamy jangle. Elsewhere, riffs are dipped in molten hellfire and pushed all the way into the red, crumbling distortion is draped over lilting minor key guitar, strange Greg Ginn-ish angular guitars are twisted and melted down into more black buzz...
And while the majority of the record is some of the filthiest, blackest buzzingest metal you'll ever hear, the buzzing blackness is split up by all sorts of unlikely and not that black jams, the strangely skeletal Stereolab-ish post rock of "Lenin Not Lennon", the creepy black electro (replete with strangely Beatles-esque guitar) of "Insignificance", the metalized buzz wrapped Neu!-isms of "Running Through The Reeds", the warbly organ flecked garage stomp of "I Guess I'm Like A Prince, Maybe" and the Spacemen 3 like druggy drone of "Like A Prince", all seemingly out of place, but when listened to as a whole, seem to perfectly balance the extreme brutal buzz of the rest of the disc. 
Maybe too fucked up and far out for most metal heads, but folks into super damaged heaviness, and freaked out whatthefuck metal will dig this BIG TIME. 
MPEG Stream: "Day Of Wrath"
MPEG Stream: "Cicada"
MPEG Stream: "Joan Of Arc"
MPEG Stream: "You Die Defiant"
MPEG Stream: "Lenin Not Lennon"

STRIBORG Solitude (Displeased) cd 14.98
Black metal bands come in many varieties, and we have our favorites among everything from blackened thrash drunkards to grandiose symphonic keyboard-laden festival headliners to grim trance-y one-man-band eccentrics... particularly the latter, though, especially when we're trying to find black metal to recommend to AQ customers who aren't necessarily metalheads but who like weird weird music whatever the genre. Droning fucked up stuff that's almost more experimental than it is metal. And this (one-man) band Striborg is precisely what we like to have on hand when the subject of, "if I were to buy just one weird black metal record, what should it be?" comes up.
For the longest time, it was next to impossible to find cds by this still-obscure artist from far-off Tasmania (that's right, Tasmania!). Fortunately others besides us have recognized his peculiar genius and now the releases are (somewhat) more readily available. Which brings us to this brand new album, Solitude, and it to us, hot on the heels of Striborg's other recent full-length release, Ghostwoodlands. As with that album, here Striborg has uncapped his usual aerosol spray of buzzing guitars and wretched effected vokills. The fuzzed out, bleak black metal clatter is interspersed with long stretches of what approaches D.I.Y. 20th Century Classical electronic music spookiness! The ambient, isolationist tracks that cropped up on Ghostwoodlands are again to the fore, as is an even more droney, doomy, droomy mood. There are several exclusively "black metal" tracks (two of 'em quarter hour epics!), some of them powered by blazing drum machine beats, but even so the overall vibe of Solitude is so slooooow and doooooomy.
Drum machine? Don't worry, it sounds good, and at times, we think he really IS playing the drums. Striborg's less-than-tight timekeeping and fucked up fills have always been paradoxical highlights of his albums in our perverse estimation, but Solitude finds many ways to provide those idiosyncratic so-wrong-its-right pleasures. Tracks like "Ektoplasmic Dreams", "Doppelganger" and "The Untouched Land" are purely electronic-sounding, ominous abstract dronescapes, piercing with high-end synth-shards and soothing with somnolent textures. Elsewhere, his blurred guitars do the same, reminding us of dreamy gloom dronesters Angelic Process, a hushed guitar tone... not even a tone, more like a pure wave, a solid mass.
We mentioned that Striborg hails from pretty far south -- Tasmania. The rainforests of his island are not that distant from the icy wastes of Antarctica. But this album, Solitude, is the sound of Striborg's one-man, one-way journey even further south, falling right off the edge of this world...
MPEG Stream: "Ektoplasmic Dreams"
MPEG Stream: "Solitude"
MPEG Stream: "The Grandeur of Melancholy"

VARGR Wehrmacht Satanas (Eternal Pride Productions) cd 13.98
The Dark Lord Nordvargr has been threatening us with it for ages, but as the sky blackens, and the thunder rolls in, the air grows thick, the ground rumbles and cracks beneath our feet, it is finally here, the debut from Nordvargr's grim black kvlt alter ego Vargr. And just like it says in the liner notes "Vargr plays True Black Nekronoise Metal exclusively."
We sure don't need to tell you how much we love Black Nekronoise Metal (at least now that we know such a thing exists) and there really is no better way to describe this caustic chaotic brutality here, but we'll give it a tryŠ
Wehrmacht Satanas begins with soft swirls of sound and cold winter winds, dark and drifting and very much like much of the stuff we love from Nordvargr, but then super harsh vocals surface from within the muted drone-y backdrop and are promptly swallowed up by a massive wall of some of the harshest, heaviest, crustiest, most distorted and buzz drenched noise metal chaos we have ever heard.
Riffs are more sort of big prickly downtuned smears, drums (are there actually drums in there?) blast like a hailstorm of hiss and buzz, the vocals hissing and howling, all crumbled into a serious ear shredding rrrooooaaaarŠ
It actually sounds bit like a Darkthrone record on DHR, imagine Alec Empire, had he grown up on Venom And BathoryŠ Primitive, grim black buzz, but completely blown out and in the red. The riffs are looped and cyclical, totally hypnotic, definitely for fans of the ultra raw BM like Bone Awl, Ash Pool, Beherit, AncestorsŠ "The Crushing Weight Of Sin" is about as hooky as it gets, with an actual melody, and plenty of space, in the context of the rest of the record it's practically a pop song. But it's quickly followed up by "Svavelsjalar" a gorgeously thick washed out blast of blackness, everything so blurred and buzzy that it almost sounds like a black metal Fennesz, until about halfway through when the sound lurches suddenly and transforms into what sounds like a radio station between stations, bits of some super lo-fi live Beherit rehearsal coming through between the jagged shards of static and white noise.
And most of the record sort of straddles that line between blasting black metal and buzzing ambience, much of this disc actually, reminds us of weirdo Canadian black metallers Wold, a twisted convoluted blurred black metal warped and wrapped in layer after layer of distortion, but where Wold was all smeared and soft focus, Vargr sharpens the edges, everything black and glinting, sharp and harshŠ
Later in the record, "Total Cryptic Darkness" is everything the title would lead you to believe. Gorgeously thick and viscous black bottomless sonic pit, a near static sea of low end whir and deeeeeeeeeeeeep dark drones. A bunch of the tracks are super intense, almost techno-like looped shards of hissy crunch, almost like black gabber, while others bliss out big time, like a blackened Total, with epic ur-drones, huge swaths of metallic reverberations and warm washed out skree.
The disc finishes off with a Burzum cover, and weirdly enough it's an ambient number, one that Nordvargr, deftly tweaks into something slightly grittier and more bleak, a gorgeous slab of groaning ambient driftŠ very tidal and hypnotic, the perfect aural balm after the skin flaying sonic assault you've just enduredŠ
Noisy, crushing, harsh, grim, nekro, black, brutal and fucked up. Hail the True Black Nekronoise Metal!!!
MPEG Stream: "Infernal Majesty Triumphant"
MPEG Stream: "The Crushing Weight Of Sin"
MPEG Stream: "Svavelsjalar"
MPEG Stream: "Panzerkrieg - Bofors Mit Uns!"

SUNBURNED CIRCLE The Blaze Game (Conspiracy Records) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
BACK IN STOCK. LAST COPIES. We just recieved the final ten copies we're gonna be able to get of the vinyl of this cool collab (the cd version of which is still readily available, however).
Any one lucky enough to visit hypnorockers Circle in Finland, besides being showered with hospitality and crazy adventures, hockey games, private concerts, lots of record shopping, reindeer dinners and Finnish pizza, also is quite likely to be invited to record with the band, as they seem to be in a constant state of ready-to-record-ness, as our very own Andee can attest to: just check http://www.tUMULt.net to hear Jaappollot, the results of several sessions he shared with the boys in Circle!
Seems a similar thing happened to abstract free rock collective Sunburned Hand Of The Man when they were in Finland, and it's hard to imagine a better match. Sunburned seems to have lured Circle back into the murky woods, for long languorous stretches of slow burning psychedelia. The metallic sheen of recent releases has been rusted and caked with mud and old dried branches, the result a trancelike folk flecked tribal krautrock, the perfect mix of what we like best about both bands. 
The sound on first listen is like some sort of alien world music, with dense, but laid back tribal drumming, swirling serpentine guitar lines, whispered chanted vocals, all wrapped in a cavernous production, making the tracks sound warm and wide open, expansive and endless, there is clatter and clang, but for the most part it's smeared and blurred, buried in sonic murk, wrapped around abstract krautrock rhythms and chunks of angular guitar riffage. Some of the tracks get wild and chaotic, but even then, the sound is still restrained, not jagged or harsh, more swirling and washed out. 
One of our favorite tracks ever, by maybe either band, is the super hypnotic "Heinavelho", another growling ambient sprawl, but strangely rhythmic and musical, still murky and muddy and super hypnotic, but with ultra subtle repetitively strummed guitars, held in check by martial drum rolls and little squalls of brushed snares, eventually building to an FX drenched gothy cabaret crawl, all moody and drunken, lurching and downtuned, staggering through a thick cloud of chirping bleeps and bloops and dense swells of rumble and shimmer. 
Fans of either band will definitely dig, and a good gateway for anyone into one, but not yet so into the other...
MPEG Stream: "Majava"
MPEG Stream: "Heinavelho"
MPEG Stream: "Vuoren Valloitus"

