SOMBRES FORETS Royaume De Glace (Sepulchral Productions) cd 13.98
Record number two from Canadian black metal depressives Sombres Forets, whose debut, was definitely one of our favorite black metal records of last year. A gorgeous blown out miserablist wash of black buzz that definitely gave other aQ faves like Make A ChangeŠ Kill Yourself, Xasthur and Burzum, a run for their money.
This disc takes that frosty washed out black sound and pushes it even further out, buzzier, fuzzier, more distorted and even more dreamlike. The brief opener sets the stage, thick swirls of keyboards throb and swell, the sound so blown out the notes distort as if burning from within, a sweet sad melody, wreathed in distortion and reverb, that quickly gives way to he record proper, the guitars thick and buzz drenched, churning over a wash of melancholy keyboards, which soar dramatically like a chorus of angels, adding a strange Arvo Part-ish vibe to the proceedings. But even minus those keyboards, the songs here, much like on the last record, are so moody and melancholy, but still super intense and powerful. Some tracks feature acoustic guitar interludes, with the acoustic guitar continuing on into the song proper, winding itself in and around the loping buzz.
The production is strange, at once thick and heavy, but also a bit murky and gauzy, the effect being that the record seems a bit blurred, a little washed out, which only adds to the lonely dreamy quality. Strip away the vokills, and the distortion, and these songs would most likely reveal themselves as heartbreaking minimal folk ballads, or depressive pop gems, but dip them in filth, wrap them in distortion, and run them through with harsh howls, and suddenly, your wallowing in some epic, majestic, depressive blackness. The final track is quite strange as well, all acoustic, a simple strummed minor key progression, peppered with occasional flurries of floor tom, some cymbal shimmer, but for the most part, simple and stripped down and strangely striking.
MPEG Stream: "The Forest"
MPEG Stream: "La Nuit"

SUNN O))) 00Void (Japanese Version) (Daymare) 2cd 36.00
The final installment in Daymare's comprehensive SUNNO))) reissue campaign, and probably the most eagerly anticipated, not just because 00 Void is one of their best, but because the extra bonus disc features the original record reimagined and recontextualized by dadaist sound sculptors Nurse With Wound.
00Void is in fact, SUNNO)))'s first proper album, the preceding Grimmrobe Demos, being just that, demos, but sonically, it picks up right where Grimmrobe left off, huge undulating slow motion riffscapes, epic, majestic, glacial, ominous and black hole heavy. Although it hardly seems necessary at this point, for those who have managed to somehow avoid SUNNO)))'s sonic influence, SUNNO))) began life as the world's first, best, only, (and last?) EARTH tribute band, emulating and bowing before the glacial "power ambient drone" metal of Earth, creating a little cult of the dronedoomdirge faithful, long before the hipster set caught on, but this record, as much as Grimmrobe before it made a case for SUNNO))) as their own entity, sure they owed every aspect of their sound to the band they were birthed to honor (still do really), but they managed to subtly imbue that same sound with their own influences and experience, creating something even more slow and low if that were even possible, setting yet another standard for heaviness.
So on 00Void, SUNNO))) indulge in pure unfettered doom, loosed from any sort of rhythmic constrictions, unmoored from traditional song structures, letting riffs and tones and pure vibrations emanate from their wall of speakers, like some monstrous black tuning fork, almost more a physical sensation than an aural one, but those movements of blackdrone infused with a musicality that blossoms slowly the deeper you allow yourself to sink. Suffocating, pummeling, crushing, oozing, but also soothing and beautiful. Maybe one of our favorite SUNNO))) records for sure. And if the pure grim heaviness of the three originals wasn't enough, 00Void also includes a cover (or, an interpretation, anyway) of a Melvins tune! Another band who were dabbling in slow motion heaviness long before it was cool...
This deluxe Japanese reissue is gorgeously packaged as always, swank matte finished textured paper gatefold, printed inner sleeves, insert with liner notes (all in Japanese), but most importantly of all, a whole extra disc, a complete reworking of 00Void by Nurse With Wound. Most folks probably never even made it this far in the review anyway, the mention of NWW remixing SUNNO))) in the first paragraph probably had most people scrambling for the add to cart button, but for folks who stuck it out, it's well worth rebuying 00Void again for the extra disc, as it's a fantastic disc of haunting drones and abstract soundscaping, constructed using the glacial doom of SUNNO))) as the building blocks, which is surprising considering how shimmery and serene much of this is.
The opening track is one long slow billow of sound, gentle clouds of muted metallic reverberations, deep resonant chiming tones, soft smeared bass notes, all blurred into a creeping drift, that is more Chalk or Coleclough than SUNNO))). The second track is evenmore abstract, isolating, or adding voices, peppering the dreamy drone with strange metallic clang, moaning horn like bleats, sprays of hiss and buzz, all over a warbly wandering bassline, the vocals driving the song at points, a nasally croon entangled in the tracks gauzy gurgle, the bass getting thicker and thicker, coated in grit and grime and hiss, the vocals effected and almost demonic, breaking glass, weird industrial clatter, and lots and lots of hisssssssss.
The final track, another gorgeously minimal drone, the sound of SUNNO))) smeared and blurred and muted into a hushed thrum, soft subtle layers shifting and blending, warm and rich and textured but simple and spare, near the end, voices and radio static surface, but still barely audible, another whispered layer beneath a sea of tranquil hushed whir. Pretty dang cool, even if it's fairly far removed from the sound of the original, but then again, that's sort of the mark of a good remix as far as we're concerned.
Be warned, we got a bunch but they'll probably go quick, so when we run out, be prepared to wait for us to get more from Japan.
MPEG Stream: "NN 0)))"
MPEG Stream: "Ra At Dusk"

FORTERESSE Les Hivers De Notre Epoque (Sepulchral Productions) cd 13.98
A brand new blast of grim frostbitten Canadian blackness from the masters of Metal Noir Quebecois, Forteresse. We were first struck by these guys when we saw the cover of their first record, an old yellowed photo of a young man cradling a violin, then once we threw the record on, it began with a crackly old recording of some sort of folky fiddle music. Whatthefuck, we were thinking, until the band launched into the first track, exploding in a frenzy of classic sounding nineties styled black metal buzz. That record was a tribute to the folk music and culture of the French part of North America apparently, but as we mentioned in the review of that disc, we never would have known it but for those brief bits of scratchy violin.
This latest disc seems to be also steeped in some sort of mythology, the record cover, a very Burzum like black and grey drawing of some old farm house, of leafless winter trees and thick drifts of snow, they are Canadian after all. The songs separated into movements. The music inside is appropriately frosty and grim, barren and wintry, a distinct departure from the thick black buzz of their debut. Here, the sound is super brittle and high end, the tracks are super washed out, the buzzing guitars so smeared and blurred and mixed down that they sound almost like long static streaks of upper register drone, the drums way down in the mix, surfacing here and there in brief flurries of percussive mayhem, but just as often rendered a relentless muted throb, the vocals a harsh howl sprawled over the top.
The result is amazing and totally mesmerizing, an intense blown out blackness, that is rife with soaring keening high end tones, shards of feedback, the riffs cyclical and repetitive. Our favorite track would have to be "Tenebras", where all of the above elements are made even more extreme, the riffing becomes some soaring looped ur-drone, super emotional majestic streaks of sound are woven into an almost static wall of throbbing high end, the drums more a distant splatter of subtle pulses, the vocals even more anguished, tangled up in the shimmering strands of sound, the result is something truly original and unlike any black metal we've heard. There must be some sort of keyboards happening too, the sound is thick and layered but it just sounds like long drawn out drones arranged into an alien orchestral black drift. WOW.
The sound might have changed, but Forteresse have managed to somehow get both better and weirder, and thus remain still, one of our favorite of the current crop of buzzing black hordes.
MPEG Stream: "En Quete Du Souvenir"
MPEG Stream: "Ancienne Voix"

LEMONHEADS It's a Shame About Ray (Atlantic / Rhino) cd+dvd 24.00
A lot of how you feel about a record is determined by when you first heard it, or at least when you listened to it most. Some records remind us of college, others about a specific relationship, a breakup, but it's amazing how music can embody a memory so completely. And how the same music can mean so many different things for so many different people.
A lot of folks our age, probably first heard The Lemonheads' It's A Shame About Ray when they were in their early twenties, maybe just out of college, or like some of us, just sort of wandering aimlessly instead of college. And while we're not sure if it's just the above mentioned musical memory, or if these songs actually embody that sort of shiftless rootless confusional youth. Regardless, it's a pretty fantastic record, that sounds as good, and as timeless as it did 15 years ago. The pop minded around here might rank Ray as one of the best pop records EVER. And listening to this again, we still would.
It's the sort of record that is so part of our musical lives, it's hard to review, like Slint's Spiderland, when we find out someone doesn't actually own it, we freak out and insist that whoever it is BUY IT IMMEDIATELY. So for folks reading this, who dig pop music, and who don't own this, for fuck's sake, buy it now. It's so catchy and rocking and sad and emo and pretty and hooky and perfect.
"Rockin' Stroll" is one of the all time best record openers, super kick ass and catchy, the vocals a lazy drawl over super propulsive riffing, "Rudderless" is all minor key and dissonant melody, but with a main hook to die for, and a killer chorus, "My Drug Buddy" has to be one of the best drug songs ever, sad and sweet and heartbreaking, "Alison's Starting To Happen" another rocker that subtly and sweetly reminds us of the Lemonheads' punk rock past, we could go on song by song, every one perfect in their own way. It's been a while since we've listened to this record all the way through, but immediately we were singing along, every word, drumming, air guitaring, Ray is just so fun, and so simple, but one of those records that never gets old, and we never get tired of listening to it.
It would be well worth buying even if this wasn't the super deluxe version, but since it is, even Lemonheads fans who already own it will have to think hard about buying it again, might be worth it. The record includes the original bonus track, their cover of "Mrs. Robinson", the acoustic B-side "Shaky Ground", and the whole record in demo form, really awesome acoustic sketches of each song, that manage to sound just as cool, and way more intimate than the actual recorded versions. The dvd includes ALL the music videos, as well as some live acoustic performances, all wrapped up in a fancy fold out digipak housed in a plastic slipcase, but that's all just the icing, the record's 12 songs are well worth the price of admission all on their own.
Absolutely and without a doubt, one of the best pop records of the last twenty years. Buy it. You won't be sorry.
MPEG Stream: "Rockin' Stroll"
MPEG Stream: "Confetti"
MPEG Stream: "My Drug Buddy"
MPEG Stream: "Alison's Starting To Happen"

