FLUISTERWOUD Langs Galg En Rad (Full Moon Productions) cd 11.98
Oh man, do we love this band. Totally furious over the top necro blackness from this grim Dutch horde. This record is from way back in 2003, but we figured if some of us somehow missed it, some of you probably did too. Which is a shame cuz this stuff totally slays.
Besides having an amazing band name, a wicked logo, a killer album cover, and some of the coolest corpse paint we've seen in ages, these guys also sound completely amazing! So dense and black and heavy and grim and necro. A completely overwhelming onslaught of utter blackness, complimented by a vocalist that sounds like he has a mouthful of bloody nails and dead babies. Imagine a sky black with clouds, the earth splitting open as the devil unleashes his own plagues upon the world, but the plagues he sends are a rain of spiked gauntlets, a flood of corpsepaint, a swarm of corrosive blast beats, an attack of acidic buzzing riffs, blasting Burzumic buzz, throat shredding growls and a brutal black sound that will shroud the world in darkness and drag every one kicking and screaming down into the pits of hell.
This sounds a little like that. Raw, fast and so brutal. Imagine being strapped to some sort of medieval torture device and being pelted with thousands of Darkthrones, eventually ending up buried beneath layer after layer of corrosive, crusty, buzzing black grimness. Awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Tergernis"
MPEG Stream: "Den Duustere Wouden"

MELVINS / PATTON OSWALT Split (Chunklet) 7" 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Boy, did we get lucky. We heard about this and at first wrongly assumed it was Mike Patton with the Melvins. And as much as we love Mike Patton, we were pretty tickled to discover that in was in fact, Patton Oswalt, one of our favorite comedians, sharing this split with the Melvins.
The thing is, this was never technically available to stores or distros. But we did manage to track a handful down for our AQ faithful. Unfortunately, because of the scarcity and the fact that technically they weren't available wholesale, the price ended up being a bit steep. But hey, $16 from us is is a whole heckuva lot better than $75 on eBay!
So act fast, these will disappear in a blink of an eye.
As with all Chunklet stuff, gorgeously packaged with killer (and hilarious) Jay Ryan cover art, screen printed onto thick cardstock sleeves.
And like with all ultra limited stuff, only one per customer please...

V/A Lightnin' To The Nations : NWOBHM 25th Anniversary (Sanctuary) 3cd 29.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Occasionally whilst reading AQ reviews (or elsewhere too of course), you may have run across a reference to something called the NWOBHM, a curious acronym that stands for "New Wave Of British Heavy Metal". Hopefully we explained what it meant! Or it was somewhat clear from context, describing the influences of such bands as Slough Feg, Early Man, or Circle at their most metal (who'd like be be called a "NWOFHM" band, actually...New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal, natch). The NWOBHM began around 1979, continuing into the early eighties, almost a reaction to and also a hybridization of both punk rock and '70s classic rock. Some famous NWOBHM acts include Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Venom, Angel Witch, Saxon... a varied bunch to be sure. And without the NWOBHM, we'd never have had Metallica, and thus thrash, and thus death metal, and thus black metal, etc. etc.... well maybe. Anyway, in case you're, say, a fan of Pharaoh Overlord's 4 album (another "NWOFHM" release), or into grim black metal, but would like a little history lesson about the real old school stuff, this NWOBHM stuff, we've got just the thing. A three-cd set, imported from England, celebrating the NWOBHM in all its (mostly obscure) glory. 56 tracks from such bands as Trespass, Raven, Bitches Sin, Blitzkreig, Persian Risk, Satan, Heavy Pettin, Silverwing, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Holocaust, Ethel The Frog, Savage, Warfare, Jaguar, Vardis, Fist, Quartz, Cloven Hoof, Tyson Dog, Praying Mantis... the biggest names are probably Venom, Diamond Head, Angel Witch, and Samson. And believe it or not there are plenty of entries here from bands that we'd never even heard of before as well (Hellanbach, She, Avenger, Aragorn, Crucifixion, Xero, Horsepower...)!! A lot of these bands didn't have long careers, but still managed a killer single or two, which is why comps like this are treasure-troves, a NWOBHM 'best of' composed of some album tracks, 7" cuts (so many great ones on the Neat Records label) and tracks from back-in-the-day comps like New Electric Warriors (1980) and Metal For Muthas (1980). So for NWOBHM fans old and new, this is a nice collection of headbanging, party hardy METAL -- catchy riffs, wailing vox, guitars guitars guitars. Comes with a 12 page booklet full of record sleeve art and liner notes on each act, packaged in a box with the cds in cardboard sleeves.
MPEG Stream: BLITZKREIG "Blitzkreig"
MPEG Stream: DARK STAR "Lady Of Mars"
MPEG Stream: TURBO "Running"
MPEG Stream: SAVAGE "Let It Loose"

SHITTY LISTENER, THE Fruitless Accomplishment (Greengate Press) cd-r 9.98
Found a box of these tucked away in the closet, a few more copies of this shitty pop gem if you missed out first time around...
The return of The Shitty Listener! Maybe one of our all time favorite band names EVER. And it's about time. We all completely dug the Girls All Say EP we listed a while back, but it just wasn't enough. It was only 9 minutes long after all. Well, Fruitless Accomplishment clocks in at a whopping 26 minutes, and thus manages to take all the elements we liked on the EP, and spreads them out, expands and explores, which just means there's so much more to like.
Actually originally released as a book, that just so happens to also contain a cd, for our purposes, we'll just go ahead and consider Fruitless Accomplishment a cd, that just so happens to come with a book (or rather with some text instead of the more extensive but now out of print book version)! For those new to the Shitty Listener, it's not really a band, instead it is one man, Jason Honea, from from the Jewelled Antler outfits The Child Readers and the Franciscan Hobbies, as well as the Chord Fort, the Knit Separates and Teenage Panzercorps. The Shitty Listener is his Honea's mostly solo, lo-fi, bedroom folk project. And is deeply connected to his poetry/lyrics and artwork. As is evidence by this deluxe text/cd combo.
The sound is incredibly intimate and low fidelity. Mostly recorded on micro cassettes or handheld tape recorders, Honea incorporates tape hiss and whatever ambient sound happens to occur in the background, whether it's a plane flying by, a dog barking, the sound of crickets, it all just becomes part of the sound. And just like old Sebadoh tapes, the ch-chunk sound of the record or stop buttons being pushed, as well as weird warbles in the tape, become as much a part of the song as the song itself. Lilting melancholy piano, gentle acoustic guitar strum, and not much else support Honea's warbly falsetto, plaintive and emotive, always way down in the mix, a sort of drifty fuzzy dreamy melody within each song. But that's more than enough. Each song ends up sounding surprisingly lush. Our favorites though have to be the ones that sound like they were recorded from a distance, or through the wall or window. Those tracks almost sound like Honea was singing and strumming indoors, while the mic was outside, capturing most of the music, but more than anything all of the ambient action happening around it. Other highlights include the a capella "Bad Wonder", "I Call You Up" which sounds a bit like Morrissey fronting Sentridoh, the minute long "Across My Dreams", a sort of processed dreamy guitarscape, and the 7 minute medley "Sweet To My Mind w/ Someone Flame-Like & Up Too Much", the first half of which sounds a bit like a Basinski composition, but made manually, by playing a figure on the piano, pushing stop on the tape player, pressing record and playing the figure again, over and over and over. So weird and wonderful.
Fruitless Accomplishment is a strangely compelling collision between abstract experimentation and lo-fi pop loveliness, and the results are truly divine!
The packaging is pretty dang divine as well. Packaged in a newsprint covered sleeve with collaged color art affixed to the front and back, inside is the cd-r, an insert with the liner notes, four full color and two black and white inserts featuring various drawings and collages by Honea, and Real Flowers, a small book of poetry, gorgeously printed on nice paper and with a full color paste on cover!
MPEG Stream: "Get A Grip"
MPEG Stream: "Pretty Soon Now"
MPEG Stream: "Sweet To My Mind / Someone Flame-like & Up Too Much"

