DRIVE LIKE JEHU Yank Crime (Swami) cd 13.98
AT LONG LAST, AGAIN BACK IN PRINT!! Here's what we said seven years ago when Swami first reissued this (and we made it a Record Of The Week):
Sometimes it's hard to believe that certain records just go out of print. I mean who would let the Conet Project go out of print, or Souled American, or the Incredible String Band. It's even weirder when the record is not old or obscure. Then it's usually some bureaucratic red tape or major label bullshit that keeps people from hearing some great record. Such is the case with the second, ultimate release from San Diego's Drive Like Jehu, originally released on Interscope in 1994. A record Allan and Andee and Jim and Sadie and Windy and quite possibly the rest of the AQ staff would rank as one of the best rock records ever! Easily as good/important as Slint's Spiderland. For those who don't know, Drive Like Jehu was fronted by John Reis of Rocket From The Crypt (who has now reissued Yank Crime on his own Swami label) and featured vocalist Rick Farr (his rock name, he's also known as Eric Froberg) who later went on with Reis to play in the Hot Snakes. Drive Like Jehu also just happened to have one of the tightest rhythm sections EVER. E V E R! Yank Crime is a tightly wound record of 'post rock' (before post rock meant watered down instrumental indie rock bullshit) with head nodding, repetitive grooves, propulsive, ultra concise drumming, and some of the most inventive guitar playing we've ever heard. All topped off with Farr's distinctive high pitched vocals (familiar to all you folks who dig the Hot Snakes). The songs are looooong and hypnotic but never boring. The band locks into totally intense, static grooves, that can go on for minutes before exploding into mayhemic bursts of controlled fury. So goddamn good. Anyone who likes the Hot Snakes MUST own this record. Drive Like Jehu is like a hyper charged, heavier, more intense and complex, MUCH BETTER Hot Snakes. Anyone who likes Feuhler or Don Cab or Slint or Engine Kid or almost any post rock will discover what all those other comers had been shooting for. This is IT. Trust us. An automatic AQ "record of the week" selection as soon as we heard it was finally being re-released - with three bonus tracks to boot! ("Bullet Train To Vegas" and "Hand Over Fist" from their Merge label 7", and the original version of "Sinews" from a Cargo/Headhunter compilation.) So even if you have the original you might want to get this reissue for those.
MPEG Stream: "Do You Compute"
MPEG Stream: "Sinews"

RUSTED SHUT Dead (Load) lp 15.98
What would you think if someone described a band to you, as sounding like a mix of Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, the Brainbombs and black metal? Want if they went on to describe the band's sound in more detail, and they came up with something like "thick oozing ultra distorted, totally chaotic, drone drenched, drugged out, noisy as fuck, weirdly hypnotic, punishing and pulverizing, scuzz drenched doomic plod"? Well your first thought, if you were anything like us, would be "could such a band actually exist?" It does sound too good to be true. Your next thought might be "well okay, if a band like that did exist, not only would they be scary as shit, they'd also probably be my favorite band EVER."
Thus we have Rusted Shut. Going on 20 years now, these Texan noisemakers have somehow only managed two proper records and a single or two, each one of those jammed to overflowing with the abovementioned thick oozing ultra distorted, totally chaotic, pulverizing scuzz drenched plod. When we reviewed their Hot Sex ep, we alluded to the fact that if said ep wasn't an ep, wasn't vinyl only, wasn't over a decade old, and wasn't WAY too fucked up for most normal ears, it would have not only been out Record Of The Week, but our Record Of The YEAR. Of our EVER! Well, it's as if whatever God enjoys inflicting sonic torture on his children heard our prayers and conjured up this festering bit of blackened noise punk brilliance from whatever pit these guys call home.
It's rare that a band 20+ years old makes a record on the tail end of 20 years even half as good as the record that started it all, but we're tempted to say, this just might be the heaviest, freakiest, most brutally brilliant thing we've heard from these guys so far. Which is indeed saying a whole hell of a lot.
The opener "Home", is 5 minutes of blown out punk-drone, the guitars unwinding in thick gnarled tangles, moaning and rumbling and howling, a dense undulating layered swell of roiling sonic filth, fragmented riffs, squiggly downtuned Greg Ginn-ish guitar scrabble, the drums skittery and abstract clouds of cymbal sizzle, bursts of free rock splatter, while over the top, some sort of harsh, whiskey soaked punk rock testifying, spouting all sorts of misanthropic misinformation, like a post punk noise rock gutter scum Whitehouse. The music grows more and more frantic, faster, more freaked out, the various streaks of sound coalescing into riffs, that blur into still more smears of sound, the song an exercise in droned out filth caked tension.
Then there's "Heart Of Hell", total old school punk rock, but filtered through a sort of washed out lo-fi Brainbombs dirginess, the main riff, total classic punk rock, but locked and looped, and played over and over and over and over, totally trancelike, the vocals just as sneeringly scowly as on the first track, but once they drop out, the song locks into a total droned out punked up krautrock groove, that sounds a bit like Circle covering the Brainbombs, albeit doused in crumbling distortion and blurred reverb and delay.
Then comes "Intellect", 15 minutes of total blown out garage dirge bliss, the sound so in the red, that every time a cymbal hits, it swallows up the rest of the sound, the vocals so loud it sounds like the singer grabbed you by the head and locked his lips around your ears, you can feel his hot hellish breath and the spray of spittle. But all the while the music underneath, grows more and more distorted and somehow more and more hypnotic, so damaged and fractured that it sounds like the song might crumble into pieces at any moment. But that's just the first few minutes. Soon the band switch gear and the bass EXPLODES, like suddenly while the band was playing, the bass player went out to his truck and got 3 or 4 more amps and just let fucking loose, low end overload, everything acid drenched and psychedelic, the sound of speakers frying, of headphones melting, the vocals garbled like speaking in tongues, the bass unleashing a sludgey doomy groove, the song an endless noise rock blown out druggy musical brawl that makes the Butthole Surfers at their fiercest sound practically tame.
This song more than anything here reminds us of our first live run in with these weirdos. At SXSW this year, they played an instore, everyone was waiting to see the Mayyors, but Rusted Shut were just destroying the place, super noisy and scuzzy and awesome, and they just NEVER STOPPED PLAYING. The homeless-looking singer/guitarist guy kept getting shocked by the mic, so eventually he simply walked outside, after leaning his guitar up against his amp... some punk dude in the audience then picked up the mic, and freestyled some "I hate SXSW" lyrics... when he was done and threw the mic down, it seemed like the drummer and bassist would wrap it up, but instead they kept on jamming... and jamming... and jammingŠ then the guitarist came back in after being outside for what felt like (and pretty much WAS) ages, picked up his guitar, and then it seemed like, OK, this must be the grande finale... but that was only the beginning!! They literally kept on playing for another half hour at least. After a while, most of the crowd had gone outside to wait for the Mayyors, driven away by the bands wall of harsh vibes and skull stomping crush, and someone even joked that they should shut the doors of the shop and lock Rusted Shut inside...
These guys are lifers, they're insane, a total mess, which is the only way a piece of glorious sonic filth like this could ever happen. This is not music made by nice guys slumming it, by punk rockers getting their hands dirty, no, this is the sound of old guys pissed and insane, hell bent on punishing the rest of the world, a furious plod and pound fueled by hate, and misery, and drugs. Lots and lots and LOTS of drugs. And that instore, for all of it's confusional chaos, is pretty much the exact same vibe captured here. That is what this band is all about. About relentless endless riffing, hypnotic crustpunk dirges, wild damaged Neanderthal noise rock. The sick sick energy of Rusted Shut is an anomaly. This is not music, this is the sound these guys conjure up from their dead souls and black hearts, a fucked up noise drenched hardcore psychedelic space sludge whathtefuck that's just about the greatest thing we've ever heard.
MPEG Stream: "Home"
MPEG Stream: "Heart Of Hell"
MPEG Stream: "Intellect"

LOOP A Gilded Eternity (Reactor) 2cd 16.98
The final two installments in the long overdue comprehensive Loop reissue campaign are finally here. World In Your Eyes, the newly expanded 12" collection, reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and this right here, the final proper Loop album, A Gilded Eternity.
Contemporaries of legendary drug rockers Spacemen 3, Loop took the same sonic influences but rocked a little harder, opting out of the extended soporific drifts the defined the Spacemen, (although they were perfectly capable of blissing out with the best of them) and instead creating looped, krautrock spacejams, that were downright heavy, as well as being space-y, druggy and surprisingly catchy. Guitars were fuzzed out, vocals way down in the mix, reverb and delay EVERYWHERE, riffs often processed into stuttering textures and looped rhythms, the drums alternatingly motorik and skeletal, and pounding and explosive, all wreathed in a glorious otherworldly haze.
A Gilded Eternity, their final record, originally released in 1990, might just be their heaviest and most rocking yet, definitely their tightest, album opener "Vapour" has one of those riffs TO DIE FOR, the main melody is so completely catchy, the song a woozy, repetitive chunk of gloriously propulsive dronerock, less space-y than much of what came before, but definitely more rocking and relentless. the next track "Afterglow" pushes that new heaviness even further, sounding not unlike Swervedriver, big crunchy distorted guitars, pounding tribal drumming, the arrangement a lurching start stop, that slips into cool washed out breakdowns, before exploding right back into the stuttery groove. And so it goes, the band unfurling their masterwork, in a career of masterful works, "Blood" is total abstract minimal krautrock, the guitars stripped away, leaving just a super spare drum part, wrapped all up in processed vocals and swirling effects, another jam that easily could have gone on for 10 more minutes. But then just like that, the band slip back into "Breath Into Me", whipping up another killer riff, the track a looped space garage groove that rivals record opener "Vapour". The record proper ends with the nearly 10 minute "Be Here Now", the Loop version of a slow jam, beginning with some strange processed guitar, the band ease into a languorous groove that drifts druggily through soft focus clouds of lysergic buzz, brief squalls of wild wah guitar, but remaining locked and looped, the weary vocals drifting above the warm endless buzz.
A Guilded Eternity comes with a bonus disc as well, perhaps the least critical of the bonus material, considering it contains 5 demo tracks and 3 Peel Sessions, BUT, it also includes the Loop track "Shot With A Diamond", which happens to be Jim's favorite Loop track alongside "Arc-Light." This track provides the perfect sonic segue between Loop and the sounds guitarist Robert Hampson would later explore with his post Loop solo project Main, an ominous bit of electronic sample laced dronemusic, creepy and haunting and so fucking awesome. Previously only available as a 7" single, and as a bonus track on the original cassette version. Essential!
In fact, all four of these Loop reissues are absolutely required listening for anyone with even the mildest interest in sounds space-y, druggy, metallic and psychedelic!!!
MPEG Stream: "Vapour"
MPEG Stream: "Afterglow"
MPEG Stream: "Be Here Now"
MPEG Stream: "Shot With A Diamond"

RUSTED SHUT Dead (Load) cd 15.98
What would you think if someone described a band to you, as sounding like a mix of Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, the Brainbombs and black metal? Want if they went on to describe the band's sound in more detail, and they came up with something like "thick oozing ultra distorted, totally chaotic, drone drenched, drugged out, noisy as fuck, weirdly hypnotic, punishing and pulverizing, scuzz drenched doomic plod"? Well your first thought, if you were anything like us, would be "could such a band actually exist?" It does sound too good to be true. Your next thought might be "well okay, if a band like that did exist, not only would they be scary as shit, they'd also probably be my favorite band EVER."
Thus we have Rusted Shut. Going on 20 years now, these Texan noisemakers have somehow only managed two proper records and a single or two, each one of those jammed to overflowing with the abovementioned thick oozing ultra distorted, totally chaotic, pulverizing scuzz drenched plod. When we reviewed their Hot Sex ep, we alluded to the fact that if said ep wasn't an ep, wasn't vinyl only, wasn't over a decade old, and wasn't WAY too fucked up for most normal ears, it would have not only been out Record Of The Week, but our Record Of The YEAR. Of our EVER! Well, it's as if whatever God enjoys inflicting sonic torture on his children heard our prayers and conjured up this festering bit of blackened noise punk brilliance from whatever pit these guys call home.
It's rare that a band 20+ years old makes a record on the tail end of 20 years even half as good as the record that started it all, but we're tempted to say, this just might be the heaviest, freakiest, most brutally brilliant thing we've heard from these guys so far. Which is indeed saying a whole hell of a lot.
The opener "Home", is 5 minutes of blown out punk-drone, the guitars unwinding in thick gnarled tangles, moaning and rumbling and howling, a dense undulating layered swell of roiling sonic filth, fragmented riffs, squiggly downtuned Greg Ginn-ish guitar scrabble, the drums skittery and abstract clouds of cymbal sizzle, bursts of free rock splatter, while over the top, some sort of harsh, whiskey soaked punk rock testifying, spouting all sorts of misanthropic misinformation, like a post punk noise rock gutter scum Whitehouse. The music grows more and more frantic, faster, more freaked out, the various streaks of sound coalescing into riffs, that blur into still more smears of sound, the song an exercise in droned out filth caked tension.
Then there's "Heart Of Hell", total old school punk rock, but filtered through a sort of washed out lo-fi Brainbombs dirginess, the main riff, total classic punk rock, but locked and looped, and played over and over and over and over, totally trancelike, the vocals just as sneeringly scowly as on the first track, but once they drop out, the song locks into a total droned out punked up krautrock groove, that sounds a bit like Circle covering the Brainbombs, albeit doused in crumbling distortion and blurred reverb and delay.
Then comes "Intellect", 15 minutes of total blown out garage dirge bliss, the sound so in the red, that every time a cymbal hits, it swallows up the rest of the sound, the vocals so loud it sounds like the singer grabbed you by the head and locked his lips around your ears, you can feel his hot hellish breath and the spray of spittle. But all the while the music underneath, grows more and more distorted and somehow more and more hypnotic, so damaged and fractured that it sounds like the song might crumble into pieces at any moment. But that's just the first few minutes. Soon the band switch gear and the bass EXPLODES, like suddenly while the band was playing, the bass player went out to his truck and got 3 or 4 more amps and just let fucking loose, low end overload, everything acid drenched and psychedelic, the sound of speakers frying, of headphones melting, the vocals garbled like speaking in tongues, the bass unleashing a sludgey doomy groove, the song an endless noise rock blown out druggy musical brawl that makes the Butthole Surfers at their fiercest sound practically tame.
This song more than anything here reminds us of our first live run in with these weirdos. At SXSW this year, they played an instore, everyone was waiting to see the Mayyors, but Rusted Shut were just destroying the place, super noisy and scuzzy and awesome, and they just NEVER STOPPED PLAYING. The homeless-looking singer/guitarist guy kept getting shocked by the mic, so eventually he simply walked outside, after leaning his guitar up against his amp... some punk dude in the audience then picked up the mic, and freestyled some "I hate SXSW" lyrics... when he was done and threw the mic down, it seemed like the drummer and bassist would wrap it up, but instead they kept on jamming... and jamming... and jammingŠ then the guitarist came back in after being outside for what felt like (and pretty much WAS) ages, picked up his guitar, and then it seemed like, OK, this must be the grande finale... but that was only the beginning!! They literally kept on playing for another half hour at least. After a while, most of the crowd had gone outside to wait for the Mayyors, driven away by the bands wall of harsh vibes and skull stomping crush, and someone even joked that they should shut the doors of the shop and lock Rusted Shut inside...
These guys are lifers, they're insane, a total mess, which is the only way a piece of glorious sonic filth like this could ever happen. This is not music made by nice guys slumming it, by punk rockers getting their hands dirty, no, this is the sound of old guys pissed and insane, hell bent on punishing the rest of the world, a furious plod and pound fueled by hate, and misery, and drugs. Lots and lots and LOTS of drugs. And that instore, for all of it's confusional chaos, is pretty much the exact same vibe captured here. That is what this band is all about. About relentless endless riffing, hypnotic crustpunk dirges, wild damaged Neanderthal noise rock. The sick sick energy of Rusted Shut is an anomaly. This is not music, this is the sound these guys conjure up from their dead souls and black hearts, a fucked up noise drenched hardcore psychedelic space sludge whathtefuck that's just about the greatest thing we've ever heard.
MPEG Stream: "Home"
MPEG Stream: "Heart Of Hell"
MPEG Stream: "Intellect"

UNITS History Of The Units (Community Library) cd 14.98
Moog-enabled synth punk subversion straight outta San Francisco in the late '70s/early '80s, entertaining n' agitating electronic New Wave action excavated and reissued! And it's totally timely considering how many bands in today's scene would so love to sound like this.
We won't pretend we were familiar with The Units before this fantastic anthology album showed up. Perhaps we'd heard the name before (or maybe we were confusing 'em with ol' Jandek's 1978 debut album, also under the name The Units), but we knew nothing about this band 'til we heard this disc a few weeks ago. And as soon as we did, it went into heavy rotation here at the store. These Units were definitely a important piece of San Francisco punk/new wave history, but just a bit before our time. Well, not Aquarius's time, just us folks who work here now! Actually, a close reading of the thanks list in the cd booklet will find a shout out to Aquarius, 'cause (if you didn't know) Aquarius was THEE punk/new wave record store in San Francisco in the '70s... (Which reminds us, we've got to get more of our history up on the AQ website.) And, in fact, The Units' debut lp Digital Stimulation was the very first release on seminal SF indie 415 Records (who had their biggest hit with Romeo Void), a label run in part by Aquarius' owners at the time. So this most certainly isn't the first time that The Units music has been blasting regularly in the Aquarius shop, it's just been a few years, is all.
Putting things in proper place/time/scene perspective, this archival disc starts off with an audio snippet of the late SF punk "godfather" Dirk Dirksen on stage at Mabuhay Gardens, good-naturedly mocking both The Units (accidentally referring to them by the name of another band, the Zeros) and their cheering fans (with the sardonic comment "obviously, people with as little taste as yourself would become ecstatic over such average talent"). Then, making us ecstatic, twenty tracks of prime Units music follows, The History Of The Units containing most all of the tracks from their 1980 415 Records album Digital Stimulation as well as a handful of stuff taken from early 7"s and demo tapes, as well as more experimental pieces recorded for film soundtracks and art happenings and other ephemera.
Not unlike Devo, The Units had a concept thing going, all about a critique of alienated modern industrial society, dehumanizing conformity, and corporate culture, with songs like "Cannibals" and "Work". Perhaps perversely choosing to use machines to make their point, The Units tried to take the human element out of the rock band equation, preferring for instance to project their own propaganda films rather than allow the audience to focus on a frontperson. And yes, they do also sound quite bit like Devo at times, which is way okay by us!
Their synth-obsession was also in part an anti-guitar thing, a reaction to the mainstream. In fact, they took their anti-guitar philosophy to the extreme of not only having a "stamp out guitars" logo, but also making fake guitars out of plywood to smash on stage, while letting their synths play on "cruise control". So definitely The Units were highly conceptual, art schoolish, but not academic - the liner notes are clear that the idea was to be an all-synth band that "kicks ass" (the full quote being: ""I wanted an all synthesizer band... and not some fucking polite, socially acceptable electronic experiment in academia. I didn't want a doctorate in electronic doodling. No, I'm talking about a synth band that kicks ass!") and according to what we're hearing here, they succeeded. And they were not without contemporaries. There were The Screamers, Nervous Gender, and of course Devo; all of whom wanted to take the synthesizer into punk. For many of the Units tracks, it would very easy to replace the lead synth lines with guitars and have an equally kick ass rock song, but the fact is that these are Moog-powered cuts which do oscillate between a quirky sensibility with angular chops and a full-throttle punk car-crash. If you would think the former finds the Units sounding like Devo and the latter like the Screamers, you'd be right!
Yes indeed, the songs on this disc range from urgent Devo-esque pop punk and Screamers-y rants to moody proto-'80s dance tracks to more abstract, instrumental, rhythmic/textural electronic pieces like "Tight Fit" and "East West". There's loads of electric energy, some goofy humor, and certainly serious intent. So many gems here, incorporating buzzing droning distorted synths, propulsively skittering drum beats, and monotone vocals (both male and female).
Their incredible singles "Cannibals" (a tempestuous, driving song that was pure '70s punk), "High Pressure Days", and "Warm Moving Bodies," are prominently featured here, all of which were impressively catchy. Their ability to write these hooks earned them a deal with Epic, who released two seminal 12" singles (which couldn't be licensed for this compilation) and has been sitting on another collection of recordings since 1983. But beyond the hook, the Units were plenty weird, as seen in their peculiar lullaby melodies on "Red" which almost comes across like a Rodd Keith song-poem with a very sparse arrangement. Despite the band's curses toward academic music, a few choice intertwining moments of the Units minimalist grooves come awfully close to sounding like a punked out Terry Riley! Hardly polite music!
Other selections here include the cold wave weird science of "Digital Stimulation", the gloriously grinding downer melody of "Contemporary Emotion" (apparently a cover, a song by some contemporaneous hard rock band we've never heard of called Trakstod Station), and there's even an ode to our very neighborhood, "The Mission Is Bitchin", with lyrics about burritos and marijuana!
Of course it's all a bit dated, of its era, and that's part of the charm... but like we said, a lot of this also sounds like it could be put out by a band today, since everything old is new again and the '80s New Wave / synth thing is a current retro craze. Definitely this is a good time for The Units to be reissued!
And Community Library have done a really nice job of it, the gatefold cd sleeve containing a thick 32 page cd booklet with elaborate colorful collage style liner notes by bandleader Scott "Dr. Tex Nology" Ryser, a Units manifesto of sorts, he also talks about the wild and crazy San Francisco of the '70s/early '80s era, and also there's several pages of old fliers for Units gigs at the Fab Mab and other SF punk venues... we noticed one for the Warfield too, with The Units opening for OMD and Gary Numan. Also shows with Romeo Void, Dead Boys, Soft Cell, Psychedelic Furs, Dead Kennedys, Crime, Screamers, Iggy Pop, the Police, Tuxedomoon... Definitely makes us young 'uns wish we'd been around in SF back then. (Another note about the packaging, it says copyright 2007 on the back but that that's a mistake, it's when the artwork was initially prepared, this is indeed a brand new 2009 release, with also a vinyl version upcoming as well, not sure when, though.)
MPEG Stream: "Cannibals"
MPEG Stream: "Warm Moving Bodies"
MPEG Stream: "i Night"
MPEG Stream: "East West"