BLACKSHAW, JAMES Celeste (Tompkins Square) cd 14.98
We went on an on in the original reviews of these Blackshaw records, about what a shame it is that records this good were doomed to remain limited cd-r's, some kept getting reissued, but always in runs way too limited...
Finally, someone (thanks Tompkins Square!) had the good sense to gussy these discs up and give them the actual proper cd reissue they so deserve.
This amazing record from James Blackshaw is totally different from what you might expect, considering it was originally released on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, home to all things whir and rumble and skree and grrr and rrroooaarrr. This is a whole 'nother ball of... um.. steel strings apparently. Long before Blackshaw was a household name (at least in modern freak folk and neo-Appalachian lovin' households) we were fawning over this gorgeous chunk of modern acoustic guitar alchemy. Celeste is made up of two 15 minute tracks (one played in open C major tuning, the other in open C minor) of totally mesmerizing Appalachian raga folk, performed mainly on 12-string acoustic guitar with occasional farfisa organ and cymbals. Fans of John Fahey, Jack Rose, Matt Valentine and all things free folk will be completely blown away. There's still an element of drone in the repetitive raga-like riffing, but this is mainly and most definitely a weird and wonderful modern avant bluegrass / folk record. Lovely!
Remastered and with new artwork.
MPEG Stream: "Celeste Pt. 1"

BLACKSHAW, JAMES Lost Prayers & Motionless Dances (Tompkins Square) cd 14.98
Of these three new James Blackshaw cd reissues of long out of print cd-r's, Lost Prayers & Motionless Dances is the only one of the three that we never managed to carry at all. We've long gone on and on about how records this good deserve to be heard by more than the 100 or 200 lucky folks who manage to get their hands on the limited cd-r's, and finally, someone (thanks Tompkins Square!) had the good sense to gussy these discs up and give them the actual proper cd reissue they so deserve.
Originally released as a cd-r on Digitalis, limited to 200 copies in 2004, this one slipped right under our radar, which is a huge shame as it is just as good as Sunshrine or Celeste. But it's also quite different. Where as the other discs focus on Blackshaw's deft fingerpicking, and mastery of the steel string guitar, this disc is just as much about the drone and the ambience. Not to say, Blackshaw doesn't get to unleash dexterous little tangles of Appalachian filigree, but those stretches of strum and shimmer are set amidst thick harmonium drones and blissed out field recordings.
The disc begins with a warm whirring drone, all thick wheezes and rich lustrous chords, Eastern melodies, drawn way out into long soft smears. Eventually the guitar joins in, but simple spare strums, soft chords, and gentle fingerpicking, nestled amidst the softly undulating harmonium in the background, the sounds of crickets chirping in the distance, bits of slippery sitar style squiggles. The sound gradually slips into something much more familiar, 'that' Blackshaw sound we love so much, a lot like the other reissued discs, until the guitar fades out, leaving a murky muted shimmer, which soon fades out as well, leaving nothing a strange high end hiss-scape of weird processed percussion and shortwave radio, peppered with bits of high end jangle and distant upper register guitar scrape and disembodied clatter, before the track finally shifts gears once again, filling the last few minutes with urgently strummed guitar, big chunky chords, moaning harmoniums, and billowing splashes of deep resonant cymbal shimmer, a glorious kinetic finish to a another gorgeous sprawling languorous guitardronedrift.
Remastered and with new artwork.
MPEG Stream: "Lost Prayers & Motionless Dances"

BLACKSHAW, JAMES Sunshrine (Tompkins Square) cd 14.98
We went on an on in the original reviews of these Blackshaw records, about what a shame it is that records this good were doomed to remain limited cd-r's, some kept getting reissued, but always in runs way too limited...
Finally, someone (thanks Tompkins Square!) had the good sense to gussy these discs up and give them the actual proper cd reissue they so deserve.
Sunshrine was originally released on Digitalis, 1000 copies that time, but still not enough, which makes sense when you hear how goddamn beautiful this disc is.
More gorgeously lush neo-Appalachia... Two tracks, the first an extended thirty minute epic, a lush and completely gorgeous steel string raga, huge majestic sweeps of intricately finger picked guitar, dense with reverb, accompanied by sarod, harmonium, Farfisa organ, glockenspiel, bells and bowed cymbals. Overwhelmingly beautiful and impossibly otherworldly. Expressive and aggressive but completely delicate and introspective at the same time. The end of the track is especially powerful when the guitars fade out and all that is left is the thick wheezing drone of the harmonium and a cloud of tinkling bells. The final three minutes is a very Fahey-esque, steel string guitar workout, gorgeous folky twang, simple and so breathtaking.
Remastered and with new artwork.
MPEG Stream: "Sunshrine (Excerpt)"

DER BLUTHARSCH The Philosopher's Stone (WKN) cd 25.00
The Philosopher's Stone marks the end the of ten long and productive years during which Der Blutharsch have unleashed their signature dark neo-folk upon the masses. Apocalyptic prophecies, mantras, and manifestos spewed forth from the hate-forged lips of Albin Julius, but even this must come to an end. Over the course of 8 tracks and nearly 56 minutes, long-time fans can't help but sit back and marvel at the gargantuan change between 1998's Der Sieg Des Lichtes Ist Des Lebens Heil! and the present release.
The band was considered highly innovative at its inception, but in retrospect it's easily classifiable as straight-forward neo-folk, albeit at its very finest. These days? Geez, I mean, we're hearing something like a blackened, post-industrial Loop or Jesus and Mary Chain. Or maybe even what the Birthday Party would've sounded like if they were a suicidal '70s psych group. Staccato dirges grab distorted basslines and ride them into droney psychedelia, underneath a sky of swirling guitar leads and brutal, haunting vocals. In a way, the album is heavily indebted to Death In June's old, old album The Guilty Have No Past, but on tons of heroin -- and probably a fistful of other downers and/or mood stabilizers. But through it all Julius's mantra could not be clearer. In fact, the back page of the booklet even reads in bold letters: "Uniforms are always changing, rock n' roll will stay forever." And if rock n' roll's main objective is to scare parents, or the majority of society in general, Der Blutharsch are definitely, definitely a rock band. Even though they sure as hell don't look like one. If you were to see them in the street, you'd probably try as hard as possible not to make eye contact, and maybe assume they were an extremely well-funded fascist militia of sorts. A dark and brooding, mysterious crew for sure...
The Philosopher's Stone is a fantastic cross-section of what Julius and crew are capable of producing, truly mood-altering, honestly fucked up music that completely transcends any traditional understanding of the way songs -- and albums -- work. Somewhere between a heathen liturgy and a well-produced personal catharsis, Der Blutharsch never fails to provide the listener with new experiences and forge new territory in a genre that tends to be cripplingly simplistic, predictable, and indulgent. Recommended.
As always, the packaging is incredible, the cd is in a miniature hardcover book style digipak, all glossy inks and subtle embossing, a big booklet, and super striking imagery. The lp too is extravagant, a similarly rendered glossy layout, but with a BONUS 7" with two tracks not on the cd, in a full color sleeve affixed to the inside of the gatefold.
MPEG Stream: "Philosopher's Stone IV"
MPEG Stream: "Philosopher's Stone VIII"

DER BLUTHARSCH The Philosopher's Stone (WKN) lp 39.00
The Philosopher's Stone marks the end the of ten long and productive years during which Der Blutharsch have unleashed their signature dark neo-folk upon the masses. Apocalyptic prophecies, mantras, and manifestos spewed forth from the hate-forged lips of Albin Julius, but even this must come to an end. Over the course of 8 tracks and nearly 56 minutes, long-time fans can't help but sit back and marvel at the gargantuan change between 1998's Der Sieg Des Lichtes Ist Des Lebens Heil! and the present release.
The band was considered highly innovative at its inception, but in retrospect it's easily classifiable as straight-forward neo-folk, albeit at its very finest. These days? Geez, I mean, we're hearing something like a blackened, post-industrial Loop or Jesus and Mary Chain. Or maybe even what the Birthday Party would've sounded like if they were a suicidal '70s psych group. Staccato dirges grab distorted basslines and ride them into droney psychedelia, underneath a sky of swirling guitar leads and brutal, haunting vocals. In a way, the album is heavily indebted to Death In June's old, old album The Guilty Have No Past, but on tons of heroin -- and probably a fistful of other downers and/or mood stabilizers. But through it all Julius's mantra could not be clearer. In fact, the back page of the booklet even reads in bold letters: "Uniforms are always changing, rock n' roll will stay forever." And if rock n' roll's main objective is to scare parents, or the majority of society in general, Der Blutharsch are definitely, definitely a rock band. Even though they sure as hell don't look like one. If you were to see them in the street, you'd probably try as hard as possible not to make eye contact, and maybe assume they were an extremely well-funded fascist militia of sorts. A Dark and brooding, mysterious crew for sure...
The Philosopher's Stone is a fantastic cross-section of what Julius and crew are capable of producing, truly mood-altering, honestly fucked up music that completely transcends any traditional understanding of the way songs -- and albums -- work. Somewhere between a heathen liturgy and a well-produced personal catharsis, Der Blutharsch never fails to provide the listener with new experiences and forge new territory in a genre that tends to be cripplingly simplistic, predictable, and indulgent. Recommended.
As always, the packaging is incredible, the cd is in a miniature hardcover book style digipak, all glossy inks and subtle embossing, a big booklet, and super striking imagery. The lp too is extravagant, a similarly rendered glossy layout, but with a BONUS 7" with two tracks not on the cd, in a full color sleeve affixed to the inside of the gatefold.
MPEG Stream: "Philosopher's Stone IV"
MPEG Stream: "Philosopher's Stone VIII"