WILDLIFE Wildlife EP (Bodies Of Water Arts And Crafts) cd ep 7.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
From right here in San Francisco, via Boston, comes this debut recording from Wildlife. And in the interest of being totally up front, we should tell you that we do actually have a vested interest in Wildlife, not only can SF always use another killer band to call its own, but we also got another amazing AQ employee out of the deal, Matt in mailorder, but all of that aside, this shit is seriously cool.
Opening with a hushed soundscape of record crackle (we're sold already!), a swirl of hiss and static and pops, underpinning thick bass thrums that shimmer like black clouds, while above this low end miasma hover simple muted guitars and huge drums way up in the mix (where they belong). Suddenly the sound is some sort of abstract slowcore indie doom, with beautiful drifting melodies, lugubrious tempos, all beneath a simple caveman plod and clouds of little effected guitar squiggles. The song eventually erupts into a massive downtuned crunch, thick waves of detuned riffage pile up beneath howled Stooges-y vocals wrapped in thick swaths of reverb, swaggering over the slippery tarpit dirge underneath. The song ends in a flurry of gorgeous harmonics, with shimmery distant angelic vocals, and strange dynamic shifts all tangled up with shards of angular jagged high end scrape and skree. Phew, and that's just the first song.
After a brief interlude, a strange cloud of ambient clatter, made up of blurred bits of fuzz and hiss, clockwork like rhythms as well as distant booming percussion, the band launch back into the rock, with a muted angular groove, not unlike Sonic Youth or Blonde Redhead with dense reverby guitars and simple tribal rhythms that build into a lurching sea sick stumble, with distorted shrieked vocals, swirls of feedback and moaning guitar wail before winding back down into a swirling dense coda of wild drumming and tangled squalls of blown out psych guitar.
The final track is a spare slab of creepy disembodied folk, thick stabs of tangled steel string dissonance wrapped in a bleak doomy ambience. A slow creeping monotone strum, with simple percussion and snarly vocals. The whole thing very sun baked with lots of reverb, a wild and clattery, Jandekian dirge folk work out that manages to be strangely epic and majestic.
We only have about twenty of these so we may run out quick. A repress is in the works, but it might be a while, so if you don't want to wait (and you definitely don't) then don't dawdle...
MPEG Stream: "Sit On The Ground"
MPEG Stream: "Love"

WOBURN HOUSE Message To Ourselves Outside The Dreaming Machine (Paradigms) cd 12.98
From the seemingly infallible Paradigms label, who in the past have brought us amazing releases from (we're gonna have to stop doing this, pretty soon the list of killer Paradigms releases will be longer than most reviews): Hjarnidaudi, Amber Asylum, Throne Of Katarsis, Blueprint Human Being, Utlagr, the Angelic Process, Titan, Jarboe and that amazing Walking With Ghosts compilation. Avid readers of the list probably own all or most of those by now. Each one totally unique and amazing in its own way. This time around we have two more releases just as unique and amazing, the droning doomed classical of Hallvardur Asgeirsson reviewed elsewhere on this list, and this disc of bizarre, convoluted, super dynamic, avant garde doomy post rock from German outfit Woburn House.
Hailing from Germany, the strangely monickered Woburn House at first listen sound a but like Dutch hypno-metallers Gore, with an immediately catchy and crunchy riff that repeats and repeats. Actually it's almost so heavy and modern sounding that it makes us think more of some sort of avant metalcore version of Gore. Gloriously grinding, churning riffage, complex yet melodic, over pounding drums. But suddenly, the vocals kick in, a soft, sort of chanted croon, while beneath it, the guitars shift to strange minor key angularity, before the whole song twists dramatically into some super complex Voivod-y metallic prog. And it's then that you realize there's still nearly thirteen minutes to go in the track! And in those thirteen minutes the band will twist and turn and shift and explore pretty much every post rock or metal nook and cranny you can conceive. Blown out high end freakouts, creaking and groaning swells of shipwreck doom, muted slow core minor key jangle, loping dreamlike slowcore, but always returning to that killer opening riff. It's very much like a doom influenced metalcore Slint, super complex, incredibly emotional, with all sorts of disparate parts and melodic fragments that fit so perfectly together, it's hard to imagine the song any other way.
Track two revisits the Voivod-y prog of the opener, beginning as a lurching dirge-like doom, with HUGE dynamics, and strange howled vocals, before shifting into a much more propulsive mathrock prog a la Bastro or Drive Like Jehu. Ominous and threatening, but super hypnotic and complex, eventually unwinding into strange strummy minor key jangle, and eventually a soft shimmery expanse of warm church organ whir.
The third track is all metallized math rock. See-sawing between spare finger picked guitar and simple shuffling drumming, and huge distorted angular crunch and complex prog pound. Again like a modernized version of Slint or Bastro, the same sort of arpeggiated minor chords, shuffling rhythms and mesmerizingly obtuse arrangements, albeit with much more metal vocals, and some ambient field recordings mixed in.
The final track is another epic (all four songs are 10 minutes +) offering up their own take of that whole Isis, Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, sort of dramatic post rock slow build majesty. And they nail it. The choruses are massive slabs of downtuned chug, the in-betweens are swirls of shuffling rhythms, finger picked guitars, simple strum, melancholy melodies, drifting and shimmering, slowly building to their inevitable climax.
We been loving the whole doom dirge sludge meets post rock thing (Isis, Tides, Mouth Of The Architect, Village Of Dead Roads, Irepress, Baroness, Conifer), but we're sort of extra smitten with Woburn House, who sound like we WISHED math rock and post rock sounded back in the day. Instead of making their sludgey metal, sound a little post rock, they sound like they could have been a post rock band back in the nineties, albeit with much bigger amps and much more metal souls!!
Unlike most of the Paradigms releases, which come in cardboard sleeves wrapped in hand stamped, brown paper, this disc is in a digipak, with some seriously intense and disturbing (but quite beautiful) drawings...
MPEG Stream: "River"
MPEG Stream: "Motor"

ACKAMOOR, IDRIS Music Of Idris Ackamoor 1971-2004 (EM Records) 2cd 29.00
As with every review of a release on EM records, we feel obligated to gush just a little. WHAT AN AMAZING LABEL! Most definitely the coolest reissue label going. Completely off the wall releases dug up and given new life. Amazing packaging, killer liner notes, tons of photos. So much love and passion obviously goes into each and every release we'd almost buy every one regardless of the music. Thankfully, pretty much everything we've heard so far is absolutely amazing, and well deserving of a deluxe reissue treatment.
You may remember a while back we reviewed a 1976 disc from a free jazz ensemble called the Pyramids, whose sound was not just jazz, but a strange swirling mix of Funkadelic, Don Cherry and the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, all with a groovy, funky, spaced out vibe. Chaotic and completely mesmerizing, some of the sounds as we described them in the Pyramids review: "Wild Eastern sounding tribal rhythms, shuffling jazzy post bop, fluttering flutes and skronking horns, chanted vocals, droning buzzing ragas, seventies psychedelic free folk, propulsive krautfunk jams, totally chaotic free jazz, octopoidal drumming, wild shrieking sax and haunting percussive soundscapes"! And those disparate elements were all wrapped up, in and around more traditional sounding African music. Wow! A total revelation for sure.
And it appears to have been a revelation for everyone else as well. There's a massive box set planned for the near future, and then there's this, a sort of career retrospective of Pyramids mainman Idris Ackamoor, drawing equally from the Pyramids albums Lalibela (1973), King Of Kings (1974) and Birth, Speed, Merging (1976), as well as a track a piece from three of Ackamoor's solo albums. As if that weren't already enough, there are six unreleased tracks, over an hour of music! One track from Ackamoor's pre-Pyramids group The Collective, three unreleased Pyramids tracks, one unreleased track from the Idris Ackamoor Quartet and finally a recording of Ackamoor and his wife at the time (1973) playing with King's Drummers Of Tamale, Ghana!!
Disc one is drawn from the earliest years, 1971 to 1974, and is completely mind blowing. Absolute free jazz nirvana! But with plenty of soul and groove. Long long tracks, heavy on the percussion, very tribal and experimental, but still soulful and jazzy. Fluttering flutes drift over dense beds of percussive shimmer, some tracks explode into full on drum solo percussion jams, others drift serenely, while still others careen wildly between the two. Modern ears will of course hear No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand, Avarus and Kemialliset, it's hard not to, after all this is where that sound came from!! Disc one would be worth the price of admission alone, and definitely has us excited to see these whole records reissued in their entirety. But lucky for us there's a whole other disc!
The first two tracks on disc 2 are from Birth, Speed, Merging (1976) and if you don't have it already, these tracks should easily convince you that you absolutely NEED TO OWN IT! Gorgeous long form, slow burning jazz epics, horns skronk and shimmer, the bass is slippery and serpentine, the drums are wild and all over the place, utterly mesmerizing, extended blasts of controlled chaos. So goddamn good. The unreleased track is a killer too. Nearly twenty minutes. The stuff from Ackamoor's solo records is a lot less far out, but still really great, from straight up Bop, to groovy sort of cinematic jazz, to some softer Cuban style jazz (the final track taken from his album Cubana).
It's hard to believe a band could be this amazing, and revolutionary and so brilliantly far out and not be spoken of in the same breath as groups like the Art Ensemble and Sun Ra's Arkestra, but here's hoping that this, as well as past and future reissues takes care of that! Absolutely essential!!!!!!
Like all EM releases, the packaging is fantastic. A Japanese style extra thick jewel case, a printed obi as well as a MASSIVE booklet full of rare photos, and liner notes penned by Ackamoor himself, in both English and Japanese!
MPEG Stream: "The Shepherd's Tune"
MPEG Stream: "Land Of Eternal Song Suite Part 3"
MPEG Stream: "Lalibela"