LOOP World In Your Eyes (Reactor) 3cd 22.00
Finally!! Ever since the first two Loop records got the deluxe multidisc reissue treatment, we've been anxiously awaiting the last two, their final record A Gilded Eternity, and this one right here, many folks around here's favorite, a compilation of 12"s called World In Your Eyes. Originally released in 1987, the updated World In Your Eyes is even better, a TRIPLE disc collection of 12"s, 7"s, bonus tracks, unreleased tracks, demos, and covers.
Seemingly always (unfairly) overshadowed by their sonic brethren the Spacemen 3, Loop managed to give the drugged out drone rock thing their own distinct spin, infusing some serious krautrock mesmer and some metallic muscle into their slow burning drones and effects drenched psychrock workouts. Slipping easily from super dreamy one riff blown out hypno rock, to in-the-red space garage pound, to hushed soft focus inner space drift, Loop were masters of modern psychedelia.
Take the 10 minute drug drift of "Burning World", with its processed guitar chug, the swirling clouds of effects, the blooping bass, the motorik drums, like the perfect mix of Can and Hawkwind. Or "Brittle Head Girl", which sounded like a spacier more tripped out Galaxie 500, its lazy drawled vocals, and woozy guitar hook, and that irresistible bassline. Or "I'll Take You There", a super fuzzed out bit of garage-y space groove, the band easily out spacing the Spacemen themselves. We could probably go track by track, every one here is a gem, and the extras! Holy shit. Where to start? Besides a plethora of demos, live tracks and the like, this collection also includes some incredible covers, A spaced out version of a Pop Group track, Neil Young's "Cinammon Girl", Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and Can's "Mother Sky (which Andee sez is better than the original, yeah we know, we know). Then there's the Arc-Lite 12" that takes up the first half of the third disc, one of our favorite Loop eps, and the track "Arc-Lite (Sonar)" is one of the best Loop jams ever, with its relentless riffing, it's strange flurries of tribal drumming, the echo drenched vox and the swooping streaks of effects, a 4 minute song that could easily have been ten times that. The song is reimagined as the "(Radar)" version, getting sort of supercharged, heavier and fleshier, less spare and skeletal and jangly than the original. There's a third version still, that gets all remixed into something less space rocky and more tripped out and dizzying. Let's not forget the ten minute "Sunburst", a sprawling bit of lysergic minimal krautdrone, woozy and druggy and slow burning. There's also the legendary live Prisma Europa Live 12", and finally, to top it all off, Loop's Godflesh cover, from their Loopflesh split 7", where each band covered the other, one of our Holy Grail 7"s, if anyone out there has one they can part with, we will be forever in your debt, and of course it's a killer, Godflesh's "Like Rats" transformed into something much spacier but no less menacing, in fact, it's most definitely the heaviest meanest slab of Loop-age ever, while still retaining plenty of that Loop-ed FX drenched shimmer. So goddamn GREAT.
These reissues have been shuffling tracks around enough to cause a little confusion, as some of the tracks on the original issue of WIYE are left off here, but are tacked on elsewhere on the other reissues, and disc 3 here seems like it could have been included on the Gilded Eternity disc as this disc highlights one of our favorite Loop tracks, the above mentioned Arc-Light, originally a 1989 single, which was lumped onto the cd edition of A Gilded Eternity which came out a year later in 1990. But who really cares, as long as it's all here, and it's ALL here, and then some. Space rock and drone rock and psychedelic rock fanatics should buy all four, one of the most supremely transcendent and kick ass bodies of work in rock. Hyperbole? We think NOT.
Killer packaging, three paper sleeves with various reproductions of the included 12"s, all housed in a slipcover, with a booklet that includes track listings credits, but sadly, not much in the way of liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "Head On"
MPEG Stream: "Burning World"
MPEG Stream: "Mother Sky"
MPEG Stream: "Pink Moon"
MPEG Stream: "Cinnamon Girl"
MPEG Stream: "Arc-Lite (Sonar)"

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Black Cascade (Southern Lord) 2lp 27.00
This gorgeous slab of Cascadian black buzz, now available on ultra limited, super deluxe double vinyl...
By now, Wolves in the Throne Room have established themselves as one of America's most gifted and awesomely dependable black metal bands, and their third long player, Black Cascade, picks up right where their recent Malevolent Grain ep left off. All the elements of their expansive, blackened psychedelic approach are here: sprawling songs with a methodical attention to song structure, relentless drumming, perfectly interlocking dual guitars, tortured raspy vocals, and an ability to seamlessly merge synthy ambience with a furious but often very melancholy black metal onslaught. There seems to be a legion of haters out there, ready to label the band as a bunch of PC hippies who aren't adhering to whatever rules they assume apply to a style of music that is pretty nihilistic and iconoclastic by nature. But fuck those people. This band is great and truly deserves whatever accolades come its way.
The ever-present density of WITTR's sound is further heightened on Black Cascade, their bio proudly emphasizing the old school analog sound they have achieved through vintage recording gear and classic tube amps. While we don't want to ramble on about various pieces of musical equipment, it should be noted that these devices have certainly helped the band to capture a sound music nerds might refer to as "organic". Sure, we at aQuarius love all the homemade bedroom black metal that sounds as if it was recorded in a blender during a tornado... The sound on Black Cascade, however, is clear and upfront, though hardly refined or polished. It is quite rock n' roll in a classic sense, which works great when the band breaks out some Thin Lizzy-esque guitar harmonies on the first track "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog". Mossy, ultra distorted guitars hang like a thick black cloud (or a sea of fog, if you will) in the atmosphere as the drums create the necessary propulsion that make a Wolves in the Throne Room song sound like it could, and should, carry on FOREVER. Song #2, "Ahrimanic Trance" is, true to its title, a hypnotic, trancelike black metal trip into some long forgotten wilderness. The song gives one a feeling of being transported at high speeds across the landscape while watching from the back of some primitive vehicle, a sense that is carried on in the next track, "Ex Cathedra". The final song, "Crystal Ammunition", starts life as a dizzying, hyperspeed slab of pure black metal before morphing into a beautiful lament that may (or may not) reference the melody from Malevolent Grain's "A Looming Resonance". It's seems like things will culminate in the ultimate fadeout. But, uh, what happens after the fade out? As everything gallops off into the distance, otherworldly guitar chords and tambourine are the only sounds evident. Eventually these too recede as they are overtaken by a phased out synthscape. Fucking awesome.
While this album was great from the moment we first put it on, repeated listens have been revealing more and more. To say this is a huge departure from what Wolves in the Throne Room have accomplished in the past would be inaccurate. It is, instead, the sound of a group who, with each record, becomes a more realized version of itself.
MPEG Stream: "Ex Cathedra"
MPEG Stream: "Ahrimanic Trance"

GOG Mist From The Random More (Utech Records) cd 14.98
In a world (our world at least) full to overflowing with drone records, dirge records, doom records, and yes, dirgedoomdrone records, the mysterious Gog have somehow always managed to transcend. From their very first release, the subtly spectacular Noriah Mills, Gog have continued to mine similar territory as so many other soundmakers, but with the resultant whole so much more than its constituent parts.
The music of Gog, while on the surface, perhaps seemingly simple, minimal, abstract, is the sort of sound that requires deep listening, upon which, the guitars then reveal themselves as so much more than electronic tone generators, the long strands of feedback and the layers of dense billowy buzz, so much more than just texture and timbre. And while on past releases, the band hinted at something a bit more black, their occasionally blissed out ambience drifting into darker and darker greys, on Mist From The Random More, the band have fully committed, creating what for them is a haunting otherworldly black metal suite, a droned out, blissed out, buzz drenched, almost static expanse of smoldering grimness, shot through with glimmering glistening effulgence, a bit like wrapping a black gauze around an exploding sun, the results, again, transcendent.
The record begins with a gorgeous, slow burning bit of guitar drone, that owes more to the kosmiche sounds of krautdrone than the downtuned glacial fug of more doom-ed entities. These guitars soar and shimmer, warm gouts of feedback enfolded by deep rich sheets of coruscating soft focus heaviness, any other band would stretch this out to fill up a whole album, and rightfully so, we'd probably be gushing just as much if Gog chose to do the same thing, but these Sunroof-ian solar sonics are only part of Gog's grand vision for Mist From The Random More.
The title track, taking up the bulk of the record, finds Gog fully immersing themselves in black metal, or at least their (very) loose approximation of what black metal is, or could be. The sound is grim, and frosty, but only in the sense that it reflects much of the black metal that came before, in every other way, it's anything but, the guitars glow, the riffs are fluid, organic, wrapped in a soft burnished buzz, that reminds us a bit of Jesu or Nadja, but the arrangement is more Necks. In fact, a shorthand descriptor might be "a black metal Necks", which if you're anything like us, would be all it would take. Simple skittery minimal drumming, almost looped sounding if it weren't so abstract, beneath a roiling cloud of layered guitars, grinding and whirring and hissing, and within that cloud, some gorgeously melancholic low end melodies, difficult to describe the strange blend of loveliness and heaviness, but there it is, a distinctly lovely heaviness, washed out and blurry, and hypnotic and epic and melodic, within this seemingly static structure, the sound swings and slips through various incarnations, moving from total blurred buzz, to a more slowcore lope, always wreathed in swirling clouds of blackened shimmer, until the end, when the track explodes in climax of effects drenched psychedelic churn.
The closing track offers a chance to decompress, a strange assemblage of soothing tones, shot through with streaks of feedback, very cool and clinical, almost a Raster-Noton sort of sound, there's a brief burst of super distorted crumbling sonic chaos, almost Merzbowian in its intensity, transforming into a haunting post industrial doomscape, before again returning to the relative tranquility of the first few minutes, eventually leaving just a single upper register tone, which also finally fades into the shadows.
Another fantastic record from Utech (after a whole mess of incredible releases, including last list's Aluk Todolo Record Of The Week), gorgeous packaging, an abstract skull, rendered in some kind of white dust (cocaine?), on a spare black background, a gatefold with printed liner notes inside, and yes, probably limited...
MPEG Stream: "Night Zoe"
MPEG Stream: "Mist From The Random More"

ALUK TODOLO Finsternis (Utech Records) cd 14.98
It's been two long years we've been waiting for this, another mysterious rhythmic communique from French blackened post krautrock alchemists Aluk Todolo. But it's not like they've been idle. Since 2007's Descension, two thirds of Aluk Todolo have recorded a record and toured the world as Gunslingers, and all of Aluk Todolo do double duty in French black metallers Diamatregon, who recently released a new full length on tUMULt called Crossroad.
But as much as we love those other two bands, and we do, there will always be something magical about the strange sonic world Aluk Todolo are able to conjure up. Especially considering they're a three piece, a power trio, drums, guitar, bass. Nothing else, no synths, no strings, just the basic rock band instruments. It's testament to the power these three wield, that they can do so much with so little. Or more accurately, so little with so little. As the music of Aluk Todolo, is disarmingly simple, subtle and minimal, but in its minimalism, lies its power. The power of rhythm, of texture, of mood, these five long pieces are so evocative, so expressive and strangely emotional. Even at its most spare and skeletal, the sound is palpable, almost a physical presence, which is surprising again considering just how stripped down Finsternis actually is.
Descension, Aluk Todolo's debut, was heavy and space-y and rhythmic, we described it as a buzz-less black metal, some of the songs were thick and caustic, others were loping and motorik, but on Finsternis, it's as if the band decided to strip away all the extraneous sounds, leaving just the core, the root, the heart of the music, and that heart beats out a simple, hypnotic rhythm.
The record is split into 4 parts, with a brief interlude, but those four parts are split into two distinct movements. The first, which comprises the first two parts, is much of what we described above, simple skeletal rhythms, surrounded by minimal guitar whir, bursts of grinding distortion, fragmented jangle, keening feedback, but it's all about the rhythm. After a brief burst of mathy chaos, the track reverts to its initial rhythm, this time the bass more prominent, fuzzy, distorted, woozy and mesmerizing, the band locked in tight, the bass and drums solid and unwavering, while the guitar sings in the background, moaning and keening and howling, giving the track an ominous otherworldly vibe, a trudge across some hostile alien landscape, a weary, washed out deathmarch.
Then the interlude, a haunting abstract percussive sprawl, simple percussive thuds set amidst a sea of warped distorted low end, bits of glitch and hiss, and grinding shards of industrial clatter, which gives way to the second, noisier movement, the drums transformed into a simple machinelike pound, snare and cymbal crashing over and over and over, the guitars whipped into a frenzy of blurred buzz and warped swirling blackened chaos, what at first sounds noisy and harsh, soon reveals itself as strangely textural, and as hypnotic as the more stripped down first movement, the guitars slip from monochromatic whir, to insectoid black metal riffing, constantly swirling around the motorik pound and pummel, the final track finds the guitars slipping into ever higher registers, blissing out, laced with feedback, smoothing out into warm smears and blurs, before a brief deconstruction, and a surprisingly tranquil last few minutes, the drums back to a woozy lope, the guitar offering up warm swells and shimmering thrum, the bass throbbing beneath, eventually stumbling to a halt in a cloud of creaking metals and static-like tape hiss. Woah.
Just like Descension, Finsternis is an intense and emotional journey through sound, a haunting and hard to describe exploration of rhythm, mood and texture, a slow shifting otherworld defined by This Heat, Geronimo, Laddio Bolocko, Can, Faust, accessible only via the three shadowy figures that make up Aluk Todolo, whose magic and mystery has been rendered in these glorious black rhythms.
Housed in a multi panel jacket with super striking original artwork by Stephen Kasner, on the always impressive Utech label (whose other two new releases, from Gog and Olivier Dumont, we'll review on the next list, although we do have both in stock if you want 'em, and we're fairly sure you do!).
MPEG Stream: "Premier Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Deuxieme Contact"
MPEG Stream: "Totalite"

ONNA s/t (Holy Mountain) cd 14.98
Tons of folks were sufficiently wowed by Onna's lone 1983 7", thankfully reissued from oblivion and drooled over a few lists back. There was just something about Onna, we couldn't quite put our finger on it, but that record was just so mysterious, a completely mesmerizing slice of lost history. Out of nowhere came this highly evocative work of melancholy psych rock with pulsing drum machines and floating Japanese vocals, sounding like nothing else you might hear from 1983, or 2009 for that matter. Adding to the confusion was almost zero information about Onna, leading listeners to make their conclusions free from any tangible facts. That changes with the arrival of this mindblowing 10 song retrospective, but just barely.
Included are the two tracks from the 7", with an additional song from the same sessions, some live material featuring the guitar skills of a very young Michio Kurihara (White Heaven/Ghost, frequent Boris collaborator), as well as outtakes plus one song from the album Katawa, recorded in 2007.
Though we were relying on the minimal information found on the 7" when we reviewed it, and listed the group as a duo, Onna was in fact the brainchild of Keizo Miyanishi, a noted Japanese Manga artist who also held a highly iconoclastic outlook on rock music, influenced by the usual suspects like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls. Even then, these groups only serve as the most basic starting point for Onna's sound, and Miyanishi's detached yet somewhat nihilistic liner notes lead to more questions than answers. Said notes include awesomely vague anecdotes like "[The tour] was packed with enough incidents; nothing was easy. Enough weird shit happened to fill a book. . . I will say that around the time we returned, I received aggressively threatening telephone messages," (with none of these things actually described), and "It was around this period that I began to lose my concept of time." Hey, we'll take it, as timelessness certainly applies to Onna's musical approach.
For folks without turntables, or anyone who missed our review of the 7" or anyone who just happens to want the cd version as well as the vinyl, the two tracks from the 7" are worth the price of admission alone. The most obvious point of reference soundwise would be legendary psych/noise enigma Les Rallizes Denudes, especially in the vocal department. This is a very good thing for anyone who loves those somewhat lazy, partially detached, Japanese sung vocals of groups like LRD and LSD-March. The use of a drum machine keeps these songs pulsing like a mechanical heartbeat, which when combined with the fairly free form guitars, definitely gives this record its own vibe. The first track begins with a meditative two chord lament before noisy, white hot guitar squalls begin creeping about in the distance as simple and repetitive bass lines keep the foundation strong and focused. The second track introduces catchy psych guitar chords with a machine modified quasi girl group drumbeat, the bass again holding things down nice and steady. The heavily reverberated strummed guitars bubble about as fake cymbal explosions recede and return over and over again, until the prolonged fade to black.
"Were You To Become A Mother", the 7" outtake, flows pretty similarly to the other songs from that session. It is certainly just as awesome, with warm bass and a super bouncy drum machine which works in perfect contrast to the somewhat ominous nature of the melody. Above it all are Miyanishi's mournful vocals, which give the impression of being lost in the darkness of the song itself.
Next up are the outtakes from Katawa. Oddly enough, the liner notes are dated to 1999, ending with the seemingly definitive proclamation that "Onna lies here, dead." But as mentioned earlier, Katawa dates to 2007, and with three songs appearing from that time, you are confusingly forced to reevaluate everything you just read and wonder what the current status is on Onna. Anyway, enough rambling, you all really want to know what these songs sound like... Strangely enough, not much like the single in any way. The honest truth is that liking the 7" may not necessarily mean you will go crazy over the rest of this stuff. It is difficult listening, but in the most rewarding way. First off, there is no drum machine; there are no drums at all. In place of the scorching fuzz guitar on the single are percussively strummed acoustic guitars, sometimes kind of folky, sometimes bluesier. Miyanishi's voice is noticeably deeper, sounding weathered and more vulnerable after 24 more years of living. The unifying thread between these songs and the single is their overwhelming sadness, but in place of the drum machine's mechanical precision is Miyanishi's internalized sense of rhythm. Unlike the ever present density on the 7", these songs are able to convey a sense of loneliness and pain through all the open space on the recording. Strangest off all, however, is how hypnotic they manage to be. As crazy as it may sound, the result is similar to that of a drone record, not in your typical way with sustained electric guitars screaming through tons of amplification, but more so in its focus and repetition. It is hardly the kind of music you'll want to play at your next keg bash, but what the songs lack in accessibility and structure, they more than make up for in genuine emotion.
Like the 7", the live tracks also date to 1983, but they are also drum-free and super minimalist. There is a weird hum that may come from the recording, or possibly from the room itself. Either way, it works its way into the songs just like the instruments, adding a nice creepy atmosphere to the proceedings. Discordant slide guitars and piano are accompanied by heavily sustained fuzz guitar, as Miyanishi delivers another wrenching vocal performance. At various points, as Kurihara whips up squalls of feedback-laden psych guitar, you assume the plucked acoustic guitars will be overtaken by noise, but Miyanishi keeps his focus and never falters from the tone he sets. After the final live track, there is some sparse and uncomfortable clapping, then silence, as the audience was no doubt wondering what the hell they just witnessed. You might even react the same way.
Accompanying the album are a few photos of the androgynous looking band members and some examples of Miyanishi's astounding, grotesquely erotic art. These images seem just as integral to Onna as their music, but unless you speak Japanese, you will probably be left scratching your head. There is no doubt that Onna created some challenging music, but what you get out of this album depends on how much you are willing to put into the listening experience. There may be no easy answers, but some things are better left as is, and in the end Onna's music is powerful enough to live on, in spite of its obscurity.
MPEG Stream: "Cortigiana Dal Velo"
MPEG Stream: "Were You To Become A Mother"
MPEG Stream: "The Swan Song"
MPEG Stream: "Salamandra, Salander (The Three Sisters)"

CAVE Psychic Psummer (Important) lp 16.98
Not one but TWO repeat Record Of The Week honorees, elsewhere, the latest from French alchemical post rockers Aluk Todolo, and this, the latest from Cave, whose recent instore performance totally blew us away. It says a lot about a band that can put together a totally improvised set, with limited gear and various members changing up instruments, and still sound better and tighter and catchier and more rocking than most bands playing their own songs on their proper gear NOT in a record store.
Born from the space drone psych outfit Warhammer 48K, these guys left Missouri, ended up in Chicago, added a whole bunch of new members and became Cave, a kick ass spaced out kraut-drone hypno rock collective, equal parts Circle, Can, Lightning Bolt, Wooden Shjips, and Hawkwind, but so much more. Their first record, Hunt Like Devil, was a glorious cacophony of circular riffage, frenetic drumming, woozy basslines, wild synths, and killer hooks, groovy, hypnotic, space-y, and while this record is more of the same, it's somehow transcends, taking everything we loved about the first record, and making it, well, MORE. We'd have probably loved it even if it was Hunt Like Devil part 2, but thankfully, Psychic Summer finds the band exploring some new territory, but dragging that old sound with them.
The opener begins with just a stripped down guitar, and some subtly noodly synth, before exploding in a sun dappled burst of super distorted, in-the-red psychedelia, before shifting again into a muted sunshiney krautrock groove, laced with some cool synths, and electronic filigree. The song locks into the groove and slowly builds to a triumphant climax, eventually slowing down to a sort of chiming jangly groove, which leads right into "Made In Malaysia" which might be the jam of the disc. Stuttering synths, stop start dynamics, chugging guitars, which gives way to a wild woozy twisted riffy bridge, with shouted vocals, and warble bended guitar notes, and an irresistable staccato groove, first just the synth, but then the drums, motorik and relentless, live it's not hard to imagine this track being stretched into a whole set. A single song, so hooky and loopy and mesmerizing. But it's Cave, so two seconds later, they're locked into a different kind of groove, a tribal rhythm, warm organ chords, underneath blooping effects, buried vocals, it's almost danceable, definitely groovy, like they just took one measure from some classic old school dance track and looped it into some space aged kraut disco space jam.
The other three tracks are just as mesmerizing, the muted space-y throb of "High, I Am", wrapped in a slithery bit of warped synthage, to the dense drum heavy "Requiem For John Sex", with some grinding mathy guitar and a bit of indie jangle all wound up in the tracks summery drift, before a wild super sped up free for all psych out finish, and "Machines And Muscles", which was originally released on the now out of print Butthash single, this seems to be a slightly different version, and is definitely another of the record's highlights, total hynorock bliss, little bits of keyboard pepper the stuttery rhythm, the main riff staying solid and unwavering, while all around it various other sounds swoop and shimmer, a Circle-like guitar groove, shuffling drums, very tribal and looped sounding, suspended in a field of space streakings, warm organ whir and smears of soft effects in the background, that main riff stays LOCKED in, until it begins to get a bit more tripped out, a little distorted, more effects, the synths skitter and stutter, and then finally, the song fades out in a blinding kaleidoscopic burst of warm sunshine-y synth.
And that's really the magic of Cave, we're all so partial to the dark and doomy, the buzzy and droney, that it's so exciting for a record to sound so heavy and tripped out and hypnotic, but at the same time so sunshiney, so Summery, so FUN. These guys totally rule, this record is fantastic, and if you can believe it, live they might be even better.
MPEG Stream: "Made In Malaysia"
MPEG Stream: "Gamm"
MPEG Stream: "Encino Men"