V/A Juche (DPRK / KimIlSung) cd 14.98
Another amazing and mysterious and confusional release from the alwasy awesome Tesco distribution, source of so many things dark and militaristic and folky and blackened and indsutrial, and noisy and fucking amazing, definitely one of the outifts keeping modern industrial and post industrial music alive and kicking. They've brought us Der Blutharsch, Death In June, Anenzephalia, and now JUCHE. A compilation of modern industrial artists, weighing in on North Korea (!). What is Juche? Well Wikipedia describes it like this:
"The Juche Idea is the official state ideology and state-sponsored religion of North Korea and the political system based on it. The doctrine is a component part of Kimilsungism, the North Korean term for Kim Il-sung's family regime. The core principle of the Juche ideology since the 1970s has been that "man is the master of everything and decides everything". Juche literally means "main body" or "subject"; it has also been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" and the "spirit of self-reliance"."
Removed from the context of actual, totalitarian politics, Juche sounds kinda cool. Intense, brutal, simple. And certainly like some sort of industrial music manifesto. So it makes sense that these bands would have something to say about it. What exactly is up to you to decipher. From the music and the extensive art and text in the accompanying booklet. But for now we'll concern ourselves with the musicŠ
We were mostly excited by a brand new unreleased track from aQ faves Anenzephalia, whose past records were rife with the sort of intense, bleak, grim, blackened dronescapes we can never get enough of. The track here is still grim and dark, but more rhythmic, a crackling lo-fi glitchscape, a skeletal rhythm crafted from squelches and pops spread out over the drift below, a garbled alien melody, equal parts sine-wave and damaged sonar ping, eventually joined by a wavery insect like blackbuzz, and some distorted disembodied vocals, a looped snippet from a speech of some sort, the whole track subtly harrowing, and weirdly hypnotic.
The Turbund Sturmwerk track is super creepy as well, a whispery shimmer of ambience, a strange looped vocal whir in the background, sweeping swell of distant distortion, soft smears of hiss, all beneath an urgent voice, an emotional speech of some sort, the song shifting gears part way through and morphing into a swirling dirge, of crumbling downtuned chords, throbbing low end buzz and extremely panned bursts of fuzz and hiss. The Grey Wolves offer up another chunk of grinding ambient creep, a rough, gritty textured wash of processed synths and strange looped distortion, melodies rendered in shards of feedback and fractured effects, a voice buried in the mix, urgent and ominous, peppered with bits of Bush, and some tangled blurred rhythms.
Operation Cleansweep weigh in with a sinister stretch of drawn out tones, layered caustic rumbles, whirring machinelike drones, mysterious percussive thumps and creaks, all smeared into a dense throbbing buzz. The strangest track is probably Militia's, beginning with some spoken word, that slips into singing, in the background a slow building looped chunk of glimmering ambience. Soon an hypnotic looped synth melody swoops in, pulled from some lost Phillip Glass piece, accompanied by junkyard drums, all very mesmerizing and repetitive, a bit like gamelan, or some Steve Reich piece. A haunting slab of alien industrial world music.
The rest of the tracks are just as weird and cool, dark and drone-y, Con-Dom, Genocide Organ, Ex-Order. In fact, much of this comp seems to fall more in line with experimental drone music, than traditional 'industrial' music, some of it reminding us of mellower more blissed out Prurient, with processed vocals, all manner of rumbling, pulsing low end, plenty of buzz and blurred murk, all of it dark and mysterious and fucking awesome.
Packaged in an oversized A5 red textured cardstock booklet, the text and symbols on the cover letter pressed in embossed metallic gold, inside a full color booklet, with lyrics, images, photos, each band with their own page. And as it says on the back cover "Limited Edition of 15,000,000 copies", so better get yours nowŠ
MPEG Stream: TURBUND STURMWERK "Reunification"
MPEG Stream: MILITIA "A Kite Of Glass In A Blood Red Sky"
MPEG Stream: ANENZEPHALIA "Work For NK"

LEVIATHAN Massive Conspiracy Against All Life (Moribund) cd 15.98
We talk about 'long awaited' releases all the time, records we hear about well before their actual release date, forcing us to wait and wait and wait, but few records have been as eagerly anticipated, or generated so many emails from customers as this, the latest from SF black metal behemoth Leviathan. Especially considering the rumors circulating that this may indeed be the final recording from Wrest and his one man band, Leviathan. If it is indeed a swansong, it's hard to imagine a more fitting or more powerful farewell-and-fuck-off.
Even being a huge fan and voracious devourer of black metal, we would be hard pressed to tell lots of BM bands apart. It's the nature of the beast in some ways. But the second we threw this on, even if we hadn't known what was playing, there's no mistaking the sound of Leviathan, the guitar tone, those demonic croaked vocals, the dizzying lush black buzzscapes, the convoluted song structures, the weird mathy rhythms and the incredible riffs.
Massive Conspiracy is not a huge departure from the sound of Tentacles Of Whorror, if anything, it just takes all the elements of that record and pushes them just that much further out. The sound is a bit more dense, more epic, the drumming is amazing (especially after the switch from electronic drums to real drums) the compositions more sprawling and expansive in scope. Which is saying a lot since past Leviathan records were pretty dang epic and sprawling already.
The sheer hatred of the titles is certainly expressed in the music as well, this is some scathing, hateful furious sound.
The record begins with some strange static, hissing drone-like buzz, ominous ambience beneath it, a haunting melody, then Wrest's howl and the record explodes in a flurry of rapid fire riffing and relentless blasting, but only briefly, the song immediately switches gear into a lurching lope, then right back into the blast. The song is peppered with super dense squalls of high end buzz, streaks of ultradistorted skree, while beneath all sorts of murky melodies lurk, almost like some old 78 was left playing in the background, giving the track an incredible creepy vibe, the last half of the song wraps itself around a slithery downtuned staccato riff, a gorgeously grim dirge that pounds its way to a burst of black chaos at the finish.
The second track is all whirring drones, loping drums, and Wrest's gurgling growl, a weird skeletal ambient dirge that is soon swallowed up by keening high end guitars, crunching downtuned churn, and some super freaky almost operatic vocals, the middle of the song is all full speed freaked out intensity, before again, the song locks into a super riffy groove, much like the opener, before finishing off in another black blaze.
The rest of the record follows suit, weaving super elaborate soundscapes of black metal buzz, and moody mathy meandering, dense black ambience, and swirling low end drones, the tracks rife with parts and bridges and confusional changes, all masterfully wound up into dense convoluted blackened, that while on their own are strange enough, are also peppered will all manner of sonic weirdness, be it slippery peals of woozy, dizzying melody, garbled vocal fragments, soaring harmony guitar melodies, super obtuse dynamics,
All culminating in the final two tracks. "Vulgar Asceticism" is definitely the most fucked, and maybe most amazing song Wrest has ever recorded. Even the opening, with its muted riffing and murky bass throb, staccato riff, and weird Greg Ginn-ish scrape and grind, before the song takes off. And the main riff is super warbly, almost sounding like he's playing with a slide, the notes wavering and detuning, only to be yanked back in line, and then bent way out of tune again, the result a blurry seasick lurch, exacerbated by the dynamics, the riffs often slipping into strange start stop stutters, until the song reaches it's middle stretch, the bass and drums locked into a relentless midtempo blast, while layers of guitars, and various riffs slip and slide, waver and warble, a super dizzy expanse of funhouse mirror blackness that is as fucked up and far out as it is amazing and masterful.
The closer, "Noisome Ash Crown" is an appropriately somber end to Massive Conspiracy, maybe even Leviathan itself. The whole first half a funereal crawl, a bleak grim landscape of whirring thick black ambience, and strange squalls of processed vocals, squiggles of distorted guitar, the drums a solid framework for the drifting abyss above. A strange washed out, gauzy black ambient bridge, gives way to a crushing almost industrial dirge, the melodies majestic and sorrowful, the vocals harrowing and harsh, the drums furiously flailing before transforming into muted little tangles, the rest of the song following suit, a dark minor key outro that gives way to the same black static that started the record.
The first limited pressing comes in a red digipak, featuring some seriously twisted original artwork from Hildolf aka Draugar on the cover. Inside lurks a 12 page full color booklet, with more freaky drawings, lyrics and no liner notes.