ASUNDER Works Will Come Undone (Profound Love) cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Oakland's doooooooooooooooooooomiest, Asunder, return with their second full-length album. Just back from a tour of Japan with none other than cultish doom-crust behemoth Corrupted, Asunder further cement their doom bonafides with Works Will Come Undone, which features just two tracks, one of 'em ("Rite Of Finality") almost a full-length itself at 50 minutes duration! The other track ("A Famine") isn't quite so long -- a mere 20 minutes. That's more than enough time for these guys and gal to squeeze in a few lugubrious riffs, even at the glacial pace with with they play their morose metallic funeral marches.
Asunder are all about atmosphere, allowing some really pretty and mellow parts into their crushingly heavy and depressed, slow-moving sound-world. The use of cello (played by Jackie Perez-Gratz, also of Amber Asylum) is one of Asunder's trademarks, and for giving an extra-mournful, classically elegant dimension to their doom it's hard to beat. The guitarists successfully venture to enter that sublime realm as well. Meanwhile the vocalist recalls the phlegmy throat of Forest Of Equilibrium era Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, mixing the rough with the smooth as it were...
For those unaware, we should also note the presence of former Weakling guitarist/vocalist John Gossard. What Weakling was to trance-inducingly epic Norwegian style black metal, Asunder is to trance-inducingly epic Finnish style doom metal!! Or maybe we should just say Oakland style, since this genre of doom has its roots all over, from Finland's Thergothon to Australia's Disembowelment and Long Island's Winter...
MPEG Stream: "A Famine"

ASUNDER Works Will Come Undone (Kreation) lp 16.98
NOW ON VINYL!! Here's what we wrote about the original cd release on Profound Lore, which is now out of print:
Oakland's doooooooooooooooooooomiest, Asunder, return with their second full-length album. Just back from a tour of Japan with none other than cultish doom-crust behemoth Corrupted, Asunder further cement their doom bonafides with Works Will Come Undone, which features just two tracks, one of 'em ("Rite Of Finality") almost a full-length itself at 50 minutes duration! The other track ("A Famine") isn't quite so long - a mere 20 minutes. That's more than enough time for these guys and gal to squeeze in a few lugubrious riffs, even at the glacial pace with with they play their morose metallic funeral marches.
Asunder are all about atmosphere, allowing some really pretty and mellow parts into their crushingly heavy and depressed, slow-moving sound-world. The use of cello (played by Jackie Perez-Gratz, also of Amber Asylum) is one of Asunder's trademarks, and for giving an extra-mournful, classically elegant dimension to their doom it's hard to beat. The guitarists successfully venture to enter that sublime realm as well. Meanwhile the vocalist recalls the phlegmy throat of Forest Of Equilibrium era Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, mixing the rough with the smooth as it were...
For those unaware, we should also note the presence of former Weakling guitarist/vocalist John Gossard. What Weakling was to trance-inducingly epic Norwegian style black metal, Asunder is to trance-inducingly epic Finnish style doom metal!! Or maybe we should just say Oakland style, since this genre of doom has its roots all over, from Finland's Thergothon to Australia's Disembowelment and Long Island's Winter...
MPEG Stream: "A Famine"

DRUMCORPS Grist (Cock Rock Disco) cd 14.98
At the risk of quite possibly making our lengthy and floridly descriptive, effusive and over the top reviews totally obsolete, we can pretty much sell this one with one sentence. Grind metal, death metal, spastic drill and bass AND a marching band drum corps. And that's not even really a sentence!
Drumcorps is the work of one Aaron Spectre, who not only shares a first name with the man behind Venetian Snares, he also shares a similar penchant for ultra twisted and impossibly convoluted and mind blowing rhythms. But where Venetian Snares builds elaborate rhythmic tangles out of beats, beats and more beats, Spectre, while a consummate beat maker himself, as Drumcorps, he concerns himself as much with riffs as beats. At its very heart, this is a metal record after all. A snarling, grinding crush of acidic metallic riffs and huge downtuned chunks of chugging death metal grind, with howled throat shredding vocals, buzzing squalls of metallic guitar freakout and pounding blasting drums. But as each track develops, you begin to notice something a little strange about this 'metal.' Every once in a while, here and there, the drums will skitter and splinter into little bursts of ultra complex splatter. Or vocals will get twisted and chopped up into a wildly stuttering rhythm, blast beats will get faster and faster until they're nothing but a buzzy blur. Riffs splinter into jagged digital shards which are then tossed about wildly over a skittering expanse of junglistic beats. This isn't just metal, and it's definitely not electronica. It's like some sort of fucked up avant post metal grind laid over super dense hyper programmed drill and bass. Like Pig Destroyer jamming with Shitmat, or Dillinger Escape Plan with Venetian Snares on drums! In fact a quick listen to track three, the aptly titled "Pig Destroyer Destroyer" lays it all out for you. Beginning with a killer drum corps snare workout, that builds into a mesmerizing chopped and looped vocal guitar grind, eventually building into a full on blast of metallic fury, but all tangled up with sputtering, hiccuping strands of head spinning drill and bass.
The amazing thing is, that Drumcorps doesn't sound like some sort of DJ mash up, where some clever fella with a wicked record collection just assembled and sequenced. No, these are real songs, with melodies, atmosphere, riffs, parts, choruses, it seems impossible that Spectre composed and performed a whole metal record only to electronically fuck it up, but if these are all purloined riffs, which at least some of them must be, then it had all the metalheads around here completely fooled. And LOVING it.
But it's not all just furious jungle metal weirdness (although most of it most definitely is!). A few tracks are droning ambient soundscapes, with huge cavernous rumbles washing over brittle complicated snare drums, others are almost funky jungle jams peppered with crunchy clipped riffs, and still others are moody midtempo jams, assembled from slowed down pitchshifted vocals and crumbling distorted guitars, sheets of feedback, and awesome Maiden-ish dual guitar leads. This is another one of those times we almost wish there were actual bands that sounded like this, as opposed to being the mad idea of a single twisted individual, crafting his dream band from a drum machine and his favorite metal records, an impossible metal / drum and bass hybrid. But who cares really, when it sounds this fucking amazing. Fans of past record of the week Drummachinegun should definitely check this out, as should folks into DHR, Venetian Snares, Shitmat and that sort of sputtering spastic drill and buzz (especially if they've got a soft spot for metal). But c'mon, this is a METAL record, so metalheads should absolutely take a chance, and give this a try, but should be well prepared to have their whole world turned upside down.
MPEG Stream: "Pig Destroyer Destroyer"
MPEG Stream: "Botch Up And Die"
MPEG Stream: "Down"

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"

TREE PEOPLE, THE s/t (Tiliqua) cd 16.98
Not to be confused with Doug Martsch's amazing nineties outfit, the Treepeople, -these- Tree People are equally amazing, but are a whole different proposition.
This disc was originally released as a super limited lp way back in 1979 and managed to quietly disappear. Now, here we are nearly three decades later, and whattaya know? There's a whole movement of modern free folk, 'freak' folk and the like, and if you didn't know better, pretty sure we could pass this off as some strange super limited cd-r by some modern folk revivalists. But keen ears would certainly be able to tell. This is so entirely original (especially for the time) and genuine sounding. Mostly acoustic guitars, flute and vocals, the Tree People had two distinct sounds, the first, a lilting melancholy moonlit folk, like Cat Stevens or Van Morrison, a gorgeous lazy drawl, rich and lustrous, over simple folk and fluttering flutes, dreamy and gorgeous, sounding like some lost folk classic one minute, a strange "Girl From Ipanema" style shuffle the next. But even at it's sweetest and softest, the record seems to always have a hint of melancholy, sometimes even a trace of ominous foreboding. Which definitely gives the songs a subtly dark undercurrent. The majority of the record however is spent in full on hippy jam mode. Very Comus-like at times (especially on track two, "Sliding"), wild steel string excursions, dense tangles of fingerpicked melodies and aggressive strummed riffs, with a definite raga like vibe, all over a smattering of hand drums and tablas, a glorious drifting buzzing steel string dronefolk, that just sounds so incredibly timeless. Elsewhere, the same jams evolve into more tranquil acoustic dreaminess, with the flutes floating over sweet lilting melodies, but even then, the songs will be peppered with sudden bursts of buzzing slide guitar, or brief squalls of atonal fingerpicking. SO cool. And considering the current love of all things freaky and folky, it's sort of amazing that stuff like this was already being made 27 years ago!
Obviously, fans of the current crop of modern folk troubadours will find this absolutely essential, Devandra, Vetiver, Espers, Newsom, whatever your particular poison, the Tree People will fit in frighteningly well. Hard to say whether it speaks to the prescience of the Tree People, or just to how much these modern bands have actually been 'borrowing'. Either way, this is absolutely essential.
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
MPEG Stream: "Sliding"
MPEG Stream: "Stranger"
MPEG Stream: "Opus"