TUNNELS Radiant Bodies Of Scorched Light (Cut Hands) cd-r 13.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
More dreamy drones from Portland, Oregon. The second audio document from the man known simply as Tunnels, and the weird thing is, the music actually sort of sounds like tunnels... We have had a few other Tunnels cd-r's, we still have a few in stock, have a look at this week's instock not yet reviewed section, they're all great, but this is the latest, and we actually managed to get enough to actually review and list.
Unlike the self titled cd-r on Yarn Lazer (now out of print, so don't order), which seemed to be mostly low end rumble and minimal drone, Radiant Bodies begins with nothing but vocals, disembodied coos and purrs left suspended in haunting stretches of reverbed shimmer and glitchy percussive skitter. Sounds a bit like Yarn Lazer head honcho Honey Owens' Valet project. The second track continues on in a similar trajectory, billowy smears of melody, over a blurred dentist drill backdrop, a pretty gauze draped over a jagged landscape of hiss and grind. The next track is even more ephemeral, gorgeous spaced out krautrock synth drift a la Popol Vuh or Tangerine Dream, but even more blissed out. In fact very little of the record is low end rumble, instead it's all blown out space rock drift, long glimmering expanses of pulsing minimal sound, meditative and hypnotic and so beautiful. 
Packaged in a mini dvd style plastic sleeve, with full color cover, and full color mini insert. 
MPEG Stream: "Lumia"
MPEG Stream: "The Light That Was Never On Land Or On Sea"

V/A People Take Warning! (Tompkins Square) 3cd box 58.00
Sometimes it seems there's so much old music to be rediscovered, what's the point in even making more? Well, maybe so folks 100 years from now can put out an amazing archival boxset of black metal, or doom, or freak folk. But we digress.
Murder ballads, true life tales of sorrow and sadness, tragedy and death, loss and misery, set to music, songs designed to help mourn, to pass on tales of lives lived and lost, a way to celebrate life, and fight off our fear of death.
For over a hundred years, these songs have existed, probably longer, the music and lyrics like tabloid newspapers, sensationalistic, bold and explicit, never designed to be popular, or mainstream, instead they existed for the people, who were hungry to hear about disaster and mayhem, just like slowing down to look at a car wreck, these songs would hold the listeners in thrall, not only designed to tell a tale, but maybe teach a lesson as well.
This collection is massive, gorgeously presented, extensively researched, and beyond all that, just an amazing collection of fantastic songs, most culled from old 78's, dusty and scratchy, hissy, pops and crackle, adding an appropriately old timey patina, country, rhythm and blues, the subject matter appropriately dark, and sinister, as if those musics weren't already primarily focused on death and dying, broken hearts and murdered sweethearts.
The sounds range from campfire country to stripped down blues, to bouncy rhythm and blues, to mournful ballads, to twangy honky tonk and every variation in between. Men, women, young, and old, all recorded between 1913 and 1938, spinning their tales, around the campfire, behind a bottle of whiskey, on a street corner, anyway there were folks in need of a good, and tragic story.
The packaging is amazing, a clothbound hardcover book the cds in little pockets on the inside of both the front and back covers, a huge book, a introduction by Tom Waits, a brief history of the genre, and then super in depth notes on each artist and each track, tons of photos, and not just the performers, but the various accidents, wrecks, mishaps and tragedies that inspired these songs (not least among them, the sinking of the Titanic!).
MPEG Stream: HI HENRY BROWN & CHARLIE JORDAN "Titanic Blues"
MPEG Stream: SKILLET LICKERS "Wreck Of The Old 97"
MPEG Stream: CANTOR JOSEPH ROSENBLATT "El Mole Rachmim (Fur Titanik)"
MPEG Stream: FURRY LEWIS "Kassie Jones Part 1"

REV. KRISS HADES The Wind Of Orion (Modern Invasion Music) cd 14.98
This is not really new, but it's one of our favorite freaked out black metal records, and it was reissued last year (originally released in 2002) although we only now managed to get in touch with the label (they also released the Vorak, reviewed elsewhere on this list) but now finally we can list and review, this amazing slab of bizarre blackness.
Those familiar with the Rev. Kriss Hades, probably know him as the guitar player for Aussie black death metallers Sadistik Exekution, who while weird in their own right, are pretty much furious grinding blacknoise, a sort of sloppy psychedelic black mess, awesome by the way, but more simple and fast than freaked out and fucked up. Which is why this first album from Sadistik guitarist Hades is such a mind blower. This is super abstract, noisy, buzzy, outsider experimental black metal, peppered with stretches of black ambience, industrial soundscapes and plenty of whatthefuck heaviness. This record has been described as a mix of Einsturzende Neubauten, Beherit and Pink Floyd, and while the sound here is probably much closer to Beherit than the other two, their are definite moments of tripped out psychedelia and industrial grind and whir.
But from the first song, it's easy to tell this is some freaky mind blowing stuff. Beginning with haunting acoustic guitar, weaving mournful melodies amidst whipping winds, when the band kicks in, instead of launching into blasting blackness, it's more a sort of murky blown out buzz, the guitars super washed out, the riffing just a blackened smear, underpinned by epic swells of super dramatic keyboards, the drums a buried blast, WAY down in the mix, while over the top the vocals are a confusional pile up of grunts and growls, of shrieks and howls, mumbling and singing in tongues, the whole thing smeared and seasick, buzzing abstractly, almost more experimental black ambience than metal, but there are riffs, and drums blasting away, reminiscent of Wold and Velvet Cacoon in some ways. The first track finishes off with more acoustic guitar, this time though draped delicately over muted black riffing.
And the weird thing is, that's about as metal as the record gets, that first track, from then on it gets more and more unhinged, more psychedelic, less riffy and definitely less 'metal', but no less heavy. The next two tracks are reinterpreted Sadistik Exekution tracks, and while we're not that familiar with the originals, these versions definitely twist the originals into new shapes. The first is a blazing black blast of buzz, but beginning with a tripped out psychedelic assemblage of backwards guitars and processed vocals, then the song itself is super convoluted, riffs slipping and sliding everywhere, squiggly leads, a total damaged black psych freakout, while the other is a sort of blissed out ambient Godflesh / Pitchshifter thing, all industrial rhythms, the riffs, way down in the mix and doused in FX, haunting vocals and all manner of swirling shimmer and crumbling drones...
Right after that is the super brief "Luciferion", a super distorted, ultra fuzzed out shred fest, just guitar, buzzing riffs and wild leads, the whole thing blown out and in the red, followed by "Meditation Of The Midnight Candle Practice" an extended soundscape of warped distorted guitars, strangled effects, huge washes of glacial guitardrone, super affected leads, glitched out minimal rhythms buried way down in the mix, drifting lo-fi ambience and super tweaked studio sounds, all woven into a seriously cracked world of black sound. The record finishes off with a creepy haunted house horror movie church organ jam that morphs right at the end into a super thick corrosive deathdronedirge...
A seriously demented slab of damaged psychedelic black buzz. Which obviously means WAY recommended.
The reissue includes a thick booklet with lyrics, photos, an excerpt from an interview with Hades, and lots of Hades' super intense artwork...
MPEG Stream: "Winds Over Orion / Pyramids Of War And The Destruction Of Enemies"
MPEG Stream: "Black Mass Murder (Satanic Version)"
MPEG Stream: "Final Execution (Ouija Version)"

REVERIES, THE Live In Bologna (Rat-Drifting) cd 14.98
We just listed the brand new Reveries album recently, a disc of all Willie Nelson covers, so we decided we'd get a few more of this live disc in for the folks who may have missed out on this last time around.
Like some dusty old 78, left in the basement for 20 or 30 years, wet and warped, gritty and scratched up, thrown onto the ol' Victrola as is, and allowed to unfurl a warped and warbly, rickety detuned slow motion blues crawl. That's exactly what this latest disc from the Reveries sounds like. Recorded live in Italy in 2004, the Reveries, fronted by Eric Chenaux (who for those of you up on your nineties indie math rock, fronted Toronto's godlike Phleg Camp), magically create this sound from another time. But there's more to it than that, the sound is strangely damaged, alien even, and for good reason. The band employ a technique as bizarre as it is brilliant. Each player, in addition to wielding guitar, harmonica, bass, saw, nose-flute and thumb-reeds (!?), holds a tiny cell phone speaker IN THEIR MOUTHS!!! WHILE THEY PLAY!! OR EVEN SING!! So each of the instruments is sent first to the speaker in the mouth of another player, who much like a Jew's harp, is able to shape and warp the sound with the shape of his mouth. So you're hearing guitar come out of the bass players mouth, the bass coming out of the guitar player's mouth, the flute through another player's mouth, and on and on...
Then there's the singing, which all three members do, and as you might imagine, it's pretty difficult to sing with a speaker in your mouth, and a speaker cable trailing out of your mouth to an amp or a bandmate's mouth. The result is a mumbled and warbly, mush mouthed drawl, fuzzy falsettos, a garbled croon, often sounding like a toothless old Nina Simone, but just as often, like some strange buzzing growl, perfectly complimenting the band's detuned twang flecked scrawl.
It's almost like the Starfuckers playing Django Reinhardt at 16 rpm, with a countrified Derek Bailey on guitar. Cracking, wheezing and skeletal, a demented yet lovely underwater slow motion Western Swing, plenty of downtuned buzz, scraping and shuffling, whispering and whistling, seasick and gorgeously woozy. There are stretches of garbled instrumental chaos here and there, but the majority of the set is spent slithering and shimmering, meandering drunkenly through some strange sonic haze, an old timey radio broadcast, from some strange musical alternate reality, bits of classic blues and jazz muted and smeared pulled apart and tangled up into haunting and perplexing shapes. So gorgeous.
MPEG Stream: "You've Changed"
MPEG Stream: "Gone With The Wind"