MPEG Stream: "Vesture Dipped In The Blood Of Morning"
MPEG Stream: "Merging With Sword, Onto Them"
MPEG Stream: "Made As The Stale Wine Of Wrath"

LEVIATHAN Massive Conspiracy Against All Life (Moribund) 2lp 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL! Packaged in a super deluxe, full color, extra thick, gatefold sleeve, that makes Hildolf's (from Draugar) creepy cover art all the more striking. Pressed on clear red vinyl, each housed in a black inner sleeve. Includes a massive 12"x12" lyric / photo book, printed on cool textured paper, and LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES!!! Here's what we had to say about the cd version when we reviewed it a few weeks back:
We talk about 'long awaited' releases all the time, records we hear about well before their actual release date, forcing us to wait and wait and wait, but few records have been as eagerly anticipated, or generated so many emails from customers as this, the latest from SF black metal behemoth Leviathan. Especially considering the rumors circulating that this may indeed be the final recording from Wrest and his one man band, Leviathan. If it is indeed a swansong, it's hard to imagine a more fitting or more powerful farewell-and-fuck-off.
Even being a huge fan and voracious devourer of black metal, we would be hard pressed to tell lots of BM bands apart. It's the nature of the beast in some ways. But the second we threw this on, even if we hadn't known what was playing, there's no mistaking the sound of Leviathan, the guitar tone, those demonic croaked vocals, the dizzying lush black buzzscapes, the convoluted song structures, the weird mathy rhythms and the incredible riffs.
Massive Conspiracy is not a huge departure from the sound of Tentacles Of Whorror, if anything, it just takes all the elements of that record and pushes them just that much further out. The sound is a bit more dense, more epic, the drumming is amazing (especially after the switch from electronic drums to real drums) the compositions more sprawling and expansive in scope. Which is saying a lot since past Leviathan records were pretty dang epic and sprawling already.
The sheer hatred of the titles is certainly expressed in the music as well, this is some scathing, hateful furious sound.
The record begins with some strange static, hissing drone-like buzz, ominous ambience beneath it, a haunting melody, then Wrest's howl and the record explodes in a flurry of rapid fire riffing and relentless blasting, but only briefly, the song immediately switches gear into a lurching lope, then right back into the blast. The song is peppered with super dense squalls of high end buzz, streaks of ultradistorted skree, while beneath all sorts of murky melodies lurk, almost like some old 78 was left playing in the background, giving the track an incredible creepy vibe, the last half of the song wraps itself around a slithery downtuned staccato riff, a gorgeously grim dirge that pounds its way to a burst of black chaos at the finish.
The second track is all whirring drones, loping drums, and Wrest's gurgling growl, a weird skeletal ambient dirge that is soon swallowed up by keening high end guitars, crunching downtuned churn, and some super freaky almost operatic vocals, the middle of the song is all full speed freaked out intensity, before again, the song locks into a super riffy groove, much like the opener, before finishing off in another black blaze.
The rest of the record follows suit, weaving super elaborate soundscapes of black metal buzz, and moody mathy meandering, dense black ambience, and swirling low end drones, the tracks rife with parts and bridges and confusional changes, all masterfully wound up into dense convoluted blackened, that while on their own are strange enough, are also peppered will all manner of sonic weirdness, be it slippery peals of woozy, dizzying melody, garbled vocal fragments, soaring harmony guitar melodies, super obtuse dynamics,
All culminating in the final two tracks. "Vulgar Asceticism" is definitely the most fucked, and maybe most amazing song Wrest has ever recorded. Even the opening, with its muted riffing and murky bass throb, staccato riff, and weird Greg Ginn-ish scrape and grind, before the song takes off. And the main riff is super warbly, almost sounding like he's playing with a slide, the notes wavering and detuning, only to be yanked back in line, and then bent way out of tune again, the result a blurry seasick lurch, exacerbated by the dynamics, the riffs often slipping into strange start stop stutters, until the song reaches it's middle stretch, the bass and drums locked into a relentless midtempo blast, while layers of guitars, and various riffs slip and slide, waver and warble, a super dizzy expanse of funhouse mirror blackness that is as fucked up and far out as it is amazing and masterful.
The closer, "Noisome Ash Crown" is an appropriately somber end to Massive Conspiracy, maybe even Leviathan itself. The whole first half a funereal crawl, a bleak grim landscape of whirring thick black ambience, and strange squalls of processed vocals, squiggles of distorted guitar, the drums a solid framework for the drifting abyss above. A strange washed out, gauzy black ambient bridge, gives way to a crushing almost industrial dirge, the melodies majestic and sorrowful, the vocals harrowing and harsh, the drums furiously flailing before transforming into muted little tangles, the rest of the song following suit, a dark minor key outro that gives way to the same black static that started the record.
MPEG Stream: "Vesture Dipped In The Blood Of Morning"
MPEG Stream: "Merging With Sword, Onto Them"
MPEG Stream: "Made As The Stale Wine Of Wrath"

RIGOR SARDONICOUS Vallis Ex Umbra De Mortuus (Paragon Records) cd 14.98
It's been a while, but it's time to haul out all those extra doom 'o's we've been saving for an occasion just like this. The return of ultra doomlords Rigor Sardonicous, they of the monstrous glacial downtuned crawl, the 'evil' cymbal (more on that in a second), the growled demonic vox, the lugubrious slow motion trudge, all that stuff we love, and all the stuff that can usually only be described by a whole handful of extra 'o's in doooooooooom.
But the opening track threw us for a bit of a loop. All weirdly folky, with chanted vocals, and fluttering flutes, some haunting almost Renn Faire court music, which quickly gives way to clean mournful minor key clean guitar, could this be the same Rigor Sardonicous? All doubts are wiped away moments later when the whole sound shifts down about a hundred octaves, the crumbling super distorted guitar spreads out like a black fog, the drums pounding, the cymbals still way up in the mix (beginning to think it's their trademark), and then the vocals. WOAH. Impossibly gurgly rumbles, like a frog croaking from the bottom of a tarpit, perfectly complimenting the band's murky plod. Weirdly the band does speed it up, but everything is so muddy and blurred that it almost makes no difference. You can hear what sounds like a little girl way off in the distance, as if she's locked in the dungeon of some great black beast. This is some awesomely creepy, heavy, and fucked up dooooooooooomy shit for sure.
If it's even possible, this is the most extreme Rigor record yet. The guitars more dense, heavier, even more downtuned, the vocals absolutely inhuman, it does almost sound like some super slow dooooom record, slowed down even more. And when the band do 'rock', they still out-doom most of their slow motion contemporaries.
Nothing else to say really. Been digging the most recent Moss, the Corrupted reissue? Still loving those Monarch records, the recent Trees disc? Fancy yourself a doomlord? Well strap on your armor, your headlamp, some industrial strength ear protection, and crawl headfirst into this black tarpit of sound, Rigor Sardonicous take even the heaviest and slowest sounds somewhere even slower and lower and so much doooooooooooooooooooooooomierŠ
MPEG Stream: "Silens Somnium"
MPEG Stream: "Incompertus Quod Anon"

RIGOR SARDONICOUS Vallis Ex Umbra De Mortuus (Paragon Records) lp 21.00
It's been a while, but it's time to haul out all those extra doom 'o's we've been saving for an occasion just like this. The return of ultra doomlords Rigor Sardonicous, they of the monstrous glacial downtuned crawl, the 'evil' cymbal (more on that in a second), the growled demonic vox, the lugubrious slow motion trudge, all that stuff we love, and all the stuff that can usually only be described by a whole handful of extra 'o's in doooooooooom.
But the opening track threw us for a bit of a loop. All weirdly folky, with chanted vocals, and fluttering flutes, some haunting almost Renn Faire court music, which quickly gives way to clean mournful minor key clean guitar, could this be the same Rigor Sardonicous? All doubts are wiped away moments later when the whole sound shifts down about a hundred octaves, the crumbling super distorted guitar spreads out like a black fog, the drums pounding, the cymbals still way up in the mix (beginning to think it's their trademark), and then the vocals. WOAH. Impossibly gurgly rumbles, like a frog croaking from the bottom of a tarpit, perfectly complimenting the band's murky plod. Weirdly the band does speed it up, but everything is so muddy and blurred that it almost makes no difference. You can hear what sounds like a little girl way off in the distance, as if she's locked in the dungeon of some great black beast. This is some awesomely creepy, heavy, and fucked up dooooooooooomy shit for sure.
If it's even possible, this is the most extreme Rigor record yet. The guitars more dense, heavier, even more downtuned, the vocals absolutely inhuman, it does almost sound like some super slow dooooom record, slowed down even more. And when the band do 'rock', they still out-doom most of their slow motion contemporaries.
Nothing else to say really. Been digging the most recent Moss, the Corrupted reissue? Still loving those Monarch records, the recent Trees disc? Fancy yourself a doomlord? Well strap on your armor, your headlamp, some industrial strength ear protection, and crawl headfirst into this black tarpit of sound, Rigor Sardonicous take even the heaviest and slowest sounds somewhere even slower and lower and so much doooooooooooooooooooooooomierŠ
MPEG Stream: "Silens Somnium"
MPEG Stream: "Incompertus Quod Anon"

SCALD Fluke (Midhir Records) cd 16.98
We admit it, we're cool packaging junkies. Which is different than being a collector. It's just that we like to have the music we love, all wrapped up lovingly in artwork and packaging that was as well thought out as the music. That's one thing you'll never get from an MP3, some crazy gatefold pop up, or some curious origami like creation wrapped in twine. The possibilities are endless. And we're constantly amazed at what artists come up with to compliment their music.
So before we get to the music on Scald's latest Fluke, we have to talk about the artwork. Some of you, whether you know it or not, are probably already familiar with the artwork of Scald drummer Paul McCarroll, who did the layout and design for the Nordvargr / Drakh on tUMULt, laid out AND painted the cover for the over the top Nordvargr / BSE Hypergenome666 box on Old Europa Cafe, he also did the cover for the forthcoming Pyha on tUMULt (yes, it's really finally coming out) as well as tons of other stuff, but this one takes the cake.
A beautiful oversized glossy gatefold, the images all washed out and dark, a crucifix in the forest, all sorts of harrowing photos, a die cut pocket for the cd, and A COMMUNION WAFER printed with the Scald log. A real communion wafer! How evil is that?! Holy shit. Apparently it took ages to find someone who would or could print on a communion wafer, but it was worth it!
Scald are a long running outfit, who sort of straddle the line between crusty punk, furious grind and buzzing black metal, their songs are complex and serpentine, the riffs massive and mathy, the drums furious and pounding, massive fuzzed out basslines, strange time signatures, lurching tempos, howled shouted vocals, the tracks are woozy and chaotic, chugging, churning, definitely hear some Amrep noise rock amidst the blasting buzz. The first 5 songs are a furious assault, that should totally hit the spot for metalheads and noiserockers alike.
But Scald have another side. A much darker, dronier side, which they indulge on the epic 25 minute closing track (longer than all the other tracks combined). A sprawling and expansive noise flecked dronescape, the usual suspects are referenced, but Scald definitely create their own sound, super creepy, and dense, with long stretches of hushed whispering shimmer, strange voices, bursts of jagged grinding crunch, strange swooping backwards effects, dense rumbling low end drones, muted glitch and all sorts of garbled interference, super cinematic, almost like a straight recording of some mysterious seventies art film, dialogue and all. Fucking awesome.
MPEG Stream: "Larva"
MPEG Stream: "Cocoon"
MPEG Stream: "Lumbricoid"