IKE, REIKO Kokotsu No Sekai (Tiliqua) cd 23.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Some of you are probably hip to the Pinky Violence films of early seventies Japan, especially with a handful or recently reissued DVD's, an eye popping, mind blowing combination of not so subtle eroticism, extreme ultraviolence and over the top ACTION! The twist, being that the brutalizers tended to be bad ass Japanese women, cat fighting, beating the crap out of men, always seeming to be clad in boots and with their shirts 'accidentally' torn open to reveal their breasts. Which miraculously never kept them from kicking still more ass! What's not to love?
Sort of in concert with the movies, a whole genre of erotic music was spawned, Iroke Kayoyoku, a bastardized version of a more popular music, sexed up as it were with chanteuse like crooning, but most important of all, an amazing array of moaning and groaning and cooing and giggling, as if in the throes of EXTREME passion. And at the time, 1971 (THAT seemingly perfect musical year!) this was indeed pretty dang racy and risque.
The sound is a blend of soft core soundtrack music, groove jazz, playful exotica, a little Spaghetti Western, with Herb Alpert horns, fluttering jazz flutes, Spanish guitars, smokey sax, hip shaking rhythms, marimbas and xylophones, very moody and dreamy sometimes, wild and playful at others, but always with Reiko's sexy croon, and of course her very convincing sounds of passion, including an unexpected bout of spanking at one point (!) accompanied by the proper breathless exhalations of pain/pleasure.
Wow! Wild and fun and sexy, but so so strange. Highly recommended for sure.
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, saucy nude photos of Reiko on the cover, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
ULTRA LIMITED!!! This is the fourth and final pressing, after the first three sold out in no time at all. Limited to only 500 copies, this is already sold out and we only got a handful, the last 15 or so from the label, so you know what that means...
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TANI, NAOMI Modae No Heya (Tiliqua) cd 22.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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, and now we have Modae No Heya from seventies bondage / S&M queen Naomi Tani, who recorded and released this album in 1979 to commemorate her withdrawal (ahem) from the world of porn.
And what better way to commemorate that sort of life change than with a record 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.
Tani's take on Iroke Kayoyoku is similar to Reiko's (in fact it's not tough to imagine a sort of Eastern hit factory, churning out these discs, ready made for some sexy thing to croon and purr over...), a strange blend of easy listening soundtrack music and spaghetti Western themes, with lots of soaring strings and epic arrangements, sultry saxophones and twangy guitar, but unlike Reiko's disc, Modae No Heya is much more Asian sounding, with plenty of distinctly Asian instrumentation and Eastern melodies.
Anyone who has seen their fair share of Asian cinema and classic kung fu movies, will find the sound instantly recognizable. And for a record that is supposedly a vehicle for her sexy presence, Tani surprisingly spends a lot of time just hanging back and letting the music swoon and soar. But when she does take part, it's in a super intimate whisper in the ear, a playful purr with plenty of giggling and occasional bouts of passionate groaning.
Erotic and wild, moody and mysterious. And pretty darn bizarre. And of course, highly recommended for all fans of sounds both strange and sexy!
Packaged in a super deluxe Japanese miniature gatefold style cd sleeve, with a printed obi, saucy nude photos of Tani on the cover, and extensive liner notes in English and Japanese!
ULTRA LIMITED!!! Only 1300 copies pressed. Already almost sold out, so don't dawdle...
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V/A Mary Anne Hobbs - Warrior Dubs (Planet Mu) cd 14.98
What the hell more can we say about grime?! Other than we love it. We're obsessed with it. Grime and dubstep are everything we wish hip hop still was (and some still is, the new Clipse absolutely destroys!). Fresh and funky, wild and weird. Fucked up beats and even more fucked up flows. Stuttering hiccupping what the fuck rhythms. It's maddeningly mind bending. And we just can't get enough. And the thing is, we're forced to subsist on a new grime/dubstep release every few weeks or every couple of months, when we could easily be eating up ten times that. This is the only music that stands any chance of getting our non-dancing asses out of our chairs and out onto the dancefloor. And even if dancing is even lower on your list of priorities that it is on ours, this shit is the perfect kicking back music, drifting off, mellowing out, late night dubbed out chill music, it also sounds absolutely amazing blasting in your car. Like we said, we just can't get enough. So here we have a collection of some of the best dubstep (and grime) jams of the last little while compiled by legendary DJ Mary Anne Hobbs. About half of these tracks were recorded or at least remixed specifically for this comp, the rest being all time grime/dubstep classics.
The disc starts off with a track from recent AQ Record of the Weeker Milanese, a furious muted blast of grime-y groove and some killer dancehall style toasting over the top. The grime element is sort of pushed aside in favor of the more blissed out dubstep sound for the rest of the disc, featuring a track from another AQ record of the week Burial, as well as a track from Kode9 & Space Ape whose full length we raved about not too long ago. And of course a track from Kevin Martin's Bug... This whole record is just so dark and deliriously groovy. Beats are all over the place, alternating between shuffling and pounding, slithering and stuttering, huge basslines fuzz and buzz, thick swaths of low end synth threaten your woofers, vocals are minimal, sometimes wild tongue twisting flows, other times growled dancehall toasting, bits of jungle surface here and there, thick swirls of ominous ambience EVERYWHERE. So goddamn good. We've been listening to this non stop!! And every time we play this in the store somebody comes up to find out what it is, and usually ends up buying it. So what else do you need to know. Buy this now!
MPEG Stream: BENGA "Music Box"
MPEG Stream: ANDY STOTT "Black"
MPEG Stream: PLASTICIAN "Cha Vocal"
MPEG Stream: THE BUG "Jah War"

TOROIDH European Trilogy (War Office Propaganda) 3cd box 42.00
As we've mentioned many times in the past, we're practically obsessed with the music of Mr. Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk. From the blackened drone of his old church burning corpsepainted ambient horde MZ 412, to the industrial noisefolk of Folkstorm, the full on noise assault of his collaboration with Goat, the rhythmic noise experiments of his collaboration with Merzbow, the bleak drone drenched dark ambience of his projects with former partner in MZ412 Drakh (including an upcoming release on tUMULt!), he also plays in a couple black metal bands, has a noise group, and of course there's the haunting militaristic ambient drone folk of Toroidh. When does this man find time to sleep?!
As much as we love everything he's done, we have a particular soft spot for the music of Toroidh. It's just so evocative, so dark and creepy, beautiful, but incredibly ominous, haunting and downright frightening at times.
We had never been able to get any Toroidh records for the store, so we were super ecstatic to discover that the first three Toroidh records were being remastered and re-released as a box set!!
It's hard to put into words just how massive and breathtaking these records are, how huge in scope. Epic explorations of history through sound. The three records are definitely distinct and unique, but they work together perfectly as a trilogy, their sound, themes and structures perfectly compliment each other. A long strange dark and soulful journey through sound.
Haunting looped military marches, snippets of speeches and rallies, lilting waltzes with moaning horns give way to militaristic drums, over slow soft swells of murky gloomy shimmer, peppered with more snippets of speeches. Thick church organ drones wrap themselves around deep densely reverbed operatic vocals, throughout muted percussive thumps and throbs pulse rhythmically, everything swirled into woozy Skepticism like dirges.
Warm swells of brass moan in the distance, beneath mesmerizing male chanting. Huge expanses of abstract drone, slowed down mournful murmurs wash over forlorn minor key melodies, spread out into murky whorls of sonic sorrow, dizzying swirls of 16rpm warble and deep droning drift. Crunchy industrial marches wrapped in smoky blackness underpin simple propulsive rhythms. Minor key acoustic guitar strum floats on thick beds of soaring strings. Each record manages a seemingly impossible balancing act, situating itself somewhere between cold martial pound, and super emotional melodicism.
European Trilogy is a completely mesmerizing, and ever shifting sonic expanse, the listener is sent into battle to wander cold and alone, lonely and afraid, allowed to wander along the streets of some unnamed village, observing some unnamed war, watching the people, the buildings, the destruction, the devastation, but most specifically the sounds. From hypnotic propulsive militaristic marches to strange processed field recordings and bits of historical sound to deep dark cavernous drones. An absolutely astonishing piece of sonic beauty!
Gorgeous, super deluxe, over the top packaging. A black matte rubberized box with the title debossed, a super striking black on black, inside each disc is in its own thick textured paper sleeve, embossed with the band name and disc number (in Roman numerals of course), and a booklet on super thick glossy paper, with track listings and credits, everything appropriately spare and striking, very simple and streamlined and Teutonic. WOW!
MPEG Stream: "Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It I"
MPEG Stream: "Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It II"
MPEG Stream: "Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It III"
MPEG Stream: "Europe Is Dead I"
MPEG Stream: "Europe Is Dead II"