SUNBURNED CIRCLE The Blaze Game (Conspiracy Records) cd 15.98
Any one lucky enough to visit hypnorockers Circle in Finland, besides being showered with hospitality and crazy adventures, hockey games, private concerts, lots of record shopping, reindeer dinners and Finnish pizza, also is quite likely to be invited to record with the band, as they seem to be in a constant state of ready-to-record-ness, as our very own Andee can attest to: just check http://www.tUMULt.net to hear Jaappollot, the results of several sessions he shared with the boys in Circle!
Seems a similar thing happened to abstract free rock collective Sunburned Hand Of The Man when they were in Finland, and it's hard to imagine a better match. Sunburned seems to have lured Circle back into the murky woods, for long languorous stretches of slow burning psychedelia. The metallic sheen of recent releases has been rusted and caked with mud and old dried branches, the result a trancelike folk flecked tribal krautrock, the perfect mix of what we like best about both bands. 
The sound on first listen is like some sort of alien world music, with dense, but laid back tribal drumming, swirling serpentine guitar lines, whispered chanted vocals, all wrapped in a cavernous production, making the tracks sound warm and wide open, expansive and endless, there is clatter and clang, but for the most part it's smeared and blurred, buried in sonic murk, wrapped around abstract krautrock rhythms and chunks of angular guitar riffage. Some of the tracks get wild and chaotic, but even then, the sound is still restrained, not jagged or harsh, more swirling and washed out. 
One of our favorite tracks ever, by maybe either band, is the super hypnotic "Heinavelho", another growling ambient sprawl, but strangely rhythmic and musical, still murky and muddy and super hypnotic, but with ultra subtle repetitively strummed guitars, held in check by martial drum rolls and little squalls of brushed snares, eventually building to an FX drenched gothy cabaret crawl, all moody and drunken, lurching and downtuned, staggering through a thick cloud of chirping bleeps and bloops and dense swells of rumble and shimmer. 
Fans of either band will definitely dig, and a good gateway for anyone into one, but not yet so into the other...
MPEG Stream: "Majava"
MPEG Stream: "Heinavelho"
MPEG Stream: "Vuoren Valloitus"

ACRIMONY Bong On - Live Long! (Leaf Hound) cd 16.98
We've long been fans of the druggy stoner grooves of the UK's Acrimony, ever since 1996's Tumuli Shroomaroom, a record that has been out of print for a while now, otherwise we would have most certainly given it some long overdue love on the AQ list. Just recently, Japanese label Leaf Hound reissued Tumuli Shroomaroom (which we now have in stock, and will list next time) but also this killer odds and sods collection called appropriately enough Bong On - Live Long! So we figured we oughta tackle the newest release first, plus for long time fans like us, there's tons of amazing out of print stuff on it we'd been dying to hear.
Acrimony exist in a similar sonic universe as their metallic countrymen Electric Wizard (as well as folks like Boris, Church Of Misery, Kyuss, Bongzilla, etc.) and while not quite as filthy and blown out and Sabbath obsessed, they are definitely just as heavy, but probably way more groovy and spaced out, adding some Hawkwind to the mix, and some organ (fuck yeah!) turning crushing druggy jams into crushing freaked out groovy druggy SPACE jams which is never a bad thing. 
Collecting tracks from old eps, compilations, and a split with Church Of Misery (even a badass Status Quo cover!), every song here is a sludgy groovy stoner space jam of the highest order, the riffs are massive and downtuned, the drums a barrage of pounding pummel, the vocals a raspy howl, wah guitar everywhere, hooks galore, lots of swing and groove, throbbing distorted bass, churning riffage that often slowly morphs into a spaced out sprawl a la Monster Magnet or Hawkwind, even the folks who don't get high here (Andee, and...?), can imagine that this is exactly what that must (or at least -should-) sound like, heavy and freaky and groovy and mind blowing. 
Fans of bands like Electric Wizard and Nebula and Ufomammut and Orange Goblin and Spiritual Beggars and the like who have somehow missed out on these guys might just have found a new favorite band...
MPEG Stream: "Spaced Cat #7 (Hammond Moon - Bong Mix)"
MPEG Stream: "Earthchild Inferno"
MPEG Stream: "O Baby"

ACRIMONY Tumuli Shroomaroom (Leaf Hound) cd 16.98
A few lists back, we reviewed a newly released collection of odds and ends from stoner doomlords Acrimony, a UK band, who combined all the best parts of many of our favorite bands, Electric Wizard, Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Hawkwind, Church Of Misery, Boris, Bongzilla, that list alone should have many of you already leaping for the 'buy' button, and that's as it should be. These guys destroy. Unbelievably heavy, crazy catchy, killer riffs, hooks galore, and plenty of spaced out druggy drone.
But YEARS before that comp, Bong On- Live Long!, we were already huge fans of this here disc right here, Tumuli Shroomaroom, now reissued with new improved sound, maybe one of the best stoner rock records EVER. High praise indeed, but not unwarranted we think. The guitars are massive, downtuned and crunchy, spitting out groovy Sabbathy riffage, but way more psychedelic, plenty of wah guitar, streaks of wild leads, all over a super dense rhythmic foundation. The drums heavy as fuck, pounding away, the bass throbbing and buzzing and holding it all together. The vocals a rough raspy, but melodic caterwaul. And the songs, as catchy as they are heavy, super charged and blown out, like someone took perfect pop songs, dipped them in LSD, rolled them in broken shards of Monster Magnet, wrapped them in thick sheets of Hawkwind, lit them on fire and smoked them, and then picked up guitars and this was the result. Not sure why these guys weren't huge.
Besides being a kick ass band, heavy and catchy, they also have a serious thing for repetition, and drone, most of the songs have long stretches of churning riffage that just repeats and repeats, mantra like, mesmerizingly headbanging, lots of them also lock into some sort of endless groove near the end, the song often transforming into an ultra heavy hypnorock workout, looped over and over, repeating sometimes for minutes, and then sometimes unexpectedly slipping right back into the song. Definitely part of what gives them such a druggy vibe. The best example of that is the track "Motherslug (The Mother Of All Slugs", a massive stoner rock jam, that is constantly locking into perfect looped grooves, so tight and hypnotic they almost sounds like the cd is skipping, a single riff churning again and again, so completely trancelike, while all around the main riff, other guitars swell and swoop, shimmering in little squalls pf psychedelic FX, sort of like those kick ass spaced out Hawkwind outros but way less spacey and more relentlessly and repetitively rocking, until the track suddenly and effortlessly slips back into the main groove again, eventually drifting apart into some awesome spacious doom jam, the guitar and drums locked in big crashes, spaced way far apart, the guitar chords crumbling and fading almost completely before the next crash comes, finally fading into some throbbing drone, buzzy and muted, maybe a didgeridoo or faux throat singing or something, finally fading out into the space-rock Sabbath riff that opens the next track.
Hard to know what else to say, one of our favorite heavy records ever, every track on here is a killer. Heavy and groovy, droney and hypnotic, druggy and spaced out, the ultimate stoner rock doom disc for sure. As we mentioned above, folks into Monster Magnet, Sleep, Electric Wizard, Ufomammut, Orange Goblin, Kyuss, Black Sabbath, Spiritual Beggars, Nebula, Bongzilla, Green Machine, Boris, Lowrider, Spirit Caravan, Solarized, Fu Manchu, Dozer and Mammoth Volume and have somehow made it this far without hearing Acrimony, might just have discovered their new favorite band.
MPEG Stream: "Hymns To The Stone"
MPEG Stream: "Million Year Summer"
MPEG Stream: "Vy"

NADJA Radiance Of Shadows (Alien8 Recordings) cd 14.98
As much as we love Aidan Baker's solo recordings, and we most definitely do, from gorgeous expansive minimal dronescapes to haunting melodic abstracts to dreamy deconstructed pop, it's all pretty genius, we have to admit that our hearts will always belong to Nadja. Everything we love about Baker, but presented in the form of a massive buzzed out doom. Even at its heaviest and most plodding, it glistens and glimmers, the melodies shimmering and ethereal, the heaviness washed out into a metallic blur.
Radiance Of Shadows is the latest offering from Nadja, a duo featuring Baker and his partner Leah Buckareff, and is shaping up to be at once the prettiest Nadjar release so far, and the heaviest.
Three 20+ minute tracks, each perfectly balanced between suffocating crush and hazy dreamy bliss. Most folks obviously focus on the heavy crushing riffage, but the magic of Nadja happens just as much if not moreso during the quiet parts, the rhythmic parts leading up to the bombastic climaxes. The build up is just as satisfying sonically as the pay off, the musical version of the whole journey / destination thing. But that said, the pay off is a massive and gloriously impossibly heavy crush, like being beaten to death with rays of sunshine or being suffocated under layer after layer of soft fuzzy concrete slabs.
Each track while hewing close to the Nadja sound we know and live is distinctly different, exploring all the various facets of the duo's dreamy metallic dronepop.
The opening track is a glistening slowcore crawl, a lush swirl of granular textures, and lurching crumbling riffage, but suspended in wide open space, languorous and woozy, with a strange staccato riff, that gradually blossoms into a blown out slow motion dream doom supernova, continually seesawing back and forth between the soft and the heavy, a hypnotic blown out two part doom symphony, wrapped around a dreamy slow motion pop core.
The second track is even dreamier and poppier, with hushed breathless vocals, buried in a swirling soft focus My Bloody Valentine / Galaxie 500 sun dappled blur, punctuated by heaving industrial metal riffing, like a softer prettier Godflesh.
The third track is maybe the strangest of the bunch, the quiet parts near silent, the heavy parts seriously and intensely punishing. The quiet parts are all haunting high end distant drones, glitched out minimal guitar strum, soft barely audible drumming, martial and machinelike, haunting near spoken vocals. The heavy parts pummeling and downtuned, but laced with haunting pianos, and some seriously aggressive growled death metal style vocals, roiling and furious, still plodding and slow, but within that plod, the various elements careening and crashing and threatening to crumble into jagged bits. The dynamic between the loud and the soft is super dramatic, culminating in a washed out buzzscape eventually dissipating and leaving that quiet, insistent melancholy strum.
The sound is so much more epic and massive, but warm and 'live' sounding. For the first time, it actually sounds like A BAND, more than a record constructed in a room by a guy (and a girl). Not sure if it's the songs, or the arrangements, the recording or all three, but whatever it is, made a sound we already thought perfect, even more perfect.
MPEG Stream: "Now I Become Death The Destroyer Of Worlds"
MPEG Stream: "I Have Tasted The Fire Inside Your Mouth"