AHMED, ILYAS Between Two Skies / Towards The Night (Digitalis) 2cd 21.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
FINALLY! FINALLY!! FINALLY!!! Lots of you probably remember when we listed these discs a few years back, both were cd-r's back then, and both were limited to about 50 copies. We got so many orders, and rightfully so, Ahmed's sound as and is gorgeous and spare, simple and spacious, darkly emotional and sweetly mournful. Ilyas promised to make more cd-r's for all the people who ordered them, but somehow, he never managed to make it happen. We waited and waited and waitedŠ But you know what? That's okay now, as Digitalis has thankfully stepped in and taken Ahmed's first two cd-r's and reissued them as real cds, and in some super deluxe packaging to boot.
For those who missed out on the cd-r frenzy way back when, Ahmed is a guitarist, pianist, and crafter of drones, but guitar is his main instrument. He explores a sonic steel string world similar to folks like James Blackshaw, Jack Rose and of course John Fahey, dense little tangles of minor key finger picking and lush metallic strum. Darkly melodic, and strangely timeless sounding. Moody and so so gorgeous. Fans of the above mentioned guitarists will absolutely want this, even just for the Towards The Night disc, which finds Ahmed doing his best modern Appalachia, and he does it so well, completely mesmerizing and intense and emotional and impossibly lush.
On the other disc, Between Two Skies, Ahmed takes his guitar, that ghostly Appalachia, all subtle and subdued, washed out and weary sounding, and sets it amidst mysterious and lush sounding soundscapes, tinkling piano, long drawn out vocal parts, slightly reminiscent of Sigur Ros, wordless, warm and fuzzy, unfurling like another layer of sound, the atmosphere gauzy and dreamlike. All the while the guitar weaves delicate little melodies, little blurs of soft focus sound wrapped in shimmering drones and warm whirring ambience.
Both discs are distinctly different, but manage to sound perfect together, each subtly complimenting the other. Folks who were lucky enough to get those cd-r's the first time around, have probably played them to death and can no get some much sturdier replacements, and for everybody else, a long overdue to get lost in Ahmed's mysterious and lovely soundworld.
Beautifully packaged in a thick two color offset printed cardstock gatefold sleeve, with a printed cardstock insert. Remastered by Pete Swanson of The Yellow Swans with extensive liner notes from David Keenan.
MPEG Stream: "Black Midas"
MPEG Stream: "As Those Above"
MPEG Stream: "Golden Eyes"
MPEG Stream: "Shumsun"

SKULL DEFEKTS, THE DFX (Cut Hands) cd-r 14.98
Another new one from Swedish noisemakers Skull Defekts, who like much of the new breed of cd-r underground outfits, have gone from unknown to prolific in the blink of an eye. This latest comes courtesy of the Cut Hands label, and is crazy limited, only a hundred copiesŠ
And while past Defekts records have been strongly rooted in rhythm, this two tracker is much more about texture and mood, timbre and ambience, with any rhythm merely a muted pulse, a submerged throb, or a bit of dizzying skipped looping. The opening track is 21 minutes of low end murk, soft shimmering drift, smeared pixilated glitch, moaning bass tones, a distant swirl of disembodied voices, croaks and creaks, blurred into another buzzy layer, the track building in intensity, the tones growing thicker and more corrosive, streaks of feedback draped over sonorous tones, all wrapped in a whirring cloud of soft insectoid buzz.
The second track, also 21 minutes, is much more chaotic and confusional, voices swirl dizzily, chunks of glitchy electronics suspended in a roiling sea of constant low end buzz, smears of malfunctioning effects, sine wave skree and crumbling distortion, all looped into some haunting post industrial collage, eventually smoothing out into a long stretch of layered rumble and whir, but still shot through with jagged shards of percussive clatter and sizzling electronic grind. Sort of Pan Sonic meets Wolf Eyes which is most definitely a good thing.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in cool oversized, textured paper, three color silkscreened gatefold sleeves, the disc attached to a nub on one of the panels, a printed black and white insert, each disc hand painted.
MPEG Stream: "DFX 1"
MPEG Stream: "DFX 2"

TUMA, SCOTT Not For Nobody (Digitalis) cd 14.98
The first time we heard Scott Tuma play guitar, was with skeletal slowcore country legends Souled American. His washed out dreamlike atmospheric guitar parts helped define their sound, but more importantly, introduced Tuma as a truly idiosyncratic guitar player, with a haunting and mysteriously unique sound. Tuma's music was like an acoustic version of Tim Hecker or Fennesz, but whereas those guys use electronics and computers and effects to transform their guitars into blurred dronescapes, Tuma's approach is much more organic, unfurling skeletal guitar lines, a slowed down Appalachia deftly woven into a sprawl of slow motion, washed out, sepia toned countrified ambience. Tuma's two proper solo records, Hard Again and The River 1 2 3 4, are both HUGE all time aQ favorites, so we were pretty excited to hear about a brand new release, especially since we've been waiting patiently for almost 5 years!
Not For Nobody begins quite strangely, a super spare, lo-fi recording of barely there guitar, stretched out beneath reverb drenched childlike vocals, cooing and purring, a bit like a countrified Bjork, the sibilance stretched out into glistening shimmers, the melody, mournful and dreamy, bits of tinkling chimes, and muted ambient clatter, the whole thing sun dappled and soft focus, so strange and haunting, but so lovely and sublime.
The next track finds us on much more familiar ground, a loose tangle of steel string guitar, sounding like it could have come off one of the later Souled American records, but sans vocals, the melodies lyrical and lilting, couched in a thick layered backdrop of warm whir, sprinkled with tinkling bells and chimes, laced with bits of piano, somehow sparse and skeletal, but impossibly lush. Which is sort of Tuma's specialty, turning minimalism into maximalism, but without losing any of the former's hushed urgency or whispered intimacy.
The whole record is quite varied, but each track manages to sound like it couldn't be anywhere else, every one seamlessly leading into the next, a song suite, an album of cohesive musical pieces, not just a collection of songs. The third track, "Eloper", introduces what sounds like horns, for a haunting funereal march, a woozy fanfare that seems to slowly spread out, a simple pulse like rhythm beneath hazy streaks and deliberate minor key strum. The next track begins as a jaunty upper register steel string lullaby, giving way, part way through, to a languorous late afternoon sun dappled sprawl, slightly atonal, gorgeous and bleary eared. "New Joy" buries the guitar in a haze of whirring buzz and warm swirls of lush chords and muted feedback, very liturgical sounding, a dark ambient drift through some ancient crumbling cathedral, while "Rakes" begins as a simple stripped down halfspeed Appalachian hoedown, before transforming into a sea of sawing strings, of layered buzz and extended steel string drones.
The record finishes the way it began, with that ghostly childlike voice, the bits of spare guitar, the massive clouds of delay and reverb, that voice a wraith hovering above the web of subtle minor key guitar, the floorboards creaking, motes of dust tinkling like chimes in a soft evening breeze, creepy, sorrowful, and so completely gorgeous.
Tuma conjures a timeless magical mystery with his guitar. He plays the mysterious traveler, a wandering audio alchemist, turning notes and chords into gold, or rather, golden streaks of dusty memory and soft golden glimpses of some hidden and blurred otherworld. His are sounds to get lost in, to wrap around yourself like some cloak spun from gold thread, to hide under with a flashlight like a child, creating worlds of light and shadow, a sound at once mystical and enigmatic, warm and familiar, and truly truly sublime.
Packaged in a swank cardstock, hand screened gatefold sleeve.
MPEG Stream: "Nobody (River Of Tin)"
MPEG Stream: "Fishen"
MPEG Stream: "Eloper"
MPEG Stream: "Tiktaalik"

FUCK BUTTONS Street Horrrsing ( ATP) cd 15.98
Fuck Buttons? Please just ignore the name for a moment. We're glad WE did, and actually gave this band a listen... 'cause, fuck if they don't push our buttons. The pleasure ones, big fat buttons labeled massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop damage. Really we were surprised, though maybe the colorful cover artwork that kinda makes this look like a Black Dice record should have been an indication that this Bristol UK duo was gonna be cool, despite their name. They're energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals, though this is mostly an instrumental, rhythmic throb. These six fairly lengthy songs wrap the listener's ears in a multihued steel wool blanket of abrasive warmth, made from such shimmering sonic elements as ambient piano, motorik machine beats, and thick spaced out synth. And just when you think it's already pretty darn fuzzed out, they flip a switch or step on a pedal or something and then the REAL fuzz kicks in.
Definitely for fans of Growing at their most SUNNO)))-y. Also we might say this sounds like Vulture Club doing the vacuuming over at Gang Gang Dance's house, playing Jesu and M83 albums real loud while they do so. A beautiful blend of noise and drone and bright shining eternal pop loveliness...
The very first track, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" might be our favorite though we're crushed out on the whole album. But this song really sums it up, it IS the album the way the first song on the Mammal's Lonesome Drifter WAS that Mammal album too. This track has got the pretty, ringing piano part to start with, gloriously building up into the choppy fuzzed out throb we soon learn is Fuck Button's modus operandi. Damn this is good -- and there's even vocals amidst this heavenly buzz that sound like they could come off some cvlt black metal album.
So yeah Fuck Buttons, cool band, dunno about the name. Seems like Fuck is the new Super or Jesus or Black, as bandnaming trends go. There's been The Fucking Champs, Fuck I'm Dead, and of course, Fuck. But more recently, bands named Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, and now Fuck Buttons have made the scene... always hilarious when they get popular enough to be played on the radio or mentioned in the mainstream press. Not so hilarious when spam filters prevent AQ list subscribers from getting emails with our reviews. But whatever, we swear a lot ourselves anyway, sorry about that. Anyway, fucking recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Sweet Love For Planet Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Bright Tomorrow"