VILLALOBOS Fizheuer Zieheuer (Playhouse) cd 16.98
You know we like repetition here at Aquarius. We like repetition. We like it. Repetition. Whether it's the motorik pulses of Neu! and Circle, or the minimalist throb of Steve Reich and The Necks, or the crackling loops of Philip Jeck and Thomas Brinkmann, or the headnodding riffs of Om and Les Rallizes Denudes, or the blurring buzz of Wigrid and Wold... we like it! Keep it goin' and we'll keep listening. Well of course one of the many musical forms that makes good use of repetition is dance music, and although sometimes we give the impression that techno and house music "isn't our thing" that's definitely not true about all techno music. Not when it's really, really about the mesmeric repetition, and in an interesting way, like the clicks and cuts of Ryoji Ikeda or the "heroin house" of Fluxion. Or the whole Kompakt catalog of pop ambient drone and beats.
Or this new disc by critical darling Ricardo Villalobos! Which is probably getting a lot of attention because of the sheer length of the tracks on it -- there's two of 'em, clocking in at more than a half-an-hour each! The title cut, "Fizheuer Zieheuer" is truly hypnotic, based on endless, slightly altered iterations of the same happy little horn riff (sampled from a Balkan brass band?), expertly joined to echoing four-on-the-floor techno beats, slowly morphing and shifting over time -- 37 minutes! Deceptively simple, but brilliantly crafted. And yes, totally, totally mesmerizing. Allan turned on the "visualizer" function on his iTunes while playing this and we all got totally tranced-out watching the flashing lights...
This album is maybe really sort of an extreme maxi-single, as the 35 and a half minute second track "Fizbeast" is a stripped-down (minus the horns) recap of the first track -- yay, more repetition! But you might also just hit play on track one again, 'cause you're gonna want to hear that infectious Balkan horn part again and again and again. Recommended, recommended, recommended...
FYI this cd is intentionally packaged by Playhouse without a tray card in the jewel case. Either 'cause it's sort-of a single, or 'cause they feel that electronic music is so modern it doesn't need a back cover, we don't know. Just mentioning this fact so that if you mailorder it, you won't think there's something wrong with your copy...
MPEG Stream: "Fizheuer Zieheuer"

WARHAMMER 48K An Ethereal Oracle (Papa Slag) cd 11.98
Well, "Columbodia, Missouri's" own Warhammer posse showed up not too long ago here at aQ enroute to all corners of the country and they stopped in long enough to rock the asses of the San Francisco scene in a wickedly intimate "bus show" (AQ pal and former A Minor Forest-er has a huge mobile venue, IN A BUS, with a stage, a solar powered generator and an engine that runs on vegetable oil!) and to hand us off a a big pile of their new self-released second cd entitled An Ethereal Oracle.
By the looks and sounds of it, the title holds true to the old adage "what you see is what you get". That is if you can figure out what an ethereal oracle is -musically- speaking.
While the mind-melting debut Uber Om was more of a big loud thud upside your melon, An Ethereal Oracle is more like some forbidden fruit. That something or someone, you've been warned about, you know it's dangerous, potentially deadly, but you just can't resist. It's the temptation of the darkside, the dangerous, you know you're in for it, you know you're done for, you just can't ever be sure when. Or how!
The record starts off with a long scary radio broadcast track, you know, like one of those Emergency Broadcast System things warning you about "the big storm approaching", and just when you start feeling REALLY nervous, you start to get dizzy, everything becomes blurry, your head is spinning, your ears are ringing, you feel flush, you start to sweat, goosebumps, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end, you try to resist, fight it off, but it's too much, you are completely under its spell.
You let the jagged guitar lines, birds chirping in the distance, strange what-the-fuck acoustic folk fuckery, drugged out laid-back droned-out blissful warmness and full on red-line space jam experimental shredding pummelry drag you into the darkness. Before you know it, you're bruised and bloody, naked and tied up with broken guitar strings, ears ringing and bleeding, you have strange WH48K images burned into your flesh, laying atop a pile of bloodstained broken drumsticks, surrounded by a Stonehenge like circle of towering totem like amps, in front of which stand the mysterious members of Warhammer, smiling wickedly as they prepare to do it all over again.
And that's only the first half of the cd!
Limited to 500 intricately illustrated/hand printed/hand assembled copies, and we only have about 30 left of the ones we got.
So act fast...
MPEG Stream: "Two"
MPEG Stream: "Five"

BUFFALO Only Want You For Your Body (Aztec Music) cd 21.00
We LOVE this band. You should love this band. How can you not, that is if you're lookin' for some proto-metal, psychedelic stoner '70s rawk action?? Buffalo is 100 percent the Real Deal. These Aussie rockers were basically what Monster Magnet (and all the other bands in the modern "stoner rock" scene) would have liked to be, doing it first and best back in the day. Once upon a time, we used to stock a 2-on-1 reissue of Buffalo's Volcanic Rock and Want You For Your Body albums (from '73 and '74, respectively) but that's been out of print for ages now. So we're super thrilled that the Aztec label from Down Under has brought Buffalo back into circulation, as part of a '70s reissue campaign featuring a bunch of other Aussie acts we're eager to check out, like Coloured Balls (reviews pending). Both of these Buffalo discs are authentically heavy '70s cock-rock from the band we've judged to be Australia's answer to, if not Black Sabbath, at least Grand Funk... no, better n' heavier than that. Sir Lord Baltimore, for sure. Did we say cock-rock? Hell, there's even a penis on the cover of Volcanic Rock! The lyrics are of the sort that amusingly confuse being sexist with being sexy (a la Spinal Tap), as in Want You's lead off track "I'm A Skirt Lifter, Not A Shirt Raiser", and they're delivered with much gusto and backed by some powerful guitar riffing that blows those stoner rock bands of today out of the (bong)water.
Volcanic Rock is unstoppable, definitely an aptly titled album. Music for rolling Mad Max style on the highways across the Australian outback. Bonus tracks include the single versions of crucial cuts "Sunrise (Come My Way)" and "Shylock". Want You For You Body is equally awesome, and features the powerful "Dune Messiah". Killer vocals on that one and you can't get much more '70s than a song about Frank Herbert's popular sci-fi classic, short of writing songs about Tolkien! Bonus tracks include a live version of "United Nations". And the fact that you can't get both albums on one disc anymore is made up for by the presence of the aforementioned bonus tracks on each cd, digital remastering, thick booklets, and generally nice presentation in digipacks.
So if you're a patron of our "proto-metal" section, into Blue Cheer and Bang and Leaf Hound and the like, you've gotta get Buffalo!!! Same deal if you're a fan of Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Heavy Rocks style Boris, etc... Highly recommended.
[Also available, is the Aztec reish of Buffalo's debut Dead Forever, which we'll list next time!]
MPEG Stream: "I'm Coming On"
MPEG Stream: "Dune Messiah"

BUFFALO Volcanic Rock (Aztec Music) cd 21.00
We LOVE this band. You should love this band. How can you not, that is if you're lookin' for some proto-metal, psychedelic stoner '70s rawk action?? Buffalo is 100 percent the Real Deal. These Aussie rockers were basically what Monster Magnet (and all the other bands in the modern "stoner rock" scene) would have liked to be, doing it first and best back in the day. Once upon a time, we used to stock a 2-on-1 reissue of Buffalo's Volcanic Rock and Want You For Your Body albums (from '73 and '74, respectively) but that's been out of print for ages now. So we're super thrilled that the Aztec label from Down Under has brought Buffalo back into circulation, as part of a '70s reissue campaign featuring a bunch of other Aussie acts we're eager to check out, like Coloured Balls (reviews pending). Both of these Buffalo discs are authentically heavy '70s cock-rock from the band we've judged to be Australia's answer to, if not Black Sabbath, at least Grand Funk... no, better n' heavier than that. Sir Lord Baltimore, for sure. Did we say cock-rock? Hell, there's even a penis on the cover of Volcanic Rock! The lyrics are of the sort that amusingly confuse being sexist with being sexy (a la Spinal Tap), as in Want You's lead off track "I'm A Skirt Lifter, Not A Shirt Raiser", and they're delivered with much gusto and backed by some powerful guitar riffing that blows those stoner rock bands of today out of the (bong)water.
Volcanic Rock is unstoppable, definitely an aptly titled album. Music for rolling Mad Max style on the highways across the Australian outback. Bonus tracks include the single versions of crucial cuts "Sunrise (Come My Way)" and "Shylock". Want You For You Body is equally awesome, and features the powerful "Dune Messiah". Killer vocals on that one and you can't get much more '70s than a song about Frank Herbert's popular sci-fi classic, short of writing songs about Tolkien! Bonus tracks include a live version of "United Nations". And the fact that you can't get both albums on one disc anymore is made up for by the presence of the aforementioned bonus tracks on each cd, digital remastering, thick booklets, and generally nice presentation in digipacks.
So if you're a patron of our "proto-metal" section, into Blue Cheer and Bang and Leaf Hound and the like, you've gotta get Buffalo!!! Same deal if you're a fan of Kyuss, Monster Magnet, Heavy Rocks style Boris, etc... Highly recommended.
[Also available, is the Aztec reish of Buffalo's debut Dead Forever, which we'll list next time!]
MPEG Stream: "Shylock"
MPEG Stream: "Freedom"