SLOUGH FEG Ape Uprising! (Cruz Del Sur) cd 15.98
Underground hometown heavy metal heroes Slough Feg, aka The Lord Weird Slough Feg are back on the attack with this new album, their seventh (not counting their most recent release, the demos/live collection The Slay Stack Grows, reviewed here not long ago). You may recall us raving about several (all!) of their previous efforts, though in our review of Slay Stack, we did say that one was pretty much intended for fans only, not the place to start if you were new to the band. But, if you're someone who still hasn't checked out a proper Slough Feg album, well THIS one would certainly be recommended. And Slough Feg fans who loved their last studio record, Hardworlder, will find Ape Uprising! takes that sound and, well, goes a bit ape with it. Some have called this their heaviest album yet. We'd say, yes, maybe, due to certain doom elements and the thick, '70s sounding production with prominent bass. But it's also perhaps their poppiest! At a tight 37 and a half minutes it brilliantly synthesizes all the best of the band's '70s and '80s classic metal and hard rock influences (Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, etc. - nothing past, say, 1982) whilst also sounding like something only THIS eccentric band of nerd barbarians could or would ever record. Utter heavy metal zeal unleashed via massively heavy, awesome riffage, triumphant vocals, memorable melodies, and twin guitar shred EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME. Yes! For an example of said awesome riffage, look no further than the start of the 10-minute-plus title track. And for an example of the latter, try the dazzling midpoint of "Ape Outro". Or just drop the needle (well, laser for now) on this anyplace! All that plus intelligent, ironic lyrics that make mention of opposable thumbs.
It's not exactly a Planet Of The Apes concept album, but it's close... half of the eight songs here have to do with the apes vs. humans theme (as ridiculously depicted in the wonderfully comic book-y cover art, that kinda makes this look like a punk rock album). And those four songs make it pretty clear that Slough Feg are on the side of the apes. Charleton Heston would not approve. In the progtastic "Simian Manifesto", a song full of over the top Queen-like drama, sudden stoner rock groove, and even some jangly placid pop parts, Mike says it best with the immortal lines: "Never coming down from the trees / Never bending down on my knees!"
So, we've made it pretty plain we dig Slough Feg and always do our utmost to spread the word - we even had 'em play and slay our SXSW showcase this year. It used to be that Allan here considered himself to be probably the world's #1 Slough Feg fan, but now that honor might go to the guy in Idaho who got a portrait of Mike Scalzi tattooed on his leg! (Seriously, we've seen a photo.) Yep, these days the band has made enough of a name for themselves, that it's not just Aquarius going apeshit for 'em anymore, when we used to be the only place that cared. On the internet, you'll find quite a few reviews of Ape Uprising! already out there in advance of ours, almost all of 'em insanely positive ('cause when you like this band, you really like this band). Even All Music Guide, not exactly a bastion of heavy metal fandom, beat us to it, giving Ape Uprising! a four-and-a-half out of 5 star rating.
So, while quite obviously we're always excited when Mike and the gang have a new album out, we're also always a bit apprehensive about being able to do their weird genius justice in our reviews. So this time around, we asked AQ customer Glenn Simpson, a known Slough Feg fan, and also the guy who first turned us on to those '70s heavies Jerusalem that we later made Record Of The Week when it was reissued, to shoulder a bit of the burden and write some more for us about Slough Feg's new album. He was nice enough to give it a shot, so let's turn this over to him:
"I want to start by saying that I'm not sure what this review can really accomplish. If you're a fan of Slough Feg, you automatically want their new album, right? If you're not a fan, I don't know what to say to change your mind that Aquarius hasn't already said in reviews of previous albums. But here goes. Ape Uprising! is more of everything that makes Slough Feg one of the best metal bands on the planet. At once familiar and fresh, this new album carries on musical and lyrical motifs that are distinctly Feg-ian, while simultaneously developing its own clear identity. This trait runs throughout the band's discography. There is an unmistakable Slough Feg sound, yet a song from one album would seem out of place on any other album. One of this album's compositional quirks: in the past, Slough Feg records have usually included a few instrumentals. This one doesn't, but several of the songs basically turn into instrumentals halfway through. Scalzi gets the singing out of the way, and then he and fellow guitarist Don Angelo Tringali go to town on their Les Pauls. Maybe that's by way of indicating that the (non-verbal) apes have taken over? Though it happens in several of the non-apey songs as well.
Some early reviews of Ape Uprising have deemed it one of the band's heavier albums. With the acknowledgment that "heavy" means different things to different people, I would say instead, I was struck by overall how energetic and frenetic much of this is, displaying attitude which maybe makes sense given the concept implied by the album's title. About half of the tracks on Ape Uprising! share a sort of punk aggressiveness. You'll hear a little more chug in the guitars, a little more gruffness in the singing, and a little more thud in the drums than on the band's galloping and epic sci-fi opus Traveller (2003), for instance. While I would not come anywhere near calling this Slough Feg's "punk" album, I would say they've scaled back the Thin Lizzy a wee bit and inserted some Stiff Little Fingers - or at least some Motorhead. But maybe that's just me. Also, a few parts of Ape Uprising! expand on the near boogie rock element that cropped up first on Atavism (2005) and then on Hardworlder (2007). This album's "Frankfurt-Hahn Airport Blues" is I guess the NWOBHMish hot rocking ripper "Shakedown At The Six", complete with brief drum solo breakdown. However, Slough Feg also haven't lost their Celtic folk touch, which you'll most prominently in the majestically stirring "White Cousin", with lovely acoustic guitars woven in. Really, its mishmash of influences from the 1970s makes Ape Uprising! sound somewhat timeless.
I'll say a little bit about my two favorite songs. (So far.) The biggest surprise on the new album is the first track. Where the previous three Slough Feg albums began with short fast instrumentals, Ape Uprising! throws fans for a loop by opening with a straight-up old-school doom track, a blown out, slowed down, heavier-than-thou dirge entitled, either cleverly or not, "The Hunchback of Notre Doom"! It turns out Slough Feg does doom that is both traditional AND original as well as they do 'true metal' that is both of those things. It also turns out that Mike Scalzi's rich, expressive vocals are surprisingly well suited to doom. Stunning. (This track alone could account for the heaviness ascribed to the entire album by some reviewers.) Slough Feg have dabbled in doom before, in parts (such as Traveller's "Vargr Moon") but never taken it to this extreme. It sounds like Saint Vitus, if Vitus were more influenced by Dio-era than Ozzy-era Black Sabbath [although, we are reliably informed that the other, equally bad pun the band thought up to call this song was "Ozzymodo"]. Doom freaks would probably be happy if the whole album sounded like this, but Mike Scalzi (who admittedly suffers from attention deficit disorder) sure wouldn't. Thus the rest of Ape Uprising! surges with a variety of Slough Feg songwriting stratagems. For example, my other favorite song is the final track, the surprisingly poppy but also totally rockin' "Nasty Hero", which sounds so authentically traditional metal that I was certain it was a cover and spent more than a few minutes trying to figure out what brilliant, obscure '70s metal band wrote and recorded it. To my amazement, it's a Slough Feg original. If a young Iron Maiden jammed with a veteran UFO in 1979, they could not do better than this!
I wish I didn't have to wait two years between Slough Feg albums."
Us too!
By the way, this IS gonna be coming out on vinyl, there's an slightly-delayed, limited edition European import of which we'll be getting a just a few, so let us know if you want the wax and we'll try to reserve a copy for you.
MPEG Stream: "Ape Uprising"
MPEG Stream: "Simian Manifesto"
MPEG Stream: "Shakedown At The Six"
MPEG Stream: "Nasty Hero"

BIG BUSINESS Mind The Drift (Hydrahead) cd 15.98
Big Business had always sounded a bit like the Melvins, which made perfect sense, as the drums and bass duo also function as 2nd bass and 2nd drums in the Melvins. But they always had their own thing going on, a sound that while still heavy and obtuse, was weirdly melodic, a sort of metallicized fractured pop. We meant to review last year's Here Comes The Waterworks, a totally classic chunk of hooky heaviness, equal parts heaving metallic heft, and twisted melodicism, but somehow it slipped through the review-writing cracks here, whoops. We were mostly expecting more of the same on Mind The Drift, but holy shit, it's even better than Waterworks. Way more epic and sprawling and proggy, showtunes is probably not the best word to use to describe the songs here, but that was definitely our first thought, not cheesy showtunes like your parents made you listen to in the car on long trips, no, BB's tunes could be the soundtrack to to some otherworldly Broadway musical jam packed with twisted carnivalesque epic songsmithery, smoke and streamers and flames and leering demonic faces, twisted shapes, colors psychedelic and kaleidoscopic, but more than anything, the songs are incredibly catchy, the vocals soaring and dramatic, a huge development from the punk rock howl of their earlier recordings, the instrumentation is lush, fleshed out by a guitarist, and the arrangements are impossibly complex, lots of stop / starts, amazing vocal interplay, some of the most incredibly irresistible melodies ever, all woven into super tight, dense mini-epics. It's not metal, it's not punk, it's not post rock, it's bits and pieces of all of those, but cobbled together into something completely jaw droppingly over the top, but not ostentatious, the songs might feel grand and majestic, but it also feels like these guys could just reel off a new song at the drop of a hat and it would sound as good as any of these. The band do get rough and raw, and rock out a bit, but they shine on those aforementioned numbers, where they kick out the sprawling dramatic soundtracky post punk show tune jams, like some impossibly rad mix of the Melvins and Meat Loaf (circa Bat Out Of Hell). Our favorite track is probably "Gold And Final" (although it seems like every time we listen to this we discover a new favorite), with its super tense brooding verse, the little looped effected stutter before a devastating chorus, and an insane hook. We've been humming this song nonstop since we got this. Just listen to the sound sample, totally timeless, like some classic rock jam transported forward in time several decades, but picking up all sorts of detritus in the process and growing gradually slightly more warped and twisted. So good. Could be a contender for record of the year. Really.
Incredible packaging too, done up like found vintage postcards, the song titles and credits worked into mysterious missives, all the images washed out, complete with a Big Business post mark and everything.
MPEG Stream: "Found Art"
MPEG Stream: "Gold And Final"
MPEG Stream: "Cats, Mice."

TELESCOPES Singles Compilation #2 (Mind Expansion) cd 15.98
We made the first compilation of Telescopes singles a Record Of The Week late last year, so it would make sense, that the second volume might receive the same honors. As we mentioned back then, we've been pretty obsessed with that particular era in druggy space rock, be it the Telescopes, or Spacemen 3, or Loop, or Swervedriver. There seems to be a resurgence in interest, as more and more young bands discover that sound and attempt to make it their own.
We're not complaining of course, we love that blown out, druggy drone rock, looped riffage, and simple pounding krautrock rhythms, effects and drones, swirling and shimmering, and the recent spate of reissues drove that home, both Loop and Swervedriver getting the deluxe reissue treatment, and reminding us why they STILL rule, and why few bands could ever hope to create the same sort of druggy sonic space magick.
That said, this Telescopes singles collection offers up another side of the band, some of that old sound is still present, the pounding droning churning riffage, the swirling spaced out effects, the buried vox, the trancelike arrangements, but if anything the band have taken their sound even further out, ditching any semblance of proper rock arrangement, sometimes playing the same riff for 6 minutes, other times crafting a slow hushed drone-y crawl, dabbling in abstract slowcore, space-drone, and various other abstractions in sound we don't really have proper names for yet, and you know what? We love it. It's like everything we love about space rock and krautrock and slowcore but just smeared and blurred and pulled apart and reimagined as something way more psychedelic, way more minimal, and so much more compelling and arresting than another disc of fuzzy space-y rock jams (not that we wouldn't love that too), instead, these are explorations, experiments, but only to the degree that they digress from various space rock tropes, offering instead, something wholly other, a sound that is avant and challenging, but at the same time warm and enveloping and inviting. This is timeless trance music, even at it's heaviest, The Telescopes have created some sort of ur-rock, loosed from all the usual rock and roll strictures and allowed to ooze and sprawl and billow and shimmer and explode into ever expanding clouds of blinding glimmer and prismatic tonal shift, and it's ever so divine.
Even though this is technically a singles collection, none of these tracks sound like proper singles, instead, as mentioned above, they barely retain any rock or pop, instead existing as slow shifting fields of looped mysterious sound, infused with elements of the rock and pop that came before.
The opener "Winter #7" is absolutely stunning, a hushed bassy crawl, with ethereal barely audible boy girl vocals, distant horns, plenty of crumbling ambience and buzzing crackle, wheezing keyboards, fans of Crescent and Flying Saucer Attack and similarly abstract space rock will be smitten. Which leads directly and seamlessly into "The Perfect Needle #4" (a title that smacks of Spacemen 3, as does the track itself), a slow smoldering drift, all muted drones, mumbled vox, buried percussive thumps, a sort shimmering patina of glitch and crackle, totally space-y and meditative, which leads directly into the first 'rock' song, "Another Sky" which takes a woozy warbly Loop-ish riff, and then, yep, loops it, creating a totally mesmerizing riffdrone, while all around it effects swirl, voices hover, shards of squiggly guitar streak past sheets of blurred psychedelic supernovas, utterly entrancing and irresistible.
And so it goes, a trajectory set for the outer reaches of the galaxy, but it's not where we're headed, it's how we get there, and the soundtrack to the ride, from the murky muted jangle laced shimmer of "Household Objective #2", the pounding flute flecked effects drenched space garage groove of "Dsm-1v Axis", which gets almost industrial at one point, to the strange muted whirring dronescape of "Another Whip", to the buzzing guitar stasis of "The Blue Shroud Of Alkatraz", with its static charged sheets of crumbling high end, wrapped in tendrils of skree and softened crunch, underpinned by a deep moaning tangle of droneguitar, finally discharging in a warped burst of glitched out effects and fractured buzz. And there's still more to discover, with every listen. Headphones, while not required, will allow you to delve even deeper, allow you to escape your earthly bonds and get lost in the Telescopes world of bleary eyed fuzz, hushed minimal mystery, greyed out guitar grime, and looped outer space shimmer.
MPEG Stream: "Winter #7"
MPEG Stream: "The Perfect Needle #4"
MPEG Stream: "Another Sky"
MPEG Stream: "Dsm-1v Axis"

BLACK VOMIT Jungle Death (Rusty Axe) cd 9.98
It's been a while, more than a year in fact, since we last got a batch of TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA, but it's finally that time once again. We were beginning to jones pretty hard. For those of you who can't quite figure it out from the name of the genre, this stuff is black metal, and psychedelic, and most (if not all) of the bands hail from Sheffield in the UK. Beyond that, this stuff is pretty hard to describe, from blown out grinding blackened psychedelic post rock to chugging in-the-red blacknoise to glistening soft focus krautdrone to pounding distorted sludge to processed machinelike buzz and stutter, and we're not even just describing the genre, most of the bands somehow manage to incorporate all of those elements into one fractured fucked up and seriously and gloriously schizophrenic sound.
We'd been waiting for a proper real cd (non cd-r) release from any of these guys, and while there have been rumors of a new Ice Bound Majesty full length on tUMULt (!), it was Black Vomit who were ultimately immortalized in aluminum and plastic first, thanks to those twisted freaks at Rusty Axe. But even by Rusty Axe's already freaky standards, Jungle Death is some seriously twisted avant heavy black weirdness. The sort of stuff that will have your standard black metal knuckle dragger scratching his head and reaching for the nearest Dimmu Borgir cd.
The metal component of black vomit is a sort of metal that sounds like it was cooked up by Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck, Aidan Baker and Justin Broadrick would have conjured up in some underground lair, with no small amount of black magic. Guitars that roar and howl, piled on top of one another until they're so thick, they threaten to collapse your stereo speakers like miniature black holes, the riffs grind and buzz, blurred and smeared into huge heaving walls of blown out white hot sound, usually weirdly processed too, so buried beneath the roiling surface, lurk all manner of electronics and glitch and hiss and static. Sometimes the heaviness stumbles into streaks of sonic black tar, slowing the sound down into some blown out glacial trudge, and even then, it's no ordinary doom, the sound glistens and glows, it's heaviness more a function of staring into some alien sun, the beams of light transformed into sound, wrapping you in thick sheets of effulgent buzz and black hued shimmer.
The various bits of skull crushing heaviness are balanced by some of the coolest drone and ambient music we've heard, from the rumbling, muted and melodic low end intro, that sounds like some creepy krautrock bassline slowed waaaaay down, to the glistening glitched out sun dappled shimmer of "Conderlint5", with it's mysterious alien voices and skittery crystalline textures, to the moaning lonely spidery guitar drift of "Last Cries Of The Lost".
The record starts out damaged, and just gets more and more fucked and freaked out as it progresses, looped tribal drumming wreathed in swirling static, laced with strange samples, gives way to stuttering processed electronic grind, which slowly transforms into a sea of warped drones and Oval like glitches, all smoothed out into an undulating underwater soundscape, wrapped in jagged shards of distorted crunch and sonar like beeps. A brief bit of indie jangle, all minor key strum and sad lilting melody, explodes in a flurry of crumbling stumbling ultra distorted post rock pound, before slipping into some almost Pop Ambient sounding drift, only to again transform into some impossibly twisted bit of cinematic mood music, complete with haunting strings, and dubbed out drums, finally opening up into "Dark Beloved Cloud", the longest track on the record, all Burzumy and murky and buzzy and blackened, woozy and off kilter, with more processed vocals, tons of effects, long stretches of tripped out psychedelic minimalism, before the pounding D-beat climax, and then a soft focus shimmery fade out, which leads directly into the record closer, a warm warped swirl of deeeeeep thrum, and slow moving melodic murk, again shot through with echo drenched voices and bits of electronic twinkle and glimmer, fading out into nearly 5 minutes of near silence. Weird.
But so fucking mind blowing. Totally wiping out any boundaries between drone music and black metal and ambient noise and electronic grind and whatever other fucked up sounds these freaks fuse into their totally genius and totally unique TRUE SHEFFIELD BLACK PSYCHEDELIA!!
MPEG Stream: "A Premonition Of Inevitable Doom"
MPEG Stream: "Deluge From Hell"
MPEG Stream: "Vigilance Night"
MPEG Stream: "Constdernt"

AMEN DUNES Dia (Locust) cd 14.98
When we first got this in, we were convinced it was some reissued lost psychedelic gem from the sixties or seventies. From the blurry red and black cover, the dearth of information, and heck it's on Locust, a label well known for killer reissues. So we threw it on, and we were still convinced, although we were blown away by its raw feral blown out psychedelic poppiness. Were there really bands making this sort of inspired and drug fueled racket 30 or 40 years ago? Perhaps, but Amen Dunes wasn't one of them. No, Amen Dunes is apparently the work of one man, a guy called Damon McMahon, who spent an extended stretch holed up in his house in the Catskills (although apparently now, he's holed up in his new house, in CHINA!) channeling some serious demons, and creating a brain melting, warped and distorted, fucked up and freaked out psychedelic classic.
There are definitely hints of the new wave of noise rock, all that shit gaze stuff, and lo-fi garage, Eat Skull, Psychedelic Horseshit, Wavves, Oh Sees, etc, but Amen Dunes' sound is much more old school, going all the way back to drugged out sonic visionaries like Roky Erickson and George Brigman and the like.
Super distorted, everything doused in reverb and delay and distortion, the recording super lo-fi, tape hiss all over the place, murky and muddy, and gloriously fuggy, the vocals slipping from feral shriek, to swoonsome moan, to almost Beach Boys like croon, but even at their most melodic, they remain a bit off kilter, slightly ominous, the rantings of some inspired lunatic right on the edge. The music is rough and raw, but catchy as hell, guitars buzz and jangle, detuned into bizarre Eastern sounding modalities or whipped up into a frenzied squall of Hendrixian freakout. The bass is a huge part of the sound too, rubbery and warm, thick and undulating, sometimes just offering up a layer of deep rumble, other times creating some truly haunting melodic counterpoint. The drums are simple and sporadic, a shuffling pound, a minimal skitter, a loose rickety framework for the Dunes' constantly-on-the-verge-of-collapse echo drenched drone pop, a sort of chilled out Dead C vibe permeates the proceedings as well, a way more damaged and even more druggy Velvets vibe too, all of this shit through with some old timey folkiness, it's a bit of a hodge podge, but it works.
The fractured looped psych drone weirdness of "Fleshless Esta Mira Wife Of Spades" is followed by the almost countryish "Patagonian Domes", before the woozy atonal Supreme Dicks worship of "By The Bridal", with some serious shades of Neutral Milk Hotel (we kid you not).
The rest of the record is equally as tripped out and all over the place, while managing to sound like an actual record, not just a collection of songs. "White Lace" is a gorgeous chunk of softly strummed murk, with super catchy vocals, layers of hiss and buzz, and a smattering of strange electronics, "Castles" is total Laurel Canyon country folk, but infused with just a little more pathos, the vocals a super gorgeous, on the verge of cracking wail, the hand claps, shakers and simple strumming underpinned by a warm wheezing organ. A handful of the songs sound almost Beatles-esque, super classic jangly pop, just barely psychedelic, with the guitars subtly warped, but the killer hooks totally intact, and then the record closes with "Breaker", maybe one of the most moving and intense tracks on the record, the musical accompaniment, minimal, simple softly strummed guitar, and some soft organ shimmer, but the vocals, so impassioned and emotional, raw and way up front, melodic and intense, howling and wailing, with multiple voices multitracked into a gorgeous wavery, fractured two part harmony, that ends up sounding like some sort of outsider gospel music. Totally inspirational, mind blowing, rocking, catchy, darkly mysterious... Easily one of our favorite records of the year so far!!
MPEG Stream: "Amen Dunes"
MPEG Stream: "Miami Beach"
MPEG Stream: "Fleshless Esta Mira Wife Of Space"
MPEG Stream: "Patagonian Domes"
MPEG Stream: "Breaker"

AMEN DUNES Dia (Locust) lp 17.98
When we first got this in, we were convinced it was some reissued lost psychedelic gem from the sixties or seventies. From the blurry red and black cover, the dearth of information, and heck it's on Locust, a label well known for killer reissues. So we threw it on, and we were still convinced, although we were blown away by its raw feral blown out psychedelic poppiness. Were there really bands making this sort of inspired and drug fueled racket 30 or 40 years ago? Perhaps, but Amen Dunes wasn't one of them. No, Amen Dunes is apparently the work of one man, a guy called Damon McMahon, who spent an extended stretch holed up in his house in the Catskills (although apparently now, he's holed up in his new house, in CHINA!) channeling some serious demons, and creating a brain melting, warped and distorted, fucked up and freaked out psychedelic classic.
There are definitely hints of the new wave of noise rock, all that shit gaze stuff, and lo-fi garage, Eat Skull, Psychedelic Horseshit, Wavves, Oh Sees, etc, but Amen Dunes' sound is much more old school, going all the way back to drugged out sonic visionaries like Roky Erickson and George Brigman and the like.
Super distorted, everything doused in reverb and delay and distortion, the recording super lo-fi, tape hiss all over the place, murky and muddy, and gloriously fuggy, the vocals slipping from feral shriek, to swoonsome moan, to almost Beach Boys like croon, but even at their most melodic, they remain a bit off kilter, slightly ominous, the rantings of some inspired lunatic right on the edge. The music is rough and raw, but catchy as hell, guitars buzz and jangle, detuned into bizarre Eastern sounding modalities or whipped up into a frenzied squall of Hendrixian freakout. The bass is a huge part of the sound too, rubbery and warm, thick and undulating, sometimes just offering up a layer of deep rumble, other times creating some truly haunting melodic counterpoint. The drums are simple and sporadic, a shuffling pound, a minimal skitter, a loose rickety framework for the Dunes' constantly-on-the-verge-of-collapse echo drenched drone pop, a sort of chilled out Dead C vibe permeates the proceedings as well, a way more damaged and even more druggy Velvets vibe too, all of this shit through with some old timey folkiness, it's a bit of a hodge podge, but it works.
The fractured looped psych drone weirdness of "Fleshless Esta Mira Wife Of Spades" is followed by the almost countryish "Patagonian Domes", before the woozy atonal Supreme Dicks worship of "By The Bridal", with some serious shades of Neutral Milk Hotel (we kid you not).
The rest of the record is equally as tripped out and all over the place, while managing to sound like an actual record, not just a collection of songs. "White Lace" is a gorgeous chunk of softly strummed murk, with super catchy vocals, layers of hiss and buzz, and a smattering of strange electronics, "Castles" is total Laurel Canyon country folk, but infused with just a little more pathos, the vocals a super gorgeous, on the verge of cracking wail, the hand claps, shakers and simple strumming underpinned by a warm wheezing organ. A handful of the songs sound almost Beatles-esque, super classic jangly pop, just barely psychedelic, with the guitars subtly warped, but the killer hooks totally intact, and then the record closes with "Breaker", maybe one of the most moving and intense tracks on the record, the musical accompaniment, minimal, simple softly strummed guitar, and some soft organ shimmer, but the vocals, so impassioned and emotional, raw and way up front, melodic and intense, howling and wailing, with multiple voices multitracked into a gorgeous wavery, fractured two part harmony, that ends up sounding like some sort of outsider gospel music. Totally inspirational, mind blowing, rocking, catchy, darkly mysterious... Easily one of our favorite records of the year so far!!
MPEG Stream: "Amen Dunes"
MPEG Stream: "Miami Beach"
MPEG Stream: "Fleshless Esta Mira Wife Of Space"
MPEG Stream: "Patagonian Domes"
MPEG Stream: "Breaker"