FUCK BUTTONS Street Horrrsing ( ATP) lp 15.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Fuck Buttons? Please just ignore the name for a moment. We're glad WE did, and actually gave this band a listen... 'cause, fuck if they don't push our buttons. The pleasure ones, big fat buttons labeled massive super distorted heavy electronic drone fuzz pop damage. Really we were surprised, though maybe the colorful cover artwork that kinda makes this look like a Black Dice record should have been an indication that this Bristol UK duo was gonna be cool, despite their name. They're energetically exotic and hypnotically repetitive and just chock full of sheer noise fuzz bliss, bulldozering over buried melodies, tribal weirdness, and equally distorted screaming vocals, though this is mostly an instrumental, rhythmic throb. These six fairly lengthy songs wrap the listener's ears in a multihued steel wool blanket of abrasive warmth, made from such shimmering sonic elements as ambient piano, motorik machine beats, and thick spaced out synth. And just when you think it's already pretty darn fuzzed out, they flip a switch or step on a pedal or something and then the REAL fuzz kicks in.
Definitely for fans of Growing at their most SUNNO)))-y. Also we might say this sounds like Vulture Club doing the vacuuming over at Gang Gang Dance's house, playing Jesu and M83 albums real loud while they do so. A beautiful blend of noise and drone and bright shining eternal pop loveliness...
The very first track, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" might be our favorite though we're crushed out on the whole album. But this song really sums it up, it IS the album the way the first song on the Mammal's Lonesome Drifter WAS that Mammal album too. This track has got the pretty, ringing piano part to start with, gloriously building up into the choppy fuzzed out throb we soon learn is Fuck Button's modus operandi. Damn this is good -- and there's even vocals amidst this heavenly buzz that sound like they could come off some cvlt black metal album.
So yeah Fuck Buttons, cool band, dunno about the name. Seems like Fuck is the new Super or Jesus or Black, as bandnaming trends go. There's been The Fucking Champs, Fuck I'm Dead, and of course, Fuck. But more recently, bands named Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, and now Fuck Buttons have made the scene... always hilarious when they get popular enough to be played on the radio or mentioned in the mainstream press. Not so hilarious when spam filters prevent AQ list subscribers from getting emails with our reviews. But whatever, we swear a lot ourselves anyway, sorry about that. Anyway, fucking recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Sweet Love For Planet Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Bright Tomorrow"

MODELL, ROD Incense & Black Light (Plop) cd 17.98
We kinda went nuts for the recent Echospace record, The Coldest Season. So much so that we made it our record of the week. And judging by the response, most aQ customers dug it just as much as we did. Which makes sense really. A modern take on that old Chain Reaction sound we all love so much. Heroin House, or whatever you want to call it, muddy murky atmospheres wrapped around deep throbbing four on the floor pulses, smeared and blurred, the sound gloriously washed out and dreamlike. Super spaced out abstract dub, beats drifting in wide open expanses of FX and electronic glitch and shimmer. Dance music for those of us who loathe the dancefloor and instead lurk in the shadows. The rhythm is probably still gonna get you, but it's going to creep up on you slowly and wrap you in its inky black embrace, and pull you into the swirling fuzzy abyss.
Incense & Black Light is the new record from Rod Modell, one half of Echospace, and while everything we loved about the Echospace record is here in full effect, it's even noisier and buzzier and grittier, which can only mean we might even like it moreŠ
The opening track is super dense and heavy, a swirling cloud of crumbling distortion, a bassline that almost sounds like some muted metal riff, but completely abstracted and disembodied, a rhythm buried beneath layers of grit and grime, the track peppered with jagged blasts of glitch and hiss, the whole thing looped into something, that despite all of it's harshness and density, is almost groovy.
The second track begins with some Pole like dub throb, drifting on a layer of gristly hiss, those big echoey crunches pulsing and fading into the mist, beneath it all a throbbing bassline and some muted percussion, sounding like a rougher more raw Echospace. After that the record drifts into much less noisy territory, dipping its toes into some Kompakt like minimalism, still dubby and dreamy, but a bit more skittery, and not nearly as dark and dense. After three songs of gauzy late night Kompakt style minimal techno, the record dips back into the darkness, a slowly shifting smear of pixilated digital crunch, long blurred waves of prickly buzz, all woven into a gorgeously gauzy sheet of sound, that seems to billow in some midnight breeze, laced with crackles and hiss, almost completely devoid of any rhythm. Almost.
The next two tracks crank the dub factor, dialing back the noise a bit, but keeping the effects distorted and the beats crunchy, a sort of Kraftwerk groove pulled apart into some alien dub, hovering over a sea of whirring hum and buried buzz, the melody clipped and bouncing from beat to beat before fading into the roiling ambient murk.
Finally, the last two tracks finish things off, the way they started, with some sort of damaged dub, via Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, the second to last a gorgeous dubby driftscape, the beats barely holding together, the sound of lapping waves another layer of hiss and buzz, the whole dub drifting into its constituent parts, so druggy and dreamy and blissed out, while the last is glimmering shimmering effulgence, sun dappled sparkles stretched into slow whirring slabs of soft fuzzy thrum, like someone took a single measure of the blissiest Orb song, and stretched it out to 5 minutes, the chords pulled apart exposing the notes within, the notes pulled apart, crumbling to pieces, just blurry shadows, all woven into some slow slippery sonic stream, gauzy, buzzy, warm and dreamlike.
If you loved that Echospace record, but wondered what it would have sounded like if it was mixed by Fennesz, or recorded by Tim Hecker, or spun in a DJ set by Philip Jeck (and who among us didn't?), then this just might be exactly what you're looking for.
MPEG Stream: "Aloeswood"
MPEG Stream: "Hotel Chez Moi"
MPEG Stream: "Body Sonic"
MPEG Stream: "Morning Again"

PHILLIPS, WASHINGTON What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? (Mississippi) lp 10.98
Another awesome archival release from the folks at Mississippi records. Not only is their catalog slowly being re-pressed, but there are a whole slew of new releases, the first being this collection from the enigmatic Washington Phillips.
Very little is know about Phillips, other than he was from Texas and only ever recorded sixteen songs. That's it. Sixteen songs. Twelve of which are here, all of them totally gorgeous and mysterious. Phillips vocals are intense and world weary, but it's the accompaniment that really stands out.
The cover shows an illustration of Phillips playing what looks like a toy piano, but the sound is stranger than a toy piano, much higher and more resonant, chiming and tinkling, like little bells, like Christmas carols, a sort of joyous effulgent sparkling shimmer. The liner notes suggest that it may or may not be a Dolceola, an extinct late nineteenth / early twentieth century instrument that looks like a hybrid of a toy piano and a zither. But as there is only one confirmed recording of the Dolceola, on a Leadbelly track from the forties, it's hard to prove just what Phillips' instrument could be. According to a 1961 interview with Frank Walker, who recorded Washington Phillips, the instrument Phillips used was homemade and was something "nobody on earth could use except him". Online sources speculate that it could be a fretless zither or a phonoharp. Whatever it is, it sounds somewhere between a hammered dulcimer, a spinet (baby harpsichord) and an ice cream truck (minus the sound system), all beneath a warm fuzzy patina of dusty crackle. The notes tumble and twinkle while Phillips weaves them seamlessly into a warm glowing backdrop for his testifying, creating a gorgeous and haunting angelic gospel blues, that is truly unique.
As always, pressed on thick vinyl, housed in a gorgeously screened jacket, includes an insert on thick textured paper, with very minimal liner notes (appropriately enough) on one side, and and on the other an ad for the Dolceola out of some old time catalog. Cool!

CAVITY Laid Insignificant (Hydra Head) cd 14.98
They just don't make bands like Florida's Cavity anymore. Or I guess maybe they do, but now they just make 5 or six bands out of the ingredients that made up Cavity back in the day. Not to sound like an old man, but these days most bands have 'A SOUND' and they stick to it. Cavity on the other hand were pretty tough to pigeonhole. Sure they were heavy. And they were metal. But also punk. Sorta grindy too. They tended toward the sludge-y end of the sonic spectrum, but in the middle of some sub Sabbath dirge they'd explode into a furious thrashing grind only to immediately slow back down to some impossibly glacial Khanate like crawl, complete with tortured shrieks, and buzzing droneguitar.
This record, originally recorded way back in 1997, sounds as fresh as it did a decade ago. Someone joked recently that super hyped duo No Age were punk rock for people who had never heard punk rock before. Which is not entirely fair to No Age as they are an awesome band, but there is some truth to the fact that lots of bands these days borrow pretty heavily from the past, without a lot of fans realizing it. No Age are kick ass and wild and fun, but they're not necessarily reinventing the wheel. That's also true with a lot of heavy bands these days. If Cavity were bunch of kids and Laid Insignificant was a super limited cd-r, or a one sided etched 12", labels would be lined up around the block to put something out by these guys, kids would be losing their shit. But just because this record is ten years old is no reason they still shouldn't. This is epic mindblowing heaviness. Furious and freaked out, sweaty and brutal and visceral. Elsewhere on this list Allan talks about Vincent Black Shadow in terms of sheer blown out sweat soaked pure rock and roll power. The same could be said about these guys, just leaning a little more toward the extreme side of the sonic spectrum. Back in the day, no band could touch Cavity live OR on record, and listening to them again, it seems like nothing has changed. The guitars are massive, the riffs incredible, heavy and melodic and thick as shit, the drums HUGE and pummeling, the songs super catchy, even when they're all tangled into buzzing blasts, or sprawled out in huge black oozing pools, the hooks remain intact. And vocalist Rene Barge has the wickedest raspy howl this side of Eyehategod. About as EMO as that kind of voice can get. Which also keeps these songs from turning into wanky riff fests. These are SONGS, dark and dense, complex and hypnotic, groovy and crushing, utterly headbangable for sure, certain to fill a pit in the blink of an eye, but at the same time, musical enough to be serious headphone bliss for the hard and heavy.
Not sure what else to say. These guys ruled. And still rule. This just proves it all over again.
MPEG Stream: "Laid Insignificant"
MPEG Stream: "The Woods"
MPEG Stream: "9 Fingers On The Spider"

POWER PILL FIST Kongmanivong (Graveface) cd 12.98
Who would have thought that an Atari 2600 would be the instrument of choice in the new millennium, but as technology moves forward in leaps and bounds, seems like the most forward thinking sound makers are reaching back, WAY back. Souped up Gameboys, home soldered circuit boards, old school analog synths, even the recent Tristan Perich release which did the 8bit-ers one better (or more precisely seven better) by creating a suite of music assembled from ONE bit sounds, as low as we can go. For now.
But for our generation, there's just something about the sound of 8bit buzz and crunch, the video games of our childhood, the strange alien computer soundtracks, it may push lots of nostalgia buttons, but you didn't have to grow up in the early eighties to dig that sound.
So here we have the first release from Ken Fec, one of the folks responsible for the tripped out bubblegum electro pop dreaminess of Black Moth Super Rainbow, who for his alter ego as Power Pill Fist, seems to have gone back to his childhood home, pulled all the boxes out of the basement, and plugged every video game and antiquated game console from his youth into a 4-track, run it through his fractured pop sensibilities, a bank of damaged effects, and voila. The cool thing is this is not a 'noise' record. There are some seriously noisy moments for sure, but at its core Power Pill Fist definitely has a glowing pulsing energy crystal pop heart. Albeit a pop that is way more freaky crunchy fuzzy trippy and whatthefuck than most. And it's flecked with bits of skittery electronica, downtempo hip hop, and whatever else Fec had up his sleeve or in his head at the time.
Originally this was touted as a record that was almost a straight recording of Fec PLAYING an Atari 2600, which would probably have been amazing, but this is way more musical and composed. There do seem to be some guitars, and some extra percussion, lurking within and beneath all the crunchy fuzzy buzz, but it's that buzz and crunch that defines the record. Give this thing BIGGER beats and you can almost imagine Daft Punk or Justice rocking some of these tracks in a DJ set. The disc opens with a murky bleep filled jam, the warbly melody and scratchy rhythm buried beneath thick layers of hiss and whir, wrapped around a simple way-down-in-the-mix guitar strum. It somehow manages to be lo-fi and lush all at once, some weird krautrocky Nintendo jam. The follow up is all big lurching drums and warbling blown out synths, that sounds like something Beck would jump all over. Some of the other tracks are much noisier, but even then, soft melodies, and haunting song fragments lurk below the surface. Then there's songs like "Chuckanut Drive" that sound like they could have been, should have been, heck, maybe actually were the soundtrack to some super obscure video game, bits of ­other games-, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, etc. cannibalized and recontextualized into some new old game, but liberally sprinkled with dizzying synth squiggles and an extra layer of stuttering buzz.
In between all of these blown out, almost-electro fuzz drenched 8bit jams, lurk subtly simple, bedroom recorded interludes, the strangely metallic minor key minimal strum of "Contours Gaining Shape" or the washed out low end droning whir of "R4eactor", and sometimes Fec will offer up a bit of abstract synth / 8bit experimentation or a more arcade-centric soundscapes like the straight video game field recording sound collage of "The Meat Tree" (sounding quite a bit like one of those Arcade Ambience discs), but it's always right back into another awesome grinding buzzy video game electro pop adventure.
Imagine Pan Sonic produced by J Dilla run through a Colecovision. Or think Donkey Kong meets Rastan, chopped up and reassembled by the Flaming Lips. Or Autchre recording a new record using only a busted up old acoustic guitars and the guts of a Sega Genesis, or some crazy psychpop jam session, but with Intellivision consoles instead of guitars. Weird and warped, fuzzy and fun, heavy and crunchy, poppy and druggy and just fucked up and freaky enough to keep our ears buzzing and ringing non stop.
MPEG Stream: "Sagadraga"
MPEG Stream: "Chuckanut Drive"
MPEG Stream: "YFF, Lou Pappans"
MPEG Stream: "Fisticus 2:36"

IRON BITCHFACE Pulse Pounding Cyberslam (Slut Factory) cd 8.98
Iron Bitchface. Some names just tell you all you need to know about a band. If your response to the words Iron Bitchface was "Umm, euuuw, whatever, ok, wellŠ" or something along those lines, then you might as well stop reading right now. But if you immediately thought "FUCK YEAH!" as you brushed your Misfits style devillock away from your corpsepainted face, your obsidian painted nails shining in the black light glow of your cave like domicile, and hitched up your leather biker pants, after lacing up huge Frankenstein boots, your be-spiked wrists and fishnet clad arms scarred from dancing wildly in the pit, whirling and thrashing on a very grim dancefloor.
Or if you're like us and just love you some fucked up freaked out synth drenched digital hardcore gabber-grind black metal. We reviewed a split release from Iron Bitchface ages ago, and ever since we had been waiting anxiously for this, their first proper non cd-r full length. If you got the other disc you know what's in store for you here, and you're probably DYING for more. If you've yet to experience the grinding glory of IB, you're in for a treat, that is if a treat for you is being pummeled by buzzing synths, programmed blast beats, howled vocals, Atari 2600 jams and furious riffing.
Long stretches of synthy ambience, Goblin-y haunted house soundtracks, all gloomy and proggy give way to garbled digital freakouts and soul shearing blasts of howling black metal, bits of 8-bit glitch pepper the tracks, sometimes becoming full on lo-fi old school techno jams, usually quickly turning back into grinding black buzz, but more often than not, all of those sounds at the same time, for a head spinning brilliantly confusional, heavy as fuck, weird as all get out black metal / techno / video game music hybrid.
Packaged in a mini dvd style clamshell sleeve with full color cover/insert.
MPEG Stream: "Push The Start Button"
MPEG Stream: "Text Bleeding"
MPEG Stream: "The Wizard Has Shot The Food"
MPEG Stream: "Game Over"

JABLADAV Drunk As Duck (self-released) cd-r 4.98
Not one, but TWO new releases from this one man, Weakling worshipping black metal misanthrope, known as Jabladav, but maybe this one doesn't count, as it was recorded under the influence, HEAVILY under the influence, and thus is a bit of a stumbling, lurching mess. But what a glorious mess it is. If it wasn't called Drunk As Duck (a reference to the debut Jabladav record Dead As Duck) and if it didn't have a cover image of discarded corks from (presumably) bottles drunk, and if there wasn't an apology in the liner notes asking the listener to listen with a sense of humor, if NONE of that were present, we probably would have just assumed this was some super wacked, freaked out, damaged lo-fi black metal record, and we would have loved it just as much as we do now, maybe even more.
Take the normal sound of Jabladav, lower the dexterity level, slow things down a bit, make it a bit doomier, a bit murkier, add a bit more stumble, a bit more warble, and fuck, if your not left with something truly deranged and warped.
Way less mathy and complex than Jabladav proper (due, we assume, in no small part, to inebriation), the sound on Drunk as Duck, is a lurching doomic black metal, which at times reminds us a bit of Xasthur, or more specifically, the legion of Xasthur influenced black buzzers, with it's murky miserablism, it's stumbling rhythms, but a little hooch isn't enough to remove all of Jabladav's instrumental prowess, so plenty, of that tangled riffing, and Greg Ginn like gnarled guitar freakouts still surface here and there, but they tend to be draped over murky buzzing plods, or funereal dirges. When the tracks do occasionally burst into blast mode, instead of sounding shitty, or bad, or amateur, it just sounds, well, weird, chaotic, confusional, often splintering into abstract freakouts, or meandering black jams, but that stuff sounds amazing. We wouldn't dare say we like this better than Jabladav proper, but damn if we don't like it almost as much.
There seems to be a lot more keyboards going on too, adding a definite moody creepy vibe to the proceedings, but what can we say, even wasted, this guy can craft some truly demented black brilliance.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES! Each one hand numbered.
MPEG Stream: "Light Has Died"
MPEG Stream: "Burzum La Chimay"
MPEG Stream: "Thangoraium"

JABLADAV Primland (self-released) 2cd-r 27.00
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
What began as an homage to legendary SF black metallers Weakling, and maybe even a joke (not a ha ha joke, more of a fucking around, we're bored so we might as well record some grim black metal joke) has pretty rapidly morphed into a serious black metal contender amongst weirdo black metal aficionados.
Jabladav is a one man band who owes as much to Weakling as they do to Black Flag. Their first release, Dead As Duck, was a gnarled Greg Ginn-ified blast of intense blackness, blown out guitar buzz, insane blasting drums, some killer riffing and huge heapings of black atmosphere, channeling Weakling through all sorts of random not-that-black business, drone, post rock, math rock, no wave, and yeah Black Flag. The thing was, whatever inspired it, was soon eclipsed by how fucked up and far out the finished product was. A baffling and fucking genius collection of convoluted black buzz. Hot on the heels of the debut, came a second disc, Black As Pitch, which was like part two of Dead As Duck, but expanding the sound, making it even more metal, more chaotic, the songs got longer, and way more complex, even introducing some intensely blackened ambience. Which led to the next record, 3K Hum, a mostly ambient affair, huge stretched out slabs of glacial blur, massive roiling low end rumble, shimmering black ambience, hypnotic and mesmerizing, and while ambient, still extremely dense and heavy.
As if that weren't an exhausting spurt of creativity, now, not all that much later, comes the latest from Jabladav, the even more expansive and sprawling 2 cd-r set Primland, two hours of incredibly tangled black riffing, super blown out buzz drenched production, creepy keyboards, and deep dark ambience, super mathy drums, demonic vocals, all wound into super extended black jams, shot through with head spinning Ginn-ish squiggly leads, stop start riffing, but all strangely melodic, a moody mournful undercurrent beneath the roiling black heaviness. And the drums, shit, the drumming is insane, WAY up in the mix, louder than the guitars even, mathy and calculus complicated, like the guy was sitting at the top of a concrete stairwell in a 40 story building, each landing mic-ed, and then proceeded to hurl drum kit after drum kit into the black abyss, only in such a way that the resulting crash and clatter coalesced into impossibly deranged black rhythms.
But then out of nowhere, there'll be a track, all murky and muddy, lo-fi and practice space style, that sounds like it could be some lost nineties BM demo. EXCEPT, it's Jabladav, so even those tracks, are layered with slow doomy tones, deep rumbling chimes, and raspy vocals, threatening to swallow up the thrashing blackness below.
The tracks are definitely tweaked, and damaged, and a little bit spaced out and acid fried, druggy and mathy, but at their core they are pure black, the riffs are blown out, recorded so loud and in the red, the chords threaten to crumble. The record careens wildly from stumbling doomic Burzum style lope, to manic crazed thrashing black blasts, often both in the same song, the strange production only adds to the mood and weirdness, the songs on Primland even more epic and far out and convoluted and fucked than any of the Jabladav we've heard before, which is saying a lot. WAY recommended black metal weirdness/brilliance.
While they last, we have the ULTRA LIMITED, wax sealed wooden box version. If it's too pricey for you, hold off and we'll relist the normal version once these are sold out, but c'mon, this music deserves more than a jewel case. These are hand assembled, hand stained wood boxes, with a removable lid, that slides out, inside are the two cd-rs, in jewel case, and a printed color insert. The box is sealed shut with a silver wax seal. Each box signed and numbered on the bottom. But be warned, these are not had crafted keepsakes, the kind on a glass shelf at your grandma's house, no, they look grim and ancient, like the music within, weathered and worn, they're beautiful, but they look like they were unearthed from some cursed tomb, left on a shelf in a locked room, in an abandoned house, where they were discovered years later. Meaning that they are not perfect, the coloring is different on each, as is the wax seal, and the seal is quite fragile, so no matter how carefully packaged, the seal might crumble, or come off in transit, but you have to remove the seal anyway if you want to listen to the music.
You have been warned...
MPEG Stream: "Black Snow"
MPEG Stream: "Lodona"
MPEG Stream: "Vin Den Orden Jag Levandre"

ZOMBIE BATTLE AXE ...Now You Are Dead (Slut Factory) cd 8.98
A band called Zombie Battle Axe. A record called ...Now You Are Dead. Released on Slut Factory, the same label that released the latest record by Iron Bitchface. So of course we were expecting some sort of grinding metallic weirdness. Some throbbing techno grindcore, something spastic and freaked out at least, but lo and behold, Zombie Battle Axe is nothing of the sort. Instead, ZBA weave dark, creepy crawly cinematic soundscapes that sound like they could have been plucked with out of a movie by John Carpenter or Dario Argento.
Long wavery synth tones, whirring and shimmering like that dense fog that always seems to be creeping along the ground in cemeteries.
Long drawn out melodies, mournful and melancholy, the sound of rain and wind, thunder and lightning, lots of howling wolves, deep dolorous drones, layers of buzz and hiss, all recorded super lo-fi, so the tape hiss adds to the mysterious murk.
Some seriously haunting cinematic ambience, drone music wrapped around some scratchy old Halloween sound effects record, dubbed onto an old cassette, stuffed into a beat up old tape player, buried in the front yard and broadcast through 3 feet of worm filled black earth. The perfect soundtrack for midnight strolls along muddy swamps, raising the dead, leering and lurking in dark alleys searching for your next victim or for your next super-eight home made giallo.
MPEG Stream: "One"
MPEG Stream: "Two"

EAST OF EDEN Mercator Projected (Esoteric Recordings) cd 23.00
Of the many, many prog rock reissues out there, here's a recent one we HAD to list, the 1969 debut album from this UK band. Why? Well, track two "Isadora" reminds us a bit of the flute-laced pastoral pagan-folk ceremony of AQ faves Comus! Elsewhere this band unleash psychedelic freakouts amidst jazz-inflected grooves, wielding electric violin, distorted guitar, and "Sumerian saxophones" in a mixture of rocked out fiddle frenzies, tricky time signatures, folky vocal melodies, and moody Eastern atmospheres. It's a mystical-Mingus hybrid, as played by a rock band, their wide ranging non-rock inspirations also allowing for one track, "Communion", to be based on a Bartok string quartet.
We'd compare 'em to contemporaneous acts like early King Crimson, and violin heavies High Tide, though these guys seem a bit more, uh, playful than either of those groups. Despite (or because of) such songs as "In The Stable Of The Sphinx", East of Eden's Ancient Egypt schtick has got to be a little tongue in cheek - check out the band photos, they simply can't be serious in that King Tut drag they're wearing! Their music certainly sounds like it comes from Swinging Sixties London, rather than out of a dusty sarcophagus. It's groovy, baby. Ferinstance, the riffy "Centaur Woman" is like Cream with bluesy harp seguing into an eruption of full on free improv horns, and also boasts an extensive bass solo (hence the tagline for that one: "half-woman, half-beast, half bass-guitar"). If they had let themselves go much further out, maybe they'd have started sounding like Japan's Food Brain from around the same time. But instead East Of Eden stick with what might play in the pop scene of the day, being exotic but not overindulgently experimental.
This nice new reish includes three previously unreleased bonus tracks - two demo versions and a cover of "Eight Miles High"!
MPEG Stream: "Northern Hemisphere"
MPEG Stream: "Isadora"

V/A An England Story (Soul Jazz) 2cd 23.00
The folks who run Soul Jazz Records must have made the best mixtapes. Heck, what are we talking about, they STILL make the best mixtapes. Their whole label is essentially based on their mixtape skills. Every release, an incredible collection of tracks, from super obscure rarities, to instantly recognizable favorites, managing over the course of a disc or two, to encapsulate and represent perfectly a sound or a scene. It's like a college course on music history condensed into a handful of songs. Whether it's Brazilian post punk, classic reggae, New York noise, Afro-Cuban music, Big Apple Rappin', modern dubstep, Tropicalia, Chicago Soul, Soul Jazz can present a super concise history of whatever sound it is. In fact, we're beginning to think, they could pick ANYTHING and we'd be willing to check it out. Easy listening, boy bands, Reggaeton, top 40, singers who used to be Mousketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club. If anyone could turn that shit into something compelling and listenable, Soul Jazz could.
Thankfully, this latest comp focuses on something much closer to our music obsessed hearts. A history of MC culture in the UK, including all the various roots and offshoots, dancehall, hip hop, jungle, garage, grime, dubstep. Anyone who dug past Soul Jazz releases like the two Box Of Dub discs, Rumble In The Jungle, any of the various dancehall comps, it almost goes without saying that this too will be some essential listening. While we recognize lots of the artists, we hadn't heard a single track here, but we've already begun compiling a list of records to track down just based on the brief samplings offered up here.
The discs aren't really chronological, or divided by genre, instead, they are deftly arranged to demonstrate the inherent similarities, to allow the listener to hear dancehall butted up against some dubstep, some UK hip hop cozied up to some jungle, the various track so different, but often incorporating similar elements and obviously drawn from the same musical history.
Some favorites: Doctor & Davinche's "Gotta Man", a loping stuttery grime jam, with a weird shuffling rhythm, a killer string stab loop, and of course some amazing tongue twisting flows. The Indian flecked hip hop groove of "So U Want Morre?" from Ty & Roots Manuva, peppered with some muted tablas, little flurries of string shimmer, a looped Eastern vocal refrain. The classic ska-infused dancehall of Tenor Fly's "Bump And Grind", soulful horns, a fluttering falsetto hook, and TF's agile gruff and raspy toasting. Riko's "Ice Rink Riddim", a convoluted grime stutter, with pizzicato guitar notes, beats made out of smeared FX and trash can lids, makes us wonder why this guy isn't as hyped as Dizzee Rascal or Wiley. "Deep" by Jakes & TC, some sort of two step garage, with some awesome fuzzed out Justice style synths, super growly vocals, and a super bouncy beat.
There are a couple weaker tracks near the end of disc two, but by then, it hardly matters, the rest of the collection is just so awesome. Funky, fucked up, groovy, big beats, killer hooks, amazing rapping and toasting, and like we already mentioned, just like the best mix tapes, An England Story leaves you wanting to hear more from pretty much every artist here!
Like all Soul Jazz releases, impeccably packaged, jewel case housed in a full color slip cover, a HUGE booklet, with liner notes, photos, interviews and more!
MPEG Stream: DOCTOR & DAVINCHE "Gotta Man"
MPEG Stream: TENOR FLY "Bump And Grind"
MPEG Stream: RIKO "Ice Rink Riddim"
MPEG Stream: JAH SCREECHY "Walk And Skank"

PROCER VENEFICUS Deathwanderings (Students Of Decay) cd-r 10.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
Latest bit of black mystery from this mysterious one man band from Santa Cruz, who constantly blurs the line between gorgeous black ambience, and blissed out buzzing blackness.
Deathwanderings finds PC in a contemplative mood, eschewing all buzz and blast, and instead offering up some hazy soft focus dronemusic, channeling folks like Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, through his blackened sonic filter.
Most of the tracks here are reinterpretations of pieces by Chopin, Satie and Schubert, stretched and blurred and smeared into soft streaks, gauzy shadows, hushed whispers, the music of breezes and flowing streams, organic and fluid, each track a hazy outline, the actual sounds within fluttering and fleeting, transitory and barely there.
Weird to hear such gentle beauty and subtle sonics from someone capable of kicking up a serious black buzz, but this is fantastic, utterly understated, and completely mesmerizing.
Nothing else to say really, other than metalheads steer clear. This is for the drone obsessed out there, those fascinated with the mystery of and majesty of minimal murk, explorers looking to delve into the heart of the drone. This is it. Right here.