FURZE Trident Autocrat (Candlelight) cd 13.98
We used to stock this when it was out on the Apocalyptic Empire empire label, sadly it went out of print but now Candlelight has reissued it (in a nice slipcase) along with Furze's other album Necromanzee Cogent (listed last time) so now y'all have another chance to dig the fucked up blackness of Trident Autocrat. Unfortunately, it's more expensive than it was before, but it's worth it, and at least we can get 'em at all!
Here's how much we love this stuff (from when we listed it the first time a few years back):
Everybody went so nuts for the newest Furze record we listed recently we figured we oughta track down the first one as well. And it's just as freaked out and damaged and totally brilliant. Unlike the weird droning doom of Necromanzee Cogent, Trident Autocrat is all black metal. But that doesn't mean it's not as bizarre, because it most definitely is. The song titles again are totally perplexing: "Zaredoo Knives Endows Thy Sight", "Devacamo Possessed Black", "Witchboundator", "Scolopendraarise" and the lyrics and imagery are quite ridiculous as well. The logo, which features three witches brooms and the slogan: "Trident Black Metal Feast", the back of the record that features a long exposure swirl of light in a spooky hallway, and lines like "The overall vibration of the preacher, The way of sneaking teeth and hypocrisy, It's the destruction ritual of the holy trinity" all combine to form the perfect framework for one of the coolest weirdest black metal records ever. All the BM hallmarks are present, buzzing riffs, growled vocals, chaotic lightning speed bast beats, but the black metal of Furze turns these seemingly typical elements into completely insane musical madness. The growling vocals squirm and morph from demonic growl, to howled distant anguish, heavily reverbed as if they were being recorded at the bottom of a well, to maniacal gremlin like chatter, and creepy cartoony chanting. The riffs, are super affected and sometimes sound totally heavy, sometimes completely brittle, lo-fi and tinny one minute, buzzing and snarling the next. The most surprising thing is how damn catchy some of these riffs are. The first song has been stuck in my head like crazy, and unlike most black metal, you'll no doubt find yourself humming along. Only a half hour long, but so much wonderful weirdness is crammed into those 30 minutes you definitely won't be left wanting.
MPEG Stream: "Zaredoo Knives Endows Thy Sight"
MPEG Stream: "Devacamo Possessed Black"

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Diadem Of 12 Stars (Vendlus) cd 15.98
Back in print! New artwork, but same mind blowing epic black metal.
We'd been selling Wolves In The Throne Room cd-r demos like crazy since we first discovered these guys last year (2004). And how could we not? You gotta love a band that unfurls massive fuzzed out epics, 10+ minute bursts of swirling droning black metal, dirging, lurching and gorgeously blown out. The obvious comparison is SF black metal legends Weakling, and you know we wouldn't make that comparison lightly. The same sort of fierce brutality and chaotic ferocity mixed with impossibly anguished emotionalism all wrapped up in a blackness that is informed as much by suffocating dark ambience and mesmerizing drones as it is grim black metal.
If you thought the WITTR demos sounded great, HOLY SHIT does their new record, and debut full length, blow those out of the water. Which is a good thing as two of the songs here are actually from the demos, but they have been massively reworked and completely re-recorded. It's got a huge wall of guitar sound, surprisingly heavy for a black metal band, in place of more typical reedy buzzy BM mosquito guitar. There's thick snarling monster riffs, dense and multilayered, spread thick over furious pounding drumming and howled strangulated vocals (very Weakling-esque). Now you might think the world needs another Nordic style black metal band like a hole in the head, no matter how amazing they are. BUT, Wolves In The Throne Room do it SO WELL, and write amazing songs, and manage to mix it up like crazy, incorporating all sorts of un-BM elements, gorgeous folky ambience, weirdly TRUE metal riffing, even some ethereal angelic female vocals (courtesy Jamie Myers, ex-Hammers Of Misfortune). It all somehow fits, and makes the Wolves' black metal black enough to remain true, but fucked up enough to matter. Plus they probably do think the world needs need a hole in the head...
You'd never guess from listening to this record that the WITTR are a bunch of short haired, furry vested, tight panted, scruffy indie dudes from Olympia. But don't let that put you off, impossibly true metal nerds, just close your eyes, listen close, and all you'll see are grim, 10 foot tall, spike encrusted leather clad warriors of the misty, ancient northwestern forests... Yep, we're surely excited to have their "real cd" debut back in print at last!!
MPEG Stream: "(A Shimmering Radiance) Diadem Of 12 Stars"
MPEG Stream: "Face In A Night Time Mirror Pt. 1"

REICHEL, ACHIM & MACHINES Die Grune Reise (The Green Journey) / Erholung (Melting Point) cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
How is it that these long overdue A.R. & Machines reissues just keep making us fall in love with Ol' Achim Reichel over and over again? 'Cause it's some of the best krautrock EVER that's how. Die Grune Reise is a re-release of the first official A.R. & Machines LP from 1970 and, while slightly less epic and grand than the blissful Echo (part of the double disc reissue we raved about a few months ago), it's no less mesmerizing, exploratory and exciting. Reichel's trademark meandering, repetitive guitar and percussion are in full effect -- spacey and grooving, but instead of totally transporting the listener into the realm of ether, there's something more rockin' and also sometimes ridiculous that keeps it in the realm of the studio. Well it had to be since EVERYTHING on here was performed and recorded by Achim Reichel himself, a total one-man-jam! Sounds like a whole hairy freak-troupe though. Die Grune Reise is like watching a preview of the even more awesome journey that Reichel eventually takes you on with Echo (which, by the way, is finally back in stock!). It's entirely possible that all the weird, sometimes goofy-hippy vocals on this album maybe make us a little self-conscious... Yes, there's a lot of the madhouse 'digga-digga-aahh-waaahhh!??" type vocals on here that at turns challenge and delight us, but they're tempered with a more than generous helping of signature chug-jams to keep us totally boogeying (dig the ZZ Top guitar riffery on track 2!) and lilting interludes to help us come down gently. When absorbing this album, it's hard to shake the very specific image of a naked, twirling free-spirited German longhair in the desert at night alone with his arms wide open holding a hand rolled cigarette/joint in one hand and doing graceful hand maneuvers with the other...and that's fine by us. We grok that dude and these albums. There's actually two of them (albums) here, as this disc also includes A.R. VI, Echolung, originally released by Brain in 1975. Compared to Die Grune Reise it's a bit more mellowed out, if anything more cosmic and spacey... real nice! Total krautrock essentials, both of these. Fans of both Can and Circle need to hear 'em...
MPEG Stream: "Station 1: Globus"
MPEG Stream: "Station 1: In The Same Boat"
MPEG Stream: "Gute Reise"

TARENTEL Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun Vol. 1 (The Music Fellowship) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrocky pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 1 is six tracks, a little over a half an hour, a dense assemblage of abstract rhythms and brooding, swirling psychedelia, heavy on the This Heat worship, beats stretched out over huge expanses of industrial whir and jagged angular guitars, very loping and hypnotic, brooding and drone-y, mysterious tribal rituals stretched out into epic spaced out, abstract rhythmic jams.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
MPEG Stream: "Everybody Fucks With Somebody"
MPEG Stream: "All Things Vibrations"