NADJA When I See The Sun Always Shines On TV (The End) cd 14.98
Covers records can definitely be a cop out. They're easy, and fun, and who doesn't want to just jam out to their favorite tunes. But some covers records do transcend, whether it's song choice, theme, or those particular versions and interpretation, the right covers, played the right way, can be as good if not better than a band's records proper. Which makes sense as you're typically covering songs that are, at least to you, if not everyone, 'classics.'
Which brings us to When I See The Sun Always Shines On TV, which is in fact, a collection of covers, many of which might seem like super obvious choices. Which is okay, it's as if Nadja wanted to acknowledge their influences loudly and proudly in the face of folks who accuse them of ripping off some of these very same bands. And at least half of these tracks are actually by bands that we've compared Nadja to in past reviews. So we were sort of psyched to see how instead of infusing their own music with the influences of other bands, they might approach it the other way around, taking these songs and bands they love, and filtering them through their own sound. Alongside those obvious choices though are some totally out of left field choices, that on the surface seem to make no sense, but in the context of this collection fit perfectly, and when heard all buzzy and blissy and Nadja'd up, sometimes sound better than the originals.
The album opens with My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow", and Nadja make it their own, which is no small feat considering how iconic that main riff is, but heck, in the past we'v talked about how everything sounds better slower, well imagine that jam, slowed way down, and beefed WAY up, so what was already THEE shoegaze anthem of all time, is transformed into a lurching, heaving, crumbling mass of glorious blurred and blown out soft focus heaviness. Then comes Codeine's "Pea", another obvious Nadja influence, we would have gone for "Cave In", some doom band needs to cover that one, but "Pea" suits them, they don't even rock it out that much, it's a bit heavier, but not much slower, and Aidan Baker's soft tentative croon is a dead ringer for Codeine's Stephen Immerwahr. The band also tackle the Swans, and the Cure, the latter's "Faith" stretched out to almost 13 minutes, and expansive glorious woozy gloomy sprawl.
But it's the unlikely choices that seal the deal. A-Ha? It's the track that gives this comp its title, and although we're not familiar with the original (well, actually Cup is!), the Nadja version is gorgeous, heavy and poppy and gloriously blown out.
Then there's the Slayer cover, "Dead Skin Mask" from Seasons In The Abyss, not as obvious a choice as "Raining Blood" or "Angel Of Death", but for Nadja a much more suitable choice, that main riff, sounds soooooo good, all sludgey and washed out, that main melody even more seasick and woozy sounding, the new version somehow even creepier than the original. However our favorite two tracks here are definitely the least likely, one you may have heard, one you most likely haven't.
First, Elliott Smith's "Needle In The Hay", which of course is a fantastic song, but in Nadja's capable hands, it becomes even more harrowing, much more minor key, the vocals worn and weary, the drums a trudging death march, all beneath a thick layer of droning buzz and keening keyboards, and then that main hook, so epic and mysterious and sorrowful. You can almost imagine this is what Smith was imagining when he wrote it. And as much as we love this whole disc, this is the one we keep returning to.
And then there's "Long Dark Twenties", which was previously releases as a super limited 7", and which just happens to be a cover of a song from the Kids In The Hall movie, and yeah, that makes no sense at all, but as far as we're concerned it's become a Nadja song, we actually reviewed that song in depth when we had the 7", so let's revisit that briefly:
Folks who managed to catch Nadja performing live at aQuarius not too long ago, were treated to quite possibly the heaviest, catchiest, grooviest Nadja track yet. An awesome hook filled seventies rock style ultra jam, wrapped in thick clouds of billowing distortion and anchored by the crunch and pound of programmed beats, Aidan Baker's vocals a whispered croon, Leah Buckareff's bass throbbing and rumbling, but the main riff, SHIT, unbelievable, even after our ears stopped ringing, we were all humming that riff for days...
Well the funny thing we learned later, was that there song was in fact a cover. And an incredibly unlikely cover at that. The only obvious link between the original and the band covering it? Canada. The song, some of you might remember, is in fact from the Kids In The Hall movie Brain Candy, and proves that Nadja can turn hooky pop into hooky sludge-y doom. The chorus is an absolute killer, and similar to how Torche transform pop into skullcrushing hook filled heaviness, Nadja take that pop and wrap it all up in some of their distinctive blissed out fuzz and we're talking HIT. Well, a hit if there were actually some sort of blissdoomdronesludgepop chart. Which there should be. And there sort of is, in our heads, but anyway...
So yeah, for folks who missed out on that single, or who just want to have it on cd instead of vinyl, well, it's worth the price of admission for just that jam. But thankfully, every song on here is a crushing doom drenched, pop infused, slow motion chunk of dreamy blissed out, ultra catchy heaviness. And even though it's not technically a proper Nadja record, it just may well be our favorite Nadja record yet.
MPEG Stream: "Only Shallow (My Bloody Valentine)"
MPEG Stream: "Pea (Codeine)"
MPEG Stream: "Needle In The Hay (Elliott Smith)"
MPEG Stream: "Long Dark Twenties (Kids In The Hall)"

OH SEES, THEE Help (In The Red) lp 10.98
Listening to Help, it's almost impossible to hear anything but mere traces of the chaotic noise rock path John Dwyer followed to make it to Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS, and Ohsees), but it's that noisy past, and penchant for musical shit stirring, that informs the jangly garage pop on Help, and transforms the band's jangle and shuffle and pound into near perfect buzzy fuzzy catchy retro pop, and makes it easily the best Oh Sees record yet. And a definite contended for (garage) pop record of the year.
Most of us were introduced to Dwyer via his two piece noise rock costume rock combo Pink And Brown (after brief stints in some well known Providence outfits), but unlike most of the costumed joke bands at the time, P&B offered some serious songsmithery along with the unhinged live shows and audience baiting. A brief stint drumming for SF grindlords Burmese led directly into the band that brought Dwyer to worldwide attention, the Coachwhips. Arguably one of the best live bands around, the Coachwhips made up for what they lacked in actual songs with sweat and alcohol soaked performances, utter chaos, and sometimes literally, ultra destructive houseshows. Coachwhips shows were all about the energy, the vibe, jumping around, flailing wildly, getting wrecked and having a blast. Sometimes though, that energy was difficult to translate to home listening. Take away the sweaty throng and the deafening volume and, well why would you want to do that?
And so came the Oh Sees, originally called OCS, and a double cd release on Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, essentially a solo record, one disc of folky fluttery lo-fi twang flecked pop, another of corrosive textured noise experiments, which ended up being, for many of us, one of our favorite post Pink And Brown Dwyer documents. OCS transformed into The Oh Sees and became a real band, and seemed poised to follow in the sonic footsteps of the Coachwhips, stripped down garage rock, super lo-fi, lost of brittle high end, yelped distorted vocals, tribal drumming, but there was definitely something more, more refined, more catchy, more timeless sounding, something much more than garage rock, a sound that reminded us of sixties girl groups, of Phil Spector productions, raw and primal, but lush and expansive and catchy. But that catchy lush side of the Oh Sees remained hidden beneath squalls of tweeter abuse and fractured effects, a wall of fuzz and buzz more than an actual wall of sound. Until now.
Help finds the band making their first record for garage rock stalwarts In The Red, which is ironic as this is Thee Oh Sees' least typically garage rock record yet. Instead, the sound is total pop, plucked fresh from a time capsule buried in the sixties, the guitars jangle as much as crunch, lots of reverb, the vocals wreathed in a haze of delay, lots of female vox, the choruses are lush, the drums are still tribal, but much more measured, often quite spare, the arrangements though are anything but classic, sometimes getting super abstract, but never losing their catchiness, sometimes adding all sorts of extra distorted overload, but just as quickly slipping into something smooth and groovy. Minus the weird moments and the fucked up productions, some of these songs do really sound like they were just transported forward four decades.
"Meat Step Lively" starts off all Cramps-y, with a fuzzy grinding main riff, simple pounding rhythm, but adds some awesome female vocals and background 'ooooohs', some spidery lead guitars, and coolest of all breaks it down with about a minute to go into a swinging sixties smoke-y jazzy flute flecked groove. "The Turn Around" is a minute of blown out drum damage and fractured effects, but wrapped around a sing songy main riff, and some cool distorted and reverbed vox, in total Guided By Voices fashion, they truncate what could have been the jam of the record, and launch into "Can You See", which is all slithery and washed out, with angelic background vocals, shuffling drums, and a cool dreamy bridge, but the whole thing still manages to sound ominous and intense and weirdly sexy.
The record closes with "Peanut Butter Oven", which we first heard on the recent (and sadly now out of print) Awesome Vistas 12", and it's obvious why this was the single, it definitely is THE jam of the record, with it's simple stripped down jangle, workmanlike drum beat, and soaring minor key strings, and let's not forget the gorgeous harmony vocals draped over the singing strings and that irresistible main riff.
And so it goes, every track here is a gem, each one offers up something new, some twisted take on that classic sixties garage rock sound, but it's that sound revved up and filtered through Dwyer's gloriously cracked pop sensibilities, bathed in buzz and fuzz or stripped way down and left shimmery and crystalline, sometimes wrapped in HUGE hooks or allowed to simmer and slither, the catchiness subtle yet so irresistible, and unlike past efforts, even at its noisiest, the noise element seems more an organic part of the sound, and is often shaped into something barely recognizable as noisy.
We knew Dwyer and company had it in them, and now they've proven it, BIG TIME. Dying to see what they come up with next, if they could possibly one up this here disc, but hell, for now, Help has us way satisfied. And records like these are exactly why they invented that repeat button on your cd player. Folks with turntable will just have to get up and flip the record over and over and over, again and again and again.
WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Meat Step Lively"
MPEG Stream: "Ruby Go Home"
MPEG Stream: "Rainbow"

OH SEES, THEE Help (In The Red) cd 13.98
Listening to Help, it's almost impossible to hear anything but mere traces of the chaotic noise rock path John Dwyer followed to make it to Thee Oh Sees (aka OCS, and Ohsees), but it's that noisy past, and penchant for musical shit stirring, that informs the jangly garage pop on Help, and transforms the band's jangle and shuffle and pound into near perfect buzzy fuzzy catchy retro pop, and makes it easily the best Oh Sees record yet. And a definite contended for (garage) pop record of the year.
Most of us were introduced to Dwyer via his two piece noise rock costume rock combo Pink And Brown (after brief stints in some well known Providence outfits), but unlike most of the costumed joke bands at the time, P&B offered some serious songsmithery along with the unhinged live shows and audience baiting. A brief stint drumming for SF grindlords Burmese led directly into the band that brought Dwyer to worldwide attention, the Coachwhips. Arguably one of the best live bands around, the Coachwhips made up for what they lacked in actual songs with sweat and alcohol soaked performances, utter chaos, and sometimes literally, ultra destructive houseshows. Coachwhips shows were all about the energy, the vibe, jumping around, flailing wildly, getting wrecked and having a blast. Sometimes though, that energy was difficult to translate to home listening. Take away the sweaty throng and the deafening volume and, well why would you want to do that?
And so came the Oh Sees, originally called OCS, and a double cd release on Andee's tUMULt label a few years back, essentially a solo record, one disc of folky fluttery lo-fi twang flecked pop, another of corrosive textured noise experiments, which ended up being, for many of us, one of our favorite post Pink And Brown Dwyer documents. OCS transformed into The Oh Sees and became a real band, and seemed poised to follow in the sonic footsteps of the Coachwhips, stripped down garage rock, super lo-fi, lost of brittle high end, yelped distorted vocals, tribal drumming, but there was definitely something more, more refined, more catchy, more timeless sounding, something much more than garage rock, a sound that reminded us of sixties girl groups, of Phil Spector productions, raw and primal, but lush and expansive and catchy. But that catchy lush side of the Oh Sees remained hidden beneath squalls of tweeter abuse and fractured effects, a wall of fuzz and buzz more than an actual wall of sound. Until now.
Help finds the band making their first record for garage rock stalwarts In The Red, which is ironic as this is Thee Oh Sees' least typically garage rock record yet. Instead, the sound is total pop, plucked fresh from a time capsule buried in the sixties, the guitars jangle as much as crunch, lots of reverb, the vocals wreathed in a haze of delay, lots of female vox, the choruses are lush, the drums are still tribal, but much more measured, often quite spare, the arrangements though are anything but classic, sometimes getting super abstract, but never losing their catchiness, sometimes adding all sorts of extra distorted overload, but just as quickly slipping into something smooth and groovy. Minus the weird moments and the fucked up productions, some of these songs do really sound like they were just transported forward four decades.
"Meat Step Lively" starts off all Cramps-y, with a fuzzy grinding main riff, simple pounding rhythm, but adds some awesome female vocals and background 'ooooohs', some spidery lead guitars, and coolest of all breaks it down with about a minute to go into a swinging sixties smoke-y jazzy flute flecked groove. "The Turn Around" is a minute of blown out drum damage and fractured effects, but wrapped around a sing songy main riff, and some cool distorted and reverbed vox, in total Guided By Voices fashion, they truncate what could have been the jam of the record, and launch into "Can You See", which is all slithery and washed out, with angelic background vocals, shuffling drums, and a cool dreamy bridge, but the whole thing still manages to sound ominous and intense and weirdly sexy.
The record closes with "Peanut Butter Oven", which we first heard on the recent (and sadly now out of print) Awesome Vistas 12", and it's obvious why this was the single, it definitely is THE jam of the record, with it's simple stripped down jangle, workmanlike drum beat, and soaring minor key strings, and let's not forget the gorgeous harmony vocals draped over the singing strings and that irresistible main riff.
And so it goes, every track here is a gem, each one offers up something new, some twisted take on that classic sixties garage rock sound, but it's that sound revved up and filtered through Dwyer's gloriously cracked pop sensibilities, bathed in buzz and fuzz or stripped way down and left shimmery and crystalline, sometimes wrapped in HUGE hooks or allowed to simmer and slither, the catchiness subtle yet so irresistible, and unlike past efforts, even at its noisiest, the noise element seems more an organic part of the sound, and is often shaped into something barely recognizable as noisy.
We knew Dwyer and company had it in them, and now they've proven it, BIG TIME. Dying to see what they come up with next, if they could possibly one up this here disc, but hell, for now, Help has us way satisfied. And records like these are exactly why they invented that repeat button on your cd player. Folks with turntable will just have to get up and flip the record over and over and over, again and again and again.
WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Meat Step Lively"
MPEG Stream: "Ruby Go Home"
MPEG Stream: "Rainbow"

CHERRY, DON & LATIF KHAN Music / Sangam (Heavenly Sweetness) lp 25.00
We rave about jazz legend Don Cherry as often as we can. Every reissue has us all in a tizzy. In the past we made his mind blowing Orient an aQ record Of The Week. And in retrospect, we probably should have made the Blue Lake reissue a ROTW as well. Cherry was continually pushing the boundaries of jazz, exploring and helping shape free jazz, and incorporating all manner of world music into his ever changing and expanding sound.
This disc, recorded in 1978, found Cherry once again reimagining the sound of jazz, and challenging unadventurous jazz fans, by teaming up with legendary Indian percussionist Ustad Ahmed Latif Khan. Cherry had experimented with Indian music before on past recordings, but this was the first full on collaboration. Two sides, one featuring Cherry compositions, accompanied by Khan on tablas, the other side, Khan compositions, the tablas more of the driving force, the sound distinctly more Indian classical, with Cherry accompanying Khan.
The untitled opener finds Cherry and Khan covering Ornette Coleman, Cherry's former band leader. It's a dark brooding shuffle, all warm keyboard grooves, and the tablas, how they change everything, the skittery rhythms, but also the strange rubbery low end, the song eventually morphs into a Cherry original, and gets a bit proggy with wild trumpets and thick organs, the tablas still driving the whole thing. It's the next track where it gets really interesting though. A sprawling rhythmscape, the tablas doing double time, the rhythm, and a pulsing sort-of-bass line, Cherry delivering abstract almost scat like falsetto vocals, dark and drone-y and spaced out and minimal, peppered with occasional bursts of wild horn skronk, but for the most part, a swirling tripped out stretch of throbbing subtly psychedelic jazz minimalism. The final Cherry composed track is another gem, all glistening chimes and high end tones, flurries of piano, distant horns, whooshing effects, and of course the skitter of the tablas, more melodic almost that rhythmic on this track. Cherry also introduces some flute, which gives the track a sort of freak folk vibe, really!
Khan's side is distinctly less jazz. The tablas way up in the mix, his dexterous rhythms totally spellbinding, intricate, and again melodic, Cherry offering up strange bits of percussion, muted keyboards, very abstract and so cool. The final track, a sprawling 13 minute epic begins with just organ, drifting in space, until the tablas come in, and holy shit, even more intense and intricate, wreathed in a bit of reverb, and slipping from loping grooves to wild bursts of impossibly complex rhythmatism, the organ, a constant warm whir in the background, and the timbre of the keyboards, continues to infuse the track with a distinctly prog feel. Making this some sort of abstract classical Indian jazz prog? Whatever you want to call it, these are some gorgeously hypnotic and meditative sounds. So very recommended. Fans of the Necks might get into this too, similarly dark minimal vibe, especially the Khan tracks, and well worth checking out for the rest of you, even if jazz isn't normally your thing.
MPEG Stream: "One Dance"
MPEG Stream: "Air Mail"
MPEG Stream: "Sangam"

PESTE NOIRE Ballade Cuntre Lo Anemi Francor (De Profundis / Rosenkrantz) cd 16.98
Pretty much as soon as we heard this, we knew it was going to be Record Of The Week, and not just black metal record of the week. In the past, Peste Noire seems to have always been unfairly categorized as an Amesoeurs / Alcest sideproject (we plead guilty of that as well) due not only to the presence of Neige, the mastermind behind both Amesoeurs and Alcest, but the seemingly shared membership between all three bands, and while Neige did no doubt contribute much to Peste Noire's sound, it seems Peste Noire was much more the brainchild of only remaining original member, Famine, whose other main musical outlet is the almost equally twisted Valfunde, and as if to prove the validity of the above claim, has assembled an almost entirely new lineup (although Audrey from Amesoeurs contributes some vocals) and cobbled together the most damaged, most fucked up, most gloriously bizarre Peste Noire record yet. Which if you've heard any of the other records is definitely saying something!
The record is weirdly arranged, five proper songs, with 2 minute or shorter song fragments and interludes, some that play like proper songs themselves, only truncated, others that act as intros or just totally tweaked unhinged sound experiments, but somehow, songs and non-songs alike hold together beautifully, and bafflingly, the band having created some sort of crusty, blackened, melancholy, depressive French folk flecked classic metal.
The intro begins with sizzling shimmering cymbals, simple percussion, eventually joined by beautiful ethereal female vocals, as well as some raspy blackened not-really-harmony vocals, then the riff comes in, and damn if it isn't a riff from Star Wars, but super distorted and blown out, pounding, crusty, epic and majestic, the rasped vocals over a haunting military sounding speech. And then straight into the first 'proper' track, which begins as some sort of sea shanty like French folk song, but with the addition of some hellish black vokills, you can almost imagine a table full of French soldiers, and one dripping slimy otherworldy beast, all singing along, glasses raised to the sky. Then in comes a very classic sounding metal riff, but the guitars muted and woozy, the tempo lurching and seasick, all manner of different vocals, crooning, shrieking, howling, then an awesomely weird squiggly bit of low end, super tripped out and psychedelic but somehow subtle and buried in the mix. Guitars soar and sing and jangle, wrapped around equally dramatic vocals, a total French folk crust anthem.
The follow up track begins all dark acoustic guitars and birdsong, martial percussion, eventually exploding into a super buzzy distorted march, pounding away, midtemp and melancholy, before returning to a super gorgeous, hauntingly depressive gothic crust almost-ballad, blackened and distorted, but also post rocky and strangely emotional and moving.
The 'interludes' include some warped and warbly haunted house piano, doused in hiss and crackle, ghostly female vocals drifting amidst the warm whir, sinister laughter, squalls of maniacal shrieks, dueling male / female vocals, almost operatic, soon joined again by that monstrous blackened croak, warm woozy calliopes, soundtracky keyboards and the sound of storms, tons of reverb and delay, tape hiss and softly crumbling distortion, all creating perfect segues between loping depressive midtempo blackened post metal lurch, super blown out in the red almost D-beat pounding buzz, those vocals transforming from hellish howl to deep moan, there's even some wheezing harmonica, all leading up to the final track, "Soleils Couchants", which begins with birdsong again, and an awesomely angular and beautifully twisted guitar part, paired up with a gorgeous minor key harmony, before slipping into a moody downtuned creep, complete with weird frog like vocals, and a looped bit of beeps and chirps, total post-doom weirdness, literally like nothing you've ever heard, it sounds a little like that first part of the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland, where you're just floating through the dark bayou, lit only but slivers of moonlight and the flickering light of fireflies, it's like a soundtrack to that, swampy and doomy and mysterious, until the band launches into a strangely melodic black doom midtempo jam, the guitars minor key, multiple vocals merging into raspy otherworldly harmonies, before breaking down into a long stretch of just guitars and vocals, the guitars twisted and spidery but still melodic, the voices tortured but super passionate, yet again infusing the fucked up twisted blackness with pathos and emotion, keeping it from being weird for weird's sake, this is something else entirely. What sounds like a child's voice joins in, twisted around that hellish vokill, all draped over a gorgeously catchy riff, reminding us a bit of Katatonia or Lifelover, before spiraling and sprawling into a seriously melodic blackened post rock jam, and then finally returning to the doomy lurch that began the song some seven minutes earlier.
Peste Noire have (again) managed the seemingly impossible, creating a record both totally twisted and damaged, but also lovely and moving and melodic, a record that ranks up there in our pantheon of most bizarre and fucked up black metal records ever, while somehow appealing to even the not so metal inclined, a confusional mix of black and crust and pop and folk, all twisted and tangled up and forced through Peste Noire's cracked musical sensibilities, the result, a record fucked up and fantastical, and this review not withstanding, almost impossible to describe.
MPEG Stream: "Neire Peste"
MPEG Stream: "La Mesniee Mordrissoire"
MPEG Stream: "Ballade Cuntre Les Anemis De La France"
MPEG Stream: "Soleils Couchants"