TRIST Stiny (Ars Magna Recordings) cd 11.98
Some of you folks who took advantage of the black metal cassette grab bag might have been lucky enough to nab Stiny, the 2006 full length from Czech blackdoomlords Trist, a gorgeously bleak slab of plodding doomy blackness. Falling somewhere between Burzum, Nortt, Make A Change... Kill Yourself and Hypothermia.
Thankfully, Ars Magna, the label responsible for the mind blowing black miserablism of Animus' Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated and the clinical black blast of Black Hole Generator, has swooped in to re-release that tape on compact disc, so now all you black hearted frozen souled metalheads who ditched the walkman years back, can still dig into this intense collection of bleak black misery. 
Four ultra long songs, the first clocking in at 16 minutes, the last at 11, Trist traffic in ultra repetitive, hypnotic looped riffage wreathed in frosty ambience, the sound is all guitar, the bass barely noticeable (if there is any bass at all), just grim sheets of keening riffs, sometimes soaring and epic, other times tangled and furious, dripping with reverb and not all that distorted, a sort of dirty clean sound, perfectly complimenting the buried vocals, an abstract screech that ends up sounding like another layer of buzzing sound, which serves in some ways to make the drums a focal point, surprisingly busy, going from simple plod to intense squalls of almost mathy drumming, bursts of double kick, some wild fills, but it all fits really well, the songs often veering from doomic trudge to almost groovy midtempo, and once in a while almost full on blastbeats.
And while the sound is plenty hateful and miserable and depressive, it still manages to be pretty at times, with little melodic bits that wouldn't be that out of place on an Alcest or Amesoeurs record... Way recommended. Fans of any of the above mentioned bands will find Stiny to be an essential addition to their library of sonic sorrow and musical melancholia.
MPEG Stream: "Samota"
MPEG Stream: "Modry Zal"

VORAK Rhetoric Of The Supermen (Destruktive Kommandoh / Modern Invasion Music) cd 14.98
Finally!!! It's taken us years (literally) but we finally managed to track down the second record (in a quantity enough to review and list) from one of our all time favorite outsider weirdo whatthefuck metal bands, VORAK! If you're a regular reader of the list, you know how much we love the damaged and demented, the fucked up and freaked out metal, so believe us when we tell you Vorak just might be the weirdest and most fucked up EVER. When we reviewed the first Vorak years and years ago, we summed it up suggesting that Lord Vorak, the man behind one man classical nihilist black metal commando unit Vorak "either must be joking or is totally out of his mind" and record number two only furthers that sentiment.
The first record was a dizzying logic defying head spinning blur of spastic drum machines, sped up vocals, garbled metal guitar and snatches of piano, all tossed in a blender and spewed out in a confusional froth. Well if anything, record number two, Rhetoric Of The Supermen, demonstrates a little bit more song structure, but manages to sound not one whit more sane. In fact Vorak's sound is almost even weirder when applied to actual sort-of-actual-song arrangements.
But let's start from the top. Vorak. Aka Lord Vorak, a man we're led to believe must be a classically trained pianist, whose record covers are covered in metallic gold busts, flaming eagles, and barbed wire, who's partial to song titles like "Dies Irae: Kruel And Glorious Purgation Of The Untermenschen", "Synthetic Nepenthe", "Australyan Uber-Volkslieder 1", there seems to be some sort of obsession with fascism, inside the booklet, it mentions that "All aspects of this supreme music of the future production emanate from the mind of Lord Vorak entirely for his own amusement and gratification"... and heck, we haven't even gotten to the music yet.
An ultra fucked up and completely fractured assemblage of super distorted classical piano, screeching metallic buzz, damaged chipmunk vocals, stumbling chaotic drum programming, interspersed with some straight classical piano, some soaring strings, all tangled and convoluted, every track rife with new head scratching (and head banging) moments...
The record opens with some wild tangled harpsichord sounding piano, dense flurries of notes, strangely recorded, but distinctly classical, until the super distorted metal riffing takes over at the beginning of track two, laid over a series of struggling stumbling drum machine rhythms, and super high pitched vocals, sounding a bit like that girl at the beginning of Kiss's "God Of Thunder" but more maniacal... The guitar is furious, the riffing relentless, with wild squiggly leads everywhere, huge swells of string like synths, and the vocals squawking and bleating all over the place, the drums a head spinning splatter... The next track slows things down a little bit, a thick sheet of blurred distorted guitar laid over some gorgeous minor key piano, the vocals sporadic and drenched in reverb, creepy more than weird, the whole thing super emotional and dark, but still completely unhinged.
Then comes "Blood-Reich 2000", with its relentless metallic onslaught, that gives way to strange piano / helium vocals / sputtering drum machine interludes, always returning to that furious minor key riffing. Several tracks are just piano, and those are quite stunning, atonal and modern, but still melodic and emotional, also strangely recorded so the lower notes are super distorted and at times sounding like a harpsichord. And there's one long track of blown out ambience, fuzzy and blurry, and strangely cinematic, thick swaths of buzz over strings all arranged into sweeping movements. But those tracks are surrounded on all sides by mind melting flurries of manic metal and furious freaked out metallic damage.
The disc includes two bonus tracks, both solo piano, both pieces by Richard Wagner, a strangely lovely and sedate finish to a record that most definitely ranks as one of the weirdest, and absolutely one of our all time favorites.
Totally recommended. And absolutely essential for all lovers of damaged, demented, fucked up, freaked out, outsider metal weirdness.
MPEG Stream: "Dies Irae I: Kruel And Glorious"
MPEG Stream: "Fylfot Lakrimosa Et Sanguinus"
MPEG Stream: "Blood-Reich 2000"
MPEG Stream: "Dies Irae II: Blood Katharsis"

PORTAL Outre (Profound Lore) cd 14.98
Record number two from these mysterious Australian technical death metal weirdoes, whose sound, as we mentioned in our review of their debut, Seepia, is anything but traditional death metal, instead, the grunted vocals and crushing downtuned riffs and all the traditional death metal tropes are completely subverted, tangled and mangled into damaged and demented squalls of chaotic blackened noize, having plenty in common with a band like labelmates Wold, as well as old school DM legends like Gorguts, Suffocation or ImmolationŠ
The sound on Outre is a murky buzz drenched sonic swamp, riffs buzz and blast, but are so doused in effects, so dripping with muddy distortion, they appear to be nothing but droning streaks of downtuned sound, until once in a while when they surface to chug briefly, offering up some brief dynamics before being swallowed up again by the band's relentless blur. The vocals are a subsonic demonic gurgle, barking, howling, growling and mewling, but again, so buried in fuzz and hiss, it just sounds like another layer of black buzz. The melodies are dark and twisted, like some vile black weed, the production is dense and thick, the sound druggy and seasick, warped and warbly, the whole thing sounding a little like some cross breeding experiment gone wrong. Gorguts, Wold, Black Flag, Faxed Head, all melted down and heated up and then poured into your cd player, a similarly noxious downtuned buzz oozes from your speakers, a distillation of Portal's convoluted and cracked take on death metal, a sound black enough to be black metal, noisy enough to be noise, and fucked up enough to be, well to be anything this fucked up sounding.
Strange swaths of synth, atonal detuned guitars, simple industrial plods, monstrous slow motion doom, blasts of speaker shredding ultranoise, billowing black ambience all pepper the proceedings, but at its heart, the sound of Outre is most definitely blasting brutal death metal, but the sort of death metal we always wanna hear, warped and twisted and damaged and filthy and crusty and noisy and buzzing and blackened and doomy and completely fucked.
Packaged in a super deluxe mini gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeve, and including super intense band photos, each band member (Aphotic Mote, The Curator and Horror Illogium) wearing a black hood (or what appears to be a mangled witches hat pulled all the way over the face), all standing in front of an old piano, each photo faded and sepia tone, one wielding a violin, the other clutching what appears to be the horn from a Victrola, the third empty handed, but with a noose hanging from his neck. Weird.
MPEG Stream: "Abysmill"
MPEG Stream: "Heirships"
MPEG Stream: "Sourlows"

ALKERDEEL Luizig (Funeral Folk) cassette 5.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We had a handful of customers recommend these fucked up doomdamagemetalnoise weirdos, and around the same time, in some glorious moment of serendipity, the band dropped us a line so we grabbed as many copies as we could of their super limited (only 66 copies) cassette, released on the same label that fellow countrymen Silvester Anfang call home...
These Belgians create a serious ruckus, pounding super distorted grim necro ultra raw dirgey droney doom metal, we saw it described as filthyblacksludgedoomdrone which pretty much sums it up. Pounding sludge, with blown out practice space production, grinding guitars, blasting super distorted drums, filthy super sick vocals, with bursts of blackness and stretches of loping minimal crunch, sort of mathy, very doomy, all very very heavy and noisy and awesome. One of our favorite new bands easy. 
Essential for fans of Bone Awl, Ancestors, Ash Pool, Beherit, Akitsa as well as other practitioners of grim buzz and noise drenched sludge...
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES!!! In super DIY packaging, printed sleeve, photocopied insert, each tape hand numbered... 

HALF MAKESHIFT Final (Small Doses) cd-r 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
We mention elsewhere on this list, about the strange viral spread of underground bands via cd-r labels. One super hyped release is all it takes, suddenly more releases begin popping up on all the other usual cd-r labels. Thankfully this usually happens to bands who deserve it, and who we can't get enough of, so more releases in that instance is definitely good news.
Such is the case with Half Makeshift, who actually started out with some proper full length cd releases, before they began dabbling in limited cd-r releases. We've listed two of their discs so far, both fantastic, dark and heavy, dense and thick, ominous and intense. Much heavier and more aggressive than your typical cd-r floorcore fare.
And 'they' is actually a 'he', he being Nathan Michael, who takes sounds low and slow, and assembles them into strangely propulsive downtuned dirges, hovering sonically somewhere between the glacial sludge of SUNNO))) and the muted minimal shimmer of folks like Aidan Baker or Jonathan Coleclough.
On Final, Michael explores a bit of both. The opener is a fierce plodding lurch, slowed way down to an almost crawl, the beats are big and effected, but they are buried in the mix, and pitched down, above the beats, guitars grind woozily and swirl weightlessly, it almost sounds like a Nadja 45 spinning at 33, or Jesu slowed way dooooooooown. A blissed out post industrial shoegazey doom, more pretty than heavy, but still shot through with bits of sharp riffage and thick crunch, but by the end, the track has transformed into a muted minor key drift, soft and serene. The second track takes the end of the first and stretches it out into a whole track of whispered whir and warm chordal swells.
The third track of four begins with piano, processed and spun backwards, a dreamily dizzy bit of swell and swoop, that continues throughout the whole track, at one point passing through thick black clouds of low end rumble, before emerging on the other side spare and sparse and hovering in an austere wide open space.
The final track, the title track, appropriately called "Final", is another piano driven jam, more moody and murky, a funereal dirge, a somber musical death march, the sounds changing timbre and tone subtly, the various notes wrapped in effects and slipped back into the melodies, gorgeously forlorn and sweetly sinister.
Like all Small Doses discs, incredible packaging, two different colored and textured paper rectangles, glued together and then folded to create a super striking two tone layered sleeve, printed with gorgeous austere photos, each copy hand numbered. LIMITED TO 151 COPIES!
MPEG Stream: "The First And Second Passing"
MPEG Stream: "Final"

GALLHAMMER Ill Innocence (Peaceville) cd 16.98
May as well re-list the cd while we're at it (the brand new import vinyl version is being listed nearby).
Ok, hopefully all of you into dooooooooooooooooom have heeded our recommendations in the past ("best band EVER" we may have said, in a moment of infatuation) and are already well acquainted with this cult Japanese band who exude a magnificently miserable mixture of slow, atmospheric doominess and crusty black metal thrashing, inspired by the likes of Celtic Frost/Hellhammer (natch), Amebix, and Corrupted. This is their 2nd full-length studio album, following 2004's Gloomy Lights debut and last year's The Dawn Of Gallhammer demos n' live cd+dvd collection. That's the one where we busted out the Simpsons Comic Book Guy impersonation in our review, but it's this album that really seals the deal, when it comes to Gallhammer's position in the pantheon of most depressive doom bands ever, anyway. They're up there, no doubt about it, as is proved by this collection of ten tracks, each one of 'em often (but not always) a slow-motion trudge through the depths of emotional bleakness in the form of monotonously massive low-end guitar riffage, wretched cookie monster screams, and simple, gloomy melodies. Several of the song titles are quite indicative of their sound: "Long Scary Dream", "SLOG", "Ripper In The Gloom"... Many of these varied tracks feature a dynamic combination of knock-you-over-with-a-feather soft n' sad prettiness setting you up for some smash-you-with-a-hammer heaviness, or even manage both at the same time. It's the former element, this band's almost post-rock instrumental mesmeric moodiness, for which we think Gallhammer should be best noted. Not that it has any of post-rock's usual complexity, this is raw and primal and ritualistic, perfectly encapsulated by the way the stark, repetitive slowcore acoustic guitar part at the start of "Ripper In The Gloom" suddenly, shockingly gives way to a full-on punk rock assault.
It also seems possible that Gallhammer, along with their interest in underground '80s doom-crust, also shares some of the Velvet Underground fixation displayed by their contemporaries from the Japanese psych-rock scene, like LSD-march and Doodles. Heck, track one, the nearly eight minute "At The Onset Of The Age Of Despair" seems to have echoes of VU's "Venus In Furs"... If one of Gallhammer's songs wound up on a PSF Tokyo Flashback comp someday we'd be surprised, yes, but only a little. Though it sure wouldn't be a track like "Killed By The Queen" or "Blind My Eyes", two of the punked out, filthy metal blitzes on here, the latter of which throws in some uncharacteristic Melt-Banana style yelping, dogwhistle vocals along with the usual guttural grunting and growling.
Hey, we made it all the way to the end of this review without mentioning Gallhammer's major non-musical selling point... we said they're a "cult" band above, but were tempted to say "cute", as this trio just happen to all be attractive young Japanese ladies, their looks further enhanced by the tasteful application of gothy corpsepaint makeup. No this fact doesn't make Gallhammer's music sound any better (or worse) but it's, um, interesting. Happily, though, Peaceville isn't using Gallhammer's sex appeal to sell this album, there's not even any pictures of the band at all included in this classy-lookin' white-and-silver digipack. Recommended nonetheless!
MPEG Stream: "SLOG"
MPEG Stream: "Killed By The Queen"
MPEG Stream: "Ripper In The Gloom"

LIFE ON EARTH Look!! There Is Life On Earth! (Subliminal Sounds) 2lp 28.00
Also available on (import) vinyl!
From the first few notes, we were totally sold. A wild freaked out psychedelic flute solo, why don't all bands start their records like that? Cuz we probably couldn't handle it! But it makes sense here, when you realize that Life On Earth just so happens to be dudes from Swedish psych rockers Dungen! Obviously Dungen fans are gonna want this, the sound is similar, maybe not quite as rocking, a little more laid back and hippified, groovy and space-y and definitely psychedelic, but still so so good. 
Fronted by Dungen-eer Mattias Gustavsson, but with musical back up from other Dungen folks, and such unlikely musical bedfellows as Town & Country and Mia Doi Todd, Life On Earth is Gustavsson's musical tribute to, well, life on earth. The sheer exuberant joy of it, happiness and sunshine and love and brotherhood and wildlife and blue skies and nature and dreams and beauty and most importantly some super kick ass folky proggy psych rock bliss...
Flute is everywhere, and obviously for that we are truly thankful, but it drift and flutters amidst gorgeous and tranquil swirly folky forests of sound. Silky threads of acoustic guitar, swoonsome strings, harmony vocals, lyrics both in Swedish AND English, bongos and simple percussion, some slithery rhythmic grooves, some killer squalls of psych guitar growl, long stretches of hushed dreaminess, with cooing vocals and muted melodies and super tripped out heart-of-the-sun druggy jams, complete with slow motion riffing and reverbed outer space vocals, the whole disc is actually very Beatles-esque (albeit at their most experimental and HIGH) giving Dungen's sound even more of a sixties pop makeover.
Surprisingly (or maybe not so) the record finishes off with nearly 30 minutes of barely there lower case ambience, bits of percussion, keening high end glimmer, all drifting in wide open expanses of mumbled drones and hushed shimmer, a super longform abstract raga, that sounds like something you'd be more likely to find on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon or Pseudo Arcana than on a Dungen related record... Awesome. 
MPEG Stream: "Life On Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Sell Your Soul To Me"
MPEG Stream: "City By The Sea"

CONVEY, JOSHUA Vacant Integument (Utech) cd 14.98
We love the harmonica, especially when it's used in super creative ways, processed perhaps, or spread out over some Morricone-ish post rock, it is definitely evocative, and has an incredibly unique and distinctive sound, which definitely comes to the fore when the harmonica is rescued from the blues rock ghetto it usually finds itself trapped in.
A couple past harmonica favorites: a tape by Usputuspud, a gorgeous dronescape of processed harmonica, and the sweeping deserty post rock of Souvenir's Young America, wherein the harmonica was used to add a layer of mournful mystery, and now we have this cd from NY soundmaker Joshua Convey, who utilizes harmonica, guitar and electronics, to create deep listening drones, and mesmerizing soundscapes of repetitive texture.
The opener is a brief shimmer of high end, the harmonica smeared into soft billowy streaks, the electronics burbling percussively beneath, like a much more tranquil and washed out Sunroof! The second track finds Convey dipping his toes into Fennesz territory, a strange murky rhythm, supports a skittery stuttery high end guitar, that is looped and layered, the notes glimmering and overlapping, creating strange landscapes of pixilated upper register metallic shimmer, harmonics drift dreamily, punctuated by smears of grinding glitchy buzz. The third is a brief clattery soundscape that sounds like a contact mic dropped into a malfunctioning music box, all truncated twang, and strange metallic plunks, fractured melodies, and strange mechanical textures. Which brings us finally to the final track, a nearly 15 minute expanse of overdriven guitars, the notes transformed into buzzing shards, the tones chime like but wreathed in pulsing electronics and grinding distortion, until the distortion dissipates, leaving a slowly unfurling tangle of steel strings and soft focus harmonics, transforming into a low end rumble and drift, until the final couple minutes when the guitars become blown out once again, creating a gorgeous squall of overlapping and almost psychedelic buzz, before slowly sinking into the murk. Quite challenging, pretty far out, but definitely haunting and strangely lovely. Fans of fucked up dronemusick, harmonicas, and gnarled guitars will definitely dig.
Gorgeous diecut packaging with super striking photos by Max Aguilera-Hellweg.
MPEG Stream: "Vacant Insturmentals 1"
MPEG Stream: "Vacant Insturmentals 2"

MABUSES, THE Mabused! (self-released) cd 16.98
We'd been going through a sort of Shimmy Disc revival lately, digging out all of our old favorites, the first Gwar record, Bongwater, Dogbowl, Jellyfish Kiss... We had sort of forgotten how good all that stuff was. One of our favorites though was this little Brit pop gem by a band called The Mabuses. One of the most perfect slabs of clever hook filled pop ever. The track, "Kicking A Pigeon", has to be, all hyperbole aside, one of the greatest and most lyrically bizarre pop songs EVER. So much so that on hearing it, Allan went on a tear trying to track a copy down for himself (and fear not, Andee is trying to figure  out a way to reissue that record on tUMULt!). 
We were sort of just enjoying this pop flashback, when our pal Brian at WFMU emailed to inform us that not only were the Mabuses still in fact a band, they were playing shows AND had a brand new record. So we got in touch with the band and here it is, a glorious new record from one of our favoritest pop bands, The Mabuses. 
There's no point in comparing the sound of this record to the Shimmy Disc one, since most folks probably missed it entirely, but for those who remember, the sound is relatively unchanged, lush and slightly twee, jangly guitars, soft horns, strings, all very lush and classic sounding, with clever lyrics and dreamy vocal harmonies, but with some BITE too. Some songs are super washed out and dreamy, others are angular and propulsive. The sound borrows from much that came before, but manages to distill it all into something, that once you've been Mabused, can sound like no one else. Bits and pieces of bands like the High Llamas, Steely Dan, Robyn Hitchcock, Cardinal, Jellyfish, that classic Flying Nun sound... that should give you a rough idea...
Every song here is a pop gem, but "Byayaba" might be the new "Kicking A Pigeon", a super catchy riff, sharp edged and distorted, the vocals doubled and delivered in a commanding baritone, like a pissed off more punk rock Magnetic Fields, then there's the strange garden party strings and horns jam of "Garden Devils", the fuzzy slithery grind of "Russian Roulette" featuring Kramer on bass, the harpsichord pounding Jellyfish jam of "Seasider"... it's just all so good...
To be totally honest, on first listen we couldn't help but compare Mabused! to their self titled record on Shimmy Disc, but the more we listen, the more this disc has grown on us, unfolding like a garden full of strange and wonderful flowers, and now, it seems to be permanently stuck in our players. Total pop nirvana! So so recommended. 
Gorgeously packaged too, a super elaborate die cut digipak, with a massive fold out poster / lyric sheet.
MPEG Stream: "Dark Star"
MPEG Stream: "Seasider"
MPEG Stream: "Mirth"

TIDES From Silence (Modus Operandi) lp 14.98
Now on vinyl, super limited import version, one sided lp, the flip side lazer etched!
Here's our review from when we first listed the cd:
The Tides made a miraculous journey last year from the reject pile of a very shortsighted local music magazine into the loving arms of aQuarius where it quickly became a unanimous favorite and a big seller. Taking all the things we love about this new post rock / dirge metal hybrid that has been kicking our asses, Pelican, Isis, Minsk, Conifer, Mare and the like, and subtly twisting it into something all their own. Where as the last Tides record alternated between rhythmic moodiness and metallic bombast, From Silence manages to be a little less overtly heavy, and a lot more moody and brooding, dark and dolorous, with slow subtle grooves and warm washes of hypnotic dreaminess, basically just good old post rock minus the metal. Although the metal is still indeed present, just in very subtle ways, more felt than heard, informing the songs and the riffs, giving the music a sort of ominous, sharp edge, lurking just below the surface. However, fear not, for the final 11 minute track is apparently where Tides had been keeping all the metal riffing missing from the first two tracks. What starts as a spacious swoonsome jam, all downtuned guitars, softly strummed, shuffling drums and wide open expanses of swooshing ambience, erupts about halfway through into a thoroughly chugging pummel, crunchy and lurching, pounding and swaying like a much groovier Neurosis before blissing out into a washed out psychedelic drift that threatens to float away completely before the hammer falls again and that gorgeously chugging riff returns to lay waste to any and all in its way.
MPEG Stream: "The Sight"
MPEG Stream: "Unveiled"

ATAVIST II: Ruined (Profound Lore) cd 14.98
Oh, the misery! Vying with the likes of Moss and Marzuraan for the title of Sludge Lords of England, Atavist offer up their second full-length (hence the title), following a split with Nadja not long ago. But Atavist are a complex beast with a tortured soul that in some ways is really less about sludge than it is about sheer sadness, opting for beauty over brutality much of the time.
Drums echo. Acoustic guitars weep. And then the walls of doom-drone (droom?) riffage come closing in, crashing down. But although there's heaviness galore, with gruff vokills raging, the gentle side to Atavist is nakedly displayed here too. Tranquil, haunting, Atavist possess almost a campfire drone post rockishness that curdles Khanate-like when the heaviness is let loose. All seven tracks, together something of a continuous emotional breakdown, demonstrate definite extreme mood swings, all of 'em melancholy and majestic, some of 'em massively metal. Actually it's a six-part dirge, plus a bonus track at the end, appropriately enough a cover of "I Hate The Human Race" originally by Boston sludge merchants Grief.
For fans of both Mogwai and Asunder for sure. So good.
MPEG Stream: "II"
MPEG Stream: "VI"

TORCHE In Return (Robotic Empire) 10" + cd 16.98
A few lists back we gushed unapologetically about the gorgeous ultra heavy sludge pop of the mighty Torche, their self titled debut having just been rerecorded remixed and reissued. And as we mentioned in that review, that sucker had been lodged in our cd player for years, since the very first time we laid ears on it. The heir to Nirvana's throne, adding a megaton of heaviness to Nirvana's near perfect sound. The result was some sort of impossibly heavy pop music, as downtuned and punishing as it was hooky and anthemic.
So here we have the long in the works follow up, and on first listen it's got a definite different vibe, distinctly less poppy, more heavy, and aggressive, less groovy, more well metal. Not a bad thing, but we kind of had our fingers crossed for THE heaviest pop record of all time. And on first listen, this wasn't necessarily that. But, the more we listen, the more the magic of this record becomes clear, and the more the pop side reveals itself, blossoming like the flowers on the cover, revealing blissed out beauty amidst all the downtuned pummel. In fact, we just noticed that the third track, "Bring Me Home" sounds like a heavier mathier Jesu, which is a very good thing indeed. All washed out My Bloody Valentine swirls of sound, big booming drums, wailing guitars, and a hook to die for. Some of the other tracks are fast and heavy and groovy and play almost like some sort of stoner rock, but still twisted into a distinctly Torche-like shape. The Melvins vibe is BIG all over this record, which is also a very good thing, and while we don't hear as much of the Torche we loved so much on their s/t full length, we do hear lots more of the other Torche related bands like Floor and Dove, and even some Harvey Milk. Which is our way of saying while we were slightly disappointed by the not-quite-as-poppiness, it's more than made up for by killer riffing and insane heaviness. And this is some heavy heavy shit, but still with just enough groove and pop to keep us listening NONSTOP.
And holy shit! The Packaging is mind blowing. A deluxe gatefold 10", adorned with a super close up of John Baizley's Pushead like painting, all smeared inks, water drops, flower petals and bees, inside, more amazing artwork, including portraits of each of the band members inside flowers, and right in the middle 4 little flaps holding the cd version of the record, a three inch cd housed in a clear 5" plastic cd shell, also adorned with a flower, the inner sleeve also printed in full color, the vinyl super thick and on various different colors of swirled clear vinyl, everything housed in a plastic sleeve, with a cool art deco clear sticker with more artwork and the track titles and band name. WOW.
MPEG Stream: "Warship"
MPEG Stream: "Bring Me Home"

DARKSPACE I (Avantgarde) cd 14.98
We know the black hearted AQ legions rely on us to trawl the dark depths and the fiery pits, in search of any essential blackness, that their cursed souls would wither without. With that in mind, we have been trying, for ages now, to get a hold of these two mysterious releases from Swiss black metal horde Darkspace. Those of you in the know, probably realize, that one of the cloaked and corpsepainted members of Darkspace is the man responsible for the epic frosty buzz drenched majesty that is Paysage D'Hiver. And judging from how big a hit Paysage was around these parts, it's no small leap to think that EVERYONE who bought the Paysage absolutely NEEDS this as well. 
Whereas Paysage was one man's vision, twisted buzzing glorious epic blasts of grim black metal and extended Tangerine Dream like sythnscapes, gorgeous subterranean drones and hushed ambient shimmer, based around themes of winter and spirituality, darkness and astral projection, the music stitched into expansive worlds of sound, Darkspace is an actual band, and in many ways is WAY heavier than Paysage. The focus is on the riff as much as the ambience, if not more so, and the riffs are some of the best we've ever heard, downtuned and super distorted, minor key and crunchy, thick and dense, twisted and black, gnarled but incredibly catchy, often, the band explodes into furious wintery blasts, dense chaotic furies, topped off by huge sweeping melodies that sound like washes of keyboards (although no keyboards were used), before settling back into a gorgeously loping buzz encrusted mid tempo, a weird black groove, haunting and intense. But fast and fierce is the order of the day, and these guys are indeed true Blizzard Beasts, whipping up nearly impenetrable walls of swirling, roiling black frost. Which is sort of why the slow parts have such impact, the riff just sort of emerges from the dense black blur, to chug briefly before being swallowed up again. And whereas in most music, sound samples and snippets of dialogue from films, usually mean less re-playability, and often eventually bug more than they enhance, here are used to fantastic effect. Darkspace are futuristic black metal voyagers, the stars, planets, the universe the cosmos, the music is all about space, and it sounds like it, epic and so MASSIVE, simultaneously like a black hole sucking up all light, and a blinding supernova, the bits of dialogue are buried in the mix and delivered like some mysterious transmission from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The fast bits and Burzumic passages are balanced by tripped out ambience, crazy dub drenched interludes, long drawn out SUNNO)))-scapes, huge walls of guitar, riffs splayed and spread out over epic expanses of low end drone, rumbling murmuring ambience....
Listening to Darkspace, we almost wish we hadn't used so much hyperbole in the past, or described other black metal bands as epic, or majestic, or even intense or brutal, or frosty and grim, because this is the music those adjective were designed for. In fact, we're almost compelled to create new words, a handful of superlatives, black metal specific, in order to do justice to these sounds. To explain just how fucking massive and intense this stuff is. NOW is the time for hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true right? And never has anything sounded this intense and blown out, heavy and black, we almost forgot how completely mind blowing this stuff was. But hearing it again, it makes us wonder why most black metal bands even bother...
The first album is separated into seven parts (1.1-1.7), with song lengths averaging about 10 minutes. Each one a burst of black chaos, little epics compressed into the length of a normal song, like it must be some trick of the light, as if unleashed they would expand and stretch out forever. Their second album is split up into just three tracks, two of them 20 minutes plus, with a much more ambient bent, a ten minute sprawling drone separating two lengthy black metal spacescapes, and much of those are taken up by drifting black hole ambience as well, but the metallic fury everywhere else is positively overpowering...
And there's a reason that both these releases have the same review, besides the fact that they are both sonically similar, it's that BOTH are essential, they are two parts of a bigger whole (with a third in the works), they might as well have been released as a double cd, they flow perfectly into one another, one massive journey through the endless blackness of space... You can certainly buy one without the other, but you will quickly find that you need more and can not live without both...
As if the music wasn't enough (and it is), their aesthetic is just as intense and mysterious. The band, all in matching corpsepaint and high necked robes, look like some alien black metal priests, or cenobites even, the band's logo, simple and subtle, a pentagram within a crescent moon, the artwork, spare and sparse, just the band logo, and the name of the record, either I or II, the song titles are numbers, "Dark 1.1", "Dark 1.2", "Dark 2.8" (you can go to their website and download the first demo, titled -I for free), a barely visible alien image beneath the tray card, everything printed in bluish silver on black, very austere and space-y...
A gloriously blinding sonic dying sun, a burst of pure blackened brilliance, both discs, separate or together, obviously black metal record(s) of the year, this year, or whatever year they actually came out, maybe black metal record(s) of forever. And yeah, we're serious. 
MPEG Stream: "Dark 1.1"
MPEG Stream: "Dark 1.2"
MPEG Stream: "Dark 1.3"

DARKSPACE II (Avantgarde) cd 14.98
We know the black hearted AQ legions rely on us to trawl the dark depths and the fiery pits, in search of any essential blackness, that their cursed souls would wither without. With that in mind, we have been trying, for ages now, to get a hold of these two mysterious releases from Swiss black metal horde Darkspace. Those of you in the know, probably realize, that one of the cloaked and corpsepainted members of Darkspace is the man responsible for the epic frosty buzz drenched majesty that is Paysage D'Hiver. And judging from how big a hit Paysage was around these parts, it's no small leap to think that EVERYONE who bought the Paysage absolutely NEEDS this as well. 
Whereas Paysage was one man's vision, twisted buzzing glorious epic blasts of grim black metal and extended Tangerine Dream like sythnscapes, gorgeous subterranean drones and hushed ambient shimmer, based around themes of winter and spirituality, darkness and astral projection, the music stitched into expansive worlds of sound, Darkspace is an actual band, and in many ways is WAY heavier than Paysage. The focus is on the riff as much as the ambience, if not more so, and the riffs are some of the best we've ever heard, downtuned and super distorted, minor key and crunchy, thick and dense, twisted and black, gnarled but incredibly catchy, often, the band explodes into furious wintery blasts, dense chaotic furies, topped off by huge sweeping melodies that sound like washes of keyboards (although no keyboards were used), before settling back into a gorgeously loping buzz encrusted mid tempo, a weird black groove, haunting and intense. But fast and fierce is the order of the day, and these guys are indeed true Blizzard Beasts, whipping up nearly impenetrable walls of swirling, roiling black frost. Which is sort of why the slow parts have such impact, the riff just sort of emerges from the dense black blur, to chug briefly before being swallowed up again. And whereas in most music, sound samples and snippets of dialogue from films, usually mean less re-playability, and often eventually bug more than they enhance, here are used to fantastic effect. Darkspace are futuristic black metal voyagers, the stars, planets, the universe the cosmos, the music is all about space, and it sounds like it, epic and so MASSIVE, simultaneously like a black hole sucking up all light, and a blinding supernova, the bits of dialogue are buried in the mix and delivered like some mysterious transmission from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The fast bits and Burzumic passages are balanced by tripped out ambience, crazy dub drenched interludes, long drawn out SUNNO)))-scapes, huge walls of guitar, riffs splayed and spread out over epic expanses of low end drone, rumbling murmuring ambience....
Listening to Darkspace, we almost wish we hadn't used so much hyperbole in the past, or described other black metal bands as epic, or majestic, or even intense or brutal, or frosty and grim, because this is the music those adjective were designed for. In fact, we're almost compelled to create new words, a handful of superlatives, black metal specific, in order to do justice to these sounds. To explain just how fucking massive and intense this stuff is. NOW is the time for hyperbole, but it's not hyperbole if it's true right? And never has anything sounded this intense and blown out, heavy and black, we almost forgot how completely mind blowing this stuff was. But hearing it again, it makes us wonder why most black metal bands even bother...
The first album is separated into seven parts (1.1-1.7), with song lengths averaging about 10 minutes. Each one a burst of black chaos, little epics compressed into the length of a normal song, like it must be some trick of the light, as if unleashed they would expand and stretch out forever. Their second album is split up into just three tracks, two of them 20 minutes plus, with a much more ambient bent, a ten minute sprawling drone separating two lengthy black metal spacescapes, and much of those are taken up by drifting black hole ambience as well, but the metallic fury everywhere else is positively overpowering...
And there's a reason that both these releases have the same review, besides the fact that they are both sonically similar, it's that BOTH are essential, they are two parts of a bigger whole (with a third in the works), they might as well have been released as a double cd, they flow perfectly into one another, one massive journey through the endless blackness of space... You can certainly buy one without the other, but you will quickly find that you need more and can not live without both...
As if the music wasn't enough (and it is), their aesthetic is just as intense and mysterious. The band, all in matching corpsepaint and high necked robes, look like some alien black metal priests, or cenobites even, the band's logo, simple and subtle, a pentagram within a crescent moon, the artwork, spare and sparse, just the band logo, and the name of the record, either I or II, the song titles are numbers, "Dark 1.1", "Dark 1.2", "Dark 2.8" (you can go to their website and download the first demo, titled -I for free), a barely visible alien image beneath the tray card, everything printed in bluish silver on black, very austere and space-y...
A gloriously blinding sonic dying sun, a burst of pure blackened brilliance, both discs, separate or together, obviously black metal record(s) of the year, this year, or whatever year they actually came out, maybe black metal record(s) of forever. And yeah, we're serious. 
MPEG Stream: "2.8"
MPEG Stream: "2.9"

GROUP INERANE Guitars From Agadez (Sublime Frequencies) lp 25.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Another winner from Sublime Frequencies! We're beginning to think with all this hidden music to be discovered and lost classics to be recovered, there's definitely no point in having so many new bands, we oughta just have some of them swap their gear in and just join the hunt for all this amazing music we miss out on...
But until then we've got the Sublime Frequencies fellas on the case, and this latest discovery has definitely got to bee one of the best yet. Group Inerane are spearheading the Tureg Guitar movement, inspired by the musicians who used this music as a political weapon in the Libyan refugee camps in the late eighties, early nineties. This is how the blues should sound. Groovy, intense, funky, emotional, dark, gorgeous, the guitars grinding and crunching and wailing, slithering and soaring, accompanied by chanted and sung vocals, that are perfectly woven into the lush fabric of the various guitar parts. The riffing is fluid, but also bit jagged and rough. The opening track is a killer. One of the most amazing and intense songs we've ever heard, worth the price of admission alone. Just guitar and vocals, chunky and propulsive, but also weirdly slippery and sinewy, the melody swaying back and forth from major key to minor key, an incredible hook and the riff, well, one of THE best riffs ever.
Most of the rest of the record is more a sort of African surf rock, fuzzy and twangy, with surfy guitar, soaring vocals, the whole thing wild and festive, jubilant and celebratory, but hold up, the final track on side one, "Nadan Al Kazawnin", is something else entirely, with its super distorted grimy guitars, a totally blown out in the red production, the riff looped and hypnotic, the vocals intense and heartfelt, the whole song howling and buzzing, sounding as gorgeously fucked up and raw as some experimental indie avant noise group, the guitar is indescribable, incendiary and white hot, all tangled up with the vocals, and bathed in distortion, wouldn't be out of place on some super limited cd-r... Totally amazing.
Pressed on super thick vinyl. Packaged in a heavy duty, full color gatefold sleeve, with tons of photos and liner notes...
LIMITED ONE TIME PRESSING OF 1000 LPS!
MPEG Stream: "Nadan Al Kazawnin"
MPEG Stream: "Kuni Majagani"
MPEG Stream: "Awal September"

V/A Music Of Nat Pwe: Folk And Pop Music Of Myanmar (Burma) Vol.3 (Sublime Frequencies) cd 16.98
Another volume in Sublime Frequencies series of compilations documenting the amazing and mysterious music of Myanmar (aka Burma). The first volume was an intense barrage of manic Burmese pop, the second focused on guitar music of Myanmar, and this new volume is all about the Nat Pwe. You may remember the DVD on Sublime Frequencies from a while back, which visually documented various Nat Pwe's in Burma, and if you were like us, you were completely blown away, by not just the spectacle, but the amazing music as well. For those new to the Nat Pwe, Nats are ghost spirits, most often historical figures who met tragic ends, and who are believed to have the power to change lives, for better or for worse. So Pwe's are ceremonies designed to appease the Nats and occur on a daily basis, for almost any reason, health, good luck, weddings and new businesses, but like any powerful ceremony, they cam also be used for evil. 
The festivals are amazing. Celebratory, wild and raucous, huge floats, giant phalluses, people throwing money and cigarettes, costumes and headdresses, lots of crossdressing, lots of drinking, folks going into trances... all to the strange and amazing strains of this fantastical music.
And it is fantastic, some of the wildest and most jubilant music we've heard. The root sounds are definitely Burmese, the percussion and the vocals will definitely sound familiar to fans of Burmese music, this is somehow even more manic and spirited. A dense assemblage of bells, cymbals, gongs, xylophones and drums drums drums. A gorgeously clattery percussive wonderland, dense and complex, with vocals that soar over the top, drenched in reverb. It's all acoustic, but it sounds so loud and incredibly intense. And beautiful. Hard to describe, as all great music is, it makes you want to dance, and trance out simultaneously, powerful, emotional and so wild and wonderful. 
Compiled from numerous live recordings, and featuring many popular Burmese songs and many famous Burmese performers. As always, tons of liner notes, and amazing photos. And if this has at all piqued your interest, see if you can find a friend who's got that now out-of-print (bummer!) DVD, as the Nat Pwe's have to be seen to be believed!
MPEG Stream: SEIN MOOTA / KYAW THET AUNG "Shwe Ku Ni Pwe Daw"
MPEG Stream: BO HEIN & BO MEIN "Master Of The Nine Cities"
MPEG Stream: BOBADIN "Di Kanar Mandut / The Hut"
MPEG Stream: BOBADIN "Mother Jhan Who Curses People"

RST Axes (Last Visible Dog) cd 13.98
More mysterious six string sonic explorations from New Zealand guitar alchemist Andrew Moon, but unlike the last release (the triple cd-r Other Machines) a grinding thick heavy smear of SUNNO))) like low end rumble and Fear Falls Burning-ish smoldering amplified intensity, the sounds on Axes is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you might expect a record called Axes to sound like. Dark, dreamy, tranquil and contemplative. Where other RST releases tended toward the minimal, the static Niblockian drone, the guitar against the amp rumble, Axes features fluttering melodies, chiming harmonics, bits of simple strum. All appropriately nestled amidst distant whirs and soft shimmers.
There are some heavier moments, the ultra brief "The Gate Of The Sun" is a minute plus of corrosive distorted crawl, and "Adrift" is an extended throbbing dirge of amp buzz and guitar distortion, melodies carved out of grinding buzz, beneath a sky filled with streaks of feedback, gorgeous for sure, but also heavy and dark. The rest of the record though, while peppered with bits of guitardrone and crumbling distortion, does definitely tend toward the dreamy, and while we love us some glacial heaviness, we're pretty into the softer side of RST: long drawn out swirls of druggy sound, sounding a bit like a more abstract Spacemen 3 at points, while at others, the sound is delicate and mysterious, a barely there hum, glistening cricket like high end, all wound into tense cinematic ambience. Some tracks explore insectoid ragas, muted buzzing woven into expansive slow shifting soundscapes, others fall in more with the modern free folk, abstract soundscape movement, like the opener, the appropriately titled "Crystalline", a slowed down lullaby of chiming guitars and distant blurred whirs.
All of Axes is gorgeous, even at it's heaviest, the sounds are still imbued with some mysterious beauty, some otherworldly magic...
MPEG Stream: "Crystalline"
MPEG Stream: "Lords Of Space"
MPEG Stream: "L.A.S.E.R."

ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB #14 (self-released) cd-r 10.98
Latest in the ongoing series of self released cd-r's from Mr. Neil Campbell, aka Astral Social Club, formerly of divine dronesters Vibracathedral Orchestra. This is number 14, and sonically begins with a track (after a brief noisy intro) that had us thinking this might end up sounding like the recent releases on Important, taking the blissed out incandescent white hot ragas, and transforming them into some strange propulsive alien dance music. And yeah, on the Important discs, dance music might have been stretching it a bit, but here, at least on the opening track, the beat is definitely the focal point, insistent and pulsing, laying down a simple groove amidst flittering clouds of spacy FX and little bleeps and bloops.
But after that it's right back to business, the business of thick corrosive washes of overblown distortion and buzzing droning ragas, thick slabs of feedback, grinding chunks of guitarbuzz, processed vocals, all wound up into a snarled dronepsych blowouts.
A few of the track eschew the noisy psych side completely, choosing instead to tinkle and drift through tranquil smears of soft sound, but even those tracks eventually build to intense climaxes, high end streaks and tangled slivers of feedback all wound up into gorgeously shimmering upper register skreescapes.
Another gorgeous collection of dense freeform psychedelia, definitely for fans of all things Vibracathedral, Skullflower, Yellow Swans, Skaters and the like, and those afraid of beats, or dancefloor phobic, no matter how noisy and strange that particular dancefloor is, can just skip over that second trackŠ
MPEG Stream: "2"
MPEG Stream: "3"

B.SON Black Shape Of Nexus (Vendetta) cd 17.98
A while back we listed a super limited lp from these German doomlords (we still have a couple left, but after those are gone, the vinyl version is gone gone gone), a record that completely and utterly kicked our asses. Now it's available on cd, and it includes not only the tracks from the lp, but also, their tracks from a recent vinyl only split with Crowskin, another German doom/drone/sludge combo we have yet to hear...
As for the sound of B.Son, well, by now, you must all realize how much we at aQ love us some ultra doom, some seriously sick slowness, you know, that doooooom, that is so glacial, that the songs begin to crumble and ooze into viscous black pools. We do. But sometimes we just want our doom to ROCK. Sounds contrary but it's been known to happen. Doom can be slow and low and still rock. Take B.Son for example. Whose particular brand of doomic energy is drawn from bands like Harvey Milk, Karp, The Melvins, godheadSilo, more a sort of downtuned propulsive sludge with doom elements, than pure doom. But goddamn if it isn't just as brutal and heck, doomy...
Thick ropy buzzbass, pounding destructo drums, throaty howls, grinding guitars, all lurching and swaying like some drugged and demented superrock doombeast, all filtered through a bit of grinding screamo and some buzzed out metallic blackness. There are moments of blisssed out post rockiness, and weird laid back grooves, stretched out near ambience and dense little mathy jams, but those moments just serve to keep the doomed sludge rock fury from becoming too much.
Produced by James Plotkin. The cd is packaged in a golden metal fold open cd box (much like the last Caacrinolas) with a full color, four panel, thick paper insert.
MPEG Stream: "IV"
MPEG Stream: "III"

SANKT OTTEN Wir koennen Ja Freunde Bleiben (Hidden Shoal) cd-r 11.98
Before we get into the story behind this disc, let us just start by saying, that not only is this one of our new favorite records, a gorgeous slithery, smokey cross between Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Portishead, but that it took a whole lot of work to get it into the store and available for sale...
So this has actually happened to us a few times, which either speaks to our naivete, or as we prefer to think a dogged belief in the record album as object, to be held, listened to and loved, and an inability to understand any thoughts to the contrary. Australia's Hidden Shoal Records got in touch with us and was hoping we would check out some of their bands, we did, and got all excited about carrying them at AQ. Until, after we emailed and tried to order some, we were regretfully informed that Hidden Shoal was in fact a digital only label, no lps, no cds, no cassettes, just MP3's. Too bad we thought, as far as we were concerned, though of course we know there are those perfectly happy to download some MP3's. But over the course of many months, and lots of emails back and forth, the label admitted to being interested in actually pressing up cds. We of course encouraged them, because we wanted all our customers to be able to buy and hear this music, but also, because, there's something about the object, the cd or the lp or the 7", the liner notes, looking through the booklet while listening to the music, the feel, even the smell. And sure, it IS all about the music, but that other stuff is part of it too, no matter how much iTunes wants us to think otherwise. Obviously most of you don't need to be told that, otherwise you'd probably not be reading this.
Well, the upshot is, two of our favorite recordings on Hidden Shoal are now finally available on cd, well, cd-r actually. But they are professionally pressed, with full color artwork, printed artwork on the disc, and heck, we'll take cd-r's over MP3s any day. And lots of you seem to prefer cd-r's anyway...
This disc is the latest from German combo Sankt Otten, often considered to be the Portishead of Germany, and sonically, that's not all that far off the mark. Although when we first heard it, we heard a lot of Bohren as well, late period Talk Talk, and maybe a little Tricky and Massive Attack. It all adds up exactly how you might imagine. Slow burning instrumentals, humid and sultry, Morricone-ish guitars drifting in a sea of rumble and shimmer, the bass a slithery serpent of sound, smooth and sexy sometimes, distorted and fuzz drenched at others.
But as with music like this, it's all about two things, the drums, and the atmosphere. And the drums here are perfect. And heck, so is the ambience. The rhythms almost always begin a jazzy