TARENTEL Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun Vol. 2 (The Music Fellowship) lp 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
When we first heard the title of this new Tarentel FOUR LP series, Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, we were pretty sure they were being ironic, or facetious, or something, and there would be no beats, ghetto or otherwise, to be found anywhere, just their usual gorgeously slow shifting epic postrock soundscapes. But actually, these lps ARE all about the beats, not sure if they're 'ghetto' or not, but they sure are dense and funky and weirdly rhythmic, from blissed out shuffling skitter to super propulsive krautrock pound, these discs are definitely a whole new side of Tarentel. A much more raw and ragged, caustic and groove based beast. It almost sounds like Tarentel covering This Heat, or a krautrock No Neck Blues Band, or maybe even Tussle via This Heat with a bit of 23 Skidoo thrown in for good measure.
While the framework of each song is some dense web of percussive clatter or some sort-of-funky drum jam, these gorgeously hypnotic skeletal rhythms are surrounded on all sides by thick swaths of crumbling ambience, disembodied guitar loops and rumbling bass, thick swells of warm whir and all sorts of other random dreamlike shimmer. Often building into seriously caustic squalls, big churning white hot sonic swirls, each wrapped around beats that seem on the edge of falling apart, or splintering into rhythmic fragments. Maybe that's the ghetto angle, the beats are super lo-fi, blown out, strangely recorded, so they sound sort of alien, with lots of strange FX and stuttering stumbling variations. So fucking awesome.
Volume 2 is 4 tracks, 40 minutes, two epic jams, both 16+ minutes, separated by two shorter tracks. The opener starts with an endlessly hypnotic, near metal drum jam, over which guitars and sound makers creak and keen, a crystalline web of high end sonics over a swirling tribal rhythm. It could seemingly go on forever, and it sort of does, but near the end it dissipates into a dark spacious soundscape of distant clatter and thick rumbling buzz. After a one minute rhythmic experiment, all freaked out psych rock effects and super distorted drum sputter, the second lengthy jam kicks in, and it's definitely the most mellow and blissed out track on the first two volumes, some muted free jazz skitter, over a slow burning expanse of chiming guitars and smears of abstract melody all stretched into a near static glacial groove. So nice. As if that weren't enough, the last 5 minutes is some of that fuzzy crumbling blurry ambience we can never seem to get enough of. Soft focus and indistinct, shimmering guitars wrapped in thick crumbling guitars and a glistening sonic glow, like Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and that sort of thing, a gorgeous late night coda of dreamy drone-y bliss.
As much as we dig pretty much everything Tarentel does, Ghetto Beats is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from these guys. So fantastic!
MPEG Stream: "Sun Place"
MPEG Stream: "Cosmic Dust"

JACKIE-O MOTHERFUCKER America Mystica (Very Friendly) 2cd 19.98
Massive collection of four epic live performances from the ever shifting Jackie O Motherfucker collective. Recorded in various venues and conditions, live on stage, live in the studio, live on the radio, with various guests and collaborators present. All four tracks are epic in length, the shortest nearly 20 minutes, each one a long and winding road that meanders through pretty much ever sonic nook and cranny the band have ever explored. And all four tracks some of the prettiest and creepiest stuff we've heard from these guys.
Raw stripped down blues guitar, abstract free folk flutter, drones everywhere, buzzing strings, and simple scattered percussion, mysterious vocals, strange samples and lots and lots of turntable. In fact, more than any JOMF recording we can remember, the turntable is one of the main elements, mostly maintaining a rich textural backdrop, but just as easily spitting out some Paul Hardcastle style stuttered loops, or offering up all manner of slippery scratchy rhythms. All very subtle and smoothly integrated into the ever shifting whole. Epic and cinematic, dark and dramatic, it sounds a bit like a dream jam between the No Neck Blues Band and Godspeed You Black Emperor mixed by DJ Shadow. When the guitar enters the fray on the second track is sounds like some slowcore post rock band suddenly decided to sit in. But it fits perfectly. The third track recorded live in Minneapolis, is the heaviest and most 'rocking', a cacophonous blast that ends up sounding like some long lost Krautrock jam, revived and brought back to life right there on stage, while the final twenty minute piece, recorded in the UK, unfurls lazily, bringing the nearly two hours of America Mystica to a close, with an epic spaciousness, underpinned by murky synths, fuzzy psych guitar buzz, splattery disembodied drumming, and a strangely funky fade out.
MPEG Stream: "Hudson Dragonfly"
MPEG Stream: "Ah Sunflower"

KIRB AND CHRIS Niggaz And White Girlz (Rapitalism) cd 14.98
Our favorite new hip hop record for sure. The minute we first heard this, we knew we had to get a bunch for the store. We finally did, but then realized we were at a loss for words (who, us?), so we hit up the guy who turned us on to the record in the first place, AQ pal / gay gangsta Matt Wobensmith, who had this to say about Kirb And Chris:
Take your favorite '80s new wave and pop hits, chop them up, lace them with party rhymes and what do you have? "Niggaz and White Girlz," maybe one of the most brilliant hip hop albums in years. Concept album? 80s revival? Party record? Political statement? Shameless excuse to get laid? Oddly, all of the above.
Inspired by the San Francisco club scene -- where Kirb and Chris do most of their "new wave thuggin'" -- reworking '80s megahits comes effortlessly, as they give new life to the Cure's "Close To Me" ("Closer"), the Smiths' "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" ("Doorstep, Girl"), and not one, but TWO Gary Numan joints, "Cars" and "Down in the Park." Round it out with Simple Minds, Talking Heads, the Human League, the Police, the B52's and others, and you've got quite a rich library to sample from. But does it work?
Absolutely.
As crate diggers constantly scrape the bins for new source material, it only makes sense that synth-driven new wave could be the next wave. Highly enjoyable, and we didn't even mention how hilarious this album's between-song skits are.
This album should totally be huge!
MPEG Stream: "Closer"
MPEG Stream: "Down In The Park"
MPEG Stream: "Cars"
MPEG Stream: "When The World Is Running Down"

MAGIC AUM GIGI MMMM (My Metal Machine Music) (Sparkling Spare Wheel) lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This may just be our new favorite record (though, it's not that new -- we've had 'em here for months but they sorta slipped thru the cracks, review-wise, until now). Which is not at all what we were expecting. Not even remotely. The first solo release from ex-Acid Mothers Temple axeman and Acid Mothers Temple soul collective member Magic Aum Gigi, MMMM is not just another AMT related psych rock freakout. As much as we do dig almost everything AMT release, we are definitely filled to overflowing with their endless barrage of tripped out psychedelic rock. So it was with some trepidation that we prepared to review yet -another- Acid Mothers Temple related release, the 30th or 40th in the last year maybe. But HO-LEE SHIT! This record completely blew our minds. When we cracked this open, a big triangular insert fell out, printed on it was a circle with the words "Raga Metal" inside, and on each corner were the words "drone", "trip" and "music." And damn if that ain't exactly what this is. DRONE TRIP MUSIC. Or RAGA METAL. Both only begin to describe the blissy heaviness and abstract beauty of this disc.
Gorgeous, fuzzy Tim Hecker sort of blurry guitars, doused in tons of distortion and reverb, until the riffs are just indistinct blurs, almost like listening to My Bloody Valentine through a transistor radio under your pillow, all murky and muddy but still gloriously melodic and epic. But beyond that, the riffs and thick swirls of sound constantly drop out, glitching into brief crackling silences before stuttering back into motion, like it was recorded on some old, super degrade tape, or as if the needle keeps slipping off the vinyl or some dizzying combination of both. Like an even more lo-fi, metallicized William Basinski, or a blissed out dronier Faxed Head. It ends up being as much about the music as it does about the strange distortions and mysterious drop outs. Like some EVP transmission from beyond, rendered in fuzz guitars and looped murky rhythms. A super distorted slab of metallic dreammusic drenched in hiss and buzz and recorded onto a thrift store cassette with using a toy tape recorder with dying batteries. So goddamn beautiful. And we only have a few, and only will ever have these few, as it's on the out of print wagon now.

MOSS The Tormented (Apop) cassette 26.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Besides being one of the filthiest, sludgiest doom bands EVER, Moss also hold the uniquely AQ distinction of being the first band to get 40 'o's in an AQ review. That's right. Moss are most definitely the supreme masters of D-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-M. Only that many 'o's in doom can truly represent the sort of twisted anguished glacial drone drenched doom these guys are capable of unleashing. Every thing they touch turns to murky, dirgey mayhem. A blackened, hateful soundscape of slow motion thud and growl, a hellish trudge through a black sonic pit. But we're sure we already had you at 40 'o's!
So what could be more appropriate than a single ninety minute epic lo-fi doom dirge, captured on three microphones and recorded on a fourtrack, then pressed on to a cassette, the grimmest and most cult of formats? Well how about if each cassette was housed in an mindblowingly elaborate, and highly dangerous, welded iron, industrial sculpture-like case? And how about if each cassette 'case' was welded together from nails, and strange rusty hinges, and huge links of chain, stuffed with burnt parchment and actual moss? Doesn't get much more doomy than that.
Seriously though, when we cracked open the two HUGE boxes these tapes came shipped in, and began to unwrap these sharp and jagged works of art, everyone in the store gathered around to see what the next one would look like. Some were like Venus Flytraps made out of nails, others were huge bear trap things wrapped in chains, and spiked with nails. It was like discovering some long buried ancient armory. A dizzying array of sharp edges and hinged nails, weird greased axles that allow pieces of metal to slide open revealing the tape inside, or dense tangles of bent nails melted into tiny cassette coffins. So intense. And amazing looking. And so appropriate to the massive downtuned sludge inside. It's almost like these tapes occurred in nature, and the protective welded iron coating is a warning to wildlife to beware of what poisonous brutality lurks inside. Each case has the band's name welded or soldered on the side, and each contains a parchment like insert with the liner notes. And plenty of moss as well. So awesome.
So here's the complicated part. They're all totally different. Some are huge, and weigh close to 5 pounds, a massive chunk of metal, some are quite not so big, but still equally spikey and dangerously sharp. So the postage will vary depending on which one you get, and due to the intensely spikey and sharp nature of these beasts, if you order them along with anything else, they MUST be shipped separately. And thus will incur an extra shipping charge. Unless you don't mind all your other records having huge nail holes in them and everything ripped to shreds. But let's assume you do mind, and so we'll just figure on separate shipping. But hell, it's so worth it. These are amazing and creepy pieces of art. It's almost just a bonus that inside is a tape of some seriously damaged, harsh and crumbling lo-fi doom.
LIMITED TO 50 COPIES! WE GOT HALF OF THEM! When these are gone, they are gone forever.