V/A 1970's Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Sublime Frequencies) cd 16.98
Another out of print, previously vinyl only Sublime Frequencies gem gets a long overdue cd reissue. We wanted to make this a Record Of The Week when the lp first came out, but there are still so many folks out there sans turntable, we figured we oughta just wait for the cd, and now it's here, so we can indeed finally lavish this record with the Record Of The Week honors it so totally deserves.
Yet another winner from Sublime Frequencies (have they ever released a loser? We think not). And like many of the Sublime Frequencies before it, we find it hard to not think that maybe folks don't need to be making so much music, releasing so many records, when so much amazing outrageously creative music is already being and has been made all over the world, for so long, much of it never heard outside of a very few people. Maybe we should have some sort of national policy, where bands can turn in their instruments, and in exchange get a recorder, a plane ticket, and an expense account, with which they can roam the world bringing back some of that unheard and lost music. Heck, sign us up right now!
Anyway, this new release is a collection of Rai music from the early seventies, from Algeria, and these particular cuts are samples of some of the sort of "outlaw" Rai performers, a modern strain that has been neglected and ignored, and takes this classic Algerian music form, and adds electric guitar, trumpets, wah wah pedal, and whips it all up into an infectious brew equal parts Ethiopiques, Bollywood and garage rock. Or something close to that. This stuff is truly hard to describe, and the liner notes, while informative, are printed on an eye popping blue on red old school 3-D colored background which makes the text swim and sway before your eyes. And offer more on the history and the players than what Rai music actually is (there's a good description on Wikipedia). But for the purpose of this review, as it should be, we'll just focus on the sound. And what a sound!
Warm whirring organ drones, trumpets EVERYWHERE, really the defining sound, wild chaotic tribal drumming, crooned dramatic vocals, groovy, soulful, funky, raw and lo-fi, like a garage rock Ethiopiques, but with a strangely raw Bollywood vibe, the trumpets peppering the murky grooves with strange fanfares and jazzy melodies, here and there distorted guitars surface, wrapped in wah wah, reverb and echo all over the place, some songs super frenzied, others laid back and dreamy, Indian melodies draped over almost surfy grooves, really pretty fantastic. Hard to imagine that folks who have been digging all the Sublime Frequencies releases, or the Yaala Yaala reissues won't go crazy for this stuff.
Group Doueh, Group Inerane, and now this, a pretty mind blowing, near perfect, far out world music three-fer, and that's not even counting the 30+ release that came before. ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED.
MPEG Stream: BELLEMOU & BENFISSA "Li Maandouche L'Auto"
MPEG Stream: GROUPE EL AZHAR "Mazal Nesker Mazal"
MPEG Stream: GROUPE EL AZHAR "Touedar Aakli"

VOTOLATO, ROCKY Makers (Second Nature) lp 16.98
Finally, this former Record of The Week gets a vinyl release! Here's what we said about it the first time:
Ahhh, the lonely ballad of the singer songwriter. A lone troubadour, pouring out their heart and soul, naked and alone, with no band to hide behind, no crashing guitars and pounding drums to shield their delicate psyche.
There was a time when being called a singer songwriter was a badge of honor. But now, we might just as well turn tail and run. Sure the legacy of singer songwriters is a mighty one, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Gordon Lightfoot, Janis Ian, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, James Taylor, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Donovan, Bruce Springsteen, but you'll notice a serious dearth of more -modern- musicians in that league. That's not because there aren't singer songwriters anymore, it's just that now, we typically equate singer songwriters with commercial radio, faceless pap, bad top 40, coffee houses, guys who couldn't start a band so decided to just 'do it themselves'. We're definitely generalizing, sure. There have definitely been some notable exceptions, Iron And Wine's Sam Beam, Damien Jurado, Edith Frost, Elliott Smith, Joel Phelps, Devendra Banhart, Cat Power's Chan Marshall, Simon Joyner, Fiona Apple, Jeff Mangum, Sufjan Stevens, Will Oldham, and now you can add Rocky Votoloto to the list. Now the funny thing is, as we mention again and again and again, if Votoloto had chosen to release this record under the name Waxwing (the name of his previous band) it probably wouldn't get lumped in with the singer songwriters at all, and might eeven get a bit more attention, even if it sounded exactly the same. That's why it's always better to make up a band name even if it's just you. We've said it before, we'll say it again. No matter how cool you think your name is, unless it's Van Halen or something like that, think again! Try this out: "I'm going to see John Smith". Or "I'm going to see Black Dungeon Firefly". Or "Strangle Flanger". Or whatever. You get the idea.
Anyway, before this review loses any more of its momentum, let's just say this is one of the most beautiful records we have heard in ages and mere months into the year has most definitely secured a spot on some of out 2006 top ten lists!
Votoloto has a gorgeously husky, whiskey soaked voice, and has an amazingly deft touch with melody and harmony. The first track is a dead ringer for Iron And Wine, delicate steel string guitar, hushed breathy vocals and sweet sweet harmonies, but the rest of the record is not nearly as restrained. Votolato's vocals are too rough and raw and powerful to be tiptoe-ing and shuffling sad boy style. No, the rest of the record sounds more like that Nirvana Unplugged record, Votolato's vocals the centerpoint, raw and ragged, but thick and warm and completely intense and emotional, more raspy and sandpapery like Cobain or Spoon's Britt Daniel or even Pete Searcy from Squirrel Bait. Not to say that he can't get all smooth, cuz there are plenty of dark and delicate tracks, where the vocals glide smoothly over sweet mournful melodies and hushed melancholy moments. But as with all "singer songwriters" (sigh) it's all about the songs, and this record is so chock full of amazing songs. Dark and dreary, warm and weary, folky and twangy, hushed and indie, a perfect mix of Iron And Wine, Ryan Adams, Elliott Smith, Uncle Tupelo, Spoon, and all that stuff we love. Acoustic guitars, harmonica, lapsteel, organ all woven into perfect chunks of dark and dreamy pop and twang.
MPEG Stream: "White Daisy Passing"
MPEG Stream: "Portland Is Leaving"
MPEG Stream: "She Was Only In It For The Rain"

AMESOEURS s/t (Profound Lore) cd 14.98
Finally! After three, years, France's Amesoeurs release their debut full length. And it's pretty shocking when you think about all the fuss these guys (and gal) have stirred up, with only FOUR songs to their name. FOUR songs in THREE YEARS. And yet, people were obsessed with those four songs, ourselves included, but hell, those four songs were fantastic, magical, barely black metal to the point where we had trouble understanding why metalheads liked it at all, but that's the thing, it managed to transcend, the songwriting is amazing, the arrangements, the production, the riffs, and mood, the ambience, Amesoeurs really are something special.
And it's not like they were doing nothing for the last three years, mainman Neige, managed to release records by his other bands, Peste Noire, Alcest, Forgotten Woods, Lantlos, in fact 3 of the four members of Amesoeurs also play in Peste Noire, but don't be expecting any of that gnarled raw black weirdness, no, Amesoeurs as most folks already know is all about melody, songcraft, it's more post rocky and shoegazey than buzzy and black, at least most of the time, and never more than on this new one. Vocalist and bassist Audrey Sylvain takes center stage here, singing most of the songs, helping Amesoeurs create a gorgeous lush sound that is so far removed from black metal, even blasts of buzz or furious riffing can't take away from its pure poppiness. Some of these songs sound like a band who should be on Slumberland not on Profound Lore.
Anyway, Amesoeurs starts off with a blast, some Joy Division-y bass, some mathy angular post rocky guitar, simple stripped down drumming, very moody and tense, almost new wave sounding, distant strings swell, until the guitars explode and the whole track is infused with buzz, creating an impossible hybrid, gorgeously achingly melodic and epic, but so buzz drenched and blackened, if the whole record had played out like this nonstop, people would have been flipping their lids (even more than they already are), but then that would take away from what makes Amesoeurs baffling and brilliant.
The second track, "Les Ruches Malades", shows no signs of blackness at all, the guitar has some bite, some crunch, but the main riff is more jangle than buzz, the bass throbs, the drums are super tight, and Audrey's vocals are front and center, this is one of those tracks that make it hard to believe metalheads get into this band at all.
Then it's back to more epic emotional blackness, buzzing, thrashing, soaring, but still jam packed with melody and moodiness, suddenly shifting to some hard rocking shoegazey jangle pop, peppered with bursts of Katatonia-like groove, before slipping into more loping rainy day bliss pop. Musically, the follow up "Recueillement" is more of the same, but here Neige adds his own shrieked black metal vox, which sound really odd draped over the minor key jangle beneath, but it also sounds kind of cool, a bit jarring for sure, but in a good way. Blackened and emotional and intense.
And so it goes, most of the record loping and jangling and shoegazing, occasionally offering up a bit of black buzz, and at least one track, "Trouble (Eveils Infames)" is pure blackness, all thrashing buzzing frenzied fury, no pop to be found, but that's the only real moment of grimninty to be found, the record is much more about melody and mood, the heaviest it gets is when Neige shrieks over some woozy melancholy jangle, and then there's the title track, that is SO new wave, straight up Cure worship, right down to the bass line and the chiming guitar parts, although Amesoeurs give it a cool twist at the end adding an awesomely jagged chugging riffy outro.
The record closes with another Katatonia style chunk of melancholy doom pop, although again, Neige roughs it up a bit with his blackened vokills, and after a brief stretch of silence, the record closes with a secret track of distorted drum machined and blurred buried melody.
Of course WE love it. C'mon! It's like if Black Tambourine were actually Black METAL Tambourine, plenty of Katatonia, Lifelover, all that off kilter blackened pop too, but it's obvious Neige and company are black metal masters (Alcest, Peste Noire, Forgotten Woods, Mortifera, right?) so even the poppiest moments are infused with a bit of blackness, no matter how subtle, and when the band do kick out the jams, like on the record opener, it's heavy and emotional in a way few other bands, black metal or otherwise, are capable of.
It might take a few listens, for some folks here it still hasn't clicked, then again it might take just one, we were smitten halfway through the first song, but then that first ep is still probably one of our most listened to records of the last several years, and if you're really in need of some blasting blackness, obviously this might not be the place to look, thankfully you don't have to look far, Neige has at least one or two other bands that'll have you covered, but if you're looking for something, gorgeous and twisted and black and dreamy and poppy and heavy and mysterious, well then, this friends, is it.
MPEG Stream: "Gas In Veins"
MPEG Stream: "Les Ruches Malades"
MPEG Stream: "Recueillement"
MPEG Stream: "Amesoeurs"

CHERRY, DON & LATIF KHAN Music / Sangam (Heavenly Sweetness) cd 22.00
We rave about jazz legend Don Cherry as often as we can. Every reissue has us all in a tizzy. In the past we made his mind blowing Orient an aQ record Of The Week. And in retrospect, we probably should have made the Blue Lake reissue a ROTW as well. Cherry was continually pushing the boundaries of jazz, exploring and helping shape free jazz, and incorporating all manner of world music into his ever changing and expanding sound.
This disc, recorded in 1978, found Cherry once again reimagining the sound of jazz, and challenging unadventurous jazz fans, by teaming up with legendary Indian percussionist Ustad Ahmed Latif Khan. Cherry had experimented with Indian music before on past recordings, but this was the first full on collaboration. Two sides, one featuring Cherry compositions, accompanied by Khan on tablas, the other side, Khan compositions, the tablas more of the driving force, the sound distinctly more Indian classical, with Cherry accompanying Khan.
The untitled opener finds Cherry and Khan covering Ornette Coleman, Cherry's former band leader. It's a dark brooding shuffle, all warm keyboard grooves, and the tablas, how they change everything, the skittery rhythms, but also the strange rubbery low end, the song eventually morphs into a Cherry original, and gets a bit proggy with wild trumpets and thick organs, the tablas still driving the whole thing. It's the next track where it gets really interesting though. A sprawling rhythmscape, the tablas doing double time, the rhythm, and a pulsing sort-of-bass line, Cherry delivering abstract almost scat like falsetto vocals, dark and drone-y and spaced out and minimal, peppered with occasional bursts of wild horn skronk, but for the most part, a swirling tripped out stretch of throbbing subtly psychedelic jazz minimalism. The final Cherry composed track is another gem, all glistening chimes and high end tones, flurries of piano, distant horns, whooshing effects, and of course the skitter of the tablas, more melodic almost that rhythmic on this track. Cherry also introduces some flute, which gives the track a sort of freak folk vibe, really!
Khan's side is distinctly less jazz. The tablas way up in the mix, his dexterous rhythms totally spellbinding, intricate, and again melodic, Cherry offering up strange bits of percussion, muted keyboards, very abstract and so cool. The final track, a sprawling 13 minute epic begins with just organ, drifting in space, until the tablas come in, and holy shit, even more intense and intricate, wreathed in a bit of reverb, and slipping from loping grooves to wild bursts of impossibly complex rhythmatism, the organ, a constant warm whir in the background, and the timbre of the keyboards, continues to infuse the track with a distinctly prog feel. Making this some sort of abstract classical Indian jazz prog? Whatever you want to call it, these are some gorgeously hypnotic and meditative sounds. So very recommended. Fans of the Necks might get into this too, similarly dark minimal vibe, especially the Khan tracks, and well worth checking out for the rest of you, even if jazz isn't normally your thing.
MPEG Stream: "One Dance"
MPEG Stream: "Air Mail"
MPEG Stream: "Sangam"

RED RED MEAT Bunny Gets Paid (Deluxe) (Sub Pop) 2cd 14.98
Red Red Meat barely get a mention on the aQuarius website, mostly in reviews of post-RRM outfit Califone, but as with many bands, that has more to do with timing than anything, predating as they did our New Arrivals list. If there was time, we can think of hundreds of bands we'd love to revisit and give their due. And Red Red Meat would definitely be at the top of the list for some of us. So this deluxe expanded reissue of RRM's 3rd, and arguably best, record makes now as good a time as any to gush a bit about one of our favorite records of the nineties.
When Sub Pop began expanding its focus beyond grunge, signing all sorts of bands, from pop to country, slowcore to garage rock, they definitely lost a lot of their hardcore buy-anything-on-Sub-Pop fans. But for many of us, no matter how into the grunge years we were (and believe you me, some of us were WAY into grunge), this shift marked the beginning of Sub Pop's transition into more than a regional label focused on a single sound, and is precisely why Sub Pop continues to thrive while so many other labels fell by the wayside. Among those un-traditionally Sub Pop sounding bands were groups like Codeine, Rein Sanction, Hardship Post, Jale and Red Red Meat, all of which ended up loving as much as if not more than all the classic grunge mainstays.
But Red Red Meat, there was just really something special about these guys. They were sort of country, definitely fitting loosely into the burgeoning alt-country movement, but they were so much more, their twang was rooted in a sort of timeless rock, but at the same time it was infused with a druggy warble, wreathed in hazy swirls of whirs and drones, the guitars were murky and muddy, the slide guitar slippery slithery, frontman Tim Rutili's vocals were weary and washed out, emotional, but laid back and slurred, perfectly complimenting the band's warped warble.
Bunny Gets Paid, originally released in 1995, found the band pushing their sound even further out, the sound still recognizably Red Red Meat, but from record opener "Carpet Of Horses", the band seemed determined to create some sort of 'classic' bit of drone drenched country blues. Lazily strummed acoustic guitars draped over a whirring fuzzy pulsing drone, the vocals appropriately melancholy, rough and ragged, allowed to drift over the slow shifting drone beneath, almost no percussion, very little structure, the song a living breathing bit of spaced out dream folk, incredible (and incredibly subtle) melodies, a killer main hook, all left to just sort of shimmer and hover and sprawl, sun baked and druggy, like some sort of drugfolk raga, definitely prescient, unwittingly laying out the blueprint for new weird America or freak folk or whatever you want to call it a decade later.
But Bunny Gets Paid is not all sprawling oozing melting slow motion blues, the band do rock, "Chain Chain Chain" is some classic sounding nineties indie rock and roll, reminding us of a more classic rock sounding Grifters, but still not losing any of their wooze or warble, the record doused in effects, guitars warped, alternatingly crunchy and jagged, bluesy and ooze-y. "Buttered" is a total heartbreaker, thick steel string strum and twang, subtle strings, effects dappled ambience, thick swaths of whirring drone, the whole thing managing to sound intimate and bedroomy, but also epic and timeless.
The classic track here though has to be "Gauze", a moody minor key lope, so laid back and soporific, the guitars spidery and translucent, the vocals seemingly an afterthought, the drums a simple shuffle, lush and intimate and hushed, until the chorus, another gut wrenching heartbreaker, the vocals wrapped in almost Butthole Surfers FX, but done so deftly, that instead of sounding weird or fucked up, it just sound perfect, delivering a total break up /make up mix tape refrain to die for. And so it goes. "Idiot Son" is a the Rolling Stones filtered through nineties indie rock and busted four tracks (with more nods to the Grifters), "Bunny Gets Paid" is another meandering druggy droney drift, disembodied vocals, fragmented guitars and skittery percussion, and another killer hook buried in the murk and mire, and the record continues to unfurl, in all its hazy, lazy, dreamy, wasted, late afternoon, too many beers and broken hearts glory, finishing off with a 2 minute bit of near perfect bedroom folk, peppered with singing strings, reverbed piano, all wrapped around Rituli's gorgeously weathered croon.
Absolutely one of our all time favorite records ever. There's a whole bonus disc too, which we'll get to in a second, but the record itself is reason enough to pick this up, especially if somehow you've never heard it. Anyone into Califone, Calexico, Souled American, Giant Sand, Neko Case, Ryan Adams, should absolutely pick this up, and any one into the current crop of freak folk and drone psych who aren't adverse to actual songs, might dig this too.
The bonus disc of b-sides, alternate versions and covers, makes this essential, even for folks like us who already have it. A 4-track demo of "Chain Chain Chain", less rocking, all stripped down and appropriately lo-fi and languid, a single version of "Idiot Son" that finds the song stretched out even further. Record opener "Carpet Of Horses" gets reworked into a pounding dirge, way more rocking and heavy than the original, but still just as darkly evocative, and FOUR unreleased tracks, one a weird dub workout, the other three wonderfully weird warbly rockers (one rife with horns) that don't sound at all out of place alongside the rest of Bunny Gets Paid.
And the super iconic doll's head in the tipped over glass cover art gets a deluxe reimagining, a massive fold out multi panel digipak inside a swank slipcover, with a thick booklet, jammed with photos, original covers and artwork, as well as some newly penned liner notes from band members and Red Red Meat fans including members of the Shins, the Fruit Bats, Modest Mouse and others!
MPEG Stream: "Carpet Of Horses"
MPEG Stream: "Gauze"
MPEG Stream: "Buttered"
MPEG Stream: "There's Always Tomorrow"

DEAD LETTERS SPELL DEAD WORDS Lost In Reflections (Killer Pimp) cd 11.98
For years now, the cryptically (and coolly) monickered Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words has been quietly and consistently releasing some of the most haunting and beautiful minimal dronemusic we've heard, a blend of soft skittery glitch, brooding guitar loops, deeeeeep drone, dreamy drift, and experimental post-everything soundscaping, that is as good if not better than anything produced by the legion of overhyped sound makers constantly fawned over by the public and press alike. We've only managed to review two DLSODW releases so far, both sadly out of print now, but the release of this new one, quite possibly his best, seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally throw our weight behind Dead Letters, and hopefully open some ears to these mysterious and wondrous sounds, and reveal to the hordes of dronelords and free music freeks just what they've been missing.
Dead Letters is the work of Swedish musician Thomas Ekelund, and over the years, his music has drifted from extreme near silent ultra minimalism, to warm whirring dronescapes to muted crunch and clatter to shimmering underwater ambience, but on Lost In Reflections, all of those elements are present, in lesser amounts, the perfect distillation of a lifetime of sounds, here presented more as background then the main event, that main event here being the guitar. Each of the six tracks, however distorted or refracted or fragmented or obfuscated, seems to be borne of the guitar, with Ekelund working his mysterious alchemy and transforming those buzzing steel strings into wholly new shapes.
The opener, "This Room Seems Empty Without You" held us spellbound from the very first few seconds, a bit of reverby guitar, moody and minor key, very post rock, slow core and abstract, the notes hovering in a dark expanse of overtones and deep low end shimmer, the guitar unfurling gradually, subtly processed, peppered with a strange percussive glitch, that gives the music a sort of downtempo vibe, still droney and abstract and free, but with a little Portishead or Bowery Electric mixed in. The glitches coalesce into an almost-rhythm, the end result is some strange minimal instrumental downtuned Galaxie 500 mixed with the brooding barely there drift of Bohren, and a sort of late night lugubrious skitter.
The next track, "Lost & Losing", takes a whole 'nother tack, beginning with bits of scrape and creak, amp buzz, muted harmonics, a subtly percussive textural soundscape, quietly and slowly surrounded by a gorgeously hazy sea of sun spots and solar flares, taking the shoegaze-y shimmer of Nadja and Jesu and dialing it way back, until it's a glimmering sheet of prismatic buzz, all the while those strange sounds from the song's beginning continuing to weave a buried barely there rhythm, everything locked into deep woozy bleary eyed swells.
We have the tendency to go song by song, describing the sound of each, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it's not just the sound, it's the mood and the vibe and the feel and the deft and delicate arrangement of those sounds. And Ekelund is a master, taking simple strummed guitars, and wrapping them in a gauzy patina of blur buzz, locking the original riff into a loop, and then gently adding bit of melody, bits of texture, turning something simple into something complex and gorgeous, there are hints of Earth all over Lost In Reflections as well, a particularly abstract bit of fuzzy drift, will suddenly part to reveal a dark elegiac guitar line, slowed way down, creating some sort of underwater blues, while elsewhere, the twang and pluck of the guitar strings is wreathed in sonic sunlight, the sounds allowed to overlap and tangle up, the notes and melodies all wound up, spinning slowly and spitting out sparks, bits of glitch and high end tones, streaks of feedback, until those sounds are smeared into one long undulating stretch, and over the top a string of chiming notes are hung like Christmas lights on a tree, the, guitar often disappearing completely, leaving just a bit of twang to hover and then fade away.
The final track is a monster, nearly 20 minutes, imagine Nadja, Merzbow and Tim Hecker covering Arvo Part, and you might be close. This is some sort of soft noise, blindingly effulgent upper register ur-drone chorale, the streaks and shards of guitars sound like voices, the distortion thick, the effects crumbling and swirling, a glancing listen reveals a wall of sound, but headphones are like a diving bell, allowing us to sink into this roiling sonic sea, that seems to stretch out forever, bottomless and endless, part way through, the song changes shape, that which constituted the whole of the sound up until that point is relegated to a background for these new sounds, a sweeping, loping epic bit of post rock, still washed out and woozy, but with a simple propulsive rhythm, and a gorgeously melodic chiming central riff, darkly fervent and slightly ominous and hauntingly epic, the swirling sounds around those new elements growing more frenetic, thickening, while the song just grows and grows, sprawls and expands, as if any second the heavens will open and the song will become the sonic manifestation of the rapture. So totally intense and powerful and moving and majestic, and simply breathtaking.
MPEG Stream: "This Room Seems Empty Without You"
MPEG Stream: "Lost & Losing"
MPEG Stream: "What I Wouldn't Give To Feel Alive"

BLACK TAMBOURINE Complete Recordings (Slumberland) cd 10.98
As of late 2008 and early 2009, there's been some serious hubbub over Slumberland, the stalwart indie label of Brit-inspired, shoegazing bliss pop, thanks to a couple of kick ass records from Crystal Stilts and Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. So a revisitation into perhaps the quintessential Slumberland outfit seems appropriate. Black Tambourine was a shortlived project featuring two of the guys from Velocity Girl, a chanteuse named Pam Berry, and Slumberland label boss Mike Schulman. They only released three singles, contributed a track or two to compilations, and played less than five shows before breaking up in 1991. Go figure that Complete Recordings anthologizes all of these tracks plus an unreleased single.
Black Tambourine's songs begin as jangly, melodic pop which gets tousled about in a blur of amplifier distortion piled onto reverb piled onto more amplifier distortion and just a little more reverb. Yup, it's the same wonderful sound that was also broadcast from the Shop Assistants, My Bloody Valentine (circa Isn't Anything, well cuz Loveless hadn't been released yet!), Jesus & Mary Chain, the Pastels, and almost any given band on Creation circa 1988. But no matter how great that all consuming shoegaze sound can be, the band has gotta have good songwriting chops; and Black Tambourine had 'em for sure. At times, there's that ramshackle quality of good old American DIY indie pop, but for the most part, the songs are effortlessly catchy and melodic with a swagger pushed forth by Pam Berry's reverb drenched and melancholy vocals. Still sounds great after all these years!
MPEG Stream: "Black Car"
MPEG Stream: "Pack You Up"
MPEG Stream: "Drown"

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Black Cascade (Southern Lord) cd 14.98
By now, Wolves in the Throne Room have established themselves as one of America's most gifted and awesomely dependable black metal bands, and their third long player, Black Cascade, picks up right where their recent Malevolent Grain ep left off. All the elements of their expansive, blackened psychedelic approach are here: sprawling songs with a methodical attention to song structure, relentless drumming, perfectly interlocking dual guitars, tortured raspy vocals, and an ability to seamlessly merge synthy ambience with a furious but often very melancholy black metal onslaught. There seems to be a legion of haters out there, ready to label the band as a bunch of PC hippies who aren't adhering to whatever rules they assume apply to a style of music that is pretty nihilistic and iconoclastic by nature. But fuck those people. This band is great and truly deserves whatever accolades come its way.
The ever-present density of WITTR's sound is further heightened on Black Cascade, their bio proudly emphasizing the old school analog sound they have achieved through vintage recording gear and classic tube amps. While we don't want to ramble on about various pieces of musical equipment, it should be noted that these devices have certainly helped the band to capture a sound music nerds might refer to as "organic". Sure, we at aQuarius love all the homemade bedroom black metal that sounds as if it was recorded in a blender during a tornado... The sound on Black Cascade, however, is clear and upfront, though hardly refined or polished. It is quite rock n' roll in a classic sense, which works great when the band breaks out some Thin Lizzy-esque guitar harmonies on the first track "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog". Mossy, ultra distorted guitars hang like a thick black cloud (or a sea of fog, if you will) in the atmosphere as the drums create the necessary propulsion that make a Wolves in the Throne Room song sound like it could, and should, carry on FOREVER. Song #2, "Ahrimanic Trance" is, true to its title, a hypnotic, trancelike black metal trip into some long forgotten wilderness. The song gives one a feeling of being transported at high speeds across the landscape while watching from the back of some primitive vehicle, a sense that is carried on in the next track, "Ex Cathedra". The final song, "Crystal Ammunition", starts life as a dizzying, hyperspeed slab of pure black metal before morphing into a beautiful lament that may (or may not) reference the melody from Malevolent Grain's "A Looming Resonance". It's seems like things will culminate in the ultimate fadeout. But, uh, what happens after the fade out? As everything gallops off into the distance, otherworldly guitar chords and tambourine are the only sounds evident. Eventually these too recede as they are overtaken by a phased out synthscape. Fucking awesome.
While this album was great from the moment we first put it on, repeated listens have been revealing more and more. To say this is a huge departure from what Wolves in the Throne Room have accomplished in the past would be inaccurate. It is, instead, the sound of a group who, with each record, becomes a more realized version of itself.
MPEG Stream: "Ex Cathedra"
MPEG Stream: "Ahrimanic Trance"

FUNERAL MIST Maranatha (Ajna) cd 14.98
This has to be one of the most anticipated black metal releases of the year, especially around here considering how much we LOVED the last Funeral Mist, Salvation, which managed to be blazing fast and technical but at the same time super heavy and well produced, none of the heft sacrificed for speed or buzz. Most definitely giving Deathspell Omega and Katharsis some serious competition. But Funeral Mist sort of dropped off the map, with mainman Arioch dedicating all his time to his other band, Marduk.
The with very little warning, word got out that there was a new Funeral Mist, and almost as quickly people started weighing in, most proclaiming Marantha to be shit, many bandying about words like 'nu-metal' to describe their sound, comparing them to Dimmu Borgir and Cradle Of Filth. Which more than anything had us dying to hear it.
We're happy to report, that while there's definitely a serious sea change in FM's sound, and they're definitely experimenting A LOT, they still destroy, and anyone who loved Salvation will most likely find much to dig here. Take record opener "Sword Of Faith": after some strange field recordings, a man screaming "It's the plague, it's the blood of Jesus!", tolling bells, strange beastly grunts, the band explodes into a burst of frenzied buzzing that to these ears sounds as good as anything on Salvation. Plenty of warped Deathspell style riffage, furious lightning fast drumming, some soaring Nordic style melody, the vocals seems to be the main difference, much louder in the mix, much gruntier and howly, less black metal shriek more guttural and almost hardcore sounding, the music around it sways and swells, slipping from doomy plod to insane lightspeed riffing, the band locked into intense mathmetal workouts, the whole sound dizzying and nearly overwhelming, the vocals getting a bit pirate-y here and there, but that just adds to the madness, if the whole record sounded like this, no one would be complaining, or at the very least they'd complain that the band hadn't progressed, but then comes "White Stone" and all bets are off.
Hard to even explain, the track begins with some tinny distorted riff, which gives way to a lurching dramatic doom, that sounds more Birthday Party or Swans than black metal, but then the guitars and the kick drum lock into a strange muted pulse, chugging away over near constant amp buzz, the vocals are WAY present, loud in the mix, backed up by weird chanting, the overall feel is gothic, almost industrial, but it's weird and twisted and black enough that it pretty much seals the deal for us. This record rules. Any black metal record that has the true grim hordes in an uproar must be doing something right.
But that bit of weirdness only lasts 4 minutes, and we're immediately thrust back into some seriously swirling sonic chaos called "Jesus Saves!", everything frantic and on the verge of total collapse, the vocals bizarre, almost Popeye-esque at times, growling over brief stretches of tranquility, sometimes slipping into hysterical howls, at one point the guitars actually get LOUDER, as in the sound of the whole record is suddenly bumped up making for some really strange dynamics, before the band slip back into some sort of brittle riffing, doomy drumming distant chanting and those monstrous growly vocals, and then inexplicably, the metal fades out, letting the last 3 minutes of the song play out as some strange almost looped sounding folk.
Minus that one track, it's really hard to see what people have been complaining about. This is some seriously twisted and heavy shit, the arrangements much more varied for sure, the vocals most definitely bizarre, but the music is just mindblowing, the riffs killer, with some awesomely fucked production, like during "A New Light" when the tape seems to melt leaving just the vocals, doused in some weird effects, making them sound like some sort of processed synth, before the song explodes again, only to slip into a weird plodding midtempo a few moments later, the drums beneath an angelic sounding choir while the vocals grunt and groan. Then there's "Blessed Curse", at nearly 12 minutes, all midtempo pound, and soaring minor key guitars, and trombone or trumpet part way through, making the band sound a bit like a blackened Beyond Dawn, the effect is awesome, haunting, ghostly, makes it seem less weird that Arioch's other band Marduk does a pretty killer Woven Hand cover. We can only imagine it sounds a little like this.
The last three songs offer up more of the same, that freaked out furious tangled blackness, rife with all sorts of what-the-fuck parts, some really bizarre almost Eastern pop sounding vocals dropped right into a swirl of black riffing, long stretches of gloomy almost new wave sounding trudge, Swans like riffing, tortured vocals, lots of creepy atmospherics, all culminating in a strange orchestral outro, timpani's and horns, dramatic and mysterious like some strange Bernard Hermann score.
Fuck the haters. The more we listen to this, the better it gets, and the weirder it gets, not just the riffs, but some of the fucked up parts and the weird effects have gotten stuck in out heads, this is some awesomely progressive, damaged and demented blackened genius, once we got into it, and sort of let it all sink in, we found ourselves practically unable to listen to anything else, so we're hereby declaring this as a contender for black metal record of the year. You have been warned.
MPEG Stream: "Sword Of Faith"
MPEG Stream: "White Stone"
MPEG Stream: "Jesus Saves!"

FUNERAL MIST Maranatha (Norma Evangelium Diaboli) 2lp 35.00
This has to be one of the most anticipated black metal releases of the year, especially around here considering how much we LOVED the last Funeral Mist, Salvation, which managed to be blazing fast and technical but at the same time super heavy and well produced, none of the heft sacrificed for speed or buzz. Most definitely giving Deathspell Omega and Katharsis some serious competition. But Funeral Mist sort of dropped off the map, with mainman Arioch dedicating all his time to his other band, Marduk.
The with very little warning, word got out that there was a new Funeral Mist, and almost as quickly people started weighing in, most proclaiming Marantha to be shit, many bandying about words like 'nu-metal' to describe their sound, comparing them to Dimmu Borgir and Cradle Of Filth. Which more than anything had us dying to hear it.
We're happy to report, that while there's definitely a serious sea change in FM's sound, and they're definitely experimenting A LOT, they still destroy, and anyone who loved Salvation will most likely find much to dig here. Take record opener "Sword Of Faith": after some strange field recordings, a man screaming "It's the plague, it's the blood of Jesus!", tolling bells, strange beastly grunts, the band explodes into a burst of frenzied buzzing that to these ears sounds as good as anything on Salvation. Plenty of warped Deathspell style riffage, furious lightning fast drumming, some soaring Nordic style melody, the vocals seems to be the main difference, much louder in the mix, much gruntier and howly, less black metal shriek more guttural and almost hardcore sounding, the music around it sways and swells, slipping from doomy plod to insane lightspeed riffing, the band locked into intense mathmetal workouts, the whole sound dizzying and nearly overwhelming, the vocals getting a bit pirate-y here and there, but that just adds to the madness, if the whole record sounded like this, no one would be complaining, or at the very least they'd complain that the band hadn't progressed, but then comes "White Stone" and all bets are off.
Hard to even explain, the track begins with some tinny distorted riff, which gives way to a lurching dramatic doom, that sounds more Birthday Party or Swans than black metal, but then the guitars and the kick drum lock into a strange muted pulse, chugging away over near constant amp buzz, the vocals are WAY present, loud in the mix, backed up by weird chanting, the overall feel is gothic, almost industrial, but it's weird and twisted and black enough that it pretty much seals the deal for us. This record rules. Any black metal record that has the true grim hordes in an uproar must be doing something right.
But that bit of weirdness only lasts 4 minutes, and we're immediately thrust back into some seriously swirling sonic chaos called "Jesus Saves!", everything frantic and on the verge of total collapse, the vocals bizarre, almost Popeye-esque at times, growling over brief stretches of tranquility, sometimes slipping into hysterical howls, at one point the guitars actually get LOUDER, as in the sound of the whole record is suddenly bumped up making for some really strange dynamics, before the band slip back into some sort of brittle riffing, doomy drumming distant chanting and those monstrous growly vocals, and then inexplicably, the metal fades out, letting the last 3 minutes of the song play out as some strange almost looped sounding folk.
Minus that one track, it's really hard to see what people have been complaining about. This is some seriously twisted and heavy shit, the arrangements much more varied for sure, the vocals most definitely bizarre, but the music is just mindblowing, the riffs killer, with some awesomely fucked production, like during "A New Light" when the tape seems to melt leaving just the vocals, doused in some weird effects, making them sound like some sort of processed synth, before the song explodes again, only to slip into a weird plodding midtempo a few moments later, the drums beneath an angelic sounding choir while the vocals grunt and groan. Then there's "Blessed Curse", at nearly 12 minutes, all midtempo pound, and soaring minor key guitars, and trombone or trumpet part way through, making the band sound a bit like a blackened Beyond Dawn, the effect is awesome, haunting, ghostly, makes it seem less weird that Arioch's other band Marduk does a pretty killer Woven Hand cover. We can only imagine it sounds a little like this.
The last three songs offer up more of the same, that freaked out furious tangled blackness, rife with all sorts of what-the-fuck parts, some really bizarre almost Eastern pop sounding vocals dropped right into a swirl of black riffing, long stretches of gloomy almost new wave sounding trudge, Swans like riffing, tortured vocals, lots of creepy atmospherics, all culminating in a strange orchestral outro, timpani's and horns, dramatic and mysterious like some strange Bernard Hermann score.
Fuck the haters. The more we listen to this, the better it gets, and the weirder it gets, not just the riffs, but some of the fucked up parts and the weird effects have gotten stuck in out heads, this is some awesomely progressive, damaged and demented blackened genius, once we got into it, and sort of let it all sink in, we found ourselves practically unable to listen to anything else, so we're hereby declaring this as a contender for black metal record of the year. You have been warned.
MPEG Stream: "Sword Of Faith"
MPEG Stream: "White Stone"
MPEG Stream: "Jesus Saves!"

V/A Plantation Gold: The Mad Genius Of Shelby S. Singleton Jr. (The Omni Recording Corporation) 2cd 16.98
On first look, and even first listen, Plantation Gold will probably seem quite familiar to a lot of folks, the faded cover image, the list of performers beneath the album title in big gold letters, inside, lots of twanging guitars, foot stompin' rhythms, slippery lap steel, booming stentorian male crooners, rich dulcet female vocalists, tales of love and loss, heartbreak and tragedy, all the sort of stuff you would expect from country music in the sixties and seventies. But look, or listen, even a tiny bit closer, and Plantation Gold reveals itself as just about the furthest thing from traditional country you can imagine.
The Plantation label (later SSS) was the brainchild of a man named Shelby Singleton, who over close to a decade, gathered up some of the most idiosyncratic, unique, and plain crazy country music artists EVER. The closest to gold that Shelby and Plantation got, and probably the only name / song here that will be truly familiar, is the country classic "Harper Valley P.T.A." written by Tom T. Hall and performed by Ms. Jeannie C. Riley, which was in fact a bona fide hit record, the single went on to sell hundreds of thousands, the album millions, and even convinced Singleton to put together a singing group actually called the Harper Valley P.T.A. to cash in on the hype, as well as inspiring a handful of homages, the weirdest one included here, more on that shortly. The rest of the tracks on these two discs range from full on over the top whatthefuck, to slightly skewed, sometimes incorporating strange sound effects, bizarre instrumentation, but sometimes playing it straight, letting the song subject and the lyrics take what on the surface sounds like regular old country music, turning it into something way more freaked out and gleefully goofy (and on occasion borderline offensive to today's more PC sensiblities).
Dee Mullins' "I Am The Grass" seems pretty straight ahead, minus the lyrics about Bigfoot and the freaky metallic effects laden hissy psychedelic refrain in the chorus. Neil Ray's "Big Fanny" is one of those Johnny Cash style talking country songs, the subject of the song a metaphorical 300 pound ugly woman in Vietnam. Weird. "Sold To The Highest Bidder" by Johnny Moore And Col. Tex Herring, is the story of all the happy memories and the family home being sold at auction, featuring an actual auctioneer reeling off the list of everything that must go. Becki Bluefield offers up the surprisingly saucy "Somebody's Gonna Plow Your Field". And then there's "Happy Valley C.I.A.", the aforementioned problematic version of Plantation's big hit, here laced with groovy sixties sitar, the vocals delivered in a very politically incorrect faux Chinese accent.
Johnny Credit offers up his theme song, featuring the clever refrain "I ain't never had no cash", and sounding, as you might guess, just like the Man In Black himself. Best country song title award would have to go to "I'm The Mail She's Waiting For" a innuendo laced love song by Chuck Wood. Then there's The Harper Valley P.T.A.'s "I Dig Dangling Participles", a clever bit of country wordplay. The other star attraction here is Tokyo Matsu, who sounds like an Asian Patsy Cline, all woozy reverb soaked twang, barrelhouse piano, slippery slide guitar, and Matsu's thickly accented croon.
And that's barely getting into the FIRST disc. There's LOTS more on disc one, and 30 MORE weird and wonderful twangy jams on disc two. Every song is a gem, whether it's laugh out loud funny, clever or subtly racy, or heartfelt and dramatic. We could pretty much go track by track, "Four On The Floor (And A Fifth Under The Seat)" is a dark brooding morality play sung by an actual police trooper, "Groovy Grubworm" is a countrified funky hoedown by Harlow Wilcox & The Oakies, and then there's Rod Hart's "C.B. Savage", the tale of a gay trucker, and his suggestive transmissions, another politically incorrect gem, the kind of song that makes you laugh, but also makes you a bit uncomfortable, and is most definitely the sort of song no one could get away with anymore.
Every time we play this in the store, people stop what they're doing to listen, to laugh, most of the time they come up to see what the heck it is we're listening to, and more often than not, leave with their own copy. The booklet is massive, with a history of Singleton, Plantation and SSS, and a fairly in depth description of each artist and all the songs, as well as tons of photos and reproductions of some of the jackets and record labels.
Some seriously twisted outsider country genius, WAY recommended, even if you're not necessarily that into country music, and all you folks into 'incredibly strange music' kind of stuff and those song-poem compilations we love so much, should definitely check this out!
MPEG Stream: DEE MULLINS "I Am The Grass"
MPEG Stream: NEIL RAY "Big Fanny"
MPEG Stream: RAY "WONG" RILEY "Happy Valley C.I.A."
MPEG Stream: TOKYO MATSU "Orange Blossom Special"
MPEG Stream: TROOPER JIM FOSTER "Four On The Floor (And A Fifth Under The Seat)"
MPEG Stream: ROD HART "C.B. Savage"

HARVESTMAN In A Dark Tongue (Neurot) cd 14.98
Musical missive number two (or three if you count the sidelong Fear Falls Burning remix from a few years back) from Harvestman, the cosmic folk space raga alter ego of Neurosis' Steve Von Till.
The first Harvestman record, A Grave Is A Grim Horse, was a dizzying confluence of delicate seventies British style folk, shimmery spaced out drift, and glacial doomdrone sprawl, a constantly evolving, organic song suite that seemed to exist in some glorious blissed out otherworld. On In A Dark Tongue, the glimmering strands of traditional folk music that tethered the first record become even more tenuous. Before, even at its spaciest, Harvestman seemed grounded and earthbound, certainly with an eye to the stars, but the sounds evoking frosty mountainsides, deep forests, blackened skies, as much as strange shapes in the heavens and mysterious galaxies, the soundtrack to a strange terrestrial world, lit by the contrails of mysterious bodies streaking across the heavens.
Like A Grave Is A Grim Horse, In A Dark Tongue is also a weathered megalithic sonic artifact of an unknowable culture, its symbols obscure yet magnetic, calling you into communion with its ancient spirit. Enduring, unnerving, moving. Evoking arcane rites, cold hazy sunrises, a god/dess visible only in the massive wheeling patterns of nature and sound. But Dark Tongue moves beyond its predecessor, creating a linked, yet wholly other sonic landscape, at once more abstract and ethereal, but also heavier and more dense, with a black hole intensity woven into the otherwise kaleidoscopic drift, the sound constantly shifting from woozy, bleary eyed psychedelia to loosely propulsive spacekraut groove, fluttery delicate thrum to wild metallic squall, all doused in effects, a warm fuzzy patina of gauzy blur and muted buzz.
It's almost as if the songs here are not so much songs as transmissions, broadcast from a lost land, messages from the original Harvestman, sprawling lysergic druidic rituals, wreathed in the sonic detritus of the sound's endless journey, a message home - or a message lost and drifting endlessly through the black expanses of time.
Recorded in the woods of Idaho, Harvestman draws from the surrounding landscape, unfurling softly buzzing spidery barely there melodies that hover in druggy expanses of Tangerine Dream warped guitar blur, druggy, woozy, hazy, delicate yet dark, an alien psych folk rendered in shades of space rock.
Soft whispery steel string strum gives way to ultra distorted ur-drone ragas, the guitars super saturated and crumbling, leads that sound more like bagpipes than guitars, the sound warped and blown out, but still warm and tranquil.
Fluttering mellotronic flutes flit dreamily around slow shifting sheets of soft swelling chords, smeared with streaks of glitch and whir. Slowly sprawling grooves underpinned by squalls of outer space FX and upper register feedback, all draped over brittle layers of jagged crunch, throbbing motorik beats wrapped in thick swaths of delay, decay and rumble, everything locked into hypnotic lurching loops.
The vocals are sparse, in fact on Dark Tongue the vocals creep to the surface on only one track, the brooding expansive "By Wind And Sun." Von Till's raspy croon, equal parts weathered Tom Waits-ian bellow and Neurosis style metallic howl, rough and raw, but still soulful and dramatic, a haunting ritualistic chant, although as the song progresses, Von Till's voice begins to transform and splinter into strange fragmented shapes, the various shards sent spinning into the ether, gradually evolving into another washed out and heavily effected layer of sound, that seems to melt into the swirling and whirling sounds all around it.
There's even one track with what sounds like a Koto, super spare and abstract, channeling Eastern classical music, but layered with slivers of minor key guitar growl, the whole thing eventually erupting into a malfunctioning electronic freakout. The whole record a constantly shifting sprawl of electric guitars and synthesizers, dulcimers and ring modulators, loops and vocals, delay and distortion. Members of the Grails and Om contribute, but here they play acolytes to Von Till's high priest, together invoking the spirit of German Oak, Amps For Christ, Can, Six Organs Of Admittance, SUNN))), Faust, Growing, Amon Duul, their sonic shadows dancing on the looming stones assembled in the flickering firelight, beneath a sky of diamond and obsidian.
In A Dark Tongue is a gorgeous slow burning psychedelic song cycle, smoldering minor key epics, the sounds lustrous and organic, the guitars viscous and virulent, the atmosphere murky and mysterious, all the while strangely sun dappled and dreamlike. Strings soar and sing, melodic fragments are hurled into the abyss, monolithic guitar drones flow into fields of ephemeral stasis, a sound not heavy so much as darkly effulgent.
The two longest tracks appear to be the space rock centerpieces, channeling the extended heart-of-the-sun outros of Hawkwind and the smoked out stomp of old Monster Magnet into classic krautrock heaviness, each a mesmerizing soundtrack to some seemingly and perhaps ultimately doomed mission into the unknown, both rife with relentless rhythms, roiling psych drone tumult and thick warbly synths, underpinning moody meandering melodies and frictive soft focus textures.
While Harvestman most definitely exists within an esteemed sonic brotherhood, the sound here most definitely transcends, Von Till proving a master of more than massive pummeling heaviness, displaying a flair for the delicate, the tenebrous, the contemplative and the hallucinatory, having created with In A Dark Tongue a sound both portentous and elegiac, an arcane and esoteric bit of beauty, of dark hued mystery, of folk flecked abstraction and churning leviathan heft. A breathtaking and expansive glimpse beyond the firmament, into the soul of a sound, where the already blurred lines between drone and doom and drift and psych and kraut and space cease to exist at all.
Other RIYL: Expo '70, La Otracina, Acid Mothers Temple, and the myriad of underground cd-r drone / drift / psych combosŠ
MPEG Stream: "Karlsteine"
MPEG Stream: "By Wind And Sun"
MPEG Stream: "The Hawk Of Achill"
MPEG Stream: "Carved In Aspen"

HECKER, TIM An Imaginary Country (Kranky) lp 17.98
It's been almost two years since the last proper full length from Canadian soundscaper Tim Hecker, and while tons of other artists have spewed out cd-r after cd-r after limited cassette in that same time, one listen to An Imaginary Country is all it takes to illustrate the difference. Why it took so long, why it was worth the wait, how the 'noise' and 'drones' and 'sounds' Hecker produces are so much more then just the words that describe them, it's all evident in every single second of this record, in fact, 10 seconds in, it's already obvious that this is indeed something special.
As demonstrated on numerous past recordings, Hecker is a master sonic alchemist, who with a handful of effects, a computer and a guitar and who knows what else, is able to construct this, a time machine of sound, a set of recordings that while simply pleasing to the ear, are also transcendent, they soothe, they entrance, they mesmerize, but more importantly, and more magically, they transport. Hecker and headphones is pretty much a ticket to some otherworld, not of sights but sounds, and not just sounds, but streaks and blurs and buzzes, soft layers and blinding crystalline shimmers, thick whirring textures and barely there delicate melodies, a sound that slips from breathless whisper to caustic roar, but each end of that spectrum fully infused with elements of the other, at its heaviest, the sound still manages to be darkly delicate, dreamy and ghostly, and at its most minimal and abstract, the sound is still imbued with some weight, a sense of import, of sounds and perhaps worlds hidden behind and within the actual music.
If anything, the sound of An Imaginary Country is heavier, and thicker, more lush, and with more heft, altogether more powerful, the sort of sound that performed live, through a massive P.A., could summon angels, or perhaps demons. But for all this added sonic weight, nothing is lost, the sounds are not just loud, they are multihued, every note, every chord, every bit of sound is alive with energy, it's as if Hecker has created a living breathing sound sculpture, made of transparent spheres, from afar, it's a gorgeous assemblage, the spheres shifting and dancing, playing out some elaborate composition, but pick one sphere, get up close and look inside, and there is a whole 'nother constellation of smaller glass spheres, engaged in a similarly beautiful and elaborate dance, and so on and so on. The magic is that every single set of movements, whether consciously or not, is visible and audible even with the slightest glance, which is what makes Hecker's sound so dense and deep and emotional and lush and utterly breathtaking.
A closer examination of each song reveals the presence of thick warm whirring organs, or some instruments and sounds transformed into organs, thus much of the record sound choral, the music of some crumbling empty church, left to play on into eternity, long long tones, blurred into slow motion epics, other tracks play out like watching some old filmstrip come to life, the newly living things still surrounded by grit and hiss and buzz, but that distorted haze that surrounds them seem to have come alive as well, moving like some organic living thing, the lives and actions of the newly living things inexorably tangled up with the movements of this other newly living things, a blurry ballet of soft sound and of mysterious sonic events. There are a few moments of relative tranquility, where the sounds are tamped down, wrangled into manageable shapes, allowed to shimmer and rippled and billow, held in check by an atmosphere of reverb and delay, but even then, off in the distance, a storm seems to be coming, and the closer it gets, the more our ears want it, and as the next song swallows the song before it, we can't help but close our eyes, open our ears, and let ourselves drift off into some other place, like walking into a warm waterfall and emerging on the other side, in a world made up entirely of warm waterfalls, our whole existence there, wreathed in torrents of sweet buzz and washed out soft focus sound, the headphone cord a tether, the only way home, if we ever felt the need to return home at all.
MPEG Stream: "100 Years Ago"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Of Pulses"
MPEG Stream: "Where Shadows Make Shadows"
MPEG Stream: "200 Years Ago"

CASE, NEKO Middle Cyclone (Anti) cd 16.98
What can we say about Neko Case that we haven't already? And what else can we add to the crazy amount of press and publicity surrounding the release of here latest record Middle Cyclone? Maybe nothing. But what the heck, we love Neko Case, we have for years. From The Virginian to Furnace Room Lullaby to Blacklisted to Canadian Amp, and of course we were early champions of the New Pornographers, especially the Neko fronted Mass Romantic. Hell, way back in the day, she even played in the band Cub with our very own Cup!!
But by now, you've probably been inundated by images of Ms. Case, interviews, magazine covers, there was even a mini documentary on the front page of Amazon, this record is getting one heck of a push, the weird thing is it doesn't really need it. On its own, minus the publicity and all the various other efforts to promote the woman and her album, the music itself speaks for itself. Lush but obviously hand crafted, the lyrics as ever are smart and wry and funny and bittersweet, the songs are fantastic, varied, played by a crack back up band, and then there's Case's voice, which as many others have stated before us is truly a force of nature. One of those once in an era voices. Dark and sultry and sonorous, but so strong and powerful, the old adage about singing the phone book, can now be applied to anything, programming code, microwave instructions, with Case, whatever it is becomes a gorgeous sweetly sour heartbreaker.
Plenty has been written about the making of Middle Cyclone too, but for those who don't have TV or radio or internet, we'll tell you much of this record was recorded using a handful of pianos Case got for free on Craig's List, set up in her drafty old barn, on the Vermont farm she now calls home. And that 'piano orchestra' is a wonder, each piano's inconsistencies blending with the other pianos, all blending together into a sound impossibly lush and totally unique. The various parts recorded in the barn also peppered with the sound of crickets and frogs outside, wind whipping through the eaves, all adding to the personal and intimate vibe that the record already had in spades.
From brooding ballad, to country rocker, to epic slow burner, every song here is a gem. After a few listens we're liking it way more than Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. There's even a Sparks cover! And a Nilssen cover! Both easily and fully transformed into what are essentially Case originals.
And if it wasn't already a stone cold classic, the 31 minute bonus track pushes Middle Cyclone into utter aQ obsession territory, with what is essentially a half hour long field recording of crickets! So great!
MPEG Stream: "This Tornado Loves Me"
MPEG Stream: "The Next Time You Say Forever"
MPEG Stream: "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Forget Me"

HECKER, TIM An Imaginary Country (Kranky) cd 14.98
It's been almost two years since the last proper full length from Canadian soundscaper Tim Hecker, and while tons of other artists have spewed out cd-r after cd-r after limited cassette in that same time, one listen to An Imaginary Country is all it takes to illustrate the difference. Why it took so long, why it was worth the wait, how the 'noise' and 'drones' and 'sounds' Hecker produces are so much more then just the words that describe them, it's all evident in every single second of this record, in fact, 10 seconds in, it's already obvious that this is indeed something special.
As demonstrated on numerous past recordings, Hecker is a master sonic alchemist, who with a handful of effects, a computer and a guitar and who knows what else, is able to construct this, a time machine of sound, a set of recordings that while simply pleasing to the ear, are also transcendent, they soothe, they entrance, they mesmerize, but more importantly, and more magically, they transport. Hecker and headphones is pretty much a ticket to some otherworld, not of sights but sounds, and not just sounds, but streaks and blurs and buzzes, soft layers and blinding crystalline shimmers, thick whirring textures and barely there delicate melodies, a sound that slips from breathless whisper to caustic roar, but each end of that spectrum fully infused with elements of the other, at its heaviest, the sound still manages to be darkly delicate, dreamy and ghostly, and at its most minimal and abstract, the sound is still imbued with some weight, a sense of import, of sounds and perhaps worlds hidden behind and within the actual music.
If anything, the sound of An Imaginary Country is heavier, and thicker, more lush, and with more heft, altogether more powerful, the sort of sound that performed live, through a massive P.A., could summon angels, or perhaps demons. But for all this added sonic weight, nothing is lost, the sounds are not just loud, they are multihued, every note, every chord, every bit of sound is alive with energy, it's as if Hecker has created a living breathing sound sculpture, made of transparent spheres, from afar, it's a gorgeous assemblage, the spheres shifting and dancing, playing out some elaborate composition, but pick one sphere, get up close and look inside, and there is a whole 'nother constellation of smaller glass spheres, engaged in a similarly beautiful and elaborate dance, and so on and so on. The magic is that every single set of movements, whether consciously or not, is visible and audible even with the slightest glance, which is what makes Hecker's sound so dense and deep and emotional and lush and utterly breathtaking.
A closer examination of each song reveals the presence of thick warm whirring organs, or some instruments and sounds transformed into organs, thus much of the record sound choral, the music of some crumbling empty church, left to play on into eternity, long long tones, blurred into slow motion epics, other tracks play out like watching some old filmstrip come to life, the newly living things still surrounded by grit and hiss and buzz, but that distorted haze that surrounds them seem to have come alive as well, moving like some organic living thing, the lives and actions of the newly living things inexorably tangled up with the movements of this other newly living things, a blurry ballet of soft sound and of mysterious sonic events. There are a few moments of relative tranquility, where the sounds are tamped down, wrangled into manageable shapes, allowed to shimmer and rippled and billow, held in check by an atmosphere of reverb and delay, but even then, off in the distance, a storm seems to be coming, and the closer it gets, the more our ears want it, and as the next song swallows the song before it, we can't help but close our eyes, open our ears, and let ourselves drift off into some other place, like walking into a warm waterfall and emerging on the other side, in a world made up entirely of warm waterfalls, our whole existence there, wreathed in torrents of sweet buzz and washed out soft focus sound, the headphone cord a tether, the only way home, if we ever felt the need to return home at all.
MPEG Stream: "100 Years Ago"
MPEG Stream: "Sea Of Pulses"
MPEG Stream: "Where Shadows Make Shadows"
MPEG Stream: "200 Years Ago"

CAVE Psychic Psummer (Important) cd 15.98
Not one but TWO repeat Record Of The Week honorees, elsewhere, the latest from French alchemical post rockers Aluk Todolo, and this, the latest from Cave, whose recent instore performance totally blew us away. It says a lot about a band that can put together a totally improvised set, with limited gear and various members changing up instruments, and still sound better and tighter and catchier and more rocking than most bands playing their own songs on their proper gear NOT in a record store.
Born from the space drone psych outfit Warhammer 48K, these guys left Missouri, ended up in Chicago, added a whole bunch of new members and became Cave, a kick ass spaced out kraut-drone hypno rock collective, equal parts Circle, Can, Lightning Bolt, Wooden Shjips, and Hawkwind, but so much more. Their first record, Hunt Like Devil, was a glorious cacophony of circular riffage, frenetic drumming, woozy basslines, wild synths, and killer hooks, groovy, hypnotic, space-y, and while this record is more of the same, it's somehow transcends, taking everything we loved about the first record, and making it, well, MORE. We'd have probably loved it even if it was Hunt Like Devil part 2, but thankfully, Psychic Summer finds the band exploring some new territory, but dragging that old sound with them.
The opener begins with just a stripped down guitar, and some subtly noodly synth, before exploding in a sun dappled burst of super distorted, in-the-red psychedelia, before shifting again into a muted sunshiney krautrock groove, laced with some cool synths, and electronic filigree. The song locks into the groove and slowly builds to a triumphant climax, eventually slowing down to a sort of chiming jangly groove, which leads right into "Made In Malaysia" which might be the jam of the disc. Stuttering synths, stop start dynamics, chugging guitars, which gives way to a wild woozy twisted riffy bridge, with shouted vocals, and warble bended guitar notes, and an irresistable staccato groove, first just the synth, but then the drums, motorik and relentless, live it's not hard to imagine this track being stretched into a whole set. A single song, so hooky and loopy and mesmerizing. But it's Cave, so two seconds later, they're locked into a different kind of groove, a tribal rhythm, warm organ chords, underneath blooping effects, buried vocals, it's almost danceable, definitely groovy, like they just took one measure from some classic old school dance track and looped it into some space aged kraut disco space jam.
The other three tracks are just as mesmerizing, the muted space-y throb of "High, I Am", wrapped in a slithery bit of warped synthage, to the dense drum heavy "Requiem For John Sex", with some grinding mathy guitar and a bit of indie jangle all wound up in the tracks summery drift, before a wild super sped up free for all psych out finish, and "Machines And Muscles", which was originally released on the now out of print Butthash single, this seems to be a slightly different version, and is definitely another of the record's highlights, total hynorock bliss, little bits of keyboard pepper the stuttery rhythm, the main riff staying solid and unwavering, while all around it various other sounds swoop and shimmer, a Circle-like guitar groove, shuffling drums, very tribal and looped sounding, suspended in a field of space streakings, warm organ whir and smears of soft effects in the background, that main riff stays LOCKED in, until it begins to get a bit more tripped out, a little distorted, more effects, the synths skitter and stutter, and then finally, the song fades out in a blinding kaleidoscopic burst of warm sunshine-y synth.
And that's really the magic of Cave, we're all so partial to the dark and doomy, the buzzy and droney, that it's so exciting for a record to sound so heavy and tripped out and hypnotic, but at the same time so sunshiney, so Summery, so FUN. These guys totally rule, this record is fantastic, and if you can believe it, live they might be even better.
MPEG Stream: "Made In Malaysia"
MPEG Stream: "Gamm"
MPEG Stream: "Encino Men"

GAINSBOURG, SERGE Histoire De Melody Nelson (Light In The Attic) cd 16.98
Well it's about time!!!!!! After years of wallowing in the hazy convoluted mists of legend, hearsay, and hipster influence, only to be obtained through ultra expensive imports, rare bootlegs, or ripped vinyl blogs, this long unavailable but hugely influential work by Serge Gainsbourg finally sees its first domestic reissue almost forty years after its scandalous release.
You won't need a translator to understand the sublime perversity at the heart of this concept record, arguably Gainsbourg's most accomplished full studio album. Released in 1971, Histoire De Melody Nelson is a seven song suite about an underage English nymphet (the titular Melody Nelson) and the wealthy lecherous older Frenchman who, after nearly running over her in his Rolls Royce, takes her in, falls in love and eventually deflowers her. And of course, like most love stories, there is a tragic climax. While the story is largely lifted from Kubrick's cinematic version of Lolita, the concept was undertaken in actuality as a symphonic love letter to Jane Birken, the British actress and singer (she sings the part of Melody). Though, not underage when they began their affair, she was twenty years younger than Serge, and their relationship became controversial with the release of their 1969 duet "Je t'aime....mon non plus" (originally recorded with Brigitte Bardot) with its sounds of a simulated female orgasm.
But Melody Nelson is not only Gainsbourg's finest moment, its musical reputation would be nothing without the orchestral arrangements and progressive grooves of Jean-Claude Vannier (see our review of L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches, to get some highly praised background). The underlying score is less obviously song-oriented and more atmospheric than previous Gainsbourg outings, yet deceptively simple. The opening and closing tracks each at nearly eight minutes mirror each other with a sinewy descending bass groove and classic drum breaks (sampled heavily by De La Soul, David Holmes and Dan The Automator), which set the stage for acid-y guitar fills, swooning strings and Serge's own seductive speak-singing. The closing track ("Cargo Culte") ups the transcendent quality of the climax by adding a mass choir and full orchestra to the swirling tower of sound. In between these two tracks are shorter but artfully arranged pieces of folk-groove, French chanson, acid rock, and cinematic sonic bliss that move the story forward. It's one of those records that slowly grabs you, lures you into its spell, and eventually hooks you, so you'll want to keep listening to it over and over.
Though it was a flop on its initial release - Gainsbourg was largely a singles artist before this point, and the leap from that to concept album, especially one of this perverse nature, was perhaps too wide for French audiences - Histoire De Melody Nelson has gained a significant cult following over the years, perhaps reaching its greatest influence in the nineties with bands like Portishead (Dummy), Pulp (This is Hardcore), Massive Attack (Protection), Radiohead (The Bends), Air (Moon Safari), Blonde Redhead (Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons) and Beck (Sea Change), nearly lifting the basic sonic template of this album wholesale.
This awesome, nicely packaged reissue comes with a beautiful booklet of drawings, essays and interviews, outlining not only the full extent of the making of this amazing work, but charting its larger cultural impact as well.
Reissue of the year!
MPEG Stream: "Melody"
MPEG Stream: "Ballade De Melody Nelson"
MPEG Stream: "En Melody"

NIGHT CONTROL Death Control (Kill Shaman) cd 9.98
A few months ago, a mysterious disc showed up in the mail. Or more accurately, discs. Four cd-r albums of fucked up fractured outsider pop. No information anywhere on the discs, or the packaging, other than the words Crystal Shards. Which seemed pretty perfect. That's exactly what that stuff sounded like. Jagged and fragmented and crystalline and shimmery and totally bizarre and beautiful. So of course, as is our way, we become a little obsessed, and decided we had to track more down, so we could share these sounds with the aQ faithfulŠ
But searches for Crystal Shards revealed almost nothing, and the label was sold out, and there were at that time no plans to make more Crystal Shards. SO we hd all but given up, until the label got in touch, and mentioned plans to release a proper cd, collecting various tracks from the Crystal Shards cd-r's, and we were thrilled, anxiously waiting its arrival, knowing that it would have to be a Record Of The Week.
And so here it is, but strangely enough, the band is no longer called Crystal Shards. In fact, there is no mention anywhere of Crystal Shards, instead, the band (actually, the man) is now called Night Control, and this disc, Death Control, collects some of our favorite Shards from those previous discs, and weaves them into a perfectly imperfect album of minimal murkiness, moody shimmer and lo-fi pop, generously dappled with effects and feedback and distortion, hooks and jangle buried in buzz and hiss. Woozy, dizzy, druggy, tripped out, and catchy as fuck. Think Ariel Pink, Gary War, John Maus, Ty Segall, Wavves, Blank Dogs, Kurt Vile, Night Control definitely fits pretty comfortably amongst those lo-fi fractured pop denizens, but definitely brings his own vibe to the party, offering up something folkier and prettier, more classically poppy, even Beatles-esque at times, but still plenty murky and freaked out and fucked up, and deliriously off kilter. We also hear some Grifters in there as well, which is never a bad thing.
Where as a lot of those other bands seem willfully obscure, the weirdness in Night Control's music seems more like a natural byproduct. As if the creation of these hauntingly perfect little pop fragments, invariably resulted in the sonic cast offs that litter the record, be they sheets of gauzy buzz, or jagged slivers of feedback, the songs at their very core, are pure pop, but that core is protected by layer after layer of noise and hiss and shimmer. Yet unlike many artists who make their pop 'weird' by adding random crap on top, or record on the shittiest equipment possible, the two sides of Night Control's sound, the jangly pop, and the lo-fi buzz, seem to meld into something totally new, a sound that couldn't exist with both those elements. The guitars jangle and strum, but often explode into blow out leads, or super crunchy textures, the bas burbles below the surface, but it too can sometimes crumble into a cloud of swirling buzz, the drums are simple and spare, but hold the whole thing together, along with the lilting vocals, always wreathed in reverb and delay. Every song here is a gem. And every song manages to reference classic pop, while filtering it through the new fractured noisepop style. Sebadoh covering Tom Petty, Cheap Trick as envisioned by Strapping Fieldhands, or imagine the Beatles or Kinks, if they were growing up today, and released handmade cd-r's. There may be noise and distortion and grit and buzz and hiss, but this stuff is way too poppy to really appeal to the noiseniks, instead this takes the sort of lo-fi pop of early Pavement records and Shrimper cassettes, and re-imagines it as some sort of alternate reality top 40, not like the bizarre alien FM radio of Ariel Pink, but something much more earnest and heartfelt. Total sad boy, late night mix tape nirvana for sure.
Hard to pick favorites, as this is a sort of greatest hits, culled from a catalog that as far as we're concerned is ALL hits, but two of our favorites are "Two Hard", with its lilting jangle, rubbery underwater bass, and some incendiary lead guitars, weaving lush sun dappled textures over a sort of repetitive post rocky drift, and "No Making", a woozy, drifty torch song, the bass driving the song, the whole thing warped and warbly, the tape speed subtly shifting throughout, causing the whole song to subtly shift and twist and making it feel like your speakers are melting, and as if that weren't enough, then there's an awesome soaring bridge / chorus, with some incredible lush guitar harmonies that could go on forever (and you'll wish they would).
Hopefully some of the other Crystal Shards stuff will surface in one form or another, but for now, there's plenty here to get lost in, a fantastic and phantasmagorical document of blissed out hallucinatory outsider noise pop. ESSENTIAL!
MPEG Stream: "Good Looks"
MPEG Stream: "Two Hard"
MPEG Stream: "No Making"
MPEG Stream: "Star 131"
MPEG Stream: "East Side"
MPEG Stream: "Those Girls"

WORMSBLOOD Mastery Of Creation Demos (Barbarian) cd 13.98
A couple years ago we reviewed an obscure, DIY cd-r release, In The Stars, by this band Wormsblood. As you might guess from their name, they're an underground black metal free noise new weird America psych folk cd-r band... oh wait you might not guess that. But you'd get the idea this is something dark and strange and evil, right? Not some normal indie rock band that's for sure. And you know this, if you remember our review of that previous release. So, band leader Wyrdskull (an alter ego of Clay Ruby from freak folksters Davenport and psych doomsters Jex Thoth, we have reason to believe) and cohorts are back with a new release, an actual cd this time, though the music is still way DIY and lo-fi (like we like it!), consisting of three "demo" sessions recorded between 2004 and 2008. Though without that info you wouldn't know this wasn't conceived as all one album. Ten tracks total, about 38 minutes of very, very fucked up "metal". Like, if Ariel Pink did even -more- drugs and then tried to produce a black metal album. Or, imagine a black metal Faxed Head (as we said about 'em before). It's that weird, that WRONG. And thus damn right in our ears. 'Cause if we know anything, we know our fucked up black metal. Dead Reptile Shrine, Varghkogargasmal, Vorak, Dead Raven Choir's Cask Strength stuff, old Necrofrost, Wold, etc., this fits right in, not that it really fits in anywhere.
The disc starts off with the amazing/retarded "Fragments Of The Witch" which will either convince you this is the best thing you've heard since you played the Weakling album backwards through a malfunctioning Kaoss pad while screaming at the top of your lungs, or convince you to turn it off. Obviously, we're part of the former camp. A murky, palpitating admixture of primitive, clanking rhythms, truly over-the-top gargled and anguished kokills, dim distorted guitar riffs and woozy synths dealing out Skeptical doom plod. All of it mired in an echoey, almost dubby "production". The next track, "Hollow Cost Nothing", ups the ante with even more majestic, messed up melodies. It dawns on us that whomever is on guitar can really play. Somehow this makes Wormsblood sound even more insane. It also suggests that maybe one way to look at this isn't as an attempt at making tr00 cvlt black metal primitivism, but rather as simply a very, very, VERY damaged version of traditional '80s heavy metal (and we recall they did do a Manilla Road cover on the In The Stars cd-r)...
Then, there's a track that also appeared on that cd-r,"The First Dim Shinings (Of Those About To Awaken)", which takes a turn into ritualistic ancient folk musick, with a military snare and Muppet-on-meth vocals. It's like Ghost meets Abruptum. Or ESP-Disk's Cromagnon gone metal. That's followed by "Sig Bind", which begins with abstract, Jewelled Antler-y atmospheres before erupting with high-end guitar neck strangle, kind of like a Kemialliset Ystavat meets Krallice mashup. By the end of this track, it's a madhouse of maniacal voices, harshing the mellow with which it began. And on it goes, this disc of demos delving backwards in time, the recordings getting boombox-ier and buzzier, the songs even less songlike and more soundscapey if possible. "Goodnight" opens a can of that Striborg-style aersol spray, a grim sonic mist of vibrating electric strings and hissing exhalations. "Obsessed By The Bloodstone" (is that shout-out to cult pulp fantasist Karl Edward Wagner?) is an ambient piece for keyboard - and barking dog! And then sometimes, they get it together for an extended spasm of, uh, song, full of high pitched singing/shrieking and chaotic drums/guitars.
Now, you might be thinking, there's other black metal releases on this week's AQ list. Yet this is the only one we chose as a Record Of The Week. Does that mean it's BETTER than those other black metal albums? Better than Ayat, or Moloch, or Nav, or the new Satyricon, for example? Well, no, not exactly. But we're not judging this purely as a black metal release. We figured this was something that AQ customers into any sort of bizarre, fucked up music (many of whom love black metal, to be sure) would find intriguing. 'Cause as metal as this is (and it IS, really metal, if you listen close) it's equally something else entirely. There's whole passages of "music" here that sound more like that fake field recordings disc Jurassic Soundscapes, but with lonely werewolves wandering around in the prehistoric swamps. And drugged up pterodactyls swooping about overhead. Wormsblood's sound is as much recognizable metallic instrumentation (guitars, drums, vocals) as it is wyrd sound FX and destroyed noise, rustlings and clankings and howlings.
As befits this music, this comes packaged in black and white and grey, bearing disturbing, fantastical, hellish yet cartoonish line drawings that look a bit like Mike Diana's notorious art... get the LP if you want to study the drawings in detail.
MPEG Stream: "Fragments Of The Witch"
MPEG Stream: "Sig Bind"
MPEG Stream: "On A Burial Of Unsilent Night Soil"

WORMSBLOOD Mastery Of Creation Demos (Barbarian) lp 10.98
A couple years ago we reviewed an obscure, DIY cd-r release, In The Stars, by this band Wormsblood. As you might guess from their name, they're an underground black metal free noise new weird America psych folk cd-r band... oh wait you might not guess that. But you'd get the idea this is something dark and strange and evil, right? Not some normal indie rock band that's for sure. And you know this, if you remember our review of that previous release. So, band leader Wyrdskull (an alter ego of Clay Ruby from freak folksters Davenport and psych doomsters Jex Thoth, we have reason to believe) and cohorts are back with a new release, an actual cd this time, though the music is still way DIY and lo-fi (like we like it!), consisting of three "demo" sessions recorded between 2004 and 2008. Though without that info you wouldn't know this wasn't conceived as all one album. Ten tracks total, about 38 minutes of very, very fucked up "metal". Like, if Ariel Pink did even -more- drugs and then tried to produce a black metal album. Or, imagine a black metal Faxed Head (as we said about 'em before). It's that weird, that WRONG. And thus damn right in our ears. 'Cause if we know anything, we know our fucked up black metal. Dead Reptile Shrine, Varghkogargasmal, Vorak, Dead Raven Choir's Cask Strength stuff, old Necrofrost, Wold, etc., this fits right in, not that it really fits in anywhere.
The disc starts off with the amazing/retarded "Fragments Of The Witch" which will either convince you this is the best thing you've heard since you played the Weakling album backwards through a malfunctioning Kaoss pad while screaming at the top of your lungs, or convince you to turn it off. Obviously, we're part of the former camp. A murky, palpitating admixture of primitive, clanking rhythms, truly over-the-top gargled and anguished kokills, dim distorted guitar riffs and woozy synths dealing out Skeptical doom plod. All of it mired in an echoey, almost dubby "production". The next track, "Hollow Cost Nothing", ups the ante with even more majestic, messed up melodies. It dawns on us that whomever is on guitar can really play. Somehow this makes Wormsblood sound even more insane. It also suggests that maybe one way to look at this isn't as an attempt at making tr00 cvlt black metal primitivism, but rather as simply a very, very, VERY damaged version of traditional '80s heavy metal (and we recall they did do a Manilla Road cover on the In The Stars cd-r)...
Then, there's a track that also appeared on that cd-r,"The First Dim Shinings (Of Those About To Awaken)", which takes a turn into ritualistic ancient folk musick, with a military snare and Muppet-on-meth vocals. It's like Ghost meets Abruptum. Or ESP-Disk's Cromagnon gone metal. That's followed by "Sig Bind", which begins with abstract, Jewelled Antler-y atmospheres before erupting with high-end guitar neck strangle, kind of like a Kemialliset Ystavat meets Krallice mashup. By the end of this track, it's a madhouse of maniacal voices, harshing the mellow with which it began. And on it goes, this disc of demos delving backwards in time, the recordings getting boombox-ier and buzzier, the songs even less songlike and more soundscapey if possible. "Goodnight" opens a can of that Striborg-style aersol spray, a grim sonic mist of vibrating electric strings and hissing exhalations. "Obsessed By The Bloodstone" (is that shout-out to cult pulp fantasist Karl Edward Wagner?) is an ambient piece for keyboard - and barking dog! And then sometimes, they get it together for an extended spasm of, uh, song, full of high pitched singing/shrieking and chaotic drums/guitars.
Now, you might be thinking, there's other black metal releases on this week's AQ list. Yet this is the only one we chose as a Record Of The Week. Does that mean it's BETTER than those other black metal albums? Better than Ayat, or Moloch, or Nav, or the new Satyricon, for example? Well, no, not exactly. But we're not judging this purely as a black metal release. We figured this was something that AQ customers into any sort of bizarre, fucked up music (many of whom love black metal, to be sure) would find intriguing. 'Cause as metal as this is (and it IS, really metal, if you listen close) it's equally something else entirely. There's whole passages of "music" here that sound more like that fake field recordings disc Jurassic Soundscapes, but with lonely werewolves wandering around in the prehistoric swamps. And drugged up pterodactyls swooping about overhead. Wormsblood's sound is as much recognizable metallic instrumentation (guitars, drums, vocals) as it is wyrd sound FX and destroyed noise, rustlings and clankings and howlings.
As befits this music, this comes packaged in black and white and grey, bearing disturbing, fantastical, hellish yet cartoonish line drawings that look a bit like Mike Diana's notorious art... get the LP if you want to study the drawings in detail.
MPEG Stream: "Fragments Of The Witch"
MPEG Stream: "Sig Bind"
MPEG Stream: "On A Burial Of Unsilent Night Soil"

V/A Pop Ambient 2009 (Kompakt) cd 15.98
Another year, another collection of gauzy, washed out atmospheric shimmer from Kompakt. The latest in their ongoing series chronicling the more ambient (and poppy?) side of techno, but unlike past installments, there has been a serious shift this time around. Not only are there a bunch of new artists, but the sound itself has definitely been transformed. Before, Pop Ambient seemed to be more about processed electronics and bleary eared synthscapes, like techno with the beats stripped away, but this time around, while those electronic and synth elements haven't been abandoned completely, the sound seems much more organic, more Kranky than Kompakt, more like a sound unto itself. We use Pop Ambient to describe much of our favorite drone music, hazy, shimmery, gauzy, dreamy, be it Tim Hecker, Aidan Baker, Jesu and the like, Pop Ambient, for us at least, has become a sort of analog to shoegaze, a drifting sound blurred and smeared and indistinct, while somehow remaining melodic and mesmerizing. Its relation to techno tenuous, if entirely nonexistent at this point, having taken off a life, and a sound of its very own.
Every Pop Ambient comp has been a huge hit around here, so much so that we just naturally assumed that we had probably made all of them Records Of The Week in the past, but upon checking, we realized only one had made ROTW. Well, now TWO.
2009's Pop Ambient focuses much more on real instruments, horns, guitars, pianos, all woven into the already familiar landscape of soft synths and barely there rhythmic pulses, a swirling slow moving ambience, that flits from haunting chamber music, to looped post rock, to deep drone.
The first thing you might notice, is some very aQ artists amidst the usual suspects, sure there's Klimek, Andrew Thomas, Burger / Voigt, but then also Tim Hecker and The Fun Years, as if they had asked for our 2 cents in putting together this year's comp. And sonically, we couldn't have done better ourselves. Much darker, and more mysterious than past installments, surprisingly varied, but it works beautifully as an album, not just a collection.
Warped orchestral fanfares are slowed down and blurred beautifully, with a subtle rhythmic undercurrent, warm woozy horns blurred into sun dappled streaks, shimmery dramatic strings wind around plaintive piano, gorgeous and soundtracky, moody free jazz records get spun at 16 rpm, the piano plucking out a funereal dirge, flutes woven into wavering sheets of sound, record crackle everywhere, bits of electronic shimmer get stretched out into gauzy looped soundscapes, simple repetitive guitar figures lope dreamily over long stretches of harmonized horns, epic sweeping swells of dramatic buzz ebb and flow over buried melodies, distorted guitars unwind amidst swirling clouds of gritty textured ambience, skittering Oval-like loopscapes stutter and glitch soft focus tendrils of electronic whir, spidery guitars tangle with looped samples, locking into impossibly dreamy drifts of hypnotic repetition.
It's a breathtaking collection of sonic wonder, of sounds we truly consider to be Pop Ambience, haunting and otherworldly, subtly dark, sometimes ominous, always gorgeous, and of course totally recommended. And while this is a no brainer for the Pop Ambient obsessed, the minimal techno folks, and the Kompakt fanatics, this record might prove to be a new favorite for anyone into Stars Of The Lid, Pan American, Labradford, Eluvium, Windy And Carl and other purveyors of deep drone and nocturnal drift.
MPEG Stream: TIM HECKER "Shosts In Silver"
MPEG Stream: THE FUN YEARS "I Am Speaking Through Barbara"
MPEG Stream: SYLVAIN CHAUVEAU "Nuage III"
MPEG Stream: ANDREW THOMAS "A Dream Of A Spider"

JERUSALEM s/t (Vintage / Rockadrome) cd 12.98
Here's one of those albums that we KNEW we'd make Record Of The Week - IF ever it was reissued. And now it has been! Here's a fully legit reish of this cult '70s hard rock rarity, a record by one of those bands who seem simultaneously to be both testosterone-tanked young men and wizened ol' wise wizards. Yeah, a Record Of The Week easy, on account of it not only being an old fave of some of us here, but something that immediately caught on with the AQ staffers who hadn't heard it before, this reissue getting played in the store quite steadily (and loudly!) since it arrived. Let's listen in, as Jerusalem's vocalist belts it out, in an emotive yowl a bit like Robert Plant but with Ozzy Osbourne's paranoid feelings: "Hey girl, will you never learn? Who d'you think you're fooling with your lyin' and your cryin'? You'll only be happy the day you see me dyin'!" But then, in more of a normal speaking voice, we get the casual aside: "Oh yeah, that's the way it happens sometimes. Ha."
Right on, brilliant. That's from "Frustration", the first of nine fantastic tracks on the one and only album by this English band, recorded in 1971, released in '72 on Deram/Decca, produced by Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. Why Jerusalem didn't get big is a mystery, though the liner notes give some clues as to why they disbanded. Heck they're even fairly unknown (or a well-kept secret) among connoisseurs of '70s heavy psych and hard rock, with this being its first ever official, non-bootleg reissue on compact disc. Now, there's lots of great obscure heavy rock rarities from the early '70s. We've raved about reissues of many of them (Dust, Leaf Hound, Toad, Bang, T2, etc.). But as far as unheralded proto-metal goes, this belongs pretty much at the top of that longhaired, bellbottomed heap, as essential as any of 'em anyway. Pentagram, Bedemon, Blues Creation, Budgie, Night Sun, you name it.
Allan here first heard Jerusalem a few years back when a friend who shares his taste for proto-metal passed along a cd-r copy of this otherwise unavailable album (thanks, Glenn!). Killer stuff indeed, damn it was good. One of the heaviest things from the era he'd ever heard, Jerusalem took it to an extreme that most of their peers didn't approach. With elements of both biggies Sabbath and Zeppelin, but more frenzied and frantic on one hand, more plodding and suicidal on the other.
Crashing, fuzzed out guitars. Energetic hectic riffage. Doomy, thudding blues. Wicked stinging, sliding soloing. Punkish attitude (competitive with contemporaries Crushed Butler). The vocals often hoarse, on the verge of screaming, or gone over that edge. Yeah, pretty heavy for '72! This is rough, raw, proto headbanging mania mixed with mystical, melodic proggy interludes, of course we love it. Plus it's got a genuine dark, occult, despairing vibe, with poetic lyrics about madness, murder and death... And you can't get much more "downer rock genocidal" sounding than the truly, uh, primitive bludgeon what might be the heaviest track here, "Primitive Man".
Pretty darn metal when it comes down to it, forget the "proto". In their own way though, Jerusalem sounding halfway betwixt '60s garage rock and '80s New Wave Of British Heavy Metal... which on balance puts them a bit ahead of their time. In fact, since what's old is new again, this actually sounds like if could have been made now, not because it sounds modern (it doesn't) but because it's so line with certain stonery retro-stylings popular today, particularly in Sweden. In other words, if you like Witchcraft, you'll love Jerusalem!! We always thought that of all the obscure '70s bands that are their forebears, Witchcraft sound most like Jerusalem (well, next to Pentagram). Remember what we said in all caps about Witchcraft's debut? "PERHAPS THEE BEST '70s INSPIRED DOOM ALBUM EVER!" Well the same would go for this, except that it's the real deal, which makes it even better.
Anyway, to return to our story, after Allan got that cd-r dub, he knew he had to find a proper cd. There HAD to be one, this was too good not to have been reissued, right? But, after looking and looking, no luck. Then, one day, Allan came to work at Aquarius and lo and behold what did he hear, but Jerusalem blaring from the store stereo! No, it wasn't this reissue. This was still a few years ago. Turns out, Andee had found a used copy of a bootleg cd someplace, and had bought it simply 'cause he thought the cover looked cool (he's like that), without knowing anything about the band. Life is so unfair, thought Allan. But he was able to eventually guilt Andee into giving him the cd for a birthday present (thanks, Andee! You can have that one back now). Later on, we discovered a Japanese reissue that may or may not have been a boot but in any event was way too expensive and hard to get, nothing we could easily stock and sell for a reasonable price. But NOW, we happily are able to share Jerusalem with you thanks to this nicely done reissue on the Rockadrome label's Vintage imprint! Yeah!
In addition to the nine songs from the original LP, this cd comes with five bonus tracks, including non-album single "Kamakazi Moth". The thick booklet is filled with lengthy liner notes, complete lyrics, vintage photos, all that good stuff you want in a reissue. Once more, yeah!
MPEG Stream: "Hooded Eagle"
MPEG Stream: "When The Wolf Sits"
MPEG Stream: "Primitive Man"

V/A Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware - Revenge Of The Super Female Rappers (Soul Jazz) 2cd 25.00
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
MPEG Stream: THE SEQUENCE "Simon Says"
MPEG Stream: TWO SISTERS "B-Boys Beware"
MPEG Stream: JJ FAD "You're Goin Down"
MPEG Stream: DIMPLES D. "Sucker DJs"
MPEG Stream: ROXANNE SHANTE "Bite This"
MPEG Stream: LADY D. "To The Beat"

V/A Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware - Revenge Of The Super Female Rappers - Volume 1 (Soul Jazz) 2lp 27.00
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
MPEG Stream: THE SEQUENCE "Simon Says"
MPEG Stream: TWO SISTERS "B-Boy's Beware"
MPEG Stream: JJ FAD "You're Going Down"

V/A Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware - Revenge Of The Super Female Rappers - Volume 2 (Soul Jazz) 2lp 27.00
Holy shit, this is what we've been waiting for! Soul Jazz comes correct with an essential collection of the fierce and fired up sounds of the early queens of hip-hop. This is basically everything we love about hip-hop, captured in one monstrous collection, perfectly reflecting out love of both old school hip hop and more specifically female MC's, proving one again that the ladies knew how to do it best!
Filled with sass, strength, humor and charged sexuality, these ladies weren't just trailblazers, they made songs that still sound so damn catchy and irresistible all these years later.
While a big shift happened for sure it's important to remember that hip-hop's origins were strongly connected to strong females and even queer spirit. Coming out of the disco and funk scenes of late '70s New York there was a whole generation of girls who grew up empowered to take the mic and take no prisoners as they did so. So many of those amazing women are on this collection. Roxanne Shante, Sweet Tee, Sequence, Cookie Crew, JJ Fad, Queen Latifah (yes, she once was way fierce!), MC Lyte, Dimples D, Missy Elliott, and way more. There are those of us who remember these tracks from back in the day and we're equally excited for a whole new generation to get blown away by the colorful energy in these sounds, kids who have grown up on MIA, Lil' Kim, Fannypack, and Yo Majesty will get to hear just where those sounds came from! While the early '80s was the heyday for these sounds, what makes Fly Girls such a cool collection is that it's a three decade retrospective which brings the best of the female MCs from the late '70s all the way to the early '90s. These tracks make us wanna dust off our old sneakers and head to the playground with nothing but a boombox, a piece of cardboard and some friends 'cause with these songs blasting that's all you need for an instant party!
MPEG Stream: DIMPLES D. "Sucker DJs"
MPEG Stream: ROXANNE SHANTE "Bite This"
MPEG Stream: LADY D. "To The Beat"

LSD-MARCH Under Milk Wood (Important) cd 14.98
Here's another fantastic transmission from the Black Snowflake Sound studio in Sapporo, Japan, sent out by these prolific psych peddlers! The duo of Michishita Shinsuke on vocals/guitar and Takahashi Ikuro (ex-Fushitusha) on drums have crafted what sounds to us like sort of a cross between two of their recent releases, Constellation Of Tragedy on Important (the gentle, twilight ballads) and Uretakumo Nakunarutorika on Beta-Lactam (freaky, experimental WTF?). Of course, with more than a few flashes of the heavy Les Rallizes Denudes-style amped-up throb and grit we all love included as well. Starting off all slow sad and soft, this disc would be a good LSD-march for Nagisa Ni Te fans as well as those into Rallizes. Moody melody abounds. "Bisyonure No Kimi" is lovely and languid, but also blanketed with shivering guitar feedback and distortion, clouding over Michishita's gentle vocals. Meanwhile Takahashi's drumming is also an crucial contributor to the mood. His deliberate, echoing clank and plink of rhythms on "Ai No Sakebi" are especially effective, in unsettling combination with the piercing Quicksilvery lead guitar unleashed by Michishita.
At about halfway through the disc, LSD-march kicks the volume up a few notches for the lumbering, distorto-rocker "Dare Ga Hoeru". But then the very next track, "Taiyoko No Uta" is so weird and glitchy it could be by Starfuckers or US Maple - it's a good example of the abstract, experimental side of LSD-march to which we referred above, like something from Uretakumo Nakunarutorika. They do channel the Rallizes once more, though, on the disc's final and longest named track, "Kimi No Uta Wo Kiite Boku Wa Akuma Ni Natta" (7:17) a slow burner which eventually erupts into muzzy heaviness, mustering quite a bit of drama in the manner of Up-Tight or Shizuka.
That's the last song, sort of, but the disc ain't over. And just gets stranger. There's two unlisted, untitled bonus tracks yet to come, including an 8 minute cut stringing together botched takes of a song called "My Mother's Killed Me" (?), featuring all their flubs and false starts, including talkback from the increasingly frustrated (and British?) sound engineer. At one point, they have to stop 'cause someone's cell phone goes off and ruins the take. Whoops. But eventually, by the end, they get the song on tape in its entirety, and it's a nice garagey groover. We're really into the fact that they included all the screw-ups. We love stuff like that. And halfway think that's how they wanted it to sound, based on some of their other strange ideas... There's another, similar bonus track that's only 18 seconds though. More WTF? for you.
Basically, Under Milk Wood manages to incorporate everything we already loved about LSD-march, plus some other confusional stuff we didn't even know they were into that's also rad. And everyone here seems to be digging it, even if they weren't already huge LSD-march fans. The band's best yet? Maybe, certainly a good one to get!!
MPEG Stream: "Bisyonure No Kimi"
MPEG Stream: "Ai No Sakebi"
MPEG Stream: "Kimi No Uta Wo Kiite Boku Wa Akuma Ni Natta"

ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB Octuplex (VHF) cd 13.98
It's a weird thing, but we've always noticed that musicians, especially avant outsider musicians (and even then ESPECIALLY metal musicians) seemed inordinately fond of electronic music. Every time a band would come in the store, they would head straight for the electronic section and end up buying a bunch of weird techno or jungle or whatever.
Which then might make it less surprising that recently some of our favorite noise makers seem to be heading in that direction with their own music. Campbell Kneale's Birchville Cat Motel is gone, and in its place, Our Love Will Destroy The World, whose first record was indeed some bastardized dance music, a strange hybrid of blurred buzzy drone music, and thumping club jamz. Similarly, Neil Campbell, aka Astral Social Club has been peppering his recent record with similarly club worthy jamz, but again, those sounds still soaked in the same sort of blissed out psychedelic ambience that most people associate with his Astral Social Club.
For this latest full length, Campbell once again starts things off with a track that would almost sound more at home on Planet Mu than VHF. A skittery bloopfest, with a thick grinding synth bass line, and bloopy bleepy beats, but all wreathed in processed guitars and blurred soft focus buzz, which leads right into the second track, still electronic, but not actually danceable, it sounded more like a club jam on 45, the beats stumbling over one another, like a jumbled, almost hyper speed Pierre Bastien, a million little mechanical men, spewing a symphony of clicks and bleeps and loops, all wound around buried melodies and long thick streaks of hiss and fuzz.
We kept expecting things to switch gears, and for the sound to gradually bliss out into the more 'traditional' ASC sound, long form ur-drones more along the lines of Sunroof! or Skullflower, but most of us were hoping just the opposite, that maybe he'd push further, take ASC somewhere no band like that had really felt at home, the dancefloor, albeit, some strange seriously fucked up and drug addled ALIEN dancefloor. And so he has, for the most part. The first half of the record is indeed, all fractured beats, and warped loops, woozy tripped out grooves, effects swirling and whirling everywhere, the beats playful and not quite funky, stuttery skittery, and seriously fun. This is the kind of stuff that just might lure the perpetual wallflowers out onto that dancefloor.
BUT!!! Hidden between the opening salvo of beats and loops, and the closing outer space house jam, lurks some of the prettiest droned out ambience we've heard from ASC. Processed glitchery, smeared into grainy expanses of glistening blur and shimmery starburst, draped with delicate melodies, gradually growing into a glorious wall of warm fuzz, super thick grinding buzz, smoothed into hypnotic loops and pulsing soundscapes, a more caffeinated Tim Hecker, gauzy and washed out but propulsive and kinetic, glorious sun baked upper register blow outs, wrapped around crystalline acoustic guitars, all woven into a wheezing heaving whole, some sort of super abstract avant garde raga, and finally, a brief but fantastical tangle of crunch and buzz, off hiss and glitch, warped melodies and damaged arrangements, lo-fi tape hiss slithers beneath stuttering chopped up samples, again all blurred into something dreamlike and bleary eyed. WOW.
It all might seem a little schizophrenic, and it is, but it's also the best of both worlds, and the key being that the more beat oriented tracks, are still able to function like the more ambient drone based sounds, if you're laying in the dark, headphones strapped on, those beats might not induce you to shake your tail feathers, but they'll still be able to suck you under, to transport you to some crazed soundworld, to totally mesmerize and hypnotize, which makes the whole record either the weirdest most fucked up electronic dance record EVER, or quite possibly just the best Astral Social Club release so far. Maybe both...
MPEG Stream: "Caustic Roe"
MPEG Stream: "Mugik Churn"
MPEG Stream: "Aggro Vault"