SUNN O))) & BORIS Altar (Southern Lord) 2cd 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 5000 copies come with a bonus disc titled SatanOscillateMyMetallicSonatas (a nod to Soundgarden, there?) that features a single 28 minute track called "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fool's? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
Packaged beautifully in a mini cd style gatefold, with AMAZING cover art, black on black with weird muted color and text printed in glossy varnish and metallic gold, both bands be-robed and standing in a cornfield, a full color booklet attached to the inside, a metallic sticker on the front, each copy individually numbered. [whoops, no longer, while we do still have copies of this double cd version left, they don't have the sticker for some reason, a manufacturing snafu we're told... no biggie since it's the extra disc not the sticker that makes these so desirable!!]
MPEG Stream: "Etna"
MPEG Stream: "N.L.T."
MPEG Stream: "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)"

SUNN O))) & BORIS Altar (Southern Lord) 3lp 27.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Okay vinyl nerds, the wait is finally over. The ultimate sludge doom matchup, East meets West, is now, in fact, available on vinyl!!! An insanely deluxe elaborate triple lp in an impossibly oversized sleeve, gorgeous matte finish, with gloss varnish filigree. Inside, a deluxe oversized 12" booklet of color photos, liner notes by Soundgarden's Kim Thayil, each of the three lps pressed on swirled green vinyl, housed black sleeves, printed in glossy black ink with various symbols. The whole thing is pretty mindblowing. Much like the music inside. PLUS!!! This deluxe version includes the 28 minute bonus track which was originally included as a bonus disc with the first few thousand cds, the amazing three way team up "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" which adds Earth to the already stellar SUNNO))) / Boris mix. Phew!! These triple lps are limited to 2000 copies, we got a bunch, but odds are they will be gone in no time! And while the sticker on the front claims that there is a libretto included, it is actually referring to the picture book, so don't freak out when you can't find the 'libretto'... Anyway, here's what we had to say about the music:
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 2000 copies of the Altar lp include the bonus track "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom", a single 28 minute epic guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fool's? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
So awesome!
MPEG Stream: "Etna"
MPEG Stream: "N.L.T."
MPEG Stream: "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)"

SUNN O))) & BORIS Altar (Inoxia) 3lp box 130.00
We took pre-orders for this puppy and of course they flew out of here in no time. But as with most things like this, a handful of folks dropped the ball and ended up not picking up their record. Thus, we have a tiny handful (5 copies!!) up for grabs. This is the super deluxe Japanese version of Altar, 200 gram vinyl, packed in a thick box, embossed, gloss on matte printing, printed vellum obi, silk screened gold on black fabric insert inside, full color printed heavy duty sleeves, so so nice. LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES WORLDWIDE!! You thought the Southern Lord version was a killer, wait until you see this!! And again, we only have FIVE copies, first ones to order get 'em and once they're gone that's it. Here's the review:
Okay vinyl nerds, the wait is finally over. The ultimate sludge doom matchup, East meets West, is now, in fact, available on vinyl!!! An insanely deluxe elaborate triple lp set. The whole thing is pretty mindblowing. Much like the music inside. PLUS!!! This deluxe version includes the 28 minute bonus track which was originally included as a bonus disc with the first few thousand cds, the amazing three way team up "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom" which adds Earth to the already stellar SUNNO))) / Boris mix.
It was inevitable really. The Japanese masters of Orange Amp-powered drone-sludge and the robed priests of low end doom. How could it not happen? In fact, if you remember the 2005 April Fool's AQ list, we actually jokingly predicted this epochal event! Although in our version it also included Earth, each band playing one note of the world's heaviest E chord.
The real question was never IF it would happen, it was when. And how. Especially how. C'mon, how on earth can you fit that many amps in a recording studio. They must have used an airplane hanger, either that or they filled a high school gymnasium with Sunn and Orange stacks and microphones, and actually played in an entirely different room.
Regardless, it happened, and it sounds as good as you might imagine. Both bands completely compliment each other. SUNNO))), whose slow motion riffing borders on pure ambience, is given a serious propulsive shove, with more structured riffing and the addition of DRUMS!!! Boris get dragged back into the gloriously glacial tarpit of their older records, discarding their current garage rock rrrooooaaar for that classic slow motion doom trudge. However you look at it, it's basically the best record either band has put out. It's like an EVEN heavier SUNNO))), with bigger riffs and pulverizing doom rock drums, and of course wailing psychedelic leads. For Boris, they've taken their blown out grooves and dipped them in tar, added a million more pounds of guitar firepower and made the best Boris record since Flood.
But it's not all pulverizing doom riffage. There's plenty of dark droning ambience too. Huge stretches of swirling guitar rumble, dreamy swaths of wispy steel string shimmer. murky and haunting, processed vocals and minor key melodies swimming in a black sea of echoey ambient guitars and sizzling cymbal shimmer. The strangest track is probably "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)", sort of the Boris / SUNNO))) version of a torch song, with FX smeared piano, strange buried rhythms, and hushed vocals, like a doom metal Mazzy Star.
The closer "Bloodswamp" is 14 minutes of churning downtuned guitars and shimmering Sunroof! like ambience. No riffs really, or if they are there, they're stretched into thick streaks of black fuzz. A furiously epic coda to a fucking amazing record.
The first 2000 copies of the Altar lp include the bonus track "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom", a single 28 minute epic guest starring Dylan Carlson from Earth! Before we go any further... are you thinking what we're thinking... April Fool's? SUNNO))) and Boris And Earth!!! And I bet you at least some of the bonus track is in E!! Boy, did we call it. And actually Atsuo from Boris confided in a friend of AQ that indeed, part of the reason they got Dylan to guest was because of that April Fool's review! How cool is that?!?
Anyway, the bonus track is a monstrous wall of churning guitars, with occasional howled almost death metal vocals buried way down in the mix, and languorous Earth Hex-like twang guitar draped lazily above a churning blackhole ambience. So good.
Besides Dylan Carlson of Earth, there are lots of other guest performers including Jesse Sykes, Joe Preston from Thrones (also ex-Melvins, ex-Earth), Kim Thayil from Soundgarden (aha) and Rex Ritter from Jessamine.
So awesome!
MPEG Stream: "Etna"
MPEG Stream: "N.L.T."
MPEG Stream: "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)"

SUNN O))) & BORIS Altar (Japanese Edition) (Inoxia) cd 23.00
Okay, it's that time again, you know, when we tell you about a new, slightly different version of a Boris record you already have. And then you decide just how much of a Boris (and in this case, SUNNO))) as well) freak you really are.
This is the Japanese version of the recent collaborative effort between Japanese sludgelords Boris and their American counterparts, glacial doom merchants SUNNO))). Arguably the best release from either band in years, it's alternately achingly lovely, and crushingly brutal. But what's the deal with the Japanese version, and do you need it. Well, if you're as Boris obsessed as most of us the answer is yes. First off, it's got amazing new artwork. A gold and black slipcover with shimmering spot varnish text over a subtly altered booklet, on nice paper and with a fold out Japanese insert. But it's the five minute bonus track that may have most of you shelling out another $20. A five minute alternate version of the track "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)". Already the records strangest and most haunting track, female vocals hover over slow shifting slabs of glistening sound. Like doom metal gone slowcore. But on the alternate extra track, the "Black Sheep" version, the doomy moody slowcore is transformed into a string quartet, all warm soaring strings over swirling shimmers, drifting sun dappled melodies over swoonsome melodies and long drawn out chords. Quite pretty, and very much a strange addition. But is it worth buying all over again. Well, it is missing the bonus disc that came with the first pressing of the American version, but if you missed out on the completely, this is obviously essential. If you have that one already, well, it just might be worth it to have both. Up to you.
Here's what we had to say about the original disc: